“A few days ago, I happened to read for the first time with open eyes book XII, De Scientia et Sapientia, of St Augustine’s De Trinitate. I will confess my shock and my surprise: I found in the pages written by this saint, so distant from the spatial and temporal coordinates of our age, the most perfect description of the age in which we are living. I don’t think it is naive or paradoxical at all to say that the many books about the crisis that have piled up, from Spengler to the present, lead us back to read this Augustinian text.

“I said at the start that I did not intend to discuss the concepts of traditionalism and progressivism in the abstract, but in the sense that they take today, inserted in the current historical context. Now, after we have examined the progressive view of tradition, De Trinitate offers us the criterion to look at the present situation from the standpoint of traditional values. What traditionalism may have meant in other epochs is a question that I am not going to consider now. Instead, what I am saying is that we have to look at book XII of De Trinitate to find the most precise definition of what it means today to recover tradition. What does St Augustine say? He distinguishes between the exterior man, who essentially is the subject of the human sciences, and the interior man, who is in contact with the eternal truths, which direct judgment and action. Left to its own devices, thought would just turn to seek the intelligible realities, pure contemplation. We have here the meaning of the primacy of contemplation, which is the core thesis of traditional thought. And let progressives feel free to understand traditionalism as exterior transmission of pre-cooked formulas and behaviors dictated by mere conformism. Why be polemical, after all? A characteristic of progressivism is that it cannot account for history, and this to the precise extent that it claims to speak in history’s name. 

“According to St Augustine, thought left to itself would just turn to seek the intelligible realities, pure contemplation. But, on the other hand, the human soul is made to rule the body, and thus to live and act, and man in his earthly state finds himself directed towards ends that are not those of contemplation. Thus, reason, which per se is one, has two functions, and therefore two virtues, the active and the contemplative, Rachel and Leah, Martha and Mary. The pragmatic function of science was not unknown to St Augustine. But it is important to observe something else: higher and lower reason are just functions of the same reason. Forgetting this leads to the sanction of slavery, more or less hidden. These Augustinian passages would immediately lose meaning if they were used to embellish a colonial system, and unfortunately they have been used to that effect. Hence the diffidence that we see today — so common even among Catholics — against the term contemplation, almost as if it were the ideological basis for the distinction between freemen and slaves. It shows how much the habits of sociologistic thought have penetrated the common opinion. Let us just say that ‘primacy of contemplation’ means that there is a necessary, unchangeable, eternal truth shared by all spirits, superior to man and guiding his action. As such, it is the basis not for separation among social classes, but rather for spiritual unity.

“Two necessary functions for man. But man faces a choice regarding their hierarchic relationship. He can opt for the primacy of wisdom, for contemplation, for the divine ideas according to which he judges everything, and to which he submits himself in order to judge everything else by their standard. He can opt for lower reason, for sensible things, for domination above them, for exploitation of them, and this is the option for the primacy of science. Hence, the difference between science and wisdom depends on the nature of their objects. The object of wisdom is such that, because of its very intelligibility, any bad use is impossible; that of science is such that, because of its very materiality, it is constantly exposed to the danger of being prey to what St Augustine calls avaritia and cupiditas, giving these words roughly the same meaning. Indeed, science can be used well or badly. It can be subordinated to wisdom, or it can be subordinated to cupiditas. Let us translate this in modern terms: it is the question that judgments of value cannot be derived from the judgments of fact at which science has to stop. It is completely delusional to regard science as the rising value, for the simple reason that science cannot give values. ‘Now, science, any science, establishes relationships, does not give values. Relationships may well lead us to give value to some object, if they establish the conditional and causal dependence of a value from what becomes in turn a mediated value, precisely because of this connection. But the proton axion must be already given, posited, recognized as value in order to make possible any axiological judgment about what is in relationship with it.’ Who said these words? An Italian moral philosopher from a now-remote generation, of great value and yet not well known, Erminio Juvalta. He was close to positivism and initially keen on affirming a form of morality completely autonomous from metaphysics and from religion; and yet, he moved away from positivism exactly because of the affirmation that judgments of value are absolutely not derivable from science.

“But in this book St Augustine describes also the characteristics of the option to subordinate wisdom to science. So, it is not surprising that, in order to describe the dynamic by which the spirit gets attached to things to treat them as its end, he resorts to scripture, and that in this book philosophy and theology meet, and meet precisely in the discussion of original sin. The disposition by which the spirit gets attached to things to treat them as its end is the essence of cupiditas, and cupiditas is the opposite of charitas. Subordinating wisdom to science leads to the use of the whole for the sake of the individual; the domination of pure science, of science not subordinated to wisdom, leads to the pure anarchism that has been identified as one feature of today’s situation.

“Thus, the historical situation characterized by the primacy of science is perfectly predicted by St Augustine. It is a possible situation, but it cannot be interpreted as the rise of new ideals. Rather, it defines the sunset of ideals that is being demonstrated by the current process of dehumanization and that St Augustine describes as the victory of cupiditas over charitas. It is because a historical-political judgment branded the traditional ideals as dis-values that the idol of science established itself, bringing along its twin, the idol of progress. At most, one can reflect about science’s power as divertissement, in the sense that today its progress distracts from the pessimistic reflection that would be prompted by the negativist side of today’s millennialism.”

— from Augusto Del Noce, The Age of Secularization (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), translated by Carlo Lancellotti.

Related reading and listening

Tags: