Cultivating the Heroic Spirit

How to find transcendence through sport

In Don’t Watch Sports, we discussed the weakening effect of being a passive observer of sports. Becoming noble requires stepping into the arena, and being unafraid to play.

But it is important to recognize that merely playing sport does not necessarily convey the full spectrum of virtue and spiritual experience that we seek. If we judge modern sport by its fruits, we find it failing. You will find few aristocrats of the soul in your local gym.

Modern sport is an entirely physical endeavor, devoid of metaphysical significance or encounters with the transcendent.

…the new generations have turned athletic competition into a religion and appear to be unable to conceive anything beyond the excitement of training sessions, competitions, and physical achievements; they have truly turned accomplishment in sports into an end in itself and even into an obsession rather than as means to a higher end.

— Julius Evola, Meditations on the Peaks

Why is this? Sport and associated activities have become commercialized, systematized, technical - a natural reflection of the broader trajectory of our society. They are de-contextualized from the metaphysical fabric in which they should be embedded, and pursued instead for tepid purposes like losing weight and mental health.

However, in modern civilization everything tends to suffocate the heroic sense of life. Everything is more or less mechanized, spiritually impoverished, and reduced to a prudent and regulated association of beings who are needy and have lost their self-sufficiency. The contact between man’s deep and free powers and the powers of things and of nature has been cut off; metropolitan life petrifies everything, syncopates every breath, and contaminates every spiritual “well.”

If you are a committed athlete, you may have experienced transcendent, ecstatic moments when playing sport, but they are rare, and lacking in understanding or reproducibility. It is the intention of this essay to begin correcting this.

This path will be a long one, with various stages we must pass through. I will suggest that these are, in order: the cultivation of personal virtue; the formation of brotherhoods of virtue; encounters with the spiritual dimensions of extreme physicality; and finally the development of a certain embrace of death, of the little death of self in an immersion of total play, prayer, and joy.

Nikólaos Gýzis, Olympic Champion (1896)

It is well understood that there are certain virtues that are best developed through sport. In the former essay in this series, we saw something of the Greek and Christian understandings of these virtues.

The first and central virtue to be gained through the authentic pursuit of sport is the discipline to joyfully embrace hardship and pain. There is no noble spiritual system that does not require this characteristic. This mastery of self fundamentally underpins the pursuit of all higher goals.

A rigorous understanding of this virtue, which I will refer to as hardihood, is perhaps best derived from those sporting traditions in which danger, pain, and codified ethics are present in their most extreme form. I will take as an example the combat sports of the medieval chivalric orders, like jousting. For participants:

Hardiness is not a quality that struggles for a definition. To be physically tough and undaunted is what the word now evokes in English, and it meant the same to the Francophone author of the Song of Roland…

Geoffrey de Charny also emphasised the masculine admirability of hardiness, but interpreted it more broadly in the light of the religious feeling of contemptus mundi… They should endure cold and heat with equal indifference; they should care little for the fear of death; they should strive hard and ignore discomfort and wounds… For him, the body is of little consequence in the face of the honour that a undaunted spirit can earn.

— David Crouch, The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France 900-1300

Pursuing the complete embodiment of hardiness in the face of intense sports cultivates unyielding, focused discipline not just in body but in mind and action. Evola describes this as:

The active realism - that lucid and perfectly mastered instinct, that style of a spirit that keeps the soul and any irrational reaction under total control…

In Meditations on the Peaks, he explores the manifestation of this virtue by men who pursue mountain climbing, wherein the precarity of the situation forces a certain stoic silence on those present, a stripping away of all frivolity and ostentatiousness, replaced by total focus and discipline.

The first characteristic is sparsity of words and reduced verbal communication. The mountain teaches silence; it discourages idle chatter, useless words, and exuberant and pointless effusive outbursts. It promotes simplification and the turning of one’s attention inward.

In this essay I will not dwell for too long on the personal virtues aspect of the spiritual quest of sport, because the fact that sport engenders virtue is not controversial, even in our age, and therefore much supportive commentary already exists. Nevertheless, recognition of the diversity and significance of these virtues is important.

A useful exploration of these virtues can be found in the document of the Holy See ‘Giving the best of yourself’:

Fair play allows sports to become a means of education for all of society, of the values and virtues found in sports, such as perseverance, justice and courtesy, to name a few that Pope Benedict XVI points out. “You, dear athletes, shoulder the responsibility - not less significant - of bearing witness to these attitudes and convictions and of incarnating them beyond your sporting activity into the fabric of the family, culture, and religion.”

Sport is not properly played in isolation. Once participating individuals are developing personal virtues, to bring these to their fullness of meaning and effect, they should be brought together in bonds of noble brotherhood.

This productive tension between individual elevation and interpersonal bonds can find its expression both in individual and team sports. In individual athletic contests:

…it is one’s opponent who draws out the best in an athlete... The word competition alludes to this experience, as the word comes from the two Latin roots “com” - with - and “petere” - to strive or to seek. The competitors are “striving or seeking together” for excellence.

In team endeavors the potential for the elevation of the individual is no less present:

Another way to put it is to be simultaneously alone and with other people — a connection occurring essentially through action. To lead and show the way is just an example of the tasks that must always be fulfilled through strength… this special sense of active solidarity, which keeps a distance between people and yet presupposes the full harmony of their forces because of the precise assessment of and trust in each member’s potential. This is virility without ostentation and mutual help without hesitation, among people who are on the same plane; it is based on a freely chosen and common goal.

— Julius Evola, Meditations on the Peaks

And, with the application of intentionality, these joint energies can be harnessed into the construction of noble brotherhoods of men.

In relatively recent times, various possibilities were offered by certain student corporations in Central Europe, the so-called Korpsstudenten practising Mensur - cruel but non-fatal duels that followed specific rules (leaving facial scars as traces) - with the goal of developing courage, steadfastness, intrepidity, and endurance to physical pain, while at the same time upholding the values of a higher ethics, of honour and camaraderie, although not without certain excesses.

— Julius Evola, A Handbook for Right-Wing Youth

Thus sport becomes integrated into its proper social and religious context, becoming fused with concepts like love and service, constituting the next ‘level’ of our journey to discover sport’s full practice.

But there are dimensions beyond the development of virtue that must be sought. True sport must be understood as a fundamentally spiritual quest, for the individual to not only lose himself amongst a group, but to transcend himself fully.

Only gnostics reject the flesh as evil; a proper understanding of the body and spirit is one of unity. We should not be surprised, then, that a furious but properly ordered focus on the refinement of the physical form can yield spiritual fruit.

The understanding of the unity of the human person is also the foundation for the emphasis in Church teaching that there is a spiritual dimension to sport. Indeed, John Paul II describes sport as “a form of gymnastics of the body and of the spirit.” As he put it: “Athletic activity, in fact, highlights not only man's valuable physical abilities, but also his intellectual and spiritual capacities. It is not just physical strength and muscular efficiency, but it also has a soul and must show its complete face.”

— Holy See, Giving the best of oneself

Indeed, this subjugation of the body in order to bring about fullness of spirit is the natural counterpart to the Christian tradition of fasting and mortification of the flesh. Sport also calls for the self-infliction of suffering in a deliberate rejection of the decadence of this world. These practices - properly pursued - reflect a commitment to break free from the gravity of disordered temptations, in pursuit of the higher.

From this perspective it is possible to appreciate a discipline which, although it may concern the energies of the body, will not begin and end with them but will become instead the means to awakening a living and organic spirituality. This is the discipline of a superior inner character. In the ascetic, such a discipline is present in a negative way, so to speak; in the hero it is present in a positive, affirmative way, typical of the Western world. The inner victory against the deepest forces that surface in one’s consciousness during times of tension and mortal danger is a triumph in an external sense, but it is also the sign of a victory of the spirit against itself and of an inner transfiguration. Hence, in antiquity an aura of sacredness surrounded both the hero and the initiate to a religious or esoteric movement, and heroic figures were regarded as symbols of immortality.

— Julius Evola, Meditations on the Peaks

In Sun and Steel, as we have previously discussed, Yukio Mishima records his gradual realization that this righteous contact with his full physicality was a necessary step for him to break out of the prison of his nervous, overly-theoretical disposition. He had developed this condition as a result of an isolated youth spent entirely in books - an affliction that prevented him from spiritual maturation, and from the fullness of life itself.

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: thus feeble emotions, it seemed to me, corresponded to flaccid muscles, sentimentality to a sagging stomach, and over-impressionability to an oversensitive, white skin. Bulging muscles, a taut stomach, and a tough skin, I reasoned, would correspond respectively to an intrepid fighting spirit, the power of dispassionate intellectual judgement, and a robust disposition.

So far in our journey we have established that sport is a vehicle for the development of essential virtue and a mode of establishing a necessary connection between physicality and spirit, body and soul. Our next task, then, is to increase the intensity of this contact, to widen the aperture through which the transcendent flows when we engage in play and competition.

Our first observation is that the more we give physically - the greater our commitment to discovering our limits - the more clarity with which the boundry between finitude and the infinite appears. In a stark encounter with our limitations, as we gasp for air and our vision turns white, it is made clear to us how much exists that is out of our reach. This moment, at the edge of our existence, we are invited to discover what is beyond.

To ascend further into this encounter with the divine, mediated by athletic activity, we must loosen the ties that bind our consciousness to the particulars of this mortal coil. I suggest that we achieve this by the ruthless pursuit of play, beauty, action, prayer, and the casting off of all profane considerations like ‘purpose’.

The Church teaches that sport at its most beautiful orients us towards the Lord.

The Church has been a sponsor of the beautiful in art, music and other areas of human activity throughout its history. This is ultimately because beauty comes from God, and therefore its appreciation is built into us as his beloved creatures. Sport can offer us a chance to take part in beautiful moments, or to see these take place. In this way, sport has the potential to remind us that beauty is one of the ways we can encounter God.

— Holy See, Giving the best of oneself

Beauty needs no justification. It is an inherent good. Thus its pursuit allows us to cast off incidental ‘purposes’ that tie our activities into the material concerns of this world. We are thus called to play, with a total lightness of being, free from the consideration of earthly responsibilities.

Catholic liturgical theologian Romano Guardini agrees with Thomas Aquinas that play and contemplation share similarities. Indeed, in Guardini’s view, the liturgy itself is a kind of play. For him, the didactic aim of the liturgy is that of teaching the soul “not to see purposes everywhere.” In this sense, the liturgy is similar to the play of the child or the life of art: “It has no purpose, but it is full of profound meaning.” The soul must learn to abandon, at least in prayer, the restlessness of purposeful activity; it must learn to waste time for the sake of God, and to be prepared for the sacred game with sayings and thoughts and gestures, without always immediately asking “why?” and “wherefore?” It must learn not to be continually yearning to do something, to attack something, to accomplish something useful, but to play the divinely ordained game of the liturgy in liberty and beauty and holy joy before God.

— P. Kelly, Catholic Perspectives on Sports

In this lightening of situation, in sport the individual becomes “freely transformed into an element of solid action”. In this freedom from profane restrictions, the heroic element of our souls is granted the latitude to more fully express itself and carry us forward.

The irrationality of impressions, visions, of inexplicable elan, and gratuitous acts of heroism urge man forward along ascending paths; thus, he eventually begins to act from an interior motive. It is in the context of the subconscious that he finds himself introduced to a wider reality through which he is transformed to a state of calmness, self-sufficiency, simplicity, purity. Moreover, he receives an almost supernatural inflow of energies that cannot be explained through the determinism of physiology. He also feels an indomitable will to keep on going, to commit himself again, to challenge new peaks, new abysses, new faces. It is precisely in this drive that we find inadequate the translation of the material action in regard to its meaning (the transcendence of the spiritual impulse in relation to external conditions), to the deeds, the visions, and the bold actions that have propagated its awakening…

— Julius Evola, Meditations on the Peaks

Our final task is to take this lightness of being to its conclusion; to develop a certain amor fati, an embracing of the contradictory principle that in these moments of supreme physicality we find an intense revelation of that which is beyond the physical, and to exploit this revelation to loosen our love of the physical world.

In 1904, Pius X opened the doors of the Vatican to sport by hosting a youth gymnastics event. The chronicles of that time do not hide their amazement toward this gesture. A story is reported that in response to the question from a puzzled priest of the curia, "Where are we going to finish?” Pius X replied, “My dear, in Paradise!”

— Holy See, Giving the best of oneself

In the ecstasy of sport we can find a love for death. In the intensity of the perfect moment of worshipful play, in the dulling of all nervousness, we glimpse what lies beyond the physical, and this gives us the courage to renounce our earthly form entirely.

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.

— Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel

All sport must thus strive towards Paradise. This natural desire to be free of the bonds of our humanity is what gives the most dangerous sports their seductive aspect. They exist right on the line between life and death, and whichever side of that shimmering boundry the participant ultimately finds himself on, he will do so with honor and emerge triumphant.

And what should I say when someone climbs almost vertical icy walls, where if two or three centimeters give way that is enough for him to fall to his death? And yet this may be one of the deepest aspects of the experience of mountain climbing: a kind of amor fati, to unite the excitement of the adventure with danger, to give in to trusting that which in our destiny is beyond human control.

— Julius Evola, Meditations on the Peaks

St. Paul did not hesitate to use sporting metaphors to evoke the path to Paradise. Let us pray that we too will one day be ready to say:

For I am even now ready to be sacrificed: and the time of my dissolution is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.

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Sic transit imperium,

Johann