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readoldthingsWhose Law, Which Prophets?
Jesus continues his discourse by telling us that he has not come to abolish "the Law" or "the Prophets." No-- he has come, rather, to fulfill them, and neither the law nor the prophets will be abrogated until Heaven and Earth pass away.
What does this mean?
If we take a parochial view, Jesus is only telling us to continue to obey the rules of purity and moral conduct given to the Jews in the Old Testament. These are the rules, and we've got to keep on following them until he comes back and blows up the Earth.
Now, this reading makes next to no sense in the context of the passage itself. Why would Jesus tell us to continue to obey the Old Testament rules, and then immediately proceed to change them? But leaving that aside, there is a much more interesting way to look at this.
Let us suppose, as we have already supposed, that God is the One, the Eternal Divine Power that brings the whole world into being. Below God, there are additional entities-- we usually call them "Gods," which confuses things, but which has its uses, too-- who carry out the actual government of the universe; who bring into being, govern and manage the particular phenomena of the living world. If this is the case, God Godself can be known by all peoples, and any of the particular Gods can be the path to God.
That doesn't mean that every particular God is good. As it turns out, many are not. Some seem to actually be evil entities in open rebellion against the divine order of the cosmos. It is also the case that there are many paths to the One God.
Many Mountains, Many Paths, One Sky
How can we know that?
By two means. The first is that, if we take spiritual experiences seriously, we have to take them seriously for everybody. For example: Porphyry tells us that through his various meditative disciplines, his teacher Plotinus was on several occasions able to rise to the presence of the Most High God. If that is so, then Platonism is a path to God, as Judaism is. Of course, Platonism's influence on Christianity is well known; even staying firmly within the bounds of orthodoxy, there quite simply is no Christianity in the forms we know it without Platonism. As some Orthodox and Anglican priests have put it, "God sent Plato to the Greeks as surely as he sent Isaiah to the Hebrews." But similar experiences-- not identical, mind, but similar-- are reported by Hermetic mystics, by yogis, Buddhists, Taoists, and followers of other spiritual paths. If all of these people are able, by different paths and different methods, to reach the proverbial top of the mountain, then there are and must be multiple paths.
The second means is simply that we can observe the changes that spiritual practices make in the lives of individuals. Remember that the soul simply is the life of the individual-- it isn't something mysterious or invisible, it's not a cloud of gas weighing 28 grams. It's the sum total of the individual's choices, habits, actions, and mental experiences. And so we never have to wonder about the condition of our souls; we can always know, by examining our thoughts, habits, reactions, choices, and how we treat others. And all it takes is the slightest familiarity with people of various religions to know that many of them save souls in the most literal sense.
Therefore, if Jesus is what he claims to be, what his followers claim him to be-- and what I believe him to be-- he cannot simply be talking about Jewish law or particular Jewish practices. The Law is the eternal order of the cosmos itself, and the Prophets are all those who reveal that order to human beings. Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Daniel; Pythagoras, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Hermes Trismegistos; Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and the Yellow Emperor; and many more besides.
The Fulfillment of the Law
For Saint Origen, an early church father and one of the very best, that meant that the whole of creation would eventually be gathered back to God, no matter how far they had fallen. The Creation of Humanity itself, in this view, is complete-- fulfilled-- once every human being is united to God eternally. Even the devil himself will be gathered back to God, in the end.
Of course Origen was eventually declared a heretic at the urging of the Emperor Justinian, though they had to wait until he had been dead for a century or two to do it. Such is the fate of most people who speak truths that upset the powerful.
In terms of occult philosophy, what this means is that the current world that we live in will come to an end once all of its participants have proceeded through the long course of spiritual evolution to deification. At that point, they themselves-- we, ourselves-- will bring new worlds into being.
