One God, Three Hermits: Monotheism Reconsidered

Real talk: our beliefs affect our ability to live together.  The creeds we adhere to have real consequences for our ability to see other people’s quests for truth as holy, or even legitimate in the first place.  Placing value judgments on people’s religious outlooks betrays a truly divided consciousness. Listen: to avoid destroying each other outright, humanity’s got to put its money where its mouth is.  Belief in many gods, if it unifies a man with himself and his fellows, is worth a great deal.  Belief in one God, if it divides a individuals from their own psyches and from each other, is worthless.

In 1886, Leo Tolstoy first published a short story called “the three Hermits.”  In the now-famous and nearly-overused tale, A Catholic bishop is forced to pause in his sea voyage at a desert island, and he finds three hermits living there.  When they pray, they lift their hands to heaven and say to God “we are three, you are three, have mercy on us.”

Such flagrant disregard for the unity of God raises the Bishop’s hackles.  He spends a good while catechizing them to the contrary.  “God is three in one not just three.  Get it?”  At the cost of a good bit of effort, he teaches them the Our Father.  After a while, they do, in fact, get it.  They’ve made the adjustments and they’ve memorized the prayer.

After some time, the bishop sails away.  It seems he’s done some salutary upgrading of their belief-set.  It would certainly meet the approval of some of the prime exemplars of pre-Vatican II Evangelization.  I mentioned these in “New thoughts on Evangelization”—they were the ones whose preaching of the gospel happened alongside colonialism, and failed to recognize or correct the violence inherent in that system.   Before I talk more about this, let me address some other stuff. 

"Functional Polytheism"--for lack of a better term is an expression of the dividedness of man against himself and against others.  It happens when different gods are in conflict.  The gods of ancient Babylon were like this.  The ancient Babylonian story of creation held that the world was created from the dead body of one diety, through the blood soaked work of his divine murderer’s hands.   The ancient Greek gods were in similar conflict.  Zeus violently overthrew his titan-father Cronus to become king of the Gods.

To put my finger on the opposite: functional monotheism is an expression of the unity of man, within himself and with others. It happens when different aspects of the deity do a single will.  Seen from the “divine perspective” of the Christian Mystics, the Holy Trinity, in which the Godhead’s expressed in three persons who share the divine nature, is a classical example of this kind of thinking.  Hinduism, according to most broad strokes definitions, is a polytheistic religion.  But this deserves a second look.  All of the gods do Ram’s will.  Hindus with nuanced understanding call their religion the most monotheistic polytheistic religion in existence.

This is a “recycled paradigm”: it first appeared in ancient israel.  It is a recasting of the differences between pre-exilic and post exilic-monotheism.  Let me explain:

Pre-exilic monotheism, what I'll call "religious monotheism," held that Adonai, the God of Israel, was the “God of gods.”  In short, other gods existed, but the God of Israel was the greatest among them.  This is the whole reason that the exodus plagues are what they are: Moses turns the Nile to blood, for instance, to specifically prove that the God of Israel is greater than the god Hapi, the god of the Nile.  It’s also the reason Moses sent plagues of frogs: God was proving that he was more powerful than the goddess Heket, who is depicted as a frog.  

El, the Canaanite God, has been theorized to be the original God of Israel.  Later biblical writers nuanced and qualified this, but the fact remains: before the Exile, Israel did not worship the God they came to revere eventually.  Other Gods existed, and all that was worthy of reverence in other religions, Israel eventually revered.

Post-exilic monotheism  is a different animal. During the exile, Israel was surrounded by a polytheistic culture.  Their culture was under attack.  The Priestly writers, who made their major contributions to the hebrew scriptures at this time, used monotheism to spearhead the preservation of cultural identity.  For that reason, I'll call it "cultural monotheism" from here on out.  They began to say “Other Gods don’t exist.  The only God who exists is the God of israel.”  Let’s understand this correctly: from the exile onwards, cultural monotheism is a sociological self-defense in sacred garb.  That isn’t to say that the things said about divinity are false: it simply means that the atmosphere of cultural threat closed Israel off to the benefits of other traditions.

My contention is that Catholicism passed on to the West not the positive monotheism of pre-exilic israel, but the negative monotheism of the exile.  True to form, Catholicism is transmitting an implied cultural defensiveness along with whatever legitimate divine riches it brings to the table.

The proof is in the pudding:  monotheistic God concepts lead to unitive thinking, and unitive thinking is the important part.  As a Catholic monk, I felt more bonded to buddhists than I did to most Christians.  Monks, after all, routinely eat the humble pie which is their slice of human darkness.  Remember (as I said in “on learning to Luff, with two Eff’s”)  a unitive perspective accepts and includes, it doesn’t judge and reject.  Vaishnava Hindus think Gautama Buddha is an avatar of Vishnu—they have found a way not just to accept, but to worship the man who reformed their entire belief system.

Polytheistic God concepts lead to divisive thinking.  This is the wolf in sheep’s clothing: in reality, it’s the “culturally defensive”  monotheism of the Exile and its aftermath.  Catholicism burned witches as opposed to learning from them for thousands of years.  It excommunicated Luther, the Eastern orthodox patriarch in the split of 1054, and generally anyone, Christian and Non-christian, who differed with its tenets.  This happens over and over in biblical history.  The sins of the parents manifest 10 times worse in the children.  So the Jews, our “parents in faith” got through the exile by eating the apple of culturally defensive monotheism.  We, the church, rebelled against our parents, emitting a centuries-long cry of “CHRIST KILLERS” and using it as a banner under which our persecution might, we thought, legitimately fly.  Sure, the Jews might have been Adam and Eve, eating the apples of their own cageyness. But we were Cain and Abel: we upped the ante to fratricide, and our hands are not clean.

Ultimately, the “good news” is anything that unites.  I’m not talking about unthinking assimilation—we have to take others’ examples with a healthy grain of salt—but I am talking about nurturing the kind of “mutual assumption of integrity” that lies at the heart of the very religious freedom the Church asks from and, these days, increasingly grants to others.

To return to the Bishop and the three Hermits:  After teaching them the Our Father, when the bishop is sailing away, he looks back towards the shore.  In the distance, he sees a light approaching the boat.  It’s the three hermits, miraculously walking toward him on the water.  They confess they’ve forgotten the words of his beautiful prayer, that they need a reminder.  The bishop is downcast: “When you pray,” he says, “say ‘we are three, you are three, have mercy on us.’”

The “one God” in whom the Bishop initially believed seemed to demand that the Bishop convert the three hermits, he comes around, conceding that the hermits themselves know how best to pray.  This kind of openness to other formulations of divinity represents the best of pre-exilic, functional monotheism: that believes in one God without disregarding other belief systems. This is the fruit, as well, of the more modern idea of religious monotheism, in which unity of divine wills reveals more of God than human divisiveness.

However many gods a person believes in, the gods’ unity shows in the placidity of a devotee’s conduct.  However many deities a person prays to, the fruit of the an encounter with the one God is increased comfort with the plurality of legitimate human paths.  The three Hermits, however they prayed, were unified.  Would that all of our beliefs led us to something similar.