In Memoriam: Christopher Bamford (1943-2022)

I don’t recall exactly when I first heard the name “Christopher Bamford,” who died Friday morning after a very long battle with cancer, but I do know it was when I was in my mid-twenties and starting to explore the world of ideas that eventually led me to a deeper search for Wisdom and to which I have devoted my life. I recall listening to cassette tapes someone loaned me from the Lindisfarne Association and hearing poet, literary critic, and Blake scholar Kathleen Raine’s admiration for Bamford as a philosopher. I also remember his introductions to other speakers at Lindisfarne (though I don’t recall what he said or who he was introducing). I had no idea how my path through life would be as a fellow traveler with Chris on the path to Wisdom.

I never met Chris in-person, though we did correspond over the last few years; but I did see him once. At the time, I was a Waldorf teacher at a teacher training course at Sunbridge College in New York and visiting the Steiner Books bookstore. For decades, Chris served as editor-in-chief at Steiner Books and his office was in the back of the bookstore. I saw him come out of his office, chat for a second with a clerk, and then disappear into his office. That was the extent of our physical contact. Not too impressive of a meeting. Still, he transformed that press into something impressive and, as my friend and Regeneration Podcast co-host Mike Sauter observes, Chris’s introductions were often the best parts of the books!

Prior to his work at Steiner Books, Chris founded the Lindisfarne Press and published or republished a number of exceptional books on what could be called implicit and explicit sophiological themes. We have a copy of Celtic Christianity: Ecology and Holiness, an anthology put together by Chris and William Parker Marsh that my wife bought before we were married—and I had a copy of Lindisfarne Letter 13, the original source of the book, though I have no idea what’s happened to it. Chris also shepherded the Esalen Institute/Lindisfarne Press’s Library of Russian Philosophy project, which saw new translations and retrofitted earlier translations of some of the great texts of Russian Sophiology, including works by Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Sergei Bulgakov. Seriously, I do not know how I would have become myself without the ready availability of these thinkers in English. They were absolutely formative.

When I was working on my own anthology, the casebook The Heavenly Country (2016), Chris was exceedingly generous in allowing me to use a number of passages from Steiner Books/Lindisfarne books, including long excerpts from Bulgakov’s Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology and Steiner’s Cosmic and Human Metamorphoses. And without charge!

Around that time, I was surprised when Chris expressed interest in attending the Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything conference at my farm in Summer of 2016, though he didn’t make it. It would have been nice. Alas.

Great interview made for the film The Challenge of Rudolf Steiner.

In addition to his gifts as an editor, Chris was also a gifted translator, and his translations of Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz (uncle of the Polish Noble Laureate) are exquisite. In one of the email exchanges I had with Chris (in November 2019—just before the world went completely mad), he told me about a new translation project:

“I am more than half way through translating the complete Angelus Silesius Cherubinic Wanderer and will one day be looking for someone to read through it with a red pencil. “Silesius, of course, takes one deep into Eckhart, Tauler, Suse and the Friends of God territory…. the depths of which almost defy contemplation…”

I hope he was able to finish it. I’d love to read it. Earlier that year, he sent me a translation of one of Novalis’s Spiritual Songs:

Few know

love’s secret,

feel insatiability

and everlasting thirst.

The holy supper’s

celestial meaning

remains a riddle

to earthly senses,

but whoever has drawn

life’s breath

from warm, loved lips,

whoever’s heart holy fervor

has melted in quivering waves,

whoever’s eyes have ever lifted

to measure

heaven’s unfathomable depths—

that person will eat his body

and drink his blood

forever.

For who has guessed the earthly body’s

higher meaning?

Who can say

he understands the blood?

Once all is body,

ONE body, then swims

the blessed couple

in celestial blood—

O! that the world sea

would grow red

and rocks rise up

in fragrant flesh!

Then the magic meal would never end

nor love ever find satisfaction.

You can never have the beloved

inwardly enough, enough your own.

Transformed by ever gentler lips

the companion becomes

more inward, ever closer.

Warmer pleasure

thrills through the soul.

Thirstier, hungrier

grows the heart:

love’s bliss endures

from eternity to eternity.

If ever those fasting

once tasted,

they would abandon all,

and sit down with us

at longing’s table

that never grows empty.

They would never know

love’s unending fullness

and praise the sustenance

of body and blood.

But I think Chris’s greatest contribution was as a writer of deeply insightful, philosophically open, and spiritually profound prose. His book An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West (2003) is as moving and enlightening a book as I have read. In fact, when I was teaching an undergraduate course entitled “Truth and Inquiry” at Siena Heights University in Michigan a few years ago, I used it as a textbook. Its table of contents, in fact, acts like a mirror in which I see my own interests and loves reflected—Sophia, the Eucharist, Hermeticism, Celtic Christianity, the Grail, Novalis, Romanticism, the Rose Cross, the Troubadours, and “Deserts and Gardens,” perhaps the best essay I’ve ever read on the Rosary. He writes with incredible felicity and grace—reading him is a pleasurable experience.

In June of 2020, Chris wrote me regarding a few publishing projects he had in the works, including a follow-up to An Endless Trace. In his words: “The Great Life: Learning to Live between Worlds. This a companion volume to An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West. My old friend and co-creator of Lindisfarne Press, Will Marsh, is presently doing a final copy edit etc. Manuscript should be available by Fall.”

I forwarded the email to my publisher, who was very interested, but I don’t think Chris ever followed-up on it. It may be that he became too ill. I certainly hope it finds a publisher...and soon!

While I never had the grace to call Chris my friend (though, as you can see, he was very kind to me), several friends and acquaintances of mine did, including one of my very best friends, Therese Schroeder-Sheker, who has known Chris for decades. Over the past few years, as we knew Chris’s condition was not improving, I would get occasional updates on his health.

When Therese called me a few days ago and told me Chris was nearing his transitus, I joined her and others in keeping vigil over the leave-taking of this extraordinary and kind soul. In my place, I worked on a guitar arrangement for “And did those feet in ancient time” (also known as “Jerusalem”)—I’m sure Chris, who loved Blake as much as I do, would appreciate it, or at least the effort. I also reread some parts of An Endless Trace. I fear that if I begin quoting the book, I may just copy the whole thing, so beautiful is the prose and filled with truth and goodness the content, but I will suffice with a selection from “Deserts and Gardens”:

“I discovered this viriditas and the healing field of the soul implicit in the Rosary at a very difficult period of my life. It was one in which, forced by circumstances I was powerless to change, I was metaphorically brought to my knees and taught that life is meaning—always, inevitably, and necessarily filled with meaning, whether I recognized it or not. I learned that life always knew best, and was wise, and would always lift me up and carry me, whether I wanted it to or not. I learned, too, that all I could do was respond, with gratitude, praise, and reverence for whatever life brought. I learned that this was healing. I learned it with a force of revelation through the Rosary at the feet and in the presence of Mary Sophia.”

I am certain that revelation is a space which Christopher Bamford now inhabits in as full a way as possible.

Thank you, friend. I owe you so much.

Godspeed.

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.

Romanticism, the Nones, and the Future of Christianity

William Blake, “The Morning Stars Sang Together” (detail) from The Book of Job

Among other things, this semester I am teaching an undergrad course of my own devising, Love & Romanticism. I taught it once before, in that ill-fated semester of 2020 when C0VID blew the whistle on teaching halfway through the semester and we all went home and online. Until that dreadful day, it had been the best course I’d ever taught—and the most enjoyable. The students were spectacular. It was not all that enjoyable once we went online, certainly not due to the students, but because of the weirdness and uncertainty of the times. So I was happy to have another go at it this semester.

Behold! The reading list:

W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Peterson (ed.), The Portable Romantic Poets (Penguin, 1950)

William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Oxford, 1970)

John Keats, Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings, rev. Jon Mee (Oxford, 2002)

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside, ed. Michael Tanner (Penguin, 1993)

Novalis, Hymns to the Night, trans, Dick Higgins (McPherson, 1988)

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus, trans, Stephen Mitchell (Vintage, 1998)

Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love (Lindisfarne, 1985)

We also look at two films: Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion and based on the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne (much of the dialogue comes directly from Keats’s poetry and letters) and Wim Wenders’s masterpiece Wings of Desire. We also consider bits from Hans Jurgen von Syberberg’s epic and imaginative treatment of Wagner’s Parsifal as an ancillary text to Nietzsche.

The course starts with Solovyov’s Meaning of Love so we can start thinking about what love is. As with many things in human existence, we often think we know what love is; but, on serious consideration, we find that maybe we don’t after all. Then we proceed through the English Romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Robert Burns and John Clare—before returning to the Germans—Nietzsche, Wagner, Rilke, and Wenders.

Admittedly, this is an unconventional way to teach Romanticism to undergrad English majors—but consider the source! We also get to talk about Jacob Boehme’s influence on Romanticism, Sophiology (because you can’t talk about Boehme or Novalis or Blake without doing so), Gnosticism, and the various other flowerings of Romanticism (which is where Rilke comes in—and I sprinkle in some Yeats, Milosz, Robert Kelly’s sublime “The Heavenly Country” and so forth).

Milosz’s wonderful “On Angels” as presented by Kathryn Oliver. Romanticism sit!

I’ve written a fair amount about Romanticism in the past, including an essay in The Midwest Quarterly, a section of The Submerged Reality, and on this blog. And recently I had a great conversation about Sophia in Exile with the wonderful Piers Kaniuka which had Romanticism as one of its main themes. It’s a subject I can’t keep away from, for, in my estimation, Romanticism is a kindred spirit to Sophiology.

This week, my class finished our section on William Blake, having covered Novalis the week before. It is impossible to read either Novalis or Blake without talking about Christianity, as idiosyncratic as their iterations of it are. But, being a guy whose iteration of Christianity is also pretty idiosyncratic, I’m just the man for the job.

Many of my college students come from families where no one really professes a religious allegiance, though they might be called “culturally Christian” in the way that the families of Ann Frank and Simone Weil were considered “culturally Jewish” in the early 20th century. Some come from “spiritual but not religious” backgrounds, some have atheist parents, and, to be sure, some also come from religiously observant families, but not many. This group of students is not different.

But I had a pleasant surprise this week.

After class yesterday, one young woman from the course came to my office about her research project for the year. We talked about her plan, but we—actually she—also talked about what is happening with her generation. “After class I was talking to Bridget,” she told me, “and we think that people our age really want a religion—or something like religion—because we know it’s missing from our lives. That’s why we love talking about Novalis and Blake. Blake is my guy! But we don’t see anything like that available to us in the various forms of Christianity out there. Where is it?” The week before another student had told me that she thought the lockdowns and madness of the past two years have had at least one good unintended consequence—they’ve made some people in her age group more thoughtful, more preoccupied with “the Life Questions” (my words, not hers), more interested in reading and looking for meaning. I told them about John Vervaeke’s lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and about my own work in Sophiology that is nothing if not invested in addressing this crisis by proposing a genuine engagement with the Real. And it’s not only this random selection of college undergrads. I hear from people almost weekly who have discovered my work to their great relief at finding that meaning still has meaning in this cold and technocratic environment.

Unfortunately, I don’t place much trust in the institutional churches as places in which such souls will find a home. Even though I wrote in The Submerged Reality that the “noble failure” of the Romantics was due to their seeming inability to ground their Romanticism in tradition or the established churches (though Franz von Baader gave it a shot), the Church of This Our Age is more or less crumbling along with all of the other institutions—in education, in economics, in government—and does not seem to me to be up to the task of welcoming these idealistic spirits in a way that will not smother the spark that moves them. I cannot help but think that Jacques Derrida was right when he proposed the possibility of “a religion without religion.” As we read in Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” this week:

We are led to Believe a Lie

When we see not Thro’ the Eye,

Which was born in a Night to perish in a Night,

When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light.

God appears and God is Light,

To those poor souls who dwell in Night,

But does a Human Form Display

To those who Dwell in Realms of Day.

Or, as the great Jamaican Romantics Bob Marley and Peter Tosh would have it:

You see, most people think

Great God will come from the sky

Take away everything

And make everybody feel high

But if you know what life is worth

You would look for yours on earth

And now you see the light

You stand up for your rights

As I’ve written before, just as the German and English Romantics were rejecting the cold and anti-human values of the Enlightenment (what a misnomer!) and the Scientific Revolution, so there will be thinkers, poets, artists, politicians, and yes, scientists, who will reject The Great Reset, the Metaverse, and the scientism (“I’m not religious; I believe in science!”) of our times. It’s happened before—and not just in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s happened with the Celtic Twilight, with Rilke, with Milosz, with Apollinaire, with T. S. Eliot, and there were whispers of it in the idealism of the sixties, and in the New Romantics of the 80s. Romanticism, that is, is always/already happening.

So the students in this course, rather unexpectedly, have given me a greater hope for the future. And they are not outliers. As Thomas Vaughan writes in his bombastic introduction to The Fame and Confession of the Fraternity of R.C., commonly, of the Rosie Cross, “the School-men have got the Day, not by Weight but by Number,” we Romantics might say that the technocrats, likewise, have the day, not by weight but by number. Number, data, is all a technocrat understands. Some understand more of reality, and it is to them the future of Christianity belongs.

A performance of “Jerusalem” that brought ol' Professor Martin nearly to tears

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.

The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse

I have a lot of books. Though I’ve never taken an inventory, my library probably totals in the low thousands, everything from farming to mead making and distilling, literature and literary criticism, arts and crafts, science, biography, theology, philosophy, psychology, history, not to mention many obscure works on magic, alchemy, astrology, and other esoteric subjects. I wrote my dissertation on a number of poets, mystics, and alchemists—John Donne, Henry Vaughan and his alchemist identical twin Thomas, Jane Lead, Sir Kenelm Digby, and John Dee—so there’s my excuse.

Recently, I was interviewed by the very generous Piers Kaniuka for his Youtube channel, Resistance Recovery. We were scheduled to discuss my latest book, Sophia in Exile, but we also spent a good chunk of our conversation talking about the various manifestations of Romanticism—in the 18th century and with the hippies in the 20th, for example—and the Occult Revival and the Celtic Twilight movements of the 19th century came up as an example of resistance to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, the technocracies of its time.

When Marygrove College, where I used to work as a professor of English, philosophy, and religious studies, announced it would close at the end of the semester, the library started selling off its collection at 10 cents a piece. Tempt me not, Satan! I did my best to clear the joint. I loaded up on all kinds of books in my various disciplines. Among books by the great Continental philosophers and medieval mystics and theologians, I scored C.G. Jung’s Collected Works (though one volume is in absentia) and the 10-volume set of Donne’s Sermons—that was a good thing, too, because all of my notes from my dissertation research on the sermons were still inscribed in the margins. Don’t judge me: it was obviously all part of God’s plan. I meant to grab the collected works of Sigmund Freud, but the last day of the semester was a snow day and school was closed. I still have nightmares about it.

I have a number of collector’s items, though I used to have more. In my twenties I collected rare books. Let’s call it an investment strategy. Times were hard financially early in my marriage, however, so I ended up selling a lot of the books so we could buy stuff like, you know, food. But I still have a few treasures. I have first editions of Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism and W.B. Yeats’s A Vision and I have a collection of The Spectator from 1714 that I picked up twenty years ago in a junk shop in, I think, Niagara Falls, Ontario or someplace thereabouts.

But one of the more curious books I own is one I picked up at Marygrove for a dime. The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse was almost an afterthought. I write about poetry and mysticism, so I grabbed it as one might grab a candy bar at the grocery store checkout line. Impulse item. It sat on the shelf for a couple of years. Then I read it. Wow.

The book starts out, surprisingly, not with Cædmon, but with an incantation:

Amergin

I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,

I am the wave of the ocean,

I am the murmur of the billows,

I am the ox of the seven combats,

I am the vulture upon the rocks,

I am the beam of the sun,

I am the fairest of plants,

I am the wild boar in valour,

I am the salmon in the water,

I am a lake in the plain,

I am a word of science,

I am the point of a lance in battle,

I am the God who creates in the head the fire.

Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain?

Who announces the ages of the moon?

Who teaches the place where couches the sun?

Dang.

Actually, Cædmon never appears. Which is odd.

The book, which was published in 1921, features many of the poets one would expect: Southwell, the Metaphysicals, Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley (no Keats), Cardinal Newman, the Brownings, Tennyson, Whitman, George MacDonald, both Dante and Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Francis Thompson, G.K. Chesterton, and John Masefield. It also includes some lesser known poets, such as the Roman Catholic nun Augusta Theodosia Drane, the Pre-Raphaelite Arthur W. E. O’Shaughnessy, Yeats’s one-time love interest Katherine Tynan, and the great Canadian poet Bliss Carman. But then it gets really weird.

The big surprise (for me, anyway) was to find so many poets of the Occult Revival and the Celtic Twilight included. I expected Yeats of course—though he only gets two poems! This was, to be sure, before his late flowering and some of his strongest poems, such as “The Second Coming,” “Lapis Lazuli,” and “Sailing to Byzantium.” Here he is represented by “The Rose of Battle” and “To the Secret Rose.” Also included are Yeats’s countryman, the visionary, poet, and social reformer Æ (George Russell) and Yeats’s co-editor of Blake, Edmond Ellis. Alongside these more conventional poets, however, were some real eye-openers.

The collection includes three poems by the (almost entirely unknown today) mystical Freemason W. L. Wilmshurst and work by esoteric historian A.E. Waite, not to mention offerings from William Sharp (also known under the nom de plume Fiona Macleod), the spiritualist Elsa Barker, the Irish pantheist Edmond Holmes, the aforementioned Evelyn Underhill, as well as—wait for it—the magician and all-round naughty person Aleister Crowley—who gets more space than Yeats!

This all kind of blew me away—this was the Oxford University Press, after all. So I checked into the editors, D.H.S. Nicholson and A.H.F. Lee. Both, it turns out, were members of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—which kind of shatters Oxford’s reputation for propriety and decorum. But this explains many of the others included in the collection—Yeats, Sharp, Underhill, Waite, Wilmshurst, and (I think Barker)—were also members of the Golden Dawn. And in the same lodge! Not much else is known about Nicholson, he seems to have been independently wealthy, but Lee was an Anglican priest.

Still, how did these guys swing the editing gig? The plot, as they say, here thickens. As I discovered, a young editor then at the Oxford University Press hired the editors for the job. His name: Charles Williams. That’s right: the Inkling—but the edgy Inkling. Williams, not surprisingly, also belonged to the Golden Dawn for a period, so The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse then becomes a kind of in-group project, the Esoteric Squad, so to speak.

Another interesting tidbit: Late in the book, which moves chronologically, in the section in which the Golden Dawn poets appear, two poems attributed to “Anonymous” appear. Usually in these kinds of collections, the anonymous poems appear in the beginning, derived as they are from “the dark backward and abysm of time” in which names often become lost to us. These two poems, “At the Feet of Isis” and “A Ballade of the Centre,” then are curiously placed and curiously attributed. I haven’t been able to find any scholarly evidence yet, but my money says they belong to none other than Charles Williams himself. Here’s the closing stanza of “At the Feet of Isis,” chock full of sophianicity:

Her feet are in the darkness, but Her face

Is in high Heav’n—all Truth inhabits there;

All Knowledge and all Peace, and perfect grace,

And in the wonder of Her joy they share

Who, blindly clinging to Her feet erstwhile,

Obtained the priceless gift—the vision of Her smile.

Tell me this isn’t by the same guy who wrote The Figure of Beatrice.

Amazing what a dime can purchase nowadays.

Not in the book: but it should be!

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.