Although this book by Cortes was not one of Evola’s favourites because of its overt theological emphasis, it is still very valuable reading for several audiences. First of all, for counter-revolutionaries, it makes clear the ideas of liberalism and socialism and brings to awareness that this opposition to Tradition is nothing recent, but has been ongoing for a few hundred years. For anti-Catholics, it will make clear the Catholicism at one time was the sole serious and viable force opposed to the modern world. They need to ask themselves if they are really willing to reject the world that defined Europe, a world created by foundational documents of Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, or Bossuet, not to mention art, architecture, chivalry and so much else. For neo-Catholics in thrall to the “spirit of Vatican II”, they need to decide if they are in continuity with the Church described by Donoso. Since the legitimacy and authority of the Catholic Church derives only from its adherence to Tradition, neo-Catholics have to demonstrate they are still Catholic.
Donoso’s Essays on Liberalism, Socialism, and Catholicism with a new introduction by Cologero Salvo is now available in the Library.
My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered healthy, sane and normal. ~ Julius Evola
In this short list of modern authors—that is, those writing after 1789—Evola includes Juan Donoso Cortes among those holding to those sane and normal principles. He writes:
In the same spirit … of the great Catholic philosophers of authority, Joseph de Maistre and Donoso Cortes, I deny everything that, directly or indirectly, derives from the French revolution, which, in my opinion, has Bolshevism as its ultimate outcome, in contrast to the World of Tradition.
To the modern mind, such a view is summarily dismissed as “Fascism”, the common accusation hurled at any idea opposed to the “manifest destiny” of the modern world. Yet as Evola points out, this spirit of Tradition predates the Fascist movements of the 20th century because:
It brings back a tradition higher and prior to Fascism, insofar as it belongs to the heritage of a hierarchical, aristocratic, and traditional conception of the state, conceptions having a universal character that were maintained in Europe right up until the French Revolution.
In contrast to the totalitarianisms of the modern age, this traditional view was based on an organic society, with power distributed under the principle of subsidiarity, and bonds of loyalty freely given.
In these essays, Donoso reaches down to the fundamental assumptions of the modern world as expressed in Liberalism and Socialism, in contrast to the spirit of Tradition that Catholicism used to represent. Since few men ever bother to question and articulate clearly their assumptions, a common dialog among the three world views becomes literally impossible. Donoso writes:
The supreme interest of that school is in preventing the arrival of the day of radical negations or of sovereign affirmations; and that it may not arrive, it confounds by means of discussion all notions, and propagates scepticism, knowing as it does, that a people which perpetually hears in the mouth of its sophists the pro and the contra of everything, ends by not knowing which side to take, and by asking itself whether truth and error, injustice and justice, stupidity and honesty, are things opposed among themselves, or are only the same things regarded from different points of view.
How much more true this is in our day, with instant and incessant televised discussions and the multitude of Internet blogs. The intent is seldom to discern truth, justice, and intelligence, but instead the goal is to promote a particular point of view.
Please be relevant.