What does it mean to speak of creation as participating in God? Yonghua Ge addresses this question through close and patient interpretation of the works of Augustine and Aquinas. His approach and framing for the book are not, however, exclusively historical. Ge is at least partly motivated by the recent renaissance of participation-language, especially as used by Radical Orthodoxy and Hans Boersma. The book can be read both as a scholarly investigation of Augustine's and Aquinas's theologies of participation and as an intervention in contemporary theology. The book is overall successful, elegant and winsome. However, it does not accomplish both of its goals in equal measure.
Both Radical Orthodoxy and Hans Boersma have renewed the idea of participation for English-language theology. In particular, they consider participatory ontology to be the long-needed remedy for our theological and cultural ailments. And yet, so Ge argues, Radical Orthodoxy and Boersma often talk as if a purely ‘Platonic’ notion of participation will suffice. This leaves their visions of creation largely vulnerable to the criticism of a Platonic prejudice against embodiment, materiality and difference.
To intervene, Ge proposes a closer reading of Augustine and Aquinas on participation. His attention homes in on the relationship of the one and the many in the two thinkers, their understandings of materiality and whether they consistently value difference and multiplicity in their metaphysics. Along the way, Ge strives to widen the gap between Plato and Plotinus on the one hand and Augustine and Aquinas on the other, suggesting that the latter have transformed the idea of participation significantly enough that their views should no longer be associated with their Platonic counterparts without serious qualification.
This reading of Augustine and Aquinas is conducted across two parts and six chapters. The first part is dedicated to Augustine and the second to Aquinas. The ordering and parallel structure of the two parts display a hermeneutic conviction that drives the work, namely that Aquinas can be read as a kind of completion of Augustine's theology, recapitulating his predecessor's thought while simultaneously strengthening it in terms of logical rigour, conceptual precision and metaphysical comprehensiveness. This means that Ge is at least in partial agreement with Radical Orthodoxy in how to situate Aquinas’ thought: we are not dealing with Aquinas the Aristotelian, but Aquinas the Augustinian (who is therefore still somewhat ‘Platonist’).
The results of these six chapters are impressive in their clarity and in the richness with which they help us see the Christian revision of participation. One of the important conclusions of these chapters is that both Augustine and Aquinas reinterpret participation through the lens of creatio ex nihilo. This forces them to rethink unity otherwise than as the opposite of multiplicity, and Ge carefully and persuasively shows how Augustine and Aquinas each conceive of transcendence and divine unity non-contrastively. Ge demonstrates further that, contrary to common opinion, Augustine has a fundamentally positive view of materiality and the body, and Aquinas values ‘the many’ to such an extent that multiplicity (specifically formal multiplicity) is given the status of a transcendental (p. 124).
Ge helps to clarify how participation is given a unique and theologically determined form in the theologies of Augustine and Aquinas, and he convincingly argues that their views cannot be reduced to the understanding of participation in Plato and Plotinus. Through close comparison on key questions, Ge shows that Augustine and Aquinas introduce distinctions that make it explicit that participation in the supereminent simplicity of God does not diminish the goodness and integrity of creaturely being, either in its inherent multiplicity or in its materiality. As a defence of Augustine's and Aquinas’ theologies, Ge's work here is convincing and, in my view, successful.
What is less clear is how successfully the work intervenes in Radical Orthodoxy's and Boersma's uses of participation language. It seems to me that there are two remaining issues here. First, Radical Orthodoxy and Boersma may be using an alternative hermeneutic for Platonism, one which stresses the continuities between Christian and pagan Platonisms and interprets their differences in terms of Christian thought having fulfilled what is incomplete in pre-Christian Platonism. If so, then Ge's rich discussion of participation may simply provide more fine-grained detail to what Radical Orthodoxy and Boersma evoke with a broader brush.
Second, Ge's choice to characterise Radical Orthodoxy through select writings by John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock is restrictive and potentially misleading. Although Milbank and Pickstock certainly can and should be read in their own terms, their work as representatives of Radical Orthodoxy is situated within a broader group of thinkers with shared aims and a degree of mutual dependency. Others in Radical Orthodoxy have written on Augustine, Aquinas and participation more directly (especially relevant would be Michael Hanby's Augustine and Modernity and Simon Oliver's Creation). It is hard to see why these were not considered, either in characterising Radical Orthodoxy or in the exegetical chapters.
These reservations mostly concern how Ge frames the work as an intervention in contemporary theology. But as a whole the book is truly an important and impressive account of participation as a Christian metaphysic in service of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Its care and patience make for rewarding reading, and it gives powerful expression to the abundance and creativity of the simple triune God, who by virtue of radical ontological difference from creation is also intimately and pervasively present, and in and through whom all creatures exist.
