At a conference at St Stephen's House, Oxford, in 2002, newly elected Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams suggested that participation, an emerging focus in contemporary theology, was a term in need of rigorous thoughtfulness if it were to avoid becoming a kind of slogan for all things trending in the new millennium. With this text, Andrew Davison has provided as thoughtful and rigorous an account as one could wish for. Following earlier work by Kathryn Tanner, Jacob Sherman and David C. Schindler, among others, Davison offers ‘an exploration of metaphysics from a theological perspective’ that ‘presents a way of thinking about the structure of created reality, in relation to God, at its most basic level’ (p. 260). This is a book that could teach a generation of theology students to avoid the pitfalls of so much modern theology, simply by following the injunction of the book's opening sentence: ‘Approaching the world in terms of sharing and receiving should be the bedrock of a Christian understanding of reality, and of Christian doctrine (p. 1).
Davison lays out his book something like a curriculum from an older generation: philosophical foundations, doctrine and practical theology (in this case: truthfulness, aesthetics and ethics). However, whereas those older curricula have been challenged as erecting silos of language and discipline, he weaves his theme of sharing and receiving throughout all.
The first part builds a metaphysical structure from Aristotle's fourfold causality, and at each step the deep connectedness of God to creation is foregrounded. For example, he tells us that, as efficient cause, God relates to the world less like a cook to a pot of soup than like a singer to a song. While God is not creation's material cause, the goodness of God finds a likeness in the goodness of a material creation. God is the formal or exemplar cause: not the stoniness of the stone, but what the stone's stoniness is imitating. And all of this means that God is also our final cause, since becoming the particular things we were created to be is a way of sharing in God's being, even of sharing in the sharing of divine persons in one another (p. 130).
The link between causality and the Trinity is the context for the one critique I have of the arguments in the book. While Davison's account of appropriations navigates the complex question of persons and divine acts with dexterity, he leaves it at that, as if ‘associating qualities with individual Persons, while not excluding the other Persons’ (p. 49), were the final word on the subject. In fact, contemporary readings of the fathers have quite a bit more to say on the question, developing language which shows the persons as causally differentiated actors of single works of God.
Before moving on to the ‘theological story’ with this rich reading of Aristotle (most often by way of Thomas) in hand, Davison offers chapters on his two key methodological terms, namely, participation and analogy. Here the ‘modus principle’ serves as a guide and rule of theological speech, always reminding us that created things are, according to their appropriate mode, ‘aflame with a similitude to some aspect of God’ (p. 148). Analogical speech recognises this ontological connectivity, and seeks ways to name those real (not forged) similitudes.
The next set of chapters are the real heart of the book, in that they are the main studies of Christian doctrine that the subtitle promises. This is where we taste the fruit of Davison's metaphysics for christology, creaturely agency, evil and redemption. The giving and sharing of personhood is the center of christology and helps us see what is really going on in the complex language of hypostatisation in the late classical period. Christ ‘has’ no person other than the one given by and sharing in the divine Logos. Human agency, and not just human existing, is a sharing in this Logos, and this is because ‘God not only causes, but, in causing, bestows upon creatures the power to be causes themselves’ (p. 217).
Evil is a dimming or greying of this share in God, which implies that ‘God concurs in evil only in as much as it preserves some element of goodness’ (p. 249). This chapter is the source of my favourite image from the entire book: evil is being that has lost its splendour, something like the coat of a malnourished cat (p. 241). By returning to language of causality, Davison can then show how God's redemption works to repair these sites of privation. Grace, he says, is less an efficient cause – a shove that sets an event in motion – and more properly a formal cause, since a just God restores the integrity of creation by drawing justice out of it again, thus renewing its share in the divine being.
All of this would surely be enough, but Davison, like a good Thomist, concludes with an account of the transcendentals, the names of participated reality par excellence. Once again, the metaphysics he puts in place gives us the means to navigate these interpretive interventions. Truth is the way God communicates participation through created realities. Beauty is the way a thing calls us to note its share in God. Goodness is the shape of a life responding to this call.
The text is written in a lucid and inviting style. The student of theology will find in it a offer a movingly coherent and often poetic account of a world ordered by and sharing in God. The scholar as well will find plenty of insights, for instance in the final chapter's discussion of natural law and virtue ethics, or the treatment of ‘affordances’ in the chapter on truth. Each chapter, in fact, concludes with ‘further notes’, paragraphs attending to more technical questions within each subject. Few scholars have the gift of writing such a full treatment of a bedrock idea in a way that is both approachable and generative of new critical engagement. Davison has this gift, and he has written such a book.
