Unclamping Grace:
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 Parmenides, 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 19th
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, follows kinesthetic awakening.
Christ becoming-all-in-all sheds the dead serpent's tail coiled around our synesthetic sense, unclamps the motor mechanisms voiding our attention that had dulled us into mind's ersatz devotion, hollow praxis for the priestly gaze, and enculturated disease of ordering. Don't exchange the tail's illusion for hard-wired handcuffs to the dirtied and dirtying algo of colored pills.
YES, CHEF! The kidney and peristalsis now pretend to guide
what once was the proprioceptive pulse and perichoretic communion. We have
surrendered the center: the heart's placement in the world's vectors of renewal.
So come the zombies. Stalking? Looming? Leering? False. Mirroring.
They are the narcotized face of modernity’s detour by false catechesis: misery, contempt, resentment, and limp-frustrated shuffle, ketamined and collapsed nihilism. Their calling is not death, but emptied meme: dragging others down as companions in entropic specters of unethic and imbalance, and computered simulacra without covenant or destiny. They are the necromatic vacuities of Frankenstein's test tube and cauterized selvings, and Dracula's puppeting performance of bankrolls tumbling through cyclic lies. They are the long 19th Century enduring now--philosophers of brand with no enduring metaphysics that come to die, never. As in sand-boxed-to-iron, synapse-electrode-squeezed-like-a-pimple-for-the-algo's-remit never.
Coda: Iconoclasm as (R)Escaping
Yet the unveiling of ungrace is preparatory terrain for milieux--habitations--of tentmaking's peripatetic invitation and wandering accountability. Upon these modernity in the Protestant Enlightenment--Herder, Schleiermacher, perhaps even early Kant--had proposed and intended to investigate until cut short by increasingly debased metaphysics from the Jena academy and Weimar's cathartic and escapist Romanticism. Ethics-founded aesthetics do not begin to paint by aiming words to elevate, but first reorder perception from within: a descent into the body’s autonomic attention, not an upward escape into divine splendor. While Dante in his day had to descend and purge before he could ascend, in mid-modernity it is attention that must be broken—“unclamped”—before grace can speak. The sublime does not arise through order mistaken as purity, but through embodied rupture and repair--iconoclasm that repairs as it emerges from quick(e)sand artifice to walk anew, realigning perception from the ground up--from the cardiac viscera enso(u)led. In this way, any poetics or philosophy seeking to divorce from accountability is "invalid," ironizing Heidegger's seeking to "validate" existence by subterranean, non-ethical masquerade dressed as philological coteries[1].
Acts 2’s Pentecost was a seismic realignment of language, embodiment, and witness, and therefore processes historically. It is no vaporate archetype that sublimates occasionally ex eventu. The Logos contexted by modernity is fluid tectonics Pentecostally emplaced to dam the gnostic ebb of modern transcendentalist focus.
And if Maximus and Bonaventure imagine Christ as recapitulator, we moderns must first unburden him of this as disruptor of epistemology. If Cappodocian Gregory seeks eternity through yearning, we must learn to perceive how yearning has been anesthetized and commodified by interiors of selving. If Dante saw the cosmos ordered by love, we now see it disordered by catechetical collapse—but still capable of being “lifemade” through ethical conation.
In this way, we abide in the Christian metaphysical tradition by undercutting systems of crisismaking--not by returning to cognitive institutions, but by passing through historical rupture like medievalism's Dante through purgatory to arrive at the heart-led, eschatological poiesis of grace-distributing ethics and kinesthetic rebalancing of allocated, though currently teetering, truth.
Christ is not the summative Logos (John 14:12), but is its living continuation who Pentecostally disrupts conceits of cognition-as-control. He moves from verbum that is announced (Shema!) into proprioceptive alignment with grace that infuses the faculties of human embodiment with vectors of the soul that images God's spreading shalom.
Art: A Prose-Poetic Precis
Style is the egoism of art.
Bad art seeks to reify style—
to preserve the artist alone in memory,
establishing affliction’s echo
within conventicles domesticated by irony.
But art, like all true archive,
is covenant through continuance:
unity's harmonies amidst entrances and exits of personalities married to the
between of appearing and vanishing of cause and effect.
Art is not the reification of pose,
but the rhythm of response—
a rebalancing within history,
an attunement to the gravity of others,
an entrusted alignment with the divine.
Art is the theology of poiesis:
ethics made stabilizing rhythm,
not fixity but extension;
a proprioceptive witness to temporality, to neighbor,
to the unfolding, dancing telos of God.
And thereby art is summative, it sustains the creation and collectively builds
by witnessing to the creator whom alone is fixed beyond time,
and who shares fixedness with whom He wills by His own rhythm.
Note:
[1] A costumed performance of ontological instability, the masquerade of philosophical depth without ethical accountability; an armband's kinesthesis later denied in historical reckoning.
--Douglas Blake Olds
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