Some may say that we are exaggerating: but it is difficult for Cesaro’s friend [Evola himself] to demonstrate here that Cesaro’s premises, i.e., those of Steiner, rigorously thought out, are sufficient to lead to so much. We don’t want to be considered tendentious and therefore we will emphasize that in Cesaro’s thought (as also in Steiner’s), this immense centuries-old destruction, of which western history was miserably the theatre, would have brought about, in the end, a good, in view of a new civilization and a new spirituality. But hypotheses of the type, in truth, are a bit too gross. Since it is certain that a destruction happened, this needs to be called by its true name: tomorrow we will be able to pick ourselves up, we will be able to surpass this decadence—the idea of the so called “cyclic laws” and of the “avatars” is characteristic of traditional conceptions—but that will never be able to and later never lead ourselves to allow what happened to be considered as providential, to justify it in terms of phases of a higher evolution. We are in addition aware that, when it will truly surpass what should be surpassed, the modern world will not reach new heights that the inferior humanity of the past could not know, but, simply, it will return to “normal”, it will know, although in different forms, what it had already known and possessed.

And that is not simply a difference of interpretation, but it also entails precise consequences in regards to orientation. Whoever holds firm to traditional teaching, from an intelligent exploration of what already has been, will in fact be able to derive certain guidelines for reconstruction: race, tradition, virility, solarity, difference, hierarchy, traditional ascesis that will give back to him living meanings and ideals. Whoever instead thinks in terms of evolution, since his point of departure is man as tabula rasa, from bridges cut from the past, will have to posit himself to make the future, to dream up principles, systems, and myths of every type, naturally having principles and a goal in their reality apart from the individual, if he will not prefer to put himself in the retinue of some new “prophet” and new Messiah of the modern world. Steiner’s formula, in such regard, is that of the “new universal era of love”, that our planet would have the mission to realize with the development of “true Christianity”.

To finish up, the question of the solarity of Christianity, as Cesaro asserted, merits a comment. From what was already said, we can already foresee the way with which, from the traditional point of view, such questions must be posed: solar elements without doubt are present in Christianity (and naturally rather more so in Roman Catholicism): but not by virtue of, but rather in spite of these subversive and universalistic aspects, whose qualities were valorized by Steiner and Cesaro, not to mention Buonaiuti and many other protestant admirers of “pure Christianity”.

These elements are not to be considered as “achievements”, but rather as residual fragments of the great primordial solar tradition, or echoes of it, resonating in an historical setting quite unfavorable to the goal of the actual protection of their purity and their deepest meaning. And it is appropriate, at any rate, to explain the fact that such solar elements in Christianity lost their original metaphysical importance and assumed only a religiosity, at the most theological, and that it is no longer connected to the mysteries and to a true and proper hereditary sacerdotal caste, but were only points of reference for a general faith and heritage of a clergy enlisted without any condition of blood and race.

Even this difference is important for its practical consequences. In fact, while the evolutionists, starting from their premises, even here will grant themselves an arbitrary digression, thinking up this or that “new” form of “Christian initiation”, (and something similar even claims to furnish Steiner’s anthroposophic doctrine, close to Rosicrucian wishful thinking), which instead poses as tradition, will measure the current value of Christianity and its possibility to contribute to a future spiritual reconstruction like the susceptibility, from among the solar elements present in it, to integrate it into a wider order of the solar primordial tradition, to what can be legitimately applied the saying quod ubique, quod ab omnibus et quod semper. And in this order, undoubtedly, an essential convergence will be verified of the positive element of Christianity with what it had that was great, virile, Olympian, whether the authentic pristine Romanity, or the greatest forms of the common Indo-European and Aryan civilization.

Because of this confusion of motives and applications, we therefore said of Cesaro’s work that it can engender only a sense of authentic perplexity. And it is truly a pity because the quality of the criticism and exegesis that the author demonstrates are indisputable, and the clarification of the lacunae that official history leaves open and for which a higher interpretation is imposed, is conducted with mastery. That such a work has therefore not been able to have the significance and the value that, otherwise, would have been proper, that is accordingly to be ascribed to the load of the deleterious influence that, in one way or the other, and even in perfect good faith, the modern occult and theosophical neo-spiritualism does not cease to wield in a cultural world disorientated in respect to true traditional spirituality, like that of the modern West.

⇐ Previous  Finis