Michael Martin's Blog, page 19

The Stars, the Cosmos, the Christ

I posted this last year on my blog on the Angelico Press website. I thought I should move it here. “Where were you when I founded the earth...while the morning stars sounded in chorus and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” ~ Job 38: 4, 7 When I defended my dissertation (later published as Literature and the Encounter with God in post-Reformation England) a number of years ago, one of my examiners asked an important question: “Why did you choose to write about so many ‘weird’ figures from l...

A Confederacy of Pious Bores

I once heard a story (which I have not been able to verify) that Martin Luther, because he was understood to have made the reading and interpretation of scripture everyone’s right (whether that was his intention or not), told someone, “I have turned every barmaid in Germany into a scripture scholar.” It was not meant as a compliment. And he wasn’t even on Facebook. About a hundred years after Luther, the English playwright Ben Jonson essentially made his living by lampooning the pretensions a...

The Conjunction of Opposites and the Technological Colonization of the Human Person

Lately I’ve been revisiting a couple of old friends: Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (in particular his film adaptation of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal) and Carl Gustav Jung. As I wrote in my last blog, Syberberg makes use of Jung’s notion of the coniunctio oppositorum (the integration of the anima for men, the animus for women) in Parsifal by having a boy of about fifteen play the title character in the first half of the film and a young woman playing him in the second half. So I rewatched his Parsifal a...

The Fisher King

If one story has haunted me, remained ever-present to me over the past thirty-five years or so, it is the story of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (c. 1210). Unlike the Galahad of Le Conte de Graal, a boring, already-perfect figure who gets the grail and evaporates like monastic froth into the ethers of a celibate dreamscape, Wolfram’s Parzival starts off as a complete goof: a bumbling teenager who stumbles into knighthood almost by accident—and even when he’s made a knight, it still takes...

On Being Thought a Heretic

One of my best friends says that when she reads my books or blogs she can’t help but think of the poster for the Liam Neeson film Michael Collins, the revolutionary title character standing defiant in the face of British imperialism and fighting for a free Ireland. I own this description of my Irishness. I have to. I also think growing up during the 1970s in hardscrabble Detroit during the rise of punk rock and under the shadow of the MC5 and The Stooges has something to do with it. But it al...

Postmodern Christian Hermeticism

Recently, I finished up a series of video lectures prepared to accompany an online seminar (described here) on Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot. (Angelico Press will soon publish a new English edition of the book with a foreword by German Catholic philosopher Robert Spaemann). In doing so, I revisited the first steps of path I have travelled since my early twenties. The subtitle of Tomberg’s book (though it was published anonymously, his authorship is a very poorly guarded secret)...

The Alternative Christianity

When I defended my dissertation several years ago, one of my committee members asked me why I chose to examine the lives and writing of some of the subjects of my study, figures deemed “fringe” by academia and the positivist hegemony from which we all (unconsciously for the most part) suffer. The subjects of my project (since then published as Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England) included Elizabethan magus and polymath John Dee, the Catholic/Anglican poet and div...

Reformation 2.0

Not long before his death, the Russian philosopher and visionary Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), who had publicly sought union between the Catholic and Orthodox churches to great personal and professional cost, is recorded to have said in response to his Orthodox critics: “I am supposed to be Catholic, but as a matter of fact I am more of a Protestant.”[1] In the light of recent scandals in the Catholic Church, I’ve been feeling the same way. Suddenly, seeing conservative bishops decked out in...

Natura Pura, the Horror Vacui, and Our Estrangement from the Real

In The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics, I argued that natura pura, a nature absolutely outside of God’s grace, is an impossibility, even though theologians and philosophers from the early modern period to our current moment have held it to be true. However, I would now like to modify that assertion. That is because AI and other productions of the computer revolution, or so they seem to me, are as close to pure nature as is possible. I do not believe they are...

The Once and Future Church

The legend of King Arthur (also called The Matter of Britain) ends in tragedy: Arthur dies in battle against his son Mordred, begotten through incest, after having lost his wife Guinevere and best friend Sir Lancelot to each other. It is a tale of sexual sin: sometimes unconscious, sometimes in the full light of consciousness and volition. Both have disastrous consequences. In Morte D'Arthur, while Arthur lay dying on the field of Camlann, he bids his knight Sir Bedivere to dispose of the swo...