The medieval quietist-pietist attitude is unfashionable even in theological circles. Liberation Theology considers metaphysics & eternity to be unknowable categories. The Hebrew God is the God of freedom & justice & Jubilee. In radical Christian theology we inhabit a Lewis Carroll mirror-world of injustice, all our words colored by its falsity, already fated for dissolution with the coming of world renewal.

Curious times : militant Islam would impose faith by force. Militant secularism would rationalize its own dominations. Militant Christianity would proselytize by rote & verbal formulae. Militant Judaism insists on a tribal literalism. Militant Hinduism parades its superstitions. Militant Buddhism (?) dreams away the world.

The concept of personal salvation of immortal soul is for the artist. Artists are those who act in response to beauty in nature, or proportion. The idea of the Redemption, leading to the resurrection of my soul and of the whole cosmos - it's an artistic vision, a fictional plot. Epiphanies. Stephen Dedalus : "Signatures of all things I am here to read." (or something like that.) Whitman : the grass is "God's handkerchief, designedly dropt" (or something like that). The artist begins to read paradoxical Nature as suffused with signs of strange hope. Dostoevsky : "Beauty will save the world."

"Hope." Bob Hope. RI State motto. "Anchor of the soul." Sir Edmund HILLary achieved the summit of Everest on 5/29/1953, 500 yrs to the day after the fall of the last Roman Empire (Byzantium, 1453).

This theme of metaphysical resurrection through love informs the psychomachia, the whole plot, of Island Road.