The dreamlike mood dramatically invoked by Wordsworth in ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ is the contemplation of the intelligible universe by the ascent of the soul as nous eron, fuelled by joy. Such a philosophical, poetic and sacred enterprise is evidently indebted to the Platonic vision. The Platonic inheritance of Wordsworth or Baudelaire requires scant justification. Yet if one looks at the terminology of the philosophers, it might be inferred that the concept of ‘participation’ had already disappeared drastically from the Western philosophical canon. A cursory glance through the indices of some of the major works of philosophy in the last century will fail to produce many instances of the term.

The concept of participation has a long and complex history. It is also inextricably linked to other cognate issues such as the nature of universals, analogy, perfect being theology, or the problem of evil. Elucidating its history and its possible relevance today for both philosophy and theology is the aim of the present work. ‘Participation’ is a central concept in various forms of Thomism, and yet it has become marginal in much post-seventeenth century Western philosophical thought. This volume should furnish a handbook and guide to such a paradigmatic, and yet enigmatic, concept. The last few decades have seen a remarkable upsurge in the study of Neoplatonism, with a flowering of commentaries and translations; this volume builds upon this outstanding development in recent scholarship. Whereas the Victorians and Edwardians were often apt to envisage Neoplatonism and its key concepts as symptoms of an age of decadence, contemporary scholarship has successfully revised this view of Late Antiquity.

The idea of the world soul is a distinctive Platonic doctrine. It is particularly significant in late Antique thought, the 12th century Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance. It is transmitted via the Cambridge Platonists, mystical pietism, Cabbala and the Spinoza revival to German Romantic period and the great age of Russian literature. Historically, it has been either loosely associated with or even identified with the Divine Sophia. This Divine Wisdom itself has a complex reception history, and constitutes a conspicuous feminine image of the Divine, and is relevant to recent discussions about the intellectual inheritance of Western Christian thought and the ecological crisis.

This chapter explores the protean character of Christian Platonism in the Romantic Age. If the Enlightenment was frequently shaped by a critique of dogma, tradition and superstition, the Romantics were concerned with the loss of culture, the exaltation of abstract reason, and a longing for the transcendent. Platonism offered a means for revitalizing Christianity, caught between the cultured despisers of religion in the Enlightenment, and the annexation of creation to the mechanistic thought of the emergent natural sciences.