Lady Day = Sophia Day

March 25th, as many people are no doubt aware, is the Feast of the Annunciation, known in much of the Anglosphere as Lady Day. It’s an important feast in the Christian year, marking, as it does, one of the quarters along with St. John’s Day, Michaelmas, and Christmas. The feast is so important that from early on in Christian history (6th century or thereabouts) the calendar year changed at Lady Day (and not on New Year’s Day) since the Annunciation recalibrated both history and time itself. It was sort of a Cosmic Reset Button, when salvation had at last come to the household of mankind. In the Eastern churches, if the Annunciation falls during the Holy Week its observation is not transferred (as it is in most Western churches), even if it falls on Good Friday or Easter. John Donne, a great lover of paradox, wrote of this great paradox in one of his finest poems, “Upon the Annunciation and Passion Falling upon One Day”:

All this, and all between, this day hath shown, Th' abridgement of Christ's story, which makes one— As in plain maps, the furthest west is east— Of th’ angels Ave, and Consummatum est. How well the Church, God’s Court of Faculties, Deals, in sometimes, and seldom joining these. As by the self-fix’d Pole we never do Direct our course, but the next star thereto, Which shows where th’other is, and which we say —Because it strays not far—doth never stray, So God by His Church, nearest to him, we know, And stand firm, if we by her motion go.

As anyone familiar with this blog or my published work knows, the essence of Sophiology is, for me, centered on the recognition of the inherent unity of the natural and supernatural orders; and the metaxological center of that reality is the Virgin Mary, the incarnation of Sophia: she who makes the invisible Godhead manifest to the senses. The Annunciation is the feast celebrating this reality in harmony with the Feast of the Nativity—and it’s no accident that March 25th falls exactly nine months before Christmas. It’s a witness of nature’s marriage to the supernatural. This is spirituality. This is biology.

In the writings of Jacob Boehme, the role of the Virgin in the Incarnation is an office engaged in the regeneration of all things—nature as well as the human soul—an absolute participation in redemption. As he writes in Signatura Rerum:

“God became man and made man to God, the Seed of the Woman, that is, of the Heavenly Virginity, which disappeared in Adam, and also corrupted man’s Seed in the Anger, that is, Mary’s Seed, were formed into one Person, which was Christ; and the Seed of the Woman, that is, of the Virgin of God, understand the Heavenly Essentiality, should bruise the head of the Serpent, understand, the wrath of God in the Corrupted man; the head is the might of God’s Anger; the Divine man, understand the Divine property, should change the earthly into itself & turn the earth to heaven.” [1]

And he explicitly identifies the Mother of Jesus with the Sophia of Proverbs:

“Therefore we set it down here (according to our knowledge) that the pure chaste virgin (in which God was born [or generated]) is the chaste virgin [that is] in the presence of God: and it is an Eternal virgin; before ever Heaven and Earth was created, it was a virgin, and without blemish; and that pure chaste virgin of God put itself into Mary, in her Incarnation, and her new Man, was in the holy Element of God; and therefore she was blessed among all Women, and the Lord was with her, as the Angel said.” [2]

This sensibility is found throughout the sophiological literature—poetry as well as prose, science as well as mysticism—and sweetly phrased in these lines from William Everson’s (aka Brother Antoninus) “Canticle to the Great Mother of God”:

Clearly you are to us as God, who bring God to us.

Not otherwise than of those arms does grace emerge, blessing our birth-blank brow.

Wombed of earth’s wildness, flank darked and void, we have been healed in light,

Traced to the sweet mutation of those hands, a touch closing the anguish-actual stripe,

Whip-flashed the sin, lip-festered on our soul.

So much of our culture and times distances us from the Real that shimmers beneath above and between All Things, as infinity is found at both ends of a number line and between every number, every fraction. Our task, most especially now under the threat of an absolute technocracy, is to participate in the regenerative actuality of Christ and Sophia. This is our Annunciation, our affirmation, our entrance into the Mysterion of the Real.

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. Jacob Behmen (Jacob Boehme), Signatura Rerum: Or the Signature of all Things…translated by J. Ellistone (London, 1651), 11.11.

2. Jacob Behmen [Jacob Boehme], The Third Booke of the Author, being The High and Deepe Searching out of The Threefold Life of Man through [or according to] the Three Principles, translated by John Sparrow (London, 1650), 22.31.

The Life and Legacy of Jacob Boehme: Review

I see in sudden total vision

The substance of entranc’d Boehme’s awe:

The illimitable hour glass

Of the universe eternally

Turning, and the gold sands falling

From God, and the silver sands rising

From God, the double splendors of joy

That fuse and divide again

In the narrow passage of the Cross.

~ Kenneth Rexroth, “The Phoenix and the Tortoise”

Unarguably, the most important figure in the secret history of Sophiology is the early modern German mystic Jacob Boehme. The importance of Boehme to theosophical Christian thought cannot be underestimated, and his contribution to Christian thinking can rightly be compared to that of Martin Heidegger to philosophy. With Heidegger, Western philosophy hit the reset button. Likewise with Boehme in regard to Christian theology. It is for this reason at the very least that the appearance of The Life and Legacy of Jacob Boehme, a new documentary by director Łukasz Chwałko, is a most welcome event. It couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time.

The film begins by setting the cultural context of Boehme—a Europe nearly destroyed by religious conflict, a time of great anxiety and widespread persecution. In the midst of this, a simple shoemaker, Jacob Boehme came to insights into the nature of God that challenged the religious orthodoxies of his day (not to mention ours) in his sincere and courageous dedication to untangling the problem of evil. When, noticing the light glancing from a pewter dish, Boehme looked into the nature of good and evil (or what we often interpret to be good and evil) and saw them both as part of God. Needless to say, this was a radical insight and drew Boehme into controversy. The idea here, as one of the film’s interviewees, Józef Piórczyński describes it, is that, for Boehme, good and evil are metaphysical categories, not moral qualities.

The first half of the short film touches on Boehme’s life and theosophical insights and turns to a number of Polish, German, Russian, and American scholars for commentary (in addition to Piórczyński, Jan Tomkowski, Jerzy Prokopiuk, Andreas Hahn, Matthias Wentzel, Monika Rzeczycka, and Joel Burnell). They and Chwałko do an admirable job of digesting the often bewildering (to the uninitiated) thought-world of Boehme who was himself, as the film says, “at the margins of rationality” (which is why he is so essential to Sophiology, a poetic metaphysics). In addition to Boehme’s insights into good and evil and nature of God (for Boehme, God only becomes fully God in Jesus Christ) the commentary explores Boehme’s concept of the Ungrund, the primal ground of both Divinity and Reality and gives some attention to his theology of Sophia, whom Boehme believed incarnated as the Virgin Mary.

The second half of the film explores Boehme’s legacy in German Pietism, the English Behmenists (mostly focusing on John Sparrow and William Law, though overlooking the Philadelphians—whom I covered in my previous post), Romanticism (Novalis, Goethe, Schelling, Adam Mickiewicz), and in the Russian Silver Age (Vladimir Solovyov, in particular) and gives a helpful survey of Boehme’s importance to intellectual history as well as theosophy.

The film is widely available on Vimeo, Amazon, and other streaming sources and I highly recommend anyone interested in Boehme, Christian theosophy, or Sophiology give it a look. It is a very helpful invitation into the world and thought of this important figure. As Piórczyriski explains, Boehme’s religious ethos, centered in the goodness of Christ, is likewise centered in a volunaristic dynamism:

“Only through human beings can the world become a good world. Never without them.”

How true these words ring at this particular cultural crossroads.

Kate Bush’s “Love and Anger”—pretty much saturated with Boehme, whether she knows it or not.

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.

“Great Pan is...alive!”

Cernunos

“Once upon a time,” begins Eugene McCrarrher in The Enchantments of Mammon, “the world was enchanted. Rocks, trees, rivers, and rain pulsated with invisible forces, powers that enlivened and determined the affairs of tribes and empires as well. Though beholden to the caprice or providential design of a variety of spirits and deities, the world of enchantment could be commanded by magic or humbly beseeched through prayer.”1 He goes on to argue that first the Protestant Reformation, followed by the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and so forth (we’ve heard it all before) further alienated human beings from the visible and invisible commonwealths of Things.

Of course, not everyone has been down with Project Disenchantment and a Counter Enlightenment, a Counter Modernity, though its adherents have been relatively small in number, has always resisted the totalizing claims of the false modernity we take for real. This was clearly the case with Hermeticism in the seventeenth century, with various forms of mysticism (though not all) through the centuries, through the persistence of folk religion and magic, and, obviously, through the various iterations of Sophiology.

At its simplest level, this counter stream is dedicated to the idea of the sacred. Modernity, it seems, has no room for a sacredness not attached to profit or efficiency—as is most disgustingly obvious in the anxieties Wall Street exhibits concerning sales numbers leading up to Christmas—but such is not sacred anyway. Sacredness is found when we enter the temenos, the space at the threshold of the visible and invisible worlds. As Patrick Harpur explains,

“We humans can make anything sacred. To the profane mind, nothing is sacred—the soul of the forest is only a metal pipe, the blood of Christ only weak wine. Everything depends on the creative act of imagination. The more we imbue the world with imagination, the more the world is ensouled—and the more soul it returns to us, singing with meaning.”2

Disenchantment—as well as sacredness—is also a matter of disposition. What is our state of receptivity?

One example of this is in the responses to a story told by Plutarch (De defectu oraculorum). According to the historian, a sailor named Thamus heard a voice, apparently at the time of the crucifixion of Christ, that told him, “Thamus, are you there? When you reach Palodes, take care to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead.” The early Christian historian Eusebius interpreted this utterance as proof that the ancient gods, Pan the one most venerated by the agrarian peasantry, were no more as a result of Christ’s death and resurrection. There is another tradition, however, that suggests the voice was actually speaking of Christ and was horrified at the death of the God of Nature; that the God of Zoë, of Life, could die. I prefer the second tradition, just as I prefer to think of Christ as the Lord of the Dance, He Who Lives.

But the death is a very real thing, as it was to the disciples and as it was to voice which spoke to Thamus. But He Who Lives is simultaneously He Who Dies. And we all have blood on our hands. As the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich wrote in the 1950s,

“In Christ man has searched for the key to his own nature and his own fate for two thousand years. In Christ man has found the access to a possible solution of the tragedy of mankind. Christ had been murdered long before Christ was born. And Christ continued to be murdered every single hour of every single year since. Unless Christ’s fate is understood fully and practically, the murder will continue with no letup. Christ’s fate represents the secret tragedy of the human animal.”3

For Reich, Christ is the representative par excellence of Life, both bios and zoë, and in our daily, hourly murder of Christ we simultaneously murder life. The ways in which we murder life are the ways in which we murder Christ. It is that simple. We murder him through all of our life-denying commitments—in the poisonous methods of conventional agriculture (which may have even had a hand in the current pandemic), in the toxicity created by industry, in the technological colonization of the human person, in our life-killing economics (and, sorry, socialism and communism don’t get a pass here). Indeed, as Sergei Bulgakov has written concerning the latter, only a sophianic economy (which can only be simultaneously a sophianic ecology) is concerned with life: “The purpose of economic activity 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.”4

Great Pan, then, is really alive. But maybe we should stop killing him.

1 Eugene McCrarrher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism became the Religion of Modernity (Harvard, 2019), 1.4

2 Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul (Evolver Editions, 2011), 50.

3 Wilhelm Reich, The Murder of Christ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1953), 54.

4 Sergei Bulgakov, The Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household, trans. and ed. Catherine Evtuhov (Yale University Press, 2000), 153.