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.

The God of the Technocrats

In the Zoroastrian mythos, Ahriman (or Angra Mainyu) is the spiritual power who opposes Ahura Mazdao (or Ormazd), the Creator, whose name means “Lord of Wisdom.” In his early novel Cosmic Puppets (1957),Philip K. Dick uses the Ahura Mazdao/Ahriman binary in the story of the battle between spiritual and cosmic evil and good played out in small town Virginia; it was kind of a precursor to Dick’s later fascination with Gnostic dualism and in no small part influenced his thoughts on what we would now call mass surveillance and transhumanism.

The concept of Ahriman also appears in the writing of the great Russian radical Christian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev and became a fundamental idea in the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner. For both Berdyaev and Steiner, Ahriman represents the technological, the materialistic, and the technocratic, that which seeks always to turn human beings into collectivist and efficient machines: emotionless, unfeeling, and inartistic—like the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

In the introduction to The Meaning of the Creative Act (1914), Berdyaev confesses himself a dualist (with some serious qualifications):

“I confess an almost manichean dualism. So be it. “The world” is evil, it is without God and not created by Him. We must go out of the world, overcome it completely: the world must be consumed, it is of the nature of Ariman, Freedom from the world is the pathos of this book. There is an objective source of evil, against which we must wage an heroic war. The necessity of the given world and the given world itself are of Ariman.” [1]

And then the qualifications:

“Over against this stands freedom in the spirit, life in divine love, life in the Pleroma. And I also confess an almost pantheistic monism. The world is divine in its very nature. Man is, by his nature, divine. The world-process is self-revelation of Divinity, it is taking place within Divinity. God is immanent in the world and in man. The world and man are immanent in God. Everything which happens with man happens with God. There is no dualism of divine and extra-divine nature, of God's absolute transcendence of the world and of man.”

He is completely aware of the antinomy and embraces it.

In The Meaning of History (1923), Berdyaev returns to the Zoroastrian understanding of Ahriman is his consideration of history and, what is always a preoccupation of his, eschatology:

“The conflict between Ormuz and Ariman is resolved by a catastrophe which brings about the end of history and the beginning of something else. Without this sense of an end, the process cannot be conceived as historical movement. Without this eschatological perspective progression cannot be considered as history, for it lacks inner purpose, significance, and fulfillment.” [2]

The Eschaton, I think it’s spiritually healthy to say, is always already happening. It’s only that sometimes it is easier to perceive.

My guess is that Berdyaev first became intrigued by the religious and sociological implications of the concept of Ahriman during the period of his interest in Rudolf Steiner. Berdyaev’s friend, the poet and novelist Andrei Bely (real name Boris Bukarev) was an early Russian enthusiast of Steiner’s and encouraged his friend to read some of the Austrian philosopher’s work, and even entreated him to attend lectures of Steiner’s in Helsingfors, Finland in 1913. Berdyaev was never completely sold on Steiner, but neither did he completely dismiss him. He returns to Steiner often in his work, sometimes in approval and sometimes in critique. But he takes him seriously.

Steiner’s treatment of Ahriman is much more developed and complex than Berdyaev’s. Clearly inspired by Hegelian dialectic, Steiner reads Ahriman as part of a polarity with Christ as the mediator:

“To gain a right conception of the historical evolution of mankind over approximately 6000 years, one must grasp that at the one pole stands an incarnation of Lucifer, in the center the incarnation of Christ, and at the other pole the incarnation of Ahriman. Lucifer is the power that stirs up all fanatical, all falsely mystical forces in human beings, all that physiologically tends to bring the blood into disorder and so lift man above and outside himself. Ahriman is the power that makes people dry, prosaic, philistine—that ossifies them and brings them in the superstition of materialism. And the true nature and being of man is essentially the effort to hold the balance between the powers of Lucifer and Ahriman; the Christ impulse helps present humanity to establish this equilibrium.” [3]

One way to think of this is to turn to basic human psychology. Say a person is drawn to an extreme self-expression characterized by a very narcissistic interpretation of “freedom”—which is how Steiner understands the workings of Lucifer. Well, just desiring this freedom might not be enough to actualize it without medical or technological interventions, so the person in question undergoes such intervention, often resulting in a lifelong dependency on various drugs or other chemical therapies or even mechanical manipulation of the body. This is what Steiner would call an ahrimanic gesture: the capitualtion to the technological (or technocratic). So we can see how the luciferic tendency can deliver the individual into the clutches of the ahrimanic. The desire for freedom, then, leads one into a life of slavery.

Speaking in 1919, Steiner explains how this tendency not only impacts individual human persons, but can also impact societies:

“Ahriman has the greatest possible interest in instructing men in mathematics, but not in instructing them that mathematical-mechanistic concepts of the universe are merely illusions. He is intensely interested in teaching us the concepts of chemistry, physics, biology and so on, as they are presented today in all their remarkable effects, and in making us believe that these are absolute truths, not that they are only points of view, like photographs taken from one side. If you photograph a tree from one side, it can be a correct photograph, yet it does not give a picture of the whole tree. If you photograph a tree from one side, it can be a true likeness, yet it does not give a picture of the whole tree as can be gained from photographing it from four sides. Ahriman has the greatest interest in concealing from mankind that in modern intellectual, rationalistic science, in superstitious empiricism, one is dealing with a great illusion, a deception—that men should not recognize this is of the greatest possible interest to Ahriman. It would be a triumphant experience for him if the scientific superstition which infiltrates all areas of life today and which human beings even try to use as a template for the social sciences should prevail into the third millennium. He would have the greatest success if he could then arrive in western civilization in human form and find the scientific superstition as prevailing dogma.” [4]

Here we are.

And, in a stirring piece of prophecy, Steiner describes the method of Ahriman:

“The second means that he employs is to stir up all the emotions that fragment people into small groups—groups that attack one another. You need only look at all the conflicting parties that exist today, and if you are unprejudiced you will recognize that the explanation is not to be found in human nature alone. If people honestly try to explain this so-called universal warfare through human disharmonies, they will realize that it cannot in fact be attributed to physical humanity. It is precisely here that ‘super-sensible’ powers, ahrimanic powers, have been at work.” [5]

In short, the desire for luciferian freedom has led to advent of ahrimanic transhumanism.

I have been teaching and writing about transhumanism, the great leap forward in human evolution by integration of biology with technology, for about twenty years. When I first started thinking about the topic and discussing its ramifications with my students, most of them seemed to think I was making a big deal out of nothing. This could never happen, they said. It’s just science fiction or a wet dream for computer nerds. Well, it’s happening. It began with promises of liberation and ends with a kind of slavery, whether to pharmacological, governmental, or corporate hegemony (and most effectively when the three are united). Transhumanism is only one tool of technocracy.

I write at length in my book Transfiguration about Ahriman in contrast to Sophia. In fact, to find an alternative to this dreadful state of affairs proposed by the threat of transhumanism is part of what drew me to Sophiology, which is, to my mind, the only antidote to the ghastly scenarios promised by technocracy, whether ushered in by a “Great Reset,” the lure of universal basic income, or any other promise of Utopia, a promise of freedom—from constraint, financial hardship, from illness, from worry—that invariably results in slavery.

What I’m saying, then, is that what we are in the middle of is a spiritual battle, a battle between the ahrimanic black magic of the technocrats and what we can call the white magic of Sophia. The late Ioan Couliano figured this out a long time ago:

“Nowadays the magician busies himself with public relations, propaganda, market research, sociological surveys, publicity, information, counterinformation and misinformation, censorship, espionage, and even cryptography—a science which in the sixteenth century was a branch of magic.... Historians have been wrong in concluding that magic disappeared with the advent of ‘quantitative science.’ The latter simply substituted itself for a part of magic while extending its dreams and its goals by means of technology.” [6]

Sound familiar?

I doubt most technocrats believe in the existence of Ahriman (or God for that matter, not to mention Sophia) and they certainly don’t pray to him. But there is no doubt that they worship him.

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. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, trans. Donald A. Lowrie (New York, 1962), 15.

2. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of History, trans. George Reavey (New York, 1962), 40.

3. Rudolf Steiner, The Incarnation of Ahriman: The Embodiment of Evil on Earth: Seven Lectures, trans. Matthew Barton (Forest Row, UK: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2006), 17–18.

4. Ibid., 22.

5. Ibid., 23.

6. Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 109.