There is a stream of theology focused on the unity of all things in Christ, beginning with the New Testament and developed by thinkers such as Origen and Nicholas of Cusa, and then rediscovered by Hegel. Through Hegel and Nicholas, this understanding is taken up in interpreting theoretical physics in the work of David Bohm (1917– 1992). In turn, Bohm’s understanding of a unified wholeness serves to illustrate the radical shift involved in the Creator being incarnate.[1]
Christian identity is, in Hegel’s description, the core of an alternative logic in which “knowing God” is participation in the Infinite. Hegel works this out most carefully in his Logic, but it is thematic in his other works, such as his Philosophy of History. There is a unified and unifying spirit which must be “cognized” so as to overcome the antinomies of Kant.[2] According to Hegel, truth is a unifying essence and energy which is not dependent on antinomies or dualisms. “It is its own material which it commits to its own Active Energy to work up; not needing, as finite action does, the conditions of an external material of given means (such as subject/object duality) from which it may obtain its support and the objects of its activity.”[3]
Reason and God are not separate but “Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process.”[4] Reason is grounded in and sustained by God and therefore “it is its own Substance,” its own “Infinite Power,” “its own Infinite Material underlying all the natural and spiritual life which it originates, as also the Infinite Form — that which sets this Material in motion.”[5] The Infinite Energy of the Universe, or the Infinite mind in which thought participates, is not a mere abstraction but the concrete reality enfolding all things. “It is the infinite complex of things, their entire Essence and Truth.”[6] While finite reason is grounded in the dualisms of subject and object (or God and world), infinite reason passes beyond alienated thinking to a unified knowing of God in “true reason.” Hegel explains this reason, particularly in his Logic, which captured Bohm’s life-long interest.
Throughout his life Bohm was reading and rereading Hegel’s Logic, apparently to such an extent that his wife complained. As reported by Maurice Wilkins, “Mrs. Bohm told me that not long before he died, he was sitting in his armchair at home reading Hegel again, and she said to him, ‘David, don’t you know everything about Hegel by now.’”[7] Specifically, Bohm found in Hegel a way in which to develop his focus on wholeness and his concern to overcome fragmentation.[8]
This choice between wholeness and fragmentation are alternative understandings of all of reality (social, scientific, and religious). Bohm recognizes that to overcome fragmentation, philosophy and religion cannot be treated as discrete realms separate from science. He found physics to have an immediate and necessary overlap, such that “his physical insights became essentially inseparable from the philosophical ones.”[9] Mind and matter in Bohm’s thought (as in Hegel’s) are not separate, but interactive realms, so that to understand the one is an insight into the other. As he explains, “I would say that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete, but which is in an unending process of movement and unfoldment.”[10]
Bohm found this sensibility most fully expressed in Hegel, though he also, at first, associated it with Eastern religion (with which he eventually became disillusioned) but not with religion per se. He may not have appreciated the degree to which Hegel was concerned with recovering Christian orthodoxy and delivering it from the philosophical abstraction into which it had fallen. According to Hegel, “The faith in that would-be philosophical sense is itself nothing but the dry abstractum of immediate knowing, a completely formal determination, not to be confused with or mistaken for the spiritual fullness of the Christian faith, either from the side of the believing heart and the Holy Spirit dwelling within it or from the side of a doctrine abounding in content.”[11] Hegel sets out to displace dry abstraction with an engaged and all-embracing speculative philosophy.
The Hegelian project is not unlike Bohm’s, in that both are seeking to overcome formal distinctions (a separate existence for God and the world or in physics the notion that the world can be divided into distinct parts and discrete causal laws). Both are displacing classical notions of causality (an objective power or force) found in the divided world of Descartes, Kant, and Newton. Ultimate reality, Kant’s “thing-in-itself” was inaccessible, there was a mind/body dualism, and human action and freedom were delimited by the mechanical order. Bohm describes the shift he sought as the displacement of the assumption that “the world can correctly be analyzed into distinct parts each having a separate existence, working together according to exact causal laws to form the whole.” He would replace it with the idea that “the world acts more like a single indivisible unit, in which even the ‘intrinsic’ nature of each part (wave or particle) depends to some degree on its relationship to its surroundings.”[12]
While Hegel is seeking a synthesis of thought in his vision of logos, Bohm’s pursuit is a consequence of the wholeness necessary to account for quantum phenomena. At first he perceives wholeness as an emergent property, but then posits wholeness as fundamental. This “new ‘basic reality’ was no more a manifest reality of discrete objects, and forms – our usual ‘explicate’ or ‘unfolded’ order – but the ‘implicate’ or ‘enfolded’ order that is carried by the ‘holomovement’.”[13] He pictures an unbroken flow from the “implicate” order through the manifest “explicate” (or “unfolded”) order, the whole of which is “holomovement.” He describes it as “the unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders.”[14] Nature is neither unchangeable nor bounded: “there are neither unchangeable ultimate elements nor fixed ultimate laws describing them, i.e. that nature is ontologically and our science epistemically inexhaustible.”[15]
The world is in process, and as reflected in quantum phenomena “becoming” is built into reality. He compares it to a flowing stream of water: “On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow.”[16] Space and time may lend itself to division into abstracted moments, like particular ripples or waves, but the splashes of a particular moment are part of the overall flow.
As Bohm explains, “explicate ‘moments’ that unfold have a certain temporal thickness, a certain duration. Moments are temporal segmentations of unfoldment.”[17] Time is typically broken into past and future with the present as an ungraspable point, but the “unfoldings” of time belong together. “[I]t follows . . . that becoming is not merely a relationship of the present to a past that is gone. Rather, it is a relationship of enfoldments that actually are in the present moment. Becoming is an actuality,” that “continues in all succeeding moments,” that is, “the two principles of the being of becoming and the becoming of being must be woven together.”[18] Time is nested in infinite layers as “any given level is unfolding (in principle creatively) from levels that are more comprehensive and more fundamental.”[19]
According to Michael Younker, “as physics has been further advanced, unexpected and nonintuitive layers beneath the atomic level have been discovered, and the subatomic level contains its own behaviors, and, again yet further, beneath the subatomic level, a layer of fields exists which contains its own distinct behaviors. This illustrates, in a manner, how there could theoretically be many deeper implicate or super-implicate orders.”[20] General laws may apply in particular contexts but this context must be viewed as part of a larger order. This means “laws will take the form of generally valid relationships between the nested sets of projections of its past enfolded in one moment and the corresponding set enfolded in another moment. The special creative quality of each moment cannot, however, be predicted in this way.”[21] Within the infinite implicate order there are always other underlying influences so that any particular moment or event cannot be isolated: “all these projections into any given moment will have the past of the entire universe as their potential content, which is thus enfolded into the moment in question.”[22]
The tendency in science to extract and divide is the tendency of society as a whole, with nations, races and religions pitted against one another. “And in turn, each man is fragmented into different and incompatible loyalties, aims, desires, etc.”[23] There is inevitable despair and helplessness in the face of these overwhelming social forces – “going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it.”[24] So too in science Bohm notes, “there are sharp divisions between applied science and pure science, between theory and experiment, between one specialized field and another, and between different branches of each specialty. The gap between science and other aspects of life is just a further example of such fragmentation.”[25]
He sounds very much like Hegel in describing how human thought divides and separates as part of an alienating utilitarian mode. “However, when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man’s notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives (i.e. to his self-world view), then man ceases to regard the resulting divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and his world as actually constituted of separately existent fragments.”[26] Humankind is confronted “with a worldwide breakdown which is self-evident not only at the political level but also in smaller groups and in the consciousness of the individual. The resort to mindless violence is growing and behind it all is the even more mindless threat of mutual annihilation, which is implicit in our current international situation and which could make everything we are doing quite pointless.”[27]
For Bohm, the cure for fragmentation is wholeness. Health and holiness, he notes, both derive from a root meaning wholeness, and this captures the human drive. “All of this indicates that man has sensed always that wholeness or integrity is an absolute necessity to make life worth living. Yet, over the ages, he has generally lived in fragmentation.”[28] To survive the disintegration, a new form of consciousness must be realized in what he calls a “postmodern science.” “A postmodern science should not separate matter and consciousness and should therefore not separate facts, meaning, and value. Science would then be inseparable from a kind of intrinsic morality, and truth and virtue would not be kept apart as they currently are in science.”[29] He calls for an understanding in which seemingly discrete fields or fractured parts are recognized as “enfolded” in a unified whole, claiming “the whole universe is actively enfolded to some degree in each of the parts. Because the whole is enfolded in each part, so are all the other parts, in some way and to some degree.”[30] The power of the imagination is in realizing synthesis as a participation in the essential wholeness of reality. “You see, like I was explaining with Hegel, the idea is first implicit only in itself and then it unfolds, it spreads out, in the imagination or in some other form like writing or painting. It becomes explicit, unfolded.”[31]
The world is not a big machine but is grounded in the energizing power of God (creation is tied to incarnation). The food and nourishment of the world are from within creation, from within history and nature. The alpha and omega is “its own basis of existence, and absolute final aim, it is also the energizing power realizing this aim; developing it not only in the phenomena of the Natural, but also of the Spiritual Universe — the History of the World.” This “’Idea’ or ‘Reason’ is the True, the Eternal, the absolutely powerful essence” that “reveals itself in the World, and . . . in that World nothing else is revealed but this and its honor and glory.”[32] This is the thesis which Hegel and Bohm share and demonstrate. In Christian terms (which Bohm did not embrace but which his work illustrates),God identifies himself with, in, and through, creation so that the eternal is not an entity apart from creation, but is identifiable in creation, in which Christ is being made all in all (I Cor 15:28).
.
[1] This peculiar Christo-logic is summed up in Maximus’ formula, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.” Maximus, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 7.22.
[2] According to Hegel truth, by definition is a unified understanding realized in thinking God: “God’s being is inseparably bound up with the representation of God in our consciousness.” Science of Logic, 267. Conceptions of God must be immediately related to thinking itself, as this is the “concrete” and unchanging foundation given in faith. There must be a concerted effort to arrive at a consciousness of God, inclusive of self-consciousness and consciousness of the world and others.
[3] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, transl. J. Sibree (Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001) 23.
[4] Philosophy of History, 23.
[5] Philosophy of History, 23-24.
[6] Philosophy of History, 24.
[7] Interviews of David Bohm by Maurice Wilkins, Niels Bohr Library and Archives, American Institute of Physics. Cited in Boris Kožnjak, “Waterfalls, Societies, and Temperaments – Fragmentation and Wholeness in the Lives and Work of David Bohm and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel” (SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 73 (1/2022) p.p. (89–128), 99.
[8] This is the claim of Kožnjak.
[9] Kožnjak, 90.
[10] David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980), p. x.
[11] Goerg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline Part I: Science of Logic, Translated and Edited by Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1817]) 113.
[12] David Bohm, Basil Hiley, The Undivided Universe. An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory (London: Routledge, 1993) 144. Cited in Kožnjak, 93.
[13] Kožnjak, 95. Bohm credits Nicholas of Cusa for the particulars of his vocabulary. Thus, for example, when asked about the Hegelian flavor of these concepts, Bohm replied that “well, of course, you can say that Nicholas of Cusa talked about something like this with a implicatio, explicatio, and complicatio”. Interview of David Bohm by Maurice Wilkins on 27 February 1987, American Institute of Physics. Available at www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohrlibrary/oral-histories/32977-9 (accessed on 31 July 2022). Cited in Kožnjak, 103.
[14] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 218.
[15] Kožnjak, 123.
[16] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 62.
[17]David Bohm, “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” in Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time: Bohm, Prigogine, and Process Philosophy, ed. David Ray Griffin (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), 185. Michael F. Younker, “The Theological Significance of the Relations of Freedom and Time in the Sciences and Humanities: An Evaluation of the Contributions of David Bohm and Pauli Pylkko” (2019). (Dissertations. 1694. https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/dissertations/1694,) 242
[18] “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” 185. Cited in Younker, 242.
[19] “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” 186. Cited in Younker, 243.
[20] Younker, 243.
[21] “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” 191. Cited in Younker, 245.
[22] “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” 191. Cited in Younker, 245.
[23] David Bohm,” Impact of Science on Society,”(https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000003864) 160.
[24] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 3.
[25] David Bohm, “Fragmentation in science and in Society”, The Science Teacher 38 (1971).
[26] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 3.
[27] David Bohm, “Postmodern Science and a Postmodern World” (https://www.davidbohmsociety.org/library/postmodern/),
[28] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 4.
[29] Postmodern Science.
[30] Postmodern Science.
[31] Interview of David Bohm by Maurice Wilkins on 6 March 1987. Cited in Kožnjak, 127.
[32] Philosophy of History, 24.