Infanticide and Sophiology

In 2012, I was teaching a course in college writing, as I have done many, many times over my career as a professor, when a very interesting article made a few waves in the academic zeitgeist. It was short article—easy enough for students to read in about fifteen minutes—and an excellent subject for introducing students to rhetorical analysis. It was co-written by two philosophers teaching in Australia, apparently former students or colleagues of Peter Singer.

The thesis of Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva’s “After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?” is stated very plainly in the abstract: “what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.” You have to admire the clarity of expression here, despite the horror.

I have used this article in the classroom regularly ever since its appearance, but I’ve noticed a change in student reception over the years. In 2012, I would watch my students read the article in class and see their growing horror and outrage at what they were unpacking. They were offended and outraged, incredulous that any professor would propose such a thing. While I hated to be “that guy,” I told them to get used to it: not only would this idea become accepted over time, it would eventually be celebrated as a good. They thought I was being alarmist. However, that outrage and incredulity has subsided over time: now students barely bat an eye.

I mention this because recent bills introduced in California and Maryland are proposing that “perinatal deaths” of newborns not be investigated—a rhetorical move that some have interpreted as opening the door to the legalization of infanticide. As expected, various news outlets have pushed against the interpretation of the proposed laws, saying that the bills do not explicitly legalize infanticide and that “the term “perinatal death” in the bill is intended to mean the death of an infant caused by complications in pregnancy.” On the other hand, the term “perinatal” is very ambiguous and could mean any time from birth to even 28 days later or more.

This is how the rhetoric (read: propaganda) game works. Make things sound innocuous or vague enough to be accepted, dress them up in euphemisms and/or neologisms (like the nonsensical “after-birth abortion”) and incrementally and eventually the goal of popular acceptance will be achieved. This is how the engineering of consent works.

I have certainly received a good deal of scorn for being an opponent of abortion. I wasn’t always against it. But then I started to give it some thought. People years ago were fond of saying that they believed abortion was acceptable, but only until the fetus had achieved “viability,” which, at the time, meant about five months into gestation. I was okay with that (at the time), but then I thought: “what about four months, 29 days, and 23 hours gestation?” So where is the magic moment? It should be obvious: there isn’t one. I was forced to change my position. In The Submerged Reality I speak out against abortion culture, and one online reviewer assumed I have never consoled or listened to a grieving or traumatized woman post-abortion, as if I speak only from an ideological position and not an experiential one. Well, I have done precisely this—and more than a couple of times. I’m still in contact with one of the women, and she may be the most pro-life person I know. She feels the culture betrayed her by telling her it was an acceptable choice. She still bears the pain of her choice over thirty years later.

Of course, now many jurisdictions in the US allow abortion not only after five months, but through all nine months of pregnancy, even to birth. This has not been a slippery slope.

As a farmer and as a sophiologist, I am intimately aware of the delicate dance of life and death, and I don’t take either one of them lightly. I deal with life and death every day. This morning, for instance, I contemplated euthanizing one of our roosters. He seems to have injured one of his eyes recently and the other rooster (who lost an eye as a chick) has capitalized on this weakness and has been attacking the injured one. I didn’t kill him, choosing to wait and see how and if his injury heals. So, I’m not against killing, per se. But I am against killing vulnerable human beings, and I’m against infanticide.

Giubilini and Minerva know their neologism is sophistry, so they try to obfuscate behind arguments such as “the moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus”—a statement with which I am in total agreement—though they also argue that “neither can be considered a ‘person’ in a morally relevant sense” which is hogwash (and I’ve washed hogs, so I know what I’m talking about.) They try to justify their rhetorical sleight of hand, that what they say is not what they say:

“In spite of the oxymoron in the expression, we propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide’, to emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child. Therefore, we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk. Accordingly, a second terminological specification is that we call such a practice ‘after-birth abortion’ rather than ‘euthanasia’ because the best interest of the one who dies is not necessarily the primary criterion for the choice, contrary to what happens in the case of euthanasia.”

My claim is that the use of the term “perinatal death” works in a disturbingly similar manner.

As anyone who ever studied Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex in high school or college would be aware, exposing an unwanted baby to the elements or the hunger of wild beasts was a standard and socially acceptable practice in the ancient world. Didn’t work out in the case of Oedipus though! The people living in the age of the “Greek miracle”—the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus, the poetry of Sappho, the art of Phidias, the rise of democracy, the wonder of the Parthenon—was also an age that didn’t think twice about the problematic morality of infanticide. It was a non-issue. This remarkably sophisticated culture gave no thought to the most vulnerable.

Our own culture is already mired and falling more deeply into this dynamic of a technologically sophisticated culture masking its own barbarity (and not only as regards to infanticide).

It was only with Christianity that this dynamic started to change, and in the Didache we read: “You shall not murder a child by abortion, nor kill a child at birth.” Seems pretty clear, but without the black magic of propaganda.

For the technologies so rife throughout our culture are indeed technologies of death, bent on the domination of Nature: mineral, plant, animal, and human. Call it “The New Black Magic.” As Valentin Tomberg once observed (and as Ioan Couliano later affirmed) what we find in technological and industrial science “is the continuation of the ceremonial magic of the humanism [of the Renaissance], stripped of its occult element.” Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.

Sophiology is the opposite of this dubious magic, as it affirms life and does not fear it.

Choose life.

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

Sophiology and the Life Questions

hand study, Leonardo da Vinci

For a while there, I regularly taught philosophy in a couple of Catholic liberal arts colleges. Most professors don’t teach philosophy to undergraduates the way I do, preferring instead to run a kind of survey of historical philosophic movements (Platonism, Scholasticism, Pragmatism, Utilitarianism, and so forth), which is okay, I suppose, but rather a scholarly or almost antiquarian approach. It’s also often impossibly dull (for students, anyway). It would also be dull for me. So I don’t do it that way.

In fact, every course I teach is essentially a philosophy course, even, for instance, the current course I am finishing up, Love & Romanticism. How can one teach Blake, or Coleridge, or Shelley, or even John Clare without asking some fundamental questions concerning society, ultimate values, the possibility of transcendence, or the existence of evil? It’s impossible.

When I have taught those official “philosophy” courses, I used many literary and ostensibly religious texts as well as more technically philosophic works. A short (and incomplete) list includes Sophocles’s Antigone, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Plato’s Symposium, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Tao te Ching, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as well as Simone Weil’s “Human Personality” and Georges Poulet’s “The Phenomenology of Reading.” These allowed the students to reflect upon their understandings of, for example, familial, religious, and political obligation (Antigone); the existence of evil (Blood Meridian); love (Symposium); the idea of living a moral life (Tao te Ching and Meditations); the (pre)existence of the soul (Tibetan Book of the Dead); self-examination (“Human Personality”); and the spiritual activity of reading (“Phenomenology of Reading”). All of these considerations are part of what we can call “the Life Questions.” If we live our lives without asking and attempting to answer them, are we living a life at all? As Socrates asked, “Is the unexamined life worth living?”

As Brad Gregory notes in his outstanding The Unintended Reformation (is it old enough to be considered a classic yet?), these questions are very simple:

“Despite the pervasive influence of science in our world, very few people look to it for answers to questions about the most important concerns of human life, and for good reason. ‘What should I live for, and why?’ ‘What should I believe, and why should I believe it?’ ‘What is morality, and where does it come from?’ ‘What kind of person should I be?’ ‘What is a meaningful life, and what should I do in order to lead a fulfilling life?’ These questions and others like them are Life Questions: they are serious questions about life, with important implications for life.” [1]

These simple questions are essential to self-knowledge; and, from what I’ve seen among college students (and, let’s be honest, most of our culture) over the past twenty years, students have been increasingly less and less concerned with them. With humanities programs more and more marginalized (if not completely eradicated) in the higher education landscape, this should come as no surprise. Of course, humanities programs in philosophy, literature, and history have only themselves to blame, captured as they have been by the simplistic and adolescent politics of “social justice” (which is neither) and cancel culture. So, I am not entirely saddened to see higher education in its death throes.

One book I have often used in philosophy courses is Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life. Philosophy, as I have alluded above, is typically taught in a scientific way, as if both professor and student are impartial observers of philosophy over time. Hadot’s tack is much simpler: philosophy as spiritual exercise. This approach has inspired, among others, John Vervaeke’s project concerning “the meaning crisis” (and it is a very real crisis), and when I had the honor to speak with John a couple of months ago we both expressed our admiration for Hadot. John criticized Martin Heidegger as being a bit cagey or stingy as regards to his practices, though I think Heidegger’s writings on poetry (I’m not sure if John is familiar with them) do offer some hints at philosophical praxis. But that is a minor disagreement since both John and I believe the spiritual practice of philosophy is central to living a life of meaning.

Hadot offers a simple recipe for this practice in a quote from George Friedman:

“Take flight every day! At least for a moment, however, brief, as long as it is intense. Every day a ‘spiritual exercise,’ alone or in the company of a man who also wishes to better himself…. Leave ordinary time behind. Make an effort to rid yourself of your passions…. Become eternal by surpassing yourself, This inner effort is necessary, this ambition, just. Many are those who are entirely absorbed in militant politics, in preparation for the social revolution. Rare, very rare, are those who, in order to prepare for the revolution, wish to become worthy of it.” [2]

My own spiritual practice includes prayer and liturgy, but also includes farming, playing music, and writing poetry. Even scholarship can become a spiritual practice. All of these are ways by which I “take flight,” and are the means by which I have come to a sophiological understanding of the cosmos. As I write in The Submerged Reality, Sophiology is intimately related to phenomenology in the way by which its practices or dispositions allow phenomena to reveal themselves to us. This method of becoming intimate with the cosmos inculcates a method of self-knowledge which arises, oddly enough, by forgetting oneself in the contemplative movement which such practices nurture.

Become eternal by surpassing yourself.

Outstanding documentary on skillful practices that become spiritual practices--whether you know it or not.

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. Brad S, Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap, 2012), 74.

2. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Blackwell, 1995), 70.

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.