Raymond Abellio and the Multipolarity

The French writer and thinker Raymond Abellio published an essential book in 1953, entitled Assumption of Europe. It is a comprehensive structural analysis of the historical morphology of Europe, and the reasons for its transformation into the West. I think that the dialectic between Europe and the West is more than ever a burning issue, and that it is the understanding of the relationship between Europe and the West that drives every person today to support either Ukraine or Russia in this conflict. To put it another way, a Westerner will proclaim his support for Zelensky, whereas someone who feels deeply European can only feel solidarity with Russian civilization. And this will only appear as a paradox to superficial observers.

Raymond Abellio explains his vision of the ontogeny of civilizations, pointing out that it is similar to that of individuals. He assigns five key moments to the life of a civilizations, namely: conception, birth, baptism, communion and death, thus founding a true historical symbolism of the sacraments.

Thus, for Abellio, the conception of Christian Europe is done through Jesus: the germ is deposited in the womb. Through birth, the infant leaves the womb to enter the world, while remaining dependent on its mother; for Abellio, this is the scholasticism of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who puts all his reason into faith. Baptism consecrates the moment when the person is no longer satisfied with seeing the world: he sees himself. He is reborn through the acquisition of awareness of his own consciousness, seeing himself for the first time as a subject in a world of objects. During the Renaissance, Galileo and Descartes put all their faith in reason.

As for communion, this is a moment when civilization changes its relationship with the world, which is no longer a world of objects, but a world of subjects. And a subject is subjecting itself. In 1789, Europe no longer sees itself as the cause-of-itself, but as the cause-of-the-universe.

From then on, it was called the West, and would increasingly merge with the world until it was the world that became fully Western. The exhaustion resulting from this indefinite outpouring leads logically to death. And this is what is happening today.

However, the law of cycles described by the Absolute Structure, established by Raymond Abellio, shows the quality of the indefinite incompleteness of this process, each historical stage of a civilization having repercussions in all the others. The alleged stagnation of Chinese civilization, for example, denigrated by Guillaume Faye in order to highlight the supposed superiority of Western civilization, is merely a sign of the longer duration of its first three sacraments. And it is very likely that China is only now crossing the threshold of its own communion with the world, which can only lead to the replacement of the West by the complete Sinicization of the world - which will eventually be given a name.

The concept of multipolarity consists, for Europe, erased and transmuted into the West by Descartes, in reclaiming its original transcendence by performing a true nuptial act with Russian civilization, in order to bring about the emergence of that Paraclete Holy Empire of the End Times, of which so many true European writers have dreamt, from Dante to Jean Parvulesco.

Laurent James