CONSERVATIVE

world (by denying its creation by God) on behalf of
divine transcendence; the post-Christian sort atheizes
it on behalf of a radical immanentism”.
Hegelian Gnosticism—which emerges at the
culmination of a process in which religion is reduced
to philosophy—is a new Gnosticism, a ‘post-Christian’
one, which sees history as the fulfilment of man who,
in overcoming the alienated world, attains a god-like
nature in Promethean fashion.
Following Hegel, what Marxism is fighting is
the ancient form of Gnosticism that abandons the
world by declaring it inherently unfair and evil, and
impossible to correct. “Within the new Gnosticism”,
Del Noce writes, “the activist and revolutionary form
is bound to prevail over the contemplative form”. To
define the process generating the “myth of modernity
and Revolution”—or the “historical watershed that
opens the way to the new man”—nothing is better
than the term “new Gnosis”. “New”, Del Noce
explains, means “post-Christian”, “fallen”, or even
“degenerate”, a term that “Voegelin could perhaps
accept”.
The old Gnosticism continued to survive
in certain pessimistic strands of modern thought.
Thinkers such as Simone Weil and the Italian Pietro
Martinetti, says Del Noce, both of whom exhibited a
rationalistically configured pessimism, struggled with
Christianity. But in the new Gnosticism, such religious
anxiety is denied, as the evil and pain of the world are
not a “gaping wound” but just necessary obstacles to
the achievement of ‘progress’. Ancient gnosis is about
cosmic pessimism and the radical dualism between
God and the world; the new gnosis turns this around
so that the negative becomes a positive.
The spiritual attitude that underlies modern
pessimism has analogies with the pessimism of
ancient Gnosticism. The legitimization of violence
that forms part of modern-day activism was also part
of a modern version of Gnosticism.
The theme of violence forms part of Gnosticism
every time. Modern violence—the sort that became
rife in the 20th century—is not ‘natural’ violence.
It is the outcome of the post-Christian context in
which, for the first time, it has been justified as
‘creative’ violence—the necessary birth pains of the
new world that has to be produced. “Violence and
the Secularization of Gnosticism”, the title of a
1980 Del Noce essay, linked the two aspects of the
problem: violence and the process that gave rise to it,
secularization.
In the end, the encounter with Voegelin
allowed Del Noce to arrive at a deeper theoretical
understanding of the new form of violence that had
arisen in the 20th century—and which increasingly
has characterized the 21st century.
After gnostic modernity
Del Noce recognized that materialism lives
on in contemporary scientism. Materialism ignores
concerns over morality and transcendence, and
justifies and ‘grounds’ the primacy of economy and
finance. In other words, the technocratic, opulent
society is connected to a neo-positivistic scientism
that eliminates the impulse—the motivation—of
the dialectic of revolution and brings alienation to a
maximum.
The opulent society is the highest form of man’s
‘self-estrangement’. It occurs with the reciprocal dehumanization
of the relationship of ‘otherness’ (the
relationship of the self with the self and with other
human beings). Everyone perceives other human
beings as ‘aliens’, strangers, persons not united in a
common devotion towards the same shared values. The
‘other’ thus becomes either an obstacle to overcome
or an instrument for our own self-empowerment.
This is the evil now corroding Western society.
In the post-Marxist, ‘profane’ period of
secularization—which is marked by the advent of the
irreligious, technocratic, ‘opulent society’—democracy
has become simply another form of relativism. The
relativism of Western thought has divorced freedom
from truth, and has opened the way for a totalitarianism
more powerful than communism: a Marxism without
any promise of a future revolution—in short, the
suicide of democracy.
Del Noce here followed Voegelin precisely
as he tried to propose a unitary and comprehensive
interpretation of contemporary history, which aimed
at demonstrating that the ‘theological’ problem was
still open—or could be re-opened. Yet the triumph of
the opulent society took the wind out of any possible
spiritual renewal based on a Christian philosophy, and
on a conception of nature and human beings open to
the transcendent.
These were conflicting dynamics that Del Noce
could not resolve. And in this, perhaps, he was also
brother-in-arms with Voegelin.
Solutions to the deep crisis of modernity with
which we now live are hard to find. But whatever they
may be, they must ultimately stem from a diagnostic
attempt that goes back to the very roots of the crisis.
In this regard, the intense reflections sparked by the
encounter between Del Noce and Voegelin, remains
of vital importance today—perhaps more than ever
before.
Bjørn Thomassen is Associate Professor at the Department of
Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University, Denmark.
He works broadly across the social and political sciences, and
his research areas include urban studies, cultural and political
dimensions of globalisation, nationalism, identity and memory
politics, multiple modernities, and politics & religion.
Rosario Forlenza is a Research Fellow at the Blinken
European Institute, Columbia University, and a Marie Curie
Fellow at the University of Padua. He is a historian of modern
Europe and 20th century Italy whose main fields of expertise
are political anthropology, symbolic and cultural politics,
politics and religion, cinema and propaganda, memory studies,
democracy and democratization.
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Summer 2015