Stand Alone

“The devil can imitate humility, but he cannot imitate obedience”

The crowd is only struck by heroism when it is bright and loud. What impresses the public is brilliance, and not the painful and slow ascent of souls who rise in silence and shadow to greatness.

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The next generation of nobles must learn to lead. But no man is ready to lead if he does not yet know obedience. We must learn true obedience: the absolute sublimation of one’s will into the higher law.

We have been born into and formed by a broken age of a broken world. Few of us have known fathers that bred us, raised us, and trained us to become leaders of men. The task falls to us. Our faith will be the visionary and exacting father that we never had, and unquestioning obedience to the divine law his iron rod.

It is telling that you hear calls from our sphere for the next Caesar, the next Franco. These were military men that had military discipline beaten into them. Before they wore the crown they followed those who did.

As Robert E. Lee once told a recalcitrant student in response to the young man’s insistence on his right to freedom: "Obedience to lawful authority is the foundation of manly character."

Lionel Noel Royer, Vercingetorix Throws Down His Arms at the Feet of Julius Caesar (1899)

Say what you like about the fascists, but they understood obedience. Léon Degrelle - a devout Catholic who fought for the S.S. on the Eastern Front - reflected on the spiritual aspect of obedience in his memoir The Burning Souls:

Obedience is the highest form of the use of freedom.

It is a constant manifestation of authority, authority over oneself, the most difficult of all.

No one is really capable of commanding others who is not first able to command himself, to tame in him the proud wanderer who would have liked to throw himself madly into the winds of adventure.

After having obeyed one may command, not as a brute, enjoying the right to crush others, but because command is a magnificent prerogative when it aims to discipline unruly forces, to lead them to the fullness of obedience, to this superior source of joy.

We must subject ourselves to an absolute rule. This will not come easily: the structures that bound men to duty and righteousness have long since dissolved. On this earthly plane, we are alone. But there is One - not of this earth - to which we can turn.

We must bind ourselves to the divine and eternal law, in as exquisite and harsh a form as we can find, in order to do the requisite violence to ourselves. Here I turn once again to my favorite Christian manual, Fr. Lorenzo Scupoli’s 1589 The Spiritual Combat:

…in this spiritual combat man has two wills - the will of the mind, which we call the reasonable and superior will; and the will of the senses, which we call the sensual and inferior will, and which sometimes bears the names of appetite, flesh, sense, and passion…

But let no one suppose it possible to form true Christian virtues, and to serve God as he ought, unless he is ready in good earnest to do violence to his own inclinations, and to endure the pain of giving up all the things which pleased him, both great and small, and to which he had clung with earthly affection.

In this regard, we are blessed to live in a time of magnificent temptation. Let us then enjoy a combat of exceptional intensity! As Degrelle describes:

The joy, the joy that spreads like a block of granite under the water of flowing life, the one that never gives up and which never disappoints, lies in the inner struggle, in the inner exaltation: to watch over oneself, to dominate oneself, to purify oneself, to rise, to have the courage to think.

Can you imagine the strength that could be derived from such warfare? The quality of the leaders that it will breed? The lone man holding fast to a law that all others have, in their weakness and sin, fallen away from - what strength, what patience!

And this combat is ever-present. You become battle-hardened every hour of every day. Every temptation is a thrust of the Enemy; every self-denial a riposte. Fr. Scupoli advises:

You have seen already, how you must fight if you would conquer self, and adorn yourself with virtues. Know, also, that to gain a quicker and easier conquest over your enemies, it is expedient, nay, necessary, that the conflict should be carried on daily…

All you have to do is to fight valiantly, and never to throw down your arms, nor flee, however many wounds you may have sustained. Finally, to spur yourself on to fight courageously, you must bear in mind that from this conflict there is no escape; for not to fight is all one with being taken prisoner or slain. Besides, the fury and bitter hatred of our enemies are such, that there is no possibility of any truce or peace.

It will be a long fight. At first it will be exhausting: day-by-day attrition warfare against the seductive but corrosive luxuries that make modern men soft. But this too is a blessing: a long fight is necessary. We have so far to go before we have mastered ourselves, yet alone be ready to master others.

I would suggest reading The Burning Souls. It is a short work, less than a hundred pages. But finely-wrought reflections about how Degrelle found spiritual refinement in months of desperate battle stuck in a frozen hole, in a hopeless and ill-advised campaign, are valuable.

Patience is the first of victories, victory over oneself, over one's nerves, over one's weaknesses.

As long as we have not acquired it, life is only a cascade of capitulations, capitulations made in struggle, certainly, crying out in what we perceive to be manifestations of authority, but which are in fact only an abdication to petty pride.

To be patient is to wait for one’s hour, finger to the trigger, as one watches for prey; it is to build each of the day’s actions in consideration of order and balance, laying carefully the foundation stones that will support the building.

Patience delivers the joy of not having given in.

Is this not an echo of Spengler’s metaphor of the centurion upon which we have previously reflected?

We are born in this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue. To hold on like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who died because they forgot to relieve him when Vesuvius erupted. That is greatness; that is what it means to be a thoroughbred. This honourable end is the one thing that cannot be taken from Man.

And yet ours is a message of hope; one of a noble life, not merely noble death. Ours is victory, not defeat: a radical victory over self, a prelude to later victories which will be known to others too.

Once total victory over self is known, only then will the stultifying morass of our present condition begin to melt. Men want to follow men. An age without kings is an unnatural one, and the disequalibrium can only last so long.

But men will not follow a pretender. Even now, we still have our instinct to discern the weak from the strong, no matter how much lesser men try to pretend.

Obedience to a law above you subjugates minds to you who never would have yielded to mere will.

— Frederick William Robertson

There is no way forward except to cultivate genuine strength, and no crucible in which that strength can be forged except the spiritual combat.

Let us conclude by repeating Degrelle’s call:

I write these words without trembling, which nevertheless make me suffer. In the hour of a world's bankruptcy, souls are needed which may stand hard and tall as rocky cliffs, beaten in vain by raging waves.

The time is coming when saving the world will require this handful of heroes and saints to make the great Reconquest.

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Sic transit imperium,

Johann