“For in him we live and move and have our being” is a stunning truth. It comes to us from Epimenides, the legendary ancient Greek poet. St. Paul cites it in his Mars Hill sermon to the searching and often skeptical Athenians (see Acts 17:28). The idiosyncratic Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) would appeal to it in aid of his thesis that only minds and ideas exist.

Reflecting on Epimenides’s truth, we might find ourselves doing philosophical theology, specifically mereology, about the relation of parts and wholes. For a start, I’d like to distinguish between ordinary participation and “the participated.” Their shared etymology is straightforward: the Latin pars means a part or division, and the stem verb capere means to take. So ordinary participation is to take part in something. Sometimes it’s even taking a part of something. Suppose for a distressing domestic example, I ask Hungry Harry if he participated in the demolition of the pizza. If he’s honest, he’ll admit to having eaten a large part of it.

But let’s shift, albeit abruptly, to a markedly different example and a different sort of participation. Thomas Aquinas teaches that since we ourselves exercise providence, we have “a share of providence” and thus “a share of the Eternal Reason”; indeed, “this participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is called the natural law” (ST I-II, q. 91, art. 2). Note that our share of God’s providence does not involve taking a part of it. Nor do we in any way change it. Rather our providence is a “participated providence.” Neither does our participation in the eternal law somehow take a part of it or change it. It is, rather, a “participated reasonableness.”

Beauty offers a comparable example. Thomas teaches that in beauty we find integrity, harmony, and clarity. He links the Son, as the perfect image of the Father, with beauty itself (ST I, q. 39, art. 8). If we trace the beauty of Creation to its source, we come to the Creator. Gerard Manley Hopkins signals as much when he writes that “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” But such beauty does not take a part of or alter God’s beauty; it is, rather, a “participated” reality.

A final example calls for further distinctions. In his 1943 encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi (The Mystical Body of Christ), Pope Pius XII writes, “If we would define this true Church of Jesus Christ … we shall find no expression more noble, more sublime or more divine than the phrase which calls it the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ” (n. 13). This expression recalls the language of St. Paul:

Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many (1 Corinthians: 12-14).

The human body, of course, has many parts, some in good order and others less so. But a hand, a whole hand, is nothing more than a part. Yet a person baptized by the Spirit in the forming of one body, the Mystical Body, is not simply an appendage of the Body of Christ. Each human person is always, in a pivotal sense, a whole. Thomas himself tells us that “person signifies what is most perfect in all of nature” (ST I, q. 29, art. 3). He affirms, too, that “the good of grace in one [human being] is greater than the good of nature in the whole universe” (ST I-II, q. 113, 9, ad 2).

In The Person and the Common Good, the eminent Thomist Jacques Maritain underscores the social implications of the interplay of person and community. To speak of the person as a part of society, he writes, “in no wise means that it must be in society in a way in which a part is in a whole and treated in society as a part in a whole. On the contrary, the person, as a person, requires to be treated as a whole in society.” Plainly put, the relation is that of all for one and one for all. Rightly understood, while self-defense is legitimate, we ought never set out to kill one even for the supposed good of another.

But can we truly hope to wage peace, or even secure it in our own hearts, given today’s cruel and chaotic world? Such a hope depends on the amazing grace which enables us to live in love. So it is that in every eucharist we pray, “By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” We do not, per impossible, take a share of Our Savior. Rather our sacramental divinization is “participated.”