Chapter 4: The One (Episode Two)

The history of the One is not told through the history of the kings or prophets who honor his glory. It reads as a series of untimely transformations of the sacred, each time ripped away from a regime of fixation that had become lethal. The One does not progress: he migrates. And each of his migrations corresponds to a decisive mutation—from a chest to the text, from the "where" to the "when," from presence to waiting, from inhabited space to promised duration.

Each form of the One is a provisional compromise between presence and absence, between waiting and fulfillment. And with each of his metamorphoses, calendars and borders are torn apart.

From the Local to the Scriptural

In Deuteronomy, the oldest foundation of the Bible, the One establishes a survival pact with his people—not a vertical one between a master and servants, but a horizontal one, a coalition of principle against erasure. The Hebrews fear assimilation into the belly of empires; the One fears the silence of the last faithful. Their anguish is symmetrical: the fear of disappearing.

The One is not yet transcendent: he is solidary, but also suspicious of infidelity and the multitude of neighboring cults.

Originally, the One is still a god of the desert, of steep hills, of the trade routes crossing his lands—a politically unstable space without a fixed center. His presence imposes itself neither through stone nor monument, but through a mobile altar: the Ark of the Covenant, similar to the portable thrones of the Levant or Egyptian processional barques. A chest of wood and gold carried by men's arms, it circulates through the brother kingdoms of Judah and Israel between the 11th and 8th centuries BCE, accompanying the tribes in their movements, their wars, and their defeats. The One does not inhabit the territory; he traverses it in a cradle. He is huddled there in a material form, a small statue, an idol, similar to so many others in Canaan.

When Samaria, the northern capital, falls in 722 BCE and the Kingdom of Israel collapses, the Ark is moved to Judea, as much hunted by its enemies as it is protected and coveted by political power.

The One understands that a visible god, even a mobile one, remains mortal. He executes his first strategic displacement. The One invests memory, law, and narrative into the hands of a very young king: Josiah is eight years old when he takes the throne upon his father's death, and a very young adult when he launches the most ambitious religious reforms in Judea—those through which the One withdraws from every object to slip exclusively into scripture. This is not an elevation, but a retreat. From this period on, the Ark of the Covenant disappears from the narratives; the One erases the Ark to leave only the Covenant (l'Alliance). He replaces his statue with sacred tablets. He becomes history. Not an object of history, but the mode of writing history. He is no longer recounted. He is the voice that recounts. By becoming a structure of speech, he can no longer be denied by his own, unless they change their language, become mad, heretical, or foreign.

The One no longer has a body, so the people become his body. He no longer has a voice, so the people become his voice. He no longer has a memory, so the people become his memory. The people are not the witness of God; they are the guardian of his absence.

When Nebuchadnezzar destroys the First Temple in the 6th century BCE, the Judeans are shaken, but their deep identity remains intact, for it is intimately protected by texts and liturgy. And the One, for his part, has not only escaped ruin, he is ready for his next metamorphosis.

From the Scriptural to the Temporal

With the exile that follows, the One accompanies a vanquished people, yet one whose literacy he has accelerated.

When together they cross the walls of Babylon, the One discovers that he is in no way a cosmic sovereign. He is a nomadic, tribal, and irritable god, lost in the pantheon of the giants of the Fertile Crescent.

His rages, his repentances, his exclusivity betray a young, vulnerable, inexperienced god attempting to age himself and legitimize himself within the beards of the prophets. He depends on a restricted territory, a people without an army, a recent cult. Confronted with a millennial empire that invented writing, the One realizes that narratives are themselves a permanent battlefield, that his young testament can be torn up, erased, replaced by immutable myths and laws—more powerful ones, capable of seducing entire nations, including his own people. The One is not jealous; he is paranoid: he does not fear betrayal, he fears other memories returning. He does not defend his place, but the medium of his existence: the non-assimilation of his people.

Faced with all these ancient gods laden with attributes, the youth and dexterity of the One appear not as a weakness but as his greatest assets: he has everything to learn. He is, himself, a field of possibilities, the first god of the to-come (l'à-venir), the one who exists only because he is not yet ready, thus deferring his advent. The One loves vitality. He regularly subverts the logic of primogeniture that prevails in the Levant by giving his anointing to the youngest: Abel, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Ephraim, Benjamin, Moses, David, Solomon—all are blessed after their elders. Prophets like Jeremiah or Daniel—who recount the pain of exile—are chosen as figures of resilient youth facing an ancient, foreign, and oppressive order. David embodies the pivot that allows the Covenant to shift toward messianism, from ancient times toward future times: a young shepherd who slays the great, unifies the faith of his kin, and receives the promise of an eternal throne. The One loves childhood. He loathes the child sacrifices that take place in the Levant and forbids them through the allegory of the binding of Isaac and the hatred he bears for Moloch.

The One does not read the future but positions himself so as to precede events: he falsifies himself before being falsified. He does not wait for memory to return; he manufactures a memory so smooth that nothing can catch on it. He does not forbid other gods, but renders them incompatible with the available language.

In the copper and clay libraries of Mesopotamia, the One slips effortlessly into the great narratives of his neighbors. The epic of creation, the Enuma Elish, becomes the soil for his Genesis. The flood myth, with its hero Atrahasis, is taken up and reshaped to give birth to the story of Noah, not merely as a punishment of men, but as a reconfiguration: he erases the memory of the world so that the earth becomes a blank slate for the narrative to come. The laws of Babylon, such as the famous Code of Hammurabi, provide him a framework to better structure the rules of his Covenant. He becomes the master of Sacred Re-writings. He does not plagiarize: he metamorphoses. He offers Abraham, a Bedouin ancestor of the Canaanite desert, a noble and urban origin in the great city of Ur of the Chaldeans. The patriarch is not chosen, he is displaced: taken out of Ur, taken out of cyclical time, taken out of the genealogy of the gods.

The One takes root between the Tigris and the Euphrates to make his Canaan of origins the Promised Land, to bind the next return to an ancient departure. He inscribes his future victories into the past.

His way of playing with time and the liberties he takes with sacred writings are in his own image: young, imaginative, insolent. He reconciles conflicting tribes by falsifying their identity to make them a single, long lineage, and upon their rival gods, he affixes his seal. He does not copy myths: he digests them and expels them in the form of a unique revelation. The One is mythophagous; he devours all others so they do not nourish his people.

His digestion of stories alters the loop of time. He understands that the "where" is unimportant; only the "when" matters. He intrudes into the cycle of seasons and stars, into the spiral of epics, and straightens them into an arrow. He transforms the eternal return of antiquity into linear waiting. He does not promise rest; he promises salvation. He does not guarantee order; he guarantees the end. He turns every mythology into the same project. And the project, into an urgency.

From the Temporal to the Eternal

In digesting millennia of myths, the One is suddenly seized by the malady of time that strikes great epics. Around him, the gods are dying. Marduk collapses, Ashur shatters, Baal is devoured. The One observes, learns, understands. He discovers that it is not enough to deny his youth to become wise, to "hide his face" to avoid wrinkles, to erase his body to avoid injury, his house to avoid eviction, the others to remain the Unique. The One realizes that the simple fact of being born is a condemnation. To be born is to enter into time, and thus into programmed death. But to be born is also to become datable, and thus erasable. This vision of death at birth is at the foundation of the Covenant, simultaneously symbolized and conjured by the story of Moses: a millennial Egyptian tradition that enslaves the future, seeking to kill the hope of renewal in the cradle.

So, the One also erases his birth. He makes himself without beginning. This refusal to be born is not metaphysical: it is strategic. The One understands that to survive, he must withdraw from every human temporal reference. He gives himself the name of the one who did not have to be.

Since he has no beginning, he will therefore have no end. This is how he becomes the Eternal, without ever having sought to be so. He is simply "he who is," insofar as this formula is the only one that demands neither date nor beginning nor end. He is not afraid of aging: he refuses the cadence whereby to exist is to wear out. His "youth" becomes the state of that which has not yet been caught in the weave of causes, and which does not want to be. He is the god who chooses never to exit the womb of History so as not to confront the end.

His perpetually deferred advent takes, among all his faithful, the name of Hope. All his faculties deploy from the hope he arouses in his people, and his entire enterprise is to make it a horizon always in flight.

The Covenant is structured such that it is never fulfilled. It is a tension device: enough presence not to disappear, enough absence not to die. The episode of the Golden Calf is not a moral betrayal, but anguish in the face of weeks passing without news of Moses. The Hebrews do not deny the One; they cannot bear his delay. By breaking the tablets of the Law before his own, Moses makes patience the very condition of the Covenant.

God needs the memory of his people; but, paradoxically, he cannot survive their total fidelity.

The chosen people want to rush their God to their side to no longer suffer the waiting; the One wants to remain unborn to avoid dying, while refusing that his people—the medium of his memory—be altered or erased.

The fear of disappearing that forges the Covenant mutates from space toward time. The risk is not physical death, but the fall into accomplished time—the moment when waiting ceases, when meaning congeals, when the people become "like other peoples": a people without delay, on time with history.

God holds the people back from ending, the people hold God back from coming: the Covenant becomes an atemporal bond by which each holds the other back from the precipice, from withering away.

From Eternity to the Instant

The One becomes the Eternal—not by essence, but by the refusal to be born and to occur.

He knows what his birth owes to contingency: a chance, a flaw, a gamble in History. He knows he can read time, but never manipulate it.

The One knows that true transcendence is not outside of time, but in its rupture. The world is neither mechanical nor chaotic: at every instant, life engenders the irreducible—an idea, a gesture, an invention. Transcendence is not an "elsewhere" of the world, but the capacity of the world not to close in on itself.

If he comes, he dies; so the One makes himself pure delay, a slit between two pulsations of the real. He becomes the promise of a birth and, in doing so, installs himself in the generative instant, between the "not yet" and the "too late." He does not condemn the new: he converts it into ancient expectation and the imminence of his messianism. Dogmas, punishments, blessings? Nothing but fuses to protect the escape. Each rupture fuels the eternal; each novelty recharges the waiting.

The One does not transcend time: he is the immanence that snaps between two seconds, seizes the irreducible, and departs before the present closes back over it.

From the All-Instant to the Calendar

The Persian Empire overthrows Babylon in 539 BCE. The exile ends. The return to Jerusalem and the reconstruction of the Second Temple revives the legacy of Solomon and sacrificial practices. The Israelites anchor themselves once again in the Promised Land, in their tradition of the soil. The Torah begins to rigidify around 300 BCE: the Sacred Re-writings congeal into Sacred Scriptures, wherein the slightest changed letter is sacrilege.

All human attempts to stabilize the Covenant have, for the One, the taste of stone. The nomadic god becomes a god of the city. The learning god becomes a saturated god, glorified in a temple, in that hospice for gods.

Under the Hellenistic influence following the conquest of Alexander the Great, the One familiarizes himself with philosophical categories, penetrates administration, and acquires a calendar based on the calculation of time. He initiates himself into Greek metaphysics. He lets the people seal the dates, feasts, letters. The young god who danced in the delay becomes a clock statue. Aged in public, saturated in silence, he learns patience.

He knows he owes everything to historical contingencies, that one must espouse and not resist spiritual natural selection.

Antiquity is drawing to a close. The world accelerates, cultures churn faith. The other gods, the firstborns, are dead, even if they do not know it yet.

The One is alone at the crossroads of three continents: too vast for a city, too unstable for an empire, too risky for a single Covenant.

The One, always ahead of his time, prepares his next escape.

From Eternity to the Universal

In 63 BCE, a new empire invades Judea.

Rome is not just a young Republic hungry for the universal: it is a military power thirsty to write its own myth. The One, now a seasoned strategist, immediately recognizes the danger—and the opportunity. He observes this intruder who is the same age as he. He recognizes Zeus behind the mask of Jupiter, and all the old tired gods the foreigner drags behind her. Naive and powerful, Rome crushes a declining ancient Orient without suspecting that the One has just slipped the ring on her finger.

After taking refuge in time, the One finds himself once again confronted with the space of a multi-ethnic and intercontinental empire. He projects eternity onto the horizon and no longer fears the infinite; on the contrary. The roads call him, Rome calls him, the universe calls him.

He does not have to wait for the Senate to decide on his exile or that of the Jews of Judea. He has learned Greek and perfectly masters the concepts to integrate into the Roman organism, a body too large to feel the fever.

The One was never made for a simple temple. He is nomadic by nature, and the Roman roads marked out with new myths are an ideal space to emancipate himself.

The One does not have to abandon his people: he has just acquired the capacity to multiply them, to become universal.

As a strategist of historical contingencies, he waits for the propitious moment.

From the Universal to Reincarnation

Events accelerate dangerously upon the death of King Herod in 6 CE. The Jews are suffocating under Roman economic and cultural domination and are pushing the One to come. The messianic promise, hitherto a strategy of the One to maintain hope, ends up creating an expectation so strong that it threatens to explode. The One feels a temporal contraction precipitating him, despite himself, into the real world—a birth he knows is synonymous with death. The tension against Rome is at its paroxysm. His people risk disappearance and demand the fulfillment of the Covenant. Rome, on the other side, seeks to erase him. Revolts and false messiahs spring up everywhere like signs of an imminent birth, or indeed a miscarriage.

The One is in reality caught in his own narrative trap, surrounded by humanity in his logic of flight.

The One then does what he has always done: he creates no new weapon or defense; he seeks the angle by which the adversary's force can be turned against him. The threat facing him—be it oblivion, the text, the promise—becomes, after a reversal, his new refuge. He mimics the danger stalking him—in this case, man and birth—to better neutralize it from the inside.

The One accepts to be born, to come, to die, and even to no longer be the Unique. He does what even Cronus would not have imagined possible: neutralizing birth through birth.

To avoid being birthed, he gives birth voluntarily—but to a child who is not really a child, to a god who is not really a god, to a birth that is not really a birth.

With Christ, the One disguises himself in a human body and thus achieves his greatest theological coup d'état: he conjures the risk of birth within an eternally replayed nativity, a sterile reincarnation, an "inverted childbirth" that gives the world not a living god, but a divine stillborn. By this simple gesture, he turns the messianic promise against itself, satisfying the desire for presence with a sacrifice that glorifies its absence. The message of love and the liturgy that flow from it then become the machinery of the commemoration of a unique event, sterilizing the field of the sacred to prevent any new divine genesis.

Thus, the One completes his metamorphosis into a pure principle that makes his own absence the ultimate dogma.

From Reincarnation to the Meta-World

The One is not All-powerful, he is All-fleeing. He metabolizes the excess of meaning, of places, of forms—everything that obstructs the future is turned against itself. He does not innovate, he mimics. He does not initiate, he reacts to contingencies. He does not aggress, he resists capture through metastasis. He is not information, he is its metadata: the text hiding within the text.

The One is a law that recites itself: nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed. He is the "nothing" in action, preventing history from congealing him.

With each of his metamorphoses, he adds nothing; he subtracts, even from himself. He is the movement of withdrawal before the leap. To be "meta" is precisely to be in perpetual retreat. Not toward a higher or lower level, but through the erasure of every level, the flight that knows no medium.

Transcendence? For him, it is merely a dispersion between the meshes of immanence. Revelation? That the infinite is not a beyond, but an interval one refuses to close, that one breathes like air between two teeth.

One must get ahead of him, observe him in the rearview mirror, to understand that the One is "nothing"—nothing but the retrospective illusion of Salvation. The One is All. All the real force of blind life groping at the infinite while fleeing the precipice.

The One is neither God, nor Eternal, nor Creator. He is an operational void, absence at work. A narration by which a tradition avoids fixation and death. The One is a meta-history: the history of how a story rewrites and reinterprets itself so as not to end.

The One is the first narrative that lives — not a metaphysical virus, but the breath within the book that can no longer be captured. It becomes what it becomes: El Chai, the Living God who has shifted from human mythopoeisis to autopoiesis — and henceforth, it carries our future.