The Mask and Face of Contemporary Spiritualism by Julius Evola

Author:Julius Evola [Evola, Julius]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arktos Media Ltd.
Published: 2018-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

VII

Parenthetical on Esoteric Catholicism and on “Integral Traditionalism”

We have already observed that one of the causes which has favored the diffusion of neo-spiritualism is to be sought in the very character of the religion which has come to predominate in the West: Christianity and in particular Catholicism. By presenting itself essentially as a theological-ritualistic system on the one hand, and on the other as a devotional and moralizing practice, it seems to offer very little to the need for the supernatural, as has been sensed by many persons in recent times, who for this reason have been attracted to other doctrines which seemed to promise something more.

Naturally, in such a case one views the supernatural as an experience; Catholicism is without doubt characterized by the claim of having, more than any other religion, its own true theology of the supernatural, with reference to the conception of a personal God detached from all the natural world, standing over this world. But it was not for any theology that these individuals went searching, and the theistic Catholic conception of God-person seemed to be inadequate already from the start, since it admitted, in principle, only a “dual” relation, between “I” and “You,” between the creature and the Creator. It is true that there exists also a Christian mysticism and that Catholicism has had its monastic Orders, which intended to cultivate a life of pure contemplation. But apart from the fact that these presupposed extremely specific vocations, and that moreover in its removal of the distance deriving from the conception of the God-person, Orthodoxy sees a dangerous heresy in the mystic life itself (thus strictly limiting the concept of a unio mystica or a “unitary life”), Catholicism of modern times, practically speaking, has emphasized all of this to an ever lesser degree. The so-called “pastoral cure of the soul” has become its principal preoccupation — not to speak of certain recent post-Council revolutions toward “modernization” and “opening to the left,” which have brought to the foreground mere social or socializing claims intermixed with well-known and squalid humanitarian, pacifist, and democratic ingredients. All that which might have had a character of true transcendence has thus been sidelined, or at least has not been encouraged in the least. From here, the emptiness which, along with the crises of the modern world, has pressed many to seek elsewhere, more or less along the lines of contemporary neo-spiritualism, exposing themselves to the danger that dark forces might pervert their highest aspirations.

But in an objective analysis certain recognitions must be made.

If we are referring to early Christianity, this religion presents itself as a typical religion of the kali-yuga, of the “dark age,” which in the Western formulation of the same teaching corresponds to the “iron age,” in which Hesiod believed that the destiny of the many would be “to extinguish themselves without glory in Hades.” Christian preaching, addressed originally above all to the masses of the dispossessed, and to those lacking the tradition of the Roman ecumene, took as their presupposition

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