UNITY, DUALITY, TRINITY, AND QUATERNITY
UNITY
God, as the “Essence”, is “simple”. He is absolute, She is infinite. I used those pronouns because they will be very important later in this section, but it is also good to remember that God transcends gender and unites the genders in that same transcendence. God is Father, but also Mother, to deny that is in fact blasphemy, for God is unlike created things with definite genders. We could also say, far more correctly, that God is analogically Father and Mother since He is no mere creaturely “Parent”. But as the Essence in its fullness, we can consider God as neither. The best name is “The One” or “The Self”, the first Plotinian, the Second Hindi. From this perspective, only The One “exists”. It is most real, and therefore the lower levels are invisible, non-existent, and absorbed in its light. This is the perspective of God as both “Beginning” (Protology) and “End” (Eschatology). God is both the source of creation and its very Apocatastasis (Restoration). When considered in itself, for The One, creation never begins, not to talk of ending. The logic of the “eternal present” that is the life of The One forbids it from knowing change, because change is ultimately unreal: “All is God”, and God is “all in all”. This, according to Schuon, is what is meant by “Samsara is Nirvana, Nirvana is Samsara”: Unity with God, Theosis, the substance of salvation, is realizing the unreality of finitude, the illusion of creation and the defeat of death. Like St. Maximus says, Theosis means we become “unoriginate”, or, “without beginning”, and therefore, without end. From one of Schuon’s footnotes:
Bayazid: 'The knower receives from God, as reward, God himself. Whosoever enters into God, attains the truth of all things and becomes himself the Truth (Al-Haqq = God); it is not cause for surprise that he then sees in himself, and as if it were him, everything that exists outside God. Similarly Shankaracharya: 'The Yogi, whose intelligence is perfect, contemplates all things as dwelling in himself, and thus he perceives by the eye of Knowledge, that everything is Atma.(The Self)' [1]
In other words, The One in His fullness becomes the centre of our identity. Christ in you, the hope of (eternal) Glory.
DUALITY
On the other hand, in our slice of reality, we do know that there is change, and even if it is unreal from the perspective of the absolute “Self”, it is still real from the perspective of the relative “diffusiveness” of that Self. Because it is self-effusive it must “pour out” existence in the “direction” of manifestation, first “relativizing” itself in divine “hypostases” or “Persons”, then relativizing itself further as the persons themselves “self-diffuse” into creation. In other words, the light that reveals The One as that which is most real, and therefore the only “reality”, is the same light that “drenches” the divine persons into being and creation into existence. The distinction is crucial, because the divine persons are ineffable in relation to creation, and are not mere “beings”, rather they are Being itself “polarized” into persons by the relationship of Being with itself, or by Being’s relationship with “Beyond Being” or “The One”. This “pouring out” should not be understood as “emanationism”, which is foreign to the idea of “emanation” as understood by Plotinus and its other proponents. This “emanation” should be understood as creation as viewed from its source in God rather than, like in the case of the doctrine of Creatio ex nihilo, where creation is viewed from where its source is not. They are two sides of the same coin. The One doesn’t cease being what it is in emanation, same for the hypostases. Creation doesn’t change God, neither does “emanation”. This is where the division between Absolute and Relative (Schuon’s “Atma and Maya”) begins.
This is God as Duality, the source of the distinction between God and His Demiurge, and the principle from which Evil is inevitable for the lower sections of reality, for although the Good diffuses itself, and from it comes beings, which are good, radiation also means distance, which is the principle of evil, the old understanding of “Separation from God” as death. All good things are “evil” in contrast with the absolute Good. This inevitability was grasped by the Gnostics who spoke of an evil demiurge who is the cause of the fall, and who opposes God. Of course their error does not lie in the statement that there is an evil demiurge, remember St. Paul speaks of “the prince of the power of the air”, the “ruler of this age”, and of him blinding the eyes of the citizens of the world to the truth (or “gnosis” according to the Gnostics). Their error was to speak of the intricacies of the divine relativity without the spirit of the gospel, all heresy is alike in that it is “a form severed from its substance” [2], the "substance" here being the spirit of the gospel. It is true that the “Divine Relative” is, in a sense, “Evil”, if we simply understand it as distance rather than obfuscation of the divine will, however, this “evil” and “death” is suffered for the sake of Good, as J. D. Wood put it:
Creation is the Word’s protological death that all might enjoy eschatological Resurrection” [3]
Or, as Schuon put it, in Mariological terms:
Eve is life, and this is manifesting Maya; Mary is Grace, and this is reintegrating Maya. Eve personifies the demiurge under its aspect of femininity; Mary is the personification of the Shekhinah, of the Presence that is both virginal and maternal. Life, being amoral, can be immoral; Grace, being pure substance, is capable of absorbing all accidents [1]
Or again, adapting a famous Christological maxim to Hindu concepts:
Âtmâ became Mâyâ so that Mâyâ might become Âtmâ.[4]
In other words, the relativity of God is God Himself calling creatures unto Himself. This is separate from the actual manifestation of evil in the sense of the attempted quenching of the good, which is, as a futile attempt, contrary to the Relativity of God itself, because it attempts to subvert it and create another “Atma”, something impossible and that will only end in failure. Not even hell can succeed, it will dissolve in the apokatastasis.
TRINITY
This is the seen when the relative is “split” according to the attributes of “Reverberation” (Son) and “Radiation” (Spirit). Or, if you recall the “horizontal Trinity”, relativity itself is “polarized” into Being, Consciousness, and Bliss. The symbol of this could be the triangle, with the top representing either Being or Beyond-being, depending on the perspective. There is also another way of naming the ternary, which is “Father, Mother, and Child”, Corresponding to Father, Spirit, and Son, because in a certain sense it is through the Spiration of the Spirit that the Son is begotten, for the Spirit is their very unity, it is the Spirit of Shalom and Shekinah. The reflection (Son, Child) is a “product” of the light (Spirit, Mother) as much as it is the product of the source of the light (Father). This images the human family, and is in a way what the human family images. It is telling that the Virgin Mother is often associated with the Spirit, even in the Quran, where it is treated as a “false trinity”. However, this relationship can also be seen in another way, a more “complete way”.
QUATERNITY
I’m sure you have noticed a trend by now. God, in his “self-determination” or “diffusion” towards creation, is continually “split” or “polarized” into “hypostases”, each multiplication corresponding to a certain “distance” from the undivided essence itself, although without splitting into separate numerical “beings”. This division can continue forever, as the possibilities of manifestation signified by these polarizations are endless, but we will stop at the fourth level, as all the others can be summarised here. Now, instead of a trinity with only one source (Father), imagine that source in the two “aspects” laid out at the beginning of this section. God as absolute (Father), and God as infinite (Mother). It is because God is infinite that God can "contain" hypostases and manifestations. It is because God is absolute that he can act as a source of these hypostases and manifestations. God as centre acts as “source”, God as “expanse” acts as container (i.e, the seed and the womb). God is in Himself a “self-inseminating womb” [4]. Here, The “Father” and “Mother” replaces the Singular “Father” of the Trinitarian synthesis, while the Spirit and Son are now “Daughter” and “Son”. Father, Mother, Daughter, and Son, the divine family is complete. Ofcourse, these aren’t separate “beings” but “aspects” understood by their relation to each other in God. The four can also be described as such:
Envisaged with respect to the principle of quaternity, the Essence comprises four qualities or functions which are reflected on earth by North, South, East and West. With the help of this analogical correspondence, we shall the more easily be able to discern, in the Essence itself and consequently in a latent and undifferentiated state- where "all is in all'~ but obviously as a potentiality of Maya, the four following principles: firstly Purity or Vacuity, Exclusivity; secondly as the complementary opposite-symbolically the North-South axis- Goodness, Beauty, Life or Intensity, Attraction; thirdly Strength or Activity, Manifestation; and fourthly- this is the East-West axis--Peace, Equilibrium or Passivity, lnclusivity, Receptivity. To these principles may be referred the Koranic Names Dhu'ljalal, Dhu'l-lkram, Al-Hayy, Al-Qayyum: the Possessor of Majesty, the Possessor of Generosity, the Living, the Changeless, Names whose meaning could also be expressed by the following notions: inviolable Purity, overflowing Love, invincible Power, unalterable Serenity; or Truth, which is Rigour and Purity, Life, which is Gentleness and Love, Strength, which is active Perfection, and Peace, which is passive Perfection. [1]
I couldn’t say how to assign the names of “Father”, “Mother”, “Son”, and “Daughter” in that description, I don’t think they fit neatly, but it shows the innumerable ways in which the divine essence can be “polarized”, and subsequently “personalised” in the various gods of the ancient myths, for example in the Greek primeval goddess Gaia, meaning “earth”, considered in its symbolism as God’s divine “virginity”, hence “inviolable purity”. She comes out of the “void” (the hiddenness of God) and is “inseminated” by her offspring Uranus (meaning Sky). Here she represents not just purity but the “Divine womb”, with her “Son”, who is "sky" (immutable and "absolute" heaven), as her Husband, and the two constituting in the divine the "self-inseminating womb" described earlier. You can see the parallels with Christian understandings of the relationship between Mary and Christ, the second Eve and Second Adam. Keeping to the typology, her son is her husband, the bridegroom is birthed from the bride. She, as mother of the church, prefigures the church, whose mission is to “birth” Christ into the world, like the divine woman in revelation, who represents both Mary and the Church:
Patristic theologies of both the incarnation and the circumcision emphasize the instability of Jesus’s gendered corporeality. Augustine’s description of the baby Jesus—“His appearance as an Infant Spouse, from his bridal chamber, that is, from the womb of a virgin” —demonstrates this. The baby boy is husband and bridegroom, spouse and prefigured lover of the mother who gives him birth, whose own body swells to contain the future Church. The bridal chamber is the womb which the bridegroom will impregnate with his seed while also being the womb from which he emerges. The material orders are inseparable from the symbolic and transcendent orders, the orders of mystery. The material orders are caught up and become significant only within the analogical orders. And so here Jesus’s body is brought within a complex network of sexualized symbolic relations that confound incest and the sacred.
Graham Ward [5]
And also;
Here it is Mary who attains to the pitch of parodic substitution, since she is both the mother of Jesus and, as Mother-Church, of each member of his body; but as the Church she is also the bride of Christ, not only the mother but the wife of her son. (Here we are reminded that what I have been calling parodic substitution allows Christianity to place at its symbolic centre certain cultural taboos—against cannibalism, incest and homosexuality—and there break them.)
Gerard Loughlin [5]
My conclusion here is basically the same as that I’ve been pounding on these past few months: Look close enough and you see the divine and timeless truth of even the most vile and misused myths and the traces of the original traditions handed down to various peoples, who we may demonize as “savages” because they don’t fit our narrow creedal orthodoxy. Now, I am all for orthodoxy, and religions are exclusive for a reason, but truth is one, and if it is to be found in other religions, I need not call it lesser or false because it isn’t mine. Truth belongs to no one, not even the gods.
Schuon, F., & Nasr, S. H. (2005). The Essential Frithjof Schuon. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0513/2005014071.html
Schuon, F. Form and Substance in the Religions.
Wood, J. D., & Wood, J. D. (2017). Creation Is Incarnation : The Metaphysical Peculiarity Of The Logoi In Maximus Confessor https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12382
Schuon, F., & Cutsinger, J. S. (2017). The Fullness of God: Frithjof Schuon on Christianity. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1rfss2f.13
Milbank, J., & Pickstock, C. Radical Orthodoxy.