Systems and Debates

by Alain de Benoist

  In his Open Letter to Happy People, Mr Pauwels targeted ‘sinistrosis’, meaning the snobbism of renouncement. He pointed an accusatory finger at the new prophets of the Apocalypse who attempt to persuade us that the society we live in is the worst possible of all, driving the West towards suicide and into the decadent splendours of a new Satyricon. In his Lettre à Louis Pauwels sur les gens inquiets et qui ont bien le droit de l’être,822 Mr Sérant adopts, but with nuance, his interlocutor’s principal affirmations. He warns the latter against scientism and naïve optimism and contests his ‘idyllic descriptions’. In his eyes, people have a right to worry as much as a ‘right to happiness’.

  In short, Mr Pauwels states that things are not all that bad, while Mr Sérant declares that things are not going so well. What is interesting about this dialogue is, however, something else: the authors’ personalities, both of whom ultimately belong to the same side.

  In the immediate post-war period, our two writers were seduced by a bizarre character that exerted equal influence upon Aldous Huxley, Pierre Schaeffer, Katherine Mansfield, René Daumal and D. H. Lawrence: Caucasian physician Gurdjieff. Stalin’s co-disciple Gurdjieff had come to Europe in the 1920s and presented himself as ‘the announcer of the good that’s to come’. Having previously acted as the Dalai Lama’s private tutor, Gurdjieff was convinced that the universe contained an encrypted message that one had to decipher to gain access to wisdom. He also believed himself to have achieved a highly elaborate synthesis of Western scientific thought and the teachings of the Orient. His was an eternal fascination for the ‘Oriental mirage’, the vertigo and seduction of emptiness. In May 1954, in La Parisienne,823 Mr François Michel had already proceeded to denounce ‘Gurdjievism’ using the following formula: ‘(+) + (−) = 0’.

  Mr Gurdjieff

  In 1945, the external world no longer appealed to Paul Sérant. He thus began a quest ‘on the side of the soul and the eternal’: ‘Why not, Mr Gurdjieff?’

  At the time, Mr Pauwels was already a student of oriental mysticism. The two men met while working at Combat, a French newspaper. Whereas Louis Pauwels was the editor-in-chief, Paul Sérant worked in the foreign policy service department. Both were young, demanding and exasperated and met at night, between the deadline of the provincial edition and the ‘putting to bed’ of the Parisian edition.

  In the café where Jaurès was assassinated, at the corner of rue Montmartre and rue du Croissant, they held the most unusual discussions. In his Monsieur Gurdjieff,824 Louis Pauwels writes: ‘Witnessing the printing of the lies and stupidities borne by the modern world on a daily basis, we were at the centre of the whole hustle and bustle. At peak time, as the tide of deceiving appearances crashed against the bar upon which our elbows were propped, we spoke of Tradition, René Guénon’s825 radical rejection, the Gnostic path and the techniques of inner experience’.

  According to Gurdjieff, what accounts for our behaviour are unknown mechanisms which ‘Training’ allows us to master. One must ‘watch themselves live’. Such is the awakening through ‘detachment’.

  ‘After two years of “working” in the sense that Gurdjieff intended, I found myself in hospital, diminished as if I had been deported, having almost entirely lost an eye and staring through the spyglass of suicide with the other, as I desperately called for help at about 3.00 in the morning’, Mr Pauwels relates.

  Gurdjieff passed away in 1949. Soon, Mr Paul Sérant broke with his ‘Training’. The self-detachment that he had never been able to believe in entirely had ended up being a source of concern. He had caught sight of the early stirrings of some sort of perversion: ‘immorality accepted as such’. (‘When one takes for granted the fact that all men are mere machines and begins to become one themselves, a dangerous temptation may well surface: if, indeed, others are but machines, why not use them as such?’) He thus finds himself wondering whether ‘a methodical practice of internalisation is not inevitably harmful to Westerners’.

  In 1950, he publishes a novel that draws inspiration from his own experience: Le meurtre rituel826 (Table Ronde). The topic is centred around a young couple who have their love shattered by the influence of a ‘spiritual master’, driving the young man towards cynicism and the young woman towards suicide. In Mr Gurdjieff, Mr Pauwels quotes the above-mentioned novel most extensively.

  The passion for esotericism, however, remained unaltered. Paul Sérant was still haunted by his inner accomplishment. He kept repeating to himself the words uttered on a Christmas night by Meister Eckhart: ‘What does it matter that Christ once chose to incarnate himself, when it has not been inside me’.

  In 1953, he publishes an essay on René Guénon (La Colombe). An extraordinary character himself, Guénon defies the modern world on a global scale, just like Evola, accusing it of having entered a degeneration process that began with the Renaissance, a process characterised by ‘progressive materialism’. He claims that our current age is none other than the Indian Kali Yuga: the dark age that shall bring the Cycle to its end.

  That is when Mr Sérant writes: ‘One could never sufficiently stress the fact that Guénon’s work expresses, and with a unique sort of power, contemporary man’s refusal to become a termite, the mere wheelwork of a mechanised order’.

  Mr Pauwels’ and Mr Sérant’s signatures were thereafter seen side by side in numerous newspapers. Their paths, however, soon diverged. Shortly after publishing Matin des magiciens,827 Louis Pauwels went on to launch Planète magazine in cooperation with Jacques Bergier. As for Paul Sérant, he went back to politics (Où va la droite?,828 Le romantisme fasciste,829 Les vaincus de la Libération),830 before developing a passion for regionalism (La France des minorités,831 La Bretagne et la France).832

  In his Open Letter, Mr Pauwels mocked the ‘Guénonian Saint-Justs’. Mr Sérant responds: ‘There are many things to condemn about Guénon, but the main elements of his work have, in my view, lost none of their topical significance’.

  Mr Paul Sérant quotes these elements throughout his chapters. He reproaches the modern world for having granted the utilitarian field primacy over everything that exceeds it. He then proceeds to enumerate the consequences: the reign of quantity, mass production (with occupations robbed of their ‘qualitative nature’), scientific ‘terrorism’, the ossification of social structures, the rationalisation of myths, the conceptualisation of ideals, the creation of artificial needs, and demagoguery. As a result, the Ile-de-France area is flooded by secondary residences. But where has Partie de campagne, the film that Jean Renoir favoured us with,833 gone to?

  Should we be surprised at our youths’ rebellion? Here is Paul Sérant’s answer: ‘I refuse to allow myself to criticise young people for not being too fond of this consumerist society — as if the latter had what it takes to satisfy them’. And what about drugs and suicide by fire? ‘At no time is the appeal of artificial paradises as great as when natural paradises seem lost!’

  A Uniform Planet

  The Church’s decomposition is an unmistakeable sign. Just yesterday, its bishops were ever so willing to believe that the devil made regular appearances in the Lodges. Nowadays, however, a mere mentioning of Satan’s name conjures up a smile. ‘This crisis that has befallen Catholicism has been triggered in the name of progress. Religion has failed to maintain itself outside and above political conflicts; it is no longer anything but an element deemed secondary in relation to political options, or is, alternatively, completely denatured through ideological contamination’. Faith has become an ‘opinion’ phenomenon.

  It is the grey world of a uniform planet that heralds its presence at the end of the process: ‘One will encounter the same crowds everywhere, dressed identically and able to understand the same basic English. On the cultural level, one can expect to be offered the same UNESCO snack everywhere, the same cocktail of Christianity, democratism, Freudism and Marxism, served by the same priests and the same syncretistic and universalistic politicians’. Could this be the best of all possible world
s? ‘To mistakenly believe oneself in paradise was, to Simone Weil, the very definition of hell’.

  The tempests of history are not a source of fear for Paul Sérant: ‘What I do fear is our own mediocrity with respect to what we have already experienced and what are we now living through’. It is not power that he condemns, but the fact that those who wield it are no longer equal to the task of exercising it. ‘The machinery was made for men; but when these men are no longer made for the machinery, what do you propose we do?’

  Mr Pauwels is thus said to have forgotten the lessons taught by Gurdjieff and Guénon. Therein lies the real reproach and the real debate: ‘Having contributed to enabling traditional doctrines to emerge from the shadows where some aspired to keep them, you now seem concerned with distancing yourself from these very doctrines. One is under the impression that it is a burden that you long to be relieved of’.

  Could it be that Mr Louis Pauwels has exorcised his own demons in his Open Letter, just as Mr Paul Sérant has done in Ritual Murder with his?

  So, which is it then: rose-coloured glasses or tinted ones? There is, in fact, some truth in both books. Mr Pauwels formulates urgent truths and presents arguments. On his part, Mr Sérant points out the natural requirements of the human mind. One approves of the modern world while still acknowledging its imperfections, whereas the other insists on its flaws while recognising its advantages. It is all a question of priorities.

  The simultaneous truthfulness of their contradictory viewpoints will, ultimately, only shock the supporters of a unidimensional world. If any contradiction is indeed to be found, it is between two relative antitheses. Has it, indeed, not always been so? Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche wrote and lived in the same period. Both of them passed judgement upon their contemporary society. As a result of the worst sort of inequality, the former detected the greatest injustice in it; as for Nietzsche, he also descried the worst kind of injustice in society, but due to a most disastrous equality pervading it. From their respective points of view, they were both right.

  ***

  Lettre à Louis Pauwels sur les gens inquiets, an essay by Paul Sérant. Table Ronde, 213 pages.

  ***

  Having passed away in November 1949 at the age of eighty-three, Gurdjieff was laid to rest in the cemetery of Avon, France. In 1976, his book entitled Récits de Belzébuth à son petit-fils,834 which had long remained unpublished, was released by Denoël. Julliard publishings had previously brought out his Rencontres avec des hommes remarquables.835 Katherine Mansfield, who spent the last part of her life next to Gurdjieff at the Institute of the Basses-Loges Priory, evoked her memories of him in her Journal (Stock, 1975). Another testimony of interest is that of Mrs. Irène-Félicienne Marie, found in her own text titled Gurdjieff (in Revue des deux-mondes,836 August 1976).

  ***

  For the Sake of Intelligence, Happiness and Will

  ‘It is a huge folly, and a hollow statement at that, for one to say: We have landed on the moon, but people still lack a sense of honesty, loyalty and fraternity. For we have already had our Christ and saints; we have had Rousseau and Tolstoy, and Marx as well; and yet, we have failed to become angelically good. I, for one, do not see why we would expect electricity and oil to bestow upon us what our Messiah and thinkers have not been able to’.

  In Ce que je crois,837 Mr Louis Pauwels, the fifty-six-year-old author, journalist, film maker and playwright who also acts as the director of Question de magazine,838 admits that what matters to him most is a policy that strives to be ‘metapolitical’, a religion that is not quite a religious system.

  His creed can be summarised in these few words: ‘I do believe that I have a soul. I do believe in my just and eternal soul’. He then adds: ‘I think that the soul takes shape through a combination of spirit and body, which does not happen to everyone’.

  Self-Causality

  The following notion was familiar to the Ancients: one is not born with a soul; one earns it or gains it. Likewise, one is not born human — one can, however, sometimes become one. In his preface to the scenario of President Faust, a film that was made for television, Mr Pauwels summarises his character’s story using these words: ‘Having made himself inhuman, and having longed to be superhuman, he ended up becoming human’.

  This profession of faith is obviously not that orthodox. He does, incidentally, admit: ‘I do not believe in Jesus’ divinity. I do not believe that he was actually born of a virgin through the Holy Spirit. I do not believe in the Eucharist’s material substantiality, nor in actual resurrection. I do not believe that, having become a man and been forsaken, some God would find it necessary to die upon the cross and resurrect in the flesh so as to reclaim eternity’.

  He expands on his statement: ‘I believe in man’s absolute freedom; that I myself am, should I choose to be so, master of my own representations, and that both good and evil thus depend on me. I believe in a kinship between man and God. I believe in the very definition of virtue and happiness and that God is within my own soul. I believe that man is not complete and that a certain part of his own creation rests in his own hands. I believe that it is up to him to make his soul blossom’.

  These words echo Plotinus’ doctrine,839 and especially that of Meister Eckhart, the Rhine mystic (1260–1327), regarding the presence of a ‘spiritual spark’ (scintilla in anima). Eckhart used the latter expression to refer to ‘the peak of being’ in which the soul unites with God. What he infers from this, and quite boldly too, is that the mystic ‘himself conducts the creative work of God once in state of union with Him’ (Ernst Benz, The Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy. Vrin, 1968), going as far as to speak of a Selbstschöpfung, meaning a ‘self-creation’. ‘Wherever I wanted myself to be and was nothing else, I was the very cause of my own self. I was what I willed, and what I willed was myself’, he writes.

  Mr Pauwels declares: ‘I personally believe that the soul emerges when, within the body, the spirit distances itself from its own self’.

  The fact of believing is thus more important than the object of one’s faith. Mr Louis Pauwels writes: ‘I ended distinguishing only two types of man: the majority, for whom reality is twofold and comprises their own person and the world, and those who, like myself, perceive reality as being threefold and comprising their own person, the world, and a certain presence within themselves and the world that transcends both their mere selves and the world’. At a time when so many Christians are turning to Jesus and forgoing God, he adds: ‘I go to God without Jesus’.

  Hence the following phrase, written as an epigraph in his book: ‘I want to be given a religious burial — no matter the religion’.

  In his eyes, the capital sin lies in the separation of the perceptible from the spiritual. The body, the soul and the spirit represent the different dimensions of a single unitary structure. There are various levels of reality, but no ‘Hinterwelt’ (world beyond): ‘The real world is as it is. There is no substitute for it’.

  The purpose of life is henceforth clear: to gain the faculty to be self-causal (‘Sacrificing myself to myself’, as stated in ‘Odin’s Rune Song’ in the Edda).840 It is a matter of living in accordance with one’s self-created image, of ‘deserving one’s soul’ by means of an active presence that simultaneously acts as a means of self-detachment: ‘Be in this world like a kingfisher that plunges and rises without having coalesced its feathers’ (Bhagavad Gita). On his part, Nietzsche declared: ‘Become who you are’ (in contrast with only ‘being oneself’). Those that have a soul have lived; the others are all stillborn.

  While proposing that we redefine the sacred, Louis Pauwels issues a warning against second-rate mysticism, a third of which is mendacious and the other two thirds marijuana-induced. This is because, ever since Gurdjieff, he has seen many a butterfly burn its wings while on a quest for the eternal Orient. Such mirages are not foreign to him: ‘We have no need of lazy people’s thirst for holidays’. Targeting amateurs, he quotes a Chinese proverb
: ‘Were it enough to sit with one’s legs crossed to experience a state of awakening, all frogs would be Buddha’. He then adds this precept: ‘Do not invoke spirits — become a spirit yourself’.

  It is the sacred that we must now focus on. Knowledge is never but a means, only enriching those who dominate it (incidentally, when one dominates themselves, one can dominate all the rest). ‘Now that we are able to control the atom and travel to Mars, ideology is of little importance’; ‘Evil does not stem from the knowledge that carries things out, but from the discourse that distorts facts’. In other words, it is not the machines that are a source of alienation for us, but the false notion that we have of the role that they are expected to play in relation to ourselves. ‘Modernity is defined by things. And things are nothing more than that: just things. In a technological society, one can readily be alone with oneself and indulge in silent prayer’.

  Historical Messianism

  In President Faust, Mephisto comes across as the embodiment of crowd mentality: the ‘eternal no’ that Goethe spoke of. This is why he irresistibly attracts dissenting ideologists; those who denounce ‘injustices’ but are themselves sustained ‘by the added value of collective production’; those who believe that expressing approval is beneath them; those whose spirit says ‘no’ because they lack the soul that would say ‘yes’.

  Based on fashionable ideologies, Louis Pauwels discerns the presence of a ‘cyclical mental disease’: historical messianism. ‘I stand against messianism, because every kind of messianism essentially implies a dismal conception of man. We are nothing — sinners in the eyes of the Christians, machines to the materialists; but someone or something will come: the Christ or revolution’, he explains.