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Of late, there have been several attacks on my writings and on me personally, in the vanguard of which has been the ex-satanist, ex-Catholic, now Eastern Orthodox writer Michael Warren Davis. The attacks are based on my occasional use of the term ‘magic’, for which Davis claims I must be embroiled in the dark occult, and that I am attempting to entangle others in its web. When I replied to Davis’s attack on me and on my book entitled Mysticism, Magic, & Monasteries, I said that I was thankful to him for provoking me into clarifying the book’s content. It seems that this little polemic between us has also considerably boosted book sales, so the list of things for which I must thank Davis is growing.
Many of the concerns that have been raised, which have been sent to me, regard the terminology I deploy in my book and the style with which I deploy it. So, for the sake of clarity, below I offer a list of points that aim to respond to these concerns brought to my attention.
Hermeticism. When I speak of Hermeticism, I am referring not only to the Corpus Hermeticum that played such a big role in the cultural and aesthetic revival of 15th and 16th century Europe, when the Greek Christians introduced this volume to the West during the Council of Florence, but to the whole intellectual and spiritual enterprise that has orbited this tradition and its inextricable connection—both historical and conceptual—to Neoplatonism. What Hermeticism and Neoplatonism have historically sought to do is offer an account of creation as living, inasmuch as creation participates in God for its existence and emanates from His creative power in its astonishing intelligibility.
Downstream from the 17th and 18th centuries, we are inclined to see nature not as our Christian forebears did, which is a grave problem for our daily conversion, and I, by analogy—for good or ill—call this Enlightenment blindness to God’s presence in His creation the ‘hex’ upon the western mind. I suggest that what Roger Buck, the contemporary Catholic author and critic of New Ageism, calls “Hermetic cognition” can help habituate us to a way of seeing the world that is less tainted by Enlightenment prejudices, and I highlight Valentin Tomberg’s proposed discipline of “concentration without effort” as a helpful foundation for how to do this.
Style. One objection to my book concerns my reluctance to offer many abstract definitions. Thus, it has been said that I appear to utilise ambiguity to avoid the charge of being heterodox or even heretical—which, were I less ambiguous, it is supposed it would be revealed that I am. I understand the criticism but, following the tradition with which I engage in the text, the purpose of the style is more to ‘initiate’ the reader into a habit of thinking rather than define a set of abstract terms. Arguing against inordinate abstractionism is, after all, one of my themes in the book. There are, of course, disadvantages to the approach I take, but also certain advantages, given my misgivings about rationalistic tendencies prevalent in (or almost definitive of) modernity. My concern, repeated in the book in question, is how much popular Christianity has adapted itself to Enlightenment rationalism, and how that is gravely undermining of Revelation’s content in its reception. Learning this is much more like learning how to ride a bike, rather than learning how to build a bike.
Natural Religion. John Henry Newman pointed out that there is a great danger in the term ‘natural religion’. It can mean the common religious impulse, or rational creature’s longing for his Source, from which all the chaotic manifestations of natural religion spring. But it can also mean those chaotic manifestations of man’s natural religious impulse, everything from African animism or Amerindian human sacrifice to nobler expressions like Vedantic Hinduism. But, again, since the 17th century, it has also commonly meant a kind of rationalistic deism that sees God as a removed and uninterested Efficient Cause of a universe that functions mechanically and automatically.
Newman, in his Grammar of Assent, goes to some lengths to understand the former two kinds by which the term is used, and he rejects as phoney the third, Enlightenment notion of ‘natural religion’. Christians do not believe that true religion replaces natural religion, but assumes, heals, and transfigures it. Thus, the relationship between the natural and supernatural orders is a major theme of my book. I recommend ‘Hermetic cognition’ as a way to overcome our ingrained tendency to slip back into Enlightenment conceptions of ‘natural religion’, from which an inordinately rationalistic and dichotomous Thomism has at times arisen.
Perennialism. One of the major advantages of appealing to both the Hermetic and Neoplatonic traditions is that they are, in general, deeply anti-Gnostic, going back to Plotinus’s attack on the Gnostics in 2:9 of The Enneads and continuing all the way to Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot (see pages 5-6 of that book). Rather than a Gnostic view of the world as an Ahrimanic prison from which we must seek escape—a view of creation which the Enlightenment reintroduced through the backdoor via Cartesian anthropology and Baconian cosmology—I try to present a different view of the world, one as the first book of divine revelation, alongside Holy Writ, as the Fathers saw it.
It is precisely such a view, in their highly erudite attack on the prejudices and assumptions of modernity, that I trace in many thinkers termed ‘perennialist’. Perennialism is a diverse school of thought that holds that common themes recur across religions and philosophies, illuminating certain universal truths about the nature of the world, human nature, and morality. It has hence been deeply bound up with presenting an anti-Enlightenment worldview amid a post-Enlightenment culture. The dialogue between the Catholic intellectual and spiritual tradition and the works of the perennialists has been fruitful, with such figures as Bernard Kelly, Jean Borella, Wolfgang Smith, and Stratford Caldecott among others all more or less connected with it. In the Preface of my book, I show how aspects of Newman’s thought anticipated this dialogue (see page xvii). A giant standing over this dialogue is the above-named Wolfgang Smith, whose engagement not only with other religious traditions but with quantum mechanics and other areas of modern science has been a remarkable contribution to the Catholic intellectual tradition in modern times. It is very obvious that those calling out in shrill tones against such a fruitful area of Catholic thought are doing so from near-total, if not indeed total, ignorance.
Magic. Michael Warren Davis has prided himself on the following argument: since the Didache condemns both magic and sodomy, by promoting magic, Morello is the equivalent of one encouraging sodomy among the faithful. What a little bit of training in analytic philosophy affords you is the habit of asking the question, “But what does he/she mean by X?” If one attends to how language works, it becomes clear that there are words that can be analogised and words that cannot. If ‘magic’ cannot be analogised, a vast amount of our literature doesn’t make any sense. In fact, ‘magic’ is a word that is analogised far more than most words. ‘Sodomy’, by contrast, has a very restricted meaning (although, as it happens, Saint Thomas Aquinas expanded the term to include all sexual acts that do not respect the end for which sex exists, namely procreation in principle).
So, when the English and Eastern Orthodox writer Paul Kingsnorth wrote a few months ago that a famous prayer written by Saint Patrick is “an incantation, a chant, a spell”, I did not interpret him to mean that Patrick was not a saint but rather a practitioner of witchcraft, nor did his readers take him to mean that, nor I’m sure did Davis. It is precisely because ‘magic’ is such a flexible term that I make certain distinctions in my book for clarity’s sake, primarily between ‘goetia’ (or ‘sorcery’) and ‘divine theurgy’, the latter of which is the offering of created goods to the Creator so that they might participate in His work of redeeming the world, the offering of which I argue requires the baptism of such ‘theurgy’, which in turn is one way to think about Christian liturgy (see page 4 of the book).
There are two senses in which I use the word ‘magic’ to denote what I’m defending: 1) to refer to the Neoplatonic world as a living emanation of the Creator, an account of the world that’s antithetical to the Enlightenment worldview which I oppose, namely that of a dead and mechanical universe; and 2) the active participation by us in the created order so as to offer it to the glory of God, which I argue is futile and even dangerous if not baptised in Christ (given the diabolical character of unredeemed nature). Strangely, Davis ignores the ways I use the word ‘magic’ for what I’m defending in my book. Instead, he attributes to me the one way I explicitly say I do not use the term ‘magic’ for what I’m defending—that is, to denote goetia, or even ‘natural magic’.
Re-enchantment. I fear many people have neglected to consider the context in which this book was written, namely the much wider debate currently raging both in the Church and beyond it, to which this book was a Catholic contribution. That debate has come to be called the ‘re-enchantment’ debate. This debate, which has arisen due to a loss of confidence in the Enlightenment picture of the world, is a massive evangelisation opportunity for the Church. People have realised that materialist reductionism and nihilism does not satiate the human heart, largely because it is completely false. They want a different account of the world, one I believe the Church can give them.
But tragically the Church itself, with so many of her faithful, is deeply enmeshed in the Enlightenment view of the world. In turn, the Church does not have the attraction it should for so many seekers. It’s that ‘spell’ over the institutional Church at this moment in its history that I would like to help to break, by bringing to the fore forgotten Christian sources, and the cross-pollination with various philosophical and spiritual traditions that have produced much fruit in centuries past. When one overcomes the Enlightenment worldview, one discovers a universe that is ‘magical’ or ‘enchanted’, because it is pregnant with saints and angels and blessings and holy places, and ever participates in the divine life of the Creator, in turn reflecting Him and glorifying Him. It is a world full of mystery and wonder, and it is that world that the Church must both convey and practically baptise, that it may be snatched from the grips of the evil one, the ‘god of this world’, and offered in thanksgiving back to the Father.
Me. It is unfortunate that what should have been a critique of my book has repeatedly veered off into speculation and tittle-tattle about my private life. I am, as it happens, quite a private person and I am intensely protective of my family, which is why it’s difficult to find me or my loved ones on online social media. It’s been frequently said that I am some sort of practising magician or sorcerer, and that, as Davis put it, I’m “openly, proudly involved with Hermetic circles”. Davis’s near-pathological obsession with me personally and what I might be hiding in plain sight betrays in him serious psychological instability, for which I hope he receives help before long.
Cards on the table: I am a remarkably ordinary person. I have an academic background, and these days I work mainly as an independent scholar and, for my sins, an occasional public commentator. I support my wife in the home education of our children and, whilst I’m often paid to review wines, I usually prefer to sit on the sofa in the evening with a pint of ale and chat with my wife. In terms of my own ‘magical’ practices, they are these: I go to Holy Mass at least weekly and to Confession fortnightly; I begin each day by chanting the Benedictus, I say grace before each meal, I pray the holy Rosary everyday with my family, I regularly say the Jesus Prayer throughout the day, I sing prayers with my children before they go to bed, and I frequently give thanks to God for His love for us. (All that is quite magical enough for me.) I am also a keen hunter, and I like to forage for wild food through the changing seasons. I am deeply attached to the English countryside; indeed, it is the English landscape that taught me that the world is in fact enchanted—and if we cannot see that, that’s a problem with us, and not with the world.
Whilst my life is, in many respects, rather quiet and rhythmical, I have been blessed with a rich interior life, and my gratitude towards God in incommunicable. I say all this (writing which makes me feel rather uncomfortable by the way) only to convey that whilst it has amused me to observe Davis insinuating that I’m a much more intriguing person than I am in reality—a spell-conjuring warlock, no less—I am in fact nothing more than a sinner among the fields, trying to live up to my baptism. I can only infer that what Davis has written about me personally comes from the overexcited imagination of an adult man yet to surpass the psychology of his adolescence.
Some afterthoughts. Davis only has one point, which is that there is a single univocal meaning to the word ‘magic’, and since I have used that word, I must be using it in his way. But that argument is very silly. What Davis should have said is: “I don’t know what Morello means by the word ‘magic’, but it connotes something negative for me, as it does for many, and I would caution him against using it”. Then, he and I could have had a much shorter conversation about the prudence of using the word ‘magic’. I would have had my reasons for using it, and he, his reasons against it. It is because his core argument is so silly, and the ice on which he stands is so thin, that for substance he has found it necessary to create a whole mythology about my private life and those with whom I am associated which bears no resemblance to reality.
What I think this debate has shown is the degree to which Protestantism and its offspring, Enlightenment rationalism, has indeed infected the western mind, which is exactly what my book is attempting to address. Even Davis’s account of the nature-supernature distinction in his second attempt to discredit me, and his view of the Christian dialogue with ad extra traditions, reeks of Protestantism and a reductionist view of creation. As I read Davis, Mirus, and others whose ramblings were brought to my attention, I felt I was encountering minds like that of Oliver Cromwell. (It ought to be remembered that in my country of England, the enchanted nature festivities like the harvest festivals and the crowning of the Queen of the May on May Day were all preserved by Catholics and outlawed by Protestants.) My detractors strike me as the sort of people who, on stumbling across Chartres Cathedral—with all the Hermetic guilds and Neoplatonic schools involved in its underlying sacred geometry (see the work of Fulcanelli, Keith Critchlow, and Tom Bree on that topic)—would raze the whole thing to the ground as an abomination.
I understand why Davis is worried by the word ‘magic’, given his history with goetia as a dedicated satanist. But, as stated, that of which he has experience is very far from that of which I have experience, thank God. It has of course saddened me that Angelico Press has been dragged into this polemic and consequently criticised for publishing books that don’t pass certain people’s purity test. The fact is that Angelico Press is a wonderful publishing house that has made a vast number of excellent and hitherto hard-to-come-by books widely available. Fortunately, Angelico Press has a great many devoted customers who know how important this little publishing house is to the intellectual formation of people, Catholics and non-Catholics, throughout the Anglosphere and beyond.
A grave problem with the attitude that Davis and others adopt online, is that it’s a massive deterrent when it comes to conversions to the Faith. A well-known writer, whom I shan’t name, wrote the following to me recently:
I believe everything the Church teaches, but I’m not sure I will ever become Catholic, or if I do, I will tell no one. I don’t even want people to detect that I am now a believing Christian. The main reason for this, is that I want to continue to write creatively in defence of the truth, choosing whichever sources inspire me, without being followed around by an internet Inquisition obsessed with determining whether I’m really Christian enough to satisfy them, and hounding me if I’m found deficient in their eyes.
When I read that, it broke my heart. I know the truth of it, too. Rather than creatively engaging with what I’ve written—its merits and demerits—what I have faced is a bizarre frenzy to prove that what I say I mean isn’t what I really mean, and a willingness to execute every possible misrepresentation and omission to prove it. Frankly, it’s all been a considerable exhibition of human wretchedness.
To calm the passions of the current online, self-appointed Inquisition, I’ll let you all into a secret about the subversive, Traddy Catholic occultism hiding under the surface, operating undetected until now: it doesn’t exist. There is no Catholic cloak-and-dagger network of secret societies, trying to corrupt the Church by initiating people into closely guarded spells. Or if there is, I’m not part of it and it’s not known to me. There are, however—and many of my friends are among them—a growing number of Catholics who are sceptical of modernity, and are more or less successfully inducting themselves back into a pre-modern view of the world which better lends itself to supernatural transformation in divine grace. Long may this trajectory continue. As for me, all I have written and said is publicly available in my books and my articles and in YouTube interviews and on podcasts. There is no secret; all that I think is out there.
Finally, an historical point which has come up a number of times in this polemic: it has been said that Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, to whom I’ve devoted much attention in my academic writings, “repented of his involvement in the occult”, to quote Davis. It is remarkable to me that someone such as Pico can be described and tossed aside in a few sentences, using a 19th century definition of the ‘occult’ that Pico would not have even recognised. This well illustrates the sheer illiteracy of my interlocutors who have, by this point, wasted a considerable amount of my time. In fact, Pico was an extremely complicated person, and there are differing opinions among historians about the end of his life. True, before his life ended unnaturally early, he burned many of his own books and all of his poems, and he gave away his entire family fortune. He had by that stage resolved to become a monk or friar, which was then prevented by his early death (likely due to his secretary poisoning him).
One can certainly, and with some reason, interpret his final actions as a renunciation of his former views, but he never formally or explicitly renounced those views. There was also never a condemnation of Hermeticism from the Church, but only certain things perceived to be related to Hermeticism, and never named as such in any condemnation. It was precisely because people like Pico were exploring Hermeticism, segregating it into what was of value (and thus could be reconciled with orthodox theology) and what was not of value, that the Church in turn made judgements about aspects related to it. Pico, for example, wrote twelve volumes against divinatory astrology, which influenced decisions concerning this practice over the ensuing centuries.
Photo by Simon Wilkes on Unsplash