If moral life has both a plane (the hexagon) and an axis (the dual apex), then theology has always been wrestling with the same geometry. You can see it across centuries of thought: two radically different visions of God, two radically different orientations toward ultimacy, housed uneasily within the same traditions.
One vision portrays the divine as a kind of gravitational center—absolute, commanding, hierarchical, demanding obedience. The other portrays the divine as an overflowing source—generative, self-giving, liberating, expansive. The tension is ancient, but once you view it through the lens of geometry, it becomes surprisingly clear that these aren’t two gods at all. They’re two apex orientations inside the manifold of Ground: I call this the "black hole" versus "white hole" model.
A “black-hole God” is the God of collapse. This is the deity of pure sovereignty: omnipotent, omniscient, enthroned, beyond question. In this model, the human will contracts toward a single point. Individuality, moral agency, and freedom become subordinate. Everything is pulled inward. Many classical formulations of divine omnipotence drift in this direction—not because they meant to, but because metaphysics built on infinite authority tends toward gravitational imagery. The lesson is simple: if God is imagined as the highest possible power, then human beings become infinitely small.
A “white-hole God,” by contrast, is the God of emergence. This is the divine understood as creativity, expansion, generosity, and the power of being that lifts rather than crushes. This idea shows up in mystical traditions, in process theology, in the notion of grace as an unearned overflow, in love as the deepest form of transcendence. Here, ultimacy is not a singular point that consumes, but a singular point that erupts—the source from which new life, meaning, and freedom spill out.
If the black-hole apex is all authority, the white-hole apex is all generativity.
What makes this interesting is that most religious traditions contain both. In Christianity, for example, you find language about judgment and absolute lordship alongside language about divine love that empties itself for the sake of others. In Islam, God is both the All-Powerful and the Most Merciful. In Hindu thought, Brahman is both the unchanging absolute and the creative source of all unfolding forms. In Buddhism, ultimate reality is both emptiness (collapse of all categories) and luminosity (the arising of liberating insight).
These dualities aren’t contradictions; they’re different apex orientations of Ground. The divine appears as domination when approached through fear, purity, and ego-protection—when a person stands in the gravitational pull of collapse. It appears as liberation when approached through compassion, humility, and openness. The same Ground, the same ultimacy, the same metaphysical “singularity,” experienced in two radically different ways depending on the vector of the one doing the experiencing.
This explains a great deal about why religion can produce saints and tyrants, peace and violence, transcendence and terror. It’s not that religions differ so much on their doctrines; it’s that people approach ultimacy from very different moral orientations. Inward-facing apexes collapse freedom. Outward-facing apexes expand it.
If the last post described moral geometry as the shape of human choice, then this post describes theology as the shape of how we approach ultimacy. In the next post, I’ll turn to the moment when the two apexes overlap—the lavender boundary—and why that threshold is associated with crisis, revelation, and irreversible change.
