A Little Bit of Nothing: Science

Warning: I may go scorched earth here.

The longer I live, the more important the wisdom of Goethe is to me. If Dostoevsky believed that beauty would save the world, Goethe has shown to me that poetry—or seeing the world as a poet sees it—is the method by which one saves it. Goethe was not only a poet and philosopher, he was also a scientist; and his phenomenological method may be his most important contribution to posterity. One saying of his has lived with me throughout my adult life: “He who possesses science and art also has religion; but he who possesses neither of those two, let him have religion!” Everything I’ve done in Sophiology is informed by this statement, which is why the subtitle of The Submerged Reality is “Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics.”

I write this because recently a Catholic blogger decided to trash-talk me when someone on social media quoted a blogpost I wrote a few years ago on Catholicism not being a religion but a field. The blogger had nothing to say about the blogpost or the quotation, only that I am “anti-vax” and “anti-science.” I’ll own the anti-vax part. My wife and I were vax-hesitant with our children, though the older few did get some of the “childhood [sic] vaccines,” but when our middle child was injured by a vaccine as an infant, we abandoned the society of the vaccine-positive. Any parent would do the same. Without getting too exhaustive, concerning the recent mRNA iterations, rushed to market (note the metaphor) without the usual years of testing, I can name quite a few people in my immediate circle who have had bad reactions to the shots: 1) my nephew, who went temporarily deaf from the first dose; 2) his wife, who has had C-19 three times despite being triple-dosed; 3) one of my dearest friends, who has had HIV-like symptoms since her second jab last summer; 4) the 20-year-old daughter of another friend who went into anaphylactic shock one week after receiving each dose and had to be hospitalized both times, and who now has widespread allergies when she had none before. I could go on. Some people, sadly, accept this as collateral damage. “Sucks to be people that happened to, but it’s keeping most of us safe.” How Utilitarian. Others argue that there’s no proof and that correlation does not equal causation. Well, you can’t find proof if no one is looking for it, for one thing. As for correlation and causation, a personal story:

Once about ten years ago, I was at an academic conference. I picked up an everything bagel and a coffee at the refreshment table and took my seat. Halfway through the first presenter, I broke out in hives—hives so bad that I had to rush to a drug store to get an antihistamine. I had never broken out in hives before. A few months later, it happened again after I’d eaten humus. Then I figured it out: I had somehow developed an allergy to sesame seeds. I didn’t go to a doctor to confirm this; it was easy to figure out by deduction. But it still bums me out because I love sesame butter so much.

As for calling me anti-science—well, that’s complete bullshit.

First of all, I am a biodynamic farmer, and farming, if anything, is a kind of science. I work with Natura. Every. Single. Day. Secondly, my third son is a Ph.D. scientist (which explodes the myth that “homeschooled kids can’t do science,” btw), and while that doesn’t make me a professional scientist any more than being the father of girls makes me a woman, it does show that mine is a household open to inquiry and wonder (I’m sure his becoming a scientist, as he admits, has a lot to do with growing up catching snakes and turtles and frogs and taking care of farm animals).

In fact, science is one of my primary interests. My first book, Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England, features out of its six individuals under consideration, no fewer than four scientists—John Dee, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Thomas and Henry Vaughan. Of course their versions of early modern science have much in common with alchemy, but especially Dee and Digby were among the leading scientists of their day. In The Submerged Reality I write about the science of the 17th century natural philosopher Robert Fludd as well as about Goethe and Rudolf Steiner. In Transfiguration I have a chapter entitled “A Delicate Empiricism: Goethe, Sophiology, and the Possibilities of a Catholic Science.” There is also a section on science in my sophiological casebook, The Heavenly Country. So don’t hand me this “anti-science” nonsense.

Really, my interlocutor’s accusations are absurd, not only because of my track record, but also because science as it is today is anything but a univocal belief system. I have been appalled—as everyone should be—at how esteemed mainstream scientists and physicians have been canceled and deplatformed for opposing the “official line” coming from various governmental and nongovernmental agencies over the past two years. I also find the performative altruism of BigPharma risible. Call me crazy, but I just can’t take seriously that the guys and dolls who brought us the opioid crisis have suddenly become the benefactors of humanity. This is certainly connected to my absolute disdain for vulture capitalism—even more egregious when married to socialism (which is the portrait drawn in Huxley’s Brave New World)—and that is the crowning feature of our new world order.

To be honest, while I love science, what we see in the corporate-governmental-pharmaceutical superstructure is a demonic parody of the altruism of which science is capable. But this is nothing new. Look at all (or nearly all) of the major problems we face—environmental degradation foremost among them—and without devoting too much speculation to it, you will find that they were all created by “science” (which is not science, really, but capitalism or fascism with a syringe). And don’t even get me started on transhumanism. This is not hard to figure out.

What I have been arguing throughout my writing on science is that the science we now have—materialistic and often exploitative—is not what science could (or should) be, and that it has become this way by being cut off from the realm of the spirit, the realm of Sophia. I am not the first to say this. The Vaughans and Fludd said so in the 17th century; Goethe said it in the 18th and 19th; David Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake, and Brian Josephson (among others) have said so in our own day.

So don’t hand me this “anti-science” bullshit. It’s just a little bit of nothing.

You saw this coming.

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.

A Rosicrucian Easter Meditation

from Daniel Cramer's 'Emblemata sacra' (1624)

In my scholarship, I often write about the Rosicrucian phenomenon that appeared in the first decades of the seventeenth century. In Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England, I have a chapter entitled “The Rosicrucian Mysticism of Henry and Thomas Vaughan” and in The Submerged Reality, I have one on the Paracelsian physician and Rosicrucian apologist Robert Fludd, and recently I edited an edition of the seventeenth-century alchemical fantasy, The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. So when I hear the word “Rosicrucian,” I don’t immediately think of quasi-Masonic fraternal orders devoted to esoteric ritual or occult trivia. In fact, I don’t think of such groups as Rosicrucian at all. In those cases, “Rosicrucian” is a glittering generality, a mirror that receives the projected reflection of the ego. This is not to say that such groups don’t have interesting doctrines; but they don’t obtain as Rosicrucian, at least in the seventeenth-century understanding of the word.

Actually, what I do think of when I hear the word “Rosicrucian” is medicine. The Vaughans were both physicians, and Henry issued translations of Heinrich Nollius’s Hermetick Physic and The Chymists Key in 1655 and 1657, respectively. Fludd and his German counterpart Michael Maier were also physicians, Fludd a respected member of the Royal College of Physicians and Maier, the private physician of Emperor Rudolf II. These were hardly fringe figures, though the medicine all of these men practiced was deeply indebted to the Swiss medical wonderworker, Theophrastus von Hohenheim, better know to posterity as Paracelsus. Were these medical professionals alive in our own cultural context, they would no doubt be practicing what we now call “alternative medicine.” Unfortunately, today’s reigning medical archons don’t consider alternative medicine as proper medicine at all, and many insurance providers won’t cover patients seeking these paths; and many alternative practitioners, to be honest, don’t want to fall into the snares of bureaucratic interference in the art of healing, whether it be from the realms of government or corporations.

In the Fama Fraternitatis, the Rosicrucian manifesto first published in 1614, we find a sketch of the mythic background of the order, a sketch, more importantly, that outlines the Rosicrucian ethos. The art of healing is listed first among their list of commitments: “That none of them should profess any other thing than to cure the sick, and that gratis.”

“To cure the sick, and that gratis”: these words strike me with hope, but that hope is compromised by living in a medical culture too ensconced with governmental control and capitalistic desires. The pharmaceutical companies pump billions of dollars into advertising ($30 billion in one year, according to The Los Angeles Times) a practice outlawed in most civilized countries. Money is a most addictive drug, and media conglomerates are addicted to BigPharma’s supply chain and are always looking for the next fix. BigPharma certainly seems to be interested in medicine, but I’m not all that convinced that it’s interested in health. Prove me wrong. While we’re waiting, don’t plan on any rigorous journalistic investigation of BigPharma as a matter of course, especially when it comes to using third world populations as human guinea pigs (a “best business practice”), a method darkly illustrated in John le Carré’s book The Constant Gardener, later turned into a film directed by Fernando Meirelles.

Another commitment mentioned in the Fama may appear unobtrusive at first: “After such a most laudable sort they did spend their lives; and although they were free from all diseases and pain, yet notwithstanding they could not live and pass their time appointed by God” (my emphasis). This line, probably more than any other, has haunted my imagination for much of the past thirty years or so. What is our time appointed by God? The medical establishment has invested much time and treasure into prolonging life, but it does not seem that it has invested similar resources into prolonging health. Indeed, the “4 out of 5 doctors” who recommended margarine instead of butter and saccharine instead of sugar did much to decrease the health of people—while standing on a platform of almost godlike authority. I suspect that their nefarious “research” promoted in the 1970s has much to do with the explosion in Alzheimer’s and dementia sufferers we see today, sufferers like my mother and a beloved aunt. Where’s a class-action lawsuit when you need one?

I often contemplate the approaching “appointed time.” Further on in the Fama, we read: “The what secret soever we have learned of the book M. (although before our eyes we behold the image and pattern of the world) yet there are not shewn unto us our misfortunes, nor the hour of death, the which is known only to God himself, who thereby would have us keep in a continual readiness.”

The readiness is all.

You can hear me talking more about Rosicrucianism on the Post-Structuralist Tent Revival podcast.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutzand 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.

Eros, Telos, and the Chymical Wedding

René Magritte, 'The Lovers'

What follows is an excerpt from the concluding essay from my recently published edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, entitled “Marriage and the Chymical Wedding: A Consideration.”

Coniunctio oppositorum

Charles Williams argues that sexual intercourse between a man and a woman “is, or at least is capable of being, in a remote but real sense, a symbol of the Crucifixion. There is no other human experience, except Death, which so enters into the life of the body; there is no other human experience which so binds the body to another human being.”1 As Pope Francis has instructed, “the sacrament of marriage flows from the incar­nation and the paschal mystery.”2 Marriage, moreover, as the Book of Revelation and even the Greek mysteries witness, is a telos but without its elevation to mysticism it inhabits a realm that is neither mysterious nor sacred and becomes a fraud, a sham, a carcass: something in need of regeneration. “Marriage as a sacrament, mystical marriage,” writes Nicolas Berdyaev, “is by its very meaning eternal and indissoluble. This is an absolute truth. But most marriages have no mystical meaning and have nothing to do with eternity. The Christian consciousness must recognize this.”3 This is a hard saying.

In the alchemical literature, the coniunctio oppositorum (conjunction of opposites) emblematizes an important paradigm of human flourishing: it is only by uniting opposites that the miracle can occur and the work be accomplished. As The Golden Tract has it:

“Know that the secret of the work consists in male and female, i.e., an active and a passive principle. In lead is found the male, in orpiment the female. The male rejoices when the female is brought to it, and the female receives from the male a tinging seed, and is coloured thereby.”4

This telos, indeed, reaches beyond the grave and realizes its promise in the glorified body, which the alchemists were so bold as to assay with their materia this side of the Parousia. It is no surprise then that the marriages of alchemical practitioners Kenelm Digby and Thomas Vaughan figure so strongly in their own work. Digby, whose wife Venetia predeceased him by over thirty years, considers her glorification with scientific candor: “I can not place the resurrection of our bodies among miracles, but do reckon it the last worke and periode of nature; to the comprehension of which, examples and reason may carry us a great way.”5 Vaughan’s wife Rebecca (whom he referred to as “Thalia” in much of his writing)6 served not only as his life partner, but also as his partner in alchemical experimentation; and she continued to inspire him and his work through his dream-life following her untimely death at the age of twenty-seven in 1658. As Donald R. Dickson describes it, for Thomas, even after her death Rebecca served as “tutelary spirit through the medium of his dreams, as spiritual lover who teaches him the sublime mysteries of eternal versus earthly love…and as idealized muse.”7 The idea of a “chymical wedding” certainly had other than materialistic applications for Digby and Vaughan.8

The mystical understanding of marriage, albeit now compromised by legalistic and absolutely un-erotic determinations conditioned by a ghastly parody of the chymical wedding joining neoliberalism, socialism, and capitalism, persists in some quarters of contemporary culture not under obligation to religious or political ideology. In Lindsay Clarke’s novel The Chymical Wedding (inspired by the life and work of Maryann Atwood),9 for example, the narrator Alex Darken explains the importance of such a gendered typology: “many alchemists had worked with a female assistant—a soror mystica—for the Art required that both aspects of human nature, the male and female, the solar and lunar, be reconciled in harmonious union if the chymical wedding was to be celebrated.”10 Likewise, in the climax (note the apt metaphor) of Wim Wenders’s film Der Himmel über Berlin (known to English-speaking audiences as Wings of Desire), the trapeze artist Marion instructs her beloved, the newly incarnated in the flesh angel Damiel, regarding the significance of such a union:

“You and I are now time itself. Not only the whole city—the whole world is taking part in our decision. We’re more than just the two of us now. We embody something. We’re sitting in Das Platz des Volkes. And the whole place is full of people with the same dream as ours. We are defining the game for everyone. I’m ready. Now it’s your turn. You hold the game in your hand. It’s now…or never. You need me. You will need me. There is no greater story than ours, that of man and woman. It will be a story of giants... invisible... transposable... a story of new ancestors. Look…my eyes. They are the image of necessity, of the future of everyone in the place. Last night…I dreamed of a stranger... of my man. Only with him could I be alone, open up to him, wholly open, wholly for him… welcome him wholly into me. Surround him with the labyrinth of shared happiness. I know... it’s you.”

Indeed, the union of the mortal Marion and the incarnated angel Damiel, marriage of matter and spirit, is nothing if not an image from the pages of alchemical tracts of the seventeenth century, only translated into a postmodern idiom filtered through the language of Rilke. And I have nothing but admiration for Wenders when we hear the applause (ostensibly for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) at precisely the moment when Marion and Damiel kiss.

Jung, in searching for a model for psychic well-being, looked to the integration of male and female (animus and anima) as the goal of psychology. He called this “a higher union….an indispensable prerequisite for wholeness,”11 and his long fascination with alchemy certainly bears witness to this insight. Of this union—which is a true communion—he writes:

“They therefore represent a supreme pair of opposites, not hopelessly divided by logical contradiction but, because of the mutual attraction between them, giving promise of union and actually making it possible. The coniunctio oppositorum engaged the speculations of the alchemists in the form of the ‘Chymical Wedding,’ and those of the cabalists in the form of Tifereth and Malchuth or God and the Shekinah, not to speak of the marriage of the Lamb.”12

Adding to Jung’s examples we might point to the creative participation of Sophia with God depicted in the biblical literature: unfortunately, most of the Fathers and the greater part of the theologians to follow have preferred to keep her in the exile of personification—perhaps the source of the psychic unrest that pervades western civilization at our own cultural moment. As Margaret Barker has argued, it was not always thus.13 But, as we all know only too well, gendered typology has not had an easy go of it of late.

Alchemical literature often includes hermaphroditic images, which some might wish to hold up as more fitting emblems of our times than the chymical wedding and the coniunctio oppositorum. But this would be a mistake. The hermaphrodite, the Rebis or Lapis Philosophorum in other imaginative constellations, represents, as Jung rightly asserts, not only the achieved union of opposites but “a symbol of the self…a union of conscious (masculine) and unconscious (feminine).”14 There are no hermaphrodites in Andreae’s tale. The hermaphrodite is an interior reality, an interior integration. Sans integration, it is pathology, a pathology projected onto and manifesting in the tableau of culture. It has nowhere else to go.

Every marriage, therefore, needs to be a chymical marriage, a mystical marriage. For it is the case that, as Berdyaev argues, “the eternity and indissolubility of marriage is an ontological and not a social truth.”15 Otherwise, we have nothing but pathology: a caricature of marriage and not a metaphysical truth. Only a marriage between a man and a woman can embody this. A marriage that does not realize the union of a man and a woman, the coniunctio oppositorum, cannot properly be construed a marriage despite the presence of its political or ideological justification, for the political and the ideological are simply pathology writ large—and this can be true as well of heterosexual arrangements that do not manifest their union to this degree. Indeed, the existence of bad heterosexual marriages in no way delegitimizes the ontological reality of what marriage is. This too is a hard saying.

Marriage, that is, is an ontological and metaphysical reality; in the language of the Schoolmen, a universal. Nominalism, the tutelary philosophy of our age, cannot alter this reality, though it tries to avoid its truth by dismissing it as “culturally constructed” or as simply a reflection of a society’s norms. Disturbingly, such malaise indicates all too well that we are party to an “implicit teleology of the gradual exclusion of all otherness.”16 Laws and customs may change, dictionaries may change: ontology and metaphysics do not. As Paul Evdokimov argued, “Without a metaphysic, without a return to the beginning, the human being can never be grasped; there will always remain a residue that is irreducible to history and pure phenomenology. Only then will we be able to deal with the archetypal constitution of man and the distinction between the charismatic conditions of man and woman.”17 To understand marriage—between the Bridegroom and the Bride, between God and Sophia, between man and woman—as the archetypal constitution underpinning all biological, somatic, psychic, pneumatic, and supernatural existence is imperative to human flourishing. For the world is, indeed, a wedding;18 and each wedding has the potential to become the world. We must return to the beginning that is always already happening, the kairotic moment that acknowledges “the birth of the simple light / In the first, spinning place” when “it was all / Shining” when “it was Adam and maiden.”19

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.

1 Charles Williams, Outlines of Romantic Theology with which is reprinted “Religion and Love in Dante: The Theology of Romantic Love,” ed. Alice Mary Hadfield (Berkeley, CA: The Apocryphile Press, 2005), 24.

2 Pope Francis, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation: Amoris Lætitia, 74

3 Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York: Harper Torchbooks/The Cloister Library, 1960), 234.

4 In Hermetic Museum, 1:14.

5 Vittorio Gabrieli, ed., “A New Digby Letter-Book: ‘In Praise of Venetia,’” National Library of Wales Journal 9, no. 2 (1955): 455.

6 After the muse of comedy and idyllic poetry. Her name means “the flourishing.”

7 Donald R. Dickson, Introduction to Thomas and Rebecca Vaughan’s Aqua Vitæ: Non Vitis (British Library MS, Sloane 1741), ed. and trans. Donald R. Dickson (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001), xxxi.

8 The notion also persists in the legend of the alchemical undertakings of Nicolas and Perenelle Flamel.

9 Atwood (1817–1910) was the author of one of the most curious works on alchemy written since the seventeenth century: A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery, with a Dissertation on the more Celebrated Alchemical Philosophers, being an Attempt towards the Recovery of the Ancient Experiment of Nature (Belfast: William Tait, 1918).

10 Lindsay Clarke, The Chymical Wedding (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 162.

11 C.G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, trans. R.F.C. Hull, 2nd ed., Bollingen Series XX (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 32.

12 C.G. Jung, Aion, 268.

13 Margaret Barker, The Mother of the Lord, Volume I: The Lady in the Temple (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).

14 Ibid.

15 Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, 235.

16 Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 32.

17 Paul Evdokimov, Woman and the Salvation of the World: A Christian Anthropology on the Charisms of Women, trans Anthony P. Gythiel (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1983), 16.

18 See A.M. Allchin, The World is a Wedding: Explorations in Christian Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

19 Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill,” lines 33–34, 29–30.