Innumerability

Giorgio Buccellati – December 2018

Apophatism
Politheism
Revelation
Living god

Apophatism

The formula by which one refers to the monotheistic god as “zero” instead of as “one” is more significant than it may seem at first. It is not only word-play. The concept of innumerability defines, in a certain sense, a particular zone in which the referent should be situated: if it cannot be “numerated” it is because it belongs to a different way of being. To be “innumerable” means, at the same time, that it cannot be relativized.

This is at the base of the concept of “apophatism,” which holds that in the final analysis it is not possible even to “speak” of God, who is precisely “ineffable”. The prohibition to pronounce the name of Yahweh is a development along this same line.

Politheism

It is important therefore to note that apophatism is intrinsicly impossible in polytheism. We could say that polytheism is by its very nature “epiphatic“, in the precise sense that the declaration of the absolute as it is proposed in myths (not only those that are already defined, but in every other mythological definition that could arise in the future) exhausts what could be discovered.

This does not mean that the divine element, in polytheism, is totally defined: the myth that describes it is cumulative, it expands and enlarges according to an ever greater comprehension of the divine. We could say that it remains intrinsicly “effable” even if it is not completely (and perhaps never will be) “effed”. In monotheism, instead, the divine is by its very nature ineffable, and is “effed” only in the measure in which it is spoken of. The Christian logos too, which claims to be, precisely, expressed or “effed”, remains such at the level of the person (of Jesus), and not as narrative or discourse.

Revelation

This is also the crux of the issue regarding the difference between myth and revelation. The first fixes in words our growing comprehension of an absolute conceived of as fragmentable. The second instead refers to a center of action, ungraspable by any explanatory reasoning, but present in the effects of its activity.

Living god

In the light of the foregoing, we can also understand better the concept of the “living god”, which directs our attention toward a center from which a “living” action emerges unpredictably, a center which cannot be defined “epiphatically” but whose presence and action can be felt.