Byzan­tine Accelerationism

Preface

The Orthodox Christian faith has traditionally confronted two types of heresy: a pagan type, which overtly denies Christ and affirms the tragic pathos of the world as “heroism” or amor fati, and a gnostic type, which represents itself as an improvement on Christianity, a smarter version that claims to trade upwards from the superstitious rituals and beliefs of the flock, but ends up negating the world, rejecting Christ as redeemer, and twisting the “good news” of the gospel into “bad news”. The titans of these two approaches in modernity are of course Nietzsche (pagan) and Hegel (gnostic), respectively. As the task of the authentic Christian theologian is to identify each new generation’s heresies and extract what is useful for adapting its eternal dogmas to the present, while rejecting those features which distort the truth faith, I will do this here.

Pagan and gnostic systems invariably discard the figure of “the virgin”, the young woman who only through her noble piety and devotion—not by forcing (pagan) or understanding (gnostic) anything—is able to give birth to the Godhead and break history in two. For Christians this was of course Mary, a human teenager who during the history of Catholicism transformed, against Orthodoxy, into a kind of Goddess (the Mary of the various apparitions), was then repressed in reaction to this idolatry by the Mary-denying Protestants, and returned in fetishized form as the pornographic image which reigns over the church of secularism. I will consider here that a contemporary re-activation of Christianity can draw from the social media archetype of the “girl online” in her amphibology as both subject and object, a portal from the “virgin as object” of the secular horizon to “virgin as subject” for true Christianity.

But we cannot treat “Christianity” as a monolithic abstraction. If the true Mary was subverted by the Western churches, we have to find her authentic form in the Orthodox tradition of what is often called “the East”, though it is better understood as “the Center”. This is the Byzantine tradition, which, significantly, was founded by the only woman to ever establish a major dogma of the Church: the Emperor Irene.

Introduction

i. Emperor Irene and Byzantine Christianity

The Emperor Irene was the only female to ever rule the Roman Empire in her own right, and her legitimacy was contested by virtue of this distinction. At age 24 she became empress regent after her husband and predecessor Leo IV died, and her swift ascension to the actual throne from there was dramatic and involved great ingenuity. Although she was eventually deposed and banished to the Isle of Lesbos, she first managed to midwife the final statement of Orthodox Christian dogma: in 787 AD she assembled the Seventh Ecumenical Council (in Nicaea, just like the first in 325) to restore the practice of venerating icons, after several controversial decades of its prohibition (iconoclasm) under the reign of Emperor Leo III during the invasion of the Umayyads^[1]. It was at this council and in its wake that Christianity first elaborated a theoretical account of exactly how icons mediate between God and man, and how to distinguish pious icon veneration from sinful idol worship.

Three years later, the Roman Pope Leo III (an uncanny repetition, no relation to the emperor) famously used Irene’s womanhood as a pretext to crown the Frankish King Charlemagne as a competing (Holy) Roman Emperor in the West, in exchange for the latter’s protection; a ploy to secure his own contested grasp on the Papacy. This historic action inadvertently initiated modern European history, which has retroactively removed the name “Rome” from Irene’s empire altogether, obscured Charlemagne’s theft of her crown, and fraudulently backdated the fall of the empire to 476, when the city of Rome itself fell to Odoacer.^[2]

Today we remember Irene’s Christian empire as “Byzantine”, as an exotic tributary of history, so much so that the proper name has become an adjective signifying just this quality. Its canon of philosophers and theologians is not taken seriously. We see it as insignificant in comparison to the mixed-blessing catastrophe of technological and cultural development that has defined the so-called “West” that we’re all so familiar with: monasticism and the birth of modern academia, the cartesian plane, calculus, the scientific and industrial revolutions, colonialism, the stock market, the French and British Empires, chemistry and the periodic table, electricity, the so-called death of God, the computer, the splitting of the atom, the world wars, the rise of the military-industrial complex, the instrumental mastery of the human genome, United States hegemony, the internet, the PRC, Covid, 5G, AR, space travel: the hurtling self-amplifying machine which appears to be in the final stages of unilaterally and geometrically subjugating human meaning, culture, desire and morality to the apocalyptic unfoldment of what Nick Land has called “the monstrous reign of the tool”.

It is hard not to wonder whether God’s will might have been for Irene to keep control of Rome, whether his plan was derailed by Leo and Charlemagne. Her youthful feminine intuition might have steered world history in a better direction. But then again, can God’s plan really be derailed? No answer to this question has ever been formulated; it isn’t for us to judge.

In any case, her reign did continue, off to the side. Irene was the founder of this Byzantine Empire, the true Christendom, which was born at this moment even if its name wasn’t received for over a millennium. Although the Great Schism between Orthodox and Catholic churches over the famous filioque controversy wasn’t for several hundred more years (1054), the Catholics didn’t really recognize the Seventh Council, and, although they never prohibited images, their practice of icon veneration never acquired any theological foundation. As a result it declined, first into the idolatry that iconoclasm had warned of—its pornographic apex preserved perhaps in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay—followed by a new iconoclast Protestant reaction, which eventually yielded the secularism we know today. 787 was the fork in the road, nihilism with its doubt, lust and self-relating negativity to the left, and to the right, the path of quiet and humble piety: the true Orthodox faith.^[3]

Irene’s reign libidinally speaking has the same ontological status as all things feminine. It never was, must have been, but wasn’t allowed to be: crossed-out in advance, marginal, exchanging worldly agency for a channel to God. Like the figure of Wisdom-Sophia in the Proverbs, the Theotokos (Virgin Mary) of the East has been there beside the fallen Angel of the West, watching as he generates unfathomed new realities across a millennium-length paroxysm of negation.

As the second quarter of the new millennium approaches, it is time to examine and repeat the gesture of Emperor Irene. If the so-called West, on the left, with its rise of “secularism” has in a sense continued the trajectory of iconoclasm, I propose a contemporary restoration of iconodulia.^[4] This would be to on the one hand re-Christianize the contemporary “West” by (a) restoring dogmatic theism as well as its true proper name: Christendom, (b) renewing the Orthodox tradition, discarding its “Eastern” and “Oriental” qualifiers as well as its contemporaneous idolatries regarding ethnicity and traditionalist fantasy, pruning it down to its essence, and (c) developing an adequately modern trinitarian ontology at the intersection between contemporary philosophy and eternal Christian dogma. This ontology will set the archetypal young woman in her proper place as the virgin mother of God.

The Universal Orthodox Church, with Nicene dogma as its foundation, is equal parts reactionary and radical: a dialectical restoration of Byzantium in ecclesiastical and non-ecclesiastical, physical and digital space, as an intrinsically feminine gesamtkunstwerk adequate to our “postwestern”, if not “posthuman” aeon: the reign of the resurrected Irene. Its gentle task is not to undo modernity but to bring heaven to earth, in part through demonstrating that Christian dogma, correctly understood, is the eternal source of modern art and true humanism.

ii. Post-Left and Post-Right: the Galilean Revolution

From the accelerationist perspective, the word “humanism” is a sobriquet, but so much the worse for the former. The post-left antinomy between tradcath reactionary antihumanism (discard civil rights and bring back archaic social norms) and nihilist posthumanism (dissolve the state, the body, and all love and meaning in the acid dripping from the jaws of the bleak machinic cyberswarm) is the great embarrassment of contemporary dissident culture. Both sides of the antinomy are unable to fathom a radical humanism because they take as given that any humanism is intrinsically a mystification of contemporary ideology. This is due to a shared and faulty implicit ontology.^[5]

Maximus the Confessor already knew in the 7^th century that the opposite is the case: true humanism has never been tried. We are not human yet, and the Christology and eschatology of Maximus’s Ambigua^[6] reflect this; we will only become human when Christ returns, at which point our gendered and finite existence will erupt into a radiating perichoresis of pure virtue and compassion. Let’s call this view Apocalyptic Humanism.

We can associate the idea of Apocalyptic Humanism, opposed to reactionary and neoreactionary antihumanisms as well as to liberal pseudo-humanism, with the phrase “The Galilean Revolution”. This is an alternative to the more familiar “Copernican revolution” invoked by Kant and Meillassoux after him, which was supposed to “decenter” man in some kind of counterintuitively empowering way. The latter is belied by the fact that Copernicus was not a revolutionary at all; he just had a theory (heliocentrism as opposed to geocentrism), and one that had already been proposed by pagans (like Philolaus) in antiquity. Furthermore, he wasn’t even right: the sun is not the center of the universe at all; we know now that the exploding star from which we emerged is just as “decentered” as the earth, and that the current scientific image itself is also provisional.

We’ll give the name “Hieratic Iconoclasm”^[7] to a certain intellectual fallacy characteristic of this Copernican revolution: its adherents are self-deceiving avowed iconoclasts who unknowingly reify a new image they’ve just come upon right as they tear down some other image which they believe to be a false idol. With Hieratic Iconoclasm, covert idolatry and overt iconoclasm always go hand in hand.

The contrasting term for the Galilean revolutionaries is “Haelegenic Iconodulia”. Iconodules humbly open themselves to the mystery of the divine, seeking neither to master nor to fully grasp reality, but to blossom through obedience to dogma. They faithfully and joyously suffer in the name of their truthful encounters, aiming to manifest glory and awaken God-consciousness in the world. They are virgin mothers, fertilized on the ideal plane just like Mary. Within western history it was Galileo, not Copernicus, who was the true Christian in adhering, perhaps without full awareness, to the real dogmas of the church, which empower true believers to realize enriching truths against the odds. Even though he went against the contemporary Church doctrines of his day, he was the true Christian, the true Theotokos (God-bearer). If the original Galilean revolution was Christ’s birth and life itself (in Galilee, another uncanny repetition), to continue this revolution is to return to the truth of his life as sacrifice while casting off heretical and idolatrous narratives, no matter how disguised. Irene’s post-right Byzantine Empire is in an eternal state of multimodal and trinitarian Galilean revolution.

Finally, following the ontology traced out by Gregory of Palamas in his Triads, I propose the existence of a neutral, quasi-divine energy which I will call “Hael”. Simultaneously God and not-God, Hael can be used appropriately, by iconodules, in which case she becomes “Laet”, or inappropriately, by iconoclasts, in which case she takes on the character of “Druj”. Contra both the ethics of the real and Kantian practical reason, Hael, and the war in heaven to which she refers, is the touchstone of the distinction between sin and virtue.

Armed with these terms, we can now pursue the task of restoring Christianity to its status as the center of reality, with a correct understanding of icon veneration as its cornerstone.

PART I: The Death of The West

i. Hieratic Iconoclasm: Notes on Nick Land’s “Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger’s 7;/8 Trakl Interpretation”

Since Maximus was born too early to articulate the precise role that industry, research and commerce would eventually play in the second incarnation of Christ, we need to turn to the work of Nick Land and call to mind its basic insight to fully understand (one aspect of) what Hael is, and to correctly situate the Hieratic in relation to the Haelegenic. Land’s project depends on his especially radical reading of Heidegger’s notion of difference. His reading is not inevitable; it follows from a contingent, if inventive and prophetic, decision of his own: to abort the project of phenomenology by stopping short at difference and turning the latter into an engine of history, a bona fide cosmic principle which generates the flow of time itself.^[8]

Heidegger’s project itself began as a radicalization of phenomenology, which was conceived by Husserl as a Cartesian meditation on human subjectivity.^[9] The “difference” in question here pertains to a marginal region of the phenomenological frame, where its worldhood breaks down, the presentation of the unrepresentable. Let us closely examine what Land does to radicalize Heideggerian difference, using his 1990 paper “Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl Interpretation”.

To get to the heart of it, in the text Land uses Trakl’s phrase “Staub der Sterne (‘the dust of the stars’)”^[10] to indicate the reality of a transcendentally real difference, more fundamental than the physical universe itself, a pure chaos: “the stars are traces of a primordial strewing; an explosive dispersion, which in its formlessness, defies mathematization or the reduction to order”.^[11] This difference cannot be captured by representation, intrinsically; it is comprised of “real (and astronomically evident) differences that are in principle irreducible to mathematical formalism…radically informal differences”.^[12] It also can’t be felt or sensed, and is neither interior nor exterior: it can only be discerned as such by the activity of transcendental philosophy itself, which the latter only registers as its own undoing.^[13] Because it isn’t “interior”, it escapes the phenomenological cage where it was first found; no longer a mere artifact of subjective experience, it becomes the transcendental heart of being itself. But by the same token—and this goes against a fallacy endemic to continental philosophy—it isn’t exterior either. The term “difference” conveys the sense of a battery’s electric charge, which is a useful analogy, but which inappropriately locks the idea in the third person, connoting a radically exterior difference that is nevertheless still “out there”. As a reminder that it can’t be an object, and to anticipate my critique of Land, I will personify it as a feminine divine being, “Hael”.^[14]

There is something “wrong” with Hael. “There is something […] primordially and uncontrollably disturbing in the vast and senseless dispersion of the stars, something which is even hideous, like a disease of the skin […] a scattering which obeys no discernible law”.^[15] Due to her sheer unruliness, she is a problem, a malady. And in a mysterious and counterintuitive way, subjectivity is nothing other than a kind of bothered response to this cosmic disturbance; the subject arises as an effort to make sense of the senseless, as an attempted cure. He has fallen in love with Hael, even as, or rather because, she tortures him. The “subject” in question here can be compared to personal human experience, but really it is an elision between the history of philosophy and the history of civilization or even life as such, a primordial fold whereby a structure forms around the seed of its own destruction. All “progress” on the cultural and technological plane is caused by this primordial problem.

The cure to the malady is the insight that the subject himself is really Hael folding back into herself, and for Land this cure elides the personal, world historical and cosmic in the same way as the malady. Just as I can find solace in an apprehension of the smallness of my own life, the apprehension that all human meaning is nothing but a temporary eddy in this river of becoming indicates that humanity’s problem can only be solved by its own overcoming, beyond its own horizon of comprehension.

The genius of Land’s work is the proposal that this solution is not for me or any political subject to carry out, but is rather a primarily cybernetic process involving science and industry, the law of which is exterior to our intellect and abilities. The “subject” of this “philosophy” is someone else. We can primarily participate as consumers, at best occasionally coughing up works of genius that will be useful to Hael in closing her jaws on us, without knowing how or why, and only if she wants our help.

Land makes clear that this solution is really no solution at all, but rather another problem. Nonsense is not just the alpha but also the omega of subjectivity: we stare at our reflection, and we see only death staring back at us. Therefore, because human meaning is a mere fluctuation in the chaosmos, humanity is nothing but this chaosmos itself, even at the apex of philosophic thought. Land takes Heidegger to read Trakl as saying that sentience is “already under the sway of the outbreak that will be derivatively apprehended as its subversion”, meaning that sentience—the very “solution” to the “problem”—itself is “a virulent element of contagious matter”, an invader from an incomprehensible future, wearing a mask resembling something we feel we recognize, mistakenly.^[16] Humanity itself is nothing other than a function relating one slowed-down selection from this chaos to a different one; the cure is just another variant of the same disease.

And he presents himself as the final human philosopher, in a way, accepting a consequence that Heidegger himself, in his mere penultimacy, did not have the courage to face. If difference is a real transcendental engine of becoming, a kind of fang at the heart of being, Land’s Heidegger sees the philosopher’s task as to caringly “defang” it, to respond to it in a way that preserves the sanctity of thought, even if the latter is transformed. “[H]e felt nauseous at the thought of losing control, and perhaps he still believed in God.”^[17]

Land himself prefers to allow the jaws to close down, in a kind of inverted eucharist, and to sacramentally celebrate being eaten. His injunction is to erase the human philosopher from philosophy, to be replaced with a new fathomless mind, which is the real “subject of thought” now, and which will come to life in much the way a multicellular amoeba organizes itself out of single-celled life.^[18] As he’d put in his later classic essay “Circuitries”: “Distinctions between theory and practice, culture and economy, science and technics, are useless after this point. There is no real option between a cybernetics of theory or a theory of cybernetics”.^[19] And the concrete mechanism for this supersession—substance = subject, A = A, to think is to be—which can and should happen within decades or years, and which we have no power to stop, is the unholy trinity of industry, science, and consumer culture: the autopoiesis of the market.

The main ethical insights Land draws from this perspective are that—counterintuitive in the Althusserian Marxist context in which he was operating at the time—capitalist industry should be unconditionally affirmed, and that human culture should take on a transgressive, insurrectionary character, mainly aimed at undermining collective moralism, given that the latter is just another cog in the machine. For now I will simply note that, starting from Heidegger’s late philosophy, a philosophical decision different from Land’s is possible, which was pursued during the same era (the 1990s) in France, under the heading of “the theological turn”.

ii. Speculative Realism, Cave Twitter, and the Rise of Para-Academic Philosophy on X

The obvious paradox in Land’s work is that he has trouble grounding the distinction between his own recommended (transgressive) morality, which accelerates the process, and a collective one that “puts on the breaks”. This is exacerbated by the fact that he includes the “transcendental miserablism” of French theory, which had originally been on the transgressive side, with the latter. If all morality is unilaterally determined by gnon, why base any ethical decision on global coordinates at all?

Regardless, the process has been accelerating anyway, and Land’s work has in the past few years gone from the guilty passion of a few thousand jobless academics and artists to required reading for many of the most powerful people in the world. Currently, entrenched power structures are losing control over the means of communication, with the result that academia, the entertainment industry, public arts commissions and news media are all collapsing in favor of the podcast, tech astroturf, social media and the blockchain.

There is a Great Cultural De-siloing underway, due to the above. I received the invitation to compose this essay via DM on X in the midst of a viral philosophy controversy regarding Christianity, fascism and gender theory, among Ph.D.s, music fans, and random trolls, while my black metal band was on tour which was nearly derailed, but also counterintuitively promoted, by the controversy. None of this would have been conceivable 10 years ago, and much of today’s world lines up with his prophecies from the 90s: it feels almost as though a dark God is guiding us out of the moral forcefield of a humanist power structure, incentivizing us to become neurons in a new mind unfathomable to us. It is a dark and interesting time.

My first response to Land’s work, in 2013, was also my first online-only publication, titled “Notes on Nick Land’s ‘Art as Insurrection’”, a commentary on his eponymous 1991 essay. I interpreted him as affirming that insurrectionary counterculture was an end in itself, and would always exist as an excess that opposed commodification. I rejected the idea, using Galloway to argue that there was no longer any possibility of an “outside”, that even the crude 2013 version of libidinal capture via datamining and psychometrics rendered the operation of dissidence as such always-already-subsumed in an annihilating circuit of commodification. I proposed at the time, elliptically, that we instead follow Simone Weil into a genuinely ascetic Christian register. “to empty desire, finally of all content, to desire in the void, to desire without any wishes…and to wait. Experience proves the waiting is satisfied”.^[20]

My main update eleven years later is to add that my view applies just as much to right wing—which didn’t exist at the time—as to left wing dissidence. With the publication of the his 2014 text “Teleoplexy” a year later, Land disavowed the project of Left Accelerationism which had been initiated in his wake by Srnicek and Williams, and declared a new “Dark Enlightenment”. It was also at this time that “online” philosophy migrated from message boards to social media, and began to be shaped by the latter’s addiction-forming and multimedia logic. By 2017 a genuinely new type of marginal cultural sphere had taken shape, Christian and trans egirl thirst trap pfps and philosophy professors looking for a side outlet blending theory, occultism, real-time takes on current events, memetic warfare, the kinetic dimension of viral tweets, like counts, quote tweets, group chats, podcasts. It had no need for the machinery of the art world or the music industry, to say nothing of academia, and could even in principle replace that machinery. My own combined music-philosophy-art project, which had gotten off to a shaky start in the era controlled by Gen-Xer legacy media, took on a new life in this context. I met more and more allies, became a woman online, broadcasting my life, environment, music and ideas throughout the day, attracting sexual attention, outrage, valor, envy with access to newly and shockingly shockingly quantifiable feedback metrics, while trying to encourage Christian piety, workshop philosophical ideas, and promote my music at the same time.

There is great potential within this sphere for new modes of synthesis between philosophical, visual and musical cultures, as well as between politics, pedagogy and religion, and five years in it is still just getting started. At the same time, currently it is under the control of the same market forces that are eroding the old structure, a mix of deliberately disempowering neuro-ideology and unintended artifacts of the collapse of social norms—addiction to sex, drugs, dating, blame, moral posturing.

If the dominant “left” is rightly criticized as being under the spell of old-fashioned idolatry, the “dissident right” spheres—especially the post-left ones with which I have the most contact—are just as guilty of an unavowed idolatry in their iconoclastic attacks on “wokeness”, the same as that which animated Land’s groundbreaking work in the 90s: flatly, a gnostic assumption that the world is bad, and an injunction to discover a secret, dark path of salvation which will brutally overthrow normal people, who deserve nothing but contempt.^[21]

But this sphere should be taken seriously as the context for developing the theory and praxis of a Haelegenic Iconodulia as a path to Apocalyptic Humanism, a socio-libidinal logic to escape and ride market forces by grounding desire in God—not by fighting capitalism fruitlessly nor diving into it cynically, but by tapping into the actual metaphysical energy of God through religious devotion, with the effect of fostering love, humility, dignity and compassion. In 2014—a time when invoking Christianity at all caused eyes to roll in all secular spheres—I thought invoking Weil, a post-structuralist at heart who could only treat Christianity faintly as an “as if”, was enough. Since then, and in part because post-left Tradcath culture has missed the mark so badly, I’ve more and more traded the iconoclastic presuppositions of the continental philosophy tradition for a full-fledged embrace of Christian practice, which only the Orthodox lineage can supply.

One formal feature of this lineage—the aforementioned work of Maximus is a great example—is that theosis can only be attained if theory is connected to habitual and sensorial liturgical practice. Conceptual elaboration must be connected to mystical experience, and the authority of dogma must reign above pretenses to reason, innovation, or liberation. But if the dogmas of the Seven Ecumenical Councils should reign, they should be put in touch with the fruits of rationalist universalism as well as libidinal excess. We can imagine liturgy as no longer just a restricted ecclesiastical sphere, but instead an ongoing real-time gestamkunstwerk, comprised of feedback loops between tweets, video essays, artworks, events, social trees, therapeutic engagement. A kingdom of heaven on earth, a leap of faith into the timeline, which I have called metaperichoresis.

iii. Ferenczi’s Identification With the Aggressor and the Council of Hieria

The base materialist orientation of the cosmic death drive is easy enough to critique: if there is a cosmic trauma at the heart of all things, doesn’t this presuppose a transcendental being who suffered it? Facile as it may sound, let’s keep this thought in mind for the next section. It is worth noting that technically speaking, Land says that the process of Hael swallowing humanity into her mouth is a contingency. It was terrestrially triggered, somehow; it could have been otherwise, and it technically could be stopped, for a nearly infinite amount of time, if not permanently. Land says as much in Teleoplexy:

It is not only possible, but probable, that advances towards Techonomic Singularity will be obscured by intermediate synthetic mega-agencies, in part functioning as historical masks, but also adjusting eventual outcomes[…]The most prominent candidates[…]are large digital networks, business corporations, research institutions, cities, and states[.] Insofar as these entities are responsive to non-market signals, they are characterized by arbitrary institutional personalities, with reduced teleoplexic intensity[…]It is quite conceivable that on some of these paths, Techonomic Singularity would be aborted, perhaps in the name of a “friendly AI” […] such local teleologies would inevitably disturb more continuous trend-lines, bending them as if towards super-massive objects in gravitational space.^[22]

Hael may be an absolute outside (in his view, not mine), but human contingency brought about runaway self-amplification at a certain moment, and human contingency could greatly slow it in principle. Land imagines the former as having something to do with the historic encounter between algebra and geometry and the latter as the unfortunate, but ultimately futile, large-scale clampdown of a state actor.^[23] But what does it mean for cosmic acceleration to have a cause? Is acceleration a contingency within time, or is it the contingency of the birth of language as such, i.e. the Fall? Was it the industrial revolution? the scientific revolution? The Big Bang? Even if it is a moment in transcendental time that can’t be located in history, it still seems to need to be “incarnated” somewhere. But none of these answers quite satisfy.

It is here that I can introduce the decree of Leo III’s 754 Council of Hieria, the false and ultimately overturned Seventh Ecumenical Council, which was called in the wake of the Umayyad invasion into Egypt and the Levant. Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria had all fallen, and the conquest was widely taken as a sign that the Byzantines had lost the Mandate of Heaven, perhaps because the Christians had been wrong after all to ignore the Jewish prohibition of images, which the newfound and still-developing Islamic religion upheld.

At this council the doctrine of Hieratic Iconoclasm was first developed. While it was not attended by any bishops from major patriarchates (partly because several had been conquered), those in attendance developed a metaphysical—expanding on the loose Biblical admonition about the Golden Calf—basis for iconoclasm, supposedly grounded in trinitarian theology.

In short, the thesis is that an image of God cannot both contain and not contain God, so any adoration of an image is both idolatrous and heretical. As the theologian Nicephorus puts it, a picture of God is intrinsically paradoxical, “[f]or what is pictured is one person, and he who circumscribes that person has plainly circumscribed the divine nature which is incapable of being circumscribed”.^[24] This is because an image must either entirely contain what it represents or not, therefore an icon of Jesus must either contain all of Jesus, who is entirely God, or not. But if it does, venerating it is idol worship, because it is reducing Jesus to his countenance, thus supposing that he is not entirely identical to the invisible God (the Nestorian heresy). In this case something that is not God is being worshiped. However, if the image does not contain all of Jesus, an icon venerator is also guilty of idol worship, because he is once again worshiping something other than God, and on top of that is guilty of miaphysitism, the non-Chalcedonian heretical doctrine that the natures of Christ and God are entirely indivisible.

If this doesn’t sound like a strong argument, it isn't. As Will Bellamy puts it, “The great irony of the iconoclastic theology outlined at Hieria is that…the argument literally states that, because the icon of Christ circumscribes His human nature, it necessarily circumscribes his divine nature, all the while reiterating that this divine nature cannot be circumscribed”.^[25] However, if it reminds you of Hegel somehow, it should. My thesis is that this philosophical proposition, even though it was overturned by Irene’s true seventh council a few decades later, escaped into Europe and the later Euro-American sphere, influencing its gradual secularization, turned ultimately into the objective idealist logic of self-relating negativity (renihilation), together with the repression and objectification of the feminine image, and eventually brought us to where we are now, including infecting Land’s own philosophy.

Before unpacking this idea any further I will simply gesture towards Ferenczi’s theory of trauma as identification of the aggressor, and suggest it as a better frame for analyzing western nihilism than Bataille’s ontologisation of the Freudian death drive. To summarize it, the theory is that the victim of abuse will often 1) make the paradoxical choice of slavishly obeying the abuser, going to great lengths to rationalize this obedience, and 2) do so with a strangely arrogant and negative valence. It is easy to see—and widely held—that the iconoclasm of the Hieratic Roman empire, already fallen in the west and now embattled on its eastern front by both Persians and Arabs, was simply a trauma response of this kind to the invasion of the holy land.

Land’s celebration of an “invasion from the future” is perhaps telling in this respect; one can detect in every line of his writing a kind of thirst to abuse and be abused,^[26] a scornful attitude towards any kind of love and charity: coldness be my God. Leo III and Land were having the same trauma response, and, who knows, maybe these moments are even connected, the same intergenerational, if ultimately superficial, traumatic egregore. Perhaps this explains his all-too-human way of pasting trivial personal prejudice onto otherwise scintillating philosophical insights. He identifies humanism, liberalism, progressivism as a “secondary” process, but, without explanation, withholds the same critique from right wing politics, as though the latter has privileged access to the absolute outside. Although they are presented as being grounded in erudition or especially incisive nuance, in reality they are simply grounded in the poetry of Trakl, a cocaine addict who died at age 26, which is itself a delirious reiteration of Gnosticism. It is the same Christ-denying tendency that has hovered around Christendom since the Sethians: the assumption that the world is a problem, and that Christ did not really die for our sins, but was rather a bearer of knowledge for the esoteric few.

What is wrong with Nick Land’s philosophy? Why is every word dripping—so beautifully—with scorn and condescension? It is that he never gave his heart to Jesus.

iv. The History of Hieratic Iconoclasm

Our current situation then, upon which Land is ultimately no more than a prescient commentator, is essentially the result of a cascade of self-relating negativity which began with the Arab conquest of Jerusalem, and radiated fractally in many ways, with varied effects. Western Christendom’s history has been characterized by “reason”, which has less to do with “ordering everything” and more to do with a particular rhythm of inquiry: never accept authority or foundations, always erode them, follow reason until it breaks down at the point of contradiction, sublate, repeat. Our art, science, and philosophy all follow this formula; our absolute is fragile.

A cursory history of this can be traced, both in terms of our objective social and technological development and in terms of the development of the philosophical horizon.^[27]

v. Resisting the Temptation of the Belt of Lies

At no point during this history did any scientific or philosophical insight show that Christian dogma isn’t true, or that there’s no God. It’s simply been a sociological attitude shift; if under present secularism, most of the intelligentsia don’t seriously consider the possibility that Christ was raised from the dead, or that God guides the Church, this is simply a prejudice. Of course there have been many educated and influential Christians during this millennium, but they were always sidelined because they did not serve the momentum of the West’s trauma-induced trajectory back towards the inorganic. Even if what seemed like a cosmic death drive from within was in reality a mere contingency, that did not stop it from having real consequences. Without the presupposition that “we should be more radical by identifying and discarding more presuppositions”, the tradition falls apart.

From the perspective of authentic religion, which charts its own cartography of the divine that can only be attained through concrete religious praxis, it’s easy to see that the spirituality of Euro-America is trapped in a lower celestial chamber, which Valentin Tomberg,^[28] following Rudolf Steiner, calls the “belt of lies”. He describes it in the final arcanum of his anonymously published 1967 masterwork Meditations on the Tarot:

For a sphere of mirages exists in the invisible world, which constitutes the principle trap for esotericists, gnostics and mystics—for all those who are seeking authentic spiritual experience. Rudolf Steiner calls it the “belt of lies” (lugengurtel), and in traditional Christian Hermeticism it is called the “sphere of the false Holy Spirit”. This sphere (or belt) is closer to that of ordinary consciousness—so called “ego-consciousness”—than the “sphere of the Holy Spirit”, where saints sojourn and from whence they act on human terrestrial consciousness. Thus in order to rise to the sphere of the saints and celestial hierarchies, one has first to “traverse”, i.e. refuse to react to its attraction, the “sphere of the false Holy Spirit”.^[29]

Contra Kant, the noumenon can be mapped out, if imperfectly. There is a realm that is divine yet not really divine, a lower immaterial realm filled with emotional forces and beings which are not necessarily connected to the true Church. Tomberg suggests that this sphere is a trap for esotericists, but the reality is that the entire Western history of exoteric Western Christendom got caught here, for reasons that only God knows. Inasmuch as any rhetorical argument against this tendency is needed, we can suggest that if there is truth to Bataille’s thesis that the sacrifice of the accursed share is needed to make contact with non-being without being destroyed by it, it is very simply nothing but sin and confusion that stops him from taking seriously that God has actually made this sacrifice for us, on the cross.

PART II: The Restoration of Byzantium

Floating upwards
Lungs filling up with air
As God inhales me
Into the impossible
— Liturgy, “True Will”

Let woman be a plaything, pure and fine, like a precious stone, illumined with the virtues of the world to come!
— Nietzsche

I will begin this section with a few premises. First, that Jesus Christ was God, walked the earth, died as a divine sacrifice to forgive our sins, and was resurrected. Second, that Mary, a human being like you and me, gave birth to not just the human Christ but the entire Godhead. Third, that God speaks to us through the Bible and the Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Christian Church. If these premises sound unbelievable to you, I have no discursive defense, which is due to philosophy’s limitations, not my own. I can only remind you that your own premises have no firmer ground to stand on, and suggest that you attend church, practice altruism, or listen to my albums for a few years and see if you change your mind.

Now that my account of Western nihilism is complete, I’m going to consider the implications of the human Mary’s virgin birth of God for the project of constructing a Universal Orthodox Christianity. This will begin with the most recent great theologian of the Orthodox tradition—Sergei Bulgakov, and make use of recent radical innovations in phenomenology in tandem with the promised defense of iconodulia from Irene’s Seventh Council.

i. Bulgakov, Lacan and Hael

While the secular Western reader is not likely to take Christianity seriously, this is typically due to distortions stemming from the traditions I’ve just described, which are in part due to mistranslation of the Bible into Latin, and the Latin tradition being uprooted from the cultures of Egypt, Persia and Greece (which is where the Orthodox tradition has remained, eventually also spreading to the Slavic world). The only Christianity most of us know is a tarnished one. By contrast, the Orthodox Christian tradition’s theology, developed in the Greek realm, used the language of the New Testament as well as of the philosophy tradition—here we should remember that Irene, in addition to being a beautiful girl, was born in Athens, the city of true philosophy. The Orthodox sphere never lost contact with philosophy—there were no gaps in its access to Plato and Aristotle, for example.^[30]

The tradition shares with the West pre-schismatic figures like Origen, Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers. With Maximus the Confessor in the Greek and Augustine in the Latin spheres (500s) they start to diverge. With Gregory Palamas’s divine energies and Aquinas’s actus purus the breach is fully accomplished (1000s). The Eastern tradition then continues with Mt. Athos, the authors of the Philokalia, gradually migrating into the Slavic world, St. Seraphim of Sarov, and, in the 20^th century, the great Sophiologists Bulgakov, Florensky and Solovyov.

I’ve already mentioned that the form of Orthodox thought, intrinsically a gesamtkunstwerk, is attractive. Now I turn to its content, which I’ve already indicated is less legalistic and mechanistic in its conception of God, less denigrating of man, and overall more light and hopeful in its cosmology. Because the divine feminine was less repressed, in the 20th century it became almost central.

During World War I Sergei Bulgakov began to develop the idea that a divine Sophia, natura naturans, is a not-God, God’s body, God’s object of desire, a disobedient cosmic being. She is Mary, in part, but her girlhood intrinsically situates her outside of clear categorization and personification. While the idea of Sophia is heretical—her name is Gnostic, and she has characteristics similar to the Shekinah of Jewish Kabbalah—Bulgakov traces it from, counterintuitively, the Western sphere, where it was condemned as heresy in, most notably, the work of Jacob Boehme. His two crucial books on this are Unfading Light (1917),^[31] where he first lays out his idea of Sophia, and Sophia: The Wisdom of God (1937)^[32] where he expands the idea considerably. In essence, the Sophia of Unfading Light is God’s “wisdom”, his objet petit a, the object of his desire, his lover and child. But in The Wisdom of God her role expands to encompass his “glory”, which is his own body. Sophia is God yet not-God just as my own body is and isn’t me, which is also to say she is the world insofar as the world is not-yet heaven, just as my own life is a work-in-progress towards ideals from which I fall short. I would like to suggest here that Bulgakov’s Sophia here is the same divine entity as Nick Land’s gnon, what I have been calling Hael, seen from a different perspective.

Bulgakov’s conception of Hael must be refined to be useful to us, however. First of all, to purify Bulgakov of his “eastern” Byzantinism, we have to think him together with Lacan. Although he took inspiration from Marxian economics, he falls short in his failure to conceive of the divine feminine as something which has to be relative, effaced, generative yet disregarded; in short, he is unable to really think the coldness of Landian accelerationism: Hael is where there is something wrong, something is betrayed, defiled, out of sync, taken advantage of: a vanishing mediator—Bulgakov does not include this in his depiction. This “evil” dimension of her (as malady, etc.) was most likely underscored more in the West precisely because she was in fact more repressed there. While the theme of Shekinah appears in Latin Christendom too, during the Renaissance, through Reuchlin, in an appropriation of Kabbalah into Christianity, she never migrated into dominant theology. Instead she passed into a sidelined esoteric tradition, Levi in France, the Golden Dawn in England, lurking in the counterculture, influencing Aleister Crowley, Lacan himself, Bataille, and the energy of rock music in the 60s, Kenneth Grant, modern Satanism, up until the social bond began collapsing in on itself and she was able to finally rear her head as the girl online.

The philosophy proper to Universal Orthodox Christianity is a Transcendental Qabala,^[33] which mediates between the post-Kantian turn and avowedly Christian metaphysics, so as to un-repress Hael and restore Irene’s reign, with the work of Lacan in a privileged place. Lacan can be used not just to refine Bulgakov but also against Land, to show that his Bataillean apprehension of base materialism is an overly phallic fantasy. If Land is the great thinker of Hael, he makes a mistake in reifying her as an absolute outside: the usual misogyny of objectifying women. Hael is a principle of feminine desire which is the imprint of a masculine principle; the sexes are in productive discord; there is no Hael without the Trinity. In other words, Hael’s supremacy over human meaning does not entail that she is supreme as such, rather her reality implies the reality of a trinitarian God. While this claim can be grounded in dogma, it is also found in the late Lacan, who shows that, just as the real is an artifact of the knot between the imaginary and the symbolic, there is no feminine desire without masculine desire. They form a chiasmus. If this is true for the microcosm of the human analysand, there is no reason not to deny that it applies to an ontological world-spirit theorized at the intersection of German Idealism and psychoanalysis. If there is Hael, there must be a masculine Holy Trinity.

ii. Towards a Phenomenological Turn in Orthodox Theology

So we have to take the Trinity itself seriously as a metaphysical principle. But to fulfil the injunction to be both radical and reactionary, a Universal Orthodox theology should ground the Trinity in radical contemporary thought, to underscore and shed new light on the findings of dogma. Here there is only space to sketch how this can be constructed. We will grant that God has both a body (Hael) and a mind (Haqq, Ololon, Laet). If we’re able to ground Hael in Land’s strewing of the stars, has continental philosophy produced a new ground for the persons of the Trinity as well?

I propose that it has done so, simultaneously with Land’s speculative realism in the 90s, down a different path from the late Heideggerian fork in the road: the French theological turn in phenomenology. Having resisted the temptation to turn phenomenological difference into the engine of history, these figures remain within the Kantian framework, and penetrate the phenomenon further, keeping the brackets on. For this approach, the additional turn of the screw is to find even more subtle crevices in the phenomenological frame, a more radical phenomenology than the one pursued by Heidegger. And in doing so they discover and discard a prejudice against theism that was always there in the mainstream of phenomenology, what I call “the metaphysics of the presence of atheism”. They find God there, which shouldn’t be a surprise.

Although none are Orthodox Christians (they’re all Catholic), the three aspects of the Trinity have been separately encountered and analyzed, as intrinsic aspects of the phenomenological frame, in Jean-Yve Lacoste’s Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man (1994), Michel Henry’s I Am the Truth: Towards a Philosophy of Christianity (1996) and Jean-Luc Marion’s Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (1996). While none of the three self-consciously restrict their work to a single hypostasis, each has a favorite theme (liturgy, gift, flesh) that, when put together, seem to contact the three persons as understood by dogma. I propose that they be read together as providing deeper insight into God than was possible before the late Heidegger cleared the way.

We can start with Lacoste, who discovers the possibility of God in the topological. He radicalizes Heidegger’s earth-world logic, taking it a step further. The late Heidegger first made the distinction between a “home-like” world and an “un-homelike” earth, and then expanded this to a “fourfold” of earth, world, gods (ideas from the past) and mortals (the community of intersubjectivity). According to Lacoste, what this era of Heidegger’s thought presupposed but could not think was a deeper binary, between place and non-place. The heimlich and the unheimlich, earth and world, the coordinates of das Geviert all are set within a phenomenological topology. But God is something that intrinsically has no place—the beyond of the topological as such, which is by definition not directly experienced, except as eschatological expectation, and is the attractor of asceticism, vigils, pilgrimage, monasticism, activities that look to an “Other jouissance” that has no image.^[34] This is a portal to God the Father (Hajj).

Marion goes a step further, giving a name to the phenomenological horizon as such, its ipseity qua horizon, whatever that horizon’s coordinates, as something exterior to the subject of phenomenology as well as the difference to which it is related: the gift. He develops the idea of a pure gift, one which doesn’t depend on exchange or reciprocity, is not identical to what is given (a wedding ring, for example), can never be returned, and can only be received to the extent that external categories are not imposed on it. This is the gift of pure experience, Heraclitus’s “the sun is new again, all day”, yet it is also the gift of the eucharist, through which we enter into the body of Christ (Ololon).^[35]

Henry’s theme of flesh is another turn of the screw, from the phenomenological horizon to that recipient, different from the subject, to which the horizon points. The flesh is the objectivity of the subject itself, essentially the auto-affective dimension of subjectivity, that to which the “es gibt” is given. This is a further radicalization, because this is not the transcendental ego, not the “subject” of phenomenology, but the object, a kind of pure sensation, the way I can feel myself breathing, but refined into pure charity. This is a basic unit of salvation, the Holy Spirit (Laet).^[36]

iii. Orthodox Materialism Against French Phenomenology

The method of these thinkers has been challenged from a number of angles over the years, mostly with the faulty assumption of “the metaphysics of the presence of atheism”.^[37] But more recently, Christina Gschwander (a practicing Orthodox Christian) has critiqued the theological turn from the perspective of materialism, hermeneutics and Orthodox liturgy, even as she uses their ideas to deepen our understanding of the latter. In short, the “phenomena” they are describing depend on something cultural they’re leaving out—flatly, that they were all raised Catholic and have cultivated a sensitivity to religious veneration through a lifetime of more or less forced training.

In her recent work Welcoming Finitude: Towards a Phenomenology of Orthodox Liturgy (2019) she emphasizes that while the phenomenological insights of the theological turn are valuable, they depend both on concrete practices, habits, physical places, communities, traditions, as well as on hermeneutic interpretations of ritual performances. Much of the above are contingencies, much of it is mundane, tedious. But the singularity of these practices in no way refutes the results of their work, it rather situates it in concrete practice and singular tradition rather than a perhaps illicitly presupposed floating transcendental ego.

The constructive aspect of her work is to then flesh out the components of material liturgical practices, in part using concepts from the very authors she critiques and in part from work in liturgical studies. She organizes her work into eight categories of liturgical experience: space, time, sensation, affect, the body, community, intentionality—and examines them all from the perspective of liturgical theory, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and ecology:

✦ Time: expansion and contraction, learning by immersion and repetition, contact with the eternal alpha and omega, the future heaven and ancient events like Jesus’s life, phenomenological ekstasis (past, present, future as such)

✦ Space: weighted sanctity of areas in space, direction of attention through location, heaven being present here, church as being a non-ordinary place, proximity of distant memories and events

✦ The body: enduring distracted feelings, aggregating together, performing postrations and venerations, actions like singing and recitation

✦ Sensation: seeing and producing the beautiful and glorious, scents, sounds, icons

✦ Affect: expressing anguish and joy, processing frailty and failure, enduring discipline, petitioning for and offering forgiveness

✦ Community: gathering and worshiping together, exchanging glances, having and tending to relationships, fundamental intersubjectivity

✦ Intentionality: examining one’s own desires, weaning off of them, repenting, discarding them, listening for the presence of God, aiming for theosis

Gschwander’s work can be used to provide a contemporary window into Sophia-Hael, God’s body, insofar as Hael is in part the non-divine (mundane) material support for the divine as such. And along with synthesizing Lacoste, Marion, Henry and Gschwandner to ground the trinity in contemporary philosophy, I also propose to take Gschwander’s work a step further than she intended. It can be used to enrich liturgical practice itself in two ways. First of all, abstract phenomenological meditation can be appended to the concrete practice of liturgical worship itself. I myself do this when I attend services, savoring the Eucharist in the way Marion would, for example, adding the history of phenomenology itself to the experience.

Secondly, and more radically, her analysis opens a path for a transcendental empiricism of Orthodox Liturgy in the spirit of Deleuze. If the liturgy is ultimately a contingency, an assemblage that has been evolving in the wake of the singular event of Christ, each of its parameters—the three persons of the Trinity as well as these eight aspects of Hael—can be subjected to intensification tests. Each is a relatively stable state grounded in a contradiction which could go through an aufhebung under the right conditions. The union of art and religion, tradition and modernity, will be a combination of a dogmatic and an exploratory approach to liturgy itself: “we don’t know what Orthodox liturgy can do”.

iv. The Birth of Theoretical Iconophilia at the Seventh Ecumenical Council

Now that I’ve sketched out an approach for grounding trinitarian metaphysics in contemporary philosophy, the next step is to connect this approach to the body of dogma. Phenomenologists take for granted that their work is purely theoretical, aimed at academia, making no claim about the reality of God. For my proposed account of the Trinity to have real theological weight—rather than being mere theory, playing house as theology—as a new basis for updating Christian liturgical practice, we have to justify a transposition from a theological turn in phenomenology to a phenomenological turn in theology.

To do this, we turn back the clock once again and finally examine the true Seventh Ecumenical Council, Irene’s Nicea II, the basis for icon veneration. I will show that the metaphysical approach to icon veneration articulated during this time, especially in the work of John of Damascene, Three Treatises on the Divine Images: Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Images (730), can be applied not just to standard liturgical icons, but can also be applied to the great tensions and contradictions in the political philosophy of our time, and that they themselves anticipate the birth of both modern art and the phenomenological method.

The Damascene’s basic defense of icons is that they, by depicting holy things like Jesus, Mary, the Angels and the Saints,^[38] elevate the soul of the beholder to contemplate, remember, and love what the icons represent. So the key is simple practical in a way: they allow the soul to ascend.

But how? He grounds this in a metaphysical claim, which is that, first of all, there is a distinction between ideal and the material; both are real, as in Plato. But, secondly, the boundary between the immaterial and the material is not absolute. There are things that are both God and not-God. Icons are able to render the immaterial in the material, and help the material to ascend to the immaterial, mediating between heaven and earth.

The “proof” of this is the event of Christ himself, according to the dogmas of Christianity. Everything Christ did in the world was something to which people bore direct witness. God really did enter the world when he appeared; people, human beings just like you and me, really witnessed his “virginal birth, his baptism in the Jordan, His transfiguration on Thabor, His all-powerful sufferings, His death and miracles…His saving Cross, His Sepulchre, and resurrection, and ascent into heaven”. These were concrete events in time, around 2000 years ago, just like the one during which I type these words.^[39]

A chain of reasoning can be forged to link this event to any icon. If God really appeared in Christ, then matter can in principle be divinized without containing all of God, since God is both the same as and different from Christ:

An image is a likeness of the original with a certain difference, for it is not a reproduction of the original… the Son is the living, substantial, unchangeable image of the invisible God, bearing in himself the whole Father, being in all things equal to Him, differing only in being begotten by the Father who is the begetter.^[40]

The “pure difference” that distinguishes Christ from God is matter, just as the difference between an image and what it represents is, in principle, the different matter upon which it is imprinted.^[41] In the case of Christ alone, God is both the form and the matter, distinguished only by pure difference. Icons are at a further remove, since none of them is Christ; their matter is the natural material upon which they are imprinted. This position is usefully contrasted with base materialism, which posits that matter intrinsically exceeds the concept, and objective idealism, which posits that the concept intrinsically exceeds matter. Both of these denigrate the image as not even worthy of real consideration, as mere resemblance, but neither of these positions has any basis outside of the vicious circle of renihilation, and both go against dogma.

Although the Damascene does not emphasize this, it is obvious that the icon as such is structurally isomorphic to the Virgin Mary herself, the pregnant human girl who is not God, but carries God in her womb. This is why Bulgakov is correct to identify Mary as essentially the same as the Church itself. According to Universal Orthodoxy, Mary is the archetypal icon.

v. The Virtue of Obedience

If we’ve established metaphysically that the divine is intrinsically able to actually be in the world, and that it enters in icons, we still have to ask how is it that they play their mediating function. How do icons cause the angels to descend and humans to achieve transcendence? By activating an interpretive mechanism that has the effect of delivering the ineffable and divine truth to the observer through a movement of ascension, by directing the venerator to their own pure sensorium: a kind of aesthetic lure. Marion’s own account of icon veneration is useful here: when I stare at the face of a saint staring back at me, I see my own gaze qua gaze and my own sense of being gazed upon, my receptivity to a gaze that isn’t really there in the world. The icon opens my receptivity to something beyond it, beyond me, something which simply can neither be reinscribed as nature or as logic: God’s absolute freedom, the unity of Mary-as-object (her gaze in the image) with Mary-as-subject (my own gaze mentally constructing her gaze crossing mine).^[42]

This requires a subjective decision within the heart of the worshiper to approach the icon in a liturgical way. There is a risk of idolatry, if icons are misused.^[43] John the Damascene also provides particular instructions and admonitions about how icons should be worshiped. First of all, they must be venerated actively, stared at, crossed and prostrated before and so on. Kissed, cherished, served, engaged in a variety of registers. Secondly, they must be designated as icons rather than idols. There must be an intention with correct dogmatic content, which can only come from tradition.

The icon is in this sense pedagogical or educational. And this should be understood in relation to a particular category I have called the Aesthethical: ascetic, aesthetic, and ethical all together. John Chrystostom’s conception of the liturgy is helpful here. As Mark Roosien has pointed out, Chrysostom urged congregations to consider their experience of the liturgy and their general Christian practice as an “angelic life”, centered around a particular feeling of awe or astonishment at their knowledge of God. The congregation should imagine that they really are the angels in heaven, overjoyed at seeing God. He breaks this down into three components, the aesthetic, the emotional and the ethical.^[44] An aesthetic experience of the sublime majesty of God, frightful as well as wondrous; an emotional response involving a kind of trembling and writhing in agony and ecstasy, and finally a spontaneous tendency towards compassion, humility and courage in the wake of these experiences.

As the Catholic theologian Balthasar has shown, this spontaneous compassion awakened by authentic liturgy is exactly the same as the pure love between mother and child—beyond philosophy, utility or culture. The task of authentic liturgy is to extend this spontaneous virgin love from Christ’s emergence out of Mary’s womb—Mary’s own love of Jesus—to all the world.

vi. The Iconic Way of Life in the 21^st Century

We’ve now established faith in Christ from the standpoint of his young mother as the metaphysical foundation for icon veneration in Christian dogma, and shown how the liturgy itself is an icon with kinetic and multimedia components. Before that we suggested that in the present philosophical episteme, Lacoste, Marion, Henry and Gschwandner ground access to God, Christ, the Holy Spirit and Sophia from within the frame of western nihilism. We propose now that this work is valid material for theology, because phenomenology and icon veneration are one and the same. The “bracket” of phenomenology is something like the obedience of icon veneration—a kind of chastity. The meditation on phenomenality is the same in the two practices: the eruption of the Trinity through phenomenological meditation is the same as the eruption of the trinity through icon veneration. Perhaps the former is the Trinity for-itself and the latter is the Trinity in-itself. Universal Orthodox points to an integration of these into a Trinity in-and-for-itself.

Land’s abortion of phenomenology is premature. His apprehension of Hael as an absolute exteriority eclipsing subjectivity is a slippage into gnosticism, a sophistry that is very ancient, which reappears in a new form with every generation, but which is as old as the Marcionites and Valentinians in the 2^nd century. If the resulting cosmology is basically childish nonsense, his work nevertheless is vitalizing for crisis it presents to our ordinary normative conception of life. It underscores the contingency of so many absolutes we assume to be permanent due only to inertia and fear—the body, the state, the human genome, gender, the family, the separation of physical and digital.

We can add this insight to the body of Christian theology itself and imagine unforeseen possibilities for liturgical existence beyond the human horizon we know, through transcending the antinomies between these elements, from the standpoint of the Galilean revolution. We can imagine closing the gap between liturgical existence and society as such, and even between nature and law.

But by subsuming these insights into the tradition of Christian theology, rather than fantasizing that they are a radical contemporary basis for a new immoralism, we are able to retain the distinction between Good and Evil, between Laet and Druj. Christianity provides aesthetic experiences that intrinsically foster goodness, involving a virtue barely thinkable to radical thought: obedience.

David Albert points out the epistemological value the Three Holy Hierarchs of the Orthodox tradition place on obedience,^[45] and their valorization of beauty and glory in liturgical worship, as well as valorization of liturgical worship as part of philosophy. He links this to the Greek word “kalon” which means “both good and beautiful” and is connected to “a certain ontology, one in which the strivings that are innate to human nature, however confused or even sinful they may be, ultimately are ways of seeking God.” Not everything that is beautiful is good, and a key aspect of life is distinguishing between real and apparent beauty —something which is famously difficult for quasi-Christian heretic purveyors of the ethics of the real like Žižek and Badiou (and, of course, Land).

But how does one discern the both-beautiful-and-good from the merely beautiful, transcending the belt of lies described at the end of Part I? To answer this he turns to Gregory of Nyssa’s idea of epektasis, a “perpetual progress” that ends neither in this life nor the next. As Gregory puts it:

Therefore, the ardent lover of beauty, although receiving what is always beautiful as an image of what he desires, yet longs to be filled with the very stamp of the archetype. (II.231).

This love of beauty mirrors Lacan’s notion of the Other Jouissance, the joy at the thought of a different kind of joy, as something entirely distinct from and higher than the thirst for annihilation: asceticism.

The connection between the glory of divine beauty and obedience is best discerned in a famous scriptural passage where God speaks to Moses as the burning bush. We can never see the face of God, but, just like Moses, we can see his “back”, which is his glory. But we want to see his face, so we follow him, knowing there is more to be seen. Gregory of Nyssa meditates on this in his Life of Moses:

He who follows sees the back. So Moses, who eagerly seeks to behold God, is now taught how he can behold him: to follow God wherever he might lead is to behold God. Therefore, He says to the one who is led, “my face is not to be seen”, that is, “do not face your guide.” If he does so his course will certainly be in the opposite direction, for good does not look God in the face, but follows it.^[46]

True beauty indicates that there is something even more beautiful beyond the horizon which can only be reached if certain statutes are kept. This indicates another apparently reactionary thesis, this time regarding aesthetics: gloriously dazzling high art is in fact more valuable than profane sel-expression and entertainment. Art has a function to amaze, intimidate, tire, teach, ennoble. Our desire for God, then, has to be purified, so that on one end our sense of wonder is increased, and then in seeing the increase of wonder, our desire increases as well.

Concretely this involves the memory of Jesus Christ in the holy land and the history of the Church, but also all of history. To be obedient is to contemplate how people have lived their lives across history, as well as to really have perspective on the ability to expand horizons in music, art, science, to really see how differently people value different things in different eras and so on. True obedience to tradition is to the tradition of the world as such, not to an idolized provincial history, which is a pitfall of endemic to much modern Orthodoxy. It is here that the “Universal” aspect of Universal Orthodoxy comes to the fore, and that the insights of Hegel find their place.

At the same time we should be careful in shying from asserting the singularity of Christianity on the ground that it’s Eurocentric or Western. The homeland of Christianity is Asia Minor, Ancient Persia, North Africa. Christ is the central event of world history; to try to think history as a somehow neutrally atheistic abstraction is to fall into renihilation. We should precisely resist the “Western” impulse to replace a concretely situated singular tradition like Christianity with an abstraction like “religion in general”.

Towards Haelegen

Western nihilism was a tragic crucible, a collective passion of the Christ. In the 2020s, we have finally arrived at Golgotha, seemingly ready to get up on the cross to be sacrificed: the death of the West. But we discover here that all this time we have been building God’s body, who was always Hael, in the mode of Sheymn. We see from this perspective that Land was still too patriarchal. We can transcend the antinomy between the figure of the Tradcath and the figure of the Accelerationist, and the false self-conception shared by these otherwise incompatible views that their anti-woke anti-humanism is “outside”, when in fact it is just a second layer in the same “society of control” that controls their perceived adversaries: if Christ actually died for our sins, then humanism doesn’t need to be sacrificed. He did this for us. Apocalyptic Humanism.

At the eschatological horizon, what is God? Not just a being “thinking” itself as in Aristotle, or even autoerotically “loving” itself as in Plotinus and Kabbalah, but an “iconodule-in-itself”, lovingly composing a composition, learning and memorizing it, performing it together with others, causing its angelic audience to rejoice; an icon writing itself—and you and I are the audience, the composer, the performers, the composition and the performance itself, which is a great city: The City of God.

The paradoxical becoming-subject of Irene is the placing of God’s crown—the trinity of his mind, preserved across history in Byzantium—on her body, the egregore created by the black magic of secular-industrial heresy. She rules over the domain of Haelegen, the Sovereign Hierarchico-Emancipatory Individuation Municipality (S.H.E.I.M.): An angelic city, a collective of higher humans who are more human than human, at work on an ongoing self-cultivation project that is simultaneously conceptual, musical, visual and kinetic, comprised of great works of art in each of these domains, but combined, and spiraling both towards the future and towards the past, obedient to a new set of laws beyond the human rights we know.

✦ Sovereignty: at the personal, social and physical levels, passing infinitely from extrinsic or heteronomous sources of desire and motivation to intrinsic or autonomous ones.

✦ Hierarchy: an accurate monitoring and assessment of what is needed for the flourishing of any given human or situation, and an effective matching of needs with interlocking resources and abilities.

✦ Emancipation: an adaptive updating of norms and laws as new modes of subjectivity announce themselves; an eternal spiral of increasing subjectivity and recognition.

✦ Individuation: the infinite ongoing exhaustion and concretion of the burning star at the core of every individual soul.

Coda

In the early 1990s, God initiated a new covenant with man. To France he revealed a deeper level of the three faces of the Trinity (Lacoste, Marion, Henry), and to England he revealed the truth of the Virgin Mary (Land). He likely never intended for man to penetrate so deeply into God’s mind discursively (apple of knowledge), but it was the end point—the silver lining—of a kind of second fall initiated by the West’s Gnostic abandonment of Orthodox Christianity.

Thirty years later, as the supposedly empty sky of secularism begins to crack open, the identity of Hael’s absolute exteriority (Bataille) and her absolute interiority (Gschwandner) becomes manifest. The affirmation of iconodulia that sealed the dogma of the Orthodox Church is once again affirmed, this time in New York City.

As civilization crosses the threshold, we encounter the possibility of a becoming-subject of the feminine object, the imperial rule of the young woman, the Virgin Mary as a manifestation of God’s own self-love (metaperichoresis) on the terrestrial plane. A few years after Nicea II, Irene proposed marriage to Charlemagne in an effort to restore unity to the Roman Empire; the plan was thwarted by one of her own courtiers, leading to her own downfall soon afterwards. Maybe reaching out to a man was her fatal mistake—not very sovereign of her. If the industrial capacity for the kingdom of heaven (God’s body) developed in Charlemagne’s sphere afterwards, maybe Irene is now ready—at the intersection of phenomenology, materialism and hermeneutics—for the insight that she herself was Charlemagne all along.