This is an excerpt from the book, Back to Reality, chapter 3 (“Moral Realism”), by Gustave Thibon a contemporary of Marcel De Corte. It will be republished this year by Arouca Press along with What Ails Mankind? He is little known in the English speaking world.
The revolutionary who kills tradition is not better than the pharisee perpetuating a dead fashion: the pharisee embalms, the revolutionary cremates, but both operations are carried out upon a corpse. The only wisdom consists in saving the youth of traditions, whenever these conform to the central exigencies of human nature. Those who desire novelty, something new for its own sake, have no belief in this nature; for them life can be nothing but a succession of beginnings, one destroying the other, a series of abortions. There is a morbid thirst for novelty which it is impossible to distinguish from a taste for death. Baudelaire had the frankness to recognize as much.
But the problem, in any case, is not one to be presented in terms of history: it is an ontological question. Ours is not a cult of the past. We do not worship the past as such or value things in proportion to their antiquity; if we did, we should never prefer the medieval civilization to the fourth-century Roman worship of the State. What we like about certain forms of the past is a deeper incarnation of truth—human and social truth. We would revive these forms, now obscured by the chimeras of a world in frenzy; and we know it is possible to do so, for if the course of history is irreversible and never repeats itself, it is always reproducing something extremely similar. But our only reason for wishing to revive these forms is that they seem better adapted to the essential needs of humanity. The face of the past has no attraction at all except in so far as it reflects the eternal.
