Category: Symbols Turning

Is it ‘given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 13:11)? How would you know? Given that all knowing is in signs, what does it mean for any knowledge to be given?

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— The Restored Finnegans Wake, 493

What is given is granted by one self and taken by another: a triadic relation, like the act of meaning. But what is given is hidden both before and after it is taken: it is taken for granted, implicit, enfolded, enveloped, buried within the context of the one to whom it is given.

Another parable spake he unto them; The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened. All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them: That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world.

— Matthew 13:33-5 (KJV)

The givenness of the Word is inseparable from its hiddenness, for that which pervades the world is necessarily inseparable from it, like yeast mixed with flour, or the bubbles from the bread. A turning sign conceals its meaning from those unable to read it, by revealing it in terms they have not learned to hear; the signs we are prepared to hear conceal all the others buried in the message.

The world does not need more books as much as it needs deep readers; and what they most need to read is the book of nature. Turning symbols can be read as a guide to reading the world, to creative perception.

The deep reader of a symbolic text withdraws into a virtual (model) world, but her experience within that world is meaningful to the extent that it makes a difference to the percepts or precepts implicated with her practice in the real world.

The disciples said to Jesus, ‘We know that you will depart from us. Who is to be our leader?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Wherever you are, you are to go to James the righteous, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being.’

— Thomas 12 (Lambdin)

In the Gospel of Thomas, seekers after an authoritative leader do not usually get such a straightforward answer from Jesus; indeed the very next saying (Chapter 6) presents the role of Jesus himself as a mystery. Saying 13 also elevates Thomas, not James, to the highest position. Perhaps, as Helmut Koester suggested, Sayings 12 and 13 were meant to juxtapose James as an exoteric or ‘ecclesiastical’ authority figure with the esoteric understanding represented by Thomas (Valantasis 1997, 74). Or perhaps they are later accretions to the gospel, as DeConick (2007a) argues.

Saying 12 is the only mention of James in the Gospel of Thomas; he may be the brother of Jesus also mentioned in Matthew 13:55, Mark 6:3 and Galatians 1:19, but we can’t be sure of that. So perhaps we should read the description of him in this saying as the essential clue to what qualifies him (or anyone) as the right leader for a community in need of one: he is the one ‘for whose sake heaven and earth came into being.’ But this sounds very much like the Tsaddik or ‘Righteous One’ of the Jewish mystical tradition, or Traherne’s ‘sole heir of the whole world’, or the ‘king over the All’ of Thomas 3, which the seeker himself becomes after passing through dismay and astonishment. So for this group of disciples, James is to be the external sign of the primal person.

Language is a very difficult thing to put into words.

— Voltaire

It is obvious enough that translation into another language can change the meaning of a text, despite the best efforts of the translator to be “faithful” to the original. But even the copying process which has brought most ancient scriptures to their readers in the original language can change the original text. Continue reading Transmission and gospel

In his ‘Afterword’ to the Nag Hammadi Library (Robinson 1988, 547), Richard Smith gives this account of Harold Bloom’s hermeneutic theory:

Bloom’s argument is that literary influence always proceeds by ‘a deliberately perverse misreading … an act of creative correction, of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism whose purpose is to clear away the precursor so as to open a space for oneself.’

Continue reading Writing wrongs

Some sayings in the Gospel of Thomas appear ‘cryptic’ at first – that is, difficult to decode, which serves to remind us that the message is coded.

Jesus said, ‘Blessed is the lion that a person will eat and the lion will become human. And anathema is the person whom a lion will eat and the lion will become human.’

— Thomas 7 (5G)

Continue reading The lion code

Interpretations at any level are selective processes, and conscious selection is grounded in natural selection. Continue reading The fountain of youth

Walt Whitman, addressing ‘Workmen and Workwomen’, has this to say about sacred texts: Continue reading Shedding leaving reading returning

In one version of his essay on ‘The Fixation of Belief’ (see Chapter 7), Peirce suggested that religious authority, or rather the ‘decay’ of its influence, prepares the ground for the emergence of dialogue, or ‘fermentation of ideas,’ where reasoning carries more weight than anyone’s authority. Continue reading Composting religions