We have already alluded to the fact that the messianic-Galilean doctrine, in its original character, did not aim at all to establish a new form of social life or even of religion. It had a purely anarchist, antisocial, defeatist character, subversive of every rational order of things. A single concern pervaded it, obsessively: the salvation of the soul of the individual in the face of the supposedly imminent coming of the "Kingdom of God".
But when the prospect of this "Kingdom" receded and finally disappeared, the forces focussed on this hope fell back onto themselves, and from its individualistic aspect, the Semitic religion passed to its socialistic aspect. The ecclesia, the community of the faithful, understood as an impersonal and mystic medium formed out of mutual need—the need to love, the need to serve, the need to communicate, the need for mutual acknowledgment, and the mutual dependence of lives each insufficient in itself—replaced in each soul the missing reality of the "Kingdom of God".
It is necessary to distinguish clearly the ecclesia, of which we are now speaking, from what would then become the Catholic ecclesiastic organisation. This organisation arose from a gradual Romanisation of the ecclesia in the primitive sense, whose spirit, to a certain extent, it betrayed, and whose Semitic part was choked off by means of a hierarchical principle of authority and a symbolic ritual corpus. What is important here, however, is to understand in its primordial reality the ecclesia of the first Christian communities, which came to the surface when the direct influence of Jesus ceased and the sense of imminence of the "Kingdom" faded. In those times we find the seed of that force which would lead to the type of modern Euro-American society.
In the Empire the principle was: hierarchy, investiture from above. In the Christian ecclesia it was: equality, brotherliness. In the Empire there were personalised relations of dependence: there were masters and there were slaves. In its most complete forms, there was a regime of castes. In the ecclesia, these relations became depersonalised: there was a bond of equal beings, without leaders, without distinction of class or of tradition, held together only by mutual dependence and by the identical need of the soul. In other words, sociality was born, the form of pure social living, of staying together in something collective, in an egalitarian solidarity. And as we said, the spirit proved to be the annihilator of the spirit.
And we now descend to the Reformation. The Reformation is the great fall of Nordic humanity: it is the degeneration, the reversal into the negative and the Semitic, of that force which had animated the struggle for the Empire against the Roman yoke. In the ideal of the Hohenstaufen we find, as a matter of fact, those principles of freedom, independence, and individuality which are characteristic of the original ethos of the Germanic stocks. Except that these values, reconciled with the hierarchical ideal, fought a spiritual battle during the Middle Ages; they raised the claim of a higher hierarchy, more solar, more virile, and more perfect than anything the Church was able to offer as compromise. In the Reformation we have precisely the opposite: these same Nordic forces freed themselves from bondage to Rome, only to bury at the same time those residues of hierarchical authority, Romanity, and universality which the Church still offered; through it, what occurred was a resuscitation of those very forces which had formed the first Christian community and the life of the ecclesia. In the Reformation we have the return of primitive Christianity, precisely in its lower, “socialistic” aspect, in contrast to the Roman aspect characteristic of the Church. Protestant intransigence put an end to the Catholic compromise, though not on behalf of the way back to the Empire, but rather towards the anti-Empire.
In spite of everything, the Germanic peoples still preserved, within the heredity of their blood, too many Nordic factors for the upheaval to be fatal for them. Among the Germanic peoples, more than in any others, despite the schism, an imperial and almost feudal regime was able to maintain itself, as well as a living sensibility for the virile and Nordic values of honour, loyalty, and hierarchy—right up until recent times, until the outbreak of the world war.
Things take a quite different form among the Anglo-Saxon peoples, especially after religious revolt became a political revolt; after Humanism and the Enlightenment yielded their fruits; after the principle of authority fell, first in the spiritual domain, then in the social domain, and finally in the moral domain, and the substance of ferment and decomposition from the Jacobin revolution invaded the world.
In this context we see in fact how the Reformation—originally a religious revolution—brought about a profound change of the political idea itself. Releasing consciences from Roman authority, it socialised and immanentised the Church; it actualised, in a more or less secularised political reality, the form of the primitive ecclesia.
Across the Reformation, the hierarchy from above was replaced by the free association of believers, emancipated from the bonds of authority, each one having become anarchically judge of himself and at the same time the equal of everyone else. This was, in other words, the beginning of the European “socialistic” decline: in opposition the imperial ideal, the Protestant religion opened the way to a form of organisation dependent, not on leaders, but on the aggregate of separate individuals; an organisation coming from below and exhausting itself in impersonal relationships; a purely collective, self-governing and self-justifying reality.
This process has rapidly drawn in the Anglo-Saxon peoples and even today tends to a “catholicity” or universality, antithetical both to Roman and medieval imperial catholicity and to that which, in the narrower sense, was characteristic of the Church itself. Just as within each individual nation, it obliterated the difference between individuals in a pure social bond by uniting them spiritually, so it also tended to obliterate the differences and the privileges of each individual nation by placing them all at the same rank in the anonymous universalism of the ideal of a “League of Nations”. At the same time, religiosity became more and more humanised, tending more and more to identify itself with sociality. The most recent orientation, towards a “religion of work”, and the increasing preponderance of personal self-interest and rigid moralistm over any other ideal and metaphysical interest in the Protestant countries, proves it.
In conclusion: the Reformation favours a consistent position, it separates the Christian aspect (in its moderate form of the ideal of a mere associative life) from its Christian-pagan nucleus still found in Catholic countries, and realises a distinct type of State: the democratic State, the anti-Empire, the self-government of the mass, sovereign over itself, along with the simultaneous levelling of individuals in an anarchic, acephalous solidarity, with a semblance of governors, servants of servants as mere “representatives”, dependent upon and responsible to the masses—rather than to be responsible to themselves, as superior leaders, to remain the principle of absolute authority.
Naturally, this is far from the whole story. By underground means, the secularised reconstitution of the ecclesia evokes again the Semitic element, and the Protestant countries are those in which capitalism and plutocracy have developed in their most significant forms and in which, behind the scenes of democratic “freedom”, the omnipotent Jew reappears, master of forces and men of a world profaned by stateless finance. Alongside this, they herald the latest fall, the birth of the pure collective, in accordance with the proletarian myth of the “Third International” and the prophetic mission of the Soviets.
We are thus confronted with a decisive “either-or”.
It is vain to fight effects without knowing the remote and concealed causes from which they derive. It is vain to look for a political reaction of any effectiveness if not rooted in a corresponding spiritual revolution.
The Church is something halfway. The Church for us is too little. We need much more. We need a true counter-Reformation. And this counter-Reformation will consist in the return to the original Aryan ethos, to the pure forces of Nordic-Roman tradition, to the Imperial symbol of the Eagle.
This is the first restoration. It will be a question of time, but our nations have to make a decision: either they will become in fact victims of the converging forces of Protestantism and of Judaism, organising themselves definitively on the republican and democratic type of Anglo-Saxon society, choosing a religion immanent to sociality, where the spiritual becomes only a means to temporal accomplishment, culminating in the service of the Ahrimanic mysticism of the faceless “collective man”—or they have to react, and commit themselves to recovery and restoration, that is, for a revolution in the other sense, thus bringing to fulfilment the ideal of the other State.
As the Protestant revolution surpassed the Catholic compromise, and brought the West back into the forms and to the values of democratic society, we, against the Reformation, must surpass the same compromise, but in order to affirm the other possible alternative: that which was announced in the struggle of the Empire for the Holy Roman Empire. On the basis of an integral Nordic-Roman restoration, we must create a State which is both new and ancient at the same time, held up by the values of hierarchy, of organisation from above, of aristocracy, of governance, and of wisdom—that is, by those imperial values which the Church in its best period possessed to some extent on loan, and which, after the setback of the Church itself—in the course of a bimillennial experiment—must be asserted plainly, clear of any disguise or reduction, by men who are not ashamed of their primordial nobility, who, in their faithfulness to the original powers of the noble ârya, their uranic-solar spirituality, and to their heroic symbols, against the whole of socialised and semiticised Europe in decline, might finally dare, as we do, to declare themselves pagan imperialists.