Participation in Western thought is usually a bad thing. Anthropologically, participation is the stuff of witch doctors and medicine men, the belief that one can be simultaneously oneself and inhabit the spirit or body of a crocodile or lion or river. Philosophically, it's a kind of group-think or convention that Socrates tried to break free from by asking what words meant. In the first sense participation is contrary to the integrity of the self; in the second sense it is the opposite of reflection, i.e., of philosophy.
In the latter half of his first essay in Grace & Necessity, Rowan Williams briefly discusses Jacques Maritain's use of participation in its theological sense of the "illuminating intellect."The idea seems to be an extension or implication of being made in the image of God. We are equipped with this illuminating intellect, which is "the reflection of God's formative mental activity within our own," a kind of "participatory awareness," below the surface of consciousness (preconscious, if anything; certainly not subconscious), "that resonates with the patterns of God's action in the created world."
What's this have to do with art?
The implication for art is, I think, clear enough. It suggests the artist attempts to listen to or perceive how, in Maritain's language, "things are not only what they are," how they "give more than they have." This presumes God's continuing activity in Creation to which our minds respond, and it explains in part why art always has a transgressive nature. Art in this sense reveals the "active intelligible life of the object" by denying its merely physical and perceptual boundaries, taking it up and rearranging, reorienting it to display it to us as a fresh thing (maybe even a thing always in need of freshening, thus of art).
This also clarifies how art is not, for Maritain, a product of the will or intention of the artist but still an act of intelligence. Art begins not with an idea, concept, or will but a sense, an intuition, or even perhaps a desire to know a thing intimately. It proceeds with an attention to the work itself (recall previous post) rather than to some purpose for the work, and so remains free, at least intrinsically, from moral judgments.
Williams shows that Maritain does at last recognize that art and morality begin to converge with respect to the world the work offers to us. We almost inevitably ask "whether a world laid before us by an artist is desirable for the kind of creatures we know ourselves to be." Theoretically, then, the work may be aesthetically beautiful but morally repulsive.
Or, more likely, morally problematic or stained. I think of Lars von Trier's Antichrist, a stunning film that disturbs and horrifies without the sensationalism and pornographic violence usually associated with the genre. It raises tough questions about the reality of evil and our modern attempts to explain or counsel it away, and it is just painfully beautiful visually. But ultimately von Trier's world is characterized more by darkness than light, held in the grip of an evil that will not be repressed and that offers no solution save desperate tears. It's for this reason that I really don't recommend the film to people - it's too dark, too hopeless, and it wants to burden the viewer with its own despair. Pan's Labyrinth might fit this category for me, too.
One last thing about participation
Williams doesn't explain how participation in Maritain isn't the bad thing philosophy thinks it is, but we might turn to David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite for help (sort of - it's a dense book, so whatever help it provides comes only after some serious work). In brief, Hart argues that the traditional understanding of the Trinity is of true difference, meaning God himself is a relation to himself. That is, there is no higher unity of the Trinity, which would make the persons of the Trinity lesser gods or mere aspects of God. In other words, in Christian theology, there is "difference at the origin," and difference does not collapse or resolve into some unity, nor does it represent some violence done to an originary unity but remains a harmony and a peace.
Basically, Hart refutes postmodernism's anxiety of participation by rejecting not only the modern thought it critiques but the heart of Western metaphysics itself, the theory of the One and the Many. The revelation of the Trinity, Hart argues, is that unity is itself diverse, contains differences that do not dissolve into one another. Creation is diverse, multiplex, abundant because it reflects, finitely, the infinite diversity and abundance of God's own nature.
Thus, if we sacrifice the concept of the autonomous self and the violence of either unity or division, participation becomes a joining in the dance, the invitation of love itself.
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