My second comprehensive exam offers a genealogy and typology of participation. Participation is Plato’s solution to the problem of the one and the many posed by the Presocratics. Participation in turn gives rise to the problem of the origins of difference (how the diverse many emerge from the unified one), which is only finally solved by Maximus the Confessor, who sources the differentiation of creation in the creature’s freewill.

Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa