The enduring metaphysical problem of mediation between God and world is brought into focus through three interrelated concepts: world soul, participation, and panentheism. Spanning Platonic, patristic, medieval, and early modern sources, the panel examines how the intelligibility, vitality, and teleology of the cosmos are articulated without collapsing into either reductive materialism or undifferentiated pantheism. Particular attention is given to the conceptual grammar of mediation, whether figured as immanent principle, divine self-disclosure, or participatory activity, and to the ways such accounts sustain both cosmic order and creaturely dependence. The panel further explores how participatory metaphysics grounds accounts of creation, sacramentality, and contemplative fulfilment, while resisting both naturalistic reduction and the erasure of the Creator–creature distinction. The panel will consider the conceptual richness and philosophical stakes of participatory metaphysics across traditions.
This paper retrieves the Platonic and Neoplatonic metaphysics of participation, as developed by Augustine and Aquinas, arguing that their accounts of the fulfilment of creatures in contemplative ascent offers a constructive alternative to impasses in contemporary models of eschatology. Augustine inteprets the creature’s longing for beatitude through a participatory ontology shaped by his Plotinian inheritance, in which all beings proceed from and return to a transcendent source. Aquinas extends this trajectory, integrating Dionysian elements within his account of creation to produce a metaphysics in which creaturely being remains ultimately ordered towards its source. Together these accounts offers a profoundly Platonic vision of participatory being which resists naturalistic eschatology or the collapse of the distinction of creatures from the Creator. Their synthesis illuminates the metaphysical depths and theological fecundity of creaturely dependence, ascent, and contemplation in ways that contemporary eschatologies–shorn of these resources–struggle to do.
This paper unveils a Neoplatonic grammar of “energy” (energeia) in Richard Hooker’s (1554–1600) account of humanity’s creative “participation” in God. His articulation of a “sacramental poetics” in his Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie has drawn attention from scholars aiming to re-enchant the post-Enlightenment world. They often read Hooker as supporting a participatory metaphysics grounded in Christian panentheism. This paper argues instead that Hooker retrieves from church fathers like Dionysius and Damascene a Neoplatonic tradition that connects the Aristotelian language of energeia with human acts of divine participation. I demonstrate this through his participative use of terms like “working” in Book One of the Lawes in relation to human acts of poesis, and then in Book Five in relation to Christ’s sacramental presence. I argue that “energy” operates as a mediating category in his thought, allowing Hooker to articulate a participatory ontology that avoids both panentheism and undue metaphysical complexity.
Plato’s Timaeus makes the cosmos intelligible by positing a world soul: a mediating intelligence that binds the visible world to intelligible order and renders it a living whole. This paper takes that account as a conceptual baseline and reads the Gospel of John in its light. This paper does not argue that John depends on Plato. This paper argues that John addresses a comparable problem—how cosmic order and knowability relate to divine agency—while refusing a key Platonic solution. In the Timaeus, intelligibility is secured by an immanent cosmic soul. In John, the work of mediation and disclosure is assigned to the Logos (and, secondarily, to the Spirit) within a doctrine of creation. The comparison clarifies what the world soul contributes in the Platonic tradition and what changes when mediation is relocated from the cosmos to the divine Word.
Henry More’s Spirit of Nature, or hylarchic principle, is well-known as one of the signature doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists by means of which they navigated between materialist atheism and hylozoic pantheism. Anne Conway’s Middle Nature occupies a similar position as it mediates between God and creatures, but it operates within a seemingly quite different, less dualist and more gradualist metaphysics. The relationship between the two, and to the deeply Plotinian panentheism of More’s early poetry, is a complex one. This paper will re-examine this relationship, arguing that Conway’s gradualist metaphysics, devised in part to overcome the difficulties of More’s dualism, approximates the metaphysics of his poetry, and there is evidence that More too, late in his career, inclined hestiantly back toward his earlier positions. Conway emerges not so much as departing from More as completing her teacher’s original system more thoroughly than he himself was able to achieve.