You Are Here: Nikolai Berdyaev Calls the Eschaton

For Nikolai Berdyaev, philosophy is many things, but it is in no way an academic exercise performed for one’s peers. The idea of conformity to the opinions of even a highly cultured group repelled him, as it always compromises the essential freedom of the philosopher who sells his birthright for a plate of lentils by appealing to the crowd, however sophisticated its opinions. Berdyaev holds that philosophy is primarily a creative act, and as such it must resist the temptation of acceptance promised by professional approval. As he writes,

“The highly cultured man of a certain style usually expresses imitative opinions upon every subject: they are average opinions, they belong to a group, though it may well be that this imitativeness belongs to a cultured élite and to a highly select group [….] Genius has never been completely able to find a place for itself in culture, and culture has always striven to turn genius from a wild animal into a domestic animal.” [1]

The philosopher, as wild animal, has no proper place in the domesticated world of the academy.

Connected to his ideas on creativeness, Berdyaev describes his attention to philosophy as revelation in terms of “active eschatology.” “Active eschatology,” he writes, “is the justification of the creative power in man.” [2] This is so because, “The outpouring of the Spirit, which changes the world, is the activity of the spirit in man himself.” Berdyaev’s active eschatology, then, speaks to the regeneration of all things, or, to adopt explicitly religious terminology, their glorification. The idea of theosis, indeed, tinctures (to use Boehmian language) all of Berdyaev’s thought. This glorification approaching from the future, furthermore, resides in the Coming of Christ which moves toward the present just as history moves toward its arrival, the two converging almost in the way of a supercollider. [3]

But the coming of the eschaton announces itself through anxiety. And while Berdyaev is assured of the final victory of Christ, he not as confident in man’s willing participation in the transformations implicit in His arrival. Man, it appears, would prefer to hold onto the dead forms of the past, their shells and ghosts, than cooperate with Christ in the regeneration of all things. Certainly, something of Boehme’s notion that God’s love feels like terror to the sinful as it burns away the impurities of the soul haunts Berdyaev’s metaphysic here. “Man is entering a new cosmos,” he writes:

“All the elements of our epoch were present in the past, but now they are generalized, universalized and revealed in their true aspect. In these days of the world’s agony we feel keenly that we are living in a fallen world, torn asunder by incurable contradictions….

“The world is living in a period of agony which greatly resembles that of the end of antiquity. But the present situation is more hopeless, since at the close of antiquity Christianity entered the world as a new young force, while now Christianity, in its human age, is old and burdened with a long history in which Christians have often sinned and betrayed their ideal. And we shall see that the judgment upon history is also a judgment upon Christianity in history.”[4]

Christianity, that is, in its amnesia has forgotten how to make all things new.

But theosis is not the only thing that characterizes the future: there exists also what we might call a “passive eschatology,” and great danger accompanies it. The defining feature of this passive eschatology has everything to do with the ways in which technology and mechanization transfigure (or, more accurately, disfigure) man as their innovations and methods are blindly and uncritically welcomed and incorporated into human life. This movement thoroughly compromises the being of man: “We face the question, is that being to whom the future belongs to be called man, as previously, or something other?” [5] Given the subsequent colonization of the human person by genetic engineering, hormone treatments, and plastic surgery—just for starters—one would have to conclude that Berdyaev was more than prescient.

Berdyaev, like his contemporaries Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Steiner, warned about the rise of technology and its impact on human flourishing. Though he died in 1948, before the advent of television and well before the totalization of the technological and technocratic which has become the information revolution and the dominance of social media, his words are startlingly (and to some degree terrifyingly) poignant:

“The greatest victories of man in the realms of science, as in that of the technical mastery over nature, have become the principal cause of man’s dehumanization. Man is no longer master of the machines which he has invented. Our contemporary mechanized civilization is fatal to man’s inner life, for it destroys his integrity, disfigures his emotional life, makes him the instrument of inhuman processes, and takes away from him all possibility of contemplation by a rapid increase in the tempo of life.” [6]

As we have become all too aware, both capitalism and communism participate in this dehumanization, and no existent political structures offer an alternative. “The world threatens to become an organized and technicized chaos in which only the most terrible forms of idolatry and demon-worship can live.” [7]

For Berdyaev, though, the rise of the technological colonization of man did not simply happen by accident. Rather, it is the result of the breakdown of culture and the failure of Christianity to transfigure society. Influenced by Solovyov’s conviction that Western Christianity, while it created a culture, did not create a Christian culture, whereas Eastern Christianity failed to create a culture at all, though its society was Christian, [8] Berdyaev lays the blame at the feet of a Christianity mired in its many sins and more invested in preservation of the past than concern about the future. His critique is scathing:

”We are witnessing a judgement not on history alone, but upon Christian humanity…. The task of creating a more just and humane social order has fallen into the hands of anti-Christians, rather than Christians themselves. The divine has been torn apart from the human. This is the basis of all judgement in the moral sphere, now being passed upon Christianity.” [9]

Christianity, furthermore, failed to save culture, because it failed to be Christian:

“In this visible world there is no external unity in the Church; its œcumenicity is not completely actualized. Not only the division of the Churches and the multiplicity of Christian confessions but the very fact that there are non-Christian religions in the world at all, and that there is, besides, an anti-Christian world, proves that the Church is still in a merely potential state and that its actualization is still incomplete.” [10]

In addition, Christianity, for Berdyaev, is too enamored of its own past, thereby neglecting its true vocation:

“In historical Christianity the prophetic element inherent in it has become enfeebled and this is why it ceases to play an active and leading role in history. We no longer look to anything but the past and to past illumination. But it is the future which needs lighting up.” [11]

And not only has the prophetic element become enfeebled, but, because it has, so has Christianity tout court:

“Christianity in the course of its history has too often been submissive to brute facts; the leaders of the churches have too often adapted themselves to various political and social orders, and the judgement of the Church is only pronounced after the event. The result of this has been a loss of messianic consciousness and an exclusive turning towards the past.” [12]

Faced with the realities of Christian history and culture and the impending demonic technicization of man, Berdyaev can only conclude that, “Either a new epoch in Christianity is in store for us and a Christian renaissance will take place, or Christianity is doomed to perish,” though he knows full well that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. [13] Berdyaev wagers on behalf of the Church Triumphant, but he condemns degenerate Christianity when he sees it because he knows a failure of culture is at its core a failure of Christianity. He recognizes the paradox.

The paradox is that only Christianity can save the world from Christianity. Thus Berdyaev prophesizes the arrival of “the new Christianity” which will “rehumanize man and society, culture and the world” because “[o]nly in Divine-humanity, the Body of Christ, can man be saved.” [14] But such regeneration is not without conditions:

“The future depends upon our will and upon our spiritual efforts. This must be said about the future of the entire world. The part to be played by Christianity will certainly be enormous on condition that its old fictitious forms are left behind and that its prophetic aspect is revealed as the source of a different attitude towards the social problem.” [15]

In language resonant to some degree with Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of the Omega Point, Berdyaev thinks of all history, all life, as moving “towards a central even of absolute importance, the Second Coming of the Saviour.” [16] Furthermore, for Berdyaev, Christianity, though it has in large part abdicated its vocation in this world, has still not completed its mission; it still has untapped reserves of creativity and revelation, which lie dormant through the accretion of centuries and centuries of acquiescence to worldliness: “When there is no sense of creative mission in the Church, spiritual decadence follows.” [17] Berdyaev, among other things, saw that his task was to reawaken Christianity to this mission:

“Every question has not yet been settled and Christianity is not a finished product, nor will it be finished till the end of time; its fulfilment corresponds to the coming of the Kingdom of God. But if we are looking for this Kingdom of God and moving towards it, we cannot be in a static condition. The existence of a static Orthodoxy or Catholicism is pure fiction, a piece of mere auto-suggestion, and it arises from the objectification and ‘absolutization’ of what are simply temporary periods in Church life.” [18]

But one must wonder if in this task he failed.

The current Christian landscape suggests that, for the most part, he has. While conservative elements in Christianity look to preserving an imagined past, more liberal elements of Christianity look to the present. The future, it seems, is of no one’s concern. Out of sight, out of mind. For Christianity, Berdyaev would no doubt observe, this is a very real tragedy.

Complacency and the bourgeois sensibility that “one must be busy doing something” alike afflict the Christianity of which Berdyaev was so critical. Only revelation, an inherently creative movement, can remedy this. But revelation, as the stories of the prophets attest (and of which John the Baptist is perhaps the paradigmatic example), is usually unwelcome and the love it offers is interpreted as a threat: “Revelation is a catastrophic transformation of consciousness, a radical modification of its structure, almost, one might say, a creation of new organs of being with functions in another world. Revelation is not evolution but revolution.” [19] It is far easier to turn away, get lost in religious nostalgia, find distraction in the politics of the moment, or engage in mindless infotainment and celebrity gossip. So stand we.

I cannot decide whether Berdyaev’s thought is pessimistically optimistic or optimistically pessimistic. He believes in the regeneration of Christianity, of man, of culture, of nature, but sees little evidence of it in the world and even less interest. Yet he knows that, bidden or not, the Messiah comes. Like William Butler Yeats, Berdyaev is attentive to the tragic nature of revelation as it destroys the falsity of our various temptations and our bourgeois complacencies; for, “Surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” Berdyaev’s radical Christian vision, his prophetic madness and absolute clarity, offer much to a postmodern milieu entrapped in its own excesses and excrescences. But will anyone have the time or inclination to listen?

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. Slavery and Freedom, 123.

2. Slavery and Freedom, 265.

3. Freedom and the Spirit, 304.

4. The Fate of Man in the Modern World, trans. Donald A. Lowrie (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1935), 21–22 and 23.

5. The Fate of Man in the Modern World, 25.

6. Towards a New Epoch, 15.

7. Towards a New Epoch, 127.

8. Vladimir Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, trans. Peter Zouboff [1948], rev. and ed. Boris Jakim (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1995), 170–73.

9. The Fate of Man in the Modern World, 118 and 122.

10. Freedom and the Spirit, 348.

11. Towards a New Epoch, 36.

12. Towards a New Epoch, 117.

13. Freedom and the Spirit, 46.

14. The Fate of Man in the Modern World, 129.

15. Towards a New Epoch, 117.

16. Freedom and the Spirit, 304.

17. Freedom and the Spirit, 305.

18. Freedom and the Spirit, 305.

19. Freedom and the Spirit, 96.

Nikolai Berdyaev on Freedom

a young Nikolai Berdyaev

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948), the Russian expatriate religious philosopher and radical thinker, was the first philosopher I ever read intently and exhaustively. As a college undergraduate, I had the great fortune of finding a teacher, a tremendously generous and open man named George Alcser, who could guide me through my halting steps on the way to being a philosopher (though I had no idea that’s what I was doing at the time). George gave me tutorials on a number of subjects—Classical and medieval philosophy, Christian existentialism, metaphysics—for which I am forever in his debt. While his student, I picked up Freedom and the Spirit by Berdyaev at a used bookstore and asked George if he knew anything about him. He did. We added it to the syllabus. But that was merely the beginning.

Berdyaev, initially aligned with the Marxist philosophy of his cultural milieu, abandoned Marx in favor of Christ. For a while he was able to stay under the Bolshevik radar, but, after being arrested and interrogated twice, accused of conspiring against the government, he was eventually expelled from Russia in 1922. Because that’s how Marxists roll. From then on his lived on the fringes of the Russian emigre community in Paris, where his friend (and likewise former Marxist) the Russian Orthodox priest and theologian Sergei Bulgakov had also settled.

Considering such a biography, it should not come as a surprise that freedom plays such a central role in this thought—but there is more to it than that. Berdyaev, much like Rudolf Steiner, sees the freedom of the human individual as not a mere political construct, but as a spiritual principle tincturing all of Creation, and the human person in particular. In what follows, I offer just a taste of Berdyaev’s thoughts on freedom from a variety of his written work. He is certainly a philosopher for our time; indeed, for all time.

“The freedom implicit in the exercise of knowledge receives its illumination from the Logos. But it is also related to Eros. To pursue knowledge without any consciousness of love, merely to seek power, is a form of demonism. It may therefore be affirmed that knowledge is essentially cosmogonic. It should consider reality carefully and examine it conscientiously; for moral pathos is the true inspiration and urge for our quest for truth. The subjective freedom thus generated by the Logos transfigures reality. The nature of knowledge is conjugal; it is both male and female, it is the conjunction of these two principles, the impregnation of the feminine element by virile meaning.” ~ Solitude and Society

“The theological doctrine that God created man for His own glory and praise is degrading to man, and degrading to God also…. God as personality does not desire a man over whom He can rule, and who ought to praise Him, but man as personality who answers His call and with whom communion of love is possible.” ~ Slavery and Freedom

“Consciousness which exteriorizes and alienates is always slavish consciousness. God the Master, man the slave; the church the master, man the slave; the family the master, man the slave; Nature the master, man the slave; object the master, man-subject the slave. The source of slavery is always objectification, that is to say exteriorization, alienation.” ~ Slavery and Freedom

“Man can be a slave to public opinion, a slave to custom, to morals, to judgments and opinions which are imposed by society. It is difficult to overestimate the violence which is perpetrated by the press in our time. The average man of our day holds the opinions and forms the judgments of the newspaper which he reads every morning: it exercises psychological compulsion upon him. And in view of the falsehood and venality of the press, the effects are very terrible as seen in the enslavement of man and his deprivation of freedom of conscience and judgment.” ~ Slavery and Freedom

“Men not only need the state and cannot do without the services it renders, but they are seduced by it, they are taken captive by the state, they connect their dreams of sovereignty with it. And there lies the chief evil and a source of human slavery.” ~ Slavery and Freedom

“The spell and slavery of collectivism is nothing else than the transference of spiritual communality, fellowship, universality, from subject to object, and the objectivization either of separate functions of human life or of human life as a whole.” ~ Slavery and Freedom

“I have come to Christ through liberty and through an intimate experience of the paths of freedom. My Christian faith is not a faith based on habit or tradition. It was won through an experience of the inner life of a most painful character. I knew no compulsion in my religious life, and I had no experience of authoritarianism either in faith or in the sphere of religious devotion. Can one oppose to this fact dogmatic formulas or abstract theologies? I answer No, for in my case they will never be really convincing.” ~ Freedom and the Spirit

“Freedom is dynamic by nature. It las its own destiny and cannot be understood except by those who have entered into its tragic dialectic. The existence of two kinds of freedom has been revealed to us and each possesses its fatal dialectic through which it degenerates into its opposite, that is, into slavery and necessity. Indeed the destiny of freedom is tragic and so is that of human life. The first kind of freedom, which is itself irrational and unfathomable, by no means alone guarantees that man will follow the right path, that he will come to God, that truth will dominate his life and that freedom will in the long run be supreme in the world.” ~ Freedom and the Spirit

“Liberty was discovered to be protection of the rights of the strong, leaving the weak defenseless. This is one of the paradoxes of liberty in social life. Freedom turned out to be freedom for oneself and slavery for others. He is the true lover of liberty who desires it for others as well as for himself. Liberty has become the protection of the rights of a privileged minority, the defense of capitalistic property and the power of money.” ~ The Fate of Man in the Modern World

“In reality, freedom is aristocratic, not democratic. With sorrow we must recognize the fact that freedom is dear only to those men who think creatively. It is not very necessary to those who do not value thinking. In the so-called democracies, based on the principle of popular sovereignty, a considerable proportion of the people are those who have not yet become conscious of themselves as free beings, bearing within themselves the dignity of freedom. Education to freedom is something still ahead of us, and this will not be achieved in a hurry.” ~ The Beginning and the End

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.

Seven Books Not Enough People Read

What is it with books and writers? Often, really lousy writers and their equally lousy books achieve great popularity, while miraculous works of miraculous artists and thinkers fall to the margins of obscurity. For example, no one read William Blake much until he was rediscovered by the Pre-Raphaelites and William Butler Yeats. The same was the case for a few centuries with John Donne until T.S. Eliot rescued him from neglect in the early 20th century. In the spirit of rescuing from neglect, below is a list of books I wish more people would read.

The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz

Milosz, who died in 2004 at the age of ninety-three, was a Nobel Prize winning poet and one of the great writers of the 20th century. During and following World War II, Milosz and his Polish countrymen lived first through the horrors of the Nazis and then through the tragedy of Communism before he defected to France in 1951 and eventually made his way to the United States. His first book to gain notice in the West was The Captive Mind, published in 1953, a methodical taxonomy of the ways in which some of his friends and acquaintances by degrees and through duress eventually capitulated to the new reality and, as another writer so tragically-beautifully described, “Came to love Big Brother.” His observations are humane while brutally honest, as this example from his Preface shows:

“The Method, the Diamat—that is, dialectical materialism as interpreted by Lenin and Stalin—possesses a strong magnetic influence on the men of the present day. In the people’s democracies, the communists speak of the ‘New Faith,’ and compare its growth to that of Christianity in the Roman Empire. There has been instituted in France a group of worker-priests, who do regular work in the factories and living the Gospel to the laboring masses while sharing fully in their living conditions. A large proportion of these men have abandoned Catholicism and been converted to Communism. This illustrates the intensity of the ideological struggle which is going on today. And let it be remembered that in the people’s democracies indoctrination is enforced by the whole power of the State.”

Waiting for God by Simone Weil

Weil (1909-1943), who was called “the only great spirit of our times” by Albert Camus, may be one of the most perplexing, challenging, and intimidating thinkers of any age. An atheist Communist from a secular Jewish family who eventually rejected revolution as “the true opiate of the masses” and embraced a mystical Christianity, she was scathing in her scrupulosity. When I first read her I was fascinated, but simultaneously guilt-ridden; I simply couldn’t measure up to her moral integrity. This passage from one of the letters in Waiting for God bears witness to a penetrating intellect married to an unshakable sense of Christian charity:

“I have the essential need, and I think I can say the vocation, to move among men of every class and complexion, mixing with them and sharing their life and outlook, so far as to say as conscience allows, merging into the crowd and disappearing among them, so that they show themselves as they are, putting off all disguises with me. It is because I long to know them so as to love them just as they are. For if I do not love them as they are, it will not be they whom I love, and my love will be unreal.”

It may be that many people do read Weil. But it could never be enough.

The Tree of Life by H.J. Massingham

Massingham (1888-1952) was a British writer and ruralist and The Tree of Life along with his The English Countryman was written during World War II as a response to the degradation of the environment and agriculture that he saw as identical with the degradation of Christianity following the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions and the bag of false promises offered by the Enlightenment. Like his contemporary Rudolf Steiner, Massingham warned about the impending doom coming on the heels of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which were for him only the “logical” (in an illogical sense) conclusion of the divorce of humanity from the land that enclosure laws (one of the greatest evils ever perpetrated) presaged and assured. Every page of his books drips with common sense and uncommon wisdom, as we see in this passage concerning “the conquest of nature”:

“In the interests of commerce and that science attached to commerce, it has rifled the world of its natural fauna and flora, reduced and potentially exhausted its natural resources, dislocated its natural balances and violated its natural beauty…. It is not surprising that religion, crushed between these steel rollers, ceased to be the bread of ultimate reality and emerged as the lifeless dough of a sanctimonious nonentity.”

Freedom and the Spirit by Nicolai Berdyaev

Berdyaev was one fiery spirit. Born in Kiev in 1874, he was a devout Marxist before defecting to a radical Christianity after he opposed the totalitarian ethos of the Bolsheviks. As a reward, he was arrested and later forced into exile. Freedom is an important theme in his works and a radical spirit haunts every sentence of his work. He was equally critical of political and religious dogmatism and profoundly inspired by the mysticism of Jacob Boehme. I chose Freedom and the Spirit because it is the first of his books I read, but all of his books bear the same quality. And not enough people read them. Sophiology haunts Berdyaev as does a mystical eschatology (he did, alas, suffer through the Bolshevik Revolution, two World Wars, and the growing specter of Communism). He knew slavery, which allowed his knowledge of freedom to flower:

“I have come to Christ through liberty and through an intimate experience of the paths of freedom. My Christian faith is not a faith based on habit or tradition. It was won through an experience of the inner life of a most painful character. I knew no compulsion in my religious life, and I had no experience of authoritarianism either in faith or in the sphere of religious devotion…. Freedom has brought me to Christ and I know of no other path leading to Him.”

Philosophy of Economy by Sergei Bulgakov

Bulgakov, like his friend and compatriot Berdyaev, was also a Communist—and an atheist—and a Marxist economist, no less, before returning to the Orthodox faith of his childhood (his father was a priest) and eventually served as a priest in the Russian diaspora in Paris after being exiled from his homeland. Theologians have been interested in Bulgakov for some time, but this early work on economics is perhaps his least read. In it he proposes the idea of a sophianic economy, one characterized by wholeness and life, not death (the only thing sold by other forms of ecomonia in his opinion). With the world’s economies now in a state of extreme implosion, perhaps it is time to turn to Fr. Sergei once again:

“The empirical world is immersed in ‘process,’ in time and space, in history, and as such is imperfect and disharmonious; yet, like humanity itself, it is never wholly separated from a higher metaphysical reality, from the divine Sophia that ever soars above the world, illuminating it through reason, through beauty, through...economy and culture. Natura naturata with its mask of death still remains a creation of the natura naturans and, though they are in actu separate, they remain eternally linked in potentia. The world as cosmos and the empirical world, Sophia and humanity, maintain a living interaction, like a plant’s nourishment through its roots. Sophia, partaking of the cosmic activity of the Logos, endows the world with divine forces, raises it from chaos to cosmos.”

The Plato Papers by Peter Ackroyd

British writer and biographer Peter Ackroyd’s Plato Papers is a seriously funny and whimsically philosophical examination of the problems inherent in language, in historicity, and in epistemology. I’ve used it in introductory philosophy courses and it is an extreme delight. Taking place in 38th century London, the story tells of the orator Plato’s lectures on historical topics and his own doubts about what he—or anyone—is able to know. In one of his orations, Plato addresses the work On the Origin of Species by Charles D— whom his society suspects to be Charles Dickens (since the only surviving copy of the text ends at the “D” of the last name, the rest being obscured). What follows is a brilliant send-up of “scholarship”:

“It opens with a statement by the hero of the narrative—‘When on board HMS Beagle, as a naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts...’— who then proceeds to tell his remarkable story. By observing bees, and pigeons, and various other creatures around him, he manages to create within his own mind an entire world of such complexity that eventually he believes it to be real. This is reminiscent of another fiction we have recovered, Don Quixote, in which the protagonist is similarly deluded. The quixotic hero of The Origin, however, is portrayed as being obsessed with ‘struggle,’ ‘competition,’ and ‘death by natural selection,’ in a manner both morbid and ludicrous. He pretends to be exact in his calculations but then declares that ‘I have collected a long list of such cases but here, as before, I lie under a great disadvantage in not being able to give them.’ This wonderfully comic remark is succeeded by one no less rich in inadvertent humour: ‘It is hopeless,’ he states, ‘to attempt to convince anyone of the truth of this proposition without giving the long array of facts I have collected, and which cannot possibly be here introduced.’ Here is a character who, if real, would not have been believed!”

Talking with Angels, a document from Hungary transcribed by Giita Mallasz

This book, first published in 1988, recounts events from 1943 when a group of four young Hungarians encountered sudden locutions from a number of angels (in the understanding of the young people receiving them) while the Nazis drew closer and closer, eventually capturing and murdering three of them for being Jews. It is my understanding that the French actress Juliette Binoche has been trying to turn their story into a film, and I pray she can. It is a fascinating document from a time of trial, and one that can perhaps give us solace as we struggle through this current upheaval. Their trust in the reality of Christ and the ever-present help of the spiritual world is as reassuring as it is comforting. And desperately needed.

Bread is the first sacrament,

wine the second,

fire the third; they are

given to the one who no longer asks.

Your body and His are already one.

The cup in which His blood glows is already yours….

WE WATCH OVER THE ALTAR.

THE ALTAR IS THE EARTH: THE WHOLE EARTH

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.