‘Mysticism, Magic and Monasteries’ Offers a Brilliant Counter-Narrative to Contemporary Inversions

"Sebastian Morello has produced a brilliant excoriation of how and to what effect western civilisation has been possessed by Cartesian thought and what he subsequently terms “the black magic of modernity” – of which he argues our present society is an extreme manifestation."

From the Catholic Herald

By George Young

In his new book, Sebastian Morello has produced a brilliant excoriation of how and to what effect western civilisation has been possessed by Cartesian thought and what he subsequently terms “the black magic of modernity” – of which he argues our present society is an extreme manifestation. Morello’s central target in Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries: Recovering the Sacred Mystery at the Heart of Reality is the supremacy of rationalism and Cartesian dualism – the fundamental distinction between mind and body posited in the 17th century – by which, he argues, European societies and the western Church have been misled to the point of complete inversion.

Morello accounts for every symptom: the erosion of sacred spaces; the obliteration of the festal calendar (particularly in Britain); the “zombie apocalypse” of mindless consumption; the opened floodgates of Vatican II; the historic decline in monasticism. All are analysed with exhaustive reference to classical mythology, Revelation, JRR Tolkein, CS Lewis and Norse myth cycles. Tomberg’s Meditations on Hermeticism (also owned by Pope John Paul II) are included, alongside psychoactive fungi and the Perennialists – often simultaneously.

Within the opening pages, he addresses institutional reactions to Covid-19, a subject still enshrouded in its own kind of reverential sanctity. That episode, Morello suggests, proved that various supernatural Christian presuppositions have been supplanted by a different, occult language of “the science”.

“Once the church building is considered within the Cartesian paradigm,” he explains, “ it is difficult to see why a building is required at all…when after 2,000 years of being told the opposite, we learned in fact we could attend Mass while staying at home.” He concludes that, in this way, “the complete disembodification of Christianity was complete”.

Morello writes as a Catholic, no doubt, but seemingly without prioritisation of scriptural or theological reference; his plundering of the esoteric and traditionalist schools, coherently subsumed into the Catholic worldview, gives extraordinary yet succinct depth to the “secular age”. It is an approach few contemporary Catholic writers and their readers dare to take; at this, committed conformists and secularists will no doubt sneer. Indeed, it is delivered in torrents with authoritative ease – the Scrutonian influence, under whom the author trained, is evident – and in consistent substantiation of the thesis that gives the book its purpose: “If the hierarchy spent only half the time on disseminating the mystical and liturgical tradition of the Church that it does on destroying our own liturgical inheritance, it could drag us out of the nihilism of the secular age in the flash of a moment.”

Morello proposes a remedial process of what he calls “re-enchantment”, an idea that is never quite defined in the pragmatic terms that will sufficiently challenge the unknowingly rationalised mind of his reader, but is thematically invoked throughout. Chapter 12 – “Start Your Day Like a Knight Templar” – is an instructive exception. In this sense, the “pathway of escape”, as the book self-describes, seems to be aimed at the escapees – traditionalist Catholics and neoplatonists sympathetic to mystical thought and Pereniallist wisdom – although this is hardly a criticism when the subject and its examination have wide appeal.

Morello frequently laments the political decline from European theocracies into the superficial and corrupt trade of today, as he does the Church – which does not realise that it has “ousted [Christ] in a diabolic effect to divorce Bride from Bridegroom”.

“We need an actual revival of real monasticism in the West,” he argues. “We need literal monasteries.” Alas, Christian thinkers and leaders – clerical and otherwise – have failed to court the private individuals on whom such a programme would be contingent (lest the western Churches or Department for Housing fund the new-builds), no less to formulate the sufficient incentives on which their respective governments could at least be lobbied.

As much as there may be an “inescapable relationship between the spiritual and the political”, the reader is left wanting an electoral manifesto in the afterword. But the first appendix – a fascinating correspondence with Peter Kwasniewski, the traditionalist Catholic writer and composer – is highly compelling for just this reason. Here Morello no longer speaks as a philosopher-writer, but personally. He details his real experiences of conversion: “Christ, the Logos Incarnate” (ultimately rejected by many of the Pereniallists he cites) and the modest, devout inner-city communities he has encountered. Both may have been forgotten between a society and Church that have inspired, by necessity, this brilliant book.

Photo: The Royal Monastery of Saint Mary of Guadalupe, a Roman Catholic monastery of the enclosed monks of the Order of Saint Jerome, in Guadalupe in Extremadura, Spain

Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries: Recovering the Sacred Mystery at the Heart of Reality by Sebastian Morello / Os Justi Press, £23.95, 204 pages