The book presented here is not a biography in the usual sense. Till Kinzel’s portrait of the Colombian philosopher and great aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila can be more accurately described as a political-historical positioning. Dávila, the ‘supporter of lost things’, is someone who coolly observes rather than complains about his horror at the dislocation, acceleration and increasing formlessness of the modern world and the horror of the often discordant sounding trumpets of the Enlightenment and humanitarianism. However, this is at the same time what is always attractive and puzzling about Dávila, something that readers of this thinker of the absolute can never come to terms with. Kinzel’s standard work, published in 2003, is now available in a fifth, updated edition.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila was born on May 18, 1913 in Santafé de Bogotá, the son of a banker and carpet dealer. As a child, he moved to Paris with his parents and attended a Benedictine school there. A severe pneumonia forced him to spend two years in bed. Plagued by boredom, he started learning classical languages and developed a strong addiction to reading of all kinds. He returned to Colombia at the age of 23. Apart from a six-month tour of Europe with his wife Maria Emilia Nieto, he never left the country until his death. The world in which it was worth traveling only existed in old travel stories anyway, he noted about his reluctance to be mobile.
Dávila’s aphorisms are piercingly poignant
He spent most of his time in his 30,000-volume library, reading and writing, and where his first book was privately printed in a small edition of 100 copies. When he was offered the position of presidential advisor after the military dictatorship in 1958, he turned it down, as well as the offer to go to London as Colombian ambassador in 1974. Instead, he preferred life with his family and conversations among his small circle of friends to political activities. He called this way of life “clairvoyant, living a simple, mysterious life and loving a few beings.”
His texts and aphorisms, on the other hand, are almost cuttingly sharp. As a reactionary, he is aware of his loneliness in a losing battle. While the nationalist makes common cause with the people and the conservative tries to create values worth preserving, the reactionary recognizes how the disenchantment with the world as a project of the Enlightenment is progressing in gigantic steps and that from left to right all Classes and strata are in a process of corruption of people. “The only thing I have in common with my compatriots today is my passport,” Dávila summarizes.
The philosopher was a Catholic traditionalist until the end of his life
The presumptuous man of modern times clings to Gnostic ideas and believes in self-salvation, denies the reality of sin, and indulges in dangerous illusions about the supposed goodness of man. But in doing so he becomes a being whose existence is absurd. For him, reactionary means primarily the defense of Christianity against its despisers, because “man is a problem without human solution” that can only be understood in his orientation towards God: “Man is important only when God speaks to him and while God speaks to him!”
Martin Mosebach rightly described Dávila’s thinking as a “Catholic philosophy of disillusionment.” “Anyone in the modern world who does not smell sulfur has no sense of smell,” Dávilá notes, leaving no doubt about his sharp criticism of the Second Vatican Council: “Whoever reforms a rite violates a God!” is just as hard-hearted, who does not murder, but always lies. But the most convinced reactionary is the repentant revolutionary who has recognized the reality of the problems and the tall tales of the solutions. However, he must learn to understand that the opposite of despotism is not liberalism or democracy, but authority, since the Christian believes in God, but the democrat believes in man.
Accustomed to life in the pale twilight of decay, Gómez Dávila died in Bogotá on May 17, 1994, the day before his 82nd birthday.
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To Kinzel: Nicolás Gómez Davilá. Partisan of lost causes. 5th edition supplemented with an afterword and bibliographic additions. Lepanto Verlag, Kevelaer 2024, paperback, 215 pages, 14.50 euros.