Night Without Sleep-Jeffers
The world’s as the world is; the nations rearm and prepare to change; the age of tyrants returns;
The greatest civilization that has ever existed builds itself higher towers on breaking foundations.
Recurrent episodes; they were determined when the ape’s children first ran in packs, chipped flint to an edge.
I lie and hear dark rain beat the roof, and the blind wind.
In the morning
perhaps I shall find strength again
To value the immense beauty of this time of the world, the flowers of decay their pitiful loveliness, the fever-dream
Tapestries that back the drama and are called the future. This ebb of vitality feels the ignoble and cruel
Incidents, not the vast abstract order.
I lie and hear dark rain beat the roof, and the night-blind wind.
In the Ventana country darkness and rain and the roar of waters fill the deep mountain—throats.
The creekside shelf of sand where we lay last August under a slip of stars
And firelight played on the leaning gorge-walls, is drowned and lost. The deer of the country huddle on a ridge
In a close herd under madrone—trees; they tremble when a rock-slide goes down, they open great darkness—
Drinking eyes and press closer.
Cataracts of rock
Rain down the mountain from cliff to cliff and torment the stream-bed. The stream deals with them. The laurels are wounded,
Redwoods go down with their earth and lie thwart the gorge. I hear the torrent boulders battering each other,
I feel the flesh of the mountain move on its bones in the wet darkness.
Is this more beautiful
Than man’s disasters? These wounds will heal in their time; so will humanity’s. This is more beautiful....at night....
Within Western Christianity there has become weakened the faith in man, in his creative power, in his aspect in the world. In the social-political movements prevail principles of coercion and authority, with a diminishing of the freedom of man -- in Communism, in Fascism, in National Socialism there triumphs a new victory of materialism both economic and racial. Man as it were has grown tired of spiritual freedom and is prepared to renounce it in the name of power, with which to order his life, both inward and outward. Man has grown tired of himself, of man, has lost the confidence in man and wants to leap off to the supra-human, even though this supra-human be a social collective. Many of the old idols have been toppled in our time, but many new idols have likewise been created. Man is so constituted, that he can live either with a faith in God, or with a faith in ideals and idols. In essence, man cannot consistently and ultimately be an atheist. Having fallen away from the faith in God, he falls into idolatry. We can see the idol-worship and the fashioning of idols within every sphere -- in science, in art, in statecraft, and in national and social life. And thus, for example, Communism is an extreme form of social idolatry.
http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1932_377.html
Del Noce now, in Voegelin’s footsteps, considers modernity as the secularization of the Gnosis, and not, as in Löwith’s philosophy, as the secularization of Christianity. Secularization is equivalent to gnosis, and as such cannot apply to Christianity. Secularization is not the transposition of religious content from Heaven to Earth but the transformation of Christianity into something different, into Gnosis, into a Gnostic model of Redemption/Salvation completely un-related to Christianity. Del Noce now accepts the concept of secularization but in the connotation given to it by Voegelin (secularization-modernity as Gnosis). It is now clear to Del Noce that Löwith was still prisoner of the spirit of modernity, limiting himself to unraveling the theological remains that lies at the basis of the philosophy of histories. Del Noce now prefers Voegelin’s analytical methodology—an analysis of the history of lived (historical) experiences rather than a pure history of ideas. Del Noce writes:
“Having encountered the concept of Gnosis, we now encounter the concept of secularization, and perhaps we are then on the right track trying to pin down its exact meaning. I propose that this term, so diffused today, is meaningful when linked to Gnosis, and not to Christianity.” (Del Noce, 1980: 208, our translation)
In other words, inspired by Voegelin, Del Noce realizes that the essential aspect shared by the various philosophies of history (Hegelianism, Marxism, and the like) is not a residual transcendence they keep in a nutshell; it is rather a drive which dates back to Joachim of Flora, a push and a force that animates English Puritanism and fully materializes with the Enlightenment: a Gnostic revolt that entrusts man with the endeavor of redemption and that appeals to the masses in the subversion of traditional order.
The interrelated terms secularization-Gnosis appeared to Del Noce as the best definition of Marxism (even in its Gramscian-Italian variant[10]) and the Marxist creed of the revolution as a passage to a higher realm. After a few decades of efforts to understand and define Marxism and modern atheism, in Secolarizzazione e crisi della modernità [‘Secularization and Crisis of Modernity’] Del Noce very confidently claims:
“In this vein, the term secularization is the most adequate in the context of the various discourses on Messianism, Millenarianism, Prophetism of Marxism, or the unconscious presence of Jewish religious archetypes in the soul of Marx—discourses that have in fact hindered a correct understanding of Marxism. This Messianism, this Prophetism, is certainly present in Marx, but only in the context of a novelty that could be defined as secularization of religion. The idea of the convenient priority in Marxism of the term secularization includes also what is right in the interpretation of Marxism as a new Gnosticism.” (Del Noce, 1989: 14-5,)
Drawing on Voegelin, Del Noce advanced the idea that atheism is not (or not only) the eventual outcome of modern rationalism (the French-German line), but the consequence of the “gnosis” that is tantamount to secularization; a gnosis that, moreover, is based on the theology of Joachim of Flora. In a 1968 conference, on Contestazione e valori, Del Noce said:
“Voegelin has with exemplary efficacy demonstrated the neo-Gnostic character of the idea of modernity, as dependant on that Joachimite vision of history that progressively replaced the opposite Augustinian view; and which during the last centuries has become so undisputed as to directly permeate religious thought itself – as in modernism, or, turned upside down, in reactionary thought. Voegelin has disclosed the character of a practical choice that grounds the substance of the immanentization of the Christian eschaton.” (Del Noce, 1969: 119, translation)