Biodynamic Farming and Gardening as Christian Path: A Course

a flyer I made 30 (!) years ago

I am happy to announce that I will be giving a weekend course, Biodynamic Farming and Gardening as Christian Path, this spring. Although I originally toyed with the idea of doing such a course online, on second thought I have decided it would be best to do this the old fashioned way: in person and on my own land, Stella Matutina Farm in Grass Lake, Michigan.

Biodynamics, while it has a solid theoretical framework underpinning it, is more than anything a hands on enterprise, so I intend to combine theoretical, practical, and, yes, artistic and festive aspects into the course. The idea is to have a lived experience of the sophiological implications of biodynamic farming and gardening and how such a way of being connects to the traditional Christian year and the astronomical and mystical elements that inform it.

The course will take place from Friday evening, April 29th, to late Saturday afternoon on the 30th. The next day, of course, is May Day and participants are invited to attend our farm’s yearly May Day Festival on Sunday the 1st of May at 3:00 p.m.

The fee for the course is $120 per family (assuming some people would like to bring spouses or children) and a lunch will be provided on Saturday. The farm is situated in the middle of Michigan’s Waterloo State Recreation Area which has plenty of camping spaces available as well as cabins to rent (though of more limited availability) and there are also other B&B accommodations in the area. Grass Lake is approximately 30 miles west of Ann Arbor and 15 miles east of Jackson, Michigan.

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and send it in via snailmail with a check or money order or email director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com and pay via Venmo @Michael-Martin-295

The Parallel Polis, or How to Beat the Technocracy

In my book Transfiguration, I write about various possible alternatives to the sterile and anti-human, anti-sophianic institutions that surround us. For one, I propose the idea of “the sophianic hedge school” as a healthy alternative to Education, Inc. that has done so much to ruin human flourishing and poison society. I also floated the idea of perishable currency, inspired by both Rudolf Steiner and Guido Preparata. This is to say nothing about the importance of the CSA (“Community Supported Agriculture”) movement as well as the availability of herd shares as a way to secure clean food and dairy products uncompromised by the death-bestowing toxins of BigAg and the diabolical interventions of BigPharma that follow in their wake. What I propose in that book is a kind of alternate society, almost, as I’ve written in this blog, like the invisible society within society that operates almost like the parallel universes found in the novels of Philip K. Dick.

I am not the first one to suggest such movements, of course, but in my ongoing consternation at the increasing totalization of the Governmental-Pharmaceutical-Technocratic paradigm, I have found myself reexamining the responses of earlier (but not that much earlier) generations when faced with such menacing totalitarian structures. As I’ve mentioned before, Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind is a great place to start if one wants to trace the gradual acquiescence of more or less good people to the will of the corporatocracy’s insidious egregore. In such scenarios (and this was also the case in England’s gradual transformation from a Catholic into a Protestant nation in the 16th and 17th centuries), the Archons first work on the middle-manager class—the intellectuals, professors, teachers, prelates, and so forth—trusting that they will lead the rest of society into a brave new world.

I also revisited the writing of Václav Havel. I probably first heard of Havel when I was in high school and he was a Czechoslovakian playwright and dissident imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain in his homeland. Some years later in one of my first major publications as a poet (in the journal Cross Currents), I was very proud to find my work alongside an interview with Havel in which he argued that a “sense for the transcendent” was the only hope for uniting multicultural and multifarious societies. This time, however, I revisited his essential essay, “The Power of the Powerless.”

“The Power of the Powerless” was written in 1978, long before the Iron Curtain showed any signs of cracking. But crack it did. Havel and his compatriots in the Eastern Bloc at that time were advocating for “parallel structures” or a “parallel polis” (the term contributed by his fellow dissident Václav Benda) as ways for peoples under whatever form of oppression (things were very different in Poland than in Czechoslovakia, for instance). For Havel, the lynchpin for such an undertaking is the ability to “live in truth,” since the Communist governments were notorious for lies (not that modern Western democracies are any better), what led in the USSR to “hypernormalization” (i.e.. “everybody knows everything is a lie, but let’s all act like it isn’t”).

According to Benda, “the mission of the parallel polis is constantly to conquer new territory, to make its parallelness constantly more substantial and more present. Politically, this means to stake out clear limits for totalitarian power, to make it more difficult for it to maneuver” [1]. This parallel polis was envisioned as primarily cultural, as in the arts, but also social. It simply had to do with giving up on the lie and living in truth (I think of Pope John Paul II, when still a Polish cardinal, leading a procession through the streets of Krakow with an empty frame since it was illegal to process with a religious image, in this case of the Virgin). As Ivan Jirous writes in “Parallel Polis,” “Those who take part are active people who can no longer stand to look passively at the general decay, marasmus, rigidity, bureaucracy, and suffocation of every living idea or sign of movement in the official sphere” [2]. How these words resonate today.

Havel extends this:

“The point where living within the truth ceases to be a mere negation of living and becomes articulate in a particular way, is the point at which something is born that might be called the ‘independent spiritual, social, and political society.’” [3]

I think our own moment calls for such a rebirth, much in the way the Dark Ages presaged the coming of Hildegard of Bingen, Thomas Aquinas, and Francis of Assisi or the waning of the Middle Ages opened onto the Florentine Renaissance. Surely the second coming is at hand.

I have been waiting, in vain as it turns out, for some Distributists or Communitarians to step up and be counted at this, their moment. But...no. They seem either to have retreated into their pipes and ale or become Catholic Marxists or worse.

But part of the problem is the overarching tyranny of our technology, a technology that has so aided the Archons in their quest for totalizing power. Havel—like Heidegger, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, and so many others—was onto this. In 1978, he wrote,

“Technology—that child of modern science, which in turn is a child of modern metaphysics—is out of humanity’s control, has ceased to serve us, has enslaved us and compelled us to participate in the preparation of our own destruction…. We look on helplessly as that coldly functioning machine we have created inevitably engulfs us, tearing us away from our natural affiliations (for instance, from our habitat in the widest sense of the word, including our habitat in the biosphere) just as it removes us from the experience of ‘being’ and casts us into the world of ‘existences.’” [4]

I will submit that part of the instinctive resistance we have to “lockdown culture” resides precisely in such a sensibility. A Zoom meeting with nature, even human nature, is not possible.

Like Havel, his exact contemporary Ivan Illich also saw what technology (not to mention modern medicine!) was doing to us. “If tools are not controlled politically,” he writes, “they will be managed in a belated technocratic response to disaster. Freedom and dignity will continue to dissolve into an unprecedented enslavement of man to his tools” [5]. It’s almost as if he were watching us. I can only imagine what he and Havel are thinking.

Havel, for example, observed the trajectory upon which even Western democracies were headed:

“It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they, too, are being helplessly dragged along by it.” [6]

Bingo.

We have many ways to build our own parallel polis. We can extricate ourselves as much as possible from the technocracy and their flunkies in government and simply live. At Stella Matutina Farm (where I live), for example, we rely almost entirely on traditional tools (with the exception of a few modern contraptions like my chainsaws). We mow some of our grass, but the cattle take care of most of it. And what we do is not an anomaly: most sustainable farmers employing no-dig methods operate pretty much the same way—and even our tiny 1.5 acre garden supplies an enormous amount of food.

But even more, our idea of a parallel polis extends to the social sphere, in particular in the ways we celebrate the Christian year. We observe all the feasts, but our biggest celebration occur at May Day and Michaelmas. At May Day this year, when our state was still under various mandates and most social activities were suppressed by government and, alas, the Church, a friend asked if she could invite some of her friends who were starving for conviviality. Surprisingly, over fifty people—mostly families—showed up to dance around the maypole and feast together. This is what a parallel polis looks like. It may not be much, but it certainly fits what Jiří Dienstbier described as something contributing to “the continual renewal of the meaning of authenticity” [7]. Bureaucracy may be death by a thousand papercuts, but the parallel polis—by which I mean “a sophiological structure”—bestows life by a thousand tiny, some might even say “insignificant,” gestures. Even our recent forays into house church can be seen as an example of this. “The failure of the modern experiment,” as H.J. Massingham so cogently observed, “is seen to be so because it is anti-Christian, anti-natural, and anti-realistic” [8].

It’s not hard. Live in truth.

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. Václav Benda, et al., “Parallel Polis, or an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe: An Inquiry,” Social Research 55, nos. 1-2 (Spring/Summer 1988): 211-46, at 219.

2. Ibid., 228.

3. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless” in Living in Truth, ed. Jan Vladislav (Faber and Faber, 1986), 85.

4. Ibid., 114.

5. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (Harper, 1973), 12.

6. “The Power of the Powerless,” 116.

7. “Parallel Polis,” 231.

8. H.J. Massingham, The Tree of Life (London, 1943), 173.

The Mystical Body of Romanticism

'The Funeral of Shelley' by Louis Édouard Fournier (1889), detail.

Some people, it seems, have a tendency to over-idealize the life I live, as if on our biodynamic farm my family and I shimmer in some agrarian dreamworld in the manner of rather tall hobbits. Ours is certainly a world foreign to that of most of those in my social class (intellectuals, academics, and other learned professionals), but it’s far from idyllic. Farming is hard work, for one thing, and we often put in 12-14 hour days at the height of the growing season. For another, it’s unpredictable—and weather, insects, animals, and a host of other variables can often destroy that which we so earnestly and carefully seek to preserve. And I won’t even get into the human interactions that can often be, well, complicated. In short, farming in this way is not unlike living in a realm somewhat like that depicted in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. But it is a good life. It’s just not an easy one.

My wife and I undertook this life because we wanted something more tangible, more sacred, than that available to us in the wastelands of modernity, overshadowed by corporate superstructures and technocracy and characterized by endemic alienation from the Real. We turned to the land, not only to work it biodynamically as a way to heal the land itself, but also to heal ourselves. Nevertheless, some people think what we do is very quaint, charming even, but dismiss it as nothing but an iteration of Romanticism. I’m fine with that. If the alternative is postmodern alterity and distanciation from the Real, then I’m a card-carrying Romantic.

Paul Kingsnorth, whom I’ve written about recently, also gets smeared with the label of Romantic—and he doesn’t mind, either. And he pushes back. “It seems to me,” he writes, “that Romanticising the past, in our culture at this point in time, is less common than Romanticising the future. The only difference is that Romanticising the future is socially acceptable.” [1] Think about that next time the WEF peddles the chintzy wares of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, they of the “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” (which has mysteriously disappeared from the WEF website. HA!) future. Kingsnorth lives a life not unlike mine (from what I can tell) and even gives workshops on using a scythe. Which is so cool. And I’m sure he understands the challenges and hardships of such a life and doesn’t get lost in misty-eyed fantasies of an agrarian Elysium. We are not, as of the moment, exactly dead.

But Romanticism is not only about returning to the land, though Wordsworth and many of the great Romantics, not to mention Ivan Illich and E. F. Schumacher, have certainly endorsed such an idea. It’s also about fighting, and even dying, for an ideal. What is really worth fighting, let alone dying, for? Certainly not “strategic governmental objectives,” though Truth, Beauty, and Goodness—however one interprets them—surely are. Lord Byron, profligate that he was, gave his life for an ideal (or tried to) when he left his scurrilous lifestyle to fight for Greek independence, a failed but noble cause. As I write this, citizens of Cuba and France show signs of a willingness to fight for an ideal—freedom. What would you fight for?

Romanticism, that is, is messy, hard to nail down, and, therefore, more human than the technocratic promises of Utopia that are the inheritors of the Enlightenment’s hollow project. H. G. Schenk in his The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History, puts it as well as anyone. For him Romanticism is

“a unity […] characterized as contrariness, dissonance and inner conflict of the Romantic mind. Utopian dreams for the future side by side with nostalgia for the past; a marked nihilistic mood accompanied by a fervent yearning for faith; serious attempts to bring about a Christian revival followed, in an admittedly marginal case, by the very abandonment of faith on the part of the former apologist; the long tug-of-war between the old religion and the new ideologies—these are some of the unresolved contradictions which lie at the core of the movement. No shorter formula can be devised to define the essence of Romanticism. All short-cut definitions that have been put forward—well over a hundred—are unsatisfactory.” [2]

Christianity, then, can be construed as a kind of Romanticism. This may be because the god of Christianity is a human god, thereby making Christianity the most human of religions.

Romanticism has, I have to confess, inhabited every phase of my life—from my youth as a musician, my work as a poet and teacher, in my scholarship and writing (Sophiology—hello?), as a husband and father, no less than my thirty years in biodynamics. For me, it’s all about hope: the belief that we can make the Kingdom present in our lives. I heard this in the music that inspired me as a young man—in Kate Bush and The Waterboys, for example—and I felt it in the poets, from the Romantic period and after, who continue to nourish me. They say, with Joyce’s Molly Bloom, “Yes” to this business of being human. The point is that to be human is to be a Romantic. It’s the default position.

One of the great moments of late-20th Century Romanticism.

The great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley met his end in Italy while sailing into a storm. Unfortunately, though a decent sailor, the poet could not swim. When the Tyrrhenian Sea’s waves brought Shelley’s sodden corpse back to land, a volume of Keats was found in one of his jacket pockets, a volume of Sophocles in the other. At Shelley’s funeral, while the poet’s body burned on the shore of Leghorn, his friend Edward Trelawney poured libations of incense, wine, and oil into the flames and consigned Shelley’s remains to the love of Nature. Then, just before the flames devoured it, Trelawney grabbed the poet’s heart.

The mystical body of Romanticism continues to burn, and we are in no danger of running out of fuel. No matter. What needs transfiguring in the fire of time will be transfigured. The treasures we find in its pockets we will cherish, despite fads and the affectations and disaffections of taste. What will remain is the heart, even if some need to risk burning in order to retrieve it. And how beautiful is fire.

A clip from the 2015 film version of Far from the Madding Crowd.

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. Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays (Graywold Press, 2017), 37.

2. H. G. Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History (Frederick Ungar, 1966), xxii.