LUKE

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In beginning with this gospel, we are following the order of the messianic events, of which the miraculous Transformation Of Water Into Wine At Cana, (John 2.1-11) is the first. Such a procedure accepts the messianic series as ordered sequentially, and at some variance with the order of the Days of creation. The formal ordering of the latter complies with the opening inclusio, the mention of 'the heavens and the earth'. Thus the creation taxonomy sorts the two kinds of events. We have urged that the rubrics of the theology of beginning are nothing other than the categorisation of the conceptual forms or ideas which are the essential or radical structures of the conceptual polarity of mind. All are ideas whether we speak of mind or mind : body, space or space : time, and male (the symbolic masculine) or male : female, all function alike in consciousness. The functions proper to these two sorts of ideas, pure conceptual forms (Days 1, 2 and 3), and forms of unity (Days 4, 5 and 6), are precisely those described above as conceptual forms of intentionality, both conscious and aconscious: will, belief, will-to-believe, and belief-in-desire. The six conceptual entities all exemplify specific formulations of these four modes of intentionality, although in each case of the latter, one and only one of the conceptual entities acts as the defining moment, that is, as the epitome of the same.

This ordering by the taxonomy of creation thus strictly conforms to the subdivision within the theology of transcendence, that is the theology of the conceptual polarity of consciousness, of the same categoreal paradigm, transcendence : immanence, determining the relation of Genesis to gospel, beginning to end, conceptual polarity of mind to its perceptual polarity. The broader relation between conceptual (transcendent) and perceptual (immanent) polarities, governs each of the polarities themselves, internally. There is thus within the taxonomy of creation, a higher level division between transcendence and what looks like immanence, namely the forms of unity. This division is set out very precisely by the text which has sorted into its twin halves, Genesis 1.1-13 and Genesis 1.14-2.4a, the two kinds of conceptual entities; pure conceptual forms and forms of unity. This is a logical and sortal difference between the two, even though the text constantly speaks of 'days', and 'evening and morning' and so on of all six rubrics.

Upon arriving at the gospel and more particularly at the messianic series, however, there is a marked alteration in the sequence. For one thing, the miracles do not begin but end with the messianic analogue to Day1. The first of the messianic miracles is analogous to the Day 4 rubric. Accepting therefore the significance of this order of the messianic events, we have to deal with that same text, Genesis 1.14-19, the story of Day 4, and the first messianic miracle, of which we have only John's copy. A brief note as to the adoption of the messianic ordering in preference to that of Genesis has already been made. It is clear from the preceding narrative in John, (1.43-51), as well as from the reference to 'the first of his signs' (2.11), which picks up the motif of 'beginning' announced at the very inception of his gospel, that the evangelist understands the sequence of messianic events as something significant in itself. This is therefore a major part of our study. For it means effectively that we have placed the gospel of Luke, proportionately to the situation of the first sign and all that this involves, as signal of the beginning of Christian discipleship itself. The very same proposition is put in the pericope which describes the calling of Nathanael. This passage, John1.43-51, sometimes referred to as The Calling Of Philip and Nathanael, focuses on the latter. Philip receives little if any real attention, and the later similar feeding miracle, The Feeding Of The Five Thousand will similarly mention him, (John 6.5-7), and again similarly dismiss him, in the interests of Andrew. Philip will occupy the centre stage briefly in an exchange about 'seeing the Father' (John 14.8-11). But initially at least, it is the turn of Nathanael.

That he was from 'Cana in Galilee' (John 21.2), assures his link with the first miracle, as does the fact that if we care to identify him with the disciple referred to as Bartholomew in the synoptic lists, he is the sixth disciple, the numerical symbolism of which would not have been wasted on John. Was he perhaps the source of the tradition behind the narrative? Or further still, had he had some personal experience of what the event signifies and is attested to in the enigmatic promise given to him by Jesus (1.51)? Having come from Cana, it is even possible that the wedding at which the miracle occurred was Nathanael's own. That would certainly comply with his cameo as presented in the cryptic exchange between himself and Jesus. This points at the character of this figure as given specifically in the miracle itself. The miracle, as a portrait of the haptic memory, and equally  a portrait of the immanent Son, the divine bridegroom, the divine Eros, the subject of the vision promised to Nathanael involving the 'angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man' (1.51), is also a chreia, a portrait of the disciple, and every disciple, the psychological and mental explication of whose nature or characteristic being, is to be found in the understanding of 'haptic memory'. The pattern of this resemblance accords with the pattern of the miracle and that of the subsequent miracles, as developmental psychology. If Nathanael is enjoying the throes of early adulthood, John has recorded this in keeping with the actual event. For his own personal identity can thus stand emblematically of the situation in life of the typical young adult disciple. In the story of Jairus' Daughter we saw that Mark put the inception of this stage of one's development as beginning at twelve years of age, with the onset of puberty.

In the course of the discussion regarding the gospel of Luke we shall recur to this healing miracle story, for it acts as the equivalent within the twelvefold schema of healing episodes as inscribing the form of unity, mind : body. Thus we will contend that of the twelve radicals of consciousness, precisely the conceptual form mind : body, and the perceptual radical haptic memory, determine the psychological and epistemological cast of the gospel of Luke. Therefore in beginning this study of the fourfold form of the gospels with that of Luke, we are following the serial order of the messianic events themselves as representative of centres or radicals of the perceptual consciousness whose conceptual analogues are to be found in the creation story. For the sequence of messianic events reflects the successive order in which the same centres of consciousness first appear throughout the life course of the individual. In other words, the things disclosed in the two stories are things representative of our own intellectual and affective existence within time itself. This fact will help explain much of the meaning behind the chiastic ordering of these events as opposed to the order of their analogues within the creation taxonomy. It will also avail in the description of the very things disclosed in the texts themselves. The following are the primary texts which deal with the two  radicals of consciousness governing the specifically Lukan evangelical perspective:

John 2.1-11 And Time

The text has three notable references to time:



None of these however specifies the diurnal/nocturnal temporal setting; and for this, we must look elsewhere than in John. But we may take into account what is the event polarised with this first sign, namely the last, the Raising Of Lazarus. For that pericope contains a myriad of references not just to time but to light also. The first thing to notice is the repetition of the duration of Lazarus' entombment:



Such graphic terms leave no room for doubt regarding the condition of the man's body. The figure four here recalls the immanence of the soma. That is, it puts with patent ease the soma as  not only the fourfold manifold of sense-percipience, but the event of death and corruption itself. Where we would have expected a triadic cipher  of transcendence, namely here, we find instead an index of the immanent; the obverse applies in the case of the first messianic event with which this is paired. For whereas the soma or mind : body is rubricized under the aegis of Day 4, John commences the narrative of the miracle at Cana by speaking of the 'third day', which has the effect of bringing the two occasions into even closer connection; so that we might just as well be thinking of transcendent mind in the first episode and of the immanence of the body in the last. Earlier in the narrative of Lazarus' death the evangelist has defined a day as consisting of twelve hours:


That the event itself occurs during the day rather than the night, the next verse makes plain:


So John has Jesus traveling with his disciples during the day, when they will not stumble, and furthermore, the awakening of Lazarus, consonantly with the metaphor of waking from sleep as from death, occurring during the day, rather than during the night. But not merely during the day, during that interval which includes the very peak of the day as far as light itself is involved. For the miracle is the last of its kind in this gospel and just like the last of the messianic events, there is none more germane to the Christology of either John or Mark. The Transfiguration, like The Raising Of Lazarus, points ahead directly to the Resurrection of Jesus himself:


These verses recur immediately to the opening temporal phrase in the first sign. Thus in keeping with the mention of '"my [Jesus'] hour"', one may also interpret the reference to 'On the third day' a propos of the entire corpus of the Johannine signs, which are impelled towards the Resurrection. The miracle at Cana looks to the miracle of Lazarus' being raised from death, as its complement, in an incorporative  schema which allows both the congruence of the Johannine signs with the sevenfold creation series, and yet also simultaneously permits them to be reckoned according to the three days/three nights pattern consistently with the 'sign of Jonah saying'.  For this reckoning, now sixfold now sevenfold, is a clear formal feature of both the Days and messianic series, allowing both their isomorphic symmetry and asymmetry. The Johannine chiasmos of course lacks a formal equivalent to the Eucharist. We have alleged that the meal shared by the risen Jesus and his disciples depicted in the epilogue, chapter 21, with its summary '153' cipher specifying the immanent messianic events from a stance not native to the bulk of this gospel, may indeed be read in terms of the Eucharist proper. The absence of a record of an instituted Lord's Supper in an earlier recension of the gospel of John, supposedly lacking this chapter, is also attested by the fact that the chiastic structure of the miracles has been interrupted with the inclusion of the story of The Healing At The Pool (John 5.1-18). This episode, unlike the remaining six, has no counterpart. That is not to suggest that it is an interpolation later than the extant messianic events in John. The opposite may well be the case.

But we must set aside the discussion of the evolving pattern of the 'signs' in John in favour of determining the  time of occurrence of the wedding in Cana. One thing is evident, that the relation of chiastic pairing between the first and last of the Johannine signs, the miracle at Cana, and The Raising Of Lazarus, stands in apposition to the pairing of the non-hybrid members of the messianic series, the miracle at Cana and The Transfiguration Of Jesus. The purposes behind both formal constructs are identical. Thus whether we take John or Mark, we have at the start of the series an immanent Christology and at its conclusion a transcendent Christology. The diurnal time of Transfiguration we will determine as synonymous with the seasonal point-instant of the summer solstice; midday, when the sun reaches its zenith. The motif of light in both the Johannine and messianic transcendent Christology secures it as the categoreal equivalent of the Day 1 rubric. Thus the two miracle narratives answer the Genesis category of transcendent mind, with that of haptic imagination. This lies directly behind the Johannine portrayal of the love shared by Jesus and Lazarus, and we have already commented on it. Their occupation of the telos of either series, messianic or Johannine qualifies their status as ultimately significant to the meaning of haptic imagination.

So if the narratives of Lazarus and The Transfiguration both stand as representative of the diurnal interval midday as encompassing the climax of the intensity of light, we have two substantial arguments of a kind for the allocation of a corresponding interval to the miracle at Cana. This immediately fits the tone of the event. We can barely imagine people celebrating and drinking wine at midday; more bluntly still, the more consistently appropriate time for sexual activity, which is what the narrative indeed denotes, is more often than not this same; the late evening and beyond, that is, the nocturnal interval centering on midnight. What other evidence supports of this conclusion?

In spite of the fact that marriage must have been an extremely common practice prior to and during the lifetime of Jesus, for the propagation of the human race was essential to Jewish values and customs, we learn all too little from biblical literature about its actual celebration. In this way, the miracle story itself meets a deficiency in picturing it in a sacramental light. For it closely allies it, and more broadly still, the event of contractual sexual intimacy, with the Eucharist as do the other two Eucharistic miracles. We know that its celebration may have extended over a number of days, lasting perhaps even for as long as a week. But concerning the diurnal/nocturnal interval we need to attribute semiologically to the account in John 2.1-11, the only assistance we have comes from the synoptists. Matthew has two parables directly focused on marriage. The first (Matthew 22.1-14), notably associates 'outer darkness' - to\ sko/tov to\ e)cw/terwn (v 13) - with the marriage feast, as the realm into which the uninvited man 'who had no wedding garment' is ordered to be cast by the king. The second, the parable of The Ten Maidens (Matthew 25.1-13) has even better evidence of the kind we are seeking:


Matthew's idea of a delay sits perfectly with the Johannine image of the delayed parousia in the unforeseen and unforeseeable gift of the good wine when the guests have already drunk freely. The expression 'the middle of the night' provides us with a literal basis for assigning this same interval to the Johannine sign. The significance of the time interval which is emphasised as marking the arrival of the bridegroom, has already been prepared for in the pericope The Unknown Day And Hour:



The ensuing parable of The Faithful Or The Unfaithful Servant, which is placed just prior to that of The Ten Maidens also elaborates this theme with references to drinking:


In this parable once again, the delayed parousia figures, the reference to its unknowable quality echoing the dominical saying in John's narrative about Jesus' hour being 'not yet come.' The Markan parallel to The Unknown Day And Hour, which lacks a reference to Noah, nevertheless has the following:


These texts are all unreservedly apocalyptic; and if they are sympathetic to and proleptic of not only The Apocalypse as a whole, but of its last section, in particular, which begins with the sevenfold series of the Angels With The Last Plagues (Apocalypse 15), where nuptial imagery predominates, then we have to reckon with the link between the same and the gospel of Luke, since we are arguing that the psychological and epistemological ground of this particular gospel is none other than the immanent conceptual and perceptual Christological categories, mind : body and haptic memory; and moreover that these determine not only Lukan soteriology, but are essential to Christian eschatology. One of Luke's own exhortations to watchfulness which includes a reference to the marriage feast, and which is parallel to the Matthean parable of  The Faithful Or Unfaithful Servant is as follows:


It is clear from this that Luke himself associates nuptial imagery, that of the eschatological wedding banquet, with the late evening. Prior to this, The Friend At Midnight pericope confined to Special Luke (Luke 11.5-8), while it does not employ imagery of the wedding feast, also accords with the temporal disposition of midnight, and explicitly so, as fitted to the time of feasting:


The case for assigning the interval encompassed by midnight to the first of the messianic miracles is guaranteed by these texts, just as it is warranted by the formal affiliation maintained between the first and last signs, The Transformation Of Water Into Wine and The Transfiguration. The temporal interval surrounding midnight is preceded by the two durations, afternoon and evening, during both of which the light is diminishing.  The last of this series is the period about midnight, when the darkness reaches its maximum. So the miracle at Cana, the first of the three immanent (Eucharistic) episodes announces itself as the first of a series of episodes. This complies with the organization of the second half of the creation story, which begins with Day 4, containing the creation of the sun, moon and stars. When we read the Genesis text homologously with the messianic series, the anomolous mention of light and darkness, and morning and evening in the first half of the narrative, when as yet there has been no creation of luminous planets, must seem much less strange. The hermeneutic given here, can lay claim to dismantling such objections since it refuses outright to cede any literality. This second section of the creation story in particular wants the fully fledged doctrine of immanence which only the gospels themselves can supply.

But the miracle narrative in John does not stand alone. For just as the earliest sections of all three synoptics extensively address the kinds of realities subsumable under both immanent Christological categories, haptic memory (Cana), and the conceptual form mind : body (Day 4), the same tendency is observable in the gospel of John. The story of the 'sign' at the wedding establishes an inspirational centre of the same order and in conformity with the same chronological pattern of the synoptic gospels. It betokens the first  phase of the ministry of Jesus once his baptism has occurred. Better  than anything,  this explains for example, why the Johannine account of The Cleansing Of The Temple (John 2.12-22) is found here rather than prior to the Passion, as is the case in the synoptic gospels. No sooner is the miracle narrated, than this episode is recounted. In it we find an explicit articulation of the Lukan conceptual category, soma, or body, (mind : body):


The phrase 'three days' cements the close connection between The Cleansing Of The Temple and the immediately  previous miracle where the same figure functioned  as an introduction. Reflecting the semeioptikon we find the same pattern. Just as the actual wine of the miracle itself suggests this, indigo-violet, the colour of its constituent 'black' grapes, there is a sustained contemplation in the narratives beginning with the hymn to the logos all the way as far as the story of Jesus And The Samaritan Woman, on both darkness and night. Many links establish the thematic consistency of this section of John's gospel, whose 'sign' quite literally is the first of the messianic events. When speaking of 'the beginning', we first hear John mention 'darkness':


He employs this same contrast in the story of Lazarus, since both the opening hymn and the final miracle in his gospel focus on Johannine transcendent Christology. Both narratives revert to the very opening rubric of the creation story, that of the 'separation' of light from darkness. If the binary form day : night is more apt, since it configures the mind : body in that same narrative under the Day 4 rubric, and recurs also in the Lazarus pericope as we have noted, then we need to see also that the Johannine narrative of The Cleansing Of The Temple is followed by that of Jesus and Nicodemus:


The close of the pericope reverts once more to the same figure:

And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness (to\ sko/tov) rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does what is true comes to the light, that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been wrought by God. (John 3.19-21)

We hear still more on the theme of sexual love, the milieu of the incarnation for John as is apparent from his editing of the first sign immediately after the beginning of the gospel, and once again he ties together the various but interrleated notions we have aleady come across; mind, the body, sexual love, purification and so on:


Then follows the story of the meeting between Jesus and the woman of Samaria (John 4.1-42), in which yet again, but now for the last time, we encounter the predominant figure of sexual love, clearly depicted in terms of intentionality, that is, in terms of desire, and in terms of the persistence of desire, that is haptic memory, the abiding figure for which is thirst:


The woman's situation vis-a-vis Jesus, is like that of Nathanael, so that when she exclaims - "He told me all that I ever did." (4.39), we are reminded of Jesus' remark to Nathanael  - "Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you" (1.48). As returning to that point in the narrative of this first section of the gospel,  also accomplished by the numerical symbolism of the woman's six 'husbands' and the figure of the water, both of which recall the miracle at Cana, the initial 'sign' is recapitulated for the last time. For The Healing Of The Official's Son (4.43) marks the inception of a new phase altogether in the trajectory plotted by the Johannine signs.


We may now turn to the healing miracle narratives. Not only has Luke followed Mark's story of The Man With A Withered Hand very faithfully, but in fact Luke's text follows exactly that of Mark 2.13 onwards, with regard to the extent of the themes galvanised about what we have termed haptic memory. This makes our task somewhat easier, for it allows us to concentrate on Luke at this point. In claiming as the guiding psychological principles of Luke's gospel the two correlated forms of intentionality, desire and  faith-in-desire, the products of centres of consciousness,  or categoreal radicals, haptic memory and the concept soma respectively, we shall also employ the doctrine of intentionality. For it is hardly possible to discuss the perceptual or conceptual radical in the abstract. That each of the two radicals embodies all six of the appropriate modes of intentionality, the six conceptual modes for the conceptual radical, and the six perceptual modes for the perceptual radical, has already been put. So there is not simply one form of desire, although there is only one canonical form of the same, just as there is neither one only form of faith-in-desire, although, once again there is a single sovereign or canonical form of the same. These sovereign  species of the two modes of intentionality formulate the heart of what is specific to Lukan theology.

Additionally we have said that in each of the four gospels, one of the four simple modes - desire, knowing, will and belief - and one of the four compound modes - belief-in-desire, will-to-believe, knowledge-of-will, and desire-to-know - are expressed canonically, that is definitively. This will also help to narrow the discussion. In other words, the discussion of the gospel of Luke as engaging the discussion of what haptic memory is and is not, will necessarily entail the discussion of desire. For haptic memory is the occasion of the definitive or regulative expression of this state of awareness, or form of intentionality. Just so, in discussing the mind : body as a fundamental constituent of conceptual consciousness, we shall also concern ourselves with belief-in-desire. For what is meant by that very term is finally provided for by that specific conceptual radical. Where necessary, we shall also consider other related modes of intentionality in order to give a fuller account of the radicals themselves. So for example here, in considering the gospel of Luke, it will repay us to enter some comments about the episteme, that is the specific form of belief, as well as the specific intentionality belief-in-desire, proper to the conceptual form mind : body. We have already just previously alluded to this, it will be seen to be peculiarly pertinent in Luke's case. It comports perfectly with what we know of Luke from the immediate nature of the text itself - that it is wrought to the level of being art.

The healing miracle narrative around which so much else seems to have been arranged, conforms to the Markan outline, with few changes. To the several parabolic sayings about fasting, Luke has added a final one (Luke 5.39), which directs us to the conclusion of the miracle at Cana. Luke's concluding parabolic saying is conspicuous from our point of view, since it contains the expression xrhsto/v - 'good', (var. xrhstoterov - 'better'). This word noticeably posits the form of value appropriate to haptic sentience as well as to the mind : body. It therefore sits with the overall presentation of Jesus healing, and healing by touch, which he does here in the story, for the second time, since Luke, like Mark, has already told the story of The Leper (Luke 5.12-16). It is therefore possible to extend even further this block of text which must first occupy us. And whereas the story of The Paralytic intervenes between the latter, Luke's recension of the healing miracle denoting haptic imagination and the continuous stretch of text leading up to that which denotes haptic memory - the Man With The Withered Hand - the two stories of the cure of The Paralytic and that of The Leper denote the two aspects of the transcendent Son; in other words, the former denotes the conceptual form mind, the latter haptic imagination, its perceptual counterpart. Like Mark, Luke's apparent purpose in such an arrangement acknowledges the necesity of referring to mind (The Paralytic) in any discussion of mind : body (The Daughter Of Jairus), as it notes the need to regard haptic imagination (The Leper), in any discussion of haptic memory (The Man With The Withered Hand).


It is of course instead the immanent Son that is envisaged in these several pericopae, which posit the affective and intellective blueprint of the gospel of Luke. We can grasp soon enough the editorial principle according to which Mark has placed the previous two miracles prior to the texts which reveal a tangible, palpable Jesus, the Son enfleshed, incarnate. This organising principle Luke has followed, but it would seem that these two narratives, The Paralytic and The Leper, have been placed where they now stand, in a way that reflects their original independence as textual units. Both evangelists  place the first listing of the twelve disciples after relating the healing of the man's hand in the synagogue and Luke again follows Mark in adding to the passage about Jesus' ministry:


This means in effect then, that the text grouped around the healing miracle, since we are taking that as the specific centre of gravity for the propositional content of the gospel at this stage, can be extended as far as 6.19, after which the Lukan recension of The Sermon On The Plain follows. The only real sticking point in all of this is the disciple list. In that list, strangely we do not find the name Levi, whose commissioning Luke told at the very beginning of the sequence of events. Levi functions in a manner altogether similarly to the role of Nathanael in the opening sections of the gospel of John. John's ironising account is surely more subtle, a fact which has resulted in the failure of many exegetes to discern the theme of sexuality in the Johannine portrait of him at all. The Lukan and of course Markan presentations are genuinely humanistic. Levi, if indeed not shown to be the incorrigible reprobate, is nevertheless a pariah. His introduction to us is also the introduction of one of Luke's most signature themes - commensality. The image of table fellowship of Jesus 'with tax collectors and sinners' (5.30), is the first of many portrayals of Luke's figure of Jesus who is to spend so much of his time eating and drinking, just those actions which sit perfectly with our contention regarding the specifically Lukan mental and emotional temperament. That motif of appetition and satisfaction which prevails throughout the gospel, will claim our attention as it squares perfectly with the idea that Luke's own perspective conforms to those aspects of the Christological doctrine we have set out above. But first of all, some comment on Luke's attitude towards healing is in order. For it is clear to us, whether or not the story concerning his being a physician is true, that the miracles of healing show just how aware of the body he was.

Luke relates the following miracles of healing:

The Demoniac In The Synagogue - Luke 4.31-37, (Mark 1.21-28);

Simon Peter's Mother-In-Law - 4.38-39, (Mark 1.29-31);

The Leper - 5.12-16, (Mark 1.40-45);

The Paralytic - 5.17-26, (Mark 2.1-12);

The Man With A Withered Hand - 6.6-11, (Mark 3.1-6);

The Centurion's Servant - 7.1-10, (Matthew 8.5-13, John 4.46b-53);

The Widow's Son At Nain - 7.11-17 *;

The Gerasene Demoniac - 8.26-39, (Mark 5.1-20);

The Haemorrhagic Woman - 8.42b-48, (Mark 5.24b-34);

The Daughter Of Jairus - 8.40-42a, 49-56, (Mark 5.21-24a, 35-43);

The Boy With An Unclean Spirit - 9.37-43, (Mark 9.14-29);

The Crippled Woman - 13.10-17*;

The Man With Dropsy - 14.1-6*;

The Ten Lepers - 17.11-19*;

The Blind Man Near Jericho - 18.35-43, (Mark 10.46-52)

Luke therefore has omitted just three healing miracles from Mark: The Syrophoenician Woman's Daughter (Mark 7.24-31), The Deaf And Dumb Man (Mark 7.32-37), and The Blind Man Of Bethsaida (Mark 8.22-26). In spite of that, Luke's final tally of fifteen events of this kind exceeds Mark's count of thirteen. Similar discrepancies between their totals of messianic miracles occur, as Luke has no record of The Walking On The Water, and The Feeding Of The Four Thousand. In common with both Mark and Matthew, his gospel lacks the first sign, the story of The Wedding At Cana. Additionally he has one miracle, which like that recounted in the final chapter of John, bears some sort of relation to the feeding miracles, (although this is more clearly so in John), and is understood by the evangelist in connection with discipleship: The Miraculous Catch Of Fishes (Luke 5.1-11). The four healing narratives marked with an asterisk above, texts exclusive to Luke, are reckoned as having been drawn from 'special Luke', which scholars designate by the symbol L. This refers to a source which appears to have been known by him alone among the evangelists.

We can thus say at the outset, that Luke never fought shy of retelling stories of Jesus healing the sick. While it may not decide one way or the other, the thesis of Luke's role as a physician, it certainly corroborates the identification we are making concerning the specific character of his gospel. For the abiding interest of Luke in Jesus as healer confirms the possibility that the core of his own peculiar psychological and philosophical perspective is grounded in the concept of the body, and the percept  of haptic memory. Not  only is Luke no stranger to the notion of corporeity, or bodiliness, but rather he is its proponent. If then the Christian faith more than any other  encourages its adherents to be at home in their bodies, which I believe it does, although not in any unqualified sense, Luke is the best representative of this general tendency. One need only consider doctrines such as incarnation, the resurrection of Jesus, and the general resurrection from the dead, the role of the Eucharist, and of course the consistent portrayal of Jesus as healer of the sick in the gospels, and Luke's similar portrayal of the disciples in The Acts, for evidence of this. We need therefore to revisit the Genesis story for a broader understanding of the body or soma, as a fundamental conceptual form, that is, as a radical of human and sub-human consciousness. But first, since it pertains to the more readily accesible, that is conscious mode of intentionality, desire, we will assess the evidence in Luke's gospel for our claim that this alone of the four modes of conscious (elemental) intentionality represents his character and provides the key to much, including his soteriology and eschatology.

THE THEME OF APPETITION-SATISFACTION IN LUKE

This topic has attracted considerable attention in recent years. If we compare Luke's portrait of Jesus with that of the other evangelists, it is immediately apparent that table fellowship  or commensality, occupies a vital role in his theological repertoire. We have already drawn attention to the twofold incidence of the word 'desire' in the account of the Last Supper - e)piqumi/a? e)piqu/mhsa - (22.15), because this serves as the final point of reference to the intentional cast of the gospel. Even a summary review of the various literary genres or forms into which the many stories dealing with eating and drinking alone, speaks for the thesis that the theme of appetition-satisfaction is seminal to Luke's outlook. If this is not in keeping with the sovereign, that is, canonical expression of desire which belongs to haptic sentience, we shall nevertheless account for that anomaly in due course. It must be remembered that only John contains the story of The Wedding At Cana, a fact which may verify that it was considered audacious in its presentation of the role of haptic memory and finally of sexuality in general in apposition to the identity of the incarnate Word. Even so, Luke like the other evangelists, including John, seems to blur the boundary between the two modes of sense percipience, touch, and smell/taste, as for example in the stories of Jesus' Transfiguration, and Jesus' Anointing.

The recapitulation of this theme in Luke spans virtually all genres. Certain instances are in fact hybrids, and difficult to classify into a single genre. Many instances can be subsumed under the evangelist's favoured mode of presentation, which we will refer to broadly as storytelling, and more precisely perhaps, parable. Some incidences are only indirectly a part of the presentation of the motif, for example, the Parable Of The Seeds. Nonetheless we shall list these as party to the same generic concept, which is determined by the criteriological motif food and or drink.

Parables And Stories:

The Wheat Gathered And The Chaff Burnt - 3.17
The Question About Fasting - 5.33-39
The Tree Is Known By Its Fruit - 6.43, 44
The Seeds - 8.11-15
The Importunate Friend At Midnight - 11.5-13
The Parable Of The Rich Fool - 12.13-21
The Watchful Servants - 12.35-40
The Faithful And Wise Steward - 12.41-48
The Barren Fig Tree - 13.6-9
The Kingdom Of God Like Leaven  - 13.20, 21
The Narrow Door/Eschatological Banquet - 13.22-30
The Guest And The Host - 14.7-11
Hospitality To Pariahs - 14.12-14
The Great Banquet - 14.15-24
The Lost Son - 15.11-32
The Rich Man And Lazaros - 16.19-31
The Dutiful Servant - 17.7-10
The Days Of The Son Of Man - 17.22-37


Historical/Polemical Narratives Set In The Context Of Table Fellowship

Levi, Having Been Called By Jesus, Makes Him A Feast In His House - 5.27-32
Plucking Grain On The Sabbath - 6.1-5
The Anointing At The Pharisee's House - 7.36-50
The Denouncing Of The Pharisees And Lawyers - 11.37-54
The Cure Of The Man with Dropsy While Dining With The Ruler - 14.1-6
"This Man Receives Sinners And Eats With Them" - 15.1, 2
Jesus And Zaccheus - 19.1-9

Miracle Stories

Simon Peter's Mother-In-Law - 4.38, 39
The Miraculous Catch Of Fish - 5.1-11
The Daughter Of Jairus - 8.40-42a, 49-56
The Feeding Of The Five Thousand - 9.10-17

Other References To Eating And Or Drinking

Prophecy Of John The Baptiser Drinking No Wine Nor Strong Drink - 1.15
Mary's Song That The Hungry Are Fed - 1.53
The Infant Jesus Lying In The Manger - 2.7, 12, 16
Anna The Prophetess Fasting - 2.37
John The Baptiser Enjoins The Multitudes To Share Their Food - 3.11
Jesus Fasts - 4.2
Elijah Sent To The Widow During Famine - 4.25, 26
Blessings Upon Those Who Hunger Now - 6.21
Woes Upon Those Who Are Full Now - 6.25
Jesus, Glutton/Drunkard Compared To John Eating No Bread/Drinking No Wine - 7.31-35
Joanna, Susanna And Many Other Provide For The Twelve - 8.3
The Missionary Twelve Enjoined To Take No Bread - 9.3
The Petition For Daily Bread - 11.3
Denouncing Of The Scribes For Loving Places Of Honour At Feasts - 20.45-47
The Exhortation To Watchfulness And Against Dissipation And Drunkenness - 21.34-36


If Luke's gospel contains more miracle stories than Mark's, in spite of the relative dearth of messianic events, and precisely because of the surfeit of healing events, then it is also the case that his references to the motif of assimilation of food and drink far outstrip that of any other evangelist. That Luke himself was conscious of such almost tendentious references to eating and drinking, is made plain enough in several of them, the comparison he has drawn between John The Baptiser and Jesus in 7.31-35 being the most salient. Any attempt to divine the specific characteristics of this gospel must countenance such facts.

In examining some of the more representative members of the above list of texts, it will be possible to treat them as independent units. However, that which first demands our notice, the story of The Man With The Withered Hand, is clearly embedded in an extensive narrative as noted above. Here Luke seems to have followed Mark's gospel very faithfully. We observed previously that 'the first of his signs', the miracle at Cana, which posits the centre of consciousness haptic memory, expresses canonically or in a regulatory way, the intentional mode desire. Thus sexual desire is representative of what we mean by desire, it stands as a reference point for the several other expressions of the same form of intentionality. Even though this narrative is missing from all three synoptic gospels, it could easily be set within this early section of the synoptics. Our procedure in treating the four gospels, and thus in beginning with Luke, conforms to this very pattern, pursuant to the exposition of a developmental psychology inherently in the messianic series, congruently with the themes of time and death-resurrection. For if his gospel sits in a peculiar relation to the conscious mode desire, and its aconscious counterpart, belief-in-desire, then these same structures announce the inception of our adult intellective and affective lives as persons.

Therefore we shall first address the body of text that appears to have been organised around the healing miracle narrative whose haptic semeion is the hand, which just as the text itself does, stands as representative of the haptic memory and consequently of the intentional mode desire. Thus we will examine that section of the gospel from the story of The Calling Of Levi (Luke 5.27) as far as the miracle narrative, The Man With The Withered Hand (6.6-11). The affinity between the twelve healing miracles and 'the twelve', more discernible in Mark than Luke, is a topic worthy of investigation in itself, but one which we shall comment on only in passing, and it presents itself here with the obvious correlation between the disciple 'Levi' and the healing event. One can glimpse immediately the clear connection between the particular haptikon, the hand as haptic (somatic) signifer of haptic memory, the perceptual radical, and desire, the intentional mode which follows from it. That is, we can very well imagine Levi manually counting his money, just as he is pictured doing so in so many famous paintings of the subject.


Luke 5.27-6.11, Levi, The Question About Fasting, Plucking Grain On The Sabbath, The Man With A Withered Hand (6.12-19)

The sequence of events and the textual order of Luke 5.27-6.11 follow directly that of the parallel in Mark (2.13-3.6). Luke contains all the Markan miracles prior to this section in just the same order as that of the latter gospel, having interpolated the story of The Miraculous Catch Of Fish (5.1-11), which is an approximate parallel of sorts to Mark 1.16-20, The Calling Of Simon, Andrew, James And John, a story Mark had told just prior to the very first miracle narrative.

Nevertheless both evangelists agree to relate the commissioning of Levi, a disciple whose name never recurs after this point in their gospels, independently of their former stories of Jesus calling his followers. The two texts are of approximately equal size, and both twice mention 'tax collectors' as having been amongst Jesus' table companions (Mark 2.15-16, cf. Luke 5.29-30). Mark writes 'tax collectors and sinners' followed by 'sinners and tax collectors', as against Luke's 'tax collectors and others' followed by 'tax collectors and sinners'. The antagonists are described as 'the scribes of the Pharisees' (var. 'the scribes and the Pharisees', Mark 2.16), and 'the Pharisees and their scribes' (Luke 5.30). But more importantly for us Luke complements Mark's single verb 'eat', used twice (Mark 2.16), with the expression 'eat and drink' (5.33) which he uses once only, (emphasis mine).

The same occurs in the opening verses of the next pericopae about fasting. Here Mark has only the verb 'fast' three times in his opening (2.18). In all, this verb occurs six times in his first five verses. But Luke instead has 'yours [the disciples of Jesus] eat and drink' (5.33, emphasis mine), and he has halved the incidence of the word 'fast'. Moreover, the concluding verses in each recension are:


This divergence is well worth noting, for it brings Luke's recension of the parabolic sayings about fasting clearly into line with the first Johannine miracle story:


There are several instances unbeknownst to the other two evangelists, of Lukan and Johannine texts in sympathetic resonance, which continue to baffle scholars. We have just previously mentioned one, the story of the Miraculous Catch Of Fish (Luke 5.1-11), to which only John (21.1-14), has anything like a parallel. This is yet another.

As for Matthew's recension of the four pericopae under consideration here, he divides the Markan narrative into two, moreover, he has already disordered the sequence of events; so for example, the messianic miracle, The Stilling Of The Storm has already been related. Matthew has maintained the seamless connection between the calling of the tax-collector whom he refers to as Matthew, and the affiliated picture of Jesus infringing the purity rules of the Pharisees (Matthew 9.9-13), and this is followed immediately, as it is in Mark, by the passage on fasting (9.14-17). The ensuing two pericopae, the first about plucking grain on the sabbath, with its concluding Son of man saying, and the healing miracle, having been separated from the previous two, are nevertheless also contiguous (12.1-14). The former concludes as it does in Mark, with albeit a truncated version of the Son of man logion, for the two clauses "The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath" (Mark 2.27) are missing, and Matthew has instead:


In all of this, Matthew has followed Mark, which means that the references to drinking and wine exclusive to Luke, do stand out all the more conspicuously. It is difficult not to believe that Matthew has in fact mitigated the real force of the Son of man saying as given in both Mark and Luke, whether or not wittingly, since he has omitted the two initial clauses which give it added weight. Additionally, the saying 'Something greater than the temple is here' may be read as countervailing the value innately given in the phenomenon of physical embodiment, if we read the noun 'temple' synonymously with the concept of the body. John employs just such a hendyadis in the text immediately following the first miracle narrative, that of The Cleansing Of The Temple; 'But he spoke of the temple of his body.' (John 2.21). But against such a reading stands the saying 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice', all the more noticeable for being a quotation. Thus at the very least, Matthew's account seems perplexing.


Disciple And Healing

To begin with, we should not fail to notice a connection in the synoptic accounts which John also makes, between and individual disciple and the miracle. In either case, synoptists or John, this is accomplished by the same means, textual and thematic contiguity. John prefaced the first sign with an extended description of the first disciples, with Nathanael the last mentioned.  Not only does Nathanael's order among the listing lend extra emphasis to his significance, but the description of his calling covers a total of seven verses, far exceeding the coverage given to anyone else mentioned in this context, including Peter. There is an indubitable sense in which the sign at Cana acts as a chreia of the individual Nathanael. The brief but certain image of the 'fig tree' (John 1.48), under which Jesus saw the disciple prior to his being called, is a token not just of assimilation. It is congruent with the essential meaning of the miracle itself. We never learn whose wedding was celebrated at Cana. The only other time in the gospel of John we hear of this disciple, is in the final chapter, which once again has overtones of the theme of commissioning, although there it has more to do with the relation between Peter and the 'beloved disciple'. There the evangelist refers to 'Nathanael of Cana in Galilee' (21.2). This makes possible of course that the actual wedding being celebrated at the outset of the gospel, was Nathanael's. He is referred to in that final chapter in which, we shall put, the entire corpus of three immanent (feeding) miracles are listed numerically. There, he figures in rapport of some kind with the 'beloved disciple', if as seems warrantable, we allow John's characterisation of him in accordance with the notion of erotic love. This is all the more reasonable if we determine the presence of the unnamed 'beloved disciple' on the first occasion:


Such a determination has been made by others because it fits with the overall anonymity of 'the disciple whom Jesus loved', and it secures his function as a witness (19.35, 20.30-31). There is thus a link forged in the mind of the evangelist between himself as 'the disciple whom Jesus loved' and Nathanael, the exemplar of erotic love. Hence his need to exist, if at all, in the background on the first occasion, for there it is a question not of the 'intellectual love of God', or to put matters more theologically, not of transcendent desire, but rather of actual, physical, sexual love; love and desire in their immanent denominations. If we were to seek a miracle story as chreia for the 'beloved disciple', it could only be the story of Lazaros. John has arranged the first and last miracles in his gospel,just as Mark would have, were the first sign not missing from that gospel, in accordance with his Christology. The first expresses the immanent Son, the last the transcendent Son; both of course revolve around the  notion of love so dear to John.

The point at issue is that of the consonance between the twelve categoreal forms and the twelve disciples. This cannot be pressed too far; even so, its presence is real and contributes to the purposes of both evangelists, John and Mark. For not without reason are the references to the disciples often formally confined to the twelve fold schema, whilst the two textual cycles, the six Days of creation and the corresponding six messianic miracles, formulate the doctrine of mind. In several instances, it is not difficult to glimpse behind the stories of the messianic miracles, character traits which correspond to the psychological/epistemological radical in question, and a particular individual - in this case, these are haptic memory and 'Nathanael'. John later connects both Philip and Andrew with The Feeding Of The Five Thousand (John 6.5-9), and Matthew associates Peter with The Walking On The Water (Matthew 14.28-33). In the Johannine text introductoryto the messianic sign we find a veiled reference to the rationale of the affiliation of individual disciples with particular events:


It is of course this reference to the ehtnicity of the indidivudal which at once links individual and 'society', or as we say, ontogeny and phylogeny. It serves certain basic tenets entailed by the soteriologies and eschatologies of not only John, but of alll four gospels, and these we shall continue to develop, such is the consistency and prevalence of this correlation. The pattern of correlation between a particular disciple and a particular healing event, at its most precise in the gospel of Mark, where there are just twelve healing miracles proper, involves the correlation between two epistemic forms, or modes of knowing. These are the two epistemic forms, or modus cognoscendi, peculiar to Mark, the conscious one being psychology and its aconscious counterpart that of the human sciences, anthropology and 'sociology' so called. Thus the explication of this schema involves the exposition of the canonical form of knowing which ensues from the perceptual radical acoustic memory, namely psychology, and the canonical form of will-to-believe, which is conditioned by the conceptual radical time, namely the human sciences. The same two categories, acoustic memory and the conceptual form of unity time, are constitutive of specific expressions of the intentional modes desire and belief-in-desire. Only neither of these is canonical, since the canonical intentionality of the same belong to haptic memory and the conceptual form soma (mind : body), those very radicals or categories operative at the hub of the gospel of Luke.

The specific desire arising from acoustic memory is that of homo hierarchicus. It is the satisfaction of the impulse for honour, recognition, esteem, status. This looms large in Luke's own gospel of course, (see for example David B. Gowler, Hospitality And Characterization In Luke 11:37-54: A Socio-Narratological Approach). It does so because the desire for honour is related to desire itself qua sexual desire. Clearly sexual satisfaction may be party to the satisfaction of the same psychological constellation, since it may involve the surrogate satisfaction of hierarchical desire in the event of the domination/submission of one of two persons to the other. We shall find this clearly outlined in the story of The Centurion's Servant, where it is all the more remarkable, for that narrative involves two members of the same sex, two males, and in the case of such homosexual relationships, parity is theoretically at least, more available than it may be in the heterosexual case, something which ideologues of both sexes, male and female, had to confront in the course of the historical development of the feminist movement. We shall discuss that particular Lukan text below, it is an essential part of the first section of this gospel where we find much of the material intrinsically proper to his outlook. But it is Mark rather than Luke who gives us the rounder account of homo hierarchicus; that is, if as we shall argue, his gospel is centred on the two categories just mentioned, it should not fail to reckon theologically, and more explicitly eschatologically, with this phenomenon, this aspect of the theology of desire. This remains a fundamental concern for the theology of religion generally, since hierarchic desire all but annihilates the erotic impulse, a fact to which even as subtle a psychologist as Nietzsche seems to have been quite blind, and is linked at once, with the desire-to-know as we see in the history of those particular religions which maintain strong traditions of ascesis. Hence in Mark, the ascetic John the Baptiser plays a role different to that which he assumes given the Lukan perspective. Luke we notice defines Jesus over and against John; Mark, like the evangelist John, does not. These topics belong to a later stage of our discussions, and for now we must resume the course of the argument concerning Luke.


Here, instead of the link between disciple and messianic miracle, we encounter the association between a particular disciple, Levi (or Matthew?) and a healing miracle. But since the number and form of the healing miracles in the gospel of Mark conform to the isomorphic Days-messianic events, the effect is the same. Whether we take the messianic miracle of Water Transformed Into Wine, or the healing miracle, Man With A Withered Hand, makes no real difference. Both posit one and the same aspect or centre of consciousness, one and the same perceptual radical, that of touch, the haptic, in its true (immanent) form - haptic memory. We shall find on closer investigation that every one of Mark's twelve healing events is formally (logically) identifiable with either one of the six Days, or one of the six messianic miracles.

That haptic memory and not haptic imagination is at stake in this episode is certifiable by several factors. Mark and Luke both mention 'the sabbath' (Mark 3.2, 4, Luke 6.6, 9), for which we have already been  prepared by the logion '"The Son of man is lord even of the sabbath"' (Mark 2.28, Luke 6.5). For the sabbath as the last of the six Days, answers to the Eucharist as the last, and indeed 'seventh', member of the messianic series. That the Eucharist presents us in its logical function, with the phenomenon of memory in its entire metaphysical gamut, must never be overlooked. Otherwise the three Eucharistic miracles will be shorn of all significance, and their meaning will rest most uneasily on their presumed actuality, in clearest contravention of Mark's inveighing against such a hermeneutic (Mark 8.11-13, Luke 11.29s).

The difference between John's portrayal of the messianic event in keeping with the character of Nathanael, and that of Mark and Luke, who reckon the equivalent healing miracle besides their portrayal of Levi, and yet again Matthew's recension, which has Matthew in place of Levi, makes no difference whatsoever to the validity of the construal. For in the end, as an index of personality type or as  a chreia, as a typological psychology, there will be untold millions of individuals who may be said to fall under the same. Indeed, if we take the twelvefold tribal 'amphyctyony' as a precedent after which the lists of the disciples are patterned, then more of the meaning of the parallels between persons and events falls into place. This very idea of collective entities as essential to a group psychology, a typological or personality theory, lies behind the references to 'Israelite' and 'Israel' which John first makes (John 1.47, 49). Further to that, the same idea and the same references are complemented by the ensuing Son of man saying in John 1.51. For the devolution of the enigma behind this title, as behind the symbolic masculine with which it is synonymous, will be upon the concept of collective identity.

It would be logical to pursue here that particular relationship which exists between psychology and 'sociology' (so-called). For on the one hand we are dealing with an 'individual', however we should define that, and on the other, with a 'class' of the same, whatever that might mean. In other words, we have stumbled upon the recurrent aporia in anthropological studies and the social sciences as to whether the individual or the collective (society) is prior. There does seem to be  a shift from one to the other in tandem with that of the shift from the Old Testament to the New. For in the former we see all to clearly the understanding of persons as some sort of uniform and homogeneous entity on par with actual space ('heavens'), the exemplar of transcendence par excellence. It is this which enables their separation, their disjunction from circumambient others, so too their identity, which is the given meaning of a tribe. The twelvefold tribal system is the dominant and recurrent social and anthropological pattern by means of which personhood is to be understood. This is no longer the case in the New Testament, although something of it remains. What replaces the former vision behind which we may logically discern the conceptual form space, is instead the body which inhabits or indwells that same space, and of course, mind. Bodies are to be thought of as indeed somewhat more individuated than the space which they occupy. The system of twelve tribes so becomes in a sense, the newer one of twelve individuated persons - twelve disciples, twelve representative bodies. The larger task of expounding this as one of the foundations on which any typological psychology or personality theory must rely, also belongs to Christian metaphysics, but we shall have to defer it until a more appropriate part of the essay.

Where Mark, Luke and John all concur once again, is in contextualising the psychic/epistemic structure, haptic memory, as given by the miracle narrative. John has the disciple list followed by the (messianic) miracle, whereas Mark and Luke relate the (healing) miracle, and place their first comprehensive disciple list after it (Mark 3.13-19, Luke 6.12-16). In Mark the sequence is briefly interrupted (Mark 3.7-12), by the description of the multitudes following Jesus to the seaside, where he seeks refuge in a boat, and by the general description of healings Jesus performed.

The Lukan arrangement has the reference to 'touch' in even closer proximity to the healing than the Markan original. These references make good any alleged deficiency in the narrative where the precise mode of sense-percipience is concerned. Thus the Markan, Lukan and Matthean stories of the healing do not specify the verb 'touch', but the version in Matthew, even though it is displaced from the wider context which Luke has maintained, contains the following:


This might be said to make up for Matthew's account of generalised healing (4.23-25), which omits any mention of 'touch'. As for Mark and Luke, we do encounter later in their summaries of healings a specific reference to the haptic:


Luke has placed his generalised reference to healing after his description of the Calling Of The Twelve, and has instead:



The Healing Miracle

  All three evangelists record a gesture which the man makes in accordance with Jesus' command, one which might suggest he is about to touch something or someone:


The essential reality of touch is surely implicit in the figure of the hand itself, the semeion of haptic memory. (For a brief but fascinating introduction to 'haptics' detailing the case of a man who had lost the sense of touch, see Gabriel Robles De-La-Torre, 'The Importance of the Sense of Touch in Virtual and Real Environments'). The messianic miracle in John which purports the very same centre of consciousness also lacks any direct reference to touch - but the effect of which is if anything, to heighten its relevance. For not only has the revelation of Jesus to Nathanael whom he saw 'under the fig tree', prepared us for the reality of haptic sentience, but the same is at once inseparable from the concept at the heart of the narrative. A wedding is nothing more nor less than the celebration of faithful sexual love between two persons, the foundation of which is the haptic form of sentience. Moreover the mention of taste leaves no room for doubt, since to taste is necessarily to touch:


The substitution here of the actual Eucharistic mode, smell/taste, for the mode touch, the Christological one, requires consideration. It will redirect us to Luke, whose plethora of references to eating and drinking as also tokening the haptic, needs to be assessed. We shall see that Luke consistently elides these two modes of sentience, perhaps in the interests of good taste, perhaps because of their certain affinity in consciousness itself. But in this he follows the format sustained by both Christological messianic events, The Transformation Of Water Into Wine and The Transfiguration, which refer to taste in relation to The Son. Such elision, whether in John or Luke, or in the other synoptists, is certainly precursive of the Eucharist as signifying the passion and death of Jesus.  For all accounts of the Last Supper mention the wine or the cup. In keeping with this, the Johannine first sign too points ahead to the cross, just as the cross looks back to the miracle:


One can hardly miss the aptness not only of the metaphor, the consumption of wine for the satisfaction of the erotic appetite, nor the nexus between the passion and death of the incarnate logos, which is fully sympathetic to Luke's case, but also the gambit which first conceptualises desire itself:


Not to have, and indeed not to have to drink something as intoxicating as wine, is as summary and succinct an image of (sexual) desire as one might conceive in so very few words. This justifies the actual concept of miracle. Thus for John as for Mark, these phenomenal modes of sense-percipience, touch, hearing and seeing, are effectively just that - phenomenal, miraculous. They furnish us with independent yet connected series of semeia, signs, or signifiers, upon which their 'miraculous' status may be said to rest, and which establish the possibility of interpersonal communication. Take the very instance in question here, and that in accordance with the haptic semiotic series itself: the hand as signifier. It is a fact that all of the external members of one's body function as means of touching. For the body itself is encased in a 'derma', an outer covering of skin. We saw this envisaged in The Transfiguration, where the meaning of 'three tabernacles' or 'three tents' (trei~v skhna/v  Mark 9.5), carries the same import. In his confusion, Peter's suggestion to Jesus about the 'three booths' conveys the same semeion. But the outer covering of the body, the skin, its largest organ, is the sign for haptic imagination. The hand is the signifier of the complementary radical, haptic memory. It consists not just of skin, in other words, by 'hand', we understand something other than mere bodily externality. It is that member of the body so often associated with 'to have and to hold'. A hand may hold and contain, as well as penetrate by means of its individually articulated fingers. These two radicals of consciousness function as a means of self-representation in consciousness, as part of the haptic semiosis of the miracle at Cana; that is, as part of the doctrine of mind, the doctrine of logos, the word, upon which we shall elaborate in the discussion of the gospel of John. The skin, signifies the haptic imagination, the hand signifies the haptic memory. They stand in a certain relation of juxtaposition or antithesis to one another, the reason why in the messianic series, the two Christological miracles appear as first and last. The forms of intentionality of which they act as the sufficient and necessary conditions are the aconscious desire-to-know (haptic imagination), and conscious desire (haptic memory). Luke's account of Plucking Grain On The Sabbath alone repeats the somatic (haptic) index, or sign:

To take the conative mode alone, desire: haptic memory is the basis of sexual desire; haptic imagination is the basis of the desire for purity. John of course adroitly includes a reference to the latter in his presentation of the radical haptic memory, for the six stone jars of water are said to be 'for the Jewish rites of purification' (John 2.6). But sexual desire necessarily entails only something akin to the desire for purity. In fact, it may be antipathetic in relation to it, just as the aspiration to purity probably will be towards the desire for sexual satisfaction. More needs to be said on this score; for if memory always comprises imagination, which it must according to the categoreal paradigm transcendence : immanence, where the latter relatum consists of a composite which includes the former in some guise or another, then it must follow that the erotic have some incorporative cathartic factor. The erotic may encompass an objective that is nothing other than cathartic, and perhaps even should incorporate such an element. This is the reason for the statement in the Johannine story about 'rites of purification'. Sexual love here in John's first narrative, assumes a nearly sacramental purpose. Any human (and any subhuman) activity, such as feeding and sexual congress, which requires repetition in accordance with the periodic structure of time already has the potential of ritualisation, guaranteeing its link with mental states such as belief and belief-in-desire. It is elevated by such a reference, and delineated in a manner which deals with the internal inconsistency of the thing itself. This inconsistency results from the theology of identity.

In other words, the erotic does and yet does not encompass a cathartic objective; just as the wine both does consist of water; but neither entity consists of this alone, and in a sense, what is now is, or has become in its transformed state, is altogether other than water. What it was, was water, but it is now 'become' (gegenhme/non John 2.9) wine. This inconsistency of the erotic towards its complement, the cathartic, bears comparison with the Platonic concept of becoming, in which both being and non-being are coalesced or co-ordinated. The inconsistency is the result of the fact of the incorporation of the transcendent relatum. In itself and for itself, the desire for purity, represented semiologically by the skin in the Transfiguration narrative, is transmuted, transformed. That is what we mean by saying 'in some guise or other'. Haptic imagination is necessarily present in haptic memory - it is always there, for there is no past without a future as there is not immanence without a transcendent component of some sort. But identity, the real business of transcendence, is not a first order concern of immanence. Rather, unity is. Thus haptic imagination, and so too the desire to which it gives rise,  which in itself may be isolable and identifiable as that for purity or catharsis, is in a sense suborned, compromised, co-opted by haptic memory. This is why we allege that only something akin to the desire for purity is encompassed in sexual desire. This belongs to the notion of transformation, and that of becoming. Just so, it is the - albeit imagined - future which in this case becomes; for memory - the actual past, the remembered past of occasions of haptic sense-percipience - here has its way.

From this first survey of the healing miracle which systematically puts the existence of a centre of consciousness, namely haptic memory, which we are in the process of defining as formally expounded by the first of the three immanent messianic (feeding) miracles, we can see that Luke very carefully follows Mark. If then Luke's Markan source lacked as it does in its present version, the first sign, Luke's own gospel does also. But if anything, Luke's redaction has heightened the concept of haptic memory for it has heightened the theme of sexual love, the immediate psychic or conative, manifestation of the same. He has done this by including a reference to 'drink' in the introductory verse of the passage about fasting, and also by the concluding verse, which as noted bears a striking resemblance to the conclusion of the messianic miracle story. This verse, missing from both Mark and Matthew, and presumeably Luke's own work, also remarkably contains a reference to 'desire':


(As noted, Matthew used the same verb in his account of The Calling Of Matthew.) The final word too of this verse, the adjective 'good' is also worth noting. It reiterates the presence in the Johannine miracle story of the adjective kalo\n - 'good', even though it is not the self same expression, a fact which may be attributable to its sounding so much like the Greek form of 'messiah' - xristo\n - which Luke had earlier used in his first generalised summary of healing (4.41), and prior to that, in his story of The Presentation In The Temple (2.26, 'the Lord's Christ'). Luke is certainly not beyond such poetic niceties. They are in fact well suited to his overall style as well as to his artistic temperament.

The Calling Of Levi, or Mathew as he is known to the evangelist of the same name, is homogeneous with this section of text. If the commissioning of an individual begins this theme of appetition and satisfaction not just in its literal sense, but also in relation to sexual intimacy, which we will claim is characteristic the specific psychological disposition of the gospel of Luke, then the commissioning of 'the twelve' concludes the unit Luke 5.27-6.19. That is not to confine it, for as the list of references to eating and drinking above proves, Luke is much given to reiterating it at various stages throughout his entire gospel. In Levi's (or Matthew's) case, the commensal functions along these lines; sharing food and drink with 'a large company of tax collectors and others' who in the eyes of the scribes are 'tax collectors and sinners' (Luke 6.29-30), renders Jesus himself equally a reprobate. He does not seem to have rejected their judgement:


This concluding verse of the narrative cements the relation between specific disciple and specific healing event. Thus the ensuing and concluding stories of 'the twelve' and the generalised account of healing, emphasise the same relation of disciple and healing, only in regard to groups of persons. Tax-collecting was not an occupation for older men. This squares with what little we know of Nathanael in so much as if he is envisaged by John beside the miracle at Cana, we may well suppose that at his calling, we was still a young man. Nathanael of course was no pariah, such as Levi is. Nor can Levi be cast in the role of faithful spouse to be, if the next verses are any indication. For the role of bridegroom in the pericope concerning fasting is given to Jesus:


John's narrative first tells of 'Jesus and his disciples' being 'invited' (e0klh/qh John 2.2) to the wedding, and then mentions 'men' (pa~v a!nqrwpov), as those who both 'serve the good wine first' and 'drink freely' (2.10). But effectively the greater role seems to belong to 'the servants who had drawn the water' (dia/konoi v 9).

We must not forget that the healing episode is Christological. The mode haptic sentience is the perceptual instantiation of The immanent Son. We see it in the event at Cana, where in turn it underpins John's understanding of the incarnation of the eternal logos. If The Word is to become flesh, then not only bodiliness, or the concept of the body - soma - but also the percept which is the haptic and no other form of sentience, must instantiate the same identity. In either case, healing miracle or messianic miracle, the theological reasoning of the event is that of Christological immanence. This serves Luke's soteriology most ably. For the final image of the sick in need of a physician cedes to a topic which meshes completely with the disposition of the gospel as about desire, and that is meta/noia - repentance. The presentation of the concept here is admirably couched in terms which recall the sexual metaphor itself in virtue of the criterion of need. For if the immanent is signaled primarily by the criterion of consumption, then a foremost secondary criterion is that of necessity. We shall find it again and again in Luke in connection with the notion of desire:


Given that the twelve miracles of healing reiterate the categoreal scheme, that is, as recapitulate the six conceptual radicals of the 'beginning' and the six perceptual radicals of the 'end', and also given the typological apposition between these same twelve narratives and the twelve disciples - we are deferring to Mark in this much, which serves as a source and inspiration for Luke - we can say in the case of Levi at least, that there is genuine warrant for the coupling. In other instances, where the concept of the group and thus of collective intentionality predominates, most notably those concerning the perceptual radical acoustic memory, envisioned in the story of The Five Thousand, and concomitantly in that of The Deaf Man (Mark 7.32-37), a narrative missing from Luke, in which Mark includes the reference to 'multitudes', it is more difficult to press for a one-to-one correspondence between a particular figure, that is disciple, and the occasion. This is only because we tend to think of all persons as individuated. But according to the degree to which the same individuals answer to the same radicals, in terms of their representativeness as types of these very things, such thinking may or may not be warranted. So for example, the acoustic memory, the subject of The Feeding Of The Five Thousand, favours a view of the person which accentuates his belonging to the particulat group or society endowing him with his language. Here, individual differences will be eroded, for the condition of belonging to a class is similarity if not sameness. Contrast this with haptic memory. Here the unity which marks immanence, is reduced to the couple, the dyad. For the erotic requires no more than a single other. One relates to one's class on the largest of scales. Sociality is plurality at its maximum - the greater, the more multitudinous, the better. It understands personhood phylogenetically. But the erotic redefines plurality, that is immanence, in terms of the body as essentially more private than public, in fact, as highly distinct, if not unique; or as we say, ontogenetically. In most cases, it will confine itself to just a single individual. This is still corporeity, still immanence, still plurality. But it is attenuated plurality when compared to what transpires in corporeity as constituted by the acoustic. In short,  two is a fish of a quite different kind than five thousand.

We can therefore say that in Levi's case, or in that of Nathanael, the apposition between the 'individual' as typologically mimetic of a certain mental structure, haptic memory, is indeed all the more reasonable. If we were to seek a representation of the acoustic memory, we should rather seek very many persons, in whom the individuating process remains at a minimum. It is not that certain persons are incapable of representing the group or social class; they are. But this very representation obliterates everything we usually associate with if not understand by a personal name, one such as Levi, or Nathanael.


Another point which must be made here resumes what was said just now about Mark being the source of this Lukan material. If we are claiming that the primary disposition of the latter is to be found in the two intentional modes, desire and faith-in-desire, of which the perceptual form, haptic memory and the conceptual form soma are the sufficient and necessary conditions, then why point to those narratives in Luke which are common to both gospels? For Mark, as we shall see, is effectively all about the social. That is, he takes his primary cue from the intentional forms related to acoustic memory and the conceptual radical time - namely, knowing and the will-to-believe. Yet we are here referring to texts  in Luke which appear to stem from Mark. We should remember we have not posited a hard and fast boundary between the two gospels as manifesting the relation between the two perceptual radicals and their conceptual counterparts which underpin the respective forms of intentionality, distinguishing their specificity. The haptic and the acoustic are both forms of memory in their normative determinations; and their corresponding equivalents in the conceptual realm, the ideas of the soma and time respectively, are both 'forms of unity' belonging to the tsame taxis.

But this section of Luke's gospel will help us to make sense of those references first given above to eating and drinking, only some of which are to be found in Mark. We can of course approach the same list independently of the narratives extending from Luke 5.27-6.19, which he seems to have drawn from Mark. But clearly the four gospels establish a corpus, just as the various modes of intentionality and the various categoreal forms do. Moreover, the four gospels are in accord in their presentation of those specific epistemic and psychic entities which determine the character of Luke. It is not that the other evangelists never write about desire, nor about believing-in-desire. Certainly they do. But Luke writes about these same things to an extraordinary extent. The great merit of what Luke has adopted from Mark, and accentuated for his own purposes, is its thematic integrity. All four pericopae, Levi, Fasting, Plucking Grain and Withered Hand, and even the two following, The Twelve, and Healing Summary, are of a piece. To seek a single point of reference for all might prove difficult were it not for the fact that the Son of man saying proffers itself fairly readily:


The sabbath, mentioned also in the other outstanding if longer point of reference for this block of text, the healing story, stands in relation to the Eucharist as first to last by means of the isomorphic pattern maintained by the seven Days and the seven messianic events. The Institution Of The Lord's Supper, Luke 22.14-22, in a sense, the last of 'earthly (immanent) events performed by Jesus, is for Luke final and irrevocable. We shall therefore use it as the final and lasting point of reference in Luke to the plethora of occasions in which Jesus eats and drinks with others, and teaches on these same subjects. David's action taking and eating the bread of the Presence, and also giving it to those with him, which was not lawful, is just one more point of contact between the discourse on Plucking Grain and the miracle story. Both David's and Jesus' actions, and Jesus'  teaching as well as healing, fly in the face of religious propriety. This is the first of several such occasions which find their final resolution in the Eucharist; in other words, it is the beginning of the end for Jesus. Jesus' last Passover supper with his disciples however pre-empts the eschatological banquet, and as we must note, Luke will take up the same motif, that of eating/drinking, even in his resurrection narratives. We have not listed these above - Luke 24.30, 35, 41-43 - but in some sense they stand as final tokens of the systematic disposition of this gospel.

Prior to the above list of the many texts in the third gospel which deploy metaphors of consumption, that is, appetition and satisfaction, we entered a list of the healing miracles in Luke, having argued that his greater number of examples of this genre evinces his mind-set as disposed in virtue of the fact of bodily existence. Before we make an assessment of the stories revolving around table fellowship and the concept of appetition-satisfaction, it will repay us to examine briefly at least two of the healing miracle stories which are contained only in Luke. In this way we may introduce the larger picture of commensality, which more effectively than anything else, supports the case being put here for the disposition of the gospel of Luke. The second of these is remarkable for the fact that it virtually reiterates the story of The Man With A Withered Hand. The first can be taken as comparable to the story of Jairus' Daughter. Both of these narratives as noted above, serve the Markan categoreal depiction of those specific radicals responsible for the intentional forms, desire and belief-in-desire, namely, haptic memory, the perceptual radical, and soma or body (mind : body), its conceptual counterpart, respectively. It is almost as if Luke in reiterating the two narratives, wishes to give them added weight, or to make them his own.

The Widow's Son At Nain (Luke 7.11-17), A Sinful Woman Forgiven (7.36-50)

In this story exclusive to Luke, the 'relationship' is one between a mother and her dead son. On account of this the son may be likened to the person of Jesus himself,  and Luke relates his being 'the only son of his mother' (monogenh\v ui(o\v - 7.12) to this very effect. What is worth noting here is the use of touch by Jesus as he restores the boy to life;


This is all but identical to the command Jesus issues to the daughter of Jairus, (Luke 8.54, cf. Mark 5.41), and we shall see directly the same as true of the previous narrative of the Centurion's Servant. So to the later relationship of father and daughter, the evangelist here juxtaposes that of a mother and son. (See Elvey, Anne, 2006, Touching (On) Death: On 'Being Toward' The Other In The Gospel Of Luke). There are many instances in Luke detailing healings which utilise touch and or verbal utterances, but this one in particular is relevant to our case. For it adds a third instance to the previous two in which the evangelist draws comparisons between 'the  physician' and  the young man  who  is in need of him. Luke is not sexualising the event any more than John does the episode involving Jesus and Lazaros. But clearly he colligates the identity of Jesus himself and haptic consciousness, and consequently forges a link between Jesus and the intentional form, desire. If anything, this episode, like that of Lazaros in the fourth gospel, extends the parameters of desire beyond those of its sovereign or canonical expression. For we witness the love of a mother for her son in Luke's story, and the love of the sisters for their brother in John. Luke has already been speaking of love, (Luke 6.27-36), and in a way which not indirectly binds it to desire:


The healing narrative cedes to that of The Messengers From John The Baptist (Luke 7.18-35), to which it is preparatory, for the story of The Widow's Son artfully ended thus:


The extended discourses on The Messengers Of John The Baptist and John The Baptist himself (Luke 7.18-30) thus function contrastively to the portrayal of Jesus in the characteristically Lukan terms which relate him to the phenomenon of desire. That is to say, these passages form a caesura before the final and explosive juxtaposition of John and Jesus, reminiscent of the previous narratives subsequent to the story of the Calling of Levi, The Question About Fasting and Plucking Grain On The Sabbath (Luke5.33-6.5):


Luke plies these linked themes most adroitly. It is as if he knows that any theology of desire will be greeted with suspicion. The reference to 'tax collectors and sinners' (7.34) reminds us at once of the identical phrase in the story of Levi's commissioning (5.34). Luke will use the second term - a(martwlo/v - more than once in the very next pericope, which tells of Jesus having been anointed by 'a woman of the city who was a sinner' (7.36-50), in connection with both touching and the related Eucharistic mode(s) smell/taste. We cite here, only the most salient features of this extended narrative:

One of the Pharisees asked him to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee's house, and took his place at table. And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner ... brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment. The Pharisee ... said to himself, "If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching (a(/ptetai) him, for she is a sinner."

There is here very substantial evidence for the hypothesis we are putting a propos of the gospel of Luke, and I do not mean merely the  ingenuousness of an image which portrays Jesus as both loved and loving. Luke has heightened the pitch of the scene relative to the similar narratives (Mark 14.3-9 and John 12.1-8). Coming much later in Jesus' ministry, the anointing for them both serves as something of an overture of the passion and death of Jesus. Both evangelists agree on the  value of the unguent:


Indeed Luke's account radically contrasts the prophet Jesus with the prophet John. There is no hint here of Jesus' approaching demise, no sense of foreboding. He is too much the bon vivant, and the woman 'who was a sinner' accentuates the characteristically Lukan portrait of Jesus. But we should not underestimate the equally Lukan concept of repentance, given by the reference to her 'weeping' and her 'tears' (7.38, 44). This, if only momentarily will permit of some kind of allusion to death, resonating with the previous story of the Widow's Son in which Jesus bade the woman "Do not weep." (Luke 7.13). If we allow this, that is, if we contend that the later passage about the sinful woman who anointed Jesus may be read in the light of the story concerning the death of the 'young man', then we must also extrapolate in the opposite way. That is, we can begin to understand the story of The Widow's Son vis-a-vis that of the anointing. This has the consequences that Jesus' perception of the woman's suffering, of her pathos, the deepest longing she feels for her only son now lying dead upon the bier, may be linked to desire, even sexual desire itself, if we accept the connexity between love and death. The expression 'he had compassion on her' ( e)splagxni/sqh 6.13) speaks for this. Jesus, is profoundly aware as he was at the wedding at Cana, that something must occur; he must act. Her suffering demands his response. (For more on the role of women generally in the gospel of Luke, and that of The Widow At Nain see Edith Ashely, Women In Luke's Gospel).

Once again some link obtains between the gospels of Luke and John regarding the story of The Anointing, even though the latter locates the event in time - prior to the Passover feast -  and place, Bethany, in keeping with the accounts of Mark and Matthew. Neither Mark (14.3-9) nor Matthew (26.6-13) inflect their accounts as John and Luke have with overtones of the connectedness between (sexual) love and death. For them, the controversy centres on the economic reality of the permanent presence of the poor, and concludes with the notion of remembrance, which links itself to the Eucharist soon to follow. John (12.1-8), certainly feels the connection with death, since he mentions Lazaros' whom he 'had raised from the dead' and the day of his [Jesus'] own burial (12.1, 7). He also incorporates the theme of the poor and the betrayal of Jesus by Judas. The other synoptists have the passage concerning Judas immediately following their recension of the anointing. Thus if anything, John seems to hint at the possibility of sexual jealousy on the part of Judas towards the woman, clearly in his story, Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazaros; possibly he means that in connection with all three, for we are told that Jesus loved each one of them, (11.5).

John's account is remarkable for the sentence: 'and the house was full with the fragrance of the ointment.' (John 12.3b), especially since he referred to the odour of putrefaction in the story of Lazaros' death (11.39). But Luke's story of The Anointing is equally remarkable since it alone develops the theme of love to a degree greater than any other of the three. The woman's love for Jesus is for him signal of her repentance, and it underpins her faith:


We shall return to this subject of the woman's faith after we have considered another story of an outcast who demonstrates exemplary love, the centurion, the account of whose slave having been healed by Jesus is the first of the three episodes of healing in chapter 7, taking as we may, the story of The Sinful Woman Who Anointed Jesus as a healing miracle, which is inferred by the citation just noted. This certainly complies with the Lukan presentation of the Eucharist, even if the passage is at some distance from that event in the course of narrated time. If Jesus is to serve as food to the world according as that occasion, the Eucharist, somehow marks the true and teleological significance of what was first described in the story of the human couple in the garden of Eden, which it does in conformity to the messianic series as a whole, then Luke better than the other evangelists has grasped the link. We shall see that even if desire and faith can be said to be at such remove from one another as to mirror the relation of polar opposition, then we may use the vocabulary of time itself, specifically that of midwinter as against midsummer for the two conscious forms of intentionality, desire and faith respectively. This very antithesis must involve that they nevertheless complement each other. The same is given in the relationship of the two corresponding aconscious modes of intentionality, the desire-to-know, and faith-in-desire. Such complementarity can be construed in terms of simultaneity of spatial (hemispherical) polar opposition. Thus the conscious intentional mode, faith simpliciter (John), and the aconscious mode  faith-in-desire (Luke), are conceivable as the analogues to the polar opposites, midsummer day and midwinter day respectively, which are nevertheless simultaneous or concurrent in the oppositional hemispheres. So too are their simultaneous counterparts, the aconscious desire-to-know (John), and desire (Luke), the analogues to night at the summer solstice, and night at the winter solstice respectively. For the basic paradigm of the conscious forms of intentionality remains that of the processive diurnal interval, whether this be long, as in the case of faith, or short, as in the case of desire. Correspondingly, the analogous template for the aconscious forms of intentionality, the desire-to-know and faith-in-desire, is the nocturnal. In the case of John and Luke, the relationship is one of contrastive complementarity, but we can glimpse from this paradigm, how they belong together. (Where Mark and Matthew are concerned, the relationship is again complementary, and this configures the rapport between the corresponding forms of intentionality. But the difference here is noticeable; for the two equinoxes posit equal durations between day and night.)


Before passing to the second of the healing stories exclusive to Luke in this first section of his gospel, a section mirroring the same concentration in both Mark and John at the same phase of those gospels, on the archetypal form of desire, the sexual, and its aconscious underpinning, faith-in-desire, we should note a further similarity between Luke and John which concerns their stories of Jesus having been anointed by a woman. Here Luke and John, if not Luke and Mark, are more in accord as to the significance of the episode as we shall argue. This is not to urge that the two episodes are one and the same - fairly clearly they are not. The time of their occurrence is the deciding factor against any such argument, the discrepancy between the duration of the ministry of Jesus as described by the two evangelists notwithstanding. Efforts towards this conclusion, motivated as they are in simplifying matters for the exegete, succeed in confusing the identities of the women involved, positing that Mary the sister of Martha and Lazaros  must not only have been Luke's 'woman of the city, who was a sinner' but also that she must have been identical to the Mary known as Mary  Magdalene, referred to in the ensuing passage (Luke 8.2).  Both assumptions are untenable. A more likely argument would be that there are three distinct women involved here. The woman who anointed Jesus at Bethany is clearly identified by John (11.2, 12.3). Mark (14.3s), like Luke, never names her, a fact which has suggested to some scholars that the Johannine version has been copied by the synoptists. It is fairly certain that the two stories of anointing in Mark and John are one and the same; but Luke regarding this part of the tradition, as in other cases, seems to go his own way.

How the Johannine and the Lukan stories do concur however is psychologically. Just as John has told the story of Jesus' being anointed subsequently to that of the 'resurrection' of Lazaros, for only the narrative of The Plot To Kill Jesus (11.45-57) intervenes so as to further the iconic similarity between Lazaros and Jesus, so too Luke places his story of Jesus' anointing in close proximity to that of the 'resurrection' of The Widow's Son At Nain. The intervening pericope in this case is that of The Messengers Of John The Baptist (Luke 7.18-35), which juxtaposes 'wailing' and 'weeping' (John) with 'piping' and 'dancing' (Jesus), and which concludes so nicely by means of Luke's signature 'eating and drinking', and hence desire. (We shall say more later concerning the figures of music and dancing, and concerning art in general vis-a-vis the Lukan epistemic index.)

Thus the Johnannine telling of Mary Anointing Jesus looks back to the story of Lazaros, the last miraculous event, and from there to the initial messianic miracle at Cana, its chiastic counterpart, in which the themes of love (Eros) and death are momentarily allowed to merge, with the difference being that in the final miracle in John, it is instead death (Thanatos) which receives the emphatic treatment.

If the narratives of the anointing of Jesus stem from a common original, which is unlikely, then Luke's in comparison with the Johannine and Markan versions, is divested of any substantial link with death. This comports with the context of his account, the fact that the texts from 5.27 as far as the end of chapter 7 are purposefully focused as are the earliest sections of both Mark and John, on the implications for Christian theology of the meaning of the soma, the body. This sits well with the Johannine dominical saying given in the first messianic miracle: "My hour has not yet come." (John 2.4) It also fits with Luke's tendency visible in not this particular tradition alone, but generally in his overall employment of eating/drinking and Eucharistic imagery, to highlight the psychology of desire. Having transferred the story of Jesus being anointed by 'a woman' to the earliest section of the gospel, in clear juxtaposition of its recension in all other gospels, has the effect of emphasising the specifically Lukan orientation. In sum, it shapes the event in the light of the physical reality of existence, the reality of the body as a given element in consciousness, and equally the reality of desire. The only hint of death as opposed to desire here is deployed by means of the connection between the pericope and the other one prior to it also involving a woman, The Widow At Nain (7.11-17). But that event too is very remarkably not about death, but about life, the life of a young man on the threshold of adulthood - neani/ske (7.14). The links between the two women's stories are symbolised by the element of tears/crying, expressive of another Lukan favourite theological theme, that of compassion. But overall, there is here as in the first messianic miracle, little if any real deployment of the theme of death.  (Kylie Crabbe  discerns the various threads which tie together the story of the woman with others in this section of the gospel of Luke, see: Transforming Tables: Meals as Encounter with the Kingdom in Luke).

This is the second pericope exclusive to the gospel of Luke, which we shall examine. The event it recounts also takes place on the sabbath. In other respects it bears comparison with the first controversial healing on the sabbath. The setting, that of the synagogue, is the same, and on both occasions Jesus was teaching, (Luke 6.6 cf. 13.10). This time the antagonism comes from a single person, the 'ruler of the synagogue' (v 14), but he elicits the same opposition from 'the people' so that Jesus refers to them collectively as 'hypocrites' (v 15). It is interesting to us because it includes the mention of animals, and moreover animals engaged in eating and drinking:

Then the Lord answered him, "You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his ass from the manger (fa/tnhv), and lead it away to water (poti/zei) it? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?" (Luke 13.15-16)

These images of the animal nature of appetition are a far cry from those in the Markan catena, the stories of The Gerasene and the Syrophoenician Woman, which featured the imagery of feeding animals. Luke's are more neutral, or if morally charged at all, then they must be seen as positive portraits of the same. The 'sabbath' reference may well allude to the J creation narrative, the 'archetypal' event which connects assimilation with both desire and knowing, as does Markan metaphysics. We shall argue that Santayana's expression 'animal faith' for the intentional mode belief-in-desire, is thoroughly apt, stemming as it does from the second half of the creation narrative in which the plenum of living creatures comes into existence. Luke more than any other evangelist expresses solicitude for animals, given the quantity of references to them in his gospel. The strength or force of the thing in question, here not only the aconscious mode, faith-in-desire, but actual desire itself, given under the aegis of thirst, is presented graphically as it overrides even the gravest of the commandments, those which pertain to the sanctity of the sabbath. Thus the actions and sayings of Jesus in this healing event conform absolutely with his demeanour in the earlier narrative of Plucking Grain On The Sabbath.

Once again, the sabbath and consumption (Eucharist) comport perfectly together, and again square with the intentional archetype, desire. Even though the sentient mode is not quite exactly that of the haptic in particular, it is very closely allied to it, on account of the function in the animal consciousness of the olfactory/gustatory, or Eucharistic mode, which is so nearly bound to the haptic. (For an introduction to the role of the scents and tastes in the role of the self-propagation by both plants and animals, and the function of chemical communication in animals, see BBC Nature). The implied link here between health or well-being and sexuality, all the more provocative for involving a woman, lies behind the 'indignation'  a)ganaktw~n, 13.14) of 'the ruler' and his ilk. Nor is the bodily semeion for haptic memory and so too for desire, lacking:

And he laid (e)pe/qhken) his hands (xei~rav) upon her, and immediately she was made straight, and she praised God. (Luke 13.13)

Thus not only the time, sabbath, nor the place, synagogue, nor the antagonism of 'the people' make this second pericope in Luke emphatically mirror of the first. For the haptic icon of desire itself, the hand, presses home the point. What this story does add however to the former, is the promotion of the human and subhuman solidarity which furnishes the basis of desire in the first place. Luke provides us with an image of subhuman, that is animal, need. The last time we heard of a 'manger' was in the infancy narratives:

"And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger." ... And they went with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. (Luke 2.13, 16)

From the inception of his gospel, Luke is aware of the significance of the act of nurturing. The consumption of life-sustaining food and drink establishes the cognitive and conative focus of his thinking. Jesus is first given to us in his gospel as embedded in the sub-human and human realm for the very sake of the same: since he fulfills the evolutionary-historical telos, he is himself food for the realm of all living things - he is the ('Eucharistic') object of our desires, and still more, since what is designated always by the actual Eucharist itself, life-sustaining food and drink, satisfies not only a desire, but a need. We cannot lose sight of this radical difference between the actual Eucharistic miracles and actual Eucharist. It remains the single rationale for the differentiation of the former from the latter, and the fact that the latter may function as summation of the series.


There is an indubitable sense of the immanence of God at work and at play here, nor can we doubt that it sustains this gospel as a whole. On arriving at the story of The Crippled Woman we should observe how tactfully the evangelist articulates the concept of desire. The image of 'animal' thirst in 13.15,  John extends over as many as forty-two verses in the story of Jesus And The Woman Of Samaria (John 4.1-42), the concluding presentation of the archetype in that gospel. Even if we disallow this same text as interpolated, the classical description of the radical, haptic memory, along with that of its canonical form of intentionality, desire, given in John 2.1-11, employs the very same model - thirst.

The recognition of these nuances gives added meaning to Luke's picture of the opposition between Jesus and the 'hypocrites' who surround him in 'one of the synagogues' where the woman was healed. If there are grounds for the charge of antisemitism to be leveled at the gospel of Luke, in the interests of fairness we need to consider the distance between his own disposition and that of Judaisms. We cannot typify the latter as entirely bereft of the same intellectual and affective patterns which predominate in Luke, for there is clear and certain, though limited evidence in the Hebrew scriptures of the same, The Song Of Songs and the book of Jonah being its classical instances. Indeed in our exposition of the aconscious form of intentionality, belief-in-desire, without which desire itself is as nothing, we shall consider the latter writing, the book of Jonah. For there we find a remarkable marriage between the very Lukan theme of repentance and the concept of human and subhuman solidarity, and thus of 'animal faith'.

Even so, the Hebrew scriptures and Judaism generally, remain substantively anerotic. In terms of the literary celebration of physical love, The Song Of Songs compares unfavourably with some of the Buddhist and Hindu tantras, and in the opinion of this writer, is much overrated as representative of the centre of consciousness we have called 'haptic memory'. We will be forced to acknowledge that a certain disparity of vision remains between this particular gospel, Luke, and rabbinic Judaism. The latter is of course less inimical to the scope and tenor of the Matthean gospel, and we will  propose that where a match between a world ('archetypal') religion and a particular gospel may be adduced, the fit there is as near to perfect as we may expect. But in Luke's particular case, that is, given his native propensity to construe the world through the lens of the intentional mode desire, and its aconscious counterpart, belief-in-desire, there must necessarily be some measure of mutual antipathy between this particular gospel and Judaism from the point of view of Torah qua will. There is a very real sense in which Luke here breaks new ground in the continuity of the Judaeo-Christian trajectory, the subject of the sayings regarding 'new wine' (Mark 2.22). It is really only a matter of time before a fracture appears in the fabric of this trajectory. Luke, sensible as he is of the historic process itself, and of the very roots of the emerging Christian tradition, can see full well the implications of his own position, nor does he resile from them. For, as we shall argue, where there is a definite unbrokenness between the will-to-believe and belief simpliciter, and correspondingly, an equal and seamless nexus between  the desire-to-know and knowing simpliciter, between will itself and desire, there is no similar traffic or commerce. These are immiscible. But note Luke's own recension of the saying regarding the new wine, in which unlike Mark, the final verse is a positive assessment of the palaio\v:

'And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the new wine bursts the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine desires new; for he says, 'The old is good."' (Luke 5.37-39)

Whatever the merits and demerits of the former testament, and however inimical to one another the two conscious processes, will and desire, as well as the two aconscious processes, knowledge-of-will and belief-in-desire, Luke's own assessment of 'the former', that is, his own attitude towards the Judaic tradition as given here, is positive to a degree well beyond Mark if the logion is any guide at all. The saying squares immediately and resolutely with the conclusion to the Johannine miracle story, which is of course the classical depiction of the haptic memory, whose sovereign form of intentionality desire is. On the value of Luke 5.39 as a textual variant see Significant Textual Variants. Notes in Metzger's Textual Commentary are to the same effect:

The external attestation for the inclusion of the verse is almost overwhelming; its omission from several Western  witnesses may be due to the influence of Marcion who rejected the statement because it seemed to give authority to the Old Testament. (Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary On The Greek New Testament, United Bible Societies, London, 1975, pp. 138-139.)

In seeking a match or fit between a specific religious tradition and the mode of intentionality desire, along with its aconscious counterpart, belief-in-desire, we can do no better than to answer with the later and highly evolved Vajrayana Buddhism. For there we encounter the same paradoxical approach to the phenomenon of desire, and its conceptual basis, belief-in-desire. It begins as the response of the mind to the awareness of its very own embodiment and the repercussions this has for consciousness, equivalent to such as we discover in the gospel of Luke. In Luke this paradox will be rendered as desiring desire. These topics of course lie well beyond the purview of this part of our study. But Leaving aside all temptations to project guilt onto any one party alone, we may as well note here and now, that the discussion of the fundamental dissonance between the gospel of Luke and a version of reality which may be accounted as 'Judaic' in the broad definitions of that term, will be forced to meet the simple fact that Judaism itself reflects a limited perspective of the cosmos, and one which invites its own rejection by alternative perspectives. That is to say, that if the four gospels are to be reckoned as individually disposed in any singular fashion after the ultimate structures of consciousness itself, a pattern which we may detect also in the radical varieties of Christian culture, and if world religions in their turn may also be thus reckoned, then Judaism no less than any of these may not lay claim to certain and absolute universalism. There is indeed a quite troubling and worrisome aspect in which Judaisms more perhaps than any other family of world religions, with the possible exception of some schools of Hindu thought, place themselves at a real disadvantage where the universalism suggested by the term 'world' becomes criteriological. Though to suggest as much in the present climate of theological thought, appreciative as it is of political and ideological currents, may be to incur immediate censure.

This short survey of two of Luke's own healing stories certainly corroborates the postulate that the psychological, or conative, temperament of his gospel is to be found in the phenomenon of desire, as will the very next miracle we are to examine. This will mean that the Eucharist must function centrally in his theology, for it is towards that event that the many and consistent references we have to eating and drinking tend. It has also proved Luke's capacity to integrate his material since it has been impossible not to infringe the boundaries between healing miracles and discourse as well as narrative. The attention to such matters will fit perfectly with what concerns us later in this essay, namely the conceptual radical soma (body) as foundational to an episteme or mode of understanding: art. We have already made mention of the fact that the mode of understanding connected with haptic memory, the corresponding perceptual radical, is that of  technological rationality. Thus technological consciousness is the cognitive realization of haptic memory and erotic desire, its conative realization - for both of which the hand acts as the somatic or haptic semeion. Luke is certainly a technician, or as we should say, an artist. Art is the epistemic or cognitive realization of the conceptual form, soma. It therefore stands in the closest possible relation to techne as possible, mirroring the aconscious conceptual pole in relation  to the conscious perceptual pole, or adopting the temporal metaphor, analogously to the relation of day to night respectively.

The Healing Of A Centurion's Servant - Luke 7.1-10

We have just discussed two healing miracle narratives bearing on the thesis that desire is the  distinctive and innate conative intentional form peculiar to Luke, since these narratives constitute a strand of the gospel recorded only by Luke, a strand designated by L ('special Luke'), and so may be said to reveal something at least of his own specific theology of salvation.  (For introductions to L see Christopher Price, The Story Of Jesus in Luke's Unique Material; and Dr. James D. Tabor, Colour Coded Luke; also Special Luke). There is yet another miracle narrative calling for comment for  it occurs in the earliest sections of the gospel concordantly with the other pericopae espousing the systematic exposition of a theology of desire which we have already examined. Hence its location squares perfectly with the general outlines sustained by the messianic series qua developmental psychology such as we find in the other synoptists, and the gospel of John too, which locates the story of the miracle at Cana first, and also much of the subsequent material likewise, in keeping with the significance of the perceptual form haptic memory, the categoreal radical which functions as the incipient mental and affective focus of our lives as adults.

We should not fail to notice that another healing takes place between that of The Man With The Withered Hand and that of The Widow's Son At Nain, to wit, the cure of The Centurion's Servant, and that it not only conforms to the general psychological pattern of Luke's gospel in as much as it almost certainly represents a sexual relationship between two persons, but does so all the more topically if not polemically in that the relationship is between two males of differing ages. The pericope has drawn much attention positive and negative from various camps. Queer Theology has seized upon this story as in part a vindication of its own agenda, that of the liberation of homosexual men and women. We may notice in passing, the context in which Luke has placed the story, which is at one with the others encountered so far, and certain of the other intervening texts including The Beatitudes, may be read in connection with the purposive concentration here of stories galvanised around the theme of sexual desire. Worth noticing in this  narrative is Luke's use of the term 'slave' (dou~lov, (Luke 7.3, 5, 8, 10), which at once resounds with the Johannine 'servants' (dia/konoi - John 2.5, 9) of the messianic miracle. In both cases, as for the immanent miracles generally, such terms revert to the idea of necessity or determinism; in other words, we have here to do with desire as distinct from (free) will. They comport perfectly and immediately with the presentation of the psychology of appetition in the Eucharistic miracles and the Eucharist itself, which latter is Luke's final and ultimate exposition of the theology of desire and belief-in-desire.

This is a profoundly controversial narrative as having been enlisted in the ideological controversies which followed liberation theology in the twentieth century in the polemical battles waged by Queer Theology. Here we need to take stock of the paucity of any relevant and current theology of desire, specifically sexual desire, even admitting that the word 'current' itself denotes some sort of radical demarcation from modernist mores, if not their 'transvaluation'. (See on this subject: Ely Cathedral Autumn Lecture Series, November 24, 2009, ‘Taming Desire:  Freud versus the Church?’; also the article by the same author Sarah Coakley in The Harvard Divinity Bulletin, vol. 33, no. 2, (autumn 2005), Toward A Contemporary Theology Of Desire). The story of The Centurion's Servant is not exclusive to Luke. Accounts of the episode, which scholars accepting the Q theory regarding the sources of the gospels assign to the same, that is Q, are contained in both  Matthew (Matthew 8.5-13) and John (John 4.46b-53). (Even granting the Q hypothesis, certain scholars argue that the recension in Luke contains some Lukan special material, namely verses 1, 4 and 5.) In all three instances, once again editing, that is the specific location of the narrative, must be taken into account in its  hermeneutic. John places it as the second miracle story, drawing our attention to this fact by means which recall 'first of his signs', the miracle at Cana:


Thus even if John shapes the event as representative of the symbolic feminine - the fact that no female figure is mentioned notwithstanding - the general ligatures of the same to the first miracle must not be overlooked.  John uses the words ui(on (vv 46, 47, 50, 53) - 'son'; and paidi/on - 'child' (v 49); and pai~v (v 51) - 'boy', 'servant', 'slave'; the last of which, the term favoured by Matthew, and to a lesser extent Luke, might suggests the possibility of a sexual as well as inter-generational relationship between the two males. But we must observe that John uses pai~v only once; moreover he includes the term path\r - father (4.53.) It would therefore be advisable to opt for the view that the Johannine recension reports an episode other than that recorded by the two synoptists.  The dearth of miracle narratives in the fourth gospel relative to their currency in the gospel of Luke ought if anything make for a clear-cut interpretation of this event as distinctly marking something other than the erotic, which is properly  confined to the 'first sign'. It is likely that the numbering of the two episodes is by reason of this same purpose. The Johannine account is edited contextually notably as is the cure of Simon Peter's Mother-In-Law in both Mark and Luke, the evangelist having drawn our attention to the fact that the story of The Official's Son is the second of the signs. (The link between the two, the first and second signs in John, literally expressive of the ties between the erotic and the economic, as resulting from the two forms of unity, soma and the symbolic feminine, mirrors the same connection sustained by the Lukan redaction of  the two healing miracle narratives, Jairus' Daughter and The Centurion's Slave, by means of their virtually equal ties with  the 'synagogue' as noted above. There is a deep-seated connection here at the epistemic level worthy of investigation, for the first episode, that concerning soma, has as its episteme art, just as the mythopoietic is invoked by the idea of the cultus ('synagogue'), and the symbolic feminine has as its episteme, that of evolutionary theoretical understanding. We have already proposed a certain tie between the aconscious orders of consciousness, here comprising soma as well as the symbolic feminine, and such modes of understanding, in respect of the repeated instances in the texts which associate the sub-human realm with the same. This squares with the depiction of the categoreal status of all three (aconscious) forms of unity as paradoxical and ambiguous, and we will further  pursue the same ideas in the discussion on the gospel of Luke.)

The Matthean placing of Peter's Mother-In-Law (Matthew 8.14,15), ensues immediately his record of The Centurion's Servant (Matthew 8.5-13), made possible since Matthew omits the first healing in the Markan series, that of The Demoniac In The Synagogue, for reasons which we must later address. Also worthy of note is the Johannine use of the same clause in the second miracle story, which except for the pronoun 'him' instead of 'her', mirrors verbatim that used by both Mark and Matthew of the cure of Simon Peter's Mother-In-Law (Mark 1.31b, cf. Matthew 8.15b, and Luke 4.39a), that healing episode which presents the symbolic feminine even if in the most cursory manner:


Regarding this clause, it is likely Luke has faithfully copied Mark in repeating first the story of The Man With An Unclean Spirit (Luke 4.31-37), which is followed immediately by the story of Simon Peter's Mother-In-Law (4.38, 39), although he has polished the Markan account so that his more elaborate locution in the second story, containing the verb 'rebuke' with its exorcistic connotations, recalls immediately the prior episode in which the same word exactly occurred: 'But Jesus rebuked him ... (Luke 4.35). Thus he would appear with even more deliberate articulation than Mark, where the ligatures are those of Peter in relation to 'the synagogue', the relation of Peter to 'mother-in-law' and the location of the two episodes, Capernaum, to subsume the second all too brief episode under the first:


The theologian credited with first recognizing the evident if not unmistakeable nature of the relationship between the two males in the Matthean and Lukan narratives of the centurion is John J. McNeill, in 1976. Donald Mader in 1987 contended that Matthew, was ignorant of its homoerotic connotations, and used the term pai~v because it was extant already in the Q document, and that Luke's having avoided it indicates the latter's sensitivity to the same. (The argument that there has been any deliberate desexualization on the part of the evangelist is more suited to the Johannine account. See Koepnick who, invoking the criterion of multiple attestation, also emphasizes the superior historicity of the synoptic records stemming from the Q source as against that of John, originating from the 'Signs Source'. He argues that Q and Signs Source 'originate from a strong early oral tradition', and that 'It is probable that the Signs Source, like its early parallel source Q, preserved the word pais - not huios - in its original form.' Koepnick, Eric, The Historical Jesus and the Slave of The Centurion: How the Themes of Slavery, Sexuality and Military Service Intersect in Matthew 8:5-13, p. 5). But even so, Luke himself uses pai~v (Luke 7.7), and uses moreover the epithet 'dear'.  The attribution to Matthew of such an ignorance relies on the premise of an Aramaic original of his gospel. On this count alone it is dubious enough. The 2004 article by Jennings and Liew, Mistaken Identities but Model Faith: Rereading the Centurion, the Chap and the Christ in Matthew 5.1-13,  concludes that Jesus in Matthew's account indubitably affirms the pederastic relationship between the Centurion and his 'boy':


In any case, we are here dealing with Luke, and that he was prepared to portray Jesus as not only failing to censure the relationship between the two males, but indeed to have him approve it in the most unquestionable of terms, those concerning the man's faith, agrees immediately with what we are arguing. Luke refers to the centurion's honorable reputation among the Jews in a way which Matthew does not, and which recurs to the classical exposition of the categoreal concept, the body, contained in Mark, the story of Jairus' Daughter. Thus he seems to be saying with Mark, that soma lies at the heart of belief-in-desire, and extends its parameters beyond its previous confines. This form of intentionality, along with desire itself are the two intentional modes about which the gospel of Luke gravitates. There can be no doubt that Luke himself wants to disestablish any notion of the confident superiority of the Judaic ethical code and its mandatory superimposition on an alien culture. This agrees completely with his broader purposes:


As noted already,  Luke here ties the event to the healing of Jairus' Daughter, the classical Markan exponent of the categoreal soma and so too of the intentional mode, belief-in-desire. But Luke also momentarily redirects our attention away from the personal affections of the centurion towards his affection for a 'nation' ( e!qnov) altogether other than his own. Is Luke citing this love as a pertinent if not mitigating factor in the response of Jesus to the situation? It would seem so. The same detail is absent from Matthew's account. Luke's use of the expression 'a slave who was dear ( e!ntimov) to him' (Luke 7.2) again advances upon the Matthean account in terms of the story's sexual overtones. The word occurs elsewhere in the Lukan corpus, and in the New Testament. For example in Luke 14.8, again within the context of implicitly sexual imagery, he uses it in the comparative degree - e)ntimo/tero/v - 'more honorable', 'more worthy', 'more valuable', 'more prized':


What then shall we make of Luke's version of the event apart from the obvious facts that his use of the word e!ntimov and his distinct portrayal of the two countervailing backgrounds, the Hellenistic and the Jewish, a most pertinent feature of his account bearing immediately on the question of the homosexual relationship? The latter is possible of further exegesis. It suggests if anything sympathy on the part of the centurion towards Jewish sexual mores. The concept of hierarchy, of subordinate and superordinate, is such a paramount element in both narratives, the Matthean and the Lukan:



Matthew's elaboration of the presumptively adversarial cultures of the centurion and Jesus in his conclusion is reminiscent of the same theme in his story of The Canaanite Woman's Daughter (Matthew 15.21-28), which Luke lacks. The pericope contains allusions to homosexual love, particularly the image of throwing the children's bread to the dogs. (The last term is a common enough trope in the literature for a male homosexual prostitute. See John Barclay Burns, Devotee Or Deviate: The "Dog" (keleb) in Ancient Israel as a Symbol of Male Passivity and Perversion). Luke's account at least for the purposes of the exercise, ostensibly adopts the prejudices of 'the house of Israel' itself against gentiles, pretending that such kinds of erotic attachments, same sex ones between males in particular, were exclusively their property alone, and unknown amongst observant Israelites; a proposition which Matthew and Mark regard as naively chauvinistic, since it is couched in the language of negotiation if not jest, given their records of the exchange between Jesus and the Syrophoenician Woman. Thus in both narratives we encounter the juxtaposition of representatives of cultures at variance over the topics of sexual ethics and of homosexual love. Equally in both, is the illustration of what possibly lies at the heart of the moral dilemmas surrounding the same, the questions regarding parity between the two parties.  If the moral issue at stake turns on this, it must be in virtue of the fact that an essential condition of love be equality. For this takes us to the heart of the doctrine of incarnation. A wholly transcendent 'God', one who is 'above' us in all respects, cannot be loved if love demands equality. The condition of equality is satisfied in the event of incarnation as we are reminded time and again in scripture. The theme of equality finds its fullest elaboration of the subordinate/superordinate motif in the pericope The Centurion's Servant, in which the preposition 'under' plays a key role. So for example:


The study by Gowler referred to above on Luke 11.37-54, highlights the significance that honour, or what we are here referring to as hierarchic desire, has for this evangelist, even while this specifically conative intentional form is proper to Mark. That is, even though it is acoustic sentience, acoustic memory in particular, which gives rise to this specific desire, the desire for the esteem of one's peers and of one's subordinates.  (For Gowler's emphasis on the theme of social hierarchy see Text, Culture, and Ideology in Luke 7:1-10: A Dialogic Reading). But of course the essential link between acoustic memory and haptic memory ensures  the possibility of transference  between their respective conative expressions - the desire for esteem and sexual desire. Thus if acoustic memory affords the opportunity of appetition-satisfaction of a species of desire, albeit a non-canonical one, for the sovereign occasion of desire is the sexual, then the desire for esteem  nevertheless offers itself as a surrogate occasion for the same. In other words, the innately social expressions of hierarchy in both the animal and human realms may present themselves as substitutes for the erotic; sexual appetition and satisfaction may in effect, be nothing other than disguised social (hierarchic) appetition and satisfaction. (In Mark, we shall see that the actual psychology of homo hierarchicus  is constituted in terms of the canonical intentional forms proper to that gospel: the will-to-believe and knowing, those two modes of intentionality determined by the conceptual category space : time and the perceptual category acoustic memory.) Once again we encounter in his portrayal of human consciousness that it is radically tied to that of the sub-human. To speak of 'pecking order' in this context, reverts conformably to the presentation of the Genesis rubric, Day 5, with its image of the creatures above and below, the birds and aquatic animals. Another saying which comes unbidden to mind here is 'Big fish eat little fish.'

Optic memory is the sufficient and necessary condition for acquisitive desire - the desire for material or economic, gain. These three expressions of desire obtain in a graded hierarchy, with the erotic ceding to the economic and that in turn ceding to the hierarchic, reflecting the pattern set out previously in the semeioptika, where the gradations were illustrated as synthetic, blended, fused. Thus while it is certain that the forms of memory differ from one another expositionally of the principle of identity, that is, while there is no real mistaking what was felt (touched) from what was seen, and in turn, what was seen from what was heard, their corresponding species of desire are capable of integration, certainly where there is immediate contiguity between the modes of sentience. But further to that, there can be and is, transition from the initial mode - here haptic, since we are discussing desire, the predominant conative intentional form proper to the gospel of Luke - to the final mode, the acoustic by means of the intervening sentient mode, the optic. Thus the three forms of appetition-satisfaction must be integrally linked:  erotic-economic-hierarchic. The first three miracle narratives in John, the miracle at Cana (John 2.1-11), The Official's Son (John 4.46-54) and The Healing At The Pool (John 5.1-18), portray this same graded hierarchy of (conscious) conative intentionality, even though only the first of these explicitly details a sense-percipient form, haptic memory. If this arrangement is to be taken as representative of a developmental psychological theory of the emotions, then this should in turn influence a more precise understanding of the age of the pai~v in the second story. Opponents to any hermeneutic laying claim to the likelihood that the Matthean and Lukan versions both  offer invaluable resources to a theology of homosexual liberation would do better not to rest their case on the apparent minority of the 'boy', alleging a pederastic relationship and thus generating still more heat and still less light. For they  will have to address the fact that the narrative of Jairus' Daughter, who is mentioned as having been twelve years of age (Mark 5.42), makes quite plain some sort of theory of adolescent  sexuality.  As germane to the interpretation of the expression pai~v we should mention a pericope confined to Luke, in which the very same figure is used:


The narrative is well known, and there is no need to cite it in full. What is interesting is that the Lukan recension of the healing of Jairus' daughter, like that of Matthew (Matthew 9.18-26), and unlike the Markan original, fails to mention the precise age of the girl. However Luke does not fail to mention in the preceding narrative, which is grafted to this one in all three synoptic gospels, the duration of the illness of the haemorrhagic woman, again in keeping with Matthew's account: 'a woman who had had a flow of blood for twelve years' - e)tw~n dw/deka, Luke 8.43; par. Mark  5.25 -  dw/deka e!th; Matthew 9.20 - dw/deka e!th. That Luke's inclusion of the narrative of The Boy Jesus In The Temple distinguishes his standpoint is certain. The entire narrative (Luke 2.1-52) is special Luke material. Its conclusion is signal of what we are predicating as the specificity of the gospel as a whole if we allow the central role of the composite narrative of the Haemorrhagic Woman-Jairus' Daughter:


Not merely the figure 'twelve', but also the setting of the Jerusalem temple - e)n tw~? i(erw~? (Luke 2.46) - which the boy Jesus himself also refers to as '"my Father's house"' (2.49), reminiscent of the role of the synagogue in the later story of Jairus', the 'ruler of the synagogue', aligns the narratives. If it has any poetic bearing, any allusiveness to the portrayal of a growing boy, one, the mention of whose exact age here certainly connotes the sexual maturation explicitly denoted in that later pericope, then this is implicit in the mention of 'stature', just as the sheer  physicality of the term denoting an edifice is significant. It is used metaphorically in John 2.21 subsequently to the story of the miracle at Cana to portray the body - 'But he spoke of the temple of his body' - tou~ naou~ tou~ sw/matov au)tou~.  (We encounter the very same figure also in 1 Corinthians 6.19: 'Do you not know that your body (sw~ma) is a temple (nao\v) of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God?') The word h(liki/a, also sometimes translated 'years', such as we find in John 9.21, where 'he is of age' - h(liki/an e!xei - is said of the man born blind, also clearly denotes physical stature, and hence as here, can indicate the onset of sexual maturation. (Luke notices of Zachaeus that 'he was of small stature' - h(liki/a? mikro\v h~(n (Luke 19.3). Is this too a typically Lukan touch in that it conveys information to us about the actual size of the man's body? The story sits well within the Lukan theological mindset as grafted to the soma, the reality of embodiment, the corporeal nature of existence.)

THE THREE KINDS OF NORMATIVE DESIRE

Erotic desire is contextualised contiguously not merely with its economic neighbour, a fact which the Johannine editing of the first two miracles makes plain, and with which it is continuously situated in the Markan mandala, but is linked further still with hierarchic desire, since this in turn conjoins the economic form of desire, consequently as acoustic memory conjoins optic memory. This means that the subtext of the various references in the story of The Centurion's Servant can be read legitimately a propos of the dialectic of dominance and submission firstly in regard to the economic - which is what the Johannine narrative of The Official's Son restricts itself to - and secondly to the phenomena of hierarchic desire and erotic desire, both of which the economic mediates. (On the concept of dominance/submission relative to the narrative see Koepnick, The Historical Jesus and the Slave of The Centurion. His suggestion that the expression pai~v may be legitimately understood to refer to the economic inferiority of the 'boy' to his master, the centurion, is well contended.) The economic motif is as pronounced in the Lukan redaction as it is in the Johannine story. The contiguity of the two stories, of The Centurion's Servant and The Widow's Son (Luke 7.1-17), ensures the viability of reading the former in terms of the economic as well as the erotic given the graduated ties between the two. For the dire economic situation of the woman, like that of the centurion, may seem of less immediate concern than her psychological suffering, but it dominates the background of her plight. In the same light, the economic becomes a major motif in the story about The Sinful Woman, not by means detailing the very great price of the unguent, a factor which Luke omits and which the other three accounts of The Anointing Of Jesus mention, (John 12.3-8, Matthew 26.6-12, Mark 14.3-9), but because of the parable of The Debtors contained within the pericope, Luke 7.41-42. The economic theme in The Centurion's Servant is supported by the effort on Luke's part to stress the comparability between the Centurion and Jairus as men of means:

"He is worthy (a!cio/v) to have you do this for him, for he loves our nation, and he built us our synagogue." (Luke 7.4b)

Such contextuality maintained also by Matthew, but less explicitly, because he uses  the simpler term 'ruler' (a!rxwn - Matthew 9.18, 23), nevertheless endorses what is the theological (psychological-epistemological) foundation of  Luke's gospel; namely the body as responsible for the intentional mode belief-in-desire. For in the story of Jairus' Daughter, and in it alone within the Markan corpus, the evangelist relates that very conceptual radical of consciousness - the soma. The implications for understanding the references to the 'faith' of the centurion, are crucial, even if subtle as is Luke's wont, and somewhat ironic, since both Matthew and Luke compare the belief of the centurion most favourably with that of 'Israel'. We cited the story of The Daughter Of Jairus'  as the classical presentation within Mark's very clearly and formally defined healing series,  of the conceptual categoreal form, the body. Both Luke, and to a lesser extent Matthew also, here make plain the nature of the connection between the aconscious role of faith, which is none other than faith-in-desire and conscious desire itself. The centurion is in no wise a believing nor practising 'Israelite'. If his 'faith' is to be compared and compared approvingly with that of 'Israel', and so affirmed, this distinction must be made. Luke's strategy is thus as refined as his impeccable style; for he makes the distinction, and yet at the same time the connection between the 'two'. This amounts to articulating the distinction as well as the connection between mind on the one hand and mind : body (soma) on the other. The very same must therefore apply to the conscious and aconscious. The story of The Centurion's Servant is of vital significance to the Lukan programme,  and the choice of a heterodox sexuality all the more appropriatly accentuates the certain relation between faith-in-desire and faith itself, just as it does that of the soma or mind : body and the transcendent mind, which are their categoreal conditions.

This story is important for that reason alone. We have already cited the theme of necessity (determinism) as one of the secondary criteria delineating the immanent miracles, both messianic and healing. It characterises all three feeding miracles and the Eucharist as well, and we will note in this connection, in tandem with our observations concerning both conscious forms of intentionality, desiring and knowing, the use that Luke makes of the expression dei~ - 'it is necessary that ...', 'it must be that ...'. But the aconscious counterpart to desire is not as some would have us believe, another desire, a 'second order desire' so called, and for the very good reason that this same deterministic aspect of the  conscious intentional process is offset by another which is wholly to do with autonomy, even if autonomy is a less fitting word than it will be for faith simpliciter. So then, the conscious process, desire, does not exist in a vacuum, it is underpinned by a mental or conceptual base. This is not the same thing as a 'second order desire'; a so-called desire regarding a desire. It is difficult to understand just what any such psychological entity might be. It is notional only, and philosophically confused at that. Not that a physical (perceptual) prehension of another physical prehension is out of the question. One may desire to know; both processes, desiring and knowing, are identifiable  as conditioned by the perceptual polarity of mind. Both desiring itself and knowing itself, in their simple or elementary forms, are physical or perceptual processes. (The desire-to-know is not the hybridised integration of two modes, desiring-and-knowing, which as we have just put, is the basis of perceptual aesthetic judgement; in other words, which is the consequence of optic memory and a canonical mode of intentionality, and which mopreove is aconscious.) Desire as actual, desire simpliciter, is a conscious form of intentionality. The desire which functions aconsciously we shall determine as differing in certain respects from its conscious form. We may take the difference of haptic imagination (desire-to-know) from haptic memory (desire simpliciter), as indicative of their disparity, in tandem with the difference of the non-normative good from the normative good. (The very same thing occurs in in the case of will-to-believe; willing and believing, are both conceptual, both elementary, and both normative). There are certain respects in virtue of which the will-to-believe varies from actual will simpliciter. We shall comment further on these matters at a later stage of this essay.) But any stance towards a desire is not itself another conscious perceptual stance of the same order as that of the desire itself. It is a conceptual attitude, and hence we refer to it as faith-in-desire. Its sufficient and necessary condition is the body, and that remains a concept. Let us be clear on this point. The body is not the same entity as haptic memory; the former is a conceptual form, belonging to the aconsious order, the latter is a perceptual mode. Even so, they are locked together in a relationship of coherence and desire, the consequence of haptic memory, cannot function without its conceptual counterpart, here the soma, or body.

Here we must broach a highly contested field, that of theodicy. Here precisely, because we have to deal with Luke's somewhat exceptional treatment of the theme of desire, one in which, whether we like it or not, the sexuality approved may contravene the received norms of Christian morality; and theodicy precisely because the discussion of homosexual love is inseparable from it. Moreover, it is incumbent on us to fully repudiate this notion of second-order desire, it is necessary to say more concerning the ambiguity of aconscious faith-in-desire, if not its adoption of what is rightly the characteristic ontogenetic aspect of faith itself, namely autonomy.  First however, it is necessary to clear the ground: that being the received wisdom which views desire generally in juxtaposition to will, analogously to the antithesis between 'what must be' and that which is subject to our choosing. But this grossly simplifies matters. It is equivalent to the elevation of the disparity between desire-to-know and will-to-believe to an order of the same, an insoluble dilemma. We might just as well order these with the same inarticulate simplicity. The theodician aporia, the issues attendant upon the responsibility for both good and evil on the part of both 'God' and humankind will not so readily be disposed of as to aver one way or the other, that we either have or do not have free choice. This is the reason for the doctrine of the aconscious in which we see for example that will itself is accompanied by an intentional form we have called knowledge-of-will. Or, to return to our subject, the reason for admitting to consideration that there is something akin to desire according to the exact same pattern, that of  aconscious and conscious forms of intentionality. Faith-in-desire thus introduces into the question of theodicy a more nuanced picture of just what desire itself is, and how it operates.

We can and surely will in our treatment of the gospel of Luke, characterise desire itself as compelling. This is the image presented to us in every one fo the three feeding miracles, beginning with that at the wedding at Cana. Just as surely we will juxtapose will with this as an intentional capacity marked by freedom. But neither of these modes of intentionality exists independently. Knowledge-of-will sipervenes upon desire; and will itself in the same structural manner, is related to belief-in-desire. These both belong to the province of practical reason, the logos ensarkos. We previously grouped the eight evangelical modes of intentionality in terms of the relations of supervenience. The iconography of which is as follows:








The theological equivalents to theoretical and practical reason are the logos asarkos and the logos ensarkos. The first is illustrated in the first icon above, and the second illustrates the logos ensarkos or practical reason. In the first the conscious mode of intentionality belief supervenes upon the aconscious will-to-believe. This is only part of the pattern of supervenient intentional forms; it is completed by the symmetrical ratio between desire-to-know and knowing. In both cases, there are reciprocal and symmetrical relations between the conscious and the aconscious. With these two constellations of intentional forms divisible according to the rational distinction between theoretical and practical reason, we come upon the semantic field proper to the two dichotomies listed above. The logos asarkos, or theoretical reason, engages the three conceptual forms: logos, that is mind, the symbolic masculine and time. It ranges against one another, the first and last of these as enjoining autonomy and heteronomy. These are the defining characteristiscs of faith and knowing respectively. In this constellation, it is not faith and knowing, but faith and the will-to-believe, the aconscious counterpart to knowing, which prevail against each other. Faith is the proper function of mind, and will-to-believe, that of the conceptual form space : time. But the will-to-believe like its conscious counterpart, knowing, is from the point of view of philosophical psychology, criterologically definable as heteronomous ('phylogenetic'). We have already examined the narrative of The Haemorrhagic Woman, in which we saw the basic outlines of this tenet: the public or extremely social nature of the event; the reference to 'faith', but in anticipation of the later and immediately ensuing episode, that of Jairus' Daughter; the role of time; the role of 'knowing' on the woman's part (Mark 5.29, usually rendered somewhat imperfectly as 'feeling'), as well as that of 'perceiving' on the part of Jesus (v 30), both of which refer to the conscious funtion corresponding to the will-to-believe.

The other thing to mention here is that the symbolic masculine is party to this same complex. In its own right, it fuses the two intentional forms will and faith. It functions in the supervenience of belief upon will-to-believe. This puts the will-to-believe and belief into such a perspective that the discussion of the dichotomy, heteronomy and autonomy can best proceed. We can see from this much clearer picture, that of the relation between belief and the will-to-belief, or to put matters more logically, between will-to-believe and belief, that it is a more refined and scrupulously articulated one which addresses the dialectic between autonomy and heteronomy. This bears at once on theodicy. Faith-in-desire insofar as it replicates or co-opts faith, which is by definition set against knowing as is autonomy against heteronomy, cognitive ontogeny against cognitive phylogeny, this ontogenetic cognition, the faith of faith-in-desire, does not in the first instance involve will.  We see from the relations of supervenience, just as will-to-believe is prior to belief, that faith-in-desire supervenes analogously upon will, that there must be an essential relation between the two, will and faith, as was also given by their taxonomic belonging to the same order, that of pure conceptuality. But even if this is so, even though it is incumbent on us to distinguish between will and faith, there is in the aconscious basis of desire which we refer to as faith-in-desire, a something by means of which the full power of necessity, of determinism, must be qualified.

The logos ensarkos, practical reason, brings into immediate confrontation the two intentional forms consequent upon haptic memory, and acoustic imagination: namely  desire and knowledge-of-will. Note here, it is not will simpliciter as such and desire which contend one with the other, but desire and knowledge-of-will. Once again, we are dealing with the relation of supervenience: knowledge-of-will follows upon desire. This inflection of the dichotomy introduces refinement rather than casuistry into the aporia.  It refuses to put the cart, will, before the horse, desire. In this process, another hybrid intentionality, that of optic memory, desiring-and-knowing, is also engaged. It acts as the corollary to the symbolic masculine in the case of theoretical reason. Once again it is altogether a different relation than the irresolvably posited dilemma which simply and baldly juxtaposes will and desire. As before, the initiating force is a conatus. Previously it was the aconscious will-to-believe, here it is conscious desire. The more complete explication of these patterns, which touch immediately as noted upon the vexatious issues of theodicy, must also grapple with their epistemological implications. In other words, it is illegitimate to discuss the theodican issues regarding practical reason, desire and  and so, without reference to those involved in theoretical reason. The role of the symbolic masculine, and hence that of will-and-faith in the case of theoretical reason, and the role of optic memory, and hence desiring-and-knowing in the case of practical reason, are paramount. There is no need to further engage these issues here, we must return to Luke's very topical narrative.

The determinism of actual desire in the aconscious (belief-in-desire), occurs in a qualified sense. To speak of believing (in) a desire is thus to conjoin autonomy and necessity. Belief, here 'faith', must take its cue from the conscious where it is synonymous with what we understand by the word 'autonomy'. The primary definition of this term is 'self-governing'. The centurion is not simply governed by, that is 'under', others. Clearly enough he sees himself in relation to Jesus in this light, on this occasion, he is the client, he is requesting help from a superior, a 'superordinate', and so he deems himself 'unworthy' to have Jesus within his own house, within his presence, 'under [his] roof', even though as we see, the Jewish community deems him 'worthy'. But that is not all. He exists within a social hierarchy which grades others below as well as above him. This allows for relational autonomy towards these others. There is a degree to which as well as a kind in which, he exercises self governance. The self-governing 'subject', the centurion who disposes of others just as he is disposed of by others in turn. He acts to some degree in a manner that can only be described as 'autonomous to a given extent', in regard to the 'object-subject' of his desire, the pai~v. He is motivated and affected by an intentional process of which he remains the sovereign in some respects. Even if there is a certain contrast between aconscious faith-in-desire, and actual conscious  and normative faith, we cannot draw it too sharply so as to leave the two completely truncated. The premise of his desire, is belief. In this respect, the story accords perfectly with that of Jairus' Daughter. She is to be given 'something to eat'; her bodily existence is to be affirmed. If the centurion's faith is commended, his faith-in-desire, signalled by his love of the 'boy', then so too is his own bodily existence which he shares, as one shares 'something to eat', with him. This is the nature of faith-in-desire. It may not be autonomous in the strictest sense that there is one isolated, singular believing human being. Faith-in-desire reshapes faith in the light of the actual connectedness of bodily existence; it is in essence a shared faith, without which faith itself is incomplete.

In this respect, the intentional mode faith-in-desire fulfills a function vital to the doctrine of mind. For it brings into focus the relation between the body and haptic memory. This relation, first announced in the story of the miracle at Cana, is best understood in terms of the concept 'transformation'. What is prior to desire both chronologically, as we see in the story of Jairus' Daughter, and ontologically, is the real and actual standing back from desire itself and regarding it, with either belief or disbelief, a process which occurs in the aconscious order of mind. This is in no uncertain sense quite different from actual desire, for it cannot be perceptual. Its categoreal definition, at least at the primary level, must be given as conceptual: the elementary (conscious) modes of conceptual intentionality are will and belief. The attitudes and the rest of the intentional processes themselves which compound the contents of desire as their 'data',  these themselves can only ever be conceptual. (If we encase the word 'data' as we do the word 'subject' in commas here, it is precisely because the forms of unity adulterate the clear boundaries of conceptual and perceptual, that is of subject and object.) In this way they can never themselves be desires, even 'second-order' ones so called. That is a philosophically unwarranted use of the term desire, and obfuscates  an essential tenet of the theory of mind. The distinction is germane because it insists on the role of faith, and therefore too, on the role in however altered a form, of autonomy. This much is clear from the pericopae insofar as concerning the all important event of faith. The aconscious form of faith, faith-in-desire, the direct result of the categoreal role of the idea of 'the body' in shaping both our feeling and thinking processes, distinguishes itself from actual and conscious desire as concept does from percept. Hence we cannot logically speak of an attitude or stance towards desire, which is as desire itself: that is what the conceptually confused notion of 'second-order' desire attempts. In so doing, merely redoubles the element of necessity, of determinism. It leaves no room whatsoever for manoeuvre, having raised the causal past, from which we can never escape, to the highest pitch. That we do have certain attitudes to our desires is never in doubt. How often we find ourselves in conflict concerning our desires demonstrates the prevalence of that which we have termed 'faith-in-desire' or 'belief-in-desire'. But Christian philosophical psychology proposes a structure of consciousness cohering with desire in an order of mind other than conscious, and shifts completely away from a  notion of unmitigated appetitive necessity,  from the notion of a wholly irresistible force, and approaches the image of intentionality as shaped instead by something reminding us of autonomy. This is 'shared autonomy'. The centurion and his partner must mutually believe the desire itself. It cannot be the faith of one or the other; the centurion or the boy. They are bound together, and here the idea of necessity or determinism is perfectly apt. It is a mutually equanimous pact which remodels actual faith.


Luke's choice in this way, reflects the 'choice' of the centurion. By choice here, we do not mean to invoke the concept of will. That too is to be carefully distinguished from faith. Perhaps 'understanding' is a more appropriate term. But his picture of an ignoble and presumptively transgressive sexual desire which confronts us with the absence of conventional mores and with the presence of the role of 'aconscious autonomy', aconscious faith, the faith-in-desire, a faith truly shared just as the bodies of those who love one another are shared, makes all the more apparent the characteristics of this form of intentionality. We shall return directly to the aconscious basis of desire as the intentional form belief-in-desire after the discussion of the hierarchies of desire, conscious and aconscious, for this brings back into focus the serial orders of the two narrative cycles, creation and salvation, orders which we described as parallel and chiastic respectively. Their relation is integral to framing more intelligibly the dialogue inherent in the aconscious forms of intentionality, and also that between the two embattled forces of will and desire.

In examining the intentional mode knowledge-of-will, we will see the very same thing, the very same something, offset. So that neither will nor desire will have full control over the human affections. These two aconscious modes of intentionality, faith-in-desire and knowledge-of-will, mutually countervail  against one another in the dialectic between will and desire, a fact which we first noticed in the two healing narratives, those of Jairus' Daughter (faith-in-desire) and The Boy With An Inclean Spirit (knowledge-of-will), which Mark sets in the clearest relational terms to each other. What should be noted here in passing, is that the pattern of relations between the two conscious cognitive modes, faith simpliciter and knowing simpliciter, is the opposite of their aconscious counterparts; and that the same variance obtains in the case of the relations between the two sets of conative intentional modes. In other words, the relation subtended between desire simpliciter and will simpliciter, is the obverse of that sustained by desire-to-know and will-to-believe. Any final resolution of the entire problematic regarding will and desire is thus framed by Markan Christology. The reason for such a claim lies in the fact that the problem has only ever been half stated. It is insufficient to speak of  determinism, by which we mean desire, and freedom by which we mean the will. For not only is each of these underpinned by a corresponding aconscious form of intentionality, faith-in-desire and knowledge-of-will, but this way of framing the issue completely ignores the corollaries which are just as germane to the problem. Thus if there is such a thing as will there is also a will-to-believe and this must be reckoned with. As for desire, it is met by the desire-to-know as its aconscious counterpart. These aconscious forms of the two fundamental conative modes of intentionality, will and desire, are absolutely germane to the questions of  both theodicy and human moral responsibility.

Before leaving Luke's narrative of The Centurion's Servant, we should remark its integration into its context. It has a particular rapport with the story of The Sinful Woman, for there, just as in the story of The Centurion, the pericope ends on the note of 'faith'. This is not the first incidence of the expression in Luke. There was in the overture to Mary's Song Of Praise (Luke 1.46-55), the following:


This adduces another feature of faith-in-desire to the description of which we can add. It also helps to explain the curious repetition of the line about 'the fever leaving her/him' which all three synoptists use in their recensions of the healing of The Mother-In-Law of Simon Peter (Mark 1.31b, Matthew 8.15b, Luke 4.39a), and which John also uses in his story of The Official's Son (John 4.52). These four stories are theologies of the economic, of The Holy Spirit. As such, they announce the idea of the symbolic feminine. This is another facet of faith-in-desire as opposed to faith simpliciter; that it is typologically feminine rather than masculine. If the story of The Centurion can be read as expounding the concept of the symbolic feminine, as should be the Johannine narrative which is at first glance so much like it, The Official's Son, in other words, if that at least part of Luke's theological purpose is to identify the economic centre of consciousness rather than that of the erotic, or in addition to the same, since these are invariably linked as noted, it is hardly surprising that two of these first three occasions in which the evangelist mentions 'faith', have to do with women. The concluding dominical saying in the story of The Sinful Woman Forgiven of course anticipates the same remark concerning 'faith' in the healing miracle narrative, The Haemorrhagic Woman (Luke 8.42b-48), cited above. There is one mention of faith before that, occurring in 8.11-15, the exposition of the previously given Parable Of The Sower:


Thus both healing pericopae, The Sinful Woman Forgiven, if we count it as such, and The Haemorrhagic Woman connect faith with salvation:


It is necessary to quote these texts once more, because in addition to the initial mention of faith within the confines of a healing miracle story, that of The Centurion's Slave, which may legitimately be read in connection with the symbolic feminine, the succeeding portrayals of faith are typologically feminine. Both the woman who anoints Jesus, and the woman suffering the haemorrhage are certainly presented in terms if not of sexuality proper, then in terms of engenderment. So just what kind of faith is here being described? There is a distinct difference between faith simpliciter and faith-in-desire recognizable from their differing respective locations within the serial order of the forms which give rise to them. We see that in the first case, faith is bounded by the conceptual form, the symbolic masculine and the form of unity space : time, the very entity outlined in the narrative of The Haemorrhagic Woman. But in the second, that of faith-in-desire, the outcome of the conceptual form soma, we see that it is bounded by the symbolic feminine, and the form of unity (transcendent) space. These differences are germane to our understanding of the Lukan presentation of faith, particularly at this point in his gospel. He seems intent on emphasising the links between faith and those centres of consciousness which we generally associate with virtues of a typologically feminine kind, particularly the virtue of compassion. The same is true of the image of faith we see momentarily in the discussion ensuing the parable, where 'hearts' (kardi/av) speaks similarly. This is a kind of faith which must be 'felt' just as the woman's 'touching' of Jesus must be felt, and which is indissolubly contracted with love, of which the parable enclosed within 7.36-50, that of The Two Debtors (vv 41, 42) speaks:



The woman depicted in this narrative has in common with the centurion, sexual transgression. She has in common with both the widow at Nain and the haemorrhagic woman, the fact of her womanhood, the fact that her body being that of a woman, is prone, vulnerable, susceptible; but to what exactly? This condition we might describe as 'passive' in the very sense of the resonance of that word with 'passion', 'feeling', 'the Passion', 'compassion' and so on, in order to distinguish it from faith simpliciter, in order that is to differentiate aconscious and conscious faith. So typologically the faith-in-desire of which the two stories of The Centurion's Slave and The Sinful Woman in particular speak, can be thought of as kindred to the symbolic feminine, rather than the symbolic masculine. For the contiguity of the categoreal forms in the creation narrative warrants that we interpret some of the difference between faith and faith-in-desire along such lines.  We have previously put that the symbolic feminine and the soma, as forms of unity, lie at one end of the spectrum of the conceptual forms, which may be described as 'concrete' antithetically to 'abstract'. This concretion is akin to feeling qua suffering, the kind of  experience marked by the cognates of the expression 'passion'. It is an image of the aconscious intentional mode as the deliberative submission to the claims laid upon us by the past. Thus where faith-in-desire is characterized as contiguous with the symbolic feminine, it is intelligible on the basis of passivity, even though as remarked already, the term 'faith' must involve some measure and kind of autonomy. The reason for saying 'some measure and kind' is the ambivalence to which the soma as categoreal form and faith-in-desire, its consequent intentional mode give rise, will mark each one of the radicals of the aconscious. There is no dodging their paradoxical status.

Subsequently to the narrative of The Sinful Woman, the evangelist continues thus:

Soon afterward he went on through cities and villages, preaching and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. And the twelve were with him, and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their means. (Luke 8.1-3)

Therefore we can well understand the thematic focus of almost the whole of 6.20-8.3, which is thought to consist of non-Markan material, as in accordance with the specifically Lukan perspective, and its formal connectivity with the symbolic feminine. This block which is usually accounted for in terms of the sources Q and L, represents distinct tendencies of Luke himself, and those tendencies are immediately recognisable in the conceptual categories and perceptual categories to which we have drawn attention, the pre-eminent ones being soma and haptic memory, and thus also to the two forms of intentionality, faith-in-desire and desire itself. We have not commented on all of the material contained within this section of the text, and we must now do so.

There is a strand of text focused on John the Baptist which culminated in the dominical saying ostensibly contrasting Jesus and John:

"To what then shall I compare the men (a)nqrw/pouv) of this generation (genea~v), and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the market place and calling to one another, 'We piped to you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not weep.' For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine; and you say, 'He has a demon.' The Son of man has come eating and drinking; and you say, 'Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' Yet wisdom (sofi/a) is justified by all her children." (Luke 7.31-38)

This text follows that of 7.18-30 which refers to the disciples from John the Baptist, whom he has sent, asking of Jesus '"Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?"' (v 20); a summary of healings (v 21); several quotes from Isaiah to the same effect (v 22); a further saying: '"And blessed is he who takes no offense (mh\ skandalisqh?~) at me."' (v 23); and finally Jesus' discourse concerning John (vv 24-30). All of this material is of a piece with what we have learned so far in the section Luke 6.20-8.3. The mention of 'wisdom' within the conclusion of the discourse identifies the entire section, 6.18-35, just as does the figure of John the Baptist. We have previously discussed the symbolic masculine and its intensional links with both John the Baptist, and of course with its contrastive relatum, the symbolic feminine - here denoted by the term 'wisdom'. It will not pay to construct an elaborate and fixed framework which denies relationality as well as oppositionality between the two, the symbolic masculine and the symbolic feminine, both of whom evince the identity of The Holy Spirit. The enigmatical Son of man here is identified with Jesus in the penultimate verse of the logion which envisages the masculine and feminine as Sophia or Wisdom, The Holy Spirit. But elsewhere, for example in the quite close introduction to Luke's account of The Transfiguration he is emphatically not of this world, and in principle enjoins the forfeiture of the same:


As close as they are contextually, these words nevertheless do occur later, notably after the turning point marked by Peter's confession of faith (Luke 9.18-20). It may well be that the best and perhaps even the only way out of the obscurity of these references to the Son of man, will have recourse to the notion of temporality. For the moment of course, in the first section of material peculiar to Luke, 6.20-8.3, life and its self propagation continue apace. Such life belongs to the idea of the symbolic feminine and the economic. The troubling existence of the masculine relatum or principle, which the aggregate necessarily co-opts if it does not actually contain, makes it possible to juxtapose the masculine in itself with the same, male and female. It is the latter whom Jesus identifies in 7.31-35, even as he is identifiable as Son of man, and it is the former, the masculine in itself, the transcendent term of the form of unity, the coming Son of man, of whom John, at least at this point in time, is pre-emptive or promissory. The contrast between John the Baptist and Jesus is thus not one of mutual exclusion as is given by their common embodiment of the masculine principle, to which the title 'Son of man' refers. John represents the symbolic masculine as the transcendent relatum existent within itself and for itself. Luke brings into rapport with one another not merely the contrastive stances towards 'eating and drinking', activities which set apart John from his fellows in accordance with the conceptual form of the transcendent masculine. In the wake of this come piping and wailing, dancing and weeping, even birth and death, if not exactly life and death, and of course the aconscious mode of intentionality faith-in-desire and its conscious counterpart, faith.

The Holy Spirit, whom Luke champions, is evinced in another parable contained within this section of the gospel, by means of the proper perceptual mode, vision. It is used to encapsulate the injunction against Judging Others (6.37-42):


Several motifs in this passage reverberate with what we have already found in the section. Not merely the saying about the disciple not being 'above' his teacher which may anticipate the importance of the theme subordinate/superordinate in the miracle story to come immediately after this grouping of parables, extending from 6.37 to 6.49. The two sayings here concerning the teacher-disciple relationship in fact intrude on the narrative flow, which opened with the saying about the blind. This itself is precursive  too, of the later citations from Isaiah in the passage on the Messengers From John:


The phenomenon of vision is salient to this evangelist, for the very same reason that the anthropic categories are. The two Pneumatological categories, which as illustrated above, border the Lukan modes of intentionality stemming as they do form haptic memory  and the conceptual soma, are those of optic memory and the symbolic feminine. These are vital to Luke's theological intent.

The very next parable in Luke 6.43-45 too identifies the Holy Spirit:

"For no good (kalo\n) tree bears (poiou~n) bad (sapro/n) fruit, nor does a bad (sapro\n) tree bear (poiou~n) good (kalo/n); for each tree is known (ginw/sketai) by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good  (a)gaqo\v) man out of the good (a)gaqou~) treasure of his heart produces (trofe/rei) good (a)gaqo/n), and the evil (ponhro\v) man out of his evil (ponhrou~) treasure produces (trofe/rei) evil (ponhro/n); for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks." (Luke 6.43-45)

Not only does this image revert at once to the Day 3 rubric, the description of the creations of the two types of plants (Genesis 1.11, 12), which we have associated directly with the life-giving Holy Spirit, but it alludes further to the J narrative in which 'the tree of life in the middle of the garden' and 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil' were said to be (Genesis 2.9). Later in the same story we hear that they, the man and the woman who had eaten of the latter, and whose 'eyes were opened, and they realized they were naked, and they sewed fig-leaves together and made themselves aprons.' (Genesis 3.6, 7). (Luke does not have an account of the Markan pericope The Blind Man At Bethsaida (Mark 8.22-26), which combines both Pneumatological motifs, vision and the iconic trees;  and in which the blind man says '"I see men; but they look like trees walking.'" Mark 8.24.) The second creation narrative itself was instrumental in pointing out the foundational links between vision, the sense of beauty and desire and knowing. Add to this of course, the dialectical configuration of  good-evil, as well as the concept of production or bringing forth. It is more than obvious that Luke has placed these parables together purposively. If this parabolic discourse does not refer to those central concerns of the creation narrative, vision, beauty, knowing and desire, then just what does it mean?

The overture, if we may call it that, to this section of narrative, consisting of Blessings And Woes (6.20-26) and the discourse on Love For Enemies (vv 27-36) need not be pressed into service for the thesis put here. There is already a weight of evidence telling for the thesis that the specific conceptual and perceptual entities motivating Luke's thinking and feeling, and that the specific forms of intentionality which they generate are equally present in this block of text. The beatitudes and woes seem to point ahead to the very summary statements of 7.31-35, which end with the reference to 'wisdom'; and the discourse on the love for one's enemies easily and beautifully blends with the focal topoi of the section.

THE SIXFOLD SPECTRUM OF DESIRE

The above diagram refers to the epilogue of the gospel of John, chapter 21, which systematically lists all three immanent messianic miracles by the means of the numbers of fish caught. This figure, '153' also succinctly and adroitly incorporates the three transcendent messianic miracles, for there is no way of understanding the order of the numbers without their inclusion. The second number '5', refers of course to the fifth event, which The Feeding Of The Four Thousand is. However the actual second miracle in the messianic series as a whole is the episode complementary to this, The Stilling Of The Storm. So, the strict chronological sequence of the six messianic miracles is not mirrored by this cipher '153'. Instead, by means of having referred to the fifth event in the second place, the author makes us aware of the chiastic order, the fact that events 2 and 5 in the sequence, both Pneumatologies, are complementary to one another; hence, he is referring to all six miracles. We need to recall also that the setting of The Miraculous Catch Of Fish, the Sea Of Galilee, is also that of two of the transcendent events. That only three of the total six miracles are recounted in this gospel makes no difference to this hermeneutic. The references to disciple listed only in the synoptic gospels, 'the sons of Zebedee' (John 21.2) suggests the acquaintance of the author of this chapter with that tradition in which of course, the messianic events missing from John are recounted.

This figure of the chiastic structure of the six meeisniac miracles arranges the immanent (feeding) events on the left-hand side; these occur first, fifth and third in chronological order. We have introduced the species of desire relative to the perceptual forms of memory which they nominate: The Transformation Of Water Into Wine, haptic memory, erotic desire; The Feeding Of The Five Thousand, optic memory, economic desire; The Feeding Of The Five Thousand, acoustic memory, hierarchic desire. We have indicated their arrangment according to this text, semiologically, that is, having use the semioptika noted in the Pneumatological miracle story, The Feeding Of The Four Thousand. We can therefore now address the several generic expressions of this one intentional mode, desire, beginning with the conscious order, related in the narratives listed on the left-hand side of the diagram above.

Haptic Memory : Erotic Desire

The Wedding At Cana (John 2.1-11), the first episode in the messianic series, accounts for this, canonical desire, while the Markan healing pericope which expounds it, is the story of The Man With A Withered Hand (Mark 3.1-6). It is not necessary to list in addition the number of parables which address the same mental/affective centre of consciousness, some of these were mentioned in the determination of the diurnal/nocturnal temporal equivalent of the same. That the latter is focused on the interval surrounding midnight, which occurred so frequently in those very texts, accords with the seasonal equivalent, that of midwinter. In The Apocalypse, this will be metaphorically represented by the last of the sections introduced by a sevenfold series, the vials or bowls, subsequently to which the plethora of nuptial imagery occurs. The first of these references, which comes at the virtual conclusion of the description of the sixth bowl, is so remarkably reminiscent of the temporal motif in the 'nuptial' parables:


The other references both positive and negative to what we may broadly name this constellation of the erotic are 'fornication': 17.2, 4, 18.3, 9, 19.2, 21.8, 22.15; 'the harlot': 17.1, 5, 15, 16; 'marriage'/'bride'/'bridegroom':18.23, 19.7, 9, 21.2, 21.9, 22.17. Equally germane to the link between the final quarter of The Apocalypse and the soteriology and eschatology of the gospel of Luke, which is that of the soteriology/eschatology of desire, are the references to 'wine': 17.2; 18.3; 'purple and scarlet': 17.4, 18.12 ('purple' only), 18.16, which are also confined to this segment of the book.

We should not forget that Luke himself is no stranger to an apocalyptic modulation in his characteristic theme of eating and drinking which are tokens of the love of human persons for one another, just as they do in the miracle story. The  shorter apocalypse in his gospel, 17.20-37,  which he shares with Matthew (24.32-44), mentioned above, contained: "As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of man. They ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them." (Luke 17.26, 27, cf. Matthew 24.38: "... eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage ...") In the same contexts of the links between Luke and the section of The Apocalypse inaugurated by the bowls series, in other words, the Lukan and Apocalyptic soteriologies and eschatologies of desire, and their clear intertextual resonance with the Johannine miracle story, we should note, albeit without the contours of the final sevenfold series not just in The Apocalypse but in the canon as a whole, the following:


This first description of the opening of the sixth seal combines the seasonal quarter figurative of the final series of seven bowls, winter, just as it calls to mind the introduction to the Johannine miracle story, which depicted the disciple Nathanael 'under the fig tree', the narrative having ended in the promise to the disciple of a vision of an apocalyptic cast (John 1.45-51).  Matthew too presents the motif of the fig tree in the closest proximity to the pericope of the days of the coming of the Son of man. He however aligns it with the season of summer. But since the image does not include that of actual fruit, this occasions no real contradiction:


It should be clear, even in spite of the brevity of the apocalyptic discourse in Luke 17, that the evangelist is capable of regarding the inherent ambiguity of the mind : body qua conceptual form of unity, along with its attendant mode of intentionality, belief-in-desire, from a point of view somewhat at odds with what we find in the characteristic presentation of the theme of eating and drinking. This is never more apparent than it is in the concluding logion:


The saying sorts perfectly not only with the negative, value assigned to the body, in the last section of The Apocalypse itself:


Even so, the Apocalypse does not impute a merely negative value to the soma, it could hardly manage to do so and simultaneously utilise the nuptial imagery pertinent to its eschatology. We need not be disinclined either to reject its positive estimate given to the body as a determinant of consciousness any more than we should neglect Luke's capacity for a negative estimate of the same, even though this is perhaps understated in relation to the overall tendency of The Apocalypse. If the overt ambivalence of the mode of intentionality which this conceptual form, the body, generates, is to be realised in its fullest potential, then both views will follow. The Lukan 'optimism', or what is the same thing, its juvenescent endorsement of the phenomenon of embodied existence, doubtless stems from the fact that it celebrates 'the days of his flesh'. Luke is concerned to preserve the historicity of the risen Christ; he is at pains always to emphasise the earthly nature of his existence in a particular given place and at a specific given time. His is a gospel at once concerned with the concept of incarnation, although it is a view of the same altogether at variance with that espoused by the gospel of John. It is a difference as well as a similarity which is best encapsulated by the two terms soma, or mind : body and Mind, logos ensarkos and logos asarkos, Eros and Thanatos, and finally, mythos and logos.

Other texts could be added to those cited in support of the hypothesis that very considerable tracts of the canon are taken up with this same phenomenon. In its entirety, the book of Jonah announced it in the Hebrew scriptures. But we have introduced the apposite section of The Apocalypse which stands as the intertextual analogue to the gospel of Luke in order to further the Pneumatological aspect of the doctrine of consciousness. That is, in order to approach the notion of a processive transition from one conceptual radical, space : time, to another, mind : body, by means of the intervening category, here, the symbolic feminine, male and female, and concomitantly the transition from their corresponding forms of intentionality, the will-to-believe and belief-in-desire. The underlying hermeneutic of The Apocalypse employed here thus takes it for granted that its four sevenfold series are correlates to the soteriologies endogenous to the four gospels, as implicitly substantiating the doctrine of human consciousness. In respect of this, it is important to notice that in the final section beginning with the series of vials, the writer explicitly conjoins one of the four living creatures with the inception of the last eschatology:


What attracts our attention here, is just that the specific 'living creature' is not named. The iconographical tradition as noted, rests upon the astral imagery which Ezekiel adopted during the exile and was then put to further use by the author of The Apocalypse, has historically been notoriously plastic. At various times each of the four different symbols has represented gospels. (For an introduction to this tradition see the page by. Felix Just, S.J.) What is interesting about the paucity of the evidence for a clear and certain ligature between the four sections of The Apocalypse and a particular gospel, and following from that, the hermeneutic of the latter in light of the doctrine of intentionality, the fact that of the four occasions where a distinct connection may be forged between one and  the same 'living creature' and so too, one and the same gospel, and a section of The Apocalypse which this initiates, it is here alone, as the final member of the quartet instigates the last phase of the eschaton, that any literal connection is given. Moreover, then, it is not specified. This accommodates the plasticity of the tradition. In the same last quarter of the book we should note also the concentration of the references to Babylon, as evocations of Ezekiel and the exile, and therefore also of the provenance of the imagery which John employs: Apocalypse 16.9, 17.5, 18.2, 18 ('great city'), 21. The description of the fall of Babylon is in chapter 18. Prior to this, even suggestive of Babylon, there has been only the oblique reference to the river Euphrates in 9.14 as part of the description of the sounding of the sixth trumpet.

Optic Memory : Economic Desire

This variety of desire  links immediately, as we glimpsed from the mandala, with the erotic; thus in a sense, both are kinds of 'having', of 'owning'. It is here of course in terms of intentional forms, that knowing begins to emerge in a clearer aspect. Even so, we should not forget that the immanence of erotic desire, initially entailed the desire-to-know with desire simpliciter.  For the intentional mode of desire, is purely immanent, arising from the haptic memory, which is thoroughly decided as to the difference between immanence and transcendence, object and subject. Which can only mean that since (haptic) memory is compounded with (haptic) imagination, desire simpliciter is necessarily compounded with the desire-to-know. The hybridisation of the forms desiring and knowing, takes full advantage of this fact. Optic memory exploits the desire-to-know implicitly contained within actual desire, so that the final member of the taxis, the acoustic memory is capable of delivering the cognitive form from its moorings so that knowing can  be considered independently of its genetic link with the conative.

One of the earliest manifestations of the essential connectedness between the visual and the acquisitive in the gospel of Luke is as follows:


Seeing is a favourite theme of Luke, since it signals the identity of The Holy Spirit, and if The Acts is replete of angelological imagery, it is due to this predilection. It would be difficult to find a more cogently articulated bond between seeing and having than is  put in these verses. They come after the parable of The Seeds (Luke 8.4-8), after which follow the discourses on parables in general and on that parable in particular (Luke 8.9-15). In the first of these, both seeing and hearing are configured; in the second,which of course highlights 'the word', the terms 'hearing' and 'word' recur (Luke 8.11, 12, 13, 14, 15). But a word is also a graphic entity, a thing visible; and so verse 18 of the logion literally enjoins us to 'see as we hear'.

Apart from the classical presentation of the category of optic memory in the stories of The Feeding Of The Four Thousand and Blind Bartimaeus, the parable of A Light Under A Bushel common to all three synoptic gospels, and one of the earliest of the parables to be told, purveys the theme according to the genre:


Matthew's version almost completely ignores the connection between seeing and having, although the word 'house' (oi)ki/a?), which neither Matthew nor Luke use, is certainly redolent of 'the economic':


But neither Mark nor Matthew make the link between seeing and having as desire anywhere near as emphatically as does Luke, who in the very next verses writes:


The parallel of this tradition can be found in Mark (3.31-35), where it sits immediately prior to the parable of The Seeds, but there is no explicit mention of 'seeing' for Mark uses the verb 'seek' (zhtou~sin), usually translated 'asking' (Mark 3.32), even though he later describes Jesus 'looking around (peribleya/menov) on those who sat around him' (v 34). Certainly Mark does not combine the verbs 'desire' and 'see' in just the manner that Luke does so, from whom it is clear that the object of both desiring and seeing here, is Jesus.

The parable of The Dishonest Steward, (Luke 16.1-9), special Lukan material, is a prime example of the radical. It follows the parable of The Lost Son (Luke15.11-32) which too deals with privation and the loss of both status and the material necessities of living. But the latter story accentuated a contrastive relationship between dissipated erotic love and the compassionate love of the father for his son. From its opening, with the description of the 'rich man' (a!nqrwpo/v tiv h~n plou/siov), there is little doubt as to the centre of gravity in the parable of The Steward. It too is concerned with the material realities of existence, with livelihoods, but that is all. It remains focused on the psychology of the economic, void of any link with the erotic, although there is a clear link between the economic and the hierarchic, given in the man's presentiment of the dishonour about to befall him. The narrator provides a window on the mind of the steward when confronted with immediate dismissal for wasting the possessions of his master.  This is less a matter of his own privation which again would place him in a situation similar to that of the previous protagonist, the prodigal son, although the narrative also employs the term 'sons'. Instead it revolves around the steward's role and place in society as these reflect his own self-understanding:


That the actions of the dishonest steward turn on the shame he associates with poverty tells for the act of his own self perception, his own image of himself. Shame more often than not bears this meaning in moral psychology, and it is to be linked with corporate existence, one's membership of a family and engenderment; hence the phrase 'sons of this world'. It is most of all from other members of the same family that we seek to cover ourselves, perhaps because they know us better than most members of society. Shame is as such a publicly or socially oriented emotion, but one also linked to the phylum, or family. Begging as a kind of moral nakedness, becomes the admission of not only one's dependence on others, but of a deficiency which exposes the vulnerable self.  Bartimaeus is spoken of in the same terms, (Mark 10.46 tuflo\v prosai/thv - blind beggar; Luke 18.35 - tuflo/v ... e)paitw~n - 'blind man ... begging'.) That the debtors are instructed to write, rather than pay in coin, as well as the reference to 'sons of light', are other motifs in the passage which reinforce the connection between the acquisitive, that is, the economic model of desire, and the role of vision.

Another account which draws upon the indissoluble psychological bond between seeing and having, albeit obliquely, but which nevertheless contains a wealth of material for a theology of economy, is that of Paying Taxes To Caesar. As we have it in the gospels of both Matthew and Luke, it differs little:

Acoustic Memory : Hierarchic Desire

Once again, this element of the biblical doctrine of consciousness is formally expounded both in a messianic miracle, The Feeding Of The Five Thousand (Mark 6.30-44), and a healing miracle, A Deaf And Dumb Man Healed (Mark 7.32-37). The acoustic semiosis presents us incontrovertibly with the phenomenon of a graded hierarchy; that is the very meaning of the word 'scale' - from the Latin scala, a ladder. It is alluded to in the parable of The Seeds (Mark 4.1-9), which  tells of the threefold yields, thirtyfold, sixtyfold and a hundredfold (4.8). This is an exponential series, arranged hierarchically and is elaborated within the context of hearing the word. It sits well with the specifically Markan perceptual perspective  of acoustic memory, and the prior narrative about the family of Jesus (3.31-35), which repudiates familial ties in favour of 'whoever does the will of God', so reinforcing the theme of the very broadest of human groupings, the society,  the class of classes, to which hierarchy is essential. This extension beyond the bounds of the family, of human communication, confronts us with the  reality of the social world, whose common coin is language itself.

In the gospel of Matthew there are several occasions where this paradigmatic desire is linked with the phenomenon of speech. One such is The Denouncing Of The Scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 23.1-12). In the narrative, as well as their functions in learning, the roles of both hearing and speaking in both  teaching authoritatively and also preaching are described in league with the desire for 'exaltation'. Additionally, the visiblity of honour and the manner in which the open display of status, here literally of the hierarchical, that is 'priestly' kind, also funtion in the service of the same motivation, the same desire for esteem. It is clearly linked, as it is in the Markan mandala, with the acoustic radical, the regulative determinant of the same:

CONSCIOUS INTENTIONALITY AND HIERARCHY

This very brief survey of the varieties of radical conscious desire, in which we have included texts other than the standard articulations of the same, the messianic and healing miracles, leaves us at a point where we must address the three corresponding incidences of desire  simpliciter in the aconscious. But before we say more about desire, we must recognise the implicit if not innate rationale of the organizational principle which structures the various instances of desire, both conscious and aconscious, into hierarchies. This is not the same thing as hierarchic desire itself, although the link between the hierarchies of not just desire, but the entire gamut of intentional forms, knowing, willing, believing and the rest, and the idea of a scale, or hierarchy itself, requires understanding a propos of acoustic sense-percipience, and the corresponding conceptual forms, those of space and space : time. Here, we confine ourselves to commenting on what it means to describe a particular instance of any given intentional mode as 'sovereign' or 'canonical' or 'regulative' and so on; and furthermore, to describe the relation of the other varieties to this single epitomising instance. So we describe erotic desire as the sovereign form of desire; and in the iconography, we listed the economic, and then the hierarchic occasions of desire as second rate and third rate expressions respectively, of the same thing, desire. We also emphasised the relation of contiguity between immediately neighbouring forms of the intentional mode: thus there is a virtually seamless transition from (sovereign) erotic desire to its economic neighbour, just as there is between the latter and social, or hierarchic desire. Notwithstanding which, there is also a degradation of the mode in this process of transition from the sovereign and initial occasion to the medial instance, and further final one. So the sovereign or primary occasion of desire, or any of other intentional modes for that matter, is followed by a secondary and a tertiary instance of the same thing, in this case, desire. The term 'medial' shall serve as the introduction to the explanation of the hierarchic structure of intentionality.

If the hand functions in consciousness as a semeion (sign) not just for the erotic, but for haptic memory as a whole, which it does, then we may also utilise it not simply as in meditation techniques, those of mudra, but in depicting the scalar organization of the species of desire. At the broadest level, desire divides itself according to the basic bifurcation of the spatiotemporal manifold, which, in its two directions, from present to future (perceptual imagination), and from present to past (perceptual memory), it reiterates the categoreal paradigm - transcendence : immanence. Each of these contains three elements, the subjects of the messianic miracle narratives. We therefore describe them referentially to the present as 'proximal', 'medial', and 'distal'. These are expressions which denote the anatomy of the hand itself, the three articulated joints of the fingers. They will acquit us of the task of describing the transitional pattern of both futures and pasts, in their convergence towards the present. The simplest and most cogent presentation of this argument is to revert to the iconography already used. Here are the two mandala which propose the hierarchical structure of desire, in both orders, conscious and aconscious. We see that the former, which is to say, the forms of memory, as always are signified by semeioptika belonging to the 'blue' end of the spectrum, denoting the settled past; while the latter are signified by semeioptika from the opposite end of the spectrum, its red polarity, which indicates the transcendent future.

The reason for distinguishing as the Markan mandala does between the forcefulness of desire according to the serial order haptic-optic-acoustic, and so contending the degrees of desire as ordered contiguously as erotic-economic-hierarchic, is ultimately due to the diffraction in memory of those same perceptual forms. Haptic memory is 'distal' in precisely the sense that it is active over a longer period of our lives than any other. This is the meaning of its location in the chiasmos. Haptic memory is engaged up until the very last phase of the series, which introduces its complement haptic imagination. (Not that haptic imagination was not present from the start; it was. Haptic memory necessarily includes its imaginal counterpart; there is no memory in se; no retrieval, reminding, recollection of past haptic occasions without some element of the corresponding imaginal form. Thus too desire is always composite with desire-to-know.) But to begin with, as we see from the messianic series, the immanent Christological form of memory extends from our remotest past - it is this exactly which gives it such power. It is this which accounts for the fact the desire in the first degree is the very desire occasioned by haptic memory, erotic desire. No desire is on par with it for this reason and this reason alone.

Optic memory differs from both the haptic and acoustic forms in just that it sits between the remotest and the nearest past respectively. Accordingly we speak of it as 'medial'. It gives rise to desire of a specifically acquisitive kind, the desire to possess whatever may be possessed. But this is a second degree grade or 'degraded' order of desire. The force of this desire,as representative of actual desire itself, is secondary in scale to that of its neighbour, the erotic. So finally too with hierarchic desiring which is the result of the acoustic memory. We therefore speak of it as 'proximal' - for although it is established as a form of perceptual memory, it borders the presential domain. In the scale of the degrees of conscious desire, this is effectively the least and last of the class. We introduce here the remaining three forms of desire which are those of the aconscious. The order of aconscious (imaginal) desires follows the ordering of perceptual memory in its hierarchic organization into tertiary, secondary, and primary, in keeping with the temporality proper to each: proximal, medial and distal, respectively.



The hierarchies of occasions of any conative intentional forms are either regressive or progressive; that is, they tend away from the present to the distal pasts and distal futures. Such hierarchies do not represent the comprehensive consistency of intentional modes. Thus when the sovereignty of the modes belonging to one and the same taxis is taken into account, in the first case above, those of desire and knowing, the actual processive flux is towards the present. This should be obvious in the case of conscious desire. Time is asymmetrical in this sense; it does not flow from the present to the past. The flow from desire to knowing represents the relation of the conative to the cognitive forms of perceptual memory. The above mandala represent the hierarchies specific to desire. To account for the first of which, it will be necessary to consider the aconscious, where the coherent or corresponding radicals and their intentional modes, mirror this pattern of regression to remotely prior pasts. The same applies to the aconscious forms of desire. The desire for catharsis, the desire for purity, consequent upon haptic imagination, circumscribes the remote future. The direction of flow in the second image above therefore does not represent the way in which the conative radical consequent upon haptic imagination, and the cognitive radical, consequent upon acoustic imagination, are integrated. Once again, we shall have to revert to the 'other' order, in this case, the conscious one, so as to explain this hierarchy. But these topics lie beyond our immediate concerns here. The main point is that the comprehensive co-ordination of categories and the sovereign occasions of the intentional modes both conative and cognitive which they produce, always tend from either distal through medial to proximal pasts or futures. The term proximal denotes the border of the same domain with the present. There is consistent passage which acknowledges the primacy of the epistemic or cognitive over the conative. Time as it is given to consciousness is always ordered in virtue of the conquest of desiring by knowing and the conquest of willing by believing.The final realization of an epistemic purpose, whether it be a form of knowing or a form of belief, is the necessary goal of all consciousness insofar as it is temporal by nature.

The syntactical integration of these modulations or types of one and the same mode of intentionality, here desire, is inseparable from the event of hierarchy; for the categoreal or radical constituents of each intentional form themselves, consist in a graded hierarchy. This is the meaning of  canonicity, namely, the force of the intentional modes varies according to its type or instance. Thus in each case of the taxa, whether the perceptual forms of memory and imagination, or the conceptual forms, pure transcendent radicals and forms of unity, there exists a scale which sorts the members according to both the threefold and sixfold models. Here we must deal immediately with not only the threefold paradigm but that also of the full range of human conscious conative intentionality, which means that we must include the three types of desire belonging to the aconscious. The question regarding the application of an intentional mode whose source is conscious, here desire, to perceptual radicals which are themselves aconscious, brings with it considerations which are fundamental to the  hierarchical ordering of the types of desire as well as the types of faith-in-desire. That is, the broader signification of a sixfold syntax of desires and so too of belief-in-desire can now be broached.

We alleged that desire arises canonically from the persistence of haptic memory as a rudiment of consciousness. While haptic memory belongs to the conscious order of mind, desire itself is expressed in every one of the six perceptual radicals. It will repay us here at the outset to repeat the division made previously between the practical and the theoretical logos, or logos ensarkos and logos asarkos. If we use the expression logos here instead of the common English equivalent 'reason', it is precisely because that equivalent leaves out of account the role of the conative or affective modes of intentionality. A better term might be 'prehension', since this word readily promotes the Christological perceptual category, that of touch or the haptic, and can refer to both thought and feeling, reason and emotion, cognition and conation. Nonetheless, we shall avoid it in order to dissociate ourselves from its connotations in process theologies. Those intentional modes subsumed under the title logos ensarkos are: desire, knowledge-of-will, will, and faith-in-desire. Those which are subsumed under the logos asarkos are: desire to know, knowing, will-to-believe, and believing.

We asserted that desire is genetically explicable on the basis of haptic memory; this is also to posit that this same 'erotic desire' is the first order  or primary instance of that intentional mode. Akin to it, but in a certain sense degraded from it hierarchically, is economic desire, and so too further still is hierarchic desire, the secondary and tertiary kinds of desire respectively. There is a pattern of continual dispersion of the full force of the consciousness itself in the serial translation from the first to the second and so also to the third instances of desire, according to the corresponding taxonomic transition from the haptic to optic to acoustic forms of memory. This is not to say that desires of these second grade and third grade kinds are unreal; they are not. But what is meant by the term 'desire' itself, is fully and finally given in the reality of erotic appetition. The satisfactions attendant upon the subsequent perceptually radical modulations of desire, are by comparison degraded, diffused, dissipated. Real desire, and here the epithet real is used most deliberately, is sexual by definition. Previously we used the notion of surrogate satisfaction in response to certain themes in the narratives dealing with both the economic and the hierarchic instances of desire, themes which purposely harked back to the phenomenon of sexual love. This notion of surrogate satisfaction suggests the same thing; it points to the taxonomic ordering of desire itself. This has been the argument so far.

Haptic Imagination : Kathartic Desire

Thus stated, the possible permutations of desire extend from one end of the spectrum to the other, and we have as yet not fully described those of its instances engendered by the three forms of imagination, although we have in fact often referred to haptic imagination, especially in its role of contrast to haptic memory. When the story of The Transformation Of Water Into Wine introduced the idea of purification, it was with a view, along with other elements in the narrative, to the final event of the messianic series, The Transfiguration. It is not difficult to determine the type which desire assumes in this aconscious radical, haptic imagination. No matter how we phrase it, or in which religious or philosophical tradition we find it, and no matter how ambivalent it may seem on account of its aconscious status, it is readily available to us in experience. The desire for purity is taken up by Mark in more than half of an entire chapter. It will lead into the second feeding miracle narrative in his gospel:


The story of The Syrophoenician Woman whose daughter was possessed by an unclean spirit ensues (Mark 7.24-31), and only the narrative of The Deaf And Dumb Man (Mark 8.32-37), intervenes before the second miracle of loaves (Mark 8.1-10). This  editing is highly economical and cogent, since the discourse on purity sits between the two miracles of loaves, and the flow from the first, The Feeding Of The Five Thousand, has been interrupted only by The Walking On The Water, which it must be in order to establish the chiastic structuring of messianic events, and by a generalised summary of healing (6.53-56). The discourses on purity then are intelligible in relation to the two feeding miracles, those texts which in terms of conative intentionality, confront us with hierarchic desire and acquisitive desire consecutively. Mark 6.45-8.27 is missing from the gospel of Luke, for which no finally adequate explanation has been given. In Luke 11.37-41 there is a brief parallel of sorts to the extensive discourse on purity in Mark. But for all that, Luke is no stranger to the desire for purity as a generic and rudimentary presence in human motivation. Just where we might have expected the larger discourse on purity in the gospel of Luke, that is, after he tells The Feeding Of The Five Thousand (Luke 9.10-17), he resumes those narratives which lead directly to the classical statement of the haptic imagination, and hence to kathartic desire, The Transfiguration; namely Peter's Confession Of Jesus, and the Passion Prediction (Luke 9.18-27). Moreover, in addition to the story of The Leper (Luke 5.12-16), Luke has an account of Jesus healing ten lepers (Luke 17.11-19). Like the first such story, it also uses the theme of cleansing:



Another and quite similar rendering of the same is the story of The Samaritan Woman (John 4.1-42). It concludes that section of that gospel in which so many of the first pericopae we encounter propose a theology of sexual desire. If then Luke knows only too well that specific type of desire aligned with the gospel of John, this accords with the fact that it is only in the latter that we possess a redaction of the messianic miracle which sets before us the canonical form of desire, namely sexual desire, the specific intentional perspective which imbues the gospel of Luke rather than John. In John's narrative, water functions as a polysemic metaphor. Clearly it recalls the role of the water in the first miracle, since this text culminates the presentation of the theme of erotic love. And although he opens the conversation by asking her: "Give me a drink." (do/v moi pei~n (John 4.7)), neither Jesus himself nor the woman are said to be thirsty. Thirst is of course mentioned in the story (4.13, 14, 15), so that after the revelation of the woman's infidelity, it connotes sexual desire. (We are never told whether Jesus was given the drink he requested or not.) But it must also stand in some measure for the material of purification, if not complete satiation. The woman's request to drink from '"the spring of water welling up to eternal life"' (v 14) is her request that she '"may not thirst"' (v 15). The image drawn here of sexual appetition is two sided; for it is countenanced with the same bracing realism we found in the chreia dealing with Nathanael, but now it is depicted as something one might do well to be rid of altogether. As in the first messianic miracle story, the motif of purification is understated; but it is present as it must be since the erotic is a source of defilement. The Markan pericopae in chapter 7 make no mistake about that:


Here we find the axiological nature of this radical. Much has already been said on the subject; it was clearly told in The Transfiguration by Peter's remark: '"Master, it is good (well) that we are here ..."' (Mark 9.5), the point being that if the satisfaction of erotic appetition is a good, then so too is its complement. For the transcendent form of the haptic is complementary in just this sense - the two forms of haptic sentience share the same axiological identity; both are Christological. If there is any paradox resulting from this state of affairs, then it pertains to the imaginal form of the haptic, as to the aconscious. Even so, we must repeat that the same imaginal element of consciousness is always present in memory, the meaning of the presence of the water which was the 'pre-existing condition' of the wine into which it was transformed. This water for 'the Jewish rites of purification' also alludes to the activity of the form of intentionality native to haptic imagination, and its compresent role in the erotic (haptic memory). One indissoluble aspect of erotic appetition is the desire-to-know. Thus there is never desire qua erotic desire without the desire-to-know just as there is never haptic memory without haptic imagination. Eros always seeks to know the other as well as to be known by the same.

This brings into focus the fact that the actual type of desire simpliciter which the haptic imagination assumes, makes common cause with itself. Thus if the desiring haptic imagination seeks purity, it may certainly do so and often does via the desire-to-know. We need only regard the fact that learning and monastic cultures have in a variety of places and times been favourable to one another. The exposition of the sympathetic and coherent relationality between believing and the desire-to-know will belong to the study of the fourth gospel. But for a canonical radical or category of consciousness, and also for the compound 'apocalyptic' categories, we should note that the intentional form native to these same will be pressed into the service of other intentional forms. Thus the desire-to-know as necessary to haptic imagination is bound intimately with the way in which the same perceptual mode expresses desire itself. That is to say, the actual conscious desire for purity and the aconscious desire-to-know in the fullest panoply of its variations are mutually sympathetic.

Haptic imagination is essentially ethical imagination just as haptic memory is the essence of ethical memory. We shall have to say more concerning this in the context of the Eucharist. That is, the way ahead for the discussion of what is meant by 'ethical imagination' as the equivalent of the imaginal function of touch, or what is the same thing, the haptic function of the imagination, must first attend to the relation between this, the extrinsic expression of the value, and its normative occasion as haptic memory, and thereby establish the connection the latter bears towards what the Eucharist signifies. The greater part of this exercise deals with the semiotic forms as expressed in the numerical details of the three Eucharistic miracle stories.

A final point concerning this perceptual form must note that its province is the distal future. In terms of the graduated shift from the haptic to optic to acoustic forms of imaginal consciousness, a shift which correspondingly registers that of the ontogenetic and conative mode to the phylogenetic and cognitive mode, there is a corresponding advance away from the remote futurity of haptic imagination towards the now. The acoustic imaginal consciousness as its canonical form of intentionality, knowledge-of-will requires, circumscribes the boundaries of the present with the future. Haptic imagination however is fixed to those domains of the not-yet which are at furthest remove from the present.

Optic Imagination : Ethnic Desire

Once again the classical exposition of the category responsible for this species of desire, since it depicts the optic imagination, is the story of The Stilling Of The Storm, (Mark 4.35-41, Matthew 8.18, 23-27, Luke 8.22-25).  It recurs to the Day 3 rubric, in which the expression 'kind' is operative. The miracle account is fairly summary, although the same cannot be said of the ensuing narrative of The Gerasene Demoniac, which relates to it as concept to percept, symbolic masculine to optic imagination, an editing ploy which Luke copies from Mark, (Mark 4.35-41, 5.1-20 cf. Luke 8.22-25, vv 26-39.) The editing of both Luke and Matthew following suit, establish the same connection between the Day 3 rubric, that of the symbolic masculine, and the perceptual radical.

The desire occasioned by optic imagination is the want of kinship, the wish for group identity, being together with those identical in a certain respect to oneself, most frequenly at the expense of all heterogeneity. The respect in which such homogeniety occurs is more often than not based on visible characteristics. Thus the commonplace manifestation of the desire can be defined as 'ethnic'. The term 'ethnic' as used here, recalls one of the aforementioned four expressions regularly used in The Apocalyps: tribe (fulh~v), tongue (glw/sshv), people (laou~), nation ( e!qnouv, Apocalypse 5.9 et passim.) In the messianic miracle story we note the company of male only disciples with Jesus beset by the storm at sea.  As previously mentioned we find it in the psychology of martial institutions as well as those of learning where the sexes are segregated. It is also prevalent in religious cultures, particularly those of Christianity and Islam. The company of men are contained within the boat as it crosses from one to the other side of the sea. As in the other events of the taxis, the issue of Jesus' identity arises. The real occasion for the theology of identity however always remains the transcendent categories listed in the first three Days of the creation cycle, and as far as Jesus himself is concerned, the first of these as we understand from the narrative of The Transfiguration is what matters most.

The connection between any of the perceptual radicals of consciousness listed in the transcendent miracles, here that of optic imagination, and their conceptual counterparts, in this case the symbolic masculine, is tacit. This provides us with a window to the world of the conative expression of the category. In the story of the Gerasene we find the term 'Legion'(Mark 5.9 cf. Luke 8.30), connotative of a prime example of the conceptual category, the army. It too is a band of brothers, a fraternity, a human agglomerate. Apart from its benign co-option in fellow feeling, that is, aside from its vital role in the exercise of sympathy, the desire this kind of desire has a demonic aspect such as the healing miracle demonstrates. The story of the Gerasene Demoniac calls to mind an image of prey and predator, for  'The Legion' is effectively a hunting party. The symbolic masculine represents the phenomenon of collective identity. Thus the optic imagination which borrows from it, is equally so. The association of the radical with the violence of (physical) nature is indicated by the storm;  Matthew's much more dramatic expression 'seismo\v' (Matthew 8.24), anticipates its use in The Apocalypse, the standard Pneumatological text of the New Testament canon, in which it features repeatedly, most notably at the conclusion of the three sevenfold series: seals (Apocalypse 8.5), trumpets (Apocalypse 11.19), and vials (Apocalypse 16.18). The last of these references speaks of 'a great earthquake such as had never been since men were on the earth, so great was that earthquake.' The Apocalypse in its entirety is somewhat like a dream, albeit with its nightmarish elements, just as it was the figure of Jesus 'asleep in the stern' (Mark 4.38, cf. Luke 8.23), which first illustrated the optic imagination.

Ethnic desire of itself and in itself effectively enlists the instinctual behaviours of the symbolic masculine. It really insists on wanting to be among one's  own kind. We met this same word in the description of Day 3, the description of the separation of the waters and the 'gathering together' of land with  the subsequent production by the earth of the two forms of vegetative life. This rudiment of consciousness like its conceptual counterpart, the symbolic masculine, is responsible for merging the identity of the individual with with that of a larger whole, for this is the primary meaning of 'ethnic'. Ethnic identity is an innate tendency which drives living things to associate with their own kind. The verb 'to perish' (Mark 4.38, cf. Luke 8.24), as well as being a Pneumatological index, binds the following story, that of The Gerasene Man, and the concept of nature to this same tendency, here predicated of humanity. The number of times we find it depicted in the gospels is quite remarkable. In Luke an outstanding one is the parable of The Good Samaritan (Luke 10.25-37). This functions as a blueprint for human behaviour as beset by the tempestuous passions which the appetition engages. A variety of 'kinds' is portrayed in the parable: the robbers form one group; the priest too belongs to another subspecies; the Levite is again a member of a party of some sort; and so too is the Samaritan. But the last forgoes his membership of the clan, race, nation, tribe. That is, he casts aside his belonging to an exclusionary group in order to affirm the final and only collective to which any of us may legitimately belong, that of humankind. Thus the neighbour, whose definition evoked the parable in the first place, is defined according to the broadest possible terms; terms which negate subcategorial kinds as inauthentic. The presence in the story of the optic imagination as the inspiration to act compassionately stands shoulder to shoulder with what we witnessed in the story of The Leper. In the latter, Jesus is said to have been 'moved with pity' (splagxnisqei\v Mark 1.41). For it is imagination whichmoves us not only to feel empathy with our fellows, and the subhuman or animal world and beyond as well, but also to act upon it. The parable resonates with references to the fact that this capacity rests almost entirely on the visual mode of sentience:



The parable of The Good Samaritan was introduced by a dominical saying which confirms the presence of this very structure of consciousness, and we advert to it:


The healing miracle which accounts not for the symbolic masculine but optic imagination, Mark 8.22-26,  is absent from Luke. Matthew's rather perfunctory recension not only distorts the original version, for he mentions two blind men (Matthew 9.27-31), but he also dislocates it from the Markan context in which it follows fairly closely on the heels of  the story of The Feeding Of The Four Thousand(Mark 8.10), and immediately after the recapitulation of the two miracles of loaves, the latter of which just mentioned, of course presents the complementary category, optic memory.

John is familiar with the tradition, at least the details of the method of the cure, anointing the man with clay made from spittle (John 9.6), which also recalls the 'earth' motif of Day 3,  is congruent with Mark's reference to Jesus having spat on the man's eyes and having laid his hands upon him (Mark 8.23). The account of The Man Born Blind (John 9.1-40) is the second last of the seven Johannine 'signs', and it occupies the entire chapter. It equates the Jesus of this particular episode with the Son of man (vv 35-37) and hence with the Holy Spirit. The story appears to complement the second Johannine narrative, that of The Official's Son (4.46-54) in theological terms, mirroring the chiasmos of the messianic series, even though of course there is but one crossing 'to the other side' in this gospel. The Johannine story is an invaluable source for understanding this structure of consciousness. From its inception it looks ahead, that is, to the future as to imagination, with Jesus' response to the congenital condition of the man reversing completely the construction placed upon it by his disciples;


The man's description of Jesus as 'prophet' (v 17) also squares with this temporal perspective, that of transcendence, hence the contrast between 'the Jews' as 'disciples of Moses' (vv 28,29), and the man himself as a disciple of Jesus, here the Son of man. Ironically, the story contains the famous or infamous reference to expulsion from the 'synagogue' (vv 22, 23); ironically, for this term itself conjures up the reality of ethnic desire: 'birds of a feather flock together':



If these verses are of interest to us, it  is not because of any alleged polemical character they may have in striving against Judaism. In the current context regarding interfaith, they effectively point to an identity of "Moses" more in keeping with Buddhistic convictions. For the story begins an ends on the same note, that of illness or misfortune as inherited due to previous 'sin'. So the introduction and conclusion controvert the doctrines of karma  and samsara as roundly as possible. We discussed such a hermeneutic of the Moses persona previously, in the detailed consideration of The Transfiguration, where he appears 'with Elijah' (Mark 9.4).

The role of the judgement of beauty here is equivalent to that of the good in the case of haptic imagination, and that of the true in the case of acoustic imagination. The prevalence of aesthetic judgement in both Buddhistic and Islamic cultures forms part of the wider consideration of this fact. Both enjoy very accomplished witnesses to visual acuity, although the former probably engages optic memory and the latter optic imagination to a greater degree than the obverse. The iconoclasm of the Islamic traditions never suppressed architecture as a necessary adjunct to the experience of religious thought and feeling. It might be argued that both traditions remain at something of a disadvantage as far as musical culture is concerned, comparatively to the 'western' religious civilizations, for certainly these have achieved the most marvelous successes. We are speaking here in the broadest of terms, but these facts are also supported by consideration of the difference between the roles played by the written form of of the Arabic language and similarly by the logographic natures of cultures where Buddhism made inroads, including China, Korea and Japan. Here of course we must repeat that there is no optic memory sans optic imagination, and the complex issues surrounding the relations of such ostensibly different modes of religious thought as Islam and Buddhism will have to deal with this fact. That they have also much in common from a phenomenological point of view, namely this very strong indebtedness to the phenomenal mode which intrinsically defines itself in term of that most immanent of values, beauty, must not escape notice.

What was said in conclusion in the above treatment of the haptic can be repeated here in respect of the aesthetic; that is, optic imagination is aesthetic imagination. But we should not understand this, nor any other imaginal form, as purely sensuous. It is necessary to keep in mind always the contradiction involved in any discussion of the imagination as pertaining to the aconscious. If it is true that imagination by nature, by definition, by taxonomic categorisation, is perceptual, it is nevertheless true that it is non-sensuous.  We must allow for the notion of transcendence even at the expense of imputing paradox to the thing in question. Again what was said in relation to the normative status of the complement, optic memory, and by means of the same, of the further relation of the optic imagination to the Eucharist, these are immediately relevant to the discussion of the axiological identity of this radical of consciousness.

Acoustic Imagination : Deontic Desire

The formal rubric presenting this category is The Walking On The Water (Mark 6.45-52, Matthew 14.22-33, John 6.16-21). The healing story in Mark, The Boy With An Unclean Spirit (Mark 9.14-29)with its clear parallel in Luke (Luke 9.37-42), likewise depict this same aconscious radical. John's gospel contains the messianic miracle and so a healing narrative would be considered otiose, since there are in all just seven signs, a mixture of messianic and healing events. In Matthew there are several narratives which might appear to have been adopted from the Markan pericope: the healing of a dumb man (Matthew 9.32-34) which follows directly his story of two blind men having been healed, cannot be the parallel to Mark's depiction of the acoustic memory, that event in his healing series (Mark 7.32-37) which shows none of the criteria for transcendence, since the equivalent of this episode in Matthew is 15.29-31. Then there is Matthew 15.29-31, which matches the Markan context in that it is immediately prior to The Feeding Of The Four Thousand. However this passage does not single out acoustic sentience as does the story in Mark, for Matthew writes:


The episode recounted in Matthew 17.14-21 is placed immediately after The Transfiguration as is Mark's single rubric of acoustic imagination in his healing series. But Matthew's version makes no mention at all of either hearing or speaking, the boy being referred to simply as 'an epileptic' (Matthew 17.15), although certainly the reference to 'the demon' (v 18) like much else in the text appears to have been borrowed from Mark.

This structure of consciousness relates to the conceptual form space as does optic imagination to symbolic masculine, and as stands haptic imagination to mind. In a certain sense then, all the forms of imagination defer to those pure transcendent forms of consciousness. Thus their explication too acknowledges the status of the pure conceptual forms as normative for transcendence. In introducing this here, since we are dealing with desire, and thus somewhat paradoxically, a conscious mode of intentionality in an aconscious guise, we shall recall the axiological identity of the pure conceptual form, it is that of the true. We have not in the previous discussions of the forms of imagination considered this strand of Markan doctrine. We might well have done so in the previous two cases; for, it is clear that what we have called 'ethnic desire', since it is grafted to the function of vision in consciousness, must necessarily engage the judgement of beauty. So also for haptic imagination: it is certain that the aspiration to purification functions in accordance with the judgement of what is good. We may therefore take it as read that the axiological property of each of these three structures will be indispensable to their fullest exposition, bearing in mind always that the forms of imagination as exemplars of value, are extrinsic expressions of the same. That is to say, the normative occasions of what is innately the immanent good, the immanent beautiful and the immanent true, remain the forms of memory: haptic, optic and acoustic respectively. Even so, there can be no doubt of the role of value in the imaginal forms. It secures at once, their polarity with the forms of memory, that is, it cross references them in tandem with their chiastic structure obtaining between the complements of perceptual consciousness, just as it secures their analogous relationality, the fact that the three forms of imagination belong to the same taxonomic order, and so subtend relations to one another.

Here then, it is truth in particular, not beauty and not goodness, which identifies this specific form of imagination, just as it belongs to the conceptual form, space ('heaven'). Hence we have called the desire which is the outcome of the acoustic imagination 'deontic', meaning 'being right', 'it is correct'. Its literal meaning refers to 'necessary existence', and can be rendered 'that which must be'. We have already mentioned dei~ in keeping with the intentional mode 'desire' in the gospel of Luke and we will survey it in the later stages of this study. We can therefore qualify the sense of 'necessary' here so as to completely sever any connection with desire as with determinism. Luke certainly does not use the expression 'must be' (dei~) in this sense, for he has opted for the very opposite insofar as his gospel is focused on the soteriology and eschatology of desire, not will, which is the appurtenance of the conceptual form space. (Precisely the same problem occurs with usage of the Greek qe/lw which sometimes refers to 'will' and sometimes to wishing, or wanting, that is, to 'desire'. The former is a  conceptual mode of intentionality and the latter a perceptual one. There is in biblical metaphysics no mixing of the two.) It is Matthew rather than Luke whose soteriological and eschatological perspetives are those in keeping with both will and the knowledge-of-will. We can see this at once in his extended treatment of the messianic miracle, which involves Simon Peter, something which no other version of the same event does.

The idea behind the philosophical notion of 'necessary being' as opposed to 'contingent being' concerns ontology tself, the doctrines of being. Thus too we encounter the simple and portentous "I am"/"It is I" ( e)gw/ ei~mi) in each of the three recensions of the miracle. This resonates with the imperatives of the creation narrative: "Let there be/ Let ..." (Genesis 1.3, 6, 9, 14, 15, 20, 24, 26), the Christological account of space, and those other categoreal entities related in various ways to it. The distinction between necessary being and contingent being, arises from Plato, for whom mathematical and geometrical entities are completely other than those things which may cease to exist. In time, 'God' too came to be defined in such terms.

For our purposes however, we need to note the colour, that is, tenor, of this type of desire. It is focused on rectitude, on rightness or correctness as truth, since space will be the category evincing the existence of this very value. In terms of the intrinsic form of the value, transcendent truth, it is on a par with the value goodness, which is also thorough or whole, as it too is a fully transcendent form. Here beauty is the odd man out; for it is weighted in virtue of immanence, at the opposite end of the spectrum from truth, even though it remains comparable to the encompassing value, the good, since this enjoys a transcendent status on par with that of truth, yet an immanent status on par with the beautiful. So where do we find such an idea in the narratives?

In John it is indeed explicit both before and after the two miracle stories, The Feeding Of The Five Thousand, and The Walking On The Water, and connected logically with the compact of ideas which includes space ('heaven'), will, and knowing. He nevertheless delineates these two acoustic radicals in the sharpest possible complementarity (antithesis) to one another. The first miracle is the exposition of acoustic memory:



The second, immediately following, is The Walking On The Water, which is the rubric for acoustic imagination:



Mark tells the same story in a characteristically summary fashion, although he expends a considerable amount of detail on the healing miracle, which also involves the role of the boy's father, a narrative on which we have already commented. Turning therefore to Matthew what strikes us first is the role he grants to  Simon Peter:


This is a remarkable rendition for a variety of reasons. Generally, the messianic miracles and the records of the Eucharist show little variation, but here Matthew certainly mirrors Peter himself in stepping out alone into uncharted waters. Why? The text is redolent of the final chapter of the gospel of John, which similarly alludes to if it does not depict Peter's martyrdom (John 21.18, 19), In fact the two evangelists use virtually identical languge:



Here we must not lose sight of the association of the transcendent miracles with death as with the imaginal realm. Moreover, even if we find in this story perhaps the most unflattering portrait of Peter we shall come across in Matthew's gospel, his gospel is on the whole, pro-Petrine in the sense of being the most 'Judaic' of all. The epilogue of John, in which Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him 'more than these' (John  21.15, 16, 17), does not hesitate to portray Peter's shortcomings, in keeping with the theme of the failure of the disciples in Mark, and the import of the Matthean story is of the same ilk. The setting is the same in each.

Once more the mention of will is salient, because it is a form of intentionality we can very readily attribute to the charaterisation of Peter in every gospel. But the real focus of the story is neither nor the will as such, it is acoustic imagination, and its necessary mode of intentionality knowledge-of-will. There is a substantial disparity between the two, and perhaps Matthew's own purpose is to meet this distinction and put it as succinctly as possible. Matthew too has Jesus scold the incompetent disciples who in vain attempted to cure the epileptic boy (Matthew 17.14-20), evidently his equivalent of Mark's boy possessed of a deaf and dumb spirit,  and Jesus charges them too with faithlessnes (a!pistov v 17). This also comports with the presentation of the 'disciple whom Jesus loved' in John 21, if we understand that figure in terms of the role of faith in that gospel,  and if we accept him as in some sense being the of the author who says of himself:


The author of the gospel of John can hardly propose himself as a solitary and peerless beacon of faith without damage to his reputation as well as his witness; even so his self-awareness on this score remains psychologically reassuring. It is of a piece with his self-awareness as to his relationship to Jesus, which is characterised by the two expressions for 'love' he uses in the last chapter, a)gapa/w and file/w; just as he understands these in connection with the function of the desire-to-know, the intellectual component in erotic love, the imaginal component in haptic memory.

The axiological character of acoustic imagination is probably more immediately identifiable in its own native intentional mode. Just as haptic imagination inherently posits, even if extrinsically so, the value goodness as the satisfaction of its own native appetition to know, the intentionality of the acoustic imagination, that of knowing-the-will, realises its own axiological identity, the true. The knowledge-of-will is as grafted to this value as its conceptual counterpart, the conceptual form space. So that once again we can affirm the reciprocity between the type of desire which this imaginal form generates, and its necessary mode of intentionality. For this reason we refer to the appetitive or desiderative type of consciousness which is the property of the acoustic imagination as 'deontic'. It seeks what is true, right, correct, just. More can be said of it than this, but that constitutes a major part of the discussion of the gospel of Matthew.

In summing up this brief review of the incidence of desire in the forms of imagination we can again add that such types of 'appetition' are vastly other than what we normally mean by the word 'desire'. There is no iterative capacity in such expressions of desire; there is never the urge for mere repetition, mere recurrence. For by definition the desiderative imagination is driven by novelty. This it accepts from the transcendent forms themselves, none more so than space and mind. If there is any creative thrust forwards in time as the business of the imagination must imply, then its impulse to ever newer satisfactions is the essential driving force. The prospective nature of these members of consciousness demands this as we see from the two crossing miracles at sea:


and equally from The Transfiguration with its overtones of The Baptism since this is a once only event antithetically to the given character of the Eucharist which enjoins repetition. To imagination, repetition is inimical. We shall be the better able to understand these structures of consciousness when we come to survey their semeia, and since the gospel of Luke requires us to consider in particular the haptic signs for the categories, we shall indeed undertake this task. All three of the haptika for the three forms of imagination, that is their haptic icons or semeia, comply with the symbolically masculine disposition of the soma. That is, all are consistently 'phallic' in as much as they are those members of the body - whether actually that of male or female - which are outwardly disposed. Another way of saying the same thing is by means of the contrast between centripetal and centrifugal. The physical morphology of the soma in which these same structures of imagination are embodied, the means of our own representation to ourselves of the forces both cognitive and conative which they effect, accords with the latter. To use another physiological metaphor, we may say of the haptic semeia which Mark details in each of the twelve healing miracle narratives, that in the case of the three forms of imagination these are efferent; they carry out from a locus towards an as yet unknown and undesired reality.

If we describe the acoustic form of imagination as 'deontic', this is to draw attention to its inherent axiological identity. All three forms of imagination as 'transcendent' provide for the equation between 'God' and value; the good as belonging to the haptic, the beautiful in the case of the optic and the true for the acoustic. Once more, the full exposition of the axiology of imagination in the first instance, defers to the three normative categories, those of perceptual memory, and thereby ultimately to the centrality of the Eucharist to this important strand of Markan and biblical philosophical psychology. The full elaboration of which is the theology of semiotic forms, and the exposition of not only a Christian theory of language, that is, of the logos, but also one of 'revelation' so-called.

The temporal referential compass of acoustic imaginal consciousness is that of the present and near future. We may describe its temporal disposition in terms of the proximal future. In this respect it functions in marked contrast to the distal future which is the domain of the haptic imagination. All of the cognitive forms of intentionality are disposed in this way; that is, all forms of knowing and believing, whether of the conscious or aconscious, delineate the present in relation to either the near future or the near past. As for belief-in desire, it determines the present realm relatively to the immediate past; as for knowledge-of-will,  the canonical form of intentionality proper to acoustic imagination, it determines the present realm relatively to the immediate future. The conative forms of intentionality operate in terms of either the distal, that is remotest, pasts or futures, without bearing upon the present. These facts are essential to any understanding of Christian eschatology.