Gospels of Thomas and Philip and Truth - Syriac Christian Church

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
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