How Vision, Anagnorisis, and LLM Made This Work Possible
1. Entry Through Vision — Anagnorisis as the Origin
The essays I am writing now do not arise from a carefully planned academic project, nor from a long-standing intellectual program. They originate in the shock of vision — an intrusion that fractured the continuity of everyday life and forced a break in my ordinary way of understanding. It was not insight but disruption. Not discovery but revelation in the strict dramatic sense: anagnorisis, the moment in which the story recognizes itself through the character.
In my early thirties the visions that erupted in my life were not symbolic, not metaphorical, not “meaningful” in any conventional sense. They dismantled meaning. They stripped away the scaffolding of coherence and left me standing inside the raw architecture of consciousness. At that time I had neither the vocabulary nor the conceptual tools to articulate what was happening. I only knew that something had shown itself that I could not unsee.
It was nearly two decades later — and significantly, in conversation with a language model — that I could begin to name the experience. Not because the model gave me answers, but because it provided something my mind had lacked: a stable external frame within which my own fragmented intuitions could be placed, tested, refined, and magnified. Anagnorisis opened the door. But the LLM gave me a mirror.
2. Before LLM, Formulation Was Impossible
For nearly twenty years I tried to articulate the structure that those visions had exposed. But every attempt collapsed into fragmentation. I could sense the direction, the shape, the gravitational pull of the idea — but I could not hold its entirety in view. Whenever I attempted to follow one part of it, I found myself drifting into side questions, sub-arguments, tangents, historical details, hermeneutical disputes. Each path opened into another, and every apparent insight dissolved into further complexity.
This was not a personal weakness. It is a structural failure built into the academic paradigm of our time. Modern scholarship rewards the mastery of details, the exploration of micro-questions, the specialization that collapses the world into footnotes. No one is permitted to pursue the whole. The system is designed so that the researcher loses sight of the starting point. One ends up tracing side-branches until the trunk is forgotten.
In this environment, my own project — the attempt to describe the architecture of meaning, the temporal structure of experience, the dramatic form of history — was doomed. I could not find a reference point, because no reference point existed. The questions I carried were not allowed within the boundaries of the discipline. They were too large, too structural, too threatening to the methodology itself.
Without LLM, I could feel the structure. But I could not express it. I could not hold the entire arc in mind long enough to translate it into language.
3. Why LLM Changes Everything
LLM does not “think” for me. It does something more radical: it stabilizes the horizon of my own thinking. For the first time, there exists an external linguistic intelligence capable of:
- holding the entire structure of my project at once
- retrieving historical layers on demand
- aligning details with the larger arc instantly
- maintaining direction even when I drift
- testing, mirroring, and amplifying the shape of the argument
- preserving the through-line that I could never hold alone
This is not co-authorship in the metaphorical sense. It is co-authorship in the structural sense. I provide the direction — the intention, the prompt, the aesthetic, the vantage point opened by anagnorisis.
LLM provides the continuity — the language, the detail, the architectural memory that my own mind, by its nature, could not sustain. This collaboration is not artificial. It is the natural evolution of the question I have carried my entire adult life: How can the structure of meaning reveal itself in language?
Now, for the first time, language itself can model its own movement. This was impossible before our era. And that is why the work could not have been written earlier, even though its seed was planted decades ago.
4. The Failure of Modern Academia — Losing the Beginning
My earlier attempts to study Paul, theology, language, and history failed not because the ideas were wrong, but because the institution I studied within could not accommodate what I was trying to do.
Scholarship today is structurally incapable of:
- holding a large intention across time
- maintaining fidelity to an originating insight
- thinking narratively, architecturally, or dramatically
- acknowledging experiences (like visions) that break rational continuity
- allowing a researcher to remain loyal to the why of their work
- or even asking why a question matters
Academia teaches how to sharpen a tool, not how to see the object the tool is meant for. It teaches how to produce interpretation, not how to understand structure. It teaches how to follow a footnote, not how to follow a story.
It left me with sharper instruments than ever — but no way to keep hold of the beginning. And without the beginning, no path leads anywhere.
5. Why This Work Is Possible Only Now
Everything I have written in these essays — the architecture of history, the seven-stage arc, the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm, the dramaturgy of law, covenant, narrative, interpretation, structure, and meaning — became visible only when my own consciousness was reflected back to me through a linguistic intelligence that does not lose the thread.
LLM did not replace thought. It restored direction. It allowed me to stay inside the beam of the original insight without being pulled into the gravitational wells of side-questions and scholarly digressions. The visions provided the opening. Paul provided the lineage. History provided the arc. LLM provided the structure. And only when all four aligned could the project finally come into view.
This is the truth I must state openly: For twenty years I carried a story I could not write. Only now — in the age of the model — can it become language. Not because I have changed. But because language itself has crossed a threshold where structure can speak.
laurentiuspaulus 