The New Dark Ages / The New Middle Ages

In his magisterial, if somewhat long-in-the-tooth study The Waning of the Middle Ages, Jan Huizinga diagnoses the end of that mysterious and wondrous time in decidedly psychological terms. “At the close of the Middle Ages,” writes Huizinga, “a somber melancholy weighs on people’s minds.” [1] As I have written on this blog and in my recent book, Sophia in Exile, I detect a similar melancholy strain in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, originally published by early English publisher Caxton in 1485 during the twilight of those same Middle Ages. The same sensibility resounds in this famous engraving by Dürer:

I raise these points not out of scholarly or antiquarian interests, but because I see the same cultural development all around me. We, too, are living during a cultural decline and deflation characterized by melancholy; and I would argue that the “pandemic” (read “plague” if you want) is not so much a cause but a symptom of this degeneration.

Like the medieval period, our times are a blend of superstition and ignorance combined with blind faith and an increasingly feudal societal structure. I see superstitious belief in “the science,” which has taken over the authority once held by the Church, replete with the punishment of heretics. I see ignorance widespread, but particularly in college students, who don’t seem to know much about anything for the most part. They’re completely ignorant about history—even the Holocaust—religion, philosophy, politics. I could go on. I noticed this decades ago when I started teaching, but it is far worse (and even more depressing to behold) now. As I said to a class yesterday, “If you don’t ask the Life Questions now, when will you? How can you learn to Live in Truth if you’ve never thought seriously about what Truth is?” People really don’t go to college looking for answers to these questions anymore; their aims, though no fault of their own making, are more utilitarian. As a result, the last generation or so is more susceptible to the influence of propaganda, and ours is certainly the Golden Age of Propaganda, aided and augmented by the pernicious prevalence of social media and surveillance technologies. Perhaps students can’t grapple with the Life Question because they’ve been trained by these technologies to avoid them in order to avoid social and technological ostracization and recrimination. But what should one expect when even a Supreme Court nominee can’t answer simple question about biology?

Unlike the earlier age, our own is not suffused by a religious culture. So we don’t get the consolation of Heaven, only the threat of a technocratic Hell. “You’ll own nothing and be happy” is the promise of the new manorial barons to their ignorant and obedient serfs. We should expect nothing less: we’ve been chemically and technologically lobotomized.

All this is to say that we are now living in a New Dark Age. There is simply no other way to describe it.

Nikolai Berdyaev saw all of this over a hundred years ago. In his book The End of Our Time, first published in Russian in 1919, Berdyaev, taking the mantle of prophet, looks into the future: “The time is coming fast when everyone will have to ask himself whether ‘progress’ was progress or whether it was a most vicious ‘reaction,’ a movement away from the meaning of the universe and the authentic foundations of life.” [2] He wrote this under the threats of Communism and Socialism, “the end and crown of all contemporary history,” a phrase he used as the opposite of a compliment. [3]

Berdyaev, however, also prophesied the coming of what he called “The New Middle Ages.” He did not propose a retrograde movement to the past, but traced the trajectorial habits of history to predict what would happen next: an era of universality, that was also a feature of the earlier Middle Ages: “The idea of universality so characteristic of the middle ages has ceased to have any influence in ours. It is only when human personality is rooted in the universal, in the cosmos, that it finds an ontological ground to give it its chief substance.” [4] But his vision also has economic and social implications:

“By this path we should be obliged to revive rural economy and return to trades, organizing ourselves into economic association and trade corporations. The town will have to link up with the country again, and competition be replaced by co-operation. The principle of private property will be kept as an eternal foundation, but will be limited and spiritualized in application: no more of those scandalous huge private fortunes with which we are so familiar. There will be no pretence at equality, but neither will there be avoidable hunger and poverty. We shall have to have a much more simple and elementary material culture and a spiritual culture that is more complex.” [5]

The future, that is, is a religious one. It is also a Distributist one (if only the alleged Distributitists would stop reading The Hobbit for five minutes and actually do something.) But Berdyaev also has something to say about woman in this future (and he doesn’t need to be a biologist to do so):

“It seems to me that women will be very much to the fore in the new middle ages; an exclusively masculine culture was undermined by the war [WWI], and in these later most trying years the influence of women has been considerable and their achievements recognized as great. Woman is bound more closely than man to the soul of the world and its primary elemental forces, and it is through her that he reaches communion with them. Masculine culture is too rationalizing, out of touch with the mysteries of universal life: this is corrected through woman. Women are filling a notably important role in the present religious revival; as in the gospel, they are predestined to be the myrrh-bearers. Day is the time of the exclusive predominance of masculine culture; at night the feminine element receives her rights…. It is the eternal feminine that has so great a future in coming history, not the emancipated woman or epicene creature” [6]

All he describes here, of course, is the essence of Sophiology.

In this regard, I can’t help but think of Nimue’s enchantment of Merlin in Le Morte Darthur. Merlin enthralled by Nimue, and who “allwayes he lay aboute to have hir maydynhode” is tricked by Nimue into divulging his magical power, by which she entraps him in a stone. I think we can interpret this as a prediction of the aged and decrepit masculine magic of the technological and of war being arrested (not killed) by the feminine. Remember: even the grievously wounded Arthur repairs to the Isle of Avalon to be healed of his hurts by a community of women, and is one day promised to return as the Rex Quandam, Rexque Futurus, the Once and Future King.

So, I think we are indeed living in a Dark Age, but I also think we live upon the cusp of a New Middle Ages. But nothing is guaranteed. I think the present Archons also see this movement—and are doing their utmost to hold on to their power through the same tools that destroyed Arthur’s realm: war, magic (or technology to you and me), and a profound misunderstanding of the feminine.

I predict most of our institutions, now faltering, will soon fail, despite the machinations of the Archons. The medical-corporate-industrial complex will implode. The educational system will do likewise. Lastly, it will happen to governments. With them our understanding of economics will undergo a vast realignment.

So what will come in their place? Time to start planning.

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. There are also a few spots open in the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening as Christian Path course being offered at the end of April. See more here.

1, J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Edward Arnold, 1924), 22.

2. Nicholas Berdyaev, The End of Our Time, trans. Donald Attwater (Sheed & Ward, 1935), 76.

3. Ibid., 78-79.

4. Ibid., 85.

5. Ibid., 95.

6. Ibid., 117-18.

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.

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.