Author: Mark Vernon

I was delighted to catch up with Matt Segall. Our interests much overlap when it comes to figures like Plato and Owen Barfield. We reflected on the radical insights of such generative thinkers, who were keen to link thought to experience, thereby expanding perception. We asked why the cataphatic needs the apophatic in speculative and… Continue reading The Origins of Language and other questions. With Matt Segall

My Thought For The Day, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 this morning, Teresa of Ávila’s day The world feels like it is getting weirder. I don’t mean that life feels more unsafe or less certain. But rather, a rational, secular worldview seems to be coming undone. Here’s an example. Twenty years ago this month, Richard… Continue reading The World Is Getting Weirder. BBC Radio 4 Thought For The Day

William Blake was born when England was at war. Conflict and the threat of conflict shaped politics for much of his life. And yet, simultaneously, Albion was booming, materially and with an influx of ideas from its empire. Blake saw Jesus walking amongst these spirited exchanges, quite as much as he discerned the powerful presence… Continue reading William Blake: A Golden String. A short film with Mark Vernon

The Nazis were keen on the Cathars. Heinrich Himmler deemed them preservers of Aryan purity in medieval Europe and funded research into the history. The detail brought me up short. I was vaguely aware that the Cathars were unlikely to have been a Languedocian para-church of harmless dualists: peace-loving, women-friendly, reincarnation-believing, pescatarian. But whilst the… Continue reading The Mists of Tyranny. Cathar lessons and the Albigensian Crusade

What if apocalyptic biblical literature is not best interpreted through historical events, though they certainly have a bearing, nor through the symbolic, as if the imagery should be decoded? Instead, these texts are educations in imagination, reorientating readers to the vision of God. Such an understanding of the apocalyptic, which means “unveiling”, was certainly the… Continue reading Unveiling Transcendence. William Blake and the Book of Daniel

New essay at my Substack, A Golden String, on the linguistic spirits active in our lives.

An extract from “History in English Words” by Owen Barfield, also marking its centenary, first published in 1926. And now there followed an event which has had more influence on the character of the English language than any other before or since. The conquest of England by the Norman invaders brought about an influx of… Continue reading The Norman Conquest in English Words. The Centenary of Barfield’s History in English Words

The extraordinary brilliance of LLMs is often a cause for alarm. But theology suggests a less melodramatic and more marvellous understanding. New essay at my Substack, A Golden String.

An ancient intuition is that plants have souls and even participate in the life of God by virtue of being alive. But what sense can be made of that today? In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon consider the Neoplatonic understanding that all living creatures, and perhaps all self-organising things,… Continue reading The Souls of Plants. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

  Ethics and identity, as liberals and nationalists respectively stress, miss the vastness of the human soul. New essay at my Substack, A Golden String. #Christianity #Nationalism #Humanism