Metalogos The Gospels of Thomas & Philip & Truth

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,
271