The Promised Land / War

Maybe it was last year. I was in the middle of a class discussion about—well, I forget exactly what, maybe it was Ivan Illich, maybe it was Václav Havel—and the conversation turned to the topic of war. Most college students, in my recent experience, don’t think much about war—or about current events to be honest—but I have been reminding them for over twenty years that the horrors of the past, of genocide, the Holocaust, chemical and biological warfare, could happen at anytime. If Germany, home of the most sophisticated and educated European culture of the early twentieth century could cave to something like Nazism, it could happen to anybody. Seeing recent disconcerting events unfolding over the Western Democracies™, I guess I was right.

I have thought long and hard about the problem of war, though I have never served in the military. Perhaps this stems from my earliest memories of waiting for cartoons to start on television in the morning and having to wait through the news reports of the dead and missing in Vietnam. I’m sure those experiences, administered in homeopathic doses over the course of my early childhood, served as something of an anti-war vaccine.

The thing is, as I was discussing with my students, I can’t believe war is still a thing. You’d think the human race would have figured this out by now, right? Watching recent geopolitical developments—not only in Ukraine, but also in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, Italy, and elsewhere—I find myself somewhat astonished that people go along with this theme and variation on totalitarianism and “soft totalitarianism” (“it’s for your safety”). And I don’t just mean the general populations, but also those enlisted in the military and police forces. Why do the men and women in uniform go along with the ruse? Why do they victimize the proletariat at the command of their masters? And I have also watched—and I’m sure you have, too—as people of relatively comfortable means in a kind of mimesis of the elite classes cheer on the prospect of war—even nuclear war. This is insane.

Over the course of my life struggling to understand the phenomena of war and human cruelty, I have turned to two sources of, if not comfort, then at least of consolation: the Iliad and the writings of my tutelary spirit, Simone Weil, whom Albert Camus called “the only great spirit of our time.”

The Iliad tells the story of the absurdity of war. The Greeks have been fighting in Troy for a decade—just to get Helen back from Paris and restored to Menelaos. Hardly a prize worth all the lives lost. But this is how the powerful roll. To add irony to the tale, Homer opens The Iliad with Achilles sulking in his tent because Agamemnon took away his war trophy, the slave girl Briseis, for his own. The story’s absurdity is extended further in Achilles’s slaying of Hector, the most noble figure in the epic, and dragging his body behind his chariot in shame for weeks afterward. Integrity doesn’t matter in a world characterized by absurdity. As Weil writes in her essay, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force,”

“The wantonness of the conqueror that knows no respect for any creature or thing that is at its mercy or is imagined to be so, the despair of the soldier that drives him on to destruction, the obliteration of the slave or the conquered man, the wholesale slaughter—all these elements combine in the Iliad to make a picture of uniform horror, of which force is the sole hero.” [1]

I think this an apt description of our own moment—and of much of the chatter on social media (from people who will never pick up a weapon) for that matter. Force is the sole hero.

Weil expands on this notion in “Human Personality,” concerning the usually unspoken utterance, “Why am I being hurt?”:

“Those people who inflict the blows which provide this cry are prompted by different motives according to temperament or occasion. There are some people who get a positive pleasure from the cry, and many others simply do not hear it. For it is a silent cry, which sounds only in the silent heart.

“These two states of mind are closer than they appear to be. The second is only a weaker mode of the first; its deafness is complacently cultivated because it is agreeable and it offers a positive satisfaction on its own. There are no other restraints upon our will than material necessity and the existence of other human beings around us. Any imaginary extension of these limits is seductive, so there is a seduction in whatever helps us to forget the reality of the obstacles. That is why upheavals like war and civil war are so intoxicating; they empty human lives of their reality and seem to turn people into puppets. That is also why slavery is so pleasant to the masters.” [2]

The question is: how intoxicated are we at this point?

Weil’s contemporary Pierre Teilhard de Chardin served in World War I and saw the horrors of armed conflict up close. He recalls his state of mind in the face of this in his essay “The Promised Land”:

“—And was peace, then, no more than this?

“—The peace that all through these long years was the brilliant mirage always before our eyes.

“The peace that gave us courage to hold fast and to go into the attack because we thought we were fighting for a new world.

“The peace that we hardly dared to hope might be ours, so lovely it seemed…

“And this is all that peace had in store for us!” [3]

Thus “The War to End All Wars.” Thus geopolitics. Thus “The Great Reset.”

In a kind of scatological free-association, this all reminded me of a song I wrote with my friend Graham when we were in our early twenties. We’d been writing songs together since we were fifteen and we were just getting good at it. We were exploring a variety of genres and styles, incorporating mandolin, harmonica, fiddle and other instruments into our arsenal of available textures. It was really an exciting time. The world opened up. Everything seemed possible.

One Sunday night we were driving around in my jalopy drinking whiskey and Coke (don’t judge me) listening to a documentary or something about Bob Dylan. I remember something about Dylan hitchhiking around Minnesota, something about the Bible, something about trying to find himself as a young man—something Graham and I were doing ourselves.

The next day or so I came up with a very folky and clever chord progression and showed it to Graham. He immediately got to work and the Dylan story transfigured through his imagination. I can’t recall all of the verses, but snatches come back:

Looking out into the blazing sun

With my Bible and my thumb

No inclination as to where we’d go

No inclination at all

But I remember the chorus:

Thanks be to Jesus and to everyone

I thank the Lord I am alive

Thanks be to you, my trusted friend

All together: We’re alive.

Now Graham wasn’t then a religious person, nor is he now that I know (haven’t seen him for a few years). But something beautiful spoke through him then. We called the song “The Promised Land.” What I loved about his lyric was that it didn’t offer any answers. Rather, it rested in the knowledge that the Promised Land is a reality we can enter at any time, that it is always present. Even in times of war.

One of the great anti-war poems.

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. There are also a few spots open in the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening as Christian Path course being offered at the end of April. See more here.

1. Simone Weil, An Anthology (Grove Press, 1986), 186.

2. Ibid., 52.

3. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Writings in Time of War, trans. René Hague (Harper & Row, 1965), 278.

The New Iconoclasts and the Sacrament of Forgetfulness

“Tell me, Campano, do you ever laugh at the arrogance of mortals? I often do. I ridicule it in the hope that I may avoid it. Boys cannot understand the counsel of their elders, nor peasants the thoughts of the wise. However, with unbecoming arrogance, the earthly creature Man often presumes to fathom the reasons of divine nature, and to search into the purpose of its providence.”

~letter of Marsillio Ficino to Bishop Campano [1]

Iconoclasm, the prohibition and destruction of images, particularly holy images, is a feature not only of religious history, but of human nature as well. It seems to particularly afflict adherents of monotheism—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—but it is not unknown in other contexts. Whatever its cultural contexts, however, whether, for example, in Byzantine Constantinople of the first millennium or in Western Europe during the second, it is often accompanied by a virulent and hysterical (in the psychological sense) puritanism: a puritanism which invariably leads to violence. Sometimes this violence is directed at images themselves, as in the stripping of the altars during the inauguration of Protestant Reformation or the destruction of the thousand-years-old Bamiyan Buddha statues by the Taliban in 2001; and sometimes this violence spills over in its zeal and turns on men, women, and children. It is nothing other than a form of cultural schizophrenia or psychosis.

Wherever it has arisen, iconoclasm has been characterized by an obsession with erasing the past—sometimes the past of a group’s perceived enemies and sometimes, as in a variety of Oedipal rage, upon one’s own cultural past. In 16th century England, for instance, as the Reformation gained steam reformers endeavored to destroy their country’s own Catholic and pagan past in the prohibition of images, masses, feast days, saints days, and folk festivals (like May Day) and eventually even forbid the celebration of the Christmas holidays. Talk about party-poopers! As Eamon Duffy argues in his magisterial study of the period, “Iconoclasm was the central sacrament of the reform, and, as the programme of the leaders became more radical...they sought with greater urgency the celebration of that sacrament in every parish of the land.” [2]

I have long argued that the English Reformation, with its systematic destruction and removal of its Catholic and pagan past (though both were never entirely eradicated), is the model for how a political coterie, once its acquires enough power and influence, can completely transform a culture. In England, this was accomplished through a variety of threats, coercion, and propaganda and was amazingly successful—and this without either mass or social media. I can imagine Edward VI uttering, upon ascending the throne, “We’re going to build England back better.” If it could happen in early modern England, it can happen anywhere.

Part and parcel of this cultural metamorphosis (or perhaps “these cultural metamorphoses” is more accurate) has been what scholar John Bossy has called “the migration of the holy” from the church to the State. [3] The secular, that is, is the modern religious. But the success of the new order of society can “only grow if all hope of a restoration of the old [is] extirpated” along with its “monuments of superstition.” [4] Thus have all cultural revolutions proceeded ever since.

Our own Western cultures have been engaged in such a pogrom at least over the last generation, a development noticeably accelerated in recent years. Has not the destruction or removal of images—of, for example, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and even Flannery O’Connor (!!)—whatever one’s opinion on the figures in question, been precisely such an iconoclastic venture, a way to erase the past’s “monuments of superstition”? Is this not the sacrament of forgetfulness writ large? Are opponents of this new religious impulse not destroyed or “canceled” (how I loathe the term) for their heresy in much the same way their counterparts were burnt at the stake for religious heresy in bygone years or hanged, drawn, and quartered for political heresy? Seriously, is anything today different from the earlier religious reformations save in method?

Perhaps most telling—and most controversial—has been the iconoclasm around gender that has accompanied this wave of political and cultural iconoclasm. But here we transgress into the precincts of the more properly sacred. For gender is sacred. When God speaks to Sophia in Genesis, he proclaims it: “Let us make Man in our image…. male and female created he them.” To destroy this image is far more tragic than the destruction of a thousand churches (as Notre Dame was not all that long ago) or a thousand Buddhas: for this iconoclasm is an iconoclasm of ontology itself: a disfigurement and, ultimately, a negation of Being. My recent book Sophia in Exile touches on the sacredness of marriage in this light; and having discovered that the journal Mere Orthodoxy declined a review of my book because of it gives me a fair amount of pleasure for some reason.

This iconoclasm, like most, is essentially rooted in a kind of black magic, by which I mean the manipulation of reality through means of language—incantations, slogans, repetitions, neologisms, changes of definition—and a variety of technologies. As I write concerning the magician and polymath John Dee in my book Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England, technology and the manipulation of language are tools the magician uses to change (or try to change anyway) other people, whether singly or in groups. Now, in The Age of Technocracy, this ability to manipulate has multiplied many times over, especially now that it has joined forces with the State (or states). The Romanian scholar Ioan Couliano called this all long ago. In 1987 he asked, “Is the Western State, in our time, a true magician, or is it a sorcerer’s apprentice who sets in motion dark and uncontrollable forces?” [5] I would say that, aided (or subsumed) by BigTech, it is both. John Dee’s magic backfired on him, toying as he was (actually, they were toying with him) with beings of great mischief and malevolence. I imagine the same thing will eventually happen in our current social and political context, but not before many innocent people have been ruined, destroyed, or killed. As is already happening.

Finally, what iconoclasm is at its core is a puritanism, a kind of cultural OCD which demands that others accommodate its anxieties or be subject to punishment or violence; but it is even more, not so ironically, a form of idolatry. In French Catholic philosopher Jean-Luc Marion’s description, the idol is the perversion of the icon: for in the idol what the viewer sees is not a window to transcendence and divinity, but the viewer’s own desires reflected back upon him, though invisibly: “With the idol, the invisible mirror admits no beyond, because the gaze cannot raise the sight of its aim. The invisible mirror thus masks, negatively, the shortcoming of the aim—literally the invisable.”[6]

And idols allow the demonic a space in which to operate—for nature (and supernature) abhors a vacuum. Of course, belief in God or the Devil, angels or demons, is not requisite for idolatry, for, as Ficino observed so long ago, “the mind, which from a long-standing desire and indulgence in physical things has become physical, so to speak, will believe the divine to be completely non-existent, or will regard it as physical.” [7]

Sophiology is preeminently an engagement with the Real. And, as such, it strives to find the icon amidst a world of idols and to be constantly aware of our own tendency to turn our icons into idols.

A cinematic masterpiece of biblical gendered typology

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.

1. Meditations on the Soul: Selected Letters of Marsillio Ficino (Inner Traditions, 1996), 135.

2. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (Yale, 1992), 480.

3. John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1987), 153-161.

4. Duffy, 569.

5. Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (Chicago, 1987), 105.

6. Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being (Chicago, 1991), 13.

7. Meditations on the Soul, 84.

Blesses All Creation: The Eucharistic Gesture of Thanks

I am really not one to post “The Thanksgiving Blogpost,” a move that I recoil from by nature, repulsed as I am by the maudlin, the saccharine, and the melodramatic. But this year is an exception. You’ll see why.

First of all, I am thankful that our farm had a good year. We had pretty decent weather, for the most part, and though we had a lot of rain, we were spared any flooding in our lower garden until November (which I hope will have subsided by planting time next spring). The previous year was a bad year: flooding, drought, and late and early frosts. Somehow, we avoided a wildfire. I attribute this year’s success, in part, to our cow, Fiona, and the manure with which she has enriched our compost and our supply of BD 500, horn manure preparation. We’ve only kept goats, chicken, and hogs before getting Fiona in summer 2020, and the difference in soil/compost quality is marked. I also think this has something to do with this being our sixth year at this location. In the documentary The Biggest Little Farm (which I recommend EVERYONE see), my biodynamic forebear Alan York observes that the seventh year on a BD farm is when the farmer really starts to see miracles. So I look forward to next year.

I am also thankful that we had a tremendous storm in mid-August, and though we didn’t have power for most of two weeks, the house and barn weren’t damaged. Many trees fell, mostly black walnut and pine, and my chainsaw was put to the test. But now we have firewood to last through the winter. It’s worth the two weeks without power: a windfall in every respect.

In addition, I am thankful for losing friends. I know this sounds weird, but losing friends has been somehow liberating. It’s not as if I cut ties with long-standing friendships (I don’t think I have), but I have fallen away from “friends” I became acquainted with through social media—people I have actually communicated with in-person or on the telephone. I imagine Aristotle would call these “friendships of utility.” My wife has told ever me since she’s known me what a lousy judge of character I am, but I’ve been this way since childhood. I must have picked up this quality in the stars on my way down. Often over the years, I have pondered Jacques Derrida’s invocation of Aristotle—“O my friends, there is no friend”—in the former’s book Politics of Friendship (the “politics” part I think I might finally be starting to understand). Likewise have Dougie Maclean’s words in “Caledonia” haunted me: “Lost the friends that I needed losing / Found others along the way.” All is well.

I am likewise thankful that I can cure and smoke my own bacon and make mead from the honey provided by my bees. These things actually require no explanation.

I am thankful for house church. The pandemic has taught me one thing about church hierarchies: they’re useless. With churches closed and bishops acquiescent to government power, we had no choice but to take things into our own hands. Literally. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t delve into here, other than to say what a blessing it has been.

But the thing I am most thankful for is the healing of my wife, Bonnie. This requires some explanation.

In April of this year, right around Easter, Bonnie came to me and told me she was having pretty extreme menstrual cycles—blood clots the size of her fist, among other things. And her cycles were coming every two weeks and not every four. At first, we thought it might be menopause—we are in our fifties after all—but after a week or so reports started to appear that some women who had received the mRNA v@ccines had been reporting similar effects. Only Bonnie hadn’t had any injections. Then Bonnie showed me a news story saying some unv@ccinated women who had been in contact with those recently v@ccinated were manifesting some of the same symptoms. A couple weeks later, I heard from a close friend, a woman just a couple of years younger than Bonnie, and she said that she, also unjabbed, started experiencing the same issues after her husband was v@ccinated. “Why is it my husband gets the shot,” she jokingly texted me, “and I get the side-effects?” The two are one flesh, I suppose.

We didn’t know what to think—what scientist or physician would even investigate?—but the entire thing looked to be more than coincidence. Bonnie’s symptoms continued for a couple of months (as did our friend’s) before settling down, though the sheer volume of blood she was losing made her anemic. She treated herself with homeopathy and herbs (as she has done all through our life together), and then she made an appointment with her gynecologist just to check on things.

The doctor found that her uterus was uncommonly large. We knew this already after having been told of it by a doctor attending Bonnie when she delivered our seventh child in an emergency c-section (all of our previous children had been born at home with a midwife). Then followed a series of tests and procedures before we finally discovered that Bonnie had cancer of the uterus, rare enough, but even rarer for women whose wombs have so much experience.

We found this out in late September, just before our farm’s Michaelmas festival. Bonnie immediately increased the alkalinity of her diet. Our food is pretty clean anyway, but she forged ahead and altered what needed to be altered in her diet (she has so much more willpower than I do). Last week, Bonnie had surgery on the damaged organ that had bestowed so much life, so many lives; the surgeon also biopsied a lymph node and an ovary that both seemed a little misshapen.

Needless to say, this has been challenging for all of us in the family Martin. I tried, successfully for the most part, to avoid imagining what I would do if things turned out for the worst—how to run the farm by myself without my beloved partner, how to homeschool the last few children (the youngest just turned eleven), and how to survive in a psychological and spiritual wasteland. But I did my best to be present to the moment and not give in to fear or despair.

But this story has a happy ending. Tuesday of this week, just as I returned home with my two youngest boys from basketball practice, Bonnie received “the phone call.” She took the call on our porch (out here in the wilderness of Waterloo Township we get terrible reception) while the rest of us ate dinner. When she came in, we all looked at her. “It’s good news,” she said: the cancer was gone and it wasn’t in the ovary or lymph node. Bonnie, who had not cried or expressed dismay through the entire ordeal, finally broke down in tears. And so did I. And this is that for which I am most thankful.

Below is a song Bonnie and I recorded (the only one) about twenty-three years ago. I only remember it was then because our eldest daughter. Mae, who is soon to turn twenty-four, was a baby at the time and we only had two hours to drive to the studio, record, and get home before Mae needed to nurse. The song, written by Bonnie, is about the birth of our son, Tommy, and a dream Bonnie had the night before he was born. In the dream, Bonnie saw a woman in a blue mantle like a shepherd’s cloak. She was holding a staff or crook and directing a herd of white horses that would charge up and down the sides of a valley, their hooves thundering. When Bonnie awoke, she was in labor: the thunderous sounds of the horses were her contractions. Her womb has always been a miraculous vessel. On the song, Bonnie plays twelve-string guitar and sings (she has the voice of an angel) while I accompany on mandolin and six-string guitar. I have no idea who put it on the internet, but it’s also available on Spotify for some reason. O my friends, the world, this eucharistic and sacramental reality, imbued with sophianic splendor, is a strange and beautiful thing.

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.