© 2022 Oluwaseyi Bello & Petter Hübner [![[80x15.png]]](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) Download: [pdf](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z9zYJBz8cMd9TBrryvrCwY2OZhW0YO4M/view?fbclid=IwAR0l31rrxvwnadQtOVqgkiMcFOr4Ifg7XX0mcoioKH7AjRv6ORQhJtH4Hyk) &nbsp > "How can the man who, while worshipping Zeus the God of Companions, sees his neighbors in need and does not give them a dime-how can he think he is worshipping Zeus properly?" (Emperor Julian, Letter to Arsacius) ## The Discovery of the Other The realization that there are many religions is far from banal. The recognition of religious alterity is an event that mobilized Western thinking about the "Other" to question the automatic responses that were previously given in the form of accusations of apostasy, heresy or schism. The "discovery" of the multiplicity of religions can be seen as analogous to the Cantorian revolution: we discovered a plurality of infinities that proved to be irreducible to one. This in such a way that the event would have the consequence of splitting the very meaning of "religion", forcing us not only to re-elaborate all previous understandings of it, but to constitute another way in which this very understanding is established, that is, to be faithful to its consequences: > "It is clear that under the effect of a loving encounter, if I want to be really faithful to it, I must completely rework my ordinary way of 'living' my situation. If I want to be faithful to the event of the 'Cultural Revolution', then I must at least practice politics (in particular the relation with the workers) in an entirely different manner from that proposed by the socialist and trade-unionist traditions. And again, Berg and Webern, faithful to the musical event known by the name of 'Schoenberg', cannot continue with fin-de-siècle neo-Romanticism as if nothing had happened. After Einstein's texts of 1905, if I am faithful to their radical novelty, I cannot continue to practice physics within its classical framework, and so on. An evental fidelity is a real break (both thought and practiced) in the specific order within which the event took place (be it political, loving, artistic or scientific...)" (Alain Badiou, Ethics, p. 42) But fidelity to the Truth that emerges from an Event is not the only possible response to it. The scandal of a disruptive novelty readily generates forms of subjectivity that desperately strive to restore the lost totality or ignore the radical consequences of the discovery involved in such a disruption. ## Simulacrum, or Reactionary Universalism > "When a radical break in a situation, under names borrowed from real truth-processes, convokes not the void but the 'full' particularity or presumed substance of that situation, we are dealing with a simulacrum of truth" (p. 72) The recognition of the diversity of religions in their radicalness even calls into question the very concept of "religion"[^1]. This instability or Void can generate a negative response, but which nevertheless recognizes the radicality of the evental irruption, reacting to the Truth through the elaboration of a simulacrum. The dismantling of a common religious world is not denied, however; in its place it seeks to establish an "event-substance", a meta-religious perspective capable of esoterically or exoterically reuniting the plurality of worlds. The Theosophical Society's motto ("there is no religion higher than truth") and the distinction made by René Guenon between "Metaphysics" and "Religion" are some examples of this attempt to suppress disruptive plurality in the name of a simulacrum of common sense that can properly colonize it. Above particular religious traditions, the universalist-reactionary places himself as the holder of a universal key capable of deciding what is "essential" or "accidental" in relation to all of them. Its "Universal" is not the one that belongs to the Void opened by the disruptive Truth of an Event[^2], as it is established in the formulation of a metaphysical grammar whose objective is the annulment of this Truth. Such meta-religious master keys are unable to recognize that they are one more religious language alongside other religious languages, that is, they illegitimately raise themselves as holders of a truth that is "behind" such plurality, exercising a full and frank epistemological despotism. A particular religion can also exercise this same despotic gesture without necessarily trying to formulate a meta-religious grammar capable of suppressing plurality, and this is possible when it takes its own grammar as the Universal in a properly absolute sense. However inclusive a religious grammar may be, it will always be so insofar as it is situated in a specific religious context and in a specific theology. Universalist claims, for example, of a Sufi mystic will start from the Islamic religious grammar, and its approach in relation to other religions will necessarily have the Quranic revelation as its axis. Even if people of different religions say they are talking about "the same thing", the conceptual underdetermination of each of these religions in relation to what is properly being "equalized" decisively prevents the simple identity between what is being said. If there is a possible universalism, it can no longer be conceived as a "transcendent unity" of religions capable of suppressing their "transcendental multiplicity" (the specificities that constitute the conditions of intelligibility proper to each of them). Reactionary universalism recognizes the radical nature of the irremediable split brought about by the discovery of religious multiplicity and is fully aware that things can no longer remain the same in the body of each particular religion. The need for radical transformation is not properly denied, but obscured and carried out in the name of an "unsplit body", of a protochronic vector where the Truth of all religions would supposedly dwell in an undivided, full and pure way as a perennial doctrine, private religions being mere transitory vehicles of the truth that can now be uttered in its entirety by the bearer of the master key who seeks to sell this Truth supposedly without body and without language. > "The obscurantist devalues an ongoing (and thus unproven or unapproved) fidelity in favor of a rigid conformity to the absolute past of an allegedly original event or revelation. Such, for example, is the figure of religious orthodoxy, for whom the certainty of inherited knowledge regarding a past definitive stifles any subjective capacity to proclaim a truth in the here and now. The obscure subject “mortifies” every present (and thus divided, open-ended) subject in the name of a definitive Truth event attributed to an originally sufficient Law (TA, 3.19.97.) For such an obscure subject all that is clear is the past, a past that has since become clouded in the present." (Peter Hallward, Badiou: a subject to truth, p. 146) A religion that performs the despotic gesture can to some extent reverse it by becoming aware that such a movement is illegitimate, but this is not possible for the meta-religions of reactionary-universalism. For example, religions that think about religious otherness through a supersessionist logic may reinterpret their claims by restricting their scope to the place or body of religion (*"Prophet x is "seal of prophecy" for religion y qua religion y"*), dissolving the simulacral pretension through the proper name of its revelation and of the world founded by it, giving a place to the validity of its statements. The despotism of the universalist-reactionary, on the other hand, is in itself irredeemable, since every proper name he possesses has the function of properly hiding his body and the peculiar character of his language. In reality, the universalist-reactionary fears the proper name, because he puts his authority at stake, which often forces him to invent for himself a fantastic precedence in lost continents or even in subterranean cities in a Hollow Earth, that is, everything that can hide the place from which its utterance begins. Despite starting from another cartographic cut, the philosopher Moysés Pinto Neto precisely describes the meaning of such a disembodied "Tradition": > "It is not to an ancestral-local tradition that one turns, reimagining the future in a disjunction that communicates with the specters. It is the materialization of the project of absolute white domination of the world, carried out by colonialism and the insignia of superiority over other peoples, which is aimed here. Extermination, war or indifference are possible forms of relationship with otherness, depending on what is best to assert supremacy" What we call "reactionary-universalism" is qualified as "reactionary" in relation to the irreducible plurality of religions, not necessarily expressing itself in a political form that we conventionally call "reactionary". However, the formal and even concrete sympathies in some phenomena present in this category with properly political reactionarism do not seem to be accidental. ## Capitulation, or Liberal Ecumenism > "Betrayal is not mere renunciation. Unfortunately, one cannot simply 'renounce' a truth. The denial of the Immortal in myself is something quite different from an abandonment, a cessation: I must always convince myself that the ImmortaI in question never existed, and thus rally to opinion's perception of this point – whose whole purpose, in the service of interests, is precisely this negation." (Badiou, Ethics, p. 79) It is possible that someone will say that the "discovery" of the multiplicity of religions does not have any radical consequences, or even that the brute fact of the multiplicity of religions does not involve any kind of Truth. For this perspective, the plurality of religious worlds must be framed by a logic where each tradition is analogous to a nation-state and ecumenism is the diplomatic dialogue between these sovereign bodies. Therefore, interreligious dialogue would be, in its full form, dialogue between religious leaders, that is, heads of state. Mutual tolerance agreements and protocol declarations about the "culture of peace" can be made between these states possessing fixed borders, official languages and internally homogeneous cultural configurations. The most radical consequence of the plurality of these bodies then implies a mere good-neighbor policy. Obviously, this framework presupposes, even if pragmatically, an international law, which in the modern case is substantiated in a secular ethic combined with some softened form of vulgar relativism. All the dynamics of religious structures are then crystallized and all transmundane communication is hampered, because in this perspective there is no Truth in the brute fact of the multiplicity of religions, only the realization that there are bodies and languages, each in its own ontological enclosure. Interreligious violence obviously precedes such a configuration, but here it gains more evident contours and a completely new degree of stimulation. Just as ultranationalism is a possibility inscribed within the liberal nation-state, sectarian religious terrorism as we know it today is a possibility inscribed in a conception of religion as a body possessing sovereign control over well-demarcated borders. The liberal-progressive religious and the fundamentalist-conservative fanatic form a dialectical polarity within each sovereign religious body, instituting a "political life" that is circumscribed within a very well-defined identity. However, we know that the "state of exception" is far from being an "exception" in the history of liberal democracies. Internal enemies are gestated and pursued inside the body in order to maintain its integrity and international dark forces are invoked as an explanatory resource for the crises created by institutional structures that occasionally monopolize the proper name of that religion.  Cross-cutting issues, such as race, class, gender and others, are completely invisible or treated within a field of parliamentary debate that softens or cancels their capacity for real transformation both within religions and in their relations with those who in other religious worlds also raise these flags. Taking power is unthinkable, one must humbly respect the rules of frank and democratic dialogue because the violent seizure of power must be restricted to fundamentalist fanatics, responsible for maintaining the integrity of the sovereign body if the more progressive liberal currents advance too much. Every advance must be gradual, and carried out in such a way that it can be reversed at any time by conservative forces and any international solidarity can be identified as heresy, apostasy or schism. ## Recovering the traces of Fidelity, or Liberation Theology Leornardo and Clodovis Boff in “Como fazer Teologia da Libertação” (1986) was convinced that the Faith was beginning to stop being a mere reproducer of structures of oppression to become an active protagonist in their overthrow. Boff’s optimism led him to believe that the liberation of the Faith from its “capitalist captivity” was “without return”, and that this fact constituted “…the most convincing refutation of modern atheism, for having shown, on the basis of practices, that God is a source of social commitment and no longer of historical alienation” (p. 140), a witty statement at the time, but which in our current context seems to have aged like milk. Currently, reactionary religious currents are not content just to conserve what is “already there”, but are substantially and creatively engaged in creating new forms of containment not only capable of rendering any progressive social change unthinkable, but of destroying and subverting the few achievements already achieved, an effort that even relies on the deliberate distortion of its own criteria of religious orthodoxy, giving the expression *“changing everything to change nothing”* an epistemological and strategic density never before imagined. The Simulacrum and the Capitulation, the conservative pole of liberal-ecumenism and the reactionary-universalists, create tactical alliances that cross different religious worlds with the aim of definitively canceling any emancipatory future. If we are faithful to Boff's statement that *“Liberation Theology appears to be contemporary with the ongoing history; it does not close itself in a splendid theoretical solitude but descends to the edge of life, where human destinies are played”* (p. 142), we must recognize that the simple hope in the realization of progressive values immanent in a theology was not enough. Indeed, God remains a source of social engagement, but not all engagements are the same as not all Gods are. The Liberal and the Communist worship the same Goddesses (“Liberty”, “Fraternity”), but they do so through completely different sacramental mediations, causing the activities (“energeia”) of these deities to be underdetermined by conceptual-ritual structures that aim to equally different goals. It is not enough to recognize the progressive potentialities of a theology, but to think about how these potentialities will be modulated in abstract or concrete structures of different scales, and how we could fulfill in these the emancipatory pretensions involved in the progressive potentialities recognized by us. When we say that there are progressive potentialities within a religious context that need to be articulated at different scales, we need to clarify that such potentialities are not the "whole" of religion, but a "position" that emerges within it in a general situation of struggle and dispute, which is eminently political. Liberation Theology is not a way of instrumentalizing Religion for the emancipatory struggle, but it is the desire for emancipation that comes from the bowels of this religion, which as a social phenomenon, manifests itself politically. The event of the "discovery" of the plurality of religions establishes, like any theological event (visible in the history of different traditions), the requirement of a compromise, of taking a position that is established both in the most abstract domain of theology and up to its consequences in the properly social. The "Einstein" event in Modern Physics did not imply, in its time, only a division between those who denied or accepted the postulates of general relativity in terms of physical theory, but also in a social and political position when his theory was criticized for having been produced by the mind of a socialist Jew. "Left politics" is not something that is placed from "outside to inside", but from "inside to outside", establishing from there a field of communicability between the religious field and the political field, conserving a relative autonomy, but visibly different from typically "secular" autonomy (where movement between fields is impossible). If philosopher Michael Löwy (2016) recognizes the existence of an "elective affinity" between the field of radical left politics and that of the Christian religion as one of the elements that constitute Liberation Theology in Latin, we can say that such affinity only may have materialized to the extent that the "position" of one of the poles of affinity was present as one of the available possibilities of realization in the theological field. This means that Liberation Theology is a theological possibility among others, a specific way in which Religion can be articulated, and that it is defined as such as committed to a project of human emancipation, at the same time that such commitment and project is an externalization of the content of the religion itself, making it possible to establish a field of relationships with struggles that share the same "affinities". Our interest in Liberation Theology does not reside only in its social concerns, but in how these are articulated in a peculiar way in the relationship with the Local-Global, Periphery-Center dyad. If *“…Liberation Theology represents the first Theology of the periphery elaborated from the questions raised by the periphery but with a universal intention”* (p. 140), then it establishes itself as a perspective absolutely aware of its local, peripheral, and as well as its universal claim. In this way, Liberation Theology enables us to think that the "center", the place from which one can have a universal intention, can be, after all, what would not usually be thought of as "center". The "universal that starts from the periphery" reveals that every universal claim starts from a local and therefore affirms a truth incompatible with either liberal ecumenism (which denies religious truth and its universality) or reactionary universalism (which denies the local multiplicity of the universal). The *"universal that starts from the periphery"* taken to its ultimate consequences coincides with the universal concreteness of the transcendental multiplicity of religions. As we have already said, every religion develops its own conditions of intelligibility of the world, in a way that it would not be possible to sustain a “transcendent unity” capable of suppressing the specificities of the transcendental conditions of each one of them. This is the local, shall we say, "peripheral" character of a perspective of the universal that stands against a unifying metaphysical colonialism, but also against an ontological apartheid between different religious worlds. Hence the need to build conditions of transversability within this multiplicity of worlds, but such construction requires from us a minimum theological commitment: to respect the “proper name” of religions, as well as the “proper name” of their Gods or sacred values. As we have already stated, even religions with universalist-unifying claims carry out this process within what is designated by their name and the theological or hierological structures associated with it, not escaping the conceptual underdeterminations of their own world. These conditions of transversability would then be means by which the "situated universals" of each religion could recognize each other. ## Methodological Polytheism > "Polytheism properly understood is not about a multiplicity of finite gods, but about a multiplicity of infinite Gods. If this way does not lie open for Theology, then only the proliferation of 'regional' disciplines on the model of Dharma Studies will restore intellectual equilibrium, just as in the absence of a multicultural Philosophy the study of Chinese philosophy, for example, might be left to the 'Confucius Institutes' funded by the Chinese government; but this will not solve the problem of mediation among these traditions and discourses. The possibility of a mediation neither reductive nor totalizing will continue to pose itself within and between these religious and philosophical traditions, for whomever have the ears to hear it." (Edward Butler, Polytheism as Methodology in the Study of Religions) At the beginning of our text, we insinuated that the "discovery" of the multiplicity of religions would be something analogous to the discovery of Cantor's multiple infinities. Badiou also understood that the Cantonese revolution would be deeply linked to a theological revolution. However, faithful to a certain secular supersessionism typical of his local culture, he could only interpret it as a secularization of the Infinite, following in the footsteps of his cultural predecessors who affirmed the identity between this concept and its God: > "The mathematical secularization—by Cantor—of infinity immediately implies the separation of infinity and the One.The fact that there are completely different infinities is undoubtedly the most important of the discoveries of this secularization (...) No wonder, then, that Cantor, who was very mentally troubled, it is true, by his own genius and the radicality of his discoveries, asked Rome—the Pope—if his mathematical concept of actual infinity wasn't ultimately blasphemous. I think it is, in fact, since, remaining foreign to the One, the various forms of multiple-infinity cannot be represented as persons, even by analogy" ("Immanence of Truths", pp. 252-253) However, long before Cantor, many spiritualities were not only aware of analogous problems, but actively constructed systems where the collapse of the One (as a unifying totality) was its constituent part: Amerindian perspectivism founded on the principle of "connection and heterogeneity" described by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and the Buddhist anti-holisms of a Vasubandhu and Nagarjuna are some clear cases of this movement. However, our attention is focused on a very peculiar case, present in the twilight moments of the Platonic Academy, often seen as the cradle of the One-All thought. Such a choice not only rests on the fact that there is a contestation of the One-All in a context intimately linked to a religious thought, but on the specific substance of this contestation, which links it with the purpose of this text: the construction of a perspective that can honor the Truth of the multiplicity of religions. Before being persecuted by Emperor Theodosius I, the Neoplatonist Damascius already questioned the possibility that the "All" could be properly unified. The extraction of the consequences of this thought was tragically interrupted and later veiled by interpretations that hid all the radicality involved in it. Before the separation between the Infinite and the One, Damascius already operated the separation between the Totality and the totalizing One through another concept of Unity, which in Edward Butler’s reading would mean saying that *“the unity of the Many things lies solely in the presence of all of them in each one, not in a totalizing one”* ("Ineffability and Totality in Damascius", p. 8). We could derive from this thought that the singularity of each religion, its proper name, does not found a body in exclusive opposition to the others (as in liberal ecumenism) nor is it the mere manifestation of a total truth that eclipses multiplicity (as in reactionary universalism), but a field of mutual universality, where each religion can see all the others from the particularity of its own perspective. However, the suggestion of such a possibility is still not enough, it needs to be properly developed.  In this sense, the “methodological polytheism” that we admit here as a principle, converges with other initiatives that, faithful to the proper name of their Faith, also want to build structures capable of giving joint traction to the various progressive movements and tendencies present within each religious universe. Each religion, on the scale of its own world, has always lived through such conflicts. Our proposal is to provide a model by which we can mobilize our struggle on a scale that is, in fact, “cosmopolitical”. A posture faithful to the pretensions of a "universal from the periphery" in the context of the "discovery" of religious plurality should not shy away from responding to this novelty by using the creative potential immanent in the world from which it properly starts, simultaneously opposing the freezing of religions in the form of dogma (liberal ecumenism) or the obscuring of change through protochronic fantasy (reactionary universalism). Our proposal does not deny its own underdetermination, but consciously operates with the aim not so much of “discovering” but of “building” transversal connection points between these diverse worlds. There is no "transcendent unity of religions" beyond the proper names of their Gods and revelations, however, nothing prevents us from aiming at a certain scale, an immanent and convergent unity of them, a unity that is established through historical struggles that they cross transversally and that can mobilize them together in the effective construction of a fairer society. Such unity of mobilization does not mean subsumption , but the affirmation of plurality through the unity of common purpose. If reactionary universalism establishes a metaperspective where all religions are dissolved in a metaphysical unity and liberal ecumenism creates an ontological-juridical structure capable of establishing peace treaties between monolithic religious territories, we seek a framework that seeks to deal with the transcendental plurality of religions from their properly emancipatory potentialities. It is not necessarily the only way to achieve such an objective, but it is established as a preliminary attempt to do so. What are the possible consequences of this within the current religious citadels? In this sense, politics and theology are shown to be hopelessly intertwined. ## The Christian case We might begin with a concrete example, say, that of perhaps one of the largest of the “universalizing” religions, Christianity. It is common knowledge that, in the broad sweep of things, the Christian faith has historically had totalizing aspirations, and has been the source of much destruction in the religious world. One might draw attention to the ways many pagan traditions in the Roman Empire were destroyed and subsumed and the parallels to the way similar things are happening in much of African Christianity (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-57316651). It is doubtful that the majority “anti-pagan” outlook of global Christianity and perhaps its Abrahamic siblings will change very soon. But, in using native Christian themes to justify and support polycentric liberation, we have a theoretical basis for when and how such an outlook might penetrate Christian circles. In dealing with these ideas in such a tradition where it is often thought this is impossible, we might have a blueprint for others. To start, it is important to note that Christian ontology is ideally Trinitarian, not just Triadic, and is also ideally Christocentric. This example makes use of the Maximian reading of the Trinitarian persons, as explained by J.D. Wood. We will see how, given this reading, we arrive at positions very similar to the polytheism we have in mind, without running afoul of anything essentially Christian. The key insight for Wood in his explanation of the theology of Maximus Confessor in his thesis (“That Creation is Incarnation, in Maximus Confessor”) is the *“beyond ontic”* nature of a hypostasis. In his reading of the Chalcedonian definition, Maximus finds that if Christ is to be the God-man, without mixture of the two natures, then his “hypostasis” must be the unity of both. For *“a “nature” has to do with “a logos of form,” and while a hypostasis as such lacks formal content, it still has a logos of some kind. Of what kind? Of no kind, for a “logos of hypostasis,” by definition, names no formal principle at all.”* (p. 129). That is, a hypostasis in the Maximian sense is not simply the particular of a universal. One word we might use to describe it is that it is the *individual*, who exists prior to all formal content, somehow, in the Logos, who is himself not a formal principle as such. The person, for Maximus, is not reducible to an instance of *what*, but a *who*. What this means is that, even with the relations of the Trinity that determine the Christian Cosmos, the three hypostases are not reducible to a universal divine “what” even if they determine themselves in relation *for us*. The predicates of Father, Son, and Spirit are determined relationally, as required within the divine essence which simply is divinity itself. However these predicates are not concrete without the “hypostases” to instantiate them. Therefore, the Son is named thus because of the relationship of being *begotten* and the Spirit named for the relationship of *procession*, with the Father as *Unbegotten*, the “source” of the Godhead, at least within a specific stream of Trinitarianism (Joshua R. Sijuade, “Monarchical Trinitarianism: A Metaphysical Proposal”), with the divine essence being the very “substance” of their manifestation; however, this “substance” is not *instantiated except as the three persons*, and not as abstract particulars from an abstract universal. This last point is crucial, because as Wood says, creation *is incarnation* in Maximus’ theology. If hypostasis instantiates nature and is not reducible to nature, then it can itself encompass “more” than divinity, even if formally, there is nothing beyond divinity. In his words: “It is of the very nature of God to become creaturely precisely because he is no creature.” (Jordan Daniel Wood, “Creation is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity of the Logoi in Maximus Confessor”, p. 18)  The Trinity is itself the beginning of the Christian Cosmos, *centered in Christ* as the hypostatic unity of contingent natures and eternal divinity, a hypostasis that has no “formal” content on its own. Somehow, each Trinitarian hypostasis can encompass the others and the Cosmos without breaking divine simplicity or reducing them to an impersonal essence. We can already see the convergence with Edward Butler’s polycentric polytheism, where each God is in fact able to encompass all other Gods without reduction to an impersonal essence and without breaking divine simplicity. We also see a convergence with how these Gods relate with each other *for us*. One might perhaps ask why this Trinitarianism is not polytheism, why Christians restrict the hypostases to three, and how this parallel might be put to use for our interreligious “bridge”? The answers to the second and the third question are perhaps less controversial than the answers to the first, because Christianity has a history of hostility towards anything that seems like “tritheism”. However, one might ask if by the Christian understanding of the word “Tritheism”, a polycentric polytheist reading of the Trinity would qualify. After all the main philosophical issue has been the fact that Christians understand “three gods” to mean three beings ordinarily subject to a higher ontological principle, but still denying that principle. Polycentric Polytheism sidesteps that critique with its own understanding of personhood that is very similar in many respects to Maximus’ understanding of the Trinitarian hypostases. We could build one bridge here with this possibility. The answers to the second and third lie in the particularity of the Christian revelation and the traditions it birthed. The Christian Cosmos is constituted by the activity of three hypostases who are often analogized as “Lover”, “Beloved”, and the “Love” between them. This is perhaps a closed loop, needing no major addition within its own ontological frame. But again, this is the Christian Cosmos, which has its own hierarchies and edges. Although the person embraces a particular ontological hierarchy – without being reducible to it – the relations and entities in explicit ontological relationship with the hypostatized natures constitute a world, from the perspective of which there is an “outside”. So, although Christ “rules” all things, the manner of this “rule” is debatable and is not as direct as a sovereign monad over all worlds. A monadic Christ cannot solve the “crisis of totality” (Butler, Damascian Negativity). In fact, such a Christ does not fully adhere to the Chalcedonian definition. A monad is formal, a hypostasis as such (in the Maximian Christian sense) is not. In the abstract, considered only in terms of the hypostases, there is nothing stopping there to be an uncountable “number” of them. However, for the Christian Cosmos, the central deity is three in unity and unity in trinity. This is the second bridge: While maintaining the “universal particularity” of the Christian tradition, with the creeds intact, we might acknowledge, using our own theology, the possibility (and actuality) of other worlds with other deities and other “hypostases” for those worlds, in whatever numbers and relationships are possible, using the fact that their unity in Christ and Christ’s unity in them is precisely not monadic, but “henadic” (in the Butlerian sense) or “Hypostatic” (in the Maximian sense). Christ “rules” in the same fundamental way the Father and Spirit “rule” and the same fundamental way any other “hypostasis” or “henad” in the abstract rules: *in each being they are the ineffable unity of all the others and all things prior to ontic determination: that is, **polycentric unity**.* Christians might also reconsider what is in fact “deity” in their traditions, for they have many entities in the positions usually ascribed to Gods, and it is possible that they too might be “autarchic” deities in their own right, deities we already “worship” (David Armstrong, “The Goddess Wisdom: Sophia, Shakti, and the Virgin”), and who subordinate themselves to the Trinity *for us* (Butler, The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus) just as the Trinity is itself fundamentally *turned towards us* in being turned toward each other (David Bentley Hart, “You are Gods”). This radical leveling of Christianity with respect to other traditions from inside Christian theology itself gives a theological justification to help preserve and support progressive flourishing in traditions other than its own, rather than the regrettable violence of subsumption common in its history. In this way, it is possible to find in a religious tradition such as the Christian one several elements of its theological infrastructure that can effectively allow a different perspective on itself and on other traditions. We affirm, without any fear of polemic, that such an attitude is a condition of Truth for a tradition: > "...it is not enough for the faith to be true in terms of its expression (orthodoxy); it is verified, that is, it becomes true, when it is informed of love, solidarity, hunger and thirst for justice." (Boff, 1986, p. 82) The above statement is not unique to the Christian or biblical tradition, but is a potential transversal point that can effectively cross different religious worlds. On an intra-religious level, such an attitude is more than necessary when many emerging and traditional forms of religions are underdetermined by ideological structures harmful to their own flourishing, preventing broad networks of human solidarity from being built and strengthening all vices and prejudices that hinder the realization of a more just and fraternal world for all.  ## Building a Faithful Subject The convergence of the polycentric and the peripheral-center relationship also gives another advantage for both the intra-religious and the inter-religious level of dialogue: the integrity of every individual on every “scale”. In opposition to the reactionary-universalist, the proper names and individual unity of traditions are preserved. In opposition to the liberal-ecumenist, this integrity is not a fixed and homogenous partitioning of opposing religious “nation states”. Individual persons as much as Institutions and whole traditions have their own proper names, with center and periphery relationships, such that the wholes are an “overlapping” of perspectives in common, with “conformal” scaling (Adam Louis-Klein, “Reflections on Cyclic Cosmologies”) and indefinite “edges” where traditions meet. A religion is no longer required to have institutional unity, even if that is allowed. It can be diverse as required and as possible. There are no more hard borders, but there is uniqueness of tradition. There is not one center, but many centers. There is no one perennial tradition, but a fractal multiplicity of traditions, where what is “repeated” on every scale is the generic peripheral-center relationship, with every iteration allowed to the extent that it maintains polycentricity, rather than just one iteration of the same particular peripheral-center relationship on every scale.  In allowing individuals to be “themselves”, to be *liberated* towards their individual integrity, in “integrity” in every sense, including the moral, we fulfill what Adam Labecki would call the purpose of “henology”, and its manifestation for the individual in what he calls “inward pressing” (Adam Labecki, “The One and the Many, Part One”). In this “Liberation”, we find a metaphysical justification to the definition of *Liberation theology* given earlier, for “inward pressing” can only start from the periphery towards the center, and the center is not one, but many. It is *each* individual, *liberated*. ## The "Other Side" of the Political Left The findings of this text cannot bring about any real change by themselves; they need to be "politically" articulated. If we define the need for this articulation within each religious world and in the domain that exists "between" these different worlds, we must add another space here. If this text proposes the construction of a religious left in a robust sense, it will also articulate with the political field of the political left as such. In this sense, what we call the religious left would not only be the set of people who politically identify with the left and who happen to have a religion, but as a relatively autonomous political field that can and must have its own political strategy of conquest in the world: it’s own domain, which is the social reality of religion, connecting this strategic field with social reality in a general sense, and in that sense, with the left in its general political sense. But what would this left be in its general political sense? In the book *Arquitetura das Arestas* (2022), Edemilson Paraná and Gabriel Tupinambá sought to develop a map of the Brazilian political left of the last decade that, despite being eminently contextual, can help us to have an idea of what the left would be in a general political sense in a concrete political reality. The work of Paraná and Tupinambá distinguishes three elementary "types" of territories governed by three types of logics in the field of the political left: 1) *Community*: deeply linked to the field of culture and the claims arising from movements guided by marginalized social identities that are transversal to the class field; 2) *Institutional*: reformist oriented and possessing political traction in the electoral field, being able to dispute its agendas within the liberal-democratic structure and, therefore, limiting them according to such dispute structure; 3) *Economic*: faithful to the centrality of the opposition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, with a revolutionary orientation and whose objective is focused on the radical transformation of the logic of work. These three logics operate in the field in the resolution of problems that are found in the immanent fabric of the claims of social movements, institutional structures and the contradictions of the current mode of economic production. They operate decisively in this world and for this world, understood as the world proper to Politics and its constitutive tensions, however, there is something "beyond" or even "between" these territories (in the domain of their mutual negations) that seem to point to another place, *"...a logical space whose "attractor" is the very idea of transcendence, with its paradoxes, its stable (God) and unstable (nihilism) forms"* (p. 161). It is not up to us here to carry out a historical survey that demonstrates how this specter of God (and Nothingness) was always present in the political field of the left in places like Brazil (where Ecclesiastical Communities guided by Liberation Theology played an important role in the constitution of what is now the institutional left). But to affirm that such *"...autonomous logic that affirms the possibility of transcendence of the world"* (ibidem) does not need to be the negative of the political left in its general sense, but an as yet unnamed otherness with not only enemies but also friends. The present text was a preliminary attempt to give some intelligibility to this terrain and the subjects that inhabit it. ## Postscript This text was written on the eve of the second round of the Brazilian presidential elections, contested by Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (a candidate of the Institutional Left who has basically mobilized all the forces of the democratic political spectrum at this moment) and Jair Messias Bolsonaro (a proud representative of the parliamentary bench "Ox, Bible and Bullet", that is, the confluence between extractive agribusiness, arms industry and neo-Pentecostalism anchored in the "Theology of Prosperity" imported from the most disgusting alleys of the Global North). This dispute clearly demonstrated that, contrary to the Schmittian maxim that modern political ideologies are secularized theologies, the space between the "secular" and the "religious" is not only porous, but has a dynamic of double movement, where secular theologies and sacralized political ideologies overlap and translate into one another. If Liberation Theology was accused of introducing political discussion within the Churches, these same accusers carried out a "counter-reform" that today takes the form of transforming certain sectors of Christianity (and not only) into an apocalyptic cult of the extreme right, capable of persecuting his own brothers in the faith in the name of a political project founded on the exploitation of man by man. 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Retrieved from [http://dlib.bc.edu/islandora/object/bc-ir:108259](http://dlib.bc.edu/islandora/object/bc-ir:108259). 2018 Julian Letter to Arsacius. http://www2.latech.edu/~bmagee/201/swinburn/Julian.html. ## Notes [^1]: Being aware of this problem, we pragmatically choose to use the concept of "religion", using it in its current sense to problematize its relations with another no less semantically problematic domain, that of "politics". [^2]: Although the framework in which these terms are being placed in the text follows by analogy the Badiounian usage (understood from the previous quote from his *Ethics*), they can also be understood in their "generic" sense.