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Kenneth Seeskin
Dept. of Philosophy
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois
Let me begin by being Platonic. I take monotheism to be something the great Western religions strive for, not something they have already achieved. So to talk about monotheism is not only to ask about the religious traditions we inherit but where we want to those traditions to take us. I say this because I don't want my remarks to be seen as self-congratulatory. On my view, monotheism is at variance with powerful human instincts and difficult to achieve in its pure form; idolatry appeals to those instincts and is still a formidable obstacle to spiritual progress. Though the three great Western religions have made great strides in the struggle against idolatry, it is also true that they have made concessions, and in some cases, admitted defeat. I wish I could say that progress is always steady: the proverbial two steps forward and one step backward. But the picture is more chaotic: sometimes many steps forward, sometimes many steps backward, sometimes running in place.
To understand what is at stake, we must start with the realization that there is more to monotheism than belief in one God. Suppose a person in a pagan culture like ancient Greece believed that all the gods and goddesses on Mt. Olympus are fakes except one: Athena. Suppose, in other words, that this person regarded Athena as the sole deity and continued to believe that she looks like a human being, dresses like a human being, displays human emotions, and lives on nectar and ambrosia. Would such a belief qualify as monotheistic as Judaism, Christianity, or Islam use the term?
I suggest it would not: instead of monotheism it would be a form
of paganism that recognizes one deity rather than many. In other words, the difference
between monotheism and paganism involves more than arithmetic. Whether a person believes
in one god, or 26, or 319 is insignificant as long as the god we are talking about wears
clothes, experiences anger, hatred, or envy, and plays tricks on mortals.
This is another way of saying that the defining feature of monotheism is not the number
but the nature of God. It is true that monotheism holds that there is only one God; but it
also holds that God is nothing like Athena, Zeus, or any other mythological figure. I take
this to mean that in a monotheistic religion, nothing in the universe can rival God,
become a surrogate for God, or even be compared to God. As Isaiah (40) asks: "To whom
then will you liken me, that I should be equal?" Unlike Athena or Zeus, God is not a
bigger, better, stronger version of something else. Nor can God be likened to a person,
natural object, or natural force. In fact, God cannot be likened to anything. That is why
the second commandment instructs us not to make images of God. The point is not that there
are good images and bad but that all images are objectionable. Instead of resembling
things drawn from our experience, God is in a separate category altogether -- so much so
that, to return to Isaiah, the mighty nations of the earth, the beasts of the field, and
the cedars of Lebanon are as nothing compared to God.
Maimonides (Guide I. 56) makes this point by claiming that contrary to our normal intuitions, it is not true that God is wiser than us, more powerful than us, or lives longer than we do. It is not true because to say that it is implies that it makes sense to compare us, that God has the same qualities we do only to a greater degree. What Maimonides wants us to see is that there is something profoundly mistaken in supposing that God has a higher IQ than I do, can lift more weight, or has been around for a longer time. The simple truth is that God's intelligence cannot be measured by any test, and the power to create whole galaxies -- or even a single atom -- out of nothing cannot be measured in terms of horsepower. Einstein was smarter than me, and Olympic athletes are certainly more powerful. But to believe that God is smarter or stronger in the same way is either to flatter me or demean God. In either case, it is to sin against monotheism no matter how vehemently we insist that God is one.
Even to describe God with a long list of superlatives like great, mighty, exalted, all-knowing, all-good, or all-powerful is misleading if our understanding of these terms derives from our own experience of intelligence, goodness, or power. To say that God is in a separate category from everything else is to say that God is beyond our ability to praise or even to comprehend. Recall that at Exodus 33, Moses asks to see the face of God but his request is denied. It could be said, therefore, that even the greatest prophet came to see that comparing God to things we encounter in our own experience is tantamount to missing God completely.
Contrary to what most people think, and to what many Biblical passages seem to imply, monotheism is not committed to a hierarchical conception of reality. You cannot begin with plants, animals, and ordinary humans beings, work your way up to kings, queens, and angels, and extrapolate to God. I was reminded of this point in a dramatic way when I saw the movie Crimson Tide. At the beginning of the movie, the narrator tells us that the three most powerful things in the universe are: (1) God, (2) the President of the United States, and (3) the commander of a US submarine carrying nuclear weapons. Consider what is implied by putting God in the same category as a politician or a naval officer. Or consider what is implied by comparing God's infinite creative power to the ability to launch a nuclear attack.
Rather than occupy a position at the top of an ascending hierarchy, God is off the scale on which plants, animals, natural forces, and even the most powerful human beings are measured. Monotheism, then, is as much a claim about us as it is a claim about God. To believe in it is to accept our own finitude and give up the tendency to see the human image reflected everywhere in the universe.
What monotheism requires is that we look at the world from the standpoint of a simple dichotomy: there is God and everything else, Creator and creation. Nothing can straddle the fence that separates them, and all differences between things in the created order pale into insignificance compared to the overwhelming difference between the created order and God.
In a word, monotheism asks us to believe in a God who is totally unique. Once this definition is accepted, we can understand idolatry as belief in a god who is not unique. Put otherwise, idolatry is belief in a god who answers to our needs and is measured in our terms, a god who looks like us, thinks like us, and upholds our point of view. While the second commandment prohibits worshiping plastic images of God, the medieval philosophers pointed out that it should also be taken to prohibit worshiping mental images. In other words, it is just as bad to pray to an image of an old man on a throne as it is to bow to a statue of Zeus.
Note, for example, that whether we are talking about mental images or plastic ones, the pictures people make of God usually reflect their own prejudices about beauty or dignity. As the Greek philosopher Xenophanes pointed out, the Thracians thought God has blue eyes and red hair, the Ethiopians thought God has dark hair and a snub nose, and if horses believed in God, they would think God had four legs, a long mane, and a tail. Surely our culture is no different. Men think God is male, people of European ancestry think God looks like a European, and academics think God is defined primary by the attribute of thought.
To portray God in our image is not only false but in an obvious way narcissistic -- to enshrine our own image in the Holy of Holies, to bow to it and serve it. The proper response is to say that when it comes to hair color, skin color, gender, body type, or any other human attribute, God is "none of the above," nothing even remotely comparable to us.
Another way to understand idolatry is an attempt to find something that rivals God or stands as a surrogate for God. It does not matter whether we pick movie stars, sports figures, guru's, political leaders, or anyone else who presents him or herself as more than human. As Isaiah tells us, they are all as nothing compared to God. This does not mean that there is something wrong with admiring people in the news or working for a political candidate, only that there is a distinction between admiration and adoration. Once that distinction is blurred, once we forget that these people are part of the created order along with everything else, we lose our hold on monotheism and take several steps backward.
But political leaders, movie stars, and sports figures are easy cases because they are drawn from the secular world. What happens when something from a religious tradition becomes a surrogate? What should we say about priestly vestments, religious art, or religious artifacts? To take two examples from my own tradition, what should we say about the Western Wall in Jerusalem or the practice of dressing, kissing, and parading Torah scrolls around the synagogue? Is there not a danger that these things too will straddle the fence that separates God from everything else? Whatever their limitations, they have one quality God does not: they can be seen, touched, or photographed. Is there not a danger that people will pay more attention to something they can see and touch than to something they cannot?
To take a more difficult case, what should we say about religious
language that is clearly anthropomorphic? Both Judaism and Christianity describe God as a
king, father, friend, or spouse. Do these expressions not encourage us to make mental
images and think of God as a human being of superlative dimensions?
As I said at the outset, monotheism is something we must strive for rather than something
we can celebrate. In a completely monotheistic religion, art and artifacts would draw
people to the sanctuary, enhance the beauty of sacred rituals, and help clergy induce a
mood of reverence. More important, perhaps, the production of art and artifacts would
allow people to express the human search for God in all its manifestations. But there is
always a risk that art and artifacts will be treated with such reverence that they will
become ends in themselves, that rather than lead people to God, they be will take the
place of God.
A Torah scroll contains the record of God's teaching. It should be dressed and stored in a
beautiful surrounding and treated with respect. But we must never forget that it is not an
object of worship in its own right; though handling the Torah is an honor, it does not
endow one with magical powers, ward off disease, or erase sin. As far as Judaism is
concerned, the important thing is not to handle the Torah but to study it. Unfortunately
this message is often forgotten. By the same token, the Western Wall is a historical site
of tremendous importance to Jews. But it is a stone structure built from the same
materials that went into the Parthenon or the Palace of King Minos. One can pray at it but
never to it, and even if ones does pray, there is no reason to think that by going to the
Wall, one has gotten closer to God.
Again let me emphasize that art, artifacts, and historical sites are important. I enjoy a beautiful sanctuary as much as anyone. My point is that these things too are part of the created order -- important parts to be sure -- but not vessels for God or plastic images of God. The challenge, then, is not to do away with them but to understand their function.
The same is true of religious language. People need words and literary devices to lift their spirits, express their feelings, praise God, and call on God in times of need. Even those who, like Maimonides, regard silence as the highest form of praise still insist on the need for prayer. But terms like father, king, or friend are drawn from human experience and describe human social roles. It only takes a moment to see that they often involve questionable assumptions about gender and class. Though they are terms of respect, and enable us to create a feeling of reverence, they clearly have limits. If Maimonides is right, all language has limits so that rather than describe God in intricate detail, it can do nothing but point the mind in the direction of God. Once again, the issue is not giving up religious language but trying to use it properly. Like religious art, religious language directs our attention to something beyond itself, something whose greatness does not fall under our laws and cannot be described by our terms. To praise God in the proper way, is, like Job, to admit one's own inadequacy before God. More than arithmetic, this type of reverence is the essential feature of a monotheistic religion as I understand it.
Though I have covered a great many issues in a short time, there
is, I hope, method in my madness. If you are not convinced by anything I say, or if you
have questions about its accuracy or application, grant me this much: that monotheism is
not a simple idea and that to understand it is to embark on a spiritual journey. Though I
do not pretend to know exactly where the journey ends, I feel confident in saying that it
is worth taking.
Kenneth Seeskin answering a question from the audience,
while Dr. John Merkle and Fr. David Burrell contemplate his response.
David B. Burrell, C.S.C.
Theodore Hesburg Professor
College of Liberal Arts and Letters
Notre Dame University
South Bend, Indiana
The Genesis story is used in different ways in our diverse traditions, but the two complementary elements remain central: the primal pair's vulnerability to the serpent's suggestion that to eat the forbidden fruit will make them "like god," and their spontaneous reaction to "the god's" confrontation: "not I but she; not I but the serpent!" My contention will be that we are all peculiarly susceptible to the temptation to be "like God," and furthermore, that we mask the incoherence of the ensuing pattern of actions even from ourselves by a policy of avoiding responsibility for our actions. That policy fosters ingrained habits of self-deception, which become the collective "built-in unawareness" that Jews recognize as the yetzer ra' and Christians elaborate as "original sin." Unawareness of our destiny is abetted by the distracting satisfactions which beset us from all sides. But those distractions are not of themselves idols; only when we invest them with ultimacy do they become god-substitutes. Indeed, I shall be arguing that the very activity of a God who reveals the Torah to a people to make them God's own, and who reveals God's own inaccessible face in Jesus as well as a "straight path" in the Qur'an, will inevitably spawn god-substitutes in the communities named. Why? Because such an overt revelation invites those who respond as Jews, Christians, and Muslims to live their lives as a journey of faith, yet nearly everything in us resists just that: living our lives as journeys of faith! I say "nearly everything," for there always remains that primordial link which Islam calls fitra, the intentional human nature created in God's image which cannot help but home in on "the good," however distorted, so can help us, in rare unguarded moments, to acknowledge our own deviance by recognizing the "straight path" as our native one. Even if we are singly and collectively unreliable, there is a trace in us all of that primordial connection with our divine source which is our very being.
The guide whom I shall be following in this diagnosis, a sixteenth-century Castillian poet and spiritual writer, John of the Cross, calls that homing instinct within us "the center of the soul," so offering a pregnant image for Aquinas' summary comment that our very being, as creatures, is "to be related" to the creator. Yet that interior relating, prior to any overt act of relating, is precisely what creates the difficulty for us so effectively dramatized (if recurrently misinterpreted) in Genesis 3. For we are pulled, it seems, by the very weight of our derived existence, to make a return to the One from whom we have received everything; indeed to return everything, if we can. Yet that very One eludes us, either as unnamable or endowed with a plethora of names; so we settle for one whom we can more easily name. And that one, by some innate preference tapped by the serpent's deceit, "eat it and you will be like gods," looks uncannily like ourselves: either myself as my own creation (Nietszche) or the body politic which can absorb most of my projections, the state.
For how else could we invest as much as we do in our own selves or in our national identities, unless we implicitly and quite unconsciously regarded these as the source of our very being to which we owe such wholehearted allegiance? That is the secret potency which turns minor sources of satisfaction into major idols, thereby scuttling Freud's attempt to trivialize human life into a series of "gratifications." For there are inbuilt limits to hedonism, and something in us recognizes that rather quickly, and moves us to look beyond "getting" for ourselves to a way of giving ourselves completely. And that was, of course, exactly what Freud feared: loss of the self (the ego) by submerging itself in the "oceanic feeling" which he identified with religion. So faith for Freud could only be idolatry, though he might grudgingly acknowledge love as "admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological."
Yet notice the instructive convolution here: the stricture against idolatry which Freud retained from his ancestral faith only functions, as we have seen, in a climate fertilized by the God-given impulse to return everything to one's transcendent source. But if everything we call 'god' is an idol, then there can be no idols, since there is no God for whom idols can substitute. And Freud must have implicitly seen this, so his campaign become one of so thoroughly secularizing our sense of ourselves that the impulse to return everything was transmuted into a simple desire to get every satisfaction. But as Woody Allen has never ceased to remind us, this strategy has not worked. And it has not worked because it moves in a direction diametrically opposed to the quest for transformation which Jung discovered to be built into our psyches: Freud would transmute the gold of aspiration into the lead of satisfaction!
Fr. David Burrell giving his presentation at the University of
St. Thomas.
Dr. Kenneth Seeskin, co-presenter, and Dr. John Merkle, moderator of the program, are
seated to the right.
So we are returned to the fitra, the buried yet operative "center of the soul," which will not be satisfied with gratification, but seeks that very source which it divines to be transcendent, a seeking which expresses itself in what Jung as identified as the inbuilt alchemical aspiration to transformation. All this is needed to appreciate the force of the biblical stricture against idolatry, as well as to comprehend why we tend to serving idols as the "default" position of our inbuilt orientation, and finally, why the activity it generates inevitably leads to violence--thereby apparently confirming Freud's judgment that religious faith can be nothing other than fanaticism.
As we consider why our exercise of this inbuilt tendency to express our creaturely relatedness will invariably lead us into idolatry as our human "default position" for faith, my guide here will be John of the Cross, but it could as easily be 'Obady’h Maimonides, the Sufi grandson of Moses ben Maimon, for each of these spiritual thinkers appropriated the reflections of their respective philosophical mentors, Thomas Aquinas and Maimonides, regarding the transcendence of the creator, translating our intentional response into a thoroughgoing journey of faith. Yet so thoroughgoing that we will each be tempted to flag along the way and invest the unlimited energies galvanized by revelation in something less, something we can comprehend and so (by definition) something less than God yet which we will call our god--so an idol.
Yet if idolatry is a default positon for Jews, Christians, or Muslims, how can we be alert to the fact that we are investing our God-given and God-drawn responses in something that is far less than God? The first and most telling indication will be a penchant for violence. For when we feel it necessary to engage in force to ensure that the ways of the Lord of the universe are being implemented, we ought rightly suspect that these are our ways and not God's. For the God of Genesis and of the Qur'an had only to speak, and the universe came into being; utterly unlike any contender "creator," who could establish the universe only after a bloody series of battles in which competitors were crudely dismembered. For these contenders, "pagan gods" so-called, were invariably made in our image. As Jesus put it, taking the opportunity to instruct his select band after the mother of two of them had infuriated the others by requesting favors for her two sons in Jesus' kingdom: "You know that among the pagans their so-called rulers lord it over them, and their great men make their authority felt. This is not to happen among you" (Mk10:42-43). We know how rulers rule; what Jesus is clarifying is that they rule as they conceive their so-called gods "lording it over" them; yet as these are not really gods, so they are not really rulers. So why should you want to imitate them, he asks us.
There are countless reasons, of course, and the nearly consistent inability of Christians to take Jesus' warning to heart underscores how powerful a default position idolatry is. For Jesus put it with unmistakable clarity: those who have recourse to force, subduing others as a way of realizing their aims, are following not the way of the creator of all but of a pagan god. And worse yet, if anyone should act that way in the name of the biblical or qur'anic God, they are falsifying God's name, substituting an idol of their manufacture--as indeed all idols are! Yet examples abound, and if the most flagrant is the Spanish inquisition, more contemporary examples come to mind when others assume political power, as with Jabotinsky-revisionist Zionists or Islamist groups intent on showing the power of the Qur'an in the face of western hegemony. We would prefer to launder these realities out of our history, as most Christians have done with the Crusades, treating them as aberrations, but what if our secular critics are right, and they do represent a tendency inherent in religion, or at least in the Abrahamic faiths? As you might suspect, I am inclined to agree with our critics here; indeed, that is what I mean by insisting that idolatry is a default position for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Yet if the God we would worship is God, and if our faith in that God is true, it must contain antidotes to the ways in which we are prone to infect it with our own ambitions? How can our traditions help us to avoid idolatry?
Once we have been courageous enough to hear our critics and put the question this way, we will be directed to those regions in our respective traditions where each of the Abrahamic faiths shows itself to be equipped to counter its endemic tendency to topple over into idolatry. My guide as a Christian will be John of the Cross; I have already suggested a Jewish counterpart, while al-Ghazali serves as a splendid Muslim witness. The stategies in question all direct us to ways in which we can wean ourselves from the god of our projections, and let God be God. Yet as attractive as that sounds, any recovering alcoholic will attest that it is an initially unwelcome invitation!
And if we do not readily identify with that group of people, we need to look again, for if we have ever taken up the ritual prescription of confessing our sins in earnest, we will have identified a personal addiction. And again, at its root will be our penchant for replacing God with an idol of our making. In John of the Cross's words, the step involves entrusting our lives to one who will guide us to make the response which intentional creatures are called to make: to return everything to the One from whom we have received everything. The name of this guide is faith; we are asked to live by faith rather than by our own lights. John will not let us dupe ourselves, however, for his experience with religious people makes him warn them especially that not all who say "Lord, Lord" are acting out of faith. To live by faith is to be open to hearing God's call in the most unlikely circumstances of our life, and to be alert to the ways in which we prefer to identify it with calls more gratifying to ourselves. In short, living by faith is a taxing enterprise; indeed, far more critical than the most thoroughgoing secular critique of faith. For such critiques can rest content with their own unexamined alternatives, as we know so well, whereas living by an Abrahamic faith requires the self-sacrifice of everything we regard as our own, as the arresting episode of the "binding of Isaac" reminds us so forcibly. For it was not, as it turned out, Isaac's life that the Lord was demanding, but that Abraham sever the attachment to Isaac as the bearer of his posterity; and to his followers: our attachment to our God!
John of the Cross calls this journey of faith one of purification, as indeed it is; al-Ghazali describes it as a series of stages in which we learn more and more to trust in the one God, and so bring ourselves to an operative faith in God's oneness--that feature of God which defies our intellectual grasp, as the rabbis have always insisted. In this way, we are invited to become authentic believers in one God, and so to respond to the imperative yet mysterious call to worship God alone. Practically, this means that we take time to pray, to let the scriptures--for Jews and for Christians, the psalms--shape our response to what is going on in our life. And this practice is not simply one of "continuing education," whereby we are taught yet more about our faith, but one which lets that faith take us over from within. The result will be a palpable sense of the power of God, and a correlatively less defensive posture with regard to our critics: we will feel less need to crush them, and find ourselves more open to their criticisms. For likely as not, they will serve our faith-journey well by ferreting out once more our endemic penchant to substitute our goals for God's.
Indeed, the ones with whom we will then have most difficulty are precisely those whom John identifies so clearly as inimical to faith: our co-religionists who substitute loyalty to a religious identity for faith, and especially those who cannot tell the difference. Yet even these we must tolerate, using all the resources of our respective traditions to delineate for them the difference between such loyalty and authentic faith, and do so as patiently as we can. For this activity is an integral part of our journey of faith, since none of us can be sure that we are journeying to the true God and are not in service of an idol, so critics will always be a blessing. At least, that is what it is like to be, in John's terms, on a journey of faith in response to the invitation of our God who is One: Shema O Israel ... (Dt 6:4). What John of the Cross is intent on removing is any hint that this God is ours, ours to do with as we will; ours to impose on others--even members of our own religious family--with a surety unworthy of people of faith. Yet that is precisely what we have identified as the penchant for idolatry, making it into an easy default positon for erstwhile "people of faith": that this God is ours, ever on our side. Indeed, that insistence is the surest indication that we have substituted a projection, a pagan god, for the "creator of heaven and earth and all that is between them" (Qur'an 25:59). Yet that God, the one in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims profess to believe, cannot be owned by any one of us, by any group among us, or by any of those groups themselves. Indeed, that is what our scriptures tell us!
We have been skirting a crucial subject: how to articulate the ineffable relation of creator to creation? And if is indeed ineffable, why even try to articulate it? The usual answer to that question is that we must try, for we shall do so in any case--just by speaking of God--and the very attempt to do so will alert us once again to our inbuilt penchant for idolatry! (This can be shown quite simply in reminding our selves that "theists" do not differ from atheists in the way that many atheists presume they do: in accepting one more item into their universe--indeed, a very large one which they call 'God'!) Now the obvious path to take in attempting a less inadequate articulation is to find a kind of half-way point between creation and creator: a role which the Torah can serve for Jews, the Qur'an for Muslims, and Jesus for Christians. Intermediaries abound, of course, as does our penchant to have recourse to them, for who can pretend to stand "before God," as Kierkegaard loves to put it? Indeed, who can "see the face of God and live?" The clearest sign of this can be found in popular Islam, which constantly invokes Muhammad as an intercessor, in the face of the repeated Qur'anic insistence that nothing, no one--even, especially, the Prophet--can be "associated with God."
How can that penchant for mediators avoid the default position of idolatry? Or is it simply an inevitable yet always reprehensible feature of popular Abrahamic faiths? I want to begin with a story and then show how an answer is adumbrated in the earliest Christian witness. The story comes from my participation in an Academy of Jewish Philosophy meeting on idolatry during the eighties. Steven Schwartzchild had just begun his opening address when I came in a bit late for the session. On seeing me enter the room, he turned to the organizers and complained: "Nobody told me Dave would be here." (I was at that time the only goy membver of the Academy.) So I responded: "What's the trouble, Steve?" To which he retorted: "I was just beginning a sustained argument designed to show that all Christians are idolaters." I managed an inspired response: "Steve, it took our community four hundred years to get straight about Jesus. I wouldn't expect you to do it in an evening!"
The witness can be found in the New Testament book attributed to Luke, the Acts of the Apostles. Peter is addressing "the rulers, elders, and scribes assembled in Jerusalem, with Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, Jonathan, Alexander and all who were of the high-priestly family" with regard to the healing of a cripple: "let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth ..." Indeed, "there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:5-6, 10-12). I cite this text, where an unlettered Peter is being presented in the rhetorical persona of a Hebrew prophet before the authorities, because its context makes clear the point which he wishes to make and must make: Jesus is the only creature whose name can be invoked as God's people have been invited to invoke the name of the creator of heaven and earth: "there is no other name under heaven among mortals ...." God alone is Lord of heaven an earth; no creature can pre-empt that role, yet Jesus' name calls forth a creator's power.
That this text has been regularly misused by some Christians to claim exclusive access to "salvation" offers another salient reminder of our shared penchant for ownership. What Peter is insisting is something quite different, and something about which he could say little more, for it took the Christian community four centuries to formulate it with clarity: the status of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet Peter's insistence, as incorporated into Luke's highly structured text, witnesses to the instinct which dominated the life and practice of Christians during that turbulent search for a formulation. John puts it most succinctly at the outset of his gospel: Jesus is the Word of God made flesh. Augustine reminds us that such an outcome was unimaginable to those people who had reflected most on the "word of God," the Neoplatonic philosophers. So Jesus can only be mediator if he is not "between" creator and creation; for there is no such place. He can only be mediator if he is--unimaginably--both, yet that can only be God's own work. For it reveals to us that "God's own Word" is in fact more than another "name" of God, more than a metaphor for God's intentional activity, but that there is articulation within the oneness of divinity--something we could never have suspected and which later Christian theologians like Thomas Aquinas will labor to show cannot compromise that unity which the rabbis celebrated.
An earlier witness, Hilary of Poitiers, notes how this revelation of God as Father, Son, and Spirit, explains as well our newfound unity with the creator: "this is why we are all one, because the Father is in Christ, and Christ is in us. He is in us through his flesh and we are in him. With him we form a unity which is in God. ... This is how he wanted us to understand the perfect unity that is achieved through our mediator, who lives in the Father while we live in him, and who, while living in the Father, lives also in us. This is how we attain unity with the Father. Christ is in very truth in the Father by his eternal generation; we are in very truth in Christ, and he likewise is in us. ... Since we who are in the flesh have Christ dwelling in us through his flesh, we shall draw life from him in the same way as he draws life from the Father." This longish quote should remind us that the so-called "doctrine of the Trinity" cannot be an arcane statement about the inner life of God, for that is strictly out of bounds for humans--even those who assume the mantle of theologians! It must rather be a way of formulating what the God who reveals the divine face in Jesus must be like to do such a thing, and remind us at the same time that the point of that revelation is to unite us creatures intimately with our creator; or as John the evangelist put it: "to gather into one the scattered children of God" (Jo 11:52). Those very aspirations can be found in Jewish mysticism, they suffuse Sufi writings and practices in Islam. Mediation without "something in between" or something inappropriately "associated with the one God"--that alone can satisfy the demand of Abrahamic faith, yet it is also something to which each of them aspires.
This page was revised on 10/18/00
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