34

Unrealism and Individualism

In order to follow the further phases of the decline of the West, it is necessary to refer to what I have previously said about the first crises undergone by traditional civilizations and to assume as a reference point the fundamental truth of the world of Tradition concerning the two “regions” of world and superworld. According to traditional man, these two regions formed one reality; the establishment of an objective and efficacious contact between them was the presupposition of any higher form of civilization and life.

The interruption of such a contact; the centering of all the possibilities in only one of these worlds, that is, in the human and temporal world; the replacement of the experience of the overworld with ephemeral ghosts and with the by-products of a merely human nature—these are the characteristics of “modern” civilization in general; this civilization has reached the stage in which the various forces of decadence, which were manifested in previous times but which had been successfully slowed down either by reactions or by the power of opposite principles, finally reach a complete and fearful efficiency.

In a general sense, humanism may be regarded as the main trait and password of the new civilization that claims to have emancipated itself from the “darkness of the Middle Ages.” This civilization will only be limited to the human dimension; in this type of civilization everything will begin and end with man, including the heavens, the hells, the glorifications, and the curses. The human experience will be confined to this world—which is not the real world—with its feverish and yearning creatures, its artistic vanities and its “geniuses,” its countless machines, factories, and leaders.

The earliest version of humanism was individualism. Individualism should be regarded as the constitution of an illusory center outside the real center; as the prevaricating pretense of a ”self” that is merely a mortal ego endowed with a body; and as by-product of purely natural faculties that, with the aid of arts and profane sciences, create and support various appearances with no consistency outside that false and vain center. These truths and laws are marked by the contingency and caducity proper to what belongs to the world of becoming.

Hence, there is a radical unrealism and inorganic character to all modern phenomena. Nothing is endowed any longer with true life and everything will be a byproduct; the extinct Being is replaced in every domain with the “will” and the “self,” as a sinister, rationalistic, and mechanical propping up of a cadaver. The countless conquests and creations of the new man appear as the crawling of worms that occurs in the process of putrefaction. Thus, the way is opened to all paroxysms, to innovating and iconoclastic manias, and to the world of a fundamental rhetoric in which, once the spirit was replaced with a pale image of itself, the incestuous fornications of man in the form of religion, philosophy, art, science, and politics, will know no bounds.

On a religious plane, unrealism is essentially related to the loss of the initiatic tradition. I have previously pointed out that in the past, only initiation ensured the objective participation of man in the superworld. Following the end of the ancient world and with the advent of Christianity, however, there no longer were the necessary conditions for the initiatory reality to constitute the supreme reference point of a traditional civilization. In this regard “spiritualism” was one of the factors that acted in the most negative way; the appearance and the diffusion of the strange idea of the “immortality of the soul,” which was regarded as the natural privilege of each and every one, eventually contributed to the loss of understanding of the meaning and necessity of initiation as the real operation that alone can free a person from all conditionings and destroy the mortal nature. What arose as a surrogate was the mystery of Christ and the idea of redemption in Christ; in this context, a theme that partially derived from the doctrine of the Mysteries (death and resurrection) lost its initiatory character and was eventually applied to the merely religious plane of faith. This surrogate, generally speaking, consisted in a particular “morality” and in leading a life in view of the sanctions that, according to the new belief, awaited the “immortal soul” in the afterlife. If on the one hand the imperial medieval idea was often pervaded by the initiatory element, on the other hand, though the representative of the Church developed a doctrine of the sacraments, revived the “pontifical” symbolism, and spoke of regeneration, nevertheless, the idea of initiation as such, which was opposite to its spirit, remained basically alien to it. Thus, an anomaly was created that lacked something in comparison with every other complete traditional form, Islam included. Christian dualism, in its specific character, represented a powerful incentive to subjectivism and therefore to unrealism in regard to the problem of the Sacred. The Sacred, from a matter of reality and transcendent experience, became either a matter of faith based on sentiment, or the object of theological speculation. The few examples of a purified Christian mysticism could not prevent God and gods, angels and demons, intelligible essences and their dwellings from assuming the form of myth; the Christianized West ceased to have a knowledge of these things as symbols of potential superrational experiences, superindividual conditions of existence, and deep dimensions of integral being. The ancient world had witnessed the degeneration of symbolism into a mythology that became increasingly opaque and mute and that eventually became the object of artistic fantasy. When the experience of the sacred was reduced to faith, sentiment, and moralism, and when the intuitio intellectualis was reduced to a mere concept of Scholastic philosophy, the unrealism of the spirit entirely took over the domain of the supernatural. This course underwent a further development with Protestantism, the contemporaneity of which with humanism and with the Renaissance is significant.

Prescinding from its final meaning in the history of civilization, its antagonistic role during the Middle Ages, and its lack of an initiatic and esoteric dimension, we nevertheless must acknowledge a certain traditional character to the Church that lifted it above what had been mere Christianity, because it established a system of dogmas, symbols, myths, rituals, and sacred institutions in which, though often indirectly, elements of a superior knowledge were sometimes preserved. By rigidly upholding the principle of authority and dogma, by defending the transcendent and superrational character of “revelation” in the domain of knowledge and the principle of the transcendence of grace in the domain of action, the Church defended from any heresy—almost desperately—the nonhuman character of its deposit. This extreme effort of Catholicism (which explains much of whatever is crude and violent in its history), however, encountered a limit. The “dam” could not hold and some forms that could be justified in a merely religious context could .not retain the character of absoluteness that is proper to what is nonhuman; this was especially true not only because a superior knowledge was lacking, but also considering that the secularization of the Church, the corruption, and the unworthiness of a great number of its representatives and the increasing importance that political and contingent interests acquired within it became increasingly visible. Thus, the stage was set for a reaction destined to inflict a serious blow to the traditional element that was added to Christianity, to exasperate the unrealist subjectivism, and to uphold individualism in a religious context. For this is what the Reformation accomplished.

It is hot a coincidence that Luther’s invectives against the ”papacy, the devil’s creature in Rome” and against Rome as the “kingdom of Babylon” and as a radically pagan reality totally inimical to the Christian spirit were very similar to those invectives employed by the early Christians and by the Jewish apocalyptic texts against the city of the eagle and of the battle-axe. By rejecting everything in Catholicism that was Tradition and opposed to the simple Gospels, Luther demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of that superior content that cannot be reduced either to the Jewish-Southern substratum, or to the world of mere devotion, which in the Church had developed through secret influences from above.^[1] The Ghibelline emperors rose up against papal Rome in the name of Rome, thus upholding again the superior idea of the Sacrum Imperium against both the merely religious spirituality of the Church and her hegemonic claims. Instead, Luther rose up against papal Rome out of an intense dislike for what was a positive aspect, that is, the traditional, hierarchical, and ritual component that existed within the Catholic compromise.

In many regards Luther facilitated a mutilating emancipation, even in the domain of politics. By supporting the Reformation the Germanic princes, instead of assuming the legacy of Frederick II, went over to the anti-imperial coalition. In the author of the Warnung an seine lieben Deutschen, who presented himself as the “prophet of the German people,” these princes saw one who legitimated their revolt against the imperial principle of authority with his doctrines and who allowed them to disguise their insubordination in the form of an anti-Roman crusade waged in the name of the Gospel, according to which they had no other goal than to be free German rulers and to be emancipated from any supernational hierarchical bond. Luther also contributed to an involutive process in another way; his doctrine subordinated religion to the state in all of its concrete manifestations. Because the government of the states was the responsibility of mere secular rulers; because Luther foreshadowed a democratic theme that was later on perfected by Calvin (the rulers do not govern by virtue of their nature, but because they are the representatives of the community); because a characteristic of the Reformation was the radical negation of the “Olympian” or “heroic” ideal, or any possibility on man’s part to go beyond his limitations either through asceticism or consecration and so to be qualified to exercise even the right from above, which is typical of true leaders—because of all these reasons, Luther’s views concerning “secular authority” (die weltiche Obrigkeit) practically amounted to an inversion of the traditional doctrine concerning the regal primacy and thus left the doors open for the usurpation of spiritual authority on the part of the temporal power. When defining the theme of the Leviathan, or of the “absolute state,” Hobbes similarly proclaimed: “civitatem et ecclesiam eadem rem esse.”

From the point of view of the metaphysics of history, the positive and objective contribution of Protestantism consists in having emphasized that in mankind living in recent times a truly spiritual principle was no longer immediately present and that, therefore, mankind had to portray this principle as something transcendent. On this basis, Catholicism itself had already assumed the myth of original sin. Protestantism exasperated this myth by proclaiming the fundamental powerlessness of man to achieve salvation through his own efforts; generally speaking, it regarded the whole of humankind as a damned mass, condemned to automatically commit evil. To the truth obscurely foreshadowed by that myth, Protestantism added tints typical of an authentic Syrian masochism that were expressed in rather revolting images. Over and against the ancient ideal of spiritual virility Luther did not hesitate to call a “royal wedding” one in which the soul, portrayed as a “prostitute” and as “the most wretched and sinful creature,” plays the role of the woman (see Luther’s De libertate christiana); and to compare man to a beast of burden on which either God or the devil ride at will, without his being able to do anything about it (see Luther’s De servo arbitrio).

While what should have followed from the acknowledgment of the abovementioned existential situation was the affirmation of the need for the support proper to a ritual and hierarchical system, or the affirmation of the strictest type of asceticism, Luther denied both things. The entire system of Luther’s thought was visibly conditioned by his personal equation and the gloomy character of his inner life as a failed monk and a man who was unable to overcome his own nature, influenced as it was by his passions, sensuality, and anger. This personal equation was reflected in the peculiar doctrine according to which the Ten Commandments had not been given by God to men to be implemented in this life but so that man, after acknowledging his inability to fulfill them, his nothingness, as well as concupiscence’s invincibility and his inner tendency to sin, would entrust himself to a personal God and trust desperately in His free grace. This “justification by faith alone” and the ensuing condemnation of the power of “works” led Luther to attack the monastic life and the ascetical life, which he called “vain and hopeless,” thus deterring Western man from pursuing those residual possibilities of reintegration available in the contemplative life that Catholicism had preserved and that had produced figures like Bernard of Clairvaux, Jan van Ruysbroeck, Bonaventure, and Meister Eckhart.^[2] Secondly, the Reformation denied the principle of authority and hierarchy in the dimension of the sacred. The idea that a human being, as a pontifex, could be infallible in matters of sacred doctrine and also legitimately claim the right to an authority beyond criticism was regarded as aberrant and absurd. According to the reformers, Christ did not give to any church, not even to a Protestant church, the privilege of infallibility;^[3] thus, anybody is able to reach conclusions in matters of doctrine and interpretation of the sacred text through a free and individual examination outside any control and any tradition. Not only was the distinction between laity and priesthood in the field of knowledge basically abolished, but also denied was the priestly dignity understood not as an empty attribute, but in reference to those who, unlike other people, are endowed with a supernatural chrism and who carry an indoles indelebilis that allows them to activate the rites (these being residues of the ancient notion of the “Lord of the rites”).^[4] Therefore, the objective, nonhuman meaning that not only the dogma and the symbols but the system of rites and the sacraments could have as well, was denied and rejected.

One might object that all this no longer existed in Catholicism or that it existed only formally or indirectly. But in that case the way leading to an authentic reformation should have been one and one alone: to act in earnest and replace the unworthy representatives of the spiritual principle and tradition with worthy ones. Instead, Protestantism has led to a destruction and a denial that were not balanced with any true constructive principle, but rather only with an illusion, namely, sheer faith. According to Protestantism, salvation consisted in the mere subjective assurance of being counted in the ranks of those who have been saved by faith in Christ, and “chosen” by divine grace. In this fashion, mankind progressed along the path of spiritual unrealism; the materialistic repercussion did not delay its appearance.

After rejecting the objective notion of spirituality as a reality ranking higher than profane existence, the Protestant doctrine allowed man to feel, in all aspects of life, as a being who was simultaneously spiritual and earthly, justified and sinner. In the end this led to a radical secularization of all higher vocations; again, not to sacralization, but to moralism and puritanism. It was in the historical development of Protestantism, especially in Anglo-Saxon Calvinism and Puritanism, that the religious idea became increasingly dissociated from any transcendent interest and thus susceptible to being used to sanctify any temporal achievement to the point of generating a kind of mysticism of social service, work, “progress,” and even profit. These forms of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism were characterized by communities of believers with no leader to represent a transcendent principle of authority; thus, the ideal of the state was reduced to that of the mere “society” of “free” Christian citizens. In this type of society, profit became the sign of divine election that, once the prevalent criterion became the economic one, corresponds to wealth and to prosperity. In this we can clearly distinguish one of the aspects of the abovementioned degrading regression: this Calvinist theory was really the materialistic and lay counterfeit of the ancient mystical doctrine of victory. For quite a long time this theory has supplied an ethical and religious justification for the rise to power of the merchant class and of the Third Estate during the cycle of the modern democracies and capitalism.

The individualism intrinsic in the Protestant theory of private interpretation of Scripture was connected with another aspect of modern humanism: rationalism. The single individual who got rid of the dogmatic tradition and the principle of spiritual authority, by claiming to have within himself the capability of right discernment, gradually ended up promoting the cult of that which in him, as a human being, is the basis of all judgments, namely, the faculty of reason, thus turning it into the criterion of all certitudes, truths, and norms. This is precisely what happened in the West shortly after the Reformation. Naturally, there were some “germs” of rationalism in ancient Hellas (exemplified in the Socratic replacement of the concept of “reality” with reality itself) and in the Middle Ages (in the theology that was heavily influenced by philosophy). Beginning with the Renaissance, however, rationalism became differentiated and assumed, in one of its most important currents, a new character: from speculative in nature it became aggressive and generated the Enlightenment, Encyclopedism, and antireligious and revolutionary criticism. In this regard, it is necessary to acknowledge the effects of further processes of involution and inversion that display an even more sinister character because they negatively affected some surviving organizations of an initiatic type, as in the case of the Illuminati and of modern Masonry. The superiority over dogma and over the merely religious Western forms—a superiority granted to the initiate by the process of spiritual enlightenment—was claimed by those who upheld the sovereign power of reason. Members of such organizations promoted this inversion until they transformed the groups that they led into active instruments of the diffusion of antitraditional and rationalist thought. One of the most tangible examples of this is the role Masonry played in the American Revolution as well as in the underground ideological preparation of the French Revolution and in the revolutions that occurred in Spain, Turkey, and Italy, among others. This is how the secret front of world subversion and countertradition was formed, not just through general influences alone, but also through specific centers of action.

In yet another one of its “fifth columns,” which was limited to the domain of speculative thought, rationalism was destined to develop along unrealist lines and to generate Absolute Idealism and panlogism. The identity of spirit and thought, of concept and reality was upheld; logical hypostases such as the transcendental ego replaced the real ego as well as any premonition of the true supernatural principle within man. The so-called “critical thought that has reached consciousness of itself” declared: “Everything that is real is rational and everything that is rational is real,” which truly represents the extreme form of unrealism.^[5] Rather than in similar philosophical abstractions, rationalism played a much more important role in a practical way in the construction of the modern world by joining forces with empiricism and experimentalism in the context of scientism.

Again, the birth of modern naturalistic and scientific thought coincided with the Renaissance and the Reformation, since these phenomena were the expressions of the same one global upheaval. Individualism is necessarily associated with naturalism.

With the revolt of individualism, all consciousness of the superworld was lost. The only thing that was still regarded as all-inclusive and certain was the material view of the world, or nature seen as exteriority and a collection of phenomena. A new way to look at the world had emerged. In the past there had been anticipations of this upheaval, but they remained sporadic apparitions that were never transformed into forces responsible for shaping civilizations.^[6] It was at this time that reality became synonymous with materiality. The new ideal of science was concerned exclusively with the physical dimension and was eventually confined to a construction; this ideal no longer represented the synthesis of an intellectual intuition, but rather the effort of purely human faculties to unify the multiple varieties of impressions and sensible apparitions from the outside “inductively,” with the sense of touch rather than of sight. The conquests of science merely consisted in the discovery of mathematical relations, laws of consistency and uniform succession, hypotheses, and abstract principles the value of which was exclusively determined by the capability of predicting, more or less exactly, the eventual outcome, yet without providing any essential knowledge and without revealing meanings capable of leading to an inner liberation and elevation. This dead knowledge of dead objects led to the sinister art of producing artificial, automatic, and obscurely demonic entities. The advent of rationalism and scientism was unavoidably followed by the advent of technology and machines, which have become the center and the apotheosis of the new human world.

Moreover, modern science is responsible for the systematic profanation of the two domains of action and contemplation, and also for the plebs’ rise to power in the European nations. It was science that degraded and democratized the very notion of knowledge by establishing the uniform criterion of truth and certainty based on the soulless world of numbers and the superstition represented by the “positivist” method, which is indifferent toward everything that presents a qualitative and symbolic character in empirical data. It was science that precluded any appreciation of the traditional disciplines; through the mirage of evident phenomena that are accessible to everyone science has upheld the superiority of lay culture by creating the myth of the scholar and of the scientist. It was science that, by dispelling the darkness of “superstition” and of “religion,” and by insinuating the image of natural necessity, has progressively and objectively destroyed any possibility of a subtle relationship with the secret powers of things. It was science that snatched away from man the voice of the sea, the earth, and the heavens and created the myth of the “New Age of Progress,” opening doors for everybody and fomenting the great rebellion of the slaves. It is science that today, by providing the instruments for the control and employment of every force of nature according to the ideals of a demonic conquest, has engendered the most formidable temptation ever to confront man: that he may mistake his renunciation as an act of real power and something to be proud of , and mistake a shadow of power for the real thing.

This process of detachment, of loss of the superworld and tradition, of all-powerful laicism and triumphant rationalism and naturalism is identical both on the plane of the relationship between man and reality and on the plane of society, the state, and morality. When dealing with the issue of the death of civilizations, I have mentioned that the inner adherence of humble and ignorant people to leaders and traditional institutions was justified in that it represented a way leading to a fruitful hierarchical relationship with beings who knew and who “were” and who kept alive a nonhuman spirituality of which any traditional law was the embodiment and the adaptation. But when such a reference point is no longer present or when it is present only in a symbolic way, then subordination is vain and obedience is sterile; the final outcome is a petrification and not a ritual participation. And so, in the modern and humanized world that lacks the dimension of transcendence, any law of the hierarchical order and stability was bound to disappear, especially on the outer plane, until the achievement of the state of radical atomization of the single individual, not only in matters of religion, but also in the political domain through the denial of any traditional value, institution, and authority.

Once the fides was secularized the revolt against spiritual authority was followed by the revolt against temporal power and by the revendication of “human rights”; by the affirmation of freedom and the equality of all human beings; by the definitive abolition of the idea of caste (which came to be understood in socioeconomic terms as “functional class”) and of privilege; and by a disintegration of the traditional social structures promoted by libertarianism.

But the law of action-reaction determines a collectivist upheaval to follow automatically every individualistic usurpation. The casteless, the emancipated slave, and the glorified pariah (the modern “free man”) has against himself the mass of the other casteless and, in the end, the brute power of the collectivity. Thus, the process of disintegration continues and what ensues is a regression from the personal to the anonymous, the herd, and the pure, chaotic, and inorganic realm of quantity. Just as the scientific enterprise has sought, from the outside, to recreate the multiplicity of particular phenomena (while having lost that inner and true unity that exists only in the context of metaphysical knowledge), so have moderns tried to replace the unity that in ancient societies consisted of living traditions and sacred law with an exterior, anodyne, and mechanical unity in which individuals are brought together without an organic relation to each other, and without seeing any superior principle or figure, the obeying of which would mean consent, and submission to which would represent an acknowledgment and elevation. In this way new collective forms arise that are essentially based on the conditions of material existence and on the various factors of a merely social life,. which in turn is dominated by the impersonal and leveling system of “public powers.” These collective forms soon overthrow individualism; and whether they present themselves in the guise of democracies or national states, republics or dictatorships, they begin to be carried along by independent subhuman forces.

The most decisive episode in the unleashing of the European plebs, the French Revolution, already displays the typical traits of this overthrow. When studying the French Revolution it is possible to see how these forces soon escape from the control of those who have evoked them. Once the Revolution was unleashed, it seems as if it assumed a life of its own, leading men, rather than the other way around; it eventually devoured its own “children” one by one. Its leaders, rather than real personalities, appear to be the embodiment of the revolutionary spirit and to be carried along as inane and automatic objects. They ride the wave, so to speak, as long as they follow the current and are useful to the goals set by the Revolution; but as soon as they try to dominate it or to stop it, the maelstrom submerges them. Some specific traits of the French Revolution include the speed and the power with which it spread and the speed with which events followed one another and obstacles in its way were overcome; in these traits what is visible is the emergence of a nonhuman element and a subpersonal reality that has a mind and a life of its own and that employs men as mere tools.^[7]

This very same phenomenon may be observed, though in different degrees and forms, in some salient aspects of modern society in general, especially after the collapse of the last “dams.” Politically, the anonymous character of the structures that credit the people and the “nation” with the origin of all powers is interrupted only to generate phenomena that resemble totally the ancient popular tyrannies; that is, personalities that enjoy a brief popularity by virtue of their being masters in awakening the irrational forces of the demos and in directing their course, all the while lacking an authentically superior principle and thus having only an illusory dominion over what they have awakened. The acceleration that characterizes all falling bodies causes the phase of individualism and rationalism to be overcome and to be followed by the emergence of irrational and elemental forces characterized by mystical overtones. It is here that we encounter further developments in the well-known process of regression. In the domain of culture this regression is accompanied by an upheaval that has been characterized with the expression “treason of the clerics.”^[8]

The people who still reacted against the materialism of the masses by adhering to disinterested forms of activity and to superior values, and who, by opposing their own faithfulness to higher interests and principles to the masses’ passionate and irrational life represented the vestiges of transcendence that at least prevented the inferior elements from turning their ambitions and their way of life into the only religion—these very same people in recent times have extolled that plebeian realism and that deconsecrated and inferior existence, and have conferred upon it the aura of a mysticism, a morality, and a religion. Not only did they began to cultivate realistic passions, particularisms, and political rivalries; not only did they begin frantically to pursue temporal achievements and conquests right at the time their moderating and contrasting role was needed the most to stem the surging power of the inferior element but—worse yet—they began to celebrate the only human possibilities that are worthy and fit to be cultivated, and the only ones from which man can draw the fullness of the moral and spiritual life. Thus, these people have supplied the passions and the instincts of the masses with powerful doctrinal, philosophical, and even religious justifications with the result of strengthening their power and at the same time covering with ridicule and contempt any transcendent interest or principle that is truly over and above the particularisms of race or nation and free of all human, sociopolitical conditionings.^[9] In this we can recognize again the phenomenon of a pathological inversion of polarity; the human person, in his superior faculties, becomes the instrument of other forces that replace him and that often use him to bring about spiritual havoc without him even realizing it.^[10]

After all, when the intellectual faculties were applied in a systematic and concerted way to the naturalistic inquiry, this represented a “treason.” The profane science that derived from this type of inquiry portrayed itself as the true science; it sided with rationalism in the attack against Tradition and religion; and it put itself in the service of the material needs of life, the economy, industry, production and overproduction, and the lust for power and riches.

The Law and morals became secularized along the same lines; they no longer were “from above and oriented downwards”; they lost every spiritual justification and purpose and they acquired a merely social and human meaning. It is significant that in some of the more recent ideologies they have claimed the same ancient authority, though with an inverted direction: “from below and upwards.” I am referring to the “morality” that recognizes a value in the individual only insomuch as he is a member of a collective, acephalous entity that identifies his destiny and happiness with the latter’s and denounces as “decadence” and as “alienation” any form of activity that is not socially “relevant” and in the service of the organized “plebs” that are on their way to conquering the planet. I will return to these considerations when discussing the specific forms with which the present cycle is about to end. At this point I will only mention the definitive overthrow of individualism that originated the process of disintegration, an indvidualism that no longer exists other than in the residues and the velleity of a pale and powerless “humanism” typical of bourgeois literates. With the principle according to which man, rather than as an individual, must be made to feel part of a group, faction, party, or collectivity, and have a value only in relationship with these units, we find the reproduction of the relationship that primitive and savage man had toward the totem of his tribe, and of the worst type of fetishism.

In general, modern man has looked at the shift from a “civilization of being” to a “civilization of becoming” as a real step forward.^[11] The valorization of the purely temporal aspect of reality in the name of history (hence historicism) has been one of the consequences of this shift. Once contact with the origins was lost the indefinite, senseless, and accelerated motion of what has rightly been called an “escape forward” in the name of evolution and progress has become the main feature of modern civilization. Quite frankly, the germs of this superstitious mythology applied to time may be found in Judeo-Christian eschatology and Messianism as well as in early Catholic apologetics, which valorized the “novelty” of the Christian revelation so much so that in Ambrose’s polemics against the Roman tradition we can find an early formulation of the theory of progress. The “rediscovery of man” promoted by the Renaissance represented a fertile habitat for the growth of those germs, up to the period of the Enlightenment and scientism. Ever since then the impressive development of the sciences of nature and technology, as well as of inventions, has acted like opium, distracting man’s mind and preventing him from perceiving the underlying and essential meaning of the entire movement: the abandonment of being and dissolution of any centrality in man, and his identification with the current of becoming, which has become stronger than him. And when the fantastic ideas of the coarsest kind of progressivism are at risk of being unmasked, the new religions of life and the “élan vital,” as well as “Faustian” activity and myth, make their appearance and become new intellectual “drugs” that ensure that the movement may not be interrupted but spurred on, so that it may acquire a meaning in itself, both for man and for existence in general.

Again, the overthrow of the civilization of being is very evident. The center has shifted toward that evasive elemental power of the inferior region that in the world of Tradition had always been considered an inimical force. In this world, the task of anybody who yearned for a higher existence, as foreshadowed in the heroic and Olympian myth, consisted in subduing that force and in subjecting it to a “form,” a dominion, and an enlightenment of the soul. The human energies that were traditionally oriented in the direction of disidentification and of liberation, or which, at the very least, recognized the supreme dignity in this approach (so much so as to establish the system of hierarchical participations), after a sudden polar shift, have entered into the service of the forces of becoming by upholding, helping, exciting, and accelerating the rhythm of these forces in the modern world.

On this basis, what we find in modern activity, instead of a path toward the superindividual (as in the case of the ancient possibilities of heroic asceticism), is a path to the subindividual; destructive incursions of the irrational and of the collective element into the already shaking structures of human personality are thus promoted and furthered. Nor in some sectors is there a lack of a certain “frantic” element analogous to that of ancient Dionysism—though on a lower and darker plane, since every reference to the sacred is absent and since the human circuits are the only ones to welcome and to absorb the evoked forces. The spiritual overcoming of time, achieved by rising up to the experience of what is eternal, is today replaced with its counterfeit, namely, the mechanical and illusory overcoming of time produced by the speed, immediacy, and simultaneity (“live,” the media would say) employed in modern technology. Those who see the part of themselves that is not contingent upon time are able to comprehend it with one glance as it presents itself the stream of becoming; just as one, who by climbing to the top of a tower, is able to gain an overall view and understand the unity of individual things that could otherwise only be perceived had they been experienced successively. Conversely, those who, with an opposite movement, immerse themselves in becoming and delude themselves about being able to possess it will only know the excitement, the vertigo, the convulsive acceleration of speed, and the excesses resulting from sensation and agitation. This precipitation of those who “identify” themselves with becoming, who pick up speed, disrupt duration, destroy intervals, and abolish distances eventually flows into immediacy and thus into a real disintegration of inner unity. Being and stability are regarded by our contemporaries as akin to death; they cannot live unless they act, fret, or distract themselves with this or that. Their spirit (provided we can still talk about a spirit in their case) feeds only on sensations and on dynamism, thus becoming the vehicle for the incarnation of darker forces.

Thus, the modern myths of action appear to be the forerunners of a last and decisive phase: after the disembodied and sidereal certainties of the superworld have faded into the distance like mountain peaks on a cloudy day; beyond the rationalist constructions and the technological devastations; beyond the impure fires of the collective vital substance; and beyond the fogs and the mirages of modern “culture,” a new era appears to be coming in which “Luciferian” and theophobic individualism will be definitively overcome and new unrestrainable powers will drag along in their wake this world of machines and these intoxicated and spent beings, who in the course of their downfall have erected titanic temples for them and have opened the ways of the earth.

It is significant that the modern world shows a return of the themes that were proper to the ancient Southern gynaecocratic civilizations. Is it not true that socialism and communism are materialized and technological revivals of the ancient telluric, Southern principle of equality and promiscuity of all beings in Mother Earth? In the modern world the predominant ideal of virility has been reduced to merely the physical and phallic components, just like in the Aphrodistic gynaecocracy. The plebeian feeling of the Motherland that triumphed with the French Revolution and was developed by nationalistic ideologies as the mysticism of the common folk and the sacred and omnipotent Motherland is nothing less than the revival of a form of feminine totemism. In the democratic regimes, the fact that kings and the heads of state lack any real autonomy bears witness to the loss of the absolute principle of fatherly sovereignty and the return of those who have in the Mother (that is, in the substance of the demos) the source of their being. Hetaerism and Amazonism today are also present in new forms, such as the disintegration of the family, modern sensuality, and the incessant and turbid quest for women and immediate sexual gratification, as well as in the masculinization of the woman, her emancipation, and her standing above men who have become enslaved to their senses or turned into beasts of burden. Concerning Dionysus’ mask, I have previously identified it with ceaseless activity and with the philosophy of becoming; and so today we witness a revival, mutatis mutandis, of the same civilization of decadence that appeared in the ancient Mediterranean world—though in its lowest forms. What is lacking, in fact, is a sense of the sacred, as well as any equivalent of the chaste and calm Demetrian possibility. Rather than the survival of the positive religion that became prominent in the West, today the symptoms are rather the dark evocations proper to the various mediumistic, spiritualistic, and neotheosophical currents that emphasize the subconscious, and are characterized by a pantheistic and materialistic mysticism; these currents proliferate and grow in a way that is almost epidemic wherever (for example, in Anglo-Saxon countries) the materialization of the virile type and ordinary existence has reached its peak and wherever Protestantism has secularized and impoverished the religious ideal.^[12] Thus, the parallel is almost complete and the cycle is about to close.

Footnotes

1. Naturally, this lack of understanding was typical of the representatives of Catholicism as well. Paracelsus was right when he said: “What is this commotion about Luther’s and Zwingli’s writings? It truly reminds me of a shallow bacchanalia. If I had to make a recommendation about this controversy I would have these gentlemen and the pope himself go back to school.”

2. This is the main difference between Buddhism and Protestantism, which confers a positive character to the former and a negative to the latter. Both movements are characterized by pessimist premises—Luther’s concupiscientia invincibilis corresponds somewhat to Buddhism’s “thirst for life”—and by a revolt against a corrupted priestly caste. However, Buddhism indicated a path to follow since it created a strict system of asceticism and of self-discipline, unlike Protestantism, which rejected even the mitigated forms of asceticism found in the Catholic tradition.

3. De Maistre (Du pape [Lyon, 1819]) correctly remarked that this situation is paradoxical: Protestantism in fact upholds the idea that God did not bestow infallibility to man or to the Church as if it were a dogma. In Islam, infallibility (isma) is not regarded as the natural possession of an individual, but of all the legitimate interpreters of the tawil, the esoteric teaching.

4. Within Catholicism, due to a confusion between what is proper to asceticism and what is proper to the priesthood, the clergy never was a real caste. Once the principle of celibacy was established, by virtue of this very principle Catholicism irremediably lost the possibility of connecting the deposit of certain spiritual influences with the deep-seated forces of a blood legacy that had been preserved from any corrupt influence. The clergy, unlike the noble class, was always affected by the promiscuity of the origins since it recruited its members from all social strata and therefore always lacked an “organic” (i.e., biological and hereditary) basis for those spiritual influences.

5. Critical or “epistemological” idealism claimed to be the awareness of all other philosophical systems; in this it was right. It is the unrealism of philosophy in general that becomes aware of itself in the system, whereby the real becomes identical to the “rational,” the world to the “concept” of the world, and the “I” to the “thought” of the “I.” I have written at greater length about this in my Fenomenologia dell ‘individuo assoluto (Turin, 1930).

6. During the Middle Ages there was a revival of some of the traditional sciences; the view of nature Scholasticism constructed on the basis of Aristotelianism, though constrained in a conceptualist apparatus, still upheld the view of the qualities or of the formative virtues.

7. Observations by J. de Maistre in Considerations sur la France (Lyon, 1860), 5–8.

8. J. Benda, La Trahison des clercs (Paris, 1928).

9. A. Tilgher, J. Benda e il problema del tradimento dei chierici (Rome, 1930). The “treason of the clerics,” as Benda envisions it, is not a peculiar case of the phenomenon being discussed. The type of the “cleric” as a mere man of letters, philosopher, or moralist (Benda stops at this level) already represents that type of “betrayjng cleric.”

10. In the Chinese tradition (Meng-tzu, 3.12) we find indications of this process in which individualism opens the gates to an obsessive phenomenon that puts man at the mercy of subpersonal and irrational faculties.

11. J. Evola, L’arco e la clava, chap. I.

12. In my Maschera e volto dello spiritualismo contemporaneo (Bari, 1949) and especially in the last chapter of Cavalcare la tigre I have discussed the meaning of the most recent kinds of “spiritualism.”