The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse

I have a lot of books. Though I’ve never taken an inventory, my library probably totals in the low thousands, everything from farming to mead making and distilling, literature and literary criticism, arts and crafts, science, biography, theology, philosophy, psychology, history, not to mention many obscure works on magic, alchemy, astrology, and other esoteric subjects. I wrote my dissertation on a number of poets, mystics, and alchemists—John Donne, Henry Vaughan and his alchemist identical twin Thomas, Jane Lead, Sir Kenelm Digby, and John Dee—so there’s my excuse.

Recently, I was interviewed by the very generous Piers Kaniuka for his Youtube channel, Resistance Recovery. We were scheduled to discuss my latest book, Sophia in Exile, but we also spent a good chunk of our conversation talking about the various manifestations of Romanticism—in the 18th century and with the hippies in the 20th, for example—and the Occult Revival and the Celtic Twilight movements of the 19th century came up as an example of resistance to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, the technocracies of its time.

When Marygrove College, where I used to work as a professor of English, philosophy, and religious studies, announced it would close at the end of the semester, the library started selling off its collection at 10 cents a piece. Tempt me not, Satan! I did my best to clear the joint. I loaded up on all kinds of books in my various disciplines. Among books by the great Continental philosophers and medieval mystics and theologians, I scored C.G. Jung’s Collected Works (though one volume is in absentia) and the 10-volume set of Donne’s Sermons—that was a good thing, too, because all of my notes from my dissertation research on the sermons were still inscribed in the margins. Don’t judge me: it was obviously all part of God’s plan. I meant to grab the collected works of Sigmund Freud, but the last day of the semester was a snow day and school was closed. I still have nightmares about it.

I have a number of collector’s items, though I used to have more. In my twenties I collected rare books. Let’s call it an investment strategy. Times were hard financially early in my marriage, however, so I ended up selling a lot of the books so we could buy stuff like, you know, food. But I still have a few treasures. I have first editions of Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism and W.B. Yeats’s A Vision and I have a collection of The Spectator from 1714 that I picked up twenty years ago in a junk shop in, I think, Niagara Falls, Ontario or someplace thereabouts.

But one of the more curious books I own is one I picked up at Marygrove for a dime. The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse was almost an afterthought. I write about poetry and mysticism, so I grabbed it as one might grab a candy bar at the grocery store checkout line. Impulse item. It sat on the shelf for a couple of years. Then I read it. Wow.

The book starts out, surprisingly, not with Cædmon, but with an incantation:

Amergin

I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,

I am the wave of the ocean,

I am the murmur of the billows,

I am the ox of the seven combats,

I am the vulture upon the rocks,

I am the beam of the sun,

I am the fairest of plants,

I am the wild boar in valour,

I am the salmon in the water,

I am a lake in the plain,

I am a word of science,

I am the point of a lance in battle,

I am the God who creates in the head the fire.

Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain?

Who announces the ages of the moon?

Who teaches the place where couches the sun?

Dang.

Actually, Cædmon never appears. Which is odd.

The book, which was published in 1921, features many of the poets one would expect: Southwell, the Metaphysicals, Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley (no Keats), Cardinal Newman, the Brownings, Tennyson, Whitman, George MacDonald, both Dante and Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Francis Thompson, G.K. Chesterton, and John Masefield. It also includes some lesser known poets, such as the Roman Catholic nun Augusta Theodosia Drane, the Pre-Raphaelite Arthur W. E. O’Shaughnessy, Yeats’s one-time love interest Katherine Tynan, and the great Canadian poet Bliss Carman. But then it gets really weird.

The big surprise (for me, anyway) was to find so many poets of the Occult Revival and the Celtic Twilight included. I expected Yeats of course—though he only gets two poems! This was, to be sure, before his late flowering and some of his strongest poems, such as “The Second Coming,” “Lapis Lazuli,” and “Sailing to Byzantium.” Here he is represented by “The Rose of Battle” and “To the Secret Rose.” Also included are Yeats’s countryman, the visionary, poet, and social reformer Æ (George Russell) and Yeats’s co-editor of Blake, Edmond Ellis. Alongside these more conventional poets, however, were some real eye-openers.

The collection includes three poems by the (almost entirely unknown today) mystical Freemason W. L. Wilmshurst and work by esoteric historian A.E. Waite, not to mention offerings from William Sharp (also known under the nom de plume Fiona Macleod), the spiritualist Elsa Barker, the Irish pantheist Edmond Holmes, the aforementioned Evelyn Underhill, as well as—wait for it—the magician and all-round naughty person Aleister Crowley—who gets more space than Yeats!

This all kind of blew me away—this was the Oxford University Press, after all. So I checked into the editors, D.H.S. Nicholson and A.H.F. Lee. Both, it turns out, were members of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—which kind of shatters Oxford’s reputation for propriety and decorum. But this explains many of the others included in the collection—Yeats, Sharp, Underhill, Waite, Wilmshurst, and (I think Barker)—were also members of the Golden Dawn. And in the same lodge! Not much else is known about Nicholson, he seems to have been independently wealthy, but Lee was an Anglican priest.

Still, how did these guys swing the editing gig? The plot, as they say, here thickens. As I discovered, a young editor then at the Oxford University Press hired the editors for the job. His name: Charles Williams. That’s right: the Inkling—but the edgy Inkling. Williams, not surprisingly, also belonged to the Golden Dawn for a period, so The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse then becomes a kind of in-group project, the Esoteric Squad, so to speak.

Another interesting tidbit: Late in the book, which moves chronologically, in the section in which the Golden Dawn poets appear, two poems attributed to “Anonymous” appear. Usually in these kinds of collections, the anonymous poems appear in the beginning, derived as they are from “the dark backward and abysm of time” in which names often become lost to us. These two poems, “At the Feet of Isis” and “A Ballade of the Centre,” then are curiously placed and curiously attributed. I haven’t been able to find any scholarly evidence yet, but my money says they belong to none other than Charles Williams himself. Here’s the closing stanza of “At the Feet of Isis,” chock full of sophianicity:

Her feet are in the darkness, but Her face

Is in high Heav’n—all Truth inhabits there;

All Knowledge and all Peace, and perfect grace,

And in the wonder of Her joy they share

Who, blindly clinging to Her feet erstwhile,

Obtained the priceless gift—the vision of Her smile.

Tell me this isn’t by the same guy who wrote The Figure of Beatrice.

Amazing what a dime can purchase nowadays.

Not in the book: but it should be!

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.

Sophia in Exile: An Introduction

My latest book, Sophia in Exile, appeared in print last week courtesy of Angelico Press. Below is the introduction as found in the text.~ mm

INTRODUCTION: NOTES FROM EXILE

After Francis of Assisi and his companions walked the hundred and ten or so miles from Assisi to Rome, a trek that took days, in order to petition approval for founding the Order of Friars Minor, the cardinals interviewing them asked what their rule would be. Pretty straightforward question. Francis, a pretty straightforward man, held up the book of the Gospels. The cardinalate thought he must be either mistaken or a fool, since such a rule “seemed a thing untried, and too hard for human strength.” [1] That says pretty much all we need to know about ecclesial governance. Very few princes of the Church take out their own garbage or dirty their hands with manual labor. Living the Gospel, for all their preaching, is ultimately impractical: at worst a nuisance, at best an ideal. Even the order Francis founded couldn’t live up to its own principles and strayed from them during Francis’s lifetime. It brought him great sorrow.

When it happened, I had no idea how prophetic an event the tragic fire at Notre-Dame de Paris on 15 April 2019 would prove to be. It’s a fitting icon for a Church in distress, the weight of its own corruption, not least the ongoing sex scandals that fill us with shame and anger, evidence as they are of an ecclesial structure inured to the sufferings of its victims and further complicated by the manner in which some of its most powerful leaders have continued to shield their own from scrutiny. These are symptoms of a deeper pathology. The hierarchy’s inept and milquetoasty response to the global pandemic that began in early 2020 only further betrays how indifference has become a cardinal virtue. How many millions died without receiving the last sacraments? How many more left the Church permanently because it was too hard for the hierarchy to live out the Gospel and too easy to play the political sycophant? Did Christ wait until lepers were no longer contagious to heal them?

It was under these conditions and in this frame of mind that I wrote this book.

This book, however, is not a jerimiad on the sins and ineptitude of the hierarchy, or even about living through the madness of the pandemic. These things, I think, are only tangential, though nonetheless symptomatic, of a deeper estrangement from the Real that is the true source of our cosmological dissociation, and which has its roots deep in the historical Christian imaginary. This dissociation did not begin with the conflagration of Notre-Dame, nor with the complicity of bishops in the abuses among their ranks. When Christ told Francis “Rebuild my Church,” he was not speaking of San Damiano, though that was what Francis thought at the time. Perhaps he was telling us the same thing with the burning of Notre-Dame, for “every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire” (1 Cor 3:13).

I wrote the first chapter, after which the book is named, in 2019. I did not return to the project until fall of 2020, the confusion of the pandemic and work on my farm taking all of my attention in the interim. Looking at it now, the book can be called the third in a trilogy that started with The Submerged Reality (2015) and continued with Transfiguration (2018), though writing a trilogy was at no point my intention. But here we are. I felt the need to write this book because I came to realize that I had left some things, such as the Gnostic mythos of Sophia and the sophiological structure of marriage, undeveloped in those previous books, and I wanted to provide insight into the poetic metaphysics of Sophiology by deeper examinations of Eleanor Farjeon, Thomas Traherne, the legend of the Holy Grail, the Rosary, and the radical Christian philosophy of Nikolai Berdyaev (the chapter on whom was originally published in the Russian journal Тетради по консерватизму [Essays on Conservatism]). In addition, I felt a call to write on the Creation and our relationship to it—as a biodynamic farmer, this is an environment in which I live and move and have my being—as well as to contribute something on the role of human creativity. These areas of contemplation organically brought me to a consideration of the Realm of Faerie, which has thankfully been getting more serious attention from John Milbank and David Bentley Hart, among others.

As a result of all these commitments and interests, what you have in your hands here is (with the exception of my poetry) the most personal of all of my books to this point. Sophiology, it is my contention, is above all something one does, a way of being. It is not a grand theory, a beautiful intellectual construction. No. Sophiology is an entrance into life.

In the Gnostic mythos, Sophia lives in exile, trapped in a kind of spiritual prison. We, too, live in exile, which is also a spiritual prison. Most of all, we live in exile from the Divine and the Creation. As the pandemic and the ever-increasing totalization of the technocracy have shown, we are also in exile from each other, and, ultimately, from ourselves. This is an untenable situation and one which, if left unchecked, will have disastrous repercussions, many of which are deep into their implementation stages. The antidote to such a situation, as I argue in these pages, lies in reorienting ourselves to the Real, to the sophianic structure of the world. Like St. Francis’s project, this is one of simplicity and not applicable to the needs of hierarchies of power and influence. In essence, what Sophiology offers is a regeneration of life by an engagement with what is Real. And this regeneration is conditioned by learning how to see.

Love is integral to this seeing, as both agapeic opening and as erotic longing. This integral seeing is in not characterized by a spiritual acquisitiveness or desire to possess, so much as it is a product of the subject’s entrance into a loving disposition to that which shines through the world. St. Paul describes such a condition in 1 Corinthians: “If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God” (8:2–3). Those who try to turn Sophiology (or any theological or philosophical gesture) into a method for comprehending or containing the world are barking up the wrong sacred tree. The first movement is in love, and the response to love is not “to know” but to be known.

And in that spirit, I welcome you to these pages.

1. Bonaventura, The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi (London: J. M. Dent, 1904), 30.

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.