Distributism, Sophiology, and the Current Moment

dust, light, a barn

Where are all the distributists at this threshold point in human history? One would think that this would be the prime moment for a distributist gambit. But it’s not, or at least it hasn’t been so far. For those who don’t know what distributism is, it is the notion, popularized in the early twentieth century by figures such as G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, that means of production and property should be widely distributed through societies and not in control of the few, whether the few be corporations (as in Capitalist economic structures) or governments (as in Socialist and Communist economic structures). The idea arises from the concept of subsidiarity found in Catholic Social Teaching stemming from Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) and reiterated regularly (and ignored just as often) in Catholic teaching ever since.

Of course, distributism and subsidiarity were proposed in an age before the internet, a space that could also use some serious reconfiguration as it is alarmingly controlled by a very few—a very few who can decide what is and what is not real knowledge, real wisdom, or real news. When in concert with corporations, governments, and multinational NGOs, these social media and search engine companies show just how insidious are the evils inherent in social structures held in the hands of the few, a warning sounded long ago in Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Zamyatin’s We among many others.

Perhaps the most powerful voice for distributism in the later twentieth century was economist E.F. Schumacher’s in his classic work Small is Beautiful. For Schumacher, the place to begin with such a project is, quite literally, on the ground beneath our feet, that is, in the soil. As we all know, BigAg, through its parasitic relationship with governments and the NGO superstructure, has done untold damage to the environment and human health, literally poisoning both. Starting from the soil, regenerative practices can then impact industry:

“In agriculture and horticulture, we can interest ourselves in the perfection of production methods which are biologically sound, build up soil fertility, and produce health, beauty and permanence. Productivity will then look after itself. In industry, we can interest ourselves in the evolution of small-scale technology, relatively non-violent technology, ‘technology with a human face’, so that people have a chance to enjoy themselves while they are working, instead of working solely for their pay packet and hoping, usually forlornly, for enjoyment solely during their leisure time.”1

I often think of the words of folksinger Pete Seeger in this regard: “I like to say I’m more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.”

More recently, anarchist economist Guido Preparata has also endorsed an agricultural model—biodynamics to be specific—as a template for human economies. “The farmers and agriculturalists of our project,” explains Preparata,

“inhabit a landscape governed by these principles: the ideal model is that of the bio-dynamic farm. A bio-dynamic farm is characterized by the absence of importation (viz. closed-circuit cycle), zero-waste (the output of a sector serves as the input of another), diversity (crop-rotation and diverse ecosystems instead of intensive mono-cultivation), and a symbiotic relationship with all the elements of the wider living system.”2

Even more recently, physician and researcher Zach Bush has been promoting biodiversity of the gut biome and the greater, environmental biome as the way to greater health and true human flourishing.

So, diversity seems to be the key here—which is precisely what distributism has always proposed. It doesn’t seem that difficult to achieve. Why is it?

One reason, of course, is the immensity of the governmental-military-corporatist-NGO megalith that seems almost insurmountable. Another is spiritual ennui: we just don’t have the strength (no doubt due to the lousy nutrition we get from processed foods laced with glyphosate and a host of other poisons). We also suffer from spiritual ennui. This, for me, is most telling in the (for lack of a better term) distributist movement (which has little distributism and even less movement). On the one hand are the distributist cosplayers, those who talk a good game about Chesterton, Belloc, and Tolkien, who romanticize about life in the Shire, wearing tweed, smoking pipes, and drinking highballs, but who never throw the ring back into the fires of Mount Doom. On the other hand are the exhausted, those who have given up on a dream of a better way and are content to pray for a Progressive Messiah who will then allow distributism to flourish. AS IF THAT WOULD EVER HAPPEN. These forms of distributism are shells from which life has long disappeared. For my part, my sword will not sleep in my hand, until we have built Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land. As St. Ambrose reminded us so long ago, “The earth is all men’s, not the property of the rich.”

What we need to enliven is what economist and priest Sergei Bulgakov called the sophianic economy, one that “establishes the ultimate connection of all things.”3 As he further argues, the true purpose of an economy, “is to defend and to spread the seeds of life, to resurrect nature. This is the action of Sophia on the universe in an effort to restore it to being in truth.... Economic activity overcomes the divisions in nature, and its ultimate goal ... is to return the world to life in Sophia.”4 This is what all people of good will should be working toward. This is true spiritual warfare.

“Everything that offends against the Doctrine of Creation is Church business; everything that affirms it, the love of nature, the craftsman’s job, the artist’s vision, the yeoman’s husbandry, responsible or creative work of any and every kind, all true zeal in interpreting that Doctrine whether by witness in art, by service in honourable labour or by devotion in resistance to anarchy or automatism, those modern enemies of godliness, should receive the holy blessing.” ~ H.J. Massingham 5

Would to God that all the Lord’s people were Prophets.

Steve Winwood returning to agriculture.

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. E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (Harper & Row, 1973), 19–20.

2. Guido G. Preparata, with Domenico D’Amico, Flavio Fabiani, Aurelio Riccioli, and Sebastiano Scrófina, “‘The Blueprint’: A Modest Monetary and Organizational Proposal for Re-launching the Economic Welfare of Communities,” in New Directions for Catholic Social and Political Research: Humanity vs. Hyper-Modernity, ed. G.G. Preparata (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 5.

3. Sergei Bulgakov, Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household (Yale University Press, 2000), 155.

4. Ibid., 153.

5. H.J. Massingham, The Tree of Life Chapman & Hall, 1943), 194.

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.

“In the first, spinning place”: Sophiology and the Idea of a Farm

Stella Matutina Farm, Grass Lake, Michigan

Sophiology has deep, deep connections to various social streams in our world: in distributism and communitarianism, for example, as well is in some varieties of Christian anarchism, not to mention various strains of neopaganism. Indeed, Sophiology, as I have always conceived of it, transcends confessional boundaries, particularly in the phenomenological attention to the Things of This World which allows them to shine forth in all of their radiance. Because of this, nowhere is Sophiology so easily found than in farming.

This is not to say that the shining of Sophia can be located on the gigantic fields and feed lots of BigAg, filled as they are with GMO grains and cattle loaded with enough drugs to stock a pharmacy. What BigAg offers are not farms, but the outdoor manifestation of the factory, the dark satanic mills William Blake so rightfully condemned for the evils they inflict on human flourishing.

A farm, to be a farm, needs to be a place where humans live in accord with animal and plants—including so-called “pests” and “weeds.” This accord, as I’ve so often written before, is also cosmologically configured: the restoration of the relationship of the microcosm to the macrocosm. Without this relationship to Being, one should expect nothing else but pathology and disease, physical and psychological as well as spiritual. This kind of farm, as Rudolf Steiner, H.J. Massingham, and Masanobu Fukuoka (among many others) have asserted, can only appear as a totality and under the loving stewardship of a devoted caretaker. And it can only be an organic or biodynamic farm. Such a farm is what Dylan Thomas identified as “the first, spinning place,” evocative of Eden, in his beautiful poem, “Fern Hill.”

Our world’s over-reliance on pharmaculture, as we know all too well, is not just characteristic of BigAg, but infiltrates every aspect of our lives—often by governmental decree—a practice which further and further estranges us from the Real. We simply have lost touch with Reality. That so very few seem to panic about this may be the greatest cause for panic.

This disconnection with the Real, sadly, runs through most (probably all) of the power structures around us: the entertainment industry, education, politics, medicine, the military, the corporatacracy, and even, it pains me to say, our various ecclesial bodies. Truly, as the Book of Job inquires, “Where is wisdom to be found?”

One answer, and an easy one to enact, is in a return to the Creation as Creation, infused with the Glory of the Lord. Sophiology, certainly, can be discerned through the farm, but it is also revealed—through scripture, through vision (as in the cases of Jane Lead, John Pordage, and Vladimir Solovyov to name just three), through the arts, and, importantly, through community (“where two or three are gathered in my name”). And what is an organic farm but a community? So, let us return to how “it must have been after the birth of the simple light.” It’s really not that difficult.

Watch this documentary inspired by the work of Masanobu Fukuoka.

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.