One

The One is a sovereign that has nothing over it. It is God and parent, father of all, the invisible one that is over all… it is greater than a god, because it has nothing over it and no lord above it.

The Gnostic Secret Book of John presents the One as an absolute apophatic principle — illimitable, immeasurable, unnameable — that transcends even the category of divinity and constitutes the ground of all existence from within itself.

Marvin W. Meyer, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005thesis

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The One is not corporeal and it is not incorporeal. The One is not large and it is not small. It is impossible to say, How much is it? What [kind is it]? For no one can understand it.

Negative theology applied to the One demonstrates that it escapes all categorical determination, including those of quantity and substance, making it formally incomprehensible to discursive thought.

Marvin W. Meyer, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005thesis

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One partakes of being, which is not the same with one; the words ‘being’ and ‘one’ have different meanings… one is never one, and in this way the one, if it is, becomes many and infinite.

Plato’s Parmenides establishes the central dialectical paradox: that the One, once it is posited as participating in being, immediately bifurcates into a duality and thus generates infinite multiplicity.

Plato, Parmenides, -370thesis

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The one cannot possibly partake of being… the one neither is nor is one… that which is not admits of no attribute or relation… there is no name, nor expression, nor perception, nor opinion, nor knowledge of it.

Under the hypothesis that the One does not partake of being, Plato derives the total ineffability of the One — it cannot be named, known, or perceived — arriving at a conclusion structurally identical to Gnostic apophasis.

Plato, Parmenides, -370thesis

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When we confess that God is One we deny that He is single; for the Son is the complement of the Father… They Two are One God. You cannot confuse Them together, for They Two are not One Person.

John of Damascus argues that the confession of divine unity necessarily entails internal differentiation: ‘One God’ excludes both ditheism and bare singularity, requiring a Trinitarian logic of complementarity.

John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016thesis

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They Who are one in essence are not one person, and He Who is not one person with Him Who is, is yet so free from difference from Him that They Two are One God.

The Damascene refines the Trinitarian paradox: numerical oneness of essence coexists with real personal distinction, and heretical reductions to either bare unity or duality both misread this formula.

John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting

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If thou wrongly employest the confession of one God to deny the Godhead of Christ… to be One is characteristic and peculiar to Him Who is One.

Damascus demonstrates that the exclusivity implied by ‘one’ cannot be weaponized against either member of the co-equal unity without self-contradiction, since both Father and Son bear the predicate ‘one’ in their respective modes.

John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting

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In the passage from one to many and from many to one, the one is neither one nor many, neither separated nor aggregated.

At the threshold between states — including the passage from One to many — the One temporarily suspends all predicates, occupying a liminal moment outside both unity and plurality.

Plato, Parmenides, -370supporting

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One, then, alone is one, and two do not exist… if there are not two, there is no contact… the one touches and does not touch itself and the others.

The argument that genuine oneness precludes duality — and therefore contact — reveals the isolation inherent in absolute unity, a structural insight that later resurfaces in depth-psychological treatments of the Self as non-relational ground.

Plato, Parmenides, -370supporting

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Both Buddhas, however, are only facets of the Great One. After one day and one night Ma died. His mortal part (his moon visage) lasted only that long, but another, more archetypal part of himself was to last much longer.

Von Franz deploys the Zen master’s death-koan to illustrate how temporal and eternal modes of being are facets of a unitary archetypal ground — the Great One — that contains both mortal and immortal aspects of the psyche.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting

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The Chinese thus have a view of the universe in which temporality and not-time are a complementary Two-Oneness; and synchronistic events would be the sporadic manifestation of their complete oneness.

Von Franz shows that for Chinese cosmology, time and timelessness form a complementary Two-Oneness whose complete unity sporadically breaks through as synchronistic events, reframing the One as a dynamic totality rather than static abstraction.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting

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Nor… can we easily persuade ourselves with Zeller that by the ‘one’ he means the Idea; and that he is seeking to prove indirectly the unity of the Idea in the multiplicity of phenomena.

Jowett’s introduction surveys and rejects reductive identifications of Plato’s ‘One’ with the Idea, insisting the dialogue’s logical exercise resists collapse into any single metaphysical doctrine.

Plato, Parmenides, -370supporting

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Diels has quoted this description as the best commentary on Parmenides’ comparison of his One Being, ‘complete on every side’, to ‘the mass of a well-rounded sphere, equally poised from the centre in every direction’.

The Timaeus’s spherical World-Soul offers a cosmological embodiment of Parmenidean One-Being — complete, uniform, equidistant from its centre — linking the logical One to the physical image of perfect wholeness.

Plato, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting

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A true understanding of myth must not take its description literally… it has the task of counteracting the textual exposition by reconstituting in our mind a unity that due to the necessities of the narrative form appears to be split apart.

Giegerich, following Plotinus, argues that psychological reading of myth must restore the underlying logical unity — the One — that narrative form necessarily scatters into sequential parts.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

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Jung advanced the idea that number is an archetype of order that is in the process of becoming conscious. It is the most primitive manifestation.

Von Franz presents Jung’s thesis that the first whole number — the One — is not merely a mathematical unit but the primordial archetype of order emerging into consciousness, connecting numerical foundation to depth-psychological ontology.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting

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‘That art thou’ (tat tvam asi)… reduced the entire spectacle of nature to its single, all-pervading, most subtle, absolutely intangible, hidden essence.

Zimmer shows how the Vedantic mahāvākya ‘That art thou’ enacts a recognition of absolute oneness — Ātman equals Brahman — that dissolves apparent multiplicity into a single hidden essence, the Indian analogue to Platonic and Gnostic One-doctrines.

Zimmer, Heinrich, Philosophies of India, 1951supporting

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Number altogether in China… becomes ‘number’ in the usual distinct sense of the word only when its latent orderedness has become conscious.

Von Franz situates the Chinese understanding of number within the framework of the One as latent archetypal order, arguing that distinctness — including the distinctness of ‘one’ — only emerges through the act of making unconscious orderedness conscious.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014aside

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The number four, from our practical experience, always points to a totality and a total conscious orientation, while the number three points to a dynamic flow of action.

Von Franz’s numerical typology implicitly situates the One at the origin of the series that generates three (dynamic creation) and four (ordered totality), framing it as the undifferentiated ground from which psychic structure unfolds.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995aside

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A woman has tremendous powers when the dual aspects of psyche are consciously recognized and beheld as a unit; held together rather than held apart. The power of Two is very strong and neither side of the duality should be neglected.

Estés approaches the One obliquely through the image of psychic duality consciously unified: the ‘unit’ formed by holding two aspects together evokes the One as telos of integration rather than starting point.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017aside

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