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The “fatherland,” without any bombast, is simply the area around oneself contemplated after climbing a hill.
A nation does not “demystify” its past without diminishing its present substance.
European virtues seem linked to political forms that current historical circumstances do not allow for.
A “nation” is a parasitic plant that dries up when it finishes sucking regional saps.
When the opportunity arises to do something debased, the Colombian rarely wastes it.
Peace does not flourish except among moribund nations.
Under the sun of iron hegemonies.
To travel through Europe is to visit a grand house in which the servants show us the empty rooms where there were once wonderful parties.
The emergence of nationalism in any nation indicates that its originality is in its death throes.
Every country has its own irreplaceable essence, a non-transferable and mysterious nature. Something that separates it, something that brings it closer to our heart. The homogeneous, the common, the similar, disgust us in their universalist insipidity.
To attribute an axial position in history to the West would be extravagant, if the rest of the world copied only its technology, and if any anything invented today, in any place, did not always appear to be invented by a talentless Westerner.
The colony that gains its independence passes from admitted imitation to feigned originality.
When we hear the final chords of a national anthem, we know with certainty that someone has just said something stupid.
If the Europeans renounce their particularities in order to generate a “good European,” we fear they will only beget another American.
Europe, properly speaking, consists of those countries educated by feudalism.
Let us not complain of the soil in which we were born, but rather of the plant we are.
The fates of nations have all finally merged into a degenerate Occidentalism.
Modern “Oriental spirituality,” like the Oriental art of the last centuries, is merchandise from a bazaar.
The basic problems of every former colony- intellectual servitude, petty tradition, subaltern spirituality, inauthentic civilization, forced and shameful imitation- have been resolved for me with the greatest simplicity: Catholicism is my native land.
A nation’s soul is born from a historical event, matures by accepting its fate, and perishes when it admires and imitates itself.
The South American intellectual, in order to sustain himself, imports junk food from the European market.
Let us not speak ill of nationalism. Without virulent nationalism, Europe and the world would already be ruled by a technical, rational, uniform empire. Let us credit nationalism for two centuries, at least, of spiritual spontaneity, of the free expression of the national soul, of a rich historical diversity. Nationalism was the last spasm of individuality before the grey death awaiting it.
Cultures dry up when their religious ingredients evaporate.
A biological understanding is necessary if we do not want to fall into some unforeseen abyss, and the shortest walk through a farm, between herds, makes this clear. The stupidity of the Nazi theory did not consist in proclaiming the urgency of the problem, but in declaring that the lion (admit that a lion was involved) and only supremely lion-esque qualities had to be preserved, purified, exalted.
Rather, the truth seems to consist in accepting not just the co-existance of lions, tigers, panthers, elephants, eagles, and doves, but also in affirming that it is wise to seek the perfection of each species.
Replace the doctrine of the lion with a zoologist doctrine.
The history of these Latin American republics should be written not with disdain, but with irony.
The nationalist vanity of the citizen of an important country is most amusing, since in such places the disparity between the citizen and the country itself is greatest.
The real crime of colonialism was in converting the great Asian lands into the suburbs of the West.
The emergence of non-European history into the Western tradition is an episode in the intellectual life of the 19th century. The participants in the Western tradition are not necessarily heirs of non-Western history, and can only understand it in the context of the West. In other words, there can be Sinologists in the West, but no Taoists.
The problems of an “underdeveloped” country are the favorite pretext of leftist escapism. Lacking new merchandise to offer the European market, the leftist intellectual peddles his faded wares to the third world.
That patriotism which is not a natural affinity for specific landscapes is only rhetoric designed by semi-educated men to spur the illiterate toward the slaughterhouse.
Fascism, more than the reaction of Italian capitalism to the communist threat of the 1920s, was an effort by the Italian petit-bourgeois to invent a modern nationalist ethos, an unsurprising attitude considering the historical moment. The social policy of fascism, its agricultural foundations, its industrial enterprises, its architecture, its educational ambitions, its party organization, they are spectacular and hollow gestures in an attempt to adapt to a changing world in which the virtues of Italy were revealed to be lamentably ineffective. This ambition was destined to fail, because Italy is not a nation, and so fascism could only try to pour good intentions into the wine-skins of a literary, romantic, and obsolete identity.
The internationalization of the arts does not multiply their sources, but the causes of their corruption.
Faced with a plurality of civilizations and cultures, we must not be relativists, nor absolutists, but hierarchists.
Few countries do not deserve a tyrant as a ruler.
The increasing integration of humanity makes it easier to share the same vices.
Nations or individuals- with rare exceptions- only behave themselves decently when circumstances do not allow for anything else.
Collective pretentiousness is more repugnant than individual pretentiousness.
Patriotism should be mute.
Except in a few countries, trying to “promote culture” while recommending the reading of “national authors” is a contradictory endeavor.
South American exuberance is not abundance, but disorder.
The flags, on “national holidays,” should wave at half mast.
The history of an individual or a people is meaningless to us if we do not acknowledge that the soul of an individual or a people can die before the body.
Openly and indiscreetly admiring or detesting any country are equally ridiculous attitudes.
Actual French art and authentic French literature has always existed on the fringe of those “latest Parisian intellectual fashions” the foreigner so admires.
The nation- a recent phenomenon with no geographical or technical basis, a purely legal and political construction- suppresses both the royal community of the Kleinstaat and the ideal community of the Holy Empire.
Men only dress in traditional costumes or in uniforms.
Although patriotic historians may become indignant, the history of many countries is completely uninteresting.
A certain way of admiring Greece immediately gives away the fool.
At times a nation can produce a set of facts, institutions, or concepts that are summarized in a great political idea; English parliamentarism, bourgeois liberalism of 1789, Russian communism, National Socialism, etc. Ideas that belong indissolubly to the country where they are born, like a system to their author. Propagating them is a seductive but unsuccessful task. Imitation soon degenerates into simulacrum, and the only thing that can be definitively copied is a new vocabulary and some nugatory constitutional provisions. Political authenticity is as difficult as aesthetic authenticity. South American history is a painfully and comically relevant example.
Without the spread of Oriental cults and Germanic invasions, Hellenistic civilization would have initiated, with Rome as its starting point, the Americanization of the world.
A culture dies when no one knows of what it consists, or when everyone thinks they know.
The West withers every non-western soul it touches.
Certain wounds to the soul of a people appear to be their only inherited trait.
When he is stripped of the Christian tunic and the classical toga, there is nothing left of the European but a pale barbarian.
National histories are interesting until the country “modernizes.”
Then statistics are enough.
Classical Castilian means, with few exceptions, an unreadable book.
Cultural rhetoric replaces patriotic rhetoric today in the gushing exclamations of fools.
The curious pessimism of South American intellectuals regarding the fate of Europe recalls the rejoicing of an ugly woman when a pretty woman is disfigured by disease.
Nationalistic literature selects its themes with the eyes of a tourist. The writer only sees the exotic.
Obviously Barrés is wrong, but with what nobility!
The waters of the West are rotten, but the source is unpolluted.
When faced with diverse “cultures,” there are two equally erroneous attitudes: To admit only one cultural standard, or to grant all standards the same rank.
Neither the smug imperialism of the European historian of yesterday, nor the ashamed relativism of the European historian of today.
Note: Dávila was a Colombian political philosopher and in the Latin church. His aphorisms are presented here for the purposes of enjoyment, study, and historical record, but do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this writer. For more information on Dávila, see this introductory post. For information on how to live your life, go to church and read the Church Fathers/Saints.
Featured image: Antique book cover from Olde Books
