A Liturgy of Death

Lex orandi, lex credendi

This is an essay on how the Right will die.  

It was prompted by a conversation with a Hindu reader, who messaged me to ask what I thought about his faith and its history, which developed into an interesting discussion about Hermann Hesse, Savitri Devi, and the Rig Veda. 

Throughout, he assured me that he wasn’t trying to convert me. My immediate thought was: you should be. If this is what you truly believe, you should be. If you carry the absolute truth, act like it - insist on it, don’t apologize for it. If you neglect to act as an absolute believer, in a way that reaffirms your conviction to your faith, then your faith will die, undermined by your own revealed preferences.  

If the Vitalist Right is to avoid the heat-death of its own belief system, then it must do the same. It must act like it believes. 

Without immanentizing their philosophy, the vitalists will remain caught in the web of post-modernity. The longer that their words remain untethered to their actions, the greater the danger grows. One of the central markers of the postmodern mind is epistemic uncertainty, and by failing to act as you speak, you reaffirm this lack of conviction.  

Regarding the furious discourse that has been raging for years on the Twitter Right, one is reminded of a passage by the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, analyzing the impact of postmodernity on the human intellectual condition:

Are we, intellectual sirs, not actively or passively 'producing' more and more words, more books, more articles, ceaselessly refilling the pot-boiler of speech, gorging ourselves on it rather, seizing books and 'experiences', to metamorphose them as quickly as possible into other words… scraping up intensities wherever possible, and never being sufficiently dead…

If you espouse a value system that you don’t deeply embed into your life, but instead treat as entertainment to be consumed in your evenings, you are reaffirming a postmodern culture, not transcending it.

Paradoxically, the faiths that have the greatest longevity are those that make the strictest impositions upon their followers. Strenuous action must be demanded, and demanded immediately. 

The Vitalist Right recognises this relationship between action and belief at some level, and expresses this realization through its focus on bodybuilding. And yet it struggles to move beyond this first step. This individually focused action is insufficient. It is the Right’s equivalent of ‘clean your room’ - healthy, necessary, but not sufficient.

As the prayers of the faithful do not cease when they leave church, so the duty of the vitalist to manipulate reality does not cease when he puts down his weights. Part of the issue is an incomplete reading of one of the central texts of this movement, Yukio Mishima’s Sun and Steel. 

Mishima was wracked in his youth by his bodily weakness and an intellectual precociousness that led to him despairing that he never encountered the world as is. He was never given the chance; consumed by a preoccupation with words, theory, and narrative, his mind constructed a veil around him that prevented the raw interface with reality that he longed for.  

It was words of this kind that, descending on me like a swarm of winged insects, seized on my individuality and sought to shut me up within it.

Mishima determined to break out of the prison of his mind through a radical project that focused totally on his physicality. He endeavored to incarnate his spirit through a furious engagement with sun and steel - breaking and reforming his body on an altar of weights in the blazing light of day. 

The exercise of the muscles elucidated the mysteries that words had made…

To revive the dead language, the discipline of the steel was required; to change the silence of death into the eloquence of life, the aid of steel was essential. The steel faithfully taught me the correspondence between the spirit and the body…

But as his masterpiece continues, Mishima gradually reveals to the reader that he is aware that this incarnation is the beginning, not the end, of his project. After all, his motivation was to replace an aspect of his lost childhood; once this is achieved, what then should come in the mature phase of the project?

Mishima provides his answer, tragic and beautiful:

Never had I discovered in physical action anything resembling the chilling, terrifying satisfaction afforded by intellectual adventure. Nor had I ever experienced in intellectual adventure the selfless heat, the hot darkness of physical action. 

Somewhere, the two must be connected. 

Where, though? 

Somewhere, there must be a realm between, a realm akin to that ultimate realm where motion becomes rest and rest motion…

Somewhere, I told myself, there must be a higher principle that manages to bring the two together and reconcile them. 

That principle, it occurred to me, was death.

On the 25th of November 1970, Mishima committed suppuku, ritual suicide, at Camp Ichigaya of the Japan Self-Defense Forces. 

Mishima’s project was not one of ‘bodybuilding’ - it was an audacious attempt at the total synthesis of spirit and physique. Weights were just one of a number of rituals - sun, steel, combat - by which Mishima was preparing himself for the total transcendence of the divide in his being through the final act of death.

I regard Mishima’s suicide as fundamentally horrific, tragic, and a terrible sin - but it must also be recognised as a supreme act of will.

If the lesson that the Right takes from Mishima is that bodybuilding is sufficient to overcome the divide between discourse and reality, then it will fail.

Mishima was able to maintain and strengthen his philosophical conviction to the very end, to refine his belief to a point of shining brilliance, through the total integration of physical ritual and action into his intellectual system. He was not just ‘lifting weights’.

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I lead two lives that I hope to cohere. Readers will have noticed that I’m intellectually fascinated by the Vitalist Right, but my true loyalty will always be to the authentic, traditionalist expression of my Catholic faith.

In pursuing these two lives, one is aware of a stark contrast. Unlike the Church, the Vitalist Right has no rituals; it has no ceremonies; it has no body. It has no liturgy.   

Liturgy is the structure of the ritual of worship. From the Greek λαός / Laos, "the people" and the root ἔργο / ergon, "work", it is thus usually translated in the Christian tradition as “the work of the people”. It defines the proper and shared form of action.

Christ - the Word became flesh - is the Chief Liturgist, who came into this world to act - to live and to die.  

In the Catholic Church, we follow the Roman Missal, which defines how the liturgy is to be celebrated. It binds the celebrant not just to the words that are said - written in black - but to the actions that are taken - written in red.

The sacred and ancient liturgy has always been understood as a theological source from which to divine God’s truth. For those new to the history of the faith, it is often surprising to learn that in some sense action precedes knowledge in the Church: lex orandi, lex credendi - "the law of what is prayed is the law of what is believed". 

As the Catechism mandates:

Liturgy is a constitutive element of the holy and living Tradition.

For this reason no sacramental rite may be modified or manipulated at the will of the minister or the community. Even the supreme authority in the Church may not change the liturgy arbitrarily…

It is through the liturgy that the sacraments are administered and the faith is maintained. 

The purpose of the sacraments is to sanctify men, to build up the Body of Christ and, finally, to give worship to God. Because they are signs they also instruct. They not only presuppose faith, but by words and objects they also nourish, strengthen, and express it. That is why they are called 'sacraments of faith.'

In the words of St. James:

Thou believest that there is one God. Thou dost well: the devils also believe and tremble. But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?

Thus St. Maximus the Confessor taught that “knowledge without praxis is the demons’ theology”. 

The Right will not live until it finds its rituals, its gatherings, its rites, its liturgy. Without this, young men will discover it, be seduced by it, tire of it, and discard it. Bodybuilding cannot be the only mode of prescribed action. Weights alone will not bind them for life. 

Origen teaches us the proper mode of prayer:

Now, since the performance of actions enjoined by virtue or by the commandments is also a constituent part of prayer, he prays without ceasing who combines prayer with work, and work with prayer. For the saying "pray without ceasing" can only be accepted by us as a possibility if we may speak of the whole life of a saint as one great continuous prayer.

Only then can we too sustain our faith to the very end, and die a beautiful death.

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Sic transit imperium,

Johann