Back to top: Giorgio Buccellati 2013 Trinity
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“Beyondness” and “nullification” of the absolute
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| "Beyondness" and "nullification" |
p. 603 |
The point I wish to stress in this context is that there is a
trinitarian dimension even to the polytheistic perception of the “beyondness.” Therein humans face, “intentionally,” a dynamics at work in the divine reality, through the very paradox of progress understood as the ultimate goal. The paradox lies in the notion that a never ending progress may in some way end. Progress entails the capturing, along the line, of fragments of a dynamic absolute, yet progress will, by necessity, come to an end when there are no more fragments — at which point the dynamics ends. The paradox, then, is in the belief that stasis is the final outcome of forward movement, that this dynamics can be seized — do we not, in fact, gradually appropriate an ever greater share of the universal progress? In this light, the death of god appears in an even more tragic light: at the very moment that we appropriate the dynamics of the absolute, we nullify the absolute. The death of god (as in Nietzsche) is the final stasis: what we presume to kill is, in reality, the dynamics of the absolute. We kill, in fact, that veiled perception of a trinitarian reality wherein we saw the absolute as endowed with an inner vitality and particularity. The death of god is, in fact, the abrogation of the trinitarian dimension within the absolute.
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Back to top: Giorgio Buccellati 2013 Trinity
Dynamics of the absolute; the “non-absolute”
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| Dynamics of the absolute; the "non-absolute" |
pp. 605-606, 609, 612 |
It is rather the apprehension of dynamics within the absolute. [...]
(1) The first is the one we have reviewed under the heading of intentionality. The absolute that conditions us is sensed as being endowed with an inner thrust, a dynamics that validates our own urge for life. Progress is the model, from early historic Mesopotamia [...] to our own days [...]. The urge is to see dynamics, the twist is to translate it into vectorial progress.
(2) Dynamics is rightly sensed as a foundational dimension of the absolute. And just as it is felt that there is dynamics within the absolute, so our deeper human urge tells us to go beyond all perceived limits, through our own dynamic effort to reach closer to that absolute factor that conditions us. We are pulled into its dynamics. But as we reach, we aim to grasp, and this results in the concomitant twist, which is the relativization of the absolute. If we can break up the dynamics by controlling each of the links in the chain of progress, to where we might eventually hold in our hands, in our power, the ultimate moment, then the absolute is no longer such, it is relativized. The urge is to acknowledge our being conditioned by the absolute, the twist is to impose our own conditioning so as to reduce the absolute to a merely relative reality.
(3) The instinctive perception of dynamics in the absolute is to view it in terms of interaction. But since its very nature has been relativized, what emerges is an interaction between alternative poles that are essentially limited by each other. And this reciprocal limitation is universally expressed in terms of strife. The urge is to see interaction, the resulting twist is to see it but as conflict. [...]
(4) [...] But if the interaction is one of strife, then the subjects emerge as even more relative because they must, by definition, limit each other. The notion of absolute persons becomes meaningless. The urge is to confront an interactive personal dimension within the absolute, the twist is to project self-limiting pseudo-persons, the gods. [...]
Another important point I wish to stress is that dynamics within the absolute is inevitably seen as a form of strife. This remains a fundamental dimension of polytheism in all its incarnations, and what is meaningful is its profound contrast with trinitarian monotheism. [...] Trinitarian love means that the dynamic energy within the absolute does not translate into an insane and endless whirl of cosmic fights, but rather thrives on harmony.[...]
The black hole is the possibility of dynamics within, and out of, the absolute. The contours are in the awareness of how this impacts us. Change is indeed our fundamental experience. And seen only as vectorial, it cannot possibly be inscribed within the absolute. To regain the absolute, we must jettison “vectoriality,” i.e., the steps along the linearity of change. Change as temporal fragmentation and vectorial linearity is identified as the essence of the non-absolute.
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Emptiness of the absolute in Buddhism
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| Emptiness of the absolute |
pp. 611-612 |
The same propensity to see action only as purely vectorial, to conceive dynamism only as becoming, and thus the inability to conceive the possibility of life and energy within the absolute, would seem to be at the roots of the eastern “enlightenment,” the Buddha experience. In answer to Greek polytheism, the pre-Socratics emphasized the dichotomy between being and becoming as the supreme intellectual goal. Conversely, and in contrast with the polytheistic view of Brahmanism, Buddhism proclaims a psychological goal: precisely because change is at the root of our actions it is, at the same time, at the root of our suffering. Hence we must resist that allconsuming greed that seeks a constant alteration of our present state: our ultimate goal should be to let go of our very desire for change. Emptiness emerges therefore as the natural state of the absolute. [...]
The very idea that the absolute may be engaged in any sort of event, and thus, ultimately, the very notions of creation, grace and sacred history, are at total odds with a spirituality that aims instead for a radical disembodiment, i.e., for jettisoning our very becoming rather than accepting the external gift that allows us to become what we can be.
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The absolute in the Enūma elīsh
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| Enūma elīsh |
p. 605-606 |
The Babylonian myth [Enūma elīsh] gives frame and shape to an important conceptual construct. The absolute is perceived as a single whole that remains amorphous as long as it is, precisely, whole. But an inner thrust leads irresistibly to “morphing” — from the initial germination of the watery gods through the conflicts of the central part of the story to the eventual issue of a superior deity endowed with fifty character traits. Morphing, then, destroys the wholeness, that is recomposed in the end only as cumulation. This is a profound insight that defines the polytheistic frame of mind as it was at the dawn of history and as it will remain for centuries to come (down to our age, as we will see). Dynamics within the absolute entails fragmentation, and hence the relativization of the original absoluteness. Differentiation is an intrinsic thrust inescapably built into the fabric of the absolute. But as soon as it is set in motion it unavoidably disfigures and corrupts the inner fabric of the absolute. Once torn asunder, there remains only the effort to construct a new absolute out of fragments which are hopelessly relative. Polytheism is, we might say, the ontological correlative of original sin. There is a glimpse of wholeness, and yet coterminous with it there is the realization of a fundamental breakup, of a cracking into component parts. The urge to reconstitute the absolute in its original wholeness yields only the broadest possible aggregation of what have become, irreparably, finite fragments. The tragic dimension of the polytheistic effort is the urge and yet, at the same time, the inability to reconfigure a wholeness that has forever come apart.
But it is this urge that betrays what we may call a trinitarian sensitivity. The central perception is that the absolute cannot be forever static, or else it is a frozen and impotent entity, incapable of serving as the primordial motor from which everything originates. Nor can change properly coexist with immobility. My point is that, in the Babylonian frame of mind, the urge to show that morphing comes out of a primordial chaos reflects the need to account for the inescapable presence of an inner dynamics within the absolute. That it should ultimately falter in no way diminishes the sincerity and seriousness of the attempt.
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Back to top: Giorgio Buccellati 2013 Trinity
Fragmentation of the absolute in polytheism
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| Fragmentation of the absolute |
pp. 612-613 |
On the one hand, Buddha teaches that we must let go of the fragments, which will leave only a blessed nothingness where there are no pieces. This is the fundamental reduction proposed as a way to overcome the metaphysical original sin of polytheism, the fragmentation of the absolute.
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“Ideal” absolute and Idealism
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| Love |
pp. 620-621 |
The idealist trend, epitomized by G. F. Hegel, seeks to project
an ideal absolute that is extracted from the depth of the human spirit. The unified whole that emerges is a projection in the sense that it can be seen as if from the outside, from the point of view of our analysis. An essential component of the grand projection is a sense of dynamics, which finds its expression in the concept of dialectics, a notion that addresses squarely the question of the relationship between multiplicity and unity, between change and the absolute. Change as development or progress is thereby inscribed in the very essence of the absolute: it is so understood that the inner dynamics of the absolute, hence the absolute itself, may be analyzed, broken down, into its component parts. A contradiction in terms, since the absolute transcends composition by definition.
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“Impersonal” vs. “personal” absolute
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| "Impersonal" vs. "personal" absolute |
p. 629 |
And just as there is no risk in laws, so they do not demand our trust. This is the great allure of polytheism. The certainty we derive from the impersonal absolute of the laws is not the certainty we derive from trust in the faithfulness of the personal absolute. There we expect, here we trust.
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Back to top: Giorgio Buccellati 2013 Trinity
Love
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| Love |
pp. 614-615 |
It is, rather, that tenderness, commitment, surrender of self are never inscribed in the absolute as they are in the Christian trinitarian perspective. Here, love constitutes the very structure of the absolute in the specific sense of an interaction that evokes, precisely, tenderness, commitment and surrender within the absolute without introducing an element of vectoriality that would impinge on its intrinsic nature. This insight allows us to better understand the profound sense of liberation that the coming of Christianity, with its trinitarian message, brought to a world where the perception of the absolute was wholly devoid of that most human of feelings. And this not just because the pagan world did not somehow think of it. Rather, it is because of a profound structural incompatibility in the very conception of the absolute. [...]
We gain thereby an insight into what may rightly be called (looking at events in terms purely of secular history) the “genius of Jesus”: to him alone do we owe the assuredness that the absolute admits of internal interaction while both remaining absolute and while not being rent by strife; that within the absolute there is love; that, in fact, the absolute is love.
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Nothingness
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| Nothingness |
pp. 613-614 |
The Incarnation, the Cross, the Resurrection, the Ascension, are not just major and significant events. They define history as the setting where the absolute is found because he descends into our nothingness. By urging that we descend into an even greater emptiness to find therein a changeless stasis, Buddha sheds the most brilliant light on the meaning of nothingness as the place where we do indeed find the absolute.
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Monotheism as “One-theism”
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| One-theism |
p. 597 |
It emerges when, in a converse sort of way, monotheism comes to be understood as “one-theistic”: there is only one god, but with the emphasis on the numerability of the “one.” He is still subject of counting. This means that conceptually he is seen as one in a series of units, a series that belongs to a broad set where everything is numerable. “One-theism” is not very different from henotheism, a term which refers to the process of rarefaction whereby pre-eminence is given to a single deity out of a pantheon of many, to the point where the other gods almost disappear. In such a perspective, the characteristic of oneness remains one of superiority rather than of utter otherness.
It is such utter otherness that is, instead, the hallmark of monotheism. Oneness means, in this case, a one that is not so much above a multitude of other ones as it is, rather, wholly set apart. The semantic trap to which I was alluding lies in assuming that the one is opposed to the many. Where polytheism admits many deities, monotheism is assumed to admit one. It comes down to a matter of scale: the one is of the same order as the many, except that it is numerically limited. But it is a trap. The insight of monotheism lies in proposing an altogether different scale, a different plane of reality where, we might say, one is opposed to one. The “one” of polytheism is a mononumerical set, but remains a set within a series of numerical sets. The “one” of monotheism is outside any such series of sets.
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The Trinity and the absolute
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| Trinity and absolute |
p. 598 |
So will, also, the realization that there is no contrast between
monotheism and trinitarianism. The Trinity is not a set any more than the One God is a set. We may think of the Trinity as the inner articulation of the altogether different order of being which we call absolute. An excessive conceptual reliance on the notion of oneness may easily work against the very impetus of monotheism, as if the reductiveness of the single count could give us control on transcendence, as if transcendence could in effect be imprisoned in the immanent function of the numeric concept.
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“Vectoriality” of the absolute
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| "Vectoriality" of the absolute |
pp. 604, 610 |
A great stumbling block is faced when we seek to overlay these categories to the notion of the absolute. If the absolute is dynamic, how can such dynamics be conceived otherwise than vectorially, i.e., as moving from point to point? But then, how can this be reconciled with that property of the absolute that calls for the absence of partitioning into discrete points? If, on the other hand, the absolute is static, how can there be interaction with the world of points, the real world as we know it?
The trinitarian intuition, which is deeply rooted in the notion of divine reality as present already in the Old Testament, is that there is a non-vectorial dimension within the absolute, whereby direction is possible between the persons (the “non-points,” to put it in terms of our essentially vectorial mindset).
[...]
The act of becoming is understood in a fully vectorial sense, i.e., as a movement from one point to another. Raised to the status of an absolute principle, it emerges as a cosmic whirlpool. But it remains essentially vectorial. There is a fundamental inability to see the dynamic dimension of an absolute that remains properly such, an absolute that is not degraded to the level of intrinsic change, one that retains all the dynamics of life.
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