News from the Edge of the World

A few thoughts and observations, possibly related, but not by design.

Stella Matutina Farm

Last week our CSA ended for the year (CSA, for those of you who might not know, stands for “Community Supported Agriculture”). Our last shares included onions, celery, winter squash, arugula, garlic, and the remnant of our hot and sweet peppers. I haven’t calculated how much produce we sent out over our nineteen weeks of the CSA, but it is certainly in thousands and thousands of pounds. We fed thirty-three families over this time—clean, biodynamically-grown, nutrient-dense produce. Our garden is only about ¾ of an acre. That’s a lot of people (not including my own family) who can be fed from a relatively small amount of land.

We practice what used to be called “the French intensive method” for growing and also observe “no-dig” approaches to cultivation. We almost never use heavy machinery. This was the seventh year of farming at this location, and the fertility and health of the farm are astounding. We had very few problems with insects—almost none at all—though we did have some rabbits poaching a few vegetables. But the creation of a biodynamic farm is the creation of a synergistic relationship with nature. That’s a long way of saying the farm is starting to come into its maturity. The being of the farm has shown itself to us.

That reminds me: I think I may have seen the Great Pan in the woods just beyond the garden a few weeks ago.

With the coming of the Fall, the rhythm of the farm changes. We haven’t been doing much in the garden (outside of harvesting), though I do need to plant garlic pretty soon. Instead, our attention turns more to getting through winter. To this end, we brought our lambs to the butcher and will process our geese next week (and I do have some older laying hens—no longer laying all that much—who need to follow them pretty soon thereafter and be turned into stewing hens). Our steer will move along sometime in late winter. And did I mention deer season is coming up? We’re still milking our cow, Fiona, and we’ve been trying to put up some butter and cheeses and will continue to do so. I also have been curing some pork bellies, rendering beeswax, and making meads and metheglins. In fact, I have a metheglin working right now I’ve flavored with juniper berries and spruce twigs—should be ready for Christmas. In the basement we have baskets and boxes full of potatoes, sweet potatoes, red and yellow onions, and winter squash and still have to pull the rutabaga, arugula, kohlrabi, and collards from the garden; but they should all be able to last in their beds for a few more weeks. Then we’ll plant spinach in the hoop house. And I haven’t even mentioned cutting up some fallen trees in the woods for use in the wood stove next year.

The take-home: scarcity is a myth.

Oh yeah, I’m a scholar. I almost forgot.

I recently delivered a keynote address for the “Pavel Florensky for the Twenty-first Century” conference sponsored by The Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies at Cambridge University. The title of my talk was “The Colour Blue: On the Sophiology of Pavel Florensky” (note the British spelling!). I heard proceedings from the conference may be published in book form, but I haven’t heard anything about video of the talks being made available. Other speakers included my soul brothers John Milbank and Bruce Foltz. Many of my readers will be familiar with John, but, if you don’t know about Bruce, check out his very fine book The Noetics of Nature.

I will participating in a colloquium on The Brothers Karamazov in Washington, DC next month. This will happen right after the election. Last time I was in DC, it was for another colloquium just after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Women were still wearing their knitted “pussy hats.” I imagine this visit may be just as fun. Speaking of eye-rolling, I may do one touristy thing while I’m there: visit the Exorcist stairs!

In addition, I will also be giving a talk on Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot next month at the Detroit branch (though actually in Berkley) of The Theosophical Society on November 4th. Starts at 7:00.

Speaking of Meditations on the Tarot, Mike Sauter and I recently interviewed its English translator, astrosopher and spiritual researcher, Robert Powell about the book (and many other things) on The Regeneration Podcast, which you can listen to on Podbean, Podchaser, and Spotify or watch on YouTube. While you’re there, subscribe. We recently interviewed, among others, Dominic D’Souza, Mark Vernon, and Ronald Hutton--so check them out! Upcoming guests include David Bentley Hart, Jonathan Geltner (see below), and Matthew Milliner, whose Mother of the Lamb has just been published and is mandatory reading for anyone interested in Sophiology.

Oh...and I finally uploaded the video on my interview with biblical scholar and Methodist preacher Margaret Barker. which appeared in print in Jesus the Imagination, Volume 5: The Divine Feminine, to my YouTube channel.

Reading list: besides rereading Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, I have been reading Jonathan Geltner’s excellent Absolute Music. You should read it too. I also have a stack of books on Distributism, enclosure, agrarianism, and folk religion on hand as I plan on getting a book on these themes (and others) finished before the next CSA year gets into full swing in April.

If I do say so myself, I also wrote a lovely arrangement of (and departure from) Hubert Perry’s setting of Blake’s “And did those feet in ancient time (Jerusalem)” which I would love to record one of these days.

Plant your love and let it grow.

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: Flesh & Spirit. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

Sophia in Exile: An Introduction

My latest book, Sophia in Exile, appeared in print last week courtesy of Angelico Press. Below is the introduction as found in the text.~ mm

INTRODUCTION: NOTES FROM EXILE

After Francis of Assisi and his companions walked the hundred and ten or so miles from Assisi to Rome, a trek that took days, in order to petition approval for founding the Order of Friars Minor, the cardinals interviewing them asked what their rule would be. Pretty straightforward question. Francis, a pretty straightforward man, held up the book of the Gospels. The cardinalate thought he must be either mistaken or a fool, since such a rule “seemed a thing untried, and too hard for human strength.” [1] That says pretty much all we need to know about ecclesial governance. Very few princes of the Church take out their own garbage or dirty their hands with manual labor. Living the Gospel, for all their preaching, is ultimately impractical: at worst a nuisance, at best an ideal. Even the order Francis founded couldn’t live up to its own principles and strayed from them during Francis’s lifetime. It brought him great sorrow.

When it happened, I had no idea how prophetic an event the tragic fire at Notre-Dame de Paris on 15 April 2019 would prove to be. It’s a fitting icon for a Church in distress, the weight of its own corruption, not least the ongoing sex scandals that fill us with shame and anger, evidence as they are of an ecclesial structure inured to the sufferings of its victims and further complicated by the manner in which some of its most powerful leaders have continued to shield their own from scrutiny. These are symptoms of a deeper pathology. The hierarchy’s inept and milquetoasty response to the global pandemic that began in early 2020 only further betrays how indifference has become a cardinal virtue. How many millions died without receiving the last sacraments? How many more left the Church permanently because it was too hard for the hierarchy to live out the Gospel and too easy to play the political sycophant? Did Christ wait until lepers were no longer contagious to heal them?

It was under these conditions and in this frame of mind that I wrote this book.

This book, however, is not a jerimiad on the sins and ineptitude of the hierarchy, or even about living through the madness of the pandemic. These things, I think, are only tangential, though nonetheless symptomatic, of a deeper estrangement from the Real that is the true source of our cosmological dissociation, and which has its roots deep in the historical Christian imaginary. This dissociation did not begin with the conflagration of Notre-Dame, nor with the complicity of bishops in the abuses among their ranks. When Christ told Francis “Rebuild my Church,” he was not speaking of San Damiano, though that was what Francis thought at the time. Perhaps he was telling us the same thing with the burning of Notre-Dame, for “every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire” (1 Cor 3:13).

I wrote the first chapter, after which the book is named, in 2019. I did not return to the project until fall of 2020, the confusion of the pandemic and work on my farm taking all of my attention in the interim. Looking at it now, the book can be called the third in a trilogy that started with The Submerged Reality (2015) and continued with Transfiguration (2018), though writing a trilogy was at no point my intention. But here we are. I felt the need to write this book because I came to realize that I had left some things, such as the Gnostic mythos of Sophia and the sophiological structure of marriage, undeveloped in those previous books, and I wanted to provide insight into the poetic metaphysics of Sophiology by deeper examinations of Eleanor Farjeon, Thomas Traherne, the legend of the Holy Grail, the Rosary, and the radical Christian philosophy of Nikolai Berdyaev (the chapter on whom was originally published in the Russian journal Тетради по консерватизму [Essays on Conservatism]). In addition, I felt a call to write on the Creation and our relationship to it—as a biodynamic farmer, this is an environment in which I live and move and have my being—as well as to contribute something on the role of human creativity. These areas of contemplation organically brought me to a consideration of the Realm of Faerie, which has thankfully been getting more serious attention from John Milbank and David Bentley Hart, among others.

As a result of all these commitments and interests, what you have in your hands here is (with the exception of my poetry) the most personal of all of my books to this point. Sophiology, it is my contention, is above all something one does, a way of being. It is not a grand theory, a beautiful intellectual construction. No. Sophiology is an entrance into life.

In the Gnostic mythos, Sophia lives in exile, trapped in a kind of spiritual prison. We, too, live in exile, which is also a spiritual prison. Most of all, we live in exile from the Divine and the Creation. As the pandemic and the ever-increasing totalization of the technocracy have shown, we are also in exile from each other, and, ultimately, from ourselves. This is an untenable situation and one which, if left unchecked, will have disastrous repercussions, many of which are deep into their implementation stages. The antidote to such a situation, as I argue in these pages, lies in reorienting ourselves to the Real, to the sophianic structure of the world. Like St. Francis’s project, this is one of simplicity and not applicable to the needs of hierarchies of power and influence. In essence, what Sophiology offers is a regeneration of life by an engagement with what is Real. And this regeneration is conditioned by learning how to see.

Love is integral to this seeing, as both agapeic opening and as erotic longing. This integral seeing is in not characterized by a spiritual acquisitiveness or desire to possess, so much as it is a product of the subject’s entrance into a loving disposition to that which shines through the world. St. Paul describes such a condition in 1 Corinthians: “If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God” (8:2–3). Those who try to turn Sophiology (or any theological or philosophical gesture) into a method for comprehending or containing the world are barking up the wrong sacred tree. The first movement is in love, and the response to love is not “to know” but to be known.

And in that spirit, I welcome you to these pages.

1. Bonaventura, The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi (London: J. M. Dent, 1904), 30.

When You’re a Feminist Theologian Like Me

Me, when I looked more like a feminist theologian

I never really considered myself a feminist theologian. In fact, I never really considered myself a theologian at all—that is, until I read John Milbank’s jacket endorsement for The Submerged Reality when it was published six years ago:

“In The Submerged Reality, Michael Martin suggests why a radicalized orthodoxy in the future will need more to ‘walk on the wild side’ and appropriate what is best in the esoteric, occult, and even gnostic traditions. He intimates that the past failure to do this is linked to a one-sidedly masculine theology, downgrading the sacrality of life, immanence, fertility, and the ‘active receptivity’ of the feminine. The consequence of this has been the perverse liberal attempt to distill ‘order out of disorder,’ or the denial of real essences, relations, gender difference, and the objective existence of all things as beautiful. Finally, Martin argues that such a genuinely feminist theology would also be concerned with a space between the openly empirical observation of nature on the one hand, and the reflective exposition of divine historical revelation on the other. In this space, continuously new poetic realities are shaped and emerge under the guidance of holy inspiring wisdom.”

Most of the feminist theology I had read until that time had been of the “Airing of Grievances” variety or that which might have belonged to what the late Harold Bloom once called in literary studies “The Schools of Resentment.” I just can’t get into it. As readers of my books and this blog will no doubt know, I have never liked political agendas posing as philosophy or theology (let alone art and science), so I have for most of my career forged my own, admittedly idiosyncratic, path through the dull and thoughtless morass of postmodern culture. And most feminist theology is of such a political variety. As such, it doesn’t interest me.

Nevertheless, after John contributed his endorsement, I started to think that maybe he was onto something and that maybe I am doing a sort of feminist theology, though in a very Derridean way: I am doing feminist theology without feminist theology.

Me, when somebody gets up in my grill about Sophiology

Some people like this, from what I can tell; and some people despise it. But I am no longer at a stage of life where this concerns me overmuch. I remember reading an interview with Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange and other works. The interviewer asked Burgess what readership he had in mind while crafting his novels. The author replied (I’m paraphrasing): “I write for lapsed Catholics, who grew up in Manchester, and who are my age. That is, I write for myself.” This is pretty much my disposition.

Recently, I have experienced a little pushback about the latest installment of the journal I founded and edit, Jesus the Imagination. Our latest issue is themed “The Divine Feminine” and it includes a breathtaking essay by Rev. Alison Milbank, a mother, professor, and Anglican priest (though I think she would be okay with the term “priestess”) who also happens to be married to John Milbank. In addition, it includes, among other fine contributions, a critique of clericalism by Therese Schroeder-Sheker along with her luminous reminder of traditional Christian communities that were far more whole, and my interview with Methodist preacher and biblical scholar Margaret Barker on the position of the Divine Feminine in First Temple Judaism and beyond. I always expect pushback (Come on—the first sentence of The Submerged Reality is “Let us start a war.”) and I’m not afraid of controversy. So there.

Some are offended (as I interpret it) that I would include work by a woman priest in Jesus the Imagination, as if I were somehow endorsing a female priesthood. Good Lord. I am against the idea of women priests—if having women priests somehow includes the emasculation of the male priesthood and results in a hermaphroditic gender-neutral priesthood (which is why I prefer the term “priestess”). To appropriate Flannery O’Connor, “If that’s what a priesthood is, then to hell with it.”

What I love about Alison’s essay is that it speaks to the charisms of a feminine priesthood (which is what brought me to tears on first reading it) and doesn’t indulge in another dreadful take on the “We can do it!” meme so prevalent on the doors of feminist professors. (Feminist theologian that I am, I don’t have one). But I am all for a female priesthood that preserves the integrity of biblical gendered typology. The last thing we need is to eradicate the sacredness of gender (“Let us create man in our image...male and female created he them.”) and the thought of starting the holiest of prayers with “Our Parent, who art in heaven...” makes me nauseous.

If Sophiology has anything to contribute to this debate, it is that Sophiology encourages (“demands” is probably a better word) that, in the quest for a female priesthood, we preserve the integrity of the biblical gendered typology so endangered in our technocratric universe. Talk about timely and radical. Otherwise, it’s just another boring poster, another slogan on a coffee mug.

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.