to express the fullness of His being, but on the contrary, that they express too high an idea for God, of whom nothing can be said except "He is," because there is absolutely nothing more to say. This conception of God is the conception of an absolutely empty being. Monism, I said, is a necessary idea in philosophy. The Absolute must be one. But an utterly abstract monism is impossible. If the Absolute is simply one, wholly excludent of all process and multiplicity, out of such an abstraction the process and multiplicity of the {71} world cannot issue. The Absolute is not simply one, or simply many. It must be a many in one, as correctly set forth in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Religion moves from an abstract polytheism (God is many) to an abstract monotheism (God is one; Judaism, Hinduism and Islam). But it does not stop there. It rightly passes on to a concrete monotheism (God is many in one; Christianity). There are two popular misconceptions regarding the doctrine of the Trinity. The first mistake is that of popular rationalism, the second is that of popular theology. Popular rationalism asserts that the doctrine of the Trinity is contrary to reason. Popular theology asserts that it is a mystery which transcends reason. But the truth is that it neither contradicts nor transcends reason. On the contrary, it is in itself the highest manifestation of reason. What is really a mystery, what really contradicts reason, is to suppose that God, the Absolute, is simply one without any multiplicity. This contradiction results in the fatal dualism which broke out in Eleaticism, and has broken out in every other system of thought, such as that of the Hindus or that of Spinoza, which begins with the conception of the Absolute as a pure one, totally exclusive of the many. {72} CHAPTER V HERACLEITUS