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.

Confessions of a Sophiologist: The Dangers of Sophiology

William Blake, "The Assumption of the Virgin," 1803

We live in a truly schizophrenic cultural moment: a world that is coming to recognize that the earth is a living being while simultaneously yawning (if not applauding) as a traumatized seventeen-year-old girl is euthanized. Enter Sophiology.

The essential insight of Sophiology is that the cosmos is infused with the Glory of the Lord, Sophia (Wisdom). The world may be fallen, but, at moments, sometimes due to our intentionality and sometimes due to a free movement of grace, that glory shines through the creation and we are illumined. Sophiology is the antithesis of the “pure nature” (natura pura) theologies and philosophies that arose during the early modern period and infect much of modern and postmodern thinking, however removed they might be from questions of religion. Pure nature entertained the question of whether or not God’s grace could be absent from any part of creation. You should seriously ask yourself whether it could.

Prior to his conversion and ordination, the Russian Orthodox priest and theologian Sergius Bulgakov was an avowed materialist and Marxist economist. In 1895, as he travelled across the steppes and took in a majestic view of the Caucasus at sunset, the young materialist and Marxist found himself confronted with an unexpected realization:

“Suddenly, in that evening hour my soul was joyfully stirred. I started to wonder what would happen if the cosmos were not a desert and its beauty not a mask of deception—if nature were not death, but life. If he existed, the merciful and loving Father, if nature was the vesture of his love and glory, and if the pious feelings of my childhood, when I used to live in his presence, when I loved him and trembled because I was weak, were true, then the tears and inspiration of my adolescence, the sweetness of my prayers, my innocence, and all those emotions which I had rejected and trodden down would be vindicated, and my present outlook with its emptiness and deadness would appear nothing more than blindness and lies, and what a transformation it would bring to me!”1

Bulgakov would go on to become the primary architect of the theological defense of Sophiology, which got him into a lot of trouble with the Russian Orthodox Church. He didn’t really care. (I write more extensively about Bulgakov’s Sophiology in The Submerged Reality).

So, one danger of outing oneself as a sophiologist is that it threatens job security (depending on the job). At the very least, it causes some to suspect the sophiologist of heterodox ideas. And. let’s face it, Sophiology is heterodox whether one is coming from either a religious or a secular standpoint.

But perhaps the biggest danger of Sophiology is that once someone comes to a sophiological understanding, one realizes that everything one has thought needs to change. Once you realize the goodness that inheres Creation, you cannot but reassess your relationship to Creation. Once you reassess your relationship to Creation, you are forced to reconsider your relationship to human community and what it means to be human. And, from a sophiological perspective, to be human is to be simultaneously in congruence with both nature and supernature. This is the supreme danger.

This is dangerous because once this happens you have to question our “civilization”’s absurd and nearly diabolical reliance on technology and the synthetic manipulation of nature and, even, the human person. This calls into question the deplorable amount of chemicals and synthetic hormones we take into our bodies and our environments to the point where Alzheimer’s and dementia run rampant through our elderly while obesity, asthma, autism, and learning disabilities afflict our children. A regular diet of chemicals and hormones can in no way be “harmless”: I’m sorry, but the herd is not being protected. And I won’t even mention the horrors implicit to a childhood spent online and not out-of-doors.

There are more dangers with our technocratic obsession: a culture of surveillance that makes Orwell look like a Pollyanna; the possibility of the ultimate AI World Dictator; a devotion to industrial farming and rampant consumerism that has wreaked havoc on the environment.

One way to think about the problems plaguing us is to think about our obsessive need to control—nature, economic growth, other human beings, and so forth. This is pathology writ large.

Sophiology, on the other hand, is not about controlling. Instead, Sophiology is concerned with presence: to nature, to other human beings, to that which shines through nature and other human beings. This presence is born only of a contemplative approach to the Things of This World.

Once you do this, though, you find yourself at odds with civilization as it has come to be in its disfigurement. Sophiology is the return to life as life, in relationship with nature and supernature.

As I have argued in my books, such a way of being is characterized by a “poetic metaphysics.” The over-reliance on rationality has resulted in madness. There is another way. As Gerard Manley Hopkins says, “And for all this, nature is never spent.” The world is definitely charged with the grandeur of God. And, as St. Francis of Assisi sings, “O Creatures all! Praise and bless my Lord, and be grateful! Serve Him with deep humility.”

A beautiful version of the Anglican hymn, “All Creatures of Our God and King,” based on the Canticle of St. Francis.

Michael's latest book is 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, including one on The Metaphysical Poets.

1 Sergius Bulgakov, A Bulgakov Anthology: Sergius Bulgakov 1871–1944, trans. Natalie Duddington and James Pain, ed. James Pain and Nicolas Zernov (London: SPCK, 1976), 10–11.

The Redemption Business: Easter and Biodynamic Farming

This article, in slightly different form, originally appeared in Church Life Journal.

Biodynamic farming, though it possesses many practical benefits—such as raw milk, fresh vegetables, fresh meats and eggs—has always been for me a kind of sacred activity. This sacredness resides in one undeniable fact: the blood of Christ saturated the earth on Golgotha. This is not some minor, locally-interesting detail. Rather, it is a supernatural event of the highest importance for the entire planet; and, indeed, for the cosmos. He makes all things new.

When I work the land, I am mindful that this soil has been redeemed along with all of Creation by Christ’s blood. This is not some piece of abstract doctrine for me, but a scientific truth. However, this is a truth I must not fully understand: if I did, I’m afraid I’d be too awestruck to do anything. Nevertheless, His blood saturated the soil and its power still enlivens it. My job, as I see it, is simply to help the vegetables and forage crops I plant find access to that power. This care implies tending: planning, planting, weeding, composting. In Genesis, God sets Adam and Eve in a garden, a cultivated space. As beautiful as the woods are, He does not place them in a forest. The Resurrection takes place in the Garden of Gethsemane. Symbol is reality.

Christ the Redeemer Greenman in Philadelphia, from "A Life in Philadelphia" blog

In the parables, Jesus never uses forest analogies. What he does, at least in many of them, is speak in the language of farming and animal husbandry: the sower, the mustard seed, the vineyard, the vine-dresser, the shepherd, the flock. He emphasizes the necessity of cultivation in our faith. Our spiritual lives need to be cultivated just as much as a garden does. Otherwise, all will go to waste and be prey to the Evil One. This is as true of the soil as it is of the soul.

Easter underscores the being of the biodynamic farm: for the farm, in its modest way, participates in Christ’s work of redeeming Creation. I don’t mean to suggest that biodynamic farming will save us from our sins, of course, only that it participates in the enlivening action of Christ’s blood when it soaked the ground at Golgotha.

As we are now only too aware, conventional farming—with its intensive use of pesticides, herbicides, and glyphosate on plants and vaccines and antibiotics on animals—envenoms the land, weakens animal life (look what’s happened to the honeybee), and seasons our foods with poisons. This is big business, BigAg, and, quite frankly, the work of the devil. It turns farms into green deserts, places void of natural life. Biodynamic farming is nothing if not pro-life. There’s a reason biodynamic practices are called “sustainable”: because chemical farming is not.

The problem with the BigAg approach is that it treats the earth as something to be exploited, not as something sacred. It embodies an ethos of rape. In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis laments this horrid mistreatment of our common home, the earth:

This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22).

“Sustainable” practices of farming certainly represent a sane alternative to the pathologies currently part of the mainstream, but they will not prove sustainable unless they can be transformed by the sacred, unless farming itself becomes a sacred vocation. How else could sustainability be sustained?

But the sacred often doesn’t make sense in a market economy governed by neoliberalism and scientific materialism. The cosmos is a sacred space, not an indifferent, cold, hostile backdrop to our sinful characters. With this understanding, in biodynamic farming we attend to the movements and phases of the moon in regard to planting. Some may think this unnecessary. Some may think it weird. But I belong to a religion that celebrates the Resurrection on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Vernal Equinox: planting by the moon sounds pretty normal to me.

The Church’s calendar, like the biodynamic one, is cosmologically configured: it recognizes the relationship of the heavens to what happens on the earth. Prior to modernity, this was even more the case. The Church year then, especially in Europe, acknowledged the harmonies between the agricultural year and the holiness of the liturgical cycle. Ploughs were blessed, fields were blessed, greenery was brought to church on Pentecost, fires burned on St. John’s Day, the first bread of the year was blessed at Lammas (“Loaf Mass”) in the beginning of August, and the dead were remembered on All Soul’s. Most of these customs have fallen into disuse long since; and our culture is impoverished for it.

Though this has not always been the case, one of the scars of modernity is that the sacredness of life and of the year are not connected to our lives in any real way in a cultural context. At best, for those of a Christian sacramental sensibility, it is merely reserved for the miracle of the Eucharist on Sundays. The rest of the week, most people seem pretty content to go along with the cultural trajectory set by the Enlightenment and neoliberalism. We trust in science for the working days and God on Sundays. But a science without God will not save us. As one-hundred years of chemical farming have shown, the promises of the Enlightenment and neoliberalism when applied to farming have, at best, short-term benefits, but many long-term detriments. Science, that is, (and farming is the earliest kind of science we have) needs God.

What I’m saying is that biodynamic farming is a branch of the redemption business, the business of Easter. The point is not simply to provide nutritious foods, raise healthy animals, and behave in a “sustainable” manner. The point is to restore life (zoë rather than bios) to the organism of the farm. This restoration is not the work of the farmer, however. The work of restoration is the province of the blood of Christ.

I realize that what I profess here might strike some as weird. But I think those kinds of perceptions are really inimical to a truly Christian epistemology. The earth, as the Russian Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov argued, contains a mystical (yet ultimately scientific) significance due to the blood that flowed on Golgotha. The earth, he says, is the Holy Grail:

The whole world is the Holy Grail, for it has received into itself and contains Christ’s precious blood and water. The whole world is the chalice of Christ’s blood and water; the whole world partook of them in communion at the hour of Christ’s death. And the whole world hides the blood and water within itself. A drop of Christ’s blood dripped upon Adam’s head redeemed Adam, but also all the blood and water of Christ that flowed forth into the world sanctified the world. The blood and water made the world a place of the presence of Christ’s power, prepared for the world for its future transfiguration, for the meeting with Christ come in glory…. The world has become Christ, for it is the holy chalice, the Holy Grail.

The biodynamic farmer, then, participates in serving this chalice; and, thereby, the vocation of the farmer becomes a kind of priesthood: a priesthood, like the sacramental one, that doesn’t make any sense without the presence of Easter.