Though, unlike Christians and certain Jungians,
You differentiated God per se
(Who, if Creation’s not self-made, transcends
The finite human mind) from a God-image;
And though the all-male Trinity was coined
By dogmatists and Fathers of the Church;
In declaring fourfold symbols (formed by Self) –
Which to you stood for true totality –
To be the only right sort of God-image,
For souls, possessed by Self, inclined to see
In individuation Incarnation
You resurrected an old Gnostic dogma –
“Divine Quaternity”, which includes Satan
(The elder son of God and His Sophia),
While for inflated egos you refined
The fantasy that man shall become God.
Oy ve voy! Better to be overwhelmed
By weighing Indivisibility
(As was poor Job, the bravest kind of Jew)
Or to conceive a Godhead with three faces,
Who points at least to paradox and transcendence,
Than to project one’s evil onto God
Or to believe mankind shall be God’s equal.
In short you should have named it a man-image,
If not Anthrópos or Adám Kadmón;
For through it man, not God, needs know himself
And hence that the Creator’s Whole and One.
This said, I grant I am a bit unfair:
You termed yourself not faithful theologian
But analyst of men’s perceptions, right or wrong.
For two millennia folk have believed
That God became a man, or vice versa.
You knew this was projection of the Self –
Though I would add the Soul which is its core –
Onto a healer-prophet. Yet, like Yeshu
When dying disillusioned on the cross,
You underestimated the very force
You had aroused and sanctified in minds.
Though meaningful, it’s no coincidence
That now some regard you as The Messiah!
Jerusalem
12 March 1999