Guido De Giorgio, La Tradizione Romana

Dante and the Holy Culmination of the Roman Tradition


The traditional gold vein of Rome in the living unity of the two forms supplementing each other in a perfect match and equilibrium, is found again in all its wholeness in Dante who was the first to reveal the mystery of Romanity. The sacred arriving at the creative synthesis of the elements contained in the ancient and new traditions for which he can be called the prophet of Fascist Catholicity [Cattolicità Fascista] in the absolute meaning of the expression.

Poetry in him resumes its place and its sacred destination, it follows “the footprints” as Boccaccio said, the traces “of the Holy Spirit”, it is no longer psychological and artificially descriptive, but an initiation, revelation, and realization. While theology is expository and proceeds discursively, submitting itself to the limits of reason illuminated by revelation, poetry grasps with supersensible intuition the mystery of the symbols and internalizes them, transforming them into shapes, living them, surpassing their representative exteriority so that to make of them the most suitable vehicle for liberation. In this sense, and in this sense only, Dante is the poet and the Comedy is the sacred poem, vehicle of the divine truth and supreme effort, the highest perhaps that was ever accomplished, to transform the sensible image the reason for the realization of traditional metaphysical principles, grasped in two directions, the ancient and the new, indissolubly unified in the occult name of Rome that is the seal of the divine song.

Thus, the universality of Dante was unique among men and poets, even though the anagogical interpretation of the Comedy had not yet been tried, in order to be completed and realized only ascetically by those who belong to the Race of the Spirit and who are the true key bearers of sacred science and the fasces bearers of divine power.

The Comedy is the supreme pilgrimage of the worlds considered as the only temple of God: if the point of departure is the earth and that of arrival is heaven, this apparent duality shows man only what he must reach when he is not what he is, what he must become in order to be what he is, and how his earthly humanity is only a veil, when removed, the Divine Reality is revealed in His original unity, ineffability of the Ineffable. Only at this point poetry ceases and with the realization of the mystery of man who is the Reality of God, the Comedy finishes because the pilgrimage is completed, the end is reached, death is overcome, fieri [becoming] became esse [being] and esse the radical non-existence of the Divine Night.

Heaven and earth are dissolved in the last smile of the Comedy, when the bright axe that dominates the Fasces [Fascio Littorio], resolving the enigma of the two-faced Janus through the plenary universality of the Cross, revealed the occult name of Rome and dissolved the Vestal fire on the lips of the Lord of the last rite. Here the mystery ends and the brilliant flashing ends in the essential tonality of the Silence, lord of Forms and Rhythms, the highest peak of integral realization. The ancient and new tradition led the poet to the secret of the Primordial Tradition, to the “letizia che trascende ogni dolzore” [“joy that transcends every sweetness of delight”]. In the paradisiacal vortex, it is completed and having completed itself it untied the traditional knot, nor can there be anything in what alone is it integrally and completely.

This is the miracle of the occult name of Rome and this is the reality of Dante and the Comedy.

The vision of the peak, insofar as it is so imperfect of the expression that tries to grasp its mystery, permits it to better consider the foundation and the progression and, what is more important to our task, the unification of the two traditions in Rome, i.e., in the Spirit of God. It is not possible to allude to this, unless metaphorically, in this simple introduction to the doctrine of the Roman Tradition, that cannot try to be more than what it is, a vestibule to the Temple, a preparation to the work of integral restoration of Traditional Romanity contained in the Comedy that is the sacred poem of Rome, no longer the ancient and new, but the eternal.

If Virgil represents the ancient tradition and Beatrice the new tradition and if, at the threshold of the Terrestrial Paradise, Virgil disappears before Beatrice, Beatrice also disappears when the divine mystery is grasped by Dante in its immediate realization and what then remains, above and beyond the two traditions unified forever is, climactically, Rome.

Virgil guides the poet through the world of Forms and Rhythms, in the two spheres of bodies and shadows, that he knows perfectly because he belongs to a tradition in which these two domains particularly were meticulously observed and studied, domains that constitute the subterranean and sublunar underworld whose secrets are fully treated in the three Virgilian works “sotto il velame delli versi strani” [“under the veil of strange verses”].

The ancient Roman tradition attached great importance to the knowledge of the immediate and psychic world governed by laws of internal, occult order, that embrace the totality of beings and things considered always with reference to the forces whose expression they are. The so called “concreteness” of the Romans was based exactly on the precise meaning of these forces that act most visibly in the existence of man inserting there a hidden network of which the events, especially “chance” events, as the common people believe, are the most significant effects: these forces are either propitiated, dominated, or determined. Virgil represents in the Comedy the knowledge of the two subterrestrial and superterrestrial worlds, the latter term however meant in the much more precise sense that must be given to the third element, the air, which symbolically corresponds to the subtle elements, the Rhythms, more through their “diffusivity” than for their nature.

In hell, we are present at the extreme concretion of these unchained forces and, so to speak, precipitated in the closed vortex of ignorance, while in Purgatary, we catch sight of them liberated from the formal element in their spontaneous structure of the subtle body, the shadow. Virgil guides his disciple with “art” up to the threshold of the Terrestrial Paradise from which ascent will begin at the paradisiacal levels, i.e., at the higher states that are forbidden to them because they realize only by means of Revealed Science, Beatrice.

Up to this point the two traditions remain separate even though the one is resolved in the other, that indicates Dante’s dismay at Virgil’s disappearance in the face of the vision of Beatrice. In the Terrestrial Paradise we have the explanation of the traditional integration, after the theory that leads the symbolic cart in front of the central tree which revives, discovering the reigns of the Silence where only the ascension to the divine states is accomplished. In other words, the second tradition is not opposed to but reveals the first, and completes it, bringing it back to the invisible centre from which everything emanates and to which everything returns as long as it is stripped bare to its original essence.

What in the first tradition is the Imperium [empire], is the Regnum [kingdom] in the second, while separately they indicate respectively temporal power and spiritual authority, there is an absolute seat in which while converging they merge into each other, and this seat, materially, symbolically, and actually is Rome. So that, while the second tradition illumines and reveals the first, the first precedes, prepares, and exists only for the affirmation of the second; there is an initial necessary opposition that is resolved only in Rome when, i.e., a unifying centre is found that is at the same time the neutral point where the traditional quarrel ends.

It is not easy to express this succession and fusion that must not be considered historically but on a plane where the symbolic values remain such even if unknown or misunderstood until a new light suddenly illuminates them and reveals them. For the two traditions which we discussing, Rome is this light and the Comedy is the poem of sovereign and Holy Rome, the unifier, while Fascism is the operator of the synthesis in which the two forms are compounded in a new revelation of power. The greatness of Dante consists in the statement of these two aspects, the ancient and the new form, of the same tradition that is Roman universality, and, while in De Monarchia he combats, as he says, pro salute veritatis [“I engage in battle in this book for the cause of truth”] to reclaim the ancient tradition that had to remain to sustain the second. In the Comedy he arrives at the realization of the unification, at what we will have to call traditional perpetuity, showing the reality of a transhumanization [passage from a human state to a superhuman state] in all its levels that embrace beings and elements, world and afterworld [soprammondo], heaven and earth, from Forms to the Rhythms in the Silence.

He is therefore the advocate of Sacred Science in the living, and not theoretical, wholeness of the Roman Tradition, of the Imperium and the Regnum: the ancient and new traditions mutually sustain each other, avoiding thereby all incongruity of a conflict that would impoverish them, impeding their supreme synthesis which is, practically, the equilibirum of the temporal and the spiritual and, at the centre of realization, the complete transfigurative process, the integral initiation, the real ascent from the earth to the elementary and trans-elementary heaven.

All the symbols of the ancient tradition live again in the creative light of the achievement, the union with god [indiamento], and the Argonautic enterprise finds its fulfillment in the revelation of the true face of God with which the last canto and the last canto of the “Sacred Poem” end. The vein of gold, the vestment of glory, is dressed by Dante in the great light of Rome, highest peak in the radiant circularity of the Ineffable. All the traditional sciences flow together in the Comedy through a dynamic complexity of states and a perfect knowledge of the transitions in the ambit of the three worlds through which the process of the cosmic-human illusion takes place, up to its resolution in the supreme principle in the three phases corresponding to the death, resurrection and transfiguration of man in God. The process of death is slow, gradual, and it embraces all terrestrial experience in its most interior forms to which the vices correspond in the moral sphere, i.e., animality: from here, the descending hierarchy of the underworld where the realizing interiority assumes over itself all human development reducing it to a totalizing unity of life integrated in the being that had and lost the light, Lucifer. He represents the maximum concretion in the scheme of diabolic unity, the inverse reflection of the divine unity of which he has only the Trinitarian analogy in the three faces that are turned antithetically while in God they are homocentric and confluent.

Human plurality is resolved in its huge body, congealing itself, solidifying itself, petrifying itself: he represents the fall, the precipitation, the last terrestrial coagulation of the impassable waters, the freeze, the totalization of ignorance and darkness: its night corresponds, according to the reverse analogy, to the night of God, to the precreative indistinction in which all the determinations of being are based, as in him all the determinations of non-being, i.e., of evil. The analogy is perfect even in that Lucifer is the first and the last as God is the alpha and omega, but while in the first case, one has a duality of movement represented by the fall, in the second instead we have the essential unity of the opposites considered as the two confluent points of the divine cycle. Lucifer who was the first is the now the last: in him the temporal cycle is resolved in the eternity of evil, as in God the eternity of good is resolved. The two main antitheses represent what can be called the highest critical polarity, i.e., the terrifying point of active realization, that precisely in which Virgil very painfully creates the overthrowing which is a rectification where the descendant interiority becomes the ascendant interiority and the place of damnation, the basis of salvation. From the stony precipitation whose symbol is Lucifer the ascendant rectification begins and the stone that is concretion and fall becomes the basis necessary for the flight toward the elementary complexity and the trans-elementary totality.

Purgatory is the place of the second birth from Forms to Rhythms in a hierarchical purification of which the seven terraces [of the mountain of Purgatory] are pointers: it is not a passage from Forms to Rhythms but a resolution of Forms in Rhythms, of the body in the shadow, of corporeity in psychicity where then even this is freed in the spirituality that is the Silence, Paradise. Virgil’s “art” is the perfect knowledge of the two spheres, the Forms and the Rhythms, through which the decoupling from error and from the ignorance of human and terrestrial fallacy is accomplished hierarchically, since reality is one, that of God, but a man has knowledge of this reality only when he integrates it, realizes it, becomes it. Up to what is not completed, it is necessary to traverse the levels of development that, from the human point of view, are the three corresponding to Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Dante in the Comedy proposes and exposes all the experience of realization, the complete, integral initiation, through positive knowledge, lived in all the levels that lead from the human to the divine. In the two first kingdoms, the ancient tradition sufficed to lead this path to completion and Virgil represents the science and the knowledge of the laws that govern the subterrestrial and sublunar world. He disappears before Beatrice because he dissolves in her, is completed in her, not because he opposes her as would be the case if Dante had considered the two traditions irremediably different and antagonistic as everyone believes, as much by those who exalt the first as by those who oppose the second. Beatrice appears at the moment when the first guide, Virgil, has completed his work and embraces the gross and subtle manifestations, the Forms and Rhythms. The exercise of human reason in its complete and normal development naturally leads to the sphere where a process of mystical union with God [indiamento] is initiated in the levels of the non-formal, i.e., in the zone of the Silence represented symbolically by the heavens.

Here Sacred Science, Beatrice, carries out the integrative cycles of unity in a flight that is light and salient flame between the Rhythms circularly untying itself in the plenitude of the Divine Being. The Trinitarian scheme is amplified in the assumption of the nine hierarchies, effulgent wings that facet the divine infinity of the joyful love of the Angels, Archangels, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Dominations, Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, where celestiality is engraved in relations of light and splendour in the face of the terrestriality which is overcome, resolved, and dissolved in the divine whirlpool. There still remains, in the first seven heavens, the divisibility of the light with planetary vertices in a progressive self-realization of perfection in unity, a display of radiations in the body of the divine diamond.

In the residence of the sun where the zodiacal band combines with its perfection of the ternary and quaternary resolved in the supreme syntheses of the trinity (12 = 1 + 2 = 3), the mystery of the Perfect Man, the Triumphant Christ emerges, the perfection of the divine sonship in absolute assumption of radiance. It comes after the last creative level of the ninth heaven of the Trinitarian perfection, assuming in each of the Divine Persons the seal of the others so to project the mystery of the Ineffable in the creative circularity, then finally the absolute level, the culmination perpetuating itself in the eternal scheme of the worlds, the Empyrean. Here Beatrice disappears, not like Virgil, to permit a progress, an arriving, an end, but to unravel the mystery of the Last Seal where the virginal matrix carries out the cyclic reduction of the light in the very face of God. The last level of Silence is integrated in the same riverbed of the Divine Night where the pulse of the Ineffable vibrates in the realizing unity of God, the Supreme Zero, transcendence of the plenitude itself, darkness of the Ineffable.

The purely exterior literary merits that common men [volgo], the profanum vulgus [unholy rabble], admire in Dante have no importance and would nullify the value of the Comedy in the very eyes of Dante and of those who can and know how to understand the purpose for which the poem was composed.

It would be necessary to feel ashamed to still speak of, and only of, “art”, “poetry”, “brilliant construction”, in the modern sense of the word when one alludes to Dante’s work which is only and eminently sacred in spirit and structure, while the allusions to historical persons are clearly motivated by Cacciaguida at the end of canto XVII of the Paradise. But these allusions hide well dramas other than those that the profane see in it. Regarding these, the central motive, the general orientation, are understood, traditionally speaking, but it is not, nor perhaps will ever be, possible to explain entirely due to the impossibility of retracing the elements of a tradition that, in Dante’s time, was entirely oral. As to the strength and the expressive completeness so steadfast in Dante, it is due to the very substance of the topics treated: it is about poetry of inspiration in the absolutely sacred meaning of the word and those who know what is meant by such an expression, know the imbued power of the realizing wave that moulds the word in a type of revealing plasma where the specular miracle of the perfect reflection is accomplished. The same Rhythm, the homophony is adequate to the state that tries to be expressed in a way to constitute as many topoi or static forms, normative traces in which the transfiguring synthesis from the image to the idea is completed, to substitute for the oral initiatic transmission.

The moderns, therefore, who for centuries have read, studied, and commented on Dante resign themselves to understand nothing of it as long as they persist in not considering him as a prophet, a sacred poet, whose work is the highest expression, perhaps unique, in the Roman Tradition, an eternally new synthesis of the two traditional forms that in Rome, in its occult name, will find their completeness and their perfection. Here is his greatness and his true originality: if the expression reaches a plastic and vibratory perfection never before equaled, that is due to the sacred character of the Poetry which catches the eternal light of revelation in the transience of phantasms and concentrates it in radiant syntheses. In Dante, East and West are balanced in a unique centre that, substantially, is the Primordial Tradition, i.e., the unique most important traditional universality and ultimate realization. Never during the Middle Ages were the relationships between East and West so close: never in those great centuries had the traditional elements completed each other and disclosed each other for oral transmission, direct from master to disciple and from disciple to disciple. Dante appears exactly at the end of this era but in a period in which Dominicans and Franciscans, although already degenerate and hostile, had outlined the two greatest ways of realization of the divine—cherubic and seraphic—homocentric even if divergent by nature and process. He unites these two ways substantially, bundles [fascifica] them without confusing them. And it is necessary to note that when we use the term fascificare, we mean nothing that can be considered, even if only vaguely, syncretism or mixture: to bundle in the pure traditional sense means to give to each way, to each element, a unique direction, a centre, an axis without confusing them: this is the novelty of the traditional steadiness.

There is one bond that captures the twelve rods of the Fascist bundle [Fascio Littorio] and there is one lightening power expressed by the double cut axe: the emblem is traditionally the greatest because it represents the confluence in the vertical direction, i.e., that of elevation and conquest. In Dante fascification is supreme, East and West, ancient and new Rome, temporal and spiritual, heaven and earth, world and afterworld, man and God, everything gets becomes more marked, matches up, is unified at a supreme vertex that is Rome. This is Sacred Fascism, the true triumph of justice and truth in man and in the world: if there are quarrels, battles, falls, these have no importance since they take place in the bosom of a traditional society where everything is formed from the supreme balance assured by key bearers and fasces bearers, by the Regnum and the Imperium forever unified in Rome.

This is the perpetual peace, the universal peace which Dante constantly mentions in De Monarchia and in the Comedy: the reaching of the traditional equilibrium that can only contain and annul in a higher place of harmony the battles and the inevitable disputes in the world, where, since duality reigns, it is not possible to avoid conflict without which the supreme unifying element of Rome would be suppressed. But instead, when this element is restored to its true function and reestablished the bases of the Roman Tradition in their living integrity, a new greatness would rise from under the present ruins of the western world, a new purity of life and thought and the Temple protected by the sword would rise up in the light of Rome for the glory of God in the heavens and the peace of men on earth.

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