19 of 70 the Complete Apocalypse an Icon for the Critics on Glas Michael Bolerjack

7/31/2019 19 of 70 the Complete Apocalypse an Icon for the Critics on Glas Michael Bolerjack

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In the days of Camus and Derrida, there was explication

de texte. That will have been approached here, while

escaping the suffocating necessity of a discursive

rhetoric. For any two things can be connected from any

distance under any rule. The text I propose for

examination is the title implicated in the top lefthand corner of the page. I need not go into the history

of the production of the title of the work, for there

are texts upon texts and their contexts, which I must

effract. How the title was arrived at, from whence it

was derived, in-volves the catastrophe of the end of

the world which I am witnessing and recording from

here, in this text. We all are, basically, from our own

angles of view, sort of like the man at the end of

Gabriel Garcia Marquezs solitude, who is deciphering

the text of the secret as the apocalypse unfolds. Yet,

let us keep our hands clean and not be negligent, for


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the secret of the text is neither magical nor given to

appropriation, neither pornographic nor pyrotechnical.

It waits on patience, and purity, perseverance and the

peace that surpasses all under-standing. It is not donein a fever, or in a sweat, but in measured strains, by

number and weight, neither a march nor a waltz, far

rather like Davids prophetic dance before the Ark of

the Lord, not frenzied, nor fraught, but rapturous,

candid, faithful and confident. That the world does

dance away its final hours on the edge of a volcano

almost without quite knowing what it is doing, for none

can be sure, our certainty forgotten, is the spectacle

and the distraction that would, if it could, keep the

knowledge locked away, but the truth will out, whether

the world will or know. That the world is standing on

its head and must be set right, and that Derrida did

this in his own way, a way parallel to that of Camus,

and not opposed, is simply the way I see it. That

Derridas last texts concern, I think, sovereignty and

the beast, will not go unnoticed, nor the myth of

Sisyphus, the problem of the suicide of the church, and

the crux of the matter contained in the juxtaposition

of two words in almost any dictionary of the English

language, that is to say,

Deconsecration

Deconstruction


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Which hold the key to the recent history of the world

and the fate of the church.

Seeing patterns is making connections. In the gameof connect the dots, one finds the hidden design amid

the random chaos, in order to reveal the hidden

meaning. If the world has an author, if the text has an

author, then we have always presumed that there is an

inherent pattern or meaning amidst the apparent chaos

of our lives and in the works of literature in which we

see ourselves reflected. However, if there is no

author, then one may connect the dots in whatever

manner one chooses, not finding but inventing a design.

I think we have reached that point. Not that there is

no author, but that things such as characters or people

or plots or history are not the paradigm of our

research, but language itself. And perhaps still the

book as such and authority remain a subject of question

and concern, for we know that as we write we may well

be written. This is true in genetics, mathematics,

physics, which involve writing or codes, that is to say

symbolization, something at once both real and

symbolic, literal and more than literal, the ideality

of design. We do not know where the design came frombut we see it. These words are letters that are

arranged in patterns that convey meaning, under ideal

conditions, the framing context of the mode of the

reader and other factors. All of this I say is not the


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explication de texte, but rather the interpretation,

the other part of studies in the French schools in the

time of Camus and Derrida. Coupled as they were in the

curriculum, explication and interpretation wereanalogical to the roles of faith and reason in

theological thought, in that they seemed to presuppose

one another. That they are still viable, and are

distinct disciplines, may be in doubt. Perhaps there is

nothing but a generalized economy of writing at this

time. Still, we seem to accept in fact some

restrictions as necessary, bending the rules where we

desire, but still within a kind of framework. I cannot

speak for all. There may be types of discourse unknown

to me that operate in far different ways. I do not

know. One limit case or promontory in that regard is

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, which in turn inspired

the Glas of Jacques Derrida. These texts rewrote the

codes or rules regarding literature and philosophy,

working out of the command and control authorial

paradigm, which is itself based on competition, into a

collaborative creativity which does not dictate meaning

but suggest it, dream-like and hypnotically, with an

almost fascist connotation to the collaborators. On the

other hand, I have found that the work I have beenengaged in is not limited to these modes, but requires

a combination of the contemplative and the critical, on

the part of both the author and the reader, for the

advent of an economy of meaning that is catholic to


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take place, that is to say, a universality, as opposed

to the authority of any Roman Empire.

The kind of writing that Joyce and Derrida excelledin is characterized by the cognizance and exploitation

of what I call the Ultra-structure, a term I have

borrowed from science and use to describe what I will

sometimes refer to as the Glossolalia of the text, a

reading and writing in tongues, as in the Wake, an

activity that is summed in the word Icon in the seven

word title that I placed at the head of this text. As

in the Bible, there is speaking in tongues, an

expression of meaning given by the Holy Spirit at

Pentecost to the nascent Church, and which subsists

today even in catholicism in some out of the way

places. But just as one may say that the whole economy

as such, all economies in principle, have transformed

from restricted to general ones, and I here refer to

Derridas early writings on the subject, the gift of

tongues has, in my opinion, also shifted from a

strictly oral or verbal expression to the modes of

reading and writing, and that in fact textuality itself

is this in some way. If language is the house of being,

as has been said, which is another way to speak of thelanguages descended from the catastrophe that took

place at Babel, at which time God deconstructed

himself, according to Derrida, then God is in

language, as the Word, logos, as truth and meaning, but


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in other ways as well. From Holderlin we derive the

scene of reading as a quiet, holy act. I project a

general-ization then of scripture as such, perhaps as

Derrida did the Messiah. Blake said everything thatlives is holy, and the word, language, is a living

thing, and though often put to profane and secular use,

which is an understatement of the greed and pornography

that engulf us, yet our texts are basically sacred in a

way, even though impure and contaminated, or perhaps

even not despite this but because of it. I have

advanced a logic over the course of my work that hinges

on the understanding of the necessity of contradiction

and it applies in this case. The Ultrastructure in

language cannot be without being inclusive, both

blessing and cursing, creating and defiling, and so on.

It is the principle of connection, the condition of

possibility for it. It is potency in relation to act,

to speak in quasi-Thomistic terms. When I first

discovered the word Ultra-structure, I used it

exclusively to describe the numerical, not the

alphabetical, and saw that numbers need no translation,

and so are privileged carriers of meaning. This insight

was crucial in the advancing of the theory concerning

the Apocalypse which turns on the meaning of a numberin the Book of Revelation. I need not rehearse that for

you now, having already covered that ground in previous

texts, but promise you the subject will have impacted

the work you are now reading. However, I will come at


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it by way of the Exegesis and Eisegesis of the iconic

seven words of my text, An Icon from an Evening in

Glas. But before turning to the explication itself, I

would like to preface it with a statement concerningthe terms Exegesis and Eisegesis. They mean in their

etymological back-grounds in Greek to lead out of and

to lead into and are used especially in the context of

describing Biblical inter-pretation. When one reads

ones own ideas into scripture, one is said to be

reading eisegetically, while when one reads what is

really there one is reading with proper exegesis. On

the other hand, Joyce and Derrida and the writers

following them eschew such an opposition, de-

constructing this polarity, rendering it meaningless.

In the explication of the seven word text that is to be

accomplished, the traditional idea of Exegesis and

Eisegesis, while not being ignored, will be redefined

by my practice. I will say in advance that all of this

bears on the conversion of leading into a kind of

following, and that interpretation and explication is

always more of the following of the seams in the semes,

rather than a seeming to lead the text toward its

inherent meaning, which is always univocal or

equivocal. The text itself is, if not infinite at least

indefinite, and cannot be pinned down to a set of

controlled meanings or readings. There is no exhaustive

Exegesis. One can say this is for a mystical reason,

when reading the Bible or other scriptures, and in my


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theory of the book in general, all texts become the

scripture that they are, and as such may be read as

having always more than one meaning, the old model

including moral and mystical levels in the hierarchy ofinterpretation, which my own work several years ago

drew on. The network of language exists at both the

hierarchical level, while at the same time, and

contradictorily, subsisting in the text as a leveling,

an evening out, I might say. This is the direction of

Ultrastructure or Metasignification, which is neither

less than nor more than nor equal to another, while at

the same time, and contradictorily, being the parallel

or prime of that other traditional, re-stricted,

hierarchical method of inter-pretation that

characterizes theology and its regimes. By being

parallel to the tradition, which has become lost in the

labyrinth of its own desire, not only is place given,

and magnitude recognized, but direction is now

discerned, without which we will not arrive. Our

arrival is not derived from the tradition, but survives

it. One need not be disconsolate over the loss of

meaning, for something is received in its stead, the

way to a let us say kingdom let us say of ends that the

tradition indicated while at the same time preventing.To put it in theological terms, the Romans do not

practice what they preach, and so cannot reach the goal

set by the savior, which is neither a leading in nor

out of the text, but a following. Deny yourselves, take


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up your crosses and follow me. Jesus asks not leaders

but followers of the good gospel.

Now, at this point in the text, if it were a retrometa-fiction, a second narrator would interrupt and

comment on what has come before, and the text would

explicate and interpret itself. It seems to me that

something of this sort is called for, because of an

apparent faux pas on my part in the preceding, that is,

my assertion of the relationship between Glossolalia

and the word Icon. As I was re-reading what I had

written, I noticed right away the dissonance in the

assertion, and thought without doubt that the word Glas

makes much more sense as the symbol for Glossolalia

than the word Icon does. There is, in my apparent slip,

a crux, and so I inadvertently really went straight to

the heart of the matter, and upon reflection, decided

that the relationship between the word Glas and the

word Icon would be the appropriate site for launching

the engagement with the text to be explicated.

Glas, the title of Derridas monumental 1974 work,

is the word in French for the death knell, the tolling

of the church bells at a funeral. One may ask, whos

death? Indeed, it seemed in a way to me at the time I

read the English translation in 1986 to be simply the

tradition, or even Western culture, everything before

postmodernism. Now, it sounds to me different, the


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tolling of the bell, and involves a complete

reevaluation on my part of the meaning of Derridas

work, and the history, meaning and fate of the Church,

by which I mean the Roman Catholic. To say the tollingof the death knell is the Church itself mourning the

death of the Church itself is what I now discern, and

in this I reinterpret Derridas overall strategy to have

been always directed at the Supreme Pontiff in Rome.

Derrida took part in the deconstruction of the time, if

not leading it then at least presciently seeing the way

things could go and the way he wanted them to go, not

for the mere sake of enjoying the de-struction of the

world, but to indicate the crisis he, I think, saw

coming for and from the Catholic Church. The target of

Derridas attack was at first expressly logocentrism,

presence and propriety, valorizing writing over speech,

absence over presence, the other over the subject orthe self, scattering over gathering, the text over the

book; then, later, he took up the problem of religion

in his writings on the Messiah, justice, hospitality,

and the openness of the to come. Toward the end, he

wrote of what he termed globalatina-zation, and warned

against a projection of power on the Roman basis, and

posthumously mentions together in a title sovereignty

and the beast. It seems to me that Derrida was

approaching obliquely but steadily to an interpretation

of the death of the Church and to the apocalypse that I


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believe is underway.

The icon is a sometimes wordless word that also

sometimes contains within itself a text, a book opened,revealing an ancient script in a foreign languages. The

icon itself is an image in need of study, and whether

or not it has letters or words in it, is open to inter-

pretation and explication. I believe that, again to

eschew the relation of Exegesis and Eisegesis, the icon

reads us more than we read it. This can be re-applied

to texts generally, rather than being restricted to

only iconic images, and then it can be said that the

text reads us, explains us, and not the other way

around. In my discovery or positing of the

Ultrastructure I have found that this phenomenon has

occurred especially in what has become known as the

postmodern period, from roughly the second world war,

or the publication of the Wake in 1939, because of a

breakdown in the traditional orders. In the chaos that

may be but random chance, the thing, which I call also

Metasignification, takes place, whether in the mind or

out of the mind, I dont know, as the connecting of bits

and pieces to form patterns. We half-perceive and half-

create this new reality, as Wordsworth said. We are co-

creators of it. It sometimes seems magical or

schizophrenic, evil or crazy, or sublimely imaginative,

and weird or supernatural. There is something there in

the details of general textuality that can be seen if


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we look hard enough. Joyce had a genius for this

perceiving and creating, and by producing the chaos of

the Wake, gave a space for the Ultrastructure to be

projected into or discovered, as in an alchemicalexperiment. The icon of Glas by Derrida fuses the

ultrastructure with the traditional, forcing the order

itself to bear the weight of the creation of new things

within it, which is one aspect of what is called

deconstruction. The text is in a place somewhere

between rigid order and complete nonsense, a place of

lability, change and openness, of possibility that

deconstructs the closure of a set arrangement, allowing

constant re-invention, and bringing to light an

indefinite number of potential connections that cannot

be limited or closed off in principle, though in fact

for a written work to be, there must be some limits

found or applied, as the human subject itself needs an

identity, in order to not become lost or submerged in

the ever greater of the sea surrounding. But as mystics

tell us, our destiny is just that losing of oneself in

the infinite sea of God. Textuality is not the

divinity, nor is the internet, which are rather

simulacrum of eternity, which at least in a parallel

manner are breaking into the closed paradigm of humansociety and are translating us into another space that

is preparatory to the advent of the thing that is on

the other side of the apocalypse, a kingdom of peace,

the new age to come.


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At the outset of my text, in addition to the

promise of an explication of the seven word title, I

promised some interpretation of Derridas sovereign and

beast, of Camus and the myth of Sisyphus, and of what I

call the suicide of the Church, as well as something on

the importance of the relation between the words

Deconsecration

Deconstruction

which I think sum-up the problem of the church in the

modern world. Taking these in order, it is not, I

think, a coincidence that Derrida employs terms that

apply to the Antichrist, though the word coincidence

has become altogether meaningless in my world. Things

just simply are, in their weird ways, and I cannot

understand or explain how or why they happen. As I have

said elsewhere, I believe John Paul II is the beast of

the Book of Revelation, based on the interpretation of

the text, including an elucidation of the famous

number. That, if this is the case, as he was raised to

the status of the order of the blessed, then the

abomination of deso-lation has already occurred, and

the order of mass that takes place in November 2011 is

his image that speaks in order to be worshipped. It is

not clear to me, however, if John Paul II and Benedict

XVI were conscious they were doing what Revelation


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prophesied. It seems to me that the world and the

church were destined to be destroyed, or changed, by

God himself, but that this takes place in two ways,

which may compete with each other as a disjunctiveeither or, or may collaborate as a synthetic both and.

The world and the church began the final deconstruction

of themselves about the same time, in the 1960s, the

time of Derridas early work, of the Second Vatican

Council in Rome, and which is the date some, for

instance the critic Northrop Frye, point at as the

start of the postmodern period. The world stayed on its

course of de-construction, including even that of the

Soviet Union, but Rome did not, and under John Paul II,

beginning in 1978, began instead a worse thing than

deconstruction, that is to say, it began to

deconsecrate itself, which Derrida, I think, obliquely

points to in one of his last ideas, that of the worst.

This is taking place, in principle and in fact, by the

repudiation covertly of the highpoints of the theology

won at Vatican II, such as the inviolability of the

conscience, in the unending sex abuse scandals, and in

other more obscure, but perhaps more unholy things,

reaching back throughout Catholic history, concerning

lies and forgeries, money and murder. Again, I do not

know the intentions, only the results. In the Book of

Numbers, God tells Moses and Aaron that he himself

breaks his promise, after the people of God refuse to

enter the promised land, as Caleb and Joshua urged them


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to do. Instead, they would stone the men who had

scouted Canaan and found it indeed a land of milk and

honey, ripe for the taking. God wills that the people

fall in the wilderness over the next forty years, fornot listening to the men who told them that the

promised land had arrived, they needed only go in and

claim the victory that God would surely give. Something

like that has happened in our own day, with the

visionary men of Vatican II and their attempt at a

free, transformed catholicity, being rejected for the

thing the Roman Church has become, a disgrace. That

those of us who know this stand like Joshua and Caleb

in relation to the people of God is to me

incontrovertible, so we must urge now, go in, trust

God, the kingdom is yours, while realizing our plea

will probably be rejected, every people of God, new and

old, Jew and Catholic, always refusing. In this may be

seen the myth of Sisyphus, as well, that we roll the

rock up, only to see it roll back down, yet must do our

duty, as perhaps even the bishops and theologians of

Vatican II knew their leadership could be eventually

despised and ignored. I do not think the Church is

going to immediately cease to exist as a visible bricks

and mortar institution, and it will still have itsmoney and some power, but as a spiritual entity it is

ceasing to be. God, I believe, as in the case of the

rebellion in the wilderness, is not bound to fulfill

the covenant with this Church, and in fact, new Israel


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and old Israel are in the same position, typologically

in every way, just as the religious authorities, in the

days of Jesus, are the same type as now. In the time of

Jesus, whose name is really the same as Joshua, thepromised land or the kingdom of God was again

proclaimed, the thing was at hand, but through some

refusal or lack on the part of the people of God, it

was deferred, not because God chose to, but rather

because the Church herself did not claim the victory.

The situation became clear under Constantine, and more

so later, as the institution became involved in money

and politics. That God knew this beforehand, that the

people would betray him, not only among the Jews but at

a later time, is foretold in Daniel 12:7, when it is

said God will scatter the power of the holy people.

Indeed, the thing is at hand, a little earlier even

than Isaac Newton foresaw based on a calculation he

made of 1260 years after the coronation in 800 of

Charlemagne. No, it is 1260 years since the forgery of

the donation of Constantine, the fiction on which Rome

bases her authority, which was accomplished by 754. In

other words, the Deconsecration that began then will be

fulfilled now, and the death knell will toll, albeit

perhaps in silence, for the iconic Church that oncewas.

To go on from this point to an explication of the

little seven word text of the title seems a bit anti-


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climactic, but I will summarily mention a few things.

In the center of the square appears the words veni

roman, and in a cross-like formation there is the

indication f-ing roman, pointing to the bind of a

contradiction that concerns the final Pope to come,

called Peter the Roman in the prophecy of St. Malachy.

Whether he will fulfill the evil plan or expose it, I

do not know, but after him, the Church will be no more.

There are many other connections among the letters in

the design, including some chatter about anal icons,

or the essential anal aspect that is the condition of

possibility inherent to a thing for it to be analyzed.

The anal is a thing Derrida writes of in his Glas, and

in connection to religion. In his work, the IC and the

GL are opposed, the immaculate conception and the

siglum GL, and it is indicated in my design that IC and

GL had a son, something of an Onan, as is the typewritten of in de-construction, such as Rousseau. As

well, several women appear covertly in the text,

including Eve, Mary and the Greek earth mother Gaia or

Gaea. That in the center of the square an omen is

written concerning at least an I, and also other

things that can be construed into some sort of

narrative, if one desires, is given, considering there

are at least several characters involved in a kind of

conflict. But, that time has stopped and that

everything is connected, would have to be the principle

of any possible inter-pretation of the text-design. You


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may look and may find more in the seven word text, but

I have shown you at least this much.

I cannot say things are even at this point, whatthe leveling means, or if there has been some kind of

revenge, or getting even. I do think we are in the

evening, as one said, not dark yet, but getting there.

The world will deconstruct and the church deconsecrate,

and what will happen after that? We do not know, but

the Bible promises great things, the thousand year

kingdom of peace on earth in Revelation, and as also

Isaiah promises, a finale in which the lion lies down

with the lamb, not a violent catastrophe, but a

restoration of lost innocence. I think, in fact, the

part of the apocalypse that is catastrophic is almost

over, and the violence, for instance the absurd amount

in Mexico as I write, is an indication of the way the

matrix of technology, money, and fascism, all tied to a

grand corruption that may be seen in the useful

paradigm of collaboration, where all give their assent,

none dissent, and the thing itself, Rome or the

authority of an invisible hand, is seemingly

infallible. But if it cant be wrong, it must be wrong,

and if I must be mistaken, then I must be telling the

truth. Truth, if it is true, must always be

inconvenient, as we say, unsettling, disturbing,

opposed to the illusion, the madness, the evil. That

truth and lies stand side by side, good and evil, being


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and mere semblance, cannot be helped, but if justice

ever happens, as we hope, then the re-conciliation of

them will have taken place. Impossible, as Derrida

said, yet God alone does the impossible.

To conclude, I should speak of the seven word text-

design, An Icon from an Evening in Glas, in relation

to my work as a whole, which could bear that

inscription. The Icon Glas pair describe the struggle

by me with catholicism and de-construction, while the

word Evening invokes Hegels word in his Philosophy of

Right that Minervas owl of wisdom flies at dusk, an

indication of his awareness of the closure taking place

through the accomplishment in the dialectic of all

possible positions in the spectrum of thought. My work

finds itself shuttling back and forth between the

Roman, the Derridean and the Hegelian, all pliedtogether as the three strand cord of which the Bible in

Ecclesiastes speaks. If this knot or circle was at any

point effracted, to use once more Derridas term I

learned from his late work Given Time, then it is not

in taking sides in the positions of the catholic,

deconstructionist or dialectician, but rather by the

autobiographical element of the writing. For those who

have read, or read about, Derridas Glas, autobiography

is a part of his de-construction. Perhaps my work is an

oblique commentary on my own deconstructed self. But as

Derrida said, GL protects against the schiz that GL


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produces, and so, having becoming other to myself, at

times uncanny, quite beside myself, I eventually

healed, and this perhaps by the very thing that GL

symbolized in its invention or intervention in my life.I do not know, and the authorial fallacy is asserted. I

am not the best judge of what I have written, or of the

life I have lived. That the work is the history of a

journey out of deconstruction and completely through

the catholic church, only to emerge on the other side,

understanding both in themselves and in relation to

each other, may be true.

If I were to add anything to these final words, it

would be concerning what Derrida already called in 1991

the state of the debt. It seems every nation and most

individuals are in a financial bind that is insolvable

except by means of a key piece of what I would have

once called the Catholic Economy, ideas that I and

others have been working on the last few years in light

of the Churchs teachings on social and economic

justice. It seems to me that we are in need of

forgiveness, of a jubilee year as in old Israel,

forgiveness of debts and debtors. As well as giving and

asking for forgiveness, as individuals, nations must

adopt a total for-bearance of the debt, at least until

things get better, if not an outright charging off of

the entire debt of the U.S. and all other countries.

Then we can start over with a clean slate. Our debt now


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threatens to enslave and impoverish the whole world. I

do not say it was an intended thing, as I do not know

the intention of any, but I know all need a chance to

begin again. The promised landto come,

will have

been, therefore, so that the Messiah may arrive.

You might say, as I said that I might, as God

Himself in His might may say, that as has been said, we

had then but a circling occupation, and did walk into

eternity without ever knowing, but for this: a young

professor stood at the chalk board and drew a new

diagram of our salvation according to the Council, in

an elaborate encircled sphere, almost justly Ptolemaic

in design, ever in a paradigm of Catholics, with Roman

centrality the primacy, and those of the other

nominations spreading out in a sea of the to be

blessed, amid the murmur of a discussion I so as

hazarded to interpose: there are not degrees of this

salvation, one is either saved or one is not; so that

for a logic disjunctive I put them to it, and did so

make them love, in that now as I see it, our circles

interchanged, what was at the center is in the end but

only peripheral at best, and God calls sinners, not the

righteous, and the twins of Israel, new and old, Jewand Catholic, miss the Messiah, or as if to, so God

turns human salvation inside out, stands our thinking

against itself, for mercy if and only if, is His alone

and is most free, and judgment has begun at the House


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of God, so that we will have been shown His ways were

never ours, nor to be comprehended.

But let this be, as it dismayed, for those who saythere can be no Christian thing proper tragic, so all

is a divine comedy, but yet we do not know the time,

whether it be free, and whether we are ready, nor if we

be ripe or rotten, or if things stand out of joint, for

it seems to me that even when we do our best, our

actions recoil against us, as Oedipus or an hero from a

tragedy by William Shakespeare, and we wonder at

ourselves as men betrayed, so let it be with Caesar, if

we had but time, what great things could have been said

and done, as men of a Roman rule did think they had

saved the Church even as they destroyed the same,

deconsecrating the blessing with the curse of

infallibility, with the assumption of the right to

heir, while propagating a faith, which, neither mystic

nor moral, did hinder the eternal from ever breaking

into time, as if, and imposed upon the becoming of the

kingdom of God a rigid, hard, static, death, the Being

of the thing appropriated, and stamped the necessity of

hierarchy and all that comes with it on life itself, as

if, only to find the miracle in the end of truesubstantiation,in that the body and blood of Christ was

given but once for all, His action saving only those

whom He chose, only those so chosen. We are all but

parallel lines that meet in infinity. Because of the


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space that took place in the modern theory, the square

as such became impossible for the geometry of Einstein,

as he reconciled the discordances in thought, and he

said there were only lines and their primes. It seemsif we be beside ourselves, we have a chance. The world

itself has created its own parallel world, and it is

more in that virtual world that we live and move and

have our being than in the space we once lived in. Now,

that other space, the primordial one of the Bible, has

become distant, in a way un-thinkable, and perhaps

impossible to reach, even more impossible to traverse,

even if it could be. But it is still possible for God

to square things, because though we are billions of

parallel lines lost in a waste land, Gods meridian

crosses all our parallels, and he closes us, squares

the accounts, gives shape and form to what, though it

was still direction, had no meaning, for the end was

unknown and un-knowable. God has drawn a line, not to

cross us through or out, and not in an erasure of our

characters, but to complete the story, so that we may

be saved. His line is not an underlining, to re-

emphasize us, nor a line across the bottom of our last

page, a line that says so far and no further, but a

kind of margin, a place for His gloss and for Him towrite, a line running from the top to the bottom, clean

through everyone and everything, like the prime

meridian spoken of by the poet, which connects us all,

our distant sites not so much gathered in the


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appropriation, that is in the circle of the text and

the world it created, but a line to cross all our lives

with the knowledge and love of that one who is alone

able to demarcate us, to take a globe, and circle itagainst the time, as he also said, there, north of the

future, for we have been given all our latitude, and

given enough, see what we have done, but as the line

approaches from the other side of this evening, how

long was his patience, how long was his forbearance,

how long he suffered us in the wilderness. But now that

waiting, that wandering, is over, and he draws over the

face of our depths, to shake us, to arouse us, to

awaken us to his arrival. Our life will not have seemed

so long, once He comes, nor will the dreams we once

beheld still hold, for the cord of life will not have

been cut, in fate it will not be so, but our lifes

lines then will have to have been, as even the Glas

foretold.

In the Book of Joshua it is told that a schism

almost occurred in Israel, in the beginning, as the

tribes were settling the promised land. The tribes of

Reuben, Gad and Manasseh had taken their places east of

the Jordan, as in the agreement they had reached withMoses, just before all the warriors crossed into

Canaan. However, after the two tribes and the half-

tribe were to the east, they thought to construct an

altar for themselves, and when the people of Israel


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heard of this they sent an armed troop to make war on

what they considered a blasphemy, the setting up of a

rival altar. Gad and Reuben, their descendents and

those of Manasseh, explained that the reason they builttheir own altar was that they feared someday the

children of Israel in the west, in the I think proper

of the Promised land, would tell the children of Reuben

and Gad and Manasseh that they were not true

Israelites, and disown them, and cause them to be

disheartened and to lose their faith in the one true

God of the patriarchs. They built their own altar they

said to show all that they too worship the same God,

and to point up the difference between themselves and

the one altar before the tabernacle, that they were not

a rival in worship, but the same, which might become

lost from view to the people of God and their

descendents because of their physical separation from

those in Israel. Phineas, representing the people of

God, was pleased with this response, as was Joshua and

the elders when he made his report upon his return.

What moral may we draw? It is this: That the altar I

have erected in the work now concluding, though it

often preaches the arrival, is not a rival to the

Catholic way, but one with it, with provision madehowever that the altar of the Lord, we feel, has become

de-consecrated by the actions of the hierarchy and the

clergy of the people of God. We do not claim to be the

only true people of God, anymore than we feel those who


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follow Rome should claim that exclusive title. At

Vatican II, in the declaration on religious liberty, it

is said that there is a true religion still, and that

this only subsists in the Catholic and Christianchurches and is not identical with them. The true

religion may be found in many places, but I feel

strongly that true religion is evidenced herein by this

altar so set up to show that we too worship God, so

that no one can claim us to be outside the one fold of

Christ, shepherd of our souls. That Christ, king of

endless glory, is the one true sovereign, and does not

need a visible representative on earth that merely

usurps the throne that is in fact set up in heaven, not

in Rome, or in any city of this world. It also exists

in the heart of each believer as the one aboriginal

vicar, the conscience, which is irreplaceable and our

last refuge. One must follow ones own conscience, as

the sole sovereignty that is within oneself.

The starting point for my critique of the papacy

last year was the coat of arms of Benedict XVI, a fact

I have concealed and withheld until now. There are

various interpretations, all benign, of what that crest

and shield contain, but I would like to add my ownreading of that heraldic device, the at once iconic and

Glas-like emblem of the man I consider the false

prophet of Revelation, who promotes worship of the

Beast, by means of an image set up for worship, at


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every altar of the Roman Church.

In the coat of arms of Benedict, there are several

features. With-in it are three items, a seashell, thehead of an Ethiopian, wearing a crown, and a four-

footed beast, a bear. Despite the benign, obscure and I

think far-fetched inter-pretations of these things by

commentators, I offer the opinion that they mean some-

thing sinister. It is in fact in what is called the

bend sinister that the Beast appears. In Revelation,

the Beast is said to have four feet like a bear. Thus

it fits. The seashell I think represents the verse of

Revelation that says the Beast will rise from the sea,

not as in some obtuse reading about heroic Augustine,

and a boy emptying the sea. The Ethiopian crowned is I

think a reference more complex, bearing on the Acts of

the Apostles, the only place in the New Testament that

such a person is mentioned. He is the one converted by

Phillip. What comes just before this is the warning

about Simon Magus and the perennial Roman ur-problem of

simony, as for instance the practice, still, in Mexico

of the selling of indulgences. It is important what the

Ethiopian is reading when he is found by Phillip,

something from Isaiah about the suffering servant. Thepassage as Acts quotes it is a little different from

the Old Testament. It speaks of him who in his

humiliation had judgment taken from him. To me this

indicates the view of the young seminarian I once heard


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that Gods hands are tied, there is nothing he can do to

end the abuses by Rome.

Surrounding the inside of the coat of arms are somecurious innovations by Benedict, the replacing of the

triple crown by the bishops miter, contra a ruling by

Paul VI in 1969, and the addition of the pallium, along

with the traditional keys of Peter. It seems this

addition of the bishops hat fits the reading by

exegetes of Revelation that the false prophet will have

two horns like a lamb, which has been taken to indicate

the form of the miter. The pallium itself is a pall

that now hangs over all. Altogether, it seems that

Benedicts coat of arms is a symbol that fits his role,

as I see it, as the one who follows the Beast, wields

the same power as the former, and will promote the

worship of him, especially by the image I take to be

the new order of mass.

In this iconic representation of who and what

Benedict is, we have the telling Glas of the Roman

Church, if it is read prophetically, which is the

dimension of Biblical studies neglected by many, but

which is the highest level of scripture interpretation,

being the end in view for which the Word of God was

given. The emblem of Benedict, an anti-icon, inscribes

the Glas of the Church, as a Mise en abime, as a crypt

to be unsealed. It is perhaps this that Aquinas was


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shown, and which caused him to lay down his pen.

Near the start of his career, in the opuscula on

the eternity of the world, Thomas had said that it hadnot yet been demonstrated that God cannot do an

infinite number of things simultaneously. Indeed.

Thomas in the beginning knew more than he knew. In the

end he knew what is called the vision of God, at least

thats what they say. They say that he saw God in a

beatitude, the glory of God, was astonished by the

beauty of love and simply ceased to write in order more

quickly to pass on to the heavenly abode that awaits.

But perhaps the vision of God was for him something

else, far stranger than the pious fraud the church used

to gloss over the silence of Thomas and his statement

that all he had written was of no account. I think, it

seems to me, God did not show him Himself but the

catholic fate. All the work of Thomas would be for

naught, and even used for evil ends. God has mercy on

whom He will, and I believe that Thomas Aquinas found

that before he died God had already decreed the

condemnation of the Church before it was ever created.

Thomas was not wicked and understood, though he was

astonished. The wicked will never understand. Gods way

is not the way of the church, nor does it know Him. In

this, blindness and blessing.

19 of 70 the Complete Apocalypse an Icon for the Critics on Glas Michael Bolerjack

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