Spring 2010 - Interpretation

Questioning Northrop Frye’s Adaptation of Vico
2 9 9
This “something” will be either another Nation or Chaos (ibid., “Conclusion
of the Work,” par. 2).
Understanding Order in Nature
Vico makes no mention of any inter-national collaboration
that is not sustained by an overarching authority. His account of human
nature has no place for a society of nations freely collaborating with each
other in the construction of a peaceful World. The highest authority we find
in Vico’s works belongs, not to a free coalition of nations, but to God as form
of nationality. Of course, Vico is fully aware that in his times Christianity
still stands as a supra-national authority tying together various nations under
the yoke of its Eternal Justice (De Ratione, Ch. IX; De Uno, Bk. I, Ch. LVI).
Yet, Christianity’s Authority does not have the power to put an end to infranational
conflicts, just as it fails to placate man’s love of his own (amor propio),
against which it otherwise wages war (ibid., Ch. XXXVIII). Vico knows of no
supra-national or international solution to the problem of Nationality or of
War (pólemos, from pólis; SN, Bk. II.5.i, par. 2). Nor does Vico invite any
political solution to the problem of infra-national conflict: the only solution
to political conflicts is disclosed contemplatively “in God” as Idea-Form of
nationality, and thereby in recognition of Mind as seat of the infinite wisdom
or authority men seek to attain to by nature. Only in the God of civil religion
do nations find themselves without attempting to define themselves through
the conquest of other nations (compare De Constantia Philosophiae, Ch. III,
XVI, and De Ratione, Ch. IX). Only in the divined unity of civil religion—
in the one God recognized nationally as Author of physical nature—does a
nation have the power to enter “in conatus,” rather than dispersing itself in
the vain conquest of what is outside of itself. Only by recognizing the civility
of the world outside of itself—a world commonly authored by God in
private—can a nation as a whole free itself from the compulsion of imposing
its own authority on the world it divines outside of itself. Failing to recognize
God as Author of the world outside of their own walls, nations—no less than
single men—assume for themselves the right of authorship over all that falls
beyond them. Such nations fail to recognize that order and authority are in
nature prior to being imposed ex machina through the Grace of foreign intervention
(compare e.g., SN44, Bk. V.3, end of par. 2; “Of the Elements,” CXIV;
and Bk. V.5.v).
The great dogmatic error transposed from the imagination
of beastly brutes (bruti) into reflection consists of assuming that civil society
is formed by injecting physical existence with intellectual dogmas—as if civil