Smash the Technocracy

Sophiology is about as far away from the idea of a technocracy as is conceivable. In my book Transfiguration I discuss this polarity in terms of Sophia and Ahriman. Sophia, as anyone familiar with my books or this blog knows, is the handmaid and coworker of the Lord, revealed in scripture, among other places, in Proverbs 8 where she describes herself in intimate terms with him: “when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman”(19-20) and in Luke 1 when the Virgin responds to the archangel that she is the “handmaid of the Lord” (38). Ahriman, on the other hand, is the Anti-Sophia who hates the Lord and wishes to turn everyone and everything into a data set ready to optimized and subsumed into the anti-cosmos. Rudolf Steiner, who used the Zoroastrian name “Ahriman” to identify the spirit working through the technological, described this phenomenon in these words:

“In his technical machines of the economic sphere the human being will perceive that, although he constructed and made them, they nevertheless gradually take on a life of their own—a life certainly which he can still deny because they manifest themselves to begin with only in the economic sphere. But he will notice more and more in what he himself creates that it gains a life of its own and that, despite the fact that he brought it forth from the intellect, the intellect itself can no longer comprehend it…. People will discover, in fact, how the objects of their industry (Wirtschaft) become the bearers of demons.” [1]

In recent news, transhumanism, which had been percolating under the cultural radar for decades, has been rebranded as a societal good, whether through various medical interventions to combat viruses, through similar medical interventions devised to alter one’s identity, or through other applications that seek to permanently connect human biology to the “internet of things.” Strangely, these developments are being proposed by the very powerful, and many people seem to be going along with it—ironically, these are the same people who were blaming these powerful figures for all the evils of Capitalism and the instrumentalization of human beings for control and profit not two years ago. For my part, I have rather a hard time believing that the people who’ve been destroying the planet and human societies for the past century will be the same people to save us from their disastrous projects. Only a fool could buy that. We have no shortage of fools, alas, but fear can make even the best of people do foolish things

In Transfiguration, I note that “as the World of Ahriman more and more encroaches upon the business of being human, more and more compromises being human and turns it into a business, the World of Sophia, the Wisdom that God poured forth upon all his works (Sirach 1:9), more and more reveals itself as the antidote to his madness.” But how do we access the World of Sophia?

First of all, by extricating ourselves from the World of Ahriman. Let’s turn the non serviam back on him. Extrication happens by non-participation, as our Amish brothers and sisters exemplify so well. The Amish, contrary to popular stereotypes, use telephones, even cellphones (the Amish carpenter who put my roof on has a nicer cellphone than I do). The difference is that they don’t let their phones use them.

Another method is by returning to the Creation. When we’ve been herded into virtual spaces, it’s easy to forget our connection to Natura. Learn how to pay attention to the Real. Develop an awareness of where the planets are in the heavens at any given moment of the day. You can start with just the moon. Where in the heavens above or below the earth is it right now? Do you know? What phase is it in? Note the subtle changes in your consciousness after doing this for a few weeks.

Attending to the subtle changes in the flora and fauna in your area works in a similar way. How is the apple tree (or grape vine, or rose bush, or lilac bush, and so forth) different today from yesterday? from last week? How does your attention alter your being?

Not participating in the World of Ahriman is the best medicine, though, of course, in this day and age, it is nearly impossible to completely divorce ourselves from the “net” (perhaps the perfect metaphor). But participation in the World of Sophia is without a doubt the antidote to the World of Ahriman. Maybe if we called the World of Sophia a vaccine more people would try it. At least post-menopausal women wouldn’t start having miraculous periods again (is anything more fitting an image of the diabolical parody of fertility, this anti-fertility?).

Another way, and perhaps one of the most practical, is to not participate in the “food” distributions system of the World of Ahriman. Join a biodynamic or organic CSA. Buy a stake in a herdshare to give yourself access to milk that’s still alive. Get to know farmers. Buy as much of your food as possible directly from them (farmers markets are okay, but they’re often of more benefit to the municipalities hosting them than to the farmers, who get fee’d to death by participating). Start a garden.

Once you start doing these kinds of things, you’ll notice you are less and less a part of the World of Ahriman and more and more a part of the World of Sophia. Sophia’s world is inhabited by people in community with animals, plants, and the land; by community with saints, angels, and God. Sophia is the bridge between these worlds.

The Ahrimanic, however, becomes enraged by such things. It wheels out various methods of curtailing life: taxes, regulations, any number of proscriptions intended to disable or destroy the wholesome and deliver the unwary into the waiting tentacles of the technocracy.

This way of smashing the technocracy boils down to generally ignoring it, or ignoring it as much as possible, and by loving each other, the land, and the beings which inhabit it in a gesture of absolute generosity and care. By so doing, we return to the place promised in Proverbs 8, when Sophia was “by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the children of men. Now therefore hearken unto me, O ye children: for blessed are they that keep my ways” (30-32).

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. Rudolf Steiner, The New Spirituality and the Christ Experience of the Twentieth Century, trans. Paul King (London / Hudson, NY: Rudolf Steiner Press / Anthroposophic Press, 1988), 82.

Farming and the Holy Grail: Blood and Water

The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Sophia in Exile.

Biodynamic farming reinforces the very Christian, very Catholic notion of the sacredness of the year. The agricultural cycle and the liturgical cycle are (or used to be) beautifully intertwined. Much like Celtic knotwork, to remove one of these strands from life is to destroy life’s integral unity and beauty. Unfortunately, that is precisely what happened over the course of the centuries until now we find Christianity and agriculture estranged from each other, to the detriment of both. What we have instead are utilitarian liturgical and agricultural models that have even succeeded in making human being strangers to the food they eat, the foundations of religion, the cosmos, and each other.

This has not always been the case, and a belief in the sacred coalescence of religion and agriculture it is not even particular to Christianity. In Virgil’s Georgics, for example, the great Augustan poet reminds the reader of the proper disposition to the land and the gods:

“Mark the months and signs of heaven; whither Saturn’s cold star withdraws itself into what circles of the sky strays the Cyllenian fire. Above all, worship the gods, and pay great Ceres her yearly rites, sacrificing on the glad sward, with the setting of winter’s last days, when clear springtime is now come. Then are lambs fat and wine is most mellow; then sweet is sleep, and thick are the shadows on the hills. Then let all your country folk worship Ceres; for her wash the honeycomb with milk and soft wine, and three times let the luck-bringing victim pass round the young crops, while the whole crowd of your comrades follow exulting, and loudly call Ceres into their homes; nor let any put his sickle to the ripe corn, ere for Ceres he crown his brows with oaken wreath, dance artless measures, and chant her hymns.” [1]

Examples of how Christianity was once entwined with agricultural are often dismissed with charges of “paganism,” the go-to libel for lazy Puritans, whether Protestant, Catholic, or secularist. But even a cursory knowledge of how the liturgical cycle when imbued with folk customs enriched human life clearly indicates how impoverished we are. A world without the blessing of the fields, St. John’s fires, and Lammas bread is a shadow world, indeed. H. J. Massingham describes this tragedy as one demarcated by “the dividing line when Christendom began to depart from Christianity.” Can it be described any other way? His diagnosis is irrefutable: “Nor can the Christian Faith (seeing that there is no alternative to it) itself be rejuvenated unless it be equally shown that its own division from nature has pauperized it as an all-sufficient gospel for modern, grown-up, Western man, wrecked in the bitter sea of his own self-will.” [2]

What is easy to miss in (re)connecting the liturgical with the agricultural is that what we are really talking about is a regeneration of Creation. Liturgical acts, sacramental acts, and agricultural acts should be (and rarely are, unfortunately) deeds reconsecrating Creation. So much the less when they are estranged from each other. The marriage of folk and liturgical customs found in the practices of the medieval peasantry maintained this understanding in the agricultural setting, but even earlier practices maintained it with Creation in its wilder forms. The Celtic churches, so difficult to perceive clearly through the mists of history, moved in such an awareness. The legends of the Celtic saints—Patrick, Brendan, Brigit, and Columba for example—are rich with a natural world barely touched by agriculture. Indeed, it is interesting to note that Celtic monasticism with its extraordinary emphasis on asceticism and learning arose in a geographical area almost complete devoid of urban centers. It may be precisely because of this that Celtic monks participated in the wildness of Creation in a manner almost entirely unknown in other contexts. The exquisite Welsh “Litany of the Creation” (c. 7th century) voices this beautifully:

I beseech the people of heaven with bright-armed Michael; I beseech you by the triad of wind, sun, and moon.

I beseech you by water and the cruel air; I beseech you by fire, I beseech you by earth. [3]

It is no accident, I think, that the alternate title for St. Patrick’s extraordinary Breastplate is “The Deer’s Cry.”

My own path into farming—and deeper into Christianity—was accompanied by the intuition (that is the only word for it) of the inner (and real) meaning of the Creation. In my twenties I had heard from a friend that Rudolf Steiner once said that there were three meetings people have with the Trinity over their lives. In the daily rhythm of sleeping and waking, he said, we meet the Holy Spirit via our guardian angel in the deepest part of sleep. Over the course of our lives, he continued, we meet “the Father Principle” but not before the twenty-ninth year (the cycle of Saturn). But over the course of a year, by paying attention to the subtle changes in Nature day by day and as mirroring the liturgical year, we meet the Son. For Steiner, Christ united himself with the earth through his incarnation, baptism, and, especially, crucifixion and resurrection, so it would make sense that we could learn to know Christ through attending to the rhythms of the year, both liturgical and cosmic. “When the year’s course is again felt by humanity as an inner connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, then, by attuning the feelings of the soul with both the course of the year and the secret of the Mystery of Golgotha, a true social feeling will be the true solution, or at any rate the true continuation of what is today so foolishly called...the social question.” [4] I didn’t know whether or not this was true, but I figured it was at least worth exploring. Over thirty years later, I still haven’t stopped this exploration. If we can meet Christ through Nature, he is available to anyone paying attention to the Creation. This is the real takeover from inside.

Farming, then, working with the earth and its rhythms, is in its ideal form to also work with Christ, a truly sacred vocation. Unfortunately, so much of what goes by the name of farming these days, even, alas, in much allegedly “organic” farming, is oblivious if not antithetical to such an ethos. But the reality of the Crucifixion enlivened a dying earth with spiritual forces: it’s as simple as that. Sergei Bulgakov explains the phenomenon with luminous power:

“The spear wound, not the breaking of His bones, is the conclusion of Christ’s salvific sacrifice for the redemption of humankind. This blood and water wash human sin and create the New Testament Church, with its grace-bestowing mysterious gifts: baptismal water and eucharistic blood. Out of the side of the old Adam was created woman, who tempted him to fall. But the wound delivered to humankind from Adam’s side is healed by the spear wound in Jesus’s side. The blood and water that flowed into the world abide in the world. They sanctify this world as the pledge of its future transfiguration. Through the precious streams of Christ’s blood and water that flowed out of His side, all creation was sanctified—heaven and earth, our earthly world, and all the stellar worlds. The image of the Holy Grail, in which the holy blood of Christ is kept, expresses precisely the idea that, even though the Lord ascended in His honorable flesh to heaven, the world received His holy relic in the blood and water that flowed out of His side; and the chalice of the Grail is the ciborium and repository of this relic. And the whole world is the chalice of the Holy Grail.”[5]

Given this reality, the methods of conventional farming, with its reliance on chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides—a true culture of death—and its promotion of GMOs and the spreading prohibitions against saving seed amount to sacrilege. To engage in it is to trample on the image of Christ.

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. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Garden.

1. Virgil, Georgics 1.335-50. In Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-IV, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1956), 105.

2. H. J. Massingham, The Tree of Life (London: Chapman & Hall, 1943), 17.

3. Oliver Davies, trans. with Thomas O’Loughlin, Celtic Spirituality New York: Paulist Press, 1999), 298.

4. Rudolf Steiner, Cosmic and Human Metamorphoses, translated (Blauvelt, NY: Garber Communications, 1989), 67.

5. Sergius Bulgakov, The Holy Grail and the Eucharist, trans. and ed. Boris Jakim (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Books, 1997), 33. My emphasis.

Rudolf Steiner and Sophiology

Last week I had the extreme pleasure of giving a lecture to the Ann Arbor Branch of the Anthroposophical Society in America. The original idea was to do it in person, but with COVID concerns and an ongoing construction project at the Society’s building, it was decided to go online in a Zoom format. Now, clearly, we all would have preferred in-person—the presence of soul available in person cannot be duplicated in an online environment, no matter how congenial; but we did what we had to do. Of course, no doubt in revenge for my many warnings about AI and the encroaching reach of Ahriman, the internet connection here at my rural farm dropped out, so I continued on my phone! Then the internet returned and I reconnected, only, having forgotten to disconnect the Zoom app on my phone, we were all entertained by a few seconds of creepy feedback. Good times! None of these technical challenges compromised our interaction, however, (there were probably about fifty participants) and our Q & A session went on for over an hour. Following my talk, participants inquired whether I could share my notes. Notes?! I never use notes, even when lecturing in colleges. All I need is two cups of coffee and I can talk about anything. So, kidding aside, what follows is a kind of outline of my talk.

Background

Sophiology is, as the title of one of my books asserts, a “submerged reality” in Western history, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Nevertheless, Sophia has not always been submerged in the long trajectory from antiquity to postmodernity. Indeed, she makes a number of appearances in the Hebrew Bible, perhaps nowhere more beautifully than in Proverbs 8:

The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made any thing from the beginning.

I was set up from eternity, and of old, before the earth was made.

The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived, neither had the fountains of waters as yet sprung out.

The mountains, with their huge bulk, had not as yet been established: before the hills, I was brought forth:

He had not yet made the earth, nor the rivers, nor the poles of the world.

When he prepared the heavens, I was present: when with a certain law, and compass, he enclosed the depths:

When he established the sky above, and poised the fountains of waters:

When he compassed the sea with its bounds, and set a law to the waters that they should not pass their limits: when he balanced the foundations of the earth;

I was with him forming all things: and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times;

Playing in the world: and my delights were to be with the children of men. (22-31)

Biblical scholar and theological maverick Margaret Barker in a number of books has been arguing that Sophia (Wisdom, Hokmah in Hebrew) was a central feature of First Temple Judaism and whose veneration was widespread prior to the reforms (some might say persecutions) of King Josiah. Nevertheless, communities of the Jewish diaspora living in Alexandria kept her memory (and veneration) alive, evidence of which can be found in the biblical books of Wisdom and Sirach among other places.

Sophia also appears in the elaborate mythologies of Gnosticism, which seem at least in part to draw on the Jewish traditions and may in some ways allude to Josiah’s exile of Sophia in Judaism by way of the exile of Sophia in the Gnostic mythos.

The Church Fathers, particularly Irenaeus and Hippolytus, discuss Gnostic theologies at length (condemning it, of course) and for centuries their criticisms were just about all anyone knew of Gnostic beliefs. The primary problem with Gnosticism—then and now—is its condemnation of the created world as a structure of evil made by an evil god as a kind of prison. Sophiology does not support this message. Nevertheless, the notion of Sophia in exile—and nowhere as significantly as in the human heart—is a tremendously useful imagination. In one Gnostic myth, Jesus rescues Sophia from exile and brings her to Reality, the Reality of the Kingdom of God. This is a reality we all wish to attain.

From there, my talk moved ahead fourteen centuries to Jacob Boehme. Curiously, Anthroposophist Paul Marshall Allen in his book Vladimir Solovyov: Russian Mystic, calls Solovyov “the Father of Sophiology in the East” (which is certainly true) and calls Rudolf Steiner “the Father of Sophiology in the West” (which is not). Even though Steiner is an enormously important figure in Sophiology, the title of “Father” can go to no one but Boehme. Modern Sophiology begins with Boehme, and from him it flows to Russia to England and to everywhere else. He’s the fountainhead.

Importantly, Boehme identifies the Virgin Mary as the Incarnation of Sophia. As Sophia makes the Glory of God palpable to sensory perception in Nature, in art, in liturgy, so the Virgin Mary quite literally makes God present to sensory perception as the Mother of Christ. It doesn’t get any more sophiological than that, and Boehme—at great risk to himself—was bold enough to say so, the consequences be damned.

Then my talk touched on Boehme’s influence in early Rosicrucianism (17th century) and on thinkers like Robert Fludd, Thomas and Henry Vaughan, and on German Pietism. He was also influential in English religious movements, like that of The Philadelphian Society (John Pordage, Lane Lead, and Thomas Bromley, among others), on the nonjuror William Law, and on poet and visionary William Blake. Boehme likewise had a deep impact on German Romanticism and Idealism, particularly with Novalis, Goethe, Franz von Baader, and Hegel. From Romanticism, Boehme reached Russia in the late nineteenth century, influencing Solovyov who then inspired the Russian theologians Sergei Bulgakov and Pavel Florensky, not to mention Boehme’s primary Russian devotee, the radical philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. Of course I’ve written about all of these things, not only in this blog, but also in my books, especially The Submerged Reality.

Enter Rudolf Steiner

Steiner arose at the ideal moment to take in all of this. A deep student of Goethe, he absorbed an integral Sophiology from his immersion in Goethe’s phenomenology (Steiner as a young scholar edited Goethe’s scientific writings for the Weimar edition of Goethe’s collected works). He likewise drank in Rosicrucian ideas from the various esoteric currents then percolating in Europe (Goethe was also interested in Rosicrucianism, which, at least in its earliest forms, was interested in preserving a spiritually scientific understanding of Creation in resistance the scientific materialism then appearing in the wake of Descartes and Francis Bacon. Steiner, who called his method “Spiritual Science,” was, as they say “all about this”). And, as a philosopher, Steiner was trained in German Idealism, which still shimmered with spiritual power and the influence of Boehme. In addition, when Steiner began lecturing to audiences involved in The Theosophical Society in the first years of the twentieth century, he found an audience open to his insights. But The Theosophical Society was too narrow an environment for such a man as Rudolf Steiner. In 1912, Steiner broke with the Theosophists after they tried to sell the young Jiddu Krishnamurti as the reincarnation of Christ (Krishnamurti would later follow suit) and called his new initiative Anthroposophy.

Steiner’s initiative grew enormously. He gave lectures, mostly on esoteric subjects in a Christian theosophical idiom. But then World War I happened. Had Steiner died before the Great War, he would probably only be remembered as an Austrian philosopher and Goethe scholar who then went esoteric. But with the cataclysm of war, Steiner rose to the occasion.

The occasion he rose to was by way of his introduction of some incredibly significant cultural contributions. They can only be called gifts. Each of them is inherently sophiological in the ways by which Steiner discloses the Glory of the Lord in practical application. Among these gifts are Waldorf education Biodynamic agriculture and beekeeping, Anthroposophically-extended medicine, and what he called the Three-Fold Social Order. By their fruits you will know them, and the fruits of Steiner’s contributions are increasingly hard to ignore.

In addition to this implicit Sophiology in Steiner’s career, he did, upon occasion, make explicit his ideas concerning Sophia. Following are a number of his sophiological statements over time. Notice how his definitions are never ossified into dead concepts, but that he imbues the conceptual realm with fluidity. (All the quotes can be found in Christoher Bamford’s exceptional collection of Steiner’s writings on Sophia, Isis-Mary-Sophia: Her Mission and Ours.

“Since the consciousness soul is the principle in which the Spirit the Spirit Self has evolved, we call it the ‘mother of Christ’ or, in the esoteric schools, the ‘Virgin Sophia.’ Through the fecundation of the Virgin Sophia, the Christ could be born in Jesus of Nazareth.” ~ 5 November 1906

“The spiritualized mother of Jesus is the Gospel [of John] itself. She is wisdom, leading humanity to the highest insights. The disciple gave us Mother Sophia, meaning he wrote a Gospel for us that allows anyone who looks into it to learn to know Christ, who is the source and goal of this great movement (spiritual science).” 25 November 1907

“The spiritualized mother of Jesus is the Gospel [of John] itself. She is wisdom, leading humanity to the highest insights. The disciple gave us Mother Sophia, meaning he wrote a Gospel for us that allows anyone who looks into it to learn to know Christ, who is the source and goal of this great movement (spiritual science).” ~ 25 November 1907

“Sophia becomes the being who directly enlightens human beings. After Sophia has entered human beings, she must take their being with her and present it to them outwardly, objectively. Thus, Sophia will be drawn into the human soul and arrive at the point of being so inwardly connected with it that a love poem as beautiful as the one Dante wrote may be written about her.

“Sophia will become objective again, but she will take with her what humanity is, and objectively present herself in this form. Thus she will present herself not only as Sophia, but as Anthroposophia—as the very being of the human being, henceforth bears that being within her. And in this form she will confront enlightened human beings as the objective being Sophia who once stood before the Greeks.” ~ 3 February 1913

“At the time of the Mystery of Golgatha, the being that enables humans to behold the world cognitively worked in a twofold way as the Divine Sophia, the wisdom that sees through the world. Divine Sophia, Heavenly Wisdom, was present in the double revelation: to the poor shepherds in the fields and to the wise men from the East.” ~ 24 December 1920

“We must realize that through the forces of the Christ we must find an inner astronomy that will show us again the cosmos moving and working by the power of the spirit. When we have this insight into the cosmos that is awakened through the newfound Isis power of the Christ—which is now the power of the Divine Sophia—then Christ, united with the Earth since the Mystery of Golgotha, will become active within us, because then we shall know him. It is not the Christ that we lack, but the knowledge and wisdom of Isis, the Sophia of the Christ.” ~ 24 December 1920

“Christ will appear in spiritual form during the twentieth century not simply because something happens outwardly, but to the extent that we find the power represented by holy Sophia. Our time tends to lose this Isis-power, this power of Mary. It was killed by all that arose with the modern consciousness of humankind. New forms of religion have, in part, killed just this view of Mary.

“This is the mystery of modern humanity. Mary-Isis has been killed, and she must be sought, just as Isis sought Osiris. But she must be sought in the wide space of heaven, with the power that Christ can awaken in us, if we give ourselves to him aright.” ~ 24 December 1920

Finally, I will leave you with a verse Steiner gave, that draws on the Gnostic mythos while Christening it with Christian theosophy:

Isis-Sophia

Wisdom of God:

Lucifer has slain her,

And on the wings of cosmic forces

Carried her hence into the depths of space.

Christ-Will

Working in man:

Shall wrest her from Lucifer

And on the grounds of Spirit-knowledge

Call to new life in souls of man

Isis-Sophia

Wisdom of God. ~ 25 December 1920

Christopher Bamford, interviewed for the documentary The Challenge of Rudolf Steiner

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.