When the Defence of Tradition Crosses a Theological Line
The charge against Dr Peter Kwasniewski is not that he is an occultist, nor that every defence he has offered of Sebastian Morello’s work amounts to personal involvement in occult practice. The serious charge is narrower: as publisher and defender of a book deliberately rehabilitating “magic” and Hermetic categories within a Catholic intellectual project, he has helped normalise a vocabulary and framework whose theological danger cannot be answered merely by saying that the terms are being used analogically.
The controversy concerns Sebastian Morello’s 2024 book Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries: Recovering the Sacred Mystery at the Heart of Reality, published by Os Justi Press. The publisher’s own description presents the work as an attempt to recover the Church’s mystical resources against modern rationalism, materialism and reductionism, and to escape what Morello calls the modern “hex”.1 The desire to recover a sacramental and supernatural vision of reality is entirely intelligible. Catholicism is not materialism with incense. Creation is charged with meaning, grace perfects nature, angels exist, sacramentals are real, contemplation is real, and the liturgy opens earthly worship to Heaven.
The difficulty begins when this recovery is expressed through the deliberate rehabilitation of “magic” and Hermeticism. Matthew Minerd, Thomas Mirus and Matthew Scarince produced a substantial critique arguing that Morello’s project does more than employ a startling metaphor. They maintain that it assigns a Catholic pedigree to Hermetic ideas and magical terminology that the evidence does not sustain. Their essay also records that Morello and his publisher, Peter Kwasniewski, responded publicly in defence of the book’s language.2
That fact must be stated precisely. Kwasniewski did not write Morello’s book. Criticism of Morello cannot simply be transferred wholesale to his publisher. Nor does publishing a controversial argument necessarily entail assent to every proposition it contains. But a publisher who publicly defends the very terminology at the centre of the dispute moves beyond neutral distribution. The question then becomes whether the defence is theologically adequate.
Morello has explained that he uses “magic” analogically: first, for a Neoplatonic vision of the cosmos as living and ordered towards its Creator rather than as a dead mechanism; secondly, for human participation in the created order when that participation is “baptised in Christ”.3 Those qualifications matter. They distinguish his intention from fortune-telling, spell-casting, necromancy or an explicit attempt to manipulate preternatural powers.
But good intention does not settle the question of language. Catholic theology has long distinguished the supernatural action of God, the sacramental order instituted by Christ, sacramentals established by the Church, natural causality, angelic action, and illicit attempts to obtain hidden knowledge or power through occult means. The distinction exists because these things are not variants of one continuum called magic. To collapse them beneath a recovered esoteric vocabulary risks obscuring exactly what Catholic theology has laboured to distinguish.
Scripture is not embarrassed by the supernatural. It is also remarkably severe about divination, sorcery, consultation of spirits and attempts to command powers not given by God. The prohibition in Deuteronomy is not Enlightenment rationalism retrojected into revelation. The Acts of the Apostles does not present Christian faith as the purification of magical technique but as its rival and judge. Simon Magus is not instructed in a higher sacramental magic; his attempt to acquire spiritual power is condemned.
St Thomas Aquinas provides the conceptual clarity needed here. Superstition is a vice opposed to religion precisely because worship and spiritual causality must be ordered according to God rather than according to humanly constructed techniques. Divination and magical practices can involve false causal assumptions, demonic invocation or an attempt to obtain effects beyond the proportion of natural means. Catholic sacramentalism is the opposite of such manipulation because sacramental efficacy proceeds from Christ’s institution and promise, not from a secret technology available to an initiate.
This is why the fashionable language of “re-enchantment” requires caution. The modern West is indeed flattened by materialism. It frequently treats creation as raw material, reason as calculation, and religion as subjective sentiment. But the Catholic answer is not to import an alternative esotericism. It is to recover Catholic metaphysics, sacramental theology, the Fathers, the Dionysian hierarchy rightly understood, the angelic doctrine of St Thomas, the liturgy, monastic asceticism and the mystical tradition of saints whose supernaturalism was inseparable from obedience and doctrinal precision.
The central charge against Kwasniewski, therefore, is one of theological responsibility. A prominent defender of Catholic Tradition has lent his publishing platform and public defence to a project in which “magic” and Hermeticism are not incidental provocations but organising categories. When serious Catholic scholars argue that those categories misrepresent the Catholic tradition, the answer cannot rest on the claim that critics are frightened by words.
Words matter because they carry histories. “Sacrifice”, “sacrament”, “grace”, “nature”, “miracle”, “mystery” and “contemplation” are not interchangeable with “magic”. The Church possesses an extraordinarily rich vocabulary for the participation of creatures in divine providence. If a disputed term adds no precision, repeatedly requires disclaimers, and predictably blurs a line Scripture and Tradition insist upon, one is entitled to ask what is gained by retaining it.
This is especially important in traditional Catholic circles. The crisis in the Church has created understandable distrust of official institutions and a hunger for sources older than modernity. But a revolt against modern rationalism can itself become indiscriminate. Not everything ancient is Catholic. Not everything anti-Enlightenment is traditional. Platonism can be purified and used by Christian theology; Gnosticism cannot be baptised into orthodoxy merely because it rejects materialism. Hermetic texts may be historically interesting; they do not thereby become streams of Apostolic Tradition.
Traditionalism is most vulnerable when “the enemy of my enemy” becomes a theological method. Modern secularism rejects angels, hierarchy, ritual, sacred kingship, metaphysical symbolism and cosmic order. That does not mean every pre-modern system affirming such realities is an ally of the Faith. Paganism can be more enchanted than secularism and still be pagan. Occultism can be anti-materialist and still be forbidden. Esotericism can speak reverently about mystery while replacing revelation with initiation.
The Church does not need magic to recover mystery. The traditional Mass itself proves the point. Its sacredness comes not from hidden techniques but from objective worship: Christ’s Sacrifice sacramentally made present, ordered ceremonial, consecrated matter, priestly mediation, Scriptural prayer and inherited rites. The whispered Canon is mysterious because what occurs is divine, not because the celebrant possesses esoteric knowledge inaccessible to the baptised.
Nor does criticism of this project require denying that Christian authors sometimes used words such as magic rhetorically or analogically. The question is not whether a word can ever be found in an orthodox author. It is whether systematic rehabilitation of that word and its associated Hermetic framework is prudent, historically justified and theologically clarifying in the present context. The burden lies with those proposing the rehabilitation.
Kwasniewski’s immense work in defence of the traditional liturgy does not place his other judgments beyond criticism. Indeed, the seriousness of his contribution makes precision more important. Catholics who have rightly resisted the invention of new liturgical traditions should be equally reluctant to invent an occult pedigree for Catholic Tradition.
The necessary boundary can be stated simply. Catholicism is supernatural, sacramental, mystical and profoundly anti-materialist. It is not therefore occult. Its mysteries are received from Revelation; its sacraments from Christ; its authority from the Apostles; its contemplation from grace. Where the Church has condemned divination, superstition and magical attempts at hidden power, the defender of Tradition should clarify that boundary, not make it harder to see.
1 Os Justi Press, Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries, publisher’s description.
2 Matthew Minerd, Thomas Mirus and Matthew Scarince, Hermetic Tradition or Catholic Tradition? A Critique of Sebastian Morello, Catholic Culture, 14 August 2025.
3 Thomas Mirus, Matthew Minerd and Matthew Scarince, Catholic Tradition or Counter-Revolution?, republication of Part III of the critique, 26 May 2026.
4 Holy See, Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§2115–2117, on divination and magic.
5 St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 92 and following, on superstition and its species.
Leave a Reply