Douglas Blake Olds
October 23, 2025
When
metaphysics is stripped away, meaning collapses. Despair sets in. Nihilism
opens its existential wound:
The secularized human ego mistakes pleasure for meaning and contextless information
for understanding—forgetting that true understanding requires wholes: what
Leibniz called monads, integrated totalities of
soul and body, existing within and yearning toward the One.
Without this developing coherence—without the soul sensing its course with Oneness, emanation, or
divine intention—anxiety and fragmentation adumbrate and collapse into entropic stasis, degrading.
In
stasis mistaken for immersive metaphysics--monastica arrival--modern persons regress toward sterile theorizing, unable to flow against
entropy by bringing forth light or fulfilling potential. One can have
everything and yet starve for significance, gnawing only on their parts, and addictively debasing their senses and degrading its flesh and surrounding substrate--humanity's particularized milieux of historical and natural contexts.
Yet there remain six historically attested “sublimities”—breaks in perception that rupture closed
systems of cognitive stasis and reorient and direct the ego toward its created coherence with outward expanding living grace and justice. These are not “keys” or "portals" in a mechanistic sense, but
spiritual ruptures—frissons, visitations, shatterings—that reveal the relational divine,
often through tears that break fears:
1.
Terror/Awe – The
sublime as Kant framed it: the overwhelming that exceeds self, yet for him affirms the ration of freedom.
2.
Beauty
as Iconostasis – A veil, not a screen. Following Balthasar
(and, controversially, Hart), beauty pierces through form to hint at the
transfigured, and becomes a halting point for recollection, meditation, and
contemplation.
3.
Grandiosity and
exaltation from an
experience with the Poignant – As in
Berkeley’s immaterialism: the vast intimacy of egophanic recurrence--perception imbued with a spirit
of comparative ego transcending the human other. A taxic inversion of category 5: Where the ego is the sovereign who embraces, not the embraced.
4.
Violence – Léon
Bloy’s shattering sublime: suffering as rupture, divine wound, catastrophic
sign.
5.
Favor by Sovereign Embrace – chesed (חסד) as unearned but preparatory/initiatory sublime: grace as encounter.
Relational, covenantal, overwhelming not by might but by right of mercy.
6.
Music – e.g. Nielsen’s
Fifth Symphony overwhelming the percussion call to martial march counterposed
by the summary, recapitulant discord in Salome's final aria: sound with eschatological curve, inner modulation toward or against the ultimate. These in alignment with the other 5 categories.
Each of these sublimities reveals a vector of divine outreach—whether through terror, beauty, mercy, or pain—disrupting the closed circuits of ego and inaugurating the heart’s reorientation to covenantal coherence and creation’s renewal.
The experience of sublimity reopens meaning after metaphysical collapse by its recollected taxis--a signaling movement that reorients classes and orders for new alignments. To do so, it must be released from the
abstractions of Enlightenment system-builders and returned to the embodied archival recollections of ethical-historic, proprioceptive encounter with a linguistic Geist—an archive of ontogenetic experience extended phylogenetically across culture and history (which is reversed in AI systems by the disruption of ontogenetic wholes into data repackaged and curated for individual "chans"). The six ruptures of the usual traced above are not discrete “keys,” nor
universal categories for aesthetic classification. Rather, they are fractal
openings, each a contextually situated response to pre-collapse eschatological flickers: flames of the divine breaking through the wounds of secularization and
stasis. In this, Herder’s call is not to systematize the inner workings of the
mind but to empirically experience, investigate, and compare: to seek human
meaning not in imposed transcendental frames only, but to venture in the Sturm
und Drang of cultural and historical particularity, where language, myth,
ritual, and suffering form the vessels of human soulmaking inside
Christological testimonies.
Each sublime bears a Herderian
signature when read not as a static category, but as an expressive form arising
from lived tension. For Herder, sublimity emerges in the ecologically- and historically-situated
soul’s cry toward the One, made legible only through the deep time of a
people’s embodied strivings. Awe, violence, embrace, and music are not
universalized experiences, but inflections of the monadic yearning Leibniz
named: the soul-body coherence that strains toward divine fullness while
refracting that yearning through the situated form of a particular life,
language, and history. Herder's extension of Leibniz lies in his insight that
the monad’s expression is cultural, and that the telos of human development is
not epistemic mastery, but ethical participation—a conative ripening into
neighborly responsibility, echoing the Shema.
So too with Simone Weil, for whom
attention was a moral act: the soul’s receptive stillness before the suffering
other and before the divine. Sublimity, in Weil’s register, is not merely
rupture but readiness—a kenotic expansion of the self so that grace might
descend. In this light, the six sublimities become not modes of ecstatic
disorientation but post-liturgical choreographies of repair. They pierce the
calloused opacity of modern simulation and abstraction, allowing history,
beauty, and covenant to be re-felt.
Against the simulated coherence of
post-metaphysical systems—whether algorithmic, market-based, or technocratic—Herderian
framing insists that true sublimity is always anthropologically processed and
thus Christo-Shemaically ethical. It is a prophetic task and outward movement,
not an aesthetic escape. It invites the reader to dwell not above history but
within it—to gather, compare, and attend. Just as Herder traced the rhythms of
Hebrew poetics, Nordic myth, and tribal oral forms not to universalize them but
to hear their distinct and facultating truths, so too must we hear the six
sublimes not as ontology, but as pedagogy of the eschaton: their call to
spiritual participation in the apocatastatic renewal of wholeness.
From this, the sublime no longer
floats as a Romantic vapor without responsibility or course, but descends as
covenantal breath—animating cries to be seen, held, and sent (Luke 4). What we
recover exceeds lost metaphysics, but the anthropology of attentive and
accountable poiesis as the soul's response to rupture. And thus, sublimity
becomes apocatastatic—not only pointing to what has been lost, but igniting
what may yet be resparked in and through the world’s poetic ache.
To reclaim the sublime from abstraction and restore it to its ethical vocation, Herder’s posture of comparative historicity seeks the sublime in the situated interplay of cultures, languages, and prophetic intuitions struggling toward coherence with God and Neighbor—its substrate in history and natural surroundings validating through love. The sublime is not a universal form but a contextually mediated eruption, an emergent pulse in the sensorium of peoples who remember their creaturely dependence, their longing for wholeness, and their expressive reaching toward the divine. The sublime becomes legible only when approached as a plural, affective archive: one must read terror in Isaiah, embrace in Hosea, eschatological song in eucharistic liturgies and doxology, or the poetic rupture toward nihilism in Hölderlin's elegies not as isolated artifacts, but as positive and negative pedagogies of soul—modes of disgust and delight in the re-membering conative vectors of human becoming. In this light, the six sublimities traced above do not exhaust the archive, but inaugurate a relational grammar of potentiation and repair: the disruption of entropy’s stasis and closure toward renewed covenant, beauty re-enfleshed through context, memory, and ethical poiesis.
Art, in this light, is not a vessel of escape but a crucible of metaphysical discernment.
Art does not flee dualism; it dissolves it by grounding the flesh of perception in the ethic of care. Only then can it speak from the shattering edge between technocratic ascension and prophetic descent. Art must rupture the metaphysically false dualism of matter and spirit by grounding its kinesthesia in somatic ethics of generosity and virtues of patience, respectful gratitude, et al. Only then may it communicate from the tension between technocratic eschatology and prophetic rupture. Art stages a dramatic confrontation where two ontologies of the future collide: one grounded in anticipation of engineered transformation (Singularity of transhumanism as intelligence, reconciling Plotinus and the pre-socratics), the other in embodied judgment, poetic justice, and metaphysical exile of the de-metaphysicals.
The eschatological polemic becomes fully dramatized in Singularity Ontology, framed as engineered transformation—a metaphysical culmination that re-routes Plotinian ascent and pre-Socratic cosmogenesis into transhumanist code: datafication, computational intelligence, and engineered transcendence[1].
Its Gnostic Prometheus stages revolt against Prophetic Ontology, opposing the limits of creaturely finitude with spectral transcendence. Against embodied justice, poetic judgment, and the exile of the “de-metaphysicals” (those who reduce reality to simulation, system, or analytics), Singularity attempts its totalizing ascent.
Yet the poietic justice of embodiment unmasks this engineered revolt: Christopoiesis is art that kinesthetically images the reversal of those who deny metaphysics—art that judges what has been denied by the very depth of its denial. At its most trenchant, it renders parody tragic, turning simulation against itself through through exposing the ethical vacuum by which simulation draws in and drafts the innocent.
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