2,512 words

The Authentic Reactionary: Selected Scholia of Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Translated with commentary by Ramon Elani
North Augusta, S. C.: Arcana Europa Media, 2023

Large linguistic communities such as the English and Spanish-speaking worlds are peculiarly liable to insularity. It was only in the late 1980s that a few adventurous German souls caught on to the existence of then-septuagenarian Colombian aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913-1994). From there, awareness of his work spread to other European countries. But the book under review here, the first serious attempt to convey his thought to readers of English, has required another generation. It consists of about 300 aphorisms arranged under 12 chapter headings with commentary and an Introduction by the translator.

Born in Bogotá, the son of a wealthy landowner and importer, Gómez Dávila was taken to Paris as a boy for the sake of his education. Falling ill of pneumonia there at the age of 16, he spent two years largely bedridden, a time he devoted to the intensive study of the Greek and Latin classics.

As translator Ramon Elani explains in his Introduction, the young Gómez Dávila was also influenced at this time by Action Française, with its “condemnation of democracy and lament over the lost sense of integral order,” as well as by the Catholic literary revival associated with figures such as Léon Bloy and Paul Claudel, a movement which eschewed rationalism (even in theological form) in favor of what it took to be “the core of Catholicism: ritual, aesthetics, and tradition.”

Not long after returning to Bogotá, Gómez Dávila married. The marriage was happy, but the couple had no children. Most of Gómez Dávila’s life was spent in his library of over 30,000 volumes, “at the polo club, or at church, or at leisure with his family and friends.” As he wrote: “One should strive to live with clarity: a simple, quiet, discrete life, surrounded by intelligent books, loving but a few precious souls.”  He attended mass regularly, but had little use for sermons: “the gesture, more than the word,” he wrote, “is the true transmitter of traditions.”

Apart from a six-month trip to Europe with his wife in 1948, he did not travel, writing: “in this age, when every famous site is desecrated by hordes of tourists, the only way for a reverent pilgrim to honor a sacred shrine is simply not to go there.” Though a member by birth of Colombia’s ruling elite, he rejected all offers from powerful friends to participate in public life. He did, however, play a role in founding Colombia’s first and still most prestigious university, The University of the Andes, in 1948.

Gómez Dávila’s complete published works consist of two volumes of prose, Notes 1 and Texts 1 (neither followed by a second volume), three collections of aphorisms, and two journal articles. He made no effort to publicize his writings.

Pride of place in this oeuvre belongs to the aphorisms, which number more than 10,000. Like the work of other great aphorists (cf. La Rochefoucauld), their brevity belies the careful labor invested in their precise wording and polishing. As Elani notes, “We should not mistake them for being rushed or casual.”

Gómez Dávila called his aphorisms “scholia” or “glosses on an implicit text,” with the text presumably being mostly favorite books from his library. Ordinary scholarship does not, of course, leave the texts it glosses implicit, so it is filled with quotations, constituting a kind of dialogue between the scholar and the usually greater thinker he is studying. Gómez Dávila preferred to keep this dialogue in the background, incorporating others’ insights so fully into his own thought that one could no longer tell — and it perhaps ceased to matter — where their thought ended and his own began. “To quote an author,” he wrote, “is to show that one is incapable of assimilating him.”

As the German scholar Till Kinzel writes, such composition reflects “a kind of reading that is the product of leisure, of schole in the Greek sense . . . digestive, repetitive and meditative.” This unfashionable type of study might best be understood by contrast with the perspective reigning at modern “research universities,” where faculty are expected to be “productive” and “contribute” to the sum of human knowledge (Gómez Dávila’s life’s work might not have earned him tenure at an American community college).

Gómez Dávila’s digestive and meditative manner of engaging with his predecessors may be illuminated by his remark that “religious thought does not advance, like scientific thought, but rather deepens.” Yet an important model for him was the not especially religious Montaigne, who was so steeped in the classics that he often ends up becoming little more than a broker between his readers and the ancients such as Plutarch or Seneca, on whom his own mind was formed. Understood religiously or not, truth is more important than the fallible human beings who occasionally succeed in enunciating it.

Despite his seemingly impersonal writing style, however, the reader will discover that a strongly-marked personality emerges from the aphorisms.

The 300 scholia which make up the core of The Authentic Reactionary are accompanied by commentary by the translator. One irate Amazon reviewer complained he had ordered a book by Gómez Dávila and was frustrated to find that it contained more from Elani than from the purported author. I can sympathize with this point of view, and eventually someone is going to have to give us a reliable and unmediated English edition of all 10,000 of Gómez Dávila’s scholia. But the aphoristic form is so alien to the average modern reader that he is likely to be better served, in making his first approach to such a writer, by an edition with significant commentary. Elani’s is not perfect, but it does reflect a long “digestive, repetitive and meditative” engagement with the scholia, as well as with at least some of the authors who influenced Gómez Dávila himself: Jakob Burckhardt, Ernst Jünger, Joseph de Maistre, Michel de Montaigne, and Friedrich Nietzsche, among others. Like the author, the translator appears to have little use for the modern world: the book jacket explains that he “raises goats and homeschools his children.” The best advice I can give to a reader dissatisfied with the commentary is to write his own.

I will, however, note two features of Elani’s thinking that may surprise some readers. The first is that he lists as one of the “catastrophes” confronting us at the present day “a new rise of nationalism and populism led by cruel and calculating demagogues, which hearkens back to the totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century.” I do not blame him for disbelieving in the existence of a political “solution” to the modern predicament — Gómez Dávila himself wrote that “man is a problem without a human solution” — but it seems suspicious that his verdict on national populism is indistinguishable from that of hegemonic hypermodernity. Would his author have shared it?

We cannot know for sure, but a possible clue may be found in a suggestion Elani makes in his Introduction regarding the influence of Charles Maurras’ Action Française on the young Gómez Dávila: viz. that if he “had been born one generation earlier, he may have ended up with a radically different outlook, joining the ranks of anti-moderns like Yeats and Heidegger, who temporarily saw something promising in the fascist movements of their day.” Was it the disaster of the Second World War that convinced Gómez Dávila of the futility of all political action? If so, is such an inference valid?

Whatever the case, Elani notes that, while Marx and Marxist writers are well-represented in Gómez Dávila’s library, works relating to interwar fascist movements are completely absent.

But we should also consider that, as a born member of Colombia’s wealthy, largely European-descended elite, Gómez Dávila knew a number of powerful politicians personally, and their position does not seem to have been any obstacle to his friendship with them. He simply declined their offers of public service.

I am unsure of the extent to which Gómez Dávila’s rejection of politics represented a personal decision, and to what extent it involved a principled condemnation of all forms of political action under modern conditions. But I do feel confident in saying that the absence of any political solution to the modern predicament does not imply that all political programs and parties are equally bad. I would be inclined to greater concern about the “cruel and calculating demagogues” actually ruling over the contemporary world than about the courageous souls emerging to contest their power.

A second point of agreement between Elani and hypermodernity is his repeatedly-expressed belief that mankind faces an imminent “climate apocalypse.” Gómez Dávila does warn us that the modern world is headed for some sort of unpleasant reckoning with ecological limits, and he is probably right. But that men marinated in every one of the modern world’s illusions would be the first to diagnose this approaching crisis correctly, or that the New York Times could be trusted to report it to us, strikes me as ludicrously unlikely.

A good place to start approaching an anti-modern such as Gómez Dávila is his thinking on aristocracy. Modern man is wont to imagine the feudal aristocracy as heartless men who used their unearned privilege to extract resources from the poor. In fact, the landed wealth assigned to them functioned to create a class of people not forced to think about production and consumption, and therefore capable of devoting themselves to higher things: loyalty, honor, sacrifice. This is why aristocrats were prohibited from engaging in trade.

It is true, of course, that feudalism accomplished this end only by creating a privileged caste: the human condition dictates the impossibility of freeing all men, or even very many, from material concerns. But the disappearance of hereditary aristocracy has only resulted in the substitution of a new elite uninformed by any ideals, and distinguished from the mass only by the possession of wealth:

The ruling class of an agrarian society is an aristocracy; that of an industrial society is an oligarchy.

For more than a century there has been no upper class. At the most we might say there is a pretentious segment of the middle class.

Elani remarks: “The crowning glory of the aristocratic system is that it recognizes nonproductive goals.”

Gómez Dávila remarks that even unearned privilege itself is a response to an important feature of human nature:

Man truly admires only the things that are given without merit: talent, lineage, beauty.

Elani comments: “Why should we admire what we ourselves are capable of doing? To deserve something is merely to have done what is necessary for it to be conferred. We admire those things which have been bestowed from God.”

To be an aristocrat is to believe that not everything depends on the will.

This affirmation of the gratuitous character of the aristocratic should be contrasted with the thought of another modern champion of aristocratic values, Friedrich Nietzsche, with his emphasis on self-overcoming and will.

The disappearance of privilege has resulted in a society reluctant to admire much of anything and, as Gómez Dávila says,

[t]o refuse to admire is the mark of the beast.

Future historians looking for a handy label for the present epoch might wish to consider “The Age of Resentment.” Overt social hierarchy functioned to keep such base instincts under control:

In societies where everybody believes they are equal, the unavoidable superiority of some makes the rest feel like failures. Conversely, in societies where inequality is normal, each person settles into his own sense of unique difference, without being compelled to compare himself to others, or even being able to contemplate the possibility. Only a hierarchical structure can be compassionate toward the mediocre and the meek.

Love of the people is the duty of the aristocrat. The democrat only loves them during election season.

The disappearance of a leisure class has also led to excessive emphasis on work and production, in spite of the increased leisure seemingly permitted by all our labor-saving devices:

After seeing work exploit and destroy the world, indolence seems like the mother of virtues.[1]

On the other hand,

[i]f one’s goal is merely to provide an increasing number of goods to an increasing number of people, without being concerned with the quality of those people or those goods, then capitalism is the perfect solution.

Let us deceive no one: the devil can deliver the material goods he promises.

The modern world has done nothing for human aspirations, but it has satisfied more appetites.

Like all intelligent defenders of aristocracy, Gómez Dávila is aware of the existence of a “natural aristocracy” only imperfectly embodied by any historical hereditary caste:

The genuine aristocrat is one who has an interior life. Regardless of birth, rank, or fortune.

It is precisely such an interior life, perhaps even more than hereditary privilege, that the modern world militates against with its rejection of the transcendent, its haste, and its cult of efficiency.

“Finding himself,” for modern man, means dissolving himself in a collective identity.

Without an inner life, modern man lacks the resources to be alone — one of the most important things he has lost.

In solitude, man recovers the strength to live.

Ordinary man lives among phantasms; only the recluse dwells among realities.

Intelligence isolates; stupidity congregates.

It is not the peasant that the true aristocrat despises, but the bourgeois. Gómez Dávila rejected Marxism because it did not represent a sufficiently radical break from the bourgeois mentality:

The leftist obviously refuses to accept that the foundational principles of leftist thought are derived from the conclusions of bourgeois thought.

A “classless society” is one where there is neither aristocrat nor common man, where only the bourgeois can move about freely.

The proletarian only hates the bourgeois because of the economic difficulty of emulating him.

Feudal society better understood the outlook of the bourgeois, and hence the need to limit his influence:

The bourgeoisie, in the feudal framework, is confined to small urban centers where it is well ordered and disciplined. With the shattering of this framework, the bourgeoisie is unleashed upon society at large.

Readers will discover that the aphoristic form tends to impose Gómez Dávila’s own leisurely, digestive, repetitive, and meditative style of reading upon them: like good poetry, his scholia best reward those patient enough to proceed slowly and return often. Here are a few more of my own favorites:

History demonstrates not the inefficacy of actions, but rather the futility of intentions.

The Church’s function is not to adapt Christianity to the world nor even to adapt the world to Christianity; her function is to maintain a counterworld within the world.

In an age when the media spew forth a constant stream of inanity, the cultured man is defined not by what he knows but by what he ignores.

After experiencing what an age with practically no religion consists of, Christianity is learning to write the history of paganism with respect and sympathy.

Since science cannot explain the consciousness that created it, when it has finished explaining everything, it will in fact have explained nothing.

Notes

[1] Cf. Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture.