Abstract

This essay concerns the problem of individuation in metaphysics in relation to the question of individuality in politics. It rejects the assumption in muchof ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy and theology that unity and diversity are opposed and that this opposition produces conflict and violence. Theproposed alternative is a metaphysics and politics of relationality. This alternative is not so much indebted to Aristotle, but instead goes back to Platonist metaphysics and its transformation by Augustine and Boethius. By privileging substance over all other categories, Aristotle not only relegated the transcendent immaterial actuality from the immanence of the material world but also divorced particular beings from the universal Prime Mover or God. By contrast, for Plato, the transcendent universal Good individuates all immanent particulars relationally at the level of the oikos, the polis, and the cosmos. Crucially, by combining the concept of creation ex nihilo with the metaphysics of participation, Augustine and Boethius reconfi gured Plato’s Good in the direction of the Creator-God and Trinitarian relationality. Thus, each and every being is individuated because it is a particular reflection of the universal Good, a unique and singular expression of God’s self-communicative actualization in the world.