Mark Damien Delp

Mark Damien Delp (d. 2012) was a scholar of medieval metaphysics at the University of San Francisco and a member of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics. His central contribution to Hermetic studies was the scholarly rehabilitation of De sex rerum principiis.

The Metaphysics of Participation

Delp's Notre Dame dissertation (1994), De Sex Rerum Principiis: A Translation and Study of a Twelfth-century Cosmology, is the foundational English-language treatment. He argues the six principles are modes of participated being — not merely logical or physical categories, but ontological ratios expressing how creatures participate in divine being and intelligibility through the Boethian-Augustinian tradition. His key insight: Numerus (number) in the text is not quantitative counting but the proportion by which a creature's being is measured against its divine exemplar. With Paolo Lucentini, Delp produced the critical Latin edition for the Hermes Latinus series (Brepols, 2006), firmly establishing the text's place within medieval Latin Hermeticism and its connections to the Chartres school synthesis of Plato's Timaeus with Christian cosmology.