The New Demons

In early modern England, a playgoer and diarist recorded an extraordinary special effect during a performance of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus:

“Certaine Players at Exeter, acting upon the stage the tragical storie of Dr. Faustus the Conjurer; as a certaine number of Devels kept everie one his circle there, and as Faustus was busie in his magicall invocations, on a sudden they were all dasht, every one harkning other in the eare, for they were all perswaded, there was one devell too many amongst them; and so after a little pause desired the people to pardon them, they could go no further with this matter; the people also understanding the thing as it was, every man hastened to be first out of dores.” [1]

Reportedly, this was not the solitary instance of the appearance of unaccounted-for players at performances of the play. But was it an actual supernatural occurrence, or only some over-the-top PR devised by some Elizabethan theatrical impresario? Nobody knows for sure, but I wouldn’t rule anything out. Always remember: there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. If you call them, they will come.

The early modern period, though it was also the time of the first stirrings of Bacon, Descartes, and the Scientific Revolution, was still a period of widespread belief in the supernatural, a belief which even found its way into what we might now call scholarly research. In my book Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation, I explore this phenomenon in relation to John Dee and his alleged conversation with angels in a chapter entitled “John Dee: Religious Experience and the Technology of Idolatry.” My argument there is that the various occult technologies employed by Dee and his assistant Edward Kelly actually worked toward deluding him (or assisting the spirits with which he was conversing toward deluding him) and resulted in a kind of Maronian lapse into idolatry. It is a tragic and cautionary tale that should make anyone think twice (or more) about using any kind of paraphernalia for attempting converse with supernatural beings. It never ends well. Not a good idea. Don’t do it. But these types of experiences hardly ended with the arrival of the Enlightenment.

On the first day of Easter 1898, for example, the Russian philosopher and mystic Vladimir Solovyov encountered a demon while on ship. It appeared “in the form of a shaggy beast,” and he asked it, “But you know that Christ is risen?” “He may very well have risen,” the beast is said to have replied, “but I will make an end of you all the same” and attacked him. According to Sergey Solovyov, the philosopher’s nephew and biographer, Solovyov was later “found stretched on the floor senseless.” [2] But he lived.

I’ve seen or experienced such things at first hand a number of times over the years, the last time about a year ago. Here’s an entry from my notebook: “My daughter is being bothered by a spirit. It won’t let her sleep. Every time it visits, always late at night, she awakens me in tears and asks me to bless her room. I pray Psalm 68 and sprinkle the room with holy water, and then the entire house, the younger children sleeping in their beds, and I anoint her with chrism. One night the spirit returns and is very reluctant to leave. After removing it from my daughter’s room, it disturbs my sleeping wife who awakens and tells me “Michael, you need to get rid of it,” in a very forthright manner as if telling me to wash the dishes. I anoint her, cleanse the room with holy water., and she goes back to sleep. When I go back to bed I pray the rosary. I finish praying, and start to fall asleep when it attacks me, pushing me down on the mattress by the shoulders. I struggle to breathe, to awaken and rise; but finally yell, “Go!” and I can get up. I anoint myself. It leaves for a time.”

I’ve told other people about what happened, and I have been (and haven’t been, at the same time) surprised to find that such is not as uncommon as one might believe. Perhaps we are not as modern as we have let ourselves believe.

Of course, none of us should really be surprised: the Gospels are full of stories about Christ casting out demons. Unfortunately, many contemporary Christians try to interpret the demons Christ encounters as manifestations of psychiatric disorders, or quirks. Or something. Maybe anxiety.

Maybe.

I say all this, not to wax sensational but only to say that our own cultural moment for the last few years seems to me increasingly to give evidence of a kind of widespread demonolatry, but for the most part masked by a sort of postmodern secular ennui. Or, as Shakespeare says in The Tempest: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!” I mean, just look around.

As we see in scripture, notably in the temptations of Eve in Genesis and Jesus in the gospel accounts, the demonic is the origin of false advertising. The subject is promised all kinds of goods—power, wealth, longevity, prosperity—but the delivered product never lives up to the hype. Just the opposite. These promises continue in our own day, though the chosen medium is not via supernatural “magic” in the manner in which it may have been understood from ancient to early modern times, but through medical and technological interventions aided and abetted by governmental policy and popular acclaim. The recently much-touted transhumanism is but one example of this with its accompanying slogan of “You’ll own nothing and be happy” and other Utopian currencies of false coinage. Demons may offer freedom or liberation, but what they deliver is slavery. Every. Single. Time.

Importantly, these interventions—not all at once, but over time and, ultimately, totalizing—distance the subject from nature. We end up imprisoned in a technological-pharmaceutical-bureaucratic Otherworld This was the long-game of urbanization—and the kinds of transhumanist phenomena I’m speaking about are nothing other than afflictions attendant to urbanization. You don’t see it happening with people in the countryside. As Jacques Ellul writes, “The city person is separated from the natural environment and, as a consequence, the sacred significations [of connection to the natural world and its rhythms] no longer have any point of contact with experience.” [3]

I don’t have a precise taxonomy for these various spiritual beings afflicting individuals and the world, but they both seem different in kind and identical in aims. I think this works initially at the individual level, exploiting the traumas and anxieties of good people who have given in to despair and hopelessness, who think something must be wrong with them and that the magic of pharmacology or technology or politics can deliver them. This is a very subtle and sneaky form of idolatry—it happens without one knowing it. But, as happened in many of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century and as we are witnessing today, this free-floating anxiety can metastasize into the body politic (the demonic parody of the Mystical Body) and infect entire societies with various forms of possession.

This is why Ellul described our post-Christian era in terms of “the new demons.” Even though our societies in the West are post-Christian, they still retain the assumptions of Christianity, though their allegiances have been unconsciously transferred to other gods. “Post-Christian society,” he writes, “has been deeply affected by Christianity, and bears the latter’s mark: the mark of original sin, of the desire for salvation, hope, and a kingdom of God, of the conviction that a Savior is needed, of the society those who are aware of radical guilt yet know they cannot pardon themselves.” [4] I can’t even read these words without images of the past decade’s ongoing secular fundamentalism—the canceling, the shaming, the iconoclasm, the calls for repentance (but never for those calling for it)—rising before me. But, as Ellul would say, these are demonic parodies of Christianity.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine. There are also a few spots open in the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening as Christian Path course being offered at the end of April. See more here.

1. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 3 (Oxford, 1923), 3:423-24.

2. Sergey M. Solovyov, Vladimir Solovyov: His Life and Creative Evolution, trans. Aleksey Gibson (Eastern Christian Publications, 2000), 464.

3. Jacques Ellul, The New Demons, trans. C. Edward Hopkin (Seabury Press, 1975), 62.

4. Ibid., 24.

Rewilding the Church, Part 2

In my last post, I wrote about my small community’s efforts at rewilding the church, not as a way to rewild the landscape around this or that church building (which, it seems, is how some conceive of it) but in terms of rewilding Christianity. The landscaping approach, which I get and support to some degree, just strikes me as just another bourgeois hobby of the gentile middle class, kind of like fashion jeans or something. I have a more radical project in mind.

Primarily, this is a project of spiritual subsistence. “Subsistence,” for me as a biodynamic farmer, is a pretty important term which as David Boilier has argued, “must be understood not as bare and brutish survival, but as a sustainable life outside of the market order.” My wife, in fact, is pretty fond of saying at our various festival gatherings, “We might not have any money, but we eat like kings.” When you grow your own food, raise your own animals, tend your own bees, and make your own mead, beer, and wine, you can afford (note the metaphor) to say that.

Boilier, however, is writing primarily about the contributions of radical Catholic priest and revolutionary thinker Ivan Illich and the contemporary commons movement (readers of this blog and my book Transfiguration will, hopefully, recall my enthusiasm for the idea of the commons—and my lament for its loss).

But this idea of the commons, as much as it touches on the economic and cultural lives of people, also has import for their spiritual lives. As Boilier writes, “Just as the Catholic Church proceeded to monopolize, regiment and institutionalize the realm of the spiritual—insisting that professional priests and church structures are needed to attain salvation—so the state, too, began to see the advantages of colonizing vernacular life.”

This institutionalization of life, as we have seen all too plainly over the past eighteen months, has also impacted our digital lives. The internet (and even social media) which not all that long ago was understood as a realm of freedom and public access—a digital commons in practice—has increasingly been morphing into a digital enclosure. The commons, that is, is the enemy of the technocrats.

All these things being so, I advocate for a spiritual rewilding, which is a rewilding of the Church writ large. The institutions around us—secular and religious—are characterized by a fetid rot. And I am no longer am willing to serve such institutions. So I propose taking back the sacramental life that has been held—surely not in “trust”—like a ring of power by those interested in maintaining power, by technocrats no less than hierarchs: a power that prohibits sincere Christians from communing together for no other reason than juridical claims to authority. This is uncivilized.

Of course, there is nothing civilized about civilization, and, as H.J. Massingham (who, along with Robert Herrick is one of my tutelary spirits) once wrote, neither is “democracy": “Abstract terms like ‘democracy’ came to mean the rule of a minority by means of propaganda and the power of wealth over vast aggregates with a collective way of life and a collective ‘soul’ pent up in squalid industrial cities.” [1] I believe this now goes under the name “The Great Reset,” the false promises of which even infect religious leaders, the Dalai Lama no less than Patriarch Bartholomew. Surely some revelation is at hand.

As I have written before, the ancient Celtic Church offers something of a model of this way of rewilding the Church. As Christopher Bamford writes of the Celts, “Theirs was a country and a people of individual, autonomous units. Placing great emphasis on freedom, they constituted no state or nation but rather a free federation of tribes.” [2] This is more or less how I envision the rewilded Church. Also from Bamford:

“Celts lived a life, as one modern authority puts it, ‘of freedom verging on anarchy.’ Jean Markale writes: ‘The essence of Celtic philosophy would appear to be a search for individual freedom, not based in egoism, but founded in the belief that each person is special and therefore different from others, that behavior cannot be modeled on a pattern created by others.’” [3]

A rewilded Church would follow along much the same lines.

Furthermore, I cannot envisage the rewilded Church as in any way disconnected from both Creation (as in the cosmos) and creation (as in the both the fine and practical arts, not to mention the liberal arts). Only in that way could the rewilded Church be reconsecrated in the ways of life. As Bamford explains it, “They studied, they learned, in order to love. Their theology, their religion, was always practical, vibrant with life, mystical.” [3] But it wasn’t otherworldly. The internet, social media, gaming—these are otherworldly. The rewilded Church, on the other hand, is this worldly in the truest sense, colored precisely by the power of Him from whom all Life flows.

The Hail Mary in Irish. Talk about rewilding!

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and 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. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

1. H.J. Massingham, The Tree of Life (London, 1943), 125.

2. Christopher Bamford, An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West (Codhill Press, 2003), 94-95.

3. Ibid., 95.

4. Ibid., 110.

Call No Man Father

Perhaps you have seen this meme above? Talk about butch! It’s pretty much the religious equivalent of this:

I have often wondered from where such a masochistic sensibility arises. It is very perplexing, but there does seem to be something in the human psyche that craves discipline and bowing to authority, despite the simultaneous triggers that resist the same. In watching the Christian, and especially Orthodox and Catholic traditionalist, landscape over the past decade, I am starting to come up with a theory of why this is.

You may not have noticed, but over the last decade or fifteen years a surprising number of millennials and post-millennials have been drawn to Orthodoxy and Traditionalist Catholicism. I certainly understand the attraction of beautiful liturgical structures, especially considering most forms of Christian worship these days (including the Novus Ordo of the Catholic Church) range from a kind of ceremonial brutalism to a flaccid “infomercial-for-Jesus” aesthetic to the pop-culture appropriation of the praise band and hi-tech inspirational graphics. So I get that young people, starved for something authentic, would turn to the great works of art of the past—and the Divine Liturgy and Tridentine Mass are nothing if not great works of religious art.

But part and parcel with this attraction to the beautiful often comes a doctrinaire fundamentalism which, for me anyway, destroys the very beauty of Christianity it seeks to exemplify. Suddenly the world (or, more properly, the internet) is populated with self-appointed heresy hunters and inquisitors.

So here’s my theory: I think the attraction to traditional Christianity for a number of millennials and post-millennials (mostly male, from what I can tell), as it is manifested in Eastern Orthodoxy and Tridentine Catholicism is at its core a search for the missing father. According to this website, 57% of millennial mothers are single moms and as of 2019 15.76 million children in the US were living with single mothers. That’s a lot of missing fathers.

It seems to me, then, that a factor in the attraction millennials and post-millennials feel toward the traditional churches is a psychological need to connect with the father. Both forms of Christianity are also heavy on rules and laying down the law concerning what is allowed and what is not—precisely what many children miss in a relationship with a father. I’m not, of course, saying that mothers don’t have rules, but it’s a different dynamic with a father—and a father a child only sees on Wednesdays and every other weekend does not offer the same guidance. So Traditional Christianity comes in to fill the void in the soul. And you get to call the spiritual leader “father” as an added bonus.

This has been particularly apparent to me in the phenomenon (“fad” is not quite the right word, but it is close) in some Eastern Orthodox circles for millennial and post-millennial converts to seek a “spiritual father,” as if their own priest were not enough. This arose, according to my understanding, with the appearance of Ephraimism in the last decades. An Orthodox priest friend of mine is exasperated by such converts and their “spiritual fathers.” “You’re not a monk. You don’t have a ‘spiritual father,’” he tells them, “you have a father confessor: me. If you want a spiritual father, memorize the psalter and then we’ll talk.” I think almost zero of them memorize the psalter.

This is a very understandable phenomenon. People like clear rules and like to follow the directions (as we have seen all too often over the past sixteen months), and the burden for discernment can then be outsourced to the authority. But this comes with all kinds of spiritual dangers as well.

One of these dangers is surrendering agency to a monastic sensibility that is in no way healthy for life in the day-to-day, whether in terms of one’s job or in parenting. Man was not made for monasticism; monasticism was made for man (and I even have my doubts about that).

What results is described by the 20th century Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev as a “false asceticism.” “This type of asceticism,” he writes, “with its hostility to man and to the world, may obscure the true end of mysticism, which is transfiguration in God. It may place upon men burdens too heavy to be borne and also produce a great deal of tension in the soul.” [1] Thank you, sir; may I have another?

Of course, the phenomenon is not only one-sided. As with the example of the Elder Ephraim, the temptation for the clerical order is to become precisely this type of “holy father” none of us have had—and that the holy fathers themselves could never, ever be (outside of the imaginary of puerile fantasy). Not all priests do this, to be sure, but it is an element of the clerical environment. Matthew 23 speaks directly to this, Jesus railing against the Scribes and Pharisees:

For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.

But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments,

And love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues,

And greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi.

But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren.

And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.

Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ.

But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant. (4-11)

You know it and I know it that we have a couple millennia of apologia telling us that Jesus didn't really mean what he said here. But okay.

An Illustrative Digression

One Easter about twelve years ago I was attending liturgy with my family, three of my six sons serving on the altar. Our pastor had been very ill, and he looked horribly weak at the altar, his face ashen. Just prior to Communion, one of the older altar servers, a young many of about eighteen, came to me to ask if I could distribute Communion—Father was too weak to continue. I did my best, but was so nervous I was shaking. It must have been noticeable because in the hall for the blessing of baskets afterwards a friend of mine took a can of beer out of his basket and handed it to me, saying, “Maybe this will help you with those shakes.” I continued to assist our pastor for the next seven years, until he died. He was often too weak to even stand for long.

At his funeral, I served along with our bishop and a number of other priests, as well as a deacon or two and two of my sons as altar boys. At the Kiss of Peace, usually reserved only for the clergy (not by law but by custom) a friend of mine, a married priest with seven children, came to me to offer the kiss. He said, “None of these guys here understand what you’ve done for this place. You deserve this more than they do.” He did me a tremendous favor, not by honoring my service, but by destroying the Myth of Holy Stratification. For all of you are brethren.

I would love to see a meme that said, Christianity—Life... Only More Alive.

Another guy looking for a father:

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and 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. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

Nikolai Berdyaev, Freedom and the Spirit (New York, 1935), 265.