Julius Evola Quotes

Warrior spirit is characterised by direct, clear and loyal relations, based on fidelity and honour and a sound instinct for the various dignities, which it can well distinguish: it opposes everything which is impersonal and trivial.

There is a necessary correspondence between the most advanced stages of a historical cycle and the most primitive. America is the final stage of modern Europe. Guénon called the United States "the far West", in the novel sense that the United States represents the reductio ad absurdum of the negative and the most senile aspects of Western civilization. What in Europe exist in diluted form are magnified and concentrated in the United States whereby they are revealed as the symptoms of disintegration and cultural and human regression. The American mentality can only be interpreted as an example of regression, which shows itself in the mental atrophy towards all higher interests and incomprehension of higher sensibility. The American mind has limited horizons, one conscribed to everything which is immediate and simplistic, with the inevitable consequence that everything is made banal, basic and leveled down until it is deprived of all spiritual life. Life itself in American terms is entirely mechanistic. The sense of "I" in America belongs entirely to the physical level of existence. The typical American neither has spiritual dilemmas nor complications: he is a "natural" joiner and conformist.

To fight on "the path of God" has been characterized as "medieval" fanaticism; conversely, it has been characterized as a most sacred cause to fight for "patriotic" and "nationalistic" ideals and for other myths that in our contemporary era have eventually been unmasked and shown to be the instruments of irrational, materialistic, and destructive forces... Soldiers went to the front to experience war as something else, namely, as a crisis that all too often did not turn out to be an authentic and heroic transfiguration of the personality, but rather the regression of the individual to a plane of savage instincts, "reflexes," and reactions that retain very little of the human...

It is a cliché that the modern scientific vision has desacralized the world, and the world desacralized by scientific knowledge has become one of the existential elements that make up modern man, all the more so to the degree that he is "civilized." Ever since he has been subject to compulsory education, his mind has been stuffed with "positive" scientific notions; he cannot avoid seeing in a soulless light everything that surrounds him, and therefore acts destructively. What, for example, could the symbol of the sunset of a dynasty, like the Japanese, mean to him when he knows scientifically what the sun is: merely a star, at which one can even fire missiles.

The Americans' "open-mindedness", which is sometimes cited in their favor, is the other side of their interior formlessness. The same goes for their "individualism". Individualism and personality are not the same: the one belongs to the formless world of quantity, the other to the world of quality and hierarchy. The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American "mind", puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.

The lesser war here corresponds to the exoteric war, the bloody battle which is fought with material arms against the enemy, against the 'barbarian', against an inferior race over whom a superior right is claimed, or, finally, when the event is motivated by a religious justification, against the 'infidel'. No matter how terrible and tragic the events, no matter how huge the destruction, this war, metaphysically, still remains a 'lesser war'. The 'greater' or 'holy war' is, contrarily, of the interior and intangible order – it is the war which is fought against the enemy, the 'barbarian', the 'infidel', whom everyone bears in himself, or whom everyone can see arising in himself on every occasion that he tries to subject his whole being to a spiritual law.

We have to face the consequences of the fact that the family has long since ceased to have any higher meaning, or been cemented by living forces that go beyond the merely individual. The organic and, to a certain degree, "heroic" character that its unity presented in the past has been lost in the modern world, just as the institution's residual veneer of "sacrality" bestowed by religious marriage has disappeared, or nearly so. In reality, in the great majority of cases the modern family is presented as a petit bourgeois institution determined almost exclusively by conformist, utilitarian, primitive, or at best sentimental factors. Above all, its essential fulcrum has disappeared, which was constituted by the primarily spiritual authority of its head, the father: that is shown by the etymological meaning of the word pater as "lord," or "sovereign." […] How could the family continue to have a firm, binding center, if its natural head, the father, is so often estranged from it today—even physically, when the practical mechanism of material life takes him away from it? What authority can the father have, especially in the so-called upper classes, if he is reduced to a money-making machine, a busy professional, and the like?

All too often people forget that spirituality is essentially a way of life and that its measure does not consist of notions, theories, and ideas that have been stored in one’s head. Spirituality is actually what has been successfully actualized and translated into a sense of superiority which is experienced inside by the soul, and a noble demeanor, which is expressed in the body.

In a superior civilization, as, for example, that of the Indo-Aryans, the being who is without a characteristic form or caste (in the original meaning of the word), not even that of servant or shudra, would emerge as a pariah. In this respect America is a society of pariahs. There is a role for pariahs. It is to be subjected to beings whose form and internal laws are precisely defined. Instead the modern pariahs seek to become dominant themselves and to exercise their dominion over the entire world.

Christianity is at the root of the evil that has corrupted the West. This is the truth, and it does not admit uncertainty. In its frenetic subversion of every hierarchy, in its exaltation of the weak, the disinherited, those without lineage and without tradition; in its call to "love", to "believe", and to yield; in its rancor toward everything that is force, self-sufficiency, knowledge, and aristocracy; in its intolerant and proselytizing fanaticism, Christianity poisoned the greatness of the Roman Empire. Enemy of itself and of the world, this dark and barbarous wave remains the principal cause of the West's decline.

Although our case is different from that of ascetics who remove themselves from the world, the situation of the latest technological civilization might offer the incentive for commitments of this kind. In a large city, in mass society, among the almost unreal swarming of faceless beings, an essential sense of isolation or of detachment often occurs naturally, perhaps even more than in the solitude of moors and mountains.

Vilfredo Pareto spoke of a "sexual religion" that in the nineteenth century, with its taboos, dogmas, and intolerance, accompanied religion as usually understood. It was particularly virulent in Anglo-Saxon countries, where it had, and in part still has as its worthy companions, two other brand-new, dogmatic, secular religions: humanitarian progressivism and the religion of democracy. […] It is known that virtus in antiquity and even during the Renaissance had the meaning of a force of the soul, of virile quality, of power, while later its prevalent meaning became sexual, so much that Pareto could coin the term "virtuism" itself to characterize the said puritanical religion. […] I have already indicated the principles of a "greater morality" that, being dependent on a kind of interior race, cannot be damaged by nihilistic dissolutions: these include truth, justice, loyalty, inner courage, the authentic, socially unconditioned sentiment of honor and shame, control over oneself. These are what are meant by "virtue"; sexual acts have no part in it except indirectly, and only when they lead to a behavior that deviates from these values.

In reality, chivalry was animated by the impulse toward a ‘traditional’ restoration in the highest sense of the word, with the silent or explicit overcoming of the Christian religious spirit.

The good fighter does "what has to be done" and does not let himself be troubled by any scepticism. [...] Given the ineptitude of the existing political groups, which, as is well known, have often forced qualified elements to move away from them, and given that what would have been desirable did not occur, which is to say, a political party as a mere force of manoeuvre in the present time, but absolutely disciplined and controlled by a superordinated group, owner of a precise inner doctrine not to be paraded in the common political struggle—given these things, the only possibilities seem to me to be those of more diffuse activity : to win, and influence with direct contacts, personalities, if possible, holding a post of command, not so much in the world of the political schemers as in that of the army, of officialdom and of business.

Those who regard the Crusades, with indignation, as among the most extravagant episodes of the 'dark' Middle Ages, have not even the slightest suspicion that what they call 'religious fanaticism' was the visible sign of the presence and effectiveness of a sensitivity and decisiveness, the absence of which is more characteristic of true barbarism.