www.metalog.org/files/a_image.html
 
(4) Angel, Image and Symbol

        The remarkable angel/image analysis woven thru the three Coptic Gospels proposes replacing [A] the ‘worldly’ frame of reference (paradigm, protocol, model, program, vocabulary) with [B] a ‘celestial’ frame of reference (paradigm, protocol, model, program, vocabulary). According to the former, we are electronic machines in a material universe; according to the latter, we are eternal spirits in the mind of God, reflecting his imagination in our five senses.

        I. (Th 5 84) Nothing is hidden; our sensory images do not disguise anything ulterior— that is, there is nothing behind or beyond or within them. In philosophical terms, there is no material substratum underlying what is perceived. So in his superlative study, Claude Tresmontant states that ‘biblical metaphysics is characterized by the absence of the negative concept of matter.... The Hebrew tradition ... uncompromisingly affirms the goodness of reality, of the sensible world, of created things.... [Thus] the Hebrew conception of the sensible insofar as it differs from the Greek, is [of] a world in which the idea of “matter” does not occur.... Hebrew is a very concrete language.... It has no word for “matter” nor for “body” [as contrasted with “soul”], because these concepts do not cover any empirical realities. Nobody ever saw any “matter” nor a “body”, such as they are defined by substantial dualism. The sensible elements— wood, iron, water— are not “matter”; they are sensible realities.... If we wish to refer to the sensible as “matter”, there can be no objection. It is just a question of words. But then we must make quite sure of our meaning and not refer to ... an inconceivable “material substance”.’ (Biblio.18; in the Middle Ages, the Jewish philosophers adopted the term mlg [golem: embryo; only in Ps 139:16] to signify matter)

        II. (Th 19 22 36 50 67 80 83, Ph 24 26 81 84 95) Starting with this implicit axiom that there can be no such thing as ‘matter’ (that being, in our modern phrase, an essentially non-referential term), the texts proceed to designate our entire sensory field as ‘imagery’ (‘icons’). This latter therefore serves as a collective term for what recent philosophers have called ‘phenomena’ or ‘sense-data’— including one’s interior soliloquy, memories, emotions and fantasies, as well as those perceptions which comprise one's individual incarnation together with its empirical environment.

        III. (Th 37 42, Ph 9 30 47 85 112) But imagery logically presupposes consciousness. One's correspondingly juxtaposed individual ego is then designated as an ‘angel’, a pure awareness which like a mirror ‘reflects’ (contemplates) its spacio-temporal complex of sensory images. In this way, the angel is said to be ‘mated’ with its imagery. Furthermore, as all space and time are merely relations among the images, the angel is itself non-spacio-temporal or ‘eternal’; thus Jn 5:19 [extrapolated]: A Son ‘can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing’; also Lk 20:34-36!

        IV. (Mt 18:10, Th 5 15 17 52 59 76 91, Ph 65 107) Therefore there is a Universal Consciousness corresponding to the meta-totality of all imagery; this superego is by definition God (Gen 1:26, ‘in our imagination’).¹ Each person or angel is thus like a mirror in the mind of God, individually reflecting in his five senses the plethora of the divine imagination.  (This importantly does not entail that everyone be explicitly cognizant of that relation, which presumably requires instruction by the Logos.) There is here a lovely word-play on EIKWN: our sensory images are themselves holy icons. (¹Victor Hugo, Les Misérables: ‘All the aspects of things are thoughts of God’; Anton Chekhov, The Sea Gull: ‘The common soul of the world is the I.’)

        V. Thus, regarding the primordial query of Thales of Miletus (625-546 BC) as to the basic substance of the perceptible Universe— from which all subsequent scientific and philosophical inquiry arose— Christ appears to have taught that it is composed of God’s imagination.

        VI. (Jn 5:19, Th 75, Ph 6 32 40 93 130 143) To know oneself as essentially a reflection of imagery in the mind of God, is then to know that one is ‘eternally born in the Bridal-Chamber’ of the mystical union of the Two into One: the Spirit with the Light, the Father with the Mother, the Bridegroom with the Bride¹, and Christ with the Totality. (¹recalling the Song of Songs)

        VII. (Th 83, Ph 78, Tr 8 17) But a (visual) mirror is itself a type of image, not somehow separate from the visual field. Just so are the two, the angel and the image, united: each individual is a unitary reflection within the divine imagery. And the incarnate Christ  is proposed as the perfect mirror-image (‘face-form’) of the Father, in which God beholds himself ideally reflected. We ourselves, on the other hand, are intended by God as imperfect— though perfectible (Mt 5:48, Lk 1:6, Tr 53)— mirror-images in his imagination.

        VIII. (Jn 1:1-3, Ph 10 11 13 25 72 136, Tr 43) Remaining to be considered would be the entire topic of semantics, which is to say of the logos or meaning itself; what is it precisely that characterizes those images— sounds, pictures, gestures, inscriptions, etc., or thoughts thereof— which serve as specifically linguistic icons or ‘symbolic images’? And in what sense is an incarnate person a logos (and Christ the perfect Logos)? A sentence is, after all, itself a complex of images (whether physical or mental) which is being put to a communicative use; so we would presumably be saying that each incarnation is a divine communication (and Christ the perfect communication). Are then propositions and their components perhaps, like the persons who use them, essentially reflectional? This would imply that the descriptive meaning of language consists in a polydimensional ‘mirroring’ of its possible denotations— just as the identity of a person consists in his reflecting his own imagery and in his being a reflection (incarnation) of God. Here we would have to analyze the various interrelations of at least six parallel binaries: ego/imagery, substance/attribute, subject/object, subject/predicate, active/passive and variable/function— both among individuals and regarding the Godhead.

        IX. Regarding only the syntactical structure which is required e.g. in order to format noun-phrases and verb-phrases, we might well think that a person's being essentially a subjective mirroring of objective images could in itself enable him inherently to understand the subject-predicate as well as the active-passive (Jn 5:19) grammatical forms. This would perhaps help to explain the necessarily innate linguistic capacity of children (thus Noam Chomsky) to understand, generate and transform new sentences in the language.

        X. Children, however, assuredly learn single words before they learn sentences; so individual words are indeed primitive in language. Now, since a word is an image (sound, inscription, etc.), we might raise the question whether there is a significant logical parallel between such ordinary linguistic icons and computer icons. For the latter— far from being mere pictures— represent files of programs as well as of data; so we might hypothesize that a word is a type of image which designates a file either of data (including images) or of a program. Thus men will, quite naturally, have made computers as simplified models of their own rationality. (Cf. Alan Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Mind, 1950: ‘In the process of trying to imitate an adult human mind, we are bound to think a good deal about the process which has brought it to the state that it is in’; NB: ordinary language is generally analog, i.e. has continuous rather than digital truth-functions, whereas modern computers function in a binary calculus.)

        XI. Such a unique and extraordinary metaphysic, which might be called SPIRITUAL IDEALISM, has significant parallels with (1) the Neoplatonism of Plotinus in his Enneads; (2) George Berkeley's philosophy of Subjective Idealism, according to which ‘sensible things cannot exist otherwise than in a mind or spirit; whence ... there must be some other Mind wherein they exist’ [Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous];  (3) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz' schema of ourselves as monads ‘mirroring’ the Universe, with God as the Supreme Monad [Monadology, 56]; (4) the ego/phenomena analysis of Immanuel Kant, where the ‘unity of consciousness preceding all empirical data,... the transcendental unity of apperception’ is in essential polarity with ‘the [sensory] manifold of all our intuitions’ [Critique of Pure Reason, A106-7]— see especially his eloquent ‘transcendental hypothesis’ [A779/B807]; (5) Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.64, Notebooks 1914-1916 [7.VIII.16, 2.IX.16], and Philosophical Investigations [#373, ‘Theology as grammar’]; (6) Martin Buber's I and Thou— see also William James's prior The Will to Believe: ‘The universe is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou, if we are religious’; (7) Hans Reichenbach's The Philosophy of Space & Time [Dover Books, New York, n/d]; (8) Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception; and (9) much traditional Oriental epistemology: Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist [recall Th 30!]— thus e.g. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism [Second Series]: ‘The entire structure of [Mahayana] Buddhist philosophy is based on an idealistic monism’; compare also the polymorphic incarnationism of the Bhagavad Gita, 11:5: ‘Behold my forms in hundreds and thousands— diverse, divine, of many colors and shapes’.

        XII. O LOGOS TWN EIKWN: THE MEANING OF THE IMAGES. A person is the consciousness of his/her particular set of sensory images, some or all of which are symbolic; God is the universal consciousness of all imagery and symbolism.

1. Ego is consciousness (subjectivity, passivity, substance, noumenon)
.....1.1 of images: things
.....1.2 of meaning: concepts
.....1.3 of oneself and other persons: incarnations
2. Imagery is sensory (objectivity, activity, attributes, phenomena)
.....2.1 consciousness and imagery are interdefined
.....2.2 the five senses
..........2.21 NB emotions are symbolic feelings
.....2.3 perception
..........2.31 we perceive our incarnations and their environment
...............2.311 two persons can and do perceive the selfsame image
..........2.32 we communicate via perceived symbols
..........2.33 coexistence = space
.....2.4 memory
..........2.41 memories are images from past perceptions
..........2.42 change = time
.....2.5 imagination/fantasy
..........2.51 hyperdimensionality
..........2.52 volition is choice among imagined actions (deliberation)
...............2.521 legality, ethics
...............2.522 Mosaic/Christlike as legal/moral norms
...............2.523 pardon/forgiveness transcends individual value-systems
..........2.53 karma is analog, not binary
...............2.531 thus e.g. Mt 25 as a binary parable of an analog event
.....2.6 dreams, visions, hallucinations
3. Meaning is symbolism (rationality, logos)
.....3.1 a symbol is an image which represents something(s)
..........3.11 e.g. utterances, gestures, pictures, alphabets, musical scores
..........3.12 a symbol can be perceived, remembered, fantasized, dreamt, etc.
.....3.2 all thought, language and communication are in symbolic imagery
.....3.3 a symbol can be either simpler, or more complex, than its referent
..........3.31 metaphors are overlapping symbols
..........3.32 parables are metaphorical stories
.....3.4 images can symbolize:
..........3.41 other imagery
..........3.42 other symbols
...............3.421 by definition: lexica, axioms, criteria
...............3.422 empirically: encyclopedias, information
...............3.423 by stipulation of criteria
....................3.4231 ethics
....................3.4232 art
....................3.4232 music
..........3.43 comparisons and modifications among images
...............3.431 qualitative: humanities, the arts
...............3.432 quantitative: mathematics, the sciences
..........3.44 propositional operations on symbols
...............3.441 predication (assertion)
...............3.442 conjunction, negation (truth-tables)
...............3.443 relations
..........3.45 programmatic operations on symbols
...............3.451 analog (practicality)
...............3.452 digital (computation)
..........3.46 persons
...............3.461 life is analog
.....3.5 ‘the logos of x’ = ‘the arrangement of x’
.....3.6 ‘the logos of «x»’ = ‘the symbolism of «x»’
.....3.7 logos = arrangement + symbolism
4. People are incarnate egos/angels/spirits
.....4.1 a person is a conscious/reflective complex of imagery
..........4.11 NB mirrors are themselves images which reflect other imagery
..........4.12 thus we perceive ourselves as reflecting complexes of imagery
.....4.2 its imagery is within the ego (as its content)
.....4.3 the ego is within its imagery (as its reflectivity)
..........4.31 hence between ego and imagery there is reciprocity, not duality
.....4.4 ‘I am the awareness of this (reflective/symbolic) imagery’
..........4.41 this is the angel mated to its iconology
.....4.5 animals also are incarnations (¹ reincarnations)
.....4.6 God is the Universal Consciousness
..........4.61 our Universe is the imagination of God, ‘the cinema in his mind’
..........4.62 thus the universal complexity is within the divine simplicity
..........4.63 ecology is sacred
...............4.631 Christ as the gardener (Jn 20:15)
.....4.7 each person is an incarnation of God
..........4.71 all are face-forms of the universal Father/Mother
5. Totality
.....5.1 of images: meta-imagery, the Universe
.....5.2 of consciousness: meta-ego, God
.....5.3 of symbolisms: meta-logos, Meaningfulness
6. Trinity
.....6.1 the Father of the images (the Bridegroom; creation, incarnation)
.....6.2 the Mother of the spirits (the Bride; birth, consciousness)
.....6.3 the Childhood of ourselves (the Sons & Daughters of the Bridal Chamber)
..........6.31 Brother/Sisterhood and compassion
7. Unity
.....7.1 the incarnate Christ symbolizes the Godhead:

.....7.2 contemplation
.....7.3 repose