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3 Claude Buffier and
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27 Jena Romanticism and Its
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28 Enlightenment and
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29 Jacob Burckhardt and
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30 The Distant Relation:
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Eoin S. Thomson
31 Mr Simson’s Knotty Case:
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32 Orthodoxy and
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Stephen J.A. Ward
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40 Reason and Self-Enactment
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48 Media, Memory, and the
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David Williams
49 An Aristotelian Account
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Louis Groarke
50 Social and Political Bonds:
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F.M. Barnard
51 Archives and the Event of God:
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52 Between the Queen and
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John R. Cole
53 Nature and Nurture in French
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Martin S. Staum
54 Public Passion:
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57 Hegel’s Phenomenology:
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Yvan Lamonde
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59 Ideas, Concepts, and Reality
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60 The Enigma of Perception
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Peter R. Sedgwick
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Michel Ducharme
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63 From White to Yellow:
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Rotem Kowner
64 The Crisis of Modernity
Augusto Del Noce
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65 Imprinting Britain:
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66 The Form of Politics:
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73 God and Government: 79 Progress, Pluralism, and
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Thought Colonialism, Past and Present
Jarrett A. Carty David Williams

74 The Age of Secularization 80 Beyond Tragedy and Eternal

Augusto Del Noce Peace:
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by Carlo Lancellotti Relations in the Thought
of Friedrich Nietzsche
75 Emancipatory Thinking:
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Elaine Stavro of an Idea
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77 The Aesthetics of Fear in 83 Imperial Paradoxes:

German Romanticism Training the Senses and Tasting
Paola Mayer the Eighteenth Century
Robert James Merrett
78 Objectively Engaged
Journalism: An Ethic 84 The Problem of Atheism
Stephen J.A. Ward Augusto Del Noce
Edited and Translated by
Carlo Lancellotti
The Problem of Atheism

Augusto Del Noce

Edited and translated by Carlo Lancellotti

McGill-Queen’s University Press

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: The problem of atheism / Augusto Del Noce; edited and translated
by Carlo Lancellotti.
Other titles: Problema dell’ateismo. English
Names: Del Noce, Augusto, 1910–1989, author. | Lancellotti, Carlo,
1965– editor, translator.
Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas; 84.
Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history
of ideas; 84 | Translation of: Il problema dell’ateismo. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210295082 | Canadiana (ebook)
20210295368 | ISBN 9780228008194 (cloth) | ISBN 9780228009061
(paper) | ISBN 9780228009375 (ePDF) | ISBN 9780228009382 (ePUB)
Subjects: LCSH: Atheism. | LCSH: Philosophy, Marxist. | LCSH: Communism. |
LCSH: Philosophy, Modern—History.
Classification: LCC BL2747.3 .D4513 2021 | DDC 211/.8—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5 /13 New Baskerville.
 Contents

Translator’s Introduction xiii

I. The Concept of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a
Problem (1964) 3
1 On the Concept of Atheism 7
(Rationalism – Empiricism – Rationalist Denial of Original Sin – Classification
of Atheism – Schopenhauer, Comte, Stirner, Sartre, Juvalta – An Objection)

2 Atheism, Anti-Clericalism, Heresy 34

(Essence of Anti-Clericalism – Renouvier – Martinetti)

3 Criteria for a History of Atheism 48

4 From the Concept of Atheism to the History of Philosophy
as a Problem 50
(Axiological Meaning of Modernity – Atheism and Historicism – Three Objections)

5 Visions of History and the Idea of Revolution 60

(The Four Essential Visions – Their Opponents – Need for a Critique)

6 Towards a Critique of the Ordinary Vision of the History

of Philosophy 63
(Idealist Vision – Brunchvicg – Philosophy through History – Marxist Visions)

7 The Role of the Religious Philosophy of Existence in the Problematization

of the History of Philosophy 70
(Religious Existentialism – Decadentism – Ontologism)

8 The Place of Marxism in the History of Philosophy 83

(My View – Historicist Objections – Unique Philosophical Character
of Marxism – Consequences)
 x Contents

9 Contemporary History as Philosophical History 99

10 The Greatest Mistake When Interpreting Marxism,
and Its Consequences 101
(Relationship between Marx and Feuerbach – Continuations of Feuerbach)

11 The Form of the Critical Power of Marxism 114

(Annihilation of Historicism and Existentialism – Fascism – Nazism –
Evolution of Communism – Contradiction and Necessary Crisis of Marxism)

12 The Nietzsche Problem 140

(Incompatibility of Marx and Nietzsche – Nietzsche and Nazism – Shestov)

13 Order of Research 157

II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism as a Political

Reality (1946) 169
1 The Methodological Interpretation 169
2 Marx’s Non-Philosophy 190
3 Marxism and Western Culture 201

III. Marxism and the Qualitative Leap (1948) 215

1 The Qualitative Leap 215
2 Critique of the Christian-Marxist Interpretation 222
3 Christianity and Marxism 230

IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963) 237

1 Atheism or “Natural Irreligion”? 237
2 On Contemporary Sociologism 260

V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 272

1 Absolute Atheism and Practical Atheism 272
2 Atheistic Moments in the History of Philosophy 282
3 The Atheistic Option 289
4 Atheism and Criterion of Truth 299
5 Pascal’s Definition of Atheism 302
 Contents xi

VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 308

1 Lucien Goldmann’s Marxist “Pari” 308
2 The Standard Secular Vision of the History of Modern Philosophy 318
3 Inevitability of the Cartesian Beginning 329
4 The Concept of Catholic Reformation 334
5 Goldmann on Descartes and Pascal 335
6 The “Significant Structure” of Cartesianism 342
7 The Crisis of Molinism in Descartes 356
8 From Descartes to Pascal 368
9 From Pascal to Malebranche 383
10 From Malebranche to Vico 394
11 Continuity of the Philosophy of the Catholic Reformation 416

VII. Political Theism and Atheism (1962) 420

1 The Postulate of Progress and the Postulate of Sin 424
2 Free Will and Political Freedom 440

Conclusion 450

Index of Names 475

 Translator’s Introduction

In the early 1960s, publisher Il Mulino offered Augusto Del Noce the
opportunity to publish a collection of his works. The result was, in 1964,
his first book, Il problema dell’ateismo, which he always regarded as foun-
dational to his whole thought and often cited (or even “cannibalized”)
in his subsequent writings. In Italy it remains his best known work,
still in print over fifty years later, and counted as “one of the important
books of the 20th century.”1 As such, its translation into English was
definitely overdue.2 However, in presenting it to English-speaking read-
ers two warnings seem to be in order.
First, unlike Del Noce’s later books, The Problem of Atheism was written
before the deep cultural transformations of the mid- to late 1960s. It is
rich with premonitions, and even predictions, of the new cultural land-
scape that was already taking shape, as one would expect from a very
perceptive thinker like Del Noce. But many of its concerns come from
the previous era – the great European crisis from 1917 to 1945, followed
by the Cold War. Readers who appreciated Del Noce’s insights into
the sexual revolution, or the student protests of 1968, or the New Left,
ought to be aware that, in The Problem of Atheism, these phenomena have
not yet entered his radar screen (however, the rise of the Western “afflu-
ent society” is very present to his mind).

1 Armando Torno, “Ecco dove porta il rifiuto del peccato,” Corriere della Sera,
18 June 2010, 43.
2 This volume follows my two previous Del Nocean translations, The Crisis of
Modernity (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015); and The
Age of Secularization (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017).
xiv Translator’s Introduction

Second, it is objectively a challenging book, for more than one reason:

length, complexity, the apparent heterogeneity of the material, and
the rather peculiar way in which it is organized. Del Noce himself, in the
very first sentence, confesses that “the apparently essayistic nature of this
book … makes its structure and unity hard to grasp.”3 Based on the table
of contents, a reader expects a sequence of seven essays but then is
immediately shocked to discover that the “introductory” one, “The
Concept of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem,” is not
an essay in any meaningful sense of the word, but rather a compilation
of a dozen chapters dedicated to a dizzying variety of subjects and
authors. Only at the end does Del Noce provide an outline of the remain-
der of the volume: two essays on Marxism, one on secularization in the
West, one on the definition of atheism, one on seventeenth-century
philosophy, and one on liberalism, followed by a conclusion. Some read-
ers may then wonder why seventeenth-century philosophy is sandwiched
between atheism and liberalism. They may also be shocked anew by the
fact that the sixth essay, like the first, is disproportionately long, adding
up to 112 pages of dense analysis of the history of early modern European
philosophy. In truth, the “structure and unity” of The Problem of Atheism
is very “hard to grasp” and has baffled many well-intentioned readers.
Here I will try to elucidate it.
I think that what needs to be understood is that Del Noce’s goal in
assembling the book was to document an entire intellectual experience.
This experience is outlined in section 13 of “The Concept of Atheism
and the History of Philosophy as a Problem,” which should probably
be read first because it is the place where Del Noce comes closest to
providing a traditional introduction to the book. His objective was not
to present “a philosophy that I held as absolutely certain”4 (because, as
he explains, he did not have one) but to illustrate his whole trajectory
of thought up to 1964. Therefore, he chose not a thematically homo-
geneous group of essays but, rather, a sequence of published and unpub-
lished texts that track the development of his research. “It is a collection
not of essays but of compressed books. But it was not possible for me
to do otherwise because it was a matter of illustrating the necessary inter-
dependence of a sequence of problems that are apparently unrelated,

3 Page 3. In this introduction page numbers with no other bibliographic informa-

tion refer to the present volume.
4 Page 158.
 Translator’s Introduction xv

and only partially solved to this day.”5 The desire to communicate an

entire experience explains not only why the essays seem heterogeneous
but also why they are not ordered logically but (roughly) chronologi-
cally: “presenting the essays in the temporal order in which they had
appeared seemed to me a better counsel, in order to communicate with
the reader through an experience that started at the ethical-political
level and led me to run into a number of philosophical problems.”6
What also needs to be explained, however, is the unusual length of
the introductory essay. About that, it is instructive to read the story of the
birth of the book as recounted by Nicola Matteucci, Del Noce’s friend
and editor at Il Mulino, in his Introduction to the 1990 edition:

We invited him to collect some of his essays for us, starting with those on
Marxism and then adding a few on the seventeenth century, which dealt with
political themes … We agreed to publish two volumes, one on the seven-
teenth century, Riforma cattolica e filosofia moderna (of which only the first
tome appeared in 1965, one year after Ateismo) and one containing some
essays he would select. Having finally received these essays we immediately
sent them to the printer, and very soon they were typeset, proofread and
paginated. We were just waiting – patiently – for a brief introduction outlin-
ing the overall meaning of the volume. The wait lasted over a year, until we
finally forced him to wrap things up. He showed up, apologizing, with a
manuscript which was almost as long as the book, so that (in the first edi-
tion) we were forced to use Roman numerals for the introduction … This
Introduction was 212 pages, and if we consider that the six essays in the col-
lection added up to 364 pages, we can say that this was a (new) book within
a collection of (old) essays.7

So, the “apparent disorder”8 of The Problem of Atheism is due to the fact
that not only did Del Noce assemble a group of heterogeneous “com-
pressed books,” he also prefaced them with a brand new book that
revisited, expanded, and corrected his whole reflection of the previous
two decades. Matteucci wisely suggests that “this new book perhaps

5 Ibid.
6 Page 450. This passage is followed by another interesting recapitulation of his
“experience.”
7 Il problema dell’ateismo (Bologna, Il Mulino, 1990), XV.
8 Page 450.
xvi Translator’s Introduction

ought to be read after the essays it intends to present.”9 In fact, a fruitful

reading strategy might be to extract various sections from “The Concept
of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem” and read them
in conjunction with the older essays they revisit/expand/correct. For
example, sections 8 through 11 should be read after essays II and III;
sections 1 through 3 after essay V.
Accordingly, the three main sections of this Introduction are devoted
to three major themes that run through the book and can be used as
guides to organize the material: Marxism, atheism in general, and the
history of modern philosophy.10 In the fourth section I briefly comment
on Del Noce’s use of the term “Ontologism.” In the last section I explain
how I augmented the original table of contents to help readers orient
themselves, and offer my own list of the sections I wish I had initially
read (and in what order) when I first came across The Problem of Atheism.

1. On Marxism

The first “compressed book” in The Problem of Atheism is clearly comprised

of the two oldest essays in the collection, “Marx’s ‘Non-Philosophy’ and
Communism as a Political Reality” from 1946, and “Marxism and the
Qualitative Leap” from 1948. Obviously, the subject is Marxism and,
more specifically, Marxism as a philosophy. This qualification is crucial
because these essays aim at refuting claims that Marx was not primarily
a philosopher and that his mature works as a political economist (most
notably Capital) do not rely on his youthful philosophical reflection, so
that they can be considered in isolation. The 1946–48 essays are supple-
mented by a wealth of additional material in the 1964 introduction,
“The Concept of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem” –
in particular, section 8, The Place of Marxism in the History of Philosophy;
section 10, The Greatest Mistake When Interpreting Marxism, and Its
Consequences; and section 11, The Form of the Critical Power of Marxism.
However, before any further discussion, it will be helpful to understand
the journey that led Del Noce to his Marxist studies and why they are,
in a sense, the foundation of his whole intellectual experience.

9 Il problema dell’ateismo, XV.

10 This classification is somewhat arbitrary, of course, because for Del Noce, on
the one hand, Marxism is the type of modern atheism and, on the other hand, modern
history is best described as the era in which atheism manifested itself.
 Translator’s Introduction xvii

The 1946 essay was the fruit of a process that had started roughly ten
years earlier. Nineteen thirty-six had been an important year because
of two events, one political and one cultural. The political event was
Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, which revealed to Del Noce (then
twenty-six years old) the true face of Fascism. Italy’s colonial war of
aggression against a poor African country represented “the affirmation
of the principle of Force as the law of history against the ideal of Justice.”11
It cleared away all possible illusions that Fascism could be a vehicle to
affirm any positive ideals because, in fact it, was just the instrument for
“the pure will to power of a man who did not lead towards any ideal
finality, but used all values – religion and country, morality and tradi-
tion – as tools for his personal self-affirmation.”12 The cultural event
was the publication in France of Jacques Maritain’s Humanisme Intégral.
In a 1984 interview Del Noce remembers being “one of its very first
Italian readers.”13 It was “the book by this French philosopher that
struck me the most, to the point that I almost learned it by heart.”14
Whereas the Ethiopian war had convinced Del Noce of the moral
necessity of anti-Fascism, Integral Humanism revealed to him the pos-
sibility of being a Catholic anti-Fascist. Until then, in Italy active opposi-
tion to Mussolini’s regime had been mostly secular, either liberal or
socialist or Communist. Italian Catholics generally were not Fascist but
had hoped that somehow Fascism could be a stepping stone to “some-
thing else,” which typically meant a restoration of a Catholic confes-
sional state inspired by medieval Christendom. This hope had been
given some justification by the Lateran Treaties of 1929, which had
granted that “the Catholic Apostolic Roman religion is the only State
religion.”15 However, during the 1930s it became clear that Fascism
viewed religion purely as an instrumentum regni. In 1931, the Fascist
government had shut down most Catholic newspapers and then
attempted to suppress the youth wing of the Catholic Action, the largest
Catholic lay organization. By 1936, faced with the rise of Nazism in

11 A. Del Noce, “L’umanesimo frainteso,” 30 Giorni no. 4 (April 1986): 70.

12 A. Del Noce, “Genesi e significato della prima sinistra cattolica italiana post-
fascista,” in Modernismo, fascismo, comunismo: Aspetti e figure della cultura e della politica dei
cattolici nel ‘900, ed. G. Rossini (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1972), 462.
13 Del Noce, Crisis of Modernity, 266.
14 Ibid.
15 Lateran Pacts, article 1.
xviii Translator’s Introduction

Germany, the Ethiopian war, and then the horrors of the Spanish Civil
War, it was becoming clear to the new generation that Fascism could
only be opposed. However, the traditional “medievalist” and “integralist”
vision of the relationship between Christianity and politics seemed inad-
equate to the fight. After all, it had developed during the nineteenth
century in opposition to the forms of liberalism and Socialism that had
originated from the French Revolution. As such it was unequipped to
criticize Fascism, which fought the exact same enemies, and claimed
to defend national tradition. Maritain’s Integral Humanism broke this
impasse and felt like a breath of fresh air. It was the proposal of an non-
modernist form of political Catholicism, which remained faithful to the
ideals of the old civitas Christiana, but in light of them developed a radical
critique of totalitarianism and made it possible to disassociate Catholicism
from Fascism.
Understanding the precise significance of Maritain’s proposal, and
Del Noce’s reception thereof, would require a lengthy discussion. What
matters here is that Catholics of Del Noce’s generation felt that Integral
Humanism gave them “the right to be anti-Fascists as Catholics” and that
it was precisely in this context that they faced the question of the relationship
between Christianity and Marxism.16 At that time, French and Italian secular
culture was rediscovering Marxist thought after several decades in which
the dominant intellectual trends had been neo-Idealism (represented
by thinkers like Croce and Gentile in Italy, Brunschvicg in France) and
later existentialism. This renewed interest in Marx was also motivated
by anti-Fascism because both neo-Idealism and existentialism had been
unable to sustain an effective opposition to the regimes of Hitler and
Mussolini (in fact, Gentile had even embraced Fascism and Heidegger’s
attitude towards Nazism was at best ambiguous). Thus, for Del Noce
and his peers, the question of a possible Catholic-Marxist alliance against
Nazi-Fascism arose very naturally. In his 1981 book Il cattolico comunista
he writes: “I remember perfectly when I got my first information about
Marx’s philosophical thought, through Auguste Cornu’s book, in the
spring of 1942, and the impression I felt, precisely as if philosophical
Marxism allowed me, a Catholic, to give a precise definition to my moral
reaction against Fascism … Marx seemed to me to be the thinker who
had developed most deeply the critique of the bourgeois world … He

16 Del Noce, “L’umanesimo frainteso,” 70.

 Translator’s Introduction xix

had not criticized religion, but bourgeois religion … even though he

had not made the distinction that to me seemed necessary; but his
critique came from an implicitly religious perspective, because the
bourgeois world was defined precisely by its deformation of religion.”17
As Del Noce explains, the attempt to reconcile Catholicism and
Marxism was born as “a lived state of mind, as a moral reaction, in search
of a doctrine.”18 This search faced an obvious stumbling block: Marx’s
atheism, which already Maritain had regarded as essential to the Marxist
worldview.19 Overcoming this difficulty became the chief intellectual
concern of a group of young Catholic intellectuals who formed the so-
called Communist-Catholic movement, which played a significant role
in postwar Italian political history. Its main representatives were Felice
Balbo (1913–64) and Franco Rodano (1920–83). In the early 1940s,
Del Noce was a sympathizer, but by the end of the war he was already
moving in a very different direction, although Balbo remained his
“fraternal friend.”20 In a nutshell, the Communist-Catholic approach
was to interpret Marxism as a science of history, “a science that will stand
only on the experimental confirmation of its predictions and not by
the power of a philosophical foundation of which it has no need.”21
This interpretation implied “the non-recognition of the philosophical char-
acter of Marxism. In their view it was a science (historical materialism
that discovered the ‘general laws’ of history; Marx as the ‘Galileo’ of the
science of history, and so on), on which an ideology had been
superimposed.”22 This ideology, however, was “provisional” and could
be cast off through a process that Felice Balbo described as a “qualita-
tive leap.” Through the qualitative leap Marxism would “by necessity
abandon its atheistic aspect and recognize its own character as science.”23
Then a purified Catholicism (freed from the aspect whereby it is an

17 Augusto Del Noce, Il cattolico comunista (Milan: Rusconi: 1971), 50–1. The
book by Cornu cited by Del Noce is Karl Marx, de l’hégégelianisme au matérialisme histo-
rique (Paris: Alcan, 1934).
18 Del Noce, Il cattolico comunista, 49.
19 As I mention later, in his mature works Del Noce criticized Maritain’s explana-
tion of the genesis of Marxist atheism but gave him credit for recognizing (unlike some
of his followers) that it is an essential part of Marx’s thought.
20 Page 34n46.
21 Page 169.
22 Del Noce, Il cattolico comunista, 180, emphasis in the original.
23 Ibid., 200, emphasis in the original.
xx Translator’s Introduction

ideological cover for the bourgeois social order) would become the
natural metaphysical complement of Marxist science, “because Marxism
and Catholicism are both true; the former is correct about the interpreta-
tion of contemporary history or history in general … the latter is correct
at the metaphysical-religious level.”24
The background of Del Noce’s two essays on Marxism from 1946 to
1948 is precisely his break with the Communist-Catholic experience,
due to the discovery that, in Marxism, the philosophical aspect has both
theoretical and practical priority over the “science of history” aspect. This context
is clearly visible in the structure of the essays: both start with sections
that discuss approaches that deny the significance of Marxism as a
philosophy. In the 1946 essay, Del Noce refers to what he calls the
“methodological interpretation” of Marxism, which he traces back to
Sidney Hook’s 1933 book Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx.25 In
the 1948 essay, he specifically addresses Felice Balbo’s article from that
same year, “Religione e ideologia religiosa.”26 Today, these initial sec-
tions will be of interest to historians of ideas more than to a general
readership. On the other hand, the remainders of the two essays – and
especially the second sections, in which Del Noce presents his own
interpretation of Marxism – remain pièces de résistance of the whole
Del Nocean corpus. Del Noce himself held them to be some of his best
work and the cornerstone of his whole political thought because they
transcend the question that motivated them (the Catholic-Marxist rela-
tionship) and arrive at a comprehensive evaluation of the significance
of Marx’s philosophy in the history of European thought.27
In broad outline, for Del Noce Marx’s philosophy, far from being a
repudiation of Hegel, is the culmination of Hegelian rationalism, where
“the rationalist attitude is nothing but the simple assumption that man’s
present condition is its normal condition.”28 Already in Hegel rational-
ism means the radical rejection of every form of transcendence, but the
“reconciliation of the rational and the real” still takes place at the level

24 Ibid., 32, emphasis in the original.

25 London: Gollancz, 1933.
26 In Rivista di Filosofia no. 2 (1948): 105–31.
27 In “A self-introduction,” in Quaderni della Fondazione Centro Studi Augusto Del
Noce 2005–2006 (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2006). Del Noce refers to “Marx’s ‘Non-
Philosophy’” as the essay “I most care about.”
28 Page 234.
 Translator’s Introduction xxi

of comprehension. In Marx’s view, philosophy as comprehension still

contains a form of transcendence, that of the universal to which the
philosopher (the “professor”) elevates himself “by forgetting himself.”
This inevitably introduces a break between thought and life, and leads
to the “conservative” outcome of Hegelianism. Therefore, “the Marxist
attempt at reaffirming the unity of rational and real cannot take any
other route but that of a radical atheologization of reason. Consequently,
man is no longer measured by reason, by the presence of the universal,
of the value, of the idea of God etc., … but man is the measure of reason.”29
Marxist thought marks a radical break with the Greek and Christian
affirmation that man participates in a universal rationality (the Platonic
Logos). On the contrary, according to Marx, “thought is praxis … activity
that transforms reality,” and “philosophy will no longer express itself in
the form of a book or a system (comprehension, self-consciousness, etc.
of a realized totality) but in the realization of a totality.”30
In short, “all of Marxism [constitutes itself] in the transition from a
concept of philosophy as comprehension to a concept of philosophy as
revolution,”31 but this shift reflects a deep anthropological shift. “If man
thinks not as a participant in reason, or at any rate in a universal essence,
but as man belonging to a given historical situation, the figure of the
‘social man’ in the specifically Marxist sense of this term arises.”32
Whereas “in Platonic-Christian thought man is in a necessary relation-
ship with God, and in a contingent relationship with society,” in Marxism
“the relationship with society becomes necessary and constitutive.”33
What makes Marxism so historically significant, and the prototype of
so much modern political thought, is the fact of being “the first consis-
tent non-Christian anthropology.”34 This new anthropology accounts
for the very special nature of Marx’s atheism, which “means the disap-
pearance of the problem of God (so that one could also say that, rigor-
ously speaking, for him the very figure of atheism disappears).”35 Rather
than denying God, Marx denies the religion question by denying classical

29 Page 195.
30 Page 197–8.
31 Page 190–1.
32 Page 196.
33 Page 201.
34 Page 190.
35 Page 196.
xxii Translator’s Introduction

philosophical rationality (the preambula fidei) altogether. Philosophy is

replaced by politics, but this replacement is itself philosophical, not
merely practical.
When Del Noce assembled The Problem of Atheism in 1964, the
two essays on Marxism were by far the oldest in the book, and so in
the introduction he extensively revisited some of his conclusions (sec-
tions 8 through 11). In the intervening years, in the context of the Cold
War, Western critics of Marxism had tended to condemn it either as
faulty social science or as a pseudo-religious ideological phenomenon,
thus calling again into question, like the old revisionists, its philosophi-
cal nature. Del Noce actually agrees that Marxism is an “atheistic reli-
gion,” but in section 8 he insists that such religion is a result of Marx’s
philosophy of history, of his affirmation that there is a direction of history
moving towards the liberation of mankind. The revolutionary is able
to read this direction of history by interpreting the thoughts and expec-
tations of the masses, and thereby he is able to turn philosophy into
religion. Marxism is “modern philosophy in the aspect in which it presents itself
as secular (that is, as surpassing transcendent thought), which becomes a reli-
gion,” although paradoxically, “since it is purely rational, [it] can make
itself a religion only in the form of rigorous atheism.”36 It is important to
understand that in Del Noce’s view Marx’s becoming world of philosophy
is not the practical application to the world of a philosophical theory
about the world. Marxism is “a philosophy ante factum and not a philosophy
post factum.”37 It does not try to first comprehend the world in order to
change it. Rather, it identifies philosophy with political action to bring
about a new reality that cannot be described using the categories of the
old reality. Revolutionary thought is “religious” because the “new man”
has not yet been revealed and will only be revealed by the revolution.
Thus, it must “establish as the ultimate criterion of truth a historical
outcome – namely, the revolution not as an idea but as a real event.”38
This “replacement of speculative philosophy with the philosophy of
praxis” forces Marxism “to abandon the perspective of truth and to
identify what is true with what is practically effective, with what is capable

36 Pages 91 and 93.

37 Page 92.
38 Page 99.
 Translator’s Introduction xxiii

of intensifying life.”39 In practice, it can only articulate its project in

terms of ideological myths.
This reaffirmation of the philosophical significance of Marxism as
the “negation-realization of philosophy” that “makes itself a religion”
leads Del Noce in section 9 to one of the core claims of The Problem of
Atheism: that “contemporary history is philosophical history.”40 If the
major political movements of the twentieth century (Communism,
Fascism, Nazism, and the “affluent society”) can be traced back to the
Leninist revolution (either as continuations or as responses that fail to
call into question its philosophical presuppositions), and if Lenin was
the one who truly understood Marx’s idea that philosophy coincides
with revolutionary action, then contemporary history is the unfolding
of that idea:

If Marx’s thought is genuinely philosophical, we must take literally his sen-

tence stating that his conception is that of a philosophy that becomes world
(which surpasses itself into political realization and finds its verification
therein) as opposed to that of a world that becomes philosophy; if, further-
more, contemporary history is the history of the expansion of Marxism, it
takes a new character … It is not just history that can be comprehended by the
philosopher; it is history made by the philosopher, because for Marx the value of
thought is that of establishing the conditions for effective action aimed at
transforming society and the world. Therefore contemporary history is philosophi-
cal history … To those who will reproach me for linking too tightly political
discourse and philosophical discourse, I simply have to respond that this
follows from having taken seriously Marx’s philosophical thought.41

In section 10, Del Noce discusses the most common misunderstanding

of Marxism, namely, attributing to Marx Feuerbach’s type of atheism.
Feuerbach’s atheism is humanistic and extends the Enlightenment’s
critique of religion, whereas Marx’s atheism coincides with the revolu-
tionary religion and extends Hegel’s philosophy of history. This crucial
difference is illustrated by the numerous philosophical-political positions
that continue (aware or unaware) Feuerbach, which Del Noce reviews
in the remainder of section 10. He starts section 11 arguing that all of

39 Page 101.
40 Page 100.
41 Page 99–100.
xxiv Translator’s Introduction

them have to be “annihilated” by Marxism and that a correct interpreta-

tion of Marxism also sheds light on the three major anti-Communist
political movements of the twentieth century – he discusses Fascism
and Nazism,42 while he refers the reader to essay IV for the ideology of
the affluent society. In the second part of the section, he considers the
evolution of Communism itself (as manifested in Russian history) and
presents his own critique of Marxism, which leads him to diagnose its
simultaneous victory and defeat in some of the most famous and prescient
passages of The Problem of Atheism.
Del Noce’s claim is that “there is already at the onset of Marxism an
insuperable contradiction, of which the historical process is the
manifestation.”43 Marx’s philosophy combines two aspects that are both
necessary to support his revolutionary aspirations but that are actually
incompatible:

In Marx there is an aspect that clearly derives from Hegel … which leads to
the primacy of praxis, to man as the creator of his own history, to the new
task of the philosopher, no longer to interpret the world but to change it.
And there is the objectivization of this position within the deterministic vision of the
philosophy of history typical of the nineteenth century. Hence the materialistic af-
firmation of the primacy of economic life, the thesis that Communism is the
result of the inevitable history of production, the thesis of the determining
power of the infrastructure (i.e., the forms of production that correspond
to social relationships), of which the superstructure, ideologies, are the reflec-
tion … [I]t was inevitable that during the further development of Socialist
thought the two positions would break apart, and that both of them would
give up on the original hope in the outcome of the revolution.44

The first, dialectic and revolutionary, aspect was developed by Lenin,

who made the party the revolutionary agent instead of the proletariat.
He pushed “to the ultimate consequences the idea that the Communist

42 Del Noce views Italian Fascism as a form of purely dialectic, non-materialistic

revolutionary thought, even more so than Leninism, which preserves historical mate-
rialism as a doctrine even as it affirms the supremacy of revolutionary practice. For Del
Noce’s interpretation of Fascism, see also the essay “Notes towards a Historical
Definition of Fascism,” in Age of Secularization, 96–117.
43 Page 129.
44 Page 135.
 Translator’s Introduction xxv

Party (which for him is a philosophical reality) is the point of arrival of

classical German philosophy … This line of development did, indeed,
bring about a revolution which, however, came to fruition in a diametri-
cally opposite form to that predicted by its prophet.”45 Del Noce recon-
structs the process whereby Leninism transformed “from faith in a
revolution that will realize a world of equals into an instrument of power
for a nation and a class.” In order to hold on to power it had to establish
“a dictatorship of the party (i.e., of the minority made up of professional
revolutionaries) over the proletariat.” Then, based on the party “a new
techno-bureaucratic class formed” that was no less hegemonic than the
bourgeoisie. The only change was the replacement of Marx’s “alienation
in the beyond … by alienation in the future” and “the complete reduction
of philosophy to ideology.”46
The second aspect was “Marx according to whom ideologies can be
explained based on economic reality and social relations.” Ultimately,
this side was bound to undermine the revolutionary impulse itself
because “this idea of his cannot but apply to Marxism as well. There
is, therefore, the objectivization of Marxism into sociology. Next to
revolutionary Marxism there is … its continuation into absolute relativ-
ism … that is, into the most complete negation of the revolutionary
spirit … So, the historical result of Marxism is, on the one side,
Communist reality, in the way it has become realized, and on the other
the affluent society, in a non-dialectic form of opposition.”47 The afflu-
ent society rejects Communism not on moral or religious grounds but
as a failed social experiment. Its intellectuals apply to Marxism itself
Marx’s materialistic-sociological critique, and such “objectivized”
Marxism (in which the social sciences replace philosophy and religion)
shapes the secular worldview that Del Noce describes in essay IV, “Notes
on Western Irreligion.”
We have here the first appearance, as far as I know, of one of Del
Noce’s most famous ideas: that twentieth-century political history was
marked by the decomposition of Marxism. The Leninist revolution and its
opponents developed the two incompatible sides of Marx’s thought,
leading in the East to Stalin’s neo-Czarism and the rule of the techno-
bureaucratic class, in the West to the radically bourgeois culture of the

45 Page 135.
46 Pages 125, 137–8.
47 Pages 138–9.
xxvi Translator’s Introduction

affluent society. Both outcomes are atheistic but contradict Marx’s

expectation of a revolutionary catharsis. Far from ending alienation,
they make it more extreme, reaching what in later works Del Noce will
call a heterogenesis of ends. “Marxism has already completely won, but
negating itself most totally … it concludes in an insuperable contradic-
tion … [B]ecause of this victory, there is the tragic situation of Christi-
anity today, such as it never happened before: it is in a vise between
two opposite types of society, which share a common origin, neither
one of which is Christianizable.”48

2 . O n m o d e r n at h e i s m

A second, fairly well-defined group of essays in The Problem of Atheism

concerns the definition, history, and characteristics of modern atheism
in general. The main text is “Reflections on the Atheistic Option,” which
dates back to 1961. It “continues” in section 1 of “The Concept of
Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem,”49 in which Del
Noce expands several points of the 1961 essay and answers various pos-
sible objections. The other major essay in this group is “Notes on Western
Irreligion,” which is a very significant text not only because of its content
but also because of its location in the book. If Del Noce had followed
literally the criterion of ordering the essays in The Problem of Atheism
chronologically, the next in line after his 1946–48 essays on Marxism
should have been “Reflections on the Atheistic Option” – which is in a
sense their logical continuation because it clearly takes Marxism to be
the “type” of modern atheism. Instead, Del Noce chose to break the
chronological order and insert before it “Notes on Western Irreligion,”
an unpublished essay written just the year before (1963).
The reason for this decision can be glimpsed in the very first para-
graph: “If we turn our attention to the Western world, we may be led
to doubt that the statement that atheism is the primary datum of the

48 Page 139–40.
49 Sections 2 and 3 also build on “Reflections on the Atheistic Option,” but they
are rather specialized. Section 2 is a study of the nature of anti-clericalism, which in
typical Del Nocean fashion veers into a sympathetic discussion of the thought of two
“minor” philosophers – Piero Martinetti and Charles Renouvier. Section 3 is just a
brief discussion of what criteria should guide a comprehensive study of the history of
atheism.
 Translator’s Introduction xxvii

historical circumstance truly expresses the factual situation. Because

we may wonder whether the ‘pressing reality’ of the last twenty years …
has been the spreading of something entirely different from atheism –
namely, ‘natural irreligion’ (the loss, the eclipse of the sacred, or what-
ever else we want to call it).”50 Something new had happened since
1945: a new culture had gradually become prevalent in Europe and
North America in the context of the Cold War. This new “West” was not
Marxist, and in fact stood in opposition to the worldwide expansion of
Communism, but was just as clearly irreligious. Its dominant philosophy
was not rationalism but empiricism, and its attitude towards religion
was not atheism but agnosticism – the agnosticism of scientists, econo-
mists, and technocrats who consider religious questions irrelevant to
the problems of the “real world.” This attitude, which became a “mass
phenomenon,” represents “a higher level of impiousness than atheism
in as much as it rejects the very idea of religion.”51
Ever attentive to “factual reality,” Del Noce realized the novelty of
this “natural irreligion” and felt that it challenged his previous views
of atheism. He states this challenge explicitly in the final pages of
section 1 of “The Concept of Atheism and the History of Philosophy
as a Problem.” Does contemporary Western irreligion still have the
dignity of a philosophy? Or is it just “a complete rejection of
philosophy,”52 which explains away religious questions in the name
of “science” (especially psychoanalysis)? And then, does it still make
sense to speak of Marxism as the prototype and source of modern
atheism? Clearly he felt that he could not republish “Reflections on
the Atheistic Option” (which was only two years old!) without first
confirming that its opening claim – “atheism as an invasive reality is
the most characteristic phenomenon of our epoch, unprecedented
in history”53 – was still justified.
This is the task that Del Noce assigns to himself in “Notes on Western
Irreligion,” a pioneering work that prefigures his later works on secu-
larization, as found, for example, in his 1971 collection The Age of
Secularization. In fact, it is probably one of the very first works of cultural
criticism, not only in Italy, on the transformation of Western culture

50 Pages 237–8.
51 Page 241.
52 Page 33.
53 Page 272.
xxviii Translator’s Introduction

from 1945 to the early 1960s. Its main thesis is that although atheism
(in the “traditional” sense) and the new “natural irreligion” are “essen-
tially different phenomena,” nonetheless “at the bottom of the features
displayed today by the Western world there is an ideal and properly
philosophical causality, of which contemporary natural irreligion is just a
consequence.”54 Thus, Western irreligion, too, is an effect, or a new mani-
festation, of “philosophical atheism.”
In order to make his case, Del Noce conducts a lengthy refutation of
“the commonly accepted thesis that there is a direct relationship between
progress of technology and increase of irreligion.”55 In his view, the
“absolutization of technicism” that underpins natural irreligion is not
a mere side effect of technological progress but, rather, reflects a phi-
losophy associated with a new type of society, which he calls the “affluent
society,” borrowing the title of a well-known book by John Kenneth
Galbraith.56 As I already mentioned, Del Noce sees a “kinship in opposi-
tion” between the ideology of the affluent society and Marxism.

[The affluent society] succeeds in eliminating the dialectic tension that sus-
tains the revolution by pushing alienation to the highest degree … Each
subject perceives the other as alienus, extraneous, separated – that is, not
joined to me by devotion to a shared (not necessarily religious) value – and
therefore as an ob-jectum, regardless of whether I deem this “thing placed in
front of me” to be a useful instrument or an obstacle. Strictly speaking, soci-
ety is no longer such because multiplicity is not unified: we have a society
without meaning and without value because the normative idea and the uto-
pian perspective of the city of God has disappeared … We can add: the afflu-
ent society gauges both the power and the impotence of Marxism. The
power, because in it Marxism forces its adversary, the society opposed to it, to
manifest itself in its pure state, as a bourgeois society that by now is unen-
cumbered by all ties with a Christian society, a liberal society, a seigneurial
society … I think we can say that, by rejecting the types of society that I men-
tioned, the affluent society marks the acceptance of all the Marxist criticisms
while, at the same time, radically negating the Marxist religion. So, we can

54 Pages 238 and 243–4.

55 Page 244.
56 J.K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958).
 Translator’s Introduction xxix

also say that it is an empiricist and individualistic translation of Marxism.

But, on the other hand, Marxism seems impotent to overthrow it.57

Del Noce’s thesis is that, far from being a mere effect of technical
progress and economic well-being, “the present irreligion of the Western
world reflects the fact that, having constituted itself in opposition to
Marxism, this world is subordinate to it, due to a failure to really surpass
it.”58 In the second part of the essay, he finds new evidence to support
this thesis by studying the rise of what he calls “sociologism,” namely,
the “integral relativism” of modern Western culture, which regards
sociology as a “new universal science of human realities” in place of
philosophy. Sociologism pushes “the Marxist theory of ideologies …
to the extreme, until it means that all perspectives of thought, including
the Marxist, do not express something eternal but are always tied to
certain social situations.” Del Noce shows that, historically, the expan-
sion of sociologism can also be traced back to the Marxist “annihilation
of philosophy,” and therefore cannot be understood apart from a his-
torical context in which atheism is the “primary question.”
This conclusion sets the stage for “Reflections on the Atheistic
Option.” It was written in part as a response to Maritain’s La signification
de l’athéisme contemporain,59 which, essentially, had placed the responsibil-
ity for the rise of Marxist atheism on the hypocrisy (on the “practical
atheism”) of bourgeois Christianity. Unsurprisingly, to Del Noce
Maritain’s “point of view seems inadequate” since it is tantamount to
denying the philosophical depth and significance of Marx’s atheism.60
In fact, later in The Problem of Atheism, Del Noce argues that Maritain’s
failure to understand Marx was the fatal weakness that undermined his
whole effort at understanding the contemporary cultural/political
landscape.61 In “Reflections on the Atheistic Option” he just points out
that Maritain’s diagnosis (atheism as “a response to the practical athe-
ism of a certain Christian world”) applies, if anything, to the atheism

57 Page 256.
58 Page 260.
59 Jacques Maritain, La signification de l’athéisme contemporain (Paris: Desclée,
1949) [“The Meaning of Contemporary Atheism,” in The Range of Reason (New York:
Scribner’s, 1952)].
60 Page 273.
61 Pages 436–7.
xxx Translator’s Introduction

of Proudhon, which, however, should be more properly described as

“anti-clericalism.”62
In Del Noce’s view what characterizes the dominant form of twentieth-
century atheism (which descends from Marx, not from Proudhon) is
being “postulatory,” or “positive.” This means that the non-existence of
God is postulated on moral grounds – for the sake of human liberation
and “to make possible truly rigorous morality, science and politics.”63
Whereas the dominant form of atheism of the nineteenth century was
scientistic – in the sense that it at least accepted the question of God as
important, even if it answered it in the negative – contemporary atheism
tends to see the whole religious dimension as irrelevant to human fulfil-
ment. It replaces the explicit negation of the existence of God with the
positive affirmation of the technical-political self-redemption of mankind:
“the attempt to prove the non-existence of God is replaced by the attempt
to show that atheism alone makes possible the full realization of scien-
tific, moral, and political humanism; in this sense we should speak of a
rejection not primarily of God but of the theistic disposition – that is,
of the reasons that led people to pose the question of God – whereas
old atheism was still merely an answer to this question.”64
Even though atheism became fully aware of its “optional nature” only
in the last century, such awareness was the end of a process that started
at the beginning of the modern age. Del Noce argues that there was no
ancient or medieval atheism in a proper sense. In his view, atheism “is
in a proper sense a position subsequent to Christianity, because it comes
after the ideas of Revelation and Supernatural, and constitutes their
criticism.”65 More specifically, in European history “the phenomenon
of atheism comes about at the terminal moment of each of the three fun-
damental modern directions that call for going beyond religion into
philosophy, and thus for the negation of the supernatural,” namely, at
the end “of the Renaissance … of the Enlightenment [and] of classical
German philosophy.”66 Del Noce defines the attitude of negating the
supernatural as rationalism.

62 Pages 273–8. As I already mentioned, Del Noce’s discussion of anti-clericalism

as a philosophical phenomenon is found in pages 34–48 in this volume.
63 Page 281.
64 Page 279.
65 Pages 17–8.
66 Page 283.
 Translator’s Introduction xxxi

Rationalism does not necessarily deny God (it can be deistic, for exam-
ple), but it denies that there is anything intrinsically lacking or prob-
lematic about the human condition, as expressed by the Christian
doctrine of the Fall. However, there is a pattern whereby atheism makes
its “necessary appearance … at the terminal moment of rationalistic
positions.”67

Atheism presents itself as the terminal stage of a process of thought that is

initially conditioned by a negation without proof of the possibility of the super-
natural … If we call this initial negation of possibility “rationalism,” we can
say that atheism has the function of highlighting its original option, the
denial without proofs of the status naturae lapsae. The option that defines
atheism is not primarily and essentially a response to practical atheism …
[T]he rationalist attitude is just the simple elevation, as a consequence of the
initial rejection of the Fall, of man’s current condition to the status of his
normal condition … But such elevation of man’s fallen reality to the status
of normal reality cannot but coincide with the elevation to normality of
death as the destiny of the finite being and, thus, with the affirmation of the
negativity of the finite.68

In political terms, the negation of the Fall is tied to the idea of revolu-
tion. Revolution “means the liberation of man, via politics, from the
‘alienation’ imposed on him by the social orders that have been realized
so far, and rooted only in the structure of these orders. Therefore, it
implies the replacement of religion by politics for the sake of man’s
liberation since evil is a consequence of society, which has become the
subject of culpability, and not of an original sin. As varied as the forms
of revolution, understood in this sense, can be, their common feature
is the correlation between the elevation of politics to religion and the negation of
the supernatural.”69 Not by chance the revolutionary idea first appears
in Rousseau – whose religious position is a sort of Pelagianism, which
“affirms God, freedom, and immortality but denies sin and grace”70 –
and then finds in Marx its “definitive expression.”71

67 Page 286.
68 Page 290.
69 Page 295.
70 Page 297.
71 Page 293.
xxxii Translator’s Introduction

The fact that it is the full manifestation of “the essence of rationalism

[as] a gratuitous option in favour of man’s aseity and self-sufficiency,”72
which “by necessity must be without proof,” explains why positive atheism
naturally eschews any theoretical corroboration. Instead, it always seeks
its verification at the historical and practical-political level, trying to pres-
ent itself as the inevitable result of the process of history. “In the final
analysis, for an atheist the criterion of truth lies in the recognition that
transcendent thought has been surpassed by history; in the sense that one
cannot account for the historical process of thought if not by conceiving
of it as a development towards more and more rigorous immanence,
and in the sense that transcendent thought is impotent to generate
efficient political and social forms (i.e., forms not liable to become tools
for forces of an entirely different nature).”73 Therefore, any critique of
contemporary atheism (including, as we have seen, the atheism of the
affluent society) must call into question its historical narrative, and in
particular its narrative about the history of philosophy. This brings us to
Del Noce’s third major area of concern in The Problem of Atheism.

3. On the history of philosophy

Del Noce brings up his fundamental claim about the theoretical signifi-
cance of the history of philosophy on the very first page of “The Concept
of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem.”

I beg the kind reader to keep in mind the essential thesis, which is the moti-
vation for the book, because I have never seen it clearly expressed elsewhere:
the problematization of the phenomenon of atheism, as the primary datum of the his-
torical circumstance … requires, as the “theoretically” primary question, the problema-
tization of the standard view of the history of philosophy.
…
Posing this question seems to me the unifying locus of theoretical philo-
sophy, moral philosophy, history of philosophy, philosophy of history, phi-
losophy of religion, aesthetics, political philosophy, or even, as we shall see
later, of contemporary politics itself. It is the meeting point, in our time, of
philosophy and life.74

72 Page 299.
73 Page 301.
74 Pages 3–4.
 Translator’s Introduction xxxiii

Simply put, if positive atheism is embodied in Marxism, and if Marxism

claims to be the inevitable culmination of modern European philosophy,
its critique must involve a critique of the “standard view” of the history
of that philosophy, from Descartes to Hegel, and especially of its forma-
tive period, the seventeenth century.
Del Noce expands and clarifies this question in sections 4 through 6
of “The Concept of Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem.”
He then presents his critique of the “standard view” in the longest essay
in The Problem of Atheism, “The Pascal Problem and Contemporary
Atheism,” which is precisely what in the introductory essay Del Noce
describes as a “compressed book.” It is in fact a “compressed trilogy,”
in which Del Noce “contracted in 134 pages a work of more than one
thousand pages, of which over six hundred have already been published
in various works that I cite here, and which is the content of three vol-
umes to be published in the near future. Such contraction, which was
inevitable, certainly could not lead to a model of clarity.”75 The three
volumes in question were supposed to be collectively titled Catholic
Reformation and Modern Philosophy, but only the first, on Descartes,76 actu-
ally appeared in 1965, one year after The Problem of Atheism.
The fact that the complete trilogy never appeared actually makes
“The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism” more interesting
because it is, to my knowledge, Del Noce’s only presentation in a single
text of his general interpretation of modern French and Italian philoso-
phy, the fruit of decades of study and reflection. However, the compres-
sion of such a large amount of material has the effect of making the
essay arguably both too long (it is still essentially a book) and too short
(many profound insights are just sketched, making the presentation
highly condensed). If we add the fact that Del Noce is also keen on
showing the relevance of his results to contemporary atheism, we see
why it cannot be a “model of clarity.”
In fact, its very title lends itself to be misunderstood, as if the essay
were primarily about Pascal. In reality, Pascal is only one author in the
development of “Cartesianism” studied by Del Noce (Descartes-Pascal-
Malebranche-Vico, with Geulincx as a supporting actor). Moreover, as
I mentioned, for Del Noce the entire history of seventeenth-century

75 Page 166.
76 Augusto Del Noce, Riforma cattolica e filosofia moderna, vol. 1, Cartesio (Bologna:
Il Mulino, 1965); new edition (Brescia: Scholè, 2019).
xxxiv Translator’s Introduction

thought is relevant to the study of atheism because this latter claims to

be the result of an inexorable process that started with Descartes. The
reason for the title is actually that the essay was occasioned by Del
Noce’s intellectual encounter with the distinguished French Marxist
thinker Lucien Goldmann (1913–70). Del Noce drew from his book
Le Dieu Caché the idea that Pascal’s thought “interfaces” in a particular
way with the question of contemporary atheism (hence the title).77
The most accurate description of “The Pascal Problem and Contem-
porary Atheism” is that it is not just a highly condensed exposition
of Del Noce’s vision of seventeenth-century thought; rather, it is such
an exposition in answer to Goldmann’s vision of the history of European
philosophy, and in view of its implications about contemporary atheism, and
Marxism in particular.
Del Noce reviews this vision at some length. Goldmann starts “from
an interpretation of Marx that at bottom is identical to the one I had
proposed in the second essay of this collection, without thinking directly
of Pascal at that time.”78 Namely, Marxism is not “an objective sociology
… What Marxism is about is, instead, a total attitude that spans in an
organic unity the comprehension of social reality, the value that judges
it and the action that transforms it … The only suitable word to describe
it is ‘faith’ … faith in a historical future that we must create through our
action.”79 Thus, “having discarded the conception that believes in his-
torical necessity … Goldmann’s Marxism takes on an appearance that
is curiously similar to that of Pascal’s thought” and adopts the idea of
the pari. However, just as Pascal must “fortify” his wager by appealing
to Sacred History, so a Marxist must rely on the history of philosophy:
“the only criterion it can use to manifest its (relative, because historical)
truth is that of being able to situate, surpassing them and integrating
them, other worldviews.”80

77 Lucien Goldmann, Le Dieu Caché (Paris: Gallimard, 1955) [The Hidden God: A
Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine (London: Verso,
2016)]. In his foreword to the English edition, Michael Löwy laments that Goldmann’s
“provocative assertion of an ‘elective affinity’ between Marxist belief and (Christian)
tragic faith … did not find a great echo in Christian thought in France.” Ironically it
did find such an echo in Del Noce in Italy, but probably Goldmann never heard about
it. To the best of my knowledge the two had no personal contact.
78 Page 308.
79 Pages 309–10. Del Noce is paraphrasing a passage from Le Dieu Caché.
80 Page 312–13.
 Translator’s Introduction xxxv

Specifically, Goldmann views Marxism as the culmination of a three-

stage process in modern thought. The first stage is rationalism (Descartes,
Spinoza, and their successors), which is individualistic and thus “essen-
tially a-moral and a-religious.” The reaction against rationalism takes
the form of a “tragic vision” (Pascal, and later Kant). “This vision … is
first of all the affirmation of a set of values that transcends the individual;
and yet, it does not express itself as a form capable of replacing the
atomistic and mechanic world of individualistic rationalism … because
its temporal dimension is the present and not the future.”81 The third
stage is precisely “dialectic thought,” which replaces Pascal’s wager on
God with Marx’s wager on the future.
To Goldmann’s “general interpretation of the historical process of
modern philosophy” Del Noce opposes his own. Here I can only outline
the main points.

• According to the standard secular view, what defines “modern”

philosophy is a sharp break with ancient and medieval thought,
which takes place when “reason becomes the supreme tribunal
against which all others must be measured.” “Modern philosophy
presents itself as absolute rationalism in the sense of a radical refus-
al of the supernatural, but as rationalism that has appropriated
the Christian truth of the real distinction between man and nature.”
This vision of the history of philosophy “as a process towards the
radical denial of transcendence in a religious sense” plays a major
theoretical role as “the fundamental argument that every kind of
secularism can bring up in its favour.” So far it has never been
problematized because even opponents of secularism have
essentially accepted it.82
• This “equation of modernity and secularity” forces any secularist re-
construction of the history of modern philosophy to include certain
obligatory steps. First of all, the philosophy of Descartes must be
viewed as the beginning of a new period. Second, all attempts at
post-Cartesian philosophies compatible with religious transcendence
must be viewed as dead ends. Allegedly, Pascal was an isolated
anti-Cartesian, Malebranche pursued an impossible reconciliation
between Cartesianism and scholasticism, Vico was an unaware pre-
cursor of secular historicism. In this sense, “the question whether

81 Page 315.
82 Section 2.
xxxvi Translator’s Introduction

modern philosophy is secular or not can be answered by studying

the philosophy of the 1600s.” Del Noce agrees that Descartes marked
a unique and irreplaceable new beginning in the history of
European thought, to which one can trace back most modern phi-
losophies. But he disagrees that the “philosophers of the Catholic
Reformation,” whose “primary intuition [is] the correlation between
the Protestant negation of man, of his freedom and of his merits,
and the degradation of God to mere irrational power,” failed to criti-
cally address the new situation.83
• Del Noce thinks that, despite their huge differences, there is actually
a deeper continuity from Descartes to Pascal to Malebranche to Vico,
which shows that the history of modern philosophy contains another
line of development, which does not progress towards secularization
but towards a reaffirmation of classical metaphysics. Proving this
continuity requires a refutation of the traditional interpretation by
secular historians that sees an absolute opposition between Pascal
and Descartes. Del Noce presents Goldmann’s form of the secular
interpretation, which draws a sharp contrast between the “rational-
ist” Descartes and the “tragic thinker” Pascal.84
• To make his case Del Noce argues that there is a general framework
or “significant structure” (in Goldmann’s language) that unites those
four thinkers and defines “Cartesianism.” This significant structure
is determined by two essential features of the thought of Descartes:
being a philosophy of freedom and being ahistorical. Following French
scholar Jean Laporte, Del Noce interprets Cartesian methodical
doubt as the experience that the human subject transcends the
world and, therefore, is free. In this respect, the primary adversary
of Cartesian philosophy is the thought of the libertines, whose
dogmatic materialism led them to skepticism and the denial of
freedom. At the same time, however, Descartes made a “concession
in opposition” to their Machiavellianism by accepting that philosophy
must be radically separated from history because history is the
domain of the ragion di stato. Thus, “the suitable formula to describe
the significant structure of Cartesianism is that of separate interiority
or of dissociation of the spiritual life from politics and from history … It is
now a matter of looking within this structure at the very peculiar
relationship, of opposition and unity, that exists between Descartes
and Pascal.”85

83 Sections 3 and 4.
84 Section 5.
85 Section 6.
 Translator’s Introduction xxxvii

• To this end, Del Noce examines the philosophy of Descartes from

the religious standpoint and concludes that it is essentially ambiguous.
It is “religious according to his theses objectively considered,” but
it “generates a spiritual disposition that hampers the transition from
natural truths to revealed truths.” On the one hand, the theme of
human freedom gives it an Augustinian character, as a philosophy
of interiority, which in principle is open to revelation. But on the
other hand, what ends up prevailing is “the power of negativity
whereby I can break my dependence on history and become capable
of an absolutely new beginning,” which is joined with “the idea of
man’s dominion over nature.” In this second respect, the philosophy
of Descartes is a “new Pelagianism” that exalts human freedom
and prepares the road for the Enlightenment. Del Noce traces this
ambiguity back to a conflict between Descartes’s novelty (his theory
of freedom, the Augustinian aspect) and “a presupposed Molinist
spiritual disposition” whereby he took for granted the “autonomy
of human values.”86
• Del Noce is now ready to state his thesis about the nature of
the “continuity” between Descartes and Pascal: “Pascal’s thought
represents not anti-Cartesianism sic et simpliciter but the continuation
of Descartes’s thought totally separated from the presupposed Molinism
in which the novelty of Descartes was inserted.” This because Pascal’s
critique of metaphysics (of the proofs of the existence of God, of
Deism, and so on) is actually an extension (probably unaware)
of Descartes’s theory of divine freedom and infinity, which in Del
Noce’s opinion is “as important for Descartes as that of human
freedom.” Thus, Pascal pits the novel aspect of Cartesian philosophy
(which amounts to the affirmation of the “mysteriosity of God’s
nature”) against its Molinist presuppositions (which push it towards
secularity).87
• However, Pascal’s anti-Molinist critique led him to a radical anti-
humanism, which left it unprepared to face the new positive atheism
that would come out of the Enlightenment. In him, “the dissociation
of spirituality and history … leads to a break between humanism and
anti-humanism.” The (unsuccessful) attempt to heal this break is

86 Section 7. Notice that Del Noce differs from those who tie Descartes’s “secu-
larity” to the subjectivism of the cogito. He thinks that Descartes’s affirmation of free-
dom against libertine naturalism was actually his religious aspect, while the Molinist
mindset he had absorbed from his Jesuit education was responsible for his “secular”
aspect.
87 Section 8.
xxxviii Translator’s Introduction

what marks, in Del Noce’s view, the thought of Malebranche and

defines “the history of modern Christian Ontologism” from
Malebranche to Rosmini. Malebranche “starts exactly where Pascal
ends,” namely, “the religious renunciation of the world,” and
rediscovers within the experience of faith “the need to become conscious
of the rationality of the obsequium.” This turned out to be impossible,
however, within the “significant structure” of Cartesianism.88
• Malebranche’s contradictions highlight the importance of Vico’s
thought, which can be “interpreted as the continuation of
Descartes’s critique of atheism after having criticized the concession
(in opposition) to the libertines, which is the distinctive feature of
Cartesian ahistoricity … A continuation that is also the continuation
of Malebranche’s Occasionalism and Ontologism.” Del Noce collects
a sequences of Vichian texts, especially from De Uno, that show that
“we can easily reconstruct his thought as an extension to history of
Malebranche’s philosophy, against adversaries that this latter had
not taken on: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bayle.” However, in the course
of this extension Vico arrives at a radical critique of the “monastic”
and “geometric” character whereby Cartesianism abandons the field
of history to the rationalism of the libertines and thus opens the
way to the Enlightenment. The most striking feature of Del Noce’s
interpretation of Vico is the rejection of his supposed “imma-
nentism” (as affirmed, famously, by Benedetto Croce). On the
contrary, for Del Noce, Vico is the point of arrival of the Catholic
philosophy of the seventeenth century, when it frees itself from the
Cartesian chasm between interiority and history, by discovering
“the natural ways of Providence in profane history.”89
• In conclusion, Del Noce claims to have achieved his goal of
reconstructing, in spite of their profound differences, “a unified
development in the four major thinkers of the time of the Catholic
Reformation: Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche, and Vico.” Their con-
tinuity is determined by having a common adversary: atheism, in its
first modern forms. Thereby, Del Noce rejects the frequent dismissal
of modern Catholic philosophies as piecemeal, critically weak efforts
at slowing down the juggernaut of “modernity” marching inexorably
towards the elimination of transcendence. Conversely, “modern
philosophy can only be defined problematically, in connection with

88 Section 9.
89 Section 10.
 Translator’s Introduction xxxix

the appearance of the problem of atheism, and its essential and

irreducible lines of development are two, not one.”
• At the same time he also rejects the “Romantic” Catholic position
that intends to answer modernity by literally returning to pre-
Cartesian (medieval) philosophy as if no new questions had arisen.
While the observation that modernity is defined by “the appearance
of a new essence [i.e., atheism] confirms that the Cartesian beginning
is inescapable, it rules out the idea of … a simple return to previous
traditions. Although, of course, it does not rule out at all the
possibility that a deeper study thereof may coincide with
encountering those traditions, to the point of recognizing that
new positions are explications of their virtualities.”90

These highlights cannot do justice, of course, to the breadth,

depth, and originality of Del Noce’s work in “The Pascal Problem and
Contemporary Atheism.” Building on some of the best French scholar-
ship of the first half of the twentieth century (Laporte, Russier, Alquié,
Gilson, Gouhier, Lenoble), he draws a comprehensive, unconventional,
and (to this non-specialist) convincing picture of a crucial period in
the history of ideas, with profound implications for our understanding
of modernity and secularization. Today’s readers may wonder whether
this tour de force is still directly relevant to “contemporary atheism,”
which is quite different from Goldmann’s erudite, critical Marxism. It
is rather symbolic that Goldmann died fairly young in 1970, when his
highly “civilized” Marxism was arguably going out of fashion. If we had
to name the atheistic thinkers from that time who have been most
influential, we would probably mention Marcuse, or Foucault, or the
structuralists. I would reply that the “myth of modernity” maintains a
strong grip on our collective imagination, and so Del Noce’s refutation
of its tendentious depiction of the history of European thought remains
valuable and important.

4. On Ontologism

At various points in the book, Del Noce refers sympathetically to

Ontologism, a term which may be unfamiliar to some readers and give
rise to misunderstandings. It was first used by Italian philosopher Vincenzo

90 Section 11.
xl Translator’s Introduction

Gioberti (1801–52) but refers to a tradition of thought that goes back

to Malebranche. The Catholic Encyclopedia defines it as the doctrine that
“maintains that God and Divine ideas are the first object of our intelli-
gence and the intuition of God the first act of our intellectual
knowledge.”91 Besides Gioberti, several Catholic thinkers of the nine-
teenth century are associated with Ontologism, including Antonio
Rosmini.92 Del Noce’s assessment of Ontologism is nuanced. While he
is critical of both Malebranche and Gioberti,93 he thinks that Ontologism
is very important as a tradition and a program, and that Rosmini’s version
is “the only starting point for a reconstruction of metaphysics.”94 In The
Problem of Atheism he describes it as “a religious school that derives from
St Augustine … It insists on the soul’s immediate and lived contact with
God, a direct experience against whose background the proofs of God
take meaning and value.”95 Elsewhere he says that Ontologism is “a
philosophy meant to define the form in which transcendent truth is
present to our mind. It is true that this term is ambiguous: it can mean
that the direct and immediate intuition of God is the condition for all
human knowledge. In this sense it was condemned by Vatican I as a posi-
tion logically close to rationalism and pantheism, in as much as it affirms
the unity of divine reason and human reason.” However, that condemna-
tion concerned “not Ontologism as such, but one particular form.”96
In Del Noce’s view, the historical significance of Ontologism is that
it was the attempt by modern Christian thought to overcome a toxic
divide between theological rationalism and religious existentialism. It

91 https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11257a.htm.
92 At that time Ontologism was very controversial: Jesuit Thomist theologians
opposed it on the basis that “the immediate intuition of God and of His Divine ideas,
as held by Ontologists, is above the natural power of man’s intelligence.” As a result,
in 1887 the Holy Office condemned some “ontologistic” theses extracted from the
works of Rosmini. However, his supporters kept claiming that he had been misunder-
stood, and they were finally vindicated in 2001 by a “Note” issued by the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith, which “rehabilitated” Rosmini. For a review of the con-
troversy see http://www.30giorni.it/articoli_id_15580_l3.htm.
93 See pages 390–2 for his critique of Malebranche.
94 Augusto Del Noce, “A proposito di una nuova edizione della ‘Teosofia’ del
Rosmini,” Giornale di metafisica nos. 4–5 (1967): 405–19. Reprinted in Da Cartesio a
Rosmini (Milan: Giuffrè, 1992), 537–52.
95 Page 387.
96 Del Noce, “A proposito di una nuova edizione della ‘Teosofia’ del Rosmini,”
541.
 Translator’s Introduction xli

started with Malebranche as a correction to the “existentialist” Pascal,

and the “attempt to reaffirm humanism after the Pascalian critique
defines, in my judgment, the history of modern Christian Ontologism.”97 While
this attempt failed in Malebranche it continued in a “French-Italian”
line of development that passed through Vico and finally came to frui-
tion in Rosmini. In his mature work, the Theosophy,98 Rosmini was finally
able to disassociate Ontologism from rationalism and from Idealism.
In this process he re-encountered Thomism, but a Thomism reconciled
with Augustinianism as a philosophy of the presence of God. Del Noce
clearly did not view Rosmini’s form of Ontologism as opposed to
Thomism but only to the “neo-Thomistic commentaries” of the nine-
teenth century. In fact, he believed that a “healthy Augustinianism” –
meaning a rediscovery of the rational import of religious experience
and of the correct relationship between fides and intellectum, healing the
wounds of the age of the Reformation – was a necessary condition for
a true return to St Thomas. It is significant that, in later years, Del Noce
actually used the word “Ontologism” very rarely. To describe his position
he referred either to Rosmini or to what he called “existential Thomism,”
by which he meant precisely Thomism reconciled with Augustinianism
in the interpretation of Étienne Gilson.99

5. Miscellanea

Given the profusion of materials in The Problem of Atheism,100 and its

complicated structure, having an exhaustive table of contents is

97 Page 386.
98 Antonio Rosmini, Theosophy, trans. Denis Cleary and Terence Watson (Durham,
UK: Rosmini House, 2007).
99 Regarding Del Noce’s appreciation for Gilson, I would like to refer the read-
er to the essay “Thomism and the Critique of Rationalism: Gilson and Shestov,”
Communio 25, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 732–45.
100 I have not even mentioned many “tangential” parts of the book that do not fall
within the three thematic areas I have considered, like section 7 of “The Concept of
Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem” on existentialism. Or section 12,
which starts discussing Nietzsche but ends up being a long essay on Shestov. Or essay
VII on “Political Theism and Atheism.” I also ignored many “sub-essays” that Del Noce
“embeds” in his essays, discussing a vast array of authors and topics: Stirner, Sartre,
Juvalta, Martinetti, Renouvier, Brunschvicg, Engels, Gentile, Marcel, Laberthonniere,
Decadentism, Molinism, Occasionalism, Liberalism. The list goes on and on.
xlii Translator’s Introduction

important. Unfortunately, the table of contents in the Italian edition is

rudimentary: it just lists the titles of the seven essays – the items num-
bered I, II, … VII in this volume – plus the Conclusion. To help the
reader, in this English edition I expand it in two ways: (1) I list all
the sections within each essay. Since essays II, III, and VI have no section
titles, I took the liberty to write them myself for the table of contents.
(2) I add outlines (in a smaller font, in parentheses below the section
titles in the table of contents) for several sections of “The Concept of
Atheism and the History of Philosophy as a Problem.”
Given the length of book, and the fact that some of its contents are
rather specialized, I toyed with the idea of publishing, besides the com-
plete translation, an abridged version. This turned out to be unfeasible,
but I would like to offer what could be the table of contents of a book
titled Selections from The Problem of Atheism. Even if it will probably never
be published, it exists “virtually” within the present volume.

Selections from The Problem of Atheism

Order of Research 157–168

On Marxism
Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” sections 2 and 3 190–214
Marxism and the Qualitative Leap section 2 222–30
The Concept of Atheism section 9 99–101
The Concept of Atheism section 11 114–40
On Modern Atheism
Notes on Western Irreligion 231–71
Reflections on the Atheistic Option 272–307
The Concept of Atheism, section 1 7–34
On the History of Philosophy
The Concept of Atheism opening 3–7
The Concept of Atheism section 4 50–60
The Pascal Problem sections 2, 3, and 4 318–35
Political Theism and Atheism 420–49
Conclusion 450–74

Regarding footnotes: I add my own footnotes marked by [TN] when

some comment or explanation is in order. I add bibliographic refer-
ences in English in square brackets next to Del Noce’s original citations
 Translator’s Introduction xliii

when available. For works that were originally written in English, I typi-
cally just replace without comment Del Noce’s citation of a translation
with one of the original works. In the older essays, the reader will notice
a few footnotes entirely enclosed in square brackets. Those are com-
ments that Del Noce himself added in 1964 to elaborate upon or correct
some of his earlier statements.

***

To conclude I want to acknowledge the support and encouragement

that I have received from many readers of my two previous volumes of
Del Noce translations. I also want to thank again the scholars and writ-
ers who have supported this work and helped make it known. I will add
to my previous list Patrick J. Deneen, Thomas R. Rourke, Fran Maier,
Margaret McCarthy, Margarita Mooney, Rod Dreher, and Paul Baumann.
Thanks to Enzo Randone and Michele Rosboch for their support from
Italy. Special thanks to Fieldstead and Company (and personally to
Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, Steve Ferguson, and Joe Gorra) for
helping cover translation and production costs. Thanks, finally, to Philip
Cercone and the McGill-Queen’s University Press staff for their excel-
lent work.
I would like to dedicate this translation to the memory of my dear
father Giovanni Lancellotti (1935–2017), who communicated to me
from a young age his love of “serious books.” For most readers of The
Problem of Atheism, Del Noce’s references to the time in European history
when educated people believed in the “immanence of the divine” will
sound foreign and unfamiliar. Not so for those of us who grew up in a
house with a big library that included a shelf laden with salmon-coloured
Laterza editions of the works of Benedetto Croce.
T H E P RO B L E M OF AT HEI SM
 I

The Concept of Atheism and the History

of Philosophy as a Problem (1964)

The apparently essayistic nature of this book – and later I will explain
in what sense this appearance is obligatory – makes its structure and unity
hard to grasp.
Therefore, it is useful to summarize the main theses and clarify their
genesis, and also to elucidate how this investigation fits in today’s philo-
sophical discourse, in order to show that today philosophies – all of
them, in my judgment, but I will have to restrict myself to some exam-
ples – are in a bind from which they cannot escape (apart from always
possible eclectic diversions) except by opening themselves up to the
investigation that here I present as necessary.
The length of this essay is justified by the fact that it refers not only to
the present book but also to others, to be specified later, that are its
necessary continuation. Moreover, it has been written after the other
essays in this volume. I wished to keep them essentially unchanged, even
though the second and the third date back to 1946 and 1948, respectively,
because I felt that their thesis, which at that time certainly was not com-
mon, has been perfectly confirmed both by subsequent critical studies
and by the present historical reality. Therefore, I will address a few pos-
sible objections and develop further a few points that may be obscure.
I beg the kind reader to keep in mind the essential thesis, which is
the motivation for the book, because I have never seen it clearly
expressed elsewhere:
The problematization of the phenomenon of atheism, as the primary datum of
historical actuality1 – a problematization that is made necessary both by the

1 [TN] I reluctantly translate as “historical actuality” attualità storica, which, in turn,

is the translation of the title of a well-known book by Fr Gaston Fessard SJ, De l’actualité
4 The Problem of Atheism

problematic (postulatory) form in which atheism is forced to present itself today,

and by the clear awareness, which has been reached over the last few decades,
that it is the final stage of the philosophical direction that I will call rational-
ism – requires, as the “theoretically” primary question, the problematization of
the standard view of the history of philosophy.
Because today the way in which this history is presented also conditions practi-
cally our entire way of understanding and conceiving philosophy; indeed, whereas
history of philosophy arose, in its first great model, as the historical verification
of Hegelian philosophy, today its function has turned upside down, after histori-
cism and the critique of evidences; the criterion of historical validity of a philosophy
today comes down to being able to surpass and integrate previous positions of
thought, explaining their genesis.
Raising this issue is the ultimate question to which theological existentialism
leads; this question coincides conclusively with that of the rigorous meaning to
be given to the term “Ontologism” (this is, in the author’s judgment, the problem
of philosophy after Heidegger).2
Posing this question seems to me to be the unifying locus of theoreti-
cal philosophy, moral philosophy, history of philosophy, philosophy of
history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, political philosophy, or even,
as we shall see later, of contemporary politics itself. It is the meeting
point, in our time, of philosophy and life. Reflecting today on the his-
torical actuality does not at all mean replacing the investigation of the
eternal with an investigation of the ephemeral. It corresponds, instead,
to the precise meaning of an oft-repeated sentence, that the task left to
a philosopher today is to decipher a crisis. Because, today, the pari is
forced on us by historical reality itself;3 in the period before ours it was

historique (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1960). I must confess I could not find a good
English counterpart of actualité/attualità, which conveys both “being present” and
“being real.” Fr Fessard’s own explanation of this concept is quoted by Del Noce in
note 1 on page 237.
2 We must observe that the crucial importance of the question of “history of phi-
losophy as a problem” was already perceived by Heidegger himself in What Is Philosophy?,
trans. J.T. Wilde and W. Kluback (New Haven: College and University Press, 1958).
Where, even if my thesis is not stated – that the question about the history of philosophy
is the primary problem of philosophy after Marx and after Nietzsche (i.e., after atheism) –
clearly we are only one step away.
3 The pari draws its power from being imposed by our human situation, so that
abstention is impossible without giving up our humanity: one is “obligés à jouer.”
However, for Pascal this obligation followed from the Port-Royalist conception of
 I. The Concept of Atheism 5

possible to speak of a moral unity, independent of any religious confes-

sion or any metaphysical or anti-metaphysical assertion.4 At that time,
even philosophers who had abandoned theism recognized as an unques-
tionable fact the existence of an ethics of which Christianity was sup-
posed to be the perfect form. Think of the following curious sentence
by Schopenhauer, which is among the most characteristic, I think, to
describe this attitude: “that principle … about the content of which all
moral philosophers are actually in agreement … neminem laede, immo
omnes quantum potest juva. This is actually the proposition which all
teachers of morality exert themselves to ground … [to find] the real
foundation of ethics, which, like the philosophers’ stone, has been sought
for millennia.”5
So, the problem of the 1800s, the old problem of morals, was not the
problem of morality, whose nature was not in question, but that of its
foundation, and of the legitimacy or not of the quest for a foundation.
In a sense, we can see in Croce’s very well-known, conciliatory essay
“Why We Cannot Not Call Ourselves Christians” the last expression of

damnation and hell, from the identification of religious truth with Jansenist theology.
In the neo-Pelagianism of natural religion, for example, the pari becomes completely
meaningless (hence Voltaire’s criticism; but it would be particularly interesting to study
Locke’s “moral politics” from the angle of the transfer of Pascal’s pari to ethics; this
theme was touched upon by R. Polin in La politique morale de John Locke [Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1960], 16n6). Today, by contrast, abstention is impossible
due to the fact that it implies giving up the awareness of one’s own decisions, and thus
giving up on being human, and suffering passively the course of events. In short,
abstention is impossible due to the failure of the last form of Pelagianism, “autonomous
morality.” Thus, this is one aspect of the complete opposition between the situation
of our historical period and that of the period from 1870 to 1914. People generally
do not define with sufficient precision how radical this opposition is, and I will come
back to it later on.
4 A typical example is the scarcely known short book Précis raisonné de moral pratique
(Paris: Alcan, 1930) by André Lalande, a French philosopher who died recently at the
age of almost one hundred. He took especially to heart the quest for moral collabora-
tion, independent of any reference to a precise religion or metaphysics (his Vocabulaire
also fits in this context). Using an expression associated with Eric Voegelin, we can say
that current ethical-political life defines itself as the end of the system of the “minimum
dogma,” in which all must believe, while everybody remains free to adopt other beliefs,
as long as they do not conflict with the “minimum dogma.”
5 [TN] A. Schopenhauer, The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, trans. D.E.
Cartwright and E.E. Ermann (Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 150–1.
6 The Problem of Atheism

this secularism that presents itself as Christianity.6 In a summary formula,

we can say that the typical character of nineteenth-century secularism
was to halt its critique in front of morals (and the refusal to do so shows
us the prophetic character of Nietzsche’s thought for our present situ-
ation). Conversely, today the recognition of the plurality of moral cri-
teria, and the correlative negation that there is such a thing as absolute
and definitive ethics, is the primary assertion of what calls itself secular
thought. The injunction of the new secularism is that we must be toler-
ant of every form of thought, except one: that which presents itself as
the assertion of an absolute and definitive truth. Deep down, there is
this thought: traditional Christian ethics corresponds to the historical
stage when nature was not dominated; man’s total dominion of nature
coincides with the disappearance of ethics, at least in the aspect whereby
it means renunciation, sacrifice, asceticism. Thus, the victory of technol-
ogy is correlated with the simultaneous disappearance of religion and
ethics; that is, technical progress makes possible complete naturalism.
We only have to browse newspapers and magazines to see how much
judgments based on this type of idea get to permeate common opinion
and, reciprocally, are required by this opinion. So, we can say: in the
1800s secularism was tightly linked with Kantian morality; now, nothing
is more foreign to the new secularism than Kantian morality, and this
process is, within secularism, irreversible. Or, in sum: today’s plurality
of moralities attests, in each of them, an implicit answer, positive or not,
to the metaphysical problem; the pari, for or against God, imposes itself
in every tiny act of daily life.
Or, again (it is the same observation, developed in another form):
the non-unifiable multiplicity, and thus the gratuitousness, of philoso-
phies and the question of atheism define the situation of contemporary
thought in terms very analogous to those faced by Descartes,7 whose
Meditations must be read as the first classical work of philosophy written

6 [TN] Benedetto Croce, “Perchè non possiamo non dirci cristiani,” La Critica 55
(1942): 289–97.
7 This is why, on the one hand, the trivial criterion of their originality – or, as
people would rather say today, of their authenticity – has become widespread, replac-
ing that of truth; and why, on the other hand, there is the conviction that all philo-
sophical problems are vacuous, except those about the methodology of science or the
analysis of language, as a mental prophylaxis that is destined to annihilate all the prob-
lems of tradition from Plato, we can say, until Marx [TN: in the original this is a long
parenthetical statement in the main text].
 I. The Concept of Atheism 7

against the atheists (and not against the Gentiles, like the Thomistic
Summa, simply in the sense that at the time of St Thomas there was
no atheism to speak of, in a rigorous sense). Except that, to Descartes,
atheism presented itself in the form of skepticism, which denied, besides
religion, science and morality; its critique was a matter of highlighting
and problematizing its underlying materialistic dogmatism. By reason
of this, the alternative presented in the Meditations was between the
affirmation of the existence of God and total aphasia (since the atheist
cannot affirm the truth of science, nor that of the external world, nor
even that of the existence of the I).
Now, instead, atheism presents itself as a thesis proved by history, and
as the salvation of science and morality; hence, it no longer poses as
the primary question the problem of the reality of the external world
but, rather, the problem of the history of philosophy. Thus, the history
of philosophy as a problem seems to be, in my judgment, the present for-
mulation of the methodical doubt.
If then one wishes to find a corroboration of this investigation, my
advice would be to think of Laporte’s Rationalisme de Descartes,8 paying
special attention to the initial pages on the concept of rationalism. This
for two reasons: because the problem of rationalism in Descartes is, in
some respect, the same problem as the rationalism and immanentism
of modern philosophy – due to the fact that when one constructs the
history of modern philosophy the Cartesian beginning is necessary, as
I will discuss later (pages 330–4); and because of the decisive indirectly
theoretical importance (which will be clarified later, in essay VI) of that
book, which is only apparently just historical (Laporte’s profile is, rather,
that of a “philosopher through history”).
Let us now comment on each one of the sentences in italics.

1. On the Concept of Atheism

According to the overall definition I reach in essay V, atheism is the

endpoint at which rationalism must necessarily arrive when it is most
consistent, which is also when it enters its crisis. Namely, when it transi-
tions from metaphysical rationalism to skeptical rationalism, or

8 Jean Laporte, Le Rationalisme de Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,

1945).
8 The Problem of Atheism

historicist rationalism, or irrationalism (this latter being the position of

thought whose initiator can only be said to be Nietzsche). Hence its
three essential and irreducible forms: negative or nihilistic atheism,
positive or political atheism, and tragic atheism, which concludes in
“philosophical madness.” I think the word “tragic” cannot be given any
other meaning, in philosophy, than that of an experience of thought
ending inevitably in that particular “philosophical madness” that lies
out of the reach of psychiatrists and that,9 therefore, seems to require
to be surpassed (but to where? Is it the announcement of total nihilism
as moral or cosmic suicide? Or can it be surpassed by some form of
positive atheism? Or is it rather the announcement of a new God or
of a renewal of religious life? These are, we know, the classic questions of
Nietzschean criticism).10

9 This character of the madness of the “tragic” philosopher par excellence,

Nietzsche, is no longer a matter of discussion after the fundamental studies by
Podach. There is only one similar case in the history of philosophy, that of Lequier, a
philosopher who felt he was the initiator of true Christian philosophy but, at the same
time, was tempted by radical atheism, just like Nietzsche the “Anti-Christ” was troubled
by a constant Christian temptation. Furthermore, if we look, in their philosophies, for
the process that leads to madness, we observe a very strange thematic affinity. Can this
be a way, never attempted before, to define, in philosophy, the concept of the “tra-
gic”? Let us also notice: Nietzsche is the philosopher who, in effect, most dissociates
German thought from other trends in European thought; the same attempt at dis-
sociation is carried out by Lequier with respect to French thought. Is it not peculiar that
these radical dissociations coincide with the tragic moments of German thought and of French
thought? I postpone a discussion of this topic to another occasion.
10 I was finishing these pages when I became aware of the extremely remarkable
essay by Fr Cornelio Fabro, “Osservazioni critiche sulla nozione di ‘ateismo,’” Euntes
Docete 16, no. 2 (1963): 197–221. It was with true joy that I found in it views that are
almost identical with those presented in this book; this is even more noteworthy
because the language is different. Here I can only highlight a few among the many
points on which we agree. Against the tendency to resolve atheism into practical athe-
ism, which is extremely widespread among recent theologians, Fr Fabro perfectly
remarks: “but the situation is less simple, if viewed from within modern thought. The
issue is the following: atheism is not and cannot be a starting point, but constitutes
the point of arrival of a certain conception of the world and of man, that is, of a quali-
fied ‘resolution’ of being, both of man and of the world” (200). Now, what else do I
intend to say when I criticize the explanation of atheism as anti-theism (see essay V)
and when, instead, I recognize atheism as the consequential ultimate point of arrival
of rationalism? Just as correctly Fr Fabro observes, regarding atheism before the mod-
ern age, that it consists of “sporadic affirmations … which could be refuted by making
appeal to the fundamental realistic principle” (202). I have denied altogether that we
 I. The Concept of Atheism 9

In our century we observe atheism’s necessary transition from its

scientistic to its postulatory form, a necessity that befalls Marxism itself
when it intends to take a rigorously critical form (see essays V and VI).
In truth, this optative aspect of atheism, as arbitrary postulation, had
already been highlighted by all its previous critics. Thusly Descartes
himself had pointed out that it is arbitrary to elevate the existence of
extended reality to an evidence valid in itself, independently of any
reference to those of the I and of God, and for him judgment is an act
of free will; thusly Rousseau (and it will never be emphasized enough
that he is Kant’s only true teacher)11 recognized in the atheistic doubt
the decision to will God not to be (a thesis that in Kant will take the

can speak of atheism before the modern age; but not in the sense of denying that in
the Middle Ages we can find sporadic manifestations of atheistic temptations or
objections; rather, in the sense that in the Middle Ages atheism is present as atheism
that is defeated and necessarily destined to be defeated, while I intended to deal only
with atheism that presents itself as the invincible conclusion of a specific line of
thought, which therefore must be criticized at its original starting point. So, there is
also full agreement, I think, on this point. Father Fabro describes the modern age
(198) as characterized from the start by positive and constructive atheism, whereas
I reserve this term for Marxist atheism and, in intention, for that of Nietzsche, while I
deem the atheism of the 1600s and 1700s to be negative and nihilistic. But also in this
case I think that the difference is merely terminological because Fr Fabro character-
izes this modern atheism in terms of “reclaiming man’s originality in front of nature”
(199), and I have insisted on the priority of the historical-political moment over the
scientistic one in the formation of atheism (pages 300–1), and spotted the first form
of consistent atheism in the libertine inversion of humanism. As for his thesis that the
principle of immanence is the “essential step” in the formation of atheism, it coin-
cides perfectly with the concept of rationalism I propose. The agreement with what
he says about the attempt to save religiosity in Marxist atheism is also perfect. I would
like to add that, when the atheist negation is made to coincide with the negation of
religiosity, as in Nietzsche, we have the beginning of the critical crisis of atheism. There
is also perfect agreement on how to characterize atheistic existentialism. The point,
instead, on which there may be a (superable?) disagreement concerns the fact that
Fr Fabro attributes the principle of immanence to Descartes himself, whereas one
of the starting points of my research is the critique of the rationalist interpretation of
Descartes, developed by Laporte. Certainly, on this point the difference is not negli-
gible. This is because if one accepts the thesis about the rationalism of Descartes, one
must come to understand the whole process of modern philosophy as directed
towards radical atheism; while instead, in my judgment, the rise of atheism character-
izes modern philosophy only problematically.
11 Not so Hume, whose thought he warped; such warping made possible the
form in which he realized criticism.
10 The Problem of Atheism

form of the postulates of practical reason and the connection between

moral consciousness and religious consciousness). But the distinguish-
ing feature of contemporary atheism is that it affirms itself recognizing
this postulatory character; that is, it rejects the aspect whereby Kantian
thought can be presented as an itinerary towards God – the Critique of
Pure Reason serving as an introduction to the Critique of Practical Reason –
and it always declares itself to be an extension of Kant’s critique of
metaphysics so radical that it cuts off the roots of the Critique of Practical
Reason. Now, this formal recognition of the postulatory character of
atheism has, in my view, the function of bringing to light the primary
option that lies at the foundation of rationalism (and of irrationalism, as its
reverse) and, thereby, of making possible its internal criticism.
However, what do I mean by this word “rationalism”? Just what Laporte
gets to in the introductory pages of Rationalisme de Descartes,12 which are
devoted to elucidating this concept: “the stance taken towards religion
is … decisive. A rationalist accepts religion, as long as it is rational reli-
gion, which translates the affirmations of reason into symbolic language,
or limits itself to the very awareness we have of reason, as the principle
of universal communication among men. He rejects every transcendence.
He shuts himself inside immanence because he thinks that reason, our
reason, does not rely on anything else, that it does not need to complete
itself with anything else, that therefore it does not need to be concerned
with any beyond. He will come to terms, if anything, with the unknowable.
He will never tolerate the supernatural.” In other words – I believe I can
continue as follows, in the spirit of Laporte’s indication – we must dis-
tinguish between the true definition of rationalism, which can only be
formulated in terms of its opposition to the supernatural, and the defi-
nition of rationalism within rationalism itself, which reduces it to a
gnoseological position (ending in dogmatism, contrarily to empiricism,
which ends in skepticism). Continuing this discussion would lead us
to show the superiority of Pascal’s criticism, which is open to the

12 Laporte, Le Rationalisme de Descartes, xix. Definitely, starting from this defini-

tion one must conclude that in ancient thought there is no atheism in a proper sense.
In fact, the prevalent trend in the field today is oriented in that direction. For exam-
ple, regarding the denial that there is such a thing as true and proper atheism in
Diagoras of Melos, the “atheist” of antiquity, see the important communication by
Italo Lana, “Diagora di Melo,” Atti dell’Accademia delle Scienze di Torino 84 (1949–50):
161–205.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 11

supernatural, over Kant’s, which is conditioned by a presupposed clos-

edness to it (or better, a closedness resulting from a moral motivation).13
Being conditioned by this initial negation of the supernatural, or of
the “miracle” in the broadest sense, or of the tria mirabilia that fecit Deus,
res ex nihilo, liberum arbitrium, Hominem Deum, according to Descartes’s
initial intuition,14 rationalism can only lead to the affirmation of the
normality of the human situation, viewed either optimistically (“reality
is what it must be,” Hegel’s criticism of the Sollen) or pessimistically
(worldly reality is what it necessarily is). Then, spiritual life can be pre-
sented as a search for liberation oriented necessarily towards nothing-
ness or else as acceptance of life in a disposition that goes necessarily
“beyond good and evil.”
Such consideration of rationalism leads necessarily to a different
definition of empiricism. To be more precise, it leads to distinguishing
three meanings of it. According to the first meaning, empiricism denotes
a philosophical line that is subordinate to rationalism in opposition
(empiricism as skepticism: in this sense Lachelier used to say that skepti-
cism is the consequence, which keeps raising its head, of empiricism).
According to the second meaning – which is the one I referred to,
because it is the most common, when I talked (essay IV) about the loss
of the sacred in the affluent society and about bourgeois society as
structured philosophically by empiricism – it intends to reaffirm itself
beyond rationalism but after having accepted its negations; then the
most appropriate terms to indicate it is positivism (science against theol-
ogy and metaphysics). The verifiable is regarded as the only reality; the
non-verifiable as a subjective illusion, which will be explained by depth
psychology and by sociology, even though it will never be possible to
eliminate from the positivist version of empiricism a shadow of agnosti-
cism; therefore, the transcendent is not denied in itself, but in its human

13 The pages in Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason that oppose the belief in
miracles, a belief that is not part of pure religiosity in as much as this latter is based
on moral faith, are decisive. It would be important to clarify to what extent the denial
of the supernatural acted since the beginning, in a decisive fashion, on the formation of
Kant’s moral thought, and led it to a warped vision of theological doctrines.
14 It seems to me that his passage from the Cogitationes privatae, about the
unbreakable link between affirming the creator God and free will, reveals the original
starting point of Cartesianism.
12 The Problem of Atheism

expressions.15 According to the third meaning – which is absolutely

opposed to the second, as empiricism coming after the critique of rational-
ism – it means affirming the plurality and irreducibility of the levels of
experience (the empiricist attitude as acceptance of plurality), with a
complete refusal to view the lowest as the deepest – that is, of the sci-
entistic spirit. Thus, such empiricism is not tied to the affirmation that
the verifiable has higher value than the unverifiable; it can be developed
in terms of a methodology of the unverifiable; it does not stand in
conflict at all with the affirmation of the validity of religion or at least
of the possibility of the transcendent, and actually it can even agree
with Ontologism as a philosophy of metaphysical experience. The proof
of this can be found in a curious note by Laporte, in which he says that
Malebranchism, by replacing the Cartesian proof with the presence of
God, is the natural outcome of the philosophy of Descartes,16 which he
defines as the example of a radical and integral empiricism. But what
matters most is that, because of this empiricism, Laporte is led to affirm
a tight kinship between the positions of Pascal and Hume, which seems
amazing. Let us consider this point as summarized by one of his students,
Jeanne Russier: “Pascal’s universe, like Hume’s, is a universe of radical
contingency. Everything is possible, because the necessary, that whose
contrary is impossible, cannot be found anywhere. And this universe of
Pascal, at least as much as that of Hume, this universe in which contin-
gency is nothing but the scientific name of what could be called, from
another perspective, gratuitousness, is what Laporte, after having taken
Hume’s side against Kant, described in the conclusion of his critique
of the Idea of necessity.”17 From this point of view, radical empiricism is

15 The greatest adversary of this second form of empiricism can be recognized in

Marcel, in the name of a metaphysical empiricism originating from Schelling – so that
one of the most exact characterizations of his thought is the one that sees it as a
“methodology of the unverifiable.” See the beautiful book by Pietro Prini, Gabriel
Marcel e la metodologia dell’inverificabile (Rome: Studium, 1950). What will be said later
about the relation between Marxist atheism and the irreligion of the affluent society –
which cannot but identify with the empiricism of the verifiable – makes it possible to
define the exact limitation of Marcel’s thought – whose importance today seems
to me to be underrated – and the form in which it can be continued in order to inter-
pret and overcome the present crisis.
16 Laporte, Le Rationalisme de Descartes, 290n3.
17 Jeanne Russier, “L’Expérience du Mémorial et la conception pascalienne de
la connaissance,” in Blaise Pascal: l’Homme et l’Ouvre, Cahiers de Royaumont (Paris: Les
Editions de Minuit, 1956), 230–2.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 13

an entirely open philosophy that, consequently, is inclined to admit the

possibility of miracles. It is ultimately Pascal’s philosophy, if one accepts
his assertion that “truth is a person” and a person is not proven but
grasped in an immediate experience, when it accepts to make himself
known and we accept to be attentive to this revelation. Starting from
an initial opposition to the philosophies of necessity of Spinoza and
Hegel, Laporte gets to set in opposition, in a form that is the opposite
of the positivist one, Hume and Kant, in the name of a philosophy of
contingent experience, which affirms that the constancy of the laws of
nature does not manifest the existence of “necessary connections.”18
This perspective directs his two complementary books, the Idée de nécés-
sité (1941) and the Conscience de la liberté (1946), the latter being an
investigation of what pure experience can lead to in the field of meta-
physics, whose importance nobody in Italy, and very few in France, as
far as I know, has noticed.
In Laporte’s assertion about the incommensurability (unknown to
rationalism) between knowledge of persons and knowledge of things,
we can definitely discern a clearly existential stance, even though he is
not fond of this word. Thus, the point that should be studied more
deeply is the possibility of an agreement between the religious philosophy
of existence and empiricism as an open philosophy, in the third sense;
or, more precisely, of an agreement among philosophy of existence,
empiricism, and Ontologism. But this is a problem that can be methodi-
cally addressed only much later after the investigations in this book.

18 Regarding this thesis on the Pascal-Hume relationship, I believe we must say it

is decisively important in this respect: there are two possible forms of criticism,
Pascal’s and Kant’s, and the preeminent value of the former can stand out clearly only
if one is able to prove that Hume has not been overcome by Kant. Laporte’s historical
research should have logically concluded, and all premises had already been stated,
in the opposition Hume against Kant. However, does it follow that Hume sends us back
to Pascal? This is what leaves me unconvinced because Hume’s critique of rationalism
does not call into question its original presupposition, which is why it must take the
form of empiricism. Hence the unique ambiguity of this thinker whom other scholars –
certainly less correctly than Laporte, and yet with some appearance of verisimilitude –
have compared to Feuerbach rather than to Pascal; hence, also, his solitude (can we
say that he had any real continuators since the positivists certainly were not?). The
solitude, in the sense of non-continuation, that standard historiography attributes to
Pascal must rather be referred, in my judgment, to Hume.
14 The Problem of Atheism

Setting aside this unconventional meaning of empiricism, and stick-

ing to the one that is unquestionably more common, we observe that
it is marked both by a constant subordination to rationalism, so that it
accepts its negations, and, from another angle, by a constant ulteriority
to it, so that it represents its crisis. The crisis becomes definitive when
rationalism reaches its insuperable form, as I think happened with
Marxism; hence the particular relationship between Communism and
the affluent society, which I will discuss shortly; hence, also, the question
whether rationalism that has made itself total brings about the fullness
of nihilism, just like a still imperfect stage of its formation was associated
with skepticism.
Let us now return to the thesis that atheism is the end stage of a pro-
cess of thought that produces, in its first expression, the “systems” of
metaphysical rationalism (closed systematics is essential to metaphysical
rationalism). History is there to confirm this relationship. Of what else
is libertine atheism the consequence, if not of the decay of Brunism?19
Perhaps, if we consider libertine thought in its most rigorous expres-
sion, and do not confuse it with a practical attitude, we can define
precisely the classical problem of the relationship between Spinoza and
Bruno: the essential motif of Brunism is reconfirmed in Spinoza after
the libertine disintegration and the Cartesian antithesis, symmetrically
to the Marxist reconfirmation of Hegelianism after its disintegration
in the Hegelian left. This is confirmed by the fact that the post-Bruno
and post-Spinoza strands of atheism essentially converge; however, here
I cannot linger on this problem, and I will only point out that it needs
to be investigated. The one-sided, but possible, materialistic version of
Spinozism is found in the atheistic, post-Diderot strand of the
Enlightenment.20 Regarding the Marxist continuation of Hegelianism,
the process is too well known. As for irrationalist atheism, does it not
represent the decay of Schopenhauer’s system, which is, yes, the exact

19 Researching Bruno’s subterranean influence on irreligion in the 1600s and

early 1700s, even before it encountered that of Spinoza, is a theme of great impor-
tance that has never been studied analytically, as far as I know. To frame the question,
see the remarkable chapter by G. Spini in his (otherwise questionable) Ricerca dei lib-
ertini (Rome: Universale di Roma, 1950). See also the short but rigorous remarks by
A. Guzzo in his Giordano Bruno (Turin: Edizioni di Filosofia, 1960), 271–2.
20 See P. Vernière, Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Revolution, vol. 2 (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1954).
 I. The Concept of Atheism 15

inversion of Hegelian rationalism, but still within rationalism, under-

stood in the sense I said? The four essential forms of atheism display
certain common features. The systematic structure that epitomizes the
“closedness” of metaphysical rationalism is dismantled in the name of
a reconciliation with reality and with the scientific trends (with political
and social reality measured by Machiavellianism in the libertines; with
the progressivism of the “parti philosophique” in Enlightenment athe-
ism; with reality as historical becoming in Marxism; with life in Nietzsche).
This reconciliation requires the elimination of the Christian elements
in the metaphysical forms of rationalism, present in the guise of pres-
ervation of religion in philosophy. Finally, in every form of atheism the
critique of transcendent religions relies on the argument that by now
their historical time is over (the “God-is-dead” theme).
Now, if rationalism can only take shape by rejecting the status naturae
lapsae, the primary theme that characterizes it must be identified in the
rejection of the biblical notion of sin. Apparent Christian elements can
be found in every form of rationalism, but they are completely trans-
mogrified precisely in connection with a different conception of sin.
This also explains how Marxism connects with the first elaboration of
revolutionary thought – which arises, with Rousseau, in a philosophical
context directly opposed to the “pari philosophique,” but which none-
theless is characterized by a new conception of sin (295ff) – and brings
it to its extreme and insuperable consequences, making it atheistic.
Let us now review, quickly, the essential texts of rationalism about sin,
and observe that they are fundamentally identical.
There is Bruno’s famous passage in Spaccio della bestia trionfante, which
says that the Fall was necessary, and has been salutary, because man’s
morality is not innocence but knowledge of good and evil; not by chance,
this is the text that so much enthused Spaventa. The texts by Spinoza
are equally well known:21 original sin is simply erased altogether because
the idea that God is the cause of everything rules out the notion of “sin.”
Scripture talks about it because it addresses the commoners and is

21 The most important passages are found in the correspondence with Blyernberg,
letters XIX and XXI. For some other references, see Theologico-Political Treatise,
chap. 19; Political Treatise, chap. 2, 18–23 and chap. 4, 4; Ethics, chap. 4, 3, sec. 2. His
well-known criticism of the virtue of penance evidently implies the negation of sin.
About the importance of his correspondence with Blyernberg, see A. Guzzo, Il pensiero
di Spinoza (Florence: Vallecchi, 1924; Turin: Edizioni di Filosofia, 1963), 102ff.
16 The Problem of Atheism

forced to express itself more humano; when Spinoza wants to interpret

the biblical story allegorically, then we find also in him the idea of the
positivity of sin.
But what are supremely interesting are, in particular, the passages by
Hegel that I already briefly discussed in essay V (291n28). Let us recall
a few more. “The Fall is therefore the eternal Mythus of Man – in fact,
the very transition by which he becomes man. Persistence in this stand-
point is however, Evil, and the feeling of pain at such a condition, and
of longing to transcend it, we find it in David, when he says: ‘Lord create
for me a new heart, a new steadfast spirit.’ This feeling we observe even
in the account of the Fall; though an announcement of Reconciliation
is not made there, but rather one of continuance in misery. Yet we have
in this narrative the prediction of reconciliation … still more profoundly
expressed where it is stated that when God saw that Adam had eaten of
that tree, he said, ‘Behold Adam is become as one of us knowing Good
and Evil.’ God confirms the words of the serpent.”22 About these passages, I
think it is worth quoting M. Carrouges’s particularly astute comment:

Adam’s rebellion is the beginning of salvation. For Christianity creation is

excellent in itself according to the words of God Himself. Just for that rea-
son, then, Adam’s sojourn on earth deserved to be called Paradise. Also,
the status of creature given to Adam made his rebellious deed against the
Creator and his mad will to be like the Almighty absurd and impious at
the same time. For Hegel, on the contrary, since Creation is the Fall, Paradise
can only be an illusion; the fact that the first man believes he is happy at
birth, and that he recognizes a Creator as his master, can only be the worst
decline, because he makes his misfortune irremediable. But, conversely, if
he stands up boldly, if he aspires to much more than Paradise, if he wants to
become like God, then everything will be saved: having recovered the mem-
ory of his divine origin, and possessing the will to climb back to the vertex of
the firmament, man will end up surmounting the division within divine na-
ture. By challenging the pseudo-Creator, he is not guilty of usurpation, but
on the contrary he marks forcefully the beginning of a legitimate attempt
at recovery … For Hegel, the greatness of Christianity is evidently giving the

22 G.F.W. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London:

Bohn, 1861), 333–4 [TN: the emphasis in the last sentence is Del Noce’s].
 I. The Concept of Atheism 17

world the notion of this challenge by the first man, but its weakness is view-
ing it as a fault.23

Against the Aufklärung, Hegel conceived a way of surpassing Christianity

that does not erase it but preserves it. Now, just as we wondered whether
Spinoza’s biblical hermeneutics was conditioned by the initial rejection
of sin, I think we are even more justified to view Hegel’s conception of
original sin as the first datum of his philosophy of religion, the true
reason the dogmas of Christian religion are, yes, preserved by him, but
within a general subversion of theology. Indeed, of all Christian dogmas,
which one appears in Hegelianism with a completely inverted meaning,
so that it is impossible to say that it is preserved?
It is also clear that this initial inversion of the interpretation of original
sin started a process of thought that could not but lead to formulating
the most radical antithesis of Christianity. Of the many ways in which
one can prove the necessary continuity between Hegelianism and
Marxism, this is perhaps the most valid.
Finally, there is Schopenhauer. His insistence on the theme of original
sin, as the only positive moment in biblical thought, takes in him the
anti-biblical meaning that existence is guilt. What he denies in Hegel
is not that the appearing of individual and particular beings is evil in
itself, but that this evil is a condition for the highest good; that is, the
process leading to the philosophy of history.
However, it is clear that this shared thesis about the nature of sin
cannot but coincide with the thesis that guilt is ontological, inscribed
in the very structure of finite being or, from the moral standpoint, in
the reduction of individualism to egoistic will. Hence comes the ideal
of spiritual life as comprehension and justification of the real, achieved
by taking the point of view of the universal; or as annihilation into
Nirvana-extinction; or as Revolution that must replace the I with the
we, individual man with collective man – who lives by participating
in the species, which is the only reality – transferring personhood from
the individual to the collectivity.
Furthermore, since there are only two fundamental explanations
of the problem of evil, that of Genesis and that contained in the myth of
Anaximander, we can also say that atheism – which is in a proper sense

23 M. Carrouges, La mystique du surhomme (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 18ff.

18 The Problem of Atheism

a position subsequent to Christianity because it comes after the ideas

of Revelation and Supernatural, and constitutes their criticism – can
be viewed, in its generality, as the final outcome of the re-comprehension of
Christianity within the interpretation of evil that had already been formulated
in the fragment of Anaximander (even though it becomes transfigured
and not easily recognizable because of the re-comprehension, and
even though the thinkers of metaphysical rationalism or of atheism
have generally not paid any particular attention to this text, apart
from Nietzsche).24
Regarding the thesis (pages 282–3) that atheism begins only during
the conclusion-dissolution of the Renaissance, the historian who has
been called “the enemy of anachronism” par excellence, Lucien Febvre,
has my back. In his work aimed at demolishing the usual picture of the
sixteenth century as an age of irreligion and as the beginning of a pro-
cess that leads to the age of Enlightenment, he wrote: “ [in the sixteenth
century there is only] the unbelief of despair … or perhaps the unbelief
that was a revolt against the triumph of injustice: ‘If there is a God, and
he is good, how can he let evil be done?’ But does that question really
go very far? In any case, it is one of the questions to which religions –
above all Christianity – have a ready answer and one that is to the
point … And it is utter madness to make Rabelais the first in a linear
series at the tail end of which we put the ‘freethinkers’ of the twentieth
century (supposing, moreover, that they are a single block and do not
differ profoundly from each other in turn of mind, scientific experience,

24 It seems to me that this definition of the historical situation of atheism matches

exactly the “pagan re-comprehension of Christianity” that Kierkegaard talked about
in reference to Hegelianism. It is important to point out that it stands in opposition
to the usual definition of the spirit of modern philosophy, understood as transition to
intra-worldly transcendence and thereby in complete opposition to ancient ontology,
reached through the radical secularization of Christian anthropology. I think, on the
contrary, that we must speak of a re-comprehension of the Christian novelty within
ancient categories.
Regarding Anaximander’s myth, Nietzsche’s classic text on the fragment of
Anaximander is in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (1873). In contemporary
philosophy, it is recalled for theoretical purposes, besides in Heidegger’s famous
essay, in Shestov, according to whom all the categories of “speculative philosophy”
depend on the theory of evil formulated in it; and in Shestov’s precise opposite, Benda,
although I am not not aware that he mentions Anaximander’s name explicitly.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 19

and particular arguments).”25 If anything, he has my back too much, I

daresay, because hatred of anachronism inclines Febvre to immobilize
ideas, somehow cutting them off from their movement, and to discern
the meaning of a work only in the awareness its author had of it. Whereas
it is unquestionable that in the 1500s – which may well be recognized,
per his judgment, as a very Christian century overall – there are also
the germs that lead to Bruno’s synthesis and to the subsequent libertine
atheism; even though Febvre is perfectly correct when he rejects the
idea of a “linear sequence.” As I already said, the three forms of atheism,
taking this word in the most rigorous sense, are irreducible.
The question of the linear sequence brings me to discuss an objection
that could be raised about my denial that there is a “development of
atheism” (page 287) while, on the other hand, it may seem that I see
in atheism the conclusion of modern rationalism.
Now, I do not think that we can speak of continuity even in reference
to metaphysical rationalisms because, in Spinoza, there are various
possibilities of development (I had or I will have here the occasion to
recall the naturalistic possibility – in eighteenth-century materialism
and in the form of positivism closest to materialism, that of Ardigò – that
of Hegel and those of Martinetti and Brunschvicg; also, cannot we speak,
with some reason, of Spinozism in Heidegger?); and because Hegelianism
can only ignore, as it has done in all its forms, Schopenhauer’s philosophy
and the process from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, and also the line of
religious pessimism (Spir, von Hartmann, Martinetti). A fortiori it is
impossible to speak of continuity among forms of atheism because each
one of them pushes to the extreme consequences the rationalistic form
from which it derives. Thus, the distance between Marx and Nietzsche
is greater than that between Hegel and Schopenhauer (shall we say the
greatest that ever occurred in the history of philosophy?). We shall see
later what this recognition implies.
To be more precise, one can discern a (non-dialectic) continuity in
the history of negative atheism due to the particular relationship, which
I just mentioned, between Bruno and Spinoza; but not in the least a process
of development from negative atheism to positive atheism. Marx continues
Hegel and, in a different respect, Rousseau, and not, despite what people

25 Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of
Rabelais, trans. B. Gottlieb (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 459–60.
20 The Problem of Atheism

have said,26 Lamettrie or Baron d’Holbach. If this second continuity

were true, one should conclude that Marx continues … the Marquis
de Sade – that is, the anti-Rousseau in every respect, as will be said later
(page 288n25). De Sade’s work is the most complete encyclopaedia of
the themes of libertine atheism in its eighteenth-century form, in which
there is certainly something to be learned from the philosophical stand-
point but as a clarification of the impossibility of combining negative
atheism, in its ultimate conclusions, with humanitarian morality –
indeed, the essential point of de Sade’s thought is the complementarity
between the negation of God, viewed as the original culprit, and the
negation of the other – and a clarification of the origins of decadentism
in negative atheism. I am certainly not unaware that people are building
a gallery of “unmaskers” that includes characters as different as
Machiavelli, Sade, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and possibly Pareto; this
gallery is strictly analogous to the eighteenth-century gallery of the
heroes of free thought, except that the characters have changed. But
never mind … whoever enjoys this exercise, go ahead; all that needs
to be said is that it has nothing to do with history. Or do they intend to
say, childishly, that dialectical materialism means “materialism plus
dialectics”? In actuality, there is nothing in eighteenth-century material-
ism that justifies a possible development in a dialectic direction.

26 This is Plekhanov’s well-known perspective – on the subject, see the acute

remarks by A. Gramsci in Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce (Turin:
Einaudi, 1948), 151–2. It must consistently lead to the exaltation of Spinoza, viewed
in his naturalistic aspect, as Marx’s true precursor. On this matter one must mention
the influence of Lange’s work, which has been enormous both on Marxists and non-
Marxists. The former, starting from the idea that Marxist materialism was just tradi-
tional materialism with the addition of dialectics, studied in Lange traditional
materialism and came to the idea of a continuity from Holbach to Helvétius to Marx.
The latter, like Croce in his first Marxist writings of 1896–99, having observed cor-
rectly that Marxism is totally irreducible to the materialism studied by Lange, consis-
tently came to deny the materialistic character of Marx’s thought. We can say that
Lange’s book conditioned the whole historical perspective of both Italian neo-
Kantians and Idealists regarding materialism and atheism. See, for example, G. De
Ruggiero’s judgment in 1941: “The History of Materialism is the most beautiful and
friendliest book produced by German philosophy over the last fifty years” (La filosofia
contemporanea, 4th ed. [Bari: Laterza, 1941], 70). It is true that this was a new edition
of a book that dated back to 1912. But De Ruggiero stated in the introduction that he
stood by all his judgments, except the one about Spaventa’s thesis on the nationality
of philosophy.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 21

Another objection might concern the reduction (page 283) of the

forms of atheism to negative atheism, positive atheism – the latter being
essentially identified with Marx’s atheism – and Nietzsche’s tragic athe-
ism. What gives me the right to talk about Schopenhauer’s philosophy
only as the beginning of a line leading to a form of atheism, when he
explicitly declares that his inseparable adversaries are optimism, theism,
and Judaism? Also, what place should we give to Comte’s atheism? Or
to atheistic existentialism, be it that of the 1800s (Stirner’s, for example),
that which rose unexpectedly in French philosophy after the war (Sartre,
Merleau-Ponty, etc.), or that of Nicolai Hartmann? Above all, why did
I not talk about aesthetic atheism, that is, the one that finds in art its
essential expression, symmetrically to Marxist atheism’s expression in
politics? How can a consideration of atheism, especially of contemporary
atheism, be exhaustive without taking into account, for example,
Surrealism? Regarding this last point I can only admit that there is a
gap. But in a book one cannot say everything; and I will touch upon
this topic, although briefly, when I discuss decadentism, as a continua-
tion of negative atheism.
So, according to this objection, I forgot pessimistic and religious
atheism, positivist atheism, existentialist atheism, ethical atheism, aes-
thetic atheism. Now, the formula that is commonly used to describe
Schopenhauer’s thought, “religious atheism” (which is completely dif-
ferent, needless to say, from the “atheistic religion” in which Marxism
finds its consistent form), signals, if we look carefully, a contradiction.
I have insisted (essay V) on this essential motif: I am considering not
this or that declaration of atheism, which could be found in any epoch,
but only the forms of atheism that present themselves as necessary endpoints of
some line of thought and that cannot be surpassed within this line, so that their
criticism must address such direction of thought at its root. Having
stipulated this, we can remark that Schopenhauer’s religious critique
of Hegelianism is still dependent on Hegel in opposition. This depen-
dence manifests itself in the devaluation of the finite, in the identifica-
tion of individual will with selfish will, and of this latter with radical evil.
As a consequence, the culmination of the religious critique of Hegel is
not in Schopenhauer but in Kierkegaard; and this was the reason
Schopenhauer almost disappeared from the philosophical literature at
the time of the Kierkegaard renaissance. Schopenhauer became the
philosopher “who wants to live on good terms with his pessimism,” a
typically non-existential thinker. I regard this criticism as fundamentally
22 The Problem of Atheism

unjust: Schopenhauer’s anti-Hegelian critique consciously intends to

be a critique within rationalism, understood as exclusion of the super-
natural, which consistently ends in atheism due to its religious character.
But in its continuation the atheistic moment and the religious moment
(which is actually properly mystical but completely different from
Kierkegaard’s religiosity) split apart in a process entirely similar to that
leading to the division between the Hegelian right and left. On the one
side there is religious pessimism, which continues with a more and more
spiritualistic tone (A. Spir, E. von Hartmann, P. Martinetti); on the other,
Nietzsche. If we want to develop the parallel further, we must recog-
nize – against Löwith’s thesis, which unifies all thought from Hegel to
Nietzsche in a single process, with the obvious and consequent reduc-
tion of Schopenhauer’s place to a minimum – a symmetric pattern
in the opposition between the lines Hegel-Feuerbach-Marx and
Schopenhauer-von Hartmann-Nietzsche. This interpretation is neces-
sary if we consider (to cite a forgotten document) the opposition and
symmetry of von Hartmann’s Religion of the Future to Feuerbach’s Principles
of a Religion of the Future. This topic would well deserve a study.
As for Comte, I certainly do not intend to deny that he strove to real-
ize a humanity without any trace of God. Moreover, his case seems to
contradict the idea that the origins of atheism lie in metaphysical ratio-
nalism. But coming up with a program is one thing, realizing it another.
So, here one might raise the question whether the conclusion of French
positivism should not be found in Bergson, whose process of thought,
which started from a critique of Spencer, ends precisely with a critique
of the kind of “closed religion” of which Comte had been the theore-
tician.27 By a process that takes place completely inside positivism as its
self-criticism, and that is hard to understand and to situate historically
precisely to the extent that all other directions of thought are initially
ignored (classical philosophers, if anything, are discovered at the end),
Bergson arrives at a critique of the original Comtian foundation. This
idea is not paradoxical if we keep in mind that the same atmosphere,

27 Regarding the character, pushed to the extreme, of being a “closed religion”

of Comte’s religion of humanity, see the very beautiful pages by Fr De Lubac in The
Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995). This is why the inten-
sity of his aversion to Christianity is equal to that of his sympathy for Catholicism. In
a synthetic formula, we might say that for Comte positivism makes possible the defini-
tive dissociation of Catholicism and Christianity, in favour of the former.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 23

the pre-positivism of the Ideologues, prepared the philosophies of Maine

de Biran and Comte. Gouhier writes: “despite their different interior
dispositions and their divergent journeys, and without attenuating what
separates an ‘amateur’ of the end of the eighteenth century from a
student of the polytechnic school at the beginning of the nineteenth,
the founder of psychology does belong to the same family as the founder
of sociology. They both start from the question: how can we make
knowledge of man positive? They both raise it because they subordinate
the answer to a way of life. They both know that the advent of the sci-
ence of man is exceptionally important; it makes metaphysics positive,
says the former, it enables us to found positive philosophy, says the
latter.”28 The analogies between de Biran and Bergson have been
pointed out often; cannot we say that the philosophy of the latter marks
the victory, within French positivism, of de Biran over Comte?
As for existentialist atheism, it takes two forms: the existentialism in
the Hegelian left and the existentialism in contemporary French phi-
losophy. Regarding Nietzsche, I think that his thought is better described
as “tragic” atheism. Speaking of existentialism in the Hegelian left,
people often mention Feuerbach; however, the term that best fits his
thought is “humanism.” The true existentialist atheist of that period is
the critic of Feuerbach’s “generic Humanity” in the name of the Unique
Individual – that is, Max Stirner. Henri Arvon deserves credit for having
highlighted the importance of this generally ignored and despised
philosopher.29 He is described either as a caricature of Fichte,

28 H. Gouhier, Les conversions de Maine de Biran (Paris: Vrin, 1948), 11. See also
“Maine de Biran and Bergson,” in Etudes Bergsoniennes (1948). After all, it is well
known that the formula “spiritualistic positivism” was coined by Ravaisson in refer-
ence to the philosophy of Maine de Biran.
29 H. Arvon, Aux sources de l’existentialisme, Max Stirner (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1954). This book expands, with regard to Stirner, the extremely effective
précis L’anarchisme (Paris: PUF, 1954). It continues in Ludwig Feuerbach: La transforma-
tion du sacré (Paris: PUF, 1957), a book that, as a result of having studied in depth
Feuerbach’s disciple/adversary Stirner, lets us establish Feuerbach’s place in the his-
tory of philosophy in a form that I am inclined to call definitive. As for the essay on
anarchism, even though it appeared in the apparently popularizing series Que sais-je?,
it seems to me that it is today the obligatory starting point for any serious study of
anarchic thought. He draws well the Hegel-Feuerbach-Stirner-Bakunin line, which in
his judgment is no less legitimate than the Hegel-Marx line. My opinion on the topic,
however, is that they are two communicating lines, of which the second is necessarily
victorious; just as we can view Marx as the one who surpasses Stirner, so we must
24 The Problem of Atheism

according to whom the I opposes itself not to the non-I but to other I’s;
or a peculiar precursor of Nietzsche in a style of petit-bourgeois medi-
ocrity; or bundled together with Proudhon and Bakunin, neglecting
the differences; or even viewed as a precursor of anarchic terrorism –
to the point of making him the true initiator of atheistic existentialism.
Actually, I am inclined to make an even stronger claim: he is the only
example of consistent atheistic existentialism. In order to grasp his
significance, we must reflect upon his decisive presence in the writings
in which Marx, once and for all, nailed down his philosophy – The
German Ideology and the Theses on Feuerbach. Not coincidentally, in fact,
the first of them features Stirner as the main adversary. Arvon writes
correctly: “praxis, man’s practical activity that exerts itself on a given
social environment and becomes, in lieu of conscience, the effective
negativity thanks to which social alienation is eliminated … is presented
as the surpassing of mechanistic materialism and dialectic Idealism. It
reconciles into a superior unity materialist sensualism and Idealist
activity. Marx entrusts to Feuerbach’s Man the function of creator that
Stirner had reserved for Consciousness. Thereby praxis seems to be
the result … of the polemics between Stirner and Marx. It is through
it that Marx ends the antinomy between Feuerbach’s humanism and

recognize Lenin, when we try to define his philosophical originality, as the one who
surpasses Bakunin. A deeper study of this last point would be called for because it
would allow the most rigorous definition of the opposition between Social Democracy and
Communism. From a theoretical standpoint, the former is the development of Marx
against Bakunin; the latter is the affirmation of Marx after Bakunin, where the thought
of Bakunin can be defined in terms of the identification of the Hegelian motif of the
antithesis as the theoretical premise of revolutionary thought. I do not need to say
how important a rigorous treatment of this topic would be for an ideological clarifica-
tion of contemporary politics.
In the book on Stirner, pages 85–7, devoted to his critique of Proudhon, are very
important, although I am not sure that Arvon grasps their exceptional importance.
What Stirner, like Edgar Bauer, fights in Proudhon is the endurance of the religious
illusion under the guise of worshipping absolute justice – that is, the fact that
Proudhon did not partake of the critique of ethics developed by the Hegelian left. In
my judgment, this is what enables us to understand Renouvier’s thought, from the
Science de la morale of 1865 onward, as the continuation of anti-Hegelian Proudhonism,
which had necessarily to take, from 1882 to 1903, the form of a heretic rediscovery
of “Christian philosophy”; and to establish the very important distinction, in view of
what will be said below about the essence of anti-clericalism, between anti-clerical indi-
vidualism and anarchic individualism.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 25

Stirner’s Egoism.”30 Within the perspective deriving from Hegelianism,

Marx is undoubtedly the winner: within the Hegelian line of descent,
atheistic existentialism is just a stage surpassed by Marxist atheism.
Hence Stirner, in order to be able to reaffirm himself after Marx, should
have shifted his thought in Kierkegaard’s direction, criticizing Hegel’s
philosophy of religion for resolving Christianity into the history of the
world spirit; he should have jumped from the Hegelian left to
Kierkegaard’s type of anti-Hegelianism. So far, Martin Buber has been
the only one who has pointed this out explicitly.31 I would like to add
that Stirner’s thought is amenable to meeting Kierkegaard’s thought
in its Shestovian development; indeed, what is Shestov’s philosophy if
not the rediscovery of the biblical God through revolt – in the individu-
alistic and anarchic sense – carried to the extreme, against evidence
and necessity, beyond ethics? I will discuss later how important this
parallel can be.
The fact that, within the Hegelian left, atheistic existentialism ends
up being just a stage surpassed by Marxist atheism is exceptionally impor-
tant in order to evaluate recent atheistic existentialism. It had to realize
itself, for reasons that would take too long to investigate now, in French
thought (indeed, Heidegger’s thought is not atheistic, or at least only
becomes atheistic in its unnecessary Sartrian extension). It is actually the
precise confirmation of that fact, in the sense that it cannot surpass, as
atheism, Marxism, and it does not contain, in its regard, any higher
critical insight. Indeed, observe the following: Sartre’s old essay (I will
restrict myself here to considering his case among all existential atheists,
as the most significant) on La Liberté Cartesienne is still exemplary in order
to define the nature of his thought.32 We can recognize in Descartes’s
theory of divine freedom the most religious aspect of his thought,

30 Arvon, Aux sources, 162. I take the liberty to remark that already in my 1946
essay, pages 194–5, I advanced an extremely similar thesis, even though at that time I
did not know Stirner directly and I did not understand clearly that, simply from the
logical standpoint, Marx could be aware only of the possibility of the atheistic form of
existentialism. To Marx, the reaffirmation of Hegel appeared necessary in order to
prevent humanism – as it moved on after the failure of the Hegelian form of reconcili-
ation with reality – from decaying inevitably into a theologization of the individual.
31 M. Buber, Dialogisches Leben (Zürich: Mueller, 1947), 195–6 and 202–3.
32 [TN] In Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 314–27, translated as “Cartesian
Freedom” in Literary and Philosophical Essays (New York: Collier Books, 1962),
181–97.
26 The Problem of Atheism

provided that we accept the openness to the supernatural proper to

Cartesianism; provided, in other words, that we give up the picture of
Descartes’s’ “rationalism.” In this sense I remarked (pages 368ff) that
Pascal’s philosophy represents precisely Cartesianism rethought from
the perspective of divine freedom as its essential thesis, which coincides
with Cartesianism completely freed from its presupposed Molinism and
from its only rationalist moment, the ontological argument. But let us
accept, instead, the critique of the supernatural developed by German
philosophy, in its most radical immanentist form, all the way to the idea
that “sin is having been born.”33 Then, divine creative freedom will be
attributed to man; that is, we will have Pascal’s exact opposite. Inserting
freedom, now, into a radically atheistic conception – in which it is no
longer true that human will is free with respect to finite goods because
it is necessarily moved by the supreme good –means talking about non-
finalized freedom, which for man means, consistently, a condemnation.
It means talking about freedom that can only express itself as destructive
freedom,34 which, therefore, cannot but welcome revolutionary thought

33 On this point, see J. Maritain, La philosophie morale (Paris: Gallimard, 1960),

471 [TN: Moral Philosophy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), 380].
34 This happens because in French thought freedom is freedom to say no; how-
ever, in Cartesian thought it is understood as the possibility to free oneself from error,
thus presupposing an order of truth, whether created or not. When this order is
explicitly rejected, the words “truth” and “order” lose their meaning. What is com-
monly called Sartre’s “moralism” – meaning the transition from Heidegger’s essen-
tially metaphysical existentialism to an essentially moral one – is actually a cover for
this position. Father Fabro’s remarks (“Osservazioni critiche,” 216–17) on the effec-
tive annihilation of freedom in atheistic existentialism are very important: “the error
of all forms of atheism lies in blocking or inverting freedom, which in the end is
reduced to necessity, that is, to nothing … Indeed, for atheistic existentialism to be
is to choose, but to choose to be what one is, to choose not to choose in other words,
because if man were to choose something beyond himself and if his choosing were
conditioned by something different from himself, it would no longer be choosing …
It is certain, anyway, that real man, the individual who is the first subject of being,
does not choose and therefore is not free.” In these considerations I find a confirma-
tion of my view about the incomparable value of Descartes’s intuition of the link
between divine creation and the affirmation of the freedom of the individual, or of
his reality, which are one and the same; this in the sense (essay VII) of political free-
dom itself. The pattern of identifying freedom and necessity is actually ineliminable
from the form of thought that concludes with atheism. If, then, we try to place Sartre
in the history of philosophy, I think the best way would be to see him as the rigorous
development of the atheistic temptation that Lequier rejected, although without
 I. The Concept of Atheism 27

in its fully elaborated form (i.e., Marxism). Hence, Sartre’s thesis that
Marxism is insuperable.35 Having established this, we must recognize in
his philosophy a decadentist version of Marxism; curiously, this progres-
sive philosophy is the only one in which existentialism and decadentism coincide.
Indeed, from the historical standpoint he inverts Marx’s problem:
whereas Marx meant to graft the French revolutionary spirit onto the
trunk of German philosophy, Sartre, on the contrary, uses German
philosophy to make the French philosophy of freedom atheistic, eroding
it from within; his decadentist character can be seen exactly in the
replacement of the Marxist process of synthesis with that of erosion.
Therefore, his thought amounts to a form Cartesianism, freed of the
ontological argument and the openness to the supernatural, which at
the same time rejects the Idealist interpretation. Thus, it is the inverse
of the religious philosophy of existence that had prevailed in France in
the 1930s. Since the inversion I described is the primary and fundamen-
tal feature of his thought, it is no wonder that he must keep subordinating
Marxism to existentialism, even after having declared, in his latest writ-
ings, that Marxism is insuperable. Even though people talk a lot about
a first and a last Sartre, no real process of development can be traced in
his philosophy. On the other hand, in a philosophy that intends to be
action, evaluating the behaviour it imposes matters more than evaluating
the theoretical expression. And it is here that his failure to surpass, and
his actual subordination to, Marxism manifests itself because to what
else did his philosophy lead, if not to the fully realized type of the “fellow
traveller”? Note that a “fellow traveller” is given the task of talking to
milieux that are thought to be out of Marxism’s direct reach. In Sartre’s

being able to overcome it philosophically. In fact, it is certainly not coincidental that

Sartre could not help renewing exactly, as the overall formula of his philosophy,
Lequier’s chosen motto “faire et en faisant se faire,” possibly without an initial con-
scious reference.
35 This is the thesis of Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1960) [TN:
Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (New York: Verso, 2004)].
However, a very sharp political critic, who is also a philosopher, Aimé Patri, could
write perfectly that Sartre did not sacrifice anything from his previous thought in
favour of the “insuperable philosophy” and that his position boils down to subordi-
nating what he calls Marxism to what he regards as existentialism. This thesis could
only be completely shared by a Marxist author, who otherwise is very benevolent in his
overall assessment of Sartre, A. Schaff – see La filosofia dell’uomo (Rome: Editori
Riuniti, 1963), 23–47.
28 The Problem of Atheism

case this is the bourgeoisie, and he did not have, nor could he have had,
any other audience. This does not take away his historical importance,
above all as a “case.” Generally, the French philosophy of freedom tended
to retreat into a closed conservative academic position: hence the very
young Mounier’s idea, shortly after 1930, of a “non-academic and non-
university-based philosophy,” centred around the consideration of the
crisis. Paradoxically this philosophy came to be realized, starting from
the very same terms in which Mounier had proposed it, by the atheist
Sartre, while the “personalist” exertions by the Catholic Mounier turned
out to be in vain from the strictly philosophical standpoint: they were
not even germs that could be developed. The question was indeed the
same: to address the hope of the young intellectuals after 1935 – those
whose background was not Idealist and did not lean towards the new
positivism – to reconcile Kierkegaard and Marx and to give existential
thought a political expression. It is undeniable now that this hope, whose
illusory character ought to be clarified, found in Sartre its insuperable
expression and its defeat. Besides, Marxism does not regard French
philosophy, in the aspect whereby it is irreducible to German philosophy
and is not surpassed by it, as one of the positions it can sublate, because
Marxism accepts the Hegelian historical perspective, albeit upending
its scale of values. This is why Marxism needs Sartre as an auxiliary in
order to advance its polemic in France.36
A few more words on the moral aspect of atheism: I defined it
(page 299) as the will to be consistent with the original option of ratio-
nalism, understood as rejection without proofs of the status naturae
lapsae. And, as a matter of fact, the quest for total consistency between
thought and life defines the question that leads to the transition from
Hegel to Marx, from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, and also, in a certain
sense, from Heidegger to Sartre.37 However, can we conclude from this

36 In other words, whereas in Italy Marxist thought has been able to establish a
bridge with tradition through Gramsci’s work, abiding by Marxist orthodoxy, in
France this could only happen in the work of somebody who must remain a fellow
traveller, like – precisely – Sartre.
37 In fact the relationship is quite different because it is from the start a transpo-
sition of Heidegger’s thought into French philosophy; hence, the insuppressible het-
erogeneity, which earlier motivated me to say that Sartre’s philosophy, exactly because
it is a transposition, is not amenable in any way to be presented as a necessary continu-
ation of Heidegger’s novelty. Quoting again Fr Fabro (211–12), I will say that the true
conclusion of Sartre’s original thought should have been suicide, even if he “seems to
 I. The Concept of Atheism 29

that atheism is tied to the idea of “autonomous morals,” made most

radical, as we often hear people say? Few people know that a definitive
study of the concept of autonomous morals has been carried out, here
in Italy, by a thinker who always had few readers, and has even fewer
now, I believe, even though he has been the subject of valuable scholar-
ship: Erminio Juvalta. His work,38 in which we must also recognize one
of the greatest expressions of the liberal conscience of the initial decades
of our century, deserves to be included among the classics of moral
philosophy as the ultimate clarification of an essence. It is not important
now to determine whether this clarification leads also to a self-criticism;
whether, after admitting the plurality of ethical criteria – an admission
that presents itself to it as necessary – it moves inevitably, against its
author’s intention (which may explain his almost complete silence dur-
ing the last fifteen years of his life, 1919–34), towards insuperable
skepticism – that is, to say it all, towards ethical nihilism;39 and whether
it does not require, in order to be continued, the development of a
relationship between metaphysics and morals different from the one

feel very comfortable in this world”; that is, his political philosophy is actually a “vital,”
and not moral, refusal of suicide. Therefore, I will also say that he has come close to
greatness only in one book, his first novel, La nausée, compared to which all his later
production is a decline.
38 All his essential writings have been collected by Ludovico Geymonat in I limiti
del razionalismo etico (Turin: Einaudi, 1945).
39 I use this expression in Strauss’s sense, Diritto naturale e storia (Venice: Neri
Pozza, 1957) [TN: Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1953)], mentally substituting “ethics” for “natural right.” Of course, nobody was more
averse to ethical nihilism than Juvalta; but this is precisely what makes his research
valuable, that he pushed the analysis of autonomous morals to its extreme conse-
quences, until he ran into a contradiction from which he could not escape except by
discovering an idea of metaphysics different from the one he had met during his for-
mation, which truly did not lend itself to provide a foundation for ethics. Mazzantini
describes very well the most serious oscillation of Juvalta’s thought: “on the one hand
he seems to affirm … that the intrinsic value of every person and his/her moral evalu-
ations is and must be recognized by every other person. But on the other hand … he
also seems to affirm that the evaluations of those who do not recognize the intrinsic
value of that just moral regime can be genuinely moral, too” (from the entry “Juvalta”
in Enciclopedia Filosofica [Milan: Bompiani, 1957–58]). Here we must observe that the
first affirmation is what moves ab initio Juvalta’s thought, and the second thesis … is
the result of his process of thought. As for the relation between Renouvier and Juvalta,
it had already been recognized, albeit not in the precise sense in which it is described
here, by L. Limentani, I presupposti formali dell’indagine etica (Genoa: Formiggini, 1913).
30 The Problem of Atheism

Juvalta had rightly criticized.40 Juvalta’s moral philosophy can be

described (even though he does not explicitly use this formula,41 which
nonetheless constantly underpins his thought) as an attempt developed
to the extreme consequences to radically separate value and force. To

40 He criticizes the metaphysical foundation of morals (I limiti, 243–5) in Rosmini’s

form, understood as the idea of conforming to a cosmic order; in this sense his critique
is definitive and still very relevant. However, is there not a deeper Rosmini, that of
“moral being,” which is being rediscovered today? An extremely interesting topic would
be the study of Blondel’s entire thought as a search for the authentic relationship between
metaphysics and morals, after having granted Juvalta’s objections in their full power
(whose thought Blondel did not know; but let us not forget his close ties to Rauh, whose
investigations are strikingly similar to Juvalta’s). This proposal seems to me what the
recent book by Claude Tresmontant, which is much superior to previous works on the
subject, Introduction à la métaphisique de Maurice Blondel (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963),
leads to. I take the liberty to transcribe, because of their importance, the following lines:
“the Normative that Blondel regarded as necessary for an integral ontology, the norm
whose necessity and meaning he discussed in the work of his that he considered the
most original, L’etre et les êtres, not only belong in the spirit and in the tradition of
St Thomas but, we can rightly say, touches the deepest aspect of the Thomist doctrine
of the law. Indeed, Blondel’s effort, like St Thomas’s, has been to relink ethics to ontol-
ogy. Natural and divine law are not the expression of an extrinsic and juridical diktat,
more or less arbitrary, imposed by a God jealous of our realization, who strives to limit
our rights and frustrate our desires. Natural law and divine law are not tyrannical muti-
lations imposed by an emasculating God; nor is the moral law, though, the inexplicable
demand imposed on us by ‘practical reason’ without ontological justification. The
Norm is the expression of a demand inscribed in being, and this norm inscribed in objec-
tive reality is not mutilating but, on the contrary, creative, striving towards more-being”
(318). Here we see the correct way to pose the question of reconciling Blondel and St
Thomas, and that of Blondel’s thought as a road to rediscover the authentic sense of
Thomism; in fact, it is well known that this conciliation was Blondel’s fundamental
problem in his last period. As a sign of the relevance both of Juvalta’s thought and of
Blondel’s question, we can cite Pietro Piovani’s remarkable book Giusnaturalismo ed etica
moderna (Bari: Laterza, 1961): “man makes himself man … not by letting himself be
included inside the authoritarian circle of a truth that is objectively exterior to him,
but … by activating the decisive responsibilities … of moral creation, so that he can call
himself adiutor Dei” (6). But does such cosmologism, which Piovani rightly rejects, truly
belong to the best natural law tradition, in its Catholic understanding? On this, see the
astute article by Fr Salvatore Lener on “Padre Taparelli e l’antigiusnaturalismo contem-
poraneo,” in Miscellanea Taparelli, Analecta Gregoriana (1963), in which he remarks that
the “fact of nature” from which Taparelli starts coincides with “that insuppressible need
for normativity which the human individual bears within himself as the mark of his
humanity,” which Piovani correctly affirms.
41 Sometimes he comes close, though. See, for instance, the proposition: “reality
can be interpreted as a system of forces and as a system of values” (I limiti, 245).
 I. The Concept of Atheism 31

be moral means giving up the criterion of siding with the strong, regard-
less of whom we regard as “strong.” But this is expressed philosophically
in the negation (as a pseudo-problem) of the search for the “founda-
tion” of morality as a force on which morality needs to rely. Thus, he
sharply distinguishes morality from science, sociology, history, metaphys-
ics, religion; his criticisms of sociologism and of the ethics of the “direc-
tion of history” seem definitive to me,42 and very valid still today for a
critique of most of contemporary moral theory. Thus, it is a humanism,
but entirely different from that of Feuerbach and, therefore, not sur-
passable by Marxism; and since in the 1800s there were, rigorously
speaking, only two forms of humanism, Feuerbach’s left Hegelian one
and Renouvier’s anti-Hegelian one, I incline to assign his work to the
ideal descent of the latter.43 However, whereas the self-justification44 of
moral values affirms that “no moral evaluation can be derived from any
religious value unless it is already explicitly or implicitly contained in
it” – that is, unless there is a moral evaluation built in the religious value
whose validity subsists or would subsist also outside of it – it does not rule
out at all the religious evaluation but actually establishes its autonomy
with respect to the moral one. And by removing any scientistic objec-
tion – because the analysis of morality makes manifest the reality of an
area of values about which science cannot make any pronouncements –
it guarantees the right to believe and the possibility of hope,45 even
though it rules out all proofs.

42 It seems to me that Juvalta’s objection (I limiti, 241–2) to the reduction of eth-

ics to sociology, which today has come back in fashion, still has decisive value. Note
that this is even more important because the ethical-political problem – of preserving
the validity of morals in a society in which its association with religious beliefs had
been shaken – was his starting point as well as Durkheim’s. We ought not to forget,
when considering this attempt typical of those distant decades, how decisive was the
critical position of the almost unknown Juvalta (for his critique of the foundation of
morals in history, see 259–63) compared to that of the famous Durkheim.
43 This is why in my work Giulio Lequier e il momento tragico della filosofia francese
(Bologna: Zanichelli, 1963) I proposed the idea that Renouvier’s philosophy pro-
vides the general context within which one can study the philosophies of Juvalta,
Martinetti, and Rensi, which are at same time similar and far from each other.
44 [TN] Autassia in the original.
45 In this sense, we can recognize the development of his religious thought in
Mazzantini’s first book, La speranza dell’immortalità (Turin: Paravia, 1923), which was
prefaced by none other than Juvalta. In I Limiti it is very important to consider page
254, where Juvalta makes precise his dissent with Høffding’s thesis, which at that time
was very popular, that the essential kernel of religion is the belief in the conservation
32 The Problem of Atheism

Finally, let us tackle another possible objection that seems particularly

powerful because it comes from the common opinion rather than from
the disquisitions of scholars. I said that the transition to postulatory
atheism characterizes our century. But Scheler wrote about it already
in 1926, highlighting in particular Nicolai Hartmann’s Ethics. Time
flows quickly, and truly Hartmann’s fortunes cannot be said to have
improved over the last decades. Almost forty years have gone by, more
packed with events than any other epoch in world history: Nazism, world
war, the atomic bomb, a completely new strategic situation, the end of
European primacy, colossal industrial growth, and so on. Just consider-
ing the period from 1945 to today, we have seen enormous progress in
the sciences and the obliteration of metaphysics. Moreover, in philoso-
phy the twentieth century has been the age of the neo’s: neo-Hegelianism,
renewed philosophy of existence, neo-Thomism, neo-criticism, neo-
spiritualism, even neo-Marxism and neo-positivism. Philosophical
originality seems extinguished, does it not? Also, metaphysical ideas

of values, because Juvalta’s critique is motivated by the need to guarantee the auton-
omy of religion with respect to morality, which is correlative to the thesis of the
autonomy of morals. Juvalta’s constant presence in the thought of Mazzantini, who
recognized him as his main teacher, could be studied also in the treatment of meta-
physical-theological themes: both regarding the relationship between God and neces-
sary truths – which he conceives neither as arbitrary creations nor as binding norms,
which burden the divine Being as an obligation – and the correlative thesis of the
persuasive (before being necessitating) character of evidence.
In Guido Calogero’s thought one could discern a rediscovery of Juvalta’s themes
after Gentile; even though of course the secularist bent is much stronger because of
his neo-Hegelian background, in which atheism and humanism are always linked. In
this regard, one should look at the many sentences with a Feuerbachian flavour
in Scuola dell’uomo (Florence: Sansoni, 1939) as a confirmation of the necessary
encounter, after Actualism, between the morality of autonomous ethics and the redis-
covery of the Hegelian left along Feuerbach’s line.
Regarding the connection between autonomous morality and atheism in the
thought of Nicolai Hartmann, we must consider that it takes place starting from
essentially metaphysical considerations (the antithesis between God’s existence and
man’s freedom; the antithesis between the religious idea of sin and the idea of moral
guilt), which renew the themes that had characterized the Hegelian left. The interest,
by now very remote, in his ethical atheism was due precisely to this renewal, in years
when that line had been forgotten.
Against the negations of religion in the name of morality, art, and science, see the
very important remarks by Augusto Guzzo in “La Religione,” Memorie dell’Accademia
delle Scienze di Torino 4a no. 6 (1963–64), 141ff.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 33

thrived in the interwar period: Does that not raise suspicion about
their nature, in the sense, if not of complicity with that time’s politics
(it matters little whether unaware), at least of correspondence to it in
the same unfortunate epoch? Thus, the situation at the beginnings of
positivism repeats itself, but much more radically. To use Kant’s starting
point as a reference, by now two of his certainties seem to have become
unintelligible: the aspiration to metaphysics and the moral law.
Full positivism, then; not even neo-positivism any longer, which by
fighting other philosophies somehow acknowledged them, and
by presenting itself as a methodology accepted the idea of philosophy
professed by some of them. Instead, a complete rejection of philoso-
phy; we no longer need to discuss it, just like we no longer discuss
astrology. Moreover, those who still practise philosophy as a profession
seek a justification by tethering their thought to the new psychology,
or to the new physics, or to literary forms that find an audience to the
extent that they are linked with psychoanalysis – “my philosophy is
the only one that can account for, and so on,” which is a slightly comical
spectacle. Even today’s fashionable theologian, Teilhard de Chardin,
knew a lot about science and little about philosophy.
So, the type of atheism that seems prevalent today is based, in the
West, on science in the form of psychoanalysis – interpreted as rejecting
any philosophy that claims to stand next to it as autonomous, and as
directing pedagogy – and, in the East, on science in the form of scien-
tistic Soviet dialectical materialism. Nor is there any point in repeating,
breaking up the word, that the a-theism of science is methodological.
If only science exists, atheism stops being methodological.
Now, consider: psychoanalysis, in its Freudian form, since it does not
admit next to itself an autonomous philosophy, does indeed contain
an apparent proof of the non-existence of God. It can be summarized
as follows: man needs God, “therefore” God does not exist. An affirmation that
cannot be verified sensorially is proven to be illusory by revealing the
need that caused it. By liberating people from delusions and from
the imbalances they cause, psychoanalysis claims to attain what atheistic
philosophies aspired to without being able to achieve, the reconciliation
of man with himself via the recognition of his normality; by effectively
dissolving every shadow of sin as well as every aggressive instinct, it seems
able to provide what earlier forms of atheism could not achieve, precisely
because they presented themselves as philosophies: happiness and
peace. Psychoanalytic education suppresses at long last the need for
34 The Problem of Atheism

“ethics” and redeems the word “happiness,” which for so long had
raised the suspicions of moralists. But its proof of the non-existence of
God is patently dogmatic. It is certainly less valid than the opposite
argument: that a universal aspiration that troubles man cannot be
illusory. Therefore, one will need to prove that this aspiration is not
universal, and to do so one will need to have recourse to sociology: to
the plurality of ethical positions and religious positions, and their con-
nection to various social orders. But no sociology of religion can justify
the transition to a sociological interpretation of religion. That requires
that sociology change into sociologism, and sociologism, as we shall
see, is nothing but Marxism’s objectivized form. Scientific atheism, that
is, subsists only by a surreptitious recourse to philosophical atheism;
and to the form of philosophical atheism that for decades now has
been conditioning, at first obscurely and then openly, all the transfor-
mations in the philosophical, moral, religious, aesthetic perspectives
of today’s world.46
It will be a matter of seeing, later on, whether this form of atheism,
when it intends to reach a rigorous critical formulation, turns out to be
postulatory or not; whether or not it must take the form of the pari.

2. Atheism, Anti-Clericalism, Heresy

In order to define the essence of atheism, we need to isolate it from

other essences that seem similar. This is why I devoted pages 273–8 to
show that atheism and anti-clericalism are totally heterogeneous.
Rereading them, I felt I had to expand them, both because the topic is
not very familiar (in fact, I did not find any literature about it),47 and
because I intend to make the discussion more precise with an important

46 Ugo Spirito, as far as I can see, is the only one among non-Marxist Italian
philosophers (besides me and my fraternal friend, Felice Balbo, who died so prema-
turely not long ago) who has explicitly said so.
47 Indeed, the very interesting and well-documented article by R. Berardi,
“Clericale e clericalismo negli ultimi cento anni,” Il Mulino no. 94 (1960), does not
mention any philosophical research on the subject. Therefore, the term “anti-
clericalism” has been reduced, in the proper sense, to mean “opposing any confusion
of the respective jurisdictions of the Church and the State,” and in a generic sense to
mean anti-Catholicism or irreligiosity of any kind. We had to wait until 1950 for
Migliorini to point out (in the appendix to Panzini’s Dizionario moderno, 9th ed.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 35

addition about the necessary, but altogether different, ways in which atheism
and anti-clericalism meet heresy and relate to it.
Apparently, the theme is not even deserving of consideration: What
could be more clear than the fact that atheism and anti-clericalism
denote different realities? Moreover, it seems that one can speak of
anti-clericalism only referring to the adjective, by the very fact that it
indicates a negation; it seems, therefore, that there is no basis for an
investigation of the essence of anti-clericalism. But this consideration is
contradicted by the fact that today there is a widespread thesis that
claims that atheism is simply anti-clericalism made most radical, to the
point that its polemic does not target only certain temporal aspects of
the behaviour of the Church but the Church and theology themselves.48
The reasoning, essentially, is this: there is a way of understanding religion
as “closed” religion (in Bergson’s sense); since it is a constant and ulti-
mately ineliminable attitude, the Church needs a perpetual reform
movement, that is, a restoration of the authentic meaning of religion
(practised by her saints). Recent Catholic theologians have discerned
the true and false meanings of this reform. However, when the closed
type of religion prevails, and religion becomes so welded to a certain
social order that it seems to be one of its organs (as allegedly happened
in the age of the Counter-Reformation), then there is anti-clericalism,
which initially expresses itself as natural religion. However, this natural
religion has accompanied the formation and the dominance of the
bourgeois class. When an agreement is established between the Church
and the new dominant class, because of the conservative character of
closed religion, anti-clericalism takes the form of anti-theism, which when
it tries to justify itself theoretically presents itself as atheism. But such
atheism, the extreme form of “resentment against the Christian world,”
is in reality a superstructure of the proletarian movement; the only way
to overcome it is by moving to “open” religion.

[1960], 812) a broader use of the term “clericalism” to indicate “any kind of orga-
nized dogmatism.” We are already on the road leading to the present investigation,
but the need to pose the question philosophically has not yet been perceived.
48 In the book by the Catholic theologian Marcel Reding, Der politische Atheismus
(Graz: Styria Verlag, 1958) – which is rigorously developed, although in my view com-
pletely mistaken due to the way in which the problem is initially posed – we can see
the most consistent application of this thesis to the assessment of Marxism.
36 The Problem of Atheism

The quickest survey is sufficient to realize that this type of reasoning

underpins not only the greater part of the evaluations in the Catholic
press but also the philosophical, theological, historical, philological
studies in which it is elaborated and documented in reference to various
topics. In its academic formulations it very often presents itself in the
customary way, as a conclusion that is in fact the presupposition. It is
the reduction of atheism to “practical atheism,” which must be recog-
nized (essays V and VII) as the first premise of Catholic progressivism
or, more precisely, of today’s neo-modernism.
It is important to observe that this thesis is irrefutable if atheism is
viewed essentially as a practical attitude and if in a religious philosophy one
attenuates the theme of sin.49 The most extreme case of this attenuation is
Bergsonism,50 whose penetration into Catholic thought, especially in
France, is still huge even today. In fact, nothing could be clearer than
this: if one does not take into account the particular interpretation of
sin that marks atheism from the start, atheism and extreme anti-clericalism
cannot, as essences, but coincide.
My thesis is entirely different: anti-clericalism is indeed a process that
leads to anti-theism in Proudhon before he starts his polemic against
Marx. However, after the appearance of the secular philosophies of
history, and of the forms of worldly religion that proceed from them,
a broadening of perspective takes place in anti-clericalism, whereby it
takes the form of a reaction against any position of thought that engen-
ders, as a practical consequence, the secular dominance of a priestly
caste (tied, of course, to other worldly interests), no matter how it
presents and establishes itself – against any position that thereby becomes
in history the instrument of the will to power of this caste. Therefore,
it is amenable to the following definition: having been originally a moral
reaction by the individual against the worldly power of the Church, it becomes,
after the philosophy of history, the antithesis, in the name of ethics, to the spirit
of reconciliation with the reality of this world; this spirit of reconciliation dissimu-
lates a will to power that, in order to realize itself, must give rise to an organization

49 The correlation between these two motifs, which is actually implicit in what
I have already written, would deserve to be clarified with a full treatment.
50 The typical character of Bergsonian religion is that of being Christianity with-
out sin. Hence we understand its continuity with Biranism (see page 297n37) as the
development of the religious aspect of Rousseau’s thought, although in a different
sense than Kant’s, because the anti-supernatural rationalist presupposition is absent.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 37

whose authority needs to take a sacred character, either as the custodian of the
deposit of a supernatural Revelation or as the representative of Progress, Evolution,
Science, History, Humanity, the Nation, and so on. Being a refusal to reconcile
with worldly reality, it is a form of pessimism; but pessimism in the name of
morality, which leads to the idea of morality as the revelation of an objective
transcendent order, and historically to the mutual opposition of Kant and Hegel;
and thus to a form of thought that is a commentary on Kant’s religious philosophy,
where Kant’s thought is used to make an absolute distinction between Christianity
and Catholicism, keeping the former.51
This definition can be verified historically by examining the two
philosophers who are most significant for the study of anti-clericalism
as an essence, Renouvier and Martinetti. There is nothing strange about
the fact that, as a result, one needs to focus on a relatively short histori-
cal period, if we reflect that the sharp break I described could only take
place after the philosophy of history reached its climax, bringing about
positions of thought that were defeated by its descendant, which often
styles itself as a rebel – historicism; that, therefore, anti-clericalism as a
substantive is foreign to the cultural atmosphere in which we live now.
Nor is there anything strange about the fact that one needs to highlight
two philosophers who are usually regarded as “minor” (i.e., as non-
classic, not authors who must be obligatorily read but, at the same time,
not mere philosophy professors); their “minor” character is due only
to the manifest failure of their research, namely, the assumption of
Kant’s philosophy as the foundation not only of a reform of existing
theologies but also of a new religion oriented towards transcendence; however,
the lessons we can draw from this failure are extremely important for
the philosophy of religion.
Regarding Renouvier, we must look at his philosophy from the angle
of the singular feature that radically distinguishes it from the French
spiritualists of Biranian descent: it represents the self-criticism of Saint-
Simonism, prompted by the ever stronger influence of the “unknown
philosopher” whose posthumous works Renouvier published, Jules
Lequier. If one looks at it from this angle, his very long philosophical
activity assumes exceptional importance because it is the most precious
document to study the moral consciousness of the 1800s, the daughter

51 The exemplary expression of this position is Martinetti’s Gesù Cristo e il

Cristianesimo (1934).
38 The Problem of Atheism

of Rousseau and Kant, in its resistance to the philosophy of history. In

this resistance we see in outline the beginnings of new philosophical
essences: a humanism that is not that of the Hegelian left, the autono-
mous morality associated with this humanism, a pragmatism that is not
the Marxist one, personalism, and at the same time the rediscovery of
Christianity, when rational religion encounters pessimism and heresy.
This self-criticism of the Saint-Simonian form of the philosophy of
history is also, effectively, the systematic continuation of Proudhon as
the anti-Marx – that is, of the Proudhon who extended the target of his
polemic to the philosophy of history, in the name of “Justice” and the
“individual.” This led Renouvier to understand anti-clericalism as radical
individualism (its metaphysical expression was La nouvelle monadologie,
i.e., a remake of Leibniz’s monadology, separated from any element
that might prepare a Hegelian continuation and highlighting its con-
nection with anti-Spinozian Cartesianism), an individualism that sepa-
rates itself entirely both from the individualism of religious existentialism
(because there is no critique of anti-supernaturalist rationalism) and
from philosophical anarchism (because this latter had risen on the
Hegelian horizon). The unique feature, which is extremely important for a
phenomenology of anti-clericalism, is that in the last phase of his thought he
rediscovers a Christian, albeit heretical, philosophy by deepening, not by denying,
anti-clericalism.
There is a legacy from Renouvier to Martinetti that nobody has ever
mentioned, which, however, Martinetti recognized, I believe, in his final
years (normally, in fact, Renouvier was considered a precursor of
Pragmatism, or a chaotic philosopher with mathematical interests, and
his religious philosophy of the final twenty years was regarded as a
phenomenon of senility rather than as the greatest document of the
struggle, in the secular camp, of ethics against the philosophy of history).52

52 In the last issue of Rivista di Filosofia that he edited personally (April–June

1940), his essay “La rinascita di Schopenhauer” is preceded by a reprint of the first
eight pages of Renouvier’s essay “Schopenhauer et la métaphysique du pessimisme”
from Année philosophique (1893). In those pages Renouvier sketches a historical pic-
ture of European civilization and thought that is exactly the same – regarding
Christianity – that Martinetti develops in Gesù Cristo e il Cristianesimo. This essay, which
probably Martinetti came to know only after writing his book, constitutes the meeting
point of the two philosophers. In the same issue of Rivista di Filosofia, his review of A.
Tilgher’s La Filosofia di Leopardi (Rome: Edizioni di Religio, 1940) is very interesting.
Although he recognizes that Leopardi had a philosophical mind, Martinetti
 I. The Concept of Atheism 39

I am referring to his last work, Les derniers Entretiens, which, as far as its
writing is concerned, is unprecedented in the history of thought: it was
dictated over the four days of Renouvier’s perfectly lucid agony to his
faithful disciple, and last intimate friend, Louis Prat. It is the sketch of
a book he had in mind and was not able to write, “a sort of breviary for
intellectuals who have not fallen into atheism and who find the Catholic
dogma repugnant.” Thus, it is the breviary of a philosophy that is at the
same time a religion, not in the Hegelian sense, though, but rather
because philosophy and religion are both answers to the problem of
evil, not its justification from the dialectical standpoint. A religion
without dogmas, without priests, without a church, but a religion that
must promote the elevation of the human person through the aware-
ness that moral consciousness and religious consciousness are insepa-
rable; it is destined to gather together the good wills “of all those who
intend to oppose both all clericalisms, whatever they may be, and
atheism.”53 What fate awaits this religion-philosophy? Renouvier answers
that nothing indicates that it can triumph, and not become for posterity,
instead, a mere object of curiosity, because its success is tied to that
historically fragile support that is men’s moral consciousness. It is, in
the end, a philosophy that does not seek its criterion in the present
because it deliberately positions itself out of time by reason of the dual-
ity of morality and history, and that has even smaller reasons to hope
because the crass disposition to reconcile with the world of phenomena
(according to the expression used by Renouvier), with power and with
strength, has found its ultimate formulation in the worst of all theodi-
cies – the triumphant idea of Progress. Under this label Renouvier
includes all historicisms, of any kind, and also the particular progres-
sivism that today we would call neo-Enlightenment (because it opposes
the Romantic type of historicism), of which he had been, many years

nonetheless says that he did not cultivate this disposition with any study and, there-
fore, was not properly a philosopher. These short remarks could be used as a trace for
a new study on “Leopardi and Schopenhauer” because, in Leopardi, the mystical
motif that instead exists in Schopenhauer is completely lacking, while there is a
strong existential sensitivity that prefigures Nietzsche, whose derivation from
Schopenhauer Martinetti instead denies. See Schopenhauer, ed. P. Martinetti (Milan:
Garzanti, 1942), 65. Martinetti’s (necessary, from his point of view) exclusion from
philosophy of Nietzsche, and of existential thought in general, is likely the motivation
for the exclusion of Leopardi.
53 C. Renouvier, Les derniers Entretiens (Paris: Vrin, 1930), 105.
40 The Problem of Atheism

earlier, the first theoretician,54 and the categories that depend on it –

“well-being, solidarity, love” (think how successful they are today!) – in
place of the idea of justice; and also that particular understanding of
laicism that means not the elevation of every layperson to a priest,
directly responsible in front of God, but rather the construction of a
morality that does not speak of God.
Martinetti’s thought is the exact, and insuperable, fulfilment of the
project of this new religion. The fact that Renouvier did not enter
directly its elaboration makes it more interesting.
Today, as a philosopher, Martinetti has been forgotten. By a very
strange paradox, he is no longer even viewed as a “minor philosopher”
(he, the Schopenauerian!) but as a very diligent “professor of philoso-
phy” or as the late representative of a nineteenth-century mindset com-
pletely closed to the thought of the twentieth century – limited, in fact,
to the decade 1880–90 (the period of Spir, Fechner, von Hartmann,
Lotze), while the next decade saw already the appearance of the lines
of thought that would blossom in the twentieth century; as a thinker
who did study, yes, Empiriocriticism, but according to an interpretation
that pushed it backward, reabsorbing it into the usual Lotzean spiritual-
ism; as the personification of a character that people like to caricature,
I am not sure how tastefully – the philosopher who preaches and cares
for beautiful souls, far removed from the types prevalent today of the
methodologist and the phenomenologist; as an indefatigable reader
but entirely devoid of a sense of the historicity of philosophies. Apart
from his moral personality, he allegedly belongs to the history of the
teaching of philosophy – because he broadened the horizons of Italian
culture by imparting to the young a direct knowledge of German
thought – but not to the actual history of philosophy.
There are various possible reasons for this underestimation. We can
think of the fate of the dualist thinkers of the 1930s (e.g., Benda, and
in part Rensi and Tilgher, who like him were tied to an interpretation
of contemporary history as a rebellion of vitality against reason, which was
indeed inadequate). We can think of Croce’s judgment, which, entirely
unlike his usual judgments, was certainly not motivated by hostility
towards the person but, rather, by a total incompatibility of thought.
Because people have never pointed out – and this is an aspect that would

54 On this point, which to me seems unquestionable, see my essay on Lequier.

 I. The Concept of Atheism 41

deserve careful study – that Croce’s peculiar feature is that of being the
only radically immanentist philosopher who nonetheless has as his
essential adversaries the same adversaries as Catholicism,55 whereas
Martinetti represents exactly the highest degree of aversion to
Catholicism in a philosopher of transcendence. We can also think of
the fact that he had no continuators, because his disciples (Banfi, Bariè,
Padovani) eventually wrote philosophical works in which the features
of Martinettism are no longer recognizable – works for which any refer-
ence to the thought of the teacher seems at least superfluous, if we
consider their objective content and not their genesis. So, Banfi’s
thought can be interpreted, in one respect, as a reaffirmation of
Martinetti after Gentile, the only possible one in a rigorous sense; but
the endpoint was a form of critical rationalism, which left behind the
dispute between realism and idealism, and which forced him to abandon
Martinetti’s religiosity and to start the process that consistently led him
to Marxism. In order to understand the peculiarity of the historical
impact of Martinetti’s teaching, we only need to refer to the very differ-
ent impact of the two other teachers of Italian anti-positivism, Gentile
and Varisco. Indeed, we cannot talk about Spirito or Calogero without
referring to Gentile, even though they can no longer be called Gentilians;
and we cannot talk about Carabellese, Galli, and Castelli without refer-
ring to Varisco, even though they can no longer be called Varischians.
Conversely, for Martinetti this has not been the case. Finally, the form
in which he exposed his religious thought in Gesù Cristo e il Cristianesimo
hurt him. Tackling such a theme meant subjecting himself to the judg-
ment of philologists and historians of religion, and Martinetti definitely
was no philologist. The expository form ought to have been completely
different in order to match the process of his thought: a book on
“Religion according to Kant,” which would also have made explicit the
vision of the history of Christianity that becomes necessary based on
such a premise, and which cannot be derived at all, like the book might
seem to suggest, from the consideration of the historical data.

55 See his radical hostility towards all philosophical forms that have their first
roots in any heresy or are related to one: even his return from Hegel to Vico is an
abandonment of Hegel’s Protestant aspects. He feels the same hostility towards the
philosophies that rely on the idea of homo faber, in the sense that Max Scheler gave to
this expression, or towards vitalist irrationalism, or towards both scientistic and postu-
latory atheism. [TN: this footnote is a long parenthetical statement in the original].
42 The Problem of Atheism

Certainly, this consideration would be inevitable if his philosophy

were just, as people usually think, a mere variation of Spinozian monism
and of the consequent process of liberation as annihilation of the indi-
vidual into the divine unity; if it were just a quest to harmonize Spinoza
and Kant, which ultimately can only result in the absorption of Kant
into Spinoza. But its meaning is entirely different.56 For the sake of
brevity, I will summarize it in the following schematic propositions:
1. From a phenomenological standpoint, his thought is extremely
important because it nails down with definitive rigour the essence
of philosophical-religious dualism and, thereby, the essence of anti-
clericalism, understood as rebellion against any reconciliation (out of
the will to practical domination) of religion with phenomenic reality.
2. By definitively clarifying the philosophical root of anti-clericalism,
it provides the criterion to write its rigorous history. The process of
anti-clericalism is circular because, having started from the dualist heresy,
it gets back to it through the historical process of natural religion. The
key moment of this process is Kant, in whom natural religion takes in
the most consistent form the meaning of “pure religion,” separated
from all its historic degradations, and in that very act separates itself
from optimism.
In this sense we see the completely different ways in which atheism
and anti-clericalism relate to heresy. Indeed atheism, in the Marxist
form, encounters the chiliastic heresy but transmogrifies it into a progres-
sive vision; the encounter with heresy is not its logical development, but
a sign of the truth of Marxism, because it signifies its historicist preser-
vation of Christianity.57 Conversely, anti-clericalism is characterized by

56 The obligatory starting point for any in-depth study of his thought is Gioele
Solari’s review of Sciacca’s book Martinetti (Brescia: La Scuola, 1943) in Rivista di
Filosofia 37 (1946): 80–5. Against the Spinozian interpretation, it says perfectly that
“he tried to reduce Spinoza to himself, to the spirit of his own doctrine, not himself
and his doctrine to Spinoza.” It emphasizes the dualistic aspect of Martinetti’s
thought, from the religious standpoint, and the pluralistic character of his idealism.
The parallel Solari makes with Pascal is certainly more questionable; in actuality,
Martinetti felt no affinity with him because of the Kantian nature of his criticism. This
parallel reflects Solari’s conciliatory spirit, in the highest sense. I would like to
describe it as a tendential “ecumenical Catholicism” in the sense of not wanting
to leave out any moment of truth.
57 This is why Marxist authors put so much emphasis on Lessing’s thought as the
meeting point of the Enlightenment and of Joachimism.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 43

a backward-moving process, towards the Manichean and Cathar heresies;

it does not surpass them, but brings to light their immanent philosophy.
Therefore, the radical anti-historicism of anti-clericalism stands in oppo-
sition to the radical historicism of atheism in its fullest (Marxist) form.
3. This clarification of the immanent philosophy is a consequence of
the typically philosophical character of the gnostic heresy,58 which starts
from the denial of creation – hence the themes of absolute transcen-
dence, the divine estrangement from the world, God as saviour and
redeemer but not creator – and thus, implicitly, from the denial of
miracles in order to save God’s “morality.” According to Martinetti’s
unique historical vision, the function of modern philosophy is, in the
final analysis, to make explicit what is implicit in the heresies of gnostic descent.
4. Hence his anti-supernaturalism, and thus the unmediated identifica-
tion of philosophy and religion, since philosophy preserves the aspect of
appealing to a transcendent reality. Hence also the impossibility of attrib-
uting value in a pragmatic sense to the visible churches, and thus the
fullness of anti-clericalism.
5. Obviously, from this perspective the criticism of the church cannot
concern only the Catholic Church. The criticism of the Catholic Church
is merely one aspect of the criticism of optimism as the will to reconcile
with phenomenic reality; since religion is pessimism, such will to rec-
oncile is essentially materialistic and atheistic (what philosophical anti-
clericalism reproaches the Catholic Church for is its dissimulated
atheism). This is why Martinetti’s thought is radically antithetical to the
other form in which, after classical German philosophy, philosophy
makes itself religion – on the condition, though, of pushing to the
extreme not the affirmation of the transcendence of the divine but,
rather, atheism – namely, Marxism. In this regard, we should observe
the symmetry between these unmediated identifications of philosophy
and religion produced (of course in opposite senses) by the

58 On this point see the very notable book by Simone Pètrement, Le dualisme
dans l’histoire de la philosophie et des religions (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), which is a com-
panion to her very broad study titled Le dualisme chez Platon, les gnostiques et les mani-
chéens (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947). Pètrement does not cite
Martinetti, evidently because she does not know him. But the typology of dualistic
thought that she draws applies perfectly to his philosophy, thus providing a complete
proof that it is an essential document because it expresses insuperably philosophical-
religious dualism.
44 The Problem of Atheism

prolongation of the new aspect of Hegelianism and the backward looking

aspect of Schopenhauerianism.
6. Undoubtedly Martinetti’s dualism is a unique case in the history
of modern philosophy. In order to explain it we must start from the
fracture of Schopenhauerianism. In its continuation, Schopenhauer’s
“religious atheism” splits into two sides, and this break takes place in
terms very similar to those of post-Hegelianism: the issue is the quest
for complete consistency between life and thought, against the aspect
whereby Schopenhauer’s philosophy seemed morally disengaged, so
that he had written that “it is a strange claim to expect a moralist not
to recommend any virtue he does not possess”; or, if you wish, the
“decadent” and “literary” aspect of his thought due to this disengage-
ment. The atheistic side is continued by Nietzsche and joined to his
critique of ethics; the religious side, religion as pessimism, finds its
ultimate expression in Martinetti. In the thinkers of religious pessimism
we have, in fact, the reaffirmation of ethical normativity; in Martinetti
it takes the form of the most radical version of the interpretation of
Kant’s philosophy as an itinerary to God. In an approximate formula,
we can say that Martinetti joined together the character of revealing
deep reality proper to Schopenhauer’s ethics and the normative and
rational character of Kant’s ethics; thus, he intensified the metaphysical
and religious character of the latter and brought it closer to Platonism.
It is in the context of this process of recovery of the ethical-religious
side of Kant that we must also understand the precise sense that the
term “reason” takes for him,59 rediscovered in the liberation of
Schopenhauer’s philosophy from irrationalism and, as a consequence,
from the aspect amenable to continuing in Nietzsche.
7. But what is the ultimate reality, the God that this ethics reveals?
Here we have the encounter between Martinetti and Spinoza. It is a
peculiar Spinoza, because Martinetti denies both the naturalistic aspect
and the pan-logistic and pre-Hegelian aspect of Spinoza.60 The first

59 Notice that by “reason” Martinetti does not mean the facultas ratiocinandi but
the “intellective intuition, the vision of unity in all its degrees, the power to construct
a unitary vision of life, in harmony with the principles of logical activity” (Ragione e
Fede [Turin: Einaudi, 1942], 13).
60 See Piero Martinetti, Introduzione alla metafisica (Turin: Clausen, 1904),
360–4.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 45

book of Ethics is completely sacrificed to the fifth. By abandoning these

two aspects, Spinoza’s thought comes to coincide completely with that
of Schopenhauer separated from atheism: the process of liberation is
no longer directed towards Nothingness but towards a divine unity,61
separated from all the anthropomorphic images that gave rise to super-
naturalism. From being the most intransigent monism, Spinoza’s
thought turns into the most intransigent dualism. From Schopenhauer’s
religious atheism we move to anti-clericalism: to Spinoza, who is the
enemy of the churches because he is inebriated with God.
8. The extremization of anti-historicism is the source of the aspect of
absolute definitiveness of his philosophy, such that either one accepts it
as a whole, with an act of moral decision, or one must radically reject
it. This aspect is in fact justified because he does push to the ultimate
consequences philosophical-religious dualism and the corresponding
image of a philosopher. Now, one cannot help noticing that this posi-
tion also marks the rejection, as criticism of their roots, of all the philo-
sophical trends of the nineteenth century that extended into our
century.62 After all, the full awareness of this rejection is what makes
him suggestive, and the criticism of being backward looking (which
coincides with the fact that Martinetti is one of the very rare thinkers
in which we cannot find any non-romantic features) does not touch

61 See his volume of selections, Schopenhauer, 53–61, where he presents “the

thought of Schopenhauer as intent on affirming, beyond negation, something posi-
tive, which can only be expressed through symbols.”
62 In fact, what has been said explains his total opposition to all forms of histori-
cism (to Marx, the result of the Hegelian left – i.e., the final outcome of the natural-
ism implicit in Hegel; to Croce, but also to Dilthey, as relativism), of existentialism
(no matter whether coming from Pascal and Kierkegaard or from Nietzsche), of natu-
ralism, of pragmatism, of scientism, of methodologism; besides, of course, to all forms
of Catholic thought and to the renewal of Protestant theology. His religious pessi-
mism also opens up an abyss between his thought and every form of modernism, in as
much as this latter seeks a reconciliation between religious thought and the philoso-
phy of life and history.
In a different sense, we can say that the two fundamental trends of twentieth-
century thought – Idealism and the philosophy of existence – do exist in him, but
truncated. This truncation is related not to eclecticism on his part – nothing is less
eclectic than his thought – but to his dualism. It happens because of a contradiction
within this position, which should indeed be studied in his philosophy, as the most
rigorous form dualism has ever reached.
46 The Problem of Atheism

him,63 given that among his many refusals there is also the refusal to
use the historical actuality as a metric.
The true criticism of his thought must concern, instead, the insuper-
able contradiction between the rationalist-metaphysical moment, which
should lead to the thesis that everything finite dies, and the ineliminable
need for the salvation of the individual. Therefore one should analyze
all the reasons that bring him both to the pluralistic character of his
Idealism and to faith in immortality, understood as persistence, even if
transfigured and mysterious, “of our best personality and our noblest
and dearest affections which are inseparable from it,” accompanied by
the explicit rejection of “annihilation into the absolute.” From his per-
spective, faith in immortality is absolutely necessary because of the
radical duality of morality and history. In other words, the truncated
metaphysical rationalism that he reaches by separating the religious
aspect of Schopenhauer from the atheistic and irrationalist aspect ends
up being fatally balanced by an individualism that contradicts it. This
contradiction is insuperable but does not take away the importance of
his thought. Actually, it gives it a particular significance because it shows
the impossibility of a religious renewal that expresses itself in “religion
within the limits of pure reason,” in philosophical faith in the transcen-
dent, freed of all supernatural elements; and it brings back today’s terms
of ideal opposition to two: philosophy open to the supernatural and
radical atheism. Alternatively, we can say, in extremely simple terms:
anti-clericalism is correlative to “natural religion” as religious opposition

63 So much so that in his lectures on Hegel (Milan: Bocca, 1943) he defines his
adversary, regarding German philosophy of the nineteenth century, as the naturalis-
tic trend, the direct continuation of the thought of the Enlightenment, which culmi-
nates in Hegel and continues in the Hegelian left to end in materialism. He fights it
in the name of the Idealist trend, which, after Kant and Fichte, continues in the great
epigones of Idealism, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Schopenhauer, and reaches us
through von Hartmann, Lotze, and Spir.
To the thought of the Enlightenment – characterized by the rehabilitation of
human nature, by the idea of progress, by unlimited trust in science and technology
as domination that verifies the idea of progress, by the quest to extend the ideal of
science to all human activities, by a forward-looking mindset – Martinetti opposes a
process of thought focused on the past, on the rediscovery of a lost tradition, destroyed
by the Inquisition and by worldly powers. Thus he goes from Schopenhauer to Kant,
to Spinoza, to the Cathars, to the Manicheans, to the gnostics, to Eastern thought.
Technical science appears to him as “empty knowledge” when it is not associated with
the science of good and evil.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 47

to the Church. This natural religion evolves, losing more and more the
meaning of “common element to all religions,” to take that of “pure
religion” or “morality.” In Martinetti this line of development reached
the highest degree of rigour and at the same time the catastrophe.64
From what has been said, it also follows that the use of the word
“heresy” in reference to the most rigorous form of atheism – people
habitually speak of Marxism as the latest Christian heresy65 – has no
rigorous meaning and leads to inevitable and dangerous confusions.
Whereas heresy cannot but present itself as the restoration of true
Christianity, atheism cannot but present itself as post-Christianity, com-
ing after its historical death. Therefore, an atheist can never accept
being called a heretic because he affirms the death of transcendent
Christianity – although, if he is a historicist, in the sense of surpassing
it. The situation is different for a Christian because, being unable to
accept the idea of post-Christianity, he must maintain that every irreli-
gious position of thought can be traced back to the development of a
heresy. But in order to speak of atheism in these terms, he must make
a distinction between heresies of the medieval type, as attempts to restore
primitive Christianity, and heresies of the Renaissance type (Bruno’s

64 For a broader discussion of his thought see my presentation at the “Giornata

Martinettiana” held at the University of Turin on 16 November 1963, to be published
in the near future [A. Del Noce, “Martinetti nella cultura europea, italiana e piemon-
tese,” in Giornata Martinettiana (Turin: Edizioni di Filosofia, 1964)].
65 See, for example, Maritain, La personne et le bien commun (Paris: Desclée, 1947),
87; and Maritain, La Philosophie morale (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 303 [The Person and
the Common Good (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 98; Moral
Philosophy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), 240]. It is curious that for Maritain, and
much more so for the many people who follow him and exaggerate his assertions, the
description of Marxism as the “last Christian heresy” does not mean “condemnation”
but “recuperability” because a heretic “preserves.” In actuality, in Marxism there is “pres-
ervation” of the messianic mindset because it is a form of historicism and, thus, a
position that intends to preserve what was valid in the past. However, in the process
whereby Marxism arrives at the “atheistic religion” there is definitely no residue or fer-
ment of the Judeo-Christian tradition because atheism acts as mediator between two
conceptions – the idea of dialectics, tied to the mortality of the finite and Hegel’s
inversion of the interpretation of sin, and the idea of Revolution – that deny this tradi-
tion in its very first assertion. Interpreting Marxism, because of the “theological” char-
acter of the philosophy of history, as a messianic transfiguration of Hegelianism
rather than as a logical process that makes Hegelianism most consequential means, in
my judgment, falling into the greatest possible misunderstanding, even though
Löwith authorizes it.
48 The Problem of Atheism

philosophy can be characterized as the first heresy of this type), which

emphasize the humanistic and worldly aspects, where such worldliness
means a fundamental pagan re-comprehension of Christianity. Atheism
stands at the endpoint of this type of heresy. In this sense, we can even
speak of the Enlightenment as a “heresy of the Catholic Reformation”66
and speak of Romanticism as “the Renaissance after the Reformation,”
which is correct if we restrict the meaning of Romanticism to classical
German philosophy and its extensions; and we can see in Marxism one
of the endpoints of this new Renaissance. But this is not exactly the
meaning that many Catholic writers give to the description of Marxism
as the “last Christian heresy” …
Finally, I think it may be worth adding – since even though these
judgments today are rarely formulated explicitly, they nonetheless linger
in the evaluations that follow from them – that we must not confuse
atheism with a superstructure of immoralism or, conversely, as a legiti-
mate, albeit insufficient from a higher moral standpoint, rehabilitation
of vitality. Above all, we must not confuse it with the mere thesis of
denying the immortality of the individual soul, because it is not one
of its specific features at all. It is all too obvious, in fact, that every form of
metaphysical or historicist rationalism, or every form of theological
humanism as distinct both from theistic humanism and atheistic
humanism,67 holds that same thesis.

3. Criteria for a History of Atheism

What I said implies that a history of atheism ought to be part of a history

of philosophies in terms of how they conceive the initial Fall, which so
far is lacking; therefore, it ought to be part of a history of philosophy
tightly linked to the history of theology and not understood as entirely
distinct. The consideration of atheism, by shifting our attention to the
act of faith at the beginning of rationalism, throws into a crisis the usual

66 Thereby welcoming a thesis brilliantly developed by Ugo Spirito in his work

“Rinascimento e Romanticismo” in the appendix to Machiavelli e Guicciardini (Rome:
Edizioni Leonardo, 1945). See also La vita come arte (Florence: Sansoni, 1941), 143
[TN: in the original this note is part of the main text].
67 I use the expression “theological humanism” to indicate the philosophies of
the immanence of the divine (Brunschvicg, Croce, Gentile, Carabellese, etc.).
 I. The Concept of Atheism 49

vision whereby the historical process is directed towards the separation

of philosophy and theology.
This theme would also be extremely important for the study of
Catholic philosophy. For instance, to what extent does the essentialism
and abstractism that have been imputed to the Second Scholastics, and
in which we must see the reason for its defeat, originate from an initial
and undue entification of the abstraction known as the state of pura
natura? To what extent has the theological line started by Molina affected
Suarez’s philosophy (I mean in its aspect as pure philosophy)? And
is not this initial entification of the abstract the reason the critique of
Scholastics has taken the form of empiricism (regarding the critique
of Scholastics, Cartesianism itself is empiricist, even if it intends to sur-
pass empiricism, after accepting this critique)? Is not the idea of autono-
mous philosophy rooted in the theology of the state of pure nature?
These considerations find immediate confirmation if we shift our
attention to the most comprehensive history of atheism ever written
until now, the very voluminous work by Fritz Mauthner, Der Atheismus
und seine Geschichte in Abendland (Stuttgard und Berlin, 1922), in four
volumes, which comes down, in effect, to a mere accumulation of mate-
rials. In the Preface, dated March 1920, Mauthner writes, presenting
the purpose of his work:

So that the reader may not have to wait for the last paragraph to know the
ultimate goal of this work, I will state my creed right away. I would like to lead
those who trust me to a clear and cold altitude, from which all dogmas will
appear to be human constructions, historically produced and historically
fated to fade away … an altitude from which faith and superstition are equiv-
alent concepts. What I strive to offer … is atheistic mysticism … What had to
be written is a “Kultur Geschichte” of the West from the point of view of reli-
gious liberation … Instead of “West” I could also have said “Christendom,”
that is, the ensemble of Europe’s Western peoples, since they form a whole
in terms both of thought and life. We all belong to this Christendom, regard-
less of belonging or not to a Church, by force of tradition and language. The
object of the struggle, the idea of God, is never for me the theological God
of one Christian confession … but always the ethnographic God of the
“whole Christendom” … Today the sciences of the spirit would like hypocriti-
cally to establish new relations with theology, but the natural sciences have
been already for a long time outside the Church and poetry is generally
atheistic, even when it tries to revive the dead symbols of theism.
50 The Problem of Atheism

So, for Mauthner the history of atheism turns into a very general history
of free thought, in which the most diverse characters are featured:
indeed, the first volume goes from the Pelagian and Manichean heresies
to “the Socinians in Poland.” They are brought together, of course,
according to a purely formal order. Because of this, his material becomes
extremely vast, to the point that he cannot control it, nor know it by
direct study; thus, it is material that cannot be trusted since it is, by his
own confession (page 6 in the Introduction), second-hand. As for Marx,
in the midst of all this abundance Mauthner only devotes to him pages
112 to 114 in the fourth volume. It seems that the result of this work is
only the fatigue that in the end overcomes the author himself, making
him declare (Epilogue, vol. IV, 448) that because of it he is giving up
on eliminating some flaws. The general perspective that guides the work
is that of a sort of (rather confused) scientistic Nietzscheanism, which
somehow anticipates the themes of neo-positivism.68

4 . F r o m t h e c o n c e p t o f at h e i s m to
the history of philosophy as a problem

So, I said, the criterion of truth of all forms of atheism is the historical
end of transcendent religions, which are incapable of guiding people
in the true choices imposed by history. Already in this priority given to
the historical argument we see the superiority, right now, of these forms
over other philosophies of a secular type (here, for brevity, by “secular”
I mean every philosophy closed to the supernatural). That is, what
characterizes the present time is that it verifies the superior consistency
of the form of rationalism of the atheistic kind over the metaphysical
form of the immanence of the divine. Thus, the journey of twentieth-
century philosophy seems to be shaping up as the disappearance first
of philosophical religion in the transcendent sense and then of the
religiosity of the immanence of the divine; thereby, it seems to present
us with a radical antithesis. For the time being, we must say, atheism
remains on the offensive. What does “on the offensive” mean? The fol-
lowing: that already with the First World War, which started under the

68 The Catholic book by G. Siegmund, Der Kampf um Gott (Berlin: Morus-Verlag,

1960), is rather more correct and quite useful. We must say, however, that even
though it contains various astute observations it is a serious work of popularization
more than a strictly scientific book.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 51

banner of the Idealist and secular theist Mazzini, and ended with the
victory of his bitter enemy Marx, atheism seems to have triumphed; the
moral history of the post-Second World War period seems to be the history of the
growing awareness of this victory.
But let us go back to the essential topic, the process that must lead us
to recognize the history of philosophy as the primary philosophical
question. After the neo-positivist critique of evidences,69 and after the
various forms of historicism, the only criterion of truth left to secular
thought is the claim that an irreversible historical process (however one
calls it) today makes it impossible to speak in terms of religious tran-
scendence. Correlatively, the word “modern” takes on an axiological
meaning: being up to date with modern philosophy means striving to
realize a form of humanism not vulnerable to turning into naturalism
(and thus into skepticism and decadentism as its ultimate developments),
nor into more or less covert forms of a return to transcendent thought.
This axiological meaning also takes the character of moral normativity:
the only form of morality is identified in being up to date with the course
of history (which is, again, the moral moment proper to atheism). The
catalogue of deviations and criticisms has been accurately established:

• Philosophies of transcendence today can take the form of academic

philosophies, but then they manifest their inferiority by being
fruitless in terms of the historical judgments that a true philosophy
must produce. In short, they replace philosophy with rhetoric, which
allegedly today starts by discussing values. As a matter of fact, it is
undeniable that a large part of Catholic thought has achieved insu-
perable perfection in the technique of evading concrete problems,
so that a doubt arises whether today “Christian philosophy” is not
defined … precisely by this technique.
• Or they are practical forms of defence of an institution and, thus,
can be considered only in light of the nature of that institution
and, as far as their historical development is concerned, in light
of its politics. This is the standard secular assessment of Catholic
thought that remains rigidly within orthodoxy, from the Counter-
Reformation onward. However, today witty comments on the form of
the “scholastic treatise” and “college-level arguments” have sidelined
these forms.

69 The treatment by Ludovico Geymonat, Studi per un nuovo razionalismo (Turin:

Chiantore, 1945), remains unsurpassed in terms of rigour.
52 The Problem of Atheism

• Or they are forms of catastrophic and irrationalist decadentism,

which express the state of mind that follows the collapse of the
practical hopes of reactionary thought; that is, they are the current
form of the reactionary “prophecies of the past.” The recognition
that the present world is Godless coincides with the declaration that
human projects are meaningless (thus, the meaning of atheism is
turned upside down); but, on the other hand, it is not the idea of
God that leads them to devalue the present world but mere religious
nostalgia, so that, in dissimulated form, the truth of atheism is being
acknowledged. The formal refinement that they sometimes achieve
fails to sustain the illusion about their non-religious content.
• Or, finally, when they wish to reach historical concreteness in the
form of adequate moral, political, and aesthetic judgments, they
necessarily fall into modernism, which can also be a form of peace-
ful transition from the old to the new vision of the world.

That these four forms exist is undeniable; that they are the only
possible ones is the judgment of secular thought, which I am calling
into question.
We can call this approach the historicist solution to the problem of the
starting point of philosophy. Accepting it already means going from
Idealism to historicism. On the ground of historicism, then, atheism
wins, as will be clarified shortly. Let us acknowledge, though, that in
fact this historicist solution has been practised by all the philosophies
of our century, except the religious philosophy of existence, which has
in this stance one of its principal original features. All others have
formed within an already prefabricated historical vision, inherited from
the nineteenth century. We find a precise awareness of this situation
in the criticism that, now thirty-six years ago, Gabriel Marcel raised
against Léon Brunschvicg:

I believe I understand that in his view a freely thinking spirit today finds
himself … in circumstances that no longer allow him, without a rationally
unjustifiable regression, to subscribe to any affirmation of the supernatural.
I insist on this word regression. According to Brunschvicg, in this domain
there is for sure a sort of definitive spiritual acquisition, something we need
not revisit. It would be the equivalent, in short, of what happens in the sci-
ences of nature, in which we can agree, with slight reservations, that acquisi-
tions of this kind exist, developments which are by right irreversible or
irrevocable. Now, I am inclined to argue that the metaphysical spirit is
 I. The Concept of Atheism 53

defined precisely by a massive calling into question, and thus by the refusal
to accept this irreversibility, this irrevocability in its own domain. It seems to
me that formulas like “today we can no longer allow,” “by now it is impossi-
ble” lose all applicability when we engage in that global evaluation that,
despite everything, lies at the heart of every metaphysics.

Now, Marcel’s view is based on the idea that “the religious problem
exists only for the individuality that affirms itself both as real, because
it desires and suffers, and at the same time as finite, as dependent, that
is to say as one monad” in opposition to Brunschvicg’s identification of
spirituality and scientific mindset (“from the perspective of Western
philosophy, the properly religious effort will then consist in thoroughly
maintaining, in all processes of human consciousness, that attitude of
total detachment from one’s own person, of total devotion to the idea,
which is the ascesis proper to a scientist”).70
Marcel’s objection contains three exceptionally important points:

1. Every immanentistic position is always tied to the theme “by now

it is no longer possible.”
2. There is a necessary link between this theme and the denial of
individuality (if anything, the individuality of the single man will
be replaced by the individuality of his work).
3. Therefore, the reaffirmation of metaphysics is tied to the question
of the effective recognition of the individuality of the single person
(which implies abandoning the thesis, which was typical of old-
school metaphysicians, that the obligatory and necessary starting
point of philosophy has to be sought in some first evidence). And
it is also tied to the critique of “by now it is no longer possible”
and thus of the vision of the history of philosophy as a process of
secularization. Having said this, it seems we are authorized to view
the critique of the dogmatism of the “modern” as today’s primary
philosophical problem.

70 Bulletin de la Societé française de Philosophie of March 28 1928, from a meeting

devoted to the “Querelle de l’Athéisme.” The sentences by Marcel are on page 81,
those by Brunschvicg on page 79. In 1927, Brunschvicg’s Progrès de la conscience dans la
philosophie occidentale (Paris: Alcan, 1927) and Marcel’s Journal métaphysique (Paris:
Gallimard, 1927) had appeared.
54 The Problem of Atheism

However, we need to add:

4. that Marcel’s response to Brunschvicg was victorious in a way that to

us today looks strangely easy, even though it certainly was not at that
time. Brunschvicg’s neo-criticism drew its apparent strength from
the critique of gnoseological realism – that is, from confusing the
problem of realism with its gnoseological version. His history of
the “progress of consciousness” claimed to be the history of a
constant victory of a form of Idealism linked with science against
the false metaphysics based on the realistic mindset and, thus, tied
to the superstitions and myths of the common people. It was the
historical illustration of his philosophy. In actuality, dualism was
only verbally negated by him, but effectively presupposed; it was, of
course, a dualism of the Enlightenment type, altogether different
from that of Martinetti, which I discussed, which was Romantic and
explicit. The true decisive criticism of it was raised, in the same
meeting of the Societé française de Philosophie, by Gilson.71
5. We understand then why the problem of criticizing the dogmatism
of the “modern” did not seem so decisive to Marcel as it does to me
today. Reclaiming the reality of individuality, at bottom, coincided
for him with affirming the discontinuity of the history of philosophy.
I think instead that we must speak of continuity within essences;
and I already said that the transition within rationalism from the
position of the immanent divine to that of atheism is necessary.

71 Gilson correctly highlighted (Bulletin, 57–8) an unresolved dualism at the bot-

tom of Brunchvicg’s thought. Even though he spoke of the creative power of the
Spirit, and sometimes created the impression that for him it was thought that con-
ferred being to the universe being thought, and that generated the existence of
nature, nonetheless, as a historian, he talked about the activity of thought that coor-
dinates forever the motions of things and the events of life, about the stages that
thought goes through in the building of science, about the hurdles it overcomes,
about a realistic mindset that constantly opposes its progress, and so on. He granted,
in other words, the existence of things that existed apart from the spirit that coordi-
nates them. Given this, how could one avoid the question “why something rather than
nothing,” which is proper to Thomistic metaphysics but is also shared by existential-
ism, which was being born at that time? This is why his fortunes declined after 1930.
In relation to what will be said later, it seems clear that there is a necessary connection
between his inability to understand revolutionary thought and the inability to under-
stand medieval philosophy.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 55

6. Without the idea of the irreversibility of the historical process,

therefore, historicism, neo-positivism, and Marxism are completely
unthinkable. Let people try and make Marxism as “open” as they
like: still, they will never be able to eliminate the idea of the
irreversibility of the process from feudal society to bourgeois society,
and from this latter to proletarian society, and of the sequence of
corresponding philosophical visions; likewise, for historicism, the
irreversibility of the process from mythical thought (revealed truth)
to metaphysical thought and then to historical thought; and so on.
So that there is an analogy between a medieval Christian thinker
and a contemporary secular thinker. The former started from Sacred
History, which he considered unquestionable;72 the latter starts from
profane history and from the assertion that since the time when the
new Science was born a world has come into being that rises to the
dignity of a philosophical event because it can find its justification
and its self-awareness only in philosophies that break radically away
from the supernatural, even if they understand the novelty of
Christianity with respect to ancient thought, and even if they
maintain, so to speak, the Christian anthropology, albeit entirely
secularized. This is proven, supposedly, by the failure of all attempts
at a Catholic restoration, from the Counter-Reformation to the
nineteenth century.
7. Furthermore, this irreversibility, in the way in which it is affirmed
by recent forms of rationalism, is not at all the construction of
genealogies that could be organized only on the basis of a philosophy
that thought itself to be “definitive” – while, correlatively, a philosophy
thought to be definitive could only produce history understood as
construction of genealogies. Rather, it is viewed as the result of
considering philosophies in their precise historicity; in the extreme
case, Marxism – which incorporates the history of philosophy into
general economic, social, and political history (an incorporation
that is not a simple “reduction”) – claims precisely to account fully
for the “humanity” of philosophies. Marcel’s objection seems to lose
meaning in reference to the historiography of positive atheism to
the extent that this latter does not confuse at all, like Brunschvicg
does, criticism of individualism with “the ascesis of the scientist.”

72 See in A. Dempf, Sacrum Imperium (Milan: Principato, 1933), the perfect defi-
nition of the attitude of medieval thinkers towards history.
56 The Problem of Atheism

In light of this, it seems legitimate to define the primary philosophi-

cal question for today’s philosophical thought in the following terms:
Is it true that there is no other way to think about modern philosophy
except as a process towards total immanentism, which cannot but take
the form of radical atheism? Or can modern philosophy be character-
ized only problematically by the rise of the problem of atheism, so that
the solution of the problem is not prejudged at all by a continuity
that exists only in the development of rationalism and in the develop-
ment of the form of empiricism that accepts rationalism’s presupposi-
tion? That is, and it is the same question: Is it true that in every
philosopher, from Descartes onward, the fruitful motif – that is, the
one able to establish critical continuity – is the secular motif? While
everything else, in the philosophers who profess to be Christian in the
transcendent sense, is just a compromise that, because of its practical
character, is not philosophy?
Against this assertion, three objections can be raised:73 the first,
that historical periodization is a purely empirical scheme, always
relative to the point of view of the periodizer. Its construction obeys
criteria of practical convenience: Is it not entirely ridiculous to make

73 A study of the protective screens to avoid this problem would deserve a sepa-
rate chapter. The typical example should be found in Croce, who, on the one side – in
La Storia come pensiero e come azione (Bari: Laterza, 1938), page 297 of the 1943 edition
[History as the Story of Liberty, trans. S. Sprigge (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1941), 302] – opposes “divisions by chronological periods” because of their “practical
origins and empirical use,” but on the other side – for example, in Storia d’Europa nel
secolo XIX (Bari: Laterza, 1932) [History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, trans. H.
Furst (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934)] – builds on the foundation of the
secularity of modern philosophy as opposed to transcendent medieval philosophy. In
short, he builds on the entirely dogmatic acceptance of a vision of history that is … a
common feature of the philosophy of history of the 1800s; so much so that to con-
clude the first chapter, “La Religione della Libertà,” he recalls, making it his own, the
Joachimite scheme. How much philosophy of history, in the man who claimed to be
the rigorous theoretician of historicism, as the position antithetic to the philosophy
of history! Regarding the influence of the Joachimite scheme on the formation of the
philosophy of history, and the reference to Joachim already in Lessing, and also on
his work’s influence in disseminating it, see K. Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1949), 208–12. On Lessing’s encounter with Joachimism,
see also W. Nigg, Il regno eterno (Milan: IEI, 1947), 321ff). The harshness of Croce’s
polemic against Toffanin would be incomprehensible if Toffanin’s thesis on human-
ism had not posed a threat to his interpretation of Vico, which is the necessary meet-
ing point between his philosophy and his history, or actually a history book that is,
 I. The Concept of Atheism 57

the problematization of a didactically useful fiction the primary philo-

sophical question?
The second: Is it not possible that this period of a little over three
centuries, in which supposedly the irreversible process is visible, was just
an epoch of crisis? And who can pronounce a judgment on the crisis
and on progress, if not a philosophy that establishes itself and is valid
independently of the consideration of the history of philosophy?
The third: By making the problematization of the history of philoso-
phy the question that today presents itself as philosophically primary,
are we not denying the eternity of metaphysical problems, and indulging
in historicism, as if there were no contradiction between the historical
dimension and the dimension of transcendence?
Regarding the first objection, I only have to refer the reader to
pages 330–4, to which I attribute absolutely fundamental importance.
There I have tried to show that to construct any possible history of
modern philosophy one cannot do without the figure of the “Cartesian
beginning,” in the precise sense I have defined; and that, conversely,
the nature of Descartes’s thought forces us to speak of a new period
of the history of philosophy because it cannot be understood as a
development of previous positions of thought. Consequently – because
of the necessary reference every later philosophy makes to it, and
because of its particular nature – the problem of distinguishing between
the religious and the secular aspect of his philosophy, and of determin-
ing which one of the two must be regarded as the critical aspect, is
exceptionally important.

peculiarly, a necessary chapter of his philosophy. Croce literally loses his temper when
he sees threatened the unproblematized historical vision of the course of thought within
which his philosophy has come together, and whose problematization would require
a total revision.
Conversely, the importance of the analysis of the concept of “modern” has been
emphasized by Husserl, La crisi delle scienze europee (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1961), 44
[TN: The Crisis of European Sciences (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970),
14–15]. Such analysis has been conducted by Franco Lombardi in Nascita del mondo
moderno (Asti: Arethusa, 1953), in a form that of course is very different from mine,
but on the same problem (constantly referring to what I call the historical actuality),
and with extremely important suggestions, even when the suggestion is to think the
antithesis. A comparison would be indispensable, but I must postpone it until after
I present synthetically my perspective, which I am doing in this book.
58 The Problem of Atheism

Regarding the second objection, the meaning of my answer will

become clear later, after the demonstration of the character of absolute
novelty of contemporary history, in as much as it is philosophical history.
For now, I will just remark that the Marxist vision of historic irrevers-
ibility leads to a critique, whose persuasive appearance is undeniable,
of the positions that reduce the modern world to a catastrophic crisis.
Allegedly, their error is manifested by the impossibility of achieving
consistency between thought and life because the radical condemnation
of the modern world cannot avoid seeking, in order to be consistent,
its own political expression. Now, in this political expression, it has been
able to reach historical reality only in the form of Fascism – understood
as a term that unifies its three stages (Action Française, Italian Fascism,
and Nazism) into a continuous process, whose type will have to be
defined. Thus, it has reached historical reality in a form that is measured
philosophically, in its final outcome, by the irrationalist type of atheism
(i.e., by nihilism) and that expresses, from the social standpoint, the
bourgeois form of reaction, in which the previous position of reaction-
ary thought – which was anti-bourgeois because of its radical condemna-
tion – is channelled. So that, allegedly, the condemnation of the “nihilism
of the modern world” has necessarily resulted – because of a changed
historical reality that it wants to reject – in supporting a position that
gives rise to the most absolute form of nihilism!74 For those who start
from this condemnation, or insist on repeating it, there is only one
alternative: to declare that the catastrophic character of modernity is
irreparable and cannot be overcome practically. But then the result will
be a form of absolute passivity, which can only translate, in practice,
into saying yes to anything and anybody; which is linked either with
an aspiration for a “God to come” that, however, remains absolutely
formless and is thus nothingness, or with nostalgia for a “past God” that

74 It is from this point of view that it would be interesting to study the stance of
Catholic counter-revolutionary thought towards the forms of counter-revolutionary
thought that have been active in our century – namely, the sympathies that the greater
part of French Catholic intellectuals (Maritain, many of the Thomist philosophers,
Bernanos, etc.) harboured for L’Action Française until it was condemned; the atti-
tude of Italian Catholic culture towards Fascism; nor can we forget the adhesion to
Nazism, albeit interpreted in a particular way, by Carl Schmitt, the greatest disciple
that Donoso Cortès has had in our century. Conversely, how does Maritain break up
with reactionary medievalist thought, if not by recognizing that “the historical situa-
tion is different”?
 I. The Concept of Atheism 59

cannot be restored; it is linked, in any case, with that contradictory atheistic

condemnation of atheism that, as we have already seen, has been identi-
fied by secular thought as the decadent form among the possibilities
left open to religious thought.
The import of this critique will be discussed later. However, for now
let us observe that those who formulate it cannot but refer to a vision
of history, which claims to be superior because it makes possible con-
sistency between thought and life. So, given that this critique is condi-
tioned on a vision of history, and given that, in practice, thinking
philosophically is always answering a historical adversary, it seems unde-
niable that there is nothing paradoxical about determining today’s
theoretically primary problem in the terms I have used.
As far as the third objection is concerned, I think I must answer that
thinking in relation to the historical actuality does not mean denying
the eternity of metaphysical problems but, rather, recognizing it in their
true sense. Because excluding the theme of progress, both in its scien-
tistic and historicist senses, is certainly what characterizes metaphysical
thought and is the foundation of the distinction between metaphysics
and science; but, in order for this exclusion to be valid, it is also neces-
sary that we unburden metaphysical thought of the immobilization in
formulas that makes it liable to look like the alienated image of a certain
historical situation; it is necessary that a certain concept of progress
apply also to metaphysical thought, which can only be expressed as
“explication of the virtual.” Excluding progress and historicism cannot
have any other meaning than asserting that “the metaphysical problem
is that which nobody else can have solved for me” and which therefore
presents itself to me in always new terms, by reason of the novelty of the
historical situation. I do not have in front of me some sort of list of
problems that have already been solved, which can be collected in a
treatise. On the contrary, it is in the course of the personal process of
solving the metaphysical problem that I recognize my thesis as the
explication of a “virtuality” of an affirmation that was already made in
the past. And it is precisely in this “explication of a virtuality” that the
metaphysical thesis becomes “evident” to me, breaking free from the
always contingent form it had taken in its historical formulations.75

75 This point, which historically is Newman’s problem, is crucially important in

order to define the concept of liberalism. Please allow me to linger here for a moment
on my memories of the unforgettable Felice Balbo because the problem, as he used
60 The Problem of Atheism

Rather than following from a latent rejection of eternity, the recognition

of the historical context is motivated by the need not to confuse the
eternal and time.

5. Visions of History
and the Idea of Revolution

In essay V, I discussed (pages 293–8) the idea of Revolution as an ideal

category that is reached through a philosophical process at the end of
which we find the greatest radicalization of atheism, combined with
a form of materialism that does not reduce at all to an instance, or to a
development, of naturalistic materialism. We must now observe that
the great visions of history formed in the first half of the nineteenth
century in connection with the historical question of understanding the French
Revolution – that is, the question of a post-Christian civilization.76 Let
us recall the essential ones: the Hegelian vision, the Marxist, that of
Saint-Simon and Comte, that proper to the Catholic restoration – we
can say from de Maistre and de Bonald to Leo XIII (see pages 327–8).
In fact, all others formed in opposition to these, among them:

to say, of the distinction between “form” and “formula” seemed to him to be essential
for contemporary Catholic thought. Hence his admiration for the book by Spanish
theologian Marin-Sola on the homogeneous evolution of Catholic dogma [TN:
Francisco Marin-Sola, The Homogeneous Evolution of Catholic Dogma, trans. A. Piñon
(Manila: Santo Tomas University Press, 1988)], which indeed, by illustrating the con-
cept of virtuality, represents the meeting point between Newmanism and Thomism.
76 On this point, see the issue of the Revue philosophique devoted to La Révolution
française et la pensée moderne (1939) and, especially, the articles by H. Gouhier on
Comte (it is the meditation on the event of the French Revolution that makes possi-
ble the transition from pre-positivism, whose beginning can be dated to d’Alembert’s
Discours préliminaire à l’Encyclopedie, to positivism. See also Lesson 57 in the Cours de
philosophie positive) and by J. Hyppolite on Hegel (by whom see also Genèse et structure
de la Phénomenologie [Paris: Aubier, 1946], 438ff). See also G. Lukàcs, Il giovane Hegel
(Turin: Einaudi, 1960) [TN: The Young Hegel (Boston: MIT Press, 1976)], in which
references to the French Revolution are ubiquitous. And the recent literature on the
importance of the reflection on the French Revolution in the formation of Hegel’s
thought is extraordinarily large. As for Marx and De Maistre, the situation is very
clear. About the presence of the Maistrian-Bonaldian scheme at the beginning of neo-
Thomism, see footnote 29 in essay VI.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 61

1. the counter-revolutionary line within the “Renaissance after the

Reformation” that classical German thought represents. This line
no longer conceives the counter-revolutionary return as a return to
the spirit of the Middle Ages but to the East or to “tragic” or anyway
pre-Socratic Greece: from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Heidegger.
I think we can say that in Scheler this line gets combined with the
Catholic counter-revolutionary line through a continuation of
the primarily anti-Marxist side of Nietzsche.
2. The counter-revolutionary line of German Catholic thought that
starts from Franz von Baader, also in opposition to the process
towards Hegelianism. It aims at freeing the results of German
Romantic thought from pantheistic or atheistic or revolutionary
aspects. Thus, it understands Romanticism as a philosophy of the
Restoration, attributing to this latter a religious, and actually
explicitly mystical, character, with the idea that Romanticism can
realize itself in its total opposition to the Enlightenment only as
traditionalism. It has to go from Jacobi to Saint-Martin, and from
Saint-Martin to Böhme interpreted in a Catholic sense. This line
would deserve to be investigated much more than has been done so
far because of the very innovative elements it contains and because
of the decisive influence it still exerts on a large part of German
Catholic thought, even very recently.
3. Schelling’s anti-Hegel line, which – after meeting Böhme too, and
coming close to Baader – continues in the most important line of
Russian philosophy before Marxism, that of Solovev (its stages are: the
encounter with Dostoevsky, the Dostoevsky-Nietzsche question,
the break with Schelling, the formation of the philosophy of the
Russian emigration, the beginning of the philosophy of existence).
In the Swiss Secrétan, who is in some way Feuerbach’s antithesis, this
line encounters in a new way Descartes after Schelling, discovering
the crucial importance of the Cartesian theme of divine freedom,
and formulates the program of a rediscovery of French philosophy
after German philosophy.
4. Renouvier’s line, which forms against the philosophy of history
of Saint-Simon and Comte.
5. The French philosophy of action, which finds its inspiration in
Leibniz separated from what continues in German philosophy
and is, thereby, led to view Pascal as an anti-Jansenist and as opposed
to Descartes at the same time. This line forms in a position that
62 The Problem of Atheism

somehow parallels the line leading to neo-Thomism.77 It rediscovers

tradition above all as Augustinism, which at first was set in radical
opposition to Thomism (Laberthonnière) and then reconciled with
Thomism according to a particular interpretation thereof (the last
Blondel). It is, in any case, opposed to neo-Thomism (in its most
common meaning) because it is a philosophy of interiority as
opposed to a cosmologism, because it conceives an agonistic rather
than a justificatory theodicy, and because it rejects the “anti-modern”
by finding a kinship with the tradition of seventeenth-century French
Catholic thought in the quest for a philosophy that is Christian by
essence and not by accident.
6. The neo-criticist line, which originated from the critique of the
materialism in which had ended a trend originating from the post-
Hegelian critique of religion. In its endpoint it is led to extend the
Kantian critique of metaphysics to a critique of the philosophy of
history, in a form of historicism inspired by Kant rather than Hegel
(which is why the historicism that begins in Dilthey is different from,
and irreducible to, that of Croce).
7. The pure Protestant line, which, starting from the antithesis rather
than the affinity between the Renaissance and the Reformation,
goes back to the original spirit of the latter against modern
philosophy drenched with Pelagianism (Barth).

The fact that the first three were thought in the nineteenth-century form
of the philosophy of history (which does not exhaust at all, as we shall
see, the meaning of the philosophy of history), namely, from the per-
spective of an ultimate end that must necessarily become realized – as a
consequence, essentially, of the idea that the system is definitive – and
that because of this character they encounter, secularizing it, the theol-
ogy of history, is a relatively secondary problem compared to the ques-
tion of their origin in the quest to understand the revolutionary event.
We can certainly say that the standard visions of history have formed
within a theological perspective, in the sense that the idea of Revolution
is an answer to the theme of the fall (see essay V). However, this may
mean not that they are secular transcriptions of a biblical scheme but,

77 Eighteen seventy was the year of publication of Ollé-Laprune’s La philosophie

de Malebranche (Paris: Ladrange, 1870), which makes manifest the break with
Malebranchian Ontologism, in the name of Leibniz’s critique.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 63

rather, that the theological theme is ineliminable, and thought entirely freed from
theology is impossible.
So, if the standard visions of history have arisen in connection with
the problem of understanding and locating the French Revolution, is
it not natural to think that the investigation forced upon all of us by the
historical situation of having to understand a new revolution, which expresses
the fullness of the revolutionary idea, must lead us to criticize those
visions? The question here should be why this question, as the funda-
mental problem of contemporary philosophy, has taken so long to come
up, and why it still meets so much resistance. The explanation is actually
quite easy. Clearly, for several reasons, the first to raise this question
should be Catholic thought: because, unlike Protestant thought, it
recognizes the legitimacy of the philosophy of history; because this
critical process leads, in the final analysis, to a positive reinterpretation
of the Catholic Reformation; because it brings new visibility to the
Catholic thought of the 1600s; because Protestantism contributed to
define the classic historical periodization and today is being forced –
after a Protestant interpretation of modern German philosophy and
an adaptation to it of its theology – to fall back on anti-modern positions,
although radically different from the Catholic anti-modern since, in
this latter, there is a tight connection between theology and politics,
and in the Protestant anti-modern there is dissociation. Many “becauses”
then; but Catholic thought is powerless to address them as long as it
remains in those four positions that were exactly defined by secular thought.

6 . T o wa r d s a C r i t i q u e o f t h e O r d i n a ry
Vision of the History of Philosophy

Nobody can fail to appreciate either that the problem I posed is

extremely important or the fact that until now it has not been the subject
of in-depth study. But in what sense can one say that it is precisely the
problem of placing atheism in the history of philosophy that calls into question
the standard vision of modern thought as a process of secularization?
Such vision presents itself as unquestionable in an Idealist-immanentist
conception because such a conception must reduce atheism to natural-
istic materialism and thus criticize it as a dogmatic and naïve form of
realism; a realist presupposition that is also that of religion, as transcen-
dent and supernatural religion. But then, on the one side, libertine
atheism must not be taken into consideration, reducing it to a practical
64 The Problem of Atheism

phenomenon; nor, on the other side, Marxian and Nietzschean athe-

ism. Consequently, Scholasticism, not the disintegration of Renaissance
thought, is viewed as Descartes’s primary adversary. In this opposition,
the emphasis, regarding Descartes, is placed on the cogito or on the
mathematization of physics, while the process of the Meditations is viewed
as a list of Descartes’s infidelities to “Cartesianism,” which has become
an entity de jure, a sort of normative essence, known not to Descartes
but to his historians. In Leibniz the critical and progressive “monadic
idealism” is separated from the archaic “monadologic realism.” In Kant
one sees only what continues in Fichte because every form of imma-
nentism of the Idealist type must in the final analysis go back from Hegel
to Fichte (see Gentile). Thus, the history of philosophy turns into a
process of liberation from transcendence, naturalistic as well as religious,
distinguishing two aspects in every modern thinker, until all residual
realism is finally abolished … in the philosophy of the author who is
telling the story. In this liberation from transcendence, Thomism meets
the same fate as Marxism.
We find the most rigorously consistent example of this vision in
Brunschvicg’s most significant work, which not by chance is titled Le
progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale. It is characterized,
indeed, by pure rationalism, understood in such a narrow fashion that
it excludes not only naturalist and irrationalist forms but also the phi-
losophies that surpass themselves by transitioning into religious thought
or revolutionary action. Hence, it excludes Marx from the history of
philosophy so consistently that it ends up excluding Hegelianism and
the thought of Rousseau (viewed as the father, at the same time, of
Catholic Romanticism and of Jacobinism, falsifying the meaning of the
French Revolution), which are seen as mere instances of negativity.
Hence, it also excludes Nietzsche, viewed as the anti-progressive thinker
par excellence for being anti-moralist, anti-socialist, anti-democratic,
anti-feminist, anti-intellectualist, anti-pessimist, and anti-religious (with
respect to Brunschvicg’s philosophical God, of course); and conse-
quently it excludes Schopenhauer, also viewed as a regressive thinker.
Thus, and above all, Brunschvicg’s idea is that transcendent religion is
the supernaturalist antithesis of naturalism within the same realistic
framework. Its genesis is explained very easily: Does realism affirm that
matter is given in itself but also exists by its own power? In order to
believe that one is escaping materialism, it will suffice to transcend the
power of homo faber into the analogical imagination of a Deus fabricator
 I. The Concept of Atheism 65

coeli et terrae. “Superstitious religion” is based on the analogy between

God and a human craftsman or the father of a family since the genera-
tive function is the most typical function of living beings; the necessarily
authoritarian character of positive religions is tied to this second anal-
ogy. Supernaturalism is easily explained starting from the idea of God
the maker of heaven: the divine craftsman must be beyond heaven, and
this leads us to affirm the existence of a region populated by invisible
and supernatural realities. From the perspective of authentic religion,
we must oppose to this God of vulgar realism a God alien to every form
of exteriority, who manifests himself only in the interiority of conscience,
as the root of all values that all consciences equally recognize, and
thus as the principle of communion through objectivity, understood
as the universality of truth and values. But this God “in spirit and truth”
is fully antithetical to the God of vulgar realism. Therefore those who
have wished to profess allegiance to him most rigorously have found
themselves exposed to the accusation of atheism by the rabble and by
the churches (like Socrates, like Spinoza, like Fichte).
I wished to bring back the memory of a philosopher of great intel-
lectual and moral seriousness – such that he earned the esteem of
adversaries of all sides, amazingly erudite, as well as an unusually elegant
writer, whose influence dominated France between 1920 and 1935,
and whose thought today is in effect completely forgotten by reason of
being radically incompatible with the orientations that prevailed after
1930 – because perhaps in no other thinker is the thematic nexus proper
to the rationalism of divine immanence made so consistently explicit.
Provided that atheism is reduced to naturalistic materialism, its critique
can only develop in the form of gnoseological Idealism against realism,
where this latter is understood not as affirmation of the ontological
reality of the finite but as the existence of material reality as a given in
itself; hence the reduction of nature to science, and of science to spirit;
hence, too, the equally necessary extension of the critique of material-
ism to that of transcendent religion, and the affirmation that there is a
link between religious transcendence and supernaturalism understood
in a magical sense; hence the opposition of Idealism’s philosophical
God to the religious God, which presupposes vulgar realism. In light of
this, the interpretation of the development of modern philosophy, or
even of all of Western philosophy, as a process of increasing seculariza-
tion is not in the least an arbitrary adjustment to which history lends itself
because of its pliability – which is possible because the history of thought
66 The Problem of Atheism

is larger than documented history – but is strictly necessary as a conse-

quence. This answers an objection I will certainly face: there is a fairly
widespread idea that general visions of the history of philosophy are
constructions of genealogies and, as such, they are necessarily aprioristic,
based on “reconstructions” of each philosopher rather than philological
investigations. In contrast to them, supposedly, the true historian redis-
covers, as he goes about his work, the value of the nominalist attitude.
Precisely for this reason the criticism of those general visions, which has
already been conducted in the name of rigorous historiography, can
never be the starting point for theoretical research.
This objection presupposes that there is, on one hand, the determi-
nation, independent of history, of a philosophy, and then, as a subse-
quent act, the distension of this philosophy into history of philosophy.
On the contrary, a philosophy actually always is, and always was, a history
of philosophy because it must account for positions of thought different
from its own. Therefore, theory and history of philosophy are two insep-
arable aspects of the unfolding of one and the same essence.
Let me better explain this perspective. Until not many years ago, at
least in Italy, a certain view of the history of philosophy was unquestion-
able. Essentially, it could be summarized as follows: “only those who
have a precise philosophy can engage in the history of philosophy.
Otherwise they will engage at best in philology or history of culture.”
People of a certain age will remember, for example, the judgment about
Gilson’s being a historian but “not a philosopher.” Speaking of another
among today’s greatest historians of philosophy, Gouhier, if he had
been known at that time he would inevitably have been judged to be –
as a scholar of the journeys of philosophers in search of their philosophy,
who is concerned, above all, with the story of a spirit rather than with
the systematic unity of his ideas – a “biographer,” a “psychologist” and
nothing more. A book of history of philosophy was then thought to be
the reconstruction of a system of thought starting from a first idea from
which all others were deduced, and this in the best case; in the most
common case, the historian of philosophy proved his philosophical
spirit by considering a philosophy only according to the aspects in which
it seemed amenable to be surpassed and sublated. And we know that
this attitude manifested the worst side of Actualism.78 The process,

78 [TN] Attualismo, the philosophy of Giovanni Gentile, which is often translated

in English as “Actual Idealism.”
 I. The Concept of Atheism 67

that is, went only one way: from philosophy to the history of philosophy.
And how did one arrive at such a philosophy, which enabled him to
write history? Evidently by a choice, which in most cases was hardly
rational. From the perspective I am proposing, which actually agrees
with today’s common habits, one can very well become a philosopher
through the history of philosophy. To criticize a philosophy, one can
start from the history of philosophy it must produce, to the extent that
it is unable to explain this or that other form of thought. For example,
immanentist Idealism is incapable of explaining both transcendent
metaphysics, which extends into theology and religious life, and athe-
ism. This is because its attempt to unify the critiques of transcendence
(spatially represented) and materialism (reduced to its naturalistic
version) failed completely.
Let me also say that today the investigation of philosophy through
history imposes itself as a necessary approach because the non-unifiable
multiplicity of philosophies and the abstract possibility of multiplying
them indefinitely pushes us to consider the real genesis of the terms we
habitually use. Look, for example, at the term “Idealism”: it has been
said, quite correctly, that “every Idealism is theological.” Now, the con-
firmation lies in its origins, which must be found, rather than in
Descartes, in the “theocentric” interpretation of Cartesianism in Geulincx
and Malebranche. It is born, and in fact it is continued, in Berkeley’s
empiricist adaptation based on the conviction that the critique of athe-
ism boils down to that of naturalistic materialism, and it is accompanied
throughout its history by this conviction. I already said, more generally, that
the genesis of all modern philosophical categories can be investigated
only through the process of thought that goes from Descartes to Vico,
an investigation that I have tried to outline schematically in essay VI.
Therefore, being a form of theological thought, Idealism could only
present itself as surpassing theological thought in a transcendent
sense. But at the same time, as I documented, it could not but exclude
atheism from its consideration, both in the form of its birth (the lib-
ertine erudites) and in its more rigorous forms, and simultaneously
it could not but avoid a philosophical consideration of the idea of
Revolution. It was forced not to move beyond the vision of Lange’s
old History of Materialism – which had been occasioned by the develop-
ments of Feuerbachism, in the aspect in which this latter, when it
refused to be surpassed by Marxism, had moved back towards eigh-
teenth-century materialism, and, consistently, had to exclude Marxism
from its discussion.
68 The Problem of Atheism

The renunciation of considering both the birth and the terminal forms of athe-
ism was necessary because, since its beginnings, modern Idealism had reduced
atheism to naturalism.
Let us now consider the history of philosophy as can be envisioned
by Marxist thought. There are only two possible ways to present Marxism
as the insuperable result today in the history of philosophy,79 viewed in
its dialectic connection with economic and technical development. The
first way is that of vulgar Marxism: presenting the history of philosophy
as the history of materialism, the only form of truly scientific thought.
However, besides the unbearable paradoxes to which it leads, or would
lead if anybody pushed it to its final consequences – namely, Lamettrie’s
thought would be the full explication of the critical moment of Cartesian
philosophy,80 or even, Marx would be the reaffirmation of d’Holbach
after Hegel! – it emphasizes very prevalently the naturalistic aspect, so
that it ends up effectively suppressing what is essential to Marxism, the
dialectic aspect.
The second way is the one that must be reached, and has been reached
in Goldmann, by the line inspired by the young Lukàcs and, as far as I
can tell, also by Bloch; namely, establishing in the history of modern
philosophy an irreversible sequence of world visions: rationalism (the
philosophy of the bourgeoisie), tragic thought (whose essential

79 Because Marxism, in its critical form, can only present itself as historical, not
definitive, truth.
80 This is what, for example, Vartanian says in Diderot and Descartes (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1953). But this is a thesis that needs no refutation. In real-
ity, in order to explain the reference to Descartes in the materialism of the early
1700s, we have to think of the rediscovery, in the second half of the 1600s, of liber-
tinism, which took place via the mutual neutralization of Cartesian and Gassendist
metaphysical themes. In the common cultural opinion, Gassendi’s critique had the
effect of devaluing, as a compromise with tradition, Cartesian metaphysics; conversely,
Descartes without the metaphysics was regarded as the teacher of anti-finalism, and
his arguments had the effect of discrediting Gassendi’s finalism. The rediscovery of
libertinism, as libertinism that feels authorized by science, takes place within the con-
text of Gassendism deprived of its finalistic metaphysics, which is also regarded as a
mere form of homage to tradition. But there is a long way from this to saying that
the materialism of the 1700s brought into focus the new and critical theme of
Cartesianism. What really matters in Vartanian’s book, instead – which confirms per-
fectly my thesis presented on pages 330–4 – is that the necessary reference to
Descartes as initiator is also present in the materialism of the 1700s, as it is in all other
forms of modern philosophy.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 69

representative is Pascal), and dialectic thought, which surpasses tragic

thought. Supposedly, after dialectic thought there is only room for the
futile effort to separate the terms “materialism” and “dialectic,” and to
fight Marxism either as materialism (Idealism) or as dialectic (existential-
ism). The end result is the destruction of reason, which verifies the truth
of Marxism, posing the choice in terms of socialism versus barbarism.
In the context of the critique of the second way (developed in
essay VI), the introduction of the concept of atheism as a position ulte-
rior to that of the immanence of the divine, and the definition of mod-
ern philosophy in relation to the problem of atheism, has led me to a
vision of the French (Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche) and Italian phi-
losophy of the 1600s and early 1700s that is rather different from the
traditional vision. I have established that there is a continuity between
these philosophers because they share a common adversary, libertine
atheism (up to Vico’s opposition to Bayle); this line moves towards a
rigorous formulation of Ontologism as the attempt to go beyond Pascal’s
anti-humanism. I have also established that this development moves in
the absolutely opposite direction with respect to that of classical German
philosophy, so that we can describe it as an anti-Renaissance because
at all its stages it contains the germs, but not the full implementation,
of the critique of subsequent secular positions. Thus, in Pascal we have
the rigorous critique of the pre-Enlightenment aspect of the thought
of Descartes; it coincides with a formulation of criticism that may be
regarded as superior to that of Kant, except that such critique coincides
with radical anti-humanism. Thus in Malebranche’s affirmation of
Ontologism we have an overcoming of Pascal’s anti-humanism, except
that we also have the beginning of modern Idealism and an inflexion
in the direction of future theological rationalism. In Vico’s critique,
within the continuity in Cartesianism, we have the full reaffirmation of
Christian humanism separated from the heresies of the Renaissance
and, at the same time, the separation of Ontologism from Idealism and
from theological rationalism, but not yet a clear definition of the meta-
physics that underpins his philosophy of history. Can the prolongation
of this line – which of course coincides with the line of the Italian phi-
losophy of the Risorgimento, viewed from the angle of being irreducible
to classical German philosophy – be said to be relevant today? Can we
find in it the motifs we need to surpass the ideal and practical difficul-
ties of the contemporary world? The form that this problem must take
will be spelled out in the final pages of this book.
70 The Problem of Atheism

7. The Role of the Religious Philosophy

o f E x i s t e n c e i n P r o b l e m at i z i n g
the History of Philosophy

In essence, we can say: Marxism has presented itself as the denouement

of classical German philosophy, being convinced that previous philo-
sophical trends have been permanently surpassed by it and that subse-
quent philosophies just constitute a futile effort to fight Marxism itself
(they correspond to the decadent stage of the bourgeoisie). We must
observe: Marxism is the outcome of just one of the two processes of
classical German philosophy, while the other one ends in Nietzsche.
But even within the dissolution of Hegelianism there is a position that
Marxism cannot criticize since Marxism is the reaffirmation of
Hegelianism only after its humanistic and existentialist dissolution in
the Hegelian left: namely, Kierkegaard’s position, which is characterized
by the opposite answer with respect to Marx to the same problem – that
is, the critique of the Hegelian relationship between philosophy and
religion. Now, whereas Nietzsche’s thought cannot enter into a direct
dialogue with that of Marx, so large is the distance – the largest that
ever occurred in the history of thought, which I have already high-
lighted – whereas, in other words, it cannot surpass it nor be surpassed by
it, nonetheless it contains a perfect diagnosis of the contemporary world
as it turns out after the Marxist revolution. And whereas Kierkegaard’s
thought is in the same situation in terms of surpassing, it can help make
manifest the original presupposition of rationalism, the act of faith at its
root, and is able to problematize the standard vision of the history of
philosophy upon which Marxism finds its foundation.
I will now try to discuss briefly this second point. It implies a general
view of the historical stages of the religious philosophy of existence,
which can be expressed in the following propositions:
a. Its true beginning lies in Pascal and in the seventeenth-century
fracture of Augustinianism, which was necessary within the significant
structure of Cartesianism (i.e., the fracture between existentialism and
Ontologism in Malebranche’s form, which I discuss on p. 339–40). A
consequence of this fracture is the intrinsic character of this philosophy
as a crisis of Christianity: crisis of the Christianity of the Catholic
Reformation in Pascal, crisis of the Christianity of Reformed theology
in Kierkegaard, crisis of the idea of European unity based on secular-
ized Christianity in the forms of philosophy of existence that emerged
 I. The Concept of Atheism 71

after 1920. The crisis, however, is exceptionally fruitful because in its

first Pascalian phase the nature of atheism becomes clear, in the
Kierkegaardian phase the same happens for Idealism, and in the most
recent phase the standard view of the history of modern philosophy
as a unitary process falls apart. But the crisis must be overcome, and
it cannot be, in my judgment, except in Ontologism, not in neo-
Thomism, nor in spiritualism, nor in Christian personalism.81 Because
otherwise it is undeniable that Pascal is liable to be surpassed in dialectic
thought (see pages 387–8), and Kierkegaard in Heidegger’s thought,
even though this latter then finds again, in a particular fashion, the
problem of Ontologism.
b. The religious philosophy of existence has in Pascal not only its
beginning but also its summit, as is proven indirectly by the fact that
the two fundamental directions of positive atheism are led to face him

81 By neo-Thomism I mean not the thought of St Thomas but the neo-Thomist

commentary, characterized by considering Ontologism its essential adversary. In this
regard, one ought to study the unjustly neglected work by Fr M. Liberatore, La cono-
scenza intellettuale (Rome: Civiltà Cattolica, 1857). His critique of Giobertism, which is
developed within the same “anti-modern” scheme as Gioberti’s Introduzione allo studio
della filosofia, leads Fr Liberatore, after Gioberti’s political-religious defeat, to affirm
that Ontologism is also modern, tainted by the Cartesian error, thus contributing
decisively to the formation of the historical vision of neo-Thomism, which is theoreti-
cally determinant. In the first stage of the history of neo-Thomism, the condemnation
of Ontologism is part of the general condemnation of modern philosophy; in the
second stage there is the idea that the process of modern philosophy – first as positiv-
ism, then as Idealism, and now as phenomenology – must ultimately come to an
agreement with Christian thought, freed from all traces of Cartesianism and
Ontologism. I think calling into question the initial condemnation of Ontologism is
the essential question for contemporary Thomism.
By “spiritualism” I mean, in a rigorous sense, the line that proceeds from Maine de
Biran, or that merges into Biranism, also starting from the rediscovery of the positive
moment of Cartesianism in the theory/experience of freedom. In a more generic
sense I mean the eclectic forms, in which all the oppositions between Christian phi-
losophies get watered down.
Regarding Christian personalism, I think we should recall that the introduction of
the term “personalism” goes back to Renouvier and that he attributes its discovery to
his friend and teacher Lequier. While I realize that I am stating an unfamiliar thesis,
which would deserve a broad treatment, I believe I can give an overall definition
of Christian personalism, at least in its French form, in terms of a reaffirmation of
Lequier’s Catholic thought after Renouvier’s secularization. See my essay “Jules
Lequier e il momento tragico della filosofia francese.”
72 The Problem of Atheism

in their quest to establish their own truth. For Marxism this is demon-
strated precisely by Goldmann’s work; it is also demonstrated by the
constant dialogue that one can intuit between Nietzsche and Pascal,
despite the paucity of quotations.
c. In the transition from Pascal to Kierkegaard we have a narrow-
ing of perspective. Kierkegaard’s adversary is not, in fact, atheism but
Idealism as “Christian philosophy” (hence his particular ambiguity,
which has often led people to raise the question of whether he really
believed or not, and to think that answering is impossible; and the
discussions whether his thought has an apologetic or merely phenom-
enological character, etc.). In relation to this, one can raise a further
question: Why is it impossible to use, in reference to Pascal, the two
categories that until thirty years ago were habitually used to rethink the
whole history of philosophy – namely, Idealism and realism? How could
he not suspect that in Descartes there was the possibility of an idealistic
development? I think that there is a very precise reason for this impos-
sibility: the true birth of Idealism in the modern sense takes place in a
different answer to the same adversary that Pascal was facing. Indeed,
Malebranche’s and Berkeley’s philosophies arise in opposition to Pascal’s
same adversary; but for them the critique of atheism boils down to that
of atheistic naturalism and not that of the atheistic choice itself – the
question of choice that was rediscovered, instead, by Dostoevsky. How
this replacement took place, and within what context of problems, is a
question that I will examine in another book.
d. The aspect of crisis of this philosophy is due to its subordination
in opposition to its adversary. This is very visible in the dependence on
Machiavelli revealed by the political side of Pascal’s thought, and also
in Kierkegaard’s stance towards Hegelianism. Therefore, with respect
to tradition, the religious philosophy of existence manifests itself as
the abandonment of all the themes that led to Vico’s “civil theology,”
of the idea of religion as the foundation of culture and civilization;
hence, the general stance that external and public life is a matter of
indifference to religious life. A correlate of this negation of civil theology
is the understanding of transcendence as separation. The disproportion
between divine justice and human justice in Pascal, “the infinite qualita-
tive difference between time and eternity” in Kierkegaard, the “totally
other” in Barth; at least in the sense that the recognition of the great
distance between God and man is the condition for opening the possibil-
ity of an encounter. These aspects explain why it is a psychologically easy
 I. The Concept of Atheism 73

possibility to go from the religious philosophy of existence to atheism,

even though this process has no semblance of logical necessity. In this regard,
there is no more expressive text than this, from Marx’s Economical and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: “A being only considers himself inde-
pendent when he stands on his own feet; and he only stands on his own
feet when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the grace
of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I live completely
by the grace of another if I owe him not only the maintenance of my
life, but if he has, moreover created my life – if he is the source of my life.
When it is not of my own creation, my life has necessarily a source of
this kind outside of it.”82 In fact, it is characteristic of atheism to always
present transcendence as separation; in this regard, one ought to con-
sider the presence of the atheistic temptation – always rejected but never
completely overcome – in Lequier, and above all the perception Nietzsche
had of himself as a new Pascal freed for good from the ravages of
Christianity. Atheism presents itself as a recovery from a religion that in
existential thought is crisis. I prefer the term “crisis” to the term “tragic”
because religious thought is always an overcoming of the “tragic.”
e. In religious existentialism the theme of Deus absconditus takes
a decidedly non-mystical character. On this we should bring up, as a text
I think of as decisive, the parallel that Gouhier draws between St John
of the Cross and Pascal.83 For the Spanish mystic God is hidden
because of his transcendence and elicits a journey of the soul, moved
by desire to contemplate the divine essence. By contrast, in Pascal we
have a God who wants to hide, and the mystery of the divine essence
is replaced by the mystery of his decrees; in his case, therefore, we
cannot rigorously speak of a mystical experience. The thesis of God’s
mysteriousness and impenetrability, radical anti-gnosticism, is thus
essential for religious existentialism. Overall we can say: to the possibility
in mysticism of falling into pantheism corresponds in existentialism the possibil-
ity of falling into radical atheism.
It is clear that this interpretation of existentialism – whose beginning
must be found in the seventeenth-century fracture of Augustinianism –
differs from the usual ones: very clearly from the interpretation that

82 [TN] Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin
Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 144.
83 See the essay “Le Mémorial est-il un texte mystique?” in Blaise Pascal, l’Homme
et l’Ouvre, Cahiers de Royaumont.
74 The Problem of Atheism

views religious existentialism as the full development of Platonism into

Augustinian interiority, and from that which says that we should look
for its first outline in Aristotle’s critique of Plato. And it calls, at the very
least, for extreme caution in finding precursors among the many patris-
tic or medieval oppositions of Jerusalem to Athens, or in the polemics
against scholastic intellectualism in the name of Christian existence.
But above all it is important to point out that this interpretation is
opposed to that whereby the existentialist tradition coincides with the
irrationalist one. This view is held in two opposite forms by two opposite
critics of the “trahison des clercs”: by the first, Benda, in the name of
rationalism radically separated from dialectics; by the second, Lukàcs,
in the name of dialectic rationalism. According to Benda existentialism
is just the modern form of a perennial position, “the will to exalt the
fact of being alive, of feeling, of acting, of ‘existing’ as opposed to the
fact of thinking, and in particular of thinking about existence.”84
According to Lukàcs, instead, it represents the necessary form of
“destruction of reason” that the polemics against dialectical thought
must take; hence, its historical time span coincided with the philosophy
of the dissolution of Hegelianism in as much as it opposed at first the

84 Tradition de l’existentialisme (Paris: Grasset, 1947), 11. This interpretation

refers to Benda’s essential philosophical book, Essai d’un discours cohérent sur le rapport
de Dieu et du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1931), in which he draws the theoretical conclu-
sions of his interpretation of the crisis of values in the world after the First World War.
He had developed it in Trahison des clercs and in Fin de l’éternel, interpreting the crisis
as metaphysically revelatory because it expressed a rebellion of vitality against reason.
The book is extremely interesting because the rationalist Benda finds himself forced
to trace his way back to the first presupposition of rationalism, which is described
exactly in the terms of the myth of Anaximander (even though it is not mentioned).
Namely, in phenomenic being there are two wills, one to affirm oneself as distinct, the
will that builds the phenomenic world, and another to return to the non-different,
which Benda calls the will to return to the infinite God. But then this infinite God
reduces to indeterminate being in as much as it is opposed to the imperial and distinct
God. Being born from reflection upon the crisis, this position leads to radical and
pessimistic dualism because the will to return to God is not necessary for the pheno-
menic world and may even disappear. The extremely remarkable significance of
Benda’s work lies in the pessimistic inversion of the classic French tradition of non-
dialectic rationalism; this inversion marks the complete opposition, in the philoso-
phy of crisis, between dualism and existentialism. In particular, it is interesting to
observe that the thought of the paradoxical Benda is the exact antithesis of that of
the paradoxical Shestov. See my essay “Il dualismo di Benda,” in Rivista di filosofia 37
(1946): 153–74.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 75

possibility (Schelling-Kierkegaard), and then the reality, of the Marxist

sublation of Hegelian dialectics.85
I, too, partially endorsed this second thesis in the 1946 essay repub-
lished here (pages 194ff and 208ff) regarding the historical period of
existentialism. I defined its rediscovery in the twentieth century as the
expression of a painful historical crisis whose historical nature people
did not grasp.86 As a result, they thought the crisis was natural and insu-
perable, and thus revealed man’s ontological nature. By doing so, I
adopted the perspective that existentialism is merely a patient of the
crisis, destined to be surpassed by Marxism and valid in its criticism only
of Idealism; although, even then I refused to view it just as a necessary
process of decadence, from Schelling to Hitler, which is the thesis that
Lukàcs later advanced (see page 209). I now think, instead, that if we
behold Christian existentialism in its entire history, without reducing it
to a moment in the crisis of Hegelianism, and if we see its first and most
rigorous form in Pascal, we must conclude that, even though it is not
able to surpass Marxism and all that flows into it from the philosophical
tradition, still it serves the purpose of problematizing the original ratio-
nalist presupposition, rationalism being much more than just Idealism.
However, in the years after 1945 it was extremely easy to make this
mistake. We must not forget that between 1920 and 1940 Marx, seen
as a thoroughly outdated thinker, had almost completely disappeared
from the European cultural perspective and that his rediscovery was
preceded by that of Kierkegaard. Because of this eclipse of Marxism,
the thinkers against whom very young people chafed after 1930, and
in relation to whom they had to take a stance, were in France the Idealist
Brunschvicg and in Italy the Idealist Gentile. No wonder then that in
the 1930s the religious side viewed existentialism as playing first of all an
anti-Idealist role, and the secular side a post-Idealist role, and that at
that time Pascal’s thought was completely overshadowed by Kierkegaard’s.

85 G. Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, trans. P. Palmer (London: Merlin Press,

1980).
86 This explains the ethical-political disengagement of the pure forms of philoso-
phy of existence in the 1930s, to the point that they have been described as decaden-
tism – see N. Bobbio, La filosofia del Decadentismo (Turin: Chiantore, 1944) – using the
term in a sense that, however, is not completely rigorous. Heidegger’s “passivity” is
typical as the aware acceptance of an irreversible destiny, which is the ultimate expla-
nation, then, of his attitude towards Nazism.
76 The Problem of Atheism

In my personal case, that first work on Marxism was, as I will briefly

explain later, a rediscovery of the interpretation of the young Lukàcs
through a peculiar process without any direct influence whatsoever.
Therefore, it is not strange that, within that thought process, I articulated
some theses that he had not yet explicitly formulated.
The ethical-political inadequacy of existentialism also explains why
some people could interpret it as the philosophical expression of deca-
dentism; which is very true if we limit the notion of decadentism to that
of practical disengagement, of the paradox whereby students of an
existentialist philosopher live happily with the crisis rather than trying
to overcome it! However, if we understand the nature of decadentism
in a rigorous sense, we have to say that its genetic process is completely
different from that of the philosophy of existence. This latter arises
against Idealism in the name of a demand for truth. Conversely, deca-
dentism is the final outcome of the loss of the idea of truth in naturalism.
I certainly need not recall here the well-known thesis regarding the
contradiction that, on the one side, naturalism cannot but present itself
as the expression of an objective truth but, on the other side, it tends
to turn into skepticism because it must regard every theory as a natural
product, an expression of the necessity that governs nature, and thus
conclude that all theories have the same truth value.
However, it is perfectly clear that in order to characterize decadentism
we cannot stop at this pure inversion of naturalism into skepticism.
Skepticism is possible only in reference to the idea of truth, thought to
be unattainable – that is, it is still a rejection of naturalistic dogmatism
within philosophy. On the contrary, decadentism draws the ultimate
consequences from this naturalistic dissolution of the idea of truth,
destroying the very idea of philosophy. So, it is most opposed to natural-
ism while, at the same time, it is its logical continuation. This is proven
by the materialism, pushed to the extreme, and by the desire to ally
itself with science – viewed as the destroyer of taboos and personified
as the hater of every form of transcendence – that characterize
Surrealism, whose analysis is crucially important because it is probably
the extreme form of decadentism.
Conversely, between skepticism and decadentism there is opposition
without continuity, as proven by the fact that skeptical thought leads to
extreme conservatism, whereas decadentism in its pure state – that is,
Surrealism – pushes to the extreme the idea of revolt. Having ruled out
every form of communication among subjects in the truth, man’s
 I. The Concept of Atheism 77

liberation takes the form of rebellion against the cosmic order, where this idea
of cosmic revolt must include that of social revolution. That is to say,
decadentism, which has reached its maximum purity in Surrealism, can
be defined historically as an attempt to re-comprehend Marx within Sade,
which is instructive to show the total heterogeneity between these forms
of thought and to clarify the absolute incompatibility between the athe-
ism of naturalistic materialism and the atheism of dialectical materialism.
It is a rebellion, and thus a practical attitude; we might say it wishes to
surpass the revolution preserving it in the rebellion. This is why Surrealism
strives towards practice, but it is also why it is ineffective. The reason is
that the moment of pure revolt dissociates from the idea of revolution
because, for the latter, the idea of truth is essential; it is essential, there-
fore, to achieve a reconciliation with reality, which cannot but exclude
the idea of cosmic revolt: “pure revolt is metaphysical, and can only lead,
if it does not let itself be channeled by the experience of another world,
to opposing to our universe a reality which is not and could not be a
world.”87 In other words, cosmic revolt cannot give up the need for the
Other because if it did so it could not even take shape; but, on the other
hand, this Other cannot take the form of a “world,” be it that of religions
or that of revolutions. And yet this dissociation cannot be recognized by
Surrealism because what can a cosmic revolt that does not include a social
revolution be, except a complete escape? Hence the constant and futile
quest for political effectiveness, which expresses itself in the absurd hope
for a revolutionary (in the Marxist sense) and non-totalitarian party (how
could that be?). Therefore, the cosmic revolt comes down entirely to
aesthetic activity, which perforce can no longer include any practical value
but must simply oppose natural reality and traditional values; hence, art
understood as “derealization” of the world; hence, the particular meaning
of the Surrealist primacy of dream over reality.
At this point we may wonder whether decadentism should be viewed,
as it has often been, as a morbid form or a degeneration of Romanticism.
Actually, I think we must say that it is its complete antithesis; not by
chance its true beginning must be found in Sade, the endpoint of the
atheistic materialism of the 1700s. This does not mean that decadentism
and Romanticism did not meet historically. Indeed, initially the revolt
expresses itself as a dissociation between values and truth, and thus in

87 F. Alquié, La philosophie du surréalisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1955), 81.

78 The Problem of Atheism

the reduction of values to myths, but in a particular sense of the word

“myth,” according to which it is used to condemn present reality (pseudo-
mysticism in forms of religious decadentism; unity of decadentism and
nationalism in D’Annunzio; etc.). Therefore, at this initial stage deca-
dentism and reactionary spirit are strangely united because these myths,
in as much as they are directed at condemning the present and are
devoid of their own content, must find it by referring to a past and distant
world, which is the object of nostalgia (and this is where the illusory
appearance of a common nature of decadentism and Romanticism
arises). But the developmental process of decadentism, which also clari-
fies its essence, manifests its dissociation from Romanticism. Thus, in
Surrealism, the revolt extends to the myths themselves as forms of rec-
onciliation with the past and thus of negation of the cosmic revolt. At a
certain moment refusal turns into rage and manifests itself in an artistic
activity that cannot be traced back to the traditional idea of art because
it expresses a refusal rather than a catharsis. As a consequence we cannot
speak, in rigorous terms, of a philosophy or a politics of decadentism
because an essential aspect of this attitude is that it can only express itself
in pure aesthetic activity, understood to absorb all other values, even
though in fact this absorption means their pure negation.
Having thus delimited the concept of philosophy of existence, we
only have to shift our attention to its two core themes – namely, the
opposition of freedom and necessity, and the refusal to absorb the indi-
vidual into “any totality,” against Spinoza and against Hegel – to see that
it agrees with the new critical literature on Descartes. This latter is
characterized by the affirmation that freedom is the “soul of Cartesianism”
(see page 345) and by the consequent dissociation of Descartes from
Spinoza and Kant, whence it follows the affirmation that Cartesianism
is not surpassed by classic German philosophy, the idea that there is a
continuity between Descartes and Pascal, and the affirmation that
Pascal’s criticism cannot be reduced to Kant’s. Also, we cannot fail to
notice a close parallel between its formation and that of the “Philosophie
de l’Esprit.” The claim that the philosophy of existence needs to be
continued in Ontologism is expressed in Lavelle’s philosophy, which is
a rethinking of Malebranche without the aspects that made it liable to
be surpassed by German thought.88

88 This could be the starting point to study the sharp distinction between his
Ontologism and that of Carabellese, whose Obbiezioni al Cartesianismo (Messina:
D’Anna, 1946) must necessarily place great importance on Gassendi’s criticisms in
 I. The Concept of Atheism 79

It is important to emphasize that this return to pre-Kantian thought

is tied to the recognition of the plurality and irreducibility of philosophi-
cal traditions. Koyré perfectly writes: “Descartes’s’ freedom could say
‘no’ to the world, to nature, to illusion, and on this ‘no’ it could found
the ‘yes’ of adhering to clarity … ; but Heidegger’s freedom can never
say ‘no.’ It always says ‘yes’ and when it decides, its decision is accep-
tance. In this way it will never be able to free itself from error, from
delusion and from confusion.”89 Conversely, in Jaspers and above all in
Heidegger – against the previous trends of neo-criticism and especially
(in a different sense) of Husserl – the need to separate German phi-
losophy from French philosophy and from Cartesianism comes to the
surface. On the other hand, as we shall see, the development of the new
Cartesian criticism leads to recognizing Ontologism as the proper char-
acter of Italian philosophy (essay VI). Clearly, we must not understand
this reaffirmation of the plurality and irreducibility of philosophical
traditions, which the philosophy of existence has occasioned, in a nation-
alistic sense, as one could have affirmed in the spirit of Taine. In my
judgment, we must understand it in the sense that in order to compre-
hend modern philosophies we cannot ignore the theological factor –
that is, their relations – either by continuity or by opposition, with
different theologies, either Catholic or Protestant. This is because I
think – against an opinion that used to be common but now, after
Barthism, is on the wane – that German philosophy arises in opposition
to Protestantism, even though it is still somehow conditioned by it. And
I also think – against the old opinion that set in opposition modern
philosophy and “Counter-Reformation” – that the critical motifs of
modern philosophy started precisely within the Catholic Reformation
(essay VI).
About the meaning of the word “Ontologism,” it will be possible to
define it precisely only in a subsequent volume of the research that I
am starting with this book. For now I will restrict myself to the following
historical definition (see p. 386), which concerns its beginning in mod-
ern thought with Malebranche’s attempt to surpass Pascal and
Malebranche’s continuation in Vico: the history of modern Christian

order to establish a continuity between Descartes and Kant while, instead, Lavelle
must eliminate from Cartesianism everything that made it vulnerable to such objec-
tions [TN: in the original this is a parenthetical statement].
89 “L’évolution philosophique de Martin Heidegger,” Critique 1 (July 1946):
73–82, 161–83.
80 The Problem of Atheism

Ontologism coincides with that of the reaffirmation of humanism after

Pascal’s critique, and with the recovery of metaphysics after criticism,
seen in Pascal’s form and not in Kant’s. Or we can say generically that,
with respect to Augustinianism, it emphasizes the aspect of being a
philosophy of the presence of God, while being different from religious
existentialism because of the prevalence in this latter of the theme of
the “hidden God.”
However, it is important to reject two definitions. First of all, the one
that views Ontologism as a form of rationalist decay of mysticism. This
thesis permeates many habitual historical judgments, even if it is rarely
stated explicitly. To understand it, let us refer to the simplest definition
of mysticism, that given by Lalande’s Vocabulaire technique et critique de la
Philosophie: “the belief in the possibility of an intimate and direct union
of the human spirit with the fundamental principle of being, a union
which constitutes both a way of existing and a way of knowing foreign
and superior to normal existence and knowledge.” Now, allegedly
Ontologism is characterized precisely by the affirmation of this union
but as if it defined the normal condition of man. This is why
Malebranche’s philosophy has often been described as “mystical ratio-
nalism.” These synthetic formulas seldom escape the danger of ambigu-
ity, and this one can be easily understood in the sense of naturalizing
the supernatural. However, the fact is that Malebranche thinks he can
be the first to give an organic and consistent form to the ontologist
orientation because he believes that Cartesianism set the indispensable
philosophical premises to distinguish between the natural intuition of
God and mystical experience in the strict sense. It set the conditions to
use the expression “vision of God” in reference to natural human knowl-
edge, without undermining the distinction between natural and super-
natural. The limits he assigns to rational knowledge are strictly similar
to those set by Thomist thought (in this life we know God not according
to his absolute essence but through creatural participation; we only
have rigorous knowledge of the essence of bodies; even the intelligibility
of the nature of our soul escapes us). The true critique of his thought
must rather concern “theological rationalism” (for its definition see
note 106 on page 391). Now, cannot the further development of mod-
ern Ontologism be viewed as a process of liberation from theological
rationalism? I think that the final stretch of this dissociation of
Ontologism from theological rationalism must be found in Rosmini
(whose thought I believe we must qualify as Ontologism, thus
 I. The Concept of Atheism 81

abandoning the meaning of the word “Ontologism” coined by neo-

Thomism, because of the near tradition to which his thought links back).
A second imperfect and inadequate definition is the one that I myself
proposed, years ago, in the entry “Ontologism” of the Enciclopedia
Filosofica. At that time I had been struck by the close symmetry between
the relationship of Malebranche with Descartes and that of Carabellese
with Gentile, and I had tried to build a historical definition based on
this symmetry. Obviously, the differences between them – whereby
Malebranche views real Being itself as the object of intuition whereas
Carabellese reduces Being to Idea, to pure object immanent in con-
sciousness, and the former meets a particular form of Augustinism
whereas the latter meets a peculiar and hardly Augustinian Rosmini –
depend on the two philosophers they want to continue. In Malebranche,
Ontologism coincides with the radical development of Cartesianism –
understood as amenable to an Idealist continuation, which he thinks
can eliminate on the one side the Spinozian threat and on the other
side the materialist threat, and the Enlightenment to come. In
Carabellese, Ontologism is meant to coincide with the radical develop-
ment of the second Idealist revolution, Kantian criticism – in such a
way as to eliminate both classic German Idealism and its final anti-
metaphysical inversion – and also positivism. Mutatis mutandis, the
essential adversaries are the same for both: pantheism (at least in the
sense of evacuating finite subjects into one Substance, or into one
Subject), materialism, naturalism (of which scholastic cosmologism is
allegedly a weaker expression), agnosticism, and gnoselogical skepticism
in all their aspects. In both of them the cogito is de-emphasized with
respect to Being. And Malebranche’s idea of God as the “locus of all
spirits” finds a secular transcription in Carabellese’s thesis of objective
Conscience, the environment of all thinking entities. Likewise, the
attention prière naturelle of the former, as a religious transfiguration of
Descartes’s methodical doubt, has a counterpart in the latter’s defini-
tion of philosophy as effort of transcendence into pure spiritual objectiv-
ity. Therefore I was necessarily led to conclude that Ontologism is
modern and that, in reference to the sequence of its forms, we cannot
speak of an internal historical development since it is the necessary
form that the radical positions of modern Idealism must take when they
intend to preserve the idea of philosophy as metaphysics and avoid an
inversion in which they are also forced to deny themselves as Idealism.
This thesis was possible because I had not gone more deeply into Vico’s
82 The Problem of Atheism

thought, in which at that time I recognized the continuation of the

theme of verum factum, which is already present in Occasionalism but
not Ontologism. Conversely, I now think that in the modern centuries
Christian Ontologism has experienced a true development and that
only after we define it in reference to Rosmini can we truly study the
tradition of Ontologism in St Augustine and in medieval thought.
Does it make sense to speak of non-Christian Ontologism? Such a
question, which was unheard of until a few decades ago, today takes a
particular meaning after Carabellese and after Heidegger (and, partially,
for French thought, after Alquié). About Heidegger we must observe
that Ontologism never penetrated, not even as a possible form of
thought to be reckoned with, into Germany, the land of the “Renaissance
after the Reformation” (its geographical boundaries were strictly limited
to Catholic countries and we can detect some ontologist aspects in
Germany only in Baader’s thought). Today when Ontologism is inserted
into the German tradition it takes the aspect of a return to early Greek
philosophy. This gives rise to several complex problems that I cannot
tackle here. But at least to set the terms of the question, let us pinpoint
the distinction by observing that the inversion carried out by Carabellese
takes place within modern philosophy and the inversion carried out by
Heidegger takes place against modern philosophy; Carabellese repre-
sents Mazzini’s religiosity developed to its ultimate awareness,90 and
Heidegger the maximum extension of Nietzsche’s critique of the
modern world. This distinction measures how far apart they are, but it
does not take away the fact that the thought of both was affected by
Actualism – a thesis that, regarding Heidegger, who probably never
read Gentile, may seem paradoxical (but it is not) because Heidegger’s
general vision of the history of philosophy, which he develops in his
book on Nietzsche, is the exact inverse, at every point, of Gentile’s. We
realize here the importance of the Gentile question since Heidegger

90 It is extremely curious that within Italian immanentism the Idealist Gentile

refers chiefly to Gioberti, and the ontologist Carabellese chiefly to Mazzini. In fact, in
Carabellese’s case it cannot be a philosophical transposition of a political passion. It
is enough to consider the common structure of his two books, L’idealismo italiano
(Naples: Loffredo, 1938) and L’idea politica d’Italia (Rome: Signorelli, 1946) to realize
that the reference to Mazzini is necessary. Although certainly the obligatory reference
to the most outdated of all political thinkers of the nineteenth century – that is,
Mazzini – suggests how to identify what makes Carabellese’s Ontologism outdated.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 83

himself can be presented as the absolute inversion of his thought. But

now, what else is Actualism, in its essential aspect, if not the seculariza-
tion of Christian Ontologism in Gioberti’s form? Thus, the critique of
non-Christian ontologistic forms must start, as we shall see better later,
from a truly rigorous examination of Actualism, from an exact defini-
tion of its residues, which are as strong as they are unaware, of the
nature of its catastrophe and of its place in the history of philosophy.

8. The Place of Marxism

in the History of Philosophy

A criticism that I will certainly face concerns the importance I attribute

to Marxism, to the point of viewing it not only as an essential aspect of the
insuperable endpoint of the form of thought I have called rationalism but also
as an endpoint that, in order to manifest its full significance, must be
separated from every combination with other philosophies and from
every aspect – even if it is present in its original formulation – that lends
itself to a combination, which would actually be an absorption.91 That
is, Marxism does not refuse all forms of deepening, but only the form
of deepening that claims to be a synthesis. Since it can only present
itself as the denouement of classical German philosophy, able to preserve
everything progressive that has been realized in the history of thought,
its deepening cannot but coincide with a critique of the possibility of
reconciling with other forms of thought that, logically, it has already
surpassed even if, chronologically, they have presented themselves as
coming after it. This is because every reconciliation would effectively
be a subordination. Hence also the form that a truly rigorous internal
criticism of Marxism must take: Does it really achieve the unity of phi-
losophy and politics, or is it fated to decompose, instead, into two oppo-
site positions without a dialectic relationship, that of a philosophy
completely subordinated to politics and that of sociologism as absolute
relativism? The word “decomposition” calls to mind the crisis of

91 Absorption is the typical character of the position that is usually called “revision-
ist,” and the considerations above show that Sartre does not escape revisionism at all.
Within what we call critical Marxism (the young Lukàcs, Bloch, Goldmann) there is
also a process of revision, which, however, is defined by its character of absolute opposi-
tion to that revisionism, albeit naturally differentiating itself from dogmatic Marxism,
which, shut inside pure fidelity to the letter, gives way to the revisionist critique.
84 The Problem of Atheism

socialism after 1890. Lenin’s attempt was to overcome the crisis by

returning to the Hegelian origins. Can we say that his attempt succeeded,
or is the decomposition raising its head again today?
Defending my point of view is extremely easy. We must distinguish,
ignoring any question of orthodoxy – besides, it would be quite hard
today to decide who should judge orthodoxy – between scholastic
Marxism and critical Marxism. Scientistic scholastic Marxism, which is
an involution into naturalistic materialism, is certainly outside of phi-
losophy; the usual criticisms, which I will briefly mention later, apply to
it. The character of critical Marxism – like, for example, that of Bloch
and that of Goldmann, to whom I especially refer in these essays – is to
criticize philosophy, instead, as closed conceptual discourse in the name
of surpassing philosophy (which does not thereby cease being philoso-
phy) by transitioning into revolutionary action. This approach parallels
medieval Christian philosophy, which, having been born inside religious
experience, is not absolutely autonomous and is a stage that is surpassed
by transitioning into mystical life. When it makes itself precise as histori-
cism and as critique of evidences – since Marxism cannot present itself
without contradiction as a position that cannot be surpassed in the
course of history (it can present itself only as the truth of the present
time, in as much as it is able to situate it with respect to past epochs and
to the epoch to be created today) – critical Marxism must necessarily
take up the motif of the pari, recognizing it as the decisive turn in the
history of modern philosophy. It is led from this to a necessary com-
parison with Pascal, given that, like Pascal, it knows no proofs other
than moral and historical ones. The form of its pari is this: “we have to
choose between Socialism and barbarism.” It the possibility of a hope
that becomes learned through proofs that can only be historical.
It is clear, however, that there is not an absolute symmetry between
Pascal’s pari and the Marxist one. Pascal’s pari precedes the historical
proofs. On the contrary, “we have to choose between socialism and
barbarism” needs a whole vision of history, which confirms Marxist
philosophy. Namely, it needs a vision in which (if we consider it in its
political terms) liberalism is not an eternal value but, rather, a political
form inseparable from the epoch of the rise of the bourgeois class. At
that stage this class will express itself philosophically as rationalism,
whereas in the epoch of decline it will seek its ideological cover in irra-
tionalism and its political defence in what in Communist language is
generically called “fascism,” whose outcome is renewed barbarism,
 I. The Concept of Atheism 85

absolute nihilism. Of course, even though this is not clear at all to many
people, such vision is unsustainable without accepting all the categories of
theoretical Marxism.92
I discussed the historical proofs in essay VI and the concept of liberal-
ism in essay VII. Now, going back to the subject of the first two essays,
which aimed at defining the place of Marxism in the history of philoso-
phy, I will also need to deal with the form of the pari in which it con-
cludes. The question will be whether it is very different from the one
that has been proposed (the choice between socialism and barbarism)
because the insuperability of Marxism also turns out to be the insuper-
ability of its contradiction. But let us begin by considering the objections
that can be raised against such insuperability within rationalism and
against the philosophical character of Marxism.
The most common criticism today concerns Marxism’s uncertain
character, straddling philosophy of history and historicism, so that

92 This link between rejection of theoretical Marxism and practical nihilism was
meant to be the topic of Lukács’s work The Destruction of Reason: History of Irrationalism
from Schelling to Hitler; however, what resulted was a book that could not please –
besides, of course neo-Enlightenment types and orthodox Marxists – even the expo-
nents of what I have called “critical Marxism” because its author intends it to be a
(failed) attempt at a reconciliation with Stalinism. It would be too much to say that,
whereas History and Class Consciousness [trans. R. Livingstone (Boston: MIT Press,
1972)] is an attempt to make rigorously explicit Lenin’s philosophical position (as is
true), The Destruction of Reason is a Stalinist book. This is because – setting aside the
Stalin quotes, and above all the intentional silence on the correlation between
Stalinism and Nazism – we can grant that its thesis is Marxistically obligatory and that
many observations are truly remarkable.
However, what the book manifests is the impossibility of depicting the trajectory of
non-Marxist German philosophy as a process that took shape, aware or unaware, at
first against the themes of the transition from Hegel to Marx, and then against
Marxism. As far as the first stage is concerned, the statement is relatively true for the
later Shelling but neither for Schopenhauer nor for Kierkegaard nor for Nietzsche.
Unless one simply means to say that these thinkers are anti-Hegelian, and that in their
anti-Hegelianism there is the root of their anti-socialism, at which point the thesis
loses significance because it is too obvious. As for the return to Kant, it did not take
shape specifically against Marx but generically against the materialism reached by the
Hegelian left, particularly in its ultimate form as scientism. In fact, there is only one
philosophy that built itself by criticizing Marxism, and that is Italian neo-Hegelianism,
particularly in Croce’s form. It is all too easy to observe that it originated from the
1895 to 1900 querelle on Marxism, out of which even the thought of the disciple of
the old Hegelians, Gentile, came out transfigured.
86 The Problem of Atheism

supposedly it needs to be reconciled with the form of historicism com-

ing from Dilthey and Weber, viewed as historicism absolutely separated
from Romanticism, which therefore liquidates the theological and
messianic aspects of Marxism. I think we must respond that Marxism,
in its critical form, is a reaffirmation of the philosophy of history after histori-
cism. It is certainly historicism because it renounces the end of history
and the necessary process that must lead to it; but it is still philosophy
of history because of the aspect of faith and hope, of atheistic religion that
is still religion even after denying every revelation, every supernatural
and every philosophical theism; these characteristics set it apart from
relativistic historicism and from the process leading from historicism
to sociology. Indeed, Goldmann never talks about historicism, and he
constantly uses the expression “philosophy of history”; but it is a phi-
losophy of history that somehow accepts the neo-Enlightenment critique,
the replacement of necessity by possibility, while rejecting all attempts
at surpassing Marxism by transitioning into neo-Enlightenment thought.
“Atheistic religion” and “philosophy of history” are inseparable terms
in the Marxist conception: Marxism preserves the “sacred” but in the
form not of a transcendent religion but of the philosophy of history. In
this respect, it would not be incorrect to present Marxism as an attempt
at a “restoration of the sacred” after the deaths both of God and of the
“divine.” Only understanding their connection allows us to correctly
assess the meaning of Marxism and, consequently, to properly interpret
the meaning of contemporary history.
So much has been said about the features that characterize Marxism
as a “secularized form of biblical thought” (Marx as the last prophet of
Israel, prophetism, messianism, eschatology; characterization of his
thought as a “secular religion” according to his adversaries; as the begin-
ning, albeit with misunderstandings, of a rediscovery of genuine biblical
thought, according to certain Catholic “progressives”) that it will suffice
to transcribe the following passage by Löwith because it summarizes it
in a few lines:

The “last” antagonism between the two hostile camps of bourgeoisie and
proletariat corresponds to the Jewish-Christian belief in a final fight between
Christ and Antichrist in the last epoch of history, the task of the proletariat
corresponds to the world-historical mission of the chosen people, the re-
demptive and universal function of the most degraded class is conceived on
the religious pattern of Cross and Resurrection, the ultimate transformation
 I. The Concept of Atheism 87

of the realm of necessity into a real of freedom corresponds to the transfor-

mation of the civitas Terrena into a civitas Dei, and the whole process of his-
tory as outlined in the Communist Manifesto corresponds to the general
scheme of the Jewish-Christian interpretation of history as a providential
advance towards a final goal.93

Moreover, there seems to be a place for miracles and for grace: How
could Marx and Engels have risen above their social class to found
scientific socialism if not through a form of thought not determined
by their social condition and, thus, if not by breaking, miraculously
indeed, the laws of historical materialism? The Hegelian and Marxist
sector of the history of philosophy seems to form a sort of sacred history
in which the thought of Hegel is the Old Testament and that of Marx
is the New Testament, and so on. But how did this parallelism come
about? Should we invoke reminiscences, the unconscious, ethnic fea-
tures? Can we carry out a psychoanalytical study of Marxist thought?
Should we interpret it entirely in terms of its messianic meaning, which,
when expressing itself in an immanentistic conception, causes a return
to mythical thought? We thus get to the idea of a “secular religion” as
a return to a primitive form of religion, which should be exhibited in
the “conservatory of superstitions, room of millennialists.”94 It is easy
to recognize in this type of criticism a reflection of Spinoza’s thesis about
the “imagination of Prophets.” But can we use a thesis of Spinoza to
criticize Marx, the post-Hegelian?
So, in order to decide whether or not Marxism has a philosophical
character we must raise the general question of the philosophy of his-
tory. And condemning the philosophy of history is one of those rare
things about which all non-Marxist Western thinkers seem to agree –
Catholic and Protestant theologians, secular thinkers, and pure histo-
rians. Theologians say: the philosophy of history is the contradictory
transcription at the immanent level of what makes sense only at the
theological level; and whereas the theology of history, which deciphers
meaning in the name of Revelation, does not mix itself up with history

93 Löwith, Meaning in History, 44–5 [TN: I slightly modified the translation].

94 J. Monnerot, Sociologie du Communisme, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), XV
[Sociology of Communism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953), which however
does not include the quote because it comes from a new introductory essay that
Monnerot added to the French 2nd edition].
88 The Problem of Atheism

and actually guarantees its autonomy, the opposite is true for the phi-
losophy of history, which, mixing itself up with the history of philosophy
and with history, compromises its scientific character. Secular thinkers
say: the philosophy of history replaces the idea that history is the only
reality with the idea of a definitive state towards which history is directed,
the City of God and the Eternal Kingdom; or it replaces real humanism,
which implies the idea of the possibility of progress, with the category
of necessity. For historians, abandoning the philosophy of history is
required in order to free history from its ancillary function with respect
to philosophy.
This agreement alone raises suspicion. We must observe: (1) there
is a philosophy of history that thinks that history has now ended. With
respect to it, the criticisms by historicism are valid; (2) there is a phi-
losophy of history that, instead, is linked to revolutionary thought, and
the reciprocal is also true, there is no revolutionary thought without a
philosophy of history. Are the historicist objections also valid with respect
to this form? Or, rather, as Marxists think, does historicism start from
an already presupposed distinction between comprehending (philoso-
phy as the methodology of historiography) and changing, which con-
ceals an actual indirect reconciliation with the existing order – which
in practice means with the historical period in which historicism was
born, the liberal-bourgeois age from 1870 to 1914, yesterday’s world?
Historicism replies: Does not attributing definitive importance to a
certain historical event as if it marked the break between a past and
a future – an attribution that distinguishes revolutionary thought –
imply already accepting the presupposition of the philosophy of his-
tory, the claim to encompass the totality of reality, as if all facts were
already given?
In order to solve this problem, we must look at it from the standpoint
of the primacy of action that is proper to the revolutionary philosophy of
history. We must not reason as if the philosophy of history, also in the
revolutionary sense, maintained its contemplative character, relating
to action as a guarantee that reality will necessarily ensure its success,
regardless of the obstacles it may encounter and the partial defeats it
may experience, as an antidote to possible despair. From the standpoint
of the primacy of action, the future that revolutionary philosophy talks
about is a near future, the only future we can make; it is the future mea-
sured by what it is possible for us to make. The course of history will
certainly continue after this reality that is to be created now – whose
 I. The Concept of Atheism 89

result will be not the total uprooting of evil and error but the disappear-
ance of “ideologies” and “false consciousnesses”; socialism is not the
ultimate end of history – which seems absolute to us only because it is
the only historical task that is possible for us. It is certainly rigorously
correct that this revolutionary philosophy expresses faith and hope, but
this is natural because revolutionary philosophy is not part of theoretical
philosophy but, rather, coincides with moral philosophy. Nor does it absorb
within itself the history of philosophy because its ability to explain it is
the only theoretical criterion of its validity. Undoubtedly, there is a
direction of history because it is impossible to conceive a revolutionary
action without rationalist optimism; but we can grasp it only as the
direction of current history, the history that we have to create, excluding
any consideration of the ultimate end (of the “end of times”) because
that would bring us back to the theology of history.
The historicist objection can renew itself by taking the following form:
“revolutionary thought” does not belong to philosophy, just like
“Christian philosophy” according to Bréhier (in fact, according to
Bréhier, who was a pure rationalist precisely because of this double
exclusion, both of them did not) and for the same fundamental reason:
revolutionary thought is “theological,” just like “Christian philosophy”
although in a different sense.
In order to respond, we have to ask ourselves whether the process
through which Marxism replaces the Hegelian type of the philosopher
with the type of the revolutionary has a philosophical character; that is,
whether it expresses the most profound distillation of Hegel’s novelty,
meaning the only way in which Hegelianism can reaffirm itself (for my
answer, see pages 190ff, 222ff). It seems to me that this is proven by the
defeat of the attempt to surpass Marxism within Hegelianism, which is
precisely Italian neo-Hegelianism.
I do not need to present here for the nth time the process that made
clear that Croce’s “non-definitiveness” of philosophy was, in an indirect
way, the consecration to an absolute model of a specific historical
period. And I do not need repeat that the development of Croce’s
philosophy from the period of the “philosophy of distincts” to that of
the “philosophy of freedom” just brought to light the original presup-
position: reconciliation with the reality of the age – in the guise of
enlightened and liberal conservatism, which also marks the overcom-
ing of his initial youthful pessimism – in which we must recognize the
result of his criticism of Marxism. Marxism had appropriated a theme of
90 The Problem of Atheism

counter-revolutionary thought, the critique of the abstractness of ius-

naturalism. As a consequence of the criticism of Marxism, Croce redis-
covered this approach in its anti-Jacobin and anti-revolutionary aspect,
and this was the source of the constant theme of his politics, his opposition
to progressivist radicalism (what else is the meaning, for example, of
his friendship with Sorel?).
Gentile’s response that the concept of praxis has an Idealist character
still seems to hold out better; however, this thesis has the result of high-
lighting, by antithesis, the primary original intuition of Marxism, the
unity – in a position of thought founded on the identity of freedom
and necessity, and on the negation of free will – between materialism
(identified with realism) and philosophy of action. Does not the invin-
cibility of the criticism that Actualism is solipsistic seem to confirm such
intuition? Here we touch upon a crucial point for the problem of real-
ism: whether the affirmation of realism as distinct from materialism is
possible only by rediscovering (on this one must read the splendid pages
in Laporte’s Conscience de la liberté) the theory of free will, a term people
rarely dare to use out of terror of Spinoza’s criticisms, which are actually
quite weak. But evidently we cannot linger on this problem now.
I will insert here an important incidental comment: Does the concept
of philosophy of history make sense only within an immanentist concep-
tion, or can it also make sense within a philosophy of transcendence?95
This question is extremely important because, if we granted that in
reference to any religious conception in the transcendent sense we can
only speak of theology of history, we ought to exclude Vico, in his novel
aspect, from the Christian philosophical tradition; the implications of
this for a critique of the interpretation of modern philosophy as a pro-
cess of secularization are explained in essay VI. Indeed, a Catholic
interpretation of Vico certainly cannot but view him as the theoretician
of a philosophy of history, which is not a theology of history, even
though it presupposes a theological interpretation of the Fall, and
which, at the same time, is not liable at all to turn into historicism – as

95 It is known that the question of the legitimacy of the philosophy of history, as

distinct from theology, is very controversial among Catholic thinkers. Among those
who support its legitimacy we must remember Maritain, Pour une philosophie de l’histoire
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil,1959). Among its irreducible enemies is Padovani, in whom
perhaps this negation represents the link between the legacy of the teaching of
Marinetti, his teacher, and Catholic thought.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 91

the affirmation that history is the only reality – nor then to surpass
historicism by transitioning into the philosophy of history, in the Marxist
sense that I have described. Now, my response is that in a Catholic
conception, which does not view the Fall as a radical perversion, phi-
losophy of history as autonomous from theology of history has its own
legitimacy and addresses a necessary question, that of defining what
man can do in the state of fallen nature (see page 409). Therefore,
given what has been said, a Catholic conception of history must see in
Vico the beginning of the process that can lead to a rigorous critique
of Marxism. We also come to this conclusion by reflecting on the fact
that the only philosophy that formed with Marxism as its essential adver-
sary, Croce’s, was led to reaffirm Vico after Hegel. Are we not authorized
to think that a return to Vico is a necessary process in the criticism of
Marxism, even if it failed in the form Croce gave it?
But let us now go back to the philosophical character of Marxist
thought. Since such character seems no longer in question after what
has been indicated by the defeat of Italian neo-Hegelianism, we can
move on and define the unique feature that marks it in the entire history of
thought: it is modern philosophy in the aspect in which it presents itself as secular
(i.e., as surpassing transcendent thought), which becomes a religion. Consider,
in fact: a revolutionary is somebody who reaches the masses, not in the
sense that he knows how to move them with irrational motivations but
in the sense that he expresses the thought or matches the expectation
that are immanent in them. And a revolutionary in the total sense is
somebody who carries out a revolution whose outcome is not dominance
by a class – a revolution that, therefore, can no longer be just partial,
or political, or bourgeois but, rather, must be total, or social, or prole-
tarian. We know that Marx’s thought is the endpoint of the interpreta-
tion of the French Revolution as an unfinished revolution.
Let us leave aside now a very important problem that, to my knowl-
edge, has never been discussed: the outcome of revolutions in the theological
sense I explained earlier is to give rise not to freedom and universal equality but
to regimes of social classes. Thus the French Revolution leads to the domi-
nance of the bourgeois class – we know the perfect sentence by
Talleyrand on the reign of Louis Philippe as its conclusion – while the
Russian Revolution seems to lead to the dominance of the techno-
bureaucratic class. Let us also observe that this type of dominance is the
unexpected result of revolutions. It certainly was not the goal of
the French revolutionaries and of their most determined expression,
92 The Problem of Atheism

the Jacobin trend; nor could I say for sure that the thought that prepared
it – the Enlightenment’s revolutionary line – was an expression of the
bourgeoisie. We have to wonder whether social classes explain history
or, rather, whether their dominance is the outcome of movements
inspired by the idea of replacing religion with politics for liberation
from evil – that is, by revolutionary thought.
Next let us observe that a worldview that reaches the masses in the
sense I described makes itself a religion; and that in Marxism’s case it is
Hegelianism that, developed to its utmost consistency, reaches the masses. I do
not mean this in the sense of Hegelianism adapted to the masses, like
the science for all of the positivist popularizations; the only possible
parallel is with Christianity, and this is where their similar character of
being religions that cannot be surpassed by transitioning into a philoso-
phy that “demythologizes” them becomes apparent. Communist cate-
chisms, like the Catholic ones, make the doctrine accessible to the
masses without substantial deformations and, above all, prepare them
for the action that the doctrine requires. The stance of the philosopher
who goes beyond the point of view of the masses is replaced by that of
the philosopher who conforms to their movement – that is, to the movement
of history – and explicates its meaning.
Let me insist on the unique feature: previous, or even subsequent,
forms of rationalism always presented themselves as going beyond reli-
gion – which was reduced to a representation of the truth in symbolic
form, or to a purely practical position that theoretical thought must
exclude – and as detaching themselves from the masses precisely on
this point. So, in the transition, motivated by the nature of philosophy, from
philosophy to religion Marxism inverts the direction of modern rational-
ism, reaching at the same time the completely opposite position to that of
Christian thought (in which philosophy is justified starting from the
characterization of faith as quaerens intellectum). Regarding politics, those
positions presented themselves either as the foundations of an eternal
model that politicians must imitate or as the awareness of a historical
process (e.g., Hobbes of absolutism, Locke of the transition to liberal-
ism, Hegelianism as the awareness of universal history, Italian
Hegelianism as the awareness of the Risorgimento, etc.). The inversion
takes place because Marxism is characterized by being a philosophy
ante factum and not a philosophy post factum like Hegelianism. Whereas
Hegel could see in Napoleon the world-soul, and Croce could see in
Giolitti – possibly the greatest adversary of political philosophy that ever
 I. The Concept of Atheism 93

existed – the ideal statesman of the age of distincts 1870–1914, which

he regarded as a model, neither Hegel nor Croce could think that
Napoleon or Giolitti had consciously enacted their philosophies.
Conversely, it is not possible to conceive of a Communist politician who
is not conscious of Marxist doctrine, and his practical errors will be
attributed to theoretical errors in its interpretation.
Let us remark en passant that this observation could be extremely
important for the history of Machiavellianism. Indeed, does not
Machiavelli’s rehabilitation by “virtuous” philosophers, and no longer
only by “libertines” or by controversial politicians like Bacon, coincide
with the history of metaphysical rationalism, from Spinoza to Hegel?96
And above all, is it coincidental that it reaches its climax in Croce’s
rationalism – which is apparently historicist but is actually metaphysical
and secular-Christian – that is, in the only philosophy that formed hav-
ing Marx constantly in mind as its essential adversary? In fact, how can
rationalism think of reaching political reality if not Machiavellically, by
regarding religions as practically useful forces?
From what we have established, several extremely important conse-
quences follow:

1. For Marxism, philosophy, since it is purely rational, can make itself a

religion only in the form of rigorous atheism. Indeed, if transcendent
religion contained its own perennial truth expressed in the guise
of “representation,” it should be preserved within philosophy.
The philosopher’s task would become, in Hegelian fashion, to look
for the counterpart of the representation in terms of thought.
Therefore, he would end up again surpassing religion by transition-
ing into philosophy, and thus thought would move from religion to
philosophy rather than from philosophy to religion. But the preser-
vation of religion within philosophy also implies the detachment of
the philosopher from the masses, and this leads to a lived contradic-
tion because the philosopher finds himself forced into an aristocratic
position that makes it impossible for him to communicate with the

96 We can find a punctual confirmation of my assertion in the excellent works by

A. Ravà, “Spinoza e Machiavelli,” in Studi filosofico-giuridici dedicati a Giorgio Del Vecchio,
vol. 2 (Modena: Società tipografica modenese,1930–31) and Studi su Spinoza e
Machiavelli (Milan: Giuffrè, 1958), which is a fairly rare example of a perfectly exe-
cuted study of Machiavelli’s fortune with philosophers.
94 The Problem of Atheism

masses and, therefore, leads him to justify the Machiavellian

disposition towards them and, therefore, to deny their humanity –
which is the vital aspect of religion, the affirmation of human
universality. Hence we see that in Marxism religion and atheism are
linked so tightly that weakening the atheistic aspect coincides with
weakening the religious aspect and, thus, the ethical aspect since, in
the case of Marxism, there is no “autonomous morality.” Therefore
we have to say that Marxism contains this aspect of truth: given
the initial negation of the supernatural, religion, as life, can only
reaffirm itself as radical atheism. Given the hypothesis, this
affirmation is absolutely undeniable.
2. By becoming religion, philosophy takes the appearance of liberating
truth. The Marxist philosophy of history makes itself a religion in as
much as it presents itself as an agonistic form of thought against the
justificatory form of Hegelian thought, viewed implicitly as the final
aspect taken on by religion reduced to a form of “theodicy.”97 But
this liberation is entirely worldly, historical, and social; hence the
identity of religion and politics; hence the particular idea of revolution
(about which see pages 295–8), whose genesis is not explained by a
reminiscence of Judeo-Christian eschatology but by being the end-
point of the Enlightenment’s rehabilitation of human nature. Thus,
in Marx the fullness of Hegelianism coincides with the fullness of

97 The concept of theodicy – in a proper sense, as the justification of God in

front of Reason, conceived as an absolute norm, so that there is a separation, however
dissimulated, of God’s Will from his Wisdom, and a dependence of the former on the
latter – is correlated with theological rationalism, which I distinguished (see note 106
on page 391) from metaphysical rationalism. The true beginning of this theological
rationalism must be recognized in the thought of Malebranche; hence, the excep-
tional importance of the polemic between Arnauld and Malebranche because of the
correct perception that Arnauld, who is a Jansenist because he is a traditionalist, has of
the novelty, as a departure from the whole theological tradition, of the thesis of the
Oratorian philosopher. Despite the decline that the idea of theodicy, thus under-
stood, represents with respect to religious thought, we must distinguish two stages:
the theodicy linked with Ontologism in Malebranche, and in a certain sense in
Leibniz, and the theodicy of the moment when theological rationalism meets meta-
physical rationalism and is transfigured by it. At this moment, which is Hegel’s
thought, there is absolute opposition between the justificatory and the agonistic aspects of
religious thought, and the second is recovered by Marx. Perhaps we can say: the subla-
tion of religion into philosophy in Hegel had to be matched in Marx by a philosophy
that makes itself religion in the guise of agonistic thought.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 95

the Enlightenment’s demand for active rationality, capable of

transforming the world.
3. The idea of revolution loses all meaning unless history is thought
to be meaningfully oriented, even in the limited sense I mentioned
earlier. Hence the ethics of the “direction of history” or, so to speak –
and the formula is perfectly correct – the replacement of ethics by
the philosophy of history; hence the concept of “attributed” respon-
sibility (we are made responsible by history); hence totalitarianism
(essay VII).
4. In light of these three points, we can understand in all its significance
the positive and political character of Marxist atheism in its total break
from the earlier form of negative atheism. We can also understand
its appropriation of the idea of the City of God (of Totality, in the
language of a certain type of recent Marxism), its self-presentation
as the condition to realize a new civilization, to radically transform
the world.

It is at this point that we can account for the parallels we observed

earlier between Marxism and biblical thought. They occur not because
Marxism must be explained on the basis of a category of prophetic and
messianic thought foreign to philosophy but because in the domain of
religion it is the exact antithesis of Christianity. From this we could also draw
an apologetic suggestion: the radical antithesis of Christianity, “atheistic
religion,” is necessarily compelled to transcribe Christian figures, in an
immanentistic sense. Now, we can wonder whether the criticisms that
anti-clericalism addressed, wrongly, against the Catholic Church do not
apply exactly to this transcription.
We see here my complete opposition to Löwith’s thesis.98 The phi-
losophy of history is not a mere evolution of chiliasm, or a contradictory

98 Actually, Löwith’s thought is conditioned, as always, by that of Nietzsche –

viewed as the insuperable endpoint of the philosophy of the dissolution of Hegelianism
(but I already said that in this philosophy we must recognize two opposite and irre-
ducible processes, that from Hegel to Marx, and that from Schopenhauer to
Nietzsche) – and by his critique of the Christianity in disguise of the nineteenth cen-
tury (in the form of humanitarianism, philosophy of history, etc.). In fact, the idea
that the philosophy of history is a contradictory secularized form of the theology of
history is typically Nietzschean. This acceptance of the Nietzschean perspective leads
him in Meaning in History to write a chapter on Marx that is essentially wrong. Léopold
Flam (“Etudes sur Marx,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 45–6 [1958]: 318–65),
96 The Problem of Atheism

contamination of secular thought with chiliasm. Rather, the fact that it

meets chiliasm, Christian heresy, in this form (like Hegelianism meets,
in a certain sense, gnostic Christianity, and religious anti-clericalism – in
the sense I described, as a continuation of Kant’s religious thought –
meets the Cathar heresy) means simply that an element of Christianity
is preserved-surpassed in modern philosophy (i.e., its historical
character).

after pointing out that Capital itself has a philosophical rather than an economic
meaning, correctly sees Löwith’s mistake in placing “Marx within the perspective of
the doctrine of Judeo-Christian salvation, so that socialism takes the appearance
of ‘God’s earthly kingdom.’ This completely fails to recognize the orientation of
Marxist thought … it is precisely because he wanted to separate completely history
from myth that [Marx] made recourse to political economy. Capitalism creates the
fetishism of implacable destiny; suppressing it will mean putting an end to every form
of fatalist thought and give back to man the awareness that he builds his own history”
(363). However, I cannot agree with Flam’s apparent negation of every interpretation
of Marxism of a religious kind. The flaw of Löwith’s interpretation is that he thinks
that this religious character follows from the illegitimate transposition into a form of secular
thought of a perspective valid only within theological thought, whereas it is, instead, a reli-
gion reached thought the reaffirmation-reformation of Hegel, which leads to the
rediscovery and preservation in a new form of messianic thought.
Viewed from his general perspective, Löwith’s insertion into modern philosophy
(which he still understands as a process of secularization – see his assessment of
Descartes in “Il ‘Discorso della montagna’ anticristiano di Nietzsche” in the volume
on Pascal e Nietzsche in Archivio di filosofia 3 [1962]: 108–9, and see above all of the
chapter on Vico in Meaning in History, where his Protestant picture of Christian
thought leads him essentially to accept the secular interpretation of Vico because of
his character as a “philosopher of history”) of the period from Hegel to Nietzsche,
with the thesis that Nietzsche is insuperable, cannot but draw him to the consequent
thesis that the history of thought takes two irreducible forms, that which concludes in
radical atheism and that marked by the primacy of Pistis. Which one Löwith’s espouses
is not easy to discern, or at least one notices his extreme perplexity (today he seems
oriented towards a Greek type of “cosmological” and “cyclical” position).
His case seems exemplary to me in order to legitimate the position of the problem
whether the interpretation of the history of modern philosophy as a process of secu-
larization is adequate. Not having posed it is what has bogged down Löwith’s thought
since the time of his major work From Hegel to Nietzsche. In comparison to it, his subse-
quent works look not like a development but an extension – and not always a very
successful one, like the work I cited on the philosophy of history – of the thesis of that
work to the examination of partial aspects.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 97

5. For Marxism, understood as the outcome of secular modern philoso-

phy, the fullness of Hegelianism coincides with the convergence, as
a consequence of the extreme radicalization of their aspect of truth,
of philosophical trends that are commonly viewed as different or
opposite:

• historicism, separated from its directly or indirectly conservative

aspect;
• the Enlightenment in its intention to bring about a renewal, but
separated both from the aspect of vulgar materialism, which made
its critique purely dissolutive and gave rise to an aristocratic position
(consider how deep is Robespierre’s sentence about his century’s
atheism: “atheism is aristocratic”), and from the iusnaturalistic aspect;
• Feuerbach’s humanism, but separated from the Stirnerian outcome
and from anarchism, and from the subsequent possibility of a rebirth
of the religious philosophy of existence;
• positivism, since experimentalism is affirmed as a fundamental
requirement, but separated from the aspect that leads (already in
Comte, and then in Taine) to the reactionary form of sociologism
as well as from the spiritualist antithesis that develops within
positivism itself;
• pragmatism, because practice is made the criterion of truth, but
separated from all spiritualistic aspects;99
• criticism, freed from everything in Kant that had made possible
the reaffirmation of metaphysical thought in German Idealism
and in spiritualist Kantism;
• neo-criticism in the form of historicism, as critique of the Idealist
formulation of the history of philosophy but freed from relativism,
which pushes it towards irrationalism;
• utopianism (regarding the aspect common to all its forms, the
critique of the idea of property) and what historically has been its
antithesis, Machiavellian political realism, are reconciled precisely
by being made extreme since their opposition was based on the old
idea of ethics;
• religion itself is preserved as messianism entirely separated from
all aspects whereby it must present itself as theodicy.

99 Lenin, Quaderni filosofici (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1969), 433, 456-8 [TN:
Philosophical Notebooks, vol. 38 of Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976),
438–9, 454–6].
98 The Problem of Atheism

Reconciliation is achieved through extreme radicalization, and thus

it is the opposite of eclecticism, whereas according to Marxism every form
of spiritualism is necessarily eclectic, and every one of the forms I listed
is susceptible, without the Marxist sublation, to a spiritualistic exten-
sion. Therefore this radicalization consists in eliminating from these trends every
element that might be the occasion for a religious opening in the transcendent
sense, or that creates an occasion to reaffirm such form of religious thought.
At the same time, it coincides with the distinction between progressive
philosophies and reactionary philosophies, which must not be under-
stood as a mere replacement of a veritative criterion with a political
criterion in the interpretation of the history of philosophy. This is
because Marxism intends to extract and preserve from every form of
thought from the past what represented the image of the movement
of history, separating it from what tied those philosophies to a given
order that was presented as definitive. By virtue of absolute historicism,
of the affirmation that history is the only reality, the terms “progressive-
reactionary” include the terms “critical-dogmatic” and express their
true meaning. In relation to the movement of history, Marxism claims
to realize the program of modern philosophy by uniting rationalism
(negation of the supernatural) and an entirely secularized Christian
anthropology as affirmation of man’s transcendence with respect to
nature. In short, by satisfying both these requirements, it claims to be
a radical humanism.

6. We must add, though (and it is a decisive point, whose importance

will be discussed later), that in secular modern philosophy there is
only one position that is absolutely irreducible to the Marxist and
cannot be surpassed by it – Nietzsche’s thought. It is almost certain
that Nietzsche never read one single page by Marx or Engels;
nonetheless, and this is the paradox, his thought cannot be explained
except in terms of a radical, completely insuperable, opposition to
Marxist thought. I would like to say more an opposition to Marxism
than to Christianity, but I will hold back, because although this is
true in the sense I just stated, of “greatest distance,” it can lead to
misunderstandings (Scheler, Shestov, etc.) about its possible
Christianization.

Whereas the perspective I have presented defends Marxism

from the objections of philosophers, its practical character (the
 I. The Concept of Atheism 99

negation-realization of philosophy) leads it to establish as the ultimate

criterion of truth a historical outcome – namely, the revolution not as
an idea but as a real event, which must bring about the disappearance
of the classes and world unification. Obviously – but apparently not
too obviously for the majority of non-Marxist people who write about
Marxism – it is not a matter of affirming from the theoretical standpoint
the unity of theory and praxis but, rather, of realizing a philosophy
whose link with practical politics is absolutely indispensable and that
loses all its validity apart from this verification. This is the point
that was recognized with absolute clarity for the first time by Lenin. It
defines his place in history and explains his judgment: “nobody after
Marx, among Marxist themselves, has understood this.” However, there
is a possible objection against this claim, and its crucial importance will
be pointed out shortly. Is Lenin truly Marx’s heir? Must we say, using
the words of Lukàcs from 1923, that the effectiveness of Lenin’s politi-
cal work is due to “his greatness, profundity and fertility as a theoreti-
cian. His effectiveness rests on the fact that he has developed the
practical essence of Marxism to a pitch of clarity and concreteness never
achieved before. He has rescued this aspect of Marxism from an almost
total oblivion and by virtue of this theoretical action he has once again
placed in our hands the key to a right understanding of Marxist
method”?100 Or must we accept the more recent, antithetical view of
Sidney Hook (and, in fact, of many others)?

9. Contemporary History
as Philosophical History

All of the above has an extremely important consequence, which is

generally not recognized, or, in any case, is very seldom adequately
expressed. Indeed, if Marx’s thought is genuinely philosophical, we
must take literally his sentence stating that his conception is that of a
philosophy that becomes world (which surpasses itself by pursuing political
realization and finds its verification therein) as opposed to that of a

100 György Lukács, Histoire et consience de classe (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit,
1960), 10 [History and Class Consciousness, xlii]. We can see in this book the rigorous
development of the sentence by Engels about the proletariat as the heir of classical
German philosophy. But Lenin also, as I will discuss shortly, had the exact same vision
of Marxism.
100 The Problem of Atheism

world that becomes philosophy. If, furthermore, contemporary history

is the history of the expansion of Marxism, it takes a new character,
different from all previous history, especially after the Renaissance. It
is not just history that can be comprehended by the philosopher; it is his-
tory made by the philosopher because, for Marx, the value of thought is
that of establishing the conditions for effective action aimed at trans-
forming society and the world. Therefore contemporary history is philosophical
history. This novelty implies that thinking the historical actuality must
be today the first question of philosophical research;101 it also implies
the revision of all traditional political categories because, in the new
philosophical-political context, they take new meanings compared to
those they could be given based on a consideration of so-called “modern
history,” from the Renaissance and the Reformation to the beginning
of the First World War. This change of meaning is particularly sharp for
the essential political category of the modern world, that of “liberalism,”
as I try to outline in essay VII. This point is extremely important because
certain habits that made sense for the period from 1870 to 1914 – the
age of “distincts” par excellence, and the period that, because of this
character, is, of all historical periods, exactly the farthest removed from
the current one – are still common, both among philosophers and
politicians. I certainly do not want to pile criticisms on Croce; today
they are definitely not in good taste. But how can we fail to recall the
impression we had at the time of his death, that his passing marked
the passing of a world that had reached in him its full and serene (Croce
as Goethe!) self-awareness? Nor has he become relevant again.
To those who will reproach me for linking too tightly political dis-
course and philosophical discourse, I simply have to respond that this
follows from having taken seriously Marx’s philosophical thought. In
fact, is there any non-pragmatic proof of Marxism? “The question
whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a
question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth
— i.e., the reality and power … – of his thinking in practice. The dispute
over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice
is a purely scholastic question” (2nd Thesis on Feuerbach). This implies
that the study of Marxism as a philosophy is inseparable from that of

101 On this topic I refer the reader to the book by Fr Gaston Fessard, De l’actualité
historique. It is a model of philosophical-theological analysis of the present reality and
a truly insuperable critique of Catholic progressivism from within.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 101

its historical result, Communism as a political reality. It also implies that

when we evaluate any contemporary philosophy we cannot do it without
considering its capacity to take a stance with respect to Marxism.
Why is this point of view generally ignored? Because the specific
character of Marxist atheistic religion, in the sense of philosophy that
makes itself religion, has not been correctly understood. The most
disparate schools of thought, from Idealism to sociologism, agree in
describing it as a “revolutionary myth.” I think we must respond that
the idea of Revolution, as replacement of speculative philosophy
with the philosophy of praxis, arises through a strictly philosophical
process, even though it cannot reach reality except in mythical form.
This happens not because the revolutionary must use myths in order
to communicate his truth to spirits who are still incapable of understand-
ing scientific truth in its purity but because of an internal contradiction
of revolutionary thought, which forces it to abandon the perspective of
truth and to identify what is true with what is practically effective, with
what is capable of intensifying life. You can see the extreme importance
of this problem, which concerns the rebirth of myth after the “age of
reason,” and raises the question whether rationalism, pushed to its
extreme consequences, brings about the age of ideological myths. My
thinking, and I will briefly discuss it later, is that the transition from the
Revolution as truth to the Revolution as myth takes place in Lenin –
unawares, though, because this transition to myth was the only way in
which the revolutionary substance of Marxism could be affirmed. But,
of course, now I cannot present such an argument, which is extremely
complex. Let this hint be enough, together with the overall statement
of my thesis: the transition to the mythical awareness is the decay of a
strictly philosophical process, that which leads to the elaboration of the
idea of Revolution, which reached its fullness in Marx. Therefore the
current idea of an “age of ideological myths” does not at all contradict
the idea that contemporary history is a philosophical history.

1 0 . T h e G r e at e s t M i s ta k e
When Interpreting Marxism,
and Its Consequences

According to the viewpoint I have proposed, radical atheism, as the

endpoint of rationalism, is the key to Marx’s whole work. His thought,
viewed as genuinely philosophical, is organic to such a degree that no
102 The Problem of Atheism

“part” can be detached (his sociology, for instance, as if it were amenable

to be interpreted apart from the reference to atheism). However, I know
well that in this regard I stand apart from many interpreters.
At this point I must define the greatest mistake a scholar of Marxism
can incur (and it is a curious fact that almost everybody does incur
it), and the sequence of philosophical and political positions that
follow from it. It has the effect of spoiling the interpretation of all of contem-
porary history and also of preventing the correct position of the philosophical
question as it necessarily presents itself to us today. This happens because
this mistake makes us miss the absolutely new character of the current
historical situation.
The mistake can be formulated as follows: for Marx the critique of
religion “already happened,” and about this “reduction of theology to
anthropology” he did not say anything more than Feuerbach had said.
He accepted uncritically that perspective “out of anti-clericalism,” but
his interest focuses entirely on the critique of capitalist society, motivated
by ethical reasons, by the ethics on which all moralists and all men
practically agree.102

102 This mistake can be observed even in the works of truly preeminent scholars.
For example, when reading the extremely valuable book by Fr Henri De Lubac, Le
drame de l’humanisme athée, one cannot help being surprised by the huge importance
it attributes to Feuerbach’s atheism, to the point of tracing back to it not just Marx’s
atheism but even those of Comte and Nietzsche: “We have seen the success that Karl
Marx was to secure for his master’s humanism by founding the communist movement
above it” (Drama of Humanistic Atheism, 135; see also 35–7). Feuerbach’s enduring in-
fluence on Marxism is emphasized here; however, it is still true that if the atheism of
Marx is reduced to that of Feuerbach it becomes possible to separate from atheism a
sociological and political part of his work. Since confusing Feuerbach’s and Marx’s
atheisms is, in my judgment, a huge mistake, one should study how much this general
consideration of atheism burdened De Lubac’s whole work (it certainly burdened his
evaluation of Proudhon in Proudhon et le Christianisme). The consequences of this sepa-
ration between the philosophical part of Marxist thought – understood as a messianic
transfiguration of Feuerbachism – and its sociological part must be recognized in two
recent Catholic works, by Fr P. Bigo, Marxisme et Humanisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1957) and by A. Piettre, Marx et le Marxisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1957). Considering only Bigo’s book, it seems to me that it suffers from a
confusion between a theoretical perspective and a historical perspective. The fact that
a few isolated economic theses of Marx may be accepted and justified from the point
of view of natural law, understood in the Thomist sense, does not mean that such an
idea of natural law underlies Marx’s work, even in combination with other elements,
which of course Bigo opposes. Once the philosophical moment of Marxism has been
 I. The Concept of Atheism 103

I already criticized this view of the Feuerbach-Marx relationship in

my 1948 essay, reprinted here (see pages 224ff), highlighting the aspect
of Marx’s thought that makes it a reaffirmation of Hegel after Feuerbach.
Here, I add:

1. Marx’s philosophy must be considered completely independently of

that of Feuerbach, of which he actually accepts nothing, no matter
how stimulating the suggestions he received from it may have been.
His philosophy cannot manifest itself as effective politics except by
making itself a necessarily atheistic religion, a step that is entirely
missing in Feuerbach.
2. What characterizes Feuerbach is the unity of atheistic humanism and
the Enlightenment. See Marx’s criticism expressly against his
Enlightenment mindset: “Feuerbach starts out from the fact of
religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a reli-
gious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the
religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis
detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent
realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-
contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in
itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized
in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered
to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be
destroyed in theory and in practice” (IV Thesis on Feuerbach). In
other words, it is not the “light” shed by the criticism of religion
that makes transcendent religion disappear but, rather, a revolution
that reaches and eliminates its real roots. There is no greater possible
misunderstanding than establishing a relationship first of all of
continuity between Feuerbach and Marx, whereas the continuity is
secondary with respect to the opposition. Feuerbach and Marx are

reduced to that of Feuerbach, adopted out of anti-clericalism, what naturally follows is

the tendency, which is very widespread among Catholic scholars, to exaggerate the
importance of the moral character of Marx’s reaction against capitalism, which sup-
posedly emerged, even if unawares, because of the traditional moral values and then
was altered by being rethought in terms of Hegelian philosophy.
Another mistake due to forgetfulness of the specific character of Marxist atheism
is that made by a very well-informed scholar of Social Democratic orientation, M.
Rubel [Karl Marx (Paris: Rivière, 1957)], who, like the Catholic authors I cited, begins
by distinguishing an ethical moment and a sociological moment in Marxist thought.
104 The Problem of Atheism

in fact two autonomous and clearly distinct thinkers. The thought

of the former constitutes the necessary philosophical form that
the Enlightenment must take in order to reaffirm itself after Hegel; Marx’s
thought in The German Ideology and the Theses is the reaffirmation of
Hegel against the Feuerbachian deterioration. What is extremely important
to emphasize here is that for Marx atheistic existentialism and the
Enlightenment are surpassed simultaneously.103 Herein lies the
ultimate reason one cannot expect … to surpass Marxism starting
from these two positions, or from their union, which, as we have
seen, had already become realized over a century ago. It does not
matter that today the union of existentialism and the Enlightenment
has presented itself in a new form, as the antithesis, on the one
hand, to the inclusion of Kierkegaardism in the tradition of French
religious philosophy and, on the other hand, to the neo-criticist form
in which the Enlightenment tradition had continued in Brunschvicg.
3. As for the suppression of atheism in socialism that Marx often talks
about (for the first time in a letter to Ruge of 20 November 1842),
it means that full atheism does not consist in the atheistic answer to
the question of God but in the suppression of the question of God.
This will be possible only when the need for God will have vanished
because of the full realization of man. That is, full atheism, as the
affirmation of humanity without any trace of God, will be made pos-
sible only by the social revolution. In other words, for Marx atheism
as full humanism is a result in the same fashion as Hegel’s Absolute.
In this sense, where Marx goes beyond Feuerbach is in the rediscovery
of revolutionary thought – and notice that the association of revolu-
tion and atheism is the solution to a problem, not a given that Marx
accepted, because in the Enlightenment the idea of revolution was
affirmed by the deist Rousseau, not by the Enlightenment’s atheists.
4. But what will be the content of this revolution since, obviously, it
cannot refer to ethical (in the traditional sense) and natural law
principles? Evidently it will be the new idea of social man as the
precise antithesis to the Christian idea. Such an idea implies a rela-
tion between ethics and politics, and a conception of individual

103 I have already said that the expression “atheistic existentialism” can be ap-
plied to Feuerbach only improperly; but it is true nonetheless that the recent forms
of atheistic existentialism, in their humanistic aspect, realize one of the possibilities of
Feuerbachism [TN: in the original this footnote is a parenthetical statement].
 I. The Concept of Atheism 105

freedom that is completely antithetical both to the Christian and

to the Kantian (202). But the idea of “social man” is tied (see pages
196ff, where I present synthetically – but non incorrectly, I believe –
the logical sequence) to integral materialism (to materialism after
Idealism). Thus, for Marxism revolution and integral materialism
are inseparably united.
5. Besides, the proof that Feuerbach’s and Marx’s positions are
distinct is provided by the entirely non-Marxist trends that link back
to Feuerbach: humanitarianism; eroticism (I do not know if anybody
ever regarded Feuerbach as one of D.H. Lawrence’s precursors,
and yet many passages by both demonstrate this connection, at least
de jure, even if there was no influence de facto); scientistic materialism
in its typical character, whereby it distinguishes itself from positivism;
existentialism as humanistic atheism. Furthermore, I already
mentioned the fact that his true critical extension is in Stirner and
the possibility of surpassing Stirner through Kierkegaard. Therefore,
while Feuerbach must be considered an independent thinker from
Marx, it is not true that he is, from a critical standpoint, a terminal
moment of atheistic thought.

Let us try and rigorously enumerate the positions I have mentioned:

i. The current form of spiritualist academicism, characterized by

the loss of the “politics of culture.”104
ii. The anti-Communist sociological critique, in as much as it replaces
the problem of the relationship between “the philosophy of Marx
and the political reality of Communism” with the problem of
“Communism as an object of sociology.”
iii. Soviet dialectic materialism.
iv. Social Democracy in all its forms.
v. Catholic progressivism (neo-modernism) and secular progressivism.

104 The definition of “politics of culture” has been illustrated with exemplary
clarity by Norberto Bobbio in Politica e cultura (Turin: Einaudi, 1955). See therein also
the perfect definition of the a-politicity of recent academicism (35). However, Bobbio’s
ideas regarding the continuity between the Enlightenment (and liberalism) and
Marxism are different from mine, as we shall see.
106 The Problem of Atheism

vi. Neo-positivism and psychoanalysis (in the form in which they

present themselves as scientific solutions to ethical and religious
problems).
vii. Atheistic existentialism.

Academicism.

It is easy to establish a parallel between Feuerbach and Kierkegaard,

and to show the latter’s great superiority. Having done this, if follows
that a spiritualist philosopher, since he cannot fail to notice the invasive
reality of atheism, must take into consideration as the authentic forms
of atheism those by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty – since they proceed from
Heidegger’s secularization of Kierkegaard, with Husserl as mediator –
given that in philosophy Marx said nothing more than what had already
been said by Feuerbach. Moreover, since Heidegger himself rejected
them, the spiritualist philosopher must seek today’s true formulation
of religious philosophy in a continuation of the second Heidegger –
whether or not the new form of his thought constitutes an explication
of what was already intrinsic in the first – and measure the entire philo-
sophical and theological tradition by its compatibility with Heidegger
and Husserl.105 In light of this we understand why the other philosophers
of existence of the 1930s have been forgotten: Berdaev, Lavelle, Le
Senne, Marcel, and Jaspers himself. How many books that follow this
outline have appeared in the last few years? Can we say that they have
achieved much, apart from their expository usefulness? Above all, did
they lead to true historical judgments? This position corresponds to the
first of the four forms, which I listed earlier, in which secular thought
has defined today’s possible ways of expression of Catholic thought.

Sociological Anti-Communism.

It is characterized by two initial judgments: (1) today’s adversary is

Communism because it is totalitarianism and (dissimulated) imperial-
ism, while Fascism and Nazism no longer have any chance of coming
back; (2) the second judgment devalues Marx’s philosophy by reducing
it to ideology, while recognizing the unity between the Marxist-Leninist

105 This, of course, also applies to theology itself, where it takes the form of com-
patibility with Bultmann.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 107

ideology and Communism. Therefore, the relationship between Marxist

philosophy and Communism as a political reality is replaced by the
study of Communism as an “object of sociology.”106 The reasons for this
transition are clear from the perspective I have proposed. If Marxism
truly enjoys the superiority I have described over the secular forms of
modern thought (apart from Nietzsche, who is irreducible to Marxism
but does not surpass it), such forms have only one way to respond to
theoretical Marxism – that of excluding it from philosophical consid-
eration. This is why it is easy to fall for the mistake of viewing the Soviet
dialectic materialism that organized itself under Stalin, which truly is
an ideological structure, as the authentic form of Marxism, while on
the contrary it represents its decline as a consequence of that historical
period of Communism. Or to fall for the mistake, which is only appar-
ently the opposite, of viewing the theoretical Marxism of the nineteenth
century and the one beginning with Lenin as altogether different posi-
tions (the European form and the Eastern form).
This approach underpins the various works by Burnham (a consis-
tent pupil of Trotsky, because he carries the Trotskyist critique to its
effective conclusion, namely, the break not just with Stalinism but with
Communism), by Hook (who tends towards neo-positivism), by
Monnerot (whose work Sociologie du communisme may perhaps be con-
sidered the rigorous continuation for Communism of that written by
Pareto on socialist systems), by Raymond Aron (who started from the
critique of the philosophy of history by German historicism), by Arendt
(a student of Jaspers and the author of the broadest investigation of
totalitarianism that has appeared so far), all of which contain precious
but inadequate elements. The proof of this inadequacy is the constant
oscillation between a feeling of confidence about the inevitable defeat
of Communism – because of the primitiveness of its secular religion
and the backward character of its sociology and economics – and a
feeling of despair because of the historical observation of its constant
progress and because of its penetration (which is hard to explain from

106 It is a piquant observation that the man who started the rediscovery of the
sociological mindset in Italy was precisely its greatest hater, Croce, because when he
sensed, in 1937, a comeback of theoretical Marxism, he judged such Marxism to be
worthy of study only from the point of view of its ideological power – which meant
declaring it an object of study for sociologists, even if he did not pronounce that
loathed word.
108 The Problem of Atheism

this perspective) among the “hommes du seuil” (its function as “opium

of the intellectuals”). In fact, by using the semantic critique in their
toolbox sociologists may well think of annulling the truth value of an
ideology but not its capacity to move people’s affective powers. Above
all, they are not equipped to build ideological weapons sufficient for
the fight because their critique is purely dissolutive and also because it
is not possible to construct an ideology “for other people” in which its
own authors do not believe. This because an ideology can certainly be
used by political operatives who no longer believe in it; but it can only
be born based on something in which one believes. This holds, as I will
mention, even for the most clearly mythical ideology – the Nazi one.
Thus, these sociologies of Communism yield merely a description of
a crisis, and a description that is altered in two respects. First of all, they
separate completely the political question of totalitarianism and of
democracy from the question of atheism; it follows that the only possible
explanation for the diffusion of atheism in the Western world must refer
to technical development (on the erroneousness of this thesis, see
essay IV). Furthermore, having lost sight of Marxism’s unique character
as philosophy that makes itself religion, they are forced to explain the pres-
ent situation through analogies with situations from the past. So, the
Marxist “atheistic religion” becomes “secular religion” and, thereby, is
characterized as a comeback, in the scientific age, of an elementary
form of religious life, which can be studied by the methods that are
valid for primitive religions.107 Thus, in totalitarianism – no longer
linked with the philosophy that conditions it as a moral reality (the
ethics of the direction of history and attributed responsibility) – they
highlight generic organizational features that induce them to confuse
its concept with other entirely different concepts like absolutism, dic-
tatorship, personal state, Eastern despotism, possibly theocratic regime,
and so on. Or they subsume under the common genus “totalitarianism”
the species Communism, Nazism, and Fascism (truth be told, regarding
Fascism today almost all sociologists agree about denying its authentically
totalitarian character), forgetting that we can speak of totalitarianism
about Communism and Nazism, but in completely opposite senses,
since Nazism is totalitarian because it is completely subordinate to
Communism in opposition, so as to be its irrationalistic translation. But

107 Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, passim.

 I. The Concept of Atheism 109

recognizing this is tantamount to saying that there is only one totalitari-

anism, which between 1935 and 1945 manifested itself with two opposite
sides because, contra the Marxist prediction, class struggle did not replace
the struggle between nations. Or, having granted the decisive character
of ideal causality in contemporary history, it is also equivalent to saying
that totalitarianism is the tragedy in which classical German philosophy
finds its conclusion.
In order to understand the sociologistic alteration, it is enough to
consider some examples in Monnerot’s work, which in fact is very rich
in qualities because of the correctness of many particular remarks, which
can be given their full value from a philosophical perspective. In the
Introduction that opens the recent new edition of his book (published
in 1949), he writes: “The essence of Communism is defined here in
terms of the mutual immanence and functional inter-dependence of
three factors: an ‘empire’ (which pretends to be something else than
an empire), a ‘secular religion’ (which pretends to be something else
than a secular religion) and a ‘subversive organization of world-
conquerors’ (which pretends to be something else than a subversive
organization of world-conquerors).” As you can see, there is no mention
of Marx’s philosophy. I will say that this characterization is perfectly
correct as far as Stalin’s era is concerned and that everything suggests
that Stalinism was not at all an episode but, rather, a stage in a necessary
process of deterioration that continues today in different form, so that
the characterization of 1949 remains valid in 1963. However, the Russian
Revolution was started by Lenin. Is his physiognomy closer to that of
Marx or to that of Stalin? It is not enough to say, like Monnerot does,
that in Marx the figure of the philosopher is prevalent and in Lenin
that of the revolutionary. This is undoubtedly true in the sense that
Marx arrives at the idea of the Revolution through a philosophical
process, while Lenin, after choosing the type of the revolutionary, arrives
at recognizing in Marxism the possibility of bringing it to fulfilment.
But we have to ask whether or not the type of the philosopher-politician
thought by Marx was perfectly realized by Lenin. This is a question that
Monnerot avoids, thinking that the negative answer is obvious; thus
avoiding also the subsequent question, whether the subsequent domi-
nance by the most perfect example of subordination of culture to poli-
tics, Stalin, may not be a coincidence at all. Then, perfectly correctly,
he says that Communist ideology, understood as dialectical materialism
in the Soviet form, marks a deviation with respect to Marxism. But
110 The Problem of Atheism

should not this deviation be explained, given the particular Marxist

relationship between philosophy and politics, by Stalin’s break between
the philosopher and the politician, and the absolute prevalence of the
latter? Very correctly, he says that Communism displays features that
are the opposite with respect both to the age of distincts – the full desa-
cralization of politics that started with Machiavelli – and to the Christian
distinction of spiritual and temporal. But does this undeniable factual
reality authorize him to understand the novelty of Communism through
the analogy with Islam, or to characterize it merely in terms of the
Eastern mindset, or even to compare his sacredness to that of the primi-
tive mindset? And yet this comprehension of Marxism through analogies
is necessary if one loses sight of its character as an atheistic religion.
Using the same method of analogy, does it not feel like this attitude of
the anti-Communist sociologists has some similarity with that of learned
pagans towards Christianity?

Scholastic Marxism

Certainly it cannot but abide, verbally, by Engels’s judgment about

Feuerbach. As a matter of fact, however, it is characterized by a form of
scientistic materialism, which is exactly the legacy of one among the
possible non-Marxist developments that befall Feuerbach’s thought
when it refuses to be surpassed by Marxism: scientism on which dialectic
is superimposed from the outside. In this way Marxism, which was
fiercely hostile to eclecticism, transmogrifies into the greatest possible
eclecticism, in parallel with its reduction to a mere instrument of politi-
cal power. Which is exactly Marxism rethought from Stalin’s point of
view. The problem it poses is the nature of and the reason for the Stalinist
moment within the Marxist making-itself-world of philosophy.

Social Democracy

It is characterized in all its forms by the reduction of the atheism of

Marx to that of Feuerbach. The following stances derive from this
reduction: (a) it prefers, in its humanitarian-democratic-atheistic form,
Feuerbach’s humanitarianism over Marxism’s scientific abstractness;
(b) it seeks a conciliation between humanistic positivism and socialism
based on Feuerbach’s philosophy, with Marxism providing the suitable
social science to bring together the intellectual (along positivist lines)
 I. The Concept of Atheism 111

and material advancement of the proletariat. Consistently, in this posi-

tion the ethical justification of socialism is sought in the positivist version
of iusnaturalism, and the revolutionary aspect of Marxism is abandoned,
taking Marx’s work as a “counsel of prudence” to revolutionaries in
the name of “historical maturity.” Social Democracy is defined by aver-
sion to Sorel’s thought as an attempt to reactivate the revolutionary
spirit of Marxism by separating it from materialism and positivism,
and Communism is viewed as falling into Sorelism. (c) However, if
Feuerbach’s atheism and Marxist social science are two different things,
it follows that Marxism can be re-understood and justified philosophi-
cally through other forms of thought (e.g., Kantian ethics); but then,
why not also through any ethics that affirms the dignity of the human
person? By this route one arrives at the position that is prevalent today,
the philosophical and religious neutrality of Social Democracy. But such
a position is inadequate because it fails to grasp the aspect of ideal
causality of today’s history.

Catholic and Secular Progressivism

They share as a common starting point a historical judgment about

the unity of Communists and non-Communists in the Resistance.
Such unity is viewed as a factual reality that breaks the ideological,
pseudo-theological schemes that come between them, and that there-
fore demands to be continued in a revision of ideas. The Resistance
is thus interpreted as a ideal unity and not as a factual unity against
a common adversary,108 nor as a mere extension of the revolution
of 1917, as orthodox Communists view it, but as a deepening of it.
Now, reflecting on a revolution always implies a revision of one’s
philosophical perspective; therefore, it is no wonder that we find this

108 Because Nazism, by presenting Germany as racially distinct and superior, had
to take the form of colonialism pushed to the extreme consequences and, therefore,
wage a war against the whole world, in which its allies had to figure as “the first de-
feated.” This is why the Second World War was taken to be a “World Revolution.” But
actually this phrase, which was already circulating in 1939, is not accurate. What is
true is that the Second World War realized to the highest degree the character of
“world war.” I advanced this thesis already in the first issue of the journal Costume
(January–March 1946). I find a confirmation of its truth in the fact that it was redis-
covered and rigorously worked out – independently of any reference to that distant
suggestion – by Sergio Cotta, in the journal Risorgimento (1961).
112 The Problem of Atheism

historical judgment, in a determinant role, at the bottom of much

of today’s culture. I already devoted the second of these essays to the
necessary reduction of the atheism of Marx to that of Feuerbach in
Catholic progressivism. But since this progressivism has endured,
and in fact has spread enormously and has adopted a new phraseol-
ogy, it is worth adding that, to cite formulas that are common today,
Catholic progressives think of Marxism as a renewal of biblical meta-
physics whose awareness has been blocked by the traditional confu-
sion between Christianity and Platonism. Hence, the current task of
Catholic culture is to elaborate a vision of the world and of history
in which the Hebrew personalist and eschatological theme is com-
pletely freed from all the gnostic encrustations coming from Greek
objectivist thought, thus making it possible to reintegrate the truth
of Marxism. By virtue of this, adepts of Catholic progressivism per-
ceive themselves to be the continuators of the work of St Thomas to
Christianize Aristotelianism, which in his time seemed to be the war
machine of the enemies of faith, like Marxism today. According to
the extreme position, Catholic thought ought to Christianize the
evolutionary conception of homo faber, just as ancient thought had
Christianized the Greek idea of homo sapiens. Clearly here we enter
true neo-modernism. In more moderate forms people speak of a
“demythologization” of politics from ideologies, but the substance
remains the same, no matter whether the assertions are moderate
or extreme: Marxism is separate in principle from atheism and is
accidentally tied to it because its messianic spirit (whose inspiration
is essentially Christian) was not finding satisfaction in the prevalent
Christian philosophies and theologies. These are, again, the misun-
derstandings that can be created by the imprecise statement that
categorizes Marxism as the “last Christian heresy.”
In the secular type of progressivism, the agreement between liberal-
ism and Communism has to be pursued along the line of a new
Enlightenment. This is simply because no continuity can be established
between liberalism and Communism except through the Enlightenment.
Therefore Marxism is re-comprehended within the Enlightenment,
understood as a process of rationalization through science; in its first
form (to which liberalism corresponds) of natural reality and in its
second form (to which socialism generically understood, as including
Communism, corresponds) of the social world. Such Enlightenment
 I. The Concept of Atheism 113

cannot have any other philosophy than a form of humanistic positivism

because the scientific domination of the world presupposes man’s
transcendence with respect to nature and, thus, a philosophy not of a
metaphysical but of a methodological character, which includes a socio-
logical explanation of metaphysical systems. Accordingly, Marx’s phi-
losophy is simply set aside as a sort of transfiguration of Feuerbachism
into a romantic, nineteenth-century-style philosophy of history. Then,
considered historically, this humanistic neo-positivism is just a position
that links back to Feuerbach, separating him from the aspects that can
give rise to a philosophy of history.

Neo-Positivism and Psychoanalysis

It is clear that neo-positivism, at least to the extent that it intends to be

more than just rigorous scientific methodology, presents itself as the
liberation of old positivism from all the themes that could give rise to
the rebirth of Idealism and spiritualism. But to do so it cannot but make
recourse to a development of Feuerbach’s explanation of religion and
metaphysics, fighting in Marxism, as non-scientific, the “theological”
aspect of being an atheistic religion – which, once again, means ignor-
ing the specific character of Marxist philosophy. As for psychoanalysis,
in the aspect whereby it presents itself as science that wants to annihilate
philosophy, clearly it is just a deterioration of authentic scientific inves-
tigations into scientistic materialism, whose Feuerbachian origins I have
already mentioned.
As for atheistic existentialism, as I already said, its line of development
is Feuerbach-Stirner-Kierkegaard-Husserl as the condition to secularize
Kierkegaard and Heidegger, understanding this latter as the philosopher
of the tragic greatness of finitude without redemption. But since one
has to exit tragedy if he wants to live – and let us not talk too much
about greatness because lived tragedy means misery, not greatness –
people look for a doctrine of action. Then the encounter with Marxism
presents itself as necessary, but it is the necessity of a practical combina-
tion. Therefore the union of atheistic existentialism and Marxism is
necessarily eclectic. Also in its regard, moreover, we must say that it is a
replacement of Feuerbach’s old atheistic humanism with an extremely
more refined form, for sure, but which still presupposes that Marx’s
atheism coincides with Feuerbach’s.
114 The Problem of Atheism

11. The Form of the Critical Power

of Marxism

It would certainly be extremely easy to write a book about the annihi-

lating power of Marxism with regard to the secular cultural forms I just
listed – in fact, too easy to justify that I undertake such work. I will just
provide a few examples about what truly matters, and about which
almost nothing has been written, the particular way in which this annihila-
tion has taken place. Croce’s historicism has been the most important
attempt at a complete liquidation of theoretical Marxism within a
reform of Hegelian dialectic. The manner of its collapse is extremely
significant. In 1945 Croce seemed to be the philosopher of the free
world; today his work seems to have become a mere subject of historical
research, nor is it just experiencing a “purgatory” because all trends of
secular thought find themselves compelled to reduce Croce’s thought
to an episode in the history of culture (see 269–70). A retrieval of some
elements of Croce’s thought will be possible, as we shall see, only in a
philosophy of transcendence. But this has happened only in connec-
tion with the rediscovery of Marxist thought because his philosophy
had resisted the substantial critiques formulated by Catholics and
existentialists and, after 1930, had been able to reaffirm itself against
Actualism. Subsequently, the attempt to annul Marxism turned around,
within immanentist historicism, into total annihilation of the thought of
the man who had attempted it. Conversely, Actualism was from the
beginning also a theoretical sublation of Marx’s philosophy. The roles
have now been inverted, in a perfectly symmetrical way to what hap-
pened to Croce’s thought: today the largest kernel of Italian philosophi-
cal Marxism is constituted by disciples of disciples of Gentile, who
sublate Actualism.
This symmetry repeats itself also for atheistic existentialism, which
presented itself as the ethical-political sublation of Marxism into a phi-
losophy of freedom. Punctually, as I already remarked, this philosophy
has turned into a theoretical justification of the fellow travellers. Their
most pertinent critic, Raymond Aron, has stated that, for him, the cri-
terion of truth in judging political facts is to think exactly the opposite
of Sartre. It is not a boutade, it is a decisive observation in order to define
the meaning of Sartrism. Merleau-Ponty arrived at a-Communism, that
is to say at the affirmation of not being a fellow traveller and of being
one at the same time; or, equivalently, to the liquidation of the
 I. The Concept of Atheism 115

“engagedness” of a philosophy that had been born precisely as engaged

philosophy. Camus has refused to take this position for moral reasons,
let us even say out of awareness of traditional moral values, understood
in the highest sense; however, a chasm has opened up between his
moralism and his atheism, such that we have to say that, as far as con-
sistency is concerned, Sartre’s atheistic existentialism is superior to his.
This is just a confirmation of the judgment I pronounced earlier about
Feuerbach, from which it follows that it is impossible to think of a vital-
ization of Marxism through atheistic existentialism, the reason being …
that Marxism has no need of it. The discussions about Marxism and
atheistic existentialism have certainly continued and continue still, but
we may ask what they achieved, besides giving ambitious young or not-
so-young authors an occasion to write with little effort essays that look
modern and critical. Atheistic existentialism constantly needs to pretend
to be a form of scholarly Marxism in order to make it feel the need for
its help. By this I do not mean that the problem of the discussion
between existential thought and Marxism is not strictly necessary and
crucially important for contemporary philosophy; rather, I mean that
it must take the form of a discussion of the antithesis between Pascal and
Marx (and not between Kierkegaard and Marx, which leads to an utterly
fruitless discussion about the opposition between their attitudes).
The forms of secular thought that philosophical Marxism did not
meet directly during its formation process seem to have more power to
resist: positivism, pragmatism, neo-criticism in historicist form. But if
you look carefully, their outcome is perfectly symmetrical to that of the
forms I considered above. Their claim to surpass Marxism through
the Enlightenment is met, as a result, by sociologism separated from the
Enlightenment (because it is impossible to reaffirm the Enlightenment
after Marxism, even as a form that includes its positivity). It coincides,
as we shall see, with one of the two developments of Marxism due to its
insuperable contradiction.
But it is above all in its ability to explain contemporary political his-
tory that the superiority of the interpretation I have proposed becomes
manifest, I believe: in the consideration of the new political forms that
organized after 1917 and that can find an explanation only in relation
to Communism and not as developments of pre-existing forms. Two of
them have irrevocably disappeared from history – Nazism and Fascism;
the third is still in the game – the affluent society. Now, then, it is a
matter of showing that the defeat of the first two was due precisely to
116 The Problem of Atheism

a subordination in opposition to Communism and that this subordina-

tion in opposition can be detected in the affluent society as well.
Regarding Fascism we know how terribly difficult it is to transition
from a polemic to a historical judgment. The proof that this transi-
tion did not happen – or started to happen only with the publication,
last year, of the book by historian-philosopher Ernst Nolte109 – is pro-
vided by the exclusively polemical (but ridiculing a disease truly does
not explain it!) or at most documentary character of the relevant litera-
ture. At most a few short pieces are salvageable.
Nobody, I believe, can sincerely think that Fascism has been (accord-
ing to the sentence of the intellectuals of “yesterday’s world”) a mere
“irrationalist parenthesis”; or (according to the thesis passively accepted
by today’s mainstream press simply because … one has to say something
after all) a “revelation” of germs that can be traced back to centuries
of closedness to the general course of civilization – since the age of the
Counter-Reformation, in short; or, finally, the reaction by the privileged
classes against the advance of the working class (this is evidently a mere
truism; the fact that the privileged groups preferred Fascism over
Communism does not mean at all … that they produced it).
To explain it, we must take into account, instead, this fundamental
fact: documents, or private communications, attest that the great major-
ity of the more prominent Italian intellectuals,110 secular as well as
Catholic, and many of them highly morally respectable, were sympathetic
(I use a generic word, but it does not go far enough) to Mussolini for a
time; that the greatest Italian philosopher after Rosmini, Gentile, was
faithful to Fascism from the beginning until his death; that the great

109 Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (Munich: Piper, 1963) [Three Faces of Fascism
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1966)]. It could be described, to use current
language, as a distinctly super-structural interpretation of Fascism. One can easily see
that what he has written about its “transpolitical” character agrees with my ideas about
the primacy of “ideal causality” in contemporary history.
110 At least this applies to the great majority of those who had sympathized with
the renewal of Italian culture after 1900 promoted by La Critica and by the Florentine
journals. Clearly this is about writing history, not holding trials: it would be extremely
interesting to gather a complete collection of sincere judgments about Mussolini
(leaving out those lowly adulatory) pronounced by intellectuals of some calibre at
one moment or another (followed, of course, by the realization of the mistake), mo-
tivated often by opposite reasons. Did not Gramsci delude himself in the years im-
mediately before the First World War? Did not Salvemini, in that same period?
 I. The Concept of Atheism 117

historian Gioacchino Volpe is still faithful; that it is even the case that
after the end of Fascism some people who had never adhered to it felt
a greater aversion to anti-Fascism.
Within this general problem of the relationship between Fascism and
the culture we must carve out a more precise question: Is it for no
reason that the period in which Fascism established itself coincided
with the full success of those Italian forms of Hegelianism whose rep-
resentatives – from De Sanctis to Croce, from Spaventa to Gentile –
perceived their own thought as the theoretical awareness of the secular
liberalism of the Risorgimento and intended to continue the work of
unification in the cultural sphere? They thought of promoting Italy’s
Risorgimento by circulating Italian and European culture and by going
beyond the regional cultures in which Italian intellectual life had taken
place until then.
Except for sporadic hints, until today this question has been carefully
avoided. It is not important to investigate now why that happened. But
this is where those altogether insufficient interpretations I mentioned
above have their genesis. By an obvious reciprocity, they bar the ques-
tion about the relationship between the final link in this culture,
Actualism, and Fascism. Indeed, if Fascism is presented as just the action
of a gang of adventurers at the service of big capitalism, or as an expres-
sion of the Bovaryism of the petty bourgeois, how will the question of
the relationship between Gentile, as a thinker, and Mussolini be posed?
People will point out, very correctly, that Gentile’s thought played no
role in Mussolini’s formation;111 that Gentile always meant to be a lib-
eral; that at most we should regard what he did as a, possibly disinter-
ested, effort to “clothe the naked,” and so on.
At this point I must make myself clear: I have no intention to present
Fascism as a historical concretion of Idealist culture. The idea, which
is as false as it is common, of a single paradigm for the relationship
between philosophy and politics must be abandoned. In reality there
is an indefinite variety of types of relationship, and they do not let
themselves be pigeon-holed into the single model of discipleship. Let us
consider, for example, the undeniable relationship that links Croce and
Giolitti, which has been much discussed but so far has not been defined

111 One should say otherwise about Croce’s thought, even though the influence
was indirect.
118 The Problem of Atheism

with the desired precision; it is obviously an entirely different relation-

ship than that between Marx and Lenin, or also Gentile and Mussolini.
Thus, the encounter between Actualism and Fascism must be studied
in its very particular singularity.
Actually, Fascism rises from an extremely noteworthy intuition:
beneath the reality of classes there is a deeper reality, which Communism
has ignored, the reality of nations. This is proven by the fact that a revo-
lution that was initially thought to be worldwide came to a halt.112 But
this intuition was rethought by Mussolini according to the categories
of the revolutionary socialism in which he had grown up. As a result,
the affirmation of the reality of the nation pushed to the extreme the
aspect – which was present but was not the only one – in which national-
ism transcribed Marxism, replacing the class struggle with the struggle
for power among the nations. The results of this mixing of nationalism
and socialism are:

a. Fascism’s nature as nationalism that reaches the masses. This is a

truly unique occurrence because nationalism is an aristocratic
phenomenon (please note that its origin is fairly recent: the nation-
alist doctrine did not exist before Maurras or, if you want to add this
name, Barrès). Therefore, in Fascism, we must assign priority to the
aspect that originates from revolutionary socialism. In other words,
there is not some sort of ideal continuity between nationalism and
Fascism. It is not the ideology of the Action Française that prepares
Fascism but,113 rather, Fascism that absorbs nationalism. The
historical question about Fascism is how this link could be
established without indulging in easy rhetoric about “betrayals.”

112 Was there in this intuition a correct aspect? I think so: the reality of the na-
tion, as man’s relationship to his tradition and history, cannot be deduced from the
economic, as relationship between man and nature. This is so much so that, in order to
explain the success of the Communist Revolution in Russia – against the Marxist pre-
dictions that the revolution would start in France, would continue in Germany, and
would end in England – we must turn to Russian history, to the form of its religious
tradition, to the formation and history of its intelligentsia, and so on.
113 I am talking about the Action Française having in mind the sequence of the
three reactionary forms of the twentieth century. The relationship between Action
Française and Fascism is repeated mutatis mutandis in that between Fascism and
Nazism.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 119

b. Fascism’s two souls, the traditionalist (which leads to the Lateran

Treaty) and the socialist and subversive. Hence its instability: we
might say, referring to the title of Zangrandi’s well-known book, that
Fascist awareness is a “travelling awareness.” Its journey can conclude
either with traditionalism or with Communism but usually with the
latter (because of the priority I mentioned).

Hence two questions: (1) How did this encounter of revolutionary

socialism and nationalism take place and where did it come from?
(2) How did the encounter between Mussolini and Gentile take place –
that is, the encounter between the representatives of two traditions that
until then had had no relationship at all, Romagna’s revolutionary
socialism and Neapolitan Hegelianism?
Regarding the first question, I think we have to answer that Mussolini’s
life is the best document for a study of the idea of total revolution
untethered from Marxist materialism and linked, instead, to the vitalistic
trends in early twentieth-century thought. That is, Fascism is the full real-
ization and the complete defeat of the type of revolutionary socialism that accepted
the Idealist critique (in a broad sense) of naturalistic materialism and of scientism,
without assuming Marx’s true position (or regarding it as a contradictory com-
bination of revolutionary spirit and materialism). We must recall, therefore,
what I said earlier about the Marxist inseparability of total revolution
and integral materialism, which was fully understood for the first time
by Lenin. Only their unity enables the revolution to have its own content
(indeed, as I say later, the thesis of the duality and dialectic antithesis
of the social classes, far from being an empirical observation, presupposes
such materialism and therefore could not but be abandoned by Fascism).
Conversely, when the revolutionary idea, in the sense of total revolution,
is separated from dialectical materialism, it irrationalizes. And its irra-
tionalization takes the form of activism, characterized by tension towards
action not finalized to any order, by the demotion of values and by the
de-recognition of other people as I’s.114 However, we must explain

114 From this point of view, one can certainly find some analogies between
Fascism and decadentism. This is why it is important to study the relations be-
tween Fascism and the political tension of irrationalist-decadent artistic movements
(Futurism; the March of Rome conceived by D’Annunzio and realized by Mussolini).
We must just remark that, in order to realize itself in political form, Fascism could not
but ally with traditionalist and reactionary forces because it had no intrinsic content
120 The Problem of Atheism

precisely what this de-recognition of other people means. The activist

will cannot be identified with the selfish will or with the bourgeois spirit.
Selfishness is a moral flaw, the practical de-recognition that other people
are real, after having previously recognized them as real. It is essentially
static – the selfish man is “the one who does not move”; it is by nature
apolitical since its political demands reduce to “demanding order.” And
even though the agonistic character establishes a kinship between activ-
ism and the bourgeois spirit (according to the well-known Marxist view,
the bourgeois man is agonistic because, being cut off from the com-
munity, he can only find himself again through competition), nonethe-
less the bourgeois spirit operates within a given order (it is conservative),
whereas activism is actually directed against all orders, even if it must
feign to be creating a “new order.” In activism’s case, it is a comprehen-
sive perspective whereby other people are reduced to objects so that,
in reference to them, it no longer makes sense to speak of moral duties –
that is, activism coincides with the form of lived solipsism.
Such a disposition must necessarily mystify itself as moralism. If the
world reduces to things, and I alone recognize myself as subject, the world
is for me, I must dominate it. This will to power becomes a moral impera-
tive since I cannot give it up without betraying myself and becoming an
object that deserves to be dominated, without falling back into “banal
existence.” Mussolini’s constant presentation of his will to power as
heroic will should not be regarded as insincerity and trickery but as a
necessity that follows from the essence of activism. This practice – which
must present itself as ethical and religious, while at the same time it
cannot, just as necessarily, not de-recognize moral and religious life
because of the failure to recognize the other as an I – can only explicate
itself at the level of politics, which is thought to absorb all values. This
is the ultimate contradiction of activism: between politicity and solipsism,
which are both intrinsic to it, so that political action can explicate itself
only as the disintegration of an already given reality (and, as a matter
of fact, the Fascist period coincided with the final crisis of a historical
reality, which had started in 1861 – namely, the Kingdom of Italy).

and because it was obliged to oppose both liberalism (by reason of its own socialist-
revolutionary origins) and Communism. This explains the aversion to it on the part
of the artistic movements of an irrationalist type that emerged after 1930.
With regard to Communism, it is important to note that, around 1930, Fascism
was often perceived at the “Western” alternative to it.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 121

Because of its lack of intrinsic finality due to its solipsistic character,

Fascism can only take from outside a content that, by itself, is foreign
to the original revolutionary disposition (i.e., tradition, the nation),
thus appropriating the nationalist replacement of class struggle by the
struggle of nations. Hence the problem of reconciliation, first with
the tradition of the Risorgimento and then with the Catholic Church.
These reconciliations were insincere because they were not reconcilia-
tions with values but with historical forces to be used as instruments.
Hence, also, Fascism’s break – which had the character of a struggle to
the death – with the other form born from revolutionary intervention-
ism, which after various vicissitudes took the name Partito d’Azione, and
viewed the agreement with the traditional forces of Italian conserva-
tism – the monarchy and the Church – as a betrayal of the Risorgimento.
The fact that the criticisms of activism and solipsism that have been
made against Fascism and Actualism alike are identical and insuperable
must make us reflect. Was it, on Gentile’s part, an illusion or a mere
sophistic performance by a philosopher who was not morally equal to
his ideas? Or was Actualism, on the contrary, truly obliged to consent,
even though it could not act as a guide and influence Fascism as a
practical force, and had to limit its political function to letting Fascism
insert itself into tradition by means of its perspective on the history of
the Risorgimento? In order to answer, we must consider the curious
contradiction whereby on the one hand Actualism was restless with
desire for action, while on the other hand it was utterly impotent to
outline and propose, let alone to form, a political movement. And we
must also consider the negations it was forced to pronounce about
existing political forms. As far as the tension towards politics is con-
cerned, we must observe that, for Gentile, the exploration in his youth
of Marx’s philosophy – which at that time he rethought in the least
Marxist disposition one can imagine, that is, completely abstracting
philosophy from politics – was the beginning of a process that led him
to the politicity of philosophy, remaking, somehow, Marxism within
Idealism. If we want to look in the past for the roots of Fascism, we have
to say – with a degree of paradox (because it is not a relationship of
doctrinal derivation but a necessary encounter) that, however, has a deep
aspect of truth – that its theoretical starting point must be identified in
Gentile’s commentary on the Theses on Feuerbach (1899), which was the
first study, in the world, of the philosophy of the young Marx. It marks
the beginning of the position of sublation [inveramento] of Marxism,
122 The Problem of Atheism

which is quite distinct from revisionism. Revisionism aims at isolating

what is thought to be the healthy part of Marxism (its economic theory,
its sociology), and to think it in a different philosophical framework or
independently of any such framework. In the sublation thesis, instead,
the intention is to extract the positive aspect of Marx’s philosophy, which
makes it irreducible to any other form of modern thought, and to free
it only of its metaphisicalist115 and materialistic elements. In Gentile we
have the beginning, at the theoretical level, of the position of sublation, which
then was proper both to Fascism and to subsequent anti-Fascist progressivism.
So, the encounter was necessary, despite their different backgrounds,
because the irrationalization of Hegelianism by Gentile corresponds to
the irrationalization of revolutionary socialism by Mussolini.
The fact that the encounter was tangential, that the constitutive pro-
cesses of Fascism and Actualism are completely different, tells us, for
sure, that the meaning of Gentile’s philosophy cannot be measured by
it; but the necessity of the encounter tells us that we cannot truly situate
his philosophy without taking it into account.
Therefore, the comparison between Actualism and Marxism is
extremely important and, so far, has not been conducted exhaustively.
I will just propose the following point of view, merely stating some of
the terms of the question: the process of thought that started in Hegel
came to manifest its insuperable contradiction in the two opposite and
irreconcilable positions of Marx (and Lenin) and Gentile.
Indeed, in the transition from Hegelianism to the philosophy of
praxis, Gentile takes praxis to the highest degree of purity through
Idealism; and his critique, not so much of realism but of the necessary
conversion of realism into materialism in any philosophy of absolute
immanence is irrefutable, from the standpoint of truth. But, on the
other hand, after being purified such praxis remains undetermined;
by reason of this indeterminacy, one goes from the revolutionary idea
to activism or to the activist form of solipsism. Gentile’s philosophy is a
philosophy of praxis that contradicts itself as such because it does not
give rise to any practice and must encounter a political position whose
constitutive process is entirely different.

115 [TN] Here and later I use “metaphysicalist” to translate Del Noce’s “metafisi-
cistico,” which he uses as a critical/derogatory counterpart of “metafisico”
(metaphysical).
 I. The Concept of Atheism 123

We know that Lenin wrote that Gentile’s book was one of the very few
commentaries by non-Marxist philosophers worth reading. What pre-
cisely did he mean, and can we speak of a real influence on Lenin by
Gentile? I don’t think that this investigation could yield any results if
conducted at the philological level. However, one can still formulate a
conjecture that has a strong whiff of truth about it: Gentile called Lenin’s
attention to the thought of the young Marx and its Hegelian origins.
By studying them, Lenin arrived at a thesis that was the complete oppo-
site of Gentile’s – namely, the unity of materialism and philosophy of
action, and of Idealism and solipsism. If we go back to Lukàcs’s thesis
that Lenin the politician is explained by Lenin the philosopher, we are
easily induced to view the duel between Fascism and Communism
as the political aspect of the duel between Gentile and Lenin, which,
within the horizon of radical immanentism, has a catastrophic outcome
for the former.
However, this view is superficial. Lenin is certainly correct when he
goes back to Marx’s thesis about the unity of revolutionary idea and
integral materialism, conceived as materialism after Idealism; indeed,
the idea of social man, whose implementation is the content of the
revolution, is sustainable only from the point of view of integral mate-
rialism. And he is correct in thinking that only by this route can Marxism
be reaffirmed. But can the theoretical value of an idea be deduced from
its practical power? Or does the Leninist reaffirmation of Marx take
place within the replacement of the idea of truth by the idea of myth?
Does his critique of Idealism concern Idealism in itself or its convenience
for the revolutionary idea, which he has already elevated to absolute
practical value, in relation to which theories must be judged? Does his
question concern the theoretical value of Marxism or, rather, what can
be done with the Marxist theory? The answers do not seem to be in
doubt. But then it seems inevitable to conclude that his attitude differs
profoundly from that of Marx, for whom practical efficacy was just the
sign of the truth of a theory. Moreover, one understands the relevance
of Nietzsche – as the theoretician of myth in the modern sense, as cre-
ation of a vital instrument and expression of the will to power – as an
interpreter of contemporary reality (of the very reality that Marxism
has brought about). One also understands the particular power of the
Marxist myth due to its capturing of real rational elements (such as the
transition, within radical immanentism, from the type of the philosopher
to the type of the revolutionary). But at the same time, it becomes
124 The Problem of Atheism

legitimate to ask whether it is precisely this replacement of philosophy

by myth that is the root of the process of deterioration that affects, in
my judgment, Communism in its historical reality.

***

We can then say that Fascism, in its subordination-opposition to

Communism, corresponds to the Leninist stage of the revolution.
Nazism, instead, is the phenomenon correlative to Stalinism in this
subordination-opposition. With the thesis of socialism in one country,
Stalin had nationalized Communism; thus, with him Marxism seemed
to have become the instrument for an inversion of the movement of
history, for the westward counter-expansion of the East against the West,
and the first nation threatened by it was Germany. Nazism arose, depend-
ing on this impression, as an attempt to free the German tradition from
all that had led to Marxism, where German tradition meant what had
led to justifying the political primacy of Germany. Because Marxism is
the rethinking in a Hebrew spirit of the philosophy that Hegel had
thought with a Greek mindset, anti-Communism goes hand in hand
with anti-Semitism, and the total rejection of biblical thought leads to
a break with Christianity. Hence racist neo-paganism, the explicit return
to mythical awareness, the opposition between the master race and the
servant race, and so on. Hence the absolutely total subordination to
Marxism, and then also totalitarianism (in reference to Fascism we
should speak – I postpone the analysis to some other occasion – of a
truncated totalitarian form). If one wants to draw a line of succession,
which however must not be thought as necessary continuity, among the
reactionary forms of the twentieth century, one has to say that the Action
Française lacks the totalitarian character, that in Fascism we have a trun-
cated totalitarianism, in Nazism totalitarianism. Notice that these differ-
ent characters preclude the possibility of thinking of them as species of
the same genus (of that “proximate” genus that allegedly should be
“reaction against historical progress”).
So, Nazism as a fact carries a very important teaching about the place
of Marxism in the history of philosophy. Within secular German thought,
the pure negation of Marxism implies also the negation of its whole tradi-
tion, with the singular exception of Nietzsche. The meaning of this
exception will be discussed shortly.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 125

Regarding the form of subordination of the affluent society, I refer

the reader to essay IV (above all pages 256ff).

***

But now, let us look at the other side of the coin. Even if they are sub-
ordinate, the forms of opposition I mentioned have determined an
internal evolution of Communism. Its character is that of a process
whereby Communism transforms from faith in a revolution that will
realize a world of equals into an instrument of power for a nation and
a class, that techno-bureaucratic class about which so much has been
written. That is to say, there is an ideal action that Communism exerts
on the world that opposes it, which translates into subordinating to it
the forms in which this world expresses itself. But, on the other hand,
these forms have a counter-effect on the reality of Communism, which
brings about a deterioration characterized by the loss of the religious-
revolutionary spirit. This deterioration can only take the form of the
transition from revolutionary politics to politics of pure power, and it
comes in different guises depending on the adversary.
Consider, in fact, the internal evolution and its characteristics: the
universal revolution conceived by Lenin and Trotsky halts in front of
the reality of the nations. Stalin’s figure rises, as the realistic acceptance
of this halt, and we must say that it is not at all true that he was the
demonic caricature that he is often clumsily ridiculed as today, as if he
understood Communism in a Nazi way. Setting aside all moral judg-
ments, he was instead, in a strictly political sense, one of history’s greatest
political geniuses. Stalinism was the form that Communism necessarily
had to take in order to preserve itself in an ideologically hostile world.
It meant provisionally building socialism in one country, while waiting
for the contradictions that would plunge non-Communist nations into
war, a prediction that came to pass. And it meant exploiting with extraor-
dinary ability these contradictions, so that the public opinion in demo-
cratic countries was given the impression that Communism was Russian
history, and that the revolution could not be exported. The result was
a Eurocentric vision in which the antagonists were, on the one side, the
liberal idea (in the higher sense) or spiritual values, and on the other
side earthly, vitalist, and irrational forces supported by selfish economic
interests. I am not saying that this vision did not include some truth,
126 The Problem of Atheism

and that Nazism and Fascism were not the primary, necessary enemies
between 1930 and 1945; but it failed to grasp the primary ideal causality
of the crisis. Furthermore, Stalinism meant the industrialization and
militarization of Russia so that, if it became involved in the war, its con-
tribution would be decisive, and this also came to pass. It meant picking
up again the transformation of the war into a World Revolution through
the hegemony that the Communists established over the Resistance.
And, in fact, the Communist Resistance prevailed wherever the Anglo-
Americans did not intervene. The result was expansion into Eastern
Europe and China, and Communism becoming the master of half of
the world.
But, at the same time, this first step in the evolution leads to a break
between the revolutionary and the politician, between Stalin and Trotsky.
Dropping the revolutionary spirit produces a phenomenon that is the
opposite of the expected withering away of the State, and this gives rise
to the new class, to its domination, and to its privileges. Trotsky said that
the revolution had been betrayed, and in his polemic against Stalin we
can find all possible criticisms from the political and social standpoint
of Communism as it has become realized. He just forgot to ask himself,
or in any case answered the question inadequately, whether such betrayal
was necessary, and necessary in Stalin’s precise form, in order for
Communism as a political reality to endure. The results were a necessary
break between the revolutionary and the power politician, the figure
of the latter becoming realized to the highest degree ever, and an equally
necessary victory of power politics over the revolutionary spirit. That is
to say, the union of utopianism and Machiavellianism fell apart.
Correlatively, a break with the intellectuals took place. The author of
the last great work of theoretical Marxism, History and Class Consciousness,
Lukàcs, had to disown it with a humiliating statement in 1924 (and the
first Lukàcs was followed by a second Lukàcs, who is much less interest-
ing, or interesting only to the extent that he covertly picks up again the
motifs of his first self). The Leninist thesis that identified philosophy
and the party (which meant that philosophers led the revolution) was
inverted into the total subordination of philosophy to politics. Marxism
was counterfeited into a clumsy scholasticism, which instead of guiding
politics is subordinate to it; and which deepens and evolves only by
carrying out the task of justifying Stalin’s every political act; and which
takes a typical scientistic character in order to fulfill its task of providing
the proofs to convict.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 127

The most complete confirmation that this process is irreversible is

given by Khrushchev’s politics, which can be characterized as the adap-
tation of Communism to a new and still unexpected adversary – the
affluent society. This requires liquidating the myth of Stalin – a liquida-
tion that is internal and necessary to Khrushchevism but that is stupidly
taken by certain democratic people in every country to be a proof of a
necessary democratic evolution. It would be interesting to compare
Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin with that of Trotsky, to show that it is
not an impossible return to the revolutionary phase but, rather, a con-
tinuation of the realistic line in relation to a new adversary, which
demands that Communism reconfigure itself. People have correctly
described this development as a second Social Democratic crisis, in the
sense that Social Democracy is defined by the idea that in socialism the
end is nothing, the movement is everything. But obviously what is hap-
pening is not that Communism is evolving towards the old kind of Social
Democracy but, rather, that Russia is taking a place in the world similar
to the place that Social Democracy had taken in the various national
communities – with the changes that follow, due to the repercussions
of foreign policy, in Russia’s internal policy and in the attitude of the
Communist parties in the various countries.
By being the definitive liquidation of every fervour of revolutionary
mysticism, Khrushchevism has united against itself a coalition of all
old-style Communists: Stalinists, Trotskyists, and the Chinese. That
explains the obligations that weigh on its politics. It can assert its ortho-
doxy against its adversaries only by quoting Lenin’s text “Left-Wing”
Communism: An Infantile Disorder – that is, by professing its realism against
the utopianism of the adversaries. And it can establish the superiority
of its realism only by showing that the expansion of Communism con-
tinues in a world in which the contradictions of capitalist states no longer
produce wars. And it is easy to understand in what direction and by
what methods this expansion can take place, after the affluent society
has removed the possibility of revolutionary action – by abolishing or
at least diminishing poverty – and after, on the other hand, the route
towards Asia has been blocked. The Chinese schism had the effect of
permanently pushing Russia back into Europe – whereas with Stalinism
Russia had taken a somewhat Asian countenance – thereby solving a
centuries-old historical problem – of making it, somehow, a bulwark
against the East, which had been Germany’s traditional role. Just as
Germany has aspired to European hegemony, so necessarily now will
128 The Problem of Atheism

Russia. But the realization of this hegemony can only happen by demo-
cratic methods. It will still be a conquest in the sense of subordination
of nations, but it cannot happen either as war or as revolution. However,
this evolution does not imply any real opening to Christianity or to the
values of freedom; it merely marks the final stage in the transition of
Marxism from faith to instrument of power. But it will still not be pos-
sible for Communism to disown Marxism and therefore atheism, which
is its starting point, nor totalitarianism, nor the idea of universal revolu-
tion (changed into that of universal domination), which are its conse-
quences. In the same way the Borgias could aspire to transform the
papacy into a temporal principality but could not deny the existence
of God and Incarnation and Redemption because, by doing so, they
would have denied the same religion they wanted to use as a tool.
Indeed, in regard to totalitarianism, we must observe that it is first of
all a moral and philosophical reality based on the ethics of the direction
of history and that, in its study, we must take into account this priority
over juridical and organizational aspects (otherwise we run the risk of
confusing the concept with entirely different ones, like absolutism,
dictatorship, personal state, Eastern despotism, possibly theocratic
regime, etc.); that we must not associate totalitarianism, as people usu-
ally do, with the idea of extermination camps and so on, even though
one is easily led to this association by remembering Hitler and Stalin;
that in principle it can realize itself while formally preserving democratic
institutions; that the true point on which it cannot not be intransigent
is the ethics I mentioned. This intransigence implies: (a) suppressing
individual freedom to dissent, at least to the extent that it affects practice
(evidently such suppression can also be achieved in a non-explicitly
violent form, via a practically unconditional domination of the press
and of education, perhaps keeping open the possibility of “dialogue”
with a form of opposition set up in advance for defeat); (b) the persecu-
tion, which may well be bloodless, of authentic religious thought. This
persecution may go together with broad tolerance of popular forms of
worship, or with explicit support for groups of Catholic modernists or
progressives who take up the task of defending the new ethics of the
“direction of history.” Based on these observations, we can explain
the Communist thesis about the plurality of ways.

***
 I. The Concept of Atheism 129

The inseparability of philosophy and political action in Marxism has

led me to this discussion, which only apparently moves away from phi-
losophy. Clearly, this very quick treatment has no intention of replacing
a rigorous study. All I need to say is the following: the most widely
accepted assessments identify in the history of Communism a breaking
process between the revolutionary (as unity of the philosopher and the
politician) and the pure politician (for whom every idea reduces to an
instrument for power), and this cannot but represent, from the stand-
point of rigorous Marxism, a process of deterioration. Is this process
necessary? This question could not be answered even by the most rigor-
ous collection of historical data. It must take a different form: whether
there is already at the onset of Marxism an insuperable contradiction,
of which the historical process is the manifestation.
It is easy enough to characterize this contradiction, if we apply to it
the methods of investigation that Max Weber used for Calvinism. Let
us not ask ourselves now whether Weber’s thought is intentionally
directed at inverting the Marxist perspective since I do not possess the
necessary expertise to answer this question.116 Let us just recall his thesis
that Calvinist theology and ethics are the basis upon which capitalism
built itself (for a Marxist, evidently, Calvinism would be only one among
the possible ideologies of the budding capitalist class). Analogously, we
ought to say that Communism is the coming to reality of classic German
philosophy in the aspect that is new and specific, in the sense of being
irreconcilable with tradition.
Let us consider the list of reasons that persuade us that this argument
is possible. First of all, the ambiguity of the way in which Marxist doctrine
presents itself historically. Whereas, from one perspective, it cannot but
present itself as the self-awareness reached by the proletarian class about
itself and its historical mission, from another perspective it poses as the
endpoint of classical German philosophy and, thereby, as the end result
of the entire process of thought. Recall Engels’s sentence that the pro-
letariat is the heir of classical German philosophy. It means that, since
classical German philosophy is the result of all previous philosophies,

116 The idea that Weber’s thought is the essential antithesis of Marxism is advo-
cated by Gurvitch, Le concept de classes sociales de Marx à nos jours (Paris: CDU, 1954).
The opposite idea is advocated by Pietro Rossi, Lo storicismo tedesco (Turin: Einaudi,
1956). I confess that I incline towards the former.
130 The Problem of Atheism

the proletariat is the heir of everything positive and progressive that

has been realized in the history of the world. The proletarian revolution
is the result of philosophy that has reached its fulfilment.
Are these two perspectives unifiable? This is a problem that Marxist
theoreticians have always avoided, reasoning as if they were effectively
unified; as if the coincidence between the conclusion of modern phi-
losophy and the self-awareness reached by the proletariat was obvious,
and one should not even ask the question whether this proletariat,
defined by a philosophical route, may be an ideal proletariat different
from the real proletariat, and whether the break between the ideal and
the real – which was the objection raised against Hegel, as a fundamental
contradiction – does not reoccur within Marxism.
Now, it is extremely curious that this unification seems to lie within
the realm of possibility for every philosophy except the Marxist. Indeed,
the thesis of historical materialism sets up a distinction between con-
scious thought and real forces. Supposedly, ideologies can only be
understood starting from their “secret history,” from the economic
conditions that explain all political and spiritual histories. Now, attempts
at explaining, for example, the philosophy of Descartes by the fact that
Descartes was a member of the Third Estate, or English empiricism by
the development of the bourgeoisie, are certainly possible, whatever
their value may be. On the contrary, not even the attempt is possible
for Marxism: its thought cannot be explained by “Marx the proletarian”
rather than, from the standpoint of logic, by Marx the Hegelian phi-
losopher who intends to push the doctrine of his teacher to the farthest
consequences and therefore is forced to turn it upside down. If we take
the perspective of secret history, we are forced to think of a renewal of
Hebrew prophetism, entirely secularized after Hegelianism.117 This is
why people have correctly pointed out that Marxism did not generalize
itself and that it used the critique of ideologies as an accusatory weapon.
It is easy to spot the mark of this contradiction in a famous passage
from the Manifesto: “Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the
decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling
class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent,
glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift,

117 See Löwith, Meaning in History, 45–6. However, I have already said how much
I disagree with this thesis. I believe that the perspective of the secret history is in fact
inapplicable.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 131

and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its
hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility
went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes
over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois
ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending
theoretically the historical movement as a whole.” This shows that Marx
was unable to achieve an explanation of the historical process through
the dichotomy of classes, and he was unable to do so precisely in rela-
tion to the contradiction I pointed out above: it is impossible to explain
his own doctrine through historical materialism.
It matters little that this group is not numerous. What matters is that,
by Marx’s own admission, there exist particular individuals who are not
assigned to be part of a particular class by an objective condition but
who have, by reason of their culture, the faculty to choose; and who, as
a consequence, cannot but present themselves as guides with respect
to the class they have chosen. The adhesion to the proletarian class by
the group of the intellectuals cannot be assimilated to that by the impov-
erished petty bourgeoisie. Granted, according to Marx, the proletariat
is recruited from all classes of the population, but the collaboration
of the intellectuals seems to be indispensable for the very formation of
the class if, as we have seen, the engine of the revolutions is the self-
awareness that the proletariat acquires about itself. Discussing the dis-
tinction in the second chapter between proletarians and Communists,
an old commentator of the Manifesto, Andler, developed an ingenious
interpretation of a Leibnizian kind: as if the proletarians represented
obscure and confused knowledge, and the Communists clear and dis-
tinct knowledge. Then, it is precisely the task of the intellectuals to bring
to actuality what is virtual in that obscure and confused knowledge, thus
creating the proletarian class.
In the final analysis, according to Marx, the particular group of the
intellectuals and the ideologists – who know, by a purely philosophical
investigation, the direction of history as a whole – superimposes itself
on the two classes of the capitalists and the proletarians. In this respect,
we can say that in Marx there is still the distinction, which is classical in
rationalism (and, in it, inevitable) between the philosopher and the
common people. The difference is that the philosophers of the previous
age sought an alliance with the princes against the invincibly supersti-
tious and ignorant commoners; conversely, Marx seeks an alliance
with the proletariat against the ruling classes. So, how could this
132 The Problem of Atheism

contradiction seem irrelevant to Marx? Here again we must refer to the

typical convictions of Hegelian philosophers: they thought they had
reached the fullness of time and that their thought represented the
ripe final fruit of the centuries-long process of philosophy. Because of
this certainty of possessing the absolute truth, it was easy for Marx to
think of a direct communication between his thought and that of the
proletariat, in the sense that his thought would have the function of
giving an account of the revolution that the proletariat – which thinks
according to true categories by virtue of its situation – must carry out
by the internal necessity of history. Basically, in vetero-Marxism the
contradiction could be, if not actually overcome, at least concealed by
making recourse to the theological and deterministic formulation of
the philosophy of history, which makes it vulnerable to the critique
coming from historicism. In relation to this, just as it has been said that
Hegel thought of himself as the secretary of the Absolute, we could
analogously say that Marx thought of himself as the secretary of the
Proletariat in its role as cosmic Mediator and Redeemer. In relation to
this, “Communists” (the intellectuals) have, according to the Manifesto,
the function of accompanying as “clear awareness” a necessary move-
ment of history. In other words, in old Marxism, precisely because it
was thought in the old sense of the philosophy of history, the social
prevails over the political.
Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? (1902) marks, by way of contrast, the birth
of the Communist party (or of the new idea of the party) and of totali-
tarianism. The usual interpretation of Marxism gets completely inverted,
in the sense that its sociology is entirely subordinated to its philosophy
(and, consequently, the “social” to the “political”), and that this philoso-
phy is made completely independent of any origin in social class. What
the proletariat is, is determined by the awareness of philosophers, which
is no longer the “reflection” of the social situation. As for the proletariat,
it must conform to the idea that philosophers have created of it. Left to
its own devices, the proletariat is in a state of moral apathy.

We said that there could not yet be Social-Democratic consciousness among the
workers. This consciousness could only be brought to them from without.
The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its
own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., it may itself
realize the necessity for combining in unions, for fighting against the em-
ployers and for striving to compel the government to pass necessary labour
 I. The Concept of Atheism 133

legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosoph-
ic, historical, and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated
representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals. According to their
social status, the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels,
themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. Similarly, in Russia, the
theoretical doctrine of Social-Democracy arose quite independently of
the spontaneous growth of the labour movement; it arose as a natural and
inevitable outcome of the development of ideas among the revolutionary
Socialist intelligentsia … There is a lot of talk about spontaneity, but the
spontaneous development of the labour movement leads to its becoming sub-
ordinated to the bourgeois ideology, leads to its developing according to the pro-
gram of the Credo, for the spontaneous labour movement is pure and simple
trade unionism, is Nur-Gewerkschaftlerei, and trade unionism means the ideo-
logical enslavement of the workers to the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the
task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the labour move-
ment from its spontaneous, trade unionist striving to go under the wing of
the bourgeoisie … Class political consciousness can be brought to the work-
ers only from without, that is, only outside of the economic struggle, outside of
the sphere of relations between workers and employers … To bring political
knowledge to the workers the Social-Democrats must go among all classes of the
population; must dispatch units of their army in all directions.118

These texts are well known but seldom well understood. Should we view
them as the confession on Lenin’s part of reducing Marxism to an ideo-
logical tool? I think this is true, in the sense of transitioning from the
man of truth to the man of ideological myths, in the political and mod-
ern sense I described. But the fact remains that Lenin rediscovered –
albeit in the different disposition that the revolutionary antecedes the
philosopher – the revolutionary spirit of original Marxism and that this
rediscovery could not happen in any other way.
People have often described it as Blanquism, as Sorelism (i.e., as
adopting the Fascist principle of élites, incompatible with Marxism),
as Bakuninism, as the inclusion of Marxism in a Russian revolutionary
tradition foreign to it. We know that these are the typical Social
Democratic criticisms. What is true in them is that Lenin developed to
the ultimate consequences the critique of revisionism that Sorel had

118 Lenin, Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House,
1946), 170, 177, 204.
134 The Problem of Atheism

started, without stopping, however, at a position that was still idealistic

but, rather, rediscovering the philosophy of young Marx and its relation-
ship with Hegel. So that in the years 1914–15 he prepared for action
by taking notes in his Philosophical Notebooks on Hegel’s Science of Logic.
And what is also true is that his Marxism is Marxism after Bakunin, unlike
the Social Democratic Marxism against Bakunin. In other words, his
Marxism is linked with the criticism of religion in Germany as it had
developed around 1840, not separated from it. The essential thing is
that he rediscovered the genuine formative process of Marx’s thought
and, in it, the precedence of the idea of the revolutionary philosopher
over the idea of class, with the consequence that the proletarian class
does not formally preexist the action of the revolutionary philosopher.

[What is needed is] the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of
civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolu-
tion of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal
suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong
generally, is perpetuated against it … a sphere, finally, which cannot emanci-
pate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and
thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the
complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-
winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the prole-
tariat … The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat.
Philosophy cannot realize itself without transcending the proletariat, and the
proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization of philosophy.119

What must be noticed here is that this definition, which already contains
all the essential characters of his concept of the proletariat, was formu-
lated by Marx completely a priori, that is, before any verification of the
empirical reality of its object. Therefore, it is not a sociological observa-
tion of facts – in the sense that sociology strives to set aside all value

119 See A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843). Regarding
the precedence and the determining function of the philosophical moment in the
formation of the Marxist theory of social classes, see my essay “Classi sociali e dottrina
marxista,” in Atti della XXXI Settimana Sociale dei cattolici d’Italia (Rome: Edizioni
Settimane Sociali, 1959). The treatment of the same topic in Fr Fessard’s subsequent
work De l’actualité historique (2:303–24 and passim) perfectly confirms my thesis [TN:
in the available English translations of this text by Marx “transcendence” is used for
aufhebung, which I normally translate as “sublation”].
 I. The Concept of Atheism 135

judgments, at least to the extent that they are conscious – but a direct
derivation from his purely philosophical critique of Hegel.
That is to say, in Marx there is an aspect that clearly derives from
Hegel (in the sense, as I have said, of reaffirming Hegel against his
critics), which leads to the primacy of praxis, to man as the creator of
his own history, to the new task of the philosopher, no longer to interpret
the world but to change it. And there is the objectivization of this position
within the deterministic vision of the philosophy of history typical of the nineteenth
century. Hence the materialistic affirmation of the primacy of economic
life, the thesis that Communism is the result of the inevitable history of
production, the thesis of the determining power of the infrastructure
(i.e., the forms of production that correspond to social relationships),
of which the superstructure, ideologies, are the reflection.
Now, it was inevitable that, during the further development of socialist
thought, the two positions would break apart and that both of them
would give up on the original hope in the outcome of the Revolution.
Thus, Lenin pushes to the ultimate consequences the idea that the
Communist Party (which for him is a philosophical reality) is the point of
arrival of classical German philosophy. Moreover, if we consider the
rigorous development of the themes of his thought, we can observe
that they verify completely the thesis I stated earlier: the philosophy of
history can preserve its revolutionary meaning, but only on the condi-
tion of affirming the primacy of action and breaking away from the
deterministic conception.
This line of development did, indeed, bring about a revolution, which,
however, came to fruition in a diametrically opposite form to that pre-
dicted by its prophet; and which not only came but had to come to frui-
tion in this form, by an internal necessity. It started, as has been repeated
a million times, not where bourgeois capitalism had reached its highest
degree but in Russia, where it was just at the beginning; and the Industrial
Revolution followed, did not cause, the political revolution. Instead of
unifying the world, it forced a recourse to what seem old categories
of the philosophy of history – East and West.
Did it succeed in the East simply because it found strength in under-
developed countries, or is there a deeper reason? To cite the most
authoritative historian of the idea of Europe, de Rougemont,120 the

120 Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1983), 69–71.
136 The Problem of Atheism

Eastern spirit is marked by the conception that finite individuality is

evil and by the consequent aspiration to total fusion with the divine.
Conversely, Western spirituality has been shaped by Christianity, which,
by insisting on the infinite qualitative difference between creator and
creature, makes it possible to speak of communion but not of substan-
tial union; which, moreover, with the concept of creation denies that
the root of evil lies in creatural finitude. Certainly, it seems that an
abyss separates the gnostic and neo-Platonic dissolution into the One
from the Marxist struggle for a classless society; and it is indeed the
abyss between a conception of spirituality as return and the greatest
openness to the future. We must ask ourselves, however, whether this
may not be an opposition inside a common essence since the overall
formula we can use to grasp the philosophical as well as political
essence of Marxism is its effort to realize the dialectics that affirms
the historical and mortal character of every reality and every truth.
Marxism, that is, has allowed the Eastern spirit to take its revenge
on the West because it has enabled it to appropriate the direction
towards the future (and with it activity, technical work) but, at the
same time, without giving up the conception of the negativity of the
finite. Marxism has been the mediating element between two positions
that traditionally seemed to be opposed – the conception of the nega-
tivity of the finite and the technical spirit. Based on the rare passages
in which Marx sketches a description of realized Communism, we can
see that he is thinking of a transformation of human nature such that
it becomes intrinsically social, of a sort of absorption of individual
consciousness into social consciousness. Given the new relations of
production, consciousness is the theoretical form of that of which the
real community is the living image. It would be interesting to study
the symmetry between this conception and the ancient conception of
absorption into the One. Thus, the final outcome of the revolutionary
spirit seems to be, because of the philosophy immanent in it, the inver-
sion of the movement of history, no longer from the West towards
the East but from the East towards the West. Even though in its
Eastern success Marxism cannot but sacrifice other aspects of
the Eastern spirit – that is, the contemplative values (and it is precisely
by aiming at the salvation of these values that the West today can take
a non-colonialist political approach to the East).
This complete contradiction of the promise (in Marx re-emerges the
prophetic spirit, in the sense I have mentioned, and “a prophet is a man
 I. The Concept of Atheism 137

who promises”) by the historical result is the object the five fundamental
criticisms to which all others that are generally made against Communism
as a political reality can be traced back. All of them originated from
Trotsky, even though Trotsky was not able to draw the ultimate conse-
quences and ran in a circle of contradictions from the beginning (1927)
to the end of his polemic. According to the first criticism, already at the
beginning of Communism in our century there was an inversion of the
relationship established by Marx between class and party. Therefore,
the dictatorship of the proletariat that Marx thought was necessary
for the revolutionary leap has been perverted. It was supposed to be
the first historical example of a dictatorship of the majority over the
minority because history, until today, has allegedly been a sequence of
dictatorships of minorities over majorities. It became realized, instead,
as a dictatorship of the party (i.e., of the minority made up of profes-
sional revolutionaries) over the proletariat. However, is this not the
necessary consequence of Lenin’s rediscovery of and faithfulness to
original Marxism, meaning not to the letter of the doctrine after 1848
but to its genetic process?
Then, in the period after the revolutionary struggle, a new techno-
bureaucratic class formed, based on the party, which is fundamentally
different from the bureaucratic layer in a non-Communist state because,
in a non-Communist state, bureaucrats depend on political power,
whereas in Communism they have nobody above them. Thus they
constitute a class that concentrates all power within itself, finding no
external constraints precisely because property has been collectivized.
This class is more oppressive than any other that established itself in
history because no moral limits restrain it from any form of abuse against
its subjects since the mirage of the future “classless society” serves as a
practical justification to use any means, even those that consist in deny-
ing the value of the individual personality. However, must not the phe-
nomenon necessarily take place as soon as the revolutionary impetus
is succeeded by regime consolidation? To explain it, we only have to
think of the typology of the lions and the foxes, as Pareto drew it. When
within a ruling class it happens that only foxes are called to join it, while
lions are rejected (Stalin’s victory over Trotsky) – which is inevitable in
a period when the revolutionary impetus comes to a forced and neces-
sary halt – the dominance of the instinct for combinations is inevitable,
so that the governing class focuses on the present and cares less about
the future: so-called Stalinist and post-Stalinist realism.
138 The Problem of Atheism

But given this dominance of the present, what is going to be the fate
of the philosophy on which this ruling class is founded if, like that of
Marx, it is future-oriented? Simply to be entirely reduced to ideology
as instrument of power, a reduction that must take the form of the
scholastics I already mentioned. Correlatively, what according to Marx
was alienation in the beyond is replaced by alienation in the future, in which
the critique that Marx had formulated against transcendent religion
gets exactly inverted, thus becoming fully rigorous.
In close correspondence, the meaning of human emancipation is
also inverted. With the complete reduction of philosophy to ideology –
that is, with the disappearance of the idea of truth vis-à-vis the spirit of
power – ideas (including that of human emancipation) are reduced to
instruments to be used as purely material devices. The affective motive
powers are regarded and handled like things, in a technicist mindset,
by Marxist leaders, who can speculate on them like the “barons” of the
capitalist market speculate on commodities. Thus, we reach “a complete
disregard of the difference between material reality and human reality.”
In the consequent reduction of man himself to capital we have the
maximum extension of the capitalist spirit.
The replacement of struggles between nations with class struggles
has not been realized. On the contrary, the class-based party has brought
about the resurgence of Islamic-type imperialism, whereby “Islam” I
mean the union, aimed at conquest, of a religion and a people, such
that the leaders of that people strive to dominate, through that religion,
beyond its borders.121
On the other side, however, there is Marx according to whom ideolo-
gies can be explained based on economic reality and social relations.
There is Marx the creator of the “sociology of knowledge,” and this idea
of his cannot but apply to Marxism as well. There is, therefore, the
objectivization of Marxism into sociology. Next to revolutionary Marxism
there is, thus, its continuation into absolute relativism – that is, into the
most complete negation of the revolutionary spirit. By such negation,

121 I present the last two criticisms in the form Monnerot gives them in Sociologie
du Communisme, which is the source also of the sentence in quotation marks (11)
[Sociology of Communism, 11n1]. However, they match exactly aspects of Trotsky’s criti-
cisms of Stalinism.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 139

it is forced to identify the current social system with society itself;122 and
also, due to the negation that any values are absolute, to break with
liberalism and with Christianity. It is also forced to elevate to a value,
de facto, a technical instrument, democracy, with all the criticisms that
this elevation implies: that by being democratic it is progressive but only
because it is conservative, and so on.
So, the historical result of Marxism is, on the one side, Communist
reality, in the way it has become realized, and, on the other, the affluent
society, in a non-dialectic form of opposition.
From the standpoint of mere observation the data of the crisis seem
to be the following:

1. In a certain sense, Marxism has already completely won, but only by

negating itself most totally. Therefore, instead of speaking of the truth
of Marxism, we must speak of its power of negativity, with respect to
the positions it intended to surpass and sublate.
2. Therefore Marxism concludes with an insuperable contradiction
precisely because of this power of negativity. Every attempt at sur-
passing or sublating it by the positions it criticized, which means
all secular modern positions – since it formed within a vision of the
course of history provided by Hegelianism, even though it has been
naturally led to invert it – is impossible.123 Just as, on the other hand,
it is impossible from the perspective of religious thought, because
what can it mean, from that perspective, to sublate radical atheism
as essence and not as accident? Can it be surpassed within Marxism
itself? The Marxist intellectuals who must be taken seriously today
(e.g., Bloch, Goldmann) must highlight the aspect of faith and
hope, regarding the Stalinist and post-Stalinist moments as episodic.
So, they have to move from Lenin’s encounter with pragmatism to

122 See essay IV.

123 It is impossible also from the standpoint of the two philosophies that Marxism
did not expect within the horizon of German philosophy: that of Kierkegaard and
that of Nietzsche (we already talked about the latter). This is the case because pure
Kierkegaardism, unless it is developed in the direction of a reconciliation with tradi-
tion, splits into the two opposite positions of Shestov and Heidegger, with the neces-
sary victory of the latter, whose philosophy is also, in a certain sense, a Nietzschean
re-comprehension of Kierkegaard.
140 The Problem of Atheism

an encounter with the religious philosophy of choice and meet,

at the endpoint, Pascal’s pari. Thus, they represent the beginning
of Marxism’s radical self-criticism. What the conclusion of this
self-criticism might be is the question raised in this book.
3. But at the same time, because of this victory, there is the tragic
situation of Christianity today, such as has never happened before:
it is in a vise between two opposite types of society, which share a
common origin, neither one of which is Christianizable.
4. A parallel situation holds for liberalism, which cannot reaffirm itself
except by a total revision.

***

If the second Social Democratic crisis of Marxism means accepting the

values of the affluent society, and if the affluent society is characterized
by “natural irreligion,” by the “loss of the sacred,” by the rejection of
the dimension of tradition and of the past because all values have been
determined to be relative to specific historical situations (essay IV), it
follows that the choice that the success of atheism places in front of us
is no longer between “socialism and barbarism.” Man, who has lost the
dimension of the past and also that of the future because of the collapse
of the revolutionary ideal, reduces to mens momentanea: today is the time
when the moral disappearance of man is possible, when man can fall
back to the animal level. The alternative takes a completely different
sense from the one that had initially been proposed: it becomes “either
moral suicide or cosmic suicide.”

12. The Nietzsche Problem

This is where we face the Nietzsche problem. Should it not take centre
stage in a study of atheism? It seems it should because, in him, the bibli-
cal accent that remained in Marx is entirely and consciously erased.
What else does the theory of the eternal return mean, if not the destruc-
tion of the Judeo-Christian element that still informs with itself, in secu-
larized form, the nineteenth-century visions of history that describe the
process from Fall to final redemption? In this sense, his position is
Marx’s exact antithesis and the affirmation, against universal equality,
of the ideal of the Master counterposed to the Slave. The Superman is
he who is capable of accepting the idea of eternal return and of willing
 I. The Concept of Atheism 141

it, of thus saying yes to being. Nietzsche did not know Marx, but in one
of his letters he talks about “those stupid blunders à la Feuerbach.”124
There is certainly no doubt that he intentionally tried to realize the
most radical form of atheism.125 Nonetheless, it is also true that today
he is not generally perceived as an atheist. Is it not significant that the
works by philosophers who in a certain sense continue his work, Jaspers
and Heidegger,126 give his atheism very little space?
We can say that Nietzsche’s place in a religious perspective is strictly
symmetrical to Pascal’s place in a secular one. There is a “Pascal des
incroyants” from Saint-Beuve to Brunschvicg and Goldmann: Pascal
allegedly destroyed for good the previous and subsequent positions of
“Christian” philosophy and politics, even though he remained a
Christian because of his faith in Sacred History, and even though he
intended to live Christianity in its absolute purity. Likewise, Nietzsche
allegedly provided the elements for a rigorous critique of the rationalist
positions, even though he remained an atheist because of his faith in
the sciences of history – such as they had organized themselves in the
1800s – or in science in general, and even though he intended to live
atheism in its purity.
This parallel must be extended: just like the (questionable) judgment
that Pascal’s thought represents the tragic moment of the Christian

124 In a letter to Indianist and Schopenhauerian philosopher Paul Deussen, cit-

ed by De Lubac, Drama, 42n74.
125 Löwith, “Il ‘Discorso della montagna’ anticristiano di Nietzsche.”
126 For Jaspers, see the short book Nietzsche et le Christianisme (Paris: Les Éditions
de Minuit, 1949), in which Nietzsche is presented as “a man who seeks God without
understanding himself any longer.” See also the older, much longer work Nietzsche
(Paris: Gallimard, 1950) in which he discusses Nietzsche’s self-destruction of his inter-
pretation of the world as pure immanence. For Heidegger, see the (certainly para-
doxical) sentence cited by Löwith in “Il ‘Discorso della montagna’ anticristiano di
Nietzsche” (112), which says that Nietzsche was “the only believer of the nineteenth
century.” We must also remember how frequent Nietzschean themes occur in the
works of Enrico Castelli. When he dedicated the issue of Archivio di filosofia for Pascal’s
centenary to Pascal and Nietzsche his intention was certainly not to set them in opposi-
tion (see the introduction). Adolfo Muñoz Alonso has pointed out very correctly (in Il
problema dell’ateismo, Atti del XVI Convegno di Gallarate [Brescia: Morcelliana, 1962]) that
Nietzsche’s influence on today’s atheism is almost nil. What is widespread is the idea,
which goes back to Scheler, that his thought is a starting point to rediscover values in
their authenticity, and Heidegger’s idea that Nietzsche was a victim of the long error of
Western thought while at the same time he pushed it to its ultimate consequences.
142 The Problem of Atheism

vision does not mean that it can be directly continued in atheistic form,
so the (unquestionable) fact that Nietzsche’s thought represents the
critical crisis of atheism does not mean that it can be Christianized.
Let us now restrict ourselves to two brief observations, one on the
nature of the opposition between the thought of Nietzsche and that of
Marx,127 and one on the possibility or not of its development in a reli-
gious direction.
On the first point: Can we trace the opposition between Nazism and
Communism back to the opposition between his thought and that of
Marx, which is completely unbridgeable? It is certainly hard to think
that Nietzsche would have recognized himself in Hitler. However, one
faces a similar difficulty juxtaposing Marx and Stalin since Stalin rep-
resents the precise inversion of Marx’s position, and the process of
deterioration has continued. Nor is there any reason to rule out that
the heterogenesis of ends can also apply to Nietzschean atheism.
If we use, as people have done so often,128 Hegel’s text of the Master
and the Slave as a guide to illuminate the opposition between racism and
Communism, it is easy to propose, and to support with texts, the idea
that Nietzsche was a theoretician of the seigneurial society since he
denied at once socialism, democracy, and Christianity (to him the abrupt
end of the Renaissance due to Luther, the decline of the French aris-
tocracy, the French Revolution, political democracy, and socialism are
all new forms of the “Christian epidemics”). Moreover, we cannot com-
pletely set aside, in the literature on Nietzsche, Alfred Baumler’s book,129
which was published in 1931, at a time when Nazism could delude even
serious intellectuals, as in fact happened, and nobody was able to predict
the horrors down the road.
However, we must also remark that the relationship was of a com-
pletely different nature than that between Marxism and Communism.
Let us recall what I have already said about the Nazi effort to free
German culture, in order to preserve the idea of Germany’s primacy,

127 On this point, and against the Enlightenment-oriented interpretations of

Nietzsche à la Kaufmann, the remarks by Lukàcs in The Destruction of Reason are rigor-
ously correct.
128 See G. Fessard, De l’actualité, 1:130–52. Father Fessard has written the most
interesting things on this topic, a true philosophical introduction to a deeper study of
the problem.
129 Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker (Leipzig: Reclam, 1931).
 I. The Concept of Atheism 143

from what in it had led to Marxism – the condemnations of Christianity

and of the pessimism that hampers the cult of action being consequences
of that first condemnation. In this situation, the encounter with
Nietzsche seemed necessary, but its nature is precisely what shows
that Nietzsche cannot be entirely reduced to the function of precursor
of Nazism. Explaining Nazism with Nietzsche instead of explaining it
as a backlash against Stalinism is, at least from one angle, complete
nonsense.130 The very way in which Marx is related to Communism and
Nietzsche to Nazism is another proof of their complete opposition, even
though it is still true that Nietzsche cannot avoid the encounter, and so
one cannot discuss Nazism without talking about Nietzsche. As mythical
as the Nazi ideologies may have been, they could not but use a language
derived from Nietzsche.
Still, his thought is more than just an anticipation of Nazism. This is
why in contrast to Lukàcs’s Nietzsche there is Heidegger’s Nietzsche,
the prophet of our time as the final stage of the “forgetfulness of being,”
of the consequent full unfolding of the will to power and of its expres-
sion in the technical age. He is the interpreter of a crisis that cannot
be solved by merely political means, and even less by sociological or
psychological therapies. According to Goldmann,131 Sein und Zeit is
largely a discussion in implicit form, and in opposition, of Lukàcs’s
Geschichte und Klassenbewusstein – namely, a metaphysical opposition to
Lukàcs’s historicism, having in mind the same situation of man. This
assertion, which I did not check out, seems to contain an element of
truth. Anyway, Heidegger’s recent Nietzsche is the exact counterpoint to
Lukàcs’s Nietzsche, even though, obviously, he could not know it
(Heidegger’s texts date back to 1936–46, while Lukàcs’s work was pub-
lished in 1954). And we must say that it marks Heidegger’s victory over
Lukàcs. The major cultural outcome of Nazism has been to separate
Nietzsche the guide for action from Nietzsche the prophet; and the
latter is not swept away at all by the collapse in which the former is
undoubtedly involved.
Next, let us tackle the question whether a religious development of
Nietzsche’s thought is possible. Clearly, a priori, my answer can only be

130 This is the real, very serious flaw of Lukács’s book, from which the tenden-
tiousness of the whole work derives.
131 La Communauté humaine et l’Univers chez Kant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1950), xxi.
144 The Problem of Atheism

negative. This simply because atheism, in the proper sense, is the ter-
minal, no longer surpassable, point of a line of thought that must be
judged at its roots. In reference to Nietzsche we can speak of a tragic
crisis of atheism, in the sense that a total negation of Christianity, without
preserving anything – the quest, in other words, for anti-Christianity
with no longer even a single heretical aspect – means negation not only
of atheism but also of religiosity, and concludes in a position that is no
longer livable and, thus, in madness. This suffering – which is inherent
to atheism developed to its extreme consequences, to the denial of
religiosity as a human surrogate of transcendent religion – is what has
often led people to think of a possible inversion of Nietzsche’s thought
into “authentic” Christianity. But the conditions for this inversion are
completely lacking. If we wish to indulge the taste for slightly baroque
analogies, since Goldmann has talked, incorrectly, about a tragic crisis
of religious thought taking place in Pascal, we should say, by analogy,
that Marx is the St Thomas of atheism and Nietzsche is its Pascal. But
we should not insist on these parallels.
Rather, let us observe that the same considerations that people use
to try and water down Nietzsche’s atheism are by necessity exactly those
that are used to water down Marx’s atheism. Namely: the God he
fought is the false God of philosophers; the Christianity he targeted
is decayed Christianity; in the course of his unconscious quest to restore
authentic Christianity he was misled by Schopenhauer, just as Marx was
supposedly misled by Hegel. We are back at the reduction of atheism
to a critique of the philosophical God and at the subsequent positive
assessment of atheism as a process towards the religious God.
Furthermore, one can point out that, whereas Marx discovered atheism
in the act of opening Hegel’s philosophy to the future, for Nietzsche
atheism is, instead, something he “observed” by considering the spiritual
life of his time. We can say that a certain interpretation, which he did
not call into question, of the development of thought led him to declare
the “death of God” because the God such culture talked about was no
longer the religious God. Moreover, the “tragic” character of his thought
can only be explained by the antithesis between the truth-seeker and
the theoretician of the pseudo-religion of Life, of the reduction of truth
to creation of values. He did not live his own reduction of truth to myth:
nobody embodied the type of the seeker of a truth that cannot be
reduced to myth more than he did.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 145

In order to show that the religious reinterpretation of Nietzsche is

delusional, we have available a definitive, rigorously conducted experi-
ence. Thus, it is just a matter of illustrating its failure. Let me give at
least a first sketch.
I am talking about Lev Shestov’s philosophy. The author of the best
among the histories of Russian philosophy, Zenkovsky,132 characterizes
its meaning most exactly: “he is the only philosopher in the world who
picked up again Nietzsche’s essential theme and unearthed its religious
meaning,” helped by the equally strong influence of Dostoevsky. He
sought to be the only “Christian philosopher of the modern age” who
tried to build a philosophy based on revelation. He waged an implacable
war against the “secularist system,” the irreligious and anti-religious
philosophy of our time. The task he proposed to himself was to free
religious thought from all the infiltrations of rationalist thought that
have befallen religious philosophy over the centuries. Therefore
Zenkovsky views him as the greatest Russian philosopher of our century,
in the sense of being the most significant continuer of Solovev’s direc-
tion. And I truly think we can say that his thought represents the end
point of the line that, by appealing (in Solovev) to the second Schelling,
going through an extension of his anti-Hegelianism in a religious direc-
tion encountered Dostoevsky. Except that Shestov substituted Nietzsche
for Schelling. Because of this substitution the anti-Hegelianism of
Russian thought takes the form of a philosophy of existence. Here we
must point out something that has gone largely unnoticed – namely,
that in the philosophy of the Russian emigration we find the first chapter
of the philosophy of existence. The renaissance of Dostoevsky preceded
in time that of Kierkegaard. It is very important to investigate the reasons
it was defeated and today is almost forgotten.
Investigating these origins of the philosophy of existence sheds more
light on its character, including with regard to its relationship with
Marxism. On this topic, we ought to consider something that I do not
think has ever been noticed – namely, the curious parallel, by antithesis,
between the thought of Shestov and that of Lenin. Both are very hostile
to “backward looking” philosophy, speculative philosophy. “Philosophy

132 Histoire de la philosophie russe, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 337–50.

146 The Problem of Atheism

is not Besinnen but struggle.”133 But what Shestov looks forward to is the
retrieval, erasing faith in reason, of Edenic freedom. Lenin also looks
forward to liberation from evil but through the revolution, as, at the
same time, a historical and a philosophical fact. In Russian thought,
from Solovev onward, a decisive battle took place in the war between
Hegel and the anti-Hegelian tradition, from Schelling to Dostoevsky,
ultimately also including Nietzsche, but in the end the winner was Hegel.
We also ought to highlight the radical antithesis between Shestov and
the first Russian philosopher who received some attention in the West –
Spir. Spir viewed God in terms of his moral attributes, regarded as con-
tradictory to his “physical” attributes. Hence his dualism between God
the redeemer and God the creator, the dualism that found its definitive
final formulation, as I have already said, in Martinetti. In Shestov, on the
contrary, God is viewed in the aspect of power and arbitrary will, sacrific-
ing, in the final analysis, his moral attributes. This, however, makes sense
as a reaffirmation of the God “of miracles” against the God “subjected
to order” of Martinetti’s religious rationalism.134 Above all, it makes
sense as an explication of the connection between the affirmation of
the reality of the individual and that of the supernatural.
The problem of the possible religious development of Nietzsche
finds its necessary form in the relationship Nietzsche-Dostoevsky. Of
these two typical brothers-enemies, as Fr De Lubac correctly calls them,
recalling the very effective sentence by Daniel Halévy, “each of the two
men loves what the other loves not, but each of them detests what the
other detests.”135
Now, Shestov wants to reconcile them through a radical develop-
ment of the anti-rationalism of both: the critique of rationalism by
Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man” and Nietzschean irrationalism.
By doing so he identifies the critique of rationalism with irrationalism,
thus interpreting “reason” in the sense it takes in rationalism. Nietzsche
is not seen in his effective historical situation as a thinker who sets

133 See Shestov’s major work, Athènes et Jérusalem (Paris: Vrin, 1938), 462–5 [TN:
Athens and Jerusalem (Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 1966), 440–3. The quote is
on page 443, which is also the last in the book].
134 See his essay “Ragione e fede” of 1934, the theoretical premise of Gesù Cristo
e il Cristianesimo, republished in Ragione e Fede, saggi religiosi (Turin: Einaudi, 1942).
135 D. Halévy, Nietzsche (Paris: Grasset, 1944), 457, cited by De Lubac, Drama,
285n3.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 147

himself in opposition to Schopenhauer by rigorously explicating the

latter’s aspect of novelty; rather, he is made to engage in dialogue only
with Dostoevsky, so that he appears to be a thinker who lacked the
courage to take the final step that his thought would have required.
However, the result confirms perfectly the perspective I expressed
above: it is a mind-blowing re-comprehension of the thought of Dostoevsky in
that of Nietzsche; it demonstrates, in a certain sense, a complete defeat
in front of Nietzsche’s atheism.
Consider, indeed: irrationalism and the critique of rationalism denote
two entirely different essences. There is only one way to try to unify
them, namely, by transforming the critique of rationalism into the nega-
tion of reason; and, as a consequence, by setting in opposition faith and
reason, in an absolute way. Accordingly, Shestov characterizes Nietzsche’s
thought as a sort of metaphysical anarchism: as a revolt against neces-
sary and eternal truths, a revolt that includes not only metaphysics as a
science but also morals. In other words, extending the “critique of
reason,” substituting Dostoevsky’s “critique of reason” for that of Kant,
implies arriving at “beyond good and evil.” In this process Shestov
becomes entirely Nietzsche’s captive, so captive that he even models his
style after Nietzsche’s – hence the very peculiar appearance taken by a
religious philosophy written in Nietzschean language.136 And yet this
sequence of concessions is the obligatory route in order to expunge
what is actually the denouement of Nietzsche’s thought, which, however,
cannot be assimilated in any way by a religious philosophy: the eternal
return, the amor fati. Indeed, if one takes the essence of Nietzsche’s
thought to be the revolt against necessity and the fight against evidence,
then one can view the thesis of the eternal return as the point where
his critique did not go all the way. In the end Nietzsche accepted ratio-
nalism’s classical thesis that freedom lies in recognizing necessity, in
necessity understood; he accepted, that is, the philosophy of “slavery”
against his affirmation of the “morality of the masters,” which, in
Shestov’s metaphysical transposition, means liberation from necessity.
Supposedly, Nietzsche was the only one of the German philosophers
who, having recognized that Socrates exemplifies the fallen man, issued
to modern philosophy a challenge akin to the one that St Augustine

136 Thus, for example, speculative philosophy, which denies the religious God, is
called by him “edifying” philosophy because it leads to justifying and “blessing” as
necessary the horrors of being.
148 The Problem of Atheism

had issued to the world by criticizing the virtue of pagans, and redis-
covered the meaning of Luther’s attack against reason. His anti-
Christianity is explained by the fact that medieval philosophers, and
then the Christian philosophers of the modern era, from Leibniz to
Hegel, surrendered to the concupiscentia irresistibilis of reason. However,
his revolt came to an end: “Luther’s hammer struck more powerfully
and more accurately than Nietzsche’s.” It was Luther who pushed to its
ultimate consequences the revolt against reason, arriving at sola fide.
Nietzsche aimed at the same goal and opened up for us the road to
rediscover Luther. But the seduction of necessity bewitched him again,
and here is his tragedy: he inserted into a philosophy of necessity an
experience of thought that was, on the contrary, “a revolt against
necessity.”137 He failed to distinguish the two dimensions of thought,
that of reason and that of faith.
But let us examine the sequence of contradictions in which Shestov
is forced to entangle himself, which demonstrates precisely that his
religious reinterpretation of Nietzsche has turned into its opposite.
Consider, first of all, his connection to Luther. Luther presupposes
German mysticism: the thesis that the just man lives by faith is the final
stage of this process. That is, his arbitrarism – regardless of the criticisms
that can be made against it, which explain the positive value of the
theology of the Catholic Reformation – reflects an absolute theocen-
trism. Even less is Shestov’s position related to Descartes’s and Pascal’s
so-called theological voluntarism, which is not arbitrarism but the affir-
mation that the divine nature is mysterious. Arbitrarism discovered after
Nietzsche is, instead, entirely different: God becomes the Absurd. One
cannot even say that he exists because then one would immediately lose
him. No apologetics is possible because the only man who can see the
truth is he who seeks it for himself but not for others, and who makes
a solemn vow not to turn his visions into a judgment obligatory for all;
who, that is, does not make truth tangible and instrumentalizable
because by doing so he would confuse the metaphysical dimension with
that of science. Truth reveals itself only to the individual, and, if com-
municated, it becomes part of the omnitudo. Therefore, seeking God

137 For the parallel between Luther and Nietzsche, which is the crucial point of
his thought, see above all the very interesting pages 173–98 of Athènes et Jérusalem [TN:
Athens and Jerusalem, 204–25].
 I. The Concept of Atheism 149

can only mean realizing the thought that “there is no impossible” since
divine freedom is not bound by any necessity.
But, at this point, does not Leibniz’s famous criticism of theological
arbitrarism – the criticism that led him to recognize that its ultimate
outcome is Spinoza, and effectively to break with Luther (which is the
break preserved in classical German philosophy)138 and to discover
the value of the Jesuit theologians – take again its full value? Indeed,
what is the difference between this God deprived of moral attributes
and nature deprived of laws? And what does Shestov’s faith reduce to
if not to will to power, to realizing the thought that there is no impos-
sible? The supernatural notion of miracle is replaced by the Renaissance
notion of natural miracle.
In other words, qualifying God as the Absurd leads to confusing
religion and magical thought. From Shestov’s perspective, the service
to God proper to religion can only be replaced by a use of God not in the
sense of reducing God to a guarantor of science but, rather, in the sense
of magical thought. Within religious thought, criticizing autonomous
morality is certainly legitimate. But actually Shestov criticizes not only
autonomous morality but morality tout court because no morality can
be derived from his form of religion. In his extreme opposition, he
remains completely subordinate to rationalism.
“It is not a matter of describing freedom but of willing it.” What he
opposes is descriptive philosophy because such philosophy loses the
existent. Hence his antithesis to, but at the same time his admiration
for, Husserl because allegedly he confessed that existence is not the
object of philosophy rationalistically understood. However, did Shestov
realize this idea that “for God everything is possible,” this breach of the
“wall of necessity”? Or, at least, does it appear from his work that he
tried to realize it? Being so cut off from practice, what does his philoso-
phy become? Nothing but precisely what it did not intend to be – a
phenomenology of religion. Moreover, a phenomenology of religion

138 Therefore Shestov is right when he points out the break with Luther on the
part of classical German philosophy. The way in which the modern period of German
philosophy is accompanied, at its beginning in Leibniz, by a rediscovery of the positiv-
ity of the Catholic Reformation is a theme worth an in-depth study, even though it has
been discussed by various scholars, albeit generally with an inadequate perception of
its importance.
150 The Problem of Atheism

that does not account for religious forms because it is unable to distin-
guish religion from magic.
The fight against evidence and against necessity takes the appearance
of a cosmic revolt. People have often talked about the Stirnerian ele-
ments in Nietzsche. Now, this transition from Nietzsche to Stirner curi-
ously becomes realized in Shestov’s thought. I already mentioned the
possible transition from Stirner to Kierkegaard, but in Shestov we have
a sort of slide from Kierkegaard to Stirner turned into a religious thinker
but without ceasing to be Stirner. From the historical standpoint, is not
his book on Kierkegaard precisely that? In order to transform religious
thought, he had to give up on evidence, necessity, and morality as
meaningful terms in religious thought and had to relinquish them to
rationalist thought, accepting completely the meaning this latter gives
them. By totally forsaking evidence, he sacrificed communicability; by
totally forsaking necessity, he effectively also sacrificed miracles, giving
them the magic significance that is proper to rationalism. But, even
more, by exalting divine omnipotence he actually ended up limiting it
to a degree that had never occurred in theistic thought. This is because
the Serpent, who, with his advice, was able to change human nature,
enslaving it to necessity, effectively created another nature: he became
as powerful as God.139 If we consider Shestov in his relation to Nietzsche,
we can say that in him we find not a theistic surpassing but somehow
theism inside Nietzschean atheism. If we consider him in relation to
Hegel – in whom, consistently, he must see the unsurpassable endpoint
of rationalism – we find again complete subordination because he totally
accepts the Hegelian history of philosophy. The only difference is that
for him Hegel’s history is the history of false philosophy – that is, the
history of the surrender to the temptation of reason, which in the his-
tory of thought was avoided only in exceptional cases, namely, in the
very thinkers whom Hegelian history cannot include: Tertullian, St Peter
Damian, Luther, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche. But then,
his descriptions of these thinkers do not match the historical realities,
even though on Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky he was able to
make really stimulating comments.

139 This last point has been highlighted very astutely by M.F. Sciacca, La filosofia
oggi (Milan: Marzorati, 1958), 455–6. It is truly curious how this intransigent adver-
sary of gnosticism ends up, as Sciacca also observes, in a form of semi-Manicheanism.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 151

Nonetheless, his has been a truly authentic attempt, conducted with

extreme rigour and consistency. In his attempt to develop Nietzsche’s
thought in a religious sense, Shestov had the courage to reach the
ultimate consequences. Therefore, it is possible to extract from it some
highly positive aspects. One needs to sort out the general framework,
the reduction of atheism to a critique of the philosophical God, and
thus to a position that can be sublated from the perspective of religious
philosophy. His thought represents, as we have seen, the definitive self-
refutation of this thesis. However, to the extent that the philosophy of
existence sets itself against Spinozism as acosmism,140 which is an aspect
he pushed to the extreme, his philosophy contains a critique of ratio-
nalism as negation of the supernatural that is so hardly paradoxical
that its features can agree very well with those spelled out by Laporte
in the definition I mentioned earlier. In the final analysis they are a
clarification of Pascal’s interpretation of the atheistic option, after the
rise of the great systems of metaphysical rationalism and after their
atheistic extensions.
In all its forms, rationalism is characterized by hatred for the individual
and by confusing religious spirituality with this negation of individuali-
ty.141 Consequently, the starting point of philosophy is viewed to be
man’s elevation through thought to such universality that his existence
in finite life becomes indifferent to him. Hegel adds that this indiffer-
ence should be felt even more as a duty by a Christian. In the metaphysics
of rationalism finite individuality is resolved into a moment in the
process of being. In the logic of rationalism the primary characteristic
of truth is its necessity as capacity to force me, whether I want it or not.
In the ethics of rationalism an action is good to the extent that it is the
volition of the universal, and it acquires value from the sacrifice of my

140 And against Hegel in his Spinozian aspect, in the name of the reality of the
individual. This is why he was led to believe in the possibility of a religious sublation
of Nietzsche as an anti-Spinozian [TN in the original this is a parenthetical statement
in the main text].
141 We have seen, for example, how confidently the rationalist Brunschvicg – fol-
lowing in the tracks of his all-time favourite author, Spinoza – during his discussion
with Marcel identified religious spirituality with “total detachment from one’s own
person,” which is “the ascesis proper to a scientist”; or how Hegel carries out what
Maritain calls “the dialectic immolation of the person”; or the replacement of I by we
in Marxism, the endpoint of the rationalistic reduction of the individual to selfish
will, in the perspective of thought related to the notion of Gattungwesen.
152 The Problem of Atheism

individuality. Any ethics that makes the realization of individuality a

goal, even with the sacrifices it implies, will always look suspicious to a
rationalist. In theological rationalism (meaning Malebranche and
Leibniz in the forms that intend to remain within orthodoxy; Kant
and Hegel in those that step out of it) theology will tend to forbid God
from performing miracles because by being performed in favour of the
individual they presuppose a violation of the order that must govern
God’s will, even though in orthodox forms this negation of miracles is
dissimulated. This order becomes emancipated from God, a norm that
constrains his thought and his will. Hegel draws the conclusions, and
this order becomes a synonym for God.
Now, this negation of individuality implies a choice about the nature
of evil, does it not? Evil is located in the very finiteness of existence, so
that guilt becomes ontological, inscribed in the very structure of finite
being. Thus, the choice that conditions all the categories and the whole
development of rationalism is the rejection of the vision of sin presented
in the book of Genesis. The religious critique that demolishes the Bible,
reducing it to legendary tales, is actually a consequence of this choice.
The biblical explanation that says that we introduced evil into the world
by an act of freedom is replaced by another explanation that regards
as necessary the link between finiteness and death. Thereby one returns
essentially to the explanation of evil contained in the fragment of
Anaximander; and since the historicity of original sin escapes an objec-
tive representation, philosophies constitute themselves on the basis of
a choice about the unverifiable. Therefore a religious philosophy inde-
pendent of faith is impossible. The criterion of truth for both rationalism
and religious philosophy will be the liberation of the person.
Now, the fact that Shestov saw in atheism, which he considered only
in Nietzsche, a criticism of the philosophical God (“When Nietzsche
proclaimed that we have killed God, he expressed briefly the conclusion
to which the millennial development of European thought had led”)
had the effect that he identified rationalism with speculative philosophy,
and religious philosophy with the philosophy of existence. Rationalism
is determined to be the philosophy of the comprehension and justifica-
tion of being; religious thought is determined to be the philosophy of
existence understood as a quest for liberation from necessity. In actuality,
the proper thesis of rationalism is the mortality of the finite, and then
it is clear that its final step must be the critique, within itself, of specula-
tive philosophy. Here we have the transition from Hegelian rationalism
 I. The Concept of Atheism 153

to Marxist rationalism, from the ultimate form of philosophy as justifica-

tion to philosophy as revolution. On the other hand, the conception
of the mortality of the finite can be viewed in an optimistic sense if we
take the standpoint of dialectics and progress, in a pessimistic sense if
we consider the perennial horrors to which the individual is subjected.
Hence the break, within the rationalist presupposition itself, between
rationalism and irrationalism. The latter is a brother-enemy of the
former precisely because it does not criticize its presupposition and
thus unfolds not as its critique but as its irreconcilable mirror image.
Hence the two opposite forms of atheism in which nineteenth-century
thought concludes, that of Marx and that of Nietzsche. Hence, also,
the historical conclusion of the former in nihilism, of the latter in the
description of this same nihilism but without overcoming it.
I mentioned the peculiar symmetry, in opposition, between Shestov
and Lenin, which Shestov could not have predicted anyway since, for
him, rationalism had necessarily to take the form of speculative philoso-
phy. Now, if, as I said, rationalism must instead move beyond the form
of speculative philosophy – because of its character of being a theolo-
gization of the finite, which implies the reification of subjects (and the
protest by the philosophy of existence, which however must remain
apolitical) – it is clear that the development of the definition of rational-
ism proposed by Shestov must arrive exactly at the interpretation of
Marxism advanced by the first Lukàcs142 – which, as I have already said,
was the development to the ultimate consequences of the sentence by
Engels on the proletariat as the heir of classical German philosophy.
Peculiarly, I went through this process myself in my 1946 essay,
reprinted here. I was commenting precisely on the Theses on Feuerbach,
with the aid of the definition of rationalism provided to me by Shestov,
which I subsequently developed into the thesis of the inversion of the
idea of homo sapiens into the idea of homo faber, which is necessary for
rationalism when it reaches its final stage. At that time I just vaguely

142 Namely, critique of revisionism, critique of Kantian morality, affirmation that

materialism is necessary as the condition to transition to the revolutionary meaning
of dialectics, critique of the system as a philosophical form linked with justifying reifi-
cation, the idea of the unity of theory and praxis, the idea of the party as their unifica-
tion, identification in the party of history and social progress, the category of Totality,
characterization of the revolutionary through totalism [TN: in the original this foot-
note is a parenthetical statement].
154 The Problem of Atheism

knew Lukàcs by name, through a citation by Berdaev, and it was not

easy to find in Italy the tools for a precise philological knowledge of
Marx as a philosopher. Such knowledge was more hampered than
helped by the commentaries of the old revisionists (Bernstein, Mondolfo,
Vorländer, Baratono, etc.), and let this be said with all due respect for
the seriousness of their works and for the honesty of the exigency that
moved them. The idea that Marx had permanently been surpassed by
Croce was still prevalent,143 and knowledge of his philosophy was
hindered even more by the new commentaries coming from Stalinist
dialectic materialism.
But how did I meet Shestov’s thought? Young Catholic scholars in
the 1930s felt divided by conflicting affections. Blondel’s thought was
still having its effects because it expressed an insuppressible need: the
quest to define the “creation of creators” and “man’s cooperation with
God.” On the other side there was Maritain’s exemplary experience in
the ethical-political field. He was the philosophical interpreter of one
of the greatest critiques of the modern world, that offered by Léon Bloy.
I said “exemplary” because after, or by virtue of, having lived fully the
anti-modern, he had been able to separate it completely from the nine-
teenth century forms of reactionary thought. Then there was
Kierkegaard’s influence, and its aspect of truth, which seemed indis-
pensable. For all of us there was also some temptation to heterodoxy,
which for me was not represented at all by Croce, who at that time
seemed to me entirely a non-philosopher,144 nor by Gentile but, rather,
by the dualistic and heretical thought of Martinetti.
So, I had been gearing up to study the formation process of the phi-
losophy of action, motivated by the idea of a reconciliation between
Blondel and Thomism, and of course the disposition more natural to
my way of thinking was to study it from the angle of the vision of history

143 Regarding the state of the studies on theoretical Marxism in Italy in 1946, see
my review “Studi intorno alla filosofia di Marx,” in Rivista di Filosofia 3-4 of that year
(223–33), in which I gave the emphasis it deserves to the new trend that was begin-
ning with the works of Della Volpe.
144 In fact, I don’t think his philosophical significance can be understood except
in the antithesis to his always-present adversary, Marx – who is always present, mind
you, in his genuine meaning, even though it is suspected rather than understood, and
even though, in order to surpass him, Croce is forced to alter him. This is why I could
not understand Croce until after I knew Marxism [TN: in the original this is a paren-
thetical statement].
 I. The Concept of Atheism 155

it proposed. Therefore I began by studying the first philosopher whom

the philosophy of action had tackled at its beginning – Malebranche
(in the book by Ollé-Laprune of 1870). I saw the problem of the
relationship between faith and reason as central to his thought, as
decisive to defining the nature of his reform of Cartesian thought.
This led me naturally to study the relations between faith and reason
in Descartes and here, besides encountering Gouhier, I was attracted
by Laberthonnière’s interpretation. He must be given credit for having
been the first to study the philosophy of Descartes as a philosophy of
life and not as a mere reflection on the nature of the new science; for
having been the first who tried to relive Descartes’s “present” instead
of trying to define the way in which he was a precursor of the future or
deviated from the past. But how to separate the aspect of truth from
the tendentiousness, which is also evident, of his study of 1909, upon
which all his other Cartesian works depend, Le dualisme Cartésien?
Through a very long tour of the whole Cartesian world, focused above
all on investigating Malebranche’s partial failure to build a post-Cartesian
“Christian philosophy,” I came to recognize that the foundation of all
Cartesian dualisms is the original duality, which is not made directly
explicit, between spiritual life and history. I felt I had found in this first
dualism the common encompassing context within which all the think-
ers who can truly be called Cartesian (Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche,
partially Geulincx) operate.145
But even while I was conducting this research, my question was how
to overcome the gnostic-Manichean temptation. In that respect, the
thinkers I was studying were not very useful. I can say now that Shestov
was for me what another Russian philosopher, Afrikan Spir, was for
Martinetti. His thesis about metaphysical rationalism made it possible
for me to dissociate the individualistic aspect of Martinetti’s thought
from the Kantian-Spinozian form of religiosity and,146 subsequently, to
tackle Marxism.

145 See my study “Cartesio e la politica,” in Rivista di Filosofia 41 no. 1 (1950):

3–30, regarding which, one must not be misled by the title, as if the problem con-
cerned a marginal aspect of the Cartesian question.
146 That is, it made it possible for me to rediscover the idea of the individual as
the decisive Christian category in the sense that Kierkegaard talks about it. So that we
can also recognize the “decline” of Christianity in what determines the process that
led to the affirmation that it was the species – mankind – that discovered Christianity.
156 The Problem of Atheism

This clarifies the extreme closeness, and at the same time the differ-
ence, between my thought and that of Enrico Castelli, who had also
encountered Kierkegaard in Shestov’s form before directly reading his
works,147 during an investigation aimed at reaffirming Blondel and
Varisco after Gentile. Of course he arrived at a form of thought that is
profoundly original compared to that of Shestov because, also accord-
ing to Castelli, the positive aspect in Shestov lies only in the definition
and critique of rationalism, and because of the different adversary.
However, Castelli has remained indifferent to the philosophical signifi-
cance of Marxism, I think, to the extent that he has judged, like Spirito,
that the Marxist motif has been surpassed in Gentile’s Idealism. Once
this is granted, one will certainly move on to a rigorous critique of
Actualism but will not pose the question of the history of philosophy as
a problem.
This also explains what distinguishes me from Ugo Spirito, a thinker
to whom I am attached because we share a constant connection
between philosophical problems and political problems, and also
because I admire his profound consistency, despite the variety of posi-
tions in which his thought has been formulated. For him such plurality
was morally required in order to stay faithful to his original starting
point, without making any concession to fashions. However, there is
only one question that he has not problematized – namely, the vision
of modern history as a process of secularization. He did not do that
because, from the perspective he has taken on the Gentile-Marx prob-
lem, he did not have to do it. The judgment about Gentile is also what

147 This was one of the very rare encounters of Western philosophy with Shestov’s
thought. Let us recall, besides his, that of Albert Camus, with regard to which one
should study in depth Wahl’s critical proposal, which interprets it as a form of secular-
ization of Shestov. Let us also recall Benjamin Fondane, who died young in a concen-
tration camp, and who is known above all for extremely penetrating studies on
Rimbaud and Baudelaire; however, what would deserve to be re-read is his collection
of philosophical essays La conscience malheureuse (Paris: Denöel et Steele, 1936).
According to Fondane, “Shestov begins where Heidegger ends.” This judgment is
incorrect because, on the contrary, Heidegger begins precisely after Shestov’s failure.
Nonetheless, the very meaning of this opposition led Fondane to write an essay titled
Heidegger devant Dostoievski, which is extremely singular and perhaps unique in the
literature on Heidegger because it curiously predicts and anticipates the subsequent
development of his thought.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 157

leads to avoiding this problematization in a thinker as “problematic”

as Gustavo Bontadini.148

13. Order of Research

The considerations I have presented thus far explain why the form I
had to give this book, which seems peculiar, was indeed necessary. Allow
me to say that it is a collection not of essays but of contracted books.

148 Accepting the victory of Gentile over Marx – instead of that particular type or
relationship I outlined earlier – seems to me a common feature of these three phi-
losophers, who are, peculiarly, both close and very different. We have seen that when
one grants that Idealism is ulterior to every materialism, one cannot problematize the
periodization schemes of the history of philosophy. Spirito affirms such ulteriority
explicitly: “The history of thought does not stop at Marx, but from Marx moves on
towards the new Idealism, towards Actualism, without being able, of course, to stop
even at this final outcome of the Hegelian tradition” (page 166 of “Gentile e Marx,”
in Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 26, nos. 1–2 [1947]: 145–66). So does Castelli,
implicitly: “when modern thought, and the final expression of this thought, Idealism,
talks about theology, it intends to talk about a transcendental I which, in the final
analysis, is inseparable from an empirical I; an empirical I who realizes himself as a
position of the transcendental I … The merit of Idealism has been consistency, which
led it to the doctrine of the single subject … Can solipsism be eliminated? Personally
I think so … But the critique of solipsisms is simultaneously the critique of Idealism”
(Existentialisme theologique [Paris: Hermann, 1948], 75–6). So that the history of mod-
ern philosophy must be thought, à la Kierkegaard, as the history of a race towards soli-
tude to the same exact extent that it intends to be a history of the quest for objectivity
at all cost. See I presupposti di una teologia della storia (Milan: Bocca, 1952). Now I agree
perfectly with Castelli as far as the definition of rationalism is concerned: it is a phi-
losophy of the “loss of the conditional” (I presupposti, 9), as suppression of the history
of the self, which erases the awareness of an initial fall. It is a philosophy of the “natu-
ralness of death” (I presupposti, 89), with the consequent characterization of thought
in terms of comprehension by impotence (by the impossibility to think the opposite)
and the reduction/confusion of evidence (the expression of a light) to incontrovertibility
(the expression of a constriction, of the fact of “having one’s back to the wall”), a
thesis that affirms the positivity of Dostoevsky’s critique of reason. But I part ways with
him when he sees in Idealism, and in its solipsist catastrophe, the ultimate outcome
of rationalism. Regarding Bontadini’s stance with respect to Idealism, see the essay
“L’essenza dell’idealismo come essenza della filosofia moderna,” in Studi sulla filosofia
dell’età cartesiana (Brescia: La Scuola, 1947). On Actualism in particular, see “Gentile
e noi,” in Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana 26 (1947): 167–88. Is it a legitimate
question whether the irreducibility of the three philosophies depends precisely on
the common presupposition? I will discuss this in a subsequent study.
158 The Problem of Atheism

But it was not possible for me to do otherwise because it was a matter

of illustrating the necessary interdependence of a sequence of problems
that are apparently unrelated and only partially solved to this day.
Certainly, the order would have been different, and much more similar
to the usual one, if I had been able to start from a philosophy that I
held as absolutely certain. Because of what I have already explained,
no other route was open to me other than an investigation of philoso-
phy through history. Given this, the obligatory order – obligatory
because the starting point had to be the historical actuality – could
only be the following:

• the realization that atheism is essential to Marxism, together with

the recognition of its philosophical significance, as the conclusion
of rationalism and as the explicative principle of present reality in
its totality (essays II and III);
• the necessity to trace back to Marxism, albeit indirectly, all forms
of contemporary irreligion (essay IV);
• the critique of Maritain’s interpretation of atheism and the
rediscovery of Pascal’s definition (essay V);
• the necessity for Marxism, in its critical form, to tackle the Pascal
problem as central to its historical perspective, and the necessity
for a discussion of the Marxist attempt to surpass Pascal. This leads
me to assert the continuity of the philosophies of the Catholic non-
scholastic thinkers of the 1600s and early 1700s (i.e., from Descartes
to Vico) and to pose the problem of Ontologism in different terms
than Carabellese, Lavelle, and Heidegger (essay VI);
• the correlation in Marxism between the primary philosophical
adversary identified in theism or, more precisely, in the religious
God, and the primary political adversary identified in liberalism,
by reason of the correlation between the two negations and the
reduction of individualism to egoism. This clearly implies a revision
of the concept of liberalism and also of the stance that religious
thought (and in particular Catholic thought) has taken towards
it (essay VII).

The second and third essays are quite old. One was a lecture given
at the Congresso Internazionale di Filosofia di Roma of November
1946, the other appeared in the October-December 1948 issue of
Rivista di Filosofia. I reprinted them almost unchanged, except for
minimal formal corrections. I was extremely hesitant in taking this
decision because my first intention was, of course, to revise them and
 I. The Concept of Atheism 159

bring them up to date. However, given the huge number of works on

Marxism that have appeared since, such an update would have required
at least two volumes, a first one on Marxism and Catholic critics, and
a second one more generally on Marxism and its critical literature.
These works, of course, are needed, but they exceeded the plan I had
laid down for this book. At any rate, mine is not a far out interpretation
since it agrees perfectly with that of the early Lukàcs and with its exten-
sion in Goldmann.149 I also stated the criterion for establishing the
erroneousness of the interpretations that diverge from it, which lies in
the confusion between Feuerbach’s and Marx’s positions about athe-
ism: this confusion is always lurking under the most varied and dis-
simulated guises.
It seems to me that reprinting these essays is advisable first of all
because of their significance as documents.150 Indeed, 1945 and 1946
were the formative years of all the positions, both cultural and political,
that fully unfolded afterwards. In reference to those years, these writings
take on the aspect of a document – certainly rare, and possibly the first,
not only in Italy – of a self-criticism, not a criticism from outside, of the
position of the Catholic left. Please forgive me for borrowing this term

149 Goldmann’s novelty with respect to Lukàcs is the following: “what corre-
sponds to the dialectic conception of history at the level of individual consciousness
is … the act of immanent faith in the manner of the wager” (Recherches dialectiques [Paris:
Gallimard, 1959], 294).
150 At least in this regard, their significance was judged to be very remarkable
even recently by E. Garin, La cultura italiana fra ‘800 e ‘900 (Bari: Laterza, 1962), 343.
These writings were conceived in a fraternal concordia discors with Felice Balbo, who
had gone through my same experience and who ended up essentially agreeing with
my perspective, even if he developed its consequences differently. See his Idee per una
filosofia dello sviluppo umano (Turin: Boringhieri, 1962).
My interpretation of the crisis, and the problematic terms in which I defined it,
was shared by L. Pareyson, a scholar so knowledgeable regarding the problems associ-
ated with the period between Hegel and Nietzsche, and so sensitive to historical con-
creteness. See his essay “Il problema del Marxismo” and also, because of similar
problems, “Due possibilità: Kierkegaard e Feuerbach,” both in Esistenza e Persona
(Turin: Taylor, 1950). See also Studi sull’esistenzialismo, 2nd ed. (Florence: Sansoni,
1950), especially pages 54–5 and 71, and Fichte (Turin: Edizioni di Filosofia, 1950),
lx–lxi, lxvii–lxviii. See also, because it fully understands and illustrates these texts, the
nice review by N. Matteucci, “La cultura italiana e il marxismo dal 1945 al 1951,” in
Rivista di Filosofia 44 (1953): 61–85, written after his remarkable, and perhaps not
well enough known, Antonio Gramsci e la filosofia della prassi (Milan: Giuffré, 1951).
160 The Problem of Atheism

from politics; but I already explained why today the link between philo-
sophical discourse and political discourse is very tight. We must give
Esprit and its founder Mounier credit for having already understood in
1932 that taking a stand on the crisis of civilization was the first condi-
tion for a renewal both of the philosophy and of the politics of Catholics,
a renewal that began with Maritain and that I lived during the years
from 1935 to 1945. As a matter of fact, Maritain had not exactly under-
estimated the importance of the atheistic aspect of Marxism – even
though in my judgment he did not fully grasp its significance, nor does
he grasp it now (essay VII). But many of those who were young at that
time and who looked at him as a teacher, at least at the level of political
thought – and who still today feel a deep gratitude for his work, even
if they incline to disagree with it – had gone farther. Back then, the
anti-Fascism of intellectuals seemed tied, in Italy, to Idealist culture and
its derivatives. Was it absurd to see in Marx’s work the reaffirmation of
a form of realism, which was certainly deficient because of the Hegelian
influence and deformed into materialism, but which in principle could
be dissociated from such Hegelian influence? Was it illegitimate to think
that his anti-religious polemics targeted “bourgeois religion,” religion
reduced to the defensive tool of a social order, the religion that Fascism
also defended? Was it impossible to find in the criticism of this type of
religion a convergence with the criticism of Maritain’s teacher, Leon
Bloy? The criticism that Communism is atheistic seemed to freeze in a
fixed figure a reality that, on the contrary, was developing. Besides
a closed Marxism, it seemed possible to conceive an open Marxism,
which would move not towards the Idealism it had definitively criticized
but towards an encounter with a renewed Catholic thought. This was
essentially the state of mind being expressed in Esprit and in its person-
alist program. It combined the influences of Kierkegaard and Marx.
People who were very young in the early 1930s had found in Kierkegaard
the true form of the critique of Idealism – in Italy against the philosophy
of Croce’s works and against Actualism, and in France against a certain
satisfied awareness in Brunschvicg’s vision of progress. But Kierkegaard
was not exactly a guide for action in the years of the Fascist and Nazist
offensive. People were rediscovering Marx while trying to address the
need for a philosophy that was also action.151

151 T.W. Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard (1933) expresses well this possible tran-
sition to Marxism out of dissatisfaction for the “closure in private existence” and the
“aestheticism” of Kierkegaard’s position.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 161

Now, already in 1945 this state of mind became for me an object of

criticism, and the complete irreconcilability between Christianity and
Marxism started to become evident to me. The break took place at the
level of ethics (see pages 201ff) because,152 apart from it, Marxist athe-
ism could certainly look like an eliminable superstructure, at least in
principle. But in fact Marxism replaced, with perfect consistency, the
idea of ethics with that of the philosophy of history, and replaced the
opposition (in the former) between good and evil with the idea that
evil is the only path that leads to goodness.153 It thus denied the whole
Christian ethical tradition, up to its secularized translation in Kant. Such
opposition was a consequence of the inversion whereby the idea of homo
sapiens, in whose framework Hegelian philosophy had still been thought,
had to be replaced by that of homo faber – namely, the ideal type that, as
absolute negation of the theme of participation, leads to the refusal to
see in man the image of God, while simultaneously it destroys, if it is
inserted into Christian thought, every type of unity between it and Greek
thought since the idea of homo sapiens is an “invention of the Greeks.”154
In this way I took the position exactly opposite to that of Mounier: there
is no common ethical aspiration shared by Marxism and Christianity
but, rather, expressly in the field of ethics, an irreparable opposition.
But, at the same time, this perception of the contradiction between
Christianity and Marxism was accompanied by the recognition that
Marxism has enormous philosophical power, which earlier I had under-
estimated, and that it is one with its practical power. This led me to reso-
lutely oppose the idea, which was current at the time, that Marxism was
suitable for the Russian people because, not having experienced

152 I daresay that my reaction to the events of 1945 (the moral problems con-
nected with the purge and so on) was entirely similar – regarding the philosophical
problem it involved, that of the morality of history – to the reaction of Raymond Aron
as described in the essay “La philosophie de l’histoire” in the collective volume edited
by M. Farber titled L’activité philosophique en France et aux Etats-Unis (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1950). See pages 338–40: “Is history the only dimension of
human existence? … The time has come for the philosophy of history to rid itself of
historical absolutism, which the Marxist tradition has inspired.”
153 See on this point Goldmann, Le dieu caché, 336 [The Hidden God, 301] and
elsewhere. It is also from Goldmann that I take the terms of the opposition between
philosophy of history and ethics.
154 Regarding the opposition between the ideas of homo sapiens and homo faber, pages
24–55 in Max Scheler’s L’homme et l’histoire (Paris: Aubier, 1955) [TN: “Man in History,” in
Philosophical Perspectives (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 65–93] keep all their value.
162 The Problem of Atheism

humanism and modern civilization, it had leaped from the Middle Ages
to Communism. In that specific formulation this idea was contradicted
by the experience of the following years, but it is still around in the only
apparently more adequate form that holds that Communism is a tech-
nique to rapidly accelerate technical progress in underdeveloped areas.
I was also led to oppose the other idea that, in order to save its valid
aspect, Marxism needed to be sublated in liberal socialism or in a
renewal of Catholic culture.
I was beginning to see in Marxism the type of radical atheism, shaping
an absolutely new form of philosophy, that I discussed earlier. As a
consequence, I was starting to view the unfolding of the essence of
atheism as the general context within which the cultural and political
forms that arose in the years after 1917 must be understood. Reflecting
on the nexus of theory and practice, and on the fact that it expresses
itself as a revolution that is simultaneously a philosophical event, in
1946 I wrote:

The most significant fact of the two Fascist decades is this: the culture that
thought it had surpassed Marxism in the realm of ideas, then found itself
powerless to surpass it in practice; so the defense organized itself around
irrational forces. Initially these forces met only limited resistance by the
culture. One would hope, and this was the hope of many Italians during
the first decade, that they could be bent to serve values, because their ideal
void created the illusion that they were pure forces, amenable to be redi-
rected. After people came to understand that they were positively directed
against values … this understanding gave rise to a reaction with some pecu-
liar features. First of all, this culture could not hope to overturn Fascism,
and the confession of this impotence is represented by forms of neo-
Manicheanism (Martinetti, Rensi). It condemns; it constitutes a society of
beautiful souls … Does not the doubt arise, then, that it was the culture of
Fascism? In the sense that the Fascist period is marked by a dissociation between
culture and politics? It is a dissociation and no longer a mere distinction, like
in previous centuries of the modern age, when culture and politics were in-
deed distinct, but could be coordinated. Over those twenty years culture was
not able to organize political forces, to make itself the form of a community;
and political forces could not find an organizing principle, except by acti-
vating an insurrection of life against values. So that culture could only un-
dermine the political organization, making its barbaric character manifest.
Perhaps we should look into this complementarity of dissociated politics and
 I. The Concept of Atheism 163

culture to find the reason why there was no Fascist persecution against
Croce … [I]t may be right to think that Fascism could not move against a
culture which was, yes, opposed to it, but complementary … So Fascism is
just the natural form that European politics took because European culture
had not been able to truly surpass Marxism. Given that culture, only that
politics was possible, even if it had the result of pushing men of culture away
from itself, to isolate them into an indignant society.155

A brief note on the distinction I made then between the positions of

Marx and Engels. The way in which Marxism was being received in
European culture had the effect that in those years the focus of atten-
tion shifted to the young Marx and, thus, precisely to the expression of
his thought, from which Marxism had removed its gaze during the
Stalinist period. In fact, this is still the necessary form in which Marxism
can act, and has acted since 1945, on Western thought – as a philosophy
ulterior to Idealism and existentialism. This conjunction with previous
existentialist thought expressed itself in a rigid distinction between
Marx and Engels, which in that year I made my own (pages 180–3),
even though I had already abandoned Marxism. I judged that both the
Soviet form of dialectical materialism – which back then I viewed not
as a necessary deterioration (as I view it today) but as a philosophically
less appropriate expression, which, however, did not alter the essence
of Marxism because it led to the same practical consequences – and
also, by antithesis, revisionism in all its forms (both the ancient ones
and those that started to appear at that time)156 depend on Engels.
Hence the need for European Marxism to rigorously separate the posi-
tion of Marx from that of Engels in order to beat revisionism.

155 “Attualità della filosofia di Marx?” in the Milanese journal Costume 2 (1946):
93–5. In that way I opposed the “tribunalistic” and “purgative” idea of a responsibility
of culture since accusing philosophers of not having been able to really surpass
Marxism or, according to a different taste, of not having been Marxist, makes no
more sense than accusing a scientist of not having made certain discoveries. The full-
est expression of the idea of responsibility thus understood is Lukàcs’s Destruction of
Reason. The dissatisfaction one feels reading it, even while one must grant that it is a
seriously thought out book, shows how much this idea is aberrant; and so is the (aca-
demic) idea of its irresponsibility, as if the fact that a philosophy is involved in a histori-
cal crisis should not affect our judgment of its theoretical value.
156 Above all in the form of joining together Marx and Dewey. But on the subject
of this combination, see the remarks by E. Garin, La cultura italiana, 307ff.
164 The Problem of Atheism

Of course, now I think that this judgment is insufficient. In fact, from

the historical standpoint it is hard to explain why, if this was the case,
all of Engels’s statements met Marx’s approval. Nonetheless, even though
this judgment must be qualified because it is certainly excessive, I do
not think that it is entirely unjustified. The full agreement between
Marx and Engels was founded on the thesis that both of them placidly
accepted because it conformed to nineteenth-century thought – namely,
that history has the character of necessity. This aspect seems to be spelled
out more clearly in Engels because of his tendency to be systematic.
Indeed, one can hardly think of removing from nineteenth-century
Marxism the idea of the “end of history,” transferred from the present
to the future. I already said that the most critical form that Marxism
can reach must consist in eliminating this image. Such elimination is
necessary in order to answer the historicist objection, which Marx and
Engels could not predict.
Why did I not continue these studies on Marxism, even though I was
authoritatively encouraged to do so also by judgments coming from
people belonging to the opposite side?157 They still seem valid to me
in their essential features, so much so that I think that, over the many
years that passed since then, the literature on Marxism has reduced
what at that time was a sketch and a program for future work into a
summary of the essential writings that appeared afterwards. I did not
continue them exactly because of the perspective I reached, whereby
the nexus of theory and practice in Marxism implies that it cannot be
judged independently of its historical realization; or, to be more precise,
because the dialectic character of Marxist thought implies that every
single concept and every single practical operation can be understood
only in relation to totality and not in isolation from it. Which, in practice,
means that Marxism can be seriously made an object of study only by
an institute or by a team. In Italy no such effort was made either then
or later – and we can see the consequences – due to the idea that all
the science of an adversary of Communism boils down to the slogan,

157 See G. della Volpe, Per la teoria dell’umanesimo positivo (Bologna: Zuffi, 1949),
now in Umanesimo positivo e emancipazione maxista (Milan: Sugar, 1964), 188. From
della Volpe’s writings I drew, at that time, the decisive confirmation of the critique of
revisionism and also, in particular, the falsehood of the thesis that Marxism is iusnatu-
ralistic, which was very common at that time and is still frequently repeated today.
 I. The Concept of Atheism 165

which is actually entirely meaningless,158 “democracy against totalitari-

anism”; and due to the other idea that, by virtue of the already developed
and forever defined critique of theoretical Marxism (!), the question
of stopping the advance of Communism was merely practical – that is
say, answerable in elementary terms.
The fourth essay, previously unpublished, is intentionally skeletal
because there have already been so many discussions regarding the
connection between technology and the eclipse of the sacred, alienation
in the contemporary world, the advent of “morality without sin,” and
so on – the aspects that describe today’s Western world, in short –
and they have been in such fundamental agreement, and, finally, they
have been popularized so much by novelists and journalists that I felt
I should limit myself to some hints. Conversely, what I really cared to
show is that the matrix of contemporary irreligion, also concerning
the Western world, is still Marxist. This in the sense that the rise of the
affluent society – which cannot be reduced to any other society from
the past, and which is necessarily irreligious because it fights Marxism
not in its aspect of atheism but in that of religion, and which may have
the practical capacity to achieve and maintain at least for some time
so-called “peaceful co-existence” but only on the condition of making
the abolition of poverty coincide with the highest degree of alienation –
is marked precisely by the failure to ideally surpass Marxism. Not by
chance its cultural expression is sociologism as absolute relativism – that
is, in exact terms, objectivized Marxism. It is one of the sides of the

158 Indeed, it is very easy for a Communist to answer that, for his party, unlike for
Nazism, totalitarianism is just a provisional situation, and that its goal is instead the
highest degree of democracy, the stateless society, and that the transition is hard due
to the fact that the passage from the world in which alienation reigns to the world
of freedom marks a qualitative leap and thus needs the revolution and the morality of
war; such hardship will progressively weaken to the extent that the new order will get
established; the duration of the revolutionary process cannot be rigorously predicted
since it is a revolution that will change the face of the earth; and so on. The opposi-
tion between democracy and totalitarianism is meaningless if it is pronounced inde-
pendently of any reference to the problem of theism and atheism. People may
counter that this position leads to confusing religion and politics and, thus, necessar-
ily to the mentality of the wars of religion. This is not true at all. Wars of religion are
a mistake because, as history shows, they led to regarding religion as an instrumentum
regni and to the victory of Machiavellianism and the Ragion di Stato in the 1600s. They
must not be confused with the religious struggle at the level of culture, which is an
entirely different thing.
166 The Problem of Atheism

necessary fracture of Marxism that I discussed. Therefore, it does not

seem to me that technical progress is linked in itself to the eclipse of
the sacred but, rather, that this link gets necessarily established within
the affluent society.
The fifth essay, which aims at achieving a definition of atheism by
considering the historical forms in which it presented itself, is a com-
munication at the 16th Conference of the Center for Philosophical
Studies of Gallarate, in September 1961, which was devoted to Il problema
dell’ateismo. Subsequently it was read and discussed at the Piedmontese
Society of Philosophy on 27 February 1962.
Regarding the sixth essay, I contracted in 134 pages a work of more
than one thousand pages, of which over six hundred have already been
published in various works that I cite here, and which is the content of
three volumes to be published in the near future. Such contraction,
which was inevitable, certainly could not lead to a model of clarity,
although I think I have provided, in very concise form, all the elements
to justify my thesis. I ask the reader to please keep in mind from the
start page 343, in which I formulate the idea that there is a continuity
from Descartes to Pascal to Malebranche. And also the general thesis:
modern philosophical historiography, since its beginning and then in
its first great systematizer, Hegel, has traditionally relied on the inter-
pretation of the thought of the 1600s developed by Leibniz, rejecting
as “fantastic” the interpretation that certainly is not clearly manifested
and yet is present in Vico’s work. Moreover, it interpreted Vico himself within
this general framework. Now, the results in Cartesian historiography from
1930 onwards seem to me to lead, instead, to the conclusion that Vico
alone was really able to understand, albeit through an extremely con-
voluted process, the spiritual process of the 1600s, and that only in
connection with this point can we evaluate and make fully consistent
the recent literature on Descartes and, in a complementary fashion,
come to define in precise terms the place of Vico in the history of phi-
losophy. But, then, how can we explain Vico’s anti-Cartesian critique?
In actuality, it is an opposition within a continuity: the adversary is the
same, the pre-Enlightenment of the libertinage érudit, irreligion that
develops starting from history. Except that Vico faces a new adversary:
the thinker who had breached the Cartesian dike against irreligion,
Bayle. Vico’s thought process can be described as the discovery that the
same exigency that led him to criticize Cartesianism as a philosophy
inadequate to human formation can and must continue in a critique
 I. The Concept of Atheism 167

of Bayle. In other words, what Vico criticized in Cartesianism was the

non-problematized encompassing context within which it formed,
the separation between spiritual life and history. From this follows the
necessary form that a new book on Vico must take, that of a parallel
between his thought and Bayle’s.
I have taken as a reference point the vision of the history of modern
philosophy proposed by Goldmann, both because his interpretation of
Marxism, which develops to the ultimate consequences the thesis of the
first Lukàcs, is essentially identical to the one I had advanced in 1946,
and also because I think that his historical perspective represents, among
those proposed by Marxism thus far, the most consistent with a critical
form of Marxism (to speak my mind, it represents the only one, no
matter what corrections may be made to it from a strictly historical-
philological standpoint). Of course, I know very well that Goldmann
cannot claim, on the Marxist side, any authority whatsoever; but I already
explained that today serious Marxist works of philosophy can only be
written by non-orthodox thinkers, regardless of what their practical
relationship with the party may be. Besides, just as Goldmann had been
led by his Marxist studies to the study of Pascal and to the quest to define
the “significant structure” that makes it possible to understand his work,
I, too, had been led by my Marxist studies back to Descartes and to the
quest to define what at that time I called “non problematized encom-
passing context,” which makes it possible to understand the operations
not only of Descartes’s thought but also of the thought of all those who
can be called, in a rigorous sense, Cartesian.159 It is starting from this
encompassing context that my critique of Goldmann’s thesis unfolds.
So that, when I was discussing his perspective, I had the impression of
holding a dialogue with myself.160

159 See “Cartesio e la politica.”

160 To see the closeness, which came to be without the least mutual influence,
between my interpretation of Marxism and Goldmann’s, one can set side by side my
1946 essay and the one Goldmann wrote in 1947 titled “Le matérialisme dialectique
est-il une philosophie?” (in Recherches dialectiques, 13ff). I will also point out that in the
piece “Cartesio e la politica” I posed to myself precisely the question about the con-
text in which the idea of philosophy as closed conceptual discourse, which does not
surpass itself either by transitioning into theological thought or by transitioning into
revolutionary thought, is born. This is the question about the origin of the modern
figure, which was born in Descartes and continued until Hegel, of the philosopher as
the “man of self-awareness.” The study by Löwith “La conclusione della filosofia
168 The Problem of Atheism

We saw already that the Marxist ethical-political option presupposes

a vision of the history of philosophy; now Goldmann’s work shows that
the Marxist history of philosophy must regard the Pascal problem as the
essential problem and, on the other side, is obliged to ignore the new
Cartesian critical literature, because it has been a consequence of the
religious philosophy of existence and of the subsequent rediscovery of
Ontologism, and must conclude in the problem of whether Cartesian
thought, in its core claim, has been surpassed by classical German phi-
losophy. This incapacity on Marxism’s part confirms the fact that, while
in Kierkegaard one cannot find a way to go beyond Marx, on the other
hand Marxism must simply exclude both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
from the history of philosophy.161
The last essay presents in schematic form a group of theses on the
nature of liberalism, which I proposed in various writings and in
particular in two communications: “Libertà del volere e libertà etico-
politica” [Freedom of the will and ethico-political freedom] and
“Concezione perfettistica a concezione cristiana del potere politico”
[The perfectist conception and the Christian conception of political
power] at the seventeenth and eighteenth conferences of the Center
for Philosophical Studies of Gallarate.

classica con Hegel e la sua dissoluzione in Marx e Kierkegaard” – in Giornale Critico

della Filosofia Italiana 3 nos. 4–5 (1935): 343–71 (see 370) – contributed very much to
drawing my attention to this topic – that is, to use his words, to the beginning of the
figure of the philosopher who “entrusts the ‘exterior’ part of his existence to the ex-
terior [social] order.” For a perfect understanding of the meaning of my essay regard-
ing the true sense of Vico’s anti-Cartesianism, see A. Corsano, Giambattista Vico (Bari:
Laterza, 1955), 62.
161 It is important to observe that Lukàcs, in tight correlation with this exclusion,
repeats with regard to Descartes, Vico, and so on the traditional judgments in their
most worn-out form, viewing any attempt at revising them as a manoeuvre, as usual,
of “bourgeois irrationalism” (see The Destruction of Reason, passim).
 II

Marx’s “Non-Philosophy”
and Communism as a Political Reality
(1946)

1. THE METHODOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION

Let us try and enucleate the philosophical problems that are implicit
in the essential question of contemporary politics: whether it is pos-
sible to want Communism on the basis of the mere historical consid-
eration of the possibility, today, of a community – where the idea of
community, understood in its rigorous sense, implies that each indi-
vidual be able to experience himself in it as a subject (i.e., it implies
that alienation, Entfremdung, and reification, Verdinglichung, come to
an end). So that its only ethical premise reduces to the generically
Christian one of the equal dignity of every human person and is thus
compatible with the most diverse philosophies. Or whether, instead,
Marxism as a philosophy is, with respect to political Marxism, the
transcendental condition for its possibility. With the further question,
of course, whether this philosophy of Marx is an insufficiently critical
and crude form of thought, suitable to serve as ideology for a “rebel-
lion of the masses,” or whether, instead, the spiritual significance of
these years is a renewed relevance of Marx’s philosophy, just as the
decade 1930–40 had been marked by the comeback of his nineteenth-
century opposite, Kierkegaard.
Philosophically considered, the question takes the following form:
whether the process of development of Marxism (which can be observed
in Marx’s own work) is directed towards becoming aware of its character
of being a political science, a science that will stand only on the experi-
mental confirmation of its predictions and not by virtue of a philosophi-
cal foundation of which it has no need. Or whether, instead, from a
170 The Problem of Atheism

Marxist standpoint the meaningful distinction is between philosophy

directed at “understanding” and philosophy directed at “changing” –
whether all of Marxism lies in the substitution of the conception of
philosophy as comprehension with a conception that I would like to call,
and I will elucidate upon this later on, of philosophy as revolution.1
Whether, as a consequence, we must say not that Marx abandoned
philosophy in favour of politics but, rather, that he became political
precisely because his philosophy demanded it; and that Capital does
not represent, as is commonly thought, the mature Marx, with respect
to which the youthful philosophical works must be regarded as prepara-
tion and sketches; but that we must turn our attention to these works
as a precondition for a truly Marxist reading of Capital, for a reading
that is not, to be blunt, a “reform” of Marx to fit the doctrinal presup-
positions of his critic.
The first route is followed by the interpretation that is variously
designated as “methodological” or “experimental” or “realistic” or, also,
with a more explicit political reference, as “European” or “progressive.”
It is widespread in the most diverse cultural milieux, ranging from
Communist Catholics to a certain kind of existentialism, and is presented
as the truly critical interpretation, adequate to the new problems that
Communism must face in the West, able to guarantee that intellectuals
can assent to the Communist idea without qualms of conscience.2 Let
us nail down its essential features.

1 [Clearly when I used these terms I did not mean at all to say that Marxism boils
down to pure practical action, unguided by thought, but only that Marx’s philosophy
cannot be interpreted as a closed conceptual discourse.]
2 The most comprehensive book that develops this interpretation may still be that
by Sidney Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (London: Gollancz, 1933). See
also the extremely clear and careful chapter that Felice Balbo has devoted to
“Metafisicismo del materialismo dialettico,” in Laboratorio dell’uomo (Turin: Einaudi,
1946).
In a certain sense this interpretation could also be described as a neo-positivist
rethinking of Marxism in the sense that the new methodological positivism provides
the criteria that make it possible. See how Ludovico Geymonat characterizes this trend
of thought: “The great conquest of modern rationalism lies all here: in not forcing
reality, in not being afraid of multiplicity, in eschewing as a matter of principle all
unfounded and forced unifications” – Studi per un nuovo razionalismo (Turin: Chiantore,
1945), 340. This makes clear the possible relationship between the methodological
interpretation and neo-positivism. Supposedly, the error of the theoreticians of
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 171

While it rejects the metaphysicalist interpretation – that is, the one

that says that political Marxism is the practical consequence of a sys-
tematic theory of reality that starts from self-evident first principles
regarding the nature of being – at the same time it rejects revisionism
in all its forms. Revisionism arose not as a critique of “metaphysicalism
as an interpretation” but, rather, as a critique of “Marxism reduced to
this metaphysicalist image”; thus, not as a restoration of Marxism to its
true meaning but as a critique of Marxism reduced to a formula. The
flaw of revisionism is that it completely misses the meaning of Marx’s
spiritual experience by losing its central point, the critique of ideolo-
gism – if Marx broke with the Hegelian left and with Feuerbach it was
precisely because he regarded ideological denunciation as insufficient
to move history forward.3 Conversely, revisionism operates entirely at
the level of ideologism, seeking the point of agreement between Marxism
and one’s own culture. From this we can also understand the necessary,
paradoxical destiny of this current. Without a doubt, it arose with the
intention of saving Marx’s politics and economics from the ruin of his
metaphysics. In fact, at the practical level it ended up with a meaning
close to that of reaction. In this decadence there is a logic: having lost
the central point of Marxism, it was bound also to lose touch with the
needs and problems of the concrete development of the proletariat,
either by forgetting the revolutionary goal in favour of individual reforms
destined in the final analysis to strengthen the existing order or by
becoming obsessed with the revolution to the point of disparaging
the separate stages and the compromises of the preparation. But then,
in order to go past preaching and attain reality, it confused the

dialectical materialism was that they were not able to free themselves form the
nineteenth-century illusion of a unitary construction that must provide the “metaphysi-
cal foundation” for practical activity.
The frequent comparisons between Marxism and American pragmatism, above all
with Dewey, also move in this direction (see the multiple articles by Giulio Preti in
Politecnico). Still, regarding the abyss that, despite everything, separates Dewey’s thought
from Marxism, see the rigorous elucidation by Galvano Della Volpe in La libertà comu-
nista (Messina: Ferrara, 1946), 185–93.
3 It is undeniable that Marx’s critique keeps hitting this point, from the youthful
dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus to the German Ideology. However, it is a matter
of grasping its precise meaning. And inferring without qualifications that, in the young
Marx, the philosophical interest is subordinate to the political interest is an arbitrary
affirmation.
172 The Problem of Atheism

revolutionary mindset with an activist spirit of innovation and limited

its truly effective action to the critique of the metaphysicalist interpreta-
tion of Marxism, thus becoming hard to distinguish from the reactionary
critique. It limited its action, that is, to the critique (to define it rigor-
ously) that, fighting Marxism as a “total conception of life,” creates an
appearance of understanding and of moving forward by claiming to
preserve Marxism’s appeal to “social justice” or its emphasis on “the
importance of the question of work with respect to that of freedom.”
While, in practice, it uses the apparent “conception of life” to fight in
actual Marxism the effort to realize this better ethical dimension – since
the ethical aspiration it preserves boils down to ethics distinct from politics
(to what would be desirable, to moral velleity), only to decay, by its vel-
leitous nature, to a mask for what is in effect a reactionary intention.
Together with revisionism, the methodological interpretation also
abandons the various figures of speech that it produces: the distinction
between the “healthy part” and the “unhealthy part” of Marx’s thought,
the search for the better Marx (the humanist, the moralist, and the
like) – in short, “neo-Marxism,” the “decomposition” people used to
talk about in order to then include his best element in a new edifice of
thought. The methodological interpretation, instead, wants to save all
of Marx, but considered “under the category of political science.” And
it expresses its opposition not in terms of new Marxism against old
Marxism but in term of the resistance of living Marxism to the principles
of death, which in the past meant orthodoxism à la Kautsky, or the
revisionist antithesis, and today may mean the metaphysicalism of dia-
lectical materialism, the false extension of Marxism via its pseudo-
elevation to a “conception of the world.” Viewed under the category of
political science, the substance of Marxism is to be found in a realistic
method of social action, in a theory of revolution. However, unlike myth,
which is unverifiable by essence (in fact, in reference to myth the ques-
tion of future confirmation in reality is meaningless: its significance
stops at being a “means to act on the present”), Marxism has its own
objective truth within the limits of political science: in the manner of
scientific propositions, it is verified by its result.4

4 Supposedly, the concept of political science – I cannot linger now on the attempts
to formulate it exactly – severs the last possible tie between methodologism and revi-
sionism. Apart from it, the methodological interpretation could well appear to be a
development of the theses that had already been advanced in Croce’s Materialismo
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 173

Evidently, the immediate question is: Does the methodological inter-

pretation correspond to Marx’s intention? And if it does not correspond,
how can anybody deny that it is a new form of revisionism, even though
in the “search for the best Marx” it replaces the metaphor of distinguish-
ing different parts with that of transvaluating. Moreover, speaking of
non-correspondence, not to scholastic Marxism but to Marxism as it
acted in history: Is not its primary presupposition, in Marx as well as in
Lenin, that radical atheism must replace the “conservatism” implicit in
the Idealist sublation of religion into philosophy? In Lenin’s so famous
and so often quoted sentence “the fundamental premise of materialism
is the recognition of the external world, of the existence of things outside
and independent of our mind,”5 one must see neither the gnoseologic
form of Communist barbarianism nor a stance that is valid against
Idealism but is guilty of confusing realism with materialism (forgetting
the existence of realist positions that are not materialist at all); nor the
endorsement of an action-oriented realism against solipsistic gnoseolo-
gism (or at least gnoseologism that relegates within theory the viewpoint

storico [Materialismo storico ed economia Marxistica (Bari: Laterza, 1921)]. [We could
wonder whether, and to what extent, the problem of rejecting the methodological
interpretation that had been made possible by his earlier position mattered to the late
Croce.] But the proponents of the new interpretation – or the proponents at least of
its novelty – point out that, in Croce, such development was blocked by the adversary
he intended to fight. Croce’s interpretation, which had risen as a reaction to the
deformation of Marxism into a sociology of the naturalistic type and having in mind
only such a deformation, lost the specifically Marxist sense of being a political science
and consistently reduced historical materialism to a canon of historical interpretation,
to a method of knowing and not of making history.
The tight kinship, apart from a very hazy concept like that of political science,
between the revisionist commentaries and those of the methodological interpretation
is a confirmation of what I will say later, that it is not possible to draw an essential
distinction between revisionism and the methodological interpretation. I should also
remark that the interpretation of Marx’s philosophical thought, which I will discuss,
as the only possible one in the context of the methodological thesis, was already out-
lined in the essay by Croce, “I ‘neo’ in filosofia,” in Discorsi di varia filosofia, vol. 1 (Bari:
Laterza, 1945).
5 [TN] V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, in Collected Works, vol. 14
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 83.
174 The Problem of Atheism

of truth),6 but, rather, the expression of this fundamental thesis in

the language of dialectical materialism.
We shall see later that this objection is, in my judgment, essentially
insurmountable. But now I will try to outline, in its necessary features,
what could be an attempt at a rigorous response within the framework
of the methodological interpretation.
If Marxism is considered under the category of political science, it is
clear that its critique of the “mendacity of lofty ideas” – religion, ideal-
ism, morality, and so on – can no longer be interpreted as a challenge
to ideas in their ontological truth value but only in their possibility of
being used as “mystification” – the word dear to Marx in his first work
of great importance, the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – of a his-
torical situation. The sociological confusion that Marxism has brought
to light is that of transferring the same absoluteness that belongs to
ideal principles to a determined historical order (of using this absolute-
ness in order to absolutize the empirical). Making a determined histori-
cal order absolute turns naturally into making the ideal principles (which
are invoked as its “foundation”) relative to it.
What does Marxism’s best teaching boil down to, then? To having
taken a stand for the essential realism of practical activity. To hav-
ing shown that history is made by men “of flesh and blood,” who have
needs and passions, and not by ideas – or by men but men regarded as
mere “carriers of ideas.” To having shown that surpassing a historical
situation is not the simple, so to speak automatic (or in any case “easy”),
transcription of an ideal dialectic but that ideas enter history as “forces”
at men’s disposal. To having revealed the characteristic ambivalence –
we also could develop Marx’s thought thus (a bit loosely, I will grant
you, but without contradicting it) – whereby the same idea can be used
to theologize the given order or, instead, to show its inadequacy. The
judgment whether or not the social order matches the idea is not

6 The Marxist confusion of realism and materialism is a theme that has often been
emphasized by Berdaev and that is being emphasized today by Georges Izard, the
recent theoretician of French revisionist socialism. On the value of the action-oriented
realism found in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, see the remarkable piece by Geymonat,
“Materialismo e problema della conoscenza,” in Rivista di Filosofia 37 nos. 3–4 (1946):
109ff. Later on I will mention briefly, and just as a suggestion for further reflection,
how Marxist realism must be understood as the result of surpassing gnoseologism
(surpassing Idealism as a consequence of radical atheologism).
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 175

pronounced by man as a pure spirit or as a logical subject but by man

engaged in a historically determined situation and who has, therefore,
needs and passions.
How the materialist myth became superimposed on this realistic and
humanistic conception of history can be easily explained by a phenom-
enological analysis of the concept of revolution. The myth of materialism
necessarily makes its appearance in the transition from the simple
economic-political concept of revolution (as substantial modification
of the property regime in relation to changed production conditions)
to the concept of total revolution (which is its utopian projection: revo-
lution as “the restoration of the man of nature” or “creation of a new
man,” and as liberation not from this or that historical evil but from
evil in general, from sin: hence, besides its anti-historical character, the
revolutionary utopia’s character of being “Christianity in reverse,” as a
promise of restoration or of instauration, depending on its anti-historical
or pseudo-historicistic form, of a humanity freed from sin). It is, in fact,
the mediating factor of this transition. It arises as a response to the conser-
vative side’s effort to theologize the given order (an effort that defines
the image of reaction); that is, when the revolutionary will cannot find
its justification by referring to the system of values recognized in a given
society. The conservative side’s ideology is necessarily Idealist (in a broad
sense – for example, precisely in the sense in which the theoreticians
of dialectical materialism regard as Idealist even Thomist realism).
Under historical conditions that make necessary an economic-political
revolution, the conservative side cannot hold on (i.e., it cannot try to
break up the mass of the alienated class) except by trying to show that
the social order it defends is mandated by a transcendent or immanent
Reason. Its philosophy will be a philosophy of “justification” of reality,
and so of “contemplation by Reason,” of “comprehension.” To be more
precise, the thesis of the primacy of theoretical activity is not even
essential to it; what is truly essential is the exhortation to a form of ascetic
morality, to the sacrifice of the inferior subjectivity of needs and passions
that the subject “of the Universal” must make – a sacrifice that, depend-
ing on the cultural situation, can be presented as aimed at Reason’s
“comprehension” or to the fulfilment of a “universal will” or of “the
ethical idea of the State” and the like.
Hence the structurally necessary features (from Antisthenes, the
Greek revolutionary philosopher, to dialectical materialism) of revolu-
tionary ideology. It will be materialism and a philosophy of action within
176 The Problem of Atheism

materialism. Materialism because one wants to show that the rationality

that justifies inequality is neither divine Reason nor human reason in
its universality but the rationality of that determined historical group,
a historical product, in short. That is, that the given social order is a
fact, has the contingency of a fact, and the rationality to which it makes
appeal is not its principle and its foundation, but it is intrinsic to the
fact itself, as a “superstructure.” Evidently, the contradiction between
materialism and philosophy of action is what makes it possible later,
once the revolution is established, to move past the substitution of
philosophy with revolutionary ideology. But we can easily realize why
in revolutionary thought the consideration of this contradiction is
blocked. The ideological figure of the materialist philosophy of action actually
expresses the transcendence of the revolutionary level with respect to the level of
moralism. Materialism means that revolutionary action is not propelled
by the morality of the single individual (by his freedom) but by the neces-
sity of the historical situation. The revolutionary is such because he feels
“alienated” not on account of an injustice (and thus of a contingency)
committed by somebody – where this somebody may well be the totality
of the community to which he belongs (in that case we have the romantic
type of the individual “estranged from the mass”) – but because of the
necessity of the existing social order (therefore one feels to be a revo-
lutionary as a subject belonging to a given class – hence the reconciliation
with the mass that is characteristic of the revolutionary spirit, its “non-
romanticism”). Therefore, the hurdle is no longer found within us, as
in the moralistic attitude, but outside us; that is, one does not elevate
oneself to the revolutionary point of view but, at most, can evade it. It is
easy to understand that, from this negative consideration of freedom
as a possibility of evasion, one must move to a philosophy of necessity
and to a materialistic interpretation of the possibility of evasion itself
(just think how the path to the negation of freedom always depends on
its previous moral devaluation, on regarding it as the mere possibility
of going astray).
Of course, no other value can be attributed to revolutionary material-
ism than that of being an ideology. In other words, it is not an answer
to the problem of being but a political position vis-à-vis a contingent
use of Idealism (broadly understood) to theologize historical reality.
Philosophy decays into ideology by excluding from its consideration
some part of the real or of the possible (the end of history, the exclusion
of the future in some forms of Idealism; revolutionary materialism, with
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 177

its exclusion of the past, is just the mirror image of this). Ideology is
such in as much as it thinks “against” – that is, it serves the purpose of
setting one part of reality in opposition to another. In this sense it is
“practical” thought (it enters the historical process as an instrument
for action). This is also why its value is historically conditioned; it can
decay from an instrument that in a determined historical and cultural
situation is useful with regard to promoting revolutionary action to an
instrument of asphyxia. It can backfire as the instrument that reaction-
aries use to isolate the proletarian party – is not the most serious anti-
Communist criticism today the one that focuses on the Soviet regime’s
character as an “atheistic theocracy” and on its consequent totalitarian-
ism? This is what a Communist regime must necessarily look like if it
wants to present itself as bearing the “only true philosophy.” The mate-
rialistic-revolutionary ideology cannot succeed because of the link with
utopia that I mentioned, except in situations in which historical aware-
ness is lacking. Therefore, in the West the marriage of dialectical mate-
rialism and Communist politics is at risk of turning into a break between
Communism and culture, and into making Communism relative to
Russia, a “non-European country.”
Now, how should one assess the presence in Marx of this revolutionary
materialism? Should we think of it as an essential element of Marxism
or as an accidental and eliminable representation? As you know this
question has been picked up again recently, and thinking that it is
essential has led to the idea of surpassing Marxism to transition into
liberal socialism. According to the methodological interpretation, on
the contrary, not only can this metaphysical foundation be removed
without taking anything away from Marxism, but this elimination is required
by Marxism’ s deep intention. Therefore, we must look at the backdrop of
problems against which Marx’s thought arose and reflect upon the
conviction shared by all the thinkers of the dissolution of Hegelianism:
that Hegel’s philosophy was “philosophy.” And this philosophy con-
cluded with the justification of the present, the identity of rational and
real led to the apology of the Prussian state. Philosophy as the “owl of
Minerva” and the polemic against the abstract Sollen and the ideology
of the Enlightenment ended up meaning, in practice, the absorp-
tion of philosophy into the established order. Hence the terms of the
question faced by the “young Hegelians,” which in fact is not a philo-
sophical but rather a practical question: asking “philosophy” to authorize
their revolutionary aspiration. It is a practical question because it is not
178 The Problem of Atheism

an internal critique of the principle of Hegelian philosophy but a

polemic against a particular practical attitude that seemed to be legiti-
mated by it, and an attempt to bend it into the program and the justi-
fication for the opposite practical attitude. An inversion was necessarily
the only form that this attempt could take, precisely because of the
absence of an effective theoretical critique. Hegel’s conclusion of history
was not eliminated but projected into the future, with the result that it
changed Hegelianism into an apocalyptic and messianic conception.
Hegelian dialectic was not reformed but transcribed materialistically.
Historically, Marx’s thought articulated itself against this background,
which goes to explain his language but not what he really thought (in
short, it explains only the contingent form that Marxism took in relation
to a given cultural environment). His actual question, which is the
source of his criticisms of the Hegelian left and of Feuerbach, is the tran-
sition from the revolutionary aspiration to revolutionary action. In him,
the political, and not philosophical, character of the question of the
Hegelian left comes to awareness (“it is not a matter of understanding
the world, but of changing it”). However, it is clear that, because of this
mere transition from the activity of the philosopher to that of the politi-
cian and the revolutionary, without a previous internal critique of
Hegelianism, the background had to be reduced more and more to a
marginal role and overshadowed, but it could not be entirely suppressed.
This would have required a radical criticism or an extension of
Hegelianism; Marx’s materialism was a sort of non-philosophical sur-
rogate of this criticism or extension, and he was satisfied with it precisely
because of the political and not philosophical character of his question.
In short, his materialism essentially meant: my revolutionary activity can
only be justified by a philosophical stance that in relation to orthodox
Hegelianism must be judged to be materialism – hence the strange impres-
sion of being a superstructure that it produces today, without the context
of the dialogue with the now-gone figure of the orthodox Hegelian. But
if, then, it must be regarded as a historical response to a given cultural
situation, removing it does not mean taking anything away from Marxism but,
rather, refraining from theologizing one of its historical ways of present-
ing itself (i.e., it means being truly Marxist). Metaphysicalist Marxism
is founded not on the positive aspect but, rather, on the historical limita-
tion of Marx’s questions, on the missing answer to a question he did not
ask (whether the perspective that viewed Hegelianism as “philosophy”
tout court was susceptible to criticism).
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 179

We saw earlier the link between the materialist myth and the revolu-
tionary spirit; certainly this link is not absolutely necessary, but still it
gets established extremely easily in history because of the very ease with
which spiritualistic philosophies decay – in indefinite, unpredictable,
and often unaware forms – into conservative ideologies. This helps
explain why it endures, and why Communist politicians are reluctant
to abandon it. The identification of revisionism and reactionary criti-
cism, and the Russian cultural situation, explains why a more rigid
materialism accompanied the “return to Marx” by the anti-revisionist
Lenin. But clearly the historical efficacy of an ideology can only last as
long as it can be mistaken for a philosophy. Its exhaustion has a particu-
lar structure: it does not merely cease, but it backfires, it becomes an
instrument of the opposite side (I cannot now linger on the reason for
this phenomenon, which is a consequence of the essence of ideology).
This is what is happening today in the West. Just think: by hardening
Marxism into a total conception of life, the metaphysicalist closure cre-
ates the necessity of choosing between Communism and anti-Commu-
nism. During the period of the Resistance people seemed to surpass
this choice in practice, after coming under the impression that renounc-
ing anti-Communism was required not just as a simple, contingent,
factual condition but as a necessary ideal condition for the transition
from anti-Fascism as a moral position to anti-Fascism as a political posi-
tion.7 But this surpassing was practically lived rather than theoretically
justified, which explains why, after the Resistance’s end, the choice
presented itself again, and the intellectuals’ sympathies for Communism
declined. Thus, it seems that the methodological interpretation is
required for the sake of the vitality of political Communism itself.8

***

We must ask ourselves (and this seems to me the best way to reach
a rigorous critical evaluation of it) whether the methodological

7 Regarding this interpretation of the Resistance, with which I disagree, see the
very interesting book by L. Lombardo-Radice, Fascismo e anticomunismo (Turin: Einaudi,
1946).
8 [TN] This concludes Del Noce’s long exposition of the arguments of the advocates
of the methodological interpretation, which started on page 174. From now on Del
Noce speaks again in his own voice.
180 The Problem of Atheism

interpretation applies to Engels’s spiritual process – which is indeed

the quest for an ontological justification of Marxist praxis in an attempt
to save the integrality of Marxism without having adequately penetrated
its philosophical origin – rather than to the process by which Marx
arrived at his Communism. In other words, whether this interpretation’s
argument is valid against Engelism – which is a quest to found the valid-
ity of political Marxism on a “conception of the world” – but is not valid
with respect to Marxism, which is, instead, an anthropology and presents
itself, with regard to political praxis, not as a foundation but as a tran-
scendental condition.
We know that Engels did not arrive at Communism through a
philosophical experience but through a study of the evolution of
capitalism in an economic-political sense. His two articles in the
French-German Annals (“The Condition of England” and “Outlines
of a Critique of Political Economy”),9 which established the union
everybody knows between him and Marx, must have appeared to Marx
to be the confirmation of his theoretical construction by historical
reality.10 Through Engels, Marx discovered the link joining his phi-
losophy to concrete politics; this is probably the meaning and the
foundation of their friendship.
But the fact that Engels did not go through the same philosophical
experience as Marx, and learned it in its already conceptualized form,
has the effect that the philosophical question presents itself to him
precisely in the terms that the methodological interpretation also attri-
butes to Marx: as a quest for the “legitimization” – for permission,

9 [TN] Friedrich Engels, “Die Lage Englands” and “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der
Nationalökonomie,” in Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher (1844).
10 Auguste Cornu, Karl Marx. L’uomo e l’opera. Dall’Hegelismo al materialismo storico,
1818–1845 (Milan: La Nuova Biblioteca, 1946), 277. The Marx-Engels relationship is
very hard to express in precise terms because of the novelty of Marx’s philosophical
position. Whereas the thesis (affirmed by the followers of dialectical materialism) that
their thoughts are completely identical is not adequate, it would be even more incor-
rect to fall into the opposite excess and to present Engels’s position as a deviation and
a distortion of that of Marx. These terms would make sense only if Marx’s philosophy
were a “conception of the world”; but if the originality of Marxism, as we shall see later,
is that of surpassing philosophy by transitioning into political action, then Engelism is
merely a less adequate philosophical expression, a sort of symbolization of real
Marxism in a naturalistic language; its inadequacy is, let us put it this way, technically
philosophical, it is just the incapacity to respond to a more astute critical position.
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 181

basically – of a political praxis by philosophy. People often say that

Engels’s Marxism is heavily imbued with positivism. This characteriza-
tion is essentially true, but let us try and give it a historically rigorous
meaning. The developmental process of his philosophical thought can
be schematically outlined as follows:

1. Engels’ concern is to preserve the integrality of Marxism. Therefore,

he grasps the necessity, for critical Communism, of a philosophy.
But, on the other hand, the deepest drive of Marx’s philosophy
escapes him: Marx’s critique of “comprehension,” of philosophy as
a “conception of the world.” Because of this, he is bound to confuse
Marx’s critique of Hegel (which concerns the question of the
relationship between reason and existence) with that developed
by positivism (about cognitive contents that do not fall within the
framework of the Hegelian system; again the realm of existence –
all critiques of Hegel come from this realm – but considered as
an object).
2. Therefore, he must rethink Marxism in terms of the positivist
critique of Hegel’s philosophy of nature.11
3. But after this transposition, how to express Marx’s distinction
between his materialism and the ancient one? And how to express
the “non-philosophy,” the surpassing of philosophy also formulated
by Marx?
According to Marx’s actual position, as we shall see later, the
distinction lay in the fact that his materialism was the negation of
materialism understood as a Weltanshauung. Conversely, Engels finds
himself forced to try and make the Marxist distinction fit within a material-
ism already understood beforehand as Weltanshauung. Hence the funda-
mental contradiction of his attempt, between materialism and
dialectics. Having inserted Marxism into the naturalistic framework,
what distinguishes it from vulgar evolutionism will be that it makes
man an active factor and not a passive product of evolution (hence
Engels’s polemic against Dühring, and his tendency to view it as
analogue to Marx’s stance with respect Feuerbach). But why,
according to Engels, is Marxist materialism able to preserve this role

11 Indeed, his fundamental work was supposed to be titled Dialectics of Nature. It

remained unfinished, and its largely unpublished fragments were published by
Riazanov in 1925.
182 The Problem of Atheism

of human activity? Because it is a materialism that, having been born

surpassing Hegelianism (and this surpassing is represented as
dialectic, distorting completely Marx’s relation to Hegel), preserves
its truth. In short, and simplifying the sequence of steps, because it
is dialectical materialism, a concept that belongs entirely to Engels,
whereas I believe that not even the term “historical materialism”
appears explicitly in Marx.12
4. Together with the concept of dialectics, Engels transcribes and also
distorts the Marxist surpassing of philosophy, which he understands
as the absorption of philosophy into science, made possible by the
appropriation by science of the dialectic method.13
5. But dialectical materialism is a conception of the world. Hence the
curious fact that, in Engelism, the properly Marxist part (Marx’s
anthropology, which is the entirety of his philosophy) becomes the
“section” devoted to the theory of history and the politics of
dialectical materialism.14
6. Dialectics is invoked, as we have seen, in order to save the activist
character of Marxism. In the end its meaning becomes equivalent
to that of revolution,15 and materialism becomes the condition for
bringing out its revolutionary sense, the transition from thought
dialectics to living dialectics (the mystic and conservative meaning
that dialectics has in Hegel is due to its being inserted within an
Idealist system).

12 This remark is made by Mondolfo in Il materialismo storico in Federico Engels

(Genoa: Formiggini, 1912).
13 “Philosophy is therefore ‘sublated’ here [in real science], that is, ‘both over-
come and preserved’; overcome as regards its [idealistic] form, and preserved as
regards its real [dialectic] content (F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, pt. 1, chap. 13) [TN: the
words in brackets appear in Del Noce’s quotation in Italian but not in the English
translation by Emile Burns (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1947). Del Noce was known
for quoting from memory].
14 This is the source of the common opinion, which is essential both to revision-
ism and to its methodological interpretation, that the specific subject of Marx’s
research is a theory of history that must be freed from the metaphysicalist framing.
15 Regarding this equivalence, see the book by the founder of anti-revisionist
Russian Marxism, G.V. Plekhanov, Le questioni fondamentali del marxismo (Milan: I.E.I,
1945) [G.V. Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (Moscow: International
Publishers, 1962)].
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 183

From what has been said it is clear that in Engels dialectical material-
ism does not arise as a philosophy but as the surrogate for a philosophy:
as a way of signifying the integral preservation of the Marxist political
praxis (it is easy to show that every single one of the terms used by
Engels is a cover for the defence or the condemnation of a practical
position). If we then consider the history of dialectical materialism, we
see that it is the fulfilment of its destiny, the clarification of its nature
as an ideology.
Apparently, in Russia it is used to judge the orthodoxy, or not, of a
given praxis. Berdaev writes: “Philosophical controversies [in Soviet
Russia] are problems debated not so much from the point of view of
truth or error as from the point of view of orthodoxy or heresy.”16 But
let us observe that, in itself, this characteristic does not even mean that
dialectical materialism is devalued. It simply says that it must not be
regarded as a philosophy stricto sensu. Its nature is exactly that of a faith-
ful transcription of Marxist materialism at the ideological level. Its task
is to justify the same practical consequences as philosophical Marxism
(when, later on, we shall examine the specific Marxist nexus of theory
and practice, we shall also see that it would not be correct to present
dialectical materialism as an alteration or as a superstructure of Marx’s
philosophy; it is merely a less philosophical expression thereof, a posi-
tion that, from the standpoint of a more rigorous philosophical critique,
must be surpassed but that, in the meantime, is useful in order to dis-
tinguish Marxism from non-Marxism because all the positions that form
the essential core of Marxism are signified in it, although in a philo-
sophically inadequate form).
It is also clear how Engelism had necessarily to originate revisionism,
upon being introduced into a cultural milieu where the mix up with
philosophy could not be sustained. In this regard, we must keep clear
of some common opinions. It is absolutely wrong to present Engleism

16 Le fonti e lo spirito del comunismo russo (Milan: Corticelli, 1945), 182 [Nicolas
Berdaev, The Origin of Russian Communism, trans. R.M. French (Ann Harbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1960), 151]. Lenin’s reflections on dialectics mark the transition
from theoretical equivalence between dialectics and revolution to practical equiva-
lence. Thus, in a 1921 text about the issue of trade unions, he uses it in order to
denounce the left-wing deviation by Trotsky and the right-wing deviation by Bukharin.
The fact that, subsequently, a famous pamphlet by Stalin was thought to be settling
questions of interpretation about dialectical materialism is the best proof and the best
clarification of its ideological, and not strictly philosophical, nature.
184 The Problem of Atheism

as the result of reading Marx from a bourgeois spiritual disposition

(unless we intend the term “bourgeoisie” as a philosophical
category).
Engelism’s origins are philosophical and not political. Regarding its
strictly theoretical form, it stems from the need to determine to what
extent Marxism is truly scientific;17 in its political forms, it stems from
the need to appropriate this critique to avoid a conflict between social-
ism and culture. In truth, rather than being intentional, downplaying
the revolutionary meaning was the necessary result of the type of reading
that, by mistaking Engels’s transcription for Marx’s philosophy, had to
proceed consistently to devalue Marxism as a philosophy.
We can observe this somehow involuntary formation of the revisionist
paradigm if we try to characterize precisely the scholar in whom people
usually see the beginning of the critical crisis of Marxism, Antonio
Labriola. The definition he gives of the flaw of revisionist literature in
a 1898 letter to Croce is unbeatable in its precision (as we shall see
shortly): “You may also agree with me on this, that you argue instead of
explaining, and you argue only with yourself. In other words: you argue
with yourself to know to what use you should put Marxism, but not to
know what it is.”18 Listen also to Croce’s comment: “In him there were
two souls, the soul of the critic and philosopher who wished to organize
and correct Marxism (and in this he was very close, not only to me, but
also to Bernstein and the other authors of the crisis), and the soul of
the revolutionary who felt and welcomed in himself Marx’s revolution-
ary value, and who, in this respect, should have taken his place next to
the dogmatists and the conservatives or re-awakeners of Marx’s original
revolutionary spirit, that is, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, who was begin-
ning his work at that time.”19 At bottom, the appearance that there
were two souls was simply the result of the conflict in him between an
extremely acute sensitivity to the disfigurements of Marxism and an

17 Regarding these origins of the “crisis of Marxism,” see the truly illuminating
essay by Croce, “Come nacque e come morì il marxismo teorico in Italia” (from
1937), republished as an appendix to the new edition of Labriola’s essays La concezi-
one materialistica della storia (Bari: Laterza, 1945).
18 Croce, “Come nacque e come morì il marxismo teorico in Italia,” 301.
19 Ibid., 308.
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 185

inability to express what it truly was,20 because the significance of the

philosophical problems from which Marxism had emerged escaped
him. This is why, in him, the conversationalist prevails over the writer
(because of the difficulty of finding the iunctura rerum);21 and this is
why his sensitivity to the disfigurements of Marxism expressed itself in
emotional reactions and polemical excesses, while, by virtue of its criti-
cal content, his work actually opened the revisionist crisis and found in
Croce its most rigorous continuer.
But now let us quickly show the derivation of the essential revisionist
themes from the mix up of Marxism with Engelism. Because of the
contradiction in Engels’s position, people occasionally come up with
the idea of going back to Marx to find in him a better philosophical
expression (in this regard the works in which Rodolfo Mondolfo tried,
between 1908 and 1923, to provide a philosophical theory of critical
Communism are extremely instructive). But, since they understand mate-
rialism in the sense used by Engels, they must consistently end up pinpoint-
ing the essence of Marx’s philosophical thought in a philosophy of praxis
for which the term “materialism” is very ill-suited. To this interpretive
position corresponds the isolation of the Theses on Feuerbach as Marx’s
only philosophical text. Where that word “only” simply meant cutting
them off from the philosophical problems from which they arose (with
the consequence that the work of the commentator ended up taking
the form, even against his deliberate intentions, of a work of abstraction
to justify how the element of truth of historical materialism might be
thinkable starting from his own philosophy). Certainly, the Theses lent
themselves to this very well. They are the conclusion of Marx’s philo-
sophical work from 1840 to 1845, a coming to awareness of his whole
process of thought. One is fully authorized to see in them all of Marxism,
condensed in a very quick synthesis. By developing them, one can find
the past and future processes of Marx’s thought; together with the defi-
nition of his break with Hegel, also the Manifesto and Capital. But, taken
by themselves, their aphoristic form can justify the most varied inter-
pretations: every revisionist can find in them the questions of his own
philosophy.

20 This should be the starting point for a rigorous determination of the meaning
of his work, putting an end to a hyper-valuation that by now has lasted half a century
and that, historically, is understandable but today has become conventional.
21 Croce, “Come nacque e come morì il marxismo teorico in Italia,” 273.
186 The Problem of Atheism

But, in the end, out of this philosophy of praxis one could only get
the thesis of humanistic Marxism: a vague thesis that limits itself to
showing that Marxism is neither economic determinism nor mechanic
nor dialectic fatalism, the purpose being to avoid getting it involved in
the crisis of evolutionist positivism. In short, it limits itself to indicating
what Marxism is not rather than its positive content (as a rule, this
deficiency was remedied by replacing Marx’s man with the man of secu-
larized Christianity). This is natural, after all. Isolated from its problems,
the philosophy of Marx was interrogated as a philosophy of comprehen-
sion. And then its devaluation became inevitable: one could point out
that Marx did not directly tackle philosophy’s classic and eternal ques-
tions, the question of God, of immortality, and so on; or that he did not
show any interest in theorizing about the spiritual forms that seem
extraneous to political activity – namely, art and science; that he limited
himself to considering and mythologizing as eternal a contingent his-
torical nexus of religion and conservative politics of the nineteenth
century; that his pretended philosophy lacks not only a systematic char-
acter but also the quest to organize ideas into an overall vision of reality;
finally, that the complete subordination of philosophical interest to
political interest (of the will to interpret to the will to change) is declared
precisely in the last thesis on Feuerbach.
By rigorously following this road, one must arrive at the perspective
of the not only unsurpassed but unsurpassable revisionist commentary
(as a precise definition of the categories under which every revisionist
reading is possible): Croce’s Materialismo storico. One must arrive at the
conviction that Capital shows us the true and mature Marx, who sup-
posedly recognized his vocation as politician and economist and not as
philosopher. With respect to it, the writings of the period between 1840
and 1848 represent Marx still unaware of himself; they signify the slow
surfacing of the true Marx from his pre-culture, from what he passively
received from the cultural milieu, which remains in the works of the
mature period as a burden or as mere phraseology – the second-rate
philosophy of the Hegelian left, a generic term in which people often
muddle together thoughts as different as those of the Hegelian left in
the proper sense, of Feuerbach, and of Marx as philosopher.
Of course, the conviction that the true Marx is Marx freed from the
bad framework of the questions associated with the dissolution of
Hegelianism had to turn into the view that is criticized in Antonio
Labriola’s judgment, which I quoted earlier: Marx’s effective thought
is a thought dissociated from his questions, which answers, instead, the
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 187

questions of his critics. Hence the precise sense taken by the image,
which is common to the entire revisionist literature, of the “two faces”
of Marx: the element that can be assimilated and the one that cannot be assimi-
lated by a European culture that constituted itself independently of Marxism. By
reflecting on this sense we understand the indefinite variety of ways in
which it has been possible to present these two faces, albeit along the
common line of reconciling Marx with traditional ethics – and it is also
worth making a remark about the typical character of this reconcilia-
tion: it is not presented as a “synthesis”; it is, rather, an observation that
Marx “is not contradictory to” or “recalls as a necessary premise.” And,
speaking of recalling a particular philosophical position other than
Marxism, it is a necessity in order to make possible the assumption of
Marxism into the cultural perspective of the interpreter. Thus, for young
Croce the recalling will be of Machiavelli and the best traditions of
Italian political science; Bernstein will view Marxism as an extension
of liberalism; Adler and Vorländer will find in it the political specifica-
tion of Kantianism; Berdaev will speak of a personalist Marx in contrast
to a Hegelian Marx; and, recently, Calogero has presented a version of
Marx who ontologizes the initially ethical meaning of the equation
value-labour, obeying the suggestions of theologizing historicism.
Furthermore: we have seen that Engels’s foundation of Marxist poli-
tics did not have the meaning of a transcendental condition but, rather,
of inserting it into a system as one part of a whole. Then, it is natural
to point out that, from the equation value-work, and in general from
the materialistic theory of history, one cannot derive any practical
attitude (or at most, only a form of political quietism). Therefore, of
necessity theoretical Marxism and practical socialism have to be evalu-
ated separately; and when the former is considered, one is forced to
recognize in historical materialism a hybrid confusion of vulgar mate-
rialism and historicism (and this is indeed what it must look like if it is
disconnected from Marx’s specific philosophy). Having disassembled
historical materialism into its terms, one consistently reaches the con-
clusion that their union is artificial and contradictory. Having rejected
it as a philosophy, the good part to be extracted from it theoretically
will be an empirical canon of interpretation, nothing more than a
recommendation to historians to pay attention to economic activity in
the life of peoples.22

22 Ibid., 292.
188 The Problem of Atheism

But then, the foundation of Marxist socialism, too, as a practical atti-

tude, must be that of every other possible socialism – namely, an ethical
presupposition. It will be implicit, but in fact quite easy to illuminate
because, once Marx’s philosophy is set aside, it becomes necessary to
make recourse to an unspoken iusnaturalism in order to explain the
critique of surplus value – indeed, how could one think of explaining
the passage from the Ricardian to the Marxist sense of the equation
value-labour if not through a critique of the reduction of labour to a
commodity, based on the affirmation of man’s right to his own free
activity?23 Hence the incorrect judgment that the distinction between
utopian socialism and Marxist socialism lies in the addition in the latter
of a realistic character – which is then variously called Machiavellian
realism, or the realism of romantic politics, or the realism of political
science – to the iusnaturalistic presupposition.24 These are contradic-
tory elements, two souls of Marxism that make it ineffective in practice,
or, better, limit its effectiveness to countries like Russia, where the
absence of the iusnaturalistic tradition permits the reduction of the
iusnaturalistic aspect to a myth (by projecting the respect for the person
to the ideal of a future society). In fact, this contradiction is intrinsic to
revisionist Marxism, within whose horizon one must necessarily face
the question of ends versus means, the question of Machiavellianism
and its insoluble antinomy.25 It is also in connection with the failure to
solve this problem that we must explain why revisionist socialism has
been less effective than old orthodoxism à la Kautsky, in which the
expression “scientific socialism” ended up meaning “socialism whose
advent is guaranteed by science,” or the absorption of Marxism within

23 The most rigorous expression of this iusnaturalistic interpretation of surplus

value is perhaps that offered by Mondolfo, Il materialismo storico, 335ff.
24 On this perspective, which is also essentially Croce’s view in the well-known
work Per la storia del comunismo in quanto realtà politica (Bari: Laterza, 1943), see the
recent essay by Antoni, “Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto nella dottrina di Marx,” in
the volume Considerazioni su Hegel e Marx (Naples: Ricciardi, 1946).
25 There is no point in reviewing the vast recent literature on the question of
ends versus means (including Berdaev, de Rougemont, Huxley, and also Köstler’s
novels). This literature is, in fact, very important in order to show the impossibility of
reconciling Communist political praxis with any anthropology that is, in a broad
sense, Christian. Regarding the travails of revisionist socialism pertaining to the ques-
tion of violence, see, for instance, R. Mondolfo, Sulle orme di Marx, 3rd ed. (Bologna:
Cappelli, 1923).
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 189

evolutionist scientism. The revisionist critique against the fatalism of

this position may make sense at an abstract ideological level. However,
as a matter of fact scientism allowed one to avoid asking the question
of means: if the inevitable advent of socialism is proved by science, and
if, on the other hand, its establishment requires that a people be mature
for it, the criterion to judge this maturity can only be sought empirically
in the degree of diffusion of the conviction that socialism is true – that
is, in practice, in the majoritarian criterion (which is Kautsky’s position
in his well-known pamphlet on the dictatorship of the proletariat).

***

If the origin and nature of revisionism are as I described them – and I

believe my argument is hard to counter – establishing an essential dif-
ference between revisionism and the methodological interpretation
turns out to be impossible. The structural elements are the same: the
same initial confusion between Marx’s philosophy and Engelism, the
same invocation of a philosophy other than Marxism – this time, neo-
positivist rationalism – to serve the same function (which is not deter-
mining a precise philosophy of critical Communism but allowing its
assumption within the spiritual horizon of the interpreter). As for the
reason given to distinguish the two positions, it is the same that propels
the dialectic of the political forms that have come out of revisionism:
forgetting the revolutionary substance of Marxism in order to shift the
question onto the ideological level, with the conviction that it will trans-
late automatically into historical advancement; and emphasizing the
agreement with the principles of liberal civilization, an emphasis whose
fault is to forget that the Marxism polemic is not against those principles
in themselves but against their bourgeois mystification, so that the
agreement it emphasizes is at risk of turning into the bourgeois mysti-
fication of socialism – but was not that the reproach by Sorel’s left-wing
socialism against Bernstein’s right-wing revisionism? Or, to remain in
Italy, was that not the reproach by Rosselli’s liberal socialism (which
formed in the atmosphere of De Man’s “surpassing of Marxism”) against
the revisionism theorized by Mondolfo?26

26 V. Rosselli, Socialismo liberale (Florence: Edizioni U, 1945), 60.

190 The Problem of Atheism

Actually, the distinction is not at the structural level but at the histori-
cal level. Methodologism faces the success, or the appearance of success,
of the socialist form that invokes dialectical materialism and the practical
failure of the forms that came out of revisionism. Therefore, it is no
longer a matter of opposing crude and non-European Communism
with forms of socialism reconciled with culture, values, freedom, and
the like but, rather, of demonstrating that political Communism can
effectively be reconciled with culture.27
However, it is also clear that in another respect the new interpretation
is in a situation of inferiority with respect to revisionism. By hiding the
ends-versus-means question behind the realism of political science, it
dodges the question that, rigorously analyzed to its core, makes it pos-
sible to dissipate the appearance of two souls in Marxism and the notion
that Marx was “as acute as a sociologist as he was weak as an anthropolo-
gist,” and to grasp the essence of Marxism as the first consistent non-
Christian anthropology. However, to do so one must leave behind the
revisionist devaluation of Marx’s philosophy; from whose perspective,
the consideration of the non-Christian aspect of Marxism can only lead
to a moralistic critique.
In another sense, we must also speak of the inferiority of the meth-
odological interpretation with respect to dialectical materialism itself.
As weak as this position may appear to a strictly philosophical consid-
eration, nonetheless it manifests the valid exigency that one cannot
enter into political Marxism without a precise philosophy, without a
new idea of man.28

2. MARX’S NON-PHILOSOPHY

The question we now have to pose to ourselves is whether all of Marxism

does not constitute itself in the transition from a concept of philosophy

27 [That is, old revisionism (à la Bernstein, à la Vorländer) set aside the revolu-
tionary themes of Marxism in order to harmonize it with the values of liberal society;
whereas new revisionism intended, and still intends today, to broaden liberalism in
order to be able to reconcile it with a revolution that it would like to justify on the
basis of liberal (or Christian) values.]
28 [At that time by the formula dialectical materialism I meant to refer, using
somewhat imprecise terminology, to the presentation of Marxist philosophy as a
closed conceptual discourse; to the scholasticism of the Stalinist period, if you wish].
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 191

as comprehension to a concept of philosophy as revolution (or, in surpassing

the type of the philosopher by the type of the revolutionary; in the transi-
tion from philosophy to a non-philosophy, which, however, is not mere
practical activity distinct from theoretical activity but rises and explicates
itself as a surpassing of philosophy). If Marx’s position is defined thus,
the distinction between him and Engels can be specified more rigorously
than I did earlier: Engels’s philosophy, just like the subsequent dialectical
materialism, is instead a “philosophy of revolution,” a justification of
revolution through the inversion of dialectics – that is, it is still an inver-
sion within philosophy (consider also the way in which Engels presents
the relationship between Marx and Feuerbach; Feuerbach lacks dialectics,
but the real relationship is more complex) and not an inversion of phi-
losophy. In order to grasp this point, namely, the strictly philosophical
and not merely moral motivation for his transition to politics, it will be
helpful to outline schematically – abstracting initially from the practical
tendency – the essential stages of his philosophical thought, starting
from an analysis of his relationship with Hegel.29

1. Engels’ judgment that Marx started from the contradiction be-

tween the revolutionary method and Hegel’s conservative system is
essentially correct, but it is important to make it precise. Marx agrees
with Hegel on the fundamental proposition of his thought, “recon-
ciliation with reality,” in its theoretical as well as in its historical-
cultural meaning (surpassing Romanticism), but he wonders
whether understanding such reconciliation in the form of
“comprehension” is contradictory. In its theoretical meaning,
Hegel’s proposition is the result of the critique of all theologizations
of the finite (hence his critique of separate infinity, made finite in
its opposition to the finite; this critique is the condition to achieve
the reconciliation with reality, to turn Hegelianism into a worldly
philosophy). But, now, what is the reason for Hegelian philosophy’s

29 The critical literature on Marx’s authentic philosophical position is very scarce.

The work by Della Volpe I cited earlier is very important; so is, of course, apart from
various critical reservations that I cannot explain now, the book by Karl Löwith, Von
Hegel bis Nietzsche (Zurich-New York: Europa Verlag, 1941) [TN: From Hegel to Nietzsche
(London: Constable and Co., 1965)], which was perhaps the first to bring Marx’s
thought back to its original philosophical questions. The book by Cornu that I just
mentioned is also very important, even though it has a mainly descriptive character.
192 The Problem of Atheism

character of finished totality, for the “conclusion of philosophy” –

or its theologization as philosophy – and its consequences ending
in the conservatism of the Philosophy of Right? In Marx’s view, the
Hegelian conclusion of philosophy and history is a consequence
of the permanence in Hegel of the “image” of Idealism – namely,
reconciliation sought in the humanization of the divine, with the
consequent image of man as “self-consciousness” – or of the
preservation of “modern Christianity,” which is implicit in the
dialectical surpassing of religion by philosophy. Together with the
“Spirit” one necessarily introduces the in te ipsum redi and its
consequence: asceticism of knowledge, meaning that the finite
subject in order to “comprehend” must “elevate” himself to such a
degree of universality that his own existence or not within finite
reality becomes indifferent to him. By virtue of this asceticism the
immanence of the rational within the real becomes the theologiza-
tion of historical reality, and one arrives at reconciliation with reality
in the sense sanctioned by the famous preface to the Philosophy of
Right. Thus, the result of Hegel’s philosophy contradicts its starting
point: immanence had been reached based on the critique of the
theologization of the finite; via the Spirit and the “immanent God”
immanence becomes the theologization of an empirical reality
However, is it not legitimate to ask whether Marx confused the
critique of Idealism with the critique of panlogism, and whether
his intention was not preserved in the following statement by Croce:
“another consequence of the systematic structure is that Hegel, who
does feel so strongly the importance of the active life, is led to affirm
in his philosophical formulas a contemplative or ascetic ideal of
human life. In his system the sphere of practical activity is inferior
to the sphere of art, of religion, of philosophy; and the objective
spirit is inferior to the absolute spirit … Here practice gets to be
conceived like Spinoza or Fichte conceive the state, as a mean;
the end being contemplative life. Hence the rebellion that men of
action felt against Hegelian philosophy, and which seems justified,
as by a factual proof, by the contemplative and inert attitude it
promotes among quite a few of its followers”30 – an attitude over-
come in Croce’s general revision? Or, from another perspective, is

30 In the essay “Il concetto del divenire e l’hegelismo” of 1912, in Saggio sullo
Hegel, 3rd ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1917), 154.
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 193

it not legitimate to ask whether his critique applies only to the

philosophy of the “Spirit in the third person” and therefore, in its
philosophically positive aspect, has already been appropriated by
Gentile’s Idealism? Here it is important to point out that it does
not seem to be the case at all that Gentile’s study of the philosophy
of Marx ought to be considered a marginal work of his youth or a
complement to Croce’s book, which concerns the non-lasting part
of Marxism. It seems, rather, given the fact that in it we already find
the themes that Gentile will further develop, that the study of Marx
constituted for him a decisive stimulus; but with the result – because
he separates Marx’s philosophy of praxis from materialism – of
confirming his intention to pick up again the revision of Hegel in
the sense inaugurated by Spaventa.
Clearly I cannot undertake here an adequate study of this ques-
tion. I must just observe that it is not legitimate to present as a solu-
tion what is only the position of the terms of the question. And that
one cannot dismiss so quickly the consideration of Marxism as a phi-
losophy, interpreting it as a nineteenth-century position that arose
from the disputes that had to take place within Hegel’s school due to
the lack of an internal critique of his philosophy.
And indeed, what prompts us to consider the possible relevance
today of Marx’s critique is the fact that the elimination of the
panlogistic image in the neo-Hegelian philosophies does not seem
to have suppressed the danger of theologizing a determined histori-
cal reality. Besides the logical difficulties it poses, does not Croce’s
concept of the “non-definitiveness of philosophy,” in which his
critique of the Hegelian conclusion is summarized, seem to undergo
an inversion into the consecration of liberal civilization, into the
“religion of freedom?”31 As for Gentile, does it not seem legitimate
to ask whether there is a relationship between his replication of

31 Here of course I cannot examine in depth whether Croce’s thought can or

cannot escape this criticism (which is essentially the one that Gramsci already formu-
lated) [at that time some passages by Gramsci had been published in the journal
Rinascita, and I had the impression that my criticism was the same as his. This was
confirmed, at least for the most part, by Materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce
(Turin: Einaudi, 1948), which was published in 1948]. What matters now is only to
observe that the recent relevance of Marxism is tightly tied to the impression that it is
possible to again apply to Croce the criticism that Marx formulated against Hegel.
194 The Problem of Atheism

Marxism within Idealism and the practical replication of Marxism

within bourgeois society, which is the only possible rigorous definition
of Fascism? Or again, in more philosophical terms, are we not
authorized to ask whether among the roots of the activist aspect
(in a pejorative sense) of Actualism there is the cutting off of the
philosophy of praxis from materialism?
2. Reconciliation with reality sought in comprehension requires that in
order to elevate myself to the universal I forget myself. But then the
truth I obtain is a truth that comes after a you must; which, therefore,
is not an expression of reality but a secondary image thereof. Reality
and thought fall into two opposite totalities, real existence is not
thought existence. By making itself absolute, Idealism ends up
“mystifying” reality, severing thought and existence; it ends up
necessarily reducing the philosopher to the “professor” in the sense
that this type, which is completely irreducible to the types of the
sophist or the scholastic or the pedant, took during the polemic that
marked the disintegration of Hegelianism32 – a professor is “a man
who thinks in categories other than the categories in which he lives.”
This is where we should look for the origin of the thesis that ideology
is a superstructure. One can easily show the existentialist character
of the Marxist critique of Hegel.33 But while the philosophers of
existence stop at the dissociation of philosophy and existence and set
the single, the private, the unique, the isolated thinker in opposition
to the community, for Marx acknowledging Hegel’s failure is the
starting point for a new attempt at reconciliation with reality.
This seems to me the starting point in order to discuss the
relationship between Marx and existentialism. Today this question
is much discussed and variously solved; some people observe that
Marx’s position cannot be understood either from the point of view
of Idealism or from that of naturalism, and they incline to present
it as the best nineteenth-century form of left-wing existentialism,

32 The frequent confusion is due to the fact that the critique of the type of the
“professor” became known above all in the form it took in Schopenhauer, in whose
thought the themes of the philosophy of the disintegration of Hegelianism come up
again, but somehow blurred and warped into a recollection of the past.
33 The essential text in order to prove this is perhaps the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right.
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 195

and so on; others counter that, from the Marxist point of view,
existentialism must be viewed as a form of bourgeois thought that
has come to confess its essence, as the confession of the individual
cut off from his community. This divergence of viewpoints is
understandable because, in fact, the relationship Marx-existentialism
is at the same time a relationship of absolute proximity and of
radical opposition. From the Marxist point of view existentialism is
just the necessary explicative process of the failure of the Hegelian
reconciliation with reality, which must end in a declaration of the
unreality of the rational and must continue the process of the
theologization of the empirical all the way to the theologization
of the experience of the single individual. At the end of the day,
what sets in opposition Marxism and existentialism is fidelity to
the Hegelian proposition: one could say that Marxism is what
Hegelianism must become in order to be able to overcome the
existentialist critique. On the other hand, it is also true that
the tendency to reabsorb Marx’s philosophy into existentialism arises
necessarily if one fails to grasp his transition from philosophy to non-
philosophy, the surpassing of philosophy; or, equivalently, if one fails
to grasp Marx’s criticism of the eternal man, or also if this criticism
is understood as an interpretation of man rather than as a critique
of the possibility of philosophy as interpretation. Because in this case
the scheme to which every possible existentialist interpretation of
Marx can be traced back presents itself as the least inadequate to
express his thought: Marx criticizes reconciliation between world
and man in thought to replace it with reconciliation in work – after
all, his man is not the man-object of naturalism. Thus, what Marx
wants to say with his critique of Idealism is that we must not replace
man with consciousness because consciousness is always conscious-
ness of an existing man (or that we must start from the Dasein, from
being-in-the-world, and so forth).
3. So, Marx’s attempt at reaffirming the unity of rational and real
cannot take any other route but that of a radical atheologization of
reason. Consequently, man is no longer measured by reason, by the
presence of the universal, of the value, of the idea of God, and so on,
with all the dependent gnoseogical and ethical categories (interiority,
and its practical translation into the category of the “private”), but
man is the measure of reason. Furthermore, in connection with the
196 The Problem of Atheism

critique of interiority, the essence “man” is no longer antecedent to

existing man.34 Here is all the difference between Marx’s position
and Feuerbach’s. Perhaps this difference can be adequately expressed
in this general formula: the inversion of Hegelianism in Feuerbach
remains an inversion within philosophy because Feuerbach preserves
the essence man and does not arrive at “social man”; for Marx the
inversion of Hegel cannot be complete unless we go beyond
philosophy, in the sense we shall see. Therefore, it is not possible
to present Marx’s thought as a development of what was implicit
in Feuerbach. The Theses do not represent a development but a
comparison “after the fact” between two autonomous positions, even
though, from a strictly historical perspective, reading Feuerbach was
for Marx a decisive suggestion. From this all the other differences
between the two thinkers also follow: first of all, the different
meaning of their atheism, which for Marx means the disappearance
of the problem of God (so that one could also say that, rigorously
speaking, for him the very figure of atheism disappears), whereas
for Feuerbach it is a matter of transferring into mankind the object
of religious love.
If man thinks not as a participant in reason, or at any rate in a
universal essence, but as man belonging to a given historical situa-
tion, the figure of the “social man” in the specifically Marxist sense
of this term arises. Moreover, with the disappearance of the idea of
participation thought loses all revelatory character and becomes
activity that transforms reality: “In practice man must prove the truth,
i.e., the reality and power, the ‘this-sidedness’ of his thinking.”35 We
see also that the thesis about turning to practice means the radical
inversion of the Platonic-Augustinian theory of ideas: I do not react
to the world because of the idea present within me but, rather, my
ideas are the articulation of my sense of reaction to the world.
From this follows: (a) the specifically Marxist sense of the work-man;
(b) the birth of Communism from the critique of the category of the
private, first of all in its metaphysical sense; and (c) the birth from
the critique of this same category of Marxist anti-Christianism. We

34 [The terms I used at that time are not entirely correct. What I meant to say is
that in reference to Marxism we cannot speak of human nature, given the process of
human self-creation and self-transformation].
35 The 2nd thesis on Feuerbach.
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 197

see then that, for Marx, anti-Christianism and Communism are one;
that, therefore, we cannot say that Marx is Communist and also
anti-Christian; that, instead, because of the philosophical origin of
his Communism, it is more correct to say that Marx is Communist
because he is anti-Christian.36
Thus we see the origin of the critique of human alienation and
why no iusnaturalistic appeal is implicit in it. We also see how, by
going down this road, we could easily solve the question of the
scientific form of Capital that so vexed revisionist commentators.
The regime of private property is the social consequence of the
distinction and priority of culture and interiority with respect to
work.37 So, if in Marxist terms man not only works but is work, we
see why the regime of private property must be considered a regime
of servitude.
4. If thought is thought by social man, man thinks in as much as he is
in relationship with other beings, in as much as he is a body. If,
moreover, thought is praxis – that is, human perceivable activity –
then it is expressive and not revelatory thought, and it is nothing
besides its perceivable manifestation; the upshot is integral material-
ism, which coincides with “real humanism” because it is not at all a
matter of making thought an epiphenomenon of nature.
Vulgar materialism is merely the impoverished translation of this
materialism at the level of comprehension. This is the meaning of
the first thesis: “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism
… is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the
form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity,
practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism,
the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of
course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.” Hence we
see how wrong is the interpretation that says that the opposition of
materialism and Idealism in the Theses boils down to the opposition

36 About all these points see the cited book by Della Volpe – and about the oppo-
sition between Marx and Rousseau, see his previous works: Discorso sull’ineguaglianza
(Rome: Ciuni, 1943); and La teoria marxista dell’emancipazione umana (Messina:
Ferrara, 1945).
37 The connection between the conception of man as work and the critique of
private property is particularly visible in the second and third of the Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
198 The Problem of Atheism

of philosophy of action and abstract rationalism. Marx’s true thought

is instead that materialism, in order to be consistent, must forgo
presenting itself as a philosophy of comprehension and must inter-
pret thought not as revelation but as activity that transforms reality.
And, conversely, only materialism can achieve a philosophy that is
action since Idealism can only treat action in the abstract (arriving,
basically, at a thought action, which is not a real action).
I will also mention a question that would deserve a lengthy
development: we also see how incorrect it is to say that Marxist
realism is primitive or crude or naïve, or to accuse Marx of not
having understood that matter is the idea of matter, and the like.
Marxist realism does not arise at all from “not having taken
gnoseology into account” or “not having understood Berkeley’s
lesson,” and so on. It arises, instead, as a consequence of the
atheologization of reason whose philosophical motivation I have at
least briefly mentioned already, even though the nature of this work
has not allowed me to go deeper. And it implies posing the question
whether the Idealist doubt may not already contain an implicit
metaphysics; whether, in fact, the precondition for the possibility
of doubting may not be the already previously accepted idea of an
absolute consciousness. In other words, Marxist realism does not
present itself as the naïve naturalistic position that precedes the
gnoseological critique but as a way to surpass gnoseologism.

This schematic description of Marx’s process of thought now enables

us to understand the central point upon which I particularly want to
focus attention: the Marxist surpassing of philosophy, which, at the
same time, is meant to be its realization. Philosophy will no longer
express itself in the form of a book or a system (comprehension, self-
consciousness, etc. of a realized totality) but in the realization of a totality;38

38 Accordingly, the truth of Marxism can only be verified by its historical result.
From this point one can reach a rigorous assessment of the customary criticism that
Marxism is a form of messianism. In connection with the questions I have just dis-
cussed, this criticism takes the following exact form: Marxism merely shifted to the
future the conclusion of history and the theologization of the empirical. But, from
what I said, it follows that messianism does not belong at all to authentic Marxism
(since its truth can only be a historical truth; we must understand, in this sense, Marx’s
well-known sentence that mankind inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to
solve). However, it also follows that this (messianic) figure arises necessarily if Marxism
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 199

in the construction of a society without classes in which the universality

of thought will be the result of the suppression of the classes. The
totalism of the systematic philosopher is replaced by the totalism of
the revolutionary.
Hence a very important consequence: let us ask ourselves what “philo-
sophical criticism” means in the Marxist inversion of the Platonic-
Christian man. Evidently, it cannot mean “an invitation to go back into
oneself,” to methodical doubt, to epoché, and so on. Nor can it mean, in
the manner of academic philosophy, “to overcome dialectically” (dia-
lectics meaning a “movement of thought ruled by the principle of
contradiction”). Indeed, what is the Marxist criticism of this philosophy
(of the eternal questions, of the priests of eternity, etc.)? In certain
historical conditions ideas form, and these ideas are expressed in words.
Academic philosophy works on these words, abstracted from the histori-
cal process with respect to which they are meaningful, trying to achieve
a vision of reality “free from contradiction” and concluding in a “philo-
sophic religion” that cannot operate except in an academic atmosphere
(an impotence that is glorified in the “isolation of the philosopher from
the rabble”), against which Feuerbach had already reconsidered the
positive value of popular religion. Nor will philosophical criticism mean
showing the inadequacy of a given philosophy to think the particular
questions of historical experience: because in that way one still remains
at the level of a philosophy of comprehension, of justificatory histori-
cism. For Marxism, philosophical criticism means showing that what
the various philosophies present as the eternal man is, on the contrary,
always the man of a determined form of society. And how can one show
that? If ideas are always the ideas of man in a determined historical situ-
ation, to criticize will mean to change the historical situation (consider
the Marxist inversion of Feuerbach’s position with respect to religion).
Therefore philosophical criticism coincides with the revolution. This
is the meaning of the Marxist nexus of theory and practice.

is understood as a conception of the world, with the consequent contradiction

between historicism and materialism, which is the core of Croce’s critique, and may
be the essential reason he believed that the exigencies posed by actual Marxism could
only be satisfied within an Idealist form of historicism – an in-depth analysis would
show that these exigencies have always been present in his thought and perhaps actu-
ally directed his research.
200 The Problem of Atheism

Thus we can say, in a rigorous sense, that Marxism is the assumption

of politics to be the language of philosophy; or that, from the perspective of
Marx’s thought, the party is the philosophical equivalent of the system.
Hence an entirely new relationship between philosophy and practice.
Politics does not intervene after philosophy in the sense of posing
itself the problem of the practical incarnation of a model, which, in
turn, has been deduced from a conception of the world. Nor is the
philosophical foundation the product of a reflection that is concomi-
tant or ulterior (in the sense that the volition of a given policy and the
philosophical search for its foundation are two different things) and
subjective, a commitment only for the philosopher who pronounces
it (in the manner, to be clear, in which for Croce the religion of free-
dom is the philosophical foundation of liberalism). On the contrary,
political praxis is the articulation of Marxism itself as a “non-philoso-
phy.” So that the question whether one can be a Communist – I mean
in the sense of Leninist Communism (Lenin must be recognized as
the first who really understood Marx, and I am thinking not so much
of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as of Lenin the political writer and
party organizer) – and think philosophically differently from Marx is
meaningless, strictly speaking. This is because Marx’s philosophy is
the political reality itself of Communism, and it is not possible to
consistently conceive the elements of Communism’s political practice
in their systematic relationship without making reference to the Marxist
idea of man (I cannot prove this now, but the proof would not be
hard). Hence the absolutely new, and historically unique, character
of Lenin’s politics, politics that is at the same time philosophy, the first
example of non-intuitive politics. This character has been highlighted
often, even though generally its meaning has not been fully grasped
(nothing shows how unfamiliar the thesis I have presented has been
so far better than the difficulty of Western culture to appropriate
the Russian judgment that Lenin was a great politician because he
was, in the Marxist sense, a great philosopher; and the frequently
repeated statement that a characteristic feature of Lenin was that, in
him, the practical interest was much greater than the theoretical inter-
est, and so on).
It seems that one can raise an easy objection to this assessment of the
relationship between Marx’s philosophy and Communist political prac-
tice. Does not the present development of Communist politics take
place more along the lines suggested by the revisionist interpretation?
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 201

Are not non-Marxist elements also allowed to join the “new party”?
However, this kind of objection does not take into account the inversion
of the notion of orthodoxy that is implicit within the general Marxist
inversion. It is clear that, according to Marx’s thought, one cannot
become a Marxist simply with his “separate intellect,” that is, by becom-
ing convinced of the objective truth of Marxism: this is precisely what
would prevent one from being a Marxist because Marx’s philosophy
would be changed into a worldview. All too evidently, from the Marxist
perspective the process goes from practice to theory and not the other
way around. The criticism of an idea follows from its being in contradic-
tion with lived existence.

3. MARXISM AND WESTERN CULTURE

We have stated that Marx’s non-philosophy not only arises but also
reaches its full expression as a surpassing of philosophy. We still have
to prove it by showing how, from the beginning of the Marx-Leninist
revolution until today, the change in philosophical views in the West
has been indirectly affected by it. This may seem paradoxical since, over
the last thirty years, no philosopher was quoted and discussed in the
West less than Marx. Not so paradoxical, perhaps, if we think of the
ubiquitous judgment that says that the rise of the philosophy of existence
cannot be explained without referring to the man of the crisis.
Let us briefly mention the quite peculiar and new fashion in which
the relationship of ethics and politics must take shape in Marxism-
Leninism, again in connection with the criticism of the fundamental
category of Platonism and Christianity – the idea of participation. In
Platonic-Christian thought man is in a necessary relationship with God
and in a contingent relationship with society (it is the necessary relation-
ship with God that founds his transcendence with respect to society,
and the contingency of his relationship with it). 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: but it is an
absorption of a special nature because it does not mean a simple reduc-
tion of ethics to politics, nor, conversely, a moralization of politics,
understood in the traditional sense; rather, it is an inclusion of ethics
in politics, which is the condition for the latter to develop its realistic
character to its extreme consequences.
202 The Problem of Atheism

Indeed, let us ask ourselves in what sense one can speak of ethics in
Marxism: evidently, not as a recognition of the presence of the “divine
image” in the other person (or, in rationalist or naturalist translations,
of “Reason” or of the “common human nature”); that is, not as a rec-
ognition of the ideal community to which both I and the other belong,
which implies the duty to limit my freedom to make space for the free-
dom of the other (and the political formula of the coexistence of free-
doms). One can speak of it in the sense that the affirmation of my
freedom (my liberation: it is evident that Marxism implies the replace-
ment of the idea of freedom by that of liberation) necessitates the
freedom of all (“the free development of each is the condition for
the free development of all”). Nor, of course, does this task present itself
to me as a Sollen but, rather, as a Müssen:39 that is, the liberation of
others does not present itself to me as a moral duty; it is one moment
of my own liberation, if my nature is social, if, in short, the relationship
with society is constitutive of my nature. Volition of the universal is
somehow reabsorbed into volition of the individual (it is from this point
of view that we must evaluate the Marxist critique of the ethical “true
socialism” of the Feuerbachians Hess and Grün, and the thesis that the
revolution cannot come about by invoking ethics or man’s true nature
but only as a consequence of the social situation in which the subjects
find themselves caught). And we see that it is precisely this inclusion of
ethics into politics that also makes possible the transition of politics to
its highest degree of realism – or, if we want to put it this way, the transi-
tion of Machiavellianism to its extreme consistency, but this formula

39 From here we can see how much the relationship between Marx and Kantian
ethics, which the revisionists emphasized so much, is not only arbitrary but actually
completely distorts the meaning of Marxism. Whereas, on the contrary, Kantian ethics is
precisely the form of traditional ethics in opposition to which Marxism took shape. In this
regard, consider how the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right essentially represents the
mere extension to Hegel’s position of the criticism that this latter had formulated
against Kantian ethics, concerning the arbitrariness of universalization and the con-
sequent possible moral mystification of every immoral content (see Philosophy of Right,
§135). As always, also here, what Marx imputes to Hegel is infidelity to his initial
proposition. A rigorous and complete treatment of Marx’s moral thought is still lack-
ing; however, see the truly important pages 203–8 in Della Volpe’s Libertà comunista.
[Here I was referring in particular to the ethical interpretations by the neo-Kantians
Cohen, Natorp and Vorländer; and, today, to that by M. Rubel, Karl Marx (Paris:
Rivière, 1957)].
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 203

would be imprecise and equivocal, as we shall see below. Therefore, we

must observe that such inclusion cannot have the meaning of replacing
the method of violence with the method of persuasion. The category
of persuasion is tightly linked with Platonic-Christian anthropology,
with the thesis of the presence in every man of the idea of God as foun-
dation of his transcendence with respect to history, of his freedom;
hence, social change will be possible as a consequence of man’s change
(of his conversion, of the reawakening in him of the idea of God); the
movement must go from man to society. But in the Marxist position
there is no essential man prior to the existing man: therefore, man’s
change will be a consequence of social change. The object of love will
no longer be man who is “a child of God” because he is such by essence,
but future man. Human universality is not something eternal against
which the present must be measured, it is a future for the sake of which
we must “make good use of the present.” This is why it has been said
very correctly that what Marxism is most opposed to is iusnaturalism,
that Marxism meets with resistance precisely to the extent that the
iusnaturalist tradition is alive, and that its revolution was able to start
from Russia because there this tradition was lacking.
From here we also see why the well-known characterization of
Marx as the “Machiavelli of the proletariat” is a misunderstanding:
Machiavellianism separates morality from politics precisely because, in
it, the Christian anthropology remains; vice versa, Marx reconciles moral-
ity and politics precisely because he negates this anthropology (think
of Lenin’s famous sentence: morality is what advances the proletarian
revolution). It has been remarked quite correctly that the true
Machiavelli is not Machiavelli but the anti-Machiavelli Frederick of
Prussia.40 That is, more than politics, Machiavellianism is the denuncia-
tion of a false consciousness, of the break in the modern age between
religion and politics, such that religion enters the field of political
relationships not as a determining principle but as one force in a play
of forces, as an instrument. On the contrary, Lenin is not the anti-Marx
but the true Marxist; that is, the Marxist revolution has marked the
end of Machiavellianism. Machiavelli is no longer useful when it comes
to explaining politics from 1917 to the present, exactly because in
Machiavelli there is politics and not the ethics of toughness, and

40 See Ugo Spirito, Machiavelli e Guicciardini, 2nd ed. (Rome: Leonardo, 1945).
204 The Problem of Atheism

between the two positions there is not continuity but a leap. But people
say: Communism is Machiavellian by virtue of the concept of tactics
since tactics presupposes some principles and some intentions that are
known to very few and concealed from many. Here again people fall
for the mistake of judging one of Marxism’s positions in relation to an
anthropology that is not its own. Conversely, if it is viewed in relation
to the anthropology on which it depends, tactics is nothing but the
process of conversion to Marxism, which cannot start from theory but
must start from practice. We are dealing again with the usual inversion:
it is not a matter of making an appeal to man’s interiority in order to
renew his existence but of renewing his existence in order to renew
his ideas. Hence the stages of the tactics: the conversion of a new
Communist begins by understanding that his ideal principles (defence
of the person, of morality, of freedom) merely mystify a social reality
that does not correspond to them; as a consequence, he is led to the
kind of practice that seems to be the only one suitable to destroying
such a mystified reality; then it will be his task to spot the contradiction
between this practice and his old principles – that is, between his exis-
tence and his thinking.
With respect to the new anthropology and to the practical stances in
which it expressed itself, the attitude of Western culture could only be
condemnation.41 But what practical form of resistance could be orga-
nized if there was no real surpassing because the philosophical questions
that had given rise to Marxist anthropology had not been tackled?
Evidently this resistance could only take place as an anti: that is, in a
form determined in its essential characteristics by its adversary. If now
we consider the a priori characteristics of this resistance, deducing them
from the concept of anti-Marxism without surpassing, and compare
them with the characteristics it has displayed historically, we can only
conclude that there is a perfect match.42

41 Croce’s judgment about Löwith’s Von Hegel bis Nietzsche is significant: “it is the
best we have on the topic, even though it is not illuminated by the conviction that
the story it tells is the story of a philosophical decline or, at any rate, of a non-
philosophy” (Discorsi di varia filosofia, 113). Considering that history, since the First
World War, has been the coming to reality of this “decline,” could Croce have declared
any better, in so few words, his belonging to the “world of yesterday”?
42 [Today my thinking on this point has changed somewhat. First of all, at that
time I did not foresee at all the resistance to Marxism by the society of well-being,
which is totally irreducible to Fascist or Nazi models. Moreover, I have become more
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 205

Indeed, consider that anti-Marxism without surpassing means, first

of all, Marxism deprived of its ideal character and put to the service of
the cause opposite to Marxism (defence of civilization, of values, etc.)
with respect to which it is contradictory. Regarding the form of the
inversion: unlinked from Marxist anthropology, the philosophy of praxis
must turn into activism. As a consequence, the praxis of the idea is
replaced by the idea reduced to instrument for action; the moral accep-
tance of toughness is replaced by violence raised to a value in itself; the
inclusion of religion in politics is replaced by the elevation of politics
to religion; the acceptance of class struggle for the sake of suppressing
distinctions is replaced by the absolutization of distinctions; the new
civilization is replaced by the disintegration of the old since its constitu-
tive order of values has been broken (values are now the instrument
for the affirmation of a “race,” of a “vitality”). The “defence of civiliza-
tion” turns upside down into its desecration.
Certainly this cannot be the place for a complete analysis of the phe-
nomenological structure of activism (I use this term faute de mieux,
knowing well the misunderstandings it can lend itself to). Let us limit
ourselves to considering a few of its features that can clarify the mean-
ing of the spiritual situation of the period between the two wars, also
with respect to philosophy. We may as well start from the simplest feature:
the inversion whereby action, in its simplest sense as transformation of
reality, is taken to be a value in itself, with the result of downgrading
other subjects to instruments or obstacles. In order for activism to be a
total attitude, such downgrading cannot just take a purely moral mean-
ing: it is a total depersonalization of reality – reality is reduced to an
object, it becomes real in my action, as the obstacle that I project in front
of me in order to overcome it. Therefore, activism implies a form of
lived solipsism. The judgment of an activist is the following: “it is my

and more convinced of the distinction between Nazism and Fascism. The one that is
really anti-Communist, in the sense of recognizing Communism as the primary
enemy, is Nazism. Fascism, by contrast, seems to me above all to be an irrationalist
competitor of Communism (but this would require a lengthy analysis, which clearly is
impossible here). As for the characteristics I used to describe anti-Marxism without
surpassing, they largely reflected a consideration of Fascism and of the anti-Fascist
experience (I don’t think, in fact, that one can apply to Nazism the solipsistic charac-
ter that, instead, can be attributed to Fascism; of course, this point would require
further specifications). Having made these clarifications, I stand entirely by what I
said about the character of Fascism and the moral reaction it elicited].
206 The Problem of Atheism

action that gives reality to the world.” Correlatively, ideas are reduced
to ways of presenting oneself in order to better have at my disposal myself
and others (hence the essential insincerity, in the sense of lacking the
intimate dimension, which is proper to an activist: whence his rhetoric and
his radical incapacity for self-awareness; whence also the characteristic
aspect of the “barbarism” of activist phenomena, but it is a barbarism
that has nothing to do with primitiveness). Due to such negation of the
meaning of intelligence, the subject of activist experiences reduces
himself to will; and acting presents itself to him as an imperative (only
in action do I affirm my existence as a subject; therefore, not-acting
coincides with moral degradation). From this follows the first funda-
mental contradiction of activism: the action it generates will necessarily
be immoral because of the non-recognition of the reality of other peo-
ple, and, at the same time, it will necessarily have to be mystified as
moral – but is not this exactly the contradiction of the bourgeois spirit
according to Marx? But there is a second fundamental contradiction.
We have already touched upon the essential anti-sociality of the activist
attitude; but from another angle we must also say that it is marked by
an essential politicity, in the rigorous sense that it cannot realize itself except
at the political level. The contradiction between these two fundamental
aspects is the reason it can only unfold as destructive of a community.
Indeed, the activist will only assume an orientation against because of
the absence of any value that specifies it; but, on the other hand, the
object of this against remains undetermined, it is not this or that thing
but the undetermined totality of the real. In order to determine itself
as action, the activist attitude must take as the object of its orientation
the most comprehensive order, the order of human relationships, civi-
lization. If, initially, activist movements have been able to present them-
selves as a “defence of order,” it is in view of a further stage of their
possibility to determine themselves concretely as action; it is because
their first necessity is to distinguish their revolutionary mindset from
that directed at the creation of a new civilization, and, in order to destroy
it, they use the given order as an instrument – hence the derivative
character of their reactionary aspect. But to see this intrinsic orientation
against “every” civilization, just observe how their action unfolded in the
direction of disintegrating the civilization they defended. But, on
the other hand, we have already seen that this action, which is political
in the crudest sense of political realism, must present itself to the activist
as the absolute value. As a consequence, activism must bring about an
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 207

elevation of politics to religion, which is a radically new phenomenon in

history. It clearly cannot be regarded in any way as a development of
Machiavellianism, if Machiavellianism is simply the recognition of the
autonomy of the political form. The only possible analogy is, as I already
said, with Marxism, except that the inclusion of morals in politics is
replaced by the affirmation of the primacy of politics over theoretical
thought, morals, religion. Hence the peculiar inverted theocratic form
engendered by activism, specified not by the exigency to defend absolute
truth but, we might say, by the exigency to defend the lack of truth.
Then we can also understand the peculiar and new character of the
persecution of the spirit in the totalitarian-activist atmosphere. It can-
not be assimilated to the classical types (e.g., the persecutions against
Socrates or against Bruno). Socrates’s judges simply declare that his
teaching does not benefit the polis:43 his condemnation is a conse-
quence of the dualism of spiritual and political life that characterized
the ancient world, which is the inverse of the monism of ours. Bruno’s
condemnation is a judgment about the falsity of his philosophy, which
the politician does not pronounce as such but as subordinate to reli-
gious authority.
The totalitarian state born from activism does not defend a metaphys-
ics; rather, it has its own theory of knowledge, so to speak. Reflecting
the nature of activism we just discussed, every philosophy is viewed as
a way in which a subject portrays himself to himself, pleases himself with
himself, a form of spiritual narcissism, of self-creation and self-contem-
plation of the beauty of the soul. The way it constricts the philosopher,
therefore, is not by commanding him to profess a particular theory
of truth but by inducing him to pronounce implicitly this judgment: I,
as a man of the community, by the mere fact of accepting to belong to it, as a
reflection the theory of knowledge that is essential to it, give the philosophy that
I affirm as an individual philosopher a different meaning. In other words,
my existence as a social man is in no way determined or justified by my
private philosophy; so that, from the standpoint of my social existence,
my philosophy seems to reduce to my way of mystifying myself, my
existential situation. As a consequence, the philosopher’s response must

43 Gaetano De Sanctis writes: the morality of Socrates “in its nature and in its
foundation was completely extraneous to the Polis and transcended it, broke the
indiscriminate primordial unity of civic life,” Storia dei Greci, vol. 2 (Florence: La
Nuova Italia, 1939), 496.
208 The Problem of Atheism

also take a different form from the classical types: the philosopher of the
past could seek the salvation of his interiority in the doctrine of double
truth or, later, in the claim of philosophical freedom – that is, he only
asked from the state the right to live for the truth. But this solution is
no longer sufficient in front of the totalitarian-activist persecution. The
type of the solitary philosopher, who moves away from the community
and thinks of the spiritual life as liberation from the world, becomes
inadequate. In order to escape the mystification, one needs to look for
a practical reversal. One encounters the Marxist question of the politic-
ity of philosophy.
Let us now examine briefly – merely establishing the criteria to
direct an investigation that naturally would require a much broader
development – how the changing of the questions studied by philoso-
phers during the second quarter of our century was tightly connected
with this changing of the historical situation and can be explained
only by this connection. Thus, let us consider the precise form of the
existentialist critique of Idealism: namely, that Idealism emphasizes
the universality of the works rather than the singularity of the subject,
it views the subject in reference to the works rather than the works in
reference to the subject. Clearly, in the face of the existential situation
of the individual cut off from the community, the Idealist notion that
the person is instrumental to the work had to look like a philosophy of
mystification, or evasion, or “divertissement,” and so on – or, in any
case, the normal philosophy of calm regions of being.
We see here that interpreting existentialism, as Croce tends to do, as
an outdated continuation of a concern that was valid only in reference
to the abstract and intellectualistic rationalism lingering in Hegel’s
philosophy – and which supposedly was already addressed by Croce’s
revision of Hegelianism – is in vain. Actually, that irrationalism, whose
element of truth Croce had sorted out and preserved, polemicized
against Hegel in the name of a multiplicity taken to be an object of
works that could not find a place in Hegel’s synthesis. With respect to
the existentialist concern taken in its specific sense, Croce’s position
cannot be preservation of what is valid but, rather, moralistic denuncia-
tion of the “fruitless turmoils,” of the “abandonment to a psychological
dissatisfaction which has no philosophical relevance,” and so on. We
also understand that we should not look either for the origin of exis-
tentialism in a decadentist attitude that makes “the crisis not an object
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 209

of disapproval, nor the springboard for a leap forward, but its destiny,
its last refuge, and finds its pleasure in this degradation.”44
In fact, please observe that stating that the Western crisis came about
because of a failure to surpass Marxism is fundamentally equivalent to
pointing out that one of its essential aspects is being unaware of its own
historicity. It is precisely this lack of awareness of its own historical char-
acter that conditions the transition from the crisis to philosophy – the
fact that it understands the present historical consideration of man as
the occasion to decipher the existential situation of man tout court.
Hence, we see that the opposite meanings by which the usual expres-
sion “philosophy of crisis” is normally understood are both wrong. One
meaning is as awareness of the crisis and thus as the starting point to
overcoming it: but existentialism is not awareness or overcoming of
the crisis because lacking awareness thereof is precisely what allows it
to form as a philosophy. The other meaning is as a product of the crisis
and its expression in philosophy, with a spectrum of negative interpre-
tations. One interpretation denounces existentialism as a philosophy
of decadentism, a lack of ethical reaction, while at the same time rec-
ognizing in it an important stimulus to philosophical reflection; another
considers it a manifestation in philosophical form of the very same
revolt against reason in which we ought to identify the essence of the
crisis; a third interpretation, by going down this road, ends up making
existentialism the philosophical equivalent of Nazism. The second
meaning is mistaken because existentialism arises not as a clarification
of the idea of man, which is the transcendental condition of the crisis,
but as the ontologized recognition of the break between the individual
and the community, which has been the unintended result of the crisis.
We can say that it is an expression of the crisis but only in as much as
the crisis is suffered and viewed as natural and insurmountable (and
thus revealing man’s ontological condition). Hence we also see that it
is not entirely correct to define existentialism as a reaction to the crisis
but, rather, as inside the crisis; because the insurmountability of
the break between the individual and the community, to which the

44 Norberto Bobbio, La filosofia del decadentismo (Turin: Chiantore, 1944), 20.

Bobbio’s thesis is true only in reference to the result of the existentialist attitude, or to
stopping at it. To use Kierkegaardian language in the precise Kierkegaardian meaning,
it is true of the existentialism of the disciple and not of that of the teacher.
210 The Problem of Atheism

ontologization of the crisis must lead, does not allow existentialism to

generate an ethical or social stance (hence the decadentist aspect,
which, however, must be seen as a result and not as the origin of the
existentialist spiritual process).
However, the condition that allows the philosophy of existence to
form also sets its theoretical limit. Its greatest merit lies in its critical
function: it relativized the theoretical significance of Idealism, highlight-
ing the character as a choice, as a presupposition, of its initial founda-
tion. On the other hand, I believe (I say “I believe” mostly because I
cannot give the proof here) that one can show the theoretical gratu-
itousness of all the existentialist forms, meaning the impossibility of
going from the philosophies of existence to an existentialism that is
their true and rigorous form. Perhaps this is the most remarkable char-
acteristic of the existentialist trend, that each of the forms in which it
expresses itself annihilates the other as a philosophy. Therefore, one
ought to illuminate how religious existentialism’s critiques of secular
existentialism are final and unsurmountable, and vice versa.45
Of course, the following judgment is a problem and not a solution:
“as a consequence of the original contradiction highlighted above, the
structure of the existentialist experience of thought is such that it can-
not give rise to a philosophy that is its truly rigorous form, but must
necessarily express itself in a plurality of forms, whose philosophical
value resides in the fact that each of them annihilates the other as a
philosophy, by revealing the negation of ontological possibilities that
lies at its foundation, but without being able to constitute itself positively
as a philosophy.” I postpone to some other occasion an attempt to prove
this. But let us suppose that we accept it as a working hypothesis, and this
is not asking too much because even a superficial knowledge of the
literature on existentialism is enough to confirm that many of the cur-
rent critiques concur with this judgment. It will follow that the most
conspicuous phenomenon marking the philosophy of the period after
the Marxist-Leninist revolution is a panoply of various philosophies that
mutually annihilate and do not surpass each other; that this annihila-
tion takes place under the pressure of a historical situation, which, in
the final analysis, is generated by Marxism; that, on the other hand, this

45 It seems to me that this mutual annihilation of the two existentialist directions

is lived in Jean Wahl’s position and leads to a “non-philosophy,” which is not, like the
Marxist one, a surpassing of philosophy but its dissolution.
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 211

mutual annihilation is the form in which the Marxist critique must

necessarily articulate itself: not as surpassing-preserving but as annihila-
tion (historical, and not dialectical, surpassing) of philosophy (in as
much as the latter has as its object eternal man, the Spirit, etc.; recall
the Marxist sense of philosophical critique that I explained earlier).
Consider also the peculiar form of Marx’s relevance today, the char-
acteristics that distinguish it from Hegel’s relevance during the first
quarter of our century and from Kierkegaard’s relevance over the last
twenty years. Hegel’s relevance had the formula “what is alive and what
is dead” – the contradiction in Hegelian philosophy between the begin-
ning and the system, which leads to surpassing it. In the philosophy of
existence it is a matter of transposing Kierkegaard’s experience into
philosophy. Vice versa, the return to Marx today does not take place at
all as surpassing, or as transposition into, philosophy but, rather, as
“revelation of the authentic.” It is about surpassing not Marx but his
interpreters, including Engels. But how can this return to the authentic
Marx not appear anti-historical? Would it not seem natural to oppose
to it a critical and non-dogmatic form of Marxism that enriches Marx
with the subsequent Western cultural experience? And yet, we have
already seen that this aspiration can only be addressed by going back
before Engelism, before the first reconciliation of Marxism with the
dominant culture in the West. How can this be? Only because all the his-
tory of Marxist thought since 1848, the conclusion of Marx’s philosophi-
cal period, has been the history of its dialogue – in the form that is
proper to it and that nobody has noticed – with this culture and its
victory. If Marx’s non-philosophy is the annihilation of philosophy,
its meaning could only become fully visible after this victory.

***

But let me comment on the meaning of this victory. Let us take as a

given what I have outlined and think to be true, but which for now I
have just stated in the form of a question, without proving it. Namely,
that Marxism constitutes a critical claim, which is definitive with respect
to the philosophies that went beyond Hegel but kept Hegel’s judgment
with respect to the philosophies of the past (they kept it in a particular
way, for sure; but of course now I cannot linger on the meaning of this
“particular way,” which is how existentialism is relative to Hegel). Shall
we conclude that Marxism faces no adversaries, or that it faces the
212 The Problem of Atheism

bourgeois world at the stage when it is confessing its own lack of truth?
Shall we conclude, therefore, that Marxism’s victory at the ideal level
has already taken place, no matter how strong may be the hurdles that
it can still meet at the strictly historical-political level?
I believe that such a conclusion would be completely illegitimate.
And this would be the occasion to define another aspect of the present
relevance of Marxism – its problematic character. In fact, it seems to
me that its present relevance coincides with the exact definition of the
problematic character of our time. Such problematic character is
marked by the loss of every “permanent conquest” beyond which, but
on the basis of which, one can build (statements like “we cannot go
back before Kant, or Hegel”). Hence that insecurity of tradition, which is
the constitutive character of the crisis; and the complete antinomy
between two opposites – the end of Christianity or its restoration.
Indeed, let us consider Marxism’s character of being a non-philosophy.
It is equivalent to saying that Marxism can only present itself as histori-
cal truth. Any attempt to present it as eternal truth immediately becomes
contradictory (i.e., its fundamental proposition, that every philosophy
is the philosophy of man in a determined historical situation, evidently
cannot be thought as an eternal truth without a contradiction).
But, now, in what sense can Marxism be thought to be the truth of
our time? Or, actually, in what sense could Marx think of it as such? I
am not able, at this point, to find any other answer but the following,
which is based on its fidelity to the Hegelian conclusion of the history
of philosophy: “To this point the World-spirit has come, and each stage
has its own form in the true system of Philosophy; nothing is lost, all
principles are preserved” (the final words of Hegel’s History of
Philosophy).46 Observe also that in him the transition itself into non-
philosophy is justified by the conclusion of philosophy in Hegel (this
is the process of thought of the youthful dissertation on Democritus
and Epicurus; but one could investigate whether Marx’s certainty of the
historical truth of his position is always conditioned by it). After phi-
losophy makes itself total with Hegel, the first position of the spirit can
only be absolute non-philosophy.

46 [TN] Georg F.W. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E.S. Haldane
and F. H. Simson (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1896), 564. Del
Noce’s quotation is somewhat loose.
 II. Marx’s “Non-Philosophy” and Communism 213

Nothing is lost. In other words, Hegel could think that his philosophy
was the truth of his time because of the surpassing-preserving. But we
have seen that, for Marx, the process of thought started by Hegel must
lead, in order not to contradict itself by falling into the theologization
of the empirical, not to the Idealist surpassing of religion into philoso-
phy, to Christianity made philosophy, but to the end of Christianity, to
anti-Christianity – and here a very important question should be posed,
the decisive question, perhaps, of Marxist criticism. Whereas on one
side Marx shows that fidelity to the initial Hegelian proposition must
lead to the annihilation of Hegel’s position, reciprocally can Marxism
think of itself as truth without surreptitiously invoking the truth of
Hegel, which it annihilates?47
However, let us now leave aside this question and its possible conse-
quence – namely, that Marxism represents at the same time not only
the conclusion but also the self-destruction of historicism – and let us
even suppose that there is no contradiction and that Marxism is the
truth of thought “past” Hegel. It is still true that it represents the unveil-
ing of the meaning of the experience of thought that starts from Hegel,
from which one must arrive not at a synthesis but at an antithesis, not
at the surpassing-preserving of Christianity, but at anti-Christianity (in
no way can Marxism be presented as a preservation or sublation of
Christianity: the only common theme, the equal dignity of each human
person, takes a completely different meaning, and not because of the
different organism of thought in which it is inserted but because of
the different process by which it is reached: in Christianity, starting
from the presence in each man of the divine image, in Marxism, start-
ing from the interdependence of freedoms, so that the freedom of all
becomes a condition for my freedom). To summarize, then (and with
the inevitable imprecision of one who has to cram into few lines a host
of open questions), Marxist historicism is a historicism that concludes
in the anti position. But for this reason, as pure historicism, it cannot

47 That is: whether historicism may be thought as a truth only if it is historicism

that justifies, even though the conclusion, somehow, of history is an inevitable figure
of such historicism; and whether when it makes itself revolutionary historicism does
indeed obey a necessity that is intrinsic to its essence but, at the same time, loses the
possibility of being thought of as truth. The process of thought from Hegel to Marx
could be the proof (I am not saying it is, I am just posing the question) of the unsolv-
able antinomy of historicism.
214 The Problem of Atheism

solve the problem of its own meaning: whether its claim is valid against
Christianity, or whether instead Marxist historicism is merely the inver-
sion of an inadequate and decayed form of Christianity, the sign of a
historical crisis (or again: its proposition could be held to be valid only
under the presupposition that its adversary is measured by history; while
Christianity’s affirmation of transcendence excludes precisely that it can
be judged by history). Therefore, the restoration of Christianity presents
itself even after Marxism as a possible thought: Marxism only goes as far
as warning us that such restoration is not possible except by reaching a
position of thought whereby Hegel’s philosophy can be regarded as a
decline. Thus, the theoretical-historical question of clarifying our his-
torical situation becomes that of Hegel’s place in the history of philoso-
phy, no longer in the sense of whether we can go beyond Hegel but in
the sense of whether something was lost with Hegel – or again: the
process of thought “beyond Hegel” concludes in the necessity of the
question whether Hegel’s position may not be regarded as a decline.
 III

Marxism and the Qualitative Leap

(1948)

1. THE QUALITATIVE LEAP

I think it is important to pick up again the topic that Felice Balbo dis-
cussed in the last issue of this journal because of the terminal character,
so to speak, of his piece.1 It expresses with definitive conceptual clarity
the presuppositions and, at the same time, the philosophical implica-
tions of the attitude that has given rise – all over the world, we can
say – to the cultural-political movements that I will call the “Christian
left,” using an approximate term borrowed from politics. But when I
speak of definitiveness, it is not only to express an evaluation; I also
mean to say that, in my judgment, it is impossible to go any further
along this line, in the direction that has been followed so far, and that
any possible step forward requires a clarification of the illusory character
of what I will call Christian-Marxism. To start, it will be helpful to elucidate
the conceptual scheme within which every possible discourse by leftist
Christians takes place. It seems to me that it can be expressed in rigor-
ous terms as follows.

1 Felice Balbo, “Religione e ideologia religiosa,” in Rivista di filosofia 2 (1948):

105–31. [Here, of course, I was not just considering the ideas presented by Balbo in
his essay, as rich as it was, but I was trying to objectivize to myself – in section I – the
philosophical-historical perspective of every possible form of “leftist Catholicism,”
considered in its most extreme and rigorous stance].
216 The Problem of Atheism

Marx’s discovery (his “moral Galileism”2) consisted in a radical exten-

sion of scientific reason so that it gets to embrace man’s entire “practical-
perceptible” activity. Evidently, such characterization should imply that
Marxism cannot directly address ontological questions. In fact, however,
Marx, followed until today by all authentic Marxists, from Engels to
Stalin, has understood the theses of verification in practice and reciproc-
ity of theory and practice as tantamount to the assertions that “nothing
exists except what is experimentally verifiable, what is historically deter-
mined, and man is found only and with no residual in work, he is nothing
prior to acting, interiority and intention are pure abstractions,” and so
on. These theses are actually ontological because they are not amenable
to experimental verification. In other words, Marx ontologized scientific
reason into absolute scientific reason and therefore understood his discov-
ery as radical atheism and the negation of every metaphysics. Thus, is
it not reasonable to conclude that advocating the reduction of absolute
scientific reason to mere scientific reason means exiting Marxism? And
exiting in the form of “surpassing” (i.e., Marxism better understood
based on different “premises” and “presuppositions”), which expresses,
in a strictly philosophical sense, the essence of every form of revision-
ism? However, if we reflect more deeply, we have to recognize that
Marxism’s nature contains the possibility of a form of development
that is unknown to speculative philosophy. Its critique of metaphysical
rationalism means essentially the following: metaphysical rationalism
falls short of reality, results in a gap between truth and reality, and in
order to reconcile reason and reality one needs to move from meta-
physical reason to scientific reason, connected to the “worldly base” by
practical verification. Let us see what follows necessarily from this appeal
to praxis. Undoubtedly, in as much as it poses itself as absolute scientific
reason, Marxism cannot directly recognize metaphysical difficulties.
However, in as much as it acts as scientific reason connected necessarily
to the worldly base – albeit giving a representation of itself as absolute sci-
entific reason – its anti-metaphysical refusal in the end simply means
that it can only encounter the metaphysical objection incarnate in
historical forces, in “practical-perceptible” realities. But those who

2 [TN] An expression due to Galvano della Volpe (1895–1968), who argued that
Marx’s greatest contribution was to extend to the sciences of history and society the
empirical approach that had been pioneered by Galileo Galilei in the natural
sciences.
 III. Marxism and the Qualitative Leap (1948) 217

recognize a metaphysical reality must necessarily affirm that, in such

form, it cannot not meet the metaphysical objection, and that the objection
can become a stage of its development; this simply because Marxism is
not scientific reason that deals with human reality as natural reality but,
rather, scientific reason that reaches human reality (or, if you prefer,
because it is dialectic and not naturalistic sociology).
Therefore the reciprocity of theory and practice makes possible a
development by a qualitative or dialectic leap, which is something else
altogether than the “surpassing” that is proper to speculative philosophy.
In surpassing, a truth is “preserved” but “transvalued”; conversely, in a
qualitative leap a truth reveals itself better in the act of overcoming the
contradictions that are placed in front of it by historical reality. The quali-
tative leap is a figure required by Marxism itself because it coincides
with the “openness” or “experimentality” that characterizes it and that
it cannot give up except at the cost of hardening up, as “scholastic
Marxism,” into the fixedness of speculative philosophy. Thus, we under-
stand how the new position makes it possible to avoid “surpassing,”
while it remains historically true that it is not at all a mere “bringing to
light” of what is already present in originary Marxism, nor is it an “analytical
development” – that is, a “discursive” development – of what in Marxism
is already implicit.
Perhaps this reasoning will become clearer if we specify the stance of
leftist Christians compared to that of Lenin. Lenin’s theoretical work
has been to reclaim original Marxism (and thus, at the same time, its
atheism and its nexus of theory and practice) against revisionism. This
theoretical work has conditioned the revolution. Today, a further stage
of the revolution – the problems that Communism must solve in order
to win in the West; the transition from pure proletarian dictatorship to
popular democracies, which requires a correlative transition from an
ideology of the “isolated proletariat” of pure “domination” or “defence”
to an ideology of “domination” and “consensus”; and so on – requires
that the focus shift to experimentalism rather than atheism to the point
that the two figures must turn out to be in contradiction. Is this change of
focus just tactical? Those who think so have failed to realize that, for
Marxism, this appeal to the historical situation does not at all mean
exiting philosophy; that is, they still approach Marxism as if it were a
speculative philosophy.
However, does the reduction of Marxist reason to mere scientific
reason not seem to imply the affirmation of the “philosophical
218 The Problem of Atheism

neutrality” of Marxism? And does such affirmation not water down its
revolutionary spirit? Can we still speak of revolution when it does not
affect “values”? Shall we think that Marxism aims only at an economic
transformation within an order of values that is given, or in any case
not directly called into question by Marxism? Then we would reach the
following conclusion: Communism should regard the revolution just
as a “faster pace” of evolution and could claim to be revolutionary
exclusively because, strictly as a historical-political judgment, it thinks
that today the evolution could not take place without this “faster pace.”
But this is not the outlook of leftist Christians. On the contrary, they
think they can also preserve the Marxist philosophical critique,3 and
actually give it its full significance because ontologization would end up
narrowing down precisely the significance of Marxism’s most original theme, the
critique of mystification, leading to a sort of “atheistic mystification” that
is not of a different nature than “religious alienation” just because it is
apparently oriented in the opposite direction (and supposedly today
this similarity of nature is becoming visible because atheistic alienation
collaborates in practice with religious alienation in an anti-revolutionary
sense by making possible the configuration of the political struggle as
a religious war, which Marxism is powerless to fight without the qualita-
tive leap). “If scientific reason discovers that we must ‘criticize theoreti-
cally’ and ‘subvert in practice’ the ‘earthly family’ in order to dissolve
the ‘holy family,’ clearly this operation does not operate only against
‘religious ideology’ eliminating man’s alienation outside of the world,
but operates also in favor of the religious truth that is ‘made worldly’
in the ‘religious ideology.’ Indeed, in order to defend itself from scien-
tific reason which subverts its ‘worldly base’ and to preserve itself as real
truth, the truth of the ‘holy family’ is forced, so to speak, to abandon
the mystified historical formulas in which it has expressed itself, and to
re-express itself with formulas that are no longer mystified.”4
Marxism “opens up the possibility of a non-mystified investigation of
the question of being,” “it opens the way to non-mystified religious

3 Here lies the difference between the leftist Christian interpretation and the
purely methodological interpretation, for a critique of which I refer the reader to my
essay “La non-filosofia di Marx e il comunismo come realtà politica,” in Atti del Congresso
internazionale di Filosofia, vol. 1 (Milan: Castellani, 1947). [TN: in this volume, pages
169–214].
4 Balbo, “Religione e ideologia religiosa,” 119–20.
 III. Marxism and the Qualitative Leap (1948) 219

work.” What do these formulas, which come up constantly in the authors

who belong to this trend, mean exactly? It is evident that Marxism
reduced to scientific reason cannot speak directly about ontological
questions. It is no less evident that no position of thought, as a force act-
ing in history, can avoid being examined by scientific reason. And it is
not true that the form in which a position enters the course of history is not affected
by its theoretical truth. For example, the claim by metaphysical rationalisms
to exhaust reality implies necessarily the elevation of a determined his-
torical order to absolutely valid order, to the terminal and insuperable
stage of the historical process, and the depiction of the process as the
solution of “particular questions” within that order (i.e., the mytholo-
gization of that order, which is confused with “history”). In other words,
metaphysical rationalisms do not become reactionary ideologies simply
because certain social classes bend them to this purpose (the partial
truth of this statement lies in the recognition of the unquestionable
fact that metaphysical rationalisms do not take shape intentionally as
reactionary ideologies). They are such by nature even though they reveal
it (to their own authors too, of course) only at the time when they enter
the course of history. It is not a matter, that is, of judging a philosophy
based on its ideological function; rather, it is the ideological function
that a determined philosophy is inevitably forced to serve that manifests
its limitation, its inadequacy to reality. Supposedly, metaphysical ratio-
nalisms and historicist forms of Idealism fall under this critique of
mystification and show their strictly philosophical limitations. So do the
various forms of positivism, criticism, and existentialism, although a
longer discussion would be needed to clarify this point (see the com-
ments on this matter in Balbo’s essay).
A certain “Christian type” falls under it as well: dualist Christianity,
Christianity that presents religious life as “liberation from the world.” In
the history of Christian thought we find two different conceptions of
the relations between religion and politics. The first (the dualistic one)
says: reconciliation – whereby men no longer feel distinct by social condi-
tion – can only happen in religious life, in front of God. Undoubtedly,
inequalities in themselves have no sacred character: rather, they are
consequences of sin (and the task of religious thought is not to sanction
their sacred character but to remove the appearance of it in order to
establish spiritual communion beyond them). However, precisely
because of the origin of the inequalities, the quest to erase them cannot
succeed (and so we have a form of conservatism, not directly willed as
220 The Problem of Atheism

such, but consequent to the critique of the will to change). To speak of

a rational order to be established in history makes no sense if spiritual
life is defined precisely as liberation from the world: then, every attempted
change can only lead to another order of inequalities. One can try to
correct them, but always keeping in mind that charity remains the best
option. Inequalities are really surpassed in the transition to the religious
point of view, which is a moral surpassing, in the recognition that true
life is not earthly life and in the subsequent loss of importance of inequal-
ities with respect to the true life. In this way alienation (in the general
sense of not feeling part of a community as subjects) is suppressed and
the single individual can deem himself to be an end of the whole social
organism in as much as he recognizes the existing order (and it does
not matter whether this order, considered in the abstract, may not be
the best possible one; it is accepted and regarded as the least bad in the
given historical condition because any attempt at radical change, due
to the commitment it requires, implies a distraction from the true end)
as the order that guarantees the external conditions necessary to the
exercise of religious life (there is a right to rebel only when these exter-
nal conditions disappear). One should also observe that the Marxist
polemic targets only this conception viewed as the Christian solution
tout court. See, for instance, Marx: “The more man puts into God, the
less he retains in himself.”5
Today the historical situation brings Christians back to the other type
of relation (which is also classic in the tradition), in which political
commitment is perceived not as other than religious commitment, or
anyway as external to it (in the sense I just mentioned of defending
external conditions), but as intrinsically required by the religious com-
mitment itself in order to preserve the religious values in their purity, to avoid
that they be debased into instruments (mystified) and that in this debase-
ment they cease to be values and deserve to be loathed and fought
against. The fact that today the political struggle presents itself as a
religious war, with the impiousness and a-dialecticity that characterize this
phenomenon, is an aspect of precisely this debasement. The condition
that makes possible religious wars is exactly the “mystification” of God,
whereby mankind breaks up into forces that recognize and defend God

5 Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Ed. Dirk Struik, trans.
M. Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 108.
 III. Marxism and the Qualitative Leap (1948) 221

only to “use him” (but is a God “that is used” still God? And does “defend-
ing God” mean anything?) and forces that, in order to deny this God-
debased-to-idol, also deny God (this is why religious wars are actually
class struggles; but it is also true, according to leftist Christians, that
without the Christian mediation, without the mediation by this type of
Christian politics, even the forces that would stand for God and not for
the idol are pushed to the side of reaction, and the appearance of reli-
gious war endures). Or, again: this second type of relation is necessary
in order for religion not to be reduced from total attitude to a mere form
or stage of the spirit; and one ought to further ask whether every denial
of religion always presupposes its previous reduction to form or stage
and is inevitable after this reduction.
Of course, the criticism of dualistic Christianity ceases to be meaning-
ful if it is limited to a mere political revision; it necessarily involves a
philosophical revision. On this issue, I will only indicate a few essential
reference points. Namely, the radical anti-modernism (modernism =
bourgeois Christianity) of leftist Christianity, which is oriented towards
a “Dominican” Thomism in opposition to the ordinary Suarezian
Thomism (in Suarezism, the philosophical transcription of the Molinist
man of pure nature, the Christian-rationalist compromise, begins) and
above all in opposition to Christian forms of Platonism and existential-
ism (which conclude in the “horror of the mass.” At the end of the
1600s, Pascal and Malebranche – the forefathers, respectively, of modern
Christian existentialists and Platonists – agree in recognizing the dualist
type as the true political attitude of a Christian).
We now have all the elements to elucidate what is the most general
presupposition of this position. According to orthodox Marxists, the
outcome of the revolution is supposed to be the “disappearance of the
question of God” (God who disappears without “leaving an empty spot”;
it is not even atheism any longer because atheism is the answer to a
question, it is a religious solution). According to leftist Christians, on the
contrary, the outcome is supposed to be purified Christianity. Because
certainly Marxism, after the qualitative leap, cannot say anything explic-
itly about the ontological problem; but, as we have seen, its scientific
rationality has a philosophical significance, and the only metaphysics
that withstands it is a restored Christian metaphysics. Thus, Marxism is
entirely re-understood as a moment of purification of Christianity. And, we
should specify, as somehow internal to Christianity because it is not a
matter of being an occasion for a purification that takes place by antithesis;
222 The Problem of Atheism

rather, Christianity will be able to express itself in forms that are no longer
mystified only by collaborating with the Marxist revolution. From this
perspective, the leftist Christian position truly deserves the name, which
I do not recall having seen explicitly used yet, of Christian-Marxism.

2. CRITIQUE OF THE CHRISTIAN-MARXIST

INTERPRETATION

The stumbling block for this interpretation is in the 6th Thesis on

Feuerbach: “But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each
single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.
Feuerbach, who does not attempt the criticism of this real essence, is
consequently compelled … [to comprehend the human essence] only
as ‘genus,’ as a dumb internal generality which merely naturally unites
the many individuals.”6 Is it legitimate to say that the Marxist philo-
sophical reduction of the human essence to a historically determined
essence is merely a rationalist residue,7 a surreptitious attribution of
ontological meaning to an affirmation that is valid only at the level
of science (since scientific reason can only consider man in his histori-
cal determinacy)? This is what Christian-Marxists think, and they must
necessarily say so, as we shall see, also at the level of a purely historical inter-
pretation because otherwise their position collapses. Or is the opposite
true, instead: that only the criticism of the concept of human nature makes
possible the transition from metaphysical reason to scientific reason (or perhaps
one should say from metaphysical rationalism to integral historicism,
given the very particular character of Marxist scientific reason)? It makes
it possible, mind you, not only in Marx’s thought process, but logically.
Evidently, this is the crux of the question.
Consider well: at the bottom of the Christian-Marxist reasoning there
is, as a precondition that people assume with a greater or lesser

6 [TN] Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German
Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1941), 83–4. The words in brackets
depart slightly from Marx’s original text, which Del Noce paraphrases in order to tie
together the two parts of the quote into one coherent sentence.
7 In short, the affirmation of “social man,” which of course is something else
entirely (but perhaps it still needs to be said) than the affirmation that “the concrete
individual always belongs to a determined social form.” It also differs radically (because
of the emphasis on the social aspect) from the affirmation that is fashionable today
that in man existence is antecedent to essence.
 III. Marxism and the Qualitative Leap (1948) 223

awareness, a line of interpretation that identifies the essence of Marx’s

philosophical thought with his anti-Hegelian stance; that is, with his critique
of rationalism tout court; and the atheologization of reason and the transition
to scientific reason are understood as moments of this critique – which,
in order to be completed, still need the qualitative leap (the very choice of
words that have a neo-positivistic sound, like “surreptitious attribution
of ontological value” and so on, says something) – rather than as
moments of the extreme radicalization of rationalism. Hence the central
role that is attributed to the themes that Marx accepts from Feuerbach:
mystification and the criticism of speculative philosophy (we must not
forget that about these points, taken in themselves, in their definition,
apart from the original application of the mystification thesis to the
critique of Hegel’s theory of the state, Marx did not say anything that
Feuerbach had not said already). Hence also the reduction of Marx’s
originality to the construction of social science and the identification
of the novelty of his thought in the 2nd Thesis (“In practice man must
prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the ‘this-sidedness’ of his
thinking”) considered independently of the 6th rather than logically con-
ditioned by it.
Let us list more consequences – which is important because in this
way we will be able to entirely re-deduce the historical interpretation
that makes possible the Christian-Marxist position. Marxist social science
will be able to study man only as “ensemble of the social relations.” But,
on the other hand, Marx still accepts Feuerbach’s central idea, the
inversion of Hegel in philosophy: “We only need always make the predicate
into the subject and thus, as the subject, into the object and principle.
Hence we need only invert speculative philosophy and then have the
unmasked, pure, bare truth.”8 This is the “inverted transcendentalism”
that, when it remains in Marxism, necessarily affirms an inverted “reli-
gious view of the world and of history,” the “scientific reason that carries
negative ontological implications” that Balbo talks about.9 If this is the
case, the anti-Hegel stance must develop by necessity into the anti-
Feuerbach interpretation of the 6th Thesis: if the object of scientific

8 [TN] Ludwig Feuerbach, “Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy”

(1842), in The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, ed. L.S. Stepelevich (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), 156.
9 Balbo “Religione e ideologia religiosa,” 115–16.
224 The Problem of Atheism

reason is only social being, and if scientific reason exhausts reality, one must
criticize Feuerbach’s human nature.
But actually Marx’s thought process is completely different. It can be
characterized as the reaffirmation against Feuerbach of Hegel’s discovery, the
unity of rational and real, after having accepted Feuerbach’s criticism of the form
in which this unity had been thought by Hegel.
This is, substantially, also Engels’s interpretation, in his famous pam-
phlet on Feuerbach, although in Engels the reaffirmation of Hegel
seems to get confused with the preservation of his dialectics understood
as simple preservation.10 Therefore, there is nothing paradoxical in affirm-
ing it. But if we look in depth at its implications, we find that it invalidates
almost all the directions followed by the critical literature on Marxism.
Indeed, it establishes a criterion whereby historical materialism must
be understood in primis as absolute rationalism, and only because it is absolute
rationalism as absolute historicism, and only because it is absolute histori-
cism as absolute materialism as well. This rules out all interpretations
of historical materialism as a “species” of the “genus” materialism, or
as a contradictory synthesis of materialism and historicism. And, above
all, it lets us see that Marx was forced by his own assumption to look for
an absolutely new philosophical position (the only absolutely new one
that appeared, or that could appear, after Hegel). His assumption implied,
in fact, accepting all the philosophical negations formulated by Hegel.
Therefore, the road to any “reform” of Hegelianism via a partial “return”
to previous positions (which is what a reform of Hegelianism must always
be) was blocked: no matter whether these positions may be Kant, or
Fichte, or moralism, or humanism, or naturalism, or the need of the
single individual, or religious experience, or the Enlightenment-inspired
materialism invoked by Feuerbach.11 I do not need to name the inter-
pretive positions that are refuted as a result.

10 Regarding the inadequacy of Engels’s concept of dialectics, the remarks by G.

Della Volpe in the essay “Marx e il segreto di Hegel,” in Marx e lo stato moderno rappre-
sentativo (Bologna: UPEB, 1947), are very important.
11 “Where the anti-scholastic, sanguine principle of French sensualism and materialism
unites with the scholastic stodginess of German metaphysics, is there alone life and truth …
The true philosopher … must be of Franco-German descent” (Feuerbach, “Provisional
Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy,” in The Young Hegelians, ed. S. Stepelevich
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 164).
 III. Marxism and the Qualitative Leap (1948) 225

After he accepted Feuerbach’s critique, Marx could only articulate

Hegel’s contradiction as follows: Hegel failed to see that the unity of
the rational and the real implies the collapse of the old speculative
concept of philosophy as “comprehension.” A philosophy of compre-
hension is actually a philosophy of transcendence; inserted into an
atmosphere of immanence it generates a new transcendence inside
historicism, the closing12 of the present order of reality and its opposi-
tion to the future as sacred.13 But, according to Marx, this closing deval-
ues Hegelianism because it shows that Idealism, precisely in the act of
making itself absolute, undergoes indeed an inversion into materialism,
but into “crass materialism,” in the literal sense of these words, because
what defines vulgar materialism with respect to other theologizations of
the finite – which is what metaphysical stances reduce to, in Marx’s view –
is the immediate theologization of the empirical. Or, again, in reference
to the theory of mystification: from the standpoint of speculative theol-
ogy, the quest for a “comprehension” of the unity of rational and real
will develop as an effort to understand the reason of which the real is a
phenomenon (appearance, allegory, etc.). But by doing so one again
separates the rational from the real, disincarnates it and fixes it.
Understanding the rationality of the real implies that reason, thus dis-
incarnated, is taken to be the subject of which the real (the particular,
the empirical) is the predicate. But then what happens is that the par-
ticular, elevated to a predicate, ends up being considered an “essential
manifestation” of reason; the unity of the rational with the real is
replaced by the confusion of the rational with the empirical, by the
theological mystification of the empirical.

12 [TN] “Conchiusione” in the original, which is an archaic form of conclusione

(conclusion) but also evokes the idea of becoming chiuso (closed). I use “closing” as a
way to try to capture both these meanings.
13 Such transcendence, if we consider it carefully, is intimately connected with
the division of society into classes. The bourgeoisie represents spiritual values, it is the
“culture” class, which plays the role of “mediating economic struggles by making
recourse not to economic but to ethical-political concepts.” It is the “class which is not
a class,” Hegel’s allgemeine Stand, which takes care of the allgemeine Interessen. See also
Hegel’s justification of private wealth as the means of sparing the general class from
direct work (Philosophy of Right, §205) and Croce’s concept of bourgeoisie [TN: in the
original, this footnote appears as a long parenthetical statement enclosed by em
dashes].
226 The Problem of Atheism

However, this part of Marx’s thought is just a radical development of

Feuerbach’s anti-Hegelian critique. Now, how can one preserve the unity
of the rational and the real (and avoid Feuerbach’s humanism, reason
as man’s accident, etc.) after such an extreme development of the anti-
Hegelian stance? That is, how can one reconcile the reality of the rational
with its radical atheologization? Evidently, for Marx there is only one obliga-
tory route, the critique of the essence “man,” of human nature, the thesis
that being man belonging to a determined historical situation exhausts being
human. We can also say that man is thus reduced to a moment in the
process of praxis; as long as we realize, however, that this does not mean
affirming man’s passivity because such an affirmation would re-establish
a transcendence of praxis with respect to man – Praxis would be given
the place of reason or of the Spirit – and by this route one would go
back to “Hegelian orthodoxy,” to simple inversion.14 An immediate con-
sequence of this critique of the essence “man” is the critique of self-
consciousness: thought does not reveal anything and reduces without
residue to practical thought, to activity that transforms reality.
Notice that so far I have said nothing original. I have only commented
on the theses, which recognize as Feuerbach’s merit that he really dis-
tinguished perceptible objects from intelligible objects (which is an
implicit reference to the theory of mystification) and, as his limitation,
that he did not conceive of human activity as activity that poses the object
(and as a consequence he did not understand the revolutionary mean-
ing of practical-critical activity), and that he did not carry out the critique
of the essence “man” – even though the connection between these two
critiques is not developed analytically. The validity of this interpretation
is confirmed by the fact that only from it can one deduce all the aspects
of Marxism, both in the strictly philosophical and in the political sense.
But let us stick to the point under discussion, the so-called (using an
expression that can give rise to misunderstandings) transition from
metaphysical reason into scientific reason. Since for Marx thought (and

14 Regarding the meaning of human activity in Marxism, it is worth recalling the

famous formula in the 3rd Thesis: “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances
and of human activity can only be conceived and rationally understood as revolution-
ary practice.”
 III. Marxism and the Qualitative Leap (1948) 227

language) are not representative of essences,15 the value of a philosophy

cannot be measured by the evidence of its principles. There is no principle
that in itself is not susceptible to being contradicted (this position
is the foundation of the thesis that every philosophy is historical).
Therefore, only one route is left: the value of any philosophy will be
measured by its historical result; that is, philosophies will only be histori-
cal working hypotheses, verified experimentally by the real operations
they produce. In other words, Marx is forced, after his critique of the
apprehension of essences, to shift the discussion with other philosophers
to the plane of historicity; to seek experimental verification as the only
guarantee of the historical truth of his philosophy. This clarifies, by
the way, that Marx’s transition to political economics and to revolution-
ary activity must not be understood either as an abandonment of phi-
losophy or as a mere application of it – in the sense of applying a
philosophy that contains in itself its criterion of truth. We also under-
stand the meaning of another formula that is often used: the Marxist
identification of philosophy and political ideology (“philosophy is always
the philosophy of a party”). This process of identification is quite simple,
actually. The distinction between the two makes sense if one defines
philosophy as the consideration of the eternal categories of being, and
ideology as a means to act in the present. But Marx’s philosophy cannot
but replace the categories of the eternal and the contingent with those of
the past and the future. However, we must avoid giving this identity a
vulgar interpretation. Because, certainly, not only would it be a vulgarity
to say that Hegel constructed his philosophy to serve the interests of

15 Clearly, this is what determines the sharp distinction between Marxist materi-
alism and metaphysical materialism. One cannot speak of matter as substance if
thought does not represent essences. “Matter” and “spirit” are thus reduced to work-
ing hypotheses. Not having understood this issue explains why many Marxists, Engels
first of all, viewed Marxist materialism as a form of metaphysical materialism. However,
it is also true that the theory of language, which is a corollary (even if it is not high-
lighted explicitly) of this theory of thought, enables Marxism to have a plurality of
formulations, provided that they designate the same practical operations. In light of
this, it is hard to judge whether Engels really departed from Marxist thought or
whether he simply carried out a translation of it suitable to a determined cultural
milieu. Another consequence of this failure to understand are the numerous remarks
by revisionist critics about the lack of rigour of Marxist language, about the word
“materialism,” which must not be taken literally, and so forth.
228 The Problem of Atheism

the Prussian state, or Croce those of Southern Italian landowners, but

also to simply say that in the philosophies of Hegel or Croce we hear
the voice of a Prussian conservative or a Southern Italian landowner.
At most, one can say that their philosophical research was halted by
their practical situation. It is evident that speculative thought does not
intentionally aim at being an ideology: on the contrary, it takes every
care to avoid being one, falling into “tendentious philosophy.” What
Marx says is that decadence into reactionary ideology is an inevitable
consequence of speculative thought and annihilates its value as philoso-
phy. This annihilation happens because, by closing the real, by means
of the mystification I mentioned above, speculative thought negates
itself in terms of what it intends to be – that is, thought of the eternal
categories of the real. The involuntariness of this decadence into ideol-
ogy reveals speculative philosophy to be the ideology of a historical
reality that it does not contribute to building. Therefore it is in the essence
of speculative philosophy to become the instrument of historical forces it does not
create. In short, whereas for speculative philosophy becoming ideology
is the sign of its limitation, conversely revolutionary ideology resolves
philosophy into itself because, by breaking the closure of being, it
expresses the direction of the real as self-realizing totality and the con-
stitutive principle of the new form of reality.
Nonetheless it may seem that an objection is still possible on the part
of the Christian-Marxist: “We can even grant that this has been the real
process of Marx’s thought; but this does not prevent scientific reason,
once it has been accepted, from acquiring its own autonomy and being
able in turn to act back on the philosophical presuppositions that origi-
nally made people resort to it, and thus from bringing about the trans-
formation of Marxism we described.” In this regard, we still have to
clarify how Marxist political practice, too, becomes intelligible only in
reference to the fundamental critique of human nature (how it is,
essentially, the experimental verification of this hypothesis); and how,
apart from this reference, the appearance of a contradictory combination of
the purest iusnaturalism with the most brazen political realism is insuperable.
That is, the thesis that has been the occasion for so many literary and
journalistic polemics (Köstler, the various memoirs by disappointed
people, etc.) is insuperable; and its fortune is understandable, given
how it matches the appearances. However, if we want to shift to a different
level, let us consider what is peculiar and truly historically unique in
the Marxist ethical-political position: the radical elimination of the question
 III. Marxism and the Qualitative Leap (1948) 229

of means without implying a separation (not even in the sense of a simple

distinction) of ethics and politics. Clearly, this apparent contradiction can
vanish only in light of the Marxist theses I recalled earlier. The moral
question of means – that is, the question of persuasion and violence – exists
only if we recognize that there is an essential man prior to the existing
man. In other words, this question is internal to the anthropology that
we could call, in the broadest sense, Hellenic-Christian. Therefore, it
cannot be carried into the anthropology that intends to be such anthro-
pology’s rigorous critique. Indeed, in Christian anthropology, in a broad
sense, social change will be a consequence of man’s moral change (of
his conversion, as the reawakening in him of the idea of God, and of its
secular translations from “common human nature” to Feuerbach’s thesis
about love).16 Conversely, in the Marxist position man’s change can
only come about as a consequence of social change, of the creation of
the new society that will be simultaneously the creation of a new man.
But does the elimination of the question of means imply the outright
elimination of ethics, pure politicism? For sure, it implies the total nega-
tion of traditional ethics. However, not the pure and simple negation
of ethics: ethics is rediscovered as included in politics, and this because
of the constitutive and necessary character of the relationship between
each single individual and the others (see the Marxist idea of the total
man). This constitutive character of my relationship with other people
has the effect that willing my own freedom implies willing the freedom
of all. Of course, the moral task will presents itself to me not as Sollen
but as Müssen. In other words, it is not the case that the liberation of
others will present itself to me as a moral duty against the resistance
of my instincts. It is a moment of my own liberation since the relation-
ship with society is constitutive of my nature; the volition of the universal
(and in Marxism universality can only mean sociality) is included in the
volition of the individual; the moral aspect, to use the usual terminol-
ogy, is included in the economic aspect.
Then, the critique of Christian-Marxism seems very easy indeed. If,
in fact, Marxist scientific reason does not stand by itself, so to speak,
but expresses the recourse to experimental verification that is required

16 Regarding the connections in Feuerbach between religious atheism (the “athe-

ist solution to the question of God” instead of the “disappearance of the question of
God”), the concept of human nature, and the theory of love, see the remarks by
Engels in Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy.
230 The Problem of Atheism

by the reduction of philosophical concepts to working hypotheses; if

this reduction, in turn, is based on the critique of every transcendence
of the human being with respect to his historical determination; if every
aspect of the Marxist political praxis is not intelligible except in relation
to this critique; then it is evident that the notion of a possible qualitative
leap internal to Marxism is nonsense. In fact, the qualitative leap would
determine a modification of the working hypothesis, in the sense that
the non-essential aspect of Marxism, metaphysicalism, would be elimi-
nated; but, if the working hypothesis is precisely the idea of “social man”
in the sense I explained, it is clear that a possible contradiction by
historical reality will mark not the need for a development but, rather,
the end of Marxism.

3. CHRISTIANITY AND MARXISM

Yet, this critique leaves us with an undeniable feeling of dissatisfaction.

Not only because of the psychological and moral difficulties that the
leftist Christian experience may reveal, with respect to which a logical
critique is fruitless, but also in the much more important sense that this
experience may point to a very important truth that, however, it has not
adequately expressed. In fact, this thought seems to be suggested by
the widespread sentiment that the actual relationship between
Christianity and Marxism is more complex than the usual ways of articu-
lating it – either as pure antithesis, or Marxism as a partial social truth
distorted by a false philosophy or, finally, Marxism as the gravedigger
of sinful modern civilization (a view that reproduces, after all, a scheme
that Catholics commonly apply to every new trend of thought:
Romanticism, Idealism, etc.). Therefore, now I would like to consider
not how this experience may present itself and develop according to
my view but, rather, how it must do so by its internal necessity, once the
contradiction of Christian-Marxism has been recognized.
Let us start from the historical contradiction that, in Balbo’s judg-
ment, makes necessary the qualitative leap: “as long as denying the
unverified working hypothesis means for him to simultaneously deny
God, man has essential motives to refuse to give up the ‘fetish.’ These
are motives that man cannot suppress without suppressing himself as
a real man, given that the foundation of religion is real and meta-
historical, because it is man’s very being … wars of religion are also
 III. Marxism and the Qualitative Leap (1948) 231

historical signs of men’s consciousness-of and will-to being.”17 Or equiva-

lently: Marxism-Leninism in its orthodox form demands, besides a
historical political judgment, a truth judgment, without being able to
give, in regard to Christianity, the element that would support it. Let
us now discuss what can be the meaning of this objection.
First of all, what has already been said makes clear that Marxism can-
not conduct its criticism of Christianity based on the evidence of its prin-
ciples. It can only base it on the fact that Christianity is “historically
exhausted.” But clearly this argument, taken in the usual empirical
sense – namely, the appearance that Christianity is exhausted because
in today’s world it fails to be for those who profess themselves Christian
the principle of their life in history – is not rigorous. Because what we
are talking about in this case is the recognition of the exhaustion of a
determined historical ideal (e.g., the theocratic ideal, or the type of
dualistic Christianity), which is arbitrarily fixed to be the absolute practi-
cal ideal of Christianity, without taking into account that the transcen-
dence and supra-historicity of Christian principles forbids that any
absolute historical ideal be derived from them. Faithfulness to supra-
historical principles can only be creative faithfulness, which creates ever
new solutions to the ever new problems that historical experience pres-
ents. The fact that in certain periods this creative faithfulness may be
lacking, that the “Christian world” may experience declines and crises,
is completely irrelevant, rigorously speaking, with respect to the truth
or not of Christianity.
In reality, Marx undoubtedly thought that the critique of Christianity
was implicit in the critique of Hegelianism: Hegel’s philosophy is the
conclusion in which “nothing has been lost” of two millennia of thought;
reckoning with Hegel is the same as reckoning with all of the past.
However, if we look carefully, in Marx the relationship with Hegel takes
place in two different ways, even though a clear awareness of the impli-
cations of this difference is lacking. According to the first way, which is
very clear in the doctoral dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus, the
Hegelian position constitutes a logically antecedent and conditioning stage
with respect to the Marxist position. That is, Marx wonders how it will
be possible to take a step forward after, in Hegel, philosophy has made

17 Balbo, “Religione e ideologia religiosa,” 111 and 121.

232 The Problem of Atheism

itself total. It cannot happen as a linear extension, as a partial reform:

by necessity it will have to be a radical inversion. But what form shall
this inversion take? In Hegel the world made itself philosophy; after
Hegel philosophy must make itself the world and, therefore, be in a
position of radical negation with respect to the world that Hegel justi-
fied (therefore the realization of philosophy will coincide with its “loss”
because the becoming world of philosophy will be at the same time the
liberation of the world from philosophy). The total reconciliation of
philosophy with reality can only be followed by an absolute break, and
the philosophy that turns towards the world will be a philosophy of
praxis. “It is a psychological law that the theoretical mind, once liber-
ated in itself, turns into practical energy, and … turns itself against the
reality of the world existing without it … When philosophy turns itself
as will against the world of appearance, then the system is lowered to
an abstract totality, that is, it has become one aspect of the world which
opposes another aspect … The inner self-contentment and complete-
ness has been broken. What was inner light has become consuming
flame turning outwards.”18 This is the initial position, the program of
young Marx. It is also his initial “Hegelian orthodoxy” because it seems
that, after all, Marx’s transformation from Hegelian to Marxist, in this
first stage of his thought, is demanded by Hegel.
But if we move on from the program to its execution, to the necessary
break, that is, with Hegelian orthodoxy, this first form of relation is
replaced by an entirely different one. Hegelianism and Marxism no
longer look like successive moments but, rather, like different solutions
of the same problem, one “mystified” and the other rigorous. The
consequences of this change of perspective are very significant.
According to the first point of view Hegelianism can still appear to be
the philosophy in which “nothing has been lost,” Christianity that has
reached its philosophical awareness and thus its sunset; the subsequent
Marxist anti-Christianity is justified by Hegel himself. According to the
second, on the contrary, the contradiction of Hegel’s philosophy mani-
fests the contradiction between rationalism and Christianity. Rationalism
pushed to the extreme must conclude not in “Christian philosophy,”
in Christianity resolved into philosophy and therein surpassed and

18 Karl Marx, The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of
Nature, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 1 (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
2010) , 85.
 III. Marxism and the Qualitative Leap (1948) 233

preserved, but in anti-Christianity. Now, it becomes very hard to under-

stand how, after abandoning the first point of view, Marxism can still
conduct its polemics against Christianity at the level of truth. From a
historicist standpoint, Marxism can present itself as truth with respect
to Christianity only in as much as it surpasses it, annihilates it in the act
of preserving it. But there is no way in which the relation of Marxism
to Christianity can be regarded as surpassing-preserving. The only
moment they may seem to have in common is the equal dignity of every
human person. However, it takes a completely different meaning not
because in Marxism it is transvalued as a consequence of being inserted
into a new organism of thought but, rather, because the process of
thought through which it is reached in Marxism (based on the inter-
dependence of freedoms, so that the freedom of all becomes the condi-
tion for my freedom) presupposes the previous negation of the process
through which it is reached in Christianity (based on the presence in
every man of the image of God). This difficulty in the historicist posi-
tion can somehow clarify the ideal origin and the endurance of the
naturalistic and scientistic form of Marxism – dialectical materialism.
Certainly it is the faithful (in as much as it implies the same practical
consequences), but logically not very defensible, transcription of
Marxism on the plane of the philosophy of comprehension; and state-
ments about its inadequacy, about the distinction between Engelism
and Marxism, and so on, today are fairly common.19 I am not going to
say they are not true, but I think that not to consider what is unsatisfac-
tory in their explanation of the genesis of this position is not right either.
Why did Marx offer no resistance to Engels’s transcription, and why did
he let people think that it adequately expressed his philosophy? Does
this not raise the question of whether it was necessary for Marxism to
shift the fight to the level of scientism because the level of historicism
had proven itself inadequate?
Explaining Marxism in terms of the “Hegelian orthodoxy” is certainly
an incorrect line of interpretation. Nonetheless, it seems to me that,
without an implicit, and certainly unjustified and contradictory, refer-
ence to it in the sense I described, Marxism cannot think of itself as
truth. If we take this criticism as agreed upon, and we try to think
Marxism without this reference, it seems to be initially conditioned by

19 See, for example, my previous essay, “Marx’s non-Philosophy.”

234 The Problem of Atheism

a gratuitous negation of ontological possibilities. Let us see what this

can mean. We saw already that Marxism presents itself with respect
to Hegelianism as absolute rationalism; it is in a certain way what
Hegelianism meant to be, the final outcome of rationalism. The pos-
sible question is now whether rationalism, having reached its outcome,
does not undergo an inversion and confess that its original postulate
was arbitrary.
At this point, we ought to specify the content of the word “rational-
ism,” which we have used without explicitly defining it. Naturally, I will
do so just in a problematic form, as a mere outline of a research program,
to which I am constricted by the limitations of this work. In its most
general sense, the rationalist attitude is nothing but the simple
assumption that man’s present condition is its normal condition. This
attitude coincides with the moral devaluation of miracles (in the broad-
est sense of this word, so that it also coincides with the negation of
free creation, of the theme of sin in its biblical meaning and so on –
consider Hegel’s statement that a miracle is a “violation of the spirit”).
But in what sense can this assumption be said to have been proved?
That is, in what sense is the negation of the supernatural that it implies
not just an a priori? The ideal of metaphysical rationalism is the ideal
of “comprehension”: man attains his freedom by adopting the stand-
point of being considered in its totality, by elevating himself through
thought to such a level of universality that his existence in finite life
becomes to him a matter of indifference (and a thousand equivalent
formulas). The ideal of philosophy, in other words, is to understand
myself as an object in the world of objects or, if you wish, the reduction
of the individual to the empirical I. This is why the philosophy of com-
prehension moves towards Idealism, as the dissolution, in thought, of
the reality of the finite (and it is worth recalling Hegel’s famous defini-
tion: “the proposition that the finite is ideal constitutes Idealism. The
Idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognizing that
the finite has no veritable being.”20 Incidentally, this definition enables
us to see that the dispute between realism and Idealism becomes utterly
meaningless if it is moved onto the purely gnoseological level). Clearly,
in this position the religious attitude, in as much as it is concerned with
individual salvation, must appear to be the mythological form of the

20 [TN] Georg W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, §316.

 III. Marxism and the Qualitative Leap (1948) 235

elevation to the universal: religion is philosophia inferior. But, on the other

hand, the truth that becomes manifested to the metaphysical rationalist
is a truth mediated by an ethical attitude (this duty to “elevate oneself
to the universal”). Hence, the hiatus that necessarily opens up in every
metaphysical rationalism between truth and reality, and its conse-
quences: the pendulum-like swings in the history of philosophy between
rationalism and anti-rationalist forms, which, however, do not touch
rationalism’s initial presupposition but stand up for forms of reality that
have been sacrificed by this or that rationalist synthesis; also the appear-
ance, among them, of forms of spiritualist eclecticism, attempts to rein-
troduce the religious form (as a mere “form of the spirit”) in order to
bridge the hiatus between truth and reality (the “reasons of the heart,”
“practical reason,” etc.); and, throughout history, the continuous effort
of rationalism to reach the concrete. But, about what concerns us here:
we may wonder whether the ethical attitude that conditions metaphysi-
cal rationalisms may not be, in turn, conditioned by a previous thesis
about the negativity of the finite or the ontological reality of guilt; by the
thesis that death is the destiny of finite being or that man is “guilty by
the very fact of existing” – that is, by an interpretation of sin that is a
direct consequence of the assumption that man’s present condition is
normal. Thus, we may wonder whether the negation of the supernatural
and the reduction of religion to philosophia inferior actually just “make
clear” an unproven initial presupposition (whether they are definitions
that are internal to an “attitude,” to a “type” that has been “chosen”).
We have already seen in broad outline how the transition into his-
toricist rationalism took place through an internal necessity of rational-
ism21 – because of the twofold contradiction in metaphysical rationalism
between the intention to atheologize the finite and the theologization
of the finite constituted by the system; and between the system and
reality because of the above- mentioned hiatus between truth and real-
ity. The critique I just formulated – regarding Marxism’s difficulty in

21 Here, of course, a further question should arise concerning whether Marxism

can be regarded as the rigorous form of historicism – that is, the “Croce versus Marx”
question. I will just briefly mention my own view: Croce’s historicism seems to me the
projection (the only possible one) of historicism on the plane of the philosophy of comprehension.
We can find a first confirmation of this in the fact that Croce needs, in order to beat
Marxism (or its shadow), to re-translate it precisely onto this plane where, obviously, it
is self-contradictory.
236 The Problem of Atheism

conducting the criticism of Christianity at the level of truth, while the

anti-Christianity of Marxist anthropology and ethics requires the affir-
mation that Christianity is not true, and there is no room for an agnostic
position – now raises the question of whether the historical process of
rationalism may not be circular and, in its final moment, may not end
up making clear the initial negation of ontological possibilities it pos-
tulated. In other words, of whether Marxism represents the outcome
of rationalism and is therefore not only an insuperable position within
the circle of rationalism but also represents its self-criticism.
But, at this point, it becomes clear that, even if we abandon the
Christian-Marxist delusion, the value of Balbo’s thesis remains intact:
Marxism opens up the possibility of a non-mystified investigation of
the question of being, the way to non-mystified religious work. It
forces Christian thought to re-express itself with formulas that are no
longer mystified.
It forces Christian thought, in other words, to a correlative self-crit-
icism even in the strictly philosophical field. Because the notion that
rationalism is “philosophy” tout court is, we can say, the “natural” con-
viction of the human spirit. It is no wonder, then, that the rationalist
spirit/temptation constantly penetrates Christian thought. This penetra-
tion takes place in the guise of accepting the two typical figures of
metaphysical rationalism, the beginning (which actually denotes the
logical-ethical ascesis that is necessary in order for the philosopher to
forget himself and to come to understand himself as an object in the
world of objects) and the system (finished reality, with the consequent
eternalization of a historical set of questions, and what that also implies at
the political level – elevating a determined historical ideal of Christian
politics to absolute ideal).
 IV

Notes on Western Irreligion (1963)

1 . A t h e i s m o r “ N at u r a l I r r e l i g i o n ” ?

If we turn our attention to the Western world, we may be led to doubt

that the statement that atheism is the primary datum of historical actual-
ity truly expresses the factual situation.1 Because we may wonder whether

1 About the concept of historical actuality, see the definition by Fr G. Fessard, De

l’actualité historique, vol. 1 (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1960), 10–11. “Thanks to their
being paradoxically united, the two terms tend to span no less than the whole range
of questions posed to each and every one of us by the fact that we are essentially histori-
cal beings, such that our reality (individual as well as social) takes shape gradually, step
by step and according to the free decisions that we make in every occasion, in the most
fleeting hic et nunc. Having to conjoin, each of these two terms loses its trivial meaning
thanks to the other, and thus awakens the need for the total meaning, which alone is
capable of satisfying our will to be, and to be in the full light of intelligibility. In order
to clarify the origin and the scope of this need, we must then resort to a method capable
of considering every problem and every event according to its historical actuality. This
requires a double, converging investigation. First of all, reflection must try to grasp the
historical element, both in its own essence and in its relationships with other dimen-
sions of being that are more familiar to a theologian or a philosopher, such as the natu-
ral, rational, supernatural dimensions etc. Then, in light of this apprehension, it still
has to seek the resolution of the antinomies he met, by means of a hierarchy of values
based precisely on the relationship between these various dimensions of being and
historical actuality.” By the same author and on the same concept, see La Dialectique
des Exercises spirituels de Saint Ignace de Loyola (Paris: Aubier, 1956), 16–17. This is also
the method that I have essentially tried to follow in the present essay.
238 The Problem of Atheism

the “pressing reality”2 of the last twenty years (the “world of yesterday”
extended past 1940) has been the spreading of something entirely dif-
ferent from atheism – namely, “natural irreligion” (the loss, the eclipse
of the sacred, or whatever else we want to call it).3
In order to show that they are essentially different phenomena, I am
forced to anticipate here a thesis that will be highlighted in the next
essay. In my judgment, after Christianity, the categories of two essential
philosophical forms, Christian thought and rationalism, are conditioned
by an initial stance with respect to the Fall. Now, there is a third form
of thought that claims to constitute itself regardless of such choice:
empiricism, which is essentially specified by the distinction between the
verifiable and the unverifiable.4 Supposedly, by virtue of this distinc-
tion, not only knowledge but also morals and politics are able to organize
themselves independently of any “hypothesis” about supra-sensitive
reality. Thus, whereas atheism always includes a mystical moment,5
albeit of mysticism in reverse, empiricism is characterized by the aban-
donment of every mysticism; whereas atheism displays in some respects

2 This term was used by A. Muñoz Alonso in his introductory presentation, El

fenomeno del ateismo, at the Gallarate Conference of 1961. It was published in the volume
Il problema dell’ateismo (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1962) [TN: the conference proceedings
happen to have the same title as the present volume].
3 By the expression “natural irreligion” I mean exactly the opposite of the “natural
religion” of the seventeenth century (e.g., Campanella’s religio abdita). This fits within
the idea, to which I will return again later, that today’s irreligious thought is the com-
plete inversion of the religious thought of the seventeenth century.
4 We must also observe that empiricism parts ways with rationalism in as much as
it eliminates the theme of the pari, which in rationalism is instead implicit and manifests
itself, as we shall see, in its final form. In this regard, we could study the relationship
between Descartes and Locke to show that, in the latter, we find the elimination, even
without a clear intention or awareness, of all the Cartesian themes that can lead to
Pascal’s position. The distinction between verifiable and unverifiable is also essential
to existentialism, but for existentialism (at least in its religious forms) what has value
is the unverifiable, whereas empiricism accentuates the verifiable. Therefore, existen-
tialism represents a much more radical critique of rationalism, and here we should
raise the question of explaining why empiricism is subordinate to rationalism in its
entire historical development. Thus, the ultimate development of rationalism into
atheism is paralleled in empiricism by the loss of the sacred.
5 Regarding the mystical character of atheism, see, for example, Fritz Mauthner,
Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendlande (Stuttgard and Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-
Anstalt, 1922). The literature about the religious character of Communism is huge.
 IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963) 239

gnostic aspects,6 empiricism is constitutionally agnostic. Now, natural

irreligion represents precisely this agnostic attitude pushed to the
extreme. Whence we can also reach the following thesis: the present
moment is when the two traditional lines of modern philosophy, ratio-
nalism and empiricism, arrive at their ultimate consequences, erasing
all attempts at conciliation with religion.
The outlook of natural irreligion says: it is not a matter of denying
that there are open questions, which cannot be solved by the ordinary
means of knowledge; but such unsolvable questions are also those that
do not interest us; meaning that they do not interest those who want to
act in the world in order to improve it in any sense, be it technical,
aesthetic, practical-social – as opposed to those who seek an escapist
transcendence. The difference between the current natural irreligion
and old-style agnosticism can be discerned in these words by Ayer:7

6 The origin of the Hegelian term “alienation,” which Marx picked up, is gnostic
and not at all iusnaturalistic as is commonly believed. In particular, we can say that
Marxism reproduces in different terms the scheme of Manichean Gnosis as described
by a recent interpreter (Claude Tresmontant, Etudes de métaphysique biblique [Paris:
Gabalda, 1955], 250): “The ensuing peace is not identical to the primitive peace. In
the epoch that preceded the Fall, temptation remained possible. Whereas by now the
Absolute is no longer tempted to alienate itself. It has achieved, thanks to its odyssey,
eternal fullness and security.” To have the Marxist vision of history, it will be enough
to add that primitive peace is that of primitive Communism, and to replace the absolute
with the Community that characterizes the final age – which is the very being of man
become aware of all his possibilities of development. In fact, the idea that the philoso-
phies of history of the nineteenth century, of which Marxism is the endpoint, have a
gnostic character is part of the common culture. Actually, Tresmontant tends to refer
the rediscovery of Gnosticism to Hegel alone and to view Marxism as a process of
liberation from it and a return to biblical metaphysics. But, in fact, if we accept the
analogy, we should rather view it as the moment in the history of thought when
Gnosticism dissociated itself from Platonism and, simultaneously, the heterogeneity
between Gnosticism and biblical thought manifested itself most clearly.
7 Generally, the word “agnosticism” is used in a pejorative sense. People think of
Spencer, of an unknowable caput mortuum, and so on. Actually, if it is placed in the
context of its time, and especially in the last decade of the nineteenth century when
criticizing materialism seemed to be the obligatory theme for philosophy professors,
agnosticism represents the effort to find a third way, beyond the metaphysical absolut-
isms of Idealism and materialism. Just as the sciences achieved a positive level when
they related to religion from a position of neutrality and did not claim to originate
new faiths, so must philosophy. Let us not forget that the phenomenology of the early
Husserl, with its suspension of judgment about existence, arose in this climate. And
240 The Problem of Atheism

“For if the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist’s
assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a
significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted.”8 Old
agnosticism affirmed that we are not equipped to decide which of the
two propositions “there is a transcendent God” and “there is not a
transcendent God” is true. But it hinted that the truth of the first propo-
sition was preferable, and it professed that asking the question of God
was an inescapable necessity for the human mind. Conversely, for today’s
irreligion the exact opposite is true: there is no reason to raise the ques-
tion of God because the affirmation of his existence is logically mean-
ingless. Furthermore, even shifting the question to practice is not
allowed because, with respect to social questions, asking the question
of God would be, people think, disastrous. They say: democratic politics
can only be de-mythologized politics, which keeps rigorously to the
temporal sphere. If anybody today insists on shifting the attention to
the theological aspect of contemporary politics, he is just proposing
to walk backwards the path that all of culture, and not just Western
culture, has followed over the last forty years. Indeed, what was Stalinism
if not the attempt to sacralize politics to the highest degree? And where
else could the forms that paralleled the triumph of Stalinism in Russia,
Fascism, and Nazism have blossomed if not in cultural climates saturated
with the sacredness of politics and with political theology?9 Spirit of

perhaps it would not be a stretch to present the philosophy of the early Husserl as that
of a thinker who, in order to give agnosticism a truly rigorous meaning, found himself
forced to give up not only Spencer but also Kant.
8 Alfred J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd ed. (London: Gollancz, 1946),
115. Since in a moment I will mention the present relevance of Comte, it may be useful
to compare some of his sentences with those of Ayer: “Atheism, even from the intel-
lectual point of view, is a very imperfect form of emancipation; for its tendency is to
prolong the metaphysical stage indefinitely, by continuing to seek for new solutions
of Theological problems, instead of setting aside all inaccessible researches on the
ground of their utter inutility … As long as men persist in attempting to answer
the insoluble questions which occupied the attention of the childhood of our race, by
far the more rational plan is to do as was done then, that is, simply to give free play to
the imagination … Persistent Atheists, therefore, would seem to be the most illogical
of theologists; because they occupy themselves with theological problems, and yet
reject the only appropriate method of handling them.” See Auguste Comte, System of
Positive Polity, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1875), 36–7.
9 Think, for example, in Italy of the religiosity of politics in Gentile, or in Germany
of the works of Carl Schmitt.
 IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963) 241

intolerance, of crusade, or of bloody revolution: supposedly these are

the consequences of introducing theological themes into political and
social questions. From the psycho-pedagogical perspective, how could
we not mention, very briefly, psychoanalysis in its most common mean-
ing? Man’s “liberation” means liberation from his psychical imbalances.
And the idea of God, which was born from the child’s sense of fear of
his real father, holds man back in an infantile stage, which cannot be
harmonized with his growth and with real problems.
According to a certain type of neo-positivism, it is a matter of banish-
ing all references to theism or atheism from every judgment, theoretical
as well as practical: soon the “useless question” will be forgotten; the
inexorable process of growth will fatally lead to the euthanasia of reli-
gion. It has been said that Auguste Comte’s philosophical enterprise
was to seek a man “without any trace of God.”10 As we can see, old
Comte – whose power of thought certainly must not be underestimated,
and who actually must be regarded not only as the greatest among the
old positivists but also as one of the most vigorous thinkers of the nine-
teenth century – is not far, even though his most recent heirs also intend
to erase his “Religion of Humanity.”
Let us observe that natural irreligion indicates a higher level of impi-
ousness than atheism in as much as it rejects the very idea of religion. Even
if it is rigorously atheistic, even if it denies every revelation and every
supernatural reality, Marxism, in its Communist version, is indeed a
religion in which the Future replaces the Eternal, and Totality replaces
the Absolute and the City of God. The process of conversion from the
atheistic to the theistic religion (or vice versa) is certainly possible,
whereas it is blocked by natural irreligion. From the standpoint of his-
tory, its novel character can hardly be emphasized enough. One cannot
establish any connection between its pressing reality and the atheistic
invasion that took place in France during the first decades of the sev-
enteenth century because then atheism presented itself as an aristocratic
phenomenon in opposition to the “natural religion” of the people (the
attitude essentially of contempt displayed by the greatest libertine

10 H. Gouhier, La jeunesse de Auguste Comte et la formation du positivisme, vol. 1

(Paris: Vrin, 1933), 23.
242 The Problem of Atheism

erudite, Naudé, towards Campanella is paradigmatic).11 Today, instead,

at the historical-social level natural irreligion is a mass phenomenon,
and at the ideal level it is a sort of a priori form that prevents the recep-
tion of transcendent religion as well as atheism since the latter still keeps
in its own way the idea of the “sacred.” It also marks the difference
between the first and the second postwar periods. The first was the time
of the transfer of the sacred to the immanent; this transfer to the imma-
nent, realizing itself in collective form, took the form of secular religion,
to use a term that was widely circulated.12 The second, instead, is the
time of its loss. Does this mean that the present time seems to mark an
ever greater victory of democracy and a decline of totalitarianism, even
in places where it seemed to have established itself most firmly? In a
certain sense, yes, but it is a democracy associated with a particular
moral attitude. By this I certainly do not mean to say that the terms
“democracy” and “irreligion” are correlated but only that there is also
a type of democracy that is tightly linked with the loss of the sacred and
that this is precisely what today’s democraticism seems to me.
Paradoxically, the disappearance of the question of God, which, accord-
ing to Marxism, should have followed the proletarian revolution, today
seems to be taking place at the final stage of bourgeois society.
Now, what are the origins of this new mentality? They do not seem
to be directly philosophical, which might lead one to think that a truly
rigorous investigation should begin by examining the social background.
This would lead us to discover a new social and historical reality that
seeks its own philosophy and, in part, has already found it, at least in a
negative sense – a phenomenon that takes shape reflecting the influ-
ences to which the individual is exposed by the fact of living in a deter-
mined society.

11 As concerns France, the origins of the word “atheism” have been highlighted
by H. Busson, La pensée religieuse française de Charron à Pascal (Paris: Vrin, 1933),
15–16. The word is first mentioned in a text of 1543, but it does not become common
(and is used mostly by its adversaries) until the first decades of the 1600s.
12 Regarding this déplacement de sacré, see the very remarkable work by Jules
Monnerot, Sociologie du Communisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1963). However, today that
book looks aged because the situation has changed since the time of its writing, when
it really might seem that the second postwar period was the fulfilment of the first; a
change to which seemingly Communism itself has had to adapt. But the most serious
defect is the inadequate awareness of the importance of the philosophical aspect in
the development he describes.
 IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963) 243

Of course, in natural irreligion the thoughts of the ancient atheists,

of Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche (for this mindset “ancient” means
the nineteenth century), return but without their tragic or revolution-
ary meaning. Thus, “God is dead” takes a rather different meaning from
the Nietzschean sacramental assassination. It ends up meaning, instead:
God was a natural idea in ages when there was a particular relationship
between man and nature. At that time he lived in the only place where
he can live, in men’s hearts. Today this idea has ceased to be, precisely
in connection with a changed relationship. Religion was alive when it
performed a human function, and at that time it was impervious to all
criticisms of a logical kind; today this human function has ended, and
all that is left is the myth, which is unverifiable and logically irrelevant;
and there is a multiplication of attempts by theologians to “de-
mythologize” it, attempts that do not persuade believers and that leave
unbelievers utterly indifferent. The notion will disappear once the
technical domination by man over nature is perfectly realized, when
the attribute of being creator will have been completely transferred into
man’s hands. The focus shifts to ethnological studies, and the reason
is quite clear. What people want to understand about these religious
phenomena that have lorded over man’s soul for so long is their genesis,
out of conviction that the study of the origins resolves in itself the mean-
ing of the value. The rejection of the idea of God will result from the
history of its origins. A whole literature is taking shape that reminds us
of the ancient “horoscope of religions.” There is very little to say on this
matter since these are mental habits that were already common during
the formative period of the Enlightenment (in order to understand
their nature, studying Fontenelle would suffice). The focus shifts to
genetic psychology, and the same comments apply. It shifts to sociolo-
gism as a doctrine of absolute relativism. In sum, it shifts to psychology
and sociology as disciplines that will account for religions and metaphys-
ics by investigating their origins. Thus, historicism of the romantic type
is replaced by historicism of the enlightened and libertine type.
Historicism that justified tradition is replaced by historicism that dis-
solves it. Those who chase the “spirit of the times” will say that absolute
liberation from Romanticism is the task of today’s culture.
Thus, it would appear that in any case a sociological study of contem-
porary irreligion should be primary. Now, the task of this essay is precisely
to argue the opposite thesis: meaning that, at the bottom of the features
displayed today by the Western world there is an ideal and properly
244 The Problem of Atheism

philosophical causality, of which contemporary natural irreligion is just a con-

sequence. And our attention must turn to this properly philosophical
atheism; the sociological investigation will be correct only if comes after
a strictly philosophical initial analysis.
Therefore, let us start from the commonly accepted thesis that there
is a direct relationship between progress of technology and increase of
irreligion.13 Technology14 brings about the loss of the traditional notion
of otium;15 technology abolishes sacred time; technology replaces the
concern for being with that for doing; technology, by focusing attention
on the efficacy of the visible outcome, leads to regarding the extroverted
disposition as the only normal one and, thus, to considering abnormal
the injunction noli foras te ire and all the themes of thought that echo
it; technology leads to the idea of a second innocence, of a complete rec-
onciliation (mediated by technology itself) between man and nature;
and so on and so forth. Hence, the collapse is due to the mere advance-
ment of the technological mindset, to the reason of the times, and not
to the elucubrations of philosophers, of culture, of piety, of metaphysics,
of the theory of knowledge, of ethics (by the replacement of the inten-
tion by the result), of theology, traditionally considered to be Christian.
Furthermore, this process appears to be irreversible because the progress
of technology is the progress of science, and the progress of science is
the progress of intelligence. These ideas would lead religious thought
to a catastrophic vision. Because if this were true, the only attitude that
could be expected today from a man of thought would the awareness
of catastrophicity.
In the vision I described there are some undoubted elements of truth,
which need to be highlighted in order to insert them into another,
more rigorous vision. Indeed, the usual terms, so common in Catholic
literature – “pride,” “resignation,” “despair,” “pessimism” – caused by the
spectacle of evil and suffering do not apply to the new form of irreligion.

13 See, for example, S. Acquaviva, L’eclissi del sacro nella civiltà industriale (Milan:
Edizioni di comunità, 1961).
14 [TN] Here, and in the rest of the sentence, Del Noce uses tecnica, not tecnolo-
gia. The two words are roughly equivalent, but tecnologia is more general and abstract.
I did not translate tecnica as “technique” because in English this word is typically used
to indicate one specific technical procedure.
15 About the classical notion of otium see the splendid essay by J. Pieper, “Otium”
e culto (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1956) [Leisure, the Basis of Culture, trans. A. Dru (London:
Faber and Faber, 1952)].
 IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963) 245

At its foundation there is, instead, the impression that the idea of God
is useless with regard to our decision to come together to build our life,
individual as well as social; that Christian science, philosophy, morality,
and politics today have nothing left to tell us, even though in other
times they spoke. There is not even mere indifference, in the ancient
sense of this word, because indifference presupposed the idea of a single
morality valid for all men, such that, if we follow it, we will be happy
doing good for good’s sake; about what will happen to us after death,
we do not care.
We can say that the new attitude is before anything else, and only,
trust in technology and overcoming all nostalgia for the past by accept-
ing the technical world; and it is trust in progress as a consequence of
trust in technology. Since I recalled Comte, it is worth pointing out the
difference because it marks our time’s specific character. According to
Comte, the process (the ideal of a new religious unification of mankind)
was progress-science-technology; the current process is rather technol-
ogy-science-progress, and the latter idea is completely freed from any
aspect leading to a religion of Humanity as a surrogate for traditional
religion. How do the idea of technology and the idea of progress meet
each other? Simply because the two ideas are correlated: the idea of
progress is valid only in the field of science and technology, and only
in there does it find its confirmation. And it is not by chance that it
really arose – as distinct from other earlier ideas (prophetism, messian-
ism, millennialism, or even the theological view of history) or other
later ones (the idea of revolution) – in the atmosphere of the new sci-
ence, despite what some people have said.16
Thus, it is natural that the extension of the technological mindset
goes hand in hand with the extension of the idea of progress, the

16 After saying in his Cours de Philosophie positive, vol. 5 (Paris: Baillière, 1877),
172, that “the conception of progress belongs exclusively to the positive philosophy,”
Comte adds: “it is certain that Pascal was animated by a sense of the progress of the
sciences when he uttered the immortal aphorism: ‘the entire succession of men,
through the whole course of ages, must be regarded as one man, always living and
incessantly learning’” [The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, vol. 2, ed. and trans. H.
Martineau (London: John Chapman, 1853), 54]. His view is essentially correct. In
fact (and here we could no longer follow Comte), Pascal has defined in an insupera-
ble way the scope of the idea of progress, as a concept that can be applied only to the
sciences, exact and experimental, and that is not transferable to other fields of spiri-
tual activity.
246 The Problem of Atheism

greatest it has experienced so far. Indeed, what value is left to the clas-
sical objection that there cannot be moral progress – because of the
intrinsic, result-independent, irrevocable value of every act, and because
of the rarity of truly moral acts – if, according to the pan-technicist
mindset, there is no other measure of the value of an act than, precisely,
its result, or, as people say, the expansion, promotion, and rationaliza-
tion of life? The words of Nietzsche, the anti-progressive, are completely
accepted as the criterion for a history of morality: “There is a continual
moiling and toiling going on in morality – the effect of successful crimes
(among which, for example, are included all innovations in moral
thinking).”17 Moreover, in this extension the idea of progress fully real-
izes a characteristic that it had been acquiring in the course of its history,
that of becoming an irreligious solution to the question of evil, a pos-
tulate opposed to that of sin. In fact, as long as one operates in the
context of the traditional contradiction between the existence of a
sovereignly good God and the presence of evil in the world – an objec-
tion that has almost disappeared from recent philosophical literature
because it was based on the metaphysical type of rationalism and led to
two solutions: either a dialectical explanation of evil, in a conception
that looked at the Whole, or metaphysical dualism in a conception that
looked at the individuals – the theologian ultimately wins the argument
because the most direct and immediate proof of the existence of God
lies in the need for him prompted by the experience of evil and suf-
fering.18 In that case, a sort of conflict gets established between reality

17 [TN] Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans.

R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 59.
18 Here, a well-known passage by Rousseau from La Profession de Foi du Vicaire
Savoyard, ed. P.-M. Masson (Fribourg-Paris: Librairie de l’université-Librairie
Hachette, 1914), 201–7, is worth quoting: “in the present state of things … the
wicked triumph and the just are trampled on and oppressed. What indignation,
hence, arises within us to find that our hopes are frustrated! Conscience itself rises up
and complains of its maker. It cries out to him, lamenting, thou hast deceived me! ‘I have
deceived thee! rash man? Who hath told thee so? Is thy soul annihilated? Dost thou
cease to exist?’ … If the soul be immaterial, it may survive the body, and if so,
Providence is justified. Had I no other proof of the immateriality of the soul, than the
oppression of the just and the triumph of the wicked in this world, this alone would
prevent my having the least doubt of it. So shocking a discord amidst the general
harmony of things, would make me naturally look out for the cause. I should say to
myself, we do not cease to exist with this life, – every thing resumes its order after
death” [Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar (New York: Eckler,
 IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963) 247

(the need for God) and abstract rationality, and the former necessarily
prevails: indeed, examining the contradiction when it is posed in these
terms leads to a critique of rationalism, understood here in its simplest
sense, of which Pascal was speaking when he recognized it in the idea
that human reason is “above everything.” In order to reaffirm his posi-
tion, the irreligious objector finds himself forced to adjust his aim and
shift to the practical standpoint: disorder can truly be eliminated from
the world and not by the action of a transcendent or immanent ratio-
nality (of providence however understood), but by an action that is our
action. This has the necessary corollary that such progress, precisely
because it depends on nothing but our action, does not present itself
as ineluctable and necessary. Therefore, today’s progressivism rediscov-
ers the Enlightenment’s formulation of the doctrine of progress, freed
from the influences that had been exerted by the romantic philosophy
of history.19 Progress can triumph if we want it – that is, if the advance-
ment of science and of its applications is not blocked by the forces that
oppose the rationalization of the world; in practice, by the resentment
of the social classes that are inimical to the movement of history, the
decadent classes that, not by chance, always speak in the name of abso-
lute truths. Therefore, the stance of breaking with tradition and the
agonistic dualization of rational versus irrational, accompanied by
the denunciation of the irrational elements the world has displayed
until now, are intrinsic to the progressive attitude. But, on the other
hand, the idea of progress has lost the ethical and humanitarian char-
acter that went with it in the 1800s (so that it meant, for instance in
Proudhon and in so many others, “the advent of justice”). Even when
the old terminology is used, the meaning is different: being progressive
today means being up to date with a possible development of intelli-
gence, which leads to full technical rationalization. I must add, very
briefly, that the ideas of progress and revolution do not coincide at all,
and that today the West is pervaded by a progressive impulse that is not

1889), 47–8]. It is worth quoting not because it expresses a particularly original thesis
but as a document of Rousseau’s quest to attain “simple” religion and theology against
the claims of “high philosophy” (abstract rationalism).
19 The philosophies of progress of the nineteenth century generally present
themselves as justificatory of the past and its necessity rather than as critical of tradition
in the fashion of the Enlightenment. Consider the difference in tone of the Hegelians,
the Saint-Simonians, and the positivists compared, for example, to Condorcet.
248 The Problem of Atheism

in the least revolutionary. Of course, the latter implies the former, and
there is no revolutionary thought without progressive spirit; or, actually,
it is the very fact of coming after the formulation of the idea of progress
that gives revolutionary thought its typical character. However, the
opposite is not true: there can be progressivism without revolutionary
spirit, first of all because the two ideas have different origins. The first
one is tied to the new science, the second to the secular translation of
eschatological thought into the philosophy of history.
But, now, how does one go from mere technical activity20 to the spirit
of technicity – namely, to the interpretation in technical terms of all
forms of thought and human activity? Because it seems that the spirit
of technicity differs from technical activity in the same way eroticism
differs from love, aestethicism from art, politicism from politics, panlo-
gism from logic, and so on. To put it in terms of religious philosophy,
the spirit of technicity is an aspect of the revolt of values against the
Value. Once values have lost their reference to the Value, their disorder
is natural, and so is the claim by each one of them to be absolute, and
the attempt to deprive other values of the autonomy that, conversely,
is guaranteed by their reference to the absolute value.21 It is true that
today this claim is advanced above all by technology, and that only by
reason of scientism (of the methodic a-theism of science) does one go
from relying on technology to overcome limited hurdles to faith in
technology and to the correlative faith in progress. And it is true that
the appearance of scientism always indicates a crisis of philosophy.
I will discuss the nature of this crisis later. I think that now, regarding
the difference between technical activity and the spirit of technicity, it
is time to comment on two remote essays, La physique d’Aristote et la
physique de Descartes by Laberthonnière and Les remarques sur l’irreligion
contemporaine by Gabriel Marcel, first of all because they express the two
extremes of the Catholic positions on this topic. The first, which is
undated and was published posthumously,22 appears to date back
(because of some political references) to no earlier than 1919–20; it

20 [TN] Tecnica in the original, see note 14. I did not use “technology” in this case
because arguably it includes the very idea of “spirit of technicity” that Del Noce wants
to distinguish from tecnica.
21 See the acute remarks by Felice Battaglia in his “L’ateismo e i valori,” in Il
problema dell’ateismo, 27–35.
22 In Études sur Descartes, vol. 2, ed. L. Canet (Paris: Vrin, 1935), 287–344.
 IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963) 249

was written as part of the life-long conversation between Descartes and

Laberthonnière, which by its very nature produced not one organic
work but essays rich with questions, which in part are still waiting for
solutions; all said and done, it is the only one among the old-time books
on Descartes that cannot in the least be said to be exhausted. Between
1909 and 1915 Laberthonnière had reached a decidedly physicistic
interpretation of Descartes. In this new essay we find elements that tend
to overturn it, or at least to present the physicistic interpretation – in
the sense of an option for the world23 – as a partial perspective that
needs to be integrated with others. Its essential thesis is the following.
In his physics, Aristotle had come to represent the world as an ensemble
of forms constituting an eternal harmony, which he paused to contem-
plate in order to enjoy it as a spectator. Descartes conceived it as a
machine that produces its effects over time and that he intends to
know in order not to contemplate it but, rather, to learn how to make
it work and how to use it. The first is an artist’s physics, which abstracts
from the needs that are imposed on us by our life on earth, and inter-
prets the world as a beautiful thing to see, so that we may act just like
pure intellects and dedicate ourselves to the divine pleasure of intellec-
tion and contemplation. The second is an engineer’s physics, which,
rather than regarding the world as a beautiful thing and becoming
aesthetically absorbed in its beauty, regards it as a good thing to possess
and strives to possess it for the purpose of satisfying the needs of earthly
life. On one side, a science of the contemplation of the world, on the
other side a science of its exploitation. Starting from here, we under-
stand their two theories of knowledge. For Aristotle it is a matter of
identifying oneself with the world in knowledge; conversely, for Descartes
it is a matter of distinguishing oneself from the world in order to affirm oneself
apart from it and above it (the thought process that leads to the cogito) for
the purpose of knowing the world from above and using it for one’s

23 “It is therefore necessary to discover the germ of moral life that constitutes the
living principle of a doctrine; and it is by following the determinism of its develop-
ment that we shall be able to assess its value; we shall see whether it can be lived or
not. The types of germs of moral life [that are] living principles of doctrines perhaps
are not very numerous. Perhaps there are only two kinds: to live for time, to live for
eternity; the alternative” (Lucien Laberthonnière, Études sur Descartes, vol. 1, ed. L.
Canet [Paris: Vrin, 1935], 2) [TN: my translation]. And supposedly Descartes chose
to live for time.
250 The Problem of Atheism

own ends. Now, which one of the two attitudes is more consistent with
the spirit of Christianity? Shall we say without qualifications that
Aristotle’s attitude is religious and that of Descartes is directed towards
worldly ends? We must see the other side of the coin: making physics a
science of contemplation of the world coincides in Aristotle with mak-
ing politics a science of exploitation of man because the liberation of
the wise man from material cares coincides with the imposition on
others of the lower task of addressing them. Therefore, by assigning to
himself the task of contemplating things in the beauty of their intelli-
gibility, the wise man is led by that very fact to use men; hence Aristotle’s
not merely speculative interest in the various forms of social organiza-
tion, in view of finding indications about how to set up a social organism
that makes possible the wise man’s life as free from material cares. Vice
versa, Descartes is aware that the science he envisions presupposes that
man as man is higher than things, is in a different order than the order
of things, and must not be considered in the same fashion. Descartes’s
physics teaches us to use the world as a means because man is spirit
and the world is matter, and these two words no longer denote two
elements or two aspects of reality but, rather, two absolutely distinct
realities, two substances that exist each in itself, one higher by nature
and the other lower, one able to know and to possess by knowing and
possessing itself, the other made only to be known and to be possessed,
destined to subjection. This leads us to say that Cartesian physics and
the technology joined with it have a Christian origin because of the
underlying conception that made possible their rise: they depend on
a Christian truth, the affirmation of man’s transcendence over the
world. By affirming that in every man there is the same nature and
dignity as a thinking being, Cartesian physics implies that no man has
the right to use other men, which brings us to the antipodes of Aristotle.
Furthermore, Laberthonnière does not think at all that the new way
of conceiving the relationships between men is a consequence of the
change in the understanding of science but, instead, that the opposite
is true: the idea that by nature and destiny man is superior to the world
of things has created the conditions in which the rise of the new physics
has been possible. And the cogito ergo sum seems to bridge the two
moments in as much as it separates man from the world and sets up
the soul, every human soul, as a reality independent of things, tran-
scending things, and therefore as their rightful master. Nor, on this
point, can one find a contradiction (and no text justifies it) between
 IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963) 251

Cartesian thought and other forms of religious thought of its century,

even the most ascetic. Pascal’s famous thought that the unthinking
world is nothing compared to thinking man, since thinking man infi-
nitely surpasses the world with his thought, is just the full expression
of this Cartesian theme in which contempt for the world changed from
an ascetic to a scientific thesis.
If we wish to link this thesis of Laberthonnière to Péguy’s suggestive –
and not worn out, despite too many repetitions – line that Descartes
was a “French knight,”24 we might say that he truly represents the epi-
logue and the endpoint of the ideal of chivalry, in the work of liberating
the humble from their earthly servitudes, through his physics and the
consequent practice. In other words, technical thought is originally
correlated with Christianity and with (virtual) democracy in the sense
that the attribution to everyone of the same right and of the same power
over things sets human individuals one next to the other, as equals.25
From Aristotle’s perspective, the wise man separated himself from men.
From the perspective of technical thought he stands next to the other
men, apart from and above things. As an overall formula, we can say
that technology means replacing the exploitation of men with the
exploitation of things. Hence, a radical negation of technology could
only be a negation of Christianity itself.
But, now, if this is the case, how could it happen that subsequently it
took a completely different meaning? Indeed, it is obvious that nobody,
facing today’s technologized world, is immediately led to think of its
Christian origins. It is also fairly clear what deviation marks the transi-
tion from technical activity to what I called pan-technicism: what was
thought about the world of things gets extended to men themselves,
who become objects and instruments of a process of production, which
in turn is directed by an individual will to power. We find one of the
earliest expressions of this danger in a lecture by Marcel, given in 1930.26

24 Charles Péguy, Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie cartésienne (Paris:

Gallimard, 1935), 59.
25 From the standpoint of the history of political doctrines, we could say that the
idea of this nexus of Christianity, democracy, and the positive value of technical activ-
ity is the initial theme that inspires Christian Democracy as a political position distinct
from other Catholic positions open to the modern world (e.g., liberal Catholicism).
26 Published in Étre et Avoir (Paris: Aubier, 1935), 259–95 [TN: Being and Having,
trans. K. Farrer (Westminster UK: Dacre Press, 1949), 179–202]. This view of tech-
nology underpins the distinction between problem and mystery, as can be seen, for
252 The Problem of Atheism

We have a position that may seem the exact opposite of that of

Laberthonnière (whose essay, published posthumously, Marcel could
not know). But it is above all a matter of a different visual angle: one
was looking at the origins of the technical spirit, the other at technology
on the verge of reaching its full essor, when the humanistic spirit and
the technical spirit were beginning to oppose each other. By technology
Marcel means every discipline that tends to grant man the mastery of
a determined object; and it is quite evident that every technique can
be regarded as a manipulation, as a means to mould some matter that,
in fact, can be purely ideal (e.g., a psychological technique). Therefore,
there is a parallel between progress of technology and progress of
objectivity. An object is the more an object the more it serves as matter
for more numerous and more developed techniques. Thus, we under-
stand why, according to Marcel, the technical spirit must progress
towards a radical de-subjectification of the world, towards a world with-
out soul and without interiority: the characteristic perfectibility of the
world of technology constantly perfects depersonalization. In the tech-
nical vision of the world, man appears to be the only centre of order
and organization in a world that, by all appearances, has been produced
by chance, or has been torn away from chance by a violent act of human
emancipation; therefore, the technical vision of the world is essentially
tied to the Promethean myth. Depersonalization affects the subject of

example, in the text “Position et approches concrètes du mystère ontologique” in

appendix to Le monde cassé (Paris: Desclée, 1933) [The Broken World, trans. K.L. Hanley
(Milwaukee WI: Marquette University Press, 1998)]. This critique must be linked to
that developed by Enrico Castelli. See especially his Introduzione a una fenomenologia
della nostra epoca (Florence: Fussi, 1948); I presupposti di una filosofia della storia (Milan:
Bocca, 1952) (“the whole history of modern philosophy is the history of the race to
solitude through the terror of solitude itself … The history of modern philosophy is,
largely, the history of an obsession: objectivity,” 7); Il tempo esaurito (Milan: Bocca,
1954); L’indagine quotidiana (Milan: Bocca, 1956) (see especially the extremely
important conclusion regarding “Il tempo giusto,” with a suggestive juxtaposition to
the question of solipsism). It must also be linked to the critique by Martin Heidegger,
particularly in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954) and in Nietzsche, 2 vols.
(Pfullingen: Neske, 1961). “Technology as the highest form of rational conscious-
ness, technologically interpreted, and the lack of reflection as the arranged power-
lessness, opaque to itself, to attain a relation to what is worthy of question, belong
together: they are the same thing” [TN: Heidegger, “Überwindung der Metaphysik,”
in Vorträge und Aufsätze, 87. Translation by J. Stambaugh in The End of Philosophy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 99].
 IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963) 253

the technique, who appears to be himself the object of possible tech-

niques – techniques that are developed after the pattern of those that
apply to the external world, but transposed. This impoverishment of
interiority, which is the correlative of technology – which is directed by
its nature to try to destroy it, and reduce it to a reflection of environ-
mental situations – coincides with the exacerbation of the most immedi-
ate and most elementary elements of affectivity. Here we can discern
why the most immediate naturalism and the most sophisticated technol-
ogy become conjoined, leaving tradition behind in the name of a form
of primitivism, and I would almost say in the name of a restored Edenic
order, of which technology is the premise. This is natural, after all, since
technology is 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, grace. These arguments are special
instances of a more general one, since religion and technology are
defined as opposite terms. Indeed religion – in as much as it distin-
guishes itself from magic and sets itself in opposition to it – is the exact
opposite of a technique: it establishes an order in which the subject is
placed in the presence of something that he is not allowed to grasp in
any way. In the act of bringing his hands together, the religious subject
demonstrates by this gesture that there is nothing to be done, nothing
to change, but simply that he is coming to make an offer of himself,
and this is truly the sentiment of the sacred in which respect, fear, and
love come together. If the word “transcendent” means anything, it is
precisely this: it denotes exactly that sort of absolute and impassable
gap that opens up between the soul and being because the latter escapes
the grasp of the former. Conversely, for the technical spirit the world is
a machine whose operation leaves remarkably much to be desired due
to defects and errors for which nobody is to blame because nobody is
there. Man is somebody only in front of an imperfect mechanism; and,
in fact, he is perfectly ready to treat himself in the same way and to
reabsorb himself into a depersonalized cosmos. It is natural that, from
this perspective, life becomes the only value, and an action is good or
bad if it contributes or not to foster it.
We have seen how the ambiguity of technology (an ambiguity that is
not unlike that of every other spiritual attitude, after all) seems to become
clear in the opposite visions of these two thinkers. I have already men-
tioned that all Catholic commentaries take place within this fundamental
opposition: if one looks carefully, the common and clichéd distinction
254 The Problem of Atheism

between Catholic left and right is linked with it, in its cultural as well as
in its political aspects. Because one side says: this world of democracy
and technology is Christianity’s child, and rejecting it means wishing to
return to a world of masters and servants, albeit unified by the religious
idea; but this return would be illusory because, after the progress of
technology, the religious factor would not play a unifying role but would
take the appearance of an instrument that politicians use in order to
maintain the differences and make them absolute. The other side says:
in this world of technicism the sacred cannot find a place, and all the
values of Christian morality must be denied; and it is not even possible
to speak of a society when not only religious unity but also the simpler
moral unity disappears; when there are irreconcilable and opposite
moralities, like Catholic morality and a certain presentation of the moral-
ity of psychoanalysis. Hence the division in the Catholic world today,
which pushes to the extreme the division of sixty years ago between
archaists and modernists. Let us discuss whether this division can
somehow be reduced. Because technology inserted into a Christian and
theistic conception is one thing, and technology inserted into an irreli-
gious conception is something else; and it is perfectly true that the irre-
ligious conception must end up pushing technicism to the extreme in
as much as it destroys the notion of adoration and the sentiment of sin.
In a theistic conception technology is joined with the idea of the
distinction between a reality lower than man and a reality that infinitely
surpasses him. This is why, for example, in the “great Christian”
Descartes, man’s transcendence with respect to nature is linked, in the
very process of meditation, with the affirmation of God’s reality and
transcendence as its condition; and certain themes that have been
variously interpreted, like the theory of the free creation of eternal
ideas, intend to sanction the idea of a reality that escapes our grasp
completely and, thus, the possibility of adoration.27 But the place of
technology is completely different in a resolutely irreligious system,

27 At the end of the third Meditation, after the first proof of the existence of
God, he writes: “But before examining this idea more closely and at the same time
inquiring into other truths that can be gathered from it, at this point I want to spend
some time contemplating this God, to ponder his attributes and, so far as the eye of
my darkened mind can take me, to gaze upon, to admire, and to adore the beauty
of this immense light.” [TN: René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. D.A.
Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 35].
 IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963) 255

where it really tends to end up in total desacralization and total deper-

sonalization of reality (leading to the question of solipsism, which is
no longer encountered in the dispute about Idealistic gnoseologism
but, rather, in lived experience).28
Therefore, it is appropriate to see a connection between the absolu-
tization of technicism and the so-called “affluent” society, and to wonder
whether the former may not be explainable starting from the process
of formation of the latter, as the new reality of the period after the Second
World War, whose rapid development has led to new ways of being,
feeling, and expressing oneself that were absolutely inconceivable and
unforeseeable twenty years ago – with the consequence that intergen-
erational understanding has become extremely difficult. We wonder,
therefore, whether it is not technical progress that explains the affluent
society but, on the contrary, the affluent society that explains the estab-
lishment of the pan-technicist mentality in its fullness.
In order to characterize the affluent society, I will use very few
propositions,29 to which obviously many others could be added. First
of all, it is the society that succeeds in eliminating the dialectic tension
that sustains the revolution by pushing alienation to the highest degree.
Here a comment is necessary. By “alienation” I mean, in the most gen-
eral sense, the mutual dehumanization of the relationship with the
other. Each subject perceives the other as alienus, extraneous, separated –
that is, not joined to me by devotion to a shared (not necessarily reli-
gious) value – and, therefore, as an ob-jectum, regardless of whether I
deem this “thing placed in front of me” to be a useful instrument or an
obstacle. Strictly speaking, society is no longer such because multiplicity
is not unified: we have a society without meaning and without value
because the normative idea and the utopian perspective of the City of
God has disappeared. We need to clearly distinguish the two ideas
of alienation and revolution, above all because, in recent years, people

28 The themes of alienation and activism in the affluent society lead logically to
consider the question of solipsism. They do so because, besides the quietist form of
solipsism (“reality is a dream”), there is also the activist form (“the world becomes real
through and within my action”), and the study of this bond between activism and
solipsism would be extremely important. But this is a question that cannot be
addressed here.
29 I will rely above all on the very beautiful piece by Franco Rodano, “Il processo
di formazione della società opulenta,” in La Rivista Trimestrale 2 (1962): 255–326.
256 The Problem of Atheism

have preferred to focus on Marx’s youthful works and, thus, on the idea
of alienation; and they have come to think that awareness of alienation
pushed to the highest degree and revolution coincide, a notion that is
as widespread as it is incorrect. The motives are easy to understand: the
term “alienation” can be easily used to forge an image of Marx as a
moralist and an iusnaturalist who supposedly criticized the economic
realities of his time on the basis of the eternal and normative rules of
natural law. This is the image that was already dear to social democrats
in the name of Kantian morality or of the iusnaturalism of the 1600s
and 1700s and is now dear to many Catholics in the name of Thomistic
morality and the natural law. Actually, as far as the interpretation of
Marxism is concerned, the problem is rather to investigate the reasons
the term “alienation” disappears in Capital. It is the intensification of
poverty, increasing poverty and not alienation, which makes the revolu-
tion inevitable; the revolution is bound to happen not in the name of
a moral value but because of the immanent laws of historical evolution.30
Failing to understand this means really leaving aside the Marxist critique
of ethics and forfeiting the distinction between utopian and scientific
socialism. Therefore, there is room to attempt a society “of well-being,”
which, even if it eliminates poverty and achieves the socialization of the
necessary, nonetheless leaves alienation intact or pushes it to the limit.
We can add: the affluent society gauges both the power and the
impotence of Marxism. The power because in it Marxism forces its
adversary, the society opposed to it, to manifest itself in its pure state,
as a bourgeois society that by now is unencumbered by all ties with a
Christian society, a liberal society, a seigneurial society. In it, the bour-
geois character manifests itself in alienation pushed to the extreme
degree and in the subsequent agonism and activism. I think we can say
that, by rejecting the types of society that I mentioned, the affluent
society marks the acceptance of all the Marxist criticisms while, at the
same time, radically negating the Marxist religion. So, we can also say
that it is an empiricist and individualistic translation of Marxism. But,
on the other hand, Marxism seems impotent to overthrow it (I say
“seems” because this is my opinion, but I do not have here, or later in
this essay, the opportunity to prove it).

30 On this subject, see the excellent observations by R. Mucchielli, Le mythe de la

cité idéale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), 163ff.
 IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963) 257

This concession in opposition to Communism explains why the afflu-

ent society is also radically distinct from a Christian society, or a sei-
gneurial society, or a liberal society – namely, from the ancient ideal
of the Christian society in which the transcendence of the Lord made
the rigid distinction between the masters and the servants disappear
(the Christian rehabilitation of the verb “to serve”; the derivation of
auctoritas from augere) in as much as the established order was reduced
to a mean whose end was the salvation and spiritual progress of indi-
viduals. Hence the importance in that society of the figure of the saint.
In order to gauge how far removed from that ideal is our age, consider
the following passage by Chesterton: “If a procession came down the
street with a brass band and a hero on a white horse, we should think
it odd to be told that he had been very patient with a half-witted maiden
aunt. Yet some such pantomime impossibility is the only measure of the
innovation of the Christian idea of a popular and recognized saint. It
must especially be realized that while this kind of glory was the highest,
it was also in a sense the lowest. The materials of it were almost the same
as those of labour and domesticity: it did not need the sword or sceptre,
but rather the staff or spade. It was the ambition of poverty.”31 By “sei-
gneurial society” I mean not an ancient society but that which had its
beginnings in the medieval opposition to Christian society and which,
not by chance, during that beginning sought its cultural justification in
Averroism. It is characterized by the idea that the world is not ruled by
any providence or by any law of progress, meaning that it is subject to
the law of eternal return; or, equivalently, that in itself it has no sense.
In such a world man is offered two options: either to ascend to the
sphere of heroes, by imparting meaning to events that in themselves
do not have one, or to descend to the animal level. Thus, there are
people who by nature are masters and people who are servants. Master
is he who accepts man’s mortal condition and wants to redeem it by
creating a work and, in order to accomplish it, “risks his life.” In this
world without Providence, all is left for a man of valour is to manifest
his “virtue” in the sense of Machiavelli, a manifestation that is worthy
in itself, whether or not it is accompanied by fortune. Conversely, servant
is he who is afraid of death or, to put it better, who obeys the natural

31 [TN] G.K. Chesterton, “A Short History of England,” in The Collected Works of

G.K. Chesterton, vol. 20 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 473.
258 The Problem of Atheism

fear of death and precisely by doing so declares himself to be a servant;

his only concern is thus to extend life, whereby he becomes a tool of
the priests who promise him immortality or, more recently, of other
priest who promise him, as the culmination of evolution, a state of affairs
in which wars will be banished. Experience shows that few belong to
the race of heroes, and very many are servants, and that the lapse of
time does not bring any progress in this respect. Moreover, the two types
do not share any common values. There is a morality of the masters
and a morality of the slaves. If this is how things stand, it is natural for
a master to think that the lower race should sacrifice itself totally for the
education of those few exemplars who redeem mankind. Therefore, a
seigneurial society must end up negating the metaphysical equality
of men and, thus, reach a complete rejection, without sublation, of
Christianity (depicted as the beginning of the rebellion of the slaves).32
Nor can the affluent society be presented as a development of the liberal
idea because, even if it is essentially democratic (a type of democracy
that welcomes Communism’s openness to the future, while rejecting
its sacral character), its democratic orientation is based on the value of
the substantive rather than the corresponding adjective, whereas in
liberal democracy it was the value of liberalism that gave meaning to
democratic institutions. Thus, we can say that in the affluent society,
because of its initial rejections, there is no possibility of evolution in a
Christian or in a liberal direction,33 or in directions that could be generi-
cally called Fascist (because of the rejection of the seigneurial society)
or reactionary (because every reactionary position can only be ideologi-
cally oriented towards the past).

32 I discussed at some length the characteristics of the seigneurial society because

many authors, and above all Fessard (in De l’actualité historique), have interpreted the
famous passage of Hegel’s Phenomenology (chap. 4, sec. A) about the Master and
the Slave as a prophecy of our time: the Communist rebellion of the slave, who has
overcome the anguish of death through liberating work and, on the opposite side,
the morality of the master, realized in its hardest and most complete form by Hitlerism.
33 Hence the need for these positions to rethink themselves. Rodano has written
very important things about the work, first of all theological, that Catholic thought
must do because of this necessity. See “Il pensiero cattolico di fronte alla ‘società
opulenta,’” in La Rivista Trimestrale 3 (1962): 431–70. I should add that liberal
thought faces the same necessity in the form of the problem of dissociating liberalism
and bourgeoisie.
 IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963) 259

In fact, the affluent society is the only one in world history that does not
originate from a religion but essentially arises against a religion, even though,
paradoxically, this religion is the Marxist one; and even though, because
of the common enemy, it relies on the support of religious forces (or
even allows political representatives of these forces to govern states but
re-establishing a balance by favouring a distinctly a-religious culture).
The explicit or tacit rejection of the values I mentioned has the effect
of reducing the only value to pure sensitive efficiency. In the society of
well-being, men are reduced to the simple economistic dimension
of mere instruments for an activity that is not ordered to anything else.
Hence, the tedium that assaults man in this society as soon as he
leaves his workplace; the feeling of falling into a void, into complete
irrationality,34 and also the agonism and activism that mark this society:
the other is reduced to a bundle of needs that must be satisfied or,
rather, that must be artificially multiplied so that the subject may affirm
itself. This lack of a communication of universal values has the effect
that the subject cannot feel to be a subject except in an exasperated
individual search for the superfluous. It has been correctly written that
“the affluent society … is the society of ‘hollow men’: beings without
ends, without values, even without the reminder, the spur to salvation,
of material suffering; beings who can feel alive only in the abstract
frenzies of sex or in the sudden and unpredictable spasms, in the out-
bursts, of a sporadic and fatuous anarchy.”35 Which shows that this
society is characterized by its own particular theory of alienation, entirely
different from the Marxist one because what it cares about is a recovery
of vitality. Hence the curious combination of instinctivist primitivism
and technology. To free oneself from alienation means to free oneself
from centuries of repression and inhibition of the instincts (in prac-
tice, from what traditionally used to be called morality, and which from
the new perspective is said to be sexophobic ethics); repressed energy
supposedly can manifest itself in forms of aggressiveness, hate, and
resentment, which are the psychological preparations to what appears
to be the greatest scandal to the progressive mindset – namely, war.
This novelty is not the development of previous positions and, thus,
it is an anti-tradition. To the younger generations accepting this novelty

34 See Rodano, “Il processo di formazione,” 265–6.

35 Ibid., 324.
260 The Problem of Atheism

seems necessary in order to avoid falling into absolute pessimism – that

is, in order to live. Perceptible efficiency is felt to be the only value,
hence a technicistic spirit. There is an antithesis to what was tradition-
ally thought to be Christian morality, and there is the idea of a “morality
without sin” since the idea of sin lies at the origin of all anti-vital attitudes,
of socially dangerous repressions. These are all aspects of one context,
and no one of them can be elevated to primary causal factor. This shows
how arbitrary it is to isolate from this context the association of technol-
ogy and irreligion. Instead of being a necessary unity, it is a factual unity
within the framework of the affluent society.
Cannot we say, then, that the present irreligion of the Western world
reflects the fact that, having constituted itself in opposition to Marxism,
this world is subordinate to it due to a failure to really surpass it? As a
consequence, the merely descriptive analysis must make room, expressly
in order to be complete, for a causal factor, which can only be found in
the definition of the essence of philosophical atheism. All of this will
become more clear if we shift our discussion to the genesis of contem-
porary sociologism.

2. On Contemporary Sociologism

Let us restrict ourselves to a consideration of two of its characteristics:

that of being a form of integral relativism, which, precisely as such,
distinguishes itself from skepticism; and that of being able to realize
itself as such only by pushing to the extreme the Marxist theory of
ideologies, to the point of regarding Marxism itself as an ideology. The
tight analogy that links it to the affluent society is immediately apparent
and is documented, after all, by the way in which their growth and their
diffusion followed parallel tracks. And indeed sociologism (to be dis-
tinguished, of course, from sociology as science)36 presents itself as the

36 Is this sociologism new? It can be interpreted as a renewed relevance of Comte

or as a curious development from Marx to Comte. Confirmations are very easy to
find: besides the idea of sociology as a universal science, we can think of its political
consequences – sociocracy and Comte’s rule by the savants – which would deserve to
be compared with certain recent versions. On the other hand, it is true that Comte
had very little direct influence on the genesis of contemporary sociologism and that
the formative processes are different. But precisely for this reason a study of the pecu-
liar form of Comte’s relevance today would be interesting.
 IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963) 261

only truly post-Marxist position, just as the affluent society presents itself
as the only truly post-Communist position. Furthermore, there is a
rigorous symmetry in the relationship between both of them and tradi-
tion. In the case of sociologism, with respect to transcendent metaphysics
and Idealist immanentism as well as Marxism and irrationalism. In the
case of the affluent society, one cannot describe it as a development of
Christian civilization or liberal civilization but, rather, as a new reality
that uses forces or institutions of one or the other. Finally, we can observe
the same religious ambiguity: as an empiricist position, sociologism
generally does not deny the possibility of a transcendent reality but, in
the meantime, it desecrates religions and metaphysics in the aspect
in which they come to be part of historical experience.
Integral relativism means that sociology – understood as a new uni-
versal science of human realities – and philosophy are opposed to each
other because philosophy has always been characterized, openly or
not, by the idea of eternal and absolute truths. Even Marxism itself;
even, and visibly, skepticism, which sought its verification not in the
abolition of the idea of absolute truth but in the fact that it is impos-
sible to conceive it in as much as every thought depends on the subject’s
concrete position in life and on his relationships with the social context.
In the new education in relativist thought, one cannot speak of sociol-
ogy beside philosophy, as a study of different questions, but of sociology
that takes the place of philosophy because it completely fulfills its criti-
cal function.
The Marxist theory of ideologies is pushed to the extreme, until it
means that all perspectives of thought, including the Marxist, do not
express something eternal but are always tied to certain social situations
and cannot be understood apart from their correlations with them.
When does one transition from normal criticism (what in the field of
philosophy could be called academic criticism) to ideological criticism?
The first concerns only expressed thought; the second wants to under-
stand the real meaning of the expressions of the adversary by tracing
them back to the subject who pronounces them, to his situation (hence
the “existential” character of recent sociologism). In order to under-
stand, one needs to go past what has been really expressed. When
referring to an individual, we are still in a particularistic conception of
ideology: we search in the individual’s psychology for the reasons for
statements that distort reality; the criticism is moralistic. When referring
to a social group, we move to the noological level of general structures
262 The Problem of Atheism

of thought, we shift our attention to the forms that make reality appear
in one way rather than another to a determined group of people, and
this independently from any consideration about good or bad faith.
Until a few years ago, the ideological method had been highlighted
and used above all by Marxism in order to show that the assessment of
reality proffered by its enemies was distorted to reflect the interests
of the group to which they belonged (“false consciousness”). Now, this
privilege of Marxism must be revoked: “The analysis of thought and
ideas in terms of ideologies is much too wide in its application and much
too important a weapon to become the permanent monopoly of any
one party. Nothing was to prevent the opponents of Marxism from
availing themselves of the weapon and applying it to Marxism itself.”37
By this extension, one moves from the simple theory of ideology to the
sociology of knowledge; from what used to be the intellectual arsenal
of a party to a method of research about intellectual history in general.
Therefore, one claims that such a sociologically oriented history of ideas
is called to provide modern men with a new vision of the whole histori-
cal process; to explain the works that belong to that now-surpassed
genre “philosophy”; to explain, above all, the moral categories because
the idea of the absoluteness of morals was the fulcrum of philosophy:
“Deeper insight into the problem is reached if we are able to show that
morality and ethics themselves are conditioned by certain definite situ-
ations, and that such fundamental concepts as duty, transgression, and
sin have not always existed but have made their appearance as correla-
tives of distinct social situations.”38
First of all we must ask ourselves: Is it true that sociologism represents
the extension of the critical aspect of Marxism, a sort of theory of general
relativity replacing special relativity? Or is it rather the result, as the
ultimate consequence, of accepting one particular critique of Marxism,

37 Karl Mannheim, Idéologie et utopie (Paris: Rivière, 1956), 72 [TN: Ideology and
Utopia (London: Routledge, 1997), 67]. Mannheim’s position can be generally viewed
as a form of revisionism, if by this word we mean the effort to enucleate the truly sci-
entific part of Marxism, starting from a culture that constituted itself independently
of it. For Mannheim such culture is no longer a form of neo-Kantism or humanistic
positivism but the philosophy of life. Starting from this consideration, one could pres-
ent sociologism as the endpoint of revisionism.
38 Mannheim, Idéologie et utopie, 81 [TN: Ideology and Utopia, 72].
 IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963) 263

which is necessary within a certain horizon of thought that cannot be elevated

to an absolute criterion?
Let us begin by observing that Marx did not consider social reality
with the spiritual disposition of a sociologist, who in his research strives
to set aside all judgments of value (at least if they are conscious) and
to break free from every form of mysticism; who, therefore, wants to
eliminate, as extraneous matter to science, all that is said in order
to push men to do practical works. Rather, he considered it with the
mind of the philosopher of history, who interprets universal history
according to the principle that historical events and sequences are
unified and directed towards a final goal; and with the attitude of the
revolutionary (i.e., with a secularized eschatological mindset). And we
must keep in mind that, concerning Marx, the very distinction between
mind and attitude can only have a relative value since he arrived, by a
philosophical route, at replacing the type of the philosopher with that
of the revolutionary – that is, at that nexus of theory and practice that is
usually, and correctly, recognized as the central point of his doctrine.
It has been said that the philosophy of history is the past rediscovered
and the future deciphered by the grace of a passionately lived present.
This definition, which was devised for Saint-Simon,39 works perfectly
to characterize Marxist thought, in whose genetic order the philosophi-
cal moment precedes and conditions the sociological observation, even
if the expository form adopted for Capital may create the impression,
at first, that the revolutionary thesis follows from a consideration of
purely objective social reality; and there is no merit in the objection
that although, de facto, Marx’s sociology is tied with his philosophy, this
does not take away the fact that it can stand autonomously de jure and
that, therefore, it can also be accepted starting from different philo-
sophical positions.
We find this dependence of the sociological perspective on the philo-
sophical in every part of Marxist thought and, thus, also in the theory
of ideologies. It has often been said that in Marx the meaning of this
word oscillates: sometimes it is used in a pejorative, almost psychoanalytic
sense, to denote the false representations that men form of themselves;
sometimes it loses this negative meaning, so that it can be referred to

39 By Henri Gouhier, in La jeunesse de Auguste Comte et la formation du positivisme,

t. 2, Saint-Simon jusqu’à la Restauration (Paris: Vrin, 1936), 274.
264 The Problem of Atheism

Marxism itself, designated to be the ideology of the proletariat.40 But

the difficulty can be easily eliminated by turning our attention to the
reduction of the idea to instrument of production, which is achieved
by a strictly philosophical route in the critique of speculative philosophy.
Indeed, it implies the disappearance of the distinction between phi-
losophy as contemplation or self-awareness and ideology as a practical
instrument to act on the world, and the consequent absorption into
ideology of all cultural productions. That is, the distinction between
truth and falsehood is not carried out outside of ideology but within it:
one can distinguish between reactionary ideologies, which justify and
thus falsify the given reality, and progressive and liberating ideologies.
In sum, according to Marx, there is philosophy that presents itself as
such and is actually just ideology because it only enters history as the
consecration of a certain given order, falsified as sacred, or at least as
natural and immutable; and there is, instead, ideology that openly
declares itself as a political and partisan stance because it wants to change
the world and not simply contemplate it, which is truly philosophy,
because it expresses the direction of history in its unfolding. In connec-
tion with this we understand the oscillations in his language between
the pejorative and the positive meaning of the word; we understand the
distinction between “true consciousness” and “false consciousness.”
The fundamental type of false ideology is religion; and spiritualist and
idealist philosophies in a broad sense, in as much as they end up in
theodicy (in this connection, one could study the development of classic
German philosophy, from Leibniz to Marx, as a process directed at
liquidating the idea of theodicy). The fundamental type of true ideol-
ogy is the proletarian one, which possesses universal validity because it
is suited to bring to an end the existence of classes, alienated conscious-
ness, and, therefore, the plurality of ideologies itself. We emphasize this
aspect because the advent of socialist society is supposed to mark not
the end of history but that of ideologies as false consciousnesses.
From this priority of the philosophical aspect it follows that, despite
its historicism, Marxism maintains a certain number of eternal truths

40 Gurvitch, in Le concept de classes sociales de Marx à nos jours (Paris: Centre de

Documentation Universitaire, 1954), 29–30, distinguishes in Marx’s work thirteen
(!) meanings of the word “ideology” “qui ne se recouvrent que très partiellement.”
But I think that they can be reduced to these fundamental two.
 IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963) 265

in the guise of theoretical judgments and judgments of value, which

are thought as universal, as valid for all men in every age.41 For example:
the idea of social man, understood as complete negation of the Platonic-
Christian idea of participation – that is, the affirmation that man does
not have an interiority of his own, so that he can find the truth by re-
entering it, but only thinks because he is in relation with other human
beings (this critique of the category of interiority, in as much as it coin-
cides with the critique of the category of privacy, is the foundation of
the critique of private property); the idea of dialectics as the unity
of rational and real; the idea of the objective possibility of the historical
realization of an authentic human community characterized by the
abolition of social classes and exploitation; the idea of the unity of theory
and practice, whereby, from the critique of speculative philosophy and
from the reduction of the idea to instrument of production, it follows
that philosophy will no longer express itself in the form of a system, as
comprehension of a realized totality, but in the realization of a totality;
the idea of a modernist, let us say, vision of history, whereby it is true
and will always be true that capitalist society, and the forms of thought
that correspond to it (i.e., rationalism), have marked a progress with
respect to feudal society and mystical forms of thought and that socialist
society in turn will mark a progress with respect to capitalist society. And
so on and so forth.
These affirmations, thought as absolute truths, are what specifies the
stance of Marxist philosophy vis-à-vis all others.42 As has been pointed

41 See the essay by Lucien Goldmann, “Le matérialisme dialectique est-il une
philosophie?” in the volume Recherches dialectiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 11–25,
with whose theses (at the interpretative level) I perfectly agree.
42 This is indeed the only way to save the originality of Marxism as a philosophy.
In the past there has been a tendency to deny it and, from a theoretical standpoint,
to dissolve its synthesis into elements that did not exclusively belong to it. See, for
example, what turned out to be the last work by Adriano Tilgher, clever as usual,
“Interpretazione del marxismo,” in Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia del Diritto 22, no. 1
(1942): 1–19. He writes: “Not one of the theses associated with Marx’s name is an
original fruit of his mind. Where is then Marx’s originality? It is entirely and only of a
prophetic, messianic and apocalyptic nature” (4). See also Maxime Leroy, Histoire des
idées sociales en France, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1946–54), who believes he can find all
of Marx’s ideas within the development of French revolutionary thought.
266 The Problem of Atheism

out quite correctly,43 it finds itself separated from all the rationalist and
empiricist philosophies of the modern age because it affirms the insuf-
ficiency of purely conceptual discourse and subordinates such discourse
to action. Thus, it opts for an only relative and not absolute autonomy
of philosophy (as a stage towards something that surpasses it). This
assertion of only relative autonomy makes it akin to the rhythm of
thought of Christian philosophy (rational thought as a stage towards
Grace and Revelation), from which, however, it is radically separated
because of its idea of total historical immanence. The emphasis on
action and the value attributed to community separate it from Spinozism.
The acceptance of evil as the road leading the good separates it from
the thought of Pascal and Kant.
This schematic description allows us to understand why Marxism is
susceptible to being criticized from completely different directions, and
why the criticism coming from each one of them cannot be accepted
by the others without logical leaps.
Now, the criticism that Marxism is an ideology, in the sense of being
a mere instrument for action, derives precisely from the conception
of philosophy as an absolutely autonomous conceptual discourse (in
the sense that it is not an introduction either to religious contempla-
tion or to revolutionary practice). We can easily convince ourselves of
this if we examine the criticisms of Marxism formulated by the most
rigorous thinker among those who proceeded in this direction – namely,
Benedetto Croce.
So, let us consider, in Conversazioni critiche, a piece he wrote over fifty
years ago. We read: “It is enough to know how to read the famous theses
on Feuerbach, written in 1845, in order to dispel any doubt. Who speaks
in these theses, addressing pre-existing philosophy, is not other philoso-
phers, as one would expect, but practical revolutionaries … [T]he
overturning consisted in surrogating philosophy with practice and
the philosopher with the revolutionary … But, if this is the case, it is
just as evident that Marx overturned not so much Hegelian philosophy
as philosophy in general, every sort of philosophy … Simply put, under
the guise of the habitual philosophical phraseology of his time and
country he expressed, on the one hand, the personal indifference to
speculation which he had matured, and on the other hand his energetic

43 Goldmann, “Le matérialisme dialectique,” 15.

 IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963) 267

interest in politics … This is also the source of Marx’s and Engels’ con-
stant habit of looking in philosophers precisely for what is not philo-
sophical; the practical tendencies, and the social and class effects that
they represent.”44 The exact same statements come up again in the
essay of 1937,45 in which there is the perception of the new relevance
of Marxist thought, which was being rediscovered – perhaps above all
in France, as far as the Western world was concerned – after decades of
oblivion: “Marx should not have looked for the science and philosophy
of pure appearance and for ‘class ideology’ in Descartes and Spinoza,
Kant and Hegel, but in himself.”
Now we have to ask ourselves whether sociologism may not be exactly
the necessary epilogue of this critique of Marxism that reduces it to ideol-
ogy. This is because, ultimately, if Marxism is a philosophy, one cannot
expel it from the history of philosophical thought and relegate it to the
history of ideologies without doing the same for all other philosophies –
that is, without pronouncing the judgment that all the various philoso-
phies, in as much as they contain judgments that are not experimentally
verifiable, express only practical fears and practical hopes, entirely
explainable by studying the social and historical condition in which
they were born.
We can try to draw an initial sketch of proof by considering the role
that Gramsci’s critique of Croce played – certainly against its author’s
predictions – in the diffusion in Italy of the sociologistic mindset. This
critique is so well known that we certainly do not need to summarize it.
Let us only recall that, according to Gramsci, the “historicity” of philoso-
phy could not take any other meaning but its “practicity” and “politicity.”
He was inserting himself into the polemics between Croce and Gentile
to affirm that the form of historicism that Croce was being forced to
embrace, in order not to yield to his adversary, could not achieve true
consistency and a true liberation from the residues of “transcendence
of metaphysics and theology” except in Marxist historicism. Croce “has

44 Benedetto Croce, Conversazioni critiche, serie prima (Bari: Laterza, 1924),

298–300.
45 Benedetto Croce, “Come nacque e come morì il marxismo teorico in Italia,
1895–1900,” in appendix to Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, 6th ed. (Bari:
Laterza, 1941). The sentence quoted below is found on page 294. [TN: an English trans-
lation of the book, by C.M. Meredith, was published much earlier (New York: Macmillan,
1914) and so does not contain the appendix to the 6th edition cited by Del Noce].
268 The Problem of Atheism

re-translated the progressive acquisitions of the philosophy of praxis

back into speculative language, and in this re-translation lies the best of
his thought.”46 To continue him means precisely to criticize the “specu-
lative” aspect of his philosophy and thereby to rediscover the true Marx
as opposed to the Marx of vulgar materialism and economicism. The
legitimacy of Croce’s speculative position would hold only if he had
really been successful in his program of distinguishing philosophy from
ideology; in actuality, his “speculative” retranslation leads instead to a
conservative ideology, modelled after the concepts of revolution-resto-
ration, national classicism, passive revolution.
With Gramsci’s theses, Marxism demonstrated irrefutably that the
surpassing-annihilating attempted by Croce had not taken place. But
it was also a criticism that went too far: the remark, made by Croce
(but not only by him) about the theological character that remains in
Marxism was left in place. What could be easier than adding the two
criticisms together, accepting the criticism of ideologism that Marx
deploys against the philosophical positions he opposes, and, on the
other hand, extending it so that it applies to Marxism itself, in the clas-
sical form in which it presents itself? And what could be easier than
directing attention and hopes towards a form of thought free of every
theological element (regarded as anti-democratic) in which Marx,
Dewey, left-wing existentialism (I already mentioned the existentialist
cadence of sociologism: shifting the attention from any thesis to the
man who pronounces it, who is always inside a situation) and the new
positivism are all reconciled?
I did not use Croce as an example by chance, because his thought –
expressly due to the insufficient critique of Marxism from which it had
started (insufficient and yet necessary within a certain idea of philosophy
that seemed justified by the secular forms of modern thought) – seems
to run the risk of figuring in the history of philosophy as a transitional
moment,47 and only in Italian thought, from naturalistic positivism (i.e.,

46 Antonio Gramsci, Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce (Turin:

Einaudi, 1948), 233 [TN: “The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce,” in Further Selections
from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Derek Boothman (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1995), 385].
47 Of course (do I need to say it?) I say “seems” with the intention of highlighting
how one-sided and partial is this judgment; which however, is by necessity extremely
common among people inclined to neo-positivism, and I daresay especially among
 IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963) 269

the naturalistic involution of positivism that had taken place especially

in Italy) to sociologistic positivism. He had presented himself as the
philosopher of the restoration of the divine: “Absolute historicism does
not deny the divine … It only denies the transcendence of the divine
and the corresponding metaphysics, unlike positivism, empiricism, and
pragmatism which, in order to get rid of transcendence and of meta-
physics, suppress philosophy itself … Therefore, how can there be any
affinity, let alone identity, between them? If anything, historicism feels
a greater affinity for religions and for the old metaphysics it fought
against and it surpassed – which in its own way welcomed and thought
the divine – than for dry positivism, empiricism, and pragmatism.”48 To
him, there was a completely unquestionable matter of fact: by then the
age of the transcendent God had permanently ended. But, among the
philosophical trends that had welcome this end, and that therefore
could call themselves modern, there was an opposition: on the one side,
there were those like the positivists, the pragmatists, and the Marxists,
according to whom true humanism is atheistic; on the other, there were
those who took up the heritage of the past and intended to replace the
old God with the immanent divine. So, Croce’s primary foe was a certain
kind of secularism; this because the other foe, transcendent religion,
could no longer be considered an adversary since, from the standpoint
of rigorous thought, in his judgment it was dead. It was a matter no
longer of destroying its vestiges but of surrogating it. Ten years after his
death, we can say that Croce’s secular adversaries have triumphed com-
pletely. The new sociologism merges the three forms of thought he
abhorred: positivism, empiricism, and pragmatism. Moreover, it is not
the case at all that these trends, in their new formulation, continue his
teaching in the sense of preserving it by sublating it. Because the new
positivism does not intend in the least to be a synthesis between

the young, even if it is rarely formulated explicitly. How little I agree with it can be
shown by the fact that in the act of writing it what came to my mind was Brunschvicg’s
judgment of Thomism as a mere “transition between Augustinian scholastics and
nominalist scholastics” (Le progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale, t. 1, 2nd
ed. [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953], 111). In Brunschvicg’s historical
perspective this, too, was a necessary judgment. What I want to stress is just how broad
is the revision that Croce’s philosophy needs to undergo in order for its still alive core
to come to light.
48 Benedetto Croce, Il carattere della filosofia moderna (Bari: Laterza, 1941), 195–6
[TN: my translation].
270 The Problem of Atheism

old-fashioned positivist thought and Croce’s philosophy but, rather, the

reassertion of positivism, freed from all the elements that caused its
defeat by the Idealist critique. And the new Enlightenment is not in the
least a synthesis between the old Enlightenment and romantic themes
but, rather, intends to mark the complete liberation from Romanticism.
And the formula that would make Croce quiver in his grave – history
as the sociology of the past – is common. Croce used to say that, regard-
ing Marxism, we cannot speak, in a strict sense, of surpassing it because
in it there is no truth to preserve; but this did not discharge his debt of
gratitude to it because he had drawn from it the suggestion for the
definition of the economic dimension. We can say that today the situ-
ation is exactly reversed. For the great majority of today’s secular think-
ers, Croce’s philosophical thought has died for good; what is left of him
is just the memory of an episode – and, nobody will deny it, of a great
episode – of Italian culture and the gratitude for a methodologically
and anti-metaphysically oriented magisterium.
Elsewhere, many years ago,49 I talked about the annihilating function
that Marxism performs with respect to philosophies as absolutely autono-
mous conceptual discourses. Today’s situation seems to perfectly recon-
firm that old judgment of mine: the acceptance by non-Marxist positions
of this annihilation of philosophies – or of the type of worldview that
many people identify with philosophy – has expressed itself in the form,
which at that time I could not predict, of sociologism. But if this is how
things stand, we must work our way back to the initial reason for the
process of which sociologism is the ultimate conclusion; which implies,
once again, understanding the widespread natural irreligion of the West
as a secondary and derived phenomenon, the mere observation of which
can only yield disconnected materials.
The formula in which Marx opposes his becoming-world of philosophy
to Hegel’s becoming-philosophy of the world is very well known; and here I
certainly will not go into an explanation of why this overturning of
Hegelian philosophy coincided with replacing Christianity-become-
philosophy with radical atheism. We are now interested in another one
of its meanings: Hegel’s becoming-philosophy of the world was tightly
linked with his “cunning of Reason,” with the translation of the idea of

49 In my essay “Marx’s ‘Non-Philosophy’ and Communism as a Political Reality,”

reprinted in this volume.
 IV. Notes on Western Irreligion (1963) 271

Providence, with his theological humanism. It meant to say: the true

meaning of historical actions escapes their authors and reveals itself
completely only when the philosopher becomes aware of it. On the
contrary, Marx thinks that only an authentic becoming aware makes
possible the action that leads to a total revolution, meaning the end of
exploitation and alienation. And in order to understand this novelty
of his, let us not forget that a common thought of the revolutionaries of
the nineteenth century was the idea that the French Revolution had
been a partially failed, or in any case unfinished, work by reason of the
scarce awareness of their historical role on the part of its authors, who
were convinced of bringing about freedom, equality, and brotherhood
for all, while in actuality they were creating the conditions for the rise
of bourgeois society.
If one believes in the power of ideas in history, one has to say that the
new fact of our century is the manifestation of the type of positive athe-
ism, of which the becoming-world of philosophy is the formula, char-
acterized by the particular relationship between theory and practice
that I discussed earlier; and that, consequently, “contemporary history” is
philosophical history because it is the unfolding of this essence, and the
various positions that take part in it are not intelligible except in rela-
tion to this first point of reference; hence its novelty with respect to
so-called “modern history” (from the Renaissance and the Reformation
to the First World War). Therefore, historical actuality brings us back to analyze
the philosophical essence of atheism as the primary question.
 V

Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961)

Atheism as an invasive reality is the most characteristic phenomenon

of our epoch, unprecedented in history. This is why it is urgent to have
a precise definition, adequate to a new problem. I would like to approxi-
mate this definition starting from a discussion of the thesis proposed
by Maritain.1

1. Absolute Atheism
and Practical Atheism

After stating that by positive and absolute atheism he means “an active
struggle against everything that reminds us of God – that is to say, anti-
theism rather than atheism – and at the same time a desperate, I would
say heroic, effort to recast and reconstruct the whole human universe
of thought and the whole human scale of values according to that state
of war against God,” and having recognized the appearance of this
form of thought as the unprecedented historical event that character-
ized the contemporary age, Maritain explains the rise of absolute

1 J. Maritain, La signification de l’athéisme contemporain (Paris: Desclée, 1949) [“The

Meaning of Contemporary Atheism,” in The Range of Reason (New York: Scribner’s,
1952)]. This work is the perfectly worked-out summary of the position about atheism
that appeared as necessary to this philosopher after Humanisme intégral and the works
that followed it. It represents his stance after the peculiar outcome of the Second World
War, whose beginning was under the banner of an alliance based on natural law against
barbaric and irrational forces, and whose conclusion was that the victory of the forces
inspired by that first idea coincided with a diffusion of atheism such as had never been
seen before.
 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 273

atheism as a response to the practical atheism of a certain Christian

world: “absolute atheism … is both the fruit and the condemnation of
practical atheism, its image reflected in the mirror of divine wrath. If
this diagnosis is true, then we must go on to say that it is impossible to
get rid of absolute atheism without first getting rid of practical atheism.”
According to his definition, practical atheism is the atheism of those
“who believe that they believe in God but who in actual fact deny His
existence by their deeds.”2
Now, to me this point of view seems inadequate. I believe one can say
that it is valid in reference to certain forms of apparent and contradic-
tory atheism – for example, Proudhon’s. But these are forms that have
not had any effective influence on contemporary atheism. The reaction
against the practical atheism of a self-described Christian world may
well explain heresies; it may well explain protest in the etymological
sense in as much as it is directed against the use of Christianity to sup-
port temporal power; it may well explain anti-clericalism in the broadest
sense, to the extent that it possesses its own precise essence and is not
just accidental to certain cultural and political positions; but, in my
judgment, it is not useful in order to explain atheism.
Allow me to linger on this point, asking the question: Which actual
form of atheism did Maritain depict? Evidently, writing in 1949, he did
not have in mind a precise doctrine but, rather, an attitude that was
widespread at that time and that still today is by no means exhausted:
the transition of secular awareness from a theological type of humanism
to an atheist humanism and the temptation that some theses of this
second humanism posed even for Catholics. But this does not take away
the fact that the position he describes unexpectedly assumes (and cer-
tainly independently of his intention) typically Proudhonian features.
Did he think of Proudhon when he used the term “anti-theism”? I
do not think so at all, but still it was Proudhon who coined it;3 and it
does not indicate something more radical than plain atheism but, rather,

2 [TN] Maritain, Range of Reason, 104, 117, 103.

3 See the splendid book by Fr Henri De Lubac, Proudhon et le Christianisme (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1945) [TN: The Un-Marxian Socialist: A Study of Proudhon, trans. R.E.
Scantlebury (London: Sheed and Ward, 1948)], whose only flaw, if we really need to
find one, is that it did not adequately emphasize Marx’s great philosophical superiority
over Proudhon and the essential irrelevance today of the thought of the latter.
274 The Problem of Atheism

intends to signify anti-clericalism carried to the extreme, much further

than that of Voltaire or Condorcet, to such a degree that all its axiologi-
cal and metaphysical implications are made clear. For Proudhon,
Catholicism represents the authoritarian principle; but for him such a
principle is proper to every church, even though Catholicism is the
perfect realization of the clerical idea. Now, his position is extremely
interesting precisely because it shows the impossibility of arriving at
rigorous atheism by merely pushing anti-clericalism to the extreme;
because it suggests, in short, that atheism and anti-clericalism are dif-
ferent essences. A comparative study of Marx and Proudhon should
start from here because, in the former, we have a politics that proceeds
from philosophical atheism and, in the latter, anti-theism that proceeds
from an ethical-political experience. Well, the first, and not the second,
is able to come to practice.
We know that Proudhon’s anti-theism expresses itself in particularly
drastic formulas: to recall the harshest of all, “God is evil.” But it has
been observed that the virulence of his language should not mislead
us. It has been said that his thought has an essentially antinomian char-
acter – that is, it is characterized by a desire to push antinomies to the
extreme before seeking reconciliations. Perhaps it would be more accu-
rate to say that it has, above all, a polemical character in the sense that
he is only able to think by opposition; his umediated polemicism leads
him to accept the language of his adversary.
To him “God is evil” means that God is the power that opposes the
immense dialectic chain of progress, conceived as the progressive mani-
festation of Justice in mankind; and the correlative power, the Revolution,
which so far has known four essential stages – the Gospel’s affirmation
of the equality of men in front of God, the Protestant and Cartesian
affirmation of the equality of men in front of reason, the affirmation
of the equality of men in front of the law, and that finally must know
the affirmation of social and anti-bourgeois equality. To him there is a
trinity of absolutism: the capital in the economic order, the state with
its anti-liberal function in the political order, the Church in the order
of intelligence. And in this trinity the central role is played by the
Church, which is the foundation of the legitimacy of the state and
thereby of the untouchability of capital: “the first duty of an intelli-
gent and free man is unceasingly to drive the idea of God out of his
mind and his conscience. For God, if he exists, is essentially hostile to
 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 275

our nature.”4 He must be fought in the name of that idea of revolution,

or “theology of immanence,” which, in his judgment, nobody had yet
theorized and of which he wanted “to write the Bible.”
In fact his formula must be understood in the same way as the other
one, “property is theft,” which refers only to abuses of property and can
be reconciled with its opposite – “property is freedom.” This is so much
so that people have correctly said that his critique of property only
meant to conclude in a system of jurisprudence. In the same way “God
is evil” seems to be just systematic negation, destined to arrive at an
equally systematic higher affirmation. There is an interpretation of the
opposition between God and man that does not rule out the possibility
of a further situation in which the opposition would stop and God would
no longer appear as evil.
Proudhonian anti-theism is directed against the idea of religion under-
stood as a force of conservation and social cohesion in the two forms
in which it had been presented in the first half of the nineteenth century:
that of the legitimism of the prophets of the past and that of the accom-
modation between bourgeoisie and Catholicism. Above all, he had in
mind the theodicy of economic harmonies, used as justification of the
capitalist bourgeoisie; the general laws of social mechanics that people
thought had been established by God to lead to the best organization
and that claimed that the individual quest for profit would coincide
with universal well being; its followers, utopians like Bastiat, politicians
like Thiers, the selfish and sordid interests of those favoured by these
laws; the Church, which, called to defend “Property” and “Order,”
accepts the deal and brings religion to bless the selfishness of private
interests; the dogma of original sin, pressed into service to consecrate
exploitation; and so on. His fight against the “God of Providence” goes
against a fatalistic providentialism that regards such laws as providential
and justifies their subsequent abuses. Likewise, his polemic against
charity in the name of justice is directed against charity as part of this
order, called to help a power that by itself could not withstand the rebel-
lion. The appeal to the autonomy of moral conscience, then, is directed
against the pure extrinsicism of divine arbitrarism.

4 From the Système des contradictions économiques ou philosophie de la misère, t. 1, 382,

quoted by De Lubac, Proudhon, 184 [TN: Un-Marxian Socialist, 171–2].
276 The Problem of Atheism

Furthermore, in order to have a complete picture of Proudhon’s

thought, we must also look at his polemic against the atheistic human-
ism of Feuerbach and Marx; and it is this polemic that leads him to
wonder, albeit incidentally, whether the end of humanity, instead of
being the elimination of God, may not be a definitive reconciliation
with God and the transition from time to eternity. The conclusion of
De Lubac’s book highlights perfectly the unresolved antinomy in which
his thought ends:

Proudhon then was opposed to Marx and on more than one ground threw
back at him the reproach of Utopia. If, for instance, the mark of a Utopian
spirit, for Marx, is the placing of one’s confidence in moral forces, for
Proudhon, on the other hand, Utopia consists in trying to recast society with-
out “stirring up anew consciousness of Justice.” He could have said what
Péguy afterwards said: “The Revolution will be a moral one or else there will
be no Revolution.” If he did not believe that humanity will one day be able to
settle itself in a definitive harmony, it is because, first of all, he did not believe
that human intelligence will fathom the mystery which attracts it. Whereas for
Marx “humanity lays down for itself only problems that it can resolve,”
Proudhon, on the contrary, was of opinion [sic] that “our thoughts go further
than it is given us to reach.” Therein he saw the greatness as well as the desti-
tution of our intelligence, in that powerlessness which kept it ever open and
prevented it from being satisfied with any solution in which it would be im-
prisoned. If our intelligence is seemingly weak, it is because in it, as on some
high ground swept by all the winds, “eternal forces throng and clash and sway
one another this way and that.” Let others fancy they have reached the goal.
Let the Positivists think they have banished metaphysics for evermore. Let the
Humanists think that they have rid themselves of the great Phantom for ever-
more. Proudhon, who was their victim, shared in their negations, but he
shows them that the pendulum has swung the other way. No, “the antinomy
cannot be resolved.” “The fight against God is never-ending.’”5

I said that the ultimate question that the study of Proudhon can lead
to is the problem of the distinction between anti-clericalism (as an
essence) and atheism. In fact, he seems to oscillate between two differ-
ent positions, depending on whether his adversary is Catholicism or
Christianity itself (since he constantly joined together Christian truths

5 De Lubac, Proudhon, 315–16 [TN: Un-Marxian Socialist, 296].

 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 277

and their use by a certain Christian world) or the divinization of human-

ity, carried out by the various philosophies of history. Now it would be
interesting to examine the development of his thought in the philosophy
of Renouvier, a development that highlights the break with atheism.
This continuation takes place, more than by direct influence (there
was no sympathy between the two thinkers), because Proudhon and
Renouvier share in common a moralism that sets them in opposition
to the historicism of the left-wing disciples of Hegel and because their
humanism differs from that of Feuerbach in being radically anti-
Hegelian.6 Moreover, every stance in their thought is actually, and
professedly, a cover for a moral attitude, which is precisely anti-
clericalism, understood as aversion to every idea that gives rise to a form
of clergy. The Catholic clergy, of course, is viewed as the greatest example
of this deviation, but there is also the clergy of scientists invoked by the
Saint-Simonians and the Comtians, or the Hegelian clergy of philosophy
professors, or other forms of clergy in which Hegel’s disciples conclude.
By this route, one arrives at something completely different from athe-
ism: a form of individualism that detects in every clergy a materialistic
and atheistic element due to the replacement of moral faith by statutory
law and worldly will to power. In the conceptual formulations, one
arrives at variations on Kant’s religious philosophy.
Indeed, the assertion that the moral conscience is autonomous, and
the rejection of ethics based on historical outcome, leads towards a
radical dualism of morals and history. But, then, will not this moral
conscience that allows one to judge and devalue history necessarily
appear to be a sign of a transcendent reality? This is the disposition
that, in Renouvier, determines a process that brings him to his final
Christian, albeit heretic, philosophy.
But, in fact, we can also find the essential elements for a definition
of anti-clericalism as opposed to atheism in the recent history of Italian
philosophy. In Martinetti – this typical nineteenth-century man, the
last philosopher of the 1800s living in the fullness of the 1900s,
Renouvier’s spiritual brother to such an extent that, in reference to
them, we could speak of parallel lives – we have the same union of

6 The convergence between the two thinkers has already been outlined by P. Mouy,
L’idée de progrès dans la philosophie de Renouvier (Paris: Vrin, 1927), 56ff, but the subject
should be taken up again. Regarding the development of Renouvier’s thought, see the
two volumes devoted by M. Méry to the Critique du christianisme chez Renouvier (Paris:
Vrin, 1952).
278 The Problem of Atheism

anti-clericalism with a heretic Christian philosophy. The fact, then, that

anti-clericalism at its most consistent concludes in fairly unpersuasive
cosmological or historical visions does not matter. What matters is that,
whereas absolute atheism is marked by the will to refound the world
so as to build a man without any trace of God, anti-clericalism in its
extreme sense leads instead to a position of detachment from the world.
A history of anti-clericalism and heresy ought to illustrate how, in the
course of its process, its political aspect keeps getting weaker, while this
same aspect gets stronger and stronger in atheism; in the former, detach-
ment from the masses gets greater and greater, in the latter the quest
to reach them gets more and more intense; in the former, the critique
of the technical world gets sharper and sharper, in the latter, the inter-
pretation of the world in terms of technical thought becomes more
and more prominent.
I think we can say that, at the bottom of anti-clericalism, there is really
a moral reaction against the political atheism of bad Christians; con-
versely, at the bottom of today’s absolute atheism there is an entirely
different impression – that today a morality founded on the transcen-
dence of the Lord cannot really be a guide in social life. In atheism, the
condemnation of the Christian world in the name of morality is replaced
by the recognition that this world is condemned, for being surpassed,
by history.7

***

7 We might say, with an extremely approximate little formula, that the way of
thinking of a consistent anti-clerical is “Kantian,” whereas that of today’s atheist is
“Hegelian.” This not in reference to Kant’s and Hegel’s overall systems but to their
moral philosophies.
Please let me insist again on the idea that Renouvier is a paradigmatic thinker,
much more than Voltaire himself, for the study of anti-clericalism. This is because the
conditions needed for the idea of anti-clericalism to reach its definitive determination
had come to maturity only in the 1800s, with the greatest flowering of the philosophy
of history and with the religions of Humanity. Renouvier’s Christianity without
Catholicism – presented as the final stage of the Protestant Reformation because of
its individualism and yet irreconcilable with every historical form of Protestant theol-
ogy – is in fact the inverse of Comte’s “Catholicism without Christianity” and intends
to signify anti-Hegelianism (anti-philosophy of history) carried to the extreme.
Can we still speak today of anti-clericalism as a substantive? I would say that it is a
phenomenon that has almost disappeared, exactly in connection with the diffusion of
atheism.
 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 279

Maritain could pronounce his thesis because absolute atheism appeared

to him to be characterized by a choice: “A man does not become an
absolute atheist as a result of some inquiry into the problem of God
carried on by speculative reason … [but] by virtue of an inner act of
freedom, in the production of which he commits his whole personality.
The starting point of absolute atheism is, in my opinion, a basic act of
moral choice, a crucial free determination … a kind of act of faith, an
act of faith in reverse gear, whose content is not an adherence to the
transcendent God but, on the contrary, a rejection of Him.”8
Now, to me the problem has to be posed in the following terms. It is
very true that, at the foundation of absolute atheism, there is an option –
that is, a consideration of values prior to a consideration of reality. The
problem of the value of truth, in the Nietzschean sense,9 is viewed as
antecedent to the problem of truth. This is why for today’s atheist the
question of the existence of God is a “vain curiosity,”10 in the strong
sense that this expression had for mystics and saints; why the attempt
to prove the non-existence of God is replaced by the attempt to show
that atheism alone makes possible the full realization of scientific, moral,
and political humanism;11 why in this sense we should speak of a rejec-
tion not primarily of God but of the theistic disposition – that is, of the
reasons that led people to pose the question of God – whereas old
atheism was still merely an answer to this question; why today we face
a true and proper atheistic ascesis as a quest to free consciousness from
the phantom of God regarded as the ghost of past cultures and

8 Maritain, La signification, 12–15 [TN: Range of Reason, 105–6].

9 In the sense that, for example, is expressed thus by Spengler: “It is one of the
greatest achievements of Nietzsche that he confronted science with the problem of
the value of truth and knowledge … Descartes meant to doubt everything, but certainly
not the value of his doubting” [The Decline of the West, vol. 2 (New York: Alfred Knopf,
1928), 12].
10 Sartre writes: “Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust
itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even
if God existed that would make no difference” [“Existentialism Is a Humanism,” in
Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. W. Kaufmann (New York: Plume, 1975),
369].
11 Thus contemporary atheism represents a complete inversion of the position
of the philosophy of the 1600s: indeed, the Cartesian meditation was an effort to
reduce the atheist to the insipiens, who cannot be certain of the truths of science nor
even of those of common sense (the reality of the external world).
280 The Problem of Atheism

civilizations that casts its shadow on the present; why, in connection

with this, the romantic figure of the tormented and desperate atheist,
nostalgic for the age of faith, has disappeared (we can say that absolute
atheism implies a break with Romanticism). This situation can also be
expressed in the terms used many years ago by Max Scheler.12
What characterizes our century is “postulatory” atheism, whereas in
the common cultural awareness of the 1800s the desirability of God’s
existence was an incontrovertible presupposition.13 That is to say, the
1800s was the century of Rousseau (“My son, keep your soul in such a
state that you always desire that there should be a God and you will
never doubt it”) and Kant (to hope for harmony, in an ultra-perceptible
reality, between virtue and happiness is a fundamental and legitimate
aspect of the human condition), and our century comes after Nietzsche.
At that time the problem was: Does any reality correspond to the gener-
ally recognized aspiration towards God? Is a reconciliation possible
between the needs of the soul and rigorous knowledge?14 This formula-
tion was accepted by the majority of positivists. A few among them, by
keeping the desirability of the existence of God while affirming its
unprovability, ended up concluding, through a process of varying length,
that its affirmation was plausible, arriving, in short, at a spiritualistic
positivism (and then Boutroux would become their idol). Others were
steady in the agnostic stance of unknowability, but the unknowable
ended up taking the role of a bridge between religion and science.
Others, finally, were influenced by other positions – philosophy of his-
tory, with the subsequent religion of humanity; the Hegelian left; the
materialism where the disciples of Feuerbach who had not accepted
that Marx had surpassed him ended up; or the idea of a naturalistic
interpretation of Spinozism – and then they affirmed as the perspective
of “reason” that the existence of God and the operations of reality

12 In the essay “Mensch und Geschichte” of 1926 [TN: “Man in History,” in Max
Scheler, Philosophical Perspectives, trans. O.A. Haac (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958),
65–93].
13 I say “common cultural awareness” because, rigorously speaking, the essence
of atheism was brought to fulfilment in the nineteenth century; in our century we are
only witnessing its diffusion.
14 These are, roughly, the initial words of the classic book of nineteenth-century
spiritualism, Lotze’s Microcosm.
 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 281

cannot be reconciled, judging inferior, subjective, and non-critical the

perspective of the “heart” tied to the desirability of the existence of
God. They used to say: unfortunately, we find ourselves forced into a
dramatic conception, in which the agreement between the subjective
needs of the heart and the objective needs of reason is not possible. In
other words, atheism was presented as scientism,15 thus becoming liable
to the spiritualist and Idealist critique. Conversely, today people say: the
negation of God is necessary to make possible a truly rigorous morality,
science, and politics. As the negation of the theological foundation
of science, morality, and politics, today’s atheism negates first and fore-
most what for the philosophical culture of the 1800s was unquestioned
(that God is a value) and, therefore, inhibits the process from the value
of God to his existence, which was typical, in different guises, of
nineteenth-century thought.
We can say that the transition from the scientistic perspective to the
optative perspective characterizes the atheism of the last few decades,
including, as we shall see better later, Marxist atheism. This is a conse-
quence, to a significant extent, of Nietzsche’s influence and of posing
philosophical questions in terms of value. But we may wonder whether
this process simply marks the rise of a new species of the genus atheism
or is, instead, the declaration of the essence of atheism itself. Whether, in other
words, there is an atheism rooted in a practical choice and another
atheism that emerges as a consequence of a purely rational, disinterested
investigation into the nature of being; or whether, instead, the presenta-
tion in terms of scientism always dissimulates an original practical choice,
which is in fact the one declared by postulatory atheism; or, furthermore,
whether atheism is not always a direct answer, in the form of refusal, to
the question of the sacred, rather than an inference drawn from a
profane consideration of the world, even though, just like the religious
vision, in its scientistic form (in what can be called the scholastic of
atheism) it seeks confirmation in proofs that claim to be rational and
binding? But what exactly are the terms of the option? What is the
nature of the atheistic act of faith?

15 By “scientism” I mean the generalization of the methodological atheism that

is proper to science. By itself such methodological atheism means explaining phe-
nomena without the intervention of transcendent causes and does not mean at all the
negation of God.
282 The Problem of Atheism

2. Atheistic Moments in the History

of Philosophy

A serious discussion of this point must necessarily start from an inves-

tigation of the atheistic moments in the history of philosophy.
First of all, let us focus our attention on the Renaissance and the
modern world without trying to answer the difficult question of whether
one can truly speak of atheism in ancient thought. In my judgment,
and in view of what I am going to say later, there can be complete athe-
ism only after Christianity. This is because atheism is characterized by
an initial rejection of the supernatural, which is something entirely
different from the rejection of the mythical or magical mindset by the
philosophers or even by the so-called atheists of antiquity. Moreover,
true atheism can only come to the fore as the terminal stage of a direc-
tion of thought, as the negation of every theistic virtuality therein; and
it is worth noticing that none of the great directions of ancient thought
ends in atheism. I think I found confirmation of what for me was only
a conjecture – or better, the consequence of a thesis that had been sug-
gested to me by considering irreligion in the modern and contemporary
world – in the exemplary paper by Carlo Del Grande.16
Neither was there, it seems to me, a medieval atheism in a rigorous
sense, even though there were positions (heterodox Aristotelianism)
that, in subsequent stages of their evolution, manifested themselves as
atheistic. Because the adversaries of St Augustine’s thought – skeptics,
Neo-Platonists, Manicheans, and Pelagians – were not atheists; and
St Thomas targeted Averroists, who were not atheists in a proper sense,
and Gentiles (i.e., Muslims, Jews, and pagans). The very insistence by
medieval thinkers on the rational proofs of the existence of God shows,
in my judgment, that one cannot speak of Medieval atheism because
facing the problem of atheism requires one to move beyond the domain
of proofs. These latter presuppose, in fact, an already religious atmo-
sphere: by justifying the affirmation, of which one is already certain, of
the existence of God, they define the relation between God and the
world within the religious vision; they move within a conception that is
already sacral. For medieval thought, atheism is more a logical

16 “Negazione di un ateismo ellenico,” in the volume Il problema dell’ateismo

(Brescia: Morcelliana, 1962), 43–55 [TN: these conference proceedings happen to
have the same title as the present volume].
 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 283

possibility,17 advanced by an always-defeated objector, than a real posi-

tion. There is no atheism in a proper sense, I think, before Machiavelli
(and it matters little whether Machiavelli was an atheist or not –
Machiavellianism is atheistic).
Having thus narrowed down the investigation, we must observe, first
of all, that the phenomenon of atheism comes about at the terminal
moment of each of the three fundamental modern directions that call
for going beyond religion into philosophy and, thus, for the negation
of the supernatural. First, at the terminal moment of the thought of
the Renaissance, in libertine thought, viewed of course in its higher
aspect, the libertinage érudit of the seventeenth century. Second, at the
terminal moment of the Enlightenment, whose peculiar character is
that in it we find associated three moments of thought that, in the first
half of the 1600s, seemed to be in conflict – the libertine critique of
tradition, the trends in religion and natural law (which, under the effect
of such critique, transition from a conciliatory to a revolutionary ten-
dency), and the spirit of the new science. After the dissociation of this
synthesis, which is the form in which the Enlightenment meets its end,
libertinism continues as decadentism, the revolutionary spirit as
Marxism, and the scientistic spirit as positivism. And third, at the ter-
minal moment of classical German philosophy, with the two absolutely
opposite and irreconcilable forms of Marx and Nietzsche. We can also
express this idea in the following form: in history we have two essential
atheistic positions, a negative atheism, or what is often called nihilism,
which consists in the declaration of the end of a supra-sensible world
with the power to obligate,18 and a positive atheism that intends to be
precisely the most rigorous critique of this nihilism. It will lead, in Marx,
to the foundation of the ideal city by unifying two position that were
traditionally opposed (extreme utopia and extreme historical and
political realism), in Nietzsche, to a new source of values situated in
the will to power.

17 By this I do not mean to say, to be clear, that the atheist doubt, as doubt, did
not always exist and did not always contribute to the purification of the idea of God.
I mean that only in the modern age has atheism been able to present itself as the
rigorous conclusion of a direction of thought; and that, therefore, from the stand-
point of the periodization of the history of philosophy, one can call modern age that in
which the phenomenon of atheism manifested itself.
18 A definition due to Heidegger.
284 The Problem of Atheism

Here, a very important question arises: Should Nietzsche’s thought

be regarded as paradigmatic of the form of absolute and positive athe-
ism, or should it be described, instead, as the critical crisis of atheism
because it is “tragic thought,” in the sense of “a conflict without a way
out”? It has been said that Pascal represents the “tragic moment” of
religious thought; I think that, a fortiori, Nietzsche’s work could be
studied as the “tragic moment” of secular thought.
Let us start from the common judgment: Nietzsche must not be
regarded as a teacher of action but as he who had a prophetic vision of
the contemporary world and provided a framework within which to
interpret it. The metaphysics of the will to power, in as much as it turns
truth into a “vital value,” has the exact same form as thought in terms
of technical activity: it replaces thought that enters into relationship
with being with this pan-technicist thought.
In actuality, Nietzsche’s thought does not overcome nihilism, but
rather fulfills it:

But yet Nietzsche grasps the metaphysics of the will to power precisely as the
overcoming of nihilism. And indeed, the metaphysics of the will to power is
an overcoming of nihilism – provided that nihilism is understood only as
the devaluation of the highest values and the will to power as the principle
of the revaluation of all values on the basis of a new dispensation of values.
However, in this overcoming of nihilism, value-thinking is elevated into a
principle. If, however, value does not let being be being, be that which it is as
being itself, then what was supposed to be the overcoming is but the comple-
tion of nihilism … If, however, the thinking that thinks everything according
to values is nihilism when thought in relation to being itself, then even
Nietzsche’s experience of nihilism as the devaluation of the highest values is
still nihilistic.19

However, in this fulfilment of nihilism it highlights its essence. What is

it? Heidegger’s answer is well known: the metaphysics of the will to
power is the true fulfilment of the history of Western metaphysics, which
has forgotten Being in favour of beings. In its final stage, the nature of
beings reveals itself as “will to power.” For sure, this is first of all the

19 Martin Heidegger, “Nietzsches Wort ‘Gott ist tot,’” in Holzwege, 3rd ed.
(Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1957), 239 [“The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God Is
Dead,’” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. J. Young and K. Haynes (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 193–4].
 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 285

conclusion of so-called modern philosophy from the 1600s to the 1900s,

but this is because the latter had been prepared by all previous philoso-
phy.20 Being a conclusion, it justifies a definition in terms of “forgetful-
ness of Being” of the contemporary situation, viewed then as the final
stage of a decline and not as a moment in a process towards liberation;
and viewed as a crisis that cannot be healed through scientific and
political techniques. But should this decline be viewed as definitive? Or
does the Nietzschean decoding of the contemporary age help instead
to reopen the discussion on the “God who is to come”?
But let us set aside Heidegger, in whose analysis it is possible to dis-
tinguish one part (the fullness of nihilism reached by Nietzsche and his
prophecy of the contemporary world), which can also be accepted from
perspectives different from his own, and an interpretation of the history
of metaphysics, which obviously can be discussed only by discussing his
whole philosophy. It seems to me that the undeniable aspect of truth
of his rethinking of Nietzsche can also be expressed in less esoteric
terms. Would it be incorrect to say that the nihilistic transfer of the
“locus” of values from supra-sensible reality to the will to power marks
the transition to a new mythical age (the age of ideological myths)?
And, in this case, does not Nietzsche’s teaching define the defeat that
befalls atheism in its attempt to realize itself as positive atheism because
it leads not to the full realization of reason but, rather, to a new mythical
age, after the rational age? And should not the continuation of
Nietzsche’s thought, after its failure to overcome nihilism, lead us to
call into question the postulate of the “death of God”? Curiously the
mythical age of nihilism gives a new peculiar relevance to the thought
of Vico as the only theistic philosopher of the possibility of returning
to the mythical age (a deeper consideration would show that, in Vico,
theism and the possibility of returning to the mythical age are linked,
so that whoever denies this possibility in the name of a vision of history
as development [e.g., Croce] must also deny Vico’s theism; just as who-
ever views this decline as necessary must deny it – for example, Spengler,

20 In the second volume of Heidegger’s Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), see

the quite unconvincing pages 141–9 devoted to Descartes, which come immediately
before the fundamental paragraph on Das Ende der Metaphysik. Essentially, Heidegger
gives a subjectivist interpretation of the history of modern philosophy, which is very
similar to that of Gentile, except, of course, that he transcribes it in a pessimistic, or
actually catastrophic, sense.
286 The Problem of Atheism

who in a sense was the continuer of the Vichian motif rejected by Croce,
although he never quotes Vico).
This complex perspective raises a number of problems that so far
have not been studied but that need to be solved because otherwise it
is not possible for Catholic thought to take a stance vis-à-vis the contem-
porary world. I will limit myself to briefly mentioning a few of them:

(a) First of all, we must observe that the historical vision I proposed,
about the necessary appearance of atheism at the terminal moment
of rationalistic positions, is far from habitual and demands a deep
revision of how the history of philosophy is framed. According to the
usual interpretation, libertinism is just an episode in cultural history,
and Marx’s philosophical thought is a mere accident of the pseudo-
philosophy of the dissolution of Hegelianism, which is interesting
exclusively because of its power as an ideological tool (that is to say,
its study is the province of sociologists and historians of political
doctrines). Atheism appears in the histories of philosophy only as
materialism, and the aspect of it that makes it the extreme expression
of the rationalist attitude is set aside. Regarding Marx, this is
inevitable in Hegelian or neo-Hegelian or neo-Kantian historiogra-
phies since these positions of thought are characterized precisely by
the initial expulsion of Marxism from the history of philosophy.21 It
is easy to give examples: for early Hegelian historiography, consider
Fischer; for neo-Hegelian historiography, Croce or Gentile; for the
beginnings of neo-criticist historiography, Lange, and for the final
period Brunschvicg or Cassirer; and we could also add, although
in this case the discussion would become more complex, Dilthey,
Weber, and so on (in short, all of German historicism, the “critical”
philosophy of history). I think that there is no such impossibility de
jure for Catholic historiography and that for Catholic thought it is
possible to carry out a positive critique of Marxism – that is, a critique
subsequent to its placement (not its expulsion) in the history of
philosophy. However, we must also keep in mind that, in practice,
Catholic historiography has been influenced by the schemes of
secular philosophy.

21 See G. Lukàcs, The Destruction of Reason [trans. P. Palmer (London: Merlin

Press, 1980)].
 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 287

We can also say that Hegelianism and neo-criticism, as philosophies

of immanent divinity,22 find themselves forced to reduce to appar-
ent atheism the forms of atheism they meet in history, excluding
from the history of philosophy in a rigorous sense those that cannot
be reduced to apparent atheism. Thus, for example, in Renaissance
thought they consider philosophical what flows into in Bruno,
whereas they exclude the libertine crisis. And this is natural and
necessary if, within rationalism, atheism constitutes a position that
goes beyond that of immanent divinity and cannot be defeated
by it. But what might be the result of a true introduction of the
consideration of atheism into the history of philosophy?
(b) From the previous considerations it also follows that we cannot
speak in a proper sense of a history of atheism because, properly
speaking, no development exists. There is a curious symmetry
between the historical stages of atheism and those of socialism
(utopian socialism-scientific socialism) It stands out because
in both cases it is impossible to speak of historical development
and also because there is absolute opposition in the first stage
(libertinism, the legacy of Machiavellianism and utopianism)
and complete identification in the second (Marxism).23
(c) It is important to observe that in the case of both nihilistic atheism
and positive atheism, the starting point was in politics – in
Machiavelli, the true teacher of the libertine writers,24 and
in Marx’s critique of Hegel. This leads to the question, which I
will bring up again later, of the role of the political moment in the
formation of atheism. It is not coincidental that, from the political

22 Despite the variety of their forms, they can be brought together under a com-
mon label because the task they set for themselves is to free the idea of God from the
transcendent realistic conception, where in their judgment transcendence can only
mean spatial exteriority. See Croce, Gentile, Brunschvicg, Carabellese, and so on, all
of whom share this judgment about transcendence.
23 Marxist atheism is not the development of negative atheism, and Marxist
socialism is not the development of Utopian socialism; regarding the impossibility of
speaking of historical development in regard to socialism, see Croce’s remarks,
Discorsi di varia filosofia, vol. 1 (Bari: Laterza, 1945), 277ff [TN: in the original this
note is a parenthetical statement].
24 On this matter, I take the liberty of referring to my own essay “La crisi libertina
e la ragion di stato,” in Atti del II Congresso Internazionale di Studi Umanistici (Milan:
Bocca, 1952).
288 The Problem of Atheism

standpoint, atheism goes together with phenomena like the

secular version of absolutism and totalitarianism.
Negative atheism has an aristocratic character. It gives rise to
the formation of narrow groups, of sects; in the extreme case
we have individualism as criminalism in de Sade.25 Therefore we
understand why it was fought by Robespierre in the name of the
revolutionary spirit. Conversely, the proper character of positive
atheism is to reach the masses, which is why in our century atheism
presents itself as an invasive reality.
This substantial link between atheism and the political forms that
oppose freedom can lead to the following question: whether it is
an essential feature of atheism that it necessarily informs the
realization of such forms, and this in the very act in which it
presents itself, and must present itself, as the most total demand
for freedom; and whether the current crisis of freedom and the
atheistic invasion are not two sides of the same phenomenon.
(d) Also interesting for a phenomenological study of atheism is
the form of antithesis that it must establish between Greek and
Christian thought. Indeed, observe the following: in the libertine
crisis we have the fracturing of the Catholic and humanistic unity
of the ancient and the Christian; in Marxism we have the fractur-
ing of this same unity in the form that had been reaffirmed
by Hegel. In libertine thought, anti-Christianity took shape by

25 Regarding the precise definition of the distinction and the relation between
the two atheisms, it is extremely interesting to study de Sade’s stance on the
Revolution, a research project initiated by P. Klossowski, Sade mon prochain (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1947), 13–43 [Sade My Neighbor, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1991), 47–65]. In its original position libertinism pre-
sented itself as a justification of the secular version of absolutism. But in another
respect it desacralized it, effectively re-establishing the ancient relationship between
Master and Slave against the vestiges of Christian society. Hence the attitude of some
libertines, and typically of de Sade, towards the Revolution. As Klossowski correctly
says, for de Sade there is no question “of inaugurating the blessed age of recovered
natural innocence. For Sade, the regime of freedom should be, and in fact will be,
nothing more or less than monarchical corruption taken to its limit” [Sade my Neighbor,
52]. Thus, the Revolution is accepted as bringing about a “remolding of the structure
of man” [Sade my Neighbor, 48], but this remoulding must take place according to the
libertine model and not the Rousseauian model. It would be important to study de
Sade’s radical antithesis to the two possible developments of Rousseau’s thought – the
Romantic-Catholic one and the Revolutionary-Robespierrean one.
 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 289

eliminating the trends of ancient thought that prefigured

Christianity; in Marxism, it took shape by developing one-sidedly,
through the reduction of thought to world-transforming technology,
the theme of man’s domination over the world, as a sign of his
transcendence, which is originally biblical. We could say that the
crisis of that time took place against the background of the
appearance that religious Christianity was no longer, while secular-
ized Christianity was not yet; and that the background of today’s
crisis is that secularized Christianity (Enlightenment, Hegelianism)
is no longer. We can wonder to what extent the relation of pure
antithesis between Hellenism and biblical thought is inseparable
from atheism, so that we can say that the currents of Christian
thought that profess this relation are actually influenced, unaware,
by their adversary. While it is also true that these positions have
their aspect of truth in the reaction against the Gnostic-type
recomprehension of Christianity that is proper to metaphysical
rationalism. Thus, the question of atheism leads us to revise the
very difficult problem of the correct relationship between Greek
thought and Christianity, showing that the ordinary perspectives
of continuity and opposition are inadequate.

3. The Atheistic Option

This observation about the historical placement of atheism has a con-

sequence that in my judgment is very important.
We can wonder whether the critique of evidences at which atheism
necessarily arrives in the process of making itself absolute (in the form
of libertine atheism still linked with skepticism as well as in the form of
decadent atheism and in the form of historicist atheism) – that is, the
optative and postulatory character that rationalism in its extreme form
must take26 – only highlights a certain initial option that conditions not
only the rise of rationalism but also all its internal categories. In other
words, we can wonder whether we can arrive at the following definition:

26 This optative character also accounts for the modus operandi of the contem-
porary atheistic critique. For it, it is a matter of criticizing theism by uprooting it, that
is, by shedding light on the human roots of the process whereby God has been ele-
vated to a value, a process that is the premise to the affirmation of his existence. It is
important to observe that the study of history shows that there is true atheism only
290 The Problem of Atheism

atheism presents itself as the terminal stage of a process of thought that

is initially conditioned by a negation without proof of the possibility of
the supernatural and that in its earlier stages of development declares
itself to be a purification of the idea of God, the transition from the
transcendent God to immanent divinity. If we call this initial negation
of possibility “rationalism,” we can say that atheism has the function of
highlighting its original option, the denial without proofs of the status
naturae lapsae.
The option that defines atheism is not primarily and essentially a
response to practical atheism. Conceptions of the world take shape
depending on an initial response to the problem of original sin – and
some philosophies of existence deserve credit for having brought this
to the fore. Once again, rationalism is a conditioning attitude, and the
great objective merit of today’s absolute atheism is that it allowed this
to become clear.
From this perspective we can say that the rationalist attitude is simply
the assumption, as a consequence of the initial rejection of the Fall, that
man’s current condition is his normal condition; it coincides with an
original moral devaluation of miracles and of the supernatural in the
broadest sense and, thus, with the negation of free creation and of
the theme of sin in their biblical meaning; with the abandonment of the
Bible to historical criticism and to the investigations of ethnologists.27
But such assumption that man’s fallen reality is his normal reality can-
not but coincide with the assumption that the mortal destiny of finite
being is normal and, thus, with the affirmation of the negativity of
the finite.
These categories get clarified historically if we consider what is
undoubtedly the most important chapter in the whole history of athe-
ism – namely, the process of thought from Hegel to Marx. In Hegel
alienation is surpassed through Idealism as the dissolution into thought
of the reality of the finite; by the absolutization of the type of the

when criticism of the proofs of the existence of God is replaced by the attempt to
uproot by clarifying the origins: this is already the case in the negative atheism of the
libertinage érudit.
27 The Bible is abandoned to that natural history of the supernatural whose pro-
faning character has been well highlighted by Enrico Castelli. See his essay “La prob-
lématique de la démythisation,” in Il problema della demitizzazione (Padua: CEDAM,
1961), 13–17.
 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 291

philosopher (i.e., of the man who achieves his freedom by taking the
perspective of being considered in its totality). We know how in Marx
this perspective is replaced by an entirely different one. But it is impor-
tant to notice that this replacement takes place based on the thesis of
the mortality of the finite, viewed as the soul of dialectics.28 Of course,

28 Regarding the relationship between the idea of death and dialectics in Hegel,
the very well-known book by A. Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard,
1947) seems fundamental to me [TN: Introduction to the reading of Hegel, ed. A. Bloom,
trans. J.H. Nichols, Jr (New York: Basic Books, 1969), which, however, does not
include the essay “The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel,” which Del Noce
quotes here. It was translated separately by J.J. Carpino and published in Interpretations 3,
nos. 2-3 (1973): 114–56. The page numbers below refer to his translation]. “But for
the Christian this ‘absolute’ Spirit is a transcendent God, while for Hegel it is Man-in-
the-world. And that radical and irreducible difference amounts in the final analysis to
this, that the Christian Spirit is eternal and infinite, while the Spirit that Hegel had in
mind is essentially finite or mortal. It is by introducing the idea of death that theo-logy
is transposed into anthropo-logy. And it is by taking that idea literally, that is, by sup-
pressing the notions of survival and resurrection that we arrive at the true or Hegelian
anthropology” (154–5). Observe how the concepts are linked together: Hegel intends
to carry out the transfer into philosophy of the only truly anthropological tradition,
the Judeo-Christian one, in order to make possible a philosophy that explains “how
and why Being is realized, not only as Nature and as natural World, but also as Man and
as historical world” (115); but in this transition “Nature is a ‘sin’ in Man and for Man:
He can and must oppose himself to it and negate it in himself. Even while living in
Nature, he does not submit to its laws (miracles!); to the extent that he is opposed to
it and negates it, he is independent in the face of it; he is autonomous and free. And by
living ‘as a stranger’ in the natural World, by being opposed to it and to its laws, he
creates there a new World that is his own; a historical World, in which man can be ‘con-
verted’ and can become a being radically other that what he is as a given natural being”
(120–1). It is starting from this replacement of the agonism against sin with the agonism
against nature that, in my view, one arrives necessarily at the thesis emphasized
by Kojève: “The Christian notion of an infinite and eternal Spirit is contradictory in
itself: infinite being is necessarily ‘natural’ given[-and-]static-Being; and created or
create-ive, ‘dynamic,’ namely, historic or ‘spiritual’ being, is necessarily limited in
time, which is to say [that it is] mortal … Hegel wanted, from the start to apply to Man
the Judeo-Christian notion of free historical Individuality, unknown in pagan antiq-
uity. But in [the course of] philosophically analyzing that ‘dialectical’ notion, he saw
it implied finitude and temporality. He understood that Man could not be a free his-
torical individual except on condition of being mortal in the proper and strong sense
of the term, that is, finite in time and conscious of his finitude. And having under-
stood that, Hegel denied survival: the Man that he has in mind is real only to the
extent that he lives and acts in the midst of Nature; outside the natural World he is a
pure nothingness. But to deny survival is in fact to deny God himself … The would-be
292 The Problem of Atheism

now I cannot linger on this point, which has already been discussed so
many times anyway, but I only wish to highlight a passage that is not
well-remembered but that I deem extremely significant. We know that
in 1888 Engels rethought the philosophy of the young Marx in his work
Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy.29 People
may definitely say, often going way too far, that Engels’s mindset was
not very philosophical; and yet, it seems to me that in this work the
relationship between Hegel and Marx is sufficiently well defined.
Idealism is accused of being unfaithful to the dialectic because of a

‘transcendent’ or ‘divine’ non-natural World is in reality only the ‘transcendental’ (or

speaking) World of historical human existence, [a world] which does not go beyond
the temporal and spatial framework of the natural World. Thus, there is no Spirit
outside of Man, living in the world” (122–3) [TN: the last sentence does not appear in
J.J. Carpino’s translation]. “Thus the ‘dialectical’ or anthropological philosophy of
Hegel is in the final analysis a philosophy of death (or, what is the same thing: of atheism)
… Acceptance without reserve of the fact of death, or of human finitude conscious of
itself, is the ultimate source of all of Hegel’s thought, which does no more than draw
out all the consequences, even the most ultimate, of the existence of this fact” (124).
Certainly, this atheistic interpretation of Hegel by Kojève is historically questionable;
but it has the great merit of giving us a decisive orientation to understand in its full
meaning the transition from Hegelian theological rationalism to radical atheism.
Consider also Hegel’s passages about the fall [TN: here Del Noce refers the reader
to page 279 of the French translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit, vol. 2, and to
page 293 of the French translation of the Philosophy of History, but without specifying
which editions]: the Fall is represented as the necessary condition so that the Spirit
may be truly itself, moving beyond the innocence of the animal condition. Jean
Hyppolite says perfectly: “infinite spirit should not be thought through beyond finite
spirit, beyond man acting and sinning, and yet infinite spirit itself is eager to partici-
pate in the human drama. Its true infinity, its concrete infinity, does not exist without
this fall … we must learn that this fall is part of the absolute itself, that it is a moment
of total truth. Absolute self cannot be expressed without this negativity; it is an abso-
lute ‘yes’ only through saying ‘no’ to a ‘no,’ only by overcoming a necessary negation”
(Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Evanston IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1974), 525 and 527). On this point see also J. Maritain, Moral
Philosophy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), 129–31.
Is there not, therefore, a very tight relationship between the sacrifice of the indi-
vidual in Hegel’s philosophy (“the dialectical immolation of the person,” as is well
said by Maritain, Moral Philosophy, 149) and the thesis of the necessity of the Fall – in
the sense that Hegelian philosophy intends to be precisely the justification of the
necessity of the link between finite existence and death?
29 [TN] F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy
(New York: International Publishers, 1941).
 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 293

failure to overcome supernaturalism. Now, the starting point for the

development of this critique is expressed in this sentence: “In accor-
dance with all the rules of the Hegelian method of thought, the proposi-
tion of the rationality of everything which is real resolves itself into the
other proposition: All that exists deserves to perish.”30 Is it not extremely
significant that in Engels the enucleation of the rationalistic aspect of
Hegelianism can only take place by pinpointing the essence of rational-
ism in the idea of the naturalness of death because this affirmation rules
out every possible reference to an original Fall of which death would
be the consequence?
But concerning this negation of the initial Fall, a negation that by
necessity must be without proof,31 it is particularly important to consider
carefully the idea of revolution, which has found in Marxism its defini-
tive expression. It is very well known that the novelty of Marx with respect
to Hegel lies entirely (in the sense of the general novelty that implies
all the partial novelties and is verified by them) in the replacement of
the type of the philosopher by that of the revolutionary, the philosopher
being the type whose existence has exhausted itself in the pure contem-
plation of being and of its dialectical motion, to which he has nothing
to add and in which he has nothing to change, but only everything to
understand and justify. This is because such a figure presupposes the
realization of an “end of times,” the achievement of a thesis to which
no antithesis is any longer opposed, of a situation in which there is no
longer negativity, and whereby Hegel’s novelty (i.e., the positive mediat-
ing function assigned to negativity) is lost.
In common discourse, this word “revolution” takes various mean-
ings.32 The first and oldest makes it simply a synonym of “revolt”:

30 [TN] Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, 11.

31 On the particular historicity of original sin, see the important remarks by Fr
Fessard in the volume Demitizzazione e Immagine (Padua: CEDAM, 1962), 75–6: “its
historicity is absolutely unique because, coming before any other historicity, it is by
that very reason not objectively representable.”
32 Regarding the history of this term, the chapter “L’idée de Révolution de
Babeuf à Blanqui,” in Maxime Leroy’s Histoire des idées sociales en France, vol. 3 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1946–54), 340ff, is very interesting. The chapter devoted to “La Révolution”
by R. Mucchielli in Le mythe de la cité ideale, 147ff, is also quite good. Of course,
two texts that remain fundamental are G. Lukàcs, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstein
[History and Class Consciousness, trans. R. Livingstone (Boston: MIT Press, 1972)] –
which, on top of everything else, is interesting as a document of the transition,
294 The Problem of Atheism

revolutionary dynamics obeys an unintentional teleology, which leads

to the destruction of the civic order. And since this destruction is not
possible without the intervention of the masses, revolution is equivalent
to a popular insurrection that is either acephalous or directed from
outside by demagogues, adventurers, sectarians. This is the only sense
in which the word was used until the end of the 1700s. We find it again
in the reactionaries of the 1800s – who use the term “revolution” to
designate a movement aimed at the destruction of the European order –
but joined with the impression of its fatality: thus people talked about
revolution using men rather than being guided by them, about the
unintentional character of its destructive finality, and so on. All these
themes were thought through for the first time by De Maistre. Then it
continues in the sociologists who were critical of democracy, whose
ideas derive, to a lesser or larger extent, from Taine: the revolution is
“an aspect of the psychology of crowds,” “a disease of the social body
whose causes we must find,” and so on.
A second sense is juridical-political: people call revolution any change
in the political order of the political societies known as states when that
change is carried out in violation of the legal constitutional principles
that embody the order itself – that is, without respecting the proce-
dures that regulate legitimate partial changes. Evidently this sense is
entirely different from the first. According to the first, violence is essen-
tial to the revolution; as destructive violence, according to the second,
it is not. According to the first, the revolution is an irrational event;
according to the second, it can be allowed or required by meta-positive
juridical principles.
A third sense is the ethical-political one, which designates the “rising”33
of a new order as an inseparably moral and political reality that cannot
be explained in terms of a simple evolution of the past. In this sense
people used to say, for instance, that the Italian Risorgimento was a

through the totalism of the revolutionary, from the revolutionary idea to totalitarian
reality – and K. Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1949) – about the theological presuppositions of the philosophy of history. Nor
should one neglect W. Nigg, Il regno eterno (Milan: IEI, 1947), and the well-known
book by A. Camus, L’homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951) [The Rebel (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1956)].
33 “Sorgimento” in the original. The word is no longer used in modern Italian
but survives in the name Risorgimento (“re-rising”) given to the period of Italian
unification in the nineteenth century.
 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 295

revolutionary process because it was a “rising,” and this is why it is pre-

sented as the model of a revolution that was “liberal” and not “Jacobin.”34
In the fourth sense, Revolution is an ideal category that is reached
through a philosophical process. It means the liberation of man, via
politics, from the “alienation” imposed on him by the social orders that
have been realized so far and is rooted only in the structure of these
orders. Therefore, it implies the replacement of religion by politics for
the sake of man’s liberation since evil is a consequence of society, which
has become the subject of culpability, and not of an original sin. As
varied as the forms of revolution, understood in this sense, can be, their
common feature is the correlation between the elevation of politics to religion
and the negation of the supernatural. The Revolution, with the capital “R”
and with no plural, is that unique event, as painful as labour and delivery
(this is the metaphor that keeps reappearing in its theoreticians), that
mediates the transition from the reign of necessity to the reign of free-
dom, where this latter is described – and it could not be otherwise –
through the mere generic negation of the institutions of the past (a
society without a state, without churches, without an army, without
crime, without a judiciary, without police, etc.); that generates a future
in which nothing will be like the old history; that is, thereby, the resolu-
tion of the mystery of history.
When did this idea originate? I think its origins are fairly recent, not
before Rousseau (not before a particular aspect of his thought, which
contradicts other aspects).35 Certainly I am not saying that there were
no deniers of original sin before Rousseau: but this denial had not been
associated with the idea of the possibility of a new order according to
nature but, rather, with the idea that religions are fictions useful for
shoring up the existing social order. Then, in the first half of the nine-
teenth century, this idea went through a development linked with the

34 In History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Co., 1933), and in general in all of Croce’s work, we find present, and set in opposi-
tion, the first and the third (which is thought to include the second) of these mean-
ings, while the fourth seems to be absorbed into the first. Regarding the opposition,
see this passage: “The horror of revolution that made itself felt at this time and which
runs through the entire nineteenth century, which was yet to carry out so many revo-
lutions, was in reality the horror of the democratic and Jacobin revolution” (32).
35 My friend Sergio Cotta, who is one of the most competent scholars of
Rousseau, not only in Italy, has kindly shared with me his manuscript “Philosophy and
Politics in Rousseau,” which fully confirms this view of mine.
296 The Problem of Atheism

historical judgment that the French Revolution had been left unfin-
ished.36 In the course of this development, it broke away from the idea
of going back to the state of nature and linked itself to the older idea of
progress – which had already been elaborated by the Enlightenment –
with the philosophies of history acting as mediating terms. Thus, we
have the fullness of the idea of Revolution when the “ideal city” is viewed
as the result of history, after Hegelianism – precisely in Marx. The start-
ing point and the ending point show that its process goes from an initial
negation of the supernatural to radical atheism.
However, regarding this process of atheization of the revolutionary
idea during the period from Rousseau to Marx some brief remarks are
necessary in relation to a theme that has never been explicitly studied.
We all know the thesis that presents Cartesian thought as a dike against
irreligion. If we consider Rousseau’s thought from the angle of the
Profession de foi, it looks like a second dike, erected against the same
adversaries after the apparent erosion of that built by the three great
men of French religious thought in the 1600s – Descartes, Pascal,
Malebranche. It is a form of religious thought that comes to the fore
after having accepted the criticisms that the Enlightenment had for-
mulated against the first direction for being metaphysical and tied to
theological stances. The symmetry could not be more rigorous. Just as
Descartes had turned around the doubt of the libertines, so Rousseau
turns around the meaning of the invocation of nature on the part of
the philosophes; whereas Descartes had made an appeal against the
errors of childhood, against the scruples of social morality, against
the gods who must go back to the imaginary regions whence fear called
them out, in Rousseau the voice of nature becomes identified with a
divine instinct that makes the infallible distinction between good and
evil, which teaches that justice is immutable and eternal, that all does
not end in death, and that the immortality of the soul, by re-establishing
order, justifies Providence; that man is not only a sensitive and passive
being, but active and intelligent; that he is not an accident of a blind
nature but the privileged centre of a world that has been made for
him. We could easily provide further details: for instance, the isolation

36 Indeed, historians of the French Revolution, in particular Michelet and

Quinet, were those who spread the revolutionary myth in its generic formulation as
the advent of Justice and Freedom against privilege and authority. I already men-
tioned the important role of Proudhon in the elaboration of this idea.
 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 297

with respect to the religious tradition in which Rousseau perceives

himself, as the rediscoverer of genuine religion, is quite analogous to
that experienced by Descartes with respect to the scientific and philo-
sophical tradition.
But, on the other hand, Rousseau does not call into question the
Enlightenment’s judgments about the culture of the past; nor, above
all, the Enlightenment’s rehabilitation of human nature and, thus, the
critique of the interpretation of the human condition as the result of
original sin. Therefore, Rousseau’s religion comes into focus as a form
of Pelagianism (shall we say, the most rigorous form of Pelagianism?):
it affirms God, freedom, and immortality but denies sin and grace. Now,
in this context, in this curious combination of a critique of the atheistic
type of the Enlightenment with the preservation of the Enlightenment’s
rejection of original sin, that extremely important fact, the birth of the
idea of Revolution, takes place. Because how can one explain evil, given
man’s original goodness, if not by referring to an artificial state of soci-
ety? So religious liberation is replaced by political liberation: only the
social contract can restore virtue to man. The problem of evil is trans-
posed from the psychological and theological level to the political and
sociological level: the dogmas of Fall and Redemption are transferred
to the plane of historical experience. In brief, Rousseau’s problem is
the co-presence of two fundamental elements, both new, which later
will dissociate: the one that lies at the origin of much of nineteenth-
century spiritualism and the one that mediates the transition from
Enlightenment thought to revolutionary thought.
At this point we can account, at the level of the necessity of philo-
sophical essences, for the present irrelevance of the nineteenth-century
philosophies of postulatory theism, which depend, directly or not, on
Rousseau’s religious position and on the extraordinary influence it
exercised as a decisive moment setting the direction of philosophical
trends.37 This influence has been so extraordinary that, as we saw, the
greater part of nineteenth-century positivism did not call into question

37 Besides the well-known influence on Kant, one must consider the influence
Rousseau exercised on French philosophy, to the point of starting a sequence, I think,
Rousseau-Maine de Biran-Lequier, which reminds us, mutatis, of the sequence
Descartes-Pascal-Malebranche of the 1600s, and which shapes the greater part of
nineteenth-century spiritualist thought (I tried to work out this thesis in my work
“Jules Lequier and the Tragic Moment of French philosophy”).
298 The Problem of Atheism

the desirability of the existence of God. In fact, which of the two ele-
ments co-present in Rousseau, and later mutually opposed, has greater
power? The spiritualism that came out of Rousseau identified atheism
with naturalistic materialism without being able to foresee the new
form of materialism that would make possible the fullness of revolu-
tionary thought.

Regarding Biran, the book that Gouhier devoted to Conversions de Maine de Biran
(Paris: Brin, 1948) is illuminating in every respect. It also suggests the question of
whether the process in Biran’s thought that goes through a sequence of conversions,
from Rousseau to Fénelon, may not be described as the rigorous continuation of
Rousseau’s thought, separated from the revolutionary aspect – even though these
conversions are a continuation and a deepening that cannot take the character of
rational derivation or even of evolution but, rather, of continuous creation. While it
remains true that “it is because Rousseau speaks to his heart that later Fénelon and the
Imitation found the way open in him” (words by P.-M. Masson, La religion de Rousseau,
t. 3 [Paris: Hachette, 1916], 307, cited and approved by Gouhier, Conversions, 400).
Biran’s descendance from Rousseau takes on particular importance because it
disproves the familiar thesis about Biran’s Pascalianism and, implicitly, the thesis
linked with it concerning the Pascalian descent of the French spiritualism of the nine-
teenth century (a thesis that, however, becomes necessary if one minimizes Pascal’s
Jansenism). In his thought process Biran met Pascal twice, in 1793 and between 1815
and 1818; but “in 1793 Pascal ran into a friend of Jean-Jacques, certainly better dis-
posed to follow him than a disciple of Voltaire, but fully satisfied with natural religion,
and not feeling the need to follow him all the way to the mystery of Jesus. In 1815,
Pascal runs into the founder of psychology; now, no matter how far from materialism
the tendencies of the new science may be, this latter makes unnecessary the explana-
tions that, in the Pensées, transform anthropology into an apology for Christianity;
it meets neither sin nor grace: early Biranism justifies the reservations of the young
reader of Rousseau” (Gouhier, Conversions, 376). For Biran there is no experience of
an initial Fall, and it is doubtful that there is room for original sin in his philosophy.
In Journal intime, on 9 October 1817, he remarks that, according to Pascal, everybody
has “the intimate perception of this degradation, every time he is not distracted by
outside reality. But we do not find in ourselves anything of the kind” (Gouhier,
Conversions, 378). And further, “Maine de Biran restores the idea that grace is aimed
at freeing the soul imprisoned in its body and not at redeeming the child of Adam …
thus he does not define the divine gift in connection with a moral fault whose psycho-
physiological consequences are transmitted from generation to generation: the res-
cue from above addresses a natural misery. No matter how far from Rousseau the
philosopher is by now, he ignores the Christian tragedy just as much as the Savoyard
Vicar” (Gouhier, Conversions, 387).
 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 299

4. Atheism and Criterion

of Truth

People often talk about a scientific aspect, a political aspect, and an

ethical aspect of atheism. What is the relationship between them? What
is, in the final analysis, the criterion of truth for atheism? I think we can
reach some clarity on this point starting from the thesis that has been
hitherto presented, which can also be formulated as follows: it is not
the refusal of sin that follows the refusal of God but, rather, the opposite;
that is, the refusal of sin, of the status naturae lapsae, of the initial Fall, is
the beginning of a process that leads to atheism. Hence, atheism can
be defined as the will to live consistently the original attitude of rational-
ism (i.e., as the will to be consistent with the original option). Therefore,
it has an essential ethical aspect – namely, the quest for an accord
between life and thought. Also in this regard, a study of Marx’s critique
of Hegel would be illuminating. It seems to me that this confirms a tra-
ditional view of Catholic thought: the essence of rationalism is a gratu-
itous option in favour of man’s aseity and self-sufficiency. It is not the
result of speculative proofs; rather, the proofs are arguments that come
after the option, through which it presumes to legitimate itself.
People often tightly link the question of the moral aspect to the
famous question of the philosophical God and the religious God. Can
we say that atheism’s power of seduction lies in its absolute rejection of
the philosophical God as a false God? This is Maritain’s view. There is
a true God of philosophers who is none but the true God Himself, the
God of saints, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, known in His
natural attributes only; such a purely rational notion of God is open to
the supernatural. But there is also a rational notion of God closed to the
supernatural: such is the false God of philosophers, who is just a supreme
warranty and justification of the order of nature and of history. It is a
God who is responsible for this world without being able to redeem it,
a God who consecrates all the good and all the evil of the world, and
sacrifices man to the cosmos; such is, essentially, the God of modern
rationalist philosophy, which, according to Maritain, had its most com-
plete expression in Hegel’s thought. Against this God, there are two
forms of uncompromising protest, that of the saint and that of the
atheist. The saint, too, totally refuses things as they are in as much as
he views them as intolerable. The saint’s attitude is a total rejection of
the false God: in this respect, he is an integral atheist, the most atheistic
300 The Problem of Atheism

of men; and the fault of the absolute atheist is that he is not perfectly
atheistic. Instead of opposing to this false God the power of the true
God, he can only fight against the Jupiter of this world by calling to his
aid the power of the God immanent in history. Therefore he replaces
the true God with devotion to history, thus making himself a servant of
history – that is, of the false God again.38 Or, in just slightly different
terms: thought closed to the supernatural faces a fork in the road
between legitimizing evil and the agonistic position: in it, every form
of theological thought must have a legitimizing character, and, conse-
quently, the reaffirmation of the task of human life as a struggle against
evil takes the form of atheism.
Now, the question seems to me incorrectly posed, precisely because
it ignores the terms of the initial option. One may certainly say that a
fundamental characteristic of every atheistic philosophy is to presuppose
that the victory of the philosophical God over the religious God has
already happened, and therefore its critique directly targets the philo-
sophical God. But in another respect we are equally justified in saying
that atheism is the refusal of every attempt at compromise and recon-
ciliation between the philosophical God and the religious God, of any
philosophy that intends somehow to preserve religion, sublating it,
either by presenting itself directly as “Christian philosophy” or as a form
of rationalism that wants to affirm the divine freed from all mythologies;
and in saying that what specifies atheism is the quest for full consistency
in the liberation from the supernatural.
Moving on now from the moral aspect to the arguments that atheism
always brings with it, politicism and scientism, we ask: Which one of
them takes priority? If we look at history, the answer seems to me
extremely easy. If we consider historically the transitions from science
to scientism, we see that they were consequences of the collapse of
spiritualist or Idealist metaphysics, a collapse caused by motivations
broadly connected with politics. Thus, the origins of modern atheism,
in libertine thought, are concomitant with the atmosphere of the Raison
d’état, which generated the impression that religions act in history as
tools wielded by politicians. Thus, the appearance of scientism in the
properly modern sense in the late 1600s, and its continuation in
the 1700s, came after the crisis of Cartesian metaphysics, a crisis that

38 Maritain, La signification, 21 [Range of Reason, 112].

 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 301

in my opinion was due to the impossibility of finding in it a foundation

to answer the urgent political questions of that time;39 Marxism follows
the political impotence of Hegelianism; the political motivation for the
formation of the original form of positivism has been well highlighted;
methodological positivism in Italy has come into fashion after the
crisis of Croce’s and Gentile’s anti-scientism, and it is superfluous to
now highlight the political motivations of this crisis. Actually, scientism
is, for atheism, always a subsidiary argument; and the true criterion
of truth, upon which atheism finds itself forced to rely for lack of evi-
dence, is its ability to provide guidance in concrete historical and
political choices.
However, be careful: this political aspect must be distinguished from
the moral reaction against an unjust social order, even though the
two motivations go together in the development of positive atheism. In
the final analysis, for an atheist the criterion of truth lies in the recogni-
tion that transcendent thought has been surpassed by history – in the
sense that one cannot account for the historical process of thought if
not by conceiving of it as a development towards more and more rigor-
ous immanence, and in the sense that transcendent thought is powerless
to generate efficient political and social forms (i.e., forms not liable to
become tools for forces of an entirely different nature).
I believe it is easy to answer a final objection from those who assert
that absolute atheism is a response to the practical atheism of a certain
Christian world. Perhaps they might remark that what has been said,
even if it is valid regarding the genesis of philosophical atheism, is not
enough to explain its diffusion; that there is a difference, therefore,
between the atheism of the teacher and that of the disciples. After what
has been said about the criterion of truth, it is clear that the process of
the reception of atheism by the common man essentially reproduces
its process of formation in the philosopher. With this difference: the
philosopher seeks a confirmation of his thesis in the historical actuality,
making a free decision whereby human reality, social as well as indi-
vidual, constitutes itself; the common man, on the contrary, goes from
the historical actuality to the atheistic thesis.
I think, therefore, that we must say that the greatest inadequacy of
today’s religious thought is the lack of a rigorous philosophy of modern

39 See my essay “Cartesio e la politica,” in Rivista di filosofia 41, no. 1 (1950): 3–30.
302 The Problem of Atheism

and contemporary history – the philosophy of history whence a political

philosophy should proceed.

5. Pascal’s Definition of Atheism

This schematic investigation of the nature of atheism leads us, it seems

to me, to an important conclusion: the fideistic and optative form taken
by contemporary atheism, which overcomes the criticisms that could
be formulated against it as scientism, establishes the conditions for a
full understanding of the thought of Pascal precisely as the first Christian
author who explicitly tackled the problem of atheism qua atheismus.
Therefore we must reflect on what constitutes his novelty not only
with respect to the Port-Royalist doctors but also within tradition in
general.40 It lies in the idea that deism is not a stage in the process
towards the religious God but, rather, the opposite mistake to that of
atheism, which therefore is liable to turn into its opposite. Indeed,
consider the very famous fragment 556:

Deism, almost as far removed from the Christian religion as atheism, which
is its exact opposite … The Christian religion, then, teaches men these two
truths; that there is a God whom men can know, and that there is a corrup-
tion in their nature which renders them unworthy of Him. It is equally im-
portant to men to know both these points; and it is equally dangerous for
man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness, and to know his
own wretchedness without knowing the Redeemer who can free him from it.
The knowledge of only one of these points gives rise either to the pride
of philosophers, who have known God, and not their own wretchedness,
or to the despair of atheists, who know their own wretchedness, but not the
Redeemer. And, as it is alike necessary to man to know these two points, so is
it alike merciful of God to have made us know them. The Christian religion
does this; it is in this that it consists … All who seek God without Jesus Christ,
and who rest in nature, either find no light to satisfy them, or come to form
for themselves a means of knowing God and serving Him without a media-
tor. Thereby they fall either into atheism, or into deism, two things which the
Christian religion abhors almost equally.

40 A point perfectly highlighted in the book by Jean Russier, La foi selon Pascal
(Paris: PUF, 1949).
 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 303

In order to understand it fully, let us refer to the thesis about opposite

errors presented in fragment 861:

There are then a great number of truths, both of faith and of morality, which
seem contradictory, and which all hold good together in a wonderful system.
The source of all heresies is the exclusion of some of these truths; and the
source of all the objections which the heretics make against us is the igno-
rance of some of our truths. And it generally happens that, unable to con-
ceive the connection of two opposite truths, and believing that the admission
of one involves the exclusion of the other, they adhere to the one, exclude the
other, and think of us as opposed to them. Now exclusion is the cause of their
heresy; and ignorance that we hold the other truth causes their objections.

This thesis about the alliance of opposites within the truth is the core
of Port-Royalist doctrine. Given the importance of the topic, allow me
to refer to what Laporte writes in his classic work on Arnauld:41

Properly speaking, and taking them in their positive aspect, there is nothing
false and excessive either in the Pelagian theses or in the Protestant theses.
Luther and Calvin are completely right to claim that God moves man invin-
cibly, and that justification comes from Faith: does that not agree with the
text of St Paul? Pelagians and Jesuits are completely right to say that man is
free and merits his salvation by his good works: does that not agree with the
Council of Trent? Each of the two sects is not wrong except in rejecting what
the other affirms. It bears repeating that in such matters heresy starts by ex-
clusion. As a consequence, orthodoxy here cannot be reduced to an inter-
mediate opinion which, by preserving only fragments of both Protestantism
and Molinism, would therefore be doubly heretical. It is only in a higher
doctrine, which on this point must complete everything the Protestants af-
firm with everything the Jesuits affirm, repudiating their mutual negations,
it is in the reunification of the two opposite errors – which reunited no lon-
ger deserve to be called errors – that Catholic Truth must reside.

Arnauld applied this thesis to the criticism of the opposite errors of the
Protestants and the Molinists. Pascal extends it, already in the Entretien
avec Monsieur de Saci, to the opposite errors of Epictetus and Montaigne,

41 Jean Laporte, La doctrine de Port-Royal (Paris: PUF, 1923), 18–19.

304 The Problem of Atheism

and then, in the Pensées, to those of the dogmatics and the skeptics, of
the deists and the atheists. This extension cannot be viewed as a mere
development because it implies a critique of the rational proofs of the
existence of God, which the Port-Royalist doctors did not foresee.
According to what could be called Pascal’s typology of worldviews,
there is a direction of thought that affirms that “human reason is above
everything.”42 This direction must necessarily break into two opposite
stances. One is that of those who, starting from a one-sided notion of
man’s greatness (which is real), are led to divinize him, the deists: “If
they gave you God as an end, it was only to administer to your pride;
they made you think that you are by nature like Him, and conformed
to Him” (fragment 430). The affirmation of human misery, which is
right in itself but just as one-sided, leads to the opposite error, atheism:
“And those who saw the absurdity of this claim put you on another
precipice, by making you understand that your nature was like that of
the brutes, and led you to seek your good in the lusts which are shared
by the animals” (ibid.).
The two partial truths fail to be reconciled because their advocates
have initially left out the truth that “You are not in the state of your
creation” (fragment 430). That is, they ignored the fact that “Not all
that is incomprehensible ceases to exist” (ibid.): “Original sin is foolish-
ness to men, but it is admitted to be such. You must not then reproach
me for the want of reason in this doctrine, since I admit it to be without
reason. But this foolishness is wiser than all the wisdom of men, sapientius
est hominibus. For without this, what can we say that man is? His whole
state depends on this imperceptible point. And how should it be per-
ceived by his reason, since it is a thing against reason, and since reason,
far from finding it out by her own ways, is averse to it when it is presented
to her?” (fragment 445).
Thus, according to Pascal, all worldviews and all moral systems
organize themselves against the backdrop of an answer to the incom-
prehensible: there are no absolutely certain, self-evident principles that
can be used as a starting point. Nor is it possible to refrain from giving
an answer, positive or negative, to the incomprehensible: and so il faut
parier. Now, do not these texts – just like the famous assertion that “they”

42 See La vie de Blaise Pascal by his sister Gilberte, in the minor Brunschvicg
edition, 11.
 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 305

(i.e., Socrates and Seneca, and more generally all “philosophers”) “have
been in the error that has blinded all men in the beginning: they have
all taken death as natural to man”43 – seem to confirm the picture of
atheism that I have tried to draw here, starting from a consideration
of the meaning of the transition to its postulatory form and of the rela-
tionship that gets established in history between forms of metaphysical
rationalism and forms of atheism – namely, that atheism is the endpoint
of a process that starts from the elevation without proof of man’s pres-
ent nature to the status of his normal situation? Do not the categories
used by Pascal frame the essential forms of philosophical thought
because, for him, deism is clearly an ideal category that encompasses
all the philosophies that affirm the divine and deny the supernatural?
However, the point where Pascal’s position seems exposed to criticism,
so that an atheist can make a response, is the identification of atheism
with the simple type of negative atheism as a philosophy of man’s misery.
Now, won’t the atheist’s response be to attempt to show that this misery
is not an ineliminable aspect of the human condition but, rather, the
force that can give rise to a new order that contains “the genuine resolu-
tion of the conflict between man and nature and between man and
man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence,
between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and
necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the
riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution”?44 Won’t
his response be, in other words, that the odyssey of history must lead
to “total man,” meaning man who is pure greatness, divinized man,
man now master of his destiny?
Is this response conclusive? In the next essay we will discuss how
contemporary atheism must encounter the Pascal problem and how it
finds itself obliged to recognize it as the central question in the history
of philosophy.

***

43 “Letter to Madame Périer and Her Husband, on the Death of M. Pascal Père,”
in Thoughts, Letters and Minor Works, The Harvard Classics, vol. 48 (New York: P.F.
Collier and Son, 1910), 337.
44 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk Struik, trans.
M. Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 135.
306 The Problem of Atheism

The author has communicated that he would no longer argue the

distinction between negative atheism and positive atheism in the terms
he defined it in this essay (page 288) – namely, that the endpoint of
negative atheism is Sade and that of positive atheism is Marx.45 In fact,
the study – which so far has not been conducted in full – of the process
of thought from Sade to Surrealism in terms of history of philosophy leads
one to recognize in the Surrealist endpoint (as manifested theoretically
in the work of André Breton) a form of positive atheism. Like Marxism,
Surrealism intends to represent the fullness of the revolutionary idea
in its primary aspect, that of intending to be a radical break with the
past and the beginning of a new history. It is defined, therefore, by
the intention to create a new reality in which humanity, by recovering
what it had projected outside of itself by creating God (the powers that
it had “alienated” from itself), will supposedly achieve the fullness of its
power. Hence the essential phraseology of positive atheism: total man,
super-humanity, surreality, and so on. These words, even if they are used
by different authors, are very similar in their essential meaning. It is
also true, however, that Surrealism – in the course of its effort to preserve
the purity and the integrity of the revolutionary idea against the dangers
of a historical involution of Marxism – tends to give the idea of negativ-
ity a magical character, as if it could be the source of the creation of the
new reality; and to end in the most radical form of nihilism, or in pure
anarchism – that is, anarchism dissociated from the moral character
that old anarchism still maintained (as has been seen in the result, in
the recent sketch of a psycho-erotic-Marxist revolution based on the
Sade-Marx-Freud mix, which is exactly the obligatory core of Surrealist
thought). It is nonetheless true that the reciprocal criticisms that
Surrealism and Marxism direct at each other are equally valid and
that they serve the purpose of highlighting the contradiction inside the idea of
total revolution. The Author intends to examine this point more deeply
in future research.
Conversely, the term “negative atheism” must be used in reference
to pessimistic atheism, founded not on the idea of a possible radical
change of the human condition but, rather, on its complete

45 [TN] These comments by Del Noce were added to the 1970 edition of Il
Problema dell’Ateismo.
 V. Reflections on the Atheistic Option (1961) 307

immutability. However, this form of thought goes through a cycle that

leads it to progressively shed its atheistic character and to reconcile with
religious thought. In the Author’s judgment, the thought of Simone
Weil represents the climax of this process.46

46 Regarding the study of the necessary development of pessimism in a religious

direction, the Author takes the liberty to refer the reader to the following works of
his: “Martinetti nella cultura europea, italiana e piemontese”; “Giuseppe Rensi tra
Leopardi e Pascal, ovvero l’autocritica dell’ateismo negativo in Giuseppe Rensi,” in
Atti della Giornata Rensiana (Milan: Marzorati, 1967); “Simone Weil, interprete del
mondo di oggi,” the introduction to Simone Weil, L’amore di Dio (Turin: Borla, 1968),
later republished in L’epoca della secolarizzazione (Milan: Giuffrè, 1970) [“Simone Weil,
Interpreter of Today’s World,” in The Age of Secularization, 118–52].
 VI

The Pascal Problem

and Contemporary Atheism (1964)

1. LUCIEN GOLDMANN’S MARXIST “PARI”

In the preceding essay I arrived at proposing two theses: (1) that the
transition from scientistic atheism to postulatory atheism leads us to
rediscover Pascal’s relevance today and the truth of his definition of
atheism; and (2) that Marx’s philosophy can be viewed as apparently the
most adequate response to the Pascalian consideration of atheism.
Now we have to prove that the clash between Pascal and Marx presents
itself as necessary at the end of the critique of the scholastic and scien-
tistic form of Marxism. The proof is quite easy because this process of
thought has been followed all the way to its conclusion by Lucien
Goldmann, who claims that Pascal has been surpassed in Marx.1 First
of all, I will describe the essential features of this process, observing that
it took place starting from an interpretation of Marx that at bottom is
identical to the one I had proposed in the second essay of this collec-
tion, without thinking directly of Pascal at that time.

1 Lucien Goldmann, Le Dieu caché, étude sur la vision tragique dans les Pensées de Pascal
et dans le théâtre de Racine (Paris: Gallimard, 1955) [The Hidden God, trans. Philip Thody
(New York: Verso, 2016)]. See also the essay “Le pari: est-il écrit ‘pour le libertin?’” in
the first of the Cahiers de Royaumont, titled Blaise Pascal: L’homme et l’ouvre (Paris: Les
éditions de Minuit, 1956) and also in Recherches dialectiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1959),
169ff. According to Goldmann, the tragic vision is a scheme that applies to a broad
set of philosophical, literary, and artistic works. He studied it in connection with Kant,
Pascal, and Racine. As far as philosophy is concerned, Pascal and Kant are the authors
to whom he thinks it is applicable.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 309

I had said then that both the metaphysicalist and the revisionist inter-
pretations, in its many forms, originate from a shared neglect of Marx’s
critique of speculative philosophy and, thus, of his surpassing philosophy
in the usual sense of autonomous conceptual discourse. Let us now see
how Goldmann’s study, of course without being influenced in the least
by that work of mine, nonetheless draws its ultimate conclusion, which
was not clear to me at the time.
In his judgment, in reference to Marxism one cannot speak of an
objective sociology in the sense of a systematic ensemble of judgments
of fact independent of the judgments of value – in short, in the sense of
a science with respect to which politics would play the role of the con-
sequent technique. On the other hand, one cannot say either that
Marxism accepts ethics, conceived as an ensemble of values that are
affirmed as valid independently of the structure of empirical reality,
as a benchmark whose necessary realization is subsequently verified
by economic science. So that in Marxism there would be two perspec-
tives, the moral one, which contains the condemnation of capitalism,
and the economic and historic one, which contains the arguments that
aim to prove that capitalism is condemned by reality itself. At the end
of the last century and at the beginning of ours, these two terms, Marx’s
ethics and his sociology, which separate the theoretical and the practical
aspect of his thought, had led socialist thought to interfere in the famous
discussions concerning the distinction between (scientific) judgments
of fact and judgments of value; and it was precisely concerning this
point that the crisis of Marxism took place (in the Western world,
this eclipse reached its climax in the years between 1920 and 1930).
People said: from premises in the indicative mood derived from judg-
ments of fact one cannot draw any conclusion in the imperative mood;
morality cannot be founded on science.2 This resulted in the opposition

2 Regarding this distinction between judgments of value and judgments of fact,

and the consequent impossibility of founding morality on science, see, for example,
the purely ethical definition of socialism given by the greatest Italian moralist from
the neo-Kantian, positivist period of our philosophical culture – Erminio Juvalta. He
defined it as the political orientation in which “justice is the establishment of social
conditions such that each individual finds in them the same external possibility of
having value as a person (which coincides with the most universally radical interpreta-
tion of the famous second formula of Kant’s Groundwork)” (in the volume Il vecchio e il
nuovo problema della morale [Bologna: Zanichelli, 1914], reprinted in I limiti del razion-
alismo etico [Turin: Einaudi, 1945], 320).
310 The Problem of Atheism

between Marxist orthodoxism and revisionism, the non-critical appear-

ance of orthodoxism and, on the other hand, the end of Marxism in
revisionism, and then the end of revisionism itself.3
What Marxism is about is, instead, a total attitude that spans in an
organic unity the comprehension of social reality, the value that judges
it, and the action that transforms it. What shall we call this total attitude?
The only suitable word to describe it is “faith” since no other word
expresses so precisely the foundation of values in reality and the dif-
ferentiated and hierarchical character of every reality with respect to
the values. For sure, the object of such faith no longer has any super-
natural or supra-historical character. It is merely supra-individual, in
the sense that it is faith in a historical future that we must create through
our action. Already here a peculiar similarity with Augustinism is vis-
ible: values are founded on an objective reality that cannot be known
absolutely but only relatively – that is, God for St Augustine, History
for Marx – and the most objective possible knowledge that man can
attain of a historical fact presupposes the recognition of such transcen-
dent or supra-individual reality as the supreme value.4
A future that we must create through our action: having discarded
the conception that believes in historical necessity, which cannot with-
stand the objection that judgments of value cannot be deduced from
judgments of fact, Marxism adopts the idea of the pari, making it the
centre of its thought. Since certainty about a historical future cannot
take the form of simple certainty about an irrevocable fate, the structure
of Marxist thought takes on an appearance that is curiously similar to
that of Pascal’s thought. On the one side, the psychological and moral
arguments that conclude in “we must choose between socialism and
barbarism”; on the other side the quest, “after making the pari, for all
the objective reasons to fortify the hope that lies at the foundation of
this pari. This is what explains, in Pascal, the discussions about Miracles,

3 The final act is, as is well known, Croce’s philosophy. I believe this vision of his-
tory due to Gramsci could also be reached starting from Goldmann’s perspective. A
common trait of revisionism, yesterday like today, is to detach Marx from Hegel, gener-
ally in order to bring him closer to Kant. Thus, in Croce the end of revisionism coincides
with his rediscovery of Hegel, but Hegel separated from what led to Marx, and already
ready to be purified of his theologism through an interpretation linked with Croce’s
very particular reading of Vico.
4 [TN] This paragraph is a loose quotation of Goldmann, Hidden God, 90ff.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 311

Prophecies, Scripture etcetera, just like in the Marxists it explains the

great historical analyses, rigorous and detailed, which establish the great
likelihood of the future victory of Socialism.”5 Repeating a formula
from Ernst Bloch, Goldmann defines Marxism as learned hope, hope that
is conscious of its reasons for hope.
Here it is necessary that I correct a thesis that I had proposed in my
early Marxist writings. Back then I was mesmerized by the formula that
describes Marxism as “moral Galileism,” which was in the air at that
time and which I was one of the very first people to use; accordingly, I
wrote that, for Marxism, philosophies are merely historical working
hypotheses that are verified experimentally by the operations to which
they give rise. Today I view this thesis as still subordinate to scientism,
and I find it corrected by Goldmann with arguments that I consider
decisive. Indeed, a scientific hypothesis has a purely theoretical char-
acter, to which practice is linked only in a mediated fashion, through
technical application. Whereas the character of the philosophical and
revolutionary pari is simultaneously theoretical and practical. Moreover,
this pari contains an element of finality that is entirely absent in scientific
hypotheses.6 A curious thing is that, in the very act of somehow recon-
necting itself to a theological tradition (Augustinism and Pascal),
Marxism separates itself completely from whatever was still theological
in the philosophy of history. This theologism manifested itself in the
fact that the existence of progress and its continuation in the future
were presented as set by fate. Instead, the introduction of the pari cor-
responds to the idea that the two fundamental values, progress and
socialism, are tied to our action. We can even say: by this statement
Marxism escapes the neo-Enlightenment critique, which tends to dis-
tinguish within it an eschatological aspect, originating in Hegel, and a
positive aspect, which makes it a further stage in the development of
the Enlightenment. Instead, it presents itself as the coincidence of the
radical fulfilment of the process of thought that started with Hegel and
of the fullness of the Enlightenment, understood as anti-theological
philosophy of the Revolution – as affirmation of an active reason, capable

5 Goldmann, “Le pari,” 130–1. On another occasion I said, using a formula quite
similar to those employed by Goldmann, that the specific feature of Marx’s philosophy
is that it expresses itself not in the awareness of a realized totality but in the realization
of a totality.
6 Goldmann, Le Dieu caché, 100 [Hidden God, 91].
312 The Problem of Atheism

of transforming the world. In this coincidence, Hegelianism, freed from

its theological aspects (which coincide with the Idealist and Platonic
aspects), in turn frees the Enlightenment from iusnaturalism, thereby
creating the conditions for a revolution that is no longer just “partial”
or “political” but “total” or “social.” However, by the very fact that it fully
realizes Hegelianism and the Enlightenment, Marxism supposedly
positions itself beyond both of them.
So, Marxist thought has a postulatory aspect, in a vision in which God
is replaced by the historical future and his City by the “Totality”; and
accordingly it has an entirely different historical vision. Scientistic
Marxism had to invoke the tradition of eighteenth-century materialism,
attributing absolutely disproportionate value to figures like Holbach or
Helvetius.7 Goldmann’s Marxism – in which I am inclined to recognize,
at least in his proposals, the rigorous form of a critical Marxism, capable
of starting a dialogue with Western thought – must emphasize continuity
and a certain recovery of the Augustinian tradition, after and against
Thomistic and Cartesian rationalism, while affirming its own atheistic
character. We have three stages of development: in Augustinianism, the
values of knowledge are founded in an objective reality (God) of whose
existence we are certain (let us call this the ontologistic aspect of
Augustinianism, in a generic sense, whereby Ontologism is opposed to
cosmologism); in Pascal, this certainty of existence is replaced by the
pari regarding the existence of a supernatural God, independent of any
human will, who is not amenable to demonstration (the “hidden God” –
let us call this the eclipse of the ontologistic aspect of the Augustinian
tradition); in Marxism, what gets affirmed is the pari on a future that
our own action has to create.8
We understand the extreme importance that the question of the history of
philosophy takes for Marxism interpreted in this way: the only criterion
it can use to manifest its (relative, because historical) truth is that of

7 See, for example, P. Naville, the most scientistic among contemporary French
Marxists, Paul Thiry d’Holbach et la philosophie scientifique au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard,
1943); or, also, the exaggerations in the well-known book by A. Vartanian, Diderot and
Descartes (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1953). This interpretation refers to a well-
known chapter by Marx in The Holy Family (whose thesis, which is of a polemical nature,
was made rigid in dogmatic Marxism à la Plekhanov).
By contrast, Goldmann’s perspective seems to confirm my thesis that there is no
transition from negative atheism to positive atheism and vice versa.
8 Goldmann, Le Dieu caché, 99 [Hidden God, 90–1].
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 313

being able to situate, surpassing them and integrating them, other

worldviews, which in turn are incapable of fulfilling this task. Of course,
the confirmation coming from the history of philosophy cannot guar-
antee that the reality that Marxism envisions will necessarily be actual-
ized, given that such actualization is tied to our action. But without the
confirmation from the history of philosophy, Marxist hope would cease
to be “learned.”
Here some clarifications are necessary concerning the concept of
history of philosophy and how it is interpreted by this author. Evidently,
it is not a matter – at least in Goldmann’s intentions and whether or
not he fully achieves his goal – of giving it a theological meaning, albeit
secularized, through the idea that history has a meaning that tran-
scends history:

Dialectical materialism embodies and comprehends itself as a moment in

universal history, and a moment which this history will necessarily transcend
and outgrow. If, however – like all classical thought – it states that there is
such a thing as human nature, and that this lies in man’s ability to go beyond
the present situation by acting upon it, then it can avoid any incoherence by
giving the notion of progress a relative content which situates every histori-
cal period only by its relationship to other past epochs and to the present
day. It thus removes the only difficult problem, that of an “end of history” as
something which, in the present state of our knowledge, we can never grasp.
It is this which constitutes one of the main superiorities of Marxist over
Hegelian thought, which tried to be Philosophy in an absolute and not
merely in a relative sense.”9

To put it differently, for Marxism there is progress in the content of

truth, and for Goldmann its historical pattern is the irreversible relation-
ship of integrating and surpassing that occurs between rationalist or
empiricist individualism and the tragic vision, and between the tragic
vision and dialectic thought. Let us also add, of course, that for Marxism
the history of philosophy cannot be autonomous since every world
vision is the vision that a social class forms in a certain age.
Without addressing the question of the concept of the history of
philosophy (of its relations with the philosophy of history and with its

9 Ibid., 240 [Hidden God, 214].

314 The Problem of Atheism

theological presuppositions; of how philosophies are tied to social

classes; and so on), let us see how Goldmann actually sees the history
of modern philosophy.
He starts from the idea that human facts always constitute global
significant structures,10 which have simultaneously a practical, theoreti-
cal, and affective character; and that consequently in the history of
philosophy one needs to use the notion of world vision, which is not
an immediate empirical datum but an indispensable conceptual tool,
in order to distinguish what is essential from what is accidental in a
piece of work.11 Or, as he also says, one needs to use the idea of totality,
whereby the parts cannot be understood except by knowing the whole
they belong to, and, conversely, the whole cannot be understood except
by knowing the parts and their relationships. A text must be integrated
in larger and larger significant wholes – that is, in the work of which it
is part; in the complete body of works by the author; in the wholes of
the literary, philosophical, and religious trends of the age and country
in which it was written; and, finally, in the whole social, economic, and
political life.12
As you can see, this concept of “significant structure” (I prefer to use
this expression rather than “world vision,” which is too generic, and
rather than “totality,” which is too closely tied to Marxist language) by
itself is not at all specifically Marxist; and, more important, it is in my
view perfectly correct. But let us see how Goldmann uses it.
In the historical process of modern philosophy he distinguishes a
first world vision characterized by the fact that “it had destroyed the two
closely connected ideas of the community and the universe, and had
replaced them by the totally different concepts of the isolated individual
and of infinite space.”13 In this vision – namely, rationalism, a generic
term that, according to Goldmann, applies also to empiricist philoso-
phies – God becomes a synonym for “order,” “eternal truths,” the guar-
antee of an instrumental world accessible by the individual’s thought
and action. It is a God “present to the soul,” as in Augustinism; but his

10 [TN] Strutture significative in the original, where “significativo” (like “significant”

in English) is normally used to express the property of being “important” or “meaning-
ful” but here should probably be understood more in the sense of “signifying.”
11 Goldmann, Le Dieu caché, 7ff, 24ff [Hidden God, 6ff, 22ff].
12 Goldmann, “Le pari,” 111–12.
13 Goldmann, Le Dieu caché, 37ff [Hidden God, 27ff].
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 315

function is reduced to that of guaranteeing to the individual the ratio-

nality and thus availability of the world in which he will unfold his
powers. The individual is central, and therefore the values that tran-
scend him are denied, and therefore rationalism is essentially a-moral
and a-religious. The great philosophers of rationalism, Descartes,
Malebranche, and Leibniz, were still sincere believers and talked about
morality and religion. But they poured into these ancient forms, in
connection with their new world vision, an entirely new content. Let us
consider, for instance, the transition from the believer Descartes to the
very pious Malebranche. There was still a theme that could seem to
establish a kinship between Descartes’s thought and the presence of
God of earlier philosophy, namely the theme of the arbitrary creation
of eternal truths. It is exactly Malebranche who eliminates it and makes
God’s will dependent on an order that precedes the creation of the
world. There are no longer particular acts of will on God’s part, but
grace becomes integrated in the rational system of occasional causes.
Therefore it is Spinoza who draws the final consequences of this new
content by dispensing with creation.14 Nor is there any room in ratio-
nalism for a true morality. It speaks of happiness and wisdom, terms
that refer to criteria like success and defeat, knowledge and error, but
not to good and evil. In brief, in rationalism “God, deprived of the
physical universe and of the conscience of man, the only two instruments
by which He had been capable of communicating with man, departed
from the world where He could no longer speak.”15 Here lies the pos-
sibility of the transition to the tragic vision. This vision opposes itself to
rationalism in its a-moral and a-religious character; therefore, it is, first
of all, the affirmation of a set of values that transcends the individual;
and yet, it does not express itself as a form capable of replacing the
atomistic and mechanic world of individualistic rationalism because it
lacks historical perspective; to be more precise, because its temporal
dimension is the present and not the future. Thus, the world of rational-
ism is fixed as definitive and unchangeable; one simply opposes to it a
new scale of values.
It is easy to derive from this first characteristic of the tragic vision all
the others. There is the affirmation that values are authentic and,

14 Ibid., 40 [30]. This assessment of Spinoza, viewed as the endpoint of Cartesian

rationalism, shows to what extent Marxism’s historical vision is still traditional.
15 Goldmann, Le Dieu caché, 41 [Hidden God, 31].
316 The Problem of Atheism

therefore, that they need to be realized, but at the same time there is
the awareness that they are rigorously unrealizable. Hence the paradoxi-
cal situation of the tragic man who lives exclusively for the realization of
rigorously unrealizable values; with the corollary “all or nothing,” the lack
of degrees, the complete absence of relativity.16 This is why the “hidden
God,” always present and always absent, is essential for the tragic vision.

Thus, while his presence takes all value and reality from the world, his equal-
ly absolute and permanent absence makes the world into the only reality
which man can confront, the only sphere in and against which he can and
must apply his demand for substantial and absolute values.
Many forms of religious and revolutionary consciousness have insisted
upon the incompatibility between God and the world and between values
and reality. Most of them, however, have admitted some possible solution, if
only that of an endeavour which can be made in this world to achieve these
values, or, alternatively, of the possibility for man of abandoning this world
entirely and seeking refuge in the intelligible and transcendent world of
values or of God. In its most radical form, tragedy rejects both these solu-
tions as signs of weakness and illusion, and sees them as being either con-
scious or unconscious attempts at compromise. For tragedy believes neither
that the world can be changed and authentic values realized within the
framework it provides nor that it can simply be left behind while man seeks
refuge in the city of God. This is why tragic man cannot try to spend his
wealth or fulfil his duties in the world “well,” nor pass over these duties and
abandon his wealth completely. Here, as elsewhere, tragic man can find only
one valid attitude: that of saying both “Yes” and “No,” of being in the world
but not of the world, as “taking neither love nor care for the things which it
contains.” Living in this world means accepting, in the full sense of the word
that it exists; being in it without being of it means refusing to accept that it
has any real existence …
The absence of God deprives tragic man of any right to remain ignorant
of the world or to turn his face from it; his refusal remains within the world,
both because it is this world that he rejects and because it is only by this
movement of rejection that tragic man can know himself and understand
his own limits and value.17

16 Ibid., 71–2 [62–3].

17 Ibid., 60–1 [50–2].
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 317

The world is dumb and God is hidden; thus the cosmological argument
and the ontological argument for the existence of God fail. Of God
there cannot be any theoretical certainty; therefore, one moves to the
“order of the heart,” the “primacy of morality,” the pari. Values are
rigorously impossible to realize; hence, the solitude of the tragic man,
to whom only one form of expression is allowed, the monologue, or,
more exactly, since it is a monologue addressed to God, the “solitary
dialogue.” The Pensées must be regarded as “a supreme example of one
of those ‘solitary dialogues’ with the hidden God of the Jansenists
and of tragedy.”18
Uncertainty and paradox (i.e., the union of opposites, which is essen-
tial, as we have seen, for the tragic vision) are pushed by Pascal to their
ultimate consequences. In this sense, his thought is the extremization
of Jansenism, not just beyond Arnauld and Nicole but beyond Barcos.
All the way to God himself. The correlate at the level of knowledge of
the presence and absence of the hidden God is the paradoxical union
of certainty and uncertainty, of hope and risk that is proper to the pari.
Believing is nothing else but parier; in Pascal’s faith, the possibility of
God’s non-existence is maintained as a continuously present and con-
tinuously denied possibility. To the Jansenist idea that God’s will is
hidden, Pascal adds the idea that his existence is hidden. “For Jansenism,
in general, God’s existence was a certainty and individual salvation a
hope. Pascal’s wager extends the idea of hope to the very existence
of God, and thereby becomes profoundly different from the view of
Arnauld and Barcos. But this is not because Pascal escapes from
Jansenism, but because, on the contrary, he carries it to its logical
conclusions.”19 In short, parier is to make hope the fundamental category
of existence.
Certainly the tragic vision turns out to be very accommodating when
it lets the dialectic vision surpass it. It loses all power of resistance as soon
as the category of the future is introduced. It cannot reaffirm its theism
because its appeal to a transcendent being is just a structural feature
due to its being static; due to the negation of every possibility not only
of realizing values but of approximating them. In Goldmann’s interpre-
tation, Pascal’s wager has features that lend themselves all too evidently

18 Ibid., 76–7 [68].

19 Ibid., 330 [297].
318 The Problem of Atheism

to letting it be surpassed in the Marxist pari. In fact, according to the

latter there is no longer any difference between faith and hope since
faith is nothing but the docta spes. However, Pascal’s pari is not on the
future but on the eternal, and the difference between faith and hope
matters. The conversion of the tragic thinker to dialectic philosophy is
quite easy to achieve: it suffices to show him that values are realizable,
and then he can no longer put up any resistance, precisely because he
has formulated the question of God not in terms of reality but in terms
of value. It is enough that men “begin to consider society from the
point of view of the future, and thereby make possible the development
of a genuine philosophy of history,”20 and the focus of hope will shift.

2. THE STANDARD SECULAR VISION

OF THE HISTORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY

Goldmann’s book has its place in the literature about Pascal, and another
place, much more important because of the questions it raises, in the
general interpretation of the historical process of modern philosophy.
It is this second aspect that I would like to discuss now, focusing on the
connection between introducing the consideration of atheism as a position that
has not been surpassed by the philosophies of divine immanence, and the necessity
to problematize the history of philosophy and its periodization schemes. Since it
is impossible to include a complete proof within the limited length of
this essay, I will try to outline exactly how introducing the methodologi-
cal tool “significant structure,” in reference to the thought of Descartes
and Pascal, must lead to a view of seventeenth-century philosophy that
is quite different from that affirmed by Goldmann and, at the same
time, very far from the traditional one, such that the question of the
whole vision of the development of modern philosophy is involved.
In the initial pages of this book, I talked about how today visions of
the history of philosophy are fundamentally important in determining
even theoretical orientations and how the vision of the development
of modern philosophy is extremely relevant in this regard. You might
reply that every vision of the history of philosophy is always relative to
a philosophy. So I have to demonstrate that the concept of “modern

20 [TN] Goldmann, The Hidden God, 282. I slightly extended the quote for
clarity.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 319

philosophy” actually reflects obligatory objective data, which any philoso-

phy must take into account. I will begin by presenting the features of
the current secular view in order to identify its essential traits; then I
will show the datum that is obligatory and unquestionable even for a
vision that intends to criticize the “secular character of modern phi-
losophy”; finally, I will point out what separates Goldmann’s interpreta-
tion from other rationalistic visions. With a most strenuous effort, I
will limit my presentation to ten pages, while trying not to leave out
anything essential.
So let us consider the meaning of the word “modern” as it presents
itself, applied to philosophy, in the habitual usage. We can say that
people regard as modern, in the most elementary sense, every philoso-
phy that presents itself as not merely explicating a “virtuality” – in the
rigorous sense of this word, which distinguishes it from mere analytic
derivation – of ancient and Christian thought; and that is led by this to
affirm, when it places itself in history, the existence of a period of philo-
sophical research marked by a break with respect to the Greek and
medieval periods, which are thought to be “concluded.”
What is the nature of the break? The usual answer is so familiar that
one is embarrassed to write it down one more time: the modern is born
with the acquisition of the awareness that reason has its own structure,
which cannot be bent to serve a form of knowledge that does not origi-
nate from it; when, therefore, reason becomes the supreme tribunal
against which all others must be measured. Maturity is contrasted to
childhood, criticism is contrasted to myth, and so on. Modern philoso-
phy presents itself as absolute rationalism in the sense of a radical refusal
of the supernatural but as rationalism that has appropriated the Christian
truth of the real distinction between man and nature (of man’s tran-
scendence with respect to nature, of human negativity, and similar
formulas). And that therefore, as rationalism dissociated from natural-
ism, is not susceptible to turning into skepticism. This is why it fights
against two fundamental positions: naturalistic metaphysics and its
skeptical inversion, and religious transcendence and its expressions
both in scholastic and in mystic form. These negations coincide with
the criticist negations of skepticism and dogmatism so that the develop-
ment of the critical spirit and of the secular spirit supposedly coincide.
Moreover, since its period is thought to be not yet concluded, the deter-
mination of the “character of modern philosophy” takes on the meaning
of an ideal to be realized rather than the result of a consideration of
320 The Problem of Atheism

history. Shall we look for the expression of this secularity in a new

metaphysics, in which liberation from naturalistic objectivism coincides
with a restoration of the divine in terms of immanence, or shall the
criticism of myth extend to the metaphysical type of knowledge? These
are the two ways of picturing the “modern,” that of Romanticism and
that of the Enlightenment.
Let us now omit the reasons why the latest secularism has come to
think that the only way to interpret the current crisis as a mere devel-
opmental stage within modernity understood as progress is by going
back to the Enlightenment; and has come to identify the type of moder-
nity with the man of the Enlightenment, in what distinguishes him from
the Romantic man (who is concerned about continuity with the past,
via a modern metaphysics that forms a continuous theological line with
the metaphysics of the past, albeit through the break) and from the
libertine; and, all the more, of course, from their union (the decadent
man). Let us take for granted already this “end of Romanticism” in the
sphere of secular awareness. Now, what is the “tune” that specifies
the Enlightenment in the history of the rationalist spirit? If we consider
such history from the twelfth to the seventeenth century (i.e., from the
Averroists to the libertines), we observe a clear continuity: irreligion
always presents itself as a return to ancient science and wisdom, as
opposition to Christianity in the name of the cyclical conception of time
that belonged to Hellenism. Now, between this rationalism that ends
in libertinism and the rationalism that begins with the Enlightenment
there is a sharp break, in the sense that the Enlightenment appropriates
the Christian sense of time, symbolized by an ascending line; thus, in
reference to it we can speak of a position ulterior to Christianity, or of
secularism in the proper sense. Modern rationalism begins when the
spiritual type that libertinism had given rise to – the erudite turned
towards the past, who is not deceived by today’s impostures because he
recognizes that they are essentially identical to those of yore – is replaced
by the type of the enlightened philosopher turned towards the future,
towards a humanity freed from mythologies and superstitions. It begins
when the thesis of the double truth, one for the learned and one for
the plebs, which was essential for the first type of rationalism, gives way
to the idea of building the future city, when the model of the political
philosopher reappears, no longer in utopian form.
Nineteenth-century historiography had searched for the beginnings
of the modern spirit in all the rebellions against the medieval ideal,
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 321

which it loved to depict as a radical negation of this world in favour of

the other. By using clichés like “discovery of man,” “discovery of nature,”
and so on, which philosophy could not be made a moment in the transi-
tion from transcendence to immanence? Neo-Enlightenment histori-
ography, in light of the distinctions I described, can only recognize the
beginning of modern thought in the area of the new science: when
the metaphysical-contemplative ideal of knowledge was replaced by the
scientific-operative one (to transform, to humanize the world). Certainly,
such a scientific ideal could not have established itself without the
Christian discovery of man’s transcendence with respect to nature;
therefore, there is no modern spirit, yet, when the crisis of the super-
natural is associated with a return to an ancient type of rationalism. But,
on the other hand, the Christian anthropology presupposed by this
science is surpassed since it is completely secularized. In brief, the
modern begins when the idea of a renovatio (it is not a coincidence that
a large portion of the metaphors employed by Bacon and Descartes are
inspired by the idea of a second birth) parts ways with the idea of a
return to classical antiquity as well as to primitive Christianity. Or again:
the inversion of humanism into erudite libertinism had coincided with
the loss of the idea of renovatio. The modern is the reaffirmation of that
idea freed from the idea of return.
For sure, the initial, purely historical definition from which we started
applies, besides to secular philosophies, to other philosophies that have
a Christian intention in the transcendent sense. As a matter of fact, the
modern is constantly and necessarily accompanied, as if by its shadow,
by modernism. By “modernism” I now mean the illusion whereby this
or that development of modern thought is interpreted as the occasion
to realize the “Christian philosophy by essence and not by accident,”21
whose precondition is supposedly the rejection of the medieval com-
promise between ancient thought and Christianity. And the seventeenth
century is expressly the century of modernisms in the sense that all the
future forms of Catholic modernism are present in it (in Leibniz and
Vico we already see the traits of a different historical perspective: some-
thing has been lost in the philosophy that broke with tradition; among

21 Clearly, I am speaking of modernism in a sense unrelated to the modernism

of the beginning of our century (or of today). Or better, it has a distant relationship
because, for secular historians, every attempt at a modern Christian philosophy must
end, when carried to its ultimate consequences, in a break with Catholic orthodoxy.
322 The Problem of Atheism

many others, we also find the germs of future reactionary Romanticism).

The question of the genesis of modernism seems fairly simple, and so
does the question of organizing its forms into types. Every stage of the
development of secular thought cannot but break with a previous secular
position. Thus, the new science breaks with the Scholastics and also
with the thought of the Renaissance. Mistaking this secondary adversary
for the primary and essential one is what originates modernisms; which,
precisely because of this origin, are unable – and this confirms their
illusion – to establish a continuity with the earlier tradition of Christian
religious thought. At the lowest level there is the “Mersenne illusion,”22
which is naïve but not naïve enough not to reoccur constantly (even
today) on the occasion of particular developments of scientific thought.
In the form this illusion took in Mersenne, the new science has an
apologetic significance in as much as it is a break with magical thought.
This latter, in order to deny the miracle, naturalized it, and in order to
do so had to deny the reality of natural laws; physics based on laws will
be much easier to reconcile with the existence of miracles since they
can only be presented as exceptions to stable natural laws. The new
science must also break with naturalistic metaphysics; corresponding
to this break there is the Christian interpretation of the “Idealism of
knowledge,” which supposedly makes possible a philosophy that fulfills
the scholastic requirement of the preambula fidei, while simultaneously
realizing the Christian character of being a “philosophy of interiority.”
Idealism must be joined with personalism in order not to turn into
naturalism: in the 1600s this is the Malebranche type, and it is also what
later will be the Rosmini type. A third type, finally, is the recognition of
the contradiction between modern thought and Christianity, albeit
maintaining the modern idea of reason and the condemnation of
returns,23 that is, the Pascal type, what later will be the Kierkegaard
type: a growing denunciation of the delusions of “Christian philoso-
phies.” In the centuries after the 1600s, each one of these forms would
be left behind: in the 1700s, the idea of the “Christian scientist”; in the
1800s, the formulation of Idealism in terms of a Christian philosophy

22 See the splendid book by R. Lenoble, Mersenne ou la naissance du mecanisme

(Paris: Vrin, 1943).
23 Or affirming a return, going back past Augustinianism itself, to pure biblical
thought.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 323

open to the transcendent; in the 1900s, the last line of defence in terms
of existential thought.
Next to the idea that modern philosophy is secular, there is the com-
plementary idea that the Counter-Reformation had a practical nature,
as definitively formulated by Croce. Recall:

What was defended by that movement … was a historically given institution,

without going back, as the Renaissance and the Reformation had done, to
mankind’s eternal sources in order to create new thoughts and new spiritual
and moral attitudes. The Counter-Reformation picked up what it needed and
what benefited it, everywhere: from humanism, classical culture; from the
politicians of the Renaissance, the raison d’État and the prudential arts; also
from the ideals of the Renaissance, the care of worldly things and practical
industry, preferred to contemplative life; from the Reformation, the needed
correction in customs and in ecclesiastical discipline; and so on. It brought
only one contribution of its own, as a directing and cohesive element: shrewd-
ness … The intrinsically political nature of its work, which subordinated
everything to the goal to be attained, explains the intellectual and moral
aridity that accompanied it … [I]t lacked moral inventiveness, the ability to
create new and progressive forms of ethical life.24

This is, in very general outline, the most common secular interpreta-
tion today. As a confirmation, let us consider the famous article that a
renowned historian who represents the type of the pure rationalist (i.e.,
the non-dialectic rationalist, in the sense used by Goldmann), Émile
Bréhier, wrote as a sort of conclusion to his history of philosophy, “Y
a-t-il une philosophie Chrétienne?”25 Let us look especially at what he
writes about modern philosophy. In his judgment, in the 1600s an

24 Benedetto Croce, Storia dell’età barocca in Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1929), 15–17
[TN: my translation]. Notice that this historical conception is, or was until a few years
ago, generally the most accepted: by secular people of all orientations, by Protestants,
and, among Catholics, by modernists (see “modernism” as “archaism” in Buonaiuti).
Regarding Marxists, see, for example, Henri Lefebvre, Pascal, 2 vols. (Paris: Nagel,
1949–54), a book that can be of some interest in helping one to understand its author’s
(a former student of Blondel) progress towards Marxism, but for no other reason.
25 In Revue de métaphysique et de morale 38, no. 2 (1931): 133–62. The quotations
are found on pages 151, 157, 159, and 161. The fact that the reference to Feuerbach
is not accompanied by any mention of Marx is significant in understanding the
author’s brand of rationalism.
324 The Problem of Atheism

attempt was made to synthesize faith and rationalism, in which Christians

claimed to turn the weapon of reason against the libertines and “wanted
reason, consulted impartially, to get to establish … the fundamental
truths of Christianity.” As far as intentions are concerned, the Descartes
of the Meditations can also be included in this attempt. But Pascal was
not deceived about the apologetic meaning of this quest, and the
Enlightenment confirmed his judgment, understanding the true spirit
of the Cartesian opus, in which metaphysics is only one part of a larger
picture oriented towards physics and towards practice. In the nineteenth
century, the Restoration went hand in hand with a Christian philosophy
that took the form of a sociology of order, traditionalism; but its true
outcome was Comte’s positivism, which “re-established all the social
values of Catholicism (meaning by social value its unifying power)
without preserving anything of its dogma.” Hegel made an attempt at
Christian philosophy, but “just like the Christianity of De Maistre and
Bonald concludes in Comte’s sociocracy, Hegel’s philosophy concludes
in that of Feuerbach. From De Maistre’s Christianity, Comte keeps the
idea of the social necessity of a dogma that unifies the spirits. From
Hegelianism, Feuerbach keeps the idea of the infinite potency that lies
in man, and contains within itself the immanent reason of all its mani-
festations throughout history.” More recently, there was Blondel’s
attempt, but “it is a matter of apologetics and not of philosophy; it is a
matter of introducing and defending Christian doctrine, regarded as
proven and verified in other ways, and even of making it desirable. But
these benefits are not arguments in its favor; why should we believe that
reality is such that our ‘deep will’ must be satisfied?” If he had been
more of an expert in Italian philosophy, Bréhier could have also talked
about the history of Vichianism until Croce and of the transition from
Gioberti and, in a sense, from Blondel to Gentile.
There is no point, after all, in multiplying the examples. Who has not
heard again and again that Leibniz is interesting because of his meth-
odological innovations, like the distinction between truths of reason
and truths of fact, the principle of sufficient reason, the law of the
indiscernibles, the theory of small perceptions, and so on rather than
his theodicy, the theory of eternal truths, or that of pre-established
harmony? Or that Vico is interesting because of his founding of the
sciences of the human world, the interpretation of myths and ancient
fables, the investigation of primitive societies and so on rather than his
metaphysics? That these Christian thinkers of the 1600s have two faces,
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 325

one turned to the future and one to the past, and thus conjoined their
effective investigations with antiquated attempts to construct a system
in the spirit of the Counter-Reformation? And that, in fact, these
attempts were hardly persuasive in their own epoch, given that all of
them, Descartes and Malebranche, Leibniz and Vico, died in isolation?
On the other hand, who does not know works that for a long time were
regarded as classics, like Brunschvicg’s studies of Descartes, Russell’s of
Leibniz, Croce’s of Vico, all directed at extracting the living aspect out
of the artificial construction?
The questions that matter are, instead: (1) What is the significance
of this view in determining theoretical orientations themselves? (2) Why
until now, in effect, has this view not been problematized? and (3) In
what sense is it problematizable, and what reasons today make this
problematization necessary?
About the first question, I believe we must say that today, after histori-
cism and neo-positivism and the critique of evidences, the fundamental
argument that every kind of secularism can bring up in its favour is
precisely this: the existence of a historical fact that is, at the same time,
a “philosophical fact,” namely, a world and a thought posterior to the
breaking up of Christendom or to the facts that accompanied it chrono-
logically – the broadening of the historical and geographical horizon
and the collapse of the Mediterranean-centred world, the Copernican
revolution of the new science – which can only be explained as a process
towards the radical denial of transcendence in a religious sense. It is
not hard to show, for instance, that in neo-positivism there is still,
implicit, the conviction of the truth of Comte’s theory of three stages,
which is in fact the true soul of positivism (and not the scientific spirit);
and it is not hard to show that, if the investigations promoted by neo-
positivism are separated from this conviction, they are amenable to
taking another meaning.
You will say: this observation may be valid in reference to the philosophy
of history and its theological substructure; in reference to the attempts
by both Hegel and Comte to establish a meaning and an ultimate end
of history, to repeat, somehow, Bossuet’s attempt, by translating in secular
terms a theology of history and constructing a new sacred history, with
the presupposition of being able to capture the totality of history; in
reference to the secular translations of Joachimism, from Lessing
onwards. Now, the orientation of today’s historical thought, which does
not at all presume to assign a goal or an end to history, is very different.
326 The Problem of Atheism

The philosophies of history established themselves on the foundation

of a philosophy that was thought to be definitive, whereas today’s histori-
cism is precisely the renunciation of this definitiveness. However, this
objection does not seem relevant to me: also from the standpoint of
historical truth one can say that certain positions have been left behind
for good because they were tied to a historical situation that cannot
return; and in historicism one cannot give any other criterion for the
adequacy of a philosophy than its ability to place historically other world-
views, putting in their right place the truths they affirmed, a task that,
supposedly, these other world views are incapable of performing.
The fact that the general periodization schemes formed at the time
of the philosophies of history does not at all negate the fact that they
can also be thought, and actually are thought, by those most opposed
to the philosophy of history. If anything, it raises the undoubtedly impor-
tant question whether the historicist critiques of the philosophy of
history did not form within a vision already determined by a philosophy
of history: which, at least in Croce’s case, seems undeniable.26
Moving on to the second question, we must observe that, among all
concepts of historical periodization, the equation of modernity and

26 We know the criticism that the “non-definitiveness of history,” as Croce under-

stands it, ultimately dissimulates the affirmation of the definitiveness of a precise his-
torical period (Europe from 1870 to 1915, the “age of distincts”). In other words, his
critique of the philosophy of history dissimulates one particular philosophy of history.
In Lukácsian terms we could say that his reform of Hegelianism consisted in going
from direct apology for a historical order to indirect apology.
But this is not what I want to linger on now. I think we should focus, instead, on
his declaration in “Contributo a una critica di me stesso”: “I quickly settled down in a
sort of unconscious immanentism, without feeling directly the question of transcen-
dence in the first place, and thus finding no difficulty in conceiving the relationship
between thought and being” (Etica e politica [Bari: Laterza, 1945], 397). As a psycho-
logical attitude, there is nothing to say. However, in his philosophical activity, this
attitude was translated into acceptance of a vision of history, whereby the question of
transcendence was by now definitively surpassed, and his whole philosophy formed
within this vision, which not only was not problematized but also was affirmed to be
non-problematizable. Croce was indeed the most intransigent adversary of the revi-
sion of what he called the functional concepts of historical periodization.
Now I would like to suggest that, from Croce’s own point of view – which holds that
thought is alive when it forms in reference to a specific historical situation – the novelty
of the situation imposes such problematization. His philosophy was the only one that came
together with Marxism as its first and essential adversary. It failed precisely because
within its vision of history it is Marxism that is right.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 327

secularity is the one that has endured the most; and not because it is
objectively the most resistant but simply because it has been the least
problematized, as one can easily verify by considering how small is the
critical literature concerning it.27 In this regard we just need to think
what a different fate befell the concept that used to be its counterpart,
that of the middle ages; or those that were viewed as the transition
period between it and the modern age, humanism and the Renaissance;
or the Protestant Reformation itself.
The fundamental reason for this seems to be the following: the equa-
tion of modernity and secularity seems to be the only point of agreement
between the two major visions of history of the first half of the nineteenth
century, upon which the frameworks of later historiography depend:
that of German Idealism (and of its Marxist inversion) and that of
Catholic Romanticism (which in its inversion gave rise to the historical
perspective of Comtian positivism).
According to the vision of Catholic Romanticism, the modern age
is a crisis against which we need to restore the European spiritual unity
that was destroyed three centuries ago.28 Supposedly, this crisis began
when nominalism prevailed in late Scholasticism; it prepared Luther’s
psychologism, of which the doubt and the cogito of Descartes are the
philosophical replica. It is very easy to spot the symmetry between this
historical vision and that of Hegel and those who depend on it; accord-
ing to this philosophy of history, too, the various spiritual products of
the modern age form a consistent process, except that, of course, the
process does not move towards fullness but towards catastrophe. Such
vision also conditions the origin of the new Thomism, which must be
found in the denunciation of the solidarity between this vision and the
theoretical affirmation of Ontologism, based on the consideration that
Ontologism, too, is modern. The appeal to Thomism has its first foun-
dation in a consideration drawn from history: that it is the only

27 See F. Lombardi, Nascita del mondo moderno (Asti: Arethusa, 1953), 49: “It is
symptomatic that despite all the past and present use of the word ‘modern’ people
have not taken the trouble to make this concept undergo an exhaustive analysis.”
28 We find the first explicit formulation of this vision of history in de Bonald; and
its most rigorous exposition, perhaps, in Gioberti’s Introduzione allo studio della filosofia
(Venice: Fontana, 1854). I already mentioned in the Introduction the important role
that reflection upon the French Revolution played in the formation of this and other
historical visions of the 1800s.
328 The Problem of Atheism

philosophy that was not extended into the modern age. Certainly, the
subsequent development of neo-Thomism entails the abandonment
of the “archeological utopia” and the fuller and fuller acquisition of
historicity. However, given the premise, this is done through the idea
of a unitary process of modern philosophy, which, having reached its
endpoint, must turn into Thomistic realism by virtue of a dialectic
dynamics whereby it cannot stop at either phenomenism or Idealism.
Thus, apart from the final inversion, the secular visions of the history
of modern philosophy are not, in their general features, contested by
neo-Thomism.29

29 Regarding the decisive role of this historical perspective in the development of

Catholic thought in the 1800s, from traditionalism to Ontologism and later neo-
Thomism, see L. Foucher, La philosophie catholique en France au XIX siècle, avant la renais-
sance thomiste et dans son rapport avec elle (Paris: Vrin, 1955). As the idea of the
“anti-modern” carried on to its most rigorous consequences, this perspective is very
visible in the initiators of neo-Thomism – for example, in Balmès and in Fr Liberatore
(in whose book La conoscenza intellettuale [Rome: Civiltà Cattolica, 1857] his tenden-
tious, but intelligent, definition of the modernity of Ontologism is very important).
But consider Maritain himself (and here I will say right away that we must recognize,
against facile criticisms, his outstanding value as the rigorous philosophical system-
atizer of one of the greatest spiritual experiences straddling the eighteenth and the
nineteenth centuries – that of Lèon Bloy). His agreement with the modern world
maintains the opposition to Descartes and, essentially, the complete devaluation of
modern philosophy; it is an agreement, in a certain sense, with the “anti-modern” fer-
ments of the modern. As for his progressivism, it is to be explained by his fine sensitiv-
ity to current history, which led him to break away from the traditional anti-modern
position of simultaneously condemning liberalism and socialism because of the pro-
Fascist attitudes to which this idea inevitably led (not by chance the most important
recent disciple of Donoso Cortès has been Carl Schmitt). Regarding the type of
thought that, instead, sees in modern philosophy a sort of circular process that brings
it back to Thomism, one of its most rigorous and intelligent expressions has been the
assessment of Actualism by G. Bontadini. In my judgment it is inadequate, at least in
the form it took in the past, due to the thesis, which I certainly could not make my
own, that Idealism is the essence of modern philosophy. The presence of the Bonaldian
historical scheme in the work of Leo XIII, and especially in the encyclical Aeterni Patris,
has been highlighted, I believe for the first time, in Brunschvicg’s Progrès de la conscience
dans la philosophie occidentale t. 2 (Paris: Alcan, 1927), 502 – somewhat tendentiously,
for sure, but to a large extent correctly, as clarified in the book by Fr. Foucher.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 329

3. INEVITABILITY OF THE CARTESIAN BEGINNING

Let us now move on to the third question. You may object that it is ill-
posed, for the simple reason that every vision of the historical process
is always relative to a philosophy. I will now completely set aside how
archaic is this idea that one needs to have a philosophy as a condition
to practise history of philosophy. Nor will I linger on the annihilating
effect that such a position has on history (which is reduced to a search
for genealogies, to a logical sequence of necessarily disincarnate ideas
because they are cut off from the real questions that led to them and
from the personality of the philosopher who thought them, and become
“no longer relevant stages,” thus rejecting what is expressly of interest
to the historian – knowledge of the other as other and so on) because
these criticisms have been very well articulated already.
What I am interested in is showing, instead, that the idea of the secu-
larity of modern philosophy, in whatever manner it may be proposed
(either Idealist, or Marxist, or positivist, or by the Enlightenment, or
even neo-Thomist) contains a sequence of obligatory points. They are:
(1) the Cartesian beginning of modern philosophy; (2) the radical
opposition between Descartes and Pascal; (3) the failure of a new scho-
lastics, founded on the agreement between Christian thought and
Cartesianism, in Malebranche; (4) the lack of awareness, in Vico, of his
real place in history, so that his philosophy exemplifies most perfectly
his theory of the heterogenesis of ends.
Here a remark is necessary. The first point is necessarily obligatory
for every reconstruction of modern philosophy whereas the other three
are proper to the secular perspective. And they are the essential and
necessary points for this vision, so that we can say that the question of
whether modern philosophy is secular or not can be answered by study-
ing the philosophy of the 1600s. Because if, in fact, Descartes is opposed
to Pascal and (regarding the essential elements of his thought) to
Malebranche, then necessarily Descartes continues in the Enlightenment.
Pascal becomes the isolated witness of a new civilization that can no
longer be traced back to transcendent Christianity; Malebranche
becomes the proof of a catastrophe, that of an attempt at modern
scholastics, which later will also sweep away Gioberti and Rosmini; Vico,
cut off from any continuity with antecedent Christian thought, can be
continued only in a historicism of the Romantic or Enlightenment kind.
330 The Problem of Atheism

Afterwards, there will only be room in Catholic thought for either aca-
demic or exigential philosophies, or for constructions that are actually
practical acts, in defence of an institution.
Let us consider the first point. It may seem that this idea of the
Cartesian beginning merely exemplifies that love for plastic figures that
is proper to the philosophy of history (dismissing authorities, the doubt;
entrusting oneself only to reason, the cogito) and that there is nothing
more anti-historical than identifying the new principle, of which sub-
sequent philosophy is allegedly just the development, in the cogito, sepa-
rated from the rest of Descartes’s work. Nor can one forget Bergson’s
irony when he evokes the caricature of Cartesianism as “armoire aux
possibles,” whence all forms of modern philosophy derive by simple
logical development.30
It is undeniable that the Cartesian beginning was often understood
in this way; but it is amenable to an altogether different meaning,
which I think is ineliminable, and whose truth is not diminished in
the least by having sometimes been combined with a caricature. In
order to understand it, it is helpful to start from the feature that confers
to Descartes’s philosophy an unparalleled singularity. First of all, it is the
only one among the great philosophies that can only be thought of as
a beginning and not also as an outcome: this leads it to set itself in opposi-
tion to past history and to present itself as new not just in intention, like
Bacon’s philosophy, but in execution. Furthermore: referring to
Descartes as beginner – and consequently distinguishing two aspects of
his thought, of which only one is true – is necessarily part of the histori-
cal horizon inherent to every modern philosophy as awareness of its
own situation. The examples are well known; I will just recall a few to
show that every modern philosophy encountered Descartes precisely
at the instant when it affirmed itself as modern, when it resisted the
danger of letting itself be reabsorbed by the past, be it scholasticism, or
“pagan ontology,” or naturalistic metaphysics in general.
Indeed, consider the aspect whereby the originality of Descartes’s
philosophy lies in its proposing itself as a philosophy of freedom that
is not merely a philosophy about freedom; and consider the consequent
foundation of personalism (as coincidence of the first truth with the
affirmation of my own transcendence with respect to the world) and of

30 Henri Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant (Paris: Alcan, 1934), 127.

 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 331

theocentric humanism (I cannot affirm myself as a reality that transcends

the world without affirming God): there is in nuce all French spiritual-
ism until the “philosophie de l’esprit.” We also find in Cartesianism – in
a form that is implicit, but implicit only to a point – another element
of subsequent French thought: the idea of a Christian philosophy by
essence – that is, a philosophy that rejects the Thomistic and humanistic
continuity of Hellenic thought and Christian thought, while still affirm-
ing itself as a philosophy. But, on the other hand, all past forms of secular
thought can take new life and become modern by grafting Cartesian
thought onto themselves. Thus, libertinism will be able to refashion
itself as the Enlightenment by combining with an aspect of Cartesianism,
and Renaissance naturalism will become Spinozism by combining with
Cartesianism; where in both cases the Cartesian moment serves as a
mediator between trends that until then had been opposed to each
other, in the first case libertinism and iusnaturalism, in the second
Renaissance naturalism and the predestinationism of the Reformation.
And it has been pointed out that even the French materialism of the
eighteenth century, in its novel aspect, refers to Descartes. Thus, modern
empiricism can be born in Locke by combining Cartesianism with the
previous English tradition; and the stages of empiricist thought curiously
repeat, in a transposition that radically changes their meaning, the
stages of Cartesian thought (Malebranche-Berkeley; Pascal-Hume;
Arnauld-Reid). Or, regarding the presence of Cartesianism in classical
German Idealism, think of Kant’s recovery of the analysis of mathemati-
cal judgment against Humean skepsis, after Cartesianism’s defeat by
the latter, or think of the curious analogy of adversaries (Descartes
against Suarezian scholastics and libertine skepsis; Kant against Wolfean
scholastics and Humean skepsis, or the abandonment in both of them
of “general ontology”); or think of Kant’s recovery of the theme of the
cogito that accompanies all our representations. German Idealism can
be viewed as a radical development of the Cartesian idealistic theme,
which ends up eliminating personalism. But even in Hegel, who sur-
passes Spinozism (in Schelling), and thereby surpasses the radical form
of “pagan” ontology via the consideration of man viewed as negativity
with respect to nature, we can see a recovery of the Cartesian theme of
freedom explicating itself as negativity. Hegel’s quest for a “Christian
philosophy” presupposes a historical horizon in which Descartes’s phi-
losophy appears to be the “first attempt at a Christian philosophy”; so
that Hegel’s philosophy can be presented as a recovery of Cartesian
332 The Problem of Atheism

themes, after having already taken for granted Spinoza’s victory over
Descartes; so that the affirmation of the humanistic theme must take
the historicist form, excluding the personalist motif. No less influenced
by the Cartesian way of posing the question of realism is the modern
one, not only, for example, in Arnauld and Reid but also in certain
forms of neo-Thomism, which are doomed to defeat precisely because
they have accepted framing the question in terms such that the victory
of Idealism is necessary: in brief, they have accepted the reduction of
realism to thingish realism,31 with the consequent, correlative appear-
ance of solipsistic themes and of the theory of common sense, in its
modern meaning.32 To refer to more recent developments, consider
the revival of the reduction of psychologism to skepticism in Husserlian
neo-Cartesianism, or the presence, in the theme of the free creation of
eternal truths, of the break between essence and existence,33 so that
we can say that the Cartesian crisis of theology prefigures the terms in
which the crisis of anthropology presents itself today. Moreover, every
modern philosophy constitutes itself within the historical horizon deter-
mined by Cartesianism. Indeed, if we look at what is being excluded,
Descartes marks the beginning of the outdatedness of Thomism – as
the only philosophy destined not to be extended (whereas every other
trend from the past, be it religious or secular, takes new life after
Cartesianism) – which seems to define, by negation, modern philosophy;
which is also, in a sense to be discussed, the outdatedness of Christian
humanism. This is why the “anti-Descartes” theme is essential to the
trends of thought that denounce the modern as a crisis.
Nor is it an option to replace “the beginning of modern philosophy
in the thought of Descartes” with the more generic “beginning of mod-
ern philosophy in the new science.” This thesis has often been advanced
by reducing the distance between the position of Descartes and that
of Bacon and Galileo; or, sometimes, by contrasting the modernity of
Galileo’s scientific position with the, still scholastic, idea of science
entertained by Descartes (unity of science and philosophy, like in
Aristotelianism; consequent ontologization of physics, dogmatism, etc.)

31 [TN] Cosale in the original, a made-up word derived from cosa (thing).
32 On this, see Étienne Gilson, Réalisme thomiste et critique de la connaissance (Paris:
Vrin, 1947).
33 To mention two opposite extremes of the philosophy of existence, see the
importance that this theme has for Shestov and Sartre.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 333

and making Descartes the initiator, more than of modern philosophy,

of the metaphysicalism that remains in it, or of the “subjectivist error”
from which, supposedly, modern philosophy ought to free itself in order
to realize itself as effective empiricism. This attempt would be valid if
one could explain the philosophy of Descartes based on his science;
but the quest to do so has failed since nobody has ever been able to
establish a necessary link between his metaphysical construction and
his scientific one.34 The physical-positivist interpretation finds itself
forced to deny altogether the originality of his strictly philosophical
thought, regarding it as the mere result of an erosion of the traditional
theses in order to make them agree with the novelty of his science; a
thesis that has been shown to be indefensible. In actuality, Descartes
begins modern philosophy precisely in as much as his position is unique
in the general area of the thinkers of the new science; in as much as his
philosophy can be regarded as a “metaphysical accident” in the history
of mechanistic physics.35 His uniqueness is this: he views his science as
an element that can only find total justification in a system that surro-
gates the Aristotelian-Thomist construction, better realizing the unity
of reason and faith and the continuity of metaphysics and physics that
the latter had undertaken, with the ontologization of physics that I
mentioned as the inevitable outcome. So that, paradoxically, we must
say: being less modern than others in his scientific mindset, Descartes
begins modern philosophy expressly in the attempt to achieve a synthesis
whose flavour is still close to the Middle Ages, on which those other
thinkers had given up. If some outcomes of modern philosophy look
like radical extensions of Baconism and Galileism, it is nonetheless true
that such extensions could only be reached by exploring more deeply
questions that arose in Cartesian philosophy and not in those of Bacon
and Galileo.
Hence the importance of this question: Where can we detect the
continuation of the critical and new aspect of Descartes’s thought (need-
less to say, “continuity” means something other than “necessary filia-
tion”)? In Spinoza? In Bayle and the Enlightenment? In Locke? In Kant?
In the radical development of subjectivist Idealism? In idealistic

34 For a strong affirmation of this impossibility, which in fact has already been
asserted many times, see F. Alquié, La découverte métaphysique de l’homme chez Descartes
(Paris: PUF, 1950), 9–10.
35 [TN] Del Noce is quoting Robert Lenoble, Mersenne, 614.
334 The Problem of Atheism

Ontologism? Or in Pascal? This latter is my thesis, which I will try to

outline in its general features in the pages that follow.
Regarding Goldmann, I already pointed out the necessity he faces –
given his interpretation of Marxism, in order to keep it from being
absorbed into different positions – to distinguish to the utmost dialectic
rationalism from mere rationalism (in whatever form it expresses itself,
metaphysical or critical) and, thus, to insert between the rationalist
conception and the dialectic conception a third position, the “tragic
vision,” which is logically superior to simple rationalism and susceptible
to being surpassed only by dialectic rationalism; so that, curiously, the
Pascal problem becomes fundamental to both the Catholic revision and
the Marxist revision of the history of modern philosophy.

4. THE CONCEPT OF CATHOLIC REFORMATION

Let us observe that the shift from the concept of Counter-Reformation

as a defensive reaction to that of Catholic Reformation, which instead
underscores initiative and innovation, clearly interferes with the inter-
pretation of the philosophy of the 1600s.
Indeed, the negative concept of Counter-Reformation cannot be left
behind merely on the basis of the Counter-Reformation’s organizational
and pedagogical features: its merits in determining dogmas, in educa-
tion and in the moral discipline of the clergy, in the works of charity
and welfare, in missionary activity, and so on. Nor, at least in the first
place, can it be left behind by highlighting its saints and its heroes. All
of this can be easily accepted by the supporters of the usual secular
interpretation.
Rather, it is a matter of showing that its primary intuition, whence all
its manifestations set forth, albeit with contrasting theological interpre-
tations – namely, the correlation between the Protestant negation of
man, of his freedom and of his merits, and the degradation of God to
mere irrational power36 – is a true idea and not the ideological cover

36 In fact, this theme unites the most antithetical Catholic theological trends of
that age, Molinism and Jansenism. A certain reading of Pascal’s Provincial Letters, cer-
tainly not reflective of the intentions of the author, and an interpretation of the his-
tory of Port-Royal, as proof of the necessary break between authentic Christianity and
the new Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation, have been decisively important in
the elaboration of the negative concept of Counter-Reformation. Conversely, an
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 335

for a practical will and a compromise. It seems to me that, from the

historical perspective, a precious element in solving this problem is
answering the question whether such an idea was or was not generative
of rational values; that is, applying the same method that Gilson has
used for medieval thought. Now, four philosophers of the first rank,
who are also counted as representatives of modern philosophy, belong
because of their faith to the Catholic Reformation, determined chrono-
logically as the period in which Catholicism had as its essential adversar-
ies Protestantism and the offshoots of Renaissance naturalism, and not
yet the Enlightenment. They are precisely Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche,
and Vico. We can wonder: What is the relationship between the ques-
tions that mark the Catholic Reformation and what is new and original
in their thought? The standard judgment on this matter is known, but
is it well founded?

5. GOLDMANN ON DESCARTES AND PASCAL

Let us now go back to Goldmann’s thesis. It contains three paradoxes

that, at the very least, cannot be proven on the basis of the texts: that
the Pensées are not an apology of the Christian religion but a “solitary
dialogue”; that it is not only difficult de facto but also impossible de jure
to look for an order by right of the Pensées because the natural expression
of Pascal’s thought was, by virtue of the tragic vision, in paradoxes and
fragments for which the search for an order by right is essential but
defeat in this attempt is no less essential; finally, the reduction of belief
to parier. Although unprovable by themselves, these paradoxes follow
from the idea that only the “significant structure” of the tragic vision
can account for Pascal’s thought; then, under this hypothesis, they

exceptionally important document – because it is the only case in which a Protestant

philosopher encountered the central theme of the Catholic Reformation – must be
recognized in Leibniz’s experience in his encounter with the thought of the Jesuit
theologians during his polemics against Spinoza. Regarding the possible directions of
this research, which to a large extent has already been conducted by various scholars,
but about which there is still something to add, see page 58n35 in my work “La crisi
del Molinismo in Descartes,” in Metafisica ed esperienza religiosa, Quaderni dell’Archivio di
Filosofia 35 (1956): 39–77. But we know the current historical assessment has distin-
guished two Leibnizes – one bent on the desperate enterprise of restoring Europe’s
religious and political unity, the other turned towards the future – which explains why
scholars have rarely paid attention to this encounter.
336 The Problem of Atheism

acquire enough power of verisimilitude.37 Hence, the discussion must

concern the legitimacy of applying this structure to Pascal’s thought.
First of all, it is very peculiar that in the whole book there is not even
one reference to Nietzsche – that is, to he who is commonly regarded,
and felt himself to be, the tragic thinker par excellence. This omission
is not accidental because the concept of tragic vision, in the form
described by Goldmann, cannot be applied to him. Apparently one
must conclude that the Pascal-Nietzsche question is a problem that
should not be posed. But does that not set aside a whole cluster of
extremely relevant problems? Namely, whether the fullness of the tragic
moment is found in the history of atheism and not in that of religious
thought; whether ignoring this problem is a sign that for Marxist thought
it is impossible to really place, and thus to surpass,38 Nietzsche by inte-
grating him into the history of philosophy, and this to the extent that
the Nietzschean stage of atheism expresses the criticism of the transition
from negative atheism to positive atheism that Marx had attempted.
Shall we say that there is a tragic moment in the history of religious
thought, represented by Pascal, and a tragic moment in the history of
atheistic thought, represented by Nietzsche? But in that way we would
depart from the exact sense of the idea of tragic vision proposed by
Goldmann, in which the “hidden God,” present and absent, is a neces-
sary element. Because this is the thing: if we stopped at saying that
Pascal, because of his anti-humanism, carried to the limit the tragic
aspects of Christian thought (he focused the attention on sin and
Redemption rather than on Creation and Incarnation), we would say
something very true (although obvious) but altogether different from
what Goldmann affirms –that we must understand Pascal’s Christianity
starting from the tragic vision and not the other way around.

37 Regarding the reduction of believing to parier, Goldmann himself has granted

that it is a plausible hypothesis but not absolutely indisputable (see Recherches dialec-
tiques, 344n1). See also, in Cahiers de Royaumont, the discussion, revolving mostly
around this issue, which followed his presentation.
38 A document of this could be the chapter devoted by Lukàcs, in his well-known
work titled The Destruction of Reason (London: The Merlin Press, 1980), to Nietzsche
“the founder of irrationalism.” But here the discussion would have to be very long
because it should address the reasons why it is impossible for Marxism to apply to
Nietzsche the criterion of surpassing-and-integrating, thus isolating an aspect of truth
in his thought.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 337

I will try to develop my critique of this interpretation from a particular

angle, which I think succeeds in capturing it and hitting it in the essen-
tial. Its core points are preserving the traditional thesis that there is a
pure opposition between Descartes and Pascal – an opposition that is
actually stretched to the maximum, so that Descartes represents the full
expression of the “rationalist vision” and Pascal that of the “tragic
vision” – and affirming that it is impossible to go back, after Pascal, to
the Augustinian doctrine of the presence of God – a thesis that is a bit
out of sight but still present. If these points were invalidated, this whole
vision of modern philosophy – with its three essential forms – rational-
ism, tragic vision, and dialectic thought (and the overcoming of the
tragic vision in the latter) – would be irremediably undermined.
The terms in which Pascal formulated his opposition to Descartes are
very well known: “I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he
would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make
Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no
further need of God.”39 According to the standard interpretation this
passage means: Pascal recognized, alone among his contemporaries,
that the Cartesian proof of the existence of God is actually an atheistic
proof; his God is actually a God of the philosophers, the foundation for
a physics meant to ensure man’s domination of the world; his proof is a
proof that comes after a doubt so radical that it extends to the super-
natural in the Bible itself, so that it is able to completely separate the
philosophical God from the religious God. Pascal grasped the novelty
of Descartes behind the traditional formulas, and in the novelty of
Descartes he grasped the “secular” novelty of the modern (i.e., a form
of atheism that comes “after” Christianity).
In fact, this idea of the radical opposition between Descartes and
Pascal is an obligatory step in the secular interpretation of modern
philosophy, which must identify a secular principle as the critical and
new element of Cartesian thought for the reasons I have already given.
Indeed, let us consider the common interpretation of Pascal in secular
historiography: he is first of all the ante litteram critic of all subsequent
trascendentalist interpretations, ranging from neo-scholasticism to prag-
matism and religious existentialism; he is the one who denounced the
non-religious nature of all attempts at a Catholic restoration that have

39 Pascal, Pensées, frag. 77.

338 The Problem of Atheism

come forth after the advent of the new science, striking down those that
had already developed and anticipating later ones. He is such because
he wrecked the scholastic ideal of Christian philosophy – as a work of
adaptation to join a theology given by Revelation with a philosophy also
given after Aristotle and Plotinus – by criticizing every natural theology
presented as a rational introduction to the revealed truths, and all related
attitudes of thought. His renewal of Augustine’s polemic against Pelagius
ended up involving all the aspects of Augustinianism that had continued
into Medieval philosophy or that had manifested themselves in the
innatistic or ontologistic aspects of Descartes’s thought. The reaction
that in the Provinciales had targeted the Jesuitic compromise between
Christianity and the changed spirit of the times, in which the sense of
man’s sinfulness had waned, in the Pensées ends up attacking Cartesianism,
humanism, and scholasticism40 – in short, the idea of “Christian phi-
losophy” in all its forms. The criticism of the “modern world” applies to
everything in tradition that prepared it. After such a collapse of the
metaphysical proofs, the only avenue that remains open to him is the his-
torical one since, on the other hand, because of Port-Royalist theology,
Pascal ignores the Romantic routes of subjectivistic fideism and religious
pragmatism (which are tied from Rousseau until James to an “apotheosis
of the I,” which is the exact opposite of his thought). Indeed, he endeav-
ours “to bring to the proof of our supernatural past the same scruple
for complete exactness, the same care to gather the opposing reasons,
to foresee them, to overcome them, that he had already put to work in
order to bring into focus and highlight the causality of nature.”41 But
here his investigation enters into a loop because the divine inspiration
of scripture, which should be the object of his proof, is instead its pre-
supposition. So Pascal’s true contribution supposedly lies in the critique
of traditional metaphysical and theological thought, not in his historical
apologetics, and the true founder of biblical exegesis was not he but
Spinoza. In short, there is a peculiar heterogenesis of ends: the Pensées
were written in view of an apologetics of Christian religion against the

40 If one tries and compares the pages that Brunschvicg devotes to Pascal in Le
progrès de la conscience, 2nd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), 156–60,
with those on St Thomas (108–11) one gets the impression that he sees in Pascal the
exact anti-thesis of St Thomas and that his great love for the former is exactly propor-
tional to his aversion to the latter.
41 Leon Brunschvicg, Pascal (Paris: Vrin, 1953), 77–8.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 339

libertines; in fact, they are still of interest in as much as they oppose the
traditional conceptions of religious philosophy and they criticize in
advance the subsequent ones. Their purpose was to focus the attention
on sacred history as the place where certain proofs of the supernatural
are found. In effect, through his critique of “Christian philosophy,” he
outlined in implicit form the historical vision that subsequent secular
thought has made clear.
Clearly we have here an absorption of the substance of the Pensées into
the destructive work of the Provinciales. And it is on this precise point,
how to account for the specific character of the Pensées, that Goldmann
intends to go beyond Brunschvicg’s interpretation, which he presents
as the highest degree that rationalism can reach in understanding Pascal.
While keeping the general premise of secular interpretations – which
can be defined as follows: “only those who are not in the least tempted
by transcendent Christianity can truly understand Pascal; because Pascal
is essentially the destroyer of every precedent and subsequent line of
‘Christian philosophy,’ and this destructive position is his solitude” –
Goldmann thinks that only dialectic thought in its Marxist form can
account for the Pensées, appropriating Pascal’s criticism of rationalism
itself. Curiously, if you think that Brunschvicg understood God to be the
infinite, spontaneous progress of conscience through history, we could
categorize his interpretation and Goldmann’s as the consistent deistic
and atheistic answers, respectively, to Pascal’s argument.
Regarding the second point, we can refer to a very insightful remark
by Baudin, which Brunschvicg picked up and extended in what was his
spiritual testament, L’Esprit européen: “Along the whole course of
Augustinian speculation, we can discern the constant presence and
parallel development of two philosophical Augustinianisms, that of the
Ontologism of rational truths, which comes to unfold in Descartes, and
that of the experimentation of religious truths which reaches its climax
in Pascal. They are two different Augustinianisms which generate two
different intuitionisms, that of pure reason and that of the heart.”42
Not only are they different, Brunschvicg adds, but such that in history
they eventually turned out to be incompatible and antagonistic to each
other, and the moment of the break between them was precisely the

42 Leon Brunschvicg, L’Esprit européen (Neuchâtel, Éditions de la Baconnière,

1947), 76–7.
340 The Problem of Atheism

first century of modern philosophy, the 1600s. This break expressed

itself in those two Augustinian Summae: Jansen’s Augustinus and
Ambrosius Victor’s Philosophia christiana, which so displeased the
Jansenists and was so useful,43 instead, to Malebranche. And then above
all in the opposition between Pascal and Malebranche:

Think of Pascal’s dialogue Mystère de Jésus. We cannot conceive of a more vio-

lent contrast than the third of the Méditations chrétiennes in which Malebranche
in his turn makes Jesus speak: “Know that all the spirits are united to me, that
the philosophers, the wicked, the demons themselves, cannot be entirely
separated from me; because if they see some necessary truth, it is in me that
they discover it, because outside of me there is no eternal, immutable, neces-
sary truth” … Whereas according to Pascal the essential core of religion is
the transcendence of the order of faith and charity, which is a supernatural
order, not comparable with the order of spirit and truth, Malebranche’s
Christianity aims at restoring the only order, which is the very order of rea-
son. Malebranche utters the words that seem best suited to upset the doctors
of Port-Royal, taking care, however, to give himself cover with the authority
of St Augustine: “Faith will pass, but intelligence will subsist eternally.”44

Hence we understand why Goldmann’s opposition is above all to

Laporte and his school (Russier, Lewis, Mesnard), who, on the contrary,
incline to affirm the closest proximity of Descartes and Pascal.
Given the importance of this opposition, it is helpful to quote one of
the passages in which Laporte insists most strongly on the closeness
between Descartes and Pascal:

We ask what is the value of Reason. The idea of the Infinite gives us the an-
swer. This idea is the keystone of our rational knowledge. Among our clear
and distinct ideas, it is the one on which all others must rely to give rise to
“true and certain science” and give us possession of immutable truths. But at
the same time it shows us that these truths, like everything that shares in be-
ing, are the work of a reason that dominates them and is not subject to their

43 Arnauld reproached Ambrosius Victor (the oratorian Fr André Martin) “de

ne ramasser que le fatras de saint Augustin, et de laisser les plus beaux morceau”
(Brunschvicg, L’Esprit, 79) [TN: “for taking only St Augustine’s mishmash and leaving
the most beautiful parts”].
44 Brunschvicg, L’Esprit, 79–81.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 341

laws; that consequently our reason draws its light from a principle in which
knowing and acting coincide, and which is still Reason, if you wish, but a
Reason that is heterogeneous and irreducible to ours. So, it is our Reason
that, by reflecting about itself, knows its own limitations. And Descartes
could make Pascal’s sentence his own: “Reason’s last step is the recognition
that there are an infinite number of things that surpass it.” In the “first and
most important of its ideas” reason has the non-problematic but positive
perception of a field of reality about which it proves both that it exists and
that it escapes us – that is, the living God. Now, by a peculiar encounter, this
reality beyond our Reason constitutes the entire object of Religion.45

Let us now listen to Goldmann’s answer:

A historian who is an authority in the interpretation of seventeenth century

thought, the late Jean Laporte, has maintained – and this was one of his
fondest ideas – the philosophical equivalence of the positions of Descartes
and Pascal. However, it seems to me that this thesis must be met with the
most serious reservations, and I will give only one but eloquent example.
Laporte quotes fragment 267, “Reason’s last step is the recognition that
there are an infinite number of things that surpass it,” and adds the follow-
ing comment: “understand that what surpasses reason, and what reason
finds in everything, is infinity. Let us observe that on this matter Pascal’s posi-
tion is analogous to that of Descartes. Also Descartes teaches …” In Pascal’s
text “surpass” is in the plural, but now Laporte replaces the plural with the
singular. According to Pascal “an infinity of things” – even better, every indi-
vidual thing – surpass the possibilities of reason. According to Descartes,
reason is surpassed only by the infinite. By replacing the plural with the sin-
gular Laporte has evidently replaced one position with another; you will be
convinced of that by reading what follows in fragment 267, which in fact
Laporte does not quote: “it (reason) is just weak if it does not get to know
this … If natural things surpass it, what shall we say about supernatural
ones?” Thus, according to Pascal, natural and supernatural things surpass
reason. Contrary to Laporte’s interpretation, this is exactly the opposite of
Cartesian epistemology.46

45 Jean Laporte, Le rationalisme de Descartes (Paris: Presses universitaires de

France, 1945), 297.
46 Goldmann, Blaise Pascal, 114–15.
342 The Problem of Atheism

In other words, Laporte’s interpretation is made possible by arbitrarily

isolating within a work certain partial elements and by the consequent
facile comparison that can be made with apparently analogous elements
from another work, also in isolation. According to Goldmann, it is
precisely the introduction of the concept of significant structure that
has the power to prevent this procedure.

6. THE “SIGNIFICANT STRUCTURE”

OF CARTESIANISM

I will formulate my disagreement with Goldmann by stating a group of

theses, which in my view make it possible to recover and extend Laporte’s
overall interpretation of the thought of the 1600s, perfecting it as a
consequence of having accepted using the methodological tool “sig-
nificant structure.”47

47 In the failure to use, even implicitly, this methodological concept, we can see
the limitations of the work of a great historian like Laporte, whose truly outstanding
merit is the definitive demolition of the Leibnizian interpretation of Cartesianism – an
interpretation that, in the manifold ways in which it can be developed, had dominated,
we can say, philosophical historiography up to him. In regard to this limitation, con-
sider, for example, his book Rationalisme de Descartes: undoubtedly he demolished for
good the traditional idea of Descartes’s rationalism by showing that, in all his theses
(except for the ontological proof), there is a reference to the theory of divine infinity
and freedom that expressly implies a critique of rationalism. While he decisively clari-
fied that the philosophy of Descartes cannot be extended into the dogmatic rationalism
of Spinoza or Leibniz, or into the rationalism of the constitutive activity of the spirit, or
even into the rationalism of the Enlightenment, his work is less persuasive when it
moves to the positive part. The very method he followed, of an integral reconciliation
of all Cartesian texts, yielded an overall presentation of the thought of Descartes that is
rather different from the one he himself gave in his works. In fact, one is left perplexed
by the fact that the form in which Laporte presents Cartesian thought does not match
any of those the philosopher chose: not that of the Discourse, not that of the Meditations,
not that of the Principles. But then, does not the hiatus between the spirit and the letter
that Laporte meant to close open up again? We have a Descartes who lacks, in some
way, the Cartesian accent; his doctrine is at risk of being detached once again from his
personality and from the historical reality in which he thought.
Based on the “reconciliation of texts” some juxtapositions that are problematic
become easy. For example, that with Pascal is perfectly correct, but Laporte pushes
it so far that the aspect of opposition, which is also real, disappears, and the differ-
ence reduces to one of “intellectual temperament” (Le rationalisme, 473). The conse-
quences are more serious when, due to the reduction of the fundamental philosophical
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 343

1. The conflict between Pascal and Descartes takes place within the
same significant structure (for which neither “rationalism” nor
“tragic vision” are suitable descriptors), so that Pascal’s thought can
be presented as the position into which the philosophy of Descartes
is forced to turn when it wants to make space for the question, which
is necessary within its horizon, of the transition from the truths of
reason to the truths of faith (to the act of adhering to the truths
of faith as truths and not as a traditional datum beyond discussion;
in short, the question of religious conversion).
2. Within Cartesianism one can trace a conflict between humanism and
anti-humanism so that, on the one hand, its humanistic continuation
was possible only by eliminating the metaphysics of Descartes
(consider the empiricist and the materialist developments of
Descartes) while, on the other hand, religious Cartesianism
necessarily had to take an anti-humanist accent.
3. Pascal’s thought can be regarded as the complete explication of
a critique of metaphysics that was implicit as a possibility in the
thought of Descartes and that is substantially different from the Kantian
critique because it gives way not to rational faith but to faith in the
supernatural.
4. There is objectively (i.e., independently of the awareness that
individual thinkers may have had of it) a symmetry between the
relationship of Kant’s critique with dialectic thought and the rela-
tionship of Pascal’s critique with the line of thought that, having
started with Malebranche, continues, dissociated from Cartesianism,
in Italian philosophy from Vico to Rosmini.

To me, these theses are so connected that one could only respond to
Goldmann’s approach by writing a book titled Philosophy and Religion
from Descartes to Vico. In an essay I am necessarily forced to give only a
condensation, which cannot claim to be fully justified. Therefore, I have
to limit myself to presenting it as a possible interpretation, trying however
to provide in synthetic form all the elements for its justification.

oppositions to rationalism versus empiricism, from the designation “radical empiri-

cism” (explicit for the philosophy of Descartes, implicit for that of Pascal; it contains
some truth, but the word “empiricism” leads to many misunderstandings) Laporte
arrives at a link between Descartes, Pascal, and Hume that is clearly anti-historical.
344 The Problem of Atheism

In order to draw the conceptual scheme that makes it possible to give

meaning to the term “Cartesianism” and to speak of Cartesian thinkers,
I think one has to think, on the one hand, of the theory of freedom –
considered not as one thesis among others of the system but as the
original experience in reference to which all other theses are under-
standable – and, on the other hand, of the peculiar way in which this
theme goes together with the greatest extension ever of the feature that
has traditionally been called anti-historicism but that can be better
described – using a term that Goldmann uses, referring it to the tragic
vision – as ahistoricity.48 Such a feature is proper to Cartesian philosophy
in the form whereby it distinguishes itself radically from both Platonism
and Aristotelianism. Indeed, the various forms of historicism did not
come out of the classical antithesis between Platonism and
Aristotelianism. In fact, every form of historicism invokes either the
Platonic or the Aristotelian tradition; for example, the atheistic histori-
cism of the libertines invoked the Aristotelian one, and the religious
historicism of Vico the Platonic one. Conversely, every historicist stance
rejects the Cartesian spirit; thus, the appearance of historicist elements
in the Enlightenment coincides punctually with the decomposition of
Cartesianism. In this loss of history we must recognize both the locus
of the break with the previous Christian tradition and a concession (in
opposition) to libertinism; specifically, to the aspect of libertinism that
made it the endpoint of Renaissance and Machiavellian historicism.
This concession is expressed by granting that a philosophy that starts
from a consideration of profane history must conclude in skepticism;
all said and done, Cartesianism begins having already taken for granted
the victory of libertine humanism over Christian humanism, thereby
breaking with all that had flowed into humanism from the Christian
tradition. This is why none of the major Cartesians invokes Plato, after
the scientific and religious rejection of Aristotelianism – not even
Malebranche, whose philosophy can be considered, from a certain
angle, as the endpoint of ascetic Platonism combined with the complete
sacrifice of political Platonism. It is also why, in Vico, the invocation of
Plato coincides with the critique of Cartesianism.

48 Goldmann, Le Dieu caché, 43 [Hidden God], 34. [Goldmann’s English transla-

tor describes the tragic vision as “unhistorical.” This would suggest the term “unhisto-
ricity,” which, however, appears not to be a proper English word].
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 345

As for the affirmation that the theory of freedom is the “soul of

Cartesianism,” I do not think it needs many justifications at the present
state of scholarly criticism. We should just recall that the line of develop-
ment followed by the interpretation of Descartes over the last hundred
years has been marked by a regression from the Spinozian interpretation
(centred on the divine substance), which is an obligatory thesis in German
historiography from Leibniz to Hegel, to the Kantian (cogito), to the
interpretation founded on the experience of freedom (and thus on
doubt, but no longer understood in the rationalistic-Enlightenment
sense of a decision to bring everything in front of the tribunal of reason).
We should also observe that Descartes has been viewed as a philosopher
of freedom since 1930, when for the first time he became relevant in
conjunction with Spinoza and gnoseologism not being relevant; so that
a possible question is whether Descartes’s being relevant coincides with
his being studied without juxtapositions.49 Because in fact the simulta-
neous irrelevance of Spinoza and gnoseologism has made it possible to
view Descartes as relevant because of the letter of what he says and not
because of what it supposedly tends to – that is, it has made it possible
to reduce to an object of historiography the symbolic transfiguration
of Descartes proper to the philosophy of history of the nineteenth
century, which I already mentioned. It has also made it possible to fill
the hiatus, which was a correlate of that symbolic transfiguration.
between his doctrine and his human person, since we can recognize in
the theory of freedom the manifestation of the experience that simul-
taneously explains his life and his thought. Thus, the superiority of the
interpretation in terms of philosophy of freedom lies in making possible
a consistent interpretation of Cartesian thought and of the relationship
between this thought and the person of the philosopher.50

49 Notice that an interpretation of Descartes centred on the theory of freedom is

not in itself necessarily a religious interpretation, even though all interpreters who go
in a religious direction must give this theme special relevance. Just think of the impor-
tant book by F. Alquié, La découverte métaphysique de l’homme chez Descartes (Paris: Boivin,
1956) – abridged in Descartes, l’homme et l’ouvre (Paris: Boivin, 1956) – which develops
an interpretation centred on freedom and yet definitely secular; or even of Sartre’s
essay “La liberté cartesienne,” in Situations, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), which however
has no historical value.
50 On this last point, I take the liberty to recall an old essay of mine titled “La
personalità di Descartes,” written as the preface to an edition of the Meditations
(Padova: Cedam, 1940).
346 The Problem of Atheism

Let us just observe that there is a relationship between the theory of

freedom and the method, and that it persists in the three great figures
of religious Cartesianism: Descartes, Pascal, and Malebranche. As
Laporte says perfectly,51 for Descartes the method is a set of habits of
attention, and for him attention means will or, which is the same, free-
dom. This doctrine of method as a tool to direct attention towards a
truth that is not of our making but already given by God is accepted by
all the thinkers of religious Cartesianism, as the doctrine that unites
critical spirit and effort towards purification. It is accepted by the Port-
Royalists and by Pascal: “It is your own assent to yourself, and the con-
stant voice of your own reason, and not of others, that should make you
believe” (fragment 260).52 It is accepted by Malebranche, who will call
such attention “natural prayer” because as an attitude turned towards
God it implies “le corps endormi,” and through the silence of the body
(and what else is the whole of his psychology, with its characteristic
psycho-physiological aspect, if not a description of the difficulties one
faces to achieve this silence?) it implies that the union with the world
has been broken. So that, with a very felicitous phrase, people have
described his philosophy as a metaphysical conception of the human
person, defined as a reasonable being, amenable to participating in the
universality of divine reason just by virtue of paying attention.53
Unlike regarding the themes of freedom and attention, regarding
the theme of ahistoricity the connection among the three thinkers has
never been studied, as far as I know. Its meaning was perceived, in my
opinion, only by Vico when he attributed a “monastic” character to
Cartesian philosophy, by which he meant expressly to refer to a sort of
“encompassing context,” of “significant structure,” of totality that makes
the real operations of Cartesian thought intelligible. In order to define
it, many years ago, I thought that one should attribute great importance
to Descartes’s political fragments, precisely in the sense that they allow
us to define the non-problematized encompassing context within which
his philosophy takes shape. I wrote at that time:

51 Laporte, Le rationalisme, 34–7.

52 On this point, see the very important discussion in Jeanne Russier’s La foi selon
Pascal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949).
53 A. Robinet, “L’attitude politique de Malebranche,” in XVIIe Siècle (1958): 22.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 347

Would it not be appropriate to link the Cartesian critique of political ratio-

nalism, which is a consequence of the dissociation of what is rational and
what is historical, with the critique of the revolutionary position that was
developed by Pascal in very well-known passages, and by Malebranche in
other passages which are almost unknown? Without repeating for the thou-
sandth time, about the closeness of the political theses of Descartes and
Pascal, that they are stated by the two thinkers ‘in a completely different
spirit.’ Undoubtedly, in Pascal and in Malebranche the anti-revolutionary
critique takes a different tone, more than a different meaning, being framed
in a different theological context. And here the investigation should address
the Molinist background … of Descartes’ religious position, which leads him
not to mention, in a field that concerns pure nature, the topic of sin. A care-
ful examination would make us recognize an initial identity of the three
thinkers’ attitude towards politics, which does not depend on their religious
position, even if afterwards it gets combined with it, taking in each one of
them a different emphasis. The examination would show, in other words,
that this attitude is essential to Cartesianism, raising the following question:
whether this is not precisely the only element that remains identical in the
philosophers who can be called ‘Cartesian,’ and whether the essence of
Cartesianism can be defined in any other way than in terms of a particular
relationship between interiority and exteriority.54

Thinking of his political fragments, Sainte-Beuve happened to write

that, if Pascal had not been Christian, he would have been Machiavelli.
Let us observe how profound this sentence is – he would not have been
Plato, like St Augustine, or Aristotle, like St Thomas – and let us try to
grasp it in all its depth. The coincidence between his political ideas and
those of the heirs of Machiavelli, the libertine erudites, is really striking;
except that, of course, these ideas are rethought by Pascal within the
form of thought of Augustinian pessimism carried to the extreme.55
Nothing is left of the ancient Christian natural law. The principle of

54 A. Del Noce, “Cartesio e la politica,” Rivista di filosofia 41, no. 1 (1950): 3–30,
pp. 20–1.
55 These connections between Pascal’s thought and libertine thought have been
greatly emphasized by E. Baudin in La philosophie de Pascal II, Pascal, les libertines et les
jansenistes (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1946). Regarding the items dis-
cussed here, see especially chapters 1, 2, 7, 8, 12. His remarks are often acute but suf-
fer from the strange general outlook of his work – namely, that there is an authentic
348 The Problem of Atheism

legitimacy lies in might: “Veri juris. – We have it no more; if we had it,

we should take conformity to the customs of a country as the rule of
justice. It is here that, not finding justice, we have found force, etc.”
(fragment 297); “Justice, might.—It is right that what is just should be
obeyed; it is necessary that what is strongest should be obeyed. Justice
without might is helpless; might without justice is tyrannical. Justice with-
out might is gainsaid, because there are always offenders; might without
justice is condemned. We must then combine justice and might, and
for this end make what is just strong, or what is strong just. Justice is
subject to dispute; might is easily recognized and is not disputed. So we
cannot give might to justice, because might has gainsaid justice, and
has declared that it is she herself who is just. And thus being unable to
make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just” (fragment
298); “Justice is what is established; and thus all our established laws
will necessarily be regarded as just without examination, since they are
established” (fragment 312).
Thus, to use a short formula, it is a form of conservatism, which how-
ever is not founded on the rationality of the present order but on the
idea that every order, since it is historical, is neither rational nor sacred.
Which means, in particular and in reference to the situation of his
epoch, consenting to absolutism, as an order that is purely exterior to
spiritual life. Every social order is folly, but “true Christians nevertheless
comply with folly, not because they respect folly, but the command of
God, who for the punishment of men has made them subject to these
follies” (fragment 338). In this position “peace” is the “sovereign good”
(fragment 299), and “civil wars are the greatest of evils” (fragment 313);
founded on the illusion of establishing justice, they can only lead to
anarchy and, finally, to another equally arbitrary order. Therefore, we
must have a “back thought” with which to judge everything, and yet talk
like the common people (fragment 336) – that is, refrain from pointing
out that the authority has no truth.
The match with libertine thought is clear because what characterized
it was the coincidence of two stances: identifying the critical spirit with
the quest for radical desecration (the will to escape “naïveté”) and
denying most radically the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, libertine

thought of Pascal that has been warped by the influences of the libertines and the
Jansenists. However, the best study of Pascal’s political idea is that by E. Auerbach, “La
teoria politica di Pascal,” in Studi francesi (1957): 26–42.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 349

desecration concluded, in politics, with the apology of absolutism car-

ried to its most extreme consequences by erasing all boundaries set by
natural or divine law. Except that, whereas libertine thought led to the
apology of the Prince in the Machiavellian sense, as the ideal type, Pascal
intends to affirm the indifference of politics to the spiritual life. Certainly,
politics has its own logic, which must be accepted. But the true good
does not lie there: it is a reality from which one must interiorly free
oneself, limiting acceptance to an exterior assent, while seeking to reach
the supernatural domain of charity.
If we now move on to Descartes’s position, we realize that it is essen-
tially identical to that of Pascal, except of course for the reference to
Augustinian pessimism. I will just summarize the conclusions I reached
in the work I already cited. According to Descartes, too, every political
order is historical and draws its reason to be from history alone and not
from religious or rational necessity. But in his philosophy there is no
room for history; a philosophy without history is matched by a history
without philosophy. It would seem that this non-rational historicity of
political orders should imply admitting their plurality without being
able to make any theoretical pronouncement about the greater value
of any one of them. However, Cartesianism, too, cannot escape what
seems to be the structural necessity of every form of conservatism: theo-
retically it presents itself as compatible with a plurality of possible orders,
but, in the meantime, because of the specific form in which it justifies
itself, it always manifests itself as sanctioning one particular order.
Considering the form in which Descartes upholds the distinction
between what is rational and what is historical determines a form of
conservatism that includes a necessary reference to the absolutist order;
and this explains why, in the passages in which he deals with politics,
Descartes always has in mind this order, and even the simple thought
of the possibility of a different order seems to be foreign to him. Man
finds himself living in a society in the same way as the soul finds itself
living in a body; in both cases, this undoubtedly defines their type of
existence in the world, but as a mere factual situation. In my formation
as a spiritual subject I do not come across participation in social life as
a necessary moment. On the other hand, this does not spare me the
recognition that social life is factually necessary for the external condi-
tions of my existence: the devaluation of social life is exactly as foreign
to Cartesian thought as is the devaluation of the body. But in this way
the established order becomes detached from the individuals as subjects
350 The Problem of Atheism

of the spiritual life and stands in front of them as something totally

exterior. Therefore, the political order transcends the private ones.
Clearly, the essential exigency that politics thus understood must address
can only be that of order; with the consequent characteristics of stability
and unity, whence one moves – through steps that Descartes only implies
but that are all too well known and easy – to the figure of the Prince
and his absolute authority; exactly as for Pascal, every attempt at chang-
ing the present order in the name of reason can only lead, albeit at the
very steep price of civil wars, to another order, which will also be histori-
cal (i.e., non-rational by definition); and actually to a tyrannical order
because it will lack the aspect of legitimacy, and an illegitimate ruler is
forced to preserve his power through crimes.56
However, Descartes supports absolutism for reasons that are not
absolutistic but conservative, with very important consequences, because
an essential element of conservatism is the distinction between politics
and spiritual life. That is to say, if on the one hand Descartes necessarily
inclines, because of his particular way of envisioning the relationship
between the rational and the historical, to envision the political order
as an absolutist order, on the other hand he desecrates it by depriving
it of the possibility of a rational or religious foundation; by depriving it,
in short, of the justifications whereby its subjects could feel part of
a moral organism. But then, dissociated from spiritual life, the tran-
scendence of the absolutist order seemingly tends to turn into a
transcendence of pure exteriority, of the infrarational, so to speak; and
the reverence towards it into purely external reverence without interior
adherence, exactly as in Pascal.

56 See the letters to Princess Elizabeth of September and November 1646 (in
Descartes, Lettre sur la Morale, ed. J. Chevalier [Paris: Boivin, 1935], 144–51, 160–1).
The following sentence is intriguing: “In order to instruct a good Prince … it seems
to me that we should propose to him completely opposite maxims [that is, oppo-
site to those suggested by Machiavelli], and suppose that the means by which he estab-
lished himself in power were just; as, in fact, I believe almost all of them are, when the
Princes who use them deem them to be such; because among sovereigns justice has
different boundaries than among private individuals, and it seems that on this occa-
sion God gives right to those to whom He gives might” (145–6, emphasis mine).
Where that supposition that eliminates the search for the origins of legitimacy –
because being “convinced” of it is necessary to the Prince in order to avoid his chang-
ing into a tyrant – has an obvious family resemblance with Pascal’s “secret thought.”
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 351

Let us also observe: Descartes’s political thesis cannot be deduced

from his metaphysics, and, conversely, history shows us that those who
wished to extend rationalism to politics by appealing to the Cartesian
spirit (like much of the Enlightenment) had also to eliminate Descartes’s
metaphysics.57 Does this not indicate that the separation of the rational
and the historical is the initial, non-problematized datum of Cartesianism,
which in a certain sense is not and cannot be rationally founded, the
initial datum that we must take into account in order to understand all
the operations of his thought?
The position of Malebranche is essentially identical, with an accent
that brings it close to Pascal. Let us just quote a few passages:

It is a certain truth that the differences in conditions are a necessary conse-

quence of original sin, and that often quality, riches, high standing all take
their origin from some injustice, and from the ambition of those to whom
our forefathers owed their birth … And injustice, which may have been its
source, now no longer felt, is not in our thoughts at all … But a Christian
philosopher looks at this magnificence without being stimulated by what as-
tonishes and prostrates weak imaginations … Human nature being the same
in all men, and made for Reason, only merit ought to distinguish us, and
only Reason guide us. But, sin having left concupiscence in those who com-
mit it as well as in their descendants, men, though naturally equal, have
ceased to form a society of equality under that same law, Reason. Force, or
the law of the brutes … has become the mistress of men … Hence it is sin
which introduced the difference in qualities or conditions into the world.
For sin or concupiscence being given, it is a necessity that there be

57 In this regard the study of Locke is extremely interesting. C.A. Viano’s book,
John Locke: Dal razionalismo all’illuminismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1960), which deserves
great credit for having studied the formation of his philosophy in connection with the
concrete problems that prompted the reflection from which it arose, ends as follows:
“Locke thus turned Cartesian philosophy into a very convenient and handy tool,
suitable to discuss and clarify questions that would have remained meaningless
within in the framework of Cartesian metaphysics. In this way … the world of political
discussions entered official European culture” (560). As you can see, the agreement
between my perspective and Viano’s could not be, on this point, more complete, even
though, of course, I do not share his idea that Lockean philosophy must be viewed as
the inheritor of the critical contributions of Cartesianism.
352 The Problem of Atheism

differences. Even Reason requires this, because force is a law which must
marshal those who no longer follow Reason.58

After having observed these common themes in Descartes, Pascal,

and Malebranche, we have the right to draw a few conclusions:
(1) First of all, Cartesianism must be viewed and placed historically
as the most complete inversion of libertine thought. This thesis ceases
to sound strange as soon as we stop viewing libertinism, considered in
its higher form (“le libertinage érudit”), as an essentially practical epi-
sode, relevant to the history of social customs rather than spiritual life
and thought, and devoid of ideal content, besides the repetition of the
old materialistic theses of heterodox Aristotelianism used to justify a
form of scruples-free hedonism, and so on; when we recognize it, instead,
in its relation with history, as the expression of a real doubt produced
by the situation of the early decades of the 1600s – politics marked by
the triumph of the Ragion di Stato – which the older culture could not
understand; and, in regard to the cultural form in which it realizes itself,
we see it as the first moment in which irreligion finds its strength in the
consideration of the human world, invading the domain of wisdom in
which humanism had defended itself from Averroist science; therefore,

58 Traité de Morale, pt. 2, ch. 11 [Treatise on Ethics, trans. C. Walton (Dordrecht:

Kluwer, 1993), 201–2]. Auerbach (“La teoria politica di Pascal,” 42) noticed the pres-
ence in Pascal’s political theory of revolutionary germs as well; and Robinet
(“L’attitude politique de Malebranche”) said the same, at greater length, about the
texts I quoted by Malebranche. When Rousseau (on whom Malebranche’s influence
was very important) will read them in a different spirit … This aspect is indeed pres-
ent in the fact that absolute power, while accepted, loses its sacred character. See, for
example, Pascal’s Trois discours sur la condition des grands: “You must have … a double-
sided thought; and if with men you act outwardly according to your rank, you must
recognize, according to a more hidden but truer thought, that you have nothing
above them by nature … The populace who admires you … believes that nobility is
true greatness and regards the mighty as being of a different nature than others. Do
not reveal this error to them, if you wish; but do not abuse this higher station with
insolence, and above all do not misjudge yourselves by believing that your being has
something in it more elevated than others” (ed. de la Pléiade, 617). In fact, “esprit
cartesien” has often been understood, from Taine to Maxime Leroy (with different
assessments), as synonymous with revolutionary spirit. Indeed, if one abandoned the
metaphysical and theological approach, and introduced the idea of natural law, the
political thought of Descartes, Pascal, and Malebranche would turn not into a reform-
ist stance but, because of its ahistoricity, into an explicitly revolutionary one.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 353

we come to see it as the first rebirth of Sophistry after Christianity, which

is also the first appearance of the atheist; it is an inversion of the whole
historical line of development of skepticism up to Montaigne – which
had been characterized by eschewing irreligion – by a sort of rediscovery
of the irreligious side of Sophistry. It is a transition, in some way, from
Bruno’s “immanent divine” to atheism because undoubtedly it marks
a skeptical turn in a process that starts in Bruno and in his union of the
themes of Renaissance Aristotelian naturalism with those of a form of
Neo-Platonism tending to religious syncretism, which had been part
of humanism, and which the Counter-Reformation had discarded when
it picked up its legacy.59 Thus the precise theoretical adversary, apart from
any practical-religious intention, against which Descartes’s philosophy
took shape was Renaissance naturalism at the last stage of its process.
Indeed, if we interpret the thought of Descartes in light of the experi-
ence of freedom, we will undoubtedly reconstruct his theses in a form
that sets them in opposition, essentially and primarily, to libertine
thought. When it is associated with the experience of freedom, Cartesian
doubt manifests itself as an operation aimed at overturning the skepti-
cal doubt which “produces itself,” which is the mere repercussion in
me of a broadening of my experience. The affirmation of my transcen-
dence with respect to the world, which my capacity to cast doubt on it
manifests, implies the denunciation of naturalistic dogmatism, which
underpins the skeptical doubt (and it is precisely the unity of skepticism,
materialism, and atheism that characterizes the libertine doubt).
Moreover, how else can we define the process of the Meditations, if not
as the reconquest of the shared vision of the world characterized by the
convictions that the soul is substantially united with the body and that
the external world is real – whose effective negation according to Descartes
is definitely a folly – by making explicit the ontological affirmations that
are this vision’s foundations (substantial reality of the I and existence
and transcendence of God)? The same process of thought that makes

59 A study – which would be even more interesting if conducted at the level of

ideas and not only in terms of the historical data – of the relationship between the
dissolution of Bruno’s philosophy (failure of his attempt to preserve religion within
philosophy, of his politics, etc.) and the birth of libertine atheism is still lacking, and
would be enormously interesting from the perspective I have drawn. Without a doubt,
other influences soon entered the very complex history of libertinism, but the initial
kernel and the reason of its birth are found there and nowhere else.
354 The Problem of Atheism

it possible to found his new physics reduces the atheist to an insipiens,

in the sense of ignorant (he cannot have certainty even about mathemati-
cal truths) and crazy (he cannot have certainty even about the affirma-
tions of common sense).
Let us further notice that affirming the primary role of the anti-lib-
ertine motive in the genesis of his philosophy does not coincide at all
with identifying the core of his work with some apologetic intention
and, even less, with attempting to reduce his philosophy to a continu-
ation of Augustinian and scholastic themes. In actuality, in the first place
he was sensitive to the aspect of libertinism whereby it was theoretical
skepticism; and it seemed to him that his philosophy objectively acquired
an apologetic meaning because of the correlation between the critique
of skepticism and that of materialism and atheism. This meaning was
not different – nor did he present things otherwise, on close inspec-
tion – from the one that the scholastic doctors he knew (i.e., essentially,
the doctors of the Second Scholastic) had attributed to Aristotelian
philosophy: the self-presentation as preambula fidei by a philosophy that
had constituted itself in the search of truth as a “natural value.” But,
on the other hand, anti-libertinism linked him to the thinkers of the
1600s for whom the specifically religious question was central and who
perceived the scholastic position to be inadequate: the Port-Royalists
and Malebranche.
(2) But precisely because it was a mere inversion of the libertine
position, it included a concession, in opposition, to the libertines: to
their philosophy based on “erudition” it opposed a philosophy separated
from history; to the political character of their thought it opposed a
sharp separation of philosophy and religion from politics. In this sepa-
ration the thought of the theoreticians of the Reason of State was at the
same time preserved and transfigured, in Pascal and Malebranche by
inserting it into Augustinian pessimism, and in Descartes by criticizing
Machiavelli, a critique that proposed to shift the attention from the case
of the illegitimate Prince to that of the legitimate Prince, from the
foundation of states to their preservation.
In light of this, the suitable formula to describe the significant struc-
ture of Cartesianism is that of separate interiority or of dissociation of the
spiritual life from politics and from history.
(3) Therefore, the concept of historical periodization that applies
to Cartesianism is that of anti-Renaissance, with the addition that it
is Catholic anti-Renaissance in as much as it operates within the
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 355

acceptance of that general intuition that I used earlier to define the Catholic
Reformation. Within this horizon it fights against its internal adversary,
the heir of Renaissance heresy, libertinism; even though this will lead
it to a lack of communication and then, ultimately, to a conflict with
the first form of philosophy of the Catholic Reformation, directed
against the external Protestant adversary, Spanish Scholastics. We must
also add that, regarding the philosophy of the 1600s we can speak of
anti-Renaissance only in reference to Cartesianism. Conversely, in
Spinoza and in Leibniz, and if you like even in Berkeley, we have the
renewal of a link with the Renaissance.60
(4) In connection with this structure we understand the particular
character with which freedom is experienced by Descartes. Essentially,
he experiences it as power of negativity; however, not in the Hegelian
sense of an activity that denies the given but in the sense of freedom
to distinguish myself, to recognize myself as an irreducible reality. One
should carefully consider, in this regard, Descartes’s language: why, for
example, the idea of substance evokes in him not the image of a centre
of activity but, rather, that of a separate reality. We shall see in a moment
how important this experience of freedom as negativity is in the context
of the theory of divine freedom. For now, let us just notice its ascetic
aspect, which is why the natural form of expression of philosophy

60 Regarding this necessity of using the concept of anti-Renaissance to describe

authentic Cartesian thinkers, see H. Gouhier, “Les deux XVIIe siècle,” in Congreso
Internacional de Filosofia, Actas III (1949), 171–81, and Les premières pensées de Descartes:
Contribution a l’histoire de l’Anti-Renaissance (Paris: Vrin, 1958), 9.
The extraordinary importance of the libertine moment (of what, for France, was
the “envers du siècle des saints”) has been highlighted by the book by R. Pintard, Le
libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Boivin, 1943). It is a funda-
mental work on the history of culture and yet is rather weak on the philosophical side.
In my work “La crisi libertina e la Ragion di Stato,” in Atti del II Congresso Internazionale
di Studi Umanistici, Roma 1952 (Milan: Bocca, 1953), I tried to highlight the extremely
important suggestions that the exact description of the libertine movement contrib-
uted to the history of philosophy as well as the new questions that arose, in the history
of philosophy, as a result of an adequate appreciation of this crisis.
Based on a consideration of the results achieved by Pintard’s work and by that
(already cited) of Lenoble, I thought I could conclude that the appearance within the
horizon of mechanistic physics of that “metaphysical accident” that is the philosophy
of Descartes can only be explained by the full awareness he had of the importance of
libertine skepticism, unlike Mersenne, whose criticism concerned only Renaissance
science, which by then had been abandoned by the libertines.
356 The Problem of Atheism

becomes meditation. It is precisely in reference to this ascetic aspect

that the “meditative” Malebranche saw in Cartesian thought the type
of Christian philosophy.
It is now a matter of looking within this structure at the very peculiar
relationship, of opposition and unity that exists between Descartes
and Pascal.

7. THE CRISIS OF MOLINISM IN DESCARTES

About the objectively (i.e., apart from his intentions and convictions)
religious meaning of the philosophy of Descartes, I believe it is fair to
say that, after its interpretation in terms of philosophy of freedom, we
have now reached definitive results.61
We need to pose two distinct questions: (a) is there objectively in
Descartes’s philosophy room not only for religious revelation but also
for the dogmas that define the essence of Christianity? (b) Since, as a
philosophy of freedom, Cartesianism is fundamentally a theory about
the “direction of attention,” we may wonder whether, in the form it
takes in Descartes, it can not only fulfill the task of providing theses that
are objectively a preamble to faith but also do the work of showing
that religion is “the most important.”
A. We can answer the first question quite simply by pointing out that
an essential element of his philosophy is the rejection of the thesis that
religion is a surrogate of philosophy, in any form this thesis can take,

61 In the following sense: the reasons in favour of the religious interpretation

have been collected and presented in definitive form by Laporte, Le rationalisme,
299–468. The reasons in favour of a secular interpretation – in an intelligent form,
and evaluating the arguments that would support a religious interpretation – are
provided, in a manner that I think can hardly be improved, in the book I cited by
Alquié, which is at the same time historical and theoretical. I present the two posi-
tions, albeit loosely, in points A and B. In point C I try to surpass them, giving them
their due, in an interpretation that to me seems well founded. Regarding older litera-
ture, we should never forget Gouhier’s Pensée religieuse de Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1924)
and Laberthonnière’s Études sur Descartes, 2 vols. (Paris: Vrin, 1935) (but the funda-
mental studies on religion had already been published between 1909 and 1911).
Maritain’s interpretations is very similar to that of Laberthonnière.
As for Goldmann, we can say that by opposing the rationalism of Descartes to the
tragic vision of Pascal he follows an interpretation very similar to Laberthonnière’s,
but quite impoverished.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 357

be it Spinoza’s or that of natural religion, or the Machiavellian and

libertine. Because, by the principle of divine freedom and the medita-
tion on the infinite “beyond reason,” it seems that Descartes joins the
greatest critic of that theory who ever existed – Pascal. Because, further-
more, the study of Malebranche can be used to illustrate that the open-
ness to Revelation endures if one abandons the theory of divine freedom
in the sense of Descartes but keeps his theory of human freedom; and
the study of Spinoza can be used to illustrate that abandoning this
openness coincides with entirely suppressing the theme of freedom.
Nor can one find, upon close inspection, any Cartesian thesis that
contradicts religious truth. Certainly not his theory of the state of infancy,
première et principale cause de nos erreurs,62 a confluence of anti-naturalism,
anti-historicism, and anti-Aristotelianism. This is because this condition
of man can be interpreted very easily – from a higher point of view that
only Revelation can make known to us – as a consequence of the Fall.
The theme behind this theory – together with the theme of attention,
to which it is evidently very tightly linked – is the only one about which
all the thinkers of religious Cartesianism are in agreement (it is the
theme that makes them take the side of the “moderns” in the famous
Querelle, the theme whose acceptance defines, expressly, religious
Cartesianism). Just think, for instance, of the form in which the
“Cartesian revolution” is accepted by Pascal in the famous fragment 72:
“Hence it comes that almost all philosophers have confused ideas
of things, and speak of material things in spiritual terms, and of spiritual
things in material terms.” Or think of the religious accent that in all
Cartesians – including Malebranche (his famous passage “De l’erreur
la plus dangereuse de la philosophie des anciens,” in Recherche de la
Verité, bk. VI, p. II, ch. III is typical), Arnauld, and Nicole – accompanies
the critique of substantial forms and of hidden qualities, which are
precisely the notions whose psychological genesis the Cartesian thesis
of the state of infancy intends to clarify. Because for these thinkers this
critique means that one and the same process leads to attaining rigor-
ous science and to detecting in man the presence of the traces of original
sin, it is the true condition for the transition to a “Christian” philosophy,
to be framed as a victory of Augustinianism over Aristotelianism. And
the fact that Cartesian philosophy presents itself with respect to

62 The title of article 71 of the first part of the Principles.

358 The Problem of Atheism

Aristotelian philosophy not as a development or as surpassing/preserv-

ing but as negation takes the meaning of a necessary radical opposition
between a philosophy that makes room for sin and one that assumes
man’s fallen condition to be his normal condition and derives its asser-
tions from this presupposition.
Nor can those who favour a religious interpretation feel much chal-
lenged by arguments drawn from the study of Descartes as a moralist.
In fact, it is not hard to spot, at the bottom of the analysis provided by
secular commentators, the implicit presupposition that only the posi-
tion that values worldly things exclusively as instruments for salvation
is a religious position. This is the same thesis that motivates so much
resistance to the recognition of a “Christianity of the humanists.” It is
also the basis of the idea of the practical and political nature of the
Counter-Reformation, precisely as a compromise with humanism. This
simply because a historian cannot not recognize the factual existence
of a Molinist Christianity, to which one must refer in order to understand
the religious thought of Descartes.
People say that metaphysics is just one part of his work, which is prin-
cipally directed towards science and technology. But we must keep in
mind that the early decades of the 1600s are those when the perspective
of the previous century is turned upside down; when the irreligious
temptation presents itself for the first time under the guise of erudition,
and when, by contrast, the equation irreligion = anti-science establishes
itself, also for the first time, and the type of the “Christian scientist” makes
its appearance in history. According to Descartes, a science founded on
a divine guarantee (and thus allied to religion and not, like magic, to
forms of heretical thought) allows me also to realize from a practical
standpoint my true situation, that to which God has destined me, with
respect to things. I related, in the third essay, Laberthonnière’s theses
about the Christian origins, in Descartes, of the technical mindset.
By placing the question of wisdom at the centre of the exposition of
his thought, in his final period, and by giving the impression of replac-
ing the movement of metaphysics towards theology with the movement
towards science and towards perfecting earthly life, did Descartes mani-
fest an axiological meaning that he attributed to them? We can think
more simply that he adapted his exposition, trying to find common
interests, to a new audience that he could reasonably expect to be more
open to understanding his truth because untrammelled by the systematic
formalization of prejudices found in Aristotelian philosophy. We can
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 359

also think that this quest to bring new listeners to assent to his philoso-
phy starting from their natural questions led him to bring to the fore
an approach in which morals are treated from the eudemonological
perspective, or actually, more precisely, from the perspective of happi-
ness in this life; which does not authorize us to speak of a general natu-
ralistic character of his ethics, except in the sense that natural values
are licit in their order. And perhaps when Descartes shows that the
philosophy that best serves the glory of God is also the philosophy most
suitable to addressing the need for wisdom and happiness that worldly
people pursue in this life, what comes to mind is the pupil of the Jesuits
rather than the man of the Enlightenment.63
B. However, things change when we consider the philosophy of
Descartes from the standpoint of the direction of attention. The strange
paradox of his religious thought seems to be this: his philosophy
undoubtedly serves an apologetic function for those who are already believ-
ers in as much as it shows them that every rational motivation to aban-
don religious tradition is contradictory; regarding the adversaries of
his time, this applies to the arguments of the libertines and the advo-
cates of natural religion. But it does not follow that it can be presented
as a philosophy that moves towards religion and predisposes one to
religious conversion, even though it keeps, from Augustinianism, the accent
of being a philosophy of conversion. It directs the attention of the unbeliever
not to the aspect whereby, while being an autonomous philosophy, it
is open to the truths that are useful for salvation, but to the power of
negativity whereby I can break my dependence on history and become
capable of an absolutely new beginning, and to the conjunction of
such negativity with the idea of man’s dominion over nature. This is
an attitude that, as I already pointed out, seemingly cannot be com-
pletely realized except by getting rid of all references to the supernatu-
ral; by reconciling, therefore, with the adversaries I just mentioned
(and, in fact, what else is the Enlightenment if not this reconciliation?).
The “libertine” adversary will be led by reading Descartes to become
a man of the Enlightenment, not to convert to Christianity;64 and to

63 Gouhier’s La pensée religieuse de Descartes is still fundamental to the illustration

of this last period of his life and thought.
64 The book by A. Vartanian, Diderot e Descartes, is interesting in spite of its evident
tendentiousness (eighteenth-century materialism as the fulfilment of the critical
motif of Descartes!). At least it shows that even materialism, in order to achieve its
360 The Problem of Atheism

erase, in order to highlight the conversion to the human, all aspects

of Cartesian thought that can mean openness to religious truth – as
happened historically.
Thus, it is a philosophy to which all the formulas used to describe
Augustinianism apply, which, however, stops being a philosophy of
conversion precisely at the moment when it presents itself as religious
philosophy. A philosophy that is religious according to his theses
objectively considered, which, however, generates a spiritual disposi-
tion that hampers the transition from natural truths to revealed truths.
The paradox becomes even more peculiar when we observe that the
origin of the secular moment lies expressly in the most religious themes:
the theory of human freedom and that of divine freedom.
Consider, indeed: the philosophy of Descartes possesses the
Augustinian tone of a philosophy of conversion. It takes as its natural
expressive form that of meditation – that is, it transposes into philosophy
a process typical of religious spirituality. But conversely, it does not
include the briefest reflection on sin and on the Incarnation. Therefore,
it seems that through doubt, the relinquishing of prejudices, the method,
it makes possible liberation from my past, from the burden of a nature
still subject to sensitivity; that, as pure philosophy, it can restore man’s
freedom from what traditionally had been thought to be the conse-
quences of sin. In short, it seems to call into question “man’s situation
viewed in light of original sin.”65
Let us read Descartes from the point of view of this lack of reference
to the Fall and the Incarnation. The connection between the exaltation
of human freedom and the dismissal, or at least the minimization, of
the themes of sin and Incarnation – thus, of the dogmas of which
Christian religion properly consists, according to Augustine’s well-known
judgment – has an ancient name in the history of religious thought:
Pelagianism. In fact, it turns out that this charge was already brought
against him by the Port-Royalist theologian who was best disposed
towards him – Arnauld. But let us explore this remark more deeply. It
seems that Descartes dissociated Pelagianism from the aspect whereby
it appeared to be the last defence of ancient rationalism and naturalism;
that he ran into it, in other words, by an extreme radicalization of

modern form, has to go back to Descartes; which is yet another proof that the figure
of the “Cartesian beginning” is ineliminable.
65 On these points, see F. Alquié, La découverte, 241–5.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 361

Augustinian anti-rationalism and of the Christian idea of man’s tran-

scendence with respect to nature (of man as freedom and not as nature).
Thus, Pelagius comes back via a transposition of attention from the past
to the future and, in the final analysis, to the realization of a humanity
that science and technology will make free. By this transposition, the
last bond between Pelagianism and Christianity is broken: that “relation-
ship of imitation of Christ through the docile reproduction in the
disciple of the image of the master; the submission to his divine model
of humility, poverty and perfection,” as the most recent historian of
Pelagius has written.66
Thus, all the formulas that have been used to describe Augustinian
philosophy apply to that of Descartes: philosophy of conversion, of
second birth, of interiority, and so on. But religious conversion has been
replaced by a conversion to the human. It is all too easy to give this
position a name: the Enlightenment. Moreover, in reference to a remark
by Alquié, who said that the eighteenth-century criticism of man’s situ-
ation as a result of original sin is more radical but also less deep, we
must not think, when we talk about Descartes anticipating the
Enlightenment, that there is a germ in his work that later will need a
more suitable climate in order to develop; nor must we think that there
are sporadic features that will only become a coherent organism in a
further position. In a certain sense, it seems that paradoxically we must
say that in Descartes there is, albeit blocked by an attempt at reconcili-
ation with the past, the Enlightenment position in its entirety, in the
form that many people think of implementing today, more rigorous
than the eighteenth-century form because freed from the physicalist
ontology and from scientism.
It is quite easy to trace back to this “new Pelagianism” detected in the
theory of human freedom the features that lend themselves even more
to depict Descartes the moral philosopher as a precursor of the
Enlightenment. The essential traits can be the following. The study of
the late Descartes highlights the limitations of his critique of sensitivity,
which is only directed at demonstrating sensitivity’s lack of scientific
value and inability to tell us what bodies are. Therefore, the “disincarna-
tion of the spiritual” described in the Meditations is not associated at all
with the practical ideal of the liberation of the soul from the body. The

66 G. de Plinval, Pélage (Lausanne: Payot, 1953), 156.

362 The Problem of Atheism

intellectual ascesis necessary for knowledge is thus freed from any mysti-
cal significance. It is, instead, the condition to found a science that
allows us to go back to sensitive reality in the position not of subject but
of “maître et possesseur,” thus realizing a higher wisdom than the
resigned wisdom of the stoics and the Epicureans. Having pushed to
the limit in his theory of knowledge one of the possibilities of Platonism
seems to provide him with the foundation needed in order to push to
the limit, from the standpoint of practice, a form of Aristotelianism (as
definition of the good in relation to the unity of the human composite)
completely cut off from every relationship with Platonism because of
the abandonment of the contemplative ideal of wisdom.67 But by doing
so he seems to clarify the meaning he attributed to his philosophy,
making precise the general axiological inversion to which it is tied.
Indeed, (a) the question of the good is posed in completely different
terms from that of the true, rigorously eudemonistic and worldly;
(b) consequently, the enhancement of our life here below is what gives
value to rigorous science, and the function of guaranteeing this science
is what gives value to metaphysics; metaphysics and science do not seem
to have value except as instruments for an increase in perceptible life;
(c) in relation to this general axiological inversion, in this last period
the philosophical-theological themes of the earlier works seem to
become an instrument to establish the idea of a separate wisdom and
the total distinction between religion and philosophy. The theory of
divine freedom, by providing a foundation to the thesis that ends are
impenetrable, contributes to making possible a quest for béatitude
naturelle, separated from all references to a transcendent destiny or to
the idea of human cooperation in the realization on this earth of God’s
ends. This seems to bring to light the constant presence in his thought
of a dissociation, even if it is never explicitly formulated, between God-
principle (of human knowledge and of existing things; and thus a
guarantee of the validity of science and of its application to what exists)
and God-end, which he does not seem at all interested in considering;
a dissociation, therefore, between “philosophical” God and “religious”
God, and at this point it seems that we can truly understand, illustrating

67 The secular and “almost atheistic” character of Descartes’s ethics has been
greatly emphasized by Gueroult, Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons t. 2 (Paris: Aubier,
1953) .
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 363

it with the example of Cartesian wisdom, Pascal’s thesis regarding the

proximity of deism and atheism.
C. These two readings are both possible because the secular reading
cannot suppress the very valid reasons for the religious reading, and
vice versa. Hence the constant alternating of the two opposite interpre-
tations in the history of Cartesian literature; hence also the impression
that the thought of Descartes needs to be unblocked by removing some
element that prevents its consistency, not only logically but above all
ethically and religiously. But in what form of thought can his novelty
(i.e., the negations he pronounced and the integrality of his metaphysi-
cal theses) be preserved?
We must speak of an essential ambiguity that does not stem, as we have
seen, from a logical contradiction in his theses objectively considered,
and that cannot even be traced back to a psychological ambiguity, since
there is no doubt that Descartes was able to feel, in good conscience,
that he had always stayed faithful to the Molinist type of Catholicism
whence he had started.
In a work of mine,68 I tried to explain this with the friction between the
novelty of his position and a presupposed Molinist spiritual disposition within
which he had thought it. Let us then consider Molinism not from the strict
point of view of theological formulas but in its original inspiration, and
in the order of the cultural values that follow from it (i.e., from the
point of view of the philosophy of history and culture). It represents
humanistic theology: against the correlation between the Protestant
negation of man and what to Catholic theologians seemed a degrada-
tion of God to mere arbitrary and irrational power, it opposes the unity
between the defence of the principle of divine goodness and that of
humanism. Having made the idea of divine goodness the central theme,
what follows is an interpretation of God’s glory, which is not found in
the predestination of the elect but in creating us and in our exercise of
free activity. This solidarity between the celebration of divine goodness
and the affirmation of human freedom takes the form of a precise
distinction between God’s and man’s shares in the work of salvation,
against Protestantism, in an opposition that is the more rigid for taking
place after having granted the conception that grace and human will
are principles exterior to each other. Therefore, the opposition to

68 “La crisi del molinismo in Descartes,” which I partially reproduce here.

364 The Problem of Atheism

Protestantism becomes at the same time an unintended separation from

Thomism and from every previous Christian concept.
By reason of this type of defence of freedom, it is permissible to view
Molinism as an assertion in theological terms of human autonomy. The
endpoint of this process is the idea of the state of pure nature in which
man could have been created, and to which he finds himself brought
back by the loss, as a consequence of sin, of the gratuitous supernatural
gifts. Translated in terms of cultural values, this thesis means that there
is an autonomous order of natural values and that there is a natural
morality of which supernatural morality represents the crown but that,
strictly speaking, could be thought to be sufficient. That is, the reper-
cussion on the cultural plane of the theological “giving God and man
their shares” is a relative separatism between the values of temporal and
religious life. Such separatism is counter-balanced by the thesis of the
absolute gratuitousness of the supernatural. The form of religiosity that
follows from this preoccupation to rigorously distinguish the orders is
thus not based on “participation” but on distance between God and
man. The quest for participation is replaced by the sense of our essential
contingency, of our humility as creatures: submission to divine majesty
and recognition of the gratuitousness of the gift. Recognizing natural
values in their order leads to abandoning whatever still remained in
Medieval Christianity of a tendency to dualistic ascesis, to the ideal of
liberation from the world; and recognizing our condition as creatures,
after having abandoned, together with the idea of participation, the
idea of our cooperation with God’s ends, means in practice a commit-
ment to carry out an exact action in the situation in which God has
placed us.
Divine goodness, human freedom, correlation between the affirma-
tion of God and that of natural values: these are also the essential
moments of the philosophy of Descartes. Regarding the central role of
the idea of divine goodness, just think of the theme of divine veracity
and its justification. How can it be deduced rationally from perfection,
if this latter is understood as absolute indetermination and free creation
of truths? If, therefore, veracity is defined not as respect of an order of
truths pre-existent to God’s will but as a perfection of divine will itself
since it creates truth?69 Reconciling this thesis and the free creation of

69 See H. Gouhier, Essais sur Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1937), 191–6.

 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 365

truths leads to difficulties, and the judgment that they are insurmount-
able is the logical justification of Malebranchism.
I do not want to discuss now if they are truly insurmountable. But
what is certain from the historical point of view is that this difficulty was
not felt at all by Descartes. God the creator of eternal truths is followed
immediately by God who is truthful because he is perfect, the guarantor
of natural truths and of the accord between natural and supernatural
light, in a connection that for Descartes does not need logical justification.
That is, the voluntaristic theme has been inserted without mediation into a pre-
existent conception of divine goodness, which cannot be deduced from it.
Thus, Descartes fully accepted all the implications of Molinist thought
regarding the order of human values. Is not his conception of the
autonomy of philosophy also derived from Molinism, and does this not
provide an explanation of his assurance about the Catholic orthodoxy
of this position? The first consequence of the theory of the state of pure
nature in which God, if he had so desired, could well have created man
is evidently the autonomy of philosophy, understood in the sense that
the philosopher, as pure philosopher, does not need to be concerned
with the status naturae lapsae.70 What I find myself in now is the natural
state in which man could have been created: only from revelation can
I learn that it is a decadence and that God had destined me to a better
state. What must be required of a philosophy for it to call itself Christian
is only the recognition that the Revelation is possible, and the Cartesian
texts are fully consistent with this conception.
Now, I think that it is precisely as a result of this accepted and not
criticized Molinist presupposition that the secular aspects of the thought
of Descartes take shape.
It really does not take much insight to realize that there must be fric-
tion between the presupposition and the novelty. Molinism is the redis-
covery, for theological reasons, of a form of Thomism that emphasizes
its Aristotelian aspect to the extreme in a polemics against the
Augustinian aspects accepted by the Reformation. In short, it represents
the extreme form of “Christian naturalism.” Moreover, or as a conse-
quence, its consideration of the problem of evil is of an essentially
justificatory nature. It is a matter of answering the following question:

70 The text of the Entretien avec Burman is extremely significant in this regard:
“philosophus, naturam ut et hominem solum considerat, prout jam est, nec ulterius
eius causas investigat, quia haec illum superant” (Adam et Tannery edition, t. 5, p. 178).
366 The Problem of Atheism

What must we think in order to recognize God as the supreme goodness?

Molina’s Concordia marks the beginning of a process of thought that
reaches its climax, perhaps, in Leibniz’s Teodicea.71
Conversely, Cartesianism is the initially unaware rediscovery,72 for
philosophical reasons, of a form of Augustinianism cut off from any
development that might somehow reconcile it with Thomism. It is the
farthest point reached by anti-naturalism: therefore it handles evil,
which it encounters in the guise of error (but people have correctly
remarked that it extends to error what the theological tradition used
to say about sin) in a typically agonistic fashion. Let us also observe that
the concessions it makes to its adversaries are symmetrical: the Molinist
idea of rigorously distinguishing, for the sake of saving human freedom,
between God’s and man’s part in the work of salvation is a concession
to Protestantism; Cartesian anti-historicism is a concession to libertinism.
Precisely because of this symmetry, Thomism in the Molinist and
Suarezian version, and Augustinism in the Cartesian version are irrec-
oncilably opposed.
In my judgment, this radical heterogeneity between Molinist naturalism and
Cartesian anti-naturalism is precisely the source of the ambiguity I men-
tioned. It is precisely why the secular interpretation of Descartes seems
to be supported by a consideration of his attitude and the religious one
by the interpretation and reconstruction of his doctrines as a consistent
whole.73 This view of a heterogeneity seems confirmed by history: by
the fact that all the thinkers of religious Cartesianism abandoned the

71 As far as I know, the peculiar symmetry between the position of Leibniz with respect to
Spinoza and that of Molina and Jesuitic theology with respect to the Reformation has not been
studied yet. Leibniz involves in his critique of Spinozism the critique of Cartesian
theological arbitrarism (because the absolute indetermination of the Cartesian God
seems to him to be on the verge of turning upside down into the absolute necessity of
the Spinozian God) and that of Protestant theological arbitrarism. Hence the great
admiration he felt for the theologians of Spanish scholastics.
72 Indeed it is absolutely unlikely that Descartes read St Augustine. See Gouhier,
La pensée, 290; and G. Lewis, Le problème de l’incoscient et le cartesianisme (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1950), 33–5.
73 An indirect, but full, confirmation of this judgment can be found in Laporte’s
own treatment. Indeed, when he illustrates Descartes’s position regarding the rela-
tionship between religion and morals (i.e., a topic in which his original attitude
comes to light), he cannot help recognizing that the thought of Descartes is frankly
oriented in a Molinist direction. Vice versa, in the fairly rare passages in which he
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 367

idea of the state of pure nature, even Malebranche, whose theological

thought in some respects does present affinities with Molinism.74
In fact, suppose that we realize this anti-naturalism while keeping
the idea that philosophy, as pure philosophy, is not concerned with the
status naturae lapsae. Because of the dissociation between the point of
view of nature and the point of view of truth, the state of nature – which
Molinism depicted in Aristotelian terms as that in which man in his
condition as a being composed of soul and body can enjoy a natural
truth – becomes the state of pragmatist sensualism and infantile ego-
centrism, from which man must free himself in order to enter into the
truth; that state of infancy that, as has been perfectly written recently,75
constitutes in the eyes of Descartes a sort of original sin with respect to
knowledge. Sin is thus inserted back into a philosophy conceived as
autonomous according to a model that, as we have seen, descended
from Molinist premises. But I can triumph over this sin just by exercis-
ing what seems to be, at least as long as I stop at a purely philosophical
consideration, my pure freedom, without the intervention of other
powers. That is, the Pelagian aspects that I mentioned before appear;
and the psychological hurdles, which I also mentioned, against the
transition to an objectively possible further religious consideration are
produced. Actually, what is produced is a deep-seated antagonism against
such transition: because the religious position distracts my attention
from the future and from the realization of my natural perfection, and
shifts it towards the past and history.
Let us also consider, briefly, the inversion that befalls the theme of
divine freedom, in which we can see the most religious moment of the
philosophy of Descartes. It is the point where his critique of libertinism
reaches its Averroistic conclusion, in the negation of the idea of the
unity of reason in God and in man. It is very easy to understand

addresses theological questions, or questions about the nature of theology (i.e., prob-
lems in which he must start from the novel aspect of his thought), his orientation is
towards Port-Royalist thought.
74 About this rejection, which Malebranche links explicitly to his core thesis, that
of Order, and thus to his reform of Cartesianism, see Laporte, Les Vérités de la Grâce,
t. 2 no. 44 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1923), 44; and H. Gouhier, La
philosophie de Malebranche (Paris: Vrin, 1926), 194–6.
75 H. Gouhier, “Doute or negation méthodique?,” in Les études philosophiques
(1954), 141 (now reprinted in La pensée metaphysique de Descartes [Paris: Vrin, 1962],
ch. 1)
368 The Problem of Atheism

the connection between its immediate consequences – limitation of the

speculative character of philosophy, impenetrability of God’s ends,
impossibility of argumentative theology – and the axiological inversion
that I mentioned speaking of the late Descartes. The secular trait appears
at the end of a sequence of negations conditioned by it: no longer a preamble
to theology, no longer directed at contemplative wisdom, metaphysics
will take the appearance of an introduction to science, which, in con-
nection with the impenetrability of divine ends, will not derive its value
from its contemplative aspect but will be, in turn, an introduction to a
wisdom that is also separated, and so on. That is, the most religious
theme of Cartesian thought, inserted into the context I described,
becomes what makes it possible to expand “separatism” to the highest
degree; and this explains why most of the time it has been considered
by historians a mere gimmick to signify in theological terms the auton-
omy of science from theology.
In summary, in Molinism the precise distinction of orders had the
function of making the assertion of human autonomy and that of the
absolute gratuitousness of the supernatural coincide.
The introduction of an entirely different content of thought into the
conception of philosophy born from that presupposition results in an
inversion, so that, while both elements are preserved, autonomy comes
to the forefront.

8. FROM DESCARTES TO PASCAL

The question that we must now pose to ourselves is whether Pascal’s

thought represents not anti-Cartesianism sic et simpliciter but, rather, the
continuation of Descartes’s thought totally separated from the presup-
posed Molinism in which the novelty of Descartes was inserted. Clearly,
this also throws into the sharpest relief the opposition of attitudes;
because, how could it be greater than between a philosophy lived by a
Molinist tending to rationalism for the reasons I already said, and that
same philosophy lived, instead, by the most intransigent among the
Port-Royalists? But this opposition takes place within a continuity.
It may seem a paradox, but it is not. Let us eliminate all appearances
thereof. Scholars have already proven perfectly well that, for Pascal, the
impossibility of proving God’s existence is one aspect of the impossibility
of metaphysics as a science, and the impossibility of metaphysics as a
science is a consequence of the impossibility of the state of pure
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 369

nature.76 A Christian thinker who thinks of constructing a metaphysics

that may serve as a preamble to the revealed truths, while being autono-
mous from them, is already going down a road on which he can only
be defeated by rationalist thought in its two forms (deism and atheism)
and in their sequence. For having developed to its extreme conse-
quences the criticism of the state of pure nature, we can say that Pascal’s
position is the extreme form of that of the Port-Royalists.
What does all of this have to do with Descartes, you will ask? His posi-
tion is the affirmation of a metaphysics as science, Pascal’s position is a
religious critique of metaphysics. These two points of view could not be
farther apart. Therefore, we will have to prove that the Pascalian critique
of metaphysics is also the most rigorous development of what was most
new in the philosophy of Descartes.
Let us observe that in the thought of Descartes there is, and remains
unsolved, the problem of the transition from speculative and disinter-
ested sciences, whose object is unrelated to concupiscence, and which
therefore is perfectly accessible to our intelligence, to the knowledge
of God and his law, for which the situation is very different. Relative to
these two orders of truth, the question becomes qualitatively different
because the truths that science presents to us are instrumental truths;
they cannot direct us to any ends (Pascal will solve the question by
distinguishing “l’ordre de la raison” from “l’ordre du coeur”). It is as if
in Port-Royalist thought there was an aspiration towards an apology of
Christianity in accord with the “critical spirit, (i.e., addressed to those
already convinced, where for those doctors the critical spirit coincided
with the Cartesian spirit). And, of course, there is also the aspiration to
a separation, which they thought to be possible, of Cartesianism from
Pelagianism, whose presence they had been the first to detect (that
Descartes’s epistolary was filled with such Pelagianism was Arnauld’s
opinion; and Pascal’s famous sentence about Descartes who would have
liked to do without God [fr. 77] is just a strong expression of this criti-
cism). So, it is not the case that the Port-Royalists directly intended to
solve a problem that was objectively open in the philosophy of Descartes
and that had been left unsolved. But they encountered it in the sense that

76 See the very important pages 421–2 in the book I cited by Russier; and, more
generally, the entire last chapter, Pascal au délà de Port-Royal; Les preuves de Dieu, 403ff,
in which the difference between Pascal and Arnauld and Nicole, who still upheld the
value of the rational proofs of the existence of God, is highlighted.
370 The Problem of Atheism

they posed to themselves, in Cartesian terms, the question of the direc-

tion of attention towards religious truths.
Furthermore, there was a precise thesis of Descartes that had already
led him away from the strictly theological theses of Molinism (except
for implicitly preserving the idea of the state of pure nature and his
general spiritual disposition) and pushed him towards the Port-Royalist
conception of theology; namely, the thesis of divine freedom and infin-
ity. Indeed, it makes impossible and unacceptable the idea of different
orders of possibles and futuribles with respect to which the divine will
exercises its choice, which is the foundation of the theory of scientia
media. Thus, regarding this question Descartes was forced to go back to
the Thomist thesis that action is not divided between divine causality
and ours but, rather, is inseparably all ours and all God’s. We can add
that he was fully aware that the Thomist solution was obligatory for his
thought, as shown irrefutably by a passage in the letter to Elizabeth of
6 October 645, in which, even if Molina’s name does not appear, there
is an explicit rejection of the thesis that separates him from Thomism:
that God is only a “partial cause” in the determination of our will; and
by another passage in the Entretien avec Burman, and also by testimo-
nies by Baillet and Leibniz.77
Given this, however, we must also notice, and it is a paradoxical aspect
of his thought that deserves attention, that this encounter with a Thomist
idea takes place starting from a thesis (divine freedom) that is the exact
antithesis of the Thomist one and that marks his departure from scho-
lastics; or, better, a thesis that is the exact inverse of the form that the
Thomist thesis had taken in Suarezism;78 while, on the other hand, all
possibilities of going back to Thomism are precluded by the fact that
Descartes keeps the Suarezian thesis about the relation of essence and
existence whence this new form followed.79
If it were developed in an organic fashion, this marginal encounter
with St Thomas would, because of the theological thesis I mentioned,
lead Cartesianism on the road to Port-Royalism. Observe that Arnauld
had already been interested in this aspect. I do not believe we can find

77 Entretien avec Burman t. 5, 166; Baillet, Vie de M. Descartes (1691) t. 2, 516;

Leibniz, Théodicée no. 365.
78 On this point, see Pierre Garin, Thèses cartésiennes et thèses thomistes (Paris:
Desclée, 1931).
79 See Étienne Gilson, L’être et l’essence (Paris: Vrin, 1948), 156–60.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 371

any passage of his in which there is an explicit assent to this theory about
the free creation of eternal truths. But certainly he accepted its presup-
positions, considering the Cartesian theory from the angle of the idea
of divine infinity and the radical non-distinction of intellect and will
rather than from the angle of arbitrarism. He thereby gave this thesis
a completely different interpretation from that developed by the
great systematic thinkers (and thus by the rationalist interpreters) of
Cartesianism, which found in Leibniz its most complete and best-known
expression.80 We can plausibly think that he viewed it from the perspec-
tive of freeing Thomism from every element that can bend it towards
Molinism; and that therefore he viewed Cartesianism as the position
that makes it possible to get Thomism unstuck from the elements that
continue in Molinism, and to establish its exact continuity with
Augustinianism; thus realizing, by freeing scholastic theology from scho-
lastic philosophy, a convergence with the theological line of Saint-Cyran
as a contraposition of positive theology to argumentative theology.
Therefore, there is no paradox in wondering whether Pascal’s extreme
form of Port-Royalism coincides, too, with a position of thought centred
on the Cartesian theory of divine freedom and infinity: in the sense that
this theory, pushed to its ultimate consequences, can lead to a critique
of speculative metaphysics and to a transition from metaphysical reason
to critical reason that is altogether different from the Kantian one, and
which also explains why the words “fideism” and “skepticism” cannot
be used to describe the thought of Pascal: “There is nothing so conform-
able to reason as this disavowal of reason. If we submit everything to
reason, our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element.
If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and
ridiculous” (fr. 272–3).

80 This is Laporte’s judgment, Les Vérités t. 2, 4–14 and 334–5n27. In this second
reference he says that Arnauld’s opinion on this matter “is not different from that of
Descartes correctly understood.” It would be interesting to examine the huge influ-
ence that the study of Arnault – which was the true discovery of a great thinker in a
writer who is usually regarded as pedantic and mediocre – had on the formation of
Laporte’s historical thought. It is such study that led him to consider “La finalité selon
Descartes,” in Revue d’Histoire de la philosophie 2 (1928): 366–96; it was the first kernel
of his study on “Liberté selon Descartes,” in Revue de Metaphysique 44 (1937): 37–87,
which, from a certain angle, can be considered, with respect to divine freedom, as a
rigorous elucidation of Arnault’s interpretation. Important traces of Arnauld’s views
could also be discerned in Rationalisme de Descartes.
372 The Problem of Atheism

Let us recall the general features of this Cartesian theory. I already

highlighted its kinship with the theory of human freedom. Freedom,
in God as well as in man, is the capacity to cause one’s own acts. But
since God is pure unity and infinity, his freedom is not subordinate to
anything, and so it is, inseparably, necessity and indifference. Conversely,
man as a finite being finds the nature of truth and goodness already
determined, established by God. Hence the distinction, in man, between
knowing and willing, and the necessity that the will, which is infinite,
conform to the intellect, which is finite, realizing somehow, in this
conformity, the image of the unity of will and intellect that exists in
God. This implies the affirmation of a complete heterogeneity between
God’s reason and ours because of the unity in God, and the distinction
in us, of will and intellect. The unity of intellect and will in God makes
it impossible to say that the divine will is determined by a pre-existent
order of truths and values. Therefore, the divine will must be said to be
the free creator of eternal truths; which does not mean that it can be described
in terms of pure arbitrarism because the term “arbitrarism” indicates that
the will precedes the intellect. Thus, there is no similarity at all with the
theses of Luther and Calvin, at least as they are usually interpreted, and
as they were interpreted by the Port-Royalists,81 because, according to
Descartes, for God videre and velle are the same thing. A corollary of this
unity of intellect and will is the unity, incomprehensible to us, of neces-
sity and indifference in God. In reference to God’s will, necessity is not
at all comparable to logical and mathematical necessity, which is inti-
mately permeable to our spirit and is the norm of all our deductions
(we are, thus, at the antipodes of Spinozism). Substantially, then, what
is being affirmed is the mysteriosity of God’s nature and the vanity of any
attempt to reconcile the plurality of his attributes.
It will be appropriate to linger a little longer on its genesis, on its
absolute necessity for Descartes’s thought, on its existential character,
since the interpretation that reduces it to a mere conceptual fiction (in
order to guarantee the autonomy of non-teleological physics, or, in

81 See Laporte, Les Vérités, t. 2, 168ff, 344ff. Port-Royalists reject, in Protestantism,

both theological arbitrarism and the negation of human free will. The “Catholic
truth” resides for them in the re-establishment of the true relation between grace and
freedom, altered by the Molinists because they accepted the Protestant separation
between grace and freedom, merely inverting it, and consequently subjecting grace
to the will.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 373

general, human autonomy etc.),82 or that views it, in any case, as an

isolated thesis, with no direct connection with the others, is still so
widespread. Therefore, we must consider the tight parallelism of the
relation between cogito and sum, on the one hand, with the relation
between the idea of God and the free creation of eternal truths, on the
other. I cannot grasp my own existence except in a necessary connec-
tion with its essential attribute or essence; except in that example of
necessary connection – namely, cogito ergo sum. For this reason the con-
tent of thought presents itself to me as the untranscendible; ideas appear
to me as natures or essences – that is, as objects no less real and inde-
pendent of my thought than physical objects. But if these are the char-
acteristics of finite existence, how shall we think infinite existence?
Evidently, only by an absolute inversion of what reason and experience
teach us about man.83 As was already said, we experience freedom as a
power of negativity, a power to suspend judgment until we reach some-
thing that resists this effort of negation. For God, who is not limited by
anything, freedom will have to be identified with absolute creativity.
The situation of this thesis in Descartes’s opus is extremely peculiar.
It was supposed to occupy an absolutely central place in the sketch of
metaphysics of 1629, according to the letter to Mersenne of 15 April
1630. In contrast, he does not discuss it in the major works, neither in
the Discourse, nor in the Meditations, nor in the Principles, even though
he holds it unchanged and keeps affirming it as essential – in a few
passages, eight overall, the last time expressly in a letter to Arnauld of
29 July 1648. On the other hand, all his theses are related to it, except

82 An example of the first thesis is the book by Gilson La liberté chez Descartes et la
théologie (Paris: Alcan, 1913); of the second, the work already cited by Laberthonnière;
Brehier’s thesis – “La création des vérités éternelles dans le système de Descartes,” in
Revue Philosophique 5 (1937): 15-29 – comes close, in a different form, to that of
Gilson: in his view the Cartesian theory guarantees that man can know essences inte-
grally and without residue by reducing them to the rank of creatures.
83 The formula metaphysical inversion, which is not in Descartes, but which
expresses his thought exactly, was recently introduced by Gouhier, La pensée metaphy-
sique de Descartes, 221. As a form of univocity in reverse, it means that regarding the
“discourse on God,” as Descartes understands it, one cannot speak either of univocity,
or of analogy, or of simple equivocity, or, strictly speaking, of negative theology (see
Gouhier, La pensée metaphysique de Descartes, 205–32). I believe there is no need to
emphasize the capital importance of this thesis to illustrate the whole metaphysical
and religious thought of Descartes.
374 The Problem of Atheism

the ontological proof, so that Laporte, having started from the idea of
valuing all Cartesian texts, linking them together and reconciling them,
without neglecting any, had to arrive at a criticism, which I think is
definitive, of the “rationalistic” interpretation of Descartes; so that
Alquié, even though his interpretation is very different, could say that
this thesis introduces the “metaphysical dimension” and thus the condi-
tion for a radical critique of scientism. This is not the place to investigate
what motivated Descartes to talk so little about it, despite the value he
attached to it. I think the reason is that to him it was the source of a
doubt that he could not fully overcome, and that could be overcome
in two opposite ways – that of Pascal and that of Malebranche.
Let us see whether, by studying the two fragments (233 and 434) in
which the reference to Descartes’s philosophy seems most evident, and
the distinction sharpest, we are led to conclude that the distinction
depends on the fact that Pascal pushed to the ultimate consequences
the Cartesian theory of divine infinity. In this regard I would like to
propose to follow a method that has never been used before: that of
comparing the opposite positions (albeit within the same significant
structure that I tried to define earlier) of Pascal and Malebranche. We
must observe that the two points where Malebranche moves away from
Descartes are the proofs of the existence of God and of the reality of
the external world. These are also the two points where Pascal moves
away from him – but in an absolutely opposite way. Indeed, Malebranche
says that the ontological argument loses its value if one accepts the
Cartesian theory of eternal truths. Pascal, instead, says that we cannot
know either the existence or the nature of God. We have to ask whether
we can see in Pascal a sort of answer ante litteram to Malebranche’s
criticism. Descartes intends to reconcile the proofs of the existence of
God with the thesis of divine freedom; Malebranche and Pascal affirm,
for opposite reasons, their irreconcilability – Malebranche by develop-
ing the theme of the unity of the human soul with God, Pascal by
developing that of the incommensurability between divine reason and
human reason.
In Malebranche’s critique of the Cartesian theory of eternal truths –
developed for the first time in the X Eclaircissement of the Recherche de la
vérité – Descartes is accused of having fallen back into the same liber-
tinism of which his philosophy, correctly extended, should constitute,
instead, the definitive refutation. Because is this God of pure power,
not subject to an immutable Order, really different from Nature as
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 375

conceived by the libertines? In Malebranche’s judgment, the conse-

quences are the same: skepticism and amoralism. Because, if eternal
truths and laws depend on God, who can assure us of the absolute value
of our science?84 Moreover, who can say that subjecting the spirit to
the body is a disorder, if we do not have a clear idea of an immutable
and necessary moral order? And then, what proofs can be given of the
fundamental truths of the Christian religion, sin and Redemption? But
let us consider the question from the more particular angle of the proofs
of the existence of God. From a Cartesian perspective ideas are created,
and so the very idea of God is created. But nothing finite can represent
the infinite: according to Malebranche, theo-centrism and the criticism
of occult faculties unify in this principle. Having accepted it, clearly I
cannot go from the idea to God: the intuition of God himself will be
the transcendental condition of our knowledge. In conclusion, the value
of the Cartesian ontological proof is tied to the meaning we give to the

84 Note the extreme importance of this aspect of Malebranche’s critique: because

it concerns the possibility that Cartesian philosophy, without the correction he adds
to it, may reduce to a form of psychologism, which to him is a position equivalent to
skepticism; or, let us say, to skeptical historicism (different systems of truth and
so on). This is the beginning of the famous opposition between Ontologism and psy-
chologism on which the philosophy of Gioberti (who was the first one, apparently, to
use the word “Ontologism”) is founded.
In reference to more modern times, his critique anticipates Husserl’s critique of
psychologism. In his magnificent work on Malebranche (Malebranche, 3 vols. (Paris:
Aubier, 1955–59), which is much superior, in my opinion, to his previous, and still very
valuable, book on Descartes, Gueroult, stressing this parallelism, remarks: “he prefig-
ures Bernard Bolzano, the inspirer of Husserl, who distinguishes propositions in
themselves, and representations in themselves, and truths in themselves, from the
knowledge whereby they become the thoughts of an I; who reckons that these entities
would immutably go on being what they are, even if nobody were ever there to actu-
ally become aware of them” (2:9–10). In fact, the affinity between Malebranche
and Bolzano, and the extreme importance of the polemics between Malebranche and
Arnauld – which takes place around the gnoseological consequences of how one
frames the question of the relation between God and the eternal truths – for the initial
formulation of the question of logicism and psychologism (which is actually evident,
but which one is somewhat hesitant to point out, out of fear of looking anti-historical)
had already been highlighted by P. Schrecker, “Le parallélisme théologico-mathéma-
tique chez Malebranche,” in Revue philosophique 125, nos. 3–4 (1938): 215–52.
On the contrary, the proximity, to the point of almost or complete identity,
between the gnoseological position of Arnauld and that of Franz Brentano has never
been studied.
376 The Problem of Atheism

Cartesian notion of the objective reality of ideas; to the distinction

between ideas and the thinking subject, which is surreptitious in
Descartes but is implicitly announced precisely in this concept. If, con-
versely, ideas are reduced to modes of the thinking subject, as Arnauld
wants to do and as apparently Descartes himself often seems to say,85
the proof loses all validity. From the fact that necessary existence is
included in our idea of God we can only draw the meagre conclusion
that we think that God exists necessarily. In such a conception, shut
inside the sphere of my own thought, I do find there the idea of God,
and certainly I find it as something that I could not have produced; but
this still cannot ensure in any way that it does not reduce to a regulatory
principle devoid of ontological value. This difficulty dissipates com-
pletely only if we affirm the uncreated character of ideas; the ontological
proof can only be consistent if the idea of God is elevated to God himself,
if the idea of God is replaced by the vision in God, if proof is replaced
by presence.
Observe that this criticism truly brings us to the core of the whole
Malebranchian revision of the philosophy of Descartes. The architecture
of the system is not changed; the superposition of substances, the infinite
substance and the finite, thinking, and extended substances all remain.
The change is all inside and concerns the divine nature and the relation
of the finite spirit with the infinite: the eternal truths are consubstantial
with God instead of being created, and therefore innatism is replaced
by vision in God. Also occasionalism depends on this replacement and,
in a different respect, Malebranche’s Idealism as well.86

85 This is what Malebranche thinks, or says he thinks, but in fact there is no

doubt that for Descartes ideas are modes of consciousness.
86 In fact, the Cartesian theory of the union of body and soul (see Laporte, Le
rationalisme, 220ff) – which is not fully worked out, and yet is established in its essen-
tial lines and is fully consistent with the rest of his thought, and which anticipates in
many respects that of Biran (“the motory efficacy of will is, for Descartes, as for Biran,
a fact sui generis, independent of any reasoning and against which no reasoning could
prevail,” Laporte, Le rationalisme, 228) – is compatible only with his idea of the limits
of rationalism, signified in the thesis of divine infinity. If this idea is abandoned, occa-
sionalism presents itself as a necessary solution. Regarding Idealism, which will be
discussed again later, let it be enough now to observe that, in Malebranche, the the-
ory of eternal truths is linked with the theory, which is affirmed for the first time in
history, of the presentative and not representative character of ideas.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 377

Let us now move on to Pascal’s very famous fragment 233, Infini-rien

(the pari), which has the exact same importance in the economy of the
Pensées as does the X Enclaircissement in the philosophy of Malebranche:
“The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes
a pure nothing,” and here we might think we have found a point of
agreement with Malebranche. But, let us keep reading: “So our spirit
before God, so our justice before divine justice. There is not so great a
disproportion between our justice and that of God, as between unity
and infinity.” And here Pascal agrees, instead, with Descartes on the
idea of the heterogeneity between divine reason and ours. Let us
go further:

We know that there is an infinite, and are ignorant of its nature. As we know
it to be false that numbers are finite, it is therefore true that there is an infin-
ity in number. But we do not know what it is. It is false that it is even, it is false
that it is odd … We know then the existence and nature of the finite, because
we also are finite and have extension. We know the existence of the infinite,
and are ignorant of its nature, because it has extension like us, but not limits
like us. But we know neither the existence nor the nature of God, because
He has neither extension nor limits. But by faith we know His existence; in
glory we shall know His nature. Now, I have already shown that we may well
know the existence of a thing, without knowing its nature … If there is a
God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor lim-
its, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what
He is or if He is … Let us then examine this point, and say, ‘God is, or He is
not.’ But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here.

It seems that in this passage Pascal develops the Cartesian thesis (clearly
here we are talking about a relationship between essences, not direct
historical influences; although Arnauld’s appreciation of it may have
been known to Pascal) such as it can be reaffirmed after accepting,
ante litteram, Malebranche’s future criticism. God’s absolute mysterios-
ity cannot be reconciled with a process wherein one deduces his exis-
tence from his essence considered in itself. Therefore, so to speak, the
ideas of the infinite and the perfect become distinguished: the only
infinite whose existence we know is the mathematical infinite, but we
ignore its nature. But on the other hand this idea of the infinite and
our impossibility to penetrate it warn us of the limitations of our knowl-
edge, and of the possibility of a supra-rational knowledge. If we cannot
378 The Problem of Atheism

prove the existence of God, we can at least recognize its possibility;

hence the pari.87
It might seem (and we have seen that this is Goldmann’s fundamental
objection to Laporte) that the thesis that reason is surpassed by natural
things themselves opens up an unbridgeable chasm between the epis-
temologies of Descartes and Pascal. Now, this surpassing of reason by
natural things reminds us of the famous sentence: “Nature sustains our
feeble reason.” Let us place it back in the context of the fragment to
which it belongs, number 434, the conclusion of Pascal’s critique of phi-
losophy, observing that this critique takes the form of a remake of the
process of Descartes’s Meditations after the collapse of the ontological
argument and thus of the “chain of reasons.”

The chief arguments of the sceptics – I pass over the lesser ones – are that we
have no certainty of the truth of these principles apart from faith and revela-
tion, except in so far as we naturally perceive them in ourselves. Now this
natural intuition is not a convincing proof of their truth; since, having no
certainty, apart from faith, whether man was created by a good God, or by a
wicked demon, or by chance, it is doubtful whether these principles given to
us are true, or false, or uncertain, according to our origin. Again, no person
is certain, apart from faith, whether he is awake or sleeps, seeing that during
sleep we believe that we are awake as firmly as we do when we are awake … I
notice the only strong point of the dogmatists, namely, that, speaking in
good faith and sincerely, we cannot doubt natural principles. Against this the
skeptics set up in one word the uncertainty of our origin, which includes that
of our nature. The dogmatists have been trying to answer this objection ever
since the world began … What then shall man do in this state? Shall he
doubt everything? Shall he doubt whether he is awake? … Shall he doubt
whether he doubts? Shall he doubt whether he exists? We cannot go so far as
that; and I lay it down as a fact that there never has been a real complete
skeptic. Nature sustains our feeble reason, and prevents it raving to this

87 I can be brief on this point because the question of the idea of the Infinite
with respect to knowledge, in Descartes and in Pascal, and of the consequent impos-
sibility for the latter to talk about proofs of the existence of God, has already been
studied masterfully in what may be the most beautiful of Laporte’s writings, Le coeur et
la raison selon Pascal (Paris: Elzèvir, 1950), 33–7, 47–9. It is a posthumous reprinting
of studies that had appeared in Revue philosophique in 1927, when its author had not
yet fully explored the question of divine freedom in Descartes and Malebranche. For
this reason, even though he perfectly captured the essential point, it still lacks the set
of references that I have deemed necessary.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 379

extent … Shall he then say, on the contrary, that he certainly possesses

truth – he who, when pressed ever so little, can show no title to it … Who will
unravel this tangle? Nature confutes the skeptics, and reason confutes the
dogmatists. What then will you become, O men! who try to find out by your
natural reason what is your true condition? You cannot avoid one of these
sects, nor adhere to one of them.

This fragment is extremely important because in it Pascal tackles the

question of the “reality of the external world” in the solipsistic sense
that is, at least virtually, proper to Cartesianism, and not in Berkeley’s
merely immaterialistic sense. Here, too, a parallel with Malebranche
(VI Eclaircissement sur la Recherche de la Vérité; VI Entrétien sur la Métaphysique)
is clarifying. By developing the rationalist motif of Descartes’s Meditations,
until he erases the hint to God as creator of the eternal truths seemingly
contained in the conjecture of a deceitful God, Malebranche gets with
great rigour to declare that the reality of the external world, including
finite spirits, is rationally unprovable – because in matters of philosophy
we must not believe anything except when evidence obliges us to – and
to affirm the necessity of a (rationally justified) recourse to revelation.
Pascal’s position is the exact opposite. A skeptic is such because he casts
doubt on “natural intuition,” because he has the same idea of the truth
as the dogmatists: he seeks “titles,” “convincing proofs” – in short, the
“metaphysical foundation” of natural intuition. This presupposes aban-
doning the rationalist idea of truth, which is perfectly consistent with
the more radical interpretation of the Cartesian thesis of divine freedom
and infinity that I mentioned. Because of this abandonment, the “oppo-
site errors” of dogmatism and skepticism are positions that man cannot
sustain. “Instinct, reason. – We have an incapacity of proof, insurmount-
able by all dogmatism. We have an idea of truth, invincible to all skepti-
cism” (fr. 395). Very real certainty and inability to prove exist side by
side. But “this inability ought, then, to serve only to humble reason,
which would judge all, but not to impugn our certainty, as if only reason
were capable of instructing us” (fr. 282).
Undoubtedly, we can see in this thesis of “natural intuition” a sort of
transition from skepticism to empiricism,88 which follows from a radical
criticism of rationalism, and we can compare Pascal to Hume on the

88 [TN] Del Noce uses “sentimento naturale” to translate Pascal’s “sentiment

naturel.” I use “natural intuition” to follow a common English translation of frag-
ment 434.
380 The Problem of Atheism

basis of what has been called the “dogmatism of intuition.” This route
has been proposed by Laporte and extended by Russier.89 To what
extent this idea can be fruitful, I cannot tell; and I already said why this
comparison seems forced and not very historical to me. But it is certain
that this aspect of Pascal’s thought can be expressed as the thesis that
there are only “truths of fact.” However, viewed in terms of the theory
of divine freedom, did not Descartes’s philosophy also take the appear-
ance of a proposal of radical empiricism, as the complete reduction of
truths of reason to truths of fact? But since the word “empiricism” is
used to mean too many things, I would rather say that the most com-
prehensive formula that can be used to define Pascal’s position is that
of the “submission of reason” consequent upon the criticism of ratio-
nalism: “so that it is not by the proud exertions of our reason, but by
the simple submissions of reason, that we can truly know ourselves”
(fr. 434). This is the full realization of a theme that Descartes had
already formulated in a letter to Mersenne: “because I have never writ-
ten about the infinite except to submit myself to it, and not to determine
what it is or is not.”90
Now I will risk a paradox: if the thesis of divine freedom and infinity
is as important for Descartes as that of human freedom, we must see in
Pascal the continuer and defender of the Cartesian novelty in its most
rigorous sense, as well as the critic of the aspect of his thought that
anticipates the Enlightenment. Indeed, every other form of philosophy
of the 1600s and 1700s reconciles Descartes with some previous
form of thought against which he had fought: Spinozism reconciles it
with Renaissance naturalism, Malebranchian Ontologism with the tra-
ditional theory of eternal truths, the Enlightenment with the trends of
libertinism and natural religion; and every one of these reconciliations

89 See her communication “L’experience du Mémorial et la conception pasca-

lienne de la connaissance,” in Blaise Pascal: L’homme et l’œuvre, Cahiers de Royaumont 1
(Paris: Minuit, 1956), 225–58. The result one reaches in this direction is that, accord-
ing to both Pascal and Hume, the constancy of the laws of nature does not manifest
the existence of necessary connections: the universe of Pascal and that of Hume are
universes of radical contingency. This can help dispel the notion of a similarity
between Pascal and Kant. But it is still a point of contact between parts of “wholes”
that are completely different.
90 Letter to Mersenne of 28 January 1641. On the theme of the “submission of
reason,” the beautiful exposition by J. Chevalier, Pascal (Paris: Plon, 1922), 291ff,
remains as important as ever.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 381

has been made possible by rejecting one element of Cartesian thought

that is new with respect to tradition – the whole philosophy of freedom
in Spinozism, the theory of divine freedom in Malebranche, and meta-
physics as a whole in the Enlightenment.
But, again, since this thesis is very far removed from mainstream
opinion, let me spend a few words to clarify it. It should be evident that
I do not mean at all to diminish Pascal’s originality, and even less to
depict him as a mere disciple of Descartes. I mean the following: there
is in him an absolutely new and original idea, the definition of atheism
that I have already emphasized so much; it is properly his and does not
depend either on Port-Royalism (even if it does not contradict it) or on
Cartesianism. By saying this we do justice to the impression that in his
thought there is more than Jansenism. But he rethought that idea in
relation to Port-Royalist doctrine and, thus, to the reduction of the
theological discussion in terms of the opposition of Jansenism and
Molinism. Therefore, it takes the meaning that there is a correlation
between the criticism of all forms of speculative metaphysics and that
of the idea of the state of pure nature; and, in this sense, the idea that in
his thought we should recognize the extreme expression of Port-Royalism
becomes absolutely correct. But the most peculiar fact is that this extreme
expression coincides with the most radical extension of the Cartesian
new moment and, at the same time, with the dissociation of Cartesianism
from the Molinist substructure. Thus, at the basis of Pascal’s apologetics
there is not only a certain theology but also a real philosophy – the one
I described. Since this kinship evidently cannot be explained in terms
of an explicit will to develop the thought of Descartes, we must resort
to the idea of a common significant structure.
After having set Pascal in opposition to Descartes, Goldmann com-
pares him to Kant, instead; and it is a comparison that, in the past, had
already tempted many people:91 “setting reason aside to make room

91 Already in 1865 there was a book by E. Saisset, Le scepticisme – Aenésidème,

Pascal, Kant (Paris: Didier, 1865) whose title says it all. In the atmosphere of spiritual-
istic Kantianism and positivism, two positions that are often hard to distinguish, the
comparison was certainly lived: consider the way in which Kant and Pascal were
united as an object of admiration by Boutroux (and here in Italy Tarozzi consid-
ered Boutroux’s Pascal one of the most beautiful books he had ever read). We must
also recall Duhem, mentioned by Chevalier in Pascal, 6n1, who judged Kant’s work
to be a long, confused, and pedantic comment on Pascal’s thought. Chevalier him-
self devotes to their relationship, which he sees as an opposition, important remarks
382 The Problem of Atheism

for faith,” simultaneous criticism of dogmatism and skepticism, criticism

of metaphysics as a science, and so on. But whoever will write a possible
and desirable book on Pascal and Kant, which is still missing, will only
be able to do so in the form of a parallel between symmetric but irre-
ducible positions. If we so desire, we can apply the concept of “criticism”
to both of them; but criticism leads the former to a supernatural religion
and the latter to a rational religion. In between Pascal and Kant there
is Rousseau and the huge influence he exercised on Kant, and this is
no small thing.92 Kant’s religious form is precisely the postulatory the-
ism that has been swept away by recent postulatory atheism, whereas it
is very doubtful that the latter has weapons against Pascalian theism.
Nor, finally, is what Goldmann says about the symmetry between
Montaign-Descartes-Pascal and Wolf-Hume-Kant entirely correct.
Allegedly, both Pascal and Kant were preceded by a dogmatic rationalist
and a skeptic, with respect to whom they stand. This would justify (to
paraphrase the title of a well-known book by Brunschvicg) two studies,
one on Pascal, reader of Montaigne and Descartes, and the other on
Kant, reader of Wolf and Hume.93 The true symmetry is, instead,

(see 197–7, 206–7, 291–2, etc.). But certainly the author who must have been most
aware of it, by virtue of his formation, was Delbos, who is mentioned by Goldmann
(Hidden God, 223n3), because Pascal, Biran, and Kant were his authors. The very
sentence that Goldmann quotes based on a recollection by A. Adam in Histoire de la
litterature française au XVII siècle, v. 2 (Paris: Domat, 1954), 294–5, “One day in a
moment of discouragement, Victor Delbos, the author of La philosophie morale de Kant,
remarked that he had found nothing in the German philosopher that was not already
in Pascal,” shows that he inclined towards a spiritualistic type of comparison that
could not lead to rigorous results. Just as his comparison between “Maine de Biran et
Pascal,” in Figures et doctrines de philosophes (Paris: Plon, 1918), did not lead to rigorous
results.
92 Adam himself, who also intends to compare Pascal and Kant, can only do it
through the Pelagian Rousseau: “Pascal, finally, does not believe in the primacy of
intelligence. What was left for him to do if not replacing it with the primacy of ethics,
i.e. the fundamental thesis shared by Rousseau and Kant?” (Histoire de la litterature
française, t. 2, 295).
93 Goldmann, Hidden God, 23. It is nonetheless true that the topic he mentions
is, in fact, extraordinarily important – so much so that it is today, among the possible
works in the history of philosophy, one of the most urgent. It would clarify the exis-
tence of two different forms of criticism (or, if you want to say so, with the incomplete
precision of shortened formulas, of two different form of reconquest of metaphysics,
and of religion, after the abandonment of “fundamental ontology”), which, however
are irreducible, and of which the second does not surpass the first. It is interesting to
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 383

between Suarez-Montaigne-Descartes (and Pascal) and Wolf-Hume-Kant

(while it is true that, in Kant, according to the terms of the parallel,
there is somehow a union of Descartes and Pascal). At most we can say
that Kant meets again Pascal’s question but, and this is an extremely
important point, having already taken as accomplished the victory of
rational religion over revealed religion.

9. FROM PASCAL TO MALEBRANCHE

It is also true, and it is what can give a certain semblance of truth to

Goldmann’s theses, that Pascal’s position is a radical anti-humanism.
Without a doubt, within the whole tradition of Christian thought Pascal
takes his place as the thinker who emphasized the discontinuity of orders,
and Gouhier has correctly remarked that the terms “continuity” and
“discontinuity” are the most effective in order to define the opposition
of Christian humanism and anti-humanism.94 Besides, who can fail to
see that his critique of metaphysics constitutes the most consistent and
most radical extremization of the anti-Molinism of Port-Royal, and what
else is Molina’s doctrine if not the effort to give a systematic structure

observe that the same parallel, regarding Descartes and Kant, had been drawn by me
in “Problemi del periodizzamento storico: Gli inizi della filosofia moderna,” in La
filosofia della storia della filosofia, Archivio di Filosofia (1954): 187–210, on page 193. I
bring it up as another proof that Goldmann and I came across the same thoughts and
thus staked opposite positions on a common ground. This is why a discussion with
him seemed fruitful, and I thought of organizing the present essay around a discus-
sion of his book.
94 In his brief but very dense communication “L’anti-humanisme de Pascal,” in
Anais do Congresso Internacional de filosofia de São Paulo (August 9-15, 1954) (São Paulo:
Instituto Brasileiro de Filosofia, 1956), 389–95. I think that the expression “anti-
humanism,” the most radical that ever appeared, is more appropriate to describing
Pascal’s position than Jansenism – which is so generic and has too often been politi-
cized – and Port-Royalism itself. Not because I do not think that his position was the
ultimate extremization of Port-Royalism, as it actually was, but because I do not want
to generate the imprecise idea that the Pensées are fragments of an application to
apologetics of the general Port-Royalist doctrine. He did not start from Port-Royalism,
but he encountered it. Pascal’s anti-humanism, and the peculiar kinship with liber-
tine themes that arises because of it, was also discussed in G. Toffanin’s Italia e Francia
(Bologna: Zanichelli, 1960).
384 The Problem of Atheism

to a humanist theology?95 Gouhier writes correctly that “Pascal’s anti-

humanism seems so perfect that it illuminates, by negating it, the essen-
tial element of Christian humanism.” He thus seems to suggest that it
would be useful to conduct a comparative study, in the form of a parallel
between Pascal and the author who, within Christian thought, seems
to be his essential antithesis – Vico. On the one side, the man who
thought that “there is, for the Christian, but one history, that which has
been made ‘sacred’ by the waiting for, the coming and the permanent
agony of Jesus Christ,”96 and who searched this sacred history for the
proofs of Revelation, as the only proofs of religion. On the other side,
the man who looked for God’s signs in profane history, intentionally
setting aside the history of the chosen people.
In Pascal the critique of atheism and the critique of humanism are,
de facto, linked. The problem of the conversion of the atheist led him
to the idea of a purification of Christian thought, in which it dissociates
itself from humanist contaminations. But can we say that the two cri-
tiques are also linked de jure? And does the fact that he thought his
new thesis as the extreme radicalization of Port-Royalism imply that the
two are really inseparable? In fact, can we ask whether precisely because

95 It must be observed that, historically, the assessment of Molinism has been

linked with that of humanism. Undoubtedly, it appears to be a position of compro-
mise when humanism is given a secular meaning (which was common until 1930 and
was never abandoned by Croce). Otherwise, it will have to be discussed in the context
of a changed historical concept of humanism.
96 The importance of the relationship between Pascal and Vico was well per-
ceived and defined by the most Vichian of contemporary philosophers, Giuseppe
Capograssi: “With that profound philosophy of his which had extracted from
Christianity all the bitter pessimism it contains, Pascal, as is not well known, professed
his own theory of force – addressing the question of authority and social order –
which has remained, and could not but remain, isolated … Evil and passion over-
whelm human wills so much that their only certainty is force, since they have
completely stepped out of themselves. As usual, Pascal went deep in his observation
of another of the miseries of life, but his mistake was that he did not see the rational
substance of authority, which can remain certainty only inasmuch as it is truth.
However, if the truth is denied, that same certainty will turn into exterior certainty,
that is, no longer certainty but true violence and typical abuse of power. Carried away
by his ardent and exclusive act of faith, in his excess of faith, and in the ardor of giving
an unshakable foundation to his apologetics, Pascal forgot what has been Vico’s core
thought, the only idea on which it is possible to found any apologetics of history and
life: that the certain is part of the true” (Opere, vol. 1 [Milan: Giuffrè, 1959], 230–1).
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 385

of this association Pascal envisioned the unbeliever in the skeptical and

pessimistic position of the libertine (in the position of mere negative
atheism) without foreseeing a future positive atheism that would claim
to speak in the name of the direction of history? And is the limited
fortune that the Pensées enjoyed in the 1700s not also explained by the
fact that Pascal, due to his anti-humanism, did not foresee the transition
from libertinism to the Enlightenment? Furthermore, does not Pascal’s
own thesis of the harmonization of opposite truths seem to authorize
this surpassing of the critique of humanism – while still regarding as
legitimate, of course, the protest against a form of Christianity at risk
of being absorbed by it? Because in the history of Christian thought
these two tendencies have always coexisted; now, does not Pascal’s
thought take a stance of simple negation vis-à-vis humanism? Nor can one
deny that this anti-humanism is also the aspect of his thought that is
not relevant today.97 For example, who would incline, today, to appro-
priate his political thought? Yet it is tied so organically to his general
outlook that it cannot in the least be cut off from it or watered down.
His anti-humanism is one with his Jansenism: this is quite certain.
However, to talk about his Jansenism as an “influence” is not exact, for
the simple reason that Pascal was not the kind of man who is passively
influenced. If he turned towards Jansenism it was because his religious
thought was already inclined in an anti-humanist direction. Without
contradicting at all the obvious idea of the unity of anti-humanism and
Jansenism, let us go back to the question I touched upon earlier of the
anti-humanist character of religious Cartesianism.
We cannot give a religious interpretation of any Cartesian philosophi-
cal thesis except by giving it an anti-humanist meaning, and the recipro-
cal is also true. Certainly Descartes had a humanist side, even after
abandoning literary and erudite humanism, the humanism of the Jesuits,
that of Montaigne, and that of the libertines. But then humanism means

97 See, for example, what has been written by a true lover of Pascal’s thought,
M.F. Sciacca: “Pascal lacked creatural sense … The Pascalian God, who saves and
damns, often leaves us in anguish in front of a silent universe” (Pascal [Milan:
Marzorati, 1962], 218–19). Read also all of his important “Conclusion.” Similarly, and
with greater emphasis on the historical-political side (which is partly questionable
because of the particular perspective in which the author inserts this reservation),
Béguin has pointed out the absence in Pascal of any sense of “the commitment of
every human person to the common work of the generations, and to the endeavors of
the centuries that will follow,” Pascal par lui-même (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952), 108.
386 The Problem of Atheism

the ideal of the “maîtrise de la nature”; the idea of man who makes
himself master and owner of nature, using the technical tools made
possible by the new science, even if it is guaranteed by God (but God
as “guarantor” rather than God as “end”); who makes himself master
and owner of his body using medicine; who becomes master of his own
behaviour through morals and knowledge of the passions. The religious
aspect is that of losing the world in meditation. But upon returning to
the world, after it has been founded through the process of the
Meditations, civilization appears to Descartes as destined to realize not
the truths of faith but, rather, the truths of science acquired through
natural reason, breaking entirely with the medieval attempt to incarnate
the City of God.
In other words, the dissociation of spirituality and history in which I
tried to identify the significant structure of Cartesianism leads to a break
between humanism and anti-humanism. Humanism continues in the
sense of Pelagianism or pre-Enlightenment that I mentioned earlier,
and agonism against sin is replaced by agonism against nature.
Conversely, religious thought takes an anti-humanistic and ascetic sense.
Now, is it possible to surpass Pascal’s negativism while incorporating
its novelty – namely, the realization that deism (metaphysical rational-
ism) and atheism are correlated? This attempt to reaffirm humanism
after the Pascalian critique defines, in my judgment, the history of modern
Christian Ontologism.
To clarify this point, let us return to the question of the proofs of
God’s existence and the negation of their possibility in Pascal.98 The

98 I know well that the question of whether Pascal admits the possibility of ratio-
nal proofs of the existence of God is in dispute. I do not want to address the question
directly, but clearly, given the vision I have proposed, I must regard as decisive the
arguments to the contrary by Laporte (Le coeur et la raison, 33–7, 47–9) and Russier
(La foi, 71ff). Does this justify speaking of skepticism or fideism in Pascal? Not in the
slightest. According to Pascal there are “certain” proofs of religion (we can say that
what he wants to prove is not the “philosophical God” but the “religious God” after
having denied that proving the former can be a preamble to proving the latter), and
if we use the word “rationalism” as a simple counterpart to the words “skepticism”
and “fideism,” very few Christian thinkers, or none at all, have been as rationalist as
he was. Except, they are historical proofs; hence, the exceptional importance that
Pascal attributed, and that historians of him should attribute, to what normally is con-
sidered to be the second part of his apologetics, which instead is so often neglected.
But the direction of attention towards these proofs is completely different from that
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 387

thesis of the discontinuity of orders – think of its wondrous formulation

in the famous fragment 792: “The infinite distance between body and
mind is a symbol of the infinitely more infinite distance between mind
and charity; for charity is supernatural” – certainly rules out that the
existence of God can be proved starting from any datum, be it real or
ideal, of the created world. From the sphere of the profane, one will
never be able to pass to that of the sacred, by reason of the infinite
distance. The author of nature, the guarantor of science, the ideal of
absolute knowledge (if their existence was ever demonstrated) have no
relation with the religious God. The ontological argument, in the form
it takes in Descartes, in as much as it claims to proceed from the idea
of God to God, is also ruled out. But in tradition there is also – and it
reaffirmed itself after Pascal, from Malebranche to Rosmini – a religious
school that derives from St Augustine and is usually called Ontologism
(an imprecise term because of the misunderstandings it can generate).
It insists on the soul’s immediate and lived contact with God, a direct
experience against whose background the proofs of God take on mean-
ing and value. Pascal’s critique does not apply to it, nor, on the other
hand, can his thought move towards it, because of the link we have seen
with the Cartesian thesis of divine infinity.
There is another and deeper reason for this surpassing: dialectic
thought can rightly claim that it has made its own the consideration of
the greatness and misery of man, secularizing it (i.e., suppressing all

towards the truths of science (or of metaphysics itself understood as science) and
requires the conversion of the heart. On this subject, Sciacca says, with a very felicitous
formula (although he seems to grant that for Pascal the metaphysical proofs retain
some value independently of apologetics, a point I disagree with) that, “in order for
God to ex-sist as a rational conviction, it is necessary that he in-exist by the motion of
the heart that seeks Him” (Pascal, 173).
Anyway, among the most recent supporters of the view that Pascal attributes value
to metaphysical proofs, I will recall Baudin, La philosophie de Pascal t. 1, 45-7, who uses
an especially naïve formulation: “[according to Pascal] God is the author of geometri-
cal truths and of the order of elements, but He is even more” (whereas Pascal’s
thought is the exact opposite: that the true God is not the God of philosophers, plus
something). I will also recall P. Eymard, who, with a rather peculiar thesis, maintains
that Pascal does not fight a posteriori proofs, both the Thomist and the Augustinian,
but only the ontological argument. See P. Eymard, Pascal et ses précurseurs (Paris:
Nouvelles éditions latines, 1954), 170ff. However, see the objections raised against
him by Orcibal in the communication “Le fragment Infini-Rien et ses sources,” in
Blaise Pascal: L’homme et l’œuvre, 164–5.
388 The Problem of Atheism

references to an initial Fall). It does not seem possible to reconfirm

Pascal after dialectic thought except in a form of philosophy that neces-
sarily links back to the ontologist tradition, no matter how it may diverge
from forms that Ontologism took historically.99
The first attempt to surpass Pascal ontologistically was made by
Malebranche. In order to understand the relationship between the
two thinkers we must briefly discuss the simultaneous diversity and
affinity of their spiritual experiences: in a sense Malebranche starts
exactly where Pascal ends. The religious renunciation of the world for
the sake of the “one necessary thing,” the endpoint of Pascal’s spiritual
process, is instead the starting point of Malebranche’s; and yet he
becomes a philosopher because he sees the need to become conscious
of the rationality of the obsequium as intrinsic to the attitude of faith.
This is because he encounters in a lived experience the theme of the
fides quaerens intellectum.100 It is the theory and the experience of

99 Brice Parain has been able to write an interesting essay on Pascal as the initia-
tor of dialectics in modern times (Sur la dialectique [Paris: Gallimard, 1953], 13–40).
Besides, Goldmann constantly insists on the yes and no co-present in the tragic vision
and surpassed precisely in dialectic thought.
Here I should also recall, somehow verifying his thesis in history, the thought of an
eminent philosopher, Pantaleo Carabellese, according to whom Ontologism is the
only position that makes it possible to surpass and criticize antithetical dialecticism.
Even though, of course, Carabellese’s position, which pushes to the extreme the unity
of Ontologism and Idealism, is rather different from the one to which I incline.
100 Pascal’s difference from Malebranche, and from both the Augustinian and
the Thomist traditions, regarding the relations between reason and faith has been
defined very well by Russier (La foi, 425–7): “whereas St. Augustine, for example,
seems to regard as normal the transition from faith to intelligence, and thus from ob-
scurity to clarity, Pascal gives a strong impression of thinking that down here it is by the
opposite dynamics that we attain the most we can possess; ‘even mathematical proposi-
tions become intuitions’ (fr. 95); the ‘coutume’ which enables the spirit to ‘dye itself’
with a belief (fr. 252) gives the knowledge coming from the esprit de géométrie the same
promptness and sureness as the knowledge produced by the esprit de finesse” (427).
Regarding the relations between reason and faith in Malebranche and the way in
which he encounters philosophy and Cartesianism, I take the liberty to refer the read-
er to two early writings of mine, “Nota sull’anticartesianismo di Malebranche,” in
Rivista di Filosopfia neoscolastica 26, no. 1 (1934): 53–73; and “La veracità divina e i rap-
porti di ragione e fede nella filosofia di Malebranche,” in Malebranche nel terzo centenario
della nascita (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1938), 143–78, which do not seem in the least
outdated to me but are actually confirmed by the later critical literature since today,
unlike then, we recognize the importance of the question, which is so existential, of
the relations between reason and faith in Cartesianism.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 389

faith – and nothing else – that establishes an essential difference between

the positions of Pascal and Malebranche. In this regard we must aban-
don some common images. There is no Malebranche who starts from
Cartesianism, and no anti-Cartesian Pascal who spoils the relative har-
mony that had become established between Cartesianism and Port-
Royalism. Instead, there is the Malebranche who, having started from
the quest for the “one necessary thing,” encounters – somewhat in the
medieval fashion, if you wish – the question of the relations between
faith and reason and of reassessing reason, and, within this question,
the thought of Descartes; and there is the Pascal, initially a Christian
scientist, and thus initially Cartesian, at least regarding the relations of
reason and faith, who encounters Port-Royalism.
Now it would be extremely intriguing, and important, to study the
transposition of Pascalian themes that takes place in the thought of
Malebranche, starting from this initial difference. I would not mind
proposing this formula: in Malebranche, Pascal’s anti-philosophy,
his critique of philosophy, becomes philosophy. The historical ques-
tion of the relations between Pascal and Malebranche is the first
chapter of a possible book devoted to the relations between theological
existentialism and Ontologism. It is an investigation that nobody has
ever attempted: the literature on the relations between Pascal and
Malebranche, even if one searches for mere hints, is minuscule, and
the best one can find is Brunschvicg’s parallel based on simple opposi-
tion. I will limit myself to some brief, elementary comments, aimed at
underscoring the kinship rather than the opposition. Consider, for
example, the role that the theme Infini-rien plays in Malebranche’s
system. Pascal had written: “The finite is annihilated in the presence of
the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing.” For Malebranche, “there is
no relation between the infinite and the finite.”101 It follows that, just
as for Pascal, there can be no ascending continuity from anything cre-
ated to God; and that no creature can be the motive of the divine creative
action, and so the end of creation must be found in the Incarnation.
Therefore Christianity is the only religion capable of establishing a
relation between the infinite and the finite; the only religion that pays
God the honour worthy of him: “compared to God, the universe is
nothing, and must be counted as nothing; but there are only the

101 See, for example, Entretiens sur la Métaphysique, XIV, 8. But this theme is re-
peated in countless other passages and is the true directing principle of his entire
philosophy
390 The Problem of Atheism

Christians, those who believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, who truly
count their own being, and this vast universe which we admire, as noth-
ing. Possibly philosophers lead to this judgment. But they do not pro-
nounce it. They dare to approach God, as if they did not know that the
distance between Him and us is infinite. They imagine that God is
pleased by the profane worship they give Him. They have the insolence
or, if you wish, the presumption of adoring Him. Let them be quiet.”102
Do we not find here, transposed, Pascal’s criticism of deism? The trans-
position consists in making the centre of religious thought not so much
the Redemption as the Incarnation. Thus, I believe one could present
Malebranche’s thought as a transposition of Pascal’s apologetics into
Berullian theocentrism (in the sense used by Bremond).103 It must also
be observed that Malebranche’s connection between philosophical-
theological and historical proofs of Christianity is strictly similar to that
established by Pascal between historical and psychological proofs.
It is a common opinion that, apart from the strictly logical difficulties
of his Ontologism,104 this attempt by Malebranche to sublate Pascal’s
philosophy realizing the unity of the philosophical God and the religious
God ended in complete failure from the religious standpoint – that is,
in the greatest separation between a philosophical God and a religious
God that ever appeared in the history of Christian thought. The attempt
to restore the classical, Augustinian and Thomist, theory of eternal
truths takes the form, when it is rethought in Cartesian terms, of the
separation between divine wisdom and power. So that, despite appear-
ances, Malebranche’s God is much farther away from the Christian
theological tradition than Descartes’s God. Divine will becomes captive
to an “order” of an intelligible world that is effectively thought as a norm
to which all spirits and God himself as will must subordinate themselves.
The endpoint is a God who is more reason than existence since his
aspect of existence (or, in Malebranche’s terms, of “power”) merely
makes up for reason’s intrinsic lack of dynamism. From this new

102 Ibid.
103 About the definition of theocentrism, see H. Bremond, Histoire littéraire du
sentiment religieux en France (Paris: Bloud, 1929), 23ff. From Bremond’s perspective
Pascal represents the extreme type of an anthropocentric religiosity.
104 Regarding this difficulty, see the extremely precise remarks by Gueroult,
Descartes, vol. 1, 287ff., which are especially interesting in as much as they differ from
the standard objections. He also insists on the extreme complexity and greatness
(which make him one of the major philosophers of all time) of this thinker who too
often goes unrecognized (see in vol. 3 his “General conclusions,” 359ff).
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 391

relation between God and eternal truths follows a new relation between
God and man. “God glorifies Himself by creating out of love” had been
until then the common motif of all Christian schools; for Malebranche
this motif is replaced by another, “God creates the world to glorify
Him.”105 The reason for this is that in God every love other than self-
love would be déreglé since divine love must conform to order, his will’s
unbreakable law. Moreover, “Reason” means universality and necessity.
Therefore God has to act according to “general practical acts of will.”
An act of love addressed at a single individual in his singularity
would be in God a “pathological act of will” (to use Kantian terminol-
ogy, which is not out of place because there is a strange analogy
between Malebranche’s theology and Kant’s practical philosophy). This
common description is certainly oversimplified and does not take into
account the countless nuances that make a precise reconstruction of
Malebranche’s thought so hard. But overall, it comes close to the truth
and raises the question of whether ultimately there is a contradiction
between Cartesianism and Ontologism in as much as the latter is
necessarily a philosophy of divine presence of the Christian humanist
kind. Within the significant structure of Cartesianism, Ontologism
becomes theological rationalism.106 The contradictory co-presence in

105 On the egocentrism of the Malebranchian God, on the novelty of this thesis
with respect to tradition, and on its consequences regarding the idea of divine good-
ness (and thus of creation and glory), see the very important remarks by Fr Y. De
Montcheuil, Malebranche et le quietisme (Paris: Aubier, 1946), 143ff. One should also
consider the comments by a philosopher, Scheler, who was very interested in the ques-
tion of Ontologism and in the philosophy of Malebranche (with which I have the
impression he often compared his thought, parting ways with it sometimes to reform
it [with respect to the vision in God], other times to criticize it [with respect precisely
to the idea of the glory of God]).
106 By “theological rationalism” I mean the position in which God is a “prisoner”
of the ideal order. This position reaches its extreme expression in Hegel, merging in
him with what I called earlier “metaphysical rationalism,” which constitutes a distinct
essence. Metaphysical rationalism and theological rationalism can merge precisely only
through the elimination of Ontologism. About God as “prisoner” in Hegel, see the impor-
tant remarks by K. Barth “on the annihilation of God’s sovereignty which makes the
qualification as ‘God’ very problematic when it is applied to what Hegel calls spirit,
idea, reason etcetera. This God, Hegel’s God … is His own prisoner” (see “Hegel” in
Cahiers théologiques [Neuchâtel-Paris: Delachaux, 1955], 51). See also the paradoxical
statements – which, however, are always stimulating – by Shestov: thinking of Leibniz
and Hegel, he sees no alternative between the “prisoner” God and theological arbi-
trarism. In fact, we know that Shestov was personally acquainted with Barth, and his
thought is still highly regarded in Barthian circles.
392 The Problem of Atheism

Malebranche of the opposite motifs of Ontologism and anti-humanism

makes him a truly representative thinker of the 1670 to 1715 crisis
between the Baroque and the Enlightenment.
At this point it may seem that Goldmann’s vision regains strength,
despite the criticisms I have tried to make: in the philosophy of the 1600s
we have, on the one side, the philosophical God of rationalism, on the
other side, the anti-humanistic Christianity of the hidden God, and this
independently of what may have been the subjective intentions of the
various thinkers. It may seem that in the 1600s the Augustinianism of
the presence of God was definitively defeated; that the fundamental
categories that Goldmann took as his starting point to explain the
process of modern philosophy – rationalism, tragic vision, dialectic
thought – have been substantially confirmed, albeit with the historical
corrections I have proposed.
However, consider this: does not the general characterization of
Cartesianism I have tried to provide – or, better, of the framework
wherein all operations of Cartesian thought take place, as the maximal
accentuation of the theme of freedom on the one hand, and of ahisto-
ricity on the other – make us understand the truth of Vico’s critique of
the “monastic” and not “political” character of Cartesian philosophy?
In opposition to Leibniz’s view of philosophy in the 1600s, which has
provided the model for the usual history of philosophy?107

107 Here I am mentioning a crucially important problem that has not yet been
worked out, or at least needs to be worked out again completely and, obviously, cannot
be worked out in a footnote. The essential points are: (1) Leibniz already takes for
granted the victory of Spinozism within the horizon of Cartesian philosophy. This hap-
pens because he shares completely in the panlogistic intention of Spinoza’s thought;
and his position can be presented as an effort to reconcile Spinozism with reality (with
the truths of common humanity, with history), and his Christianity itself, rather than a
presupposition, is a Christianity rediscovered in this work of reconciling Spinozism
with reality. To Leibniz panlogism is a philosophy of justification and universal recon-
ciliation; on the contrary, in the form it takes in Spinoza, it becomes the meeting point
of all heresies. Hence Leibniz’s “eclecticism” and “diplomacy” (terms that are used
often but must be defined in their very special meaning); hence the need to redis-
cover, deepening them, the themes of that true masterpiece, Leibniz et l’organisation
religieuse de la terre by J. Baruzi (Paris: Alcan, 1907), recognizing this ideal as the central
point starting from which all Leibnizian themes can be understood. His political and
religious action is internal to his philosophy. (2) So that, even though in some respect
we can say that his greatest foe is Spinoza, in another respect we can say it is Cartesianism
because, for Leibniz, the reason for Spinoza’s defeat lies in the fact that his system was
built using Cartesian materials. (3) Leibniz’s radical incomprehension of Cartesianism
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 393

Here several questions arise: How much can Vico’s judgments about
the history of philosophy, which are normally regarded as mere examples

manifests itself first of all in the reduction of doubt to a mere rhetorical procedure; as
a consequence the aspect of Cartesianism that makes it essentially a philosophy of
freedom is set aside and not recognized. (4) What has been most negatively affected
by Leibniz’s perspective on this matter has been his assessment of Malebranche and
Occasionalism, and this to the extent that Malebranche intended to pursue the same
ideal of religious restoration as Leibniz but within Cartesianism (this shared ideal was
the reason for the longest philosophical friendship in history, lasting forty years, in
which, however, the two philosophers did not understand each other). The study of
the relations between Malebranche and Leibniz – in which, however, we must recog-
nize the complete sincerity of the latter, even in his misunderstanding – must be com-
pletely refreshed. Today the task is greatly facilitated by the magnificent book by A.
Robinet, Malebranche et Leibniz (Paris: Vrin, 1955), a work of high philology in which
are gathered all the relevant texts of the two authors and of their exchanges. We can
say that due to the incorrect assessment of Occasionalism Geulincx (never quoted by
Leibniz) became a philosopher that interests only the Dutch and the Flemish,
Malebranche almost only the French, and Vico almost only the Italians. (5) In the
important but questionable book by Y. Belaval, Leibniz critique de Descartes (Paris:
Gallimard, 1960), we find a curious remark (126–9): Descartes, the despiser of histo-
ry, was the promoter of the history of philosophy, whereas Leibniz, the historian, her-
alds the philosophy of history (the second thesis is not new; and we must recall the
important intuitions on this matter by F. Olgiati, Il significato storico di Leibniz [Milan:
Vita e Pensiero, 1929]). Now, this thesis can be given a correct meaning – namely, that
the “Cartesian beginning of modern philosophy” cannot be eliminated, as I said ear-
lier (nor do I think that Belaval understands it otherwise, regarding Descartes). But we
must observe that, in Leibniz, we find the first kernel of the standard secular vision of
the history of modern philosophy and that Hegel’s vision of the 1600s follows exactly
that of Leibniz, secularizing it. Or, better, we must observe that, in Leibniz’s consider-
ation of the history of post-Reformation thought, two elements coexist: the first, com-
pletely forgotten, is the rediscovery of the theologians of the Catholic Reformation
and, thus, of the Catholic Reformation itself (whereas, strangely, an isolated and ten-
dentious consideration of Pascal’s Provinciales has been fundamentally important in
the formation of the negative concept of Counter-Reformation); the second is a judg-
ment about the philosophy of the 1600s that, in the various aspects in which it can be
developed, has become the criterion that all histories of philosophy have taken as a
model, at least until its demolition after 1930, whose importance has hardly been
perceived anyway (hence the exceptional importance I have attributed to Laporte’s
historical work). This is why a study of the role played by Leibniz’s thought in the for-
mation of the history of philosophy and its usual periodization schemes would be
extremely important. (6) We must also observe that secular interpretations of Vico
depend on having inserted his thought into a historical framework already deter-
mined by Leibniz’s scheme, within the variety of extensions and corrections to which
it is amenable (e.g., that Leibniz’s devaluation of Occasionalism is decisive for those
interpretations). (7) And that the new interpretation of Cartesianism leads us to
394 The Problem of Atheism

of “poetic characters,” be used to determine his philosophical position

and be a guide in choosing among the many interpretations of his
thought that have been given? Second, can Vico’s thought be interpreted
as the continuation of Descartes’s critique of atheism after having criti-
cized the concession (in opposition) to the libertines, which is the
distinctive feature of Cartesian ahistoricity and the reason the crisis of
the Cartesian dike against irreligion manifests itself in Bayle’s thought –
a continuation that is also the continuation of Malebranche’s
Occasionalism and Ontologism, so that we can speak of a certain sym-
metry between the relationship Vico-Malebranche and the relationship
Pascal-Descartes?

10. FROM MALEBRANCHE TO VICO

I am aware, of course, of the perplexities this parallel may arouse, which

have been responsible for the negative reception of a book108 – which
in fact was very remarkable, although not exactly a model of philologi-
cal precision – arguing the thesis that Vico was a Malebranchian.
Who, apparently, could be farther away than Vico from Malebranche?
On one side, the last of the humanists, on the other, the last of the
medievals; on one side, the discoverer of fantasy, on the other, the enemy
of imagination and the most rigorous theoretician of the ascesis of pure
intellect; on one side, the man who conceived knowledge as vision, in a
form that may appear to be purely passivist, on the other, the man who
advanced an activist doctrine of knowledge; on one side, the philosopher

recognize, instead, the truth of the very different vision that Vico had of the philosophy of the
1600s, even though it was formulated in historical judgments, expressed, so to speak,
in mythical form; or rather, in ingenious judgments, if we want to refer to Vico’s doc-
trine of ingegno. (8) And that the question of the relations between Vico and Leibniz
must be set up in this context, and it must lead, I believe, to the thesis that we must
look to the latter and not to the former for the initial germ that subsequently led to
historicism (this assertion, however, must be formulated in very different terms than
those used, for example, by Meinecke).
108 L. Giusso, La filosofia di G.B. Vico e l’età barocca (Roma: Perrella, 1943). This
thesis is not new, anyway, because the comparison had already been made by Gioberti
in such terms that he made rethinking and perfecting it the program of his own phi-
losophy; more recently, Carabellese, to whom Giusso’s book is dedicated, had insist-
ed, albeit without referring to Malebranche, on the necessity of an ontologistic
interpretation in L’Idealismo italiano (Naples: Loffredo, 1938).
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 395

of history, on the other, the thinker who reduced our rigorous knowledge
to that of the essence of bodies, the greatest enemy of erudition in the
1600s; on one side, the philosopher who most had a sense of vitality, on
the other, the least “vitalist” philosopher who ever lived.
Still, sometimes history presents us with the most peculiar paradoxes,
and although here I cannot fully justify the thesis that Vico was the only
rigorous continuer of Malebranche, I will try nonetheless to highlight
some facts that seem essential to me for a precise reconstruction of Vico’s
thought. I will do so based on a premise that I believe is easy to accept:
the interpretation of Vico is tightly linked with that of the philosophy
of Descartes, which is in a sense, but only in a sense, its antithesis; and
therefore the renewal of the concepts of Cartesianism, Ontologism,
and Occasionalism cannot but have an impact on it.109 Because it is
obvious that, if one interprets Descartes’s philosophy as pure “mathema-
ticism” or as the “beginning of subjectivism,” Ontologism as the caput
mortuum of dogmatism and Occasionalism as a mere miracle-based
solution, the question is already settled. Vico will be the initiator of
“historicism,” as deeper subjectivism,110 and the critic ante litteram of the
philosophy of history; or, if one does not want to use this terminology

109 In Giambattista Vico (Bari: Laterza, 1956), 6–7, Corsano does a good job of
recognizing this, affirming that, for a more precise interpretation of Vico’s thought,
it is necessary to take into account investigations like those by Laporte, Gouhier,
Pintard, and Lenoble, which are precisely those essential for such revision. But then,
strangely, he writes that, regarding Descartes’s religious thought, Gouhier and
Laporte “face the objections of men like Gilson, Blondel and Jaspers, just to name the
most important” (88). Now, Gilson’s La liberté chez Descartes et la théologie is certainly an
extremely important work because it highlights, so forcefully and for the first time,
the theological horizon into which the formation and development of Cartesianism
must be inserted; but it is entirely outdated as far as its interpretation of Descartes’s
philosophy is concerned, an interpretation that has been practically abandoned by
the author himself. See, indeed, his subsequent Études sur le rôle de la pensée médiévale
dans la formation du systeme cartésien (Paris: Vrin, 1930), and the correct remark (from
his perspective) by Maxime Leroy, who said, I do not remember where, that the pupil
(Gouhier) perverted the teacher. As for Blondel, in his final years he went as far as
completely reversing the interpretation he had advanced in 1896. And, as for Jaspers,
his book is certainly of very great interest because it manifests the reactions of a great
philosopher reading Descartes, but it cannot be said to be a work of history.
110 I am referring to Croce’s sentence: “It is true that with the new form of his
theory of knowledge Vico himself joined the ranks of modern subjectivism, initiated
by Descartes,” in The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, trans. R.G. Colingwood (New York:
Macmillan, 1913), 26.
396 The Problem of Atheism

too closely tied to a specific philosophy, he will be essentially a meth-

odologist of history, the first who fixed the canons of history as reliable
science; his invocations of metaphysica philosophorum will be hat tips to a
venerable tradition; and Occasionalism will be a mere instrument to
avoid materialist and sensualist positions.
Things will go differently if one recognizes that Ontologism and
Occasionalism are serious philosophical positions, and that Malebranche
was the first thinker who united them rigorously.111 In this case, it
becomes quite easy to gather the texts that show Vico as an adherent
of Ontologism and Occasionalism in the properly Malebranchian form.
We only have to browse the initial pages of De uno:

“Summa autem sapientia est ordo rerum aeternus, quo Deus per simplicissi-
mas vias cuncta regit. Quae viae, quia ab omnipotentia patefiunt, facilissimae
sunt; et, quia ad Deum summum bonum ducunt, sunt omnes optimae”

We know that Croce refused to even consider, dismissing them as second-hand

formulae, any ontologistic and Occasionalistic aspects of Vico’s thought, whose pres-
ence he must well have recognized, at least in the juridical treaties and above all in
the first book of the De uno (The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, 95–6). We can say in his
justification that, at the time he was writing his book, 1911, everybody agreed –
Hegelians and Kantians, positivists and neo-Thomists – in regarding Ontologism and
Occasionalism as examples of uncritical philosophical thought, but today …
This amputation is what makes his work so peculiar. Because his case actually can-
not be described as one of those, once fashionable, idealistic sublations in which an
author was considered … only under the aspect that lent itself to be sublated. On the
contrary, there is no doubt that Croce felt Vico to be his true “auttore”; the third “aut-
tore” after Marx and after Hegel, but the essential “auttore.” There is no doubt that
his philosophy has been a constant dialogue with Vico. Hence, a historical problem
arises: How does Vico’s philosophy, amputated of its Ontologism and Occasionalism,
prefigure Croce’s philosophy? How can a process that began with a critique of Marx
end up in a philosophy that in a certain sense finds itself to have been prefigured by
Vico? This problem, which is essential for a critical study of Croce, is also clearly of
interest for the study of Vico’s thought. But it does not affect, or affects only tangen-
tially, the question of the historical Vico.
111 In the XV Eclaircissement of the Recherche de la Vérité, Malebranche, who con-
stantly makes every possible effort to conform every one of his theses to St Augustine,
must acknowledge that this latter never posed the question of the efficacy of second-
ary causes and that we cannot find in his works a hint of anything that could enable
us to support the new thesis with his authority. On the other hand, in the Middle
Ages, Occasionalism had constantly gone hand in hand with theological arbitrarism
and, thus, with the opposite of Ontologism.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 397

(Ch. VI). “Simplicitas educet, quod una directionis lege facit regitque cunc-
ta. Facilitas manifestatur, quod ipsarum sponte rerum disponit cuncta”
(Cap. VII).112 “At Dei sapientia, quatenus suo quaeque tempore cuncta
promit, ‘divina providentia’ appellatur” (Ch. VIII).113 “Divinae providentiae
autem viae sunt opportunitates, occasiones, casus” (Ch. IX). “Occasiones non
esse causas rerum. Corpora autem et quae sunt corporis, uti sensus, esse oc-
casiones, per quas aeternum rerum ideae in mentibus excitentur. At fluxa, uti
corpora et quae sunt corporis, uti sensus, quid aeternum supra corpus gig-
nere non posse: prae cuius veri ignoratione homines in Deum ingratos agere”
(De opera proloquium [35]).114 “VI ORDINIS COGNOSCIMUS VERA RERUM –
Sed homo eas veri notiones cum ceteris hominibus communes habere non
posset, nisi ideam ordinis cum iisdem haberet quoque communem”
(Principium [3]).115 Also, about Adam’s sin: “Haec est natura hominis integra,

112 The theory of simple ways, in connection with the theory of Order, is specific
to Malebranche, without antecedents. Just consider the reactions it provoked in
Arnauld, who perceived himself to be the great defender of tradition, and in Fénelon
(in his posthumous Réfutation du système du P. Malebranche sur la nature et sur la grâce,
ch. 13). For its overall exposition, see Malebranche, Entretiens, IX.
113 According to Malebranche, the connection between divine wisdom and
Providence is founded on the idea that “the instant of creation does not pass”
(Entretien VII, 6). That is, what divine wisdom has established continues in time,
through simple ways and general laws, by which Providence manifests itself.
114 It is all too clear that Malebranche and Vico think identically about making
the systems of occasional causes the ways of Providence. As for the second step, by
finding the root of men’s ingratitude to God in the failure to distinguish Cause and
occasions, and thus in ignorance of the true Cause, Vico returns to an idea that
Malebranche highlights at great length in the passage I already mentioned from De
l’erreur la plus dangereuse de la philosophie des anciens.
115 This idea coincides with Malebranche’s famous thesis about “God as the lo-
cus of the spirits.” The vision of the intelligible order is the foundation of spiritual
society and of communication itself because purely sensitive beings could not com-
municate. As for the vis ordinis or the vis veris, their activist character certainly does
not contradict the “passivity” that is often attributed to Malebranche’s thought; be-
cause we must not forget that, for Malebranche, ideas have “efficacy,” and the “visual
metaphor” runs the risk of making one misunderstand the meaning of his thought.
Far from breaking away from Malebranche, Vico is, thus, in De Uno, one of the few
who truly understood him. Unlike the De Antiquissimo, the juridical treaties attest to a
very careful reading of Malebranche, even though the quotations are relatively rare.
Here I depart from a common opinion, which is also accepted by an eminent
philosopher who is hardly inclined to accept the standard interpretations of Vico,
Capograssi; who, in his very beautiful study Dominio, libertà e tutela nel De Uno (in Opere,
v. 1) writes that, “in its presuppositions, the position of De Uno is a traditional
398 The Problem of Atheism

qua primus omnium parens, Adam, a Deo creatus est, divino auxilio ita com-
parata, ut nullo sensuum tumultu agitaretur, sed et in sensus et in cupiditates
liberum pacatumque exerceret imperium” (Ch. XIV). “Hinc sensus, a Deo
homini inditi ut vitam tuerentur, sumpti sunt arbitri iudicesque, qui vera re-
rum disceptent et iudicent. Atqui sunt fallacissimi: igitur ratio, quae sensuum
iudicium sequitur, vera rerum ignorat” (Ch. XXV).116 “Sed homo Deum as-
pectu amittere omnino non potest suo, quia a Deo sunt omnia et quod a Deo
non est nihil est. Nam Dei lumen in omnibus rebus, nisi reflexu, saltem radio-
rum refractu cernere cuique datur” (Ch. XXXIII). “Hinc aeterni veri semina
in homine corrupto non prorsus extincta, quae, gratia Dei adiuta, conantur
contra naturae corruptionem” (Ch. XXXIV).117

I chose these passages, and many others could be presented, especially

from De uno and De constantia, because it seems unquestionable to me
that they refer not to generic Augustinianism but specifically to
Malebranchian Augustinianism.

position” (12). On the contrary, in my judgment, and I believe I outlined at least the
first but essential elements of the proof, it is typically Malebranchian.
116 The brief description of intact nature summarizes perfectly the theses of
Malebranche. Since the texts that should be cited are too numerous, I refer to
Gouhier, La philosophie de Malebranche, 103ff, and Gueroult, Malebranche, III, 210ff.
The second passage clearly goes back to Malebranche’s theory of the biological func-
tion of sensitivity. This thesis had already been outlined by Descartes (VI Meditation),
but nonetheless it was rigorously developed, and introduced into the theory of cor-
rupted nature, only by Malebranche: “never judge through the sense what things are
in themselves, but only what relations they have with our body, because [the senses]
have been given us … only for the preservation of our body” (Recherche, t. 1, ch. 5, 3);
the senses are “false witnesses with respect to the truth, but faithful admonishers with
respect to the preservation and comfort of life” (Entretien IV, 15).
117 These passages, and especially the first, can be linked to the one by
Malebranche that I cited earlier (339–40), in which Brunschvicg saw the greatest op-
position between him and Pascal.
We must also recall that Vico clearly had Malebranche in mind when he talked
about the “metaphysica philosophorum,” which “docet homines in Deo ideas rerum
omnium intelligere” (see Notae in duos libros, and so on, in vol. 3 of Il diritto universale
in Nicolini’s edition [Bari: Laterza, 1936], 736). See also, in De constantia, ch. 5, where
he speaks of Malebranche’s philosophy as the road “ad Platonis dogmata metaphysica
recipienda” but defines at least the third of the “Platonis dogmata” in Malebranchian
terms; likewise in ch. 185 of De Uno he compares Malebranche to Plato by attributing
Occasionalism to the latter. In short, for Vico, Malebranche brings us back to Plato,
but from the theoretical standpoint it is a very Malebranchized Plato.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 399

Starting from these we can easily reconstruct his thought as an exten-

sion to history of Malebranche’s philosophy against adversaries that the
latter had not taken on: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bayle. It is God’s presence
to the human mind that halts men “in their bestial wandering through
the great forest of the earth, in order to introduce among them the
order of human civil things,”118 and “without order (which is to say
without God) human society cannot stand for a moment.”119 It is the
vis veri that keeps acting even in the world of pagan nations and, actu-
ally, in the bestioni themselves. Undoubtedly this interpretation would
impose itself if all we had left of Vico were the juridical treatises.120
Against this interpretation three objections seem possible – and deci-
sive. The first, and fundamental, is: What value shall we give to the
principle of verum factum, which is apparently irreconcilable with an
ontologistic theory of participation? Indeed, in its first form it seems to
mean a semi-skeptic gnoseology of humility, far removed from
Ontologism;121 and in the second form it seems to mean an affirmation

118 Scienza Nuova seconda §1097 [The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. T.G.
Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1948), 377.]
119 Ibid. §1100 [Ibid. 378–9].
120 I do not need to spend too much time on this interpretation since the reader
can find a complete exposition of it in the book by Giusso, which is based, essentially,
on the juridical treatises.
Its greatest limitation is that it pays almost no attention to the verum factum, with
the result of essentially presenting Vico’s philosophy as a mere extension of that of
Malebranche; and truly in the juridical treatises it is hard, if not impossible, to find
any trace of the verum factum (see the correct remark by Corsano, Giambattista Vico,
138). Moreover, Giusso’s book is tainted by his polemical intent to give an interpreta-
tion that is the exact opposite of that of Croce, with the result of depending, in op-
position, on his adversary.
While I understand, because of this polemical aspect, the severe judgments by
historians with an Idealist inspiration, I do not comprehend the hostility of Franco
Amerio in his otherwise very fine book Introduzione allo studio di G. B. Vico (Turin: SEI,
1946), which is the true endpoint of the Catholic critique of Croce’s interpretation,
which had started with Buonaiuti’s review in Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica 3 no. 6
(1911) (regarding Giusso, see 155n2, and Giornale di metafisica [1946], 157–63). Nor
do I comprehend why Amerio gives so little space to Vico’s Ontologism and
Occasionalism (see 153–5). Or, actually, I comprehend it all too well in light of the
old grudge between Thomists and ontologists.
121 Commenting on De antiquissima, Croce writes that “for Vico God’s existence
is certain, but not scientifically provable” (6–7), but the context seems to convey that
he thinks it is certain as a revealed truth. On the contrary, according to Vico, this
400 The Problem of Atheism

of the divinity, or at least of the autonomy, of man, of the historical

world. The second objection, connected to the first, is: what to make
of his critique of Cartesianism? The third is the presence, in De antiquis-
sima, of a nominalist philosophy of mathematics, which is at the antipo-
des of that of Malebranche.
To answer the first question, we need to see whether the verum factum
is linked with the history of seventeenth-century Occasionalism, so that
the originality of the latter lies precisely in its having made its own a
principle that previously belonged to skeptical or empiricist philoso-
phies; so that one can draw a line of development from Geulinx to
Malebranche to Vico.
Therefore, let us begin by saying something about the history of
seventeenth-century Occasionalism, from the standpoint of what makes
it totally irreducible to previous forms in which it was linked, instead,
with theological arbitrarism.122 In this regard, we must break away from
two standard views. First of all, from the view that originates from
Leibniz, who sees in it only a miracle-like and edifying solution. Then,
from the more astute view that tends to see in it the theological and the
metaphysical stages of the process that leads to the empiricist

certainty without proof is due to the fact that, in reference to God, we must speak of
presence and not of proof, precisely in the sense of Malebranche.
I am not going to comment on the best known passage about Malebranche in De
Antiquissima, ch. 6 (De Mente), both because it contains, more or less, one error of
interpretation per line and because I cannot bring myself to give this still immature
work the importance that ontologistic interpreters, above all, attribute to it. Anyway,
the meaning is clear: (1) Vico intends not to involve Malebranche in his condemna-
tion of Descartes; (2) the passage contains an acceptance, by and large, of Ontologism
and Occasionalism: “what we know in ourselves is that God is the first author of all
motions both of bodies and of souls.”
I think it is important to point out that Vico, who is such a peculiar reader, is
instead exemplarily correct when he presents the doctrine of Malebranche’s “meta-
physica philosophorum” in the juridical treatises. This suggests an extensive reading
of Malebranche on his part, after De Antiquissima. And, above all, it suggests a possible
hypothesis about the evolution of his thought. I do have the impression that in the
juridical treatises he thought of his philosophy as a political and historical extension
of that of Malebranche. Subsequently, and this is the perspective of the two versions of
the Scienza Nuova, he realized that it was impossible to conceive of the continuity as
an extension.
122 Until now, nobody has attempted to write a history of Occasionalism. I tried
to sketch a possible outline of it in the entry “Occasionalism” in the Enciclopedia
Filosofica (Florence: Sansoni, 1968–69).
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 401

conception of “nomological causality.” The theological stage is that

from Al-Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers. The scientific-metaphys-
ical stage is the replacement of the quest for causes by the quest for laws
in Malebranche; supposedly, Hume’s genius was to transcribe into
empiricism the themes of the critique of causes that Malebranche had
already developed, thus enabling empiricism, via the consequent dis-
sociation from naturalistic metaphysics, to reach its modern and critical
form; while at the same time he separated the critical aspect of
Occasionalism from the dogmatic one by making impossible, through
the critique of the causal axiom, the theological transfiguration of the
empiricist conception of causality, which, supposedly, is precisely what
Occasionalism consists in.
Let us briefly sketch, against these two views, the line of develop-
ment of seventeenth-century Occasionalism. I believe that a first over-
all definition could be to describe it as the effort to expel from
Cartesianism all the motifs amenable to be developed in the direction
of the Enlightenment or towards empiricism (or even materialism)
or Spinozism.123
Let us set aside the erroneous thesis that the doctrine of occasional
causes is virtually present in the philosophy of Descartes as the only
solution concerning the relations between the soul and the body that
truly follows from his principles. Descartes professed a completely dif-
ferent thesis about such relations, which is perfectly consistent with the
rest of his philosophy.124 He grants a real reciprocal action of the soul

123 Perhaps in Geulincx we must recognize the extremization of the anti-

Gassendism of Descartes; in Malebranche, certainly, both the anti-Locke and the
anti-Spinoza; in Vico, just as certainly, chiefly the anti-Bayle. Consider, in fact the (es-
sentially correct) characterization that Pintard (Le libertinage érudit, 570) gives of
Bayle’s thought: “Protestantism, Cartesianism, libertine Pyrrhonism, these three forc-
es which until then had been enemies now united in Bayle’s thought,” giving rise
to “a consistent and aggressive rationalism.” Now, Vico, through the critique of
Cartesianism, arrives at a position, at least in his judgment, capable of fighting liber-
tine thought, and at a work that is clearly anti-Protestant, because of the underlying
relationship between nature and grace. Or we can also say: at the beginning of the
Enlightenment we have the unification of three trends that until then had been en-
emies: iusnaturalism, libertine thought, and a certain type of Cartesianism. Through
his critiques of Cartesianism and libertinism, Vico gets to trace back to Catholic
thought the idea of natural law. It is undeniable that this matches the letter of his
work, and I think we should look for his spirit nowhere else than in his letter.
124 See footnote 86 above.
402 The Problem of Atheism

on the body, the two of which he regards as essentially united. Certainly,

one can only “éprouver en soi même sans philosopher” (“Lettre à
Elisabeth” of 28 June 1643) – that is, one can live it and not think it. It
only manifests itself in the “relâche des sens” (ibid.) and, thus, in an
altogether different disposition than the intellectual ascesis required
for scientific and metaphysical knowledge. However, this thesis does
not contradict the spirit of his philosophy, if we consider that the affir-
mation of a dimension “this side of reason” – of an infra-rational sphere,
in short – is in a way correlative with the affirmation of the dimension
“beyond reason” signified by the theory of divine freedom. Therefore,
Occasionalism that presents itself as fully consistent Cartesianism must
necessarily emphasize simultaneously its rationalist and idealist charac-
ters, with the idealist emphasis limiting the rationalist one and prevent-
ing the transformation into Spinozism. A deeper analysis would bring
to light a deeper reason: the correlation between the transition to
Occasionalism and the different ideas of philosophy in Descartes,
Geulincx, and Malebranche. Indeed, Descartes had only asked philoso-
phy to overcome a doubt; instead, Geulincx asks of it the definition of
a type of existence, and Malebranche a type of thought that continues
religious experience, in terms of form and meditative ascesis, because
the need for rationality is intrinsic to faith.
For Geulincx the philosopher is a man who operates a conversio mentis
intra se ipsam, replacing false naturalistic certainty with the evidence of
the cogito; where we must observe that he emphasizes the cogito rather
than the sum, giving the Cartesian principle an idealist bent that is not
found in any other philosopher of the 1600s. To him thought becomes
the measure of being, and this leads him to eliminate all Cartesian
themes tied to the assertion of the “primitive notion” of the unity of
soul and body. By virtue of this idealist bent, the affirmation of the cogito
coincides with the declaration that the principle impossibile est ut is faciat
qui nescit quomodo fiat is an axiom – that is, with the very thesis verum
factum stated in negative terms. It is an axiom because such a principle
presents itself as the farthest extension of the Cartesian consciousness
argument: the Cartesian critique of the unconscious faculty to produce
ideas is extended to a denial of the power of the soul to cause physical
motions, so that I ignore everything about my action on the body, except
the fact of my own will. By denying to anybody who ignores the genera-
tive process the dignity of being a cause, the axiom determines a meta-
physics of creation (dissociation of the idea of power from that of
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 403

nature) and creatural humility. But the deepest aspect of his thought
can be identified in his attempt to re-deduce Aristotelian metaphysics
starting from the logical motif that supposedly conditioned it. Since
the opposition of Occasionalism and Aristotelianism is envisioned as
that between a theocentric and an anthropocentric metaphysics, the
critique of Aristotelianism will necessarily take the form of an accusa-
tion of having transformed our intellectual operations into existing
things. And from another angle, which is complementary to this opposi-
tion of the theocentric and anthropocentric points of view, it will coin-
cide with the opposition of science, which frees our vision of reality
from what has been added by our subjectivity, and rhetoric, so that the
explanation of Aristotle’s categories will have to be found in the forms
of language. In its original formulation language reflects the slavery of
man to the prejudices of the senses as a consequence of sin. Aristotle’s
gnoseology is perfectly consistent with his metaphysics, so that its fun-
damental axiom can be held as true, with one variation (nihil est in
“corrupto” intellectu quid prius non fuerit in sensu). Aristotle’s entire phi-
losophy is thereby reduced to an ontologization of human discourse:
therefore, it must find its explanation in the philosophy of rhetoric and
of language. Geulincx pushes this criticism so far that it threatens the
very possibility of metaphysics in general: so that it seems that the very
principle of Occasionalism, “we cannot think things except as souls and
bodies,” expresses only that it is altogether impossible for us to think
otherwise. The ideal of metaphysics tends to present itself as that of a
knowledge of reality independent of the forms of thought. Just as rigor-
ous physics must abstract from perceivable qualities, so a true metaphys-
ics would require the possibility of abstracting from the form of the
intellect. But whereas in the case of physics we can correct the perceiv-
able appearances with the intellect, for metaphysics this correction is
impossible. Thought and reality seem fixed in an absolute opposition:
the thing being thought is not the real thing precisely because it passed
through the forms of the intellect. Having posed the question in these
terms, the conclusion he should be obliged to draw is immediately
apparent: metaphysical knowledge is impossible and must be replaced
by criticism, as determination of the limitation we cannot overcome. It
is a form of criticism of a skeptical-mystical character, which inclines
towards a rediscovery of the theme of docta ignorantia: the awareness
that things are not in themselves as they are thought by us and that
only God as their creator can have an adequate science of them. In
404 The Problem of Atheism

some way it is a prefiguration, albeit in critical-skeptical form, of Kantism,

so that people have been able to talk quite correctly about a Descartes-
Geulincx-Kant line of development.125 Likewise it was also said, some-
what emphatically, but fundamentally correctly, that his ethics is the
link connecting the teaching of Socrates with Kant’s foundation of
the metaphysics of morals.126
I thought I ought to belabour this point a bit (even though at the
same time I have been too brief, running the risk, because of brevity,
of some imprecision, given the complexity of Guelincx’s thought) for
several reasons: because the continuity of the development of the
verum factum in Occasionalism is an unfamiliar topic; because against
this background we understand the originality of Malebranche, which
lies in the ontologistic surpassing of Guelincx’s skeptical motif; 127
because, in the same way in which Guelincx is the prelude to classical
German thought, Malebranche is instead the intermediary between
Cartesianism and Italian thought from Vico to Rosmini; because, within
Cartesian philosophy in a broad sense, the point of contact with Kant
must be sought in Geulincx and not in Pascal; and, finally, because
the enormous importance attributed to the theme of fallen man is a

125 As was done by the renovator of Geulincxian studies, H.J. de Vleeschauwer.

We are waiting for the publication of his great work on Geulincx, which has already
been written. Among his numerous partial writings I will only recall: Three Centuries of
Geulicx Research (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1957), in which he clarifies the
process whereby the history of Geulincxian criticism leads to the question of Geulincx
as a precursor of Kantian transcendentalism; and the very unusual article “De
Benedetto Croce a Arnold Geulincx o el Criterium ‘verum est factum,’” in Revista de
filosofia (1955), in which there are also some extremely peculiar judgments. Indeed,
de Vleeschauwer speaks of a Geulincx-Vico-Croce line of development (261), which
evidently makes little sense; furthermore, he maintains that the principle verum fac-
tum cannot be found in Malebranche, neither implicitly nor explicitly (271), which is
absolutely incorrect. And since he evidently has little sympathy for Malebranche, he
thinks that the parallel Geulincx-Pascal is more relevant today than the parallel
Geulinck-Malebranche, on the basis of their common “Christian existentialism,” a
very vague expression (Vleeschauwer, Three Centuries, 72). In fact, I really do not see
how this Geulincx-Pascal parallel could get off the ground.
126 This was said by Brunschvicg who – in Progrés, 215–16 – devotes to Geulincx,
because of the general plan of his work, only a few (albeit very intelligent) lines.
127 We ignore whether Malebranche read Geulincx. He certainly does not quote
him, but he owned his Questiones quodlibeticae. See Gouhier, La vocation de Malebranche
(Paris: Vrin, 1926), 69.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 405

shared feature among the three major Occasionalists – Geulincx,

Malebranche, and Vico.
Let us now proceed to examine the presence of the verum factum
in the philosophy of Malebranche and the relationship of continuity
and opposition (with continuity being prevalent)) that gets estab-
lished between his thought and Vico’s. Synthetically, we might say:
the same principle of verum factum, freed from the possibility of a
skeptical inversion through the connection with Ontologism,128 is
what leads Malebranche to affirm that the doubt about the reality
of the external world is rationally insuperable and Vico, instead, to
affirm “civil theology.”129
Let us listen to Malebranche, following the text of the VI Eclaircissement
or that, which is equivalent, of the VI Entretien sur la Métaphysique: the
existence of bodies cannot be proven perfectly (i.e., proven with geo-
metrical rigour).130 He speaks only of doubting the existence of bodies,
but it is clear that, for him (unlike for Berkeley, whose position is very
different), this doubt also affects the existence of other finite subjects.
Because, in fact, how else can other men be for me data of experience
if not through the sensitive experience I have of their bodies?
The merely “conjectural” form that he attributes to the knowledge
of other spirits is a further confirmation of this. In these writings we
truly have the first formulation of the question of solipsism, albeit limited
to finite beings.131 Because in matters of philosophy we cannot affirm

128 It is interesting how an interpretation of Vico based only on the verum factum
must inevitably take a skeptical turn. A proof of this is provided by the very beautiful,
truly decisive pages 103–25 of La vita come arte (Florence: Sansoni, 1943) by Ugo
Spirito, who draws the ultimate logical consequences from this kind of interpretation.
From the historical standpoint, we might say: separating the verum factum from
Ontologism leads, in its ultimate consequences, to exacerbate the skeptical motif that
was already in Geulincx (and his learned ignorance).
129 This seems to me the best description of his philosophy. See sections 2, 347,
366, 385 in the second edition of the Scienza Nuova, and, above all, read and reread
section 2 to convince yourself that the immanentistic interpretations are impossible.
130 The unity of Idealism and mathematicism has been often asserted, for ex-
ample, by Brunschvicg in Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique (Paris: Alcan, 1929);
and, from a perspective opposite to Brunschvicg’s, by M. Gentile, Il problema della filoso-
fia moderna, part 1 (Brescia: La Scuola, 1950). This text by Malebranche could provide
a significant confirmation of this unity.
131 On this point, see L. Robinson, “Le ‘cogito’ cartésien et l’origine de
l’idéalisme moderne,” in Revue philosophique 123 (1937): 307–35. According to
406 The Problem of Atheism

anything except when evidence compels us irresistibly. Otherwise, when

our consent is not compelled by evidence, it is we who act, not God who
acts in us. Thus, from the rational standpoint we cannot affirm that
there are other realities, besides God and our spirit, which we know by
awareness, without having science of them. Therefore, the reality of
finite existences other than mine can only be known by God in as much
as he has created them because he alone knows his acts of will, which
produce all beings. Hence, in order to be fully convinced of the reality
of the external world, it is necessary to prove not only that there is a
God and that God does not deceive but also that he assured us that he
really created the world. It is not important now to describe how the
transition to this certainty of the divine guarantee works. It is enough
to remark that it requires the theory of the necessity of the Incarnation
as the justification of creation and, thus, the inclination to theological
rationalism that is so visible in his thought.132
Certainly, this role of verum factum leads irrefutably to consequences
that are entirely foreign to Vico’s thought. But, from a different angle,
we must say that there was objectively room in Malebranche’s philosophy
for the verum factum as the foundation of historical knowledge. Indeed,
it has been definitively proven, against a contrary opinion that was
dominant for many years, that Malebranche is one of the greatest and
subtlest theoreticians of human freedom and that, for him, man has a
“power” that is certainly “immanent” and “moral” and not “physical”
but still capable, by virtue of the general laws that are the immutable
rules of God’s action, of determining his freedom towards one external
outcome rather than another.133 Therefore, should we not feel autho-
rized to say that man can know historical reality because it was he who
“morally” made it?

Robinson, Malebranche’s system is the first modern idealist system, and, in it, the pos-
sibility of the solipsistic doubt becomes clear for the first time. It is a thesis that I al-
ready fully shared at that time (see “La Veracità divina”). Apparently, a solipsist from
the early 1700s, Claude Brunet, was influenced by the thought of Malebranche – on
this, see L. Robinson, “Un solipsiste au XVIIIe siècle,” in L’année philosophique 24
(1913): 15–30.
132 On this connection, see my article “La Veracità divina.”
133 See Laporte, “La liberté selon Malebranche,” in Revue de Métaphysique 45
(1938): 339–410, or in Études d’histoire de la philosophie française au XVIIe siecle (Paris:
Vrin, 1951), 193–254.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 407

Moreover, let us consider the system of the general laws of Providence

in XIII Entretien, 9. Three groups of general laws are made manifest to
us by reason and experience. The first group is that of the general laws
of the communication of motions, whose occasional cause is the colli-
sions between bodies. It is through these laws that God has communi-
cated to the sun the power to give light, to fire the power to burn, and
so on. The second group is that of the general laws of the union of the
soul with the body, whereby I have the power to speak, to walk, to feel
sensations, and so on. Through them God unites us to all his works.
The third group is that of the general laws of the union of the soul with
God, of created reason with universal Reason. The occasional cause of
these laws is my attention, and by them I have the power to think and
to discover the truth. Then he adds: “these three general laws are the
only ones that reason and experience make us know. But the authority
of scripture makes us know two more”: the laws that regulate the rela-
tions that good and bad angels have with lower beings, and the laws
whereby Jesus Christ has received the power to distribute grace. The
task of philosophy is to highlight the architecture of the divine work
and make us embrace in one gaze the order of nature and the order
of grace.
Now, is it not strange that history is excluded from this investigation
of the abysses of Providence? Should not Providence govern the world
of men beside that of nature? And furthermore, does not the New Science
expressly contain a fourth system, accessible by the natural light of
reason, that of the general laws that govern the course of history? This
system is formulated by Vico exactly according to the principles of
Occasionalism. We only need to consider the very famous text of the
Conclusion of the second New Science: “It is true that men have them-
selves made this world of nations … but this world without doubt has
issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always
superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves;
which narrows ends, made means to serve wider ends, it has always
employed to preserve the human race upon this earth. Men mean to
gratify their bestial lust and abandon their offspring, and they inaugu-
rate the chastity of marriage from which families arise etcetera” (Sec.
1108).134 It cannot be said with greater clarity that human actions are

134 [TN] Vico, New Science, 382.

408 The Problem of Atheism

mere occasions for the institution in history of an order that is estab-

lished by Providence, according to immutable laws. The fact that the
result transcends men’s particular ends is just another form of the defi-
nition of the concept of occasional cause. According to a well-known
image, man is the “craftsman” of the world of nations whose “Architect”
is the divine mind. Men’s vital advantages are the occasion arranged by
God so that his designs may be realized: “This axiom proves that there
is divine providence and further that it is a divine legislative mind. For
out of the passions of men each bent on his private advantage, for the
sake of which they would live like wild beasts in the wilderness, it has
made the civil orders by which they may live in human society”
(Sec. 133).135 And above all consider this text, which I regard as fun-
damental: “non igitur utilitas fuit mater iuris et societatis humanae, sive
ea sit necessitas, sive metus, sive indigentia, ut Epicuro, Machiavellio,
Obbesio, Spinozae, Baylaeo adlubet: sed occasio fuit, per quam homines,
natura sociales et originis vitio divisi, infirmi et indigi ad colendam
societatem, sive adeo ad celebrandam suam socialem naturam raperen-
tur” (De Uno, Ch. 16).136
It seems to me that the consideration of this identity between
Malebranche’s Providence and Vico’s Providence – if we choose to
consider it in its concept and not in the different fields of application –
is decisively important because it definitively rules out the usual imma-
nentist interpretations of the latter. The immanentist thesis can be
summarized as follows: the core of Vico’s theory of Providence is imma-
nentist because its means and its ways are human. The Catholic inter-
pretation would be well founded only if all of human history were
patterned after that of the Jews, which is governed by the inscrutable
transcendent will of God. But Vico, even though he piously accepts the
privileged status of the Chosen People, sets Hebrew history in opposi-
tion to that of the rest of humanity, which, unlike it, is made by men
and not directly by God, and whose rationality must therefore be sought

135 Ibid., 56.

136 The lines immediately before are also very interesting, in which Grotius’s
mistake is said to be that he did not see that the occasion is not the cause. Therefore,
according to Vico, the theory of natural law can become rigorously consistent only if
it is rethought within ontologist-Occasionalist philosophy. I do not need to emphasize
how important this is in order to understand Vico’s “Grotius.”
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 409

in the human mind.137 In response, we must observe that the reason

Vico did not talk, except occasionally, about Jewish history and the
Christian religion is that, given the nature of his research, he did not have
to. His investigation concerned the natural ways of Providence in profane
history, and this implied that there would be no reference to the super-
natural; just as there could not be any, in Malebranche, in the study
of the laws through which Providence regulates the communication of
motions. At most, one can say that Vico does not want to extend his
investigation to the general laws that, according to Malebranche, also
govern the order of the supernatural and of grace; but by doing so he
protects its gratuitousness. If we interpret it in a theological sense, his
research is for what man can do in the state of “natura lapsa,” and it has a
distinctly anti-Jansenist character and tone.
So, on the one side Vico conforms perfectly to Malebranche’s thought;
moreover, his extension is perfectly legitimate. But, on the other side,
if we try to imagine a meeting between Malebranche and Vico, we ought
to bet that it would have risked the same outcome as the meeting,
whether it really happened or not, between the former and Berkeley.
Indeed, to understand the contrast between their attitudes, try to read
Malebranche’s famous chapter on L’erreur la plus dangereuse de la philoso-
phie des anciens. In essence, his thought is similar to Vico’s: pagans were
able to create their gods because the idea of God remained in fallen
man but in a corrupt form due to the prevalence of imagination over
reason as a consequence of sin. Thus they ascribed power, a divine
attribute, to the so-called forces of nature; and ancient philosophers
followed them by attributing forms, faculties, qualities, virtues – in short,
causal power – to the bodies. Essentially, Malebranche is facing the
question of myth and, due to the principles of his philosophy, can only
delineate, regarding its nature, a solution similar to that subsequently
affirmed and elaborated by Vico. But whereas this latter rehabilitated
the ancient fables for the aspect of truth that remains in them, albeit
distorted, and sees a process of providential transformation from the
“first divine fable” to God as infinite Mind, Malebranche sets reason

137 I related this sententia communis in the words of G. De Ruggiero, Storia della
Filosofia: La filosofia moderna, III, da Vico a Kant (Bari: Laterza, 1941), 56. But it is in-
teresting, and goes to show how widespread this idea is, that a scholar of a completely
different orientation, like K. Löwith, reasons in the same way in Meaning in History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 129–31.
410 The Problem of Atheism

and myth in most rigorous opposition. By destroying the entities that

were a legacy of mythical thought, the Cartesian “philosophie nouvelle”
achieves a perfect harmony with the first principle of religion – that we
must love and fear only one God – and leads to true harmony in
Christians between the heart and intelligence because, as long as
Aristotelian philosophy was prevalent, one could say that, while the
heart was Christian, the depth of the spirit had remained pagan.
We have here the real point of opposition: religious Cartesianism
does not know degrees, and not because it is religious but because it is
Cartesianism. Absolute truth on one side, error on the other, just as abso-
lute – that is, its thought is “ahistorical” in the sense I mentioned earlier.
Therefore, Vico’s “civil theology” could not fit inside Malebranche’s
system, even though in a sense it seemed to be a legitimate extension
of it, with respect to a question it left open. It was necessary that two of
Malebranche’s essential theses be abandoned by Vico: that of the rigor-
ous knowledge of the ideal archetypes of the physical world, and the
question of the reality of the external world.138 It was necessary, that is,
to criticize Malebranche’s mathematicism and also (it is the same thing)
his Idealism; it was necessary to arrive at a position to which the (more
recent) terms Idealism and realism could not apply; or equivalently, it
was necessary to carry out an inversion to replace the primacy of essence
with that of existing reality.
It is at this point that we must adequately appreciate Vico’s critique
of Cartesianism. A critique that draws its originality, in my judgment,
from the fact that it concerns precisely the significant structure of
Cartesianism itself; namely, the concession it makes to the libertines,
that a philosophy based on a consideration of profane history can only
lead to skepticism. Thus, Vico’s adversary is still the same as that of
Cartesianism (i.e., libertine thought); he simply deems Cartesian

138 Of course, Vico could not formulate the question precisely in these terms;
but I think it is possible to easily show that this was the result of the critique he devel-
oped. This fact is quite important because it can be used to show that it is not possible
to continue his thought in idealist philosophies. It has been shown (see Laporte,
“L’étendue intelligible selon Malebranche,” in Études, 153–92) that Malebranche’s
intelligible extension prefigures Kant’s space and that, on this point, he acts as inter-
mediary between Descartes and Kant (which is, anyway, as I mentioned, a common
occurrence in pre-Vichian Occasionalism because of its idealist accent). Now Vico, by
abandoning this Malebranchian idea of knowledge of the ideal archetypes of physical
nature, interrupts precisely the process from Malebranche to Kant.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 411

thought inadequate to beat it because of its “monastic character.” It

seems to me that we reduce the significance of this criticism if we view
it merely as a defence, against mathematicism, of the individualizing
forces – in the theoretical spirit, imagination; in the practical spirit,
power and will; in empirical science, which corresponds to the philoso-
phy of the spirit, barbaric civilization or poetic wisdom. Why then does
he insist so much on establishing a kinship, which at first blush is so
peculiar and hardly historical, between Cartesian philosophy and sto-
icism and Jansenist rigourism? The first aspect that Vico’s critique
emphasizes is the opposition of the “political” philosopher to the
“monastic” philosopher; this is the constant theme, first in De nostri
temporis and then in the Risposte al giornale dei letterati and in the Scienza
Nuova. In the first text he affirms the inadequacy of Cartesianism with
regard to forming civil prudence. In the second, he says:

Philosophies have been of no other use to the world than for making nations
… Now, the republic of letters was founded at first in such a way that philoso-
phers be satisfied with the probable, and dealing with the true be left to
mathematicians. As long as this order was preserved in the world we know
about, Greece yielded all the foundations of the sciences and the arts, and
those very happy centuries were rich with inimitable republics, enterprises,
works, and great words and deeds … The stoic sect arose and, ambitious, it
wished to confuse the orders and take the place of mathematicians with that
pompous sentence: sapientem nihil opinari; and the republic did not bring any
better fruit. On the contrary, an altogether opposite order was born, that of
the skeptics, who are completely useless to human society; and they were
scandalized by the stoics, because, when they saw them affirm as true what is
doubtful, they began to doubt everything.

In this passage we must regard as extremely important the remark

about the correlation between stoicism and skepticism, which means,
in reference to his time, between Descartes and Bayle. Finally, we have
the famous degnità 130 on the opposition between “monastic or solitary
philosophers,” stoics and epicureans, and political philosophers, mainly
Platonists. So, in my judgment, Vico’s historical vision must be inter-
preted as follows: for him the critique of mathematicism is a conse-
quence of the critique of an original “monastic” attitude within which
mathematicism really does seem to be the only possible way to beat
skepticism. For Vico, the non-politicity of Cartesian philosophy is not
412 The Problem of Atheism

a consequence of mathematicism but, on the contrary, the “condition-

ing attitude” within which a philosophy of geometric rigour takes shape.
I wrote elsewhere:

The presence of the libertine moment – the rationalistic interpretation of

history – is what gives the French Enlightenment its typical character. It start-
ed, around 1680, precisely from the results that the libertine movement,
which seemed exhausted in the years between 1655 and 1660, had reached.
Bayle’s Dictionnaire realizes the book that Naudé had planned as the conclu-
sion of his thought, the Elenchus rerum hactenus falso creditarum. Think now of
what Bayle represents – the decomposition of Cartesianism, the moment
when it loses its metaphysics. Why then does the decomposition of Cartesianism
take this form? Why does it coincide with the resurfacing of the libertine back-
ground? This suggests the idea that libertine skepticism was the challenge
that the spiritualism of the sixteen hundreds did not adequately answer.139

If this is the case, we cannot help wondering whether Vico, who is nor-
mally regarded as a bad historian of philosophy, and unaware of the
true nature of his own thought, and the “precursor” philosopher par
excellence,140 did not, on the contrary, grasp like nobody else the mean-
ing of the thought of the 1600s? Does not the (certainly extremely
tortuous) process that leads Vico from the criticism of Descartes to that
of Bayle – and not because he considers Bayle a Cartesian; on the con-
trary, he constantly puts him together with Epicurus, Machiavelli,
Spinoza, Hobbes (i.e., with the adversaries of Cartesian stoicism, despite
the correlation between stoicism and Epicureanism)141 – define

139 “La crisi libertina e la ragion di stato,” 36.

140 Croce, La storia come pensiero e come azione (Laterza: Bari, 1943), 58–61 [History
as the Story of Liberty, trans. S. Sprigge (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1941),
71–4].
141 See, for example, Diritto Universale, 4, 32, 55, 301, 327. And in the conclusion
of the second Scienza Nuova see sections 1109, 1110. This goes to show that going
from the juridical treatises to the New Science the adversaries really did not change.
The fact that in the Sinopsi of De Uno (4) these five, always mentioned together, are
labelled as “skeptics” is also interesting. Without insisting too much now on this ap-
pellation, given the oscillations in Vico’s language, it seems nonetheless that such a
designation reveals that he viewed the thought of these authors (including, and this
is certainly a bit peculiar, Spinoza) in the aspect according to which they participated
in the general libertine trend; and that the passage I just recalled from the Risposte
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 413

somehow the “significant structure” within which the operations of

Cartesian thought take place and its inadequacy with regard to facing
the attack of what we can call, in a broad sense, libertine thought?
According to the interpretation that I have sketched here, and that
of course I have presented as hypothetical (on top of everything else
because the nature of this essay does not allow me to fully prove it),
Vico’s thought represents an ulterior step in the development of
Malebranche’s rediscovery of Occasionalism. This ulteriority expresses
itself in the critique of the significant structure of Cartesianism, within
which Malebranche had kept the reaffirmation of Ontologism, with the
consequence of accentuating Idealism and theological rationalism –
motifs that subsequently were picked up and carried to their conclusions
by immanentist thought.
Allow me to highlight more analogies in the architecture of the sys-
tems. Consider the passage in the second Scienza Nuova in which the
principle verum factum is affirmed most clearly: “But in the night of thick
darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves,
there shines the eternal and never-failing light of a truth beyond all
question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men,
and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifica-
tions of our own human mind” (sec. 331). The term “modifications” is
certainly drawn from Malebranche.142 Now, what does Vico intend to
say? Certainly not that history can be explained through the modifica-
tions of the human mind only. Because, in that case, what would be of
the “civil theology”? He means, instead, that studying the modifications
of the human mind as they manifest themselves in history, as the only
reality directly accessible to us, reveals the action of a principle that is
irreducible to these modifications themselves. Likewise, Malebranche’s

uses the terms “stoicism” and “skepticism” to define the correlation between
Cartesianism and libertine skepticism (with the victory of the latter), which I have
discussed. Note that in the Risposte this intuition is still vague and grows clearer in the
subsequent works.
It is interesting to notice that, in the VIII Entretien, 14, Malebranche, in the name
of his idea of Order and of the relations of Perfection, which are the foundation of
morals, develops a very harsh critique of Hobbes, without naming him, in terms re-
markably similar to those of Vico: Hobbes’s conception could only conclude in “turn-
ing human society into an assembly of brute beasts.”
142 This observation was already acutely made by Corsano, Giambattista Vico,
220–1.
414 The Problem of Atheism

Recherche de la Vérité was a study of the modifications of the individual

human mind that revealed the presence of an element irreducible to
them – the eternal, universal, and necessary ideas – and the presence
to the soul of the divine being, as the “place” in which they were seen.
By this I do not mean to say that Vico consciously thought of this sym-
metry. Let us rather say that the symmetry forced itself on him, without
being able to know to what extent he was aware of it.
But, you may ask, what does Vico “see” in God, after abandoning
Malebranche’s idea of the vision of the essence of extended reality?
This objection is certainly very important because God’s presence, when
it is separated from any idea of “vision,” tends inevitably to take an
immanentist flair. Now, we must not forget that for Malebranche the
vision of God also concerns “relations of perfection” (which translate,
in his Ontologism, Pascal’s “ordre de cœur.” Because of their norma-
tivity, and thus of the determination they impose on the movement
of the will, they are apprehended differently than relations of magni-
tude, which leave the subject indifferent), or, as he also says, “the
immutable order of justice,” and that, because of this theory, he has
recently been regarded as the founder of axiology. There is an immu-
table universal order that is the foundation of morals. It might seem
that we are here at the threshold of “Christian natural law.” On the
contrary, when Malebranche moves to the study of social life he
becomes, as I have said … as pessimistic as Hobbes.143 Morality remains
utterly separate from politics and law. Why this must be the case is all
too clear, after what has been said; and the parallel with the non-
extension to history of the general laws is perfect. Likewise it is very
clear that this is the point where Vico surpasses him, while remaining
completely faithful. At any rate, the relationship between vulgar knowl-
edge and reflected knowledge, where the second has only the task of
interpreting, rules out every possible idea of sublating religion into

143 Regarding the beginning of axiology, see Gueroult, Descartes t. 2, 33.

About “Hobbesian pessimism” (a sentence that perhaps is not too precise but that
is substantially accurate with respect to what the author meant to say) and about the
separation carried to the extreme by Malebranche between morality and law – where-
as his idea of the “Order” might have suggested the opposite – I am happy to recall
pages 104–7 in the book by G. Solari, La Scuola del Diritto Naturale nelle dottrine etico-
giuridiche dei secoli XVII e XVIII (Turin: Bocca, 1904), which have not grown old, even
after so many years.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 415

philosophy. At most we can say that, after he abandons Malebranche’s

theological rationalism, Vico’s Christianity – in fact, his Catholicism –
remains a presupposition, a bit in the manner of Descartes, although
in a different sense because of the enormous importance he attributes
to sin. This parallel is rigorous because we can say that both of them
destroy all possible (libertine and Spinozian) objections to religion;
however, neither treat explicitly the question of the transition from
rational truths to revealed truths.
Let us move on to the contemplative aspect of the New Science: “the
reader will experience in his mortal body a divine pleasure as he con-
templates in the divine ideas this world of nations in all the extent of
its places, times and varieties” (sec. 345). What the New Science leads to
is a feeling of admiration for the architecture of the universe, considered
from the standpoint of its historical laws. But Malebranche had said
exactly the same, in reference to the general laws of the physical world:
“I do not admire so much the trees covered with flowers and fruits as
their marvelous growth as a result of the natural laws.”144 Learning to
behold the fabric of the world and the principles of unity that govern
it, shifting the attention from the objects to the way in which God fills
the world with them, and to the coordination of the various systems of
laws: this is the foundation of the aesthetic emotion in its purity accord-
ing to Malebranche.145 This extremely similar union of aesthetic emo-
tion, science, and piety – the final words of the New Science are “this
science carries inseparably with it the study of piety, and … if one be
not pious he cannot really be wise” – is the deepest feature that manifests
the kinship of the two systems.

144 Entretiens, X, 7.
145 At this point the discussion should veer towards Malebranche’s relationship
with the art of his time, a topic that has never been covered. See, however, regarding
the closeness between the ideas of Malebranche and the art of Guarini, the penetrat-
ing remark by C.G. Argan, L’architettura barocca in Italia (Milan: Garzanti, 1957), 62–3.
The same discussion ought also to be promoted for the idea of art in the reflected
age, according to Vico. At any rate, studies in Vichian aesthetics need to be renewed,
too, now that we have understood that it is no longer acceptable to confuse his theory
of myth with a theory of art.
416 The Problem of Atheism

11. CONTINUITY OF THE PHILOSOPHY

OF THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION

Drawing now the conclusions of this long discussion, I will say that, in
my judgment, Goldmann is mistaken in identifying a “tragic vision” that
supposedly unifies thinkers so distant from each other as Pascal and
Kant; and that in reference to Pascal we should speak, rather than of a
“tragic vision,” of the extreme radicalization of an “anti-humanism,”
which is intrinsic to religious Cartesianism.
But, evidently, this is only the least important of the results that I
believe I have reached by discussing his thesis: because it has led me to
recognize a unified development in the four major thinkers of the time
of the Catholic Reformation: Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche, and Vico;
and also a (subordinate) line of development of Occasionalism.
Unity, continuity: today these words do not sound right in philosophi-
cal historiography. It has been said, and rightly, that the historian must
grasp philosophies in their individuality; a seeker of unity is somebody
who does not consider the historical situation in which philosophies
arose; who regards as irrelevant the study of the biographies of the
philosophers; who detaches philosophers from their actual questions
in order to understand them in relation to the question of the philoso-
pher who is writing history.
However, there is a good way and a bad way of understanding unity.
A very bad way is, certainly, that of the self-generation of concepts; that
of neglecting “to treat each philosophy as a historical reality in which
ideas do not stop being ideas upon becoming a man’s thoughts.”146
With respect to this way of writing history, Gouhier’s remark is certainly
impeccable: “Cartesianism would not have generated Spinozism without
Spinoza and no history of Cartesianism will prove that Spinoza’s exis-
tence was necessary.”147
Things change when unity is looked for or, rather, is presented by
history in the unity of the question: meaning the sameness of the
adversary that a group of thinkers, despite their differences in psy-
chology and formation, intended to defeat – such as precisely the
Molinist Descartes, the Port-Royalist Pascal, the Berullian theocentrist

146 H. Gouhier, La philosophie et son histoire (Paris: Vrin, 1948), 124.

147 H. Gouhier, L’histoire et sa philosophie (Paris: Vrin, 1952), 125.
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 417

Malebranche, and the anti-Jansenist humanist Vico. Now, it is interest-

ing to realize that expressly the introduction into the history of philoso-
phy of a serious consideration of atheism leads us to cast doubt, at least
as far as the philosophy of the 1600s is concerned, on the usual judg-
ment that says that, after the Renovatio (in its three moments: Renaissance,
Reformation, and New Science), the philosophies of transcendence do
not “form a chain”; meaning that, in each one of them, we must distin-
guish an aspect of true research that will take its full meaning in further
immanentist or at least secular philosophies, an aspect of critical demoli-
tion of the past, and an antiquated attempt at reconciling with tradition,
which at best can achieve the academic result of being non-contradic-
tory; meaning that the process of secularization that is undeniable in
German philosophy, from Leibniz to Marx, marked by the progressive
abandonment of the idea of theodicy, can be extended to the entirety
of modern thought. Instead, to express my full thought, modern phi-
losophy can only be defined problematically, in connection with the
appearance of the problem of atheism, and its essential and irreducible
lines of development are two, not one.
While this definition in terms of a problem, associated with the
appearance of a new essence, confirms that the Cartesian beginning
is inescapable, it rules out the idea of a “radical error of modern phi-
losophy,” no matter whether it is affirmed in Catholic or Heideggerian
terms, and the possibility of a simple return to previous traditions.
Although, of course, it does not at all rule out the possibility that a
deeper study thereof may coincide with encountering those traditions,
to the point of recognizing that new positions are explications of their
virtualities. This is precisely what Cartesian thinkers failed to achieve,
first of all by exasperating, at the philosophical level, the opposition
of Augustinism and Thomism, and subsequently by splitting
Augustinism in two. In Vico this possibility remains limited to a reaf-
firmation of humanism separated from what had led to the heretical
aspects of Renaissance thought.
Tying together more deeply the history of philosophy and the history
of culture has made it possible to give the libertine trend the importance
it deserves as the intermediary between the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment, acting in the 1600s above all in France and, as a reper-
cussion, in Italy. In this connection, it has made it no longer possible
to separate the “letter” from the “spirit” in the philosophies of Descartes
and Vico in the name of Cartesianism and Vichianism “de jure.”
418 The Problem of Atheism

So, in Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche, and Vico the adversary is the

same; and there is a unity that establishes itself, albeit through extremely
serious contrasts, in the process of their philosophies: the ideal essence
that is reached is that of Ontologism.
In this unitary process the ideal essences of all subsequent philoso-
phies can be discerned and can be investigated at the moment of their
genesis. Leaving aside the obligatory reference of every modern phi-
losophy to Descartes, which I already discussed, I will mention: the
essences of criticism and theological existentialism in Pascal; that of
Idealism in the “theocentric revolution” of Geulincx and Malebranche,
and in this latter also the essence of the shadow that goes along with
Idealism, solipsism, and those of logicism and psychologism; the
conditions that make possible the transition of empiricism to its rigor-
ous critical form in Hume are found in Pascal and Malebranche; in
Vico we have humanism in its final form of maturation and in its
irreducibility to the categories of Idealism and realism, and the prob-
lem of history.
This view calls into question another common idea, that of the “cul-
tural sterility of the Counter-Reformation,” because the philosophies
of the four authors we have considered operate within the Counter-
Reformation’s essential intuition: the nexus between lowering man and
reducing God to pure irrational power, which applies also to Port-
Royalism, as we have seen.
I said that the ideal essence that takes shape at the end of this process
is that of Ontologism. Does this essence still have a meaning today?
And in what terms can it be reaffirmed? And how does it relate not
only to the Augustinian tradition but also to Thomism in its most seri-
ous interpretation? Regarding the first two questions, one of the prob-
lems that must be solved first is the exact definition of the defeat that
befell Actualism in its attempt – wherein lies its originality – to move
beyond the Ontologism of Gioberti and Rosmini in a reformation of
Hegelian dialectics.148

148 In reference to what was said in the Introduction on the inseparability, today,
of philosophical discourse from political discourse, it becomes important that, since
the beginning (precisely since Rosmini e Gioberti), Actualism was associated by its au-
thor (with the most sincere passion) to the question of the Risorgimento and viewed as
the philosophy of its fullness, whereas its fate was to become the philosophy of its
crisis – and not because of any subjective responsibility of Gentile but out of an ideal
 VI. The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism (1964) 419

In fact, Actualism is the necessary form, the only truly consistent one,
that Hegelianism must assume to reaffirm itself, as philosophy of the
immanence of the divine, after both Marxism and Ontologism and,
thus, after both the criticism of religion developed by the Hegelian left
and the Catholic Italian philosophy of the Risorgimento. It does this by
realizing a very peculiar coincidence of Marxism dissociated from mate-
rialism, and philosophy of the presence of the divine dissociated from
any reference to the transcendent. The fact that Gentile started his
activity as a writer with a book on Marx and one on Rosmini and Gioberti,
which were written almost simultaneously, takes in this regard a symbolic
significance, and I do not know if this has ever been noticed before.
Therefore, a deeper critical study of the genesis and defeat of Actualism
can be the precise verification of the vision of the history of modern
philosophy to which we have arrived starting from the problem that was
most extraneous to him – that of atheism.149

necessity whose nature must still be rigorously defined – in perfect symmetry with the
fact that it seems to verify exactly, from the theoretical standpoint, the criticisms ad-
vanced (albeit in often uncertain form) by Ontologism against “subjectivism.”
149 Thus, the rigour with which Gentile’s research was conducted is such that
only after having examined it can one undertake a truly critical study of Rosmini –
and especially of the greater Rosmini, that of the Teosofia – in order to define his pres-
ent relevance, also with respect to the current rediscoveries of Ontologism.
 V II

Political Theism and Atheism

(1962)

I said that atheism finds its own criterion of truth in the determination
that transcendent thought has been surpassed by history in the twofold
and inseparable sense that it cannot account for its development and
cannot serve as guide in actual historical-political choices.1 I also said
that atheism always goes together with forms of negation of freedom:
with the harshest form of absolutism, in the libertines; with totalitarian-
ism, in Marxism; and we can also think of Hobbes, whose atheism is a
hypothesis that is certainly possible, and can be supported with good
arguments, and who was in any case among the first to “conceive a
politics with the clear intention of excluding from its principles the
divine.”2 Limiting ourselves now to the most radical form of positive
atheism, it is an obvious observation that what corresponds from the
political standpoint to its primary adversary from the philosophical

1 Regarding the connection that exists today between the religious, the philosophi-
cal, and the political question, Maritain writes perfectly: “whereas, over the centuries,
the crucial questions for religious thought have been first of all the great ideological
controversies on the dogmas of the faith, today the crucial questions concern above
all political theology and political philosophy” (Raison et Raisons [Paris: LUF, 1947],
182).
2 R. Polin, Politique et philosophie chez Thomas Hobbes (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1947), XV–XVI. Polin himself, in his subsequent book La politique morale
de John Locke (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), highlights, instead, the
depth of the religious motif that underpins Locke’s ethical-political thought. On the
connection between atheism and negation of freedom, see the splendid pages by R.
Guardini, “Der Atheismus und die Möglichkeit der Autorität,” in Il problema dell’ ateismo
(Brescia: Morcelliana, 1962), 199–207.
 VII. Political Theism and Atheism (1962) 421

standpoint, theism, and more precisely the religious God (see pages
299–300), is liberalism. After all, this relationship is perfectly defined
by Marx himself:

Only under the dominance of Christianity, which makes all national, natu-
ral, moral, and theoretical conditions extrinsic to man, could civil society
separate itself completely from the life of the state, sever all the species-ties
of man, put egoism and selfish need in the place of these species-ties, and
dissolve the human world into a world of atomistic individuals who are inimi-
cally opposed to one another.
Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen,
and as an individual human being has become a species-being … only when
man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and,
consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of
political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.

These passages are from “On the Jewish Question” of 1844. It is an

extremely interesting work because the selfishness of bourgeois society
is traced back to Jewish-Christian “subjectivism” and individualism, to
which is opposed the notion of species-being (Gattungwesen), which will
then be the core theme of the Manuscripts of 1844. Thus, Christianity
is criticized as individualist, by reason, that is, of that connection between
finite individuality and evil that is the necessary presupposition of ratio-
nalism, as negation of Creation and Fall. Here the discussion should
be broadened: the first datum of rationalist ethics is the far-from-obvious
reduction of individualism to selfishness; the negation of the connec-
tion, which is proper to traditional Christian ethics, between love of
Order, desire for happiness, and love of the Good. We can see to what
extent the habits of rationalist ethics have triumphed by considering
how little religious moralists emphasize this point today.3

3 A deeper exploration of this issue should lead one to consider the extremely
important dispute on quietism, about which see the very remarkable book by Fr Y. de
Montcheuil, Malebranche et le quietisme (Paris: Aubier, 1946), which builds on the studies
on the Thomist doctrine of love by P. Rousselot, and which highlights well the perspi-
cacity of Malebranche’s critique. In fact, the importance in the history of philosophy
of this dispute on pure love – as an anticipation, in the quietists, of the more question-
able aspects of Kantian morality – had already been pointed out by scholars who today
have been forgotten, such as P. Janet, La morale (Paris: Delagrave, 1887), 104; and G.
Zuccante, Aristotele e la morale (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1926), 112–13.
422 The Problem of Atheism

But it is not possible now to adequately treat this topic, which, if

analyzed rigorously, would lead to clarifying the unsurmountable oppo-
sition between rationalism and liberalism.4
We must focus our attention, instead, on the extremely curious fact
that many Catholic as well as the majority of non-Communist seculars
seem to try as hard as they can to ignore the Marxist correlation between
the negation of the religious God and that of liberalism. And “open”
Catholics do so more than backward Catholics, open seculars more
than conservatives.
Let us outline schematically the customary argument, which origi-
nated in Maritain and is widespread among the vast majority of today’s
Catholic intellectuals. The civilization that came out of the Renaissance
and the Reformation, and was continued by the Enlightenment, replaced
true humanism, which is theocentric, with anthropocentric humanism.
In it the affirmation of the person changes into that of the absolute
freedom of the individual, accompanied by trust in a rational order of
things, whereby a cosmic harmony reconciles the quest for private
advantages into universal well-being. God as origin and end is replaced
by God at the service of man, God with the task of harmonizing the
outcomes of the explication of individual freedoms. In short, it is
the idea of a “guarantor” God, which is universally embraced by the
rationalism and empiricism of the 1600s and 1700s, including the think-
ers who, in their interior forum, were most persuaded of serving God’s
cause (Descartes, Leibniz).
Supposedly, the affirmation of the absolute freedom of the individual,
accompanied by trust in a rational order that guarantees his knowledge
and his action, constitutes the essence of liberalism. Its fruits are the
capitalist and bourgeois regimes and, thus, the conflict between classes,
the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat. Therefore, it is precisely from the
historical result of liberalism that the Communist opposition originates;

Maritain has spoken very well, with regard to atheism, of “a new kind of pure mysti-
cal love,” as “a renunciation of all hope of personal redemption,” but “bought at the
price of what in us is an end in itself and the image of God” (La signification, 19). As
a matter of fact, because of what I have already said, atheism cannot help developing,
in the moral aspect, an aspect that was already present in the doctrine of pure love.
4 I say this, of course, in reference to the definition of rationalism given on
pages 10ff. Who would be willing, today, to include Spinoza and Hegel among the
classics of liberalism?
 VII. Political Theism and Atheism (1962) 423

its fault is that of being an opposition by mere inversion, that is, of

sharing liberalism’s worldly and immanent presupposition; however,
this error is motivated by a just moral reaction against the capitalist
order and by a no less just reaction against the philosophical God who
supposedly provides its guarantee. Finally, there is, in the modern world,
a third position, the one that can be called, with a generic term,
“Fascism.” It is an absorption of the human person into a collective
entity that, in its first and still rational forms, will present itself as an
“ethical State,” which will then take an irrational form in the nation
and in the subsequent cult of the Leader, which, finally, will find its
point of arrival in racism. It is immediately clear that, in this vision, the
condemnation of liberalism carries much greater importance than that
of Marxism. Supposedly, the result of liberalism has been the destruc-
tion of the communitarian spirit that was proper to the Middle Ages,
the replacement of the person by the individual, as a naturalistic entity.
By contrast, socialism must be viewed as an inadequate attempt at sur-
passing liberalism. Socialism has a historical truth in as much as it
describes exactly the world to which the success of the bourgeoisie has
led; and supposedly the rise of the Fascisms is a historical verification
that the liberal error is more serious. That is, liberalism and Fascism
are two successive manifestation of the same mentality – the bourgeois
spirit. Liberalism is the political ideology of the bourgeoisie during its
ascending stage; Fascism, its reactionary moment. If I may use a histori-
cal analogy, the attitude of the Catholic left with respect to liberalism
and Communism is strictly similar to that of Jansenism, or at least of
typical Jansenism, with respect to Molinism and Protestantism; and this
is, perhaps, the only historical analogy that applies. At that time, too,
it was a matter of realizing an alliance between opposites, between
partial truths, which had become errors in their exclusive and one-sided
affirmation; but, in effect, in a typical Jansenist the hostility towards the
adversary within Catholicism, the Molinist, was much greater than that
towards the external adversary, the Protestant. This was the case because,
in his eyes, the new Molinist Pelagianism turned into an introduction
to naturalism and deism, which were the ideological covers for the new
bourgeois spirit, just as, mutatis, for a leftist Catholic, liberalism, through
the bourgeois regimes it originated, has been the premise of irrational-
ist and Fascist totalitarianisms. And liberalism can today again be the
condition for a return of Fascism in a different and, at least initially,
embryonic form.
424 The Problem of Atheism

For secular people liberalism is tied to the idea that truth is historical,
human, and so on. So that its negation depends on the idea of “absolute
truth,” the truth that claims to be “the only true one,” and which instead
is “the only false one” in as much as it denies history and the plurality
of perspectives, which are all authentic since they match the infinite
mobility of reality, and is the negation of the spirit of understanding
and tolerance. So that in Marxism we should distinguish two souls, one
theological and one historicist; the first derives from a realistic mindset
that underpins all theocracies, ranging from that conceived by St
Thomas to that of Lenin or Stalin. Thus, totalitarianisms are reduced
to the theocratic model.5
Clearly, I cannot share either one of these two viewpoints. I will
schematically present my position in a group of theses that I can
only enunciate.

1 . T h e P o s t u l at e o f P r o g r e s s
a n d t h e P o s t u l at e o f S i n

I. Does the typology of worldviews that I have outlined so far not also
apply to political positions?
Indeed, we can distinguish one conception that sees human reality
as really or absolutely transformable with respect to what concerns moral
good or evil; we can generically call it the conception of the
Enlightenment since it is characterized by the extension of the idea of
progress to the world of history. And we can identify another concep-
tion that, on the contrary, is characterized by the postulate of sin: prog-
ress is limited to the scientific and technical field, and at every time in
history there is the same possibility for evil, and the task of the politician
is to minimize it, without claiming, however, to be able to destroy it at
its root.6

5 Indeed, it is a commonplace that transcendence equals authoritarianism, and

immanence equals liberalism – a commonplace that Croce has reproposed and popu-
larized, and which is still alive in the mainstream press.
6 The expressions “postulate of progress” and “postulate of sin” are taken from
Renouvier, Esquisse d’une classification systématique des doctrines philosophiques (Paris: Au
bureau de la critique philosophique, 1885). Renouvier’s very distinctive spiritual
experience – which arrives at a theology of Creation and sin by deepening the liberal-
ism of Science de la Morale (1869) – is almost unknown, although it deserves a lot of
attention. Regarding the approach – which is, in a particular sense, liberal – to “the
 VII. Political Theism and Atheism (1962) 425

II. The first conception is characterized by the idea of the “direction

of history” and of the salvation of the individual achieved by participat-
ing in it. The direction of history is meaningfully oriented in such a way
that the reality of evil keeps shrinking, where this shrinking can be
viewed either as a necessity or as a possibility tied to human will. The
interpreter of this direction of history is the Politician or, if you prefer,
the State, the Party, which has not only the right but also the duty to
strike at the individuals who oppose it because, by doing so, it executes
against them the verdict that history has pronounced. Hence its domi-
native conception of power.

III. We must distinguish three fundamental types of progressive posi-

tion. In the first, the radical one – its most authentic expression is
Condorcet7 – social progress follows from the diffusion of the light of
reason; thus, it is a type of progressivism that rejects Terror. Shall we say
that it rejects every persecution and makes the idea of tolerance its
banner? Or, shall we rather say that it is always and inevitably tempted
to choose as a model the persecution by another one of its heroes, Julian
the Apostate, which supposedly failed because it was inspired by the
ancient type of rationalism? Do we not hear its echo, after all, in
Combes’s bloodless persecution during the early years of our century?
The second type is the revolutionary position, characterized by the
critique of the Enlightenment that I have already highlighted. After its
crisis, we have the evolutionary position, in which the “end” of history
is set aside altogether; it is characterized by an inversion whereby the
value of democracy (i.e, of a technical instrument), understood as a
rapid turnover of the élites, takes priority over that of liberalism.

IV. Conversely, in a politics that obeys the postulate of sin, the struggle
against evil and the realization of a relative degree of perfection is the

question of socialism as the question of atheism,” the classic authors are Dostoevsky
(see what is still Berdyaev’s essential book, Dostoevsky, trans. Donald Attwater [London:
Sheed and Ward, 1934]); and Rosmini (see P. Piovani, La teodicea sociale di Rosmini
[Padua: Cedam, 1957]).
7 One of the philosophically most rigorous expressions of the radical mindset is
found in the chapter that Brunschvicg devotes to Condorcet in Le progrès, 476–84. The
terms in which he defines precisely Condorcet’s opposition to Rousseau are important
(483). Brunschvicg sees Rousseau as the initiator, at the same time, of the two mindsets
he detests, the traditionalist and the revolutionary.
426 The Problem of Atheism

task of the individual and,8 thus, is a struggle that can, indeed, minimize
evil, which is beatable in that precise moment and at that precise point,
but cannot extinguish it at its root; and the politician’s ministerial and

8 I prefer the term “individual” rather than “person” because today the latter is
too often used in a way that makes the communitarian aspect completely dominant.
In fact, this preference is shared by many people; I will recall Capograssi and two
Catholic scholars closely associated with him by a very similar moral experience, Sergio
Cotta and Gabrio Lombardi. But also C. Ottaviano, according to whom “the supreme
task of the State is to make the individual an individual,” to establish the conditions for
“the complete free explication of what is most exquisitely individual in the individual”
(La soluzione scientifica del problema politico [Naples: Rondinella, 1954], 104–5), a work
that is a condensation at the political level of his Metafisica dell’essere parziale (Naples:
Rondinella, 1954), which is devoted expressly to the metaphysical definition of the
notion of individual. Of course, this does not mean embracing the atomistic conception
of individuals, which is proper to classical liberalism, because by doing that one would
deny precisely the nature of the individual as being defined by reference to another.
Needless to say, the critique of progressivism does not at all rule out (on the contrary!)
the idea of juridical and social progress. What it does rule out is the thesis of “perfectism,”
exactly defined by Rosmini as “the system which believes in the possibility of perfection
in human affairs and sacrifices present benefits for some imagined future perfection”
[TN: Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Politics, vol. 1, trans. Denis Cleary and Terence
Watson (Durham UK: Rosmini House, 1994), 74]. The consequences [of perfectism]
are the suppression of freedom – because otherwise, as Rosmini also says, “the ideal
that has been achieved would be in a state of unstable perfection, exposed to all the
attacks of the individuals who are averse, for one reason or another, to that ideal of
perfection” [TN: this is actually a sentence about Rosmini written by Italian philosopher
Pietro Piovani in La teodicea sociale di Rosmini, 370] – the devaluation of past history and
the deification of future history, the necessity of regarding original sin as an eliminable
residue, and the reduction of the individual to his social relationships.
It must be remarked that history’s horrors have generally found their justification
in the perfectist principle. Consider the most deplorable aspects of the exploitation
of labour in the past century (e.g., the exploitation of child labour): did they not find
their justification in the paradisiacal state to which the liberist principle, understood
in the theological form in which it presented itself at that time, was supposed to lead?
As for the horrors of our century, the way they have been justified is all too clear.
Nor can one understand why the postulate of sin should debilitate the struggle
against evil; on the contrary, it implies a constant struggle against this or that historical
form of evil, albeit knowing that the root of evil cannot be extinguished politically;
and that juridical and social progress is utterly insufficient with respect to it. For
example, liberalism certainly implies the rule of law; but will anybody argue that the
reciprocal is also true, that the rule of law implies the reality of liberalism in its ethical
meaning? It is obvious that it is quite possible to effectively establish a tyranny while
formally respecting the rule of law.
 VII. Political Theism and Atheism (1962) 427

not dominative task is that of establishing the best conditions to facilitate

this struggle. What evil? The definition can change. In a society char-
acterized by unity of faith, evil will be identified above all with any attack
on what is thought to be the objective truth; in a society characterized
by a plurality of spiritual families – after the discovery of plurality, and
thus after the acquisition of the sense of historicity and of the importance
and ontological character of the personal itinerary towards the truth –
evil will be identified above all with the forced imposition of the truth.
In the first type of society, the politician will put might at the service of
the truth; in the second, his concern will be instead to prevent the
method of persuasion being replaced by that of violence. However, this
distinction must not be changed into opposition: such change leads to
the false problem of tolerance, which is unsolvable at the philosophical
level and amenable of solution only at the practical and prudential level.
This is the case because, in this conception, the idea of truth and the
idea of freedom are correlative terms, so that their negation is comple-
mentary. Indeed, no one among the fieriest advocates of the traditional
characters of truth – objectivity, eternity, necessity, immutability – ever
thought of equating a truth imposed by force with a truth accepted by
interior persuasion; because in that case truth would be reduced to
force in the hands of the politician, the guardian of the city; it would
lose its character of eternity and acquire the merely sociological char-
acter of being a necessary element for the preservation of a political
community; religion would be debased to closed religion. We would
move towards a Machiavellian-libertine-Hobbesian conception of poli-
tics, certainly not perfectist9 but still marked by a form of realism totally
different from the Christian one: this point is important in order to
pinpoint the historical position of Machiavellianism as a degeneration
of Christian realism. This misunderstanding about the term “realism”
has led to completely erroneous judgments about the relation between
Machiavellianism and Marxism. Think, on the other hand, of a society
in which the plurality of values is regarded as irreducible. As a conse-
quence, dialogue, and therefore persuasion, would become impossible
because dialogue could only get to acknowledge this plurality, the exis-
tence of what would amount to irreducible moral species. In such a

9 [TN] I translate as “perfectist/perfectism” the Italian “perfettista/perfettismo,”

which needs to be distinguished from “perfezionismo” (perfectionism) because it
refers to a political doctrine and not to a psychological trait.
428 The Problem of Atheism

conception the various spiritual families could only dominate by force,

even if the technique of freedom were recognized as the rule of coex-
istence. The strongest spiritual family may even recognize the right to
self-expression but as a matter of fact would prevent the other freedoms
from expressing themselves. The concept of a pure democracy, as a
neutral ideal, so to speak, acceptable by the most diverse positions of
thought, must therefore be regarded as the most irrational among
political concepts.

V. Thus, the non-perfectist conception actually has presuppositions

of a metaphysical nature: the absoluteness and transcendence of the
truth. I will make this stronger: its ultimate presupposition is a generi-
cally Christian political theology – namely, accepting that there is a
reality higher than man, accepting the Fall. Any state inspired by it will
flourish only when religiosity in a transcendent sense is alive in the
culture and in popular awareness. The present crisis of authority in
the Western world, whose inspiration is the ministerial conception of
power, stems from the crisis of this awareness. That is, only the restora-
tion of “authority” (auctoritas from augere) can really prevent the decline
of social relationship into relationships of force.

VI. If we consider the problem in its strictly conceptual aspect, that

is, in relation to ideal archetypes and independently of their reference
to current political parties, we can say that the socialist conception is
essentially perfectist because it is founded on the conviction that the
historical period that mankind has come through until today, character-
ized by conflicts among individual consciences, must be succeeded by
another period characterized by the dominance of collective life and
awareness, in which these conflicts will be pacified and surpassed; even
though there is, as we shall see, a form of ethical socialism – which,
however, is called socialism improperly – that has a non-perfectist char-
acter. In liberalism we can distinguish two forms, the perfectist and the
non-perfectist. By way of contrast, Christian thought is essentially anti-
perfectist, although subject to penetrations by perfectist thought. About
the impossibility of mediating between two types, we can say that various
recent theorizations of reconciliation must be discarded: first of all, that
between liberalism and socialism, which was so common between 1930
and 1945; then the more recent neo-Enlightenment conception, which
regards Marxism somehow as the legitimate heir of liberalism, even
 VII. Political Theism and Atheism (1962) 429

though then it views it as in some way still tainted by the theocratic error;
then the reconciliation between Christianity and socialism, and also
that between Christianity and the perfectist form of liberalism, which
marked a considerable part of the liberal Catholicism of the 1800s.10

VII. An example of the perfectist form of liberalism is the thesis that

there is a connection, thought to be unbreakable, between liberalism
and liberism,11 in the name of the deistic theodicy of cosmic harmonies,
which dates back to the Enlightenment. It claims that general laws
established by Providence ensure the agreement between individual
advantage and collective advantage, so that complete economic freedom
will end up leading to universal well-being. In reference to this form of
liberalism, which, at the time of Capital, could seem to have been com-
pletely realized, the Marxist critique is perfectly rigorous,12 even though
it has the flaw of being kept within perfectism. Also perfectist is the
foundation of liberalism in the empiricism that came afterwards which
preserves the unity of liberalism and liberism but separates it from the
theological aspect and links it instead with an evolutionary conception;
I am thinking, for instance, of the foundation of economic liberism in

10 We must beware mythologizations of this liberal Catholicism; the genuine

exceptions to the agreement with perfectist liberalism are actually very few.
11 [TN] I use the word “liberism” to translate the Italian Liberismo, which corre-
sponds to “economic libertarianism”or “laissez-faire capitalism” in the English-
speaking world.
12 For a Christian philosophy, understanding history certainly means being will-
ing to grasp the positivity, from the standpoint of the providential rule of things, of
everything that happens. There is no doubt that in order to make manifest the reality
of poverty in the industrial society of the nineteenth century what was necessary was
not only socialism but also its atheistic form, so well was such reality covered by the
cultural positions of the age, not excluding a certain religious spiritualism founded on
the idea of worthiness and culpability and inclined not to recognize the misfortune
of the unworthy. Having said this, many people insist that, until today, no anthropol-
ogy has been as radical as the Marxist in denouncing the flaws and errors of man-
kind’s systems of life until Communism; and that none has been as radical in affirming
the commitment necessary to modifying the previous system as well as the possibility
of moving past inferior conditions and of achieving a real unity of mankind.
We only need to remark that today historical reality has completely changed,
above all precisely as a result of Marxism becoming history, and that it is at least
extremely doubtful that Marxism can be used to denounce the evils internal to a real-
ity that it itself generated.
430 The Problem of Atheism

von Mises. Also perfectist is, finally, the conception of conservative

liberalism, whereby justice means guaranteeing freedom for all in the
historically given social conditions. This is because in this position one
ends up affirming that such social conditions are the ultimate, in a
certain way perfect, result of the historical process. In reference to
conservative liberalism, the thesis of what we call ethical socialism –
because it coincides with the development in the political and social
field of the second formula of the Kantian imperative – is perfectly valid:
justice is the establishment of social conditions such that everybody may
find in them the exterior possibility to realize himself as a person. We
must only point out that this position can be called socialism only
improperly, given that the content of its finality is individual and that
it carries to the extreme the ministerial conception of power.13
In Croce’s thought we have a form of liberalism with an anti-perfectist
intention: he truly understood that the problem of today’s liberalism,
of its reaffirmation after the socialist antithesis, coincides with the ques-
tion of whether it can break away from the perfectist form. However,
can we say that he succeeded? Or does his political philosophy rather
go to prove that a historicist foundation of liberalism is impossible? The
reasons it must necessarily fall back into the perfectism of conservative
liberalism will be highlighted later on.

VIII. At this point we can move on to a brief discussion of how the

perfectist stance insinuates itself into Christian thought and of the texts
that deserve particular attention. I think we can propose the following
general thesis: today perfectism penetrates Christian thought to the
extent that socialism is not regarded as a dialectic reagent that forces
liberalism to break away from perfectism and its practical consequences
in order to reaffirm itself but, rather, as the premise for a “new
Christendom” that will be superior to medieval Christendom and that,
above all,cuts at the root the flaws of Counter-Reformation Christianity.
Now, this penetration can be observed in the trend of Catholic thought
that took shape after 1930 and that sets itself apart from so-called

13 See Juvalta, Il vecchio e il nuovo problema della morale (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1914),
320n1. We can say that, whereas the perfectist forms of liberalism and socialism are
in radical opposition, so that every attempt at reconciliation turns out to be merely
eclectic, conversely liberalism and socialism in non-perfectist form essentially tend to
become identical.
 VII. Political Theism and Atheism (1962) 431

integralism because, at the theoretical level, it rejects the archeological

utopia and the medievalist myth, and, in practice, the defensive associa-
tion with every conservative form, or he subversive association with
Fascist forms. And it also sets itself apart from modernism because it
rejects its immanentist tendency, emphasizing transcendence instead;
this emphasis makes it possible to separate Christianity from the
Christendoms of history and to abandon the thesis that the ideal pur-
sued by Medieval Christendom is the only and definitive model of
Christendom. Certainly, all indications are that Catholic thought cannot
go back to where it was before taking this new direction, which is still
being elaborated; but this does not take away the fact that, in most of
the forms in which it has expressed itself, it has suffered the penetration
of perfectism. To begin from the beginning, the presence of a perfectist
germ in Maritain’s position itself has already been defined with rigorous
precision. It is no more than a germ, which enters in an involuntary,
and I would almost say unaware, fashion, but which is still destined to
blossom in the theoretical formulations that follow Integral Humanism
(1934) and more so in the works and in the ideal and practical orienta-
tions of his continuators. This presence has been illustrated in a defini-
tive manner by an exceedingly benevolent critic, Fr Fessard,14 who
rightly rejected all the other criticisms that were made against Maritain:
subjectivism, naturalism, evolutionism, historicism. Maritain has
accepted not only the notion of class but also the exclusive dualism of
proletariat and bourgeoisie, the unity of the proletariat, the agreement
between Christians and Marxists concerning the existence of classes
and their conflict – in short, notions that are meaningful only within
historical materialism. Or, better, I believe we can say that Maritain’s
thought has two sides: on one it seems oriented towards a reconciliation
between Catholic thought and non-perfectist liberalism and, through
it, with the ethical and non-perfectist socialism I mentioned. This direc-
tion is blocked by the surreptitious introduction of the concept of class
in a properly Marxist sense, which he tries to attenuate and justify but
without really succeeding. How could this happen, given that he did
recognize that atheism is essential to Marxism? Should we speak of a
necessity of essences – that is, of a necessity intrinsic to the neo-Thomist
vision of the history of philosophy? Can this lead us to say that the

14 Fessard, De l’actualité historique (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1960), 181–91.

432 The Problem of Atheism

insurmountable contradiction in which he ends also marks the end,

certainly not of Thomism, but of the neo-Thomist commentary on St Thomas,
which is something else entirely?
I already talked (pages 60 and 327–8) about the origins of this com-
mentary as the endpoint of the Catholic anti-modern of the 1800s:
the “Catholic anti-modern” began with De Maistre’s intuition about the
demonic character of the revolutionary event. This attitude looks back
at the revolution not so much as a political event, in the sense of abol-
ishing privileges, but as a spiritual event, as the outcome in all domains
of public and social life of a spirit that by then had been informed for
over a century by hostility against Christianity. If we call this “anti-
modern” integralism, nothing is more visible than the fact that it always
goes together with its brother-enemies, modernism and progressivism.
The transition to progressivism has indeed taken place in all forms of
thought that have accepted the integralist vision of history: in tradition-
alism with Lamennais, in Ontologism with Gioberti,15 in the Thomist
renaissance with modernism in the early decades of our century, and
with progressivism since 1935. The re-occurrence of this process sug-
gests that it is a necessary phenomenon. What is the nature of this
necessity? I think – and here I am formulating a hypothesis about a
historical investigation that so far has never been conducted – that it
reflects a subordination to the secular spirit, in the form of opposition
as inversion, a subordination that is found at the very start. Indeed,
when De Maistre and Bonald considered the relation between the
Revolution and the culture of the Enlightenment, they were forced to
invert the first organization of the secular view of history, that by Bayle,
which conditioned the Enlightenment. In his work, the three rebellions
against authority on the part of Protestantism, Cartesianism, and liber-
tine skepticism, which until then had been in conflict, had come
together for the first time. As a consequence of this we understand the
definition of the modern world as characterized by the rejection of all
authorities higher than individual conscience, which implies the rejec-
tion of God’s sovereignty and, above all, of God the revealer; in short,

15 The Gioberti problem is particularly interesting because, in his thought, as

presented in the Introduzione allo studio della filosofia, the (explicitly declared) develop-
ment of the Malebranche-Vico line and the anti-modern historiographic scheme, car-
ried to its extreme consequences, coexist. How far can this co-presence go to explain
his uncertainties and contradictions?
 VII. Political Theism and Atheism (1962) 433

we understand the characterization of the modern world as subjectiv-

ism. It is at this point that we understand why the work on Bayle and
Vico that I mentioned in the Introduction is absolutely necessary: in
order to show the difference between the stances of De Maistre and
Vico regarding Bayle, and thus to clarify the possibility of a different
Catholic vision of the history of modern philosophy than the one that
formed in the 1800s and is still dominant today, in its opposite forms.
In other words, whereas Bayle’s reduction of Cartesianism to a method
created the conditions to mediate the unification between two lines
of thought that, until then, had been opposed – the libertine trend
and iusnaturalism – thus making possible the total secularization of
iusnaturalism and the transition from irreligion in a defensive position
(libertinism) to irreligion ready to go on the offensive (Enlightenment),
Vico – who, like De Maistre, in his critique targets Bayle’s idea of a
possible society of atheists – through the critique of Cartesianism dis-
sociates natural law from the Enlightenment and claims it for Catholic
thought. That is, in Vico we have not the simple negation of the modern
but the enucleation within it of a positive moment that, however, is
not the Enlightenment and revolutionary moment.
Going back now to Maritain, let us recall the general outline of his
process of thought: it goes from anti-modern to the extreme (in his works
up to Primauté du spirituel [1927]) to ultra-modern, in the sense that
the humanism of the modern world realizes in an incorrect fashion
(because it is anthropocentric) the humanism that was already theorized
by St Thomas, and that, therefore, only a return to a living Thomism
can save the positive values of the modern world, setting the stage for
a new Christendom, in which the medieval truth of theocentrism and
the modern truth of humanism may be united. Just as for Lamennais
in the case of traditionalism, and for Gioberti in the case of Ontologism,
which in the 1800s was thought with an anti-modern intention (and
this coincidence, too, must be noted because it points to an important
characteristic in the formation of the Catholic vision of history), the
occasion for this development was a political situation: the question
that the (entirely unforeseen) fact of the fascisms forced on Catholic
thought. Because the fascisms (I use this term in the plural for the sake
of brevity, although I already said that Fascism and Nazism are positions
that are irreducible to each other) seemed, on the one hand, to welcome
some aspects of the Catholic critique of the modern world (the nega-
tion of both liberalism and socialism, the corporatist order, etc.) and,
434 The Problem of Atheism

on the other hand, linked this critique to a general attitude that we can
generically call vitalist and irrationalist or, even more generically, an
extremization of closed religion. Maritain was thinking within the still-
Eurocentric perspective of the 1930s when, precisely because nobody
was looking outside Europe, the offensive by the fascisms seemed irre-
sistible, and the essential poles in the struggle seemed to be Fascism
versus democracy. Unlike other Catholic thinkers – Carl Schmitt, to cite
the most significant – Maritain opted for democracy; but this option
forced him to rethink the Catholic philosophy of history and politics,
which must be recognized as a sign of how much implicit philosophical
richness is contained in contemporary history.
In the transition from anti-modern extremism to the affirmation of
the ultra-modern, from reactionary thought to democracy, one cannot
deny the symmetry between the development of Maritain’s thought and
that of Lamennais. This parallel becomes more persuasive if we
recall that Maritain is the pupil and the continuator of the last of the
great reactionary writers, and of the most virulent critic of democracy –
Bloy; so that the relations Bonald-Lamennais and Bloy-Maritain can be
compared. Let us say there is a symmetry between them and no more
because an Argentinian theologian, Meinvielle, has affirmed that
Maritain’s thought reproduces in Thomist language that of Lamennais.
Now, this thesis, against which Maritain reacted extremely harshly, seems
mistaken to me, too; but this does not take away from the fact that the
formal symmetry is undeniable, and that it is of some importance,
because it poses the problem of the necessity of the penetration of
perfectist elements into Catholic thought in the transition from the
pure reactionary position to the democratic position. Certainly, we can-
not speak of modernism in reference to Maritain, by virtue of the intrin-
sic strength of his Thomism; we can speak, instead, of a line of lesser
resistance with respect to the resurgence of modernism. It marks the
moment when neo-Thomism, on whose foundation the resistance to
the first modernism had been organized, seems in danger of capitulat-
ing to the second. In fact, observe the following: in Maritain there is a
reconciliation with modern political values, not at all with modern
philosophy; actually, the greatest radicalization of the condemnation
of modern philosophy – by returning to a pure Thomism, in some
fashion an existential Thomism as opposed to the essential Thomism
of the commentators (hence his closeness to Gilson) – coincides with
the reconciliation with the ethical-political values that have been
 VII. Political Theism and Atheism (1962) 435

highlighted by the modern world but that can be saved only by return-
ing to pure Thomism. Now it is important to show that the degree of
penetration by perfectism that I described takes place starting from his
vision of the history of philosophy. Indeed, how will Maritain envision
the history of modern philosophy, given that the discovery of the subject
must, in itself, be considered a positive value? The habitual neo-Thomist
critique of modern philosophy was that of being subjectivist; Maritain
finds himself forced to reform it.
Then, what will be the fundamental error of all the rationalism and all
the empiricism of the 1600s and 1700s? Precisely the idea of a “guaran-
tor” God, of a philosophical God separated from the religious God, the
replacement of the person by the individual that I discussed earlier.
Individualism, philosophical God, trust in a rational order of things:
these are philosophical positions that can be extremely easily trans-
lated, at the political level, into the unity between the concepts of
liberalism and bourgeoisie. Indeed, what is the endpoint of individual-
ism accompanied by trust in a rational order of things if not the homo
oeconomicus of classical liberal economics? And, on the other hand, is
not this idea of God as guarantor and guardian of order exactly the
characteristic idea of God of the bourgeois class? In fact, it is intrigu-
ing to observe that this Thomistic interpretation of the Christian
metaphysics of the baroque age essentially agrees with that of
Goldmann, which is formulated starting from a consideration of the
origins of the idea of bourgeoisie.16

16 See Maritain’s Cartesian studies, Les trois réformateurs: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau
(Paris: Plon-Nourrit et cie, 1925); La songe de Descartes (Paris: R.A. Corrêa, 1932); and,
above all, the vision of history in Humanisme Intégral. In the age of anthropocentric
humanism that followed the Renaissance and the Reformation we have la tragédie de
Dieu [Integral Humanism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968), 32]: “in the first
moment of the humanist dialectic, God becomes the guarantor of the domination of
man over matter. It is the Cartesian God” (33). See also his judgments about
Malebranche’s and Leibniz’s theodicies (33–4). The Christian philosophy of the
1600s is the first moment of the humanist dialectic. It is the first moment, that is, of
a crisis that will reach its conclusion in absolute immanentism. Its development is
nothing else but the development of a crisis (which is exactly the opposite point of view
from the one I advanced in the 6th essay). Even though Maritain does not explicitly
use the word “bourgeois,” it is clear how, via the idea of the “guarantor God,” the
expression “first moment of the humanist dialectic” can be easily translated into “first
moment of bourgeois rationalism.”
436 The Problem of Atheism

Then one cannot escape the consequences: once this set of intercon-
nected theses is accepted, the Christian metaphysics of the baroque
age and liberalism become moments in the formation of the bourgeoi-
sie; and once this classist concept is introduced, it becomes impossible
to contain it. Socialism constitutes a higher stance than liberalism, in
the sense I said before.
But, in this way, the transition from the reactionary to the democratic
position has the effect, within Maritain’s historical perspective, of tran-
scribing in some fashion the Marxist vision of modern history into
Thomism. And it is natural that it does not happen otherwise, if we
consider the pure reactionary position as it appears, for instance, in
Donoso Cortès: supposedly, liberalism and socialism are successive
moments in the development of the same essence, which can well be
defined by the term “perfectism,” but socialism represent the final and
worst outcome. Therefore, the inversion of the reactionary scheme
cannot but imply a preference for the kernel of truth contained in
socialism over that of liberalism. There is also a deeper reason. We must
not forget that the adversary against which neo-Thomism formed,
among Christian philosophies, is Ontologism: therefore, the Christian
metaphysics of the baroque age, in the Cartesian form, must appear to
it as pure decadence and not as an answer, albeit inadequate, to new
problems (namely, the rise of atheism) that St Thomas had ignored
simply because every philosopher cannot but think within a particular
historical situation and against particular adversaries.
In Maritain’s position the introduction, albeit as a watermark, of the
classist theory does not take place without a contradiction because,
conversely, he also affirms that atheism is the first fundamental premise
of all of Marxism and, thus, also of the classist thesis. He perceived this
contradiction, but without being able to really escape it; the conse-
quence was his undeniable decline after Integral Humanism, which
therefore remains his essential work. Not having moved any further
explains the decline of his fortunes, at least in Europe, both among
those Catholics who are keenest to highlight the priority of the value
of socialism compared to liberism, and, of course, among their adver-
saries.17 He perceived it, and, in fact, overcoming it was what prompted

17 The close resemblance between the fortune of Croce and that of Maritain
deserves our attention. The former, who had been seen in the 1930s as the teacher of
secular anti-Fascism, and had been thought to be the beginner of a new Enlightenment,
 VII. Political Theism and Atheism (1962) 437

him to formulate, and endlessly repeat, his only new thesis after 1934 –
that about the nature of atheism. If we consider the long chapter he
devoted to Marx in Moral Philosophy, we easily realize that he thought
this work in relation to Marxism, and to have a criterion to judge it. I
already said that, for him, atheism is, as an attitude, a demand for
freedom – the affirmation that man is the only master of his own destiny,
freed from every alienation and every heteronomy, independent of an
ultimate end and every eternal law. But this demand faces a contradic-
tion when atheism is formulated as a doctrine: because its revolt trans-
forms truth, justice, good, and evil into forces originated by the process
of history. An atheist replaces submission to God with self-immolation
to the “sacred voracity of becoming,” a “pure mystical love” for the new
image of the false God – History. His break with the false “God of idola-
ters” is less radical than that of the saint; an atheist is a “saint manqué.”
Throughout this entire book I have shown that, in this fashion, one
does not at all grasp the nature of atheism and, consequently, one fails
to adequately place Marxism in the history of philosophy. The chapter
in Moral Philosophy is a confirmation of this. According to Maritain,
Marx’s work can be explained in terms of a moral reaction against the
“prince of false gods,” Hegel’s God mistaken for God. Because of this
confusion Marx remained a prisoner of Hegelianism: “The obligation
to be in connivance with history is just as strong, as total, as fundamental
for Marx as for Hegel. It is difficult for the observer who is determined
to maintain the freedom of the critical mind not to conclude from this
that in the last analysis Marx was vanquished by the false God of
Hegel.”18 Seduced by Hegelianism, Marx was not even able to confess
the moralism without which his work defies explanation, and which
made him take the side of the slave in Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic19
(this is so hardly true that Marx never refers to this passage of the
Phenomenology, and there is no proof that it had the least influence on
his thought); there is a contradiction between the ethics he lived and

was abandoned by the subsequent neo-Enlightenment. The latter, who had been seen
in those years as the teacher of Catholic anti-Fascism, had to be abandoned by the
Catholic left for symmetric reasons. Consider also the peculiar affinity in the spiritual
physiognomies of Mounier and Gobetti, who was the real initiator, ante litteram, of
Italian neo-Enlightenment thought.
18 Maritain, Moral Philosophy, 233.
19 Ibid., 242.
438 The Problem of Atheism

the ethics he formulated. Given this, it is really not surprising that all
the types of Marxist criticism that I criticized in the Introduction come
back in Maritain’s pages. Thus, regarding the relationship between the
atheism of Feuerbach and that of Marx, he subscribes to De Lubac’s
thesis; thus, he interprets the religious character of Marxist thought as
the unconscious permanence of ideas that were originally Christian
(“the latest Christian heresy, the atheist faith of Marxism, is precisely
the only faith in which a real vestige of Christianity has found and could
ever find a rational systematization in terms of the Hegelian dialectic”),20
missing entirely its specific features; thus, he must talk about an uncon-
scious iusnaturalism.21 Therefore, there is a contradiction between
moralism and historicism; Marx’s work is directed against Hegel, and
yet is a captive of Hegelianism. In this way Marxism is not placed in
history at all because, on the contrary, it is a reaffirmation of Hegelianism
against its critics. We are not surprised, therefore, that the subsequent
chapters of the book become a sequence of portraits without a real
internal connection, devoted to Comte, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Dewey,
and Bergson; since the place of Marxism in the history of philosophy
escaped Maritain, it becomes impossible for him to take into consid-
eration its claim of having already surpassed the philosophies that
followed it in time. For Maritain, too, the critique of Marxism as a
philosophy reduces to a critique of Hegel.
Now, what Marx’s emotional reaction might have been (whether it
was genuinely moral, in the traditional sense, as an unaware invocation
of “Natural Law Avenged,” or whether, instead, in him hate prevailed
over love, as Mazzini thought) is a question that not only is difficult to
answer but above all is of very little importance. What matters, instead,
is his work – that is, the capture of socialism by Hegelianism (the great-
est bargain, one would be inclined to say, the Hegelian school ever
made) and the loss, in this capture, of its ethical character. This raises
the question, which is seldom discussed, as to why socialism and ratio-
nalism carried to the ultimate consequences have a similar nature; and
the other question, about Maritain, as to whether his position is obliga-
tory within the historiographic perspective that follows from the neo-
Thomist commentary on St Thomas.

20 Ibid., 243; see also 241.

21 Maritain, Moral Philosophy, 256.
 VII. Political Theism and Atheism (1962) 439

IX. In fact, it is certainly not coincidental that other thinkers who

moved in this direction, of affirming the superiority of the socialist
stance over the liberal, have abandoned Thomism and embraced the
French trend of Pascalianism separated from Jansenism; meaning a
position that, while maintaining all of Pascal’s condemnations of previ-
ous positions of Christian thought, adds to them the condemnation of
Jansenism as well; and presents itself as “biblical” thought in Pascalian
fashion but completely inverting Pascal. Or else they have set St Thomas’s
example – as the Christian philosopher who baptized Aristotelianism,
which at that time was the war machine of the adversaries of Christianity –
against his doctrine, viewed in its standard scholastic exposition.
Supposedly, today being truly Thomists means fulfilling the same task
with respect to evolutionism and Marxism.
Indeed, I mentioned the perfectly consistent and unitary character
of Marxist thought. As a consequence, once one of its theses is accepted,
one must reach the ultimate consequences; and this is what is happen-
ing in a large part not only of today’s Catholic culture but also of Catholic
opinion. Do we not constantly hear people say that Christianity must
abandon the morality of Order in favour of that of Progress, the moral-
ity of the individual in favour of that of collective humanity, because
the only certainty left is that ethics cannot be defined in any other way
than as participation in the march of progress; that progress has the
right to swipe away its opponents, that the only sin is immobility, pes-
simism, and so on; that today there is a change in the human condition
whereby we are entering the socialization phase; that all philosophies,
except Marxism and evolutionism, belong to a pre-Galileian stage; that
what is defective is not the principle of totalization but the imperfect
way in which it has been applied; that the true opposition is not between
producers and profiteers but between progressives and regressives (by
saying which people would like to move beyond Marxism, as if Marxism
today did not prefer such narrative to that about classes, which is rather
more embarrassing);22 and so on.
Thus, in the end the judgment that the socialist exigence takes prior-
ity over the liberal leads to modernist attempts to subsume the “modern”

22 By saying this I do not want to make any pronouncement on the thought of Fr

Teilhard de Chardin, which is not so easy to understand. I will only make a brief com-
ment about his opposition to Pascal: we must acknowledge that today Pascal’s thought
is enormously important from the philosophical standpoint but has lost its grip from
440 The Problem of Atheism

into Christianity, which have the inevitable outcome of modernisms –

namely, subsuming Christianity into the modern, in the secular sense,
and in this case precisely in the Marxist sense. But what is worth pointing
out is that the morality of the “direction of history” presupposes the
Marxist reduction of man to the ensemble of social relations and is,
under such presupposition, quite valid; as is also valid within the pan-
theistic position that affirms a God immanent to humanity, who grows
together with it. It becomes completely meaningless when one admits
the reality of the individual, both when one affirms it in a position of
autonomous morality (because in what sense can the course of history
be a principle of ethical obligation?) and when one affirms it in a tran-
scendent theological position because, if the course of history has been
arbitrarily fixed by God, and could have been different, there is no
reason why man is morally obliged to abide by it: from a relationship
of force one cannot derive a moral relationship. We can feel that we
are God’s cooperators in history only in as much as this cooperation
appears to us to be imposed by a morality of Order, even though its
rigorous meaning is not easily defined. Under the hypothesis of God’s
transcendence, no obligation can derive from a mere consideration of
the historical process, even if we were able to decipher its direction
inductively with a high degree of confidence.23 It is undeniable that,
with respect to the ethics of history, an evolutionist and a Marxist find
themselves in a morally better situation.

2. Free Will and Political Freedom

X. At first sight they seem to be entirely distinct questions. To my knowl-

edge, an investigation that highlights the unbreakable link between the
affirmation of free will and the positive value that exists in liberalism,24

the apologetic one. Striving to make up for this insufficiency might be considered
Teilhard’s positivity. But I am not going to tackle this question now; I only intend to
refer to the current form of Teilhardism.
23 Therefore, Maritain wrote very well when he said: “We are not the cooperators
of history, we are the cooperators of God,” in Pour une philosophie de l’histoire (Paris: ed.
du Seul, 1959), 72.
24 Regarding the problem of free will, I view as decisive the results reached by the
philosopher-through-history who has best studied this doctrine in its classical authors
(St Thomas, Descartes, Malebranche), Jean Laporte, in his book La conscience de la
liberté (Paris: Flammarion, 1947). He decisively dispatches all the criticisms that have
 VII. Political Theism and Atheism (1962) 441

and that, conversely, shows that the loss of the idea of free will is one of
the fundamental elements of the contemporary crisis, is still lacking,
and would seem to me to be exceptionally important.
You may object that it is lacking because it must be lacking. Indeed,
it is a common opinion that the problem of political freedom is alto-
gether different from that of freedom in its traditional terms and solu-
tions – free will, determinism, unity of freedom, and necessity – and
must be treated with entirely different methods lest we fall into those
philosophical-political hybrids that are the delights, many times too
easy delights, of the analysts of language. The problem of free will,
people think, is about man’s freedom with respect to God or with respect
to nature, whether or not it is amenable to being solved; conversely, the
problem of political freedom is about “freedom in the city” and, there-
fore, about freedom with respect to other men; it is the problem of the
means that can be used to defend man from the oppression he can
suffer not so much from the state, in its impersonal nature, as from
other men, those who hold power. In short, the freedom political phi-
losophers talk about is freedom from servitude, which is something
other than the freedom from necessity, which is the topic of discussion
of metaphysical philosophers. Nor does the principle of political free-
dom require, as a foundation, any metaphysics: it will be justified or
unjustified based on purely pragmatic considerations – the consider-
ations that demonstrate the catastrophic character of political mysti-
cisms. People add that the quest for metaphysical foundations is what
prevents effective liberalism because it leads to seeing, or at least to
auguring, the state as the guardian of the metaphysics that guarantees
“true” freedom.
This opinion, upon closer inspection, is much less persuasive that it
may seem. First of all, it is not at all as philosophically neutral as it claims
to be: on the contrary, it contains the affirmation that political freedom

been made against free will, and he does this in a study that wants to clarify what pure
experience can tell us in the field of metaphysics; and which, therefore, goes to show
that criticisms of free will have an entirely different origin than a consideration of
experience. He rightly observes that the problem of free will is “the philosophical
problem par excellence, because it directs the theory of knowledge, morals and every
concept we may form of the human person and its relationship with God” (6). I per-
fectly share this judgment, and I add that we meet again the problem of free will at the bottom
of the problem of ethico-political freedom itself.
442 The Problem of Atheism

is tightly linked to philosophical empiricism, understood as a position

of thought founded on the distinction between the verifiable and the
unverifiable, and on the assertion that human life, as knowledge as well
as morality and politics, can organize itself on the terrain of the verifi-
able, independently of the opinions, which are necessarily subjective,
that we may have about what is not empirically verifiable. At the end of
the day, according to this opinion, liberalism is inseparable from the
empiricist cultural climate, as a moderate form of rationalism that allows
the certainty of valid knowledge without claiming to exhaust reality.
This is in contrast both to dogmatic rationalism and to irrationalism
and skepticism, positions that are all tied in various ways to authoritar-
ian solutions. It is also inseparable from the Enlightenment, which saw
in freedom the “not hindering,” in contrast to Romanticism, which
saw its creativity.
Now, it seems to me that, from the idea of freedom as “not hinder-
ing,” without any ulterior specification beside the fact that subjects have
to coexist, one can only derive … precisely what historically derived
from it: namely, the form of liberalism that has presented itself as atom-
istic individualism and as naturalism, as faith in the goodness of the
laws of nature, which supposedly will bring different interests into har-
mony – that is, liberalism so welded to economic liberism that it looks
like a superstructure of it. Nor is this the only element in which we can
recognize how the opinion I just described, which is usually more theo-
rized than lived, gives way to the theses of historical materialism: because
from the idea that the problem of political freedom is different from
that of metaphysical freedom one moves easily, at least psychologically,
to the idea that the various metaphysical positions on the theme of
freedom are nothing but projections of different social and historical
situations; to the idea that historical materialism, accepted as a method
and not generalized to a total conception of reality, is able to explain
metaphysical positions.

XI. The lack of attention to the link between the problem of free will
and that of liberalism reflects, essentially, the permanence of cultural
habits that predate the First World War. Because at that time the antith-
esis with respect to which the ideal of freedom was affirmed was what
remained of the Middle Ages or of the absolutist states, viewed as guard-
ians of a transcendent truth. As a consequence of this, the tradition of
the classics of freedom was identified with the champions of free spirit
 VII. Political Theism and Atheism (1962) 443

and of reason’s struggle against ancestral myths and prejudices and

thus, generally speaking, precisely with the foes of free will. This is why,
for instance, people recognized a teacher of liberalism in Spinoza, who
proved in the Theological-political Treatise that libertatem philosophandi …
nisi cum pace reipublicae ipsaque pietate, tolli non posse. Therefore we under-
stand why the 1800s were the century in which the libertas minor of free
will was most sacrificed in favour of what was traditionally called libertas
maior. Today, on the contrary, the problem is that of defending the ideal
of freedom within democracy accepted as an irreversible historical fact;
the ideal of freedom as declaration of the primacy of conscience, with
respect to any external power of a minority or a majority. This presup-
poses affirming the thesis – which has been the object of much reflection
but is not very common in current opinion – that freedom and democ-
racy are not identical at all. Certainly, the exigence of freedom also
implies that of democracy as a consequent and subordinate value: there
can be no full realization of the moral ideal of freedom except in a
regime, and in an international community, in which every single indi-
vidual is also able to regard himself as an end of the entire social process.
But the two values cannot be put on the same level, nor can one say
that the ideal of democracy includes in itself, surpassing it, that of free-
dom. What now must be seen is how the problem of defending freedom
against the possible totalitarian involutions of democracy involves pick-
ing up anew the problem of libertas minor.25

XII. Therefore, the question to ask is whether the reaffirmation of

liberalism today requires again picking up a concept, like free will, that
certainly belongs to “theological philosophy.” I have already recalled
that decisive passage by Descartes: Tria mirabilia fecit Deus: res ex nihilo,
liberum arbitrium et Hominem Deum.26 It raises the theoretical question

25 The fact that Dostoevsky felt that this reconsideration is crucial to addressing
the new questions posed by atheism is well known. But the almost unknown philoso-
pher who, before him, tried to base an entire reform of philosophy, in all its parts,
including moral and political applications, on a deeper understanding of the idea of
free will as the first and fundamental truth, unrecognized by all philosophers and
affirmed by one tradition only, that of the Catholic Church, deserves to be remem-
bered: Jules Lequier was the thinker who at that time saw best the connection between
the idea of free will and the truth of liberalism.
26 ”Cogitationes privatae,” in Ovres de Descartes, t. 10 Adam and Tannery eds.
(Paris: Cerf, 1908), 218.
444 The Problem of Atheism

of the connection between the thesis of free will and those of creation
and miracle; and also the historical question, which is extremely impor-
tant, as to whether the negation of divine creation and miracles, tied
to the rationalist hatred of finite individuality, was always the motivation
for the sophistic reasons adduced to deny the experience of free will.
Whereas today many people think, as I said, that the time has come to
claim evolutionism for Christianity, in a particular form in which it
means (in its transposition to the political and social field) the total
negation of liberal man, I think instead that it is the time to claim for
it the modern world’s greatest truth – liberalism in its ethical sense.
But what is most surprising is that what leads us to pose the problem
of the relationship between free will and ethical-political freedom is
nothing other than the critical consideration of Croce’s formulation of
liberalism. In fact, in Croce’s political philosophy we find three contra-
dictory aspects. First of all, the rigorous exigency – which is a consequence
of the “stronger and stronger obsession” with historical materialism as
the principal adversary27 – to dissociate liberalism from perfectism and
from radicalism (i.e., from all the motifs that lead to revolutionary
thought). Then, in complete contradiction, the very real, albeit kept in
check, presence of all the motifs of the totalitarian position, which is
necessarily consequent upon Hegelian historicism. Finally, what does
the job of keeping them in check: a conservatorism that contradicts both
his historicism – or at least the logic of historicism – and the exigency of
separating liberalism from perfectism, which is nonetheless the only
element that enables him to avoid the totalitarian outcome.
In connection with this, the three judgments that have been made
about his political theory can be explained. The first – which by now is
pronounced by very few people – views him as the thinker who elabo-
rated, in definitive form, the complete theory of liberalism. This judg-
ment was common in secular intellectual milieux in the 1930s, when
the anti-clericalism of History of Europe seemed to justify the idea that
he had embraced the tradition of the Enlightenment; but then people
realized that it was not so, that anti-radicalism was still one of his essential
themes, that he loathed the Enlightenment-inspired Partito d’Azione and

27 A. Gramsci, Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce (Turin: Einaudi,

1948), 206.
 VII. Political Theism and Atheism (1962) 445

so on. The second judgment was that his liberalism had been, at most,
a matter of sensitivity and temperament, but that actually his thought,
much more than Gentile’s, had contributed to the formation of the
totalitarian and Fascist mindset. This judgment was then amenable to
various versions, spiritualist or Marxist.
The third judgment sees in him – because of his teachers, Marx,
Machiavelli, Sorel, Treitschke; because of his aversion to iusnaturalism,
to the Enlightenment, to the mentality of the eighteenth century, to
the English empiricist tradition; because of his anti-democratism;
because of his traditionalism; because of his references to the thought
of the Restoration (and, among authentically liberal authors, essentially
only to Constant, whom he views, however, almost exclusively in his
anti-Jacobin aspect rather than in his aspect as a theoretician of the
limits of power); because of his neglect of the juridical institutions in
which liberalism becomes concrete – “more than a theoretician of
liberalism … the man who inspired the resistance to oppression.” And
this because, at bottom, the political problem had never really deeply
interested him.28
I confess that I disagree with all three judgments. I see in Croce first
of all a political philosopher because I think – and on this point I sub-
scribe fully to Gramsci’s thesis – that his essential and constant adversary
was Marx, his first teacher from whom he had moved away. By reason
of this adversary he was, so to speak, obligatorily bound to become the
most complete theoretician of liberalism within secularism. But to these
two judgments I add that his formulation also marks the end of the
secular foundation of liberalism. The investigation (and I apologize for
being able to sketch its outline only schematically) should include the
following moments. First of all, a full development of the theme “what

28 This thesis is expressed most rigorously in Norberto Bobbio’s two essays

“Croce e la politica della cultura” and “Benedetto Croce e il liberalismo” (in Politica e
Cultura [Turin: Einaudi, 1955]). It is curious that Bobbio, even though he mostly
leans towards linking liberalism to the Enlightenment and to empiricism, occasion-
ally swings towards its religious foundation: “The liberal spirit was born from religious
and theological conceptions such as those of Calvinism, and so far nobody has found
a better argument against the dominance of the state than the absolute value of the
person” (ibid., 267).
446 The Problem of Atheism

Marx owes to the counter-revolution.”29 A critic of Marxism cannot be

reactionary because the reactionary themes were already assimilated by
Marxism. Thus, Croce is liberal, even before he declares or recognizes
himself as such, but since his is liberalism after Marxism, what happens is
that the Marxist counter-revolutionary themes (anti-iusnaturalism, etc.)
are absorbed by him into liberalism until it becomes completely dissoci-
ated from radicalism. His thought process cannot but repeat that of
Hegel, in the sense of a reconciliation with historical reality, but this
time with the liberal reality of 1900 to 1915; and this in the form of
giolittismo,30 that is, of the greatest foe of “political philosophy” (and,
mind you, this does not happen by chance: because Croce’s reconcili-
ation with reality implied a complete break with revolutionary thought,
and there is no revolutionary thought without “political philosophy”).31
The theoretical formulation of such liberalism is, therefore, the “phi-
losophy of distincts.” Such development of a non-Enlightenment-based
form of liberalism reaches its conclusion in the critique of the theodicy
that justified the indissoluble marriage of liberalism and liberism.
However, because of Croce’s immanentism, after this sequence of nega-
tions liberalism can only find its philosophy in a form of historicism
opposed to the Enlightenment and, thus, in a form of Hegelianism
separated from what could lead to Marxism. Because of this historicism,
pre-totalitarian motifs make their appearance in Croce, and they are
linked expressly with the negation of free will. The essential point of
Croce’s pre-totalitarianism lies in the affirmation that the concepts
of free will and responsibility have meaning only from a practical and
energetical point of view – that is, the theoretical point of view (of truth)
is always justificatory. And saying that the concept of responsibility
belongs to the practical sphere means that we are not responsible, but
we are made responsible in connection with some practical task – that is,

29 Some initial suggestions on how to treat this topic can be found in Monnerot,
Sociologie du Communisme, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 191ff [from a new chapter
not included in Sociology of Communism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953),
the English translation of the 1st edition].
30 [TN] Giovanni Giolitti (1842–1928) was prime minister of Italy five times
between 1892 and 1921. He was known for his pragmatic and unprincipled approach
to politics, which gave rise to the term giolittismo.
31 Bobbio points out correctly (Politica e Cultura, 211) that Croce’s reflections on
liberalism start with a short note in La critica 21 from the early months of 1923, titled
“Contro la troppa filosofia politica.”
 VII. Political Theism and Atheism (1962) 447

we are made responsible by the process of history.32 Certainly I have no

intention of claiming that every negation of free will leads necessarily
to totalitarianism; I say, instead, that in historicism the principle of
attributed responsibility is the true ideal foundation of totalitarianism,
which distinguishes itself from all other authoritarian and dictatorial
forms precisely because of this foundation. Indeed, let us consider other
texts by Croce. Freedom, being unconstrained from any transcendent
norm, as the principle and unique subject of history, must be viewed
by him as creativity, without further specifications: “the awareness of
being free and the will to be free is nothing else but the prod to con-
tinuously increase life”; “the purpose of morality is to promote life”;
“long live those who create life!”; “we ought to get rid of a judgment
which is doctrinally and logically incorrect: namely, that freedom meets
its boundaries again and again in moral law or conscience. But moral
law or conscience commands to be free and defines itself through
freedom; so that it cannot set boundaries to freedom or, using a differ-
ent word, to morality.”33 Now, from such “creativity” one cannot in any
way deduce respect for the single individual. Did not the famous “cosmic-
historical individuals” always legitimate their right to destroy precisely
on the basis of this creativity? And how else can today’s totalitarianism –
which is something else entirely than the cosmic-historical individuals
of the past – justify its harshness?
But the anti-revolutionary motif kicks in, and then, “leaving aside the
scruples about the possibility of justifying a political theory with a philo-
sophical theory,”34 Croce strives to identify liberalism and historicism.
The only formula he can find, after liberalism has been dissociated from
the idea of the person, must be that of history as history of freedom.
Now, I do not think that the common objection has merit: namely, that,
from the idea of freedom as the “subject of history” and its creative
force, the essence of historical change, one cannot deduce the political
theory of liberalism because the latter has in mind freedom in time,

32 See the essay “La grazia e il libero arbitrio” (1929, in Ultimi saggi [Bari: Laterza,
1935], 290–5); and, among the “Frammenti di etica,” composed between 1915 and
1920, see the one on “Responsabilità” (reprinted in Etica e politica [Bari: Laterza,
1945], 125–8).
33 Benedetto Croce, La storia come pensiero e come azione (Bari: Laterza, 1938),
244, 42, 238.
34 Bobbio, Politica e cultura, 229.
448 The Problem of Atheism

freedom under threat, freedom that has value to the extent that it can
be lost; that one cannot deduce it because, from the Spirit, conceived
theologically as the mono-agonist of history, one cannot deduce any
political position, the most tyrannical regimes being instruments of its
realization as much as the freest.
Indeed, according to Croce, in the 1800s thought came to understand
history as “history of freedom.” Those who have reached this awareness
cannot but reject the theocratic, the absolutist, the democratic, and the
Communist ideals; nor can they feel tempted by morbid Romanticism,
the father of decadentism and grandfather of recent political activism.
From the idea of history as history of freedom follows a concrete practi-
cal ideal that, however, is only depicted via negations. Now, the negative
way in which liberalism is reached as an effective political position rules
out the possibility of presenting it as an ideal that promotes the advent
of something new; instead, this ideal becomes identified with a histori-
cal reality under threat, which must be preserved against returns of the
past and dangers of the present. The gap between the meta-political
theory of freedom and liberalism-in-time is overcome only by absorbing
into the meta-political principle of freedom an empirical content and
an already realized reality. Namely, the so-called liberal age from 1870
to 1914, which he elevates to a model of history, in the sense that every
improvement must take place within the horizon of its values. There is
a perfect correspondence between his philosophy of distincts and this
historical epoch, which can only be described expressly as the age of
distincts. But does this not mirror exactly the conclusion and exhaustion
of history and philosophy in Hegel, even if Croce replaced direct apolo-
getics by indirect apologetics? The historicist sublation of Hegel did
not take place because the “non-definitiveness of truth” in thought was
just a cover to assert the definitiveness of a determined historical reality,
which, in turn, could not find awareness of itself except in this theoretical
affirmation of non-definitiveness. Moreover, his philosophy concludes
in a “utopia of the past,” even though this past is close, the world of
yesterday; but it is close in the sense of purely temporal closeness
because, as I already explained, from the standpoint of the relation
between spiritual and political life no historical period is further away
from the present. By being forced to elevate the empirical into the
meta-political, Croce has run into a grating contradiction with his own
historicism, whose strength supposedly lies “in the proof that ideas
 VII. Political Theism and Atheism (1962) 449

or values, which have been assumed as models and benchmarks in his-

tory, are not universal ideas and values, but particular and historical
facts themselves, maladroitly elevated to universals.”35 The transition
from expounding his philosophy in the form of philosophy of distincts
to expounding it in the form of philosophy of freedom clarifies that his
attachment to a particular historical period is not merely a political and
practical fact (as, for example, his neutralism at the time of the First
World War might appear to be) but, rather, is related to his philosophy
as a necessary consequence.
The contradictory nature of the quest to find the foundation of non-
perfectist liberalism in radical immanentism, which is tied to the dis-
solution of the personality and substantiality of the individual, thus
raises the question of its connection with the idea of free will.36

35 Croce, La storia come pensiero e come azione, 51.

36 [Note added in 1970] What is the author’s position vis-à-vis Maritain, after
the publication of The Peasant of the Garonne? Kindly be aware that he still maintains
what he wrote because his intention was not to fight against the thought of the man
whom he recognized since his early youth as one of his most secure guides but to
continue what he regards as his authentic aspect, freeing it from the elements that
prevent it from fully resisting the neo-modernist position. The Peasant of the Garonne,
which clarifies the true sense of Integral Humanism, shows the authentic intention of
Maritain’s thought, confirming in full the author’s view of this book. Nonetheless, he
thinks that Maritain’s position, in order to become truly adequate to his purpose,
must be completed with a critique of the ordinary vision of the history of modern
philosophy; something Maritain did not do, and could not have done, because he
did not consider the continuation of religious Cartesianism in Italian thought from
Vico to Rosmini. The development “from Descartes to Rosmini,” and the conjunc-
tion of Rosmini’s deepest aspect with the most authentic sense of the best Christian
philosophical tradition, remained unknown to him, just as did, in point of fact, the
Italian tradition.
 Conclusion

Let us consider the thesis I stated on page 1. Has it been proven? Also:
after this first chapter on the problem of atheism has been written, what
further investigation is necessary?
One may deplore the apparent disorder of this book. Indeed, from
both the logic and the didactic standpoint a different criterion would
have seemed appropriate: start from the definitions of atheism, critique
them, and so on.
Nonetheless, presenting the essays in the temporal order in which
they had appeared seemed to me a better counsel in order to commu-
nicate with the reader through an experience that started at the ethical-
political level and that led me to run into a number of philosophical
problems. Pages 205–7 are clearly autobiographic: they describe the
anti-Fascist experience as it presented itself at the purely moral level to a
young intellectual who, between the years 1935 and 1940, had no ties
whatsoever to pre-existing political positions, and who opposed the
Idealist culture that was dominant at that time;1 his temptation and
dissatisfaction, simultaneously, vis-à-vis both the philosophies of existence

1 At that time this experience was shared only by few; but I think that those few,
upon reading these pages, will recognize themselves in them. But my isolation was
especially hard because then I was also separated, albeit within relationships of personal
friendship, from the broadly Idealist culture in which the anti-Fascist youth of that
period sought its ideal foundation. Conversely, this feature united me to Ludovico
Geymonat, even though, starting from a common moral experience, we moved in very
different directions. I was also separated from the very large majority of young Catholics
of that epoch, who, with full loyalty, at that time focused rather on the conciliatory
aspect of Fascism, or regarded it as a force that certainly was irrational but that none-
theless prepared the way for a Catholic renaissance by dissolving liberalism and
 Conclusion 451

and forms of religious dualism; his encounter with Marxism, due to the
political tension within this moral experience, and his attempt to rec-
oncile it with Christianity; the break, which was first of all ethical, with
Marxism and the affirmation that atheism is its essential principle, which
conditions the entire process of its practice.2 Then new problems arose:
how to go from the critique of the position that in rigorous terms should
be called neo-modernist – because neo-modernism is the final figure
in the line of thought that intends to surpass Marxism through a quest,
conceived incorrectly, to welcome its ideal and practical truths – to the
critique of Marxism itself? Its criterion of truth is located in history –
namely, in the irreversible relationship of integrating-and-surpassing
that it has with other forms of philosophical and religious thought;
therefore, the question must focus on its claim of being the endpoint,
not of philosophy in general, but of philosophy so far, of representing
the truth of the current historical epoch; hence the need to focus the
investigation on the origins of modern philosophy, such as they must

socialism. That mindset, in young Catholics, changed after 1940: and then my experi-
ence coincided with that of Felice Balbo and that of Franco Rodano, even though its
outcome, at least for a few years, was different from theirs.
2 The relationship between ethics and politics in Marxism highlights its complete
negation of the idea of participation, which is the foundation, even as it is amenable
to being understood in different ways, of Christian thought. It is also based on this
negation that we can understand the meaning of “Marxist materialism.” Many authors
have wondered: Why the word “materialism” if it is an entirely distinct position from
usual materialism? Does not materialism in Marx stand for “humanism” against Hegelian
“Idealism,” or for gnoseological realism? For example, G.A. Wetter writes: “The reality
just described, which elevates itself ever higher, and ultimately even into spiritual forms
of existence, is regarded, for reasons which are not rationally intelligible and may well
be explicable only on psychological grounds, as essentially ‘material’ in character” in
Le matérialisme dialectique (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1962), 585 [TN: Dialectical
Materialism, trans. P. Heath (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), 550–1]. I
think, on the contrary, that the meaning of Marxist materialism, as the most radical
and authentic form of materialism, can be grasped by a negative route when one
develops all the implications of the negation, carried to the extreme limit, of the idea
of participation.
The question is exceptionally important since the idea of participation also marks
the link between Greek thought and Christian thought. You see, therefore, how super-
ficial is the reasoning of those who think that the Christian adoption of the forms of
Greek thought is contingent (affirming that other positions of thought could be
Christianized just as easily) or who even view it as the defect that Christian thought
has to rid itself of.
452 The Problem of Atheism

appear to us after existentialism and Marxism.3 The rediscovery, in the

course of this investigation, of a continuous line of development from
Descartes to Vico, as a consequence of the insertion into the history of
philosophy of a serious consideration of the atheistic position, and the
question about the possibility of a reaffirmation of liberalism – but
liberalism such as it can be conceived after Kierkegaard (“the individual
is more than the species”) and Dostoevsky4 – are evidently connected
with the experience I mentioned. If the book is not “organic” in the
academic sense, the experience from which it was born is.
The purpose of the opening essay is to clarify some aspects of this
experience and, above all, to define the sequence of problems to which
those discussed are tied, as topics whose consideration is indispensable
in order to understand contemporary history as well as contemporary
philosophy;5 this because the former has the character of being novel,
by virtue of being a philosophical history, which is simultaneously his-
tory of the expansion of atheism, history of the appearance of a new
form of mythologism as the unexpected conclusion produced by
rationalism,6 history of the process towards nihilism – “l’enfouissement

3 The repercussion of the philosophy of existence has been a focus on the anti-
Spinozian aspect of Cartesianism and the acknowledgment of its rigorous and critical
significance. The repercussion of Marxism, according to my interpretation, has been
the definition of the overarching structure that joins together the philosophies of
Descartes, Pascal, and Malebranche, to the illustration of which I devoted, in this book,
the essay “The Pascal Problem and Contemporary Atheism.” The repercussion of the
critique of Marxism has been the analogy between the problem faced by today’s Catholic
thought (to show the correlation between the negation of God and the negation of
man) and that faced by the theological and philosophical thought of the Catholic
Reformation (to show the correlation between the negation of man and the negation
of God) (see my work “La crisi del Molinismo in Descartes,” Archivio di filosofia [1956]).
4 It was precisely Dostoevsky, and the fundamental book that Berdaev devoted to
his thought, that prompted Piovani to study La teodicea sociale del Rosmini (Padua:
Cedam, 1957) – as explained in the beautiful introduction – which is one of the best
philosophical works to have appeared in Italy since the war.
5 Regarding this sequence of problems, I generally had to limit myself to initial
sketches of their new formulation in light of the definition of atheism that I proposed;
in turn, this definition can be fully verified only if such formulations can be proven.
Thus, studying them in specific works is for me a necessary task.
6 When we talk about mythologism in reference to today’s world, we must not
think at all of primitive myths, nor must we think of the romantic conceptions of myth,
and not even, strange as it may seem, of the theory of myth that results from Sorel’s
erosion of French utopian socialism through Marxist socialism, and which in effect
 Conclusion 453

dans l’animalité” as it has been correctly written – and history that is

for the first time truly worldwide. Compared to this history’s novelty,
contemporary philosophy might seem to be the mere reiteration of
forms that had already taken shape in the previous period (phenomenol-
ogy itself rose during the period between 1870 and 1914). However,
this phenomenon must not be interpreted as a decline in originality;
the reason for it is that what characterizes the present moment is that the
various philosophies are being tested by a history that has in philosophy
its genetic process. Do they have in themselves the “virtuality” to reform
in order to face the new history and to give an answer to its “crisis,”
which so far is unresolved?
I will now try to formulate most concisely, and without fear of repeti-
tion, the essential theses I have reached:
1) The vast majority of the forms of religious thought that have come
to the fore after the Second World War are underpinned and charac-
terized by the idea – no matter whether it is explicitly affirmed of

stops at a consideration of the irrational aspect of politics. Instead, we must think of

such a conception of myth that, because it comes after rationalism, eliminates entirely the
distinction between truth and falsehood. This happens when thought about being is
measured only by its practical power and is thus reduced to an instrument of the will to
power. I have already said, proposing it as a research topic, that this position starts,
unaware, within Marxism, in Lenin’s thought. Hence the crucial importance of two
problems: (1) the relationship Lenin-Gentile, as the two contradictory ultimate posi-
tions in which Hegelianism concludes. They both affirm the unity of theory and practice;
but in the first the point of view of theory completely loses its autonomy and is absorbed
into practice; in the second there is an effective primacy of theory, which deprives
philosophy of any direct impact on the becoming of the world; (2) the relationship
Gentile-Mussolini, which makes manifest this broken connection in the sense of phi-
losophy’s lack of practical efficacy: Actualism cannot pretend to maintain the unity of
theory and practice, except through an alliance with a mythical position, subordinate
to the Marxist-Leninist one.
Among the very few who have correctly framed the problem of myth in the con-
temporary world, we must remember P.-L. Landsberg, a pupil of Scheler and the
conduit between Scheler’s personalism and that of the group of Esprit, of which he
was unquestionably the most philosophical thinker. His work, which was just sketched,
but from which one can get profound suggestions, has been published in the posthu-
mous volume Problèmes du personnalisme (Paris: du Seuil, 1952). Unfortunately,
Landsberg, who died in a Nazi concentration camp, was not able to continue it.
454 The Problem of Atheism

not – of “purifying atheism.”7 That is, atheism is essentially defined as

the “discovery of evil” and the revolt against it in the name of “morality”
and, thus, as the destruction of philosophical idols, of God understood
as soul of the world, as natura naturans, as transcendental subject, as
the spirit of history, as eternal axiom, as constitutive reason. This
destruction is such that it makes it impossible to reaffirm religious
thought as pantheism, cosmologism, justifying theodicy; it is the lucid
recognition of the reality of evil (hence its work of demystifying opti-
mism, Idealism, etc.), followed by the replacement, in its regard, of the
justificatory attitude – in which one goes on to consider the harmony
of totality – by the agonistic one. Therefore, religious thought will be
true to the extent that it “assumes” atheism’s truth; it can do so because
the moral revolt that defines atheism can only be motivated by the
presence of the idea that God is inseparably being and value. Mere
rejection would lead to the cosmologism of manualistic scholastics,
characterized by isolating pure being and by the vain attempt to deduce,
out of this abstraction, value.
In short, atheism allegedly represents the stage of the “death of God,”
which is a prelude to that of his Resurrection. Therefore, it can be
viewed and lived by the Christian as a moment of negative theology.
This thesis is seldom affirmed explicitly, but it is nonetheless clearly
visible under the cover of precautionary formulations. For example,
Jean Lacroix writes: “The great merit of contemporary atheism is that
it has achieved a scouring out of the human intellect by abolishing all
idolatry. It does not turn man into a God, but fully accepts his humanity,
and will answer for it. Never before has the human predicament been
seen so clearly … Never before has the absolute been so utterly
excluded … Man is not God; this is not the whole truth, but it is the
first and most indispensable … [atheism is] a radical critique of all
human absolutes.”8

7 This is the title of a chapter in the brief, but tight and juicy, essay by Étienne
Borne, Le problème du mal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960). Even though
I disagree completely with his thesis about atheism, I would like to highlight the very
insightful remarks that Borne makes about the pari and the ontological argument
(104–8).
8 Jean Lacroix, Le sens de l’athéisme moderne (Paris: Casterman, 1961), 64–5 [TN:
The Meaning of Modern Atheism, trans. G. Barden (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 62–3].
This book carries to the extreme consequences, within the line of the personalism of
Esprit, the thesis I am fighting against.
 Conclusion 455

The language in which this thesis is formulated is very often Pascalian;

but actually it originates not from Pascal but from Bergson, and one
should highlight the necessary attenuation of the meaning of the initial
fall to which it is liable, which derives expressly from Bergson. This
attenuation reaches its highest degree, I am not sure in Teilhard but
certainly in Teilhardism.
2) I must emphasize the novelty of this thesis with respect to what
was, until very recently, the traditional thesis in religious thought, which
affirmed that atheism must necessarily transition into other illusory and
mythical forms of religion (religion of humanity etc.). This was said to
be a vital necessity because of the unlivability of radical atheism: when
it wants to give up building up surrogates for God, it must lead to psy-
chological dissolution (e.g., Kirillov in Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche).9
Thus, the idea that atheism builds up idols is replaced by the idea that
it is first of all a criticism of idols.
How could this new interpretation come about? We will not step outside
of philosophy if we seek its roots in a certain interpretation of contem-
porary history, which took shape in the 1930s and is still dominant.
We know that interest in Marxist thought disappeared almost com-
pletely from European culture in the 1920s, and it was broadly redis-
covered only during the war, and above all in the period immediately
afterwards. Thus, in the years after 1930, an interpretation of the crisis
was formed that entirely overlooks, if not the political reality of
Communism, at least Marx’s philosophy. Consequently, a typically
Eurocentric vision occurred just as history was becoming worldwide;
Communism is Russian history, people said, to be considered in light
of that country’s process of Westernization and industrialization. As a
corollary, since nobody could fail to notice that contemporary history
was new – in the sense that it could not be viewed as a mere develop-
ment of the period between 1870 and 1914, understood as the outcome
of a process that started with the Renaissance – there were only three
ways to explain this novelty. The first talks about an irrationalist paren-
thesis, an insurrection of vitality, an explosion of morbid Romanticism,

9 Regarding the thesis of the unlivability of atheism, see Maritain, Humanisme

intégral, 69–70 [Integral Humanism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968), 59–61].
456 The Problem of Atheism

and so on.10 But how did it happen that what earlier had expressed
itself in the form of bizarre literary works, later determined political
reality? Evidently only by activating certain germs – and thus we move
on to the second way – that were already present in Italian and German
history, and, as far as the Stalinist involution is concerned, in Russia.
But why, in Europe, did the educated classes, the small and the great
bourgeoisie, join the irrationalist movements? One must logically arrive
at an interpretation in terms of class. The bourgeois class, which during
its rising period had associated itself with the expansion of rationalism,
at the time of its sunset had to mobilize irrational powers. In this way
one accepts a historico-materialistic interpretation of contemporary
political reality; and, curiously, this happens precisely as a result of hav-
ing underestimated the philosophical moment of Marxism.
We must recognize in the final moment of Mounier’s experience,
whose nobility is beyond doubt, the martyrdom to which the error of
this position leads when it is lived by a Catholic all the way to its extreme
consequences. Indeed, whereas, according to the first position, Fascism,
Nazism, and Communism are reduced to genera of a common species,
in the second and third they are set in opposition to the advantage of
Communism; so that this latter becomes “the only bastion of the
oppressed, so much so that every anti-Communist thesis transmogrifies
automatically into a right-wing thesis,” whereas Fascism is characterized
by “the rejection of Christian spirituality as existence, replaced by the
idea of spirituality as strength,” and every form of anti-Communism
“tries to shore up everything that is dying and is poisoning the country
with its overextended agony; and is above all the necessary and sufficient
form of crystallization for Fascism to take new life.” And yet, he still
rejects Marxism as a crude “totalitarian philosophy which reduces every

10 Certain philosophical developments in thinkers belonging to “yesterday’s

world” can only be understood relative to this interpretation. I mentioned Benda’s
philosophy. But think, too, of the introduction in the last form of Croce’s thought of
the category of vitality; which is, yes, matter for subsequent categories but at the same
time is persistent negativity, so that it takes the appearance of reality’s original sin.
This is the tribute that the old philosopher paid to the dualistic pessimism that is
necessarily linked with this interpretation of contemporary history and that, until
then, he had tenaciously resisted.
 Conclusion 457

spiritual activity to a reflection of economic circumstances, while it

neglects or denies the mysteries of man and of being.”11
This necessity to reject simultaneously philosophical Marxism and
every form of anti-Communism, while burning with political tension,
leads to an unlivable situation (Mounier’s premature death is symbolic);
still, it is a necessary consequence of a certain interpretation of contem-
porary history whereby Communism and Fascism are in a relation of
pure opposition and, ultimately, anti-Communism and barbarity are
linked together. Everybody can see the connection between this position
and the definition of atheism, which I have discussed; the only philo-
sophical continuation of Mounierism had to develop in that direction,
as it happened.
In actuality, when one recognizes the unity between Marxism’s philo-
sophical power and political power, and at the same time its inadequacy,
the criteria of closeness and opposition no longer apply: Fascism and
Nazism are blowbacks (in the context of an inability to surpass Marxism
at the ideal level), in countries that felt threatened, of the failure of
Marxism as a world revolution.
3) Hence a materialistic interpretation of contemporary history, which
is the exact opposite of the one I have proposed. Certainly, interpreting
a particular period in terms of the prevalence of the economic factor
does not require, as such, accepting the whole Marxist philosophy. But,
on the other hand, according to this vision the specific character of
today’s history requires recurring to some theses of Marx that are directly
linked with his philosophy (mystification, alienation). Without referring
to this consideration of today’s history, it is impossible to explain the
genesis of secular and Catholic progressivism, and the process whereby
these forms have to spread to philosophy, and why they continue the
stance of sublation [inveramento], whose true beginning is found in
Gentile. Moreover, certain religious philosophies are obliged to embrace
this interpretation because of their historical perspective. We have seen

11 The sentences I quoted come from Révolution personnaliste et communautaire

(Paris: Aubier, 1935), 139; Feu la chrétienté (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1950), 38 and
190; Les certitudes difficiles (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1951), 188. Other harsh judg-
ments on theoretical Marxism are found in Feu la chrétienté, 141–2 and 158. It would
be a useful study to track the necessary trajectory of decline of French Catholic phil-
osophical-political thought from Maritain to Mounier and then to Teilhard due to
that first germ of error that I have detected in Maritain’s position.
458 The Problem of Atheism

this about the neo-Thomist commentary on St Thomas – if it is defined

as I said, as a position that arises out of the crisis of Ontologism and
determines its essential features in reference to it12 – at the stage when
it is forced to give up the reactionary image (I am not using this word
in a pejorative sense at all) of being “anti-modern.”
Consequently, the interpretation that sees in Marx a union of moral-
ism and atheism, because his adversary is Hegel’s God, makes sense.
The process whereby one moves from this to the idea that atheism is a
lucid acceptance of evil and a determined revolt against it, in a form of
pessimism that is at the same time a commitment to effective action, is
very easy to understand; and so is the break with scholastic cosmologism
in the name of personalism, and then the proposal to revise all of
Catholic thought to absorb the truth of evolutionism and Marxism, the
only adequate philosophies for our time, in the name of the transition
to the “post-Galileian age.”
4) It is precisely from this indivisibility from a vision of contemporary
history that the recent interpretation of atheism draws its power to
persuade and to spread. But once it is separated from it – and once this
interpretation has been called into question and found to be untenable,
as I tried to do in outline – its arguments turn out to be weak.
Indeed, let us consider its essential thesis – the elevation of moralism
and of the agonistic stance against evil to primary characteristics of
atheism. We must observe that the word “morality” takes entirely
different meanings in traditional ethics and in atheism. Certainly, we can
speak of a moral moment of atheism in three senses.

• In the sense that there is a moral choice already at the beginning

of rationalism,13 which is manifested precisely by the postulatory
aspect that atheism must take in its extreme forms; however, it is not
a choice in favour of autonomy, as refusal to grant moral significance

12 I think that, therefore, we can say that what defines the characteristic profile
of neo-Thomism is the attempt to sharply separate Thomism and Ontologism. We
ought to wonder whether the thought process of the most recent Thomist authors
does not move in the opposite direction, even though they seldom use the word
“Ontologism,” which as I said is difficult to define precisely.
13 In the sense defined starting on page 10.
 Conclusion 459

to a law purely imposed from outside, but, rather, in favour of man’s

self-sufficiency.14
• In the sense that the step from Idealistic rationalism to atheism is
not reducible to a purely speculative process but stems from the
quest for consistency between thought and life.
• In the sense, finally, that there is an ethical commitment to
transform man’s situation in the world, in the terminal moment
of libertine atheism as well as in Marx and in Nietzsche: “for the
Prometheans the expansion of freedom down here will be limitless;
they dream that the universe will became completely pliable to their
desires; certainly, they know well that today this freedom is not
exercised like omnipotence on nothingness, but rather dramatically
against an antagonistic world; and yet they dream of a time when
these hostilities will cease through the radical triumph of human
freedoms. And the faith on which their false religion is founded
consists in this.”15

It remains true that the constitutive feature of this morality is the yes
to (worldly and historical) being, based on the affirmation of the “nor-
mality” of the human situation, which is a consequence of the negation
of the idea of the Fall, in which I have tried to identify the essence of
rationalism. The ethical quest of atheism is for a full reconciliation
of man and nature, either understood as a complete harmonization

14 A passage from Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is decisive

in this regard: “A being only considers himself independent when he stands on his
own feet; and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his existence to himself. A
man who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I
live completely by the grace of another if I owe him not only the maintenance of my
life, but if he has, moreover, created my life – if he is the source of my life. When it is not
my own creation, my life has necessarily a source of this kind outside of it.” And fur-
ther on, in the same work: “But since for socialist man the entire so-called history of the
world is nothing but the creation of man through human labor, nothing but the emer-
gence of nature for man, so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through
himself, of the process of his creation” [TN: ed. D. Struik, trans. M. Milligan (New York:
International Publishers, 1964), 144–5].
15 M. Carrouges, La mystique du surhomme (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 359. I found
in this book – which is devoted above all to the study of atheism in modern French
poetry, and of which I became aware only while I was drafting the Introduction (in
Italy it has gone almost unnoticed) – a complete confirmation of my interpretation of
atheism and its future.
460 The Problem of Atheism

with the creative possibilities of nature or, oppositely, as a humanization

of nature freed from the divine disguise. The practical stance of atheists
takes the meaning of accepting the “harshness” of reality, denying
completely “compassion” and “charity.” The apology of cruelty does
not belong only to de Sade or Lautréamont but also to Nietzsche, even
if it is unpleasant to say; and also to Marx as concerns the acceptance
of evil as the process that leads to good. Only through this acceptance
will we get to that total transformation of reality, as deification of man,16

16 The idea of a total transformation of reality appears already at the endpoint of

libertine atheism, in de Sade’s thought. Klossowski rightly highlights this curious text
of his: “If man destroys himself, he does wrong – in his own eyes. But that is not the
view Nature takes of the thing. As she sees it, if he multiplies he does wrong, for he
usurps from Nature the honor of a new phenomenon, creatures being the necessary
result of her workings. If those creatures that are cast were not to propagate them-
selves, she would cast new entities and enjoy a faculty she has ceased to be able to
exercise” (De Sade as quoted in Klossowski, Sade my Neighbor, trans. A. Lingis
[Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991], 85). He remarks: “The concep-
tion of Nature as aspiring to renew her most active power marks a a dehumanization
of Sade’s thought – a dehumanization that now takes on the form of a singular meta-
physics. If Sade … now goes so far as to consider man to be entirely distinct from
Nature, it is in order to bring out more effectively a profound discord between the
notion of the human being and the notion of the universe, and to explain how all
the attempts he attributes to Nature to repossess her rights must be proportionate to
this discord. We might also see in all this Sade’s will to separate himself from solidarity
with man by imposing on himself the categorical imperative of a cosmic tribunal that
demands the annihilation of all that is human” (86–7). Therefore Klossowski also
raises the question of whether Sade’s ultimate question may not be essentially the fol-
lowing: “Is man really a termination?” (86n10); and whether the moral meaning
taken for him by aspects like corruption, putrefaction, dissolution, and annihilation
must not be linked to the core idea of “Nature’s aspiration to … return to the uncon-
ditioned state” (90); which confirms my idea that all forms of atheism refer necessar-
ily to the conception of finite individuality declared in the myth of Anaximander.
Certainly Marx’s atheism takes the viewpoint exactly opposite to Sade’s because
Marx’s God is not Nature but History. But man after the realization of Communism is
a supernatural being, and he is such precisely to the extent that he has moved beyond
the characters of finite individuality. Indeed, he would be a man for whom all distinc-
tions would disappear: between mine and yours in the realm of property; between
permitted and forbidden in the realm of morality and of the state; between thought
and its objects in the realm of science; between form and perceptible matter in
the realm of art; between down here and beyond in religious life; in short, every
opposition between him and others, between him and nature, with all that this last
 Conclusion 461

such that the name of God will be reduced to a meaningless group of

letters (the surpassing of atheism that is at the same time its realization,

opposition implies, space, time, perceptible qualities, and so on. This according to the
pertinent remarks by the most acute French critic of and commentator on Marxism,
Fr Fessard (Le dialogue catholique-communiste est il possible? [Paris: Grasset, 1937], 224–
5), to whom Carrouges (La mystique, 224–6) also refers. We see from here how incor-
rect it is to define atheism in terms of pessimism and moral revolt as, for example,
Borne does. Conversely, I think that it is precisely having dissociated the terms “pes-
simism” and “atheism,” with unprecedented and insuperable rigour, that is Martinetti’s
great merit (even though in my judgment his limitation is that he keeps this truth
inside the horizon of rationalism, and of the concept of individualism, which is proper
to rationalism; so that his thought can and must be continued but only through a
sharp break). According to him, as we have seen, pessimism is the refusal to reconcile
with phenomenic reality in the name of pure Christian morality. Nothing is farther
away from the pessimistic morality of the absolute no to worldly and historical reality
(hence its taking shape as morality of the irrevocability of actions) than the atheistic
morality of yes to nature or history, which does imply the moment of negation but in
order to erase from worldly reality every aspect that can give rise to the thought of
God (hence its taking shape as morality of the result). It is very curious that Borne, who
is a rigorous thinker, in perfect consistency with his interpretation must go so far as
writing: “therefore it follows … that Marxism is a false atheism, and that we could not
ask it to play a purifying function in the questions about God and evil, because it par-
ticipates in the backward motion towards wisdom: its divinized humanity is, barely
renewed, the old myth in which the problem of evil dissipates without being posed.
Being a return to the origins of thought, Marxism is thus, at least philosophically, the
opposite of progressivism” (Le problème du mal, 99). Indeed, his definition of atheism
leads Borne to characterize it as giving decisive value to free individual conscience, as
a profanation that redeems the true cosmic and social profanation of the sacred; and
to see its philosophical expression in a form of atheistic existentialism that ultimately,
since it is antithetical to Marxism, could only take Stirner’s form, for an evaluation of
which see the considerations I made in the introductory essay.
These considerations can also guide us in reaching a definitive formulation of the
critique of Maritain’s theses. When he reproaches atheism for not carrying its revolt
to completion but stopping instead at opposing to the God who consecrates the
world’s evil the other false God, which is history, he shows that he does not under-
stand at all (or does not want to understand, because his inadequate definition of
atheism is required by his historical outlook) the essential point of atheism, which lies
in totally changing the notion of morality.
The parallel between Sade and Marx is useful in showing that atheism is always
necessarily materialistic not because it abides by vulgar naturalistic materialism but
because it rejects the idea of participation. It also raises a question of the greatest
importance, which I will have to study further, regarding the relations between
462 The Problem of Atheism

a thesis that in Marx is perfectly equivalent to that of the surpassing-

realization of philosophy). It is based on the radicalness of this trans-
formation that the character of total revolt, which is proper to atheism,
must be explained. Likewise, it is only in reference to atheism that
Marx’s famous sentence about philosophies – that until now have inter-
preted the world, while what matters is to change it – takes its full
meaning. Besides, the revolt against God in the name of the humaniza-
tion of nature is completely different from the revolt against the col-
lective and against necessity in the name of the individual; the latter
leads, instead, to a religious position, and this is where the question of
the continuity between Stirner and Kierkegaard and the question of
Shestov become extremely important.
5) The following are further proofs that the process leading to athe-
ism starts by taking a stance regarding the not objectively representable,
and thus unverifiable, historicity of original sin:

a) The fact that atheism cannot seek its criterion of truth in the proof
of the non-existence of God but, rather, in the acknowledgment
of his death because the idea of God no longer directs us in actual
practical choices but enters into them as a mere instrument in order
to give an absolute character to a determined historical order, which
therefore presents itself as closed. This historical proof naturally
implies the idea that only an atheist philosophy can account for
the historical process as it has unfolded so far.
b) The fact that the endpoint of rationalism coincides with the end-
point of the idea of Revolution characterized by the transposition
of the dogma of the Fall onto the level of historical experience.17
Hence the necessity of studying the historical development of the
idea of Revolution and the formation within it of the usual historical
narratives, which were the context in which the subsequent

historical materialism and dialectical materialism. Normally people think that dialec-
tical materialism represents the inclusion of historical materialism in a general system
of the world; I believe we must say, instead, that dialectical materialism (and here I
disregard the form it has taken in Russia – that of scientistic dogmatism) is a necessary
condition for the transition to the “historical” conception of materialism. I think that
a study of the idea of dialectics in Marx should be carried out from this perspective.
17 Regarding how this transposition takes place in Marxism, and its preservation
in Russian Marxism, see, for example, among many people who wrote about it, G.A.
Wetter, Le matérialisme dialectique, 594–5 [TN: Dialectical Materialism, 559–60].
 Conclusion 463

philosophies built themselves up, changing in relation to the new

adversaries they had to face (thus, for example, neo-Hegelianism is
Hegelianism after Marxism and positivism) but without criticizing
them at the root. Those historical narratives are inevitably inferior to
the Marxist one because they start from the idea that the Revolution
has already taken place in its stage as the French Revolution. This
is why Marxism appears to be unsurmountable by the existing
philosophies; and why it really is unsurmountable, to the extent
that such philosophies are not able to reform themselves because
this reform requires defining a historical narrative that accounts
for the final outcome of the idea of Revolution and for the place of
atheism in history.

If atheism means taking a stance with respect to human history, if it

is born neither from morality, nor from science, nor from art, criticizing
it must concern first of all the way in which it places itself in the history
of philosophy (the choice it proposes, in its form as political atheism,
between socialism and barbarism makes sense, as we have seen, only
relative to an interpretation of history). In this book I have tried to show
that it must accept the thesis that the history of philosophy is a process
of secularization, a thesis that, valid in Idealistic rationalism, ceases being
valid after the critique of this latter operated by atheism itself. One cannot place
atheism in history as a position ulterior to the philosophy of immanent
divinity without reinterpreting the history of modern philosophy, raising
the question of whether Italian and French philosophy of a religious
orientation has really been surpassed by classical German thought,
which in effect ends in atheism, or by Anglo-American empiricism in
the aspect in which it ends up “losing the sacred” – betraying, in my
judgment, the deepest motif of empiricism. In any case, these are not
two distinct questions because this empiricism presupposes that French-
Italian religious philosophy has already been surpassed by classical
German philosophy, with respect to which it presents itself as an ulterior
position, which erases its mystical aspects.
6) Moving on to the political aspect that is essential to atheism, we
must observe that it is always totalitarian and that the reciprocal state-
ment is also true: atheism and totalitarianism form an indissoluble unity.
We have defined Marxist totalitarianism in terms of the ethics of the
direction of history; and this applies to atheism that is actually able to
enter politics. But scientistic atheism is also totalitarian (how could
464 The Problem of Atheism

there be freedom with respect to “scientifically proven truths”?)18 and

so is aesthetic atheism. That is, atheism, in its refusal to link values to
the religious Value, is led consistently to absolutize one specific value,
which is thought to include all others, but in fact this inclusion manifests
itself as their pure negation.
Hence the connection today between religious reaffirmation and
liberal reaffirmation.
Certainly, this viewpoint may seem questionable, and the fundamental
objections to the interpretation of today’s conflict as a religious struggle
can be found in an article by Hanna Arendt.19 I regard as entirely non-
sensical the position of those who think, just like Arendt, that they can
cut short the discussion of Marx’s atheism, regarding the question as
entirely marginal in his work for the simple reason that his atheism is
not speculative since Marx renounces the attempt to prove the non-
existence of God. It is quite clear that this proof is absolutely impossible
and that, precisely for this reason, Marx shifted to a critique of specula-
tive philosophy. Nor can the critique of religion be conceived in the
Enlightenment’s fashion (Boulanger etc.) as a revelation of its origins.
This is the road that ends in psychoanalytic atheism, whose acritical
character I mentioned. Marx understood that there is but one way to
strike at religion, that of effectively suppressing its roots. That is, neither
the metaphysical way nor the historic or scientific way but the political
way; which, as it happens, is a full confirmation of my thesis about the
priority of the political moment in atheism. But how will the realization
of Communism have atheism as its “result”? Will death possibly disap-
pear in a Communist regime? And how can death not raise the questions
it has traditionally raised, even assuming a perfectly just society? Are we
not entitled to hope for reparation for the hundreds of millions of
innocent victims that the process of history has steamrolled during its
course? It seems to me that only one answer is possible. The revolution

18 An essential text that illustrates this point is the sociocracy that follows from
Comte’s intentional atheism.
19 Hanna Arendt, “Religion and Politics,” in Confluence: An International Forum II,
3 (September 1953): 105–26. Arendt writes – and this seems entirely questionable to
me: “The concept of freedom (and this is primarily a struggle between the free world
and Totalitarianism) is certainly not of religious origin” (111). Although, further
down, she is right to protest against a certain type of sociologism that treats ideology
and religion as the same thing because it is convinced that every vision of the world
boils down to an ideology and, thus, to a myth.
 Conclusion 465

leading to Communism can only be realized through an ethics founded

on an absolutely atheified conception of man, whose adoption imposes
itself as necessary in any case because the alternative is thought to be
radical barbarism. Only in this sense, I think, can we say that the real-
ization of Communism must coincide with the disappearance of the
question of God.
From the recognition of the link between atheism and totalitarian-
ism we can draw an initial legitimate induction about the usual thesis
that Marx “inherited” totalitarianism from Hegel. I think one must
reply that Hegel’s conception of the state is not by itself totalitarian;
rather, it only carries the possibility of becoming totalitarian in the
Marxist inversion.
7) Positive atheism has historically won in its Marxist form, but this
victory has coincided with its defeat. In the first place, because it has
given prophetic value to the intuition of its greatest adversary, Nietzsche,
himself defeated due to the powerlessness to which his thought finds
itself reduced in practice. Dialectical materialism has become an instru-
ment of the will to power, but not of a superman, not of he who accepts
the thought of the “eternal return,” but of the man in whom the herd
recognizes itself and who speaks to it, today, the suitable language, that
of the “inventor of happiness.” Furthermore, Marxism has decomposed
into two forms: dialectical materialism and socialism. And the process
of Communism is oriented towards accepting the values of the affluent
society, measured by sociologism. Thus, the dimension of the past is
lost (which is what bourgeois society has accepted from Marxism, real-
izing itself as purely bourgeois, separated from any reference to other
values that “mystified” it), but the dimension of the future is lost as well.
Thus, the realization of human fullness and freedom has been replaced
by the process of man’s involution into animality (i.e., radical nihilism).
The expression of this just-bourgeois-bourgeoisie (i.e., of a society
reduced to mere economic relations) is today’s pure democracy, as
democracy elevated to a value, which is different from totalitarianism
in the exact same terms in which the “loss of the sacred” is different
from atheism, and only in those terms. This is because it, too, is founded,
in the final analysis, only on force (i.e., the number of votes), nor does
it recognize, besides force, the authority of other values.
The disappearance of the question of God is taking place in a form
that the atheist philosophers did not foresee but that confirms,
instead, a view held by religious thought: namely, that only the idea of
466 The Problem of Atheism

participation makes possible a real distinction between man and animal;

the idea of homo faber erases it, seeing in man an animal that uses a
particular system of signs (language), which makes him capable of
actively adapting to new situations.
8) But from this defeat of positive atheism we must not infer the too
easy victory of religious transcendence.
In fact, what is contradictory about the moral or even physical disap-
pearance of man? A discourse against nihilism based on values consti-
tutes, as Heidegger correctly remarks, the complete nihilistic discourse.
Moreover, what is being defeated today is atheism in its mystical aspect,
not the position, which is ulterior to it, of the “loss of the sacred.”
9) Let us begin by observing that the failure of the idea of the
Revolution in the theological sense I described coincides with the failure
of the idea of Counter-Revolution in its reactionary sense. We have
already seen that the reactionary position (the condemnation of the
“modern” in the name of any past) can only lead to a complete break
between theory and practice, so that the past, devoid of any compelling
value, becomes, indeed, pure “past,” what “is no longer” and that which
nobody will ever be able to re-establish. A reactionary position could
subsist when there were still some traces of the sacral civilization of
the Middle Ages; the process of history, from the First World War on,
has destroyed them. So, the “right” has been annihilated, but the “cen-
tre” and the “left” have been equally annihilated.20 Belonging to the
“centre” means to mediate, but what will it mean, for example, for a
party of Catholics or for a liberal party to mediate between two equally
irreligious and equally illiberal forms? Being on the left today takes
the meaning, regardless of the intentions of those who profess to be
on the left, of becoming the defender of the constitutive disorder of
the present.
Therefore, the fight against the process of dehumanization, if possible,
could only take the form of a fight against today’s world in its totality,

20 I am speaking, of course, in terms of political philosophy and not immediately

in terms of practical politics, where it is obviously impossible to do completely without
such phraseology; and where very often one has to choose the lesser evil – that is, in
connection with what has been said, the conditions that preserve a country from per-
manent servitude. Regarding the end of the “right,” the position of “apolitia” that pure
counter-revolutionary thought is forced to take is characteristic. On this topic, J. Evola’s
observations in Cavalcare la tigre (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1961), 244ff, are very remarkable.
 Conclusion 467

in the name of the individual and of the universal humanity that is being
negated by negating the individual. It is therefore, in a sense, a revolu-
tionary position. Should we develop a true concept of revolution to be
opposed to the theological concept we have so far discussed? This seems
ambiguous to me because we cannot forget that the present situation
is the result of the idea of Revolution carried to its extreme conse-
quences. Hence the need for a new word.21
10) But is this fight possible? The question cannot have any other
meaning but whether atheism can be surpassed, even after having rec-
ognized that so far it has not been formally surpassed. We face here the
thesis that Marxism is insuperable, as it has been formulated by Sartre:
anti-Marxism must choose between going back to pre-Marxist ideas and
rediscovering ideas that have already been formulated by Marxism. But
does this thesis have true power? It is quite true that Marxism is insuper-
able within that particular line of thought that I have defined as ratio-
nalism. But we have seen that rationalism is conditioned by an initial
act of faith, by an original choice that rules out the supernatural, a
choice that comes to light in the postulatory character that atheism
must take. Consequently, from the insuperability of Marxism within
rationalism one can only derive the following truth, which curiously is
valid against Sartre himself: Marxism cannot be the object of “sublation”;
the quest to surpass it cannot configure itself as dialectic surpassing but
must start precisely from the insuperability of its contradiction, as the
unveiling of the erroneousness of a line of thought. The contradiction
is such that it cannot be overcome either in Marxism itself or in an
ulterior form within rationalism itself, or, finally, be healed in a synthesis

21 It is important to point out that the theses I am presenting here are, at least in
many respects, extremely similar to those that F. Rodano has developed in the still
unfinished series of his admirable essays in Rivista Trimestrale (“Il processo di formazi-
one della ‘società opulenta,’” 2 [1962]; “Il pensiero cattolico di fronte alla ‘società
opulenta,’” 3 [1962]; “Sul concetto di rivoluzione,” 5–6 and 7–8 [1963]). In fact, our
judgment is identical regarding the dehumanization process of the affluent society
and the relationship between Marxism and sociologism; regarding the inadequacy of
the position of pure conservation and regarding its inevitable conclusion in De
Maistre’s “genial” but, by now, historically exhausted “reactionarism”; and regarding
the need to problematize the idea of revolution because the one that has been pro-
posed until now by Marxism is inadequate … but regarding the manner of this prob-
lematization, our agreement (or disagreement) will become precise only after a
lengthy discussion, which I plan to write when the series of articles is finished.
468 The Problem of Atheism

with other forms of thought because all of them lead to eclectic results.
Given this, the obligation to return to pre-Marxist positions is certainly
true; but it will be necessary to prove that they are up to the task of
reaffirming themselves after Marxism – that is, of re-forming themselves.
In short, in order to draw the line of resistance of non-Marxist culture
to Marxism, we must think, rather than of Hegelian dialectics, of those
“acts of self-preservation” by which, according to Herbart, the “reals”
defend themselves from “perturbations,” threats of destruction, pro-
duced in them by other reals. Or, if we want to speak in terms that by
now have been made current by Toynbee, and which have become
completely superficial in common usage, for philosophy and for Western
society, it is not a matter of “surpassing” or “sublating” but, rather, of
answering a challenge.
11) Until today, only two attempts have been made to move beyond
Marxism in the sense I just described: in the secular world by Croce’s
thought and in the Catholic world by Maritain’s thought. These two
philosophers cannot be adequately evaluated without giving Marxism
its rightful place (even though Croce had to end up denying Marxism’s
philosophical significance, thus preparing himself his present outdated-
ness). Both these attempts failed, but the analysis of their failure deserves
the greatest attention. Indeed, Croce established three essential points.
The first – which is the simplest and the best known, but is such that it
must absolutely not be overlooked, and which is seldom understood in
its full meaning – is that the reaffirmation of liberalism after Marxism
can only take the form of a dissociation from liberism.22 However, in
Croce this distinction effectively takes the meaning of an identity of
liberalism … and conservatism. In the last essay I wondered whether
the question of this dissociation must not lead to a critique of the imma-
nentistic formulation of liberalism. The second point is much less known
but is crucially important. Croce understood that moving beyond
Marxism could not take the form of sublation (hence his criticism of
liberal socialism and similar forms). But this can only mean that the
critique of Marxism can only take the form of a reform of a previous
thought; or that the philosophical function of Marxism cannot be
defined other than as a dialectic reagent. Therefore, we understand
why Croce met, in the years of his first critique of Marxism, Herbart’s

22 [TN] See note 11 on page 429.

 Conclusion 469

thought, and why he drew from it a decisive suggestion (the idea of the
distinti) for the reform of Hegelian dialectics, which supposedly makes
it possible to avoid the Marxist inversion.23 A broader discussion would
show that, in the context of Croce’s presupposed and unquestioned
immanentism, the thought liable to be reformed could only be that of
Hegel. The third, equally important, point is that moving beyond
Marxism cannot but coincide with rediscovering a line of thought that
starts from Vico. We have already seen, in this regard, that Croce’s book
on Vico is actually an integral part of his philosophy, so that any criti-
cism of it calls into question Croce’s whole thought; so that the natural
form that a book on Croce ought to take is that of a history of his
encounters with Vico, in the sense that every deepening of his thought
appeared to him as a clarification of Vico’s thought.
Of course, Croce’s Vico cannot but be Vico after Hegel, reaffirmed
as relevant after Hegel in order to bring to completion his immanentism.
And the most curious thing is the fact that Vico separated from
Ontologism and Occasionalism – which in 1911 Croce regarded as
non-critical positions, in agreement with a common judgment at that
time – really becomes the precursor of Croce’s thought and of his form
of historicism. The possible question as to whether Croce’s thought

23 See the essay “Commiato dallo Herbart,” in Discorsi di varia filosofia, vol. 1
(Bari: Laterza, 1945) and also the essay that immediately follows it in the same collec-
tion, “I ‘neo’ in filosofia.” In it, Croce essentially affirms that Herbart’s exigences vis-
à-vis the philosophies of the dissolution of Hegelianism are valid until the time when
this crisis is overcome “in a new and genuine philosophy which .. undoes that system
[Hegel’s] from the foundation and .. by the same deed includes all of it in the new
building with its new foundation” (115); until, that is, Croce’s philosophy. Not
enough attention has been paid to this passage: generally, scholars of Croce, restrict-
ing themselves to the pages of the Contributo, have limited Herbart’s influence on the
young Croce to pure moral rigourism, in which he supposedly found an armour
against the positivist dissolution of ethics. Therefore, his Herbartism was supposedly
an aspect of Labriola’s influence, in the development of whose thought the Herbartian
moment does indeed have that meaning. Actually, Herbart’s philosophy also played a
role, and a much more important one, in his subsequent disagreement with Labriola,
who was not very receptive to the distinti, which he considered to be a residue of
Platonism, of Scholasticism, of speculative philosophy.
It must be pointed out, in reference to what I said about the link between atheism
and totalitarianism, that in the enunciation of the theory of distinti we find already
implicit – even though certainly (do I need to say it?) unaware – Croce’s future anti-
totalitarian polemic, with all the historical motifs that depend on it.
470 The Problem of Atheism

process ended in Vico expressly because of the inadequate interpreta-

tion of Marxism in the book of his youth is baseless: because the link
with Vico grew especially tight right after Croce became aware of the
philosophical character of Marx’s work – an awareness that character-
izes the final period of his thought. Therefore, there is still reason to
wonder whether this encounter with Vico in the process of surpassing
Marxism may turn out to be necessary even after Croce’s defeat, although
of course with a Vico who is no longer Croce’s.
12) If we now ask ourselves what may have been the reasons for the
defeat, despite having correctly posed the question, we must say that
we cannot trace it back to anything other than a presupposition tacitly
accepted by Croce – namely, that the history of philosophy is a process
of secularization; that is, to his acceptance of a certain historiographic
perspective whereby one could no longer talk about the question of
transcendence, which was taken as already solved and left behind. Hence
the critical problem raised by Croce’s thought: its continuation can only
be precisely the study of “the history of philosophy as a problem” in the
sense discussed so far. We can add that only in this way we are his dis-
ciples, in the sense of valuing his affirmation that we should always think
in relation to a historical situation. It is the present historical situation,
in as much as it is absolutely unforeseen and inexplicable from Croce’s
perspective, that imposes, and should also impose from his perspective,
a problematization of his thought that can only take the form of a re-
proposal of the question of transcendence.
13) The remarks that can be made about Maritain are similar. He
correctly saw that the reaffirmation of Christian thought after Marxism
required the abandonment of the identification between the ideal of
Christendom and a determined historical Christendom; it required,
therefore, a critique of the standard Medievalistic-reactionary approach
of Catholic thought. This affirmation was made based on the need to
distinguish between the eternal and transcendent and the temporal
and historic; thus, from an essentially anti-modernist standpoint. From
a certain angle, we can see in the pupil of Bloy, of the last great reaction-
ary writer, the point of arrival of anti-modernism; in this sense, there is
a perfect consistency between the reactionary Maritain of the 1920s
and the later Maritain, in that a deepening of anti-modernism requires
a critique of reactionary thought. But he rethought this truth from
within the neo-Thomist commentary on St Thomas and the vision of
the history of philosophy that necessarily follows from it. Is it as a
 Conclusion 471

consequence of this that Maritain became the one who opened the way,
of course unwillingly, to neo-modernism understood as an alliance no
longer, like old modernism, between Catholicism and the forms of
thought tied to the Idealist reaction against science of the years after
1890 – with religious pragmatism, to use an overall formula (with those
forms that had already been beaten by Idealist immanentism) – but
with Marxism? An answer to this question has been sought in essay VII.
Assuming that it is correct, we have to say that the failure of Maritain’s
attempt, too, leads us back to the question of the history of philosophy
as a problem, just as it did in Croce’s case.
14) As a consequence, we must shift to the question of whether there
is a modern philosophical line [Ontologism] that Marxism has totally
ignored and that is altogether irreducible to those it considered. It
ignored this line first of all because it had been ignored by Hegel, who
dealt only with one ontologist in his history of philosophy, Malebranche,
and practically excluded him from the history of thought by judging
his philosophy to be a process towards Spinozism, cut short by extra-
philosophical concerns.
Recognizing its development shows that within its line the type of the
philosopher of history and that of the political philosopher come to
the fore; the emergence of the latter marks its crisis but then also the
overcoming of this crisis – although, in my view, partial and in need of
integration – in Rosmini after Gioberti. I just talked about the concept
of a “true” revolution as restoration of the human; we have seen that,
from the theoretical standpoint, it cannot but take the guise of a re-
form, in the etymological sense, of a tradition of thought. Now, do we
not have a suitable term to characterize this restoration-revolution in
all its meanings? We can think of the term “Risorgimento,” understood
as a philosophical category, independent of any immediate reference
to the Italian Risorgimento; although, in fact, a worked out a priori
definition of Risorgimento as a category is necessary for a correct evalu-
ation of this historical fact and of the reason for its crisis, in which we
still find ourselves.24

24 We can say that the idea of Risorgimento as a primarily philosophical category

is essential to Italian Ontologism. See, for example, Carabellese, L’idealismo italiano
(Naples: Loffredo, 1938), 82, where he protests against the usual presentation of the
Risorgimento “just as a great political event, limited, also as political, only to the
Italian nation, and without reflections on the remaining spiritual activity. It is true
472 The Problem of Atheism

15) How can a study of modern Ontologism be conducted? I already

traced the outline of the first part, from Descartes to Vico. But, clearly,
while this first part pushes into a crisis the usual scheme of historical
periodization, especially regarding the question of the relationship
between Catholic Reformation and modern philosophy, it cannot show
the possibility and the form of the reaffirmation of this philosophy
today. Therefore, we must shift our attention to the Gentile problem.
The fate of his thought has been quite curious. This is because, in a
sense, he, the great surpasser, today seems completely surpassed. Indeed,
it was around 1920, at the time of his greatest success, that the verb “to
surpass” [superare] became fashionable; no longer in the original sense
in which the idea of “preserving” is as essential as that of going beyond
but, rather, in the sense of “getting rid of” because Idealism is always
underlain by a certain dualism, by the admission of the possibility of
another point of view, realistic and naturalistic if you like. This point of

that the core question of this movement is the ethical-political one; but that does not
mean that it limits itself to the conquest of the unity and independence of Italy,
and that it starts only when this conquest is implemented in political action. As in
the Renaissance, also in the Risorgimento there is a profound philosophical soul.”
It would not be incorrect to say that, just as for Marx and Engels, the Revolution
was the conclusive process of classical German philosophy, so for Carabellese the
Risorgimento, understood in a universalistic and not nationalistic sense, is the con-
clusion of what he calls “Italian Idealism” (in his sense of Idealist Ontologism). His
quotation of a passage by Gioberti, in the opening speech in Rome in 1930 (L’idealismo
italiano, 16), is important. Essentially, it states clearly that the idea of the Risorgimento
as a philosophical category takes priority over its political reality. It is true that
Carabellese looks for the adequate political expression of this philosophical idea in
Mazzini … and here I truly can no longer follow him.
Regarding the relationship between Risorgimento as a philosophical category and
Risogimento as a historical reality, I read now on La Stampa (28 February 1964) this
remark by A.C. Jemolo: “the book that marks the beginning of the Risorgimento, the
Primato morale e civile” [Vincenzo Gioberti, Del primato morale e civile degli italiani
(Brussels: Meline, Cans et Compagnie, 1843)]. But is not the Primato the political face
of the ontologistic Introduzione allo studio della filosofia? The Gioberti problem deserves
to be restudied in its entirety.
Considered as a philosophical category, the word “Risorgimento” has indeed the
sense of a Restoration not of a previous factual situation but of an order of values; of
a rediscovery and a new development of permanent principles, with respect to new
adversaries; of a purification, occasioned by new problems, of a tradition. Today, that
would be the tradition of homo sapiens as opposed to the heresies of European thought
inspired by the idea of homo faber.
 Conclusion 473

view is declared to be unthinkable, absurd, but then the entire history

of philosophy was conceived as a struggle against this unthinkable until
it was defeated for good by absolute Idealism; even though one then
discovered that this “unthinkable realism” in fact had never been
thought by anybody, and did not match any historical form of realism,
so that the problem of realism had to be set up otherwise. His philosophy
is often perceived as the symbol of Italy’s isolation from world culture;
but actually his influence continues, and in the aspect that I find most
disagreeable, the scheme of the sublation of Marxism, which he initi-
ated, even though, generally, in his often unaware continuators there
is no reference to his work.
But what confers his philosophy a very particular, and unique, interest,
is the fact that the line from Spaventa to Gentile has been the only one
to pose to itself a problem of which no trace could be found in Hegel –
that of surpassing Ontologism. Gentile’s philosophy is exactly what
Hegelianism must become in order to go beyond Ontologism, while
simultaneously going beyond philosophical Marxism; and let us not ask
now – even though the question is extremely important, especially so as
to account for the different profile of the Gentilian left compared to
the Hegelian left – whether as a result it had to stop being Hegelianism
and meet and bring to conclusion Fichte’s line against Hegel. Now, what
form does Ontologism have to assume in order to reaffirm itself after
Gentile? In this investigation one encounters the Carabellese question
and the Heidegger question; but in both of them the rediscovery of
Ontologism is associated with the preservation of Gentile’s historical
perspective – certainly reformed by the former to affirm the autonomy
and primacy of Italian thought, and inverted by the latter, but not criti-
cized in its immanentistic presupposition by either one of them. This
may be the sign of the limitations of their renewal of Ontologism.
By identifying the fulfilment of Gioberti with his secularization, Gentile
also realized his program of sublating into Italian thought German phi-
losophy – viewed from an angle that also included Marx (but not
Kierkegaard’s line, and even less Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s) and
French philosophy taken as a philosophy of interiority that concluded in
modernism (hence Gentile’s surpassing-preserving of modernism, which
coincided, of course, with a liquidation of Catholic modernism).
The synthesis fell apart, and its various elements resurfaced. On one
side Marxism, on the other religious French philosophy. Thus, it will
be necessary to conduct a parallel investigation of French philosophy
474 The Problem of Atheism

after 1930, or, to be more precise, after the crucially important querelle
of 1931 on the “Philosophie Chrétienne.” We need to examine with
the greatest attention the process whereby the greatest part of it, when
it did not run aground in academic formalism, surrendered to progres-
sivism and to the false notion of atheism that characterizes it, or resisted
it insufficiently; and to verify if, and to what extent, this surrender is
tied to the rejection, or to the insufficient reaffirmation, of Ontologism.
 Index of Names

Acquaviva, S., 244 Baader, F., 61, 82

Adam, A., 382 Bacon, F., 93, 321, 330, 332–3
Adler, M., 187 Bakunin, M., 23–4, 133–4.
Adorno, T. W., 160 Baillet, A., 370
Al-Ghazali, 401 Balbo, F., 34, 59, 159, 170, 215,
Alquié, F., 77, 82, 333, 345, 356, 218, 219, 223, 230–1, 236, 451
360, 361, 374 Balmès, J. L., 328
Ambrosius Victor, 340 Banfi, A., 41
Amerio, F., 399 Baratono, A., 154
Anaximander, 17, 18, 74, 152, 460 Barcos, M. de, 317
Andler, Ch., 131 Bariè, G. E., 41
Antoni, C., 188 Barr s, M., 118
Arendt, H., 107, 464 Barth, K., 62, 72, 391
Argan, C. G., 415 Baruzi, J., 392
Aristotle, 74, 249, 250, 251, 338, Bastiat, F., 275
347, 403 Battaglia, F., 248
Arnauld, A., 94, 303, 317, 331–2, Baudelaire, Ch., 156
340, 357, 360, 369–71, 373, 375, Baudin, E., 339, 347, 387
376, 377, 397 Bauer, E., 24
Aron, R., 107, 114, 161 Baumler, A., 142
Arvon, H., 23–5 Bayle, P., 69, 166–7, 333, 394, 399,
Auerbach, E., 348, 352 401, 411–2, 432–3
Augustine (Saint), 82, 147, 282, Béguin, A., 385
310, 338, 340, 347, 360, 366, Belaval, Y., 393
387, 388, 396 Benda, J., 18, 40, 74, 456
Ayer, A. J., 239–40 Berardi, R., 34
476 Index of Names
Berdaev, N., 106, 154, 174, 183,
187, 188, 452
Bergson, H., 22–3, 35–6, 330, 438,
455
Berkeley, G., 67, 72, 198, 331, 355,
379, 405, 409
Bernanos, G., 58
Bernstein, E., 154, 184, 187, 189,
190.
Bigo, P., 102
Bloch, E., 68, 83, 84, 139, 311
Blondel, M., 30, 62, 154, 156, 324,
395
Bloy, L., 154, 160, 328, 434, 470
Blyernberg, W. van, 15
Bobbio, N., 75, 105, 209, 445, 446,
447
Böhme, J., 61
Bolzano, B., 375
Bonald, L. de, 60, 324, 327, 328,
432, 434
Bontadini, G., 157, 328
Borne, ƒt., 454, 461
Bossuet, J. B., 325
Boulanger, N. A., 464
Boutroux, E., 280, 381
Bréhier, E., 89, 323–4
Bremond, H., 390
Brentano, F., 375
Breton, A., 306
Brunet, C., 406
Bruno, G., 14, 15, 19, 47, 207, 287,
353
Brunschvicg, L., 19, 48, 52–55, 64,
75, 104, 141, 151, 160, 269, 286,
287, 325, 328, 339–340, 382,
389, 398, 404, 405, 425
Buber, M., 25
Bukharin, N., 183
Bultmann, R., 106
Buonaiuti, E., 323, 399
Burman, E. O., 365, 370
Burnham, J., 107
Busson, H., 242
Calogero, G., 32, 41, 187
Calvin, J., 303, 372
Campanella, T., 239, 242
Camus, A., 115, 156, 294
Capograssi, G., 384, 397, 426
Carabellese, P., 41, 48, 78, 81–2,
158, 287, 388, 394, 471–2, 473
Carrouges, M., 16–7, 459, 461
Cassirer, E., 286
Castelli, E., 41, 141, 156–7, 252,
290
Chesterton, G. K., 257
Chevalier, J., 380, 381
Cohen, H., 202
Combes, E., 425
Comte, A., 21–3, 60, 61, 97, 102,
240, 241, 245, 260, 263, 278,
324, 325, 438, 464
Condorcet, M. J. de, 247, 274, 425
Constant, B., 445
Cornu, A., 180, 191
Corsano, A., 168, 395, 399, 413
Cortès, D., 58, 328, 436
Cotta, S., 111, 295, 426
Croce, B., 5–6, 20, 40–1, 45, 48, 56–
7, 62, 85, 89, 90–1, 92–3, 100,
107, 114, 117, 154, 160, 163,
172–3, 184–5, 186–7, 188, 192–
3, 199, 200, 204, 208, 225, 228,
235, 266–270, 285–6, 287, 295,
301, 310, 323, 324, 325, 326,
 Index of Names
384, 395–6, 399, 404, 412, 424,
430, 436, 444–9, 456, 468–471
D’Alembert, J., 60
Damian, P., 150
D’Annunzio, G., 78, 119
Delbos, V., 382
Del Grande, C., 282
Della Volpe, G., 154, 164, 171, 191,
197, 202, 216, 224
De Lubac, H., 22, 102, 141, 146,
273, 275, 276, 438
De Maistre, J., 60, 294, 324, 432, 433
De Man, H., 189
Democritus, 171, 212, 231–2
De Montcheuil, Y., 391, 421
Dempf, A., 55
De Plinval, G., 361
De Rougemont, D., 135, 188
De Ruggiero, G., 20, 409
De Sanctis, F., 117
De Sanctis, G., 207
Descartes, R., 6–7, 9, 11, 12, 25–6,
56, 57, 61, 64, 67, 68, 69, 72, 78–
9, 81, 96, 130, 148, 155, 158,
166, 167, 168, 238, 249–251,
254, 267, 279, 285, 296–7, 315,
318, 321, 324, 325, 328, 329,
330–3, 335, 339, 340–383, 385,
387, 389, 390, 393, 394, 395,
398, 400, 401–2, 404, 410, 411,
412, 414, 415, 416–8, 422, 440,
443, 449, 452, 472
Deussen, P., 141
Dewey, J., 163, 171, 268, 438
Diagoras of Melos, 10
Diderot, D., 14
Dilthey, W., 45, 62, 86, 286
477
Dostoevsky, F., 61, 72, 145–7, 150,
156, 157, 279, 425, 443, 452, 455
Duhem, P.-M., 381
DŸhring, E., 181
Durkheim, E., 31
Engels, F., 87, 98, 99, 110, 129,
133, 153, 163–4, 180–5, 187,
191, 211, 216, 222, 224, 227,
229, 233, 267, 292–3, 472
Epicurus, 171, 212, 231, 412
Epictetus, 303
Evola, J., 466
Eymard, J. d’Angers, 387
Fabro, C., 8–9, 26, 28
Farber, M., 161
Febvre, L., 18–9
Fechner, G. T., 40
Frederick II of Prussia, 203
Fénelon, F., 298, 397
Fessard, G., 3–4, 100, 134, 142,
237, 258, 293, 431, 461
Feuerbach, L., 13, 22, 23, 24, 31,
32, 61, 97, 102–5, 106, 110–3,
115, 141, 159, 171, 178, 181,
186, 191, 196, 199, 222–6, 229,
243, 276, 277, 280, 323, 324, 438
Fichte, J. G., 23, 46, 64, 65, 159,
192, 224, 473
Flam, L., 95–6
Fondane, B., 156
Fontenelle, B., 243
Foucher, L., 328
Freud, S., 20, 306
Galli, G., 41
Garin, E., 159, 163
478 Index of Names
Garin, P., 370
Gassendi, P., 68, 78
Gentile, G., 32, 41, 48, 64, 75, 81,
82, 85, 90, 114, 116–9, 121–3,
154, 156–7, 193, 240, 267, 285,
286, 287, 301, 324, 418, 419,
445, 453, 457, 472–3
Gentile, M., 405
Geulincx, A., 67, 155, 393, 401–5,
418
Geymonat, L., 29, 51, 170, 174, 450
Gilson, ƒt., 54, 66, 332, 335, 370,
373, 395, 434
Gioberti, V., 71, 82, 83, 324, 327,
329, 375, 394, 418–9, 432, 433,
471–2, 473
Giolitti, G., 92–3, 117, 446
Giusso, L., 394, 399
Gobetti, P., 437
Goldmann, L., 68, 72, 83, 84, 86,
139, 141, 143, 144, 159, 161,
167–8, 265–6, 308–319, 323,
334, 335–6, 339–344, 356, 378,
381–3, 388, 392, 416, 435
Gouhier, H., 23, 60, 66, 73, 155, 241,
263, 298, 355, 359, 364, 366, 367,
373, 383–4, 395, 398, 404, 416
Gramsci, A., 20, 28, 116, 159, 193,
267–8, 310, 444, 445
Grotius, H., 408
Grün, K., 202
Guardini, R., 420
Guarini, G., 415
Gueroult, M., 362, 375, 390, 398, 414
Gurvitch, G., 129, 264
Guzzo, A., 14, 15, 32
Halévy, D., 146
Hartmann, E. von, 19, 21, 22, 40, 46
Hartmann, N., 21, 32
Hegel, G. F. W., 11, 13, 14–5, 16–8,
19, 21–2, 23, 25, 28, 37, 41, 45,
46, 47, 60, 61, 62, 64, 68, 78, 85,
87, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96,
103–4, 122, 124, 130, 132, 134–
5, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150, 151–
2, 159, 166, 167, 177–8, 181–2,
185, 191–6, 202, 208, 211–4,
223–5, 227–8, 231–2, 233–4,
239, 258, 267, 270, 277, 278,
287, 288, 290–3, 299, 310, 311–
2, 313, 324, 325, 327, 331, 345,
391, 393, 396, 422, 437–8, 446,
448, 458, 465, 469, 471, 473
Heidegger, M., 4, 18, 19, 25, 26, 28,
61, 71, 75, 79, 82, 106, 113, 139,
141, 143, 156, 158, 252, 283,
284–5, 466, 473
Helvétius, C. A., 20
Herbart, J. F., 468, 469
Hess, M., 202
Hitler, A., 75, 85, 128, 142
Hobbes, T., 92, 399, 412, 413, 414,
420
Høffding, H., 31
Holbach, P. H. d’, 20, 68, 312
Hook, S., 99, 107, 170
Hume, D., 9, 12–3, 331, 343, 379–
380, 382–3, 401, 418
Husserl, E., 57, 79, 106, 113, 149,
239–240, 375
Huxley, A., 188
Hyppolite, J., 60, 292
Izard, G., 174
Jacobi, F. H., 61
James, W., 338
 Index of Names
Janet, P., 421
Jansen, C., 340
Jaspers, K., 79, 106, 107, 141, 395
Jemolo, A. C., 472
John of the Cross, 73
Joachim of Fiore, 56
Julian the Apostate, 425
Juvalta, E., 29–32, 309, 430
Kant, I., 9–13, 20, 33, 36, 37, 41–2,
44, 46, 62, 64, 69, 78–80, 81, 85,
96, 97, 147, 152, 153, 161, 212,
224, 240, 266, 277, 278, 280,
297, 308, 309, 310, 331, 343,
380, 381–3, 391, 404, 410, 416.
Kaufmann, F., 142
Kautsky, K. J., 172, 188–9
Kierkegaard, S., 18, 21–2, 25, 28,
45, 70–2, 75, 85, 105, 106, 113,
115, 139, 145, 150, 154, 155,
156, 157, 160, 168, 169, 211,
322, 438, 452, 462, 473
Klossowski, P., 288, 460
Kojève, A., 291–2
Köstler, A., 188, 228
Koyré, A., 79
Khrushchev, N., 127
Laberthonni re, L., 62, 155, 248–
252, 356, 358, 373
Labriola, A., 184, 186, 469
Lachelier, J., 11
Lacroix, J., 454
Lalande, A., 5, 80
Lamennais, F. R. de, 432, 433, 434
Lamettrie, J., 20, 68
Lana, I., 10
Landsberg, P.-L., 453
Lange, F. A., 20, 67, 286
479
Laporte, J., 7, 9, 10, 12–3, 90, 151,
303, 340–3, 346, 356, 366, 367,
371, 372, 374, 376, 378, 380,
386, 393, 395, 406, 410, 440
Lautréamont, C. de, 460
Lavelle, L., 78–9, 106, 158
Lawrence, D. H., 105
Lefebvre, H., 323
Leibniz, G. W., 38, 61–2, 64, 94,
131, 148, 149, 152, 169, 264,
315, 321, 324–5, 335, 342, 345,
355, 366, 370, 371, 391, 392–4,
400, 417, 422, 435
Lener, S., 30
Lenin, V. I., 23, 84, 85, 97, 9, 101,
107, 109, 118, 119, 122–3, 125,
127, 132–3, 135, 137, 139, 145–
6, 153, 173, 179, 183, 184, 200,
203, 217, 424, 453
Lenoble, R., 322, 333, 355, 395
Leo XIII, 60, 328
Leopardi, G., 38–9
Lequier, J., 8, 26–7, 37, 40, 71, 73,
297, 443
Leroy, M., 265, 293, 352, 395
Le Senne, R., 106
Lessing, G. E., 42, 56, 325
Lewis, G., 340, 366
Liberatore, M., 71, 328
Limentani, L., 29
Locke, J., 5, 92, 238, 331, 333, 351,
420, 431
Lombardi, F., 57, 327
Lombardi, G., 426
Lombardo-Radice, L., 179
Lotze, H., 40, 46, 280
Löwith, K., 22, 47, 56, 86–7, 95–6,
130, 141, 167, 191, 204, 294, 409
Louis Philippe, 91
480 Index of Names
Lukàcs, G., 60, 68, 74, 75, 76, 83,
99, 123, 126, 142, 143, 153, 154,
159, 163, 167, 168, 286, 293, 336.
Luther, M., 142, 148–9, 150, 303,
327, 372
Luxemburg, R., 184
Machiavelli, N., 20, 72, 93–4, 110,
187, 203–4, 257, 283, 287, 347,
350, 354, 399, 412, 445
Maine de Biran, F. P., 23, 71, 297,
298, 376, 382
Mannheim, K., 262
Malebranche, N., 67, 69, 70, 72, 78,
79–81, 94, 152, 155, 166, 221,
296, 297, 315, 322, 325, 329,
331, 335, 340, 343, 344, 346,
347, 351, 352, 354, 356, 357,
367, 374–381, 387–418, 421,
432, 435, 440, 452, 471
Marcel, G., 12, 52–5, 106, 151, 248,
251–2
Marin-Sola, F., 60
Maritain, J., 26, 47, 58, 90, 151,
154, 158, 160, 272–3, 279, 292,
299–300, 328, 356, 420, 422,
431, 433–438, 440, 449, 455,
457, 461, 468, 470–1
Martin, A., see Ambrosius Victor.
Martinetti, P.,
Marx, K., 4, 6, 19–20, 21, 22, 23,
24–5, 27–8, 36, 38, 45, 50, 51,
60, 64, 68, 70, 73, 75, 77, 83–
144, 153, 154, 156–7, 159, 160.
163–4, 168, 169–214, 215–236,
239, 243, 256, 260–271, 273,
274, 276, 280, 283, 286–7, 290–
3, 296, 299, 305, 306, 308–311,
312, 323, 336, 396, 419, 421,
437–8, 445–6, 451, 455–462,
464–5, 470, 472, 473
Masson, M., 298
Matteucci, N., 159
Maurras, C., 118
Mauthner, F., 49–50, 238
Mazzantini, C., 29, 31–2
Mazzini, G., 51, 82, 438, 472
Meinecke, F., 394
Meinvielle, J., 434
Merleau-Ponty, M., 21, 106, 114
Mersenne, M., 322, 355, 373, 380
Méry, M., 277
Mesnard, P., 340
Michelet, J., 296
Migliorini, B., 34
Mises, L. von, 430
Molina, L., 49, 366, 370, 383
Mondolfo, R., 154, 185, 182, 188,
189
Monnerot, J., 87, 107, 108, 109,
138, 242, 446
Montaigne, M., 303, 353, 382–3,
385
Mounier, E., 28, 160–1, 437, 456–7
Mouy, P., 277
Mucchielli, R., 256, 293
Muñoz, A., 141, 238
Mussolini, B., 116–120, 122, 453
Natorp, P., 202
Naudé, G., 242, 412
Naville, P., 312
Newman, J. H., 59
Nicole, P., 317, 357, 369
Nietzsche, F., 4, 6, 8–9, 15, 18, 19,
20, 21, 22, 23–4, 28, 39, 44, 45,
61, 64, 70, 72, 73, 82, 85, 95–6,
98, 102, 107, 123, 124, 139,
 Index of Names 481

140–153, 159, 168, 243, 246, Prini, P., 12

279, 280, 281, 283–5, 336, 455, Proudhon, P. J., 24, 36, 38, 102,
459, 460, 465, 473 247, 273–277, 296
Nigg, W., 56, 294
Nolte, E., 116 Quinet, E., 296

Olgiati, F., 393 Rabelais, F., 18–9

Ollé-Laprune, L., 62, 155 Racine, J. B., 308
Orcibal, J., 387 Rauh, F., 30
Ottaviano, C., 426 Ravà, A., 93
Ravaisson, J.–G.–F., 23
Padovani, U. A., 41, 90 Reding, M., 35
Panzini, A., 34 Reid, T., 331, 332
Paul (Saint), 303 Renouvier, C., 24, 29, 31, 37–40,
Parain, B., 388 61, 71, 277, 278, 424
Pareto, V., 20, 107, 137 Rensi, G., 31, 40, 162
Pareyson, L., 159 Riazanov, D., 181
Pascal, B., 4–5, 10, 12–3, 26, 42, 45, Rimbaud, A., 156
61, 69, 70–3, 75, 78, 79–80, 84, Robespierre, M., 97, 288
115, 140, 141, 144, 148, 150, Robinet, A., 346, 352, 393
151, 155, 158, 166, 167–8, 221, Robinson, L., 405–6
238, 245, 247, 251, 266, 284, Rodano, F., 255, 258, 259, 451, 467
296, 297, 298, 302–5, 308–419, Rosmini, A., 30, 80, 81, 82, 116,
439, 452, 455 322, 329, 343, 387, 404, 418–9,
Patri, A., 27 425, 426, 449, 471
Pelagius, 338, 361 Rosselli, C., 189
Péguy, C., 251, 276 Rossi, P., 129
Pètrement, S., 43 Rousseau, J.-J., 9, 15, 19–20, 36, 38,
Pieper, J., 244 64, 104, 197, 246–7, 280, 288,
Piettre, A., 102 295–8, 338, 352, 382, 425
Pintard, R., 355, 395, 401 Rousselot, P., 421
Piovani, P., 30, 425, 452 Rubel, M., 103, 202
Plato, 6, 74, 344, 347, 398 Ruge, A., 104
Plekhanov, G., 20, 182, 312 Russell, B., 325
Plotinus, 338 Russier, J., 12, 302, 340, 346, 369,
Podach, E. F., 8 380, 386, 388
Polin, R., 5, 420
Prat, L., 39 Sade, A. F. de, 20, 77, 241, 288,
Preti, G., 171 306, 460–1
482 Index of Names
Saint-Cyran, J. Duvergier
d’Hauranne, abbé de, 371
Sainte-Beuve, C. A., 141, 347
Saint-Martin, L. C. de, 61
Saint-Simon, C. H. de, 60–1, 263
Saisset, E., 381
Salvemini, G., 116
Sartre, J.-P., 21, 25–8, 83, 106, 114–
5, 279, 332, 345, 438, 467
Schaff, A., 27
Scheler, M., 32, 41, 61, 98, 141,
161, 280, 391, 453
Schelling, F. W. J., 12, 46, 61, 75,
85, 145, 146, 331
Schleiermacher, F., 46
Schmitt, C., 58, 240, 328, 434
Schopenhauer, A., 5, 14, 17, 19,
21–2, 28, 38–9, 44–6, 61, 64, 85,
95, 141, 144, 147, 194, 473
Schrecker, P., 375
Sciacca, M. F., 42, 150, 385, 387
Seneca, 305
Shestov, L., 25, 74, 98, 139, 145–
156, 332, 391, 462
Siegmund, G., 50
Socrates, 65, 147, 207, 305, 404
Solari, G., 42, 414
Solovev, V., 61, 145, 146
Sorel, G., 90, 111, 133, 189, 445, 452
Spaventa, B., 15, 20, 117, 193, 473
Spencer, H., 22, 239–240
Spengler, O., 279, 285
Spini, G., 14
Spinoza, B., 13, 14, 15–6, 17, 19,
20, 42, 44–5, 46, 65, 78, 87, 90,
93, 149, 151, 192, 267, 315, 332,
333, 335, 338, 342, 345, 355,
357, 392, 412, 416, 422, 443
Spir, A., 19, 22, 40, 46, 146, 155
Spirito, U., 34, 41, 48, 156, 157,
203, 405
Stalin, J., 85, 107, 109, 110, 124–7,
137, 138, 139, 142, 183, 216
Stirner, M., 21, 23–5, 105, 113, 150,
461, 462
Strauss, L., 29
Suarez, F., 49, 383
Taine, J., 79, 294, 352
Talleyrand, C. M., 91
Taparelli d’Azeglio, L., 30
Tarozzi, G., 381
Teilhard de Chardin, P., 33, 439–
440, 455, 457
Tertullian, 150
Thiers, A., 275
Thomas Aquinas (Saint), 7, 30, 71,
112, 144, 282, 338, 347, 370,
424, 432, 433, 436, 438, 439,
440, 458, 470
Tilgher, A., 38, 40, 265
Toffanin, G., 56, 383
Toynbee, A, 468
Treitschke, H. von, 445
Tresmontant, C., 30, 239
Trotsky, L., 107, 125–7, 137, 138,
183
Varisco, B., 41, 156
Vartanian, A., 68, 312, 359
Vernière, P., 14
Viano, C. A., 351
Vico, G. B., 41, 56, 67, 69, 72, 79,
81, 90–1, 96, 158, 166–8, 170,
285–6, 310, 321, 324–5, 329,
335, 343, 344, 346, 384, 392–
401, 404–418, 432, 433, 449,
452, 469–470, 472.
 Index of Names 483

Vleeschauwer, H. J. de, 404 Weil, S., 307

Voegelin, E., 5 Wetter, G., 451, 462
Volpe, G., 117 Wolf, C., 382–3
Voltaire, F. M., 4, 274, 278, 298
Vorländer, K., 154, 187, 190, 202 Zenkovsky, B., 145
Zuccante, G., 421
Wahl, J., 156, 210
Weber, M., 86, 129, 286