Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 02:2 (Fall 2020)
Article: The Most Important Philosopher Of Whom You Have (Probably) Never Heard
Author: Carl R. Trueman

Eikon 2.2 (Fall 2020) p. 56

The Most Important Philosopher
Of Whom You Have (Probably) Never Heard

Carl Trueman

Carl Trueman is Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College.

While he is little known among Protestant Christians, the Italian Catholic philosopher Augusto Del Noce was one of the most perceptive late-twentieth-century critics of both secularism and the sexual revolution. Indeed, his most important work is arguably that which drew an intimate and necessary connection between these two phenomena: the abolition of Christianity as a dominant cultural force and the transformation of sexual morality. While one may question whether the idea of Christianity as a dominant cultural force was an unmitigated good, given the way Christendom could often be little more than worldly concerns expressed in a religious idiom, the current contested status of religious freedom certainly points to the problematic political consequences of its rapid decline.

Del Noce’s basic thesis is that in the twentieth century the political left came to see the dismantling of traditional sexual codes as the means by which Christianity could be destroyed. Of course, sexual morality and religion were not novel targets of social radicals. The demolition of the normative status of lifelong, monogamous marriage was something that William Godwin, among others, had attacked in the early nineteenth century. Human freedom consisted, in large part, of sexual freedom. Marx assumed the validity of Feuerbach’s materialist critique of religion as alienation and drew the political conclusion that demolition of the illusions of religion was thus a vital part of preparing the proletariat for revolution. What Del Noce saw was that the left had brought these two ideas together in a potent way that

Eikon 2.2 (Fall 2020) p. 57

meant the sexual revolution of the sixties and beyond was both deeply political and deeply anti-Christian not only in its effects, but also in its intentions.

Del Noce saw two key moves facilitating this, both connected to the rise of the New Left. First, the New Left reconceptualized oppression as something with a significant, even central, psychological component. While the traditional Left had regarded oppression as essentially economic, certain Marxists in the 1930s had drawn on Freud’s anthropology to move oppression into the realm of psychology. Second, again drawing on Freud, these thinkers had sexualized psychology and thus made oppression something that was intimately connected to sexual codes.

Del Noce presented his argument most pungently in a 1970 essay, “The Ascendance of Eroticism.” Here he identified Wilhelm Reich as the key intellectual progenitor of the modern philosophy of poli...