(see Chapter V of Ways to God)

It is no accident that the great figures, Plato (429-348) and Aristotle (384-322), who marked out the major paths in Western philosophy should follow Parmenides in rapid succession. Once directly confronted with the unity of reality and hence with the issue of the reality of differentiation, the Greek mind had either to accept the skeptical position of the sophists which excluded any basis for organized civil life, or to begin some steps toward the resolution of the issue. These steps proceeded along the route of Plato’s notion of participation of the many in the One. Based on this some Church Fathers listed Plato among the precursors of Christ, while Whitehead considered all subsequent Western philosophy to be essentially a series of footnotes to Plato’s work.

Plato and the Notion of Participation

On the other hand, that the community of things is similar or alike requires a source which itself is one. Because John, Agnes and Thomas are alike as humans, their form is not limited to the perfection of any one person, but is able to be participated in by an indefinite number of humans. To participate means to have one’s being in derivation from, and hence as image of, absolute Being itself. Hence, I am by imaging or participating; imaging is not what I do, but what I am.

By philosophizing in this mode of participation one escapes becoming trapped in the alternative of either constructing personal but arbitrary intellectual schemata, or elaborating an impersonal science. Philosophizing is rather a gradual process of discovery, of entering more deeply into the values which we have in order to comprehend them more clearly in themselves and in their source. Because progressive sharing or participating in this source is the very essence of human growth and development, the work of philosophizing and the religious sensibility implicit in this notion of participation is neither an addenda to life nor merely about life. Rather, as was seen regarding totem and myth, philosophy and religion are central to the process of human growth itself and at the highest level; from this process it draws its primal discoveries.

Though Plato began the philosophical elaboration of the notion of participation, as his method was dialectical he did not construct a system. His terms remained fluid and his dialogues ended with further questions. It was left to his pupil, Aristotle, to develop the means for more rigorous or systematic work in philosophy. For this Aristotle elaborated a formal logic for the strict codification of forms or terms, their cognition in judgements, and the coordination of judgements into patterns of syllogistic reasoning. With this tool he was able to outline the pattern of the sciences which have played so dominant a role in the Western world to this day.

This notion of participation according to which the many derive their being from the One which they manifest and toward which they are oriented and directed would subsequently provide the basic model for what the Chinese refer to as "outer" transcendence or the relation of creatures to God. In Plato’s thought, however, the order of forms was relatively passive, rather than active. Hence, the supreme One or Good was the passive object of contemplation by the highest soul, which was conscious and active. Most scholars, therefore, consider that in Plato’s thought the highest Soul or the one who contemplates in Plato’s thought, rather than the highest One or Good upon which it contemplates, to correspond to his notion of God.

Further, while the individual’s actions were stimulated and patterned — each in its own way — upon the one objectless Knower (noesis noeseos) as final cause, the many individuals were not caused thereby, derived therefrom or known by that principle of all meaning. Thus, though intense human concern is expressed in hellenic dramas which reflect the heritage of human meaning as lived in the family and in society, Greek philosophic understanding was much more specialized and restricted, particularly as regards the significance of the person.

More could not be expected while being was understood in terms of form alone. If, however, the meaning of the human person in this world of names and forms is of key importance today in both East and West; if the protection and promotion of the person become increasingly problematic as our cultures become more industrialized, technological and global; and if the search for freedom and human rights is central to our contemporary search to realize a decent society — then it will be necessary to look to further developments of the notion of being and of divine life. These will create higher levels of equilibria by retrieving and making explicit more of what was meant by Parmenides’s One than had been articulated in the Greek philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. Indeed, the fact that the thought of Plato and Aristotle was not brought into synthesis by Aristotle himself suggests that it simply was not possible to do so in terms of being as understood merely as form, as was the case in those times. Thus, in order to draw upon the full contribution of both Plato’s notion of participation and Aristotle’s systematic structures it is necessary to look to a later equilibrium predicated upon a significantly deepened understanding of being, namely, being not as form, but as existing.

(see Chapter V of Ways to God)

Iqbal sees as key to religious reconstruction the overcoming of the relatively passive sense of reality found in the formal order characteristic of the Platonic strain of thought, and also reflected in modern rationalism. In that light limited realities passively replicate the archetypal forms or ideas, but add nothing new; finite reality is drained of its vitality and reduced to a shadow. Instead, Iqbal calls for a return to the active character of reality. As we shall see below this is the same call issued almost stridently by Mulla Sadra, as an archetype of Islamic philosophy. The emergence of being as existence took place in the early Christian Fathers and characterized the thought of Thomas. In order to follow the flowering of reason as the articulation of life in God we must now turn to these sources.

Although Greek philosophy grew out of an intensive mythic sense of life in which all was a reflection of the will of the gods, it nonetheless presupposed matter always to have existed. As a result, the focus of its attention and concern was upon the forms by which matter was determined to be of one type rather than another. For Aristotle, physical or material things in the process of change from one form to another were the most manifest realities and his philosophizing began therefrom. This approach to philosophy beginning from sense encounters with physical beings corresponded well to our human nature as mind and body, and could be extended to the recognition of divine life. But Iqbal wants more; for him "it is in fact the presence of the total infinite in the movement of knowledge that makes finite thinking possible." The Greek philosophical awareness of what it meant to be real would need considerable enrichment in order to appreciate the foundational significance for human though of its grounding in a fully transcendent and infinite Being.

One might follow the progression of this deepening awareness of being by reflecting upon the experience of being totally absorbed in the particularities of one’s job, business, farm or studies — the prices, the colors, the chemicals — and then encountering an imminent danger of death, the loss of a loved one or the birth of a child. At the moment of death, as at the moment of birth, the entire atmosphere and range of preoccupations in a hospital room shifts dramatically, being suddenly transformed from tactical adjustments for limited objectives to confronting existence, in sorrow or in joy, in terms that plunge to the center of the whole range of meaning. (This can be stated in social terms as described in Ways to God, Chapter 9.) Such was the effect upon philosophy when the awareness of being developed from attention to merely this or that kind of reality, to focus upon the act of existence in contrast to non-existence, and hence to human life in all its dimensions and, indeed, to life divine.

Cornelio Fabro goes further. He suggests that this deepened metaphysical sense of being in the early Christian ages not only opened the possibility for an enriched sense of freedom, but itself was catalyzed by the new sense of freedom proclaimed in the religious message. That message focused not upon Plato’s imagery of the sun at the mouth of the cave from which external enlightenment might be derived, but upon the eternal Word or Logos through and according to which all things received their existence and which enlightened their consciousness life:

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

The same was in the beginning with God.

All things were made by him: and without him was made nothing that was made.

In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

. . .

Thus the power of being bursts into time through creator and prophet:

- it directs the mind beyond the ideological poles of species and individual interests, and beyond issues of place or time as limited series or categories;

- it centers, instead, upon the unique reality of the person as a participation in the creative power of God, a being bursting into existence, who is and cannot be denied;

- it rejects being considered in any sense as nonbeing, or being treated as anything less than its full reality;

- it is a self or in Iqbal’s term an ‘ego’, affirming its own unique actuality and irreducible to any specific group identity; and

THOMAS AQUINAS AND THE EXISTENTIAL SYNTHESIS (See Chapter VI of Ways to God)

This question was resolved soon thereafter in the work of Thomas Aquinas through a real distinction which rendered most intimate the relation of the two principles as act and potency and opened a new and uniquely active sense of being. This is not to say that Ghazali was wrong in opposing Averroes or that Islam was wrong in choosing the side of Ghazali in this dispute. Aquinas also had to overcome the Latin Averrorists in the course of his intellectual battles in Paris. But Mulla Sadra’s and Iqbal’s intuition of the central importance of reasoning in terms of being as actively existing suggests the importance of this in the unfolding of human awareness as the evolution of the religious vision both of God and of the reality of the human person and of society as participations therein. This is the heart of the classical Christian philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (see Chapter VI of Ways to God) who developed the technical tools for a religious understanding in God of human life in this world. Here I should like to stress the important way in which this provides for the dignity and proper autonomy of the human person while locating the source of this dignity as participation in the divine.

1. The focus upon being as active had profound implications for the understanding of man in God. It had crucial importance for the sense of the divine itself. In Plato’s more passive vision the divine as active would be situated below the idea of the Good or the One which were objects of contemplation. We saw how taking being in a more active sense allowed Aristotle to appreciate divine life as an active thinking on thinking.

Iqbal and the Islamic tradition rightly feared that this notion, as a product of human reasoning, would be essentially limited and limiting. This is his incisive and trenchant critique of the cosmological and other modes of reasoning to God. Certainly reasoning in terms of forms and categories would be subject to this critique, but, as just noted, being had come to be perceived rather in terms of existence, which is affirmation without negation and hence without limitation.

Nevertheless, Iqbal makes a key contribution to any appropriate reading of a systematic Christian philosophy by insisting that the notion of God is not a product of human reasoning. Rather, as seen above through the archeology of human knowledge, the absolute is there as the center of human life in its earliest totemic mode; it flowers as humankind develops the mythic mode of thought; and it is there from the beginning in Parmenides’s founding of Greek metaphysical thought. As Augustine notes in his dialectic of love: it is not we who first loved God, but He who first loved us: from him come life and light and love.

In this light, one need not fear that an affirmation of man whether by personal freedom or technological means will be detrimental to religion. Rather human life becomes the proclamation of God’s wisdom, power, love and providence. On this basis Thomas proceeds systematically to shed the requirement not only of an external agent intellect, but also of a special divine illumination for each act of reason, and of seeds of possibility for all new realizations — all of which were ways by which the earlier Christian-Platonism had attempted to preserve a role for God in human progress. Instead the human person is seen as sacrament of God, His sign and symbol, as creative vice regent and artist in and of this world. Thus, Thomas does not hesitate to affirm of the human person whatever is required in order that, properly according to his own nature and in his own name, the person be able to fulfill these roles in this world. This is the proper autonomy of the human in the divine; we might say that in this the human person comes truly home in God.

2. The existential sense of being and its openness to the infinite has allowed more recently for a renewed appreciation of Thomas’ structure of participation by which human autonomy is an affirmation, rather than a derogation of God. In any limited being, its essence or nature constitutes by definition a limited and limiting capacity for existence: by it, the being is capable of this much existence, but of no more. Such an essence must then be distinct from the existence which, of itself, bespeaks only affirmation, not negation and limitation.

But such a being, whose nature or essence is not existence but only a capacity for existence, could not of itself or by its own nature justify its possession and exercise of existence. The Parmenidean principle of noncontradiction will not countenance existence coming from non-existence, for then being would be reducible to non-being or nothing. Such beings, then, are dependent precisely for their existence, that is, precisely as beings or existents.

This dependence cannot be upon another limited being similarly composed of a distinct essence and existence, for such a being would be equally dependent; the multiplication of such dependencies even infinitely would multiply, rather than answer the question of how composite beings with a limiting essence have existence. Hence, limited composite beings must depend for their existence upon, or participate in, uncomposite being, that is, in a being whose essence or nature, rather than being distinct from and limiting its existence, is identically existence. This is Being Itself — the total infinite to which Iqbal refers as making finite being and thinking possible.

This sense of participation makes it possible to speak of the nonreciprocal relation of finite to infinite and to identify the essentially caused character of the former. This is a crucial step beyond the Platonic tradition which rightly can be criticized for failing to develop adequate tools for distinguishing man from God. An existential metaphysics understands causality in terms of participation in the infinite. Hence, even while placing central emphasis upon union with the divine, by its conceptual and ontological structures it never loses sight of their distinction. Nevertheless, through making this distinction it sees every aspect of the caused or created being as totally derivative from, and expressive of, the infinite. Let man be man; indeed let all creatures be, for they glorify God the infinite and all mighty, the munificent and merciful!

As clarified and enriched by Aristotle’s sense of being as active, by the Christian existential sense of being and by the work of his great medieval Islamic commentators, Plato’s metaphysics of participation can provide the systematic clarification needed regarding religion in order that it be articulated in the increasingly structured physical and social environment in which we live. In the face of the dilemma of human hubris vs. religious passivity in our days, this provides indispensable help in responding to the need of those devoted in faith. It can aid them to understand better the relation of their increasingly complex life to God and assist them in living their faith in our times: in a word, it is crucial to coming home and being at home religiously in our times.

1. Plato, Sophist, 259 A.

2. Ibid., 248 E.

3. Plato, Republic, 509.

4. Ibid., pp. 509-511.

5. Noesis noeseos: "Thought thinks itself as object in virtue of its participation in what is thought," Metaphysics XII, 1072 b 19-29.

6. Ibid.

7. Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being, The Aristotelian Metaphysics: A Study in the Greek Background of Mediaval Thought (Toronto: PIMS, 1951).

8. A. Mansion, "Positions Maitresses de la philosophie d’Aristote," in Aristote et Saint Thomas d’Aquin (Louvain: Université de Louvain, 1955), pp. 58-67.

9. G. McLean, Plenitude and Participation: The Unity of Man in God (Madras: The University of Madras, 1978), pp. 53-57.

10. Aristotle had taken the compossibility of forms as a sufficient response to the scientific question of ‘whether it exists’. See Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics; A Study in the Greek Background of Medieval Thought (Toronto: P.I.M.S., 1978).

11. Mortiner J. Adler, The Idea of Freedom: A Dialectical Examination of the Conceptions of Freedom (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1958), I, 609.

12. John I:1-5, 8.

13. C. Fabro called the graded and related manner in which this is realized concretely an intensive notion of being. Cornelio Fabro, Participation et causalité selon S. Thomas d’Aquin (Louvain: Pub. Univ. de Louvain, 1961).

14. Cornelio Fabro, La nozione metafisica de partecipazione secondo S. Tommaso d’Aquino (Torino: Societá Ed. Internazionale, 1950), pp. 75-122.

15. Iqbal, pp. 25.

16. Ibid.