A phantom kingdom

Hell is with us at all times, a phantom kingdom perpetuating itself in the wastes of sinful hearts, but only becomes visible to us as hell because the true kingdom has shed its light upon history. In theological tradition, most particularly in the East, there is that school of thought that wisely makes no distinction, essentially, between the fire of hell and the light of God’s glory, and that interprets damnation as the soul’s resistance to the beauty of God’s glory, its refusal to open itself before divine love, which causes divine love to seem an exterior chastisement. Hell is the experience (a possibility in each moment) of divine glory not as beauty, but as a formless sublimity; it is the rejection of all analogical vulnerability, the sealing off of the “self” (or the cosmos) in univocal singularity, the “misreading” of creation as an aboriginal violence. The “fire” of hell is that same infinite display of semeia [signs] by which God is always declaring his love, misconstrued (though rejection) as the chaotic sublime rather than the beautiful, not susceptible of analogical appropriation, of charity; it is the soul’s refusal to become (as Gregory says) the expanding vessel into which the beauty of God endlessly flows. For exile is possible within the beauty of the infinite only by way of an exilic interiority, a fictive inwardness, where the creature can grasp itself as an isolated essence. Hell is, one might almost say, a perfectly “Kantian” place, where the twin sublimities of the star-strewn firmament above and the lofty moral “law’ within remain separated by the thin tissue of subjective moral autonomy: where this tissue has become impervious to glory, the analogy of the heavens is not the transforming voice of God but only a mute simile, an inassimilable exteriority, and so a torment. Hell is the perfect concretization of ethical freedom, perfect justice without delight, the soul’s work of legislation for itself, where ethics has achieved its final independence from aesthetics. Absolute subjective liberty is known only in hell, where the fire of divine beauty is held at by, where the divine apeiron [limitlessness] miraculously divests itself at the peras [boundary, end, extremity] that, in Christ it has already transgressed and broken open, and humbly permits the self to “create” itself. True, though hell is the purest interiority, it is also by contagion a shared interiority, a palpable fiction and common space superimposed upon creation, with a history of its own; but still, it is a turning in, a fabrication of an inward depth, a shadow, a privation, a loss of the whole outer world, a refusal of the surface. For Eastern Christian thought, in particular, it makes no difference here whether one speaks of death, sin, or hell: in each case on speaks of the same privation, the same estranging history, the same limit shattered by Easter; and hence there can be no aesthetic explanation of hell (something that few of the Fathers occasionally foolishly attempted) that would make of it a positive moment in the exposition of divine beauty, a part of the universe’s harmonious ordering of light and darkness. Hell cannot serve as an objective element of the beautiful—as source of delight—because it is an absolute privation of form and quantity; it has no surface, nor even a shadow’s substance; its aesthetic “place” is the sealed outside of an inside.

(David Bentley Hart, Beauty of the Infinite)

Reppin’ the Kingdom

Heard this beat and I had to get it pronto,
Eat it like steak with potatoes and cilantro,
The Lord’s the Lone Ranger, I’ll be the Tonto,
Reppin’ the Kingdom from Texas to Toronto,

I Am aka the Head Honcho,
Raining down Grace, betta get yourself a poncho,
I’m Ricky Ricardo and this beat’s my bongo,
Runnin’ it like OJ in a white Bronco.

Bump it, Ima keep goin’, the Spirit’s in me, Livin’
Water, let it keep flowin’, no fear in me, Givin’
Love, let it keep showin’, deep in the focus
Like mud, but I keep growin’, like a lotus.

So I’m standing tall in Imago Dei,
You can have the world, baby, I’m OK,
I got my mission, and I’m stayin’ in position, so when
God starts to wishin’, I listen and obey.

(Dwayne Polk)

Free-falling

Free-fall in ivory black of night with not a soul beside,
No wind to pace my sure descent, no echoed cry to mark the ride,
No shout of warning from below, nor from above a last Adieu,
No compass and no map in hand, no starlit sky to see me through.

No memory can ease the fear as Shame’s grip ever tightly holds,
And I, recounting all the steps by which I hid within its folds,
Cried out for help and strained to hear only Winter’s silent voice,
And so am falling ceaselessly, the consequence of my own choice.

But when all hopes at last expired, and I still falling through the dark,
A face appeared and, falling with me, made no gesture or remark,
But only saw me, and I in seeing knew, I was beheld and known,
And being seen could only mean that I in fact was not alone.

His eyes and voice were one and fixed as to my fading form his glance,
Undisturbed and free of threat from all my loss and circumstance,
Spoke faith and love and hope within my thinning ghostly mortal frame,
Assured me he would never leave, and as he spoke he said my name.

What poetry then can reproduce his presence which in me construes
Falling into friendship and from loss my liberty renews?
Would I give up such brokenness if it meant milder grace to gain?
I’d say surely not, and recommend to you the same.