Against Sorcery, For Re-Enchantment, Part III: Against the New Puritanism
Towards Ending a Battle Between Brethren
In Parts I and II of this series—please read if you haven’t yet—I attempted to define common terms and directly address the arguments of the critics. But if you’re only going to read one part, please do me the honor of reading this one—my whole heart’s in it.
The pattern of the debate thus far has followed a familiar rhythm: accusation, followed by defense. This is understandable. Although a few perhaps uncharitable comments have been made by some of the authors now unjustly falling under the blanket of the so-called “occult revival”, the overwhelming majority of public attacks have come from a handful of critics publishing “studies” into what they label “The New Gnostics”.
The writers (Sebastian Morello especially) have responded seriously, capably, and at length. Their defenses have not only been theologically sound, but deeply rooted in the Church’s intellectual and liturgical tradition.
Yet, the posture of their response has remained fundamentally defensive. And that posture, I would argue, is an unjust necessity—particularly because the critics in question are often reacting to books they have not read in full, or fragments pulled out of context and shared online. The authors under scrutiny are doing serious, copious, and integrative work. In contrast, some of the critics are launching accusations from a place of reaction, rather than comprehension.
I do not intend to dramatize the situation—and again, I will try not to single out individuals. Although some of their accusations have been…precipitous, I am less worried about the critics in question, and much more concerned with the conversation that is happening around their posts.
I think it is time to articulate something that is plainly occurring: the conversation is, in many cases, engaging in something far more spiritually dangerous than mere gatekeeping or the occasional odd take.
It has revealed a posture of suspicion toward symbol, imagination, beauty, and metaphysics itself—a posture that cuts at the heart of the Catholic vision, and indeed the Orthodox vision, of Reality.
Some have chosen to label their targets with the ominous sobriquet “The New Gnostics.” It is perhaps justified to return the favor. If there is a term for this increasingly rigid, suspicious, anti-symbolic mode of argument, it is this:
The New Puritanism.
What Is the Real Threat?
We can talk about the aesthetic style, theological content, or didactic tone of this particular battle—but what really lies at the heart of it is a deep and serious concern: what, exactly, is the real problem that the critics are trying to articulate about the state of theological discourse?
I would suggest that the real scandal in Catholic theology today—especially in the faceless engagement-seeking of online dialogue—is not that some authors are reading Ficino.
It’s that so many Catholics are functionally incapable of understanding Bonaventure.
We must ask: what is the greater danger? Not just in theological discussion—but spiritually? A Catholic writer occasionally referencing the Hermetica in service of Christological metaphysics? Or a Church, especially in the West, so spiritually enervated by rationalism, nationalism, legalism, bureaucratic bloat, and desacralized liturgy that it no longer knows how to speak of heaven?
Shall we be content with the Orthodox picking up the broken hearts?
It’s already happened to some. We possess the fullness of the Faith, in full communion with the Throne, and, what, we’re just going to… capitulate to fallen, shattered Byzantium?
I say this with the utmost fervor and love: I long for our reunion with the East. But reunion, like marriage, requires an offering. The Orthodox have kept the apophatic fire burning with steadiness and grace. We in the West possess both fires—apophatic and kataphatic, emptiness and abundance—but our fires flare in fits and starts, often untended and misunderstood. We are, in truth, the full nuptial mystery—but we need counseling. The Orthodox, for all their solitude, have at least not forgotten who they are. They are bachelors in the wilderness, yes—but they have not gotten distracted.
The real threat to the Faith is not Valentin Tomberg’s Renaissance metaphysics. The real threat is that our churches resemble insurance offices. That our homilies echo TED talks. That our catechesis is reduced to slogans. That we have priests who deny the Resurrection and bishops who raise Pride flags—while some are panicking over Iamblichus, as though the next wave of Catholic theology is going to emerge from some witch’s coven.
The great irony is that our society is already inundated with real witches. While public Satanic rituals in support of Planned Parenthood are conducted in major cities, a few online voices are panicking over astrology and crystals. This isn’t a desire to protect the Church from insidious heresy (a great work to be sure)—instead it is a self-appointment to arbitration of theological purity.
The real enemy of the Church is Modernity. Modernity’s mind-body dualism. Its utilitarianism. Its suspicion of beauty. Its flattening of symbol. Its hatred of hierarchy. Its erasure of the sacred. Modernity has made us numb to beauty, goodness, and truth, and has destroyed our relationship to the land, our neighbor, our culture, and God.
Those mocked for “LARPing”—for dressing differently, for praying reverently, for reading deeply—are not conjuring spirits. They are trying to remember what the Church once knew. They are not inventing a new religion. They are simply attempting to live as if Catholicism were true—from the bones outward. In time, dress, prayer, art, story, and soil. Against the Modern.
They are not perfect. But they are not Gnostics. They are Pilgrims. Sons and daughters of the Church, hungry for bread not bleached by scorn and plastic.
And if they sometimes love beauty too much, then perhaps we ought to remember Augustine’s confession: “Late have I loved you, Beauty ever ancient, ever new.”
At least they have loved.
The Occult? No—the Image
This love, this hunger—this longing for something fuller, more beautiful, more whole—leads us to a deeper question still: not just what is threatening, but what is missing. We do not merely need better theological arguments. One more catechesis program will not save us. No, to salve a broken imagination, we need better images.
We are starving for images of power. But we lack them.
Like many Catholics, I have always loved film, especially the visually arresting work of Werner Herzog. Herzog, in all his brooding, bleak modernism, has strikingly articulated the issue with our society in general: “We lack adequate images.” And he’s right. Herzog himself has tried to fill the nihilistic void with images of staggering power—ecstatic landscapes, mad prophets, volcanoes and frozen worlds—but the very effort proves the point: he is still searching. Still grasping. He will never find them.
Because modernity cannot give us “adequate images.” It traffics only in fragments and simulations. Its images are functional, manipulative, often obscene. It advertises instead of reveals. It seduces instead of invites. It distracts instead of teaches. And worst of all, it bloats. We take a thousand photos and never look at them again. Our digital imaginary is sagging under the weight; our senses dulled by an endless stream of glowing icons that do not mediate heaven, but market hell.
Only the Church possesses the adequate image. The luminous icon. The miraculous relic. The ordered heavens. The sensible world, transfigured. And the Church has, largely, forgotten. We lost the War on Beauty. We are occupied by ugliness and utilitarianism like a conquered country.
The wreckage of this war—the Amnesia of the Imagination—has led, not to simplicity or sobriety, but to a frantic, rapacious hunger. A culture that once knelt before stained glass now scrolls through memes. We no longer know how to contemplate a single rose, but we consume a thousand distractions before breakfast. We are billboarded to death. Jingled to death. Advertised to death. We are dying of too many images—because we have forgotten the One Image that transforms it all.
Are we finally waking up to the spiritual horror of this situation?
Consider, for instance, this luminous passage from an Orthodox critic of the so-called “New Gnostics”—a passage that, perhaps inadvertently, exemplifies the very enchantment it gracefully defends:
Archbishop Alexei once recalled a member of his flock saying, “We Aleut people, we were always Orthodox. We just had to wait for Christ to come and show that to us.”
How is that? Father Michael Oleska (of blessed memory) had a theory. He said,
“Alaskan native people believe that all life is a mysterious and sacred reality, not just in humans but in animals. The animals are sensitive and, in many ways, wise. The hunter can never surprise the animal, or outsmart it, or overpower it. They only get the animals who allow themselves to be caught. The animals must sacrifice themselves to keep the otherwise pitiful and pathetic humans alive. This is the traditional belief that goes back thousands of years. And when the story of Christ was told to them, they accepted the sacrifice of Christ in the same way.”
This, again, is what it means to be Enchanted. It doesn’t mean seeing the world as a place where anything is possible. It means seeing the world as a place where one thing is inevitable: Light will triumph over darkness. Love will conquer hate. God Himself will be with us and be our God, and He will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and there will be no more death, no more sorrow, no more crying.
This is the order of the Universe: self-sacrificial love. Creation is the icon of the Creator—the unspeakably, unbearably beautiful face of Christ.
If we can quiet our thoughts, find rest for our hearts, we’ll hear the whole Universe breathe: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy.”
Then all we have to do is join in.
This is undeniably a powerful articulation of a Christian cosmic vision—one that, perhaps, undercuts the author’s own critique. Because what he has just given us is an Image. A deeply enchanted one. In fact, it is exactly the same image offered by Sebastian Morello: a knowledge ancient and beautiful, waiting for Christ’s transformation, made Holy by correct perception, and ending in self-sacrificial love as the Icon of the Creator and Redeemer. I don’t think we are saying different things at all; just speaking in different idioms.
But I do worry about this shimmering passage “summed up” in a different post: “All we need to re-enchant the world is the Jesus Prayer and a walk in the desert.” These are striking words. But something is missing.
What is missing is Image.
Where is the Eucharist? The Sacraments? The sacred Liturgy? Where are the rites, the feasts, the families crowned in grace? The world transfigured—not only renounced? This impulse to clarity sounds like Catholic mysticism—but it is tinged with American pragmatism. It is efficient. It is more Corporate than Cistercian. There seems to be a lingering Puritan suspicion of beauty, image, and festivity. Is it Orthodox?
I don’t think so; I think it is scrupulosity.
Purification, as necessary as it is, is not the telos. The Church is not merely ascetical. She is incarnational. And Incarnation means image. It means the Word became flesh and dwelt among us—not as abstraction, but in time, in place, in a body. With a voice, a face, a mother, a culture. The Catholic imagination does not end with negation. It must also affirm. This is the via positiva, kataphasis—the way of image, of symbol, of exulting in Creation and Creator. What Charles Williams called the “positive sanctity of enjoyment.” Holy Delight.
Yes, the apophatic tradition is holy and necessary. But if it is cut off from its complement, it becomes not merely incomplete—it becomes false.
I do not accuse either of these authors of denying the goodness of the Incarnation. Far from it. But I am suspicious when anyone suggests that this path alone is “all we need.” The early Church was suspicious too. Consider two striking second-century canons recorded in Hefele’s History of the Church Councils, here translated by Charles Williams:
If any bishop or priest or deacon, or any cleric whatsoever, shall refrain from marriage and from meat and from wine, not for the sake of discipline but with contempt, and, forgetful that all things are very good… blasphemously inveighs against the creation, let him either be corrected or deposed and turned out of the Church. And so with a layman.
And again:
If any bishop or priest or deacon does not feed on meat and wine on feast days, let him be deposed, lest he have his own conscience hardened, and be a cause of scandal to many.
I am no expert in canon law history. But these canons testify to the Church’s earliest instincts: creation is good. Matter is good. The feast is good. Image is good. To reject the feast is not a mark of sanctity. It is, in the eyes of the early Church, blasphemy.
This also demonstrates the pure poetry and purpose of purification: to go and be the redemption of the world. From the Sayings of the Desert Fathers:
“A brother came to Abba Anthony and said: ‘I want to flee the world.’ The old man answered: ‘Go, and when you prefer men to God, return.’”
Thankfully, the Church does not choose between ascetic and incarnational. She embraces both—not in balance, but in a higher synthesis. That synthesis, in its most vivid cultural flowering, was medieval Christendom: a society where the spiritual and the symbolic were not opposed, but united. That synthesis was wounded—first by iconoclasm’s legacy in the East, then by Puritanical austerity of Protestantism in the North.
Today’s panic over symbolic systems or esoteric language is not new—it’s the aftershock of older ruptures. On one side, it echoes a troubled but understandable fascination with Orthodoxy, where the apophatic (negation) tradition has been preserved beautifully, but often without its kataphatic (affirmation) counterpart—there is real suspicion in the East of eros, of passion, of desire, of beauty, of Imagination. On the other side, it reveals a historical blind spot to the medieval synthesis—tinged, in many cases, with Americanism. The American program of history begins with Greece and Rome, skips contemptuously over Christendom, and picks up again at the Renaissance. But Christendom is ours, and the thousand-year gap in our historical education is the same gap we feel in our hearts.
We are not reviving occultism. We are reviving Catholicism—in its full sacramental depth, against the disenchanted flat-earth of modernity. We are not conjuring spirits. We are remembering that the world is charged with the grandeur of God.
I came across a telling comment thread. Someone asked, “Isn’t the sign of the cross a kind of magic?” Another replied, “Well, no—because it’s oriented toward God.” This inadvertently articulates the entire issue. A symbolic action ordered to God’s Will is sacramental. Ordered to man’s will, it becomes sorcerous. That, in fact, is a major point of Morello’s book.
But the question itself reverberates with spiritual danger. It echoes with an old suspicion—the same that once saw incense as superfluous, icons as idolatrous, and bread as…just bread. It leaves room to repeat the old Protestant sneer: Hocus Pocus—a mocking distortion of Hoc est enim corpus meum.
The mystery of the Eucharist, recast as cheap conjuring. Are we to repeat the same confusion?
This confusion is a sword that cuts in every direction. East and West. North and South. It stabs at the heart of Christianity itself. If signs and symbols ordered to God are to be feared—if the spell of sacrament is confused with the spell of the wizard—then not only the Mass, but all Christian worship begins to look suspect. That’s how we got to this wasteland in the first place.
The Hunger for the Symbolic
The critics are right about the fact that something strange is happening. There is a widespread return to symbol, myth, and metaphysical hunger—but it is rarely led by the Church, and it is often horribly misdirected. Occult aesthetics, pop Satanism, supernatural and folk horror, a shallow aesthetic interest in kings, angels, saints, relics, rosaries, and rituals—these are rising across the cultural landscape. Some fear this as novelty, even danger. But most of it is not innovation. It is a memory struggling to reemerge. And much of the discomfort surrounding it is not theological at all—it is cultural. Sometimes, even ethnic.
The Anglo-French Revival of Symbol
Many of the thinkers accused of esotericism or Neoplatonic elitism are simply participating in a Catholic symbolic tradition that has flourished, especially in England and France, for over two centuries. In the aftermath of Enlightenment disenchantment, these cultures produced saints and visionaries, poets and priests, aesthetic movements and theological revivals—each insisting that Catholicism could and must reassert its claim to the symbolic cosmos. They preserved the memory of the medieval in recusant strongholds and counter-revolutionary counties.
This tradition shaped entire cultural currents: the Pre-Raphaelites, the Decadents, the Gothic revival, the Symbolists, the Arts & Crafts movement, the Oxford movement, the Inklings. Tolkien, who is often praised (if quietly sanitized), was steeped in this tradition. His closest friends, C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, employed symbolic reasoning with roots in sacramental and even hermetic structures—not to glorify magic, but to affirm that reality is symbolically and liturgically ordered. Others like Waugh, Eliot, Claudel, Huysmans, and Péguy carried the same torch in prose and poetry.
Today’s supposedly “esoteric” Catholics—figures like Kwasniewski, Coulombe, Morello, Martin, and Buck—are best understood as heirs to that same tradition; they do not emerge from nowhere. Morello studied under Roger Scruton. Buck channels Chesterton’s rollicking paradox and lives in Ireland. Coulombe, with deliberate pageantry, argues for Marian monarchy and mystical realism. None of these figures are offering novelty. They are simply inheritors of the Incarnational Revival crafted in the English and French crucibles—where the fault lines between the medieval and the modern were clearest.
But this tradition has always been…alien to American sensibilities.
In America, Chesterton’s jolly, witty metaphysics feels a little rococo, perhaps even embarrassing. Coulombe’s monarchism seems absurd to a country who just lost their minds over the “No Kings” protest, as though a Schoolhouse Rock episode constituted serious political thought. Buck’s poetic, narrative theology clashes with our preference for apologetics reduced to propositions and clear-cut arguments. We are a bullet-point people. We were raised on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, not Morte d’Arthur. Even the most devout Catholics in America culturally inherit a suspicion of excess, a lingering legacy of let’s-not-get-carried-away Puritanism that recoils at gratuitous symbol, beauty, and delight. We are instinctively pragmatic, moralizing, democratic. There are virtues in that, to be sure. But the medieval…unsettles us. So when the symbolic tradition at the heart of Christendom returns, we mistake it for danger. It’s a little too Frenchy for us.
That confusion is not entirely our fault. Our cultural memory has been ruthlessly propagandized from the Enlightenment onward to justify the systematic suppression of the ancien régime. But that history is not dead. And the thinkers under fire now are trying, in good faith, to bring that buried inheritance back into the light—so that we might walk forward, out of modernity’s curse, with our heads bowed before the Lord.
Contemporary Hunger
But amidst all these old stories, something new is happening too. The symbolic revival isn’t just a recovery of old forms. It’s also the outcry of modern souls starved by disenchantment. The occult turn isn’t a trend. It’s a survival mechanism.
As materialism collapses, even in the hard sciences, the cultural tide is shifting. Neuroscientists speak of consciousness. Physicists return to metaphysics. The world’s empiricism is beginning to crack. Physicalism is dead—we’re in its death throes. The voices who proclaim this range from fringe kooks to industry leaders. Materialism is eating itself at last.
But the Church, in many places, is not leading this conversation. Not because she lacks the nourishment—but because many of her children are ashamed of the feast. They’re still embarrassed by mystery. Nervous about beauty. Afraid of image. And the hungry turn elsewhere: commercialized occultism, New Age spiritualities, horoscopes and psychics, “manifestation,” and digital witchcraft. These are demonic distortions—but they emerge from attempts to occupy a cosmos with embedded symbolic correspondences. They testify to a core truth: man cannot survive in a world without wonder.
And while the Church remains tentative, the world is being re-enchanted—by devils.
We cannot meet this crisis by ridiculing the impulse. We must baptize it.
To dismiss this mystic hunger as “Gnostic” is not only wrong—it is a tragic misdiagnosis. Gnosticism was never condemned for its mysticism. It was condemned because it denied the goodness of matter and the Incarnation. The true Gnostic is not the one who sees signs everywhere—it is the one who sees nothing in bread and wine. Catholics, of all people, must not become iconoclasts in defense of orthodoxy. We risk leaving a generation, longing for heaven, trapped in the wilderness of false lights.
Let us not fear looking a little pagan. Let us fear looking dead.
Beyond the Desert and the Jungle
I would like to begin concluding this journey with a very personal note. I appreciate, more than I can say, the critics’ sensitivity and caution regarding spiritual danger embedded in the Hermetic Corpus.
I have a son with the same frantic magical fascination that I had. He flips through books of symbols, heart pounding. He sees clearly that the world is… simply more boring than it ought to be. I bless Providence that I have walked the esoteric path to its dead end—so that I might instruct him on how to avoid the real pitfalls embedded in the false promises of occult knowledge. I am hyper-aware of the spiritual danger in getting a little too interested in Tarot.
And there absolutely exist moments in history when faithful people—especially monks and nuns—went far too deep. The monks had moments of gnosis (I here use it to mean “divine insight,” not Gnosticism) and the nuns had strange visions. Sometimes they were led astray—for instance, Joachim of Fiore, who believed that he had discovered a hidden meaning to history within Scripture… thus unbottling an apocalyptic terror that eventually led to Luther. By no means is this a Western phenomenon only; one need only mention the name Rasputin to see that sometimes… it spills out.
But more often—far more often—monks and nuns, visionaries and wandering preachers did not go astray. Instead, they channelled this mystical and esoteric insight into devotion, creative genius, theology. Through the discipline of their obedience to their Rule, and their fidelity to the Church, they transformed what might have been excessive enthusiasm and the vice of untoward fascination into some of the greatest works of spiritual contemplation in Church history. This is a key insight of Morello’s book, and a suspicion I’ve harbored for many years; the monasteries were a kind of escape valve of spiritual energy, where wild charisma wasn’t tamed but ordered, like the explosions in a combustion engine.
We struggle with this in modernity, with our gutted monasteries in the West, and the embattled hermitages in the East. Our hearts are diminished—for our nuns have all but disappeared. We struggle in our lack of fidelity, lack of obedience, and lack of clarity. We wildly oscillate between scruples and laxity.
So it is time to move past accusation and defense, and into something greater. We can theorize more carefully and precisely—for all of us. The dwellers in the weird and awesome symbolic correspondences must never forget the clarity of the desert. And the dwellers in the dark and windy caves of purified contemplation must never forget the living thrum of the jungle.
Never forget to practice asceticism. Never forget to aim at the sanctification of the world. But above all, we must never separate them. The desert purifies the soul so that the jungle may be illumined. The jungle rewilds us so that we may go to the desert pulsing with God’s Life. It sounds like a paradox. But it is the Real.
This reality has been explored before, but perhaps never so beautifully as in David Fagerberg’s Liturgical Asceticism, Liturgical Mysticism, and Consecrating the World. These works, rooted in both the Desert Fathers and the Christian Magi, articulate a synthesis that is truly Catholic, truly orthodox (and Orthodox). They are a clear rejoinder to Puritanism, and death to Modernism.
In Fagerberg’s work, the key to the synthesis of apophasis and kataphasis is the mystical Reality of the liturgy. But we know this. We have seen it before—in Gregory the Great and Hildegard of Bingen, in the concept of viriditas: the greening force of grace that flows from the Incarnation into all creation, animating both the cloister and the kitchen, the solitary cell and the city street.
Practically, this means recovering the loving poverty of the Christian fast and the raucous delight of the Christian feast. The cycle of the liturgical year is not optional background—it is the crucible into which we pour our lives, the alchemical fire in which we are transfigured into the purest gold. This rhythm is not decorative. It is formative. It is medicine. The most beautiful and healing way forward is not a new movement. It is to return, with both silent gravity and wild dancing, to the full rhythm of the Church’s calendar: feasting without laxity, fasting without scrupulosity. This calendar is not mere discipline. It is pedagogy. It is healing. It is the shape of the Christian soul.
The Church needs both instincts—those who hunger for silence, and those who fill their homes with children and song. Both must not only be purified, but sanctified. The solution is not either/or, but both/and.
It is wrong to assume that those who feast have not fasted, or that speculation and curiosity means interior laxity and dissatisfaction. The Church has always needed both the desert hermit and the domestic saint. We cannot read each other’s hearts. We regard the ancient hermit and the rosy mother of twelve with equal awe. And there is something of the life-giving fecundity of the mother in the hermit’s hospitality and gentleness. And something of the self-sacrifice and luminous emptiness of the hermit in the mother’s steady affection.
When the via positiva, ravenous curiosity, and secret knowledge is pursued without the restraint of obedience and fidelity to the tradition, it becomes dangerous and indulgent. I don’t see even the slightest stain of this laxity of the authors accused of occultism. But when the via negativa is pursued without joy in the wonder of creation, love of fellow men, or childlike openness to the magic of Being, it risks becoming scrupulous, suspicious—a reborn Puritanism. We are not meant to oscillate between extremes, but to live their synthesis. Each must be restrained and perfected by the other.
Finally…
I have seen a note of smugness in some corners of online Orthodoxy, and online Traditionalism. But I understand this as a survival instinct. The Orthodox did not pass through the brimstone of the Protestant Revolt, the religious wars, absolutism, the Revolution, or the Industrial debasement of the human person. They were oppressed—by Islam, by Communism, by nationalist violence. The West has fought a civil war and we are exhausted; the East endured foreign rule and they are lean. So yes, they have preserved the desert and the icon. They have preserved mystery. And it is beautiful. And the “Traditionalists,” in the West, have held the Tridentine Vision, still occupying its rigor and orderliness and its sharp categories. They have kept Fidelity, and it is also beautiful.
We cannot deny that Catholicism is inundated with heretics, or that Orthodoxy is inundated with schismatics. But I will not abandon Holy Mother Church because she is sick and tired. I will remain. Because I have faith—not in abstractions, or in feelings, but in Christ, who will not forsake His Bride. And I believe that the Catholic Church still possesses all the resources to heal: kataphasis and apophasis, affirmation and negation, intellect and childlike wonder. Song and silence.
This synthesis is not merely a matter of balance—as if virtue were a midpoint. That is a Stoic, sober—and ultimately broken road. The Church does not strike compromises between opposites; she fuses them together in a new alloy. Rest and activity, discipline and liberty, the mystical and the mundane, the timeless and the historical—these are not rivals to be managed, but dimensions of a single incarnate reality.
Christ did not merely teach this synthesis. He is the synthesis. He wept over Jerusalem and laughed with friends. His glorified body passed through walls—and yet He ate fish with relish. He is both the Logos and the carpenter’s son.
This is what Christian anthropology offers the world: not a compromise between ideals, but a vision capacious enough to hold the knight and the martyr, St. Louis and St. Francis, Albert the Magus and Anthony the Hermit, the court and the cloister. The Church is the living Body of the One who united dust and divinity, time and eternity. We are not called to choose between the Silence of Space or The Music of the Spheres—but to be sanctified in both.
The real danger is not cosmic symbolism. It is theological impoverishment. It is when imagination, beauty, and desire are feared rather than purified. The Fathers may have cautious of Beauty, but not because they feared the symbolic—they lived in a world steeped in it. Their warnings came from within a feast of meaning. Our fear, often, comes from a culture that has grown comfortable with famine.
This argument has never really been about the occult. It is about something deeper, expressed in esoteric language and tradition, not because it’s an elitist secret or higher wisdom, but because it is too large for the textbook and too beautiful for prose. We do not want a war between the soul and the senses. They are on the same side. They are the same person.
If you have ever been arrested by a sunset, moved by the wind in the branches, pierced by the eyes of your beloved or the laughter of your child—and in those moments felt an ache toward something more—then you have already touched the Divine.
If you meet those moments with suspicion, you are not practicing asceticism. You are denying God’s gifts. The senses are the door to love, and love is the door to Truth.
Why do we have tastebuds? Why do we have eyes? Surely not merely to survive.
We have them so that we might taste and see that the Lord is good.
So–into the desert.
Into the jungle.
And may both become the Garden again.
+Pax+
So beautiful. I love Fagerberg too.
St. Seraphim of Sarov said" Acquire the Holy Spirit and thousands will come to Christ." In other words, become holy and that will draw others to holiness. Attempts to transform the world that come from our fallen natures will only produce failed utopias. I am vigorously allowing GOD to make me holy through humbling prayer. Join me.