From earliest recorded times many people have sought to understand as best they could the foundations for spiritual reality. Throughout the early ancient world from at least India to Greece, ‘monism’ appears to have been the most favored model.  It accorded with the experiences reported by mystics and seemed to handle people’s experience of there being many deities in different cultures who are not always the same masquerading under different names.  Mars is not Ares.  Not entirely.  

But over time in the West monism was pushed aside by monotheism.  According to many monotheists the major difference between monotheism and monism is that monotheism is ‘personal’ whereas monism is ‘impersonal.’  There are lots of problems with this criticism. I want to discuss one of them.

To say that God is “personal” usually seems to mean at least in part that God has a personality, a perfect one.  A personality is defined in part by what it is NOT. I am ‘friendly’ by being contrasted to what is not friendly.  Masculine is not feminine.  Loving is not judgmental.  Relaxed is not uptight.  Fearless is not fearful.  Not very opposite of a personality is obviously less perfect than its contrasting partner, though some are.

When we reduce the spiritual ultimate to a personality we have to choose what among these qualities is most definitive, because if they are ALL definitive, or at least all good qualities are, the result is monism, with every thing in the world reflecting or emanating from a whole greater than it is, and of which in some sense it is a part.

Monotheists therefore have a problem – any single personality leaves other possible personalities out.  The result is a partial image of the whole, or a claim that what is left out is less perfect than what is included.  I can agree that ‘loving’ is definitely more perfect than ‘cruel.’  But what of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’?  Having chosen a ‘masculine’ personality, they have to downgrade the feminine. 

The result is that in practice monotheism becomes what I term “serial monotheism,” rather akin to ‘serial monogamy.’  The Calvinist God is not the Pentecostal God is not the Catholic God is not the Episcopal God is not the Quaker God.  Each tends to argue their conception is a better description than the others.  From this perspective, monotheistic positions are polytheistic because no single personality suffices for the whole, and at different times different personalities appear to fit one’s views better than another.  I have been reminded by some when I say that John says God is love, they answer  but God is also just in contrast to our conception of love.  If God’s justice cannot be reduced to the God’s love they and John are talking about different Gods using the same name.  If it can, their point is irrelevant or (as I believe) a misunderstanding of justice.

From this perspective the demonists of the religious right, whom I have described in earlier posts, are a logical outgrowth of  people having to pick and choose among competing models of divine personality, each claiming sole primacy, and having to do so from the perspective of one’s own often very wounded personality.  They choose badly, and then use their choice so as not to consider other views.