“In the first, spinning place”: Sophiology and the Idea of a Farm

Stella Matutina Farm, Grass Lake, Michigan

Sophiology has deep, deep connections to various social streams in our world: in distributism and communitarianism, for example, as well is in some varieties of Christian anarchism, not to mention various strains of neopaganism. Indeed, Sophiology, as I have always conceived of it, transcends confessional boundaries, particularly in the phenomenological attention to the Things of This World which allows them to shine forth in all of their radiance. Because of this, nowhere is Sophiology so easily found than in farming.

This is not to say that the shining of Sophia can be located on the gigantic fields and feed lots of BigAg, filled as they are with GMO grains and cattle loaded with enough drugs to stock a pharmacy. What BigAg offers are not farms, but the outdoor manifestation of the factory, the dark satanic mills William Blake so rightfully condemned for the evils they inflict on human flourishing.

A farm, to be a farm, needs to be a place where humans live in accord with animal and plants—including so-called “pests” and “weeds.” This accord, as I’ve so often written before, is also cosmologically configured: the restoration of the relationship of the microcosm to the macrocosm. Without this relationship to Being, one should expect nothing else but pathology and disease, physical and psychological as well as spiritual. This kind of farm, as Rudolf Steiner, H.J. Massingham, and Masanobu Fukuoka (among many others) have asserted, can only appear as a totality and under the loving stewardship of a devoted caretaker. And it can only be an organic or biodynamic farm. Such a farm is what Dylan Thomas identified as “the first, spinning place,” evocative of Eden, in his beautiful poem, “Fern Hill.”

Our world’s over-reliance on pharmaculture, as we know all too well, is not just characteristic of BigAg, but infiltrates every aspect of our lives—often by governmental decree—a practice which further and further estranges us from the Real. We simply have lost touch with Reality. That so very few seem to panic about this may be the greatest cause for panic.

This disconnection with the Real, sadly, runs through most (probably all) of the power structures around us: the entertainment industry, education, politics, medicine, the military, the corporatacracy, and even, it pains me to say, our various ecclesial bodies. Truly, as the Book of Job inquires, “Where is wisdom to be found?”

One answer, and an easy one to enact, is in a return to the Creation as Creation, infused with the Glory of the Lord. Sophiology, certainly, can be discerned through the farm, but it is also revealed—through scripture, through vision (as in the cases of Jane Lead, John Pordage, and Vladimir Solovyov to name just three), through the arts, and, importantly, through community (“where two or three are gathered in my name”). And what is an organic farm but a community? So, let us return to how “it must have been after the birth of the simple light.” It’s really not that difficult.

Watch this documentary inspired by the work of Masanobu Fukuoka.

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.

Sophiology vs. the Zombie University

Millbrook Junior College

Anybody involved in its various manifestations and permutations knows that higher education in the United States is on life-support if not already dead. There are many, many reasons for this, but the most significant are the changing demographics of available college-age students and the burden of outrageous debt students carry with them following graduation. This dynamic results in a catch-22: recruiters increasingly try to corral students who are not necessarily “college ready” in order to fill seats in lecture halls, and to do so some compromise is in order. One way colleges and universities compromise is by offering scholarship for more and more arcane “sports,” such as “e-sports” (better known as video gaming) or fishing or bowling or other non-traditional activities. Another way is by lowering admissions standards. As a result, many students come into college with limited academic abilities (often through no fault of their own and due to a horrid K-12 education) and, therefore, need remedial courses. In my twenty-years of teaching college, I have had a shameful number of students who were barely literate—but they were literate enough to sign a promissory note. When I taught at Marygrove College in Detroit prior to its closing (it’s a long story) I would often ask my colleagues at faculty meetings if they, too, felt complicit in a system that was graduating students with limited skills and a mountain of debt. Though some also wondered how much blood we had on our hands, the question was ignored. I’m sure Marygrove was (and is) not exceptional in this regard.

I’ve been teaching at a number of local colleges part-time since then (I am too old to move out of state and don’t want to abandon either my farm or my older children) and I see those schools also struggling with these problems to greater or lesser degrees. One response is “dual-enrollment,” wherein colleges admit high school students who can start working on their college degrees. Actually, the high school students I’ve taught—including my unfortunate middle child—have been outstanding students for the most part. But, let’s not kid ourselves, it’s not teaching college. And it’s not too difficult to see why administrators think enrolling these young people is a good idea.

I wrote a little about these problems in my book, Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything:

“A tremendous hindrance to forging any kind of change in education, however, lies in the existence of accrediting bodies and governmental regulations to which most existing educational institutions are enslaved (and this touches K–12 as well as higher education). This enslavement, as in chattel slavery, is all about economics. Governmental funding is tied to schools acquiring the appropriate accreditation, which more and more looks like bad MBA philosophy applied to pedagogy. Private and parochial schools, though typically free of the burden of government funding and at least some of the regulations that accompany it (at least in the United States), have nevertheless been infected by the accreditation bug, yet another indication of the insidious omnipresence of secular education’s superego. Teachers and professors, feeling powerless to do anything to fight against this culture of byzantine bureaucratic absurdity, have more or less adopted a “go along to get along” ethos regarding this problem, though it compromises their integrity and agency by a thousand tiny papercuts (almost literally!). They shrug their shoulders, roll their eyes—and then obediently add another “core component” or “institutional learning outcome” to a syllabus that is already twenty-five pages long.

“But the existence of this kind of funding (especially through subsidized loans in higher education in the United States) has artificially inflated the cost of education, and not just tuition. Because funding is assured, and because students need textbooks, the publishers of academic textbooks have exorbitantly inflated the prices of their products (and usually give the authors only a 1–3 percent royalty). Ivan Illich was onto this ruse in 1971:

‘School programs hunger for progressive intake of instruction, but even if the hunger leads to steady absorption, it never yields the joy of knowing something to one’s satisfaction. Each subject comes packaged with the instruction to go on consuming one “offering” after another, and last year’s wrapping is always obsolete for this year’s consumer. The textbook racket builds on this demand. Educational reformers promise each new generation the latest and the best, and the public is schooled into demanding what they offer.’1

“Since then, the game has been refined to the point where students are turned into ATMs for the system (let’s call it “Edu, Inc.”), and they are then stuck with a degree that is nearly worthless in many cases owing to educational inflation and are simultaneously saddled with unbelievable debt. But, because of a demographic shift that finds fewer available students, schools compete for enrollment—replete with marketing campaigns and communications directors—such that administrators and enrollment coordinators enlist students less and less prepared for college. But, prepared or not, the loans are still assured—so why not! All this while administrators and university presidents receive increasingly generous salaries and instruction is more and more farmed out to part-time adjuncts, turning the teaching profession into a service industry more or less on par with working the deep fryer in the fast food business. Can a person of integrity participate in such a system with a clear conscience? I think not. But if the institutional educational system cannot be changed (and I don’t see how it can), it can at least be subverted or short-circuited.”

College and university faculty, for the most part, play the “go-along-to-get-along” game. No one wants to be voted off the island. But, as Rod Dreher recently reported, this climate easily slips into a Soviet-style atmosphere of “hypernormalization,” an environment in which everyone knows what’s going on is absurd and bullshit, but no one wants to make waves or challenge the status quo. (You can read it here.)

Coupled with the social and economic tragedy now playing in higher education is the explosion of the myth that college is a place of free inquiry and challenging assumptions. It’s not. And everybody knows it’s not. “Institutional learning outcomes” that uphold “critical thinking” as an objective notwithstanding, college is less and less a place to find anyone challenging the shibboleths of our times unless they're willing to suffer the consequences.

Despite the best efforts of recruiters and the success of e-sports programs (I. Can’t. Even) it is pretty much universally agreed that small liberal arts colleges are on the endangered species list and extinction is anticipated to be swift and soon. Think of it as a cultural asteroid hit. With the disappearance of smaller colleges, the need for doctorates, especially in the humanities, will all but vanish. I imagine STEM disciplines will remain “relevant” (in a chilling mimesis of Huxley’s Brave New World), but the humanities, as they say, are toast. But that could be a good thing.

In Transfiguration, I entertain the idea of a “Postmodern Sophiological Hedge School,” and I like to imagine that such a thing might also apply to a higher education pedagogy. It could be something like Plato’s Academy, or the school Thoreau founded and ran for a short time in heyday of American Transcendentalism. It could also bear a resemblance to an ashram, even a folk school. My project is, after all, concerned with reimagination. As I write in the book,

“The recalibration of the human ego to participation in the Real is fundamental to my conception of the postmodern sophiological hedge school. There could be many varieties of hedge school, but without participation in the Real, they would only be adaptations of the educational superego that permeates the culture. My claim is that a way of learning imbued with the arts and engaged with practical activities combined with a contemplative ethos provides a corrective for the human soul seriously damaged by a culture characterized by the technology, isolation, and synthetic media that insulate human persons from nature, the cosmos, and, ultimately, from God.”

The university is dead. Long live the hedge school.

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. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 61.

The Wisdom of the Stars: Thoughts on Astrology

People often ask me if I “believe in astrology,” a question I really don’t know how to answer. Of course I don’t. Asking people if they believe in astrology is pretty much like asking if they believe in the ocean or in snow or in food or something. It’s a dumb question. Even a more precisely articulated question, such as “Do you believe the stars influence us?” rather misses the mark.

A better question would be “Do you believe that we are part of the cosmos and that the cosmos is part of us?” To this one, much in the spirit of James Joyce’s Molly Bloom, I would answer in an ebullient and whole-hearted “Yes.” In fact, as I have proposed in all of my books, I think most of the problems we now face—environmental degradation, rapacious capitalism, adolescent socialism, isolation, a lifeless preoccupation with cyberspace—are precisely due to our having been estranged from the cosmos. The absurd assumption that we are somehow separate from the world which René Descartes inflicted on the West in the seventeenth century—a disorder that jumped into hyperdrive with Judith Butler and others in the twentieth—has done unbelievable harm to our humanity (and our planet and those with whom we share it). Nominalism and its inheritance, let me say (again), is complete bullshit.

As a biodynamic farmer, I plant by the sun, the moon, and the stars (a motif richly permeating the language of fairy-tales). In general, I plant leaf vegetables when the moon is in a water sign (Pisces, Cancer, Scorpio), roots in an earth sign (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn), flowers in air (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius), and fruits in fire (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius). It gets a little more complicated than that, but that’s the idea.

It’s also pretty clear that animals respond to movements in the cosmos—breeding patterns, for example, responses to tides—but when it comes to human beings things become more complex. Here I hold to the maxim (variously attributed to Aristotle, Plotinus, and so forth) that “The stars incline, they do not compel.” The reason for this, is that we humans, due to our having an ego, have freewill: we can choose. The less liberated our thinking is from our emotions and our wills, however, the less freewill we have, which renders us closer to plants and animals in the degree to which the stars might influence us (especially for ill). I came to this insight not through reading, but from an actual study of astrology going back over thirty years. I am not at the moment a practicing astrologer (though I was once upon a time), though I do keep my eye on the stars.

Some people, especially my more orthodox Christian friends, may be aghast at such a confession. But astrology has a rich history in both Christianity and in Judaism (particularly in the Kabbalah). The Christian antecedents, obviously, begin with the Star of Bethlehem and the astrologers (magi, three kings, wisemen, whatever), but span the last two millennia, sometimes in the underground, sometimes out in the open. In fact, you wouldn’t believe how many traditionalist-leaning Catholics have emailed or messaged me about astrology—though they admit they’d never announce so publicly, as they fear it would decimate their traddie street-cred. (The same goes for Sophiology, incidentally.)

One of astrology’s “out” periods was during the Renaissance. Many a Christian humanist practiced astrology, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Kepler, Robert Fludd, and Marsilio Ficino among them (a comprehensive list could probably fill a small volume). In a letter to the great patron of the Florentine Renaissance, Lorenzo de Medici, Ficino, spiritual head of the Plato Academy as well as a Catholic priest, had this to say.

26 September 1480

“Lorenzo, today and also tomorrow, be on your guard; for Mars, passing into Capricorn, your ascendant, is seen to look with square aspect, today at Saturn and tomorrow at the Sun. Besides this, Saturn himself, the lord of your ascendant, has not quite passed through the rays of the Sun. For this last reason I, too, should take care.”1

Ficino, translator of Plato and the Corpus Hermeticum among many other contributions to scholarship, was no naive dummy. He knew very well the problems inherent to placing too much trust in an interpretive art and in 1477 wrote Disputatio contra iudicium astrologorum (Disputation against the Judgments of Astrologers) calling into question the practice of astrology. Then as now, unscrupulous practitioners of any art—medicine, finance, and politics no less than astrology—were plentiful enough to remind any potential customer that caveat emptor.

Of course, with the Reformation (and the Tridentine reactionarianism of the Counter Reformation) all of that slowly came to a halt, though it persisted in subterranean streams forever after denigrated as “occultism” or “esotericism.” As Ioan Couliano has written,

“In response to Luther and to Puritanism, the Church embarked on its own reform…. Far from consolidating the positions assumed by Catholicism during the Renaissance, this movement severed itself completely from them and went in the same directions as protestantism. It was along the lines of severity and harshness that the Reformation developed, from the Protestant as well as the Catholic side.2

I think it’s time to recapture a healthy relationship to the cosmos. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we need to subscribe to a heedless and superficial approach to astrology. But we do need to heal our relationship to this blessed Creation in which we live and move and have our being. We need to disrupt our sense of alienation from our own home. And the heavens are part of this home, as Blake so eloquently writes in The Four Zoas:

Thus were the stars of heaven created like a golden chain

To bind the Body of Man to heaven from falling into the Abyss.

And “abyss” is precisely the correct word.

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 Meditations on the Soul: Selected Letters of Marsilio Ficino (Inner Traditions, 1997), 166.

2 Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 1987), 194.