Myatt - "a British iconoclast" - is a former Catholic monk, a former British Muslim, a former neo-nazi, who since 2010 has written extensively about his rejection of both Islam and his extremist past, writing that: "What I came to understand, via pathei-mathos, was the importance - the human necessity, the virtue - of love, and how love expresses or can express the numinous in the most sublime, the most human, way. Of how extremism (of whatever political or religious or ideological kind) places some abstraction, some ideation, some notion of duty to some ideation, before a personal love, before a knowing and an appreciation of the numinous."
Myatt has translated works by Sophocles, Sappho, Aeschylus, Homer, translated and written a commentary on the Greek text of the Poimandres section of the Corpus Hermeticum. He has also developed a mystical philosophy which he calls the Way of Pathei-Mathos.
