Due to severe pneumonia, he spent about two years at home where he was taught by private teachers and developed a lifelong love of classical literature.

Though he supported the later president Alberto Lleras Camargo's role in bringing down the dictatorship, he refrained from any political activity himself, a decision he had already reached early on in his practice as a writer.

His skeptical anthropology was based on a close study of Thucydides and Jacob Burckhardt as well as his affirmation of hierarchical structures of order on society, state and church.

The literary method he developed is the gloss, the scholion, which he used to comment on the world, particularly in the five volumes of Escolios a un texto implícito (1977; 1986; 1992) that he published from the seventies to the nineties.

On the basis of a Traditionalist Catholicism influenced by the intellectual probity of Nietzsche and others he criticized modernity and saw himself as a partisan for a "truth that will not die".

Only by way of German (and later Italian as well as French and Polish) translation beginning in the late eighties did Gómez Dávila's ideas begin to be read among poets and philosophers such as Robert Spaemann, Martin Mosebach, Botho Strauss, Reinhart Maurer, Rolf Schilling, Heiner Müller, Franco Volpi, Asfa-Wossen Asserate and Krzysztof Urbanek.