Neoplatonic Tawhid
Between Polytheist and Islamic Neoplatonism
Dr. Khalil Andani has recently published a clear and frankly beautiful argument for the existence of God using Islamic Neoplatonism[1]. It is well worth the read if you are into these debates. My entry into Neoplatonism began with David Bentley Hart’s “The Experience of God”, but more explicitly facilitated by the Islamic Neoplatonic elements in Frithjof Schuon’s thought. It’s safe to say that without Schuon’s Neoplatonism[2], I would not be so enamored with Proclus. Accordingly, a lot of my more explicitly religious practice is influenced by that period in my journey, particularly by the concept of the “Imaginal”[3], but also the “non-dualism” you find in certain quarters[4]. It is also a breath of fresh air in a context where, as Andani says, “they all explicitly or implicitly center on a Christian theological worldview” (p. 11). Just as importantly, it is also a breath of fresh air as an argument for an understanding of deity that, although very old, is not very well respected or understood. I can still remember the usual responses to Hart’s “The Experience of God”, where readers found the “God” in question very unrelatable and seemingly at odds with what they considered the revelation of said God (scriptures and otherwise). Andani notes all of these with respect to his preferred understanding of Deity, and sets out to argue against them as part of the paper.
What I am going to do in this essay is to lay out the vision of Platonic Polytheism in contrast with Islamic Neoplatonism as Andani has explained it, and propose a conciliation. The conciliation is in the spirit in which I understand religious dialogue. I seek not to reject any God as less “divine” than any other, and so Allah remains a God I respect. A contest for a religion which is exclusively true is the lowest goal for any religion, in my book.
I
Classical Theism and the Platonic Tradition
I am no longer a “classical theist” in the sense Andani describes, having concluded that Platonic Polytheism seems a better way of articulating the principles the classical theist seeks to maintain, but this is not intuitive for most today. The most interesting arguments for Platonic Polytheism I have read on the analytic philosophy of religion space have come from Steven Dillon, in his book “Polytheism: A Platonic Approach”[5] (another book I think more people in that space should read), followed by Eric Steinhart’s essay “Axiarchic Polytheism”[6], although this latter is not “Platonic” in the classical sense that Dillon approximates best. However, what caught my eye while reading Andani’s article were the similarities and differences with classical Platonic Polytheism and the implications both positions draw from the need for an ultimate first principle of existent things, what Andani calls “Unconditional Reality”, a term he borrows from Father Robert J. Spitzer (p. 18). Similarly to Hart, Andani contrasts this “Unconditional Reality” with the prevalent conceptions of God that see “God” as a “World Maker” or “Necessary Being” that fall short of the high standards of a first principle that Deity should embody. A World Maker might still have higher causes or a higher ground for its existence (p. 13), and a “Necessary Being” God can be one among many modally necessary beings (p. 15-16). In contrast, a Platonic Polytheist like Proclus[7] can both affirm “Unconditional Reality” – saying that “All that exists has the Good as its principium and first cause” (Prop. 12)[8] – and the true God-hood of those entities that are “World Makers” and “Necessary Beings” by linking them directly to unoriginated divine selves (Prop. 115, 119, 135)[9]. The reason he can do this lies in the differing manners in which the first principle is understood between the Neoplatonic tradition represented by Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, etc., and the later Christian and Islamic Neoplatonic traditions. A part of this divergence lies in language. Andani adopts the language of “Unconditional Reality” (which we will call UR), which suggests a singular entity, and indeed, he does argue for the singularity of this entity (p. 39-49). The way to understand the problem with this can be found, perhaps ironically, perhaps not, in David Bentley Hart’s description of what it is to be a “cause” in the classical sense. He says that the language of aitia or “cause” is “a grammar of predication, describing the inherent logical structure of anything that exists insofar as it exists,”[10] a grammar that describes “a world in which things and events are at once discretely identifiable and yet part of the larger dynamic continuum of the whole.”[11] The issue is subsuming this grammar into the language of “theology”, even “natural theology”. Edward Butler argues that Proclus inherits an old distinction between philosophy and theology[12] that carries over into his metaphysics, such that we have to separate the inquiry into the principles of existence (the “grammar of predication” mentioned earlier) from the inquiry into theology, where “theology” represents those modes of discourse in which the revelation of the Gods, their substances and their activities, are expounded, sung, recited, ritualized, etc[13]. This means that the books of the Bible, the Quran, the Vedas, the Theogony, etc, would be considered theologies, insofar as they concern specific Gods, their revelations, their relationship with their worshippers, followers, etc, while the Proclus’ Elements of Theology, Plotinus’ Enneads, and Edward Feser’s “Five Proofs of the Existence of God” would not be theology, even “natural theology”, but philosophy.
This is a distinction that does not entail a lack of connection between the two categories. One can philosophize on theology as we might find in Aquinas or Proclus himself (in his “Platonic Theology”); and philosophical terms and methods can be a part of theology, as we see in for instance, the Chaldean Oracles, in the first chapter of the Gospel of John or the letters of St. Paul. However, it is a distinction that facilitates for us the possibility that a first principle, or a principle of divinity, need not be one God. For philosophers like Proclus, there was a sense of the generically divine, which Butler says is “that space which comes initially from the recognition of the others’ Gods and Their sanctity, even if They are not one’s own, but which comes to apply as well to what is divine without being peculiar to any particular cult, not replacing such devotion, but rather being constantly nourished by it. Philosophical knowledge emerges within and continues to inhabit this space.”[14] By holding this space open, one allows for a multitude of theophanies and senses of the term “divine”, a stance justified by the normalcy of religious experience as well as a presumption of its possibly ineffable innocence[15], and the more important fact that this experience has often involved an experience of the divine person as ultimate, and the implied existence of more than one omnipotent God[16]. The presence of a multitude of theologies and their revelation of omnipotent Gods is the context in which Platonists like Proclus seek to explain and articulate the first principle. It is a principle that must explain, rather than reduce, the multiplicity of existent things, and for our purposes, the multiplicity of omnipotent Gods. It is for this reason that Butler has appropriated Étienne Gilson’s term “henology” for the description of Platonic metaphysics, only adapted to explain this anti-reductionism[17].
II
Looking for a First Principle
The result of these requirements for a first principle is that ever more universal principles are less “monadic” in proportion to their universality, and by “monadic” I mean a principle with a primary referent or instantiation that is the eminence of all the principle is, and around or towards which the other instances or referents of the principle find their meaning as instances. This is basically the notion of Aristotle’s pros hen equivocity[18].
Nature
Let us consider a principle that explains all physical things. All physical things are defined by several fundamental physical laws which inform their properties that physicists study and discover. However, there are things physics cannot explain, such as “qualia”, which are “first-person sensuous intuition, immediate impressions”[19] of things like colour. Instead, physics reduces these phenomena to a quantitative description of, say, in the example of colour, wavelengths and frequencies of electromagnetic wave descriptions of the phenomenon of light. This is a key aspect of monadic principles, they cannot explain certain things, and must reduce them to what it does explain of it is taken as absolute. The “Physical Principle”, which has an analogue in the Proclean concept of “Nature”[20], with key differences, is one of the most monadic principles, insofar as it has a singular paradigmatic reference, which is the physical universe as a whole, as one thing that can be described by physics. It is the monad for the manifold of physical things, that around or towards which, their status as “physical” has meaning; it is their context, or ground.
Soul
However, many philosophers have recognized a more primordial principle, the “closest” principle to us, whose primary participants possess agency, and whose activity enacts time. We call this principle “Soul”. Indeed, it is well known that special relativity leads to a “Block Universe” where all cosmic history is simultaneously present[21], and that the physical arrow of time is a statistical phenomenon, such that the processes we would associate with “time reversal”, like spontaneous entropy decrease, are possible, even if relatively improbable[22]. That is, time is one of those things that isn’t really explained in physics, but reduced to a process that is not time. Wolfram even argues that the experience of time is correlated with the size of one’s body and the possible perceptual senses one has, such that being the size of a planet comes with a radically alien non-sequential (or at least not sequential as we understand it) notion of Space-Time[23]. For the Platonist, this is a sign that the principle of time is to be found elsewhere, and the Platonist finds a proximate cause in Soul or Psyche. The ubiquity of time beyond the movement of bodies can be argued from the temporality of thinking itself, the process of reasoning about things. If we are to follow the non-reductionism emphasized earlier, we have to take the objects of reasoning as existent entities in their own right, and their temporality as fundamental to their operation[24]. It is this “temporality” of the activity of thinking that informs the classical meaning of “motion” that is attributed to bodies and souls alike, but while bodies are moved by external influence, souls are “self-moved”, a sign of their agency.
A way to understand the movement of souls is to consider the phenomenology of a mind working through an argument. Note that “mind” can be considered the principal part of the “soul” in this formulation. A mind accepts a given argument from its premises to its conclusion through the “force” of logic. Its consideration of the argument is a “change”, a purposeful “movement”, but it is not a movement extrinsic to the mind that moves. The unfolding elements of thought constituting the argument takes place in the mind. Thus, the movement of the mind is from itself to itself, a movement internal to the mind initiated from the mind. That it is from the mind – or, that it is the mind itself that thinks – is why soul is called “self-moved”. The “force of logic’ is a metaphor for the fact of movement, not the involuntary outside influence implied by the term “force” more appropriate to bodies. That this movement is completely internal, that it is a movement into one’s self, is what Proclus calls the capacity of “self-reversion” (Prop. 83)[25]. This movement, this “self-reversion”, is also a self-knowledge, as what is known through the argument in the example is a part of the mind’s constitution, since the movement, and the objects of knowledge, are internal to the mind. Because only minds know, and all knowledge and movement to knowledge – the phenomenology of knowledge’s coming to be – is internal to the mind as a part of its constitution, it can be concluded that all knowledge is self-knowledge. The structure of the Soul then, is noetic, a term that basically means having a structure primarily known through the category of “logical” and coextensive with “logical”, the “intelligible.” The soul is a substance of noetic temporality. It consists in an agency that unfolds in temporally repeated, and endless, acts of knowledge. This is how it “gives life” to bodies (Prop. 188)[26], by giving those entities noetic temporality. This is the difference between the relations between bodies and the relations between souls and bodies. Bodies relate to each other through force. Souls relate to each other and to bodies through reason, in the classical sense of logical order, worked out temporally. Because of this, the presence of soul in bodies is discerned in its intelligible motion. This is most clear in the transparency of physical processes to mathematical description, and the usually deterministic consequences of this description. However, this includes other logics, including those eminent in the social sciences, and even in the possibility of a non-deterministic biological science where “[a]n evolving biosphere is a propagating construction, not an entailed deduction,”[27] such that the open endedness and real agency of biological living things are taken seriously, without reducing them to the non-agentic motion of bodies that modern physics requires for its inquiry into the nature of its objects. The question of “social constructs”, institutional ontologies, physical change, the open-endedness of meaning in texts, etc; all of these are presences of soul in the intelligibility of material substances. The principle of the universe qua agentic life (thinking as self-constitution) and intelligible motion (not physical constitution) is thus Soul.
Andani has aptly noted that William Lane Craig’s understanding of deity as the cause of the universe’s temporal existence is very World Soul-like, an estimation that means that for Andani means that it cannot be proper deity, only deity by derivation (p. 13-15). This is in step with the monotheist emphasis of Classical Theism. However, although Neoplatonists like Proclus would not simply agree with Craig’s understanding of divinity, neither would they deny that a World Soul is a God, and the reason lies in the agency of souls and the eminence of the monad. You see, the problem of individuation is particularly acute for Souls. There is nothing in soul specifically that explains the multiplicity of souls. Soul is also “monadic” in that their commonality implies an overarching context that is the eminence of Psyche. Unlike bodies, which are made different by division enacted by force, souls are not so distinguished. Their constitution is “intension” and not extension. Their substance is an internal movement. This means that taking every soul in itself, in their commonality, seems to suggest that they are all one soul, following the identity of indiscernibles. The primary way we, here in this life, can determine different souls is by identifying different bodies. Beyond the difference of bodies, what distinguishes souls from each other? This is a problem that plagues monisms that are monadic, they usually have an implicit dualism where an opposite principle, usually a “material” principle, has to be present in order to individuate the diversity we see in the world. The problem with this is that the interaction between the principles implies a commonality between both, a substance which will be a “third man”. The alternative is that they have nothing in common, and thus would have no interactions. But this is evidently not the case, as bodies are always in intelligible motion relative to each other, the sign of soul. The other problem is that delegating the act of individuation of the multitude of souls to bodies is to fall into the reductionism we are trying to avoid. Soul is self-moving, and thus primarily self-determining. This means that if we are to take seriously the agency of the multitude of souls, we have to affirm their irreducibility to their monad as well as to body. That is, the ontological context or ground of Soul qua Soul must not absorb the multiplicity of its participants, even as it explains their substance; and the context of embodiment must not be the cause of their individuation, even if it participates in their activity. We must hold out until we can account for the principle that can explain this multiplicity without reduction. This has the added advantage of also not reducing bodies to the psychic principle, since the force that reduces souls to Soul can also reduce Bodies to Soul due to the same principle of reduction. The monad of Soul thus explains the “soulness” of souls, as well as the “soul-likeness” or “participation in soul” of bodies. The monad of soul is thus “less” monadic in its greater universality. However, this monad does not explain the individuality of souls, and the mutual intelligibility of souls and bodies, even as it explains the “soulness” of souls and the intelligible motion of bodies. Is this monad a God? The Platonic Polytheist can certainly agree with Andani and classical theists in general that it is a divine entity, but to explain what enables the Platonic Polytheist to go farther than the classical theist without becoming “neoclassical” monotheists looking for a singular “world maker”, we have to consider the next principle that enables the context/ground of Soul and the context/ground of Body.
Intellect, Life, and Being
In order to understand the ground of both Soul and Body that participate it, we have to see what those latter two principles explain and what they do not explain. Bodies are defined by extension in (and maybe as) space. Its intelligibility (as a kind of knowable object) is grasped in extension, and the implications of extension, including having its source of movement outside itself and an inability to self-revert. Soul, on the other hand, is the principle of intelligible self-movement. It is defined by intension, which is an index of agency. It moves through reason, and moves bodies through the participation of bodies in the motion of reason. This is the way bodies come “alive”. Even when biological living things lose their bodily integrity, their bodily elements are returned to the larger context of bodily existence, all of which participates in the intelligible motion of the universe. This is a sign of the Universal Soul, that which animates the universal body. But although Soul explains the movement of intelligible elements and body explains their extension, neither explains the intelligibility as such of these elements. Neither Soul nor body explains the subsistence as objects of intelligible elements that compose their peculiar existences as intelligible motion and intelligible extension. The only way to account for these through soul and body is through reduction, either the reduction of these intelligible elements to physical existence or the reduction of these intelligible elements to Soul as intelligible motion. The former we have broached earlier; the latter belongs to a particular kind of Panpsychist monism, one you might perhaps find in Whitehead[28]. But this reduction indicates, again, the presence of a more primordial principle. This principle is the principle of subsistence itself, of what it means to be an intelligible object of knowledge. More precisely, this is a class of principles that govern subsistence, because there are many related principles that share the characteristics we are about to elucidate. A key attribute of this class of principles is their proper eternity. For something to be eternal entails that it has all that is proper to spatio-temporal unfolding at once[29]. This is to be distinguished from being everlasting, where an object endures through time. Souls are everlasting, they enfold through time as time for all time. However, insofar as it is temporal at all, it has temporal parts that do not coincide. Eternity has all that is proper to time at once, so all temporal parts are present together in one present. It is for this reason that it is often described as “eternal now”[30]. It is not a spatial simultaneity of temporal parts, like in the Block Universe, nor is it the “intensional” everlastingness of soul, but the intensional simultaneity of all that is proper to space and time. Let us use one of those principles as an example, “Same and Different”. The principle by which things are the same as, and different from, themselves or as others is present in every stretch of Soul and Body. For soul, difference is displayed in temporal motion that differentiates past from present from future as well as in the differing content of thought, while sameness defines the continuity in that motion. Bodies participate in this temporal activity as well as in the sameness of bodily extension and the difference of bodily division. But this principle is not itself something divided among bodies or souls. There is no “less quantity” of sameness and difference just because a larger number of entities participate it. There might be a lower or higher number of objects participating sameness and difference in this or that context, but sameness and difference itself is not diminished by any number of participants. Its power is invariant. It is thus not bodily. Neither is that power something that diminishes with time, with the flux of souls. Most importantly, it is not itself the power of motion/change but that which motion/change itself participates. It is a principle somehow always present, but not in a way that means it is enduring like the objects that move through time and thus have to be thought by and as soul. All the members of this class of principles are like this. Proclus parses them into three categories – Being, Life, Intellect, defined by Intelligibility/remaining, Wholeness/Power/Procession, and Intellectual reversion, respectively – and we will begin from the last to the first. It is important to note that, because of this eternal “intension”, these principles are not separated from each other, even if they are distinct from each other. They can be considered a whole with parts, but a whole that is “less” monadic, with an astonishing independence of said parts, the details of which will be clearer as we move on
Intellect or Nous for Proclus is that which is responsible for the organization of units or existent objects according to intelligible categories considered as valuable ends. It is because of this that Antonio Vargas often translates it as “Providence” instead of “Intellect” in order to highlight the theological import for greater clarity[31]. It includes not just principles like Sameness and Difference, but many of the “forms”. There are many kinds of Nous, some are more “Intellectual”, while others are more “Intelligible”; that is, some are more “subjects” and others are more “objects” of intelligibility. No Nous is devoid of either. Instead, it is a grade defined by the relative ontological position to multiplicity. The form of Beauty, for instance, is a principle that, like sameness and difference, is always present without being enduring i.e. it is eternal. Unlike sameness and difference, however, it has little, if any, enabling grounds of its own. Sameness and difference are always relative modes of organization. You ask if it is the same as or different from something. It is a principle that orients things towards one another and towards other principles, such as the principle of Beauty. Beauty itself, on the other hand, is often called a “transcendental” because of how properly basic it is, being irreducible in a quite unique way. The beauty of a thing orients others towards that thing, rather than something else around or beyond it; by consequence, Beauty itself, as a form, does not orient things towards many other principles, at least not as many principles as Sameness and Difference. It gives a better ground for things to express themselves in their integrity as objects in their own right. It is less “monadic” in proportion to being more universal. That is, it is a more primal ground for intelligibility; while Sameness and Difference is a ground for intellectuality insofar as it disposes other objects (as subjects that know) towards objects to be known (intelligible objects). Beauty is intellectual in an intelligible way, while Sameness and Difference is intelligible in an intellectual way. Beauty is closer in subsistence to the principle of Being, while Sameness and Difference help operate the principles of Intellect. In fact, Beauty is one of those principles which mediate pure Being, which Vargas translates as “Presence” in order to highlight its key feature of intelligibility. The most basic intelligibility (as intelligibility is the mark of Being) is the simple presence of things to one another, a presence mediated by manifestation, which is one of Vargas’ translations of Zoe, “Life”, that mediates Being (Ón), and Intellect (Nous)[32]. “Beauty” is one of those primary mediators/manifestations of Being, and thus even as it is an intellect is more “intelligible” than those entities more properly called Nous[33], like the Nous in charge of Sameness and Difference; Beauty is thus one of the primary Lives of Being, one of those which mediates or manifests the pure presence of things to one another.
The point of this detailed digression is to illustrate the inverse relationship between universality and/or transcendence, and “monadicity”. “Nature” is very monadic. Soul is less monadic, Nous is even less monadic, and this monadicity decreases with the more universal eternal principles of subsistence, like Beauty. The eternal principles themselves, considered as monads, are more aptly described as eternal presences. They are present in a way that is not dictated by time but present throughout time at once without variation. In this way, they organize the world while restricting less and less of its content as universality increases. They explain more and constrain/reduce less. By the time we get to the principle of Being itself as the principle of presence, we have something that constrains and reduces so little that all it explains is the simple presence of things to each other and to themselves. All it explains is object unity. It does not determine what kinds of beings there are, just that there are beings. This is why it can explain the eternal beings as well as the temporal beings; they are all modes of presence. Body is an extensional mode, soul is an “intesional” and temporal mode.
Unity or “The One”
The eternal presences are the most complete participants in the principle of Being as presence. Their presence is not limited by space or time, and because the only thing all of them have in common is simply presence, they form a “whole” whose “parts” are prior to the whole qua presence, and are wholes themselves qua the relation of self-identity. The “Being” of these eternal hypostases precedes their common whole, insofar as presence precedes manifestation/mediation, and a whole is a kind of mediation between parts. Their “Being” also precedes each individual whole, insofar as self-identity is manifestation to self (I = I). Being is thus this principle of presence, the “I” prior to “I = I” as its ground. Its operation radically underdetermines the content of what beings can be, beyond simply that they be objects of some sort, either to self (I = I) or others. But to be a being is already to be multiple. Although “I” is more fundamental than “I = I”, there is no possible world where “I” does not unfold “I = I”. Presence is already relative to someone, even if it is one’s self. If “I”, if there is some “one” that “is”, a unity that exists as intelligible presence, then it is already two, it is “one” and “is”. Which is the more primordial principle? If Being is the more primordial principle, the distinction between the eternal beings (and all other psychic and bodily beings) is accidental. We are led to that problem of monadism yet again, as we cannot explain the multiplicity of beings, their numerical difference, except by falling into a dualism by positing a principle of distinction. The result of that dualism is that we have to find a prior principle that explains their conjunction. In contrast, for the Neoplatonists, the first principle is “The One”, “Unity itself”, from the fact that each monad of presence is rooted in itself, in its own unity. You can see this a lot more clearly in the eternal principles. Much like Soul, their eternal presence is a self-reversion. It is an internal (and eternally accomplished) “movement” of self-knowledge. The monad of Sameness and Difference does not relate to the principle of Beauty as an external relationship of accidental contact, like bodies do. It relates to beauty as internal to its self-knowledge. All organization of things according to Sameness and Difference, from the organization of souls and bodies, to the very ends of that organization – i.e. what they are “same” and “different” with respect to, from other souls and bodies to other eternal presences like Beauty – is an act of that monad’s self-knowledge as Sameness and Difference. The presence, the Being as monad, of Sameness and Difference, is all things according to sameness and difference. Therefore, although there is a place for distinction among the eternal presences based on negation (Beauty is not Sameness and Difference), there is also an irreducible positive individuality of these presences, which includes that which it is not as much as what it is. This inclusion of all things, or at least the inclusion of things not part of some unit’s formal unity, within the manifestation of that unit as presence is what Unity as a principle is meant to explain[34]. Considered in their formal unity, we can enumerate a multiplicity of principles, e.g. Beauty, Man, Justice, etc. But to consider each of these in themselves is to consider all things as they come to be implicated in them. It is them as a centre of all things, a pure presence prior to their “partness” in a greater whole, and thus prior to the whole as such. That considering the monads in themselves implicates them in relation to all that the monads qua formal unity are not means that the unity we indirectly encounter is greater than formal unity. Beauty’s activity includes Sameness and Difference, it includes Souls, and Bodies. To consider all of these is to grasp a unity beyond Beauty’s necessarily logical difference from these entities. It is beyond insofar as it can implicate what is in some sense, not Beauty in Beauty’s own self-manifestation. This unity is beyond Presence, beyond Being, and it is pure unity. Beauty itself, as a monad, directly participates a pure unity. This is the same for all the other presences, all the eternal principles considered as monads, as well as the Psychic Monads. They all, by virtue of their “firstness”, their “eminence” as a monad that organizes all things, directly participate the first principle, a concrete unity, and this participation can be simply described as this act of self-knowledge, a “self-realization” as that God and thus a moving beyond, qua God, into all that the monad organizes. The absolute simplicity of the God beyond Being is as Self, participated by monads through their self-unity and self-knowledge. While the monad is an object, a presence to self and others, the God is a Self that is no object. It is irreducibly first-personal. It is in their capacity as objects that commonalities can imply a monad all beings of a particular type can participate. They are present to each other and so they can relate, and proceed from a primary presence as their principle, itself an object to itself and others. Pure Self is no object of anything, and so cannot enter into relations that imply a monad:
“[T]he claim made here is not that the One is an individual Self from which all of reality is derived. Rather, the claim is that the One is abstract Selfhood as such, what it is to be a Self, and not a particular Self that would attribute to itself any particular activities. Through this, we can shed light also on the enigmatic “henads” or “unities” that Proclus posits as identical with the gods: just as the one is Selfhood itself, they would be individual, sovereign Selves, existing for themselves (and not as features of a substance with many parts, like the soul).”[35]
III
Differences between Polytheist and Islamic Neoplatonism
The multiplicity of absolute unities is the first difference between Platonic Polytheism and Islamic Neoplatonism. Here is the argument for the existence of just one UR God (pp. 39-40):
C1: If there were two Unconditioned Realities in existence, then the following state of affairs would obtain:
(C1a) The two Unconditioned Realities would necessarily share a common property, feature, essence, and/or genus by virtue of which they are two of the same kind of reality—namely, an Unconditioned Reality.
(C1b) The second Unconditioned Reality would necessarily possess an essential differential feature, attribute, quality, property, accident, and/or differentia by which it (the second Unconditioned Reality) is distinguished in existence from the first Unconditioned Reality;
C2: The second Unconditioned Reality would be an ontological composite comprised of the common property/essence/ genus that it shares with the first Unconditioned Reality and its essential differentia (attribute, feature, quality, property, accident) by which it is different from the first Unconditioned Reality;
C3: The second Unconditioned Reality, in order to exist as a truly distinct reality from the first Unconditioned Reality, would be dependent upon and conditioned by its parts—namely, the common feature and the differential feature;
C4: The second purported Unconditioned Reality, due to being dependent upon its ontological parts, would actually be a conditioned reality;
C5: The idea of two Unconditioned Realities reduces back to there being only one Unconditioned Reality.
C6: Therefore, there is only one Unconditioned Reality in all of existence.
Considering C1, C1a, and C1b, we can ask, what do all the Gods, considered qua unity, share? Well, they share unity. But, they do not share unity as an attribute of their being. In fact, as mentioned earlier, they are not beings. They are beyond being (Prop. 115), “[n]either their goodness nor their unity is a quality superadded upon other qualities; they are pure goodness, as they are pure unity,”[36] meaning each is absolutely simple. So if they have unity in common, it is not as an abstractable quality they all participate in, but from which they are also distinct. If they have unity in common, it means that have each other in common. As Dillon argued concerning the henads (the technical term for “Gods” in this form of theism):
“The henad does not belong to any kind or type no matter how general, let alone as its only member. As such, it can never be that any henad is the only henad: there is nothing for her to be the only one of. It follows that whichever henad theism affirms there to be, it cannot be the only one there is. Theism, in other words, just is polytheism. However, for there to be many henads is for them to have something in common, and as henads there is nothing for them to have in common but each other. Moreover, if they have each other in common, they cannot be extraneous to one another, lest there be more to a henad than herself. As such, the henads have each other in common by being each other. To be a henad is to be a way of being a multitude of henads; it is to be polycentric.”[37]
The best way to understand it is to return to see what Gods do. Recall our description of the self-realization of the monad as entailing the thinking or organization of all things according to that monad’s peculiar activity. As this realization entails all things, it also entails all other monads, themselves unified by other Gods. The self-realization of the monad involves something rather interesting from the other monads in that those monads facilitate the realization by being caught up in it. That is, other Gods help facilitate the self-relation and self-realization of that monad – a realization that is its participation in the Henad – by letting their monads be elements of that self-relation/self-realization. The relationship between the purely formal aspects of the monads is as Proclus describes, that is, “there is compounding of Forms, and likeness and friendship and participation in one another,”[38] but for the Gods themselves qua unity, they are “in each other and are united with each other, and their unity is far greater than the community and sameness among beings,”[39] and yet:
“in spite of this degree of unity in that realm, how marvellous and unmixed is their purity, and the individuality of each of them is a much more perfect thing than the otherness of the Forms, preserving as it does unmixed all the divine entities and their proper powers distinct, with the result that there is a distinction between the more general and more particular, between those associated with Continuance, with Progression and with Return, between those concerned with generation, with induction to the higher, and with demiurgic administration, and in general the particular characteristics are preserved of those gods who are respectively cohesive, completive, demiurgic, assimilative, or any of the other characteristics of theirs which our tradition celebrates.”[40]
That is, the self-realization of the monad as the God which is beyond being qua unity is identical with the realization of monad as the centre around which all things dispose themselves, a disposition which requires that these things be themselves individuated, maintain their integrity, a sign that the other Gods remain unifiers of the appropriate monads even here, their individuality preserved. To remix Dillon’s words, a God’s self-realization is a way of being all these other Gods together. The fact that individuality is maintained through the “supraessential Gods” means that this perspective is reversible. If this monad appears in the intelligible horizon around the focal monad, we can investigate that monad’s fullness and the result would be a reorganization (from our perspective) of all things around that new focal monad. That this preserves divine simplicity will be explained later on. For now, note that this the structure of an ultimate polytheism: It is not all in one, it is all in each.
This leads us to the second difference between Platonic Polytheism and Islamic Neoplatonism. In Islamic Neoplatonism, there is only one eternal creation given existence by an absolute unoriginated monad, Andani’s “Unconditioned Reality” (p. 43-48). It is this first eternal, perfect creation that then generates the “less perfect” Universal Soul, as we can see in a section taken from one of Andani’s papers:
“d. The First Intellect, as a created being that ontologically depends on God, is ontologically constrained and cannot produce a wholly perfect creation of its own; it only produces an effect that partakes in both perfection and imperfection; this effect is called the Universal Soul;
e. Unlike the First Intellect, the Universal Soul is in a state of potential perfection perpetually seeking actual perfection; the imperfect ontological status of the Universal Soul motivates it to engage in a goal-directed activity that produces the Cosmos and individual souls;
f. The Cosmos including the world of humanity is an expression of both perfection and imperfection; it is the manifestation of the Universal Soul’s potential perfection in the process of seeking actualization; what appears as “evil” in the world is ontological privation, imperfection, deficiency, and disorder.”[41]
In Platonic Polytheism, on the other hand, the eternal presence monads are each directly unified by a God, even if their collective, as a unity itself, can also be directly unified by a God. This means their existence is not given by a prior monad, but by the God that they realize themselves to be. The multiplicity of Gods is thus not determined by their formal difference, but it is unoriginate, their being dependent on their unobjectifiable selves. This is why Butler says of Proclus’ metaphysics that “every God is an intelligible God”, because the ineffability of Selves as Unities, their corresponding underdetermination by intelligible and formal categories, and the very fact that they are unities, means that every God at the very least unifies a pure presence to self, a “subjectivity”[42]. The underdetermination of the number of Gods by formal categories and the irreducibility of each to formal categories – which are related facts – leads to two kinds of excesses with respect to the world qua formal categories. First, that every God is an intelligible God in the sense outlined eariler means that any concrete philosophical exegesis of a theology that interprets particular presences as participating this or that God always has an excess of Gods it does not account for in its formal categories. Second, even the Gods that it does account for, in their ineffable unity, exceed the formal monad which they unite, meaning it does not constrain the ability of that God to directly unify some other monad.
These two excesses highlight a third difference with respect to Islamic Neoplatonism in connection to this second difference, which is that this excess compromises any attempt to formalize units completely. Because individuation is primary, even with respect to Being and subsequently Form, Being and Form cannot completely determine the existence of units (i.e. existent entities qua existent). There is always more, for instance, to the Gods than any of their self-realized monads can express:
“This, I would argue, is why Plato is so interested in reincarnation: because if we accept the thought experiment, it reveals a very important kind of unity: a unit the same while any of its particular attributes vary—an individuality, thus, beyond identity and difference.”[43]
If we apply the analogy to Gods, it means that a God can have more than one directly unified monad. Examples include the two Aphrodites of the Symposium and the fact that there is more than one hypostasis (instantiation) of Zeus for Proclus, all of which are fully Zeus[44]. In contrast, Andani has this argument against UR having more than one direct participant:
“If the Unconditioned Reality directly originates two conditioned realities, then this requires two real-distinct aspects or parts within the Unconditioned Reality: the first aspect explanatorily and ontologically grounds the first conditioned reality and the second aspect grounds the second conditioned reality. If these two aspects did not exist, then the existence of two conditioned realities—as opposed to any other number of conditioned realities—would lack a sufficient explanation and ontological ground. However, since the Unconditioned Reality is absolutely simple without any internal multiplicity, it follows that the direct origination of two conditioned realities from the Unconditioned Reality is logically impossible. One the earliest Islamic philosophers to argue this position was the Ismāʿīlī thinker al-Kirmānī:
It is impossible for two different things to be brought into existence except from two things that necessitate the existence of both. Whatever combines together two things is itself multiple and whatever is multiple is preceded [in existence] and has something that is prior to it. Since He [God], may He be praised, transcends being multiple or being conjoined to any attribute, the existence of two different things from Him is impossible; and since the existence of two different things from Him is impossible, it follows that what comes into existence from Him is singular (wāḥidan)” (p. 44-45)
The polytheist rebuttal would look remarkably like Schuon’s. Schuon says in this extended quote concerning the problem of “realization” with respect to a subordinate subjectivity and its “Lord”:
“It follows from what has been said above that it would be completely wrong to speak of the Lord ‘and’ the Self, for God is One. If we speak of the Self, there is neither servant nor Lord, there is but the Self alone, possible modes of which are the Lord and the servant—or what are so-called from a certain standpoint; and if we speak of the Lord, there is no Self in particular or different from the Lord; the Self is the essence of the Lord of the worlds. The Attributes of the Lord (Sifat, in Arabic) concern the servant as such, but the Essence (Dhät) does not.
From this it follows that man can speak to the Lord, but not realize Him, and that he can realize the Essence or Self, but not speak to It. With regard to the Self, there is no opposite nor interlocutor, for the Self or Essence, let it be repeated, is entirely outside the axis ‘Creator-creature’ or ‘Principle-manifestation’, although in this relationship It is present within the Creator; but It does not then concern us as creatures or servants, and we are unable to attain It on the plane of this polarity, if we except the possibility of conceiving It, a possibility accorded by the Lord by virtue of the universal nature of our intelligence, and also by virtue of the universality of the Self. In other words, if we are able to attain the Self outside the said polarity, it is solely by the Will of the Lord and with His help; the Self cannot be realized in defiance of the Lord or in defiance of the ‘Lord-servant’ relationship.”[45]
Schuon articulates a principle in Islam by which one can understand the direct unification of more than one subjectivity, and it is remarkably similar in logic to the polycentric model, different only in that there is only one “Self” for Schuon. The key here is to consider this direct participation in the same way simultaneously is a mistake. The pure Self is not an object such that any such comparison can be made. It is irreducibly first-personal. When the monads are considered qua being, we can compare the superior to the inferior monad – superiority and inferiority here in the ontological, not moral, sense – and join a relation of cause to effect. But the Self is only best seen from articulating how any one of these monads is a centre of all things. It is not something done simultaneously, with both at the centre at once. The nature of the Self makes it impossible for it to be known this way; subjectivities can be compared, but not the Self, as such comparison and relation is second and third personal. The divine simplicity of the Self lies in its aforementioned irreducible first-person nature. It has no attributes or predicates because it is not a subject (and thus not an object to itself and others). This polycentricity does not destroy the relationship qua being, it is infact what grounds the relationship, because the individuality of the monad being irreducible makes it possible for it to be in such relations. The God chooses to be in relationships of superiority and inferiority, hence Proclus says for any God, regardless of the ontological position of the monad that participates them through self-realization, that “every god begins his characteristic activity with himself” (Prop. 131).
The other consequence of the excess of the number of Gods to intelligible categories and the excess of each God’s unity over those categories, is that it is the source of the material principle. On the one hand, we have the freedom of the Gods beyond being to unify more than one direct participant. On the other hand we have the necessity of resistance to intelligible determination by Being in general and Forms in particular. The principles of form define the task of “Demiurgy”, as they are the providences by which the world of time is inspired to move intelligibly i.e. it is the principle of Soul and its animation of the universe. However, since unity is prior to being, units cannot be completely determined by demiurgy. The “residue” of demiurgic activity is called “matter”, but this “matter” in the Iamblichean Neoplatonists has an origin in the first principle:
“This reserve can be understood in one of two ways, as I have indicated previously. It may be seen, on the one hand, as representing the occultation of the henad in his/her summit and that accompanies the deity's activities of illuminations like a shadow of sorts. Such is the material upon which the demiurge works when seen from within the demiurge's own perspective qua intellect. Qua deity, by contrast, the deity who is the demiurge would perceive no alterity and hence no "matter." By contrast, we may see the infinite process as already accomplished. Hence the demiurge's "matter" is, in fact, illuminated by all the Gods prior to him/her. This "all," the totality of all the Gods, is something altogether different from the discrete topoi generated within the intelligible-and-intellectual order: it is no Olympus, Asgard, Kailasa, Amenti or Kunlun. The absolute totality of the Gods, by contrast, can only correspond to the cacophony of disparate voices before we have selected some particular one which will be our "signal" while the rest are regarded as "noise": the moment of "initiation."”[46]
That is, “matter” as that which receives form – and yet resists it – is the effect of the unifying power of all the Gods and their derivative individuals (including us) in its exceeding of formal determination. The monism of the Platonic Polytheist is thus complete, explaining the multiplicity of things with a deflationary first principle and bracketing all possible dualisms as provisional and dependent on the individuality of things.
IV
Conciliations and Conclusion
I began with an overview of the goals and context of Platonic Polytheism, especially the goal of non-reductionism with respect to the multitude of existents and omnipotent Gods. The criteria for more universal principles were articulated as a reducing gradient of “monadicity”, from “Nature”, to “Soul”, to the “Intelligible”, and finally to “Unity” as absolutely deflated, concrete in a polycentric multiplicity of Unities or Henads, which are the Gods. The primacy of individuality articulated led to consequences that are compared with Andani’s Islamic Neoplatonism. The first consequence is the aforementioned polycentric multiplicity of Gods, which contrasts with Andani’s “Unconditioned Reality”, which he argues can only be one, not multiple. The second consequence, following from the polycentric multiplicity of the Gods, is that they ground the entire procession of being, unifying each monad of a particular mode of being, in contrast with Andani’s description, where there is only one directly caused intelligible entity from which the others only gain existence indirectly. Third consequence is the excess of unity over being (and all subsequent principles) and how this frees the Gods to polycentrically unify more than one directly participating monad; in contrast, Andani’s “Unconditioned Reality” can only ground one such entity, with him arguing that anymore would complicate the necessary simplicity of the Unconditioned Reality. I argue that the first-personal nature of divine selves, and the attendant polycentricity that is necessary to know it, maintains divine simplicity without restricting it to unifying just one monad. The other implication of this excess of individuating causation is that it explains materiality insofar as the phenomenon of the “material” is the effect of individuation exceeding formal categories. This resolves the dualism of form and matter without dissolving them.
Where does that leave the Platonic Polytheist with respect to Islam, with respect to Allah? With respect to Islamic Neoplatonism in particular, the structure of the metaphysics leaves them open to Plotinus’ critique of the gnostics, where he says:
“For what those who understand god’s power do is not to reduce divinity to a single god but to show that divinity is as profuse as god himself shows it to be when he, while remaining who he is, creates all the numerous gods who depend on him and derive their existence from him and through him.” (Ennead 2.9.9: 35-39)[47]
Recall our conclusion on the kind of multiplicity the Gods are. Each God is a way of being the multitude of Gods. The gnostics denied this, and made divinity a gradient in which only their highest God is full divinity. The other dependent Gods are, because of their status in the metaphysical chain, not divinity as such, but only derivatively divine. In contrast:
“Plotinus argues that even if there is a God who, as a “natural” matter, either rules or even creates the other Gods, this does not affect the “nature,” so to speak, of being a God. Plotinus warns against reifying such a hierarchy as an intelligible structure. For if, as in the essay on intelligible beauty, “each God is all the Gods coming together into one” (V.8.9.17), and this clearly is Platonic technical doctrine, as we can see from its elaboration in subsequent Platonists, then the creative moment of which Plotinus speaks when he speaks of a God “abiding who he is, makes many [Gods] depending upon him and being through that one and from that one” (II.9.9.38-40), must exist as a phase in the activity of a God simply qua God, and not limited to some one God to the exclusion of others, in which case there would no longer be a manifold corresponding to Unity, a “numerical” manifold.”[48]
That is, Plotinus, in his own Platonism, argues for the polycentricity of Gods, and critiques the gnostics based on that, such that even if qua being, there is a hierarchy of Gods, the subordinate Gods remain full Gods, as their “nature” of Godhood is not diminished, because that nature is Unity and not being, a distinction he argues for in his essay on Number. This distinction is why the classes of Gods extend from the intelligible to the Psychic (yes, including World Soul) and even below, to the encosmic Gods and the “material” Gods[49]. Every God qua Unity is beyond Being, but their activity extends to every strata of Being. A forest is as much a God as a prime demiurge. The result is that the perfection of a hypostasis is considered according to its substance. For example, although Soul cannot have the perfection of Intellect, it does not need to have the perfection of Intellect because it is itself perfect as Soul. Its perfection is in fulfilling its own nature as Soul. The being of Soul is not defined by a failure to be an eternal intellect, but its success in being Soul. The inalienable self-realization of primary monads, whether they are intellects or souls, is their realization of Godhood; our participation in their being, concurrent with our own self unification, is our own realization of divinity. It is a participation that begins in most basic existence and is expanded into fullness by ethical and spiritual cultivation.
So, what then, does this invalidate Islam? I do not think so. One of the reasons I like Schuon is that he anticipates and comes close to many of these conclusions in his own (admittedly eclectic) Islamic Neoplatonism. This is also another reason to appreciate Henry Corbin, as he says this in his incorporation of Proclus:
“Let us say that in the system envisioned by Proclus, there are the One and Many Gods. The One-God is the henad of henads. The word One does not name what it is but is the symbol of the absolutely Ineffable. The one is not One. It does not possess the attribute One. It is essentially unificent [unifique], unifying, constitutive of all the Ones, of all the beings that can only be existents by being each time an existent, i.e. unified [made one], constituted in unities precisely by the unifying One. This sense of unifying of the One is what Proclus meant by the word henad [principal of unity]. When this word is used in the plural form, it does not denote productions of the One but manifestations of the One, 8 “henophanies”. Those in addition to Unity, are the divine Names and these Names govern the diversity of beings. It is from beings that are their partners that it is possible to know the divine substances, that is to say the Gods that are themselves inconceivable.”[50]
Although Corbin was wrong about the Henads being “Henophanies” – they are Unities, not manifestations of Unity, however ineffable – I think he touches on a possibility at conciliation, one that starts with the statement that “a henad is to be a way of being a multitude of henads”[51]. The way to understand this is to go back to Proclus, through Butler’s interpretation of the “Intelligible Gods”. The basic idea is that although every God is an intelligible God – meaning Being participates every God, making it polycentrically constituted – when considered with respect to a particular family or organization of Gods (a “pantheon” if you will), or more precisely from the perspective of a theological tradition, Being takes on the face of one God in particular. For the Hellenic tradition as Proclus understood it, it is Phanes that is the face of Being. All other Gods qua Being are “Phanic”. Phanes is the “the very phenomenality of any event;”[52] of any event of being. Despite this, Butler argues that the Hellenic tradition’s unfolding in all spheres of life and history, what he calls the Olympian Project, can be thought to be more properly Zeus’ Project, in which the other Hellenic Gods participate, along with the participation of all the spirits and mortals in and with these Gods[53]. This is interesting because Zeus’ more proper activity comes somewhat in the middle of the classes of Gods, at least according to the Platonic interpretation of the Hellenic theological field. Zeus is the Prime Intellective (and thus eternal) Demiurge for Proclus, as well as having another hypostasis as the first hypercosmic Psychic Demiurge, and a few others[54]. Although He, like any God, is also an intelligible God, He was not considered by the Neoplatonists as the Intelligible God for the Hellenic tradition in particular; and yet he is the God that disposes the project, appropriating the activity of the Gods prior to his peculiar demiurgic monad and influencing those posterior to that monad. It’s an interesting example of how any God can rule from anywhere, and even here it is important to note that even if it is Zeus’ project, it remains the case that:
“The original status of a God is never ‘God of X’, where X is some narrow function, and Hellenic religious texts virtually never use this kind of language, by which moderns seek to tidy up the complex nature of polytheism as it actually exists. In reality, every God is the God of everything, at least at Their cult centers. The Olympian order and project, therefore, is never simply given, but constantly constructed in works such as the Theogony and in their recitation and reception.”[55]
It is a construction that is as much divine as mortal, insofar as the recitation and reception are tied to divine inspiration as well as divine and human creativity. The variable nature of the possibility of a project like this in different traditions can be seen in Butler’s comparison of the Hellenic conception to the Egyptian, when he says the following:
“It is actually easier to read the Platonic determinations of the intellective off from the Egyptian theologeme than from the Hellenic. In the Hellenic theology, Kronos generates the dialectic of in self/in other, Rhea that of motion/rest (as chief vivific Goddess), while Zeus is the master of identity-and-difference. In the Egyptian theologeme, though, we do not have such a neat division of labor, because Atum, operating as prime intellective monad, and so comparable to Kronos, dominates, and the position of the demiurgic intellect (third intellective monad), strong in Hellenic theology, is more recessive in the Egyptian structure, in accord with a more evenly distributed demiurgic function. The Olympian pantheon is strongly centered on Zeus, though he is not an authoritarian figure, operating by persuasion and mediation. Nevertheless, it yields a distinctly monocentric structure, accentuated by the clear generational periodicity of the Hellenic pantheon.”[56]
What is acknowledged here is the possibility that different Gods in different ontological positions can take the lead in the weaving of the tradition’s Pantheon narrative. My proposal, as argued in a previous essay[57], is that Islam is Allah’s project, and Allah’s position is as the Intelligible God for the tradition:
“Perhaps here we have the divine core the monotheism that has so plagued us. While the Hellenic Project is Zeus’, who is Demiurge for them in one capacity or the other; the Islamic Project, is Allah as Being itself. Perhaps he reveals what is muddled in Christianity with the doctrine of the Incarnation. Rather than a monarch who is managing an ever-expanding polity of already existent free individuals, Allah taking the central stage as the force of Being itself is what characterizes his Project. The intensification of this force on our part into political violence is thus our misapprehension of the pure thisness of Being that is only a “force of Salvation”, the force of the Good and integral Being of each, rather than a confluence into conformity of all.”[58]
If Allah’s primary activity is Being itself, then as the highest activity of a God, it follows the principle that “the more excellent something is in metaphysical terms, the more equally it disposes all things in relation to itself”[59]. The implication is that “in the limit case”, which is the case in which the God’s activity is the highest possible activity, Being itself, “its own products are suspended from their own being, and each of the Gods, just in declaring what is most peculiar to Herself, would be thereby the prophet of any God of Gods worthy of being so conceived.”[60] This is because, again, of the conclusion we had earlier, which is that to be a God is a way to be all other Gods, and so for Allah’s activity to be Being itself means that it is a way to be each and every God independent in their being and in their being together, insofar as Allah is their common substance. Indeed, we can interpret certain Islamic Neoplatonic ontologies with this principle. For example, see Andani’s description:
“Theologically speaking, God’s Essence alone is “absolutely Unconditioned Reality” (wujūd lā bi-sharṭ); whereas God’s first act of eternal self-manifestation or entification—known as “God’s All-Merciful Breath” (nafas raḥmānī)—is “reality conditioned by nothing/negatively conditioned” (bi-sharṭ lā), also known as the Muḥammadan Reality; and God’s unified real-distinct divine names and attributes comprise “reality conditioned by something” (wujūd bi-sharṭ shayʾ), also known as the Adamic Reality. … God’s Essence qua Unconditioned Reality (lā bi-sharṭ) wholly transcends all attributes and names; the first manifestation of God that is “conditioned by nothing” (bi-sharṭ lā) is a level where the various divine names and attributes exist in a state of absolute oneness (al-aḥadiyya); and the second level of conditioned reality, which is “conditioned by something” (wujūd bi-sharṭ shayʾ), is the ontological degree of Divinity in which there exist many real-distinct but metaphysically inseparable divine attributes (God’s life, knowledge, power, hearing, seeing); these attributes subsist in a hierarchical format in which the primary divine attribute of life grounds the others. The Ismāʿīlī philosophers identify this latter level of conditioned reality with the First Intellect and likewise locate the real-distinct divine attributes within it. In other words, the “personal God” conceived within many theistic theologies corresponds to what Ismāʿīlīs call the First Intellect and what Akbarīs call the Level of Divinity. The essential reality of God qua Unconditioned Reality wholly transcends personal names, attributes, and qualifications.” (p. 25-26)
The Platonic Polytheist interpretation of this would be to see the “Unconditioned Reality” as Allah qua Unity, the God who is “to speak in Koranic terms—“the Inward” or “the Hidden” (Al-Bâtîn),”[61] who then directly unifies the monad of Being, which is the “Breath”, and whose activity is the real independent being of all beings. The “Breath” is in a state of absolute oneness because its activity is simply the independent being of things prior to any attributes, while the “Adamic” reality corresponds to the intellective, which is the point in Proclus where properly ontological hierarchies like Andani describes, begins its unfolding[62].
We can then say concerning this Platonic Polytheistic interpretation of Islam, that the many monadic hypostases, from the Eternal monadic intellects to the divine monadic souls to the spirits in charge of material determination, often corresponding qua activity to divine names and attributes, are truly Gods in this interpretation, and are Gods for this perspectival ontology as ways of being Allah. The realization of “mystical union” common in Islamic mystical traditions is here the natural state of the monads of these Gods. The Gods are “Prophets”, and perhaps we might also say that certain Prophets are Gods. Here we have the basis for a religious pluralism using Islamic ideas that has much in common with Islam’s own traditional streams of this pluralism[63], even within the Islamic tradition itself, where the different philosophers finding different “models” of Allah’s hypostasis is a genuine discovery of different Gods manifesting Allah’s Being. The key difference is that it is a proper “Polytheism” in a way that does not conflict with Tawhid, or at least the interpretation of Tawhid that sees it as concerned with the Unity of (Divine) Reality rather than the number of Gods[64].
[1] Khalil Andani, “Allah the Unconditioned Reality: A Contemporary Argument for Islamic Neoplatonic Theism,” Journal of Islamic Philosophy, January 1, 2025, https://www.academia.edu/129691625/Allah_the_Unconditioned_Reality_A_Contemporary_Argument_for_Islamic_Neoplatonic_Theism_Journal_of_Islamic_Philosophy.
[2] Frithjof Schuon, Form and Substance in the Religions, n.d. See his chapter titled “The Five Divine Presences”, which became my default ontology before I started reading Proclus.
[3] Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “The World of Imagination and Concept of Space in the Persian Miniature,” Islamic Quaterly, n.d.
[4] Oludamini Ogunnaike, “Insān-Ity or ‘Knots in the Real’: Exploring Ibn al-’Arabī’s Paradigm of ‘Philosophy of Religion,’” accessed May 11, 2025, https://www.academia.edu/127222146/Ins%C4%81n_ity_or_Knots_in_the_Real_Exploring_Ibn_al_Arab%C4%ABs_Paradigm_of_Philosophy_of_Religion_.
[5] Steven Dillon, Pagan Portals - Polytheism: A Platonic Approach (Alresford: Moon Books, 2022).
[6] Eric Steinhart, “Axiarchic Polytheism,” n.d., https://ericsteinhart.com/articles/onleslie.pdf.
[7] Proclus, The Elements of Theology, trans. E. R. Dodds (Oxford University Press, 1971).
[8] Proclus.
[9] Proclus “Every god is above Being, above Life, and above Intelligence” (Prop. 115), “The substance of every god is a supra-existential excellence; he has goodness neither as a state nor as part of his essence (for both states and essences have a secondary and remote rank relatively to the gods), but is supra-existentially good.” (Prop. 119), “Every divine henad is participated without mediation by some one real-existent, and whatever is divinized is linked by an upward tension to one divine henad: thus the participant genera of existents are identical in number with the participated henads.” (Prop. 135). The “god” is the “henad”, and based on Prop. 135, a World Maker qua being directly participates the God. That this means that is eternally “realizes” itself as the God it participates has been argued before, but will be argued here again. For the argument, see: Oluwaseyi Bello, “To Be a God,” Substack newsletter, A Play of Masks (blog), February 15, 2025, https://symmetria.substack.com/p/to-be-a-god.
[10] David Bentley Hart, “Plan for a Book on the Science of Mind,” Church Life Journal, June 28, 2021, https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/plan-for-a-book-on-the-science-of-mind/.
[11] Hart.
[12] “[T]he distinction between philosophical and theological discourse for Proclus is that between a discourse of classes and a discourse of proper names. The philosopher, except for purposes of illustration, has nothing to do with particular deities, but only with classes of Gods. Henads, while they are all supra-essential by nature, fall into classes based upon their activities with respect to Being. In this way we can speak of classes of deities mirrored by the hierarchy of ontic hypostases, all the way up to the class of Gods simpliciter, which is the class corresponding to the One Itself. However, each henad is also an individual God with a proper name and an identity primordially distinct from the rest. To deal with particular, named Gods is the province of the theologian and, of course, the individual worshiper. Edward Butler, “The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus” (New School University, 2003), https://henadology.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/edward-butler-the-metaphysics-of-polytheism-phd-thesis.pdf.
[13] “The writings of the theologoi, therefore, are a sort of repository for the thickest account of things, which as such cannot be exhausted in any narrow interpretation. We see this as well in Aristotle’s comparison of Thales’ water to the divine river Styx, by whom the Gods swear Their oaths (Hesiod, Theogony 383ff), for as Aristotle says, “what is most ancient is most revered, and what is most revered is what we swear by” (Metaphysics 983b). There is an essential dialectic between the richness of theological texts, which are semantically dense and incorporate multiple layers of signification, and the effort of abstraction involved in separating off particular principles and focusing on their activity alone.” Edward P. Butler, The Way of Being: Polytheism and the Western Knowledge System (Notion Press, 2023). p. 47.
[14] Edward P. Butler, Polytheism in Greek Philosophy (S.l.: PHAIDRA EDITIONS, 2025). p. 6.
[15] “Given that there really are religious experiences happening, and that experience implies reality, they should be treated as innocent until proven guilty.” - Dillon, “Some Thoughts on Religious Experience,” The Analytic Pagan (blog), July 13, 2022, https://dillonly.com/2022/07/12/some-thoughts-on-religious-experience/.
[16] “if the Greeks should be ‘desperately alien’ they are not so in that having so many gods they must do without the notion of theological omnipotence, but in that they have so many omnipotent gods. Or rather—to sugarcoat the pill for the sceptics— because any of their many gods may have his/her share in omnipotence whenever the occasion requires it. One amazing testimony is that even in a marginal private cult in a grotto on the isle of Crete the very humble local variant of the least godly of all gods, Hermes, can be addressed as pantokrator. If this seems paradoxical to us, that is our problem.” - H. S. Versnel, Coping with the Gods: Wayward Readings in Greek Theology, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World, v. 173 (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2011). p. 436.
[17] “I would argue that the overriding concern in Plato’s thought is the avoidance of reductionism in inquiry, analysis and explanation. This, in my view, is also the essential feature of what has since Gilson been termed ‘henology’ as distinct from ontology.” - Edward P. Butler, “‘The Indispensability of Polytheism to a Living Platonism,’ Harvard University | Henadology,” accessed August 2, 2024, https://henadology.wordpress.com/2024/05/17/the-indispensability-of-polytheism-to-a-living-platonism-harvard-university/.
[18] E. N. Beard, “Platonic Causality : A Primer of Metaphysical Intuitions,” 2020, 1–35. p. 14
[19] Hart, “Plan for a Book on the Science of Mind.”
[20] Pieter D’Hoine and Martijn Marije, All From One: A Guide to Proclus, ed. Pieter D’Hoine and Martijn Marije (Oxford University Press, 2017). p. 152-153. What is Nature? – “The principle of bodies is called nature.51 Where universal nature, also called Fate, is the principle of the material universe as a whole, particular bodies also each have their own nature. These particular natures depend upon universal nature as their monad (El. theol. § 21, 24.22–5). Nature is inseparable from bodies and physically immersed in them, but as their principle, it precedes bodies and is thus incorporeal. It serves as the genuine cause, or more precisely, the proximate cause of bodies. Nevertheless, it is lower than soul properly speaking. It is a distinct, transitional hypostasis intermediate between soul and body. Nature may be a hypostasis of its own; it is not transcendent. Even the highest nature, universal or monadic nature (cf. in Parm. III 791.21–795.6), does not transcend the cosmos but is rather the inner-cosmic formative principle of the world.” (p. 152).
[21] Michael Silberstein, W.M. Stuckey, and Timothy McDevitt, “The Block Universe from Special Relativity,” in Beyond the Dynamical Universe: Unifying Block Universe Physics and Time as Experienced, ed. Michael Silberstein, W.M. Stuckey, and Timothy McDevitt (Oxford University Press, 2018), 0, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198807087.003.0003.
[22] “This is why the universe has a direction forward in time, the arrow of time—it’s the direction of entropy increase; it points one way and not the other. This entropy increase is not a property of the evolution laws. The evolution laws are time-reversible. It’s just that in one direction the evolution law brings us from an unlikely to a likely state, and that transition is likely to happen. In the other direction, the law goes from a likely to an unlikely state—and that (almost) never happens.” - Sabine Hossenfelder, Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions (New York, New York: Viking, 2022). p. 64.
[23] “The view of consciousness that we’ve discussed is in a sense focused on the primacy of time: it’s about reducing the “parallelism” associated with space—and branchial space—to allow the formation of a coherent thread of experience, that in effect occurs sequentially in time.
And it’s undoubtedly no coincidence that we humans are in effect well placed in the universe to be able to do this. In large part this has to do with the physical sizes of things—and with the (undoubtedly not coincidental) fact that human scales are intermediate between those at which the effects of either relativity or quantum mechanics become extreme.
Why can we “ignore space” to the point where we can just discuss things happening “wherever” at a sequence of moments in time? Basically it’s because the speed of light is large compared to human scales. In our everyday lives the important parts of our visual environment tend to be at most tens of meters away—so it takes light only tens of nanoseconds to reach us. Yet our brains process information on timescales measured in milliseconds. And this means that as far as our experience is concerned, we can just “combine together” things at different places in space, and consider a sequence of instantaneous states in time.
If we were the size of planets, though, this would no longer work. Because—assuming our brains still ran at the same speed—we’d inevitably end up with a fragmented visual experience, that we wouldn’t be able to think about as a single thread about which we can say “this happened, then that happened”.
Even at standard human scale, we’d have somewhat the same experience if we used for example smell as our source of information about the world (as, say, dogs to a large extent do). Because in effect the “speed of smell” is quite slow compared to brain processing. And this would make it much less useful to identify our usual notion of “space” as a coherent concept. So instead we might invent some “other physics”, perhaps labeling things in terms of the paths of air currents that deliver smells to us, then inventing some elaborate gauge-field-like construct to talk about the relations between different paths.
In thinking about our “place in the universe” there’s also another important effect: our brains are small and slow enough that they’re not limited by the speed of light, which is why it’s possible for them to “form coherent thoughts” in the first place. If our brains were the size of planets, it would necessarily take far longer than milliseconds to “come to equilibrium”, so if we insisted on operating on those timescales there’d be no way—at least “from the outside”—to ensure a consistent thread of experience.
From “inside”, though, a planet-size brain might simply assume that it has a consistent thread of experience. And in doing this it would in a sense try to force a different physics on the universe. Would it work? Based on what we currently know, not without at least significantly changing the notions of space and time that we use.” - Stephen Wolfram, “What Is Consciousness? Some New Perspectives from Our Physics Project—Stephen Wolfram Writings,” March 22, 2021, https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/03/what-is-consciousness-some-new-perspectives-from-our-physics-project/.
[24] “The soul individuates in time and as time.” - Yuk Hui, Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2024). p. 28
[25] Proclus, The Elements of Theology.
[26] Proclus.
[27] Stuart A. Kauffman and Andrea Roli, “A Third Transition in Science?,” Interface Focus 13, no. 3 (April 14, 2023): 20220063, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2022.0063.
[28] “I would at least like to show that it is plausible to suggest that Plato held a version of panpsychism similar to that held by Whitehead or Hartshorne” - Daniel A. Dombrowski, “Being Is Power,” American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 16, no. 3 (1995): 299–314. I do think that it is correct that Plato held on to some sort of Panpsychism, but I think his emphasis on henology means he held it as one ontology in the midst of others, an insight most well developed in the Neoplatonists.
[29] Proclus, The Elements of Theology. “All that is eternal is simultaneously whole” (Prop. 52).
[30] For a comparative religious treatment on the concept of Eternity as “Eternal Now”, see Ananda K Coomaraswamy, Time and Eternity (Select Books, 1989).
[31] See Antonio Vargas, “Proclus on the Vocation of Humanity,” Substack newsletter, @philoantonio (blog), February 15, 2023, https://philoantonio.substack.com/p/proclus-on-the-vocation-of-humanity. “providence, in the sense of a prior comprehension of being and an organization of the world according to their ends - that is the province of nous.”; “the providential activity of the gods, their prior and eternal activity of producing the world as constituted by so many universal realities, Universal Beauty, Justice and Truth, the Universal Man, Horse and Eagle”
[32] “Zoe — which I increasingly translate as manifestation rather than simply "life" — is already implicitly there through Proposition 30’s principle that whatever goes forth remains in its cause, for this identity-in-procession seems to be what is proper to Zoe as opposed to Unity or Presence (ón).” - Antonio Vargas, “Recent Updates,” Substack newsletter, @philoantonio (blog), April 28, 2025, https://philoantonio.substack.com/p/recent-updates.
[33] “In the next place let us consider the beautiful, what it is, and how it primarily subsists in the Gods. It is said therefore to be boniform beauty, and intelligible beauty, to be more ancient than intellectual beauty, and to be beauty itself, and the cause of beauty to all beings; and all such like epithets. And it is rightly said. But it is separate not only from the beauty which is apparent in corporeal masses, from the symmetry which is in these from psychical elegance, and intellectual splendour, but also from the second and third progressions in the Gods; and subsisting in the intelligible place of survey, it proceeds from this to all the genera of the Gods, and illuminates their superessential unities, and all the essences suspended from these unities, as far as to the apparent vehicles of the Gods. As therefore through the first goodness all the Gods are boniform, and through intelligible wisdom they have a knowledge ineffable, and established above intellect, thus also, I think, through the summit of beauty, every thing divine is lovely. For from thence all the Gods derive beauty, and being filled with it, fill the natures posterior to themselves, exciting all things, agitating them with Bacchic fury about the love of themselves, and pouring supernally on all things the divine effluxion of beauty.” - Proclus, The Theology of Plato, trans. Thomas Taylor (Prometheus Trust, 1995). Book I, Chapter XXIV, p. 114.
[34] “The Platonists recognized that individuality was so essential to the nature of godhood that they called the Gods henads, or “units.” The Gods are the things most one, not because they are all one thing, but because to be an ultimate individual is to include everything.” - Edward P Butler, “MANY GODS, MANY PATHS,” accessed November 25, 2021, www.witchesandpagans.com.
[35] Antonio Luis Vargas, “Antonio Luis Costa Vargas - Reading with the Mind’s I: The Role of Selfhood in Proclus’ Reading of the First Deduction of the Parmenides.,” International Plato Society (blog), accessed January 27, 2025, https://platosociety.org/event/antonio-luis-costa-vargas-reading-with-the-minds-i-the-role-of-selfhood-in-proclus-reading-of-the-first-deduction-of-the-parmenides/.
[36] Proclus, The Elements of Theology. Prop. 119.
[37] Dillon, Pagan Portals - Polytheism. p. 18 (kindle pagination)
[38] Proclus, Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, trans. Glenn R. Morrow and John M. Dillon (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987). p. 407.
[39] Proclus. p. 407.
[40] Proclus. p. 407.
[41] Khalil Andani, “Necessitated Evil: An Islamic Neoplatonic Theodicy from the Ismaili Tradition ~ Contemporary Islamic Thinkers on Evil, Suffering, and the Global Pandemic,” From the Divine to the Human: Contemporary Islamic Thinkers on Evil, Suffering, and the Global Pandemic (New York: Routledge, 2023), January 1, 2023, https://www.academia.edu/92920186/Necessitated_Evil_An_Islamic_Neoplatonic_Theodicy_from_the_Ismaili_Tradition_Contemporary_Islamic_Thinkers_on_Evil_Suffering_and_the_Global_Pandemic. p. 3.
[42] “As we know, in fact, the Middle and Neo Platonisms have absorbed Aristotle, and thus their universe is better (if not completely) understood as systems of subjectivities and analogies of subjectivities than as hypostatized concepts standing over against sensible substances.” - Wayne J. Hankey, “God’s Care for Human Individuals: What Neoplatonism Gives to a Christian Doctrine of Providence,” Quaestiones Disputatae 2, no. 1 (2011): 4–36, https://doi.org/10.5840/qd201121/21.
[43] Edward P. Butler, “On the Gods and the Good,” no. September (2014): 20. p. 7
[44] Edward P. Butler, “The Platonic Zeus,” in From Cave to Sky: A Devotional Anthology for Zeus, ed. Melia Suez (Shreveport, LA: Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 2010), 139–67, https://www.academia.edu/114212193/_The_Platonic_Zeus_pp_139_167_in_From_Cave_to_Sky_A_Devotional_Anthology_for_Zeus_ed_Melia_Suez_Shreveport_LA_Bibliotheca_Alexandrina_2010_.
[45] Frithjof Schuon, Dimensions of Islam, 1985. p. 48.
[46] Butler, “The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus.” p. 320-321.
[47] Lloyd P. Gerson et al., “Plotinus: The Enneads,” 2018. p. 220-221
[48] Edward P. Butler, “Plotinian Henadology,” Kronos - Metafizyka, Kultura, Religia 1, no. 5 (2016): 143–59. p. 151
[49] “According to the art of the priests, one must begin the sacrificial process from the material gods; for by no other route is ascent possible to the immaterial gods. The material gods, then, have a certain communion with matter inasmuch as they preside over it; it is they, therefore, that are responsible for those phenomena that arise in matter, such as divisions, impacts and resistance, and the alteration, generation and destruction of all material bodies.” - Iamblichus, De mysteriis, trans. Emma C. Clarke, Writings from the Greco-Roman world 4 (Atlanta, Ga: Soc. of Biblical Literature, 2003). p. 249.
[50] Henry Corbin, “The Paradox of the Monotheism - AAHSC,” Association des amis de Henry et Stella Corbin (blog), accessed May 28, 2023, https://www.amiscorbin.com/bibliographie/the-paradoxe-of-the-monotheism/. p. 5.
[51] Dillon, Pagan Portals - Polytheism.
[52] Butler, Polytheism in Greek Philosophy. p. 119.
[53] This is one of the main themes Butler develops in his Polytheism in Greek Philosophy.
[54] See Butler, "The Platonic Zeus"; Pp. 139-167 in "From Cave to Sky”; D’Hoine and Marije, All From One: A Guide to Proclus, Appendix I.
[55] Butler, Polytheism in Greek Philosophy. p. 20.
[56] “Endymions_bower | More on Egyptian vs. Hellenic Theology,” accessed November 20, 2022, https://endymions-bower.dreamwidth.org/42687.html.
[57] Oluwaseyi Bello, “A Sonorous Metaphysics: Prolegomena,” Substack newsletter, A Play of Masks (blog), May 4, 2024, https://symmetria.substack.com/p/a-sonorous-metaphysics-prolegomena.
[58] Bello.
[59] Butler, Polytheism in Greek Philosophy. p. 379
[60] Butler. p. 379.
[61] Schuon, Form and Substance in the Religions. p. 51.
[62] “the new element present in the intellectual order of Gods is narrativity. The Gods of this order are not merely present together, they engage in activity together, which takes the form of mythological narrative. Narrative action implies fully reciprocal relations of the Gods to each other, and hence the hypostatization of relations themselves. The members of the intelligible order of Gods - which is every God simply qua God - had no relationship to each other. Rather, each simply contained the All. Within their potentialities, their dunameis, were the potential for many specific relations to other deities, but these were not to be fully actualized as relations, that is, as "thirds" beside the two deities concerned, until the intellectual order. This is because relation in general achieves concretion in the intellect. The concretion of relation permits at last the genuine unification of the Gods into a class represented by the power to quantify over "All the Gods." Indeed, with the emergence of intellect, all that is necessary for philosophy is in place; the Gods have provided humans with the capacity to understand the cosmos at the same time that they have imparted to the cosmos itself a fully intelligible structure. And so when we speak of an intelligible or an intelligible-and-intellectual class of Gods, we are regressively applying to these orders of Gods prior to the emergence of intellectual being characteristics appropriate to intellectual being.” - Butler, “The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus.”. p. 11.
[63] See for instance Ogunnaike, “Insān-Ity or “Knots in the Real””
[64] Ali Imran, “Theophanic Imagination in the Sufism of Muhyiddin Ibn Al-ʿArabi,” Theophaneia (blog), February 21, 2024, https://www.theophaneia.org/theophanic-imagination-in-the-sufism-of-muhyddin-ibn-arabi/; Corbin, “The Paradox of the Monotheism - AAHSC.”
Wow.
Nothing else to say!
Thanks for this! Your work has really helped give me greater appreciation for the different monotheistic faiths, especially Islam.