Insightful and poignant, as always. I greatly enjoy your writings here, as well as your contributions to John Steppling’s Aesthetic Resistance podcast. Thanks for writing.
In The Problem of Atheism, Del Noce argues several key themes. Two are worth noting here. First, the seemingly useful and “scientific” elements of Marxist thought—its economic and cultural tools of analysis—can’t be separated from a radical atheism that “is the key to Marx’s whole work.” Marx offers a new anthropology that completely rejects the Platonic-Christian understanding of man and society. As Del Noce writes:
In Platonic-Christian thought, man is in a necessary relationship with God and in a contingent relationship with society. . . . For Marxist atheism, the relationship with society becomes necessary and constitutive. Therefore in Marxism the Christian subordination of politics to ethics must be replaced by the absorption of ethics into politics.
This has consequences. For the Christian, every man has a vertical obligation of worship, and also a horizontal responsibility for his fellow human beings. But finally each person is a unique individual bearing the imago Dei, from which his or her dignity proceeds. For Marx there is no such thing as man outside “social man”—man in his social relations determined not by God or natural law, but by the economic conditions of history. Truth and the legitimate use of power take on a flexibility shaped by political goals.
As Del Noce notes, “Marx reconciles morality and politics precisely because he negates [Christian] anthropology (think Lenin’s famous sentence: morality is what advances the proletarian revolution). . . .” For Marx, philosophy is no longer a search to understand the world. Instead, it becomes the tool to change it; to bend the world to human will. The resulting bias toward activism and acquiring power creates a curious form of atheist religion, i.e., “the elevation of politics to religion, which is a radically new phenomenon in history.” And this “peculiar, inverted theocratic form engendered by [Marxist-influenced] activism” helps to explain an inevitable drift toward totalitarian intolerance.
Put simply, in rigorous Marxist thought, the ends do justify the means. Christian progressives who try to purify Marxism of its atheist elements or who seek common ground with Marxist-inspired social movements delude themselves. In effect, they build for their followers a halfway house to unbelief.
For Marx, philosophy is no longer a search to understand the world. Instead, it becomes the tool to change it; to bend the world to human will.
Goods Displacing God
A second key theme in The Problem of Atheism emerges in Del Noce’s 1963 essay, “Notes on Western Irreligion.” From the 1930s through the early Cold War, Western nations, and especially the United States, tended to highlight their religious faith as an answer to “godless” Nazism, fascism, and Communism. But in the late 1950s, Western elites shifted. They started tuning their message to a different melody. They would beat Communism not by more God but by more goods. In other words, they would outperform “the Reds” with better science, better technology—more and better refrigerators, cars, and televisions.
It worked. Western technology created affluent societies of unparalleled abundance. This new wealth simultaneously drove Soviet Communism into the ground and rendered the God question irrelevant for tens of millions of distracted consumers. Del Noce was never a Luddite. He understood and valued technology’s many benefits. But he also saw that man’s tools tend to become, in practice, man’s objects of worship because they produce immediate, tangible results.
By comparison, the biblical God can seem much more leisurely in answering human prayers and more ambiguous in his responses. Unfortunately, the technological spirit tends toward a world where man himself becomes the raw material and victim of his tools; “a world without soul and without interiority.” Thus, in the end, technology can become “the most complete negation of the awareness of sin, because the latter cannot be cured by any technique but only by a supernatural action—namely, by grace.”
In its material success, the secularized West has become the perfect distillation of appealing, practical atheism. God is not hunted down. He’s rendered vestigial. And then he’s forgotten. That is, if not the plan, at least the effect.
“In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Insightful and poignant, as always. I greatly enjoy your writings here, as well as your contributions to John Steppling’s Aesthetic Resistance podcast. Thanks for writing.
Hopefully we will find a solution as we are not the first who has been there, as you have mentioned an "ambivalent" Babel tower..
Very true. Thank you!
In The Problem of Atheism, Del Noce argues several key themes. Two are worth noting here. First, the seemingly useful and “scientific” elements of Marxist thought—its economic and cultural tools of analysis—can’t be separated from a radical atheism that “is the key to Marx’s whole work.” Marx offers a new anthropology that completely rejects the Platonic-Christian understanding of man and society. As Del Noce writes:
In Platonic-Christian thought, man is in a necessary relationship with God and in a contingent relationship with society. . . . For Marxist atheism, the relationship with society becomes necessary and constitutive. Therefore in Marxism the Christian subordination of politics to ethics must be replaced by the absorption of ethics into politics.
This has consequences. For the Christian, every man has a vertical obligation of worship, and also a horizontal responsibility for his fellow human beings. But finally each person is a unique individual bearing the imago Dei, from which his or her dignity proceeds. For Marx there is no such thing as man outside “social man”—man in his social relations determined not by God or natural law, but by the economic conditions of history. Truth and the legitimate use of power take on a flexibility shaped by political goals.
As Del Noce notes, “Marx reconciles morality and politics precisely because he negates [Christian] anthropology (think Lenin’s famous sentence: morality is what advances the proletarian revolution). . . .” For Marx, philosophy is no longer a search to understand the world. Instead, it becomes the tool to change it; to bend the world to human will. The resulting bias toward activism and acquiring power creates a curious form of atheist religion, i.e., “the elevation of politics to religion, which is a radically new phenomenon in history.” And this “peculiar, inverted theocratic form engendered by [Marxist-influenced] activism” helps to explain an inevitable drift toward totalitarian intolerance.
Put simply, in rigorous Marxist thought, the ends do justify the means. Christian progressives who try to purify Marxism of its atheist elements or who seek common ground with Marxist-inspired social movements delude themselves. In effect, they build for their followers a halfway house to unbelief.
For Marx, philosophy is no longer a search to understand the world. Instead, it becomes the tool to change it; to bend the world to human will.
Goods Displacing God
A second key theme in The Problem of Atheism emerges in Del Noce’s 1963 essay, “Notes on Western Irreligion.” From the 1930s through the early Cold War, Western nations, and especially the United States, tended to highlight their religious faith as an answer to “godless” Nazism, fascism, and Communism. But in the late 1950s, Western elites shifted. They started tuning their message to a different melody. They would beat Communism not by more God but by more goods. In other words, they would outperform “the Reds” with better science, better technology—more and better refrigerators, cars, and televisions.
It worked. Western technology created affluent societies of unparalleled abundance. This new wealth simultaneously drove Soviet Communism into the ground and rendered the God question irrelevant for tens of millions of distracted consumers. Del Noce was never a Luddite. He understood and valued technology’s many benefits. But he also saw that man’s tools tend to become, in practice, man’s objects of worship because they produce immediate, tangible results.
By comparison, the biblical God can seem much more leisurely in answering human prayers and more ambiguous in his responses. Unfortunately, the technological spirit tends toward a world where man himself becomes the raw material and victim of his tools; “a world without soul and without interiority.” Thus, in the end, technology can become “the most complete negation of the awareness of sin, because the latter cannot be cured by any technique but only by a supernatural action—namely, by grace.”
In its material success, the secularized West has become the perfect distillation of appealing, practical atheism. God is not hunted down. He’s rendered vestigial. And then he’s forgotten. That is, if not the plan, at least the effect.
Del Noce saw that man’s tools tend to become, in practice, man’s objects of worship because they produce immediate, tangible results. https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2021/12/79316/
Thanks for a beautiful essay. It made me think of Tomas Transtromer.
Here's one off his:
Allegro
After a black day , I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.
The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.
The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no taxes to Caesar.
I shove my hands into my haydnpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.
I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
"We do not surrender. But want peace."
The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.
The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.