CONSERVATIVE

Augusto Del Noce, Eric Voegelin & Modernity
Bjørn Thomassen & Rosario Forlenza
All was darkness, superstition, and despair—
until the Enlightenment and the revolution ushered in
modernity as a radical departure from the old, classical,
and Christian civilization. That, at least, is how many
in the modern West understand their history—and,
therefore, their identity.
Conservatives thinkers, of course, have often
challenged this view. One of the most profound
attempts to correct this narrative and its destructive
side effects was made by the Italian thinker Augusto
Del Noce (1910-1989), especially after his encounter
with the works of his Austrian contemporary, Eric
Voegelin (1901-1985). Del Noce sought to reconceptualize
the modern call to freedom from
within the Christian Catholic tradition. And his
trenchant critique of ‘gnostic modernity’, a legacy of
the Enlightenment was accompanied by an attempt
to develop an alternative ‘Catholic modernity’ instead.
Del Noce’s thought remains crucial to post-war
Europe. Even the Marxist intellectual Lucio Magri,
has asserted: “Augusto Del Noce, one of the finest
minds among the Left’s adversaries … said that the
Communists have both lost and won. They have lost
disastrously in their Promethean quest to reverse
the course of history, promising men freedom and
fraternity even in the absence of God, and in the
knowledge that they are mortal. But they have won
as a necessary factor in accelerating the globalization
of capitalist modernity and its values: materialism,
hedonism, individualism, ethical relativism. An
intransigent Catholic conservative, Del Noce believed
he had foreseen this extraordinary heterogenesis of
ends, though he would have had little reason to be
pleased by it”.
Both Del Noce and Voegelin tried to formulate
a critique of modernity that exposed the tendencies
that could be detected within both communism
and fascism but which could not be reduced to
those ideologies. And both came to argue that in
the modern world, something ‘new’ had taken the
place of utopian ideologies—what Del Noce called
the “opulent society”, the kind of society in which
we live today, driven by consumerism, globalization,
materialism, technocracy, the triumph of finance over
politics, and characterized by a generalized loss of
ethical foundations.
A new Christian Democratic politics
Del Noce grew up and studied in Turin, where
he graduated in philosophy with a dissertation on
Malebranche in 1932. Having been profoundly
marked by the rise of fascism and the horrors of the
Second World War, he saw a need to find ways in
which Catholics could forge an accommodation with
democracy and modern, secular politics. And greatly
inspired by Jacques Maritain, he sought to think
through the possible links between Catholicism and
liberalism.
For Del Noce, this was not merely a scholarly
enterprise: From the 1950s onwards he was strongly
committed to the Christian Democratic project as
formulated by Alcide De Gasperi. However, he was
deeply frustrated with the weaknesses that plagued
Christian Democratic politics.
According to Del Noce, Christian Democrats
needed to provide their own interpretation of history
if they were to avoid being subjugated by the narratives
of other political ideologies. Catholics, he believed,
could be fully modern and democratic, building on
their own ideological and religious roots, without the
need to rely on inspirations and sources alien to their
own traditions. Otherwise, he thought, they would be
unable to counter the claims of the Communist Party,
which had gained tremendous momentum during the
1960s and 1970s.
At the same time, Christian Democrats needed
to articulate an alternative vision to another enemy
more insidious than communism and fascism: what
Del Noce called the “opulent society”, or Western
irreligion. Just like communism and fascism, this was
the product—not the culmination—of the modern
MARCELLO MENCARINI
The late Augusto Del Noce (1910-1989) in his study.
The European Conservative 43