The Metaphysics of War

Julius Evola
Arktos, 2010
150 pp

paperback: $20

These essays, originally written by Evola during the 1930s and ’40s, deal with war from a spiritual and heroic perspective. Evola selects specific examples from the Nordic, Vedic, Roman, Persian, Islamic and other traditions to demonstrate how traditionalists can prepare themselves to experience war in a way that will allow them to overcome the limited possibilities offered by our materialistic and degraded age.

In so doing, Traditionalists can transcend the Age of Kali and enter the world of heroism by achieving a higher state of consciousness, which Evola depicts as an effective realisation of the ultimate purpose of life. His call to action, however, is not that of today’s armies, which ask nothing more of their soldiers than to become mercenaries in the temporary employ of a decadent class. Still less is it a call to misdirected or nihilistic violence. Rather, Evola presents the warrior as one who lives an integrated and purposeful way of life – one who adopts a specifically Aryan view of the world in which the political aims of a war are not its ultimate justification, but rather war is seen as merely a means through which the warrior finds his calling to a higher and more complete form of existence beyond the political, and in accordance with the teachings of the great spiritual texts. More importantly, he shows how the ideal of the warrior extends beyond the battlefield into other aspects of traditional living, even in times of peace

Read Derek Hawthorne’s review here, and a sample chapter here.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. The Forms of Warlike Heroism
2. The Sacrality of War
3. The Meanings of the Crusades
4. The Greater War and the Lesser War
5. The Metaphysics of War
6. ‘Army’ as Vision of the World
7. Race and War
8. Two Heroisms
9. Race and War: The Aryan Conception of Combat
10. Soul and Race of War
11. The Aryan Doctrine of Combat and Victory
12. The Meaning of the Warrior Element for the New Europe
13. Varieties of Heroism
14. The Roman Conception of Victory
15. Liberations
16. The Decline of Heroism

Index

paperback: $20