National-socialism, Fascism and Catholicism

Joseph Mérel's philosophical audacity.

Trying to present a foreign, untranslated author seems futile an effort. Lots of interesting, sometimes already known authors have yet to be translated. It is even more difficult when the said author's work is vast, technical, repetitive (in a pedagogical way), and disappears easily from the market due to its nearly samizdat kind of edition.

Why would one try to spark interest in the philosopher Joseph Mérel, then ? There are a couple of good reasons to do so.

Courage is one of them. In the French Right-wing, germanophilia is not well regarded. Sympathies for Fascism, or - horresco referens - for the Third Reich are even worse, especially within Catholic circles : France has been drinking the intoxicating wine of both “Christian democracy” (even among “antidemocrat Catholics”) and national hatred for more than a century now. Except for the Nouvelle Droite, the French Right has been ferocious against Germany since the Franco-Prussian war, in 1870. Maurras, who saw them as “Blonde n*ggers”, as “intellectual barbarians”, had many sons, who still live up to these days. Both World Wars were a pretext for major intellectual figures of French Catholicism to present Germans as anti-christian barbarians, projecting onto them the very vices of their own people and authorities. The Nuremberg Trials coupled with the complete shutdown on German primary sources, that were anyway very rarely studied before the war, canonized this version of history. Yet, some tried to shake off this gangue, moved by a deep respect for Truth. Joseph Mérel is one of these very few French voices that cry in the desert. For more than 20 years, he has been defending the memory of both fascist Italy and national-socialist Germany, but also their doctrines, from a French and Catholic perspective. His first book, a quite peculiar essay from 2001, has a title that sums up his intellectual project : Fascism and Monarchy - an attempt for conciliation from a Catholic perspective.

“How can one think these regimes can help us ? We Catholics already have the Social Doctrine of the Church, we have Aquinas, and Popes did not like fascism very much.” Mérel knows all that, as a dedicated thomist academic who had several works published by serious editors¹. It is precisely because he is a staunch thomist that he wants the Right and Catholics to seriously tackle Fascism, which implies questioning several common misconceptions about their respective doctrines, but also the common historical narrative.

His starting point is a quite simple observation : the Right seems to be right, but it fails, and nowadays, it fails hard. It is also not a doctrinally unified movement, and each chapel fights one another. Why is that ? If there is so much division, what unites it ? Does the Right even exist ? Some say it does not. Mérel thinks it does, and tries to identify its essence, in order to offer us a proper and intellectually effective typology of the Right and Left.

The distinction between Right and Left wings is fundamentally Right-winged because, even if born in a Left-winged context [the French Revolution], it signifies an intemporal, metaphysical caesura. Any doctrine that admits the existence of a natural order of things, that men did not create, to which their subjectivity has the vocation to conform to, is Right-winged […] Any political doctrine that denies the existence of a natural order of things, of a human nature, of a Creator, is Left-winged. This doctrine gives a freedom seen as perfect by essence the task of defining, and even creating men, of creating order, in order to reach a purely terrestrial bliss.²

Such is the base of another reason why his work can be interesting. Instead of neglecting non-Christians by using a narrow definition of the Right (for example, unlike lots of Christians who like to oversimplify things, he says that “even Nietzsche, for whom force makes the law, is a man of the Right since, despite his subjectivist pretention to create values, he recognizes that Life is what gives their value to values, and therefore has to be recognized as the supreme value”), he gives reasons for the formation of a greater, inclusive front, without making any concession whatsoever.

It is tied to one key element of his political, and even metaphysical doctrine which may seem to be a detail. In a purely thomistic fashion, he says that Politics is of the natural order, and the natural order has its own consistency, that ought to be respected and cultivated, both for itself and for grace to better fructify. Gratia non tollit naturam³. Taking the Catholic doctrine on the natural order seriously, he recalls the substance and implications of the forgotten condemnations of jansenism⁴, fideism, traditionalism⁵ and modernism⁶, and opposes what he sees as a common element in those heresies, which he calls, like some other forgotten but oh-so pertinent thinkers⁷, “supernaturalism”, which can only conceive the intromission of the supernatural (i.e., grace) within the natural order as something conflictual.

A deprecative view of the natural order makes Catholics forget the inner beauty and importance of things natural, especially natural virtues, which are not the privilege of Catholics.⁸

It also makes them think that Politics are not that important. How many times do we hear that, in the end, “the solution is not political” ? That we ought to just “find God” ? Also, too many think that the excellency of a political regime depends on its degree of religiousness, the more ostensive the better; that Christians have a special charisma for judging things political, or that Christians are necessarily better than anybody else in Politics. But as Péguy said,

I am afraid that we will fall into the sophistry of sloth. It is not enough to say “I am a Catholic”. Everything still needs to be done. It is not enough to say “There are Catholics there.” Catholics hermetically keep the truth in matters of Faith. They have no monopoly over the recovery of a people. In 1813, Prussia was not Catholic. And she still is not.⁹

Striking counter-examples come to mind : why did some think that Kanye West was going to save the US, if not because of such an erreneous vision ? Saying “Christ is Lord” will not make one a political genius. In the last Century, France gave us too many examples of poor political judgement from the part of Catholics : thomists such as Gilson and Maritain were Christian-democrats. Bernanos was against Franco. Father Fessard, who was an antimarxist, yet considered Stalin to be the one who truly defended Christianity during World War 2...

No depreciation of natural virtue and of true Politics (which is not “a branch of moral philosophy” as some say¹⁰ ) can thus be tolerated by Catholics in the name of the supernatural order, in Mérel's opinion. In a very provocative manner, he reminds us that Saint Thomas Aquinas was not a conformist, but a revolutionary genius who, instead of following the rather “augustinian”, theocratic way of treating politics that had been common among Catholics (and even great Popes, whom Integralists like to invoke), preferred to meditate the lessons of the Pagan Aristotle. Some clerics at the time condemned him, going as far as saying that this emphasis on the autonomy of philosophy “filled the Lord’s house with idols”¹¹. (In another place, he evokes a cleric who saw heliocentrism as ruinous for the Faith, while another one, centuries earlier, saw it as more fitting.¹²) Yet the Church chose Aquinas, not Peckham, as the Common Doctor, and often reminded the faithful how important it was to stick to his principles : “To deviate from Aquinas, in metaphysics especially, is to run grave risk”, as Saint Pius X said¹³. One can add that this applies to politics too, especially when one sees how his doctrine is close to that of the early Church towards Politics¹⁴. Mérel, taking Aquinas' openness to its logical conclusion, goes as far as saying that he would have tackled fascist political philosophy in order to try solving current issues.

This is not just provocative for the sake of being provocative. One could respond, tongue-in-cheek, that then, “thomists should then become marxists”; but the point made is that, according to his typology, Fascisms were Right-winged. More than that,

Not only is Fascism Right-winged, but it is even the Right that has reached self-consciousness.

They were the only modern attempts to rightly, even if not perfectly, answer the issues raised by Modernity. Only they, and more precisely, those of Italy and Germany, tried to actively fight Communism and the nascent consumerist Globalism in the name of their ideals, and it is important to remember that. Which is the reason why they should be taken seriously and studied.¹⁵

Fascism willed to be - and let us dare to write : wills to be - the effort of integration, to the Traditional corpus of natural and supernatural widsom, of the captive truths that lay within revolutionary modernity.¹⁶

That is a project Mérel only outlines in his work, which needs to be refined and taken further by other thinkers, since he “only” does a foundational, brush-clearing, but very necessary work. Lots of primary sources, especially from Germany, are only starting to be available, often through academic works on doctrines that have been meticulously wiped out, vilified and misrepresented for generations. As the late Gianantonio Valli showed in his Race according to national-socialism. Anthropological theory and juridic practice, more than 33 000 book references and 2 500 periodicals were put to the Index right after World-War 2, following to the recommendations of the 4-volume-long (1946, 1947, 1948 and 1953) Liste der auszusondernden Literatur.¹⁷

Mérel offers a fruitful method for this work to be done, rather than just a compilation of opinions to adopt. What he recognizes in fascism is an organicist conception of the State, and therefore an adequate conceptualization of the common good, which is what the Old Regimes lacked in order to persist. To him, National-socialism and Italian Fascism are complementary as they both developped and put an emphasis on necessary political principles, namely that of the national and fascist State, and the national-socialist principle of the Empire (which derives from a truthful conceptualization of the common good) and of biological integrity (thomism offers a very pertinent philosophical framework to further conceptualize race, with hylemorphism, the aristotelian doctrine on material cause and on the psyche).

Interestingly,

According to us, the chief virtue of Fascism is theoretical. It is the only regime, the first one, and in fact the sole that attempted to build nationalism not on feeling, not on experimental reason, but on metaphysical reason, therefore on a truly rational reason, on the absolute realism that knows that the Idea is the reason of reality.

Against a common anti-philosophical tendency, he underlines the importance of a true philosophical concern. Yet while being a self-proclaimed “hyper-rationalist”, he constantly hammers a very hegelian “it is rational that irrationality should exist”, and shows the importance of “irrational moments” that mediatize through passions, and sometimes even violence, in reasonable life, and in political (re)construction. He proceeds to delve into deep and technical metaphysical issues in order to give a rational ground for his doctrine and its potential developments.

One interesting aspect of this method is a certain critique of historical thomism(s), and a will to overcome its shortcomings¹⁸, through a throrough examination of both the letter and spirit of the Aquinate, and an openness to the best of modern philosophy in his eyes, which is hegelianism. Of course, Hegel is dangerous, but as he reminds us,

Our methodological principle is that there are captive truths, which means errors that remind us of the truths they betray, within false doctrines. Those truths are truths we disregarded before the error arised, and such an ignorance let evil win.¹⁹

The concept of captive truth is understandable for a thomist, who knows quite well that error, just like evil, is somehow a lack of being rather than a positive reality, and that its attractivity comes from the truths it retains. Such a conception enables the Right to operate a critical reflexion on its own shortcomings, as they most likely come from an univocal, therefore not true enough, aspect of its doctrine, instead of trying to think of evil as primarily caused by external agents. Mérel opposes the conspirationist way of thinking and, while recognizing the existence and harmfulness of occult forces, rather says, like Saint Pius X, that “the strength of the wicked depends on the cowardice of the good”²⁰. Cowardice also exists in intellectual matters. For example, a Christianity that puts aside the natural order and reason because of what it contains that might be frightening, in the name of (and often with the excuse of) the supernatural and of Faith will inevitably beget a naturalism that puts aside the supernatural. There are severe and deep pages on the nefarious psychological effect of such a supernaturalism.

Due to that cowardice, fertile concepts have been confiscated by the historical revolutionaries, and based on a false, manichean conception of evil, Counter-revolutionaries often ignored real and vital issues. French Legitimists, for example, opposed the category of Nation since it was, in a way, a child of the French Revolution. Mérel calls the Right to act :

It is in the mud of errors that lays the redeeming pearl, which the incomplete truth does not know it is deprived of. Traditionalists have pure hands, but their pathological sense of purity prevents them from using them. Because they do not have the courage to risk dirtying them while using them, they let them rot.²¹

As a traditional Catholic, he also tries to reflect on modern issues in the Church with that method. While I do not follow him on some of his positions (he is nearly a sedevacantist), he can be read by Catholics from any milieu since, apart from some verbal vehemencies, the questions he raises are quite pertinent. Against a tendency to extend infaillibility to any word uttered by current or past Popes, he sticks to the Dogmas and the Magisterium, but is not afraid of adressing problems within the fallible domain. While being, as any should be, very critical of the metaphysics and theological conclusions of authors from the Nouvelle Théologie movement (de Lubac, Rahner, Balthasar), he recognizes, unlike some who prefer to sweep things under the rug, the pertinence and importance of the questions they raised, especially about the relationship between natural and supernatural order, or about a natural desire for God. He also underlines the conceptual proximity between their views and the “supernaturalists” of the Right's : in this particular case, conceptual history very much enlightens the emergence of modernism (for example, Victor Hugo and Lamennais went from supernaturalist Counter-revolution to messianic democratism, and Léon Bloy, an author who influenced a lot of the French Catholic intelligentsia of the 20th Century, went from voltairianism to a very heterodox, judeophile supernaturalism). Against both tendencies, he calls, as usual, for a Hegelian supersumption (Aufhebung), and even for “theological fascism” :

There may be a true “aggiornamento” that churchmen should have been wise enough to lead, in order to ward off the eclipse of the Church : it would have been, theologically, an anti-revolution revolution, a revolution within Tradition. Some sort of theological fascism is necessary to reconciliate, here below, within daily life, both private and public life, (...) nature and grace, the desire for the immanent finite and the desire for the transcendent infinite. And that would be, if it ever comes to life, the most beautiful victory of the spirit of fascism.²²

To him, the supernaturalists' mindset particularly fails to understand the structure of being, which puts them in difficulty when adressing the problem of evil. By an association that is very common, Christians tend to mix physical (or natural) and moral evil, and link any kind of natural tension to evil. This mentality will tend to see it primarily as punishment : death, sickness, natural disasters, violence, wars are only seen as the result of demonic forces at work, or as consequences of sin. Such a vision, even if common, is particularly reductive, if not heretic, at least for a Catholic.²³ But this is a complex issue. In order to reflect on this very deep and eternal topic, Joseph Mérel proposes the concept of “non-sinful negativity” [négatif non-peccamineux], which is especially visible in the creature. Being, to him, takes the form of a victory, that implies assuming it, over this negativity.

There are many other things to say about Joseph Mérel, but it would lead us too far. To us, he is a contemporary master. Far from forgetting God and religion in his apostolate of the natural order, he writes at length about the necessity of Christianity, about Christ's love for his creatures. Such a love should help us understand that disdain for temporal matters, especially in our era, is not per se a path to sanctification. It is only when one makes idols out of them that he distracts himself from God, not when he loves them : “we have to hate the World in that it distracts us from God, while relearning to love the world, up into its most unsettling aspects, hence up into the non-sinful negativity it envelops, in so that it talks about Him.”

Such is the core of Joseph Mérel's lesson.

1. Under his real name. It must be noted that Joseph Mérel is one of several aliases. Others are Jean-Jacques Stormay, Stepinac, Edith Floral, Tartempion. His books are available at Reconquista Press and Éditions Chrysalide. Free articles such as La réflexion philosophique, pour quoi faire ? [Why philosophical reflexion ?] or National-socialiste et catholique, une nécessité [National-socialist and Catholic, a necessity] are available online.
I would advise any interested person to look into Pour une Contre-Révolution révolutionnaire (to get an overview of his project), Réflexions sur le nationalisme and Antidote (under the name Stormay; to get an application to his method to nationalist doctrines and philosophical subjects) and to Une réponse nationaliste au mondialisme: Doctrine élémentaire du bien commun (Stormay; a more theoretical approach to nationalism, organicism and the doctrine of the common good). A single text of his has been translated into English : an essay contained in Serviam: The Political Ideology of Adrien Arcand, Arcand (1899–1967), “The Canadian Führer”, having been leader of the National Unity Party of Canada, formerly National Social Christian Party.

2. In the booklet La démocratie est radicalement incompatible avec la pensée de droite [Democracy is radically incompatible with Right-winged thought], 2006

3. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Q. 1, art. 8, respo. 2.

4. Jansenism is a form of radicalized augustinianism, characterized by an excessive asceticism and moral rigour, defended by unorthodox Catholic reformers in the 17th and 18th Century. Blaise Pascal belongs to their movement. The following propositions of Baius and Jansenius have been condemned by the Church : DZ1025 “All works of infidels are sins, and the virtues of philosophers are vices.”; DZ1026 “The integrity of the first creation was not the undeserved exaltation of human nature, but its natural condition.”; DZ1034 “That distinction of a twofold love, namely a natural one, by which God is loved as the author of nature, and of a gratuitous love, by which God is loved as one who blesses, is vain and false and devised to ridicule the sacred literature and most of the testimonies of the ancients.”; DZ1092 “Some of God's precepts are impossible to the just, who wish and strive to keep them, according to the present powers which they have; the grace, by which they are made possible, is also wanting.” (Declared and condemned as rash, impious, blasphemous, condemned by anathema, and heretical.)

5. Fideism and "philosophical traditionalism" posit that reason has no power to reach moral or metaphysical truths by itself, and that Faith or Revelation are necessary in order to do so. Louis-Eugène Bautain had to adhere to the following proposition in order to not be excommunicated in 1840 : DZ1622 “Reason can prove with certitude the existence of God and the infinity of His perfections. Faith, a heavenly gift, is posterior to revelation; hence it cannot be brought forward against an atheist to prove the existence of God.” The Dogmatic Constitution Dei Filius of the first Vatican Council (1870) and the Oath against modernism (1910) teach the same thing.

6. Against neo-modernist authors such as those of the Nouvelle Théologie, Pius XII reiterated such teachings, saying that “[o]thers destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision.” (Humani Generis, 1950).

7. Such as thomist philosophers Marcel de Corte, Gustave Thibon, and Charles de Koninck, from the 1930s on. The latter went as far as to say, in his series of conferences on Nietzsche in 1936, that “Jansenism, this pestilential doctrine so little different from Puritanism, which was for centuries in the very bosom of the Church of Catholic Christendom, and which is far from being extinct, is our nearest danger.” (page 33 of the pdf)

8. See notes 3 and 4. Also, Pius XII, in his Address on the Science and Morality of Painless Childbirth (1956), reminds us that “the ideology of a researcher and of a scholar is not in itself a proof of the truth and the value of what he has discovered and expounded. (…) Even a materialistic researcher can make a real and valid scientific discovery.”

9. L’argent suite, 1913.

10. As Creane and Fimister say on the first (!) page of Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy (2020). Louis Jugnet, another great French-speaking thomist, has a very interesting chapter on this topic in his Pour connaitre la pensée de Saint Thomas d'Aquin, 1949, a book that Pius XII praised. “Without doubt, the exercise of political science, just like that of medicine, is subordinated to morals. But in itself, Politics is not morals, and is differentiated from it by its end (that is not directly virtue) as well as by its means.”

11. John Peckham (1230-1292), archbishop of Canterbury, in a letter quoted by Étienne Gilson in Studies in Medieval Philosophy (1921, transl. 2019 by Cascade Books).

12. “Epistemologist Pierre Duhem reports that Francis of Meyronnes, a contemporary of Duns Scotus, declared that the letter of the Bible seemed to agree with geocentrism, but that if heliocentrism was scientifically correct, things would be even better from the point of view of the credibility of the Scripture. The bigger point is that : (...) all that is true is Catholic, even truths that disrupt Catholics' comfort.”, in L'essence de Dieu est-elle seulement d'exister ? 2022.

13. Pascendi, 1907.

14. See Fr. Hugo Rahner, S.J., Church and State in Early Christianity, Ignatius Press, 2005 [1943, 1961].

15. Francoist Spain, while having been important, is not considered by Mérel to be fascist, but rather a capitalistic, clerical and paternalistic authoritarianism, unfaithful to the greater ideals of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, which is why it fell so easily after Franco's death.

16. Politique et Religion, Immanence et Transcendance [Politics and Religion, Immanence and Transcendence], 2021.

17. La razza nel nazionalsocialismo. Teoria antropologica, prassi giuridica, 2010. According to wikipedia, the German State Library had 150 000 volumes unborrowable and uncheckable (except with a special permission) NS books. Hundreds of millions of book copies were destroyed then.

18. See Géry Prouvost, Thomas d'Aquin et les thomismes [Thomas Aquinas and Thomisms], 1996. Mérel adresses this in various works, but his L'essence de Dieu est-elle seulement d'exister ? [Is the essence of God only to exist ?], 2022, focuses on such issues.

19. Pour une Contre-Révolution révolutionnaire [For a revolutionary Counter-Revolution], 2017. This is followed by this note : “The antique gnosis, matrix of all theories of the revolt of mankind and angels against God, as it was formalized by Hegel (who did not succeed in liberating himself from it) is rich of a captive truth (the ontological reflexion, a theme borrowed by the gnostic systems from neoplatonism) that, as captive, is precious for us to the extent of the extreme perversity (that may surpass everything else in evil) of the doctrine that confiscated it. As such, it is the only intellectual weapon capable of overcoming this doctrine, through a completion of thomism.”

20. Saint Pius X, 13 December 1908, in his speech about the beatification of Joan of Arc in Orléans, France.

21. Présentation de l'Institut Charlemagne, 2016.

22. Politique et Religion, op cit.

23. See Fr. Fourure, Les châtiments divins, étude historique et doctrinale [Divine punishment, an historical and doctrinal study], 1959. The author examines the controversy at the time of Jansenism and gives the orthodox Catholic arguments contra, which, based on Scripture, Patristics and scholasticism, rejected this opinion. On the particular case of death as something natural, see Augustine in The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Book VI, Chapter XXV.