Michaelmas and the Battle Against Evil

"The Vision and Inspiration" by Louis Maurice Boutet de Monvel

“Michael is interpreted as meaning ‘Who is like God?’ and it is said that when something requiring wondrous powers is to be done, Michael is sent, so that from his name and by his action it is given to be understood that no one can do what God alone can do: for that reason many works of wondrous power are attributed to Michael. Thus, as Daniel testifies, in the time of the Antichrist Michael will rise up and stand forth as defender and protector of the elect. He it was who fought with the dragon and his angels and expelled them from heaven, winning a great victory. He fought with the devil over the body of Moses, because the devil wanted to keep the body hidden so that the Jewish people might adore Moses in the place of the true God. Michael receives the souls of the saints and leads them into the paradise of joy. In the past he was prince of the synagogue but has now been established by the Lord as prince of the Church. It is said that it was he who inflicted the plagues on the Egyptians, divided the Red Sea, led the people through the desert, and ushered them into the Promised Land. He is held to be Christ’s standard-bearer among the battalions of holy angels. At the Lord’s command he will kill the Antichrist with great power on Mount Olivet. At the sound of the voice of the archangel Michael the dead will rise, and it is he who will present the cross, the nails, the spear, and the crown of thorns at the Day of Judgment.” ~ from Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend [1]

Ever since my days as a Waldorf teacher, the festival of Michaelmas has held a special place in my heart as well as in my family’s celebration of the Christian Year. At the Waldorf school where I once taught, the children form the “body” of the dragon, partially hidden under various interpretations of “dragon skin” made from bed-sheets and, led by a student wearing the dragon’s “head” (some sort of headdress) process around the precincts of the schoolyard until they meet St. Michael (usually a community member in angelic swag) who then transforms the beast. I’m not sure if all Waldorf schools still do this, as they have become increasingly allergic to anything remotely Christian (and, I am sad to report, most Waldorf teachers these days only have a superficial familiarity with the work of Rudolf Steiner), but my family has carried on the tradition at Stella Matutina Farm, the place where we reside, for the last six years. A wonderful community of people join us, and our celebration gets bigger every year.

Our celebrations have a very medieval folk-Christian/pagan vibe to them, as not only do we have St. Michael and the Dragon but we also feast and make merry, often with mead or metheglin I have made—with the help of my bees!—on the menu. My younger children look forward to it for weeks.

Michaelmas at Stella Matutina Farm, 2019

But conviviality is not the only thing we celebrate at Michaelmas; we also celebrate the intersection of the Church year with cosmic realities.

Rudolf Steiner paints a beautiful imagination of this reality. For Steiner, the cosmos (the Creation, that is) speaks to us, but only if we have ears to listen and eyes to see. As he points out, Michaelmas—as well as the harvests that accompany it in the northern hemisphere—is anticipated in the Perseid meteor showers (Perseus another great fighter of monsters) that occur in late July and August. For Steiner, this symbolizes St. Michael’s victory over Satan and his angels as well as the introduction of meteoric iron into the atmosphere that can steel the resolve of perceptive individuals attentive to what happens on both heaven and earth. “If,” Steiner says,

“a man enters thus into the enjoyment of nature, the consciousness of nature, but then also awakens in himself an autumnal self-consciousness, then the picture of Michael with the dragon will stand majestically before him, revealing in picture-form the overcoming of nature-consciousness by self-consciousness when autumn draws near. This will come about if man can experience not only an inner spring and summer, but also a dying, death-bringing autumn and winter. Then it will be possible for the picture of Michael with the dragon to appear again as a powerful Imagination, summoning man to inner activity.” [2]

This Michaelic strength can be seen politically as well. St. Joan of Arc, to cite a famous example, was directed by St. Michael to save France from the corruption of the Burgundian machinations with England that oppressed French sovereignty. At her trial, her interrogators asked whether God hated the English. “She said that as to love or hate that God had for the English, or what He would do for their souls, she knows nothing; but she is well assured that they will be driven out of France, except those who die there; and that God will send the French victory over the English.” [3]

Joan was an illiterate peasant girl (only nineteen at her death), a “useless eater” as some would say. That she fearlessly confronted the amassed power of the medieval Catholic Church without so much as quaking is evidence of Michaelic iron in action, echoed recently by an army of construction workers in Australia.

Michael’s battle with the Dragon is always already happening. Again Steiner:

“Then men will come to understand these things, to reflect on them with understanding, and they will bring mind and feeling and will to meet the autumn in the course of the year. Then at the beginning of autumn, at the Michael Festival, the picture of Michael with the Dragon will confront man as a stark challenge, a strong spur to action, which must work on men in the midst of the events of our times. And then we shall understand how it points symbolically to something in which the whole destiny—perhaps indeed the tragedy—or our epoch is being played out.” [4]

As I’ve mentioned before, the Celtic churches had a deep reverence for St. Michael, and invoked his protection with startling regularity:

“I beseech you by the tenth order on the compact earth; I beseech praiseworthy Michael to help me against demons.

“I beseech the people of heaven with bright-armed Michael; I beseech you by the triad of wind, sun, and moon.” [5]

The “tenth order” mentioned above has another name: mankind.

It is my profound hope that the Feast of St. Michael will become more and more richly and enthusiastically observed in this post-Christian epoch. For his moment, as always, is now. Invoke his aid, and fear not.

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 Divine Feminine. Watch for his Sophia in Exile, due momently from Angelico Press.

1. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, 1993), 2 volumes.

2. Rudolf Steiner, The Four Seasons and the Archangels (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1984), 15.

3. The Trial of Joan of Arc, trans. W. S. Scott (Associated Booksellers, 1956), 123.

4. Rudolf Steiner, The Four Seasons and the Archangels, 21.

5. From “The Litany of Creation” in Celtic Spirituality, ed. Davies and O’Loughlin (Paulist Press, 1999), 298.

Rewilding the Church, Part 2

In my last post, I wrote about my small community’s efforts at rewilding the church, not as a way to rewild the landscape around this or that church building (which, it seems, is how some conceive of it) but in terms of rewilding Christianity. The landscaping approach, which I get and support to some degree, just strikes me as just another bourgeois hobby of the gentile middle class, kind of like fashion jeans or something. I have a more radical project in mind.

Primarily, this is a project of spiritual subsistence. “Subsistence,” for me as a biodynamic farmer, is a pretty important term which as David Boilier has argued, “must be understood not as bare and brutish survival, but as a sustainable life outside of the market order.” My wife, in fact, is pretty fond of saying at our various festival gatherings, “We might not have any money, but we eat like kings.” When you grow your own food, raise your own animals, tend your own bees, and make your own mead, beer, and wine, you can afford (note the metaphor) to say that.

Boilier, however, is writing primarily about the contributions of radical Catholic priest and revolutionary thinker Ivan Illich and the contemporary commons movement (readers of this blog and my book Transfiguration will, hopefully, recall my enthusiasm for the idea of the commons—and my lament for its loss).

But this idea of the commons, as much as it touches on the economic and cultural lives of people, also has import for their spiritual lives. As Boilier writes, “Just as the Catholic Church proceeded to monopolize, regiment and institutionalize the realm of the spiritual—insisting that professional priests and church structures are needed to attain salvation—so the state, too, began to see the advantages of colonizing vernacular life.”

This institutionalization of life, as we have seen all too plainly over the past eighteen months, has also impacted our digital lives. The internet (and even social media) which not all that long ago was understood as a realm of freedom and public access—a digital commons in practice—has increasingly been morphing into a digital enclosure. The commons, that is, is the enemy of the technocrats.

All these things being so, I advocate for a spiritual rewilding, which is a rewilding of the Church writ large. The institutions around us—secular and religious—are characterized by a fetid rot. And I am no longer am willing to serve such institutions. So I propose taking back the sacramental life that has been held—surely not in “trust”—like a ring of power by those interested in maintaining power, by technocrats no less than hierarchs: a power that prohibits sincere Christians from communing together for no other reason than juridical claims to authority. This is uncivilized.

Of course, there is nothing civilized about civilization, and, as H.J. Massingham (who, along with Robert Herrick is one of my tutelary spirits) once wrote, neither is “democracy": “Abstract terms like ‘democracy’ came to mean the rule of a minority by means of propaganda and the power of wealth over vast aggregates with a collective way of life and a collective ‘soul’ pent up in squalid industrial cities.” [1] I believe this now goes under the name “The Great Reset,” the false promises of which even infect religious leaders, the Dalai Lama no less than Patriarch Bartholomew. Surely some revelation is at hand.

As I have written before, the ancient Celtic Church offers something of a model of this way of rewilding the Church. As Christopher Bamford writes of the Celts, “Theirs was a country and a people of individual, autonomous units. Placing great emphasis on freedom, they constituted no state or nation but rather a free federation of tribes.” [2] This is more or less how I envision the rewilded Church. Also from Bamford:

“Celts lived a life, as one modern authority puts it, ‘of freedom verging on anarchy.’ Jean Markale writes: ‘The essence of Celtic philosophy would appear to be a search for individual freedom, not based in egoism, but founded in the belief that each person is special and therefore different from others, that behavior cannot be modeled on a pattern created by others.’” [3]

A rewilded Church would follow along much the same lines.

Furthermore, I cannot envisage the rewilded Church as in any way disconnected from both Creation (as in the cosmos) and creation (as in the both the fine and practical arts, not to mention the liberal arts). Only in that way could the rewilded Church be reconsecrated in the ways of life. As Bamford explains it, “They studied, they learned, in order to love. Their theology, their religion, was always practical, vibrant with life, mystical.” [3] But it wasn’t otherworldly. The internet, social media, gaming—these are otherworldly. The rewilded Church, on the other hand, is this worldly in the truest sense, colored precisely by the power of Him from whom all Life flows.

The Hail Mary in Irish. Talk about rewilding!

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 Divine Feminine.

1. H.J. Massingham, The Tree of Life (London, 1943), 125.

2. Christopher Bamford, An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West (Codhill Press, 2003), 94-95.

3. Ibid., 95.

4. Ibid., 110.

Rewilding the Church

In biodynamic farming (of which I am a longtime practitioner), a salient principle is that the individuality of the farm, in addition to crops, domesticated animals, pastures, and orchards, should also contain water—streams or ponds, for example—and wild places, such as woods, coppices, or meadows—which are the homes of a great variety of flora and fauna. The idea here is to practice biodiversity. As Alan York, the late, great master of biodynamics says in the film The Biggest Little Farm (which everyone should see), “Diversity, diversity, diversity.” Don’t plant just one variety of peach tree—plant thirty. Don’t raise only one kind of domestic animal—raise as many as feasible. On our small ten-acre farm, which is bordered on two sides by a State wilderness area, we grow more than fifty kinds of vegetables in garden, not to mention the small orchard I planted. We also raise a dairy cow and her calf (their names are Fiona and Seamus, if you want to know), heritage hogs (American Black Guineas), honeybees, chickens, and ducks. We also forage from the woods and meadows: mushrooms, blackberries, huckleberries, black walnuts. We house our hogs under oak trees in order to fatten them on acorns and we practice sylvo-pasturing with our chickens and cows to some degree. We heat our house with timber from our woods (mostly from trees damaged by storms) and add venison and the occasional wild turkey or rabbit to our diet. Trying to demarcate the lines between the wild and the cultivated here is an almost meaningless activity. In short, we are part of nature and nature is part of us.

Some of my friends are advocates of the “rewilding” movement, a “conservation effort focused on restoring sustainable biodiversity and ecosystem health by protecting core wild/wilderness areas, providing connectivity between such areas, and protecting or reintroducing apex predators and highly interactive species.” I like the idea, but, as with so many conservation groups, the rewilding movement is not too keen on the human species in their quest for a “dynamic but stable self-regulating and self-sustaining ecosystems with near pre-human levels of species diversity.”That’s a red flag for me.

I like something about this concept of rewilding, but I think humans need to be part of the picture. As with arguments about “overpopulation,” it seems some of the avid rewilders think too many people are crowding out native species—but they never volunteer to undertake the heroic work of making more room by their own absence. Overpopulation, that is, is a problem of other people.

But I get it. What I think we need is a rewilding of the human race, not necessarily to a return to the days of hunting and gathering and cave-painting, but in reintegrating our relationship to nature—in much the same way a biodynamic farm combines cultivation and wildness.

And part of this rewilding of the human race, for me at least, includes a Rewilding of the Church.

Some people like to think of Christianity as originally an urban movement, one that initially flowered in cities—like Jerusalem or Rome or Corinth or Alexandria—and that this urbanity is part of the religion’s DNA, as if the guy who started the whole thing wasn’t a carpenter from the sticks and his first followers weren’t rural fishermen and shepherds. Maybe Christianity is an urban phenomenon, but that urbanization has impoverished it. But even the earliest urban Christians were far more embedded in nature than we are; and for a long time throughout Christian history elements of the Church resisted the hegemony of the urban Church, nowhere more clearly than in the Celtic Church. As H.J. Massingham (whom I more and more regard as a saint and prophet) writes, “Thus 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.” [1]

This is what a rewilding of the Church would accomplish. But how do we get there? What I have to offer is speculative, but still based on long years of contemplation and practical work in the world, both as a scholar and as a farmer.

First of all, as I wrote recently, the idea of a house church is very useful. As my friend Chris recently informed me, it should properly be called art of “the independent sacramental movement.” It was a group I did not know existed, let alone that I belong to! As I have mentioned previously, the frustrations we experienced (and continue to experience) with the Church in the Time of COVID became too much for us to bear, and my younger children, we felt, (my youngest is ten) needed to be immersed in the sacramental world. It’s not that I no longer consider myself Catholic (I do), but I have had a pretty plastic notion of Catholicism for a good long while that extends to the Eastern Orthodox and Anglican branches of the family tree. In fact, the original subtitle for my The Submerged Reality was “Ecology and Ecumenism” (or something to that effect). The Year of This Our Contagion required me to interrogate this understanding even further, to the point that it seemed to me that one of the main roles of the episcopacy—of whatever jurisdiction—is characterized by holding the sacraments hostage, or at least by holding that threat. I know this is controversial.

My model and inspiration for this rewilding concept is the ancient Celtic Church, which was not only almost entirely rural and connected to the wild, but was equally distant from the meddling of hierarchs far-removed from the day-to-day working out of the faith in actual, living communities. These communities were suspicious if not dismissive of the authority claims of ecclesial power structures, though they certainly had their own trusted bishops (Patrick and Aidan, for example). Being in Ireland and Scotland at far remove from Rome or Byzantium in an age before postal service, let alone mass communication, the influence of popes and cardinals was almost a non-issue.

Rewilding the Church could have a profoundly vivifying influence on a faith ossified by centuries of the corruption and abuse so endemic to bureaucracy. Imagine Christians living a sacramental life in all of its dimensions—Eucharistic as well as in relation to the natural world. As my friend Chris (who is studying for the Episcopalian priesthood) recently told me, “I’d bless rivers, fields, woods… everything.” Amen.

My thought is that the faithful should feel free to take things into their own hands. I know—this is controversial. Eventually, bishops may catch on—but they’d have to stop being middle-managers and, like Aidan and Patrick, get a little dirt on their hands. I fear, however, that they will probably respond like Dr. Leo Marvin (in the film What about Bob?) when Bob Wiley teaches Leo’s son Sigmund how to dive.

Here comes the bishop!

Such a rewilding, an absolute and sincere sophianic gesture, could save Christianity from its rapid decline as it holds onto the structures that no longer function. The structures, the hierarchies of whatever jurisdiction, are not the Church. We need to remember that. Now is the time.

Steve Winwood in the wild.

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 Divine Feminine.

1. H. J. Massingham, The Tree of Life (London, 1943), 47.