The Many Faces of the One

In this episode, I return to Henry Corbin’s The Paradox of Monotheism and explore his strange, beautiful, and deeply provocative argument that monotheism can become idolatrous when God is imagined as the highest being rather than the mystery of Being itself.Drawing from Ibn Arabi, Shi’a theosophy, Proclus, angelology, and Corbin’s reflections on mystical kathenotheism, I think through what it means to say that the One does not erase the Many, but reveals itself through many names, mirrors, angels, and Faces.This is an episode about theology after rigid certainty, spirituality beyond flat relativism, and the possibility of a re-enchanted symbolic world where plurality is not a threat to transcendence, but one of its deepest forms of disclosure.