I want to say I was introduced to this substance by my niece, Hannah Claghorn, who at 19 was tragically killed last week. She was very inspired by your writing and was baptized as a result in November. I want to write more but I'm very grateful. I would love to share her substack with you as she was very influenced. It's a beautiful thing and I thank you although words fail me now.
I am 100% sure. I am on a flight to attend her funeral but I will share what information I have with you. I was so moved today when I saw your St. Francis graphic with the wolf. She was always a bit dubious of astrology but at the same time curious and I wish she could be alive to read your words. She knew I cherish St. Francis and at her new church, she challenged the pastor to accept perhaps animals have an afterlife by invoking the Assisi saint. I'm not very good with Substack and have many travels ahead but please email me at veronikald37@gmail.com and I will share as much as I have available It may not be this weekend as her burial is tomorrow but I am confident you were a tremendous influence on my precious niece and I am eternally grateful. Her family is Mormon and so her choosing her own faith has rocked them and I want to honor her wishes and memory as much as possible. I'm heartbroken her family is erasing her spiritual journey https://www.howeandyockey.com/obituaries/hannah-claghorn She was such a bright light in my life since she was a child. I love her as my own. Thank you to you for your wisdom.
Grateful to read this thoughtful and personal reflection. I wouldn’t call myself a “hermeticist” but there are a few things that spring to mind while reading your piece that might contextualize the Christian reception of “Hermeticism”. One is that the danger of technological appropriation of patterns in creation is endemic to ANY idealist metaphysics, and Christianity, as an imbiber of various Stoic, Platonic, and Aristotelian idealisms, as well as its own profound transformations of these metaphysics in logos theologies, contains this understanding of patterns of reality without Hermeticism. Two, the Hermetic Corpus did not spring up as something previously unknown in the Renaissance or even the Latin Middle Ages. Clement of Alexandria knows all about these writings, Lactantius sees Hermes Trismegistus as a pagan prophet and sage, and there is a variety of positive, negative, and mixed assessments among the Greek and Latin fathers. I’m sure there is also a Byzantine reception of the hermetic corpus if one were to look. Three, the twinning of particularly Renaissance Hermeticism and modern science is real but their relationship is very complicated. Carolyn Merchants “Death of Nature” does a wonderful job of tracing these affinities without blaming the Renaissance in a crude way for our current techno-ecocide. Four, the very things you want, an extension of personalism into nature herself, a greater role for the body, imagination, affections, creativity, is what is motivating the best of the Renaissance figures engaged with Hermeticism. It is also one source for the great Russian Sophiologists who see a kind of white magic as the ultimate destiny for good technology.
What a gracious and helpful reply. Even as I was writing I was aware in the back of my mind that if I admit a baptism of "natural" magic in the sense of Slavic dual-faith, for example (and I know this category is contested), I must also admit a baptism of Hermeticism. I do think there was something fundamentally different in the way the Fathers appropriated the ancients compared to the way the West appropriated them in the post-schism medieval period as well as the Renaissance; I am so far out of my depth there, though, that I'd be better off not commenting (probably won't stop me forever tho LOL). I will look for Carolyn Merchant. Casting the Russian Sophiologists in that way is very interesting and suggests resonances with Russian Cosmism. In any event, it strikes me that all the attempts to integrate the Hermetic current into Christianity have been fraught with danger and I am not confident that danger has been everywhere evaded; of course the same can be said, as you note, for any idealist philosophy. I suppose that is why in the end I find personalism, phenomenology, and existentialism so congenial. But I am groping for what their *praxis* might look like, I suppose.
I think we are all in the same boat. Christian thought has not yet found what KIND of existentialism and materialism is necessary (and already implied in the doctrines of creation and Incarnation). The search for better praxis continues!And you’re right, the Russian Sophiologists absolutely must be seen in the context of Russian Cosmism. They were deeply involved with these currents and their account of sacramental deification (and the kind of participation art and technology can have in a lesser way) was meant as a counter to the more horrifying transhumanist versions. This book is great:
I never considered the powers and principalities to be the forces of nature themselves. Once you said it makes perfect sense, given how ancient gods often personified these natural elements. Framing them in this way makes it much easier to understand Christ as a cosmic liberator freeing us from the sense of fatalist determinations in the universe and breaking the cycles of history.
Folk magic seems like a far better path to re-enchantment than esoteric philosophy. I was recently in Ireland and traveled past a fairy fort, a raised mound of hawthorn trees. I was struck there by the respect with which many older local people treated the fort, refusing to pass through it for fear of disturbing the fairies. There was no veneration of the fairies, no sense of being under their control, but an awareness that there was a non-human power amidst nature which could never be perceived fully.
Great essay. I can't say much about hermeticism or folk magic, being too ignorant of such things, but I have a couple of thoughts...
First, about mathematics and the mathematical description of the creation: I don't think we can discount it, or deny how much our lives are reliant upon it. Math is real. It has the same maker as all real things. God is not displeased that we can calculate the precise moment of the solstice and predict the eclipse. Astronomy/astrology is perhaps the most ancient science, everywhere a means by which peoples related themselves to and situated themselves upon the Earth. I see nothing in this way of approaching the creation as inevitably deterministic or disanimating: clearly it has only been that for modern Western people.
Second, about the personality of the creation, what you excellently describe as a practical hylozoism and a practical panpsychism: I could not be more fully in agreement with this attitude. But it is an attitude I have adopted since long before I knew or cared anything about the Christian revelation, and it strikes me (after many years of studying the phenomenon) as the central insight of what we now broadly call environmentalism or environmental philosophy. Read Rachel Carson's Sea Trilogy and tell me that eloquent, wondering, learned hylozoic panspsyhism isn't exactly what she's practicing in those books. You mention John Muir, so I'll say something that has occurred to me more than once: The modern environmental movement is arguably an American phenomenon, and as such it is also arguably the most Christian expression America has ever produced. Interestingly, it stems from our Calvinistic founding (and Muir came from a Calvinist background which he avowed as an influence).
However, for all its moronic and paranoid ill-treatment at the hands of so-called traditional and conservative Christianity over the years, the environmental movement needs the Christian revelation which begins with God's pronouncement of the goodness of his creation. I came to see this while working on environment and literature ("ecocricitism") in grad school. Without that revelation, there is no way to ground the assertion of the goodness and *meaningfulness* of the Earth and the Cosmos -- and environmentalism quickly degenerates into the zero-sum contest of oppressor and oppressed which nihilistic mentality has taken over the "Left." It is merely another version of the determinism you decry, and the necessary result of a bracketed Transcendent. And without the Christian revelation in particular, there is no way to introduce and grapple with the problem of evil or fallenness. For both creation's aboriginal goodness and its quasi-aboriginal corruption, Christian understanding is necessary. I saw this most clearly while studying Philip Sherrard and some other Orthodox authors, like Juliet du Boulay. But as for personalism, it's interesting to me that the environmental movement arrived there on its own. Like mathematics to our minds, the personality of the more-than-human world is perhaps evident to our hearts. There is an ancient Christian notion of the Book of Creation. To read any book we must have grammar, i.e. rules, regularity.
I would consider Thomas Berry as a patron saint of American, Christian environmentalists and deep ecologists. His most well-known quote is: “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” Although Berry was a Catholic priest, he saw himself as playing a shamanic role in the contemporary West.
Thank you for this and your other writings. I love it. I pray that we can find the unity between the love of the natural world and the love of Christ! They are compatible, I know it!!!
Comments written in other arenas but pertinent here.
I suppose an aspect of this controversy would be something that could be called Natural Magic, the nonmaterial effects of and relationships with aspects of the physical creation. Varieties of life and sentiences. An example - I know a sweet gravitas and awareness in oak trees of a more advanced age and they know me, but they’re awake In of themselves no extra dryad needed. These effects and awarenesses are not detectable by dead scientific instruments but can be discerned and known by the living human frame. This knowing was a part of the medieval sensibility as in Hildegard of Bingen.
What “enchanted” Jesus - knowing the Father. The robust present personal Father Jesus walked with is SO missing from this discussion of “re-enchantment” on both sides. And as regards the Jesus Prayer and Hesychasm didn’t Jesus say in Matthew 6 - “pray to your Father”? Jesus as the Way is access to the Father, he said to Mary Magdalene “my God and your God , my Father and your Father“
"And he cried, saying, Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me. And they which went before rebuked him, that he should hold his peace: but he cried so much the more, Thou Son of David, have mercy on me. And Jesus stood, and commanded him to be brought unto him: and when he was come near, he asked him, saying, What wilt thou that I shall do unto thee? And he said, Lord, that I may receive my sight."
I certainly agree re the oak tree -- I would say simply that what the ancients called a "dryad" is simply the inwardness of the tree itself; they are the same thing, just as your "soul" is the inwardness of your נֶ֫פֶשׁ, your nephesh; an aspect of you as a "living soul" and not some different being.
Oh, I pray to Jesus and have called upon for salvation, but he explicitly taught us to pray to and know the Father. He came to make that connection possible and accessible as in Ephesians 2:18, It says the Spirit within us cries out “Abba, Father” Jesus is the door and the way to the Father so to my mind the prayer of Hesychasm is an endless dithering in the door and never entering in, a subtle resistance to the Holy Spirit and a subtle unbelief in the accessibility and closeness of the Father, an incomplete knowing of the Triune God, an unbelief in the love of the Father who as in the parable of the Prodigal Son runs to meet us as we come to him.
I would just ask if you know anything about this prayer and the world surrounding it from your experience, or only from reading about it and thinking about it with your rational, critical mind? It feels to me like you are very caught in rational analysis and critique, which is fine, of course, but you should deepen it by *entering* this world, with a charitable heart that desires to understand. For example, by coming to know some of the hesychast saints. I wonder if you have ever read this -- http://orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/wonderful.aspx?
Familiar with that website. First read The Way of the Pilgrim over 40 years ago. Read Bishop Kallistos Ware and Ignatius Brianchaninov among others on the subject along with The Philokalia and attempts to practice the Jesus Prayer. What you call rational analysis and critique I would call paying close attention to the New Testament and the experience of the work and effects of the Spirit in my heart - Hesychasm for me didn’t work and was an impediment to simply being before the loving Father knowing that the blood and crucified body of the resurrected Jesus has opened the way. and then receiving inner life as a gift of grace. That I can simply be in poverty of spirit and hope before the Father who is with me unseen and as it says in Hebrews receive grace and mercy to help in time of need and then walk with him being refreshed as needed. “The love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given us” The heart of the gift of the Spirit is knowing the love of the Father, Abba, Father.
Well, humans being what they are, experiences are bound to differ, aren't they? I followed the advice of Fr Lev Gillet and a number of ancient saints and just pray the word "Jesus." His Name, I apply like a balm; to myself, to others, to the world... “Always have the name of the Lord Jesus in your heart, and when you have gone out, let your lips guard His name.” (Abba Philemon)... “The holy name of Jesus, as a light, endlessly shining, so also should the mind continually call upon Christ, Jesus, the Son of God...” (St Hesychios of Sinai). How can it be wrong to keep this Name in my heart when “There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved"?
I love what you say about being in poverty and hope before the Father! Amen! I actually find that the Name of Jesus helps to bring me there. When I put His Name in my heart, He puts my name in His, and He brings me to the Father. This is a poetic way of saying it. We can say "Abba!" because the Lord sends the Spirit into our hearts to cry "Abba!"
And of course, even in my tradition where the holy Name is invoked, we pray "Our Father," as He instructed us...
Beautiful post. One reflection: Even though astrology can become mechanistic, I don’t think it has to be. Some of the best astrologers I know today (typically coming from a traditional perspective, whether Hellenistic or Renaissance) are also animists, *relating* to the planets and fixed stars as (non-human) persons rather than the cosmos as a giant clock. It’s like you can relate to the universe as Saruman, Radagast or Gandalf. Choose your fighter! Saruman sees the natural world mechanistically, as something to be bent to his will. Radagast lives in brotherly communion with the creatures of nature. Gandalf… I’m not quite sure. He certainly respects *persons* both human and nonhuman, while lending his weight to the right side of the moral scales of his time. He also chooses very carefully when to use magic to tip the scales, and only does so in service of the Good.
I want to say I was introduced to this substance by my niece, Hannah Claghorn, who at 19 was tragically killed last week. She was very inspired by your writing and was baptized as a result in November. I want to write more but I'm very grateful. I would love to share her substack with you as she was very influenced. It's a beautiful thing and I thank you although words fail me now.
Are you sure it was my Substack that influenced her to be baptized? What was her handle here?
I am 100% sure. I am on a flight to attend her funeral but I will share what information I have with you. I was so moved today when I saw your St. Francis graphic with the wolf. She was always a bit dubious of astrology but at the same time curious and I wish she could be alive to read your words. She knew I cherish St. Francis and at her new church, she challenged the pastor to accept perhaps animals have an afterlife by invoking the Assisi saint. I'm not very good with Substack and have many travels ahead but please email me at veronikald37@gmail.com and I will share as much as I have available It may not be this weekend as her burial is tomorrow but I am confident you were a tremendous influence on my precious niece and I am eternally grateful. Her family is Mormon and so her choosing her own faith has rocked them and I want to honor her wishes and memory as much as possible. I'm heartbroken her family is erasing her spiritual journey https://www.howeandyockey.com/obituaries/hannah-claghorn She was such a bright light in my life since she was a child. I love her as my own. Thank you to you for your wisdom.
Grateful to read this thoughtful and personal reflection. I wouldn’t call myself a “hermeticist” but there are a few things that spring to mind while reading your piece that might contextualize the Christian reception of “Hermeticism”. One is that the danger of technological appropriation of patterns in creation is endemic to ANY idealist metaphysics, and Christianity, as an imbiber of various Stoic, Platonic, and Aristotelian idealisms, as well as its own profound transformations of these metaphysics in logos theologies, contains this understanding of patterns of reality without Hermeticism. Two, the Hermetic Corpus did not spring up as something previously unknown in the Renaissance or even the Latin Middle Ages. Clement of Alexandria knows all about these writings, Lactantius sees Hermes Trismegistus as a pagan prophet and sage, and there is a variety of positive, negative, and mixed assessments among the Greek and Latin fathers. I’m sure there is also a Byzantine reception of the hermetic corpus if one were to look. Three, the twinning of particularly Renaissance Hermeticism and modern science is real but their relationship is very complicated. Carolyn Merchants “Death of Nature” does a wonderful job of tracing these affinities without blaming the Renaissance in a crude way for our current techno-ecocide. Four, the very things you want, an extension of personalism into nature herself, a greater role for the body, imagination, affections, creativity, is what is motivating the best of the Renaissance figures engaged with Hermeticism. It is also one source for the great Russian Sophiologists who see a kind of white magic as the ultimate destiny for good technology.
What a gracious and helpful reply. Even as I was writing I was aware in the back of my mind that if I admit a baptism of "natural" magic in the sense of Slavic dual-faith, for example (and I know this category is contested), I must also admit a baptism of Hermeticism. I do think there was something fundamentally different in the way the Fathers appropriated the ancients compared to the way the West appropriated them in the post-schism medieval period as well as the Renaissance; I am so far out of my depth there, though, that I'd be better off not commenting (probably won't stop me forever tho LOL). I will look for Carolyn Merchant. Casting the Russian Sophiologists in that way is very interesting and suggests resonances with Russian Cosmism. In any event, it strikes me that all the attempts to integrate the Hermetic current into Christianity have been fraught with danger and I am not confident that danger has been everywhere evaded; of course the same can be said, as you note, for any idealist philosophy. I suppose that is why in the end I find personalism, phenomenology, and existentialism so congenial. But I am groping for what their *praxis* might look like, I suppose.
I think we are all in the same boat. Christian thought has not yet found what KIND of existentialism and materialism is necessary (and already implied in the doctrines of creation and Incarnation). The search for better praxis continues!And you’re right, the Russian Sophiologists absolutely must be seen in the context of Russian Cosmism. They were deeply involved with these currents and their account of sacramental deification (and the kind of participation art and technology can have in a lesser way) was meant as a counter to the more horrifying transhumanist versions. This book is great:
https://www.amazon.com/Russian-Cosmists-Esoteric-Futurism-Followers/dp/0199892946
I never considered the powers and principalities to be the forces of nature themselves. Once you said it makes perfect sense, given how ancient gods often personified these natural elements. Framing them in this way makes it much easier to understand Christ as a cosmic liberator freeing us from the sense of fatalist determinations in the universe and breaking the cycles of history.
Folk magic seems like a far better path to re-enchantment than esoteric philosophy. I was recently in Ireland and traveled past a fairy fort, a raised mound of hawthorn trees. I was struck there by the respect with which many older local people treated the fort, refusing to pass through it for fear of disturbing the fairies. There was no veneration of the fairies, no sense of being under their control, but an awareness that there was a non-human power amidst nature which could never be perceived fully.
Yes, this is just the sense I meant.
Great essay. I can't say much about hermeticism or folk magic, being too ignorant of such things, but I have a couple of thoughts...
First, about mathematics and the mathematical description of the creation: I don't think we can discount it, or deny how much our lives are reliant upon it. Math is real. It has the same maker as all real things. God is not displeased that we can calculate the precise moment of the solstice and predict the eclipse. Astronomy/astrology is perhaps the most ancient science, everywhere a means by which peoples related themselves to and situated themselves upon the Earth. I see nothing in this way of approaching the creation as inevitably deterministic or disanimating: clearly it has only been that for modern Western people.
Second, about the personality of the creation, what you excellently describe as a practical hylozoism and a practical panpsychism: I could not be more fully in agreement with this attitude. But it is an attitude I have adopted since long before I knew or cared anything about the Christian revelation, and it strikes me (after many years of studying the phenomenon) as the central insight of what we now broadly call environmentalism or environmental philosophy. Read Rachel Carson's Sea Trilogy and tell me that eloquent, wondering, learned hylozoic panspsyhism isn't exactly what she's practicing in those books. You mention John Muir, so I'll say something that has occurred to me more than once: The modern environmental movement is arguably an American phenomenon, and as such it is also arguably the most Christian expression America has ever produced. Interestingly, it stems from our Calvinistic founding (and Muir came from a Calvinist background which he avowed as an influence).
However, for all its moronic and paranoid ill-treatment at the hands of so-called traditional and conservative Christianity over the years, the environmental movement needs the Christian revelation which begins with God's pronouncement of the goodness of his creation. I came to see this while working on environment and literature ("ecocricitism") in grad school. Without that revelation, there is no way to ground the assertion of the goodness and *meaningfulness* of the Earth and the Cosmos -- and environmentalism quickly degenerates into the zero-sum contest of oppressor and oppressed which nihilistic mentality has taken over the "Left." It is merely another version of the determinism you decry, and the necessary result of a bracketed Transcendent. And without the Christian revelation in particular, there is no way to introduce and grapple with the problem of evil or fallenness. For both creation's aboriginal goodness and its quasi-aboriginal corruption, Christian understanding is necessary. I saw this most clearly while studying Philip Sherrard and some other Orthodox authors, like Juliet du Boulay. But as for personalism, it's interesting to me that the environmental movement arrived there on its own. Like mathematics to our minds, the personality of the more-than-human world is perhaps evident to our hearts. There is an ancient Christian notion of the Book of Creation. To read any book we must have grammar, i.e. rules, regularity.
I would consider Thomas Berry as a patron saint of American, Christian environmentalists and deep ecologists. His most well-known quote is: “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” Although Berry was a Catholic priest, he saw himself as playing a shamanic role in the contemporary West.
Thank you for this and your other writings. I love it. I pray that we can find the unity between the love of the natural world and the love of Christ! They are compatible, I know it!!!
Comments written in other arenas but pertinent here.
I suppose an aspect of this controversy would be something that could be called Natural Magic, the nonmaterial effects of and relationships with aspects of the physical creation. Varieties of life and sentiences. An example - I know a sweet gravitas and awareness in oak trees of a more advanced age and they know me, but they’re awake In of themselves no extra dryad needed. These effects and awarenesses are not detectable by dead scientific instruments but can be discerned and known by the living human frame. This knowing was a part of the medieval sensibility as in Hildegard of Bingen.
What “enchanted” Jesus - knowing the Father. The robust present personal Father Jesus walked with is SO missing from this discussion of “re-enchantment” on both sides. And as regards the Jesus Prayer and Hesychasm didn’t Jesus say in Matthew 6 - “pray to your Father”? Jesus as the Way is access to the Father, he said to Mary Magdalene “my God and your God , my Father and your Father“
On the Jesus Prayer, St Luke 18 is relevant:
"And he cried, saying, Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me. And they which went before rebuked him, that he should hold his peace: but he cried so much the more, Thou Son of David, have mercy on me. And Jesus stood, and commanded him to be brought unto him: and when he was come near, he asked him, saying, What wilt thou that I shall do unto thee? And he said, Lord, that I may receive my sight."
I certainly agree re the oak tree -- I would say simply that what the ancients called a "dryad" is simply the inwardness of the tree itself; they are the same thing, just as your "soul" is the inwardness of your נֶ֫פֶשׁ, your nephesh; an aspect of you as a "living soul" and not some different being.
Oh, I pray to Jesus and have called upon for salvation, but he explicitly taught us to pray to and know the Father. He came to make that connection possible and accessible as in Ephesians 2:18, It says the Spirit within us cries out “Abba, Father” Jesus is the door and the way to the Father so to my mind the prayer of Hesychasm is an endless dithering in the door and never entering in, a subtle resistance to the Holy Spirit and a subtle unbelief in the accessibility and closeness of the Father, an incomplete knowing of the Triune God, an unbelief in the love of the Father who as in the parable of the Prodigal Son runs to meet us as we come to him.
I would just ask if you know anything about this prayer and the world surrounding it from your experience, or only from reading about it and thinking about it with your rational, critical mind? It feels to me like you are very caught in rational analysis and critique, which is fine, of course, but you should deepen it by *entering* this world, with a charitable heart that desires to understand. For example, by coming to know some of the hesychast saints. I wonder if you have ever read this -- http://orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/wonderful.aspx?
Familiar with that website. First read The Way of the Pilgrim over 40 years ago. Read Bishop Kallistos Ware and Ignatius Brianchaninov among others on the subject along with The Philokalia and attempts to practice the Jesus Prayer. What you call rational analysis and critique I would call paying close attention to the New Testament and the experience of the work and effects of the Spirit in my heart - Hesychasm for me didn’t work and was an impediment to simply being before the loving Father knowing that the blood and crucified body of the resurrected Jesus has opened the way. and then receiving inner life as a gift of grace. That I can simply be in poverty of spirit and hope before the Father who is with me unseen and as it says in Hebrews receive grace and mercy to help in time of need and then walk with him being refreshed as needed. “The love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given us” The heart of the gift of the Spirit is knowing the love of the Father, Abba, Father.
Well, humans being what they are, experiences are bound to differ, aren't they? I followed the advice of Fr Lev Gillet and a number of ancient saints and just pray the word "Jesus." His Name, I apply like a balm; to myself, to others, to the world... “Always have the name of the Lord Jesus in your heart, and when you have gone out, let your lips guard His name.” (Abba Philemon)... “The holy name of Jesus, as a light, endlessly shining, so also should the mind continually call upon Christ, Jesus, the Son of God...” (St Hesychios of Sinai). How can it be wrong to keep this Name in my heart when “There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved"?
I love what you say about being in poverty and hope before the Father! Amen! I actually find that the Name of Jesus helps to bring me there. When I put His Name in my heart, He puts my name in His, and He brings me to the Father. This is a poetic way of saying it. We can say "Abba!" because the Lord sends the Spirit into our hearts to cry "Abba!"
And of course, even in my tradition where the holy Name is invoked, we pray "Our Father," as He instructed us...
Beautiful post. One reflection: Even though astrology can become mechanistic, I don’t think it has to be. Some of the best astrologers I know today (typically coming from a traditional perspective, whether Hellenistic or Renaissance) are also animists, *relating* to the planets and fixed stars as (non-human) persons rather than the cosmos as a giant clock. It’s like you can relate to the universe as Saruman, Radagast or Gandalf. Choose your fighter! Saruman sees the natural world mechanistically, as something to be bent to his will. Radagast lives in brotherly communion with the creatures of nature. Gandalf… I’m not quite sure. He certainly respects *persons* both human and nonhuman, while lending his weight to the right side of the moral scales of his time. He also chooses very carefully when to use magic to tip the scales, and only does so in service of the Good.
Substack*