Michael Martin, The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics, foreword
by Adrian Pabst (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2015), 246 ppg., pb, €16,00. ISBN 978-1621381136
Michael Martin's newly released The Submerged Reality (February 2015) is a genuinely
daring, sophiological work that is both clearly articulated and matched with fine historical
scholarship—a welcome exception to much of the Gnostic vaguery and 'militant feminism' that has
previously plagued this genre—while nevertheless refusing to compromise the main thrust of its
engagement with sources of considerable poetic breadth and insight. Martin engages a wide-range
of Western Sophiological and Romantic voices, in addition to certain marginal undercurrents—Jacob
Boehme, Robert Fludd, Goethe, Novalis and Rudolph Steiner—to the more well-known Russian
Sophiologists—Solovyov, Florensky and Bulgakov—in addition to twentieth-Century Catholic
ressourcement figures—De Lubac, von Balthasar, de Chardin—from which he argues that the best of
the sophiology's diverse, polyvalent tradition is precisely to be viewed as a reemerging, counternarrative to the Enlightenment and its narrow rationalism. Martin's ambitious aim is to wed orthodox
Catholicism with an adventurous, hermeneutical generosity that confidently seeks out pregnant
intuitions from an incomplete and 'submerged' Sophiological tradition in order to present a fullyintegrated, Catholic alternative to postmodern secularism and its nominalist antecedent. In this
manner, Martin pushes forward many of the insights and intuitions of the late Stratford Caldecott
and John Milbank in describing the duplicitous cultural legacy of a Baroque natura pura and the
suppleness of a sophianic challenge to secularism's benign neutrality. Rather, sophiology's
contemplative intentionality towards the splendorous Divine imbued within the created world resists
clear division as it is "art as much as it is theology, as much mysticism as it is natural science' (7)
Sophiology thus occupies, in explicit and repeated reference to William Desmond, a metaxological
between, one which avoids immediate conceptualization and identification, and is rather described
as a 'poetic intuition' and is principally engaged with Christianity's explicitly bodily, aesthetic and
cosmic dimensions—for God's immanence to creation is through His Wisdom as the 'scaffolding of all
creation' (46), from which grace's intrinsicism 'maintains its presence in the world' as it is through
'Wisdom that each creature realizes its being.' (78) Martin thus seeks to contribute to the overall
reinvigoration of a metaxological metaphysics and at its core, many of Martin's sources critically
expand—both speculatively, as well as practically—the dynamic implications latent within the
analogia entis. In so doing, one of sophiology's genuine contributions is that it presents a viable
alternative, that is nonetheless complementary to a more Przywarian take that begins with the maior
dissimilitudo, and instead saturates it with a bridal mysticism and robust Mariology of active
inseparability, thereby counter-balancing Lateran IV with the Council of Florence's pronouncement
that 'Nothing of God, in Him, is separated from man, and nothing of man is separated from the
Godhead.' (Den. 708) Hence, Martin's plea for a sophiological return to the natural and the real
deliberately avoids the 'noble failure of Romanticism' and instead, seeks to renew the robust identity
of orthodox Christianity in its cosmological and cultural milieu, bringing the fruits of this wisdom to
bare on various contemporary concerns, from GMO agriculture and transhumanism, to the crisis of
sexuality and gay marriage, the deconstruction of gender and the family. However, like the German
Poet and essayist, Novalis, Martin desires not to return back to some mythical past. Instead, he
clearly wants to pick a fight, both as a wide-ranging and supple cultural attack on liberalism, all the
while challenging many of his would-be Traditionalist allies by demonstrating an equally daring
theological reading of more marginal and esoteric sources that heretofore have justifiably given
many sufficient pause and are by no means mainstream and predictable. Martin thereby seeks to
show the distinctive way of Sophia as uniquely unfolding and making common cause with
reinvigorating the distinct identity of the Christian/Catholic Tradition otherwise fragmented by the
Enlightenment, all the while demonstrating an impulse within the "new evangelization" by going
straight to the spiritual peripheries that have long been estranged from the Mystici Corporis,
reminiscent in part of von Balthasar's ardent praise of the Catholic sophiologist Valentin Tomberg.
Critically, Martin's account will most likely not allay the fears that many do have especially about the
work of Jacob Boehme and his appropriation by Hegel, as Cyril O'Regan has argued in his
genealogical work on the return of Valentian Gnosticism in modernity. Admittedly, Martin's
hermeneutic, which foregoes "heresy hunting" is itself not the problem. Rather, what is perhaps
lacking in Martin's otherwise valuable work is perhaps a real confrontation with both the
sophiological promise on the one hand, with an equal confrontation of the legitimate dangers
surrounding some of his more marginal and esoteric sources. While seeking out a dynamic middle,
the legitimacy of borders that dogmatically secure sophiology's viability remains vague and
uncertain. Nevertheless, Martin wisely sidesteps many of the more problematic dimensions of
identifying divine Sophia as a tertium quid, fourth hypostasis or as the divine ousia that is
nonetheless apart and distinct from the Trinitarian Persons themselves. Rather, Martin's interests are
clearly and unambiguously directed more towards creaturely Sophia as a response to the
contemporary crisis wherein "we no longer can be certain what nature is, what a family is, what
rights are and from where (or whom) they are derived, what gender is, or, indeed, what a human
person is. Sophiology answers all of these questions…by describing how in ever new and multifarious
ways the holy Presence of God inhabits his creation." (203) And it is in this context that Martin
indeed shows an acute attentiveness to Sophia's distinct femininity, the complementarity of sexual
difference and the integral sacramentality of the body's nuptiality. Hence, attention to the genuine
femininity of Sophia's active receptivity can both serve as a further theological aid in analogously
disclosing the gendered dimensions of a Trinitarian communio and its gift exchange between the
Father and the Son in the mutual fecundity of the Spirit, in addition to vigorously challenging the
'bewildering approach' of postmodernism and its laissez-faire views on the plasticity of gender and
the family.