ABSTRACT
The logic of the One, which has governed the era of European expansion, has tendrils stretching back as far as thirty-five centuries into the reign of Akhenaten in Egypt, though it did not become dominant and flourish until much later in Persia, Israel, and Greece. The logic of the One-only very lately dubbed monotheism-has functioned powerfully on behalf of exiles and emperors alike, and it has framed a whole scientific methodology. For all of its success, however, the logic of the One simply doesn’t work well enough any more to satisfy far-reaching questions about either divinity or the world. The logic of the One is not wrong, except, ironically, when it is taken to be the whole story. Rather than false, it is incomplete. The logic of the One (and the concept of God that falls within it) is simply not One. There is always less, and more, to the story. To paraphrase Luce Irigaray’s wonderfully double-edged notion, this is a
book about the divinity ‘‘which is not One.’’2 What is more, it is a book about divine ‘‘being’’ and ‘‘presence,’’ both of which are topics that have sunk far more learned and accomplished theologians than myself. There is, however, some comfort in knowing that we need not fear sinking (or foundering, or stumbling, or falling into contradiction, or any number of like disasters that normally stump the systematic theologian). Sometimes these mishaps are the best way to move forward. As Gilles Deleuze once happily declared, ‘‘An impasse: So much the better.’’3 The ‘‘ship’’ of theology, particularly of Christian theology, is full of holes and always has been. Sinking may be precisely the way to proceed. The deceptively simple claim of this book is that divinity beyond the
logic of the One, beyond monotheism, occurs. This idea of occurring divinity-divine multiplicity-sins against the ideologies of eternity and stasis required of oneness and so recognizes leaks in the Christian empire’s God
Who Is and Ever Shall Be. It also sins against ideologies of linear progress, as if there is a single goal or telos toward which the rich manyness of the embodied cosmos must ‘‘process,’’ in flight from itself as it is. Instead, the idea of occurring divinity pursues incarnation in terms of bodies (which may seem a straightforward notion but, sadly, in Christian theology it is not), and this means affirming what Marcella Althaus-Reid calls ‘‘the dissonant and multiple in theology’’ as much as, if not more than, the ordered and unified.4 While not opposed to unity in a proximal sense (that would be merely a new either/or, which depends on the logic of the One) there is an epistemological challenge in this affirmation that comes directly from feminism. Not only is the question of incarnation a feminist one because it takes up the messy variability of bodies, but because, as Claire Colebrook points out, ‘‘feminism has always been more than a quibble regarding this or that value or prejudice within an otherwise sound way of thinking.’’5
