In his masterpiece Metaphysics of War, Julius Evola contrasts the liberal-democratic view of the military as a subordinate tool of the state to the traditional Aryan ideal that sees warrior ethics as the spiritual and moral foundation of true civilisation, arguing that a renewed European order should be built upon this disciplined, heroic, and metaphysically grounded warrior spirit.
One of the main oppositions which the First World War brought to light concerns the relationship between the state and the military element. What appeared was a characteristic antithesis, which in reality reflected not so much two different groups of people as two different ages, two mentalities and two different conceptions of ‘civilisation’.
On one hand one found the idea that the military and, more generally, the warrior element is merely subordinate and instrumental to the state. The normal and correct rulers of the state, according to this view, are what one might call the ‘civil’ or ‘bourgeois’ element. This ‘bourgeois’ element engages in professional politics and – to use a well-known expression – when politics must be continued by other means,1 the military forces are employed. Under these conditions the military element is not expected to exercise any particular influence on politics or on the life in society in general. It is acknowledged, certainly, that the military element has its own ethics and values. However, this view considers it undesirable, and even absurd, to apply these ethics and values to the entire normal life of the nation.
The view in question is in fact closely related to the democratic, illuminé2 and liberal belief that true civilisation does not have anything to do with that sad necessity which is war, but that its foundation, rather than the warlike virtues, is ‘the progress of the arts and sciences’ and the formation of social life according to the ‘immortal principles’. That is why, in such a society, one should speak of a ‘soldier’ element rather than a true warrior element. In fact, etymologically the word ‘soldier’ refers to troops which fight for a salary or a fee in the service of a class which does not itself wage war. This is, more or less, the meaning which, in spite of obligatory conscription, the military element has in liberal and democratic-bourgeois States. These States use it to resolve serious disputes on the international plane more or less in the same way as, in the domestic order, they use the police.
Over and against this view there is the other according to which the military element permeates the political, and also the ethical, order. Military values here are authentic warrior values and have a fundamental part in the general ideal of an ethical formation of life; an ideal valid also, therefore, beyond the strictly military plane and periods of war. The result is a limitation of the civilian bourgeoisie, politically, and of the bourgeois spirit in general in all sectors of social life. True civilisation is conceived of here in virile, active and heroic terms: and it is on this basis that the elements which define all human greatness, and the real rights of the peoples, are understood.
It hardly needs to be said that, in the 1914-1918 World War, the former ideology was proper to the Allies and above all to the western and Atlantic democracies, while the latter was essentially represented by the Central Powers. According to a well-known Masonic watchword – which we have often recalled here – that war was fought as a sort of great crusade of worldwide democracy3 against ‘militarism’ and ‘Prussianism’, which, to those ‘imperialist’ nations, represented ‘obscurantist’ residues within ‘developed’ Europe.
This expression contains, however, the truth which we pointed out at the beginning, namely that the opposition was not only between two groups of peoples but also between two ages – even though, naturally, at the time and subjectively things appeared in a very different manner. What were called in the Masonic jargon ‘anachronistic residues’ meant really the survival of values peculiar to the whole of traditional, warlike, virile and Aryan Europe, while the values of the ‘developed world’ did not mean anything but the ethical and spiritual decline of the West. Moreover, we know better now what ‘imperialists’ the hypocritical exponents of this latter world were in their own peculiar way: theirs was, to be exact, the imperialism of the bourgeoisie and the merchants who wanted to enjoy undisturbed the benefits of peace, which was to be imposed and preserved, not so much by their own military forces as by forces enlisted from all parts of the world and paid for this purpose.
With the peace treaties and the developments of the post-war period this has become more and more evident. The function of the military element deteriorated into that of a sort of international police force – or, rather than really ‘international’, a police force organised by a certain group of nations to impose, against the will of the others and for their own profit, a given actual situation: since this was, and is, what ‘the defence of peace’ and ‘the rights of nations’ really mean. The decline of all feelings of warrior-like pride and honour was subsequently demonstrated by the fact that all sorts of ignoble means were developed to secure the desired results without even having to resort to this army degraded to the status of international police: systems of sanctions, economic blockades, national boycotts, etc.
With the most recent international developments which have led to the loss of authority of the League of Nations and, finally, to the current war, an effective reversal of values, not only on the political plane but also on the ethical one and in general of life-view as a whole, has become clearly visible. The current battle is not so much against a particular people but rather against a particular idea, which is more or less the same as the one supported by the Allies in the previous war. That war was intended to consolidate ‘democratic imperialism’ against any dangerous troublemakers; the new war is intended to mark the end of this ‘imperialism’ and of several myths which serve it as ‘alibis’, and to create the preconditions for a new age in which warrior ethics are to serve as the basis for the civilisation of the collective of European peoples. In this sense the present war can be called a restorative war. It restores to their original standing the ideals and the views of life and right which are central to the original traditions of the Aryan peoples – above all the Aryo-Roman and Nordic-Aryan ones – so central that, when they decayed or were abandoned, this led inevitably to the fall of each of those peoples and power passed into the hands of inferior elements, both racially and spiritually.
It is, however, advisable that misunderstandings do not arise about the meaning which the warrior element will have in the new Europe, focusing on the word ‘militarism’, similar to those already deliberately fostered – with full knowledge of the facts – by the democratic adversaries. It is not a matter of confining Europe to barracks, nor of defining a wild will-to-power as ultima ratio4 or arriving at an obscurely tragic and irrational conception of life.
Thus, in the first place it is necessary to become well aware that specifically warrior values, in the military context, are only representations of a reality which, in itself, can have a higher, not merely ethical, but even metaphysical meaning. Here we shall not repeat what we have already had the opportunity to discuss at length elsewhere:5 we will only recall that ancient Aryan humanity habitually conceived of life as a perpetual battle between metaphysical powers, on the one hand the uranic forces of light and order, on the other hand the dark forces of chaos and matter. This battle, for the ancient Aryan, was fought and won both in the outer and in the inner world. And it was the exterior battle which reflected the battle to be fought in oneself, which was considered as the truly just war: the battle against those forces and peoples of the outer world which possessed the same character as the powers in our inner being which must be placed under subjection and domination until the accomplishment of a pax triumphalis.6
What follows from this is an interrelation of the true warrior-like or heroic ethos with a certain inner discipline and a certain superiority, an interrelation which, in one form or another, always appears in all our best traditions. That is why only one who is short-sighted or prejudiced can believe that the unavoidable consequence of putting forward a warrior-like vision of the world and of maintaining that the new Europe will have to be formed under the sign of the warrior spirit must be a chaos of unleashed forces and instincts.
The true warrior ideal implies not only force and physical training but also a calm, controlled and conscious formation of the inner being and the personality. Love for distance and order, the ability to subordinate one’s individualistic and passionate element to principles, the ability to place action and work above mere personhood, a feeling of dignity devoid of vanity are features of the true warrior spirit as essential as those which refer to actual combat: so that, from a higher point of view, combat itself can be worthwhile not so much for its immediate material results as for evidence of these qualities, which have a self-evident constructive value and can amount to elements of a special ‘style’, not only in a given area of the nation devoted specifically to soldiering, but also in a whole people and even beyond the frontiers of a given people.
This last point must be especially stressed, precisely in relation to our fight for a new Europe and a new European civilisation. The relation which, according to the aforementioned Aryan and traditional view, exists between inner struggle and ‘just war’ is useful, in addition, in preventing the equivocal irrationalism of a tragic and irrational vision of the world, and also allows one to go beyond a certain hardening, devoid of light, found in some subordinate aspects of the purely military style.
According to the highest view, which is resurfacing today in the staunchest and most potent forces of our peoples, warrior-like discipline and combat are connected with a certain ‘transfiguration’ and participation in an effective ‘spirituality’. This is how an idea of ‘peace’, which has nothing to do with the materialistic, democratic-bourgeois conception is outlined: it is a peace which is not the cessation of the spiritual tension at work in combat and in warrior-like asceticism, but rather a sort of calm and powerful fulfilment of it.
Fundamentally, it is here that the irreducible antithesis between the two different conceptions of ‘civilisation’ appears. There is not really ‘imperialist materialism’ and ‘warlike brutality’, on the one hand, and, on the other, ‘love for culture’ and interest in ‘spiritual values’. Rather, there are spiritual values of a given type and of a properly Aryan origin, which oppose a different, intellectualistic, ‘humanistic’ and bourgeois conception of these. It is useless to delude ourselves that a warrior civilisation can have the same consideration for the so-called ‘world of sciences and arts’ as that which they enjoyed in the previous age of liberalism and of the Nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. They may retain their own significance but in a subordinate manner, because they represent not what is essential, but the accessory. The main thing consists instead in a certain inner style, a certain formation of the mind and character, a simplicity, clarity and harshness, a directly experienced meaning of existence, without expressionisms, without sentimentalisms, a pleasure for commanding, obeying, acting, conquering and overcoming oneself.
That the world of ‘intellectuals’ considers all this as ‘unspiritual’ and almost barbaric is natural, but it has no significance. A very different seriousness and depth from the point of view of which the ‘culture’ of the bourgeois world appears itself as a reign of worms, of forms without life and without force, belongs to the ‘warrior’ world. It will only be in a subsequent period when the new type of European is sufficiently formed that a new ‘culture’, less vain, less ‘humanist’, can be expected to reflect something of the new style.
Today it is very important to become aware of these aspects of the warrior spirit so that, in forming the bases of the future agreement and common civilisation of the European peoples, abstract and outdated ideas are not again brought into play. It is only by working from the energies which in the test of the fire of combat decide the freedom, dignity and mission of the peoples that true understanding, collaboration and unity of civilisation can be forged. And as these energies have little to do with ‘culture’ as understood by the ‘intellectuals’ and the ‘humanists’ to which they cannot be expected to rededicate themselves, so every abstract conception of right, all impersonal regulation of the relations between the various human groups and between the various States will appear intolerable to them.
Here, another fundamental contribution which the warrior spirit can offer to the form and sense of a new European order becomes clear. 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. In every civilisation based on warrior spirit all order depends on these elements, not on legal paragraphs and abstract ‘positivist’ norms. And these are also the elements which can organise the forces, aroused by the experience of combat and consecrated by victory, into a new unity. That is why, in a certain sense, the type of warrior organisation which was peculiar to some aspects of the feudal Roman-Germanic civilisation can give us an idea of what, perhaps, will work, in an adapted form, for the new Europe for which today we fight. In dealing with relationships, not only man-to-man, but also State-to-State and race-to-race, it is necessary to be able to conceive again of that obedience which does not humiliate but exalts, that command or leadership which commits one to superiority and a precise responsibility. Instead of the legislation of an abstract ‘international law’ comprising peoples of any and all sorts, an organic right of European peoples based on these direct relationships must come about.
Suum cuique.7 This Aryan and Roman principle defines the true concept of justice on the international plane as on the personal and is intimately connected to the warrior vision of life: everyone must have a precise sense of their natural and legitimate place in a well-articulated hierarchical whole, must feel pride in this place and adapt themselves to it perfectly. To this end, in fact, the ‘ascetic’ element also comprised in the warrior spirit will have a particular importance.
To realise a new European order, various conditions are necessary: but there is no doubt that in the first place must be the ‘asceticism’ inherent in warrior discipline: the ability to see reality, suppressing every particularistic haughtiness, every irrational affection, every ephemeral pride; scorn for comfortable life and for all materialistic ideas of well-being; a style of simplicity, audacity and conscious force, in the common effort, on all planes.
In our age of real and fake conflicts, the time is ripe for rediscovering the metaphysical mysteries of war and the warrior ethos. Metaphysics of War, the singular masterpiece on the spiritual dimensions of warfare by the Italian Traditionalist Julius Evola, was, is and will remain the go-to handbook for cultivating the warrior within our souls. Drawing on the arsenal of wisdom and experiences from Nordic, Vedic, Roman, Persian, Islamic and other traditions, Evola shows how the art of war can lead to transcendence and greatness in everyday life.
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1‘We see, therefore, that War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means.’ A famous quotation from Claus von Clausewitz (1780-1831), a Prussian military theorist. The quotation can be found in his book On War (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 42.
2French: ‘enlightened’.
3When the United States entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson characterised it as a ‘crusade for democracy’.
4Latin: ‘the last resort’.
5Cf. above all our work Revolt Against the Modern World, Hoepli, Milan 1934. (Note added by Evola.)
6Even in the Christian doctrine of Saint Augustine, this view on the just war clearly remains: ‘Proficientes autem nondumque perfecti ira [to fight] possunt, ut bonus quisque ex ea parte pugnet contra alterum, qua etiam contra semet ipsum; et in uno quippe homine caro concupiscit adversus spiritum et spiritus adversus carnem’ (De Civ., XV, 5). [‘But with the good, good men, or at least perfectly good men, cannot war; though, while only going on towards perfection, they war to this extent, that every good man resists others in those points in which he resists himself. And in each individual “the flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh”.’ From St. Augustin’s City of God and Christian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988).] (Note added by Evola.)
7Latin: ‘to each his own’.