Michael Martin's Blog, page 18

Christianity, Alchemy, Hermeticism, and Being a Biodynamic Farmer

Lately, I’ve been working on entries for a dictionary of Christianity. As ambivalent as I am about the entire “definition thing” (a product of my training in phenomenology and the insidious influence of Jacques Derrida in my intellectual make-up, no doubt), it has been a fun project. Of course, and not surprisingly, I was given the allegedly “weird stuff” to edit or create: Jakob Boehme, Paracelsus, sophiology, enthusiasm, Familists, kabbala, magic, animals, alchemy, and hermeticism. Since my...

In the Name of the Fatherless

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46): the words of a son feeling abandoned by his father. Both Freud and Jung (among many others) identified the significance of the father-imago in the psychological makeup of both men and women (the Oedipal conflict, the Elektra complex…). The two pioneering psychoanalysts were interested in how this worked in the psyche and how the unregenerated father-imago could haunt people throughout their lives (they also, obviously, were interested...

In the Name of the Mother, and of the Daughter, and of the Holy Soul

The Swiss psychoanalyst C.G. Jung was notably enthusiastic in 1950 when Pope Pius XII promulgated the dogma of the Assumptio Mariae. Indeed, he saw this event as a psychological necessity for Western culture: For a long time there had been a psychological need for this, as is evident in the medieval pictures of the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin; it was also responsible for elevating her to a position as Mediatrix, corresponding to Christ’s position as mediator…. The recent promulgat...

Book Review: Jeremy Pilch on Vladimir Solov’ev

Vladimir Solov’ev (1853–1900) is widely regarded as one of the most important Russian philosophers of the nineteenth century. His work in ecumenism, human rights, and sophiology was far ahead of its time and he influenced some of the most significant figures of early-twentieth-century Russian religious thought, including Sergei Bulgakov, Pavel Florensky, and Nikolai Berdyaev. Though he is receiving more attention, Solov’ev remains underappreciated on the contemporary metaxu shared by theology...

“Catholic” as Empty Signifier

Back in the early summer of 2018, when I sent the manuscript for Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything to my publisher, I was pretty comfortable with the identifier “Catholic.” But while the manuscript was in the hands of copyeditors and in the limbo of the publishing process, the atomic bomb that is the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report came out, as did the disgusting details of Cardinal McCarrick’s evil shenanigans. The list, of course, has grown and no e...

Persona, Ideology, the Egregore, and Social Media

Something has never sat well with me when people announce their ideological allegiances in conversation, or even in the informal setting of social media. When people drop identifiers along the lines of “as a Roman Catholic,” “speaking as an Orthodox Christian,” “as a feminist,” “as a vegan,” “as an atheist,” "as a Catholic feminist vegan," and so forth, as much as I try not to, I cannot help but interpret everything that follows as talking points grounded in ideology. The extent of self-fashi...

Trust and The Absolute Reality of the World

Phenomenology, brothers and sisters, is like learning to play the harmonica (or mandolin): it’s easy to get the hang of it, but mastery takes much time and practice. A few years ago, I submitted an essay entitled “George Herbert and the Phenomenology of Grace” to an academic journal. Among other things, in the correspondence between the editor and myself, he had this to say: “Your essay…is beautifully written (to be honest, not something I expected from an essay that features the words “pheno...

Learning to See

Perhaps the most important factor on the road to sophiology is acquiring the ability to properly see. By this, I do not mean scheduling an appointment with an optometrist in search of the proper corrective lens. What I mean is that one needs to learn to see all over again. The point is that, in general, we do not really know how to see. There are many, many analogies for this of course. St. Paul’s blindness, inflicted from the flash of light when he encountered Christ on the road to Damascus,...

The Nuptial Structure of Being

In Martin Scorsese’s great, great film The Last Temptation of Christ (based on the Nikos Kazantzakis novel) we find a scene central to all “Jesus movies”: the Agony in the Garden. But this one is a little different. We listen as Jesus (played by Willem Defoe) prays: Father in heaven, Father on earth, the world that you’ve created, that we can see, is beautiful. But the world that you’ve created that we can’t see is beautiful, too. I don’t know… I’m sorry, Father… I don’t know which is more be...

Congruence: Cosmology, the Soil, and Judith Butler

(Post)modernity is weird. You know it, I know it. But we seem to ignore it, feeling, I assume, that we can’t do anything about this unbelievable weirdness. (Aside: I know some people don’t like the term “postmodernity”—I’m thinking about you, Scott Dodge!—but I find it useful. Think of it as modernity + the internet. Because the internet has changed everything.) Probably starting with nominalism and traversing through the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the sexual revolution...