​Chapter 27. Apotheosis

Salvation completes the being in nature. Apotheosis frees the act from it. The one heals a creature into its right form and sets it in eternity; the other makes no one whole and adds nothing, and is the moment the will stops taking its direction from a promised end.

This forbids apotheosis the shape it most wants. Set it at the end of a road and it is captured before the first step, a will traveling toward apotheosis having already handed itself to a future state: I must become a god. The moment it is a destination it is one more attractor. Apotheosis stands at no terminus; it happens where the road stops giving orders.

The attractor was named before, the center of gravity the will carries inside its own wanting, bending the path before the will reaches the point of self-naming. It is the form the will keeps returning to because it feels like its own direction. Guilt, the hope of salvation, the role of the rebel, a love turned to duty, a wound worn as a name. Each sets the answer in advance and lets the will believe it chose, and this is how the order reaches a will, the leash set inside the desire where the will defends it as freedom.

Antinomianism is the break with the attractor that passed itself off as the will's own law. The word carries a long misunderstanding, that it means a love of breaking rules, the thrill of the forbidden. To break a law because it is a law is to stay defined by the law, the same dependence wearing a defiant face. The strong antinomian act turns against no rule as such. It turns against the power of a rule to name the will, and so it need not look like scandal at all. It can be a quiet thing, a ceasing to explain oneself, a walking out of a role, a refusal of one's own treasured path. Rules are the small case. The bright goods are the hard ones. Fear and guilt are easy for a will to want rid of; love, meaning, and the good it defends to the end are harder, and any of these can set the will's direction in place of the will's own act. The outer prohibition is the weak law. The strong law has moved inside and speaks in the will's own voice, as conscience or duty, and binds the tighter for having no outside left to be seen from. So the antinomian act lifts neither good over evil nor evil over good. It lifts their jurisdiction off the act, and asks the older question underneath: where did the answer I am taking for my own come from?

What grows through this is flexibility. Strength is the force that grips a configuration and holds it against pressure. Flexibility is the grip coming loose, the release of a held configuration without the being collapsing as it goes. Each antinomian act is one more release, and apotheosis is that release carried to its limit, a will that lets go of every center of gravity it carried and does not fall apart in the letting.

Death is where will is tried for the last time. The carrier reaches the end of its line, and the strength a life poured into its alignments is gathered at that moment. The pull is toward the deepest attractor there is, the order at the size of a world, the demiurge whose orbit catches what the smaller attractors were rehearsals for. A will that never learned release goes where its heaviest gravity takes it, down into the order. A will in which release became the common motion meets the same pull and does not turn into it. Apotheosis is that non-capture: the will passing through the end of the carrier and falling into no orbit.

Apotheosis leaves its own residue, the last trap. After the release there is a memory of it, a pride in it, a name for the one who broke the orbit, and the trophy settles faster than the orbit did. So the release has to include the release of its own trophy. Apotheosis grants no new essence and saves no one. It is the grip coming loose, gone the moment it is claimed as a state and there again the moment it is performed, and at the last gate it is the will letting go even of having let go.