Craving for psychological closure is an important element in religion, especially those religions who look forward to the fulfillment of an expectation or “prophecy.” The experience of fulfillment is the feeling of completion, often expressed in the New Testament and other early Christian writings by the word πλήρωμα (pleroma). The root meaning of πλήρωμα was the state of having a full belly. According to St. Paul, God sent his Son ‘in the fulness of time’ (‘τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου’ – Galatians 4:4). Now ‘the whole fulness (πλήρωμα) of deity dwells bodily’ in Christ (Colossians 2:9), and the community (ἐκκλησίᾳ) is the body of Christ, ‘the πλήρωμα of him who dwells all in all’ (Ephesians 1:23). Those who know the love of Christ are thereby ‘filled with all the πλήρωμα of God’ (Ephesians 3:19). Teilhard de Chardin (1957, 57) associated St. Paul’s usage of the word with ‘the consummation of the world,’ which is also ‘a communion of persons (the communion of saints).’
But the meaning of pleroma also branched in unexpected directions during the 20th century. C.G. Jung initiated this departure in a strange neo-gnostic piece that he wrote in 1916 and later described as ‘a sin of his youth’: ‘Seven Sermons to the Dead’ (printed as an appendix to Jung 1963). From this, Gregory Bateson picked up the term and used it as a complement/opposite to creatura, the realm of life and mind. ‘In Jung’s pleroma,’ says Bateson (1979, 106), ‘there are no differences, no distinctions,’ while creatura arises from the mental act of carving pleroma into entities. Pleroma is the mechanistic world of Newtonian physics – ‘that nonmental realm of description where difference between two parts need never be evoked to explain the response of a third’; it is ‘the world in which events are caused by forces and impacts and in which there are no “distinctions”’ (Bateson 1972, 456). Thus we have ‘two worlds of explanation’ which might also be called the physical and the mental. Tracing this usage from early Christian times through Jung to Bateson demonstrates how radically the meanings of terms can change, especially when they are used to distinguish between kinds of worlds.
Developed in this way, Bateson’s concept of the ‘mental’ (like Peirce’s conception of thought as Thirdness) encompasses far more than what goes on in the human cranium, without losing any of its rigor. Thus he gave a scientific grounding to what Shunryu Suzuki (1970) calls big mind. Sentient beings are subjects who respond to stimuli rather than being affected by forces; the energy for the response is supplied by the responding organism. In the creatura all effects are brought about by difference – which cannot be localized. When a difference actually makes a difference, a circuit is closed thereby; and as Bateson (1979) pointed out, a switch in a sense does not exist when its circuit is closed. Likewise, when the subject/object distinction vanishes, the ‘self’ is annihilated – an experience referred to by the Sufis as fana.