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Health & Fitness

Polytheism, Henotheism & Radical Monotheism

That title is quite a mouthful, isn't it?  I hope to make some sense of those big words in today's posting, which continues the exploration the work of James Fowler I began last week.  In today's article I want to explain how Fowler describes different kinds of faith.  

Our lives are filled with myriad relationships that require varying faith stances:  our faith in the work we do (do we believe in the significance of our vocation?), our faith in our family (do we have faith in their love and goodwill?), or even our faith in a particular store we frequent (will they sell us a product of value and stand behind it if something goes wrong?).  How do we organize and integrate these different faith relationships?  Fowler describes three possibilities:  polytheism, henotheism, and radical monotheism.

“Polytheism” Fowler defines as “a pattern of faith and identity that lacks any one center of value and power of sufficient transcendence to focus and order one’s life."  It is easy to think of examples of this: people who use their time, money and energies for a wide range of things generally touted by popular culture to represent the good life (e.g. weekend ski trips, fancy restaurants, exotic vacations).   It is not the things themselves that are the problem.  It is that they are pursued as if they are minor gods embodying some higher good, without the person consuming them having awareness of anything of supreme value within themselves by which to order their priorities.  Their pursuits reflect the waxing and waning of various styles and fads, their sense of self borne up and down on the swells and troughs of popular culture with no internal rudder to direct them toward a truly transcendent goal. 

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Fowler divides the polytheist style into two sub-categories. One type he describes as the “protean” type, who makes “a series of relatively intense or total identity and faith plunges, but their commitments prove to be transient and shifting."  Proteus was a minor sea god who could adopt any form he desired, but who found it impossible to maintain any particular identity or commitment. The second type of polytheist he describes as the “diffuse” kind: 

These people never bring all of their passion to any relationship or value commitment.  They tend to preserve a kind of laid-back, cool provisionality regarding commitment or trust.  Most of us are more polytheistic than we like to think.  The practical impact of our consumer society’s dominant myth – that you should experience everything you desire, own everything you want and relate intimately with whomever you wish – is to make the polytheistic pattern, in either its protean or diffuse form, seem normative.

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The second faith-identity pattern Fowler describes is “henotheistic,” which suggests an intense and long term devotion to a single god, but a god that is ultimately false, in that it is limited and thus not worthy of our full devotion.  Common examples of henotheism can be witnessed in mid-life men and women who have made their career or their children the supreme focus of all their energies.  They usually have to come to terms with the limits of these values as their children move out and their careers either stall or succeed:  “The henotheistic god is finally an idol.  It represents the elevation to central, life-defining value and power of a limited and finite good.  It means the attribution of ultimate concern to that which is of less than ultimate worth."  Fowler acknowledges there can be noble examples of henotheism:

Nations, churches, universities, political parties, the liberation and empowerment of minorities, even (or especially) philosophies and ideological movements, are all potential henotheistic centers of value and power.  There are many others.  In this more noble form of henotheistic faith, identity is found in losing the self in the service of a transcendingly important, if finite, cause.

The third faith identity pattern is what Fowler calls “radical monotheism.”   He defines radical monotheism as a “supreme trust and loyalty in a transcendent center of value and power, that is neither a conscious or unconscious extension of personal or group ego nor a finite cause or institution." He says that many religions have captured this concept, and it does not mean the devaluing of less transcendent centers of power and being (such as the henotheistic ones listed above), but their being held in their relative place of importance:

Radical monotheistic faith calls people to an identification with a universal community.  Again this does not negate or require denial of our membership in more limited groups with their particular “stories” and centering values.  But it does mean that our limited, parochial communities cannot be revered and served as though they have ultimate value….

Radical monotheistic faith, as understood here, rarely finds consistent and long lasting actualization in persons or communities.  People too easily lapse into a confusion of our representations of a transcendent center of value and power with that reality itself.  We continually feel the pull towards henotheistic and polytheistic forms of faith.  But as a regulative principle, as a critical ideal against which to keep our partial faiths from becoming idolatrous, radical monotheism is of tremendous importance.

I will skip here to the punch line of Fowler's six stages of faith development and tell you that Stage Six embodies the kind of radical monotheism he is describing here.  But next week we'll start with Stage One so you can understand the progression.

Do you have a question about your marriage or relationship? Is there a particular topic on relationships or individual psychological issues you would like addressed in this blog? Ask Josh in the comments below or email him at josh@joshgressel.com.

Josh Gressel, Ph.D., is a couples and individual therapist based in Pleasant Hill, CA. Visit his website at joshgressel.com.  He is currently accepting referrals.


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