Masks, or Until We Have Faces

Perhaps the most spiritually and psychologically dangerous development in this current mass neurosis (the new abnormal) called the pandemic is the wearing of masks. Just think about this: a mask. What is a mask? Of course, many will say a form of protection—but is it not also, as in Greek tragedy, the projection of a persona? Such are not unlike kinds of personae (also known as avatars) that have become the norm via social media and the totalizing demand that the internet turn each and every one of us into a product. We wear masks to hide our identities.

So much of our discourse now has become faceless, dealing only with eyes (often fearful or suspicious) and muffled sounds of voices. Just think how much more of a disrupture will take place if people begin wearing goggles as well, following the advice of the illustrious Dr. Fauci. We will be even further removed from the Real.

In his classic text Totality and Infinity, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas meditates on the phenomenology and attendant metaphysics of the face. “The face,” he writes, “ is a living presence; it is expression. The life of expression consists in undoing the form in which the existent, expressed as a theme, is thereby dissimulated. The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse. He who manifests himself comes, according to Plato’s expression, to his own assistance. He at each instant undoes the form he presents.”1

Masks, I submit, subvert this very human need for encounter via the countenance, the encounter with the Other. They distort our humanity. Further: the politics of the mask have divided us, pitted us against one another. But the political does this by short-circuiting our chance at human connection. Even the blind touch the faces of their friends to know who they are. As Levinas observes, “The face to face remains an ultimate situation.”2

Our current facelessness, like the inherent facelessness of social media, gives vent to, I think, our baser instincts, allowing us to be cruel without compunction, callous, ugly. When we have faces, we reveal our humanity, bearing witness to the words of William Blake’s “The Divine Image”—

For Mercy has a human heart,

Pity a human face,

And Love, the human form divine,

And Peace, the human dress.

Without faces, we don’t face anything. Rather, in keeping with the metaphysics of the apparatus, we hide. By hiding ourselves from the humanity of those we encounter, we likewise hide from our own. Furthermore, the mask illustrates our enlistment as what Michel Foucault calls “docile bodies” and the masks become our portable disciplinary spaces. As Foucault phrases it, “Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony.”3 What a sublime description of our times.

The anxiety that accompanies this enclosure of the countenance was also a feature of the transition to modernity, as the almost beatific vision of Renaissance humanism gave way to the cruelties of Hobbesian pessimism, Cartesian duality, and the punitive theology of John Calvin. Shakespeare’s Hamlet articulates this stirringly:

“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.”

Let us have faces, for then we have each other.

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. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Duquesne University Press, 1969), 66.

2. Ibid., 81.

3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans, Alan Sheridan (Vintage, 1979), 140.

The Ahrimanic Moment

In a poetic metaphysics such as the one I’ve been promulgating for some time now, one finds that the distinctions between actual and imaginal, between the concrete and the dreamt, between the logical and the intuitive are in reality constructed and that the barriers separating them easily dissolve before the beholder’s mindful and attentive presence.

We’ve recently been confronted with a number of narratives that shapeshift in response to need, even if the need is to confuse and destabilize. We’ve witnessed, of course, the myriad conflicting reports and mandates regarding the Covid phenomenon so engulfing our lives as of late—conflicting reports more often than not arising from the same entities, be they human persons or corporate bodies. Simultaneously, we stand and watch in a kind of awe if not bewilderment as our basic freedoms as human agents are challenged, muffled, if not canceled in the face of a totalizing onslaught of speech codes, restrictions on mobility, and threats of repercussion if we question these phenomena at all.

One of the disturbing developments in this moment, for me at least, is the migration of so much of our lives into online environments, not least schools and shopping. The gradual disappearance of coinage, for one, appears a bellweather of a disturbing trend. We have all become avatars, projected selves that would melt in the presence of other human beings of flesh and blood, warmth and spirit--presences which are at the moment discouraged.

As a result of all of this, what I’ve been thinking about lately is Rudolf Steiner’s notion of “the Incarnation of Ahriman.” For Steiner, Ahriman is a spiritual being that wishes to enslave us to logic, efficiency, and the technological (The Evil Genius in Terry Gilliam’s 1982 film Time Bandits illustrates this in a humorous manner). In a lecture delivered a century ago, Steiner contrasts this image with that of Lucifer (Hegel haunts Steiner to a degree):

“Lucifer is the power that stirs up all fanatical, all falsely mystical forces in human beings, all that physiologically tends to bring the blood into disorder and so lift man above and outside himself. Ahriman is the power that makes people dry, prosaic, philistine—that ossifies them and brings them in the superstition of materialism….

“Ahriman has the greatest interest in concealing from mankind that in modern intellectual, rationalistic science, in superstitious empiricism, one is dealing with a great illusion, a deception—that men should not recognize this is of the greatest possible interest to Ahriman. It would be a triumphant experience for him if the scientific superstition which infiltrates all areas of life today and which human beings even try to use as a template for the social sciences should prevail into the third millennium. He would have the greatest success if he could then arrive in western civilization in human form and find the scientific superstition as prevailing dogma.”1

As I’ve written in my book Transfiguration, I’m not exactly sure how to read Steiner’s take on Ahriman—as a metaphor? or as a spiritual reality? Maybe as both. Because, let’s face it: Steiner was on the money about the twenty-first century and every physical reality has a spiritual counterpart. In addition, the morass of scientific superstition in which we now wallow is more dogmatic than any pronouncement from the Catholic Church, and secular scientific inquisitors infest every corner and pixel of the internet, the world where most of us now live.

Steiner was hardly alone is his concerns about an encroaching technological evolution that could compromise the essence of being human. The Russian philosopher and prophet Nikolai Berdyaev predicted much the same thing, as did in their way Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, and, most notably, Martin Heidegger. Berdyaev, writing in the 1930s, speaks directly to our moment:

“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

Sophiology stands in firm opposition to this mechanization of life, this Ahrimanic moment. Sophiology offers a relationship to the Real—to other creatures, to people, to plants, animals, and the cosmos, including even microbes, not to mention the angelic and divine orders. Our current moment encourages just the opposite.

One could say that our times have forgotten the incipient philosophical question posed by the Psalmist: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour” (8:3-4). The Psalmist furthermore places these relationships at the center of human flourishing: “Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas” (8:6-8).

Our own path to human flourishing is a simple as it is clear. Will we embrace it?

The Evil Genius plans on remaking Creation.

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. Rudolf Steiner, The Incarnation of Ahriman: The Embodiment of Evil on Earth: Seven Lectures, trans. Matthew Barton (Forest Row, UK: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2006), 17–18; 22. My emphasis.

2. Nicolas Berdyaev, Solitude and Society, trans. George Reavey (1938; repr., London: Geoffrey Bles / Centenary Press, 1947), 109.

The Kingdom of Heaven

a puddle in my driveway

These are definitely surreal times, unreal times. I mean that literally and sincerely: these are days completely disconnected from the Real. If you think I am speaking directly to current events, though, you would be wrong. Current events, as I read them, are precisely the result of our disconnection from the Real.

As a biodynamic farmer, I am fortunate that at this season of the year I don’t have the time to get entrapped by social media and its discontents. I simply have too much to do—crops to plant, animals to care for, honeybees to monitor, pastures and woodlots to manage, a cool room to build, fences to move, a hedge to build, not mention attending to the needs of my wife, my aged mother, and my children. This doesn’t mean that current events don’t weigh heavily upon my soul. They do.

Like many clamoring for change, I have long been discontent with things as they are. I even wrote a book about it, Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. Central to my project is not the overthrow of civilization, but its transfiguration (hence the title). I also hold that such a transfiguration resides solely in learning how to see.

As I said, current events have been weighing heavily on my soul (as they have with so many of us). Even when I’m in the garden. At this time of the year, my farming rhythm is to rise at dawn and pull weeds for two or three hours before attending to the animals and taking care of my mother. Often while I’m weeding, snatches of song or random phrases repeat themselves in my mind. Often the lines come from songs which are not necessarily on my playlist—like the times I have been haunted by ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” or by any Taylor Swift song!... O tempora! O mores!—sometimes they’re lines from scripture or poetry (“Let mans Soule be a Spheare….”). But Saturday, the phrase that kept arising was “The Kingdom of Heaven.” And this one, contrary to the usual way this works out, I was saying out loud, “the kingdom of heaven...the kingdom of heaven.” This is no surprise, of course, since Sophiology as I conceive of it is an attentiveness to the splendor that shines through all things and reveals the inherent goodness of Creation. This is, as I have long argued, what we should be training people to see through education (but don’t) and in religion (but don’t, really), in our economics (we really don’t), not to mention art (when we’re lucky) and science (rarely).

As it happens, while I was weeding Saturday, I received an email from my publisher at Angelico Press. He was sending me the proof copy of an edition Angelico is doing of Thomas Traherne’s Centuries, for which I wrote an introduction (the book should appear very soon). He wanted me to proof my work (written last December) where I found affirmation not only of my repeated phrase but a reminder of why I’m doing this in the first place:

Traherne’s work can in some regards be read as an exegesis on Matthew 6:22: “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”

But beholding will prove ineffective unless one possesses the requisite inner disposition to have it bear fruit. And for Traherne, that requisite inner disposition can only be found in becoming childlike. Indeed, Traherne takes Christ’s admonition in Matthew 18:3 as delivered: “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Traherne articulates what he takes to be the primal human condition in his most anthologized poem, “Wonder”:

How like an Angel came I down!

How Bright are all Things here!

When first among his Works I did appear

O how their GLORY me did Crown!

The World resembled his Eternitie,

In which my Soul did Walk;

And evry Thing that I did see,

Did with me talk. (lines 1–8)

That we are not accustomed to maintain such a childlike disposition, Traherne attributes to not knowing how to see, which is primarily the result of a skewed set of values and the failure of an educational system that encourages and fosters illegitimate ways of seeing:

“The first Light which shined in my Infancy in its primitive and innocent clarity was totally eclipsed: insomuch that I was fain to learn all again. If you ask me how it was all eclipsed? Truly by the customs and manners of men, which like contrary winds blew it out: by an innumerable company of other objects, rude, vulgar, and worthless things, that like so many loads of earth and dung did overwhelm and bury it: by the impetuous torrent of wrong desires in all others whom I saw or knew that carried matters and concernments that covered and drowned it: finally by the evil influence of a bad education that did not foster and cherish it.” (Centuries, 3.7)

Not much has changed since then in the wasteland of this our kingdom.

We are, all of us, trapped in an unreal world emblamatized above all things by the internet and distilled to potency in social media. We cannot trust what we see, yet let our adrenaline drive our emotions to rage and hatred. Whatever is to come, without learning to see again we will be doomed to the eternal return of violence, hatred, and retribution. As is only too apparent, “from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force” (Matt 11:12). But the Kingdom of Heaven is also at hand, attainable. Even now.

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.