Myth as Pedagogy: Herder, the Shema, and the Poietics of Covenantal Perception inside Theophanic Struggle

Douglas Blake Olds

12-16 November 2025

Abstract

This essay reclaims myth as historically embodied preparation for Christophany—rooted in the Shema’s call to relational accountability, proprioceptive perception, and covenantal becoming. Against romantic mythologizing, psychological essentialism, and analogical formalism, myth becomes ethical pedagogy: a poiesis walked in community, trained by history, redeemed by grace. Herder's peripatetic and investigatory Reformation thinking--his  Humanität as proto-Christopoietic becomes the metaphysical account of how the sacred speaks and moves from the heart: the recovered bridge--beneath which mythos lurks, the ogre of disavowed kinesthesis--between Enlightenment pluralism and metaphysical singularity of shared Trinitarian conation.

This critiques both Jungian archetypal projection and metaphysical universalism (e.g., Dávila) as distortions—one privatizing myth into intrapsychic recursion, the other flattening it into static hierarchy. In contrast, Johann Gottfried Herder’s Humanität is proposed as a conative metaphysics in which myth unfolds as a pedagogical encounter within history, forming ethical subjects through cultural and linguistic embodiment.

Against Jung’s racialized and formalist archetypes, myth is reframed as the expressive outworking of divine-human relationality, accountable to creation and Creator alike. Rather than encoding trauma or serving as static symbol, myth is poietically engaged and eschatologically directed—mediating healing through participatory narration, communal memory, and proprioceptive discernment.

Thus, metaphysics itself becomes pedagogy for the heart's training: not escape from the body into abstraction, nor collapse into subjective trauma, but a pneumatologically animated praxis of historical repair. This Shema-Christological anthropology proposes myth as relational revelation—refiguring narrative, not as submission to inner determinism, but as covenantal reorientation.

Myth, rightly reimagined, is not mirror, echo, symbol, or ladder—but a path walked with others. Aligned with Shemaic attentiveness and Christic descent, Herder’s Humanität inverts the logic of ascent. Myth becomes neither individuation nor gnosis, but an assay of graced responsibility—toward others, language, and the eschaton, where grace transforms perception, and story becomes vocation.

MYTHIC TRAJECTORIES:

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Psychological Reduction → Egophany → Narcissistic recursion

Metaphysical Inflation → Analogical verticalism → Gnostic abstraction

Christopoietic Pedagogy →Re-construal of Conation → Ethical covenantal witness

In recent theological and metaphysical discourse, there has been an accelerating return to myth, not simply as narrative but as ontological ground. Across thinkers ranging from Jung to Corbin to Cassirer myth has been read alternately as symbol, symptom, or spirit: the eruption of the sacred into time, the echo of collective trauma (mythic time as recurrence), or the imaginative scaffold of consciousness itself. While this pluralism may seem generous and integrative, it often masks a deeper confusion: a refusal to discern myth within the conative, ethical frame demanded by the Shema and exemplified in Hebraic and Christic wisdom traditions. Myth becomes flattened into psychological artifact or inflated into metaphysical escape. These trajectories—downward into archetypal psychology and “upward” into esoteric verticalism as retrieval—miss the covenantal telos of myth as lived instruction, ethical communal archive, and eschatological poiesis.

I. The Metaphysical Misfire of Psychological Mythologizing: Myth as Egophany

"The study of myths belongs to metaphysics, not [depth] psychology," notes Nicholas Gómez Dávila, slaying  the sprawling assumptions of the archetypal Jungian paywall and complex (e.g. Joseph Campbell [17]). 

For Jung, myth was an expression of the unconscious, a reservoir of archetypes inscribed across racialized and psychological structures. Yet this framework reduces myth to a symbolic reflex of psychic patterning and internal adumbration. It becomes a function of intrapsychic sorting rather than an encounter with divine summons—resonating inwardly while radiating little outwardly. In such a schema, myth is no longer theophany but projection; no longer revelation but therapeutic metaphor for metaphysical dislocation.

This psychologization has consequences[1]. It relocates the source of myth from cosmic address to unconscious structure. The vector of divine centrifugality is severed. Myth becomes not flame-language from on high, but the murmured trauma of the basement [2]. In collapsing the sacred into the symbolic, myth is rendered only as authoritative as one’s capacity to introspect, emote, or reframe. Egophany is enthroned.

II. The Inverted Tower: Metaphysical Inflation Without Ethical Ground

Opposite this psychological reduction stands an inverted metaphysical inflation. Here, thinkers like Dávila, Corbin, and esoteric commentators treat myth as archetypal theophany: a direct unveiling of divine forms, independent of psychological experience or communal test. In this register, myth is ontologically prior to humanity and sacralizes verticality without contextual accountability. The mundus imaginalis becomes Plato’s autonomous realm, higher than thought and detached from historical unfolding.[3]

While more reverent toward transcendence, this move often breeds elitism and gnostic estrangement. Myth becomes the domain of the initiated few and their historicism, not the pedagogy of an ethically formed people. It privileges ecstatic ascent over neighborly justice, vertical revelation over horizontal care. In so doing, it abandons the ground where myth must be tested: history, community, and the body.[4]

III. The Muddled Third Way Middle: Systematized Mythos and the Collapse of Conation

Between these poles of psychological reduction and metaphysical inflation lies a confused third way: the anthropologized mythos of modern thinkers who blend metaphysics, psychology, and cultural critique—by way reducing all--without clarifying the ethical telos of myth. In this middle path, myth is treated as a symbolic form, a consciousness state, or a department of the creative imagination—aligned with mathematics, fiction, or psychology.

But this gesture already surrenders—by reducing--the sacred to system. To situate myth within cognitive imagination without the nuance of conative metaphysics is to dislocate it from covenantal responsibility by the primacy of cogito.[13] The modern mythologizers obscure the fact that myth, in its traditional context, is not a narrative we generate but a summons we receive. It calls not for creative admiration but for ethical alignment.

Jung and Dávila, as one commentator observed, might both be pattern-seekers, but one turns inward to the psyche while the other turns upward to the divine. Neither addresses the ethical outwardness of myth as the Shema demands. Myth only serves ontogeny (individual development) as an archetype or an arche that recurrently erupts through history, but is content of a directive to hear, remember, teach, and enact (Deut. 6:4–9). Myth serves theopoietic sequence (Matthew 22:32-37), not merely expressive or contemplative of recurrent moment. In this we note harmony with Steiner's notion of "real presence" in meaning, and Weil’s insistence on gravity and grace—i.e., myth as ethical-metaphysical event, not psychic mirror.

IV. The Shema and the Book of Proverbs: Against the Off-Ramp to Conation

What, then, offers a corrective to egophanic assertion in mythic analysis? The Shema-Christological anthropology, [5] rooted in the ethical telos of Deuteronomy and fulfilled in Christ, offers myth not as projection or elevation but as instruction. Myth hence is not a spectacle but a way station testified in ethnic archives toward covenantal summons; not a symbol to sit with but a call to investigate its intermediate, dialectical torques on the path to unifying grace. Myth is preparatory metaphysics not abstracted psychological occlusion.

The Book of Proverbs offers a dialectic of two ways—shalom vs. agon[6] —a theological grammar for mythic reception, discerning wisdom cries out in (from) the streets (Prov. 1:20), not in the clouds or the subconscious.  Discernment and shalom are trained through use (Hebrews 5:13-14), not through ascent into infinity by analogy nor regression into primordia. In this view, myth serves metaphysics of conation[7]:  willing, by bodily and historic movement and ethical service the sustenance of Creation of which the human is trustee. The heart’s intention to serve neighbor and sustain the generative substrate of the earth, committed to grace, tested by covenanted time, and witness by ethnic archives comparatively merited. Conation as covenanted intent is not a realization of mythos of agon, nor a mysticism of revealed inner depths, but a conative routing and spread of ethical selfhood within a community (a spreading and harmonization of ethnic language groups’ ideals) attuned to divine speech.

V. Herderian Humanität and the Reclamation of Myth as Covenant

Herder, in his ethical historicism and comparative philology, saw myth not as a metaphysical escape or psychological echo but as a communicative event: the unfolding of human formation in language, culture, and divine proximity (Enlightenment-era “Geist” that investigates ontogeny rather than proleptically advances phylogenetic Hegelianism or anachronistic pneumatological doctrine). His Humanität is not a universal subjectivism but a developing conative singularity of perfection[8] with multiplicity of engagement: each individual person drawn toward the Creator’s immanence (revealed as divine attribute only by the conative metaphysics operating inside proximity) through poietic participation in the eschaton generationally unfolding, ethical responsibility as human essence, and embodied discernment that radiates into community, ecology, and history.

Herder, as a Christian pastor and ethical historicist, understood myth not as metaphysical escape or psychological residue but as a communicative unfolding of divine proximity through human formation in language, culture, and conscience. His Enlightenment-era Geist  is that which investigates ontogeny and covenantal growth rather than presupposing later Hegelian dialectic or abstract pneumatology. His Humanität is not reducing universalism but a Christologically open, conative singularity—each person drawn toward divine perfection through poetic action, ethical vocation, and embodied discernment that radiates into community, nature, and redemptive history. Where ontogeny recapitulates, by pedagogy, phylogeny, and then genius of ontogeny influences phylogeny's archives. In both his sermons and speculative works, Herder affirms an eschatological horizon—not as dogmatic system but as providential telos—something later idealists and romantics come to deny as secularity came to reject metaphysics --grounded in God’s love, revealed in Christ, and enacted through the Spirit’s historical and poetic stirrings.

His thinking as the foundation of the Shemaic-Christological anthropology rejects both Pearl-Kantian causal closure[9] and psychological determinism. It affirms that healing from metaphysically extended trauma—such as racialized or inherited violence—requires a conative response: an anthropology of restoration through historical reckoning that repairs, not suspends history by grievance. Communal Bildung covenantally re-emergent. [10]   In this sense, myth becomes part of the grammar of preparing for eschatological reassembly after God’s (not logic’s) winnowing:[11] the voice of God remembered in archive and reembodied through Providence-aligned, peripatetic and virtuous living. Myth is the most ripe of human tropes for deconstruction, for transfiguring the natural kinesthetics of dis-embedding agon into the embodying trusteeship from human essence due to pacify and image the divine heart. 

VI. Conclusion: Myth as Telic Range Between False Spectacle and Unveiling Conation

Against psychological symbol and metaphysical fetish alike, myth must be reclaimed as theopoietic summons or deviation: iconoclastic utterances reinterpreted by an ethically reforming covenantal people. It is not the song of the self or the symphony of preying stars, but the voice that calls us to walk justly, love mercy, and tremble humbly before God (Micah 6:8).

“Third-way” approaches, often anointed by a language of the imaginal and enchanting, flirt with mythic agonism or archetypal recursion--muddled metaphysical drift attempting to reconcile metaphysics and psychology without anchoring in the singular vector of covenantal becoming, never rooted in enveloping vectors of covenantal responsibility or ethical pedagogy: teaching embedded ethical accountability. “An understanding of myth is achieved by considering all layers.” Reductionism as drift in either direction up ord down risks distortion—not as mere error or loss, but as ontogenetic, epistemological drift: the unfolding slippage of perception and formation when myth detaches from covenantal moorings. In those, myth shapes how and what we come to know, guiding cultural and poietic becoming, unobscuring relational attunement. Drift that obscures is not collapse but a deviation in the development of conscience, inviting both critique and redemptive reorientation. Deviation in conscience formation is an expected ontogenetic slippage when myth detaches from covenantal moorings. If myth structures (fallen) understanding, substituting pagan tradition for critical and experiential inquiry, symbols become what shapes consciousness, and their recurrence (algorhymed loops) shape reality by false patterning. This shaping can be countered by passing down from ear to ear reality lived with God, a reality of meaning making shaped by straighening the crooked path of invidious cognitive operations (Jame 1:8) to care for context, creation, and covenant (Luke 6:31).

As Shema-dianoia-informed anthropology insists, myth must be retorqued through ontogenetic conative intent: an ethical becoming that binds creature and Creator, recollection and telos, language of providence and justice. A singularity of cosmic will emerging with diverse potentialities, destinies, and accounted favour. Or an alternative singualrity, a fearful mirror of our failure to according with metaphysical will.

Myth, then, is neither to be worshipped nor systematized by reductive explanation. It is poietic: to be walked as peripatetic accountability to emplaced habitus--to context, not to an analogical transcendance-seeking.

And in walking with and through myth as a tabernacle of pedagogy, we remember who we as language-bound people are becoming—together perfecting by the radiance of the Holy Spirit in immanent virtue that cares and repairs.

 

APPENDIX:  Whence Philosophy Breaks

Philosophy often begins in poetry—whether in mythic accounts like Hesiod’s cosmogonies, the ecstatic riddles-- divine madness (theia mania cf. P. 244a–245c) )-- of the Phaedrus where the soul is likened to a 3-horse winged chariot and intoxicated by beauty’s memory (P. 246a–254e) [16]. The Ancients theorized their world employing analogical tropes that we moderns see as magical or enchanted thinking, and some post-moderns want to recover (“all things are full of gods”) [15]. 

For centuries, philosophy was tied to religion, drawing its questions and limits from Pauline sources and poietic kinematics--as in Augustine’s tears or Boethius’s prison-song. But even in modernity, the most ambitious thinkers return to poetry or mysticism. The renowned systems either start in mysticism—Schelling’s night of identity, Hegel’s Spirit brooding over nothingness—or else end there: Heidegger muttering of Being’s clearing, Wittgenstein (following Fichte) standing silent before what “must be passed over,” Zizek gesturing toward a gap in the Real.

The false universal grammar of ascent, formalized in mythic and metaphysical schemata, assumes that the soul’s journey is one of upward reconciliation through layered levels of being, knowing, or initiation. Mythos imbues these arcs not with celebratory anticipation, but with a paradoxical forewarning of their insufficiency. Each tripartite ladder following collapses into its own structure, unable to bear the weight of ethical or metaphysical completion.

The formal arcs of mythic initiation—whether in Pessoa, Phaedrus, Parmenides, or Hart—serve as proleptic witnesses to the failure of all tripartite imaginal ladders not torn by Christic descent into the rag-and-bone shop of the heart, where singularity is learned through covenant, not ascent:

Hence compressed iconoclastic poiesis breaks the aesthetic and philosophical allure of laddered metaphysics (whether neoplatonic, poetic, or theological), revealing them as insufficient in the face of Christo-telic kenosis and covenantal immanence that calls forth the metaphysics of rupture, repair, and responsive love that unveils the singular heart beating in creation.

• Pessoa’s three poetic initiations—Dionysian, Templar, Rosicrucian—symbolize spiritual transformation yet remain steeped in deferred fulfillment, irony, and spectral yearning.
• Plato’s Phaedrus relies on an upward myth of memory and beauty, the soul drawn toward a divine origin via recollection. Yet the soul’s desire remains unmoored from covenantal ethic; it hovers in ecstatic suspension.
• Parmenides’ path of truth models a metaphysics of negation, subtracting becoming for Being, speech for silence. This apophatic absolute severs the movement of the real from its ethical entanglements.
• David Bentley Hart, representative of analogia entis metaphysics, constructs a system of irreducible orders—ontological ladders—yet does not descend into the radical particularity of neighbor or the wounded heart.

Together, these mythic systems are not metaphysical errors so much as archetypal failures—formal enactments of longing misdirected by Titanic idols when not interrupted by divine descent. Titanic myth becomes self-critical—an then pedagogical--in the face of the incarnate Christ: an ironic prophecy of its own insufficiency when it bypasses the heart’s suffering for the ladder’s elegance.

Where Christic Descent Rends mythic Pattern is theological and literary reversal. Where the manger’s lamb coos while the Rome wolf howls. Where Mary supplants Rhea Silvia. Where the gospel announces not another imperial triumph but the overcoming of that raging world.  Yeats’ “rag-and-bone shop” reanimates ruin by the sacred ground of reparative poiesy: the site of incarnational interruption following the resurrection at Pentecost. The descent of Christ into this locus marks the point where myth ends and covenant restarts.

• Christ does not fulfill the pattern; he tears it. The metaphysical veil is not ascended through but broken from above.
• The “singularity” of the heart is learned not through epistemic clarity or metaphysical participation, but through ethical encounter, covenantal commitment, and suffering love. This is counter-mythos: conation rather than cognition, responsible presence rather than  taxonomies of conceiting order.

That “truth is not ascended toward, but encountered in responsibility” denies both gnostic bypass and aesthetic consolation. The ragged, particular, embodied, ethical site is where truth resides.

The mythic pattern of visitation by Titans lacking heart reveals a structural limit to human experience: conceptual systems reach a point where they can no longer account for the fullness of experience. At that edge, something breaks open--at the far edges of its logical architectures, philosophy keeps circling its chariots back to what it first suppressed: mysticism and poetry. And when the philosopher is honest—pierced by revelation, as Thomas Aquinas was—he confesses it: “All that I have written seems like straw…” The revealed exceeds the reduction: Putting the center of anthropology in scanning the popup shadows of cogito rather than the oared singularity of conatus. Putting the cart before the horse. Logic cannot cradle the Real. The detritus of forms burns in the fire of dynamic encounter with vectors that rupture.

Such rupture is what’s needed now, in a time where the eschaton of entropy has abandoned the gifts of voyaging and investigative humanism for the sterile idol of the Cognitive One sitting in his armchair by a fire, tended by his right arm, Martin Lampe. Seeking form without conation, machine knowing without neighborly being. Seeking a singularity of mind that never comes because it ignores the gifts of singularity of heart.

Cormac McCarthy warned in the twilight of the secular: No Frankenstein more brutalizes than rationality unmoored. Christopoiesis refuses the horse that forgets its field and delivers the cached, repressed remainders of its straw. 

Walking with and through myth as a tabernacle of pedagogy, we recall that Christopoiesis not as fabrication of new myths but as participation in their critical struggle. In the communal, covenantal, and Trinitarian unfolding of ethical singularity and becoming, Pentecost brings poetic-redemptive “counter-speech” to typological recurrence and historical determinism. This is not myth renewed, but language redeemed: a Christopoietic grammar that resists the re-landing of Titans, interrupting their cycle with conative utterance, covenantal presence, and the Spirit's call to repair.

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[1] Jung's position here is ontological essentialism undergirding ethnic superiority and historic trauma. This racialization grounds a metaphysical hierarchy within psychological typologies—essentializing difference through mythos-as-personality.

Source: The State of Psychotherapy Today (1934, reproduced in his Collected Works Volume 10). Relevant transcript at https://x.com/FullVerity/status/1964432577860677970/photo/1

Such essentializing leads to occult division found in Rosenzweig. See source at footnote 5.

[2] An attempt to preserve both genetic embeddedness and spiritual transcendence proposed by https://x.com/FullVerity/status/1988431571741757830  November 11, 2025.

[3] Distancing from Jungian projection, these threshold figures are not sufficient in themselves but are valuable for unveiling a pedagogy toward a Shema-Christological metaphysic of movement, relational accountability, and poetic justice:

Corbin’s mundus imaginalis is where archetypes dwell in a metaphysically real, ontological intermediary world—not in projection. The imaginal is higher than thought. Yet it is not peripatetic (Abrahamic tenting) but Platonically static and bounded. It lacks covenantal movement or historical embedding. Reverent but unmoved, it offers no conative walk with the divine imager, only a contemplative elevation.

[4] See my “The Collapse of Historicism and the Apocatastatic Opening of Humanity: Vindicating Herder After the Epochal Demise of Simulated Ends” at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KXByByziVw9APj5Q3timfomUbvrvxiwJT0iMC-F5vBY/edit?tab=t.0

“The Collapse of Historicism and the Apocatastatic Opening of Humanity: Vindicating Herder After the Epochal Demise of Simulated Ends” at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KXByByziVw9APj5Q3timfomUbvrvxiwJT0iMC-F5vBY/edit?tab=t.0

[5] See my “The Restoration of Reason from the Eyes of a Neighbor: A Shema-Christological Metaphysic of Conative Healing” at https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-restoration-of-reason-from-eyes-of.html

[6] Olds, Douglas B. Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care: Virtue as the Craft of Theology Beyond Strategic and Authoritative Biblicism. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2023, esp. 54-56, 136-7.

[7] Ibid., Appendix I.

[8] My terminology and interpretation following from Herder’s his emphasis on inner striving (Streben); moral formation; and freedom as a becoming toward the divine ideal realized immanently.

[9] See source given at Footnote 4, esp. its Appendix A.

[10]Mythic mediation between unseen eschatological vectors (NOT titanic forms) and incarnate language. See also Part VI of the source given at Footnote 3.

[11] See my “The Gospel Sung In Christmas Carols: A Seasonal Service for December 24, 2023” at https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-gospel-sung-in-christmas-carols.html

[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Swedenborg

[13] Swedenborg and Goethe both affirm a metaphysical origin for myth as experientially expressive—infusing perception with sacred (or romantic) relationality. In Swedenborg, myth participates in an explicit eschatological telos, structured by his doctrine of correspondences and layered post-mortem judgment. These appear ex eventu, as interpretive fulfillment rooted in a historical-theological horizon that moves Reformation thought toward a teleology of relational repair. Myth, in his system, is not merely symbolic but sacramental and diagnostic, mapping inner volition onto eternal consequence.

By contrast, Goethe embeds myth within a latent telos—a romanticized morphogenetic arc emerging from aesthetic form and historical intuition. Myth is panoramic, an aesthetically inflected survey from the promontories of universal Titans longing to be unbound from the particular and context in the lowlands. Though less doctrinally committed, Goethe’s early Sturm und Drang phase, under Herder’s influence, gestures toward a metaphysics of Bildung: a solidarity with becoming grounded in morphological transformation. However, Goethe’s metaphysical reserve and aesthetic idealism resist covenantal consummation in willed singuarity Trinitarian expressed. His Weltliteratur vision [14]  affirms historicist permeability but lacks eschatological commitment to repair, as noted in Meinecke’s (Historism) account of Goethe’s historicist uses in cosmopolitan circuits (see below).

Swedenborg, for all his theo-processive depth, remains religio without advance towared conative singularity: his angelology is vertical, ethereal, and moralistic without fully incorporating the willed, historical participation of the body in time-bound covenantal justice. His framework abstracts responsibility from incarnate communal action, reifying judgment into moral sorting rather than redemptive embodiment.

Goethe, though more culturally formative, offers aestheticized openness without ethical finality. His metaphysics of perception celebrates inner formation but does not channel it toward teleological fulfillment in neighborly service. His vision of becoming remains atelic, ultimately undercutting the metaphysical torque  necessary for covenantal anthropology and Christopoiesis.

Thus, both thinkers serve as waystations--pivots, Swedenborg with eschatological vision without eschatological torque--toward a metaphysics of myth. Each illuminates dimensions of mythopoetic pedagogy while falling short of an embodied, eschatologically accountable, heart-led and -cycling anthropology. They trod the terrain, preparing for a more fully Shema-Christological model, in which myth is neither projection nor poietic stasis, but a peripatetic vocation of covenantal pedagogy—walked, tested, and fulfilled across communal time and sacred history.

[14] "Increased international literary exchanges which are the result of modernisation, or it has a normative charge, suggesting that Weltliteratur enables intercultural understanding."

Goethe’s literary corpus reveals his characteristic reliance on Überschauung—a surveying overview, a kind of proto-analogia entis—that lacks contextually embedded care and covenantal commitment. Where Überschauung aspires toward dispassionate universality, Erschauung—awareness as illuminated through context—is rendered only through Christopoietic radiance. This is the axis along which Herder far exceeds his “frenemy” Goethe.

Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur, while ostensibly intercultural and humanistic, subtly prioritizes aesthetic cosmopolitanism over ethical-pedagogical responsibility. It orients the reader toward resonance rather than redemptive response. His morphogenetic forms suggest openness and unfolding but refuse singularity of ethical essence; they sparkle with the romance of becoming but remain unfulfilled in sacrificial, obligated neighbor-care or Trinitarian radiance of will. His metaphysics, therefore, remain suspended in latency—aesthetic, willed by his concept of genius, but severed from the heart’s intending, and thus eschatologically inert.

By contrast, Herder’s metaphysical anthropology is rooted in the investigative vocation of language and historicized feeling. For him, (mythic) poiesis is not contemplative evocation but an ethical event—where insight flashes in crucibles of cultural encounter, bodily formation, and prophetic maturation. Where Goethe surveys, Herder ambles. Where Goethe analogizes the universal, Herder embeds it in the comparative milieux of human plurality and the call to neighborly covenant. Goethe remains a lambent precursor—a waystation of morphogenetic brilliance—but Herder pivots decisively toward the covenantal threshold: where language, culture, and Spirit converge for redemptive unfolding of perfection. This is not religious morphogenesis but Humanität as pneumogenesis—the Spirit-breathed conation of eschatological repair and life perfecting.

[15]Mid-dialogue, Socrates employs an epitaphic rhapsody:  "I am a maiden of bronze and lie on the tomb of Midas; So long as water flows and tall trees grow, So long here on this spot by his sad tomb abiding."

For a critique of analogical theorizing, see footnote 10 of my "The Hermeneutics of Iconoclasm in Mid-Modernity."

[16] As Jowett interprets Plato’s fourth madness:

Socrates begins his tale with a glorification of madness, which he divides into four kinds: first, there is the art of divination or prophecy—this, in a vein similar to that pervading the Cratylus and Io, he connects with madness by an etymological explanation (mantike, manike—compare oionoistike, oionistike, ''tis all one reckoning, save the phrase is a little variations'); secondly, there is the art of purification by mysteries; thirdly, poetry or the inspiration of the Muses (compare Ion), without which no man can enter their temple. All this shows that madness is one of heaven's blessings, and may sometimes be a great deal better than sense. There is also a fourth kind of madness—that of love—which cannot be explained without enquiring into the nature of the soul.

All soul is immortal, for she is the source of all motion both in herself and in others. Her form may be described in a figure as a composite nature made up of a charioteer and a pair of winged steeds. The steeds of the gods are immortal, but ours are one mortal and the other immortal. The immortal soul soars upwards into the heavens, but the mortal drops her plumes and settles upon the earth.

Now the use of the wing is to rise and carry the downward element into the upper world—there to behold beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the other things of God by which the soul is nourished.

--Benjamin Jowett, Introduction to Phaedrus 

[17] “The first step to mystical realization is the leaving of such a defined god for an experience of transcendence, disengaging the ethnic from the elementary idea, for any god who is not transparent to transcendence is an idol, and its worship is idolatry.”

— Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949)

Campbell here proposes transcendence as the regulative principle of mythological maturity, elevating myth beyond ethnic facilitation or historically facultative specificity. This framework conflicts with Christopoietic metaphysics wherein contextualized immanence, not abstraction, discloses covenantal relation. Rather than disengage from the ‘ethnic’—understood not as racial essentialism but as historically embodied language community—the Shema-Christological model affirms myth’s communal embeddedness as the very medium of divine relationality. Myth becomes not a detour through symbolic universals but a proprioceptive pedagogy of ethical presence, a tabernacle journey of ontogeny whose arrival signals vocation. Thus, while Campbell’s critique of idolatry may rightly reject static or tribal reifications of deity, his transcendentalism is the prior systematizing of the cognitive that inverts the incarnational, sequential motion of the Christic God into and through the “rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”