The Slow Work: On Monotheism

μόνος, or "monos," means "single" or "only."  θεός, or "theos," means god, originally in the sense of entities like Zeus or Athena.  Together, it is pretty straight-forward--monotheism is a assertion that there is "a single god."  Fair enough.

But, within this framework, there are actually a number of permutations.  Rather than spell them all out in the beginning, I'll cut to the case--I believe in and interpret monotheism in the maximum possible way.  I believe there is one and only one divine, transcendent principle, period.  And that singular divine principle, as Aquinas would say, "everyone calls God."  Now, I understand that singular divine principle to be compatible with the assertion that the Son of God came to earth and lived among us, but for the purposes of this reflection that thorny issue is not really relevant, so let's set it to the side.

So, only one divine, transcendent principle.  This means, by definition, that everything else that exists is not divine, and not transcendent.  This includes, specifically for this discussion, us.  We are not divine, and we are not transcendent.  Yes, Genesis 1 tells us that we are created "in the image" of the Transcendent One, and that's enormously important, but just as a photograph of something is not the same as the thing which is photographed, we are not of the same kind as the Transcendent One.  And this applies doubly so to that which we have created--our buildings and our institutions and all of our works, physical and intellectual and a combination of the two.

This is important to say, because human beings constantly and insistently try to infuse transcendent qualities in the things they create and the people who create them, and then treat that infused thing as divine and transcendent.  Human beings cannot create transcendent realities, and all such attempts are false, not matter how much it might feel real to us.  This process of infusing false transcendence into human institutions and human products and humans themselves is, I think, the best definition of "idolatry"--by making something that is not transcendent into an apparently transcendent thing, you make it into an idol.

When you frame it like that, idolatry seems very dumb.  It's very easy for us to laugh and dismiss ancient cultures that thought their gods inhabited statues and other truly physical idols.  But, as the Hebrew Scriptures are insistent in warning us, idolatry is a deeply insidious phenomenon.  While we laugh at ancient effigies, we insist that a handful of rich Englishmen living on the edge of a continent they were in the process of stealing from the native inhabitants initiated a divine, transcendent mission, such that the strips of cloth that come to symbolize it must be legally protected from being disposed of in the wrong way.  We find it ridiculous that the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt and the Roman Emperors were considered to be gods, but Trump's supporters basically treat him as divine entity, and those of us who oppose Trump talk about how he has "desecrated" the office of the President.  Maybe we make our idols of out Constitutions and economic data as opposed to stone and wood, but they are fundamentally different manifestations of the same basic process.  It's very easy to point out other people's idols, and very difficult to identify our own.

But there is another, related dimension to idolatry, one that I call "counter-idolatry."  When you see idolatry, the temptation is to smash those idols, to do everything you can to get rid of the idolatrous object.  This is a mistake, and a trap, because the act of freaking out about the idol also is the investment of transcendent meaning and purpose in the idol.  The person who burns the American flag and the person who wants to prohibit the burning of the American flag both agree that the American flag is something that is infused with tremendous meaning.  Both of them have an idolatrous relationship with the American flag, approached from different directions.  Loving an idol and hating an idol are not opposites, but two sides of the same coin.  If you really want to throw down an idol, the best thing to do is to name it as an idol, and then ignore it.    

This is one of the key insights of Rene Girard, in my view.  Perhaps the best expression of this insight is a powerful essay by James Alison, discussing 9/11.  Alison encourages us to reflect on the power weight of meaning we all, collectively, imparted to the events of that day:

This is what I mean: some brothers of ours committed simple acts of suicide with significant collateral murder, meaning nothing at all. There is no meaning to the act of destruction caused by hijacking planes full of people and crashing them into buildings. It is not an act creative of anything at all, any more than any other suicide is a creative act.

But immediately we began to respond, and our response is to create meaning. It is our response that I am seeking to examine. Our response was sparked by two particular forces: the locations chosen for the suicide with collateral murder -- places symbolic of power, wealth and success (never mind that many of those killed were neither powerful, wealthy or successful); and the omnipresence in the cities in question, and particularly New York, of rolling cameras and a hugely powerful media network which enabled a significant proportion of the planet to be sucked in to spectating from a safe distance. An already mimetic center, drawing more attention than ever towards itself, on that day became virtually inescapable.

As we were sucked in, so we were fascinated. The "tremendum et fascinosum," as Otto described the old sacred, took hold of us. Furthermore, we did not come to the spectacle with fresh eyes, as to something entirely new. We came with a script given us by a thousand movies and conspiracy novels of the Robert Ludlum / Tom Clancy genre. . . .

And immediately the old sacred worked its magic: we found ourselves being sucked in to a sacred center, one where a meaningless act had created a vacuum of meaning, and we found ourselves giving meaning to it. All over London I found that friends had stopped work, offices were closing down, everyone was glued to the screen. In short, there had appeared, suddenly, a holy day. Not what we mean by a holiday, a day of rest, but an older form of holiday, a being sucked out of our ordinary lives in order to participate in a sacred and sacrificial centre so kindly set up for us by the meaningless suicides. . . .

The Christian call, which in this case is identical to and derivative of the Jewish call, is not to get swept up in mass manifestations of false transcendence, no matter how tremendous or fascinating the manifestation may be.  And I think we need to be more afraid of getting swept up in negative transcendence than we do of positive transcendence.  As Alison says, 9/11 is a story of 20 people committing suicide, and taking a few thousand people with them.  Period.  There is no greater, transcendent dimension to what happened.  It is a human tragedy, especially for those innocents that were killed but also for the hijackers.  But it is not a divine tragedy, not a transcendent event, and we create terrible, much worse problems for ourselves when we think and act otherwise.

A big part of that Christian/Jewish project, then, is the demystification of evil.  Classical theological reflection insisted that evil is privatio bonum, the absence of good, and not a thing in and of itself.  I used to think this was a product of ontological and metaphysical commitments, but I think it is also about denying evil a transcendent dimension.  If evil has a separate existence, then it is too easy to fall into a kind fascination with it, even while you rage against it.  There are people who do bad things, but there is no free-floating evil out there that we must ward against.  It's too easy, far too easy, to try to bypass the difficult reckoning with the human dimensions of wickedness and suffering by projecting it all onto some quasi-divine, transcendent manifestation of evil.  That's the easy way out--after all, what can we do against a transcendent force of evil?  No, evil is us, it is in our hands.  It is our job not to do evil.

And, here, I am going to be controversial--this is why I don't believe in demons, and I don't think anyone else should either, at least not in the classical formulation of the concept.  I've talked before about Girard's conception of demons in his book I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, and I still hold to that understanding, but (at least as I read Girard) his conception of demons and demonic forces is as a personification of what is fundamentally a human reality and human experience.  They are trans-personal, and so we can experience them as separately existing entities, but they don't actually exist apart from the collective human experience.  Because, if they exist separate and apart from our collective experience, then they would be transcendent entities, embodying an evil that has its own ontological reality.  They might not be God, but they would be gods.  Believing in those sorts of demons is, in my view, is yet another example of investing human works with the divine.  It is idolatry.

This, then, is what I mean by my radical monotheism.  There is one and only one transcendent reality in the universe.  Everything else is the natural world, or our world and the world of our creation.  There are no gods, no transcendent political or social or cultural principles, no demons.  There is the Transcendent One, and their is the Transcendent One's non-transcendent creations.  That's it.