Originally published in the double special issue of Arthos dedicated to Julius Evola in 1974, Francisco Elías de Tejada’s “Julius Evola alla luce del Tradizionalismo ispanico” (Julius Evola in the Light of Hispanic Traditionalism) offers a rigorous Carlist and Hispanic Traditionalist assessment of Evola’s thought.
Compared with From Evola to Christ, Tejada’s article is more demanding yet also more illuminating. Whereas the earlier essay presented Evola as an unlikely bridge toward Catholicism, Tejada approaches him from the standpoint of Hispanic Traditionalism—specifically Carlism—and asks a harder question: what in Evola can be accepted, and what must be rejected?
The result is a mixture of admiration and correction.
Tejada recognizes Evola’s greatness. He sees in him a rare aristocratic spirit, a man who stood above the vulgar assumptions of modernity and gave intellectual form to the revolt against the modern world. Evola’s critique of liberalism, democracy, bourgeois weakness, secularism, and the collapse of traditional order is treated with deep respect. On that level, Tejada regards him as an ally.
But he refuses to let admiration become acquiescence.
For Tejada, the central problem is that Evola seeks Tradition outside the history of Christendom. Evola looks to primordial metaphysics, Eastern doctrines, Tantra, caste, myth, and initiation. Tejada, by contrast, insists that true Tradition is not an abstract or esoteric inheritance. It is historical, concrete, Catholic, and, above all, embodied in the Spanish tradition of Carlism.
Tejada argues that Evola correctly diagnosed the disease of modernity, but misidentified the highest Western remedy. He searched the East for a heroic and aristocratic spirituality while overlooking what Tejada sees as the heroic Catholic tradition of Spain: the Reconquista, the Counter-Reformation, the Battle of Lepanto, the Carlist wars, and the militant defense of altar, throne, and inherited liberties.
This is where Tejada is at his strongest. He does not present Catholicism as soft, sentimental, or merely devotional, but as militant, virile, aristocratic, and sacrificial. Christianity, in his view, is not the religion of slaves, as Evola sometimes suggested, but the faith of knights, crusaders, missionaries, kings, martyrs, and soldiers of God.
That point speaks directly to the same spiritual tension found in From Evola to Christ. Evola awakens the hunger for transcendence, hierarchy, and sacred order. But Tejada insists that these things are not fulfilled in pagan revivalism or esoteric self-overcoming. They are fulfilled in Catholic militancy—in a faith that does not flee history, but enters it and fights.
Like From Evola to Christ, the article traces a path of spiritual development: beginning with Evola’s critique of modernity, recognizing the inadequacy of purely political answers, and discovering that the deeper answer is not abstraction, but the living Catholic tradition.
But Tejada presses the issue further. The question is not merely whether Evola can lead one toward Catholicism, but whether Evola himself must be judged by Catholic Tradition. In that sense, the article is both appreciative and corrective: Evola is honored as a formidable critic of modern decadence, but he is not allowed to become the final authority.
That distinction matters because, for someone shaped by Evola, the temptation is to remain at the level of metaphysics, symbols, and aristocratic distance. Tejada challenges that temptation, arguing that true Tradition is not solitary self-mastery, but fidelity to God, to inherited order, to one’s people, and to the battles history places before us.
This is why his contrast between the kshatriya and the hidalgo is so important. Evola is portrayed as the Western warrior who turned eastward and became a kind of isolated initiate. Tejada’s ideal is different: the Christian nobleman, the militant Catholic, the man who serves rather than merely overcomes.
Evola may help one see the emptiness of the modern world. But Tejada reminds us that seeing is not enough. One must belong, serve, and fight under a banner that is not self-created. For the Hispanic Traditionalist, that banner is Christ, the Church, and the historical inheritance of Catholic civilization.
In that sense, this article complements From Evola to Christ beautifully. The first essay explains how Evola can become a bridge to Catholicism. Tejada’s essay explains why, once one crosses that bridge, one cannot remain an Evolian in the strict sense.
For many readers, Evola was not the destination. He was the provocation—the figure who made modernity appear intolerable and transcendence necessary. But Tejada points to the next step: from the solitary metaphysics of revolt to the historical and militant faith of Catholic Tradition.
Perhaps that is the real movement: not simply from Evola to Christ, but from abstraction to incarnation, from the initiate to the knight, from solitary revolt to Catholic fidelity.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, Spring 2026, published on May 20th, the Feast of San Bernardino da Siena
