Snuffing the Pyre: A Reply to Michael Warren Davis

Antoine Caron, detail from Dionysius the Areopagite Converting the Pagan Philosophers (source)

Note: Monday’s posts are usually paywalled, but due to the importance of this post and the discussion to which it contributes, I am making it freely available to all readers.—PAK

Recently I was out on what became an eight-mile hike through the countryside with my son in search of wild garlic. My near-idyllic day turned a little sour when, on arriving home in the evening, I checked my computer to find messages, emails, and screenshots from friends and colleagues informing me that, hitherto unbeknownst to me, I was in fact a witch. The ex-satanist and now Eastern Orthodox commentator Michael Warren Davis had lit a pyre for me. As I read his critique of my recently published book, Mysticism, Magic, & Monasteries (Os Justi Press, 2024), I was rather disappointed.

Davis’s article amounted to calumny, accusing me of encouraging sin so grave that he compares me to one promoting sodomy among the Christian faithful. Thus, I found myself obliged to reply. With a pad of paper and a pencil, I went through his article and abstracted from it those direct criticisms of my book that could be discerned amongst the personal denunciations. In what follows, I strive to treat his concerns and criticisms as sincere.

The Rise of the Demonic

Davis begins by stating that “The demons are making a comeback in the West.” I wholly agree. Indeed, in the Preface to Mysticism, Magic, & Monasteries, I wrote the following:

In the struggle to survive our civilisation’s rapid unravelling, we will have to contend with the rise of goetia — that is, of sorcery — among those intent on enslaving us. Certainly, from its inception, modernity has been satanical, but, as C.S. Lewis famously noted in his Screwtape Letters, not always overtly so. More recently, however, our epoch has become openly and visibly demonic in its music, fashions, moral commitments, bodily mutilations, and paraliturgies.

In the face of this rise of the demonic which characterises late modernity, many are looking for solutions that will enable them to enjoy lives in union with God despite the diabolical influences on them, to which they’re exposed simply by being enmeshed in modern culture (or more accurately, anti-culture). Davis acknowledges that I hold the solution to such diabolical influences to be the mission of the Church, but he claims that I simultaneously argue that the Church must first be ‘saved by Hermetic magic’. He assumes that this is what I think because in 2023 I wrote a three-part essay entitled “Can Hermetic Magic Rescue the Church?” (out of which I developed some of the chapters of the book under scrutiny).

Davis mistakes a question for a conclusion. Neither in that three-part essay nor in my book do I conclude that hermetic magic can save the Church. I posit the question, and in seeking to answer it, I highlight the limited ways by which certain authorities in Church history — especially invoking the writings of Hildegard of Bingen, Albert the Great, and Marsilio Ficino — have “stolen gold from the Egyptians” (as luminaries of the Patristic age such as Tertullian and Augustine put it). In so doing, I indicate how re-opening the dialogue with the Hermetic tradition, following the example of the doctors and holy people named above, among others — in a way not dissimilar to the Church’s dialogue with Hellenic wisdom, Roman law, and the traditions of nations (especially of Europe) — could plausibly help us to overcome certain challenges we face on account of widespread rationalism.

In my view, rationalism’s far-reaching account of reality has fettered the Christian faithful for centuries now. Indeed, in Chapter 1, I go to great lengths to show how many of the largely unexamined and thoroughly erroneous assumptions and prejudices of the so-called Enlightenment are taken for granted by our modern culture. I argue that, to the degree Christians adopt these prejudices, the Church’s mission of transforming the world in the love of Jesus Christ is persistently undermined. I give reasons therein for why these prejudices of modernity act on the mind in a way comparable to the way hexes were traditionally thought to do so.

When it comes to answering the question, “Can Hermetic magic rescue the Church?”, I conclude antithetically to the way Davis claims I conclude. Here is what I actually wrote in the book, page 79:

So, can Hermetic magic rescue the Church? I must conclude with a qualified no. Obviously, Hermeticism cannot rescue the Church. The Church has a Saviour, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. He alone can rescue the Church, and so He will, for the Church must continue until the conclusion of the world. Christ walks this earth today, however, in His members. The baptised are other christs, and they are called evermore to become such by sacramental — principally, Eucharistic — transformation. Whilst they remain under the spell of Enlightened man, that warlock who has conjured modernity, and before whom the Church’s hierarchy presently quakes, the Church’s members will continue to stagger and their mission will increasingly ebb. [Valentin] Tomberg claimed that the time had come for the Church to engage once more with the Hermetic way, to discern what could be embraced within the broad sphere of Christian spirituality and what could not be accommodated. Such an engagement may now be a pressing necessity.

Again, I declare that Christ alone can rescue His Church, but we have ousted Him in a diabolic effort to divorce Bride from Bridegroom. We have lost the primacy of the supernatural: however much the Lord may seek to rescue His Church from its current trajectory of self-destruction, He finds a Church whose members largely don’t believe they need rescuing.

My case above is that the only Saviour of the Church is Jesus Christ, exclusively and uniquely. I am nonetheless convinced of the veracity of an argument that the theologian and translator of the Philokalia, Philip Sherrard, developed in a 1994 essay entitled “For Everything That Lives is Holy”, wherein he demonstrates how our reception of, and union with, reality greatly depends on interior dispositions, both intellectual and moral. Sherrard claims that developing certain habits of mind, will, and imagination is essential for the acquisition in modern people of a pre-modern, non-rationalistic apprehension of reality. He thinks — arguing along Platonic and Neoplatonic lines — that such an overcoming of rationalism naturally gives rise to a truer apprehension of, and union with, the realities we experience. Whilst I don’t mention Sherrard in my book, my own position is similar to his. But I transposed that basic epistemological case over to questions concerning the mission of the Church, in order to present its ecclesiological and soteriological implications.

Lisette Wesmael, Jongens op school (source)

Against Magic

Davis quotes a number of Scriptural passages against me that condemn the practice of magic. Never anywhere, though, do I argue that Christians should practise magic. My case is quite different, and one with which he never engages. My case is that one of the many infelicitous effects of rationalism has been that of re-framing Christianity as predominantly propositional. That is to say, for many people today Christianity is often deemed to be a list of doctrinal abstractions which merely require assent, if not a list of moral dos and don’ts. In Mysticism, Magic, & Monasteries I develop an extended argument for why Christianity is better understood as liturgical, sacramental, existential, transformative, and thus in essence mystical, rather than exclusively or predominantly propositional. I write in the book, page 111:

We needed the Christian religion not understood as a catechetical exercise, but as the ongoing, incremental transfiguration of nature by grace. Now, before anyone accuses me of denying that the faith is propositional, let me be clear that I believe that the Christian faith requires assent to propositions of divine revelation just as I believe that friendship requires belief in truths about one’s friend. Given that the reception of grace moves one from enmity with God to friendship with God (James 4:4), the analogy isn’t an inappropriate one. But if one were to think that friendship consisted solely of accepting propositions about one’s friend, rather than merely presupposing the acceptance of such propositions, one would have misunderstood what friendship is.

The point is that rationalism, which on account of its formal structure privileges ideas and abstractions over concrete realities, has deleteriously influenced Christianity, causing many Christians to see their religion as comprising propositional assent alone, leaving very little room for any account of grace. The liturgy and the sacraments thus risk being reduced to mere window-dressing. But when Christians privilege the sacramental character of their faith, they naturally become aware that the Church is dealing with operations — in communion with all the holy saints and angels — of immeasurable power, by which she regenerates her members and vanquishes their demonic adversaries.

The point is not that Christians should practise sorcery or witchcraft, but rather that sorcery and witchcraft are very real, and an inordinately rationalistic type of Christianity has neither the conceptual framework for addressing the presence of such practices nor the means for effectively counteracting the evils that such diabolical activities entail. Those activities, I repeatedly stress, are on the rise. (As it happens, in several places in Mysticism, Magic, & Monasteries, I commend Eastern Orthodoxy for resisting rationalistic tendencies that are destructive of the Christian faith where the Latin West has sadly failed — see pages 66, 114-115, 141-142, 148, and 164.)

Davis proceeds to accuse me of propagating magic by way of a false equivalence. Here is what he writes:

Morello is pulling a classic syncretist gimmick: the false equivalence. Hermeticists believe in some kind of supernatural Thing. Christians also believe in some kind of supernatural Thing. Therefore, Hermeticists and Christians essentially believe the same Thing.

A straw man, for that is not my argument. My argument is that Hermeticism, with its traditional connection to the Neoplatonic ontology so treasured by many Church Fathers, offers a way to analyse the hierarchical structure of creation per se as well as natural religion specifically. That does not mean that nature is identical to what comes by way of supernature. Rather, following the ancient tradition of the Church, I claim that it is possible to show how, despite nature’s fallen condition, there is nonetheless a connaturality of the natural with the supernatural, which we ought to expect if we really believe that the latter is God sharing His own divine life with the former in order to redeem it. (The complex theological accounts of the relationship between nature and supernature is a major theme of my book, and I give some attention to the Orthodox-Catholic debate on this topic on pages 157 and 171-173.)

It is interesting to be accused of arguing from a ‘false equivalence’ on this topic, when it is precisely such an error that I criticise in my book when discussing Rod Dreher’s otherwise excellent volume entitled Living in Wonder. Here is what I write on pages 174-175:

‘All Christians of the first 1,300 years of the faith,’ he [Dreher] tells us, ‘shared with the pagans this sacramental vision: a material world saturated with spiritual meaning and power.’ But they didn’t share it. Christians understood the world as saturated with spiritual meaning because they saw it to unfold out of the Godhead in its awe-inspiring intelligibility and to be filled with angels and saints who interact with us. The pagan ‘sacramental vision’ saw the world as a realm of mischievous gods who torment us and who must be appeased at all times with violent sacrifices and the prizes of war. What the pagans worshipped as gods the Christians derided as demons. Moreover, when Dreher comes to tell us why Christianity won out over the pagan religions, we discover that it was because the former was superior to the latter by degree, not different in kind: ‘the “magic” of the Christians was more powerful than the magic of the pagan priests and sorcerers.’ Intermittently, albeit inadvertently, conflating Christianity and paganism amid a sustained attack on the latter was confusing as I read Dreher’s book, especially as he urgently tells us that ‘people today aren’t wrong to seek enchantment — but if they do it outside a clearly and uniquely Christian path, they will inevitably be drawn into the demonic.’ So . . . which is it? Are Christians mere supercharged pagans, sharing with all pagans the same ‘sacramental vision,’ only a better version of it, or do they reject the world of paganism as demonic? I was left guessing as to what Dreher thought.

The point here is that, despite the connaturality that exists between nature and grace, the fallen condition of the former means that all expressions of man’s natural religiosity that have not been assumed into the life of grace, and both healed and transformed by it, will inevitably be to some degree demonic. Thus, we ought to be wary of suggesting that the difference between paganism and Christianity, or between the natural religious urges of unredeemed man and the divine life of revealed religion, is a difference of degree and not of kind. It was certainly odd to read Davis accusing me of arguing for the opposite of what my book in fact claims, but I also noticed that this was an emerging pattern.

The real error underpinning much of what Davis writes about my book is that he assumes ‘magic’ has a univocal meaning, and then proceeds to argue that I deploy the term in his univocal sense, because according to him there are no other senses. But I reject this premise. For example, even though I disagree with the point Dreher is making in the quotation above, it is blindingly obvious that when he says that the early Christians were in possession of ‘powerful magic’, he is not claiming that they were actually sorcerers. He is analogising on the term at hand. It is helpful to reflect on what C.S. Lewis wrote in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:

Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.

This ‘deeper magic’ that belongs to a ‘different incantation’ is clearly not of the same kind as the sorcery that belongs to the Witch in Lewis’s novel. So, what is it? Well, Davis answers the question for me: “Whatever power Morello’s ‘magic’ is tapping into, it is either beatific or demonic.” Exactly so. As I put it in the Preface of my book:

Who knows if we are witnessing the diabolical principality’s final onslaught against the remnants of what we once called Christendom? What we do know is that the Church has always taught that the world is an arena of strife, wherein the devil’s principality and the Lord’s Kingdom are in ongoing conflict. The baptised, it seems to me, are unfit to defend their Kingdom whilst they remain under so many spells, the spells of modernity.

For the reason of this spiritual conflict, in my book I use the term “baptised theurgy” to describe the power of the Church’s liturgy. Theurgy is often translated as ‘divine magic’. A more literal rendering, however, is ‘divine work’. In any case, the word itself is used repeatedly by Dionysius the Areopagite, who is among the most important Christian authorities in the history of the Church, and one to whom I’m especially indebted. (A major theme of my first book, The World as God’s Icon, was that of tracing Dionysius’s influence on the philosophy and theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas.)

Among the many reasons I think it is important to reflect again on a Dionysian conception of the liturgy is that we must understand that the world is an arena in which evil spirits and their master — the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4) — seek to corrupt our nature. The sacramental and liturgical power of the Church, which belongs uniquely to Christ’s own priesthood, is the power by which we, in union with Him, thwart their attacks and, transformed in Him, become other christs.

Of Angels and Egregores

Davis says that “we do not believe that words and/or gestures have any inherent power. Again, the power comes from either beatific or demonic powers.” Nowhere in my book will you find any argument to the contrary. So, again, he attacks a straw man. He then moves on to my reflection on ‘egregores’, about which he gets especially flustered.

In Chapter 7, I suggest that one way to think about the role of angelic operation — benign or malign — is by considering the nature of blessings and curses. (Strangely, Davis accuses me of neglecting angelic operation when discussing prayer and blessing, claiming that I hold such things are operative automatically — or ‘magically’ — when yet again, I argue the opposite case.) By appealing to the esoteric idea of ‘egregores’ I indicate that there may be here a way of developing a metaphysical account of what this intangible but real thing called a ‘blessing’ or ‘curse’ actually is. Catholic theology has a surprisingly underdeveloped metaphysics in this area.

My critic then proceeds to claim that I believe we ‘create’ spirits in the same way as God creates His creation. But, yet again, that’s not what I have written anywhere in the book. What I wrote was that in the process by which curses or blessings come about, the person doing the cursing or blessing is not accidental to its realisation. The exact passage, on page 90, is as follows:

One may retort that when a person blesses a cursed object, God and His mediating saints and angels bring about the effect, not the person who is blessing. Perhaps, but neither is the person doing the blessing accidental to the process of banishing the curse. Conversely, black magic has its effects on account of the operation of demons, but that doesn’t mean that the spellcasting warlock is accidental to the evil manifested — he clearly is a necessary part.

A difference between a blessing and a sacrament is that the latter is confected purely by the virtue of Christ’s singular priesthood. In turn, the Eucharist, for example, is not more or less the Eucharist depending on the holiness of the minister offering the Eucharistic sacrifice. An extra-liturgical blessing’s power, on the other hand, partly depends on the holiness of the one blessing as another christ, more or less conformed to Jesus Christ by His grace. Thus, my blessings are not as holy as a saint’s blessings. Many faithful travelled considerable distances in the 20th century, for example, to be blessed by Saint Padre Pio, because his blessings were especially holy.

Protestants as well as Enlightenment sceptics often accused Catholics of superstition and “magick” because Catholics believe that particular formulas and their speakers have effects. In the case of sacraments, they have their power by divine institution and divine actuality. In the case of blessings, their effects are largely dependent on the participation in the life of grace — or personal holiness — of the person doing the blessing. But either way, something happens objectively, divinely, at the performance of the proper ritual: graces are brought into the world and demons driven away.¹ This sounds much like C.S. Lewis’s “different [kind of] incantation” in service of “deeper magic.” Of course, one may object to such language, but it patently admits of an orthodox Christian understanding.²

As Davis notes, in Chapter 7, besides analysing the nature of blessings, I seek to develop further the analysis of the phenomenon of cursing; having considered cursing in light of the idea of egregores, I then turn to an account of the nature of ‘antichrist’. Just as he claims that the word ‘magic’ has only one univocal meaning, so Davis claims the same for the word ‘antichrist’: “Antichrist is not a ‘spiritual error-structure’” he writes, “He is a person.” But that is to assume that the term is not analogised in Holy Scripture and in the Christian tradition, and of course it is so analogised.

Davis quotes the description of antichrist in the first letter of Saint John, but he conveniently omits the next verse of the passage, which reads: “They [the antichrists] went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out, that it might be plain that they all are not of us.” John the Divine is clearly not talking about the particular person of the Antichrist who is to appear prior to the Eschaton. And it is what Saint John is referring to that is my focus in the chapter under scrutiny. Of course, if you’ve decided, contrary to Scripture and Tradition, that there is only one univocal meaning of the word ‘Antichrist’, then what I write does not make much sense. But there is no reason to accept such an a priori commitment, and every reason not to.

So, Davis, having proven nothing but his inability to grasp a book’s content, concludes that my arguments are “heretical, historically illiterate, and metaphysically nonsensical”. But as demonstrated here, that’s not the case. I’m not a heretic, and I do know a bit about history and metaphysics. I hold bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in philosophy; I have twice been appointed a senior research fellow at Princeton University; I have published in peer-reviewed journals; I have co-authored several research publications and I have two research monographs to my name. Whilst we are all, and forever remain, novices and apprentices, it cannot be said that I am wholly ignorant of the topics with which I engage. Perhaps Davis, in the light of my response, and the seriousness with which I’ve treated his concerns, will publicly retract — in full or in part — what he has written about me personally and about my book, but I will not hold my breath.

The distortions of my book’s content seem wilful, so replete is Davis’s article with internal contradictions, misrepresentations, and attacks on straw men. An emergent motif of my response has been that of having to show that I argue antithetically to how Davis claims: it is right there in the text. It is unwise for a writer to publish an overtly inaccurate account of another writer’s work, as doing so leads readers to question the critic’s reliability.

But it is not just him who is up to it. Since Davis wrote his article, someone named Thomas Mirus has also written a piece for an online publication called Catholic Culture in which he rehashes Davis’s criticisms. According to Mirus, I present “sacramentals as talismans” and I place “the supernatural action of God on the same plane with the purportedly ‘opposing forces’ of white and black magic”. Of course, I do not make either claim in the book or elsewhere. Mirus raises a number of objections to the book, every one of which is anticipated by the book itself and receives a comprehensive response therein. He would know this had he read the book he publicly attacks, but it’s clear that he has not read it.

Such people should learn a new lesson without delay: practising some elementary moral and intellectual hygiene is necessary for a writer’s self-preservation. In any case, they should at least bear in mind the hermeneutical principle of charity, by which Christians are bound to find an orthodox meaning for whatever they read from their coreligionists, wherever possible. Or, for that matter, the even more basic principle of honesty, which would require one not to condemn a book that he has not bothered to read. Even the English writer Paul Kingsnorth joined in online, referring to me as “encouraging the rise of Antichrist”; only later, when questioned by one of his readers, did Kingsnorth confess that he also had not read the book, and was only commenting because of some personal animus towards me.

What has both surprised and saddened me in reading the attacks on me personally and on my book, is the apparent — and I fear, real — deficit in moral rectitude among my detractors.

Statue of Copernicus in Warsaw. Photo by Rafael Ishkhanyan

Postscript

Before I had the opportunity to publish the foregoing response, I saw that Davis had already posted a second round of attacks on me and on my book. I will repeat what one theologian friend of mine said: “His account of the relationship between philosophy and Christianity, and between natural religion and supernatural religion, is one of the most muddled and inadequate I’ve ever seen”.

In this latest post, Davis writes that, for what we seek, “we don’t need to look outside of the Christian tradition”. But looking outside the Christian tradition is part of the Christian tradition. From her inception, the Church’s leading thinkers have been in dialogue with Hellenic and Egyptian wisdom traditions, Roman stoicism, Neoplatonism, and the works of Islamic and Jewish philosophers. Such dialogue has given rise to insightful schools of thought concerning the proper relationship between nature and supernature, the fallen world and the redeeming power of grace.

Presenting the implications of the various accounts is a recurring feature of my book Mysticism, Magic, & Monasteries, with which its critics have hardly engaged. Thinkers such as Wolfgang Smith, Jean Hani, Jean Borella, Valentin Tomberg, and Stratford Caldecott, and Eastern Christian thinkers such as Sergei Bulgakov and Vladimir Solovyov, have been for me guiding lights, though I wholly acknowledge that their works are not without their imperfections.³ But accusations of ‘satanism’ or ‘witchcraft’ or ‘sorcery’ from those with a superficial knowledge (if any at all) of these thinkers’ scholarship and those who have sought to develop it further is far from helpful. There is no virtue in ignorance, which, as Saint Catherine of Siena repeatedly insisted, is a species of evil.

Having read the second round of attacks, I can only say that Davis’s miscomprehension and subsequent misrepresentation of my work, so as to present me as a blasphemer, continues to be disappointing. Davis writes the following:

What’s amazing is that Morello’s book was published by Os Justi Press, which is owned by my friend Peter Kwasniewski, a highly respected Catholic intellectual. It was endorsed by several other Catholic luminaries, including Joseph Shaw of the Latin Mass Society and Charles Coulombe of the International Theological Institute.

It was also endorsed by the Dante scholar Jason Baxter, by the psychologist and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke, the social critic Mary Harrington, author Stephen Klimczuk-Massion, sophiologist Michael Martin, philosopher Robert Lazu Kmita, and also by The Catholic Herald. There is perhaps a reason why “luminaries” have endorsed it: they have understood the book, whereas Davis evidently has not, and apparently has no intention of trying to do so.⁴

At the end of his second round, Davis appears to offer an olive branch, suggesting that he and I are in fact seeking the same thing. I wouldn’t deny it for a moment. If he knew anything about me, he would know that I am a keen promoter of the hesychastic practices he recommends, and I am personally very devoted to the Jesus Prayer. And I should say at this moment that I am at least in one regard grateful to Davis: he has provoked me into producing this clarification of the general position conveyed in my book. Genuinely, for that, I thank him. I hope that, in the future, we might seek common understanding beyond misrepresentations and slanders. To make his words my own, “He and I are on the same quest”. As things stand, I will pray for Davis, and I implore him to pray for me.

1. I am defending Thomistic realism (physical causality) over Scotistic occasionalism (moral causality): rites are not merely reminders to God to do something, as if He is fulfilling an agreement per its legal terms, but rites really do things and change things, ex vi verborum. Not only the seven sacraments; the traditional blessing of holy water (unlike the new “blessing”, unfortunately) really wrests the water from the prince of this world and confers on it a quasi-sacramental power to drive away demons and bless additional objects.

2. If we want to claim that Christians should absolutely avoid this language, we must be ready to denounce Lewis’s use of it in The Chronicles of Narnia. But I’ve never heard anyone complain about it there. Beyond that, I suppose we should also be scandalised by medieval writers (like those of the School of Chartres) using pagan Greek and Roman names to describe natural forces as if they were persons, or the ubiquitous presence of an astrological worldview (including in Aquinas), or their understanding of the properties of metals and elements (as in Aquinas’s work on the “hidden operations of nature”: De Occultis Operibus Naturae). Saint Augustine famously argued that the term ‘fate’ admitted of an orthodox meaning, although he recommended that Christians avoid using it so as not to cause misunderstandings. Perhaps the term ‘magic’, like ‘fate’, does indeed allow for misunderstanding, but if there is good reason to use it, and if one explains clearly what is meant, as I have at length, the objection falls away — at least among literate and thoughtful people. Davis’s argumentation against the word ‘magic’ is as sophisticated as claiming that anyone using the word ‘gnosis’ or ‘pleroma’ must be a Gnostic, or anyone speaking of ‘theosis’ must be a pantheist, or anyone saying that ‘the flesh wars against the spirit’ must be a Manichaean.

3. It should not surprise us that some of these authors’ ideas cannot be accepted by Christians or Catholics without qualification. Few are the authors who never erred — and this includes saints, among them Fathers and Doctors of the Church. That should not prevent us from learning from the wisdom such authors have to offer.

4. That Davis has posted online a photo of his copy of my book with passages highlighted and marginal notes demonstrates, strictly speaking, that he is capable of wielding a highlighter and a pencil. But elephants have been taught to use paintbrushes. Has he understood what I have plainly written? I believe this essay has given a conclusive answer.