1,

Because Jewish-Christian religion is rooted in time, three steps, or stages, of a different ‘nature of things’ can be envisioned, corresponding to time’s [1] Start, [2] In-Between, and [3] Finish.

2,

It is clear that existentially there is a marked difference between Innocent Beginning, Fraught Middle, Holy End, of time; but less often recognised is that the victory in time of the Daemonic makes possible a ‘sea-change’ in the very nature, the essential being, of Eros.

[1] The Paradisiacal Garden at the Start= the Golden Age;
[2] The Waste-land of the City in the In-Between= the Nightmare of History;
[3] The Holy City and Sacred Garden Unified at the End= the Eschatological Victory.

3,

Hidden in this ontological shift that occurs in time is a stupendous mystery.

Everyone is nostalgic for Paradise. Everyone wants to go back to the Goodness and Beauty in which everything and everyone begins.. Salvation looks back to this Origin which God views as Good and Beautiful. It is a ‘place’ where divine and created overlap, inter-sect, and the divine nourishes the created which flourishes as a result. This ‘Garden’ is not nature as a whole, but nature’s pearl of supreme value, nature’s inner sanctum, nature’s soul. The Jewish Temple is, in an important sense, a memory of Paradise, a recollection of the primal unity of Uncreated and created.

The loss of Paradise is an Exile, a leaving of our ‘rightful place’, the place we were created to occupy.

Going back, to regain what has been lost, might be possible in Shamanism, and especially in Oriental religions. It is not possible for Jewish tradition. Humanity must take the risk, enter the gamble, of going forward toward an End where the lost Beginning might be restored, or might be forever lost in time..

It is not only that the Jews must press ahead in time, not go back to a rosy past, nor stall in the grim present.

The mystery is that when Redemption is victorious, and only if it is victorious, the treasure always buried in, always tacit in, the Garden is finally revealed and realised. This is the capacity in the created to be ‘married’ with the Uncreated; invisible spirit and visible matter in a knitting together and inter-penetration of converse natures that generates a third more than both= a Child more than spirit-father or material-mother, a union without confusion of divine energy and bodily energy. This is the unexpected destiny of the creation= not to melt away in order to ‘return to source’, nor to become ever more separated from source so that fragmentation, and degeneration, the triumph of entropy, destroys the primal unity and replaces it with nothing better, but only something increasingly worse..

Rather than either reversion to source, or adrift from source, a third alternative= the ‘new heaven and the new earth’ promised from so very long ago. It is their marriage, their personal loving embrace as well as natural uniting in which husband and wife become ‘one flesh’, one complex two-fold but undivided whole, differentiated yet ‘as one.’ This new reality is the ‘heavenly earth.’

This mystery — latent from the Start, but only actualised, only realised in full, at the Finish – is Incarnational. It says that matter was never the encumbrance of spirit; rather, matter was designed as ‘user friendly’ to spirit, and thus melting matter into spirit was never the aim.. The aim is for matter to become the poem of spirit, the house of spirit, the fountain of spirit, the hearth of spirit, the embodiment of spirit.

This is present, in prefigured form, already in the Paradise of the Beginning, for the ‘splendour in the grass’ already shines out from the onset; yet it will become fully literal, fully real, only in the Holy City and Sacred Garden Conjoined of the End.

What has been lost in the distant past can only be regained in a faraway future.. This is Eschatology. Eschatology is not only= we are all on our way to a battle, of heart. It is also, we are all on our way to a wedding, of soul.

4,

Redemption makes happen a radical Salvation, never before actualised, never before possible; a Second Flowering at the Finish more comprehensive, more amazing, than the First Flowering at the Start.

Only if Redemption wins= then the Salvation that marries heaven with earth, in a final Incarnational unification. Not only does the Incarnation of the Logos in Yeshua anticipate this, but Yeshua’s strange body after the Resurrection is the first instance of it= ‘the first born of many.’ The spirit-matter marriage, and embodiment, will be a new kind of materiality, different from what we know at the present, yet it will be a materiality. Matter will no longer die, no longer decay, no longer corrupt.

This means there are three, qualitatively different ‘states of nature’ which arise over the entire span of time.

[1] First state of nature, first state of being= the Light shines through matter, like a stained glass window lit up from within. This is Paradise. Every person, being, thing, creature, is the signature of the Light.

[2] Second state of nature, second state of being= the Light is still there, but humanity has shut its eyes and so can no longer see it shining through, and bringing to light and fructifying, all that is. This horrendous blindness, this massive ignorance, not only limits humanity, but because we are a key player in the network of the creation, so what happens to us has a ripple effect on all other things. Nature is no longer responsive to us, nor to what we were meant to bring to the functioning of the network. We were never an insignificant and unnecessary part of the whole; even as a part, we gave something to the whole that the whole needs, and in the absence of, the whole is depleted. Hence Adam naming the animals in Paradise.

In this sense, and contrary to the widespread belief our difficulties are limited [subjectively] to our species, the human race, and do not [objectively] impact nature as such, the truth is the very converse= when we go into Exile, there is a subtle sense in which nature goes into Exile with us.

No one except the Jews understand this. Martin Buber= “The world is an irradiation of God, but as it is endowed with an independence of existing and striving, it is apt.. to form a crust around itself. Thus, a divine spark lives in every thing and being, but each such spark is enclosed by an isolating shell. Only man can liberate it and re-join it with the Origin= by holding holy converse with the thing and using it in a holy manner” [p vi, ‘The Way of Man’, 1965]. Humanity has caused the ‘exile of the shells’, and we must work to ‘make sacred’ all things, beings, creatures, persons, in the creation, for in this way the current opacity of matter is rendered again transparent. The Hopi shamans who feel they must pray every morning on a high rock facing eastward, or the sun will not rise, are operating in accord with the Jewish sense that mankind impacts nature at a subtle level. However, it is obvious that the opaque matter is currently ‘fixed and frozen’, whilst the fluid matter responsive to spirit influences is certainly still ‘out there’ but difficult to uncover. A veil has to be ripped back, to reach it. Shamans, and certainly Yeshua in the four gospels, work with the subtle physical stuff – more like energy – to create shifts in the hard crust of the shells. None the less, the shells remain ‘encrusted.’ It will be interesting to see if science ever ceases its preoccupation with the mechanical ticking over of the shell, and finds the more water-like, fluid states of materiality beneath that hard armouring. “Nature loves to hide.”

In the Garden of Eden, God gave kingship to humanity, but that does not mean conquest and exploitation, but sacrificial love. The Wisdom of Solomon states that humans are not superior to beasts, but are on a par with animals, and the Book of Job states that the animals should be consulted, and learned from, because they convey a wisdom of God woven into the very warp and woof of creation. Sophia, God’s feminine consort through-out the Wisdom Literature, is the mother of all animals as well as all people. ‘She’ is Solomon’s mentor, who guided him in the construction of the First Temple [“Wisdom builds her house.”] Thus, in the act of creating, God has a partner; the creation works to a binary system.

Nature is in a contradictory state, because of human failure to love its sacred mysteriousness, of both being fixed in its outer shell, yet remaining fluid in its innermost core. For those who love, and honour, nature, possibilities of holy converse open up miraculous, and magical, natural events. These odd, uncanny occurrences look back to the song of the Start, and look forward to the poem of the Finish, at the same time.

For those trying to conquer and exploit nature, the outer shell is all they ever see and act on. To those who want to ‘rape’ nature to subdue her, in Francis Bacon’s revealing words, nature is never translucent, always impenetrable. For those who befriend and co-operate with nature, the material world and the Spirit World are not so divided. As the Shamanic Celts put it, the Otherworld – tir na nog – is not found in some celestial plane but ‘just behind the house.’ Hasidism= “Rabbi Hanokh said: ‘The other nations too believe there are two worlds.. They too say: in the other world. The difference is this: some of them think that the two worlds are separate and severed, but Israel professes that the two worlds are essentially one and shall in fact become one.’ In their true essence, the two worlds are one. They only have, as it were, moved apart. But they shall again become one.. Mankind was created for the purpose of unifying the two worlds” [Martin Buber, ‘The Way Of Man’, p 32]. Such unifying is called ‘making sacred’ in Shamanism, and according to St Maximus, humanity is tasked with bringing together all polarities which tend toward division= feminine and masculine; paradisiacal and worldly; sensible and intelligible; culminating in Creator and creation.

[3] Third state of nature, third state of being= this is what we know nothing about because it is the mystery hidden over the ages, the treasure buried in nature of what, finally, it can become when fully fructified by God [Isaiah, 55, 10-11; Psalms, 64, 10-14]. This is not just the creation translucent with Light, travelling through the water rolling through all things. It is more than that= it is the creation burning with Fire.

The final ontology is the wonderful Salvation hinted at by the Jewish prophets, especially Isaiah, but what seems never to have been clarified is that it is only Redemption which can bring this Salvation.

The first Salvation= Paradise, no Exile. The creation, just as it is.

The second Salvation= ‘preserve us in Exile, and get us out of it.’

But, what home do we go to after Exile? Do we go back, to something old, and imaginably marvellous; or do we go forward to something new, and unimaginably tremendous?

No human eye has seen, nor any human heart conceived, what God has in store for those who love in the Accomplished Future..

The third Salvation= Holy City and Sacred Garden.

Isaiah, 35, 1-6, 10=

“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert will rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it will blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel.. They shall see the glory of Yahweh, the majesty of our God. Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, fear not! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy. For water shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert. And the ransomed of Yahweh shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

“The Lion will lie down with the Lamb”= and similar radical ontologically-altered depictions of ‘the way the nature of things is’, and the way the ill-being of humans has disappeared and well-being, even everlasting-being, has come, is not an account of Israel’s ‘salvific happiness’ after leaving Babylonian Captivity in 500 BC. The good times lasted only 500 years – and they were not all that good, for prophecy ceased, the Second Temple did not regain the mysticism of the First Temple, and so Israel became bourgeois again, and again fell under foreign yokes of the Greeks and then the Romans – before the third and longest Exile ended any salvational completion..

This, and similarly outlandish passages in Isaiah, portrays not what awaited Israel when they returned from Exile in Babylon.

It describes what awaits all flesh, all things, beings, creatures, persons, at the End of time= if, and only if, the Daemonic wins. No Jew, no Christian, seems to appreciate that Cross, Descent into Hell, and Resurrection, are necessary to the radical ontological transformation that is poetically envisioned as the climax of the End Time= its fruit. ‘Fruit that will last.’

Only the fight and suffering in the Daemonic secures the marriage and joy in Eros.