From an undisclosed location on the coast of Tuscany, I bring you Sebastian Edoardo di Giovanni for an interview: An international man of mystery, friend & fellow informed conspirator—or rather, “a conspiracy factist, if anything”, as he likes to say. Sebastian is loved because he is beautiful, just like the Saint for whom he is named, he fascinates his friends & enemies with his culture of Catholicism & science, which ranges from an easy acquaintance with important intellectuals to techno-mysticism, & he's known for his fiery politics, a sworn enemy to all things Left—save the left bank of Paris.
One cannot call Sebastian typical of Italian men—he is representative precisely as he approaches to the ideal summarized by Castiglione in his The Courtier—Il Cortigiano—as sprezzatura, which may be translated as nonchalance or spontaneity or perhaps etre sans souci. Italian history is a better mix of beauty & terror than most & it offers a very easy understanding of the conflict of Emperor & Pope, of two very different tempers in the North & South of Europe, of the politics of commerce & the politics of faith, which could be said to mean also rationalism against Romance, if we could remember that romanticism must ultimately trace its origins to Rome. The entire question of what it means to be European hangs on this question of faith the name of which is Rome—this is, however, not a historical question but one that bears on our lives, education, & souls. What kind of man would love & quarrel in such a way as to aspire to what Castiglione prescribed? So much for an introduction; one cannot put words in Sebastian's mouth; I point you instead to the portrait Raphael painted of Baldassare Castiglione & to the novels of Henry James.
The Making Of An Italian Man
Sebastian, how shall I introduce you to an American audience? I should say, what do you for a living--but it were better to say, to what have you dedicated yourself? What is your mission, how are you going about it?
Sebastian: I love the way you posed the question as, almost always, unfortunately, when one is asked, especially in our modern times, who he is, the reply one gets most often is their job title. This means that most people fail to see the profundity of the question put to them. Now, the Japanese have a wonderful way of describing what your question implies: They call it Ikigai: In Europe, it is the French that get the closest to this concept with their wonderful expression: raison d’être. So, to finally answer your question, I’d say my mission is to—whenever possible, in my modest way—contribute to the cultural landscape & public discourse of my society & my times. As Whitman put it: “That you are here–that life exists, & identity; that the powerful play goes on & you may contribute a verse.” So, how am I trying to contribute a verse in this powerful play that is life? Well, at the moment in two ways: On the one hand, I am writing—I should say editing, a process which is taking me forever—a novel where, under the guise & disguise of fiction, I talk about all the things dear to me that I have learned, experienced & interiorised throughout my life & especially during my years of travel & living overseas. You have to know that, before moving back to dear Europe three years ago, I spent about eight years living between Australia, Asia and Indonesia, places where I had the most extraordinary experiences. That formed who I am, of course, but at the same made me understand where I come from, who I am: A European, from Italy. I learned for myself the truth that is otherwise reduced to a platitude: Living for so many years overseas, in cultures & realities foreign to my own, I started to understand & appreciate my own. Its uniqueness, its qualities & peculiarities, the good & bad. Only thanks to all those years overseas did I realize my interior need to go back home, to not get lost & escape the challenges of my times—as so many valiant young people do nowadays who are often too sensitive for this world & its current critical condition & escape it, trying to forget & be forgotten in some tropical paradise—but instead to try to do something about it. Try to bring back home something I’ve learned along the way & that might be helpful to the situation. Something my home country couldn’t provide, gifts I received in my peregrinations. But much of this is personal: The most precious gift I received from that incredibly gorgeous & generous country that is Australia is the one of the silence in me. The silence of the mind. Believe me: Spend months on end looking at vast red sand dunes, deserts without end, &—obtorto collo—you’ll start to look within. To listen to yourself. To observe your own mind. To meditate, if you will. To pray. Something our current, modern, chaotic, noisy century cannot really provide anymore—certainly not the necessary time for it to stick with you. A life-changing experience for me, the one of learning to silence the mind & observe my own thoughts, that resonated a lot with a passage I once read in the Coran, I believe, where God says: “To the extent that you empty yourself, I shall enter you.” What a profound truth. So I wonder, is it just a coincidence, the decline in so many aspects of human expression, & thus of the mind—art, architecture, political thought, literature etc.—or is it that our minds are never where they should be, in the here & now, not endlessly distracted by traffic, noises, notifications of a dozen apps on your phone, & by all sorts of entertainment, so that the mind can never really formulate a complex thought in silence?
Ok, so the novel is the first thing. The second one I felt I needed to do right away to contribute in some way, once on Italian soil—& one also a tad more immediate than the publishing of a book—was the organizing of conferences. Conferences in which the key concept I tried to convey & bring to flourish was the other great gift, or even great truth perhaps, that was revealed to me whilst on the other side of the world, that science & Faith are not only intimately related & connected—but supporting one another. But I need to provide you & your readers with little background here: You see, aside from literature, history, & philosophy, the other subject I have always been passionate about ever since I can remember is science. And throughout my life—& I am cutting a very long story, very short here—I have had the opportunity to work & talk with some of the greatest scientific minds on the planet. In briefest synthesis here, but bear with me, dear friends—most times, they were all willing to admit—usually in informal circumstances & more often than not after a few wines at dinner—that in their specific department, whether it was genetics, DNA, biology or cosmology, the notion that random chance & blind luck are to account for the perfect, precise, multifarious & sublime precision of Creation did not hold water. To put it mildly. Indeed, many of them scoffed in front of me at ideas such as Darwinism or the Big Bang, bluntly telling me they were “fables” they had to tell us—the scientific illiterate masses—but that, in truth, they had no real explanation for the emergence of life or even the universe. & the mincing of words they had to do to not mention the dread G-word almost became embarrassing after a while. & this went on & on over the years in various conversations I had with all sorts of important men & academics. So, in short, the idea that ultimately Faith & science are not enemies, but actually allies in the search for truth started growing stronger & stronger in me—especially in the most recent years, as discoveries of such magnitude have been made (always clouded in magniloquent terms, published in obscure scientific lingo, on cryptic scientific papers so that the profane can’t find them, let alone understand them) that the very ideas of a happenstance emergence of the universe, of life & evolution on this planet are crumbling under the pressure of mounting evidence of a Primum Movens. These conferences were about that, they were extremely successful (only proving the hunger the human soul feels & will always feel for the transcendent & the divine within itself) & they really started a sort of counter-movement of bright & young men & women that just won’t adhere to the nihilist-atheist post-modernist weltanschauung peddled to them by the gauche-caviar globalist corpocrats.
You search for a new education, a new rhetoric, a reorientation that will allow Europeans to take pride of their heritage by taking possession of it. But this is a task greater than any man, more than a lifetime's work. What are you doing now?
Sebastian: True. But our task is not to change or save the world—that indeed is a task greater than any man & thus a mission that only our Lord has accomplished—so, rather, it might just be for any one of us to defend our common cultural heritage. Defend our beliefs. Especially as modern Western Catholic men & women, I think it is vital that every one of us embodies, carries within & carries out the message that can save our heritage. By writing about it, reading about it, living it & acting it out. Particular attitudes or gifts come to matter if we become what we are trying to save: Honourable men of the 21st century. The great Italian writer, thinker & poet Gabriele D’Annunzio once said: “I have what I have given”. So, again, in my case, what I am doing is embarking of this novel-writing endeavour, combined with the efforts to make the Church & science talk & work together again, to finally inflict a lethal blow to the true enemy of our times: Nihilism militantly promulgated by scientism, which, to this day, still too many people confuse with science: Science bases itself on evidence, scientism, instead, is the belief in any scientific narrative supporting a political & ideological agenda. A bunch of nonsense with no actual evidence whatsoever to this day, in this year of our Lord 2021—as, in fact, as I was saying, our finer & finer understanding of genetics & cosmology, something the founders of these branches of knowledge did not have, actually decisively points at an Ab Initio moment by an Omega Point, as Jesuit priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin would put it.
Let's now turn to how you got here & what it means to be Italian: Sebastian, tell us about your upbringing, education, the circumstances & the people who shaped you.
Sebastian: Well, I might be biased again here, but I read somewhere that life is just too short not to be Italian. Which is true. But here is the beautiful thing about it: This is also true of every country & nationality on Earth—despite what a certain global, borderless agenda would like us to believe—it’s a beautiful spirit, belonging, & the pride one feels for one's nationality & culture. Firmly believing it’s the best thing to be & worth fighting for, to have a strong identity is at the same time what it takes to appreciate & fall in love with other identities as well: How gorgeous is it to feel a romantic Frenchman when in Paris, or a little bit of an alchemist-poet once in Prague? Or a logical & precise German, yet somehow capable of the deepest feelings when in cold Heidelberg? The lie peddled to us about how wonderful it is to be one global society is terrible because by necessity the global identity is no identity at all.
Now, that said, to answer your question finally, what got me here, where I am & who I am, is a series of coincidences in life. But coincidences so momentous that one realizes, reflecting on one’s life, were not coincidences at all. That there is a fine red thread connecting all the events of my life. So I had a classical Catholic education which gave me the tool to understand, to appreciate my culture later on, but then once I was sent to a public classical education lyceum, I had the great good fortune to meet what was to be my first mentor in thought & reason, my philosophy & history teacher—which, God bless, are usually still taught by the same professor in Italy, which is vital to have a coherent picture of both. Now, the same thing usually also happens in my country for art & art-history, Latin & Greek, literature & composition. All of them, in pair, normally taught by the same teacher. This gives the students & eager young minds a more coherent picture of the men, the times, the ideas, the art & literary expressions of every century. Most importantly: The student will realise that they are all connected. That no man or woman of importance he studied was disconnected form his times & cultural landscape. Can we really learn about all the great philosophers of ancient Greece without understanding the political & social context they were in? Are we truly able to penetrate the beauty of a Renaissance painting without the background knowledge of what philosophical & religious ideas shaped an artist’s mind & soul? The compartmentalization of knowledge is truly one of the great evils that was allowed to fester in our educational system, because it sterilizes everything, vacuum-sealing every man, moment & century, isolating them from their predecessors & cultural context. This unfortunate tendency forged entire generations that are completely oblivious to the complexity & interconnectedness of human events & thoughts. &, of course, but this is a coincidence I am sure, ensured & enabled the emergence of a very fragmented & partial knowledge of the world on the part of the population which just happens to be more suitable to anyone aiming at ruling by the means of divisiveness & fear. But I got lucky enough to be educated in the old ways & from then on, strong of a Faith that was seeded in me, armed with the tool of the reason that was installed in me, I could successfully embark on the great journey of adult life, which starts with University & the International relations & geopolitical studies I was to undertake. But that story is for another time.
To have an education is to have access to more than what we see & hear just now. Who did you learn to love through your learning?
Sebastian: I was tempted to quote Mark Twain in this instance, where he said—genius that he was—that he never allowed schooling to interfere with his education. Alas, in my case I cannot claim this & have been lucky enough for that not to be true in my case. I had a fantastic education, sensational teachers—a rarity on par with finding beauty in any post-modern work of art—I always loved learning & have been a voracious reader since my earliest years.
In my personal pantheon of these thinkers I learned so much from & that I love jut as much as I would have had I met them in the flesh are Thomas Aquinas of the erudite acumen; St Augustine & his astuteness in solving paralyzing conundrums, paradoxes of faith & doctrine; Umberto Eco, his unparalleled mastery in words & unrivalled ability to shroud & hide in the convoluted & contradictory personas of his novels’ protagonists his own actual thoughts & opinions; Tiziano Terzani for being a vox clamante in deserto in trying to warn us about the dangers of ruthless, soulless globalisation & his search for transcendent meaning in life; & lastly the great Oriana Fallaci, a journalist the likes of which we shall never see again, I fear. Her courage, her adamant determination to speak the truth, always, as she saw it, alongside the pride she took in her job & identity & fierce sense of romantic patriotism influenced, shaped the man I became—or at least so I hope. Obviously they are so many other Magisters I cannot mention all here or else we’d have to grab a whiskey & a couple of cigars & continue our conversation well deep into the night & ad libitum—but just mentioning some of them in passing: Roger Scruton, Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, Marcus Aurelius, all the great Russian novelists, Steinbeck & Hemingway, Tolkien & Phil K Dick, Bukowski & Faulkner, Piaget & Jung, Curzio Malaparte, Pirandello Primo Levi: Thank you all.
This is the first half of our interview. You can find Sebastian on Instagram & share in his love of beauty. More of his thoughts soon!