CONSERVATIVE

project. It was against this third ‘enemy’ that a rediscovery
of Catholic tradition as a way of interpreting
the present would stand its real test.
The question of modernity
How should modernity be “re-conceptualized”?
According to Del Noce, philosophers and historians
had taken three different theoretical positions vis-àvis
modernity:
(1) the “anti-modern” attitude (the
“restoration”), also defined as the “archaeological
utopia” of the past (for example: Joseph de Maistre);
(2) the “ultramodern” attitude (the “utopia of
the future”), which eagerly embraces any modernist
developments, including secularization;
(3) the “compromising” attitude, which seeks
a middle ground but thereby “de-ideologizes the
political” and reduces politics to mere “pragmatic
choices”. Del Noce placed Christian Democracy in
this latter third category. As such, Christian Democrats
were losing the “Christian” aspect, the religious élan.
All three positions were unacceptable for Del
Noce because all three were based on a “spiritual
separation between Faith and Reason, Faith and
History, Nature and Grace”. The “central problem
of contemporary Catholic thought”, wrote Del Noce,
is precisely this “Cartesian separatism”. According to
him, the rationalistic philosophy that grew from this
had as an objective the ‘erasure’ of any transcendental
perspectives from history.
Del Noce tried to trace back and reconstruct
a dual development in the history of Western
thought. This meant elaborating an elaborate
intellectual genealogy that went from Descartes to
Nietzsche and passed through Hobbes, Spinoza,
Feuerbach, and Marx, on the one hand, while also
developing a trajectory from Descartes to Rosmini
via Pascal, Malebranche, and Vico. This second line
of thought—“the line of ontologism”—was the basis
for Del Noce’s claim of an “alternative tradition” of
modern thought—one that retained a transcendental
perspective of history.
The encounter with Voegelin
Eric Voegelin lived through both World Wars.
His was an age where the “ordering structures” of
society were collapsing. And his work was an attempt
to understand both wars, as well as the related political
ideologies and mass movements.
Voegelin diagnosed the modern world essentially
as “gnostic”: a worldview driven by the idea that there
is no order in nature, and that humans therefore are
forced to “artificially” create order out of the disorder
of the world through their own devices. This all
stemmed from a sense of alienation or ‘homelessness’.
To Voegelin, this amounted to intellectual hubris that
was deeply nihilistic and which hopelessly emptied
the world of meaning. He recognized this tendency
as underpinning both modern science and modern
politics.
Some of Voegelin’s early writings were about
the roots of Nazism; however, for him, the problem
turned out to be much broader. Like Del Noce,
he also identified a “gnostic tendency” in modern
political movements. He provocatively categorised a
host of other ‘-isms’ under the term ‘gnosticism’—
such as scientism, Marxism, or positivism writ large.
In other words, for Voegelin it was somehow the
very modern worldview and its search for “innerworldly
fulfilment” which was deeply pathological.
Consequently, the end of Nazism was not the end of
“the problem”.
Del Noce encountered Voegelin’s writings in the
late 1960s, after the former had already published such
books as Il problema dell’ateismo (The Problem of Atheism)
in 1964. He went on to write the introductory essay
to the 1968 Italian edition of Voegelin’s 1952 classic,
The New Science of Politics. Titled “Eric Voegelin and the
Critique to the Idea of Modernity”, Del Noce’s essay
explicitly reflected on modernity and secularization
as a ‘new Gnosis’ (or knowledge). His subsequent
works—on Marxism, atheism, and secularization, and
on revolution and tradition, permissivism, and the
opulent society—all reflect Voegelin’s influence.
According to Del Noce, the philosophical
proposals elaborated after the Second World War had
failed in their attempts to liberate themselves from
“fear”. Rather, he thought, “the anti-Platonic new
world constitutes itself in the name of force and fear”.
It is Voegelin, he wrote, who had first identified the
emergence of a new phenomenon: the “prohibition
to ask questions”, a kind of epistemological ‘closure’
that in the name of “science” or revolutionary thought
erects a self-sustaining ideological edifice, declaring
“irrelevant” anything that might serve to question the
very premises set up.
In addition, both Voegelin and Del Noce saw
atheism fundamentally as a spiritual “revolt against
God”. Thus, because the question of truth had been
eliminated, the ideology of atheistic secularism had
ended up constructing “another reality” in its stead—
as a sort of secular projection of a fundamentally
religious dimension.
This, however, was a dangerous construction, a
kind of “horizontal transcendence” which in practice
turns man into God, and which substitutes the
spiritual dimension with a secular notion of fulfilment
and perfection, in which man seeks to be liberated
from any dependency on external forces. This is the
ultimate expression of hubris.
The ‘modern’ theory of secularization is an
integral part of that particular narrative of modernity.
The term ‘secularization’, Del Noce wrote in the 1980s,
“is always to be found in a judgment on contemporary
history typically favourable to the Marxist revolution,
or to the idea of progress; as a consequence, through
the modern age, the mundane character of the world
has triumphed”.
Del Noce relied on the concept of secularization
in his discussion of the opulent—or affluent—society
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Summer 2015