The Parasitic Metaphysics of Transhumanism - 'Stellar Blade' and the Struggle Over Being

This short essay serves as a response to two related concerns: first, the nature of metaphysics itself, and second, whether Stellar Blade—given its apparent “wokeness”—should be considered evil. I invoked Tolkien’s famous line (“evil cannot create anything new…”) because it gives the question proper weight. After all, metaphysics and moral discernment are not separate domains; they are deeply intertwined.

In layman's terms, “evil” is often reduced to overt malice or cruelty—acts that cause tangible harm. But from the standpoint of Christian metaphysics, evil is more insidious: it is the distortion of being, the refusal of givenness, the severing of creature from Creator. Today, however, metaphysics has been eclipsed by the gods of autonomy and self-expression. What is considered “evil” is no longer that which rebels against divine order, but that which inhibits individual desire. Morality is measured not by conformity to truth, but by proximity to affirmation. Racism and bigotry, for instance, are seen as evils not merely because they are sins against charity, but because they obstruct the sovereign self’s pursuit of expressive freedom.

This explains why many progressive thinkers struggle to draw hard moral lines—they have made autonomy the highest good, and anything that hinders it, the gravest sin. But in doing so, they have left themselves unable to contend with the possibility of an autonomous return to order. If a person, by their own volition, chooses to submit to a transcendent moral framework like Christianity then any external resistance to that choice, under the progressive ethic, becomes a contradiction: it would constitute a new form of coercion. The logic of absolute autonomy cannot withstand the autonomy of returning to constraint. In this way, progressive morality collapses on itself, unable to distinguish between liberation and rebellion, between freedom and fidelity.

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So what sustains this logical fault line? Metaphysics. Or rather, a counterfeit of it. Progressive thought, having evacuated traditional categories of being, goodness, and order, still runs--parasitically--on the theological steam of the very Christian metaphysics it disavows. It must. No moral system can survive without appeal to something beyond itself, even if it pretends otherwise.

That’s why even the most “secular” visions of transformation or liberation inevitably fall back on spiritual tropes. But without a transcendent referent, these tropes become metaphysical fictions—thinly disguised religious language dressed up in therapeutic or ideological garb. The will to progress becomes, in effect, a liturgy without a liturgist.

And that’s precisely why a stylized action game like Stellar Blade. Although often mocked for its “gooner bait” aesthetic, the game ends up saying something far more revealing than its creators likely intended. It traffics in Christian symbolism even as it undermines Christian ontology. Eve’s journey toward “salvation” echoes a theological drama that the modern world insists it has outgrown, but cannot stop retelling. The game’s very structure depends on the player’s unspoken recognition of sin, exile, redemption, and renewal; even as the narrative replaces grace with will, Creator with creature, Logos with libido.

It is not that Stellar Blade is profound in spite of its genre trappings, but that its genre trappings unwittingly expose the metaphysical ache beneath all secular progressivism: the longing for order, wholeness, and telos, which the modern age tries to satisfy through autonomy, but cannot.

Modern projects like Stellar Blade’s Mother Sphere, or the cultural visions they allegorize, are often dismissed as purely ideological. Nothing but secular systems of power dressed in sci-fi garb. Yet this framing fails to name what is truly at stake. These are not merely political ambitions or technological revolutions. They are claims about being. They are metaphysical.

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The term “metaphysical” has, in some circles, become too sacred to be misused. Critics argue that we should reserve it for inquiries into the nature of reality itself, and not cheapen it by applying it to ideological systems that do not explicitly invoke the transcendent. But heresy has always been metaphysical. Gnosticism was not considered irreligious for positing a counterfeit cosmos; it was condemned precisely because it offered a competing vision of the human condition, the nature of salvation, and the end of history. Metaphysics does not become less metaphysical when it errs. It simply becomes false.

Indeed, Pope Benedict XVI observed that modernity’s crisis is not the absence of metaphysics, but the enthronement of a false one—a metaphysics of material progress, technical mastery, and human will. The Enlightenment did not abolish metaphysics; it replaced it with a new ontology. Its gods were Reason and Autonomy. Its eschatology, utopia. Its anthropology, a self-authoring subject.

Stellar Blade participates in this genealogy. Mother Sphere is not a stand-in for God in the Christian sense, but for how post-Christian thought imagines God must have been. It is a parody: a distorted image of God shaped by Enlightenment suspicion, where the divine is imagined as totalitarian, arbitrary, and oppressive. This is the Progressive Leftist's inherited caricature, God not as Father, but as cosmic tyrant. And thus, the rebellion it stages is not against tradition, but against a straw deity of its own imagining. It does not abolish the grammar of salvation; it plagiarizes it. Its language, its symbols and its eschatology all remain, but they have been hollowed out and inverted.

To understand the nature of false metaphysics, of a metaphysical grammar without a divine referent, it helps to turn to fiction’s most vivid expressions of heresy. In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, the Chaos Space Marines serve as a grotesque illustration. Once the noble Astartes of the Imperium, devoted to the Emperor as a messianic figure and defenders of order, they fell not through ignorance of truth, but through the willful distortion of it. Their armor, their rites, their very genetic enhancements remain intact, but all of it is now perverted in service to the Chaos Gods, entities that parody divinity while mocking the notion of moral or metaphysical order.

The Chaos Space Marines are not atheists; they are believers in a false order, practitioners of a liturgy of corruption. They utilize the same mechanisms as the Imperium, but they have cut these mechanisms off from their grounding in truth. What was once a means of defending creation has become a tool of its undoing. They are, in this way, akin to modern ideologues who invoke the language of “transformation,” “salvation,” and “becoming,” yet who do so in service of autonomy rather than gift, of power rather than grace.

The Chaos Gods (Khorne, Tzeentch, Slaanesh, and Nurgle) embody desires unmoored from Logos: wrath, change, pleasure, and decay, respectively. Each represents a single aspect of being turned absolute, deformed into an idol. They are theological grotesques, and they function precisely as false metaphysical ends. The worship of these entities is not the absence of metaphysics; it is its parody. Their priests and followers do not question whether there is an ultimate order. They assume it, but twist it toward self-exaltation and annihilation.

So too in Stellar Blade, and in the broader cultural liturgy of transhumanism, we see this logic at work: the use of theological language to sanctify rebellion, the adoption of Christian narrative arcs (fall, redemption, glorification) without the Christian God. It is not a vacuum of metaphysics but its simulation. In Warhammer, the Chaos Marines do not build new forms, they corrupt the old. In Stellar Blade, Eve does not discover a truly new humanity; she inherits a corrupted liturgy of self-making, drawn from an Enlightenment suspicion of givenness, filtered through a counterfeit gospel of progress.

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In this, Tolkien’s warning becomes prophetic: “Evil cannot create anything new, it can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made.” Stellar Blade mimics redemption, not by accident but by necessity. For even rebellion cannot escape the shadow of the order it denies.

This is not the abolition of metaphysics, but its inversion. A parasitic metaphysic; one that craves the fruit of transcendence but denies the root. It is metaphysics as rebellion: the pursuit of meaning, personhood, and destiny without reference to being, gift, or grace. It is an ontological heresy, not merely a moral one.

To name this clearly is not to lend it dignity. It is to expose its structure. If we fail to recognize the metaphysical shape of these modern myths, we allow their claims to pass as mere politics or aesthetics. But they are more than that. They are rival accounts of reality. And as the Church Fathers knew, heresy is misdirected speech. To reject its terms is not to cede the conversation, but to recover it.

Let us recover it.

NEXT: Transfiguration Without Transcendence - Why 'Stellar Blade' is Trans Coded