The Sophianic Knighthood

Reclaiming the wild.

“The Knights and the Briar Rose” by Edward Burne-Jones

I often speculate—out loud as often as not—about why more Christian intellectuals or thinkers don’t speak out more often about the Great Evils of Our Time. And by “more Christian intellectuals,” of course, I really mean “any.” And by “the great evils of our time”—just to make sure we’re all reading from the same hymn book here—I mean all things “Great Reset” and “The New Normal” that began with the COVID pandemic and the subsequent roll-out of lockdowns and the subscription service known as the (utterly worthless as a medical intervention and enormously dangerous) COVID gene therapies (marketed—note the metaphor—as “vaccines”). I could add the current war on farmers and farming that characterizes most of the Western “democracies,” as well as the quickly falling-apart narrative that wants us all to live in 15-minute cities under constant digital surveillance in order to “keep everyone safe” and “save the planet.” But I won’t.

To all of this, the Christian intelligentsia has been all but silent, with the exception of a few stout souls like my friend, Larry Chapp (not only an outstanding Catholic theologian but a Catholic Worker farmer). No one else really comes to mind. Which is surprising and also not surprising.

This certainly has something to do with the ecosystem of higher education, the polluted environment in which a good many Christian intellectuals make their living. Like stagnant waters breed mosquitoes and disease, the higher education environment breeds cowards and conformity. Those caught in that milieu stick their necks out for nobody—unless it helps tenure and promotion and funding, usually accompanied by the dramatic embrace of this or that variety of “activism” (a phenomenon the philosopher and social anthropologist Ernest Gellner once ridiculed as Sturm und Drang und Tenure). The Academy is no place to look for leadership, because it is no place to look for courage; and without courage, there can be no leadership (I think I just dismantled every college/university mission statement right there). And this is nothing new (despite the cosplay-like posturing of activism that characterizes college and university campuses). The truly courageous Christian intellectual Nikolai Berdyaev called this out in his book, Slavery and Freedom, nearly ninety years ago:

“The highly cultured man of a certain style usually expresses imitative opinions upon every subject: they are average opinions, they belong to a group, though it may well be that this imitativeness belongs to a cultured elite and to a highly select group…. Genius has never been completely able to find a place for itself in culture, and culture has always striven to turn genius from a wild animal into a domestic animal.”

The Academy, home to a highly cultured elite, contains an enormous amount of intellectual capital and power, but contains it like a zoo contains a wild animal. You might get an occasional roar out of an academic in a cage, but he’s still in a cage and will do nothing to cross the zookeeper because he knows where his next meal comes from. So don’t look to the Academy for help.

Outside of the Academy, Christian intellectual life is a bit more vigorous and dynamic. David Bentley Hart is a great example of a wild animal outside of the cage of academia, but I am not aware that he has addressed in any way what I identify as the Great Evil of Our Time (if he has, please let me know in the comments). I’m not sure why this is, but I did get into a very heated Facebook debate early in the pandemic with his brother Robert, an Episcopalian priest—who is very pro-vaxx (or at least was)—so I imagine David is either sympathetic to his brother’s position or maybe doesn’t feel like “going there.” I like David and have a lot of respect for him, and I really like his older brother Addison, who seems to be much more suspicious of what’s been going on over the past four years. He’s not a person afraid to speak his mind, and I love that about him.

And then there’s Paul Kingsnorth. Paul, actually, has had quite a bit to say about the movements of those I call the Archons (“The Machine” is his preferred term). But Paul has grown mostly silent on this topic for the past year, preferring instead to ease into his recent conversion to Christianity in its Eastern Orthodox permutation and is attending more to spiritual concerns. I completely understand that sentiment—I did the same thing myself for many years as my wife and I essentially retreated to the wilds of Waterloo Township, Michigan to raise our children away from the madness of the world and live more closely to the land and God. (Incidentally, in her song “To the Lighthouse,” Olivia Chaney—about whom I’ve written recently—sings of a similar aspiration).

Enter Sir Lancelot

I get the desire to completely reject the world and hold to what is spiritual. Indeed, it is a theme in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, especially in the case of Sir Lancelot. Lancelot, in Malory’s telling, due to his overwhelming sense of failure and shame, abandons his chivalric vocation and becomes a priest, the seeming futility of the quest driving him into a religious mania, a psychological phenomenon not unlike that Homer examines in the Odyssey with the Island of the Lotus-eaters. (I completely understand the temptation to eat the lotus). I write about this aspect of Lancelot in my poem “Vocation” from Mythologies of the Wild of God. In the poem, one of the knights of the Round Table explains what happened to Lancelot:

So, after a time, seeing him at enmity with his dearest friend we found ourselves
All at enmity—with ourselves, with the world—and those who died not from despair
In the search for something holy lived in disdain for the abject failure of the Good;
And in our anger at this betrayal all was lost in the lust of blood and fire and ruin.

The failure of this vocation led him to another, but even then he failed to find solace,
Forgiveness cruelly eluding him in this broken cosmos where all that lives can only die.
We followed, thinking if we found no comfort at least we would refrain from harm; 
Yet the barley and corn grew very thin and the heavens were ever masked in grey.

So I get the resignation.

But this is not the time for resignation.

“Joan of Arc” (detail) by Donato Giancola

A Girl with a Mission

As I think I mentioned before, over the Christmas break I read through the transcripts of the trial of Joan of Arc—one of the most shameful show trials in history. I have had a deep love for her since childhood and she has haunted me ever since I first heard about her (maybe from that great film starring Ingrid Bergman—I must have been ten or younger). What astonished me on this reading was how this illiterate peasant girl could not only hold her own against a high-powered panel of inquisitors (the clerical order being the caged intellectuals of the age), but how she put them to absolute shame by her intelligence and courage. She was not afraid to speak the truth of her mission.

That is one thing I hope we all learned from the past four years: how so many who could have helped—be they physicians, professors, politicians, journalists, teachers, or intellectuals—feared to speak out even as so many were injured or killed, whether through the gene therapies themselves or from the cruel and unusual punishments of lockdowns or having one’s business closed or vaccine mandate required to attend school or any of the other numberless ways suffering was inflicted on the world. When they face the Day of Judgment, I doubt Christ will congratulate them for playing it safe in order to make sure they received tenure or promotion or preserved their social standing.

On the Christian side, it seems those who have not completely acquiesced to the will of the Archons (and many, many have—especially those holding ecclesial power) have for the most part contented themselves with concerns over trivialities over the filioque, or which way a priest should face during Mass, or who is and who isn’t a heretic. This while the entire world burns. My God.

It might be asked whether or not God loves even the Archons—after all, we are always told that God loves everyone. Joan was asked the same thing by her inquisitors about the English. Her answer is as timely for us as it is poignant:

“She said that as to the love or hate that God has for the English, or what He would do for their souls, she knows nothing; but she is well assured that they will be driven out of France, except those that die there; and that God will send the French victory over the English.”

This is precisely what will happen with the Archons. And they know it, which is why they are panicking at the moment and have ratcheted up their propaganda and attempts to discredit the truth-tellers. They won’t win.

A Sophianic Knighthood

Even though I spent the better part of a decade influenced by the idea of Christian non-violence which eschews even the imagery of knighthood (“It’s so patriarchal! Such toxic masculinity!”), I think sometimes you need to fight. Now, I am not suggesting anybody take up arms against the Archons—who have all the weapons and all the power—but I do think the time for the safety of silence is long past. But I also know that many—if not most—of my Christian friends prefer to remain silent. They are neither hot nor cold. The Kingdom will not arrive through such as these. Just look around at all the Christian (Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant) “influencers” on social media platforms or YouTube—who’s fighting back? Almost no one. Are they afraid of being demonitized? They have been domesticated by mammon. They need to reclaim their wildness.

A Sophianic Knighthood is both masculine and feminine (and not androgynous) in that it fights on behalf of the integral image of the union of the natural and the supernatural realms, archetypally depicted in Woman and Man, and the place of Wisdom as the organizing principle guiding that movement. The world the Archons want has no room for Wisdom (Sophia), no room for an integral view of Creation, and no room for the Wild of God—which is why they want all those things destroyed or at least forgotten. This is why the Gnostic myth of Sophia (echoed in the fairy-tale of Sleeping Beauty) is so important to our age: Sophia is asleep in the realm of the Dark Lord and we need to awaken her so that the world may again flourish. And this can’t be accomplished by people more interested in preserving their “brand” than in speaking Truth.

A Sophianic Knighthood with all the images and emotions it evokes—of courage, truth, goodness, beauty, divinity, and wisdom—is not a luxury, but a necessity to human flourishing. William Blake captures all of this in the opening lines to his illuminated book, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion:

Of the Sleep of Ulro! and of the passage through
Eternal Death! and of the awaking to Eternal Life.

This theme calls me in sleep night after night, & ev’ry morn
Awakes me at sun−rise, then I see the Saviour over me
Spreading his beams of love, & dictating the words of this mild song.

Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!
I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine.

Awake. 

Lancelot after he wakes up up in John Boorman’s Excalibur—doesn’t follow the book, but still…