FASCISM AGAINST
CHRISTIANITY: THE GREAT LIBERATION
Julius Evola (Translation
from Imperialismo pagano,
Atanor, Todi-Roma 1928)
Let us conclude.
Today we must absolutely put a stop to Christianity.
Everything in it is incompatible with and contradictory to the ideals,
the morals, the vision of the world and of man that
would enable a race to bring about the resurrection of the empire.
Our sleep has lasted long enough. All the possible compromises and
variations have been exhausted. It is time to say "Enough!" No more
of Christianity embraced as a whole, in the totality of all its forms! The
Latin race in particular must bitterly disavow any descent from the dark object
that emerged from the Jewish slums of
On an ideal and moral level, it is time to unmask Christianity's
enormous doctrinal bluff and to refuse to allow it to continue to parade around
loaded up with all the values that have been superstitiously and unconsciously
attributed to it.
On a practical level, it is time to become aware of the European danger
and the decline of the West and to respond by reviving in the modern world the
political and sapiential values characteristic of the
Mediterranean tradition.
Ethical and religious Christianity today is nothing more than a name and
a habit, absolutely external to conscience; but nobody, or nearly nobody, has
bothered to abolish the name itself and to put its content on trial again, so
as to start right back at the beginning, rejecting the "fact" of
Christianity, its "tradition" and all the rest.
This is precisely my intent: to hold such a trial, demanding that every
account to be scrutinized with inflexible severity, that all cards be placed
openly on the table, and that every way out and every compromise be barred in
advance. At stake are not more or less anticlerical polemics but rather a
serious, objective examination, unbiased by feeling and belief. A cool-headed
examination should suffice to blunt the ecstatic thrill and to unmask the true
poverty and inferiority of the Christian vision of the world and of man.
With regard to fascism I declare:
Fascism... will blaze the path toward breaking up the monstrous
political connivance with the Catholic Church, abetted by the intrigues of that
secret and illicit association, the Society of Jesus. It will become aware that
it has fallen prey to a suckers' marketplace (
This transpired because fascism still lacks spirituality and culture of
its own, as fresh and vibrant as the warrior forces that brought it into being.
The result was that fascism's political triumph was unaccompanied by a
spiritual-cultural triumph. This transpired because fascism is still crippled
by a definition of empire as a simple political, economic, and military
organization, based on the industrial-capitalist system and cast in the mold of
British and German bourgeois and material imperialism. But such a definition
has nothing in common with true imperialism, that spiritual, sacred, and heroic
imperialism of ancient
Once fascism transcends the bourgeois-industrial definition of empire,
once it embraces imperiousness (imperialita') in the
true, traditional sense, the problem will be resolved. Fascism will find its
soul within itself, a fact that will paralyze all efforts to apply external
pressure and render ever more acute the incompatibility between state and
Church. "Incompatibility" not as understood by demagogic,
anticlerical, or secular ideologies but in the sense that the empire would
become the true spiritual reality, the immanent, powerful religion that ousts
the dead hierarchies and empty devotional forms that have
survived in Catholicism.
So if the "daring" that fascism regularly exalts is more than
rhetorical bluster, here's a first task: deride the arrogance that did not
hesitate to call the king of Italy a usurper from on the high at the Vatican
and reaffirm the complete dominion of the state over the Church. The Church
must be directly controlled by the state. Its every organization must require
state approval and sanction... Above all, it must be denied any role in the
education of souls during the period in which the will is not yet formed and
the conscience is not yet clear. (Though its continuing presence can be
tolerated as a feature of popular belief, but only on a temporary basis, until
such a time as the
So much for Catholicism, which on a practical plane must distiguished from Christianity. The
latter is mostly to be identified with the forms of Protestantism active in
Anglo-Saxon liberal democracies. Here lies the true European danger from which
we must protect ourselves, reacting ruthlessly to all the international,
unionist, Masonic, anti-aristocratic, anti-Roman, socialist, humanitarian,
moralist ferments with which it would seek to infiltrate Italy.
In the properly cultural field, fascism ought to begin by promoting
critical and historical studies, not partisan studies but cold surgical
analyses of the essence of Christianity akin to Louis Rougier's
work in
Let the following be stated firmly, absolutely, and unambiguously. We
are not destroyers but restorers. When we appear to be destroying we are in
fact rearranging and replacing what is on the wane with higher forms, forms
more vibrant and glorious. We possess a complete, total, positive system of
values, developed in close connection with the forms of contemporary
civilization, a system that provides us with a firm foundation and frees us
from any fear of the void as we demolish all the the
negatives of European decadence.
From the standpoint of its praxis, Fascism must not betray itself, which
is to say, it must deeply embrace those values of affirmation, activity, will
to power, antisentimentalism, and antirhetoricism
whose imprint it bears (especially in its purest manifestations). Values that are essentially anti- Christian. Values to be
raised to a higher internalized and spiritualized form and freed from the
inferior and provisional approach based on mere violence and material domination.
And here there is a precursor, a misunderstood man, who waits in the
shadows: Friedrich Nietzsche. The Nietzschean
experiment is not yet exhausted because it hasn't even truly begun. What is
worn out is the aesthetic-literary or firebrand(baionettista) caricature of Nietzsche found in characters
like Corrado Brando, Stelio Effrena, or William II. But
very much alive are values that Nietzsche heroically propagated despite no end
of suffering, despite the rebellion of his entire being, which, after having
given everything without complaint, simply collapsed. These values transcend
his philosophy, his "humanity", even himself. They are of cosmic signifance, reflecting the power of the Aeion,
the
Accordingly, education will be reoriented toward pagan and Mediterranean
values.
The "myth" of the crucified God-man who suffers and loves will
be opposed that of the man-God, a being radiating light and power, the summit
of an imperial ethos. To a dualistic and transcendetal
worldview will be opposed a vision of free and immanent unity, withdrawn into
itself, matter for domination. To Christianity's race of "slaves and
children of God" will be opposed a race of liberated and liberating beings
who interpret God as a supreme power that one may freely obey or do battle
against in manly fashion with one's head held high, immune to the taint of
feelings, vacillations, and prayers. To feelings of dependence and lack will be
opposed a feeling of sufficiency; to the will to equality, the will to
difference, distance, hierarchy, and aristocracy. To the mystical communist
promiscuity will be opposed firm individuality; to the need for love, happinesss, peace, and consolation, the heroic contempt for
all this and law of pure will and absolute action. To Christianity's
providential vision will be opposed the tragic conception whereby man stands
alone facing the contigencies of nature such that
either he must redeem himself or redemption will forever elude him. Do away
with "sin" and "bad conscience" brashly heap all
responsibilities upon one's shoulders, bar the door to any escape, fortify the
innermost spirit.
No more "brothers" or "fathers" but instead a fully
autonomous individuals, self-enclosed as if each were a separate world, rock,
or peak, individuals clothed only in their strength or in their weakness, each
and every one operating like an independent combat post that defends a
distinctive quality, life, dignity, unequal strength, indomitable force. No
more subjection to the need to "communicate",
and to be "understood" or to fraternal bonds or to the sensual
pleasure of loving and of feeling loved as equals. All are subtly corrupting
and violent forces that weaken aristocracy and individuality. On the contrary,
the incommunicability must be celebrated in the name of absolute purity and
respect. Stronger forces and weaker forces, the one alongside or against the
order, loyally, coldly, acknowledging one another thanks to the discipline of
the spirit that burns within but produces an exterior rigid and tempered like
steel, forces magnificently infused with the immeasurability of the infinite as
found in feats of war and on the battlefield : (this is the ideal). A state of
absolute generosity and absolute cruelty insure that some men and races ascend,
while others fall with a thud. Nothing "infinite".
Precise relations, order, cosmos, hierarchy. Solar and
sufficient beings, masters who are far-sighted, fearful, distant, and solitary;
who, instead of taking in, give out an overabundance of light and power, who
resolutely incline toward ever more dizzying intensities within a hierarchical
chain of being that comes not from above but from the dynamic natural
interconnection between their natures.
"How beautiful they are, how pure are these free forces not yet
corrupted by the spirit!" wrote the young Nietzsche after an ascent during
a storm. In the place of Nietzsche's "not yet", I would substitute
"no longer corrupted by the spirit" in the present context, the word
"spirit" meaning the unreal: an outer crust of feelings, hopes,
doctrines, beliefs, "values", sensations, words, sensual pleasures,
and human emotions. But the meaning remains the same. The world is to be
cleansed, returned to its pre-Christian state. It is to be returned to a free,
overabundant, essential state within which nature is not yet nature or the
spirit, in which "things" and "forms" do not exist except
as powers; in which every instant of life is a heroic event, made up of acts,
symbols, commands, magical gestures, and rituals, accompanied by great waves of
sound, light, and terror.
This is our truth and this is the threshold of our great liberation: the
end of faith and the world's emancipation from God. No "heaven" will
hover over the land, gone will be "providence", "reason",
"good", and "evil", masks for the terrified, pallid escapes
for pallid souls. At last, those who think themselves men, unaware that they
are sleeping gods, will be left to themselves:
everything, all around, will return to a state of freedom; everything will
finally breathe. The weak will collapse. The strong will assert themselves and
will be rekindled as the "holy race of the kingless" of the ancient
Gnostic oracles; the race of "those who are", of the unchained and
the unburdened, of reedemed justifiers of the world,
lords of necessity and suffering.
This is our truth. This is the "myth" that we pagans oppose to
the superstition of