Philosophical Monotheism

Biblical and Hellenistic philosophical monotheism were unified in their rejection of myth and polytheism. But the direction of their critique was different. For Plato and Platonism, the world of sensible things and change is a distraction: “Physical sensations and poetical imitations of them enslave the mind in the world of change and subject to its flux. But rational contemplation of what is really real, above and beyond all change and becoming, exalts the thinker beyond this apparent world and satisfies the desire to understand why things must be as they are. In rational contemplation of purified concepts, the philosopher even may be said to participate in eternity, no longer a slave, tossed here and there by ever sense experience, without any knowledge of the abiding form of reality” (Hinlicky, Divine Complexity: The Rise of Creedal Christianity , 174-5).

In this stability, the philosopher becomes like God, the God who is “eminently Mind.” He must be Mind because he is certainly not material, and being Mind is the only possible alternative to being matter (175). God is known negatively, as the negation of everything that is characteristic of sensible reality. For philosophical monotheism, union with God means becoming “indestructible as God is thought to be by removal from relationships with others and the world and indeed one’s own body” (178).

This program contains “the seeds of its own cancellation.” Negative theology “was driven by an insatiable quest to attain to ‘God beyond God’ – beyond being as well as becoming, beyond mind as well as matter – to the point where God becomes indistinguishable from nothing.” Following Jenson, Hinlicky suggests that modern atheism is the culmination of “the historical journey of negative theology through Western civilization” (176).