REVIEWS
The Nonconformist
Gerald J. Russello
The Age of Secularization
By Augusto Del Noce
Edited and translated by Carlo Lancellotti
(McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017)
A n American approaches this book with
some hesitation. Although Augusto
Del Noce (1910–1989) is one of the most
important figures in twentieth-century Ital-
ian political philosophy, he remains little
known in this country. But Del Noce faced
a situation similar to our own, in which
many cultural institutions are accommodat-
ing themselves to the left and a new elite is
emerging by posing as a revolutionary van-
guard, promoting “self-realization” rather
than traditional norms.
Born in Tuscany, Del Noce spent much
of his early life in Turin, where he received
a degree in philosophy in 1932. His career
splits into three general stages. Before the
war, Del Noce focused on early modern phi-
losophy, especially the French metaphysician
Nicolas Malebranche. During the 1930s
and into the Second World War, Del Noce
taught and published on contemporary
French thought, with which he had come
into contact before the war. Turin was a cen-
ter of anti-fascist thought, which Del Noce
also absorbed into his work. After the war,
he concentrated on the relationship between
Catholicism and Communism, and was one
of the early Italian interpreters of Jacques
Maritain. During these years, Del Noce
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unraveled arguments for a continuing alli-
ance between Communists and Catholics,
who had joined together to fight the fascists.
Del Noce contended that liberal goods, like
democracy and individual freedoms, could
only occur within a Christian framework,
so Marxism, like fascism before it, needed
to be rejected. In the 1960s and 1970s, Del
Noce moved away from academic philoso-
phy, writing popular essays and becoming
a member of the Italian Senate, where he
supported the Christian Democrats and
Antonio De Gasperi, who served as prime
minister from 1945 to 1953.
These topics may seem of little interest to
American readers. Marxism was never a direct
force for social change in the United States.
And didn’t we defeat fascism in the Good
War? But that attitude would be mistaken.
The social and cultural dysfunction evident
today was already present in the Italy of the
1960s. Drawing on writers like Maritain and
Eric Voegelin, Del Noce saw further than most
of his contemporaries. Del Noce transcends
his midcentury setting because he recognized
that Marxism is more than a reductionist
economic theory. At the same time, and per-
haps more fundamentally, it is a materialist
and atheist anthropology whose descendants
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haunt contemporary public debate in the guise
of progressivism or secular humanism.
Del Noce saw that the anthropological
elements of Marxism would devour its other
parts. Rather than pointing toward the end
of history, “Marxism has ended up being a
stage in the development of the technologi-
cal and affluent society, which accepts all its
negations of traditional thought but at the
same time eliminates its messianic and (in
its own way) religious aspects.” What is left
after the revolution is a materialist and athe-
istic core that thrives even when the Marxist
political and economic program fails. What
this meant in practice was that the affluent
society (società opulenta—the same Italian
title used for John Kenneth Galbraith’s
famous work, of which Del Noce seems to
have been aware) proved more resilient than
its radical critics hoped. Just as it produced
enough material goods to satisfy consumer
demand, foiling Marxist predictions of
immiseration and eventual class war, it
also transformed Marxism’s teleology into
a nontranscendent spirituality that justified
and encouraged the pursuit of these worldly
goods.
In the 1964 essay “Dialogue Between the
Church and Modern Culture,” Del Noce
argues that the affluent society replaces
universal values with subjective ones.
Although it includes no transcendent God,
this perspective is no less of a “religion” than
is Christianity. The position that Del Noce
calls “natural irreligion”
is characterized by the refusal even to
pose the problem in terms of theism ver-
sus atheism, because it is not interesting
[original emphasis], and by a relativism
so absolute that all ideas are viewed as
relative to the psychological and social
situation of those who affirm them, and
so can be evaluated from a utilitarian
standpoint, as life stimulants. As a con-
sequence, everything becomes purely an
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object of commerce. This is symbolized
by the disappearance of modesty; in the
most elementary forms everything is
reduced to “water, sleep, sex,” falling, in
short, into pure animalism.
The reference to modesty is striking, in
that Del Noce sees that virtue as important
to the maintenance of civilization. Remov-
ing objective standards of behavior points
toward a society whose main goal is to sat-
isfy physical appetites. Yet Del Noce has no
a priori opposition to technology. Indeed,
he insists that “condemning technical activ-
ity is so foreign to Christian thought,” and
he is careful to insist he is no reactionary.
The problem is that in the affluent society
technological and economic “well-being”
becomes the final goal of all life, individual
and political.
In other words, Del Noce rejects the
Marxist view that economics drives culture.
Without culture and its attendant explana-
tion through story and ritual, what is left
instead is “the quest for well-being,” where
intellectuals “serve the public not in order to
elevate it but to satisfy the need for novelty.”
One need only look at the current adulation
of TED talks or Silicon Valley to see confir-
mation of his prediction.
The rejection of transcendent principles
sets the modern age apart from previous
eras. It is not the case that other societies or
moments agreed about metaphysical order
or the right way to live. Early Christianity
fought over the nature of divinity; the Ref-
ormation wrestled with the sacraments and
the Church as mediator of grace; even early
modernity fought over whether a personal
God exists and acts in the life of the world.
What is different now is that the debate
over whether transcendent principles should
guide individual or social lives no longer
seems to be an important one to have. Even
among those who participate in ethical dis-
cussion, the ethic of self-realization—often
 Reviews
expressed as “rights talk”—predominates.
Too often, these so-called rights are based
on the notion that “my truth”—what Del
Noce calls the “psychological and social
situation”—is incontestable, dissolving the
world into a multitude of perspectives that
are incomprehensible to one another. The
only thing that is common is whether these
individual truths can be monetized, some-
thing the affluent society does very well.
Del Noce thus stands at the beginning of
the debate concerning the future of liberalism
now breaking out among Catholic thinkers
like Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, Ross
Douthat, Robert Miller, and R. R. Reno.
Some, like Vermeule and Deneen, argue that
liberalism is in its final stages and that it is
not compatible with a true understanding
of human flourishing or Western civiliza-
tion more broadly. Others, such as Douthat,
recognize the challenges of liberalism but
argue for some set of compromises or other
arrangements with the liberal order, fearing
the alternative is political unrest and even
violence.
Del Noce prefigures the main lineaments
of this debate. For example, he considers,
then rejects, a strategy similar to the one
identified by Rod Dreher as the Benedict
Option. Del Noce describes this position as
affirming Christians’ “status as a minority,”
encouraging them to “focus on their own
interior purification and apostolic work,
which is the only way to bring about the
conversion of their adversaries.” The danger
is that such a “catacombal” church will focus
on a constant search for its own faults, leav-
ing an opening for those who advocate for
the church to adapt to the contemporary
world. In a surprising conclusion, Del Noce
writes, “the transition to progressivism,
starting from an apparently opposite view, is
actually easy.” This insight is one not always
appreciated by proponents of the Benedict
Option. Overcritical internality may further
progressivism, not protect against it.
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Del Noce also acknowledges the hope that
affluent-technological society can accommo-
date traditional ways of life. All that is nec-
essary, it might be thought, is to extract the
“goods” of secular ideologies like Marxism or
liberalism and ally them with Christianity. In
a 1967 piece written specifically for Catholics,
Del Noce contended that the “peculiarity” of
modern atheism “is that it does not call itself
explicitly atheistic, because it limits itself to
what is verifiable, making no pronunciation
about the unverifiable.” Because it dwells in
the realm of “facts,” it seems that this form
of atheism does not impinge belief. Yet the
admission that religious beliefs are unverifi-
able by scientific reasoning invites their dis-
missal as irrational.
The apparent objectivity of the new athe-
ism is a ruse, however. For Del Noce, “due
to its professed relativism about values and
the concrete evaluations it leads to, [atheism]
replaces a direct struggle against religion
with an indirect one and thereby endangers
religion even more, because it erodes the
religious dimension until it erases from con-
sciousness all traces of the question of God”
[original emphasis]. The modern version of
the struggle between belief and unbelief is
not a headlong fight between God and not-
God. It is a dismissal of the theological ques-
tion as irrelevant to scientific inquiry.
As Vermeule has written, however, liberal-
ism has its own liturgical character, its sacred
holidays and ceremonies, its saints and vil-
lains, its eschatology in the form of eventual
triumph over “hate” by the forces of “toler-
ance,” and even—as we see in the apologies
of public and private figures when they have
transgressed liberal orthodoxy—confession
and redemption narratives. A society that
celebrates Earth Day and recognizes Wicca
as a religion is not a Christian society, but
that does not mean it isn’t based on particu-
lar beliefs about society and human nature.
Such a society can satisfy a human need for
the sacramental, but does so in a way that
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leaves holiness and morality at the mercy of
markets and political power.
But what is so terrible about an increas-
ingly rich society that provides endless con-
sumer choice, in ethics no less than foods and
services? Del Noce hints at a response in an
essay titled “Common Morality in the Nine-
teenth Century and the Morality of Today.”
Responding to a comment by Sartre that
man should arrogate to himself the ability to
“create,” a power formerly attributed to God
alone, Del Noce proposes that, in human
hands, this creative potential is necessarily
destructive and negative. He writes: “It is
not coincidental that [liberalism] went hand
in hand with the fortune of the works of the
Marquis de Sade, who on this occasion has
been elevated to the ranks of a great moral-
ist. When every objective order is denied, in
what else can the will find a content except
in the idea of destroying this order?” Writ-
ten in the annus horribilis of 1968, even Del
Noce could not have foreseen how prophetic
this prediction would prove. In 2017, France
officially classified one of the Marquis’s
works as a “treasure” of French literature.
Like Deneen, then, Del Noce thinks that a
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successful secularism is one that ends in its
negation. A world that elevates the rational
will descend to the irrational, and a society
that looks for a god in each of us will instead
find a beast.
So what is the answer? Like many con-
servative thinkers, Del Noce offers a better
diagnosis than a cure. A student of Maritain,
and writing in a setting where the Church
was associated with authoritarianism, Del
Noce rejected an “alliance with conservative
forces.” Rather, he thought the liberal age
could be accommodated to the technologi-
cal, so long as transcendent religious belief is
preserved. Democracy devolves into tyranny
of a political or cultural kind without the
ballast of a belief system outside itself. So
political efforts should be dedicated to recog-
nizing the separate existence of that religious
aspect of life, and cultural efforts made to
recognize the different vision of the person
presented by religious belief.
Gerald J. Russello is editor of the University
Bookman and author of The Postmodern Imagi-
nation of Russell Kirk.