Sophianic Economies

I was really looking forward to the new Dune movie. Not that I’m this giant Frank Herbert fan. I’ve only read the original book—the first time thirty years ago—but the trailer looked good. But apparently Covid can do what no sandworm could and defeated the launch of the film which has now been postponed from November 2020 to October 2021. So, since I couldn’t see the film, I read the book (I didn’t have a copy of it, but my son gave me one for Christmas).

One section of the book really struck me this time. In about the middle of the book, shorn by his enemies of his stillsuit (the contraption that allows his to recycle his own body’s water and sustain him in the harsh desert environment of the planet Arrakis) and becoming delirious from heat exhaustion and dehydration, the Freman planetologist, Liet Kynes, starts to hallucinate (or does he?). “The real wealth of a planet is in its landscape,” his meandering consciousness utters, “how we take part in that basic source of civilization—agriculture” [1]. Then, in his delirium, he hears the voice of his deceased father, also a planetologist:

“The more life there is within a system, the more riches there are for life…. Life improves the capacity of the environment to sustain life…. Life makes needed nutrients more readily available. It binds more energy into the system through the tremendous chemical interplay from organism to organism.” [2]

These notions did not jump out at me at that first reading all those years ago, but they certainly did this time. What Herbert ventriloquizes through Kynes is essentially a dictum of biodynamic agriculture (and all sound agriculture). Rather than the anxious, greedy, and decidedly neurotic attempts by governments and corporations to encourage monoculture and grand scale farming, biodynamics and COMMON SENSE encourage diversity—of plants, animals, woodlands, waterways, pasture, insect life—as a key to life. It is a closed system (ideally, nothing is brought in off of the farm to augment this fertility), but it is a very different kind of closed system from those of monoculture or factory farming—which are systems closed to life. Call them Zombie Farming.

It just so happens that while I’ve been reading Dune, I’ve also been reading the radical agrarian pamphleteer and Member of Parliament William Cobbett’s Cottage Economy (1822). Cobbett, God bless him!, was so radical he had to flee the country a few times, and he wanted to turn back the enclosure laws that so decimated English farmers and turned them into mere wage-earners. He gives very practical advice on farming for self-sufficiency and he rails against the Christian (I assume Catholic) embrace of poverty as a tool the wealthy and powerful use to keep the lower classes quiet and under their control. He was particularly disgusted with what it had done to the Irish peasantry (he was one of the few British MPs of his time, along with William Wilberforce, to support Catholic emancipation).

Cobbett endorses a way of living both sensible and healthy:

“From a very small piece of ground a large part of the food of a considerable family may be raised, the very act of raising it will be the best possible foundation of education of the children of the labourer; that it will teach them a great number of useful things, add greatly to their value when they go forth from their father’s home, make them start in life with all possible advantages, and give them the best chance of leading happy lives. And is it not much more rational for parents to be employed in teaching their children how to cultivate a garden, to feed and rear animals, to make bread, beer, bacon, butter and cheese, and to be able to do these things for themselves, or for others, than to leave them to prowl about the lanes and commons, or to mope at the heels of some crafty, sleekheaded pretended saint, who while he extracts the last penny from their pockets, bid them be contented with their misery, and promises them, in exchange for their pence, everlasting glory in the world to come? It is upon the hungry and the wretched that the fanatic works.” [3]

Fanatics, of course, continue to work upon the hungry and wretched as well as upon, as recent events have emphasized, the fearful.

Ever the idealist, Cobbett also thought things would improve. They have not. As John Lennon sings in “Working Class Hero,”:

They keep you doped with religion and sex and TV And you think you’re so clever and classless and free But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see

In the early twentieth century, a number of rural reformers, distributists, and communitarians tried to revive a sensible approach to economy, anticipating and trying to avoid the overwhelming deluge that would become the military-industrial-governmental-pharmaceutical complex. Besides Chesterton and Belloc, H.J Massingham and George William Russell (also known as the poet, A.E.) pushed for a more human economy. For Massingham, the failure of the human economy was directly attributable to the failure of Christendom to be Christian, and he hoped for a return to a time when “religion, learning, the arts and crafts, agriculture and the contemplation of wild nature as the manifestation of God, were integrated as aspects of one whole.” [4] If that sounds like Sophiology, gentle reader, you are not mistaken.

George Russell, for his part, though his proposal for rural regeneration is very practical, nevertheless waxes very poetic in his description of his vision:

“God’s world—all the light, the glory, the beauty which the earth puts forth to her children—the dawn over the hills, the green grass, the odour and incense of flowers, the smell of the turned-up sod, trees, hills, the multitudinous magnificence of nature—are all being deserted by humanity because humanity cannot exist on the earth and cultivate it, and maintain thereon an equal life. If they remain they are poor, they are ignorant, they are beset by hostile forces, they are enslaved, and they give up their inheritance as heirs of the ages and the spoils which man has ransacked from time.” [5]

Notice how the sophianic reality of the world becomes disfigured by our disengagement from the Real as Russell describes it here.

Of course, the ruralists, communitarians, and distributists also failed. But the war isn’t over yet.

Now, as we see, the richest men on earth are swallowing up farmland at a disturbing rate, the newest form of enclosure, now in a corporate guise and under government sanction. They might have all the power and wealth, but they don’t have either truth or reality. At the same time, the proponents of The Great Reset are pushing for hyperurbanization and a technocratic dystopia (not their word, but actually the deal).

A sophianic economy (by whatever name one calls it) offers the only path by which sanity may be reached. It could also salvage the wreckage that is Christianity. This will probably entail some sort of upheaval (or, better, ignoring of) the dominant power structures in both of those domains.

Just don’t let the technocrats win.

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. Frank Herbert, Dune (Penguin, 2018), 345.

2. Ibid., 346.

3. William Cobbett, Cottage Economy, to which is added, The Poor Man’s Friend (New York, 1833), 11.

4. H.J. Massignham, The Tree of Life (London, 1943), 47.

5. George William Russell (A. E.), Co-operation and Nationality (Dublin, 1912), 22.

Rosicrucian (Sophiological) Medicine

Some people assume that, because I question some of the assumptions of this or that “medical expert” that I am somehow “anti-science.” I take great umbrage at such a charge. When people tell me to “follow the science,” my response is to tell them to “follow the scientists,” which often is synonymous with “follow the money.” Recent scientific history is absolutely crummy with compromised scientists pushing compromised science in the grand cabal that is the governmental-military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex. I think some of the same people assume that, since I often write about spirituality, mysticism, and poetry that I am somehow not interested in science. Nothing could be further from the truth! First of all, most of the subjects of my first book, Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England—John Dee, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Henry and Thomas Vaughan—were scientists or physicians. I also have a chapter on the seventeenth-century scientist and physician Robert Fludd in The Submerged Reality. I start off Transfiguration with a chapter entitled “A Delicate Empiricism: Goethe, Sophiology, and the Possibilities of a Catholic Science.” I also wrote the entry on Paracelsus for the forthcoming 4th edition of The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Religion. One of my sons is a scientist (which, by the way, blows up that “homeschool kids can’t do science” canard). In addition, I am a practicing biodynamic farmer, and farming is one of the oldest scientific methods known to us. So there.

I love science, because I love Natura. That’s rather a fundamental sophiological position, and one I have held to for a long, long time.

I’ve learned more than a few things about science from my scholarly and academic careers. First of all: it’s politics, stupid. This was as true in the seventeenth century as it is now. Science may be neutral, but scientists aren’t. Envy, greed, lust, gluttony, pride, sloth, and wrath haunt the hard sciences as much as any other domain of human endeavor. And there isn’t a vaccine for it. Of course, not all scientists act out of the Seven Deadly Sins; but, if they don’t, they have colleagues or enemies who do. It is unavoidable. Don’t believe me? Ask people who lost loved ones to the opioid epidemic, or those whose loved ones listened to the bogus research suggesting smoking, aspertame, and glyphosates are healthy and safe and now suffer for it. Follow the scientists.

The thing that has most disturbed me during this pandemic is how “scientists” have stigmatized actual health and healthy practices—like interacting with other human beings by way of touch and embrace, breathing fresh air, and spending time in the sun. We’ve been condemned to a Zoom version of Hell. I still see people walking alone, outside, wearing masks without anyone within hundreds of feet from them. This makes no sense, and it has nothing to do with science. Of course, we know these things are also psychologically damaging (we’ve all seen the statistics) and psychological states invariably affect one’s health.

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I have often wondered what would have happened had the Paracelsian and Rosicrucian natural philosophers and physicians won the day against the scientific materialism which arose in the seventeenth century and which has employed a method of exploitation and conquest of Natura ever since. The first commitment of the agreement of the Brethren of the Rosy Cross in the Fama Fraternitatis (1614), for example, promises “That none of them should profess any other thing then to cure the sick, and that gratis.” Likewise, the last article listed in the enrollment for Christian’s membership in The Order of the Golden Stone in The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (1617) is “That you shall not be willing to live longer than God will have you.” That is, that one shall not utilize artificial means—whether medical or magical—to prolong existence beyond the point of life. I think we have been trained to fear two things during this pandemic: illness and death. If you don’t believe me, fake sneeze next time you’re in line at the grocery store. Thirteen months ago no one would bat an eye. Now they run (not walk) for the hand sanitizer.

an edition of Paracelsus

But even more than their common sense approach to things, the Rosicrucian and Paracelsian physicians looked to the supersensible worlds as well as to the aspect of Natura present to the senses in order to facilitate healing. Nature spoke to them in the language of divinity; and Divinity spoke to them through Nature. This idea permeates the writing of Thomas Vaughan, Robert Fludd, and Paracelsus and shines in the poetry of Henry Vaughan, as can be seen in these lines from “Regeneration”:

With that, some cryed, Away; straight I

Obey’d, and led

Full east, a faire, fresh field could spy

Some call’d it, Jacobs Bed;

A Virgin-soile, which no

Rude feet ere trod.

Where (since he slept there,) only go

Prophets, and Friends of God.

What would happen if medicine and the natural sciences had taken this path instead of the one they followed? Goethe tried to right the ship, but he was all but ignored. Still, their legacy lives on in the thousands of homeopaths, naturopaths, Anthroposophic MDs, and others who draw not only on current medical knowledge but on the spiritual healing traditions of indigenous peoples and folk medicine—people the AMA, the CDC, the WHO and others try to suppress, while they uphold The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and pharmaceutical giants as benefactors of humanity (despite their dismal records). The inheritors of Paracelsian and Rosicrucian medicine, on the other hand, are interested in the art of healing. But the real money is in sickness. As Thomas Vaughan writes in his preface to The Fame & Confession of the Fraternity of the R.C. (1652): “We plainly see, that if the least Disease invades Us, the School-men have not one Notion that is so much a charm, as to cure Us: and why then should we imbrace a Philosophie of meer words, when it is evident enough, that we cannot live but by Works. Let us not for shame be so stupid any more.”

So, one year into this strange experiment in...in what?—I can’t say “health”—where do we find ourselves? Are we any wiser?

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.

Jacob’s Ladder: Sophia and Creation

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

Jacob named the site of his vision Beth-El, “the House of God,” and there is no reason to believe that every parcel of Creation is not a potential Bethel. Indeed, religious experiences tied to nature are too numerous to count, almost universal in their distribution. I would wager that they are among the most common of human experiences, though many if not most people lack a sufficient language for describing their experiences. Joan of Arc’s initial visionary experiences, for example, occurred at what was know as “The Ladies’ Tree” or “The Faeries’ Tree” in her village of Domremy. Some villagers even claimed to have seen faeries there, but Joan only claimed to have seen saints Catherine and Margaret and the Archangel Michael who “was not alone, but was accompanied by angels from heaven.”[1] Even the (at the time) hardened Marxist economist Sergei Bulgakov was not impervious to the glory shining through the landscape one sunset while traveling through the Caucasus:

“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!”[2]

But the Glory of the Lord doesn’t only shine through the beauties of nature. Bernadette Soubirous’s first vision of the Virgin Mary came in a small alcove near a garbage dump, and Jacob Boehme’s insight into the nature of God occurred through the reflection of light off a pewter dish. There is no place where grace cannot appear. Beth-El: You are here.

But you are also not here.

One thing that keeps us from the experience of the Real is our pathological drive to control everything from fertility, to illness, to our environments. We regulate fertility through artificial birth control, through abortion, through “waiting until we’ve established our careers.” Fertility, that is, terrifies us, so we treat it as a disease, even, in some cases, by comparing a growing fetus to a parasite. It terrifies us so much that fertility rates have been plummeting for decades though NGOs have nevertheless been advocating for a massive population decrease. If we learned anything through the Covid-19 panic, it has to be that people have fetishized antiseptic living into a demigod. When people used to get the flu, it was just one of those things. You took some over-the-counter medication or homeopathy and let the illness run its course. After Covid illness somehow became evidence of moral turpitude and selfishness. Another thing we learned is that it is “safer” to encounter others through virtual environments, like Zoom, than by interacting, by exchanging genetic information, in the face-to-face of a lived life. This is entirely neurotic.

These phenomena are merely symptomatic of a way of life (bios)completely divorced from Life (zoë). We live lives in which, as John Donne says, “‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,” divorced as we are from the world of clouds, of plants, of animals, and from each other, from the cosmos, and because of these from from God. Indeed, the inverse is also true: we are distanced from the world of clouds, plants, and animals because we are distanced from God. The integral unity of life and purpose that we instinctively feel lacking is really a product of our disengagement from the calendar; and by this I mean from both the calendar of the seasons and the liturgical calendar, both of which reflected each other once upon a time. Enoch I is very clear about the repercussions of our disconnect from the cosmos and God:

“In those days the angel Uriel responded and said to me, ‘Behold, I have shown you everything, Enoch, and I have revealed everything to you [so that] you might see this sun, this moon, and those that guide the stars of heaven as well as those who interchange their activities and their seasons and rotate their processions.

“‘In respect to their days, the sinners and the winter are cut short. Their seeds shall lag behind in their lands and in their fertile fields, and in all their activities upon the earth. He will turn and appear in their time, and withhold rain, and the sky shall stand still at that time. Then the vegetable shall slacken and not grow in its season, and the fruit shall not be born in its season. The moon shall alter its order, and will not be seen according to its cycles.’” (80:1-5)

Surrounded by the scientific hubris that seeks to “improve” seed by genetic engineering and that attempts to dim the sun, the moon, and stars through the dispersal of calcium carbonate through the atmosphere (among many other foolish ideas)—things we have let happen through either ignorance or inertia—is it any wonder that our impact on the Creation grows more and more devastating? We operate not in a cooperative manner with nature, but stick to a paradigm characterized by suppression, dominance, and control, but above all by hubris. We shouldn’t ask why wildfires, droughts, and devastating hurricanes occur so often: we should ask why they don’t happen more.

The reason for this is that the world has a soul, the anima mundi. This is an idea found throughout history. Plato, in the Timaeus, describes it this way: “we may say that the world came into being—a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God.” [3]And because the world is a living creature endowed with soul, all things within it participate in this life. As Plotinus writes, “the work of soul is something awake, both that within it and in the same way that which goes out to something else. Soul therefore makes alive all the other things which do not live of themselves, and makes them live the sort of life by which it lives itself.” [4] The Judeo-Christian tradition has a proper name for the bearer of this soul: “Wisdom, the fashioner of all things” (Wisdom 7:22).

To live in accord with Wisdom is to live in accord with both creation and God. The poetic metaphysics of this understanding can be found, among others, in the symbolism of the harmonia mundi and of the tree.

The harmonia mundi, literally “harmonies of the world” but often rendered in English as “the Music of the Spheres” has a rich history in the West, probably stemming from Pythagoras and is alluded to by Plato in the Timaeus. Plotinus provides a very beautiful description:

“The harmonious adjustment of the souls to the order of this All of ours witnesses to this: they are not cut off from it, but fit themselves in in their descents and make one harmony with its circuit, so that their fortunes and their lives and their choices are indicated by the figures made by the heavenly bodies and they sing, as it were, with one voice and are never out of tune. (And this is more properly the hidden meaning of the doctrine that the heavenly spheres move musically and melodically.”[5]

Many Renaissance writers and thinkers touched on the idea, Robert Fludd and Johannes Kepler, for example, and Shakespeare in his play Pericles, Prince of Tyre. It is a very simple concept: to live in harmony with Creation and God is to be at one with All That Is. Conversely, to be out of harmony with Creation and God is to invite corruption, infertility, and desolation upon the world.

The image of the tree, as the Tree of Life, may be the symbol par excellence of Wisdom from antiquity. The Tree, of course, makes its first appearance in Genesis, but it was also a feature of First Temple Judaism as an icon of Wisdom before Her worship was banned under the reforms of Josiah and her devotees driven into exile. The Tree returns in Revelation at the restoration of All Things: “And he showed me a river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street thereof, and on both sides of the river, was the tree of life, bearing twelve fruits, yielding its fruits every month, and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (22:1-2). Margaret Barker reads this restoration as the restoration of Wisdom, the Divine Sophia, to her proper place in Christian worship and understanding. For her, “The fate of the tree [is] the fate of Wisdom,” which is why she argues that the earliest Christian communities understood it in precisely this way: “When John saw the woman and the tree in the holy of holies [i.e., Revelation 22], he showed that the Christians were faithful to the older ways. Their temple was the ancient temple, and so the woman and her tree and everything they represented shaped their way of thinking. Wisdom/Miriam was the mother of the Messiah, and that is how the Christians told the story of the birth of Jesus.” [6]

This is the challenge presented to us at this point in history. We find ourselves confronted with a choice between the Real or a simulacra of the Real, what the kabbalah calls the qlipoth, the world of demonic powers. [7] Do we assist in the work of salvation by recognizing Sophia’s place in Creation, thereby calling her out of exile? Or do we follow the trajectory of death that has and will continue to wreak havoc on Creation and on our own souls as they descend into the technological and technocratic abyss of the qlipoth? Too often, Christians or any people of good will, leave the work of salvation to politicians or to an amorphous future event, the Coming of the Messiah. But our actions constitute a call, a summons. As Nikolai Berdyaev so stridently says, “My salvation is bound up with not only other men but also of animals, plants, minerals, of every blade of grass—all must be transfigured and brought into the Kingdom of God. And this depends upon my creative efforts.”[8] Salvation, that is, is not a spectator sport.

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. W. S. Scott, trans, and ed., The Trial of Joan of Arc, Being a Verbatim Report of the Proceedings from the Orleans Manuscript (Westport, CT: Associated Booksellers, 1956), 78.

2. 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.

3. 30c.

4. 4.3.36-38.

5. 4.3.20-29.

6. Margaret Barker, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment (London; T & T Clark, 20100), 266, 265.

7. Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans Ralph Manheim (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 114.

8. Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 294.