ABSTRACT
Ontology framed by the logic of totality, or the One, long ago become for theology a dead-end. This is because the One-whether system, thing, tradition, or God-always fails to be one. It is from this dead-end that ‘‘the death of God’’ was (correctly) trumpeted. But I have already argued that the dead-end of ontology framed by the logic of the One need not be a dead-end for all ontological or theological thought. Nor is it necessarily the case that a passion for reality is finished off along with God by the failures of the logic of the One demanded by monotheism. The One-Many divide, necessitated by the logic of the One and by the demands of the One God, is a masquerade, a projection out of the fluidity and flux of divine creation. The One, and the One-Many divide that produces it, has mesmerized and split monotheists who must look to the abstraction of certainty: to a Heaven purified of Hell, to a conclusive end to the story of being instead of its always-beginning-again. If ontology is to serve theology beyond the logic of the One, it clearly calls for a logic of multiplicity that, in shaping new ontological claims, cannot fully escape the risks of totalization. Ontology does not, in other words, ever entirely avoid gestures toward oneness, but when pursued with ‘‘a logic’’ of multiplicity such oneness is perforated and exposed as not-One. This is something of a paradox: I am arguing that, in order to undo the One, ontological creativity is necessary, but ontology consorts intimately with dreams of totality which reinscribe the One all over again.3 But right here lies the distinction upon which I am staking this ontological journey: there is a real difference between the logic of the One that ever hides the totalizing drive of ontology and a logic of multiplicity that ever seeks to expose it. Any effort to annihilate the One
only feeds the logic of the former. This means that some sort of being-with oneness is required of any logic of multiplicity. Absolute disavowal of oneness is not the goal, but rather a more mature (and skeptical) intimacy with it, as we shall see in the final chapter. A logic of multiplicity is therefore not the logic of multiplicity because it
is necessarily provisional and partial. A logic of multiplicity that is a thinkingtoward divinity demands that we take the notion of incarnation much, much more seriously than Christian theologians since Pelagius and until Ruether have been wont to do. Most of Christian theology has fallen into more or less of a Docetic groove, unwilling to grant to divinity the freedom to incarnate except in one ‘‘conclusive’’ time and place in the person of Jesus. Following the early ecumenical councils’ insistence on the uniqueness of Jesus’ divinity, most Christological formulations throughout Christendom tend narrowly to conceive the richness and openness of what it means to be bodied in the person of Jesus, and then for the sake of proclaiming his divinity. Indeed, the Hellenistic themes of divine eternity and impassibility carried
over fully into early Christian battles over Christology. The incarnation was, as we saw in Chapter Five, a profound problem for these Christians largely because of their own inheritance of the logic of the One that could brook no internal contradiction. They were obliged to declare the incarnation of God in Jesus a divine miracle and a mystery precisely because, in the dualistic logic of the One, divinity as spirit and world as body are conceptualized in opposition to each other, at times in order to define one another by way of exclusion. For that reason, incarnation has remained a challenge for Christian theology, meaning that the ‘‘in-’’ has held place of privilege over the ‘‘carnation’’, usually in order to keep ecclesial control over the actual and actualizing multiplicity of bodies. Since the emergence of process theology, and of feminist and other lib-
eration theologies in the latter half of the twentieth century, however, the body has begun to return to theology. The close (and explicitly derogatory) association of woman with matter and earth in the hierarchical chain of being throughout the history of Christian theology certainly made the question of the status of the body and earth a natural target for nascent feminist theologies.4 Although the doctrine of the incarnation emphasizes a male divinity in the person of Jesus, some feminists saw right away that the rupture of divinity into any body in Christian theology could represent a fissure in the otherwise full exclusion of the female from concepts of God. Grace Jantzen points out, for example, (quoting Irigaray) that
if Jesus is taken as in traditional Christendom as unique, then he ‘‘truly does represent the realization of the Patriarchy, the appearance of the father’s and the Father’s power’’ and feminists should have nothing to do with him. But if he was partial, then his incarnation leaves room for other incarnations, other trinities, other sexualities.5
