“In paganism, the human being is by nature innocent. Certainly, over the course o his life he will have responsibilities to assume. One or another of his actions, by implicating him in a situation or a conformation of given facts, may cause a feeling of fault to arise within him. But this feeling always results from voluntary choices he has made. Man does not inherit at birth any guilt, any imperfection bound to his very condition (other than those of his psychic or physiological limitations, which are exempt from moral implications). He is at the onset pure innocence—innocence incarnate. And it is this innocence which he puts into action like the seriousness a child puts into play. He transforms action into game. Because only the game is truly serious: the game of man, the game of being, the game of the world. The game is fundamentally innocent, beyond good and evil. When he describes the Trojans’ assault on the wall the Achaeans erected to protect their camp, Homer himself compares the actions of the god Apollo to a children’s game. Montherlant said that the game “is the sole form of activity that should be taken seriously.” Lastly, Schiller declares: “Man is not fully man except when he plays.” This is why it is the child who is the closest of all people to the overman. The world of the overman, to paraphrase Montherlant, is a world whose prince is a child. It is a world instituted beyond good and evil, a world where the moral sense of action is a matter of indifference with respect to the action itself. “To desire indifferently,” Montherlant says, “is the very essence of play.” Aedificabo et destruam.”
Alain de Benoist, On Being a Pagan
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