THE CONSTITUTION OF A TRADITIONAL SOCIETY
The Priests
Part I
     In La Tradizione Romana [The Roman Tradition], Guido De Giorgio dedicates a section to the question of the reestablishment of a traditional society. It includes four chapters: The Priests, The Warriors, The Workers, and The King. This is the first part of the chapter on the priests. De Giorgio provides some very precise indications which are very demanding and ought to be taken with some seriousness. 

The general lines that are given here about a society established along the norms of a tradition truly such, can serve as the model and example for leading the current West to a normality that it has lacked for quite some time, which could, however, be gradually and prudently restored without great difficulties by the return to those principles and to that spirituality of thought and life that are indispensable to the very existence of men. Therefore it is a question of a general type according to which Europe could be oriented and hence the world with the necessary adaptations to change conditions of life while avoiding a violent and radical dissolution that would jeopardize, through its rapidity, the reintegration of a normal state.

If a return is possible, if a rectification is still possible to save the world from spiritual and material ruin, it entails a change of direction that must absolutely proceed from the inner to the outer and not otherwise. First of all, spiritual conviction of a similar change is necessary, and this conviction must be founded on a purely intellectual realization, i.e., without any sentimental infiltration whatsoever, of principles that rule a traditional society, and, since it would be useless and childishly utopian to believe that the entire people and the masses can achieve it through an instant process, it would be sufficient that a few at the beginning would constitute a formative nucleus with an increasingly more efficient operative irradiation leading up to the reintegration of a nearly perfect form. These few would be animated by a single force, that of truth, and guided by a single goal, that of making it triumph, and not to give in to any concession toward oneself of others, but to become true and proper centers of salvation for men misled and corrupted by centuries-old errors. If such men do exist, the return to normality would again be possible and the truth could still triumph over ignorance.

A change of this type entails the pure and simple rejection of all the prejudices that have debased Europe for centuries, of all the errors that the Anti-tradition has been amassing for hundreds of years to corrupt thought and life, impoverishing the mind and paralyzing those spiritual forces promoting the true and only good, the fruition of the Truth in a superhuman order where it alone resides and where it is necessary to have the courage and the strength to maintain it. These men could save Europe and the world, leading the people back into the great traditional channel, toward the light of those principles that are the very basis of existence. But a great energy is necessary to conquer pessimism and skepticism which are opposed to any reestablishment on the one hand, and superficial optimism, on the other, that considers apically reached that which is a simple degree of transition. Above all, great detachment is necessary, strict intellectuality, the absolute absence of that pseudo-mysticism so much in style at the present time where spirituality and sentimentality are equivalent, where enthusiasm and faith are placed on the same level, where the darkest and murkiest impulsiveness is believed to be an expression of strength, where the external is not only excessive, but tends to destroy the internal, where agenda kills true development, where finally all that is inferior and illegitimate is affirmed with an immodesty which the world has never known before now even in the most acute periods of decadence.

But above all, great courage would be necessary in these men and a great faith to conquer so much darkness of ignorance, to break up so many false bridges, to facilitate the return to the comprehension of the truth, to give back to thought its dignity and to life, its justification. Many currently in Europe are aware of the mud the world gets mired in every day, but their conviction is half-hearted and imperfect: it is more about a pessimistic and skeptical attitude than a true and proper conviction. None of those would be able to indicate the remedy or to show the way to return to true life, which, before all else, reconfirms the values of the spirit that are divine, but do not neglect the necessities of existence, orienting them along the purely traditional axis.

Every traditional society entails the organic allocation of labor and the assignment of tasks to various categories of men adapted to their nature and their possibilities. Even currently, in the agonal state of Europe and the world, this allocation exists, but it is false, arbitrary, unnatural, temporary, not founded on traditional norms, i.e., according to a strictly and purely hierarchical order that derives from the very meaning of the term [hierarkhia=high priest in Greek], whose sacred character should not elude anyone. Since every tradition is sacred, the allocation of labor must be imposed only from deference to the truth that is the divine order; therefore, the priests would stand at the apex of a traditional society, who are the bearers of the divine order, the divine knowledge. We could say Ascetics, but we prefer to preceding term because it better highlights the precise character of the nature and the office assigned to the bearers of supernatural truth. This caste includes those who do not participate in active life, who lack every responsibility of the profane, temporal order and are the leaders of traditional society, but in reality, through the very character of their mission, occupy a marginal place in respect to the practical act of existences, but one that is central, determinative and indicative for the maintenance and the development of traditional society. They are the poor of God, the voluntary renouncers of the world, the truth givers, the Spirit lovers, the last because the first, whose life is devoted to the realization of the great divine norms that constitute the traditional body. No confusion is possible regarding their nature and their missions which are of a purely spiritual order, without any worldliness, extending into the pure regions of the Spirit of God who governs the world invisibly.

Part II
    This is the second installment from Guido De Giorgio‘s chapter on the priestly caste from La Tradizione Romana [The Roman Tradition]. He sees the process of the degeneration of the castes as beginning, not from the revolt of the Kshatriya, but rather from the failure of the Priests to fulfill their divine mission. Nevertheless, Tradition may be forgotten, but never lost, so there are always some solitary men who continue to maintain that sacred knowledge. De Giorgio moves on to the topic of faith which, he says, is necessary because a man must believe before he knows. 

Therefore, they constitute the caste of the invisible ones because their continuous, untiring, hidden action is of the sacred spiritual order and is spontaneously fulfilled through the very force of the soul, the purity of their life that must be a rite, an offering, a sacrifice. We insist particularly on the character of the priestly caste to determine the modality of the hierarchic power and the efficacy of the revelatory mission entrusted to them. They are the leaders of traditional society, but invisible leaders because the sacred knowledge of which they are the depositaries is not a purely dogmatic system nor a dead body, but a living, perennial fire that they must nourish, living continuously in communion with the spirit of God, acting so that His truth is towering at its peak, in isolation from His profound virtue, in the active and effective development that only the contemplative life allows to be realized.

They are the great hermits and they descend among men, the bearers of the graces of the truth, but, even if living in the world, they are really on the outside and dominate while not dominating, act while not acting, illuminating with their light, they save with their presence, strengthen with their example. Their hierarchy and their organization, the traditional type to which they are tied, the value of the character of their mission are absolutely determined by their having freely and consciously chosen not a career, not a profession, not a job, but the way of God, that by leaving from God leads back to God, and of having chosen it not only for itself, but rather with the precise task of showing it to all. They sacrifice themselves and they sacrifice: it is reflected carefully in the value and in the immense importance of these two expressions when led back to the precision of their etymological meaning [sacrifice=make sacred]. The Priests cannot not be sacred themselves, they cannot not make sacred everything that they touch and go near because they were born for that, they were destined to that and their choice, in embracing the holy ministry, is an absolute match with the inherent possibilities of their nature.

They cannot deviate if they are truly priests, they cannot, if they deviate, not fall into the lowest abjection because they have betrayed God, they failed in their vows, and by abjuring, they contaminated themselves and men. If the value and the height of the task entrusted to the Priests is fixed and well understand, one will reach some conclusions to which the modern world, having become anti-traditional, is no longer capable of elevating itself. Let us outline one of them.

Since the Priests are the holders of sacred knowledge and constitute the insuppressible base of a truly traditional foundation, they are to secure its normality, they are to maintain the unity with their invisible spiritual hidden work and therefore are responsible for the general defection of the traditional spirit, because no one can fall if the priests themselves do not fall, no one can fail if the priests themselves do not fail, no one can be banned against the truth of God if the priests do not betray it first, no one can corrupt the world if they do not corrupt it first, abandoning their sacred mission for the concerns of the temporal order, passing from the contemplative life for which they are destined, to the active life that is not absolutely the place of the development of their activity, with falling short of their caste, their obligations, and especially the divine principles whose radiating virtue they must keep intact. How many are capable of understanding how the current state of abjection is due to the defection of the priestly caste who are responsible for it because they alone, the Priests, maintaining contact with the divine not only by means of their action over men, but above all with the constant realization and efficacy of their interior ascesis? Just as God’s strength is mysterious and invisible, so is the Priest’s occult and hidden: contemplating they act, fulfilled in God, they work in the world, sacrificing themselves they sacrifice, praying they save, although their mission is genuine and not the unholy profanation of God’s laws.

If one can with absolute certainty impute to them the state of current Europe, whatever defection of this caste, whatever decadence of humanity is not attributable to the traditional form to which they are reconnected and of which they could be the authentic representatives. Tradition is invulnerable, inviolable, unassailable, it is God’s truth and is kept intact because, even if betrayed by His ministers, He always finds those who preserve its sacred character, those who, among men not belonging to the priestly caste, become its legitimate and authorized carrier. And almost always those, priests among men, carry out their mission more dangerously than if they belonged to the officially recognized caste, because they have to fight against a profane force that tends to suppress them, that of those who have betrayed the faith, repudiated tradition, abandoning the divine for the human and the sacred for the profane: those are the false priests who are no longer such, i.e., holders of sacred knowledge. Reflect on the importance of what we say, and you will be able to understand how the solitary Ascetics, those who we will be able to call οι εξω [the outside], in all the periods of decadence of the priestly caste, have kept alive the perennial fire of tradition against the deceit, the hatred, calumny of those who failed in their mission.

The self-establishment of ascetic groups outside the priestly caste, the presence of Masters, i.e., of solitary Ascetics, in all the period of decadence is explained precisely by the abandonment of tradition by parts of those to whom its deposit was entrusted, and the necessity—of the divine order, we insist—that others seek to keep contact between man and God, purging the sacred ways of the profane dross that the false priests amassed, i.e., the most ungodly deniers of the supernatural world. Dante docet …

It is necessary, to avoid misunderstanding, to insist on the nature and character of this definition, of this contamination that takes place in the ambit of the priestly caste in the periods of decadence. The divine truths that constitute the sacred body of tradition has a purely metaphysical, or transcendent, character: they are superhuman, eternal, and to approach them, it is therefore absolutely necessary to pass beyond the human condition and bring oneself with the intellect into that sphere of pure actuality where the divine reality is developed beyond the domain of Forms and Rhythms in the silence of its ineffability. Faith prepares this transition from the human to the divine, in fact, it is its essential condition, that which cannot elude anyone through the elementary analogy with so many human and contingent situations. It is necessary to believe that one knows, because one knows only by knowing that one can one know before knowing, i.e., before having acquired the wisdom and having already completed the passage from the human to the divine in order to do so that only the divine is.

Faith in whom? In God, in the Master, so say all traditions that insist on this absolutely necessary condition for the effective realization of the divine. One believes in the truth before reaching it, i.e., before being there and being it, and the intensity of faith is in direct relation with the efficacy of the achievement.

Faith is therefore the rail, the bridge, the isthmus between the human and the divine, between what man is not and what he really is when he is no longer, when he surpassed and passed over forever the human condition. But since this is the fruit of ignorance, faith is the necessary condition for the dispersal of ignorance and the reaching of wisdom.

It annuls every human limitation in man, abolishes individuality, opens all the passages of Infinite possibility, considers the chains as untied so that they are really so, it works a type of preparatory radiation of individual faculties, because one believes in things other than oneself, in the sacred text, in the hidden value of the rite, in the minister, in the master, in other words, in whatever passes beyond quotidian reality, the illusion of the world ordinarily experienced in the ambit of all sensible and rational limitations, it denies resolutely the tangible whole and affirms an invisible reality.

To have faith means to believe in what one does not yet know, one does not know, it is the most noble and desperate attempt to bring oneself face to face with the threshold of mystery and to affirm that beyond it there is an unspeakable reality, that which is revealed. Even for those who cannot pass over this threshold, it is enormously positive that they succeed in bringing themselves to the extreme limit connected to their strengths with an act of faith that leaps over error, the visible presence, the world and things, in one stroke, to genuflect in the face of the Invisible Presence, God and His Names still concealed precisely because they are absent, asserted, and believed and not known. Faith is therefore superior to any human knowledge whatsoever, to any conquering activity of the human alone, because it passes beyond it, considers it as ancillary, negligible, negotiable, even nothing in the face of the divine that it recognizes as the invisible venerable root through its invisibility, real through its apparent unreality, divine exactly because not human, not tangible, not discernible with the senses, and analyzable by reason, placed in a sphere of this the good ones, those who believe, will be able to enjoy, if it will be pleasing to God, only after the dissolution of the human compound, i.e., post mortem.

Faith works this miracle that those who cannot reach by an operational effort and aware of the threshold of the divine, attain it with the rapid and direct contact that can be fecund with greater results: compared to those who know, that are beyond the threshold, they find themselves very far, but compared to those who do not believe, to the small men of the small world, the affirmers of the minimum in the minimum and lovers of the shadows, they are in a clearly privileged position because they are distant from just as far as the spirit surpasses the flesh and intelligence surpasses imbecility.

Part III
    This is the third and final installment from Guido De Giorgio‘s chapter on the priestly caste from La Tradizione Romana [The Roman Tradition]. He continues the discussion on faith. He points out that when the priesthood deteriorates, it gives rise to priesthood of solitary Ascetics. Although they maintain traditional teachings, these solitary men do not have the authority to maintain traditional society. Furthermore, they find themselves opposed by the decadent priests. The priests who go astray need to be punished in order to prevent scandal. In the contemplative life, one’s own thoughts and desires are emptied and the Invisible Presence begins to manifest in one’s center in an endless number of stages. By losing his life in this way, his life becomes more real and more fulfilled. 

Those who are called “geniuses” by men of today, so tied to the human to see them through the greatest irony, even the superhuman, enclosed as they are in human and terrestrial limitations, are greatly inferior to the most humble of believers because they hypertrophy a nothing, man and the world, and they make everything from this nothing, while the believers deny the nothing, man and the world, and reaffirm it only putting it back on God, i.e., in the supreme cause. Those who do not believe see the effect separated from the cause, which is absurd, while those who believe see the effect in the cause, which is conformed to truth: those who know even abolish the effect and this is the truth. Deepening this last point, one will be able to come to understand, first of all, the triple attitude of man in the face of the truth in accordance to what is subhuman, human or superhuman, and consequently the way in which the principle of causality must be considered in the transition from the profane to the sacred, from the human to the divine, according to what the schema of death, life, and liberation makes of it. This triple schema can be more crudely formulated in connection to these possibilities: without God, with God, God.

Faith is therefore the traditional base for excellence since it is the necessary anticipation of the means through which the path begins from the human to the divine and it resolutely builds a bridge that is fixed on the other shore without seeing it but only knowing it as revealed: tradition works this fixation in the divine that constitutes for the believers the invisible ubi consistam [place to stand], the fulcrum of its elevation to the threshold of mystery.

We note that God, precisely because He is believed but not known, is affirmed in His deepest reality, that of the Unmanifested Principle, and that simple faith pronounces itself more positively than what would appear to a superficial examination, since by affirming the unknowability of the destination, it admits implicitly that only a realizing knowledge can attain it with an effective becoming. This knowledge follows faith, it passes over the threshold of the divine to carry oneself into the same mystery.

It is the most interior part of the Temple where the sacrifice is performed, that altar where the Priest resides.

So if the whole temple constitutes the domain of the sacred and we have the profane only outside of it, in the temple itself  among the altar and the rest, there is a clean separation, and while the altar constitutes the active realization  of the divine and therefore it is the true domain of the sacred, the rest of the church is reserved to those who are present at the sacrifice, they participate in it, but do not perform it themselves, therefore they are always only the profane because there is a barrier between them and the divine truth. This is the relationship between faith and knowledge, between the faithful and the Priests, between those who only believe and those who know and should know, between the throng of the called and the and the rank of the elect, between passive love that genuflects and pulls back outside of the sacred threshold and the active love that performs the sacrifice directly with a gesture that is a benediction, a voice that is of God, an altar that is the very throne of the Eternal.

From all that it is easy to reach this conclusion that the Priests, as the bearers of sacred knowledge, must really possess it by means of a realizing knowledge in order to be able to perform on the altar the highest of the sacrifices, the divine sacrifice, through which they strengthen the faith, reconfirm it in its strength, and reach the hope that it can, by crossing the threshold, reach the sphere of charitas, of divine love.

If the Priests do not attain this realizing knowledge, they are not such, they cannot be the sustainers of Tradition, the princes of a traditional society, those who maintain the contact between the human and the divine in a permanent current, who secure life and the justification of life itself, placing it back in God. This is the true sin which a Priest can incur, of not having attained the realizing knowledge, of performing a rite with knowing its value, efficacy, and meaning, of not knowing, in other words, the sacred knowledge and of reducing it to a simple babbling of the lips or to an idle formulation that, in the scope of realizing knowledge which should be that of the Priest, is an absurdity because the one falling short puts himself beneath the believers, the profane among the profane and the profaner among the profaners.

Tradition remains untouched however, even in such a case, the intangible rite does not diminish the efficacy that it had on believers, on the faithful, some of whom can even substitute, if not in fact, in a reality that even leaps over the fact, the Priest, performing for them the rite and becoming for them the transient or permanent deposits of God’s truth. If this defection does not harm Tradition in itself, it harms enormously the basis of a traditional society, it invalidates the principle of authority that is absolutely necessary to the maintenance of the two orders, the human and the divine, the profane and the sacred, that of faith and of knowledge, of those who believe and those who know, but what is more serious, it  gives rise to the priesthood of solitary Ascetics who, by God’s will, maintain the traditional secret with their work reserved to a minority, they safeguard it, they protect it against profanations, and they end up being opposed by the priestly class that fears in then its same knowledge, that which they themselves abandoned and betrayed. These deplorable clashes always occurred at the expense of sacred knowledge, giving rise to upheavals and conflicts of every type contrary to the maintenance of traditional order.

In making the Priests the depositaries of sacred science in in considering so these various questions, we thinking of a traditional form that more is adapted to nature and the spirit of the West where the sole ascetics should be the Priests, where they along should truly safeguard the traditional body realizing effectively in itself the doctrine with the deep knowledge of everything that constitutes the divine truth.

The Priests besides being deprived of real knowledge of sacred things can also come up short of the decorum that is imposed on their caste. The accusation of immorality is too noted and too usual because one has to insist there, instead of this were derived incomprehensible devaluations of tradition itself, which is truly absurd, giving rise to the sect, schism, heterodoxy. We will immediately and clearly say that the morality is for knowledge and not the inverse and the purely moral side of a question of any fact is the least act for make it comprehend and valued its meaning. The first and only sin is ignorance and one is responsible more for not knowing or poorly knowing than to act evil. As to judge conscience, we do not believe that his is not only a very arduous and insolvable task, but directly a sacrilege, because from God alone and in the name of God consciences are judged and where it never than the so called more judgments are given in God and in the name of God? One reflects attentively that and one will see that only the facts can be judged in the customary place as the condition capable of determining others and therefore, if harmful, condemnable.

Therefore what must be judged, condemned, and punished is the deed when it is visible, it is “active”, it leads to imitation, it is the example, the seed of other deeds, it corrupts: what must be condemned is scandal in all forms, in all classes, and this is the healthy principle of a truly traditional ethic that maintains the privilege of the conscience in action as God’s privilege, and represses the infraction not because the motives are condemned, but to prevent the repetition, the example.

And since there is a vast range in the intensity of the propagation of an offense, i.e., in the immortality of a deed, a truly civil society should adopt all those natural, external, brutal, repressive measures that punish, from the death penalty up to the torture and flogging, but they do not judge, in beating the man, what he has that is the most external, i.e., the flesh.

A truly civil society, readopting all the old measures of physical, outward coercion, returns to the truth of the traditional river-bed, obeys scrupulously God’s truth, and at the same time enriches the number of true, real reasons for action, creating a game, an alternation, a reciprocity between the crime and the punishment, fruitful in sensations beneficial to life, fertile in expansions and the surpassing of the brutal fact. Capital punishment, the various types of torture publicly inflicted with their tragedy, are always considerably effective and instructive and they can even determine true sources of purification, positive complexes, whose importance does not elude those who are equipped with sense and truly constructive imagination and not esthetically and softly deviators. But there is another consideration of a deeper order: the crime has degrees integrally subordinated to human passionate nature, i.e. to the darkest complex that dominates ordinary men undisputedly: it is therefore necessary that hierarchically or analogously proportionate penalties correspond to these levels, penalties determinate by an impersonal justice that strikes in the flesh, abstracting from any experimental character: thus only a reward and a rectification reaching a balance is established; this is the indicator of a true and proper traditional society.

The Priests can and must be blamed only if they fail at their task through total or partial incomprehension of traditional truths: their existence, on the purely exterior side, i.e., from the moral point of view, is reprehensible when it offers matter for scandal and then only if they submit to a tribunal that can be constituted only by men belonging to their caste. In fact from what has been said thus far, it results that real knowledge, i.e., integrative and realizing, belongs to the contemplative, and not the active life. The relationship between contemplation and action is of the greatest importance for the maintenance of the traditional idea because their imbalance constitutes a rupture, a hierarchical inversion, a veritable deviation that, prolonged for centuries, was the origin of the current abjection of the West. Contemplation stands to action in the same relationship as the divine to the human, the sacred to the profane, the eternal to the ephemeral, since their range is distinct and cleanly circumscribed by the two different types of activity. In contemplation there is an activity of a special order that is accomplished in the eternal place, beyond time and space in the sphere of transcendent truths, in an apparent retreat and in an interiorization that in reality are a veritable translation from the human to the divine and a cancellation of the human so that only the divine remains in its absolute autonomy.

In this sense, contemplation and revelation are synonyms because the divine truth can be revealed only in man becoming a temple, i.e., the refuge itself of the truth, the empty temple of humanity founded on earth and elevated to heaven in a verticality symbolically reflecting the lifting up of all being to the totalization of the higher states for their inclusive and intensive integration.

If in the Primordial Tradition the world itself was the temple, with the successive degeneration of humanity, the sacred enclosure was established to separate the sacred from the profane and maintain the distinction between the two orders in the way that the higher directs and guides the lower. The temple is the symbol and more than a symbol, it is the place of peace, of absolute interiority where, every individuality is denied, annulled, or distanced from every human dross, the realization of the divine is accomplished, the theophanic cycle of all its effective fullness.

Whoever contemplates—and contemplation is only of the divine order, therefore it must be judged absolutely inappropriate to any order, especially to the esthetic order which is visibly inferior—not only separates himself from others, but from himself, that which is the essential, and it empties his heart making it the center of his being where the Invisible Presence is manifested in a progressive irradiation whose levels are without end and constitute the hierarchy of divine stages. This term therefore cannot be, nor must be, applied to another that is not the real, effective achievement of higher states not passively glimpsed as though from the outside, but actively realized in one’s interiority of the great temple which is the purified heart, cleansed, made a receptacle of light, the holy chalice where the divine mystery is completed. Everything that is purely and clearly human—like art in the profane sense and philosophy especially in the modern meaning—is excluded from the contemplative field that is the divine and not human life, reality and not illusion, truth and not ignorance. Philosophy that is an impaired wisdom and art that is a purely exterior infatuation for their very degeneration, are excluded from contemplative life and represent an artificial interstructure that the current abjection established between contemplation and action, small spurious world where weakness and imbecility produced by the ignorance of external things is depleted.

If contemplation is therefore reserved to the Priests who are the bearers of divine wisdom, what will be the relationship between the contemplative and active life? It is identical to that which rules the divine order and the human order: the active life must be oriented in accordance with a vision that can be determined only by those who live contemplatively, In fact, if man and the world in themselves are nothing when separated from their cause and not put back in it, i.e., in God, they acquire instead quite another meaning when they are integrated in the real order because they represent the same place where one of the divine possibilities is fulfilled. Reflect attentively on this: the contemplative life is a larger circle that includes in it a smaller one, the active life, the integration of these two modes constitute the traditional unity. Affirming the superiority of the contemplative life, we postulate the necessity of the active life provided that the latter is included in it, i.e., it remains hierarchically subordinated in order to shape it and procure for it all its operative efficacy. One, contemplation, works in the eternal, the other, action, works in the ephemeral, which is the symbol of the eternal: one, contemplation, is the domain of the sacred, the other, action, is the domain of the profane that becomes sacred only if it receives light from the former. To be more explicit: the contemplative returning to life properly called, i.e., to external existence, sees it under another aspect, different from that of the common man, therefore it is logical and natural that he seeks to consider it not as separate from the divine truth, but as effective preparation for that, the vestibule, the pre-position that rules and determines a final development realized only in the place of pure contemplation.

The harmony between contemplation and action is necessary for the complete integration of human possibilities so that man could be truly such, rich in every development, judge of his own destiny, capable of elevating himself from earth to heaven in a progressive expansion of all his faculties. But that is possible only if contemplation dominates action: in the reverse case we have the hierarchical revolution, the annulment of the traditional axis, the impoverishment of man demasculinized, made ugly, victim of all those inferior forces on which he can have the upper hand only if he is guided by the spirit of God.

It is up to the Priests, besides, to act so that the spirit of God reigns in the world and sustains the forces of man and truly dignifies him because man is everything with God, nothing without God, and his action deprived of any traditional content is a groping in the lower darkness, a wicked shadow among wicked shadows, sterile bedroom activities [fornicatoria] that impels him from illusion to illusion, from error to error in the great detrital riverbed, the hellish, subhuman, ghostly, and lemuric world.

But if instead the active life is regulated along the traditional axis, as a rite, then all the apparent imbalances are annulled while counterbalancing each other, all the varieties of human espression and deviations are arranged and are resolved in an integrative homogeneity. It is necessary to insist on what men have completely forgotten in the collapse of all traditional values: the active life is so much richer the more it is subordinated to the contemplative life, because in a truly traditional society there is an amplification of human possibilities, an infinitely more fertile development of their most various activities, in the modern world, they are completely wasted. For a law of analogy that regulates the parallelism of the two orders, we will say that the more intense the contemplative life is, the richer is the active life, as much as God is exalted, so much more is man valued, and that in a truly traditional society, everything profane is something sacred in fieri [pending] and all aberrations are recomposed in the equilibrium between the divine and the human, love and hate, wisdom and ignorance, war and peace, virtue and vice, good and evil, in a full, integral, oceanic confluence, are harmonized, surpassed, and twinned, in the great traditional river-bed.

But because this takes place, it is necessary for the Priests to truly be the supreme club-bearers and that their life be purely contemplative, as the bearers of divine truths, the great fee men of the eternity that they keep watch on the bastions of time, intermediaries between the higher and lower waters, between the divine and the human, between the cosmic and the hyperuranium [where the Platonic ideas reside], knowers of the light that is the only light emanating from God.

The Warriors
Part I
     This is part I on the role of the Warrior caste in a Traditional Society. Here Guido De Giorgio describes the role of the warrior caste and its relationship to the priestly caste. He then relates that to the Great War and and the Lesser War. 

In the active life, they are the bearers of power and therefore constitute the second caste of traditional society whose duty is the maintenance of activity guided by virtue. We say power only in the arena of the active life because in the contemplative life, true power is manifested in its highest reality, from the invisible to the visible, from the divine to the human, and thus represents the supreme authority that belongs to the priestly caste. Power in the active life is realized by giving a sacred character to every manifestation; hierarchically organized, the Warriors sacrifice themselves in order to remove the purely contingent aspect from human activity and to make it a kind of need that is accepted by consciously sacrificing themselves for the fulfillment of divine reality. They are the hosts of the earth and choose the most difficult path in it, keeping the sanctity of the intent unbroken in the pang of the most intense activity by virtue of a continual ascesis that is a purification and a preparation for glory. Since the Warriors reach glory that makes them the victors of the time in perpetuity that is immortalized for ages and their name is preserved as the constant example of sacrifice. They choose to be victims to affirm the victory of man over death even where death reigns: voluntary and active victims, arbiters of their destiny, aware of the transience of the flesh and the perpetuity of their example. As everything pivots on the contemplative life for the Priests, so for the Warriors everything is based on the active life because they constitute its summit and its law. In fact, the active cycle reflects the contemplative, and as the death of the human is the prelude necessary to the fruition of higher states, so the Warrior lives in order to die in the awareness that everything is vanity except victory over death, which is also the seal of glory.

They obey a purely interior discipline that purifies the passions, exalts them, and directs them toward a single end, the affirmation of power in the intensive deployment of a force that acts materially, but has its origin in the world of Rhythms. As the spiritual and the noetic dominate in the Priests, in the Warriors the psychic dominates, the hidden network of Rhythms that heighten human possibilities creating the heroic turmoil which, like a flame, nurtures the great warrior virtues.

No one, more that the Warrior, is averse to Silence, to the world of the Spirit, because he voluntarily chose the active life in its most violent form to set his strength against it, to defeat it with his own violence, exalting his hidden energies and carrying the Rhythms to such a high tonality that it encroaches on the Forms and bends them integrally, surpassing them. We observe that this overflowing of strength cannot be absolutely effective without a true and proper ascesis, a self-denial in every moment for self- assertion only in victories, unless this assertion has the aspect of rhetorical jubilation, but rather it is like the blossoming of now equalized warrior virtues, recognized in the flower of all the activity precisely because surpassed and triumphant. While all other men compromise, they are the intransigents, those who make the obstacle the prize of their strength, for which the cement is the sanctification of man: they know that only death can placate them, so in confronting it, they escape it, and in escaping it, they confront it because it comes only when the peak of power is reached in the peak of abandonment.

In this sense, peace is their war and war is their peace. They are appointed by the Priests who sanction them the sacred character of their activity with the rite, which is uniquely directed to self-sacrifice as an offering of all of the active life on the threshold of contemplation, a sacrificial purge of the existence that is continued even after death, and even after death. While the contemplative death that is faced by the Priests can neither be seen nor understood by the masses of men who, as we said, believe but do not know, they do get a glimpse of, but do not understand, the degrees of integrative knowledge, while the death faced by the Warriors is visible to all; it reflects, in an active place, the former and is carried out, analogically like the former, with a sacrifice whose value for men is as much higher as it is more apparent. But while this sacrifice is fixed plastically for the masses that relive it in its most conspicuous phases, its secret rhythm and intimate character elude them. In the Warrior the active life asserts itself by exalting itself and in the fierce heroic heat, it denies itself: in fact, the force that animates the Warrior is love in its most destructive capacity and devotion in its most constructive form: love and devotion constitute the warrior cycle which is that of triumphant virility. While knowledge dominates for the Priests, for the Warriors, love dominates, because all their strength is a type of offering in a continuous dissatisfaction that is satisfied only with death. While they cannot know the divine world, they love it and tend to it, climbing over human limitations with a constant overcoming of Rhythms over Form, of the psychic over the organic that it sustains, it increases a hundredfold the resistance to the obstacle and the force that surpass it, establishing a formidable aura of secret flashes that the ancients symbolized with the real, but invisible, divine assistance of the heroes.

The Forms, in heroic action, undergo a greater or lesser inflection in accordance with the intensity of the Rhythms that make them jump, by encroaching on them, replacing them, fringing them, so to say, with an imprecision that makes them more indefinable, while the Warrior himself is dragged, aware only of the sanctify of his sacrifice, in an always more overwhelming turmoil that is crowned, while filling up with death. But we can say here that love defeats death as glory defeats time, not in the absolute sense that is realized only through the knowledge and in the knowledge which dissolves every duality in the integral fulfillment of the divine.

It is necessary now to speak of the great and the small war to make precise the two fields of active contemplation and heroic activity.

The Great War is the development of the being in the surpassing of human conditions that are first confronted and then surpassed, destroyed, transformed, and resolved only in the divine sphere: the enemy to defeat is the man who must be struck centrally in himself: the field of action is his own heart that must be emptied of every dross: victory is that of truth over ignorance, of divine reality over cosmic and human illusion that is dispersed with the realizing knowledge just as the fog breaks up in the sun without residue, and that which disappears had never existed in reality. Victory in the Great War is Divine Solitude, the decisive summit of every ascesis where nothing remains except pure aseity and what in Him is absolute ineffability. The starting point of the Great War is the non-duality of the human and the divine: the destination is divine unity: but since what vanishes is not a reality but only ignorance, once this is dispersed, only what always was remains, that cannot be said of the transient, but only and uniquely of the eternal.

Now this victory, which is the only real and definitive victory of Life over death, which, for simplification, we say call the resolute peak, while in the reality of its development it is manifested as a difficult complexity of states, it requires such a concentrated force, a task so resolute of the whole being who must be transfigured in a succession of progressive realizations, from being able to be produced only in externally favorable conditions, not that these are the necessary principle, but practically they become so. Hence, the isolation of the Temple for the priest, of the remote place for the ascetic, the hermitage and finally an ensemble of conditions that favor and facilitate this which is the highest and the holiest of all rites, the most heroic of all actions, and the most perfect of all tasks, the killing of man in the Law of God, the real abandonment of Rhythms and Forms dissolving in the allness of Silence. Now evidently whatever type of action is contrary to a similar achievement, and every rhythm must be recomposed, every whirlwind assuaged for the achievement of the Great Peace that is the true Victory of the Great War. The enemies to defeat in fact are so numerous, so terrifying, the dangers to avoid, the states to revive so repetitive and successive, that only the integral cessation of every activity can make victory possible. It is about surpassing the human and the cosmic in all their forms and in all their rhythms, to remake the creative process in the reverse path, to lead to where God formed man with His breath, to be able to initiate the paradisiacal cycle. This is the model barely noticed for the Great War that constitutes the traditional secret, the sacred deposit held in trust by those who know, i.e., the Priests.

One can understand from that how much this caste surpasses all the others and is not, almost the truth, a caste, but a true and proper supercaste, because of its absolute preeminence. Thus its supreme authority, its consecrating, legitimating power, the dependence of the three castes on it, the justification of their existence, because nothing that is accomplished by men has value in reality if it is not sealed by the divine spirit.

Now the Warriors themselves are consecrated by the Priests, nor can they not be, without ceasing to belong to their caste since the war that they fight must represent a reduced version of the Great War in order to be legitimate, it must lose, i.e., the external character and conquer a deep meaning that justifies its attainment. The Warriors therefore submit themselves to an inner discipline, to a true and proper ascesis that will consist in their depassionalization so that by killing, they know how to kill themselves, by defeating, to defeat one themselves self, by considering the enemies as victims, in the sacred sense, and not as flesh from the slaughterhouse, by respecting them as themselves, by passing over the carnage with the love that redeems, over the contaminations with the purity that justifies, over death, and over atrocity of death with the consciousness that nothing can die because nothing can be born, only the eternal existing in its inaccessible reality.

Part II
    It seems to me that Guido De Giorgio and Julius Evola agree on the role of the Warrior caste, with some fundamental disagreements. The first obviously is that Evola fails to understand the relationship of the warrior caste to the priestly class. The second is more difficult to express. Evola is “cold”, i.e., for him, the warrior is cold and detached. We could say that for De Giorgio, the warrior is hot: he loves, he is devoted, he is faithful. For Evola, the warrior fights as it is in his nature. For De Giorgio, too, it is in his nature, but he fights for his family, his land, his Temple, his lord. We can note here how the notion of bhakti yoga has been sentimentalized and the understanding of devotion trivialized. There is something else, more subtle, to consider, but since it is not part of De Giorgio’s purpose, I’ll save it for another time. 

The Small War acquires a deep ascetic significance and imposes on the caste, only to which it is reserved, not slight surpassings that have, as we said, love and devotion for its foundation. The Warrior is guided by his love for the Divine Principle that is close to him, almost accessible and even distinct, in which he centers himself when the heroic peak happens and the confluence of Rhythms generates the supreme passion, that of dedication to God of the carnage: then a super-action of the normal human faculties operates, that adapt, raising himself in the highest development of the consuming fire and the Warrior becomes the great sacrificer, the victimarius, and the baptism of blood is a catharsis that renews him, freeing him with his violence from human brutality, redeeming him as in a purifying basin [Ex 30:18] that cleanses horror with piety at every death. Piety in fact pushes him to sacrifice of himself and of the enemies in each one of which he catches sight of his own effigy; in the clash of a fight, he seeks to beat back the resurgent duality, the terrible “thou”, the shadow of himself, the eye that looks askance at him, the hand and the arm that threaten him, the love in which his own love is mirrored, the “other” who blocks his vision of the Supreme Unity. He kills and gets killed in the name of God, in the name of God he defends his lord and his land since his weapons are blessed and he is invested just as his lord is, and his country is the place fixed by God for the conquest of heaven, the support, the base of his ascension, and he must defend it in order to keep God’s law in the world, as long as the enemy does not deprive him of God by snatching his land, home, temple. His caste is the guardian of sovereign power in which the virtues are combined, that when entirely followed, lead man to the Edenic fruition, restoring his eternal and original country to him, whose necessary starting point is this land. The king and the country are made sacred by the radiant vision of divine Glory since in loving it, the warrior loves God, and in protecting it, he defends God’s possession.

Note that the realization by means of warrior ascesis is always indirect, while the priestly ascesis is direct or final: the former is accomplished through the world of Rhythms, the latter in the Silence, the former remains in duality, the latter reaching unity from non-duality. This difference is essential and eliminates whatever arbitrary reduction that would subvert the traditional order. The warrior caste obeys its own law that is justified only through a higher law which, originating in the divine, extends it. In fact, if the Primordial Tradition is taken as the starting point, the castes are reduced to just one, that of the Priests, nor is it put there for others because in this stage only the contemplative way exists which excludes any action: there is no caste in reality in the Primordial Tradition in which human unity is realized in its most absolute expression. The King here is the high priest and one can speak of regality only in the sense of cognitive absoluteness. But in successive traditional forms, the distribution of human possibilities is necessarily carried out, because we are already in a greater state of decadence and complexity through which life assumes a internal and external double aspect; in this stage, the priestly class assumes an absolute position that puts it back in the Primordial Tradition, that of the Warriors is internal in respect to the purely exterior Workers but, considering the whole tradition in its triple aspect of Silence, Rhythm, and Forms which correspond to the Priests, Warriors, and Workers, the second caste occupies an intermediate position of equilibrium between the two extremes and serves to maintain the traditional unity because its attribute is power.

Representing the traditional boundary circularly like a fortified city, we will say that the center, the Temple, corresponds to the priestly caste, the periphery, i.e., the ramparts, to the Warrior Caste, while the workers remain in the middle. Considering such relationship, the Warrior caste occupies the most dangerous place in the traditional defense, the one most exposed and, if one understands the value of this depiction in relation with what has been said, the Warriors are the lords of Rhythms and the art that is most appropriate to them is Magic.

Whoever is capable of reflection will understand without difficulty how, this caste living in the paroxysm of action, must necessarily be involved in the wave of hidden forces that are unleashed especially when the rhythm of the active life is intense, so that the warrior ascesis has as its principle goal the knowledge of the world of Rhythms, of the laws that govern it, and the defense from the traps of the field of shadows. That appears more clearly to those who consider with attention life and the work of the great conquerors where one easily sees how materially infinitesimal elements have engendered inevitable imbalances. What is true for every man is doubly so for the Warriors who live intensely in order to confront the most terrible enemies, those who are invisibly close to us and of which the visible enemies represent a type of material duplicate.

Speaking of this caste we implicitly asserted the necessity of war, but not less implicitly we asserted the need that it is uniquely entrusted to the true and proper Warriors that they have the legitimate use of it. Now as one does not become a priest, so one does not become a warrior, and the contamination of castes has unfortunately produced the current degradation since, with democratic leveling, introductions of every type have taken place, distorting the traditional order and engendering the fall of a truly civil society. A return to normality worked with discernment, progression, and measure would permit the restoration of the sole and true hierarchy in the attributions of caste conformed to the nature of man, to his possibilities, and to the effective development of his more specifically productive activities.

The warrior is the ascetic of the active life and hits discipline is purely interior: whoever cannot kill himself will never be able to kill or, better said, in killing he will profane life and death because his cause is not holy. Now a man kills himself by his own hand or with the sanctified arm in a way that the enemy is visible and close, otherwise a true assassination is accomplished and not an act of purification. If war, as we said, is justified only as the symbol of the Great War, it is inconceivable that the battle be not focused, faithful, open, frontal, because only by knowing oneself can one dominate himself and only in seeing his own enemy can he be surpassed without the battle and the carnage having the bestial character of the battle and anonymous, unholy, and sacrilegious carnage. If one is capable of developing all the aspects of the question when placed in its true light, one understands that war must be made by warriors and not by the entire democratically leveled people and violently carried back in great conflicts to the state of savage desperation: it follows from it that war must be normally conducted man to man and, in its most typical expression, brought back to the preliminary dispute, to the duel.

We said that the Warrior caste is founded on a dualistic base that the Latin term duellum, the ancient form of bellum, expresses with perfect obviousness: war is the expression of this fundamental duality of which love and hate—the latter reducible, if you reflect on it well, to love—represent two extremes: in the event a traditional restoration is produced, which is difficult but not impossible, and which, in every way, only modern devirilization can gravely obstruct with its two most typical expressions, pessimism and skepticism, war should be led back to its fixed normalizing function, i.e., to exist permanently for the single caste of the Warriors. The duel that so called civil society of the West, barbarous in reality, repudiated with satanic thoughtlessness while they turn current conflicts into a hellish game of machines that work the foolish and most ungodly destruction, would be the essential condition of the return to normality in case it was led back to its natural, spontaneous, i.e., effective, form and not to that modern parody that stands to the duel as the courtier stands to the knight.

If normal arms were only in the hands of the Warriors, the duel would take back its traditional value and would constitute the customary standard training of the caste, developing the sense of honor that has now faded in the heart of men. The duel with cold weapons [arma bianca] is the most noble, the purest, the highest expression of the warrior caste because it establishes a reciprocity of force, honor, and love in two men confronting each other, who are saved by killing each other and sanctify themselves by being killed. One observes that duality remains before and after: before life against life, after life in the face of death. And this duality is precisely the permanent indication of the warrior caste and is the basis of its purpose. War in a traditional society is the amplification of the duel, but other factors intervene: family, country, lord. It should have led back to normality, limited to the only caste that can do it without involving entire peoples, working that chaos that compromises the very existence of a civilization. Brought back to clarity, to the brutality of the ancient wars, although circumscribed and delimited, it should be, if not permanent at least frequent, giving in that way the acceleration necessary to the rhythm of life that makes it deeper and more fertile for revelation.

Modern wars—and for us, this “modernity” lasts for centuries—are the products of the democratic degeneration that has leveled humanity substituting for the Warrior caste a fictitious hierarchy in times of peace, even chaotic in times of conflict when every citizen must become what he never was, i.e., a soldier. The soldier obeys external discipline while the warrior obeys the inner: the warrior is always a warrior, the soldier can occasionally become a warrior through force, not by choice or by natural inclination. But there is a more important consideration. The Warrior is the refusal of sentimentality and among the ancients it did not exist: only modern degeneration has created through the monstrosity of democratic conflicts the romanticism of war, because in these conflicts in which all the people participate, there are only mediocre warriors, while the mass is constituted by a type of human gelatin that trembles with pathetic oscillations at every twisting that violates his nature. Instead, war reduced to lesser proportions, but with a more intense and more frequent rhythm, because it is entrusted only to men and not to machines, to Warriors and not to other castes, would be an indispensable element of a full and fecund life if led back to the traditional type, i.e., sanctified by the rectitude of causes that would give rise to it. Its delimitation would constitute a permanent and normal base of the activity to paralyze by no means all the people, but to intensify the rhythm of the active life with a continual contribution of strong and decisive reflexes.

Part III
    This is the final segment on the role of the Warrior caste in a Traditional Society. Here we see that the point of war is to establish peace. The respective spheres of influence of the priests and warriors are made clear, although caste conflicts can still break out for the reasons specified. Guido De Giorgio then relates the roles of the castes to contemporary events [circa 1940]: when priests are no longer the bearers of the holy science, there is a state of perpetual war and democratic leveling, then spiritual ruin results, as man is left to his own devices. 

The return to normality restores the people’s strength established of the Warrior caste which abides by love and whose sacrifice, different from that of the Priests, comprises an ascent of psychic energies oriented in the direction of heroic glorification. As action is subordinated to contemplation, so the warrior is subordinated to the priest, without however this subordination equalizing or confusing the two domains that are autonomous and separated and which constitute the spiritual authority and temporal power. These two jurisdictions are as cleanly separated and distinct as eternity is from time, therefore the two domains are unmistakable through the impossibility or reducing the first to the second or of extending the second to make it correspond to the first, since the eternal cannot be contained in the transient, nor can the transient cease to be such and to coincide with the eternal. This only consideration suffices to show that the temporal regiment is independent of the spiritual without however opposing it in any way, but rather in parallel turning to itself up to what is the maintenance of traditional unity that contains the both together and harmonizes them.

If in the primitive phase of perfection, with life being only contemplative, we can acknowledge a true unity of development oriented toward purely spiritual ends, this is not possible in the subsequent traditional forms where action appears immediately next to contemplation, temporal activity next to the spiritual, from which arises the separation of the two domains.

But this separation is necessary for the purity of the ends to which activity and contemplation tend: a fusion or an overpowering in part by one of these jurisdictions would constitute a true anomaly because it would confuse the divine with the human, the spiritual with the temporal, the sacred with the profane without reaching any profitable result. When we spoke of subordination we meant it only hierarchically, i.e., from the unique, traditional point of view that embraces and contains the contemplative life and the active life: in this sense one cannot escape anyone that the temporal is subordinated to the spiritual as and in the same measure that the human is subordinated to the divine from which it derives, and the existence and the justification of existence.

The Priest consecrates the Warrior and arranges that his action returns to the traditional sphere, but in his sphere the Warrior is autonomous and he neither can nor must collide with the Priest since his activity does not oppose the spiritual activity carried out in the bosom of the first caste. In a traditional society every dispute between the temporal and the spiritual is resolved in the unity the encompasses them; if, in fact, there is conflict, this must uniquely be ascribed to the temporary deviation of one or two domains due to essentially individual, and therefore unimportant, factors.

As long as the Priest remains priest and the Warrior, warrior, no conflict is possible because each one of them will understand he belongs to a sphere whose activity is clearly separated and distinct: this knowledge, this awareness, must guarantee the harmony between the temporal and the spiritual. But whenever, through complex circumstances that are not always easily discernible, a serious conflict between the two powers may happen, it is necessary to come back to the principles that safeguard traditional unity and then they will be resolved hierarchically in the seat of pure spirituality to rectify the deviations and annul the deflections that can be produced by one side or the other, with leading the two castes and therefore the two powers each back to its own domain.

The elimination of the purely individual factors will produce the placation of the dispute, because unfortunately these will take place only through the surpassing of certain personalities who respectively break the law and the norm which regulate activity and establish the limits of the two castes. The relationship between the two powers is very delicate and the development of Europe shows how often the disputes between the spiritual and the temporal have assumed immense proportions up to the point of becoming outright hostility. There is a reason for all that: the imperfect realization of the traditional unity, that must be ascribed to the defection of the priestly class which can always make its authority matter, with well understood spiritual means, provided they don’t distance themselves from sacred knowledge and in this, it only demands the defense of the highest values of the spirit. The temporal cannot undermine and diminish the eternal, and therefore the temporal power, in any way whatsoever and by whatever means, will not be able to harm the spiritual authority which will always know how, when it wishes, to withdraw from the world and allow it to deteriorate because it is deprived of divine help. Reflect very attentively on that in order to understand what is happening in Europe and in the world.

Nevertheless the bearers of sacred knowledge must at all cost maintain contact with traditional principles and undergo whatever duress, submit to any violation, in order to continue to save men by getting them back in touch with the eternal. The spiritual authority asserts itself with quite other means than those with which the temporal power asserts itself and we think that, in case of conflict, through oppressive or destructive that is the deviation and the overpowering of the temporal power, the spiritual authority will always have the upper hand, if it obstinately remains in its domain and does not descend into open battle with the temporal on the terrain of activity properly assigned that is not absolutely of its sphere.

We think instead that as much as it will stay in its domain, so much more effective will its own work be because therefore, as was said with the greatest absoluteness, it assumes its authority from God and not from the world, and its strength, nourishing itself fervently on the divine, will not be able to triumph over hidden dangers, incomprehensions, suppressions, and apparent collapse. Because if in addition the deviation of the temporal power assumes such proportions by becoming absolutely anti-traditional and sacrilegious and the Warriors, forgetting themselves, insulting the principle of love, which is the foundation of their existence, were exceeding their deplorable actions, compressive of every traditional spirituality, know that nothing can touch, profane, and be admitted to God’s Truth that is not God himself and that also the ruin of the world would leave perpetually together the Silence or where the divine mystery unfolds.

But we are convinced that the dispute between the two powers is almost always due to a remote deviation in the very heart of traditional unity and above all in the priestly caste whose members have often forgotten what is their only and great strength: sanctity. Whenever the spiritual authority, without any concession to the profane, takes up its true function, the maintenance of God’s truth in the world for its salvation, and the Priests, who are its bearers, may not fail in their task which is contemplation and not action, effective realizing knowledge and not pure external, literal science of holy things, the traditional unity would harmoniously include the two distinct powers, but in parallel tending toward a single end, the return of man to God, through time, into eternity.

The temporal power in fact, of which the Warriors are the bearers, offers as terms the realization of the divine through time, in a concert of all the faculties tuned by their own equilibrium. Until now, in regard to this caste, we have spoken of war, but it is now necessary to consider the positive aspect of war, i.e., peace. War is an imbalance that produces a balance which in its turn is broken through the intermittent character of human affairs:  but if one considers that in analogy with the spirit whose domain is eternity, war appears as a renewal, a purification, radical emendation, followed by the achievement of a state of absolute and permanent pacification that represents the fruition of beatitude.

As much as equilibrium is superior to disequilibrium, so peace is superior to war of which it is the crowning achievement. No consideration of aesthetic order may contaminate the vision of the truth in the seat of pure spirituality. The Warrior yearns for peace since his war is holy only if it leads to a permanent and definitive peace. War represents the germinative suffering, and peace, the flower and the coronal fruit. If intermittence is a type of destiny of human and temporal affairs, it must never be considered as a cyclic law on the part of the Warriors and the Leader, meaning to say by that, that each war must be completed for the end of the disequilibrium and the realization of peace. That intermittence exists, but it does not make law, this is the foundation of the right and healthy development of temporal power. If, as we said, war is in analogy with the Great War that represents the permanent conquest of the divine, it must tend to peace and this must be the true and holy goal of the Warriors: only a soft and superficial esthetic, ignorant of the profound truths of certain analogies and the symbolic relationship between the temporal and the eternal can consider war as the end in itself, a spastic state, fascinating for its own anomaly; only when true peace is not realized, can the nostalgia of war be felt, this very dubious sentiment of order because it belongs to the purely sentimental sphere.

In order to prevent this anomaly, it would be necessary to avoid, above all else, the wars that are not decisive, considering them as imperfect actions, true and proper permanent crises that contribute to the crumbling of traditional societies.

What has happened and is happening in Europe must be considered under this light and then one will understand the gravity of the current situation in which, through the confusion of castes, through consenting to an absolutely bestial democratic leveling, the detachment of the human from the divine takes place and therefore the very end of man is prepared. When we speak of the end, we mean the true and proper end that is certainly not that of the flesh, as every person gifted with the most elementary good sense can comprehend, but the spiritual ruin, the collapse of those bridge that connect the world to the Superworld, of which follows the instantaneous formation of the hidden ways that connect the earth to the darkness of the Underworld. If humanity does not want to become an immense and sterile hell, it is necessary that it brings back the great traditional ways by which only will new bases be found for new developments.

The Warriors must participate with the Priests for the restoration of order because these two castes are the bases of traditional unity: from their concordant action everything can be made smooth, the one being the bearers of sacred knowledge, i.e., of wisdom, the other the judges of power; the one, if you will, the club bearers, the others the fasces bearers. The harmony of the spiritual and the temporal can rebalance the world against all pessimisms and skepticism so acute and stupidly brayers of the current times; in no mode will be realized a permanent arrangement of the world without the cooperation of the spiritual authority and the temporal power because the return to normality must be effectuated from above to below, from the higher to the lower, and not the other way around.

For centuries the masses flounder in bestial tumults and will still flounder as long as the Priests and the Warriors permit it: that if these two castes feel the enormous weight of their responsibility and have the awareness of their respective domains and their true obligations, no one could prevent the restoration of traditional unity, the new equilibrium that would reopen the great passageway to eternity for the glory of God in heaven and the peace of men on earth.

The Workers
Part I
    This is the first part of the chapter on the workers from La Tradizione Romana [The Roman Tradition] by Guido De Giorgio. In this part, De Giorgio reviews the metaphysical foundations of the notion of castes and prepares the groundwork for the discussion of the specific functions of the workers. In his understanding of the degeneration of castes, De Giorgio says here what Nietzsche should have said, had he had the proper background. What De Girgio describes as the “principle of freedom” is an essential point to understand. 

They constitute the third and final caste that corresponds to the domain of Forms in the sphere of the active life. They should really form the penultimate caste, the last begin the Servile workers, but from the median and reconciliatory point of view in regards to a true and proper return to the spirit and traditional form most easily realizable in the current conditions of humanity, we adopted the threefold formula while knowing that in a more perfect traditional society the number of castes must be raised to four in analogous correspondence with the full realization that, as we pointed out, beyond Silence, it includes a state, the supreme, absolutely undefinable, state designated, in the most complete tradition, with the name of “Fourth” and that is the domain of Absolute Ineffability.

This state comprises and resolves the threefold formula—Silence, Rhythms, Forms—in an integrative indistinction that distinguishes it precisely from them as the mystery of the irreducible unity in its ineffable essentiality. In it the divine cycle is completed totally and integrally. From here the analogous necessity of a fourth caste that would include the Servile workers whose activity assumes the most austere, most elementary, most terminal form.

The constitution of castes must be understood in this way, according to the great law of analogy, i.e.,  in relation with the divine cycle and not from a purely human and partitive point of view that would have no reason to exist through its fragility and inadequateness to the truth. It is not despotism that creates the castes and especially the servile caste, but rather a necessity of development inherent to the mirroring in the human world of a divine complex that is the one and only reality. The current state of humanity, the apparent abolition of castes, corresponds to the erroneous and confused vision that men make themselves of the divine world: the Divine Principle is currently for men everything they want it to be, i.e., an indecisive and vaguely imminent fog, as men, having abolished caste distinctions, are likewise everything that they want.

The vision of a divine chaotic level corresponds to the leveling human chaos where all pseudo-mysticisms, philosophies, and nontraditional currents flow together, constituting the impure bundle of solidified forms.

But the abolition of castes is unrealizable and they exist even if not explicitly admitted and recognized: their hidden, invisible existence, over which democratism has stratified a leveling haze, creates an incongruence that should strike every person equipped only with good sense. Everyone know that men are not currently in their place and that the division of the active life is arbitrary and unjustified, because everyone is pushed, constrained by circumstances, by his own impulse and not by a conscious force of order, of the state, and of duty. Everyone knows that there are servile workers who dominate and masters who serve, and that even in the two first castes there are atrocious anomalies and that in the third caste these are furthermore still more remarkable: that is due to the absence of the traditional spirit, to democratic leveling which believes it can enslave those who cannot be enslaved, the determinative characteristic of the inalienable and indivertible human person.

This lasts for centuries and the current confusion is only the result of a slow and progressive degeneration due to the purely apparent superiority of man over the divine, of servitude over freedom, of confusion over order, and disorder over true hierarchy. What determined this fall must be ascribed to the incomprehension of that which constitutes the nature and the form of freedom, confuses with the arbitrary, and forces on everything the humanizations of reality that is actually of an absolutely divine order. Now the constitution of castes is based on the true concept of liberty considered in its four essential forms: absolute liberty in the Priests, conditioned liberty in the Warriors, conditionality in the Workers, servitude in the Servile workers. The two extremes are represented by the first and last caste in as much that what is affirmed in the first is denied in the last and vice versa: they constitute the alpha and omega between which the distinctive qualification exist. Reuniting the two extremes in the unification of the absolute principle that is God, one reaches the integral equalization that cannot be realized unless in the divine place, which is definitely affirmed by all traditions. One will easily understand that by reflecting on the true purpose of castes, to arrange the imbalances in a hierarchy where every element is contained in its own sphere in a way to constitute a homogeneous whole in which nothing introduced disturbs the traditional linearity. Seen from above, the constitution of castes is not presented as a scale that goes from the higher to the lower, by as a system of concentric circles around an absolute point that is the traditional unity.

All the castes are therefore to be considered on the same level and is unfortunately the incomprehension of this elementary truth that has produced the democratic illusion and error. Instead of putting themselves at the higher point of view that is the divine order, men have descended into the human level that has no value when it is cut off from the divine and thus the revolt has happened in the sense of the same caste which, going beyond its limits, has flooded like a river that runs over the banks and violently levels what it floods. Then, after having cut off the human from the divine, with a logic of free will whose unconsciousness is truly stupefying, the divine plane is confused with the human and what is equal in the eyes of God, they want to transform to equality in the eyes of man, not knowing that equalization is possible only through a being who is beyond the plane considered and, as such, through His own summit, glimpses a unique level while this level does not exist below. They even go back to the sacred texts in order to justify this error of perspective, interpreting it in the most absurd way, overturning every traditional order, abandoning the true God to create a god in man’s own image and likeness. It is seen in the abolition of true order, that distinctive, determinative and determined order of castes, the affirmation of the principle of liberty, not knowing that this in the absolute sense exists only in God, while in man it is conformity to the law of God. According to which every element of creation must remain absolutely in its place in order to be the normal element of nature. But since this democratic leveling was unnatural and restrictive, the castes were transformed into classes and the activity generally understood as a complementary way in the unity of tradition and contemplation, was transformed into work, i.e., into pain, coercion, since such is the meaning of the Latin word.

That explains the class warfare that is the degenerate form of disputes between the castes, which, as we said, is always limited to the first two for reasons of quite another order then those who fuel the claims of the current lower classes. Now “work”, properly called, can be applied only to the caste of Workers if this is considered as the last for the reason already mentioned, and not to the Warriors and Priests whose activity is absolutely of a totally different order. The latter are tutelary of the divine constitution, the former protectors of the human constitution, and neither of the two castes therefore leads by its activity to the satisfaction of its own needs: therefore in a truly traditional society, it is necessary that the last caste provides the maintenance of the first two, neither the Priest nor the Warrior, being able to work, and that in an absolute way, since work would impede the fulfillment of their very difficult task, the maintenance of the traditional order.

Referring to the circular symbolism of which we just mentioned, if this represents the traditional world as a circle whose center is constituted by the Priests and the circumference by the Warriors, the very close relationship of these two castes in a perfectly organized society will appear: the Warriors represent the centripetal convergence that binds all the points determining them in the univocal axis. They, with their power, defend the traditional purity, which cannot be accomplished materially by the Priests who are contemplatives and who must be protected in the external order by the Warriors. In the convergence resulting from the harmony between these two powers, the two greatest energies of the traditional world, true, integrally solid, power is achieved, the forest of swords that protect God’s enclosure. We recommend to everyone to achieve in its fullness the results that would be obtained from the harmony and the cooperation between the spiritual authority and temporal power through the true destinies of humanity brought back into the great traditional riverbed.

Part II
    This is second part of the chapter on the Workers from La Tradizione Romana [The Roman Tradition] by Guido De Giorgio. Here he describes the nature of work and art, and their relation to the divine. I have translated the root lavor- as labor and oper- as work to be consistent. 

The Worker caste includes every assignment operative in the individuals who do not belong to the two preceding castes which constitute the base of traditional society: authority and power. When we speak of activity, for this last caste, we mean every type of labor both of the strictly material order like the crafts and of those seemingly more elevated like the professions, since both are remunerated individually. In the two higher castes, we do not speak of truly individual activity since their members work constitutively for the maintenance of the two higher powers, while here, in the last caste, it is a question of an active personal determination whose fruit, however, remains limited to the individual order, while contributing to the general order. We are in the domain of Forms, the last determination of visible reality whose essential characteristic is individualization. In this caste, as in the two higher castes, persons can be included who in reality should not belong to it, which is the indication of the current disorder due precisely to the lack of traditional unity whose most obvious characteristic is the arbitrary distribution of wealth. But in a truly traditional society in which the castes are rigorously established, remunerated labor should be limited to the majority, i.e., to those who neither know how to nor can do otherwise, incapable of the pure contemplation of the Priests and the pure activity of the Warriors.

It is therefore necessary to insist on the analogy between the various castes and the three degrees of reality, i.e., Silence, Rhythms, and Forms, in order to understand their true purpose. If the Forms constitute the most exterior part, that does not mean that their determination does not reflect, in a thousand aspects, the invariable unity that is the one true reality. Every form is a symbol and every symbol is the vehicle of a profound truth whose importance must never be forgotten. So-called objects, things, are likewise mirrors that variously reflect the unity of the creative rhythm in multiple aspects. Man, in ordinary life, makes use of tools that he himself constructs but whose symbolic meaning is currently unknown, while in a traditional society this meaning is precisely what is more important because it provides all the value to the thing without which it would be deprived of universal purpose. Hence, the necessity that the tool be patiently constructed and not serially, with an individual labor that itself is the symbol of the effort through which it is elevated to a higher reality of an absolutely spiritual order.

It will be easy for everyone to distinguish the value of an object, the fruit of patient and assiduous work, quite different from that accomplished by a brutal, external, artificial, and sterile process like an assembly line. Hence, the artistic beauty of the most humble tools of an era and the banality of what is produced in modern times by the machine. Previously, there was art, the profound meaning of symbolic correspondence, and the indicator of this was exactly the care, the commitment with which every object was constructed by the strictly personal work of the craftsman with a diligent technique, in strict analogy with the spiritual renewal wrought in the contemplative and ascetic domain. Every craft then symbolically represented the fixation, in Forms, of a process of an absolutely spiritual order related to a higher reality of which the material world is an appearance, in the strictly etymological sense: man, the creator, makes use precisely of so-called matter—not neglecting the etymology of this word—that is the last, final concretion of reality, in order to redeem it from its apparent blindness and lead it to the transparency of an analogical correspondence with a higher world. So that while in the already made Forms among which man lives, that are the patterns of the Rhythms, are likewise found mirrors of the higher reality, the objects, the things, the tools that man constructs are new forms and represent the work that he must undertake laboriously in order to liberate himself from his humanity and restore in himself the divine state. Ars et labor: art is the knowledge of the analogical relationships that govern Forms, by means of Rhythms, and achieve them, i.e., make them porous, transparent, to the breath of God who expresses them, while labor is exactly this effort of enucleation of the deep, hidden, veiled reality, protected in matter from which it must shine through to reveal itself to man. There is thus a contact between the interior—man—and the exterior—nature—which is resolved in a single reality of realized and experienced expression, therefore abolished in its crude materiality and restored to its true origin and purpose.

Thus understood in its profound meaning that justifies it and makes it necessary, art is a redeeming purification that reestablishes the creative rhythm obfuscated and neglected by the preoccupations of ordinary life. This life, in an absolute way, is a death, not a life, i.e., the avulsion of the world and man from the true reality of the world and of man realizable only if hidden in divine reality whose origin it symbolically expresses.

Tools, the most common objects of use, were not created for the satisfaction of our needs, but only to express the analogical relations between appearance and reality, between what appears and what is, between the world and God: their practical efficiency is of the second order and is of value only for true serfs, i.e., for those whose intellectual myopia is so widespread that it results in the exclusion of every truth beyond the environment of their terrestrial life. If, in a state of primitive perfection, it is necessary to think of the exclusion of every order in order to reach or extend what was already given, if man, in this state, gathered the fruits of the earth and fed himself with them and did not complete, with his work, what naturally surrounded him, in later stages, distancing himself from this original standard, he had to reconstruct the access to the divine from which he had fallen and thus a new necessity: art.

To those who know how to examine in depth what we said, the relationship between art and life will appear evident, initially unified so that art was the life itself considered as a rite, then increasingly more discordant, life was reduced to its lowest function and art limited to those who cannot decide to reject truth, up until the current time in which life is really death and art, deprived of every sacred and realizing character, is an expressive monstrosity wherein all the misery of the world and man is reflected.

Art is not redeemed by making of it a need of the spirit: the spirit, and in an absolute way, is nothing if not the Spirit of God, i.e., the breath that is in life, that penetrates and informs the whole man, that makes him feel, act, think according to God, not according to his own humanity. What is human remains human, therefore purely bestial and inferior, which is the level of this humanity, just as everything that is iron remains iron from the most common utensil to the most refined artistic product, both able to lead back to the unity of origin when their exteriority is removed. In fact, what constitutes art for modern men is precisely exteriority instead of the sacred, symbolic content, what this exteriority expresses by relating to a reality of a transcendent order in the absolute meaning of the word and to a truth of divine order.

Man, in the development of his human faculties, remains man, i.e., nothing: what he feels, lives, accomplishes, thinks, if not beyond the human environment, is destined to perish because it cannot extend beyond time that is succession and beyond space that is materiality.

He remains closed in this prison that he adorns with the most lavish funereal pictures, so that to the extent he embellishes it, so much more will the tomb will exist for him as long as he lives: but, after the dissolution of the body, who is there to take care to lead him into the place of truth, dooming him eternally to that death that he had already experienced in life by rejecting every effort for the surpassing of human limitations. Homo humus: as long as he remains earthbound, he will be doomed to fecundate the earth and to perpetuate the lucifugous illusion that is the detrital, lower world: it is necessary that he clear up the illusory obscurity, due to ignorance, in the light of truth and that he expresses from himself what is hidden, i.e., the other half, which could mean the passage from the archaic word hemi, referring to the general meaning of half, to homo, where the circularity of the o represents the realizing universalization of all the human faculties transposed into the divine and integrated in a essentially superhuman plane. Art is the expression of this transposition that is a true and proper transformation, i.e., a surpassing of the form that is obtained by replacing it in the plane of its normal purpose as symbol of a higher truth. But it is necessary that art is in everything and not in part, that it is not exiled from life and that it does not represent only what we could call the kingdom of fringe utopias, but rather it imprints on the most humble of objects, tools, the seal of its symbolic purpose.

This is craftsmanship, these are the crafts: to depict in every material substance, with a labor of diligent understanding, the intimate, symbolic value, expressing a truth of a higher order, from agricultural instruments and those of the weaving mill, from the most common objects of wood and earth to the construction of house and temple. They are various modes of expression of a unique reality that signify as all the ways lead to God if truly it is God who is sought and not a simple derivative human more or less dressed up and idealized for the use that one wants to make of it.

Part III
    This is the third part of the chapter on the Workers from La Tradizione Romana [The Roman Tradition] by Guido De Giorgio. Here he describes how science changed the nature of work and displaced tradition. 

Hence, the corporations also originally represented modes of realization of the divine organized in a regulatory body that established its purpose. This is the real and deep significance of art, craftsmanship, professions, corporations, and let us not pretend that they all come to fathom it, but what is important is that the pauci optimi [the few of the best], who ought to participate in restoration of tradition, understand what is hidden under the appearances of “utility” and “activity”, expressions so dear to those who understand nothing because they realize nothing beyond the illusion of the world and man, both considered without relationship to divine reality. If man is one half, he has to search for the other in order to be made whole, i.e., to be truly man—hemo homo—and one could say, without making a game of words, that he then will truly be man when he ceases to be so. Likewise the world—if it concludes its etymology—that is attired, ornamented, under which the truth of God is hidden, then it will truly be the world, i.e., the place of purification and resurrection, when it is the world, purified from every ignorance, likewise it also will become—the lapis manalis removed—the wide abyss for the precipitation in the spectral kingdom.

From everything that we have mentioned, one easily understands how and why—not for simple purely aesthetic reasons, therefore negligible in themselves—the machine, in all its forms, represents a veritable profanation of labor, because it removes every sacred character, every profound meaning, violating its secret, denaturizing its purpose, suppressing all those seeds of redemption that constitute the raison d’être of manual work and of art.

The return to a traditional society would entail a prudent progressive normalization that would be, for the ignorant mass, a true and proper regression but which could be accomplished gradually without creating catastrophes. It is enough that the pauci optimi understand, to their full extent, the absolutely positive consequences that would result from a comparable return to normality: it is a question here, more precisely, of the human dignity that would be restored and reintegrated in all its hierarchical development, in all its expressions, in all its aspects, in all its fields, in all the castes, in all men.

In order to become sacred, labor must be accomplished by man and not by the machine that, as is clearly observed, takes revenge on man, destroying him in the most blind, bestial and inhuman way, violently and fatally. A renovation worthy of the name entails the return to the norm of human labor, a restitution of those conditions of existence suitable for the development of the great energies that lie buried in man and that can permit him to reach and truly integrate the divine world of reality.

Labor, once connected to its necessary base of meditative concentration, of patient meticulous contact with the world of Forms, in order to perceive the Rhythms and realize the Silence, would again become sacred for all men and each one could, according to his possibilities, accomplish what he is destined to do and that he is strongly removed from that outrageously superficial and profaning modernity.

May the earth, the sea, the sky be restored to their elementary purity, returned to their symbolic purpose, the earth in order to construct house and temple, the base point for the elevation from the human to the divine, the sea to the navigation between the two shores that separate the transient from the divine, the sky to the penetrative flight into the reality of God that is the only reality, and that the machines are gradually, prudently reduced and eliminated in order to make a place for man and put him visibly, without intermediaries, in the face of the difficulties of his celestial task on the earth. Because he cannot escape from the earth if he does not know it, if he does not penetrate it, if he does not make it transparent, letting the holy spirit of the real achievement pass there, returning to labor and art, enriching again the impoverished world, mutilated and profaned by the machine. This was created by the lowest part of man, from what in man is the negation of man because it is the negation of God. We allude to profane science, to that which for so many centuries gives itself the false privilege of redeeming humanity from the chains of materiality.

Here a position of the absolute level that does not admit subterfuge and loopholes is necessary. There is only a single science, sacred science, in an absolute way, i.e., the knowledge of true man restored to his elementary function, to his base, to his centre, to his reason to exist, to his life; to his being, to his purpose, to his perfection, to his universality, to God. This is the only science, the only power derived from the knowledge of his own limitations—it is well established—and of exceeding the limits of terrestriality for the effective realization of the divine possibilities: in this sense only scire est posse [to know is to be able] and not otherwise.

One goes to God with and in the spirit of God, becoming again sons of God, be it formulated in the integrative fullness that does not admit secondary residues and disturbances. All traditions affirm it, with different expressions, in various forms, but with an intentional unity that no one can misunderstand and confuse. Ars una species mille. What is sacred remains such in every tradition of truly divine order and every race is given a tradition conformed to is possibilities, to which it must remain faithful in order to not make the task of traditional integration difficult, while it is permitted only to very few to return to the Primordial Tradition that is in direct contact with the divine plane.

The true science is therefore that contained in the traditional body and has as its goal the return of man to God in all the forms, through all the levels, and according to all the possibilities. Sacred science is the true absolute and definitive knowledge of man and the world in God and comprises various planes of development according to the domain to which it is applied, each one of these planes, however, not able to, nor ever having to, be considered in itself, but all in convergence, in accordance with the unity of the traditional axis, into a single point. This was maintained in antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Science instead is of the exclusively profane order and considers visible reality exteriorly, as it appears not as it is, by integrating itself in such a case in the invisible reality and, taking as the base point exteriority itself, it determines laws.

Therefore, while sacred science is fixed, immutable, eternally constituted and causes stable and permanent traditional societies, profane science is mutable, unstable, progressive and, with its development, gives origin to anti-traditional, precarious, and transient societies.

The domain of sciences is the visible, i.e., therefore, the superficial that, as such, separated from the body to which it belongs, is illusory and as nonexistent; the successive development of scientific hypotheses shows the inanity of an effort destined to remain sterile, unproductive, since truth indefinitely postponed into the future, i.e., never realized, is not a truth. What is concrete and positive for science is truly the ephemeral and the negative, i.e., the phenomenal appearance considered in itself, because as we said, when brought back to its invisible root, it reacquired another meaning, another attribution, and another reality.

This sign in the theoretical field can suffice: how much then is the development of the so-called western civilizations the most conclusive demonstration of the practical advantage derived from the applications of science? One thinks of the misery, the precariousness, the frivolity of current existence and one will understand what results science applied to life can lead to. It is not allowed to insist on that without falling into the realization that every reasonable man can currently make, considering the shortness of the duration of life, its sussultatory character, the rising devirilization of humanity, the precariousness of everything, the spasmodicity of every bond, the insecurity of every system, finally the instability that is the indicator of a permanent abortive process due to the absence of traditional fixity.

Science, having become secular, i.e., popular, became the dominion of everything because it is accessible to everyone through its exteriority, superficiality, and facility and was the principle stimulus to the so-called servile awakening, to the progressive democratization of Europe since, after eliminating every true traditional knowledge and excluding every spiritual surpassing, it leveled hierarchy and, with its practical industrial applications, it amazed the foolish and caused libertarian unrest in the masses, of which the current world is the strongest and most authentic expression. Humanity let itself deviate by easy explanations, by immediate practical applications and has forgotten to ask itself up to what point could it reach such a pronounced deviation from the traditional axis. First of all, science has infinitized so-called nature, divinizing it and exalting its mysteries as if there could be other mysteries outside the divine, then it made a stir on a problematic god who follows with his benevolent eye, approving, the progressive contaminations, and finally, acting autonomous, was proclaimed the guide of research and master of life. Man, destitute of all his power, i.e., the very surpassing of his own humanity in order to reach higher and decisive states, was given instead a false creativity in the world of exteriority that lasts as long as his life and is prolonged as long as he is ignorant.

Part IV
    This is the concluding part of the chapter on the Workers from La Tradizione Romana [The Roman Tradition] by Guido De Giorgio. 

Even those who say and believe they adhere to a tradition have accepted science as the expression of an achievement that, according to them, would not collide with the truths of the divine order; more impure and blind than the others, they implicitly repudiate every spirituality and show they do not know the fundamentals of sacred science: this is exclusive of every knowledge that does not replace the elements of creation in the circularity of dependence by a unique center of which they are only appearances. Men, accustomed to the separative visions of things, in considering elements and forces, distanced themselves from integrative contemplation for which everything loses precisely that material and determined consistency that is the foundation of scientific investigation. Science rises when traditional knowledge no longer succeeds in maintaining supremacy through the disintegration of its own unity: philosophy, also secular, has substituted for sacred wisdom.

It is a fateful cycle that is fulfilled and whose origins must be traced back to the very nature and the frame of mind of the people of the West incapable of maintaining intact the traditional solidarity in order for them to be brought to the exteriority of the active life. With the progressive dimming of sacred motifs secular motifs arose and the attainments that man was no longer able to accomplish in the domain of the supersensible were limited to those that were easy and exterior for a childish craving for visible concreteness. While the creative process starts from the internal to the external, the scientific process comes from the external, which does not exist as such, to a purely nonexistent and ideal internal subordinated to that which does not exist except as depending on appearance: hence the scientific hypothesis claims to be the standard of method.

The current condition of humanity and antitraditional blooming are due in great part to science, to the scientific spirit, but also to philosophy that, with science, has substituted for sacred science. Philosophy, subordinated to Revelation, is a preparatory and necessary stage to higher truths that must be integrated, experienced, in order to be known: without revelation, it is sterile and false and is transformed into veritable diverting nonsense. Philosophy is based exclusively on reason, which presupposes a revelatory light in order to be guided to truly decisive ends be it only in the theoretical sense: isolated from this, it cannot find any absolute point of reference, because the absolute is beyond reason and beyond man in the sense that these cannot approach it unless ceasing to be it, which does not prevent them from passing through his terrestrial existence, as everyone will easily be able to convince himself considering that Ascetics and the Saints, those, i.e., those who from this life have reached a permanent state of beatific vision that is fulfilled in eternity, certainly not able to be realized within the limits of time and space. Philosophy is a preparation to sacred science and can constitute its theoretic side only if it is subordinated to it, because otherwise it is nothing: it would not even be of interest to show how and why, from the Renaissance on, modern thought unwound following a direction that is ever more antitraditional in order to be liberated from sacred science that necessarily must precede it because it is focused and productive.

To what extent can Pascal’s famous phrase[1] suffice to denounce the incongruity and inadequacy of the god of the philosophers and poets. Divine reality is revealed and no philosophy, if it remains such, can realize it: this possibility is to be excluded in an absolute way: all the acrobatics of human reason will never succeed in grasping that which, being simple, original, and absolute, offers itself from itself through direct realization and cannot actualize itself through a discursive process that is only direct and mediated. Moreover, after what has been said, in the domain of divine unity there is only divine unity itself and what is human is not excluded from it as simply nonexistent, or, better said, as existing only as long as ignorance lasts: this dispelled, and sacred science tends precisely to that, true and proper realization is initiated that, as unitary and passing beyond what is produced and generated, can rigorously be called metaphysical and metarational. We could also call it “intuition” although no psychological quality is given to this term: the psyche in fact is below the spirit, the intellect, the heart—these three terms denoting, under three aspects, the same type of integrative activity of the divine. The spirit expresses the direct integration whose absolute type is the divine breath, the intellect expresses the cognitive permeation, the heart expresses radiant receptivity: by means of the first, one is elevated, with the second, absorbed, in the third, one is welcomed and realizes himself. Representing here a vertical axis, the spirit is the peak, the intellect the base, the heart the center that gathers the two extreme points and extends them, prolonging them horizontally, hence the Cross as radiant symbol of universality and unifying centrality.

No one will dare assert that philosophy can be elevated to this sphere which is of an integrally revelatory order because it is superhuman in the absolute sense of the word. These truths constitute exactly the traditional body, the sacred science, whose transmission happened in a divine way: this knowledge is the true knowledge for the absoluteness and legitimacy of the efforts accomplished in the same axis of truth.

If the Priests are the depositories of it, all men, even the Workers, must extend themselves by giving to their activity a sacred intention and not considering it as the pure satisfaction of their needs and desires. These cannot be, in the seat the truth, distinct in the lower and higher, material or spiritual, in the absolutely erroneous meaning that the moderns give to the last term when they apply it to that which is called the cultural environment. Culture is a profane thing and does not come close to true spirituality: we admit that it perfects the sensibility and develops the intelligence, but it rests completely outside of that which is sacred and real precisely because it is sacred. It is something empty and superficial and is reduced to a vision of life where all the prejudices of the modern era flow into each other, from so-called historicity to linguistics, all exterior sciences that leave intact the domain of the true reality which evades any separative analysis and false constructive synthesis. As behind the Forms there are Rhythms, so behind the visible there is the invisible and as modern sciences stop only at what is expressed but not at that which expresses. Actually, cultural prejudice contributed to the current decline with a dense network of loci communes [commonplaces] which is applied indiscriminately to the present and the past, all being considered sub specie alteritatis in its own function and not as the reflection of a quid that eludes exterior analysis. This is not the place to insist on modern deviations which have behind them a centuries-old preparation which led to the current madness. Nevertheless many symptoms of nausea, fatigue, and glut bring hope that a radical change can still be produced in a progressive way and without too violent perturbations. This rectification can and must happen from the inside to the outside, i.e., it is necessary that the orientation of thought changes and determines the progressive return to normality: let us say “return” meaning especially a restoration of the traditional spirit because the exterior forms can never be reproduced; the cycles do not renew themselves and do not return backwards, repeating developments already accomplished. Nor is it possible to predict how this traditional return will happen if first it is not really initiated with stable foundations and with roots that sink into the very core of the integrally restored traditional unity.

The sad anomalies of current life, the discomfort of individuals and peoples, all the previous misunderstandings serious in themselves but fueled by freedom granted with impunity to those who are not worthy of it, the impoverishment, the progressive cover-up of existence, the vanity of facts, the lack of a secure direction capable of satisfying not only the small needs of small men, but above all the needs of integral man in his true revelatory function of the divine essence—all that brings hope that an awakening can and must be accomplished provided that the pauci optimi, conscious of this necessity, does not let itself be submerged by the ignorance of the anonymous and profane crowd.

But if we start from the divine truth as the basis of orientation and we restore the axis of convergence integrally, an endeavor to which the Priests and the Warriors must contribute to, consciously united as being truly the sustainers of tradition, it unites them because the former contemplate and by contemplating realize, the latter because they liberate activity from its contingent utilitarian character developing it in protective adherence to what is sanctified in the Temple through the maintenance of the sacred deposit, then truly the last caste, which is the most numerous and constitutes the great mass, will also reclaim the Sacred Path where every feeling, symbol of a higher purpose, is established in a single direction like a river from a thousand ripples contained within the same banks, and will be reconstituted, with the fascification of all the energies turned to a single end, the new trunk on the old roots which are still alive and ready to regerminate because revived from the eternal breath of God.
[1] God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of the philosophers and scholars.

The Leader
Part I
    This is part 1 of the concluding section of Guido De Giorgio‘s description of the establishement of a traditional society. Here, he develops the idea of the supreme leader, above the three castes, whose primary duty is the maintenance of Tradition.

    This section, as a whole, needs to be compared to the similar efforts by Guenon, Coomaraswamy, and Evola to describe the respective roles of Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power. However, De Giorgio’s work comes from a completely different place, from a deep understanding of the principles involved. The other three try to make an “argument”, by referring to various scriptures or historical situations. Guido De Giorgio speaks from the heart, from what he knows; he can be judged on that basis. That is how Tradition is to be recovered.

    Interspersed within the main topic, as always there are various spiritual gems to be recovered. We can call attention in particular to the notion that a man creates his own life. Also, pace those who want to create a superman, De Giorgio believes that man qua man must vanish in order for something higher to appear. 

We could repeat at this point the exhortation that Homer put into the mouth of wise Ulysses when the Greeks appeared to abandon the Trojan adventure and that even Aristotle cited at the end of Book XII of the Metaphysics: “let there be one ruler.” There is first of all the great law of analogy according to which the only leader in time must correspond to the supreme unity in eternity and since God is pure contemplation and only the cognitive fruition of aseity can be conceived in Him, so the Leader inversely will make a pure activity of his life dedicated to the maintenance of his command on the earth.

He holds temporal power, exercises it uncontested, and is the supreme authority whose domain embraces all the active life in its multiple aspects and over which he is the regulator and judge. His function is therefore integrative and his work is strictly dependent on Justice, the highest of the virtues.

If on the one hand, while being the supreme leader, he is above all the prince of the Warriors, his power is exercised over all indiscriminately in the temporal environment because he could not go beyond it without failing in his task and his purpose.

Although he arose from the Warrior caste, in order to carry out his task he is above the three castes and so must, while remaining strictly within the scope of the active life, serve as the harmonious base of the development of the first two castes, from the first receiving consecration, and serving for the protection and the maintenance of the traditional order of the second. In order to preserve inviolate his sovereignty, he will have to guard the Temple that is the foundation of every tradition and defend the Priests who nourish with their spiritual influence the body of the truths accessible only to the contemplatives. While depending spiritually on them, he is absolutely autonomous in his domain and the Priests in this owe him obedience as all men belonging to the other two castes, nor can or should the spiritual insert itself into the temporal and compromise the pure sphere of contemplation which does not have to undergo profanation of that sort.

The unity of command represents the centralizing equilibrium of the active life that loses in the Leader its particularistic and widespread character in order to rise to a level analogous to the Edenic state where everything is put before man who is truly the king of creation. Therefore the Leader vanishes only before God where his sovereignty is annulled in the Lordship of all the lords: everything in this life, he will be in the other that which he will have merited according to the meaning it will have had from God. “Caesar I was, Justinian I am…” [Dante, Paradise vii]. In the face of God the greatest victory will be that which he will have been able to bring back on himself and on what he will have accomplished on earth, nothing will matter for him except the works of justice, rectification, equilibrium, and peace. Since the Leader must always seek peace for his subjects in analogy with that same thing that in the contemplative order is the foundation of every realization and all aspire to that type of activity that develops them. The maintenance of this equilibrium is reserved to the Warriors who will always make war an instrument of peace and not of pure and simple conquest. The unity of the empire avoids the unproductive diffusions of the active life concentrating its energies toward a single end where all disparities and partial imbalances are evened out, therefore if in the Warriors, as was said, inner asceticism is the necessary base for the development of their activity, this is even more strict in the Leader who must annul in himself any individuality whatsoever in order to make justice triumph and the rule secure the empire.

He knows that he is the supreme ruler of the active life and that the active vibration emanates from him that, in analogy with the divine, is extended to all the branches of humanity of which he constitutes the propelling and purifying center through which the backward wave [onda di ritorno] obtains new energy for new possibilities of development in a perpetually mobile and fecund circle of flux and reflux.

We are purely in the sphere of action in which all men necessarily live and to which none are exempt except those who can and must dedicate themselves to the contemplative life: what each man accomplishes in it, and the way in which he accomplishes it, has a very great importance for the equilibrium of human perfection that would be maimed and amputated if an element is removed from that current of active homogeneity that constitutes temporal modality.

All traditions in fact reserve the contemplative life to those for whom it is appropriate and who are worthy of it, while they condemn asceticism and separation from the world for those who lie outside it obeying a sense of inadmissible egoism: those are the weak and the lifeless and they avoid the responsibility of worldly life through real insufficiency. It will be well to insist on that: everyone brings and creates, so to speak, his environment and by this word we do not mean only the closest circle, but the entire temporal extent of human life with everything which is positive and negative in it for the individual. Making use here of an image, we could say that every man has a passage of existence that is not only his world, but all the world that is for him what he is for the world itself: in this passage that starts from the center of a circumference and is contained between two divergent rays which, having as base a segment of the circumference itself, form a cone, there is everything that man wants and that he does not want, his fortune, his misfortune, his battle, his dispute, his victory or his downfall. The essential thing for him is to rise up in ascending planes from the circumference to the center, from the base of the cone to the vertex that represents the greatest of the minimum, i.e., God, while reassimilating all multiplicity gradually into a point only in which he is annulled, because he, dispelling ignorance, will recognize himself in everything, even and above all, in that to which he is most opposite and will recompose in a perfect equilibrium all the antagonisms up to the point of extinguishing them in the highest vortex of his asceticism, or better said, of his recovery, which is God.

When we employ this term, we mean everything that is truly of God in God, truly and not fallaciously, i.e., all the superhuman states of union with God that man can realize only starting from himself in order to reach that which is no longer himself, man before, no longer man afterwards.

The terrestrial level is one experience and not another, that is necessary to start from a base of disablement in order to reach an apex of absolute immutability: these are the two greatest terms in the sphere of that which appears in the seat of human relativity: a fallacious reality, man, a genuine reality, God, the former only illusory, the latter, supreme certainty. But placing oneself at an integrative point of view, one is reality, God, who is no longer a goal which one reaches except through a dissipation of ignorance, as whoever believes real the phantasms of the fog that are non-existent provided the sun dispels and dissolves it.

Part II
    In this second of three parts, Guido De Giorgio expands on the role of the Leader in a traditional society. It is instructive to compare De Giorgio’s point of view with Evola’s idea of the state; De Giorgio includes the spiritual or contemplative aspect which brings in some subtle changes. Nevertheless, Di Giorgio also recognizes that the active life can also be a path to realization.

    The emphasis on the law is also important, such Guenon pointed out that the western medieval tradition did not have a sacred law. There was, and is, canon law, but that is at a lesser level. What De Giorgio is describing is more akin to sharia law in Islam, or the complex rituals and requirements required of Hindu castes, and even the ancient Romans whose daily lives were regulated by rites and taboos. Abandoning such laws, in his view, does not lead to more freedom, but rather to is opposite: it leads to servitude to one’s passions and lower nature. 

On the other hand, by not knowing himself man does not know God because only the knowledge of his illusory existence permits him to realize the essential truth of God in a process that moves from negation to affirmation, from human nothingness to divine wholeness, not from a fragment to a totality, but from a non-totality to totality, from illusory human unity to real divine unity, not from duality to unity, but from non-duality to unity. This knowledge entails an effective realization that in its turn annuls the earthly sphere, the environment in which man lives, putting all its elements on a plane of absolute equivalence, i.e., neutralizing, dissipating the sense of otherness that derives from the possessive conceit concluding in the ontological absurdity “I am I”.

The process of realization instead denies the first person, affirms the second, unifies the first and third, and definitively puts itself beyond this union, in what we could call the Fourth Sublime, the Fourth Absolute.

This is the ideal plan of transhumanization presented as a fieri while it is an esse, and it is the decisive model of everything in principle and therefore also and above all of the Leader who is not such if he does not take on the experience of his subjects in the purity of the distributive standard and in the unification of sovereign power. Therefore his function is, so to say, the restoration of hierarchy, the consecration of the human body whose members are the subjects while he is the vivifying center that accomodates the innumerable expressions of the active life, purifies them in the renovating power of traditional principles whose deposit the Priests hold and returns them almost equipped with a more intense rhythm and clad with the united seal.

In this sense he the first and the last of his subjects because his subordination to divine principles is dependent on his capacity to centralize the forms of active life while expending his personality in a decisive totalization. The relationship between the Leader and his subjects consists in this, that he is in all and all are in him with an absolute reciprocity that makes of the entire active life a veritable sacrifice, i.e., an imperfection made sacred through the gift that is made of it to God in the person of the Leader. He accepts and gives, and what he offers is always himself: he is responsible for how much his subjects accomplish because in him everything merges in order to receive the supreme consecration. The asceticism of the Leader is in a sense superior to that of the Warriors because it is vaster and more integral, accomodating in himself all the developments of the active life in order to maintain them within the traditional ambit with the spiritual authority of the Priests and the power of the Warriors, from the former, the conscience, and from the latter, the personality so that ascetically the last in front of God is the first in front of men. His activity, obeying the law of justice, is thus purged of any personal motives whatsoever because, by becoming Leader, he consecrated himself to the coming of peace on earth and governs in order to make it respected and he provides the harmony of traditional society with a constant effort of rectification. As God is the ruler of all the worlds, he is the ruler of the earth and of the men who inhabit it, the supreme regulator of their activity without passing beyond his domain which is that of the active life, without which he could be in open conflict with his function and purpose as temporal leader occupying the contemplative sphere that is to the Priests reserved. Harmony must precisely consist in the separation of the two powers that, on earth, and on earth alone, where activity is in force, conserving two distinct spheres while it no longer exists in an ultra-worldly stage that is the starting point for the integral realization of the divine.

The subjects owe the Leader obedience and respect; obedience because he directs human affairs, analogously with God who rules the creative universality, and respect because his function is the application of justice, i.e., the rectification of the disparities produced by the multiformity of men’s actions and protects them and guides them to the realization of happiness in whose terminal and plenary stage is Edenic perfection.

Human activity when brought back to the purpose of rite is purified from every contaminating egoism and the man who has fulfilled his temporal stage in prefect adherence to the norm of justice, regains the absolute preeminence over the other beings of whom he becomes again lord and he enjoys the Great Peace in the exercise of his liberty released from every abuse. It is the Leader’s precise function to tend to this reintegration of the divine state, directing all the forms of earthly activity toward a progressive purgation and acting so that man can fulfill what is granted to him on earth without actions limiting and precluding contemplation but, regulated and ordered, more than a snag and a chain, is itself a mode of liberation. And he can become it only if conducted according to justice which is the greatest of the virtues, especially for the Leader who must prefer it more than any other virtue because his action neutralizes the will leading every form of activity back into its channel, preventing abuses of power and giving true liberty to the subjects, i.e., the spiritual practice that is gained with obedience to the law.

Here man is liberated by obeying and not otherwise: whoever does not understand that will always be subjugated. In fact, in order to obey it is necessary to understand the value of the law that is placed to redeem men from the appetites that enslave and to make him able to exercise his freedom effectively. The Leader must be vigilant in respect to the law in order to facilitate the gaining of freedom and he himself will be liberated to the extent he maintains the limits of his temporal function without ever passing beyond them. The law in itself does not know how to nor can it make itself respected, but it needs whoever establishes it, and since it is a pure norm higher than men, it must be imposed: in this sense strength accompanies justice, nor can it be separated and the Leader must make the law respected with strength. But from submission to the law, freedom is born that, being purely of the spiritual order and belonging to the contemplative life, arises only from the perfection of this, like a crowning achievement, an apical stage that is the triumph of man over himself.

Man calls himself free only when he again becomes the son of truth and does not recognize subjection other than this to the point of confusing himself, identifying with a further state which will be that of pure unity. But in the domain of the active life, it is not possible to be liberated other than by obeying the law personified in the Leader who must make it respected with strength, not through an affirmation of supremacy— which is to be excluded in a traditional society—but to prevent the subjects from falling into servitude by breaking the law. The temporal power is inclined to the achievement of freedom and is established for this, so that, by imposing the law, the immoderate will is avoid, the bestial part in man is restrained, and it is started precisely to be free. To regulate the active life can signify nothing other that is positively fertile than to permit contemplative practice in the measure conceded to each one by his spirit. In civil life, freedom is therefore obedience and in the contemplative life it is liberation: up to this point it is understood that man is not so much born free as he becomes free, and better said, born free, he can maintain his freedom or fall into servitude: most men, by forgetting freedom, which is a divine gift, prefer servitude to their passions, and this they call freedom and are opposed to the monarchical regime because they see in the Leader a man like them and not a model who, in order to make himself respected, must necessarily personify himself: one is not liberated, but becomes liberated, and naturally he becomes it because he is it, but ignorance prevents him from knowing why man is born free: only for the fulfillment of his earthly experience and not for the exaltation of that which is least human in him. He was free at his birth as the son of God, but, straying in order to follow his impulse, which he fallaciously calls freedom, he has become again a slave: in order to become free again, i.e., a son of God, he must put himself under the regulative norm of the active life and to regain the freedom of the contemplative life.

Part III
    This is the conclusion to the role of the Leader in a traditional society. It needs to be read meditatively, and not with the intent to refute or falsify it. If read in silence, without the infusion of personal opinions, something very different may be heard. 

We said that man first denies himself and then affirms himself: he denies himself in the law and affirms himself in love, which is only the supplementary knowledge of the truth. Now the active life cannot be abandoned to the disordered will of the appetites which would make it an end in itself, while it is only a means whose purpose is clearly determined by the temporal power embodied in the Leader. In order to be truly such, it is necessary that this power be employed by a single man so that every subject contemplates himself in his sovereign, his better part, to whom he must submit himself, the reason that regulates every activity restraining them within their limits and preventing them from gravely obstructing the attainment of the pure values of the spirit.

If the natural end of man is heaven, the starting point is the earth, so that the necessity for making its foundation organized by a liberating action that acts especially on the obstructing element, the body, which abandoned to itself, precludes every possibility of overcoming and attainment. That which is corporeal remains subordinated to the psychic element that is transparently vague through its elusiveness and diffusivity: the virtues inherent in the active life, that the Leader rules and directs, have as their field of action the psychic complex that must be contained and limited by reason as if by a supreme command. But reason is in a certain sense two-edged to the extent that on the one hand it dominates and restrains the lower faculties and on the other, it inserts into a higher order of reality where the intellect extends and, while being human, is the mediator between the human and the divine: likewise the Leader rules in the sign of justice so that a higher stage becomes a reality, whose domain belongs more specially to the Priests, but it is necessary for the Warriors to facilitate this perfection.

Given that, it indicates that war is the condition of peace as long as it is truly conducted by those for whom it is their only given mission and within the limits that make it justifiable and necessary.

In the earthly and human domain, law must make use of force and the symbol and the means of justice is two-edged sword, one of which strikes and points toward the lower, which the other points higher and is bloodless, the point representing the peak of unification of the higher and the lower, the supreme acme, death, or resolution Thus what seemingly appears cruel, is not always so in reality, and the justice that imposes itself with force is often the necessary vestibule of the highest sphere of love. The activity of the Leader in human and earthly life is analogous to that of God, whose direct instrument he is, in order to coordinate the modes of activity pursuant to justice, truth, and love. No one more than the Leader knows that by punishing others he punishes himself and that with an act of justice he fulfills an achievement of love and truth: if he does not know this, if the ignores his purpose, he is not truly a leader, but a slave of his own cupidity, since he cannot command if he is not aware of the raison d’être of his authority, of the divine character of his mission.

A Warrior among the Warriors he must be an ascetic among the ascetics: so he will reach the point to rule others by how much more he will rule himself and to defeat his enemies by defeating himself, and to fight the small wars by fighting the Great War, and to achieve external peace by how much more profoundly and perfectly he will have achieved interior peace, knowing that earthly life is only a stage, but the most important of all, of which he is the orderer. His responsibility is very great before men but especially before God since by betraying his creatures he betrays his Creator and by neglecting justice in order to follow his own impulse he contradicts the nobility of the position that he occupies and abuses the power that is given to him: then he will truly be last among men and servant among the servants. Since there is no justice without a judge, so the Leader is also judge among men and here his task is still more serious and difficult: he must be very attentive and not exceed the scope in which his activity unfolds, since as judge he can affect the case, but not the knowledge of those who have accomplished it. He knows in fact that everything that happens may not happen and that there is nothing open to censure that others accomplish that he himself cannot accomplish, since men are the mirror of man and he, as Leader, is the mirror of the time in which he lives and is also the supreme responsible man for it.

His more or less great adherence to tradition is measured by the degree of greater or lesser spirituality of the era in which he lives and of which he is the judge. He must dematerialize the world, bring active life back within its normal limits, to make action a means and not an end, and contemplation an end and not a means, and force the pure expression of law and power, the assertion of his humility before God, and justice the implacable rectification, and the gift of himself the constant offering.

He is in the world to redeem it, to purify it in the name of God, for the love of God, because he, with the Warriors, is the protector of the Temple and his mission is the respect of the sacred law to which he is subject and through which he is the Leader, since everything that comes from God must return to God, and what is accomplished on earth is only for the dignity of the true man who is a son of God. His true glory, his true conquest will have facilitated it, prepared it, realized the coming of the kingdom of God, having transformed life in a rite redeeming man from his state of servitude, leading him to liberty through to liberation, making of the active life a connecting bridge to the beatitude of contemplation where the divine is only realized, ransoming not oppressing, spiritualizing not materializing.

Only in that way will he be the God’s chosen and his power will receive that consecration from which all authority comes. He knows that man and the world are of God and that everything must flow into the great traditional axis that is sustained by sacred knowledge of which he is the most pious and aware supporter. The active life that he rules and normalizes must be contained within the limits that permit each man to rise to the sphere of contemplation where true life begins, the divine life, and his mission unfolds in the temporal sphere for eternity, on earth for heaven, the center of the innumerable efforts that flows from every point into a single wave, in a single rhythm, for the glory of the one before Whom everything is nothing and the nothing is all.

Supreme bundler of fasces [Fascificatore], the Leader redeems the transience of man and the world with the vivifying rhythm of tradition of which he must be the most intransigent defender in order to establish the constitutive unity of castes, the harmony of principles, the respect of standards, the convergence of all the efforts in the fulfillment of his very high mission, so that the world is truly the mark, the crown, and the sign of God.