Jacob’s Ladder: Sophia and Creation

The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Sophia in Exile.

Jacob named the site of his vision Beth-El, “the House of God,” and there is no reason to believe that every parcel of Creation is not a potential Bethel. Indeed, religious experiences tied to nature are too numerous to count, almost universal in their distribution. I would wager that they are among the most common of human experiences, though many if not most people lack a sufficient language for describing their experiences. Joan of Arc’s initial visionary experiences, for example, occurred at what was know as “The Ladies’ Tree” or “The Faeries’ Tree” in her village of Domremy. Some villagers even claimed to have seen faeries there, but Joan only claimed to have seen saints Catherine and Margaret and the Archangel Michael who “was not alone, but was accompanied by angels from heaven.”[1] Even the (at the time) hardened Marxist economist Sergei Bulgakov was not impervious to the glory shining through the landscape one sunset while traveling through the Caucasus:

“I started to wonder what would happen if the cosmos were not a desert and its beauty not a mask of deception—if nature were not death, but life. If he existed, the merciful and loving Father, if nature was the vesture of his love and glory, and if the pious feelings of my childhood, when I used to live in his presence, when I loved him and trembled because I was weak, were true, then the tears and inspiration of my adolescence, the sweetness of my prayers, my innocence, and all those emotions which I had rejected and trodden down would be vindicated, and my present outlook with its emptiness and deadness would appear nothing more than blindness and lies, and what a transformation it would bring to me!”[2]

But the Glory of the Lord doesn’t only shine through the beauties of nature. Bernadette Soubirous’s first vision of the Virgin Mary came in a small alcove near a garbage dump, and Jacob Boehme’s insight into the nature of God occurred through the reflection of light off a pewter dish. There is no place where grace cannot appear. Beth-El: You are here.

But you are also not here.

One thing that keeps us from the experience of the Real is our pathological drive to control everything from fertility, to illness, to our environments. We regulate fertility through artificial birth control, through abortion, through “waiting until we’ve established our careers.” Fertility, that is, terrifies us, so we treat it as a disease, even, in some cases, by comparing a growing fetus to a parasite. It terrifies us so much that fertility rates have been plummeting for decades though NGOs have nevertheless been advocating for a massive population decrease. If we learned anything through the Covid-19 panic, it has to be that people have fetishized antiseptic living into a demigod. When people used to get the flu, it was just one of those things. You took some over-the-counter medication or homeopathy and let the illness run its course. After Covid illness somehow became evidence of moral turpitude and selfishness. Another thing we learned is that it is “safer” to encounter others through virtual environments, like Zoom, than by interacting, by exchanging genetic information, in the face-to-face of a lived life. This is entirely neurotic.

These phenomena are merely symptomatic of a way of life (bios)completely divorced from Life (zoë). We live lives in which, as John Donne says, “‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,” divorced as we are from the world of clouds, of plants, of animals, and from each other, from the cosmos, and because of these from from God. Indeed, the inverse is also true: we are distanced from the world of clouds, plants, and animals because we are distanced from God. The integral unity of life and purpose that we instinctively feel lacking is really a product of our disengagement from the calendar; and by this I mean from both the calendar of the seasons and the liturgical calendar, both of which reflected each other once upon a time. Enoch I is very clear about the repercussions of our disconnect from the cosmos and God:

“In those days the angel Uriel responded and said to me, ‘Behold, I have shown you everything, Enoch, and I have revealed everything to you [so that] you might see this sun, this moon, and those that guide the stars of heaven as well as those who interchange their activities and their seasons and rotate their processions.

“‘In respect to their days, the sinners and the winter are cut short. Their seeds shall lag behind in their lands and in their fertile fields, and in all their activities upon the earth. He will turn and appear in their time, and withhold rain, and the sky shall stand still at that time. Then the vegetable shall slacken and not grow in its season, and the fruit shall not be born in its season. The moon shall alter its order, and will not be seen according to its cycles.’” (80:1-5)

Surrounded by the scientific hubris that seeks to “improve” seed by genetic engineering and that attempts to dim the sun, the moon, and stars through the dispersal of calcium carbonate through the atmosphere (among many other foolish ideas)—things we have let happen through either ignorance or inertia—is it any wonder that our impact on the Creation grows more and more devastating? We operate not in a cooperative manner with nature, but stick to a paradigm characterized by suppression, dominance, and control, but above all by hubris. We shouldn’t ask why wildfires, droughts, and devastating hurricanes occur so often: we should ask why they don’t happen more.

The reason for this is that the world has a soul, the anima mundi. This is an idea found throughout history. Plato, in the Timaeus, describes it this way: “we may say that the world came into being—a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God.” [3]And because the world is a living creature endowed with soul, all things within it participate in this life. As Plotinus writes, “the work of soul is something awake, both that within it and in the same way that which goes out to something else. Soul therefore makes alive all the other things which do not live of themselves, and makes them live the sort of life by which it lives itself.” [4] The Judeo-Christian tradition has a proper name for the bearer of this soul: “Wisdom, the fashioner of all things” (Wisdom 7:22).

To live in accord with Wisdom is to live in accord with both creation and God. The poetic metaphysics of this understanding can be found, among others, in the symbolism of the harmonia mundi and of the tree.

The harmonia mundi, literally “harmonies of the world” but often rendered in English as “the Music of the Spheres” has a rich history in the West, probably stemming from Pythagoras and is alluded to by Plato in the Timaeus. Plotinus provides a very beautiful description:

“The harmonious adjustment of the souls to the order of this All of ours witnesses to this: they are not cut off from it, but fit themselves in in their descents and make one harmony with its circuit, so that their fortunes and their lives and their choices are indicated by the figures made by the heavenly bodies and they sing, as it were, with one voice and are never out of tune. (And this is more properly the hidden meaning of the doctrine that the heavenly spheres move musically and melodically.”[5]

Many Renaissance writers and thinkers touched on the idea, Robert Fludd and Johannes Kepler, for example, and Shakespeare in his play Pericles, Prince of Tyre. It is a very simple concept: to live in harmony with Creation and God is to be at one with All That Is. Conversely, to be out of harmony with Creation and God is to invite corruption, infertility, and desolation upon the world.

The image of the tree, as the Tree of Life, may be the symbol par excellence of Wisdom from antiquity. The Tree, of course, makes its first appearance in Genesis, but it was also a feature of First Temple Judaism as an icon of Wisdom before Her worship was banned under the reforms of Josiah and her devotees driven into exile. The Tree returns in Revelation at the restoration of All Things: “And he showed me a river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street thereof, and on both sides of the river, was the tree of life, bearing twelve fruits, yielding its fruits every month, and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (22:1-2). Margaret Barker reads this restoration as the restoration of Wisdom, the Divine Sophia, to her proper place in Christian worship and understanding. For her, “The fate of the tree [is] the fate of Wisdom,” which is why she argues that the earliest Christian communities understood it in precisely this way: “When John saw the woman and the tree in the holy of holies [i.e., Revelation 22], he showed that the Christians were faithful to the older ways. Their temple was the ancient temple, and so the woman and her tree and everything they represented shaped their way of thinking. Wisdom/Miriam was the mother of the Messiah, and that is how the Christians told the story of the birth of Jesus.” [6]

This is the challenge presented to us at this point in history. We find ourselves confronted with a choice between the Real or a simulacra of the Real, what the kabbalah calls the qlipoth, the world of demonic powers. [7] Do we assist in the work of salvation by recognizing Sophia’s place in Creation, thereby calling her out of exile? Or do we follow the trajectory of death that has and will continue to wreak havoc on Creation and on our own souls as they descend into the technological and technocratic abyss of the qlipoth? Too often, Christians or any people of good will, leave the work of salvation to politicians or to an amorphous future event, the Coming of the Messiah. But our actions constitute a call, a summons. As Nikolai Berdyaev so stridently says, “My salvation is bound up with not only other men but also of animals, plants, minerals, of every blade of grass—all must be transfigured and brought into the Kingdom of God. And this depends upon my creative efforts.”[8] Salvation, that is, is not a spectator sport.

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 Garden.

1. W. S. Scott, trans, and ed., The Trial of Joan of Arc, Being a Verbatim Report of the Proceedings from the Orleans Manuscript (Westport, CT: Associated Booksellers, 1956), 78.

2. Sergius Bulgakov, A Bulgakov Anthology: Sergius Bulgakov 1871 – 1944, trans. Natalie Duddington and James Pain, ed. James Pain and Nicolas Zernov (London: SPCK, 1976), 10–11.

3. 30c.

4. 4.3.36-38.

5. 4.3.20-29.

6. Margaret Barker, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment (London; T & T Clark, 20100), 266, 265.

7. Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans Ralph Manheim (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 114.

8. Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 294.

Farming and the Holy Grail: Blood and Water

The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Sophia in Exile.

Biodynamic farming reinforces the very Christian, very Catholic notion of the sacredness of the year. The agricultural cycle and the liturgical cycle are (or used to be) beautifully intertwined. Much like Celtic knotwork, to remove one of these strands from life is to destroy life’s integral unity and beauty. Unfortunately, that is precisely what happened over the course of the centuries until now we find Christianity and agriculture estranged from each other, to the detriment of both. What we have instead are utilitarian liturgical and agricultural models that have even succeeded in making human being strangers to the food they eat, the foundations of religion, the cosmos, and each other.

This has not always been the case, and a belief in the sacred coalescence of religion and agriculture it is not even particular to Christianity. In Virgil’s Georgics, for example, the great Augustan poet reminds the reader of the proper disposition to the land and the gods:

“Mark the months and signs of heaven; whither Saturn’s cold star withdraws itself into what circles of the sky strays the Cyllenian fire. Above all, worship the gods, and pay great Ceres her yearly rites, sacrificing on the glad sward, with the setting of winter’s last days, when clear springtime is now come. Then are lambs fat and wine is most mellow; then sweet is sleep, and thick are the shadows on the hills. Then let all your country folk worship Ceres; for her wash the honeycomb with milk and soft wine, and three times let the luck-bringing victim pass round the young crops, while the whole crowd of your comrades follow exulting, and loudly call Ceres into their homes; nor let any put his sickle to the ripe corn, ere for Ceres he crown his brows with oaken wreath, dance artless measures, and chant her hymns.” [1]

Examples of how Christianity was once entwined with agricultural are often dismissed with charges of “paganism,” the go-to libel for lazy Puritans, whether Protestant, Catholic, or secularist. But even a cursory knowledge of how the liturgical cycle when imbued with folk customs enriched human life clearly indicates how impoverished we are. A world without the blessing of the fields, St. John’s fires, and Lammas bread is a shadow world, indeed. H. J. Massingham describes this tragedy as one demarcated by “the dividing line when Christendom began to depart from Christianity.” Can it be described any other way? His diagnosis is irrefutable: “Nor can the Christian Faith (seeing that there is no alternative to it) itself be rejuvenated unless it be equally shown that its own division from nature has pauperized it as an all-sufficient gospel for modern, grown-up, Western man, wrecked in the bitter sea of his own self-will.” [2]

What is easy to miss in (re)connecting the liturgical with the agricultural is that what we are really talking about is a regeneration of Creation. Liturgical acts, sacramental acts, and agricultural acts should be (and rarely are, unfortunately) deeds reconsecrating Creation. So much the less when they are estranged from each other. The marriage of folk and liturgical customs found in the practices of the medieval peasantry maintained this understanding in the agricultural setting, but even earlier practices maintained it with Creation in its wilder forms. The Celtic churches, so difficult to perceive clearly through the mists of history, moved in such an awareness. The legends of the Celtic saints—Patrick, Brendan, Brigit, and Columba for example—are rich with a natural world barely touched by agriculture. Indeed, it is interesting to note that Celtic monasticism with its extraordinary emphasis on asceticism and learning arose in a geographical area almost complete devoid of urban centers. It may be precisely because of this that Celtic monks participated in the wildness of Creation in a manner almost entirely unknown in other contexts. The exquisite Welsh “Litany of the Creation” (c. 7th century) voices this beautifully:

I beseech the people of heaven with bright-armed Michael; I beseech you by the triad of wind, sun, and moon.

I beseech you by water and the cruel air; I beseech you by fire, I beseech you by earth. [3]

It is no accident, I think, that the alternate title for St. Patrick’s extraordinary Breastplate is “The Deer’s Cry.”

My own path into farming—and deeper into Christianity—was accompanied by the intuition (that is the only word for it) of the inner (and real) meaning of the Creation. In my twenties I had heard from a friend that Rudolf Steiner once said that there were three meetings people have with the Trinity over their lives. In the daily rhythm of sleeping and waking, he said, we meet the Holy Spirit via our guardian angel in the deepest part of sleep. Over the course of our lives, he continued, we meet “the Father Principle” but not before the twenty-ninth year (the cycle of Saturn). But over the course of a year, by paying attention to the subtle changes in Nature day by day and as mirroring the liturgical year, we meet the Son. For Steiner, Christ united himself with the earth through his incarnation, baptism, and, especially, crucifixion and resurrection, so it would make sense that we could learn to know Christ through attending to the rhythms of the year, both liturgical and cosmic. “When the year’s course is again felt by humanity as an inner connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, then, by attuning the feelings of the soul with both the course of the year and the secret of the Mystery of Golgotha, a true social feeling will be the true solution, or at any rate the true continuation of what is today so foolishly called...the social question.” [4] I didn’t know whether or not this was true, but I figured it was at least worth exploring. Over thirty years later, I still haven’t stopped this exploration. If we can meet Christ through Nature, he is available to anyone paying attention to the Creation. This is the real takeover from inside.

Farming, then, working with the earth and its rhythms, is in its ideal form to also work with Christ, a truly sacred vocation. Unfortunately, so much of what goes by the name of farming these days, even, alas, in much allegedly “organic” farming, is oblivious if not antithetical to such an ethos. But the reality of the Crucifixion enlivened a dying earth with spiritual forces: it’s as simple as that. Sergei Bulgakov explains the phenomenon with luminous power:

“The spear wound, not the breaking of His bones, is the conclusion of Christ’s salvific sacrifice for the redemption of humankind. This blood and water wash human sin and create the New Testament Church, with its grace-bestowing mysterious gifts: baptismal water and eucharistic blood. Out of the side of the old Adam was created woman, who tempted him to fall. But the wound delivered to humankind from Adam’s side is healed by the spear wound in Jesus’s side. The blood and water that flowed into the world abide in the world. They sanctify this world as the pledge of its future transfiguration. Through the precious streams of Christ’s blood and water that flowed out of His side, all creation was sanctified—heaven and earth, our earthly world, and all the stellar worlds. The image of the Holy Grail, in which the holy blood of Christ is kept, expresses precisely the idea that, even though the Lord ascended in His honorable flesh to heaven, the world received His holy relic in the blood and water that flowed out of His side; and the chalice of the Grail is the ciborium and repository of this relic. And the whole world is the chalice of the Holy Grail.”[5]

Given this reality, the methods of conventional farming, with its reliance on chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides—a true culture of death—and its promotion of GMOs and the spreading prohibitions against saving seed amount to sacrilege. To engage in it is to trample on the image of Christ.

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. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Garden.

1. Virgil, Georgics 1.335-50. In Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-IV, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1956), 105.

2. H. J. Massingham, The Tree of Life (London: Chapman & Hall, 1943), 17.

3. Oliver Davies, trans. with Thomas O’Loughlin, Celtic Spirituality New York: Paulist Press, 1999), 298.

4. Rudolf Steiner, Cosmic and Human Metamorphoses, translated (Blauvelt, NY: Garber Communications, 1989), 67.

5. Sergius Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, trans. and ed. Boris Jakim (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Books, 1997), 33. My emphasis.

The Ahrimanic Moment

In a poetic metaphysics such as the one I’ve been promulgating for some time now, one finds that the distinctions between actual and imaginal, between the concrete and the dreamt, between the logical and the intuitive are in reality constructed and that the barriers separating them easily dissolve before the beholder’s mindful and attentive presence.

We’ve recently been confronted with a number of narratives that shapeshift in response to need, even if the need is to confuse and destabilize. We’ve witnessed, of course, the myriad conflicting reports and mandates regarding the Covid phenomenon so engulfing our lives as of late—conflicting reports more often than not arising from the same entities, be they human persons or corporate bodies. Simultaneously, we stand and watch in a kind of awe if not bewilderment as our basic freedoms as human agents are challenged, muffled, if not canceled in the face of a totalizing onslaught of speech codes, restrictions on mobility, and threats of repercussion if we question these phenomena at all.

One of the disturbing developments in this moment, for me at least, is the migration of so much of our lives into online environments, not least schools and shopping. The gradual disappearance of coinage, for one, appears a bellweather of a disturbing trend. We have all become avatars, projected selves that would melt in the presence of other human beings of flesh and blood, warmth and spirit--presences which are at the moment discouraged.

As a result of all of this, what I’ve been thinking about lately is Rudolf Steiner’s notion of “the Incarnation of Ahriman.” For Steiner, Ahriman is a spiritual being that wishes to enslave us to logic, efficiency, and the technological (The Evil Genius in Terry Gilliam’s 1982 film Time Bandits illustrates this in a humorous manner). In a lecture delivered a century ago, Steiner contrasts this image with that of Lucifer (Hegel haunts Steiner to a degree):

“Lucifer is the power that stirs up all fanatical, all falsely mystical forces in human beings, all that physiologically tends to bring the blood into disorder and so lift man above and outside himself. Ahriman is the power that makes people dry, prosaic, philistine—that ossifies them and brings them in the superstition of materialism….

“Ahriman has the greatest interest in concealing from mankind that in modern intellectual, rationalistic science, in superstitious empiricism, one is dealing with a great illusion, a deception—that men should not recognize this is of the greatest possible interest to Ahriman. It would be a triumphant experience for him if the scientific superstition which infiltrates all areas of life today and which human beings even try to use as a template for the social sciences should prevail into the third millennium. He would have the greatest success if he could then arrive in western civilization in human form and find the scientific superstition as prevailing dogma.”1

As I’ve written in my book Transfiguration, I’m not exactly sure how to read Steiner’s take on Ahriman—as a metaphor? or as a spiritual reality? Maybe as both. Because, let’s face it: Steiner was on the money about the twenty-first century and every physical reality has a spiritual counterpart. In addition, the morass of scientific superstition in which we now wallow is more dogmatic than any pronouncement from the Catholic Church, and secular scientific inquisitors infest every corner and pixel of the internet, the world where most of us now live.

Steiner was hardly alone is his concerns about an encroaching technological evolution that could compromise the essence of being human. The Russian philosopher and prophet Nikolai Berdyaev predicted much the same thing, as did in their way Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, and, most notably, Martin Heidegger. Berdyaev, writing in the 1930s, speaks directly to our moment:

“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

Sophiology stands in firm opposition to this mechanization of life, this Ahrimanic moment. Sophiology offers a relationship to the Real—to other creatures, to people, to plants, animals, and the cosmos, including even microbes, not to mention the angelic and divine orders. Our current moment encourages just the opposite.

One could say that our times have forgotten the incipient philosophical question posed by the Psalmist: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour” (8:3-4). The Psalmist furthermore places these relationships at the center of human flourishing: “Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas” (8:6-8).

Our own path to human flourishing is a simple as it is clear. Will we embrace it?

The Evil Genius plans on remaking Creation.

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.

1. Rudolf Steiner, The Incarnation of Ahriman: The Embodiment of Evil on Earth: Seven Lectures, trans. Matthew Barton (Forest Row, UK: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2006), 17–18; 22. My emphasis.

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