CONSERVATIVE

(what others have called the ‘technological society’).
This is the society that comes after revolutionary
Marxism and which Del Noce considered the last
stage in the process of the loss of the sacred and the
race towards atheism—an atheism that was much
worse than Marxist atheism. According to Del Noce,
secularization means the “de-sacralization” of the
world. Modernity can thus be understood as the
secularization of Gnosis—and not as the secularization
of Christianity.
He wrote: “Having encountered the concept
of Gnosis, we now encounter the concept of
secularization, and perhaps we are then on the right
track trying to pin down its exact meaning. I propose
that this term, so diffused today, is meaningful when
linked to Gnosis, and not to Christianity”.
The essential aspect shared by the various
philosophies of history is not a ‘residual transcendence’
that they retain; rather, it has to do with a trend that
dates back to Joachim of Fiore, a force that animated
English Puritanism and which later fully materialized
during the Enlightenment. It was a Gnostic revolt that
entrusted man with the task of redemption and which
appealed to the masses because of its subversion of
traditional order.
As Del Noce wrote in his introductory 1968
essay, “[t]he spirit of modernity, as the foundation
of evaluations and of modern political movements,
is thus the immanentization of the Christian
eschaton; and the factor that furthers this evolution
is, in [Voegelin’s] view, gnosticism, and therefore the
evolution of the spirit of modernity coincides with
the evolution of Gnosticism”. Del Noce agreed with
Voegelin that modernity enacts an immanentization
of the Christian eschaton—which means that the
human being, through the discovery and unveiling of
the law of history (such as Marx and Engels’s diamat),
can redeem himself in the world.
Del Noce also endorsed Voegelin’s view of
totalitarianism as a modern expression of Gnosis—a
political project that proposed a human selfredemption
and salvation that was entirely historical
and intramundane. Thus, all forms of totalitarianism
are expressions of “political perfectionism” that is
substantially anti-Christian, as it denies that Evil is
constitutive of the human being. Evil is thus reduced
to merely a “consequence of society”.
Gnosis produces a sort of theology of selfliberation—without
the sacramental mediation of
grace. This results in, for example, the Third Reich as
willed by Nazism or the communist realm of freedom
and social justice after the withering away of the State.
In this way, both Nazism and Marxism can be seen as
the most significant types of contemporary Gnosis. At
the same time, Gnosis has Christianity under check:
Redemption through the grace of God is replaced by
‘self-redemption’ through the denial of original sin.
To Voegelin, this idea of the ‘superman’—a
man who, so full of hubris, claims to save himself
and forces others to save themselves—was already
present in Ludwig Feuerbach’s humanism and in
Marx’s scientific socialism. It was also embedded in
every manifestation of socialism, which, along with
earlier medieval heresies, elicited their own historical
origins and produced their own symbolism.
In the context of this current of thought, God
is only a projection of the human spirit. Del Noce
wrote: “God would not exist because His existence
is the product of human demands. This argument
implies that God could exist only if Man would not
need Him”.
It is an untenable argument, yet unquestionable
within the categories of neo-Gnostic thought. To
assign the creation of God to man, as well as the task
of building the ‘Ideal City on Earth’—that which
Christianity placed in Heaven—means to divinize
man. The concept of sin is turned upside down, too:
It is not God who redeems and liberates man but man
who redeems himself from the sin of having created
God.
Yet—and this is probably the only criticism
Del Noce has of Voegelin—the indiscriminate
use of the term ‘Gnosticism’ is confusing. It is
important to distinguish between an old or ‘ancient’
Gnosis and a new, or ‘post-Christian’ Gnosis. This
can lead to, Del Noce says, “an extremely serious
misunderstanding”—that is, “the idea of the unity
of pre-Christian and post-Christian Gnosticism”.
He further writes: “Ancient Gnosticism atheizes the
The philosopher of history Eric Voegelin (1901-
1985) before returning to Germany.
The European Conservative 45