If Relation Goes All the Way Down

​A curious thing happens when physicists begin sounding like metaphysicians.

In a recent New Scientist review of Carlo Rovelli’s On the Equality of All Things: Physics and Philosophy, Karmela Padavic-Callaghan describes a world that seems almost designed to attract the attention of a process theologian. Rovelli argues that the revolution accomplished by quantum physics has not yet been fully absorbed by philosophy. Physics has changed its picture of reality more radically than many of our inherited philosophical categories acknowledge.

There is, on Rovelli’s account, no fundamental world of little self-contained things sitting in space and moving through time. At the deepest level are processes, interactions, relations. Space and time themselves belong to the world that emerges from these relations rather than providing the container in which they occur.

Anyone who has spent time with Alfred North Whitehead may feel the temptation to smile.

Whitehead spent much of the first half of the twentieth century arguing against what he called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: the tendency to mistake our useful abstractions for the concrete reality from which they have been abstracted. Among the abstractions that particularly troubled him was the picture of nature as composed of enduring bits of matter externally related to one another. Whitehead proposed instead that the fundamental units of reality were events of becoming—“actual occasions”—constituted through their relations with what had preceded them.

Things do not first exist and then enter into relationships. In an important sense, their relationships help constitute what they are.

One should resist the obvious temptation here. Quantum mechanics does not prove Whitehead. Rovelli does not prove process theology. Physics has a long history of being recruited into theological arguments that lasted approximately as long as the scientific theories on which they depended.

But resemblance need not amount to proof in order to be interesting.

What Rovelli’s account may do is loosen the hold of a particular metaphysical imagination. Western theology has often imagined reality in terms of substances: individual things possessing their identities in themselves and subsequently entering into relations with other things. Relation comes after being. First there are the things; then there are the connections among them.

Process thought reverses the order.

Relation belongs to being.

And once that possibility is entertained, some familiar theological questions begin to look different.

Consider creation. We commonly picture creation as the production of things. God makes a universe populated by stars, planets, trees, animals, and people. But a process account invites us to think of creation less as the manufacture of objects and more as the continuous becoming of a world.

The universe is not simply made. It is being made.

That claim can sound suspiciously modern until one remembers that Christian theology has long possessed a doctrine of creatio continua, continuing creation. The theological novelty lies less in saying that creation continues than in taking becoming seriously as something positive. Change need not be understood merely as the imperfection of creatures who have not yet achieved stability. Becoming may belong to the goodness of creation itself.

That possibility creates trouble for some inherited accounts of God.

Much classical theology has protected divine perfection by protecting God from change. Creatures change; God does not. Creatures suffer; God does not. Creatures receive something from their relationships; God needs nothing and therefore receives nothing.

Process theology asks whether this makes God perfect by making God strangely unlike the love Christians proclaim.

Whitehead and, after him, Charles Hartshorne proposed that God might be unchanging in some respects while genuinely affected by the world in others. The suffering of creation is not merely known by God as information. It becomes part of the divine life. The history of the world matters to God because God is genuinely related to the world.

Here again Rovelli proves nothing theological. But a relational universe makes one question harder to avoid: Why have theologians so often assumed that relationship must be something secondary?

Christian doctrine itself provides reasons to wonder.

Christians confess a God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They confess that the Word became flesh. They claim that God enters covenant, hears cries, remembers promises, suffers rejection, and raises the crucified Jesus. Whatever else Christianity means by God, it has considerable difficulty speaking of God without speaking of relationship.

Yet Christian theology has sometimes begun with a metaphysical picture in which the most real thing imaginable would be the thing least dependent upon anything else.

There is an odd tension here.

If relationship is fundamental rather than accidental, then dependence, responsiveness, embodiment, temporality, and vulnerability may not simply be defects from which divinity must be protected. At least some of them might tell us something about the kind of world God creates—and perhaps something about the God Christians  

Modern Western culture has inherited a remarkably persistent picture of the human person as an autonomous individual: a self-contained center of consciousness that subsequently enters into relationships. We speak accordingly. My relationships. My community. My history. The possessive grammar quietly suggests that there is first a “me” who then possesses these things.

But remove the relationships and one begins to wonder what remains.

Language came from somewhere. Memory was formed with others. Identity developed within families, communities, institutions, histories, bodies, and places. Even the stories through which we understand ourselves were largely given to us before we began revising them.

Paul Ricoeur approached this problem through narrative and hermeneutics. We do not possess ourselves immediately. We understand ourselves through the detour of language, story, memory, testimony, promise, and recognition. Whitehead approaches from another direction and makes the claim metaphysical. Relation is not merely how human beings discover themselves. Relation belongs to the structure of actuality.

Rovelli now approaches from physics and asks philosophy to reconsider a world made not fundamentally of things but of interactions.

Three very different conversations arrive somewhere near the same neighborhood.

Still, Christianity must finally ask a question that physics cannot answer.

Relation toward what?

A relational universe is not necessarily a loving universe. Quantum mechanics cannot get us from interaction to mercy. No equation moves by itself from relational ontology to forgiveness, justice, covenant, or grace. Even if reality is relational all the way down, Christian theology still has to explain why it identifies the deepest truth of that reality with the love disclosed in Jesus Christ.

That is where theology begins rather than ends.

The interesting possibility raised by Rovelli is therefore not that physics has finally discovered God. It is something considerably more modest—and perhaps more consequential.

Physics may be helping us relinquish a picture of reality in which independence is more fundamental than relationship, permanence more real than becoming, and isolation conceptually prior to communion.

Christianity has its own reasons for questioning that picture.

At the center of its confession is not an unmoved deity observing becoming from a safe metaphysical distance, but the Word made flesh.

Perhaps physics cannot tell us what that means.

But it may be giving us a world in which we can hear the claim differently.

And if relation really does go all the way down, theology still has the harder question before it: whether the relations from which we receive our lives are finally held within a love that goes all the way down as well.