Let us move on to the contemplative aspect of Vico’s ‘New Science’: “the reader will experience in his mortal body a divine pleasure as he contemplates 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”. 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 according to Malebranche.
This extremely similar union of aesthetic emotion, 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” – [...] manifests the kinship of the two systems.
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With regard to Nazism I think that we should emphasize not so much the relationship with Fascism – of which it is said to be an extreme form, which is a rather vague analysis – as much as the relationship that ties it to Communism as its 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘤𝘵 𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘦.
I mean that we should focus on the fact that Nazism reproduces, in reverse but with perfect symmetry, the characteristics of Communism at the stage when it reaches its unintended outcome.
It reflects the defeat of Marxism in its aspect of promising a revolution that could only take place worldwide (with Stalinism and socialism in one country).
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 Stalin 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, depending 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.
A transposition of totalitarianism from “physical” to “moral” … would be achieved through the prevalence of coercion over consent, obtained through discrimination against questions, prohibiting those that the interpreters of ideology … define as “reactionary”.
Or rather, through the creation, which is arranged through the domination of culture and education, of a new “common sense”, in which traditional metaphysical questions no longer resurface.
It is with regard to Gramsci that we can understand in all its depth the apparently very simple formula through which Voegelin defined totalitarianism: “the prohibition of asking questions” (and in fact, “ideological” thought asks that questions about its “truth” not be posed).
The primary theme that characterizes rationalism must be identified in the rejection of the biblical notion of sin. …
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. …
The texts by Spinoza are equally well known: original sin is simply erased altogether ….
Scripture … is 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.
Consider the internal evolution of Communism and its character: 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 is not true at all that he was a demonic and grotesque character as he is often clumsily ridiculed today, as if he understood Communism in a Nazi way.
Setting aside all moral judgments, he was, 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.
The ideal of Christian politics must, in my opinion, be seen as an eternal (in the sense of never exhausted; the Christian is always fighting) restoration of principles (not to be confused with the “restoration of facts” proper to reaction) in their eternal character; …
… as a dissociation of the eternal principles from their historical realization, which are always relative to a given historical problem and in this way inadequate; that is, as an affirmation of the transcendence of principles, of their eternity, …
… so that they are not exhausted by [the way they were realized in particular] historical situations, but contain an indefinite virtual possibility of [being] “new”. The Christian’s “fidelity” thus takes on a new meaning; …