A World without Forgiveness

In March of 1881, the great Russian philosopher, mystic, and sophiologist Vladimir Solovyov gave a speech following the assassination of Czar Alexander II. In the speech, Solovyov, a young academic at the time, insisted that Alexander’s son and successor, Alexander III, should forgive the murderers in the name of Christian justice. In the highly controlled society that was pre-Revolution Russia, Solovyov knew this was career suicide, and soon after resigned (a rather mandatory resignation) and, in his own words, “abandoned my professional career forever.”1 Solovyov’s gesture may have been bad politics, but it was good Christianity. Then as now, taking Christ seriously was not sound public policy—which speaks volumes about Christianity and its relationship to “this world” (and by “this world” I do not mean Creation. Far from it).

Like Solovyov, the visionary poet, painter, and engraver William Blake was intimately familiar with his own conscience and its relationship to Christian truth. And forgiveness was especially significant in the expression of this truth. On the first page of his magnum opus, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, he describes this ethos:

“The Spirit of Jesus is continual Forgiveness of Sin: he who waits to be righteous before he enters into the Saviour’s Kingdom, the Divine Body, will never enter there. I am perhaps the most sinful of men: I pretend not to holiness; yet I pretend to love, to see, to converse with daily, as man with man, and the more to have an interest in the Friend of Sinners.”2

From Solovyov, we learn the importance of communal forgiveness; from Blake, the need for personal forgiveness. The Christ of the Gospels gives witness to both.

How often does Jesus say, “Your sins are forgiven” in the Gospels? Better, when does he not say it? One of my favorite examples in from Mark’s telling of the healing of the paralytic. The paralytic’s friends lower him through the roof and set him before the Master. Notice how He never asks anyone to explain the case. There is no confessional cross examination, no scholastic disputatio. Nope. “When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, ‘Child, your sins are forgiven’” (2.5). The episode of the woman taken in adultery is also worth recalling. We all know the story, but it bears repeating:

‘Teacher,’ they said to Jesus, ‘this woman was caught in the act of adultery. The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?’

They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger. They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, ‘All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust.

When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman. Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman,“Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?”

‘No, Lord,’ she said.

And Jesus said,‘Neither do I. Go and sin no more.’ (John 8:4-11)

Here, again, there is no cross-examination. There’s no “Well, I hope you learned your lesson!” He hardly speaks.

Forgiveness is not a part of our cultural fabric. Instead, we have condemnation, ridicule, and shaming, the world of Thomas Hobbes and Machiavelli. There is no room for Christ in such a world, nor is their room for forgiveness.

Indeed, so proficient are we at the art of unforgivness that we have perfected the art to the point of not forgiving people for sins they didn’t commit (Kafkaesque, I know). Social media, in particular, is rife with demonic accusation, angry mobs carrying stones (or bricks) to punish sinners, real or imagined. René Girard called this a “scapegoat mechanism.” “All such victims,” he writes, “are what we now familiarly call ‘scapegoats,’ innocent targets of a senseless collective transference that is mimetic and mechanical.”2 “Mimetic,” of course, means “imitated,” the internet has made this kind of mimesis almost instantaneous. Certainly collective.

For Girard, the event on Golgotha disables this mechanism. “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.” Jesus is the Friend of Sinners, but that doesn’t mean we should persist in our sins.

For those of us who follow the Master know that forgiveness is the only way. “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained” (John 20.23) is not simply a mandate to the priesthood; it’s an accurate description of the psychology of forgiveness. To forgive is to transform; to retain forgiveness is to invite disease, dis-ease.

Blake describes this succinctly in “A Poison Tree”:

A Poison Tree

I was angry with my friend;

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe:

I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I waterd it in fears,

Night & morning with my tears:

And I sunned it with smiles,

And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night.

Till it bore an apple bright.

And my foe beheld it shine,

And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole,

When the night had veild the pole;

In the morning glad I see;

My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

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. Sergey M. Solovyov, Vladimir Solovyov: His Life and Creative Evolution, trans. Aleksey Gibson (Eastern Christian Publications, 2000), 227. Sergey Solovyov, a Russian Byzantine Catholic priest, was the nephew of the elder Solovyov.

2. “To the Public” in Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion.

3. René Girad, I See Satan Fall like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Orbis Books, 2006), 1.

Distributism, Sophiology, and the Current Moment

dust, light, a barn

Where are all the distributists at this threshold point in human history? One would think that this would be the prime moment for a distributist gambit. But it’s not, or at least it hasn’t been so far. For those who don’t know what distributism is, it is the notion, popularized in the early twentieth century by figures such as G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, that means of production and property should be widely distributed through societies and not in control of the few, whether the few be corporations (as in Capitalist economic structures) or governments (as in Socialist and Communist economic structures). The idea arises from the concept of subsidiarity found in Catholic Social Teaching stemming from Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) and reiterated regularly (and ignored just as often) in Catholic teaching ever since.

Of course, distributism and subsidiarity were proposed in an age before the internet, a space that could also use some serious reconfiguration as it is alarmingly controlled by a very few—a very few who can decide what is and what is not real knowledge, real wisdom, or real news. When in concert with corporations, governments, and multinational NGOs, these social media and search engine companies show just how insidious are the evils inherent in social structures held in the hands of the few, a warning sounded long ago in Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Zamyatin’s We among many others.

Perhaps the most powerful voice for distributism in the later twentieth century was economist E.F. Schumacher’s in his classic work Small is Beautiful. For Schumacher, the place to begin with such a project is, quite literally, on the ground beneath our feet, that is, in the soil. As we all know, BigAg, through its parasitic relationship with governments and the NGO superstructure, has done untold damage to the environment and human health, literally poisoning both. Starting from the soil, regenerative practices can then impact industry:

“In agriculture and horticulture, we can interest ourselves in the perfection of production methods which are biologically sound, build up soil fertility, and produce health, beauty and permanence. Productivity will then look after itself. In industry, we can interest ourselves in the evolution of small-scale technology, relatively non-violent technology, ‘technology with a human face’, so that people have a chance to enjoy themselves while they are working, instead of working solely for their pay packet and hoping, usually forlornly, for enjoyment solely during their leisure time.”1

I often think of the words of folksinger Pete Seeger in this regard: “I like to say I’m more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.”

More recently, anarchist economist Guido Preparata has also endorsed an agricultural model—biodynamics to be specific—as a template for human economies. “The farmers and agriculturalists of our project,” explains Preparata,

“inhabit a landscape governed by these principles: the ideal model is that of the bio-dynamic farm. A bio-dynamic farm is characterized by the absence of importation (viz. closed-circuit cycle), zero-waste (the output of a sector serves as the input of another), diversity (crop-rotation and diverse ecosystems instead of intensive mono-cultivation), and a symbiotic relationship with all the elements of the wider living system.”2

Even more recently, physician and researcher Zach Bush has been promoting biodiversity of the gut biome and the greater, environmental biome as the way to greater health and true human flourishing.

So, diversity seems to be the key here—which is precisely what distributism has always proposed. It doesn’t seem that difficult to achieve. Why is it?

One reason, of course, is the immensity of the governmental-military-corporatist-NGO megalith that seems almost insurmountable. Another is spiritual ennui: we just don’t have the strength (no doubt due to the lousy nutrition we get from processed foods laced with glyphosate and a host of other poisons). We also suffer from spiritual ennui. This, for me, is most telling in the (for lack of a better term) distributist movement (which has little distributism and even less movement). On the one hand are the distributist cosplayers, those who talk a good game about Chesterton, Belloc, and Tolkien, who romanticize about life in the Shire, wearing tweed, smoking pipes, and drinking highballs, but who never throw the ring back into the fires of Mount Doom. On the other hand are the exhausted, those who have given up on a dream of a better way and are content to pray for a Progressive Messiah who will then allow distributism to flourish. AS IF THAT WOULD EVER HAPPEN. These forms of distributism are shells from which life has long disappeared. For my part, my sword will not sleep in my hand, until we have built Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land. As St. Ambrose reminded us so long ago, “The earth is all men’s, not the property of the rich.”

What we need to enliven is what economist and priest Sergei Bulgakov called the sophianic economy, one that “establishes the ultimate connection of all things.”3 As he further argues, the true purpose of an economy, “is to defend and to spread the seeds of life, to resurrect nature. This is the action of Sophia on the universe in an effort to restore it to being in truth.... Economic activity overcomes the divisions in nature, and its ultimate goal ... is to return the world to life in Sophia.”4 This is what all people of good will should be working toward. This is true spiritual warfare.

“Everything that offends against the Doctrine of Creation is Church business; everything that affirms it, the love of nature, the craftsman’s job, the artist’s vision, the yeoman’s husbandry, responsible or creative work of any and every kind, all true zeal in interpreting that Doctrine whether by witness in art, by service in honourable labour or by devotion in resistance to anarchy or automatism, those modern enemies of godliness, should receive the holy blessing.” ~ H.J. Massingham 5

Would to God that all the Lord’s people were Prophets.

Steve Winwood returning to agriculture.

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. E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (Harper & Row, 1973), 19–20.

2. Guido G. Preparata, with Domenico D’Amico, Flavio Fabiani, Aurelio Riccioli, and Sebastiano Scrófina, “‘The Blueprint’: A Modest Monetary and Organizational Proposal for Re-launching the Economic Welfare of Communities,” in New Directions for Catholic Social and Political Research: Humanity vs. Hyper-Modernity, ed. G.G. Preparata (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 5.

3. Sergei Bulgakov, Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household (Yale University Press, 2000), 155.

4. Ibid., 153.

5. H.J. Massingham, The Tree of Life Chapman & Hall, 1943), 194.

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.