Here we must address the "outer" relationship to the Christian Church and to the Nation. Evola preserves Codreanu's words:
"We are trying, in general, to put life into this religion which has become very mummified--the mere traditionalism of a clergy who have gone to sleep--in the form of national awareness and living experience. Furthermore, we find ourselves in a condition that is foreign to our religion: that of dualism between faith and politics, which produces an ethic and a spirituality that have no political consequences. The Iron Guard movement is removing a fundamental idea from our religion: that of ecumenism. This is a positive denial of any internationalism, any abstract and rational universalism. The idea of ecumenism is that of a society as a unity of life, as a living organism, as a "life" not only with our folk, but also together with the dead and with God. The realization of such an idea in the form of an actual experience is the center of our movement: politics, party, culture, etc., are just consequences and incidentals to us. We will revitalize this central reality and thereby renew Romanian man, so that he can finally act and also construct the nation and the state. It is a very important point to us that the presence of the dead in the ecumenical nation is not abstract, but real: the presence of our dead, and especially of our heroes."
We cannot go here into detail about how closely these thoughts correspond to many of those of the Austrian Catholic thinker Othmar Spann, who had also influenced Evola at this period. Together, they showed Evola a living spiritual nationalism (or ecumenism), in contrast to the philosophical concepts on paper.
Consequently Evola was shaken, after Codreanu's imprisonment, when the news reached him at the beginning of December 1938 of Codreanu's shameful murder by the state authority. (see his article
Dopo l΄assassinio di Codreanu: la tragedia del legionarismo romeno)
Corneliu Codreanu and the New European Empire According to Julius Evola
In March 1938, one month before Codreanu's imprisonment, a meeting between Codreanu and Julius Evola, the famous Italian traditionalist, took place in Bucharest. Evola wrote a very important article about Codreanu΄s thoughts on the struggle of the Iron Guard.
According to this, Codreanu characterized the national movements of the time as follows: "He said that there are three principles in every organism: Form, Vital Energy, and Spirit. A movement for national rebirth could not develop if it placed its emphasis on one principle or another. If one follows Codreanu, in Fascism the Form-principle is the leading political idea that the State has priority. The heritage of Rome is here the organizing energy. In German National Socialism, on the other hand, special weight is given to the principle of Vital Energy. This is where the concern about race comes from. The myth of race, with its recognition of blood and the national racial community, stands at the center of National Socialism. For the Iron Guard, in contrast to these, the Spiritual element is of central significance, with religious and ascetic values, which for Codreanu are closely related." (Evola,
Il mio incontro con Codreanu).
There is no doubt which of the three principles Evola ascribed the greatest weight to. For a long time he had been criticizing the reduction of Fascism to State-worship and a new bureaucracy. In his opinion, Fascism had to choose between the Roman Empire and Italy: between the Roman Empire, which is also an important heritage for Romania, and Italy, the revolutionary, freemasonic state that arose out of the unholy spirit of the French Revolution, corresponding to the current Romania of party squabbles.
In National Socialism, Evola certainly welcomed the racial ideas in one respect, but openly criticized its formulation in the terms of biological materialism. For Evola, the racial soul was of greater significance than the material basis of heredity. This view was clearly connected with his refusal of the so-called "theory of evolution," that materialistic invention of Darwin's, which, together with Marx and Freud, Evola considered as the lowest drivel of the materialistic period.
Evola was in quest of a national movement that would help the spiritual principle to break through. He and a few friends had tried to influence Fascism accordingly. He thought that he had discovered in National Socialism, with the SS, the attempt to found a new ascetic Order. In fact, the intention of Reichsfόhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler's was to lay a net of castles of the SS Order all over the new Greater-German Reich, which would take over its rule after the death or retirement of the Fόhrer, thus thwarting the development of a new bureaucratic hegemony. But what was the spiritual principle of this ambition? Beside the adoration of the Fόhrer (the Form principle) and the belief in the superiority of the Nordic race (the principle of Vital Energy) there was not much room left for the Spirit: merely an exoteric rune-cult, supposed to evoke the spirit of the Germanic antiquity. Here Evola saw a chance of introducing his doctrine of Tradition, but this met with mistrust and incomprehension. As the records of the NS authorities show (see
Julius Evola nei documenti segretei del Terzo Reich, Edizioni Europa, 1986), it was this concept of soul-race that upset them. They could issue certificates of Aryanism, but in no way could they meet Evola's hopes for the Aryan warrior in the spiritual sense.
The Iron Guard, on the other hand, seemed to correspond to the ideal that Evola was seeking. He particularly approved of the name they had chosen: "Legion of the Archangel Michael." Evola mentions the importance that fasting and prayer had for Codreanu. "By prayer he understands inner composure and the gathering of energies." This had nothing to do with his former interpretation of Christian prayer, in the spirit of Nietzsche, as nothing but crawling and debilitation. Evola would later write about ascesis in the context of Buddhism (
La dottrina del Risveglio, 1943: Eng. tr.,
The Doctrine of Awakening, Rochester, VT, 1997). There he argues the idea that Buddha taught nothing other than the original Indo-Germanic values, lost to us today because Buddhism had fallen under Asiatic influence.
Here we must address the "outer" relationship to the Christian Church and to the Nation. Evola preserves Codreanu's words:
"We are trying, in general, to put life into this religion which has become very mummified--the mere traditionalism of a clergy who have gone to sleep--in the form of national awareness and living experience. Furthermore, we find ourselves in a condition that is foreign to our religion: that of dualism between faith and politics, which produces an ethic and a spirituality that have no political consequences. The Iron Guard movement is removing a fundamental idea from our religion: that of ecumenism. This is a positive denial of any internationalism, any abstract and rational universalism. The idea of ecumenism is that of a society as a unity of life, as a living organism, as a "life" not only with our folk, but also together with the dead and with God. The realization of such an idea in the form of an actual experience is the center of our movement: politics, party, culture, etc., are just consequences and incidentals to us. We will revitalize this central reality and thereby renew Romanian man, so that he can finally act and also construct the nation and the state. It is a very important point to us that the presence of the dead in the ecumenical nation is not abstract, but real: the presence of our dead, and especially of our heroes."
We cannot go here into detail about how closely these thoughts correspond to many of those of the Austrian Catholic thinker Othmar Spann, who had also influenced Evola at this period. Together, they showed Evola a living spiritual nationalism (or ecumenism), in contrast to the philosophical concepts on paper.
Consequently Evola was shaken, after Codreanu's imprisonment, when the news reached him at the beginning of December 1938 of Codreanu's shameful murder by the state authority. (see his article
Dopo l΄assassinio di Codreanu: la tragedia del legionarismo romeno)
During the war years, Evola devoted himself to understanding the significance of the World War. He tried to comprehend war not as an evil to be put up with, but as the opportunity for the development of heroic energies and for the formation of a new man. "A lot will now depend on how the individual can form his experience of battle: on whether he is able to accept heroism and sacrifice as a catharsis, as a means to liberation and inner awakening. This inward, invisible deed of our warriors has nothing to do with gestures or grand words, but it will be of decisive significance not only for the eventual victorious conclusion of this stormy time's events, but also for giving form and meaning to the Order that will arise from victory. [...] This new man will vanquish everything tragic, obscure, and chaotic in himself, and will constitute the start of a new development in the time to come. According to ancient Aryan tradition, such heroism on the part of the best men can work as an evocation, and re-establish the contact between the world and the higher world that has been weakened for centuries." (
Die arische Lehre von Kampf und Sieg, Vienna, 1941) Who embodies this contact, if not the Archangel Michael?
But the War did not end as Evola had hoped, and Europe was divided between the powers of Bolshevism and Americanism. What had the Axis Powers done wrong? Evola put his thoughts on the faults of Fascism and National Socialism into his work
Il fascismo. Saggio di un\'analisi critica dal punto di vista della Destra (1970). He called his point of view that of the "authentic Right."
Regarding the Duce, he criticized the deification of personalities, in which, for example, Mussolini praised the tireless sportsman and the inexhaustible lover, but knew of no transcendent principle beyond the personality. If the Duce saw himself above all as the embodiment of the State, then the Fόhrer saw himself above all as the embodiment of German Folk. This implied theoretically a direct contact between Folk and Fόhrer, without any intermediary hierarchy; it was a tendentious leveling in which every member of the Folk was equal. Evola maintained that National Socialism had become proletarianized. On the other hand, a parasitical class of bureaucrats sneaked in between the Fόhrer and the Folk, acting despotically towards the people and quashing any criticism of itself as criticism of the Fόhrer, while at the same time isolating him from the Folk who were his only source of power.