Eugenio D’Ors in Asturias

Andreu Navarra, author of one of the best works published on Eugenio D’Ors – «Writing and power», Tusquets, 2018–, gives an account in his formidable book of an outstanding Orsian talk scheduled to be read in Oviedo in 1948, at the height of the frenetic intellectual activity of the great Xénius. Thanks to the invaluable work of Susana Penelo, librarian of the documentary collection on D’Ors that is preserved in the National Archive of Catalonia, in Sant Cugat, I have been able to obtain a copy of that extraordinary conference, hitherto unpublished, in which the Barcelona universal he wanders about life and nature, in his line of argument denouncing fin-de-siècle decadence. The document, a fairly detailed script of his intervention in Oviedo, is typewritten, including some crossing out, under the title «Conference Oviedo 4-22-48». Days later he would write the reply to Sánchez Mazas’ admission speech at the Royal Spanish Academy, which would not be read because the holder of the K chair never wanted to take possession of his position.

Josep Pla, fellow sufferer of D’Ors in the newspaper “La Veu de Catalunya”, said that he spoke in italics. And in his presentation from Oviedo he makes it clear. His Asturian lesson, given at the age of 67, is certainly not suitable for all audiences. He speculates extensively on the concepts of nature, life and spirituality, judging that “there is a third style, higher than that of nature and life, which is that of the Spirit, where the synthesis between nature and life, between rest and activity, between law and creation. For Don Eugenio, unlike the natural and the vital, the metaphysical belongs to a higher order, “that of the cyclical conception of the universe,” no less.

In his thesis presented in Oviedo, D’Ors unites that mystical notion with the predestination of things. With the platonic “perfect year” in which everything begins again and repeats itself invariably, as it has ever happened in the past. “History would have, like the landscape, its seasons, their wheels would follow, should follow, a regular symmetrical course,” he maintains in Carbayona’s presentation of him. Hence, Xénius addresses the Asturians to clarify that «I, who am here, and you, who are there, have already found ourselves in the same situation, under the same form, at some point in the forgotten past and we will find ourselves equally on other occasions, perhaps on many occasions, of the dark future…». D’Ors does not intend to defend a kind of reincarnation, but many of the issues that today pass for novelties, including those that cause uneasiness, are usually a mere reproduction of what has happened in other times.

“In round trips, in originalities that are restorations, the spiritual par excellence is encrypted”, concludes D’Ors in Oviedo, recalling other leading thinkers who have insisted on this idea, from Vico to Nietzsche, passing through Spengler , of which he was so supportive.

That Eugenio D’Ors had chosen the subject of nature, life and spirituality for his Asturian dissertation, perhaps responded to the characteristics of the Principality at the end of the forties of the last century. Our proverbial environmental wealth, together with the accentuated industrialization of that time and the outstanding immaterial references that we treasure, surely conditioned his theme, which he approached with the depth that was usual for him.

Although the affection that D’Ors felt towards Galicia is well known, until the Navarra book his Asturian adventures were not well known, which in this conference in Oviedo are reflected in a deep philosophical argument that keeps his considerations intact in current terms. Everything tends to repeat itself and there is something more than the material, it could be summed up in a tweet about what Don Eugenio came to tell us in 1948. And seventy-four years later his words sound just as good.

Eugenio D’Ors in Asturias