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Augusto Del Noce is the most important thinker we don’t know. Del Noce viewed The Problem of Atheism, his essay collection that will be made available in English early next year, as the cornerstone of his scholarship.
Augusto Del Noce, who died in 1989, ranked as one of Italy’s leading public intellectuals. His seminal text, Il problema dell’ateismo (“The Problem of Atheism”), first published in 1964, has never gone out of print in his homeland. A committed Catholic and distinguished philosopher, he flirted with Communism as a counterweight to his nation’s fascism in the years before the Second World War. The love affair didn’t last. Instead, he spent his postwar career deconstructing Marxism and diagnosing, with exceptional skill, its toxic effects. Yet his thought was largely unknown outside Europe. A decade ago, English speakers versed in the work of Del Noce numbered in the few dozens.
That began to change in 2015 with Carlo Lancellotti’s excellent translation of The Crisis of Modernity. Lancellotti followed it in 2017 with Del Noce’s The Age of Secularization. Both books are collections of work dating from the late 1960s to the late ’80s. The essays “Violence and Modern Gnosticism” and “The Ascendance of Eroticism,” collected here; along with “Technological Civilization and Christianity” and “On Catholic Progressivism,” collected here, are models of superb cultural criticism. Over the past six years, Del Noce’s thought has gone on to influence the work of Carl Trueman, Patrick Deneen, Charles Chaput, Rod Dreher, and many others.
Continued below.
Augusto Del Noce and The Problem of Atheism - Public Discourse
Augusto Del Noce, who died in 1989, ranked as one of Italy’s leading public intellectuals. His seminal text, Il problema dell’ateismo (“The Problem of Atheism”), first published in 1964, has never gone out of print in his homeland. A committed Catholic and distinguished philosopher, he flirted with Communism as a counterweight to his nation’s fascism in the years before the Second World War. The love affair didn’t last. Instead, he spent his postwar career deconstructing Marxism and diagnosing, with exceptional skill, its toxic effects. Yet his thought was largely unknown outside Europe. A decade ago, English speakers versed in the work of Del Noce numbered in the few dozens.
That began to change in 2015 with Carlo Lancellotti’s excellent translation of The Crisis of Modernity. Lancellotti followed it in 2017 with Del Noce’s The Age of Secularization. Both books are collections of work dating from the late 1960s to the late ’80s. The essays “Violence and Modern Gnosticism” and “The Ascendance of Eroticism,” collected here; along with “Technological Civilization and Christianity” and “On Catholic Progressivism,” collected here, are models of superb cultural criticism. Over the past six years, Del Noce’s thought has gone on to influence the work of Carl Trueman, Patrick Deneen, Charles Chaput, Rod Dreher, and many others.
Continued below.
Augusto Del Noce and The Problem of Atheism - Public Discourse
