Michael Martin's Blog, page 11

The School for Wisdom: The Sophiological Hedge School

A reader named Eirik recently asked me what I would include in “the perfect reading list, the perfect Canon… to momentarily escape from the difficulties of the new dark age” (how well put!). Actually, I’ve been contemplating this for quite some time, and have been encouraged by John Milbank to do precisely that. In fact, just last week my wife and I were looking at a yurt that we might build on our farm which could function as both a kind of retreat house and place for teaching classes in Sophio...

Ubi Caritas: Where Is Charity?

Maybe you noticed it. In the transition from life in the world to a more-or-less (even liturgically) online existence, from a life of faces, of smiles, grimaces, and laughter to a life of masks, suspicion, and muffled speech, we ourselves have changed. Technology, as Heidegger so emphatically asserted, is never neutral. Social media, always threatening in its ability to divide and the temptation to demonize, has reached its apotheosis in this regard, even to the point of laying down the new dogm...

Love is still all you need

I have a number of, mostly vague, memories from television in the 1960s. I remember watching Niel Armstrong walk on the moon, 20 July 1969. I was so tired! I remember watching funerals for Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968—and Dwight Eisenhower’s in early 1969. So much darkness my young mind could not process. But there were pleasant experiences, in particular the Beatles performing “,All You Need Is Love” on the ,Our World broadcast on 25 June 1967. Like those other events, ...

The Hypostasis of the Archons: Politics

In the study of Sophiology, one inevitably encounters the vast, complex, often confusing mythologies of Gnosticism. Gnosticism borrows freely from Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Platonism and Neoplationism, and any number of systems available to late-classical era investigation. As a Sophiologist, however, I’ve never thought much of the Gnostic and later Manichaean and, even later, Catharist/Albigensian thought regarding Creation as the work of a deluded demiurge. If Sophiology has anyth...

The War against Sloth: Paul Tyson, Moshe Idel, and the Sleepwalkers

The following is a review essay from Jesus the Imagination: The Garden.

Paul Tyson, Seven Brief Lessons on Magic (Cascade Books, 2019), $13.99 US

Moshe Idel, The Privileged Divine Feminine in Kabbalah (Walter de Gruyter, 2019), $114.99 US

Academia, counter-intuitively perhaps, does not constitute an environment favorable to original thought. This is not necessarily a problem only of our own moment, though it has certainly been exacerbated by the increasing specialization and, at least in th...

Death in the Time of Plague

“Last night the wife said,

Oh, boy, when you’re dead,

You won’t take nothing with you but your soul—

THINK.”

~ The Beatles, “The Ballad of John and Yoko”

It is clear to me by this point in the pandemic that what, collectively, we most fear as a society is death. This is understandable, of course. But we don’t seem to fear economic ruin, loneliness, or existential despair with the same intensity.

I think part of the reason is that, in a post-Christian, post-religious world, we are not really ...

Masks, or Until We Have Faces

Perhaps the most spiritually and psychologically dangerous development in this current mass neurosis (the new abnormal) called the pandemic is the wearing of masks. Just think about this: a mask. What is a mask? Of course, many will say a form of protection—but is it not also, as in Greek tragedy, the projection of a persona? Such are not unlike kinds of personae (also known as avatars) that have become the norm via social media and the totalizing demand that the internet turn each and every one...

A World without Forgiveness

In March of 1881, the great Russian philosopher, mystic, and sophiologist Vladimir Solovyov gave a speech following the assassination of Czar Alexander II. In the speech, Solovyov, a young academic at the time, insisted that Alexander’s son and successor, Alexander III, should forgive the murderers in the name of Christian justice. In the highly controlled society that was pre-Revolution Russia, Solovyov knew this was career suicide, and soon after resigned (a rather mandatory resignation) and, ...

Jesus the Imagination V: The Divine Feminine--call for submissions

,Jesus the Imagination, Vol. 5: The Divine Feminine

,Jesus the Imagination is now inviting submissions of poetry, essays, photography, and artwork for volume V, “The Divine Feminine.” We are also interested in translations! Send no more than 3-5 poems, one essay, or 2-3 works of art (in a file, of course). The deadline is 1 January 2021.

Send submissions to:

The Ahrimanic Moment

In a poetic metaphysics such as the one I’ve been promulgating for some time now, one finds that the distinctions between actual and imaginal, between the concrete and the dreamt, between the logical and the intuitive are in reality constructed and that the barriers separating them easily dissolve before the beholder’s mindful and attentive presence.

We’ve recently been confronted with a number of narratives that shapeshift in response to need, even if the need is to confuse and destabilize. We...