In drawing out the connection between Paul’s positive use of “letter” and Maximus’ development of the term logoi (see here), the material world is inseparably bound-up with meaning. Significance in the Logos is incarnate or embodied and in turn what is embodied has significance. Maximus works out this participatory ontology through his identification of the Logos directly with creation (in the logoi). His is not the Neoplatonic notion of emanation, with its distinction between the One (in whom there is no distinction) and divine Intellect (with its logos and distinction) but in the explanation of Mika Törönen, “This is another kind of simultaneous union and distinction where wholes and parts through God’s providence and judgement make up a harmonious manifold.”[1] The structure of reality, according to Maximus, is in its wholeness through which things are united, but this takes place at both the level of the particular (logoi) and the universal (Logos). In Paul’s terms Christians are the particular instantiation of the letter of Christ, and for Maximus, Christ’s stamp is put upon all creation in the logoi: “‘Who … would not recognize that the one Logos is many logoi distinguished in the undivided difference of created things through their unconfused individuality in relation to each other and themselves?”[2] This accounts for the union between the created and the uncreated but also, according to Maximus, the “union of the mind with the senses, and the union of heaven with earth, and the union of sensible things with the intelligible, and the union of nature with the logos.”[3] The one being made “all in all” or incarnate in all things “lends” the meaning of personhood to all of creation and it is through this incarnate reality that meaning is available (the Logos/logoi relation). This is the primary principle, I would argue, behind Maximus’ theory of logoi and it is the driving presumption (“discovery”) reflected in the theoretical physics of David Bohm.
Theologically the choice is between a theology which divides the Logos and incarnation, so that a preexistent Logos is separated from the incarnate Christ (a logos asarkos or disembodied Christ), or incarnation is understood to be an eternal fact about God in Christ being worked out in and through all of creation. In physics the choice is between a matter and mind duality or, as in quantum theory, the recognition that matter is interdependent with mind and meaning. According to quantum theory, elementary particles account for and respond to the observer, so that mind appears on both sides of observation. In the words of biochemist Rupert Sheldrake, commenting on Bohm, “mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call ‘chance’ when they are made by an electron.”[4]
In most contemporary science reality is presumed to be material or physical, and this is foundational. Matter serves as the final reference, so that the brain may produce consciousness, but this is a by-product of the brain’s activity. A purposeless evolution has produced a material based human activity grounded in the set structures of the physical world. As Sheldrake sums up, in contemporary science everything, including people and animals are reduced to the mechanical and matter is unmixed with consciousness; nature is fixed and unchanging as the total amount of matter is the same and the laws of nature are fixed; all life is based on biological structures carried in genetic material such as DNA; minds are inside heads and are the product of brains; memories are material traces in brains; there is no direct activity between mind and matter (such as found in telepathy); and mechanical or material medication alone is authentic.[5]
Even where this neo-evolutionary doctrine may be denied, the Cartesian split between mind and matter, body and soul, thought and physical reality often prevail, and matter is defined as something that exists independently of mind. A privileging of material reality prevails, even where materialism may not be consciously embraced and even where the existence of mind is acknowledged, it is usually given no place in physical reality. This physicalism reigns, though the emergence of life is mostly unaccounted for (statistically it is improbable if not impossible) and even though science now recognizes that 96% of reality in “dark matter” or “dark energy” is still obscure. Better to believe in infinite parallel universes, all with different laws, then allow for the possibility of a creator God. The prevailing doctrine not only excludes the divine mind, but mind itself – consciousness should not really exist as matter is prime reality. Thus, the materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett can write a book, Consciousness Explained, in which he dismisses consciousness as illusory.
Bad theology guided by materialist assumptions, is actually the historical cause preceding materialism. That is, it was dualistic Christians who first separated mind from matter. As Sheldrake explains, “They downgraded matter, making it totally inanimate and mechanical, and at the same time upgraded human minds making them completely different from unconscious matter.”[6] They assumed they were strengthening arguments for the soul (mind), empowering it over the body (as in Descartes), and they sought to show the superiority of humans over animals. Humans, they would argue, are immortal, completely separate from animals (in their possession of mind and soul), and in the process, they created an unbridgeable gulf between body and soul and between humans and “nature.” Most people, Christian or not, presume this dualism, in spite of its deeply unchristian bias and regardless of the fact that modern physics indicates the fallacy of the materialist worldview.
Bohm (1917-1992), a theoretical physicist who studied under Robert Oppenheimer, has boldly set-forth for an alternative understanding. He argues that quantum physics, due to its interactions with the mind of the observer, spelled the end of both materialism and Cartesian dualism. Mind is not localized in the head of the observer but extends into the world, so that thought shows itself in and through material reality. Human minds can reach to the stars because the world resonates with and can be read and touched by thought and at the same time, the world seems to look back.
Bohm’s interpretation overlaps with Maximus’ understanding of logoi, in that the world is penetrated by mind. The materialistic tendency is to separate the physical and mental, or soul (mind, meaning) and body so that the “psychosomatic” is thought to refer to two distinct entities, with “psyche” or mind arising as a result of the material body (soma). Bohm maintains there is a unity between soma (the physical) and significance (the mental) as they are part of “one overall indivisible reality.” [7] The observer is part of the observation, and in turn the observed accounts for and responds to the observation. Like Logos and logoi or creation and incarnation, each “reflects and implies the other (so that the other shows in it) . . . they are both revealing the one unbroken whole of reality, as it were from two sides.”[8]
The letter written in stone or ink does not have its meaning in the medium, and so too in the physical world, DNA or electrical and chemical activity, are not reducible to their medium. A television signal is produced by images from a camera transformed into subtle electrical signals, carried on even more subtle radio waves, but the content is not found in electricity or radio waves per se, but in the images and sound in the television set received by the mind of the viewer. According to Bohm, “Meanings are thus seen to be capable of being organized into ever more subtle and comprehensive overall structures that imply, contain, and enfold each other, in ways that are capable of indefinite extension.”[9] The depth of subtlety and the extent of their manifestation is infinite.
Meaning is not fixed, and as a result there is an openness toward infinite clarification, deeper understanding, ongoing discrepancies, which all point to a depth of structure or an ever-changing understanding and more comprehensive meaning.[10] For example, Newton’s laws indicated Einstein’s insights of a conjoined space/time, which indicate a quantum reality. Bohm explains this involves a paradoxical unfolding: “while the quantum theory contradicts the previously existent classical theory, it does not explain basic concepts of this theory as an approximation or as a simplification of itself. Rather, it has to presuppose the classical concepts at the same time that it has to contradict them.”[11] It is not that quantum theory introduces new basic concepts, but it introduces ambiguity into concepts such as position and momentum, which were previously unambiguous. The ambiguity is not simply in the mind of the observer, but there is an ambiguity (openness) built into basic reality.
Matter is open to mindful interaction, which means the world can act back upon us, positively or negatively. In cancerous cells there is replication and duplication, or in neurosis the compulsion to repeat, a sort of miscommunication which damages the body or mind, creating a closed feed-back loop. Misinformation or disinformation is a disease or neurosis that directly impacts the host. “It is evident that this typical form of a runaway feedback loop between the soma- significant and the signa- somatic is deeply involved in a wide range of neurotic disorders.”[12]
The letter kills, or meaning takes on a deadly form precisely because it is stunted and turns in on itself. A deadly relationship to the law (occurring between meaning and embodiment) may infect one individual, interpersonal relations, or relationships with nature, as all involve soma-significance. There may be either a circular feedback which gets stuck in a deadly loop or soma-significance extended and opened to ever-renewed growth. Relationships with Nature or with the Cosmos are affected, on both sides of the relationship, by a meaning that may be rightly or wrongly construed. That is, just as in human relationships there are two sides interacting and affecting the relationship, so too the world in general reflects this interactive relation. “Indeed, insofar as we know it, are aware of it, and can act in it, the whole of Nature, including our civilization which has evolved from Nature and is still a part of Nature, is one movement that is both soma- significant and signa- somatic.”[13]
There is no flat material world, or in Paul’s language, the letter that kills is deceptive and deadly, not because it is a reality, but because it is presumed to be an end in itself. The law, Scripture, or the letter, which is presumed to be a foundation is on the order of a materialism that assigns the fulness of reality to the material order. It is deadly in its finitude, deceptively hiding the eternal. On the other hand, the living letter has the breath and breadth of personhood and access to participation in or even identification with Christ. The letter is part of a word which is part of a structure of meaning but this meaning always exceeds itself in the manner of personhood, not simply referring back to the material or to other letters but resonating with the eternal – an excess of meaning without a definitive closure. As in Maximus, the many logoi have their union in the Logos, containing both a distinct and unconfused particularity with an integrity in the unifying Logos.
There is the continual encounter with Christ in creation, or the filling out of the Logos in the logoi, which may simply specify the mind in Bohm’s description. The name of the universal in the particular, or the union of body and meaning, is specified in the logoi of the Logos. The extension of the incarnation into all creation, is a reality about creation reflected in quantum physics, which is simultaneously sensible and intelligible. There is a singular unbroken reality, which apart from the specificity of the Logos tends to be divided and delimited (the letter that kills). The isolated letter, law, or material nature cut-off from its extended meaning is reductive but the letter or quantum reality as a living process refers to the personal, mindful, eternal, interpenetrating all things.
[1] Mika Törönen, Union and Distinction in the Thought of St Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 8.
[2] Ambig. 7 (PG 91), 1077C. Cited in Törönen, 30.
[3] Qu. Thal. 48: 188–9 (CCSG 7), 341. Cited in Törönen, 30.
[4] Rupert Sheldrake, “Setting Science Free from Materialism,” (Explore 2013; 9:211-218 & 2013 Elsevier Inc) 217.
[5] Sheldrake, 211.
[6] Sheldrake, 213.
[7] David Bohm, “Soma- Significance: A New Notion of the Relationship Between the Physical and the Mental” (https://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/1995/bohm.html, 2016) 1.
[8] Soma-Significance, 1.
[9] Soma-significance, 2.
[10] Soma-significance, 3.
[11] Soma-significance, 8.
[12] Soma-significance, 3.
[13] Soma-significance, 4.
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