Gospels of Thomas and Philip and Truth - Syriac Christian Church

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 ΕΙΚΩΝ: 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
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