Defining Paganism – Faye

Defining Paganism

By Guillaume Faye

 

Paganism: The philosophic and/or religious attitude, generally polytheistic and pantheistic, that is the antipode to the revealed salvation religions, to religious or secular monotheism, or to Western materialism.

For Christopher Gérard, one of the principal contemporary practicing authorities on the subject: ‘Paganism, as a coherent vision of the world … is faithful to an ancestry, considered part of a very long memory, enrooted in multiple terrains, opened to the invisible … an active participant in the world, a sought-after harmony between microcosm and macrocosm. Paganism in essence is a natural religion, the most ancient of a world “born” with its birth – if the world were ever born. Rather than an eccentric fad – or the elegant nostalgia of literary refugees from some mythic Golden age, I think paganism is on the way to becoming the first of the world’s religions.’ He mentions 1.5 billion pagans on five continents, which would make it the world’s largest religious group. Gérard adds, ‘Without being narrowly moralistic … a lived paganism seems to me incompatible with whatever makes man servile. As the exaltation of life – of the eternal élan – paganism refuses everything that debases man: drugs, dependencies, every kind of unhealthy life.’ A lived paganism, in other words, is not destructuring, nor linked to the permissive, anti-vitalist mores of the present West (as certain prelates would have us believe). Gay Pride has nothing in common with the pagan bacchanalia! Paganism, moreover, is neither superstitious nor vacuously ritualistic, in contrast to Islam (this belief system which is most opposed to it), for Islam is all these things to the highest degree.

Pierre Vial has written that paganism is not anti-Christian, but a-Christian and post-Christian. ‘To be pagan is to refuse the inversion of values that Nietzsche denounced in Christianity. It is to take the hero, not the martyr, as the model. Christian suffering has always repulsed me. To celebrate the redemptive value of suffering seems life a form of masochism.’ (Today, modern European Christians practice their ethno-masochism and culpability on the immigrant colonisers; in every domain they practice the ‘duty to repent.’) Vial continues, ‘To exalt wretchedness, suffering, and sickness is unhealthy and I much prefer the Greek ideal of transcendence or the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius. Paganism ought not, though, to be confused with anti-clericalism or atheism. Another point: a purely intellectual definition of paganism … won’t suffice. It’s perhaps necessary, but it doesn’t go far enough. For paganism to exist, it must be lived. Not simply in gestures, but in life’s most ordinary expressions. Paganism is defined primarily in reference to the sacred … It affirms the immanence of the sacred.’

For both Gérard and Vial, paganism the authentic ‘religion,’ for it ties men of the same community together and ties them to a cosmos in which the divine is everywhere, where the gods are not separated from, but part of, the profane world.

Similarly, Gnosticism, which inspires Freemasonry, has nothing to do with paganism. Paganism’s constituting traits are: the presence of the sacred and the supernatural within nature; a cyclical or spherical conception of time; the refusal to consider nature the ‘property’ of the men who exploit and thus destroy it; the coming-and-going of sensuality and asceticism; the unqualified apology of the life-force (the ‘yes to life’ and ‘the Great Health’ of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra); the idea that the world is ‘uncreated’ and corresponds to a river of becoming, without beginning or end; the tragic sentiment of life refusing all nihilism; the cult of ancestors, of the line, of our people’s biological and cultural identity; the refusal of all revealed and universal Truths and thus the refusal of all fanaticism, dogmatism, and forced proselytism.

We need to beware, though, of certain so-called pagans who hold that paganism stands for ‘absolute tolerance,’ in the name of ‘social polytheism.’ Such pagans, like the post-conciliar Church, support, for instance, immigration and Islam and refuse to struggle against the reigning social decadence. This pseudo-paganism of secular clerics gives the pagan spirit a Leftist slant. It’s a pseudo-paganism, in effect – purely negative and reactive, a hollow Judaeo-Christianity, an anti-Catholic fixation.

It’s not a philosophy of life, but an attitude of resentment. Besides, these pseudo-pagans, who lack true culture, have never been able to define nor positively live their assumed ‘paganism.’ In a totally absurd way, it’s even led them to a pro-Islam position (whose Qur’an considers pagans ‘idolaters’ – and whose lot is that of the Eid al-Adha’s slaughtered sheep) – and to the egalitarianism of absolute toleration for every form of deviance, justified in the name of a purely casuistic ‘social polytheism’ (hemophilia, antiracism, ethno-pluralism, tribalism, etc.) One doesn’t even have to criticise the Church to assume the position of Monsignor Gaillot and the post-conciliar humanitarians.

Against this, we affirm that paganism is in essence a partisan of social order – which it sees as reflecting the cosmic order, it equally opposes the fusion of peoples, random mixing, and thus a massifying individualism. The pagan vision of the world is holistic and organic and views its people as a hierarchical community of destiny. Like ancient Greek paganism, the notion of the City, inseparable from notions of patriotism and ethnic identity, is fundamental the pagan conception of the world. Similarly, Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power perfectly accords with paganism (to the degree it respects the natural, cosmic order).

In Europe, paganism – her ancient religion, far older than Christianity – has taken several forms: first there’s a ‘philosophical’ paganism (or neo-paganism), with Hellenic, Roman, Germanic, Scandinavian, etc., components, all of which hold no belief in anthropocentric gods, but rather in a sacred, polytheistic, and pantheistic vision of the world, in which the divinities are eternal allegories representing the multiplicities of life and cosmos; this paganism knows numerous communal rituals linked to the different stages of human life and to the seasonal cycles; it’s been evident in European art for centuries. There’s also a ‘wild’ paganism that stretches from the (pseudo-pagan) New Age to European Buddhism. Another false paganism is intellectualist paganism, which is often just a form of anti-Catholic hatred; what Gérard calls ‘salon paganism.’ And finally, there’s the latent or implicit paganism of traditional Catholicism and Orthodoxy, especially evident in their polytheistic cults.

There’s no pagan ‘Church.’ Paganism isn’t sociologically unified – one needs to speak of paganisms. The word itself is ambiguous, coined by Christians to designate the religion of peasants (pagani).

It might also be noted that sects belong neither to paganism nor its philosophy, but to derivations of the mystic monotheistic salvation religions.

Pagans today need to have the intelligence and wisdom to not – apriori – reject traditional Christianity, and vice versa, for the struggle against the common enemy is what’s most important. Not sectarianism, but a historic compromise, is needed here. No reconciliation, by contrast, is possible with the Judaeo-Christianity of the post-conciliar Left.

The main pagan reproach of Christianity (as made by Pierre Vial, Giorgio Locchi, and Louis Rougier) is its roots in universalism and egalitarianism and its progressive view of history; totalitarian ideologies of salvation, such as globalist liberalism, with its end to history and its disarming humanitarianism, are simply secularised forms of Christianity. Universalism, for example, has been transformed into a secular cosmopolitanism, and Christian charity into a masochistic humanitarianism. Universal charity, as it comes from Judaeo-Christianity and clashes with the pagan world vision, has been central to Europe’s moral disarmament, to its failure to resist the Third World’s colonising invasion. Similarly, in situating God outside or above the universe and declaring the latter profane, Judaeo-Christianity opened the way to an atheistic materialism. Following Augustine and Aquinas, traditional Christianity claimed that the equality and universality of men before God is destined not for the City, but for the beyond, following the Last Judgment.

We need, henceforth, to recognise that the egalitarian, universalist, and anti-nationalist virus of the early Christians, neutralised by the Medieval Church and by chivalry, has returned in force with the modern post-conciliar Church. Traditional Christianity, whether Catholic or Orthodox, incorporated important pagan elements, notably in the polytheism of the Holy Trinity, the cult of the saints and the Virgin Mary, etc. We might also mention Pelagius, Teilhard de Chardin, Giordano Bruno, or other Churchmen who attempted a synthesis of European Christianity and paganism.

The most important thing today is to confront the common enemy, Islam – the most abstract, the most intolerant, the most dangerous of the monotheistic religions (founding model of totalitarianism, even more so than Communism), with which, unfortunately, the Catholic hierarchy and our pseudo-pagan ‘ethno-pluralist’ intellectuals suicidally collaborate. In the course of the Twenty-first century, it’s not unreasonable to expect that authentic pagans in Europe and India will be the ones manning the front line in the struggle against the desert’s totalitarian religion – not the Catholic clerics or republican ‘secularists.’

It would be vain to instrumentalise paganism as a ‘political religion.’ For paganism is above all an attitude, a philosophical, spiritual positioning, a choice of values, and in no case does it have a vocation to institutionalise itself as a religion – as a ‘new Church.’ European Catholicism – before it was desacralised by Vatican II – included important pagan elements, to such a degree that certain modern theologians accuse it of having been a ‘pagano-Christianity’ – the same reproach Luther and Calvin made of it. Slavic-Greek Orthodoxy still retains many pagan remnants.

The historic alliance of authentic pagan philosophers (inspired by the heritage of Greece, Rome, and India) to traditional European Christianity is a prerequisite to the merciless struggle that is to be waged against the Masonic gnosis, the obscurantism of the Muslim colonisers, and the virus of materialism.

————-

Excerpt from: Faye, Guillaume. Why We Fight: Manifesto for the European Resistance. London: Arktos Media, 2011, pp. 205-210.

 

Advertisements

Mircea Eliade: An Appreciation – Levy

Mircea Eliade: An Appreciation

by David J. Levy

 

The work of Mircea Eliade has found a ready audience among thinking conservatives ever since it began to be widely known in the 1950’s. It may seem strange that a current of thought rooted as self-consciously as conservatism in the distinctive religious and cultural heritage of the West should be so stimulated by the writings of this student of oriental and archaic religions. To understand the reasons for this is to grasp not only the meaning of Eliade’s work in the context of our present cultural plight but an important point about any coherent conservative philosophy. Let me label that point, the postulate of permanence. It may be expressed as follows: that coherent conservatism rests on the belief that what is permanent in the human condition, that is to say in human nature and in the enveloping reality in which we participate, is more significant for political philosophy than what changes. Eliade’s lifelong vocation has been to grasp and communicate the meaning of the symbols, rites and myths of cultures remote from our own. His insistence that these cultural expressions can and must be understood as an integral part of the human response to the mysteries of existence strikes a responsive chord in the conservative consciousness; just as the conservative emphasis on the unchanging character of man’s nature and status in the order of being finds a ready echo in Eliade’s work. For underlying the stress which he places upon the abiding truth to be discovered in the symbols of oriental and archaic, or non-literate, religions is the recognition that there is an order of being which persists through history – an order to which man responds through the creation of symbols allowing him to discover and express the meaning of his existence. Eliade’s voluminous writings and wide-ranging scholarship introduce the reader to unfamiliar facets of this process. Yet the shock of unfamiliarity is only the prelude to recognition. Exploration prepares the way for anamnesis in that the encounter with an apparently exotic world of thought and beliefs can restore awareness of truths that have slipped from Western consciousness. This is an integral part of Eliade’s purpose. As he conceives it, the history of religions, of which he is our foremost practitioner, is both a journey into strange territory and a long path home. The encounter with other, religiously centered cultures is meant to reawaken us to the spiritual sources of our own.

Eliade is a Romanian, born in Bucharest in 1907. After graduating from Bucharest University in 1928 he was awarded a scholarship by the Maharajah of Kasimbazar which allowed him to spend the next four years studying in India. This period of immersion in Hindu culture was enormously important for the development of the young scholar’s thought. In his experience of Indian life and religion lies the source of Eliade’s belief that the central meaning of religion is to be found in man’s effort to transcend his status as a historical being subject to change and decay and reach a realm of changeless perfection. “It is difficult,” Eliade writes, “to imagine how the human mind could function without the conviction that there is something irreducibly real in the world, and it is impossible to imagine how consciousness could arise without conferring meaning on man’s drives and experience.. . Through the experience .of the sacred, the human mind grasped the difference between that which reveals itself as real, powerful, rich and meaningful, and that which does not – i.e. the chaotic and dangerous flux of things, their fortuitous, meaningless appearances and disappearances.”[1] In Hinduism Eliade first saw something that he later found to be true of all religion – that the achievement of meaning in human existence and the experience of the sacred are intimately linked. Homo religiosus of whatever tradition catches and clings to intimations of the sacred in the profane course of events. What this means is not that the consciousness of religious man rejects the conditions of human existence as unworthy of his true spiritual nature, as the Gnostics would have us believe, but that he sees the world as itself symbolic, a universal cipher of a reality beyond. This according to Eliade is at the heart of every religious world view.

When he returned to Romania in 1932, Eliade found that his years in India   him a new capacity to sympathize with the popular the peasantry of his native land.Practices and beliefs that had earlier puzzled and even embarrassed him took on a fresh significance. He now understood, the religious function of the  icons so characteristic of Orthodoxy: “Before my stay in India,” he recalls, “I was rather disturbed by the fetishistic side of such an action, and I thought that ‘true religion’ was first of all contemplation and meditation, like any Christian who sees himself as an enlightened believer. But when I saw the extraordinary importance of symbolism for the Indian people, I realized that until then I had very much underestimated the existential scope of symbol and image.”[2] The power of the symbol, as object of veneration,to open the mind to awareness of the sacred was one of the most important lessons that Eliade learned in India.Another was the value of spiritual disciplines. For during his stay he not only learned Sanscrit and studied Hindu thought but spent some time practicing Yoga in the Himalayas under the noted master Swami Shivananda.

Yoga was the subject of the doctoral dissertation which Eliade presented in 1933. In the same year his first novel Maitreyi was published to great acclaim. The young university teacher became instantaneously a well-known figure on the Romanian cultural scene. Indeed, among his fellow countrymen his reputation as a novelist and teller of tales has always been at least as great as his name for scholarship. When a Festschrift, Myths and Symbols, was published in his honor in 1969 most of the Romanian contributors chose to write about his literary works which are, even now, scarcely known in the English speaking world.[3] In this they echoed Eliade’s own judgment of their importance. Reading his journal, it is clear that at times the demands of scholarship have seemed an almost intolerable distraction from the pursuit of his vocation as a novelist. Nor is this altogether surprising. Eliade comes from a culture in which the scholar, the poet, and the novelist were often one and the same. He sees the novel as a literary form occupying an essential place in modern Western consciousness. The novel is, we might say, the present incarnation of fable and, as such, a privileged ground for the survival of mythical themes and symbols which retain a compelling power over the human psyche. Eliade’s sense of the living force of symbol informs his literary no less than his scholarly work.

With the French publication of his book on Yoga in 1936 Eliade began to acquire an international reputation. In 1940 he was appointed cultural attaché to the Romanian legation in London, being transferred to Lisbon the next year. The years surrounding the war provide the setting for Eliade’s most ambitious novel The Forbidden Forest. It is a long book, almost six hundred pages in English translation, whose scope and manner invite comparison with Proust. Through the life of his central character, Stefan Viziru, Eliade explores a theme which is never far from his mind – man’s quest for an escape from time and “the terror of history.” The rise of Romanian fascism, the disastrous war against the Soviet Union and the subsequent communist invasion and takeover of the country form the terrifying backdrop to this epic of spiritual survival. Stefan Viziru is caught in the tragic rush of events and yet, as Virgil Nemoianu puts it, somehow distanced from them by his will “to capture or recapture a secret experience of ‘totality’ which partakes equally of an absolute love and of a revelation of the sacred in the profane. Ultimately this amounts to a stepping outside Time, which the individual has to attempt, not only for the sake of his personal redemption, but also as a matter of national concern: Romanians can survive only by boycotting History… , by evading its crushing hostility to them through some decisive ontological withdrawal.”

Nemoianu’s reference to Romanian history is appropriate. There is in every authentic thinker, every true philosopher or lover of wisdom, an intimate relationship between the challenge of life and the path of reflection. In Eliade’s case, the consciousness of Romania as a nation more often the victim than the maker of its destiny played an important, if largely covert part in the development of his thought, especially his opposition to every intellectual system that tries to identify ultimate reality with the course of history. If it was the Indian experience that formed Eliade’s conception of religion as man’s effort to achieve contact with an absolute reality beyond the ravages of time, then it was his consciousness of himself as a Romanian that opened his mind to such a view in the first place and later confirmed its truth in the harsh experience of personal exile and national defeat. Eliade knows as well as anyone that history cannot be ignored – the finger on the trigger is as real as the life it takes – and yet there is, he insists, something more, a realm of being revealed only in religious experience.

Since Eliade is sometimes accused of regarding history as unimportant it is worth quoting a passage in which he makes his position clear: “The expressions ‘history’ and ‘historic’ can occasion much confusion; they indicate, on the one hand, all that is concrete and authentic in a given human existence, as opposed to the unauthentic existence constituted by evasions and automatisms of every kind. On the other hand, in the various historicist and existentialist currents of thought, ‘history’ and ‘historic’ seem to imply that human existence is authentic only insofar as it is reduced to the awakened consciousness of its historic moment. It is to the latter, the ‘totalitarian’ meaning of history that I am referring when I take issue against ‘historicisms’. . . the authenticity of an existence cannot be limited to the consciousness of its own historicity.”[4] Eliade speaks of love, anxiety, melancholy and joy as fundamental experiences which together constitute the integral man “who neither denies himself to his historic moment, nor consents to be identified with it.” Historicism, as Eliade describes it, is mistaken because it identifies man’s essence with historical existence and does not see that history determines neither the nature of reality nor the consciousness which responds to it. Fundamental experiences of consciousness, love and anxiety, melancholy and joy, happen in history but they are not historically relative. Rather they represent permanent forms of human response. They are the precondition and not the product of history. While existing in the historical stream man never loses touch with that which is beyond history and it is the peculiar function of religious symbolism to express this relationship to the ground of his being – the ultimate reality that makes him what he is and gives meaning to his existence. Religious man, Eliade suggests, does not deny the truth of experience but seeks to grasp its covert meaning. Awareness of the sacred, the “wholly other” which may paradoxically manifest itself in the most familiar item of experience, is a matter of spiritual growth and not sensual atrophy. What Eliade calls “the dialectic of the sacred’ is the process by which a being or event becomes the cipher or symbol of something beyond without ceasing to be itself. Employing the vocabulary of Hinduism, Maya, the divine play or cosmic illusion of the passing world, is simultaneously Brahman, the sign of the absolute. As the Chandogya Upanishad put it, for the religious man, “Verily, this whole world is Brahman, from which he comes forth, without which he will be dissolved and in which he breathes. Tranquil, he should meditate on it.” Was Henri Bergson saying anything other when he declared in a lecture that enthralled the young Jacques Maritain: “it is in the absolute that we live and move and have our being”? As Eliade frequently points out, while the terms of religious discourse vary from place to place and time to time, the reality which they try to express is everywhere the same. The dialectic of the sacred expresses the mystery of the manifestation of eternal Being in time. It is small wonder if the effort to express it seems at times to break the bounds of what can be said. The inadequacy of expression to experience in the sphere of religion is a fact of life and quite beyond repair. We see through a glass darkly or not at all.

Eliade did not return to Romania after the war. He lived at first in Paris and then, since 1956, in Chicago where he succeeded Joachim Wach as Professor of the History of Religions. America is now his home but his sense of exile remains, giving a unique. personal tone to his continuing meditation on the meaning of religious experience in the frequently distressing course of life. This personal note comes out most clearly in the journal which Eliade kept between 1945 and 1969, a portion of which appeared in English translation under the title No Souvenirs. It is a work of the greatest interest to anyone wishing to understand the driving force behind his work, which is found in his belief in the enduring existential relevance of the material he studies. No Souvenirs records Eliade’s meetings with many of the significant figures in contemporary culture but, more than that, it provides a chronicle of his spiritual Odyssey through the postwar years. Eliade interprets his own fate and that of his nation in the light of his unequalled acquaintance with parallels and archetypes drawn from the full range of human experience. The tragic but not hopeless history of one man and people becomes exemplary for the understanding of permanent features of man’s being in the world.

“Every exile,” he wrote in 1960, “is a Ulysses traveling toward Ithaca. Every real existence reproduces the Odyssey. The path toward Ithaca, toward the center. I had known all that for a long time. What I have just discovered is that the chance to become a new Ulysses is given to any exile whatsoever (precisely because he has been condemned by the gods, that is, by the ‘powers’ which decide historical, earthly destinies). But to realize this, the exile must be capable of penetrating the hidden meaning of his wanderings, and understanding them as a long series of initiation trials (willed by the gods) and so many obstacles on the path which brings him back to the hearth (toward the center). That means: seeing signs, hidden meanings, symbols, in the sufferings, the depressions, the dry periods in everyday life. Seeing them and reading them even if they aren’t there; if one sees them one can build a structure and read a message in the formless flow of things and the monotonous flux of historical facts.”[5] Behind this passage lies a whole philosophy of man, a philosophical anthropology which stresses the need to find meaning in existence while resolutely facing the fact that there is no reassurance to be found in the temporal order of events. In other words, Eliade introduces his readers to the dimension of meaning conveyed by ancient myth while rejecting the specifically modern, historicist myth, the superstition of “progress” and “the meaning of history” which identifies temporal succession with ontological and ethical order. The experience of the historical disasters of the twentieth century has already done much to undermine this view and Eliade believes that we are now more likely than were our grandparents to understand the Weltanschauung of men for whom history was no freeway to redemption but a time of trial and terror. Indeed, he suggests that it is only insofar as we are able to do this that we will avoid the cultural despair typical of recent Western thought and art.

But how can this be done? The cultures of other times and places exist for us as complexes of symbols whose meaning is not transparent but demands interpretation. The theory and practice of interpretation – hermeneutics as it is often called – thus lies at the center of the history of religions as it must in every area where the works of man are the object of study. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur points out that Eliade’s approach to symbols stands in stark contrast to the hermeneutics of suspicion as practiced by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. While the latter, each in his fashion, aim to demystify symbolic expression in order to expose the harsh and unacceptable reality that lies beneath – class interest, the will to power, and infantile sexuality respectively – Eliade conceives his task in terms of the recollection of meaning, the deciphering of the truth of being embodied in the symbol and culturally maintained in myths and rituals: “Symbolic thinking,” he writes, “…is consubstantial with human existence, it comes before language and discursive reason. The symbol reveals certain aspects of reality – the deepest aspects – which defy other means of knowledge. Images, symbols and myths are not irresponsible creations of the psyche; they respond to a need and fulfill a function, that of bringing to light the most hidden modalities of being.”[6]

This tendency to treat symbols as coded truths rather than irresponsible fantasies or indices of cultural immaturity is characteristic not only of Eliade’s work but of much of the most fruitful scholarship in the humanities. Eric Voegelin, for instance, speaks of an equivalence between experience and symbols, meaning the way in which a certain type of symbol appears in history as a response to certain identifiable circumstances. Eliade for his part says: “The greatest claim to merit of the history of religions is precisely its effort to decipher in a ‘fact,’ conditioned as it is by the historical moment and cultural style of its epoch, the existential situation that made it possible.”[7] To understand the meaning of a particular myth or rite involves setting it in its context. The specific insight of men like Eliade and Voegelin is that there is more to this context than the transient or merely historical. Whatever the course of events that an individual or group endures, the structure of existence remains the same. Birth, copulation and death, the fact of coming into being and passing away, must be faced in a way consistent with the no less universal need of the psyche to see life as possessing a certain meaning or order.

In Eliade’s case the attempt to recollect and communicate the truths expressed in the symbolism of archaic and oriental religions leads him to reject many of the assumptions of previous scholars. Explicitly or not, most of his predecessors in the field have approached the data with minds conditioned by belief in the self-evident superiority of modem Western thought forms. Eliade’s opposition to historicism and sensitivity to the coherence of non-Western world views produces a radical questioning of all such complacency. Referring to the author of The Golden Bough, he writes: “Where a Frazer could see nothing but ‘superstition,’ a metaphysic was already implicit, even though it was expressed by a pattern of symbols rather than by the interplay of concepts: a metaphysic – that is, a whole and coherent conception of Reality, not a series of instinctive gestures ruled by the same fundamental ‘reaction of the human animal in confrontation with Nature.’”[8]

Eliade calls the implicit metaphysic of religious symbolism “archaic ontology.” However this is in one sense a misleading phrase, for the conception of reality involved is not confined to the religious universe of archaic, or non-literate, peoples. Rather, it is the living core of the religious view of the world as such, one which neither Indian speculation nor Judaeo-Christian revelation definitively transcend. Archaic ontology embodies the effort to express awareness of an ultimate reality beyond history and change. There is nothing intellectually primitive about it. When the intelligible essence of myth, rite and symbol is grasped what we find is not a shoddy tissue of superstition but a creative interpretation of human existence as participation in universal, cosmological order. Simply put, the fundamental problem which man faces is how he may interpret his existence as meaningful in spite of the disasters that befall him in life. Somehow the order to which the psyche aspires must be matched to the experienced nature of the cosmos. As Eliade puts it, the terror of history must be overcome, for history tears the fabric of meaning by bringing everything to oblivion.

Insofar as there is a historical dimension to archaic ontology it is a “sacred history.” Sacred history, in the form of myth, recounts the origins of the cosmos or any part of it. It tells how the world was made as it is by the gods and of the exemplary deeds of mythical heroes. Through myth man accounts for his own existence and nature as well as that of the cosmos. Myths tell him what he is and why. They “preserve and transmit the paradigms, the exemplary models, for all responsible activities in which men engage. By virtue of these paradigmatic models revealed to men in mythical times, the Cosmos and society are periodically regenerated.”[9] Myth recounts origins, in illo tempore, and this mythical time can be reactualized through the ritual repetition of archetypal gestures and events. To recollect or repeat is to reactualize a time when everything was new and uncorrupted. It is to participate in the renewal of the world through repetition of the original act of creation by which the order of the cosmos was brought out of chaos. This theme of the regeneration of the world is difficult for the modem Westerner to grasp. The image of the arrow of time which expresses the irreversibility of the historical moment is deeply etched in our consciousness. Nevertheless it is not impossible to understand the significance which the repetition of archetypal events and gestures has for archaic man. Our own ceremonies and celebrations – Christmas, Passover, or Thanksgiving for instance – recall culturally or spiritually significant events, while in at least one case, the celebration of Holy Communion, what is involved is nothing less than the reactualization of an event which, in terms of historical time alone, belongs irredeemably to the past. The sacred time of the Mass and the ever presence of Christ’s sacrifice within it testifies to a continuity between Christianity and the most profound conceptions of archaic ontology.

Eliade’s analysis of archaic ontology in The Myth of the Eternal Return is remarkably successful as an attempt to communicate the meaning of ancient myth and ritual to the modern reader. The universality of the ontology he discovers, as well as the possibility of making it comprehensible to his audience, is rooted in the unity of man as a symbol making animal and the permanence of the fundamental cosmic structures to which the human mind responds. From the conjunction of the two – the creative meeting of psyche and cosmos – there is born a coherent interpretation of existence which, to a unique extent, provides man with answers to the questions that trouble him most deeply. The symbols of religion reveal a continuity between the structures of human existence and those of the cosmos. In doing isolation in a cold and heartless universe, to see himself as a partner in a world that manifests order. When archaic man interprets his life and destiny by analogy with the repetitive and cyclical rhythms of nature he lays claim to a unity between psychic and cosmic reality that assuages the fear of oblivion. He is never far from death but he knows that when the moon vanishes from the sky the darkness is only a prelude to its return. The barren surface of the winter landscape is no more than a mask before the promise of spring renewal. As part of the cosmos, archaic man sees his life as participating in the same rhythms. No end is final. No merely historical disaster is more than moment in a process which renews and restores. “The religious symbols which point to the structures of life… unveil the miraculous, inexplicable side of life, and at the same time the sacramental dimensions of human existence. ‘Deciphered’ in the light of religious symbols, human life reveals a hidden side: it comes from ‘another part,’ from far off; it is ‘divine’ in the sense that it is the work of the gods or of supernatural beings.”[10] Thus religious symbols do not only bind the structures of psyche and cosmos in a tight web of meaning but also serve to link the limited space of experienced reality with the mysterious unknown out of which it emerges and into which it passes. What happened in illo tempore provides the mind with sufficient reason for the world we know.

Eliade believes that the history of religions can provide the foundation for a new humanism. The reflection of the West upon its own past, the core of traditional humanism, must be supplemented with a dialogue between East and West and a widening of the historical and anthropological horizon to include archaic cultures. “More than any other humanistic discipline,” he claims, “… history of religions can open the way to a philosophical anthropology. For the sacred is a universal dimension and… the beginnings of culture are rooted in religious experiences and beliefs. Furthermore, even after they are radically secularized, such cultural creations as social institutions, technology, moral ideas, arts, etc., cannot be understood correctly if one does not know their original religious matrix, which they tacitly criticized, modified, or rejected on becoming what they are now: secular cultural values. Thus, the historian of religions is in a position to grasp the permanence of what has been called man’s specific existential situation of ‘being in the world,’ for the experience of the sacred is its correlate. In fact, man’s becoming aware of his own mode of being and assuming his presence in the world constitute a ‘religious’ experience.”[ 11]

This emphasis upon the discovery of the religious dimension as original to and formative of man’s discovery of the truth of his being is certainly a major reason for Eliade’s appeal to conservatives. Even among those whose thought is not anchored in Christian or Jewish belief there is a natural affinity for a religious conception of the unchanging conditions of human existence. At the same time the breadth of Eliade’s horizon, his incorporation of the widest possible range of data, poses a special challenge. The symbols we encounter are strange and do not yield their meaning easily. As Ricoeur puts it, “Le symbole donne à penser”: symbolism invites thought, the symbol provokes philosophical reflection which extracts a meaning not visible to the initial glance. If appreciation of the permanence of the human condition is a central feature of any coherent conservative philosophy we can learn as much from other cultures as from our own past. To do this, however, we must first learn to decipher the symbols in which the men of other times and places have articulated their response to the tensions of existence. The sympathy which Mircea Eliade has brought to this task makes him a model for us all.

Notes

[1] Mircea Eliade: The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 1.

[2] Encounter, Vol. LIV, No. 3 (March 1980).

[3] The University of Notre Dame has recently, published English translations of two of Eliade’s novels. These are The Forbidden Forest (1978) and The Old Man and the Bureaucrats (1979).

[4] Mircea Eliade: Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism (London: Harvill Press, 1961), pp. 171-2.

[5] Mircea Eliade: No Souvenirs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). pp. 84-5.

[6] 1mages and Symbols, p. 12.

[7] Mircea Eliade: “Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism,” in The History of Religions, edited by Mircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kitagawa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 88.

[8] Images and Symbols. p. 176.

[9] The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos and History (Princeton University Press, 1954). p. xiv.

[10] “Methodological Remarks etc.” loc.cit., p. 98.

[11] The Quest, p. 9.

 

———————

Levy, David J. “Mircea Eliade: An Appreciation.” Modern Age, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Spring 1981), pp. 155-161. Retrieved from: <http://www.mmisi.org/ma/25_02/levy.pdf >.

Note: We also recommend to our readers the key excerpts from Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, made available on our site along with some information on further reading: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/sacred-profane-eliade/ >.

 

New Paradigm of Science – Dugin

New Paradigm of Science

Speech in the Tokyo University

By Alexander Dugin

 

We regard the science as a system of relations of a rational man with a mechanistically interpreted reality. Having arisen at the edge of the New Time in Europe, that system of relations includes both theory – the knowledge about that reality (which claims its own objective character, verifiability and indisputability) – and practice (technics) – the methods of affecting that reality.

The rational man, the man who bases his perception of the world on the “common sense” (“la bonne raison”, “bon sens” or “la bonne foi”) is the subject of the modern science, its self, its creator, its main developer. In the pre-scientific period such a subject did not exist purely or, at least, it did not claim for the rational approach as the only one to formulate the truths of the surrounding reality’s nature. Some certain superrational dogmas and myths always prevailed over the rational man. As to science, it set itself to emancipation from non-rational foundations from the very beginning. And this is just what one of its specific distinctive features consists in. Where this criterion is not observed, we cannot talk about the science in the strict (modern) sense of that word and should use other formulas, such as “pre-scientific conceptions”, “para-scientific method”, “pre-scientific” and in some situations even “post-scientific” approaches.

The mechanistic and atomistic interpretation of reality is the other necessary criterion of understanding science. Only the mechanistic nature, deprived of any faint resemblance of “its immanent-essential life” must be the object of the science. As regards this, Martin Heidegger wrote:

“The science establishes the Actual. It presses for the Actual to appear every time as a result of one or another action, in other words, to appear in the form of visible aftereffects of some causes, which give a good ground for them.”

Such objective-made reality functions completely according to cause-and-effect relationship and is subordinate to a mechanistic determinism. That reality is supposed to be “accessible to strict measurement” (as M. Plank said). As to M. Heidegger, he emphasizes that “any objectivation is calculation”. So then the outside world in the modern science is taken as the Absolute Object, lying before the Absolute Subject, the “Subjective Subject”, and they do not have any common mediating substance with each other. Hence follows the most important classic science principle of reducing “the organism to the mechanism”, the representation of an organism as a complicated, intricate version of a mechanism. In turn, from this emerged the Cartesian thesis of “the animals as mechanical apparatuses” and the radical Lamerti’s statement that “the man is nothing else but the machine”.

Such vision of the world and of the man attains prevalence (in Europe) only in New Time and just in the same period the concept of “science” is realized as describing some system of “exact” relations of two set-apart poles – of the “Subjective Subject” and of the “Objective Object”. In other epochs the term “science” was used in some other, more wide and less precise sense, since both the man and the Nature were perceived absolutely otherwise and their interrelations had fundamentally different character.

So, the main quality of a science as itself consists in striving to attach some autonomous character to the deterministic and mechanistic system of relations between the subject and the object, in purifying that system of relations from any collateral and unscientific, extrascientific factors (theology, traditions, myths, “superstitions” and so forth).

In turn, such an autonomous state, attained by the science, should have brought to ranking the scientific knowledge in its own opinion above the rest gnoseological patterns of pre-scientific and unscientific origin. This last point is extremely essential, since in a historical process the substance of the science was developed in dispute with comprehensive gnoseological systems, mostly related with religions and other topping institutes of a traditional society. The opposition of the science as specific gnoseological system, claiming independence and dominance, to other patterns of cognition and perception of reality, that are inherent in a traditional society, makes the science an ideologically concerned phenomenon.

Methodology of meta-paradigms (Sphere, Ray, Segment)

The main methodological instrument we employ is a principle of paradigms.

The Greek word “paradeigma” literally means “what predetermines the character of the manifested, but at the same time remains outside the manifested” (“para” signifies “over”, “above”, “by what”, “about what”, and “deigma” signifies “manifestation”). In the most broad sense, it is an initial pattern, a matrix, which prefers to act not directly, but through its own manifestations, having predetermined their structure. The paradigm is not manifested by itself and represents a structure-forming reality, which, being not accessible to direct introspection, always remaining “off screen”, establishes the main, basic, fundamental parameters of human thinking and human being. The specificity of paradigm consists in that gnoseological and ontological aspects in it are not divided yet and are subject to distinguishing only as our basic intuitions, having been sifted through the paradigmatic sieve, take form of one or another affirmation of gnoseological or ontological character.

The term “paradigm” was applied by the Platonic and neo-Platonic philosophy schools for describing some supreme, transcendent example, predetermining the structure and form of material things. It was introduced in the science history methodology anew by G. Bergman, who interpreted it as some common principles and standards of the methodological research. T. Kuhn gave more wide interpretation (than by Bergman) of the term, summarizing in it the general context of the scientific conceptions, axioms, methods and certainties, which predetermine weltanshaaung orientations, shared by the scientific community in the given historical situation. Kuhn made the paradigmatic method of research a principle instrument for researching the structure of scientific-technical revolutions. Kuhn’s term “disciplinary matrix” was a specified synonym for “paradigm”.

Even more broad sense was implied in that term by Fritjof Capra, who proposed opposition of two paradigms: the old (classic, Cartesian-Newtonian) one and the new, named by him as “holistic” or “ecologic”, one, destined to replace the rational-discontinuous methodology of mainstream science of New Time.

We use the term “paradigm” in the most common sense, different from those of G. Bergman, T. Kuhn, F. Capra, in the sense of generalization universality. That’s why, to give a more accurate definition, we have had to introduce a concept of “metaparadigm”. We interpret it as a vast aggregate of non-manifest orientations that predetermine the manner itself of understanding and viewing reality’s nature and that, being formed, may give birth to manifold philosophical, scientific, religious, mythological, cultural systems and conceptions, which have some common denominator despite all their formal difference.

In other words, the paradigm is not a myth, but a system of myths and it is able to generate new mythological subjects and recombinations. The paradigm is not a theology, but a system of theologies, which, differing in their concrete affirmations, are reduced to the common proto-matrix. The paradigm is not an ideology, but some pre-ideological nebula, able to crystallize out of itself (as in Laplace’s hypothesis) uncertainly large system of ideologies. The paradigm is not an ideology, but an ultimately underlying reason for ideologies, able to reveal similarity in ideologies, not just different externally, but even opposite, and vice versa, show a fundamental differences in ideologies, very like formally.

In such a vision one cannot draw a strict distinction between a gnoseological ingredient and an ontological ingredient of a paradigm. Each of the global paradigms certainly sets up axiomatic structures, where the statuses of Being, Consciousness, Spirit, World, Origin and their interrelations are predetermined. As to empirical confirmations or refutations of those axiomatic structures, they do not even apply to the paradigms directly, since they affect intermediate levels of formal realization. The question of reflection on the paradigms themselves and their quality is put in special historical moments only, when transition from one paradigm to another occurs. But as soon as the change is accomplished, the possibility itself of such reflection is reduced to minimum. The paradigm predetermines how is what is, what is what is, and finally, how we cognize what is. It is a closed set. In some paradigms the ontology and the gnoseology are knowingly merged, in the others are separated. But it is not a property of level or degree of cognition, it is a result of a paradigmatic influence, which is expressed in multiform series of scientifical, philosiphical, mythological and cultural discourses.

As the most general paradigms we propose to take three paradigms – paradigms of Sphere, of Ray and of Segment. Each of these paradigms might underlie philosophy, science, mythology, theology, gnoseology, and so on. Each paradigm dictates its own model of association with the world, world’s general structure conception, world’s cognition aspects and models.

It is exactly the dialectical development of these paradigms, their interrelationship, and their change determine, in our opinion, the flow of human history, determine the emergence of science itself, its development, conditions of its coming into being. Each of the paradigms totally and radically changes the meaning of the terms and intellectual constructions, which in the formal and lexical way might look identical. The transition from one paradigm to another basically changes the main parameters of reality perception by a human, transforms the status of a human himself.

Each of the paradigms gains prevalence in certain historical periods. And at first sight, their evolution has the character of succession: for example, the paradigm of Sphere was peculiar to the ancient humankind and to traditional societies initially. It is primordial and is found in most ancient and modern (mostly Oriental) civilizations. In historical and geographical senses that paradigm is spread more widely than two others. It corresponds with basic, profound and deep strata of human’s psyche and therefore remains surprisingly stable even in the periods when on the surface it is displaced by other alternative paradigms. The paradigm of the Sphere is based on the fact that the Deity / proto-Principle / Origin is found inside the World, is cosubstantial to the World, inseparably and substantially linked with the World. This gives birth to conception of “cyclic time”, “eternal return”. This motive is a commonplace in all mythological and religious teachings except for Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam; but it is still present in those three in the form of mystical, esoteric trends, somewhat different from dogmatic norms.

The paradigm of the Ray is the next one both in logical and historical aspect. It is connected with the unique theology of those religious forms, that are called “religions of Revelation” or “monotheism”. The idea of world creation from nothing, “ex nihilo” underlies the paradigm of Ray. Such an approach momentarily breaks the continuity of the spherical world, evenly imbued by the Divine presence, the presence of proto-Principle. Here God-Creator seems to be external to the Universe, separated from the nature of Universe. The relation of the beings, present on Earth, to the Origin immediately changes. The reality becomes locked from one side, from the side of its emergence, its origin. The Ray paradigm gives birth to one-directional time, gives grounds for turning history into a “time arrow”. However, the religions of Revelation (though in varied forms) teach that in certain stages of humankind history the alienation, which underlies creation ex nihilo, will be overcome as a display of the “Divine mercy”. And starting from a certain moment the immanent created reality will be “atoned”, “saved” and elevated to the transcendent Origin. That epoch of atonement is called “eschatological” or “messianic”. The world to that moment discontinues being alienated from the Creator and transits to some other mode of being, which roughly reminds of the reality conceptions in the Sphere paradigm. Hence follows that the Ray (or the Hemisphere) is limited from one side, from the side of ‘world creation from nothing’ dogma, and is unlimited from the other side. This “unlimitedness” does not imply indefinitely long duration. The symbol of Ray is taken here metaphorically, just in order to stress the “half-indefinite” character of the model, beginning with the radical rupture and resulting in the blessed reconciliation and reunification. That messianic motive is to varied extent inherent in all monotheistic religions, but is especially clearly expressed in Judaism and Christianity, and in Christianity the eschatological aspect is accentuated unprecedentedly.

The Ray paradigm follows the Sphere paradigm both in logical and historical aspect. It is as if it dissects the Sphere, cutting off the half, that postulated the direct resulting from God (what is called “manifestationism” or “ex deo” creation).

Further, the Segment paradigm follows the Ray paradigm. Here the world’s limitedness from both sides is postulated. Such world appears from nothing and disappears in nothing. It has no direct Divine Origin and no hope for return to Deity. The Universe is conceived as God-abandoned objective reality, closed from all sides by non-existence and death. That paradigm is characteristic for New Time and underlies the modern science.

The Segment paradigm insists that no transition of immanent reality to the transcendent levels is possible, in its most complete forms that paradigm denies the existence of those levels at all. That’s why the Segment paradigm gravitates to atheism, rejecting the transcendent principle. In some cases, however, instead of atheism there is deism in it, which affirms a transcendent Creator, but denies messianism and eschatology. In the viewpoint of Segment paradigm, such deism does not differ from atheism and materialism in almost any way.

The Segment Paradigm gravitates to mechanistic conception of reality nature, to atomism and local situations’ priority. In that paradigm the General, the universal live interrelationship among objects, beings and phenomena is denied. The prevalent approach is discontinuity, divisibility, relativity.

The Segment paradigm follows the Ray paradigm as a result of its development. It is significant, that the Segment paradigm becomes established only where the Sphere paradigm was replaced by the Ray paradigm beforehand. There is a logical and symmetrical correspondence in that fact. With certain approximation and considering the fact that New Time is exactly characterized by the process of the Segment paradigm’s obtaining universal character and its extensive development, one may conceive the paradigm development process as a consequent transition from Sphere through Ray to Segment. In some reality aspects it is so.

So, the general process of paradigm evolution has a whole series of fine points, defining that process, as well as there is some dimensions, where the external successive transition from Sphere to Ray is compensated by the reverse phenomena, that shows ancient Sphere paradigm’ resistibility and stability as regards competing “innovative” paradigms.

We would like to solve the comprehension problem of “scientific epoch” as a whole and having an autonomous structure intellectual paradigm (the Segment paradigm) which exists along with other paradigms (the Sphere and Ray paradigm) which are based on the other premises, that are to the same extent well-grounded (or groundless) as “scientific dogmata”. Sometimes unscientific and even pre-scientific paradigms affect the evolution of the scientific orthodoxy itself, admixing to it and creating intermediate and quasi-homogeneous variants, that often evade looks of researchers who operate with conventional schemes and methodologies.

Apart from “critical rationalism” we are absolutely not sure that preserving modified norms of “classical rationality” is a self-evident truth and that giving the scientific orthodoxy up would bring to humankind’s intellectual degradation. We would like to show that the other, non-scientific paradigms also rest on quite harmonious and complete intellectual constructions, arranged otherwise (which does not mean certainly worse). On the other hand, the “epistemological anarchism” as mixture of all possible paradigms and giving up any general gnoseologic vectors at all can scarcely give really useful and correct intellectual results (though in some cases such an approach may be justified). As to theses of radical positivists, today they are not regarded as serious by anyone.

In our viewpoint, the method of “meta-paradigms” just may set one of the possible landmarks for the further scientific self-consciousness development and the evolution of the phenomenon that according some certain historical inertion (despite the obvious change of functions) is still common to call “science”.

 

—————–

The text of this speech was originally published online at the official Fourth Political Theory website (n.d.): <http://www.4pt.su/el/node/708#sthash.Okm75fc6.dpuf >. (See this essay in PDF format here: New Paradigm of Science).

Note: Our research shows that the theory of paradigms discussed in this speech is based upon the ideas which Aleksandr Dugin expounded in more depth in his dissertation Эволюция парадигмальных оснований науки (Москва: Арктогея, 2002). On the relationship between science and religion and the idea of a reform of science from a religious perspective, related ideas to Dugin’s have been advanced by Mircea Eliade and Gilbert Durand (both of whom influenced Dugin’s thought). For Dugin’s studies on these matters, see also his book Социология Воображения (Москва: Академический проект, 2010), which is his most comprehensive sociological work.

Additional note: We also recommend that our audience read Alexander Dugin’s article on modern Japanese society and culture: ‘In the Country of Rising “Do”’, <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2015/01/04/on-japan-dugin/ >. According to Dugin’s description, Japan has a society in which the qualities of modernity and tradition are very well combined. The Japanese society of recent times (the late 20^th Century and early 21^st Century) is highly advanced technologically, scientifically, and economically, but it simultaneously possesses a rich and high-quality culture which is very religious, spiritual, conservative, and ethnically identitarian in nature. In other words, it is “revolutionary conservative” because it possesses a culture where the progress of modern science is fused with the spiritual qualities of traditional society. Thus, modern Japanese society can be seen as a source of inspiration and also as a model for European Conservatives and Identitarians, who aim to create a similar type of society for European nations.

 

Fourth Political Theory (Excerpts) – Dugin

Excerpts from The Fourth Political Theory by Alexander Dugin

 

To Be or Not To Be?

In today’s world, the impression is growing that politics has ended – at least the politics that we used to know. Liberalism stubbornly fought it out with its political enemies, which had offered alternative recipes – with conservatism, monarchism, traditionalism, fascism, socialism, and communism – and, finally, at the end of the 20^th century, it beat them all. It would have been logical to surmise that politics would become liberal, while all of liberalism’s opponents, having turned up on the periphery, would begin to rethink strategies and to form a new front: the periphery against the centre (Alain de Benoist). But at the beginning of the 21^st century everything followed a different script.

Liberalism, having always insisted upon the minimization of the political, decided after its victory to countermand politics altogether, possibly in order not to allow formation of political alternatives and to make its rule eternal, or from the completion of the political discussions of the day due to the lack of enemies, who are necessary, according to Carl Schmitt, for the proper constitution of a political position. In any case, liberalism drove the matter to the wrapping up of politics. At the same time it itself changed, having moved on from the level of ideas, political programs and declarations and entered into the very make-up of social reality, which became liberal, not in a political but in a natural, every-day manner. As a consequence of such a turn of history, all the political ideologies that feuded passionately with one another over the last century lost their currency. Conservatism, fascism and communism, together with their secondary variations, lost; but liberalism, having won, quickly mutated into a way of life: consumerism, individualism, and a post-modern style of fragmented and sub-political being. Politics became bio-politics, redeployed on an individual and sub-individual level. It turns out that not only the defeated political ideologies but politics as such left the scene – including the liberal variant. For that reason, the formulation of alternatives is proliferating. Those who do not agree with liberalism found themselves in a difficult situation: the victorious enemy dissolved and disappeared; they’re fighting with the air. How, then, is one to engage in politics, when politics is no longer?

There’s only one solution: to give up on the classical political theories – those that lost and those that won – and to strain the imagination, to grasp the reality of the new global world, to decipher correctly the challenge of post-modernity and to call into being something new, apart from the political fights of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Such an approach is an invitation to the development of the fourth political theory, opposite communism, fascism and liberalism.

In order to approach the development of this fourth political theory, it is necessary:

1. To rethink the political history of the last centuries from new positions, beyond the frameworks of the ideological cliches of the old ideologies;
2. To become aware of the deep structure of the global society appearing before our eyes;
3. To decipher correctly the paradigm of post-modernity;
4. To learn to oppose oneself not to political ideas, programs or strategies but to the objective situation of things, to the most social aspect of the apolitical, fractured (post-) society;
5. Finally, to build up an autonomous political model, which offers a way and a project in a world of blind alleys and the endlessly recycled “same old” (post-history; as in Baudrillard).

This book is dedicated precisely to such purposes, as an entrance into the development of a fourth political theory through the example of the three political theories and to the closely related theories of National-Bolshevism and Eurasianism. This is not a dogma, not a finished system, not a completed project. This is an invitation to political creativity, to the paraphrasing of intuitions and hunches; an analysis of new conditions; and an attempt at a rethinking of the past.

We think of the Fourth Political Theory not as a single work or author’s cycle, but as a tendency of a wide spectrum of ideas, researches, analyses, prognoses and projects. Everyone who thinks in this tendency can bring something of his own. One way or another, more and more intellectuals, philosophers, historians, scholars and thinkers respond to this appeal.

It is significant that the book by the successful French intellectual Alain de Benoist, Against Liberalism, coming out in Russian under the publisher Amfora, has the subtitle: To The Fourth Political Theory. Most likely, there is much to say on this theme to both the old Left and the old Right – yes, probably even to liberals, who are conceptualizing the qualitative change of their political platform, from which politics is vanishing.

For our country the Fourth Political Theory has, in addition to everything else, a large practical significance. The majority of Russians suffer integration into the global community dramatically, like a deprivation of their identity. The liberal ideology in the 1990s was almost entirely rejected by the populace. But together with that, it is intuitively understandable that the appeal to the illiberal political ideologies of the 20^th century, to communism and fascism, in our society is unlikely, since those very ideologies already proved themselves historically as failures in opposition to liberalism, to say nothing of the moral costs of totalitarianism.

Therefore, in order to fill the void, Russia needs a new political idea. Liberalism does not fit, but communism and fascism are unacceptable. Consequently, we need a fourth political theory. And if for someone this a question of free choice, the realization of political will, which can always be directed both to an assertion and its negation, then for Russia this is a question of life and death, a Hamlet-like question.

If Russia selects “to be”, then this automatically signifies the creation of a fourth political theory. In the opposite case there remains “not to be” and quietly to leave the historical arena, to dissolve into the global world, neither brought into being nor directed by us.

 

Introduction to the Fourth Political Theory

End of the 20^th Century – The End of the Epoch of Modernity.

The 20^th century ended, but we’re only now beginning to realize that. The 20^th century was the century of ideology. If in the previous century religions, dynasties, aristocracies and nation-states played a big role in the life of peoples and societies, then in the 20^th century politics redeployed into a strictly ideological region, reshaping the map of the world, ethnic groups and civilizations in a new mould. In part, political ideologies embodied in themselves previous, deeper civilizational tendencies; in part they were absolutely innovative.

All the political ideologies, having reached the peak of their dissemination and influence in the 20^th century, were the outcome of “the new time” [i.e. the Modern Era]; and embodied, although differently and by different signs, the soul of Modernity. Today we are freeing ourselves from this epoch in leaps and bounds. Thus, everyone speaks more and more often of “the crisis of ideology”, even of “the end of ideology”[1]. (Thus, in the constitution of the Russian Federation the existence of a government ideology is directly denied.) It is high time to occupy ourselves with this question more attentively.

The Three Main Political Theories and Their Fate in the 20^th Century

The three foundational ideologies of the 20^th century were:

1. Liberalism (right and left)
2. Communism (including together with Marxism both socialism and social-democracy)
3. Fascism (including National-Socialism and other variants of the “Third Way”, the National Syndicalism of Franco, Justicialism of Peron, the regime of Salazar, etc.)

They fought amongst themselves to the death, forming along the way the whole dramatic, bloody political history of the 20^th century. It is logical to assign to these ideologies (political theories) ordinal numbers according both to their meanings and to the order of their appearances, as was done above.

The first political theory is liberalism. It appeared first (back in the 18^th century) and turned out to be the most stable and successful, having beaten its opponents in the historical battle at last. By means of this victory it proved along the way its claim to the full inheritance of the Enlightenment. Today it is clear: precisely liberalism more exactly than any another political theory conforms to the epoch of modernity. Although, earlier, this was contested (for that matter, dramatically, actively, and sometimes convincingly) – by communism.

It is fair to call communism (together with socialism in all its variations) the second political theory. It appeared after liberalism, as a critical reaction to the establishment of the bourgeois-capitalist system, the ideological expression of which was liberalism.

And, finally, fascism is the third political theory. Laying claim to its interpretation of the soul of modernity (many researchers, in particular Hannah Arendt, rightly see totalitarianism as one of the political forms of modernity)[2] fascism turned together also to the ideas and symbols of traditional society. In some instances this resulted in eclecticism; in others, in the striving of conservatives to head a revolution rather than resisting it and bringing society into the opposite direction (Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, D. Merezhkovsky, etc.).

Fascism appeared after the other major political theories and disappeared before them. The alliance of the first political theory and the second political theory and the suicidal geopolitical calculations of Hitler defeated it at take-off. The third political theory died a violent death, not having seen old age and natural decomposition (in contrast to the USSR). That’s why this bloody, vampirical spectre, shaded with the aura of “world evil”, is so magnetically appealing for the decadent tastes of post-modernity and why it is still so scary to humanity.

Fascism, having disappeared, freed up space for a battle of the first political theory with the second. This took place in the form of the “Cold War” and threw up the strategic geometry of the “bi-polar world”, which lasted almost half a century. In 1991 the first political theory (liberalism) defeated the second (socialism). That was the decline of world communism.

And so, at the end of the 20^th century, of the three political theories capable of mobilizing many millions of masses in all areas of the planet, only one remained – liberalism. But when it was left alone, everyone in unison started speaking of “the end of ideology.” Why?

The End of Liberalism and Post-Liberalism

It happened that the victory of liberalism (the first political theory) coincided with its end. But this paradox is only apparent. Liberalism initially showed itself forth as an ideology; not as dogmatic as Marxism, but no less philosophical, well built and precise. It was ideologically opposed to Marxism and fascism, waging with them not only a technological war for survival, but also defending its right to a monopolistic formation of the way of the future. While other concurrent ideologies were alive, liberalism remained and grew stronger particularly as an ideology; that is, a totality of ideas, opinions, and projects peculiar to a historical subject. Each of the three political theories had its own subject.

The subject of communism was the class; the subject of fascism was the State (in the Italian fascism of Mussolini) or the race (in Hitler’s National-Socialism). In liberalism the subject was the individual, freed from all forms of collective identity, from all kinds of “attachments” (l’appartenance).

While the ideological fight had formal antagonists, entire narodi[3] and societies (at least theoretically) could select which subject to address themselves to; to the class-based, the racial (Statist), or the individual. The victory of liberalism answered that question: the normative subject at the limits of all humanity became the individual.

And soon appears the phenomenon of globalization, the model of a post-industrial society, the beginning of the epoch of post-modernity. From now on the individual subject is no more the result of a choice but some kind of compulsory given. A man is freed from “attachments”, the ideology of “human rights” becomes standard (at least in theory) and, in fact, compulsory.

Mankind, composed of individuals, is naturally drawn to universalism, becomes global and integrated. Thus is born the project of “world government” and “world rule” (globalism).

The new level of technological development allows people to reach independence from the class structures of industrial societies (post-industrialism).

The values of rationalism, science and positivism are recognized as “disguised forms of totalitarian repressive strategies” (big narratives) and are exposed to criticism – with a parallel glorification of complete freedom and independence of individual from any restraining factors, for that matter from reason, morality, identities (social, ethnic, even gender), discipline, and so on (post-modernism).

At this stage liberalism stops being the first political theory, but becomes the only political practice. “The end of history” comes; politics is replaced by economics (by the global market); government and nations are drawn into the melting pot of world globalization.

Having won, liberalism disappears, transforming into something entirely different: post-liberalism. It no longer has a political dimension; it is not a matter of free choice but becomes a peculiar kind of “fate” (from which comes the thesis of post-industrial society: “economics is fate”).

And so the start of the 21^st century coincides with the moment of the end of ideology, of all three ideologies. They all had various endings: the third political theory was destroyed in the period of its “youth”, the second died of decrepitude, the first was reborn as something entirely different, as post-liberalism, as a “global market society”. But in any case in that state in which the three political theories existed during the 20^th century they are no longer available, suitable or relevant. They explain nothing and do not help us understand what’s happening or to respond to the global challenge. From this statement there follows the necessity of moving to a Fourth Political Theory.

The Fourth Political Theory as Opposition to the Status-Quo

The Fourth Political Theory will not happen by itself. It might appear, but it might not. The premise of its appearing is disagreement: disagreement with post-liberalism as a universal practice, with globalization, with post-modernity, with “the end of history”, with the status quo, with the inertial development of the cardinal civilizational processes at the start of the 21^st century.

The status quo and inertia presuppose no political theories at all. The global world must operate with only economic laws and the universal morality of “the rights of man”. All political decisions are replaced by technological ones. Technique and technology displace all else (the French philosopher Alain de Benoist calls this “la gouvernance”, “governance”). Instead of politicians, who make historical decisions, come managers and technicians, optimizing the logistics of administrative leadership. Masses of people are compared to the mass of individual objects. Thus, the post-liberal reality (more precisely, virtuality, more and more displacing reality from itself) leads straight to the abolition of politics.

It could be objected that liberals “lie” when they speak of “the end of ideology”, that “in fact” they remain believers in their ideology and merely refuse the right of all others to exist. This is not entirely so. When liberalism from an ideological preference becomes the only content of the available social and technological reality, it is no longer “ideology”; it is a fact of life, an “objective” order of things, which to call into question is not only difficult but absurd. In the epoch of post-modernity, liberalism is transposed from the sphere of the subject to the sphere of the object. This, seen in perspective, will amount to the complete replacement of reality with virtuality.

The Fourth Political Theory is conceived of as an alternative to Post-Liberalism; not like an ideological attitude in relation to another ideological attitude, but like an idea set against material, like the possible, coming into conflict with the actual, like a not yet existing or being undertaken assault against the already existing.

At the same time, The Fourth Political Theory cannot be a continuation of the Second or Third one. The end of fascism, as well as the end of communism, was not simply an accidental misunderstanding, but the expression of the clear logic of history. They challenged the spirit of Modernity (fascism almost openly, communism in a veiled manner—see the studies of the Soviet period as a particular “eschatological” version of the traditional society in Agursky[4], or Kara-Murza[5]) and lost.

That means that the war with the post-modern metamorphosis of liberalism in the form of post-modernism and globalism must be qualitatively different, must be based on different principles and must offer new strategies.

Moreover, the starting point of this ideology – the possible one, but not guaranteed, not fated, not predetermined; issuing from the free will of man, from his soul, but not from impersonal historical processes – is precisely a rejection of the very essence of post-modernity.

However, this essence (as with the discovery of the earlier, unknown, hidden motives of Modernity itself, which so fully realized its content that it drained its inner possibilities and went over into a routine of the ironic recycling of prior stages) is something entirely new, previously unknown, and only intuitively and in part guessed at during the earlier stages of ideological history and the ideological struggle.

The Fourth Political Theory is a “Crusade” against:

1. Post-modernity
2. The post-industrial society
3. Liberal thought realized in practice
4. Globalism and its logistical and technological bases.

If the Third Political Theory criticized capitalism from the right, and the Second from the left, then in the new stage this old political topography no longer exists: in relation to post-liberalism it is impossible to determine where the left is and where the right. There are only two positions: agreement (centre) and disagreement (periphery). Both one and the other are global.

The Fourth Political Theory is a concentration in a common project and common impulse of everything that turned out to have been thrown away, toppled and degraded on the way to the erection of the “spectacle-society” (Post-Modernity). “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” (Mark 12:10). The philosopher Alexander Sekatsky rightly points out the importance of “marginalia” for the formation of a new philosophical zone, offering as a metaphor the expression “the metaphysics of garbage”.

The Battle for Post-Modernity

The Fourth Political Theory is concerned with the new rebirth of the old enemy. It disputes liberalism as did the Second and Third Political Theories of old, but it disputes it in a new condition. The principal novelty of this condition consists in the fact that, of the three great political ideologies, only liberalism won the right to the legacy of the soul of modernity and received the right to form “the end of history” on the basis of its premises.

The end of history could theoretically have been a different one: “the planetary Reich” (in the case of the victory of the Nazis), “world communism” (if the communists had been right). But “the end of history” turned out to be namely liberal (a fact that the philosopher Kojeve was one of the first to assess correctly[6], though his idea was later used by Fukuyama[7]). But since it turned out to be liberal, then any appeals to modernity and its variants, which in one or another degree the representatives of the Second (mostly) and Third political theories urged, lose their relevance. They lost the battle for modernity (the liberals won that). Therefore the theme of modernity (as, by the way, of modernization), is no longer the topic of the day. Now begins the battle for post-modernity.

And it is here that new perspectives open up for the Fourth Political Theory. That post-modernity, which today is realized in practice (post-liberal post-modernity), itself annuls the strict logic of modernity – after the goal has been reached, the steps toward it lose their meaning. The pressure of the ideological corpus becomes less harsh. The dictatorship of ideas is replaced by the dictatorship of things, “login-passwords”, bar codes. New holes are appearing in the fabric of post-modern reality.

As in their time the Third political theory and the Second political theory (understood as eschatological version of traditionalism) tried “to settle modernity” in its battle with liberalism (the first political theory), today there is a chance to complete something analogical with post-modernity, using precisely these “new holes”.

Against the straightforward ideological alternatives, liberalism worked out perfectly functioning means on which its victory was based. But precisely that carries in itself the greatest risk for liberalism. It is necessary only to find these new points of danger for the new global system, to decipher the access codes, to break the system. At least, to try. The events of 9/11 in New York demonstrate that this is possible even technologically. The network society can give something even to its convinced opponents. In any case it is necessary, first of all, to understand Post-modernity and the new situation not less deeply than Marx understood the structure of industrial capitalism.

In post-modernity, in the abolition of the Enlightenment program and the attack of the society of simulacra, the Fourth Political Theory must draw on its “personal enthusiasm”, understanding this as a stimulus to battle, but not as a fatalistic given. From that one can make a few practical inferences relating to the structure of the Fourth Political Theory.

Reconsideration of the Past and of Those Who Lost

The second and third political theories positioned themselves as contenders for the expression of the soul of modernity. And these contentions fell to pieces. Everything connected with these unwarranted intentions in the previous ideological theories is least interesting to the founders of the fourth political theory. But the very fact that they lost is worth attributing sooner to their virtues than to their vices. Since they lost, they proved by that very loss that they do not belong to the soul of modernity, which, in its turn, transformed into a post-liberal matrix. And precisely in that are their good qualities. Furthermore, this signifies that the representatives of the Second and Third political theories – consciously or unconsciously – stood on the side of traditionalism, although they did not make from this the necessary conclusions or were not admitting it at all.

It is necessary to rethink the Second and Third political theories, setting aside what should be thrown away, and what has some worth in itself. As finished ideologies, insisting on themselves literally, they are useless, both theoretically and practically – but some marginal elements, as a rule unrealized and remaining on the periphery or in the shade (reminding ourselves again of the “metaphysics of garbage”), can turn up unexpectedly as incredibly valuable and saturated with meaning and intuitions.

But in any case the Second and Third political theories must be rethought in a new key, from new positions, and only after the refusal to believe those ideological constructs on which were held their “orthodoxy”. Their orthodoxy – that is the most uninteresting and useless in them. A more productive approach would be a combined reading: “Marx through the positive views from the right” or “Evola through the positive views from the Left”. But such an engaging “National-Bolshevik” beginning (in the spirit of N. Ustryalov or E. Niekisch) is not enough by itself, since the mechanical joining of the Second political theory and Third political theory won’t get us anywhere by itself. Only retrospectively will we be able to delineate their common area, which was harshly opposed to liberalism. This methodological event is healthy as a warm-up before the full working out of the Fourth Political Theory.

Truly, the important and decisive reading of the Second and Third political theories is possible only on the basis of the already existing Fourth Political Theory, where the most important – although radically rejected as a value! – object is Post-modernity and its conditions: a global world, governance, the market society, the universalism of the rights of man, “the real domination of capital”, and so on.

A Return to Tradition and Theology

Tradition (religion, hierarchy, the family) and its values were overthrown with the dawn of modernity. Strictly speaking, all three political theories were thought of as the artificial ideological constructs of people, reflecting (in different ways) on “the death of God” (Nietzsche), “the demystification of the world” (Weber), and “the end of the sacred”. The heart of the modernity consisted in this: in the place of God came man; in the place of religion: philosophy and science; in the place of Revelation: rational, volitional, and technological constructs.

But if in post-modernity modernity is exhausted, then together with that ends the period of “theomachy”. To post-modern people, religion is not inimical but indifferent. Moreover, specific aspects of religion, as a rule, relating to the regions of hell (the demonic textures of the post-modern philosophers) are rather attractive. In any case, the epoch of the persecution of tradition has ended, although following the very logic of post-liberalism this will most likely result in the making of a new world pseudo-religion, founded on disconnected fragments of syncretic cults, unrestrained chaotic ecumenism and “tolerance”. And although such a turn of events is in some ways more frightening than straightforward and simple atheism and dogmatic materialism, the weakening of persecutions of faith has a chance if the carriers of the Fourth Political Theory will be consistent and uncompromising in defence of the ideals and values of tradition.

That which was put beyond the laws of the modern epoch one can bravely assert today in a political program. And this will no longer be seen as so ridiculous and absurd as it once was. Although that is perhaps because generally everyone in post-modernity looks ridiculous and absurd, including the most “glamorous” sides: it is no accident that the heroes of post-modernity are “freaks”, “monsters”, “transvestites”; this is a law of style. Against the background of world clowns, nothing and no one will look “too archaic”, even people of tradition, ignoring the imperatives of modern life. The justice of this arrangement shows not only the serious successes of Islamic Fundamentalism but also the revival of the influence of extremely archaic Protestant sects (Dispensationalists, Mormons, and so on) on the politics of the USA (Bush started the war in Iraq because, in his words, “God told me ‘Strike Iraq!’” — entirely in line with the soul of his Protestant teacher-Methodists).

Thus the Fourth Political Theory can calmly appeal to what preceded modernity and draw therefrom its inspiration. The acknowledgement of “the death of God” stops being “a categorical imperative” for those who want to remain relevant. The people of post-modernity are already so reconciled to these events that they can no longer understand: “Who, who do you say has died?” But for the developers of the Fourth Political Theory it is possible in the very same way to forget about these “events”: “We believe in God, but ignore those who teach of his death as we ignore the ramblings of madmen.”

Thus returns theology. And it becomes the most important element of the Fourth Political Theory. But when it returns, post-modernity (globalization, post-liberalism, the post-industrial society) is easily recognized as “the kingdom of the anti-Christ” (or its analogy in other religions – “Dadjal” for the Muslims, “Erev Rav” for the Jews, the “Kali-Yuga” for Hindus, and so on). And now this is mobilizing a mass of metaphors; this – the religious fact, the fact of the Apocalypse.

Myth and Archaics in the Fourth Political Theory

If for the Fourth Political Theory the atheism of the modern age stops being something obligatory, then also the theology of the monotheistic religions, which displaced in its own time other sacred cults, will also not be the truth in the final instance (more exactly: maybe, but maybe not). Theoretically, nothing limits the depths of the attention to ancient archaic values, which, correctly discerned and considered, can occupy a definite place in the new ideological construct. Free from the necessity of having to develop theology under the rationalism of modernity, the carriers of the Fourth Political Theory can neglect entirely those theological and dogmatic elements, which in monotheistic societies (especially in their late stages) were touched by rationalism, which, by the way, led to the ruin of Christian culture in Europe first in deism, and later in atheism and materialism, in the course of a phased development of the programs of the modern age.

Not only the highest and wisest symbols of faith can be taken up anew as a shield, but also those irrational moments of cults, rituals and legends, which confused divines in previous eras. If we dispose of progress as an idea characteristic of the modern epoch (which, as we see, has ended), then everything more ancient acquires for us a value and persuasiveness by the mere fact of being more ancient. More ancient means better. And the more ancient, the better.

The most ancient creation is heaven. The carriers of the Fourth Political Theory must strive to its new discovery in the future.

Heidegger and “the Event”

At last we can mark the deepest – ontological! – foundation of the Fourth Political Theory. Here it is recommended to turn not to theology and mythology, but to the depths of the philosophical experience of the thinker who made a unique attempt to build a fundamental ontology – the most summarizing, paradoxical, profound and piercing teaching about being. I am speaking of Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger’s conception, in short, is this. At the dawn of philosophical thinking, people (more exactly: Europeans; even more exactly: Greeks) put the question of being at the centre of their attention. But thematizing it, they risk being confused by the nuances of the difficult relationship between being and thinking, between pure being (Seyn) and its expression in things (Seiende), between human being (Dasein) and being in itself (Sein). This error occurs already in the teaching of Heraclitus about physis and logos; later it is seen clearly with Parmenides, and at last, with Plato, who put ideas between man and things, and who determined truth as correspondence (the referential theory of knowledge), it reaches its culmination. From here is born alienation, which gradually leads to the emergence of “calculating reason”, and later to the development of technology. Little by little man loses pure being from view and turns to the path of nihilism. The essence of technology (based on the technological relation to the world) expresses this constantly accumulating nihilism. In the modern age this tendency reaches its culmination; technological development (Gestell) finally displaces being and elevates “nothing” to the throne. Heidegger despised liberalism ferociously, reckoning it the expression of “the calculating beginning”, which lay at the base of “Western nihilism”.

Post-modernity, which Heidegger did not live to see, is in every sense the final oblivion of being, “midnight”, where nothing (nihilism) begins to ooze from every fissure. But his philosophy was not despairingly pessimistic. He supposed that nothingness itself is the opposite side of the purest being, which – in such a paradoxical manner! – reminds humanity of itself. And if the logic of the development of being is correctly deciphered, then thinking humanity can save itself, and with lightening speed, at that, in the very moment when the risk will be maximal. “There, where the risk is greatest, there lies salvation” quotes Heidegger from Hölderlin[8].

Heidegger calls this sudden return of being by a special term “Ereignis”, “the Event”. It occurs exactly in the middle of world midnight, in the darkest point of history. Heidegger himself constantly vacillated regarding the question of whether that point had been reached or “not quite yet”. The eternal “not quite yet”.

For the Fourth Political Theory, the philosophy of Heidegger can turn up as the most important axis on which everything else will be strung, from the rethinking of the Second and Third Political Theories to the return of theology and mythology.

In this way, at the centre of the Fourth Political Theory, as its magnetic centre, is placed the vector of approach to “Ereignis” (“The Event”) in which is embodied the triumphal return of being precisely in that moment when mankind finally and irreversibly will forget about it; yes, even as the last traces of it disappear.

The Fourth Political Theory and Russia

Today, many guess intuitively that there is no room for Russia in the “brave new world” of world globalism, post-modernity and post-liberalism. Never mind that world government and world administration are constantly countermanding all national governments. The problem is that all of Russian history is a dialectical argument with the West and Western culture, a battle for the assertion (sometimes grasped only intuitively) of its own Russian truth, its messianic idea, its version of “the end of history”, however that would express itself – through Muscovite Orthodoxy, the secular empire of Peter, or the world communist revolution. The best Russian minds saw clearly that the West is moving to an abyss, and today, looking at where neoliberal economics and the culture of post-modernity have brought the world, we can be entirely sure that that intuition, pushing a generation of Russian people into a search for alternatives, was absolutely well-founded.

Today’s world economic crisis – this is only the beginning. The worst is yet to come. The inertia of post-liberal processes is such that it is impossible to change course; “emancipated technology” (Spengler) will seek for the salvation of the West all the more effective but purely technical, technological means. This is a new stage of the dawn of Gestell, the spreading of the nihilistic spots of the world market over the entire planet. Going from crisis to crisis, from bubble to bubble (thousands of Americans demonstrate during the crisis with signs that read frankly: “give us another bubble!”) the globalized economy and the structure of post-industrial society make the night of mankind more and more black; so black that we gradually forget that it’s night. “What is light?” people ask themselves, never having seen it.

It is clear that Russia has to go another way. Its own way. But just here there is a question. To diverge from the logic of post-modernity in one “separately taken country” cannot easily succeed. The Soviet model collapsed. After that the ideological situation changed irreversibly, as did the strategic balance of power. In order for Russia to be able to save herself and others, it is not enough to think up some technical means or dishonest gimmicks. World history has its own logic. And “the end of ideology” is not an accidental falling-out-of-step, but the beginning of a new stage; by all signs, of the last stage.

In such a situation, the future of Russia depends directly on our efforts at working out the Fourth Political Theory. While locally looking over variants which a globalized regime offers us with but a superficial correction of the status quo, we will not go far; we will only lose time. The challenge of post-modernity is extraordinarily serious: it is rooted in the logic of the oblivion of being, in the retreat of man from his being-related (ontological) and soul-related (theological) sources. To respond to it with hat-throwing initiatives and PR substitutes is impossible. Consequently, in order to decide urgent problems – the global economic crisis, resistance to the unipolar world, the preserving and conserving of sovereignty, and so on – we must turn our attention to the philosophical bases of history, must make a metaphysical effort.

It is difficult to say how the process of working out this theory will unfold. Only one thing is obvious: this cannot be an individual matter or the undertaking of a limited circle of people. It must be a universal, collective effort. We can be helped greatly in this question by representatives of other cultures and peoples (both European and Asian), who also sharply perceive the eschatological tension of the present moment and who also seek desperately an escape from the global dead-end.

But first we can affirm that the Fourth Political Theory, founded on the rejection of the status-quo in its practical and theoretical dimensions, in its Russian version will be oriented to the “Russian Ereignis”, to that “Event”, sole and unrepeatable, which many generations of Russian people lived for and waited for from the beginnings of our people to the arrival of the last days.
Notes

[1] Daniel Bell. The End of Ideology. Harvard University Press, 1960.

[2] Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Moscow; CenterCom, 1996.

[3] [Translator’s note: this Russian term is usually translated as “people” or “nation”. On the recommendation of the author, I have decided to transliterate it, since the full significance of this term, as the author develops it in this and other works, is not well-captured by the usual translations. Narod is the singular, narodi the plural, narodni(e) the adjectival form.]

[4] Mikhail Agursky. The Ideology of National Bolshevism. Moscow; Algorithm, 2003.

[5] Sergey Kara-Murza. Soviet Civilization: From the Beginning to Our Times. Moscow; Algorithm, 2008.

[6] Alexandre Kojeve. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Read from 1933 to 1939 in the Ecole De Hautes Etudes. Saint Petersburg; Science, 2003.

[7] Francis Fukuyama. The End of History and the Last Man. Moscow; AST, 2004.

[8] Martin Heidegger. Country Path Conversations: Selected Essays of the Late Period. Moscow; Vysshaya Shkola (Higher School), 1991.

 

————-

From: Dugin, Alexander. The Fourth Political Theory (London: Arktos, 2012), pp. 11-31. Text retrieved from: <http://www.4pt.su/en/content/fourth-political-theory >. (See this essay in PDF format here: Excerpts from The Fourth Political Theory by Alexander Dugin).

Note: For a brief discussion of Dugin’s theories and also a listing of major translated works by him, see Natella Speranskaya’s interview with Dugin: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2014/06/27/civilization-as-political-concept-dugin/ >.

 

On Being a Pagan – Benoist

On Being a Pagan by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 52.8 MB):

On Being a Pagan – Alain de Benoist

————

Note: This is the complete book by Alain de Benoist, On Being a Pagan (Atlanta: Ultra, 2004), the English translation of the French original: Comment peut-on être païen? (Paris: A. Michel, 1981). The book is also available in Spanish translation as ¿Cómo se puede ser pagano? (Molins de Rei: Nueva República, 2004), in German translation as Heide sein zu einem neuen Anfang (Tübingen: Grabert, 1982), in Italian translation as Come si può essere pagani? (Roma: Basaia, 1984), in Dutch translation as Heiden zijn vandaag de dag (Monnickendam: Stichting Deltapers, 1985), and in Russian translation as Как можно быть язычником (Москва: Русская Правда, 2004).

Another notable work by Alain de Benoist on religious matters is the book written in cooperation with Thomas Molnar, L’éclipse du sacré: discours et réponses (Paris: Table ronde, 1986), translated into Italian as L’eclisse del sacro (Vibo Valentia: Edizioni settecolori, 1992). We should mention that it needs to be recognised, in this regard, that Benoist is not rigidly anti-Christian (in fact, there are many Christians in the New Right, who have found ways to reconcile Pagan values with Christianity). See in Spanish the commentary on the New Right and its approach to religion by Rodrigo Agulló (Interview on his book Disidencia Perfecta, published at El Manifiesto, 9 June 2011): <http://www.elmanifiesto.com/articulos.asp?idarticulo=3729 >. The section of Agulló’s Disidencia Perfecta dealing with religion has been excerpted and published as “¿Qué religión para Europa? La polémica del neopaganismo” in Elementos No. 82.

On religious and spiritual issues, we also recommend that people consider Mircea Eliade’s understanding of Paganism, Christianity, and religion in general. A good introduction to Eliade’s studies is provided by the excerpts from his The Sacred and the Profane, made available on our site here: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/sacred-profane-eliade/ >.

 

Sacred & Profane – Eliade

Key Excerpts from The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion by Mircea Eliade

 

The extraordinary interest aroused all over the world by Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (The Sacred), published in 1917, still persists. Its success was certainly due to the author’s new and original point of view. Instead of studying the ideas of God and religion, Otto undertook to analyze the modalities of the religious experience. Gifted with great psychological subtlety, and thoroughly prepared by his twofold training as theologian and historian of religions, he succeeded in determining the content and specific characteristics of religious experience. Passing over the rational and speculative side of religion, he concentrated chiefly on its irrational aspect. For Otto had read Luther and had understood what the “living God” meant to a believer. It was not the God of the philosophers – of Erasmus, for example; it was not an idea, an abstract notion, a mere moral allegory. It was a terrible power, manifested in the divine wrath.

In Das Heilige Otto sets himself to discover the characteristics of this frightening and irrational experience. He finds the feeling of terror before the sacred, before the awe-inspiring mystery (mysterium tremendum), the majesty (majestas) that emanates an overwhelming superiority of power; he finds religious fear before the fascinating mystery (mysterium fascinans) in which perfect fullness of being flowers. Otto characterizes all these experiences as numinous (from Latin numen, god), for they are induced by the revelation of an aspect of divine power. The numinous presents itself as something wholly other” (ganz andere), something basically and totally different. It is like nothing human or cosmic; confronted with it, man senses his profound nothingness, feels that he is only a creature, or, in the words in which Abraham addressed the Lord, is “but dust and ashes” (Genesis, 18, 27).

The sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from “natural” realities. It is true that language naively expresses the tremendum, or the majestas, or the mysterium fascinans by terms borrowed from the world of nature or from man’s secular mental life. But we know that this analogical terminology is due precisely to human inability to express the ganz andere; all that goes beyond man’s natural experience, language is reduced to suggesting by terms taken from that experience.

After forty years, Otto’s analyses have not lost their value; readers of this book will profit by reading and reflecting on them. But in the following pages we adopt a different perspective. We propose to present the phenomenon of the sacred in all its complexity, and not only in so far as it is irrational. What will concern us is not the relation between the rational and nonrational elements of religion but the sacred in its entirety. The first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane. The aim of the following pages is to illustrate and define this opposition between sacred and profane.

When the Sacred Manifests Itself

Man becomes aware of the sacred because it itself, shows itself, as something wholly different

from the profane. To designate the act of manifestation of the sacred, we have proposed the term hierophany. It is a fitting term, because it does not imply further; it expresses no more than is implicit in its etymological content, i.e., that something sacred shows itself to us. [Note: Cf. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, New York, Sheed & Ward, 1958, pp. 7 ff. Cited hereafter as Patterns.] It could be said that the history of religions – from the most primitive to the most highly developed – is constituted by a great number of hierophanies, by manifestations of sacred realities. From the most elementary hierophany – e.g., manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree-to the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian, is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ) there is no solution of continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act-the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural “profane” world.

The modern Occidental experiences a certain uneasiness before many manifestations of the sacred. He finds it difficult to accept the fact that, for many human beings, the sacred can be manifested in stones or trees, for example. But as we shall soon see, what is involved is not a veneration of the stone in itself, a cult of the tree in itself. The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree; they are worshiped precisely because they are hierophanies, because they show something that is no longer stone or tree but the sacred, the ganz andere.

It is impossible to overemphasize the paradox represented by every hierophany, even the most elementary. By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently (or, more precisely, from the profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The, cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany.

The man of the archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects. The tendency is perfectly understandable, because, for primitives as for the man of all pre-modern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being. Sacred power means reality and at the same time enduringness and efficacity. The polarity sacred profane is often expressed as an opposition between real and unreal or pseudoreal. (Naturally, we must not expect to find the archaic languages in possession of this philosophical terminology, real-unreal, etc.; but we find the thing). Thus it is easy to understand that religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power.

Two Modes of Being in the World

The reader will very soon realize that sacred and profane are two modes of being in the world, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of his history. These modes of being in the world are not of concern only to the history of religions or to sociology; they are not the object only of historical, sociological, or ethnological study. In the last analysis, the sacred and profane modes of being depend upon the different positions that man has conquered in the cosmos; hence they are of concern both to the philosopher and to anyone seeking to discover the possible dimensions of human existence.

It is for this reason that, though he is a historian of religions, the author of this book proposes not to confine himself only to the perspective of his particular science. The man of the traditional societies is admittedly a homo religiosus, but his behavior forms part of the general behavior of mankind and hence is of concern to philosophical anthropology, to phenomenology, to psychology….

The Sacred and History

Our primary concern is to present the specific dimensions of religious experience, to bring out the differences between it and profane experience of the world. I shall not dwell on the variations that religious experience of the world has undergone in the course of time. It is obvious, for example, that the symbolisms and cults of Mother Earth, of human and agricultural fertility, of the sacrality of woman, and the like, could not develop and constitute a complex religious system except through the discovery of agriculture; it is equally obvious that a preagricultural society, devoted to hunting, could not feel the sacrality of Mother Earth in the same way or with the same intensity. Hence there are differences in religious experience explained by differences in economy, culture, and social organization-in short, by history. Nevertheless, between the nomadic hunters and the sedentary cultivators there is a similarity in behavior that seems to us infinitely more important than their differences: both live in a sacralized cosmos, both share in a cosmic sacrality manifested equally in the animal world and in the vegetable world. We need only compare their existential situations with that of a man of the modern societies, living in a desacralized cosmos, and we shall immediately be aware of all that separates him from them. At the same time we realize the validity of comparisons between religious facts pertaining to different cultures; all these facts arise from a single type of behavior, that of homo religiosus….

Homogeneity of Space and Hierophany

For religious man, space is not homogeneous; he experiences interruptions, breaks in it; some parts of’ space are qualitatively different from others. “Draw not nigh hither,” says the Lord to Moses; “put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground” (Exodus, 3, 5). There is, then, a sacred space, and hence a strong, significant space; there are other spaces that are not sacred and so are without structure or consistency, amorphous. Nor is this all. For religious man, this spatial nonhomogeneity finds expression in the experience of an opposition between space’ that is sacred-the only real and real-ly existing space and all other space, the formless expanse surrounding it.

It must be said at once that the religious experience of the nonhomogeneity of space is a primordial experience, homologizable to a founding of the world. It is not a matter of theoretical speculation, but of a primary religious experience that precedes all reflection on the world. For it is the break effected in space that allows the world to be constituted, because it reveals the fixed point, the central axis for all future orientation. When the sacred manifests itself in any hierophany, there is not only a break in the homogeneity of space; there is also revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the nonreality of the vast surrounding expanse. The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world. In the homogeneous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation can be established, the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center.

So it is clear to what a degree the discovery-that is, the revelation – of a sacred space possesses existential value for religious man; for nothing can begin, nothing can be done, without a previous orientation-and any orientation implies acquiring a fixed point. It is for this reason that religious man has always sought to fix his abode at the “center of the world.” If the world is to be lived in, it must be founded – and no world can come to birth in the chaos of the homogeneity and relativity of profane space. The discovery or projection of a fixed point – the center – is equivalent to the creation of the world; and we shall soon give some examples that will unmistakably show the cosmogonic value of the ritual orientation and construction of sacred space.

For profane experience, on the contrary, space is homogeneous and neutral; no break qualitatively differentiates the various parts of its mass. Geometrical space can be cut and delimited in any direction; but no qualitative differentiation and, hence, no orientation are given by virtue of its inherent structure. We need only remember how a classical geometrician defines space. Naturally, we must not confuse the concept of homogeneous and neutral geometrical space with the experience of profane space, which is in direct contrast to the experience of sacred space and which alone concerns our investigation. The concept of homogeneous space and the history of the concept (for it has been part of the common stock of philosophical and scientific thought since antiquity) are a wholly different problem, up which we shall not enter here. What matters for our purpose is the experience of space known to nonreligious man, that is, to a man who rejects the sacrality of the world, who accepts only a profane existence, divested of all religious presuppositions.

It must be added at once that such a profane existence is never found in the pure state. To whatever degree he may have desacralized the world, the man who has made his choice in favor of profane life never succeeds in completely doing away with religious behavior. This will become clearer as we proceed; it will appear that even the most desacralized existence still preserves traces of a religious valorization of the world.

But for the moment we will set aside this aspect of the problem and confine ourselves to comparing the two experiences in question-that of sacred space and that of profane space. The implications of the former experience have already been pointed out. Revelation of a sacred space makes it possible to obtain a fixed point and hence to acquire orientation in the chaos of homogeneity, to “found the world” and to live in a real sense. The profane experience, on the contrary, maintains the homogeneity and hence the relativity of space. No true orientation is now possible, for the fixed point no longer enjoys a unique ontological status; it appears and disappears in accordance with the needs of the day. Properly speaking, there is no longer any world, there are only fragments of a shattered universe, an amorphous mass consisting of an infinite number of more or less neutral places in which man moves, governed and driven by the obligations of an existence incorporated into an industrial society.

Yet this experience of profane space still includes values that to some extent recall the nonhomogeneity peculiar to the religious experience of space. There are, for example, privileged places, qualitatively different from all others-a man’s birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the “holy places” of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life….

Theophanies and Signs

To exemplify the nonhomogeneity of space as experienced by nonreligious man, we may turn to any religion. We will choose an example that is accessible to everyone a church in a modern city. For a believer, the church shares in a different space from the street in which it stands. The door that opens on the interior of the church actually signifies a solution of continuity. The threshold that separates the two spaces also indicates the distance between two modes of being, the profane and the religious. The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds-and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible.

A similar ritual function falls to the threshold of the human habitation, and it is for this reason that the threshold is an object of great importance. Numerous rites accompany passing the domestic threshold-a bow, a prostration, a pious touch of the hand, and so on. The threshold has its guardians-gods and spirits who forbid entrance both to human enemies and to demons and the powers of pestilence. It is on the threshold that sacrifices to the guardian divinities are offered. Here too certain palaeo-oriental cultures (Babylon, Egypt, Israel) situated the judgment place. The threshold, the door show the solution of continuity in space immediately and concretely; hence their great religious importance, for they are symbols and at the same time vehicles of passage from the one space to the other.

What has been said will make it clear why the church shares in an entirely different space from the buildings that surround it. Within the sacred precincts the profane world is transcended. On the most archaic levels of culture this possibility of transcendence is expressed by various images of an opening; here, in the sacred enclosure, communication with the gods is made possible; hence there must be a door to the world above, by which the gods can descend to earth and man can symbolically ascend to heaven. We shall soon see that this was the case in many religions; properly speaking, the temple constitutes an opening in the upward direction and ensures communication with the world of the gods.

Every sacred space implies a hierophany, an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different….

Often there is no need for a theophany or hierophany properly speaking; some sign suffices to indicate the sacredness of a place. “According to the legend, the marabout who founded El-Hamel at the end of the sixteenth century stopped to spend the night near a spring and planted his stick in the ground. The next morning, when he went for it to resume his journey, he found that it had taken root and that buds had sprouted on it. He considered this a sign of God’s will and settled in that place.”[Note: René Basset, in Revue des Traditions Populaires, XXII, 1907, p. 287.] In such cases the sign, fraught with religious meaning, introduces an absolute element and puts an end to relativity and confusion. Something that does not belong to this world has manifested itself apodictically and in so doing has indicated an orientation or determined a course of conduct.

When no sign manifests itself, it is provoked. For example, a sort of evocation is performed with the help of animals; it is they who show what place is fit to receive the sanctuary or the village. This amounts to an evocation of sacred forms or figures for the immediate Purpose of establishing an orientation in the homogeneity of space. A sign is asked, to put an end to the tension and anxiety caused by relativity and disorientation. In short, to reveal an absolute point of support. For example, a wild animal is hunted, and the sanctuary is built at the place where it is killed. Or a domestic animal-such as a bull-is turned loose; some days later it is searched for and sacrificed at the place where it is found. Later the altar will be raised there and the village will be built around the altar. In all these cases, the sacrality of a place is revealed by animals. This is as much as to say that men are not free to choose the sacred site, that they only seek for it and find it by the help of mysterious signs.

These few examples have shown the different means by which religious man receives the revelation of a sacred place. In each case the hierophany has annulled the homogeneity of space and revealed a fixed point. But since religious man cannot live except in an atmosphere impregnated with the sacred, we must expect to find a large number of techniques for consecrating space. As we saw, the sacred is pre-eminently the real, at once power, efficacity, the source of life and fecundity. Religious man’s desire to live in the sacred is in fact equivalent to his desire to take up his abode in objective reality, not to let himself be paralyzed by the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in a real and effective world, and not in an illusion. This behavior is documented on every plane of religious man’s existence, but it is particularly evident in his desire to move about only in a sanctified world, that is, in a sacred space. This is the reason for the elaboration of techniques of orientation which, properly speaking, are techniques for the construction of sacred space. But we must not suppose that human work is in question here, that it is through his own efforts that man can consecrate a space. In reality the ritual by which he constructs a sacred space is efficacious in the measure in which it reproduces the work of the gods. But the better to understand the need for ritual construction of a sacred space, we must dwell a little on the traditional concept of the “world”; it will then be apparent that for religious man every world is a sacred world.

Chaos and Cosmos

One of the outstanding characteristics of traditional societies is the opposition that they assume between their inhabited territory and the unknown and indeterminate space that surrounds it. The former is the world (more precisely, our world), the cosmos; everything outside it is no longer a cosmos but a sort of “other world,” a foreign, chaotic space, peopled by ghosts, demons, “foreigners” (who are assimilated to demons and the souls of the dead). At first sight this cleavage in space appears to be due to the opposition between an inhabited and organized – hence cosmicized – territory and the unknown space that extends beyond its frontiers; on one side there is a cosmos, on the other a chaos. But we shall see that if every inhabited territory is a cosmos, this is precisely because it was first consecrated, because, in one way or another, it is the work of the gods or is in communication with the world of the gods. The world (that is, our world) is a universe within which the sacred has already manifested itself, in which, consequently, the break-through from plane to plane has become possible and repeatable. It is not difficult to see why the religious moment implies the cosmogonic moment. The sacred reveals absolute reality and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world….

An unknown, foreign, and unoccupied territory (which often means, “unoccupied by our people”) still shares in the fluid and larval modality of chaos. By occupying it and, above all, by settling in it, man symbolically transforms it into a cosmos through a ritual repetition of the cosmogony. What is to become “our world” must first be “created,” and every creation has a paradigmatic model – the creation of the universe by the gods. When the Scandinavian colonists took possession of Iceland (land-náma) and cleared it, they regarded the enterprise neither as an original undertaking nor as human and profane work. For them, their labor was only repetition of a primordial act, the transformation of chaos into cosmos by the divine act of creation. When they tilled the desert soil, they were in fact repeating the act of the gods who had organized chaos by giving it a structure, forms, and norms.[Note: Cf. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, New York, Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series XLVI, 1954, pp. 11 ff. Cited hereafter as Myth.]

Whether it is a case of clearing uncultivated ground or of conquering and occupying a territory already inhabited by “other” human beings, ritual taking possession must always repeat the cosmogony. For in the view of archaic societies everything that is not “our world” is not yet a world. A territory can be made ours only by creating it anew, that is, by consecrating it….

Consecration of a Place = Repetition of the Cosmogony

It must be understood that the cosmicization of unknown territories is always a consecration; to organize a space is to repeat the paradigmatic work of the gods….

Life is not possible without an opening toward the transcendent; in other words, human beings cannot live in chaos. Once contact with the transcendent is lost, existence in the world ceases to be possible….

To settle in a territory is, in the last analysis, equivalent to consecrating it. When settlement is not temporary, as among the nomads, but permanent, as among sedentary peoples, it implies a vital decision that involves the existence of the entire community. Establishment in a particular place, organizing it, inhabiting it, are acts that presuppose an existential choice – the choice of the universe that one is prepared to assume by “creating” it. Now, this universe is always the replica of the paradigmatic universe created and inhabited by the gods; hence it shares in the sanctity of the gods’ work….

The Center of the World

The cry of the Kwakiutl neophyte, “I am at the Center of the World!” at once reveals one of the deepest meanings of sacred space. Where the break-through from plane to plane has been effected by a hierophany, there too an opening has been made, either upward (the divine world) or downward (the underworld, the world of the dead). The three cosmic levels – earth, heaven, underworld – have been put in communication. As we just saw, this communication is sometimes expressed through the image of a universal pillar, axis mundi, which at once connects and supports heaven and earth and whose base is fixed in the world below (the infernal regions). Such a cosmic pillar can be only at the very center of the universe, for the whole of the habitable world extends around it. Here, then, we have a sequence of religious conceptions and cosmological images that are inseparably connected and form a system that may be called the “system of the world” prevalent in traditional societies: (a) a sacred place constitutes a break in the homogeneity of space; (b) this break is symbolized by an opening by which passage from one cosmic region to another is made possible (from heaven to earth and vice versa; from earth to the underworld) ; (c) communication with heaven is expressed by one or another of certain images, all of which refer to the axis mundi: pillar (cf. the universalis columna) , ladder (cf. Jacob’s ladder), mountain, tree, vine, etc. ; (d) around this cosmic axis lies the world (= our world), hence the axis is located “in the middle,” at the “navel of the earth”; it is the Center of the World….

We shall begin with an example that has the advantage of immediately showing not only the consistency but also the complexity of this type of symbolism – the cosmic mountain….

According to Islamic tradition, the highest place on earth is the ka’aba, because “the Pole Star bears witness that it faces the center of Heaven.”‘ For Christians, it is Golgotha that is on the summit of the cosmic mountain. All these beliefs express the same feeling, which is profoundly religious: “our world is holy ground because it is the place nearest to heaven, because from here, from our abode, it is possible to reach heaven; hence our world is a high place. In cosmological terms, this religious conception is expressed by the projection of the favored territory which is “ours” onto the summit of the cosmic mountain….

This same symbolism of the center explains other series of cosmological images and religious beliefs. Among these the most important are: (a) holy sites and sanctuaries are believed to be situated at the center of the world; (b) temples are replicas of the cosmic mountain and hence constitute the pre-eminent “link” between earth and heaven; (c) the foundations of temples descend deep into the lower regions….

“Our World” is Always Situated at the Center

From all that has been said, it follows that the true world is always in the middle, at the Center, for it is here that there is a break in plane and hence communication among the three cosmic zones. Whatever the extent of the territory involved, the cosmos that it represents is always perfect. An entire country (e.g., Palestine), a city (Jerusalem), a sanctuary (the Temple in Jerusalem), all equally well present an imago mundi. Treating of the symbolism of the Temple, Flavius Josephus wrote that the court represented the sea (i.e., the lower regions), the Holy Place represented earth, and the Holy of Holies heaven (Ant. Jud., 111, 7, 7). It is clear, then, that both the imago mundi and the Center are repeated in the inhabited world. Palestine, Jerusalem, and the Temple severally and concurrently represent the image of the universe and the Center of the World. This multiplicity of centers and this reiteration of the image of the world on smaller and smaller scales constitute one of the specific characteristics of traditional societies.

To us, it seems an inescapable conclusion that the religious man sought to live as near as possible to the Center of the World. He knew that his country lay at the midpoint of the earth; he knew too that his city constituted the navel of the universe, and, above all, that the temple or the palace were veritably Centers of the World. But he also wanted his own house to be at the Center and to be an imago mundi….

In short, whatever the dimensions of the space with which he is familiar and in which he regards himself as situated – his country, his city, his village, his house – religious man feels the need always to exist in a total and organized world, in a cosmos.

A universe comes to birth from its center; it spreads out from a central point that is, as it were, its navel. It is in this way that, according to the Rig Veda (X, 149), the universe was born and developed – from a core, a central point….

1t follows that every construction or fabrication has the cosmogony as paradigmatic model. The creation of the world becomes the archetype of every creative human gesture, whatever its plane of reference may be….

City-Cosmos

Since “our world” is a cosmos, any attack from without threatens to turn it into chaos. And as “our world” was founded by imitating the paradigmatic work of the gods, the cosmogony, so the enemies who attack it are assimilated to the enemies of the gods, the demons, and especially to the archdemon, the primordial dragon conquered by the gods at the beginning of time. An attack on “our world” is equivalent to an act of revenge by the mythical dragon, who rebels against the work of the gods, the cosmos, and struggles to annihilate it. “Our” enemies belong to the powers of chaos. Any destruction of a city is equivalent to a retrogression to chaos. Any victory over the attackers reiterates the paradigmatic victory of the gods over the dragon (that is, over chaos)….

Some Conclusions

….There is no need to dwell on the truism that, since the religious life of humanity is realized in history, its expressions are inevitably conditioned by the variety of historical moments and cultural styles. But for our purpose it is not the infinite variety of the religious experiences of space that concerns us but, on the contrary, their elements of unity. Pointing out the contrast between the behavior of nonreligious man with respect to the space in which he lives and the behavior of religious man in respect to sacred space is enough to make the difference in structure between the two attitudes clearly apparent.

If we should attempt to summarize the result of the descriptions that have been presented in this chapter, we could say that the experience of sacred space makes possible the “founding of the world”: where the sacred manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence. But the irruption of the sacred does not only project a fixed point into the formless fluidity of profane space, a center into chaos; it also effects a break in plane, that is, it opens communication between the cosmic planes (between earth and heaven) and makes possible ontological passage from one mode of being to another. It is such a break in the heterogeneity of profane space that creates the center through which communication with the transmundane is established, that, consequently, founds the world, for the center renders orientation possible. Hence the manifestation of the sacred in space has a cosmological valence; every spatial hierophany or consecration of a space is equivalent to a cosmogony. The first conclusion we might draw would be: the world becomes apprehensible as world, as cosmos, in the measure in which it reveals itself as a sacred world.

Every world is the work of the gods, for it was either created directly by the gods or was consecrated, hence cosmicized, by men ritually reactualizing the paradigmatic act of Creation. This is as much as to say that religious man can live only in a sacred world, because it is only in such a world that he participates in being, that he has a real existence. This religious need expresses an unquenchable ontological thirst. Religious man thirsts for being. His terror of the chaos that surrounds his inhabited world corresponds to his terror of nothingness. The unknown space that extends beyond his world – an uncosmicized because unconsecrated space, a mere amorphous extent into which no orientation has yet been projected, and hence in which no structure has yet arisen – for religious man, this profane space represents absolute nonbeing. If, by some evil chance, he strays into it, he feels emptied of his ontic substance, as if he were dissolving in Chaos, and he finally dies.

This ontological thirst is manifested in many ways. ‘In the realm of sacred space which we are now considering, its most striking manifestation is religious man’s will to take his stand at the very heart of the real, at the Center of the World – that is, exactly where the cosmos came into existence and began to spread out toward the four horizons, and where, too, there is the possibility of communication with the gods; in short, precisely where he is closest to the gods. We have seen that the symbolism of the center is the formative principle not only of countries, cities, temples, and palaces but also of the humblest human dwelling, be it the tent of a nomad hunter, the shepherd’s yurt, or the house of the sedentary cultivator. This is as much as to say that every religious man places himself at the Center of the World and by the same token at the very source of absolute reality, as close as possible to the opening that ensures him communication with the gods.

But since to settle somewhere, to inhabit a space, is equivalent to repeating the cosmogony and hence to imitating the work of the gods, it follows that, for religious man, every existential decision to situate himself in space in fact constitutes a religious decision. By assuming the responsibility of creating the world that he has chosen to inhabit, he not only cosmicizes chaos but also sanctifies his little cosmos by making it like the world of the gods. Religious man’s profound nostalgia is to inhabit a “divine world,” is his desire that his house shall be like the house of the gods, as it was later represented in temples and sanctuaries. In short, this religious nostalgia the desire to live in a pure and holy cosmos, as it was in the beginning, when it came fresh from the Creator’s hands.

The experience of sacred time will make it possible for religious man periodically to experience the cosmos it was in principio, that is, at the mythical moment of Creation.

 

—————

Excerpts from: Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (Orlando: Harcourt, 1987), pp. 8-65.

Note: The Sacred and the Profane is Mircea Eliade’s most important introductory book to a deeper understanding of religion and has been translated into a large number of other languages. Also notable in this regard are Eliade’s books: The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: the Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities (New York & Evanston: Harper & Row, 1975), and The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). For a record of all works by Mircea Eliade in various languages, see the World Catalogue: <http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3AMircea+Eliade > (lists of translations of Eliade’s works are also oftentimes recorded in bibliographies in their respective languages).

Additional note: See also the overviews of Mircea Eliade’s religious philosophy in “Mircea Eliade: An Appreciation” by David J. Levy and “Mircea Eliade: The hermeneutics of the religious phenomenon” by Livia Durac.

In the Spanish language, commentaries and resources on Eliade can be found in Sebastian J. Lorenz’s Elementos, N° 64, “El Eterno Retorno de Mircea Eliade” (Marzo 2014), <http://issuu.com/sebastianjlorenz/docs/elementos_n___64._mircea_eliade >. (We have made Elementos N° 64 available for download on our site: Elementos No. 64).