On Gaining Incomprehensible Certainty, Ambivalently

The Christian East has abounded in images, and celebrates them annually on more than one occasion. But what is an icon exactly? What does it mean to see? How can we see some things and yet be blind to others? Can some see what others regard as beyond sight, beyond materiality itself? Can one see spiritual realities? Can God be seen?

These and other questions are taken up in a thick new tome coming out next month: Thomas Pfau, Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (University of Notre Dame Press, June 2022), 811pp. 

About this book the publisher crows thus:

Thomas Pfau’s study of images and visual experience is a tour de force linking Platonic metaphysics to modern phenomenology and probing literary, philosophical, and theological accounts of visual experience from Plato to Rilke.

Incomprehensible Certainty presents a sustained reflection on the nature of images and the phenomenology of visual experience. Taking the “image” (eikōn) as the essential medium of art and literature and as foundational for the intuitive ways in which we make contact with our “lifeworld,” Thomas Pfau draws in equal measure on Platonic metaphysics and modern phenomenology to advance a series of interlocking claims. First, Pfau shows that, beginning with Plato’s later dialogues, being and appearance came to be understood as ontologically distinct from (but no longer opposed to) one another. Second, in contrast to the idol that is typically gazed at and visually consumed as an object of desire, this study positions the image as a medium whose intrinsic abundance and excess reveal to us its metaphysical function—namely, as the visible analogue of an invisible, numinous reality. Finally, the interpretations unfolded in this book (from Plato, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Damascene via Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Julian of Norwich, and Nicholas of Cusa to modern writers and artists such as Goethe, Ruskin, Turner, Hopkins, Cézanne, and Rilke) affirm the essential complementarity of image and word, visual intuition and hermeneutic practice, in theology, philosophy, and literature. Like Pfau’s previous book Minding the Modern, Incomprehensible Certainty is a major work. With over fifty illustrations, the book will interest students and scholars of philosophy, theology, literature, and art history.

What is Truth?

My entry into the world of academic theology, in the latter half of the 1990s, coincided almost exactly with the advent of the Radical Orthodoxy movement out of Cambridge. Having obsessively read everything written by Stanley Hauerwas, I followed his encouragement and next read John Milbank's landmark Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. I then met him during his brief sojourn teaching at the University of Virginia, where he agreed to be my dissertation director if I were to come there, but he returned to England not long after.

Before that, as soon as it was published over the Christmas break of 1997-98, I eagerly and devoutly devoured Catherine Pickstock's After Writing: on the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. It was a book I was in awe of for a long time, and I made a mental commitment to make sure I read everything she published. I have cited it countless times, and still think--though I have not followed debates in Latin liturgiology for several years now so perhaps someone has finally responded to Pickstock's challenge--that it makes a criticism of post-conciliar Latin liturgical reform that has never been acknowledged let alone answered: the elimination of structural repetitions in the post-conciliar Mass.

Not long after, in late 1998, I remember clearly standing in a bookstore in downtown Ottawa when Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology was published. I bought it immediately. All three of these books cemented for me--as I know it did for a lot of others for a time--this almost mystical faith in the supposed philosophical corruptions of the High Middle Ages, not least those brought about by Scotus and Ockham, at whose names we all learned to expectorate in disgusted unison.

This all coincided with strong encouragement to pursue doctoral studies, which I had not considered myself worthy of doing. So I wrote to Pickstock with a possible dissertation topic--medieval corruptions of notions of authority in the Church, especially papal authority--and we entered into a dialogue by e-mail and letter and phone. She was enormously charming and encouraging. So I applied to the doctoral program at Cambridge and she agreed to be my director. I was admitted for the fall of 2000, but for reasons I will not bore you with here did not take up the position.

Nevertheless, I have always thought back on our conversations with fondness, and admired her work even if now I would regard parts of it--and, mutatis mutandis, the work of Milbank even more so--with a different eye.

All that is a typically prolix way of introducing you to a book of hers that is set for release in September: Aspects of Truth: A New Religious Metaphysics (University of Cambridge Press, 2020), 275pp. I'm looking forward to reading this and, if I can arrange it, to interviewing her about it.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

What is 'truth'? The question that Pilate put to Jesus was laced with dramatic irony. But at a time when what is true and what is untrue have acquired a new currency, the question remains of crucial significance. Is truth a matter of the representation of things which lack truth in themselves? Or of mere coherence? Or is truth a convenient if redundant way of indicating how one's language refers to things outside oneself? In her ambitious new book, Catherine Pickstock addresses these profound questions, arguing that epistemological approaches to truth either fail argumentatively or else offer only vacuity. She advances instead a bold metaphysical and realist appraisal which overcomes the Kantian impasse of 'subjective knowing' and ban on reaching beyond supposedly finite limits. Her book contends that in the end truth cannot be separated from the transcendent reality of the thinking soul.

The book comes with some hefty endorsements, not least from someone who also endorsed my own book last year:

'This is emphatically an important book – one of the most innovative and wide-ranging essays in philosophical theology to appear in recent years – from a scholar quite capable of tackling the most sophisticated minds of secular academic philosophy on their own ground, and showing that theology has a serious contribution to make to our thinking about thinking. This seriously original work – which addresses the fundamental question of what we think we are doing/claiming when we say we are speaking truthfully – has the capacity to make a major difference in its field.' Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge; formerly Archbishop of Canterbury

'Aspects of Truth is an original, serious and demanding work that seeks to come to a novel metaphysical perspective on the nature of truth, a perspective both adequate to and informed by Christian liturgy. Over the course of ten chapters, it draws upon the insights and reflects upon the inadequacies it finds in the writings of a great pantheon of philosophical and theological figures. It crosses and re-crosses boundaries between analytic philosophy, continental philosophy and theology. It's an exciting journey to take, in Pickstock's company. Aspects of Truth is provocative and challenging, written in a style that crosses boundaries as much as its arguments. I can think of no other book quite like it.' Fraser McBride, University of Manchester

Michael Martin on Transfiguration

Running interviews on this blog is one of its real delights, and never more so than with authors of such fascinating and wide-ranging erudition as Michael Martin, whom I previously interviewed here about his earlier book on sophiology. This also allows me to repay, in part, the kindnesses he bestowed on me in helping get my own recent book into print and then blurbing it so generously.

As usual in these interviews, I e-mailed some questions to Michael. Here are his thoughts.

AD: Tell us about your background.

I started out as a musician and songwriter, long, long ago, before I eventually wandered into Waldorf teaching. Around the same time as I started teaching, I became involved with the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening movement and also did some garden design and consulting in that regard. After sixteen years of Waldorf teaching, I left to become a professor of English, philosophy, and religious studies at Marygrove College in Detroit. When the College—shockingly—announced it was eliminating its undergraduate program in 2017, I found myself at a crossroads. Since then, I’ve concentrated on farming and alternative education. My wife and I run a CSA and market garden (Stella Matutina Farm) and also raise dairy goats, poultry, hogs, and tend an apiary. I also started The Center for Sophiological Studies in 2018, where I offer online courses, education, and occasional lectures.

AD: What led to the writing of Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything?

MM: In summer of 2016 I hosted a conference at our farm on the theme of “The Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything.” We had sessions on all the themes represented in the book as well as thoughts on conviviality, liturgy, and ecumenism. In fact, my journal, Jesus the Imagination, was conceived that weekend. So I guess we could say that the seed for the book was planted then as well.

In 2017 I taught a course called “Science and Religion: At the Crossroads” and started thinking seriously about what “science” could possibly mean in a religious context. As a scholar of 16th and 17th century religious literature, I am acutely aware that what we now think of as “science” did not exist then and that understandings of phusis or natura were not exactly separate from the concerns of metaphysics, ontology, or theology. What we now call science and mysticism, for instance, were often indistinguishable from one another, as, for example, in alchemy, astrology, and magic.

John Milbank and Adrian Pabst have spoken of the “alternative modernity” that has continued since the Scientific Revolution—a modernity characterized by sympathies for hermeticism, mysticism, and, maybe not so obviously, Sophiology. I wondered what would have happened if science and religion had not been divorced at that time (and who did the kids end up living with?). What would science look like now if the realm of the spirit had not been excluded from consideration, let alone investigation? So that got me started. Eventually I expanded it to other areas of concern: education, the arts, economics, technology.

AD: People often gloss over sub-titles but I’m quite struck by what seems a real tension in yours between: notes, radical, and everything. The latter two suggest a kind of totalized, comprehensive, far-reaching, and inescapable revolution, while the first suggests provisionality, hesitation, incompleteness, a work-in-progress. Explain for us if you would a little bit about that tension (which seems to me both healthy and necessary).

“Provisionality” is exactly what I was going for: the book was meant to be an initiation to conversation and thoughtful consideration. But I am also seriously and adamantly interested in a radical re-imagination of everything. I think we are at the mercy of old forms and obligations in the Church which need to be re-imagined, or thrown out, or otherwise transfigured. If not, I think the game’s over—and by “the Church” I have a much broader understanding than meaning “Rome” or “Constantinople,” just as the “Catholic” of the title is meant to include a broader field than individual confessions. Indeed, after the disaster of last summer (which impelled you to write your important Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed) I very nearly took “Catholic” out of the subtitle. However, I felt an obligation to the impulse that started at the conference and the tiny movement that arose from it, and decided to let it stay, though not without misgivings.

AD: I have to say that your introduction really resonated with me in this being a book you did not want to write but did so out of a sense of vocation to the future, which is something I felt and feel about my own recent book. What did you mean by that?

MM: I felt a distinct call to write this book, even though I had planned on working on a volume of poetry. It was like a spiritual tap on the shoulder: you need to do this. I was not unaware of the boldness—that some might take as outrageousness—of some of my proposals. But I was also tentative.

I wrote the first chapter in 2016, but waited almost year before beginning the rest. My friend, the composer, musician, and clinician Therese Schroeder-Sheker encouraged me along the way. She reminded that me that only I could write this book, no one else: my particular biography had prepared me for it and that it was important that I should get it out there. It was my task; I was called to it. I sent several drafts to Therese and another friend as well as to my publisher with the instruction that they should tell me whether or not I’d lost my mind. They encouraged me to not hold back. So I didn’t. John Riess, publisher at Angelico, said, “It sounds like most of the things you write. What’s the problem?” Ha! I suppose I could have played it safe, like a good academic, but I didn’t want to face the Master after my death without having performed my task. That’s how strong this sense of vocation was. It’s like your book: I don’t see how anyone else could have written it. You were called to it; your biography prepared you for it.

AD: I’m very glad to hear you speak of the desperation on the part of some Catholics who bring out Mendel or Roger Bacon as examples of “Catholic scientists,” a move that you suggest leaves nothing changed by merely juxtaposing two disciplines or commitments. Instead of that, yours is a more far-reaching call—here is the ‘radical’ of your sub-title coming in, it seems to me—for a Catholic science, as you call it. That phrase, as you know, on the part of clumsy apologists and opponents alike can be easily abused (“does 2+2 = 5 if the pope says so?”), so why don’t you unpack it for us a little bit.

Well, first of all, I think it’s okay to admit that the tendency for some Catholics to point to various scientists (those you mention, as well as Lemaître...even Descartes!) is not much more than a desperate plea for cultural legitimacy. It’s embarrassing. As you can see in the book, I think Goethe’s “delicate empiricism” offers something much more hospitable to a Catholic/Christian sensibility than the exploitive, even rapacious arm of the corporatacracy that science as we know it has too often become.

There are other scientists out there—David Bohm, Brian Josephson, Rupert Sheldrake, to name just three—who offer something more holistically sympathetic to a Catholic/Christian and, indeed, sophianic worldview than that parade of “scientific saints” typically wheeled out by the Catholic mainstream; but since these figures were or are not dues-paying members of team Rome they get ignored while the scientific materialism and spiritual emptiness of the scientific saints is celebrated just because somebody went to or celebrated Mass in between materialist conquests. I don’t doubt the faith of the canonized scientists. It’s their science I have a problem with.

Also, to reiterate, when I use the term “Catholic,” what I really mean is “sacramental.” So this attributive can also be applied to Anglicanism and Eastern Orthodoxy. As a Byzantine Catholic who grew up in the Latin church but is a scholar of the Metaphysical Poets—most of them Anglican clergymen— my spiritual psyche is pretty much all over the place. And the older I get, the more the alleged divisions between these different confessions just look stupid and petty: a reading of Christian history first as tragedy, then as farce.

AD: Reverence for life, understood much more comprehensively than any of us in the sciences or humanities alike (“we murder to dissect”!), is a key theme of your first chapter, but almost everywhere strangled by our tendencies for abstraction, materialism, and problems in operative cosmologies. Tell us a bit more about this, and how you see sophiology playing its part here.

I recently caught a video on social media of a woman, ostensibly a housewife, being interviewed while on LSD. This was in the 1950s when scientists routinely explored these kinds of phenomena. When the non-participant researcher asks her what she is experiencing, she says things like “Can’t you see it? I’m part of it…We’re all part of it... Everything is one...I’ve never seen such infinite beauty in my life.”

Sophiology does the same thing, but with none of the harmful side-effects. Something one notices when reading through the history of Sophiology is that all of the great sophiologists—Boehme, the Philadelphians, Solovyov, Florensky, Bulgakov, Merton, and Tomberg to name only a handful—came to a similar holistic insight, sometimes through liturgy or prayer, sometimes through the arts, sometimes through nature; but always through contemplation. (I don’t think it’s any accident that most of them held to apokatastasis, either.) It all goes back to Proverbs 8: “When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth.” Proverbs 8 is my touchstone, the place to which I return, again and again, to remind myself what reality is. It cuts through ideology, confessionalism, tribalism. I think this is where Sophiology meets phenomenology: it engages the epoché and is present to what is.

And “what is” is Sophia, the Glory of the Lord, the Presence, shining through Creation (to my mind, Terrence Malick’s films are essentially an extended meditation on this insight). And once you see it: that’s it. There’s no turning back. Such an experience requires, indeed, impels one to a holistic, ecumenical sensibility. Actually, the original subtitle for The Submerged Reality was “Ecology, Ecumenism, Orthodoxy.”

“Reverence for life,” unfortunately, has become something of a hackneyed and politically-charged phrase. Before one announces reverence for something, it’s a good idea to actually know what it is. But once one sees this shining, reverence is the only response. Goethe’s science, in fact, adopts reverence as a methodology. He called the science of Bacon and Newton “the empirico-mechanico-dogmatic torture chamber” for a reason.

AD: Your claim at the end of your first chapter, “We don’t need a new revelation; we need to do something with the revelation we already have” (33) seems to me linked to another bold claim at the start of your second: “Christians are afraid of the death of Christianity. This is irony at its most sublime” (35). Two thoughts: is this fear a universal problem, or perhaps more acute in the US, especially among certain evangelicals and Catholics? Second, is this fear of the death of Christianity (and perhaps more accurately the social power of its proponents) what lies behind the mania for new “revelation,” new programs (“evangelization”) and new “options” (pseudo-Benedictine and otherwise)?

Maybe it would have been better for me to have written “The Christianity that we are so desperately trying to hold onto is already dead.” I think that’s what we see all over the place—especially in America, Europe, Australia (and I am not a fan of the “the Church is strong in Africa/South America, etc.” chorus; what I see coming from those spheres seems pretty rigid)—but it is not something anyone wants to admit.

Some Traditionalists seem to think that if everybody just went back to the Tridentine Mass all of our problems would go away and there would arise a new Holy Roman Emperor or something. Dream on! Is this not a kind of infantilism? On the other hand, I share their eye-rolling at what often transpires in the typical Novus Ordo Mass, which more and more strikes me as a kind of Infomercial for Jesus.

I do think the fear is connected to a fear of losing power. But no one wants to own up to that! As you can tell from the book, I think the “bunkerism” of much of what passes for Christian culture (especially, but not exclusively, in conservative circles) is pretty desperate, and often pathetic. Let’s call it “The New Martyrdom.” That is the polar opposite of the Sophiological, which is characterized by porousness, an openness to grace, and idealism (not in a philosophical sense) and not by fear and what appears to be a death wish.

Did you ever look around during a Mass or Divine Liturgy and wonder why nobody looks happy? I mean really happy. I’ve been obsessing too much about this lately, perhaps—but would people look that maudlin if Christ were really there? (I mean, He is, but nobody acts like it). In Denys Arcand’s film Jesus of Montreal there’s a great scene in which the actress playing Mary Magdalen in a reworked Passion Play comes running at full speed down a cavernous hallway, her eyes on fire and with a tremendous smile on her face. She sees the disciples and announces, “I’ve seen Him! He’s alive!” Should we not be doing the same thing?

AD: You tell us in your second chapter, “Art as Eschatology,” that any Christian art properly so called should be “grounded in the future.” Tell us a bit more what you mean by that.

Even though there are some fine Christian artists out there doing innovative and imaginative work, much of what is promoted as “Christian art” is often a simple regurgitation of earlier forms, particularly from the Renaissance, but also in the endless iterations and appropriations of Eastern iconography. I don’t dislike the Renaissance, and I do pray before icons: but come on already. This “let’s make Christian art great again” schlock is setting back both Christianity and art—and not in the way its purveyors think. Let the dead bury their dead.

On the other hand, the appropriation of secular forms characteristic of much Christian popular “art,” particularly prevalent in Evangelical circles (such as in the dreadful God Is not Dead franchise and the phenomenon of “praise bands”) only shows, if anything, how incredibly inept Christian attempts at art can be. So maybe the Catholic-Orthodox propensity is to look to the past, while the Evangelical is to look to the present. Either way: it’s not working.

I get a surprising amount of poetry sent to Jesus the Imagination written in formal verse. Now, I have nothing against formal verse, but to assume that “Christian poetry” somehow has an allegiance to the august forms of the past is sheer ideology (the strange allegiance to “liberal education” among the same ilk is likewise performative….of something…but I don’t think it’s Christianity). Paul Claudel, T.S. Eliot, William Everson all may have appreciated tradition, but their poetry arrived from the future, and brought with it life.

For me, the paradigmatic figure of the Christian artist is not St. Luke or even St. Cecilia, but John the Baptist. He calls the Messiah from the future. That’s what Christian art should be doing now, even as, especially as, Christianity is dying. For we live in the most eschatological of times. Retreating to the imagined golden age of Christendom is to already admit defeat or at least irrelevance.

AD: Your chapter on education has, it seems to me, obvious echoes of Alasdair MacIntyre’s skepticism (in his Gifford Lectures, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry) about the fetish for “classical” education among some Christians today, and rightly notes how bloodless and joyless too many schools, Christian and public alike, are today. I also heard echoes of Ivan Illich when you say we need to stop thinking of education in the terms of “degree-granting institutions.” Though appreciative of much of what you learned as a Waldorf teacher, you want to go beyond that in part, if I'm not mistaken, because schools as they are currently structured function according to capitalist logic, not least in terms of their scheduling and timing, which do not allow for curious meanderings and wide-ranging exploration (the kind of “free association” method of Freud). I just finished Joshua Eyler’s fascinating new book How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching, and he argues in there that too many teachers and institutions today specialize in killing curiosity. Would the “hedge schools” you describe, based on Irish models, be a place for cultivating curiosity and the “contemplative engagement” you discuss in your last chapter?

What drew me to the Irish hedge schools was their incredibly bold and subversive aims. The Irish weren’t about to let their British overlords define what an Irish education could be; and if they had to do so in secret, so be it. We, especially in America but also in Europe and Australia from what I can tell, are typically at the mercy of our overlords, usually under the guise of accreditation and “best practices,” which are neither best nor practiced for the most part. This thinking also infects Waldorf schools (to a lesser degree, obviously) and nearly every other institutional educational model. The hedge school as I am envisioning it would be anything but institutional. Current educational models are based on the assembly line, usually with the goal of socialization in mind, but not always (a great book on the failure of most current educational models—and a fine proposal for a new one—is Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind).

After almost thirty years of teaching—and I have taught everything from kindergarten to graduate school, including a stint as a Master Waldorf Teacher—I have seen how students best learn when given time to enter into subject matter through a contemplative engagement. But that takes time, and stopping to run to the next class when the bell rings (is this not the most Pavlovian of practices?) is an absolute obstacle to such engagement.

I also think contemplative engagement arises organically through involvement in the arts, both fine and practical. This is certainly something I learned—and saw—as a Waldorf teacher. In face of the increasing totalization of the internet and online “environments” in education it seems to be absolutely crucial that people actually learn how to do real stuff—like playing an instrument, carpentry, painting, gardening, archery… Of course, some people do these things, usually as specialists, but education should be that of a whole person, and a whole person should be able to do a little of all these things—and many more. It also drives fear away. People with broad exposure to different ideas, practices, and skills are naturally engaged with the world as a real thing. Nothing could be more sophiological.

AD: A devil’s advocate reading your fourth and fifth chapters might say “Okay, you start off by talking about what was lost in medieval England during and after the Reformation, move on to attack ‘Big Agriculture’ and ‘big tech’ and their ecologically (and other) disastrous practices, approvingly mention ‘community supported agriculture,’ and then call for ‘cultivating an authentic relationship to creation’ (126). How can I, just Joe Average in suburban America, be expected to put any of this into practice?”

An easy thing would be to join a CSA. What a subversive move! Food, Inc. is a dreadful and poisonous (literally) behemoth completely tied into the governmental/industrial/pharmacological complex. Not only buying direct from farmers, but getting to know them and the place where one’s food comes from ties one to nature, to the farmer, to the cosmos.

Not long ago I went to a Facebook distributist forum to ask if anyone there belonged to a CSA. Almost no one! Then I asked what the members did that was “distributist-y.” Most of what I heard was theme on variation of “I write a blog” or “I read Tolkien, Belloc, and Chesterton.” Take me now, Lord Jesus! Just getting freed from the meshes of the interNET and engaging the arts or practical activities (gardening is a good one) is another thing anyone—even Joe Average in suburbia—can do. There was life before television and the internet, even in suburbia. There still could be.

So let’s take suburbia as an example: ditch Chem Lawn! Turn your yard into an organic garden, and add a wayside shrine. Reclaim what you’ve been given to steward for the Kingdom.

Of course there are other things (avoiding plastic, for example). But I think the key (the sophiological key) is to do this out of a sense of joy and with an eye to the Glory of the Lord, not out of some guilt-ridden sense of unworthiness and despair that all too often turns misanthropic. The Kingdom of Heaven is among you. Intentionality means everything.


I agree with Patrick Deneen and Guido Preparata (begrudgingly) that significant change in the economic sphere might not be able to occur until the current “filthy, rotten system,” in Dorothy Day’s apt expression, finally atrophies and eats itself. But we can still do things that enact what Bulgakov calls “the sophianic economy.” As he writes in his The Philosophy of Economy, the purpose of economy, “is to defend and to spread the seeds of life, to resurrect nature. This is the action of Sophia on the universe in an effort to restore it to being in truth…. Economic activity overcomes the divisions in nature, and its ultimate goal…is to return the world to life in Sophia.” Anything working to this end, and joining a CSA is just one way, is engagement with the Real. As such, in our current economic realities, it is absolutely subversive as well as radically Christian in its reverence for the Creation and our role as stewards.

AD: Sum up your hopes for the book.

My greatest hope for the book is that it might shake people out of their complacency about accepting things as they are. Why do we accept the scientific, educational, artistic, and economic paradigms we’ve accidentally inherited as the only possibilities available to us? I also hope it might help some folks migrate away from the “bunker mentality” so characteristic of Christian “culture” at the moment. Playing martyr is too easy. And boring. Create the Kingdom instead.

AD: Having finished Transfiguration, what are you up to these days? Is there another book in the works?

Well, I have an edition of the satirical 17th century alchemical romance The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkruetz coming out very soon (though I finished almost two years ago). Also, I just started work on a second book on Sophiology. I hadn’t planned on it, but I felt a nudge to explore some ideas I didn’t have time for (and didn’t exactly fit) in The Submerged Reality. I wanted to more deeply investigate the Sophia figure in Gnosticism as well as the notion of the Shekinah in the Kabbalah, among other things. The project will also examine the sophiological insights of the poets William Blake, Thomas Traherne, and Eleanor Farjeon. Other than that, I’m pretty busy farming, beekeeping, and teaching.

Michael Martin on Sophiology

If you know nothing else about twentieth-century Orthodox theology, you have at least likely heard that some shadow of suspicion lies over Sergius Bulgakov in particular and sophiology in general. A new book tackles many of these questions head-on, and bears an impressive roster of "blurbers" on the back: the Orthodox Andrew Louth and Antoine Arjakovsky; the Catholic Francesa Aran Murphy; and the Anglican ("Radical Orthodox") John Milbank, all endorsing Michael Martin's new book, The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics (Angelico Press, 2015), 246pp. I asked Michael for an interview about this fascinating new book, and his very interesting life, and here are his thoughts.

AD: Tell us a bit about your background

MM: I grew up in working-class Detroit in a working-class family. I hold a Ph.D. in English from Wayne State University, specializing in early modern literature, especially religious literature. I have worked as a musician, bookseller, garden designer, Waldorf teacher (hence my interest in Rudolf Steiner), and for the last fourteen years as a scholar and professor. I am also a poet. I am married, a Byzantine Catholic, and I have nine children. My wife, Bonnie, and I run a small organic farm close to Ann Arbor.

       AD: What led to the writing of this book?

MM: I’ve been interested in sophiology since hearing about it twenty-five years ago when I first encountered the writing of Solovyov. While working on my dissertation (since published as Literature and the Encounter With God in Post-Reformation England) and writing chapters on Jane Lead and Henry and Thomas Vaughan, I realized what an important figure Jacob Boehme was to 17^th century English religion and literature—especially his introduction of Sophia to religious awareness—and thought “somebody should write a book on that.” That “somebody” turned out to be me. Originally, I planned on sticking to seventeenth-century England—there is more work to be done on the topic with Thomas Traherne and the Cambridge Platonists, for instance—but John Riess of Angelico Press, who was then preparing my poetry collection, Meditations in Times of Wonder for publication, approached me about doing a book and I decided to do a book on sophiology more broadly conceived and from the 17^th century to the present. It was a fun book to write.

AD: For nearly the last century, anything with the word "sophiology" in the title has tended to make Eastern (esp. Russian) Christians nervous thanks to the controversy around Bulgakov—a fact several of your reviewers note by variously calling your book "brave," "daring" and "controversial." Did you feel you were beginning under a shadow as it were—like someone presumed guilty until proven innocent? Or are we far enough away now from controversy that sophiology today no longer rings alarms for people (those who, rightly, you say indulge in the "inherently ugly" business of heresy hunting)? 

I didn’t feel I had anything to lose, but I did expect to be greeted with a hostile reception. My pastor, a wise and scholarly man, was the only person to look at any of the book before it came out—I showed him the first chapter and the chapter on the Russians. He thought much of them, but said, “Michael, my son, you’re going to make some people mad.” Looking at the history of sophiology, I’d say that goes with the territory.

I don’t know if we’re far from the controversy or not. My guess is that we aren’t. I’ve had a few scholars already question my investigation of this “heresy” (their words). I really don’t care. I really did feel called to write this book, so I trust in God and pray that good may come of it.

AD: What is it, in brief, about sophiology that it seems to have been such a magnet for misunderstanding and controversy?

Two things, I think. One: some people don’t like to think of Sophia as a divine person (the “fourth hypostasis” anxiety). Two: the issue of gender. Now, despite what John Milbank has suggested, I am no feminist theologian. But I really don’t understand why some theologians get so freaked out when someone suggests that we take the feminine Wisdom figure of Proverbs and the other Wisdom books as feminine and not as code for “Logos.” Last night I was reading Augustine: On the Trinity—the Father as lover, the Son as beloved, and the Spirit as the love between them. That may be a nice way to put it, but Sophia is missing from the picture and would give it a more accurate, gendered typology with real applications in our current cultural situation—and I am NOT saying we need to add Sophia to the Trinity, just that we need to think about gender (and how God works) differently when it comes to theology. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Augustine—we even named one of our children after him—but classical culture was all about the dudes. As I argue in my book’s conclusion, despite/due to feminism, gender difference has been rendered almost inconsequential and even changeable. How’s that for heresy? A sophiological approach could restore some balance and common sense to some aspects of theology, not to mention philosophy and culture.

        AD: Give us your brief sketch of how you understand sophiology and why it is so important.

I understand sophiology as a poetic intuition, primarily, as a way of perceiving. In this, it has much in common with phenomenology, for both are grounded in contemplation. For one, contemplation is one way in which Sophia—the Wisdom of God—is disclosed, is seen as shining through the phenomenal world (von Balthasar’s notion of “splendor” is a great help in this regard). This can happen through the natural world, through the arts, through liturgy, through another person.

Sophiology is important because it offers a way to bring reverence to scientific modes of inquiry and return beauty to the lexicons of both art and theology. Sophiology asks us to be attentive to the possibility of God’s presence in the phenomenal world, in history, in the human person, and in the cosmos.

 AD: Your first chapter draws on a vast and very impressive array of people ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, philosophical and theological. But what I truly did not expect to find was a disquisition on genetically modified organisms! Tell us how you see the links in Western theological developments, Eastern ressourcement, and GMOs.

Well…rationality is not always a good thing, for one. I trace the problem from the nominalist/realist debates of the Middle Ages to natura pura with early modern Neo-Scholasticism to scientific materialism to our current, postmodern nominalist cultural milieu. Sophiology—at least since Boehme—has been pushing against this trend.

My interest in the GMO issue is connected to my understanding of farming. But the GMO issue, as well as transhumanism and the postmodern dismissal of gender as a reality, all lead back to nominalism. For a postmodern nominalist, GMO corn, for instance, maybe not genetically be corn. The postmodern nominalist attitude is, basically, “So what? ‘Corn’ is just a name.” Same with the human person: “gender is culturally determined.” There is something, and I don’t mean this metaphorically, inherently demonic about such language. Sophiology pushes against this extreme violence and, like phenomenology and ressourcement, returns “to the things themselves” in order to reset our notions of the real against what is clearly a disordered state of affairs.

AD: Your fourth chapter treats the "noble failure of romanticism." What was noble about it, and why was it a failure?

What was noble about it was that the Romantics at least tried to come to what I would call a religious intuition in their rejection of the Enlightenment. It failed because it wasn’t grounded in the historical Church and tried to realize that essentially religious intuition on its own. I greatly admire their attempt to find the good at the center of the world. But you can’t find it without Jesus. This is why, for me, of all the Romantics, Novalis comes closest. He sensed, even more than Goethe, the importance of the Church to this seeking. Had he lived (he died—on the feast of the Annunciation, incidentally—before he turned thirty), he may have made it a reality.

      AD:  In that chapter, Goethe features prominently. What role do you see for him in sophiology?

For me, Goethe’s great contribution is in introducing the concept of “reverence” into scientific inquiry. His phenomenology is itself a kind of sophiology, attentive to presence, beauty, and “things as they are.” He was suspicious of ideology, especially scientific ideology, and such an attitude is truly helpful for beholding and comprehending that which is before one. And the end Faust, part 2—when the Mater Gloriosa rescues Faust from damnation—is some of the most beautiful sophiology/Mariology I’ve read.

AD: Your conclusion notes that a "complete sophiology has yet to be realized" in part because of attempts to turn it into theology or doctrine. If it is not those latter two things, or part of them, what is it? How would you characterize it? What is its "genre" if you will?

I think it could be part of them, but I wonder if academic theology would be welcome to such an idea. I doubt it, frankly. Academia, in my experience, is a pretty politically-charged work environment generally hostile to new ideas.

What I am envisioning for a “complete sophiology” is probably far too idealistic, but here goes: I think it would include a complete teardown of our current secularist worldview—a worldview that, as you know, almost totally permeates Catholic higher education. The kind of sophiology I envision is one that integrates science, art, and religion. I think this idea is beautifully manifested in Henry Vaughan’s poetry wherein God, the natural world, and poetry are united in a fully integrated whole. So, maybe it is best to say that such an idea probably couldn’t be realized in the academy. But it could happen in the context of a community (or communities).

Sophiology’s genre, as I argue in the book, is poetic. But I am thinking of “poetic” here as a way of perceiving, not necessarily as a form of writing. For me, like liturgy, a farm or a scientific discovery can be every bit as poetic as a poem. I follow Heidegger in that way: “All reflective thinking is poetic, and all poetry in turn is a kind of thinking.”

             AD: Sum up your hopes for this book, and who should read it.

I hope the book can help reset the conversation about sophiology, for one. For another, I hope it can offer people a way to rethink our relationship to the created world and culture, the Church and the cosmos. I also hope it can encourage some people to interrogate the Enlightenment/scientific materialist assumptions about knowledge of the world that our culture has interiorized to such an alarming (if, for the most part, unconscious) degree.

Though I am an academic, I didn’t write the book only for my peers. I wrote it for people interested in religious ideas, in ideas about what is most important in human life. In a way, I think I had my eldest son and people of his age in mind when I wrote the book. He’s twenty-five and I know how people at that time of life are trying to find meaning in the world and are often turned off (or away) from the religious discourses or communities available to them. Beauty has a way of speaking to them directly and drawing them more effectively to the Church than hours and hours of (often) sterile apologetics. Sophiology, if nothing else, is engaged with beauty.

AD: Having finished this book, what projects are you at work on now?

First, I have been trying to finish an article on the Catholic specters in the poetry of Robert Herrick and Nicholas Ferrar’s community at Little Gidding. I am also preparing a sophiology casebook which will consist of about 120 pages of primary source material (Boehme, Jane Lead, Goethe, Solovyov, Bulgakov, and so forth), 75 pages of poetry (Blok, Novalis, Hopkins, Merton, etc.), and 7 or 8 critical essays. This summer, I hope to work on some new poetry and then get to a book on poetics. I also have a garden to plant, some goats to milk, and a few beehives to shepherd.