The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” (Luke, 4:3)
My Father, today is the first Sunday of the Lente. I am preparing for my Baptism and I am daily pondering how I can give up on my own pettiness in order to make more room for You—in fact, how to have room for You only, and for anything else only through You. I’ve realized that love and obedience go hand in hand: one cannot really love another without trust and respect; vice versa, obedience without love is slavery. Your first and foremost request is to love You and only You above all the rest. For my whole life, I’ve never really satisfied this request—far from it. I am sorry for this, I apologize.
This first fault entailed many others. The most serious, perhaps, concern the fact that I did not always pay due respect to my parents as I should have done as a son, and that I had a disordered sentimental and intimate life, in which my search for love was steered away from You. I am sorry for this, I apologize.
However, I do see as even more serious the fact that I ended up worshiping other ‘gods’ and using this name of you, ‘God’, improperly. Even more, I also publicly advocated and taught these things as if they were right and true, by thus contributing to misleading other people, especially those entrusted to me as an educator. I did not clearly distinguished between what I was presenting as a document of past doctrines and views, from what I was myself endorsing and inculcating as the actual truth. I am sorry for this, I apologize.
This is why I would like to clarify here the scope and significance of this sin, so that I can hope in Your forgiveness, and in the forgiveness of those who might have been hurt or misled by my actions or words.
Everything You created is good. Even human reason is good, and to some extent it can guess something about Your presence and Your nature. Moreover, the study of human history (and specifically the study of the history of human thoughts and human forms of religious practices) has nothing wrong with it. Yet, the problem begins when human reason is taken in isolation, entrusted as the ultimate authority, protected by a firewall against Your own voice. The problem gets even worse for me, because when I looked at history and other ways of thinking, I did not limit myself to a pure historical gaze, but I wanted to endorse, embrace, and diffuse those views I was attracted to, by thus presenting them not just as historical facts, but as a living possibility for life. This was my idolatry. I am sorry for this, I apologize.
Let me briefly review how this idolatry took three main shapes throughout my adult life.
My first idolatry was for the metaphysics of ‘Being’. I’ve grown interested in the philosophy of Emanuele Severino since a very young age (since high school, indeed). He claims that everything is eternal just in fact of being something, since ‘non-Being’ cannot exist. Severino then rejects creation and claims that everything and everyone is in fact ‘God’ (understood as Being itself). I now see that Severino’s philosophy is nothing but a secularization of Your Revelation (as his later use of the notion of ‘Glory’ [=resurrection at the end of time], but also his discussion of the ‘isolation of the earth’ [=sin] and other ideas of his could demonstrate—but this is not for now). The mistake is not only and not just the fact that he denies creation (which was the reason why his philosophy was declared incompatible with the Catholic faith back in 1970, way before he developed his full system). More importantly, he denies the freedom and responsibility for human beings to choose for You and Your Love. In Severino’s view, the negation of the Truth is as necessary as the overcoming of this negation. There is no true freedom and hence no true love. Without love there is no God, since You, Father, are Love. Without You, there is no Truth.
I was attracted by this philosophy because it gave me ‘eternity’ no matter what I was doing, and eliminated the problem of taking responsibility for myself about how I would answer Your call. No matter what I would do, that’s necessary, and eventually all mistakes will be in any case subsumed under the necessary appearing of the ultimate Truth (the ‘Destiny of Necessity’), so I do not have to do anything or to worry for anything, all is and will be fine. This was my first idolatry: the adoration of ‘Being’ in order not to face the responsibility asked and imposed by Your love. I am sorry for this, I apologize.
The second idolatry concerned Buddhism. What is good and valid in the Buddhist tradition is the sort of moral and psychological training that it entails. It requires growing in sensitivity towards the basic guidelines of natural moral law (no killing, no stealing, no abusing, no lying, no intoxication) and purifying the mind from craving, aversion, and ignorance. More generally, this is leading to uncovering the pretensions of control through which the finite ‘self’ or ‘I’ wants to impose its own lusts and desires upon life. This is all good—except for the fact that the positive solution that Buddhism offers is limited. All partial truth, insofar as it is partial, remains a partial falsity. The partiality of Buddhism consists in trying to find a way for the self to abandon itself. It rightly sees in the arrogance of the self the fundamental problem and the structure that needs to be deconstructed and demolished. However, Buddhism aims at undoing the self from within, eventually reaching a state of depersonalization and derealization. I touched that state and I realized I could have remained there. But something (I dare to say, You and Your grace) suggested me that there was more waiting for me, and I eventually freed myself from that condition.
The problem with this Buddhist approach is that by undoing the self, it makes love impossible. Friendliness, even when boundless, is not properly love. When friendliness drifts towards actual love, it necessarily reactivates the self, simply because you can’t love if you are not the one who loves someone else and who is loved in turn. That was also my realization (pointed out to me also by a number of my students during the courses I gave on friendliness). I was cultivating friendliness, but in fact I was discovering a background of love that could not fit that sense of dispassionate friendliness. Eventually, I had to choose: either reject love as something to overcome, or admit that boundless friendliness is still something incomplete. Thanks to You, I did the latter, and now I can see why the Buddhist path can successfully lead to achieve the suppression of the self (as it claims), but this achievement is not genuine happiness and freedom, since there cannot be any genuine happiness and freedom without love, and there is no genuine love that is not rooted in Your love. So, Buddhism was my second form of idolatry. I am sorry for this, I apologize.
The third form of idolatry concerned the ‘yoga’ traditions outside of Buddhism, and in particular my trajectory towards devotional forms oriented towards various Indian masks of the divine: Krishna, Shiva, Shakti. These forms of yoga too agree with Buddhism in recognizing that the self and its arrogance is the problem that needs to be overcome. Unlike Buddhism, they see in a relation with the divine the solution to the problem: not in a complete self-effacement, but in the realization of the unity between the finite self and the divine self. This unity is a unity of love and bliss, which eventually overcomes all dualities. I was profoundly moved by my engagement with these traditions, and I do think that they give justice to the fact that without love, genuine happiness and freedom are not really achieved.
However, the problem with these traditions is that their conception of the divine (of You, Father) remains limited to what natural reason can reveal about it. Usually, yoga traditions take ‘consciousness’ to be the essence of the divine, since ‘consciousness’ is necessarily required for all experience to occur and by itself is not bound or limited to any particular content of experience (since all determinations can only appear within consciousness, but they are not, by themselves, intrinsic to the nature of consciousness—otherwise we would always be conscious of the same things). Of course, You, Father, are also a conscious being. However, the problem with taking ‘consciousness’ as the essence of what You are consists in taking one of your manifestations and making it the whole (a pars pro toto fallacy).
This is in fact the fundamental paradigm of any idolatry: take a creature and make it into a god. In this sense, taking ‘consciousness’ as the essence of You is not substantially different from taking ‘matter’ or ‘energy’ or whatever else we can experience in the world. The problem lies in the arrogant pretention of saying: “I experience this as fundamental, hence God must be this”. Natural reason can advance various hypotheses about your nature, or it can even arrive at a more apophantic position and declare that your nature is entirely inexpressible. The problem is not only or just with each of these hypotheses, but with the very fact that by engaging with them, we downplay Your Own Revelation. In fact, since reason can only make hypotheses, none of them can be fully convincing, hence different people are entitled to advance different hypotheses based on their preferences, and even chose which ones they prefer, how to combine them, so to make the best cocktail, the one that pleases them the most. So they can be devoted to what they would like You to be, and not be confronted to what You ask them to be.
You are Love, but this Love is not something known by natural reason. It comes to us from within us, because we originally come from it—the whole world comes from it. And this Love is fully revealed only by your Son, Jesus. Who misses Him, misses the fullness of Your Love. Imagine that you have a modest house and a minimal salary. Someone comes to your door telling you: I have good news, we discovered you have inherited an immense fortune, you can move since today into a beautiful mansion and you’ll never have to worry about money for the rest of your life and that of your dear ones. Just come out of here and follow me, I’ll show you. How would a normal person react? Most often, they would be sceptical and think about a fraud. Better stick to one’s modest house and minimal salary, than take the risk of following such a bizarre announcement. You know your house, and you’ve already engineered your life to make it run with your minimal salary. Why taking the risk? This is why someone (like myself) can miss out the fullness of Your love: because they do not dare to take the risk of trusting and following.
I also realize that my situation today (9 March, year 2025 after Christ) is different from the situation of the Buddha (some 500 years or so before Christ) or the position of any Indian sage who never heard about You. For them, it was somehow unavoidable to search for You through natural reason alone, since they did not yet receive the announce of Your word. But looking at myself, today, I can’t say that I do not know what Your Revelation is, since it left traces everywhere, it’s attested in every corner of our cities, in every church, and in most of Western art and culture. Hence, when I, in these conditions of abundance, decide to follow natural reason alone, I do make a mistake. The mistake is not necessarily in the historical views that were developed in circumstances where Your revelation was not accessible. They can indeed be a wonderous witness of the inextinguishable drive that all human beings from all ages and places have for You. In this sense, even the historical study of those views does not entail anything wrong per se. The mistake is only mine, because I am gifted with the possibility of hearing Your voice, but I have decided to simply dull myself to it, and rely only on natural reason and what it can say about what it calls ‘divine’. My mistake was my choice, my choice was my mistake.
From this perspective, the kind of idolatry that I committed by endorsing and exploring devotion through various yoga traditions, is not too far from a sort of deism, in which Your nature is reduced and interpreted to what can be understood and experienced of You through natural reason alone. Again, natural reason is good by itself, and it can tell us something about You. The problem is the partiality of taking it as the only source of knowledge about what You are. There is an act of bad faith in doing so, since natural reason usually tends to omits or ignore the notion of original sin (the archetypical act through which human beings turn away from Your love in order to give priority to themselves and what they want, instead of obeying to what your Love is calling them to do). Embracing the form of devotion that comes from natural reason can thus be particularly mischievous because it gives the impression of practicing already a form of divine devotion open to divine love, hence in a sense, not dissimilar from what You are asking. However, by obfuscating Your Own Revelation, by ignoring the dynamic of sin, this natural devotion undermines true obedience, and hence also true love.
If I look at how I encountered this kind of deist-yogic devotion, I have to say that it always insisted on the fact that we are naturally good and all that we need to do is just to realize it. There is no sin, no original fall, just psychological blockages and clouds that need to be removed. When we do so, we are united to ‘God’, which is interpreted as the best part of what we already are (e.g. consciousness). Hence, deist-yogic devotion ultimately leads no farther than to a devotion towards the best of what could be found in human beings. Sure, human beings are also good. But devotion to something human is precisely a form of idolatry, because You are not just a human and Your nature cannot be understood through and by human nature alone.
Yogic traditions share with the Buddhist tradition the idea that it is the individual itself that needs to free itself through certain practices and reach by its own power union with the divine (which is a version of the Pelagian heresy already countered by Saint Augustin). But even when they introduce the idea of a ‘divine grace’ (e.g. shaktipat, in the Tantric tradition), they remain inevitably bounded to the idea of the divine that natural reason can provide, which eventually is always and only an idea of something divine in human beings. Hence, this kind of devotion is ‘anthropomorphic’ in the pejorative sense of the term, because it restricts and confines what You, my Father, really are, within the boundaries of what I can understand based on what I think I am.
This also fully applies to Spinoza’s own philosophy, which I happily include among the deist-yogic devotion. First, Spinoza shares with yogic traditions the idea of freeing oneself from the limitations of ordinary imaginative views about the self. This is something you do by your own forces, or at best by relying on the help of adequate socio-political conditions (hence, Spinoza too is a Pelagian, like most yogi). But asserting that I need to find within myself the force to save myself is precisely a way of restating the fact that I am the one who decides, achieves, and acts, and this is the fundamental delusion and arrogance that constitutes the original sin from which one should be saved. Second, Spinoza argues against those who conceives of God as an agent moved by passions, including love. In fact, Spinoza argues against Your Own Revelation, Father, and in the name of natural reason he candidly admits that it should be interpreted at best only as a metaphorical, imaginative, and inadequate way of speaking. Spinoza takes reason, knowledge and being to be the more fundamental aspects of our experience, he includes extension in the list, and then he concludes that ‘God’ must be an infinite thinking and extended substance. This is deism: natural reason arrives by deduction at what seems to be the most fundamental and positive aspect of reality, and then gives to it the label ‘god’.
Spinoza developed his own devotion and speaks of an ‘intellectual love of god’, which feels like an opening to love due to the knowledge of what god is and how everything is in god and depends on god. The structure of this love sounds promising, since Your love, Father, is truly a love for knowing You and everything as dependent upon You. But the mistake lurks in the premise of Spinoza’s conception of ‘god’: having preliminarily restricted what You must be, what Spinoza presents as ‘knowledge of god’ remains always something determined by the limits of natural reason that arrogates itself the right to judge who ‘god’ is (Spinoza demonstrates that we all have an adequate idea of the essence of god, in the Ethics, part 2, proposition 47). In this sense, paradoxically and ironically enough, Spinoza is guilty of presenting an ‘anthropomorphic’ idea of god no less than the Jewish and Christian traditions that he criticizes—with the difference that those traditions did not based their view of God on natural reason only, while Spinoza pretends to do so.
Devotion for deist-yogic conceptions of God was my third form of idolatry. I am sorry for this, I apologize.
What now? I do not dare to say that I know You. What I know about You, comes from Your Son, Jesus, from your Spirit, and from all those You have moved and inspired to Your love. It is not an adequate and full representation of who You are. It is only an indication, a pointer, an intuition, a promise, a faith. It is not irrational, but it is also not something that natural reason alone could have ever conjured up. Indeed, this is one of the motivations that make this kind of imperfect knowledge more plausible to me: I could have not made it up myself. I know very little of You, but the little I know is quite clear: you ask me to love You, and I am committed to do my best to answer ‘yes’, with all my being, actions, and strength—knowing that they are yours anyway. I am sorry if it took me so long to realize this. I hope You will give me time enough to remedy and grow in Your love.
What I know is that by asking me to call you Father, You invite me to understand myself as a son, a child. Only children are innocent enough, and not yet enough involved with the arrogance and pride of adulthood, to really listen to You and learn to know You in Your own way. Please allow me to remain a child, and live the rest of my adult life with the ability of following Your lead always, as You take me by the hand, bringing me wherever you will like me to be.
Comments