Against Sorcery, For Re-enchantment, Part II: The Critical Arguments
A Convert's Response to the Anti-Magical Turn
In Part 1, I offered some definitions of common “occult” terms, broken into three tiers: what is expressly condemned by the Church, which ideas and philosophies warrant caution but are not condemned, and which are necessary for understanding the Church’s metaphysics as expressed in Classical Realism, or Neoplatonism. If you have not read that, please do so here; it is essential to understanding what I’m about to argue.
I also discussed briefly my own interest and background in this debate, and pointed out my own history; a desire for enchantment, which I unsuccessfully sought to satisfy in paganism & occultism–then fulfilled and transfigured by Christ. In this part, however, I want to engage with some of the arguments offered by authors who are accusing certain “traditionalist” writers of sneaking sorcery into the Church.
In this section, it is not my intention to critique individual statements, or refute particular blog posts or threads. That work is already ongoing, and by the time this is published, the conversation will likely have moved on.
Additionally, there is much I admire in the work of the critics, and I’d like (if possible) to remain in friendly conversation with them. My aim is not to attack these authors (they are fellow Christians), but to question the mood that has emerged, not, perhaps in each individual writer, but certainly occurring in the discussion surrounding this issue: a mood of blanket suspicion toward anything that is perceived as too symbolic, too mystical, or what some have hastily and inaccurately labeled “perennialism” or “the occult”. I use those terms here not as an accurate descriptor, but as the critics seem to use them: vague umbrellas covering everything from Neoplatonic cosmology to typology, from Giordano Bruno to liturgical aesthetics.
Importantly, at the outset I would like to commend the authors of the “anti-occult” for their vigilance against spiritual danger for individual souls. If their intention is to preserve fellow Catholics from dangerous spiritual error, their intention is good. But good intentions must still answer to the truth: are their claims accurate?
My contention is that they are not.
The reductive, reactionary posture of these posts collapses necessary distinctions, dismisses the Catholic tradition’s own philosophical and symbolic richness, and risks replacing sacramental imagination with a kind of pragmatic rationalist moralism.
This posture, this mood, is not only historically unmoored but is in itself theologically hazardous, and its prevalence among some corners of online theological and spiritual dialogue (and monologue) is deeply frustrating. In their zeal to protect the Faith from “esoteric infiltration,” these critics may be discarding some of its richest theological and cosmological inheritances. In seeking to avoid the spiritual elitism of Perennialism and Esotericism, they risk positioning themselves as the gatekeepers of the “pure” faith; without ecclesiastical authority, academic precision, or indeed even—I’m sad to say—personal charity or clarity.
My contention, in short, is this: the thinkers under fire (Morello, Buck, Coulombe, Kwasniewski, and others) are not trying to introduce alien spiritual categories into Catholicism. They are attempting—and succeeding, in many cases—to rehabilitate a theological and cosmological tradition that was once at the heart of the Church’s vision of reality, but which has grown dim in the modern mind. They are not reviving Gnosticism or Hermeticism as such; rather, they are rearticulating Christian Platonism, sacramental realism, and symbolic ontology for generations starved of wonder in the wake of corrosive Cartesian abstraction and dystopian materialism.
This, I believe, is the crux of the matter. The debate is not simply about what is “orthodox” versus “heretical.” It is about whether there remains room within contemporary Catholic discourse for mystery, for symbol, for a participatory cosmos. And if there is not, then something has gone deeply wrong—not in the hearts of those who wish to re-enchant the world, but in the hearts and minds of those who fear and mock it.
I’d like to examine five particular arguments that came up several times.
I. Philosophical/Theological Accusation: Syncretism Masquerading as Orthodoxy
One author summarizes the concern succinctly when he writes that one author “weaves these syncretistic, Gnostic, Kabbalistic and Manichean beliefs together, while maintaining that all of the above conforms to his orthodox Catholic Faith.” The charge, in essence, is one of theological compromise—an attempt to smuggle esoteric or occult ideas into the Church under the guise of tradition.
Let me be clear: syncretism is a serious issue. In an age where incense is offered before Pachamama and spiritual influencers blend Christian language with New Age self-indulgence, vigilance is not only understandable, but necessary. The concern itself is not inherently wrong.
But it is severely misplaced here.
What is being labeled “syncretism” in these critiques is, in fact, part of a long and legitimate tradition within Catholicism: the integration of truth, goodness, and beauty from outside sources into the Church’s own intellectual and spiritual patrimony. St. Augustine, for example, having passed through Manichaeism and Neoplatonism, retained Neoplatonic metaphysical insights while rigorously condemning the heresies he had left behind. St. Thomas Aquinas baptized Aristotle—whose work reached Christendom through Muslim thinkers like Avicenna and Averroes. Catholic Spain, similarly, drew from Jewish Kabbalah and Islamic Sufism—not as rival religions, but as philosophical and mystical resources reframed and ordered under the Lordship of Christ. Modern theologians, both in the Catholic and Orthodox Churches—from Benedict XVI to Hieromonk Damascene, from Henri de Lubac to Aidan Nichols—have affirmed that the Logos was at work before Christ’s Incarnation, and that Christian theology is capable of baptizing the true insights of other traditions, not to compromise the Gospel, or under the guise of false ecumenism, but to proclaim the fullness of revelation more profoundly.
And while this demonstrates that the careful baptism of extra-Christian sources is a long-standing, necessary, and fruitful practice within the Church, it must be stressed: that isn’t even what’s happening in most of the texts being accused of syncretism. The vast majority of the sources employed by these writers—Morello, Buck, Kwasniewski, and others—are not drawn from alien spiritual systems at all. They are drawing on the native language of the Church herself: the Fathers, the Scholastics, the mystics, the liturgists. The language of analogy, participation, hierarchy, symbolism, and sacramentality is not foreign—it is ours. It is the grammar of Christendom.
The critics, in their haste to guard against dangerous synthesis, often end up mistaking the Church’s own metaphysical idiom for something subversive or esoteric. In doing so, they risk discarding not only misidentified “influences,” but entire dimensions of the Catholic intellectual and mystical tradition—dimensions once central to her self-understanding. The critics of the “Gnostic turn” are seeing a Gnostic phantom. If they would turn on the light, they would find that it’s the Angelic Doctor himself.
The Gnostic accusation, in particular, requires special caution. It is increasingly used as a vague slur rather than a precise term. Gnosticism is not simply “mysticism” or “symbolic thinking” or even “interest in cosmology.” It is a well-defined heresy, condemned by the Church for its rejection of matter, its denial of the Incarnation, and its dualistic and elitist cosmology. Ironically, the thinkers under fire are recovering a vision of creation that affirms all the things Gnosticism denies: the goodness of matter, the meaningfulness of form, the efficacy of symbols, and the absolute centrality of the Incarnation.
If these writers and presses are Gnostics, they are Gnostics who profess the Nicene Creed, kneel before the Eucharist, and proclaim that God became flesh. Which is to say—they are not Gnostics at all.
II. The Institutional Accusation: Tradition Subverted from Within
The second critique is institutional. As one writer puts it:
“It uncovers unsettling facts about an occultist influence on ‘Traditional Catholicism’ or ‘Catholic Traditionalism’—and here we use the term in a very loose sense.”
The suggestion here is not simply that certain ideas are dangerous, but that publishers like Angelico Press, and respected outlets like Rorate Caeli and the New Liturgical Movement, are actively advancing a covert spiritual agenda—smuggling in “esotericism” under the guise of tradition. This critique is serious, and again, it is spiritually hazardous to make lightly.
Because to make this claim is not just to critique a book; it is to imply deceit. It is to accuse authors of bad faith, of consciously leading souls astray. If wrong, it is slander and calumny. It is to suggest that trusted publishers and platforms—many of which have done great work preserving orthodox doctrine, reverent liturgy, and faithful philosophical inquiry—are at best negligent, and at worst complicit in a spiritual subversion of Catholic tradition. That is not merely implausible.
It is uncharitable, sloppy, and utterly false.
The reality is far simpler, and far more beautiful: Angelico, Ignatius, Cluny Media, Os Justi, IHS Press, and others are doing the work of intellectual retrieval. They are helping Catholics recover the fullness of their inheritance—philosophically, liturgically, and imaginatively. If we are going to dismiss Angelico’s entire catalog because it publishes authors who make reference to cosmology, hierarchy, the symbolic order, or a participatory metaphysic, or even Sophiology or Hermeticism, then we must also dispense with a substantial swath of the Catholic tradition itself. Augustine and Dionysius. Hildegard and Bonaventure. Even Aquinas and the Catechism, which speaks freely of “symbol” and “mystery” (even astrology!) without a trace of embarrassment.
The suspicion of beauty, of poetry, of analogy and mystery, is not traditional. It is reactionary. And often, it is Protestant, almost Puritan, in style.
The works being targeted are not Goetia or manuals for sorcery. They are not crypto-hermetic treatises. Although I am embarrassed to say it, I know what those kinds of books look like. No, these are books of theology, cultural criticism, metaphysics, and devotional reflection. To employ a distinction from Susanna Clarke’s novel Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norell, they are books about magic, not books of magic. Their goal is not to undermine the Deposit of Faith, but to illuminate it—to reawaken the symbolic grammar through which that Faith has traditionally been understood and lived.
Do I agree with all these books? No, of course not. Do some of them go too far into speculation? Perhaps—in enthusiasm. Are these thinkers Romantic in temperament? Certainly, sometimes. But the Catholic tradition has always had room for romantics—so long as they kneel before the altar and love the truth. The suspicion of beauty, of poetry, of analogy and mystery, is not traditional. It is reactionary. And often, it is Protestant, almost Puritan, in style. If Romanticism is now the enemy—rather than, say, gender ideology in diocesan schools, the flattening of catechesis, or the denial of the Real Presence or Hell in modern seminaries—then our sense of proportion has failed. Our priorities need recalibration.
Catholics should not be naïve. Careful discernment is necessary, and every book should be read in the light of the Church’s teaching. But to cast entire publishers or authors into outer darkness for seeking to recover the participatory and symbolic vision that shaped the very heart of Christian thought? That is not vigilance. It is blindness dressed up as caution. It is to protect the shell of the Faith while hollowing out its marrow.
III. Historical Accusation: A Novel and Dubious Revival
The third critique is historical: that the symbolic, sacramental, and mystical themes reappearing in Catholic writing today are not traditional at all—but rather a modern distortion, a contemporary throwback to Renaissance-era syncretism. One recent piece at claims:
“This revival of ancient ‘knowledge falsely so‑called’ laid the foundations for modern occultism. …It was only in the decadence of the Renaissance that some Catholic scholars began to practice the magical aspects of the Hermetic tradition.”
This is inaccurate on several levels.
As already discussed, the integration of philosophical and poetic insights from outside the Christian fold has never been foreign to the Catholic tradition—it is constitutive of it. From the earliest centuries, Christian thinkers have baptized elements of pagan philosophy not to corrupt the Gospel but to better express its cosmic scope. Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, Bonaventure, and Aquinas all worked within inherited symbolic metaphysics to proclaim the Incarnation, the sacraments, and the layered harmony of creation.
I mean, c’mon. Paul did it. John did it. When did Tertullian’s snide remark, “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” (note that, ironically, this was written by Tertullian in the Latin language, in a Greek rhetorical style) resurfaced as a serious critique?
To suggest that Catholic interest in symbolic cosmology or metaphysical structure emerged only in the “decadent Renaissance” is to grotesquely misread both the “Renaissance” and the Church’s own memory. Patristic and medieval theology was replete with what today’s flat modernity would call “magical thinking”; not occultism, but the deep sense that form reveals meaning, that matter participates in spirit, that creation is a woven tapestry of sign and significance that can be understood, manipulated, corresponded, cataloged, and employed for spiritual purpose.
Second, the idea that today’s Catholic writers are engaging in a novel or eccentric trend—a twee “online trad” revival—is spectacularly misinformed. What we are seeing is the continuation of a much older renewal, one that gained momentum in the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially in England and France. This was not an elite esoteric fringe. It was the foundation for a widespread return to Catholic imagination, theology, and literature.
In England, we see this in the Oxford Movement and in the Catholic literary revival it sparked; John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and Robert Hugh Benson all drew from the deep wells of Christian symbolism, sacramentality, and cosmological imagination to present the Faith to a disenchanted age. They were not only steeped in Christian metaphysics—they were responding directly to the Hermetic and occult revival of their own time. Their works are not mystical side-quests but masterpieces of modern Catholic renewal—works that taught generations to see again with sacramental eyes.
In France, figures like Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, and Joris-Karl Huysmans (after his conversion… from the occult!) were doing much the same. They stood against the mechanized secularism of their day not with fantasy, but with fierce realism shot through with symbol and sacrament. Their Catholicism was liturgical, embodied, symbolic, mystical. They recovered what had never been lost—only buried.
Similar patterns appeared in Germany and Italy. The mystical theology of Edith Stein, the Christological metaphysics of Romano Guardini, the liturgical anthropology of Odo Casel. Even artists like Gustave Moreau, William Morris, and Arnold Böcklin, though not Catholic, sensed that the modern world was starving for sign and symbol, for some metaphysical grammar. Many of these artists, influenced by both occult and biblical sources, anticipated the same spiritual hunger that Catholic thinkers would later meet with clarity, beauty, and faithfulness.
The Occult Revival in Europe provoked not imitation, but response. And the Catholic imagination roared to life. We continue to see its fruits today—in the popular devotion to Tolkien, the enduring appeal of Chesterton, the academic fascination with T.S. Eliot and Evelyn Waugh. A recovery was already well underway. And it still is.
The writers now accused of “syncretism” are not inventing anything. They are inheriting. They are carrying on a long and faithful effort to recover the poetic and metaphysical language of the Church—a language that was never meant to be buried under thin rationalism, ideological nationalism, or pragmatic moralism.
If the critics believe this is something new, it is only because they are just now arriving at a century-long party. And frankly—they’re well past fashionably late.
IV. Intellectual Elitism and the Charge of Spiritual Uselessness
This critique is less often stated directly in the articles themselves and more frequently seen in the comments sections, threads, and conversations surrounding them. It is a concern not just about what is being said, but who is saying it and how—a suspicion of intellectuals in general, and of overly sophisticated discourse about the Faith. The implicit claim is that this body of writing is spiritually useless to most Catholics, or worse, spiritually dangerous: intellectualism masquerading as mysticism, inaccessible to ordinary believers, and potentially prideful in tone or content.
There is something here worth affirming. The Church has indeed suffered terribly from intellectual betrayal over the last century. The university, the seminary, the academic theology echo-chamber, the gutted Catholic private school—all were once institutions at the heart of Christendom, forming saints and shaping culture. But since the mid-20th century, these same institutions have become passive participants or even agents of cultural and ecclesial dissolution. Whether through the false promises of "ecumenical dialogue" and "cultural diversity," or the sterile rationalism of late scholasticism, or the bureaucratic mangling of 20th-century theological developments, much of the Church’s intellectual leadership has become an object of deserved mistrust.
But this distrust and even righteous anger is shared by the writers now under suspicion. Kwasniewski, Buck, Morello, Coulombe: all have been among the most vociferous critics of these institutional failures. They and other writers in their “camp” are not offering pseudo-academic spiritualism. They are attempting to rescue theological reflection from the abstract, dull, physicalist, modernist frameworks that have gutted it. They are trying to recover a mode of thought that is not divorced from the life of prayer, the liturgy, or the common faithful, but grounded in them. They are reclaiming the mind as a faculty ordered to contemplation.
To treat serious metaphysical reflection, speculative theology, or poetic philosophy as inherently elitist is to allow the betrayals of the last century to overshadow the entire tradition. If Augustine had said that to read the Platonists was fanciful, or if Aquinas had treated Aristotle as “too intellectual,” we would not have a Catholic intellectual tradition at all. Yes, intellectualizing can be dangerous—but it is not, by nature, initiatory. It does not constitute a secret religion. It is simply part of what it means to love God with the mind.
The fact that theologians have too often retreated to an ivory tower is a structural, not a spiritual, problem. And much blame here in the last century can be laid at the feet of an education system that has intentionally brutalized the Western imagination and historical consciousness. I say this not as an accusation, but with shared mourning. My education too was woefully inadequate, and it is only through God’s grace—and the work of great Catholic authors—that I have been able to fill some of the gaps. I still would consider myself terribly uninformed—which leads me to dive deeper into my own tradition, not seek to import foreign cosmologies and praxes.
That said, the critics are not entirely wrong to call out the occasional condescending remark. There are real problems in the tone of some online debates. Phrases like “midwits” or “normies” are spiritually corrosive—not because they reveal an initiatory esotericism, but because they reveal exasperation turned into uncharity. But this kind of language is no Gnostic dog whistle. It is the emotional venting of Catholics who feel intellectually homeless—who find themselves mocked in both mainstream Church settings and traditionalist circles for simply asking the same questions as the medieval saints once did.
The real danger here is not the content of the contested ideas, but the tone of the entire debate, and the eggshells that we’ve been walking on since Vatican II. Suspicion, slander, fear, and accusation are not just unfortunate—they are damaging to the soul. And I will confess—I have felt and acted on this frustration, too. I have responded to suspicion with irritation, to poor arguments with sarcasm, to bad faith with derision. But that is precisely why this needs to be said clearly: whatever is being debated, it must not be debated like this. The Church deserves better than a spiritual cold war between those who seek the fullness of the Faith. And all of us, myself included, need to recover charity as the primary mark of orthodox theological discussion.
It should be noted here that the disembodied realm of the internet does us no favors here, and that, if at all possible, we should seek personal and face-to-face conversation. Grace moves differently in person.
V. The Charge of Crypto-Modernism
A final, strange, and increasingly common claim is that the thinkers in question are secretly part of the problem they claim to resist—that they are disguised heirs of ressourcement theology or nouvelle théologie, not defenders of tradition. The idea here is that by integrating Romanticism, or by speaking of mystery, symbol, and imagination, these authors are actually reintroducing the very theological confusion that gutted Catholic identity after Vatican II.
This argument misunderstands both the history and the substance of these debates.
It is true that many 20th-century theological movements bore strange and troubling fruit. And it is true that the bureaucratic, pastoral, and liturgical implementations of certain theological ideas were often disastrous. But it is not true that the thinkers being attacked today are the heirs of those disasters. They are more often the ones cleaning up the wreckage.
To accuse someone like Kwasniewski or Coulombe of “crypto-modernism” is frankly absurd. These men are not nouvelle théologiens. They are not Hans Küng with candles. They are realist theologians and cultural critics who recognize that the Church’s metaphysical tradition, which has always been grounded in classical realism and Christian Platonism, has a robust and coherent symbolic language, and that this language must be recovered. They do not promote subjective experience as the ground of doctrine. They do not relativize the sacraments. They do not reinterpret the Deposit of Faith. Rather, they fight to defend it, using every tool of imagination and philosophy the Church has ever claimed as her own.
And it is precisely here that the confusion emerges. Because these thinkers respect the gifts of Romanticism—its poetry, its beauty, its hunger for meaning—they are painted as mystical modernists. But Romanticism itself was a response to rationalist disenchantment. It may have lacked theological rigor, but it intuited that the world had lost something essential. The men being accused today are not echoing Romantic theology à la Charles Williams, though they may employ him. They are articulating realist theology in a Romantic tone, which is something very different.
[Note: There is a curious hatred of the ressourcement theologians that seems unmoored from their actual work. They are associated online with aggiornamento and nouvelle theologie, casually, just because they happened to be around at the same time, or shared the occasional concern or person. But it is much more complicated than this, and I will soon be writing a piece examining some of these thinkers. Suffice it to say here that the traditional Catholic faithful should be cautious but not afraid to engage with these theologians, many of whom detested how their work was twisted to justify liturgical abuse and vague theology.]
The work of Morello, Kwasniewski, Coulombe, and Buck is anything but crypto-modernist. It is anti-modern—but in the best and truest sense: it is trying to move out of modernity, not to fight it on its own terms. This is not a betrayal of tradition. It is fidelity to tradition under attack.
Notes on the Polemical Subtext: “Trads” as Target
Up to this point, we’ve engaged five major arguments—the theological, institutional, and historical concerns raised by the critics. But we must also examine the rhetorical posture behind these critiques. One cannot read them without sensing a broader unease—not just with “esoteric” theology, but with the entire ecosystem of thinkers, artists, writers, and liturgical reformers who have gathered under the banner of what we might call Christendom Restoration.
In short: the target is not merely “the occult.” The target is the growing intellectual and spiritual revival of pre-modern Catholic cosmology—and the loosely defined group of “trads” associated with it. This does not include only the authors we’ve examined here, but a whole host of authors, podcasters, and institutions, that never seem to be “orthodox enough” for the critics. New Polity, The Theology of Home, The Catholic Lamp, First Things, Dappled Things, all the things, have come under fire from voices whose radical fidelity to the Tridentine vision, while emotionally compelling, has become a historically frozen lens.
The critics seem to be policing not simply theological content, but a mood, a method, a worldview. The tone of the accusations—words like “LARPing,” “weirdos,” “crypto-pagans,” or “esoteric cosplayers”—suggests that what really irritates is not just doctrine, but affect. There is a discomfort with those who are unapologetically re-enchanting the world: recovering hierarchy, beauty, kingship, Marian devotion, symbolism, chivalry, metaphysical realism, liturgical depth, and even cultural eccentricity. A growing sense that the only proper concern of Catholics is personal sanctity, fidelity to Trent, and violently squashing “laxity”.
Consider the line, “What do I know?—I was just raised on the Baltimore Catechism.” This comment, offered with passive-aggressive irony, does not clarify doctrine or advance debate. It implies that love for the rich metaphysical tradition of the Church is something exotic, even untrustworthy, and that anyone reaching beyond the most digestible summaries of the Faith is a kind of spiritual show-off. The word “LARPing” in particular is telling: it implies pretense, performance, delusion. It turns a theological dispute into a cultural dunk.
The moment a theological disagreement is reduced to snark, the conversation ceases to be about truth and becomes about cultural policing. It becomes about who gets to speak for the Faith—and who is to be laughed out of the room.
In this light, it becomes harder to believe that the objections are primarily theological. The concern may be real, but the target seems more political and cultural. “Occult” becomes a kind of slur, deployed to discredit not a heresy, but a sensibility: an aesthetic, a lineage, a tradition older than modernity, and much older than Trent.
What, precisely, is being labeled “occult”?
A renewed attention to sacramentality. A recovery of the symbolic meaning of creation. An effort to reclaim the grandeur of Christian metaphysics. A desire to read the liturgy not just as rubric, but as cosmological grammar. A desire to reach beyond Trent and Vatican II for theological discourse. If that is what qualifies as suspect, then the Church has far more to lose by avoiding these themes than by exploring them. Indeed, it becomes hard to escape the conclusion that the real discomfort is with the recovery of a Catholic worldview that is beautiful, strange, and uncompromising—a worldview that challenges not only secular modernity, but the banal, flattened sensibility masquerading as “simple faith” that has come to dominate much of modern Catholic discourse.
And the irony stings: the very authors accused of Gnosticism are, in fact, working to restore the full dignity of matter and symbol, while their critics, in their attempts to expose Gnostic danger, risk repeating the primary Gnostic error: suspicion of symbol, contempt for form, embarrassment at the sacramental density of the visible world.
Let us be honest, then. Much of the rhetorical energy behind these critiques is not driven by careful doctrinal analysis, but by a reflexive cultural anxiety—a suspicion of anything too Gothic, too poetic, too Anglo-French, too metaphysical, or too “aesthetic.” And this is why it is not enough to dismiss the accused thinkers as merely eccentric. They are not being treated as eccentrics, but as infiltrators. And the evidence offered is not that they reject the Creed or the Councils, but that they speak of angels, stars, kings, and planets.
But those things, I would argue, are Catholic things.
What is actually taking place? The men under fire—Morello, Buck, Coulombe, Kwasniewski, and others—are not importing magic or paganism into the Church. They are attempting to recover the Catholic synthesis: that grand, hierarchical, symbolic, and sacramental vision of reality which reached its summit in the High Middle Ages and has never been rejected by the Church—only eclipsed by a half-millennium of spiritual crisis and reaction.
This retrieval is not about adding strangeness to the Faith. It is about reclaiming what was lost. It is about recovering a full symbolic grammar of worship and devotion. It is about curing our blindness, not indulging our fantasies.
But beneath much of the critic’s call to a sort of “gospel simplicity,” a more troubling trend is taking shape. It is not a return to the poverty of spirit, but a retreat of soul. It speaks in tones of purity and clarity, but it is laced with panic—about images, about beauty, about language that reaches too far or adorns too much. It fears enchantment not because it is false, but because it is powerful. And now, with the accelerant of the internet, this mood has metastasized into a digital scrupulosity.
It is a mood that belongs not to the Fathers or the saints, but to the Puritans.
Part III: Against the New Puritanism coming soon.
I'm eastern Orthodox. The problems you are addressing in the RCC, and I commend you for dong so, are for the most part not found in the EOC. Beginning with scholasticism and continuing in the renaissance, the west became infatuated with explaining everything rationally. We in the EOC believe in the real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but we don't need the explanation of transubstantiation. We let the mystery be a mystery. We in EOC believe that the BVM was sinless, but we don't need the explanation of the immaculate conception. We let the mystery be a mystery. A mystery explained is no longer a mystery.