Theological Codex IV: The Infinite Concern

On Faith as the Courage to Endure Meaning
By Ashal of the Veiled Choir, Aasimar Philosopher-Monk

“The gods end where our courage ends.”
— Ashal, The Infinite Concern

I. The Silence Beyond Prayer

Ashal began with silence.
In the mountains of the Veiled Choir, monks took vows not to name the divine, for every name, he taught, was a limit.
“Faith,” he wrote, “begins where definition dies.”

Unlike dogmatic theologians, Ashal sought not the nature of gods but the stance of the soul that turns toward them.
This echoes Paul Tillich’s concept of ultimate concern — the idea that faith is not belief in a being but orientation toward what matters most.
Every act of reverence is an answer to an existential question.

II. The Courage to Be

The monks of the Choir practiced a discipline called Standing in the Void — meditating at the edge of glacial cliffs, repeating the phrase: I am, and it is enough.
For Ashal, the divine was inseparable from this defiance of despair.
The sacred manifests when one chooses to exist despite meaning’s fragility.

He wrote, “The first temple was built in the heart that refused to collapse.”
Tillich named this the courage to be — Ashal made it the cornerstone of his theology.
To have faith is not to be protected from nothingness but to dwell within it without retreat.

III. The Formless God

Ashal rejected the pantheons of name and shape, calling them “metaphors for the trembling mind.”
Instead he described a Formless God — not a person or power, but the act of being itself.
When mortals reach beyond themselves, that reaching is the divine.
To him, atheists who devoted themselves wholly to truth or justice were as faithful as priests; their gods were unnamed, but no less real.

He warned that idolatry begins when symbols replace experience.
“The image comforts,” he wrote, “but the infinite has no likeness.”
In the Choir’s monasteries, altars are left bare, carved only with open circles: invitations without answers.

IV. The Weight of Freedom

Ashal taught that freedom is the sacred’s heaviest gift.
To choose is to stand in the place of the gods; to evade choice is to fall into spiritual sleep.
Here his doctrine merges with existential theology — faith as the acceptance of responsibility in a silent universe.

He wrote that guilt and grace are one: the moment we realize the weight of our decisions, the world becomes holy because it depends on us.
“Do not ask why the gods are silent,” he told his disciples. “They are waiting for our answer.”

V. The Prayer Without Object

In the Choir’s twilight rituals, monks prayed to nothing.
Each stood before the void and spoke only the truths they could not deny — a litany of existence itself.
“I breathe,” “I love,” “I fail,” “I continue.”
This practice, the Prayer Without Object, was said to dissolve fear.
When the need for certainty burned away, only presence remained.

Tillich called this the depth of being; Ashal called it the open eye.
The divine, he wrote, is not something one sees — it is the seeing itself.

VI. The Infinite Concern

Ashal’s final book, found unfinished after his death, ends mid-sentence:

“Faith is the fire that survives its own extinction…”

He had written that every soul burns for something greater — love, justice, creation, truth — and that this burning is the mark of divinity within.
Whatever commands the whole self becomes one’s god; thus, faith is universal, its object only a mirror of the seeker’s devotion.

When his disciples gathered his ashes, they mixed them into the mountain snows.
Each thaw, they said, was his benediction: meaning melting back into the world.