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_

Jesus the Imagination, Vol. 6: Flesh & Spirit

At long last, Jesus the Imagination, Volume Six: Flesh & Spirit is in print and available. Below is my introduction to the volume which features work by Christopher Bamford, Therese Schroeder-Sheker, Jonathan Geltner, and Ramon Elani among others. You can purchase copies wherever books are sold.

INTRODUCTION: FORGETTING THE BODY

I had no idea, when I announced the theme for this volume of Jesus the Imagination, that the idea of “flesh and spirit” would so characterize the entire year for me. In April of 2021, my wife started having extraordinarily heavy periods, with fist-sized blood clots, and which would repeat every two weeks. She was growing anemic. We had heard that women having received the new COVID vaccines had been experiencing similar problems, but my wife wasn’t vaccinated. Then, in a New York Times article—that has mysteriously disappeared—we read that many other unvaccinated women were having similar experiences after being in contact with the recently vaccinated. My wife’s symptoms eased a little after a couple of months, but never went away, and eventually she saw a doctor. Then, after a series of specialists and procedures and tests, we discovered that she had cancer of the uterus. My wife proved herself very brave. She wasn’t afraid of dying. To our great relief, we discovered just before Thanksgiving that she was cancer free: we had caught it early. To God alone be the glory.

Simultaneously with this challenge, we found that a young woman close to us was pregnant by rape. Strange phenomena accompanied this revelation—once dark spirits invaded her room waking her from sleep (she was staying with us at the time) and she asked me to bless her room. I did, but later that night a spirit (or spirits) attacked my wife as she slept—and I blessed the house again. My wife went to sleep and I prayed the rosary, which Valentin Tomberg describes as an “all powerful weapon” against evil. But when I completed my prayer and fell asleep, I was attacked, feeling myself pushed down into the mattress and unable to speak or move for several moments. I had my wife anoint me and we prayed Psalm 68, and we have had no such unwelcome visits since. To avoid her violator, the young woman went into hiding and had her baby far, far from her home and family. She is extraordinarily courageous.

I know much of what I have written thus far may strike some as incredulous, or even inappropriate for the introduction to a literary journal. I am fine with that, as I have nothing to prove or explain. I have seen what I have seen. Quod scripsi, scripsi.

I raise these very personal issues here for a couple of reasons. First of all, as I have mentioned, they hold import on our theme. But most importantly because they bear witness to the words of St. Paul in Ephesians: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (6:12). My family, your family, the world—all of us have been contending with spiritual wickedness in high places: a wickedness that no longer is content to slink in the shadows, but, in its extreme arrogance, now allows itself to preen in the light of day for all to see. Among other forms of wickedness, we have seen the manifestation of what the prophecies of Fatima foretold: “The final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will be about Marriage and the Family.” I have seen what I have seen.

One scripture I have turned to again and again during this year has been Mark’s account of the healing of Jairus’s daughter. In the story, Jairus comes to Jesus because his twelve-year-old daughter is stricken with a malady, “My little daughter is near death,” he implores the Lord. “Please come and place Your hands on her, so that she will be healed and live” (5:22). En route to the little girl’s bedside, a crowd presses around Jesus and a woman who has been afflicted with an issuance of blood for twelve years wishes to approach Jesus to heal her from her infirmity. “She had borne much agony under the care of many physicians and had spent all she had, but to no avail. Instead, her condition had only grown worse.” She tried trusting the science. Perhaps out of desperation, all other avenues exhausted, she turns to Jesus:

When the woman heard about Jesus, she came up through the crowd behind Him and touched His cloak. For she kept saying, “If only I touch His garments, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped, and she sensed in her body that she was healed of her affliction.

At once Jesus was aware that power had gone out from Him. Turning to the crowd, He asked, “Who touched My garments?”

His disciples answered, “You can see the crowd pressing in on You, and yet You ask, ‘Who touched Me?’”

But He kept looking around to see who had done this. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell down before Him trembling in fear, and she told Him the whole truth.

“Daughter,” said Jesus, “your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be free of your affliction.” (27-34)

Jesus then comes to the house of Jairus and, accompanied only by the girl’s parents and the apostles Peter, James, and John, enters the now dead girl’s room, where he utters the Aramaic phrase, “Talitha koum!”—“Little girl, I say to you, get up”—and the girl is restored to her parents. To prove she is not a ghost, Jesus tells them to give her something to eat.

I have often (and I mean for decades) puzzled over the curious fact that the girl in the story is twelve and that the woman’s problem (and it was definitely a woman’s problem) also was measured in twelve years (in Matthew’s version, which is far shorter than Mark’s, the girl’s age is not mentioned). In fact, I have many times asked priests or theologians what they thought the significance of the number twelve in the story is (I even dreamt such an interrogation this last week). No one could ever give me an answer. I have speculated that perhaps it has something to do with a Jupiter cycle (which lasts twelve years), but that doesn’t seem to quite fit—Jupiter, the Greater Benefic of the astrologers, gives abundance, growth, and fecundity—and the women of the story are suffering from exactly the opposite.

After much thought, I have decided the story has something to do with a woman’s power to give birth (and contrary to the opinions of the possessed, only women possess this power), which the little girl had not yet come to and which had been disfigured in the woman. Jesus restored both of them—that is, he restored their bodies, their flesh, to their proper functions: the woman to the regularity of her cycle, and the little girl to the arrival of sexual maturity: the former’s cycle had become overactive, we could say, while the latter feared its inevitable appearance. And I think it unavoidable but to conclude that Jairus’s daughter and the woman were spiritually and physically united by way of their afflictions.

We have seen much of this in our current culture: a mania regarding the most beautiful miracle of the reproductive cycle in women—so mad as to suggest that such is not even confined to women; so mad as to suggest that the terrifying prospect of puberty should be blocked or redirected even before it arrives. Such are the symptoms of a humanity in the grip of spiritual sickness: a spiritual sickness that impacts the flesh. Only a god can save us.

The English writer D.H. Lawrence spent his entire literary career wrestling with this question. He saw the attitudes of the West toward sexuality as pathological for the most part, and sought to offer an alternative in his imaginative explorations of the subject. I admit that I don’t find his conclusions very satisfying, but I admire his courage in facing the questions which confronted him. Early in his novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence ventriloquizes through his characters a kind of dialectic on the spirit and the body. One, Lady Bennerley, suggests the body is the problem: “So long as you can forget your body you are happy,” she says. “And the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So, if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without knowing it.” Clearly, our own civilization now suffers from precisely this desire to “forget our bodies,” though with obviously disastrous results.

Lady Bennerley is countered by brigadier general Tommy Dukes who proclaims, “Give me the resurrection of the body![…] But it’ll come in time, when we’ve shoved the cerebral stone away a bit, the money and the rest. Then we’ll get a democracy of touch, instead of a democracy of pocket.” Unfortunately, for all his rhetorical aplomb, the good general is a tremendous disappointment—all talk and no action, supportive of the sensual but asexual: a proper image of the British intelligentsia Lawrence excoriates in the novel.

But Lady Constance Chatterley, married to a (literally and figuratively) impotent Lord (he is essentially dead from the waist down), finds inspiration in the phrase “Give me the democracy of touch, the resurrection of the body!” though she doesn’t exactly know what this means at the time.

Lawrence was, like Milton and Goethe, a Christian who practiced a Christianity “for his own personal use,” in Goethe’s phrase. His desire to see the face of God united to his desire to see the Real of eros between a man and a woman, we might say, were the two most important facets of his psyche. These realities coalesce in much of his work, particularly in his poem “The Church”:

If I was a member of the Church of Rome

I should advocate reform:

the marriage of priests

the priests to wear rose-colour or magenta in the streets

to teach the Resurrection in the flesh

to start each year on Easter Sunday

to add the mystery of Joy-in-Resurrection to the Mass

to inculcate the new conception of the Risen Man.

Give me the resurrection of the body. Give it to us all.

Michael Martin

Stella Matutina Farm

14 July 2022

THE DIVINE FEMININE: LEADING US EVER ONWARD

“The Death of Arthur” by Julia Margaret Cameron

What follows is my introduction to Jesus the Imagination, Volume 5: The Divine Feminine, published last month by Angelico Presss.

“Let a body finally venture out of its shelter, expose itself in meaning beneath a veil of words. WORD FLESH. From one to the other, eternally, fragmented visions, metaphors of the invisible.” ~ Julia Kristeva [1]

I have never felt comfortable with Simone de Beauvoir’s bristling in The Second Sex in regards to Goethe’s concluding lines of Faust: “the Eternal Feminine leads us ever onward.” De Beauvoir extends this complaint to allegorical representations of principles (like Liberty or the Church, for example) as female, to Dante’s Beatrice, to divine figures such as the Virgin Mary and the Sophia of Gnosticism. De Beauvoir seems to operate under the assumption (note the term) that only feminine figures are idealized in Western culture, and that such are incommensurate with the actual reality of women. Idealization, however, is a universally human interpretive gesture; and that it is often personified can hardly be evidence of a conspiracy theory of male oppression, as if any man could live up to the model of Jesus, the Buddha, Odin All-Father, or even Pa Ingalls. Figuration leads us ever onward, Simone.

Julia Kristeva, much more generous of spirit and, as a result, much more human, acknowledges the West’s—and particularly Christianity’s—psychic relationship to the feminine, especially as regards the image of the Mother. “The question is,” she writes, “whether this was simply an appropriation of the Maternal by men and therefore, according to our working hypothesis, just a fantasy hiding the primary narcissism from view, or was it perhaps also a mechanism of enigmatic sublimation? This may have been masculine sublimation, assuming that for Freud imagining Leonardo—and even for Leonardo himself—taming the Maternal—or primary narcissistic—economy is a necessary precondition of artistic or literary achievement.” [2] This notion can be applied, with some qualifications of course, to Goethe’s pronouncement.

Goethe the poet, who was Goethe the scientist as well, however, was also giving utterance to a metaphysical principle. Inspired by his reading of Boehme and the example of Novalis, an incipient Sophiology haunts the conclusion to Goethe’s Faust. Many feminist commentators, like de Beauvoir, have chastised Goethe for not having Faust justly punished for his mistreatment of Gretchen—and the fact that Gretchen even prays for Faust’s redemption from the heavenly realm during his apotheosis in the play’s conclusion further offends them. But such a disposition profoundly misreads Goethe—and Christianity, for that matter. Faust’s denouement is a picture of apocatastasis, the redemption of all, an idea that profoundly colors Sophiology.

What political discourses routinely miss when projecting their biases onto works of literature and metaphysics—to say nothing religion, science, or nature—is that not only the natural world, but the world of the spirit is also gendered. Try as we might, through whatever optics or interventions, we cannot ultimately avoid this reality. It is a matter of primal ontology.

Often sterilized in mistaken conceptions of neutrality, a gendered one-sidedness, as both Alison Milbank and Therese Schroeder-Sheker argue in this volume, is detrimental to everyone, regardless of gender. We act as though this is a reality we are only just now discovering—since the advent of feminism and ideas of gender equity—but this is not at all the case. It is my claim that the Western psyche has been clamoring for a regenerated imagination of the ontological reality of gender for at least a thousand years—and, as Margaret Barker discusses in my interview with her here—the same Western psyche has been in search of a holistic and healthy imagination of gender from at least the time of Lady Wisdom’s expulsion from worship in First Temple Judaism under the reforms of King Josiah.

During the Middle Ages, the Christian psyche was on the way to rectifying this situation. Beguine mysticism, with its holy feminine eroticism, Franciscan spirituality, with its deep relationship to Nature, and the lays of the Troubadours and their adoration of the Lady all rendered witness to the need of the re-entrance of the Divine Feminine into culture. That reformation was not to be fully realized, alas, though the dream lived on. Its palimpsest bleeds through Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, in which the hero’s development depends upon the counsel and examples of both women and men, even though he often misinterprets things at first. As we all do.

But perhaps the most accurate depiction of the phenomenon of which I speak in medieval literature is Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur. The great medieval historian Jan Huizinga describes the late-medieval period in which Malory wrote as a time when “somber melancholy weighs on men’s souls,” [3] and nowhere is this more evident than in Malory. Malory’s Arthurian realm doesn’t end in cataclysm so much as in dissipation and self-sabotage. As with Wolfram, women also figure in this story, but they also contribute to the ruin of the land and of chivalry. The knights who survive the Battle of Camlann, even the great Lancelot, end their lives as monks, priests, or hermits. Queen Guinevere herself dies in the cloister. A tremendous ennui taxed with apocalyptic sterility burdens both Malory’s text and its readers. In the nineteenth century, Malory’s melancholia reappeared in that of Tennyson, nowhere so strongly as in his Idylls of the King, a melancholic tableau brought to beautiful realization in the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron.

Malory is not entirely without hope (though what hope he offers is as delicate as frost), as Arthur does not die in the text. Malory tells us that in a mysterious bark “resceyved hym three ladyes with grete mournyng. And so they sette hem downe, and in one of their lappis kyng Arthure layd hys hede.” [4] and ferried him to the Isle of Avalon to be healed of his grievous wounds with the promise to one day return in parousaic triumph. Avalon is an island of women; it is only there where Arthur can find healing.

I have often thought, over this past, most melancholic of years, that Malory’s tale is precisely the homeopathic medicine required for our particular moment. The West, and especially the Christian West, suffers from a grievous wound and it is only the Divine Feminine which can bring it healing. What was lost must be restored. In our end is our beginning. For the Divine Feminine leads us ever onward.

Toss that Freudian symbol back to the unconscious, my mans!

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. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Poetics Today 6, no. 1/2 The Female Body in Western Culture: Semiotic Perspective (1985); 133-52, at 134.

2. Ibid., 135.

3. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study in the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries (St. Martin’s Press, 1924), 22.

4. Thomas Malory, Works, ed. Eugene Vinaver, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1971), 716.