Michael Martin's Blog, page 14

Nobody Understands My Relationship to Rudolf Steiner

There are but a handful of individualities whom I turn to again and again as spiritual mentors, though all returned to the undiscovered country long before I...

Nobody Understands My Relationship to Rudolf Steiner

There are but a handful of individualities whom I turn to again and again as spiritual mentors, though all returned to the undiscovered country long before I was born. Individuals I thought would have a long-lasting effect at the first blush of my love for them—William Butler Yeats, Valentin Tomberg, and Martin Heidegger, for example—have not had the same impact, though my love for them persists. But of those who have tinctured my very soul, one is the poet, engraver, and visionary William...

On Supernatural Evil

This blog entry appeared once upon a time on my old blog at Angelico Press. "Dear children, keep yourselves from idols." ~ 1 John 5:21 Much of my scholarly work has been invested in a retrieval or at least recognition of the supernatural in a positive sense. Indeed, Sophiology is a philosophical/theological discourse interested in the disclosure of the Glory of God in nature, the arts, liturgy, and the sciences (among other things). But not all of my work on the supernatural has been...

Into Darkness: A Meditation on the Winter Solstice and the Birth of Christ

The various late-classical sects falling under the catchall term “Gnostics” were nothing if not some of the most impressive practitioners of mythopoesis the world has ever seen. Drawing on biblical, platonic, and Zoroastrian antecedents, their various mythologies—which have influenced scores of poets, thinkers, writers, and artists from Jacob Boehme to William Blake, from Cormac McCarthy to Terrence Malick—are extraordinarily rich and imaginative explorations of the human condition, a...

An Advent Gift: A Course on the Metaphysical Poets

As we make our way through Advent in anticipation of the Great Feast of Christmas, I am making available my Metaphysical Poets online course for free, though for a limited time. I will have it available until at least Twelfth Night, and I hope you enjoy it. The intended sequence of the course is "On Agapeic Criticism," "Metaphysical Poets: Introduction and Background," and then John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, and Thomas Traherne—but you certainly can pick and...

Entering the Kingdom

One of my earliest memories—I must have been five or six—is of going to the grocery store (Farmer Jack, for those of you from Michigan and old enough to remember) with my mother in the spring. During these visits, I would always ask her if I could look at the seeds displayed on the rack for intrepid Detroit-area gardeners. To me, it was a wonderland. All those colorful pictures of carrots, squash, peas, onions, radishes, and even flowers! I begged my parents to let me have a garden, and...

Catholicism isn’t a Religion, it’s a Field

If you can define Catholicism, you probably have no idea what it is. A friend of his once described the great Irish writer James Joyce as a Catholic. Joyce thought this not quite accurate: “You allude to me as a Catholic,” he responded. “Now for the sake of precision and to get the correct contour on me, you ought to allude to me as a Jesuit.” People think they know what “Catholic” means. I wonder if anybody does. As a Byzantine Catholic, I have been admonished I don’t know how many times by...

Eros, Telos, and the Chymical Wedding

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...

Anglo-Catholic Pagan: St. Robert Herrick

As far as I'm concerned, Robert Herrick is a saint. He may not be known for his piety or his sanctity, but, God love him, he may be the most human poet ever. If ever I could, I would gladly live in 17th century Devonshire as a member of his parish. So, in the spirit of All Saints Day, here is an excerpt from my chapter on Herrick and the community at Little Gidding that appears in my book The Incarnation of the Poetic Word: Theological Essays on Poetry and Philosophy/Philosophical Essays on P...

Repairing the World, Sophia, and Those Knuckleheads in Rome

Sophiology, certainly as I conceive it, is, if nothing else, a way of being dedicated to the idea of tikkun olam. Tikkun olam, “repairing the world,” an idea originating in Judaism, at least as far as Sophiology is concerned, begins with learning to see the glory that shines through the world. The light of the First Day, created before the Sun and the Moon, still illumines the universe. I have to remind myself of this—daily—as I watch the theme and variation on neurosis and pathology that cyc...