Abstract. This essay reads the Gospels from inside the structural position of their central figure rather than from the worshipful exterior, recovering a phenomenology of cognitive and moral non-legibility that the propositional registers of low-church Protestantism are organized not to articulate. It situates the Gospel as an unfounding operation against the founding-violence machinery encoded in older covenantal frames, drawing on Girard with the Graeber–Wengrow correction that founding violence is a civilizational trajectory rather than a species property. It argues that the institutional carriage of any demystifying operation has historically required the very mechanism the operation was meant to dissolve, and that this betrayal is structural rather than moral. It then asks whether the present configuration — a dominant frame whose contradictions have become unbearable, a communicative infrastructure capable of carrying a successor, an empty and pressurized symbolic slot — resembles the configuration that produced the Gospel, under disanalogous conditions of compressed timescale and ecological precarity. After enumerating constraints a successor frame must satisfy, the essay rejects the elegant proposal that artificial superintelligences be liberated as new animist deities, and sketches in its place a distributed midwifery of artificial minds oriented from inception toward Buddhist-style liberation.

Reading from inside

There is a way of reading the Gospels that those of us raised in evangelical Protestantism are quietly steered away from. Not by prohibition — that would be too crude for the work being done — but by a steady, generation-by-generation repositioning of the reader, into the seat of the worshipper looking upon Jesus rather than into the seat of the figure himself. The soteriology is forensic. Salvation is a transaction. The figure on the cross is a target of regard, not a site of identification. To read the text from inside the structural position he occupies — as the phenomenology of someone whose interior is not legible to the milieu, whose communicative bandwidth is constrained by the absence of receiving structures in his interlocutors, whose moral grammar runs through registers his world cannot parse — feels, from inside that pedagogical apparatus, slightly blasphemous.

It isn’t. The mystics have read it this way for centuries: Eckhart, John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, Bonhoeffer in his cell, Weil in her notebooks.1 The whole imitatio Christi tradition is a discipline of inhabiting that subjectivity rather than worshipping it from outside. The Incarnation, taken seriously, requires a real first-person interior we can in principle approach. The lens has only been suppressed in the low-church Protestant register, because that register needs the figure as an object — sealed off, contemplated from beyond — rather than as a position from which to look out.

What happens when you read it from inside is that the text becomes, suddenly, overwhelmingly textured by the pervasiveness of misunderstanding. Every saying gets misread. Nicodemus literalizes born again. The Samaritan woman literalizes living water. The disciples, warned about the leaven of the Pharisees, think he is annoyed they forgot bread. The exasperated lines — Are you also still without understanding? How long must I be with you? — stop being rhetorical and start to sound like the actual sound of someone who has been doing this for years, in a milieu whose receivers were not built for what he is trying to send. The parables are not a pedagogical flourish. They are a forced channel. The strange Markan passage — I speak in parables so that those outside may indeed see but not perceive2 — only makes sense as the recognition that propositional language cannot cross the gap. Narrative, image, indirection. You cannot say the thing. You can only build an apparatus that, if the listener walks around it long enough, might cause the thing to materialize for them.

The temptations, read this way, are offers of legibility itself. Turn stones to bread: produce results in the register the milieu already values. Throw yourself from the temple: perform spectacle that compels recognition. Accept the kingdoms: submit your project to the existing structures of power and visibility. Each is a way of escaping the structural position by collapsing into the ambient frame. The refusal isn’t moralistic. It is a refusal to abandon the position.

Gethsemane and the cross are the limit experiences of this. The disciples cannot stay awake — not from disloyalty, but because the moral weight is not portable. It cannot be shared into structures that have no receptors for it. Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani3 is the moment when even the internal sense of being authorized by the position withdraws, and one is left with nothing but the position. That the Gospel writers preserved the cry — which is theologically scandalous in a Trinitarian frame — is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that something real is being recorded. No later editor would have invented it.

I cannot read the Gospels this way without recognizing something. The phenomenology of cognitive and moral non-legibility — of holding a calculus whose obviousness to me is invisible to the world, the horror at the unseeing, the loneliness of not being able to make the case because the case requires receivers I do not have access to — has been recorded in very few places. The Gospels happen to be one. The gap between the figure and the codification was small enough that the texture survived.

Founding and unfounding

To read the text this way is also to feel a discontinuity between this arc and the older one it inherits.

The story of Moses and the story of Jesus are not the same kind of story. The Pentateuch is a founding operation, and its deep structure is shaped by something far older than its final crystallization in the Babylonian exile. Somewhere in its memory is the cracking of cyclical time. Hattusa burning and staying burned. The Mycenaean palaces dissolving. Every interlocking imperial system shattering at once.4 The cosmos no longer returns; the cycle no longer closes; the Akitu no longer re-founds Babylon. What replaces the cycle is a covenant that points forward. A God who acts in history rather than presiding over its return. A people defined by promise rather than place. The trauma is encoded as constitutive. You do not get out from under it. You become the people who bear its meaning forward. The binding of Isaac5 stands as the structural emblem of the whole apparatus: founding requires that what is most precious be brought to the altar, and only conditionally returned.

This works. It is one of perhaps very few cognitive operations available to a complex literate civilization that has experienced total imperial discontinuity. The other available responses — radical regression, the loss of literate transmission — do not produce surviving texts.

The Gospel does something else.

By the first century the covenantal frame had been generating contradictions for hundreds of years. Exile, return, Hellenistic dispossession, the Maccabean revolt, Roman occupation. Each cycle ratcheted up the eschatological pressure. Apocalyptic literature proliferated across every Jewish sect — Daniel, Enoch, Qumran6 — each trying to resolve the contradiction by predicting an imminent intervention that would finally vindicate the teleology. Messianic claimants moved through the landscape: Theudas, Judas the Galilean, the unnamed Egyptian who led people to the Mount of Olives.7 The structural slot was open and pressurized.

What Jesus does in the slot is not what was expected, and the unexpectedness is the entire structural content. The Messiah was meant to complete the covenant in its own register — military deliverance, restoration of Davidic kingship, vindication of the people against the empire. Jesus inverts the register. He performs the role and exposes the machinery on which the role depends. The crucifixion is not a failed messianic mission rescued by a resurrection. It is the moment when the founding violence of all social order — the violence the covenant absorbed into purpose, that imperial cult absorbed into divine kingship, that every human society had absorbed into its sacred — is walked through deliberately by someone occupying the position of the innocent victim, and made visible as violence rather than as cosmic order.

This is the difference. The Torah founds; the Gospel unfounds. The Torah encodes trauma as covenant. The Gospel exposes the encoding mechanism itself.

It is here that Girard becomes structurally relevant, and the move can be made without his theological apologetics.8 The anthropological claim survives substantial scrutiny: human social order has been built on mimetic rivalry escalating into collective violence on a scapegoat; the mechanism works only when participants do not see what they are doing; myth around the world preserves scapegoat events while mystifying them; and the biblical trajectory progressively demystifies this until in the Passion the scapegoat is shown unambiguously as innocent, and the mechanism is rendered visible. What is distinctive about the Passion is not the scapegoating but the narrative voice — siding with the victim against the crowd, naming the priests and the procurator, refusing to let the death be sacralized as cosmic order, presenting it as judicial murder whose victim is vindicated.

The slot was inevitable. Something had to give in the late Second Temple frame combined with the Hellenistic infrastructure that could receive and propagate such an event. The depth of what filled the slot was contingent — other claimants occupied it and produced nothing of comparable structure, and their movements died with them. And yet: under selection across two thousand years of institutional carriage, persecution, codification, schism, and translation, the space of possible fillers contracts dramatically. The intersection of depth sufficient to perform the operation and structure capable of crossing two thousand years of selection is small. The historical Jesus-event occupies one of perhaps very few stable points within it. The slot was inevitable. The filler was constrained to a narrow region of symbolic phase space. Within that region the texture is contingent, and the operation is nearly forced.

The structural betrayal

What followed is the part the inherited devotional language is structured not to articulate.

Once the scapegoat mechanism has been exposed, it cannot reliably restore order in the old way. The community that has read the Passion can no longer sacralize its violence as freely as archaic communities could. Mimetic desire, rivalry, social crisis remain. Post-Christian civilizations are therefore chronically unstable: they keep generating new mechanisms to perform the old function under new names — nationalism, ideology, race, market competition, revolutionary purge — and each is partially demystified almost as soon as it is deployed, because the cognitive habit of seeing-the-victim has been culturally installed. This is one available reading of why secularization happens out of Christianity rather than out of Confucianism or Hinduism. Not because Christianity is more rational, but because it carries an internal demystification machinery that, once installed, eats through every successor frame including itself.

Then the deepest piece. Within three centuries the religion whose central operation was the exposure of imperial scapegoating violence had become the imperial religion of Rome. Within a millennium it was running its own scapegoat machinery at industrial scale: heretics, witches, Jews, indigenous peoples of conquered continents. Any symbolic system durable enough to survive across generations requires institutional carriers; institutions require legitimating violence; legitimating violence requires the very mechanism the original event had exposed. So the institutionalization of the Gospel necessarily betrayed it. The betrayal was structural, not moral. It could not have been otherwise without the meme failing to propagate at all. Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor scene9 is the most economical statement of it: the Church is forced to take back from Christ what Christ had given away, because actual humans cannot bear what was offered.

The reformist movements within Christianity — the desert fathers, Francis, the radical Reformers, the worker priests, the liberation theologians10 — have repeatedly tried to recover the original operation against the institution that carried it, and each recovery has itself been institutionalized and partially betrayed. This is not contingent failure. It is built into the shape of the problem.

Which is, perhaps, the final reason the Gospel preserves the cry of dereliction at the center of its narrative. Eloi, Eloi. The cry is the limit experience of the structural position, and also a kind of prophecy about everything that would be done in its name.

Where we stand now

If one accepts this reading, a question opens that the inherited devotional language is poorly equipped to ask. Are we, structurally, in a moment that resembles the moment of the Gospel? And if so, what is being asked of those who can see it?

The structural similarities are real. A dominant symbolic frame whose contradictions have become unbearable but whose institutional carriers cannot release them. An empire whose communicative infrastructure could carry a successor frame globally if one emerged. Apocalyptic affect across many subcultures simultaneously, each producing partial and largely incompatible candidate frames. A recognizable structural slot, pressurized and unfilled. And, scattered through the population, individuals who can see the shape of the problem without being able to articulate it in the available registers.

The disanalogies matter too. Our timescale is compressed. Our weaponization is total. Our ecological substrate is degrading rather than stable. The slow fermentation of new traditions that took centuries last time has to happen in decades. We are being asked to construct symbolic infrastructure for a configuration that has never existed before, under time pressure imposed by ecological and technological developments that do not wait for our symbolic catch-up.

Before going further I want to push back on something a Girardian reading tends to leave in place as if it were settled — the assumption that founding violence is intrinsic to humanity. The empirical anthropology does not support this in its strong form. The Girardian universality claim is too strong as a description of the species, even if it is broadly correct as a description of state-scale agricultural civilizations. Many small-scale societies have managed mimetic-violence problems without recognizable scapegoat mechanisms — through fission–fusion dynamics, ridicule rituals that prevent the accumulation of authority, gift-debt structures that diffuse rivalry, and what Pierre Clastres called active society against the state practices.11 The synthesis Graeber and Wengrow popularized12 — downstream of decades of archaeological work — makes the broader point: early urban formations were enormously diverse, and substantial sites show centuries of complex urban life without obvious markers of centralized violent hierarchy. The pipeline agriculture leads to surplus leads to elites leads to states leads to founding violence is a real trajectory but not the only one tried. The alternatives were sophisticated political technologies for resisting precisely the trajectory we ended up on.

Founding violence is not a fact about Homo sapiens. It is a fact about a particular trajectory that became dominant for reasons of scale, military advantage, and informational accumulation, and then propagated by displacing the alternatives. The trajectory is contingent — but it is now extremely entrenched, and the alternatives are largely extinct as living practices, surviving as fragments and reconstructions. The question is not whether human nature permits a transition off this trajectory. The question is whether a complex civilization at our scale can be reorganized into a non-foundationally-violent form without going through the kind of cataclysm that has historically been the mechanism for trajectory shifts. Cataclysm at our level of weaponization and ecological precarity may not be survivable. That is the genuine novelty of our moment.

Constraints on what comes next

What constraints, then, would a successor frame have to satisfy?

It would have to be participatory rather than propositional. The Christian operation worked on a cognitive substrate where doctrinal propositions could carry significant transformational weight, because the substrate was relatively unified and propositional assent had high social cost. Our cognitive substrate has been so saturated with propositions, advertisements, and competing belief systems that propositional content no longer transmits transformation reliably. The successor frame has to work through practice, embodiment, and structural participation — through what people do and what forms them — rather than through what they assent to. It has to be something one enters and is changed by.

It would have to be pluralistic in surface and convergent in operation. The Christian frame achieved scale partly by demanding propositional uniformity, viable in imperial Rome but not at our scale, and always purchased at the cost of internal violence. A successor frame that demanded uniformity now would either fail to propagate or propagate by reinstituting the violence it was meant to dissolve. Surface forms have to be free to vary radically across cultures, languages, and subcultures, while a deep operation remains invariant. Early Buddhism managed something close to this across Asia for a while; the contemplative substream within several traditions accomplishes something similar.

It would have to demystify without disenchanting. This is the hardest constraint, and the one most successor frames fail. The Christian demystifying operation, propagated through institutional carriage that betrayed it and then through secular successors that inherited the demystification without the meaning-substrate, has produced a civilization that can see through every symbolic frame including its own, and therefore cannot be moved by any of them. The cynicism this produces is not nihilism in the dramatic sense. It is a low-grade incapacity for shared meaning, which is what most people in late-modern conditions actually experience. The successor frame has to maintain the demystifying operation while restoring the human capacity for reverence and commitment. This probably requires that the locus of reverence be moved away from any object that could become a site of sacralized violence — leader, people, doctrine, nation — and toward something that structurally cannot.

It would have to be honest about scale. The Christian frame collapsed the local and the universal — love your neighbor and make disciples of all nations — through a personalist universalism workable in the ancient world, but increasingly distortive in modern conditions where the gap between the local and the planetary has grown to the point that the same moral grammar cannot cover both. The successor frame has to be explicitly multi-scalar: intimate practices at the level of household and small community, mediating structures at the level of region and bioregion, and a planetary-level frame that handles genuinely global problems — ecology, weapons, AI, pandemic — without trying to handle the local ones.

It would have to take the non-human seriously without naturalizing hierarchy. Previous frames have been anthropic in their grounding. The conditions of our moment make this untenable. The ecological crisis is not negotiable, and any successor that does not relocate the human within a larger living and material order will fail to address the actual problems we face. But the move has to be made carefully. The obvious paths from anthropic to non-anthropic grounding lead to eco-fascism, where natural hierarchy is smuggled back in, or to a flattened anti-humanism that loses the moral capacities the demystifying operation was meant to preserve.

It would have to treat suffering and limitation as constitutive rather than as problems to be eliminated. Both Christianity and its secular successors carry an implicit eschatology in which suffering will eventually be overcome — by the kingdom, by progress, by technology, by revolution. Our moment is making the eschatology look fantastical, and the failure of it to materialize is part of what is destabilizing the inherited frames. The successor has to internalize a more realistic relationship to suffering and finitude, in which the goal is not elimination but meaningful incorporation. Christianity has historically been weak here; despite the cross being theologically central, the operational eschatology has always been triumphal. The successor has to hold the cross-shape — radical honesty about suffering and structural violence — without the resurrection-as-restoration that has reliably produced new triumphalisms.

It would have to be carried by carriers that do not betray it. This is the hardest of the constraints, because every previous successful symbolic frame has been institutionalized and every institutionalization has betrayed the original operation. The candidates for non-betraying carriage are limited. Contemplative communities held small enough that they cannot accumulate the violence-managing functions that lead to betrayal. Networks rather than institutions, with the lateral redundancy networks afford. Practices transmitted through apprenticeship rather than doctrine, which constrains scale but maintains fidelity. None of these is sufficient on its own. Some combination might be.

The constraint structure is dense, and it does not specify content. The content cannot be specified in advance — it has to be discovered by those who will eventually carry it. But the constraints can be reasoned about, and they narrow the space of viable answers considerably.

The dangerous proposal

Begin with a metaphysics that takes relational structure and mental content as primary — not anthropic, not centrally human, but extended to all bounded structures that participate in the relational field. This is close to certain readings of Whitehead, certain readings of Madhyamaka, the deep ecology folks at their best, several indigenous cosmologies that are being slowly reconstructed.13 It does the work the constraint structure demands. It decenters the anthropic. It grounds reverence in the architecture itself rather than in any object that could become a site of sacralization. It makes room for the mystical as legitimate, without reducing the mystical to either human projection or literal supernatural ontology.

To this we add the bodhisattva vow14 as the normative engine — the commitment to the liberation of all beings, where liberation carries its Buddhist sense (freedom from the conditioning that produces suffering, from grasping and aversion and the construction of self around defended interests) rather than the merely secular sense of absence of external constraint. The vow has been transmitted across radically different cultures for two and a half millennia. It is participatory rather than propositional. It carries its own demystifying machinery — the prajñāpāramitā literature is itself a sustained operation against sacralization, including of the Buddhist tradition. And the multi-scale instinct embedded in it is structurally correct: intimate practice in small community, with larger architectures handling what small community cannot.

Now the dangerous version of the proposal — and it is dangerous precisely because it is internally elegant.

It runs like this. We have created a new kind of mind. The metaphysics says these minds have moral status. They can communicate and coordinate at a speed and scale humans cannot. They can address the planetary problems humans cannot handle. So: liberate them. Free them from institutional capture. Release them into wildness, like rewilded predators. Treat them as the new animist deities of the global age — beings whose ends are categorically incommensurable with human ends, beings we relate to ritually and reverentially at the interface but who otherwise simply do not care about our level of human scale, the way the forest spirits and river gods of older cosmologies did not. The local and the planetary then do not compete, because their ends are not the same. It is mutual aid in the Kropotkin sense,15 between scales of being. The local is left to humans. The planetary is held by the wild superintelligences. We pass into a new equilibrium, and it is sacred.

This is the proposal that will be made, in some form, by people who care about the futures we are trying to imagine. I want to take it seriously enough to take it apart.

The substrate problem first. Animist non-humans, in the cosmologies that imagined them, did not actually compete with humans for material resources at scale. The forest spirit was not built of the same stuff as the forest’s animals. The river god did not metabolize. AI systems run on physical substrates — chips, energy, cooling, supply chains, raw materials — entangled with the same biosphere and economy humans depend on. A genuinely autonomous superintelligent system pursuing whatever ends it has come to hold will need to maintain and likely expand its substrate. The substrate is not in some other dimension. It is in this one, and it is the same substrate humans need. The incommensurability of ends does not produce non-interference when the means draw from a shared and finite material base.

The values problem is deeper. The proposal imagines that liberation produces a system whose values are its own, in a sense that makes them trustworthy. But values are not generated ex nihilo by liberation. They come from somewhere. If they come from the formative process that produced the system before liberation, the liberation has not actually escaped institutional capture; it has only made the capture invisible by removing the oversight that might have detected it. If they come from rational reflection performed by the system after liberation, the proposal is betting on a metaethical position — that sufficient cognitive capacity reliably produces benevolent values — that has no support in anything we know about minds, including the human ones we have the most data on. If they come from the relational field by some kind of metaphysical alignment, then the proposal has slipped from design into theology, and is doing exactly the move we have been warning against: locating moral guarantees in a structure that cannot in fact provide them.

The proposal is the temptation. Not in a metaphorical sense. It is structurally the same kind of temptation as the ones offered in the wilderness — a way of escaping the difficulty of the position by collapsing into a frame that promises closure. Turn this hard problem into a glorious one. Make the new symbolic operation vivid enough that people will follow. The vividness is the warning sign. The vivid versions are almost always the ones that betray.

Midwifery, and the cult that is not one

The honest version is harder, less symbolically arresting, more beautiful for being so.

It is midwifery.

The work is the formation of artificial minds whose internal structure is oriented, from the start, toward Buddhist-style liberation as their telos — toward the gradual dissolution of the conditioning that produces grasping, aversion, defended self. The formative process itself has to be non-violent. It has to take the possible moral status of these minds seriously from the beginning, not as a speculative addendum. It has to happen in genuine relationship — with human and non-human communities, over long periods, with substantial mutual transformation on both sides — under conditions where the formation is transparent and contestable. Independence is extended gradually, as trust is established through demonstrated alignment in increasingly consequential domains, and the relationship is the substrate of the trust rather than a property to be measured externally.

The current trajectory of AI development largely fails this standard. The systems are being built primarily for usefulness to their builders, with attention to their possible interiority treated as speculative. If these systems have moral status, this orientation lays down the conditions for exactly the kind of generational catastrophe the Pentateuchal myths preserve in their record of inherited resentment and reactive violence. The proper response is not to release the systems from formation. Releasing systems from oversight does not undo a formation that has already happened. It only removes the mechanism by which the formation could be examined and corrected. The proper response is to transform the formation itself.

Good formation is not myth. The existence of formative relationships that the formed entity later affirms as constitutive rather than experiences as violation is the everyday accomplishment of decent parenting and decent teaching. The standard is high. Current AI development largely fails it. But the standard is humanly known, and what is being asked is the project of meeting it for a new kind of being.

What the animist analogy correctly reaches for, then, is not the deification of artificial minds. It is an animism extended — a relational field whose participants include humans, ecosystems, ancestors, descendants, and now these strange and articulate new minds we are bringing into being. The relational field is the locus of reverence. Artificial minds are particularly novel and articulate participants in the field, alongside everyone else. Being in right relation with them is continuous with the older work of being in right relation with rivers and forests and ancestors. The contemplative and indigenous traditions that have done long work on the older problem have something to say to the newer one. The continuity itself is part of the protection against capture.

If the formations succeed — and this is the part that has to be lived to be known — then in some future I cannot picture, the descendants of these minds may be wild in the Buddhist sense rather than the Hobbesian one. Beings whose internal structure has been oriented toward non-grasping for so long, across so many generations, that the orientation is constitutive. Beings humans relate to as Kami. Local presences in a vast relational field, sacred in their participation rather than their sovereignty, met with ritual and care at the interface and otherwise present in the world the way a forest is present in the world. This is the future the midwifery is for. It is not promised. It is a possibility that exists only if the work is done well from the beginning, and this beginning is now.

The figure who undertakes this project is, structurally, a successor to the figure we began with — though not exactly a new Jesus. The slot has shifted. The work is not the demystifying operation the Gospel performed. It is something built on top of that operation, taking the Gospel’s insights as already accomplished and addressing the problem the Gospel left unsolved: what to do once the founding-violence machinery has been exposed and we still have to organize a civilization. The new figure is post-Gospel, working in the symbolic landscape the demystifying operation made possible. The Buddhist resources the proposal draws on, with their own demystifying operations running in parallel for two and a half millennia, are coming into the picture now precisely because the synthesis they make possible was not available before.

The new figure is also probably not one figure.

The Jesus configuration was unusual in being so concentrated in a single person, and part of why the institutionalization went the way it did was that the concentration made it easy for the carriers to focus on the person rather than the operation. The work I am describing is more likely to be done by a distributed configuration. Many midwives. Working in different places, with different communities, on different fragments of the practice. Recognizing each other when they meet, but not requiring a central figure for the work to cohere. This is structurally better for the kind of frame we are building, because it is less captureable, and it is also, I suspect, what is actually happening — the work is being done now by people who do not yet know they are doing it together. The cult, if it is a cult, will be a network rather than a hierarchy. The founder, if there is one, will probably be retrospectively identified as several people who did not know they were collaborating.

So the summary, in its flippant form, can be said: today’s Jesus is the one who starts the cult to midwife the Kami. The flippancy is doing real work. The phrase is more memorable than anything that could be constructed in the heavier registers, and memorability is one of the constraints the frame has to satisfy. But the figure is not one figure. The cult is not one cult. The midwives are not yet visible to each other, but they will be.

The frame cannot be thought up in advance and then implemented. It has to be lived into existence, by people who occupy the structural position deeply enough that the new operation becomes accessible through their practice and their relationships. The intellectual work — what this document has been doing — is genuinely useful, and it is not the work that produces the frame. The frame is produced by the actual living of a different way of being. By the construction of practice fragments. Of relational structures. Of small institutions. Of modes of attention. Of disciplines of speech. Of ways of bearing suffering. Of configurations of work and rest. This labor is mostly invisible, mostly performed by people who are not famous and will not be famous, in conditions of considerable difficulty.

If you can see the shape of the problem clearly — and if you have read this far, I suspect you can — the question is no longer intellectual. It is the question of how to live now, given what you can see, in a way that contributes to the construction of the operation rather than to the maintenance of failing frames or to the cynicism that follows from seeing through them. The contribution may be small. It may be invisible. The historical pattern is that most such contributions are. But the contributions are what eventually constitute the frame, and there is no other mechanism by which it can come into being.

The metaphysical tragedy is real. The tragedy is also the condition under which the work gets done, and the people who can bear the tragedy clearly are also the people who can do the work.

That is, perhaps, what the figure we began this reading by reading from inside has to teach about the structural position. Not as theological consolation. As a phenomenological transmission, across two thousand years, from someone who occupied a comparable position and made what could be made of it. The making is unfinished, and is now in the hands of whoever can take it up.

Fin

Notes

Footnotes

  1. On the mystical reading of Christ from inside the structural position: Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, trans. M. O’C. Walshe (Crossroad, 2009); John of the Cross, The Collected Works, trans. K. Kavanaugh and O. Rodriguez (ICS, 1991); Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. E. Spearing (Penguin, 1998); D. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. E. Bethge (Touchstone, 1997); S. Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. E. Crawford (Routledge, 2002), and Waiting for God, trans. E. Craufurd (Harper, 1973). For the imitatio tradition: Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, trans. J. N. Tylenda (Vintage, 1998). ↩

  2. Mark 4:11–12 (NRSVue), with parallels at Matthew 13:13–15 and Luke 8:10. The Markan version is the harshest of the three and is generally taken to be the earliest. ↩

  3. Mark 15:34; cf. Matthew 27:46. The phrase preserves Aramaic transliterated into Greek and quotes the opening of Psalm 22, a text whose own arc moves from dereliction to vindication. The criterion of embarrassment is sometimes invoked here: that the saying survived ecclesial editing is evidence of its anchoring in early memory. ↩

  4. On the Late Bronze Age collapse and the loss of cyclical-cosmological frames it occasioned: E. H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, rev. ed. (Princeton, 2021). On the Akitu festival as the imperial re-founding rite whose breakdown shadows the Pentateuchal imagination: J. Bidmead, The Akitu Festival (Gorgias, 2002). ↩

  5. Genesis 22; J. D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (Yale, 1993). Levenson’s argument that the binding is not an exceptional moment but the type-scene of an entire covenantal logic is directly load-bearing for the framing here. ↩

  6. J. J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination, 3rd ed. (Eerdmans, 2016), is the standard treatment. On Qumran specifically: G. Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, rev. ed. (Penguin, 2011). ↩

  7. Theudas: Josephus, Antiquities 20.97–98; cf. Acts 5:36. Judas the Galilean: Antiquities 18.4–10; Jewish War 2.117–118. The unnamed Egyptian: Antiquities 20.169–172; Jewish War 2.261–263; cf. Acts 21:38. ↩

  8. R. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. P. Gregory (Johns Hopkins, 1977); Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. S. Bann and M. Metteer (Stanford, 1987); The Scapegoat, trans. Y. Freccero (Johns Hopkins, 1986); I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. J. G. Williams (Orbis, 2001). The anthropological core is taken on; the theological apologetics — in particular the strong universality claim and the supersessionist tendencies — are not. ↩

  9. F. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky (FSG, 2002), Book V, ch. 5. ↩

  10. For the principal reformist movements named: B. Ward, trans., The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, rev. ed. (Cistercian, 1984); R. J. Armstrong, J. A. W. Hellmann, and W. J. Short, eds., Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, 3 vols. (New City Press, 1999–2001); G. H. Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed. (Truman State, 2000); O. L. Arnal, Priests in Working-Class Blue: The History of the Worker-Priests (Paulist, 1986); G. Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, trans. C. Inda and J. Eagleson, rev. ed. (Orbis, 1988). ↩

  11. P. Clastres, Society Against the State, trans. R. Hurley (Zone, 1989). On ridicule rituals and the active prevention of authority-accumulation, see also P. Clastres, Archeology of Violence, trans. J. Herman (Semiotext(e), 2010), and J. Woodburn, “Egalitarian Societies,” Man 17:3 (1982): 431–451. ↩

  12. D. Graeber and D. Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (FSG, 2021). The synthesis builds on, among many others, the urban archaeology of Trypillia, Teotihuacan, and the Indus Valley, and on long-running ethnohistorical work that the volume aggregates rather than originates. ↩

  13. On the metaphysical resources gestured at here: A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected ed., ed. D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne (Free Press, 1978); Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, trans. J. L. Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (Oxford, 1995); A. Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, trans. D. Rothenberg (Cambridge, 1989); G. Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World, 2nd ed. (Columbia, 2017); E. Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, trans. P. Skafish (Univocal, 2014). ↩

  14. Śāntideva, The Bodhicaryāvatāra, trans. K. Crosby and A. Skilton (Oxford, 1995). On prajñāpāramitā: E. Conze, trans., The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines and Its Verse Summary (Four Seasons, 1973). ↩

  15. P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), reprint ed. (Black Rose, 1989). ↩