The New Iconoclasts and the Sacrament of Forgetfulness

“Tell me, Campano, do you ever laugh at the arrogance of mortals? I often do. I ridicule it in the hope that I may avoid it. Boys cannot understand the counsel of their elders, nor peasants the thoughts of the wise. However, with unbecoming arrogance, the earthly creature Man often presumes to fathom the reasons of divine nature, and to search into the purpose of its providence.”

~letter of Marsillio Ficino to Bishop Campano [1]

Iconoclasm, the prohibition and destruction of images, particularly holy images, is a feature not only of religious history, but of human nature as well. It seems to particularly afflict adherents of monotheism—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—but it is not unknown in other contexts. Whatever its cultural contexts, however, whether, for example, in Byzantine Constantinople of the first millennium or in Western Europe during the second, it is often accompanied by a virulent and hysterical (in the psychological sense) puritanism: a puritanism which invariably leads to violence. Sometimes this violence is directed at images themselves, as in the stripping of the altars during the inauguration of Protestant Reformation or the destruction of the thousand-years-old Bamiyan Buddha statues by the Taliban in 2001; and sometimes this violence spills over in its zeal and turns on men, women, and children. It is nothing other than a form of cultural schizophrenia or psychosis.

Wherever it has arisen, iconoclasm has been characterized by an obsession with erasing the past—sometimes the past of a group’s perceived enemies and sometimes, as in a variety of Oedipal rage, upon one’s own cultural past. In 16th century England, for instance, as the Reformation gained steam reformers endeavored to destroy their country’s own Catholic and pagan past in the prohibition of images, masses, feast days, saints days, and folk festivals (like May Day) and eventually even forbid the celebration of the Christmas holidays. Talk about party-poopers! As Eamon Duffy argues in his magisterial study of the period, “Iconoclasm was the central sacrament of the reform, and, as the programme of the leaders became more radical...they sought with greater urgency the celebration of that sacrament in every parish of the land.” [2]

I have long argued that the English Reformation, with its systematic destruction and removal of its Catholic and pagan past (though both were never entirely eradicated), is the model for how a political coterie, once its acquires enough power and influence, can completely transform a culture. In England, this was accomplished through a variety of threats, coercion, and propaganda and was amazingly successful—and this without either mass or social media. I can imagine Edward VI uttering, upon ascending the throne, “We’re going to build England back better.” If it could happen in early modern England, it can happen anywhere.

Part and parcel of this cultural metamorphosis (or perhaps “these cultural metamorphoses” is more accurate) has been what scholar John Bossy has called “the migration of the holy” from the church to the State. [3] The secular, that is, is the modern religious. But the success of the new order of society can “only grow if all hope of a restoration of the old [is] extirpated” along with its “monuments of superstition.” [4] Thus have all cultural revolutions proceeded ever since.

Our own Western cultures have been engaged in such a pogrom at least over the last generation, a development noticeably accelerated in recent years. Has not the destruction or removal of images—of, for example, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and even Flannery O’Connor (!!)—whatever one’s opinion on the figures in question, been precisely such an iconoclastic venture, a way to erase the past’s “monuments of superstition”? Is this not the sacrament of forgetfulness writ large? Are opponents of this new religious impulse not destroyed or “canceled” (how I loathe the term) for their heresy in much the same way their counterparts were burnt at the stake for religious heresy in bygone years or hanged, drawn, and quartered for political heresy? Seriously, is anything today different from the earlier religious reformations save in method?

Perhaps most telling—and most controversial—has been the iconoclasm around gender that has accompanied this wave of political and cultural iconoclasm. But here we transgress into the precincts of the more properly sacred. For gender is sacred. When God speaks to Sophia in Genesis, he proclaims it: “Let us make Man in our image…. male and female created he them.” To destroy this image is far more tragic than the destruction of a thousand churches (as Notre Dame was not all that long ago) or a thousand Buddhas: for this iconoclasm is an iconoclasm of ontology itself: a disfigurement and, ultimately, a negation of Being. My recent book Sophia in Exile touches on the sacredness of marriage in this light; and having discovered that the journal Mere Orthodoxy declined a review of my book because of it gives me a fair amount of pleasure for some reason.

This iconoclasm, like most, is essentially rooted in a kind of black magic, by which I mean the manipulation of reality through means of language—incantations, slogans, repetitions, neologisms, changes of definition—and a variety of technologies. As I write concerning the magician and polymath John Dee in my book Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England, technology and the manipulation of language are tools the magician uses to change (or try to change anyway) other people, whether singly or in groups. Now, in The Age of Technocracy, this ability to manipulate has multiplied many times over, especially now that it has joined forces with the State (or states). The Romanian scholar Ioan Couliano called this all long ago. In 1987 he asked, “Is the Western State, in our time, a true magician, or is it a sorcerer’s apprentice who sets in motion dark and uncontrollable forces?” [5] I would say that, aided (or subsumed) by BigTech, it is both. John Dee’s magic backfired on him, toying as he was (actually, they were toying with him) with beings of great mischief and malevolence. I imagine the same thing will eventually happen in our current social and political context, but not before many innocent people have been ruined, destroyed, or killed. As is already happening.

Finally, what iconoclasm is at its core is a puritanism, a kind of cultural OCD which demands that others accommodate its anxieties or be subject to punishment or violence; but it is even more, not so ironically, a form of idolatry. In French Catholic philosopher Jean-Luc Marion’s description, the idol is the perversion of the icon: for in the idol what the viewer sees is not a window to transcendence and divinity, but the viewer’s own desires reflected back upon him, though invisibly: “With the idol, the invisible mirror admits no beyond, because the gaze cannot raise the sight of its aim. The invisible mirror thus masks, negatively, the shortcoming of the aim—literally the invisable.”[6]

And idols allow the demonic a space in which to operate—for nature (and supernature) abhors a vacuum. Of course, belief in God or the Devil, angels or demons, is not requisite for idolatry, for, as Ficino observed so long ago, “the mind, which from a long-standing desire and indulgence in physical things has become physical, so to speak, will believe the divine to be completely non-existent, or will regard it as physical.” [7]

Sophiology is preeminently an engagement with the Real. And, as such, it strives to find the icon amidst a world of idols and to be constantly aware of our own tendency to turn our icons into idols.

A cinematic masterpiece of biblical gendered typology

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.

1. Meditations on the Soul: Selected Letters of Marsillio Ficino (Inner Traditions, 1996), 135.

2. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (Yale, 1992), 480.

3. John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1987), 153-161.

4. Duffy, 569.

5. Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (Chicago, 1987), 105.

6. Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being (Chicago, 1991), 13.

7. Meditations on the Soul, 84.

The Mystical Body of Romanticism

'The Funeral of Shelley' by Louis Édouard Fournier (1889), detail.

Some people, it seems, have a tendency to over-idealize the life I live, as if on our biodynamic farm my family and I shimmer in some agrarian dreamworld in the manner of rather tall hobbits. Ours is certainly a world foreign to that of most of those in my social class (intellectuals, academics, and other learned professionals), but it’s far from idyllic. Farming is hard work, for one thing, and we often put in 12-14 hour days at the height of the growing season. For another, it’s unpredictable—and weather, insects, animals, and a host of other variables can often destroy that which we so earnestly and carefully seek to preserve. And I won’t even get into the human interactions that can often be, well, complicated. In short, farming in this way is not unlike living in a realm somewhat like that depicted in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. But it is a good life. It’s just not an easy one.

My wife and I undertook this life because we wanted something more tangible, more sacred, than that available to us in the wastelands of modernity, overshadowed by corporate superstructures and technocracy and characterized by endemic alienation from the Real. We turned to the land, not only to work it biodynamically as a way to heal the land itself, but also to heal ourselves. Nevertheless, some people think what we do is very quaint, charming even, but dismiss it as nothing but an iteration of Romanticism. I’m fine with that. If the alternative is postmodern alterity and distanciation from the Real, then I’m a card-carrying Romantic.

Paul Kingsnorth, whom I’ve written about recently, also gets smeared with the label of Romantic—and he doesn’t mind, either. And he pushes back. “It seems to me,” he writes, “that Romanticising the past, in our culture at this point in time, is less common than Romanticising the future. The only difference is that Romanticising the future is socially acceptable.” [1] Think about that next time the WEF peddles the chintzy wares of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, they of the “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” (which has mysteriously disappeared from the WEF website. HA!) future. Kingsnorth lives a life not unlike mine (from what I can tell) and even gives workshops on using a scythe. Which is so cool. And I’m sure he understands the challenges and hardships of such a life and doesn’t get lost in misty-eyed fantasies of an agrarian Elysium. We are not, as of the moment, exactly dead.

But Romanticism is not only about returning to the land, though Wordsworth and many of the great Romantics, not to mention Ivan Illich and E. F. Schumacher, have certainly endorsed such an idea. It’s also about fighting, and even dying, for an ideal. What is really worth fighting, let alone dying, for? Certainly not “strategic governmental objectives,” though Truth, Beauty, and Goodness—however one interprets them—surely are. Lord Byron, profligate that he was, gave his life for an ideal (or tried to) when he left his scurrilous lifestyle to fight for Greek independence, a failed but noble cause. As I write this, citizens of Cuba and France show signs of a willingness to fight for an ideal—freedom. What would you fight for?

Romanticism, that is, is messy, hard to nail down, and, therefore, more human than the technocratic promises of Utopia that are the inheritors of the Enlightenment’s hollow project. H. G. Schenk in his The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History, puts it as well as anyone. For him Romanticism is

“a unity […] characterized as contrariness, dissonance and inner conflict of the Romantic mind. Utopian dreams for the future side by side with nostalgia for the past; a marked nihilistic mood accompanied by a fervent yearning for faith; serious attempts to bring about a Christian revival followed, in an admittedly marginal case, by the very abandonment of faith on the part of the former apologist; the long tug-of-war between the old religion and the new ideologies—these are some of the unresolved contradictions which lie at the core of the movement. No shorter formula can be devised to define the essence of Romanticism. All short-cut definitions that have been put forward—well over a hundred—are unsatisfactory.” [2]

Christianity, then, can be construed as a kind of Romanticism. This may be because the god of Christianity is a human god, thereby making Christianity the most human of religions.

Romanticism has, I have to confess, inhabited every phase of my life—from my youth as a musician, my work as a poet and teacher, in my scholarship and writing (Sophiology—hello?), as a husband and father, no less than my thirty years in biodynamics. For me, it’s all about hope: the belief that we can make the Kingdom present in our lives. I heard this in the music that inspired me as a young man—in Kate Bush and The Waterboys, for example—and I felt it in the poets, from the Romantic period and after, who continue to nourish me. They say, with Joyce’s Molly Bloom, “Yes” to this business of being human. The point is that to be human is to be a Romantic. It’s the default position.

One of the great moments of late-20th Century Romanticism.

The great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley met his end in Italy while sailing into a storm. Unfortunately, though a decent sailor, the poet could not swim. When the Tyrrhenian Sea’s waves brought Shelley’s sodden corpse back to land, a volume of Keats was found in one of his jacket pockets, a volume of Sophocles in the other. At Shelley’s funeral, while the poet’s body burned on the shore of Leghorn, his friend Edward Trelawney poured libations of incense, wine, and oil into the flames and consigned Shelley’s remains to the love of Nature. Then, just before the flames devoured it, Trelawney grabbed the poet’s heart.

The mystical body of Romanticism continues to burn, and we are in no danger of running out of fuel. No matter. What needs transfiguring in the fire of time will be transfigured. The treasures we find in its pockets we will cherish, despite fads and the affectations and disaffections of taste. What will remain is the heart, even if some need to risk burning in order to retrieve it. And how beautiful is fire.

A clip from the 2015 film version of Far from the Madding Crowd.

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. Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays (Graywold Press, 2017), 37.

2. H. G. Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History (Frederick Ungar, 1966), xxii.

Paul Kingsnorth and John Michael Greer Are My Homeboys

Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern

I can take a hint.

A few weeks ago, I went through a spate of queries as to whether I had read anything by Paul Kingsnorth or John Michael Greer. These inquiries were from readers of my books and my blog as well as from good friends—and when I received three such prompts from three people completely unknown to one another within the space of a couple of hours, I figured it was time to give these two writers a hearing, Like I said, I can take a hint.

I had never heard of Kingsnorth, the novelist and environmental writer, though it seems as if I should have. Good heavens, he’s everywhere these days! I had heard of Greer, but only knew about his neopagan writings (which I’d never read), and learned that not only was he Archdruid of North America at one time (a job I did not know available) but also that he is a very perceptive social critic, the kind of guy not afraid to ask the most obvious questions. My friend Mike Sauter, a regular contributor to Jesus the Imagination, has been recommending Greer’s blog to me for a good long while, and I really liked this blogpost on Johnny Appleseed,. And, for Pete’s sake!, his blog is entitled Ecosophia. How have I not been following this guy?

Anyway, prodded by my better angels, I purchased a couple of their books, Kingsnorth’s Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays and Greer’s The Retro Future: Looking to the Past to Reinvent the Future, both published in 2017. My own book Transfiguration, which treats many of the same issues as their books—transhumanism, the coming collapse of the technocratic paradigm, our relationship to the Creation and divinity, and how to live a fully human life—was published in 2018. So, obviously, I was overjoyed to find two kindred spirits out there in the world.

The gist of Kingsnorth’s book (and approach to life) is that talking about environmentalism and the thing we call “activism” are essentially fruitless at this moment. Better, he argues, is to actually live it, which is why he and his family bought two and a half acres in the west of Ireland (Kingsnorth is British) and started walking the walk instead of talking the talk so much (his own admission). As anyone familiar with my work will know, this is precisely what my wife and I have been doing on our biodynamic farm. Theoretical environmentalism is one thing; living it is another.

Greer’s book, on the other hand, is a cogent interpretation of modernity and its discontents. In particular, he repeatedly points out that those of us who think electric cars and wind farms will solve anything and allow us to still hold to our transportation-heavy and technologically-reliant lifestyles in the future are living in a fool’s paradise. That’s why his book examines the retro future: he thinks what we need to do is start developing the skills that will be necessary in a post-industrial age (I also touch on this in Transfiguration). He lists “seven sustainable technologies” that would serve humanity in good stead as we move into such a time: 1) organic intensive gardening; 2) solar thermal technologies (not the same as solar panels); 3) sustainable wood heating; 4) sustainable health care; 5) letterpress printing and its related technologies; 6) low-tech shortwave radio; 7) computer-free mathematics. Some may bristle at these, astonished that Greer would suggest that the future will not be one of multiplying digital playgrounds and unbounded transportation freedom. Greer might say they’ll just have to learn the hard way.

As I did in Transfiguration, in these two books these writers anticipated where our civilization was heading and how to answer that. They’re pretty smart guys, but the World Archons are also pretty smart and could also see where things were heading—so they’ve been trying to game the outcome to their advantage. But that can only last so long. I don’t think either of them saw what the Archons were planning. But here we are.

Kingsnorth was recently received into the Orthodox Church and, unfortunately, he’s been paraded around by a number of Orthodox bloggers and such much in the way the captured Cleopatra was through Rome (Catholic media is horrible at this kind of convert trophy hunting as well). Nevertheless, an incipient Sophiology certainly seems to inhabit his work (which may be what drew him to Orthodoxy). The Archdruid Greer also seems to embody an inherent Sophiology. For souls attuned to both the natural spiritual worlds—and who do more than that conceptualize, a sophiological sensibility is simply unavoidable.

Ride on, brothers.

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.