D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y
IN PHILOSOPHY

One of the teachers of the law ... asked [Jesus],
"Of all the commandments, which is the most important?"
"The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this:
`Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One."
- Mark 12:28-29

In the arena of philosophy, Division Theory seems to have been long anticipated. As far back as the 5th century BC, Plato related a story already thought quite ancient in his day, a legend about a primordial "Fall" from unity into multiplicity. Seven centuries later, Origen, one of the leading theologians of the early Christian Church, apparently placed such stock in this timeless creation-legend that he placed it at the center of his own teachings. A thousand years later, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux was still expounding upon this theme to his students; the specific purpose of the many exercises and observances of Christian life were, according to Saint Bernard, to make people aware of their own inner state of division. And four hundred years after Bernard's teachings, the Church still found this ancient stream of thought being supported, this time in the work of St. John of the Cross. This famous Christian mystic taught that all dicotomies and duali ties, such as subject-object, male-female, or even conscious-unconscious, are no longer real or meaningful for a soul who has achieved divine union. For such a one, St. John insisted, all contraries are resolved and all divisions dismissed, leaving the soul knowing only absolute oneness.

Philosophers seem to have been climbing on this bandwagon in ever greater numbers in recent centuries, often using the idea of a foundational division as a framework to assist them in their efforts to define the essential nature of reality. Immanuel Kant, for instance, focused intently on the division between phenomena and noumena in developing his thought, while William Blake addressed the distinction between imagination and reason. Similarly, it was the subject- substance dicotomy that got Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's intellectual juices flowing, just as did the will-idea polarity for Arthur Schopenauer. Being-in-itself contrasted with being-for- itself in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, while, to Paul Tillich's way of thinking, existence wrestled with essence. And, of course, the famous I-Thou relationship was the key to understanding the universe for Martin Buber.

What's more, Blake, Hegel, Sartre, and Tillich all specifically endorsed the theory that an original Primodial Unity suffered an ancient, catastrophic rupture, in an event powerfully reminis cent of the creation-legend of the `Fall' of Man. Blake, in fact, went so far as to claim that all subsequent divisions and dicotomies, whether in objective existence in the physical world, or merely subjectively apparent to the human mind alone, were the direct consequences of that primordial fall and rupture.

Hegel named this Original Unity `Spirit', and its divided halves he identified as `subject' and `substance'. He viewed their division as part of a profound metaphysical circle, a great recurring cycle that spirals ever upward. Upon dividing apart, Hegel maintained, the two halves then begin struggling to reunite anew, eventually doing so at a more mature, more advanced level of being. This newly reformed Unity then divides apart once more, repeating the cycle endlessly (reminding one eerily of double helix diagrams of DNA molecules). While the Unity's two halves are divided from one another, Hegel believed, they are tormented by the need to end the division. Hegel thought that the ultimate reunion of the two halves was inevitable, that they could not help but eventually merge back into a singularity again at the far end of the cycle. Such an image is not without its Biblical parallels:

I am Alpha and Omega,
the beginning and the end, saith the Lord.
----- Revelation 1:8

But the reunion of the two halves would not, according to Hegel, be achieved merely by returning to their earlier states; the reunited Unity, he believed, would possess a hard-won new quality, a new state of being, a new immediacy, as if the Unity, although infinite, was none theless able to grow, progress, even evolve, through the agonizing, self-confrontative process of division and reunion, the process, in other words, of living and dying:

Everywhere, no matter what the sphere of interest (whether reli gious, political, or personal), the really creative acts are repre sented as those deriving from some sort of dying to the world; and what happens in the interval of the hero's nonentity, so that he comes back as one reborn, made great and filled with creative power, mankind is also unanimous in declaring.
------ Joseph Campbell

...schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futur ism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld to gether again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death - the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new."
------ Joseph Campbell

One of the greatest stumbling blocks Christianity has ever encountered is the question `How could God ask His own Son to die?' But if this vision of the Supreme God Himself dying and being reborn is correct, then the life and career and crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ is just all that more appropriate; indeed, it is exactly what one would expect the life of the Son of such a God to be, an absolutely perfect representation of, a perfect reflection of, His Father's own reality:

Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.
------ John 14:9

One wonders why, where one philosopher was convinced he'd found imagination and reason to be the foundations of reality, another saw subject and substance, another, will and idea, and still another, existence and essence. Fortunately, Sartre's thought seems to include an intriguing suggestion as to why all these profound thinkers might have arrived at such dissimilar visions of ultimate reality:

Being is never exhausted by any of its phenomenal aspects; no particular perspective reveals the entire character of being. ...Be ing ... never becomes totally translucent to consciousness. Being is ... in no way exhausted by any particular perspective that man has of the phenomena.

If true, this would explain why all these philosophers' individual approaches, their celebrated attempts to describe ultimate reality, all drew maddeningly different conclusions; indeed, it would also explain why humanity's various religious founders all seem to have painted different pictures as well. But isn't it curious that all these profound thinkers, philosophers and theologians alike, used the framework of Division Theory as the tree upon which their thoughts took bloom?

If these philosophers are correct, and a Primordial Unity indeed did once rupture into two parts at the dawn of time, and if, as virtually all religions claim, that Primordial Unity was infinite in nature, then each of the two parts of its division would also be infinite as well. If this was so, there would have to be an infinite number of ways of perceiving the divided halves, an infinity of perspectives available to observe the division. But no single perspective could completely capture and define it in its entirety, except for one: the perspective that is only visible from within its Reunited Center. Innumerable mystics from every culture and time have, in fact, claimed to have achieved this ultimate perspective, but upon doing so, they quite invariably and all-too frustrat ingly inform the rest of us that the perspective they found there, although glorious, is virtually impossible to describe in words.

The problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey. "For then alone do we know God truly," writes Saint Thomas Aquinas, "when we believe that He is far above all that man can possibly think of God." And in the Kena Upanishad, in the same spirit: "To know is not to know; not to know is to know."
------ Joseph Campbell

These celebrated philosophers tried, and perhaps even succeeded, in grasping and relating genuine glimpses of the Divided Unity that is our reality; all their approaches, and doubtless countless other possible approaches as well, may indeed be correct (though necessarily incomplete) perspectives of the ultimate nature of our divided reality.

The Hebrew prophets seem to have concealed their vision of the split within the meta phors and symbolism of the Old Testament's passages. The ancient Hindus, notwithstanding their famous devotion to religion, seem to have never become more than partially familiar with the full picture; nor did the Buddhists of Tibet or the Taoists of China. The worlds of psychology and philosophy have likewise each recognized no more than part of the picture; the origins, climax, and eventual outcome of this condition seem even now to remain beyond the scope of pure scien tific inquiry or intellectual analysis alone. Even the mainstream Christian denominations never recognized more than part of this story. Didn't any group, at any time in history, ever perceive the whole picture - what the split was, how it originated, what its significance was, what its conse quences were, and what its ultimate solution would be?

Yes. The gnostics knew.