What the Book Verily Sayeth
A Reflection on Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries, by Sebastian Morello.
Catholic Traditionalism is in a Dustup.
Everyone with eyes, hearts, and minds can see, feel, and reason that the Church is in some kind of crisis. But boy, do we respond to it differently.
There are many types of “traditionalism” emerging—mostly as internet phenomena, occasionally in the parish (usually a Latin or Byzantine one, let’s be honest), and increasingly in the publishing world. It’s primarily a lay movement, and it has textures that are hard to define and impossible to delineate. There are Orthobros and Madtrads, Tradwives and the Retvrn crowd. Aesthetics and memetics shape these groups, along with varying degrees of intellectual and spiritual sophistication.
But beneath the memes, four theologically serious responses have begun to emerge—and, perhaps, to compete for dominance of the “traditionalist” discourse.
Now, I’ve noticed that these groups fall along humorous lines. Both in the sense that people are inherently funny, and in the older sense: they align surprisingly well with the medieval theory of the four humours—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.
1. Reformists (Sanguine: hot, wet, airy, springy, vigorous adolescence)
This is the most common group by far. They’re trying to build a cautious but sincere pact with contemporary spirituality, aesthetics, and ecclesiology. They're doing serious theological work—grounded in Vatican II, the Theology of the Body, the Catechism—and doing their best to draw from the modern age what can still be sanctified. They're integrated with both modernity and the ecclesial hierarchy, yet deeply suspicious of the culture it has produced. And they’re doing pretty well, apart from the occasional slip of the tongue. Think Matt Fradd, Gabi Castillo, Joe Heschmeyer, Scott Hahn, even—to an extent—Benedict XVI. They're meeting people where they are. They roll up their sleeves. They want to fix what went wrong. But, it must be noted, Reformists can get doctrinally slippery. Sometimes it starts to feel like youth group with more orthodox opinions and higher production value. I think of Chris Stefanick—no one doubts his zeal for Jesus, but you do start to wonder if he’s trading in beauty for enthusiasm. He’d probably say, “That doesn’t matter as much as Jesus.” We know, buddy. But, I don’t know, maybe… put on a suit? I hate when I disagree with these people; they are realistic optimists. But they often seem at risk for the occasional major heresy. The hierarchy love ‘em.
2. Retreatists (Phlegmatic: cool, wet, watery, wintry, wizened old age)
This group has mostly checked out. They are in their own little world—off-grid, off-line, off-trend. They don’t argue; they just go plant something. If they’re online at all, it’s to post a picture of their sourdough starter or a cow. They’re probably in adoration right now, or watching a snail. If they’re women, they wear flowy dresses. If they’re men, they’re deeply into coffee, mushrooms, or bluegrass. You don’t know their opinions—on anything. They are fascinatingly vague. It’s almost impossible to disagree with them. They’re living beautiful lives, raising brilliant and muddy children, and planting cabbages. They are, to be honest, too checked out from the world—they’re not even monastic. They live in the vague in-between, and seem to do whatever pleases them. You want to shake them sometimes, but you’re afraid they’ll just smile and hug you. And you’re not ready for that. They might be sweaty.
3. Rigorists (Choleric: hot, dry, fiery, summery, childlike seriousness)
This is the rule crowd. Doesn’t matter what the rule is—as long as it’s old, sharp, and Latin. They want Trent back. They want the Baltimore Catechism engraved. They tend to hold the hierarchy to a higher standard than the hierarchy has ever reached. They’re almost always angry at the Vatican and more than a little suspicious of influencers. You know exactly the kind I’m talking about. I genuinely like them, but let’s be honest: if you don’t have the right position on Lefebvre, they probably think you’re a Freemason. And they’re mad about that too.
Rigorists know that Heaven is a narrow road, and they’re ready for the Sorting to get going. Their kids are beautiful, shockingly clean, and they have rosary bumper stickers. They call the Reformists “popesplainers.” They believe that True Charity is to call your local parish music program “heretical.” To be fair to them, it probably is.
4. Restorationists (Melancholic: cool, dry, earthy, autumnal, contemplative maturity)
This is the style in which I feel most comfortable, so I make fun of myself here. We want Christendom back, blast it all. We love churches, chant, and the Mass as a work of art. We like culture—but not modern culture. We read Waugh, Tolkien, Chesterton, and maybe a little too much poetry. We’d rather share a pint with a tortured artist than a television personality. We dress well—if a bit foppishly. We want beauty back. We believe we’re supposed to bring Christ into real places. But sometimes you have to ask: do we love Jesus, in all His creatures—or just Jesus in the pretty old things? We can’t imagine that someone could come to Christ through Disney, but absolutely can understand coming to Christ through Dionysius. Our temptations are preciousness, snobbishness, and more seriously, occasional despair. We look deeply in the tradition, and so sometimes we are also tempted to believe that we’ve discovered something that the Church hasn’t, risking obscurantism and pride. We are generally complicated people that love the idea of simplicity, but are unable to achieve it. Over-thinkers.
We're the most likely to bring too much champagne to a party, but absolutely the least likely to drink Red Bull.
[Note: Here’s a quick test to find out which group someone’s in: play them a song from that priest who “raps.” If they say “Well... if it leads someone closer to Christ...” that’s a Reformist. If they say “Wow. That’s... haha... I don’t know,” you’ve got a Retreatist. If they say “That is demonic Novus Ordo cringe,” congrats, that’s a Rigorist. If they begin weeping or curl into a fetal ball, you’ve found a Restorationist.]
Each group has blind spots. And there are very real theological disagreements—but also real spiritual affinities. What we share, despite our differing instincts, is Love. Love for Christ, his Church, and a longing for sanctity. We should strive to remember that, especially when on the Internet. I have a feeling our children would have a great play date, and the beer and conversation would flow like water. We would all go home feeling a little humbled by each other’s holiness. I know I would be, and often am.
[For instance, the youth pastor and music leader at our parish is certainly a Reformist. And I am… who I am. We circled each other for months like hackled dogs before our priest made us sit down with each other. We were fast friends in ten seconds.]
General Overview and Judicious Critiques
Sebastian Morello, I think, is a Restorationist by temperament. But his book shows almost none of the eccentricities of that mood. He combines the Reformist’s charity with the Retreatist’s humility. He carries the confidence of the Rigorist, and the vision of the Restorationist.
His book—Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries: Recovering the Sacred Mystery at the Heart of Reality—has stirred up quite the ruckus. Like the aforementioned Catholic DJ priest, it’s polarizing—but unlike “Lil Father,” Morello’s book has been polarizing because of its scope and, I think, its beauty. No one has attacked it for its beauty per se, but that seems to be the underlying discomfort. He’s been said to “sneak” Hermeticism into the Faith (he’s sneaking it through his beautiful prose, the rascal). It has received some glowing, thankful reviews, some reviews which might be characterized as pious overreactions, and some which are obviously artifacts of having read no further than the title flap.
After spending a considerable amount of time and energy last week on this platform defending not the book itself but the worldview that informs it, I thought it could be important to actually finish the work (I got it in the mail last Wednesday) and to review its actual contents for us all, who have been variously befuddled, dismissive, defensive, or just plain ornery.
First I'd like to offer an overview of Morello's central theses, which are quite straightforward: First, that The Church of today is in an unprecedented crisis of epistemology—of meaning-making, of thought-world—and one solution may be the recovery of medieval "magical thinking", of which the Hermetic corpus offers a potent and fitting example. Second, that the Church's epistemological break from its own worldview, its current mental confusion, is to blame for many serious troubles. Morello argues that disembodied Cartesianism (cogito ergo sum instead of simply SUM) is a "spell" or, more accurately, a "curse" that has been laid upon Christ's living Body, and that the ways to break this Curse of Modernity are three:
1. Mysticism, in which we ground our fundamental epistemological trust and telos in the immediate knowledge of the Divine-as-such.
2. Magic, which depends on a pre-modern framework of symbolic correspondences and The Real, yields no explanatory grounds to Cartesian dualism, and can provide an idiom native to the Church in which the sacramental life is inherently meaningful and attractive. And
3. Monasteries, which are physical, placed, and embodied manifestations of Christ’s radical transformation of the world, in which the Life of the Holy Spirit and the Peace of Christ extend outward into the Church and upward toward Paradise.
Before I begin to gush (and I will), let me be judicious and offer a few real critiques from my own perspective.
1. Morello's assessment of modern traditionalist circles sometimes underestimates the faithful's need for clarity and rigor in this cruel and vague environment. This is seen in his critique of an exorcist (who shall remain nameless) who condemns any crystal-usage. The lady who asked “the crystal question” could very well have been in some spiritual danger. Although the use of stones was extremely common among the saints, the saints weren’t living in a culture soaked in consumerist spirituality and commodified esoterica. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the exorcist in question is a little like a soldier who comes home and comments about the danger of firearms. He has seen how the demonic can twist innocent curiosity into demonic fascination, and for people struggling to discern what constitutes a pious life, his advice may very well be important. This is a pattern across the board; sometimes Morello seems to lose sight of the fact that some people need strict boundaries from their spiritual leaders, that it’s not always a problem of Cartesian Modernity vs. The Magical World. I think this risks presenting the argument more simplistically than Morello actually wants.
2. Morello’s (entirely personal, not theological) limitations about what language or system could constitute a sufficient idiom for the project of re-enchantment pokes out occasionally. He is knowledgable in Hermeticism, but there very well might be other “magical” systems—equally native to the Christian cosmos—that could help us break free of the Curse of Modernity. To wit, there have been comments about "Christian animism" (a very shaky name, but emerging from some very interesting Orthodox sources), the "re-wilding" of Christianity, re-integrating Alchemical texts, reaching further back into Hebrew covenant history (and the wild and beautiful cosmology of 1st century Jewish mysticism), the Martin Shaw "shamanic" territory, and my own favorite concept: Viriditas from Gregory and Bingen. More likely, we will need some version of all of these, carefully baptized, explored without panic or rancor, and collated ruthlessly to rigorous orthodoxy and orthopraxy. But his own expertise is in Hermeticism, and it's an understandable and not very limiting limitation. He also helpfully acknowledges that the Hermetic tradition contains within it some writings and some expressions which are spiritually dangerous—a necessary caveat.
3. He refers to Hermetic spiritual exercises, monastic liturgies, and instances of "magical" thinking, but offers few examples. I'd have liked to see a list or a chapter dedicated to these exercises and historical examples, and have them explored and explained. This is a minor fault though, and one that most likely has to do with the digestible length of the book. I look forward to further works which take up these exercises more directly and show how we might break the Cartesian curse with them.
4. He does not go into detail (or even mention much) the ways of purgation, ascent, or apophasis, which I think ticked off the Orthodox and Orthodox-adjacent commentators. But, to be fair to Morello, he need not have mentioned them—that method is already making a serious and beautiful comeback. To the critics of this particular problem, I would rejoin that to pretend that the way of negation is the only Christian way is historically uninformed, theologically inaccurate, and culturally naive. [I've explored this at length in my article: Against the New Puritanism] So while this is a critique—he perhaps should have given a serious chapter to the "rejection of the world" as a valid path forward, even if it is not explicitly his subject—I would also say that we have many serious resources to set us on the apophatic path, and very few to set us upon the kataphatic path, so his book is a very welcome addition.
So there. I've been "objective". Those are the only real faults I can find in this work, and really they are calls for more detail, and perhaps more careful analysis of contemporary traditionalist culture. These "faults" do not detract much from what I consider to be a masterpiece of historical theology and cultural criticism.
The central argument of this work is deceptively simple and devastatingly convincing: We have a cursed and crippled Imagination, due to the mostly accidental adoption of a mistaken epistemology, and we need to rediscover our Faith's natural metaphysics—the metaphysics of the Saints—to shock ourselves out of it. We need a counter-spell.
Instead of the limp-wristed, disembodied, pseudo-mystical "subject" theology of heretics like Tielhard de Chardin and Hans Kung (I mean ‘heretics’ literally here), derived from anti-Christian sources and Martin Buber's obnoxiously passive I-Thou theology, Morello offers a glimpse into the pre-modern mind, one that affirms and sanctifies the world in a robust, object-oriented metaphysics of grandeur. He suggests that this pre-modern epistemology offers us a Christian grammar for seeing, affirming, and sanctifying the created world—and our place within it. A way to live in the world, without being Of the World.
The Course of the Argument
He names the devil plainly in the Introduction. Modernity takes the form of a curse. We no longer perceive reality as what it is; a sorcerous, demonic veil has been drawn over our eyes like the proverbial wool. As he writes:
Modernity, I have come to see, is ultimately a conjuring of black magic by which the mind is hexed with abstractionism, rationalism, scientism, mechanization, and all the various ways we are rendered sightless by the blinding of the mind’s eye.
Once the world is flattened and de-sacralized, the universe ceases to be “a meeting place of God and man,” and becomes “lifeless stuff to be utilized.” This is not just a philosophical problem; it is a political, liturgical… and historical problem. Morello is sharp to point out that “ideas” are not forces in history to the extent that Enlightenment historiographers often pretend. This history of the Cartesian “spell” is fundamentally communal, almost personal. People have to be “captured” by an idea and implement it; ideas don’t have power in themselves. Later in the work, he sharpens this further; that if enough people begin to enact the idea, it seems to have an almost demonic quality, and we can speak of them as egregores—communal thought-forms that, once embodied, take on spiritual momentum of their own.
In other words, he acknowledges that ideas are not destined—but may act as if they are, declaring themselves to be “inevitable”. In doing so, he avoids the usual trap of progressive and Hegelian historiography, which is itself a kind of thought-curse. He demonstrates that it is possible to be on the wrong side of history (to employ that noxious phrase against the even more noxious “best-of-all-possible-worlds” nonsense), and then to realize our mistake, and go back. Simply put: some bad ideas are laid upon people as a curse, which can be removed, and are not merely progress. This underscores Morello’s deeply Christian historiography.
A lack of this theoretical sensitivity is often the real failing of contemporary historical theology. There is almost always the assumption that contemporary life is—at least in some way—better; that any wish to “go back” is simply “nostalgia”. That word, too, is often wielded as a spell, rendering any critique of modernity toothless. These sorts of “critiques” are almost always couched in the flaccid phrase: “Now, by saying this, I’m not arguing that we ought to go back to the Middle Ages…”
Sebastian Morello is more courageous; he interprets history like Dawson, not Fukuyama, and he channels a Chestertonian rhetorical clarity. It recalled to me a paragraph from What’s Wrong with the World:
There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.
The Church is a society which is supposed to have as its purpose the redemption of souls, and establishing the reign of Christ on Earth. So what is this plan that Morello suggests to reconstruct this special kind of society, the Church? The title gives the answer: Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries.
In the second chapter, “Mysticism as the Foundation for Philosophy”, Morello advocates for the re-instantiation of the essentially mystical nature of philosophical inquiry. He writes: “The mystical assumption at the heart of philosophy, which…delayed the asking of the Cartesian question for so many centuries, is that the world is in some mysterious way a divine communication.” In other words, the Enlightenment has lost the plot, the purpose, the telos of the philosophical project, and it is imperative that we re-ground our minds on the mystical insight which undergirds Classical Realism.
Without the mystical intuition, the intellect enters an inescapable spiral of anxiety-ridden, self-directed nitpicking. The childlike wonder at the world which underpins the philosophical life corrupts into the childish confusion that underpins modernity.
This centrality of wonder is not only from Morello’s personal experience, but his influences from the Incarnational revival in the 19th century. And it is the foundation for the whole work. Wonder, here, is portrayed as the fundamental Yes to Being Itself, without which all experience becomes an intolerable burden. At the center of the restoration then is this joyful surrender to the Divine Communication. Wonder.
It is this posture which will restore our philosophical project by sidelining questions of subject for the primacy of object.
There is real philosophical sophistication here, too. Some of the most cutting-edge theorists in contemporary philosophy are, in fact, accidentally reinventing the wheel—though theirs still doesn’t roll, it is at least vaguely circular—through Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO, for short) and strains of post-humanist thought (which often mean, in practice, post-subject). So Morello is not merely a Restorationist or a mystic; he arrives early to a future parley the Church must eventually have with these emerging schools of thought.
But what of Magic?
(This is the bit that made people mad)
Morello draws the connections that most modern commentators are afraid to draw: the Christian imagination is not allergic to the language of magic, properly understood. In fact, it was baptized from the beginning:
“Christians—alongside their practices of meditation and contemplation—have ever believed in sacred magic, or ‘theurgy,’ but they have held that such magic has the power... to sacralize the world only when united to the eternal and singular priesthood of Jesus Christ, and to this baptized theurgy Christians have given the name liturgy.”
This is the key: not escape from the world, but the re-consecration of the world through the liturgy, which is the only legitimate form of Christian theurgy. Thus, he writes, our true political task is to establish “liturgical nations in fraternal union with each other, for the alternative... is... the grey mass of a diabolical slave settlement.”
Magic is here cast an essentially political act, an act of War—but a spiritual war between Christ the High Priest and Satan, Prince of Lies.
We are perhaps accustomed to the language of spiritual warfare—but so accustomed, in fact, that we now employ it almost exclusively in the realm of private sin, yet another effect of the interiorizing of the Christian project under Cartesian dualism. Morello argues for the more classical view: that a spiritual war is in fact a war of magics. Sorcery against Liturgy. The use of this terminology is perhaps an issue for some—the discomfort with the word “magic” is understandable—but by rehabilitating the word magic, which has lost almost any sense of real meaning in English, Morello shocks us into realizing what the Christian claim has always actually been. Christ has set up His Church, an outpost of Heaven, behind Enemy lines.
When we reclaim this cosmic sense of the Christian sacramental life, we remember that it is not merely a project of individual conversion or personal mystical union—though that remains its undeniable heart—but also a public, ontological project. We are the salt and the light Christ says we are. He has added us like leaven to dead dough. He is the only living thing in the universe, and by sharing in His Being, we communicate Life to the dead earth. We remake it. It begins to lean toward the Kingdom of God.
Morello zeroes in on one of the more uncomfortable points for modern Catholics—one that I think he gets exactly right. He argues that many of the Church’s modern maladies stem from the slow shift “from a monastic culture to a clerical culture.” This transition, though gradual and largely unintentional, has real consequences:
“The Church’s culture moved from one focused on the supernatural transformation of concrete localities and communities to the sanctification of the interior life and the inner self, shifting the emphasis from shared places and communal practices to personal piety and rational assent to propositions.”
In other words, the mystical and sacramental presence of Christ has been displaced—from the center of the world to the interior of the individual. And in doing so, the Church has slowly relinquished her claims on the world itself. A Christianity that no longer seeks to consecrate time, place, nature, kingship, language, and law is a Christianity that has already surrendered to secularism—even if it keeps its catechism tidy, even if it still occasionally produces personal sanctity.
This is also directly opposed to any so-called “apolitical” Christian message. Even the most renunciatory hermits of East and West have placed swords in the hands of kings to defend Christian civilization. The modern impulse to detach that civilization from the teachings of Jesus is not faithfulness—it is revisionism, dressed up as Gospel sensitivity. It is a false, a cowardly, and a cheap “mysticism”. One that pretends to be fighting a higher battle, when in fact it has simply fallen on the back foot—and stayed there—for nearly two centuries
The Startling Conclusion
Christian civilization is losing right now. And so, some pretend that we never should have been fighting for it in the first place—blasphemously twisting Christ’s own words to justify this entirely new interpretation of the Gospel.
But we ARE losing. And if we are honest, we must ask: where do we go from here? The answer, Morello says plainly, is Monasticism.
I’ve long been confused by the Church’s emphasis on friars and parish priests rather than monks. Morello answered that confusion with historical aplomb. He shows how the religious/secular divide was remade into a muddled system of priesthood vs. laity vs. religious orders. This broke a natural distinction—in the world or out of it—into a bewildering menu of “vocations”: Do you feel called? To which order? Which charism? Which level of tradition? To the priesthood? To the married life? To the single life, even?
This destruction of the natural divide of vocations—the saeculum or the cloister, regardless of your clerical status—is shown to be not just strange but wantonly destructive to the faithful’s sense of mission. And so Morello re-proposes monasticism proper: the sanctification of place through longstanding, sheltered, mystical practice, within a community of obedience. This, he argues, would erect real spiritual and visible fortresses against Modernity’s satanic hex. It is The Benedict Option, gone fully Benedictine. Not only is this the only hope for civilization—but more importantly, it is the magnet that draws souls to Christ.
So many commentators—materialist, Protestant, Orthodox, even, I am sad to say, Catholics—have repeated over and over again, with a tone of high moral purity: “Christianity is not about culture, or politics, but about salvation in Christ.” That is obviously true; it is also a stupid thing to say. People, persons, souls, are formed by culture. Christian culture is worth fighting for because it forms people, because it leads many souls to Christ. To give up on Christian culture is to give up on Christ’s claim to souls. This is so blatantly obvious that I feel insane for writing it down. I often think that perhaps I am missing something—that these people aren’t saying what they seem to say. But then, almost daily, I see yet another fresh arrangement of the same old argument: that Christians must stay out of the City of Man. Trespassers will be prosecuted. It is an argument that seems to come from a computer rather than a person; or perhaps a person who speaks in binary [note the clever pun].
That being said, it is clear that a new road has to be carved for an authentically Christian culture, and Morello offers the unoriginal but painfully needed advice; we ought to do it this time like we did last time. With monasteries.
Morello’s remedy is not despair or nostalgia. It is memory. He does not call for a reactionary enclave or LARPing medievalism, but for the spiritual reawakening of the imagination through the communal liturgy, the mystical tradition, and what he dares to call “magic”—that is, the cooperative work of grace through symbol, nature, and rite. The rest of the book sketches the spiritual architecture of such a revival: it touches on sacramental realism, the communal and cosmic logic of monastic life, the proper place of elders, and the incarnate reality of flow state exercise in a wonderful concluding chapter about exercising like a knight. This is not esoteric, not heterodox, but hierarchical, historical, and oriented completely to the Real.
The book is, perhaps, not a primer for beginners to spiritual life. If to write a difficult book is elitist, then we might as well call the entire history of serious theological writing ‘elitist’. It is challenging, primarily because it demonstrates that our modern practice of Catholicism has a real rupture in it that must be repaired by something. But it is also thrilling, fiery, and sincere. It reads less like a treatise and more like a battle standard. Morello is not issuing academic critiques from a distance—he is strumming the harp of David inside the walls of Christendom, daring us to wake up from a demonic oppression.
If you're looking for a comprehensive theological system, or an excuse to invite your tradwife group to a Tarot reading, this isn’t it. But if you’re looking for a vision—a metaphysical lens, a kind of intellectual and spiritual shock therapy—then this is exactly the book you need. Morello reminds us that when the Mind is severed from the Body, we can no longer see the liturgical world. We cannot live a full life. Imagination illumined by wisdom is not a luxury—it is the organ of vision. He is not calling us to a “RETVRN”, or to occultism, but calling us to triage: a recovery of the world’s sacramental structure, the Church’s mission in Creation, and the soul’s power to perceive the glory of God.
We should heed the call.
+Pax+
Purchase the book here from Os Justi Press.
I am reading your series on this with great interest- until this controversy came up, I wasn't aware that the problem existed. I assumed we all knew to leave the obvious dark occult alone. This brings me to my perhaps simplistic question: what are some examples of other types of practices that others are warning against? After thirty active years in Trad-dom, I've been out of the community for seven, so I seem to have missed some trends.
Your humorous breakdown of the "camps" is very apt, as well as funny.
So glad to have found your Substack!