Early in December, Os Justi Press released Sebastian Morello’s Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries: Recovering the Sacred Mystery at the Heart of Reality. The following 2-minute video sums up its main points:
The book is full of rich reflections on the thought and culture of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity, and the spiritual and liturgical implications of the shifts. Rather than attempt a mere summary, I thought I might offer some quotations chosen specially for NLM readers.
« Part of adopting a premodern mind is first acknowledging that every people in history has accepted that our world is a world pregnant with magical forces and the activity of spiritual beings. And Christianity has never denied that curses, hexes, and many kinds of evil spells exist, or that evil spirits can be contacted and succumbed to, in order to attain evil ends. So too, Christians—alongside their practices of meditation and contemplation—have ever believed in sacred magic, or “theurgy,” but they have held that such magic possesses the power to conquer demons and sacralise the world only when united to the eternal and singular priesthood of Jesus Christ, and to this baptised theurgy Christians have given the name of liturgy. This brings us to the great political work to which Christians ought to be dedicated, namely the endeavour to establish liturgical nations in fraternal union with each other, for the alternative to such a civilisation is the accursed dominion in which nations are first fragmented and then dissolved altogether in the grey mass of a diabolical slave settlement. » (p. 4)
« The pre-eminence of the mystical life understood not as spiritual ascent out of the created order, but rather as embodied induction into shared life with a personal God who meets us in the world that is an emanation of His own inner life, is emphasised by me largely because I observe that in the epoch of ideology—namely, modernity—we have lost a sense of the existentiality and immanence of the Sacred Mystery. Tragically, this spiritual blindness has encroached on many aspects of religious devotion and piety. In turn, religion is understood ever less as ongoing transformation through the liturgical and sacramental life, and it is instead understood as mere intellectual assent to doctrinal propositions and spiritual ascent away from the concrete reality in which we find ourselves. Religion is hence tacitly reframed for a people formed by virtual reality lived from an online existence. Unfortunately, such a life is no life at all. And the upshot is the reduction of Christianity, or whatever we mean by Christianity today, to a base species of ideology, just one among a plethora of squabbling ideologies in the modernist arena of competing “systems.” » (p. 11)
« I dare say we must rediscover our liturgy as a baptised form of “theurgy,” a term largely gone from Christian theology today, but one that was repeatedly deployed to discuss Christian worship by such an eminent authority as St. Dionysius the Areopagite. By Christian theurgy, I mean the fulfilment of all religious sacrifice, during which those offering the sacrifice commune with the divine spirits and call God down into the inner chamber as they chant the sacred words and perform the sacred rituals. » (pp. 38-39)
« Latin Christians have long emphasised “assent,” and hence the possession of ideas, over existential transformation through right worship (an emphasis that has only swelled due to the unexamined acceptance of the rationalist paradigm). It is unsurprising, then, that serious Catholicism is more likely to be found online— where ideas are offered and bought up— than in the local church. And those Catholics who have retained the organic conception of the Church as the institution that gifts to the baptised the virtues of right relationality with God—a conception of the Christian as a liturgical creature—have for some time now been actively persecuted by the incumbents of the Church’s highest offices. Such Catholics are seen as betrayers of the modern project of Enlightened man, whom the Church’s leaders have enthroned in their demotion of Christ the King. And in seeing such Catholics in this way, the Church’s government is entirely correct. » (p. 66)
« Whenever I step foot onto Benedictine grounds, I feel as if I have come home. The chanting of the psalms, the sacrifice offered on the altars, the way of life lived under a Rule that’s over a millennium and a half old— all the sacrality of these abbeys seems to have seeped into the stones themselves. Even after all the scandals, the collapse in vocations, and the ruination of the liturgy following that unhappy Vatican Council that baptised the fleeting fever of the 1960s— from which it will take many, many centuries for the Church to recover— the monasteries still appear as loci of divine grace, by which little parts of the diabolical principality we call the world has been captured and placed under Christ’s kingship.» (pp. 97-98)
« In late modernity, the Church’s supreme office, the papacy, got its first middle-class pope, when hitherto this office had been occupied only by nobles and peasants. Pope Paul VI had all the characteristics of a middle-class manager. He was a social climber with a sympathy for tabula rasa ways of governing. Just as the bourgeoisie, with their privileging of ideas over realities—and their pathological impulse, rooted in rationalism, to conform the latter to the former—had overseen every modern revolution, so too Pope Paul oversaw an analogous revolution in the Church. He reduced the sacred liturgy from a mystical conduit of grace expressed in a sacred language to a vernacularised, didactic exercise to entertain a new, educated population.» (pp. 109-10)
« Tragic it is, then, that the Church’s current hierarchical incumbents seem, generally speaking, to be neither elders themselves nor to love their elders. They appear as frustrated rascals who have undergone all the humane development and civilisational induction of Tolkien’s orcs. Perhaps this ought not to surprise us. After all, the men who fill the Church’s higher offices today were all formed in the crucible of the Second Vatican Council’s progressive theology, and their intellectual habits were fashioned by daily exposure to the so- called liturgical “reform.” The “experts” who subjected the Church’s liturgical heritage to ongoing experimentation did so on the grounds that it was somehow legitimate to call into question— and redact or even reject altogether— huge swathes of prayer and mystical experience inherited from our ancestors in religion, the sum total of elder-wisdom in ritual form. The very Council, then, that claimed power to renew the Church’s youth in fact emptied the churches, and by so doing it aged the Church rapidly, in turn aging the civilisation she once animated.... And this process of aging the Church, far from recovering her charism as the Great Elder of our civilisation, merely rendered her decrepit.» (p. 124)
In the midst of his critique Morello examines the paths of and conditions for renewal or regeneration in the Church, and offers very concrete advice for how tradition-loving Catholics struggling with the hierarchy and the postconciliar devastation can strengthen their faith, love, and perseverance.
N.B. Os Justi Press is running an Epiphany sale from now through January 6, with 10% off sitewide. Discount is automatically applied at checkout.
« Part of adopting a premodern mind is first acknowledging that every people in history has accepted that our world is a world pregnant with magical forces and the activity of spiritual beings. And Christianity has never denied that curses, hexes, and many kinds of evil spells exist, or that evil spirits can be contacted and succumbed to, in order to attain evil ends. So too, Christians—alongside their practices of meditation and contemplation—have ever believed in sacred magic, or “theurgy,” but they have held that such magic possesses the power to conquer demons and sacralise the world only when united to the eternal and singular priesthood of Jesus Christ, and to this baptised theurgy Christians have given the name of liturgy. This brings us to the great political work to which Christians ought to be dedicated, namely the endeavour to establish liturgical nations in fraternal union with each other, for the alternative to such a civilisation is the accursed dominion in which nations are first fragmented and then dissolved altogether in the grey mass of a diabolical slave settlement. » (p. 4)
« The pre-eminence of the mystical life understood not as spiritual ascent out of the created order, but rather as embodied induction into shared life with a personal God who meets us in the world that is an emanation of His own inner life, is emphasised by me largely because I observe that in the epoch of ideology—namely, modernity—we have lost a sense of the existentiality and immanence of the Sacred Mystery. Tragically, this spiritual blindness has encroached on many aspects of religious devotion and piety. In turn, religion is understood ever less as ongoing transformation through the liturgical and sacramental life, and it is instead understood as mere intellectual assent to doctrinal propositions and spiritual ascent away from the concrete reality in which we find ourselves. Religion is hence tacitly reframed for a people formed by virtual reality lived from an online existence. Unfortunately, such a life is no life at all. And the upshot is the reduction of Christianity, or whatever we mean by Christianity today, to a base species of ideology, just one among a plethora of squabbling ideologies in the modernist arena of competing “systems.” » (p. 11)
« I dare say we must rediscover our liturgy as a baptised form of “theurgy,” a term largely gone from Christian theology today, but one that was repeatedly deployed to discuss Christian worship by such an eminent authority as St. Dionysius the Areopagite. By Christian theurgy, I mean the fulfilment of all religious sacrifice, during which those offering the sacrifice commune with the divine spirits and call God down into the inner chamber as they chant the sacred words and perform the sacred rituals. » (pp. 38-39)
« Latin Christians have long emphasised “assent,” and hence the possession of ideas, over existential transformation through right worship (an emphasis that has only swelled due to the unexamined acceptance of the rationalist paradigm). It is unsurprising, then, that serious Catholicism is more likely to be found online— where ideas are offered and bought up— than in the local church. And those Catholics who have retained the organic conception of the Church as the institution that gifts to the baptised the virtues of right relationality with God—a conception of the Christian as a liturgical creature—have for some time now been actively persecuted by the incumbents of the Church’s highest offices. Such Catholics are seen as betrayers of the modern project of Enlightened man, whom the Church’s leaders have enthroned in their demotion of Christ the King. And in seeing such Catholics in this way, the Church’s government is entirely correct. » (p. 66)
« Whenever I step foot onto Benedictine grounds, I feel as if I have come home. The chanting of the psalms, the sacrifice offered on the altars, the way of life lived under a Rule that’s over a millennium and a half old— all the sacrality of these abbeys seems to have seeped into the stones themselves. Even after all the scandals, the collapse in vocations, and the ruination of the liturgy following that unhappy Vatican Council that baptised the fleeting fever of the 1960s— from which it will take many, many centuries for the Church to recover— the monasteries still appear as loci of divine grace, by which little parts of the diabolical principality we call the world has been captured and placed under Christ’s kingship.» (pp. 97-98)
« In late modernity, the Church’s supreme office, the papacy, got its first middle-class pope, when hitherto this office had been occupied only by nobles and peasants. Pope Paul VI had all the characteristics of a middle-class manager. He was a social climber with a sympathy for tabula rasa ways of governing. Just as the bourgeoisie, with their privileging of ideas over realities—and their pathological impulse, rooted in rationalism, to conform the latter to the former—had overseen every modern revolution, so too Pope Paul oversaw an analogous revolution in the Church. He reduced the sacred liturgy from a mystical conduit of grace expressed in a sacred language to a vernacularised, didactic exercise to entertain a new, educated population.» (pp. 109-10)
« Tragic it is, then, that the Church’s current hierarchical incumbents seem, generally speaking, to be neither elders themselves nor to love their elders. They appear as frustrated rascals who have undergone all the humane development and civilisational induction of Tolkien’s orcs. Perhaps this ought not to surprise us. After all, the men who fill the Church’s higher offices today were all formed in the crucible of the Second Vatican Council’s progressive theology, and their intellectual habits were fashioned by daily exposure to the so- called liturgical “reform.” The “experts” who subjected the Church’s liturgical heritage to ongoing experimentation did so on the grounds that it was somehow legitimate to call into question— and redact or even reject altogether— huge swathes of prayer and mystical experience inherited from our ancestors in religion, the sum total of elder-wisdom in ritual form. The very Council, then, that claimed power to renew the Church’s youth in fact emptied the churches, and by so doing it aged the Church rapidly, in turn aging the civilisation she once animated.... And this process of aging the Church, far from recovering her charism as the Great Elder of our civilisation, merely rendered her decrepit.» (p. 124)
In the midst of his critique Morello examines the paths of and conditions for renewal or regeneration in the Church, and offers very concrete advice for how tradition-loving Catholics struggling with the hierarchy and the postconciliar devastation can strengthen their faith, love, and perseverance.
N.B. Os Justi Press is running an Epiphany sale from now through January 6, with 10% off sitewide. Discount is automatically applied at checkout.
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