The One: Breaking Theological Accounts

2 Compare Plotinus on “the One or the Good” to a representative of polydox theology. Assess the advantages and disadvantages of each perspective. Conclude with your own response to this issue. You may think of this primarily as a content question; you may prefer to think of it methodologically: how does a theologian form an idea or interpretation of the One. How does their method affect what they see in this metaphor. How does their interpretation of the One refract through their theology? I) The One: Breaking Theological Accounts German romantic poet, Friedrich Hölderlin, writes that to be One is divine and necessary for the good; but the human emphasis on The One (as one truth, one way, one nation) is the root of evil. Abraham Joshua Heschel puts it more succinctly, ‘God is one, but One is not God.’ Both suggest the conceptual ‘near enemies’: the One Beyond Being that embraces beings in its transcendence of them; the One Imposed Upon Beings that excludes differences in its totalizing of them. So when contemporary theologians of polydoxy, such as Laurel Schneider, advocate for a move beyond ‘monotheism,’ we must ask which mono is in play? If the latter, we cry, “About time someone expose the violence of claiming ‘one true church,’ or ‘one nation under God!’” But if the former One—the Good beyond Being--is also a part of the Christian tradition, say in Neoplatonic theologians, how can we afford to dismiss the very thing that makes critique possible: the otherwise than what is, by which all things are? Is it the One we hit on a theological number line: a discrete point after nothingness, where we contentedly camp, then build and forcefully secure—ignoring all numbers, refusing all others out to the infinite? Or is it the One that is the rejection of all countability—the simplicity not of easy distinctions, but of a unity where differences have their origination, their belonging as such? Certainly, Schneider might refuse this opposition insofar as it poses a binary logic of either/or. Both notions of the One (and many others) are operative in theology. However, in this paper, I posit that Schneider misunderstands (or simply does not address) Plotinus’ understanding of the One. Plotinus’ One is beyond being, and thus the means by which one could critique the violence of the ‘one’ of beings. Plotinus’ descriptions should be read apophatically; they are not the imposition of a posited One, a totality that ousts outliers. Due to this logic, a Plotinian theology can neither neglect Schneider’s thesis. What follows are some points of appreciation, conversation, and distinction in their respective explorations of the One. II) Plotinus: The One as the Good Beyond Being The One is among three basic principles of Plotinus’ metaphysics (One, Intellect, Soul). The One, as first existent and supra-existent, is the simple; ‘is’ hardly applies to the One insofar as Being is understood by beings. The One is beyond our conceptions of causality, and is thus apophatically called ‘self-causing.’ It is everywhere in that nothing could be without it, and yet nowhere since it transcends everything. Like an axiom, the One is posited in order to make possible all theorem, in this case—all that is. But as axiom, it cannot be shown or articulated directly. The One is the unique ground; and Plotinus identifies it with Plato’s ‘Idea of the Good.’ Like the Good beyond Being, we can only grasp the One indirectly by what it is not. Thus the One is often the basis for apophatic descriptions of God. And yet, how can something only apophatically supposed (by what it is not) be the basis of all that is? One could think of it as the white light that implies the full spectrum of differentiated colors. This metaphor of course is limited, because the emanations of Plotinus’ One cannot be understood in the differentiations of temporal separation or spatial distance. Emanation describes an ontological, or eidetic, structure of interdependence grounded in the One. The One’s internal activity is its own contemplation; a kind of hyper-intellect. However, its external activity is emanation to the Intellect (the Divine Mind, site of different forms). The Intellect predicates the essences of what is, and permits beings to have an intelligible structure that can be thought. Thus the Intellect is called the ‘One-in-Many.’ It mediates to souls the unknowableness of the One through complexity, multiplicity, and plurality. The Intellect is the highest activity of life but as thinking requires the Soul’s noetic structure. The Intellect cannot be unproductive, but must engender the Soul in its ability to realize thought. In humans, the Soul (‘One-and-Many’) expresses itself as the desire for external things—whether it be food or the desire to know the forms. Like Plato, Plotinus conceives of three phases of the soul; they resemble the emanations of the One. The first is the intellective soul, which is separated from the body and thereby able to contemplate the One. The second is the reasoning soul, which does not have unmediated access to truth, but arrives at imperfect knowledge through discursive reasoning. The third is the unreasoning soul, present in animals and humans, engaging matters of sensation and vegetation. The Soul’s generative capacity, so to speak (though Plotinus does not put it this way), is a desire to surpass its current state. It seems as if the One’s unsatisfiable generativity is implied apophatically in our lack, our need for satisfaction. In the emanation structure of the One, the Intellect, the Soul there is implied aspiration. The Intellect aspires to the One as it emanates the forms to the Soul. The Soul aspires to the forms in its external activity, but is also internally active in its psychic states. Already, in our rudimentary approach to Plotinus’ One, we see that the One is both absolutely distinct and yet the basis of relationality. However, we must address another false supposition of the One as the denigration of materiality: its processes, its multiplicity, its mutability. The lowest emanation of the One is matter. And so several contemporary theologians, Schneider included, may challenge Plotinus’ One as denigrating the material world. This is not necessarily the case. For Plotinus, matter is not materiality as we understand it (embodiment, objects, the natural world); matter is potentiality. The forms shape it, making it intelligible. Materiality, as we think of it today, would be for Plotinus composed of form and matter. We can perceive the natural world because it is not wholly given to chaos and entropy. So when Plotinus states that matter makes evil possible, he is discussing pure matter as entropic—not materiality as the cooperation of form and matter. Materiality is not evil, but can tend toward evil (entropy, diminishment, nothingness) insofar as it is partly composed of matter (the condition for evil, thought not evil as such). The difficulty, as in any theodicy, is whether this One as the Good must then be the creator of evil, since matter is its lowest emanation. In one sense, yes—since to posit that evil is uncreated would be to place it somehow beside the One (therefore begging the question of what simplicity founds them both?). Therefore evil (again as unencumbered potentiality, resembling entropy) is caused by the One (Good) in order for the separation of emanation to occur. Or rather, the separation of the Intellect in emanation is the distance that opens potentiality. It is not difficult to be sympathetic with Schneider (and Derrida), hearing in this a problematic construal of difference, distance, and deferral with evil. But we must strive to understand that, for Plotinus, evil is absolute differentiation and division—multiplicity without opportunity for connectivity or intelligibility. It is chaos that cannot even have enough form to suggest the concept of chaos. Evil is chaos beyond chaos; matter without being; potentiality without the possibility of actuality. Evil would almost be more like a cancer in eidetic structures of the cosmos. (As Simone Weil says, evil is not the infinite—it is the limitless.) Matter makes possible the entry of forms into the sensible world, albeit imperfectly. So Plotinus does not despise matter or potentiality as such; it is as necessary as the Good. But unlike the Good, it should not be admired as the goal; matter may be the end of the Good’s emanations, but this is not the Good’s telos and thus should neither be the Soul’s nor the Intellect’s. Matter, and the evil it makes possible, seems more a byproduct of the Good’s emanations; the Good, as the absolute that permits connectivity in difference, is the aim of desire. Unlike the natural world, humans can consciously orient toward evil as their goal. This can happen when a person relates to sensibility without consideration of the form. For example, when one treats another human being as materiality without soul, as object without dignity. Thus when Plotinus advocates a certain detachment from the body, as a resistance to evil, he is not saying that the body is inherently evil. Rather, the right relation to the body, and to all concreteness, is a level of detachment. This detachment permits one to see the body as such, concrete materiality, without then making that concreteness replace the One. A reader could easily detect this intuition in Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness (Schneider herself mentions this): the possibility of mistaking the abstract for the concrete. Plotinus wishes to protect against mistaking matter for the One, not because the One as abstraction should denigrate the concrete. Matter is not ‘concrete’ as such since it is potentiality. But evil—it is the worst abstraction; it is matter rejecting even the liberating constraints of form. In contrast, the abstraction of the One is the basis of the many, the forms that make distinction and unity possible. Thus, when Plotinus mentions the One as the Good, he discusses it in terms of beauty. Beauty requires an interplay of form’s constraints and matter’s possibilities. Beauty is only possible because matter has become pliant to form, and in this capacity exemplifies our creation in the Good. Typical of his Neoplatonic strand, Plotinus does claim that physical beauty is a lower emanation of Beauty than the beauty of non-bodily Forms. This is again not to suggest that Plotinus denigrates the beauty of embodiment. He simply suggests that beauty cannot be so identified with a body because bodies are finite and changing. Someone might object: but finitude is beautiful, and so is change! Plotinus’ point is more to the effect of: if a person dies, beauty itself should not be threatened with extinction. Claiming that there is a beauty non-reducible to embodiment is the very opening of beauty to multiple expressions. The fear of chaos perhaps riddles Plotinus’ ontological understanding of the One. I would not claim it as a fear of decay writ large, but rather the desire for there to be enough consistency to make possible intelligibility, and frankly, conversation. If materiality does not participate in the forms, then we could neither perceive difference nor the potential for cooperation. This is perhaps why the One must be eternal. The One gives without diminishment, as in the Trinitarian dance of perichoresis, so that given emanation returns as received aspiration. The One is infinite as the circulating capacity to give and receive—not giving without limit (the chaotic profusion of evil), nor reception without interaction (matter without form). Of course, this may be too generous a reading. Certainly one could see the names of the One as totalizing (The Simple, The Absolute, the Transcendent, the Unconditioned). The One sounds like a fortress one cannot reach, an impervious being beyond existence and nature. How is the infinity of the Good not the limitlessness—the unrelational proliferation—of evil? Precisely in its withdrawal is its giving. Its ineffability and invisibility is mediated; whereas evil so resists being and the forms that it cannot be relayed in any capacity except as utter deprivation. The Good withdraws from finitude and form in order to make them possible. A strange gift perhaps, but if one desires multiplicity and even desire itself—Plotinus would argue that these are only possible with the One. Additionally, the One is the possibility for critiquing anthropocentrism—or any other centrism. It is also, as in Plotinus’ refutation of Gnosticism, the means for relaxing any strict dualism. In this treatise, Plotinus both rejects their binary opposition--of evil materiality versus good immateriality—and their privileging of the human soul over against the ‘eternity’ implied in the universe. Humans are not the center of the universe, and they do not need a God to become human that they might be saved. The Good beyond Being remains necessarily outside of Being to serve as a telos for all that is (and thereby, all who through the Soul desire the Good). The goal is to know oneself in one’s very connection to and distinction from the One—which will necessarily include a reverential relation to all others in their beautiful difference. II) Laurel Schneider: The One as the Repression of Alterity Laurel Schneider’s book, Beyond Monotheism, begins with an honest probing: when did religion and its stories enter into the logic of the One? The logic of the One, as multiply defined by Schneider, implies totality, closed system, fixity, predictability. Thus, already, the One eludes her definition of it. The oppressions of the One are many. Its dangerous tendencies to eradicate mutability, flesh, adaptability, are legion. It is possible therefore that the One as she describes it, is a straw man of Plotinus’ One (which she never fully treats). She claims that multiplicity is not in a binary relationship to the One; binary logic is a distortion of the logic of the One. I suspect Plotinus would agree. And yet, she does not spend time examining the very nature of the many as it relates to (is organically connected to) Plotinus’ One. Though she may not break the very binary (multiplicity v the One) she refutes, this seems the necessary evil of making a thesis statement. Schneider accounts for this in the later chapters, using Navajo stories and Dante’s Inferno to emphasize the multiplicity inherent to the genre of story (as opposed to argued position). However, the thetic criticism stands: the eidetic capacity of the One—as transcendent Good beyond being, or a withdrawing excess that grounds every concrete manifestation—has been distorted existentially. Schneider enlists these varied distortions, claiming that (1) they miss her vision of multiplicity, and (2) in their very variety suggest her own critique. One of the virtues of her method is that she acknowledges herself as situated in an ongoing conversation. She opens by admitting that since the whole is never given, theology must take into account its incompleteness. Because theologians necessarily take positions, they must do so with the acknowledgement that there is always more to God, and to the stories they tell. This means that theology will necessarily have to ‘sin against’ concepts of immutability, eternity, and an unambiguous teleology. (Fair enough—though sin is not necessarily implied in departing from Plotinus’ One.) The most theological way to lean against these tendencies is to focus on the incarnation; embodiment implies multiplicity. Though again, she claims that multiplicity must be privileged over order and unity, without accounting for the body’s order and healthy attempts at equilibrium… Why this privileging? Perhaps to counter-balance the tendencies of monotheism as totalitarian unity and imperialistic self-preservation (which naturally entails violence to what exceeds—heresy, difference, diversity). Schneider acknowledges the multiple voices in her own critique, claiming that there is no purity (no unicity) to her own voicing of the argument. Schneider assumes, from this middle, multiple ‘genealogies of monotheistic morals.’ She gathers them under the heading of empire theology. She assumes that Christian monotheism especially is empire theology, or at least has been since Constantine. Over against these calculations of imperial power, she again asserts the necessity of the incarnation. She characterizes Christian empires as domains of abstraction theology: ignorant or simply reductive of the concreteness of bodies. Monotheism totalizes; the body resists this. (It is significant, for example, that Constantine encouraged theologians to sort out the mystery of the incarnation in order to establish a mobilizing—and unfortunately ostracizing—orthodoxy). An incarnational theology will recognize these totalizing impulses in church history instead of remaining distant from them. Schneider asserts that theology as an embodied practice, cannot ignore the ‘ruins of the absolute.’ We never begin the theological work of recovering symbols ex nihilo, or in a pure void of meaning. This would first require that we attend historical theology in all its complexity: our understanding of Christ should acknowledge his Jewish milieu; our reading of his theology must regard the Hellenistic colonialism of his day; and finally, we must acknowledge the African context of Christianity’s theological origins. In order to truly attend to the complexity of the Christian tradition(s), one must do so with humor, humility, and even the acknowledgement that our understanding changes simply because we are involved in what we study. Theology and theologians are mutually implicating. This admission requires, for Schneider, a special attention to those who have been excommunicated by an imposed theological unity. She writes for ‘exiles’ in and outside of the church, precisely because they are a reminder that abstractions have casualties. An embodied theology (porosity, fluidity, multiplicity) would not risk such losses of complexity for the sake of a conceptual unity. Just as the incarnation is a reach toward those who have been excluded, so too theological language must be considered a metaphorical reach toward what exceeds one’s grasp. In traditional apophatic theology, the One was precisely this simplicity, this perfection, and Goodness beyond being. Schneider’s thesis suggests that this language has been taken non-metaphorically. Ecclesial authorities have abusively applied it as an abstraction instead of an allusive gesture towards what eludes (even as it founds) all that exists. It is precisely this elusive presence that Schneider wishes to place paradoxically in the incarnation. Both the elusive quality of the mystery and the allusion of the body to holy multiplicity preserve what is essential to Schneider’s divinity: a presence ‘unprovable yet vital’—not unlike love that desires to take form even as it eludes every expression. To recognize this elusive quality in theology is to recognize the very ambiguity of its terminology. For instance, any close reading of the Hebrew text will reveal images of God as multiple (Elohim) as much as One (as in the Shema). Monotheism itself, Schneider reminds, is a modern concept. She claims that it can be traced to the anxiety of Europeans who wished to ground their theology as superior, a mark of progress from earlier forms of polytheistic idolatry. The consolidated God is the more powerful, more primordial God. Monotheism, as expounded by European colonialists, served as the basis for dismissing non-monotheistic peoples. This rubric of the One God expressed through the One love of Jesus Christ also served to diminish Jewish and Islamic monotheism. Judaism and Islam had not selected the right One. This gospel of Christian monotheism translated into a security that, in turn, totalized all others as illusory idols. The irony here (besides the neglected implications of the Trinity) is that Christians respect Judaism as the radical innovator of monotheism. More ironic still, Biblical scholarship has shown this to be true only in the ideal. For one matter, the Exodus command to have no other Gods before Yahweh ruled for a certain priority, and not necessarily against the existence of other gods. Additionally, the Israelite transition into monotheistic religion is more gradual, and ambiguous, than the text itself reveals. Much of the transition occurred in the long exile in Babylon, where remaining distinct supported such an exclusive claim to God. In the post-exilic period, Yahweh then became a singular God—refuting the existence of other gods as a God ruling all nations. This universalism was not entirely disinterested. Though God could rebuke the Israelites through other nations, they were still God’s chosen people. And if God could be construed as cosmic ruler, God’s transcendence loosened the correlation with Jewish temporal experience. God was both in relationship with Israel, but Israel’s fate was not God’s fault. Here, God as an abstraction was a means of preserving God from the accusations of contingency, or the destruction of locality. God could be as mobile and near as the Torah: removed from a specific sacred site, and yet immanent in just acts. Wherever obedience to God took place, there God would both be and transcendently rule. Monotheism thus expresses itself in at least three ways: (1) a polemic against other cultures, (2) the absorption of certain advantageous characterizations of God from kinder colonizers, and (3) the binding of a divided nation on the premise of rejecting outsiders. This move toward monotheism was not unique to the Israelites. Schneider posits that the Egyptians experimented with monotheistic impulses long before Israel. So too Persia—during its time of colonizing Israel—claimed one God. The claim of the One had already acquired multiple (and internally ambiguous) expressions prior to Christianity. It therefore seems not only arrogant, but also neglectful of their own inheritance, for Christians to assume that monotheism evolved to establish the singularity of Christianity. Christian monotheism not only idealizes Judaism for its own self-assertion in the lineage of a superior God, it also neglects its inheritance from Greek culture. The concept of the One for Christianity mingles with the Greek ideals of purity and immutability. These ideals could serve to mobilize Christians in a time when their fate (and that of the Hellenistic world) was subject to violent shifts. Schneider argues that the dream of a pure God--untouched by the constraints of the body and the vicissitudes of historical powers--had its roots in philosophical abstraction (Thales’ theoria), Pythagorean mathematics, and Xenophanes’ divinity (immutable, indivisible). Each respective withdrawal from materiality could be regarded as leverage against the corruptibility of the temporal powers. Significantly, the logic of the One can offer a space from which to critique what is, just as it can be a means of legitimating the status quo. Though Schneider discusses the polemical potential of the One (as transcendence, or disinterestedness), she observes that so often the leverage for critique becomes the license for violent exclusion, or indifference to the material. Even the Platonic ideal—preserving a realm where the really real can be accessed by courageous love of wisdom—correlates truth with immutability. This immutability could be the cause of deep intellectual humility; and yet the philosophers can claim kingship based on their unique access. Schneider seems most concerned with this latter abuse, regardless of whether Plato (or Plotinus) suggest that the True, the Good, the One can be used to validate earthly power. Schneider does not fully attend the apophatic quality of the Greek ideals: immutability, indivisibility, disembodiment, perfection, eternity. For Schneider, the abuses outweigh their apophatic potential. One can say that the reason the church has been so violent is because it has claimed immutability, spirituality without regard for bodies, perfection even. Here, the error seems not the logic of the One, but the idolatrous conflation of Christianity, and its institutions, with the One. From another view, the One can be a means of critiquing idolatry. God alone is and is not the One. The apophaticism implied in abstraction is not only to preserve God’s uniqueness, but to keep us from experiencing a certain godlessness when our images of God prove finite (idols). If God participates in (but is not subjected/reduced to) embodiment, history, causality, then--when our bodies suffer, when our historical narratives founder, when causality blunts itself on absurdities and change—God cannot die. Or perhaps more importantly, our views of this (dis)incarnate God have lasting purchase. This God has the sustaining capacity to mobilize and orient, not simply because God is guiding us with God’s touch and sympathy, but also because God is so distant, alluringly so. The truly One can be the opening of desire, not only the means of violent abuse. God is the removed cause of our goodness, and also too far to be implemented in our evil. To claim God’s immutability, untouchability, is to keep God safe. It is to keep us from the disorientation of a God who is subject to our denials, our violence, our deaths. But what of the ‘singularity’ of the incarnation, which also shows, through Christ’s very embodiment, how God is and is not subject to violence? Schneider would question. This is perhaps the more interesting argument. How does the incarnation in all its multiplicity and ambiguity, its messy fluidity and elusive embodiment, participate in the One? And how can this participation disassemble the violent correlation of a monotheistic God and a monarchical power? I have suggested above that it would require an apophatic understanding of Christ as the multiplicity that approximates (asymptotically) the One. But less apophatically, it might require an examination of beauty. Beauty is the participation of the forms in existence. Beauty is our intimation of the Good as it takes root in materiality. Schneider locates this beauty not in the coherence of theological explanation, or in the order of Constantine’s urge toward orthodoxy, or in the simplicity of monolithic readings of scripture. She locates beauty in the in-finite alterity and diversity of bodies. She even locates it in Tertullian’s attempt to introduce plurality into the divine unity. Tertullian suggested that plurality needn’t imply separation from unity; rather the One gives birth to alterity. The persons of the trinity, and all other multiplications of divinity in creation, are not subordinated to one another ontologically, though they may imply temporal subordination. Schneider mentions African theologian, Ogbonnaya, as he incorporates Tertullian into ‘communotheism’: to be is to belong, to exist is to participate. This breaks the logic of a certain ‘One’ in a way not unlike Plotinus or Plato’s sense of beauty. It is perhaps on the point of beauty that Schneider is best able to break her own implied dualism of a theology of the One and a theology of multiplicity. She finds a beauty in Augustine’s expression of Trinitarian plurality as loving relationality. (Though she cannot follow his understanding of the mind as it constructs a united subject.) In this sense, she may not be able to follow Plato’s Republic as an allegory between political hierarchy and the soul. And yet, insofar as she practices what she preaches, she cannot absolutely dismiss any thinker without abstracting them from their context. Otherwise, she would be using her polemic against the ‘One’ to dismiss everything that contradicts her own position with its ambiguity. It is my belief that the One as the Good Beyond Being is what precisely allows her to critique the abuses of (1) economies of sameness, (2) absolutism, (3) abstraction, and (4) limits of non-contradiction in theology, science, and politics. The logic of the One is not simply these methods of freezing fluidity; it is the light that reminds us our shadows are not the One. It is the generative light of God that thaws Dante’s wintry hell. It is the fire of apophaticism, which fuels itself on what it is not, to clear the brush of violent reductions. As Schneider remarks, it is the artist and poet who perhaps understand best the metaphor of this fire, indeed the very metaphorical quality of monotheism. It is in the metaphor’s multiplicity of meanings, in its ‘relation’ to materiality, that the beauty of a truth beyond being can reside without violence. IV) Epilogue: The One as Unity or Unit Maybe the problem is not so much the One, but the missed apophatic thinking (and thereby critiques of totality) given by it. Indeed, the One is not so much a number as what makes possible all numbers. In a rigorous (perhaps apophatic?) sense, One is the infinite expanse between zero and one. In computer science, ‘not a number’ (NaN) occurs as an error flag when a zero or infinity gets introduced accidentally as a result of the programmer’s rules. NaN cannot be divided, multiplied, added to, or subtracted from without getting the response, NaN. The NaN asserts itself, tautologically, ‘I am what I am,’ unable to concede identical relationship or diminishment with particular integers. Any attempt to discover whether NaN is greater than or equal to or less than another number will return the designation ‘false.’ The One is like this NaN, which often history—like agitated software code—will try to flag and ask, ‘What is this? What should we do with this intrusion into our rules, our concepts?’ A good software designer will only be able to manage this NaN by trying to write in the biggest, most inclusive number imaginable. NaN can only be approximated, because like a zero or infinity—it cannot be counted. Perhaps it is this intuition that Schneider advocates: we can only approximate the infinite quality of God (which might look like a nihil ‘not this, not that’ from another perspective) by taking more multiplicity into account. Account is of course a misleading word—since the goal of the One is to break all accounting. Perhaps it is this breaking of calculation that Plotinus most anticipates, when he gives the eidetic contours of the One. This One cannot be proven by its multiple manifestations; but it no less shapes our desires, if even in this generative absence of the Good. The virtue of Schneider’s work is in pressing upon the Beautiful multiplicity of Christ’s incarnation; like Plotinian beauty it alludes to the Good beyond Being by entering materiality. It is perhaps only on the point of beauty that these two thinkers join—but that is precisely the role of beauty, to draw different potentialities into union with what exceeds them both, while appreciating each in their respective manifestations of the Good. 1