Top 15 Alain de Benoist Quotes

In paganism, on the contrary, good cannot be separated from beauty, and this is normal, because the good is form, the consummate forms of worldly things. Consequently, art cannot be separated from religion. Art is sacred. Not only can the gods be represented, but art is how they can be represented, and insofar as men perpetually assure them of representation, they have a full status of existence. All European spirituality is based on representation as mediation between the visible and the invisible, on representation by means of depicted figures and signs exchanged against a meaning intimately tied to the real, the very guarantee of this incessant and mutual conversion of the sign and meaning. Beauty is the visible sign of what is good, ugliness the visible sign of not only what is deformed or spoiled but bad.

As only God has an absolute value, everything that is not God can have only relative value. To be created means that one’s being is not due to oneself but to something other than oneself. This creates a perpetual sense of self-loss within one’s own state of unfulfillment. It means that one is not self-sufficient but a dependent being—one’s state of existence is caged from the start inside that dependency. Creation therefore does not posit man’s autonomy. It circumscribes it, and by virtue of this, in my opinion, invalidates it. Indeed, man has no right to enjoy this world except on condition of acknowledging that he is not its true owner but at best its steward. Yahweh alone is the owner of the world. “The earth belongs to me, and you are nothing but strangers and guests to my eyes” (Leviticus 25:23).

Faith and science thus find themselves reconciled, not in the way of the scholastic, who claims to prove the reality of his dogmatic propositions by means of universal reason, but by the assertion of the overall oneness of the real that has no double or reflection.

The world only hides one thing, says Clément Rosset, and that is that it has nothing to hide. It is sufficient onto itself for its own unveiling. Meaning only appears as the result of the representations and interpretations man may give to it.

The opposite concept of the Latin religio should be sought in the Latin verb negligere. To be religious is synonymous with responsibility, not neglect. To be responsible is to be free — to possess the concrete means of exercising free action. At the same time, to be free is also to be connected to others by a common spirituality.

In fact, it is not a question of going back to the past, but of connecting with it — and also, by that very fact, in a spherical conception of history, to connect to the eternal and cause it to surge back, to have consonance in life, and to disentangle itself from the tyranny of the logos, the terrible tyranny of the Law, so as to reestablish the school of the mythos and life.

As man has managed to turn himself into a player of the world, the sole thing that can now prevent him from using all his possibilities of playing, is to make him believe that he did not invent the rules of the game.

Yahweh accepts that man has a history, but he strives to neutralize it by giving it a purpose, which is precisely the return to the pre-historical state of paradisiacal “innocence.” (Yahweh only accepts history in order to assign it an end.)

"One can have a society without God,” writes Régis Debray, “but there cannot be a society without religion.” He adds, “Those nations on the way to disbelief are on the path to abdication.” One can also cite Georges Bataille, according to whom, “religion, whose essence is the search for lost intimacy, boils down to a clearly conscious effort to become entirely self-conscious.”

Adam and Eve, placed in the garden of Eden, find themselves forbidden to eat of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). Catholic theologians believe this “knowledge” forbidden by Elohim-Yahweh is neither omniscience nor moral discernment, but the ability to decide what is good or evil. Jewish theology is more subtle. The “tree” of the knowledge is interpreted as the representation of a world where good and evil “are in a combined state,” where there is no absolute Good and Evil. In other words, the “tree” is a foreshadowing of the real world we live in, a world where nothing is absolutely clear cut, where moral imperatives are tied to human values, and where everything of any greatness and importance always takes place beyond good and evil. Furthermore, in the Hebrew tradition “to eat” means “to assimilate.” To eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is therefore to personally enter this real world where human initiative “combines” good and evil. Adam’s transgression, from which all the others are derived, is clearly “that of autonomy,” accordingly, as emphasized by Eisenberg and Abecassis, this would be “the desire to conduct his own history alone in according to his own desire and his own word or law.

If all men are brothers outside of any specifically human paradigm then no one can truly be a brother. The institution of a symbolically universal “paternity” annihilates the very possibility of true fraternity, in such a way that it proclaims itself in the absolute by the very thing that destroys it.

Paganism sacralizes and thereby exalts this world whereas Judeo-Christian monotheism sanctifies and thereby retreats from this world. Paganism is based on the idea of the sacred.

Nor is there any valid reason to reject the idea of God or the notion of the sacred just because of the sickly expression Christianity has given to them, any more than it is necessary to break with aristocratic principles on the pretext that they have been caricatured by the bourgeoisie.

A connection could be drawn between the secular ascent of biblical values in today's world and the depreciation of beauty that characterizes it on so many levels. Beauty today is often depreciated as monotonous or denounced as a constraining norm, when it is simply reduced to a pure spectacle accompanied by a rehabilitation or even exaltation of deformity and ugliness, as can be seen in many areas. The degeneration of beauty and the promotion of ugliness, tied to the flowering of intellectualism, could be certainly be part of the Umwertung stigmatized by Nietzsche.

But for man to set himself up as man, means the adoption of a super-nature, a superior nature that is nothing other than culture whose effect is the emancipation of reflective consciousness from the repetitious constraints of the species. What this means especially is that man is given the possibility of going beyond himself and transforming. In other words, to ensure that each “super-nature” obtained is simply a step towards another “super-nature.” Now this project is the equivalent of making man a kind of god — allowing him to participate in the Divine — a perspective the Bible depicts as an “abomination.” Accordingly, the monotheist declaration is first and foremost a solemn prohibition against man establishing himself as a god. The reason for this is that when man has gone beyond his original status (the episode of “original sin”), to one that is fully autonomous he thereby takes on a super-humanity that confirms him as the cause of himself.