Certain forms of the traditional order cannot be restored. The sacred kingship, the organic hierarchy of functions, the living presence of a spiritual authority that shaped the ordinary life of a people—these belonged to a different phase of the cycle. The forces that sustained them have withdrawn. Efforts to reconstruct them as external institutions in the present age produce only imitations. The imitations lack the interior reality that once gave the forms their power.
The differentiated individual accepts this irreversibility without despair. He does not waste force on the reconstruction of what the cycle has already closed. He turns instead to the residual possibilities that remain open to the individual. Those possibilities concern the quality of being that the traditional forms once protected and transmitted. That quality can still be realized in the man who is capable of it. The forms themselves are no longer the necessary vehicle.
Young men who feel the loss of higher order often invest their energy in political or cultural projects that promise a return. The investment is understandable. It is also a misdirection of the force that should be applied to the formation of the type. The age will continue its course. The man who places his hope in a collective restoration places his orientation outside himself. When the restoration fails to appear, the orientation collapses with it.
Clarify what can still be done. The applications already established remain valid. They do not depend on the return of a traditional environment. They are the concrete means by which the residual quality is maintained. The man who continues them has already accepted the irreversible character of the age and has chosen the path that remains open.