It can sound mysterious to say that there is no determinate upper bound number of Gods; or, that this upper bound amount cannot be counted, or that this kind of state of affairs is due to the fact that Deity precedes everything, even Number. This can make it sound like at the highest level of consideration, or in their innermost respect, the Gods are not even there as distinct things to be counted, or that they so transcend all category at this level that no distinctness or positive individuality is discernible among them.

Is it then that their distinctness and so plurality is only relative or perspectival; an arrangement only visible from down here looking up, but which disappears once one reaches that level and looks around? Is it similar to how what is on one level each individual color, seamlessly blends on another into the brilliance of white? Kaye Boesme says that: “In Platonism, reality unfolds from a “compact”, ineffable summit to generate all of the complexity around us.” Are “Gods,” properly speaking, downstream from this compact summit?

Whyever one asks these sorts of questions, we must be careful to resist the subtlety of the assumption that Gods are coordinate all the way up. Only once you try, as it were, to ‘picture’ all of them at once while also conceiving of them as uncountable or numerically indeterminate does it become an effort to understand what it is one is even looking at. Are they all there, and we are just agreeing not to count them? Or are they not all there after all?

But all that I mean in what is being said is that at the highest level of consideration, or in their innermost respect, each God is, as it were, singular, and so not coordinate. That is why they can have no determinate upper bound. That is why they are uncountable. This is the middle term that causes the conclusion. “They” cannot be, say, 12, or 3 at this level because at this level there is no “they.” There is only this one, for each one.

Properly speaking, they do not differ from one another, nor are they merely non-identical: “they” are not even related. So, it is not because they are the same, but because there simply is no ‘they’ around in the first place at this level. ‘They’ have not yet come into focus; we are too zoomed in or magnified, as it were.

Nor is it that there is change in the life of a God from being wholly singular and bereft of the other Gods to just the opposite, but rather that a God’s innermost respect is her hyparxis, prior even to her dunameis. So, there is no relation or coordination among them here, they do not form a heap or collection, there is only each one, wholly and singularly. This is partly why I have found the language of equivocity useful: it is more of an absence of coordination than anything.

Proclus for one makes clear that Gods “transcend all relation,” (Elements of Theology, prop. 126). ¹ In his Commentary on the Parmenides, he will also say that “in the supra-essential realm, instead of the otherness of superior forms to inferior, we must postulate transcendence, instead of that of inferior to superior, declination, and in place of the distinction of coordinates from each other, individual peculiarity,” (In Parm. 1190-91). ² Indeed, their hyparxeis precedes even self-identity–a higher order relation.

The key then here for any attempted monotheist appropriation is that there is no exemplification nexus or space within which to coordinate a God as either solitary in lieu of anything else or accompanied by others. It cannot be Trinitarian here. It cannot be Unitarian. These notions are relational, and this is a place beyond all relation.

For this reason, there is no pantheon here. A fortiori, there is no monarchically arranged pantheon here. Strictly speaking, it makes no sense to say at this level that there is one God who is to all others as the head is to a pantheon. There is no meaning in a string of words that simultaneously predicates and negates relation.

The logical immiscibility of polycentricity and anything in a monotheist orbit has not stopped good, brilliant, and original attempts at appropriation. ³ But, logically immisicible they remain.

As Edward Butler says “Strictly speaking, therefore, there are not degrees among the Gods, though their activities within Being are arranged hierarchically.” ⁴

You might think, well, every hierarchy has a top, does it not? Perhaps this is the ineffable summit. Indeed, adherents of polycentricity may talk about Gods, but can’t we just as easily talk instead about Divine Persons? “Polytheism” seems only like an application of the polycentric structure, and it is no less legitimately applied to Trinitarianism. ⁵

In such a mindset, one might say that within a polycentric structure, why could there not be, say, a pantheonic monarchy?

This would be to dispense with monotheism, but to still try and retain its structure on a subordinate level–like as a primus inter pares. It may be, as Xenophanes said, that there is none supreme among the Gods; or, as Olympiodorus said, that no God is imperfect. They are each essentialized in themselves, and precede all relation. But their activity in Being is so arranged that there is one above all.

The motivations for this are unclear, and its machinery is wholly inadequate for the monotheist project: one could not, from its premises, deny that other Gods exist, or are worthy of worship. ⁶

Moreover, and this point may only be of interest to niche thinkers, because this status would be relational and so logically secondary to the Gods, this so-called ‘monarch’ could not be the unparticipated One which, in virtue of being unparticipated, is not present in the hierarchy of Being, let alone as its monarch!

Some might persist, though. Recall that in his Commentary on the Parmenides (1069), which we will need to quote at length, Proclus says that “each of the gods is nothing else than the One in its participated aspect.” ⁷

He goes on:

“And if in fact we have the whole level of gods and all the One which is participated in by Being presented to us in the Second Hypothesis, this very circumstance which they are seeking for, who try to squeeze the whole discourse about the gods into the first hypothesis, what need is there to cause confusion in this part of the discourse by joining on to speculations about the first principle an exposition about the multiplicity of the gods? For what else is that One which is ranked with Being and proceeds forth together with Being, than the multiplicity of gods, which gives divinity to the whole hypostasis of Being and coherence to the whole multiplicity of essential things?”

And continues:

“It follows necessarily, then, that the First Hypothesis is about God alone, in so far as he is the generator of the plurality of gods, he himself being transcendent over their multiplicity and unconnected with those
gods who have proceeded forth from him. It is for this reason that everything is denied of this One, as being established as superior to all things and transcendent over all things, and producing all the characteristics of the gods, while itself being undefinable and uncircumscribable in relation to all of them. For it is not a particular one, but One in the absolute sense…,”(ibid.)

So, forget that by the very fact of being unparticipated, the One cannot be monarchical. Notice instead first that at no point does Proclus say he is speaking about a particular one in his talk of “God,” and so there is no textual reason here not to read him as talking about any God in a generic or collective sense (as he usually does). In fact, he explicitly says the One is “not a particular one.” And Plato clearly says in the Parmenides that the One “neither is, nor is one.” (141e).

So, it is not the case that there is one “One” in three henads. It is not the case that there is one henad above all others. There is no upper bound number of henads at all, let alone “one” or “three.” Nor can it be that all chains of participation ultimately come to one or three, with that corresponding amount of henads being thereby participated. As Edward Butler says, “There cannot be fewer Gods than there are classes of beings, for the real articulation in Being is furnished by divine activity and the differences within the given pantheon; but the determination is not reciprocal, and neither the total number of deities nor the total number of pantheons is delimitable any further than to finitude.” ⁸ No henad could be essentially ‘relational’ — such as paternity, filiality, or spiration: each henad, in its hyparxis, precedes all relationality (while still being productive of relations).

Polycentricity, in its attempt to preserve the purity of each God and resist their subordination to abstract structures, is just as opposed to the failure to do this that is inherent in monotheism and Trinitarianism as it is to the failure to do this that is inherent in atheism.

1. Proclus (ed.), The Elements of Theology: A Revised Text with Translation, Introduction, and Commentary by E.R. Dodds. 2nd Edition. (New York: Oxford University Press UK, 2004), 113. ↩︎
2. Proclus, Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, trans. J.M. Dillon and G.R. Morrow, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 538-39. ↩︎
3. Cf. these papers for overviews of discussions on the subject:
   O’Neill, Seamus (2024). “Angels and Henads: How Aquinas’ Angelology Draws Upon Proclus’ Henadology.” Dionysius 39:36-71.
   Hankey, Wayne. (2019). “Divine Henads and Persons: Multiplicity’s birth in the Principle in Proclus and Aquinas.” Dionysius 37:164-181. ↩︎
4. Edward Butler, Polycentric Polytheism and the Philosophy of Religion, in Essays on a Polytheistic Philosophy of Religion, (New York City, NY: Phaidra Editions, 2012), 97. ↩︎
5. e.g. Does not St. Basil the Great speak of not counting the Divine Persons as first, second, and third, or one, two, and three, but as one and one and one? De Spiritu Sancto, Ch. 18.44-45. ↩︎
6. Paul says “No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons,” (1 Cor. 10:20 ESV). Sorry Paul. ↩︎
7. Ibid. 422. ↩︎
8. Edward Butler, The Gods and Being in Proclus, in Essays on the Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus, (New York City, NY: Phaidra Editions, 2014), 81. ↩︎