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TLS signed "Love, Phil," with a sketch of a Christian fish, two pages, 8.5 x 11, September 9, 1981. Letter to science fiction author Patricia Warrick, in full: "Thank you so much for Robert Galbreath's article; I was so impressed with it that I sent it on to my agent. It set off a very long and extraordinary line of thought in my mind, that caused me to go back to my reference books again to research Pythagoras. I am very tired and have had temporarily to give up working on The Owl in Daylight, but I can't turn my mind off. I dreamed a terrific opening sentence for the book: 'It was his mysterious destiny to be mistaken frequently for Donald Duck.' When I awoke, the sentence seemed somehow less effective than it had in the dream.
Pat, I am onto a line of thought involving Pythagoras' insight that the basis of reality is form; I have connected this to Philo's Logos doctrine 'Logos' defined as the rational principle immanent in the universe. Pythagoras concept of form is a concept of pure structure, how things fit together and that they fit together—in contrast to some physical substance as the basis of reality. Thus, his basis of reality is an abstraction, and indeed I find out that for that time-period there was an incomplete ability to conceive of pure form as an utter abstraction, so that for those people even numbers were to some degree substantial. (They would not, for instance, have been able to conceive of what we call 'energy.') Nonetheless, the Pythagoreans were in the right track, and all Western science has benefited by this notion of numerical ratio and proportion as the basis of reality (which I'm sure you know). Now, how this applies to my exegesis is that when I saw VALIS it was not a thing among things but was how plural things fitted together (I'm sure I've mentioned this to you before). Further, VALIS was increasing its dominion, bringing more and more of its environment under its structuring, without in any way affecting their concrete substantiality with the result that unless the percipient saw (or 'saw' in the sense of intellectually conceived) this structuring, he saw no change. Thus VALIS is not only seen (or 'seen') by an abstraction—an abstracting cognitive event or process—in the percipient's mind, it itself is an abstraction, but it is real; it is an abstraction that has intrinsic independent existence. That this could be is ratified by Plato's Forms doctrine, in which abstractions (e.g. roundness, whiteness) are regarded as having real and independent existence separate from the objects in which they participate i.e. their particulars. Thus I see a direct connection between Pythagoras notion that form or structure is the basis of reality, and Plato's Forms doctrine…and indeed when I researched this I found that the Britannica agreed; in Middle Platonism the two sources of thought fused. They fused, for instance, when Philo of Alexandria came across them in his study of Greek philosophy. Now, it was Philo who developed the version of the Logos doctrine that entered Christianity in the Fourth Gospel. What I am leading up to is this: I am beginning to think that Philo's Logos—and hence the Logos of Christianity—is Pythagoras kosmos, an abstraction that is structure, insubstantial, which fits together a multiplicity of physical objects, perhaps even all physical objects, the entire universe.
Structure (form) and rationality are thus equated. But what is more important (to me at least) is the intimation that the Logos is available to our perception-conceiving by the same meta-abstraction that causes us to 'recover' Plato's Forms. In this case, the Logos would be a hyper-structure that is not substantial; it is not a thing among things but rather a way things have of either fitting together harmoniously or being fitted together harmoniously by an active principle or agent or organization. It is, then, right before our eyes, but we cannot see it because we see what is substantial and concrete; we do not see the structure. Now, if we equate the risen Christ with the Logos, and the Logos with Pythagoras' kosmos, and this kosmos with Plato's Forms, then we have an all- embracing philosophy that demands a certain very high —perhaps ultimately high—order of meta-abstracting on our part, and if we can accomplish this, the 'supernatural' entity that these various terms apply to is 'seen' by us as present, and this mental operation is, in the final analysis, intellectual; it does not involve faith or revelation or religious doctrine. Pythagoras believed that the kosmos (as he defined it) imposed ratio and limit on what he called atelos, the unlimited, and that kosmos is alive like a biological organism; it grows from the center outward, and its incorporation and assimilation and subsumation of its environment resembles breathing, as if kosmos inhales more and more of reality. This is precisely how I saw VALIS behaving. There is a very strong possibility, then, that what I saw that I called 'VALIS' was in fact Pythagoras kosmos, but as I say I am now identifying that kosmos with Philo's Logos, with Plato's Forms, and, finally, with the Christ-Logos Doctrine of the Fourth Gospel. Then indeed Christ as the Logos invades and penetrates the universe, devouring it, as I say in VALIS, so that, as I say, 'the entire universe is in the invisible process of turning into the Lord,' the Corpus Christi. This Corpus Christi is available to us only if our minds perform this meta-abstraction, and this, as Plato taught, depends on anamnesis (which I discuss at length in VALIS). Something is progressively consuming our universe, and that 'something' is rational: the rational principle or agency itself; and, in contrast to it, the universe (it follows logically) must be regarded (as I do in fact regard it in VALIS) as irrational. This is the dialectic that I saw, this combat between the rational kosmos or Logos or Cosmic Christ and the antecedent universe.
To my knowledge, no one has ever homologized Pythagoras' kosmos with Philo's Logos, although the influence of Pythagoras on Philo is a matter of record. I scarcely know what to make of this, it is such a strange line of thought. As Galbreath says in his article, if what we ordinarily see is illusion, then reality would—if we saw it—be disorienting. I am trying to make sense out of what I saw; what I saw was the epitome of coherence, and yet I do not know what it was. I may call it 'Logos' but then I must ask, 'What exactly do I mean when I use that term? I am naming it without understanding it.' Pythagoras gives a lengthy description of what he means by 'kosmos'; he was the first to use this term and he used it in a precise and special way. And perhaps this is what I saw; and yet nonetheless it is Logos." In fine condition. Accompanied by the original mailing envelope.
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