Bar the Horizon

When Hunter claims that, to paraphrase, the only way we can truly come out of a fallen state and really do something worth doing is to "labour to create a Gesamtkunstwerk which simultaneously gives an account of the history and nature of the world as well as a vision of a New Order to transform it" it’s easy to slip into jest simply because it sets the bar so high it seems utterly absurd. To understand this - and move beyond the reflexive raising of eye brows - we ought to take this formulation of Ark Work in the context of the Christian religion and its ethical imperative.

Islam and Judaism are a lot more sensible than Christianity in a lot of ways: their vision of God is more easily translated into the abstract God of the philosophers, they set laws which are mostly reasonable and can be kept by most upright members of society etc. Meanwhile Christianity has jarringly antinomial doctrines, it’s scripture is in many ways very inconsistent, and - most importantly for us at this moment: it makes absurdly difficult demands on it’s followers. Jesus hasn’t come to upend the law, but to elevate the law to the highest conceivable level. In this Christianity gets a special existential character, where the impossibility to not fail is a central part of the religion.

Correspondingly Ark Work aims “not to upend the arts, but to elevate the arts to the highest conceivable level’. The formulation of Ark Work above is art as the creation of a monadic microcosmic Philosophers Stone proper - as the instantiation of the cornerstone of the world within the world - and it seems you could make an argument of informational complexity and encoding that this is strictly impossible (at least if within this paradigm of information theory), but that is not an issue. In this way the Stone is a catalyst which in the Great Work of attempting to manifest it, however doomed this project is, we are transformed and elevated - in a way only possible by our engagement with this impossible task. I think this is the point, and analogously I think this is also the point with Christianity - and you could argue with any sort of ideal such as the Greek’s vision of the perfect Sage. It’s hard not to think of objet petit a in relation to this: the object of desire which you will never get, and indeed the Stone is a kind of objet petit a, namely the highest possible kind. The stone is, crudely, to objet petit a what Christ is to the human. You could say the stone is equally objet petit a and cornerstone of the Kingdom of God.

However, it isn’t simply about that. It seems trite to say that we just set the bar high to reach higher than we would if we set the bar at a reasonable height. It seems trite to say that this is what Jesus did. No, Jesus is the redeemer. For us to succeed, for us to create an Ark Work that transforms the world into the Kingdom of God, we require divine intervention. We need to cultivate a faith in the Heavens literally reaching down and adding the final touch to our work to push it into the impossible realm of success. To find a way to feel the necessity of our doing our absolute best to perfect the bezel and to trust that if we do this God will in it set her gemstone and redeem our effort.