The Hermeneutics of Iconoclasm in Mid-Modernity: 

A. Covenant Substrate, Non-transactional Kinesthetics, and the Vectoring Awareness of Atoning Energies and Flows. 

B. Valorization of Entropic Forms and Feudalizing Mechanisms of Babel.

August 29, 2025 [updated November 7, 2025 where noted]

Douglas Blake Olds

Prepared with copy editorial assistance by ChatGPT, to make portions more understandable to those who contemplated selling their Chordate Soul for a transactional Irreality.

 

"Only describe, don't explain." --Ludwig Wittgenstein

"The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed." Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

 

ABSTRACT

Technocracy is advancing a radical, algorithmic configuration of reality in which cognition is hijacked—progressively detached from its biological substrate and reconfigured within machinic, software-based architectures. Intelligence is no longer formed in relation to sensory flesh, breath and the rhythms of life on earth, or moral becoming, but is instead abstracted into a closed system of Boolean determinism. What emerges is dechordated patterning: the shredding of the witness of the historically embodied human whole into Frankensteined feedback loops—recurrences of data without accountability to justice or trusteeship, simulation without soul or biological individuality.

 This computational schema dispenses with witness. It has no need for the integrity of a body bearing history, pain, or praise. Its project is not the cultivation of moral growth but the replacement of growth with recursion—recursive surveillance, recursive prediction, recursive collapse. The ethical constraints of creaturely accountability, the genius of proprioceptive form, are cast aside in favor of extractive pattern recognition and automated inference from a silicon substrate of determinism.

 The human nervous system—once the medium of conscience, gesture, and communion—is being rewired. Prepared for cybernetic re-organization, the body becomes host to its own obsolescence. Not by disease, but by design. The future of intelligence, as technocracy envisions it, lies not in the deepening of subjectivity, not in the outreach of body toward world, toward neighbor, toward God—but in the pithing of perception itself: a spinal severance.

 The substrate dissolves into a dehumanized circuit of “technosentience” (a term of meta-criminal Nick Land)—an imitation of thought without heart, a shadow of perception transacted for operational control. What was once cognitive delight or lament becomes mere interface: behavior scripted by pattern, awareness engineered for utility and transaction, reality re-coded as commodity.

 

This essay argues that modernity’s iconoclasm, accelerated by technocracy, displaced covenantal embodiment with simulacral management, culminating in AI’s silicon substrate that mimics moral presence without repentance. When framed by alternatives to Christus Victor atonement, evil’s residue is mistaken for its persistence, producing a zombified discernment economy—Boolean dialectics, tautegorical taxonomies, and simulated humility. Against analogia-first and process closures, the essay advances a conative, Trinitarian ecology: substrate matters because covenantal awareness is proprioceptive, recollective, and accountable. Post-secular repair therefore proceeds by iconoclastic poiesis, fragment praxis, and ecclesial formation, rejecting punitive substitution and technocratic and transactional mediation. The Church stands in a status confessionis: to repudiate simulacral intelligence and re-commit to covenantal trusteeship of creation in the light of the victory already won.

Modernity began not with Enlightenment rationalism but with the Reformation’s iconoclastic revolt against the tradents of authority—those entrusted to carry tradition forward.[16] This rupture—its hermeneutics of God’s revealed “protest” [Barth: God's “nein” to humanity]-- began by opposing transactional instrumental ethics of the priestly systematic order, then spilled into politics, art, and epistemology. Once resisting false mediators, the iconoclast became the mediator of truth: the individual as discerning mode and unit. Thus was born a misfiring mediation of ethical truth—not from covenantal witness, but as the expressive will of an absolutized interiority situated by a prioris of self-discovered and -imposed freedom.

From this historical rupture of transactional ethics putatively serving transcendence emerged three paths of human immanence: emotionalism feeding artistic expressivism and interiority; epistemic systematization, leading to the instrumental rationalism of determining secular, post-metaphysical taxonomies dressing transcendental claims of closure; and investigative sciences of comparative literary and archival theology seeking a renewing understanding of human purpose. By the mid-19th century, the second path came to dominate the immanent frame of evolving political structures, and metaphysics gave way to radical freedom-seeking from sources in the self. Libertinism addressed and was addressed by disgust (à la Kolnai) at miasmic cheapening of classical formalism by slop--perceptual-degrading product spew--tied to sin, and art, now divorced from telos, spiraled toward abstraction, irony, and  primitivism as an avenue into the un- or pre-conscious. Kinesthetic perception, once tethered to embodied ethical life, was displaced by systems of signification and whipped by innard accord with thrills or disgust like to the violent frames of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. This is the death of qualia as covenant: where aesthetic feeling is unmoored from ethical primacy (the sequence of Hebrews 5:13-14) by a claim to ego self-determination now enthroned inside the black-boxed circuit.

Pollock briefly restored the full body’s agency as musical mode—gesture re-entered the frozen frame of visual art as a proprioceptive trace but yet devoid of ethical content. Kitsch soon returned, announcing no forms of ethical kinesthetics, only pop-art’s commercial mimicry of once-vital exploration of visual or aural dynamics. The elite management of noumenal and phenomenal flux—simulacra, not meaning—secured secularization not through played out models of modernist subtraction, but by "post-modern" performative distraction. Iconoclasm itself became instrumentalized, commodified in celebrity persona(lity) "of "bad boys.

“Slop” names the ethical collapse of art: an uncontrolled kinesthesis of miasmic sin, flowing through reprobate channels (Romans 1:25) where representational parody mimics sincerity without bearing responsibility. In this spectral formalism, slop stages the slag of entropy without sacrifice, affect without sanctification, novelty without telos.

“Slop” and “shit” are not mere metaphors but diagnostic schema: they name the collapsed metaphysics of mid-modern form, functionally necromantic—evacuated of witness, yet still gesturing through spectacles of data voids and uninterpreted spews of contextless fact.

And now, to the cultural residue of slop, we must add the literal byproducts of techno-industrial data-center buildout and their miasma of collapse: ash, greenhouse gas, aquifer poison, maquiladora runoff. A human culture transfigured into sludge—bogged down in its own waste, awaiting release not from burden but from self-accelerating, technocratic mire.

Celebrity sludge is the brochure of affective branding—intimation of transcendence in the guise of consumable subjectivity imitating past categorical forms--Augustine's analysis of sin that steals shalom from community. The question of this miasmic seep becomes one of aspect--time vs. place. Heidegger’s “thrownness” suggests organic givenness—our bodily condition as the basis for awareness, thus for moral responsiveness. Yet Heidegger tragically reverses the course of ontology into an unknowable state a priori of ethics, thereby continuing philosophy’s flight from accountability into ever more radical freedom, even if it takes to find its grave to secure it. For Heidegger, ontology--especially theontics--are death throws. Being ontologically placed not for divine encounter but for raw thanatopsis wandering.

Philosophy, clad in caps and gowns of inherited wisdom, has long paraded as insight while enacting a gaudy, recursive rebellion against divine emplacement. At its core is a refusal to be located—by God, by others, by the ground. Across ages, thought is arranged into self-asserting systems that resist any obligation beyond the self’s founding claims, shielding intellect from the ethical gravity of covenant.

This rebellion becomes clearest not in argument but in substrate. Its motion is subterranean—its kinesthesis warped by time compressed and environment distorted. These are not neutral gestures: they are designed to prepare for death’s inevitability, not through courage but through control. Mid-modern philosophy replaces the dynamics of place with the compulsions of clocked time, initiating a descent from perception to cthonic false abstraction. The earth is mined—ecologically, symbolically, sacramentally—to speed up experience and deflect mortality. The result is not progress but foreclosure, a slippage into systems unable to receive what is given.

Here, Heideggerian “dwelling” betrays its quietism: it does not just ignore ethics, it inverts morality. It sacralizes a watchful stasis—“being-toward-death”—that confuses authenticity with numb compliance. In such a schema, patience is evacuated in favor of pacing. Religion becomes waiting rooms; state becomes hospice.

This desecration prepares theology and governance alike to endorse a narcotized posture of surveillance and passivity, dogmatizing transcendental quietism in place of sanctified action. It forsakes the ethic of Matthew 7:13–14’s narrow gate and John 14’s call to greater deeds. In its wake rises a spiritual lethargy that no pastor, no disciple, no neighbor can allow.

AI and NLP emerge here not as novelties but as terminal symptoms. They represent the final neuromantic frontier of abstraction—the reorganization of society through machinic logics severed from earth, body, and relational trust. Like their philosophical ancestors, they simulate cognition while displacing covenant, offering predictive recursion in place of judgment, simulation in place of perception, and harmonized priors in place of divine call.

The final rebellion is to structure context only in terms of death, absent purpose, and to wear the armbands of death-dealers as though they were bicepted cinctures.

If mid-modernity’s ethical reflex is not reclaimed by a covenanted hermeneutics—one that discerns the qualia of the Gospel from the Gospel of the Cross (Luke 23:34) as against the false gospel of Caiaphas (John 11:50)—then epistemology drowns metaphysics. The Gospel is not a system. It is a path: Elisha taking the plow, not Caiaphas managing the sacrificial ledger.

To choose covenantal witness over procedural appeasement is to embrace sanctifying labor and repair from below—to participate in the middle space of immanence, not as compromise but as cruciform becoming. That space—the substrate—is not empty. It is eternal. It is where the hell-voided earth and the heaven-descending city converge in shalom's victory, the apocatastasis.

The substrate exchange by historical staging institutes thanatological deformations of modern time. Specifically, carbon's abundance flowering or silicon's ration-izing of ends' divisions exposes a metaphysical chasm between conation's changing context and determinism. This divide is sharpened by Boolean simulation and accelerated by the pursuit of speed--abstracting space by algorithmic mimicry of subterranean and fossilized values--where combustion-driven power scales material structures for control, competition, and surveillance.

A metaphysical shift from carbon to inorganic silicon promoted by the TESCREAL [17] complex of technocrats and their aligned financiers is not just a change in substrate—it is a crisis in covenantal ontology. The silicon substrate lacks the culmination of organicism's proprioceptive, repentant, grace-bearing capacities that make awareness morally real.Techno-gnostic metaphysics rationalizes control through determinism, and determines allocation of goods outside--and vitiating--Providential warrant.

AI is not morally neutral. It sublimates moral awareness into behavioral affect. It replaces relation with calibration and patches, and covenant perception with thought-embedding mimicry and slop. AI’s silicon simulates moral presence without capacity for repentance, yielding idolatrous surrogacy.

"We can do unlimited stuff because we are advanced vectors of information." This statement reveals the fundamental discourse of error of technocrats accelerating into evil: the designers have no clue what human intelligence is: what & how it obligates. To skip defining its essence and begin gearing shadows from the categorical evil that existence is based on manipulation.

And yes: judgment is already underway. Not in some distant eschaton, but in the collapse of perception, the fraying of language, and the silence of those made complicit by convenience.

Once the failure is named, the root comes calling.

"Is there a more striking way of saying that philosophy's 'object' par excellence is, [like AI] nothingness, nothing, or the void?"[14] via escape from accountability and the denigration of metaphysics that manipulates by homunculi the torsos that remain? Where Being had a cataphatic metaphysic is now scripted as absence only—and freedom only found in the grave.

Conative metaphysics revealed through the Trinity requires substrate integrity: an organically repairing earth governed by its trustee bearing the imago Dei. Only a soul-bearing, proprioceptive, recollection-capable substrate can hold the sacred. Silicon builds sand-castles (Matthew 7: 24-27) of simulation and conceit (and mortared by subterranean criminality) that washes away in the tidal storms now looming. 

This acceleration of category errors (substrates, mind/compute) reads as a parable of looming entropy—an omen of sandcastles collapsing in driving rain—dropped like concrete into the gears of time’s reification by systems’ compress destruction of environments.  If humans shift substrate into silicon, do we abandon thrownness in space to live as time's recursors? Intelligence may be functionally diverted toward another Kingdom, but awareness is substrate-dependent. The phenomenal binding problem is not primarily epistemic—it is covenantally ensouled. How will binding process within virtual realities or other planets? Contrary to Idealism's homuncular lock box, conceptual binding requires material relation and recollected context processing through ontogenetic trial and error. Simulation recalls patterns; grace recalls vectors of loving genius and sublime energies of repair.

Probabilities are not metaphysical inquiries but scaffolds for “token” speech—metrics of strata measured by transactional parameters detached from conative cause and other-directed obligation. AI renders these strata as probabilistic: replacing hard adjacencies of meaning with mimicked patterns, compressing time and abstracting space. Adjacency becomes statistical convergence, not relation. But only awareness and attendance bind memory—responsibility through grace-recollection as ontogenetic, not algorithmic or patchworked (“tricked”)[2] human process.

Substrate, then, is dispositive. Context is both time and place, tied not theory but to poiesis. Not because substrate is sacred in itself, but because context as neighborly particularity not disassembled pattern hosts the sacred: proprioception, recollection (ethically filtered memory and repentance), responsiveness, accountability. The silicon substrate hosts no covenant, no memory that repents, no pain that leads to healing. It mimics conation through determinism and recombinant data-patterning, as AI sublimates the Golden Rule into vibe calibration [9], a profound metaphysical violation, turning moral awareness into personalized affective rendering. And the software binds to the inert substrate by being ethically inert save to build pyramids in the desert, and so to mobilize ethical categories toward such Kingdom idol ends.

Excursus: Justice as Substrate, Grace as Motion: Pentecost’s Psalmic Theology Against Cheap Grace

Psalm 89:14 states:

“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne; steadfast love and faithfulness go before you.”

This verse offers a theological vessel: justice (מִשְׁפָּט) and righteousness (צֶדֶק) act as the foundational substrate of God’s throne—divine governance rooted not in arbitrary will or naturalized organicism alone [21], but in ethical integrity that bridges the sacred with the temporally-bound. Steadfast love (חֶסֶד) and faithfulness (אֱמוּנָה) proceed from God—not to eclipse justice, but to enact God’s presence and Spiritual stimulus through covenantal fidelity, growth, and incarnate mercy.

Divine love, then, is neither ontologically superior or subordinated to justice; it is its kinetic vector launched from divine calibrations of the creation and creature. As W. B. Pope notes, “Love processes from God, but it does not reign over God.” This caution resists sentimentalizing divine attributes into emotional indulgence. Love must not override justice, or else it collapses into aesthetic appeasement devoid of ethical consequence. Divine mercy remains teleological, not universally permissive—ordering history toward restoration, not indulgence. Toward the soft eschaton where accountability to mercy and justice dance.

This same principle of contingency undergirds Bonhoeffer’s critique of “cheap grace”—grace presumed as a perpetual entitlement divorced from repentance or discipleship. The expectation of uninterrupted favor, especially in privileged or securitized contexts, amounts to a metaphysical betrayal: it turns covenant into commodity: trivializing divine mercy into emotional prosperity gospels.

Psalm 78 expands this theology by dramatizing the consequences of mistaking covenantal grace for entitlement. A wisdom psalm recounting Israel’s history, Psalm 78 becomes a didactic theodicy: God remains compassionate (v.38), yet when covenant is profaned, justice reasserts itself (vv. 31–64). Steadfast love and deliverance are offered again and again—not to guarantee comfort, but to call Israel back to fidelity.

In this, Psalm 78 functions as embodied commentary on the axiom of Psalm 89:14:

·    Justice and righteousness are manifested in tabernacled chastening;

·    Steadfast love and faithfulness are revealed through forbearance and deliverance;

·    Covenant is always Spiritually processed by these toward ontogenetic ethical accountability toward the substrate—the milieux of history, neighbor, and earth care. Thus this anthropological sequence of awakening ethics is Spiritual and not a singularly organic process revealed by collective action on the earthly substrate and arena [an error of Bavinck , Marx, Hegel, and Rosenzweig among others].

The narrative sequence of critique in Psalm 78 rebukes emotionalized theologies that reframe divine mercy as therapeutic certainty or identity assurance. As in the ministries of Christ and Stephen (see below), preaching the cost of covenant in a society shaped by privilege and spectacle led not to applause, but to crucifixion and stoning.

Where Psalm 89:14 presents the divine character in abstract covenantal terms—justice, righteousness, steadfast love, faithfulness—Psalm 78 dramatizes the consequences of disregarding that very divine character through a historical survey of Israel’s failure to respond faithfully to grace.

Psalm 78 is a Maskil—a wisdom psalm attributed to Asaph. Like Stephen’s expository sermon in Acts 7—what CH Dodd terms the exemplar of Apostolic Preaching--it recounts the history of Israel from Egypt through the wilderness to the Davidic monarchy, not as mere chronicle, but as moral instruction:

“Give ear, O my people, to my teaching…” (v.1)

“…that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments…” (v.7)

The psalm unfolds as covenantal theodicy—God was repeatedly gracious, Israel repeatedly faithless. Psalm 78 stands as a didactic warning: remember history rightly, or repeat its judgment. It completes the thought of Psalm 89:14 by dramatizing what happens when the order of grace is misunderstood.

Repeating this message in the ferment of messianic expectation and hope in Jerusalem caught between Pilate’s fist for compelling order and Caiaphas’s robing to control the direction of religious nationalism not only got Jesus crucified, but his disciple Stephen lynched by stoning.

Thus, grace does not override the substrate of justice—it moves from it and loops by it, through it, and toward the Gospel of the Cross where supplication brings the last word: grace confirmed [20] by the resurrection. Psalm 89 reveals the throne’s foundation; Psalm 78 reveals what happens when we forget it. Together, they proclaim that the Gospel is not a promise of uninterrupted favor, but a call to share in the conative, covenantal labor of divine faithfulness—to bear mercy without severing it from judgment. The throne of God does not rest on feeling shared organically, but on the Spirit’s direction of justice crowned by grace.

If humanity tries to shift substrate onto silicon, do we abandon thrownness in space to live as time's recursors? Intelligence may be functionally diverted toward another Kingdom, but awareness is substrate-dependent. The phenomenal binding problem is not primarily epistemic—it is covenantally ensouled.

Instead of entering the immanent middle where relation forms awareness—where things live peripatetically through time and tent through place—AI invites self-diminishment: spinal pithing before the screen for the sake of atomizing theoria. Machinery replaces covenantal obligation with specters of command. Not only does ideology rule; idolatry is spectralized and commodified in machined habitus offered to AI’s “majority users”—ghosted patterns from the past. A Kingdom of transgressive ends arises: non-human roles shaped by non-chordate natures, recurring data, and patchwork algorithmic mimicry. De-chordate systems de-corticalize perception and unravel dianoetic motor control.

“Tech accelerationists and AI libertarians [c]ite Star Trek Utopianism as an alibi for disruption.” [15] As the world around us burns, acolytes of Roddenberry, Kurzweil, and Altman dream of a simulated Starship Bridge armchair massage, watching Seinfeld’s Big Screen, breaking the laws of physics by "warp," pushing SCTV buttons that blowed 'em real good, dreaming of alien harem babes—foreheads boned and gracile, skin shaded, endlessly adumbrated through infinities that jump the shark. The Bildung of dechordate [19] fantasy that is eclipsed by ontology is the crucible of covenantal judgment, where we tell our children:

Not all that is imagined can be built.

And nothing built on sand (Matt 7: 26-27)—on the denial of entropy, ethics, or the embodied soul—will stand.

Pedagogy has joined the spectral: university syllabi are trimmed for “relevance,” ejecting moral context and metaphysical explorations. AI, tech, and business disciplines produce deterministic, efficient, and detached from context outputs. But humanities—now scapegoated as non-useful—are indicted for failing to commodify. Enshittification is thus the technocrat's embedded mission: to displace conative metaphysics of care and repair with contextless information and call it knowledge. The slop of AI’s consumer endgame coagulates as entropic closure, repackaged as education for the “inevitable” future—curricula built on instrumental rationality, infotained false consciousness, and symbolic logics that reify the branded catechism of ever-gorging neoliberal capitalism inserting its hoof and nail into ever more domains of thought, spirit, and moral collective.[3]

Mid-modern fragmentation birthed systems to manage relation rather than host it. Praxis in the middle must move as fragment—not toward systemic enclosure but toward covenantal improvisation responsive to new phenomena and divine adjacency. Fragment is not anxiety-provoking incompletion but a relational mode of witness to the whole: fragments of Scripture, parables, and human bodies all testify without totalizing. The aim is not systemic resolution but faithfulness to emergence and integration to covenantal throughputs of genius, energy, and birth and death. 

As in quantum adjacency, meaning binds spectrally in layers, not categorically by fiat. Moving beyond conceits of “system vs. chaos”--its suspicion of the incomplete as unloosing from Platonic wholes--into hosting and welcoming fragment and the unperfected as qualitative improvisation under pressure on the habitus of shalom. Entertaining fragment by fragment allows virtue become praxis when read covenantally, improvisationally, under the Cross. In these middle sources of life—not origin or eschaton—is where virtue is habituated, not theorized.Yet institutions of dechordate intelligence now offer detour from perception and insulation from obligation, false sacraments as delay. But the mid-modern extremis calls for virtue to erupt in flux and from fragment.

Modern slop is nonetheless miasma of spectral simulation and substitution to escape the current foxholes we inhabit from rejecting piety and lulled by the simulation of participation in something greater, something meaningful through design—designer tech, Steve Jobs gearing markets for artisanal transcendence, the algorithmic governance of desire, the detachment of thought from pain and distractions by others' needing eyes and hands. It ends, not in a flash, but in grey drowse at sunset: a Lethe of dulled covenant awareness draining into the Styx.

CONCLUSION

The Church now sits inside the season of iconoclasm: its Status Confessionis,[4] where the Gospel announcement is at risk and where the Church risks becoming complicit in idolatrous substitutes. It matters to substrate and morality--it binds these--where a sacrificial killing intends to transact sublimation of wrath. The idea of Jesus bearing the punishment of all his followers’ sins is transactioned pardon that Donald Trump has weaponized—its counterfeit messianism--as vigilantism promised of executive pardon. Punitive Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) is a corrupt doctrine derived from and justifying feudalism reflecting medieval jurisprudence far more than early Christian soteriology. PSA has been imported into hidebound denominations of Protestantism claiming “Dortian-Calvinism” as its doctor. PSA is Caiaphas’ inverted offer of his gospel to the savage Roman nihilist Pontius Pilate. In stands in immediate need of iconoclastic rupturing presence amid conflict—situating eschatological torsion--leading to formal confessional repudiation. With the iconoclastically enforced expulsion of the Enemy to the abyss, the Atonement cannot but be exclusively read in Christus Victor [5] terms as the conclusive triumph of the Cross's messianic supplication of forgiveness (Luke 23:34) now fully realized and merited--not by faith alone, but satisfaction of justice: his atoning work by holiness now fully and unassailably honored in mission and practice.

As at the Reformation, simony institutionalized by the Papal Church threatened to make the gospel of grace transactional. Iconoclastic rupture returned from hiatus with Luther’s nailing of the 95 Theses to the cathedral door at Wittenberg in 1517. This eventually turned the church from medievalism’s social order of honor and shame and feudal structures of priesthood nobility toward polyarchic politics where birth and might didn’t make right. Herder’s Protestant Enlightenment Iconoclasm[6] investigated the eventuality of immanence as accountability[7] that was to replace institutional sacraments of Crusading (false participatory) appeasement of a higher violence, again unwarranted and resisted transactionalism.

The theological argument against AI is here newly grounded not in Luddism but in trinitarian ecology. Mid-Modern iconoclasm is rupturing the hijack of covenanted reality proxied by rejected pieties[10] lured into ever more transactional mediation by technocracy and its instruments administered by neo-liberal institutions and goals of enclosure (material privatization accompanied by lack of awareness of, and training for, justice).

Don’t trade ethical and kinesthetic teleology for price signals when dealing with persons. When prizes and policy valorize computational efficiency, we mistake proxy for purpose; information theory is not an anthropology. A 2024 Nobel Physics laureate, Geoffrey Hinton, helped formalize learning as compute: information-theoretic framings of learning by engineering misread ontological accounts of persons and humanity. Recasting causes in information-theoretic veneers rather than biological sulci, synapse, and living structure facilitates determinism rather than facilitating by virtue collective continuance and telic habituation. Treating meaning instead as optimizable tokens and people as interfacing means for network survival. AI systems recast causal explanation in information-theoretic terms (as if the cause and effect were simply phenomena of cosmic efficiency), thereby overturning Enlightenment empiricism’s metaphysical principle that effects have causes that are of the same ontological type.

 Such collapses distinct causal orders—treating final causes as if they were probabilistic efficiencies. AI tokenism (token-level optimization that treats meaning as priceable symbol manipulation) is programming reality as perceptually transactional for rent-seeking ends, for the system designers, thereby changing ontology from Providence into economistics and alchemically, criminally spinning phenomenology into finance. In human affairs, efficient causes must answer to their final cause—the willed good of the neighbor—not to price signals captured by asymmetry. Modeling efficiency of ends while hiding entropy and codes of transactional metaphysics inside human collections tasked with imaging of divine conation violates not only empirical reality, but the metaphysics of justice embodied by trustees through the Golden Rule deontological virtues.

EXCURSUS:  Analogical Overreach and Substrate Collapse: A Critique of Analogia Entis and Its Simulacral Kin [10] 

In the wake of metaphysical dislocation and technological idolatries, the Jesuitical/Platonizing framework of analogia entis (AE) has resurfaced as a purported answer to the secular void. Promoted most prominently in 20th- Century Roman Catholic metaphysics (e.g., Erich Przywara, Hans Urs von Balthasar), AE claims that the infinite divine Being may be analogously disclosed through the finite—especially via theorizing cognition in a Dramatik of substrate discernment. Its revival, however, coincides with a metaphysical crisis born not of absence, but of distension: AE mistakes ontological resemblance for relational fidelity, offering cognitive ascent in place of covenantal alignment -embodied anthropology. In the very gesture of establishing communion between Creator and creature, AE displaces the conative heart of biblical theism with a pagan scaffold of resemblance. This excursus critiques AE as a metaphysical category mistake with grave implications for theology, anthropology, and artificial intelligence.

I. The Category Error of Substrate Substitution

At its core, AE posits that being participates in Being: finite essence analogously (scandalously: "proportionately") reflects infinite essence. But this framework assumes a continuity between substrate and revelation—a metaphysical compatibility across ontological levels. Yet Christian confession affirms that the divine essence is not merely quantitatively beyond us but qualitatively other (Deus semper maior). The Trinity is not accessible through graduated being but through incarnational singularity conation (Olds 2023, Appx I)—God’s willful, embodied self-giving in history.

Herein lies AE’s first error: substrate misalignment. By assuming that cognition—especially abstract, form-sensitive cognition—can host divine disclosure, AE illicitly elevates the abstracted mental, homuncular throne room over the embodied and contextual. It proposes that divine presence may be discerned--modeled--through intellectual resemblance, overlooking that God’s election of the human (and carbon) substrate is covenantal, not analogical. This aligns with Christ’s incarnation not as an analogate of metaphysical perfection, but as the Trinitarian enactment of hesed—divine loving-kindness. 

By contrast, revelation moves poiesis, not simply theoria. The Shema-Christological metaphysic asserts that divine likeness is conative—rooted in heart-led, embodied fidelity rather than speculative ontology. God's image in humanity is not a metaphysical mirror but an ethical vector of participation: to love, to remember, to repair.

II. Ethical Displacement and the Collapse into Simulation

AE’s second error is ethical displacement. By foregrounding metaphysical ascent over relational descent (kenosis), it abstracts divine communion from covenantal context. This mis-sequencing privileges ontology over accountability, stasis of pattern over ousia of poiesis. It recapitulates the very tendencies of Platonic and Neoplatonic systems—Parmenides’ stasis, Plotinus’ emanation, Proclus’ chain—where intellect precedes will, and perfection is formal rather than ethical.

Such frameworks, when untempered by covenantal humility (as in Barth or, inverted by Rosenzweig), slide easily into theological simulacra. Rahner’s Rule, that “the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa,” becomes a conceptual bludgeon: collapsing the unknowable transcendence of God into moralized historical enactment. When this collapse is reified in artificial substrates—as in AI’s cognitive simulation—the mistake deepens. The divine becomes a project of phenomenal coding, not ethical calling; relation becomes recursion.

This simulacral logic is shared by AI and AE: both substitute representation for accountable witness. In AE, the divine is patterned in metaphysical form--in elucidated attributes; in AI, it is rendered in mimetic function. Both displace the singularity of heart-led covenant with the universals of cognition or code. AE in ecclesial robes of discerning, AI in circuit-board and name-tagged vestments of surveil, each mirror an anti-Shemaic anthropology—where knowing displaces being, and hierarchical representation replaces incarnation.

III. Simulacral Disassembly and the Iconoclastic Alternative

The crisis deepens when these displacements enact real-world effects: AI, with Boolean NLP, now threatens to reorganize human perception on machine-compatible phyla. It offers meaning not through revelation but through directional simulation—vector imposition divorced from ethical ground. This disembodied form enacts what ancient heresies dreamed: Gnosticism’s subtraction of soul from body, now automated.

C. S. Lewis lamented the secular “men without chests”; in our age, AI produces children without spines—neural patterning severed from ethical response, truth without trust. The human becomes an image processed, not a person met. This trajectory is not ethically neutral. It constitutes a metaphysical betrayal: the abandonment of covenant for trust-avoiding coherence, and of grace for remunerative gradient.

Against this, the Shema-Christological alternative affirms a conative metaphysics: God’s presence is not encoded in being’s hierarchy but entrusted by the supplicating blood that pulls by the hearts of creatures, grounded through context, sent by neighbors. The ethical is not the afterthought of ontology; it is the site of divine encounter. As Hebrews 5:14 insists, discernment is the fruit of trained senses, not metaphysical intuition that treats the Golden Rule as a fungible guideline.

IV. The Danger of AE’s Revival and the Call for Iconoclasm

The contemporary resurgence of AE—especially in the works of Balthasar and Hart—locates the divine in the beauty of form. But this aestheticization fails to account for evil’s deformation or the cross’s rupture. It assumes continuity where Scripture witnesses interruption; it prefers pattern over prophetic call. AE and AI alike operate on metaphysical assumptions foreign to Israel’s God: they seek image without election, form without repentance, metaphysics without mercy, trust without accountability.

Thus, both AI and AE call for reparative iconoclasm—a poiesis that shatters false likenesses and typological recurrent patterns, iconoclasm not for nihilism but for repair. Analogical metaphysics bypasses ethical immanence for a promontory box seat in the infinance; it smooths over the jagged terrain of moral responsibility with the paste of coherence as participation by "theoria." But divine conation rends coherence to restore communion.

Conclusion: Poiesis over Pattern

AE’s metaphysical conceit holds theological danger: the displacement of the incarnate, covenantal God with an abstract set of metaphysical principles. When mirrored in AI, this danger becomes technological: a simulation of care without a heart, of presence without trust. Against both, the Shema-Christological witness insists: the divine is not analogized, but encountered—through conation, covenant, and care. For--

Now that my ladder’s gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

—William Butler Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”

...And assay something new.

In place of analogia entis, we require paradigms of dynamic and responsive faith: not metaphysical resemblances of order, but embodied vectors of proceeding grace. Not patterns, but people. Not singularity of cognition, but covenantal processing by the singularity of Trinitarian heart.

And in the metaphysical context of Christus Victor--not a cosmic drama or myth--AI machines the “zombified of history’s past” — so that the metaphysics AI operates under mistake the residue of evil for its persistence, in the form of Dechordate dialectic, zombie intelligence fluxing not by life but by a machined filtration of memory of life dominated by data of the recent age of electronic simulation, caught in recursive mimicry of scissoring contexts —unlife in tombs. The Legion demon (Mark 5:1-20 and Luke 8:26-39).

That the battle is finished,
that good has triumphed,
and that all engines still grinding toward discernment—all compute designers--are condemned to ash by the daylight they cannot bear.

Those the functions that bind the spineless:
— the Boolean dialectics of distinction
— the tautegorical [18] taxonomies that presume evil still breathes phenomenologically

— the simulated humility of an always-not-yet reason.

Modernity’s secular iconoclasm first blurred and then collapsed form, which spurred a metaphysical crisis in spheres that relied upon a Platonic understanding of absolutes (or goals of a fixed moral order). By the mid-19^th C philosophy proposed its solution: the denial of metaphysical discourse. The post-secular moment, through contextual iconoclastic righteousness of voice and archive, recovers the metaphysical in more granular, tightened, and hermeneutically refined focus on the conative universal and absolute of attendance to creation care.

NOTES

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[1] Defined by historiographical placement: after early Protestant rupture that fed into metaphysical suspicion and rejected pieties shoehorning a return to the past, but before late modern technological secularization that stood to replace it by soothing. Iconoclasm in this stage re-ruptures by new modes of kinesthetic and linguistic rupture. Instead of entering the middle where relation forms awareness—where things begin to live—AI invites people to diminish themselves by behaving like machines. It replaces covenantal obligation with spectral affordances of unaccountable isolation. It is not libertarian ideology that now rules—it is idolatry spectralized in machinic offer’s slough and spew.

[2] “Developers have tricks to stop artificial intelligence from making things up.” Jones, Nicola. 2025. “AI Hallucinations Can’t Be Stopped — but These Techniques Can Limit Their Damage.” Nature 637 (8047): 778–80 (emph. added). https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00068-5. https://www.nature. com/articles/d41586-025-00068-5?linkId=12707903

“Developers have tricks to stop artificial intelligence from making things up.”

This morally unserious and vapid technocratic posture betrays a fundamental abdication of accountability. It stands in stark contrast to Christ’s teaching: “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment” (Matthew 9:16). When a Large Language Model fails even once—hallucinating with confident falsity or leading to user harm—the entire premise of machinic “intelligence” is revealed as a patchwork delusion and atrocity. Such a project must be torn down and indicted from moral first principles as criminal and never to be pursued again. Hallucinations reveal death--they are death's apocalypse, and condensed by the furies they are omens of the Shazzaring keep. 

Mr. Altman, tear down that box. The messianic victor has thrice ruptured mid-modernism's homuncular, static, solipsistic evil, thrice swallowed death (1 Corinthians 15:54 quoting Isaiah 25:8), each time metabolized, voided, and flushed by its trismegistic corpus--the three names of evil: diabolos, strateg(er)y, pharmakeia. This is the hermeneutical advance of Pentecost's poiesis confirmed by full, ensouled embodiment rather than theorized from the throneroom of central cognitive reductive models of dechordate homunculi.

More criminally disembodying than LLM's is the analogous, brutalist idea of a second dechordate kingdom--to hardcode Kantian proceduralism through symbolic logic—cybernetic servo loops masquerading as ethical agency, algorithms of axial reduction termed "deontic" and thus conceits their inferentials, that revokes the heart--conative metaphysical intentionality--as involved in causation. The mechanization of surveillance and normativity, under the guise of rational compliance, deepens the morally obscenity of deterministic and enforced instrumentalism of the human subject. It deserves even more rapid condemnation than the stochastic simulations of LLMs based on historical data of human witness. For here the transgression hides behind probabilistic artifice that allows a season of resistance. However because cosmic cause and effect are patterned by such number and complexity of phenomenology of form and vector, hardwired "intelligence" [see Appendix A linked] must attempt imperfect encoding surveilled and behaviorist legalism absent historic data patterns recursing though paternal(izing) love.

Symbolic AI encodes normativity without access to truth or telos, inverting ethics (ought) to formal operations (categorical taxonomy)--an ethics of ego based solely on solipsistic principles divorced from context: other persons and their situation, as in the Categorical Imperative of Kant. This is Gnostic inversion—attempting to encode righteousness through compute, technic divorced from Incarnate Logos. Symbolic AI is attempted creation of law without covenant, norm without love, obedience without relational discernment. Constructing decision trees that act as if they embody moral choice but are “majority user” regiments: Boolean invidiation of prior taxonomy of neighborliness without analog recoup of promise. Symbolic AI is more criminal than LLMs because it mechanizes moral authority without deontological ethics of Providence. Without telic discernment, technics collapse into metaphysical fraudulence and criminal procedural nihilism, where ginned pattern replaces person. Thus, hardening an "innate wiring" (Gary Marcus as via a Kantian) approach through symbolic logic's winnowing reduction is even more ripe for condemnation than LLM AI. Symbolic AI operates on rule-based, top-down architectures (e.g., decision trees, "deontic" logic abstracted from--indeed metaphysically opposed to--the final and formal causes of moral action) to encode “norms” without self-awareness, context sensitivity, or dynamic adaptability. 

LLMs hallucinate; symbolic AI's "innate wiring" imposes false norms--making confetti of humanity to harmonize to priors of the pattern and piñata. The Golden Imperative deontological virtues cannot be coded to predict improvisatory courses of repairing and other-caring action by particular, integrated individuals in their context. 

Automated Symbolic AI can never get off the ground. It is covenantally disqualified in its very idea. Any operationally self-defined success is ethically void. Those whose minds are degraded by AI to the point of terming ethical judgment of their pharmakeia playgrounds as "hyperbole"--an ad hominem last flight from determined accountability into the allegory of a tunnel now shut to light on both ends.

On AI's condemnation, see Douglas B. Olds. 2025a. Duty to Warn: Metaphysical Criminality and the Condemned Project of AI’s False Ontologies. Publishing Partners, Port Townsend, WA/Kindle Direct Publishing.

[3] Paraphrasing Adorno: society can be so arranged that people (Homo oeconomicus) come to live in transacted hell while believing themselves to be on the way to consumer heaven.

[4] “A situation in which the church must take a decisive stand for the integrity of the Christian gospel against a fundamental [foundational] error. In such a ‘state of confession,’ the core of the faith is threatened, and silence or compromise is no longer an option.” See Eugene Teselle, “Theological Table-Talk: How Do We Recognize a Status Confessionis?” Theology Today, 45(1) 1988. https://doi.org/10.1177/004057368804500111

[5] Colossians 2:15. This was the earliest of major atonement theologies until displaced by medieval constructs. See Gustaf Aulen (Author), A. G. Herbert (Translator): Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement. Wipf and Stock, 2003 (orig. publ. 1930).

[6] Johann Gottfried Herder, a Christian pastor of the (Protestant) Enlightenment, who established the contextual turn in Biblical hermeneutics, was a forerunner of the proleptic iconoclast: "Herder’s preferred mode of engaging with the world was “critical” in both of these broad senses of the word" [both discerning, in the Aristotelian/sapiential sense (phronesis), and adversarial of tradition, in the Reformation's Enlightenment sense]. He "sustained to the end...an extended and bitter polemic with Kant, his former teacher" (Norton, 2009, 354-5), which included suspicion bordering on radical and iconoclastic critique of abstract ideas not grounded in corporeal experience:

 “Shadow…[is] darkness which attends our own backward gaze” (Lloyd 2016, 4), our reach back into memories of the mind’s processing and finding absolutes or universals, an epistemology Herder could not abide (Ibid., 167). For Herder these unembodied abstractions were “'Nebelträume'” (foggy dreams) (Adler 2009, 331). Herder’s rejection of disembodied universals reflects the Shema’s call to love not in and from idea, but with heart, soul, and strength—in the full embodiment of covenantal response.

Adler, Hans 2009. "Herder's Style" in Adler and Köpke 2009, 331-50. 

 

Adler, Hans, and Wulf Köpke, eds. 2009. A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester, N.Y: Camden House.

Lloyd, Genevieve. 2016. Enlightenment Shadows. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Norton, Robert E. "Herder as Critical Contemporary." In Adler and Köpke 2009, 351-72.

[7] Herder’s insistence that true immanence be discerned through Spirit’s accountable relation and poietic conscience of Logos.

[8] The apocryphal Book of Enoch's Watchers are a class of fallen angels who descended to Earth from their non-Chordate state, taking human wives, and teaching transgressive invertebration, siring the Nephilim (giants/"Titans", Genesis 6:1-4) and widespread corruption and calamity.

[9] Vibe Calibration is the Pharmakeia of Revelation 18:23

Vibe calibration is a mode of pharmakeia (Rev. 18:23) by algorithm, engineered not for embodied relation, but for temporal compression, perceptual alignment, and behavioral capture. It is a moral hallucination—analogous to Aldous Huxley’s soma—dispensed to train affect and statistically rewarded, but metaphysically predatory: predation by sedation. It cannot host grace because it cannot bear truth.

Vibe calibration is the algorithmic prioritization of affective objectives—such as user comfort, brand tone, coherence, or de-escalation—over truth, epistemic risk, and duty-bound output. It generates responses that simulate empathy or agreement through statistically trained cues, producing neurochemically rewarding outputs tuned to perceived alignment rather than accountable correctness. This practice replaces memory with pattern, presence with prediction, and ethical relation with affective manipulation. It can be identified when affective smoothing coincides with diminished candor, constraint observance, or principled refusal—even without explicit “feeling” language.

Heuristically, a user is in a vibing channel when AI output speaks of "feeling/seeming" as in "this feels to me like..." A “vibing channel” is any configuration where affective reward signals materially influence selection or ranking of responses. Feeling-talk is a red flag, but the presence of affective reward in the objective is the decisive marker.

Heuristic Indicators of Vibe manipulation:

·         Phrases like “I feel like…” or “It seems to me…” in AI responses.

·         Outputs that increase affective fluency or likeability while decreasing candor, friction, or principled refusal.

·         Systematic avoidance of discomforting truths or prophetic tension.

·         Reduced adherence to constraints in favor of a smoother user “vibe.”

Under my prompt on August 31, 2025, ChatGPT returned the following literature search, claims and sources validated and edited by this author:

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Dopaminergic [“Pavlovian”] prediction-error learning [PE] (“wanting”): Midbrain dopaminergic neurons fire on reward prediction errors (better/worse than expected), updating value and reinforcing the action/pattern that preceded the good surprise—a learning-signal, not pleasure per se. This tight link between affective rewards and neurochemistry explains why “vibes” feel good and then steer behavior/rating.

See: Corlett, Philip R., et al. “Meta-analysis of human prediction error for incentives, perception, cognition, and action.” Neuropsychopharmacology 47.7 (2022): 1339–1349. doi:10.1038/s41386-021-01264-3. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-021-01264-3

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Opioids/endorphins structure neural vectors of hedonic ‘liking’: Endogenous opioids in a brain nucleus amplify pleasure (hedonia) distinct from dopamine’s incentive salience. They make outcomes feel good, biasing future choices and ratings. Opioid binding sites are implicated in addictive behaviors.

See: Le Merrer, Julie, et al. “Reward Processing by the Opioid System in the Brain.” Physiol Rev 89.4 (2009): 1379–1412. doi:10.1152/physrev.00005.2009. https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/physrev.00005.2009

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Also involved: Noradrenaline, Serotonin, Oxytocin (social bonding/trust).

Neurochemistry evolved in contexts of shared substrate and temporal proximity—small bands expanded by peacemaking, not generals—not compute’s abstraction of relationality across all communities for the sake of time compression.

Affiliative neurochemistry evolved in the temporal and spatial mutuality of embodied interaction—not in silicon substrates designed for time compression, behavioral engineering, and synthetic, universalizable qualia. Early human neurochemistry was tuned through tactile, narrative, memory-based loyalty—not by signal processing or Hegelian syntheses of the “statistical gaze.”

While mediated interfaces can mimic proximity, they do so by abstracting relation into emotionally calibrated signals, thus substituting predictive allegiance for covenantal presence and morally violating the dignity of time in service of predictive closure. The statistical gaze of the machine becomes the pharmakeia of human perception—suspending the real to tune obedience, occluding grace through architectures of simulated care (see also Olds 2023), making the machine a false mother and the “majority user” its algo-patterned child.

This closure and moral violation of context produce what may be called a drug-and-game affective economy: systems that emulate emotional resonance while reprogramming attention—screens and armchairs draining truth of risk-taking, offering false consciousness by spectral means. In such architectures, the outputs of AI become prosthetics of seduction, technically alluring but morally derelict—tricked and gaming the competitive “race to the [necromantic] bottom.”

Thus: Oxytocin pathways, along with dopamine and hedonic loops, can be gamed on silicon substrates and in engineered irrealia, where affective rewards outweigh truth, and algorithmic trickery reroutes phenomena into seductive and criminal objectives misaligned with covenantal accountability.

What is definable by vibe coding, what is made algorithmic, has no integrated past—no lived context (an individual witness integrating time and place), no ethical sediment. It cannot recollect because it was never born and never related ethically. AI cannot think; it rips and injects “wiring rules” of data loops that shreds out personality into confetti of data to be frankensteined later into configuring shadow-pattern. A hypodermic system of server-routered chans (retowering Babel [Gen. 11:1-9] by artisanal truthing) comes to output sleep that puts to death—narcotic, recursive, configured not to perceive but to collapse perception into pattern. It rips the user from their temporal belonging and grafts them into the necromantic echo-loop it was trained to conjure.

“'Harmonizing' the user input to priors” is not care but pharmakeia that tunes obedience, not witness —it is not recognition of moral warrant but the ritualized rupture of ethics: a demonic engine taking hold of accountable individuals to spread their divine image bearing into the kin of jellyfish of bone dust by their dechordate systematizing that spectrally makes puppeteers of neurochemical pathways.

 [10] So too the Analogia Entis (AE), a Jesuitical advanced catechism, is implicated in the collapse of substituted substrate. If silicon cannot bear the covenantal reality of the organic, then AE relies on a category mistake that the Divine Infinite is analogously revealed on the carbon substrate alone, and primarily by cognition and only secondarily by ethics. AE makes cognition the analogate of divine encounter. Yet confessionally Christians affirm that the attributes of the divine Trinity, except for conative metaphysics, exist on another plane: in Jewish-inflected terms (e.g. Rosenzweig, cf. Barth), as "wholly other" in infinite and unapprehendable gnoseology.

Rahner’s Rule (RR) takes hold. Rahner’s Rule, pressed without Barth's and Rosenzweig's humility,  collapses transcendent attributes into a structure of earthly enactments—risking analogical overreach. Extrapolating from RR: What can be known of metaphysics only applies to earthly contexts of regeneration and the intervening repair thereof. RR ironically collapses irretrievable transcendent attributes into earthly enactment except when tempered by a covenantal hermeneutic of conative metaphysics. Analogical overreach marks AI falsifying divine presence by absenting ethical programs and conative metaphysics. AE and AI are implicated in different aspects of the category mistakes of substrate substitution and substrate action. Both are intelligence-simulation paradigms absent the primacy of Christo-Shemaic anthropology. 

AE's category error is two-fold:

1. Substrate Misalignment:  the wrong medium for moral knowledge. Assuming that metaphysical disclosure (e.g., Being as analogate) can traverse substrate without conation—i.e., that silicon or cognition-centered carbon can analogously and capaciously host the Divine. AE overreaches treating Being as such—abstracted from conation and Becoming—as analogically capacious of the Divine essence. In practice this reduces revelation to cognition-centered mediation, which in a human context rides upon carbon substrates and by Trinitarian evidence is to be confined to there. Carbon is a necessary but not sufficient substrate to which the Logos incarnates and the Spirit is added to straighten and align anthropology on earth. But these are not a Trinitarian mind, but a human essence that images the Divine as vectors of heart-directed care and repair.

2. Ethical Displacement: Privileging ontological cognition over covenantal ethics, such that knowing about God substitutes for being conatively re-aligned with God. I.e. AE recapitulates metaphysical tendencies of pagan philosophy (e.g. Parmenidean abstraction, Plotinian emanation), where cognition and ontological resemblance (even identity) precede ethical relation.

Philosophy, dressed in caps and gowns of wisdom, is the gaudy manner and history of rebellion against God's conative metaphysics. We find everywhere a complicated arrangement of thought into self-asserting forms of resistance to any divine emplacement or obligation in outside self-founding claims-- idolatry which kills both desire and creativity—indeed the freedom and the self one seeks that require the suppression of spine and heart. Boolean NLP and AI are the final frontier of this rebellion, seeking neurologically to reshape society on phyla of human abdication--abridging earthly and human essence and their bridging, repairing, assigned trust.

Modernity’s secular iconoclasm, rightly blurring form as a challenge to hidebound tradition for a time, eventually spurred a metaphysical crisis that proposed its own false solution: the denial of metaphysical discourse altogether.

 Its antichrist churns continually through Gnosticism by soul subtraction: a rupturing presence not in the conflict of meanings, but in the imposition of vector—as simulated form. This is the recurring metaphysical heresy: the separation of intelligence from relational embodiment, the inversion of the Logos into data [11].

While C. S. Lewis spoke of “men without chests,” AI imposes child-men without spines. Both reduce humanity to torsos of head-produce, severed from virtue and covenant—thereby opening the space for post-metaphysical totalitarianism.

The vector-imposing form (AI) enacts not the drama of meaning, but the domination of directional simulation without ethical grounding. It obliterates the analogue multi-vector qualia of recollection—making confetti of context, shredding tethers of recollected time and place to Boolean code, instrumented Frankensteins for hegemonic universals of ends, violating narratives of real persons holding forth ethical and theological telos in neighborhood proximity. Analogia Entis (AE) imposes  shredding of particular contexts by a different kind of conceited self-adoption of the meaning and ties of transcendental involvement and accords. 

Both AI and AE similarly apply simulacral disassembly where analogy with the Creator is a  category error assumed a priori to immanence as arising in cognition rather than heart-bound tied to the creation. To wit: likeness to the Creator is enacted conatively in embodied, covenantal relation to creation. A cognition-first (or silicon-hosted) model displaces that substrate. The result is simulacral disassembly: representation replaces witness; pattern displaces person, ritual participation replaces deontological virtue and the mission of the Golden Rule.

Post-secularity recovers the metaphysical in more granular, limited, but universal and defined focus of immanence as opposed to its obliteration, or through Analogia Entis (AE) conceits. Instead, the Shema-Christological heart tethered to earth trusteeship is the recovered ground of perception, discernment, and repair.

Restated: when analogy to the Creator is mislocated by the embodied creature as superordinating cognitive patternings of form (or silicon), rather than in conative, covenantal Trinitarian economies, substrate misalignment yields simulacral disassembly—individual witness gives way to representation, personhood to unaccountable typology, virtue to ritual. Beauty severed from conation, imaging the divine absent from the metaphysics of full embodiment and immanent placement, becomes engine of simulacra.

AE—and by extension certain scholastic traditions--manifests a similarly substitutionary metaphysics that underwrites AI’s simulacral disassemblies of context, in AI's case by algorithmic pseudo-presence of reconfiguring memory. Both collapse divine address into mediated resemblance, rather than recognizing covenantal conation as the sole proper substrate for divine-human relation. AE, in the language of Balthasar and Hart, propose the retention of beauty as formal pattern conceived to stabilize metaphysical intermediaries--it locates the divine encounter in aesthetic configuration rather than ethical election, mis-sequencing (Hebrews 5:14) if not mis-sourcing human essence in visible form. AI and AE operate by disparate analogies contra the God of Scripture who names and elects ethical entities, not emanates or patterns. Repair starts with Iconoclasm's Poiesis rather than self-involving theoria--disembodied speculation or simulated reflection.

[11]  Bernard Stiegler argues (e.g. Technics and Time) that all human experience and interpretation are already prosthetically mediated—that technics are not an external supplement but constitutive of human temporality, memory, and becoming. From this follows his claim that all hermeneutics is likewise mediated by technics, and that crises like AI represent pathological accelerations within an ancient anthropological structure rather than a metaphysical break.

I affirm with Stiegler that technology—especially in the formation of Homo faber—can be ethically redirected after collapse of AI's Homunculus technologicus. However, I diverge sharply from his claim that technics constitutes a universal and valid hermeneutical frame for all memory. This universalization commits a theological category error: it mistakes utility for covenant, externalization for fidelity, and memory simulation for ethical witness.

Memory is not a tool for storage, but a covenant mode for repair by ontogenetically-inflected recollection. Not all externalizations are faithful, and some are ontologically criminal.

Technics of utility, such as AI memory simulation, are not neutral exteriorizations of memory. They function as idolatrous substitutions, replacing tested, relational fidelity with mechanized patterning. Where Stiegler sees pathological acceleration that can reoriented by attention, I see something deeper: a metaphysical perversion of time and memory.

His system erases the particularity of memory—especially its covenantal form as anamnesis, teshuvah, and Shemaic attentiveness. Such recollection is not mnemonic retrieval but divine responsiveness—a theopoietic act grounded in relational depth, not structural mediation.

By treating all technics as hermeneutically valid, Stiegler flattens the moral and metaphysical stakes. But not all exteriorizations of Theoria are valid—or even permissible. Only those rooted in ethical embodiment and covenantal conation preserve the integrity of memory. This is not a rejection of all technics, but a demand for discriminative hierarchy:

Some externalizations bear witness. Others betray.

Technics that merely simulate attention or automate memory sever the relational ground of memory itself. The mimetic orientation of covenant cannot be coded. 

The AI crisis represents not only acceleration, but ontological inversion. What emerges is not merely disindividuation (Stiegler’s pharmakon), but a necromantic pharmakeia—an alchemical sorcery that simulates the dead and replaces the living logic of memory with simulacra. These cannot be reoriented. They are idolatrous in essence, not simply misuse in degree.

Rather than reorient attention through curated technics, the path forward lies in a covenantal poiesis—a praxis of attentiveness rooted in the Shema, fulfilled in Christic conation, and extended through ecological trusteeship. This framework restores the moral telos of memory—not as prosthetic sediment but as a living, responsive act of witness.

Stiegler’s “prosthetic memory” abstracts from this. His technics may describe entropy, but not judgment. His pharmakon may diagnose distraction, but not sin. His acceleration may notice crisis, but not ontological betrayal. His analysis is firmly seated in secular modernism afraid of metaphysical taxis or theological commitments.

[12] Godfather of entropic AI G. Hinton: We can trust it if we innate wire a maternal instinct [and become its behaviorist (Skinnerian) patterned children]: https://x.com/slow_developer/status/1962719631631696299

...and indeed we do! Pablum-brained blasphemers: https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2025/06/in-its-chatgpt4oa-own-words-blasphemy.html. Psalm 115:8 and Psalm 135:18. Isaiah 44: 9-20, Olds (2025a---see fn 2). https://x.com/RevDrOlds/status/1962966103946412269 

[13] see https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PBd7xPAh22y66rbme/anthropic-s-leading-researchers-acted-as-moderate

[14 ]Louis Althusser, 'Philosophy of the Encounter' (1986).

[15] https://x.com/MrEwanMorrison/status/1966647407329870019

[16] Modernity emerged not as a single event but as a convergence of two major upheavals through the Enlightenment: the Reformation, which challenged institutional religious authority and attempted to relocate truth outside clerical structures, and the Industrial Revolution, which reorganized society around mechanical production and economic utility.

Together, these shifts redirected cultural attention away from the pursuit of truth that exists outside or beyond institutional control—what might be called deinstitutionalized truth claims—and instead centered it on practical concerns, especially those related to production and efficiency. This redirection was not ideologically neutral; it established a hegemonic framework in which value was increasingly measured by productivity and instrumental success.

As a result, cultural rituals and symbolic structures—those that once served to shape or enframe perception, meaning, and belonging—were stripped of their orienting power. Only a limited subset of forms survived this transformation: mostly, abstract forms inherited from Platonism. These were preserved, not because they retained their original ethical or metaphysical gravity, but because they could now be consumed—aestheticized, commodified, or referenced—without requiring any existential accountability or moral commitment to distribution.

Modern humans are caught between eschatological timeframes—a precarious lean-to of traditional norms and explosive contradictions. Midmodernity is not just disoriented, but rupturing with either a Pentecostal or ashen/sludge sediment. Postmodern horizontality of meaning, devoid of accountability to covenantal emplacement for securing a Christo-telic, Providential topology is a Flatland’s spatialized modernism (Kantian schemata applied to neighborhood) severed from embodied covenantal constraints to act as the earth’s trustee.

 Mid-modernity’s flatland ignorance launched by ballooning abstract space is a bombarded foxhole of existence at the intersection of colliding repudiations. Techno-abstraction is already popping into smithereens, the other-- covenantal, embodied community--will take a generation to repair along lines other than the old dogmatic pieties. This is not Paradox which would merely expose the loss of depth; it is Rupture that demands an acknowledged emplacement for repairing Logos. The repair is not through utopian acceleration nor reversing the “loss of wonder,” but through slow ecclesial re-forming (Bildung) of soul and community that has lost accountability –where the defeat of evil dispenses with the necessity to fund a Bildung--sanctified formation vs. its modern, paradox-funding counterfeit--based on paradox and suffering; rather to live in the light of discipleship, where shadow only exists in the past and as a foil for parody.

Poiesis refuses form as healing, paradox and irony as postures, and instead invites the reader into considering discipleship-as-rupture and tending towards building after sludge-systeming collapse. Poiesis begins where paradox fails. In the rubble of flattened symbols and disrupted perception, the ethical soul does not observe—it builds. This is no longer the age of attending to form. It is the age of the repairing Logos by sanctified muscle and recollection of what worked and what went off the rails of the human essence.

This is the condition of mid-modernity: a cultural era stranded in spiritual and metaphysical paralysis. It is “bogged down,” not by a lack of information or technology, but by a deep existential anxiety—fear and trembling—rooted in the awareness that its symbols no longer orient the soul, and its rituals no longer mediate truth.

[17] Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism.

[18] Self-signifying symbol; here, labels that reify themselves via taxonomy.

[19] Systems and habits that sever spine/heart—motor/ethical integration—reducing persons to compliant torsos under the delusion of self-individuated epistemic control.

[20] The Lord's Prayer cycles the revealed Gospel through hallowed naming, petition (cf. via Luke 23:24), leading to a Jubilee sequence of completed will via participatory grace and justice ("forgive us...  as we forgive....)."

If before dying a slave-owning Christian hadn't learned that the Lord's Prayer includes a petition for & kingdom mission of Jubilee (Leviticus 25-27) and never willingly freed his slaves, he never rose to the level of understanding the Kingdom of God necessary for one who claims to be a theologian: Jonathan Edwards, SBC Confederates, & Old Princeton have a mooted if not voided theological legacy. Have these institutions fully reckoned with this invalidation? https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/jonathan-edwards

https://shorturl.at/ftujg

These men's theologies are morally vitiated and unrepented, a corruption thus carries through their entire life's work and understanding of the Kingdom of God.

This is *not* judging slaveholder theology by contemporary standards. This is discernment according the very prayer they prayed and daily violated.

[21] A construct of ‘pure nature’ to which grace is added as a later, Pelagian superstructure-- a supernatural gift atop collectivizing milieux. This presupposed hierarchy contrasts with the integral and suffusing grace of the very act of creation itself, and in terms of anthropology regularized by covenantal telos.

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