An Interview with Arthur Versluis
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Copyright Grail Publishing 2003
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Interviewer: You've written a wide range of works, and I'm wondering what it is that connects them. *Island Farm* is a book about family farming, but you've also published books on religious and literary themes. Is there anything that links these books?
AV: It's true that I've published quite a variety of books, but all of them center in various ways on the themes of religion and literature. For example, *Island Farm*, which is in part about my family's farm near Grand Rapids, Michigan, is a literary and philosophical work with religious themes. Woven into it, and its discussion of family farming life, are Emerson, Thoreau, and even the great German theosopher Franz von Baader. And my trilogy of books that introduce the previously obscured subject of Christian theosophy also emerge from the meeting of religion and literature, although in this case with more emphasis on religion, in particular, experiential spirituality. The first of these books was *Theosophia*, for the general reader as well as the academic. The second was *Wisdom's Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition*, and the third was the anthology, *Wisdom's Book: The Sophia Anthology*, published in 2000. These three books reveal the theosophic tradition for the first time in English, and to some degree show the indivisibility of religion and literature. It's relatively common now to attempt to study literature or the humanities without reference to religious themes or traditions, but I believe that it's critically important to study them together. The confluence of these two streams is Western esotericism, and that's a primary area of my current scholarship.
Interviewer: Could you say a bit more about Western esotericism and why you're interested in it?
AV: The field of Western esotericism is fascinating because it is like journeying into previously unexplored terrain - virtually everywhere one turns is some new vista. I wrote my books on the Christian theosophic tradition of Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) and his followers because there was nothing in English available on them, and I knew that they were the Christian equivalent of Sufism and Kabbalism in Islam and Judaism, respectively. Every religious tradition has its inner or experiential dimension, and Christianity certainly is no exception. Reviewers of books in my theosophic trilogy have said that works like *Wisdom's Children* and *Wisdom's Book* redefine the way we understand Christianity, and I think that's true. But the field of Western esotericism more generally, and theosophy in particular, are difficult because they require a great deal of general knowledge of disparate fields in order to write well or accurately about them. I think there is some danger that as Western esotericism becomes more well known in the academic world, it becomes merely grist for academic mills. To do justice to esoteric authors and works requires what I call imaginative sympathy in order to understand what they are about. One can easily imagine books on esotericism that are full of information but devoid of understanding, and that would be unfortunate. But I would encourage people interested in Christianity or Christian history to read my books on theosophy - they are written for the general reader as well as for the scholar. So also is my most recent book from Oxford University Press, *The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance*, which offers a groundbreaking view of early and nineteenth-century cultural and literary manifestations of esotericism, all the way from the founding fathers to Emerson, Dickinson, and Melville. Books like these, whatever their flaws, define whole new areas of study, and that's always exciting.
Interviewer: Your most recent book is *Shakespeare the Magus*. Could you speak a little to how that book came about?
AV: You won't be surprised, given what I've said already, to learn that this is also a book on religion and literature. It is interesting that Shakespeare's works are permeated with references to what used to be termed in a denigrating way "the occult," and yet no one had written specifically on Shakespeare's magical worldview. In this book I cover all of Shakespeare's plays, and look at such themes as alchemy, herbalism, astrology, white magic, sorcery, and the nature of good and evil. As it turns out, one can hardly turn around in a Shakespeare drama without bumping into magical themes - they're everywhere. In fact, some of the plays, for instance, "A Winter's Tale," or "The Tempest," have explicit alchemical or magical themes at their very center. Once I realized this, the book became inevitable. Readers of this book will not see Shakespeare's works in quite the same way again. I owe some debt, which I acknowledge in the book itself, to C.S. Lewis and his *Discarded Image*. Like him in that book, I seek to offer the reader of *Shakespeare the Magus* a glimpse into entirely different ways of seeing the world. Much more than the modern world tends to be, the medieval and Renaissance periods were suffused with what we may loosely call a magical perspective, and this book offers a way into that worldview by looking closely at the works of Shakespeare.
Interviewer: In *Wisdom's Children* you allude to the possibility of a cultural renaissance. What do you see as our current cultural situation and how do your books connect to that situation?
AV: I suppose that in answering that question, everything hinges on one's definition of "culture." We now tend to use the word loosely, as if culture and society were the same thing, but I don't think they are. The word "culture" derives from the word "cultus," and is connected on the one hand to "cultivation" or agriculture, and on the other hand to "cult," or religion. I think that a living culture is rooted in and conserves the land and nature through a balance of wilderness, agrarianism, and village life. But a living culture also expresses its spiritual-religious center, so we could say that culture is what joins humanity with the natural and spiritual worlds at once. Much of modern society totally divides these realms, and the result is the rampant destruction of nature out of greed and ignorance as well as the absence of the sacred. Is a cultural renaissance possible? Perhaps not on a vast scale, but for individuals and groups, I'm sure it is, and in various ways, my books point in that direction.
Interviewer: Thank you for taking the time for this interview.
AV: You're quite welcome; it's been a pleasure.
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