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In verse 26 of Chapter Four of The Gospel of John (τὸ κατὰ Ἰωάννην εὐαγγέλιον) Jesus, speaking to a Samarian woman, is recorded as saying: Ἐγώ εἰμ ιὁ λαλῶν σοι. The first part – Ἐγώ εἰμ – literally means “I am.” Most translations insert ‘he’ – “I am he” – which in my view seems to somewhat lesson the impact of what Jesus says, which is that he just “is”, beyond causality itself and thus beyond any manifestation of Being – on Earth – as “a being”, be such a ‘being’ the mortal Messias or some other mortal. Expressed less philosophically, Jesus says that it is the divinity who is speaking to her: “it is I AM who is speaking to you,” which expression is what I, during my short perambulation as a Catholic monk wrote, near the verse in the margin of my copy of τὸ κατὰ Ἰωάννην εὐαγγέλιον.
Revisiting such marginalia decades later during my translation of and commentary on eight tractates of the Corpus Hermeticum, I began to translate the Gospel itself and which translation and the accompanying commentary given the relevance of the Gospel to particular verses in some of those tractates, for example φῶς καὶ ζωή ἐστιν ὁ θεὸς καὶ πατήρ, ἐξ οὗ ἐγένετο ὁ Ἄνθρωπος (phaos and Life are the theos and the father from whence the human came into being) from the Pœmandres tractate and ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν, καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἦν τὸ φῶς τῶν ἀνθρώπων καὶ τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει καὶ ἡ σκοτία αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν (Who was Life and which Life was the Phaos of human beings. And the Phaos illuminates the dark and is not overwhelmed by the dark) from Chapter One of John.
This led to further questions some of which I discuss here.
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Image credit:
Icon of Jesus Pantocrator, Δέησις Mosaic
Hagia Sophia, c. 1260 CE
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Some Notes On De Vita Coelitus Comparanda
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The genesis of this essay was some correspondence from a reader of my translation of Tabula Smaragdina Hermetis who enquired about the Latin text of the two illustrations from a manuscript of De Vita Coelitus Comparanda that I included. In response, I translated the relevant passages, in the process discovering some interesting connections to the Corpus Hermeticum, alchemy, and the Art (Latin Ars) of μαγικός as understood by Pliny the Elder, Ovid, and Tacitus, with Pliny in Book XXX, iii relating that Homer’s Odyssey is based upon that Art and recounts a legend that Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, and Plato, all journeyed abroad to learn that Art.
Image Credit:
Galaxy UGC 12591. NASA, ESA, Hubble Space telescope.
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Image credit:
Icon of Jesus Pantocrator, Δέησις Mosaic
Hagia Sophia, c. 1260 CE
A pdf version of my now defunct davidmyatt dot info website (as of February 2024) is available enabling the complete site to be accessed, and searched, by means of a stand-alone pdf reader or by opening the file in a web-browser such as Firefox.
Website: Portable Document Format
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Image credit:
κρατῆρ ἡ μονάς, Tractate IV, Mercvrii Trismegisti Pœmandres, Paris (1554)
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In my recent (2023) essay A Sacramental Link? I mentioned that my interpretation of the Gospel of John inclined me suggest that Johannine Christianity was “the way of humility, of forgiveness, of love, of a personal appreciation of the divine, of the numinous; and a spiritual, interior, way somewhat different from past moralistic interpretations.”
My interpenetration of that text is however just one of thousands over centuries with many of those other interpretations, of that and the other Gospels and the Scriptures in general, causing schisms, conflicts, and accusations of heresy as in the case of the Alexandrian priest Arius (born c.250, died 336 AD) who voiced an interpretation of the difference between the denotatum θεὸς and the denotatum ὁ θεὸς in, for instance the Gospel of John, leading to that interpretation being denounced as heretical.
Which returns us to the problems of exegesis and denotata, and the axioms of my weltanschauung of pathei-mathos.
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An eclectic selection by some Oxfordian folk of some of my post-2010 writings, many to do with Christianity and religion. The 355 page tome also has some articles by them speculating on why such writings of mine have been and are ignored both within and external to academia.
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Would being connected again to the ‘source of grace’ through the Catholic sacrament of confession and Holy Communion provide expiation for past transgressions and be cathartic? Possibly, given that certain passages from the Gospel of John have somewhat resonated with me since I began the task, in 2017, of translating that Gospel.
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Image credit:
Icon of Jesus Pantocrator, Δέησις Mosaic
Hagia Sophia, c. 1260 CE
The Gospel According To John
Chapter 1 -5
Translation and Commentary
Corpus Hermeticum: Eight Tractates
Translation and Commentary
The following items are now available in print from amazon dot com and amazon.co.uk
1. Mystic Philosophy Of David Myatt. Third Edition, 84 pages. ISBN 979-8392761791
2. DW Myatt. The Gospel According to John. Chapters 1 – 5. Translation And Commentary. 57 pages. ISBN 979-8393182656
3. Rachael Stirling. The Peregrinations Of David Myatt: Ideologist. 104 pages 979-8392990900
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Tu Es Diaboli Ianua
(pdf)
Contents
° Exordium
° Part I. The Johannine Weltanschauung And The Numinous
° Part II. A Paganus Apprehension
° Part III. Numinous Metaphysics
° Appendix I. Logos Δ. The Esoteric Song
° Appendix II. A Note On The Term Jews In The Gospel of John
° Appendix III. The Human Culture Of Pathei-Mathos
Exordium
Given that the religion termed Christianity has, for over six centuries, been influential in respect of the ethos and spirituality of the culture of the West – often to the extent of having been described as manifesting that ethos and that spirituality – one of the metaphysical questions I have saught to answer over the past forty years is whether that religion is, given our thousands of years old human culture of pathei-mathos, a suitable presencing of the numinous. If it is not, then could that religion be reformed, by developing a Johannine Weltanschauung given that the Gospel According to John – τὸ κατὰ Ἰωάννην εὐαγγέλιον – arguably presents a somewhat different perspective on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth than the three other synoptic Gospels. Would such a reformation be a suitable presencing of the numinous, and if not, then what non-Christian alternatives – such as a paganus metaphysics – exist, and what is the foundation of such an alternative?
This essay thus compliments my book Classical Paganism And The Christian Ethos. As in that book, I have made extensive use of my translations of certain classical authors and of various hermetic texts as well as the Gospel of John, and given that those translations are currently quite accessible I have not except on a few occasions explained my interpretations of certain Greek or Latin terms since those interpretations are explained in the associated commentaries.
As noted elsewhere, I prefer the term paganus – a transliteration of the classical Latin, denoting as it does connection to Nature, to the natural, more rural, world – in preference to ‘pagan’ since paganus is, in my view and in respect of the Greco-Roman ethos, more accurate given what the term ‘pagan’ now often denotes.
The title of the essay, Tu Es Diaboli Ianua – “You Are The Nexion Of The Deofel”, literally, “You are nexion Diabolos ” – is taken from Tertullian’s De Monogamia, written at the beginning of the second century AD.
David Myatt
Winter Solstice 2017
Image credit: Attic red-figure vase, c. 500-450 BCE, depicting The Horae. Antikenmuseen, Berlin
David Myatt 
In Regard To The Divine
0
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In regard to Christianity and the Divine in general do we human beings really need anything more than the musical introduction to and the first Chorus of JS Bach’s St John Passion? [1]
Lasting, as it generally does, less than ten minutes it to me at least so expresses, beyond words, beyond theology, beyond doctrine, and beyond all ideations, the allegory of the Passion of Jesus of Nazareth.
We seem to so easily forget, find excuses for, ignoring such a revelation; or more probably in our modern era we have never encountered such an intimation of the divine. Personally, I am not ashamed to admit that I found and still find the opening to be not only the most inspired human expression of Jesus and his life, reducing me as it always does to tears, but also a wordless remembrance of what the Passion, and – sans the theology of whatever religion – of what divinity-presenced personally means and can mean.
David Myatt
Feria sexta in Parasceve
2024 CE
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[1] Chorus:
Herr, unser Herrscher, dessen Ruhm
In allen Landen herrlich ist!
Zeig uns durch deine Passion,
Daß du, der wahre Gottessohn,
Zu aller Zeit,
Auch in der größten Niedrigkeit,
Verherrlicht worden bist!
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Image credit:
Icon of Jesus Pantocrator, Δέησις Mosaic
Hagia Sophia, c. 1260 CE
Filed in Christianity, David Myatt, DW Myatt, τὸ κατὰ Ἰωάννην εὐαγγέλιον, Jesus Of Nazareth, New Testament, Novum Testamentum Graece, Personal Comments, Way of Pathei-Mathos
Tags: Catholic Church, Christianity, David Myatt, Evangel of Jesus of Nazareth, Gospel of John, τὸ κατὰ Ἰωάννην εὐαγγέλιον, Novum Testamentum Graece, Numinous Religion, Way of Pathei-Mathos