Things Happen
In his book Do I Stay Christian? Brian McLaren devotes one of his chapters to what he calls the Church’s toxic theology. As an example of such toxic theology, he describes the “mechanical, dualistic universe of things,” a universe of “static, inert being”.[1] He criticizes this vision of the universe because he thinks that it encourages an ossification of Christian theology, since, “if something was perfect and holy, it was necessarily unchangeable. Which means if Christianity is from God, it must never, ever evolve. Which means it is forever stuck either being perfect or pretending to be perfect”.[2] For McLaren this is a problem.[3] He goes on to endorse a universe not of clearly defined and static categories of being into which every entity is organized, but a “universe of constant motion, becoming, evolving, decomposing, recomposing”.[4] I happen to be sympathetic to McLaren’s vision of a constantly fluctuating universe, but I don’t think I can agree with his inclusion of “static, inert being” among other toxic theologies. This is mostly because I don’t think simple observation really allows us to deny such a theory, and I don’t think it requires the kind of dualism that compels Christianity to remain petrified in its thought and practice. But to explain that, we must first consider McLaren’s great bane: things.
[1] Should I Stay Christian? p.58
[2] p.56
[3] Incidentally, he may well be right; for every argument I marshal against his assertion, I can think of an example of the justification of utterly uncritical fundamentalism—be it Protestant, Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox—based on exactly this argument.
[4] p.57
How Are Things?
What is a thing? Well, what do I know, I’m just some guy. But really, the world is full of people going through life assuming they know what things are. Things are things. Things are the most worldly thing in the world. So what is a Thing? I suppose a thing must be characterized by stability (a characteristic that seems to disqualify Things from McLaren’s thinking). If something is in constant flux, it isn’t something—it isn’t anything. In his chapter, McLaren attempts to illustrate his point by describing his experience of fly-fishing:
I’m standing in a stream, and I cast my fly … to a seam in the water, a place where fast-flowing water meets slower or still water. What is that seam? It certainly is not a set of atoms; every second, one set of atoms is replaced by new ones. If we suddenly froze the stream to stop the atoms from moving, to capture that seam as in a photograph, the seam would no longer exist. That’s because the seam, we might say, isn’t a fixed and static thing. It’s a pattern of things, a relation and flow of things. It is temporary, contingent, more of an event than a thing.[1]
[1] p.56-7
Let us consider McLaren’s seam. He seems pretty convinced that this seam isn’t really a thing, but his language certainly suggests otherwise. If it were not somehow a thing, how could we have a word for it? How could experienced fly-fishers identify it as a good place to cast their fly? It may not be a static set of atoms, but there is certainly some kind of stability, otherwise no one would be able to talk about seams. The stability is not to be located in the atoms that make up the constantly rushing water, but rather in the “pattern” or “relation” with which he identifies the seam. The seam must be a Thing even if it is not characterized by material stability. For us to have any meaningful relationship with the world, Things must exist and present certain predictable and stable characteristics. We would perceive anything other than that as chaos, and we would never have been able to flourish as a species. So McLaren’s seam needs to be and stay what it is. I mean, any normal person would probably just say that to be a Thing, a thing just needs to exist. But that’s the whole question, isn’t it? Just what does it mean for something to exist?
I propose a two-fold heuristic that I don’t think will be terribly controversial: to exist a thing must have material and it must have form. That is, a thing needs to be made of “Stuff” and that Stuff needs to have “Shape.” Allow me to elaborate.
What’s the Matter?
By Stuff, I just mean the smallest meaningful parts of a thing, Aristotle’s “material cause”. This isn’t nearly as straight-forward as it may seem. For example, what are the parts of a tree? Leafs (or some other fibrous means of photosynthesis), branches, a trunk, and roots, as well as some means of reproduction perhaps? But we can also say that the parts of a tree are all the innumerable molecules that make up its matter. But, if we’re going to say that, then we should say that actually the parts of a tree are all the atoms that make up those molecules. But, then those atoms are made up of all those weird subatomic particles. And maybe it goes farther than that! What is quantum, anyway?
As a general heuristic, I prefer to leave analysis at the level of everyday observation: it’s easier, and its utility is much more intuitive, thus my use of the term “meaningful”: we can identify subatomic particles as the smallest parts of a tree, but that conversation would only be meaningful to molecular physicists, not to some guy like me. In the case of McLaren’s seam, I think the smallest meaningful division would be the two streams of water, differing in relative speed, which must meet to make the seam. Those two streams of water are themselves made of H2O molecules moving at a particular speed in a certain direction, but to identify the seam the everyday observer only needs to identify the meeting-point of two currents of water differing in speed.
There is more to a thing than its Stuff, though. Material becomes undifferentiated at finer levels of analysis. At the atomic level, there is no meaningful difference between trees and human beings: they are both made of the same atoms. So, if we locate thing-ness solely in material, there can be no difference between humans and trees. And, while I’m sure all of us can think of someone in our lives who seems more vegetable than human, no reasonable person will deny that there is a difference between trees and humans. So where is the difference? Well, trees and humans have a different Shape.
Formal is More Than a Black-tie Event
By Shape, I mean the relationship between a thing’s parts that dictates the way in which those parts co-inhere to produce a whole, what Aristotle calls a “formal cause”. A tree doesn’t exist merely because there are branches, and leafs, etc. in the world. All those parts must relate to one another in a particular way in order for that thing to exist. A deck may be made of planks of wood, but those same planks of wood can be rearranged into a shed, and suddenly what was one thing has become something else. The deck no longer exists, and what didn’t formerly exist has suddenly come into being. All we did was change the thing’s form. Here is where McLaren wants to locate the source of the seam’s being. He calls it a “pattern” rather than a “thing.” For someone so critical of what in essence is a vaguely Platonic dualism, one wonders how he kept himself from arguing for the real existence of Platonic Forms![1] Where I think he goes wrong is where he identifies the form with the thing, saying that any particular seam is the form of seam-ness. This is simply wrong. The seam itself is not the form, but rather an instantiation of that form in a material. Obviously, other seams exist, that is, the pattern of a faster current meeting a slower current in a river is instantiated in countless other instances. As I explained in the section above, his seam is both the two currents of water and their relation to each other, both material cause and formal cause, Stuff and Shape.
[1] Plato argues that these forms have a real existence of their own, residing in the eternal and immaterial realm of Ideas. Aristotle disagrees, saying that forms can only exist as instantiations in material.
I must clarify. Form is not just a thing’s physical shape. It is merely the pattern that dictates or describes the relationship of parts in forming a whole where that pattern is abstracted from the matter of the whole. Mathematics is a formal description of the world, specifically those parts of the world that are characterized by quantity. The word “formula” literally means “a little form.” We’ve all seen models of atoms that describe the relationship of the atom’s parts without really representing accurately what an atom actually looks like. Love is a form, a pattern by which people relate to one another. Government is a form instantiated within a community of people. Basically, wherever parts meaningfully relate to one another there is a form.[1] But for that form to exist in the world of Things, it needs matter.
[1] What’s really interesting is when these forms are consistent across time and space. It’s as though there are certain relationships that are more amenable to stable being and consistent flourishing than others. This probably forms the basis of the good, and suggests that form is also contingent, and therefore not self-caused.
Bottomless Wholes
We must return to a problem introduced above. What are the parts of a tree? Leafs and roots? Molecules? Atoms? Subatomic particles? Quanta? The fact is that each of those things are themselves wholes. A leaf is a part of a tree, but it itself is also a whole; it has both Stuff and Shape, and we can divide it into smaller constituent parts. But those parts are themselves wholes made of smaller wholes. Plant cells are wholes made of molecules. Molecules are wholes made of atoms. Atoms are made of subatomic particles. Etc. The ancients theorized a kind of formless matter that existed down at the bottom of all being that was the medium of form having no form itself, which produced the more complex matter of the visible world.[1] This matter they termed Prime Matter. But it turns out that matter cannot exist without form. Even a lump of un-shaped clay is made up of molecules that must relate to each other in a particular way for that lump of clay to exist, that relationship is form. Even if we posit quantum as some kind of chaotic and formless basis of reality upon which the whole edifice of the universe is built—some roiling ocean of pure quantum energy, or something—we cannot really call that quantum matter.[2] Matter only exists when energy “coagulates” into a stable form. A Thing, then, is an inextricable co-inherence of matter and form. If form is removed, the matter dissolves into the next level of stable form.[3] On the other hand, if the matter is removed, the form is detached from the world of Things.
[1] This theory established an unbridgeable distinction at the bottom of existence between matter and form, giving us the dualism that McLaren is resisting so adamantly in his chapter.
[2] This is as much as I can say about quantum physics; I don’t know enough about it to say more.
[3] For example, a tree becomes a pile of leafs, branches, etc. all of which are themselves wholes.
Things Happen
A Thing, then, is the coincidence of Stuff and Shape, and cannot exist without both. This means that, if McLaren thinks that his seam is an “event” because it’s a “pattern,” and every Thing is a pattern, then every Thing is an event. The universe of things that he denies is the universe of events that he prefers. Every Thing that populates our world is a meeting of material and immaterial, body and spirit, earth and heaven. Matter is deified and form incarnated. Every event of being is a part-taking in spirit. McLaren, therefore, is correct in thinking everything to be an event, though he is incorrect in thinking that events aren’t things. He’s also correct in criticizing the dualism that he describes: that of worldly things and eternal things. He’s right, after all, in saying that such a theory exists and has formed the basis of a toxic impulse towards conservation in many expressions of the Christian tradition. But this is not the fault of Things. The existence of Things is an inescapable fact of the world we inhabit. However, I hope that I have made a compelling case for the inextricable relationship between Stuff and Shape in the existence of Things, such that the absolute distinction between matter and form is impossible to maintain. Forms do not exist in some pure and eternal realm of Ideas, and matter cannot not exist in some formless primordial state. To me this means that every Thing takes part in the immaterial and the immaterial is always already incarnate in Things. That relationship of part-taking and incarnation is, in my mind, a pretty good candidate for the term “mystery,” and the world is therefore full of such mystery.
