The Ladder Tearing:
A Christopoietic Rejection of Ascent without Neighbor
Bearing...and of DB Hart's Platonic-Inf(l)ected Teaching
Douglas Blake Olds
17 November 2025
There is a certain kind of metaphysician—learned, serenely confident,
mistaking the florid for the elegant—who peers at the world’s formal splendor
and mistakes its shimmering surfaces for truth. He believes the universe climbs
a ladder: physics to psyche, psyche to nous (or v.v. when what is “presupposed”
slips its rung), nous to the One. He names this ascent “order,” and calls its
rungs “irreducibility.” He supposes that by describing desire’s upward reach,
he has spoken of infinite goodness rather than finite conceit. He speaks of divine complexity
as if it reveals covenant; of emergence as if it were responsibility; of
metaphysical hierarchy as if it were wisdom. He presupposes far too much of
what is knowable about the attributes of God, that his patterned obsession allows the heart
to be buried of its concern for neighbor. He writes decoratively, intending
bouquets of what is already vulgarly assumed, the slop decorum of undestining solace. He recoils
from the liberal protestant with a sneer of challenge.[1]
Because they know how to say, “NEIN!” So that in the end, both in terms of his looping rhetoric of solace and critical rejection, readers suffer through a jibing sea of the most orotund, atelic apophaticism of a brig with never a sand of shore in view.
ABSTRACT:
Judged by the emergent criteria of ethical accountability, metaphysical clarity, and theological innovation appropriate to the present eschatological crisis—when the meek prepare to inherit the earth—David Bentley Hart’s revanchist metaphysics and rhetorical bravura demand the heavier judgment assigned to teachers (James 3:1). This critique applies equally to its author. But the more pressing demand is upon the reader: amidst competing metaphysical architectures, where does one stand in this era’s status confessionis? Is reality discerned first by αἰσθητήρια (the trained senses) or by ἕξις (habitual form)? This moment demands the antithetical decision: which eschaton, which metaphysical inheritance, is truly the inheritance of the meek?
Hart’s 2023 essay, “Entropy and the Metaphysics of Morals” [2], asserts that physics alone cannot account for higher-order realities such as moral intentionality and semantic consciousness. He argues against mechanistic materialism and secular emergentism through a Neoplatonic metaphysical architecture: psyche presupposes nous, which in turn presupposes the One. This concentric metaphysics advances transcendental participation through analogia entis, wherein the finite reflects and ascends toward the infinite by formal analogy—a metaphysical ascent through beauty and hierarchical ordering.
At first glance, this appears aligned with critiques of reductive metaphysics. Yet the architecture of Hart’s metaphysical ascent ultimately diverges from the Shema-Christological, covenantal, conative theology that arises in prophetic response to the epochal rupture of eschaton. Hart’s schema presumes a metaphysical order where virtue emerges from form, where ethics descends from contemplation, and where poiesis is an aesthetic realization of divine principles. The theological anthropology this yields is impassive: humanity participates in the divine not through relational conation, but through formal alignment with an unchanging ideal. The result is a moral typology centered on metaphysical hierarchy rather than on the groaning, proprioceptive heart of covenantal responsibility.
By contrast, a conative metaphysic reads Scripture as initiating rupture rather than retrieval. The ethical does not follow the aesthetic; it interrupts it. The Shema-Christological witness affirms that form is judged by the neighbor’s need, by Christic descent, and by the groaning of creation. The mature discern good and evil not by logical ascent but through the exercise of aistheteria (Hebrews 5:13–14)—trained perception, historical responsibility, and lived obedience.
This metaphysical critique does not deny the potential ethical import of analogical systems. Rather, it exposes how in late modernity such systems tend to aestheticize ethics into delay. They render moral rupture optional, replacing covenantal urgency with ornamental continuity. Hart’s theology gestures toward ethics but structurally defers it. His metaphysical prioritization—One, Nous, Psyche—grounds a theo-dramatic spectacle that closes upon itself, abstracted from conative encounter and neighborly demand.
What results is a theology of eschatological evasion disguised as synthesis: ethics secondary to spectacle, iconodulic forms masking iconoclastic summons, and ecclesial belonging predicated on metaphysical assent rather than covenantal repair. The moral atmosphere of Hart’s metaphysics, however florid, lacks proprioceptive response. His rhetorical mode—brilliant, scornful, performative—exemplifies the very aesthetic self-sufficiency that Scripture contests.
Thus, the fundamental question is not whether Hart affirms morals, but whether his metaphysical ordering permits ethics to speak first. The difference is one of sequence: whether Christic conation precedes metaphysical system, or whether it is permitted only after the system has completed its aesthetic climb.
Whereas Hart’s vision follows the Alexandrian model—logos enfolding form—this critique aligns with an Antiochene and Shemaic priority: logos revealed in the historical, the kenotic, the ruptured, the neighbor-bearing. Christ’s command to love with all the dianoia (Matt. 22:37) is grounded in the God of the living (v. 32), not a god of recursive patterns. These reveal the categories of sin (Olds 2023, 153-57f). Metaphysics must therefore be re-sequenced: not rejected, but ruptured, purified by the demands of neighbor, Scripture, and the eschatological summons of conative care.
The metaphysical task, then, is not to ascend into the One, but to descend with the Cross into the world groaning for repair. It is not to proclaim continuity of form but to participate in the discontinuity of grace. For only in the refusal of metaphysical bypass can the inheritance of the meek be honored, and only through ethical rupture toward accountability may the true metaphysics of Christ be revealed.
DB Hart’s Metaphysics of Morals
In this most recent essay, Hart performs an adumbrative sleight ornamented
by patristics’ summons. He dissects the inadequacies of reductive physicalism, rightly
challenging the claims of materialist ontology to explain moral intentionality,
cultural creation, or aesthetic meaning through thermodynamic processes alone.
The argument intends a clear rebuke to the sterile terminus of secular
emergence, gesturing toward a reality irreducible to quantification. This
gesture waves at those of us who insist on the irreducible reality of meaning,
the semantic integrity of the Logos, and the moral demands of creation.
But what Hart giveth with one hand, he recovers with another—processing not through the heart of covenantal relations (cf. Jeremiah 31-34) that heal and repair but into the polished spirals of Neoplatonic emanation with effete if not tragic ethics. Neoplatonic ethics are mis-sequenced—derivative of form rather than responsive to divine address from neighborly calls. For Hart, psyche implies nous, nous implies the One, and the One remains beyond all differentiation except by logic of ascent, of metaphysical launch: a mis-sequenced anthropology eager to jump into full cognitive modes of discernment—theorizing--of theoretical dramas taking place.
Hart’s anti-materialist thrust is his critique of entropy, but one that does
not yield to incarnational poiesis as Spirit but rather recoils into
abstraction, and in so doing reverses the anthropological attainment of human
immanence as earthbound trustee and divine imager. While Hart grants that
physics cannot account for ethical or artistic depth, his solution remains outside
the covenantal witness of Scripture: his is a metaphysical climb of and from cogito
rather than a redemptive, horizontal journey of ethical and kinesthetic training
prior to dianoia that solves problems in context. This the Shema’s (Deut.
6:4-9) sequence prior to attaining Christological understanding (Matt. 22:37)
that contextualizes the living God’s presence with His people of the enduring moment (v.
32): ‘I am the God of Abraham...’ states the resurrectional confirmation that dianoia links not not speculative intellect but to embodied covenantal remembrance. This textual sequence is also revealed in the foundation of ethics
kinesthetically, autonomically and thus nominally purposed (Hebrews 5:13-14) to
address here and now the greater context of eschatological challenge and
throughput: the pithing of human reality by dechordate machining of perception
and meaning making (see below).[4]
In contrast to cogito/ratio-first anthropology, the Shema-Christological
theology of immanence is rooted to the regenerating cycle of the earth as
substrate, its missional task proceeds not by hierarchical ascent but by
conative trusteeship (far better than “participation” or “stewardship” in
imaging the divine)—rooted in the Word who became flesh, in the Spirit who
groans with creation, and in the incarnated covenant that binds the finite
heart to neighbor to every other and to the infinite God incarnated through
history. Where Hart sees an ontological ladder in the nous presupposed by
psyche, I see a proprioceptive and kinesthetic grammar of the soul obligated by
the Golden Rule. Where he locates the good in an ineffable source beyond conceits
of differentiation, I locate it in the rupturing nearness of the Word who
speaks, heals, and commands. Where he sees orthodox retrieval as what is
necessary for every historical moment to believe, I see an epochal tipping
point—an eschaton both now and for a briefest remaining moment “not yet,”
requiring service that the Church Fathers both lacked awareness and the
technologies to apply thereto.
Hart’s system is the over-saturated,
over-familiar logic of the analogia entis: the idea that finite being can
analogically reflect divine being through a chain of formal correspondences.
This tradition, inherited from Plotinus and hypertrophied by Balthasar, though transmuted a bit by Aquinas' actus essendi, organizes Being into formal continuity, with higher levels
“containing” lower ones by participation. But this is precisely the move that
Barth, Kierkegaard, and the ever-Reforming Christological conscience have
rejected—not because it lacks sophistication, but because it lacks the radical
rupture of divine conation torquing through soul and logos by obligated and
accountable virtue rather than emanating from and by cogito sustained through
pragmatic strategies of ego. Not every ethical program meets the demands of
justice and righteousness. Christ’s advent experienced in every generation is
not analogical but apocalyptic: not a higher expression of an existing order,
but a judgment and regeneration of that order by the conation embedded in the Golden
Rule.
The system Hart advances projects metaphysical order through
a formalist lens, prioritizing logos-as-form over logos-as-call. In contrast,
Hebrews 5:13–14 disrupts such frameworks, describing maturity not as ascent
through abstraction but as ethical discernment forged through repeated,
responsive engagement with good and evil. This counters Hart’s Neoplatonic
metaphysics of ascent—from psyche to nous to the One—with a
Shema-Christological structure of reception: from ear to heart to neighbor.
Hart’s aesthetic metaphysics resists rupture, ultimately evading the ethical
demands of incarnation and apocalyptic interruption. His theological edifice,
reliant on a canonical scaffold, retreats from contemporary crises rather than
engaging them through theopoietic confrontation and covenantal response. Notably,
these themes do not function architectonically in Hart’s major works: the
Golden Rule, Shema anthropology, and habituated ethical discernment rarely
appear as organizing principles, and ethical formation is typically
subordinated to metaphysical and aesthetic vision.
Hart’s ontology is one of emanation rather than of embodied (ear-initiated, heart-trained and -centered) incarnational covenant. He begins with unity—as if the finite holds the infinite through proportion—through ratio--then descends into discerning multiplicity. The very complexity of the reverse is vitiated by complexity.
I begin with brokenness, then
receive the possibility of singularity through Trinitarian grace that unifies.
He posits the One as origin and explanation of theology, of religio; I proclaim
the neighbor and context as the site of moral meaning.[5] For
Hart, the hierarchy of Being justifies the existence of form beyond entropy.
For me, the heart’s cry—“Hear, O Israel”—grounds the reality of the good in
conative response and responsibility. Hart’s metaphysics ascend toward a god of
formal sufficiency. Mine kneels before a God who speaks into history, whose
Word rends the heart’s veil set by rational interest, who bears wounds, and who
calls us not to analogize, but to remember and act.
From the theological perspective of Trinitarian conation and immanent
anthropology, Hart proposes an:
Unspoken Seduction: Semantic Altitude Without Ethical Gravity
Hart’s essay begins in shared resistance: it rightly
refuses the reduction of music to entropy, meaning to mass, consciousness to
computation. There, our critiques harmonize. The author sees, as I do, that
music cannot be collapsed into unembodied, unmerited thermodynamics. He grants
that desire for the good is irreducible to physical conditions. He gestures toward
Plotinus, tracing psyche to nous, nous to the One. Here they stand together
before the veil.
But only the ethically (un)prized may step through
by Christ’s gate, a difference simple and absolute: not to end in the One but
to begin eternally anew with the neighbor and her context.
Where Hart’s essay presents irreducibility as proof
of form, I see singularity as the call to mission. Where it ascends toward aesthetized
elegance, I descend bruited with an iconoclast’s covenantal entrustment. Where
it invokes metaphysical longing, I invoke Trinitarian love established in the virtues
of the proprioceptive heart. What the author calls intrinsic form, I call membering
entrustment: semantic reality not as structure but as responsibility; not as
participation, but as hearing—Shema—begun in the ear’s remembering, the ear’s
balanced repairing, rejoicing the heart’s connection and collective.
Plotinus sees reality as ascent into formal unity.
But the God of Israel speaks only rarely in heights—when the people are most
estranged--but in covenant: not psyche → nous → One, but ear → heart →
neighbor. The moral world does not emerge from ontological necessity by the fall.
It erupts from divine conation after the fall. It is given—as entrusted
to hands, not spectated from the boxes.
Hart’s Analogia
as Anti-Shema (putting the mind before experience)
Hart claims that desire for the good presupposes a
horizon of goodness. But he forgets: that horizon was spoken. Not abstractly,
but covenantally. It is not upward. It is given in the streets (Proverbs 1:20),
in the cries of the oppressed, in the kinesthetic groan of the Spirit. The One
he imagines does not speak. It receives no cries. It does not assign
trusteeship. It simply rests where it floating apophatically.
While such a metaphysics reaches toward the beautiful, it lands with the false conceit of securitization.
The core conflict between
Analogia Entis and Conative Christopoiesis lies in metaphysical vector: heart
movement (the supplicating blood of the Cross that pulls toward immanence) vs.
the motion of cognitive “ascent” that abstracts ethics from incarnate,
relational obligation. The mind that pushes away milieux and immanence to pull
upward toward infinite absolutes as “proportioned” participation.
This encapsulates Hart’s
metaphysical aesthetics: form, beauty, and participatory ascent is theodicy—theorized
Spiritual Dramatik[6]--that
putatively discloses the divine. This is precisely the structure of the
analogia entis, which Hart explicitly affirms and which this review repudiates
as theologically mis-sequenced, ethically inert, and metaphysically bypassing
covenantal poiesis.
For “speaking” of participation in beauty without
entrustment becomes the ground for simulacral ordering and detachment. The
language itself is paradoxically both reductive and multiplicative of divine
attributes:
As for…ontology, it would certainly seem to
offer thought a more obvious and substantial form of
analogy: a direct and proportionate similitude (albeit in finite and infinite
instances) between attributes inhering in discrete beings. It would seem,
indeed, that the metaphysics of participation, precisely insofar as it regards
God not as a being but as the source andultimate truth of all beings, opens an
abyss between God and creatures that neither thought nor language can traverse
without losing its moorings in human understanding. A more univocal ontology,
though, allows the meanings of our attributions to remain intact, even with the
addition of the further attribute “infinite.” (Hart, Beauty of the Infinite [BI], Eerdmans 2003, 301-2).
Hart is circling his wagons around Alexandria: the
finite proportions the infinite by assigning attributes, rather than acting by
the conative singularity that alone may be known about God—the heart for what
is encountered, to sustain and repair context [10], and now the epochal moment of substrate tipping points requiring
transformed instances of poiesis—including meta-hermeneutic rupture that stabilizes Anthropocene metaphysics by centripetal singularity of safety
and care including through dynamically-contextualized technology. Such
hermeneutics deny that participation in Being is sufficient without a
Shema-structured poiesis of care, neighbor, and covenant.
Where Hart permits semantic continuity with
infinity, I assert that true theological meaning begins where semantic
structure is broken open by divine entrustment to the neighbor. The latent contradiction
is exposed: Hart’s metaphysics both insists on the inaccessibility of God in
infinite difference and yet preserves semantic continuity by analogizing divine
attributes. This collapses by paradox into reductionist pluralism: God becomes
formal rather than covenantal, encountered via beauty rather than
responsibility.
“If [baptismal] theophany reveals God as
perichoresis, it also shows him to be the God whose life of reciprocal “giving
way’ and ‘containing’” (BI, 175).
If theophany reveals God in perichoresis, it does not thereby disclose reciprocity as divine essence. Human dance, too, must be subjected to a Shemaic-anthropological sequence of dynamic arts of grace [9]. What Hart speaks of the ecstatic sublime is a gift from the singularity of heart—the negentropic source of will and process by Creation. Reciprocity, even if for Hart a model of moral relationality, is not the foundation of Torah nor of the Golden Rule; accountable grace is the cornerstone. Hart gestures beyond processive anthropological ethics when he identifies (“also”) divine perichoresis with the certain pragmatics of reciprocity. Such metaphysically misaligns ethics. Reciprocity is a faulty, nominalist construct—contractual, mirror-bound—precisely a nominalist posture Hart elsewhere repudiates (BI, 133, 159). Reciprocity functions like nominalism by reducing ethical reality to external relations / contracts / names for exchanges rather than covenantal participation and accountable obligation.
Nominalism’s resurgence at epochal thresholds (see Hesse’s liminal character Steppenwolf and his portrayal of dancing as a cultural maverick vector at the place of epochal change) often frightens orthodox systems into spectral formalism and quietist stasis. But as the eschaton advances, language must rupture these frozen, transcendentalizing conceits—instituted, inert, systematized, and entropic. The insight of the OT prophets carried forward by Herder is that substantives--which are contextual nominals--are unbound from their subterranean entropies by the lexemic unpacking of geminal roots to their underlying verbals. It is the dynamic vectors of divine in nature that are universal and reveal the divine, not the stasis of form--which take to nominalization and entropy.
In his “Entropy and the
Metaphysics of Morals” essay, Hart confronts entropy yet turns backward to what has been frozen by foreclosure:
retrieving analogical metaphysics as a bulwark against moral disintegration.
But analogy that aesthetizes, however lambent, is not negentropy. It cannot
generate covenantal life from the centrality of practical cogito discerning by
theory. As constructive departure, only Christic, proprioceptive,
unreciprocated, accountable virtue is reanimating ethics in a world unraveling
under the weight of conceits and mirror-seeking, egophantic ascent.
Eschatological
beauty comes by ethical poietics and accounted, not by Dramatic theurgy,
pharisaically reasserted through ritualized reciprocity and ritual. Rather, by an eschatological ontology that
cannot be retrieved from patristic primordia. Form without mission is the elegy
of the inert. This is not simply mis-sequenced theology. Hart’s analogical
metaphysics occludes the interruptive immediacy of divine address as command
that elects, as Shema, hear: Make the Gospel perceivable by nominals of the contextualized
Logos, Adam’s task in a changing world of telic substrates as yet not fully eschatologically
realized. Adam’s nominalist task rejects both the nostalgic
sublime (retrieved transcendence) and the nihilistic sublime (ecstatic rupture
without covenantal telos).
Excursus: The
Sublime as Negentropic Charge — Divergences in Hart and Olds on Ethical
Ontology
Both David Bentley Hart’s essay “Entropy
and The Metaphysics of Morals” and my meditation, “Short Note on the Theoretical Physics of Grace (with an application to political systems)” confront the crisis of entropy at the
intersection of metaphysics and moral philosophy. Yet we diverge significantly
in our ethical response to the entropic condition. Hart frames the modern moral
collapse as a symptom of metaphysical forgetfulness—specifically the loss of
analogical participation in a non-nominalist order of transcendentals, among
which beauty functions as a cosmic attractor. His solution is a retrieval of a
metaphysics of form, mediated by beauty and supported by a premodern
ontological grammar. While Hart laments entropy, he treats its moral
consequences as remediable through metaphysical recollection—a backward-facing
ascent on the ladder of analogia entis.
In contrast, I cast the sublime not
as a static retrieval of form, but as a ruptural moment of negentropic charge:
a divine call within collapse. The sublime, in my account,[7] is not reducible to aesthetic arrest or to an
analogical participation in Being. It is torquing vector of apocatastatic
poiesis (see below)—a summons to the heart’s will that breaks open the entropic
closure of metaphysical, ecclesial, or cultural stasis. The ethical register of
the sublime is thus radically different: not a return to order, but a
proprioceptive charge to enact covenantal repair amid collapse, even if forms
and orders bring change—improvements by the eschaton’s ethical clarity. In this
light, negentropy is not moral resistance to decay that slows down, but the
creationally accountable conative force that realigns relational perception
from debility. Unlike Hart’s entropic concern with the loss of stable form, my
taxonomy of the sublime insists on ethical reembodiment through kenotic
responsiveness and poetic justice in the flux of telic history.
Crucially, Hart’s essay does not
explicitly engage the sublime as such—let alone as a negentropic phenomenon.
His analogical aesthetics aligns beauty with form and order, not rupture and
renewal. There is no articulation of the sublime as a destabilizing ethical
imperative that calls the creature into action, only a yearning for the
re-enchantment of metaphysical architecture. In this way, Hart’s vision remains
within a metaphysics of hierarchical structure and retrospective
intelligibility. By contrast, negentropy’s conative sublime demands that beauty
and ethics be actualized in responsive movement rather than preserved form. The
ethics of negentropy is eschatologically charged—requiring not recollection but
covenantal interruption. The result is a metaphysical shift from Hart’s drama
of return to Being to the summons of Becoming.
Hart’s ladder ascends by beauty as non-nominal
universals and thus by the rungs of stasis. The gospel begins when the ladder
falls—Jacob’s ladder inverts--and brings the human trustee to ethical emplacement
actualized by the virtues which serve neighbor in context (Olds 2023). Aisthesis
in the sense of Hebrews 5:13-14 manifests when doctrine gives rise to tested
ethics, and then theophany results in and by kenotic, autonomically pacified,
kinesthetically pacifying, contextually situated, creational and
creationally-accounted virtues of apocatastasis—that which flows from (apo)[8]
the resistance (cata) to stasis—including the conceits of a fully formed
ego, the homunculus of conceit fully sprung like Athena from the head of Father
Zeus.
The
Emergence of Immanence by Semantic Iconoclasm and Contextualized Praxis that Refuses
Displacement by Static Orders
The metaphysical cost is high.
In the absence of covenantal
anthropology:
- form is mistaken for the approach of truth;
- irreducibility is mistaken for vocation;
- semantic structure is mistaken for divine voice
- ethics are reduced to pragmatism.
This is how analogia entis comes of medievalism's theology--every man a pope brandishing two-swords doctrine slicing out theoretical dominicum and compelling imperium. Hart’s system—elegant, lambent as a wind-quaking flower,
tragically inert—offers no trustees, no neighbors, no Shema. It proposes to dazzle
the mind but bypasses the body. It names depth but flees descent. Its polite refusal to silence
is not reverence, but the cutting absence of the God who calls.
The crisis of secularity
deepens when these displacements enact real-world effects: generative Artificial
Intelligence, with Boolean algorithms conceited as diagrams of “neurolinguistic
programming,” now threatens to reorganize human perception on
machine-compatible, non-chordate phyla. It offers meaning not through
revelation but through directional simulation—perceptual vector
imposition divorced from ethical—even motor-sensory--ground. This disembodied
form enacts by machine recursive loops 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 students
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 restored and stabilizing order and hierarchy
but entrusted by the blood that pulls to the hearts of creatures, grounded by
context, sent to 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.
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 infinite; 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.
Canon as Rampart: Retreat and the False Eschaton
When pressed, analogist flees not forward but backward—up the spiraled steps of the canon, into the sanctum of already-warranted authority. He turns not to the neighbor but to the Fathers, not to the present but to the prestige of precedent, as if the eschaton were merely the recovery of canonized form. He names names—Maximus, Gregory, Dionysius—not to deepen argument, but to insulate it. The canon becomes citadel.
But a citadel is not a covenant. And a name is not a warrant. That which once catalyzed living perception has become, in the analogist's hands, a gallery of foregone conclusions—scenic rather than ethical, reverent rather than ruptural. He invokes tradition as bulwark precisely when the tradition is under judgment, when the world it once guided is falling into technocratic simulation, planetary desecration, and moral theater.
Hart’s metaphysical elegance—so admired—reveals itself as eschatologically regressive. It seeks apocatastasis without rupture, theosis without conation, redemption without the scandal of ethical discernment. But the eschaton does not descend to recover the canon. It breaks through it. It calls to account even the most golden of formulations, even the most symphonic metaphysics.
Christianity must blast through these canons—not to desecrate, but to fulfill what they foreshadowed. Their time was temporal. Their beauty was provisional. Their arrangement of being was preparatory, not final. Now the individual is summoned—not into abstract participation, but into direct immanence and accountable perception. Into conative modernity: not the modernity of secular collapse, but the iconoclastic awakening of neighbor-responsibility under judgment.
The Shema demands more than Hart’s analogia. The cry of the Spirit does not echo politely through Patristic arches. It shatters the vaulted halls to re-tent the world. We must not ascend his grammar. We must answer the call to conative rupture—to ethical, proprioceptive witness not secured by citation but enacted by grace.
In place of
Hart’s consoling enchantments in the face of mechanical surveil—his
titular revival of the ancient intuition that “all things are full of gods”— we require paradigms of dynamic and
responsive faith: not governed
by the seductions of order, first things (other than the metaphysical singularity
of conative entrustment), or aesthetic pulchritude. Not patterns, but people. Not singularity of
cognition, but covenantal processing by the singularity of Trinitarian heart.
That the battle
is finished, the ladder is put aside,
that good has triumphed, and that all engines still grinding toward discernment—all compute designers
and elegant rhetoricians of scoping pattern--are condemned to ash, by the
daylight that they occlude by taxonomy then display as haberdashery inside
tabernacling taxidermies.
FUSILLADES
of academic
philosophogians
climbing backwards
onto the ramparts
of canons
to sortie forth again
against
eschatological
light
and tone.
Their lobed lobs
against
the throned
throwne...
Conclusion [updated January 11, 2026]
Judged by the emergent standards of ethical accountability, metaphysical clarity, and theological innovation in this apocalyptic moment—when the meek are poised to inherit the earth—Hart’s revanchist flourish and abrasive bravura must bear the weightier judgment upon teachers (James 3:1). So too must this author. The reader is not excused, but summoned: where, amidst these converging polemics and eschatological wagers, does her Pascalian alignment rest--this era’s status confessionis: With αἰσθητήρια preceding ἕξιν, or the reverse? The rhetorical pageantry of inversion—gnostic or otherwise—the taste-bound fidelity to ecclesial doctrinairies, the charge of inconsequential or idiosyncratic hermeneutics (but aligned with Sellers 1940 [10]), and the disavowal of any mediating path (consult the Book of Proverbs! [Olds 2023 passim]) all obscure the central, antithetical demand: which eschaton is enduring as the inheritance of the meek? The wisdom that binds these texts is not located in aesthetic contortion or delayed theodrama, but in the decision to bear metaphysical clarity as ethical witness now.
The position of this essay is rooted in Hebrews 5:13–14, emphasizing mature discernment through experientially trained senses (Antioch) rather than speculative abstraction (Alexandria). This grounds metaphysics in proprioceptive responsibility and repentance, contrasting starkly with Hart’s elevation of aesthetic plenitude as metaphysical principle. Biblical virtue ethics (see Olds 2023) centers ethics in ontogeny/experience and Heb. 5:13 perfecting after doctrine, while Hart subordinates it to a naturalist fallacy--of aesthetic continuance as canon. When the Biblical God is taken as ahistorical systematizer of monotonic theodicy outside of context and its ontogenetic potentials.
When rhetorical
bravado and invocations of dead authority reads as deflection rather than
argument—recall the expansion of the Shema into the domain of dianoia in
Matthew 22:37 is contextualized in v. 32!—conative rhetoric is polemical, yes,
but sequenced and accountable, making iconoclasm earned rather than reactive.
Scripture is not analogia entis’ unloosed pretext for metaphysical speculation, but as a crucible of ethical reformation. By leveraging biblical witness with exegetical care—drawing esp. from Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hebrews, and the Gospels— poiesis is rooted to covenantal movement, correcting Hart’s tendency to treat Scripture as symbolic archetype within a Platonic metaphysic system. In a moment of historical crisis of existential hijack, poetics must bear ethical weight to become the second edge (Revelation 1:16; 19:15) to Hebrews 4:12’s sword: the 'sword-buccaling' tonal voice exerts the needed ethical gravity to the soul perfecting by metanoiac epitemics.
Hart’s analogia
entis and metaphysical ascent is non-cruciform because couch- and
throne-ridden, structurally avoiding the rupture and descent required by
covenantal service and neighbor-bearing. By contrast, Christopoiesis is a
participatory metaphysic born of judgment and reparation. It dispenses with
fences and albs clothing the Table. This resonates more fully with current
critiques of theological aestheticism and escapist ontology.
A rejection of the
canon as eschaton and the reassertion of the neighbor as site of divine
encounter mark a correction to Hart’s metaphysical pageantry. The recovery of
substrate loyalty should be and will be seismic:
While Hart draws on
the patristic and Neoplatonic heritage, modern eschatology enlists both
apophatics and cataphatics of iconoclasm: Herder, Simone Weil, Moltmann, and
the Christo-Shemaic tradition of covenantal perception to articulate a
post-collapse metaphysic not just critical but constructive, offering the
requisite path forward in theology, poetics, and ethics:
Not simply a new
idea, but a re-anchored theological grammar—a reordering of being’s grammar
from the ear and heart outward. A post-collapse metaphysic with literary teeth
and prophetic tone. Not a sneer accompanied by handwaving to Dionysius,
Augustine, or Aquinas.
Hart remains a master of metaphysical flourish but wields theologically blunt tools, a less cruciform ethical grammar, and a metaphysic less attuned to the eschatological burden of our time and the condemned moment of aesthetic simulation.
Both the precepts and percepts of analogia entis involve baroque anthropologies that treat the Bible not as an historical account of living close to God but a storehouse of metaphysical data as fixed symbols to be applied to watchers seeking recursion. Such an approach is definitively superannuated for the eschatological church requiring a morally urgent, biblically accountable, and
poetically unbinding of meaning from form to energy, from canon to context and vectored
dynamism. The Eternalizing Church ontogenetically not formally expressed. Else the metaphysics of error are dragged by Artificial and Simulating systems and lead their adherents into determinist and necromantic compounds.
Epilogue: Poiesis over Pattern
A Christopoietic, Shema-grounded metaphysics directly rejects Hart’s analogical aestheticism. Where Hart locates the good in contemplative ascent toward the formally beautiful, this essay relocates it to kinesthetic, covenantal, incarnational descent into historical obligation. Theological rupture—Christ’s descent and the tearing of the temple veil—stands as the decisive judgment against Hart’s metaphysical continuity. The ladder falls where it conspires to ascend. The ladder falls. The trustee rises. Not by ascent, but by grace trained in service.
These nominals do not cohere. Their convergent anti-physicalism masks a profound divergence on the nature of divine-human encounter, the shape of ethical life, and the structure of theological metaphysics.
The gospel begins not in form but in the tearing of form—the interruption of analogical elevation by covenantal entrustment. Against Hart’s contemplative moment of peace as proportioned entry into infinitude, the kinesthetic theology of repair grounds the ethics of finite incarnation, poietic responsibility, and eschatological judgment: (Matthew 10:34-36).
For proportion and beauty entails no explicit responsibility other than implicit orders of stability except by accommodation with Being. The analogical elevation of the soul without the tether of neighbor detaches from the Shema, Matthew 22:32-37, and Hebrews 5:14. Hart’s metaphysics ends in contemplation; whereas the eschaton is revealed as accountable obligation.
The conceits of theory holds theological danger: the displacement of the incarnate, covenantal God with an abstracted set of theatrical 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.
[1] “It
may sound like I'm becoming a liberal Protestant, but fear not, because no
liberal Protestant theologian can withstand the fire of my intellectual
contempt.” https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/an-interview-with-ross-allen-of-the
[2] Leaves
in the Wind (Blog), November 14, 2025. https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/order-entropy-and-the-metaphysics
The link to an early version of this essay was entered into the comments of Hart's substack essay on November 17, 2025. On November 19, I checked and could not find my comment with the link on that substack page.
One of the problems with public discourse and debate is the algorithmic scrubbing of alien links, creating an echo chamber. When Dr. Hart discovers this essay, I invite his comments on this blog, below. Comments are always received and open.
[3]“The
Restoration of Reason from the Eyes of a Neighbor: A Shema-Christological
Metaphysic of Conative Healing” In the iconoclast’s descending (blog,
June 15, 2025). https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-restoration-of-reason-from-eyes-of.html
[4] “AI’s
Necromantic Narcissism: Hallucinated Hegemonics and Its Condemning Collapse of
Covenant Perception.” In Ibid, June 6, 2025.
“The Lamb’s Victory: Spectacle or Repair? Status
Confessionis and the Kinesthetic Ethics of Poiesis.” In Ibid, September 9,
2025. https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2025/09/from-spectacle-to-repair-lambs-victory.html
“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.” In Ibid., August 29, 2025.
[5] See
source in footnote 3.
[6] See
the critique of Balthasar in “The Lamb’s Victory…” sourced at footnote 4.
[7]“τάξεις of the Sublime that Reopen Meaning After Anthropological Collapse” In the iconoclast’s descending (blog, October 23, 2025). https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2025/10/six-taxes-of-sublime-that-reopen.html
[8]
Cf. “Precis for a Metaphysics of Flow” In the iconoclast’s descending
(blog, October 21, 2024). https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2025/06/precis-for-metaphysics-of-flow-rev.html
[9] See "The Kinesthetics of Dance as an Theological Allegory for Immanence: Johann Gottfried Herder's Adrastea, II.9 [Introduction] (1801-02)." In Crying in the Wilderness of Mammon (Blog, August 15, 2023). https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2023/08/kinesthetics-of-dance-as-theological.html
[10] Sellers, Robert V. 1940. TWO ANCIENT CHRISTOLOGIES: A STUDY IN THE CHRISTOLOGICAL THOUGHT OF THE SCHOOLS OF ALEXANDRIA AND ANTIOCH IN THE EARLY HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. London: SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE.
The Antiochene Biblical hermeneutic, the poiesis of immanence that some would subsume into "sua causa voluntarism" [BI 166] but is ethically realized through Golden Rule deontological virtue.
The singularity of Trinitarian dynamism is the conative kinesthesis of perichoresis by the three divine hypostatic persons in the one Creation—the only metaphysical attribute is the willing heart revealed by Christ and thus finitely perceivable and achievable—not by analogy but by union of conative essence in the earth-bound trustee that images God in earthly creation (Cf. Olds 2023: Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care, Appendix I).
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