Nations are mortal. They live and they die. And the United States — as recent mounting crises suggest — is no exception. To weather these storms, Americans need the wisdom and perspective provided by Holy Scripture and by true, Christian philosophy.
The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is a critically important figure in the Western intellectual tradition. He was a true, Christian philosopher who explained, in deep ways, how history is God's providence and how the human mind, to become truly educated, must be cultivated in proper order through the liberal arts and sciences.
An autodidact schooled by tutors under parental influence, Vico taught for over 40 years as professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples. A passionate apologist for classical antiquity and for the Renaissance humanities, Vico was a sharp and deep and prophetic critic of the rationalistic "Enlightenment" of his day. A foundational metaphysician of true or Christian conservatism, Vico influenced David Hume (1711-1776) and Edmund Burke (1729-1797) and other politically conservative luminaries.
A commoner, and the son of a Naples bookseller, young Giovan, around age seven, fell headfirst from a high ladder and fractured his skull. Motionless and unconscious for "a good five hours", the prognosis was death, or a life of idiocy. In his autobiography — a work that, following Augustine's Confession, pioneered that genre — Vico declared how, by God's grace, neither prediction came true.
Despite a large tumor and much blood loss from many lancings, Vico recovered, but, as he put it, "grew up with a melancholy and irritable temperament such as belongs to men of ingenuity and depth, who, thanks to the one, are quick as lightning in perception, and thanks to the other, take no pleasure in verbal cleverness or falsehood."
An imaginative and highly original genius -- a prober of deep historical and metaphysical and moral and political causes-- Vico has been called, for good reasons, the founder of philosophy of history and of cultural anthropology. But still, even into the 21st Century, for myriad and striking and telling reasons, Vico --as thinker and writer and philosopher and man --has not been adequately understood and characterized and appreciated.
++++++++++++++++++
Vico scholars since the so-called Enlightenment, which Vico rejected in its Cartesian and atheistic "rationalist" fundamentals, have secularized or de-Christianized Vico's thought, both unwittingly and wittingly. Swayed by the very same false-philosophical notions and atheist spirit of that "Enlightenment" that Vico had warned about, these scholars have failed hereto-- ultimately by personal, spiritual disinclination -- to see and to duly emphasize how history, understood as Divine Providence, is the central theme of Vico's wide-ranging and manifold and ultimately comprehensive philosophical thought.
Descrying by great insight, in its early days, the baleful historical trajectory of his own time, Vico was, as his given name prefigures, a lone Christian philosophical voice crying out in an "Enlightenment" philosophe wilderness.
Vico foresaw how, by certain laws of history, atheist philosophes — not real or true philosophers — would soon rail and foment rebellion against God and Church. Voltaire (1694-1778), for example, would say, hopefully: "Another century and there will not be a Bible on earth"; and "If we would destroy the Christian religion, we must first of all destroy man's belief in the Bible." Voltaire's comrade-in-arms, Denis Diderot (1713-1784), co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the secular-atheist Encyclopedie, with black tone and bloody heart, urged atheist-on-Christian murder, saying: "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
Vico, as Christian philosopher of history, foresaw -- as far as finite man has -- both these evil words evincing what he called "the barbarism of reflection", and the bloody, mass-murderous deeds to follow, culminating first in the Jacobin guillotine and then in the Communist, anti-Christ holocausts of the 20th Century.
And sadly, while Vico's ideas have suffered neglect and inattention and uncomprehending distortion from purported scholars and from others who profess learning, his motives — and his character itself—have been impugned.
Some unbelieving scholars, anxious to appropriate Vico's ideas for their own purposes, have suggested that Christian elements in Vico's writings are merely a sop to avoid Inquisitorial persecution, or mere window dressing that covers essentially neutral or non-Christian ideas. But such claims are palpably false and tendentious; and indeed quickly melt away at any open and honest reading of Vico himself.
One example, among a great many, that illustrates Vico's personal faith and admiration of the Christian religion, is found in his autobiography, where he criticizes his favorite philosopher among the ancients, Plato (d.348 BC), who, by the pre-Incarnation timing of his life, "... was shut off from [a truer conception of the ideal republic] by [his] ignorance of the fall of the first man [Adam]." Such statements, expressed as matter of fact, and seamlessly interwoven with tangential elements, are incontrovertible.
And in truth, all of Vico's references and allusions, as expressed in his writings, to both his personal Christian faith and to his conception of the role of the Christian religion in history, are, in their obvious sincerity, beyond question. Only corrupt and misguided and malicious wits, motivated by the hermeneutics of suspicion —a vicious mode of criticism Vico himself foresaw and refuted --would, upon actually reading Giovan, conclude otherwise.
Indeed, as if to anticipate and confute future atheist detractors, all of Vico's references to Christianity, direct or indirect, are tightly interwoven with and thematically inseparable from the surrounding "non-Christian" elements of his thoughts, on the most disparate range of subjects, where Providence, being always present and in operation, is being discussed by him without more direct and express reference to its All-Wise Author.
But again, consider the charge against Vico of sopping and bowing to Catholic authorities.
In Naples, in Vico's time, Spanish and then Austrian Habsburgs ruled. Efforts to establish the Spanish Inquisition in that city two hundred years prior, in 1517, in the year of Luther's 95 theses, had failed. Although a non-Spanish Inquisition was active in Italy into the 19th Century, through and beyond Vico's life, no hint of servile obeisance or of pro forma signaling to Papal authorities and censors can be found in Vico's writings. Moreover, a fearful panderer under powerful Catholic political and ecclesiastical authorities would likely pander in specifically and expressly Catholic terms, and not speak — as Vico does, and as we will see below -- only more generally and more generously of Christian Europe, which includes, of course, the hated Protestant north.
++++++++++++++++++
It is with Christian thinkers as with bombardiers: the flak is always heaviest over the target. So, among thinkers, those who expound, with greatest clarity and power, those Godly and true and unpopular ideas most needful because most destructive to error and evil, will receive the hottest blasts and the coldest neglect, in this earthly life, from Satan and his minions, who are bent on destroying all humanity by deception.
Ask Augustine, or Calvin, or Calhoun —those masterful and courageous expositors of unpopular truths. And Vico too is one such thinker; profound, and rich in wise offerings, but passed over and neglected — yet still available and still a great blessing, by his writings, to future generations.
For what is quite clear and pronounced in Vico's works is a warm and clear and authentic and wonder-filled appreciation of God's Providence by a man of cosmopolitan Christian faith, focused wisely on revealed essentials, that transcends the Catholic-Reformed divide. And ironically, the slanderous and self-serving secularist charge against Vico, of being a mere cowardly pretender of faith, is itself accounted for and explained by Vico the philosopher in his account of moral decline in polities.
In fact, as demonstrated below by ample and apt quotation, Vico's personal Christian faith -- of uncommon, philosophical, and Augustinian depth -- drives and animates his writing while the Providence of the one and only true (Triune) God, in its fascinating natural laws and complex, interwoven operations, forms the central theme of all Vico's philosophy.
Vico was a profoundly Christian and therefore profoundly anti-secular and counter-"Enlightenment" thinker. And yet, due to the baleful social and intellectual trajectory of his time, Vico himself, in the legacy of his ideas -- in a development Vico himself foresaw -- became a victim of that secular, anti-Christian trajectory.
Vico's ill-treatment by post-Enlightenment scholars is a re-enactment of the Herodian beheading of his namesake prophet of Christ. Failure to grasp Divine Providence as the central theme of Vico's thought, as its explanatory sine qua non, is an ideational decapitation of his seminal and profound contributions to Western intellectual discourse.
++++++++++++++
Etymology tells us that "providence", from the Latin pro + video, means "to see out in front of." "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet", as the Psalm (119:105) goes. The idea is that, for those who believe, and who have been predestined or given to believe, all needful provision, material and spiritual, is made by the Lord (Romans 8:28).
In his principal work, Scienza Nuova (New Science 1725), Vico describes the universal providential natural laws, rooted in human nature, by which the nations of the world rise, progress, mature, decay, and dissolve. By these laws, he explains the development, acme, and decay of all nations, regardless of time or place, and the challenges of human existence and flourishing to their human participants.
To illustrate, we begin with Vico's soaring description of a happier time, and then conclude with his profoundly chilling description of the darkest times in the history of earthly life, relating this latter account to our present realities and struggles in early 21st Century America.
+++++++++++++++
In the New Science, Vico surveys the ancient world and the modern world of nations in the light of the providential laws or principles he has discovered. Pointing out God's providences in antiquity, Vico says:
"When, working in superhuman ways, God had revealed and confirmed the truth of the Christian religion by opposing the virtue of the martyrs to the power of Rome, and the teaching of the Fathers, together with the miracles, to the vain wisdom of Greece, and when armed nations [of pagan barbarians] were about to rise on every hand destined to combat the true divinity of its Founder, he permitted a new order of humanity [European Christendom] to be born among the nations in order that [the true religion] might be firmly established according to the natural course of human institutions themselves."
Then, passing from antiquity to modernity, Vico empathetically but critically discusses the Czar of Muscovy, the Khan of Tartary, China, Japan and other nations, and then turns to describe, with steadfast objectivity, yet in terms unmistakably affectionate and Christian, his beloved homeland, Christian Europe of yesteryear. He says:
"But Christian Europe [of 1725] is everywhere radiant with such humanity that it abounds in all the good things that make for the happiness of human life, ministering to the comforts of the body as well as to the pleasures of mind and spirit. And all of this in virtue of the Christian religion, which teaches truths so sublime that it receives into its service the most learned philosophies of the gentiles [the Platonic, Pythagorean, and Aristotelian] and cultivates three languages as its own: Hebrew, the most ancient in the world; Greek, the most delicate; and Latin, the grandest. Thus, even for human ends, the Christian religion is the best in the world, because it unites a wisdom of [revealed] authority with that of reason, basing the latter on the choicest doctrine of the philosophers [Platonism] and the most cultivated erudition of the philologists."
In morals and politics, too, Europe, because Christian, was at a high point around 1725. So, while pagan despotism ruled, at that time, over much of the globe, "... in Europe, where the Christian religion is everywhere professed, inculcating an infinitely pure and perfect idea of God and commanding charity to all mankind, there are great monarchies most humane in their customs."
But from this radiant scene, arguably the happiest in earthly historical experience since the Fall, we now turn to Vico's profound and pioneering moral philosophical account of earthly civilizational decline by dark human and cosmic forces.
+++++++++++++++++++
For Vico, social and civilizational decay and dissolution are inextricably connected to sin and to personal moral and spiritual corruption. The relationship between the individual and the social is dialectical and quite complex. When polities, due to more extensive internal corruption, are incapable, by the deficient will and mind of their participants, to reform themselves, external forces come into play. In such cases:
"... if providence does not find a remedy within [the polity], it seeks it outside. And since people so far corrupted have already become naturally slaves of their unrestrained passions —of luxury, effeminacy, avarice, envy, pride, and vanity —and in pursuit of the pleasures of their dissolute life are falling back into all the vices characteristic of the most abject slaves (having become liars, tricksters, calumniators, thieves, cowards, and pretenders), providence decrees that they become slaves by the natural law of the gentes [families] which springs from this nature of nations, and that they become subject to better nations, which, having conquered them by arms, preserve them as subject provinces. Herein, two great lights of natural order shine forth. First, that he who cannot govern himself must let himself be governed by another who can. Second, that the world is always governed by those who are naturally fittest."
But what becomes of a people, incurably corrupt, but geographically remote from a would-be conqueror? What becomes of a nation, for example, like the United States of America of the early 21st Century, a nation that has run its full moral-historical course, from being oppressed colonies of the virtuous to being an oppressive empire of the vicious?
Note ye well, American reader, Vico's wise and prophetic answer:
"[For] if the people are rotting in that ultimate civil disease and cannot agree on a monarch from within, and are not conquered and preserved by better nations from without, then providence for their extreme ill has its extreme remedy at hand. For such peoples. like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure."
Here Vico echoes Plato's description, in the Republic, of the uber-sensitive and uber-envious because uber-sinful atheist egalitarian levelers of mass tyrannical democracies. These ancient miscreants were forerunners, of course, of our profoundly perverse and easily offended psychopath-sociopath liberals of today, who are politically correct and woke. He warns: "... if religion is lost among the peoples, they have nothing left to enable them to live in society: no shield of defense, nor means of counsel, nor basis of support, nor even a form by which they may exist in the world at all."
So a people, ridden with ultimate civil disease, cease being a people. And, as disconnected, deracinated, alienated, and spiritually isolated atomistic individuals, they nearly cease, in their reprobate corruption and evil, being recognizably human, or image-bearers of God:
"Thus, no matter how great the throng and press of their bodies, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or caprice. By reason of all this, providence decrees that, through obstinate factions and desperate civil wars, they shall turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of men. In this way, through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first men had been made by the barbarism of sense. For the latter displayed a generous savagery, against which one could defend oneself or take flight or be on one's guard; but the former, with a base savagery, under soft words and embraces, plots against the life and fortune of friends and intimates. Hence peoples who have reached this point of premeditated malice, when they receive this last remedy of providence and are thereby stunned and brutalized, are sensible no longer of comforts, delicacies, pleasures, and pomp, but only of the sheer necessities."
So now, in Vico's words, we see ourselves. And when, after this cataclysmic social dissolution, the dust settles and the smoke clears, what then? Well then, perhaps, in Vico's next words, we see our destiny:
"... the few survivors in the midst of an abundance of the things necessary for life naturally become sociable and, returning to the primitive simplicity of the first world of peoples, are again religious, truthful, and faithful. Thus [God, in His] providence brings back among them the piety, faith, and truth which are the natural foundations of justice as well as the graces and beauties of the eternal order of God."
------------------------
Winston McCuen is a metaphysician and political philosopher and Christian apologist. He is a Reformed believer, native South Carolinian, proud son of the Confederacy, and outspoken Southern patriot. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in philosophy from Emory University, is a John C. Calhoun scholar, and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Furman University in history and philosophy. Formerly a welding instructor, philosophy instructor and Latin teacher, he holds multiple welding certifications and is a senior certified nuclear metallurgical welding engineer.
