Liberty
By Mircea Eliade
"Iconar", March 5 1937
There is an aspect of the Legionary Movement that has not been sufficiently explored: the
individual’s liberty. Being primarily a spiritual movement concerned with the creation of
a New Man and the salvation of our people – the Legion can’t grow and couldn’t have
matured without treasuring the individual’s liberty; the liberty that so many books were
written about with which so many libraries were stacked full, in defense of which many
democratic speeches have been held, without it being truly lived and treasured.
The people that speak of liberty and declare themselves willing to die for it are those who
believe in materialist dogmas, in fatalities: social classes, class war, the primacy of the
economy, etc. It is strange, to say the least, to hear a person who doesn’t believe in God
stand up for “liberty,” who doesn’t believe in the primacy of the spirit or the afterlife.
Such a person, when they speak in good faith, mix “liberty” up with libertarianism and
anarchy. Liberty can only be spoken of in spiritual life. Those who deny the spirit its
primacy automatically fall to mechanical determinism (Marxism) and irresponsibility.
People bind themselves together according to either hedonism or a familiar economic
destiny. I’m a comrade of X because he happens to be my relative, or a colleague at
work, and thus comrades of pay. Connections between people are almost always
involuntary, they are a natural given. I cannot modify my familiar destiny. And with
respect to economic destiny, regardless of how much effort I employ, I could at most
change my comrades of pay – but I will always unwillingly find myself in a solidarity
with certain people I don’t know to which I’m tied by the chance of me being poor or
rich.
There are, however, spiritual movements wherein people are tied by liberty. People are
free to join this spiritual family. No exterior determination forces them to become
brothers. Back in the day when it was expanding and converting, Christianity was a
spiritual movement that people joined out of the common desire to spiritualize their lives
and overcome death. No one forced a pagan to become a Christian. On the contrary, the
state on the one hand, and its instincts of conservation on the other, restlessly raised
obstacles to Christian conversion.
But even faced with such obstacles, the thirst of being free, of forging your own destiny,
of defeating biological and economic determinations was much too strong. People joined
Christianity, knowing that they would become poor overnight, that they would leave their
still pagan families behind, that they could be imprisoned for life, or even face the
cruelest death—the death of a martyr.
Being a profoundly Christian movement, justifying its doctrine on the spiritual level
above all – legionarism encourages and is built upon liberty. You adhere to legionarism
because you are free, because you decided to overcome the iron circles of biological
determinism (fear of death, suffering, etc.) and economic determinism (fear of becoming
homeless). The first gesture a legionnaire will display is one born out of total liberty: he
dares to free himself of spiritual, biological and economic enslavement. No exterior
determinism can influence him. The moment he decides to be free is the moment all fears
and inferiority complexes instantaneously disappear. He who enters the Legion forever
dons the shirt of death. That means that the legionnaire feels so free that death itself no
longer frightens him. If the Legionnaire nurtures the spirit of sacrifice with such passion,
and if he has proven to be capable of making sacrifices – culminating in the deaths of
Mota and Marin – these bear witness to the unlimited liberty a legionnaire has gained.
“He who knows how to die will never be a slave.” And this doesn’t concern only ethnic
or political enslavement – but firstly, spiritual enslavement. If you are ready to die, no
fear, weakness, shyness can enslave you. Making peace with death is the most total
liberty man can receive on this Earth.
