I am currently taking a course in Natural Theology, which is understood to be the discipline or science that proves or demonstrates the existence and attributes of God (classically conceived). Two of the works we are reading are Edward Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God and Matthew Levering’s Proofs of God: Classical Arguments from Tertullian to Barth. I’d like to use this as an occasion to share some thoughts from the perspective of a polytheist, and hopefully put into better words points I have long been trying to make. Depending on what we read in the course, there may well be more to come!

For this post, I’d like to consider Edward Feser’s text, where he interacts with an objection to classical theism that goes something like this: the atheist and classical theist both agree that most purported deities do not exist; it’s just, the atheist is more consistent and goes one further. In typical fashion, Feser knots the objection up from different perspectives, including parodying the logic itself. But one of his strategies is to distance the God of classical theism from the lower-case ‘g’ gods of paganism. He says this:

“To suppose that the God of classical theism is ‘a god’ or ‘a being’ alongside Zeus, Venus, Thor, Quetzalcoatl, and so forth is like supposing that triangularly in the abstract is one triangle alongside the others one finds on chalkboards, in books, and so forth, or that Plato’s Form of the Good is merely one more or less good object alongside others, such as good people, good food, and good books… Even if the atheist were correct, that would not be because it turned out that the God of classical theism really was after all another nonexistent member of a class of ‘gods’ which includes Zeus, Venus, Thor, Quetzalcoatl, and so forth.” ¹

Now, before responding, I do want to be clear that Feser does elsewhere devote entire sections to explicitly arguing for monotheism. For example, on p. 187, he has a whole section on God’s attribute of unity, wherein he argues that “the theism to which the arguments defended in chapters 1 through 5 lead us is a monotheism.” Why? Because God’s utter simplicity and pure actuality preclude him from belonging “to a kind of which there could be more than one instance.”

But for the same reason that he could not belong to a kind of which there is more than one instance, neither could he belong to a kind of which there is only one: he cannot belong to a kind at all.

This is the inescapable end for monotheism: in its innermost respect, what is divine cannot be counted, even in principle, not as one among others, not as the only one of its kind. This state is what guarantees, with the strictest of necessity, that One does not exclude One: it, in fact, has nothing to say about it. One is wholly uncollated with, unrelated to, and equivocal with One.

When it emerges later in One’s procession that he is Ra, or that she is Athena, ‘they’ can be said for the first time, and be looked back upon within a unified field centering on our ‘nullpunkt’.

Monotheism pollutes divine uniqueness by relocating it from this state of innermost, pure positive individuation to a subsequent state of negative differentiation from other things. Divine uniqueness, in other words, comes to consist, not in this one being this one, but in nothing else being this one. However, in the God’s innermost sense, there are no ‘others’ to be identified with or differentiated from. It is not that she is one among other Gods, or that she is the only God there is: there is at this stratum no ‘type’ for her to quantify, or be counted in.

This is why theism just is polytheism.

In three recent posts here (One Before Each, Agent -> Structure = Soil -> Roots, and Phenomenality as Imaging the Gods), I have been circling the theme that a God precedes all formality, abstractness, or structure, such that she precedes even the designation of being a ‘God’. In other words, their coordination as “deities,” or as deities of this or that pantheon, is something these ones go on to do, so to speak.

Finding or crafting terms adequate to express this non-collative compossibility is a challenging task, and so it is important to keep our eyes on the ball and give the “safe” answers.

But, in Dialoguing with Aquinas on Polytheism, I had said that “To call each ‘God’ is to recognize her in the innermost, irreducible sense of being herself. Beyond all being, beyond all category, and all relation, there is her. And there is no further terms to say what that is: she really is ultimate.”

There is, of course, truth to this, but it could lend itself to the misimpression that there is some ‘Godhood’ or ‘divinity’ of which Ineffables partake, such that they are essentially coordinate or collated. A more precise way of looking at this is that it is the ones who are utterly unique that are also designated as Gods.

Edward Butler will say at one point in Polytheism in Greek Philosophy that “A God is a unique individual, a one as such: that is what the God is, and that is what makes for divinity in anything,” ² and elsewhere in the context of discussing Proclus’ triadic moments in a God’s procession, that “the third moment of the triad is the first and highest of these, the God classified in any way whatsoever, including, of course as ‘a God’.” ³ ‘God’ is a latter designation, in other words.

We meet ‘them’ at the intersections of their processions and, in trying to trace back, reach the edges of intelligibility, and fall into silence. We want to say ‘each’ of them is in this wholly solitary state, but even this language collects ‘them’.

Butler says we can classify Gods in one of two ways: either by the powers they manifest through the relationship of personal devotion, or by the classes of beings. ⁴ As they are prior to these, nothing but themselves can be said.

As Butler puts it, “[t]he ‘pantheon’ is not a logical structure: it does not encompass ‘all Gods’ in the sense of universal quantification. Rather, it is a society of Gods associated with one another in Their joint illumination of a ‘place’ that at once truly ‘is’ (ontōs on), and also is nowhere and everywhere (cf. ET prop. 103).” ⁵

Contrary to Feser’s “ontological” distinction between God and gods, or the collation he takes to be inherent within polytheism, the pantheon is not a “classification,” as Butler says, but “concrete bonds of peculiar individuals;” the “kind of [homoiomerous] set native to the hypostasis of Life.” ⁶

Even though “[i]t was largely through Neoplatonism that Aristotelianism was preserved through late antiquity,” ⁷ you will not see the classical theists engage with the explicit polytheism of the Neoplatonists.

Until then, I suppose.

1. Edward Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), 292. ↩︎
2. Edward Butler, Polytheism in Greek Philosophy, (Phaidra Editions, 2025), 482-483. ↩︎
3. Edward Butler, Polytheism in Greek Philosophy, 525. ↩︎
4. Edward Butler, Polytheism in Greek Philosophy, 504. ↩︎
5. Edward Butler, Polytheism in Greek Philosophy, 531. ↩︎
6. Edward Butler, Polytheism in Greek Philosophy, 512. ↩︎
7. Edward Grant, A History of Natural Philosophy: From the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 53-4. ↩︎