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13 - Richard Hooker’s Metaphysics of Divine Participation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2024

By
Torrance Kirby
Edited by
Douglas Hedley  and
Daniel J. Tolan
Douglas Hedley
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Daniel J. Tolan
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

In the fourth book of his treatise Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (1593), Richard Hooker affirms a conspicuously positive role for the function of the lower, sensuous faculties of the soul in the religious life. Hooker paraphrases the sixth-century Syrian Neoplatonic theologian Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite when he observes that “the sensible things which religion hath hallowed are resemblances framed according to things spiritually understood, whereunto they serve as a hand to lead and a way to direct.” The phenomena of human aesthetic experience are understood here as “resemblances” of their original “causes,” and “participation” (μέθεξις) works in both directions: Hooker speaks of the various species of law as “ofspringe of god, they are in him as effects in their highest cause, he likewise actuallie is in them, thassistance and influence of his deitie is theire life” (Lawes v.56.5; 2:237.23–25).1

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Chapter
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Participation in the Divine
A Philosophical History, From Antiquity to the Modern Era
 , pp. 292 - 302
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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