'That is a fair lord and a great captain of men,' said Legolas. 'If Gondor has such men still in these days of fading, great must have been its glory in the days of its rising'.
'And doubtless the good stone-work is the older and was wrought in the first building,' said Gimli. 'It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.'
'Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,' said Legolas. 'And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimli.'
'And yet come to naught in the end but might-have-beens, I guess,' said the Dwarf.
'To that the Elves know not the answer,' said Legolas.
The Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien
I have always found the above to be a particularly deep and resonant passage; and so do many others.
At one level, the difference between short-lived, distractible but procreative Men; and the Elves and Dwarves who are (especially Elves) potentially relatively longaevus - seems to be profound. Elves and Dwarves are both capable of greater works of arts and crafts, better able to work on long 'projects' without losing interest...
Yet this is only a relative difference, and sooner or later, all the achievements - all the 'stone work' - of Middle Earth, will decay, and be destroyed.
The rate of change can be diminished by better work, by steadier and more focused effort - but, it seems, only by a 'slowing' of existence.
Dwarves and Elves have a longer time horizon, but this goes-with a lower rate of procreation, a lesser focus on reproduction - which stands-for and is symptomatic-of a tendency towards desiring to slow life, trying to hold-things static, attempting to prevent decay by 'crystallizing' achievement...
But, this has a price; being bound-up with a tendency against life.
Men, by comparison, are more alive, do more stuff (good and bad, careful and slapdash); just keep on trying different things; bounce-back after defeats and start again - have kids, rebuild the ruins, make another new civilization...
But Men never seem to get very far with anything they attempt; and they each soon die, and their best civilizations are brief.
So; in this mortal world, in all we know of this material universe, entropy will always win in the end - whether sooner or later; it will prevail.
If we imaginatively identify with the perspective of God the Creator, take his Point of View (POV); then this continual dismantling of creation by entropy is unsatisfactory.
Of course, we (as God) can keep-on creating forever and without limit; yet this is always going to be a matter of patching-together repairs and not a restoration to a pre-entropic state. We can continually compensate for the damage of entropy - a bridge collapses, so we build a new one; a Man dies and another is born - yet whatever we do, entropy accumulates.
More familiarly for Christians, a closely analogous situation occurs with Sin (which may be understood as an aspect of entropy). God can compensate for the effect of Sin, can repair the consequences, can provide the world with help from Angels and Saints... but, nonetheless, Sin accumulates.
The way out from this unsatisfactory situation was for God to create another and secondary world from this-one; by using this-one.
In other words: God's creative plan was two-stage (which is why Jesus was necessary - for the second stage).
While the first creation is mandatory; the second creation is discretionary: optional, opt-in, for those who choose it.
The second creation is a 'world' without entropy, a world in which the tendency for destruction and sin has been left-behind.
I am talking about Heaven, of course.
And Heaven did not arise until after Jesus Christ.
The reason that Jesus Christ is an essential aspect of salvation; is that He was what made it possible for Heaven to exist, for Heaven to be populated...
To put it bluntly; God the primary creator needed Jesus Christ in order to make possible the second - and final - creation that is Heaven.
Jesus Christ came from within the prime creation, lived within the world of entropy - and died; but did so in perfect alignment with the values, aims, love, of God the prime creator.
In other (more familiar) words; Jesus was a mortal Man who was fully divine. Mortal in body and by living in the primary creation, divine in terms of wholly Good and on the side of God; knowing and being in complete-harmony-with God's creative plans.
Thus Jesus was unique: nobody-else could have done the job (not even God the prime creator) because Jesus knew - experientially, from living fully in both worlds - 'how' to guide Men from this primary and entropic-mortal creation to the secondary and eternal-immortal creation that is Heaven.
12 comments:
"God the primary creator needed Jesus Christ in order to make possible the second - and final - creation that is Heaven."
Things begin to make more sense if you consider that God may have needs.
@Frank - It's something that classical Christian theology has always 'struggled' with making sense of. If Jesus Christ is necessary (which he is) then this entails that what he did could not have been done without him; which means that The Father *needed* Jesus to do it.
But it seems that early theologians regarded it as imperative that The Father also be omnipotent, which meant that He did not need anyone else.
For me, this is one of those occasions when positing an abstract property of God the Creator, then distorted Christianity to try and fit-in with a prior philosophical assumption. It would have surely been better to start with the fact that Jesus being necessary, and work from there.
I appreciate your example of thinking through and your conclusions about the necessity of Jesus. It's very important.
Your insights have led me to wonder if Heavenly Mother may not have been fully on board with Creation at first, and maybe that is why Heaven could not exist straight away, complementarily to what you have explained here. It seems to be true that a man is oriented toward achieving great original creations with the reward of being approved and adopted by a woman.
@Lucinda - I tend to think that this mortal life is often so difficult and hazardous, that it must be necessary to salvation. If there had been any safer and more reliable way to attain resurrection, theosis and heaven - I presume that alternative would have been our path through creation. But there was no alternative, so this is what we must do.
I regard creation as a consequence of love, deriving from the eternally-commited love of our heavenly parents. It is this love that provides and purpose and 'methods' by which creation grows.
It is hard for me to imagine anything being manifested that was not fully and harmoniously desired by both our heavenly parents - yet, of course, where there are two, there will always be differences - different possibilities, and preferences (all of which will be woven-together through time).
So, maybe you are right?
A thought that occured to me after reading this was to think of Heaven as having been made by the dyad of Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ in the same way that Heavenly Mother and Father made prime creation.
The Celestial Mariage in Cana could then have been the creation of Heaven. Entropy would have been overcome by the love of a Man and a Women within the prime creation, in perfect alignment with Heavenly Mother and Father.
As someone grateful for you beautiful metaphysics, I wonder how this would fit in.
@LS - I'm not sure about these matters - I don't have an intuitive feel for this at present. Something of the sort seems possible.
"It is hard for me to imagine anything being manifested that was not fully and harmoniously desired by both our heavenly parents"
"Not fully on board" is not the right way to say what I meant, because this statement of yours is consistent with my thinking. I guess my question is whether innate feminine desire to select between being reward or punishment, in order to guide creative potential, is an aspect of eternal feminine nature (even for Heavenly Mother), or merely part of created feminine reality.
@Lucinda - I don't think that the ultimate ("celestial") differences between men and women can properly be expressed in terms of a contrasting set of "attributes".
To talk in terms of attributes seems to be the best we can manage her and now; and there is probably some kind of overall and approximate validity to it -- but I think we certainly lack the language, and perhaps even the way of thinking, to get at the essential nature of this fundamental difference.
In general terms, my belief is that what we call creation - all of it - is a direct consequence of the love between our Heavenly Parents: creation cannot be separated from love.
To put it crudely (and my understanding is itself crude), I envisage that creation 'started to happen' as soon as our Heavenly parents loved one and made an eternal commitment to that-love.
Creation was a kind of inevitable overflow of that-love; as that-love was (to varying degrees and in various ways) 'joined' by more and more primordial Beings, or that-love 'organized' other Beings.
'It's something that classical Christian theology has always 'struggled'
with making sense of. If Jesus Christ is necessary (which he is) then
this entails that what he did could not have been done without him;
which means that The Father *needed* Jesus to do it.
But it
seems that early theologians regarded it as imperative that The Father
also be omnipotent, which meant that He did not need anyone else.'
Why would The Father being omnipotent mean that He did not need anyone else? If He needs a Son to be a Father, and if it can be understood that:
'....creation - all of it - is a direct consequence of the love between our Heavenly Parents: creation cannot be separated from love.'
....then why can't creation, and needing others, be a direct consequence of an omnipotent God of love?
@L - "Why would The Father being omnipotent mean that He did not need anyone else?"
It seems obvious to me that if God was omnipotent, He would not need anybody else to do anything that can be done.
"....then why can't creation, and needing others, be a direct consequence of an omnipotent God of love?"
I don't understand your point - it seems like a non sequitur.
Creation could be a direct consequence of God's very being and self, a central part of God's very life in Himself so that it is no God (of love, of Father who begets a Son,..) = no creation. Creation then is a necessary part, a consequence, of God's very life. There's no question of needing creation and others, creation and others simply are (and come to be).
God the Father needs the Son to be Father, and out of the life of God comes creation, yet it is also said the Father is omnipotent (and the Son, and Holy Spirit) but this isn't understood to mean God the Father is all powerful so He doesn't need the Son, or that He could be four persons and not three, or that He can lie or murder when He is truth and life, or that He can't be creator when He is creative,....all powerful does not mean God can contravene His Being, Him self, it's understood in the context of His other qualities and aspects. And creation and others are a consequence of His life as also a God of Love.
Sorry if I haven't followed you...
Sorry to come back so late.
I suppose that part of my motivation would be to find a reason why women are not interested in truth, really at all. In order to understand how to perceive myself properly and guide my daughters.
Even bad men seem interested in finding out what's happening behind the scenes, if only to game it, or sabotage it.
So I'm always looking for a noble explanation for women's dislike of reality!
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