Not One and Many

Is the Trinity a solution to the “problem of the one and many”? I think not. It is less a solution than a subversion of the problem itself.

In Trinitarian theology, “one” no longer means what “one” means in the traditional problem of the one and many. If it does mean the same thing, then we’re lurching headlong to quaternity or modalism rather than Trinity. There is no undifferentiated one in the Trinity, no unsupplemented origin, for the one God is originally Father, Son and Spirit.

The same holds for a Trinitarian anthropology: Human society is not a balance of “individual” and “collective,” but rests on the reality that the individual is always already penetrated by others. There is a decentering at work in Trinitarian theology far more profound than anything in atheistic postmodernism.

Hart again: “Theology speaks of nothing if it speaks taxonomically of the one and the many, because difference as revealed in the trinitarian economy precedes this static and mutually conditioning opposition; the motion of divine love shows self-contained singularity to be a fiction of thought, for even in the ‘instant’ of origin there is the otherness of manifestation: knowledge and love . . . .God is always articulate, an address, given over in the image that repeats and yet repeats at a distance and is bourne over into yet another open intonation; God, one might presume to say, is God in supplementation, repetition, variation; and yet the one God.”