Mark 5

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confus'd;
Still by himself abus'd, or disabus'd;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

Within the context of the theology of semiotic forms, the Eucharist stands in relation to the three Eucharistic miracles as the specification of the 'animal' mode of sense-perception, the mode(s) of smell-taste (osmic-gustic), to the three 'phenomenal' modes, touch, hearing and seeing. Its immediate link to the haptic mode is guaranteed by the fact that taste entails touch, for just which reason 'taste' is mentioned explicitly in both Christological miracle narratives. These narratives also signal the distinctively binary pattern of the Christian sacraments which replicate the categoreal paradigm, transcendence : immanence; namely baptism and Eucharist respectively. The metaphor of appetition-satisfaction combines all three Eucharistic miracle stories. Indeed, stories of The Institution Of The Lord's Supper all refer to communion under two species, bread and wine, which are referent to the body and blood of Christ respectively. Thus both miracles of loaves and fish are incorporated as members of the same taxon of which the haptic is the initial term when the class is arranged according to temporal succession from distal to proximal pasts. We refer to these three modes, haptic, optic and acoustic, designated in the miracle narratives as 'phenomenal' in contradistinction to the 'animal' mode, that is, to the Eucharistic mode(s) proper, smell and taste. The latter are also known as the chemical modes.

Although the same role in our prehominid forebears has long since atrophied, smell-taste still functions as a means of communication in some animals. Smell remains a powerful source of knowing in some species of dogs for example, where it is utilised in the detection of diseases such as cancer with remarkable degrees of acuity. Whatever its cognitive capacity, smell-taste nevertheless induces appetition in all creatures, provided the data are judged to be 'good'. Thus if the basis of experience can be said to be 'emotional', it can be said to be 'Eucharistic', or indeed, 'animal', given the primordial stature of olfaction-gustation. The acquisition of food necessary to any continued existence of the living organism, in spite of costing most creatures inordinate amounts of effort and time, remains primary to survival, and consumption in its turn, depends on just this form of sense-percipience. The primordial quality of need-desire is first envisaged in the J creation story.

There is no fourth form of value concomitant with 'animal' sense-perception, smell-taste, even though its alliance with the haptic mode might easily warrant its evaluative or axiological capacity as determined by the good. Smell, as well as taste, is highly operative in the animal realm in league with haptic sentience. In many species oestrus in the female attracts the male by means of olfaction, and determines the timing of the reproductive cycle. In humankind, the freedom from this process is complete. Human sexual reproduction is not seasonally or periodically impelled in the same way as that of animals. (Just so, the restrictive diets of many animals differs from that of humans in the same respect.) In the J creation narrative, which registers the second and explicit theological deployment of the notion after its introduction implicitly in the first creation story, it is of course associated with 'the knowledge of good and evil'. There it is precursory to the three feeding miracles and the Eucharist, as is the theology of immanence in the first creation story. That no fourth form of value can be attributable to the Eucharistic mode(s) of sentience sits with the absence of a fourth (-seventh) conceptual form in the P creation narrative.

If the animal mode of sense-perception signifies no further, fourth, form of value, it nevertheless clearly marks the threefold nature of value denoted in the three phenomenal modes of sense-perception, the subjects of the three miracle narratives in turn, as constitutive of a single entity. The existence of a fourth and final sentient mode, the Eucharistic, or animal form(s) of sense-percipience, determines their coherence as more than mere membership of a class or taxon. This explains the structural motif in the P creation narrative, whose second half precursively adverts to the four Eucharistic events of the messianic series. There being noticeably, no conceptual entity analogous to the Eucharistic mode(s) of sense-percipience, as the story of the Sabbath makes perfectly clear, the resultant fact of a strict enumerative distinction between transcendence and immanence according to the ratio 3:4, is resumed in the messianic series, as in the gospels taken as a whole, and furthermore in The Apocalypse. Conformably to the perspective of immanence, in both of these cases, is a purposeful adoption of the fourfold. The ratio 3 : 4, initially pronounced in the P narrative, is a legitimate construal of the four dimensional and Transcendental category, space : time, even though, as a conceptual form of unity, it is taxonomically a category of virtual immanence within what is indubitably a theology of transcendence. But the tetrad as a marker of immanence, manifest in the spatiotemporal manifold, cedes to the sense-percipient manifold. The final semantic thrust of the cipher four devolves upon the delivery of the messianic series, and the four feeding events in particular.

The creation story demands accommodation of the theology of the Sabbath in any discussion of the Eucharist. Their one-to-one correspondence obliges this treatment. Thus we might ask, if there is no equivalent seventh conceptual form, how shall we fulfill this obligation? Insofar as it prefigures the Eucharist, the Sabbath clearly defines the six conceptual forms, as a class or group, consisting of two subsets; both the triad of conscious radicals, and that of the aconscious. Certainly the one-to-one correspondences of the six conceptual radicals with their perceptual analogues tells for the same. But if we allow for identity as a primary marker of transcendence, then this refutes any unity of these components of consciousness on par with that of the analogous perceptual categories. Perceptual consciousness, clearly distinguished by the primordial status of the Eucharistic mode, secures the unity of value: the good, the true, and the beautiful. These three axiological dimensions are epiphanies of The Son, The Transcendent, and The Spirit respectively. Those corresponding conscious, perceptual, modes of intentionality, desire, knowing, and desire-and-knowing, whose functions span the entire spectrum of perceptual forms, both conscious and aconscious, that is, both memorial and imaginal, are solely capable of achieving the oneness of God's being.

Notwithstanding the diversification of value, the business of the pure conceptual forms as of the theology of transcendence generally, the unity of value is what is meant by the promotion of God's unity as the raison d'être of the creation. There can be no unity of identities in God without the world, and without the world of sentient beings, such as ourselves, and our sub-human forebears. The unity of value is the consistency of the good, the true and the beautiful, as the function of perceptual modes of intentionality, depicted in the Eucharist. This is also what is meant by the claim that the world is internally related to God. As the raison d'être of the relation of the world to God, the unification of value, tantamount to the oneness of God's immanent nature, cannot be the exclusive prerogative of humankind, the reason for adopting the epithet 'animal' in reference to the Eucharistic form of sentience. All creatures, all living entities which engage in consumption of other entities, organic and inorganic, provide for the unity of God. All living creatures are thus responsible for the achievement of God's immanent nature.

The relevance of sub-human life for theology and for the doctrine of intentionality should hardly surprise us. It is first inferred in the second section of the P narrative, which details the creation of animals and humans; it occurs next in the J narrative; and it receives its final deposition in the messianic series. We see the inclusion of animals in several of the healing miracle narratives also in the gospels. Further to which, The Apocalypse recognises in theriomorphic imagery derived from astrological myths, another trope for 'earth', as for immanence, tokens of the gospels themselves, for the purpose of relating them to the annual compass. Its primary iconographical depiction of The Son as The Lamb is likewise consonant with these earlier examples of a theological strain of 'deep-ecology'. The reason for emphasising such elements of the texts is not to replace the doctrine of the imago Dei, which renders the status of humankind within the created world, as unique, but to supplement it. The net result places humankind both continuously and discontinuously with its evolutionary antecedents. The deep ecological theology of intentional modes such as desiring and knowing, the acknowledgement that these very processes occur in beings other than humans, of course fits with the natural theology linking time and mind semiologically. Moreover, it squares with the essential rapport between time and mind envisaged in The Transfiguration, and with the evolutionary theoretical view of mind as a temporally emergent property of living beings.

The Apocalypse is unique in its dedication to the theology of immanence as to Pneumatology. This pursuit renders it fundamental to the reckoning of the unity of God, and explains its emphasis upon the anthropic category. I shall develop this postulate with reference to the gospels as manifestly specific and diversified in terms of the doctrine of intentionality vis-à-vis eschatology. I shall argue that intentionality must be epistemologically demarcated from the taxonomies of Genesis and the messianic series to which it is nevertheless integral. Their integration is complete in the case of the Eucharistic miracles. Thus the Christological narrative, Transformation Of Water Into Wine and the Transcendental feeding miracle, The Feeding Of The Five Thousand, both pay heed to the dodecadic tally of categoreal constituents of mind whose epistemological status is other than that of the forms of intentionality. The status of the latter is typological. The twelve categoreal radicals of both polarities, conceptual and perceptual, effectively vary from the modes of intentionality which derive from them. This distinction is best expressed by transcendence : immanence, the categoreal paradigm. The Pneumatological principle of unity certainly shapes both narratives, the story of 'beginning' as well as that of 'end'. But we see in both, the dominance of the hexadic and dodecadic strutures enumerated in the Christological and Transcendental miracle stories.

As the paramount theology of immanence, The Apocalypse concerns the nature of God's unity. Its chief formal outlines are the tetrad and heptad, conforming to the two numerical references in The Feeding Of The Four Thousand. They permeate the entire text recursively in a variety of ways. These ciphers attest a methodical aim comparable to the taxonomic purpose of those stories of 'beginning and end' in Genesis and the gospels, which are formally analogous to one another. But The Apocalypse does not participate in this relationship with any immediacy, that is, with any further contribution to their taxonomies. Nevertheless the P narrative, the messianic miracles, and the various sevenfold series of The Apocalypse are given to systematic classification. But whereas the primary classificatory semantic of the taxonomies of creation and salvation, 'beginning' and 'end' proper, rests upon the construct of identity, that of typological understanding obtains in virtue of unity. It is typological rather than taxonomical classification that occupies The Apocalypse. The clearest exemplification of this alterity is the dissimilarity between the acoustic and optic semioses. This accounts for the ambiguity inherent in the syntactical possibilities maintained by the three texts, creation story, messianic series, and The Apocalypse, which we have already remarked; its explication will become clearer as we proceed. It marks the absolutization of contrast between the two phenomenal modes of sentience, acoustic memory and optic memory, mirrored in the relation of the creation story and The Apocalypse.

Fourfold morphology as indicative of sense-percipient modality does not account for the discernible shape of the gospel, except insofar as the two Christological categories, haptic memory and haptic imagination, and the two Transcendental categories, acoustic memory and acoustic imagination, are isomorphic to the composition of the annual cycle. That is, they stand representatively of the (solstitial) gospels Luke and John on the one hand, and the (equinoctial) gospels Mark and Matthew on the other, given that these four-eight categories occasion the four-eight canonical expressions of intentional modes, conscious and aconscious, analogously to the four, singular, temporal moments in the annual cycle. These four, singular durations, epiphanies of perceptible alterations in the ratio of diurnal and nocturnal intervals, reiterate the four 'canonica-evangelical' moments of the year. They calibrate analogously the measure of the relations of conscious to aconscious intentional processes, the relative forcefulness of the two intentional forms which operate in tandem. They also therefore stand representatively of the four cardinal directions of the compass as the first part of the series of seven seals in The Apocalypse makes clear.

This accords with the discernible pattern of the four sevenfold series in The Apocalypse as a whole, since the letters and trumpets both reformulate the acoustic mode, whereas the seals and bowls both reformulate the haptic, supporting the identification of those same series with the specifically various eschatologies of the gospels. But any such configuration remains incomplete without the addition of the Pneumatological categories, since each quarter of the annual cycle consists of two tokens, indicative of the initial, conative, distal, phase, and the final, cognitive, proximal phase of a process, the former being instrumental to the latter. This requisite is supplied by The Apocalypse. Its representation of the four Pneumatological categories is that of the passage from each and to each of those various tipping points, in those sections of the text not specifically given to the reiteration of a tetradic morphology. These two sections are unnumbered, and the detection of a heptadic form in each is logically valid. This gives the work a remarkable degree of formal consistency. The same two sevenfold unnumbered series should take precedence of sorts, over the four sevenfold series, since they announce the Pneumatological, eschatological radicals of consciousness: symbolic feminine and symbolic masculine; and optic memory and optic imagination. Much of the semantic purpose of the four sevenfold series, letters, seals, trumpets and bowls, resides in their formal consistency with the morphology of the gospel and with the conative and cognitive forms derivative from those very four Pneumatological, 'eschatological' radicals of consciousness. Thus they should not be overemphasised in accounting for that work.

EUCHARISTIC SENSE-PERCIPIENCE AND KNOWING

The six messianic miracles as a systematic and essentially Trinitarian theology of sense-percipience have already been considered in the study of the gospel of Luke. We there examined in detail the six radical types of conation, or desire, generated by these same perceptual components of mind. Their study did not include the Eucharistic mode itself, the animal and osmic-gustic form of perceptual memory. Clearly within the framework of the theology of desire, the Eucharist denotes the very underpinning of desiderative, that is, conative, consciousness. But inasmuch, does it indicate solely the appetite for food and drink as necessary to existence? If the Eucharist is formally and logically framed analogously in rapport with the Sabbath, is there not some connection with the portrait we have of the same, the desire-need to consume, and the knowing of 'good and evil', and death itself, the centrepiece of the J creation narrative, which was adumbrated in the P story? The significance of this most rudimentary mode of sentience must be linked to more than conative consciousness alone. Its remit must also concern cognition. I will submit that the modus cognoscendi proper to the Eucharist is theology itself, more specifically, the theology of immanence. I am thus proposing that cognition or understanding occasioned by the mode smell-taste is identifiable as 'religious' in the broadest of terms. It will follow from the division of the categoreal paradigm comprehensively defined in the very isomorphic structures which interrelate the P narrative and the messianic series, as well as the recapitulation of the categoreal paradigm within each of these two cycles, that such 'Eucharistic' theology is necessarily immanent in kind. This means that it is necessarily given to the 'religious' explication of the 'connective tissue of reality' (Whitehead); the interdependent nature of distinctly earthly existence construed in terms that are recognisable as a metaphysics.

Concerning the Sabbath, matters must differ according to the same categoreal difference between the fundamental orientations of the two cycles. Any 'Sabbatical' (transcendental) theology must observe fidelity to the reality of identity rather than unity ('yoga'). Since the Day 7 rubric does not announce a seventh entity comparable to the six conceptual forms of the prior hexameron, is it not then equally valid to conceptualise this Sabbath as an incipient theology of death itself? Such characterisation of the Sabbath rubric complies with understanding the osmic-gustic mode of sense perception vis-à-vis theology as a form of knowing, a modus cognoscendi. Sabbath and Eucharist will then consist as defining the broadest parameters of theology as an episteme, or form of cognition. That conceptual awareness is bound to the apprehension of finitude and death agrees with The Transfiguration and its Johannine equivalent, The Raising Of Lazarus. The temporal phrase 'After six days ...' links the P narrative as a whole to baptism and identity and death. The Transfiguration, as messianic miracle corollary to the Day 1 rubric, effectively consummates not just the messianic miracle series, but the six Days and the six messianic miracles. Its recursion of the creation series confers upon the conceptual pole of mind as a whole, that central point of epistemic-psychic gravity, death. The Transfiguration refers to the logos asarkos as Thanatos in several ways:

the verbatim repetition of the same title in the synoptic records of the baptism;

the reference to Jesus speaking of his exodus (Luke 9.31);

the general tenor of the miracle narrative, and its references to the fear and incomprehension of the disciples;

the introduction which mentions 'deny[ing the] self and tak[ing] up [one's] cross and follow[ing the Son of man]' (Mark 8.34); and 'not tast[ing] death before see[ing] the kingdom of God' (Luke 9.27);

the extended discourse immediately following, which refers to Jesus' death and resurrection (Mark 9.9-13).

Luke's introduction to the last miracle of the series is unique:

Now about eight days after these saying ... (Luke 9.28)

The reference to 'eight' instead of 'six' seems intent on returning to the first of the Days series. Thus it includes the Sabbath in the cycle, and yet clearly recapitulates the correspondence between the transcendental Christological miracle, and the equivalent creation rubric, for in the heptadic cycle, the eighth day returns us to the first. The octave of Luke's narrative thus sits perfectly with the significance of the acoustic semiotic series in which the octave and resurrection form a hermeneutical and semantic unit. We have already noticed the same in The Appearance Of Jesus To His Disciples (John 20.19): 'On the evening of that day, the first day of the week ...'. The demonstrative adjective refers of course to the previous narrative also, The Appearance Of Jesus To Mary Magdalene (20.11-18); further to which we noted the introduction to the story of Jesus And Thomas: 'Eight days later ... '(20.26).

MARKAN COGNITIVE INTENTIONALITY

As noted previously, the classical testimonies of the categoreal entities which specify the Markan theological agenda are as follows:

ACONSCIOUS CONCEPTUAL RADICAL - SPACE : TIME	CONSCIOUS PERCEPTUAL RADICAL - ACOUSTIC MEMORY
Sevenfold Creation Series	Sevenfold Messianic Series
Genesis 1.20-23 - Day 5	Mark 6.30-44 - The Feeding Of The Five Thousand
Markan Twelvefold Healing Series
Mark 5.24b-34 - The Haemorrhagic Woman (c.f. John 5.1-18 - The Healing At The Pool)	Mark 7.31-37 - The Deaf Mute

God said, "Let the water swarm (wcr#$y; LXX e)cagage/tw) with swarms (Cr#$) of living creatures and let birds fly across the expanse of the sky (LXX to\ stere/wma tou~ ou)ranou~)." God created the great sea creatures and every living and moving thing with which the water swarmed (wcr#$), according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful (wrp,) and multiply (wbrw) and fill (w)lmw; LXX au)ca/nesqe kai\ plhqu/nesqw kai\ plhrw/sate) the water in the seas, and let the birds multiply (bry; LXX plhqune/sqwsan) on the earth." There was evening, and there was morning, a fifth day. (Genesis 1.20-23 NET2 emphasis added.)

The Johannine miracle narrative is included here as being of the same theological kind as the Markan healing pericope. Its uses of the motifs of water, movement, and multitudes ('swarms') confirm its connection to the Genesis text. The record of the feeding miracle should be assessed in relation to at least one other evangelical text of equal import. In Mark, it follows upon his second, which is actually the third, of the three messianic feeding miracles: the recapitulation of both the Transcendental and Pneumatological narratives of that class. The introduction reads thus:

Now they had forgotten (epela/qonto) to bring bread: and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. And he cautioned them, saying, "Take heed, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod." (Mark 8.14, 15.)

Those terms in the recapitulation explicitly referential to knowing, have already been discussed; they are italicised in the following citation:

And they discussed it with one another, saying, "We have no bread." And being aware of it (gnou\v), Jesus said to them, "Why do you discuss the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand (noei~te ou)de\ suni/ete)? Are your hearts hardened (pepwrwme/nhn e)/xete th~n kardi/an u(mw~n)?

Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? (o)pqalmou\v e)/xontev ou) ble/pete kai/ w]ta e)/xontev ou)k a)kou/ete;)

And do you not remember? (kai\ ou) mnhmoneu/ete;) When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?" They said to him, "Twelve." "And the seven for the four thousand?" And they said to him, "Seven." And he said to them, "Do you not yet understand?" (ou)/pw suni/ete; Mark 16-21.)

The Matthean redaction includes all three key verbs: ginw/skw - 'to know', 'to have knowledge of (sexual relations', as in Matthew 1.25, Luke 1.34); noe/w - 'to perceive', Matthew 16.9, 11, again in the negative interrogative; and suni/hmi - 'to understand', 'to comprehend', 'to have insight into', ('to perceive'):

Then they understood that he did not tell them to beware of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees. (Matthew 16.12, emphasis added.)

Matthew also utilises mnhmoneu/w - 'to remember', 'to keep in mind' (16.9), as well as epilanqa/nomai - 'to forget', 'to overlook' (v 5), following Mark, but does not repeat that the disciples 'had only one loaf with them in the boat':

When the disciples reached the other side, they had forgotten to bring any bread. (Matthew 16.5).

Similarly to other moments in his gospel, Matthew here mitigates the theme of the failure of the disciples. Jesus' admonition of the disciples as being 'of little faith'; o)ligo/pistoi (v 8) - sounds a less reproachful tone than that of the Markan parallel. The recension notably lacks the Markan Jesus asking if their hearts are 'hardened', and the quotation (Jeremiah 5.21, Ezekiel 12.2) regarding both sentient modes, hearing and seeing, the key to its own understanding. There is however a closely related quotation reasonably close at hand, subsequently to The Parable Of The Sower (Matthew 13.10 ff), in the verbatim rendering of the original Septuagint version of Isaiah 6.9:

He said, "Listen continually, but do not understand! Look continually, but not perceive!" (NET Bible; LXX: a)koh~? a)kou/sete kai\ ou) mh\ sunh~te, kai\ ble/pontev ble/yete kai\ ou) mh~ i)/dhte.)

Matthew also utilises mnhmoneu/w - 'to remember', 'to keep in mind' (16.9), as well as epilanqa/nomai - 'to forget', 'to overlook' (v 5), following Mark; verbs which in this context, allude to the Eucharist. It is worthy of note that ginw/skw which can also mean 'to remember', carries the additional meaning of sexual experience, formerly known in English as 'carnal knowledge'. This and the reference to 'hearts' in the Markan original, both proscribe an interpretation of the two events in terms of exclusively cognitive intentional awareness. That is, they prescribe the conative aspect of intentionality as of equal importance to the cognitive, even though not a single synoptic gospel contains the Christological feeding miracle, The Transformation Of Water Into Wine.

In both gospels the pericope is extremely condensed. Other verbs such as 'to caution' - diaste/llomai, and 'to discuss' - dialogi/zomai, readily support the hermeneutic of both The Feeding Of The Five Thousand and The Feeding Of The Four Thousand already flagged, as theologies of the Transcendental and Pneumatological modes of sense-percipience, acoustic memory and optic memory respectively, and of the essential relevance these have to consciousness as both cognitive and conative.

I have drawn attention to the context of the healing story, The Deaf Mute. Its immediate proximity to the second of Mark's Eucharistic miracle stories, The Feeding Of The Four Thousand, (Mark 8.1-10) and the recapitulation of both Markan Eucharistic miracle stories (vv 11-21), with its concentration on the themes of perception and cognition is primary evidence for the significance of cognition to this gospel in particular. The next healing miracle, The Blind Man At Bethsaida, occurs counterposed to the other. Thus the two healing events bordering the recapitulation concur with the citation, the key to the hermeneutic of both the Transcendental and Pneumatological Eucharistic events:

Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? (o)pqalmou\v e)/xontev ou) ble/pete kai/ w]ta e)/xontev ou)k a)kou/ete;)

MARK 7.31-37: THE DEAF MUTE

There are several points of contact between the various pericopae: two healing miracle narratives, the Eucharistic miracle narratives, and their recapitulation. The Deaf Mute contains a)nable/yav ei)v to\n ou)rano\n ('looking up to heaven', Mark 7.34), which is used verbatim, understandably enough, of only the Transcendental miracle, The Feeding Of The Five Thousand (a)nable/yav ei)v to\n ou)rano\n Mark 6.41), distinguishing it from the Pneumatological event. The same aorist participle occurs in The Blind Man At Bethsaida, once again not surprisingly given its subject matter; but it is not used in conjunction with 'heaven'. (In both healing events Jesus uses his hands. This point is interesting, because it too ties them together as bound by the theme of sense-perception, and also because neither event is intrinsically related to haptic sentience, the Christological mode. On both occasions Jesus is importuned in the same manner: 'They brought to him a man ... and they besought him to lay his hand upon him.' (Mark 7.32), c.f. 'And some people brought to him a blind man and begged him to touch him.' (8.22). We may notice that these two healing events adjacent to the second miracle story of loaves and fish and the recapitulation of both, also involve Jesus removing the suffering persons from the people gathered about him (Mark 7.33 and 8.23), a motif which further cements their close relationship. But the first episode ends with the zealous proclamation of the event in spite of injunctions to the contrary. The second takes place outside the village, and people are still in view of sight since the man remarks: '"I see men; but they look like trees walking."' The motif of privacy here is notably qualified.)

The prior healing story refers to 'ears' (w]ta, 7.33) as does the recapitulation of the feeding story (8.24), there all the more remarkably because it is a citation. It also mentions tou~ o)/xlou ('crowds' 7.33), common to The Haemorrhagic Woman, (5.24b, 27, 30, 31), as well as to both Eucharistic miracle stories (6.34, 8.1, 6). This motif is vital to the description of both Markan intentional modal idioms, knowing and the will-to-believe. The healing story concerning hearing also contains the verb diaste/llomai ('And he charged them ...' 7.36 bis), which is used in the recapitulation also ('And he cautioned them, saying ... ' 8.15). The conclusion of this pericopae is worth quoting. It is fully congenial to the thematic construct combining speech-hearing and the intentionality of knowing:

And his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. And he charged them to tell no one; but the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. And they were astonished beyond measure ( e)ceplh/sonto), saying, "He has done all things well; he even makes the deaf hear and the dumb speak." (Mark 7.35-37).

It is a finer point, but all the same worth noticing: the adverbial qualification 'beyond measure' (v 37), alludes in general to the notion of satisfaction as fullness, as well as the use of a cognate depicting the 'fullness' of the twelve baskets in the the first feeding story and the recapitulation (plhrw/mata 6.43, 8.20). John uses a different verb in his recension of The Feeding Of The Five Thousand ( e)ge/misan John 6.13), which occurred in the first Eucharistic miracle story (gemi/zw John 2.7 bis), but nevertheless uses a cognate of the same term, 'full', to describe the satiety of those who were fed: 'When they had eaten their fill ...' ( w(v de\ e)neplh/sqhsan John 6.12). We shall have recourse to the gospel of John in the next section since one of its healing miracle stories agrees theologically, that is, taxonomically, with the Markan text expounding the aconscious radical analogous to acoustic memory. The same verb occurs three times in the Septuagint translation of the Day 5 rubric, then again twice in that of Day 6, with the meaning 'multiply', 'pullulate', 'increase' (Genesis 1.22, 28).

It is difficult not to grant that the primary emphasis for Mark in the recapitulation falls upon acoustic memory rather than optic memory, even given the strong likelihood that the messianic series itself was originally a written rather than an oral tradition, and even if, the quotation from the Tanakh notably reverses the order of the two messianic miracles as indicative of acoustic and optic memory, the order in the recapitulation also. This is also the order of the two healing stories which enclose the texts as a sequence. One factor in support of the priority of the Transcendental narrative is its attestation in all four gospels. In addition to which, its companion piece, The Walking On The Water, is absent only in Luke. On the other hand, we have only two accounts of the Pneumatological Eucharistic miracle: those of Mark and Matthew. The chiastic structure of the series means that the paired events at the peripheries and centre naturally receive the most accentuation. These are the Christological and Transcendental pairs of messianic miracles. This itself can be read in terms of the essential taxonomical rapport between the P narrative and the gospels.

The other argument in favour of Mark's native preference for the acoustic rather than the optic form of sentience, is the twelvefold healing series. These texts all perform in accord with the analogous relation of the six messianic miracles to the six days of the creation. We find, not surprisingly, since both series are stories of miracles, messianic and healing, that he utilizes the same theological criteria, whether primary or secondary, to acknowledge the paradigmatic distinction between transcendence and immanence. The primary criteria, identity and unity, the latter, often enough in the guise of the feeding motif, are present in several of the healing events. The secondary criteria have already been listed, and these too can occur in the healing stories just as they do in the messianic narratives, indicatively of the categoreal paradigm. That Mark limited the healing miracles to twelve in number, and moreover, that they fully reiterate the twelve categoreal radicals which are the subjects of the two analogous cycles, is certainly evidence of the aesthetic integrity of his gospel. The numerical consonance between the healing series and the categoreal forms is further linked to the theme of discipleship. Mark's preferred reference to the disciples as a whole is simply 'the twelve'. This figure is central to the Transcendental Eucharistic story as enumerating the categoreal entities. Like the hexads of the Christological messianic miracles, it adverts to transcendence as opposed to immanence.

I submit that knowing in its canonical instance is 'knowledge of the soul', or 'metapsychology', the doctrinal focus of this study, The Markan Mandala, and the pre-eminent focus of Markan and biblical metaphysics. The scriptural exposition of this knowing is borne by the semiotic forms of acoustic memory, and defined in The Feeding Of The Five Thousand. Thus the ultimate responsibility of the acoustic semiosis is the exposition of Christian epistemological and psychological doctrine. This makes metapsychology of paramount concern of theology. Such knowing cannot be merely objective in the sense of a propositional content capable of acquisition and possession by mere enquiry, as has been noted. Its axiological identity prohibits this since truth, the indentifiably 'Transcendental' value, is characterised by axiological subjectivism. We glimpse as much precisely in The Walking On The Water, the companion, that is, complement, to the Transcendental Eucharistic narrative. That pericope, like all the miracle stories of virtual transcendence, addresses identity as that aspect of perceptual consciousness, complementary to unity, notwithstanding that the perceptual polarity of mind, disposed in virtue of immanence, is remarkable for the defining expression of unity. The miracle as sea contains the 'I am' saying resonant with God's epiphany to Moses: '"I am who I am"' (Exodus 34.) And it recurs also to the presentation of identity qua transcendence in the P creation story.

If the Eucharist specifies the animal mode of sense-perception, smell-taste, within a comprehensive accounting of the perceptual polarity of mind as a whole, and if all knowing must necessarily be inseparably bound to the intuition of value, threefold value itself being tantamount to the threefold 'God' of Christian doctrine, then all knowing, psychology no less, must reflect as much. But the specifically theological, or axiological aspect of the episteme, metapsychological cognition, is bound to the value truth. Its veridical cast, in the canonical, or exemplary degree of manifesting Transcendence, ensures its cognitive status as first order. Such canonical status is inseparable from its singular and paradigmatic exemplification of the true. The epistemological status of second and third order forms of knowing, is due to those values with which they are concomitant, beauty and goodness respectively. We might well enough say of them that they reveal the beauty of truth, and the goodness of truth. But their categoreal disposition is not in the first instance due wholly and solely to truth as the singularly transcendental form of value. The significance of optic memory and haptic memory for the unity, or immanence, of God, is the provision they make for first order or canonical occasions of knowing-and-desire and desire respectively. That is, their realization of the values immanent beauty and immanent goodness is likewise canonical or first order; and it is as such that they contribute to the oneness of God's being.

Psychological knowing, knowing of the self by the self, must necessarily be also epistemological, knowing about knowing itself. Such factors constitute it as 'meta'-psychology. There is no Archimedian locus outside of space and time, as well as beyond that of embodied being, whereby such knowledge is made available to oneself. In this sense, and for just this reason, it squares with the status of special revelation as a divine disclosure, of the '"I am ... "', and with the theology of The Word (logos). The P narrative and the messianic series formulate the rudiments of biblical metapsychology; but the acoustic semiosis and these two narrative cycles of 'beginning and end' are mutually inclusive. The myriad relations to one another established by the twelve categoreal entities, recognisable as psychological-epistemological, and so, Christological, as well as those of the ensuing forms of intentionality, of which they are the sufficient and necessary conditions, will remain insusceptible of understanding without recourse to the acoustic semiosis.

MARK 5.24B-34: THE HAEMORRHAGIC WOMAN AND JOHN 5.1-18: THE HEALING AT THE POOL

The essentials of Mark's text have already been discussed. Its location at the apex of an extended catena of healing miracle stories tells for the importance the evangelist attaches to it. In which respect, it is on a par with The Feeding Of The Five Thousand. The latter with its complement, The Walking On The Water occupy the centre of the chiasmos. They establish a pivotal moment in the narrative arc of the gospel. We have just noted the presence of expressions denoting 'multitudes' or 'many (persons)' in narratives salient the specific theological orientation of this gospel, as well as the images of the same in the Day 5 rubric. These reflect the phylogenic as opposed to ontogenic character of both the conscious mode, knowing, and its aconscious counterpart, will-to-believe. This fact defines their epistemological and psychological ambit, their identification in terms of human enterprises which are recognisably Christological in nature; that is, having to do with the logos as with consciousness.

There are several different references to the phylogenic in The Haemorrhagic Woman. They begin of course with the story into which it is interpolated, Jairus' Daughter (5.21-24a, 35-41):

And when Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd ( o)/xlov polu\v) gathered about him. (5.21).

That event has only Jesus, three of his disciples, and the parents of the little girl attend the actual healing, and nothing further is added to contradict this. This miracle occurs in private, consistently with its subject matter, the conceptual form soma. But once introduced into the first of two episodes linking the two female protagonists, the element of the multitude of persons is maintained in several references: 'And there was a woman ... who had suffered much under many physicians ( u(po\ pollw~n i)atrw~n, vv 25, 26); 'She had heard the reports about Jesus (a)kou/sasa pe\ri tou~ I)hsou~), and came up behind him in the crowd ...' ( e)lqou~sa e)n tw~? o)/xlw??, v 27); 'And Jesus ... immediately turned about in the crowd,' ( e)pistrafei\v e)n tw~? o)/xlw?, v 30); 'And his disciples said to him, "You see the crowd pressing around you ..."' (to\n o)/xlon sunqli/bonta/, v 31). Surely, it could hardly be more emphatic on this point of the extremely social milieu of the healing. (In addition to the references to hearing, there are two references to the woman 'knowing', vv 29, 33, and one to Jesus 'knowing/perceiving' (v 30). There is also a reference to 'truth' (v 33), which indexes the pericope in axiological conformity with The Feeding Of The Five Thousand. This text indeed is again remarkable in that it mentions all three modes of sense perception; touch, hearing and seeing.)

The Johannine miracle story bears close comparison with all too many aspects of the Markan event for us to overlook it as its equivalent. Its Trinitarian denomination is pronounced at the close, and is comparable to Jesus' relation to the woman whom he addresses as 'daughter' (Mark 5.34):

But Jesus answered them, "My Father is working still, and I am working." This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the sabbath but also called God his own Father, making himself equal with God. (John 5.17, 18 emphasis added).

There are numerous references to God, The Father in the narratives which follow in John, and these lead directly and purposefully to the two Transcendental messianic miracle stories, the first of which is The Feeding Of The Five Thousand. The introduction of the healing story with its numerical reference, the 'five porticos' of the pool at the Sheep Gate, allusively to the miracle of loaves, is also direct and purposeful, so that the context of this narrative mirrors the tendency we sometimes find in Mark to place a healing miracle and a messianic miracle of one and the same kind as closely together as possible, similarly to the way all three evangelists, Mark, Matthew and John, occasionally associate a particular member of 'the twelve' (disciples) with a particular miracle. I have discussed certain factors of this narrative previously, but they bear repetition in the present argument. The two stories, although they stem from widely differing perspectives, are nevertheless of a piece. The size and pertinence of the crowd is common to the Markan and Johannine texts, and in the latter is evinced more than once. Their shared features are as follows:

In these lay a multitude of invalids, blind, lame, paralyzed. (kate/keito plh~qov tw~n a)sqenou/ntwn, tuflw~n, xwlw~n, chrw~n, John 5.4);

The sick man answered him, "Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is troubled, and while I am going, another steps down before me." (5.7);

both narratives specify the locations of the cures (Mark 5.21, John 5.2);

both narratives record the duration of the illnesses, the Johannine pericope notes also that the healing occurred on the sabbath (Mark 5.25, John 5.5, and 9c, 10, 16);

both events involve discourses between the healer and the healed (Mark 5.33-34, John 5.6-8); and exchanges between Jesus and witnesses to the miracle (Mark 5.30-32, John 5.9c-18)

both narratives deploy the idea of (social) hierarchy as a key factor in the theological meaning of the miracle: the woman is ritually unclean, and as such, untouchable, thus she approaches Jesus 'from behind', ( o)/pisqen, Mark 5.25-27); the man is the least able of any of the multitude to help himself, and he comments '"... another steps down before me."' (a)llov pro/ e)mou~, John 5.7), thus both figures are social pariahs;

both texts include references to knowing and willing, either implicitly or explicitly: the woman is compelled to act according to her own resolve, unaided by another, and her initiative rewards her with the cure. Mark's reference to 'many doctors' (5.26) also highlights the existential reality of knowing as a public and social enterprise. The Johannine story is equally clear about the role played by volition on the part of the invalid, even though he is deprived of the ability to move: 'When Jesus saw him and knew (gnou\v) that he had been lying there a long time, he said to him, "Do you want to be healed?"' (qe/leiv u(gih\v gene/sqai; v 5.6 emphasis added.) This makes the story of the man a more subtle presentation of will in its aconscious form, since we readily relate conscious will simpliciter with the freedom to move in space. Whereas the Markan narrative lacks explicit reference to will, but nevertheless concludes with a reference to the woman's faith (5.34), the Johannine text makes no reference explicit reference to faith as such, but accentuates the reality of volition.

These descriptions all match phylogeny as opposed to ontogeny. All of them illustrate human existence in terms of belonging to human aggregates or classes just as The Feeding Of The Five Thousand deploys the same in league with the phenomenon of language. The location of the healing miracle story in John, prior to that particular messianic event, tells for the same: that both miracle narratives concern the same theological realities. Language as acoustic memory, itself attests the same fact of human belonging to a social grouping of a burgeoning scale. It is a joint venture, shared by the many, and purposive to the event of knowing. The will-to-believe we shall argue, the outcome of the aconscious radical, is responsible for the episteme best describable as social sciences. Under the same umbrella, political theory and anthropological studies can also be subsumed. And it is just this which forms a vital part of the theological critique behind the letters which begin The Apocalypse.

There remains a substantial difference between its two first series, as between the two gospels whose eschatologies they restate in symbolic terms: Mark and John. This difference is best characterised axiologically as that of the true and the good, correspondingly to phylogeny versus ontogeny. These are the eschatologies respectively of the phylogenic forces, knowing and the will-to-believe on the one hand, and of the ontogenic forces, desire-to-know and belief, on the other. Notwithstanding their variance due to the axiological identities behind them, the true and the good, their relation is accounted for in terms of supervenience. Thus desire-to-know, a Christological drive, is prevenient to the Transcendental mode, knowing; and the Transcendental mode will-to-believe, is prevenient to the Christological mode, belief. This means of course that no absolute division between phylogeny and ontogeny can be upheld. They function in mutual equilibrium, even if the resultant or supervenient modes, knowing and belief, are diametrically opposed in terms of the same differential.

The will-to-believe, which determines the Markan theological perspective in tandem with knowing, is the outcome of the conceptual form space : time. Like knowing, it occupies the phylogenic extreme of the scale from the many to the one. The Feeding Of The Five Thousand denoting the perceptual radical acoustic memory, and the intentional mode knowing, notably involves the greatest of any number of human participants. The Day 5 rubric, announcing the conceptual equivalent, likewise envisions swarms of creatures, birds and fish, in regard to places and times, clearly adverting to their movement. The Markan healing miracle representative of this aconscious, conceptual complement to acoustic memory, The Haemorrhagic Woman, no less, repeatedly refers to crowds. The woman herself remains virtually anonymous, her individuality absorbed in the masses milling about Jesus. The male persona in the corresponding Johannine story confirms the same characteristic of the same intentional mode.

KNOWING AND THE WILL-TO-BELIEVE

'The proper study of mankind is man' and 'the knowledge of God and of ourselves' cited in the epigraphs to this chapter, put succinctly the canonical occasion of knowing. Their nearest and best available paraphrases must include 'psychology' and 'anthropology' with an emphasis on the role of consciousness in the latter case. As for the episteme occasioned by the aconscious intentional radical, space : time, the canonical mode of intentionality proper to which is will-to-believe, the best fits must be 'political science', 'social sciences', or 'human sciences'. It is necessary to remember that the latter does not operate within a temporality contiguous with the immediate present. That is to say, that it does not, like the conscious mode knowing, establish the parameters of a proximal past (or future) which is indivisibly joined to the immediate present, as do all cognitive or epistemic modes of intentionality. This is tantamount to noting that the intentionality derivative from the conceptual form space : time, in the first place is not epistemic (cognitive). It generates the aconscious form of will, a conative mode of intentionality, and is responsible as the driving force of the conceptual aconscious towards this very end, cognition. But the end of the aconscious conceptual pole, its epistemic outcome, is art, the discussion of which formed part of the study of the gospel of Luke. The will-to-believe may operate cognitively, just as belief-in-desire may function conatively. I mention the episteme generated by the aconscious counterpart to conscious knowing here in order to highlight the coherence of these patterns of consciousness vital to Markan Christology.

We can see at once the phylogenic character of both, a property which surfaced repeatedly in the relevant narratives, just as it will surface in the ecclesial and world-religious exemplifications of the dyad. The identification of the specific ekklesiai and the specific religious traditions other than Christianity which typify this dyad clearly pronounce the dominance of social over individual existence. Calvin belongs to the Reformed Christian tradition, but is by no means its standard-bearer, not its single nor foremost spokesperson. His role as part of a more collegial and societal movement than that to which Luther belonged, encapsulates the distance between the Reformed and 'Lutheran' traditions, conformably to the dichotomous relation of phylogenic and ontogenic patterns of being. The Reformed Church embodies the psychology and epistemology foundational to a specifically Markan theological perspective. In the extra-ecclesial world they are epitomised in Sanatana Dharma. (I am as reluctant to use the word 'Hinduism' as to use the word 'sociology' in the present context; the former because it smacks of 'orientalism', notwithstanding that it has been thoroughly internalised by many followers of those various traditions, and the latter because it represents 'linguistic miscegenation', notwithstanding that it is commonplace in epistemological discourse.)

The postulate that the Reformed tradition epitomises the intentional modal bases on which the gospel of Mark is premised, accords with the criterion of heteronomy as a primary attribute of both knowing and the will-to-believe; both intentional modes are irrevocably phylogenic in nature. This tradition is remarkable for its privileging of the social order over the individual, and in this respect it differs radically from the first wave of the Reformation which culminated in the emergence of the Lutheran confessional branch of the church. Even doctrines such as predestination, or its inherently social-hierarchical bent, fail to interfere with the overriding tendency to social cohesion innate within the Reformed Church, and its ensuing subjugation of the singularity and autonomy of the person. This impetus towards social solidarity and the psychological definition of a more or less purely heteronomous self, which obtains on a par with the function of a lingua franca, severely proscribes the functioning of the self as an autonomous being. We shall come to examine these phenomena in the discussion of The Apocalypse. The remarks entered here are for the purposes of designating in the broadest terms only, some of the reverberations of the epistemological-psychological doctrines consequent on the Christologies central to both narrative cycles, creation and salvation, and to account for the inclusion of The Apocalypse as somehow the third member of this trilogy.

Which brings us to the caveat necessary to any identification of the ecclesial and extra-ecclesial instantiations of the twelve radicals. The foremost of any doctrinal matter which follows upon the hermeneutic of the two narratives must be the identification of the cognitive and conative expressions of these same rudiments of consciousness. That is the reason for the primary concern with epistemology and psychology as vital to Christology, and theologies of logos and the imago Dei. This reveals the status of The Apocalypse as distinguishable from the analogous series of Days and messianic events. In sum, its difference may be framed as the difference of typological from taxonomical theological classifications. The identification of specific Christian traditions, like that of specific traditions of world religions, is not logically comparable to the identification of categoreal forms. The twelve structural components of mind disclosed in the two homologous narratives stand apart, as do those narratives themselves. They are core doctrinal sources for the present undertaking, Christian metapsychology; by which I mean an epistemology-psychology that is essentially Christological and Trinitarian. They denote key precepts for any systematic and biblical theology. The relevance they have for Christology and the doctrine of the Trinity is paramount. The material contribution of The Apocalypse certainly relates to this doctrinal core. But it does figure as a third systematic disclosure, in apposition to those which bind together the two foremost expositions of the essential credal affirmations characteristic of Christianity, the creation story and the messianic series.

The recognition of typological 'exemplifications' of these same radical aspects of consciousness, whether in particular individuals, as per a theory of personality types, or in whole classes of persons belonging to given geopolitical units and/or given temporal-historical complexes, that is whether as ontogeny or as phylogeny, is of a different order. It is more proper to speak of the intentional modes derivative from the actual radicals, and then, to speak of these as tokens of a given type. Here thus we are drawing a certain and categoreal distinction between taxa and types. In avowing that the Reformed Church and Sanatana Dharma equally epitomise the intentional modal dyad upon which Markan soteriology-eschatology is predicated, namely knowing and the will-to-believe, we are claiming that they are type-identical. Each is a token of the one type. The governing mental and affective states which define or identify these cultures are formally identifiable in such terms. But as manifests or epiphanies of the categoreal dyad, they are not pure instances. They are not pure exemplifications, of the radicals themselves; the perceptual form acoustic memory in the case of knowing, and the conceptual form space : time in the case of will-to-believe, even though certain evidences of these categories will inevitably surface in the specific cultural phenomena nominated.

A distinct and obvious allowance for this avowal of typology as as a geopolitical and historiographical adjunct to ecclesiology, is already present within The Feeding Of The Five Thousand, under the guise of the fractio panis. This Eucharistic motif, the notion that the baskets collect together the fragments of the miraculous feeding, denotes the serial structure of the twelvefold acoustic scale as a miracle or sign. That is, as a 'semiosis', a means, a theological method of elaborating the dialectic between identity and identity in the service of knowing God and knowing oneself, and an indispensable element of ongoing special revelation. But the Eucharistic miracle stories also prophetically portray the church itself in its existential brokenness, as a dismembered the whole, a unity not unlike the given nature of the body. For soma maintains the integrity of its identifiable members, broken and incomplete as they are in isolation from one another, yet simultaneously composite, complete only in their togetherness. The Eucharistic re-membering is then no melancholic re-enactment smacking of debilitating nostalgia for a lost status quo, a paradise lost. It is promissory and the pledge of a future in which the restorative power over death of its poietes, its maker, poet, re-creator, is celebrated.

The twelve healing miracle stories in the gospel of Mark support this. They deliver images of the psychopathologies attendant upon each taxonomical radical and its derivative, corresponding, mode of intentionality. These narratives should be read in light of 'the twelve', the followers of Jesus, and consequently, in accordance with the missional performance of the church itself throughout time. Mark is unremitting in his portrait of the failure of the disciples, a fact which at once suits the first of the sevenfold series in The Apocalypse, and indeed, later sections of that book. The same commission given to the disciples as to the church, is presupposed in the activity of knowing, which I am alleging is fundamental to understanding the gospel of Mark. The commission given to the disciples is very nicely and clearly announced in both Markan feeding miracle narratives:

And when it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, "This is a lonely place, and the hour is now late; send them away, to go into the country and villages round about and buy themselves something to eat. But he answered them, "You give them something to eat." And they said to him, "Shall we go an buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?" And he said to them, "How many loaves have you? Go and see. ( u(pa/gete i)/dete)" And when they had found out they said (kai\ gno/ntev le/gousin), five, and two fish." Then he commanded them all (kai\ e)pe/tacen au)toi~v) to sit down by companies upon the green grass. So they sat down in groups, by hundred and by fifties. And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven (a)nable/yav ei)v to\n ou)rano\n), and blessed, and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all. (Mark 6.35-41, emphasis added.)

In those days, when again a great crowd had gathered, and they had nothing to eat, he called his disciples to him, and said to them, "I have compassion on the crowd because they have been with me now three days, and have nothing to eat; and if I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way; and some of them have come a long way." And his disciples answered him, "How can one feed these men with bread here in the desert?" And he asked them, "How many loaves have you?" They said, "Seven." And he commanded the crowd to sit down on the ground; and he took the seven loaves, and having given thanks he broke them and gave them to his disciples to set before the people ( ((i)/na paratiqw~sin); and they set them before the crowd (kai\ pare/qhkan tw~? o)/xlw~?). And they had a few small fish; and having blessed them, he commanded that these also should be set before them (kai\ tau~ta paratiqe/nai). (Mark 8.1-7, emphasis added.)

This image of the obligations of the disciples to emulate the Eucharistic ('sacrificial') actions of Jesus in both narratives, dovetails with the epilogue in the gospel of John, which shows Peter rehabilitated, and three times enjoined to feed/tend the flock. The conjoint ideas of the failure of the disciples and of the missional enterprise incumbent on 'the church', along with the psychopathology of the four cardinal intentional dyads, will be pursued imaginatively in The Apocalypse, the hermeneutic of which must therefore give ample scope to church history and the history of religions, as well as the futures of both church and world religions, imaginatively reconceived and preconceived. The same construct is introduced in the seven letters, and then immediately graphically resumed in the presentation of the four horsemen allied, each with one of the four living creatures, hence with a gospel, hence with an epistemic-psychic dyad, and hence with a formal complex aconscious-conscious intentional structure. These portraits of the four horsemen articulate the innate proneness to sin of the cardinal forms of intentionality. In the immediacy of the now the effects of their failures stand as a permanent reproach of the abuse and corruption by power of the Christian church in its entirety. The cavalier and military imagery thus adverts to the perversion of the four intentional-modal complexes, demonic in their degraded liability towards violence and destruction.

The first four seals is therefore re-creative disclosure of the fractio, the fragmentation of the church reflected in the very formal constitution of the gospel. They pictorially conceive the effects entailed by the canonical intentional-modal forces on which the gospels are formally based, logically compatibly with Mark's programmatic tendency to align the twelve healing miracles with the psychopathologies native to each of 'the twelve', the categories in themselves, as well as to the disciples. This quartet is then pursuant to the first sevenfold series, which reproaches the seven churches for various shortcomings. The same four evangelical-cardinal complexes are embodied as types in the four distinctive branches of the church. The first four seals focuses Christianity itself as one world religion among at least three others; but the actual series of seals alone typologizes Christianity itself, albeit not in isolation from, but relative to worldwide 'religion' as a human pre-occupation defined relatively to the meaning of the Sabbath-Eucharist complex outlined above.

These first four seals thus follow logically from the prior series of letters, as well as sorting with later strands of the work, given over to the same thematic critique. They follow upon the letters as essentially a critique, the emphasis being given over to the notion of the destruction wrought by each. Conquest is mentioned in the vision of the first of the horsemen, tying this second series to the seven letters, in which it was a keynote (Apocalypse 2.7, 11, 17, 26, 3.5, 12, 21). The injunction to 'conquer' in the series of letters, repeated as frequently as is the theme of 'knowing', assumes a profoundly different tenor in the last letter, where it becomes framed comparably with the conquering of the 'one like a son of man', 'the first and the last, the living one', who is dictating the letters. This is one of the very few features of the seventh letter, distinguishing it as such; that is, consonantly with the particularity of the Sabbath and Eucharist as the final members of their respective series.

"He who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I myself conquered, and sat down myself with my Father on his throne." (Apocalypse 3.21).

This is not the kind of conquering imagined in the first seal, attributed to the rider on the white horse, further attributable to the remaining three. The first four seals address the proseltyzing missio ecclesiae, imaginatively pictured by means of the metaphorical construct of the four horsemen, advancing presumably in all four cardinal directions of the compass. It squares adroitly with commissioning of the disciples 'to make disciples of all nations' (Matthew 28.19a). This image directs attention not solely to the fundamental differences between each of these subdivisions of the church militant. Indeed no greater differences can be better iconographically rendered than the notion of the cardinal directions of the compass. Yet this image account for their relational composition.

The four horsemen allude to the visions in Zechariah. John understands the mission of the church vis-a-vis the four, cruciform, directions of the compass, comprehensively throughout the world and throughout time. (The sixth seal contains a vision of 'four angels standing at the four corners of the earth' (Apocalypse 7.1).) The destructive capacity of the horsemen is intelligible in relation to the specificity of the gospels, graphically invoked by the four 'zoa' who summon each one, and determined as part of the theology of logos. Since the mission of the ekklesia duly reifies the very epistemological and psychological forces and drives which characterise the gospel(s), just as these were initially designed to serve its positive influence in the world, the seer of The Apocalypse envisions in this way, the missional propagation of the gospel in terms of its failure. The effects of the horsemen are emblematic of systematic evils consequent upon the historical expansion of Christianity itself. The psychopathology of same forces which diversify and specify the theological perspectives of the four gospels are represented by the four horsemen who betoken the adulteration of the Christian kerygma compromised by political power, and whose legacy is summed up in the conclusion to the fourth seal:

... and they were given power over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine, and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth. (Apocalypse 6.8b).

The upshot of the distinction between taxonomical and typological reasoning, correspondingly to the difference between the narratives of Genesis and the gospel on the one hand, and those of The Apocalypse on the other, must be to insist that neither the ecclesial nor the extra-ecclesial type in this, as in every case, fully implements the given character of the radical forms of intentionality in question. Thus neither the Reformed Church nor Sanatana Dharma wholly embody what we identify as knowing and/or the will-to-believe. Effectively, neither can be said to be the perfect token, the absolute expression, of its type. But they are indeed those very tokens which best recognisably approximate the same. The further exploration of the specifically 'Markan' instances of the church and its corresponding world religion belong to the discussion of The Apocalypse

The seventh events of the series of seals, trumpets, and vials, and even those of the letters in The Apocalypse, each give rise to subsequent events. As suggesting a linear construct of time this is not surprising. The prevailing tendency of that book favours vision, with its innately relative contrast to the acoustic, the mode in which the creation story is framed, and to which the concept of cyclical time is congenial, given the acoustic semiotic phenomenon of the octave. The Apocalypse stands in completest contrast to the stories of beginning. What evidence does the book contain for the kind of doctrinal affiliation between intentionality and eschatology which will offer support to the hermeneutic of the Sabbath-Eucharist that we are proposing? As noted, it comes in the seventh letter and the following three seventh episodes, all of which reformulate the categoreal link subtended by Sabbath and Eucharist. These 'Sabbatical-Eucharistic' episodes are vital to our understanding of the Pneumatological feeding miracle story, The Feeding Of The Four Thousand. They also stand out in the four heptadic series of The Apocalypse due to the semantic value of the figure 7 for Pneumatology in general.

Preliminary to any comment on the prevalence of imagery that may be accounted 'Sabbatical-Eucharistic' in the Apocalypse, must be the observation that the preferred title for The Son by the seer is 'the Lamb', to\ a)rni/on, a preferential usage which resounds with the synonym in John's depiction of the baptism of Jesus, a)mno\v, (John 1.29, 36). (In John 21.15, the risen Christ refers to "my sheep" as ta\ a)rni/a mou.) It occurs in the work twenty-eight times, a fact which has called some commentators to remark on the same number a the product of 7 and 4. It alludes to the Eucharistic modes of sense-percipience, particularly to taste as to eating. In chapter 5 of The Apocalypse the vision of the Lamb forms the exordium to the series of seals. Opinions of the putative derivation of the metaphor from the Old Testament vary, if in fact there are any at all. Certain scholars argue for a hermeneutic of the entire book on the basis of the various Jewish liturgical practices employing the lamb. (See for example in this connection The Sacrificial Symbolism Of The Lamb in the Book of Revelation by John Ben-Daniel, which treats of the entire work in accordance with the Lamb Christology.) There is more than a single reference to eating in the series of letters to the churches. We should not forget that the letters are not numbered as are the other three series, although there are three references to the churches as numbering seven (Apocalypse 1.11, 20 bis). But the most emphatically Eucharistic of these various references to consumption and commensality appears in the last, the seventh letter of the series. The first instance of the eating motif comes in the first letter, which is addressed to Ephesus. It concludes with the promise:

"'To him who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.'" (Apocalypse 2.7).

Similarly, the third letter, addressed to Pergamum ends:

"'To him who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna ... '"(Apocalypse 2.17).

The fourth letter is addressed to Thyatira, and refers also to the consumption of foods involved in cultic sacrifice, a practice widespread in the ancient world. The name 'Jezebel' uncompromisingly connects the act of such consumption with sexual immorality:

"'But I have this against you, that you tolerate the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and beguiling my servants to practice immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols. I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her immorality. Behold, I will throw her on a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her I will throw into great tribulation unless they repent of her doings; and I will strike her children dead.'" (Apocalypse 2.20-23a).

By far the most resounding of any such reference comes in the last and seventh letter, which is addressed to Laodicea:

"'Behold I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. He who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I myself conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.'" (Apocalypse 3.20-22).

The 'Eucharistic' motif in the last of the seven letters confirming its link with the Sabbath just noted, formally alludes to the death of 'the Lamb', whom the seer sees 'standing, as though it had been slain (e)sfagme/non), with seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth' (Apocalypse 5.6). The reason here for linking the Sabbath 'rest' of the creation with the phenomenon of death is not so much due to the mythical aetiology of death provided in the J narrative. It has to do with worship, a theme more appropriate to the P creation narrative. The Day 6 rubric blends two ideas, the reproduction of living things, both animal and vegetable, and consumption (Genesis 1.28-30). Of course the J narrative utilises this same compound, but in the first story there is no hint of primal miscarriage as in the second story. The Sabbath is resolutely affirmed by the Priestly author. It is blessed and made holy as the consummation of God's work (Genesis 2.3), and serves as foundational to the Judaic liturgical system. A Eucharistic theology which has recourse to any sacrificial rationale, even a notional one, must therefore in the first instance acknowledge the existential fact that life itself depends on the death of other living entities. Consumption is irrefragably grounded in this way.

The concluding exhortations of the last letter, the first of the four clearly demarcated sevenfold series, then give way naturally to the vision of the worship of 'the one seated on the throne'. The connecting link between the last letter and the vision is the door at which the letter's speaker stands: 'the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God's creation', stands and knocks, ready to eat with anyone hearing his voice, who opens, and with whom he will eat. (Apocalypse 3.14, 20), These are distinctly Eucharistic constructs, carried over to the following text since the 'open door' into heaven is next mentioned (Apocalypse 4.1). There is no doubt then, that the last letter performs a role similar to, if not the same as, the seventh episodes in the following three series. All are teleological; the seventh seal likewise cedes to its subsequent series (Apocalypse 8.1-2), with a vision of the heavenly worship. In Apocalypse 11.19, the seventh trumpet is followed by a description similar to the previous portraits of 'God's temple in heaven' after the series of letters (Apocalypse 4.5 emphasis added), and seals (Apocalypse 8.2), although chapters 12-14 intervene before the final sevenfold series, that of the vials. The last image of the heavenly throne occurs after the series of vials (Apocalypse 16.17-21), the effect of which virtually trumps all three previous comparable occasions.

MARK

5 BAPTISM-EUCHARIST AND THE IMMEDIATE PRESENT