Richard Hooker

The Architecture of Participation

Paul Anthony Dominiak

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780567698926
• eBook ISBN:
  9780567685100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity has long been acknowledged as an influential philosophical, theological and literary text. While scholars have commonly noted the presence of participatory language in selected passages of Hooker's Laws, Paul Anthony Dominiak is the first to trace how participation lends a sense of system and coherency across the whole work.

Dominiak analyses how Hooker uses an architectural framework of 'participation in God' to build a cohesive vision of the Elizabethan Church as the most fitting way to reconcile and lead English believers to the shared participation of God. First exploring Hooker's metaphysical architecture of participation in his accounts of law and the sacraments, Dominiak then traces how this architecture structures cognitive participation in God, as well as Hooker's political vision of the Church and Commonwealth. The volume culminates with a summary of how Hooker provides a salutary resource for modern ecumenical dialogue and contemporary political retrievals of participation.

1

‘The participation of God himselfe’: Hooker and the retrieval of participation

Introduction

Every political vision assumes an epistemology, a way of looking at and understanding the world, in turn buttressed by some kind of ontology, a claim about what, how and why the world is. The vision of Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a late sixteenth-century apology for the Elizabethan Church, is no different. In the Laws, Hooker moves from ‘general meditations’ to the ‘particular decisions’¹ that govern the Elizabethan Religious Settlement but which have proved contentious. In his initial general meditations, ‘law’ acts as Hooker’s controlling image, an architectural blueprint through which Hooker will parse subsequent particular points of controversy over the role and interpretation of Scripture, the Book of Common Prayer, and ultimately the nature of the Elizabethan Church. For Hooker, all things ‘do work, after a sort, according to law’, and such laws direct creatures to their perfective formal end.² Hooker perceives that the root issue underneath the religious and political controversy of his age is whether the Elizabethan Religious Settlement has the character of such law. In the move from the general to the particular, then, Hooker’s apology for the political structures of the Elizabethan Church assumes a particular epistemology undergirded by a legal ontology. Early on within his general account of law, Hooker crucially claims that, through formal laws, ‘all things in the worlde are saide in some sort to seeke the highest, and to covet more or lesse the participation of God himselfe’.³ For Hooker, the metaphysics of participation describe how creation relates to the divine Creator: creation consists of participatory and teleological bodies, both physical and social, ordered within a cosmic hierarchy of laws and which desire to share analogically in the divine nature. If ‘law’ lays out a formal metaphysical blueprint, ‘participation in God’ emerges as its living, dynamic architecture that generates and illuminates the entire edifice of Hooker’s subsequent rebuttal of ‘them that seeke (as they tearme it) the reformation of Laws, and orders Ecclesiastical, in the Church of England’.⁴ As this work will show, the concept of participation rests behind every major argument in the Laws. A study of Hooker’s architecture of participation opens up new horizons both for understanding the internal coherence of his work and for grasping how, far from representing an arcane museum piece, the Laws illuminates modern theological, ecumenical and political discussions around the concept of participation and the closely related idea of deification.

The meaning, architecture and retrieval of participation

When the modern reader hears Hooker claim that law and the sacraments draw people into ‘the participation of divine nature’,⁵ and that in the Incarnation ‘God hath deified our nature’,⁶ it begs the question about what Hooker takes these closely related terms to mean, as well as how his use might relate to recent ecumenical retrievals. In order to grasp the interconnected quality of Hooker’s thought, it is necessary to define participation and deification, explore how these terms relate to each other, draw out a heuristic ‘architecture of participation’, and finally, examine why and how there have been modern ecumenical rediscoveries of such concepts.

The concept of participation has a double register – the philosophical and the scriptural – each of which will be important for Hooker, especially as they converge on the closely related idea of deification. Unpacking this double register eventually generates the heuristic ‘architecture of participation’ that this study will use to explore Hooker’s thought.

At first glance, participation seems to have a straightforward Latin etymology: as Thomas Aquinas puts it, ‘to participate [participare] is, as it were, to take a part [partem capere]’.⁷ For Aquinas, however, such Latin also renders an older Greek philosophical notion of participation as methexis. Unlike methexis, the Latin etymology of participare seems to suggest that participation divides some simple quality into discrete parts (partem capere). To avoid this suggestion, Aquinas quickly extends his definition also to state that, ‘when something receives in particular fashion that which belongs to another in universal fashion, the former is said to participate in the latter.’ Accordingly, Aquinas shifts the still familiar, quotidian notion of participation (as taking a part in or of something) towards a more philosophical sense of methexis, which involves an asymmetrical relationship between something restricted and contingent with some donating, universal source.

Aquinas hereby accommodates a Platonic notion of participation. Plato was the first philosopher to use participation (methexis) in a precise philosophical sense in relation to the problem of the many and the one, namely, how a contingent phenomenological multiplicity relates to some metaphysically simple, unitive, formal source.⁸ For Plato, participation (methexis) expresses the way in which many things can warrant the same name without dividing some simple quality into separate parts. The etymology of methexis (μέθεξις from μετέχω) indicates that things in the world have an ontological dependency on higher spiritual, intellectual realities, and implies plurality, similarity, relation and asymmetry all at once.⁹ Indeed, participation becomes an attempt to see the world as, in some sense, saturated with divinity. The root of the term, ἔχω (‘to have’) when used with a genitive object indicates the ‘having of’, in the sense of ‘sharing in’ a whole rather than ‘taking’ a part. Thus, many things share limited possession of a whole without dividing it into many discrete, separate parts. Meanwhile, the prefix, μετά, means ‘amidst’ and, in compositional words, ‘after’ or ‘in pursuit of’ something else. Methexis is therefore a compound construction suggesting that one thing has its own reality only by virtue of sharing in something other than itself and by dynamically tending towards that other. Accordingly, Charles Bigger defines Plato’s use of methexis in this manner: ‘“Participation” is the name of the “relation” which accounts for the togetherness of elements of diverse ontological type in the essential unity of a single instance. In this sense it is a real relation, one constitutive of the nexus qua nexus which arises from it.’¹⁰ For example, one calls something ‘beautiful’ insofar as it participates in the exemplary form of beauty. In participatory metaphysics, there exists a real, constitutive (if asymmetrical) relation between an exemplary, heavenly, participable form and the temporal, embodied participant of that same form. Plato uses a host of other terms in addition to methexis in order to describe this asymmetrical relationship: mixis (mixture), symplokē (interweaving), koinōnia (coupling) and mimesis (copying). Yet, methexis has had the most enduring and wide-ranging impact.

The attendant Platonic idea of imitating God connects the metaphysics of participation with ideas about deification, or becoming godlike through assimilation (homoiōsis theōi) in some regard.¹¹ Plato understands the ‘divine’ in diverse ways throughout his writings, including the gods of mythology, the soul of the world, the intellect that orders all things and the formal philosophical notion of ‘the Good’ as the fullness of being.¹² In the dialogue ‘Timaeus’, for example, Plato describes how an intelligent Maker produces the sensible world, describing this intelligent Maker as God, Father, Craftsman, One or Mind.¹³ For Plato, both human beings and the cosmos exhibit a likeness to the divine, a similarity making possible the participation (methexis) and imitation (mimesis) of God, the dynamic ensoulment of the exemplary Good, Beautiful and True.¹⁴ The end goal of such imitation of and participation in God is assimilation, which Plato sees as the development and growth of divine characteristics, and which some later Neoplatonists more strongly (and evocatively) parse as ontological union (henosis), the ecstatic mingling of the many with the one.¹⁵

Early Christian thinkers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the text
• Abbreviations
• 1 ‘The participation of God himselfe’: Hooker and the retrieval of participation
• 2 ‘Most abundant vertue’: Hooker’s metaphysical architecture of participation
• 3 ‘A drop of that unemptiable fountain of wisdom’: Cognitive participation in God
• 4 ‘Politique societie’: The politics of participation
• 5 ‘To resolve the conscience’: Revisiting the architecture of participation
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page