The Sophianic Resistance

A quick rundown of recent news:

• Elon Musk keeps launching satellites at a rate greater than a finale at the Fourth of July fireworks.

• Billionaires are racking up record profits while small businesses drop dead like dinosaurs after an asteroid hit.

• 5G, the safety of which has been questioned by scientists and some municipalities for a good long while, has suddenly become “essential” (how I have come to despise the word) to “the new normal” (another term worthy of contempt).

• Oh, and there’s this coronavirus thing, which is apparently what Thomas Hobbes was praying for when he prophesied the war of all against all.

• Because of the coronavirus thing, governments are being very governmenty about events in much the same spirit as the PATRIOT Act was about patriotism and security and their responses have a good deal to do with surveillance and another dreadful word: “tracing.”

All of this, at least for me, contributes to what I can only describe as a technocratic nightmare. As Nikolai Berdyaev wrote long ago, “The world threatens to become an organized and technicized chaos in which only the most terrible forms of idolatry and demon-worship can live.”1 To which one can only add: “Mission accomplished.”

Of course, these deadening developments are not the only things going on. Some people (though often maligned by their contemporaries) are resisting the technocratic paradigm and seeking instead a more holistic and healthy response to our moment. I see this mostly in the renewed interest in locally-produced food and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) as well as in the sudden care for local businesses in a spirit that should give hope to any distributist or communitarian heretofore languishing in cultural atrophy and neglect. Likewise, some people are starting to think more about building immunity through nutrition and methods more in accord with Nature than through the administration of vaccines and other varieties of allopathic medicine that operate on fear and a military search and destroy model.

Nevertheless, I do think we are at a watershed. How we come out of this crisis is important. Unfortunately, the money and power is on the side of the technocrats—as we can see by the way they’ve been maneuvering during this “crisis” to secure and expand both their wealth and power. Most of us don’t have that kind of cultural cache, so either find ourselves enthralled by fear and the mandate of the powerful or we just try to ignore them and hope they go away. But they won’t go away.

This didn’t just happen. For decades, our relationship to Nature has been compromised by scientists, medical experts, and governmental agencies in a drive (a real Will to Power) to “make our lives better.” I’m sorry, but glyphostae, “three-parent babies,” the prescription of opioids, or waiting for a vaccine until we can open up the world, to name only a handful of examples, aren’t making anyone’s life better—not even for Bayer and The Gates Foundation. Living in disharmony with Nature and Divinity never could.

In my book Transfiguration, I talk about this at length. The problem, ultimately, is not one of human power games and control (though those are its tools); rather, the problem is metaphysical, a spiritual problem. As I write in the book,

‘This encroaching and, in the main, uninterrogated acceptance of “technological reproduction” in all of its forms delineates a movement away from Sophia and her illumination of the united natural and supernatural realms and toward Ahriman and the darkness of a natural realm subordinated to subnature. When we can no longer differentiate between the Real and the simulacra, we have already compromised our connection to the spiritual in the universe, to God by way of Sophia. And when differentiating between the Real and the simulacra invites ridicule, hostility, and ostracization, we can then be sure that we have entered the realm of the demonic, of Ahriman; that culture has been lured into subnature; and that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12). Ahriman’s genius is that it has convinced us that spiritual forces, of any kind, do not exist, and that science and technology hold the keys to prosperity, health, and happiness. In this, it is we who are imprisoned and isolated from the Real, as Sophia is in the gnostic mythos. It would appear that only a god can save us.’

What I propose (and have been proposing for years) is a Sophianic Resistance to this totalizing, technocratic, and Ahrimanic paradigm threatening our lives and ways of being from so many sides. Many have already capitulated to this paradigm. But humans are free, and an aspect of freedom is in the changing of one’s mind. As the Master said, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” (Matt 4:17). The Greek word here translated as “repent,” however, is Μετανοεῖτε (metanoite) which, in addition to repentance, refers to changing one’s way of life. This is precisely the moment at which we find ourselves.

Berdyaev, so prescient, was able to diagnose our trajectory—now nearing its apotheosis—almost a century ago:

‘The speed consequent upon the increasing mechanization of life has had a deadly effect on the human Ego, and has sapped its foundations of unity and consistence. The advent of machinery and the mechanization of life have led to an extreme objectification of human existence, to its materialization in a strange, inhuman and frigid world. And though this world is the work of man, it is essentially anti-human.’2

In order to reorder our lives, we first need to acknowledge how entrammeled we are by fear. Then comes the time of the turning. Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutzand Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.

1. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Fate of Man in the Modern World, trans. Donald A. Lowrie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1935), 125.

2. Nicolas Berdyaev, Solitude and Society, trans. George Reavey (1938; repr., London: Geoffrey Bles / Centenary Press, 1947), 109.

Sophiology and the Unnatural Response to Nature

'Mary Magdalene' by Georges de la Tour

If I have learned one thing from this pandemic, it is that the primary recourse of most of the archons running the world is to flee nature and what is natural and cleave to the unnatural as the salvation of our souls. The unnatural idols range from the Messiah-like vaccine promised to arrive some time in the future and deliver us all from the scourge to the Ahrimanic desire to track people and isolate them “for their own safety” to the more simple “remedy” of sequestering people in their homes—by force if need be—under the mistaken assumption that nature is somehow unable to get in as if a safe zone in a game of tag, even though New York City recently discovered that most new cases of the virus are infecting those in their homes.

We fear nature, and due to our fear we attempt to dominate her. This has been the trajectory of science at least since the seventeenth century. Nature, formerly spoken of in decidedly feminine terms as Natura, needed to be dominated like any other willful female to the misogynistic and mechanistic thinking of early modern science, a practice that persists in all but semantics today. As Mary Midgley so clearly describes it,

“The literature of early modern science is a mine of highly-coloured passages that describe Nature, by no means as a neutral object, but as a seductive but troublesome female, to be unrelentingly pursued, sought out, fought against, chased into her inmost sanctuaries, prevented from escaping, persistently courted, wooed, harried, vexed, tormented, unveiled, unrobed, and ‘put into question’ (i.e. interrogated under torture), forced to confess ‘all that lay in her most intimate recesses,’ her ‘beautiful bosom’ must be laid bare, she must be held down and finally ‘penetrated,’ ‘pierced’ and ‘vanquished’ (words which constantly recur).”1

I could get into a whole Freudian thing about the method for injecting a vaccine here, but I will resist.

Coinciding with the scientific domination model during this COVID phenomenon has been a perhaps more troubling move toward political or governmental domination. Government authorities assert their power over their unruly charges with all the authority of a first-year elementary school teacher with no classroom management skills and a host of unacknowledged anger issues, while the populace wobbles between obedience and rebellion. As Wilhelm Reich observed, “People fear or admire what they cannot grasp.”2 It’s a recipe for disaster.

Trying to divorce ourselves from the natural world will not work, because we can’t. And no one needs expertise in quantum mechanics to realize this.

It is telling, I think, that the places hardest hit by the COVID phenomenon are places most alienated from nature and most afflicted by varieties of pollution, cities mostly. And the fact that most people are the victims of diets also characterized by the scientific domination of nature—and often the exclusion of nature—and thus even more susceptible to diseases (also known these days as co-morbidities). American diets, for example, are rife with unnatural products which contribute to hypertension, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, stroke, and so forth. As an aside, one of my sons worked as a hospital orderly through college. One day he told me that his job taught him how harmful diets contributing to obesity are: the greatest share of the patients he had to move at the hospital were morbidly obese, their health and quality of life destroyed by the garbage they consumed sold as “food.” Interestingly, yesterday I was listening to an interview with two physicians on NPR about the disproportionate representation of people of color in C-19 deaths—but nobody said anything about diet. Poor diet, we could say, is the engine that drives our medical economy. I have yet to hear Dr. Fauci or Bill Gates talk about nutrition.

Illness and death, I am sad to report, are part of the natural world, as much as we fear them. All generations have been awed by the mysteries of illness and death, the author of the Epic of Gilgamesh no less than the Psalmist or Dylan Thomas. But we have an antiseptic relationship to death—even bodes of the deceased are disappearing from funerals, not to mention the tragedy of so many people dying during this pandemic deprived of Last Rites and holy burial, unaccompanied on their journey to the undiscovered country. What an inhuman and unnatural tragedy.

It was not always thus. Julian of Norwich, for example, actually prayed that she could become ill in order to draw closer to Christ. Her shewings, or revelations, in fact, occurred during an illness when she came very close to death. And her take away, as told by Jesus: “All shall be well.” This way of being is absolutely foreign to our current ethos. We don’t think all shall be well. Not ever. Instead we tell ourselves creation myths about a “new normal.”

St. Francis of Assisi also acknowledged the reality of death as part of life. Toward the end of his relatively short time on this earth, he added a verse to his Canticle of All Creatures in honor of Sister Death:

Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no one living can escape.

Woe to those who die in mortal sin. Blessed are those whom death will find in Your most holy will, for the second death shall do them no harm.

Praise and bless my Lord and give Him thanks and serve Him with great humility.

It may be that part of our forgetting how to live is attributable to our forgetting how to die. Did the Master not say “Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted”?

Sophiology, at its core, celebrates the shining of God through Creation via his Mediatrix, Sophia. The world, as the Lord says in Genesis, is good. Christ, the Lord of the Dance, is that goodness incarnate: “He has the full power of the God-given Life force. He understands the birds and he knows how to distinguish a grain of rye from a grain of wheat.”3

We can get through this, but we can’t hide from it.

A useful interview with an MD who understands both virology and nature.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutzand Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.

1. Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning (London: Routledge, 1992), 77.

2. Wilhelm Reich, The Murder of Christ: The Emotional Plague of Mankind (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1953), 21.

3. Ibid., 33.

On Supernatural Evil

detail from Rudolf Steiner's sculpture 'The Representative of Man'

This blog entry appeared once upon a time on my old blog at Angelico Press.

"Dear children, keep yourselves from idols." ~ 1 John 5:21

Much of my scholarly work has been invested in a retrieval or at least recognition of the supernatural in a positive sense. Indeed, Sophiology is a philosophical/theological discourse interested in the disclosure of the Glory of God in nature, the arts, liturgy, and the sciences (among other things). But not all of my work on the supernatural has been concerned with such an optimistic and beautiful milieu of Creation. Not every encounter with the spiritual is tinged by grace.

In Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England, for example, alongside John Donne, Sir Kenelm Digby, Thomas and Henry Vaughan, and Jane Lead—all concerned in one way or another with an experience of God marked by truth, beauty, and goodness—I explored the career of the Elizabethan magus and polymath (his was a multifarious genius) John Dee and the “Actions” (conversations) he had with spirits and took to be from God. In the chapter entitled “John Dee: Religious Experience and the Technology of Idolatry,” I argue that Dee, an occasional counselor to Elizabeth I, deluded himself into thinking the spirits with which he and his assistant, Edward Kelley, discoursed were of divine origin (they clearly were not) and that, even though he was in his essence a very good and pious man (if a little vain), he let himself be talked into the danger of mortal sin.

The sin in question was adultery. But not just any adultery. The primary spirit, identified as Madimi, in fact, ordered Dee and Kelley to swap wives. As I write in the chapter:

On 17 April 1587, a series of very bizarre Actions began which encouraged Dee to think he and Kelley were “above the law.” That day, Kelley reported, “I saw Madimi, Il, and many other that had dealed with us heretofore, but shewed themselves in very filthy order; and Uriel appeared, and justified all to be of God, and good.” In the crystal, Kelley saw a globe covered all over with writing. One message read, “Souls joined toward the better.” The session ended with a shocking pronouncement: “All sins before me in this are disregarded: having been made mad for my sake, he is wise: on the contrary, committing adultery on my account, he is blessed in eternity and he will be touched by a heavenly reward.” The injunction must have caused Dee and Kelley no little amount of anxiety.

The spirits appeared the next day en force, as Kelley reported: “There appeared Madimi, Il, and the rest.” The majority of the spirits, however, straightaway vanished, leaving Madimi alone. She at this point exhibited some uncharacteristic behavior. According to Kelley, “she openeth all her apparel, and her self all naked; and sheweth her shame also” which was definitely outside the norm, even for the Actions. The vision unsettled Kelley and a fascinating exchange between the physical and spiritual participants of the dialogue ensued:

E.K. Fie on thee, Devil avoid hence with this filthiness, &c. Mad. In the name of God, why finde you fault with me? ∆. [ Dee identified himself by the Greek letter delta] Because of yesterdayes doings, and words are provocations to sin, and unmeet for any godly creature to use. Mad. What is sin? ∆. To break the Commandment of God. Mad. If the self-same God give you a new Commandment taking away the former form of sin which he limited by the Law, What remaineth then? ∆. If by the self-same God that gave the Law to Moses, and gave his New Covenant by Christ, who sealed it by his blood; and had witnesses very many, and his Apostles instructed by his holy Spirit, who admonished us of all cleanness in words and works, yea and in thoughts, if by the same God, whose former Laws and Doctrines be abrogated, and that sufficient proof and testimony may be had that it is the same God: Then must the same God be obeyed: For only God is the Lord of Lords, King of Kings, and Governour of all things.

Dee knew he was walking into tricky theological as well as legal territory, and we can see by his response to Madimi’s question that he knew he had to be completely clear about what was at issue. Madimi capitalized on his anxieties and avouched for the trustworthiness of her message: “The Apostle Paul abounded in carnal lust: he was also offensive unto his brethren so that he despaired, and was ready to have left his vocation, untill the Lord did say unto him, My mercy and grace sufficeth thee. Beleeve me, that we are from above.” Madimi was right, Dee would have agreed, God’s mercy should be enough (2 Corinthians 12: 9). Paul had transgressed the law in order to maintain the intergrity of his vocation, and Madimi commanded Dee to do the same:

Behold you are become free: Do that which most pleaseth you: For behold, your own reason riseth up against my wisdome. Not content you are to be heires, but you would be Lords, yea Gods, yea Judgers of the heavens: Wherefore do even as you list, but if you forsake the way taught you from above, behold evil shall enterprise your senses, and abominations shal dwel before your eyes, as a recompence, unto such as you have done wrong unto: And your wives and children, shall be carried away before your face.

This was rather a threat.

Even though Dee knew what the spirits were asking was against God’s mandates—he articulated as much—he nevertheless went along with the spirits’ demands, compromised as he was by the pride and promise of being God’s new messenger.

Most of us don’t compromise our principals as a result of direct communication from spirits. We have our culture for that. But that’s not to say that we aren’t led into these compromises by more indirect spiritual means.

Indeed, it doesn’t appear to me that we are appropriately aware of the presences of spiritual evil around us. The medieval period and Renaissance had precise taxonomies of the demonic realms: we have, in general, psychologizing or a sort of bland, generic affirmation that diabolical entities are “out there” somewhere. The cartoonish antics of SNL’s “The Church Lady” and The Temple of Satan aside, I think it’s almost as important to be cognizant of supernatural evil as it is to be aware of the sophianic glory that also abides in Creation.

I have found Rudolf Steiner’s conception of Lucifer and Ahriman very useful in diagnosing our own struggles with the Spirit of the Age. Though I disagree with Steiner on certain aspects of his Christology and the persistence of Blavatskian theosophy in his, especially earlier, work, I think he’s on to something with Lucifer and Ahriman.

For Steiner, Lucifer is the principle (or spiritual being) that tempts us with promises of “freedom,” the desire for self-expression, individualization, and an absolute creativity. Ahriman, on the other hand, is the principle (or spiritual being) that promises order and a kind of technological and corporatized efficiency that enslaves us to the subhuman, turns us effectively into machines. Between these two polarities, Steiner points to Christ as that principle which guides us through the perils of the promises made by Lucifer and Ahriman and helps us abide in the real.

When I look at our own culture, I can’t help but think that Lucifer (however one wants to understand the term) tempts us to a freedom of expression and selfhood that inevitably delivers us to Ahriman. That is, in order to “become who we really are” (or so we think) we turn to technology and scientific/medical interventions which enslave us to a lifetime of injections, prescriptions, surgeries, and technologies that inure us from the Real that inheres Creation. This is most obvious in some of the diabolical interventions foisted upon certain children in the name of freedom, but it also acts in subtle ways upon all of us.

Even though demonic possession as often depicted in film (The Exorcist, The Rite, Deliver Us from Evil, The Exorcism of Emily Rose) is certainly a reality, in general, the fallen angels work in much more invisible ways to lead us away from reality and, therefore, from Christ. It’s easier that way. I know this from experience. But, as St. John tells us, “We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true. And we are in him who is true by being in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life” (1 John 5:20).

A traditional protection against evil:

Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered: and let them that hate him flee from before his face. As smoke vanisheth, so let them vanish away: as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God. (Psalm 67:2-3)