A Resolution for the New Year: Truth, Resistance, and the Care of the Soul

Landscape with Two Soldiers and Ruins, c.1650, oil on canvas,
Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), Art Gallery of Nova Scotia

“Clarity is the reward of the vanquished.” ~ Nicolás Gómez Dávila, The Authentic Reactionary

The new year arrives without illusions. We will not greet it with plastic optimism, nor with the forced cheer of a civilization willfully submitting to its own destruction. Positivity, if it is to mean anything at all, must be rooted in truth. And the truth is stark: much of the world we knew has vanished. Customs, institutions, moral language, even the visible structure of the Church have been hollowed out or inverted. There is no gain in pretending otherwise.

This year, our resolution is not to lie to ourselves. We will refuse the narcotic of false hope—the kind that demands we say things are “getting better” simply because acknowledging decay is considered impolite or extremist. We will look directly at what is broken: the incoherence, the hypocrisy, the endless moral fraud, the rituals without belief, the words emptied of meaning. We will not waste our remaining strength arguing with lies that are not disagreement, but the inversion of reality itself. Silence, withdrawal, and detachment can sometimes be more powerful than debate.

And yet—resignation is not our vocation. To accept reality is not to surrender to it. To see clearly is not to lie down. If this decadent civilization insists on destroying itself, we will not assist it by passivity or despair. We will deny it our complicity. If we are to be crushed beneath it, then its victory will not be comfortable. We will resist by constancy, by memory, by stubborn refusal to internalize its values or repeat its slogans. Even small acts of resistance—truth spoken plainly, traditions kept alive in private, children raised rightly, prayers said without apology—can wound an enemy that survives on universal assent.

But the primary battlefield is not external at all. This year, above all, we resolve to tend our interior life. To rebuild inwardly what has been desecrated outwardly. To recover silence, discipline, prayer, fasting, and reverence. To take seriously the reality of sin, judgment, grace, and salvation—realities that do not disappear simply because the age finds them inconvenient. As the world descends, our task is ascent. As the age grows noisier, we cultivate silence. As everything is politicized, we seek transcendence.

We will measure success not by visibility, influence, or approval, but by fidelity. Not by outcomes, but by obedience. The saints were not optimists. They were realists—men and women who knew the world was fallen, the powers hostile, and the road narrow. They did not conquer by pretending; they endured by believing.

This is our resolution: to live without illusion, without cowardice, and without despair. To accept the ruins, but not make peace with them. To fight where fighting is required, to withdraw where withdrawal is wiser, and to kneel always before God.

The year ahead may offer little comfort. That is acceptable. Comfort was never promised. What is promised—if we remain faithful—is truth, meaning, and salvation. And that is enough.

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, January 1st, Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord