The One is Each God

Non-Duality as “Polycentric Polytheism”

“Every God is above Being, above Life, and above Intelligence” (prop. 115)[1]

There are two broad competing views for the relationship between monotheism and polytheism. The first is what I call a “flat” distinction, namely that monotheism and polytheism are alternatives, such that you can only accept one, and not the other. The second view – or set of views perhaps – are attempts to reconcile them, usually with a form of henotheism, much of which involves having one proper absolute God, with the other “gods” being “angels” or similar. In the Christian case, we have the supremacy of YHWH and the pagan Gods being reduced to the role of intermediary angels who are “inappropriately” worshipped, venerated, or something else.

My problem with the first is simply that things are rarely ever that simple. The words “Monotheism” and “Polytheism” are not so separated in meaning that they are mutually exclusionary[2]. This is the virtue of the second position. It uses this ambiguity for an attempt at reconciliation. The problem with the second position, however, is more subtle.

I am assuming a “classical theist” bias here since it is in this context much of Christian “henotheism” and the likes come from. In particular, I am using the Neoplatonist synthesis, as I find it the most adequate for my purposes. I agree with D. B. Hart that the “neoclassical” vision corresponds more to the classical theist’s understanding of “demiurges”[3], and perhaps – even if I wanted to be as charitable as possible – some of the highest levels of still complex intellect, but not the divinity as such. To make it clearer, the Neoclassical theist God(s) correspond to the “angels” of Christian henotheism in some of their more powerful forms. It is from these “angels” we will begin our ascent. In doing so we will see the problem with the straightforward Henotheist approach, as well as what the ascent really reveals*.

I

“…the One is the unique property of the divine” – Theoprastus[4]

In the phenomenology of the greatest revelations, there is only the God. Any self-consciousness we may have in that experience is only a reflection of the Self-Consciousness of the God as the “Only God”, both in contrast, such that we realize our nothingness, and in affirmation, such that we realize our only real substantiality is in the God “emself”[5]. This is often simultaneous. The death of the Ego in its darkness is its rebirth as the refraction of the positive radiance of the God’s self. Isaiah sees the Lord and weeps. He knows he is to die. When his Ego is destroyed it is also reborn, and he is sent as a logoi of the Logos, a spirit of the Spirit, to his people, the ego of coal transformed into the diamond refracting the radiant God he encountered in his heart-temple.

This is one example of many an encounter, and many monotheists have seen this as the evidence of the unity of God as absolute singularity. Basically, the two main approaches to the polytheism/monotheism divide meet: Since there cannot be multiple ultimate Gods, on pain of contradiction, either all but one are false – to varying degrees of “false”, like deceiving demons or human hubris concocting entities that don’t exist – or all of them are somehow be One God, with many manifestations, whether it is Isis who is called “Supreme” or Zeus the God of gods, or YHWH the Most High God.

I admit I have “perennialist” tendencies. I have always had such tendencies, so I took to real perennialism quite quickly when I encountered it. The first option never really did it for me. It is more correct to say that many of these entities exist in some way and can in some sense be called “Good” apart from any reference to the Christian religion. The platonic refrain of “to be is to know”[6] must lead to “to be is to be knowable”[7] and ultimately to the Guenonian insight of “the possible is the real”[8]. If it is knowable, it is possible in some way, and hence is real in some way. The implications are rather startling, but we should focus on what this means for the many revealed “Gods”, beginning with the fact that it renders the first option of rejecting polytheism as such impossible. The question then is how we understand this “polytheism” in light of the seeming mystical “monotheism” that reveals these Gods as the “only God”.

II

“But that the First Principle transcends Being is evident. For unity and Being are not identical: it is one thing to say ‘it exists’, another to say ‘it has unity’.” – Prop 115

In arguing towards the first principle of all essences, we tend to stop at Being itself. This is so for many contingency and cosmological arguments. We ascend from the sensible rabbit to rabbitness to animalness to “thingness” or “Being”, the principle of essences. We must grasp that it is a thing before we know what kind of thing, and “kinds” of thing are often hierarchical relationships. It must be grasped that the logical and linguistic structure of our knowledge was thought to be a symbol revealing the structure of reality[9]. There is an endlessness to this that we can’t go through here, but there is always a dazzling top of the pyramid that is hard to see because it is too bright. “Thingness” or “Being” is itself an “object” in that it is objectified as a principle in relation to its manifestations, but the objectification “nullifies” itself. You cannot know Being except in the many faces that are beings. The best you can attribute to it is “singularity”. It – Being, Logos, Noesis – is truly “that than which nothing greater can be thought”, the true “Limit” of thinking, itself being indistinguishable from thinking – in the Aristotelian sense[10]. For there is no thinking, no conceptualization, or knowing of objects that is not a bringing to singularity of beings. Thinking as such is thus the principle of Singularity. Thus, again, the objectification of Being is its veiling in beings, and to know Being beyond beings is to “unknow” beings, to ascend to the pure act of thinking, or rather “Noesis”, since “thought” can be construed in too much of a simple “mental” sense. This act is also the only way we can grasp the Unity of the One[11], but that is getting ahead of ourselves. This is not the only way to Noesis and Henosis, or rather, this is the sliver of the way, abstracted from it. Thinking still has to exist. It is not the principle of existence as such, but the principle of essences that exist. Thinking is prior to specific forms, but it is also their Source. Thinking does not grasp individuals as such, that is, a unity apart from and prior to the essences it instantiates. Thinking grasps individuals as they instantiate essences. Thus we identify “humans”, “rabbits”, “bones”, etc. in our conceptualizations and demarcations. To grasp the individual as such is to intimate henosis, and although they are tied together, such that there is no Henosis without Noesis, the principle of Henosis is prior to Noesis, and to know how we have been truly ascending to this Henosis through Noesis, we are going back to our example with the rabbit.

III

“Again, if the First Principle transcends Being, then since every god, qua god, is of the order of that Principle (prop. 113), it follows that all of them must transcend Being.” – Prop 115

To return to our example for the ascent according to essence, we conceived of a rabbit according to rabbitness. This is simply restricting ourselves to this individual as a rabbit, not as the multitudes of other things it is. That which we call a rabbit is also a particular colour, with many shapes, surfaces, organs, knowledge, etc. Although we can indeed have a predominant characteristic to identify something with, as an individual it participates many other things. There is no essential connection between being a rabbit and the colour white, yet there are white rabbits. The individual rabbit has as important to its identity in some way the fact that it is white, although that is more “accidental” compared to the characteristic of being a rabbit. There is no essential connection between many “forms” – even if there are logical connections – and yet many forms are instantiated in an individual. Following the law of cause and effect native to platonisms and their analogues elsewhere, it is correct to say that the principle of individuality is prior to essence, since it unites essence.

Why can’t this principle simply be “Noesis”? Because Noesis is the principle of singularity, not unity. There is a subtle distinction here.

Recall that Noesis does not grasp the individual as such, but the individual as it instantiates some essence. We see “one man”, “one rabbit”, “one pencil”, etc. This is “singularity”. “Being” is the Metaphysical “One”[12]. The difference between Singularity and Unity is that singularity is an “instance of unity”, that is, as Proclus said in Prop. 115, “it has unity”. It is not unity as such. It is not the principle but the manifestation. This is where “analytic” definitions and uses of “Platonism” demur from the Neoplatonic. If Noesis is Nous or Intellect, which it is (Eric Perl), then the “realm of forms” is not some a place of “abstract objects” but the very singularity of an intellect and the communion of intellects. “Every Form mirrors the whole of Intellect, but from its own perspective”[13] because Intellect is the unity in singularity of every form. Behind even the complicated Noetic cosmos of Proclus is this understanding of Intellect, such that even “Intellect” as reversion of Being and “Being” as the highest Logos can be described with it. But Noesis is not the first principle. Even with the apophatic nature of the highest Noesis/Nous/Logos, it is still not apophatic enough. It is still “One”. We might say it is the highest manifestation of the individual, even if it is not the individual as such, not the unity as such. It is here we see that the “Self” of the individual is “beyond Being”.

Now keep this in mind, we are not supposed to reify another singularity “above Being”. This is where the intimate link between Noesis and its absolute principle comes in. Marilena Vlad is good here:

“Ultimately, to step into the void is to try to advance where there is nothing more to report, thus, it is an effort of thought which does not render anything anymore, but which experiences and expresses its own reversal (περιτροπή), at every step of the way. The reversal (περιτροπή)—which best describes the manner of the advance into the void (κενεμβατεῖν)—consists in the fact that any assertion turns to its contrary and the slightest attempt to determine the principle undermines itself, like when we call it unknowable, but we realize that, if it were unknowable, we would at least know this about it: namely that it is unknowable. This constantly reversed thinking is the only one that can search for the principle without determining it. Through this reversed thinking, we can actually speak about the principle, trying to perceive its presence, while knowing that the principle is unspeakable, and that it is impossible to speak about it directly. Even if we cannot grasp it, the principle remains the final and constant goal of this constantly reversed thinking, which strives towards it. This thinking is never annihilated, but rather reduced to its bare act of thinking, which no longer has an actual subject of thought, nor a result of its approach.”[14]

I can’t really say much after this, but with this in mind as a corrective against taking a symbol as the full reality, let us continue.

IV

“There is the caveat, however, that beings participate, not only in ontic classes, but also in divine series; and it is only through participation in such a series that a being has real subsistence as an individual rather than as instantiating form.” – Edward Butler[15]

If you have been following closely, you might have found some similarity between the path of individuality and the revelation of the God as “the Only God”. Indeed this is not accidental. This is the way the revelation works. Nature is nothing but revelation after all. Here is an example, using a prayer to Isis:

“O You, the truly holy and eternal redemptrix of the human race, be ever generous to the mortals whom you cherish, bestowing a mother’s sweet love upon the miserable in their times of trial. Neither day nor night nor a single moment, however small, is devoid of your blessings, for you protect men at sea and on land, and you chase away life’s storms by stretching forth your saving right hand, wherewith also you unwind the inextricably tangled weave of fate, and calm Fortune’s tempests, and restrain the baneful courses of the stars. The gods above worship you, the gods below venerate you, you turn the earth, you give the sun its light, you rule the world, you trample down hell. It is you whom the stars obey, you for whom the seasons return, you in whom the gods rejoice, and you whom the elements serve. At your bidding, winds blow, clouds nourish the earth, seeds sprout, and harvests swell. At your majesty, the birds traversing the heavens, the beasts wandering the mountains, the serpents lurking in their lairs, and the monsters swimming the sea tremble.”[16]

If you can believe it, here is the goddess being praised in a manner many monotheists would only ascribe to the Supreme God. In fact, there’s no other way to read this that doesn’t make this person the Supreme God(dess). She is here described as the ultimate singularity, which means She is also the unity as such that births the revelation of singularity. The Logos is also the God, even if its principle is “beyond Being”. It is described here how she is the unity of all the disparate items and essences of the Cosmos, how she is the teleological end to which they revert. She is “ultimate”, like it is said of many other Gods and she is this despite whatever her place in a myth. Thus, every ultimate individual, that is, every God qua God is truly of the order of the first Principle, as Proclus said. Every ultimate God – which are the only proper Gods there are – is capable of being described as the first principle. But how does one conceive of the first principle if this is the case? Remember that this is not a unity of essences, but of individuality. Every God qua God is the ultimate singular and by implication the ultimate unity. How this is so with so many Gods has an answer with the Henotheists, but I think it is a flawed answer. This is because of the unique nature of this “singularity” and “unity” of which these Gods are said to be.

V

“Two modes of reversion are thus possible for individual beings: one by way of form, which is mediated by the whole of Being, the other by way of theurgic sunthemata and reversion upon the tutelary deity.” – Edward Butler[17]

Eric Perl’s apt description of the One according to Plotinus shows how Plotinus meets Damascius[18], and also shows the way we are to conceive of the Gods as of the “order of the First principle”.

On the one hand, a simple contingency argument qua essences leads up to the principle of essence, the order of participation proper to things qua things. On the other hand there is the contingency argument qua unity, of which the argument from essence is simply a limited case. Here we have the more complete image of the dependence of individuals rather than simply essences, because although the individual rabbit is contingent on the form of rabbitness, the whole rabbit, with all its other characteristics like colour, size, etc, as an individual is dependent on the individual intellect in whom rabbitness and these other attributes as forms are united in singularity. Thus the chain of being is only partly a chain of essences and forms and their images. It is more fully a chain of individuals who both display either more or less of unity qua essence and display the ineffability and “indiminishability” of unity prior to essence. Basically, no matter how “unreal” an essence is as instantiated by an individual, the individual is still “One”. One individual human is not less “one” in number than the form itself, even if it is less “unified” in terms of its qualities.

This immutability of unity manifest in singularity can only be viewed through the chain of being, even if the principle of unity is not on the chain of being. Although Unity or Individuality is prior, one cannot “know” Unity in any positive way except through its many singular faces, which are related to each other on a chain of being. Thus the revelation of the individual human as “one” is only through the principle of being prior to its form at the impossible “top” of the chain of being. In Christian terms, you cannot know the “Father” but through the “Son”.

It is this “vertical” revelation of the “beyond vertical” unity that makes the individuality of the Gods in revelation require something different from the contingency argument qua essence. The God is revealed as the “positive individual”. In our realm of shadows, things are only known in contrast and negation. Part of what defines a particular human is its “cutting off” from other humans. This is how “abstraction” works. It is the only way we can conceive of the individualities of ontic multiplicities, as somehow “negations” of each other in some sense, that is, “mutually exclusive”, even if related. The Gods on the other hand, when revealed as Gods, are not defined in this way at all. They are instead the opposite. They are the “source” of everything. They are all things in being their “source”, and as said earlier, if they are so in the sense of the Ultimate Monad/Logos, they must also be so in the sense of the first ineffable principle that the Ultimate Monad instantiates. The Logic of essences dictates that its highest explicit principle be a singular monad, or rather singularity itself. All essences “disappear” in the Monad such that the monad can only be viewed through them. But Gods are not discrete essences. The ineffable Principle prior to essence and singularity is not an essence or essentiality as such. When Gods are revealed, it is not an essence that is revealed. It is an individual. The virtue of knowing the principle of thinking is that it reveals – and yet hides – the principle of unity. One cannot encounter singularity without meeting unity.

Basically, if we take the logic of singularities – which we can call “persons” – as the fuller vision of the chain of being, and these persons as persons do not follow the logic of essences, then we cannot say that the highest persons dissolve into an essence beyond being. We would be contradicting ourselves. In fact, let us drastically reduce – or “occultically increase” – the number of true individuals. In the revelation of the God, the limited particular is seen as an instantiation and reflection of the God. Remember, it is through the ultimate singularity that any other limited singularity can be revealed as singular. The singularity of all particulars and universals is the singularity of Being itself, the veil of Unity. Thus, all particular humans are manifestations of the Singular Gods, their “images” qua essences, but their person qua individuality-cum-singularity. Thus the chain of being qua individuals, or the “divine series” is the serial manifestation of a God. These manifestations are the “angels”, “daimons”, and so on. In the sense of their individuality, they are the God, but this individuality is simply the manifestation of the One Individual that is the God in question. This individuality is often symbolized as the “name” of the God, which is shared among the manifestations. Thus, although the manifestations of the God – whether angel, daimon, human, etc – “disappears” qua essence when we ascend to the God as Being, the individuality of the God is not an essence subject to dimunition or increase. But if this is true, even if we cannot see the Gods as disappearing like an essence into a High God that is himself an individual God, why can’t we view this apophatically in the classical Christian sense, where “God is not a god among others”?

VI

“The One, therefore, establishes being not only by unifying it but equally by differentiating it, and indeed is the source of being because it is the principle of difference no less than of identity. Thus the One's "absoluteness" and "simplicity" consist not in its being a simple, self-contained, undifferentiated monad, isolated above all differentiated being, but rather in its being nothing less than differentiation, distribution, or giving itself.” – Eric Perl[19]

If we indeed hyperfocus on the mystical revelation of each God as the only God in esoteric settings, we would end up with an absolute monotheism of the sort the more charitable Christians are known for. But, if, the greater perspective contains the lesser, then the reality of an Ultimate God must contain the logic of the pantheon. It is here the functional henotheism of much of Christian theology gets wrinkles. The many Gods in the many myths and pantheons interact with each other, and yet many of these Gods are ultimate Gods for their particular mystery cults. The earlier example of Isis is an example of a Goddess who acts different roles in different myths. There are two possibilities for our hypothetical monotheism.

The first is that the Gods are all manifestations of a God that is specially revealed elsewhere. whether Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or elsewhere, or a combination thereof. Here, the monotheist God is the highest God and all others are simply the shadows and faces of this one God this group of people have special access to.

The second is that every God, including those of the formerly considered “special traditions” is a face of the one True God, who is beyond determination. This is the more straightforwardly perennialist position, although I will get to how this doesn’t take the perennialist conclusion far enough.

The problem with both approaches is the same: the “essentialization of persons”. Most or all the Gods are reduced to the roles they play in the myths and pantheons. “Roles”, “faces”, are ultimately “forms” or “essences”. Thus to reduce a God or Goddess of Wisdom to the role of Wisdom itself is to forget that this God has all other perfections in the same infinite measure. It is why there can be contrary roles for Gods in different myths. If the God was reducible to the role, the God would change with role. But this is not the case. Isis has several roles but the prayer quoted earlier cast her in an absolute creative role. Isis is not approached as the face of a God that is not really Isis, she is approached as Isis, the Goddess of creation. Although the Gods are also the highest intelligences, as persons they are not all the limited image of an overarching person. The logic of essences to not apply here. What is communicated is the individuality, and the individuality of Isis is not the individuality of Zeus or Ra. They all have limited instantiations in being that interact with each other while themselves remain “beyond being, life, and intelligence”. The truths of the esoteric revelation and the “exoteric” myth must be held together.

Remember the idea of positive individuality, the individuality of the Gods is that which spawns the Cosmos. It is not a privative individuality. Isis is not the ultimate individual because she is not Zeus. She is not defined over against any other God. She is the definition herself, by which creation is and is formed, and we can say that about every God. Thus Proclus says “every God is the measure of things existent” (Prop 117).

To put this in other words, every manifest God is an intellect. As an intellect, it is the unity of every form in its singularity as intellect. Thus, the logic of the procession of Intellect qua Intellect is not that of forms qua forms. It is the proceeding of individuals. Intellect qua intelligence proceeds from Intellect qua Being. Thus, the root of every God as Intellect is simply the God as Being. The Gods qua intellect “converge” on and into Being. But, if Individuals don’t follow the Logic of essences, it cannot be that the individual Gods merge into a “MegaGod”, it must be that they unite in a communion that is unitive but not singular. Essence and Noesis cannot explain this unity, it must be prior, and it is prior, since it is this principle of unity that precedes Noesis, and it is this principle that the Gods somehow are. Thus, “the One” cannot be a singularity. In fact, Eric Perl intimates this when he says:

“Clearly, this must mean not that the One is a thing which overflows, which would contradict Plotinus' entire philosophy by treating the One as a being and ascribing to it both a positive content and an activity distinct from itself, but rather that the One is Overflow itself, not a distributor but the constitutive distribution of all things. As such, the One is "beyond" both differentiation (that is, being differentiated) and simplicity (that is, being simple).

…

The One "cannot" withhold itself, not because it is a giver, a being which has the attribute of giving, but because it is pure giving, Giving itself, the unfolding or distribution in and by which all beings come to be.

…

This imagery thus supports the understanding of the One not as a separate monad but as the differential structuring which constitutes being as intelligible.”[20]

“The One” names that which structures the intelligible without being reducible to it. As mentioned earlier, the fullest vision of the chain of being is as a chain of persons, singularities of the singularity. The unknowable principle of singularity is “unity”, this “the One” can be called “Unity”. But this unity is not in the sense of singularity. “The One is not one”. It is not an ontic singularity or an ontic multiplicity. It is neither positively “simple” like Being, or negatively multiple like beings. It is somehow both single and multiple, and yet neither. The only way to grasp this is as Perl says:

“…instead of thinking of the One by itself and then asking how it can produce being, we must follow Plotinus' more usual procedure and explain emanation by working up to the One from below, by discovering the dependence, the derivativeness, of being.”[21]

This is what we have done thus far, and we have found that the most complete framework with which to view the chain of being requires that the Gods be not reducible to a singular God in the manner of essence, nor to “split” Being into multiple essential principles. Being is One, but it reveals many Gods in their singularity prior to any real “relation” and hence “negative determination” in their roles. The only way it can do so is if the Gods themselves are “beyond being”, and as we have also seen, “Beyond Being” is not an entity, a realm, a singularity, or a “structure”. Thus the Gods beyond being cannot be in some sort of “relationship” with a reified “the One” nor can they “proceed” from any “One” in any real sense, even with lip service to the latter’s ineffability and non-reification. The Gods as such are thus indistinguishable from the One. The term best used to describe this is “Polycentric Polytheism”[22]. The Gods are absolutely united, and yet not dissolved into each other, or in Proclean terms, they are “all in each”. This is where the logic of the chain of being, properly considered, leads to. It is not a henotheism but a real polytheism, but not an “ontic polytheism”. It is not one God emanating many, but many Gods coming into being from themselves “beyond being” and constituting relations with each other qua roles/forms/essences, which limit, yet reveal them. This is where the logic of Non-duality leads. To be a bit more “esoteric” for those in the know, this is why Proclus and his “Henads” do not unnecessarily complicate Plotinus’ more “simple” Cosmology and metaphysics. It is that same cosmology with more details as to certain specifics in relation to theology as the study of the Gods.

The next and last question for this post will now be: What does this mean for Christianity, monotheism, and, for the more charitable, Perennialism?

VII

“For the henad, however, there is, existentially, only itself.” – Edward Butler[23]

Right away, this way of viewing things should reorient how we monotheists relate with other traditions. For Christianity in particular, it should influence how we think of our past relationships with other religious traditions, from the African traditions suppressed by colonialism up to the many late antique Hellenistic religions and even the roots of our tradition in pre-judaic religion.

The “polytheism” of the pre-judaic religion should not be seen as a backwards state to progress from, but a rich culture that is lost. There is much to lament in the distant past, including the wanton violence and prejudice, but if we can be charitable with our present traditions and abstract them from their more violent instantiations, we can and should do the same for pre-judaic religions and much else. We should lament the world we live in where practitioners corrupt themselves and these traditions ultimately die out while seeking to revive the spirit of the possible openness this diversity could have bring for us now. We do not have to believe Zeus is YHWH for us to respect Zeus, and we don’t need to reduce Zeus to the mockery and banality some of his followers, being frail humans, inevitably bring him. This is where the famed “spiritual interpretation” of scripture and other texts should come to shine the brightest.

In practice, for me as a Christian perennialist, the best way to view the presence of my God in other traditions is exactly in the sense of “all in each”. Thus, YHWH is present in Zeus, without being Zeus. Because of the unity without mixture of the Gods, we can say that “a God present in person is every God present in Power”. Thus this statement by Coomaraswamy is still correct:

“In the Bhagavad Gita (VII, 21) Sri Krishna proclaims: “If any lover whatsoever seeks with faith to worship any form [of God] whatever, it is I who am the founder of his faith,” and (IV, 11), “However men approach Me, even do I reward them, for the path men take from every side is Mine.”[24]

It is not correct in that a singular God is the ultimate founder of every faith to the exclusion of others, but that each and every God is the founder of every faith by their presence in each God. This, to me, is the better way to interpret the perennialist stance of “Metatheism” as Schuon called it[25]. The “Self” is every God considered in the denial of aspects. It is not to be made (ontically) singular or plural, otherwise we are enthralled by avidya. The Supraessential is both singular and plural and neither of them.

For the monotheist, we take the perspective of the “positive individuality” of the God. We see YHWH in his positive individuality as the source of all things. The Ineffable Father that “is not” begets the Son that is, as the One “gives” Being and is the giving of Being, in the unity of Spirit poured from “both”, keeping in mind that the One is not a singular added to Being in “both”. A God is prior to the pantheons and myths. They must be. The ontic organizations of myths and pantheons are posterior to the Gods. They are “mythotopoi” after all[26].

This “positive individuality” is important, because with it we prevent the subsuming of the multitude of myths into singularity. Through the individuality of the God, we should see the possibility of every myth in each myth, rather than, for example, reducing and reconfiguring each myth into the Christian myths and only assimilating what fits. The full details of this is not possible to put here, but at least one possibility is that, in translating between traditions, the God(s) in that tradition can themselves act out their instantiation of the myth from the communicating tradition. Thus, through the unity of Gods, one can worship YHWH through the God that instantiates that myth we associate with YHWH. This can be understood in the sense of myth and relation being rooted in the intellectual acts of the Gods themselves, acts that constitute a “cosmos” for their subjects. Myth is nothing more than the constitution of cosmoi, for “the mytheme and the matheme constitute a “beautifully ordered system”, that is, a cosmos.” where pantheons, “divine councils”, and “henotheisms” are constituted and properly begin. The communication of the Christian myth in another tradition, therefore, begins when the God or Gods of that tradition constitute a Christian cosmos within its own multitude of cosmoi as a space of communion with the many other Christian cosmoi of many traditions; a constitution that, in order to be complete, must be mutual. That is, we must also constitute — and we do perhaps have examples of this constitution — the myths of others in our Christian traditions. This mutual constitution does not have to be absorption or “conquering” of one system by another, and indeed it cannot be such if it is proper communion and not violent subjugation. Because of the Non-dual unity of the Gods, this is still direct worship of YHWH, as worship of YHWH is direct worship of all other Gods. The possibilities are perhaps endless. There is the question of the total number of Gods, which is not knowable, even if an “indirect minimum” can be given, which is that, following Syrianius, there are at least the same number of Gods as the classes of Gods allowed to exist. In any case, this is simply a sketch. As a Christian, I think this is the best way to carry out the charity of Christ in this particular domain. I really hope someday I can spark something with other Christian Neoplatonists, hopefully, better read than I, to take this further. I will certainly be writing more in view of that. I pray that these words are to your glory, my Lord and My God. Amen.

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*I want to especially thank Dr Edward Butler for his wonderful dissertation and the conversations he graciously had with me in order to understand many of the ideas explained in this post. I also want to thank Dr Antonio Vargas, Dr Jordan Wood, Ellery Beard, and Success (or as he likes to call himself, the “Postdiluvian Patriarch”) for their insights, perspectives, and even disagreements on Proclus’ metaphysics and theology. Others of note include Adam Louis Klein for his endlessly interesting cosmologies and Steven Dillon for his brilliant translations of Neoplatonic Polytheism into an analytic key. This post owes a lot to them.

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[1] Proclus and E. R. Dodds, The Elements of Theology, Second Edition (Oxford University Press, 1971).

[2] Dale Tuggy, ‘On Counting Gods’, TheoLogica, 1.1 (2017), 188–213 <https://doi.org/10.14428/thl.v1i1.153>.

[3] “As it happens, the god with whom most modern popular atheism usually concerns itself is one we might call a “demiurge” (dēmiourgos): a Greek term that originally meant a kind of public technician or artisan but that came to mean a particular kind of divine “world-maker” or cosmic craftsman… Suffice it to say that the demiurge is a maker, but not a creator in the theological sense: he is an imposer of order, but not the infinite ocean of being that gives existence to all reality ex nihilo.” – David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, 2013 <https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-3784>.

[4] Phillip Sidney Horky, ‘Theophrastus on Platonic and “Pythagorean” Imitation’, Classical Quarterly, 63.2 (2013), 686–712 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009838813000189>.

[5] ‘Welcome to the Orion’s Arm Universe Project’ <https://www.orionsarm.com/> [accessed 5 January 2022]. This is the preferred way of referring to the “AI Gods” in the franchise. I think it helps capture the intensity of the reality we are encountering here.

[6] “Not only are being and intelligibility co-extensive, as the Goddess here indicates, but intelligibility is the very meaning of ‘being.’ ‘Being,’ ‘that which is,’ can mean only ‘that which is given to thought,’” – Eric D. Perl, Thinking Being Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition, ed. by Robert M. Berchman and John F. Finamore (Brill, 2014).

[7] “…it seems fair to say that if such a universe did in some sense exist, it would do so exactly to the extent that it could be known to consciousness of some kind. There is no such thing as ontological coherence that is not a rational coherence. There is a point then, arguably, at which being and intelligibility become conceptually indistinguishable.” – David Bentley Hart, Roland in Moonlight (Angelico Press, 2021).

[8] “The distinction between the possible and the real, upon which many philosophers have placed so much emphasis, thus has no metaphysical validity, for every possible is real in its way, according to the mode befitting its own nature; if it were otherwise there would be possibles that were nothing, and to say that a possible is nothing is a contradiction pure and simple” – Rene Guenon, The Multiple States of the Being (Sophia Perennis, 2004).

[9] “A better rendering of aitia or causae, in the ancient or mediaeval sense, might be “explanations,” “rationales,” “logical descriptions,” or (still better) “rational relations.” The older fourfold nexus of causality was not, that is to say, a defective attempt at modern physical science but instead chiefly a grammar of predication, describing the inherent logical structure of anything that exists insofar as it exists, and reflecting a world in which things and events are at once discretely identifiable and yet part of the larger dynamic continuum of the whole… In a sense, a causal relation in this scheme is less like a physical interaction or exchange of energy than it is like a mathematical equation, or like the syntax of a coherent sentence.” – David Bentley Hart, ‘Where the Consonance Between Science and Religion Lies | Church Life Journal | University of Notre Dame’ <https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/where-the-consonance-really-lies/> [accessed 11 October 2021].

[10] “Aristotle seems torn between a conception of God as the active intelligibility of the cosmos itself, and a conception of God as a pure, immaterial activity independent not only of the sensible, but even of any distinguishable content.” – Jakob Ziguras, Aristotle: Metaphysics as Theanthropology,  Kronos Philosophical Journal, 2018, VII.

[11] “Even if we cannot grasp it, the principle remains the final and constant goal of this constantly reversed thinking, which strives towards it. This thinking is never annihilated,75 but rather reduced to its bare act of thinking, which no longer has an actual subject of thought, nor a result of its approach.” – Marilena Vlad, ‘Stepping into the Void: Proclus and Damascius on Approaching the First Principle’, International Journal of Platonic Tradition, 11.1 (2017), 44–68 <https://doi.org/10.1163/18725473-12341364>.

[12] Guenon; Eric Steinhart, Believing in Dawkins: The New Spiritual Atheism, Journal of the American Academy of Religion (Springer International Publishing, 2021), lxxxix <https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfab061>. Steinhart’s error here is the “depersonalization” of the first principle. Although his description of the emergence of Being from Non-Being is “formally” correct, his inability to distinguish negative and positive Non-being and ultimately the seeming inability to understand the unitive nature of personhood as individuality beyond essence makes his Platonism shallow.

[13] Algis Uzdavinys and Jay Bregman, The Heart of Plotinus: The Essential Enneads (The Perennial Philosophy), ed. by Algis Uzdavinys (World Wisdom, 2009).

[14] Vlad.

[15] Edward Butler, ‘The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus’ (New School University, 2003) <https://henadology.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/dissertation-copy.pdf>.

[16] A quote from Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass), as written in David Bentley Hart’s ‘The Desire of the Nations’, First Things, 2011 <https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2011/06/the-desire-of-the-nations> [accessed 19 July 2020].

[17] Butler.

[18] Eric D. Perl, ‘“The Power of All Things”: The One as Pure Giving in Plotinus’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 71.3 (1997), 301–13 <https://doi.org/10.5840/acpq199771331>; Vlad. Like Perl, Vlad describes the One as irreducible to any object. Perl’s philosopher of focus is Plotinus while Vlad’s is Damascius and Proclus. The One as not an object, singular or plural in the ontological and ontic sense, is important in understanding how the One is the divinity of all Gods.

[19] Perl, ‘“The Power of All Things”: The One as Pure Giving in Plotinus’.

[20] Perl, ‘“The Power of All Things”: The One as Pure Giving in Plotinus’.

[21] Perl, ‘“The Power of All Things”: The One as Pure Giving in Plotinus’.

[22] Butler.

[23] Butler.

[24] Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, ‘Paths That Lead To The Same Summit’, in Ye Shall Know the Truth: Christianity and the Perennial Philosophy, ed. by Mateus Soares de Azevedo (World Wisdom, 2005), pp. 213–26.

[25] “we may call "metatheism" the Vedantic or Taoist idea of a supra-ontological Reality — the suprapersonal Ātmā — in order to indicate clearly that this idea basically transcends all theism properly so called; for a "God" creates, speaks, legislates, judges and saves, which the Divine Essence could not do, since by definition it excludes all Māyā, and consequently has no associate.” – Frithjof Schuon, To Have a Center, 2015. Schuon also distinguishes in “the Five Divine Presences” between “Unity” and “Unicity” as “Beyond Being” and “Being”. The implications of “not one or many” of “Unity” tend to be obscured by a methodological monotheism that privileges the “neither many” part of this equation and reifies the One as singular.

[26] “And I think of religious symbolic economies as specific congelations and contractions of consciousness, local dreamscapes or… oh, I don’t know… ‘mythotopoi,’ I suppose I might say, where the mystery truly shows itself.” – Hart, Roland in Moonlight. As a system of symbols and therefore relationships of like and unlike, sameness and difference, myths are posterior to the singularity of Being and the manifest individuality of the Gods, and are thus “malleable”.