Desert and ruins — landscapes of anger and traces of unbelief (landscape and Scripture)

The God and his temple become part of the royal landscape.
Walter Bruggeman

When does nonviolence become fatal?
Rene Girard

Themes, motives, images and texts: the architectonic as the exegetic

The given text is the result of the author’s rather prolonged attempts to find structural meaning of the everything that is dubbed sacred and architectonic (the “temple” and everything that surrounds it, everything that precedes, follows or replaces it)¹.

Methodologically, the text is at risk of seeming to be a quite traditional, a preiconographic exercise: it is a sketch that pertains to the so-called “motif”, not simply the thematic complex that refers us to the reality on the exterior of the image, but the visual configuration itself, which “motivates” certain reactions, to be more precise — the affects (“the pathos”) as the direct and not always a conscious reaction/reception addressee of this motif. The motif therefore presents itself as an active statement, aimed at the effect, experienced by the ones who watch (listen, read, feel and most importantly — who will it).

This influence of meaning — often independently of the medium (visuality can be correlated, for example, with textuality) — can also have a sufficiently reflective character, turning out to be a stimulus for creative (generative) reactions. In this case, we are dealing with a direct connection between the informative effect and the performative affect. Moreover, an aesthetic statement, that is, any kind of “poetic” text is also a rhetorical text: it is created as a work that produces some action, which also presupposes a change in attitudes, including changes in relation to discursiveness of one sort or another. It can be, for example, some behaviour (it is necessary to perform some form of action), but it can also be some interpretation (to make some sense). This may be some kind of “plan-program”, some influence on the imagination, etc.

We proceed from the assumption that not only creativity as such is performative-transformative, but the reaction to it can or should be its equivalent: interpretation (even in the position of abstaining from it) is one of the affects. Moreover, almost everything can be an object or a reason for interpretation, although the main thing is that it is driven by some critical circumstance that invariably evokes a reaction: the creation of some new meaning is a possible way out of this crisis.

That is why it is so important to systematize such motives in which the production and destruction of something becomes its content. Some texts of a certain kind, being themselves certain constructions-complexes of themes and motives, without hiding their affective intentions, simultaneously reveal the mechanisms of critical reactions-receptions. This is especially true when it comes to the most basic topics, where place, space, the world of life, its characteristics and conditions (for example, dwelling places), as well as all kinds of transcendental-numinous outputs and alternatives to it, are just the leading topics and motives.

And in the complete, or conversely, the original form, this applies to texts that have the status of “sacred”, having the character of metatext, by definition acting hyper-textually, opening and creating worlds, as well as destroying them. Therefore, if someone may be confused by an openly hermeneutic approach to this kind of textuality, then it is worth noting that we start exactly where the traditional procedure of iconological analysis ends: we assume that textuality nourishes “essential levels of meaning”, basic attitudes towards to your own being, etc. We will try to tackle the very last level of proofreading, which usually looks like the finale of analytics, but perhaps, on the contrary, actually stimulates it.

A most obvious objection arises: scientific discursiveness, built on attention to the figurativeness, being localized in a certain disciplinary-cognitive situation (“fine art”, “art history”, “art history”), cannot start with a text, ignoring visuality for the time being. Our own legitimation as “art historians” is our trust in the visual, our belief in imagery as a primary and direct experience of life. But this is precisely what we question (without being, however, super-original here).

We act, albeit risky, but quite simply, examining such motives that clearly create the hermeneutic circle situation, telling us about architecture, they cannot thereby be a source for our understanding of architecture. We cannot be sure that the architecture did not get into the text from reality, thus having prerogatives in front of the text, even the most ontological ones. But the fact is that reality — even the most architectonic one — was not configured (at least virtually) by textual patterns.

And this is especially true for the architecture of the so-called “Sacred,” which seems to be sacred because it deals with sacred content. But if we turn to the source of this sacred meaning, we will find that the corresponding texts speak directly and frankly about the architecture already built: the built architecture is sacred because it is built textually, and vice versa. Moreover, we cannot refer to the text when dealing with architecture: the text is written and compiled, and architecture is built and exhibited, or rather, it is projected, but its projectivity is within the text, where it is already built, as, incidentally, the text itself. And — rhetorically! And even before that — imaginatively!

The way out of the circle is to pay attention to motives that do not create architecture, but destroy it: after all, the whole experience of the numinous is the experience of meeting the Other and the experience of a place that is before any building on it, and which remains so — even after construction. Moreover, discursiveness, especially rhetorical narrative, is always a reality competing with architectonic identity-stability.

This is the basis for referring to the “Desert” and the “Ruin”, which must, of course, be supplemented by the “Garden”, because it is almost immediately after the chaos from which everything began and in which there is every beginning, and maybe even every end (the Pinnacle?).

The text is constructed as a series of historical excursions on topics, and then on motives, with an intermediate zone of memorial issues. First — some overview of the semantics and symbolism of the selected motives, then their general literary history, again systematized thematically, and finally — some preliminary exegesis of the corresponding passages of the Old and New Testaments. The frankly collage-like nature of our text is stipulated at the beginning and has a deliberately methodical character as an open construction inviting (“motivating”) the reader to some cooperation — certainly a critical one.

Desert and Ruins — Infinity of Meaning and Concentration of Meaning

Here is the image and the turn that prompted us to the observations, notes and remarks offered below — scattered, perhaps in our presentation, but gathering under the gaze of a condescending but attentive reader into sufficiently significant semantic connections and relations:

“For your ruined and desolate places and your ravaged land will now indeed be too small for your people, and those who devoured you will be far away” (Isaiah 49:19).

This is a somewhat unusual logic: destruction is only a pretext for restoration. Ruins are a tool of recreation; they remove the obstacle and at the same time remain a reminder of such a task. In this either dialectic, or irrationality and even alienation — lies the whole logic of the Revelation, in any case — its fixation in the form of Scripture. We will resort to it in order to describe some structures of meaning, of course, which reveal the structures of being, and not only in the form of a human and not only in the world.

The desert² is the opposite of inhabited zones and regions and therefore takes on the appearance and condition that is opposed to what happens in places inhabited by people. It is they, the people, who make the desert what it is, they fill the emptiness with what they can or are ready to fill as surplus or waste of culture and orderliness. Including impurity.

And then comes purification — emptying, emptying the world from the impurities of being. Ruins are born — what remains of the results of abolition. Strictly speaking, if nothing remains, then the world returns to its original state — into nothingness or at least into chaos. But something should remain as evidence, on the one hand, of the past state, which was overcome through cleansingdevastation, on the other hand, of the work done, on the third, of the future and replacing — i.e. — filling the resulting emptiness of the state. Destruction creates the future in the place of the past, to which you said goodbye for the sake of joining the not yet existing. The ruin is a promise, consolation instead of loss. It is memory transformed into imagination. Rather, it is the place of memory (lieux) in place of the environment (milliuex)³.

And this is a place of reminder that any construction also presupposes a process of destruction: only the previously built can be destroyed. And not only because such is the nature of any man-made building, and not because there is a flaw in any built structure, but because the finality of the building, as its exhaustion, already means death. The ruin is a reminder of handmade imperfection, that is, the incompleteness of the plan. Therefore, ruins are inevitable on the path to perfection, and only in this way — by destroying or allowing to destroy one’s own — it is possible to make room for the other’s accomplishments. He does not stop, He does not delay, for He builds in the blink of an eye, so rapidly that from the outside one can simply not notice the changes, and therefore He often seems too slow in its immutability and duration, causing impatience or boredom. Although His persistence deserves some awe.

A desert is different from devastation: one is a natural and lawful place (position), the other is an artificial and lawless state of affairs. The desert is not a void! The desert belongs to the natural world (creation as such), the wasteland is the work of human hands, the product of evil deeds. Therefore, the desert is transformed, the wasteland is abolished. One is in expectation of beneficent intervention, the other is in its rejection. The first can be saved in renewal, the second in final disappearance. The desert is just a construction site, so to speak; wasteland — a rather long-term construction, turning, as usual, into a wasteland⁴. The desert is capable of perceiving the new, the wasteland is dilapidated and reclaimed. Wasteland and emptiness are places of filling and replacement, that is, the appearance of something radically new, not similar to the first or decrepit. In the abolition of oneself, the empty and empty reveals the potential for something radical. These and many other oppositions contain all the collision and all the inviolability of the unity of the Old and New Testaments.

The desert has no certainty, it is not differentiated, and therefore it is a convenient tool for all kinds of poetics and rhetoric of change. The desert attracts us with being opposite to everything familiar and ordinary. It is an alternative and therefore it is a means of hermeneutics, for it is a challenge to everything familiar and, so to speak, a space for transcending.

It is important that the “desert/ruin” is the essence of the structure and of the narrative itself. The topos of a topic turns into a topos of rhetoric: the desert from a scene of action turns into a mode of action, more specifically — into a metaphor, that is, a transfer, which is infinitely close to one of the main motives of Scripture — the transition-Easter, where the Crucifixion itself is the “New Exodus [Daniel 2013:27]. As a motive, “desert” is also a place where you can collect, archive and transform a number of meanings, which, among other things, have cultural-historical as well as cultural-sacred significance.

The motive “ruins” is less capacious, it would seem, but more specific, specifically in the temporal and historical aspects. There is objectivity in it, but at the same time there is a topic, like any construction (albeit in a state of “deconstruction”), that is, it is linked to the locality. Moreover, if the desert is rather vague (unlimited), then the limitedness of the ruin makes it a convenient object of transfer: although it cannot contain and hold, the values in it are held and cling to it (as if due to unevenness and fuzziness of surfaces, the presence of voids and gaping openings)⁵.

After these somewhat hasty and emphatically preliminary observations, we offer a certain set of systemic — and therefore once again open — knowledge regarding the entire semantics of the desert and the ruin, and then we will make a short transition through a completely non-desert, although textologically relatively incomplete construct, called the literary testimony of St. Scriptures. By it we mean the text of the Old and the text of the New Testaments, which in selected passages concerning our topic, we will accompany, as agreed, with some commentary and observations.

The Desert and Ruins — Word, Memory, Space

Thus, the two objects of our research have two dimensions: spatially objective phenomena and literary (mainly) ones, that is, poetic motives-topos. That is, both can be a “thing”, or maybe a carrier of a certain set of “meanings”⁶. Let’s try to present both in a threefold sequence: literature is replaced by the theory of memory, which in turn passes the baton to philosophy, first of all — space (and hence time, which means — with a return to history and everything connected with it or cancelling it).

First of all, the desert is “a dry, sandy and, accordingly, a place poor in vegetation and simply hostile to life” [Günzel 2012:459]. There are no landmarks here: a flat, uninhabited landscape, giving rise at least to the feeling of infinity. The uncertainty of forms also gives a sense of the transitory. The rapid disappearance of all traces explains the impossibility of defining boundaries. This place is on the edge, above all, of the ecumene. The most direct opposition is everything that is not inhabited and not alive (the desert is not a settlement-city, not a house, not a garden and not a pasture).

These properties form all the symbolism of the desert, which can take the shape of endless spaces of the north, and any rocky terrain, and steppes, and even the sea (of course, without the dryness). And therefore, as we will see, the modern city turns out to be a “desert”, and any place, not at all natural, where one can get lost and lose the way to what is dear, which is opposite to wandering, wandering and suffering — to home and shelter.

But the presence of the desert in Scripture (this is our separate and main conversation) introduces relatively positive dimensions into its semantics, although the most important thing is rather ambivalence (wandering is combined with temptation, hermitism — with loneliness and longing). The desert is a transitive and transformative place, that is, it is associated with all kinds of trials and changes, with a change in position (the sense of settlement is replaced by wandering, unity — by absent-mindedness-diaspora).

The quality of emptiness in the desert gives rise to a special “negative phenomenology”, or rather, “denial of the phenomenal”⁷. This emptiness, this nothingness, however, paradoxically implies its content, and not as logically as by instinctive-volitional efforts: “topography of the irrational” implies the fear of emptiness and its repression by all means — not only physical, but also imaginative. And we must distinguish between filling and displacement. Moreover, the topic of the desert is not only topography, but also topology, strictly speaking — special spatial structures with special dynamics of rather “nomadic” properties. But the desert is also the opposite of “non-space”⁸: if the latter corresponds predominantly to transitivity and the temporality of rather “compressed” time, then the desert is “extended” time, not so much “swallowed” as absorbing.

In addition, the desert space is similar to the sea in another aspect: it is a fluid, unsteady, if not a slippery place. Rational indicators of space (dimension, boundaries, direction, distance) are replaced by irrational ones — incidents and affects, which also implies a corresponding sensory modality with a predominance of haptic experiences and intensity indicators. This is a kind of “serif space” (attempts to equip and cultivate the desert with the help of all kinds of marks). In any case, the desert is opposed to the sky as an ideal and absolute space (the sky easily passes into the heavens, into the space of cosmic spheres). The desert is maximally adapted to all kinds of tracing, that is, the practice of laying routes. All kinds of “transfer zones” originate from the original properties of the desert.

What about the semantics of the desert? It is “a symbol of closeness to the divine and, accordingly, remoteness, mystical purity, purely natural space, unlimited power of imagination, as well as absolute freedom and existential abandonment” [Butzer, Jacob 2012:490]. These five symbolic fields are constituted, respectively, by such already mentioned qualities as unlimited breadth, heat and dryness, sterility and, as a result, emptiness, as well as the opposite of cultivated land.

Regarding the “proximity/remoteness of God”, we have a separate and basic conversation, although it should be noted already now that the sacred ambivalence of the desert is associated with the equally dual behaviour of the chosen people in the desert (in contrast to the perfectly clear behaviour of Yahweh, by the way). In addition, a fundamentally new aspect is given by the texts of the New Testament, where the preaching of the Forerunner is correlated with the stay of Jesus in the wilderness. Finally, as a continuation — the desert as a place of hermitism and, accordingly, communion with God — this is an early text of Vita Antonii (4^th century), where the desert is a place of asceticism (partly prepared by the corresponding places in Luke, about which below). The desert, as a place of temptation for the hermit (and in two ways — with flesh and wealth), is quickly demonized, and not without efforts on the part of Dante in Inferno (XIV, 1-42). He was later echoed by I. Swedenborg (in Earth and Heaven, § 587): the desert is a place of punishment in the Hell of Apostates.

The opposite — and a positive dimension of the motive of temptation (and the victory over it) gives the image of the desert as a place for the mortification of the sensible and liberation from everything earthly through settling into the “true desert” (already in Saint Mechtilde of Magdeburg in her Flowing Light of the Divine, in the section “The Desert 12 Things”). The ascetic symbolism of the desert is a key motive for Bernard of Clairvaux (Sententiae II, 11: desert as overcoming the frailty of current existence, a symbol of simplicity as a purely Christian virtue, sought-after and indestructible purity). In other words, the desert of the soul is mated with the desert of God — a cross-cutting motive of all negative theology from the Areopagitics to the twentieth century.

A separate side of the semantics of the desert — the historical and geographical one — is the absence of a real desert in the Christian and European West (the sea could partly serve as such, but the desert is after all exactly land, especially dry). And its replacement already in the Middle Ages was the forest (observation of Le Goff⁹) — a place of hermitage not worse than the desert itself.

A characteristic transformation of the desert as an open and boundless space takes place in the Christian West in the Middle Ages, when the alternative to the desert (it does not exist for purely geographical reasons¹⁰) as a place of hermitage is a closed and impenetrable forest¹¹ — dark and frightening. Chrétien de Trois (in Parsifal and Ywayne) equates the “forest of the soul” with the desert of life that does not know God, which is at the same time the starting point of the ascent to moral perfection. A slightly more secular version is already proposed by Petrarch: a thicket-desert is the poetic ideal of vita solitaria: the striving for bliss is expressed in amorous lamentation, filled and softened by poetic inspiration (Canzoniere XXXM)¹².

An interesting case is the experience of the Baroque era in transferring the ambivalence characteristic of the “desert” symbolism and the entire semantic corpus of the hermit’s life to poetry and its inherent power of imagination. The result was, among other things, the replacement of the “transcendental” and mystical-magical motivation (temptation by unclean spirits) with the paradigm of “genius and madness”: R. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) combines loneliness (= recluse), melancholy (= mournful component of asceticism — disappointment with the world) and painfully exaggerated power of imagination (= desire and search for God)¹³. The religious symbolism of the desert is mastered and overcome by the whole range of romantic motives of artistic creativity, where the pathologization of loneliness (I. G. Zimmerman: “On loneliness”, 1785) is adjacent to the experience of “staging” a lonely and universal memory (F. Brentano: “I drag myself through the desert”, 1816). The continuation of this strategy is already Sh. P. Baudelaire, for whom the despondency (ennui), inherent in the “desert of a big city”, makes the artist turn not just into an eremit, but also into a nomad wanderer, that is, a flaneur immersed in world filled with his creative dreams (Paris Spleen, 1869). Similarly, G. Flaubert, sharpening the isolation of the artist within modern society, alien to the search for truth and beauty of absolute creation, expands the tension between phenomenal emptiness and imaginative fullness, as well as between escapist anti-civilizational fantasies and the world of dreams characteristic of the East (Salammbo, 1862 and etc.). The transformation of the desert into a place of literary writing and a medium of writer’s self-reflection is no less characteristic. For the next century, the “desert” is a historicized mnemotope and a point of departure, and a place of escape for the narrative itself.

And finally, the last symbolic field of the desert is absolute freedom and existential abandonment. The beginning is A. de Lamartine (The Desert or About the Immateriality of God, 1856), for whom the East is a place of primary vitality, nobility and beauty, and the nomadic way of existence is an alternative to the networks of a big city, and the same desert is a symbol of boundless selfrealization. For A. Rimbaud (A Season in Hell, 1873), the desert is a pretext for glorifying nomadic life and a place for the loss of illusions, a place of the same boredom, although it can also be a place for the realization or staging of male heroism (T. E. Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1926). F. Nietzsche (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, 1891) became one of the central — and positive — motives of the desert: it is a symbolic place of absolute freedom and the revaluation of all values, connotating with the wisdom and art of life characteristic of a desert inhabitant who is able to transform dead longing in the “desert of creativity”.

Here is another series of “desert” symbolism, which is densely present in the literature of the twentieth century: the desert as a “no-place” beyond the functionality of the technical space of modernity and the space of reflection and existential self-identification; the desert as a place for alternative public projects and literary worlds; the desert as a symbol of the immeasurable and therefore absurd, surmounted through an unbound striving for peace and productive creativity; the desert as a loss of orientation and therefore is a symbol of the indistinguishability of primitive nature and civilized culture; the desert, finally, is a symbol of the inhuman in modern subjectivity.

Thus what, then, are literary ruins, or rather ruins as a literary symbol? This is, first of all, “a symbol of epoch-making breaks and changes, limited artistic creativity, the frailty of human existence and poetry itself” [Butzer, Jacob 2012:355]. Constitutive for the symbolism of ruins is the transitory gestalt image, located between nature and culture, destruction and montage, between the past and the present (future).

Ruin as a symbol of the crisis course of history — already in Virgil (and, of course — in the IV song of the Aeneid), in the continuation of which F. Petrarch (LIII. Canzone) speaks of the need to restore antiquity from its ruins, so that it becomes a guarantee of freedom and the world. For the “Goethe era”, it is the ruins that are the sign of a turning point in history, marked by the French Revolution. The essential point is the requirement for constructive restoration. The ruin is a sign of a surmounted negative past and a symbol of transition (I. G. Fichte: The Emblem of Reason, 1789). History is a construction site for mankind (I. G. Herder: The Idea of the Philosophy of Mankind, 1784). The past is intended to become the material for the future, where the poet is the “chief builder” (J. W. Goethe, The Traveler, 1776 and C. Brentano Godwy I, 1800). But for K. F. Moritz (Andreas Hartknopf, 1786), everything is quite the opposite: despite the unremitting efforts to erect a “building of culture”, the ideal construction for mankind has not succeeded.

In Romanticism, the ruin is a reminder of the lost Eden (here the entire almost limitless symbolism of the garden is connected to the ruin symbolism). Therefore, the ruin is also significant eschatologically: humanity needs salvation. The ultimate goal is “the regeneration of Paradise”, but under the sign of modernity (Novalis: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 1800, Disciples at Sais, 1799 and F. Schelling: “Clara ...”, publ. 1862). Similar motives — in the so-called. “Trümmerliteratur” (German literature after 1945: “literature of the collapse”), when the symbol is no longer the ruins of the past, but the ruins of the present, German cities actually wiped off the face of the earth (and in the same way — old genres and old styles, all the same Kahlschlag¹⁴, with the simultaneous motives of returning and regaining the former homeland and the former art forms — up to Homer with his theme of the horrors of war and destruction).

The antithesis formed in the Renaissance era (with the transition to the Baroque), human creative efforts (the power of creativity) and the precariousness of their results, in an understandable way, was connected with the motive of the ruin as a sign, on the one hand, of the greatness of the fruits of creativity, and on the other, awareness insignificance and frailty of any human effort. Despite the fact that since the beginning of the 19^th century. Nevertheless, primacy is given to creative energy, just from the inside of the destroyed developing towards new productivity. A poet is already a “renovator”, and poetry is a movement towards each other of two processes — destruction and renewal (J. W. Goethe Italian Journey, 1817). For subsequent eras (especially the 20^th century), the dichotomy of aesthetic decay and restoration is a criterion for creativity as such. The ruin is the stage where such destructive and constructive actions unfold and where the very beauty of destruction appears. It is at the moment of its violent destruction that the object, taking the form of a ruin, reveals its original existence (G. Simmel and his Ruin, 1907). Strictly speaking, thinking in fragments, without making up a purely imaginary unity and wholeness, is the sought-after strategy of postmodernism as such.

Expansion of the motive of aesthetic ruin to a symbol of existential corruption gives one more symbolic space — melancholy and fear, “nesting” in the same ruin (or rather, in its contemplation and experience), starting with the ancient genre of “consolation” (Cicero: “Letters to relatives”, IV, 5). It is the Baroque that makes the ruin not only a sign of the insignificance of a human being, but also a directly stylized “body” similar in its decline and decay to the affected and damaged (“ruined”) bodies from the organic world (the same hyacinth is a powerful symbol in itself — as the embodiment of all decay). But the motive of mourning the ruins can be transformed into the so-called. “Sweet melancholy” of a didactically pious nature, when decline or fall is only a fragment of the Divine plan (the passionate cycles of B. G. Broches, extremely popular in the middle of the 18^th century, relied on the music of J. S. Bach). Lonely contemplation of the ruins-tombs in the night is a through motive of English poetry of the same time (especially with the addition of Roman themes), while at the beginning of the 19^th century. Night aesthetic vigils are already connected with such sadness that it is rather pleasure, especially in combination with the magic of moonlight (J. Eichendorf Marble Image, 1818). However, such states do not exclude thoughts of death and a sense of danger (L. Tick, E. Hoffmann, G. Kleist), including in the context of the “Gothic novel” (M. G. Lewis The Monk, 1796 and E. A. Po The Fall of the House of Usher, 1839). In general, the ruin as a sign of a languid and melancholic transcendence is a symbol of romanticism itself.

The ruin also represents the most important poetological plots: as a fragment of the whole, lost and sought after, it is the essence of poetry itself, when the author is in some way a “constructor” of the ruins (Preface to the second part of Godwy by Brentano). The author’s deconstruction is staged by many means, including the direct destruction of a single and unique narrative instance: the continuity of poetic productivity makes the very functioning of the text the meaning of what is happening in the novel (Jean Paul Invisible Lodge, 1793). And not a ready-made text, but poetic speech as such consists of a destroyed language and the inevitable attempts to restore it — on the material of fragmented speech fragments (V. Benjamin The Origin of the German Baroque Drama, 1928).

And one of the cross-cutting dimensions of this so universal literary motif is all sorts of memoriality. In this case, a ruin is “a building destroyed by natural disaster, war, or as a result of natural decay” [Pethes, Ruchatz 2001:509]. Antiquity does not know much interest in the ruin and its meaning, except for the custom of deliberate destruction of the enemy’s buildings as a symbolic act of abolishing the memory of the vanquished (damnatio memoriae). Equally, the Middle Ages knew mainly a practical attitude to the ruin as a source of building material. But the inclusion of Rome and its still ancient (pagan) existence in the sacred history of salvation creates a certain semantic areola around the relics of Roman antiquity (a kind of topographic typology). Only the Renaissance creates a new attitude to the ruin as a monument, moreover, of the past. From now on, the ruin (starting with the aforementioned F. Petrarch) is an aesthetic means of contemplation, both of the past and the future: the ruin is a place of memory created by history¹⁵. Since the ruin is a fragmented whole, it contains the complementarity of memory itself, as well as memory and oblivion (preservation and loss). It is possible — with the help of the power of imagination — to restore the fragments to the whole, but in the same way — individual fragments remain unread due to the loss and absence of the whole as such. Such ambivalence sets, on the one hand, the theme of succession — the continuation of the past in the present and the future, and on the other — as historicism grows, the ruin turns out to be a sign of discontinuity, historical distance and just a break. At the emotional level, the ruin can be experienced and thematized as a place of ideal life (Arcadia), as a place where dreams of the past come true, and on the other, as a reminder of mortality, of the insignificance of human existence (all the same melancholy). Secular cults of the same state power were inclined already in the 18^th. Use the ruins as a contrasting frame of their own (actual and at the same time virtual) stability. Not for nothing is the impulse to the cult of ruins — the French Revolution. Romanticism replaces the symbolism of the ruin as a “cipher of decay” (the ideal whole) for a direct experience of fragmentariness as a way of manifesting modernity, the essence of which is its transience.

But the ruin can also be interpreted as a direct memorial sign: since the original does not completely disappear into the ruin, it remains a kind of metahistorical narrative that develops over the historical context itself. Ruin turns out to be an objectification of historical consciousness as such, moreover, in relation to a specific time and in contrast (as a cultural value) to the material “interests” of modernity, for which the ruin is primarily material remnants. Despite the fact that in the ruin as a symbol and the real presence of transitory being both the dialectical and therefore paradoxical contexts of the past / future, old / new, death / life, victory / defeat are hidden and revealed. Therefore, in all that exists, one can discern a “ruined ruin” [Pethes, Ruchatz 2001:510]. But the ruin immediately reveals its role in the constitution of any historical identity, building tradition and succession, and not without staging aspects (practice and theory of artificial ruins), reproducing the entire mythology of searching and finding sources (including in the form of “genetic method”). The ruin manages to be a marker of both the historical continuity, and the rupture, and the beginning of the new, and the renewal of the old (but not obsolete!), A sign of all renaissances and all kinds of restorations. The fact of the preservation of the ruins symbolizes the whole context of stability and prolongation of the past, and as a result — the reliability of historical knowledge and confidence in the availability of the past. Hence the whole ideology and mythology of the historical process as progress.

Indicative in this context is the active use of architectural and constructive metaphor, which can be used with the opposite sign: where there is construction, there is deconstruction, where there is construction, there is decline and decay. In a provocatively-projecting way, the ruin realizes the “future of the past” [Pethes, Ruchatz 2001:510], it is the present (extended) form of the past tense (according to G. Simmel) and as “the true content of history” it exposes history as a “process of constant decline” (V. Benjamin). The ruin reveals the transience of life (vanitas), but it also contains the hidden promise of “the present, which belongs to the future”. A ruin can denote the origin of something and then — its purpose, which means dissatisfaction with the present and the promise of the future as the soughtafter motherland, somewhere the present is only a “temporal diaspora”. Ruin is a memorial construct of any utopia (according to E. Bloch). And a radical means of overcoming the memorial functions of the ruin is the restoration of the original state of the building: restoration as a revolution [Pethes, Ruchatz 2001:511].

For philosophical discourse, “ruin” is interesting as a spatial structure, which, to an even greater extent than a memorial structure, turns out to be not even a symbol, but almost an instrument of “temporalization” of space. A ruin is, first of all, a space limited by its location, or rather a body, although independent, but revealing its incompleteness (but different from the “unfilled” desert). The ruin realizes and exposes the passage of time within the architecture: it is “no longer” (lost integrity), and it is “not yet” (final destruction). Such tension — both in time-space and in consciousness-experience — makes the ruin a kind of “aesthetic imaginarium”, since tension requires its overcoming: in the mental, imaginary and boundless space of the Possible, the shortcomings and losses of the limited space of Reality are filled. The real decline is restored by the virtual fullness [Günzel 2012:348].

The value aspects of the ruin are connected precisely with the loss of its functional, purely architectural aspects: it is impossible to live in the ruins (compare the metaphor of the unclean and unholy mixture of the city-ruins and the desert in Isaiah in his prophecy about Babylon — Isaiah 13: 19-22), but it is possible to contemplate them. This is how the aforementioned “aesthetics of ruins” was born (approximately from the Renaissance) — together with the aestheticization of the past in general and antiquity (antique) in particular (the latter is also associated with the sacralization of, first of all, ancient Rome, which preceded such aestheticization, which, by the way, was not knew — in relation to antiquity, for example, Greek). The eve of the French Revolution is, in fact, the manifesto of a similar worldview in Constantin-François de Volney (Ruin or Reflections on the Revolution in the Empire, 1796). The stability, continuity (albeit material) of ruins in its current state makes it a means of critical analysis of our time. For G. Simmel, obligatory in our context, a ruin is an attempt to balance between a weightless soul striving upward and heavy matter striving downward, and therefore is the embodiment of “opposing forces of being”. For V. Benjamin, the ruin is the “allegorical physiognomy of natural history”: a fragment, highly valuable for the Baroque cult of the past, is the noblest matter of creativity. For J. Derrida (Memoirs of blindness. Self-portrait and other ruins, 1990¹⁶), if the beginning of creativity is a fragment (the design of a building is only a part of it), then “at the beginning there was a ruin” (if the creation as a metaphor has an architecture that begins with a sketch and is created by the effort of memory, which preserves the incompleteness of the initial concept as a condition for moving towards the final realization¹⁷). The future is the denial of the whole. The disintegration of world architectonics makes the metaphor of ruin not only a means of reproducing the enigmatic-symbolic nature of meaning: the discourse itself already has a ruin as its sign. Ruination and incompleteness are finally constructed!

The Desert and the Ruin — with Revelation through Scripture

So, we will distinguish between the desert and the ruins as a certain phenomenon and carrier of qualities, and also as a metaphor, including theological. As well as poetic. Therefore, the order will be as follows: what, who and why? That is, properties-signs, signs of participation-order of actions, results-goals — and according to the list of corresponding books first of the Old Testament.

Initially, the desert is an aspect of the earth (the entire range of meanings of the latter is related to the desert and emptiness). And, accordingly, the origin of the desert is not at all an affirmative, but an incentive discourse: in Scripture, it is immediately the bearer of the kerygma. It is a given, although not a gift.

The earliest parts of the book of Genesis show that the desert is associated with Eden and the unsuccessful project of its cultivation on the part of man: the desert appears in the east of Eden after the expulsion of the ancestors as a “cursed land” (cf. however Gen. 5:29 as a blessing instead of a curse, but connected with the flood, where the opposition is confirmed and abolished, although this can be observed earlier, for example, in the genealogy of Cain with his “city”, etc.)¹⁸.

But is there opposition to chaos as an alternative to creation as such (desert as a property of the earth — “tohu”, which is also “bohu”)? Is it enough to just be “empty” or is “formlessness” (tohu) also required? The desert is not emptiness (“bohu”), although the commentaries project onto the original what is the subsequent [Classic Bible Commentaries 2010:5-6]. The fact is that creation from chaos or from emptiness are equal opportunities, if we proceed from Gen. 1: 1. In addition, the context of the creation of the final text is important: this is the Babylonian captivity (VI century BC) and a memory-reminder of both the beginning of life and the beginning of liberation (Babylonian captivity is a synonym for Egyptian captivity [Bruggeman 2013:36-37]). Despite the fact that the promise of the land (Gen. 15) already has directly liturgical forms (the cult of oath and sacrifice has a performative character even at the grammar level [Zenger 2008:238]).

The beginning of creation from chaos (“cycle of Adam”: Gen. 1-6) is repeated in re-creation from the results of the flood (“cycle of Noah”: 6-9). As a result, there is a mirror symmetry of prehistory (and myth) and history (kerygma) as the initial emptiness and cleansing devastation (in the future, situations can change places, and different things can turn out to be “sources”, the most important thing is the degree of cleansing: desert — fullness, ruin — partially, with the ability to start from the interrupted place, and not from scratch). But Ramban has purely architectonic associations, where the substance of the sky and the substance of the earth are allocated, which is “tohu”, and “the form it takes is called bohu”. With reference to Ex. 34:11, which speaks of the “line of ruin” (tohu) and the “plumb line of destruction” (bohu), Ramban allows himself to expand the semantics: tohu is already a cord for marking out the building plan, and bohu is the plumb line of a building already being erected. Tohu is “nothing” because it “follows nothing,” that is, it starts construction from scratch. It is like stones that rely on nothing. We can say that tohu is the materia and the horizontal of the layout plan, and bohu is already the forma, that is, the real appearance and vertical structure of the building, erected, taken out from the zero level¹⁹.

The wilderness, although it seems to be “in the East of Eden” (Gen. 3:24), is not an anti-garden, but a place of exile. Antisad is just a ruin-ruin. The garden has a dispensation, the desert has its own existence (even if we do not resort to the opposition of natural and cultural being, it is clear that the desert exists, albeit in opposition to the vital, but still — the region!). There are probably other oppositions, more fundamental from the point of view of the Covenant, but not so basic ontologically and historically²⁰.

But the world reveals itself as a global ruin, as a result of a destructive and cleansing effect — after the “second creation”, that is, after the flood, where the Ark is a concentrate of ruins, a remnant of the old world (it is nevertheless destroyed not without remnants: apparently, fish and other sea creatures led, among other things, with Leviathan [Classic Bible Commentaries 2010:115-116]). It is a fragment of the former whole and a pledge-condition for the subsequent renewal, that is, not just restoration. However, it can be clarified that the flood is not so much destruction as an act of extermination and cleansing of what is on the earth (this is not even a landscape ruin, but a devastated land, rid of unnecessary or unwanted things, that is, wasteland). And within the narrative itself, the culmination is precisely the transition from destruction to creation, moreover, through a purely memorial act: “And God remembered Noah” (Genesis 8:1) [Brueggemann 2009:48].

The juxtaposition between the garden and the city (paradise and home, as well as the inhabited and uninhabited land, including Egypt and the promised land) continues in the further narration (that is, in the history of Abraham) with the most fundamental opposition of the “land” (promised) and the rest of the world: this is, so to speak, a sacred topography partly equivalent to the opposition of the sacred and the profane, and moreover, created as orderly and obedient (involved in the will of Yahweh and that which opposes it).

In the course of the narration (within the framework of the PentateuchTorah), several more fundamental aspects are discovered in the phenomenology of the desert (and in its narratology too). The desert is:

1. Place of mortal threat (the story of Joseph takes place in the desert, where the empty chasm also appears: Gen. 37:22), death (including waterlessness and lack of vegetation and food in combination with wild and dangerous animals (Isaiah 34:14).

2. A place of wandering and wandering (in a positive and negative sense) — the whole story of Abraham, who travelled a path that ended in a land that was no longer deserted, but inhabited (“the promise was not given in a vacuum” [Bruggeman 2013:128]).

3. The place of flight of Hagar (Gen. 16:7 — an angel at the spring with a continuation in Gen. 21:14-20, where thirst and the threat of death are mentioned, as well as despair — but together with the subsequent consolation) and, accordingly, — a place of shelter and salvation (1 Sam. 23:15 and, undoubtedly, Rev. 12:6: “And the wife fled into the wilderness, where a place was prepared for her from God, to feed her there one thousand two hundred and sixty days.”

But without exaggeration, we can say that the real history of the desert (previously — prehistory) begins with the book of Exodus²¹. The desert itself becomes the protagonist of the story and, most importantly, an effective instrument in the hands of God, the manifestation and provision of His will.

The first appearance of the desert in such a role is the beginning of the Exodus, when Yahweh precisely “far into the desert”, where Moses brought his flock (a hint of the future bringing him Israel), is revealed to him in the Burning Bush (Exodus 3:1). In the wilderness, Aaron meets Moses (Exodus 4:27). The same desert becomes a kind of camouflage trick symbol (forced for now) to free the people: Pharaoh is required to let the people go to the desert for three days, which should become the place for the Passover (Exodus 5:1). In contrast to the unholy land of the Egyptian desert, it turns out to be a holy place²².

Although not for long: the same desert locks the people just released (Exodus 13:17, 14:3), it becomes a trap for them (so that there is no temptation to return to Egypt), but itself becomes a trap for the Pharaoh.

The desert turns out to be a place where a real theophanic-performative action unfolds, including the formation of a void in the middle of the sea. It is the wilderness that is the place of temptation-testing, and the mutual one: the place where dissent rises (Exodus 16:2), but also being the place of the manifestation of the Divine Glory (Exodus 16:10), the place of the Presence (the pillar of fire, the brazen serpent (John 3:4) and, accordingly, mercy (including the manna²³).

Finally, the desert (Sinai) is the place of the Law (Exodus 19) and the place of worship (Exodus 25), that is, the Tabernacle, sacrifice, the place of God’s patience. Thus, the desert is the place of redemption (including the place for the scapegoat sacrifice Levite 6)²⁴.

It turns out that the desert is directly connected with the Tabernacle, while the exodus from the desert prepares the need for the Temple. This is how one of the most significant oppositions and collisions is born, which are resolved with difficulty and pain only in the New Testament²⁵. After all, the Temple is not just the work of human hands, but the fruit of human (royal!) Initiative. The temple is fraught with “deep conflict” already in the Solomon “project” — “the quintessence of the Canaanization of Israel” [Bruggeman 2012:72]²⁶. The restoration of the Temple is carried out in an empty (devastated) place. The

Second Temple is a mnemotope, the effect of restoring the past, that is, the lost.

Its foundation is a ruin! That is, the fate of abolition always looms: the entire New Testament is revealed as a result of the previous and unsuccessful experience of “temple building”²⁷.

The desert begins to flourish and play with new colours at the fingertips of the authors of prophetic books, and likewise of “scriptures” in the broadest sense of the word, where, first of all, the poetry of the psalms awaits us: the motive turns into a metaphor and vivid imagery of the desert, its symbolic capacity competes only with the vastness of its physical prototype (as well as the narrative element: the exodus of the motive from the captivity of literalism to the promised lands of universal meanings is another discourse-plot within the sacred letter, and then the canonical interpretation²⁸)). We see how, falling into the structures of the already prophetic genre, the former narrative and constructive-compositional meanings undergo changes, similar to what the people of God experienced in the desert.

This is all the more relevant because the real eventfulness of the prophetic books, the historical situation required more powerful means and a new ministry. We mean, of course, the circumstances of the death of the Hebrew state under the onslaught of enemies who came from the places just as deserted and alien. When not only cities are devastated, but life itself, becomes devoid of meaning and the very conditions for its maintenance, the seemingly purely rhetorical technique of exposure and consolation, which is the distinctive essence of prophetic poetics, turns out to be a new form of direct descriptiveness and presentation. This is all the more true for the experience of captivity: the image of the desert from the book of Exodus takes on a monumental and epochal resonance. Such a desert — which good, full of mercy and loyalty to Yahweh, undoubtedly opposes the wasteland, the devastation of faith, and calls for attempts at a new filling. In other words, the desert in the Old Testament comes closer to ruins and ruins than anywhere else. This circumstance also compels us to trace these transformations and mutual transitions with greater care and, so to speak, smoothly.

Something dies, something turns into an object of memorial experience. This is already noticeable in Deuteronomy, where the commandments given in the wilderness and recorded in Exodus are reproduced once again in the form of a reminder:

“then your heart will become proud and you will forget the LORD your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. 15“He led you through the great and terrible wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water; He brought water for you out of the rock of flint” (Deuteronomy 8:14-15).

Truly, the cure for aphasia is affect. A prophetic utterance is all the more in need of strong images that, in addition to the memorial and directly affective experience, are capable of generating both new and sought-after states. Prophets and psalms are a direct path to a new and sacred experience. This is the path to the New Testament.

All the troubles are the consequences of the people’s apostasy from God, the desert is thereby reproduced as a place of murmuring and temptation, but now the fury of God extends to inhabited places, first of all — cities and settlements, turning them into a desert:

For My people are foolish,
They know Me not;
They are stupid children
And have no understanding.
They are shrewd to do evil,
But to do good they do not know.”

I looked on the earth, and behold, it was formless and void;
And to the heavens, and they had no light.
I looked on the mountains, and behold, they were quaking,
And all the hills moved to and fro.
I looked, and behold, there was no man,
And all the birds of the heavens had fled.
I looked, and behold, the fruitful land was a wilderness,
And all its cities were pulled down
Before the LORD, before His fierce anger.
For thus says the LORD,
“The whole land shall be a desolation,
Yet I will not execute a complete destruction.
“For this the earth shall mourn
And the heavens above be dark,
Because I have spoken, I have purposed,
And I will not change My mind, nor will I turn from it.”
At the sound of the horseman and bowman every city flees;
They go into the thickets and climb among the rocks;
Every city is forsaken,
And no man dwells in them.

And you, O desolate one, what will you do?
Although you dress in scarlet,
Although you decorate yourself with ornaments of gold,
Although you enlarge your eyes with paint,
In vain you make yourself beautiful.
Your lovers despise you;
They seek your life. (Jeremiah 4:22-30).

It is extremely important to note that the devastation of Jeremiah is of a personalized nature: suffering is not only physical and, so to speak, landscapegeographical, but also moral — bodily through not just sorrow, torment, humiliation, etc., but also through the disintegration of human (bodily!) nature. Although it looks like the deprivation of decoration: as the earth remains bare, so the flesh itself is exposed ...

Here is another classic passage where the prophet brings together the full range of what happened, resorting to the full power of “desert” rhetoric:

You contended with them by banishing them, by driving them away.

With His fierce wind He has expelled them on the day of the east wind.
Therefore through this Jacob’s iniquity will be forgiven;
And this will be the full price of the pardoning of his sin:
When he makes all the altar stones like pulverized chalk stones;
When Asherim and incense altars will not stand.

For the fortified city is isolated,
A homestead forlorn and forsaken like the desert;
There the calf will graze,
And there it will lie down and feed on its branches.

When its limbs are dry, they are broken off;
Women come and make a fire with them,
For they are not a people of discernment,
Therefore, their Maker will not have compassion on them.
And their Creator will not be gracious to them. (Isaiah 27:8-11)
The desert can turn into its opposite, which, as it turns out, is a garden!

“For the land of my people in which thorns and briars shall come up;
Yea, for all the joyful houses and for the jubilant city.

Because the palace has been abandoned, the populated city forsaken.
Hill and watch-tower have become caves forever,
A delight for wild donkeys, a pasture for flocks;

Until the Spirit is poured out upon us from on high,
And the wilderness becomes a fertile field,
And the fertile field is considered as a forest” (Isaiah 32:13-15)

But in forgiveness comes the abolition of emptiness itself and new creation begins, even at the level of images and motives, a new creation, reminiscent of the previous arrangement of a waterless earth, and at the same time carrying something new:

Behold, I will do something new,
Now it will spring forth;
Will you not be aware of it?
I will even make a roadway in the wilderness,
Rivers in the desert. (Isaiah 43:19).

Isn’t it a new creation? Rather, the restoration of what was in a new way, for the Lord is again the organizer of the garden, which can be mistaken for the former Eden, but this is rather its expansion, expansion into the very desert that arose not without the closure of the former garden:

I will put the cedar in the wilderness,
The acacia and the myrtle and the olive tree;
I will place the juniper in the desert
Together with the box tree and the cypress (Isaiah 41:19).

The difference is that from now on (eschatologically) cities will also be included into the former desert — both those destroyed before (or in the “now” of the prophet) and those coming into being:

Behold, all those who are angered at you will be shamed and dishonored;
Those who contend with you will be as nothing and will perish. (Isaiah 42:11).

And what’s more, the ruins will also be included in the upcoming celebration:

Then they will rebuild the ancient ruins,
They will raise up the former devastations;
And they will repair the ruined cities,
The desolations of many generations (Isaiah 61:4).

Thus, the desert is waiting for its transformation. This is still an empty space, but already cleared and prepared for imminent labors ...

The Psalter offers a universal, almost metaphysical picture of the universe, the place of man in it and the place of the desert — as a place of testing, or rather, an image of existential and again complete eschatology:

And gathered from the lands,
From the east and from the west,
From the north and from the south.
They wandered in the wilderness in a desert region;
They did not find a way to an inhabited city.
They were hungry and thirsty;
Their soul fainted within them.
Then they cried out to the LORD in their trouble;
He delivered them out of their distresses.
He led them also by a straight way,
To go to an inhabited city. (Psalm 107:3-7).

Strictly speaking, from desert to garden through ruins, destruction, death, etc. — this is, so to speak, the life cycle of all mankind, not only the chosen people, in the face and with the participation of the One Who is ready to lead from wickedness to glory, leading through the consequences of falling away. That is, alienation from life and meaning, in fact, through the verge of transcending:

He changes rivers into a wilderness
And springs of water into a thirsty ground;
A fruitful land into a salt waste,
Because of the wickedness of those who dwell in it.
He changes a wilderness into a pool of water
And a dry land into springs of water;
And there He makes the hungry to dwell,
So that they may establish an inhabited city,
And sow fields and plant vineyards,
And gather a fruitful harvest (Psalm 107:33-37).

And at that point “the abomination of desolation” (Dan. 9:27, 11:31) on the wing of the sanctuary is a sign of the coming of the Messiah. Although a very special and further fate is already as a destroyed structure-ruin, which turns into an involuntary (first), and then a conscious mnemotope — a means of the postcaptive activity of specific figures (Ezra, Nehemiah).

It is worth noting that we are returning to historical and material realities, and from them — on a new round of metaphorization, but already with a decrease in scale (but not the degree of monumentality!) we ascend to personal realities: we, on the other hand, again find ourselves on the threshold of the New Testament.

“Forces from him will arise, desecrate the sanctuary fortress, and do away with the regular sacrifice. And they will set up the abomination of desolation” (Daniel 11:31).

It turns out a void-wasteland can be arranged, organized and built: this is a kind of artificial ruin of a deliberately broken garden (landscape as a staged return to nature through overcoming regularity, etc.).

Thus, the wilderness and ruins are associated with the influence of the will (the wrath of God and the actions of God’s enemies or the instruments of His punishment-revenge). Therefore, the desert and the ruins are intertwined not only semantically, not only within symbolic circles interacting with each other, in the center of which, as we found out, there is a certain phenomenon or eventfulness. Desert and ruins are complementary in the structure of the narrative itself, as if this is a property of the text itself or its main idea: one is inseparable from the other (starting with the history of creation — the history of it — the text — composing-creation as a whole, in fact — a canonized construct!).

Here is a place that clearly shows the difference and unity of the desert and ruin ruins:

“So, Joshua burned Ai and made it a heap forever, a desolation until this day” (Joshua 8:28).

It is important here that not every ruin is a desert, but only a vast one, when the city is being destroyed, and such destruction, having become something prolonged (until eternity), risks becoming a desert, that is, approaching the primary, natural, pre- and extra historic state ... We can say that only a neglected ruin (ruins) can become a wasteland and desert. That is, in addition to destruction, abandonment, uselessness, that is, a curse, is also possible. And also — binding to the time of the story.

Let us trace this sequence of ruins within the canon sequence. Moving from the seemingly primary ruins of non-existence of the first verses of Genesis, through the main milestones of the Pentateuch, again, to the texts-places of prophetic literature, more precisely — the book of the Prophet Jeremiah, the authors of which witnessed both threats of destruction and the fact of death, and not only of the city, but also the Temple, not only even of the people, but, alas, almost of the faith itself (or the Covenant).

In this sad series, at the very beginning, we will find the story about the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:4-9), which does not imply any ruins: the construction of the tower, or rather the city, remained unfinished, which if it suggests ruin, it is only due to the subsequent abandonment but not direct impact²⁹. This is a rare case of an involuntary architectural non finito, that is, all the same long-term construction (like, for example, the Cologne Cathedral with its symbols of the opposite kind — bringing to the end as unification-building of national unity, etc.)³⁰.

But after the cessation of construction, humanity itself, being scattered, turned out to be fragmented, turned partly into its ruin (it took away its “unfinished business”) [Brueggemann 2013:105]³¹. But this is also the destruction of linguistic communication, the ability to listen to the speech of the Other and the Other as a friend: the disintegration of communication as a fragmentation of both language (or rather, the transformation of living speech into grammar and writing), and its bearer — along with its functions-abilities: a separate sensory channel, separately — speaking. And this is the fragmentation of communication links (“death of relationships”). “God does not interrupt the construction of the tower” [Brueggemann 2013:107]³², he exposes the latent inability to communicate in trust, but only in unification (one language that can die and become a monument — as happened with the tower).

Significant is the preceding of this episode with the story of Abraham, who left this area for the promise of a better land. Waiting for the reformatting of creation — through scattering, defragmentation through deconstruction (up to Acts 2, i.e. Pentecost).

An example of the first direct and destructive impact on a specific land — Sodom and Gomorrah — a fertile area around Jordan, comparable to the “garden of the Lord” (Gen. 13:10), until it was destroyed (Gen. 19:25). Again — devastated, but not deserted. The result is comparable to the sight of a smoking stove (Gen. 19:28)³³. These are not ruins, but final destruction [Brueggemann 2013:183]³⁴. This is comparable to a flood, where instead of water³⁵ there is the element of fire and where, as a result, there is something close to a desert, because this is an area and, moreover, an urban area that has become empty. This is not just a deconstruction, but a whole — a decomposition, because it is obtained from a composite whole, more precisely, something that was whole once but did not survive.

The ratio of the content of chapters 18 and 19 contains the experience of overcoming (destroying) previous paradigms and establishing a new one [Brueggemann 2013:182], and at the compositional-structural level, in the first place. In addition, there is a slightly earlier theme of Sarah’s sterility (the voiddesert is destroyed by the power of mercy, etc.).

Expansion and bringing into the state of a universal metaphor is already another genre within Scripture, and above all — the already mentioned prophetic books, first of all — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the first of the Later prophets, the texts of the books of which were compiled, as already mentioned, under the impression from very real and completely catastrophic and specific circumstances — the capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 BC.

In this connection, the universe itself runs the risk of becoming a desert (Isaiah 14:17), which is already evident in the words addressed to Lucifer (“the son of the dawn”): “He made the universe a desert and destroyed its cities”. It is due to the lawless invasion-aggression that the desert and the ruin unite into a new state, where exactly such a mixture is the most unbearable. Again, God’s intervention and cleansing and desolation — and the promise are desirable! The desert as a result of lawlessness is already the underworld on earth:

Your pomp and the music of your harps
Have been brought down to Sheol;
Maggots are spread out as your bed beneath you
And worms are your covering.’
“How you have fallen from heaven,
O star of the morning, son of the dawn!
You have been cut down to the earth,
You who have weakened the nations!
“But you said in your heart,
‘I will ascend to heaven;
I will raise my throne above the stars of God,
And I will sit on the mount of assembly
In the recesses of the north.
‘I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.’
“Nevertheless you will be thrust down to Sheol,
To the recesses of the pit. (Isaiah 14:11-15).

In the history of not only the relationship between the desert and the ruins, but also Yahweh and Israel as such (and perhaps the universe), the most fundamental, tragic and universal page is the fate of Solomon’s Temple, the final and most deplorable stage of its existence, described by the prophet Jeremiah. Although the specificity of the situation — at the metaphorical level too — lies in the fact that we have several stages and levels of destruction, where a physical ruin only crowns the previous and much deeper destruction of the former, once undoubted shrine:

“Do not trust in deceptive words, saying, ‘This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD /.../ Will you steal, murder, and commit adultery and swear falsely, and offer sacrifices to Baal and walk after other gods that you have not known, 10then come and stand before Me in this house, which is called by My name, and say, ‘We are delivered!’ — that you may do all these abominations? 11“Has this house, which is called by My name, become a den of robbers in your sight? Behold, I, even I, have seen it,” declares the LORD” (Jeremiah 7:3, 4, 8-11).

Nevertheless, how tragic everything that happened looks in its imperturbable descriptiveness:

Now on the tenth day of the fifth month, which was the nineteenth year of King Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, Nebuzaradan the captain of the bodyguard, who was in the service of the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem. 13He burned the house of the LORD, the king’s house and all the houses of Jerusalem; even every large house he burned with fire. 14So all the army of the Chaldeans who were with the captain of the guard broke down all the walls around Jerusalem (Jeremiah 52:12-14).

The list of losses given below is not accidental and revealingly repeats the description of the decoration and inventory of the newly built Temple of Solomon (1 Kings 7:15-47): its deconstruction was already recorded in the construction. If we take into account such a characteristic, purposeful and unforgiving criticism of Jeremiah’s false, almost magical piety, associated precisely with temple rituals (Jer. 7:4, 8), then it becomes clear who really ruined and did ruin the Shrine: those the most wicked, reckless and treacherous “shepherds” who will be replaced by other pastors — conquerors (Jer. 12:10 et seq.), when Nebuchadnezzar himself is called (Jer. 43:12) “the servant of Yahweh”! So, it is not for nothing that the list of the stolen and taken away in the form of extraction of treasures is supplemented by a mention — albeit very brief — and the inhabitants taken prisoner³⁶.

But what, of course, is extremely important — not a word is said about the Ark of the Covenant³⁷! And it is just as important that it is Jeremiah who is the prophet of the New Testament (Jer. 31:31), who will be eternal, because it is written on the tablets of the heart, and not on a stone: “I will put My law in their innards and on their hearts I will write it” (Jer. 31:33). But on the way to it, however, another Temple awaits us — just something “New”, which the prophet Ezekiel has already seen, echoing Jeremiah and concerning all the same hearts:

And I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them. And I will take the heart of stone out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh (Ezekiel, 11:19)³⁸.

And as a complete parallelism to the Gospel and Jesus as such — the most famous, “Christological-temple” place:

“The priests and the prophets and all the people heard Jeremiah speaking these words in the house of the LORD. 8When Jeremiah finished speaking all that the LORD had commanded him to speak to all the people, the priests and the prophets and all the people seized him, saying, “You must die! 9“Why have you prophesied in the name of the LORD saying, ‘This house will be like Shiloh and this city will be desolate, without inhabitant’?” And all the people gathered about Jeremiah in the house of the LORD.

When the officials of Judah heard these things, they came up from the king’s house to the house of the LORD and sat in the entrance of the New Gate of the LORD’S house. 11Then the priests and the prophets spoke to the officials and to all the people, saying, “A death sentence for this man! For he has prophesied against this city as you have heard in your hearing” (Jeremiah 26:7-11)³⁹.

From the Desert through the Ruins to the New Testament

Thus, the First Testament knows the desert from all sides, and precisely — in its multidimensionality, diversity and multidimensionality, and as a motive, theme, image itself — in its (his) relationship with emptiness, the emptiness and, accordingly, with ruin. Moreover, if we look for logic in the relationship between the one and the other and some chronology (what happened before, what will come later), then it quickly becomes clear that, as it seems, interdependence is initial, or rather, initial (everything starts with the book of Genesis, and not with Exodus!). And in the same way, at the end — in Revelation, one can observe correspondences with the history of creation.

But in between and the whole New Testament as a fruit of Revelation, which means places and actions, which, as we found out, is the desert and destruction (ruin). It is significant that it is the desert — and at the beginning of the New Testament. The story of salvation seems to be reeling back: and the Forerunner (or the Evangelist himself) quotes Isaiah, and it is precisely the place concerning the desert:

The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as it is written by the prophets: “Behold, I send My Angel before Your face, who will prepare Your way before You.” “A voice crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make His paths straight.” John appeared baptizing in the wilderness and preaching the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:1-4).

After the Jordan (after the river and the water element — as before after the Red Sea!), Jesus was transferred to the desert by the Spirit and there goes through temptations, embodying by Himself (substituting and representing) the entire people, although in reality — he realizes the unity and mutual the trust. The Gospels emphasize the success of the repeated exodus to and from the wilderness.

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2And after He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He then became hungry. 3And the tempter came and said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread” (Matt. 4:1-3).

And very quickly, as in fast forwarding (quite quickly — in Mark 1:12-13), the following plot is scrolled — infinitely significant and emphatically significant:

Then the devil took Him into the holy city and had Him stand on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down; for it is written,
‘HE WILL COMMAND HIS ANGELS CONCERNING YOU’;
and
‘ON their HANDS THEY WILL BEAR YOU UP,
SO THAT YOU WILL NOT STRIKE YOUR FOOT AGAINST A STONE.’”
Jesus said to him, “On the other hand, it is written,
‘YOU SHALL NOT PUT THE LORD YOUR GOD TO THE TEST” (Matt. 4:3-7)⁴⁰.

Jesus is on the roof of the building, which is destined to be destroyed again (for the second time!). And in this different (radically different — for bodily, that is, whole!) Fate to be broken is a guarantee of new relations, because in it there is a New Testament, which is already formulated retrospectively with all inexorable certainty by the author of the fourth Gospel (see below). Desert and ruins are drawn together in one — and sinless — flesh, capable of nourishing thirsty and hungry in the same desert⁴¹. But being a source of saturation, this Flesh is also capable and even ready (prepared) for belittling and destruction, but equally ready for the sake of final and final results to resort to very decisive and rather destructive acts directed outward:

And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all those who were buying and selling in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who were selling doves. And He said to them, “It is written, ‘MY HOUSE SHALL BE CALLED A HOUSE OF PRAYER’; but you are making it a ROBBERS’ DEN.” (Matt. 21:12, 13).

Jesus, by a power unknown to “the chief priests and elders of the people” (Matt. 21:23), cleans up the Temple — through its desolation, the abolition of the worship service itself. It is important and significant that the fate of the Temple is determined again in the form of a prophecy, and just after a seemingly quite joyful contemplation of its beauties:

Jesus came out from the temple and was going away when His disciples came up to point out the temple buildings to Him. And He said to them, “Do you not see all these things? Truly I say to you, not one stone here will be left upon another, which will not be torn down” (Matt. 24:1,2)⁴².

Although we must imagine that the act performed by Jesus in the Temple is not his cleansing, but namely “symbolic destruction”⁴³. It is no less significant that this is precisely a typically eschatological-prophetic performative act, designed to provoke a reaction!

And the most important thing is that, as is almost always the case with destruction, its consequence is restoration. And therefore, Mark directly connects the words of Jesus with Daniel:

You will be hated by all because of My name, but the one who endures to the end, he will be saved.

“But when you see the ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION standing where it should not be (let the reader understand), then those who are in Judea must flee to the mountains (Мark 13:14).

The devastation of the Temple (or rather, its courtyards, while the courtyards!) and the reason for someone to “finalize the issue” with Jesus, and at the same time — only the beginning of the transition to much more frighteningly eliminating actions of the One who once revealed his prophets, and now — the Son. Yes, the Crucifixion is a cosmic disaster:

And behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth shook and the rocks were split. 52The tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; 53and coming out of the tombs after His resurrection they entered the holy city and appeared to many. (Matt. 27:51-53).

Destruction is almost irreversible, for the very insides, the bowels of the earth, are emptied. But this irrevocability is also desirable, since there is truly no turning back, because the Resurrection is not revival, it is not the restoration of the previous existence, but the abandonment of everything formerly behind; it is a new life in the eschaton:

While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men suddenly stood near them in dazzling clothing; and as the women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living One among the dead? (Luke 24:4,5)

The world of the dead — in the present, for example, thanks to the memory

of the living, who are in the same space (place) with this world and who can personally contemplate that Jesus — in another place and world — is more alive than the one in which, for example, dialogue and in which the comers expect to see and meet Jesus. Their life is still here and now, having met the Risen One, they will enter His eschaton. Jesus does not return for them, but calls them and waits for them (by the way, this is why the meeting of the Magdalene with Jesus takes place in the garden — in a different space and in a different existence, where, in particular, familiar expectations and presets do not work, where one cannot see Jesus with the same gaze — you need a voice and hearing, you need a Word that is ready to listen to humanity)⁴⁴.

But, as it turns out, even bodily destruction (Crucifixion and burial) is an unfinished process. And not only because in the nature of any destruction to leave traces — in fact, ruins, replacing a dwelling and capable of something and someone to contain (remember the demoniac Gadara, who lived in coffins, that is, in abandoned burials⁴⁵). The main thing is that the most radical of all destructive circumstances — death itself — reveals its unreliability in the case of Jesus: she and her strongholds (not even the grave, but the underworld) also turn out to be unstable and unstable — under another and, apparently, final blow from the Almighty, who revealed Himself with all certainty as the Father of the Son, Whom He raised up! And it is John, with all decisiveness and from the very beginning of his gospel (in contrast to the weather forecasters) and with an almost verbatim documentary notion, prioritizes:

The Passover of the Jews was near⁴⁶, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And He found in the temple those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables⁴⁷. And He made a scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables; and to those who were selling the doves He said, “Take these things away; stop making My Father’s house a place of business.” His disciples remembered that it was written, “ZEAL FOR YOUR HOUSE WILL CONSUME ME.” The Jews then said to Him, “What sign do You show us as your authority for doing these things?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It took forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?” But He was speaking of the temple of His body. So, when He was raised from the dead⁴⁸, His disciples remembered that He said this; and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken (John 2:13-22).

Thus, thanks to the act of remembering, the consonance and almost coincidence of the beginning and the end — Genesis and Revelation becomes clear. Moreover, consistently and step by step, since one cannot fail to notice on this path both the Garden and the loneliness in it of the One who contains the whole world! The prayer and struggle of Jesus in Gethsemane is an echo of temptations in the wilderness, and the last reflection of a tragedy that once happened in another and most original garden:

They came to a place named Gethsemane; and He said to His disciples, “Sit here until I have prayed.” And He took with Him Peter and James and John, and began to be very distressed and troubled. And He said to them, “My soul is deeply grieved to the point of death; remain here and keep watch.” And He went a little beyond them, and fell to the ground and began to pray that if it were possible, the hour might pass Him by (Мark 14:32-35).

The indifference of the disciples only emphasizes the loneliness and abandonment of Jesus: He is alone with the Father, substituting — voluntarily and consciously for Adam in the face of his Creator...

As a result, the Coffin is emptied! Of all the objects of all destruction (houses, cities, altars, temples, fortresses-strongholds, pastures-gardens, bodies and hopes), it is the earth in its hidden and seemingly buried (secret, albeit lawless) device (it, as it turns out, in itself inside it concealed its emptiness, almost primordial!) — it is the most fundamental that is exposed to the most radical influence of the most all-crushing Will⁴⁹:

And behold, a severe earthquake had occurred, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon it. And his appearance was like lightning, and his clothing as white as snow. The guards shook for fear of him and became like dead men. The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; for I know that you are looking for Jesus who has been crucified. “He is not here, for He has risen, just as He said. Come, see the place where He was lying (Matt. 28:2-6).

It is noticeable how Matthew, with the help of lightning⁵⁰ and white vestments, like snow⁵¹ (this is what the color of the vestments on Tabor means — the coming Resurrection!) Denotes a mirror projection of the picture he just described of the all-embracing cosmic catastrophe of the Crucifixion, which he, among other things, anticipated with his so-called ... small Apocalypse, in turn referring to one of the preceding and preceding catastrophes:

Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away. (...) For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah (Matt. 24:35, 37).

No less, and perhaps a more important parallel — already at the level of poetics and stylistics — is a much earlier and infinitely significant episode from Exodus 32. We mean the destruction of the first tablets by Moses — in view of the dishonor of the Israelites, who, in the absence of Moses, made themselves a golden calf to worship. It was on them that the wrath of God, or rather Moses, who had just defended his people from the wrath of Yahweh, was transferred:

It came about, as soon as Moses came near the camp, that he saw the calf and the dancing; and Moses’ anger burned, and he threw the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain (Exodus 32:19).

In the case of Jesus, the wrath of God intended for the people is transferred not to the tablets (made for the first time, by the way, by the hand of Yahweh), but to the very Flesh of the Messiah, who has absorbed all mankind into Himself. It must be admitted that before us is destruction not just to the ground (its exposure and the discovery of proximity to the earth), not just even deep, passing through the surface and the entire earthly “stratigraphy”. This destruction, both earthly and ascending to heaven, is cosmic. This is a crosscutting destruction within the framework of eschatology: the final cleansing and deliverance and the end of all that is erected, stable and unyielding. Instead of the built-up — the hard-won! It is not for nothing that corporality is involved, which carries mortality and decay and also abolishes it: “We do not need a New Temple in the place of Herod: Jesus and His people are the true replacement for the Temple” [Wright 2013:582].

But the most essential and decisive thing is that everything is accomplished by the flesh (“... we are sanctified by the one-time offering of the body of Jesus Christ”, Heb. 10:10) and by the Spirit of the Lamb:

When I saw Him, I fell at His feet like a dead man. And He placed His right hand on me, saying, “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, 18and the living One; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades (Revelation 1:17,18)

So, devastation, destruction, defeat and humiliation — such states, so conveniently acquiring carriers in the person of desert and ruins, themselves turn out to be devastated by the very fact of their presence within the text — not only sacred, but also hermeneutic: the eventfulness of the narrative is embraced by the eventfulness of interpretation, which although it is done with power, as Heidegger⁵² once reminded us of this, but which is not at all the same as violence, which we are called upon to always remember, including thanks to R. Girard⁵³.

***

And let the end of our observations be another passage from Isaiah:

Indeed, the LORD will comfort Zion;
He will comfort all her waste places.
And her wilderness He will make like Eden,
And her desert like the garden of the LORD;
Joy and gladness will be found in her,
Thanksgiving and sound of a melody (Isaiah 51:3).

God restores unity and turns the desert into its opposite, which is paradise and garden. But he is already a different motive, including for writing as a practice of leaving a trace.

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