MARK

All knowledge is conscious discrimination of objects experienced. But this conscious discrimination, which is knowledge, is nothing more than an additional factor in the subjective form of the interplay of subject with object. This interplay is the stuff constituting those individual things which make up the sole reality of the Universe. These individual things are the individual occasions of experience, the actual entities. (Ibid pp 227-228).

'Objects' for an occasion can also be termed the 'data' for that occasion. The choice of terms entirely depends on the metaphor which you prefer. One word carries the literal meaning of 'lying in the way of', and the other word carries the literal meaning of 'being given to'. But both words suffer from the defect of suggesting that an occasion of experiencing arises out of a passive situation which is a mere welter of many data. Thus viewed in abstract, objects are passive, but viewed in conjunction they carry the creativity which drives the world. The process of creation is the form of unity of the universe. (Ibid pp 230-231).

But in another sense I have endeavoured to put forward a defence of dualism, differently interpreted. Plato, Descartes, Locke, prepared the way for Hume; and Kant followed upon Hume. ... The dualism in the later Platonic dialogues between the Platonic 'souls' and the Platonic 'physical' nature, the dualism between the Cartesian 'thinking substances' and the Cartesian 'extended substances', the dualism between the Lockian 'human understanding' and the Lockian 'external things' described for him by Galileo and Newton - all these kindred dualisms are here found within each occasion of actuality. Each occasion has its physical inheritance and its mental reaction which drives it on to its self-completion. The world is not merely physical, nor is it merely mental. Nor is it merely one with many subordinate phases. Nor is it merely a complete fact, in its essence static with the illusion of change. Where a vicious dualism appears, it is by reason of mistaking an abstraction for a final concrete fact. (Ibid pp 244-245).

The Universe is dual because, in the fullest sense, it is both transient and eternal. The Universe is dual because each final actuality is both physical and mental. The Universe is dual because each actuality requires abstract character. The Universe is dual because each occasion unites its formal immediacy with objective otherness. The Universe is many because it is wholly and completely to be analysed into many final actualities - or in Cartesian language, into many res verae. The Universe is one because of the universal immanence. There is thus a dualism in this contrast between unity and multiplicity. Throughout the Universe there reigns the union of opposites which is the ground of dualism. (Ibid p 245).

IDENTITY

The notion of identity is common to the description of the three pure conceptual forms, and to the three miracles of virtual transcendence. (We have just observed that the semeiacoustika representing the intentional processes dependent on these six structural components of mind, the three pure (transcendent) conceptual forms, and the three forms of imagination, to be of the same kind. Thus the cadences of either three forms of intentionality, conscious, pure, conceptual (transcendent) modes, or aconscious, perceptual ('transcendent') modes, always resolve in virtue of the descending tone of the scale: 4-3 in the major, and 6-5 in the minor.) It is conveyed by two means: (1) the separation of the thing in question from what is other than itself; (2) its identification as being named by God. Nuances are present in both scriptural descriptions, the three conceptual forms, and the three forms of imagination. These we shall review in brief, before taking up what is arguably the most important of all the binaries emerging from the texts.

The theology of transcendence posited in the rubrics Days 1, 2, and 3, makes a clear distinction between the entities classified in the last two rubrics, 2 and 3. Space is utterly disjunct from its alterity, which in its primeval form, exists in the state antecedent to the creation described in Genesis 1.2. This entity other than '(the) heaven(s)' is not simply time as such, space : time. Insofar as these are two things in number, space and time, they are susceptible of unification; they are one composite thing, and depicted so in the Day 5 rubric, and in the text as an entirety of 'halves', consisting in the ratio 3 : 4. But the depiction of transcendent space, 'the heaven', 'the firmament'/ 'the firmament of heaven'/ 'the heavens', the story clarifies, according to the order of its disjunction from any other entity. Its separation/identification is determined to be as absolute as possible. A similar fission occurs in the Day 1 rubric. But it is qualified by the fact that both things brought into being are named:

And God said: Let there be a solid vault in the middle of the waters, so as to form a division between water and water. (And it was so.)

And God made the solid vault and created a division between the waters above the vault and under the vault.

And God named the vault heaven. And it was evening and it was morning, a second day. (Genesis 1.6-7, trans. Westermann/Scullion.)

And God said: Let there be light! And there was light.

And God saw, how good the light was. And God separated (ldyw LXX diexwrisen) the light from the darkness.

And God named the light day, but the darkness he named night. (Genesis 1.3-5).

The association-separation between light and darkness will be resumed in the Day 4 rubric, notwithstanding a crucial demarcation of the two pairs, Day 1 (light : darkness)  and Day 4 (day : night), upheld by the logic governing the narrative as a whole, which it sorts into three pairs:

And God put them [the two great lights] in the vault of the heavens to give light over the earth,

to rule over the day and the night and to separate (lydbhlw, LXX diaxworizein) light and darkness. And God saw how good it was.

And it was evening and it was morning, a fourth day. (Genesis 1.17-19).

This is the single incidence of the verb 'separate' (ldb LXX diaxwrizein) in the second part of the narrative. It recapitulates the former description, reasserting the distinction between light and darkness according to the theology of transcendence. Nevertheless, according to the textual formal, propositional structure, we cannot fail to observe the dissimilarity as well as similarity between the initial couplet light-darkness, and the final couplet day : night. The effective result of which is to portray the relation of the couplets complementarily to those of Days 2-5 and Days 3-6. In the first case, Days 2-5, the depiction of the conceptual forms space and space : time respectively, the first rubric is paramount. The theological outlook of this narrative as a whole is weighted in favour of transcendence, and the portrayal of the transcendent heaven in the Day 2 rubric, is of primary importance. Not so in the second case, that of Days 3-6. For the first member of these concerns the creation of the earth, and the last, that of the earth animals. Thus the alterity between the two paired couplets must be taken into account. Here then, the paramount rubric is actually the final one, Day 6, even though the overall perspective of the narrative privileges transcendence, and thus the first three Days are of signal importance. Day 6, according to the overarching narratological structure belongs to the 'earth' half of the story, distinguished by its quota of four, rather than three members, Days 4, 5, 6, and 7.

This pattern allows us to understand the evident ambiguity of the Christological pair Days 1-4. If we admit the categoreal paradigm 'transcendence : immanence' ('the heavens and the earth') to consideration, then, however uneasily, we must acknowledge their equivocal semantic, reflected initially in the copula, the central term. This advocates a relation of no uncertain ambiguity. The categories in question, mind and mind : body thus stand vis-à-vis the paradigmatic structure paradoxically. They are not weighted in favour of either transcendence or immanence; or rather, they must accept both in equal measure, no matter how logically perplexing this appears. These rubrics thus both divide and bridge the two halves of the narrative as theologies of transcendence and immanence.
 
I have argued for the hermeneutic of the text according to the organizational principle given in the initial inclusio, 'the heavens and the earth'. This results in the most thoroughgoing contrast between the entities as well as the two halves of the narratives, to which this merism refers. It also accounts for the singularity of the copula 'and' as responsible yet for the association-dissociation of terms. Thus  three forms of antithesis result. This means that the Day 2 rubric and the Day 6 rubric sustain the uttermost contrast of any of the entities taxonomically posited  in the narrative. These are the transcendent form of space, and the virtually immanent form of unity, male and female respectively. It means also their relation(s) must be the business of the remaining entity, which accordingly, can be neither exclusively transcendent like 'heaven' (space), nor exclusively immanent like male and female. This remaining thing described in the Day1 and Day 4 rubrics, is the Christological event, mind (logos) and mind : body, which is weighted neither in favour of transcendence nor of immanence, as are space and the anthropic form of unity. But which nevertheless, is equal to both in terms of a paradigmatic and categoreal distinction between transcendence and immanence, 'the heavens and the earth'. That is, it is equally transcendent and immanent. In this, the copula of the inclusio, like the copulas of the Christological-Trinitarian formulae, best represents The Son, as does the central sign in the categoreal paradigm, transcendence : immanence.

The comparable stature of the conceptual entities, equal in terms of transcendental status, mind (Day 1) and space (Day 2), must seem odd in view of the fact that the textual motifs of Day 2 and Day 3 at first sight, are evidently much more explicitly connected as having in common the figure of water. Thus the conceptual forms space (Day 2) and symbolic masculine (Day 3) appear initially to be much more closely akin than do the pure conceptual forms space and mind. And so too, the complementary rubrics in the second part of the narrative, Day 5 and Day 6, likewise detail the creation of living entities, dissimilarly to the inorganic things, sun, moon and stars, of the Day 4 story. Thus if anything, the Day1 and Day 4 rubrics stand apart from the remaining pairs, furthering the apparent similarity of Days 2 and 3.

But closer examination reveals a genuine difference between Days 2 and 3, which will not support their interpretation other than that given in the initial inclusio 'the heavens and the earth'. For indeed, heaven is brought into being on Day 2, and the earth on Day 3. This distinguishes them categoreally, albeit according to the second level iteration of the paradigm transcendence : immanence. Added to this logical refinement are two facts: not only is the very notable verb 'separate' (lbd / diaxwrizein) missing from the Day 3 rubric, but that text anticipates the proliferation of the immanent form of antithesis in the second half of the narrative. The gathering together of the water in one place, and the description of the first living, reproducing, organisms, the two kinds of plants bespeak unity, rather than identity.

And God said: Let the water beneath the heaven gather into one place, so that the dry land may appear. And it was so.

And God named the dry land earth, but the gathering of the water he named sea. And God saw, how good it was. (Genesis 1.9-10 emphasis added.)

Even though the idea of transcendence through disjunction is clearly qualified in the description of Day 3, as indeed it must be, all the things created during the first three days are identified and named. Identification and naming nowhere occurs in the second half of the text. It is a distinguishing feature of P's theology of transcendence, just as identification of Jesus will be of the 'transcendent' miracles. The arguments concerning which it is not necessary to repeat here. The presentation of that motif in all three of the miracle narratives further verifies their relation to the theology of transcendence proper, since it comports with the concept of 'beginning' or creation, in the P narrative.

During the second part of the creation, living creatures, aerial, aquatic and terrestrial, are blessed by God, and enjoined to be fruitful and increase (vv 22, 28). Preparatory to the same, and part of the ostensibly irrational inclusion of the creation of the earth in the first and 'heavens' half of the text, is the creation of plants. Again a subtle nuance emerges in that their two types ('kinds' wnyml / whnyml, LXX kata genov vv 11, 12), are veiled descriptions of sexual dimorphism, although distinguishable from  the fully fledged binary, male and female, which is explicitly mentioned only under the Day 6 rubric (v 27), the complement to Day 3. The  first living, reproducing, things to be created, naturally appear to be in some sort of sexually dimorphic relation to one another. They prefigure final, realized, sexual dimorphism as prototypes. The description of their manner of 'bearing (producing) seed' and 'containing seed (within)',  is almost as clear a presentation of the difference in disposition of animal-human genitalia as one might expect to find in such a text. I have discussed this text previously at greater length than I do so here, and within the wider context of the creation  story as a whole. The logical binary conjoining and disjoining the two rubrics, Day 3 and Day 6, cannot be ignored. Additionally, the relation of the cycle as a whole to the messianic series, also bears upon its interpretation for Christian theology. For these reasons, the description of the two types of plants vis-a-vis the physical constitution of genitalia, externally in the male, and internally in the female, is of decisive importance to the hermeneutic:

And God said: Let the earth sprout forth fresh green (h#$d): plants (b#() which produce ((yrzm) seed ((rz) (LXX speiron sperma), (and) fruit trees (C( yrp) that bear (h#$() fruit (yrp,, LXX culon karpimon poioun karpon) on the earth (Cr)h l() each of its kind, fruit containing its own seed.  iwb w(rz r#$), LXX to sperma au)tou en autw).
And the earth sprouted forth fresh green: seed-bearing plants (whnyml (rz (yrzm b#(, LXX speiron sperma), each of its kind, and trees that produce fruit, containing its own seed (wb w(rz r#$)), each of its kind. And God saw how good it was.
And it was evening and it was morning, a third day. (Genesis 1.11-13, Westermann/Scullion, emphasis added.)

The text is faithfully, if fatefully, indebted to such a description, given its core subject matter, the created order. Creation is ongoing, and although it is not mentioned explicitly, procreation casts a long shadow in the form of death. Creation is necessarily connected to reproduction because of, and/or in spite of, consumption, as we see from the ensuing J narrative. In the P story, consumption appears to involve vegetable life only, the animals are not objects of human consumption, even if the text eludes mention of consumption of animals by other animals. Consumption, which will be fully thematically and theologically utilised in the messianic series, is acknowledged as requisite for the continued existence of the animal-human realm. Hence death remains  the central suppressed premise undergirding every one of the blessings and injunctions to reproduce, since everything consumed, with the exception of water, was itself, once a living organism. (The two anomalous cases are milk and honey, but these too are produced from once living organisms by parent creatures.) 'Kind' thus too recurs throughout the second half of the narrative (vv 21, 24, 25 bis), as we would expect, pursuant to its initial usage which linked it to 'earth', as to immanence. There, it was in accord with the first and notional presentation of immanence as 'togetherness' in the portrayal of the waters of the Day 3 story.

Not surprisingly then, the hermeneutic which New Testament texts will legitimately ascribe to the meaning of the Sabbath cannot avoid reference to death. Chief among these is the story of the institution of the Lord's Supper. However subtly its configuration, the evident bipolarity of Eros-Thanatos in the P narrative seems to pre-empt the same in the Christological messianic miracle stories and in turn, the narratives about Eucharist and baptism. In each of the three miracles of virtual transcendence, the motifs of separation and identity occur hand in hand. We notice in this context also, the clear connection forged in the messianic series between the description of perceptual imagination and death in the three 'transcendent' miracle narratives. They are characteristically pervaded by angst in the face of awe-inspiring theophanic experiences on the part of Jesus' disciples.

The presentation of both criteria, (1) separation and (2) identity in the 'transcendent' messianic events is as well defined as the concept of unity in the P creation narrative. Both of these formulations are of course secondary. The primary, theological rationale of the P narrative is transcendence, and that of the messianic series immanence. But their co-ordination nevertheless entails that secondary attention be given to identity (transcendence) in the messianic series, and unity (immanence) in the P narrative. The thematic one-to-one correspondence between the three messianic miracles of virtual transcendence and the initial three creation rubrics is unmistakable. It answers to the presence of themes of assimilation and reproduction in the second part of that story, and in the later J narrative, precursively to the stories of feeding miracles, and hence the one-to-one correspondence of those rubrics of virtual immanence with the narrative concerning actual immanence, part of which is the final correspondence between Sabbath and Eucharist.

All three miracles of virtual transcendence involve only the immediate circle of Jesus' male disciples, not the multitudes of the feeding miracles. Any exclusion of female disciples or of children should not perturb us. Typologically, the events of this sub-category are all of this kind, just as the four feeding events can be considered typologically feminine.  Certainly, all three episodes restate the theology of transcendence as a sanctification or setting apart of the person of Jesus. This sorts well with  a theme of purification, and much of the message first put in the P narrative centres upon concerns of this nature. But the real centre of concern of the three episodes is the notion of identity.
 

In all my interactions and changes something is retained that makes them my, in virtue of which all these interactions and changes happen with me, not with someone else − this “something” is my separate self (I). It is absolutely separate in the sense that I am always I, not someone else − although it obviously is not separate, if ‘separateness’ is understood in the sense of isolation, the absence of interactions with anything that is not me (including all other I-s).
Sometimes, the idea of selfness is denied with a reference to ecstatic experience – peculiar experiences that are interpreted as unity with another I, dissolution of one’s own self in another. It can be the state of merging with God, as described by mystics, or an extraordinary feeling of unity with another human being, perhaps in mystical or sexual ecstasy. I think that this is a false interpretation of the experience. What is illusory here, is not I (self) but the merging-dissolution. We have to do with an inaccurate description-interpretation of a certain extraordinary experience that belongs to the very I at issue. The experience is someone’s experience. It is my, or your, or his, or her experience; it is what have happened with me, or you, or him, or her – what I, or you, or he, or she have (has) experienced. Thus, the self (I) of the experiencer was there throughout the experience; it did not vanish, or dissolve; it was the one who experienced this extraordinary mental state. Therefore, if it seemed to this self that it has disappeared-dissolved, it was an illusion – the self’s illusion. The self itself is not an illusion. It is real and separate in its existence. It is the same self (I) that “stands behind” all interactions in which it takes part, and all changes that happen with it. The self (I) is an individual, distinct of all others, subject-bearer of experience and changes.

Really, the feeling of the unity with the world need not be opposed to one’s “selfness”, distinctness, separateness, individuality: one does not contradict the other. The unity of reality means that everything is in the process of interactions with one another – not the non-existence or “illusoriness” of those elements of reality that interact. Changes, in the case of a self, are changes of subjective states with the retention of the subject. (Dmytro Sepety, The Mind as Subjectivity: the Mystery of the Self, 8. The Problem Of Personal Identity.)

We have considered the theology of immanence from the point of view of unity, its seal. The forms of unity in the creation story introduce it, albeit in its secondary realization, the conceptual pole of consciousness, prefatory to that of the perceptual pole, its final and actual instantiation. The J narrative further takes account of that particular exemplification of immanence and of The Holy Spirit, the (animal-anthropic) form of unity male and female, first listed in the Day 6 narrative. The primary disclosure of immanence is undertaken in the messianic series, in the four Eucharistic events. Once again, it occurs in relation to epistemology-psychology, as Christological. This inflection renders it apposite to the logos theology of John and of The Transfiguration. Immanence is routinely catalogued by the metaphor appetition and consumption. Its depiction as such, supports perfectly the interpretation of sense-percipience in all four modes, haptic, acoustic, optic and osmic-gustic, a propos of perceptual data as persistently available to memory. Of the three phenomenal modes, optic sentience corresponds to immanence and to The Holy Spirit. The conceptual form of unity male and female, and the perceptual radical optic memory, are those members of their taxa which are structured in virtue of immanence.

If we recognise the axiological accent proper to immanence and necessarily to The Holy Spirit, then beauty is an essential theological part of the discussion. This was of course prefigured in the P story, for we must allow that the eschatological dimension of creation, the fact that humankind is the last of God's creation, signals the same. Humans stand apart from their forebears in the animal realm, with whom they are continuously linked even so. They stand apart not only as created in God's image and likeness, but as superlatively beautiful. The J narrative expands on this, and gives pride of place to the woman, even though it never actually speaks of her thus explicitly. The clear and certain extent to which male and female (humans) are one, a unity of opposites of some kind, is never compromised. But the emphasis in the J narrative falls to the woman and not the man. She, not he, is the key player, the chief agent in the drama. This has been generally understood in its deprecating sense, so that she rather than he becomes the object of blame and censure for the expulsion from the garden and all else following from their disobedience.

The Apocalypse takes a completely different stance. Its vision of 'a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars' (Apocalypse 12.1), reverts to both creation narratives. The initial cosmic imagery closely replicates that of the Day 4 story, but the subsequent descriptions of the great dragon, also known as 'that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world' (12.9), supplement the invocation of the P narrative with imagery from the J story. Adam does not figure in any of this, as he did in Paul's theology of anakephalaiosis. Like J, John awards pride of place to the woman. His theology of recapitulation is at complete variance with that of Paul, who has failed to appreciate the actual theological perspective of J. This squares with the exceptional axiological specificity of The Apocalypse as Pneumatological, and with the fact that the sense of beauty and the sense of vision are inseparable.

Aesthetic sensibility, by which I mean, the sense of beauty, can and should be taken in both kinds, concrete and abstract, immanent and transcendent. Optic sentience provides us with the actual, primary instance of what is beautiful, or ugly, in the world. Beauty is the most unequivocally earthly of all values. But we cannot afford to ignore the transcendent aspect of this characteristically immanent form of value. Its abstract and transcendent aspect will be conveyed in just that episteme (modus cognoscendi), derivative from the Pneumatological radicals, symbolic masculine and optic imagination, the former in particular, since it is a pure conceptual form, which is mathematical reason. Wherefore we find numerical signifiers almost as prevalent throughout The Apocalypse as colour terms. Their common axiological denominator is aesthetic value.

Mathematics is uniquely beholden to graphic representation. Its cast is graphological rather than phonological. Mathematical 'discourse', or at least, communication, materializes without recourse to verbal, that is, spoken, communication. In this respect, it is the most opticocentric of any means of communication. And for just the same reason, its axiological character is aesthetic. Mathematics has less to do with truth (or the good for that matter), than we are generally prepared to concede. Mathematical 'rationality' has accordingly less to do with truth and clearly most to do with beauty. Its indispensability to scientific method has aided and abetted certain blindness to these facts, as has the privileging of scientific modes of thought in modern and postmodern cultures globally. The modernist and postmodernist zeitgeist awards science based episteme virtual epistemic omnicompetence. This has surely blurred the inherent axiological identity of mathematics itself. But the disponibilité of mathematics to science notwithstanding, mathematical reason (logos), exemplifies aesthetic value. This is very intelligibly, how and why it remains an immediate linguistic resource for The Apocalypse.

If discourse which is innately disposed in virtue of the graphic is necessarily 'aesthetic', if that is, the (unequivocally) immanent, the optic, is by definition the guarantor of our intuition of this value, beauty, then, on the other hand, that which is innately acoustic obtains as the manifest of the transcendental value, the true, albeit in its immanent form. And this, even though as such, it is constituted as an actually immanent form of a transcendent reality, is nevertheless witness to that specific value, the true, as to no other. The 'transcendental' character of the acoustic semiosis secures its legitimacy as indispensable to theological method.


The gospel of Mark guarantees the paramount importance to its own idiomatic, theological perspective of both knowing and the will-to-believe, by means of similar strategies. The narratives which secure the primary relevance of the perceptual form, acoustic memory, and the conceptual form (of unity), are the messianic miracle The Feeding Of The Five Thousand and the healing miracle The Haemorrhagic Woman respectively. Although the former consists in an analogous relation to the creation rubric, Day 5, which is the scriptural deposition of the conceptual radical, so that it is already highlighted. This categoreal radical and its concomitant intentional mode, the will-to-believe, are of equal moment as are the perceptual radical and its proper intentional mode, knowing. The prominence of these miracle stories is accomplished in comparable ways. As the central episodes of the messianic series, The Feeding Of The Five Thousand and The Walking On The Water are the substantial  dénouements of the creation narrative. The first of these, is contained in each of the four gospels, which in itself, attests its significance. But its import is bolstered by the recapitulation of the numerical details and the admonition of the disciples' failure to attend to its relevance in the recapitulation (Mark 8.14-21).

The healing miracle also receives equal emphasis by structural means. It is interpolated into the two parts of The Daughter Of Jairus, so that it stands emphatically, at the apex of a chain of events. I have dealt with this in Mind And Time: The Theology Of Semiotic Forms, under the subheading, The Healing Miracle Stories Which Recapitulate The Three Forms Of Unity - The Spatiotemporal, The Psychophysical And The Anthropic.




Returning to the first messianic Christology, we find the single numerical signifier 6. It is effectively doubled, and so, invites comparison with the double 5 and double 7 of the other feeding miracle stories. No augmentation of quantity occurs in the Christological Eucharistic miracle, as in the other events of this class. Rather, a change in the quality of substance, water, transpires. (I use the term 'substance' in this context, independently of any Aristotelian, ontological, connotations.) The transmutation of a quale in The Transformation Of Water Into Wine refers to the transaction between an antecedent 'archaeological' substance and its 'teleological' reconstitution. In simple terms, the 'miracle' refers to the processive transition from a conceptual form of consciousness to a perceptual form. This may be read in light of the image introducing the Christology, which envisions heaven opened and the angels of God 'ascending and descending upon the Son of man' (John 1.51). The traffic of the angels of God to and from the Son of Man, is reminiscent of Mark's introduction to The Transfiguration, which likewise combines the Son of man and 'the holy angels' (Mark 9.38). The certain Christological contours of these two narratives warrant reading the last messianic Christology in terms matching those of the first. As a Christian epistemology-psychology, indeed it acts reciprocally to the first episode. Thus it posits the alternative processive transitions from perceptual to conceptual polarities of consciousness. It must also be read a propos of  the person of Christ. The synoptic gospels do not expound the doctrine of incarnation as such, but The Transfiguration roundly compensates for its absence.

These reciprocal, transmutative, operations denoted in the first and last messianic miracles, cannot be divorced from either phenomena marking the beginning and end of adult life, and so of discipleship itself, love and death, or Eros-Thanatos. Nor can we understand them in isolation from the sacraments of Eucharist and baptism. But the Son of man persona to whom both miracle stories refer, also pertains to the complex relations subtended by the two chains of events. Recurring to the passage in the P narrative about the third day, John records the first messianic miracle event immediately following the Son of man reference, similarly to the introductions Mark and Matthew give for its complement, the last:

On the third day (Kai\ th~? h(me/ra? th~? tri/th?) there was a marriage at Cana in Galilee ... (John 2.1);

And after six days  (Kai\ meta\ h(me/rav e(\c) Jesus took with him Peter and James and John ... (Mark 9.2);

And after six days (Kai\ meq' h(me/rav e(\c) Jesus took with him Peter and James and John his brother ... (Matthew 17.1).

The temporal phrases in these introductions are referent to the creation taxonomy as consisting of two triads. Additionally, both ciphers three and six, point to just those rubrics which identify The Holy Spirit, and which we briefly reviewed above. (Matthew's recension of the miracle also contains references to the 'Son of man' both before and after the miracle (Matthew 16.27, 17.9, 12). I have identified the symbolic masculine of the Day 3 rubric with the same figure, Son of man. Apart from the introduction to The Feeding Of The Four Thousand: '"I have compassion on the crowd, because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat;"' (Mark 8.2, par. Matthew 15.32), the only other references of this kind, diurnal, temporal phrases, which also act as introductions, are those of the resurrection appearance narratives. These   invariably utilise the construct 'eight days', or 'on the first day of the week', and their recursion to the P creation narrative is obvious, as is the fact that it nominates the Day 1 rubric of that cycle. We shall come to this issue in discussing the octave as a fundamental part of the acoustic semiosis.

If we arrange the repeated numerical signifiers of the two miracles of loaves according to the categoreal paradigm, the result is a simple arithmetical progression: 5-6-7. The effectively doubled hexad of the Christologies, intervenes between dual ciphers. It functions as a pivot, synonymously with the central ratio sign of the categoreal paradigm. In the Transcendental miracle story, the dual pentads infer a dichotomous relation between subject(s) and object(s). The Feeding Of The Five Thousand certainly conceives of loaves as objects of consumption. The thousands are just as legitimately intelligible as sense-percipient subjects. The Christological miracle narrative seems to reaffirm this construal. The initial substance and amount, quality and quantity, six stone jars filled to the brim with water, are tokens of the six conceptual forms delineated in the P narrative. But these are merely inferential or tokenistic incidences of the subject object dichotomy, and will not satisfy the broader and most comprehensive hermeneutic of the narratives.

The most effective, because most simply contrastive or antithetical, pattern which might answer any such formulation has to be that of the three pure conceptual forms in juxtaposition to the forms of memory. These configure the clearest and most unequivocal exemplification of the categoreal paradigm, transcendence : immanence respectively. But we have to admit to consideration the fuller scope of this paradigm, and the depiction of the aconscious in both narrative chains, creation and salvation, and the ineluctable fact that this brings contradiction as well as sophistication to the taxonomical account of categories. We shall come to this matter also in the following exposition of some of the most basic structural aspects of the acoustic semiosis.


Thus the conceptual pole of consciousness is isolated from the perceptual, for this latter openly suggests the nature of sense-perception in its character of the qualitative. The foremost of these being haptic memory due to its role in sexual appetition and satisfaction. It is depicted as intoxicating because of the 'pleasure principle', and the exceptional and phenomenonal nature of orgasm. The final substance and quantity, the same, now transformed into wine, stands equally well, representatively of all six perceptual forms, and not merely that of haptic memory. This substance, the wine and not the water, is the object to be consumed. The story turns upon the theology of perceptual consciousness, conceived as the metaphor of wine, not water. It classifies haptic memory as belonging to a sixfold class or taxon of such things, perceptual radicals of consciousness, the first of which it here describes theologically, in apposition to the Son, and equally in apposition to the value 'goodness'.

Even so, the first Christological messianic miracle complies with the Transcendental messianic miracle insofar as it too appears to imply a subjective-objective dichotomy. (I use the adjectival and not the substantive epithets wherever possible, so as to direct attention away from the tendencies of the nouns to reify independently real persons and non-persons, and also towards the centrality of axiology in the exposition.) On the one hand there is the combination water-wine, indicating the poles of consciousness disclosed analogically in both sexpartite taxonomies, and emphasising the perceptual polarity. A clear distinction emerges of human agents consuming 'objective' substances. In both depictions, the numerals are equivalent, since the morphologies of each narrative cycle, creation and salvation, are consonant and mutually implicative. The difference in numbers between the Christological miracle and the Pneumatological miracle, that is, between the duals 6 and the dual 7, is insignificant here. What counts, is the designation of substances. In both stories they can be properly understood to infer an irreducibly axiological dichotomy: subjective-objective. This sets up a formal antithesis between the true and the beautiful, the pre-eminent exemplifications of which are the pure conceptual form space, and the perceptual radical optic memory. These two categories are unequivocal as determinations of their respective values. They must be bridged by the Christological categories, which are equivocal as to transcendence : immanence. This is suggested by the motif of the descent/ascent of angels upon 'the Son of man' as well as the pattern of numerical progression 5-6-7.

To claim The Transformation Of Water Into Wine as a theology of haptic sense perception is indeed to argue that it qualifies as a theological taxonomy of objective rather than subjective consciousness in the first instance. But various factors qualify this. The most salient one is that of the equivocal status of all the Christological categories, including of course, haptic memory vis-à-vis the categoreal paradigm. That was first proposed in the P creation narrative; and the messianic series follows suit. Haptic memory stands to acoustic memory as it does to optic memory. That is, it stands to transcendence - albeit exemplified within the category of actual immanence - as it stands to immanence. It is not weighted in favour of either. The uniqueness of haptic sentience is its adequation of 'the heaven(s) and the earth'. Like the logos itself, it co-ordinates these relata as remaining otherwise incompatible with one another. These are not prima facie subjective and objective modes of consciousness, but their native forms of value, the true and the beautiful respectively, in their canonical occasions certainly are. So we must concede that within its own categoreal class, haptic memory is paradoxically poised between those two forms of actual immanence, or memory, from which the intuition of these values derive as concomitant, acoustic memory and optic memory respectively.

The 'translation' or transposition, in this case, of the true and the beautiful by means of the good is conveyed less by the numerical references in the texts, than by the evident similarity between consuming subject and consumed object, thousands of persons, and loaves of bread - as well as the two fish - in the Transcendental  miraculous event, The Feeding Of The Five Thousand, and the two substances, water and wine, in the Christological event, The Transformation Of Water Into Wine. These both fit the construal subjective-objective. (So too does the actual binary, two fish.) The pentads refers to the Day 5 story, which details the creation of both birds and fish. Both are spoken of relatively to the previous and normative text, Day 2. Both are seen as inhabiting the two waters, the one above, the other below. In this rubric, no preference attaches to what we might mistakenly view as analogous to the transcendental term, 'above'. The birds are in no way superior to the fish. Both are entirely comparable to one another. The real differential in this event, as implicitly in the previous episode, and explicitly, in the next, the rubrics Day 4 and Day 6, is the paradigmatically immanent form of unity, male : female. Which indeed, if it incurs any representative or 'symbolic' partiality of one over the other of the relata, is that of the feminine, further demonstrated in the J narrative. But such a estimate is valid only insofar as the 'symbolic feminine' represents both sexes inclusively. It is by definition male and female:

And God said: Let the waters teem with living beings, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the heavens.

And God created the great sea monsters and every living being that moves, with which the waters teem, each of its kind, and every winged bird, each of its kind. And God saw how good it was.

And God blessed them saying: Be fruitful and increase and fill the waters in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.

And it was evening and it was morning, a fifth day. (Genesis 1.20-23, trans. Westermann/Scullion.)

Reading the double pentad and the double hexad of the Transcendental and Christological miracle stories as both signalling the two poles of consciousness, conceptual-subjective and perceptual-objective, a propos of the forms of value native to each, the true and the beautiful respectively, follows from the first order distinction the narratives posit as wholes. It does not stem from simple allegorical methods of interpretation, which are metaphorical rather than analogical. The remaining substance of the Transcendental miracle story, the two fish, reaffirms the same hermeneutic. Fish are tokens of both operations, actively consuming and passively being eaten. The figure 2 numbering the fish, then complies with the same inference conveyed by the two pentads. Taken in conjunction with the number of loaves as well as thousands, since both are foodstuffs consumed by the persons, it fully serves the identification of the paired texts, Day 2 - Day 5, which identify Transcendence in the two narrative sections. But the chief emphasis of the miracle story falls to the figure 5, even if Day 2 is certainly the paramount rubric the pair 2-5 in the creation series.

This affirms that even though acoustic sentience exemplifies The Transcendent, not The Son, nor The Spirit, it nevertheless belongs to the class of actually immanent entities. The Day 2 rubric lists Transcendence in its primary instantiation, space, and as conceptual form. The Day 5 rubric lists Transcendence exemplified in space : time, a conceptual form of unity which bears comparison with the analogue, acoustic memory, a form of actual immanence. It is precursory to the similarly taxonomic depiction of its analogue, acoustic memory, which is the normative member of the dyad. Hence the figure 5 is the more significant of the ciphers 5 and 2 in the miracle story, even though the latter functions sympathetically towards the meaning of the former.

The relation of Christ and Transcendence as exhibited by the relation of the two Eucharistic miracle stories, conveys the dichotomous relation of subjective and objective realities of consciousness by means of the qualitative contrasts of persons and comestibles on the one hand, and water and wine on the other. Any closeness of kind between the two, is absolutely vital to the notion of processive change in both Christologies. This links the poles of consciousness, conceptual and perceptual, just as it secures the clear affinity each bears respectively to subjective and objective axiological dimensions of mind. I shall argue that the basis of the links conceptual-subjective and perceptual-objective are irreducibly axiological: namely, that what is necessarily subjective in the conceptual pole of consciousness is veridical evaluation, judgements concerning the true, and that what is necessarily objective in the analogously perceptual pole is aesthetic evaluation, judgements concerning the beautiful.

This brings into direct contrast the pure conceptual form space, as foundational to the intentional mode will (simpliciter), and the perceptual form of actual immanence, optic memory, the basis of knowing-and-desire. Such an antithesis, can only be negotiated by the Christological categories of mind. Any translation between these antithetical forms of value, the true and the beautiful, can be accomplished only by the good. Whereas the Christological and Transcendental stories, Transformation Of Water Into Wine  and The Feeding Of The Five Thousand, are linked by the double ciphers marking qualitative difference, introducing the subjective-objective binary, that which most clearly serves to link the Christological and Pneumatological Eucharistic events is the quantitative factor.  In The Feeding Of The Four Thousand the same number counts initial loaves, and the baskets full of remaining portions. The fish are not numbered, but instead, in both recensions reckoned indefinitely. (In both recapitulations the fish are not mentioned at all (Mark 8.17-21, Matthew 16.8-12)).

And they had a few small fish (kai\ ei])~xon i)xqu/dia o)li/ga); and having blessed them, he commanded that these also should be set before them (Mark 8.7);

And Jesus said to them, "How many loaves have you?" They said, "Seven, and a few small fish ( e)pta\ kai\ o)li/ga i)xqu/dia)." And commanding the crowd to sit down on the ground, he took the seven loaves and the fish, and having given thanks he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. (Matthew 15.34-36).

This is not to say there is no consideration of polarity. In keeping with the actual emphasis of the wine and not the water in the Christology, the 7 here certainly enumerates the sevenfold messianic series. This marks the shift from the orientation of The Feeding Of The Five Thousand as the Transcendental Eucharistic event, to the Pneumatological Eucharistic event, and so from from the 'beginning' to the 'end'. So it includes the Eucharist, a point worth noting. The figure 6 in the Christology, isolates for attention the six miracles proper, analogous to the six days of creation proper. There are not seven conceptual forms, even if we count the perceptual categories as sevenfold, adding the fourth mode of sentience smell-taste to the tally. This was the point in describing the Sabbath as a member of the last four days, and as provisional, in that the second part of the narrative anticipates the four Eucharistic episodes. The Pneumatological feeding miracle story confirms this reading. Just as importantly, it combines with the Christological narrative, but not in terms of a qualitative marker for the distinction between subjective and objective axiologies synonymously with the conceptual and perceptual categories respectively. The integration of meaning between The Transformation Of Water Into Wine and The Feeding Of The Four Thousand turns upon the figures and not the substances. This it achieves while also recurring to the sevenfold schema which structures the story of beginning, since the Pneumatology catalogues the unequivocally immanent form of sense-percipience, optic memory. In other words, it lays claim also, to being the episode in completest contrast with the story of beginning, of any of the three Eucharistic miracle stories.

It is by no means difficult to accommodate the figure 4 in this hermeneutic. It could be read vis-à-vis the subjective-conceptual polarity of consciousness. In all perceptual (immanent) modes of intentionality as represented in the acoustic semiosis, four conceptual forms are operative. Moreover, the number of rudimentary intentional processes, both conceptual and perceptual, is exactly four. It adverts in this possibility, to the totality of elementary modes of intentionality, even of this omits for considertion, the four cardinal aconscious modes, as well as the two hybrid forms in both orders. Having read the five of 'thousands' relatively to the five of 'loaves', as suggesting a dichotomous relation of subjective and objective intentional processes in accord with the paradigmatic distinction between conceptual and perceptual categories, there is no reason why the same cannot apply in the hermeneutic  of the Pneumatological miracle. Of these four only, simple and rudimentary conceptual modes of intentionality, each figures once in a particular gospel, and we have stressed the significance of optic memory for the graphic aspect of language, and hence for the written ('special revelatory') tradition. (The surest of any references to this construct occurs in The Apocalypse, whose basic outlines adopt the numerical references of the Pneumatological Eucharistic miracle story, 7 and 4.) Any legitimacy of this hermeneutic is enhanced by the high likelihood that the messianic series itself was from the earliest times, a written rather than oral tradition.

Even so, it is not necessary to press for such an interpretation of the figure 4. Indeed the foregoing discussion is not offered as anything more than the introduction to the hermeneutic of these ciphers. All of the numerical signifiers in these stories are susceptible of multiple meanings. The fact that both heptads of the Pneumatology enumerate quantities of foodstuffs contravenes any construal of persons and loaves as indicative of subjects and objects. It will not conform to previously understanding the thousands as subjective and loaves as objective realities of any sort. The final arbitration of the meaning(s) of these figures is beholden to the theology of acoustic semiotic forms.


The P creation story is the primary, formal avowal in special revelation of the doctrine of Trinity. It is as good as certain that the gospel of Mark and the gospel of John endorse this, even though they both contain incomplete records of the messianic series. The two stories, creation and salvation, are mutually inclusive. One need only read the beginning of the fourth gospel to understand that John's theological perspective esteems transcendence, its variance with the optional preference of both Mark and Luke for immanence notwithstanding. It is obvious that the first creation narrative was highly valued by that evangelist. Mark's almost complete record of the messianic series, and certainly his account of The Transfiguration, assure us that he too attached the same worth of theological meaning to the same narrative. This narrative is a clear theological deposition as to the transcendent, triune nature of God. Its primary aim is to demarcate between the three identities, to whom classical theology refers as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and of whom it speaks as 'persons'. This language squares with the unique status accorded to humankind by the doctrine of imago Dei contained in the story of the creation of humankind. It also fosters understanding P's creation theology as anthropology; that is, in psychological-epistemological terms conforming to the Johannine doctrine of the Word, the logos.

To urge that the narratives are mutually inclusive is to assert the direction of semantic influence as reciprocal. A beginning without an end is as incomplete as it is incomprehensible and meaningless. Just so, there is no end without a beginning. The full semantic freight of the word 'earth', both referential and structural, testifies to the logical validity of this claim. We do not reach the 'earth' without the gospel. Such claims may strike the apologists for Judaisms as polemical. In response to which, I can urge only that they read the texts with open eyes. The creation story may or may not count for much in terms of Judaic theology, but it is of paramount importance to Christian doctrine. The remarks a propos the Christological content of the P narrative thus follow. If the narratives are mutually inclusive, then the creation story is equally Christological and Pneumatological.

The three statements concerning the transcendent God, Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3, then must be read against the three Eucharistic miracle narratives for a more comprehensive view. The chief characteristic of the theology of transcendence is the triune nature of God. One outstanding image of the same, is tri-dimensional space itself, an image congenial to P's almost geometrical presentation of space. Thus we are presented with the separation-identification motifs, which the theology of the messianic series in the gospels will complement. These narratives deal with the immanent nature of God. They are structurally or morphologically, consonant with the first narrative, and complete its intent. Otherwise it remains deficient. A theology of immanence ('earth') of sorts is present in both creation stories, but its final and definitive treatment is the business of the gospels, and of the messianic series in particular. The theology of the immanent nature of God is as much essential to Christology, doctrines of Trinity and of imago Dei as are they to it. The chief characteristic of immanence is unity, and it is deployed consistently by means of the metaphor of assimilation. Thus the narratives concerning the Eucharistic miracles and the Eucharist itself, respond definitively to its initial, equally metaphorical deployment in both creation narratives, the second part of the P story, and the J story as a whole, while these remain secondary.

Any discussion of subjective and objective consciousness must deal squarely with the concept of binary formulations. That such constructs are vital to metaphysics is as sure as that of analogy. Polarity and analogy are methodologically essential to one another. This very openly demonstrated in the two narrative cycles. Not only do they co-inhere analogically, but within each we discover the same formal structure, which in the first instance is binary or polar. But the matter is much more refined than any simple pattern of opposing terms tout court. For example we notice the description of the earth's creation within that particular section of narrative logically polarised as representative of 'the heavens'. Yet again, we find the presence of a single element, now Sabbath, now Eucharist, which is apparently non-polarised, and which renders the serial order asymmetrical, according to the ratio 3 : 4. But certainly the exegesis of both texts must attend to the overwhelming presence of binary forms.

The acoustic semiosis replicates these with admirable ease. To begin with, the twelve tone series reiterates the two sixfold series of beginning and end, the first level incidence of the categoreal paradigm. When we consider these two expressions of serial forms of order in terms of the binary, we find only one conspicuous example: the tritone. The tritone - diabolus in musica - arranges the incidence of antithetical semeiacoustika in either case, the acoustika representative of the conceptual categories of the creation narrative, or those representative of the perceptual categories of the messianic series. This interval is called the 'tritone' because it consists of three whole tones: for example, Cb-F, Db-G, and Eb-A, all of which articulate the three pure conceptual forms relatively to their immanent occasions. The same interval expresses the relation of the forms of memory vis-à-vis their corresponding forms of imagination, acoustic, optic and haptic: F#-C, G#-D, A#-E, respectively. This is the only means possible of expressing the certain antitheses of which both cycles are more than merely redolent structurally. It is the Christological form of antithesis.

To make this perfectly clear, I emphasise: the P creation story and the messianic series are both serially ordered narratives. Setting aside for one moment, the seventh event in each, both consist of three sets of pairs, or two triads; there are six actual creative fiats contained within a day, and six actual miracles. The dodecaphonic series also consists of just two sexpartite serially ordered wholes: the two whole tone scales. When we examine these a propos of the binaries we encounter in the narrative cycles, only one possible mode of antithesis occurs. Thus the three binaries Cb-F, Db-G and Eb-A represent the conceptual forms, taxonomised in the rubrics, Day 2 - Day 5, Day 3 - Day 6, and Day 1 - Day 4. These are uniformly the same interval; the tritone. The same recurs in the messianic series, expressed in the remaining whole-tone and hexadic scale. Its intervals are F#-C, G#-D and A#-E, the semeiacoustika representing the paired episodes of the chiasmos beginning with the central and Transcendental events, The Feeding Of The Five Thousand-The Walking On The Water, and ending with Transformation Of Water Into Wine-Transfiguration. Once again the mode of antithesis as articulated in the acoustic semiosis, is exclusively that expressed in the interval of the tritone. In neither case, Genesis nor gospel, are the binaries fundamental to the structure and meaning of either series, other than that of the tritone. Yet this is only one of three means of dividing the octave; it is only one of three comparable forms of antithesis resulting from the necessary mutual inclusiveness of the texts.

In itself, such a fact remains enigmatic and astonishing. For it fully supports the previous claims regarding the Christological hermeneutic of the P narrative. But in order to justify the description of the tritone as 'Christological', we need to consider the two remaining modes of antithesis which the acoustic semiosis announces: those of perfect fourth and perfect fifth. I have referred to these already in the context of the circle of fourths/fifths. They are fundamental to understanding the structural basis of the dodecaphonic series. A first point in their consideration should be that of the obvious and immediate relation in which both stand to the tritone. An example of the perfect fourth is C-F. (I choose this example since it can be compared to the role of both intervals in previous examples.) An example of the perfect fifth is Cb-F#. So here we have three clear patterns which interrelate the categories universally representative of Transcendental components of consciousness. There are of course three other possible arrangements of the tritone qua the Christological form of antithesis using the same elements, thus making for a total of four. As well as F#-C, there is C-F#. When we invert the perfect fourth, we have a perfect fifth; and inversion of the latter results in the former. But the opposite of this form of opposition, so to speak, expressed by the tritone, is itself a tritone. C-F# is the same as F#-C as far as intervals function commensurately. This means there are four tritones possible using just the four semeiacoustika representing the Transcendental categories: Cb-F, F-Cb, C-F# and F#-C.

As already observed, the only antithetical intervals occurring in the whole-tone scales, are those of the augmented fourth/diminished fifth, or tritone, diabolus in musica. There are neither perfect fourths nor perfect fifths in these scales. In both the pentatonic and sevenfold scales, both intervals occur. Within the pentatonic proper, as consisting of just five tones, there are only two possible incidences of each interval, perfect fourth, and perfect fifth. If we include the tonic as constituting a serial form on par with the octave, then three instances of each interval are possible. As for the sevenfold scales, major and minor, three instances of each interval, perfect fourth and perfect fifth, and one instance of the tritone occur. If we include the tonic at the octave which makes for a total of eight tones, or thirteen semitones, then there are four instances of the perfect fourth and perfect fifth, and two instances of the tritone. These two instances of the tritone are the inverse of each other. The octave will assume greater importance because of the additional intervals it accommodates. Thus the interval 1-4, the perfect fourth, is inverted as the interval 4-8, the perfect fifth. Likewise 1-5, the perfect fifth, is inverted as the interval 5-8, the perfect fourth. We shall comment further on the octave. It must be considered in conjunction with the Day 1 rubric, and the stories of the resurrection:

Now on the first day of the week ...  (Th?~ de\ mia?~ tw~n sabba/twn ... John 20.1)

On the evening of that day, the first day of the week ... (Ou)/shv ou~n o)yi/av th?~ de\ mia?~ tw~n sabba/twn ... (John 20.19)

This temporal framework cannot be understood without immediate reference to John's logos theology at the inception of the gospel, and the synoptics are no exception to this fact. Indeed they confirm it. The messianic series as a whole is implicated in the resurrection narratives as we see quite plainly from the three miracles of virtual transcendence. The empty tomb story from the shorter ending of Mark begins synonymously with the first of the appearance stories in John, and so does the appearance story from the longer ending. The stories of Matthew and Luke follow suit:

Now when the Sabbath was  past ... (Kai\ diagenome/nou tou~ sabba/tou ... Mark 16.)

Now when he rose early on the first day of the week ... (A)nasta\v de\ prwi/ prw/th? sabba/tou ... Mark 16.9)

Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week ... ( O)ye\ de\ sabba/twn, th?~ e)pifwskou/si ei)v mi/an sabba/twn ... Matthew 28.1)

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn ... (Th?~ de\ mia~? tw~n sa/bbatwn o)/rqrou baqe/wv ... Luke 24.1).

It is obvious from these introductions, like those of the Christological messianic miracle stories, that the octave is semiologically bound to doctrines of resurrection. There are other resurrection appearance stories which do not involve the first day of the week: The Commissioning Of The Disciples (Mark 16. 14-18, Matthew 28.16-20); Jesus And Thomas (John 20.24-28), the phrasing of which however, is similar to that of the first narratives as well as to Luke's introduction to The Transfiguration, 'Eight days later ...' (John 20.24); and finally, the epilogue of John, which contains the third appearance story in that gospel, The Appearance Of Jesus To The Seven Disciples (John chapter 21). It begins simply:

After this Jesus revealed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he revealed himself in this way. (John 21.1)

The narratives which do begin with reference to 'the first day of the week' (the 'octave'), are significant to the understanding of the gospel of Mark in particular. That is because the acoustic semiosis discloses two forms of intentionality, the perceptual mode, knowing, and the conceptual mode, will-to-believe, which emanate respectively from acoustic memory itself, and the conceptual form space : time. These are semiologically represented by the same cadence in the major scale, 7-8. Moreover they recur at the beginning of The Apocalypse in the seven letters, and reassert Mark's soteriological agenda in eschatological terms.

The references to 'the first day of the week' also help explain Luke's introduction to The Transfiguration. He intends to link the miracle as Christological, with the resurrection. The same purpose belongs to the description of the young man at the empty tomb, 'dressed in a white robe' (Mark 16.5); and that of 'an angel of the Lord  ... [whose] appearance was like lightening, and his raiment white as snow' (Matthew 28.2-3); and the 'two men ... in dazzling apparel', (Luke 24.4). Even the first appearance story in John follows this pattern. It mentions that Mary 'saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet' (John 20.12); surprisingly enough, since his gospel has no record of The Transfiguration:

Now about eight days after these sayings ( E)ge/neto de\ meta\ tou\v lo/gouv tou/touv w(sei/ h)me/rai o)ktw\) he took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. (Luke 9.28)

Any semiological account of the phenomenon of the octave must therefore also deal with the three intervals: perfect fourth, tritone, and perfect fifth. In varying ways these divide it into two equal halves. The generation of the dodecaphonic series is discussed in terms of the circles of fourth and fifths, as is the constitution of the pentatonic. The consideration of the octave brings in its wake a variety of connected issues. For example, the octave rather than the sevenfold series, consists of two 'tetrachords', parallel to one another. (I use the term 'tetrachord' in its classical sense here, to mean the interval of a perfect fourth. The octave C-c, consists of C-D-E-F, tone-tone-semitone; and G-A-Cb-c, tone-tone-semitone. But we need not further address these issues here.)

The point we must note, is that the disjunctive-conjunctive intervals, and the tritone, which appears to contradict them, concern the octave. The existence of the octave is of seminal importance to the theology of acoustic semiotic forms precisely because it connects the stories of the resurrection appearances with the creation taxonomy in its entirety. This is so, because the Day 1 rubric, which describes the creation of 'evening and morning, (the first/one Day)',  logically establishes the possibility of the series of seven days as a whole. (Westermann's translation, quoted above, somewhat unaccountably, avoids any enumeration of the first day as such. But the enumerative pattern is consistent throughout, as a demarcation of the end of one rubric and the beginning of the next: dh) mwiy ... yn# mwy ... y#yl# mwy ... y(ybr mwy ... Genesis 1. 5, 8, 13, 19; the LXX supports the translations which number the first day as such: kai egeneto prwi hmer mia ... kai egento prwi hmera deutera ... kai egeneto prwi hmera trith ... kai egento prwi hmera tetarth. All ten translations listed at NET Bible number the Day 1 rubric.)


The Feeding Of The Five Thousand relates the exemplification of Transcendence within the taxon perceptual memory. It isolates for consideration acoustic memory as the (actually immanent) instantiation of Transcendence within the sense-percipient manifold, and in so doing, refers to the perfect fifth. The Feeding Of The Four Thousand answers this in determining the representation of immanence, and The Holy Spirit, as the perfect fourth, albeit in reference to the same theology of acoustic forms, even though its own purpose is the disclosure of optic memory, a member of the same taxonomical subseries. These two intervals structure the twelve tone series in radically oppositional ways: the circle of fifths and the circle of fourths. (We may demonstrate the mode(s) of antithesis by means of semeioptika, but these are insufficient to represent the entire range of antithetical modes. All of the intervals mentioned in the above example are represented by the same optic semeia, red-green, or green-red.) The two hermeneutics are consistent in the matter of thus taking the cipher 4 pursuant to the pentad. I am arguing these two figures, 5 and 4, which jointly enumerate 'thousands of persons', pertain to the doctrine of relations which the P narrative first introduced. The acoustic semiosis concurs faithfully with the theology of transcendence. The three modes of antithesis it articulates, are none other than those which we first encountered in the creation story. This will in turn facilitate the hermeneutic of these very fundamental, and categoreally opposed, intervals. It must influence the interpretation of the forms of relation, the modes of antithesis which they iterate. I repeat here P's geometrical iconography of the three modes of antithesis, and its immediate recapitulation by the acoustic semiosis:


There is good reason to associate it with the colour spectrum because the book, as a whole, is suffused with references to colour, the semeioptika, and because we habitually classify colour in sixfold or sevenfold terms. The menorah allows for both possibilities, since the central, unpaired branch or stem, stands apart from the six tributaries. Its configuration is therefore often seen as referring to the creation story. The lamps themselves of course emit light, which justifies the association of the sixfold-sevenfold pattern with the visible hues.  We find a reference to the rainbow in the later vision of The Heavenly Worship:

And he who sat there appeared like jasper and carnelian, and round the throne was a rainbow that looked like an emerald. (Apocalypse 4.3).

So it seems viable to understand the lamps themselves as refracting the various colours of the spectrum. References to the menorah are concentrated in the first part of the text, and are linked with the seven letters to the angels of the churches. It is first described as golden, and seven in number:

Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden girdle round his breast; (Apocalypse 1, 12, 13);

As for the mystery of the seven stars which you saw in my right hand, and the seven golden lampstands, the seven stars are the angels of the churches and the seven lampstands are the seven churches. (1.20).

The first letter begins with a reference to the lampstands, and the church is threatened with removal of its lampstand:

"To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: 'The words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand, who walks among the seven golden lampstands.'" (2.1),

"'Remember then from what you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place ( e)k tou~ to/pou au)th~v), unless you repent. '" (2.5).

The idea of place here, especially in the first of the letters, is appropriate. It resonates with the iconography of the three-dimensional spatial manifold, which was reflected in the morphology of the creation narrative, and which the menorah reconfigures. The menorah is intelligible as a concrete metaphor of the same space : time manifold, though it accentuates the role of temporality. It accords with the acoustic semiosis as a metaphorical, if not analogical, means of reckoning the antithetical relational patterns subtended by the twelve categoreal radicals of consciousness, and justifies the use of the semeioptika in the same endeavour. The uniqueness of its single stem is equivalent to the singularity of the central point at which the three axes of the co-ordinate system intersect. This corresponds to both cadences in the conceptual and perceptual semioses respectively, 4th-3rd major/6th-5th minor and 7th-8th major/2nd-3rd minor, and to the single repetition of that particular semeioptikon representing the form of intentionality, in the conscious order. In the conceptual world of the creation narrative this is the former, and in the perceptual realm, it is the latter, for all six normative modes of intentionality.

Thus the presence of a geometrical paradigm, which we shall further develop in relation to astral and cosmological directives suggested in the opening sections of The Apocalypse and throughout that entire work, is avowed in every one of the three texts which concern us. If we model the co-ordination of both taxonomies, creation series and messianic series, and the further integration of The Apocalypse as fully representative of Trinitarian doctrine, the three forms of antithesis themselves can serve just as logically to symbolise these same three texts: The P creation narrative, being given as the axis of transcendence, A-B, and external relationality; The Apocalypse as the axis of immanence, a-b, and internal relationality; and messianic series as the Christological axis a-b, and Christological relations which can be either external or internal. This last is of course highly significant, consisting as it does of both the immanent and transcendent forms of opposition or antithesis, the 'heavenly' and 'earthly' forms. We shall return to this image as a model of the integration of the three texts, all of which are equally our concern, in light of the integration of the three phenomenal modes of sense-percipience which they instantiate: the acoustic in the P creation narrative, the optic in The Apocalypse, and the haptic in the messianic series.

Their co-ordination or syntactical integration is seminal to the doctrine of the Word, and to the Christian understanding of language. This image orders the axiology of sense-perception according to the categoreal paradigm, in which The Good acts as the essential bridge between radically juxtaposed forms of value, The True and The Beautiful. That is, it systematically correlates the alterity of axiological subjectivism and axiological objectivism. Here however, it is necessary in pursuit of the exposition of the soteriology specific to the gospel of Mark, to resume the theology of acoustic semiotic forms vis-a-vis the presentation of binary logic in the P creation narrative and beyond.



This is not meant to attenuate the importance of markers in the texts of those two identities other than the one upon which each is nevertheless focused. In terms of the intentional modes upon which their soteriology-eschatology is based, the gospels themselves are nuanced so as to emphasise either The Transcendent ("The Father"), in the case of Mark and Matthew, or The Son, as in that of Luke and John. In other words, Mark and Matthew are predicated upon Transcendental modes; those of willing and knowing; Luke and John are predicated upon belief and desire, both of which are Christological forms of intentionality. This does not conflict with the postulate that John and Matthew espouse transcendence whereas Mark and Matthew espouse immanence. Intentional modality is organised according to the pattern whereby actual and virtual immanence as for Mark and Matthew, and pure and virtual transcendence as for Matthew and John, form the predominant, that is, idiomatic, outlook of their specific perspectives. In Mark's case these are the modes knowing, and will-to-believe respectively, and in Luke's they are desire and faith-in-desire respectively.

In the case of Matthew the purely transcendental mode is willing, and the virtually transcendental mode is knowledge-of-will; in that of John, the pure and virtual modes of transcendental intentionality are belief and desire-to-know respectively. Thus just as for Transcendence ("The Father"), there are modes conforming to immanence, both actual and virtual, and the same applies to The Son. This means that both identities are instantiated in all four categories which define intentionality taxonomically. The qualification of the conceptual, ('transcendental') aconscious, consisting of conceptual forms of unity, as virtually immanent, notwithstanding that the conceptual conscious is purely transcendental, and likewise, the qualification of the perceptual, (immanent) aconscious, the forms of imagination, as virtually transcendental, notwithstanding that the status of the perceptual conscious is actually immanent, ensures this classification.

That The Apocalypse, whose real centre of gravity is The Holy Spirit, itself belongs to the New Testament rather than to the Tanakh, aligns it with the same projected sphere of general relevance, namely the immanent rather than the transcendent. Throughout both canons we find the preservation of this principle which relates the three identities in God as in some sense one. The three major prophets for example, Jeremiah, Isaiah and Ezekiel are party to such a purpose. We have already commented on the manner in which the books of Daniel, Jonah and Job concentrate on theological aspects which are broadly identifiable in Trinitarian terms. Of course the messianic series itself is just as indubitably a theology of the Trinity as the P creation story. And in The Apocalypse, where we find two groupings of two of the sevenfold series mirroring the patterns which synthesize Mark with Matthew, and John with Luke, we also find in the two unnumbered sevenfold series, the actual gist of that work, to be its Pneumatological keynote.

Two very remarkable outcomes of the concurrence of the acoustic semiotic representation of modes of antithesis with the P narrative arise. The first is the confirmation of the the latter as innately Christological. The P narrative is a comprehensive taxonomy of the three pure conceptual forms, and their corresponding forms of unity, all of which are at the first level, classifiable as conceptual. It permits antithetical relations of the Christological mode only, which is that semiologically announced by the tritone (augmented fourth/diminished fifth). The same is true of the entities classified in the messianic series. These too conform to the first level application of the paradigm. They are all in the first instance, immanent entities. The relations of each miraculous event of actual immanence to its counterpart within that series, is expressed always by the same interval announcing the Christological form of antithesis, the tritone. For antithetical relations represented by the intervals of both fifth and fourth in the acoustic semiosis, the integration of the conceptual and perceptual radicals of mind is requisite. Thus in one sense, the P narrative is every bit as 'messianic', that is, Christological, as its counterpart in the gospels. Taken in themselves, the two narrative series are unanimous as to the singular nature of the mode of antithesis which acts as their organizing principle.

In other words, the tritone expresses the Christological form of antithesis, upon which is premised the logical structure of both narratives, P creation story and messianic series taken in isolation. The juxtaposed forms of antithesis as essential to the doctrine of Trinity, expressed as perfect fourth and perfect fifth, are only given in the complete co-ordination of the texts. As independent narratives, both the story of beginning and the story of end remain incomprehensible, or at best incomplete. The tritone consequently is is only interval which articulates 'the' binary contours of these texts viewed as independent units. It focuses the relation between the terms indicated by the inclusio 'the heavens and the earth' in the first narrative, and by the polar construct of crossing 'to the other side' in the gospel. At the same time, it insists on the integration of the two narrative cycles.

As the fulfillment of the initial and secondary deployment of a theology of immanence in the creation narratives, the messianic miracle series thus displaces the space-time manifold, with another; the sense-percipient manifold, congruently fourfold, and equally infused with notions of love and death, Eros-Thanatos. This is the conclusive and final doctrine of actual immanence beyond further taxonomical consideration, evident of God as one. We are justified therefore in speaking, albeit metaphorically, of the components of the perceptual polarity of mind, as 'dimensions', convergent upon a point representing the 'Eucharistic' here-and-now. It is equally valid to attribute the same metaphorical language to the conceptual pole. The pure conceptual forms and their corresponding forms of unity were in the first place subject to such an iconographical paradigm. That said, the (three) dimensions of conceptual awareness emerge from, that is, diverge from the hub at which the perceptual merges.

The abstract model of the twelve categoreal entities, iterated in the dodecaphonic semiosis, can be justly illustrated by three axes at right-angles to one another - A-B, a-b and a-b - demonstratively of their relation to Sabbath-Eucharist; this iconography first emerged in the review of the P creation narrative. The divergent axes from the central point at which all three intersect thus represent the pure conceptual forms relative to the forms of unity, and their innate realization of identity. Each conceptual form is conveyed in terms of its Christological antithesis, following the very dyadic structure of the propositional content of the P narrative itself. This model of the innate properties of the conceptual polarity of mind is illustrative of a deep divide between the three major monotheistic world religious traditions. The divergence of conceptual forms, stemming from their espousal of identity as opposed to unity, perfectly exhibits the substantial disparities between the three monotheistic world faiths. I will propose that each, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, espouses one the three pure conceptual forms more or less to the exclusion of the others, principally in terms of the intentional mode derivative from the same. At the same time, there are observable elements in each, of the very  categories themselves: space in the case of Judaism; mind in the case of Christianity, and symbolic masculine in the case of Islam. These are world religions which distinguish themselves from sramanic religions, according to the alterity of transcendence and immanence.

Alternatively, the convergence to the centre of the same model, the Sabbath-Eucharist, figured by the single point, illustrates the nature of the perceptual components of mind, and their inherent tendency to unification. The immanent pole of consciousness, sentient, that is, perceptual awareness, is determined by unity. Here then, the axes represent the forms of memory relative to the forms of imagination'; once again, in keeping with the Christological form of antithesis. In the abstract axial-axiological model, the central point portrays the Sabbath-Eucharist, both from which, and to which the axes themselves now diverge, and now converge. The three axes of this paradigm, initially signifying the three-dimensional spatial manifold,  accordingly justifies the discussion of axiology in terms of dimensions. In effect, this is how the two systems of convergent perceptual forms and divergent conceptual forms, given over to unity and identity respectively, can be superimposed upon each other, according to the analogous relations sustained by conceptual and perceptual radicals. This same tri-axial or three-dimensional model therefore subserves the illustration of both the unification and diversification of values; the good, the true, and the beautiful.

The second fact ensuing from the single mode of antithesis in the two narrative cycles, the Christological form, as foundational to their infrastructure, is equally important. It concerns the Peripatetic Axiom. In order to discuss which, we need first to propose the doctrine of external and internal relations.



In order to  further understand the disparate accounts given by the narratives of 'beginning and end' of the ultimate generalities, the pervasive structural features of mind, and yet to avoid the pitfalls of facile Cartesian substance dualism, which would attribute subjecthood and objecthood tout court to the entities which these narratives respectively disclose, with no further means of elucidating their connectedness, we can advance the exposition of the theology of acoustic semiotic forms. We shall take the body, soma, as one example. It belongs to the aconscious, and so is at once riven with apparent incertitude as to the first level distinction between transcendence and immanence. This means that we may be hard pressed to utilize the subject-object dichotomy in grasping its purport in the broader scheme of biblical philosophical-psychology, that is to say, Christology. It will shed still more light on just how consistently interwoven are the aspects of the nexus we have been addressing, the Christological facets of the narratives encapsulated in the nexus of Eros-Thanatos. For at each minimal step in the deodecaphonic series we encounter a transition from one 'to the other side'. I mean, not just simply transference between perceptual memory and perceptual imagination, which is what this phrase in Mark and the synoptic refers us to, but the still broader, because comprehensive transition between poles of consciousness distinguished at the first level.

The integration of the conceptual and perceptual radicals taxonomised in the two narrative cycles brings them into immediate contact. This contact is expressed by the semeiacoustika as the interval of a semitone, the smallest of any interval in the twelvefold series. Each member of the two series, is bordered by two members of the alternative series. The acoustic semiosis posits that each conceptual radical  is immediately tangential to two perceptual radicals; and that each perceptual radical is conversely likewise, immediately adjacent to two conceptual radicals. This makes possible the transference from one pole to the other, marked by the semitonal interval as cadence. The pole to which the transition is made, the resolution of the cadence, determines the mode of intentionality as either conceptual or perceptual. There are six modes of either polarity; three conscious, and three aconscious in either case. Conscious components or radicals of mind may function according to aconscious modes of intentionality, and likewise, the aconscious radicals may operate according to conscious intentional modes, in both cases, the perceptual and conceptual.

The axioms have already fully covered the acoustic semiosis as a means of signifying these processes. What it also demonstrates is the difference between the two adjoining radicals of the one kind, which embrace the single radical of the other kind. One of these bears the same axiological identity to the radical to which it is either antecedent or consequent, and the other bears a differently axiological identity. Thus what is at the heart of the transmutations is the confirmation of value, or its composition. All conscious modes of intentionality transpire according to the identification or sameness of value. Thus the value of the adjacent radical, whether antecedent or consequent, is the same as that of the radical to which it tends, or resolves, for conscious modes of intentionality. All aconscious modes occur according to the composite nature of value, so that the value of the adjacent radicals and that of the radical to which it resolves are different for aconscious intentional modes. This was set out in the axioms, and of course is clearly represented in the semeioptika as well as in the musical notation adopted here. Identity of value is thereby signified by the same optikon, and the same letter signifying the elements of the two poles, (e.g. indigo-indigo and A-A# or A#-A); and difference of value is given by different optika as well as different letters for the names of the tones, (e.g. G#-A, blue-indigo; or A-G#,  indigo-blue).

The arrangement of the two taxonomies by the acoustic semeia tells for the interdependence maintained by the two poles of consciousness. Each conceptual form is represented as bounded by two perceptual forms, and each of the perceptual forms in their turn, by two conceptual forms, and so on. Such contiguity is maintained extensively throughout the acoustic semiotic spectrum, although there are variations according to the succession and precession of normative and non-normative categories. Soma for example, is contiguous with two normative categories, optic memory and haptic memory, and is itself, a non-normative category. But the neighbouring category signified by Cb, transcendent space, itself a normative category of transcendence, is contiguous with one normative category, which is haptic memory, and one non-normative category, acoustic imagination. This apparent 'contact' with one another of members of the two disparate polarities aptly describes their integrated ordering, since it repeats the central, albeit perceptual, or immanent, Christological category, the haptic. But it is vital to realize that the double contiguity these two classes, conceptual and perceptual, sustain, ought to be itself dual. The characterization which their co-ordination infers is that of possible reciprocal interdependence or contingency. This topic relates to the Peripatetic Axiom, and we shall in due course address it in more detail. It figures significantly in the following discussion.

To further advance the acoustic-semiotic representation of intentionality, we may refer to the two rudimentary processes as those of objectification and subjectification. This fully prohibits any reification of radicals as substantive things in themselves, enjoying self-subsistent independence.  It emphasises the passage of one to the other poles of consciousness as either transformative, that is, finally perceptual, or transfigurative, that is, conceptual in its finality. We may legitimately substitute 'objectification' for the former, and 'subjectification' for the latter. In other words, we may view the variety of intentional processes as subjects constantly becoming objects, and those objects constantly becoming subjects, in perpetuity. This repeats descriptors regarding change and becoming in the miracle narratives and related texts themselves:

Now the Word became flesh and took up residence among us. (Kai\ o( lo/gov sa\rc e)ge/neto kai\ e)skh/nwsen e)n h(mi~n.) We saw his glory - the glory of the one and only, full of grace and truth, who came from the Father. (John 1.14 NET Bible, emphasis added.)

When the head steward tasted the water that had been turned into wine (to\ u(/dwr oi}non gegenhme/non), not knowing where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), he called the bridegroom ... (John 2.9, emphasis added.)

Six days later Jesus took with him Peter, James, and John and led them up a high mountain privately. And he was transfigured (metemorfw/qh) before them ... (Mark 9.2 NET Bible, emphasis added.)

The NLT renders the second sentence: 'As the men watched, Jesus' appearance was transformed'; the MSG has: 'His appearance changed from the inside out, right before their eyes'; and the BBE has: '... and he was changed in form before them.' See NET Bible Mark 9.2.)

The acoustic semiosis represents each conceptual radical as bordered by two perceptual radicals, and this is equally true of the perceptual radicals, mutatis mutandis. Thus each category is articulated as intervenient or mediatory between two others of the opposing polarity. In the instance before us, that of the body, the perceptual radicals in question are optic memory, and haptic memory. The relationships of soma to each of these varies accordingly, yet in one respect at least, they are comparable. Cadences are the distinctive markers of interchange of either kind, transformation from the conceptual to the perceptual pole, with its attendant associations, Eucharist, Eros, and so on, or transfiguration from the perceptual to the conceptual pole, with its own train of consonance, baptism, Thanatos and the rest. The identity of The Son is central in both cases.

The cadences which signal the relationship of optic memory and soma have been clearly established axiomatically. The cadences here, occurring in virtue of the perceptual radical, optic memory, must all indicate perceptual modes of intentionality. Just so, since they obtain in the descending scale, they must be either those of 4th-3rd, in the major scale, or 6th-5th in the minor scale. The former announces desire-to-know, the latter announces knowledge-of-will. Both belong to the aconscious order, as must be, since the two radicals involved are not analogues. (These intervals may occur simultaneously, without any effect upon the argument at stake here.)

The cadences which signal the analogous relationship of haptic memory and soma will thus belong to the conscious. In the minor scale there is 2nd-3rd, which bespeaks desire (simpliciter), and in the major scale, 7-8, bespeaks knowing (simpliciter). (These too are susceptible of simultaneous occurrence.) In both of these instances there is a process by which the body itself, previously held as subjective, now becomes objectified. Put simply, bodies as prone to both seeing and touching are thereby prone to objectification of sorts. The rider 'of sorts' is important here, because this is not the prime occasion whereby the divide between subject and object (or object and subject) is completely rescinded. Even so, it is objectification of a kind.

Subjectification, of a kind, thus too follows in those instances of intentional processes, transfigurative by definition, in which the perceptual data of either form of memory, optic or haptic, are rendered in virtue of the soma. We can clearly state these. For optic memory, there is belief-in-desire, which the cadence of minor 2nd-3rd articulates, and which is necessarily aconscious, given the disparity involved, since the radicals involved are not analogous, even though they are immediately contiguous with one another. In addition to this is also the major cadence, 7-8, which marks will-to-believe, also necessarily an aconscious mode of intentionality.

The analogous radicals, soma and haptic memory are mutually engaged in the intentionality of both will and belief, conceptual, and conscious forms of intentionality. That of will is given as 6-5 in the minor scale, and that of belief, as 4-3 in the major scale. In the last four examples, all of which are conceptual forms of consciousness, there is accordingly a kind of subjectification of what were formerly, objective realities, the sense-percipient data of visual and tactile awareness.


This brings us to those two extraordinary because singular instances in which we may speak unconditionally of both objectifying and subjectifying processes. There is one of either kind, transformative and transfigurative, within each octave, and they immediately advert to the division of the octave itself, and the doctrine of relations, specifically Christological relationality. That is, they isolate for special attention the point at which one category of both polarities, conceptual and perceptual, blend seamlessly into one another. This occurs only according to Christological forms of intentionality, belief and desire. The philosophical psychology of 'besire' theory thus provides a context for their elucidation. The Christological, conscious modes of intentionality, belief and desire, and the Christological, aconscious modes of intentionality belief-in-desire and desire-to-know, provide in every case of the twelve categories, a merger between poles such that there is finally no possible distinction between subjective and objective modes of being, because there is no longer any differentiation betwen conceptual and perceptual. This singular moment represented in the octave, since it isolates a particular conceptual radical, and its contiguous perceptual radical, is also an essential part of the hermeneutic of the dual pentads in the Transcendental Eucharistic miracle narrative.  It establishes the basis of resolution between axiological subjectivism and axiological objectivism. We shall return to this topic in the further discussion of acoustic semiotics and the octave.

This is one of three elements of the same species or kind, and so it may stand representatively of the efficacy of both space : time and male : female as conceptual components of consciousness. It is unlike them in that it is the least phylogenically disposed member of its taxon, (conceptual) forms of unity. This is simply another way of saying that it is the foremost ontogenic, conceptual form of unity. It operates according to the difference of the individual person from the group. This is obvious enough to common sense. Our bodies are in some sense bearers of personal individuality, or singularity. My body is mine alone; it remains unique in a given sense, even though there exist other bodies similar to it, and even though in the event of coition, it is joined with another of these.

We find certain hints of this in the first messianic miracle story, depicting haptic memory, the perceptual radical analogous to soma or the body. The prior narrative of the commissioning of the disciples mentions four disciples by name, and even the unnamed disciple, if he is identical with 'the disciple whom Jesus loved', is portrayed in terms that are  noticeably individualised. The other disciple in the narrative is similarly not mentioned by her personal name, Mary, but we know that the phrase, 'the mother of Jesus' (John 2.2), can refer to only a single individual and no other. There are similar tones in one of the succeeding narratives, Jesus And Nicodemus (John 3.1-21). This is again a personalised account, and sorts perfectly with both the conceptual form soma, and its perceptual analogue, haptic memory.  For we are generally not prone to treat either our bodies or those of others, or yet again, things we readily touch, in quite the same way as we are for the other two dyadic structures of mind which function in like manner.

By soma, and the body (mind : body), I mean of course the intensional definition, but also extensional references which this term conveys. The body in the context of the creation narrative is allied with the mind (logos), but its semantic range need not be confined to somaticity in humankind. That story is well supplied with references to animals of the earth, seas, and sky. Indeed the extensional meaning of the term, as suggested by the Day 4 rubric which delivers it, may include inorganic entities. (I shy away from using the term 'matter' in this context. If it is of use at all as a tool in biblical metaphysical theology, it is probably best suited to the male : female form of unity.) That rubric in particular is remarkable for the fact that it comprises three quite different, if related symbols: those of sun, moon and stars. It is legitimate to read these in step with the prevalence of the category of gender and the injunction to propagate the species in this section of the story. Hence we may take these celestial 'bodies' prima facie as symbolic equivalents to the threefold typology of gender: male, female, neuter. The use in language generally of personal pronouns such as 'he', 'she' and 'it', and indeed in some cases, articles and their nouns, which differentiate between male, female and neuter, promotes the link between language and logos. Thus the creation narrative demarcates logically the anthropic category, male : female from the somatic, even while it insists that they equally exemplify immanence. (The transcendent, or most transcendent member of this particular taxon is space : time.)

Something of the same, the kindred natures of the somatic and anthropic forms of unity, is given in the narrative of Jairus' Daughter, precisely where we find the body listed in Mark's twelvefold series of healing miracles. The body is in this case that of a female child, but her parents, both mother and father, are also mentioned. The narrative in this respect, quite closely mirrors the tripartite rendering of somaticity in the creation rubric, sun, moon and stars, now become male, female and child. But the important feature to notice is the gender of the child. It vacillates at the beginning between a neuter form, and what is ultimately that of an adult female. The interpolation of the story of The Haemorrhagic Woman leaves no doubt as to Mark's intentions in this regard:

Then came one of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus by name; and seeing him, he fell at his feet, and besought him, saying, "My little daughter (to\ quga/trio/n) is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well and live." (Mark 5.22-23, emphasis added).

When we next hear of her fate, she is referred to unmistakably in the feminine:

While he was still speaking, there came from the ruler's house some who said, "Your daughter (h( quga/thr) is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?" (Mark 5.35, emphasis added).

It is here that the personae of both parents enter the picture:

And they laughed at him. But he put them all outside, and he took the child's father and mother (to\n pate/ra tou~ paidi/ou kai\ th\n mhte/ra) and those who were with him, and went in where the child (to\\ paidi/on) was. (v 40).

The theology of acoustic semiotic forms situates the body between two perceptual radicals, optic memory and haptic memory. Their concatenation, their linking together, is announced in the ascending scale as G#-A-A#, where the first and last tones, G# and A#, represent optic memory and haptic memory respectively, and A represents of soma, the mind : body, the psychophysical form of unity. We understand from this, the immediate nexus between seeing, the body itself, and touching. The relationship of the body to touch is evinced in the healing miracle story, Jairus' Daughter, just as it is in the Johannine tradition, where the first Christological messianic miracle is succeeded by The Cleansing In The Temple (John 2.13-22), which concludes with a dominical saying using the temple as metaphor for the body, in anticipation of the resurrection.

The relation between touch, more specifically, haptic memory, and the body is thus immediately and essentially real. They form a one-to-one correspondence correlating the narrative cycles of Genesis and the gospel. Their relation is given in the various modes of intentionality, all conscious, since both categories express one and the same value, goodness. These modes transpire in virtue of either the aconscious radical itself, soma, or the conscious radical, haptic memory with comparable effect. The conceptual modes are faith, willing, and faith-and-will; the perceptual modes are knowing, desire, and desire-and-knowing. Even though haptic memory is the normative expression of immanent goodness, that is, even though it supplies us with the experience of goodness as an intrinsically realized value, the superordinate member of the dyad is soma. This has already been discussed, there is no need to repeat it.

This dyad is also manifest in the template of the annual cycle, as the transitional moment between the day at the winter solstice (soma) and the subsequent evening. Thus its nocturnal correlate, midwinter evening, analogous to haptic memory, denotes the inception of spring, even if it remains at furthest remove from the evening of the spring equinox. As the token of the diurnal interval at the winter solstice, the soma is the consummation of its class, conceptual forms of unity, just as haptic memory is the initial member of its class. Soma occasions the intentional mode, belief-in-desire, which recreates faith (belief) in its own image. Haptic memory occasions the intentional mode desire. The former circumscribes presentational immediacy, as do all fully cognitive forms of intentionality, with its immediate roots in the proximal past; and the latter circumscribes the distal past. These postulates also have been recounted in dealing with the gospel of Luke. The Lukan theological agenda focuses the same two components of consciousness and its soteriology and eschatology are coupled with desire and belief-in-desire.

In any assessment of the nature, status and function of this member of the aconscious, conceptual pole, these two modes of sentience are key factors. The dubious influence of the body in consciousness stems entirely from its calibre as a form of virtual immanence, and it may seem to be nothing more, than a derivation from the two forms of actual immanence which border it. The Peripatetic Axiom  renders this possibility still more likely.


I invoke this axiom here, because of its fitness for the purpose of describing the relation of the forms of virtual immanence to those of actual immanence, in this example, that of soma to haptic memory. Actual immanence circumscribes all past occasions, as the locus of sense-percipience proper. That is, normative immanence, formally defined in the Eucharistic miracle stories and the Eucharist, decrees the realm of settled sense-percipient occasions to be the past. This past impinges on the present most in the case of acoustic memory; its domain, proximal past, borders presentational immediacy. But acoustic memory can be the legatee of those forms of perceptual memory, optic and even haptic, which are indeed chronologically prior to itself. There is no actual sense-percipience void of past occasions. If this entails that the life of the foetus in utero is the only available means of fully conserving the principle of the essential yoking of actual sense-percipient experience during the lifespan of the individual, then so much the better. The life of the foetus is in the first instance, dependent on the sustenance provided by the mother. A fact which gives even more purchase to the reality of the inseparable tie between the past and sense-percipience, and to the typological cast of the Eucharistic events. From infancy to old age, womb to tomb, actual sense-perception necessarily involves inheritance from past occasions of the same.  This is the doctrine espoused by the gospels. In view of this, the question remains: is the soma as integral to the conceptual polarity of mind, but even so virtually immanent by nature, ipso facto bound to the past in the same way? And are all three forms of unity disposed in this way?

However, priority or 'first[ness]' in the context of the Peripatetic Axiom, and in this context, refers not to the hierarchic sequence generated among the forms of actual immanence themselves, nor that endogenous to the forms of virtual immanence. Rather it focuses the relation between the two taxa, the three forms of perceptual memory and their three analogous conceptual forms of unity. Even though the three phenomenal modes of sense perception are organized hierarchically in relation to the past, that is, even though some are more 'first' chronologically than others, and even though the conceptual forms of unity are serially ordered in the same way, the Peripatetic Axiom accords with the distinction of conscious and aconscious as normative and non-normative. Actual immanence is the final and definitive form of immanence. It means that all residual sense-percipient data stored as haptic memory, are indeed verifiably first in relation to the subjective 'data', ('subjective object'), which is the body, soma. In just this way, the sense-percipient mode as normative and conscious, is indeed first in relation to its virtual copy.

The Peripatetic Axiom then holds true of the relationship between the soma and touch, here defined as haptic memory. That is, haptic memory is first 'in the senses' regarding the constitution of the conceptual form of unity soma. The relations sustained by the conceptual form symbolic masculine : symbolic feminine and optic memory, like that between the conceptual form space : time and acoustic memory are the same. All three cases involve analogous conceptual and perceptual poles of consciousness. (I leave out of consideration for the moment, the relation of non-analogous relations between the radicals of virtual immanence and those of actual immanence. It would seem, given the nearness or contiguity of optic memory as well as haptic memory to soma demonstrated in the acoustic semiosis, that there must be certain possibilities of 'firstness' in such cases. We shall return to this likelihood directly.)

As it then stands, the Peripatetic Axiom is true of the relation of each form of actual immanence to its equivalent form of virtual immanence as one of priority. Touch, is indeed 'prior' to soma, and their contiguity at the very least infers, if it does not in fact postulate, the contingency of the latter upon the former. This 'priority' of the 'sensu', the forms of actual immanence to the 'intellectu', their analogous conceptual forms of unity, defined as virtually immanent, seems to entail the dependence of the later on the former. Contiguity implies contingency at least in those cases of axiological identity, such as haptic memory and soma, and the rest. Any incertitude surrounding the status of a conceptual form of unity as indeed conceptual, and necessarily of ultimate general significance to human and animal consciousnesses, entitles us to question its status. The nearest and best possible explanatory account of its dubious character is that form of actual immanence immediately adjacent to it and with which it shares the same form of value.

This procedure accords with the one previously used, in which the ambivalence of the Christological relation(s) as to externality and internality, was resolved. Each of those contained one non-normative relatum. This single term is immediately contiguous with its normative analogue, hence those initially ambivalent relations resolve either up or down the scale, becoming either external or internal. Such a manoeuvre is nothing more than due deference to the priority of the conscious normative term on the part of its aconscious and ambiguous analogue. In the case of soma, the resolution occurs in favour of haptic memory.

The applicability of the Peripatetic Axiom to the evidently troublesome relation between forms of actual immanence and those of virtual immanence however, is only half of the picture. For it must be now revoked in assessing the pure conceptual forms vis-à-vis their virtual copies, the three forms of perceptual imagination. The one-to-one correspondences in these three cases reverses those in which perceptual (immanent) normativity was the dominant force. The pure conceptual forms on the other hand, space, mind, and the symbolic masculine are distinguished as 'purely' transcendent. Those forms of imagination which appear as their analogous counterparts have no equal standing. For they belong essentially to the forms of memory, all of which are by nature composite. Pure conceptual forms are appropriated in the composition of the forms of unity: the spatiotemporal, psychophysical, and anthropic. Nevertheless the creation taxonomy classifies them as determinately transcendent. They are not compromised by their immanent denominations, for it goes without saying, that pure conceptual forms are not data. They are never given as amenable to understanding as percepta; they are immune to objective assimilation. They remain the primary exemplifications of transcendence qua identity, without which consciousness is impossible. They are and will be, nevertheless, externally related to forms of memory, and hence to sense-percipient data. These relations, which like their opposite, internal relations, are systematically and theologically accounted for by the acoustic semiosis.

In just this sense then, pure conceptual forms are 'prior'. The limitations of this word are thereby apparent, if as it stands, they allow only for past occasions as effecting both the present and the future. For we have to conjure in this case with the relation of entities, all of which, are in some way, not-yet. Transcendence, pure and virtual, is to the unrealized future just what immanence, actual and virtual, is to the actual and settled past. This radical bifurcation of the space : time manifold is of foremost significance to any epistemological (Christological) understanding of the texts themselves, as to Christian metaphysics. In this context the full force of the epithet 'beginning' in the P creation story must be admitted, even though the pure conceptual forms, the pre-eminent subjects of that narrative, correspond to the future rather than the past. Just so, the duplication of the other synonyms for 'prior', namely, 'the first' and 'The Alpha', in the Christological titles, demand their full semantic due.

Both actual and virtual forms of immanence belong to the past. And both pure conceptual (transcendent) forms and forms of virtual transcendence (imagination) belong to the future. Even so, the former are clearly prior to the latter. Conceptual forms are normative and thus 'prior' for their given pole of consciousness. This entails that the Peripatetic Axiom must be no more than half true; it is incompatible with Christian doctrines of transcendence. It is patently false of the relation sustained between these components of consciousness on which the justification of all convictions of identity rests, and not conviction only. Both forms of intentionality, belief and will, as well as their hybrid, belief-and-will, are unachievable without the understanding of the self ('subject') in terms of identity. The essential function of mind is belief, and to will, and to will-and-believe are its closest accidental functions. These are the very conscious, intentional processes on which identity depends. Variations in this identifiable self correspond fully to its provenance in Transcendence as threefold; their major differences arising from their location on the spectrum from phylogenic to ontogenic.

Once again, the previous resolution of the Christological relations which contained one relatum being a form of imagination, agrees with this postulate. That is, it repeats the concession made by the aconscious, non-normative to the conscious, normative  radical in all three instances. The pure conceptual forms are prior by dint of their status as purely transcendent. Their primacy over the secondary status of forms of imagination rests on their definitive expressions of all three values, the good, the true and the beautiful. Here we can examine the imaginal (perceptual) components of the aconscious and characterise them in still more detail. Haptic imagination is constituted by the data of consciousness which as yet, non-actualised, are nevertheless real. Those elements of my specifically haptic sentient awareness are more or less exclusively mine. They belong to me as individuated, as uniquely myself and no other, and especially as no others. The Transfiguration appropriately concerns the barest minimum of personae, to which it draws attention in mentioning the 'some', or 'certain ones' who witness the eschatology of desire itself, as the eschatological judgement of The Son, 'the Beloved':

"For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of man also be ashamed, when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels." And he said to them, "Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here (tinev w[de tw~n e)sthko/twn) who will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power." (Mark 8.38-9.1 emphasis added).

This squares with John's final portrait of the 'beloved disciple', 'the disciple whom Jesus loved', in contrast to Peter:

When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, "Lord, what about this man?" Jesus said to him, "If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!" (John 21.21-22).

I am not seeking to identify the beloved disciple with the persona of the particular disciple John, said to have been present at the last messianic miracle; but rather to relate that miracle itself to that identity, just as Peter will be related to The Walking On The Water by Matthew (Matthew 14.28-33). We should recall here the significance of these three figures, Peter, James and John in the synoptics and the gospel of John, and the clear affiliations linking several of 'the twelve' with corresponding miracle stories, beginning with the association John forges between Nathanael and the first event of the messianic series. There does seem to be a clear link between these three foremost of the twelve disciples in Mark and the three miracles of virtual transcendence, and thence to the three pure conceptual forms, as part of a theological typology of personality. An important strand of which must be the developmental psychology inherent in the taxonomies of both Genesis and the gospel. Once again, such a possibility stems from the conceptual forms themselves.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, acoustic imagination is societal. It is juxtaposed to haptic imagination, and the two intentional modes to which acoustic and haptic imaginal perception are foundational, aconscious knowing, or knowledge-of-will, and aconscious desire, or desire-to-know respectively, are disposed after the same manner. That is, acoustic imagination makes no allowances for personal identity, construable in terms of the body, desire, haptic sentience and so on. It amplifies being to its phylogenic extreme. Betwixt and between them, optic imagination  mixes and matches the limits of these terms. We may think of it as 'familial', in just the sense that a family has both societal and personal aspects, and is neither wholly one nor the other.

All such imaginal elements of consciousness however have in common that they posit the data of future sentient occasions as already constitutive of memory. The immanence of the future in the past is assured by the normative status of (perceptual) memory, its own priority over and against that of perceptual imagination, and this is compatible with the secondary status of the forms of imagination vis-à-vis their analogous pure conceptual forms. These conceptual forms themselves, are the basis of the gradations from ontogeny to phylogeny in perceptual imagination. Mind is ever the single most individuated of any of them, and thus too, is belief, the intentional mode of which it is the foundation. But it cannot proceed without either the symbolic masculine, or the pure conceptual form space, from both of which it differs radically. Space is a plenum of uniformly coextant spaces; the symbolic masculine is more discernibly pluralistic still, in that it is aggregative, an amalgam of (human) persons, who may be considered in both terms, phylogenetically, that is, collectively, and/or ontogenetically, that is, individually. Thus anthropic identity itself must be accounted for comprehensively, ranging throughout a graded scale which considers human(s) accordingly.

The resolution of the ambivalence surrounding the Christological relations in favour of normativity, also elucidates the structures of the aconscious. That is, the fact that one member of the Christological (tritonal) relations is always non-normative, or, a component of the aconscious, and that the relation itself is decided in virtue of being either external or internal by the immediate reference of this non-normative element to its analogous, normative, dyadic counterpart. This sheds light upon the way in which forms of unity are composite, and forms of imagination are simple. For these structures as such contradict those of their normative analogues.

Let us take the example of soma. It is conjunct with the logos, but the logos, or mind, is in no way necessarily conjunct with the body. (I am speaking here as almost everywhere, in epistemological rather than ontological terms. That is, these postulates issue from the Christological anthropology, the doctrine of the constitution of the mind or consciousness, delivered in the two deposits of faith, the creation story and the messianic series.) The explanation for the conjunction in this case, lies with the internal relatedness of haptic memory to mind, represented by the interval A#-Eb. This is a perfect fourth, and it denotes that haptic memory is conjunct with mind. This conjunction is responsible for the conjunction of soma with mind, due to the relation of analogy subtended by soma and haptic memory. The body or soma is in effect aconscious haptic memory, though it is more than that, because it is bordered also by optic memory. (The soma itself acts as a conduit for the transmission of intentional processes between these two forms of memory.) The actual relation of the soma to mind defers to the normative, conjunctive, internal relation of haptic memory to mind.

To take an example from the imaginal components of consciousness, let us consider haptic imagination. It functions as the aconscious equivalent of mind. When we ask how can it obtain in itself, independently of haptic memory, with which it is necessarily conjunct, given the constitution of all forms of memory with their imaginal opposites? The relation of haptic imagination to haptic memory is that of the tritone, the Christological relation, beset with ambiguity, as hopelessly neither internal nor external. It is represented as E-A# in the acoustic semiosis. But this relation is resolved by means of the dyadic counterpart to haptic imagination, mind. So that the relation of mind to haptic memory (Eb-A#), which is a perfect fifth, and external or disjunctive, speaks for the ambiguous relation  between the two perceptual radicals, haptic imagination and haptic memory. It means that this relation also is external.


The previous discussion centred on the relation of soma to its actual, analogous counterpart, haptic memory, and the same holds true of the other two members of the two taxa. Forms of memory actually consist inseparably with their imaginal complement. Imagination is already and always a constituent in perceptual memory. This is guaranteed by the principle of immanence, unity. We may say that memory is internally related to imagination, as in the case of haptic memory and haptic imagination, expressed semiologically as the relation A#-E. The same cannot be said of the composition of the conceptual forms of unity. The relation of mind to mind : body (soma) is not identical to the relation of haptic imagination and haptic memory. In simple philosophical terms, the union of memory and imagination is inevitably true of all memory; in all possible worlds, and at all possible times. It is and was ever thus. Imagination is necessarily part of memory. But the unity of mind and body is contingent or dependent. Mind (logos) is not perforce embodied. So whereas actual, settled sense-percipience is always and everywhere compounded of memory and imagination, because imagination must inhere in memory, pure conceptual  mind, alternatively, is independently together with the soma. By pure conceptual mind, I mean of course the mind of God, of Christ, of The Son, logos. The logos is externally related to soma, as it is externally related to haptic memory. 

The logos is not a part of the soma in just the same way that haptic imagination is a part of haptic memory. That which is mind as mind : body (soma), is otherwise logos, the mind of Christ who is the Word become flesh. Only insofar as my mind is 'in Christ' is my being 'ensouled' at all. In only this much is it psychophysical, and in this way only, am I a 'person', in the image and likeness of God. The chief functional characteristic of this mind is belief, and the chief axiological identity of this same belief is and will be, belief in the good. This event whereby my mind participates in that of The Son, is given by means of divine grace, the description of which was part of the prologue to the fourth gospel. We find the same in the Letter To The Philippians, in a passage reminiscent of the Johannine doctrine of incarnation. Becoming on the part of God and on the part of humankind, interchange between the two as between 'heaven and earth', returns us to the two processes which engage the interaction of conceptual and perceptual polarities of consciousness:

But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God ( e)/dwken au)toi~v e)cousi/an te/kna qeou~ gene/sqai); who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 12.13).

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus (Tou~to fronei~te e)n u(mi~n o(/ kai\ e)n Xristw~? I)hsou~), who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped (o(\v e)n morfh~? qeou~ u(pa/rxwn ou)x a(rpagmo\n h(((gh//sato to\ ei]naie i)/sa qew~?), but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men ( e)n o(moiw/mati a)nqrw/pwn geno/menov). And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2.5-11).

Consideration of the limited truth of the Peripatetic Axiom brings to light the reality of transcendence and its seminal role in Christian doctrine. The alliance between Transcendence and the future is more than simply one more means of opposing immanence and transcendence. It completes the reckoning with presented time as imbued with inheritance from the past (immanence) and anticipation of the future (transcendence). The equal and opposite influence brought to bear upon the present temporal domain by the past and the future is inseparable from the doctrine of intentionality, as this in its turn, conforms to the bifurcation of the spatiotemporal manifold. It gives rise to the discussion of causation as well as the elaboration of subjective and objective phases of intentional processes. Causality in this context is usually spoken of as either efficient, or final. A synonymous characterisation is that of passive and active. This introduces a further dichotomy to the several already deployed here. And it is perfectly apt to the way in which the categoreal paradigm is  responsible for the categorisation of forms of unity with forms of memory as grafted to past experience on the one hand, and on the other, the antithetical categorisation of pure conceptual forms and forms of imagination.

These epithets 'active' and 'passive' are frequently used in the description of sexual relationality, from which we cannot legitimately extrapolate to the second level division of the categories, notwithstanding that the symbolic masculine as pure conceptual form, is conformable to futurity, and that the symbolic feminine as a conceptual form of unity is conformable to pastness; and that the symbolic feminine reiterates the conjunction of the anthropic category as male and female. Sexual relationality itself follows the experience of passivity, for which both haptic memory and the conceptual form of unity soma tell quite plainly. Those components of consciousness which are readily identifiable in terms of the not-yet, pure conceptual forms, and forms of imagination, as well as their corresponding forms of intentionality, are all active by nature. The forms of memory, and the forms of unity as well as the modes of intentionality to which they give rise, tell for passive causality. Other synonyms for this dichotomy are ideal, potential, undetermined, as against actual, definite, and settled. Causation from the past and that from the future however, is best considered according to this construct of agency on the part of future causes, and passivity on the part of past causes. I have in mind the grammatical voices 'active and passive' in applying these expressions to the division. We should note that it cuts across the divide between the two orders of consciousness, the conscious and the aconscious. Thus we may describe the imagination and the forms of unity as the actively and passively causative ingredients in consciousness respectively.

More than any other modern or postmodern school or movement, Process philosophy gives an account of teleological, or final causality congenial to biblical metaphysics. Its clearest formulation can be found in Whitehead's The Function Of Reason, particularly in its second chapter. We should mention here also that Whitehead's doctrine of relations given in Science And The Modern World, accords with the basic tenets we have posited thus far. (The references to page numbers of The Free Press edition are given in parentheses, those of the linked Internet Archive copy are given in square brackets.)

There persists, however, throughout the whole period [the last three centuries] the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what is does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call 'scientific materialism.' Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived (Whitehead, Alfred North, Science And The Modern World: Lowell Lectures 1925, The Free Press, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1967, p 17, [p 22]).

Evolution, on the materialistic theory is reduced to the rôle of being another word for the description of the changes of the external relations between portions of matter. There is nothing to evolve, because one set of external relations is as good as any other set of external relations. There can merely be change, purposeless and unprogressive. But the whole point of the modern doctrine is the evolution of the complex organisms from antecedent states of less complex organisms. The doctrine thus cries aloud for a conception of organism as fundamental for nature. (Ibid p 107 [135]).

The theory of the relationship between events at which we have now arrived is based first upon the doctrine that the relatednesses of an event are all internal relations, so far as concerns that event, though not necessarily so far as concerns the other relata. For example, the eternal objects, thus involved, are externally related to events. This internal relatedness is the reason why an event can be found only just where it is and how it is, - that is to say, in just one definite set of relationships. For each relationship enters into the essence of the event; so that, apart from that relationship, the event would not be itself. This is what is meant by the very notion of internal relations. It has been usual, indeed, universal, to hold that spatio-temporal relationships are external.  That doctrine is what is here denied. (Ibid pp 122-123, [p 155]).

We shall have further recourse to the insights of process philosophies and theologies, even though it is obvious that certain discrepancies between some  of these and certain Christian doctrines arise.  For example, although it makes adequate allowances for final causality, and admits the reality of the future as influencing the present, God is not seen as creator, in spite of the role attributed to 'Creativity' in the abstract. The salvation of the world process is nevertheless envisaged, even if, once again, there is no equivalent to the doctrine of incarnation, Whitehead's interest in the middle Platonism of the Alexandrian fathers notwithstanding.  The role of memory in the salvation of the world as understood by process philosophy, sits well with the Christian epistemology provided by the messianic series, but there is a real deficiency in Whitehead's psychology which stems from the premium placed upon on immanence at the expense of transcendence. And just as clearly, there can be no account of the threefold nature of God, although we find a systematic focus on the threefold forms of value, The Good, The True, and The Beautiful, which comes tolerably close to an equivalent of the Trinitarian God. (A further example of the inconsistency of process metapsychology with the exposition given here must be the summary and wholesale depiction of the to the 'primordial' (transcendent) nature of God as 'unconscious', and the subsequent definition of God's 'consequent' (immanent) nature as fully conscious. We shall pursue these matters in more detail in later chapters.)

That said however, the original exposition of process philosophy subjugates not only The Good, but also The True to the eminently immanent form of value, namely The Beautiful. This hierarchical axiology is at variance with basic Trinitarian theologies which stress the parity of identities in God. Nor does it follow from this proposition that no structural distinctions obtain between the epistemic-psychic structures of mind corresponding to these same forms of value. The Good occupies the central, pivotal role as mediatory between transcendence and immanence, and so too, The True and The Beautiful. This is first, and amply attested in the sheer, and simple configuration of the texts which address each identity in turn: P creation, messianic series, and Apocalypse. The uniqueness of goodness, as well as its mediatory faculty, accrues from its equal exemplification of transcendence and immanence. No other form of value is so constituted nor fitted to the same task. Process philosophy's emphatic apprehension of beauty thus remains problematic for Christian doctrine. Whitehead understands the purpose of the actual world to be the realization of beauty, and insists in no uncertain terms, on its exigency to God.

This sorts well enough with a Christian appreciation of evolution, and certainly agrees with Pneumatological doctrines first divulged in the P narrative and fully declared in The Apocalypse, for which ironically nevertheless, he had little to say that was anything but critical. Much of the difficulty of process philosophy stems from its given premises, of which the anthropic category, male and female humankind, is an abiding centre. Arthur Holmes, (A History Of Philosophy 61-63), suggests that Whitehead himself thought of his work as metaphysical groundwork for Christian theology, noting that the original teleological doctrines of process philosophy make no provision for an eschatology as such. Whitehead's total disinclination to engage with theology generally as well as scripture, and his unquestioning and misplaced confidence in the methodological capacity of mathematical rationality to discharge the duty of metaphysical speculation adequate to the demands of the age as well as reason itself, are marks of his shortcomings in any such enterprise. His essay Mathematics And The Good seriously misconstrues the axiological nature of that episteme, quite oddly so in fact, since, as I will contest, mathematics itself testifies to the value beauty This is arguably the pre-eminent axiological focus of process philosophy. I do not mean to deny any relation between beauty and goodness; I have just averred that the good is the single organizational principle of, and therefore the bridge apposite to, any reconciliation of the radical bifurcation of truth and beauty. These are weighted in favour of transcendence and immanence respectively, and their arbitration requires reconciliation by the Christological form of value. Equally troublesome is Whitehead's epistemological understanding of art, whose axiological content he contends is beauty. That view is here refuted. We have already discussed the soma as the foundational principle of this episteme, and its concomitant form of value, the good. Christian metaphysics can afford no truck with the preferential option of process thought for the primacy of beauty over the other forms of value.

The keynote of process theism is value, construed as in the Hebraic and Hellenistic traditions stemming from Plato: the good, the true and the beautiful. Consequently it is open to the charge of tritheism, since the primordial, that is, transcendent, nature of God makes no provision for the complete integration of these variant forms of value into one whole. The transcendent nature of God is value in its separative, identifiably tripartite formulation. The substantial difference Christian theology establishes between transcendence and immanence in respect of the Trinity, is that of identity and unity respectively. Immanence alone affirms the identities in God as one, and the Eucharist is ever the supreme token, or sacramental expression of this fact.

Thus the 'primordial', 'absolute', or 'abstract' nature of God is, by definition, incapable of promoting value in the generic sense of being a unified whole. Transcendence is that of three 'persons' or 'identities'. They are self-identical, unalike, heterogeneous, divergent. If we accept the geometrical model of three axes, A-B, a-b, and a-b, at right-angles to one another, then these axes are to be viewed as centrifugal, and effectively without a single, central point at which they intersect. That single point at which the axes converge, and the centripetal order of the same axes, represents immanence, the oneness in being of God. But God's 'consequent', 'relative', or 'concrete' nature in process metaphysics fares no better in any systematic accounting of value as a unity. In themselves the terms 'primordial', 'abstract', 'absolute', and 'consequent', 'relative', 'concrete' are interesting choices. Whitehead himself never fights shy of 'mental' and 'physical', as the epigraphs above demonstrate. They correspond respectively to the distinction between conceptual and perceptual radicals of consciousness, more or less, but with serious caveats nevertheless enjoined. Related to the same distinction, each of the three pure conceptual forms bears a certain resemblance to Kantian noumenon, the unknowable 'thing in itself' (das Ding an sich); although this description refers to an object in general. Again, the epistemological notion of the a priori seems immediately appropriate to the characterisation of the three pure conceptual forms, and certainly in its  opposition to the a posteriori, which appears to be just as fitted to the description of the contents of actual immanence, the forms of perceptual memory.

The pure conceptual forms are the sole means of identity for human consciousness. Their divergence, their difference from one another remains to be reckoned. Clearly, if by 'personal identity' we mean a single, unique, 'ontogenic' self, then the Christological radical, mind is the provenance of such. The pure conceptual form space, and the pure conceptual form symbolic masculine, differ from mind in just this respect. Certainly, the symbolic masculine is in part, the provenance for collective identity, and is also partly responsible for collective intentionality. If then, by 'subject' and 'subjects' we mean the 'self', and 'selves', then there is no entity, other than these three categoreal determinants of consciousness worthy of consideration. The same three entities are to be reckoned as in the previous discussion, in terms of the relations they subtend to objective and virtually objective radicals of mind. Therefore what is of utmost significance is not any of these things in themselves. The foremost issue for theological reflection must be the relations obtaining between the terms. The most significant content of the biblical and Christian doctrine stemming from the two narratives of 'beginning and end' for Christology, can only be the myriad relations obtaining between the elements of consciousness as revealed in the theology of acoustic semiotic forms. The external and internal relations regarding which, are the most immediately obvious doctrinal propositions available to understanding.

There must be further justification for the continued existence of the world, as yet remaining, even though the resurrection is already accomplished. From the Christian standpoint, the purpose of the continuity of creation is  the unity of identities in God, of which the fourfold, 'everlasting gospel', is the pre-eminent epiphany. The unity of the three identities in God is the aim of human consciousness. As immanent, unity in this kind is comprehensible as harmony, and beauty. But process metaphysics assigns no genuine purposefulness to human consciousness as securing the oneness of either the forms of value itself or of the identities in God. The oneness in being of God is the intent, the sacred obligation, conferred upon humankind, and it frames a significant, if not the major theological, rationale, of The Apocalypse, and certainly indexes the difficulty of its agenda.  In large measure, the appointed brief of the final member of the canon is to answer questions concerning the 'delay of the parousia'. But still more to the point, if the existence of the world, and of humanity finally in particular, is to serve the unity of God's being, the canon must finally reckon with the problem of evil, rather than theodicy, that is, 'the enigma of iniquity', as the most pressing issue for any Christian anthropology. The thoroughgoing reiteration of both the P and J creation narratives, and the recapitulation of the systematic correspondence between the first of these and the messianic series in the series of seals, particularly that of the sixth seal, witness to this fact.

We may summarise the previous discussion in several further axioms:

Axiom 10: External and internal relations in the conscious order

In every case of the antithesis maintained according to one specific Trinitarian identity, the relation of a pure conceptual form to a form of memory is external; and the relation of a form of memory to a pure conceptual form is internal.

Axiom 11: External and internal relations in the aconscious order

In every case of the antithesis maintained according to one specific Trinitarian identity, the relation of a conceptual form of unity to a form of imagination is external; and the relation of a form of imagination to a conceptual form of unity is internal.

Axiom 12: The resolution of the Christological, antithetical, relations

All Christological antithetical relations are either external or internal. Their resolution follows from the criterion of normativity. Relations of pure conceptual forms to correspondingly antithetical forms of unity are thus external, as are relations of forms of imagination to correspondingly antithetical forms of memory, in every case of the antithesis maintained according to one specific Trinitarian identity. Relations of forms of unity to correspondingly antithetical pure conceptual forms, and relations of forms of memory to correspondingly antithetical forms of imagination are internal, in every case of the antithesis maintained according to one specific Trinitarian identity.

Axiom 12 clearly relates to the hermeneutic of the central structural patterns in both textual cycles, the creation series and the messianic series, independently of one another. But since the normative elements of immanent consciousness, the forms of memory, are given in the messianic series, and since the normative elements of transcendental consciousness, pure conceptual forms, are given in the P narrative, the resolution of the Christological relations entails the integration of the two texts. Neither is intelligible in isolation. The presence of the same Christological, antithetical mode in the formulation in each to so marked a degree that it is impossible to ignore, provides still further vindication of interpreting the creation narrative and the messianic series as wholly interdependent.

This axiom demonstrates the kernel of evaluative, that is, axiological intentionality as dominated by ostensible paradox. The Christological core of intentionality is its centredness upon just those particular modes, belief and desire, foundational to human consciousness. In both orders, in the conscious, that is, belief and desire, and in the aconscious, where these assume the forms belief-in-desire and the desire-to-know, such processes are distinctly recognisable as uniquely human. This was first sketched in the J creation narrative, but it becomes the focus of the messianic series, and of the Eucharist as its culmination. The Christological, antithetical relation, eminently posed in the two narrative cycles, is represented semiologically as the competing claims of radically juxtaposed components of consciousness, whether these are those of the Christological categories themselves, soma and the logos for example, or the Transcendental categories, for example, acoustic memory and acoustic imagination, or the Pneumatological categories, for example, symbolic feminine and symbolic masculine. The relations of such categories, and all such commensurately, Christologically related categories, initially subtend to one another putatively irresolvable purposes. 

Axiom 13: God and the world

The relation of God to the world is external; the relation of the world to God is internal.

Thus all of the numerical references must comply with fundamental relational patterns readily discernible in the acoustic semiosis. Viewing the 5 and 4 of the two narratives, as counting thousands of persons, and consequently as somehow jointly intelligible, we shall revisit the two opposing circles of fourths and fifths which structure dodecaphonic series in both directions. (We have already accounted for the 12 and 7 numbering the baskets of fragments a propos of the twelve semeiacoustika and 6-7 semeioptika respectively. This is yet another instance of the coherence of what is meant by 'jointly intelligible'.) The consideration of the two intervals, perfect fourth and perfect fifth, entails the question of internal and external relations. These are tenets essential to the theology of semiotic forms, which are at once congruent with the notion of subjective and objective forms of consciousness.

In keeping with the prominence of these two intervals, the perfect fourth and perfect fifth, which structure the dodecaphonic series, the third, which mediates those two, the tritone, certainly bespeaks paradox. It too indubitably pertains to the doctrine of internal and external relations. This is yet another instance of what is meant by assessing all endeavours to interpret the numbers in these narratives, firstly in reference to the acoustic semiosis. We must recall that the propositional weight of the doctrines they contain is carried firstly by the details of the Transcendental miracle narrative. The exposition of the doctrine of intentionality, vital to the theology of the Word, rests almost entirely upon the acoustic semiosis. In terms of their respective expository capacities, there is little if anything that the optic semiosis can tell us, that the acoustic semiosis cannot. The justification of this claim adverts to the form of value, truth, and not beauty, concomitant with acoustic memory. Its net result is to refuse any over-valuation of The Apocalypse, or better still, not to esteem its theological status without reckoning fully with its limitations.

Within an octave, that is, one complete dodecaphonic series constituting the twelvefold 'chromatic' scale, there are exactly five perfect fifths, and seven perfect fourths. This is yet another example which meets the same hermeneutical demands of comprehensiveness and avoids allegorical considerations which depend on the meanings of words rather than that of the numeral signifiers as party to a theory of relations. It expressly reiterates another of the numerical patterns disclosed in the two miracle narratives, numbers of loaves relative to number of thousands. We shall not abandon any further reflection on the possible value of 'thousands qua subjects', and 'loaves qua objects', nor the 'two fish', nor six jars of water transformed into wine, as in league with this same dichotomy.

That said however, any inflexible metaphorical, allegorical interpretaion which reads 'thousands' as referent to conceptual forms, and 'loaves' as referent to perceptual forms, and correspondingly alleges these necessarily satisfy the distinction between subject and object respectively, cannot meet the criteriological definition of analogy to which it is methodologically inferior for the purposes of metaphysical speculation. Nor does it advance the hermeneutic in any viable manner. Furthermore, it begs the question as to which, if any, of the five 'subjects as conceptual forms' and 'objects as perceptual forms' of consciousness are said to cohere, and how we explain such a selection, as well as that of the omission of the sixth and singular member of each of those two classes, in accounting for the total number of categories, twelve.

The pentatonic and heptatonic scalar systems, although they too are immediately suggested by the dual figures of the two miracles of loaves, fall short in just the same way. Taking the octave as the standard of division in any first step regarding the interpretation of the acoustic semiosis, how exactly can we account for the relations of the two pentads and two hexads? Notwithstanding these problems, the notional value of such  readings, in spite of its deceptive simplicity, has served to introduce the relevance of this dichotomy, subjective-objective, to the exposition. But there can be no fixed, simple correspondence urged between all conceptual forms as subjective and all perceptual forms as objective systems of consciousness. Neither is any equally binding equation of pentatonic scales and conceptual-subjective entities, and heptatonic scales and perceptual-objective entities logically permissible.
 
Finally, resuming the question of the relevance of the dichotomous relation of subjective and objective consciousness to the hermeneutic of the texts, the following propositions, which are yet to be fully developed, can be put here:

• time vis-à-vis mind can be depicted as a series of twelve mandala, representative of its recursive nature within increasingly smaller as well as larger, temporal, perspectival cycles, of which the diurnal-nocturnal, and annual are the most immediately recognisable;

• each of these temporal-mental cross-sections, consists of an iconic variety of patterns of relatedness between the categoreal components disclosed in the narratives, which are represented both by semeioptika and semeiacoustika;

• a single pair of which, occurrent at the centremost point of the dodecaphonic series, is indiscernible as to the dichotomy subject-object;
  

• this fusion of 'opposites', is opposed at the outermost points of the same compass, articulated as the beginning and end of the twelvefold series, degrees I and VII of the major heptatonic scale,  by the two components whose fission signifies the absolute distinction of subject and object, and which individually subtend the Christological, antithetical relation of tritone, to each of the radicals constituting the nucleus of the mandala;

• thus these relations between the peripheral and core components, I to +IV/-V and +IV/-V to VII, can be construed as the a-b axis of rotation which organizes the syntactical order of the elements;
  

• this equips us with an adequate explanation of the relation between the dual fives and dual sixes of the Transcendental and Christological narratives; it explains which two sets of singular categories, variant across the changing temporal perspectives illustrated in the mandala and reiterated in the individuated twelve instances of the dodecaphonic series, uniquely exemplify the reality of both complete conflation and total differentiation of subjective and objective patterns of consciousness;

• in the core event of fusion, these Christological relations finally assume the Christological modes of intentionality, desire simpliciter and belief simpliciter, and desire-to-know and belief-in-desire;

• in the peripheral event of fission, the relations finally assume the Transcendental modes of intentionality, those of knowing simpliciter and will simpliciter, and knowledge-of-will and will-to-believe;
  

• the  contemporary epistemological-psychological account best fitted to reckon with the proposition that desire and belief on the one hand, and desire-to-know and belief-in-desire on the other, are uniquely and fully conflated as subjective and objective systems of consciousness, is 'besire' theory.

The fusion of the Christological modes of intentionality elides the subject and object as finally indeterminate, or indiscernible. It means that belief and desire, and likewise, belief-in-desire, and desire-to-know, cannot be numerically distinct, if they share all of their properties. But this is not to assert the conflation of those poles of consciousness, perceptual and conceptual, which give rise to these recognisably Christological modes of intentionality. At the same time, the fission of these systems of consciousness, subjective and objective, is the task of the Transcendental modes of intentionality, will and knowing.

It will be necessary to develop this claim in particular as we elucidate the theological psychology native to the gospel of Mark, in keeping with the acoustic semiosis. Both subjective and objective systems of consciousness equally abjure any categoreal equation between the conceptual and the subject, and the perceptual and the object, independently of the reality of transmutative and co-dependent processes. The bipolar dichotomy conceptual : perceptual, is not unambiguously coterminous with that which the terms subject and object mean. This is succinctly put by the second level implementation of the categoreal paradigm; the fact that the aconscious conceptual pole bears distinct marks of perceptual awareness, and that the aconscious perceptual pole conversely, manifests elements of an evidently conceptual nature. The forms of unity and the forms of imagination thus preclude enlisting the subject-object dichotomy in this way.

To say that desire and belief are finally given to fusion, and that knowing and will are ultimately resistant to the same, and must always and everywhere remain numerically distinct, is to make a claim concerning intentionality rather than its sources. The sources of intentional modality, the twelve radical entities, are categoreal; that is, their epistemological status is taxonomical. But intentional modes themselves are not. They emerge from the radical structures of mind, delineated in the analogous P and messianic narratives. The epistemology of intentional modes as classificatory can be best described as typological. Because of which, the distinction between taxa and types must therefore occupy us. It once more broaches the relation of The Apocalypse as somehow the third member of the intertextual complex sustained by the stories committed to the deposition of the primary constituents of consciousness, the six radicals of the conceptual polarity, and their six corresponding, analogous, perceptual equivalents or compliments.

Even so, as distinct from the formal binary which unites the narratives of creation and messianic series as encapsulated in the three Trinitarian titles: 'beginning and end', 'first and last', 'the Alpha and the Omega', and the processes which reflect this syntax, those of creation and salvation, the third term, the copula as a representation of both The Apocalypse and the identity of The Holy Spirit, is cognate with the event of 'sanctification'. This will certainly dovetail with the theology of intentionality, as with the anthropic category, male and female, the conceptual category, which effectively announces a major strand of its eschatological agenda. I will contend that the essential focus of The Apocalypse concerns the transcendent component of the anthropic form of unity, the symbolic masculine rather than the symbolic feminine; and consequently, that it demonstrates a marked predilection for the perceptual category analogous to the same, optic imagination rather than optic memory.

The systematic rapport between The Acts and The Apocalypse confirms the basic thrust of this claim. Both are intended in no small measure, as Pneumatologies. The Lukan work however covers the historical realm as its theological ground, and with it, the symbolic feminine. Luke's clear acceptance of the value of women generally in the mission of the church is pronounced and well known. The Apocalypse is equally, primarily a theology of The Holy Spirit. The manner in which the theme of war is not only a historical reality, but also of oracular import to John's vision of the future of the world guarantees this. Its rapport with The Acts presents a symmetrical tendency to register the decisive influence of the symbolic masculine~optic imagination with symbolic feminine~optic memory. The vision of the sixth seal, reverting to the tradition of a twelvefold tribal system, begins this element of the book. War, the masculine preoccupation, nihilistic in intent, counters the creation just as the book itself stands vis-à-vis the story of creation, or 'beginning'. It aspires to announce the future course of the world rather than its past. The images of war and destruction displayed in this book are not as such prescriptive or normative. They are descriptive, and it pulsates with a realistic appraisal of this archetypally masculine form of evil.


This page was updated 09.05.2022.

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