Revolution and Counter-Revolution – Part I Chapter VII Ending – Chapter XI

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3. Pride and Sensuality and the Metaphysical Values of the Revolution

Two notions conceived as metaphysical values express well the spirit of the Revolution: absolute equality, complete liberty. And there are two passions that most serve it: pride and sensuality.

In referring to passions, we must explain in what sense we use the word in this work. For the sake of brevity, adhering to the usage of various authors on spiritual matters, whenever we speak of the passions as promoters of the Revolution, we are referring to disordered passions. And, in keeping with everyday language, we include among the disordered passions all impulses toward sin existing in man as a consequence of the triple concupiscence, namely, that of the flesh, the eyes, and the pride of life.⁷

A. Pride and Egalitarianism

The proud person, subject to another’s authority, hates first of all the particular yoke that weighs upon him.

In a second stage, the proud man hates all authority in general and all yokes, and, even more, the very principle of authority considered in the abstract.

Because he hates all authority, he also hates superiority of any kind. And in all this there is a true hatred for God.⁸

This hatred for any inequality has gone so far as to drive high-ranking persons to risk and even lose their positions just to avoid accepting the superiority of somebody else.

There is more. In a height of virulence, pride could lead a person to fight for anarchy and to refuse the supreme power were it offered to him. This is because the simple existence of that power implicitly attests to the principle of authority, to which every man as such – the proud included – can be subject.

Pride, then, can lead to the most radical and complete egalitarianism.

This radical and metaphysical egalitarianism has various aspects.

a. Equality between men and God. Pantheism, immanentism, and all esoteric forms of religion aim to place God and men on an equal footing and to invest the latter with divine properties. An atheist is an egalitarian who, to avoid the absurdity of affirming that man is God, commits the absurdity of declaring that God does not exist. Secularism is a form of atheism and, therefore, of egalitarianism. It affirms that it is impossible to be certain of the existence of God and, consequently, that man should act in the temporal realm as if God did not exist; in other words, he should act like a person who has dethroned God.

b. Equality in the ecclesiastical realm: the suppression of a priesthood endowed with the power of Orders, magisterium, and government, or at least of a priesthood with hierarchical degrees.

c. Equality among the different religions. All religious discrimination is to be disdained because it violates the fundamental equality of men. Therefore, the different religions must receive a rigorously equal treatment. To claim that only one religion is true to the exclusion of the others amounts to affirming superiority, contradicting evangelical meekness, and acting impolitically, since it closes the hearts of men against it.

d. Equality in the political realm: the elimination or at least the lessening of the inequality between the rulers and the ruled. Power comes not from God but from the masses; they command and the government must obey. Monarchy and aristocracy are to be proscribed as intrinsically evil regimes because they are antiegalitarian. Only democracy is legitimate, just, and evangelical.⁹

e. Equality in the structure of society: the suppression of classes, especially those perpetuated by heredity, and the extirpation of all aristocratic influence upon the direction of society and upon the general tone of culture and customs. The natural hierarchy constituted by the superiority of intellectual over manual work will disappear through the overcoming of the distinction between them.

f. The abolition of the intermediate bodies between the individual and the State, as well as of the privileges inherent in every social body. No matter how much the Revolution hates the absolutism of kings, it hates intermediate bodies and the medieval organic monarchies even more. This is because monarchic absolutism tends to put all subjects, even those of the highest standing, at a level of reciprocal equality in a lower station that foreshadows the annihilation of the individual and the anonymity that have reached their apex in the great urban concentrations of socialist societies. Among the intermediate groups to be abolished, the family ranks first. Until it manages to wipe it out, the Revolution tries to lower it, mutilate it, and vilify it in every way.

g. Economic equality. No one owns anything; everything belongs to the collectivity. Private property is abolished along with each person’s right to the full fruits of his toil and to the choice of his profession.

h. Equality in the exterior aspects of existence. Variety easily leads to inequality of status. Therefore, variety in dress, housing, furniture, habits, and so on, is reduced as much as possible.

i. Equality of souls. Propaganda standardizes, so to speak, all souls, taking away their peculiarities and almost their own life. Even the psychological and attitudinal differences between the sexes tend to diminish as much as possible.

Because of this, the people, essentially a great family of different but harmonious souls united by what is common to them, disappears. And the masses, with their great empty, collective, and enslaved soul, arise.¹⁰

j. Equality in all social relations: between grown-ups and youngsters, employers and employees, teachers and students, husband and wife, parents and children, etc.

k. Equality in the international order. The State is constituted by an independent people exercising full dominion over a territory. Sovereignty is, therefore, in public law, the image of property. Once we admit the idea of a people, whose characteristics distinguish it from other peoples, and the idea of sovereignty, we are perforce in the presence of inequalities: of capacity, virtue, number, and others. Once the idea of territory is admitted, we have quantitative and qualitative inequality among the various territorial spaces. This is why the Revolution, which is fundamentally egalitarian, dreams of merging all races, all peoples, and all states into a single race, people, and state.¹¹

l. Equality among the different parts of the country. For the same reasons, and by analogous means, the Revolution tends to do away with any wholesome regionalism – whether political, cultural, or other – within countries today.

m. Egalitarianism and hatred for God. Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches¹² that the diversity of creatures and their hierarchical gradation are good in themselves, for thus the perfections of the Creator shine more resplendently throughout creation. He says further that Providence instituted inequality among the angels¹³ as well as among men, both in the terrestrial Paradise and in this land of exile.¹⁴

For this reason, a universe of equal creatures would be a world in which the resemblance between creatures and the Creator would have been eliminated as much as possible. To hate in principle all inequality is, then, to place oneself metaphysically against the best elements of resemblance between the Creator and creation. It is to hate God.

n. The limits of inequality. Of course, one cannot conclude from this doctrinal explanation that inequality is always and necessarily a good.

All men are equal by nature and different only in their accidents. The rights they derive from the mere fact of being human are equal for all: the right to life, honor, sufficient living conditions (and therefore the right to work), property, the setting up of a family, and, above all, the knowledge and practice of the true religion. The inequalities that threaten these rights are contrary to the order of Providence. However, within these limits, the inequalities that arise from accidents such as virtue, talent, beauty, strength, family, tradition, and so forth, are just and according to the order of the universe.¹⁵

B. Sensuality and Liberalism

Along with the pride that breeds all egalitarianism, sensuality in the broader sense of the term is the cause of liberalism. It is in these sad depths that one finds the junction between these two metaphysical principles of the Revolution, namely, equality and liberty, which are mutually contradictory from so many points of view.

a. The hierarchy in the soul. God, Who imprinted a hierarchical mark on all visible and invisible creation, did the same on the human soul. The intelligence should guide the will, and the latter should govern the sensibility. As a consequence of Original Sin, a constant friction exists within man between the sensible appetites and the will guided by the reason: “I see another law in my members, which fights against the law of my mind.”¹⁶

But the will, even though a sovereign reduced to governing subjects ever attempting to rebel, has the means to always prevail . . . provided it does not resist the grace of God.¹⁷

b. Egalitarianism in the soul. The revolutionary process aims to achieve a general leveling, but frequently it has been no more than a usurpation of the ruling function by those who ought to obey. Once this process is transposed to the relations among the powers of the soul, it leads to the lamentable tyranny of the unrestrained passions over a weak and ruined will and a darkened intelligence, and especially to the dominion of a raging sensuality over the sentiments of modesty and shame.

When the Revolution proclaims absolute liberty as a metaphysical principle, it does so only to justify the free course of the worst passions and the most pernicious errors.

c. Egalitarianism and liberalism. This inversion—right to think, feel, and do everything the unrestrained passions demand—is the essence of liberalism. This is clearly shown in the more exacerbated forms of the liberal doctrine. On analyzing them, one perceives that liberalism is not interested in freedom for what is good. It is solely interested in freedom for evil. When in power, it easily, and even joyfully, restricts the freedom of the good as much as possible. But in many ways, it protects, favors, and promotes freedom for evil. In this it shows itself to be opposed to Catholic civilization, which gives its full support and total freedom to what is good and restrains evil as much as possible.

Now, this freedom for evil is precisely freedom for man as long as he is “revolutionary” in his interior, that is, as long as he consents to the tyranny of the passions over his intelligence and will.

Thus liberalism and egalitarianism are fruits of the same tree.

Incidentally, pride, in breeding hatred against any kind of authority,¹⁸ induces a clearly liberal attitude. And, in this regard, it must be considered an active factor of liberalism. However, when the Revolution realized that liberty would result in inequality if men, being unequal in their aptitudes and their use of them, were left free, out of hatred for inequality it decided to sacrifice liberty. This gave rise to its socialist phase, which is but a stage in the process. The Revolution’s ultimate aim is to establish a state of things wherein complete liberty and complete equality would coexist.

Thus, historically, the socialist movement is a mere refinement of the liberal movement. What leads an authentic liberal to accept socialism is precisely that under it a thousand good or at least innocent things are tyrannically forbidden, while the methodical satisfaction (sometimes with a show of austerity) of the worst and most violent passions, such as envy, laziness, and lust, is favored. On the other hand, the liberal perceives that the broadening of authority in the socialist regime is no more than a means within the logic of the system for attaining the so intensely desired goal of final anarchy.

The clashes between certain naive or backward liberals and the socialists are, therefore, mere superficial incidents in the revolutionary process. They are harmless misunderstandings that disturb neither the profound logic of the Revolution nor its inexorable march in a direction that, when one sees things clearly, is simultaneously socialist and liberal.

d. The rock-and-roll generation. The revolutionary process in souls, as herein described, produced in the most recent generations, and especially in adolescents of our days who hypnotize themselves with rock and roll, a frame of mind characterized by the spontaneity of the primary reactions, without the control of the intelligence or the effective participation of the will, and by the predominance of fantasy and feelings over the methodical analysis of reality. All this is fruit, in large measure, of a pedagogy that virtually eliminates the role of logic and the true formation of the will.

e. Egalitarianism, liberalism, and anarchism. In accordance with the preceding items, the effervescence of the disordered passions arouses, on the one hand, hatred for any restraint and any law, and, on the other, hatred for any inequality. This effervescence thus leads to the utopian conception of Marxist anarchism, in which an evolved humanity, living in a society without classes or government, could enjoy perfect order and the most complete liberty, from which no inequality would arise. As can be seen, this ideal is simultaneously the most liberal and the most egalitarian imaginable.

Indeed, the anarchic utopia of Marxism is a state of things in which the human personality, having reached a high degree of progress, would be able to develop freely in a society with neither state nor government.

In this society—which would live in complete order despite not having a government—economic production would be organized and highly developed, and the distinction between intellectual and manual labor would be a thing of the past. A selective process, not yet determined, would place the direction of the economy in the hands of the most capable, without resulting in the formation of classes.

These would be the only and insignificant remnants of inequality. But, since this anarchic communist society is not the final term of history, it seems legitimate to suppose that these remnants would be abolished in a later evolution.

7. CF. 1 John 2:16.
8. See item m, below.
9. Cf. Saint Pius X, apostolic letter Notre charge apostolique, August 25, 1910, American Catholic Quarterly Review, vol. 35 (October 1910), p. 700.
10. Cf. Pius XII, Christmas broadcast, 1944, in Vincent A. Yzermans, Major Addresses of Pope Pius XII (St. Paul: North Central Publishing Co., 1961), vol. 2, pp. 81-82.
11. See Part I, Chap. 11, 3.
12. Cf. Summa Contra Gentiles, II, 45; Summa Theologica, 1, q. 47, a.2.
13. Cf. Summa Theologica, 1, q. 50, a. 4.
14. Ibid., q. 96, aa. 3, 4.
15. Cf. Pius XII, Christmas broadcast, 1944, op. cit., pp. 81-82.
16. Rom. 7:23.
17. Cf. Rom. 7:25.
18. See item A, above.

CHAPTER VIII

The Intelligence, the Will, and the Sensibility in the Determination of Human Acts

The previous considerations call for an explication on the role of the intelligence, the will, and the sensibility in the relations between error and passion.

It could seem that we are affirming that every error is conceived by the intelligence to justify some disorderly passion. Thus, a moralist who affirms a liberal maxim would always be moved by a liberal tendency.

That is not what we think. The moralist may arrive at a liberal conclusion solely through weakness of the intelligence affected by Original Sin. In such a case would there necessarily be some moral fault of another nature, carelessness, for instance? This is a question beyond the scope of our study.

What we do affirm is that, historically, this Revolution had its ultimate origin in an extremely violent ferment of the passions. And we are far from denying the great role of doctrinal errors in this process.

Authors of great worth — de Maistre, de Bonald, Donoso Cortes, and so many others — have written numerous studies on these errors and the way each was derived from the other, from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, and so on till the twentieth century. Therefore, it is not our intention to insist on this matter here.
It does seem to us, however, particularly opportune to focus on the importance of the passional factors and their influence in strictly ideological aspects of the revolutionary process in which we find ourselves. For, as we see it, little heed is paid to this point. On account of this, people do not see the Revolution in its entirety and consequently adopt inadequate counter-revolutionary methods.

We will now add something about the way in which passions can influence ideas.

1. Fallen Nature, Grace, and Free Will

By the mere powers of his nature, man can know many truths and practice various virtues. However, without the aid of grace, it is impossible for him to perdure in the knowledge and practice of all the Commandments.¹

This means that in every fallen man there is always a weakness of the intelligence and a first tendency, prior to any reasoning, that incites him to rebel against the Law.²

2. The Germ of the Revolution

This fundamental tendency to rebel can, at a certain moment, receive the consent of the free will. Fallen man sins thus, violating one or more of the Commandments. But his rebellion can go further and reach the point of a more or less unconfessed hatred for the very moral order as a whole. This hatred, which is essentially revolutionary, can generate doctrinal errors and even lead to the conscious and explicit profession of principles contrary to Moral Law and revealed doctrine as such, which constitutes a sin against the Holy Ghost.

When this hatred began to direct the deepest tendencies of Western history, the Revolution began. Its process unfolds today, and its doctrinal errors bear the vigorous imprint of this hatred, which is the most active cause of the great apostasy of our days. By its nature, this hatred cannot be reduced simply to a doctrinal system: It is disorderly passion exacerbated to an extremely high degree.

Such an affirmation, which applies to this particular Revolution, does not imply that there is always a disordered passion at the root of every error. Nor does it deny that frequently it was an error that unleashed in a given soul, or even in a given social group, the disorder of the passions. We merely affirm that the revolutionary process, considered as a whole and also in its principal episodes, had as its most active and profound germ the unruliness of the passions.

3. Revolution and Bad Faith

One could pose the following objection: If the passions are so important in the revolutionary process, it would seem that its victims are always, at least to some degree, in bad faith. If Protestantism, for instance, is a child of the Revolution, is every Protestant in bad faith? Does this not run contrary to the doctrine of the Church, which admits there may be souls of good faith in other religions?

It is obvious that a person who has complete good faith and is endowed with a fundamentally counter-revolutionary spirit may be caught in the webs of revolutionary sophisms (be they of a religious, philosophical, political, or any other nature) through invincible ignorance. In such persons there is no culpability.

Mutatis mutandis, the same can be said of those who accept the doctrine of the Revolution on one or another restricted point through an involuntary lapse of the intelligence.

But if someone, moved by the disorderly passions inherent to the Revolution, shares in its spirit, the answer must be otherwise.

A revolutionary in these conditions may have become convinced that the Revolution’s subversive maxims are excellent. He will not therefore be insincere, but he will be guilty of the error into which he has fallen.

Also, a revolutionary may have come to profess a doctrine of which he is not convinced or is only partially convinced. In this case, he will be partially or totally insincere.

In this respect, it seems to us almost unnecessary to stress that when we affirm that the doctrines of Marx were implicit in the denials of the Pseudo-Reformation and the French Revolution, we do not mean the adepts of these two movements were consciously Marxist before the Marxist doctrine was put into writing and were hypocritically concealing their opinions.

The orderly arrangement of the powers of the soul and, therefore, an increase in the lucidity of the intelligence illuminated by grace and guided by the Magisterium of the Church are proper to Christian virtue. This is why every saint is a model of balance and impartiality. The objectivity of his judgments and the firm orientation of his will toward good are not even slightly weakened by the venomous breath of the disorderly passions.

On the contrary, to the degree a man declines in virtue and surrenders to the yoke of these passions, his objectivity diminishes in everything connected to them. This objectivity becomes particularly disturbed in the judgments a man makes of himself.

In each concrete case, it is a secret of God to what degree a slow-marching revolutionary of the sixteenth or of the eighteenth century, his vision beclouded by the spirit of the Revolution, realized the profound sense and the ultimate consequences of its doctrine.

In any event, the hypothesis that all were conscious Marxists is to be utterly excluded.

1 See Part I, Chapter 7,2, D.
2 Donoso Cortes’s important development on this truth is very pertinent to the present work. See his “Ensayo sobre el Catolicismo, el Liberalismo y el Socialism,” in Obras Completas (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1946), vol. 2, p. 377.

CHAPTER IX

The “Semi-counterrevolutionary” Is Also a Son of the Revolution

Everything that has been said herein provides grounds for a practical observation.

Spirits marked by this interior Revolution might conserve a counter-revolutionary attitude in respect to one or many points due to an interplay of circumstances and coincidences, such as being reared in a strongly traditional and moral milieu.¹

Nevertheless, the spirit of the Revolution will still be enthroned in the mentality of these semi-counterrevolutionaries.

In a people where the majority are in such a state of soul, the Revolution will be irrepressible until they change.

Thus, as a consequence of the Revolution’s unity, only the total counter-revolutionary is an authentic counter-revolutionary.

As for the “semi-counterrevolutionaries” in whose souls the idol of Revolution begins to totter, their situation is somewhat different. We shall discuss it later.²

1. See Part I, chapter 6, 5, A.
2. See Part II, Chapter 12, 10.

 

 

CHAPTER X

Culture, Arts, and Ambiences in the Revolution

Having described the complexity and scope of the revolutionary process in the deepest levels of souls and, therefore, in the mentality of peoples, we are prepared to point out the full import of culture, arts, and ambiences in the march of the Revolution.

1. Culture

The revolutionary ideas enable the tendencies from which they originate to assert themselves with appearances of acceptability in the eyes of their adherents and others. Used by the revolutionary to shake the true convictions of the latter and thus to unleash or exacerbate the rebellion of their passions, these ideas inspire and shape the institutions created by the Revolution, and are to be found in the most varied branches of knowledge or culture, for it is nearly impossible for any of these branches not to be involved, at least indirectly, in the struggle between the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution.

2. Arts

Given that God established mysterious and admirable relations between, on the one hand, certain forms, colors, sounds, perfumes, and flavors and, on the other, certain states of soul it is obvious that, through the arts, mentalities can be profoundly influenced and persons, families, and peoples can be induced to form a profoundly revolutionary state of spirit. It suffices to recall the analogy between the spirit of the French Revolution and the fashions created during it, or the analogy between the revolutionary turmoil of today and the present extravagances in fashion and in the so-called advanced schools of art.

3. Ambiences

Ambiences may favor good or bad customs. To the degree they favor good ones, they can oppose the Revolution with the admirable barriers of the reaction, or at least the inertia, of everything that is wholesomely customary. To the degree they favor bad customs, they can communicate to souls the tremendous toxins and energies of the revolutionary spirit.

4. The Historical Role of the Arts and Ambiences in the Revolutionary Process

For this reason, in point of fact, it must be recognized that the general democratization of customs and lifestyles, carried to the extremes of a systematic and growing vulgarity, and the proletarianizing action of certain modern art contributed to the triumph of egalitarianism as much as or more than the enacting of certain laws or the establishing of certain essentially political institutions.

It also must be recognized that if a person managed, for example, to put a stop to immoral or agnostic movies or television programs, he would have done much more for the Counter-Revolution than if, in the course of the everyday proceedings of a parliamentary regime, he had brought about the fall of a leftist cabinet.

CHAPTER XI

The Revolution on Sin and Redemption,
and the Revolutionary Utopia

Among the multiple aspects of the Revolution, it is important to emphasize its inducement of its offspring to underestimate or deny the notions of good and evil, Original Sin, and the Redemption.

1. The Revolution Denies Sin and the Redemption

As we have seen, the Revolution is a fruit of sin. However, if it were to acknowledge this, it would unmask itself and turn against its own cause.

This explains why the Revolution tends not only to keep silent about its sinful root but also to deny the very notion of sin. Its radical denial applies to Original and actual sin and is effected mainly by:

• Philosophical or juridical systems that deny the validity and existence of Moral Law or give this law the vain and ridiculous foundations of secularism.

• The thousand processes of propaganda that create in the multitudes a state of soul that ignores morality without directly denying its existence. All the veneration owed to virtue is paid to idols such as gold, work, efficiency, success, security, health, physical beauty, muscular strength, and sensory delight.

The Revolution is destroying the very notion of sin, the very distinction between good and evil, in contemporary man. And, ipso facto, it is denying the Redemption by Our Lord Jesus Christ, for, if sin does not exist, the Redemption becomes incomprehensible and loses any logical relation with history and life.

2. Historical Exemplification: The Denial of Sin in Liberalism and Socialism

In each of its stages, the Revolution has sought to de-emphasize or radically deny the existence of sin.

A. The Immaculate Conception of the Individual

In its liberal and individualistic phase, the Revolution taught that man is endowed with an infallible reason, a strong will, and orderly passions. Hence the concept of a human order in which the individual—supposedly a perfect being—was everything and the State nothing, or almost nothing, a necessary evil provisionally necessary, perhaps. It was the period when it was thought that ignorance was the only cause of errors and crimes, that the way to close prisons was to open schools. The immaculate conception of the individual was the basic dogma of these illusions.

The liberal’s great weapon against the potential predominance of the State and the formation of cliques that might remove him from the direction of public affairs was political freedom and universal suffrage.

B. The Immaculate Conception of the Masses and the State

Already in the last century, the inaccuracy of at least part of this concept had become patent, but the Revolution did not retreat. Rather than acknowledge its error, it simply replaced it with another, namely, the immaculate conception of the masses and the State. According to this concept, the individual is prone to egoism and can err, but the masses are always right and never get carried away by their passions. Their impeccable means of action is the State, their infallible means of expression, universal suffrage—whence spring parliaments imbued with socialist thought—or the strong will of a charismatic dictator, who invariably guides the masses to the realization of their own will.

3. Redemption by Science and Technology: The Revolutionary Utopia

In one way or another, whether placing all its confidence in the individual alone, the masses, or the State, it is in man that the Revolution trusts. Man, self-sufficient thanks to science and technology, can resolve all his problems, eliminate pain, poverty, ignorance, insecurity, in short, everything we refer to as the effect of Original or actual sin.

The utopia toward which the Revolution is leading us is a world whose countries, united in a universal republic, are but geographic designations, a world with neither social nor economic inequalities, run by science and technology, by propaganda and psychology, in order to attain, without the supernatural, the definitive happiness of man.

In such a world, the Redemption by Our Lord Jesus Christ has no place, for man will have overcome evil with science and will have made the earth a technologically delightful paradise. And he will hope to overcome death one day by the indefinite prolongation of life.

Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (York, Penn.: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 1993), Part I, Ch. VII, 3, A-B; Part I, Ch. VIII – Ch. XI, pgs. 46-68.