Desmond points out that an origin but be both one and more than one: “even if we want to say that the origin of coming to be possesses some kind of ‘unity’ with itself, this ‘unity’ cannot be univocal. Why so? Because, such a univocal unity would be hard to distinguish from inert self-sameness. And were the latter the ‘unity’ of the origin, the origin could not be an origin at all. For an origin is that out of which something comes to be . But if something comes to be out of an origin, that origin must necessarily have the power to originate beyond itself; hence it cannot be an inert self-sameness. In a word: a univocal origin could not originate anything beyond itself. Hence if there is a ‘unity’ to the origin, if the origin is one, this one must be more than univocal, it must be more than unity with itself. Paradoxically, the origin must be an originative One that is more than one.”
A few pages later he expands on the point, suggesting that the origin must be thought of as a plenitude rather than as either univocal self-sameness or equivocal difference: “to think the origin as plenitude we will have to go beyond univocity and equivocity, and the dualistic opposition between them. Univocity too easily suppresses difference; equivocity too quickly exults in difference. The first can try to overcome doubleness and multiplicity by stifling it; the second can accentuate difference in a manner that reinstates dualistic opposition in another mode of antithetical, or antinomic thinking. Neither has a rich enough sense of the mediation of differences. Absolute unity tried to bind plurality as sheer opposition, but sheer opposition can return with the vengeance of an unbound equivocity.”
The way forward is to recognize “becoming as a process in which beings both are and also are not.” That is to say, “No being is fully coincident with itself, and hence none is fully itself; and yet each is itself, and is itself not as a defective condition of being. That is, beings in becoming are not mere potentialities, understood as the absence of actuality. We might say that beings are promises . Their present being promises more than it currently delivers. But to be a promising being is to be in an essentially affirmative condition. A promising being is the promise of more, but the more is there now, already at work, in redeeming itself as promise - or betraying itself, or being betrayed.”
The key point for Desmond is that “the promise of becoming reinserts a creative indeterminacy at the heart of being. The doubleness of the ‘is’ and ‘is not’ may be like the strife of Heraclitus that he says is father of all things. But Heraclitus is wrong if he thinks that strife is the father of all fathers. What he calls the father is an offspring of the origin. The origin is, so to say, a father/mother beyond this father.” And this means again that the origin is beyond univocal self-sameness and utter difference but is a ” creative excess of plenitude .”
Desmond never mentions the Trinity in this whole discussion, but his whole project approaches a Trinitarian metaphysics.