Pynchon's Jewish God & the Catholic Church of Plato

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> ----------
> >From: CyrusGeo at netscape.net
> >
> 
> > Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the God of the Old Testament is
> > in fact the Hebrew God.
> 
> I'm not sure. I think that, at least theoretically, the God of the Old
> Testament and the God of the New Testament are one and the same bloke. The
> peoples of/to whom He was God might have changed, so that maybe you could
> say that the Old Testament God was the God of the ancient Hebrews and the
> New Testament God was the God of the early Christians, but I'm not sure that
> that even tells the whole story in terms of the way the texts of the Bible
> have been arranged, when they were written/edited, by whom etc.

Oh no. 



> 
> > The Christian God resides in the New Testament and
> > I don't think he would qualify as a badass.
> 
> I was probably being a little bit facetious, but I was thinking more of the
> vengeful, wrathful God of some of the Old testament books who went in for
> all that smoting when his subject populations were doing a little bit too
> much begatting with one another.
> 
> best

Be fruitful and multiply. No, since you are still being
facetious, obviously, I'll simply point out one of the
essential facts, essential also to GR and M&D. The Jews were
not influenced as the Christians were by Plato. First, the
Jews held that their bodies, the world was a very, very 
good place, intrinsically good, created by God.  God made it
expressly, and not by any unconscious effluence of his
virtue, as the Platonists and some Neo-Platonists believed.
But the Jews did take one step towards the Platonists and
Gnostics, they held that the work of God appeared to them to
have some imperfection, in fact they believed that its moral
excellence was Potential and not actualized, a suggestion of
what Might Be. To explain the imperfection in the creation,
again they viewed this creation as good, very good, what
they experienced as imperfection in their daily lives in the
present moments, they decided that it must be owed to some
bad shit. The Jews were very interested in the "books" of
Fortune and Changes. So, they looked at the Fortunes, the
Vicissitudes, the changing careers of Men and Women. Like
all peoples, particularly those beaten up in the world,  the
Jews wanted to be safe, secure, to have their "horn of
plenty" too (the holy Grail, so important to GR is also the
horn of plenty) and being very smart and wise people
interested in Fortune and Changes, they perceived that
wickedness does not make for a safe, secure, good
environment. The Jews, zealous in their goodness, knew that
bad shit worked against prosperity. Next, Bad shit was to
become the cause of death, suffering and then they
attributed all that was evil in the beautiful and good world
to the sin of the first man and to the infection and death
transmitted to his decedents. The imperfection then, in the
Hebraic point of view was due to accidents in their
operation and not, as in the Platonic (Gnostic) point of
view, to their essential separation from their source and
their end. The Jews then   conceived of salvation as a
Revival of their National existence, goodness and greatness
to be brought about by the patience and fidelity of the good
man and the great supervening miracles of God. The problem
as I see it played out in TRP's books is history. Salvation,
the Fall and Redemption become  a historical conception. 

For the Platonists, the world was rather like the mental 
fountain of Yeats, like the great oceans and the sky, the
water falls and rises without end.   

I'll continue of not....