Romeosy ne My ths and Memes Mo nograp h Series, N o .

GIAMBATTISTA VICO
ON GOD, HISTORY AND
GENEALOGY

JAMES L. KELLEY

Romani ty Press
Norman, O K
Cover image: Jupiter Embracing Cupid (ca. 1570-20) by
Marcantonio Raimondi, engraving after a fresco by Raphael.
New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Copyright @2018 by James L. Kelley

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Romanity Press, Inc., Norman, OK, United States of
America, in 2018.

© 2018 Romanity Press

ISBN 958-88-7642-482-7
 Few outside the academy know the name
Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), though he is pos-
sibly the greatest Italian philosopher of his time,
and is arguably one of the greatest philosophical
minds to ever hail from Italy. Before the middle of
the last century, Vico was most commonly viewed
either as a proto-Marxist (the Vico of the left), or as
a "Counter-Enlightenment" anti-Cartesian (the Vico
of the right).1 The truth, I contend, lies somewhere
between these extremes: Vico is a third-option
thinker who speaks to modernity precisely because
he cannot be forced into our neat binaries of left/
right or progressive/reactionary. Accordingly, the
present writing finds in Vico a political moderate
who was influenced by the more holistic, open-end-
ed Roman Catholic culture of his Neopolitan milieu
to reject some of the dead ends of Thomism in his
theory of divine/human justice. In this sense, the
key to Vico's political moderation might rest in his
theological commitments.
Our point of entry will be an insightful book
by Mark Lilla that anchors Vico's sociopolitical
vision in his theology, or, to use Vico's preferred
term, his "metaphysics." Our first section will
examine Vico's political theology through Lilla's
insights into the Vichian notion of conatus. Next we
will turn to Vico's trio of historical stages, our focus
being the "Jovian epiphany," one of the Nea-
politan's most dramatic and typological concepts.
2
The third and final section will attempt to tie the
philosophical theology of conatus to the three Ages
through an under-studied aspect of Vico's thought:
his theory of sexuality.

I. "CONATUS": VICO'S LOGOS

Mark Lilla's 1993 volume G.B. Vico: The Making of

an Anti-Modern is rare among recent book-length
treatments of Vico in that it does not give short
shrift to his theological fundaments, especially as
they are evinced in the Italian thinker's early
works.2 Our engagement with Lilla's volume will
not heed its polemical strands (i.e., Lilla's view that
Vico was essentially a conservative whose worship
of the irrational has had a baleful influence on the
history of ideas). Instead, we will hone in on Lilla's
presentation of Vico's doctrine of human impetus.
Conatus is the term Vico used for man's faculty of
causing his own mind and body to act. We agree
with Lilla that conatus is a metaphysical red
thread that connects Vico's earliest essays to his
later writings. However, since there was no
monolithic Roman Catholic theology in Vico's Italy,
we must be as careful on the theological front as we
are on the philosophical front. We distort history if
we retroject the Roman Catholic Church's official
 3
subscription to Thomism in the late nineteenth
century onto the Reformatio Catholica, especially if
we bear in mind the latter's freewheeling, even
loose adoption of Scholastic terminology and its
often quasi-nominalist moderation. Vico, with his
idiosyncratic synthesis of ancient philosophy, Med-
ieval Scholasticism, and Neo-Roman jurisprudence,
fits into this Counter-Reformation rubric as well as
anyone.
Lilla shows us that Vico's central belief was in
a single divine truth that works directly on the
heart of man to bring about his salvation, but also
works indirectly through man's socio-political
reality to bring about as much justice and equality
as is possible given man's choices and the motive
interpersonal structures that result from them.
This unitary divine truth can be fully known only
by the Holy Trinity Itself because it is eternally
"made" out of God's own thoughts or logoi (Vico
does not use the term "logoi," but rather "elements"
or "ideas"). The Fall occurred when Adam was
tempted into mistaking his participation in divine
truth for infinite, perfect knowledge of the forms or
logoi in God. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit know
their own Truth because they generate it eternally
out of themselves and contemplate it as something
they make ad intra.3
Difficulties arise, alas, when we try to express
just how this realm of forms, forever generated in-
4
side the divine essence, relates to God's creation ad
extra. Are all of the logoi represented in the
cosmos? How is the eternal generation of the Son
from the Father different from the eternal
generation of the logoi or exemplars in the divine
essence? And how are both distinct from the
creation ex nihilo of material bodies? When the Son
became Incarnate as the Logos, did He contain only
the logoi for this cosmos within Himself, or did he
contain all possible logoi as some sort of enfleshed
plenum of divine forms? If not, was the Incarnation
somehow incomplete?
In any case, for Vico, man can never know
these ideas in God from the inside. God knows the
future, but this does not imply any lack of free will
on man's part (or God's part). Man fell from his
Edenic starting point—where man participated in
the ideas or logoi in God in a finite, limited fashion
—when he presumed to grasp this "knowledge of
good and evil" (Gen. 2.9) in order to "be as gods"
(Gen. 3.5). However, God foreknew that man would
fall, and so He built into man the possibility, even
after losing his immediate (though relative) contact
with God's ideas or forms, to still find God in-
directly through conatus.
A Scholastic term introduced into modern
philosophy by Hobbes and Descartes, conatus is
used by Vico to mean the divine mode or power of
creation that ensures that man, despite his efforts
 5
to the contrary, will nonetheless find himself partic-
ipating in divine truth, at least on a lower, though
in some sense broader, societal level. Here is the
meaning of Vico's famous "ideal eternal history of
the gentile nations" (New Science, 3rd ed., §7, §17,
and §29): Ham and Japeth's descendants forgot
about divine truth as it was followed by the
Hebrews, but Providence in the form of conatus
continued to shape how these gentile wanderers
went about their business.
Thanks to God's conatus, which not only
grounds man's ability to act, but also supplies the
shapes of possible sociopolitical coordination, man
does not fall into permanent or utter anarchy, but
is instead called back from the brink to a kind of
baseline order through pagan religion, the latter
being invented by man as a result of what Vico
scholar Donald Verene has termed the "Jove
experience."4 Inspired by Verene's adjective
"epiphanic" to limn this irruption of a "false," yet
providentially directed experience of the divine, I
have coined the term "Jovian epiphany." It is hoped
this coinage adequately underscores the human-
divine co-enacting aspect of Vico's notion.5 Seeing
that for Vico a single God-directed Truth operates
in practical human affairs as well as in the interior
life of the Trinity, the question presents itself: What
is this mysterious God-man interface, if not a direct
experience of the Holy Trinity, albeit one condition-
6
ed by man's relative estrangement from divine
grace after the Fall?

II. Vico's Three Ages: A Brief Exposition

Vico is known for his corso e ricorso, which is

his teaching that all human cultures develop ac-
cording to the same three-stage sequence: they
begin with an Age of Gods, move to an Age of
Heroes, and end in an Age of Men. Though the
simplified picture I am about to sketch could
doubtless be qualified on many points, it will
suffice for our purposes.
According to Vico, man started out as a
solitary hunter-gatherer who had immense phys-
ical and imaginative powers, but had no language
and, indeed, no thought!6 Primitive man possessed
no shared experience, if by experience we mean
conscious memory of events. The ball got rolling
once a huge primal storm broke out over the whole
"great forest of the earth" where these men were
traipsing.7 In short, man unconsciously invented
culture and society out of the awe and fear that the
storm drummed up inside of him.
Man's history can be split into the afore-
mentioned trio of stages. In the Age of Gods, men
get their first thought and their first memory by
imagining that the thundering sky of the primal
 7
storm is a huge body that mirrors their own fears
and passions (naturally, these primitives do not
know they are projecting their own affections and
sensations onto nature―it is automatic).8 The
cosmic cloudburst inspires fear in the barbaric
nomads, for this sky-corpus is larger and more
powerful than their own bodies. Indeed, though
men may have feared and avoided more powerful
men before the Jove epiphany, it is precisely the
all-encompassing nature of the storm (they are
naked and have no shelter from the rain, wind,
lightning and thunder) that qualifies the ordeal as
a "break in being"9; the whole sky is pressing down
upon the whole earth not unlike the Greek creation
myth, wherein Ouranos lay upon Gaia before a
scythe pried them apart, thus suspending the
primal rape and giving birth simultaneously to
otherness (on the anxious side of consciousness)
and to ordered movement in space and time (on the
serene side of consciousness).10
Men just happen to be copulating with feral,
unwilling women when the primal storm erupts.
Vico says that men, before the first peal of thunder,
had no sufficient reason to differentiate one object
from another (the reasons for man's initial inability
to think in terms of comparisons and contrasts are
expanded upon in the third section, below); so, men
never looked up at the sky before that moment.
After looking up at a powerful body that seemed to
8
threaten them with violence, these beastly men
looked down at their women captives, felt pudor or
shame, and ended by dragging them to caves,
wherein they solemnized their unions through a
ritual auspice-taking.11 This was the beginning of
marriage, and soon men supplemented their
liturgical repertoire by burying their dead relatives
(yes, now we have the first families, since women
are quarantined and so give birth to sons of certain
parentage) and by creating enclosures (the first
cities) that admitted clientes as non-blood related
helpers who were given protection from the feral
men who remained outside the enclosure. 12 In
short, Vico has no doubt that human society sprang
into being as a reflex resulting from the Jovian
epiphany.
A few comments on Vico's linguistic theory
will flesh out our portrait of the Age of Gods. Words
were few in number following the Jovian violation;
actually, the original lexicon was meager in the
extreme, as it was comprised of simple variations
on the same involuntary fear- and pain-inspired
cry. This first word most frequently sounded
something like "Jove!" or "Pa!," both unthinking
imitations of the sound of the "voice" of the divine
body that kick-started these primitives into
thought and feeling.13 As men's minds became more
able to differentiate the bodies, regions, and
qualities that they were sensing, they named each
 9
after a different god.
By the time we get to the Age of Heroes,
language has evolved from grunts of fretful
onomatopoeia like "Jove!" into something more like
military commands. Vico uses the example of
heraldry: pictures on a flag that represent the
virility and joie de vivre of the family or ethnos.14
The third stage, the Age of Men, sees the
flowering of man's reason. Now the emblems of the
age of heroes are replaced with little marks that
have little or no intrinsic relation to anything
bodily or even verbal. They represent sounds and
are grouped together to stand for spoken words. 15
There is a problem here: In the Age of Gods, men
curbed their physical domination of less powerful
bodies out of fear of an inscrutable, huge body; in
the Age of Heroes, prominent men commanded less
powerful men through unquestioned directives; in
the Age of Men, concern with force of argument
overrides any reliance on physical force. Anything
can and is questioned. We are all equal in our
rationality (in theory). But, as De Maistre once
averred, if we take all of the hallowed truths of
tradition and subject them to pitiless scrutiny, we
end up eroding any possibility of communication,
much less consensus.16 We become reasonably de-
luded, one might say.
Vico thinks that the Age of Men can lead to a
new barbarism, a new Age of Gods, though this
10
ricorso would not be a return to the ferine
peregrinations of the Jovian epiphany, but rather a
return of the poetic sensing of the Age of Gods, only
in a strange, because unforeseeable, form. What
does man do with his overripe rationality, the
"reign of quantity," once the repressed poetic
feeling of divine possession returns? One can
imagine new progressions, but also new degrad-
ations, both reflections of divine conatus through
man's mental, physical and social unfolding.

III. VICO'S JOVIAN EPIPHANY: A GENEALOGY

OF (IM)MORALITY

This final section will review the corso e

ricorso, with its Edenic prelude, in terms of Vico's
Christian theology of sexuality. Vico followed
Augustine, and indeed the main trunk line of
Christian tradition, in seeing untempered sexual
desire as the most extreme manifestation of al-
ienation from the will of God, and so an archetype
of all sins. Augustine is famous for his idea that in
man's fallen state the male sexual organ is the only
visible part of the body that can act (in its in-
stances of arousal) without being commanded
either by the mind or by somatic reflex ( De civitate
Dei, 14.23). In other words, tapping one's knee with
 11
a reflex hammer normally results in a knee jerk,
but this is not the same as sexual arousal,
registered in the motility of the generative organ,
which has an indeterminate relation both to one's
mind as well as to the nervous system as a whole.
Vico uses the image in Genesis 3.21 of the
"garments of skin" (as conditioned by the overall
negative OT and NT attitude toward nudity as
lust-inducing) alongside the pagan image of Jove as
both supreme power and divine libertine in order to
illustrate man's changing relation to God's ordering
principle or nomos throughout history. For Vico,
sexual practice in the Age of Men (which most
would identify with our present epoch) is best
symbolized by Jove's no-holds-barred sensuality,
which finds its nadir in his abuse of his cupbearer,
the boy Ganymede.17 Keep in mind that the center
of Christian life is the offering up of the Eucharistic
Cup as the means for man to be united to God;
thus, we should expect Vico to see in pagan ritual
and myth a misuse of wine or life-giving juice that
parallels its proper use in the Christian Sac-
rament.18 With the foregoing in mind, we will offer
a summation of Vico's theory of history in terms of
concupiscence, that is, of the covering and un-
covering of the shameful member.
First Adam falls from life with God in Eden by
considering the divine ideas of which he has a
limited vision to be his own by nature. This newly
12
independent Adam, in St Athanasius's words, fell
in lust with his own body (Contra Gentes §3); his
inner disquiet, tied to his new form of empirical
perception that sees not the divine ideas, but
rather representations of corporeal forms, led him,
for the first time, to look down at his genitalia, feel
an intensification of pudor, and, as his first act of
fabrication, weave an apron or campestria out of fig
leaves to cover the offending member (Aug- ustine,
De civ. Dei, 14.17).
In this period from the Fall of Adam to the
time of Noah, the descendants of Abraham followed
their leaders and so stayed somewhat nearer to the
ordering principle of God than did the non-
Abrahamic population, which worshiped idols.
Things came to a head after the great flood, when
Ham rejected the patriarchal auctoritas or nomos
by entering Noah's bedchamber, where he found his
father in a sacred sleep, having just drained the
cup filled with the blood of the grape given him by
God. Ham and Japheth viewed the genitals of their
father, the sight of which caused Ham to jest rather
than show respect and pudor. 18 This was a further
fall from human venery to bestial venery; these
unworthy sons' descendants, bereft of Edenic or
even Patriarchal nomos, lost their sociality, their
speech, even their ability to connect their thoughts
in a temporal sequence.19
Now we come to the aforementioned Jovian ep-
 13
iphany, which is preceded by what might be termed
a non-reflective apeironic sexuality. It is non-
reflective because the feral, gigantic descendants of
Ham and Japheth think only in images that equate
disparate realities (i.e., their own orgasm plus a
thundering sky equals a sky god who is violating
them, and there is nothing going on outside of this
situation—all else is atopos), and which have
absolute duration (i.e., each image is all of reality,
there being no past or future, but only present
"thought").20 Jovian sexuality is apeironic (Gr.
apeiron, unlimited) because it admits no boundary
to its expression: anything that moves is fair game
until the great epiphany leads the giants to look up
at the sky and become chastened by the sight of a
luminous column flashing across the darkened sky.
Just as Adam's fall was a looking down at himself,
and just as Ham's fall was a looking into his
father's sacred bedchamber, so the fall of the feral
men was a looking up at the Jovian flash, which
prompted them to look down at the women with
whom they were copulating. Then, newly equipped
with pudor, the gentile beasts found caves and
redoubts which they first—in an ironic echo of
Ham's intrusion—looked into before solemnizing
them as their own sacred marital bed-chambers.
So, a consistent typological structure emerges
from Vico's presentation of the historical stages of
14
human sexuality. Adam sees God's body, His Logos,
as the logoi or thoughts of God which are so many
bodiless chisels that carve bodies out of the solid
ether in the act of creation. 21 Adam, expelled from
Eden, replaces his vision of the works of the
bodiless hand of God with a fixation on his own
bodily stylus or chisel. Ham enters into the Garden
of the patriarchal bedchamber and views the virile
organ of his patriarch, the incisiveness of which he
repudiates with an impious scoff. Henceforth the
gentiles deny the acuity of divine and human
fatherhood, and so cavort wildly, denuded of both
the cloth of sexual norm and the parchment of Holy
prohibition. Subsisting now as mere shadow-
images of Adam in the Garden, the giants see fit to
copulate with any and all at any given opportunity.
Indeed, the condition of these men of the Age of
Gods is the result of two declensions: first, Adam's
aphallic vision of God declined into phallic self-
viewing; next, patriarchal respect degenerated into
Ham's phallic jesting, the latter ending in aphallic
(because unreflective and unconscious) orgy, an
ultimate dulling of the human's ability of unite to a
divine or human Other through existential
sharpness or acuity.
Now, a final word of summation on our
subject. Vico's genealogy of human knowledge has a
great relevance to contemporary debates in the
areas of politics, theology and sexuality. Apart from
 15
the seemingly ineluctable binary of liberal indivi-
dualism versus conservative communalism, Vico
models a politics based upon his understanding of
the rhetoric of topics, in which meso-level identities
and a plurality of motivations become so enmeshed
that dichotomy-straddling trajectories leap out to
the attuned observer. On the theological front, Vico
reminds us just how fluid and tractable Roman
Catholic theology was in the early modern period,
when Descartes' and Spinoza's terms could still be
taken over and reanimated without fear of a
Thomist orthodox backlash. But, perhaps the most
striking area in which Vico contributes is sexuality.
In an era in which Enlightenment hubris has led to
anathemas being hurled at traditional Christian
teachings on sexuality, it is jarring to encoounter
Vico's typological reading of salvation history as a
deliverance from phallic self-worship that, if un-
checked, could precipitate a reversion to the carnal
apeiron of the Age of Gods.

NOTES

1. David L. Marshall, Vico and the Transformation

of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 1. On the
origin of the term "Counter-Enlightenment," see p.
16
xxvn1 in Henry Hardy's introduction to Isaiah
Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History
of Ideas, 2nd edition (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2013).
2. Mark Lilla, G.B.Vico: The Making of an Anti-
Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1993).

3. For Vico, conatus "is the power of moving, and in

God, the author of conatus, it is rest; so prime
matter is the power of / extension, and in God,
founder of matter, it is the purest mind. (…)
Division is the act of body, but the essence of
body...consists of what is indivisible" (Giambattista
Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians
Drawn out from the Origins of the Latin Language ,
translated by Jason Taylor [New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2010 (1710)], IV.1,
p. 61, 63). Vico refers to this work as his
"Metaphysics."

4. For the phrase "Jove experience" see Donald

Phillip Verene, "Introduction: Interpreting the New
Science," pp. 1-14 in Giambattista Vico, Keys to the
New Science: Translations, Commentaries, and
Essays, edited by Thora Ilin Bayer and Donald
Philip Verene (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 2009), p. 10.
5. Vico: "...God both founded the true religion of the
Hebrews upon worship of His infinite and eternal
 17
Providence and punished the first authors of the
human race for their desire to know the future,
thus condemning the whole race to toil, pain and
death. Whence the false religions all rose from
idolatry, i.e. from the worship of imaginary deities,
falsely believed to be bodies with supernatural
force, who give succour to men in their final
afflictions" (Giambattista Vico, The First New
Science, translated by Leon Pompa [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002 (1725)], §9, p. 10).
6. Giambattista Vico, The New Science of
Giambattista Vico, Third Edition, trans. Thomas G.
Bergin and Max H. Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1968 [1744]), §447, p. 150.

7. Ibid., §369, p. 112-113.

8. With the Jove experience, man “enters the first
stage [of freedom] through the advent of fear: men
start to behave differently from animals, when they
stop feeling the mere metus, the mere instinctive
fear, and start feeling the fear of something they
imagine as superior: it is the metus numinis, the
fear of god. Pudor is modesty in the face of the
power of a superior being, coupled with shame;
man is ashamed of his own nudity and of his
bestial life. Pudor brings about the domain of
reason over the senses...” (Mirella Vaglio, Truth
and Authority in Vico's Universal Law [New York:
Peter Lang, 1999], p. 79).
18
9. Donald Phillip Verene, "Introduction: Interpret-
ing the New Science," pp. 1-14 in Giambattista
Vico, Keys to the New Science: Translations,
Commentaries, and Essays, edited by Thora Ilin
Bayer and Donald Philip Verene (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 2009), at p. 10.
10. Hesiod, Theogony, 126, 137-181. See also James
L. Kelley, Orthodoxy, History and Esotericism: New
Studies (Dewdney, B.C.: Synaxis, 2016), pp. 142-
143.
11. Vico, New Science, Third Edition, §506, p. 171-
172. See also James Robert Goetsch, Jr., Vico's
Axioms: The Geometry of the Human World (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p.
30.
12. Vico, New Science, Third Edition, §529, p. 184-
185; §556-557, p. 197-198.
13. Ibid., §448, p. 150-151.
14. Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giam-
battista Vico, translated by R. G. Collingwood
(London: Howard Latimer, 1913), p. 51.
15. Vico, New Science, Third Edition, §32, p. 20-21,
and §34, p. 21-22.
16. Joseph de Maistre, Etude dur la souverianeté,
in Oeuvres complètes, 14 volumes (Lyons: Vitte et
Perussel, 1884-1886), 1.366.
17. Vico, New Science, Third Edition, §80, p. 80-81.
 19
Cf. ibid §515, p. 157, where Ganymede's being
"borne off to heaven by an eagle" represents for
Vico the antipodes of "eros": on the one hand, unity
with the divine, and on the other hand, the lowest
possible expression of union between humans.
18. John Sietze Bergsma and Scot Walker Hahn,
"Noah's Nakedness and the Curse on Canaan
(Genesis 9:20-27)," JBL 124.1: 25-40. Bergsma and
Hahn conclude that Ham's offense had more to do
with simply seeing Noah nude, but their analysis
does not take into account the theme of vision of
god, or theoria, central to the Patristic tradition
since Apostolic times (See Eric Osborn, The
Beginning of Christian Philosophy [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009]). The latter, we
contend, accounts for the severity of Ham's action,
which entailed a further fall beyond Adam's initial
viewing of his own phallus. We do find, however,
support for our analysis of Vico's Christian theory
of sexuality in the Rabbinic tradition that Ham
raped Noah (cf. Bergsma and Hahn, pp. 28-30).
This theme of sexual violation would parallel Vico's
notion that the human body is "touched" by Jove in
the form of air pressure (Vico, On the Most Ancient
Wisdom of the Italians, IV.5), and his theme of Jove
as the violator of Ganymede (cf. note 17, above).
19. Vico, New Science, Third Edition, §58, pp. 46-
47.
20. Ibid., §700, p. 236.
20
21. Here we are suggesting a connection that is
never made explicit in Vico's work between the
human reproductive organ, the stylus of the
philosopher, and the chisel of the (divine or human)
sculptor. Each of the three, according to Vico's
system, exhibit acuity, as in topical rhetoric, which
presents an underlying reality or truth as a point
indicated by sharply-angled legs or appearances,
the latter being the plurality of enmeshed causes
that make up any social or cosmic reality (Vico, On
the Study Methods of Our Time, §24, cited in
Donald Kunze, Thought and Place: The
Architecture of Imagination in the Philosophy of
Giambattista Vico, 2nd Edition [Boalsburg: Cyrano,
2012], pp. 41-42). We may surmise that Vico saw
the ideas or forms in God's mind that radiate from
the divine topos or essence as analogous to the legs
of the acute angle, which are extensions or
appearances of the one Truth. In the Incarnation,
Vico might hold, Christ's inactive genitalia is
upheld by His two legs in a uniquely acute angle
that represents the logoi that the Incarnate
mindbody of Christ contains.

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