MIND
AND TIME
THE
THEOLOGY OF SEMIOTIC FORMS
1 PROLOGUE
That which
was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have
seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched
with our hands, concerning the word of life which was with
the Father and was made manifest to us - that which we have
seen and heard we proclaim to you, so that you may have
fellowship with us; and our fellowship is with the Father
and with his Son Jesus Christ. And we are writing this that
our joy may be complete. (1 John 1.1-4).
Any quest to grasp the
tetramorphic contours of the gospel must first relinquish as its
solution, what is otherwise central to Christian metaphysics at
the categoreal level, namely its understanding of the role
played in human and animal consciousnesses by the modes of
sense-percipience. This may seem surprising for the same
metaphysics views these modes themselves as formally fourfold in
nature. They confront us not only in some of the earliest New
Testament texts which we possess, the messianic miracles and the
Eucharist, but they are portended by the theology of immanence
configured in the second half of the P creation narrative, that
of the last four Days, and again, even more explicitly in the
ensuing J narrative, where we encounter the metaphor of
assimilation in the story of the 'fruit of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil' as a conceit for the two primary
modes of perceptual intentionality, knowing and desire.
The first letter of John confirms the obvious rapport they must
have not only for a Christian theory of language, and we should
note in this much, that the role of touch or haptic sentience is
accorded its dues, something which most if not all contemporary
denominations of linguistic theory/semiotics are unprepared to
concede. It also prepares the way for a doctrine of revelation.
In these studies we are all too concerned with the form of the
texts, its shape, its bodiliness, the way in which certain of
its members are similar and or dissimilar to others, and so
'comprehensible' or 'apprehensible'; in short, that which we may
prehend, touch, grasp, not to be aware that this itself is
somehow delivered to our understanding by means of touch or
feeling. Any theory of language which ignores the essential
co-operation between these three phenomenal modes of
percipience, hearing, touching and seeing, and the role of touch
in particular, must forfeit all claim to being a Christian
theory of language, and consequently relinquish also the obvious
duty of articulating a doctrine of revelation.
Difficult as it may seem then, we must give consideration to the
fact that we have urged this co-operation or consistency of the
four modes of sense-percipience as the hallmark of unity. That
is to say that their unity is undeniable. The four Eucharistic
episodes in the gospels clearly mark the four sentient modes as
ordered in virtue of the principle of unity, the formal
criterion distinguishing them from the conceptual polarity of
mind with its equally undeniable logical disposition, that of
the triad.
Simple reflection on the mediation of the body, 'the withness of
the body', will render more than questionable the widespread
tendency of the current discussions of language and semiotics to
underplay if not ignore the bearing that the mode of touch has
on consciousness generally, and must necessarily have on its own
objects of inquiry. The voice does not spring magically from
nowhere; it is the product of a larynx, the member of a body. It
also engages the mouth, lips, tongue and so on. No discarnate
hand produces the visible signs which constitute the written
word; rather, the means of inscription, the actual hand itself
too exists in the same relationship of membership of a body.
Such members of the body are all equally palpable; all are
susceptible of touch. Moreover this very body itself, in turn
exists in relationship to other bodies. Talk of graphic and
phonetic structures, graphemes and phonemes as of much else,
proceeds as if the actual body itself was never party to the
phenomenon of communication.
This body, this soma
is a given. It is, to employ all too favoured bywords
beloved in much post-structuralist discourse, 'always already'
there. That being the case we must reckon with that of which the
same body is pre-eminently susceptible, to wit touch. The
failure to so conjure with the same is as serious a solecism of
many contemporary, or post-structuralist semiotics and
linguistic theories as any. These can never sit comfortably with
the Christian account of language as of semiosis which the opening
of the letter of John proposes in a rudimentary way. The haptic
modes of sense-percipience and the body, soma, are the
perceptual and conceptual structures respectively which are
embedded at the heart of the gospel, and two gospels in
particular Luke and John as we shall see; the reason for which
is that they are embedded in the semiotic process itself.
But as central to the Christian theory of language as are
all four modes of sense-percipience, and as central also as they
are to the theology of Trinity and the doctrine of imago Dei, they are not the
means of specifying the particular orientations of the four
gospels. If it is simply the case that not one of the four
gospels shows any particular marked predilection for a specific
mode of sentience, and so to our surprise perhaps, because they
reckon with all four components of consciousness in such a
thoroughgoing way, this fact must be offset by another, which we
will posit directly. For the three phenomenal modes of
sense-percipience certainly do account for the congruence of
three textual centres of the biblical narrative, something which
we cannot overlook. This confirms the delivery of the messianic
miracle stories: that the operation of these three modes of
sense-percipience in our consciousness is ultimately general and
pervasive, or as we have been urging, radical, categoreal. That
one of these same three phenomenal modes of sentience
characterises the creation narrative, the messianic miracles and
The Apocalypse in turn, to a degree that is nothing short of
exceptional, nothing less than outstanding, secures the
intertextuality of the same, consonantly with the manifest
meaningfulness of the structuration of their components, the
most obvious feature of which is sevenfold serial form. Thus it
confirms their contextual treatment as required not merely by
the presence in each of them of sevenfold series, their
formal coherence, it demands that we ought to seek if not
find in them, something of a Christian doctrine of language, and
moreover, of revelation, both of which the First Letter Of John
associates with the person of Christ.
Those narratives which detail the natures and functions of the
four modes of sense-percipience we have already observed. In
each of the gospels they are ordered in precisely the same way,
as a chiasmos, culminating in the Eucharist. They establish
unmistakably the polar or dyadic character of human
sense-percipience, the fact that it is inextricably co-extant
with memory and imagination. By the first term we understand the
perceptual in its actual, true and immanent nature, that of
memory which necessarily comprises imagination. By the latter
term, imagination, we refer to the fact that to some degree,
this particular polarity of perceptual consciousness exists
independently of memory, in some measure in itself and for
itself; that is, according to virtual transcendence. We shall
for the moment, set aside consideration of the Eucharist,
insofar as this denotes within the overall purpose of the
messianic series, a specific sense-percipient mode, that of
smell/taste. Where language and semiotics are concerned it no
longer plays the part in human communication that it
continues to do for the sub-human realm, where however, it
remains in league with both knowing and sexual desire.
Accordingly, we have interpreted the story of creation, Genesis
1.1-2.4a as complementary to the same aim, that of an exposition
of mind or consciousness. It too subdivides the conceptual pole
of mind according to the same paradigm. Thus the reiteration of
the categoreal paradigm within the messianic series supplements
their division into truly immanent and virtually
transcendent subgroups. Correspondingly the reiteration of the
categoreal paradigm within the creation taxonomy consists
likewise of truly, or purely, transcendent entities, and
virtually immanent entities. The two rudimentary polarities of
consciousness, the perceptual and the conceptual, are the basis
of the present study. It concerns the form and content of each
of the four gospels. But it adds to consideration the presence
of The Apocalypse within the same theological project as already
defined by the cohering narratives of beginning and end,
creation and salvation
GENESIS 1.1-2.4a, THE
MESSIANIC SERIES, AND THE APOCALYPSE AS VERBAL
Reverting to the citation of
the first epistle of John above, we can see then that the three
phenomenal modes of sentience do not supply us with the
information necessary to answer the questions relating to
exactly how we apprehend the fourfold form of the gospel(s). By
apprehend we mean more precisely still, grasp, or as the epistle
puts it 'touch'. For if the messianic and healing miracle
stories by dint of their subject, the Son, rather than either
Transcendence or the Holy Spirit, are logically related to the
phenomenology of the haptic, then we ought to be able to
understand the contours, the shape, the very form of the
documents themselves, and in the first instance, this is
fourfold. This fourfold structure reiterates immanence, but the
selfsame subject of the gospels, The immanent Son, specifies the
immanent identity in question. Why do we have four gospels? How
is each different from the other three? How moreover, are we to
understand their configuration given our interpretation of The
Feeding Of The Four Thousand, which, since it relates to
visual sentience, relates also to the phenomenon of the written
word? How should we feel and touch and grasp this written word?
Such questions concern most fitly what we are addressing in
these pages: the three narrative cycles whose interpretations
are interrelated as establishing a coherent and
comprehensive whole. Even though the fourfold perceptual
polarity of consciousness does not itself answer our questions,
it is nevertheless true that the three sevenfold cycles of the
creation story, the gospels, and The Apocalypse, conform very
remarkably to the same radicals, the same triadic order, which
in its Christological ('messianic') depiction contained in the
gospels, immediately proposes the existence of 'The Word'.
This admits at once the pertinence to theology as to philosophy
and to psychology, of the same: the rudimentary contribution of
sense-percipience to consciousness. The specifically visual
(optic) modality is more than incontrovertibly obvious in the
case of The Apocalypse. That book superabounds with visions,
stars, sights, colours, appearances, lightnings, rainbows,
coloured stones, and indeed eyes themselves (Apocalypse 4.8,
5.6). How can we miss its Pneumatological cast? That The
Apocalypse is the story of the visionary experience of an
individual follows logically from the fact of its four paramount
concerns: the sense-percipient categories, optic imagination and
optic memory, and the anthropic categories, the symbolic
masculine and symbolic feminine. These are prime instances of
the beautiful in the known world, and its primary exemplars of
the Holy Spirit.
An equally assured argument for the first creation narrative
stands, where nothing is achieved without the spoken, and thus
heard word of God, and where also in the first section of the
archaeological fiat
the same entities called into existence are identified and
named. It is true that God 'sees' that what is thus brought into
being is good; but even if that doesn't exactly come as an
afterthought, in the first instance the prevailing sentient mode
is the acoustic, precisely because in the first instance,
acoustic sentience exists in apposition to the primordial
conceptual categories, space and space : time. The divine will
is uttered or spoken, or as has been suggested, sung by the
poet, the creator of this world, because of the singular
appositeness to the same transcendent will of this very mode of
sense-percipience.
The Feeding Of The Five Thousand articulates this plainly
in relating as one-to-one correspondence, the two acoustic
radicals, memory and imagination, with space : time and space
respectively. Precursory to the Johannine recension of that
miracle story are the several references to 'the voice [of the
son of God]' (th~v fwnh~v, John
5.25, 28) and 'hearing' (a)kou/w,
5.24, 25, 28 30,), followed by the reference to 'the will [of
him who sent me]' (to\ qe/lhma,
5.30). Will was a key factor in the prior miracle, The
Healing At The Pool: '... he said to him, "o you want to
be healed?" ( qe/leiv u(gih\v gene/sqai;
5.6). Our later discussion of intentionality will posit the
specific affinity between the same conceptual form, space, and
this particular mode of intentionality, willing, and
subsequently that between, space : time and the will-to-believe,
in relation to the same identity, The Transcendent, that is,
"The Father". It is in speaking, in vocalising, in being
heard, that the will is manifest. Once again, how can we miss
the abiding predilection of the description of the beginning for
acoustic sentience? Here of course, the real and effective
occasion or instantiation of transcendence as of will itself,
remains the pure conceptual form, space, 'heavens'. It is
reconfigured in the perceptual manifold as acoustic imagination,
rather than acoustic memory, whose classical or
taxonomic, that is rubrical description is given in the story of
The Walking On the Water.
We have on the basis of the hermeneutic of the messianic
miracles as a whole, referred to these same two modes, the
characteristic sentient modes deployed in those two books which
begin and end the canon of scripture, acoustic and optic
respectively, those of the two stories of specific Eucharistic
miracles of loaves and fish, as 'archaeological' and
'eschatological' respectively. They sit well with one another in
accordance with that hermeneutic. Thus that the three textual
cycles are clearly analogously related to one another
reifies, or embodies these three modes of sense-percipience
consistently with the hermeneutic of the three immanent
messianic miracles which we have proposed, and positively
supports this hermeneutic. The predilection of Genesis, the
gospels, and The Apocalypse, for specific sentient modes,
specific dimensions of the word we might say, is the consequence
of the fact that each is specifically related to one particular
given identity, the Transcendent, the Son and the Holy Spirit,
notwithstanding that this focus does not proscribe in any case,
the roles of the remaining identities in God.
Of the three immanent messianic miracle stories, The Feeding
Of The Four Thousand will most repay our attention here at
the introduction of the theology of semiotic forms, for it is
the best equipped to begin the exposition not just of the
simpler relations between the various subjects of the
narratives, but also to commence the task of a Christian
doctrine of revelation, by which we mean, the doctrine of
revelation qua text
itself: the written, graphic, visible tradition. We have
interpreted this narrative as the theological description of a
radical centre of consciousness, optic memory. That is, the
narrative specifies the way in which specifically visual
rationality/affectivity is deployed in human consciousness. It
must concern us, because of what was just said regarding the
perceptible, and so 'tangible' shape or form of the narratives.
The sevenfold patterns systematically correlate the three
textual cycles, creation story, messianic series and Apocalypse.
Moreover, if optic memory has anything whatever to do with the
written word, with 'scripture', then we should expect that this
narrative has to do with these same systematic theologies. We
alluded previously to the immediate references within the story
to the phenomenon of vision.
That is, in the first place, the concrete stuff of optic
sentience as denoted by the repeated figure 7, quantifies the
seven hues of the visible spectrum. Often enough they will be
tallied as sixfold, usually, the last member of the series,
being referred to conventionally as 'violet', is deleted from
the series. That is well and good, but two points are vital
here. The first is that the overall pattern of messianic
'events' if not 'miracles', like that of Days of
'beginning' if not Days of 'creation proper', is consistently
enumerated as sevenfold. Any reduction of the members of the
series to six will consequently downplay if not ignore the role
of the Eucharist itself, the 'sabbath' or seventh occasion in
the reckoning of the perceptual consciousness. The
semantic worth of such a tally is provided in The Apocalypse.
Again this enumerative schema has important repercussions for
the theory of intentionality, which manifests the bipolarity of
transcendence : immanence everywhere reiterated in the three
narrative cycles. In other words, the intentional modes consist
of both transcendent (conceptual) and immanent (perceptual)
components. Either series, that of Genesis or that of the
gospels, is bifurcated in this way, for we noticed the
reduplication of the same paradigm, transcendence : immanence,
which initially served to distinguish the former from the
latter, operative once more within each of the very two series
themselves, Days and messianic events.
Hence the overall relevance to biblical theology of this miracle
story is methodological. The two ciphers 4 and 7 which identify
respectively immanence in general, and the Holy Spirit in
particular, are given repeatedly in the narratives, not simply
in the story of the Eucharistic miracle itself. We encountered
them in Genesis, and the gospel and will encounter them once
more in The Apocalypse. In the last case their presence is
obvious immediately, for there we find four clearly demarcated
series of seven units: letters, seals, trumpets and bowls;
(Apocalypse 2.1-3.22, 5.1-8.5, 8.6-11.19, 15.1-16.21), as well
as other material. The Pneumatological orientation of that book
comports perfectly with the same two interdependent
factors, immanence and the identity of the Holy Spirit. Equally
however, both figures as referential to the form and content of
the gospels which function at the centre of this arrangement, in
accordance with the doctrine of the Word, insofar as it is
there that we find this doctrine expounded explicitly, will
serve us in our quest to explicate their specific natures. That
is, they will promote the doctrine of mind, hence Christology,
precisely as this relates to the doctrine of intentionality and
as it explicates the fourfold form of the gospel(s).
The second reason for accepting the value of a sevenfold
reckoning here in conjunction with optic sense-percipience, with
the Holy Spirit, with immanence and so on, is that the cipher
six is already identifiable in relation to the Son. The
arrangement of the three reiterated figures five, six, and seven
in the three miracles, The Feeding Of The Five Thousand,
The Transformation Of Water Into Wine, and
The Feeding Of The Four Thousand respectively, situates
at the pivot of this schema the identity of the Son as the
immediate and central concern of the gospels, if not of all
three textual cycles, since the formal arrangement renders the
significance of the creation narratives and The Apocalypse
referable to the same. So insisting on the centrality to the
schema of the Christological cipher, the hexad, we cannot fail
to distinguish the Son from the Holy Spirit. At the same time,
we can be sure of safeguarding the peculiar status which
attaches to the Christological categories, whether these be
conceptual or perceptual, and their mediation of transcendence
('5') and immanence ('7'). We encountered the figure 6 in both
Christological miracles, and did so observing its ramifications,
namely, its extensive epiphany equally of both transcendence,
the theological outlook of the creation narrative(s), and
immanence, that of The Apocalypse.
If the hermeneutic of The Feeding Of The Four Thousand
situates the phenomenon of vision within the context of a
theology of the body, or more exactly, the theology of
perception, and offers to theological method as resources, the
contents of our visual experience, the seven colours of the
spectrum, that need not exclude the possibility of a reference
by the same narrative to the traditions, the three 'finally'
written, graphic, visible traditions, the texts themselves, the
narratives of Days and messianic miracles, and The Apocalypse as
a whole, in each of which we find the two formal factors, the
fourfold and sevenfold, as formal or logical determinants. As we
noted again and again, this squares with the self-relational or
reflexive capacity of the word 'Word' itself. What was already
delivered in the creation taxonomy, the concept that mind is
somehow inclusive of itself, or somehow self-referential, this
is the meaning of selfhood. Such a postulate avails us in the
interpretation of the forms of the narratives and the numerals
contained within the stories of the Eucharistic miracles whose
meaning has eluded interpreters for far too long.
I mean to propose here as elsewhere, that the hermeneutic of
this particular miracle narrative entails the occasion of
self-reflexiveness, or self-referentiality which the doctrine of
'the word' involves. If the messianic series receives the
creation story as a point of reference, then it is bound to
comment at length on the tradition, that is, on itself, and
precisely itself, the tradition as written. This is all the more
the case in The Apocalypse, which readily presents itself as a
text, a writing, a scripture, a document, and which refers
consistently to writing, scrolls, little books, as to the
gospels, albeit in a manner which might best be described as
symbolical if not semiological. It is to be a book about books,
not the least of which is the book about 'the beginning'. One of
the great merits of The Apocalypse for the contemporary
theological outlook is that it recasts 'the fall' so called, as
teleological, as final. If we can no longer believe, except
disingenuously, the Pauline hermeneutic of the P creation
narrative, this situation is remedied by the fact that one of
the primary intentions of The Apocalypse is the deconstruction
and reconstruction of that mythology in accordance with
historical and actual time.
Thus eschatology concerns itself with 'first things' insofar as
the created order suffers an inevitable incursion by the
condition antecedent to creation, that of chaos, first depicted
in Genesis 1.1, at the hands of humankind. While it is not
synonymous with time qua
death, this nevertheless in the visionary experience of the
author of The Apocalypse must be understood in the light of the
same: that which has had not beginning but will have an end,
just as time has had no beginning and will have and end. Time
without beginning is or was transformed in creation, with the
inception of space, with which it necessarily co-exists. Such a
reading of the Apocalypse can best deal with its patently
mythological content, and its deliberate intent to recast the
story of 'the fall' not as an actual verity, as Paul did, but in
terms of a prophetic understanding of the course of the created
order to its end. Thus also, salvation concerns itself with
creation. For the conceptual categories are the depiction of the
transcendent logos as
will be depicted also in The Transfiguration, an event
which signifies the alliance between the birth of the one and
the death of the many. In this way we must completely rethink
our approaches to both stories, that of the beginning contained
in the P and J narratives, and the gospel narratives, where as
it must, the notion of time intrudes. Effectively, we are
required to invert the manner in which we approach these two
texts where our common notions of time and the course of time
intervene without due reflection. This is especially true of the
second creation story, that of J, with its aetiology of death.
This story is one of many narratives which The Apocalypse not
only adopts, but adapts to its own purposes.
When we noted that comparably to the healing miracle stories,
the various recensions of the messianic miracles contain very
few discrepancies, in some cases we have as many as four
different redactions of the one episode, it was precisely with
the content of the two miracles stories which deal with optic
and acoustic sentience, in mind. Mark has carefully restricted
the number of healing miracles to just twelve, and links them
systematically with both 'the twelve', meaning of course the
disciples, but also with the oral tradition. We allege that the
acoustic series of the dodecaphonic scales semiologically
instantiates immanent Transcendence. It reflects Mark's
presentation of the oral tradition, that of the twelvefold
healing/disciple series. That The Feeding Of The Five Thousand
refers to the acoustic semiosis is never in doubt, unless we
close revelation. But initially the details of the 'baskets full
of remaining portions', twelve in The Feeding Of The
Five Thousand, and seven in The Feeding Of The Four
Thousand, do indeed refer immediately to the tradition,
now oral now written, clearly exhibited in both series, now
messianic, now healing. Of course these mesh; they depend on one
another. What is more, they mesh with the creation narrative;
but the first point to notice of the editing of the two sets of
miracle stories themselves, both the twelvefold
cycle of healings in Mark and the sevenfold messianic
tradition, is that the immediate referents of the two figures,
seven and twelve are these very same narrative cycles
themselves. Here we encounter the self-referential character of
'the word', its innate capacity to reflect itself. The inference
of which is, if anything, that the sevenfold messianic series
was in essence predisposed to having been written from an early
stage in its history, and that for a considerable time the
healing series remained a largely spoken tradition.
We shall find at later remove, in The Apocalypse, or much sooner
than that, in the story of The Flood, literary precedents at
least for the hermeneutic of The Feeding Of The Four
Thousand as postulating optic sense-percipience.
Hence these texts are seminal in any theology of revelation, if
by that we mean exclusively the written tradition which
testifies to The Word itself. So we must stress here, in advance
of the theology of the optic semiotic forms, that the first
referents of this and its companion episode, The Feeding Of
The Five Thousand, are the traditions themselves, whether
written or oral, or as we should say, both written and oral,
since these clearly consist as one whole. Illustratively, they
remain peripheral to the centrality to consciousness of haptic
sentience, and in so doing, they invite the fullest integration
of the three cycles.
Therefore we remain always in
media res, with the gospels as with the focus of these
three instances of the written, graphic, visible forms of these
narratives, outlined in The Feeding Of The Four Thousand,
with which we shall have much to do in the first part of this
essay, since it pertains to that aspect of the doctrine of mind
we refer to as 'intentionality'. It is from there that we can
extend the compass of biblical metaphysics to both worlds; the
'acoustic' world of the transcendent forms in which the fivefold
dominates logically, and the immanent world of the
visible, and invisible, wherein the sevenfold recurs to such a
conspicuous extent, a world which clearly concerns the same
doctrine of intentionality. This means that central to our quest
will be the recognition of the hexadic contour of all three
narratives, for it prevails in The Apocalypse to precisely the
same degree that we witness it in Genesis and gospel, but
without confusing this reckoning. We are in media res in
understanding ourselves corporately, that is, with respect to
mind : body, envisaged in the gospel narratives. These texts
require that we handle them; that we feel and perceive their
form; which can only occur if we revert to the stories situated
in the canon as their beginning and end. In short it demands an
approach fully cognisant of their intertextuality as of their
respective differences. This is how we endorse the opening of
the first Epistle of John and lay claim to having 'touched
with our hands ... that which was from the beginning'. It will
be in grappling with the various texts, and grasping their own
corporeal nature, their own belonging as members to a body, by
comprehending the tissue of their relatedness; it will be in
bringing each of the three narratives into contact with one
another, and so in assimilating them palpably, that we should
understand them. It will moreover be by this means alone; for it
is already apparent that any comprehension of the creation
narrative as of The Apocalypse must assume the same
methodological premise.
Such intertextuality relies
upon the formal plasticity of all three narrative centres,
Genesis 1.1-2.4a, the messianic series and The Apocalypse as a
whole. So for example, given the peculiar status of the Sabbath
in the first case, and the equally conspicuous status of the
seventh events in each of the last three sevenfold series in the
last, we are fully justified in arguing that both of these texts
are logically ordered to identify the Son, whose numerical
cipher in the messianic series is the 'six'. The
previous Christological hermeneutic of the creation story which
deferred to the gospels not simply as supplementary but as
conclusive, corroborates the fact that discerning the acoustic
predilection of the creation narrative, in no way proscribes the
presence of the Son. Nor does it proscribe the role of the Holy
Spirit, whom we see from the very inception of the narrative,
and of course in the heptad itself. For even if the creation
series unfolds conspicuously and with an obvious theological
intent in affinity with the phenomenon of speaking/hearing, its
contours, its morphology, its shape, which linguistically we are
inclined to apprehend in virtue of the haptic, these remain
undeniable. Just as the story as story precisely of 'beginning',
and so of space and space : time, brings before us the dyadic
rubrics of Days 2 and 5, which will be reiterated in the feeding
miracle story which correspondingly manifests The Transcendent,
there is no denying its protean morphology. If the latter were
not the case, then the story of creation could not logically
function qua text;
that is, it could never have been committed to a written form in
the first place, extensively related morphologically to others
of its kind. Just so, those sentient radicals which these same
ciphers identify, the haptic and optic, also present themselves
at virtually every point in the narrative.
All three textual cycles are indeed pliable if not protean
enough to be reckoned in this way, or these ways. Thus in just
the same manner too, the theology of immanence does not confine
itself at the expense of transcendence. We do find in The
Apocalypse not just significantly formal but also
referential reminders of the complementary polarity, which
here of course means the Transcendent, and also of The Lamb, its
favoured name for the Son. So just as the creation story may
function in a secondary fashion as about the immanent, The
Apocalypse may for its part also adopt that modality counter to
its very own and function orally:
Blessed is he who reads aloud
the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and
who keep what is written therein; for the time is near.
(Apocalypse 1.3)
"He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to
the churches." (Apocalypse 2.7a, 11a, 17a, 29a, 3.6, 13, 22).
In the second of these examples, there is a clear-cut
correspondence to the repeated formula 'And God saw ...' of the
Genesis text. Thus where this latter sense-percipient mode
identified immanence and the Holy Spirit subsequently to each
creative act, in The Apocalypse at the very beginning, there is
a conscious and repeated mention of Transcendence given by the
same index, the sense-percipient mode, here acoustic. Once again
this secures the intertextuality of the two narratives,
notwithstanding their oppositional or complementary
relationship.
Before we leave the First
Letter Of John as the introduction to the present discussion,
it is necessary to note here another part of the Johannine
tradition - the last chapter of the gospel, chapter 21. Many
commentators have thought it to be a later addition to the
whole of the gospel, a judgement we will repudiate here. It is
of interest for many reasons; for example, it contains the
first and only reference in this gospel to 'the sons of
Zebedee' (21.2), disciples who assume quite important roles in
the synoptic gospels. It is held by some scholars to have been
written by the redactor of the gospel, whom they regard as the
author of the First Epistle of John. Others maintain that it
sits well within the gospel and that the author of the gospels
of John as a whole and the author of the Epistle are one and
the same. What most concerns us however, is that it shows
clear evidence, the clearest of any, that the tradition of the
six messianic miracles consisted as an entirety, quite early
in the history of the tradition. The portion of the text which
concerns us immediately here is as follows:
When they got on land, they
saw a charcoal fire there, with fish lying on it, and bread.
Jesus said to them, "Bring some of the fish that you have
just caught." So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net
ashore, full of large fish, a hundred and fifty three of
them; and although there were so many, the net was not torn.
Jesus said to them, "Come and have breakfast." Now none of
the disciples dared to ask him, "Who are you?" They knew it
was the Lord. Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to
them, and so with the fish. This was now the third time that
Jesus was revealed to the disciples after he was raised from
the dead. (John 21.9-14).
We notice in this passage at once, two things most
pertinent to our studies, the presentation of the motifs which
are tantamount to the categoreal paradigm, identity and unity.
The identity motif has already been given as just one of
several contrasts drawn by the author between Simon Peter and
'(that) disciple whom Jesus loved' (21.7, 20):
That
disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, "It is the Lord!'
(John 21.7a).
The idea of identity surfaces here as surely in the
appearance stories as it does in the transcendent miracle
narratives, and previously just as it did in the first half of
the creation taxonomy. The cryptically unnamed beloved
disciple is not referred to in the same terms in the opening
of the narrative which lists the seven persons engaged in the
fishing expedition, but we understand him to be one of the
'two others who were his disciples' (21.2). This has the
effect at once of returning us to the initial list of persons
given in the lead up to the first miracle story:
The next day again John was
standing with two of his disciples; and he looked at Jesus
as he walked, and said, "Behold , the lamb of God!" The two
disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus.
(1.35-37).
There are so many deliberate points of contact between
these two episodes, the commissioning of the first disciples,
and the events related in chapter 21. The last chapter of the
gospel of John all but reverts to the story as it begins with
the calling of the first disciples, so that to consider them
all, worthy indeed as it is, would take us far afield from our
immediate concerns. Apart from the names of the figures, Simon
Peter, Nathanael, somewhat remarkably, along with the
reference to 'Cana', and the two unnamed disciples, the verbs
common to both pericopae are as follows: 'follow' (1.37, 38
cf. 21.20, 22); 'turn' (1.38 cf. 21.20); 'see' (1.38, 42 cf.
21.9, 20); 'stay/remain' (1.38 cf. 21.23). Equally remarkable
is the manner in which Jesus addresses Simon Peter on both
occasions: 'Simon the Son of John' (1.42), Si/mwn o( ui(o\v I)wa/nnou
and 'Simon Son of John' (varr. Jonah), Si/mwn I)wa/nnou,
(21.15-17). This is too conspicuous to miss, for the
evangelist uses it no less than three times in the 'epilogue'
(as well as the more traditional 'Simon Peter' (1.40 cf.
21.15)): 21.15, 16, 17. This form of address is important both
in its use of the expression John, and in its variant form in
part of the tradition 'Jonah' (Iwna), for it connotes the expression 'sign
of Jonah' employed by Matthew and Luke in the pericope
following the recapitulation of the two miracles of loaves and
fish, The Demand For A Sign (Mark 8.11-13). Indeed,
Matthew in fact uses it twice:
Then some of the scribes
and Pharisees said to him, "Teacher, we wish to see a sign
from you." But he answered them, "An evil and adulterous
generation seeks for a sign; but no sign shall be given to
it except the sign of the prophet Jonah ( I)wna~). For as Jonah
was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale,
so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the
heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will arise at the
judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they
repented at the preaching of Jonah ( I)wna~), and behold,
something greater than Jonah ( I)wna~) is here ... (Matthew 12.38-42).
And the Pharisees and
Sadducees came, and to test him they asked him to show them
a sign from heaven (ou)ranou~),
He answered them, "When it is evening, you say 'It will be
fair weather; for the sky (ou)rano/v) is red (purra/zei = fiery).'
And in the morning. 'It will be stormy today, for the sky (ou)rano/v) is red (purra/zei) and
threatening.' You know how to interpret the appearance
of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.
An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no
sign shall be given it except the sign of Jonah (
I)wna)."
So he left them and departed. (Matthew 16.1-4).
When the crowds were
increasing, he began to say, "This generation is an evil
generation; it seeks a sign, but no sign shall be given to
it except the sign of Jonah ( I)wna~, varr. tou proqhtou). For as Jonah ( I)wna~v) became a
sign to the men of Nineveh, so will the Son of man be to
this generation. ... The men of Nineveh will arise at the
judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they
repented at the preaching of Jonah ( I)wna),
and behold, something greater than Jonah ( I)wna) is
here. (Luke 11.29-32).
Mention of 'the sign of Jonah' and the recurrence of that
highly charged name in this the last chapter of the gospel of
John is not the main reason we have cited it here, even so, we
should nevertheless make a momentary digression in the
interests of several factors, the main one being the history
of the tradition. As noted, this last appearance story in John
recurs to the opening of the gospel. There was no mention of a
fishing expedition or The Sea of Tiberias in John's
narrative of the commissioning of the first disciples,
but such a reference here in the final scene with its
clear resonance of the former stories, suggests that the first
narratives of the disciples having been called, may be read
along lines which set the gospel more in keeping with the
synoptics on this score (John 1.35-51 cf. 21.1). This means
also of course, that efforts to harmonise the name
'Nathanael', since it is a given name, with the figure in the
synoptic lists referred to only by his patronymic,
'Bartholomew', must be accorded some credibility (Mark
3.13-19). He, Bartholomew, is the sixth figure in Mark's list,
and as noted, in the gospel of John, the same number is
purposively associated with Nathanael, as it is with the
miracle at Cana, and with Jesus And The Woman Of Samaria,
the pericope which
concludes the evangelist's presentation of the haptic form of
memory. More to the point, and this applies even more
emphatically still to what we are about to contend regarding
the incidence of numerical referencing in chapter 21, accounts
of the relation between John and the synoptic gospels and
between John and Mark in particular which rule out of court
any interdependence or influence will not stand. But first to
the enigmatic Jonah references, and to the equally important
clues which Matthew provides in this context for the
theology of semiotic forms.
We may suspect that the 'sign of Jonah' logion has something to
do with the tradition history of the messianic miracles. We
have not rehearsed the full argument concerning the durations
of these six events within the nocturnal/diurnal cycle here,
but we have alluded to it as party to the polarity which
logically and consistently throughout the gospels elaborates
the Markan formula '... to the other side'. For the chiasmos
arranges in pairs of one-to-one correspondence exactly three
of each polarity, nocturnal, the feeding miracles, and
diurnal, the identity, that is transcendent, miracles. This
coheres with Matthew's prompt for the theology incorporative
of the optic semeia,
his remark which combines references to colour, to 'signs', to
Jonah, and of course to time(s). There is no mention of Jonah
in the same context in Mark, which allows some historians of
the tradition to assign the saying about the sign of Jonah to
a putative Quelle source (Q).
Matthew more than once refers to Jonah, and this in its
turn would seem immediately to evoke one particular messianic
miracle, The Stilling Of The Storm, which of course he
relates (Matthew 8.23-27). The first reference in Matthew to
the 'sign of Jonah' mentions 'three days and three nights'
twice (Matthew 12.40). The second does not include such a
mention, although the pericope
comes most noticeably immediately on the heels of The
Feeding Of The Four Thousand, which we have said denotes
optic memory, and just as significantly immediately before the
recapitulation of the details of the two miracles of loaves,
and again just as tellingly, just prior to Peter's
Confession (Matthew16.13-20), in which the evangelist
yet again refers to 'Simon Bar-Jona' (Si/mwn Bariwna~ varr. Ba\r Iwna~ v 17). There
is no mistaking the names 'John' and 'Jonah' here, just as
there wasn't in John 21. In all then, this makes for five
references to Jonah in Matthew within just as many chapters.
This is the first of the three passion predictions, and its
parallel in Mark (8.27-30) lacks the same patronymic, as do
the following two both in Mark (Mark 9.30-32, 10.32-34), and
Matthew (Matthew 17.22-23, 20.17-19), although the second
Markan prediction includes the phrase 'three days' (9.31), as
does the last (10.34), just as the second in Matthew uses the
expression 'raised on the third day' (17.23), while the last
has the very same Greek clause (20.19). In Luke's accounts of
the same three sayings, the first is almost identical to the
last two of Matthew's expressions, but it reads 'and on the
third day be raised' (Luke 9.18-22). Of Luke's two subsequent
passion predictions (Luke 9.43b-45, 18.31-33), the next has no
references to periods of time, diurnal or nocturnal, whereas
the last does: 'and on the third day he will rise' (Luke
18.33b), in which the form of the verb is different yet again
from Matthew's form of the same verb, and from Luke's own
previous usage.
Mark interpolated The Blind Man At Bethsaida
(8.22-26), just before the first Passion prediction, and
indeed there is an even, logical flow from the last miracle of
loaves, the one which denotes optic memory as a radical form
of sentience, to this healing narrative about the very same
phenomenon. But Matthew's recension also deserves enormous
credit, for it conjoins so adroitly the themes proper to this
aspect of biblical metaphysics. We noted just now in the first
of Matthew's two references to 'the sign of Jonah', how
articulately he forges a connection to the book of that name
in the Hebrew scriptures. For he places that saying after his
recension of The Feeding Of The Four Thousand, the
transcendent partner to which is The Stilling Of The Storm.
These are the two Pneumatological miracles of the messianic
series, the one immanent in kind, and specifying the radical
of consciousness optic memory, the other transcendent, and
specifying optic imagination. Of course the book of Jonah is
instantly recognisable in the transcendent miracle story
itself, centering as it does on a storm at sea, and the
peculiar role of the 'prophet' who, in order to quell the
tempest, is thrown overboard and spends the ensuing three days
and nights in the belly of the whale. This must certainly have
been an accessible enough paradigm for the evangelists.
Whether or not the miracle story, The Stilling Of The
Storm, can be accounted for in terms of it is
undecidable.
If the 'sign of Jonah' saying is as early as proponents of
the Q source theory would have us believe, then this may be
the first of the six stories to have been committed to
writing. On the other hand, we aver here the integrity of the
messianic miracle series as an entirety, and equally the fact
that it corresponds formally and referentially to the P
creation narrative. This tells against any division of the
series into single units composed independently of one
another. A single correspondence between the book of Jonah and
only one particular messianic event is hardly sufficient to
warrant the contention that it served as a prompt or a source
of some kind for the messianic series as a whole. Yet the same
name itself occurs three times in the final chapter of John, a
fact which is highly significant, as we shall see, for the
messianic series. If it refers to the book of that name in the
Hebrew canon of the twelve minor prophets, then it also
recalls another famous narrative in the canon in virtue of
another of its meanings. The meanings of the name given
by the Koehler-Bumgartner Lexicon are as follows:
I hnfwOy:
I dove, Columba Gn 8.8-12; cooing, symbol of the moaning of
those who suffer Is 38.14; ... II hnfwOy n. pers.
Jonah 2K14.25, Jon 1-4 ... (William L. Holliday, Ed., A Concise Hebrew And Aramaic
Lexicon Of The Old Testament, Eerdmans, Grand
Rapids, Michigan, 1971, p 131).
The following discussion resumes this first meaning of the
word in its original form, the Aramaic one, not the Greek of
the text. For the latter inclines us to overlook the
associations of the word any further than the single book of
Jonah.
In the first reference to the story of The Flood with its
certain and immediate links to the creation narrative, we may
indeed find something of the intention behind the 'sign of
Jonah' saying. The story is a well known one, just as well
known as that of the prophet Jonah himself. The references to
'dove' are many; Genesis 8.8, 9, 10, 11, 12. (There are
further references in Psalms 55.6, 68.13, The Song of Songs
and so on.) In the story of The Flood, Noah first sends out
the raven, 'and it flew to and fro until the water on the
earth had dried up.' (Genesis 8.7):
Then he sent out the dove (hnfwOyO, ; peristera\n) to see
if the waters on the earth had subsided further.
But the dove (hnfwOy; LXX peristera\) did not
find any place where it could rest the sole of its foot, so
it came back to him in the ark because there was still water
over the whole earth. He put out his hand and caught it and
brought it back into the ark.
He waited another 7 days; then he sent the dove (hnfwOyO ; LXX
peristera\n)
out of the ark again.
And the dove (hnfwOyO ; LXX
peristera\)
returned to him in the evening, and it had a fresh olive
leaf in its beak. So Noah knew that the waters had subsided
from the earth.
He waited yet another 7 days and sent the dove (hnfwOyO ; LXX
peristera/n) out
again; this time it did not come back to him. (Genesis
8.8-12. Claus Westermann, Genesis
1-11: A Commentary, translated by John J. Scullion
S.J., SPCK, London, 1984, p 390)
Surely the mention of '7 days', like the three tentative
dispatches of the 'dove', as well as still other elements of
the story, are relevant to our argument here. Time is a
salient factor, as is the fact that the creatures are enjoined
to 'increase and multiply' after leaving the ark at God's
command, just as they were in the creation, (8.17). After the
description of Noah's building an altar upon which he offers
whole-burnt offerings, we read:
And Yahweh smelled the
sweet odour and reflected: "Never again will I curse the
ground because of people; indeed the inclination of the
human heart is evil from its youth; and never again will I
slay every living creature as I have done.
While earth lasts, there shall never cease seedtime and
harvest, frost and heat, summer and winter, night and day.
(Genesis 8.21-22).
And God said: This is the sign (twO)O ; LXX to\ shmei~on) of the
covenant that I am establishing between myself and you and
every living being that is with you for all future
generations.
My bow I am putting in the clouds, which shall be the
sign (shmei~on)
of the covenant between me and the earth,
When I now form clouds over the earth and the bow becomes
visible in the clouds,
then I will remember my covenant which exists between me
and you and all living beings, and never again shall the
waters become a flood so as to destroy all flesh.
And when the bow is there in the clouds, I will look at
it so as to recall the everlasting covenant, between God and
all living beings, all flesh that is on the earth.
And God said to Noah: This is the sign (to\ shmei~on)
of the covenant, which I am setting up between myself and
all flesh that is on the earth. (Genesis 9.12-17).
The latter text, the later blessing and
covenant made by God with the new creation, is as
noticeable, and just as significant, as its sign,
particularly given the Matthean redaction of the Jonah saying.
Here we resume the discussion of Matthew's articulation of
the two Pneumatological miracles - signs of the Holy Spirit,
represented by the dove in Christian iconography - in
conjunction with their underlying subject, that of optic
sense-percipience. The first instance of the Jonah
saying extends the references of its second version. The
expression 'stormy' in the latter (xeimw/n, Matthew 16.3), in league with 'the
sign of Jonah' and The Feeding Of The Four Thousand,
just related (Matthew 15.32-39), reiterates the miracle of The
Stilling Of The Storm, the transcendent counterpart to
that feeding miracle, and whose optic semeia is explicitly
given, even if Matthew uses for the latter, 'storm', an
expression quite different from that which the transcendent
miracle story contains: seismo\v
(Matthew 8.23). He twice mentions the colour of the sky in
relation to the stormy weather. The Greek word for 'sky' is
also the word for 'heaven'. Simply put, the sign or signs of
'Jonah', signs of 'the dove', for that is a meaning of the
Hebrew word every bit as salient as the proper noun, are in
the second variant of the Jonah saying, thus just two,the two
colours of the heaven/sky: one the blue of 'fair weather',
which is only referred to implicitly, the evening colour, and
secondly the reddish or 'fiery' hue, of the morning of the
stormy day. These then are two of the 'signs from heaven/sky'
(Matthew 16.1). (Mark's account of The Demand For A Sign
(Mark 8.11-13), just after the second miracle of loaves
(8.1-10) and just prior to the recapitulation of the details
of both feeding miracles (8.14-21), even though it lacks any
mention of 'Jonah', contains the phrase 'a sign from
heaven' (shmei~on a0po\
tou~ ou)ranou~, v 11). These 'signs', blue and fiery
red, are the chromatic values to be assigned to the
Pneumatological events; and at a stroke Matthew has deployed
them both, mentioning one twice by name, and referring to the
other under the noun 'sky/heaven'. Thus in the second of the
above citations from Matthew, themes germane to the two
miracle narratives, their time of occurrence and their optic semeia, are clearly
interwoven.
The first 'sign of Jonah' saying (Matthew 12.28-42) may have
been included after the second saying, since this latter
pericope (Matthew16.1-4) is situated immediately after the
Pneumatological miracle of loaves in accordance with its
Markan parallel (Mark 8.11-13), which we presume he was
following, and since Matthew also places the recapitulation of
the two miracles as does Mark, immediately after the pericope
The Demand For A Sign From Heaven, (Matthew
16.7-12 cf. Mark 8.16-21). He therefore has to find another
context for the first instance of the 'sign of Jonah' logion.
He places it after the pericope A Tree and Its Fruits
(Matthew 12.33-37 cf. Luke 6.43-45), and prior to the story of
The Return Of The Unclean Spirit (Matthew 12.43-45),
which notably includes sevenfold imagery. Luke contains only
one occurrence of the Jonah logion (Luke 6.43-45), citing the
pericope about The Unclean Spirit in which he too uses
sevenfold imagery, prior to his redaction of the Jonah saying,
though not immediately (Luke 11-24-26), and the parable about
The Light Of The Body: The Eye (Luke 11.33-36),
immediately after the Jonah saying. This parable too
intersects perfectly with the Pneumatological mode of
sentience, vision. (Most exegetes have argued that Luke's
single version of the saying better reflects its Q origins.
But if we dispense with Q altogether, which would entail the
hypothesis of some sort of interdependence between Matthew and
Luke if not Luke's dependence on Matthew, then there is no
reason to entertain this argument. Matthew's versions may
better reflect any presumed original version, not that this
matters a great deal to our argument.)
What is of greater moment is that the prior of Matthew's two
versions extends the referentiality of the second account from
just two to all messianic miracles and hence to all six or
seven optika. For in addition to the mention of 'the prophet
Jonah', 'the belly of the whale', 'Nineveh' and so on, it has
'three days and three nights'. This accounting indicates the
series in its sixfold and Christological entirety.
Part of the rationale of the signification of such semeia
rests upon the time of the occurrence of the two episodes; we
shall put that The Stilling Of The Storm took place
during the morning (prwi~
Matthew 16.3, h(merw~n
Luke 8.22), and The Feeding Of The Four Thousand,
during the precisely complementary interval, twelve hours
prior to/after, the morning, that is, during the 'evening' (oyi/av 16.2), though
not of course on the same day. The connotations of the name
'dove' are thus several in fact. We fully concede the allusion
to the book of Jonah, with its clear mention of the time
interval. This does not proscribe however other purposes
behind the same word. One of these is of course to specify the
identity associated with The Stilling Of The Storm, as
with its complement, The Feeding Of The Four Thousand,
namely the Holy Spirit whom we know from the very inception of
scripture as associated with water:
The earth was still a
desert waste, and darkness lay upon the primaeval deep and
God's wind (myhilo)e:
haw=r ; LXX pneuma
qeou) was moving to and fro over the surface of the
waters. (Genesis 1.2).
And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw
the heavens (ou)ranou\v)
opened and the Spirit (to\
pneu~ma) descending upon him like a dove (peristera\n); (Mark
1.10).
And John bore witness, "I saw the Spirit (to\ pneu~ma) descend
as a dove (peristera\n)
from heaven (e)c
ou)ranou~), and it remained on him." (John 1.32).
We should note the occurrence of the same expression in
the book of Jonah:
When the sun began to shine, God sent a hot east wind (haw=r; ; LXX pneu/mati kau/swnov).
So the sun beat down on Jonah's head,and he grew faint. So
he despaired of life, and said, "I would rather die than
live!" (Jonah 4.8 NET Bible).
The important points are these: we are allowing the two 'sign
of Jonah' sayings in Matthew their fullest referential compass
as recurring not only to the book of Jonah, but to the story
of The Flood, and by extension, to the story of
creation, thereby finally presenting the messianic series as a
sixfold whole. Both the 'three days and three nights' saying
and the narrative of The Flood in its capacity as
creation theology serve as references to the entire messianic
miracle series. One final point concerning the 'dove' as an
invocation of The Flood must claim our attention; at
the conclusion of that narrative we notice not only the role
of the dove, but also the 'sign' of the rainbow, which
immediately confronts us with the phenomenon of seeing itself,
and calls to mind the optic semeia.
In The Flood, the three flights of the dove
square at once with the threefold patterns of the creation
narrative and messianic cycle, just as its references to '7
days' tend towards the same meaning.
Before we pass to a brief exposition of the optic iconography
behind the miracle stories, we need to see that there is yet
another reference to the messianic series, which once again
maintains its integrity. This will justify the attention just
given to the three 'Jonah' references in the last chapter of
John.
JOHN 21
We began by noting the triple usage of the expression 'Simon,
son of John' in this chapter, and a well attested variant
reading of the latter name, 'Jonah'. Even if in the setting of
the first instance of this form of address of Peter by Jesus
(John 1.40-42), we are not evidently in the vicinity of the
sea, in the last, we certainly are, a fact which tells in
favour somewhat for the variant reading. There is no storm
here; nor any appearance of Jesus on the sea. But there is a
miraculous catch of fish, and an episode in which Jesus gives
both fish and bread to the seven disciples. The same or a
similar incident is told in Luke 5.1-11, in the course of
which Simon also, or Simon Peter also, figures
prominently; he is referred to by both names, (Luke 5.5, 8
respectively and once again as Simon (v 10)). But Luke's
account lacks any Eucharistic motif as well as what is equally
notable for us:
When they got out on land,
they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish lying on it, and
bread. Jesus said to them, "Bring some of the fish that you
have just caught." So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the
net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred and fifty-three of
them (e(kato\n
penth/konta triw~n); and although there were so
many, the net was not torn. Jesus said to them, "Come and
have breakfast." Now none of the disciples dared ask him,
"Who are you?" They knew it was the Lord. Jesus came and
took the bread and gave it to them, and so with the fish.
This was now the third time that Jesus was revealed to the
disciples after he was raised from the dead. (John 21.9-14).
This text abounds with threes, so often a veritable formal
signature for the evangelist Mark; there are the three figures
constituting the number of fish, which as we shall argue in a
moment, are as important as the figures in Mark's own
recapitulation of the two miracles of loaves of bread and fish
(Mark 8.11-13, 14-21); as just observed, this episode is
enumerated as the third (tri/ton
v 14) appearance of the risen Lord to the disciples; finally
there are the three times which Jesus puts to Simon Peter the
question concerning his love for him (vv 15-19), these too are
enumerated lest we fail to notice the pattern: ' ... a second
time ... a third time ...' (vv 16-17).
We contend here that efforts on the part of textual critics to
determine the chapter as anything other than an integrated
whole are misguided for failing to notice the underlying theme
- the Eucharist. In its record of Jesus' actions, there is no
mention of 'thanksgiving' as there was in the Johannine
miracle story. The text simply says e!rxetai I)hsou~v kai \lamba/nei to\n a!rton kai\
di/dwsin au)toi~v, kai\ to\ o)ya/rion o(moi/wv -
'Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and so
with the fish.' (21.13) However, both verbs recall John's
recension of The Feeding Of The Five Thousand - e!laben ou)~n tou\v a!rtouv
... die/dwken ... o(moi/wv kai\ e)k tw~n o)yari/wn
... (John 6.11) (The verb rendered 'distributed', (die/dwken), is a
cognate of the verb 'to give'.) Mark has both verbs 'take' and
'give', in both accounts of the two Eucharistic miracles
contained in his gospel (Mark 6.41, 8.6). The occasion John
describes in chapter 21 in itself, the fact that this event
speaks of the risen Christ feeding his disciples, an action
which he then three times enjoins Peter to repeat, surely
settles its Eucharistic status undeniably. But we have to do
with the mysterious or not so mysterious figure, 153, which
has generated speculations ranging from the mundane to the
bizarre.
The Eucharistic-feeding motif is the one single theme which
binds together this final chapter of the gospel of John. From
start to finish, the action gravitates about this idea.
Scholars who have deemed it to consist of two or more parts
must be oblivious to its aesthetic integrity secured by the
prominence and consistency of this theme. Little wonder then
that this cipher, '153', which is really not so enigmatic at
all, combines at a stroke all three Eucharistic miracles, The
Transformation Of Water Into Wine - the first; The
Feeding Of The Four Thousand, the fifth; and The
Feeding Of the Five Thousand, the third. Why does the
ordering of the events vary their chronological sequence?
Quite simply because it takes into account not just the
immanent (feeding) miracles themselves, but the entire sixfold
series. In this series the Pneumatological episodes, The
Stilling Of The Storm, and The Feeding Of The Four
Thousand, are second and second last respectively, or
what is the same thing, second and fifth respectively.
Therefore the enumeration of the feeding events alone, reckons
the inclusion of the three transcendent miracles in its
specification of the innate chiastic complementarity of the
series. In other words, the enumeration of the serial order of
the immanent episodes alone, points just as surely to their
complements. The setting, by the sea again supports this,
since it denotes the same location of two of those miracles.
This figure '153', is extraordinarily concise in its reference
and meaning, since it articulates by means of indicating the
seriality of the feeding events, the entire sixfold series of
messianic miracles. As it now exists, the cipher sits within
its context as a succinct summation of the entire messianic
miracle series and the Eucharist, the last episode now taking
place. It would seem then, that it was included in the gospel
to achieve this very purpose; the final full summation of the
sevenfold messianic series. In other words, this last episode,
may be considered the seventh and final member of the
messianic series, it is for John a Eucharist if not 'the'
Eucharist. Whoever wrote this last chapter of the gospel knew
well enough for sure of the existence of all six of the
miracle stories, even though three of these are missing from
John, and the same author knew also of their chiastic form, just as
that person knew of the Eucharist. We can summarise this
hermeneutic as follows, where the order of the events on the
left, all immanent (feeding) by definition, conforms to their
signification in John 21 as first, fifth and third
respectively. This ordering follows that of the
diurnal/nocturnal sequence. Thus the juxtaposed complements in
one-to-one correspondence according to their Trinitarian
rationale, occur at opposite intervals within the same
twenty-four hour cycle. So for example, the two Christological
events, Transformation and Transfiguration,
take place during the intervals centred on midnight and midday
respectively:
There is only one further point we need to enter here, that of
the normative status of the immanent messianic events. The
author of John 21 tallies the full six episodes, implicitly
adding the seventh, the Eucharist proper, while
referring only to the feeding events. The effect of
simultaneously highlighting their chiastic structure thus both
incorporates the three complementary transcendent episodes and
acknowledges the Eucharist itself, while it also stresses that
these 'feedings' are definitive for this entire class of
events, that is, normative for the series as a whole. The
obvious echo of all of which follows in the ensuing three
times Jesus enjoins Peter:
... "Feed my lambs."
... "Tend my sheep."
... "Feed my sheep." (John 21.15-17)
In the second essay of Miracles
As Metaphysics, we considered the close links between
the three transcendent messianic miracles and various
resurrection narratives in Mark, Matthew and John, having
concentrated on the last gospel. We contended that the three
appearance stories in John, The Appearance To Mary
Magdalen (John 20.11-18), The Appearance To the
Disciples (20.19-23), and Jesus And Thomas
(20-24-29) portrayed the identities of The Transcendent ("The
Father"), The Holy Spirit and The Son, respectively, just as
the three miracle stories did, albeit in relation to the Son.
That is, we postulated the triune rationale behind these texts
as equally and systematically formulated behind the three
miracle narratives, only one of which is contained in John.
Chapter 21 of John needs to be assessed in the light of this
clear pattern which aligns the three prior stories of
appearances of the risen Christ with the three transcendent
miracles. For it delivers to us the fourth and final feeding
episode - again, apparently despite the fact that John lacks The
Feeding Of The Four Thousand, and some would say, also
the Eucharist proper.
There is in this final chapter thus a very clear and certain
summation of the theology of immanence as given in terms of
Christian epistemology-psychology. For it brings into focus as
a whole, not just the three immanent episodes which taxonomise
the perceptual soma,
and in so doing, their three transcendent counterparts, but
all four immanent events. It thus speaks with the utmost
clarity of the manifold of sense-percipience. The ordering of
the three feeding events appears to contradict their
sequential pattern, for if we take the two subspecies
patterned in terms of the three figures, first, fifth and
third, the Pneumatological occasions are ostensibly not the
last, as they were in the creation, Days 3 and 6 being the
final members of their respective halves. But this ordering in
John 21 complies with the occurrence of the events relative to
one another within the nocturnal-diurnal cycle, and it
conforms with the optic semiosis as indicated by the presence
of two references within the narratives, temporal references
to the same twenty-four hour cycle and colour terms.
The several stories of The Flood, The Sign Of
Jonah and The Feeding Of The Four Thousand
dovetail in a way that makes it binding upon us to link the
sevenfold series of both Genesis and the gospels and The
Apocalypse, with what the miracle narrative indicates, the semeia of vision and so
of inscription, of the visible word; that is, the seven or so
visible hues of the spectrum. The utility of these to our task
will be indispensable, for their serial structure will avail
the exposition of the variety of relationships that the
various radicals of consciousness subtend to one another. But
in addition to that, they will also disclose certain aspects
of time, and so of mind, which will be otherwise insusceptible
of description. As qualia, that is as certain
properties or qualities which are visually perceptible, they
will tell us about the entities in question; they will as no
other resource will, put certain judgements about the actual
nature of not only the categoreal forms, but the modes of
intentionality which these entail. To say that the semeioptika perform
certain propositional functions of which no other semiotic
system is capable may be an exaggeration. But its
co-ordination with the acoustic semiosis is invaluable to any
detailed hermeneutic of the contents of the miracle
narratives. Indeed, it will be necessary to use all
three semiotic series if we are to reach any comprehensive and
balanced doctrine of mind.
We have just seen in the 'sign of Jonah' sayings which include
a reference to 'three days and three nights', another
application of the optika vis-a-vis the six conceptual
radicals along with their six perceptual counterparts. Two of
these signs were framed for us in the Matthean redactions of
the 'sign of Jonah' saying. They are the orange of
dawn-morning and the blue of evening-night, which are formally
separated by a twelve hour interval. These designate the
Pneumatological dyads: the conceptual categories, male and
female, and their perceptual equivalents or counterparts,
optic imagination and optic memory respectively. All three
pairs of events, whether 'Days' or messianic miracles, that
is, whether conceptual or perceptual categories, are thus
signified by means of oppositional or complementary optic semeia as these refer to
the diurnal/nocturnal temporal cycle. Later we can and will
utilise also the annual, that is solar, cycle, as well as the
lunar cycle, which will entail a twelvefold system, but for
the moment at least, we will pursue our task as simply as
possible and address the sixfold schema as referent to the
twenty four hour cycle alone. Moreover, we will rely on the
indications given in the miracle narratives, for we have
already noted in the Matthean pericopae the prompt for this
part of the theology of semiotic forms. There are expressions
in the creation taxonomy also which will avail us in this
procedure, but the messianic series remains the best guide,
not only due to its references to colours, but also its
references to time. This link between colour qua light and time is
perfectly consonant with the same semantic in the creation
story.
Just as comprehensibly, both Christological miracles use the
hexad in relation to the Christological categories, which
always serve to focus our endeavours. Those narratives speak
of two processes, 'becoming' in the case of the first and
'changing of form' in the second. These two processes of
transmutation reflect as noted, the relation of God to the
world, and that of the world to God; the first pointing to the
event of birth and the last being a clear reference to the
phenomenon of death, not just the birth and death of the Son,
but also to the same events for ourselves. (In which respect
we must allow that The Transfiguration defers to the
Day 1 rubric which posits Mind, as precisely normative in this
case.) Thus the 'changing of form' (metemorfw/qh Mark 9.2) or 'transfiguration'
of Jesus, is nothing other than his death as a human person, a
fact which Mark and the other synoptists articulate in the
subsequent pericope dealing with Elijah and the Son of man,
and which Luke makes doubly clear in speaking of his, that is
Jesus', 'departure'.
The six conceptual and the six perceptual categories stand in
a relation of one-to-one congruence. So in the examples just
noted, the symbolic masculine and optic imagination are
equally about the transcendent Holy Spirit; whereas the
feminine and optic memory are equally about the immanent Holy
Spirit. This is the logical justification for employing the
optika for both series congruently. The use of the optika must
reflect this; the fact that the same signs designate both
conceptual and perceptual radicals. At the basis of this same
congruence, represented in the two processes of change in the
two Christological 'events', is one and the same entity: a
specific value. In this instance, that of the Holy Spirit, it
is the value beauty. The difference between the two processes
of change, of transmutation, has already been observed. In the
case of immanence ('transformation'), change is continuous and
conforms to the symbolic feminine and to memory; in that of
transcendence ('transfiguration'), it is discrete, conforming
to the symbolic masculine and to imagination. The legitimacy
of this distinction devolves upon the fundamental disparity
between the relationships of the present to the past and to
the future respectively, and is tantamount to the difference
obtaining between unity and identity.
It must be emphasised that what we are about to advance, the
theology of optic semiotic forms as this concerns the Holy
Spirit, in no way depends on either or both of the two 'sign
of Jonah' sayings in the gospel of Matthew. We have already
postulated as the hermeneutic of The Feeding Of The Four
Thousand, the existence of two centres of consciousness
inextricably stemming from the phenomenon of visual sentience
- optic imagination and optic memory. The latter is of course
the topic of the feeding miracle story, and the former, the
topic of its counterpart, The Stilling Of The Storm.
If the theology of optic semiotic forms, (henceforth 'semeioptic' forms and semeioptika), depends
upon any of the biblical texts at all, it is this second of
the miracles of loaves. We must emphasise that the 'sign of
Jonah' logia as we have understood them in Matthew at least,
merely confirm the hermeneutic of the feeding miracle story.
Thus the feeding miracle narrative repeats one of the most
immediately recognisable of all ciphers for the Holy Spirit:
And he asked them, "How
many loaves have you? "They said, "Seven." ( e(pta/) ... and he
took the seven loaves ( e(pta\
a!rtouv) ... And they ate and were satisfied; and
they took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full
( e(pta\ spuri/dav).
And there were about four thousand people. (Mark 8.5-9).
"When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how
many baskets (kofi/nouv)
full of broken pieces did you take up?" They said to him,
"Twelve." "And the seven ( e(pta\) for the four thousand, how many
baskets (spuri/dwn)
full of broken pieces did you take up?" And they said to
him, "Seven." ( e(pta/)
And he said to them, "Do you not yet understand?" (Mark
8.19-21).
It is well worth noting that in both episodes, the recounting
of the miracle itself and the recapitulation of the two
miracles of loaves, which follows it so promptly, the
words for 'loaves' and 'baskets' are sometimes dropped,
making the figures function even more abstractly. It is not
necessary to repeat the arguments resulting in the
hermeneutic. Its further application is what must now
occupy us. In the first place we should observe the clear
function of the repeated figure 7. For if it refers to the
role of visual sentience in human consciousness, then it must
also certainly apply not only to the systematic arrangement of
the narrative cycle of which The Feeding Of The Four
Thousand is part, the sevenfold messianic series, but
equally to those other cycles in Genesis and in The
Apocalypse which are formally consonant with the messianic
events. In other words, the text reflects itself. In bringing
to our notice the phenomenon of vision, and so too the visible
semeia, it is at the same time referring to itself as
manifesting the very patterns inherent in the visible semeia. We notice this
again and again as according with the Johannine and creation
descriptions of mind; for they both depict its reflexive or
self-referential capacity.
The first purpose in applying the hermeneutic therefore must
consist of the recognition that the visible forms of the words
in Genesis, the gospel, and The Apocalypse, in a word, these
'scriptures', all comply with the heptadic schema. This does
not entail that the four series of sevens in The Apocalypse
can be mapped onto the existing relation between the
categoreal morphology that binds together the creation and the
salvific events in a relation summed up in the paradigm
transcendence : immanence, as well as by the various
Christological formula, 'beginning and end' and so on. We have
insisted all along that the categoreal paradigm presents
us with just two relata and their ensuing relatedness.
There are two terms at work here, not three, and we must be
mindful not to multiply our categories beyond the exigencies
of the principle of parsimony. The relation of the contents of
The Apocalypse will necessarily concern us, and these will
become clearer as we proceed, but it will repay us now at the
outset to be constantly aware of the systematically dyadic
relation that obtains between beginning and end as between
creation and salvation. The categories of consciousness are
taxonomically two in number at the most radical of levels; we
know these as conceptual (Genesis) and perceptual (the four
gospels).
There is an obvious reference of the repeated figures in each
of the three feeding miracles to the intertextuality of the
three narrative cycles. Clearly the Christological events
which portray the figure six in relation to the identity of
the Son, can be read in terms of the central relation
obtaining between beginning and end, creation and salvation,
Genesis and the gospel. The Sabbath day in the P narrative is
passed over if not in silence, then without the same import as
that story attaches to the six Days of beginning proper. This
fits it to the Christological purposes of the later narratives
in the messianic series, Transformation Of Water Into Wine
and Transfiguration. If then, we find in the gospel of
John no real formal equivalent to the account of Jesus
instituting the Lord's Supper or Eucharist such as we have it
in the three synoptic gospels and in Paul, that speaks for the
awareness of the author(s) of John of the logical contact
between the two cycles, Days and messianic miracles, as
between the conceptual forms and perceptual forms. The sixfold
enumeration of these leaves the Sabbath-Eucharist
correspondence out of consideration in order to make the
clearer the precise semantic attaching to the Christological
titles as well as to the categoreal paradigm. John's
understanding of the messianic series posits it in relation to
the Christological. If it reduces the categories to the hexad
then it also highlights the singular relationship between
Genesis and gospel as 'messianic'.
Thus the two Christological miracle narratives centre the
theology of semiotic forms for they interrelate the 'two'
members of the canon, the two testaments as reflected in the
events of 'beginning and end'. This reverts to the status of
the categories belonging to the same identity, the Son. For
whereas the repeated fives of the first miracle of loaves
posit the semiosis of the acoustic, it is weighted in favour
of transcendence, just as it identifies the Transcendent. On
the other hand, the repeated figure seven, of the last of the
miracles of loaves, is referent to immanence and the identity
of The Holy Spirit. These formal patterns are immediately
recognizable as configuring essential aspects of the internal
construction of the same two narrative cycles and their
relatedness. There is an arguably implicit reference in the
story of The Feeding Of The Five Thousand to the
organization of the Hebrew canon as it consists of two related
sets of texts, Torah and Megilloth, The
Festival Scrolls. The Hebrew Tanakh collects the twelve
minor prophets on a single scroll, calling them The Book
Of The Twelve. But it would be difficult to ascertain
how widespread knowledge of such formal features as these was
at the time when the two miracles stories were written. In
keeping with this, there is a certain reference to the
internal constitution of the New Testament by means of the
repeated figure seven, indicating the corresponding connection
between the (four) gospels and The Apocalypse.
We do not need to rely on such notions however. For the
rationale which interrelates the three texts concerning us is
the phenomenological one; it adverts to the obvious
orientation of each of the three texts in virtue of a specific
sense-percipient mode. In addition to this, we will
interpret the figures of the three miracle narratives which
logically denote the same three modes of sentience. This we
will do in relation to a theory of language, and
simultaneously, a doctrine of the word, and a theology of
revelation itself. Thus centering the synthesis of the texts,
Genesis 1.1-2.4a and The Apocalypse on the gospels not only
introduces the eschatological dimension first adumbrated in
the story of beginning as the paired rubrics concerning the
eschatological category, the anthropic category, Day 3 and Day
6, major concerns for The Apocalypse. It also reduces to two
relations what might be otherwise reckoned as three divergent
and unrelated terms. The initial or 'beginning' and final or
'end' point of reference for all three texts remains the
gospel. It is not this co-ordination of the three main textual
cycles alone which occupies us, it is the corresponding
co-ordination of their governing phenomenal modes of
sense-percipience, acoustic, haptic and optic, and hence the
prospect they offer to semiotic and linguistic theory as to
the doctrine of revelation.
It will be possible to elaborate this hermeneutic when we come
to deal with the first of the gospels. The point necessary to
grasp here is that of all three episodes, the story of the
miracle at Cana co-ordinates the theology of semiotic forms.
For not only do the two concerns with which it and its
complement, The Transfiguration, concern themselves, the
haptic radicals of consciousness, evince their intermediate
status as to the total disparity between transcendence and
immanence, 'heaven and earth' so to speak, as emblematic of
the Son, and in so doing corroborate the same premise first
predicated of the Christological conceptual categories, mind
and mind : body, but they serve simultaneously to model the
actual correlation between the two canons as between the two
events, 'beginning' and 'end'. The elementary formal logic of
these patterns can be put here. We shall elaborate upon them
when dealing with the gospel of Luke, when we shall have
occasion to consider the nature of the body as semiosis indicative of
the dialectic between identity and unity.
Further to the opening of the first letter of John, and the
introduction to the theology of semiotic forms, we repeat what
was said previously as regards the difference between the
three phenomenal modes of sense-percipience and the categoreal
paradigm: the haptic semeia are weighted according to
neither principle. They do not as the acoustic signs do,
propose more or less exclusively a theology of transcendence;
nor only a theology of immanence, the business of the optic
signs, given that these two interact and are mutually
inclusive according to the bifurcated phonetic and graphic
structure of language itself, and according to their mediation
by the haptic. Alternatively, we say of the haptic semeia as
of the mind : body as conceptual form of unity, that they are
accentuated in both directions at once. They are equally
transcendent and immanent. The peculiar identity of the
Christological categories resides in this fact, and is
manifest in the nature of language itself. If the category
mind : body mediates between primordial and eschatological
categories, then just so does the haptic semiosis mediate
between the acoustic and optic semiotic series.
This corporeal mediation, or co-ordination of the primordial
(archaeological) and teleological (eschatological), itself
confers alterity on the two antithetical semioses as
represented in the two components of the canon, Old and New
testaments as they are known in the Christian tradition.
In short then, the body and haptic sentience as equivocally
determined in respect of transcendence : immanence, entail the
reality of language itself; this will be vital to a doctrine
of revelation. Thus for the conceptual polarity of mind as for
its perceptual pole, the intervenient and Christological
categories correlate both enumerative systems detailed in the
feeding miracles, those of The Feeding Of The Five
Thousand and The Feeding Of The Four Thousand.
Without the story of the miracle at Cana and its complement, The
Transfiguration, we can never make any sense at all of
any of the many numerical details of the immanent messianic
events, including the Eucharist.
transcendence : immanence
space : space-time (beginning
mind :
mind-body and
male : male-female
end)
transcendence
:
immanence
acoustic
haptic
optic
The implications of the archaeological and teleological semioses, the acoustic
and optic, and of the haptic and Christological semiosis for a Christian
theory of language as for its doctrine of revelation are far
reaching. We must understand at once the primordiality of
orality, or the orality of primordiality. If we take the
creation story in terms of its own self-referential nature,
its own operation as 'logos',
then the acoustic semiotic forms, the patterns reflected in
the story of The Feeding Of The Five Thousand, signal
the orality of the word. On the other hand, its inscripted
form, its graphic and visible mode, that of 'scripture' as a
whole, of which The Apocalypse must remain in some sense, the
final exemplar, stands in direct opposition to this very
primordiality. The final or written epiphany of language as of
the word, its self-constitution as text, and as all but
palpable, something which orality necessarily lacks, stands in
antithesis to the primordial. There is thus an absolute
discrepancy as far as the theology of semiotic forms is
concerned, between beginning and end of the word; between the
sound and the sight of the same. This collocation, the
juxtaposition of the primordial and eschatological
(consequent) natures of the word are disclosed in the haptic
as in the soma. That
is, the resolution between these ultimately variant aspects of
language is the business of the theology of hapsis. In this
way, cognition and conation both may be understood as
embodied, and language must begin with the body itself. The
identifiable membra
disjuncta of the body, those of its components or
elements which are nevertheless whole, as fully integrated as
immanence itself, these establish the basis of communication.
This 'erotism' of the word, the tangibility or haptic reality
of communication as of physical love, will be discussed in the
first of the gospels at which we must look, Luke, in the
context of the intentionality of desire and the conceptual
form soma.
We cannot press into service a specific
sense-percipient modal propensity vis-a-vis each
gospel. Even if the sense-percipient manifold, the soma, the body is
reckoned in this fourfold way, it will never serve to
explicate the specific natures of each of the four gospels. We
must look elsewhere. The inapplicability of the
fourfold structure of soma
as a manifold of sense-percipience to the fourfold form of the
gospels, should be also at once clear from the fact that no
one of these in particular can be deemed Eucharistic, to the
exclusion of the remaining three. All four gospels gravitate
towards the final episode in the messianic series, the
Eucharist, including the gospel of John. Whether the final
chapter of that gospel is intended largely to make up for any
apparent absence of a narrative relating the institution of
the Lord's Supper or not, and so exhibits a synoptic
provenance, does not belong to the discussion here; but we
must observe the clear existence of a theology of the
Eucharist in John 21, as in the discourse relating to The
Feeding Of The Five Thousand, Jesus The Bread Of
Life (John 6.22-40). In just this sense, we again
confront the collusion that occurs between the mode
representative of the Son, the haptic, and the Eucharistic
modes(s), smell-taste. The prevalence of references to taste
in the Christological narratives, the first and last miracles
of the messianic series, and the story of Lazarus, has been
noted. It is equally clear that no one evangelist evinces a
clear inclination for any particular form of sentience.
Even so, all four gospels may be deemed 'Eucharistic', and
this renders by dint of the closest possible intimacy between
touch and taste, what we have put concerning the haptic
orientation of the gospels. Just such an orientation,
the apparent predilection of the gospels for the haptic,
reiterates the mediatory nature of hatpicity itself, the fact
that it is weighted neither in favour of transcendence nor
immanence, but realizes both equally, as do the two conceptual
Christological categories, soma
and mind. This intervenience, this mediation of what are the
otherwise disparate conceptual and sentient modal entities
reflecting transcendence and immanence, is put in the above
data. It should follow from what was said at the beginning of
this study that we may attribute the three phenomenal modes to
the three instances in scripture of texts given according to
serial forms of order. Thus it was argued that The Apocalypse
does exhibit a certain predilection for that form of
sentience, vision, which identifies the Holy Spirit. Nor need
we resile from the observation concerning the prevalence of
the acoustic mode in Genesis and by extension in John.
We must emphasise that the same formal systems disclosed in
the pericopae formulate the actual texts. We have then, twelve
healings, twelve oral traditions. (We shall later deal with
the two stories of Simon Peter's Mother-In-Law and The
Syrophoenician Woman's Daughter a propos of this
reckoning.) That they were passed down to us in this way is
probable as noted from the many variations involved in their
several recensions. Not that this counts against them. As for
the written 'gospel', a word fairly infrequently used in the
New Testament, but remarkably present in The Apocalypse,
matters are very much otherwise. Not only are all seven
accounts of the messianic episodes in closest conformity with
one another as to their details, but their very existence as
inscribed places them at significant remove from the healing
miracle pericopae, and also completes the promulgation of the
gospel as finally written. It achieves this in just the same
way as the oral kerygma, that of the reflexive, the
self-referential, so pronouncing the idea of selfhood
indivisibly from the content.
The Apocalypse, whatever else may be true of the time of its
composition, articulates as written, the very last stage
of this process of the embodiment of the Word. Hence this
coherence must be the first recourse for the hermeneutic of
the miracles. We cannot suppose, nor have I supposed, that the
evangelists were prescient enough of the course of the
evolution of human culture to know anything much concerning
the final determination of the dodecaphonic series, and the
various acoustic scales, which replicate the sevenfold,
sixfold, and fivefold patterns of the three miracle
narratives. That was never posited. But that they might indeed
have understood at one or another level of consciousness, just
as John seems to have understood, the clearest possible link
between language itself and the semiotic variance between
heard and seen signs, and the role of the intervenience of
haptic semiosis in all of this, as again expressed in the
opening of the first letter, this certainly seems not simply
possible, but very probable.
THE SIGNS OF THE DOVE
I have not found one work
which dealt in any way with the figures of these miracles.
Commentaries which are intended to explain the Gospels line
by line suddenly skip over entire verses when they come to
the miracles of the multiplication of bread and fish.
A clear example of what may
be termed resistance to understanding is provided by the
first rate commentary by Father Raymond E. Brown to the
gospel of John in the Anchor Bible. He includes a
presentation in table form of all details of the two
miracles of multiplication, lining up in parallel columns
against each other the two miracles according to each of the
four gospels. Every single item in the accounts is compared,
but the figures in the miracles are left out. The same blind
spot is to be found in similar comparisons by other
scholars. (See Livio C. Stecchini, A History Of Measures,
Part IV: Hebrew Measures, They
Have Eyes And Do Not See.)
We should never expect to understand these narratives
without some conviction that the numbers contained within
them, are at least as meaningful as the words which comprise
the text, assuming for the moment the existence of some
kind of difference between numbers and words. Yet that
invariably happens. Few if any interpretations of the
narratives even broach the subject. The figures in the texts,
figures which are the same in all synoptic versions of the
narratives as well as in John's account of The Feeding Of
The Five Thousand are generally passed over in silence
as Livio Stecchini justifiably and indignantly observes.
Indeed in the recapitulation of both miracles of loaves and
fish in Mark (8.14-21), where the same details are faithfully
repeated, Jesus reproaches his disciples for their 'hardness
of heart' (Mark 8.17), and their failure to understand (v 21).
These same reproaches still stand; they indict contemporary
theologies which purport to deal with these very narratives
while ignoring the numerical details. No reasonable
hermeneutic of the three feeding miracles can afford to
neglect these most salient details of the narratives, the
figures. Furthermore no truly biblical theology of the
Eucharist itself, can evade the same responsibility, given
that the feeding miracle stories are intrinsically germane to
it. Reading the events of either series, beginning or end, in
terms of a semiosis of the hues of the visible spectrum is at
last a start towards unraveling some of the pedagogical
objective behind Mark's very purposive accounts of the
stories. Theological method may not do without such a
procedure; even though we shall argue later that it is
necessary initially to dispense with the Pneumatological
occasions in search of the meaning of the fourfold form of the
gospels, and even though the acoustic semeia will fully
articulate the forms of relatedness and the doctrine of
intentionality (consciousness) as an essential component of
Markan metaphysics.
Why methodologically employ such 'signs', the semeioptika? Is
it merely for the re-enchantment of theology? There is no
reason for theology to remain monochromatic, or achromatic,
and still less why it should remain innumerate. The
semiological factors in the theology of semiotic forms occur
hand in hand. There is no other way to begin the exposition of
the details in the miracle narrative, The Feeding Of The
Four Thousand, which are of such import to Mark than by
means of the semeioptika. Colours are in a sense, inscribed
upon everything visible to us. If we are to understand the
messianic miracles, we are to understand the fact of this
phenomenon as incorporated quite literally not just in one
particular member of the seven episodes, The Feeding Of
The Four Thousand, and to codify the entities in
question, both conceptual and perceptual radicals of mind
accordingly. We are also by the same means to begin to pursue
a doctrine of revelation itself. For the tradition as written,
inscribed as well as passed on orally, demands the same method
of understanding. Indeed it is this written tradition
with which we have most to deal. This does not mean simply The
Apocalypse alone, that most 'written' part of the whole
written tradition, and the most abstruse book in the canon. It
means the systematic entirety which is the theology of
semiotic forms, and which as 1 John suggests is more than
merely tangential to the doctrine of the Word.
Here at the beginning of the theology of semiotic forms, it
will greatly assist us in simplifying matters and in
forestalling misunderstandings if we conjure with the semeioptic series. Its
elements will moreover be available to those of us who choose
to avail ourselves of visualization techniques in Christian
meditation. That is, semeioptika commend themselves at the
level of praxis as well as that of doctrine. We shall deal
first with the Pneumatological semeioptikon in association
with the transcendent term of the anthropic category, the
conceptual form symbolic masculine, identifying the
transcendent Holy Spirit. We encounter the semeion for the
optic imagination, the subject of The Stilling Of The
Storm, in the allusions in Matthew 16.1-4, the
perceptual radical analogous to the conceptual radical,
symbolic masculine. We need not put too fine an edge on this.
For above all, we have urged that the immanent inclination of
vision itself towards unity, is immediately evinced in the
very fact that spectral hues proximate to one another,
colours in the visible spectrum which are contiguous, tend
imperceptibly to fuse. This phenomenon puts better than
anything else, that which is germane to consciousness as
intentionality: wholeness, integrity, unity. If Matthew's use
of 'fiery' red of
the morning in connection with the time of day, as well as
miracle story may allude to both incipient intervals,
dawn and morning, The Walking On The Water and The
Stilling Of The Storm, that is good and well. For these
two forms of the imagination, the 'first' and 'last' forms,
the acoustic and the optic, are ordered in the texts in the
same way, proximately, in the greatest possible propinquity.
This means that such forms of imagination are mutually
compatible, as are their equivalent forms of memory. Even so,
it will be possible just as it is necessary, to isolate one of
these texts, and so too, one form of the imaginal
consciousness, as signified by the expression 'fiery red'.
Here we can repeat the bare outlines of the diurnal/nocturnal
sequence with which the six messianic miracles are
synchronised. The details of the argument remain to be
rehearsed. If we adopt the sixfold schema rather than include
the Eucharist so as to reckon with the full compass of seven
events, that is because of the centrality to the theology of
semiotic forms of the hexad as already noted. The procedure
here therefore follows the Christocentrism of the texts in
their co-ordination. It is in the later consideration of the
concatenation of four sevenfold serial events in The
Apocalypse, and in relation to the Pneumatological doctrines
espoused by the same, that it will be incumbent on us to
reconfigure the semeioptika in their role. We shall also have
to include the fivefold forms referred to in the other similar
miracle of loaves. That is, we shall have to bring into mutual
correlation the numerical details of both stories, hence the
obvious and simplest way to set out is by means of the shape
central and mediatory to both as just indicated, the
Christological hexad. We enter here also, in advance of the
full argumentation, the semeioptika assigned to the messianic
miracles.
WALKING ON WATER
|
STILLING THE STORM
|
TRANSFIGURATION
|
FEEDING THE 5,000
|
FEEDING THE 4,000
|
TRANSFORMATION
|
dawn
|
morning
|
midday
|
afternoon
|
evening
|
midnight
|
There is nothing new for the history of thought, in
methodically relating analogously the hues of the spectrum to
the intervals of the twelve hour diurnal cycle.
Aristotle carried out the same procedure in De Metereologica (See
Color Systems: Color order systems in art and science,
Aristotle). Obviously with results quite different from
those given here. Our premise differs from his own
empirical method. At its base, stands our conviction implicit
in the creation narrative that time is a radical constituent
of human (conceptual) consciousness, and that it is of
fundamental importance to religious consciousness in
particular. This means that the theological exposition of the
fourfold form of the gospel will have recourse to the same
fact: the pertinence of time both to the Markan catechetical
project, his metaphysical doctrine, and to religious praxis,
the ritual celebration of times and 'seasons'. This last is of
course the operative word for us, since it is only in relation
to the broader annual pattern that such an analogy, that
between the semeioptika and the cardinal points of the
(annual) temporal cycle, will serve the exposition of what is
rudimentary to the morphology of all mandalas, their fourfold
structure.
The method we are employing here is not empirical, insofar as
it does not depend on any supposed observations of particular
colours at particular times of day. Again in departure from
Aristotle and others, we shall also plot the semiosis
consisting of analogous relations of the visible spectrum and
the annual cycle. But our procedure relies in the first place
on the analogy between the six visible hues as these are
sequentially or serially ordered in the spectrum and the
diurnal/nocturnal cycle, and sets them in one-to-one
correspondence with the contents of revelation. We have
emphasised that the spectrum is polarised; it has a
'beginning' and an 'end'. We have thus taken the beginning as
the red end, repeating the pattern of the colours as every
school child learns them: red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo.
(Regarding the connection between 'the sign of Jonah' and the
'sign of the rainbow' in the story of Noah and the flood, see
the following two articles in The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning: Chad
Pecknold, Reading the Sign of Jonah: A
Commentary on our Biblical Reasoning and Rachel
Muers, Reading the Rainbow).
La Rochefoucauld's maxim is here pertinent: Le soleil ni
la mort ne se peuvent regarder fixement. ('Neither the
sun nor death can be viewed constantly.') Even so, just as our
eyes cannot tolerate prolonged contemplation of the sun
itself, they nevertheless can and do enjoy sustained gaze upon
its reflected light; the colours of the visible spectrum. So
it is with the soul vis-à-vis death and time respectively. The
contemplation of time is de facto the contemplation of
death.
Matthew
16.1-4: purra/zei
Matthew twice uses the verb purra/zw meaning 'to be fiery red, of the
sky', to depict the colour of 'the heaven' on the morning of
an approaching storm. Liddell And Scott cite its use in
Josephus, Pausanius, and Strabo as well as in the New
Testament, but only here in Matthew. The Apocalypse uses purro\v both of the
second horse to appear at the opening of the seven seals, and
of the 'great red dragon', Apocalypse 6.4, 12.3. The
Stilling Of The Storm has already been told (Matthew
8.23-27). The root of the word for this hue is 'fire'. The
translations almost always given in The Apocalypse
notwithstanding, we are reluctant on several counts to
translate the term that Matthew uses, simply as 'red'. First
we should note that a word for the same is extant in Greek, eruqro/v, occurring in
Acts 7.36 and Hebrews 11.29 of the 'Red Sea'. Secondly, this
derivative of the word for 'fire' occurred in the compounds
'red-haired' (pu/rro-qrix)
or 'red-bearded' (purro-gen/eiov).
Yet again, the words describing the redness of skin used the
former, thus, e)ruqrai/nomai:
'to blush', 'to become red', and e)ruqrai/nw: 'to paint red', 'to rouge'.
Considering the differences in these two applications to
anatomical features, hair/beard colour and skin colour, we can
more exactly determine the meaning of 'fiery' as a
Pneumatological signifier. Colour terms are notoriously
slippery and we need to be sure just what is intended in the
sign of Jonah logion. Since the cognate of 'fire' is used of
the stormy sky in the morning and also of the colour of hair
and of beards, we can legitimately propose that what is meant
is akin to that which we understand by the expression
'orange', the predominant colour of fires, which Luke also
will associate with the Holy Spirit in a description that also
involves visionary experience:
And suddenly a sound came
from heaven, like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled
all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared (w!fqhsan) to them
tongues of fire (puro\v),
and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled
with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as
the Spirit gave them utterance. (Acts 2.2-4).
This brings us to the next
consideration; the story of the creation of 'mankind' during
the sixth day:
And God said: 'Let us make man (mdf)f) in our own image, after our
likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the
sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and
over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that
creeps upon the earth (Cre)f).'
And God created man (mdf)f) in his own image ...
(Genesis 1.26, 27 NET Bible.)
The rubric describing the sixth Day, has for its counterpart
in the theology of transcendence, Day 3. On the third Day both
types of plants are produced. We have interpreted the two
dyads as representative of the instantiation of the Holy
Spirit in sexual dimorphism, male and female. The degree to
which transcendence is applicable in this final and indeed
eschatological category is circumscribed. Nonetheless all the
entities in these taxa, the two types of conceptual entities
given in the halves of the narratives, are formulated
according to the same categoreal paradigm, transcendence :
immanence. This entails that a transcendent form obtains for
the anthropic just as for the other categories. We refer to
this as 'symbolic masculine'. The word 'man' used in the story
of the last day of the creation proper, is a generic term,
which the Septuagint renders similarly: a)nqrw~pon.
Nevertheless, the link with the previous 'beginning' half of
the narrative is ensured by this same expression. In every
case, Days 1 and 4, Days 2 and 5, and Days 3 and 6, we have to
consider that the preferred stance of the author is that of
transcendence. This was what was meant by saying that the
first three Days represent normative occasions for what is at
stake - conceptual forms, true ideas. Therefore to miss the
certain invocation of the role of the masculine here, even
where the feminine stands as emblematic of the conjunction
male and female, is
mistaken. With this in mind we should observe that this is
effectively the second allusion to a colour word in the
scriptures:
md):
qal w,md:)F:
be red; I mdf)f:
people, men; III mdf)f:
n. pers., Adam, first in Gn 4.25, 5.1a, 3, 5, IC 1.1; IV mdf)f = I hmfdf)a:fa ground;
... surface of the earth Zc 9.1; ... mdO)f (4x) mwOd)f (1x) colour
of blood, red (-brown) Gn 25.30. (A Concise Hebrew And Aramaic Lexicon Of The Old
Testament, p.4.)
Here we encounter a longstanding difficulty associated
with all language referring to colour, and indeed with sense
perception in general. The history of language is also the
history of consensus or accord concerning entities as
'subjective' as percepta. 'Red' is among the first of
references to any hue in many languages. (See World Atlas of Language
Structures Online). Nevertheless, colour terms often
expose language at its most duplicitous. The surest way to
represent, that is refer to, any colour, is literally to
exhibit it. So once again, because soils present an
extraordinary range of colours, predominantly browns, reds,
ochres, yellows, and greys, it may seem insuperably difficult
to fix any specific meaning to the term as precisely referent
to a known colour. In accordance with the hermeneutic of the
creation story the specific rubric denoting the symbolic
masculine is that of Day 3, which speaks of the two types of
plants as produced by the earth or ground. We posited that
these stand in relation to the male and female of Day 6, but
there, in the more definitive account of the Pneumatological
category, the anthropic is finally realised, because logically
placed in the immanent second half of the narrative, in favour
of which this particular form of unity is weighted, the male
and female as sexually dimorphic and conjunct relata manifest
the eschatological contrastively to the primordial.
This meant that the anthropic itself should be subsumed under
the symbolic feminine, and the symbolic masculine understood
as that first expressed in terms of transcendence, fission,
separation, the condition of the two types ('kinds') of
plants. Effectively then, the hermeneutic reads the Day 3
narrative as denoting the symbolic masculine. Thus the
plants signify a method of generation, the asexual, distinct
from the final ordering of the human couple. In just this
respect they denote the symbolic masculine which insists on
the concept of identity, symbolic masculine being the category
under which either the exclusively masculine or exclusively
feminine are subsumed. The point is that as in each occasion
of transcendence, there is no commerce, no transaction, no
fusion between the two. It is to this rubric of Day 3
signifying the application to the anthropic of the nature of
transcendence then, that in keeping with the hermeneutic we
should take the term denoting both 'ground' or 'surface of the
earth' and its related colour term 'red', 'red (-brown)'.
Although the Day 6 rubric does include the proper noun 'Adam',
the Day 3 story does not. This name will be the subject of the
paronomasia establishing the link between the generic term
'man' (humankind) and the word 'ground' or 'soil' in the
ensuing J narrative of Adam and Eve, and of course the Day 3
story does indeed mention 'the earth' (Cre)e Genesis 1.10,
11, 12). Of these two narratives, the former is the most
important for us, since we are working on the temporal
sequence given by the messianic series rather than that of the
Days. We should note in direct support of this
link, the mention of 'three days' in both accounts of The
Feeding Of The Four Thousand, Mark's and Matthew's. The
references to the humans in both narratives, P and J, in close
association with the 'ground', or 'soil', or 'earth',
establishes something of the illuminative power of the optic
semeion, amber, or orange, as a sign for both radicals of
mind, the symbolic masculine and optic imagination. This first
association between the transcendent Holy Spirit and the
'earth', 'ground' and so on, may be the reason for the
proliferation of references to jewels in The Apocalypse. It
connects directly with the tradition of the breast-piece of
the high priest's accoutrements, which was adorned with twelve
stones representing the twelve tribes and is writ large in the
book of Ezekiel, so much of which functions as a prompt for
that part of The Apocalypse which must concern any discussion
of the forms of the gospel, and immanence: the four living
creatures. In the latter as in Ezekiel the stones are
representative of these collectively identifiable groups. We
have consistently associated the attenuated concept of
identity in the case of the anthropic category, the symbolic
masculine, with the same, collective or generic identity, the
identity of one's own 'kind'. An equally common metaphor for
the transcendent Holy Spirit is that of fire, and it too will
be resumed in the last book of the canon, further to the
precedents established in Ezekiel. That there is a logical
thread binding the several notions light, fire, and colour is
obvious enough.
The creation taxonomy is arranged serially. There can be no
doubting that as the concept of time is so central to its
meaning, it is a logically ordered sequence, whose contents
are arranged in a serial form of order. But is it an actual
temporal one? With the achievement of the archaeological week
and the institution of Sabbath, we can see something of
mundane lived time, but the six conceptual categories are
presented distinguishably from this. The hermeneutic which
posits the conceptual categories as pervasive, ultimate,
epistemic and psychic generalities does not require that we
read the hexadic structure of the narrative in this way. In
the first instance, the interpretation rested upon the tenet
that the story's paramount concern is mind, principally
transcendent mind. There is a definite relation between the
two entities, time and mind, this after all is set out in The
Transfiguration. Something of the kind is set out in
evolutionary theoretical accounts of the pre-history of
humankind. Only in the latter case of course what we mean is
the mind : body unity, the psychophysical.
The abiding perspective of the creation story remains that of
transcendence, and this must qualify any understanding of the
conceptual categories as serially ordered in virtue of a
temporal scale of whatever sort. The two primary concerns that
shape the awareness of the author(s) P, space or 'the
heavens', and mind, and so, Transcendence, must repudiate the
organization of the conceptual forms as a graded hierarchy
unless that be with recourse to the insights that are to be
provided by the messianic series, since it is there that we
encounter the description of actual time (space : time), which
will portray in terms of its perceptual manifestation, this
same scaled hierarchy. Here is the reason after all for
accepting the sequence of the messianic miracles as
definitive. They portray events clearly located within the
spatiotemporal continuum; they deal with the data of
consciousness, as these obtain inseparably from what we mean
by time (space : time). But just as surely, the two
series are ordered differently, a major part of the meaning of
the messianic events is the consequence of their chiastic
arrangement. The messianic series certainly exhibits
adaptation of the paradigms set out in the story of beginning.
In view of this, in reckoning the proper optic semeion for the
events under consideration, The Stilling Of The
Storm and the Day 3 rubric, it is vital to consider the
messianic event by reason of its provision of actual temporal
criteria. These are the outcome of (i) its sequential
location, and (ii) actual temporal references which also
assist us to resolve uncertainty.
In the brief introduction to the hermeneutic of The
Feeding Of The Four Thousand, we observed the use made
by astrophysics, and by spectography in particular, of the
hues of the visible spectrum. The latter utilises the inherent
polarity of the spectrum. Consequently it speaks of a red
shift and a blue shift; of lights sources moving away from the
observer and of those moving towards the observer
respectively. This same polarity fits the categoreal paradigm.
We can co-ordinate both the archaeological category, space :
time and the teleological category, male : female, just as we
did for the categoreal analogy of immanence. Thus it was put
with reference to the intermediate event, that of
psychophysicality, that the symbolic masculine and the vector
present-to-future, and the symbolic feminine and the vector
present-to-past, stand analogously to the inherent polarity of
the optika. The real import of the categoreal analogy of
immanence is not effectively, merely the alignment of the
masculine with the future and conversely that which occurs
between the feminine and the past, but of the eschatological
category itself, male and female, with the entirety of the
percipient modes, those of imagination and memory
respectively. These modes are to be thought of as an unity in
the first instance, as must be suggested by the principle of
immanence: male and female. However, notwithstanding its own
innate paradoxes, imagination presents us with virtual
transcendence, which means virtual distinguishability. In the
case of Ezekiel for example, we see the prevalence of optic
sentience over other forms of the percipient. (In the
discussion of the forms of intentionality which is to follow,
we shall notice of the form of intentionality proper to optic
imagination, just how appositely it fits with his
incorporation of the theme of movement in his visions. This is
so often a feature of portrayals of the Holy Spirit in the
literature, we saw it first in the opening verses of Genesis.)
As to the sequence of the Pneumatological miracles, the second
and fifth of the chiasmos, they are so to speak, of the
essence of betweeness. They sit between the two pairs which
identify now Transcendence and now the Son, and here
once more we can envisage the very same theme - that of
movement, of an intervening phase, of transition from an
initial to a final state. We can revert to what has already
been said in relation to the polarity of the diurnal/nocturnal
cycle. The distinguishing criterion is that of the
increasing/diminishing light, so that the entire spectrum if
it is to be mapped onto the same, must contain an equal number
of members for the two halves of the twenty-four hours. In the
second essay of Miracles As Metaphysics, we introduced
this pattern of the diurnal/nocturnal cycle vis-a-vis the six
messianic miracles. We have a clear and certain indication
from Mark as to the time of the occurrence of the first of the
three transcendent episodes. We recall that it recapitulates
the 'first' of the conceptual forms, the archaeological
initiation of space, the primordial entity par excellence, in
terms of the percipient manifold. Therefore the first of
the optika must be proper to these things - space in itself as
conceptual form (Day 2), and acoustic imagination (The
Walking On The Water), the perceptual equivalent. That
temporal reference, repeated verbatim in Matthew, (Mark 6.48 peri\ teta/rthn fulakh\n th~v
nukto\v: 'about the fourth watch of the night'
cf. Matthew 14.25 teta/rth|
de\ fulakh~| th~v nukto\v: 'in the fourth watch of
the night'), tells for the fact that the miracle occurs in the
first of the six intervals of four hours each. That is, it
takes place in the first of the three intervals during which
the light increases as the sun moves towards its zenith. It
will be this episode of course which is to be signified by the
very first, 'beginning' optikon at the transcendent (solar)
pole of the spectrum, red.
The Time Of The
Stilling Of The Storm
Matthew presents no temporal construct regarding when the
event took place. This is certainly passing strange given the
working assumption that he was copying from Mark who begins
his account:
On that day (h(me/ra|) when
evening (o)yi/av)
had come ... (Mark 4.35);
and given moreover, that Luke flatly contradicts this:
One day (mia~| twn h(merw~n)
he got into a boat ... (Luke 8.22).
Mark of course does not mention the length of the journey,
none of the three do. But even allowing for the intervention
of the stormy weather it would be amiss to reckon it such
lengthy journey as to have taken the entire night, thus
fitting with the morning arrival depicted in Mark 5.1.
Matthew's parallel text not only omits the initial reference
to time which we find in Mark, it also lacks the ensuing
statement of Jesus to his disciples of his intention, having
it at 8.18:
On that day, when evening
had come, he said to them, "Let us go across to the other
side." And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the
boat, just as he was. And other boats were with him. (Mark
4.35, 36);
And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed
him. (Matthew 8.23).
Matthew's mise-en-scene here is somewhat sudden. 'The' boat
suggests that we ask, 'Which boat?' There has been no prior
mention of a boats nor of boats. The last explicit reference
to place was to Simon Peter's house where his mother-in-law
lay ill with a fever (Matthew 8.14). In the Matthean text
there is an intervening couplet of parables regarding
dwellings:
And a scribe came up and
said to him, "Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go."
And Jesus said to him, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the
air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his
head." Another of the disciples said to him, "Lord, let me
first go and bury my father." But Jesus said to him, "Follow
me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead." (Matthew
19-22).
It is at the beginning of this pericope containing the two
sayings that we find:
Now when Jesus saw great
crowds around him, he gave orders to go over to the other
side. (8.18).
The statement regarding Jesus' intention and the reference to
time both thus bear the traces of redaction. This is neither
the first nor the last of Matthew's emendations of the Markan
text which we may suppose him to have been following. Mark
much earlier in the piece, at the beginning of chapter 4,
provided the setting:
And he began to teach
beside the sea. And a very large crowd gathered about him,
so that he got into a boat and sat in it on the sea, and the
whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. (Mark 4.1).
A collection of parables follows, notably The Sower
and considerable text on the purpose of parables and the
explication of this, one of his most important parables (Mark
4.10-12, vv 13-20); A Light Under A Bushel (vv
21-25); The Growing Seed (26-29); The Mustard Seed
(vv 30-32); and finally, two verses again on the use of
parables (vv 33-34). In all of which there has been no
apparent deviation from the previous location.
Luke's text previously has had Jesus traversing cities and
villages with 'the twelve' and also some women. His collection
of parables prior to the miracle story more closely resembles
that of Mark, but there is no prior setting beside the sea for
these. We thus have three witnesses and absolutely no multiple
attestation about the time of the event. Luke and Mark in fact
contradict one another, since for Luke clearly the event
occurs during the day. We are unable to argue from silence,
but at least this contradiction suggests the temporal clause
in Mark to be redactional. In all three cases (Mark 5.1-20,
Matthew 8.28-34, Luke 8.26-39), the healing of The
Gerasene Demoniac - in Matthew, two demoniacs - follows
the crossing during which the sea had been calmed. Clearly
there is a theological link between the two miracles. The
latter one presents nature in a demonic guise. And if we are
to make any sense at all of this strand of biblical
metapsychology, there is no better place to begin than here.
Nature itself as well as human nature does manifest an aspect
that can only be called 'demonic' - here it is the symbolic
masculine in its destructive aspect which confronts Jesus. The
meaning of the healing narrative is the conceptual form now
depicted in the Markan twelvefold series just as it was in the
Day 3 rubric. Thus the messianic miracle at sea recounted
immediately prior to the healing, so places the perceptual
structure, optic imagination in closest proximity to the
conceptual form, symbolic masculine. (We find this and
similar patterns elsewhere in the gospel, for example, the
close proximity of the two healings, The Leper and The
Paralytic, Mark 1.40-45, and 2.12, which locate the
perceptual form haptic imagination vis-a-vis the conceptual
form mind.) The provenance of both components of
mind in this case is the transcendent Holy Spirit. Hence the
miracle at sea is portrayed in terms very similar to the
'exorcism'. This particular healing story is very
clearly for Mark as for Matthew and Luke, about the symbolic
masculine. So once again, we are in the province of the
Pneumatological. The storm at sea and the powers extant in the
figure, or figures whom Jesus heals, are one and the same. On
this account the cure of the Gerasene ('Gadarene'?) man takes
place during the morning, Mark telling us that: 'And when he
saw Jesus from afar, he ran and worshiped him;' (Mark 5.6), so
clearly by the time of the arrival on the other side of the
sea, it is morning. In view of these facts, and since the
temporal clause 'when evening had come' finds no support
from Matthew and is moreover contradicted by Luke, we are
justified in questioning its value. But there is one other
point to consider, and that is Matthew's use of a temporal
adverb in his discussion of the 'sign of Jonah' pericope:
Matthew 16.3: prwi~
This word is usually translated 'in the morning', although
'early' is a reasonable alternative. We find the same
expression in John 18.28, just after the story of the cock
crowing and signaling the fulfillment of the prophecy of
Peter's denial, a more exact and explicit reference, and it is
used also in Acts 28.23, there in juxtaposition to evening, a)po\ prwi~ e(/wv e(spe/rav,
'from morning till evening'. John's example is salient, for it
complies with the sense in Matthew. Once again it is certain
that the colour indicative of the approaching storm to be
visible, must occur after the period initiating the diurnal
half of the cycle. For this latter interval of course belongs
to The Walking On The Water, and we possess a clear
marker as to its temporality - 'about the fourth watch of the
night'. (Matthew clearly associates Peter with that event
which initiates the chiasmos from its centre and which mirrors
space, the initiating event unparalleled in this capacity.)
This means that The Walking On the Water sits
on the cusp between night and day, marking the very initiation
of the same. The Pneumatological episodes are located
internally within the chiastic structure, as second and fifth,
a locus which supports their processive role in keeping with
the identity of the Holy Spirit, to whom the notion of
movement is so often ascribed. The Johannine epilogue
made this quite certain by means of referring to The
Feeding Of The Four Thousand as fifth, simultaneously
referring to the order of the companion event, The
Stilling Of The Storm as second. It thereby recalls the
importance of serial order for the messianic events generally,
as well as their chiastic arrangement. Thus the assignation to
the second miracle of the series, The Stilling Of The
Storm of the second hue of the spectrum receives support
from this source also. Given so many considerations, the use
of 'evening' in Mark, which in any case, applies to the
embarkation only, should not be allowed to obscure the pattern
of events. We have more than sufficient warrant for the claim
that the Pneumatological miracle at sea takes place during the
morning, the interval succeeding the dawn, and the second of
the six durations dividing the twenty-four hour cycle. Its
semeioptikon is therefore as Matthew has already put, the one
we see occupying the second position in the visible
spectrum beginning at the 'solar' (red) end.
Designating both Pneumatological radicals, optic memory (The
Stilling Of The Storm), and symbolic masculine (Day 3,
and again in the twelvefold healing series, The Gerasene
Demoniac), by the same chromatic value which we have
translated as 'orange' or 'amber', is confirmed by the optic
signifier given above, the term used twice in Matthew
16.1-2, purra/zei;
by the temporal reference in 16.3 to 'morning'; and also by
the serial contiguity of the miracle story with that for which
there is a precise temporal reference, The Walking On the
Water.
The Time Of The Feeding
Of The Four Thousand
This narrative has so much potential for the hermeneutics of
all the narratives which concern us, that it is difficult to
know where to begin. That is because the very narratives
themselves are written visible texts, and this particular
miracle narrative itself taxonomises the functions of optic
memory in consciousness. The miracle story therefore brings to
our attention the existence in either cycle, Genesis and
gospel, of a sevenfold series; but of course it points beyond
there to the same morpheme in The Apocalypse. The word
'morpheme' is intended to convey that these three series
remain consistent. Their semantic value and import for
Christian metaphysics insists on as much. We must therefore
attempt to integrate all three, even though until now, it it
has been two series, those of creation and salvation, the Days
and the messianic events, which have claimed the bulk of our
attention. In the first of the messianic episodes, mention is
made of this broader pattern:
Now six stone jars were
standing there, for the Jewish rites of purification, each
holding twenty or thirty gallons (a0na\ metrhta\v du/o h! trei~v). (John
2.6).
This mention of 'two or three measures' is decisive, coming at
the very inception of the messianic series. It points to the
systematicity involved in the theology of signs. That is, it
points not just to the two series, Days and messianic events,
which, both because of the status of the seventh event,
Sabbath, and Eucharist, are radically determinable in terms of
the sixfold pattern, here the one at large in the actual
miracle, as in its counterpart, The Transfiguration,
which speaks literally of 'six days' not seven. It also points
to the sevenfold serial form itself - properly confined to the
eschatological and Pneumatological Eucharistic episode, The
Feeding Of The Four Thousand, where the same cipher is
repeated, as 7 loaves and 7 containers full of fragments. The
term 'two or three' perfectly encapsulates the significant
difference of The Apocalypse from the Genesis and gospel
series, which may be counted as two, conformably to the
relation of beginning and end. In either case, we have only
one series of 6-7 events. In The Apocalypse, we have in all,
four. Thus the two salient figures of the Pneumatological
feeding miracle, are systematically engaged at the core of the
organisation of this last book of the canon, and the one which
is most readily recognizable as a Pneumatology.
There are several other instances of threefold symbolism in
the first miracle story of John, which reiterate the coherence
or consistency of the three verbal (phenomenal) modes of
sense-percipience. The account begins with 'On the third day
...' (John 2.1), which also figures in the last of the three
feeding miracles, Mark 8.2, and Matthew 15.32. In John there
are three references to 'the steward of the feast' (John 2.8,
and verse 9 twice). This term, a)rxitri/klinov, is a translation of a
Greek expression which even if poetically, certainly alludes
to the creation story since it consists of three roots, one
meaning 'three' - tri - and the other, a)rxh, meaning 'ruler'
(a!rxwn), as it
does here, but also, of course' 'beginning' - a!rxomai. (The verb kli/nw means 'to
incline', 'to recline', but also 'to wear away'; Luke uses it
in this very sense in his introduction to the story of the
Five Thousand : 'Now the day began to wear away ... ' (Luke
9.12.))
The introductions of both Mark's and Matthew's version of The
Feeding Of The Four Thousand (Mark 8.2, Matthew 15.32),
contain the expression 'three days' which comports with the
introduction to The Transformation Of Water Into Wine:
In those days, when again a
great crowd had gathered, and they had nothing to eat, he
called his disciples to him, and said to them, "I have
compassion on the crowd, because they have been with me now
three days (h(me/rai
trei~v), and have nothing to eat; and if I send
them away hungry to their homes (oi!kon), they will faint on the way; and
some of them have come a long way." (Mark 8.1-4).
Then Jesus called his disciples to him and said, "I have
compassion on the crowd, because they have been with me now
three days (h(me/rai
trei~v), and have nothing to eat; and I am
unwilling to send them away hungry, lest they faint on the
way.' (Matthew 15.32).
The temporal clause in Mark and Matthew's story of The
Feeding Of The Four Thousand is similar to and
comparable with John's expression 'On the third day', nor can
it be a reference to the theology of transcendence in Genesis.
Indeed these references in the gospel if taken in respect of
the creation series, might give rise to the confusion of the
episodes with the rubric Day 3, which first introduces the
concept of food as well as that of life, into the creation
story, notwithstanding that this rubric is our first
encounter of the theology of immanence, and the identity
of the Holy Spirit within the actual taxonomy. The Day 6
narrative which fully and finally realises the presentation of
the Pneumatological conceptual category, that is, which
presents the symbolic feminine precisely as masculine and
feminine, in keeping with the Pneumatological emphasis in
favour of immanence, is invoked in these references of Mark
and Matthew, just as it is in John, and just as it will be in
The Apocalypse, where both categoreal principles, masculine
and feminine figure to a degree reminiscent of their
presentation not in the P story of creation, but in that of J.
It is the sexual psychology redolent in the latter, that these
represent archetypal forms of evil, as they did for the
Jahwist, which fits them for a remaking of the original myth
of 'the fall'. The apocalyptist, unlike Paul, seems perfectly
aware of his material as mythical. He makes no effort to
contrive the Eden myth as anything other than a 'literary'
account of the 'last things'. In this sense, his vision of the
course of history, a vision quite literally, because it must
necessarily take into its sweep the full final course of
events first portended in the J account, can be nothing other
than 'literary', nothing other than 'symbolic'. It must view,
or review the total trajectory of history as an accomplished
fact just as the Jahwistic 'beginning' is; except of
course, what lies in the past is not the event formulated in
the P narrative.
We affirmed of the temporal referentiality of Genesis, that it
primarily concerns 'heaven' as the ordering of primordial
events of the kind envisaged by the philosophical tradition by
expressions such as 'universals', or more recently 'eternal
objects' (Whitehead), since these indicate in the first
instance, the existence of the pivotal category, Mind itself
as transcendent. The concept will be taken up and amplified in
the messianic series, particularly in the narrative of The
Feeding Of The Five Thousand. It is the second story of
creation, where the perspective is that of immanence,
that the course of mundane history commences. The creation
story of J taken in the full context of the syntax that
obtains between the three scripted landmarks which concern us,
the three points of reference of the tradition, grasped
according to their obvious morphological intertextuality which
itself reifies or exemplifies the essential, universal event,
perceptual (immanent) Mind, and hence the incarnate logos, The
Word, represents history already fulfilled, ' the fall' so
called as what is definitively a past occasion. It too points
ahead of itself. Both the J story and The Apocalypse will be
obliged logically to comprehend with the full force of
the same means, the symbolic, the literary, that which will
have taken place, where the perfect future so to speak, is a
settled, fixed event. The Apocalypse can therefore do no other
than speak of such things as a 'red dragon', and variously
coloured horses, of a woman clothed in scarlet and purple, and
so on. For its essential topoi are the contents of
visual sentience, the hues of the visible spectrum, and the
anthropic categories, male and female, which compel the
symbolic nature of its discourse, and these formulate the
stuff of its historical case, its narratological
understanding.
Neither of the two accounts of the Pneumatological miracle of
loaves has a reference to any nocturnal-diurnal interval. But
just as we did find such a term in The Walking On The
Water, so in the complementary episode immediately
prior, The Feeding Of The Five Thousand, we find:
And when it grew late (Kai\ h!dh w(/rav pollh~v,
Mark 6.35);
When it was evening (o)yi/av
de\ genome/nhv, Matthew 14.15);
Now the day began to wear away... (Luke 9.10).
John's account has no such reference, although it does refer
both to 'barley loaves' and 'grass' (John 6.9, 10), the latter
agreeing with Mark's even more explicit 'green grass' (Mark
6.39); Matthew has simply 'grass' (Matthew 14.19). So whereas
the time of the first of the three transcendent messianic
events supports the assignation to that event of the first
optikon of the series, red, so here, concerning The
Feeding Of the Five Thousand, the time and optikon
accord complementarily; they are the interval of
afternoon shading into evening and its token 'green'. This
means that the next, or 'later' chroma, blue, the complement
of orange, is proper to the second miracle of loaves. We have
seen already in the Matthean text (16.1-3) the use of
'sky-heaven' and the temporal expression 'evening' as pointing
in the very same direction, while the same intention stands
behind Mark's own recension of the 'sign from heaven' (Mark
8.11-13), since he puts this immediately after The Feeding
Of The Four Thousand. Then just as the colour of 'grass'
is green by default, so the colour of the sky is blue by
default, notwithstanding the 'fiery' hues of the morning when
the storm is approaching.
Having determined the two signs for the Pneumatological dyads:
symbolic masculine/optic imagination and symbolic
feminine/optic memory, which are orange and blue respectively,
we shall pursue the issues germane to the fourfold form of the
gospels. What follows will be a study of the sources for the
other four radicals of the series, two of which which identify
the Son, and the other two which identify the Transcendent.
This means of course another eight items in all. We shall
endeavour to apply optic semeia to the same four
elements of consciousness according to the theology of The
Feeding Of The Four Thousand as they arise in the course
of the study of the fourfold form of the gospel. For it is the
doctrine of consciousness, or as we say, intentionality, one
of the most fundamental tenets of Christology, that this
'optic' component of the theology of semiotic forms subserves.
THE FOUR GOSPELS
1:1 In the thirtieth
year, on the fifth day of the fourth month, while I was
among the exiles at the Kebar River, the heavens opened and
I saw a divine vision. 1:2 (On the fifth day of the month –
it was the fifth year of King Jehoiachin’s exile – 1:3 the
word of the Lord came to the priest Ezekiel the son of Buzi,
at the Kebar River in the land of the Babylonians. The hand
of the Lord came on him there).
1:4 As I watched, I noticed a windstorm coming from the
north – an enormous cloud, with lightning flashing, such
that bright light rimmed it and came from it like glowing
amber from the middle of a fire. 1:5 In the fire were what
looked like four living beings. In their appearance they had
human form, 1:6 but each had four faces and four wings. 1:7
Their legs were straight, but the soles of their feet were
like calves’ feet. They gleamed like polished bronze. 1:8
They had human hands under their wings on their four sides.
As for the faces and wings of the four of them, 1:9 their
wings touched each other; they did not turn as they moved,
but went straight ahead.
1:10 Their faces had this appearance: Each of the four
had the face of a man, with the face of a lion on the right,
the face of an ox on the left and also the face of an eagle.
1:11 Their wings were spread out above them; each had two
wings touching the wings of one of the other beings on
either side and two wings covering their bodies. 1:12 Each
moved straight ahead – wherever the spirit would go, they
would go, without turning as they went. 1:13 In the middle
of the living beings was something like burning coals of
fire or like torches. It moved back and forth among the
living beings. It was bright, and lightning was flashing out
of the fire. 1:14 The living beings moved backward and
forward as quickly as flashes of lightning.
1:15 Then I looked, and I saw one wheel on the ground
beside each of the four beings. 1:16 The appearance of the
wheels and their construction was like gleaming jasper, and
all four wheels looked alike. Their structure was like a
wheel within a wheel. 1:17 When they moved they would go in
any of the four directions they faced without turning as
they moved. 1:18 Their rims were high and awesome, and the
rims of all four wheels were full of eyes all around.
1:19 When the living beings moved, the wheels beside them
moved; when the living beings rose up from the ground, the
wheels rose up too. 1:20 Wherever the spirit would go, they
would go, and the wheels would rise up beside them because
the spirit of the living being was in the wheel. 1:21 When
the living beings moved, the wheels moved, and when they
stopped moving, the wheels stopped. When they rose up from
the ground, the wheels rose up from the ground; the wheels
rose up beside them because the spirit of the living being
was in the wheel.
1:22 Over the heads of the living beings was something
like a platform, glittering awesomely like ice, stretched
out over their heads. 1:23 Under the platform their wings
were stretched out, each toward the other. Each of the
beings also had two wings covering its body. 1:24 When they
moved, I heard the sound of their wings – it was like the
sound of rushing waters, or the voice of the Almighty, or
the tumult of an army. When they stood still, they lowered
their wings.
1:25 Then there was a voice from above the platform over
their heads when they stood still. 1:26 Above the platform
over their heads was something like a sapphire shaped like a
throne. High above on the throne was a form that appeared to
be a man. 1:27 I saw an amber glow like a fire enclosed all
around from his waist up. From his waist down I saw
something that looked like fire. There was a brilliant light
around it, 1:28 like the appearance of a rainbow in the
clouds after the rain. This was the appearance of the
surrounding brilliant light; it looked like the glory of the
Lord. When I saw it, I threw myself face down, and I heard a
voice speaking. (Ezekiel Chapter 1 NET)
10:1 As I watched, I saw on the platform above the top of
the cherubim something like a sapphire, resembling the shape
of a throne, appearing above them. 10:2 The Lord said to the
man dressed in linen, “Go between the wheelwork underneath
the cherubim. Fill your hands with burning coals from among
the cherubim and scatter them over the city.” He went as I
watched.
10:3 (The cherubim were standing on the south side of the
temple when the man went in, and a cloud filled the inner
court.) 10:4 Then the glory of the Lord arose from the
cherub and moved to the threshold of the temple. The temple
was filled with the cloud while the court was filled with
the brightness of the Lord’s glory. 10:5 The sound of the
wings of the cherubim could be heard from the outer court,
like the sound of the sovereign God when he speaks.
10:6 When the Lord commanded the man dressed in linen,
“Take fire from within the wheelwork, from among the
cherubim,” the man went in and stood by one of the wheels.
10:7 Then one of the cherubim stretched out his hand toward
the fire which was among the cherubim. He took some and put
it into the hands of the man dressed in linen, who took it
and left. 10:8 (The cherubim appeared to have the form of
human hands under their wings.)
10:9 As I watched, I noticed four wheels by the cherubim,
one wheel beside each cherub; the wheels gleamed like
jasper. 10:10 As for their appearance, all four of them
looked the same, something like a wheel within a wheel.
10:11 When they moved, they would go in any of the four
directions they faced without turning as they moved; in the
direction the head would turn they would follow without
turning as they moved, 10:12 along with their entire bodies,
their backs, their hands, and their wings. The wheels of the
four of them were full of eyes all around. 10:13 As for
their wheels, they were called “the wheelwork” as I
listened. 10:14 Each of the cherubim had four faces: The
first was the face of a cherub, the second that of a man,
the third that of a lion, and the fourth that of an eagle.
10:15 The cherubim rose up; these were the living beings
I saw at the Kebar River. 10:16 When the cherubim moved, the
wheels moved beside them; when the cherubim spread their
wings to rise from the ground, the wheels did not move from
their side. 10:17 When the cherubim stood still, the wheels
stood still, and when they rose up, the wheels rose up with
them, for the spirit of the living beings was in the wheels.
10:18 Then the glory of the Lord moved away from the
threshold of the temple and stopped above the cherubim.
10:19 The cherubim spread their wings, and they rose up from
the earth while I watched (when they went the wheels went
alongside them). They stopped at the entrance to the east
gate of the Lord’s temple as the glory of the God of Israel
hovered above them.
10:20 These were the living creatures which I saw at the
Kebar River underneath the God of Israel; I knew that they
were cherubim. 10:21 Each had four faces; each had four
wings and the form of human hands under the wings. 10:22 As
for the form of their faces, they were the faces whose
appearance I had seen at the Kebar River. Each one moved
straight ahead. (Ezekiel Chapter 10 NET)
This book repeatedly uses the title 'Son of man', it occurs
also in Daniel, Job, Psalms, and Isaiah. In Ezekiel however,
we meet it more than ninety times. This formula, which we have
identified as synonymous with what is meant by 'symbolic
masculine', finds in the book of Ezekiel its single greatest
meditative concentration in the Hebrew scriptures. The value
and meaning of the semeia, symbol, sign of the 'phallos'
accords with this conceptual form. It is perfectly at home in
this frame of reference rather than in the New Testament. For
all three transcendent conceptual forms, mind, which
exemplifies the Son, space which exemplifies the Transcendent,
and the symbolic masculine, exemplifying the Holy Spirit, as
manifest in specific members of the Tanakh, elaborate the
Christological postulates given definitively in the creation
taxonomy.
In other words the conceptual polarity of consciousness has
its proper representation in the Hebrew Scriptures rather than
in the New Testament. We have repeatedly drawn attention to
the link between immanence, the feminine as masculine and
feminine, and the Holy Spirit, and to the fact that the
feminine rather than the masculine, remains the defining
occasion of the anthropic category, as of the Holy Spirit. It
is in the light of this fact that we are to understand The
Apocalypse as representative of the feminine, for its context,
that of the New Testament, assures it of this role,
complementarily to that of Ezekiel in the former canon.
Ezekiel in this respect is indeed a prophetic work - it is
pre-emptive or proleptic in respect of The Apocalypse,
thoroughly in keeping with the symbolic masculine, and the Son
of man. Feminist theologies have failed, just as have secular
psychologies, to account adequately for the roles of the
masculine and feminine in Christian theological texts beyond
determining the all too plainly obvious faults endogenous to
their male authorship. Criticism has thus far had the last
word, much to the detriment of hermeneutics.
The stance here adopted is that the book of Ezekiel therefore
requires no apologia for what may occur to some as undue
anthropomorphism; nor, to take issue with the more strident
polemics of at least some current feminist theologies, whose
governing intention is political rather than theological, is
it necessary to rebut charges of 'phallocentrism' or
'phallocratism', on the part of the work. (See for example
Cynthia R. Chapman's 'Sculpted Warriors: Sexuality
and the Sacred in the Depiction of Warfare in the Assyrian
Palace Reliefs and in Ezekiel 23:14-17'.) It is of course in
this particular chapter of the book that we encounter that
which is to some the most shocking of Ezekiel's utterances:
1 The word of the LORD came
to me: 2 “Son of man, there were two women, daughters of the
same mother. 3 They became prostitutes in Egypt, engaging in
prostitution from their youth. In that land their breasts
were fondled and their virgin bosoms caressed. 4 The older
was named Oholah, and her sister was Oholibah. They were
mine and gave birth to sons and daughters. Oholah is
Samaria, and Oholibah is Jerusalem.
5 “Oholah engaged in prostitution while she was still
mine; and she lusted after her lovers, the
Assyrians—warriors 6 clothed in blue, governors and
commanders, all of them handsome young men, and mounted
horsemen. 7 She gave herself as a prostitute to all the
elite of the Assyrians and defiled herself with all the
idols of everyone she lusted after. 8 She did not give up
the prostitution she began in Egypt, when during her youth
men slept with her, caressed her virgin bosom and poured out
their lust upon her.
9 “Therefore I handed her over to her lovers, the
Assyrians, for whom she lusted. 10 They stripped her naked,
took away her sons and daughters and killed her with the
sword. She became a byword among women, and punishment was
inflicted on her.
11 “Her sister Oholibah saw this, yet in her lust and
prostitution she was more depraved than her sister. 12 She
too lusted after the Assyrians—governors and commanders,
warriors in full dress, mounted horsemen, all handsome young
men. 13 I saw that she too defiled herself; both of them
went the same way.
14 “But she carried her prostitution still further. She
saw men portrayed on a wall, figures of Chaldeansa portrayed
in red, (r#f$#f$),
15 with belts around their waists and flowing turbans on
their heads; all of them looked like Babylonian chariot
officers, natives of Chaldea. 16 As soon as she saw them,
she lusted after them and sent messengers to them in
Chaldea. 17 Then the Babylonians came to her, to the bed of
love, and in their lust they defiled her. After she had been
defiled by them, she turned away from them in disgust. 18
When she carried on her prostitution openly and exposed her
nakedness, I turned away from her in disgust, just as I had
turned away from her sister. 19 Yet she became more and more
promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she
was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her
lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose
emission was like that of horses. 21 So you longed for the
lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was
caressed and your young breasts fondled.
22 “Therefore, Oholibah, this is what the Sovereign LORD
says: I will stir up your lovers against you, those you
turned away from in disgust, and I will bring them against
you from every side— 23 the Babylonians and all the
Chaldeans, the men of Pekod and Shoa and Koa, and all the
Assyrians with them, handsome young men, all of them
governors and commanders, chariot officers and men of high
rank, all mounted on horses. 24 They will come against you
with weapons, chariots and wagons and with a throng of
people; they will take up positions against you on every
side with large and small shields and with helmets. I will
turn you over to them for punishment, and they will punish
you according to their standards. 25 I will direct my
jealous anger against you, and they will deal with you in
fury. They will cut off your noses and your ears, and those
of you who are left will fall by the sword. They will take
away your sons and daughters, and those of you who are left
will be consumed by fire. 26 They will also strip you of
your clothes and take your fine jewelry. 27 So I will put a
stop to the lewdness and prostitution you began in Egypt.
You will not look on these things with longing or remember
Egypt anymore.
28 “For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I am about
to hand you over to those you hate, to those you turned away
from in disgust. 29 They will deal with you in hatred and
take away everything you have worked for. They will leave
you naked and bare, and the shame of your prostitution will
be exposed. Your lewdness and promiscuity 30 have brought
this upon you, because you lusted after the nations and
defiled yourself with their idols. 31 You have gone the way
of your sister; so I will put her cup into your hand.
32 “This is what the Sovereign LORD says:
“You will drink your sister’s cup,
a cup large and deep;
it will bring scorn and derision,
for it holds so much.
33 You will be filled with drunkenness and sorrow,
the cup of ruin and desolation,
the cup of your sister Samaria.
34 You will drink it and drain it dry;
you will dash it to pieces
and tear your breasts.
I have spoken, declares the Sovereign LORD.
35 “Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: Since
you have forgotten me and thrust me behind your back, you
must bear the consequences of your lewdness and
prostitution.”
36 The LORD said to me: “Son of man, will you judge
Oholah and Oholibah? Then confront them with their
detestable practices, 37 for they have committed adultery
and blood is on their hands. They committed adultery with
their idols; they even sacrificed their children, whom they
bore to me, as food for them. 38 They have also done this to
me: At that same time they defiled my sanctuary and
desecrated my Sabbaths. 39 On the very day they sacrificed
their children to their idols, they entered my sanctuary and
desecrated it. That is what they did in my house.
40 “They even sent messengers for men who came from far
away, and when they arrived you bathed yourself for them,
painted your eyes and put on your jewelry. 41You sat on an
elegant couch, with a table spread before it on which you
had placed the incense and oil that belonged to me.
42 “The noise of a carefree crowd was around her; Sabeans
were brought from the desert along with men from the rabble,
and they put bracelets on the arms of the woman and her
sister and beautiful crowns on their heads. 43 Then I said
about the one worn out by adultery, ‘Now let them use her as
a prostitute, for that is all she is.’ 44 And they slept
with her. As men sleep with a prostitute, so they slept with
those lewd women, Oholah and Oholibah. 45 But righteous men
will sentence them to the punishment of women who commit
adultery and shed blood, because they are adulterous and
blood is on their hands.
46 “This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Bring a mob
against them and give them over to terror and plunder. 47
The mob will stone them and cut them down with their swords;
they will kill their sons and daughters and burn down their
houses.
48 “So I will put an end to lewdness in the land, that
all women may take warning and not imitate you. 49 You will
suffer the penalty for your lewdness and bear the
consequences of your sins of idolatry. Then you will know
that I am the Sovereign LORD.” (Ezekiel chapter 23, NIV)
There is of course another colour word pertinent here: r#f$#f$ : 'red
pigment used for paint: minium (lead oxide) or vermilion (=
red ocher, hematite, an iron oxide) Je 22.14, Ez 23.14' (A Concise Hebrew And Aramaic
Lexicon Of The Old Testament, p. 385). The latter of
these two references accords with what has already been put
regarding the semeioptikon of the symbolic masculine. We shall
have to consider much of the Book of Ezekiel in this essay,
not merely because the visions of the four living creatures
so-called in chapter 1, and of the similarly described
cherubim, they are referred to as such only in the second
vision, that of chapter 10, certainly concern the fourfold
aspect of the gospel, by virtue of the later reconfigurations
of this same iconography in The Apocalypse. We shall contend
that if these four icons, 'likenesses', do indeed immediately
refer to the gospels themselves, by dint of their later
'canonical' adoption in The Apocalypse where they are
subordinated to a purely and clearly eschatological purpose.
In describing this procedure as 'canonical', we mean to fully
articulate the relation between time, which as the motif of
change of place and movement is a preeminent concern in the
visions of Ezekiel, and the four gospels themselves. This very
relation moreover involves immediate implications for the
Christian doctrine of time, as is apparent from the
'apocalyptic' concentration on the phenomenon of death and the
final destiny of the created order.
We must mention here, as already stipulated, not in any
apologetic tone, but rather in the interests of Pneumatology,
that of the many references to The Spirit in Ezekiel, the
following are feminine
in gender: Ezekiel 1.12, 1.20-21, 2.2, 3.12, 3.14, 3.24,
8.3 (twice), 11.1, 11.5, 11.24, 36.26, and 43.5.
Needless to say, none of these references are derogatory,
pejorative, or 'sexually violent' in any way whatsoever. In
the following references, the gender cannot be decided due to
the absence of a pronoun or verb: 10.17, 36.27, 37.1, 37.14,
39.29. Thus there are no instances of a masculine 'Spirit' as
such in this entire book, which is replete of references to
this identity. The real point is that without this member, by
which I mean the actual text, as well as that which from the
point of view of a corporeal, somatic, haptic semiosis it must
signify, to wit, the phallos,
the actual canon would remain emasculated. This symbolism must
needs be understood in the context of the identity of The
Paraclete as lifegiver, a function we first observed in the
Day 3 rubric of the creation story. That the sign does not
function as it does in contemporary secularist iconography
cannot be stated too emphatically. It bears a meaning
altogether at variance with the almost compulsorily sexual
denotation of the phallos
in current mainstream western cultures.
The creation rubric, Day 3, presented the symbolic masculine
vis-a-vis its complement, the symbolic feminine, Day 6, which
latter is to say, male and female, in terms of the contrast
between two different 'kinds' of plant, biota, or living
things which reproduce asexually - and the anthropic category,
the sexually dimorphic humans, male and female, made in the
image and likeness of God. The hermeneutic therefore
stressed the aptness to the concept 'symbolic
masculine' of transcendence of the phenomenon of sexual
dimorphism as a whole, thus leaving no room at all for any
charge of misogyny to be leveled at Ezekiel. Hence there is an
essential paradox at work in the semeion of the phallos, lingam, vajra, and so on, its
signifiers are legion. It does not matter how we refer to it,
since taken by itself, and in itself, rather than as 'the
jewel in the lotus', that is, as conjunct with its somatic
counterpart, it is the least 'sexual' of any signifier. For as
such, what does it amount to?
The phallos does not refer to the erotic in systematic
biblical semiology - it designates the same idea of collective
identity as is given by the name 'Son of man'. As for actual
libidinal consciousness, this consists of two categoreal
radicals: the conceptual form of unity the body, soma, systematically
proposed in the Day 4 rubric, and the (perceptual) haptic
memory, the subject of The Transformation Of Water Into
Wine (John 2.1-11). The bodily, (haptic) sign for the
conceptual form the body, is the gut, the belly, the stomach,
so beautifully evoked in the book of Jonah, arguably the
reason why that same parable has been used by Christian
theology to refer to the ultimate destiny of the body in the
'sign of Jonah' logia, Resurrection; and further to which, by
means also The Daughter Of Jairus with its
unmistakable references to the girl's menarche and by the
conclusion, 'And he told them to give her something to eat'
(Mark 5.43). The bodily, (haptic) signifier for the perceptual
radical haptic memory, is the hand, which Mark presents in his
story of The Man With A Withered Hand (Mark 3.1-6), a
narrative which he adroitly locates at the conclusion of
several pericopae all of which deal with the same
category: The Calling Of Levi; The Question About
Fasting; and Plucking Grain On The Sabbath (Mark
2.13-28). His intentions here are unmistakable. These
observations are put here in advance of the ensuing references
to Ezekiel, some of which in accordance with post-feminist
sensibilities may be deemed pornographic; so be it. What is
remarkable about and in keeping with Ezekiel's
contemplation of the 'loins' of 'the one that appeared to be a
man', is the prevalence of terms relating to colour, many of
which will be utilised later in The Apocalypse. These testify
to the sense in which the work participates in the
epistemic-psychic category, optic imagination, as well as that
of the symbolic masculine:
Then there was a voice from
above the platform (firmament ((ayqirf : LXX sterew/matov) over
their heads when they stood still. Above the platform over
their heads was something like a sapphire (ryp,i,sa : LXX sa/pfeirov) shaped
like a throne. High above on the throne was a form that
appeared to be a man (mdf)f
: LXX a!nqrwpov).
I saw an amber (lmoa#$"xa
: LXX hle/ktrou
= molten bronze) glow like a fire (#$)" : LXX puro/v) closed all around from his waist
(mynat:m : LXX
osfu/ov) up. From
his waist (mynat:mf
: LXX osfu/ov)
down I saw something that looked like fire (#$)" : LXX puro/v). There was a
brilliant light (h,gfnO
: LXX fe/ggov)
around it, like the appearance of a rainbow (t#$eq,e : LXX to/cou = bow) in the
clouds after the rain. This was the appearance of the
surrounding brilliant light (h,gfnO LXX fe/ggouv); it looked like the glory of
the Lord, when I saw it, I threw myself face down, and I
heard a voice speaking. (Ezekiel 1.25-28 NET
Bible)
Because Ezekiel so often refers to dates, that this prophet,
who later married, was probably about thirteen years old when
he received the first vision of the four living creatures,
which we may reasonably conjecture, is highly relevant
in coming to terms with the significative power of what is so
often modestly translated as 'loins downwards' or 'waist
down'. The visions in Ezekiel speak repeatedly of mynat:mf, 'the
strong musculature which unites the upper & lower part of
the body, lumbar region, hips
& small of the back, loins Gn 37.34 ... ' (A
Concise Hebrew And Aramaic Lexicon Of The Old Testament,
p. 223).
Scholars have been slow to realise just how much of the
Ezekiel is given over to what I am referring to as the
'symbolic masculine', evident not merely the recurrent phallic
preoccupation of the visions which effect his commissioning,
but also in what some consider his misogynistic tendencies,
apparent in an almost obsessive concern for Levitical purity
laws pertaining to menses. The symbolic masculine is again
evinced in the role and significance of the lands apportioned
the twelve tribes and the description of the twelve gates to
the city of Jerusalem which are named after each of them.
These motifs in chapter 48 will be resumed in The Apocalypse,
along with his vision of the 'likeness of four living
creatures', albeit with certain modifications. These two books
are the pre-eminent pneumatological members of their
respective canons, and certainly their authors' intentions are
in both cases informed by strong visual imaginations, their
descriptions of the city in both cases, reading much like
cruciform, mandalic patterns. Howard Ellberg-Schwartz for one,
seems partially at least, to have determined without
unnecessary embarrassment, the presence of the somatic index
of Ezekiel's imagination:
Thus we find that the metaphors of marriage are
first appled to the relationship between God and Israel by
Hosea, the prophet who is also credited with having
initiated the turn towards a more monotheistic worship of
Yahweh. Significantly, Ezekiel's vision comes after these
developments. His vision is by far the most explicitly
erotic of the God sightings, describing God from the loins
up and the loins down. It is as if Ezekiel gives us the
erotic version of the myth in which God turns his back to
Moses. What I am suggesting, therefore, is that the
homoeroticism that was always latent in Israelite theology
was intensified by the emerging exclusive worship of Yahweh.
(Ellberg-Schwartz, Howard, God's Phallus And Other
Problems For Men and Monotheism, Beacon Press, Boston,
1994, p. 107).
The prophet Ezekiel provides a still more explicit depiction
of the sexual relationship between God and Israel. In this
case, God first discovers Israel as an abandoned baby, cares
for her, and watches her mature:
Your breasts became firm and your hair
sprouted. You were still naked and bare when I passed by
you and saw that your time for love had arrived. So I
spread My robe over you and covered your nakedness and I
entered into a covenant with you by oath - delares the
Lord God; thus you became Mine. (Ezek. 16:8).
This passage comes the closest of any to imagining God as
an anatomically male deity. Most interpreters sanitize it
and ignore its sexual overtones. They construe "spreading a
robe" over the naked Israel as a symbol of marriage, as an
act of acquiring the woman as a wife, or simply as
protecting her. But the sexual meanings in the passgage are
conveyed in a number of ways. First, the very same language
is employed when Ruth goes to her kinsman Boaz (Ruth 3:3-9).
God's promise that he "will enter" into a convenant with
Israel carries similar sexual overtones. In Hebrew, "coming
in" is sometimes used to describe sexual intercourse (e.g.,
Gen. 38:9, 15). And the expression "coming into a
covenant," though occasionally used in other contexts (I
Sam. 20:8; Deut 29:11; Jer. 34:10), is not a typical way of
expressing the idea of making a covenant. The expressions
"cutting a covenant" and "establishing a covenant" are used
more frequently by Ezekiel (16:62, 17:13, 34:25, 37:26).
Finally, in a similar parable about God marrying two sisters
(Israel and Judah) who had earlier whored in Egypt, Ezekiel
has God say, "They became Mine, and they bore sons and
daughters" (23:4). The birth of children here makes explict
the idea that divine intercourse has occurred with the
feminized nations of Israel and Judah.
Some interpreters view Ezekiel's imagery as
bordering on pornographic and dismiss it as a product of his
idiosyncrasies (Cooke 1951; Eichrdot 1970). From another
perspective however, Ezekiel is simply stating more boldly
what is implicit in the thought of Hosea and Jeremiah. God's
intercourse with Israel is simply the mirror image of
Israel's "whoring" after other gods or other nations. If
Israel's relations with other gods and nations is sexual,
then fidelity to God may be sexual as well. (Ibid
p. 111-112).
The Ezekiel passage is as close as we get to a
graphic image of God having sexual intercourse. But even
here, the sex of the deity remains veiled, for in this case
the gaze emanates from God and alights on the body of the
female Israel. The divine body is shifted behind the look
and not the object of it. This represents a critical shift
of perspective. (Ibid p. 113).
I agree with Halperin that there is something disturbing
about Ezekiel's vision that did not involve the problem of
anthropomorphism generally. "We are looking for a
'something,' he writes, "that somehow has to do with the
visions of Ezekiel, that somehow had the power to stir fear,
excitement and perhaps even ecstasy" (1988,11). I suggest
that the something for which we are looking is Ezekiel's
reference to God's loins. Recall that Ezekiel twice
describes God from the loins up and the loins down, as if
his gaze was irresistibly drawn there (Ezek. 1.2, 8.2). It
is possible that while the idea of God in human form did not
trouble the rabbis greatly, they were upset by the focus of
Ezekiel's gaze. This would explain why the rabbis found his
vision more problematic than other God sightings. Ezekiel's
vision, more than others, raised the possibility of a male
desire for God, a desire that could cause death if men were
unable to act with propriety. (Ibid pp. 178-179).
Essential to the
understanding of both writers, or sets of writers, the authors
of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse, are all four Pneumatological
categories: the concepts 'symbolic masculine' and 'symbolic
feminine', which latter is equivalent to both male and female
of the anthropic category, and the two forms of optic
sense-percipience, both that of the imagination and that of
memory. All four of of these are exemplars of the beautiful.
In each case there is a different emphasis: we may reasonably
expect of the book of Ezekiel that it will in some way adhere
to the predominant perspective of the Hebrew scriptures,
namely transcendence. This leaves The Apocalypse the essential
as well as supplementary role of establishing the import of
the symbolic feminine and of course optic memory, which in
large measure will be synonymous with the epistemic or
cognitive aims of historiographical literature. By the latter
we mean not just history of course, but evolutionary theory.
It is by dint of such concerns that theriomorphic forces both
for good and evil are presented throughout the latter work.
We need to consider Ezekiel here insofar as it functions
proleptically for The Apocalypse and additionally of course,
the title 'Son of man', as these both concern the present
study. Regarding the latter however, it may be signal of the
currently critical if not parlous state of scholarship that it
all but abjures understanding this very title as employed in
the New Testament vis-a-vis its plainly remarkable prominence
in Ezekiel. The two references in Daniel to the same, have
been afforded a vast amount of attention, the reason of course
being that they are seen to be 'apocalyptic' and
'eschatological' both, in accordance with the majority of New
Testament usage, and they have claimed the lion's share of
academic attention at the expense of Ezekiel. No examination
of the fourfold form of the gospel in light of the essential
tenet of The Feeding Of The Four Thousand, which
construes vision generally, and so by logical extension the
written tradition itself, can maintain such a stance.
The four Pneumatological categories establish the rational and
not just rational alone, but also the affective defining
parameters for both texts, Ezekiel and The Apocalypse. These
categories engage both species of intentional modes, cognitive
and conative, thinking and feeling, epistemic and psychic. The
discussion of these modes belongs to the next stage of our
study, but it is necessary to put here in broaching the
semiotic forms, the obvious consonance of these two members of
the canon. For whether we wish it or not, any discussion of
the messianic miracles, and effectively any discussion of the
Christian doctrine of revelation, must comprise The
Apocalypse. It is not just the single story of the messianic
miracle, The Feeding Of The For Thousand, which poses
for us the value of the visible, actual texts to any doctrine
of the Word as also to any Christian theory of language
itself, though clearly that makes addressing The Apocalypse in
part incumbent upon us; it is also the clear consonance of the
four sevenfold series it contains in conformity with the
creation rubrics and messianic series, which insists that it
be accepted in reference to the gospel and the stories of
creation both. The discussion of The Apocalypse is best
entered by a careful consideration of some of the contents of
the book of Ezekiel.
Of course the visions of Ezekiel predate the appearance of the
four gospels. It is possible that the same may even be true of
The Apocalypse, the other text in the canon which speaks of
'four living creatures'. Namely, that its reference to
the latter may occur prior to the manifestation in the canon
of the New Testament, of four distinct gospels. Whether or not
the images of the latter in that text can be taken as
referential to the gospels will be hotly contested by any
scholar with a view to the history of the tradition. The
adoption of the 'four living creatures' as iconic
representations of the four gospels, takes place at a later
period in the overall development of Christian iconography.
Hermeneuts with a specific concern for the historicity of the
tradition will doubtlessly and necessarily urge that
construing 'the four living creatures' in The Apocalypse
(4.6b-9, 5.6-11, 6.1-8, 14.3, 15.7) referentially to the
actual gospels themselves is anachronistic. But as it stands
this claim, must be tested against the fact of the
intertextual nature of that book. The apocalyptist is also
laying claim to aspects of the tradition in a completely
different way. The Apocalypse strategically replicates the
tradition from Ezekiel 1 and 10. Thus it binds together the
two canons, Judaic and Christian, just as the Days series and
messianic series function congruently. The charge of
anachronism against the interpretation of the four living
creatures as references to the gospels must therefore address
the intimate bond between the two books. Certainly Ezekiel
predates The Apocalypse, and just as certainly, the astral
imagery it adopts, whatever its provenance, predates both. We
are confronted in either case, Ezekiel 1 and 10 and those
sections of The Apocalypse already cited, with a 'religious'
tradition of greater antiquity than is suggested by even the
relevant details of Babylonian mythology, if as is put here,
the essential meaning of these images situates us within an
emerging stream of cultural consciousness, at the basis of
which remains the temporal constructs we are adducing.
In any case, we reaffirm that our method is overtly that of
speculative philosophical psychology, which adopts a
synchronic view of the texts. We will differ in terms of the
emphasis given to this reading of the figures. That is, we
will specify the four symbols not as symbols tout court
as if that were the end of the matter. For what is the value
of such a claim? To identify the four living creatures of the
visions of Ezekiel and The Apocalypse with specifically formed
written documents, as well as being naive, does not advance
our understanding in any degree. We have merely substituted
one thing, a document, for another, a visual symbol or icon.
That is the reason here for interpreting the vision of Ezekiel
with specific reference to time, and subsequently the
observations that the common periodic patterns of both
temporal, and visible cycles, solar and lunar, are analogous.
We have therefore set ourselves the more comprehensive task of
incorporating a vital aspect of natural theology, one which
has occupied religious consciousness since the dawn of time
itself, since the emergence of consciousness itself.
Certainly when it comes to the 'literary' and visionary
appropriation by the author(s) of The Apocalypse of Ezekiel's
visions of the four living creatures, which ought to be the
first recourse for any interpretation of the structure of the
text as a whole, and as such, the first step in
interpretation, it will be necessary to acknowledge the
obvious astral imagery operative from start to finish. That
these same four living creatures are discernible prior to
their appearance in Ezekiel as elements of Babylonian
astronomical time keeping, matters not a whit. Rather it
performs the necessary duty of a prompt, since the same four
zodiacal figures mark the four quarters of the solar, annual,
year as marking the equinoxes and solstices. But this does not
mean that the significance of the entire book can be
dispensed with by allowing such imagery its fullest and freest
rein. Astrology is not a key to unlock the meaning of The
Apocalypse, (pace Bruce Malina). Indeed what is
understood in the contemporary context by the term 'astrology'
does not apply to the argument put here at all. Astrology,
even in its relatively more developed Babylonian form, appears
fairly late in the history of thought.
The suggestion that the zodiac was originally
established as an intended scheme of 12 constellations and
12 equal divisions some 6000 years ago (or even earlier) is
untenable. The fact that these ideas have been effectively
disposed of seems to be ignored in publications addressed to
the jury and not to the bench. The zodiac is not that old.
It is Babylonian in origin and dates to the 5th-century BCE.
There is no evidence that the Greek scheme of 12 zodiacal
constellations existed anywhere prior to its evolvement in
Greece circa 500 BCE.
(Gary D. Thompson, The Origin of
the Zodiac).
Instead, the observation of the parallel between the same
iconic tetrad and the creatures of the visions of both Ezekiel
and The Apocalypse removes us to the furthest reaches of the
past and delivers us to the realms of an emerging human
consciousness grafted to the phenomena of cyclical time, as
fundamental to religious consciousness. Two examples which
spring immediately to mind as intimately related to the
solstitial moments in the annual cycle are Stonehenge and the
temple at Karnak. (See Ancient
Observatories - Timeless Knowledge, an article
from Stanford Solar Centre which discusses structures as early
as The Goseck Circle, and as recent as The Bracewell Radio
Sundial for a comprehensive list; and for more information, The Stanford
Solar Centre page.) For the immediate significance
of the four 'zodiacal' signs given in Ezekiel and The
Apocalypse does not devolve upon the beliefs of Babylonian
astronomy. It defers rather to fundamental features of the
solar year which have at various times and places been
observed. It concerns precisely the four cardinal
point-instants of time which in turn belong to the subject
under survey, the rapport between mind and time as disclosed
in The Transfiguration. It is these and other aspects
of the temporal compass and not any astrological symbolism
that will best serve the hermeneutic of the gospels as well as
The Apocalypse.
The recapitulation of the theology of the Holy Spirit in
respect of the narrative of the second miracle of loaves, our
point of entry into the discussion of the fourfold aspect of
the gospel, has been given because we must initially dispense
with the very same identity in order to appreciate the
fourfold paradigm which acts as the rationale of the form of
the gospels. Such a procedure may seem at first altogether at
odds with our reading of the same figure, the four, indicative
of unity, as in the Pneumatological event, The Feeding Of
The Four Thousand. However we have urged that one
purpose behind the identification of optic sentience as
evincing the same identity, the Holy Spirit, recurs to the
existence of a fourfold written, that is visible, inscripted
gospel. We do not have six gospels, a number which might
immediately suggest the Christological hexad; neither do we
have five, which might be signal of the Transcendent. For
although the gospel(s) must have been transmitted orally at
some stage, what we have to conjure with here and now, is its
final graphic, written form, immediately recognisable as
fourfold. At a later point, we shall still more closely align
the Holy Spirit, and the two immanently oriented categories of
the same, symbolic feminine, and optic memory, with The
Apocalypse, so as to make up for any apparent shortcoming in
this method.
In other words, The Apocalypse replicates the figures, 4 and 7
of the Pneumatological feeding miracle, and in utilising these
same two figures to an extraordinary degree, it posits its
paramount theological topos, the Holy Spirit, at the same time
adapting the morphological relation already sustained between
Genesis 1.1s and the gospel. But it inflects this
narrative, with the later creation story of J, as is shown by
the prevalent role of the woman and the serpent. Thus
the Apocalyptist takes for granted the continuity between the
two stories, regardless of their differing perspectives. It is
of course, the second narrative, that of the immanentist
oriented J that is the more important of the two
creation stories for this book. Even so, the P narrative and
the categories inherent in both it and the messianic series,
are indispensable to the meaning of the work.
This reverts to what we began by saying, namely the peculiar
specificity to The Apocalypse of the perceptual mode of
vision. Nevertheless, the same figures, 4 and 7, point to the
role that immanence and the Holy Spirit play in both other
narrative cycles, the creation story and the messianic
miracles. These too are texts, written traditions, visible,
though without an equivalent emphasis on immanence. The cipher
4, can therefore aptly and logically be applied in the case of
the gospels - its intended meaning is aimed directly at what
we understand by 'incarnation', the final achievement of
immanence - the bodily existence of 'the Word', 'the divine Eros',
'the divine bridegroom', as a being in all respects like
ourselves. As far as must therefore concern the doctrine of
the 'triune' nature of God, the gospels remain more focused on
the Son, and to a lesser extent 'the Father', since the former
designation implies the same. Whereas the creation
sufficiently addressed the latter, the identity of the Holy
Spirit remains to be accounted for in equally adequate terms.
This is the task of The Apocalypse. The same motivation is
present in The Acts, which Luke appended to his gospel. Its
purpose is to provide an adequate theology of the Holy
Spirit insofar as this seems to him requisite for a
comprehensive canon. To this end its primary epistemic purpose
is that effected by the conceptual form, symbolic feminine;
namely the historiographical.
But we need to stress the reason for the apparent reduction of
the hexadic structures which resonate in all three textual
cycles, ostensibly and initially at least, to a tetradic form,
as again omitting from consideration the Holy Spirit. For we
do not have six gospels, reducible to a threefold pattern, but
rather four, outlined in the miracle narrative, and if the
same morpheme indicates the role of the Holy Spirit, as is
entailed by the notion of 'inspiration', while somehow leaving
for later consideration of this identity, that fact conforms
with the radical tetramorphic structure reducible to the
twofold binaries - solstices and equinoxes - representative of
both the Son and 'the Father' respectively and mirrored in the
mandala as in the annual course of time itself. For finally,
there are just four tipping points, four turning points, four
morphologically distinct moments or point-instants in the
annual (solar) year, not six. This is affirmed throughout both
apocalyptic and Pneumatological narratives themselves, Ezekiel
and The Apocalypse.
THE
FOUR CARDINAL POINT-INSTANTS OF TIME
Mention has been made just now of both sevenfold series, that
of the seven Days and the seven messianic events, in terms of
the twenty-four hour cycle, the diurnal/nocturnal pattern.
This is the most effective way of determining the optic semeia
proper to each rubric/messianic event. We have begun with the
Pneumatological members for a good reason, for as we shall
argue, it is the remaining four non-Pneumatological members
which establish the four cardinal points in the mandala.
'Points' of course is too exclusively spatial an expression if
by that we mean simply, the four cardinal points of the
compass. These are ineffective for our requirements due to the
relative cardinality of space. They will not meet the
analogical needs of metaphysical method. In the two
visionary experiences of Ezekiel just cited, as in so
many other of the Pneumatological texts, descriptions of
movement are a key to the theological hermeneutic. A major
innovation introduced by this work to the theology of the
Hebrew canon, is the realisation that the divine presence was
not confined, not spatially restricted to the temple in
Jerusalem. This, the exiles had left behind. The strikingly
novel feature of so much of the two visions involves movement.
For us, the relevance of this, the introduction of the concept
of time to the notion of sacred space, that of the temple, is
considerable. It is evinced in a variety of expressions all of
which are concerned with movement: 'wings', 'moved', 'each
moved straight ahead', 'wherever the spirit would go they
went, without turning as they went', 'torches moving to and
fro among the creatures', 'The living creatures darted to and
fro like a flash of lightening', ' a wheel on the earth beside
the living creatures, one for each of the four of them', '
their construction being something like a wheel within a
wheel', 'when they moved, they moved in any of the four
directions without veering as they moved', and so on. There is
here a plethora of images almost all of which have to do with
movement, change, and of course the passage of time.
Thus no longer is the 'God' of Israel confined to a single
place. The same God can and does move 'wherever the spirit
would go'. This movement occurs in time, that is in
space-time. The same characterisation of the Holy Spirit by
means of the idea of movement and process, or change,
resurfaces profusely in The Apocalypse. We have tied the
figure four to the idea of immanence and to the identity of
the (Holy) Spirit. Much else in this extended text from
Ezekiel complies with the general cast of the theology of
immanence. The 'stormy wind' for example recalls the Day 3
rubric and more nearly The Stilling Of The Storm, both
of which identify the Paraclete; the various expressions
referring to colour - 'amber', 'flash of lightening', 'beryl',
'sapphire', 'gleaming amber', 'splendour all around', ' Like
the bow in a cloud on a rainy day, such was the appearance of
the splendour all around ... This was the appearance of the
likeness of the glory of God.' All of these expressions
concern visual experience, and this sits well with the
previous description: 'for the rims of all four were full of
eyes all around.' Our hermeneutic has consistently allied the
specific mode of sense percipience, vision, with the same
identity, the Paraclete.
This now brings into view the analogical spatiotemporal
sequence which will supply the basis of the next stage of our
inquiry; the annual cycle, that of the four seasons, which we
found first set down in the creation story. There it was
pronounced within the Day 4 rubric, which we have interpreted
as essentially linked to the Christological purposes of the
text. The Day 4 rubric lists the category mind : body (soma), relatively to the
other two members of the same taxon or class, space : time (Day 5) and
male : female (Day 6). It reiterates the
diurnal/nocturnal pattern of light-time. So its references
stand in very good stead the next step in our procedure:
And God said: Let there be
lights in the vault of the heavens, to separate the day and
the night; let them serve there as signs to determine the
seasons, days and years. (Genesis 1.14)
We have previously employed one of the four forms of serial
order, the four being: beginning with end, beginning without
end, end without beginning, and neither beginning nor ending.
In the discussion of the denumerability of mind, we referred
to one such: beginning without ending. This reference
was in order to highlight the categoreal distinction of the
psychophysical from the spatiotemporal, since both evince
transcendence and do so equally. We affirmed that
whereas space as defined in the creation narrative, is
precisely that which has a beginning and no ending, we can say
of Mind, that it has no beginning and no end. Care is
needed to avoid understanding this in any mathematical manner,
at least where mind is concerned. It may be logically
appropriate to posit some sort of numerical form of seriality
where space is concerned, although it is assuredly more the
property of the symbolic masculine. These categories, Space
and the masculine, though they stand in the most direct
antithesis to one another, are depicted in quite comparable
terms in the rubrics, Day 2 and Day 3 respectively. But number
is finally epistemically appropriate to the symbolic masculine
and to the anthropic category. Geometrical method properly
belongs to the spatial. Thus in having said of mind that it
remains insusceptible of counting, that it has neither
beginning nor end, which also means effectively that we cannot
decide either way for or against either the singularity or
plurality of mind, we are speaking not of any numerical
transfinite, nor of a spatial (geometrical) transfinite, but
of the temporal one.
The analogy of the 4 seasonal divisions of the year best fits
the exposition of the fourfold form of the gospels, and it is
that referred to in the story of 'beginning' just noted
(Genesis 1.14). The four annual, or solar, cardinal
'points' of the spatiotemporal compass, as of the mandala, are
the two solstices and the two equinoxes. These iconically
frame the four momentously singular and different
point-instants in the annual cycle, related to one another in
terms of the ratios of light to darkness and day to night. The
word 'mandala' here should be extended to comprise those
ancient and varied systems of thought cognizant of these very
same contours of the solar year. Hence it can include some of
the earliest examples from archaeoastronomy such as
Stonehenge, the temple at Karnak, and many others. From
earliest recorded history given to us in architectonic and
graphic symbols, it is obvious that the human spirit was aware
of these same radically formal aspects of the course of time.
It has always continued to develop with consciousness,
and with religious consciousness in particular, due to the
affinity between time and death.
IDENTITY AND UNITY
If the gospel is one as expressive of the concept of immanence,
and immanence guarantees plurality as the polar antithesis of
identity, then it is also true that its fourfold form requires
attention and understanding of some sort. On the basis of the
comparison between the theology of transcendence, (creation, or
'beginning'), and the theology of immanence, (salvation, or
'end'), we established a contrastive rapport between the
concepts of identity and unity respectively. Even if the gospel
is determined in virtue of the principle of immanence, a
tetradic unity, it remains to consider such tetradic contours.
Unity is by definition compounded, it is not simple but
composite. So, it must have parts which are in some measure at
least disparate. In biblical metaphysics the two models of this
same composite unity are male : female for the theology of
transcendence, and imagination : memory for the theology of
immanence. The first is the more problematic as we noted. For by
definition, ideas or conceptual forms have as their governing
criterion identity rather than unity. Thus the composite nature
of the anthropic category, the symbolic feminine, as consisting
of male and female,
lacks the fullest integration of memory and imagination. It was
for this reason that we proposed that the second half of the
creation narrative containing the rubrics of the three forms of
unity of which male and female is the last, and certainly the
one weighted in favour of immanence, anticipates the messianic
series. The chiasmos which shapes the latter, suggests the
fullest integration of both aspects of perceptual consciousness,
imagination aligned with the symbolic masculine, and memory
aligned with the symbolic feminine. Of the two templates which
exhibit the composite nature of immanence at the broadest level,
that of binary form, it is the true immanence of the forms of
memory that best manifest the principle of unity.
Historically, much of the effort to discriminate between the
four gospels according to their peculiar interests was
instrumental in redaction criticism. Redaktiongeschichte, a term
used by Willi Marxsen in 1954, was in large measure a response
to form criticism. The intention of the latter, which dates from
the 1920s, was to discern two levels or layers of the written
gospel: an earlier tradition supposed to have been transmitted
orally and consisting of a variety of categories or forms -
miracle story, parable, controversy story, sayings and so on -
and the later (written), 'editorial' elements of the text, which
were therefore supposed to be of lesser significance. Redaction
criticism however, proposed to account for the latter more
constructively. In so doing it postulated, in the case of the
synoptic gospels and for most of its practitioners, a single and
purposeful redactor acting as collector and editor, who framed
the various components of the tradition according to a
particular Sitz-im-Leben,
or life-setting, which reflected the existence of the redactor's
community. Both methods are based on textual analysis and
presuppose historical methods - that is, they both assume a
history (geschichte) of
the tradition. Whether or not they come to terms with the
specificity of the various gospels and whether or not they
account for the relationships between the same is a moot
question. Redaction criticism for its part, assumes the Two
Source Hypothesis. That is, it relies on the hypothesis that
Matthew and Luke used the gospel of Mark, supposed to be the
earliest of the synoptic gospels, and that they used also a
sayings source Q (Quelle) which pre-dates it. The relationships
between the gospels proposed by this hypothesis notably fails to
reckon with the gospel of John.
What we will undertake here will differ completely. Our method
in the first place, overtly acknowledges psychological and
epistemological realities rather than historical ones. We will
propose specific modes of intentionality peculiar to each
gospel, a concept which replicates a vital tenet of the doctrine
of mind contained in the very narratives which the gospels
themselves share. Moreover, these will stem from the hermeneutic
itself of the narratives concerned. This method conforms to the
self-referential intention inherent in the narrative. If we are
correct, the numerical details of the three feeding miracle
narratives specify among other things, something of the
tradition (-history) itself. Thus, as already put, part of the
meaning of The Feeding Of The Four Thousand relates to
the written gospel itself, an essential element of which is the
sevenfold messianic series, culminating in the Eucharist. This
brings the story of salvation into congruence with the story of
creation, that of the seven Days. For we cannot urge that this
Pneumatological miracle story posits visual sentience as the
incarnate mode of sense-percipience of the Holy Spirit as if
this had no reference at all to the fact that the actual story
itself, and moreover, that the actual narratives in their
entirety which comprise the gospels, are written, visible,
entities. The numerical details in the miracle narrative are
here taken as polysemantic, as referring to several things at
once. Just so, we have already indicated their equally certain
referentiality to the semeia or optic signs themselves, the
visible, virtually 'inscripted' hues of the spectrum. But an
equally important strand of that referentiality is to the
fourfold tradition of the gospels. The repeated figure 7 in the
story secures the relation between the stories of 'beginning and
end' - the stories of the seven Days of creation and the seven
messianic events precisely as things written, iconic, graphic,
visible, and the object of faith. Further to that, it is
inclusive of the reiteration of the same form within The
Apocalypse, and hence the more extensive hermeneutic must
include the eschatological aspect of the soteriologies contained
in the four gospels.We have already begun to explore the meaning
of that aspect of 'beginning and end'. That is, we have already
begun to include consideration of The Apocalypse within the
framework of the theology of immanence as this remains the
primary concern of the New Testament.
Recurring to the idea of time then, to introduce a basic
postulate of the conceptual scheme which will occupy us in
trying to account for the specific variation in the four
gospels, we find more than one tetradic paradigm. The recurrence
of the fourfold typology within the two fundamental temporal
orders, lunar and solar suggests that we incorporate both
templates in any reckoning of the significance of the series.
The first references to time in the creation story are:
... And it was evening, and
it was morning, a ... Day. (Genesis 1.8, 13, 19, 23, 31)
In the Day 4 rubric we find:
And God said: Let there be
lights in the vault of the heavens, to separate the day and
the night; let them serve there as signs (tOtO)0) to determine
the seasons, days and years.
And let them serve as lights in the vault of the heavens,
so that it may be light on the earth. And it was so.
And God made the two great lights: the greater light to
rule over the day, and the lesser light to rule over the
night, and the stars too. (Genesis 1.14-16)
It is important to repeat that the immanent events,
the three feeding miracles and the Eucharist, are normative, as
are the Days 1, 2 and 3 of the creation series. Thus there is a
complement of seven normative entities, which for the sake of
simplicity, and in deference to the Christological categories,
we are reducing to six. The figure six acts as a pivot in the
list of numerical details in the feeding miracle narratives. The
sevenfold series suggest a lunar accounting, even though the
product of the two figures, 7 and 4, namely 28, does not accord
with the length of a lunar month. The moon orbits the earth in
29.53059 days, so that a lunar year of 354 days, equivalent to
12 lunar months, is less than a solar year of 365.2422 days by
11 days. Various attempts to reconcile the lunar and solar
methods of reckoning time have been proposed:
The complexity of the
calendar is a permanent challenge to human ingenuity. That's
why we say: if God exists, either he's got a sense of humour
or he's a lousy mathematician ... or else he just can't be
understood by the human mind. (Stephen Jay Gould, Time Scales and the Year 2000,
in Conversations About The
End Of Time, Edited by Catherine David, Frederic
Lenoir and Jean-Philippe de Tonnac, Translated by Ian Maclean
and Roger Pearson, Penguin, London, 1999, p.7)
It will be possible and moreover desirable to fit the semeia
(signs) not just to intervals within the twenty-four hour cycle,
as is suggested by references to the same in the messianic
series. In light of the isomorphic and analogous relationship
between these seven events and the seven Days, we ought to
follow the same procedure in relation to either system of
accounting for days, lunar or solar, or both. Initially,
examination of the texts in the gospels which do mention the
time of day will most repay us. That is why we have begun with
Matthew 16.1-4, and how we have established already the interval
assignable to The Stilling Of The Storm, and its
equivalent rubric, Day 3. Where the lunar and
monthly method of reckoning does seem adaptable or congruent
with the solar method, is in terms of the tetrad, if we take the
criterion for distinguishing four distinct phases and/or
seasons, to be the variation of the ratio of light to darkness.
The term 'light' emphasises daylight, since we are
speaking in terms of solar rather than lunar, for the night is
marked by the absence of daylight proper, even though the moon
may appear during daylight hours. But the moon itself either
waxes or wanes. It gives either less or more light during the
nights of its cycle. Congruently, the days either lengthen or
shorten, according to their season, that is, according to the
orbit of the earth around the sun. The relation of day to night
viewed at any point in the years, varies.
Now it should be apparent to anyone not living in either
equatorial or polar regions of the planet, that four relatively
distinct seasons obtain, four different occasions which process
the dynamic relationship between night and day. These establish
paradigms which are highly significant and which will avail the
hermeneutic, and more importantly, they interpret the two
visions of Ezekiel 1 and 10 foundational to the eschatological
thrust of The Apocalypse, and this in turn has an obvious
bearing on the messianic series, and by extension on the
creation series itself. The four seasons will furnish us with
templates necessary to the explication of the specificity of the
four gospels vis-a-vis the Christological categories of the Day
1 and Day 4 rubrics, Mind and mind : body. Thus if the light in
relation to darkness, that category first presented to us in the
creation story, is constantly changing, there are four
rudimentary cosmic resultant types of this relation. In summer
the light reaches its maximum, the days lengthening up to the
point-instant of the solstice, when the duration of daylight is
at its maximum, exceeding that of night by a considerable
margin. The opposite, the winter solstice, occurs in the
opposite hemisphere at the same time. However, during winter in
the hemisphere where we began, reaching its peak at precisely
six months later in the solar cycle, the winter solstice takes
place. These two seasons, summer and winter, thus establish a
relation of contrast with one another, resulting as they do in
the longest day/shortest night for the summer solstice and
longest night/shortest day for the winter solstice.
Nevertheless, we must not ignore the fact that they occur
simultaneously in the two hemispheres.
The most salient feature of the four point-instants of the
annual cycle is the fact that they mark distinct divisions. The
ratio of daylight to darkness is constantly either increasing or
decreasing. Thus we divide the year into its two halves
consisting of the spring quarter culminating at the vernal
solstice and also the summer quarter, which reaches its
apotheosis at the summer solstice. These two quarters, this
whole half of the year, will be read in connection with the
categories described here as 'normative', and listed in the top
half of the iconography, employing the entire spectrum of optic
semeia. The other half of the year consists of the autumn and
winter quarters, which also have equinoctial and solstitial
points. These are represented by the same semeia, for the
narratives of Genesis and the gospels logically construct a
one-to-one correspondence between events of 'beginning' and
those of 'end', or, as we have labelled these same, the
conceptual forms and the perceptual forms of mind. So no new
signifiers need to be introduced at this stage. What is
absolutely pertinent to the theology of semiotic forms, and so
also to the exposition of the form of the gospel, is that the
otherwise unremitting movement from one quarter to another,
includes four puncta
at which there is ostensibly no change, no movement. In the
Pneumatologies of both Ezekiel and The Apocalypse we witness
this constant and unrelenting process of change, just as the
metaphorical and literal language which depicts the Holy Spirit
engages the concept of motion, from the inception of scripture,
where we first find 's/he was moving to and fro over the surface
of the waters.' (Genesis 1.1). This is the very condition of the
temporal annual cycle, except that we must realise that the
logical and formal configuration of the same does comprise four
very remarkable instants. We may call these puncta, or points, or
point-instants, and say that such are more than nothing, but
possibly less than something, at least as far as their
ontological status is concerned, given the prevailing fact of
transition. It is these same four 'points' in the year which we
shall relate to the visions of Ezekiel and the apocalyptist, the
author of The Apocalypse, and these same four points which in
accordance with the latter, we shall utilise in the exposition
of the theory of mind. This phenomenon, according to the
Christian doctrine of mind, as we know from The
Transfiguration, is contracted with time. Whatever time
is, and whatever mind is, they are inextricably co-extant,
compossible, compresent. Their relation more than anything else
is just what occupies us here.
The equinoxes also establish a relation with one another, albeit
of a different kind, for it is obviously very much other than
one of total contrast. The spring and autumn equinoctial seasons
both tend towards the adequation of light and darkness. If
we divide the year into four equal intervals, we shall have to
use the solstices and equinoxes as termini. So for the purposes
of argument certainly, the equinoctial seasons - spring and
autumn - can be said, logically at least, to begin immediately
after the solstices, and correspondingly, the solstitial seasons
- summer and winter - can be said to begin after the equinoxes.
Precisely at the actual equinoxes of course, there is neither
contrast between light and darkness nor between the equinoxes
themselves. That is to say, the spring equinox like the autumn
equinox, is marked by the fact that the duration of day and the
duration of night are equivalent. Here then the pattern of light
to darkness is one of parity. Additionally the two equinoxes do
not contrast with one another as the solstices do. Instead they
are entirely comparable if not actually the same. Of course,
they are tending in opposite directions, and we must always bear
in mind that what we are considering is the constantly changing
relation between light and darkness, day and night. Thus what is
at stake is a series of processes, a series of dynamic patterns
which are always moving or changing. (It is important to
distinguish between the two dyads: light/darkness and day/night.
Both the Genesis narrative and the fourth evangelist do so. We
have followed this differentiation elsewhere, since it clearly
relates to the axiological strand of the texts. Only for now, we
have suspended that distinction.) We can so put the entire
isomorphic series of both Genesis and the gospels according to
the semeioptic spectrum, listing the normative rubrics and their
categories in the above half of the following diagram:
Those categories in the top half of this image are normative for
their counterparts. Thus the first three - space, the masculine
and mind - are truly transcendent entities, and the final three
- acoustic memory, optic memory and haptic memory - are truly
immanent entities. The forms of imagination, the first three
things listed in the lower half of the image, are by definition
perceptual. They belong formally to the messianic series,
relating to the forms of memory by means of the chiasmos, and as
such are in the first instance determined as immanent, that is
perceptual. Yet they enjoy a virtual transcendence; they are in
many respects like the pure conceptual forms. In the bottom
section of the diagram are listed also the compound conceptual
forms, the forms of unity. These are taxonomically given in the
theology of transcendence, the creation story. Hence they are in
the first place, conceptual entities. But they too replicate the
paradigm transcendence : immanence within their categoreal
parameters, so they are capable of being considered virtually
immanent. In other words, they function in consciousness very
much like the forms of memory. These two indispensable
subdivisions within the rudimentary polarities of conceptual and
perceptual consciousness which appear to subvert the logical
categorisation of radicals, introduce paradox to the doctrine of
mind.
Concerning the normative nature of the six categories above, we
should allot each an interval within the twenty-four hour cycle
so that the entire diurnal/nocturnal cycle is represented. We
will see that the three feeding miracles take place during the
afternoon, evening and late night time. In the same vein, the
solar imagery of Day 1 sets the tone for the transcendent
entities, so that the six normative radicals can be assigned to
the six durations constituting the cycle of twenty-four hours.
But what then of the remaining six categories? An immediate
response would be to reply that it is neither necessary nor
logically defensible to entify all twelve radicals. The two
Christological events, the first of 'transformation', the last
of 'transfiguration', central to the entire spectrum of twelve
categories, both with their sixfold form which we are adopting,
as emphatic of the concept of process, insist on the relevance
of the idea of transmutative exchange between the two polarities
of consciousness, conceptual and perceptual. These are
interdependent, and mutually interrelated. They are mutually
inclusive, such that there is no change from one polarity into
the other, without a correlative transmutation. There is the
transition from the conceptual pole to the perceptual pole
envisaged in the first Christological event, and
correspondingly, that from the perceptual pole to the conceptual
pole which is the event of 'transfiguration'. In this way, there
is a perpetual process of two relations, God relating to the
world, and the world relating to God. These are precisely what
are evinced in both miracle narratives, The Transformation
Of Water Into Wine and The Transfiguration,
respectively. One way of resolving the dilemma of co-ordinating
the twenty-four hour diurnal/nocturnal cycle and the hexad,
given that there are in all, twelve and not just six radicals of
consciousness, is to emphasise these same Christologies,
refusing any reification of the twelve entities as anything
other than relationally interdependent. For this reason we use
the same optikon of each category, conceptual and perceptual, as
these are correlated according to the formal sixfold rationale,
which is of course triadic and theological.
This roundly contradicts the reconstruction of the messianic
series itself as identifying the same cycle, a procedure in
which we shall nevertheless persist, even if, only because of
the pattern or isomorphism between 'beginning' and 'end' events.
It allows for the application of one specific interval,
from the total of six, to the three pure conceptual forms, as
well as assigning an interval to each of the three forms of
memory, since these three conceptual forms are normative like
the forms of memory. These six normative categories are
candidates for the six intervals identifiable on the basis of
textual evidence from the messianic series alone. But the final
plasticity of what the various figures in the narratives deliver
to us, as best suits our quest for understanding the fourfold
structure of the gospels vis-a-vis mind and time both, is
clearly apparent in the two tetradic cycles, lunar and solar. Of
these, the latter best befits our initial purposes. That is, the
clarity of four annual seasons exhibiting the dynamic
relatedness between night and day, not, we should note, light
and darkness, best subserves the doctrine of consciousness. For
the interpretation of the first narrative, the story of
creation, noticed its abiding and undeniably epistemological
rather than ontological tenor. Thus we are able to read the
signs of Jonah, the signs of the six messianic events which
reformulate the Triduum; the signs of the dove, the
Pneumatological signs; the signs of the rainbow, the semeioptika, the signs of
the times, according to a variety of temporal templates, and the
archaeological signs, which are analogous to the messianic
series. This we must do a propos of mind, as it is readily and
distinctly rendered by these four classes or taxa of things: pure
conceptual forms, forms of memory, forms of imagination and
conceptual forms of unity. Only, neither do these four divisions
themselves answer to the fourfold form of the gospel as we shall
soon see.
These six chromatic values -
optic semeia - should be grasped as best fitted to reflect the
seamless integration of adjacent radicals, whether conceptual or
perceptual. Part of the rationale behind optic semiosis is its
ability to render visible the (immanent) connectedness of
adjacent forms. That is to say, it is best fitted of all three
semioses to express the principle of unity. The acoustic semeia
do not perform the same function quite so readily. The twelve
tones do not literally shade seamlessly between each other, each
now into its predecessor and now its successor. The acoustic
semeia are distinct from one another and, signify properties of
time at variance with those demonstrated by the optic signs. But
the optic semeia are perfectly equipped to demonstrate the
before-and-after pattern of the forms, and the quality of time
we refer to as its successiveness, if not simultaneity. This
topic belongs to the theology of semiotic forms, but it must be
mentioned here. Thus by means of ascribing optic semeia to both
the six conceptual radicals and the six parallel, perceptual
radicals of mind, we can conceive and literally express the
phenomenon of their possible indetermination. This is restricted
to immediately adjacent or contiguous categories. There is a
sense in which haptic imagination and optic imagination 'meet'
and no boundary between them exists. This after all is the
meaning of the principle of immanence, unity, and the optic
semeia, the visible hues of the spectrum, are the proper
expression of this same principle. Since vision itself rather
than any other phenomenal mode of sentience, exemplifies the
Holy Spirit, who guarantees the purpose and function of
immanence, we should expect of optic semeia the manifestation of
this principle, unity. The acoustic semeia on the other hand,
will be better predisposed to tell a completely different story,
one which defines mental/affective processes in terms of the
principle of identity.
In the above iconography as a result, we can imagine the
graded hierarchical transition from each optic semeion to the
next adjoining one, not only as bounded, but also as
non-bounded. That is, we should regard those signs which are
contiguous, yellow-amber for example, as portraying
non-differentiation, a graduated transition, which reveals two
things only at the peripheries of the same transition. At its
inception the sign is yellow, but it nevertheless
'becomes' in its final phase. This is one way in which all
the forms, and not merely the perceptual modes, those of
imagination and memory, work. If, because all sentient modes are
by nature given to unity, then non-differentiation between
contiguous forms of both memory and imagination, the source of
this principle of unity in consciousness - the fact that one
mode of sentience blends without differentiation into another -
will be shared by the conceptual forms of consciousness. This
follows from the relation of analogy between the stories of
creation and salvation. Hence in the example just
given, that of the semeioptika amber (orange) and yellow,
representative of the possibile integration of the two forms of
imagination, optic and haptic, there is likewise the capacity of
the (parallel) conceptual forms, namely the symbolic masculine
and mind, to function indiscernibly.
This fact is
pertinent to the doctrine of intentionality, where once again
the Pneumatological cast of consciousness acts to combine
specific modes of intentionality, such as desiring and knowing.
I cite this one of the four instances of such composite modes of
intentionality, because it appears so conspicuously in the J
creation narrative, that is, in the story of Adam and Even in
the garden of Eden.
Conversely, transcendence being tantamount to 'identity'
rather than 'unity', and since conceptual forms and forms of
unity are natively at least, clearly and distinctly bounded and
differentiated from one another in accordance with the principle
of identity, that the same property of identity will be extended
to cover the sentient modes will follow logically. We require
both factors, identity and unity, to be predicated of both
polarities of consciousness, conceptual and perceptual, in both
cases, normative and non-normative orders, so as to grasp them.
This is one of the logical consequences of the isomorphism of
the two textual cycles. At a later point we can elaborate this
postulate, the compresence of threefold and fourfold patterns
manifesting identity and unity respectively, of the constituents
of consciousness, but for the moment, we shall deal with the
immanent, for it will lead us into the exposition of the
fourfold and unified nature of the gospel(s).
The analogical relation of both narrative cycles, creation
and salvation, entails that the same two semioses apply
equally to both series of categories. The above signs do not
signal the perceptual radicals of mind only; they also signify
for the six members taxonomised in the Genesis narrative. One of
the great merits for metapsychology and epistemological
philosophy both, of such a method, particularly as it is given
here in a linear gradation which all but obliterates the
distinctions between contiguous radicals of both kinds,
conceptual and perceptual, is that it highlights what is always
germane to immanence and to The Spirit, unity. The discussion of
intentionality will revert to the translation of the categoreal
paradigm into the dialectic between identity and the same. So we
put the common morphology of the Genesis and messianic series as
identity : unity. It is usual, and legitimate to think of unity
in relation to sense-percipience, assimilation is after all the
recurrent metaphor for each of the miracle stories which denote
the normative perceptual categories. But the morphology
interleaving two narrative cycles will insist that what is
proper to one, in this instance, unity, belongs by virtue of
their analogous relation, to the other. This entails that the
conceptual forms too are party to the same fact of graded
differentiation verging on non-differentiation where contiguous
members are concerned. Its obverse demands the application of
identity, the indigenous property of the transcendent, that is
of conceptual radicals, to their immanent counterparts. We shall
say more on this topic later. The above iconography thus brings
to our appreciation the role that a semiosis of the kind
outlined in The Feeding Of The Four Thousand has for any
emerging doctrine of mind which accepts as it basis, the four
gospels.
The various relations which follow this shared morphology
between the conceptual and perceptual polarities of mind, are
what ensue in the discussions of the four gospels. For just as
we have already contended, the Pneumatological members of the
corpus, optic imagination and symbolic masculine are present to
an extraordinary degree in Ezekiel, and as we will allege, the
complementary Pneumatological radicals, optic memory and
symbolic feminine are prevalent in The Apocalypse to an equally
remarkable degree. The gospels themselves as four distinct texts
clarify the relation which holds the creation and redemption
similarly in parallel, in a common and reciprocal morphological
syntax. It is with regard to consideration of the specificity of
the intentional orientation of each of the four gospels, and the
clarification this will bring to the doctrine of the
categories, that we can best proceed.
The fundamental paradigm of bipolarity is given in the
introduction to the story of creation 'the heavens and the
earth'. Subsequently, it is recapitulated in Mark's phrase '...
to the other side', also used by John. That is, the gospel
adopts the same paradigm which it presents as the consistent
oscillation between one and the other side of a spatial unity,
the actual Sea of Galilee, where or near to which, so many of
the miracles take place. The hermeneutic proposed in the first
essay of The Markan Mandala,
'Miracles As Metaphysics: A
Hermeneutic Of Mark', which undertook a survey of the
creation narrative, Genesis 1.1-2.4a, understood the first
of these bipolar formulae as referring to the three entities -
space : time, mind : body, and male : female, in two ways.
Firstly, in determining the internal triadic structure, of each
of the three events or things in question, and secondly as
referring to their extensive relatedness. Such referencing is
not confined merely to these three words, for other similar,
Christological formulations, analogously tripartite - for
example, 'beginning and end', ' first and last', 'alpha and
omega' - put the same propositions. To cover all of these
permutations of the inclusio
we adopted the expression transcendence : immanence. Like the
others, this expression is non-commutative. In other words the
actual placement of each term is part of its meaning. This
formula, the categoreal paradigm 'transcendence : immanence',
('heavens and the earth'), can thus refer to any of the three
forms of unity. As a whole, it also refers to their extensive
relatedness, such that the initial conceptual form, space, is
arranged in antithesis to the final form of unity male : female,
as first is to last, while the median, universal and
Christological event, mind : body, conforms now to the initial
pure conceptual form space in its realization of
transcendence, and now also conforms as mind : body to the form
of unity male : female in its realization of immanence. Hence
the copula indicates that the Christological categories
integrate the juxtaposed terms 'transcendence and immanence'.
The same categoreal paradigm, transcendence : immanence,
reiterates the interrelatedness of the perceptual radicals of
mind. It manifests equally the relationship between the various
forms (modes) of imagination 'and' memory. These words,
imagination and memory, call to mind an essential feature not
just of the various modes of sentience, the perceptual forms of
consciousness, but also of the conceptual modes. Explicit in
both expressions, 'imagination' and 'memory', is a temporal
vector. Imagination points to the orientation of the perceptual
consciousness towards the future, while memory expresses the
attitude of perceptual consciousness towards the past. Both
function with reference to a present, the hic et nunc, thus both are
perspectival. This means the number of terms is limited to two,
there being a past and a future in relation ('and'). The present
is not granted the same entitative status as these two
orientations, but is said to be the consistency, the confluence
of both. Exactly the same formal co-ordination obtains in the
conceptual polarity of mind. That is, the transcendent forms -
space, mind, and the symbolic masculine - are equally
determined in relation to the future, with reference to
consciousness or mind itself. The three forms of unity -
space : time, mind : body, and male : female - express the
complementary principle. They function in human consciousness in
terms comparable to the function of memory; their disposition
shows an essential predilection in virtue of the past. As
polarised, the semeioptika
are perfectly fitted to reflect this basic feature of the
radicals. They bring before us the pre-eminence to consciousness
of time, and of the two Christological occasions, birth and
death. That is one important function they fulfill, and it is
mentioned here, in keeping with a fundamental tenet of The
Transfiguration which relates time and mind.
NORMATIVE AND NON-NORMATIVE CATEGORIES
We have already launched the meaning of this basic tenet by
drawing a fairly obvious if not self-evident conclusion, which
seems to fit much of the language of both Testaments concerning
darkness, night, sleep, and death. That is the distinction at
once recognisable between a waking form and a sleeping
form of consciousness. We shall refer to these with the
following working hypothetical distinction: conscious and
aconscious respectively. It must be said here and now, this does
not fit the categoreal paradigm. It is not the case that the
conceptual polarity of mind fits the conscious, and the
perceptual fits the aconscious. Hence neither is it so that
those events which are signified by the 'nocturnal' optika, the
three forms of memory and the three forms of unity, correspond
wholly and directly to the aconscious. The former events are
certainly established in the narratives as occurring within the
periods we refer to as afternoon, evening and night. But this
does not require their relegation to that order of mind which is
termed here aconscious. Where we have employed the annual
fourfold cycle, instead of the lunar cycle , in the above
introduction to the theology of semiotic forms, we have given
equal significance to both day and night, or, 'morning and
evening' to use the phrase of the creation story. The conscious
cannot be restricted to just one half of a spectrum or compass,
signifiable by the semeioptika. Given the status of pure
conceptual forms as equal to that of the forms of memory,
namely, normative, for their own respective classes or taxa, it would be
unintelligible to downplay the latter. Perception is as real to
consciousness as its transcendent counterpart, the pure
conceptual polarity of mind. These both dispose the order of
mind we are referring to here as 'conscious'.
In regard to the manner in which the division of the annual
temporal cycle divides the year into two halves, the defining
criterion is the dynamic role of light. In either case, that of
spring or that of summer, the duration of the night is
decreasing, even if as it must be, half of these categories
classified as normative, those of perceptual memory, are
signified by the nocturnal rather than the diurnal intervals. In
that half of the year comprising the vernal equinox and the
summer solstice the light is incremental. We must repeat here,
that the basis of the ascription of the semeioptika takes into
account the twelve radicals which are the subjects of the
creation story and the messianic series, as well as of the
healing miracle narratives in the gospel of Mark. We have not to
deal with a total of six, but of twelve entities. Since these
are classed in terms of four distinct groups or taxa, each with three
members, the obvious temporal template first to pursue is the
solar rather than the lunar one. Hence 'conscious' as used here
is not necessarily equivalent to 'diurnal' or even 'waking', and
neither is 'aconscious' equivalent to 'nocturnal' or 'sleeping'.
But we shall see that the notions of darkness, night, sleep and
death, certainly function in the biblical depictions of what we
mean by 'aconscious'. Both classes of categories, forms of
imagination and forms of unity, bear certain characteristics
utterly logically incompatible with their formal taxonomical
description, the former having certain properties in common with
the transcendent pure conceptual forms, the latter sharing
qualities with the forms of memory. That particular
half of the annual cycle which conforms to both members of this
order, the non-normative 'aconscious', is to be represented
iconographically by the half of the annual, cycle containing
both the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. It is here
then that the images of sleep, darkness and death enter the
biblical portrayal of mind.
But the real theological legitimation of applying the annual
cycle to both series, that of creation and the messianic series,
so that we have two interlocked sets of events corresponding to
the binary division of both the year itself, and the sum of
categories, twelve in all, are the several references to 'the
sign of Jonah' which include images immediately relevant to any
discussion of the aconscious in such metaphorical terms already
indicated: darkness, death and the like. We have already linked
the book of Jonah with the story of The Flood as with the
Pneumatological signs, the signs of the rainbow. In so doing, we
have proposed that the reference to 'sign' is a reference to the
several signs which constitute the messianic signs as a whole.
These total six of course, and are configurable in precisely the
temporal construct, 'three days and three nights', that both the
Matthean and Lukan versions of the saying include. There are
various references to the 'three days and three nights' other
than those which are part of the 'sign of Jonah' logion. Thus
even though Mark's account of The Demand For A Sign (Mark
8.11-13) includes no mention of either Jonah or
'three days and three nights', all three passion predictions
(Mark 8.31, 9.31, 10.34) contain the phrase 'after three days',
somewhat reminiscently of the introduction to The
Transfiguration, 'And after six days ...' (9.2). These can
hardly fail to connect to both series, that of 'beginning' and
that of 'end', and indeed in the latter, the messianic series,
we find two references to time which use the term 'day':
"I have compassion on the
crowd, because they have been with me now three days and have
nothing to eat; and if I send them away hungry (nh/steiv,'fasting') to
their homes, they will faint on the way; and some of them have
come a long way." (Mark 2-4)
On the third day there was a marriage at Cana in Galilee,
and the mother of Jesus was there; Jesus also was invited to
the marriage, with his disciples. (John 2.1-2)
The gospel of John also, which has no tradition of the 'sign of
Jonah' logion
nevertheless reiterates the tradition of the Passion prediction
after the cleansing of the temple which follows the first sign:
The Jews then said to him,
"What sign have you to show us for doing this?" Jesus answered
them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it
up." (John 2.18-19)
It will be in the discussion of the gospel of Luke that we first
examine in more detail some of the implications of such texts,
and others, for the doctrine of the aconscious. Each gospel in
its turn will address the same issue. But certainly, everything
we already understand concerning the ambiguity of those six
conceptual and perceptual radicals which comprise the
'aconscious', suggests the validity of the emerging framework
that represents them and it, by that which the temporal
construct of the annual cycle when the light diminishes, in
other words, in which the days decline in length. These terms,
'conscious' and 'aconscious', which have no occurrence in any of
the actual texts themselves, but which we use to interpret a
fundamental feature of the Markan doctrine of mind, are not
imported from psychological discourse as for example
'sociological' terms are by certain schools of theology, without
qualification. Our procedure borrows from psychology, but it
stems from a Christology which is the sum of the currently
defined hermeneutic. In the course of this as of other essays,
the psychology involved cannot be said to be other than
'biblical' at least, and Christological at best. I do not know
if there is a specifically Christian 'sociology', the very
possibility would seem to be ideologically fraught. Sociological
discourse by definition can hardly evade political engagement.
Whether or not this is also true of the secular humanist
psychological enterprise I neither know nor care. What is
obvious however, is that there is a specifically Christian
psychology, just as there is a specifically Christian
epistemology, and these concern us. We will hence provide a
justification, again Christological, that is
epistemological-psychological, of the role of psychology itself
within this enterprise. Christology itself, will seek to give an
account of the method, that of combined epistemology and
psychology. If such a project seems circular, then it is not
viciously so. Indeed, it is circular in the same way that
'logos', the word 'word', marks the self-referentiality of
consciousness itself, and in the way that theoretical
reasoning must be for the sake of its own internal coherence.
It will best suit us to first address both the pure conceptual
forms and the pure perceptual forms a propos of the doctrine of
intentionality. Both of these are what we have called
'normative'. Because the categoreal paradigm recapitulates
itself within the two taxa,
it subdivides the six events in Genesis into true or pure
transcendent occasions, signifying the three ideas - space,
mind, symbolic masculine - and also their immanent
determinations, the forms of unity - space : time, mind : body
and male : female. The latter are notoriously ambivalent as
regards the first level taxonomy. For they are virtually
immanent. They are proleptic of the contents of the messianic
series, as we see from the ideas of feeding and multiplication
of kind, in the second half of the creation story, and from
their number, four, equating to the three feeding or
'Eucharistic' miracles and the actual Eucharist itself. But
these latter, the truly immanent events, the messianic feeding
miracles, propose the normative immanent consciousness; their
precedents, in which we encountered the figures of the planets,
and various animals also, are non-normative, and are explicable
on the basis of the other than conscious mind.
The three compound ideas themselves, the conceptual forms of
unity, with the possible exception of the idea of time, that is
space : time, are immediately discernible as somewhat more
concrete than the truly abstract, pure, conceptual forms, yet
nevertheless somewhat less concrete than the occasions depicted
in the feeding miracles which articulate the anatomy of the
perceptual memory. The obverse occurs within the perceptual
theology of the messianic series. There we understand
immediately, and without qualification what is meant by haptic,
acoustic and optic modes of sentience when these are given as
for memory. They are material, concrete, and actual, depicting
the settled past of such sense-percipient events. This is
outlined clearly and without any qualification in the feeding
miracles, all with their several expressions quantifying the
elements involved. But imagination is another affair altogether
as the three transcendent messianic miracles make plain. For
they seem to borrow from the creation story, and they have been
presented to us more or less ambiguously as virtually
transcendent occasions. Their taxonomic status, like that of the
forms of unity, is ambivalent, highly dubious, evidently
questionable. Here then again, we have to do with the
aconscious. For if the forms of unity look towards the gospels
and to the feeding miracles for their normative counterparts,
then the transcendent messianic events look back to Genesis for
theirs. It is the pure conceptual forms which determine the
conceptual conscious along with the normative modes of
conceptual intentionality. The forms of imagination produce
modes of intentionality every bit as important as those of their
conceptual counterparts, only these must be classified as
ordering the aconscious. This distinction is vital in both
cases, forms of unity and forms of imagination. These two taxa furnish the basis of
the aconscious. The two normative taxa, pure conceptual forms and forms of
memory are the foundation of the conscious modes of
intentionality. The former is responsible for conceptual modes
of intentionality, the latter for perceptual modes of
intentionality.
The recapitulation of the paradigm within each already extant
polarity, transcendent events of beginning and immanent events
of end, makes for no confusion at all once we fully accept the
value and function of the ambivalent status of the two
non-normative sets of events. Both classes of events or taxa, are perfectly adapted
to deliver the doctrine of the 'aconscious'. It is this very
notion which will account for their apparent mediation of the
fundamental differential which establishes transcendence and
immanence as absolutely contrastive. The same arrangement
reckons the discussion of subject and object, but we will
postpone that for now. It is necessary to put here that there is
no obfuscation at work in the narratives. The formal definitions
they impart are more than adequately capable of a doctrine
essential to Christian metaphysics, that of the aconscious, and one which
secular psychology has hitherto failed to elaborate
satisfactorily. We shall say more directly concerning the
aconscious, but the first part of the study will pursue the
conscious forms of intentionality, that is those which are the
outcomes of what we have called the normative radicals or
categories of mind. These consist of the three members of
the two taxa, pure
conceptual forms, and forms of memory, standing in thorough and
unqualified contrast to one another.
Before we examine the typologies of time-light and so too
consciousness, operative in the four gospels, we must set out
another binary distinction essential to the parameters of
Christology, or what is the same, the doctrine of mind. The
metaphorical language centred on light will serve to introduce
what is perhaps the most basic aspect of the same, one to which
we have alluded already by the compound expression
epistemology-psychology. Light and heat are for our purposes,
that of understanding these texts seminal to theology,
distinguishable, notwithstanding their certain relatedness. In
day to day human experience, we usually encounter one where
there is the other. So we can use such metaphorical language
about light to draw attention to the fact that consciousness
consists of the two sides we are referring to as
cognitive-conative, intellective-affective, thinking-feeling, in
short, epistemic-psychic. The two terms,
epistemology and psychology, and their cognates, epistemic and
psychic, thus refer here to what we can broadly determine as the
thinking and feeling modes of consciousness. Western philosophy
and psychology are replete with a battery of expressions; we
have just used one which calls to mind Spinoza, 'conative'. The
conatus of his
philosophy conforms fairly closely to the deterministic
appetitive consciousness as pictured in the immanent messianic
events. It is broadly identifiable as desire.
We use such binary terms to indicate the inherence in
consciousness of two distinct intentionalities: one
intellective, the other emotive. Thus we can divide
consciousness itself into its cognitive and conative processes.
One problem with any rendering of the Greek lo/gov is that all too
often it refers to the cognitive, intellective apparatus,
leaving the emotive out of consideration. Looking at the role of
the four feeding episodes in the messianic cycle should be
enough to correct this. For such events highlight at once the
role of appetition in human as well as animal consciousness.
(Concerning the latter, there are at least two healing miracle
stories in Mark: The Gerasene Demoniac and The
Daughter Of The Syrophoenician Woman.) So any
understanding of the breadth of mind which is in some sense at
least, coterminous with logos,
must allow for those functions which have to do with 'feeling'
rather than 'thinking'. One can certainly think about being
hungry, but in the first place, it is something one feels. Our
understanding must so concede a status to this aspect or
component of consciousness, the conative, affective, emotive, as
functioning in parity with the rational.
The first order fundamental difference between the subjects of
the creation story and those of the messianic events is that of
conceptual and perceptual. The role of light in the former story
is crucial, and comports instantly with the interpretation of
the 'archaeological' events, by which we mean conceptual. But we
should not mistake this for a connection between rational and
conceptual. That is, we must not on any account identify the
pure conceptual forms, the ideas - space, mind, symbolic
masculine - nor the forms of unity - space : time, mind : body,
male : female - exclusively with the epistemic, cognitive,
intellective, thinking processes. Correspondingly, except by
completely ignoring the evidence of the text, nor can we equate
the messianic series exclusively with the psychic, conative,
affective, emotive processes. The distinction just made between
centres of consciousness which are describable as somehow
distinct according to the various terms cognitive-conative,
intellective-affective, thinking-feeling and so on, does not
refer to the radical distinction between conceptual and
perceptual polarities of consciousness as these are disclosed in
Genesis and the gospels respectively. There is no simple
equation tout court
between conceptual : perceptual and thinking : feeling. That is
a first caveat to aver. Perceptual conscious both thinks and
feels, as does conceptual consciousness. Conceptual
consciousness, the thing first outlined in the creation story,
has its affective or feeling side, and so too, perceptual
consciousness has its side which is other than merely
appetitive, other than affective or emotive. Perceptual
consciousness must also be cognitive.
Finally we should note that three sets of binary terms are
utilised here: we are using three fundamental binary constructs
which must serve us in the discussion to come. These are
conceptual/perceptual, which resulted from the consideration of
the analogously structured stories of 'beginning' and 'end';
conscious/aconscious which we have introduced as essential to
any Christological reading of the light/darkness : day/night
language of both Genesis and the gospels, and germane to the
consideration of time; and epistemic/psychic, which we are just
now considering. The latter too picks up something already
implicit in the same metaphorical language and a commonplace of
discussions concerning consciousness and mind, namely the
substantial and essential difference between thinking and
feeling, cognition and conation. In the course of this essay, we
shall deal with each of these distinctions, but it is
emphatically necessary to understand that none of them is
analogously related to any other. We are now in a
position to examine how the twelve constituent radicals of mind
determine both processes, epistemic and psychic, that is,
cognitive and conative, and how these in turn give rise to the
specifically fourfold form of the gospels.
This page was updated 04.09.2022
Copyright MM Publications.
© All rights reserved, including international rights.