The Radical Subject, the mask and the fall of the gods

The Fundamental Option

The Radical Subject who makes the choice to follow the Divine, unveiled in his soul/consciousness at the moment of his birth in the Chàos, during the first catharsis that conceived him beforehand, under the effect of the blinding divine light, together with spiritual consolations and metapolitical visions that confirm him in the choice he has made, also sees the darkness of his nature, the shadowy zone of his being, the pollution of capital vices throughout his person and personality.

The light of the Divine illuminates and blinds and, in this chàotic darkness, the Radical Subject sees the fragile substance of which he is made, the mask that he himself has placed over the face of his true nature where, adoring himself like Narcissus, he has built an egocentric realm of falsehoods and distorted beliefs that he himself believes, has convinced himself and has convinced others. Thus, the initial vision of the fallacy of one's own nature, the awareness of the darkness involving body, mind and soul create as a response different inner dynamics of an egoistic type, from the rejection of such a negative vision and awareness to the exclusive search for spiritual consolations, for the light of the Divine without the shadow of one's own contaminated nature that one does not tolerate seeing.

Here, the Radical Subject, by means of these selfish dynamics, in time is projected to the edge of the furnace of the underworld, the underworld of his corrupt nature and is still placed before a choice, a new choice, the radical choice. That is, either to back down, to give up and be content with an illusory life, or to trust the Divine that has guided him up to this point and brought him there and, therefore, to have the courage to throw himself into the abyss, to resolve to descend into the underworld in total abandonment and kenosis. This terrible choice is called the "fundamental option" and it is the only Way granted to the Radical Subject to become, after the Great Trial, a fiery warrior and an archer guardian of the fire of Tradition. Otherwise, the Radical Subject will live by human expedients or, in the worst case scenario, become an operator of iniquity, becoming himself the architect of postmodern liquid decay, under the illusion of living by his own selfish reflected light rather than fighting in the shadow of the Divine's radiance.

The Mask

Every human being possesses a mask of falsehood on his original face, created by his pride or, better - as the Eastern Church Fathers indicate to us, who divide pride itself into two spheres - he has a mask of a mythical type self-made by vainglory and pride, which have grown up with him from his birth until the fulfilment of his psychophysical maturity. This mask, if one can call it that, naturally tends to ossify, to harden with the years, becoming inestimable unless the Divine intervenes directly to eradicate it in a progressive manner with the active cooperation of man, as in the case of the Radical Subject who adheres to the descent into the underworld.

It seems clear that Luigi Pirandello's illuminating statement in the novel One, No One and a Hundred Thousand: 'You will learn to your cost that on the long journey of life you will encounter many masks and few faces', not only finds confirmation here but can even be considered a truth of nature, incontrovertible. In the foundation, understood as the initial formation of the mythical mask, the hereditary fragility components of DNA and family environment have an extraordinary negative influence that only a high talent of an intellectual order, very rare at a young age, could avert. Also because, except for a rigorous monastic training as is still the case with children in Tibet and the rest of Asia, in the child moral ethical understanding does not go hand in hand with his precocious spiritual impulses and this thus demonstrates the virginity of his tiny weltanschauung, still below and above good and evil.

In the growth phase, then, the development of the mythical mask generally takes shape through the imitation of the cultural and social standards present in the environment and, in the last four to five generations, it can be said that this development has mostly been adhered to the behaviours dictated in succession by the radio and television media to the cinema media to the virtual media of social networks via PCs, mobile phones and smartphones, including the current intellectual vacuity of the consumerist phenomenon of the Influencers.

Bearing in mind the specificity of the Rebel human type, a candidate to be in fieri a Radical Subject who, in antithesis to the media world, is a devotee of the idea of Tradition, his mythical mask barely touched by the media pseudo-culture, instead finds nourishment from the negativity represented by the unethical and falsely spiritual aspects of 20th-century ideologies and totalitarianisms, which mingle with Tradition itself by proposing the birth of the New Man at the expense of the Man of the Eternal Return, the Man who is the image of the Divine and the guardian of the fire of Tradition. Thus, the most painful aspect of the fall of the mythical mask in the radical subject is given not only by the eradication of its vices but also by the renunciation of the ideological poison inherent in the three political theories of liberalism, communism and fascism, being unable to existentially separate what still remains of traditional value in such ideologies from what is laxity or unrealisable utopia insofar as it does not conform to human nature.

The mythical mask is thus the ossification of the lack of knowledge of the deadly vices and of wallowing in them with the founding myth of our narcissistic relationship with ourselves, with others, with the world, and which seeks, desires, strongly demands adoration. The mythical mask thus elevates itself to 'god of itself and of others' and through a centripetal mechanism of attraction seeks to use, dominate, crush, manipulate, and plagiarise other people for its own exclusive ends. We have become so accustomed to acting and behaving this way that we are rarely aware of it, all the more so in this age of liberal totalitarianism, which represents the scientific socio-political and anti-spiritual organisation, through the media, public opinion and political correctness, of the production of mythical masks. But the mythical mask must eventually fall in the existential perspective of the radical subject, and to make it fall, he must bring down the gods that dwell in the depths of his soul and condition his body, mind, life and existence.

The fall of the gods

From the Sanskrit dyàuh, the word 'god' means 'bright, shining, blinding'. And, thus, the light of the Divine appears when it penetrates the depths of the soul and summons the Rebel deputed to the ultimate transformation into the Radical Subject. Within the human being, in his nature, in his soul as well as in his body and mind, however, dwell above all those illusory lights, those gods of death who have patiently constructed over the course of each human existence the mythical mask that veils his original face and have caused his ability to communicate with the Divine to be obscured in each person.

The names of these deceptive lights, these gods of death, are: Pride, Envy, Wrath, Avarice, Sloth, Lust. They are like octopuses that from the command centre of our soul, branch out and entwine themselves in the mind, body, relationships and create spiritual and psychosomatic as well as physical illness. These gods are as terrible as they are little known and their contrary virtues, as emanations of the Divine through which the Radical Subject must realise the Opus magnum of its own transformation, are even less so.

According to Western and Eastern monastic tradition: 'Every disease of body and mind in a direct or indirect way has a spiritual root, because it finds its abode in the soul'. In fact, within the temperamental anthropological instinctual binomial Attraction/Repulsion, which generates the existential character binomial Love/Hate, mystical anthropology takes up the experimental teachings of classical Philosophy, reading the deadly vices by the technical name of negative habits (from the Latin habitus - dress), in the sense of alterations, irregularities in interpersonal and intrapersonal relations, deeply rooted within the soul/consciousness.

Let us add that negative habits (capital vices) having their origin in the soul/consciousness, are described as pathological conditions of the consciousness itself, which then branching out into the psychosomatic tissue give rise to neurobiological disorders. In the same way, we consider the practice of positive habits (natural virtues) as an antagonistic response to negative ones and, therefore, conditions of salutogenesis of the consciousness and a sure path to psychophysical regeneration.

In the diagram below, we have interfaced vices (on the left of the table) and contrary virtues (on the right of the table) with the neutrality of the passions (in the centre of the table), which the ancient philosophers considered the 'engines of the soul', i.e. of human activity, and which in scientific terms constitute the survival instinct and the instinct of preservation. In addition to the traditional terms describing the capital vices and natural virtues, we have also added current anthropological terms, which better help us understand the reality of negative and positive habits.

In the course of future articles, we will delve into the analysis of each capital vice and its contrary virtue, which will also be the subject of a future volume with a specific slant. For the time being, we limit ourselves to emphasising the urgency of this struggle, an essential key and passepartout for moving from the Rebel to the Radical Subject. A struggle that must be generous, without discounts, cruel and tenacious, aimed at making the old man with his vices die in order to give birth to the Man of Tradition with his virtues and his faith in the Divine. In a highly self-centred environment full of duchies and self-centred pseudo-Nietzschean solipsists (but who have very little of Nietzsche in them) like the national-popular area from which we come, the motive for this struggle towards self-decentralisation and serene self-mastery to become unsuspecting warriors guardians of the fire of Tradition must be only one: the fall of the gods!

Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini