Looking for Help in All the Wrong Places

Sebastian Morello’s Mysticism, Magic, & Monasteries is extremely wide-ranging but focuses on a few major and related themes: that modern man, including modern Catholic man, has lost a sense of the mystery, or enchantment, of reality; that an important way of recovering this lost sense is through what can be called esoteric knowledge and practices; and that this spirituality must be centered on a renewed monasticism that will go a long way toward healing some of the deep-rooted problems that afflict the Church. What does the author mean by a world that has lost its sense of enchantment? Seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes held that created reality is divided into two sharply distinct realms: the human mind, wherein alone is meaning and purpose, and an external world of “lifeless stuff,” as Morello succinctly calls it. For Descartes, this means animals are merely complex machines, devoid of feelings, so that the howls or groans of a dog being beaten have no more significance than the grinding noise of an insufficiently lubricated engine. Descartes’s philosophical ideas went hand in hand with the rapidly developing scientific revolution. This revolution achieved success by focusing only on those aspects of reality that could be treated mathematically. C.S. Lewis, in the brilliant introduction to his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, describes the historical trajectory as follows:

What was fruitful in the thought of the new scientists was the bold use of mathematics in the construction of hypotheses, tested not by observation simply but by controlled observation of phenomena that could be precisely measured…. By reducing Nature to her mathematical elements it substituted a mechanical for a genial or animistic conception of the universe. The world was emptied, first of her indwelling spirits, then of her occult sympathies and antipathies, finally of her colours, smells, and tastes…. Man with his new powers became rich like Midas but all that he touched had gone dead and cold.

This is the thought-world most of us inhabit today, consciously or unconsciously. Even if, for example, we affirm the reality and activity of spiritual creatures both good and bad, in practice most of us live by the scientistic creed that has afflicted our civilization for several centuries. Thus, it is common to find Catholics, even those who claim the mantle of orthodoxy, who are just as committed as are any of the “new atheists” to the notion that any novel idea not validated by the current scientific consensus is suspect, or who attempt to prove that it was the Catholic conception of the universe that fostered the rise of modern science — rather than realizing that the modern scientific understanding of reality arose from the ruins of medieval Christian thought.

Morello points out that this emptying of the external world of any significance translated into the idea that all meaning is within. Qualities such as color, smell, and taste no longer were qualities “but quantities, for the only realities were those that could be subjected to scientific measurement.” Hence the common notion that colors have no existence as such, but only as sensations in our minds, arising from light of a particular wavelength encountering our eyes and causing certain reactions in our brains. Reality is thus now a numerical wavelength, not the color we think we see with our eyes. As far as our spiritual lives go, it is “the ‘inner self’ making a personal religious commitment — rather than the integral, relational person being sanctified by induction into a visible and liturgical community” that matters. If all meaning is in our minds, what difference does it make how we build our churches or celebrate the liturgy? “A concrete warehouse was judged as good a church as a Gothic masterpiece, for ultimately they were both just heaps of atoms,” Morello observes. “What mattered, it was thought, was holy feelings, not holy places.”

I entirely agree with this indictment of Morello’s. Modern Catholics have not only privatized the practice of the faith but have compartmentalized it intellectually as well by shunting it off to a corner of their minds, where it enjoys a quiet existence but usually has little effect on the rest of their thinking, aside from certain matters of personal morality, which differ depending on whether they are “conservative” or “liberal” Catholics.

Yet in considering Morello’s proposals to remedy this sad situation it is necessary to proceed with caution. His description of modern spirituality as having abandoned monasticism as its paradigm has a certain validity, but Catholicism is not simply a set of propositions about God, man, our last end, etc. The notion of Catholicism as a culture, a way of life, has been a subject of interest at least since the 1930s. Monasticism is primary here for Morello in that monks consecrate a monastery as a sacred place and take a vow of stability to remain in that place. He thus sees monasticism not simply as having a certain spiritual priority, which I am prepared to grant, but as being the only sort of spirituality with staying power. The rise of the friars, Dominicans and Franciscans, in the Middle Ages, and later the Jesuits, although necessary in the exigencies of the times, were, in a sense, a necessary evil. Because the friars, and the later orders especially, were not rooted in a place, as monasteries are, they helped change our understanding of the faith from a “concrete and settled way of life, to a set of intangible ideas or propositions which one either agreed with or did not.” By the time of the Protestant revolt, the Church at the Council of Trent had “doubled down on the notion that the Christian religion is in essence a catechetical enterprise.”

If the Church, however, is to respond to the actuality in which we live, she must adapt her praxis to changing conditions. While it is true that to reduce the faith to an adherence to a set of propositions is a mistake, this was not inevitable with the rise of the later religious orders and congregations. Just as the earlier monasticism was premised on a chiefly agricultural society, so the later manifestations of religious life were a response to a growing urbanism and the discovery of new and unexpected lands beyond the seas. A balance is necessary between the faith conceived as intellectual assent and as a lived experience, rooted in the liturgy but extending to all aspects of our lives, both individual and social. The fact that we have not kept that balance very well is not an indictment of the new forms of religious life but simply a commentary on the Church’s failure to adequately comprehend the novel culture of modernity.

But there is more to Morello’s prescriptions for restoring a vibrant Catholic life than a recovery of monasticism. This is indicated in the second word of the title of his book, Magic. A discussion of this aspect of his thought requires considerable care and some background information. In recent years, there have arisen a number of Catholic thinkers who, to one degree or another and with varied but important differences, have sought spiritual and intellectual guidance in the Western esoteric tradition or even in the traditions of non-Christian religions. Some of them hold positions frankly incompatible with the Catholic faith, most notably those calling themselves perennialists or sometimes esotericists (this latter term can be used in different senses), who hold that there is an esoteric core of religious truth, common to all the major religions, and that all these religions, including Catholicism, are merely an outward and relative embodiment of that inner truth. Morello is not such a one, but he does tread down paths that seem dangerous, even if not explicitly contrary to the faith. Such is his engagement with the writings traditionally ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus.

The Greek god Hermes (Trismegistus means thrice-great), called Mercury by the Romans, was the alleged author of a body of writings that probably originated in the first three centuries of the Christian era in Egypt. Here’s how Morello introduces the topic:

In the early 1460s Marsilio Ficino, one of the greatest minds of the Italian Renaissance, was working on the newly rediscovered Platonic dialogues…. Then, unexpectedly, he was given a Greek copy of the Corpus Hermeticum of Hermes Trismegistus — the central mystery text of esoteric transformation. Ficino immediately stopped his work to focus all his efforts on translating it into Latin. What Ficino soon realized was that out of the Hermetic traditions, along with those of Platonism and Neoplatonism, emerged a metaphysical language expressive of the vertical vision of the cosmos common to all religious traditions. From this Ficino derived a notion, later developed by his brilliant student Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: the prisca theologia — the ancient theology that underpins all natural religion, which is illumined and transfigured by the renewing power of grace that belongs to supernatural religion.

Here we encounter the crux of the problem. In Morello’s laudable desire to recover a pre-modern intellectual and spiritual approach to reality, he appeals not merely to recognized thinkers and doctors of the Church, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, but to esoteric sources never fully accepted in the central Catholic tradition. There is ample reason to question the usefulness of the Hermetic writings for a renewal of Catholic thought and life. C.S. Lewis, speaking of what he calls “the ‘Platonic theology’ of the Florentines Pico and Ficino,” writes:

I have called this system, as Ficino himself calls it, “Platonic theology”…. It is a deliberate syncretism based on the conviction that all the sages of antiquity shared a common wisdom and that this wisdom can be reconciled with Christianity….

Hence, paradoxically, it comes about that though the Florentine Platonists were wholly pious in intention, their work deserves the epithet pagan more than any other movement in that age. That their conscious purpose was Christian we need not doubt…. Yet the actual trend of Ficino’s thought is always away from the centre of Christianity. One has the suspicion that though he and Pico doubtless believed Christianity to be true, they valued it even more for being lofty, edifying, and useful…. In their readiness to accept from whatever source all that seemed to them elevated, or spiritual, or even exciting, we sometimes seem to catch the first faint suggestion of what came, centuries later, to be called “higher thought.”

In their task of defending what they thought a spiritual cosmology they raked together all that the late pagan sources could tell them about the invisible population of the universe. They readmitted all those “middle spirits,” which St. Augustine is labouring to expel all through the eighth and ninth books of the De Civitate Dei. (op. cit.)

It is fitting to speak of “middle spirits,” for these curiously do figure in Morello’s account of things. For example, when speaking of blessings imparted by a priest, he writes that they “possess a special causal power when aided by special powerful spirits.” What spirits are these? The angels? Perhaps, but I am none too sure that they are what Morello means. Moreover, even if he does, and even if angels always accompany our prayers and good acts, are they necessary for the efficacy of a priestly blessing?

Let us move on to something more dubious, the so-called egregores. What are these supposed to be? According to Morello:

The term “egregore” belongs to Hermetic philosophy and to Western esotericism more broadly. The notion of “egregore” is not dissimilar to that of “tulpa” in Tibetan Buddhism, the latter being a spiritual agent generated by the intense concentration of an elite monastic practitioner. “Egregore” is different, however, because according to the simplest definition, it is a spiritual force that arises out of the collective commitment of a people to a falsehood.

Aquinas said that not even angels could create. But here we have alleged beings created by misguided human thought. Morello continues:

It remains obscure how human beings can, merely by thoughts and words, generate a spiritual being and then be bound and fettered by such a spirit. The reason for this ambiguity is partly because egregores only make sense when considered within a category of knowledge and practice too readily dismissed today, namely magic. The art of magic precisely holds that special words and incantations, with gestures and the use of distinct artifacts, accompanied by extreme mental concentration, can together possess a causal power beyond what belongs to common communications.

Whatever power magicians have or do not have, the notion of manipulating the universe obviously ought to be off-limits to Christians. We may implore God and His saints for aid, but we do not and cannot compel them. It is not clear exactly what Morello recommends by way of magical practices, or what he finds helpful in Hermetic doctrines, but I see no reason for any involvement in them whatsoever.

In his effort to garner historic Christian support for his project, Morello attempts to draw in a variety of Catholic writers, for example, from among the early Fathers. It is true that Neoplatonism constituted a common philosophical background in the early Church, but it is also true that Christian thinkers who interested themselves in some of the more dubious aspects of Neoplatonism, such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and John Scotus Eriugena, have always stood under a kind of theological cloud. Whatever genuine instances can be found of important thinkers who, for one reason or another, did explore esoteric writings, they have not been part of the main trajectory of Catholic thought.

This is the primary thrust of our author’s argument, but there are two additional and important points I must mention. The first is Morello’s constant assertion that “creation is the emanation of the Godhead.” Modernity, he says, saw creation not as “an emanation of the Divine Mind but a mere artifact of Divine will — a view that fast led to deism.” By my count, he calls creation an emanation at least seven times in the book. Why is this of concern? Well, to emanate usually means to flow from something, to come out from something. It does not ordinarily mean to be created by something. In the case of an emanation from God, it raises the possibility that we are talking about pantheism. The First Vatican Council pronounced an anathema on “anyone [who] says that finite things, both corporeal and spiritual, or at least spiritual, emanated from the divine substance” (Dei Filius, ch. 1, can. 4). It is possible — indeed, I hope it is so — that Morello is simply giving emanate a special meaning and does not mean it in the sense condemned by the council. But the idea of the world as an emanation from the Godhead is a common Neoplatonic theme, and a Catholic writing in support of Neoplatonic or Hermetic ideas presumably would want to make it clear that he accepts the Catholic doctrine of God’s free creation of the world out of nothing.

Lastly, another point of doctrinal obscurity. What does Morello mean when he speaks of the Church? More than once he appears to see the Church of God as more than the Catholic Church in communion with Rome, at one point apparently including the separated Byzantines and the Anglicans and other Protestants as part of “the institution that the Incarnate Word established on earth to lead ‘all nations’ to ‘all truth.’” As in the case of creation as an emanation, here again Morello is not altogether clear, but it is odd that there would be any possibility of confusion on either point in a book from a publisher that claims to adhere to the Church’s traditional faith and practice.

Mysticism, Magic, & Monasteries, while exposing the scientistic and rationalistic world modernity has constructed, fails to offer an entirely coherent Catholic alternative. Readers would be well advised to steer clear of authors who see in a suspect or occult mysticism a help to renewing the Church.

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