No real news flash.

[novapsyche]

As can be surmised from my last post, I consider myself an Old Testament Christian.

What does that mean? Well, I believe that Christ is the Logos of the Lord of the Old Testament. The Lord of the Old Testament:

* enters and affects the physical world as He sees fit.
* communicates to and through visionaries (Abraham, Israel, Enoch, Moses, Elijah, Samuel, Ezekiel, John the Baptist, Paul).
* has several aspects, including Sophia and Shekinah.

Part of the New Testament covenant declares that the Holy Spirit is evidence of Christ after the resurrection. But what is the Holy Spirit, and what is meant by "resurrection"? The Gospel of Truth says that the Holy Spirit is the tongue of God. The Holy Spirit is the Tongue, and the Logos is the Word, and God is the Breath. And this universe is the poetry that is uttered thereby.

As for the resurrection, I will turn to Harold Bloom, in his Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection:


One way of seeing just how radical The Gospel of Thomas truly becomes in a Western world still overtly professing institutional and historical Christianity is to contrast it with Saint Augustine's interpretation of Saint Paul's "spiritual body." In The City of God, Augustine says that this spiritual body is one's own body but only when "subject to the spirit, readily offering total and wonderful obedience." In the Gospel of Thomas:

Jesus said, "I am not your teacher. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring that I have tended.
--translated by Marvin Meyer

Intoxication is rather different from obedience; you can be obedient either in the physical or the spiritual world, but not in the extended interval of resurrection, which is an imaginal world in the rather rigorous sense derived by Henry Corbin from his Sufi precursors. When Enoch walked with God, and he was not, because God took him, we are in that middle world, the realm of the Resurrection Body, of the angels of prophetic dreams, of walking with Jesus, of Gnosis throughout the ages. As Corbin says, this mediating power of the imaginal is a cognitive force in its own right, though unrecognized by most modes of philosophy. We are in an intermediate realm between pure matter and pure spirit. Empiricists and supernaturalists alike may dismiss this middle sphere as a fiction, but imaginative men and women, whether literary in their orientation or not, will recognize that the imaginal world exists, and is not fantasy or wish fulfillment. I set aside the question of prayer when I make these remarks, which are neither Gnostic nor agnostic in their design. THe imagination of the Resurrection Body need be neither a prayer nor a poem nor a desperate lunge at a materialist revivification; it need not be myth nor metaphor nor part of a Jungian cult of a divinized unconscious.

[...] That "prophetic insight or divination" is the imaginal at work interpreting what essentially is our common (and commonplace) existence.

[...] Love, in every sense that is not just what Freud named as the sexual drive, clearly inhabits the world of formation or the imaginal. . . . Love, interpreting the body of the other, participates in a divination or insight that should be called "prophetic."

Comments

[liquidgrey.livejournal.com]

The Gospel of Truth says that the Holy Spirit is the tongue of God. The Holy Spirit is the Tongue, and the Logos is the Word, and God is the Breath. And this universe is the poetry that is uttered thereby.

I like that image - it's seems a highly accurate portrayal, from what I've seen of the existential manifold.
beautiful thoughts.