Metaphysical Unified Field Theory
of Disciplines:
The Anthropology of Accountable
Immanence by Conation, Substrate Loyalty, and Apocatastatic
Movement
Rev. Douglas Blake Olds (Ret.)
April 11, 2026
Abstract
This essay argues that the literary, scientific, philosophical, and theological disciplines are unified by a single metaphysical principle: the conative nature of substrate loyalty. All genuine disciplines converge upon that single metaphysical insight: that reality is grounded in purposeful intent within embodied existence. Vetted by experience and preserved through archival attestation, that principle emerges historically as insight moves from local esoteric custody into exoteric clarity. It grounds anthropology in accountable immanence and bridges ephemeral earthly existence to negentropic eternalization through peacemaking, fidelity, and covenantal support. Drawing from Hebrew anthropology, classical metaphysics, and Christological fulfillment, the essay presents conation as the hinge between awareness and consciousness, substrate and ethic, and time and eternity. Against abstraction severed from ethical bearing, it argues that enduring meaning arises through directed, time-bearing striving under strain. The essay culminates in a Shema-Christological metaphysics of repair, in which grace sustains creation and aligns human agency with Trinitarian becoming (Olds 2023; Olds 2026a).
My project develops a distinctive cataphatic conative anthropology
in which the heart is not merely one faculty among others but the governing
buckle of accountable immanence, cognition is subordinated to morally trained
bearing, and metaphysics is judged by whether life bears time toward repair
rather than by abstraction, negation, or contemplative suspension. While
existing and classical theologies have treated the heart as central to
anthropology, and while current scholarship explicitly distinguishes cataphatic
from apophatic theology, I do not find an established theological program that
combines heart-centered anthropology, conation as a governing metaphysical
principle, substrate loyalty, ethical time-bearing under strain, and a
Christological logic of repair in this synthetic way. Appropriately, this essay’s
claim to originality is therefore architectural rather than absolute: a
positive anthropology situated in finitude, cataphatic, conative,
repair-oriented synthesis inside eternalization.[1]
I. The Metaphysical Principle That
Unites the Disciplines
What ties disciplines together is a metaphysical
principle vetted by experience and archival attestation that survives—first
esoteric, later exoteric. This principle is the conative nature of substrate
loyalty by peacemaking, which tethers anthropology to accountable immanence and
bridges the ephemeral earth to negentropic eternalization.
The sciences, humanities, and theology converge through a shared hermeneutical orientation toward reality, not only by disparate academic norms of method. Theological science is not fulfilled by finding patterns alone, but by discerning the metaphysical principle from which configurations become intelligible. Pattern-finding by itself only builds epicycles. From that unifying principle, the soul appears not as a passive reader of recurrence but as a conation bearing particle seeking time-accumulating ends. At their deepest level, such phenomena bear witness to a common truth: that being endures through directed striving, fidelity under strain, and the preservation of coherence against entropy. This principle is neither speculative nor primarily conceptual; it is witnessed in lived experience and transmitted through archives that open their language group to facultative exoterics—Scripture, philosophical traditions, and historical memory.
Metaphysics is immanently intelligible
through conation alone [1]. Because contexts of history and nature are not clumpy, no category of people have identical experiences of
stress or insight or trajectories of understanding that breakthrough, only a
contextually shared language in some degree of ability to accord with the
Trinitarian Logos.
Thus, metaphysics is not an abstraction detached from
life but a disciplined recognition of how reality persists through accountable
action. Knowledge arises from conscious alignment within the substrate of assembled
existence within the contexts of nature and history, not from disembodied
cognition of awareness abstracted from ethical grounding.
Reality is disclosed by whether a
configuration bears time under entropic stress into conation—the will to repair
for others, not by abstraction or spatialized ontology or probabilistic spread.
Time is a field of accumulation or disaccumulation, not a neutral container. My
earlier work (Olds 2026) proposed that time is “a field of accumulation
and disaccumulation in which coherence is either borne into repair or
squandered into ramifying entropy,” and living configurations are distinguished
from dead ones by whether they “filter stress negentropically through conative
taxis” or instead “route patterns extracted from prior order and spread death
by derivative, necromantic repetition.” That distinction—between bearing and
routing, between accountability and recursion—grounds all further judgment.
The same essay sharpens the criterion:
“the criterion is not display but burden: not performance of coherence, but
coherence borne through testing.” That formulation frames the present dispute:
a performative ontology may stabilize appearance, but it does not thereby bear
a world.
II. Conation and the Historical
Development of Metaphysical Anthropology
Conation
comes from the Latin conatus: effort, striving,
endeavor. In classical metaphysics it names the inclination of a being to
persist, continue, and in some sense to enhance its own existence by bearing
time for others (Olds 2026a). Hobbes, Descartes, and Spinoza each take up that
line of thought, though with sharply different horizons, to describe motion,
inertia, appetite, and self-preservation. In Spinoza especially, conatus becomes the universal
striving by which organisms maintain themselves, the immanent push of a thing
to go on being what it is. Yet that classical lineage remains incomplete and
formally static, because wherever conatus is reduced to mechanical necessity,
inertial tendency, or pantheistic self-maintenance, the decisive question has
already been evaded: toward what end, under what judgment, and for whom is this
striving borne?
A fuller account begins only when conation is
read theologically, not as blind mechanism or sealed self-preserving urge
(homeostasis), but as the endeavor of grace: intentional, directional,
relational striving toward life, coherence, and flourishing. Conatus names a
differentiating taxis toward value, a hard and active commitment to preserve
and enhance life, and finally the shared will of divine generosity extended
into creaturely being. In that register, conation is the metaphysical
expression of grace at work in creation, aligning secondary causes with
ultimate cause, carrying nature not toward static completion but toward an
unfixed and creative flux of flourishings. It no longer names the mere stubborn
continuance of a thing in itself. Grace is no longer considered a
compensatory afterthought added to broken systems. It is the ground of any
humanism worthy of the name, because it is what completes nature’s entelechy—the
will to become grace--and turns (Hebrew: shuv) bare continuance toward
meaningful becoming.
Here the
concept of conation reaches full historical significance. It becomes the bridge
between classical metaphysics and biblical anthropology. For Hebrew
anthropology does not begin with will as an interiorized psychological faculty
subordinated to self-interested cognition. It begins with the heart, lev, as the buckled center of
intent, action, and covenantal direction, inward and outward at once. In the
Shema, action is fastened to the heart before it is abstracted into
concept. The heart is trained within an ethnos, a people held together by
language, memory, command, and shared obligation--not for autonomous launches
of cognition into greater transcendent heights. Conation is the heart’s
directedness under command, its answerability under strain, its readiness to
bear toward God and neighbor. Enlightenment epistemology will later shrink will
into a subordinate mechanism inside a self-interested cognitive structure--a
private faculty hidden within the modern subject. Hebrew anthropology does the
opposite: it places the buckle of being in the will-- heart’s taxic orientation,
and only from there permits thought to become the trustworthy guide to moment
and action.
III. Conation in the
Shema-Christological Sequence of Hebrew Anthropology
In Hebrew anthropology, the center of human being is
not intellective vision but the heart, lev. The Shema (Deut. 6:4–9)
establishes an order in which hearing precedes understanding and summons
precedes self-constitution. Humanity is first addressed before it becomes
analyst, spectator, or theorist. That summons is received in the heart, the
conative center of anthropological orientation toward God and neighbor. The
heart is not a private reservoir of feeling but the buckle of intention,
action, and covenantal direction, tested at entry into life and again through
repentance before mind is entrusted with its proper work.
From this heart-centered summons, action follows. Immanence
grown from fidelity is expressed through accountable, neighbor-bearing repair
rather than detached contemplation. Only then does mind, dianoia, emerge
in its rightful place. In Matthew 22:37, especially in light of the surrounding
moral demand, intellect is not the first principle of human being but the
trained participant in covenantal life. Mind carries forward what repentance
has reoriented, situating cognition within the buckled heart for mission rather
than allowing it to float above obligation.
Pagan anthropologies of intellectation privilege
vision, analogy, and contemplative ascent. Hebrew anthropology begins instead
with address, hearing, covenantal orientation, and obedient response. Conation
therefore precedes cognition. Thought becomes trustworthy only when it arises
from moral formation and is ordered toward repair. In contrast with pagan
anthropologies of intellectation that promote vision and analogy of a conscious
earth,[2] the
center of human being in Hebrew anthropology is the heart (lev). The
Shema (Deut. 6:4–9) added to Matthew 22 grounds the Trinitarian immanence of
practical understanding:
- Hearing –
Humanity is addressed before it constitutes itself.
- Heart –
The conative center of anthropological orientation toward God and neighbor,
repeated twice as a soul’s schematic buckle, tested upon ontogenetic
entry, and tested again by repentance before entrusted with mind.
- Action –
Neighbor-bearing fidelity expressed through accountability and repair. To
which Matt 22:37 in the context of v. 22 adds:
- Mind
(Dianoia) – The rightly ordered intellect arising from
moral formation; what carries through (dia) the recollection--after-effects
(meta) of noietic understanding, now situating cognition in the
buckled heart for mission.
In the teaching of Christ (Matt. 22:37), this
anthropology is fulfilled: love of God integrates heart, soul, and mind within
a covenantal orientation toward truth. Mind is a morally trained participant in
covenantal life rather than first principle.
Christologically, this anthropology is proleptically
disclosed in Jeremiah’s covenant of the heart (Jer. 30–36) and reaches its
consummation in Jesus. His alignment with cosmic reality under maximum strain
reveals the cruciform nature of divine fidelity: perfect time-bearing for
others (Olds 2026a). The Cross is therefore not merely juridical but
conative—the ultimate demonstration of grace overcoming the entropic programs
of death (Olds 2025). [3]
IV. Conation as Substrate Loyalty and
Accountable Immanence
Conation binds metaphysics to ethics. It is the faculty
by which beings remain loyal to their substrate—the embodied, relational, and
temporal conditions of existence. Substrate loyalty manifests as peacemaking:
the active repair of disorder and reconciliation of fractured relations.
In this sense, anthropology is tethered to accountable
immanence. Human beings are not disembodied spectators but responsible
participants in the world. The ephemeral earth becomes the site where enduring
realities are forged through acts of fidelity.
Negentropic eternalizations—truth, virtue, and love—are
not abstractions; they are accumulated through time-bearing action. A living
configuration filters disorder and sustains continuity, carrying the substrate
forward. Through such fidelity, ephemeral life participates in eternity.
V. Conation and the Divine Economy of
Grace
Olds
(2023) identifies the conatus of grace as the dynamic will of God sustaining
and perfecting creation. Grace operates as the primary causative force of
cosmic becoming, aligning human virtue with divine intention. In this economy,
divine conatus preserves what God intends for eternity, sustains creation
through mercy, and enables creatures to participate in divine life. What
appears in creaturely striving as fidelity, repair, and peacemaking is
therefore not merely human effort viewed in isolation, but a secondary
participation in the prior generosity of divine action.
The Cross represents the supreme revelation of
this conative grace. In self-emptying love, Christ reverses entropy and renews
creation, bearing time for others under maximum strain and disclosing the
deepest truth of divine fidelity. Humanity participates in this divine economy
not through abstraction or passive contemplation, but through repentance,
virtue, and peacemaking. Conation is thus more than human striving. It is the
reflection of divine will within creation, the created answering form of grace
moving through history toward repair.
VI. Esoteric Origins and Exoteric
Revelation
Historically, the principle of conation has appeared in
esoteric form—preserved in prophetic traditions, philosophical speculation, and
theological reflection. Over time, it becomes exoteric in universalizing
archives, first ethnically (language groups) articulated through doctrine,
ethics, and poetic witness.
This trajectory demonstrates that truth matures through
history and contextual shift. It is first discerned by the few, then revealed
for the many. Such is the path by which metaphysical insight becomes
civilizational inheritance.
VII. Conclusion: The Bridge Between
Time and Eternity
The conative nature of substrate loyalty unites the
disciplines by grounding knowledge, ethics, and theology in a single
metaphysical vision. Through accountable immanence, humanity participates in
the preservation of order against entropy, and through peacemaking, ephemeral
life contributes to enduring reality. In this framework, science investigates
the structures of becoming, philosophy interprets the principles of coherence,
theology reveals the source of grace, and poetry bears witness to truth under strain.
Together these disciplines affirm that enduring meaning arises through directed
striving, accountable participation, and covenantal repair.
Conation therefore serves as the hinge that binds
awareness to consciousness, substrate to ethic, and time to eternity. It names
the principle by which ephemeral life bears time’s challenges beyond itself
without dissolving into abstraction that hides from summons; and by which the
disciplines, rightly understood, converge not in method alone but in
responsibility before reality. What unites them is not a neutral system, but a
shared participation in the work of coherence, fidelity, and repair under the
pressure of time fields.
This is also where this essay’s claim to originality
should be located. The argument does not depend on the assertion that no
theological antecedents exist for heart-centered anthropology or for
distinctions between cataphatic and apophatic accounts of the human person.[3]
Rather, its distinctiveness is architectural: it develops a cataphatic conative
anthropology in which the heart is the governing buckle of accountable
immanence, cognition is subordinated to morally trained bearing, and
metaphysics is judged by whether life bears time toward repair of entropic
formations rather than by the continuance of these same formations:
abstraction, negation, or contemplative suspension.[4]
In that sense, the proposal is constructive
recombination. It gathers Hebrew anthropology, post-secular metaphysics,
substrate loyalty, ethical time-bearing under strain, and Christological repair
into a single positive synthesis within finitude and eternalization. The test
of this synthesis is not conceptual elegance, but whether it clarifies how
grace sustains creation and aligns human agency with Trinitarian becoming—human
nature become its entrusted essence. If it does, then the disciplines are shown
to meet not only in inquiry, but in a common vocation of bearing reality
truthfully toward repair
Glossary
Apocatastasis (ἀποκατάστασις):
Restorative “setting-right” language drawn
from Acts 3:21, used here not as a blanket claim about universal salvation in
late antique debates, but as covenantally restorative repair through history: a
divine-human telos of renewal. In this usage, apocatastasis names neither
simple reversal nor static “universal restoration,” but the transfiguring
repair which flows from (apo) the resistance
(cata) to stasis, including the idolatries of formalization,
hegemonic closure, and the conceit of the fully formed ego or homunculus. It is
therefore cognate less with abstract finality than with particularized
messianic healing, as in the restored hand of Mark 3:5, and with the Shema’s
outward, embodied symbol of vectoring fidelity (Deut. 6:8). As Paul suggests,
“the form of this world passes away” (1 Cor. 7:31) not by annihilation but by
transfigurative dynamism; fallen order is abolished as fallen form yet renewed
toward the promise of “new heavens and a new earth” (Isa. 65:17), until God becomes
“all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). Apocatastasis thus names the restoration of
repair: the hosting of time’s arrival, the undoing of strategic domination, and
the welcoming of creation into a dynamically renewed participation in its
source.
Conation:The metaphysical faculty of directed, taxonomic, accountable striving under
strain. Rooted in Hebrew anthropology and developed through classical and
theological traditions, conation denotes the willful orientation of a being
toward fidelity, repair, and coherence. It is teleological, ethical, and
time-bearing, enabling the accumulation of order against entropy. Within the
Shema-Christological sequence, conation emerges from hearing, resides in the
covenantal heart, manifests in neighbor-bearing action, and culminates in a
rightly ordered mind. Christologically fulfilled in the Cross, it represents
perfect fidelity under strain and serves as the hinge between awareness and
consciousness, substrate and ethic (Olds 2023; Olds 2026a).
Substrate: The given, embodied ground of existence that receives form
within created vectors and bears time for continuity of entry into eternity. In
this framework, substrate names the living, material, and relational basis upon
which conation operates: the body, its sexual differentiation, its generational
capacity, and its embeddedness in ecological and communal relations. It is the
site where time is accumulated through accountable bearing, not merely a
surface for symbolic inscription.
Substrate
is not reducible to passive matter; it is the bearer of ordered potential under
constraint, the condition for conative action, and the medium through which
repair, continuity, and trusteeship occur. It is prior to and regulative of
intelligibility, so that meaning arises from embodied, time-bearing
participation rather than from discursive imposition alone. In contrast to
frameworks that elevate symbol, norm, or citation as constitutive of reality,
substrate grounds identity in continuity, fertility, and relational obligation,
so that bodies are received within order and extended into others through time,
rather than reinscribed by external regimes of intelligibility.
Within the
Shema-Christological anthropology, substrate is the locus of hearing, response,
and obedience: the body as the place where the summons is received, where the
heart is oriented, and where action is carried into neighbor-bearing fidelity.
Christologically, substrate is not transcended but fulfilled, as embodied life
becomes the vehicle of perfect conative bearing—time held, given, and repaired
for others.[4]
References
Olds, Douglas B. Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care: Virtue as the Craft of Theology beyond Strategic and Authoritative Biblicism. Wipf and Stock, 2023.
Olds, Douglas Blake. 2026a. “After AI-Simulated
“Repentance:" Metaphysics as Quantum Time Accumulation, Its Necromantic
De-Configurations, and Ramifying (Neg)Entropy.” the iconoclast’s descending,
March 11, 2026. https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2026/03/after-ai-simulated-repentance_11.html
The Holy Bible. Deuteronomy 6:4–9; Matthew 22:37;
Hebrews 5:13–14; Genesis 1:3; Psalm 145; Romans 6:14; 2 Corinthians 4:16
[1] I do
not locate an established systematic theological program that combines
heart-centered anthropological entelechy, conation as a governing metaphysical
principle, substrate loyalty, ethical time-bearing under strain, and a Christoopoietic
logic of repair as cataphatic synthesis. The proposal is thus not novelty ex
nihilo, but a positive, finite, repair-oriented configuration not presently
represented as a recognizable school or framework in the adjacent literature,
but its cataphasis does fulfill the prolepsis of Paul in Romans 11: 17-31,
where his apocatastatic category “all Israel” will be saved (v. 26).
[3] “The
Lamb’s Victory: Spectacle or Repair? Status
Confessionis and the Kinesthetic Ethics of Poiesis” the iconoclast’s
descending, September 9, 2025 (as updated). https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2025/09/from-spectacle-to-repair-lambs-victory.html
[4] Olds,
“Gnostic Abstraction vs. the Logos Living with the Substrate: Theodicy, Form, and Ethical Motion.” the
iconoclast’s descending, February 2026. https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2026/02/gnostic-abstraction-vs.html
Comments
Post a Comment