Iter et adventures baronis Trump et canis mirandus Bulger—III

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CAPUT IV

Quaestio, quae nunc animum patris occupavit ad exclusiones omnium aliarum cogitationum, hanc magnam pecuniae summam collocare erat, ut, cum pervenisset ad annum vigesimum primum, satis magno fructui ad habitandum Baroni provideretur. Praesertim cum ad tam celebrem familiam quam nostram pertineat.

Ita se res habet, pater, hanc quaestionem depraedari tranquillitate animi permisit in tantum, ut sensim carnem amitteret.

Mater quoque eius miserabilem condicionem videns usque adeo anxiari et laborare coepit, ut ipsa quoque valde macer fieret. In carne enim sua minuebantur naturaliter, et paulatim vel nullo cibo suppeditabatur; vel, certe, non plus quam satis erat satisfacere Bulgeris et meis necessariis.

Unde servi coeperunt amittere carnem et tectum et foris; cum magno animo esse intermisso, equi iumentaque exiguis frumento pasti, quo fit, ut celeriter etiam labi incipiant.

Itaque admodum gravis visio crevit, ut miserum patrem et matrem in meris pellibus et ossibus redactis, meris raedarii et peditis umbris circumacta patria, quatuor equis traheretur, quorum ossa sub pellibus cum essent satis crepitantia. Coactus fueris aut tunditur in curriculo piger.

Bulger et ego solus pinguedinem nostram et bonos spiritus retinuit. Tandem intervenire decrevi et celerem finem huic rei miserandae statui. Exegi a seniore Barone promissionem sponsionis, quod mandassemus se ad amussim, et non obiiciebamus, quantumvis ferae vel irrationabiles sibi vel matri meae viderentur.

Tunc precepit ei ut sumeret aliquod bonum et sucosum cibum, et primo secederet et caperet sibi iucundam diu somnum, salutavi eum reverenter et dixi:

Baron, usque ad crastinum diem.

Vix ientaculum finieram cum fores apertae et senior Baron in cubiculum ambulabat.

Refectus multum aspexit. Color in maxillam rediit, fulgor ad oculum.

Erat jam alius homo.

Ecce, domine clementissime, incepi ei pergamenum tradere, index omnium notissimorum Almanachorum in terra nostra. Colloquium cum illis statim habes et ab illis emptionem ius praebet ut tempestatum praesagitiones praebeant anni futuri!

Senior Baron coepit expostulare. “Baron!,” ego duriter inspexi manum, “Verus eques non habet unum verbum dare.”

Ille tacuit et me pergere annuit.

Ita sum secutus.

“Reuerende parens, cum ab utroque hoc iure obtinueris, ad me redi.”

Paucis diebus pater munus suum perfecit.

Et intravit cameram meam, et dedit in manus meas concessiones necessarias ab omni almanac factore prenotato in terra.

Iterum imperavi ei se ipsum refocillare, ut bonam noctis quietem caperet et mane me videret.

Cum Bulgerus et ego rediens a prandio, senior Baron senior se obtulit ad fores mansionum mearum.

Vidit fortis et bene. Vultus iterum impleverat et gressus pristinam elasticitatem recuperaverat.

Iterum in manibus suis librum pergameni posui et dixi ei.

Per singulas almanach istius membranae contenta aequaliter et copiose sparge in paginas devotas mensibus Novembris, Decembri, Ianuario, et Februario.

Respexit ad me percunctando, et movere labia coeperunt.

“Domine illustrissime!” inquam, antequam sonus ex ore eius emanasset, “In familia nostra semper milites sine timore et sine opprobrio fuistis.” Tacitus inflexit sublimem formamque recessit.

Fortasse lector aliquantulum curiositatis scire potest contenta voluminis pergameni, quam in manibus baronis maioris hac occasione posui.

Si brevitas sit animus ingenii, facetus. Si rotundus, vestis veri, verax fuit. Hoc ut esse libuerit, verba quae in illo volumine pergameno exaravi stylo meo, haec leguntur.

“Omnes signa demonstrant frigidissimo hiemali.” “Indicae sunt hiemem venientem dimidio saeculo gravissimam fore.” “Omnes idem praesagiunt responsum, eximiae longitudinis hyemem et frigora amara.” “Prognosticatores peritissimi concordant in praedicando gradum temperaturae humilis raro in his latitudinibus perventum.” “De hoc tempore expecto insolitum frigus.” “Protege plantas.” “Nunc vide bene herbas tuas hiemales.” “Conserva eos ab extremo gelu.” “Duplici copia brumalis cibus.” “Nunc saevas nives expectamus procellas.” “Exspecta frigoris amarum in toto hoc mense.” “Praeparate rarissimas grandines procellas.” “Cavete de repentinis ac penetrabilibus Aquilonibus ventos.” “Domus pecudes conlaudantes per totum hoc mensem.” “Cavete a lethalibus blizzardis, venient rabie ruenti.”
Paucis diebus absens pater meus domum rediit. Eius adventus mihi rite nuntiatus est a Bulgero, cui dixi: “Ite, bone Bulger, et baronem deduce ad cameram meam.”

Multis saltu et cortice ludibrio se circumscribit, et mox seniori barone cum iocunditate tam communi sibi serviendi more inauguravit.

Obedivi tibi, fili mi. Murmuravit senior baron cum grandi arcu in flexa.

“Salve!,” Respondi eum sedere rogans.

“Et nunc incertorum pedum meorum rector honorate, verba mea attende: negotium nostrum paene factum est. Paucis diebus confecta erit haec pecunia, quae tibi tantam sollicitudinem attulit, et cordis tui officia expilavit; atus, completus; et, quod melius est, tam feliciter investituram, ut patrem unius ditissimi filii in regno vocare valeas.

Audi, Baron. Ite nunc in primores mercatus terre et quemlibet furnum mercatorem sub stipulatione scriptionis ponite, ut tradat tibi in primo autumno omnes pelliculas, indutas, vestes, vel dorsa dominis, de quibus manutenebunt traditionem sub manibus eorum et sigillis.”

Vix labiis exciderant verba prius quam senior Baron e sella surrexerat meque ad pectus amore rapuit.

“Fili mi!” exclamavit permulsit frontem meam protuberans, “Dominum ictus est! Dignum est rectore provinciae. Cupio incipere bonum opus.

Permitte me hac nocte proficisci! “Exspecta Barone!” Dixi, ducens eum ad sellam suam et cogente leniter sedere. Exspecta, Baron; nonnihil tamen dicendum est. Cum perfeceris emptionem omnium pelliculorum, quae hoc anno exspectantur in Regnum, expende reliquam pecuniam in emendo omnibus lignis, carbo et gagatis invenis, non quod lucrum ex pauperis emolument. Graciles copia; sed ne alios iniquum in eum contrahendo, quod in prima tempestatum praedictione certe faciunt. “Ah, parve Baron!” pater, “quam cogitatione; non enim, ut dicis, pauperum humeris oneramus!

Tanta fuit diligentia qua pater meus consilia perfecit, ut uno mense totum opus macelli emissem ac vendidissem, parvo quidem progressu, sed satis amplo, ut me perquam pessime faceret dives.

Quod ita leniter et scite factum est, ut nemo callidam calliditatem umquam suspicaretur qua satis mihi ad iter faciendum divitias comparare potui, sicuti animus promptus erat, et scire me captum et teneri. Redemptis praedonibus avarissimis, nummulariis meis aurum satis esset ad redimendum me.

Post octavum annum expletum, inexstinguibili desiderio sum, ut statim ingrediendi ad perficienda diuturna consilia dilecta, longinquas terras, ab extraneis et curiosis hominibus habitatas, visitaret. Domus mea, lingua mea, populus meus multa me fœtebat, et circumdederat me.

In somnis ego navia pudens navigia pressi, iussa mea vociferans, placidum vela scopulum imminentem tempestatem creber. Transivi tempus meum a mane usque ad noctem, congruis articulis mercandi cum barbaris positis stipendiis, ut penetrare in interiora nunquam possem ab homine humano visitari, et ascendere flumina clausa a mundo incohata alatis nunciis. Mercatura et mercatura. Sed, quod mirum dictu, pater ad hoc adhortatus est, forte precibus matris meae, firmiter ac fortiter intendit in consilium abiturum domum.

Iuxta me destitutione fui. Oravi, obtestatus sum, minatus sum. Primum enim in vita mea—dolet enim me etiam nunc confiteri—cuiusdam incusavi autorum meorum contemptio.

Bulger, post aliquot dies res perspectata, conclusionem habuit seniorem Baronem aliquo modo infelicitatis meae causa, et postulabat interdum severissimo meo imperio eum a vitulis maioris dentes cohibere. Tibiis Baronis, ut ex mea diaetas post aliquod turbidum colloquium egrederetur.

“Quid!” exclamavi voce tremens maerorque, “Ego magna pereo munera, quibus me natura dedit, muris oppidi huius saeptus, cuius rixis fora amplissima sunt, quorum numquam homines testantur. Quid magnificentius quam regia turma equitum transitus? Non oportet, non erit. Tute dixisti, me non vulgarem esse puerum, ut pila et cacumine delectetur, et picturis excipiatur libris.

Sed senior Baron induraverat cor suum, et omnis oracio mea incassum erat.

Et tamen non desperavi in fine potiri.

Tandem aqua iugi stillicidio abstraxit petram. Constitui nunc animum meum Baronem seniorem movere ut acquiescendum in consilio meo relinquendi domum, conferendo ad rationem prorsus diversam. Dixi egomet mihi.

“Puer me esse vult: unus ero!” Statimque in oppido omni pernicioso scelesto amicos facere institui.

Non una iuvenilis curas meas ne-do-bene fugit.

Quo magis vehemens, strenuus et infatigabilis suae mali potentiae, eo arctius involvi affectibus meis.

Haec mihi de cinereis aurora roscida vesper Concurritur, comitesque mei comitantur in arcem. Me ducem colebant, et praeceptis meis obsequens obtemperabant, ac si alicuius dominii super eos haberem.

Senior Baron vidit glomeratam nubem et intendit caput quasi ad occurrendum tempestati meliori casu resistendi.

Ibi convivio accessit, electissima Burgundia subductus repertus est et utres communi claviculis referti. An senior Baron senior cum accipitribus amicis in campis ad iudicium venit, id solum deprehensos ita fuisse demersos ut cucullo remoto stolide placide sederent. Dicatur coquus hospites expectari et cavendum esse ut globuli pulmenti sui extra delicati, seniori Baronis horrori, in centro cuiusque globuli cerasi inveniretur.

Unus ex coadjutoribus meis satis ausum fuit cistam Baronis senioris surripiere et eam pipere implere. Consequens cogitari potest. Alius bene curavit ut omnes pyxides fomes infunderent aquam coram invitantibus ad fistulas. Cum a mensa surgere conaretur, passim queue dorsum cathedrae secure reperiretur alligata.

Una mearum rerum gestarum me in prima statione scalae constituo et, “Pontem teneo ut olim Horatius Cocles,” mea effera cohors duorum duodenarum iuvenum barbarorum per scalas ruentium clamoribus, clamoribus, vocibusque quae haberet. Cui umquam immanium verarum turbae fidem visitavi, dum ego, cum ligneo sabre, fustibus tundendo, interdum nimis audacter adolescentulus in articulos irruens, et ad calcem scalae Bulgeris infinito ludibrio mitto. Ut semper adsensum in acie esse et de virtute gloriantem.

Tandem cum magno gaudio meo animadverti, quod maior Baron maior deditionis signa ferebat.

Ego quasi prudens imperator omnes in ipsa acie impetum feci.

Futurum esse ut vulpes postridie venaretur. Unam ex meis legatis fidelissimis mandavi ut canes cibos omnes crudos deglutirent, circa horam ante initium.

Alios denos, velocissimos ac dicaces, decem principes medicos et chirurgos oppidi et vicinitatis eius domos misi, cum isdem mandatis, ut singulos, feminas, puer; violenter egrotante manerio fuerat, et maxime festinandum est ad uenturam cum medicinis pectoribus, ut pestilentia reprimatur.

Eodem fere momento decem doctores in atrium incurrerunt, solum ut Seniorem Baronem et amicos suos in suggestu congreges invenirent, et de insolitis canum actionibus sibila consultatione tenentes. Irati Galeni discipuli pro animalibus pauperibus praescribere noluerunt, et bene repletis holsteriis in crura involaverunt.

Interea non eram otiosus.

Ad ungues scoriae vel plurium volatilium Baronum senioris ligavi quamdam fuzeam inventionis meae, ita inflammabilem, ut levissima frictio exardesceret, et tunc in campis et hortis adiacentis resolutos converti domus praetorium.

Tota aestas occupati erant et laetati sunt in spe boni temporis scabendi, inter folia arida et stipulam camporum patentium.

Per hoc tempus venatores canes nonnihil e stupore excitando successerant, cum clamor, “Ignis! Ignis!” Ascendit. Venaticus raptim desiluit et insana ruunt aqualis hydrias iunctaque ministris.

Sedebam placide in conclavi meo, cum Bulgerus ad latus meum, cum tumultus sublatus est.

Senior Baron in primis inclinabat in mentem, quod, licet mea opera manifesta esset in fabrica mali, quod in edacitate canum consistebat, et decem doctores ad manerium vocato in venatione anseris feri, igne tamen erumpente. In proximis hortis et agris nihil ad rem pertinens. Reditus vir venerabilis Dominici Galli senis, qui vel nimis imbellis vel nimis piger fuerat, ut fuzees unguibus adnexis exploderet, rem tamen confecit.

Maioris Baronis animus iam claruit quisnam facinus conceperit in quo tam ignari conscii eius miseris avibus facti sunt.

Illa nocte Bulger et levibus cordibus cubitum ivi.

Senior Baron tandem consensit, ut primo proficiscamur ad quaerendum peregrinos casus inter curiosos populos longinquarum terrarum.

The Death of the West

For more than a century, since the First World War, authors, notably Spengler and Toynbee, have announced the decadence of the West. Spengler shows that civilizations, like living organisms, are vitally destined, after birth, growth and aging, for death. According to Spengler’s historical morphology, the Faustian civilization, which is the result of the imperialist excess of techno-science and of the delirious, satanic and omnipotent will to despise and dominate nature, is the flagrant symptom of the sclerosing crystallization of culture into civilization, of the turning against itself of the vital will.

According to the historical paradigm of Toynbee, decadence has for symptom, beyond the debilitation of the elites, unable to take up the big challenges of their time, the sleep of a glorious civilization resting on its laurels before the external proletariat comes to deliver it the coup-de-grâce.

All this was neatly conceptualized and announced. The decline of the West was certainly particularly slow, no doubt in proportion to the glory and prosperity of the West itself, but its inevitability did not further need to be demonstrated.

Moreover, one of the symptoms of the decadence, according to Toynbee, is psychic and social disintegration, giving rise to the subjective illusion of the universal. This illusory universality is double. It is at the same time political and religious. It is on the one hand the elaboration, by the elites who lost their authority and their charismatic force of drive, of a totalitarian universal State aiming at maintaining, by the force of institutions and fear, and not any more by creative genius, the social order. It is on the other hand the elaboration, by the insider proletariat, of a universal religion whose spirituality is foreign to civilization. These two illusory universalities are the ultimate symptoms, before the final destruction coming from outside, of the decadence.

Two contemporary books describe the process of totalitarian sclerosis from which modern Western states are already suffering. In the novel Le Réveil (Awakening), Laurent Gounelle draws an analogy between the dictatorial management of the pandemic on the one hand and American propaganda during the Great War and communist totalitarianism on the other. In his book, Post-modernisme et néo-fascisation: le grand retournement (Post-Modernism and Neo-Fascism: The Great Reversal), Gilles Mayné establishes, using the study by the philologist Klemperer of the rhetorical procedures specific to Nazi discourse, an analogy between Hitler’s “phagocytage” of opposing ideologies, including Christian ideology, and the ideological “blurring” specific to Macron’s “at the same time.” Mayné thus shows that, beyond the antithetical character of the Macrono-post-modernist and Hitler-Nazi ideologies, the ideal of openness of the former opposing that of closure of the latter, it is the same totalitarian process that is at work. This process is still what is now called triangulation; that is to say the systematic and silly amalgamation, in political rhetoric, of references and ideas proper to the adversary, the refusal of a clear and assumed democratic combat.

Today, it is not only the simple ageing, but it is now the death of the West that is taking place, before our eyes. The Muslim insider proletariat is making a foreign Islamic spirituality flourish in the Christian West. The European states are borrowing from the totalitarian states of the world the mode of institutional domination through fear and intimidation.

Beyond these two symptoms of death foretold, even before the destructive invasion of the African foreign proletariat, two other symptoms of civilizational death are already working on us and destroying us in depth. On the one hand, it is the totalitarian ecological ideology which, allied to the ideology of the deconstruction of authorities and of minority victimization, aims very clearly at the self-destruction of Western traditions. On the other hand, it is the economic and financial imperialism of China which, allied to the great capitalists of the world, has programmed the pauperization of the Western middle classes, the dynamic and global displacement of wealth having led to the prosperity of the new Eastern middle classes.

The agony of the West has arrived. In a world where Christianity hardly prospers any more than in South America, we are condemned to wait, in Europe, for our eventual salvation from Providence alone.

Patrice Guillamaud is a philosopher. His latest books include Le divin et l’Etat, essai d’ousiologie théologico-politique sur la co-existence (The Divine and the State, an essay of theological-political ousiology on co-existence), and La Nation, pour une définition philosophique (The Nation, for a philosophical definition). He has been working for many years on a new philosophical science, “usiology.” This article appears through the kind courtesy of La Nef.

Featured: Vanitas Stilleven met denken jonge man (Vanitas Still-life with Thinking Young Man) by Samuel van Hoogstraten; painted ca. mid-1640s.

Bakunin

Władysław Broniewski (1897—1962), the famous Polish poet, translator, writer and soldier, wrote this poem as a homage to Mikhail Bakunin (1814—1876), the Russian revolutionary. This poem is translated by Przemysław Abramowski.

Bakunin

Such veiny hand on manuscript
Lionish profile of head above it.
Huge shadow falls on wooden doors
Slightly ajar. On the table
Oil lamp glows
While the night—immense, starry…
The silence overwhelms, it’s midnight.
Sparkling snow on roofs, fluffy snow.
Bakunin’s writing.
(This veiny hand. The lion’s mane.
Ominous shadow alludes pain?)
The shadow here might rise a cloud
Which could unleash a storm today!
(How heavy’s hand… To think about
Why pen—my weapon—is a weight…)
Outside—just snow, night, stars…
The tea is tepid. Pipe’s smoke rises…
Bakunin dreams—scenes from his life
Flow in his brain… some, inter alia,
Adventurous—like freedom run
He made alone through Transbaikalia
With Tsarist posse right on his heels
Escape by luck—chance U.S. sail…
His traces then, to their blight
As if some snow obscured white.
The silence grows. The darkness crawls.
Cherry smoke curls dreamingly wade…
This shadow there, dwarfing the walls
It’s him! Year eighteen forty-eight!
Again, voracious and so savage
Sniffing for blood in shifts of tone
Song sung on Dresden’s barricades
Which cries as then: Tear down the thrones!
This song puts Europe to a torch
The spring of nations, freedom’s magnet
The million-footed crowd now bulging
In booms of salvos—hear, young Wagner!
…all lost. Last, mutinous
Prague would flash, then only darkness.
And so things ended up
In chains, in bloody Chemnitz dungeon.
Each day he measured the world with thought
His cell had three steps for him only.
Freedom! Many hard years went by
Whispering her name to walls in torment.
Nicholas’ thugs put him in chains
Whose ringing he only heard as “Rise!”
Free man he sailed the world around,
No land was safe like Switzerland
Where he had settled—and what today—
Bern’s eerie silence so tough to heart?
Here—Siberian snow…
Wild and unbounded freedom!
Longing, which Herzen didn’t know!
In this great silence time seems to
Roll back the memory with its weight
Bakunin’s mind breaks free and talks
Again to Orlov, which their fate
Prevented, yet the old man swears
To give the Tsar no more weak lies
Never kowtow—better offend!
“Pugachov’s spectre is now me
So like a phantom shall I stand
Over Empire, and people’s fury
From prison here I will swing
On world and Russia!”
With squinted eyes
This January Bakunin writes:
“I’m leaving only what I got
Some clothes (all patched), some free thought.
The glass of life—I took a good sip
So as a free man I’m on this old trip
I’m leaving now. Swiss city Bern,
Its silence—Iet clock-masters keep them.
Our stars have harsher sparkle learnt
Over the steppes and in my wisdom.
Slowly through snow I’ll walk alone
After the call of northern wind
Which in eternal snowstorm blows
And blasts, so free—all time it did
Shake fist at Earth—while in its path
Teaching us humans its full wrath.”

The Catholic Challenge to Progressivism

Thomas Michaud’s book, After Justice: Catholic Challenges to Progressive Culture, Politics, Economics and Education, is an attempt to address the decline of Western Civilization. Michaud believes that this decline has occurred incrementally, and he is intent on identifying the reasons for it. Convinced that ideas have consequences, Michaud records how competing ideologies have upset the West’s moral compass. The most conspicuous of these ideologies is Progressivism. For the author Progressivism is something of an umbrella term covering several left-leaning visions of individual and communal life.

Since this volume is a kind of polemic, one might expect it to have a bellicose tone, followed by a mournful quality. But to the contrary, Michaud’s book is curiously bright and hopeful, despite its critical aims. Michaud’s polemic is buoyed by its enthusiastic reliance on Catholic social teaching and Catholic wisdom in general. Michaud is confident that the long historical arc of Catholic wisdom provides the resources to teach how the decline of the West can be arrested.

Michaud discovers in the Catholic tradition the principles of a rich theological and philosophical personalism. On this earth God’s glory is most manifest in a human life fully lived. In personalism the wonder of the mysterious depths of human person as an embodied soul, endowed with intellect and will, is the metaphysical foundation for explaining human nature and civilized life. Accordingly, personalism, comprehensively understood, is the remedy for what ails culture. This book is basically a reminder that Western Civilization is at its heart Christendom, a vision of society built on Jesus Christ as the standard of humanity. Personalism applies its principles on cultural, economic, and political life, since the triad of culture, economics, and government constitutes society and its development. Michaud’s volume shows that Western Culture now is in distress because it has forgotten the person as the proper foundation of this triad.

Upon summarizing the book’s structure, an Introduction and Seven Sections of essays, one can see how Michaud in his own way prosecutes this triad. The Introduction provides autobiographical details which illuminate key elements of Michaud’s own pilgrimage as an educator, philosopher, and Christian intellectual. Next follows the book’s seven broad sections, each containing a “Section Introduction,” which is exceedingly helpful. The Sections cover a wide variety of subject matter. Section I: Lectures and Editorials treats issues ranging from electoral politics to sports. Section II Marcelian Perspectives speaks to the influence of Gabriel Marcel on Michaud’s philosophical work. Marcel’s influence is evident one way or another throughout the entire volume. Section III: Leadership Formation summarizes reflections on the nature of leadership, a subject on which Michaud has lectured extensively, appreciating that principles of leadership disclose how organizations, including civilization itself, can succeed. Section IV: Environmentalism and Realism, a discussion Michaud takes up because of the many ideological assumptions implicit in the environmentalist movement. While environmentalists profess to be green, they also tend to be red since they hope to commandeer big government to advance their various agendas. Section V: Critiques of Progressive Politics, Pluralism, Political Economy and Revolution is a set of essays wherein Michaud speculates about the reasons for social decline. Out of the plurality of essays in this section, Michaud recommends five of them for special consideration: “The Problematic Politics of Postmodern Pluralism,” “Diversity within the United States’ Culture and Politics.” “Democracy Needs Religion” “Blasts from the Preclassical Past: Why Contemporary Economics Education Should Listen to Preclassical Thought,” and “Anatomy of the Progressive Revolution.”

The first two of these five essays express Michaud’s conviction that tolerance and justice have been altered by Progressive culture to insinuate a social philosophy akin to Marxism, especially in the form of identity politics. These essays also suggest Michaud’s agreement with John Adams that America will thrive so long as her citizens remain a moral and religious people. As a group, these five essays consider how Left-Wing ideology depersonalizes society, the effects of which are evident in the past few generations. Michaud salutes the influence of Alexis de Tocqueville and Michael Novak for their implicit personalism, especially evident in the way they worry about the erosion of morality and the dignity of the person in economics. The fifth essay reminds us that Progressivism is not just a movement aiming at reform but seeks transformation of Western Culture.

Section VI: Progressivism’s Challenges to Education and Millennials’ Happiness relates how questions of social organization impact individual happiness. The book closes with a fascinating Short Story which narrates an event from Michaud’s autobiographical record.

The persistent theme percolating throughout Michaud’s book is that political correctness is a toxin. Political correctness is not just an annoyance caused by ideological busy bodies. It is an assault on truth by the manipulation of language. By means of that manipulation, people become confused and social standards become transformed, which causes confusion as people habituated in traditional language are bemused by its change. Political correctness in its extreme is Orwellian, represented by Winston Smith conceding in 1984 that indeed 2 + 2 = 5. By control of language, authorities can control thought. This outcome is now evident in the way universities equivocate on truth and turn education into indoctrination.

A keen insight is Michaud’s observation that in recent times, champions of political correctness have refined two social tools to serve their purpose of transforming Western society. These tools are (1) a modified, ideological adaptation of tolerance and (2) an alteration of fairness in the form of social justice.

Tolerance and social justice are subtle devices since they exploit the hope that people will assume that tolerance and social justice today mean what they have meant for centuries. Who would oppose openness and fairness, which principles tolerance and justice imply? However, tolerance today and social justice are a new kind of pluralism and fairness and are effectively equivocations on the ancient meanings of those terms. The politically correct are clever, which is demonstrated by using terms which have appeal because people think they signify what they have traditionally meant. But by the sleight of hand of Leftist ideologues, the meanings of justice and tolerance have changed.

Justice classically means relating to people in a way that they deserve. But social justice is different. It interprets desert not in terms of merit but in terms of identity politics. Consider that political correctness adds an adjectival qualifier which alters meaning. When the word “social” modifies justice, a different meaning is attached to fairness. Traditionally, justice is an individual’s habit or virtue of being respectful of others, who deserve respect. Social justice, on the other hand, is a kind of identity politics, in which one divides people into groups and stereotypes them. Once the groups are stereotyped, the effort is made, often by means of government, to favor some groups and disfavor others. The virtue of justice classically understood implies impartiality and equality of standards in the application of fairness. But this is not how social justice applies today. Instead, social justice suspects traditional ideas about impartiality associated with meritocracy or earned desert. Social justice comfortably accepts partiality and inequality of application, which the politically correct call “equity,” a principle inspired by the aim of restorative justice, the remedy of past wrongs perpetrated by some groups against others.

Aware of these points, Michaud regards social justice as a Marxist trope. By using politically correct language, social justice insinuates that justice is about groups, not individuals. Because human beings are social animals, as Aristotle long ago observed, there has always been sociability implicit in the idea of justice. But the status and significance of the individual was nonetheless at the heart of the classical meaning of justice because it involved individual judgment and habit formation. Social justice, however, is a Marxist tool to eliminate the individual and reduce justice to a matter of group identities and relations. For example, when a teacher discovers that a student is cheating in class, he or she ought not judge that the student is an individual wrongdoer. That would imply that he has autonomy and moral agency. Such judgment is simplistic and does not consider how we are shaped by social forces. No, it is not the cheater’s fault. It is society’s fault, which has somehow made the student a victim. If schools weren’t compromised by an unfair social system, students wouldn’t cheat. Not surprisingly, victimology is common in the exercise of social justice, a point of view that echoes Vladimir Lenin’s conviction that the proletariat cannot commit crimes because of their disadvantage before bourgeoise power. Of course, the radical political implication is that when injustice occurs, social justice warriors cry out for big government intervention to remedy the problem. Hence, social justice becomes an excuse to expand government. As a tool of unbridled political correctness, it can encourage formation of a totalitarian state.

Tolerance is another classical virtue that has been malformed by political correctness. Historically, tolerance was understood as a virtue of justice which impels a person to allow something he disagrees with because, if he were to disallow it, a kind of injustice could follow. In the spirit of traditional tolerance whole peoples with profoundly different beliefs and values have gotten along and have even lived as neighbors. But this vision of tolerance is less popular today, especially when ideological disagreements are the issue. Today, those who profess to be among the most tolerant are often content to seek refuge in tribalistic separateness. Among Progressives, tolerance is a kind of virtue signaling, a way in which a person authenticates himself as an enlightened human being by accepting the directives of politically correct thinking.

Accordingly, Progressives, while preaching tolerance, often appear intolerant. For them, tolerance is not a species of traditional justice but a politically correct instrument to transform society. Of course, one could say that it is a species of social justice. In this way, tolerance conforms to the Leftist agenda to transform the West. Hence, the Progressive’s exercise of intolerance is quite coherent with their own worldview, even though it is out of step with the classical view of tolerance. Conservatives often do not understand this progressive application of tolerance, dismissing the Progressive’s attitudes and practices as inconsistent. But Progressives are consistent according to their own imperative: be intolerant of those who champion traditional tolerance, which is based on corrupt, benighted values. A tolerant person, as Progressives see it, is enlightened, and an enlightened person knows that intolerant people should not be tolerated. Intolerant people are unenlightened, and they are people who do not support or advance the interests of Progressive politics and culture. As a result, they are a social menace. So why should society tolerate them? An intolerant person, on their view, is indeed a regressive person, someone, like a practicing Christian, who tries to maintain traditional values and institutional beliefs that, while they pass as civilized, are, in fact, benighted.

Michaud’s book is a reminder that conservatives could help themselves by better understanding these nuances about tolerance in the Progressive movement. Instead, conservatives tend to complain tirelessly about inconsistency and censorship, failing to grasp and address the deeper motivations in Progressivism. Conservatives must recognize that they are dealing with a collision of worldviews. The Progressive worldview has endured longer than many conservatives realize, having emanated out of the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose ideological heir was Karl Marx.

Conservatives would do well to appreciate how champions of political correctness play them. Michaud appreciates how political correctness has taken over universities. Allan Bloom, in his instructive book, The Closing of the American Mind, explains in detail how the University became a stifling culture against free thought, changing from an institution that sought to instill liberal education, freedom and independence of thought, to a system repressing the exchange of ideas. This happened, Bloom explains, as Leftists indoctrinated students in relativism, claiming there is no truth, and that no idea is more defensible than any other. Bloom explains that this relativism, akin to nihilism, would nullify educators’ efforts to instill moral and intellectual ideals in students. The only virtue, intellectual or moral, that students wanted taught, was openness, a curriculum without judgments. The students would pay a price as this relativism became the cultural norm at the university, an outcome Bloom captured in the subtitle of his book: How Higher Education Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. Without moral judgment there is no nutrition for the soul.

Michaud understands that this is what happened to the universities. But, of course, the strategy of political correctness recognized that this nihilism was just an episode. No culture can exist without judgments and constraints. The politically correct just pretended for a while that the university was a bastion of non-judgmentalism. After removing traditions and curricula on grounds that they were biased, the new politically correct leaders took over most universities and imposed a bureaucracy of bias and censorship of their own, mainly through the formation of programs and committees that might make old-time fascists envious. For example, universities made traditional educators remove speech codes and standards. But they celebrated this removal only until they came to dominate the university and inflict innumerable speech codes, behavioral restrictions, and censorship rules of a sundry kind. The politically correct played the Rope-a-Dope game to perfection. The conservatives on campus, wanting to appear open, accommodating, and non-judgmental (in short, wanting to appear “Progressive-Lite”), fell for the strategy: from radical openness to repression in two generations.

Conservatives would do well to learn to resist political correctness at every turn and not play the game by its rules. This is one of the lessons of Michaud’s instructive book: conservatives must learn to fight back, and with intelligence.

Curtis Hancock is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Rockhurst University, a Jesuit institution in Kansas City, Missouri, USA, where he held the Joseph M. Freeman Chair of Philosophy for twenty years. He has a B.A. and M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Oklahoma, and a Ph.D. from Loyola University of Chicago. He is former President of the American Maritain Association and co-founder of the Gilson Society. He has published several books, including Recovering a Catholic Philosophy of Elementary Education. He has also published numerous articles and reviews.

Featured: The Liberation of St. Peter, by Antonio de Bellis; painted ca. early 1640s.

Iter et adventures baronis Trump et canis mirandus Bulger—II

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CAPUT III.

Hic manus tremit, et stylo titubans atramentum fluit.

Quas res gestas profiteor, Lector mihi pro certo assentior, cum considerans maxime interesting meae vitae alienae ac variae. Forsitan mihi studium dicat; Nam, Lector benevole, unum ex his “quaedam eventa” supra citata non minoris momenti evenit quam nativitas mea in hunc magnificum et pulcherrimum mundum, quem mundum mirabilibus et mirabilioribus, sicut tu, plenum esse probavit. Videbunt ut ego pergam cum mea fabula.

Aestate natus sum. Nox erat tempus.

Milia per cunabula miselli Scintillata, parva, inops, argillae gleba; sed clarior omnibus, ut purpurea taeda in sethera flammea, Sirius, caniculae stella, super me effulsit!

Ad coelum aspiciens pater subridens, murmurat: «Parve peregrine, canum semper eris amator. Risus erit illis laetitia, musica verba tua, et in aliqua bestia quadrupedia generis sui, optimum, fidelissimum, amicum tuum invenies.

Quasi in verbis patris mei ipsum veritatis pressum poneret, eo ipso momento clamor matris canis in contiguo cubiculo auditus est et unus e regiae familiae Chew-lâ-â in meam praesentiam accurrit cum calatho parvo catuli. Pater meus viminea cunabula noviter advenientis familiae ridens rapuit eamque ad me clamabat;

Elige, parve baro, amicum et socium elige tibi. Manum meam parvulam porrigi parvulam et in una cum maximo capite recumbens. “Ha! ha!” risit pater, “Bone te, parve baro, elegisti, cui tu tantum cerebrum elegisti, ut bene torvum caput.”

Et cum ad luctandum cum illo verbo infantulus lingua mea venit, tortum est in “Bulger.” Sicque Bulger et eodem fere momento in vitae itinere profectus sum! Postera die pater patefecit aquas nocte recedere coepisse, et prospiciens ab excelso domicilio nostro, vidit in medio satis amplae insulae stetisse. Pater meus post prandium, secundum morem patriae, duos Chew-lô regi calceos ligneos ligneos, quibus omnes canorum scularium usos erant, in superficie molli luto movere conabantur, imposuit inundatio.

Hi calcei lignei perquam leves sunt, quamquam tam longi et tam lati quam calcei nivei sunt. Expolitione pedum, velatos perlabier in lutum, quod natura terrae est pinguissimum, eadem celeritate qua currit ad calceos nivis.

Post aliquot horarum excursus in montem et descendentem, pater meus cum hac mirae intelligentiae particula rediit, scilicet, quod proculdubio habitatio eorum, ante descensum aquarum in stagno posita; sed paulatim, cum recessissent aquae, factam esse insulam, quae paulo post in peninsulam fuerat, quae rursus adhuc demersa aquarum in verticem montis conversa erat. Leniter acclivis lateribus ut, referens matri meae, pereuntem diem neque dicere posset, si natus esset in lacu, in insula, in paeninsula, an in summo monte, factum esse. Quod eum gravissime angebat, nam, ut omnes eius familiae sodales, summa rerum memorandarum summa diligentia usque ad minutissimas rerum gestarum fastus summa cum diligentia sumpsit.

Dissimilis plerisque infantibus, qui primum dimidium annum transire contenti videntur, aut vitae suae edentes, dormientes et clamantes, ab ipso exordio praecocentiam mirabilem prae se ferunt.

Cum paucae tantum hebdomades, quamvis loqui non possem, sibilo tamen didicerant Bulgerum, cuius progressus in animo et corpore etiam gressum meam tenere visus est, et qui plurimam aetatem aspiciens in puerilem vultum transiit. Quod significat, “O, gaudebo, cum ista lingula soluta est, ut me vocas Bulgerum et iubeas me facere voluntatem tuam.”

Nec mora.

Illud unum, quod in hac aetate vitae meae mihi gratissimum gaudium dedit, lux erat.

Fui intus fores morosus, morosus, iracundus, sed sub divo semel emissus, tota natura mutatur. Bibi mollem et mollem acrem vigorem et oblectamentum patris mei delectantis. Facies mea clara est, oculi mei de valle ad collem, a summo usque ad celum gradiebantur.

In tantam ecstasim voluptatis me hoc conspectus mundi magni proiecit, quod mater mea anxia facta est, ne praevideret aliquod magnum malum mihi evenire.

Sed magnificus baro tantum risit. “Nihil timeas, uxor, solum significat quod intra caputculum illud miro modo activum animum prolis mensibus habitare.”

Quotiens Bulgerum dominum suum laetis vocibus ad aspectum mundi pulchri clamantis audiebat, certo vehemens latratu correptus erat, in quo circum me evagabatur cum asperrimis et profusissimis sympathiae manifestationibus.

Sine dubio mira inter nos fuit dilectionis vinculum.

Matris meae paene horrorem dixeram, ego quadam die cum mecum in brachiis suis in latis verandis ambularet, quae aedes Chewchewlô cingebat, me ex brachiis iactare conatus sum, Germanice clamans: Los! Los! Dimitte me! Sine me!

Habui usque ad id tempus, ut videtur, plus studii fuisse in lingua mea regiae nutricis Chewlae molli et canora, in qua facillime me intellegere potui. Circa hoc tempus accidit mihi, quod, licet non effecit, valde festinavit emissio parentis continentiam, tam ardenter desideratam, tam a Bulgero quam a me, nam ab ipso ingressu in hunc mundum aliquid mihi dixit me esse. Puer clarus debet esse, non mera et praecocia iuventus, qui a parentibus in coetu socialium adhibitus est ad portandos homines iam in pauperes spirituum, ascendendo super sellam vel mensam et versus declamando, parrotsos, cum dimidia duodecim lignea, hiulca gestus; sed verus heros, verus viator, non formidans tempestatem, feram, saevum, barbarum, ut faceret, quod vellet.

Solebat matris meae in auram diei sedere mecum in latis verandis, dum patris mei tibialia arridebat; Nam, licet generosa, ita consueverat, cum puella in omnibus rebus Germanicis parsimoniam exerceret, ut nunc, quamvis verae baronis uxor facta esset, non posset in illis bonis rebus agendarum delectationem praetermittere vias.

Sicque patrem meum multis pfennigibus servavit, quod vir bonus pauperibus dignis largitus est, et bonis onustus ad sepulchrum descendit.
Tali tempore subito Sternutatio matris rapuit, et infandum horrorem e manibus emisit. Decidi, decidi, lutum molle feriens, et visu evanescens.

Misera quasi plumbum ad solum cecidit.

Adstitit ei proceras ad pedes stabantque pedesque, fugitque virilem genae color.

Sed Chew-lô, qui ad patrem feliciter salutabat, risit.

“Agnus barbarus!” fremebat magnus baro, “Nisi despicis lachrymas patris, angorem matris? Ex te. Utinam nunquam regnum tuum intrassem in coelum! Chew-lô ne verbum quidem. Conversus imperioso more ac iure regio in turbam clientium manum quassat.

Citius quam cogitatio Sutulae canororum cohors ad calceos ligneos prosiluit.

Ite, procul, iaculantes sicut nigrae in ala vespertiliones.

Baro videbat in tremendo maerore emissum iudicium melius elabi, et vultu pallente caputque inclinatum stabat languida forma coniugis.

Sensit, sciebat, praesentiam suam apud Melodios Snutores hoc momento solum perturbare, impedire progressum, ac fortasse ita confundere, ut frustra omnis conatus esset. Illi ab infantia ita consueverunt ligneos illos calceos ingentes gestare, ut in hoc luto perfidiae versarentur, ut, si fieri posset, manus humanas filium ad bracchia restitueret, id facerent.

Itaque pauca adhortatus ad aurem matris fatur, et instar statuae stare pergit, voltu melodiae snuculorum longis scriniis defixit, dum circumvoluti cacumen montis locum obtineret, judicabant, interissem.

Luce lato, ligneo scopulo armato, armisque obscuris surrexerunt, et mira subtilitate ac constantia ceciderunt, notis musicis sternutationis commorantes; nunc mollis et humilis, nunc erumpens in modum truculenti ac putrefactus.

Descende! Descende! Descende!

Et tamen frustra elaboraverunt!

Nullum ibi erat indicium miserae moeroris aegrae.

Sed cor!

Quid est clamor iste?

Non est humanus!

Nullus; est enim cortex Bulgeri, vel potius latrantium Bulgeri est.

Spectaverat Sutulae canorae thiasos, ceu candida scopas, Omniaque incassum concidit, pergula pergula capite impulit.

Nemo satis erat mente et corde ad capiendum sensum illius miselli latrantis.

Chew-lô vidit suos stantem in scopis innixum, oculis dubiis et haesitationibus.

Rex tacuit.

Erat baro ille magnus, qui loquebatur;

“O ne des! Mea vita, opes, omnia tua sunt bona, bona Chew-Chew.

Sternumenta appellatio.

Iterum clamor Bulgerorum sublatus est, et hoc tempore rex eam exaudivit.

Famulus regis videns nutum, et festinans ad pedes canis ligneos calices ligandos, in superficie luto solutus est.
Quid est homo intelligentia gloriata?

Erant decem passus vel amplius ab eo loco ubi disparui.

Gannita, latratu, et ploro per vices, mi Bulger, properavit ad eum locum, quo evagatus odor narravit carissimum dominum suum descendisse.
Iterum canororum snuariorum cohors renovato vigore laboratur, scopae albae miro opere fulgentes contra atram caeni nigredinem.

Bulger eos magnis et laetis latratibus hortabatur.

Subito serenus, tinnitus, canorus “rumdere” aerem discidit.

Me viderant!

Rara providentia per unum mensem, una manu nares clauseram priusquam ad lutum perveniam, et sic pulmonem a repletione servaverim.
Sed quam inutilis fuisset haec cautio, nisi bulger meus fidelis subveniret!

Nunc gaudens modum non noverat.

Putabam me subridentem veteris baronis lacrimosa maxillam prehendi, dum puer ad verandam ferebatur, animati massae terrae magis quam alia re, nam me aerem recreaverat. Oculi mei non modo aperti erant, sed solum in toto corpore mundo.

Convulsa mater mea me pressit pectore pectus, et equidem caeno pressisse caput et ora, ora, ni latam suspectam vidissem baro palmam; dum matris cor se verbis effundit. Pelves paucae aquae calidae, et ego ipse iterum.

Imo numquam ipse iterum fui. Balneum meum in luto calido Lâ-aah-chew-lâ maximam mihi mutationem fecit; incrementum corporis mei compressit et omnes vires meas in caput et cerebrum convertit.

Caput meum in uno brevi mense fere magnitudine duplicatum.

Infans vultus vultusque meus recessit!

Et prius alia luna impleverat cornua sua: Crevi mirandum!

Non solum magnitudine capitis mei aliquid praeclarum fuit, sed etiam ex oculis mirificam intelligentiam eluxit.

Mulieres pauperculae de Lâ-aah-chew-lâ ante me oraverunt quasi ens essem ab alio mundo, et deinde frontibus percutientes matri meae appropinquaverunt et susurrabant:

“Gracissime Magnus Spiritus Chew-lâ-â-â-â-â-â erravit et duas animas ibi pro una posuit!”

Et tunc decora corpora inclinaverunt donec frontes matris meae tangebant pedes et recesserunt retro exeuntis sicut dominae curiae optimae, unusquisque digitum suum ad me adaequans et oculos suos per ianuam evanuit aperiens.

Tota res adeo deridiculo erat, ut in risus clamorem erumperet.

Quo audito, miserae bestiae inter se praecipites ruebant, insano conatu, ut extra domum exirent, stridentibus in summa vocibus;

“Serva nos! Salva nos! Llle nos fascinabit!

“Parvus baro!” Pater meus irae voce subsannans dixit, “Dominas regis Chew-chew-lô’s aulam non terrere!”

Chew-pa! Chew-pa! (Idiotae! Idiotae!) Respiciebam e tabula mea, in qua exemplum arithmeticae faciebam, nam figurarum valde cupiebam.
Nam pater meus iam me adiectionem docebat, ostendens mihi quam vilia globuli vitrei pro ebore pretioso mercari, et dividendo, auferendo nonaginta cents de quolibet dollario quod feci. Multo ante quam legere aut scribere potui, epistolas plurium linguarum noui nominatim, nec verbum ullum exarare potui, quod nullas in ea litteras taceret. Nemo miris artibus magis delectabatur quam Bulger.

Is suapte natura videbatur scire parvum dominum suum non esse vulgarem hominem, et eum honoratum esse. Nunc valedicere Landam La-aah-chew-lâ et Sut.

Rex Chew-chew-lô cum valida manu clientium nos ad suum fines comitatur, sylvas canoras masticando ruminando resonant. Super humeros baronum veterum stans, ultimum vale eos vibravi ad quod tam perfecto turbine Chew-chew-â responderunt quod Bulgerus satis jucunde ululaverat.

Quilibet praecipuus honor domino suo semper fuit ei materia personalis. Senior baro ulterius penetrare in cor Africae destinaverat; sed plane, tam mirabile mentis meae incrementum, ut a mane usque ad noctem animum suum occupaverit. Conatus est hoc a me celare; sed omnes inaniter.

Priusquam biennium essem, cerebrum meum adeo grave erat ut mater mea in plantas calceamentorum meorum suere plumbeos, ut me rectum finem sursum teneret, et tamen in hac cautione saepe stans inveniebam. Caput meum difficiles difficultates mathematicas operando utendo digitos meos, sicut Sinenses faciunt machinas numerandas.

Primum quod pater meus domum attigit, me ad phrenologum duceret ut chartulam capitis mei haberem.
Examen fuit unum mensem.

Tandem, chartula completa, repertum est me habere triginta duas labeculas distinctas.

Bene intellegitur etiam!

Statutum est igitur statim instituisse tutores duos et triginta doctos, ut quisque paedagogus habeat singulas personas gibba, et operam navare, ut si cornu sit crescat.

Pater meus decrevit nihil omittere, ut meae mentis vires usque ad ultimum evolveret. Nihil dixi aut ad consilium aut contra.

In uno brevi anno didici omnia, quae me docere possent triginta duos paedagogos, et, quod plus est, unumquodque eorum quinquaginta docuissem, quae ante non cognoveram, et quae peregrinando in exteris regionibus didiceram. cum parentibus meis.

Tutores triginta duos uno mane cum magna admiratione eorum totum functus sum.

Senior baro ad suggestionem meam nunc misit libellum cuilibet tutori pro servitiis sibi per me redditis.

Quisque tutor solvere noluit.

Senior baro, meo suggestione, nunc fecit processum juris unicuique eorum serviendum.

Curia, audito testimonio meo, sententiam reddidit, quae quinque millia paginarum chartarum legalium operiebat, et totam hebdomadem ad legendum requirebat, in qua singula, quae singulis triginta et duobus paedagogis docuerat, mirum in modum erat et peculiare, ut in oculo legis saltem centum dollariorum valebat. Qui rogationem cuiusque paedagogi fecit ad quinque milia dollariorum, vel omnium centum sexaginta milia dollariorum.

Curia deinde per annum dimittitur, omnes tres iudices mente et corpore ita fatigati ut duodecim mensibus reliquis egent antequam aliud negotium suscipiant.

Plures casus venire…

Lege pars I

First Cinema in Iran

The first Iranian cinema spectator (1897 AD). and the first Cinematograph theater in Iran: 21 November to 20 December 1903.

As such eminent scholars as Farrokh Ghaffari and Jamal Omid have shown in the past, an Iranian‘s initial acquaintance with the cinema is first mentioned in Ebrahim Sahhafbashi‘s memoirs.

Ebrahim Sahhafbashi (Mohajer) Tehrani was born around 1858 and died in 1921 or 1922, at the age of 63, in Mashhad His full name has been copied from a note of his reproduced below his portrait in Name-ye Vatan, and his birth and death dates are approximations provided by his son, Abolqassem Reza‘i. He was fascinated with new technologies and inventions and his trade of eastern Asian goods took him several times across the world. He was a liberal-minded modernist and rather nonconformist in his clothing. Undoubtedly, following the first cinematographic representation in Paris in 1895, and soon after that in London, Iranians living in Europe at the close of the nineteenth century were able to see various films, but since no writings from them remains—or has come to light—the first spectator (as he is called today) must be considered to have been Ebrahim Sahhafbashi, in London, seventeen months after the first public representation in Paris.

He writes in his memoirs:

Yesterday, at sunset I took a walk in the public park… [In the evening] I went to the
Palace Theater. After song and dance performances by ladies [… and a show of acrobatics, etc., I saw] a recently invented electric device by which movements are reproduced exactly as they occur. For example, it shows the American waterfalls just as they are; it recreates the motion of marching soldiers and that of a train running at full speed. This is an American invention. Here all theaters close one hour before midnight.

Sahhafbashi was mistaken as to the cinema‘s country of origin, perhaps because the film he saw was American, as his reference to the Niagara Falls seems to indicate. There is no reason to believe that Sahhafbashi‘s interest in cinema, during his first encounter with it, went beyond that of a mere spectator, but it is also probable that the thought of taking this invention to Iran crossed his mind, although this is never mentioned in his writings.

According to sources known to the present, he was the first person to create a public cinema theater in 1903, eight years after the invention and public appearance of the cinema in France, six years after Sahhafbashi‘s seeing the cinema in London, and three years after the arrival of cinema equipment to the Iranian court.

Sahhafbashi perhaps held glass plate shows (akin to present-day slide shows) before making his career in the cinema. These were performed with the lanterne magique, known as cheraq-e-sehri in Iran. In good shows of this kind, a succession of black and white—or, even better, color—glass plates depicting a story (as in today‘s comic strips) was projected on a screen. The lanterne magique was used in Mozaffar-ed-din Shah’s court and a couple of such color plates have been identified in the Album House of the Golestan Palace. Viewing was affected with one or another type of jahan-nama, including the stereoscope, in which a pair of almost identical pictures were used to achieve a three-dimensional view. It consisted of a small (or large) box equipped with two viewer lenses and a slot in which the glass plates bearing the image pairs were inserted. Examples of this type of jahan-nama, for example of Verascope brand, existed in Mozaffar-ed-din Shah’s court and in the hands of private individuals, because I have seen glass plates of this type, both processed and unprocessed, in the Album House of the Golestan Palace. Another type of jahan-nama, the Edison Kinetoscope, was completed in 1891. It was a large, hefty machine in front of which the viewer stood to watch a very short cinema-like film through a pair of lenses on its top. Other types of jahan-nama, namely Mutoscope, Kinora and Théoscope, also existed, in which cinema-like moving pictures could also be seen. The Théoscope, for example, was small and could readily sit on a foot.

As concerns lanterne magique shows, Nazem-ol-Eslam Kermani writes in his Tarikh-e Bidari-e Iranian:

The (lanter majik) cheragh-e sehri appeared in Tehran in the sixth year of the reign [of Mozaffar-ed-Din Shah]‖, which corresponds 10 April 1902–29 March 1903. What Nazem-ol-Eslam Kermani means by (lanter majik) cheragh-e-sehri is unclear. If he means the kind of shows current at the time, which consisted of projecting a succession of various scenes depicting a story (as in today’s comic strips), these had certainly―appeared‖, even if they had not yet achieved wide popularity, before this date. But, if he means the onset of private and semi-private film viewing with the lanterne magique and then the jahan-nama, then the date does not conflict with that of Sahhafbashi‘s film screenings. It is conceivable that, following the warm welcome given at the court to various types of lanterne magique, jahan-nama and Cinematograph, and perhaps after a second travel to the West in 1902, Sahhafbashi brought together a collection of such devices, together with X-ray equipment, electric fans and probably phonographs, etc., which he sold to the rich or used to hold shows. Therefore, Nazem-ol-Eslam Kermani‘s allusion to him—whom he says he knew well and with whom he was involved in underground political activity points directly to Sahhafbashi and his first public lanterne magique, jahan-nama and later Cinematograph shows. It was not rare at the time to refer to the Cinematograph as lanterne magique, and Khanbaba Motazedi, at the age of fifteen (1907), heard his father say that Russi-Khan had―brought a lanterne magique… which showed moving pictures‖ to Arbab Jamshid‘s residence.

The first reference to a theater (public cinema) is found in the absorbing memoirs of Nasser- ed-Din Shah‘s protégé. He wrote about the evening of Sunday 22 November 1903

I went to Sahhafbashi‘s shop. On Sundays he holds simifonograf shows for Europeans, and in the evening for the public. When I arrived there was no one; just me, a secretary of the Dutch embassy and a few of Taku‘s personnel. Taku was a European goods shop on Lalehzar Avenue. Apparently, on this occasion Malijak went to see a session for Europeans, because he adds: It was two and a half hours past sunset when I called for a landau. Accompanied by the supervisor [his teacher], I went to Sahhafbashi‘s shop to watch the Cinematograph.‖ Malijak. Taking the season into consideration, the cinema session began around eight o’clock PM. Malijak was interested by the cinema, because he again went to a session on the next evening. He wrote in his memoirs: “I called for a landau and we went to watch the simifonograf.”

Having watched for a while, we returned home.

This was probably no more than one or two days after Sahhafbashi had begun holding public film shows, because, had other films been shown earlier, Malijak would have certainly paid a visit or made an allusion to it in his memoirs. The study of Malijak‘s memoirs clearly shows that, fortunately for the history of Iranian cinema and photography, he truly was a full-fledged professional sloth. From morning to night, he paid visits to the court and the houses of different people, poked his nose into shops or wandered in the streets. Malijak‘s life and the style of his memoirs, particularly concerning everyday events, hunting, music, gambling… and social visits, are such that it is hardly conceivable for a public film show to have taken place without him noticing it.

Moreover, in those early years of the twentieth century, Malijak was also keenly interested in photography and music. He took piano lessons and was well aware of the existence of the Cinematograph. He had seen films at Mozaffar-ed-Din Shah‘s court at least as early as 1902, a year before the first public cinema was created. Although opposed with his political views, he was acquainted with Sahhafbashi and had paid him visits even before seeing films, mentioning the novelties he had seen in his memoirs. At first Malijak misjudged Sahhafbashi as an ignorant liar, but after seeing his X-ray equipment at work on the next day—Thursday 22 May 1902—he wrote extensively about it.

Unfortunately, as Malijak‘s memoirs begin on 20 March 1903 / 29, they hold no indication concerning the first four years of filmmaking in Iran. The first Iranian cinema, or tamasha-khaneh, was located in the yard behind his shop on Lalehzar Avenue.

Jamalzadeh writes about Sahhafbashi‘s estate: He had a building at the crossroads and avenue known as Comte, on the northern stretch of Lalehzar, on the left hand side, and he and his wife had transformed their home into a hospital… [and] they had [also] built a functional water cistern on the street side of their garden … The type of goods that Sahhafbashi had in his shop indicates that his customers came from among the aristocracy. Among the films shown there, Qahremanshahi mentions one in which a man ―forced more than one hundred [?] men into a small carriage and had a hen lay twenty eggs. Such comical or extravagant films were very popular at the time and lasted about ten minutes, as did most other films made in that period.

The history of the activity of Sahhafbashi‘s cinema must be limited from 21 November to 20 December 1903, because Malijak makes no other mention of its activity, Sahhafbashi having apparently traveled to America in the meanwhile. The month of Ramazan, which occurred in autumn in that year, was undoubtedly chosen on purpose, because spectators could easily use the long evenings to go to the theater after breaking their fast.

Financially, Sahhafbashi‘s venture seems to have been rather unsuccessful. For example, as we saw, only a few spectators were present at the first session attended by Malijak. And this was probably why Sahhafbashi moved his cinema to a new address on Cheragh-e Gaz (later Cheraq-e-Barq, and now Amir Kabir) Avenue after returning from America around 1905 and not later than 1908 in any case. If this change of address actually took place, it was not any more successful, and this time Sahhafbashi‘s theater closed its doors for good.

The only document on Sahhafbashi‘s travel to America is a bust photograph that shows him in European attire and which was reproduced by Jamal Omid together with the caption: “The picture] shows Mirza-Ebrahim-Khan Sahhafbashi (Mohajer) Tehrani [in] San Francisco.” Of course, the picture does not bear a date ―one must conclude that Sahhafbashi was away from Iran at least during 1904, and that the reopening of his cinema can therefore not have taken place before 1905.

The reopening of Sahhafbashi‘s theater is obscure and no contemporaneous written source concerning this event and the subsequent activity of this theater has yet come to light. As the present article does not intend to enter a long discussion on this reopening, we limit ourselves to a description of it as it was narrated by the late Abdollah Entezam, who attended Sahhafbashi‘s theater in his childhood, and another by Jamalzadeh, which may be related to
the same cinema. Neither Entezam nor Jamalzadeh gives any date, but Farrokh Ghaffari‘s inference from Entezam‘s description was that it was situated around 1905.

Entezam recounted his memories of Sahhafbashi‘s cinema to Farrokh Ghaffari in Bern, Switzerland, in October and November 1940. To his relation of this event to the author, Ghaffari added that Entezam had repeated these words in Tehran in 1949-1950), in the presence of the late Mohammad-Ali Jamalzadeh and himself, and that Jamalzadeh had confirmed to them. Jamalzadeh himself has been more cautious in his interview with Shahrokh Golestan, believing it ―very, very likely‖ that the cinema to which he had gone in his childhood was Sahhafbashi‘s, and adding that he could no more be sure about it See the full text of Jamalzadeh‘s account, reproduced a few lines below. He also spoke of Sahhafbashi‘s house on Lalehzar Avenue in a brief article he wrote on him in 1978 on the occasion of the reiterated notice of the sale of his chrome plating factory and theater equipment Jamalzadeh, but made no mention of the theater‘s reopening on Cheragh-e-Gaz Avenue or its connection with Sahhafbashi. Neither did Sahhafbashi‘s son, Jahangir Qahremanshahi, or Malijak, that professional sloth, ever mention any such reopening.

Despite these obscure points, doubting the reopening of Sahhafbashi‘s theater on Cheragh-e Gaz Avenue is not justifiable either, and for the present, in view of Entezam‘s solid testimony, the reopening in question should be considered as having taken place, and Jamalzadeh‘s memories of going to that cinema should be taken into consideration. Of course, it is much more probable that Jamalzadeh visited another, lesser, cinema on the same avenue. During the chaotic days of Mohammad-Ali Shah’s reign, others had begun setting up cinemas. They included Aqayoff, whose film shows were also held on Cheragh-e-Gaz Avenue but in the coffee-house of Zargarabad, and Russi-Khan, who had contrived a small cinema next to his photo shop.

Shahryar Adle (1944-2015) was a noted French-Iranian historian and art historian, who is recognized as one of the foremost scholars of Iranian studies. This article is an extract from a much larger study.

Tocsin of the Absolute: Armel Guerne

Armel Guerne (1911-1980) was a French poet and translator. A friend of Mounir Hafez, Georges Bernanos and Emil Cioran, he is the author of numerous translations, including those of Kawabata, Hölderlin, Novalis, Woolf, The Book of a Thousand and One Nights and Moby Dick, to name only the most famous. The fame of his work as a translator has somewhat obscured his own immense poetic work. Yet, according to his own admission, he had no other ambition “than to be welcomed and received as a poet, to be able to count myself one day among the holy number of those divine ruffians of love.”

In the midst of an indigent modernity, dominated by the “absurd and monstrous accumulation of the things without souls,” Armel Guerne knew how to tear open an irredentist breach—a breakthrough “against the world” to sound the tocsin of the Absolute. From his first arrow to his final salvo, his work never deviated from its outgrowth—all were charitably oriented towards a poetic star, the only herald of a “truth that lasts, that begins at the ground level and goes to the sky, and that remains.” And as a cliff carries its other side, his work as a translator and poet are rooted in the same mythical Vale of Tempe—that land of the German Romantics, on which they silently set the “very seal of eternity” on poetry.

Of Armel Guerne’s critical writings (collected in Le Verbe nu [The Naked Word] and L’Ame insurgée [The Insurgent Soul]), chanted at the edge of inner constellations, one could say what Bettina von Arnim said of Hölderlin’s poetry: they are “in the eternal fermentation of restless poetry.” Without ever feeding on any “flavor of the day”—whose constant frenzy is only a proof of its latent paralysis—Armel Guerne watched over a branch of speech, which it is up to each generation to revive in a “grace of living charity” (Lettres Dom Claude—Letters Dom Claude). Like a guardian of the Pyrenees, like the crypt where the Mazdean priests maintained a sacred fire for a thouysand years, Armel Guerne praised and preserved this heritage of “incessant orations”—thus re-establishing the preeminence of the poem, this “brazen shaft of all words, this axis around which all the worlds revolve and all the ages turn.” (La Nuit veille—Night Watch).

In fidelity to this stellar decree, one finds in each of Armel Guerne’s poems the destined reflection of the “infinite Silentiary” (Journal—Diary), which gave his poetry a vesperal and definitive character—in the image of the burnt sky which culminated above Tourtrès, where Guerne sat with his mill, like a watchman on an inalterable Acropolis. It is from this “mill of miracles,” rooted in “the mineral of the wind and forgotten times” that Armel Guerne wrote his greatest poetic work, including Les Jours de l’Apocalypse [The Days of Apocalypse], Le Jardin colérique [The Angry Garden], or the Rhapsodie des fins dernières [Rhapsody of the End Times].

In spite of the overwhelming confidentiality in which his work remains walled up, Guerne remains a sentinel in our night, reminding us of the imperative necessity of poetry, this “Ravenous hunger of the Holy Spirit” which never gives up its weapons to any world, and only gives its eyes to the expectation of a Word—without ever dimming its “purple wing” (St. John of the Cross).

If the poets are immutable and that they alone “found what remainsm” as Hölderlin said, the conservation of their voices seems however to be endangered by the modern pandemonium, which does not cease to reduce the range of their insolent brisures. Guerne hurled in particular violent anathemas at the prolific critical logorrhea which, contrary to its initial mission of “passer-by,” is now happy to palaver blissfully, by assembling and disassembling the great texts upon a mechanical and inert frame. In this necropolis of the word, erected by these merchants of contraband, we find “Nothing true. Nothing alive. Nothing lived. Death put in tomes. Death. Easy to recognize: it cannot be silent, since it exists only in its chatter” (Le Verbe nu). By thus spatulating its plaster of quibbles, this “necrophilic literature of professors, doctors, commentators, exegetes, analysts, biographers, historiographers, anecdotists, nomenclators” proves in the same gesture that it does not actually reside in the poem—its learned objectivity was thus only a scarecrow, upon which it leaned its disarmament—its escape before a sovereign Word. According to Guerne, this denial is the very sting of this pantomime modernity, which, by fear or by cowardice, gesticulates ceaselessly on its own rubble: “For there is a modern thought… clothed in a barbaric or zany language, caught in a corset, a thought without breath; its circle has been reduced to the dimensions of a tiny circus… without ever risking a glance outside” (Le Verbe nu). From then on, we have to consider, following Guerne, that this tropism to the dismantling of the poets is only an umpteenth modality of the “technical Moloch” demystified by Bernanos—this specter of orphaned ashes, which voluntarily forgets as its corruption of the world advances, the vital ferments which made it get born.

Drained and brutalized, the modern soul—whose each edges seems dedicated to the countable osculation of the world—does not know how to measure itself with this sibylline and elusive truth deposited by poetry. It is against this seated deciphering that Guerne crystallizes his rock of insurgency: his anger has no other aim than the fight against all these debilitating deadlocks—tightened every day by the modern dementia, “whose characteristic is to never think, but to turn in circles, faster and faster, in the sawdust and the dung of the time, with the other civil servants, without ever risking a glance outside” (Le Verbe nu).

It is thus against the grain that Guerne reveals to us the dawn of an interior vox cordis, that of poetry—since it is “the only language still alive enough, still armed enough, still powerful and whole enough, close enough to the mystery also of the word, to carry away the fortresses of the inertia and to burst the concrete of the lie, carrying in it a grain of human truth which can still germinate, a seed of beauty which will bloom in the hideousness” (L’âme insurgée).

“All true language is silence”

In response to this deadlocked language, padlocked in its own corrosion, Guerne enjoins us to scrutinize the incandescent hearth of poetry, where only “silence” crackles—this pneuma of an unconquerable breath that whispers its “Unavowable absence impossible to grasp” (Le Jardin colérique). This absence—unavowable because unforgivable—is not this withdrawn mutism that a certain poetry obscure to itself claimed in a self-sufficient glory. On the contrary, with Guerne, silence is an immemorial tear to be safeguarded, a mythical Palladium which guarantees to the world the perpetuation of an island of freedom: “Silence is not what one believes, an extinction, an immobility, a not closed in a yes wide open. Silence is a movement that contains itself, of such power and intensity that to move beside it becomes a grotesque caricature, a stunning simulacrum. The movement of movement, the universal source… The hand of all caresses, of all pains, beyond evil and good, of all acts” (Fragments).

To be disposed to this poetic grammar, it is necessary to imagine that poetry shelters in its torn center a baptistry of silence, where is imperially maintained the forefinger of Angerona, that ancient goddess whose finger affixed to lips—symbol of an ordered silence—is an insolence opposed to all the noises of the world, be they the sweetest. And it is from this preserved archipelago—where the eternal and the temporal intersect—that Armel Guerne composed his Adamic alphabet, wherein culminates in its summit “the unique human voice that stands behind the words and that resounds, mysteriously, each time man reaches out to himself… Sometimes open to the heavy night and echoing in the depths of the abyss, sometimes torn by supernatural gleams, this authentic voice of man, which reappears suddenly at the crucial hours, pierces and disperses his languages” (L’Ame insurgée). For Guerne, perhaps even more than an inapparent heart or a founding axis, silence is the very strength of the poet—indeed, the only one he truly possesses. [“That the most sublime poetry is really, in the end, only the learning of silence” (Le Verbe nu)].

And to connect the corolla of the diamond cutters, who set poetry with an aura of silence, it is appropriate to quote Max Picard and his Monde du silence (World of Silence), in which he writes that “Poetry comes from silence and for the nostalgia of silence.” [Max Picard wrote of Hölderlin that his words “seem to come from a space that existed before creation” (Le Monde du silence)].This echo without return acts thus in the manner of a liturgical screen, by which the poet sifts the relics of a word which precedes the creation, to collect the deposit of a new clarity—opened in the immobile one. This is what Guerne’s poem Le Poids vivant de la parole (The Living Weight of the Word) evokes, in which he dips his hieratic blade, ever more deeply into the “amassed” powers of silence [“The most difficult thing is still to gather the silences, all the silences of the most diverse kinds, and to bring them back intact, one by one, by the dozens, by the thousands, the smallest and the largest, to collect them carefully as they pass and to bring them home delicately. Without breaking them, without tarnishing them, without crumpling them” (La nuit veille)]:

You can write, and you write;
You can be silent, and you are silent.
But to know that silence
Is the great and only key,
One must pierce all the symbols.
To devour the images,
To listen in order not to hear,
To undergo until death
Like a crushing
The living weight of the word.

It is thus about poetry as about an asceticism: a constant and heroic “mine of will” which arms itself in a column of silence. In these two secret nobilities, the same language of oracle is whispered: an awakener of the Spirit who goes “to seek behind the noise; who picks it up and who collects it for all those who are exiled from it. In such a poetic alchemy, there is no place for embellishment or ornament: each word, however simple, is chanted at its “maximum flavor“—thus crystallizing this concretion of the poem into a secret pearl, which testifies before its living weight: “The silent meditation of the most silent of monks is, in this sense, a listening of the word until the finest of the ineffable. Almost perfection” (Fragments).

The Abyss of Time

For Guerne, much more than a simple aggregate of captious and scattered words, the poem is a tension—torn at the two points of the infinite, between the previous Word and the words that seek it. This caesura of abyss, as violent as a “silent storm,” reminds us of the famous letter of the American poet William Carlos Williams [1913 letter to Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine], where he, after having written that ” Now life is above all things else at any moment subversive of life,” indicates that it is the same for the poem: ” Verse to be alive must have infused into it something of the same order, some tincture of disestablishment, something in the nature of an impalpable revolution.” With Guerne, it is a question of the same perseverance of the poem in a stellar conatus, of the same light accentuating itself in a coruscating force—all these ardent powers concur to this “oxidation of the infinite, of the eternity or of the things” carried by the poetry.

Detecting then a “source of all fires,” the poet fans the mythical remains of it to the point of setting his own word ablaze in a burning firebrand—to be able to welcome “the deposit of a truth” which is not his own. It is this lightning rearrangement that the poem Soudain [Suddenly] encloses, spurring even more deeply this “urge for renewal is gaining ground in the aftermath of monstrous destruction,” of which the poem is only one meteor:

Words, just to put them down
One next to the other,
That say more and go further
Than we go; words
Suddenly no longer ours
And stand so close
Close to a supreme truth.
Words that cease to be said
To better come, suddenly, to become again.
Words of the word.
(Le Poids vivant de la parole)

And if “the ark of the world is on the waters of time,” as Guerne writes in his Jours de l’Apocalypse, it is because it is the poet’s responsibility to go up the tubular corridors of time—themselves linked to the “pillar of Eternity”—to ring the bell of the unalterable. Split between these two temporal poles, his own and that of the word, the poet condenses a “hurricane above the deserts” and breaks the anthropic bodice by a ray of lightning—such as the “interior blood and its irrevocable mystery, until then contained in the night of the body” (La Nuit veille). For, contrary to a modern taxonomy, which requires of the poet a hectic inventiveness turned towards artifice or imagination, Guerne teaches us that the “clairvoyance” of the poet is above all an inclination of the soul towards itself—a sovereign expectation of the living Weight of the word: “The true mystery of all poetry, it is that the poet is in us; the other one, the one who speaks, doesn’t speak; it’s not true: it’s not him, it’s just the Word. Thus, it is by an august gesture of allegiance that the poet makes himself Sphinx, by putting himself in tune with an anterior sovereignty—being able thus only “to give his voice—even if it is breathless—to the voice which calls” (Au bout du temps—At the end of time).

And it is in this beginning of a rediscovered word that we detect the first strain of Guerne’s thought—the vital point from which all its foliage branches out. It is based on the intuition that poetry should not “second the world” as Kafka said about the novel, but that it aspires to be a mirror of the Apocalypse, taken in its primary sense of “revelation” and “unveiling”: “We have passed the threshold of the Apocalypse and, in my opinion, we are mistaken when we want to look at or read the Apocalypse as a prophecy. In reality we should read and understand it as a lived history, already past in part, and in the depths of which we are charitably engaged. This is what is happening every day. It is more than at our doors; it has entered our lives, we are living it, absolutely.” This apocalyptic bottom generates a deep caesura in his poetic thought—it calls him to a conversion, which carries the word on the imperious way of necessity. As if, by the tear that it would impose, the Apocalypse definitively breaks the vitiated fabrics of the babble, so that poetry finds its innocence of the aerolith. It is with this breaking star that Armel Guerne hoped to hang poetry, as shown in one of his confessions, written in the beating of a revealed abyss: “About poetry, I have ambitious and clear ideas which put it a little higher than the ditty: I want to say, today, vigil of the end time” (Letter to his editor).

The Open Palms

“On a sinking ship, panic comes from the fact that all the people, and especially the sailors, obstinately speak only the language of navigation; and no one speaks the language of shipwrecks. Only prophets and poets know how to use this language of meltdown panic, according to Guerne. In a disoriented universe, where dissolution and siltation seem to be the only avenues of the future, these two passers-by of the absolute raise the lost by only their glances “turned right side up.” It is one of the multiple possible meanings that we give to the Apocalypse evoked by Guerne—beyond a material state of the world, it is an interior accentuation by which the poet does not write any more for himself, nor for the others, but in front of the end of times. Howling thus his Rhapsodie des fins dernières, under the porch of the agony of the world, his verses are consumed in an irrevocable detonation, which tremble with equal intensity with all the “revelations”—”For the poet, the universe is an incandescent drama. Its tragedy enlightens” (Fragments).

Guerne initiates us then into a blessing by the desert—understood as the voluntary desiccation of the poet where the waiting and the attention become his only prayers, his only consoling sources. In these latitudes—dug in an unfathomable abyss that summons all the chasms of silence and night—the freedom of the poet is strangled by the very power of the word: “The word speaks; and I listen to it speak. It sings; and I listen to it sing. It commands; and I listen to it obey and I see it obey. This is the School of the Seer.” And it is from these specular sighs, which reflect even more deeply the received light, that the poet abandons his lower maneuvers to receive the break of a superior verb: “The writing is only a bark of which one makes a divine cup; remains the One who fills it and the one who is thirsty and who takes it to drink. Begging before the one and begging before the other, the poet is between the two ” (Rhapsodie des fins dernières). It is this hieratic snatch of which each poem is the palpitating witness that makes Guerne’s poetic thought so necessary. It reminds us that beyond the dislocation of the poet, between supplications and thundering, it is the simple word carried by poetry which bequeaths to us an effulgent crystal—”The poet did nothing but open his blood, source of word” (Le Verbe nu).

It is up to the poet alone to hold out this open palm of the beggar—whose bruised phalanxes are only the pulverized reflection of his own charity—to pick up this immemorial tear of the word. Like a herald, the poet then remembers this mythical needle by affixing it on all the ruins of the world—and carries in front of a new Axis Mundi, like an Atlas armed with the sword of the Archangel: “All set their traps for you, scholars, politicians, bankers; the traps in which they themselves are caught. The poet holds out to you his buoy, and if he can, his hand”. (Preface to his translation of the Disciples at Sais, Hymns to the Night, religious songs of Novalis).

Henri Rosset writes from France. “Everyone wants to own the end of the world.” This articles through the kind courtesy of PHILITT.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila: The Antidemocratic Rebel

“In our time, rebellion is reactionary, or it is nothing more than a hypocritical and facile sham.”

In 1908 the young José Ortega y Gasset wrote in a letter to Ramiro de Maeztu, with a glorious outburst of youthful pedantry, “either one does literature or one does precision or one keeps quiet.” Then Ortega spent almost half a century doing literature. Without precision and without silences. Beautiful and brilliant literature, perhaps the best Spanish prose since the 17th century. And certainly the best aphorisms since 1658, when Gracián died, and until 1954, when Nicolás Gómez Dávila began to write his notes and Scholia.

What happened, however, was that Ortega placed his aphorisms in essays of different genres, like flowers in a meadow. Sometimes the proportion of aphorisms in the text increased to the point that the flowers hid the meadow, or the trees hid the forest. Ortega y Gasset’s philosophy is very literary and his literature, like his philosophy, is in essence aphoristic.

Of course, Ortega was not the only conscious or unconscious supporter of aphorisms. Unamuno is another great fan and so is Eugenio d’Ors. And Juan Ramón Jiménez is another, but with the bad luck that his aphorisms are narcissistic and soft; that is to say, cheesy.

However, in Spanish, for quite some time, there is no author of aphorisms comparable to the great Colombian writer Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913-1994). A different question is whether it is justified to pay little attention to the essays of Gómez Dávila, always concentrating on his Scholia. Perhaps this happens because we do not understand that, as in the essays of Ortega or Eugenio d’Ors, the essay and its aphoristic content are inseparable. Of course, sometimes a paragraph with a more logical and discursive structure leads to a final aphorism, and enhances it with the strength and beauty of the most sustained prose. As an example, these two paragraphs, the first and the last, of a text that is considered of capital importance for being “the seminal idea” of the “implicit text” to which the Scholia allude:

Indifferent to the originality of my ideas, but jealous of their coherence, I try to draw here a scheme that orders, with the least possible arbitrariness, some scattered and foreign themes. Amanuensis of centuries, I only make a patchwork quilt (Texts, p. 55.).

The democratic purpose extinguishes, slowly, the luminaries of an immemorial worship. In the solitude of man, obscene rites are prepared.

Tedium invades the universe, where man finds nothing but the insignificance of inert stone, or the repeated reflection of his slow face. When he realizes the vanity of his endeavor, man takes refuge in the atrocious lair of the wounded gods. Cruelty alone solaces his agony. Man forgets his impotence, and imitates the divine omnipotence, before the useless pain of another man whom he tortures. In the universe of the dead god and the aborted god, space, astonished, suspects that its hollowness is brushed by the smooth silk of wings. Against the supreme insurrection, a total rebellion raises us up. The complete rejection of the democratic doctrine is the final and meager redoubt of human freedom. In our time, rebellion is reactionary, or it is nothing but a hypocritical and easy farce. (Texts, pp. 83-84.)

Note the strength of the two final aphorisms, in the respective paragraphs. If the author had written them for a read speech, we would say that he was using techniques like a tamer with his whip to arouse the audience. But they fit perfectly into the logical argument of the essay, which otherwise contains many more of the aforementioned aphorisms. His short essayistic work constitutes a spectacular procession of scholia, aphorisms, apothegms, sentences and epigrams.

Everything but Sayings

But the most popular sayings do constitute part of the “implicit text”. With apologies to our Olympian master. For example, his rampage in a profusion of sayings against fools, imbeciles and imbecility. They occupy more of the master’s attention than the perverse themselves and their wickedness:

In every age, happily, there are fools indefinitely capable of the obvious (Escolios a un texto implícito, pp. 7-9).

There is nothing in the world that the enthusiasm of the imbecile does not degrade (Escolios a un texto implícito, p. 220).

Politicians, in democracy, are the condensers of imbecility (Escolios a un texto implícito, p. 221).

But in reality, for Gómez Dávila, the bad guy is a fool because he is too smart and his myopia leads him, leads us all, to perdition. And the fool is bad for similar reasons. Or, to put it in common parlance, there is no good fool.

Certainly, the fact that Gómez Dávila brings out, I don’t know whether the worst or the dumbest of his antagonistic admirers, is something more than a moral and literary curiosity, which he also has. For example, García Márquez said, apparently in private, “if he were not a leftist, he would agree on everything with Gómez Dávila.” Because of medical advice, he had to keep quiet about which political person, or did he say this like some cholesterol patient, “if I were healthy, I would eat this ham?”

And Savater prefered the scholium “the opposite of absurdity is not reason but happiness”—because, Savater said, “it overcomes the pessimism/optimism dichotomy.” I don’t think so. Gómez Dávila says that “with good humor and pessimism, it is possible neither to be wrong nor to be bored.” So, wherever the Colombian master is now, he will verify daily what I have just said—even posthumously he brings out either the worst or the silliest in his antagonistic admirers.

I see only four things for sure in Nicolás Gómez Dávila’s thinking:

  1. He knew how to write.
  2. He believed in God. But “more than a Christian, perhaps I am a pagan who believes in Christ” (Scholia, page 44).
  3. He did not believe in democracy. He was a liberal, insofar as he would never have said, applying it to anyone, what Juan Benet said about Solzhenitsyn: that his existence justified the existence of the Gulag, necessary to keep the decanter of communism locked up. And the fact is that Juan Benet was a scoundrel and Gómez Dávila was not. The latter, on the other hand, was capable of severe irony, something very different from Benet’s knavery. Gómez Dávila wrote:

“The hullabaloo unleashed by the Second Vatican Council has shown the hygienic usefulness of the Holy Office.”

By witnessing the “free expression of Catholic thought,” we have seen that the intolerance of the old pontifical Rome was less an imperial limit against heresy than against rudeness and nonsense.”

  1. He was also reactionary; he did not believe in the modern dogma of progress. He was not a conservative: “If the reactionary does not awaken in the conservative, he was only a paralyzed progressive.” He was not so much a right-winger as a reactionary:

“Popular suffrage is less absurd today than it was yesterday: not because majorities are more cultured but because minorities are less so.”

The above quotation is the most clairvoyant of all those that deal with politics. It is also the most pessimistic.

I wish there were more reactionary and free-thinking Colombians like this one, walking their “good humor and pessimism” around the world or locked up in their libraries, free, reacting and thinking. In the end, perhaps they exist and remain hidden, out of modesty and elementary prudence.

The Marqués de Tamarón writes from Spain, and this articles appears courtesy of El Manifesto.

The European Musical Shipwreck

A Brief Musical Review

Dance and song, which are at the origin of music, are known to all civilizations.

The ancient Greeks mastered sound, as can still be seen today in their theaters. Pythagoras (c. 580-495 BC) attempted to access the harmony of the spheres, while Plato (c. 428-348 BC) declared, “Music gives soul to our hearts and wings to our thoughts.”

The early Chinese measured the morale of a kingdom by the quality of its music.

In Christianity, the primordial sound is postulated as the founder (“In the beginning was the Word”). Gregorian chant is part of the heritage of ancient Mediterranean liturgies, while drawing from a Nordic source. Subsequently, the architects of cathedrals and churches perpetuated the primordial role of the human voice.

In contrast, the Koran does not mention music, and some fundamentalists even advocate the destruction of instruments.

In medieval times, musical notation appeared, which made it possible to preserve the precise memory of compositions and to form orchestras in which musicians played together on different scores instead of improvising in turn on a common theme.

In the 12th century, polyphony was created in the construction of Notre-Dame de Paris. This combination of melodies or musical parts, sung or played at the same time, is the result of ancient practices, both liturgical and popular.

From the Renaissance onwards, the notion of pleasure predominated. According to the Irish scholar Robert Boyle (1627-1691), who distinguished it from acoustics, “music has for its object sound insofar as it is pleasing to the ear.”

The invention of musical writing made possible the existence of symphony orchestras in which musicians could play together to different scores.

In the 17th century, after Monteverdi, Italian opera conquered all of Europe, except France, where Louis XIV himself took the stage to dance to the music of Lully. With opera, for which real palaces were built, the combination of the orchestra, lyric and dance brought these three arts to an unprecedented level.

National anthems appeared for the first time in England in the 18th century, inspired by the religious hymns sung during battles. In France, the Te Deum and Domine, salvum fac regem served to “divinize” the king as the embodiment of the fatherland, and their subsequent replacement by La Marseillaise marked a transfer of the sacred.

In the middle of the 19th century, choirs and open-air music developed considerably. A little later, the Belle Époque saw the golden age of music stands, which marked a great movement towards the democratization of musical practice. In 1899, France had seven thousand civilian bands and four hundred military bands.

For three centuries, European “classical tonality” permeated countless unparalleled masterpieces.

At the beginning of the 20th century, however, artists undertook a movement of “deconstruction” of the musical rules, considered “reactionary,” proposing atonal, dodecaphonic and serial music.

This new compositional technique was not successful among the mass of listeners. The human ear, even without notions of music theory, hears false notes, and all the massive subsidies granted to Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) and others since the Pompidou presidency were not be able to change this singular characteristic of music that distinguishes it from other arts. The success of film and video game music, often by well-known composers, illustrates the public’s resistance to the spread of atonal music.

However, a divergent opinion was formulated by the writer and music lover Lucien Rebatet (1903-1972), author of the masterful book Une histoire de la musique (1969), who praised atonalism by considering Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951) as “the culmination of great German music.”

After World War I, the arrival of jazz in the baggage of the U.S. Army reflected a real shift in the musical center of gravity, which until then had remained European. In the 1930s, the Americans also developed “muzak,” or elevator music, which colonized public places.

Also, from the other side of the Atlantic, the Scopitone, a combination of image and sound, spread to France in the 1960s, followed by the music video in the 1980s.

In 2017, the South Korean song Gangnam Style surpassed 3 billion views on YouTube.

In recent years, classical music has come under attack in the name of anti-racism. For example, Oxford University has recently published a report claiming that “white European music of the slave period [causes] great distress to students of color” [sic]. This is an “intersectional” discourse that clearly ignores the existence of singers Barbara Hendricks and Jessye Norman.

Music as a Cultural Practice

In so-called primitive societies, sorcerers and shamans used the psychic effects of rhythm or music in activities related to the sacred.
Today, the disc jockey is a mere sound technician without psychic or religious endowments, although he is capable of appreciating the sound effects experienced by the dancers. As in ancestral techniques, but without ritual supervision, psychotropic drugs are consumed to induce the participants to feel a collective social fusion and temporarily break with reality.

In addition, the mass production of works made possible by technology has brought about a real revolution in the relationship with sound, favoring the rupture of traditional social relationships and the emergence of artificial conflicts in families. Recordings and broadcasting have also gradually made music kiosks and street singers disappear.

Now the listener can remain alone and still feel a sense of freedom. However, this feeling must be relativized, as young people in particular are strongly influenced by large-scale commercial operations that promote lifestyles associated with pseudo-rebelliousness.

Politicians have also turned their attention to large music festivals, the model for which remains Woodstock in 1969, as such events are likely to channel the subversive impulses of participants. On July 14, 2011, a “Concert for Equality,” organized by SOS Racisme at the Parisian Champ de Mars, brought together a million people. Since 1998, the Paris Techno Parade has brought together some 300,000 “partygoers” each year, while its Berlin counterpart has exceeded one million.

In fact, computer tools now allow technicians, who know nothing about music theory or the principles of composition, to offer their creations to a large public.

Orchestrating the Reaction

Like food products, musical productions can contain toxic elements, which is all the more harmful since an individual’s cultural frame of reference often corresponds to the music he or she plays or listens to.

Thus, even among activists conscious of their deep-rooted identity, it is not uncommon to find the predominance of musical tastes borrowed from the “cultural occupation troops.”

The organizers of the Manif pour tous, who played techno music during the demonstrations, did not distinguish themselves from the soundtrack of Gay Pride, which anticipated their political failure.

Thierry Decruzy urges “dissidents” to draw inspiration, among others, from a “French identity rock” (RIF) group such as, In Memoriam, which performed in the middle of the NATO war in Belgrade in April 1999, or from the female group Les Brigandes, whose references are openly inspired by the counter-revolutionaries of the Vendée.

He also recommends drawing on the repertoires of film music, epic video game music and classical compositions, while supporting singers committed to the defense of identities and drawing inspiration from a living musical practice as rich as that of the folk choirs of the Baltic countries.

Johan Hardoy writes from France. This articles appears courtesy of El Manifesto.

Featured: Instruments de musique (Musical Instruments), by Anne Vallayer-Coster; painted in 1770.

The School of Salamanca: Origins of Political Economy and International Law

At the beginning of the 16th century, Salamanca was a city of 20,000 to 24,000 inhabitants, with about 7,000 students (today there are 145,000, of whom 30,000 are students). Founded in 1243, the University of Salamanca is the third oldest university in Europe. In the Golden Age (1492-1681), Spain was the country with the largest number of university students in Europe.

The reputation of the University of Salamanca grew stronger from the 15th century onwards. It became a center of intellectual influence, the symbol of the Renaissance and of Spanish humanism. The great figures, such as Antonio de Nebrija, Fray Luis de Leon, St. John of the Cross, Luis de Gongora and many others studied there. Unlike the Universities of Valladolid and Alcala (the vanguard of Spanish Erasmism), which were mainly focused on theology, Salamanca was also oriented towards legal, political and economic studies. However, the School of Salamanca was above all a theological movement that had as its primary objective the renovation of theology.

[The two most complete works on the School of Salamanca are those of Juan Belda Plans, La Escuela de Salamanca y la renovación de la teología en el siglo XVI, and Miguel Anxo Pena González, La Escuela de Salamanca. De la Monarquía hispánica al Orbe católico].

The theological humanism of the School of Salamanca, and more broadly of the Hispanic Neo-Scholastic school (the scholastic tradition going back to the University of Paris founded around 1200), was an original synthesis of Thomism, Scotism and nominalism, enriched successively by Dominicans, Jesuits and Franciscans, but also by Augustinians, Mercedarians, Carmelites, secular priests, jurists and laymen. The period of its full flowering was from 1526 to 1604; thereafter, its influence declined and finally died out in 1753. At its peak, the trend in favor of Thomism as an orthodox line was very strong; but in the sixteenth century the intellectual atmosphere was open enough to allow the expression of very different concerns and visions. To illustrate this atmosphere, it is worth recalling that the universities of Salamanca, Alcala, Valladolid and Osuna were familiar with the work of Canon Copernicus, who defended heliocentrism with De Revolutionibus (1543). Its study was optional at the University of Salamanca in 1561 and its teaching was compulsory from 1594 onwards. This situation was not exceptional in sixteenth-century Spain, since the Casa de la Contratación de Indias, an institution created in 1503 to promote navigation, had a large team of royal astronomers and cosmographers fully aware of European astronomy.

[Eugenio Bustos, “La introducción de las ideas de Copérnico en la Universidad de Salamanca,” Revistas de la Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas naturales (67), pp. 235-253].

Francisco de Vitoria (1483-1546), the Master of Masters

It was the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (1483-1546), who first contributed to the prestige of the School of Salamanca. Vitoria came from a family of converts. He first studied at the Universities of Burgos and La Sorbonne. He was thirty years old when he left Paris and returned to Spain. He first went to the University of Valladolid, then arrived in Salamanca in 1526, where he remained until his death.

[Since the 1980s, studies on Francisco de Vitoria have multiplied. In fifteen years (1980-1995), Ramón Hernández Martín (author of Francisco de Vitoria. Vida y pensamiento internacional) estimates no less than one hundred works have been published. See in particular, Francisco Castilla Urbano, El pensamiento de Francisco de Vitoria. Filosofía política e indio americano, and Simona Langella, Teología y ley natural. Estudio sobre las lecciones de Francisco de Vitoria].

The School of Salamanca, or “Hispanic School” (since there were many of its followers in Hispanic America), was not the result of a deliberate plan, or of a well-established project. It was a current of thought that was spontaneously created around a master. And this master-founder was Vitoria. For him, as for all his followers, if power is necessary for the State, its raison d’être and its finality can only be the common good. The Pauline idea that power comes from God was accepted by the whole of Christianity, but it gave rise to two opposing interpretations. For some, the monarch governs and imposes laws in an absolute manner, by direct delegation from God (a point of view later developed by James I of England and by Bossuet). In Spain, however, it was quite different, since the idea outlined by Isidore of Seville (560-636) at the time of the Hispano-Visigoths—that the monarch or the dominant oligarchy does not receive power directly from God, but indirectly through the people. This conception was theorized and concretized by the great masters of the School of Salamanca in the 16th and 17th centuries. In other words, for Vitoria, Francisco Suarez, Luis de Molina and so many other Neo-Scholastic authors, God does not grant power directly to the monarch, but only to the people, who freely transmit it to the king by means of a pact that can be modified. The power is “of human right;” it is not directly divine, and it can be more or less ample, according to a free pact. The king is not a mediator between the will of God and the people, but rather the people are.

Vitoria’s freedom of expression from his chair is astonishing. An example: the instrument that Spain brandished to exercise its dominion over the Indies was a bull of Pope Alexander VI, which gave the Crown of Castile a right over the lands and inhabitants of the Indies. However, in two of his famous re-readings (Relectiones) De Indis and De jure belli (1539) [Francisco de Vitoria, Leçons sur les Indiens et sur le droit de guerre. trans. Maurice Barbier, o.p., (Libraire Droz, 1966)], Vitoria simply asserts that the Emperor is not the master of the world and that the Pope is not the lord of the planet either. According to Vitoria, the papal bull does not legitimize either the conquest or the discovery. He asserts that the property of the Indians does not belong to the monarch, nor to the conquistadors, and that the Spaniards do not have the right to get their hands on the gold of America or to exploit the wealth of the continent against the will of the Indians. The emperor, he says, rules over a community of free peoples. Imperial laws are only just insofar as they serve to promote, conserve, and protect the indigenous people.

What are the illegitimate and legitimate titles of domination and conquest according to Vitoria? Illegitimate are the alleged powers of the Emperor or the Pope over the world; the right of discovery; the violation of natural law by the natives (anthropophagi, human sacrifices, incest, homosexuality, etc.); the acceptance of foreign domination by a minority of the rulers and the ruled; and finally, the alleged special gift of God. Legitimate only are: the right of people and the right of natural communication; the right to preach and to announce the Gospel freely; the tyranny of the native rulers, the agreement of the majority of the natives; the alliance and the call for help from friendly peoples; and finally, a point that seems to be debatable—the temporary incapacity of the natives to administer themselves. One sees that paradoxically the arguments that justify today the right of interference (the possibility for international actors to intervene in a State, even without its consent, in case of massive violation of human rights) are not so far from his own.

In short, according to Vitoria, the Indies should be considered a political protectorate. A protectorate justifiable only insofar as it serves the welfare of the indigenous peoples. On the other hand, Vitoria and his followers generally agree that individuals who have never been Christians should not be forced to become so.

The reaction of the Emperor, Charles V, was remarkably debonair and peaceful. He limited himself to sending a letter to the prior of the convent of San Esteban in Salamanca to urge his colleagues to show a little more restraint and caution in expressing doctrines that might offend the dignity of the Emperor and the Pope.

In his 13th lesson, De jure belli, Vitoria redefines the theory of just war, developed until then by Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas. He states his three principles: One should not seek the occasions and causes of war, but should live in peace with men; the rejection of the Gospel is not a reason for just war. War should not be waged for the loss of the enemy, but for the defense of one’s country and so that peace may result. It is necessary finally to have a just proportion between the violation of the right and the evils generated by the war, and to benefit from victory with measure and moderation.

If Francisco de Vitoria is often considered the founder of international law, it is not because he invented the notion of the law of nations, the jus gentium (the Greeks and the Romans already used, in the relations between States, elements of a true system of international law, later developed by Saint Augustine, Saint Isidore and Saint Thomas), but because Vitoria was able to discover the fundamental laws of relations between men. His genius was to consider the law of nations as a natural law, common to all men and to all States.

The Disciples of Vitoria

A whole group of scholars soon became part of Vitoria’s lineage. About twenty names are famous, but about 80 deserve to be studied. They soon became the moral conscience of the Empire. Among them: Domingo de Soto, known for his theory of money and his renovation of the law of nation /jus gentium; Melchor Cano, who advised King Philip II to resist the temporal claims of the Pope; Tomás de Mercado, who studied the commercial exchanges between Spain and the Indies; Martin de Azpilcueta, former rector of the University of Coimbra, who was the first economist to correctly analyze the process of inflation caused by the influx of precious metal from the Indies.

To these names should be added those of Juan Gil de Nava, Pedro de Sotomayor, Juan de la Peña, Mancio de Corpus Christi, Bartolomé de Medina, Domingo Bañez, Juan de Guevara, Luis Sarabia de la Calle, Fray Luis de León, Diego de Covarrubias y Leiva, Bartolomé de Medina and Juan de Maldonado. Then, the names of a second generation, to which belonged the Jesuits Luis de Molina (who taught in Madrid and Coimbra), Juan de Mariana, and especially Francisco Suarez (1548-1617). The economic thought of these authors was new and original. Domingo de Soto maintained that the wealth of nations came from exchange and not from the accumulation of precious metals. He was thus clearly opposed to mercantilism.

[Raoul de Scorraille, François Suárez de la Compagnie de Jésus, d’après ses lettres, ses autres écrits inédits et un grand nombre de documents nouveaux, 2 vols.; Joseph H. Fichter, Man of Spain: A Biography of Francis Suárez; José Manuel Gallegos Rocafull, La doctrina política del P. Francisco Suarez (Jus, 1948); Mateo Lanseros, La autoridad civil en Francisco Suarez (IEP, 1949); Reijo Wilenius, The Social and Political Theory of Francisco Suarez (Societas philosophica Fennica, 1963); Jean-François Courtine, Nature et empire de la loi. Études suaréziennes; and A. Couartou-Imatz, La souveraineté populaire chez Francisco Suarez (Faculté de droit de Bordeaux, 1974)].

Luis de Molina explained that the right price is the price of competition, of the game of supply and demand; that the value attributed to things is subjective and not objective, as Marx, and Ricardo before him, would later say. For Molina, the right price is the market price; it is the abundance or scarcity of goods that determines their price and not the costs of production, work or risk, as was believed in the Middle Ages (via Duns Scott).

The masters of the Salamanca school criticized excessive taxation and price controls. Price controls can and should only be exceptional. They also clearly defended property, which is necessary for social peace; to deny it, to refuse it, according to them, is a heresy (Domingo de Soto), but it is not absolute; it can never be detached from its social function.

The thinkers of Hispanic Neo-Scholasticism condemned usury, but accepted moderate interest. They were therefore attacked, on the one hand, by Protestants and Catholics who demanded a return to the purity of the Church’s doctrine and who reproached them for softening the prohibition, and, on the other hand, by secular authors who accused them of hypocrisy because they sought exceptions to the principle.

These thinkers also made a distinction between citizens and foreigners. Luis de Molina is the very example of the scholastic author who today offers arguments to defend restrictions on the international market and immigration.

After the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria, the most famous author of the School of Salamanca is the Jesuit Francisco Suarez (1548-1617). His work was known throughout Europe in his time. It consists of 27 volumes (unlike Vitoria who did not publish anything during his lifetime, his re-readings being notes taken by his students).

Suarez is an anti-absolutist thinker. In his Defensio fidei (1613), he states the fundamental axiom of Neo-Scholastic theology: “No king, no monarch, has or has had according to the ordinary law, the political principate immediately from God or by the act of a divine institution, but by means of human will or institution” [Cited by Couartou-Imatz, L’État et la communauté internationale dans la pensée de Vitoria (Faculté de droit de Bordeaux, 1972), p.16]. Public power always comes from God, but it is given to the people who place it in the hands of an individual or an institution for reasons of historical circumstances. This being the case, only the authority that does not lose sight of its mission is legitimate—that mission being, the attainment of the common good and the respect of human dignity. At the heart of the Neo-Scholastic approach is the integration of theology, ethics, politics and economics. The Dominicans and the Neo-Scholastic Jesuits cannot be described as individualistic thinkers in the contemporary sense, even though their work demonstrates a constant concern for human dignity.

It is only from the beginning of the nineteenth century that several Spanish and European jurists, all specialists in international law, began to recognize the influence of Vitoria and his followers on the Dutch Protestant jurists, Hugo Grotius, and the German, Samuel von Pufendorf, who were then considered the only precursors of international law. Their influence on the works of the Italian jurist, Alberico Gentili, the German philosopher, Johannes Althusius, the French political theorist, Jean Bodin, and indirectly on the group of Scottish economists, headed by Adam Smith, is equally undeniable.

The precursory character of the School of Salamanca was more and more admitted from the turn of the 20th century. In France alone, the pioneering work of Ernest Nys (1894), Alfred Vanderpol (1911), Hubert Beuve Méry (1928) and Louis Le Fur (1939) should be recalled.

In the field of economics, however, it was not until another century later that the thinkers of the School of Salamanca were recognized as the founders of modern economics. For a long time, they were confused with the most vulgar mercantilism (which defended the idea that the possession of precious metals made the wealth and power of nations). It had even been said that the thinkers of the School of Salamanca, guided by their religious principles, had been unable to understand the mechanisms of the market and prices. But this was not true!

The works of Pierre-André Sayous, Joseph Schumpeter, José Larraz Lopez, Luis Martínez Fernández, Andrés Martín Melquiades, José Barrientos, Juan Belda Plans, Murray Rothbard, Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, Jesús Huerta de Soto, Raymond de Roover, Alejandro Chafuen, to name but a few, have shown that the thinkers of Hispanic Neo-Scholasticism described and systematized, long before the economists of the 19th and 20th centuries, and in an almost complete way, the theory of subjective value, the theory of marginal utility, the theory of prices, the quantitative theory of money, the phenomenon of inflation and the mechanisms of exchange. What is most surprising is that modern economic science has confirmed the conclusions reached by the thinkers of the School of Salamanca through theological and ethical reasoning, as early as the 16th century.

Many ultraliberal supporters of the Austrian School have sought to see in the Salamanca School the origins of the liberal school of economic thought.

[See Alejandro A. Chafuen, Christians for Freedom. Late Scholastic Economics/ Raíces cristianas de la economía de libre mercado ( Buey Mudo, 2009); Thomas E. Woods, The Church and the Market. A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy/ La iglesia y la economía. Una defensa católica de la economía libre ( Buey Mudo, 2010); André Azevedo Alves and José Manuel Moreira, The Salamanca School. For the opposite view, see Daniel Martín Arribas, Destapando al liberalismo. La Escuela Austriaca no nació en Salamanca (SND Editores, 2018)].

Some of the most feverish supporters even went so far as to assert that “God is liberal/libertarian;” perhaps in order not to be outdone by those who, like Camilo Torres or Leonardo Boff, saw in Christ “the first communist.” But this is to forget that the Neo-Scholastic authors never separated the economy from morality, from natural law and from God. And this also forgets that the principles of a just Christian order, juridical, political, economic and social, are in direct opposition to those of a liberalism that idolizes freedom and private property.

The Influence on Power

What was the influence of the School of Salamanca in the 16th century? On the Church it was undoubtedly very important. Members of the School of Salamanca were omnipresent at the Council of Trent (1545-1563). During its three stages, the Spanish participation amounted to a total of almost a thousand people, of whom 245 are known among the most prestigious figures.

What about political power? It is impossible to overemphasize here the close and privileged relationship that existed between the thought of Vitoria and his followers and the Spanish Monarchy. On November 20, 1542, Charles V promulgated in Barcelona the New Laws of the Indies. His decree abolished slavery and the encomienda and ordered that the Indians be considered free vassals of the Crown of Castile. But obviously the ideal ran up against the realities and the interests of the men. The pressure of the Spanish authorities of the Indies and the various insurrections (in Peru) compelled the emperor to modify partially the contents of his decree. But the influence remained however tangible in the more than 3000 laws of the Indies enacted by the kings of Spain.

A word about the Valladolid controversy, which in 1550-1551 pitted the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas against the humanist theologian, also a Dominican, Juan Ginés de Sepulveda. Sepulveda declared the domination of the Indians just in order to civilize them, to teach them religion without doing it by force and to have them respect natural law. Las Casas, on the contrary, was a pacifist. According to him, there was no legal title that could justify the Spanish presence in America. He proposed the restitution of lands, compensation for the Indians and peaceful evangelization. But his pacifism was perceived by the whole School of Salamanca as an unrealistic and irresponsible thought. In this, Vitoria was paradoxically closer to the realist or moderately Machiavellian (and not at all Machiavellic) Sepulveda, a fine connoisseur of Aristotle, than to the utopian Las Casas.

[Machiavellianism refers to a conception of politics that advocates the conquest and preservation of power by all means. The adjective “Machiavellic,” which has passed into common French parlance, refers to the dark and manipulative interpretation of Machiavelli’s best-known work, The Prince (1531). Thus “Machiavellic” is always sinister and nefarious. This is to be distinguished from the term “Machiavellian,” formed by contrast to designate the concepts stemming from Machiavelli’s political philosophy, without passing judgment. Thus, “Machiavellian” is realist philosophy in politics].

Today, scholars continue to argue about the position of the Salamanca School on individual rights. For some, the Salamanca masters represent a resurgence and development of an authentically Aristotelian and Thomistic framework centered on an organicist conception and objective natural law. For others, they are closer to the notion of subjective law centered on individual rights and liberties. For some, they are part of the most orthodox Catholic tradition; for others they break with it and anticipate modernity.

Are Vitoria and his followers at the origin of the modern conception of human rights? No, answers the philosopher of law Michel Villey. “Certainly, the Spanish scholastics had a great desire to impose their theology and their conception of a natural moral law on jurists; but to derive from it duties, obligations to be borne by the individual. They were agents of order. As for deducing from the dignity of nature the ‘rights’ of man, they were not ready for it, not having the taste for anarchy, because of their attachment to tradition.” According to Villey, human rights have their source in a deviated Christian theology; they are the product of modern philosophy, which emerged in the 17th century.

In any case, the legacy of the School of Salamanca is originality of thought, a combination of an organic conception of society, centered on the common good, with a prominent place given to the dignity of man and even to individual rights; a simultaneous defense of the right of the city and the right of individuals.

Arnaud Imatz, a Basque-French political scientist and historian, holds a State Doctorate (DrE) in political science and is a correspondent-member of the Royal Academy of History (Spain), and a former international civil servant at OECD. He is a specialist in the Spanish Civil War, European populism, and the political struggles of the Right and the Left – all subjects on which he has written several books. He has also published numerous articles on the political thought of the founder and theoretician of the Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, as well as the Liberal philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, and the Catholic traditionalist, Juan Donoso Cortés.

Featured: “Francisco de Vitoria,” by Daniel Vázquez Diaz; painted in 1957.