Revelation

Recordare, Jesu pie,

Quod sum causa tuae viae.

Ne me perdas illa die.

Quaerens me sedisti lassus,

Redemisti crucem passus:

Tantus labor non sit cassus.

The Dutch word for “Revelation” is “Openbaring”, which literally means something like “bringing into the open”. There is an element of uncovering (as in the Latin revelatio), but also an element of sharing (the open space is a public space where many can see). It has been pointed out to me that the life-long story of my discovery of God could well go under this name. Upon hearing the suggestion, I could immediately agree. I am realizing more and more that it hasn’t been a story of sudden breaks and illogical turns, but rather the slow coming together of a complex puzzle, which eventually became very straightforward. In the following, I’d like to put together the most salient pieces.

With a retrospective gaze, I can see that my encounter with God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit, see here) has been a multilayered encounter, which has been prepared on several levels through personal, philosophical, contemplative and existential encounters. Each of these levels revealed to me something about God, or made Him manifest under a different respect.

I can also see that these encounters were neither random nor accidental aspects of my life. Quite the opposite, they sum up the most important core features and formational events of all that I have been doing, thinking, and experiencing. As I am putting together these notes I am myself astonished by the picture that emerges.

The short summary is that seemingly my whole life has been a streaming towards God’s love, with a lot of twists and turns, for sure, yet with a clear direction. Writing and re-reading this post I confess that I also feel exceptionally emotional.

Personal encounters

The first level of my encounter with God is ‘personal’ in two senses. On the one hand, it concerns how several people in my life have ‘revealed’ or brought to me the idea there is a God. On the other hand, it concerns the fact that this was more than just an idea, but the reference to someone to whom I could relate and ask for help.

My parents decided that I should not be baptized and eventually I should come by myself at any decision or commitment in religious matters. They also did not to give me any religious education, besides occasionally expressing a number of reservations and criticisms about religion in general, Catholicism in particular, and church life especially. I was thus prohibited from taking part in any of the activities for kids organized by the local parish, and exonerated from the hour of ‘religious education’ throughout my school years. Yet, my first encounter with faith occurred in the first year of primary school. One of my teachers (Nuccia, originally from Sicily), was a very living, Mediterranean, passionate, loudly-speaking (often screaming) teacher. Among other things, she wanted everybody to start class in the morning by reciting three prayers: Our Father, Hail Mary, and the Angel of God. I was exempted from verbally reciting these prayers, but of course I was present in the class, I had to stand up with the other kids, and in a short time I also memorized the words they were reciting. In fact, I started using them myself at some point (I do not remember when exactly). Throughout my childhood and also well into my adolescence and adulthood I found myself reciting those words when something difficult was coming, some hardship was on the horizon, or simply I needed some extra help.

All my grandparents were supporting this idea in various ways, with their reports about how they prayed in moments of difficulty and were helped. Especially my grandfather recounted once when he was jailed by the Nazis in 1945 (he was 18 at the time, enrolled among the ‘partisans’ in Italy). He was about to be brought to shooting the next morning. He spent the night praying and “miraculously” was released. Nice story. I never recall any of my grandparents going to Church nor talking more specifically about religion, except for vague sayings like “there is surely a God!” and some connected gesture of their hands, some gazing at the sky, smiles, and the like.

On my side, there wasn’t any serious thought behind my occasional praying, except the sense of ‘asking for help’ in a moment of need. This behavior was largely disconnected from my public official identity as “non-religious” (I could never declare myself as an “atheist”). Yet, it was and remained there since then until now. When I picked up the rosary for the first time a few days after my conversion in Freiburg, those words I learned more than thirty years before eventually fall in place.

During my adolescence the main means through which I was in touch with anything religious was music. I liked sacred music and I myself played a few times during masses or concerts (sometimes at the organ, one time at the harpsichord, a couple of times in the Conservatory choir). Mozart’s Requiem was particularly engrained in my sensitivity, partly because I could relate somehow to the tragic celebration of lost and sorrow that the music conveys, partly because my dad used to listen almost constantly to “Radio Radicale” (an Italian radio station of a political party who used exclusively pieces of Mozart’s Requiem as musical intermezzo). At all times of day and evening, at home or at the shop of my parents, the words of the Requiem were constantly resonating, like a reminder.

Then, one day in 2005, when I was 19, I found the Gospel on my way back home. I already wrote elsewhere about this (see here and here). In the period that followed, I wrote a number of short stories connected with the Gospel, and a couple of choir pieces (prayers). But then life moved on again.

A person that directly confronted me with Christian religion later on (especially between 2007 and 2012) has been the mother of a friend of my ex-partner. She and her husband used to host us and many others in their home near the Alps. We visited them regularly for a number of years. These reunions where very convivial and brilliant, with excellent and very abundant food for everybody. But at the time she was also a very devout Christian woman (I think she would appreciate now a somewhat broader denomination), speaking not too often about faith per se, but showing it in almost everything else she was doing, in her deeds and presence.

Since then, I can’t recollect any other significant person who brought me in touch with religion, except perhaps the few funerals I attended for my grandparents and a couple of marriages of friends. But then I was attending these functions not knowing much what was going on, and always with the same implicit attitude I had in primary school: “I’m here but I am not supposed to belong here”.

The last direct, personal encounter dates back somewhere in 2019. I was walking in the park in Groningen with a friend, to whom I was “teaching” Buddhist meditation. We run into a couple of Christian preachers who enthusiastically approached us saying “Do you know that God loves you?” I wanted to run away but my friend staid and exchanged a few words with them. Then he asked me: “what would you reply to these Christians?” and I started my little righteous preach in which I argued of course against the very idea of a Christian God since that wouldn’t fit a Buddhist worldview. Besides my words, what happened then was that I felt under pressure and something in me didn’t want to give in into that idea of love—I was still terribly afraid of it.

Philosophical encounters

The second level of encounters in which I experienced a sort of “revelation” of God concerns occasions that led me to deepen my general understanding who God is (or might be).

The earliest memory of me engaging in anything like a philosophical inquiry dates back to the beginning of my primary school. It must have been in the first or second year (I was 6 or 7 years old). I remember I had a conversation with some other kids in class about the question “if God created everything, who created God?” I don’t remember exactly the output of that inquiry, but I see that I didn’t leave it behind.

My original meeting with the Gospel in 2005 quickly drifted into a more philosophical reflection, and when in 2007 I decided to leave my musical path behind and turned full-time to philosophy, that became in fact the main focus of my interest.

I started with the metaphysical eternalism of Emanuele Severino (already during the last year of high school). Severino’s philosophy was commanded by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as being incompatible with Christian doctrine. However, he was formed at the Catholic University in Milan, under Gustavo Bontadini, a foremost actor in the Italian “neo-scholastic” movement. Severino’s philosophy discusses the issue of God at almost every other page, developing at great length the issue of the “death of God” in contemporary culture, but also arriving at the conclusion that everybody in fact is eternal as “God”. I now see how his metaphysics is in fact a secularized rethinking of a number of Christian ideas. I found it “safe” because in Severino’s eternalism there is little talk about a personal God loving me, which somewhat took the pressure out from the encounter and put it on a cool-blood logical and rational plane, where I found myself more confident. At the time, I could not handle much more than that.

From 2007 on, I’ve been busy with Spinoza. I won’t spend much words about him here. Just recently, I’ve published a whole new book about his views of God’s love (Spinoza’s Yoga, but see already here). But in 2013 I already completed the full manuscript of (a still unpublished) book entitled The Gospel according to Spinoza about Spinoza’s interpretation of the Christ. Besides Spinoza, I also worked on Giambattista Vico’s theory of language and especially his view about the role that religious experience plays in prompting humanity into language as an “answer” to divine signs (now published as Teoria del Silenzio, 2019). And further on in my academic career, I’ve run a 4-year research project funded by the Dutch NWO about “occasionalism”, the early modern view according to which God is constantly operating in nature. Running this project led me to study a number of theologians (all Catholics), among whom Aquinas, Scotus and Suarez, plus a number of early modern authors deeply involved with religion (including Malebranche and Pierre-Sylvain Régis).

Putting together these elements, I am actually realizing that the budling up of my philosophical career has been driven by an interest for a philosophical investigation of the nature of God, or at least of several of its facets. Among the 94 publications I have on my CV at the moment, I would say that more than 70% are somewhat connected with various discussions of God or religion.

I would even say that when this “theological-philosophical” interest at some point dried up, I started feeling dissatisfied with my philosophical research and even with my work. At some point I felt I was feed up with philosophical theories and they were no longer really answering my existential thirst for something “more” (although I could not explain what this “more” would look like). It’s no mystery that when I obtained an ERC funding (2019-2023) for a 5-year project on the normalization of science in the early modern period, during much of that period I also shifted my main personal interests towards different, more “contemplative” approaches.

Contemplative encounters

The third level of encounters concerns my actual “experience” of meeting with something “divine”, although I could not always label this as such, nor the interpretative lenses I was using to frame and interpret my experience would always do full justice to this aspect.

These encounters unfolded mostly in the period 2018-2023, which is relatively well documented in this blog. This was the time of my engagement with Buddhism (mostly between 2018 and 2022), and then Yoga (especially Sri Aurobindo and tantra, 2022-2023). All far away from Christianity, in a sense (as I mentioned here). However, it was during these years that I started putting into focus not much God per se, but rather a number of ‘blockages’ and ‘hindrances’ that were positively poisoning my life, and were actually preventing any more fundamental encounter to occur. Among the most important, for sure, I can name an ingrained sense of ‘existential fear’ and a consequent craving for ‘control’. My Introduction to Friendliness (2022) and the Tragedy of the Self (2023) deal extensively with these topics, so I won’t comment further on them. I think it is no secret that both books are sorts of “philosophical diaries” of what I was practicing and brooding at that time.

However, what pushed me forward during this contemplative phase was the fact that, once arrived at a relative state of stable quiet and voidness through meditation, I consistently encountered a profound sense of “love” at the bottom of my experience. The presence of absolute voidness wasn’t per se what shocked me most (although it was one of the first significant contemplative breakthrough I had in 2019, see how I stuttered about it here). What was really puzzling was that within that Void there was something very “warm”.

I could not really explain this fact through Buddhist practice, since “love” is definitely something warmer than “friendliness” or “emptiness”. The Buddhist path led me to almost dissolve any sense of personal experience (I’m still convinced that what the Buddhist tradition describes as “liberation” has a lot to do with the sense of depersonalization and derealization, see here), but that is clearly incompatible with actual “love” (since love is per definition a personal relation). Eventually, I realized that was that love that really was calling upon me, and so I moved progressively away from Buddhism to follow up on that call (recall this).

Initially, this led me to a form of ‘devotion’ to Krishna, which took up a few months. I remember being moved almost to tears while reading the stories of the Bhagavad Purana. Yet, something remained somewhat artificial and forced, with all that “practice” (meditation, pranayama, asana), and the idea of having to “reach” God, or having to “practice” in order to experience “union”. There was still too much “me” in all of that, and not enough listening. I was also dissatisfied with the overall theoretical framework I could use to interpret my contemplative experience, mostly because its contemporary Western expressions looked to me a farfetched and ad hoc mix of different ideas, and because I needed to do some violence upon myself to really like and appreciate the more philosophical historical texts of the Indian tradition. That’s why Sri Aurobindo, with his amazing poetry and his emphasis on surrender and grace guided me towards a different approach (which I now also see relatively close to that of Christianity, mutans mutandis; but also not accidentally, since I guess that Aurobindo was well aware of the Christian tradition, having being educated in England).

Be that as it may, at the end of my tantra retreat with Hareesh (aka Christopher Wallis) in August 2023, that experience of “love” was fully in sight (see here). Yet, the non-dual approach was still making hard for me to do full justice to my own experience. In non-duality, it is God that loves itself through finite consciousness (as the finite consciousness is nothing but Shiva’s own consciousness affected by ignorance). Non-dualism ultimately bypasses Otherness since it dissolves any genuine duality. Yet, that was not what I was seeing, nor what was enticing my desire and calling me. While there is a form of self-love, I do see very clearly now that that’s not the fundamental form. The ground of love itself is a relational love open to an Other that is really distinct from the one who is loved. Even more, I can love someone only because I have been loved first. While I could not fully articulate these ideas yet, I did have the sense that I needed to move into another direction.

This happened between September 2023 and December 2024 with my ‘dance journey’. As documented throughout many posts (see here and here), what actually emerged during this period was, on the one hand, a need to explore how to be at the same time present as a stable basis for another human being, while also allowing myself to be the one who is taken care of. Especially through the practice of contact improvisation, I discovered that it is possible to play both roles (support and surrender) at the same time, but I also realized that I spent most of my life trying to ‘fake’ the role of the ‘strong one’, while in fact I was desperate for simply being allowed to be ‘weak’, surrender and be supported.

Over and over again, I was confronted with this pattern: searching someone to support, while actually asking to being supported. I convinced myself that I needed to embody this structure in a romantic relation with someone else. The love I was founding in contemplative experiences was a deep longing for someone, and I interpreted this as a romantic longing for another human being. I acknowledged that this love was not fulfilled in the relation with partner, so I eventually decided to break it (it took long to take this resolution!) and find someone else. However, I was quickly confronted with the fact that it is almost impossible for someone who needs care and support from another to simultaneously also being able to really take care and give support in return. Despite several good moments, hopes, excitement, not only I could not find anybody to really answer my longing but the more I was searching for a romantic partner, the more I was feeling thirsty and frustrated. I was thus jailed in a paradox: I was seeking something that seemingly nobody could be able to provide. It was precisely when I thought that no other human being could ever satisfy this deep longing, and I gave up the very idea of this search, that I met the Cross (remember this).

Existential encounters

The fourth kind of encounters with God were more existential, in the sense that they did not reveal to me something about God directly, but more those dimensions of human life and suffering within which meeting God becomes actually meaningful and cogent.

The fundamental encounter at this level unfolded through my relation with my dad. It wasn’t always easy to be with him, but our relation degenerated after my parents broke in 2000 (when I was 14). I felt trapped in a difficult situation in which I had to look strong and be supportive for my mom, who was taking the decision to cut what then was a toxic and unsustainable relation at the verge of domestic violence. But that gesture of having to take side in the fight between my parents (and more generally within my family), profoundly wounded me, in ways that only now I can recognize.

By 2006 I remember genuinely hating my father and that hate was poisoning me. Then in 2010 he was diagnosed with throat cancer. I quickly became the one who assisted him for two years through hospitals, home recovery, therapy, and eventually home-hospice. That changed something between us, for the better. Paradoxically, his sickness created a sort of common project for which we could work together. It wasn’t easy and we never really talked explicitly about ‘us’, but in practice part of the hatred was gone, as there was no more space or time for it. I slowly learned to forgive him and love him despite everything.

Much later, in 2019 (he was already dead for 7 years), when I was staying at a Buddhist monastery, I first realized how difficult all of that must have been for him—how difficult must have been being him. For the first time, I really felt all that happened from his own point of view, and I cried as I never did before (actually, one of the few moments in my adult life when I really cried). That shifted my self-understanding of our relation even further. I think that most of my sensitivity for the “reality of evil and suffering” comes also from my experience with my dad. I cannot genuinely buy into anything that would try to deflate the dark side of existence as simply a “privation of good”. I grew convinced that there is something meaningful in suffering, something that demands not only care but also understanding, and that can be a source of meaning. However, I struggled for a very long time trying to articulate this intuition (see here), without falling back in easy philosophical denials. Until I met the Cross. Then I saw the taking up of a symbol of evil within the embrace of love as the means of revealing what genuine unconditioned love actually feels like. Arguably, I wouldn’t have been able to understand the Cross, had I not myself underwent the whole drama with my dad (someone who suffered deeply, and made me suffer deeply, and yet I also deeply loved, and he too also deeply loved me). – And strangely enough, I am crying again as I write these lines.

From a distance, one might say that the bigger problems of my dad were a terrible combination of depression and alcoholism, which was already a bit in place when I was a kid, but exploded after my parents broke up. However, looking at the root of these symptoms, I think that his deepest problem was a genuine inability to say “sorry”. I never heard him asking for forgiveness nor forgive anybody. Even when it was totally obvious that he made some (no matter how little) mistake, he would never mention that, rather change topic, make a joke, ignore the fact, anything but saying “sorry”. According to my mom’s memories, that began very early (he would have been roughly 20 years old). He needed to pass his driving license exam and was (in his view) unjustly failed. According to her, that was the first moment in which he stubbornly decided to be victim of an injustice and righteously never wanted to re-do the exam again. That attitude started to take deep roots in him and spread in many other areas of his life. In the course of the years, it got worse and worse, he started to have strong arguments with his many friends, and they left him, one by one—always because of their fault, of course. I witness some of those arguments myself. As a result, in the last years of his life, he was absolutely alone, even my grandparents had major difficulties living with him. He was trapped in a world of unforgiveness (for others and for himself), and that was the cancer that really strangled his soul, long before than his body.

The second existential encounter with the meaningfulness of sorrow has been with my ex-partner (recall this). In our relation I repeated many of the patterns I developed in the relationship with my parents. I tried since the beginning to be in a position of “strength” and being the one who was “strong” to support the other. This worked to some extent. I think we managed to spend almost half of our life together building a relation that remains unique in my personal history. We undoubtedly had many good moments and there was a sense of complete trust that I never had with anybody else. The lesson there, though, was learning how difficult it is to love someone who is in and out from depressive phases, which eventually lead to consider the whole world as meaningless. I had to pull out all my optimism to face the “defensive nihilism” I was confronted with on a daily basis. In fact, the more my personal research developed (especially since 2018), the more our worlds grew distant apart, until we broke in July 2024.

The one lesson that our relation taught me is that I am not the savior, in fact, I cannot be the one who saves anybody else. This idea of having to “save” the other was deeply engrained in me (and to some extent still surfaces from time to time). I applied it even to my own public life as teacher, and I definitely lived it in my relationship. It does not work. I am as broken as anybody else. Salvation comes from someone else. It has to come from above. Otherwise, it cannot work. This does not mean that I cannot help, support, being-with, listen. But it does unveil the deeply engrained form of pride concerning what I can really do or achieve. And this was very important to realize, since it was only when I eventually let go the idea of “me” being the one who could save anybody (me included), that I could met the Cross.

In fact, a few days before the final “revelation” in Freiburg, when I was desperately hoping to start a new relationship with someone else I was dating, we happened to walk in front of a church. The door was open and there was Mass. We stopped: “What do you think?”—I asked—“Nothing…  maybe they have found the answer” was the reply. On the spot, I did not know what to replicate. We walked on. However, just a week later, I dropped the “maybe” and joined “them”.

The only picture I have with my dad, some summer time at the river, 1995?