Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries

Recovering the Sacred Mystery at the Heart of Reality

Author: Sebastian Morello and Charles Coulombe

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"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."

According to Sebastian Morello, the Church possesses the most potent resources for mystical transformation, with the event of the Incarnation and the outpouring of grace it entailed radically altering the cosmic order. But we would hardly know it today. A leaden blanket of rationalism, materialism, reductionism-all that goes by the name of modernity-has descended over this ancient treasury of divine wisdom, and myopic pastoral programmes which only intensify the despoilment and quashing of the Lord's Kingdom have eclipsed its innate appeal to the searching heart of modern man. In this ambitious and at times unconventional book, Morello proposes a pathway of escape from what he calls the "hex," toward a rediscovery of the Sacred Mystery at the heart of reality.

Critic Reviews

Praise for Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries

"C.S. Lewis once said that we live in an age of 'evil enchantment, ' by which he meant that we have now lived for so long within the modern paradigm that even we religious people are default materialists in how we live our lives and feel about the world, even if we 'know better' in terms of doctrine. We need a strong 'counterspell' to wake us up from this dogmatic slumber. And Sebastian Morello has provided us with this remarkable and heartfelt book to help! I feel blessed to be living at a time in which the established paradigm is cracking up and Christianity is undergoing a rewilding. Old things are new again."-Jason Baxter, author of An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: Recovering the Wildness of Spiritual Life

"If the story of modernity has been one of 'comprehensive disenchantment' (as Charles Taylor put it), we now stand on the cusp of enchantment's return. To survive the world that will result, in which angels and demons mingle with robot dogs and silicone 'intelligences, ' we will need all the metaphysical resources we can muster. Sebastian Morello's Christian counter-history of modern mysticism is an invaluable tool in the arsenal of anyone who wishes to stay sane amid a world whose longstanding 'secular' foundations are crumbling beneath us." -Mary Harrington, author of Feminism Against Progress

"This book opens up some of the most important but ignored questions, engaging some of the most important yet neglected resources, in the cultural and philosophical debate of our age."-Joseph Shaw, author of The Liturgy, the Family, and the Crisis of Modernity

"If you are tempted to regard this as a 'niche' book, you could not be more wrong. In our time of great confusion and spiritual hunger, this marvellous volume gets to the very heart of the crisis in our desacralised Western culture and desiccated Western Christianity, and shows us the way to regeneration through re-enchantment. Expect to be surprised, as Sebastian Morello reveals what so many others have failed to see."-Stephen Klimczuk-Massion, Trustee, Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project

"It may finally be time to admit that the virtuous pagans of antiquity-Homer, Socrates, and Plotinus among them-were far more deserving of the name 'Catholic' than the likes of Hans Küng or James Martin. The latter, being but cultural excretions of both a stale Cartesianism and the tiresome iterations of trying to stay 'relevant, ' have nothing to say to the predicament of modern man and even less to say to posterity. Not so with Sebastian Morello. In all of his work, and especially in Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries, Morello reimagines the Catholic cultus as the site wherein philosophy is still 'a pathway of mysticism, ' and in doing so he shows how the Catholic mystical tradition and creation itself are infused with the sophianic glory of the Lord. Morello's is, in every way, a magical enterprise."-Michael Martin, author of Sophia in Exile and Mythologies of the Wild of God