Reefer Madness
Being an introduction to the last Material Mysticism of 2025, alongside Ruskin, Sophiology, Chicago strip malls, universalism, an apology, flesh, etc.
I’ve been sitting on this Augustinian essay (or rather, prayer) about an ancient coral reef fragment for about a year, and I’m glad it got so carefully edited, and I’m even more glad to get it out there as a Christmas offering of sorts. The essay is also my attempt to keep the ball rolling regarding the meta-historical fall, which Jesse Hake and others keep fruitfully exploring and which this recent documentary touches on somewhat.
The mixing of rocks and art history in said piece is deliberately, you will have already suspected, Ruskinian. John Ruskin’s holistic regard of science, nature, economics, and art anticipated the “Sophiological” elements of the celebrated Russian Orthodox theologians who came after him. Both Michael Wheeler and Aidan Nichols have suggested as much at book length. “Sophiology,” after all, is just a stylized, deeply Scriptural way of saying that there is a deep Wisdom embedded into how God made the world, a wisdom that cannot be entirely reduced to, but most certainly culminates in, the Virgin Mary’s yes to God. Not to mention yours and mine.
And make no mistake, Ruskin the lover of Wisdom was also a lover of Mary. Those who don’t think so have clearly not been to his house. Ruskin’s office at Brantwood in the Lake District, after all, is effectively a Marian shrine. “[T]he lustre of the limbs of the Aphrodite is faint beside that of the brow of the Madonna,” the young Ruskin wrote in Modern Painters (WJR, I, 114). Or as the mature Ruskin wrote in The Eagle’s Nest, “[W]e are commanded to know her,” that is Wisdom, “as queen of the populous world, ‘rejoicing in the habitable parts of the Earth, and whose delights are with the sons of Men’” (WJR, XXII, 136). Ruskin’s so-called “unconversion” of 1858 must be paired with his re-conversion in Venice in 1876-77, where the Christmas story in particular convinced him that “love survives the grave; that human personality continues; that men and women live on earth under heavenly guidance even if they cannot discern it” (151-52).
After farming (shout out to a real live actual farmer I know), one might even say that art history has long been a primary mode of Sophiology, at least in the discipline’s Anglophone, Ruskinian mode (until the Germans ruined it). As Brian Robinette argues—drawing on Rowan Williams and Sergius Bulgakov—sophianic perception, more welcoming than dominating, “does not require the accumulation of peak aesthetic experiences so much as it entails a sustained willingness to welcome and grow more sensitive to the beauty at the heart of created reality, just as it is” (260). Ruskin was, and I think through his writing remains, a supreme exemplar of such sustained willingness.
Speaking of things as they are—including strip malls—here’s the video for my “regional interest” (I love that phrase) talk regarding miracles alongside Roosevelt Road in Chicagoland, wherein I express the smallest of frustrations with Carlos Eire’s wonderful book, They Flew. Perhaps it’s a set up for an essay I may one day write on the spirituality of Route 66. But with a print essay coming out this month in Mockingbird Magazine about the Precious Moments Chapel, maybe Route 66 is already covered. If you don’t live anywhere near Roosevelt Road I don’t see why you would in any way be interested in this talk. If you do, how could you possibly look away?
On the podcast end, my friends Tim Taylor and Enoch Hill and I enjoyed discussing saints at Choosing Better, my friend John Drury re-released a Christmas conversation at Fresh Texts, some others have told me they have found this conversation helpful from the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, and I have a forthcoming (next week) tell-all Christmas conversation with Mark Labberton where we cover some new Marian terrain.
Now an apology. I truly hate internet debates (and Substack’s awkward comment thread formatting doesn’t help), and I’m genuinely sorry to have stirred one up by making a sarcastic remark about confirmed universalists that emerged from hearing Christ’s words read aloud during an evening prayer service. I did not intend to cast aspersion on all who believe in universalism or who have written about it, but only to maintain room for those such as myself who consider that this particular path of inquiry is best left open. The hope-not-doctrine position seems to be drawing more and more aspersion of late (“worse than Arianism,” said one interlocutor to me), but I take it the hell of uncool theological opinions is only purgative, not eternal.
Precisely because I hope that all shall be saved, I continue to wonder if it is wise to proclaim that in the present as settled fact. With respect and even affection for both, I therefore side with Hart the elder. I remain drawn to the universalist position (especially as Al Kimel so irenically formulates it, but really, no one can top my son’s case). Still, in such delicate and weighty matters, my casual sarcasm was uncalled for. I should have done what Jesus counsels in that passage instead of posting about it. I am cheered that my universalist friends were consistent enough to not just say go to hell; and again, because I do hope all shall be saved, this is a debate I desperately hope to lose.
Finally, if anyone is disappointed because they wished from the title that this post would be about psychotropics, sorry, not this time (but I had you covered a few months back).
Merry third week of Advent, and soon Christmas. The Word became flesh, which is the best of news for anyone with flesh. Those with flesh who still actually read long essays like the one here introduced, thank you for doing so, and all pity to the rest of you so-called “readers,” the tiny, fleshless, ontologically bankrupt web-scanning bots who try.