the iconoclast's descending

  Unclamping Grace:  A Theological Prose-Poem in the Age of Collapse A human’s vocation is to discover the sublime by ethics-founded aesthetics--those two or three thrums of embraced inner imaging that capacitate the heart to deroute the mind as harbinger—not of transcendental escape—but of eternal life and lifemaking. Contra Plotinus, the telos is not the One’s stillness, or Heraclitus, the attraction to the one of pure thought, but the re-animating earth under human trusteeship displacing aggrandizing human nature: virtue installed as the habituation of human essence, displacing ego-routing epistemology’s long usurpation of metaphysics and providence. “Participation,” as rote liturgy, dulls aisthesis , even if it stops short of ethical quietism. But often it doesn’t. The 19 th C in the 21st lets “Jesus” take the wheel for the whole task—as if grace were outsourcing mission to others, later. When the monk-hardens the next Jerusalem temple. Iconoclasm, not ritual, follow...