The wedding of cyclical symmetry and linear transformation in St. Matthew’s Gospel

It’s a full-blown textual masterpiece whether viewed as literature or as theology

Behind the curtains: “Hagios Mattheus” from the Lindisfarne Gospel (8th c.).

There are so many things I’d like to do, so many creative projects sitting around in my mind, books I want to read, places I want to go, causes I want to dedicate my life to — it’s a common enough condition that you, dear reader, probably know what I mean. One only has so much time and resources; there’s only the one life to dedicate. What to do and where to go become a constant concern and cause for searching. It has been over nine months since I “turned to the octave” here on Substack, opening the floodgates on a reservoir of ideas that for my first year on here I had kept off limits. Each post I write on the topic of the octave is a sketch I’m making for a larger composition, a book I’m to write that will draw everything together — everything that fits, anyways.

In between the posts on the octave I have found cause to write occasional posts on random topics that I discover inspiration in, posts such as “In the intermediate state of the soul after death, we’ll have no eyelids to close,” “Converting desire,” “That angels can’t of themselves know the future,” and “What kind of old person will I be?” It feels like I get more action on such posts, more engagement, which just confirms my original insight into their meaningfulness, the reason I wrote them in the first place. That the octave posts perform slightly less well on average does not discourage me from working on my book. I believe once they’re placed in the larger context for which they’re destined, there will be sufficient interest for the work to be worthwhile. Right now they’re just isolated sketches, on topics such as Orthodox liturgics which may not have the widest appeal (unjustly, I might add — go to church!). I’ll continue writing them and posting them, but as they are meant for a book I’m preparing, and because on their own they’re not generating excessive interest, I’ve decided to place them behind a paywall going forward. For the free subscribers I will strive to provide the type of content that seems to perform better in this format. It’s just that the octave stuff will be extra now, and only available to my paying subscribers, whose patronage means a great deal to me. I figure many of my free subscribers may even prefer the arrangement, as I weed out of their vision the posts that ... well, optimistically speaking, the posts they’re waiting to read in book form. If anyone reading this very much regrets this decision, just shoot me a note and I can make it right.

Anyways, on with the post...

The Gospel according to St. Matthew, the first book of the Bible I ever successfully outlined as a fractal, lays itself out into eleven neatly marked sections. Five discourses, all marked at the end by a variation of a unique verbal formula (“And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings...”), serve as the chiastic skeleton of the structure, evenly spaced by six meaty chunks of narrative. Of course, I introduced this outline in “The Cosmic Chiasmus,” focusing on the Gospel’s chiastic nature. Here it is again as a reminder:

Such a chiastic outline serves as an expression of stability and identity. If you’re into The Language of Creation, this is what Matthieu Pageau calls “space”. It’s only half of the story of what is going on with the formal structure of St. Matthew’s Gospel.