In an age drowning in the deafening noise of opinions, ideologies, and the flat truths of the state, the search for truth — in veritatem — is a lonely, almost monastic occupation. Few have embraced this intellectual exile as radically and elegantly as the Colombian thinker Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913-1994). From the stillness of his immense library in Bogotá, this ‘hermit of the Andes’ waged a lifelong war against the follies of modernity.

His weapons were not treatises or systems, but aphorisms: sharp splinters of insight, polished to perfection. He called them Escolios a un Texto Implícito — scholia on a text that is written nowhere, but everywhere present: the implicit, unchanging truth of God, of nature, and of tradition.

These escolios are not comfortable wisdom. They are meant to unmask, to irritate, and to compel the reader to see the lies he has unwittingly accepted. They are the antidote to the Enlightenment, a scalpel for democratic dogma, and a balm for the reactionary soul.

Inveritatem.com is proud to begin its translation of this monumental work. This is not reading material for the masses; it is ammunition for the spirit that refuses to bow to the lie. May his words be a mirror for the confusion of our age, and a guide back to the truth.

The first eighty aphorisms.

1.
The history of unbelief is even richer in grotesque episodes than the history of religion.

2.
Science enriches the intelligence; literature enriches the whole personality.

3.
The charlatanism of the great of the earth held the nineteenth century spellbound; the twentieth is captivated by petty charlatans.

4.
Truths contradict one another only when they are in disorder.

5.
The aesthetic impossibilities of an age do not arise from social factors, but from internal censorship.

6.
The aesthetic canons have never been more rigid than in our age. Let us pause to consider all the literary genres that have died out and all the themes that have been buried.

7.
Communication or expression are not ends, but only means in the work of art.

8.
A great writer is not he who has no faults, but he who succeeds in making his faults unimportant.

9.
The democrat changes his method in the human sciences as soon as a conclusion displeases him.

10.
The mind of the Marxist petrifies with time; that of the leftist man becomes soft and spongy.

11.
In matters of importance one can prove nothing — only point.

12.
The distinction between scientific and emotional language is not itself scientific, but emotional. It is used to discredit propositions that modern man finds uncomfortable.

13.
He who has not lived through a revolution has not taken the measure of man.

14.
Might the maturity of the Causeries du Lundi [a work of Sainte-Beuve] not be owed to the proximity of the revolutionary year of 1848?

15.
The history of these nations is of little interest: a second-hand history. Nothing original has ever been seen here; nothing has ever achieved here its highest brilliance.

16.
The modern writer forgets that only the allusion to the gestures of love can capture its essence.

17.
Nothing is easier, in philosophy, than to be coherent.

18.
The enemy of a civilization is less the external adversary than the internal wear.

19.
The political errors that could be most obviously avoided are precisely the errors most often committed.

20.
The taste of the young must embrace; that of the adult must select.

21.
The truly civilizing task consists in the repetition of old commonplaces.

22.
Probability is the temptation into which the amateur historian most easily falls.

23.
Solitude teaches us to be intellectually more honest, but moves us to be intellectually less courteous.

24.
One has grown accustomed to claiming rights in order to violate duties.

25.
The difference between “organic” and “mechanical” in social matters is a moral difference: the “organic” is the result of countless humble acts; the “mechanical” is the result of one decisive act of pride.

26.
When even the possibility of transcendence becomes unthinkable, thought remains useful, but loses all importance.

27.
The dangerous idea is not the false idea, but the partly correct one.

28.
More than an impersonal proposition, truth is a way of thinking and feeling.

29.
The writer who does not strain to convince us costs us less time, and sometimes convinces us.

30.
The relativity of taste is an excuse embraced by ages that have bad taste.

31.
We do not always distinguish between what wounds our delicacy and what irritates our envy.

32.
The only pure pleasure is the discovery of an idea.

33.
When the intellectual climate in which something happens lacks originality, the event has interest only for those physically involved in it.

34.
The concept of ‘style’ conceals three meanings: the property of an individual expression, a system of forms, a particular kind of value.

35.
Every piece of writing can have style in the first sense, inevitably has it in the second, and sometimes manages to have it in the third.

36.
History seems to reduce to two alternating periods: a sudden religious experience that propagates a new human type; a slow process of dismantling that type.

37.
Modern man has no inner life: only inner conflicts.

38.
Where traces of the old Christian charity are absent, even the purest courtesy has something cold, hypocritical, and hard about it.

39.
Let us not grant foolish opinions the pleasure of scandalizing us.

40.
We reactionaries grant the simple of mind the pleasure of feeling themselves daring, avant-garde thinkers.

41.
What does not at first strike the reader as wrong is not worth writing.

42.
The vanquished should draw consolation not from the possible vindication of history, but from the sheer excellence of his cause.

43.
If we aim high, there is no public capable of judging whether we hit the mark.

44.
Science is not education, for it transmits not the object of study, but only the way of using it.

45.
The history of literary genres permits sociological explanation. The history of works themselves does not.

46.
The only superiority that does not risk meeting a new superiority that overshadows it is the superiority of style.

47.
What is unsympathetic in the work of a great writer is the element that anticipates and foreshadows his disciples.

48.
Profane confession purifies only him who possesses the gift of intelligent speech.

49.
The norm of Christianity is Christianity itself. To be a Christian is not to apply one of our prejudices as a norm to Christianity.

50.
A decision that is not a little mad does not deserve respect.

51.
The difficult thing is not to believe or to doubt — in any field whatever — but to gauge the exact proportion of our authentic belief or our authentic doubt.

52.
Nothing that can be summed has an end that fulfills. What matters is the immeasurable plenitude.

53.
What a famous artist signs has interest only if the work deserved to be signed.

54.
Whoever lives long years is the witness of the defeat of his own cause.

55.
He who does not doubt the worth of his cause need not desire that his cause should win. The worth of the cause is its triumph.

56.
Influences enrich only original spirits.

57.
He who does not feel himself heir even to his intellectual adversaries acquires only a part of his inheritance.

58.
What has worth is distinguished from what has no worth solely by worth itself.

59.
Philosophical problems are sometimes solved by transposing them. A metaphysical problem into psychology; a psychological problem into metaphysics.

60.
A manifesto signed by more than three persons is invariably a new instance of the same idiotic theme.

61.
Let us not generalize without a smile of distrust.

62.
Contrary to the modern prejudice, the perfect attunement of an object to its purpose is always paid for by the absence of style.

63.
The usual factors of history do not suffice to explain the rise of new collective mentalities. It is fitting to introduce into history the mysterious notion of mutation.

64.
To that which has worth we should invite only with worth itself in view. The good for the good, the truth for truth, art for art.

65.
Since Romanticism, literature forgets verse as an autonomous literary category, distinct from poetry and prose. The verse of Horace, of Boileau, of Pope.

66.
To seek an explanation for what is proclaimed as mystery is the prologue to heretical divagation. Let us content ourselves with a Christian empiricism.

67.
Christian dogmas are not speculations of the religious consciousness, but the canonical formulation of experimental enigmas.

68.
There are problems we must live as problems, and problems we must live as an invitation to solve them. To be Christian is to possess the tact that distinguishes them.

69.
To renew, it is not necessary to contradict; it suffices to deepen.

70.
The liberal always errs, because he does not distinguish between the consequences he attributes to his intentions and the consequences his intentions actually carry within them.

71.
“Belonging to a generation” is more a decision of herd-spirits than a necessity.

72.
What imagination does not complete is only a fragment of reality.

73.
The presence of an imbecile is dispiriting.

74.
Nothing remains of Christianity when the Christian strains not to seem foolish to the world.

75.
To wish that Christianity made no absurd demands is to ask that it renounce the demands that move our hearts.

76.
There are many who suppose themselves enemies of God and only succeed in being enemies of the sacristan.

77.
The common man lives among phantoms; only the solitary moves among realities.

78.
To replace the concrete sensory perception of the object with its abstract intellectual construction is to make man win the world and lose his soul.

79.
For the contemplative, reality is not the canvas and the pigments, but the painting.

80.
What has been operationally defined can no longer be concretely perceived.