The Inhabited Distance

This essay is, above all, about a way of inhabiting, that of someone who learns to live within a climate, within a landscape, within a distance, rather than within a closed system of propositions. That way of inhabiting is what I call, throughout these pages and in other writings of mine, the ontology of comparecencia, or by its fuller name, the tragic humanism of embodied comparecencia, sometimes also tragic anthropism, that is, the conviction that truth is not possessed but appears, and that every appearance retains a depth that no proposition exhausts. What follows is an attempt to think that ontology in dialogue with several traditions that have tried to name what comes forward, Christianity among them, perhaps the one closest to me biographically, but by no means the only one, nor the one that claims the final word for itself. This ontology holds itself, above all, against any system that claims to close reality within a total cartography, whether religious, scientific, or esoteric, and against the symmetrical temptation to dissolve all truth into an uncommitted relativism, and only secondarily against particular authors or schools, whom I will name as the essay proceeds.

For that reason I never take it for granted that I am a Christian. I belong to a Christian tradition without being able to affirm its propositions with an undivided conscience, and the whole essay questions, rather than settles, what exactly that belonging means. I begin, then, with what is closest at hand, that is, with the body, with ritual and ceremony, with the family genealogy that I cannot amputate without amputating myself, and with the image of Mystery that I prefer to any theodicy that claims to explain it. I then point, without evasion, to the exact place where I truly part ways with historical Christianity, the Christianity that affirms that Mystery has a single, unrepeatable face, and from there, after Hegel, I draw a map of the soul without dogma that forces me to carefully distinguish the labels that do not suit me, namely, neither militant atheist, nor confessional believer, nor comfortable relativist.

That same ontology of comparecencia is then tested against science, which I accept fully without turning it into metaphysics, and against politics, where my closeness to liberation theology coexists with my distance from Rome, my fascination with Gethsemane, and my critical dialogue with Catholic atheism. I review the ancient heresies and the unitarian conscience, compare Orthodox East and Catholic West, and then trace a more explicit philosophical genealogy, from the Husserlian root to a phenomenology scattered across half of Europe, from Russian cosmism to the Shema of Israel, and from there toward India, where the distance from the Semitic landscape becomes greatest and, for that very reason, most revealing. I also recognize a tragic humanism I feel as my own, state precisely what I reject in esotericism and its totalizing cartographies, weigh my distance from and closeness to contemporary integral thought, to perennialism, and to certain Romanian thinkers, and review twentieth century Christian theology alongside the mystical Neoplatonism of which I feel myself a heterodox heir.

The aim of this text, then, is not to decide whether or not I am a Christian, nor to convince anyone of a faith or an unbelief. The aim is more modest, and perhaps more difficult, namely to think honestly about an ontology of comparecencia through its closest traditions, and to offer the distance that results from that journey, with all its discomfort, as a legitimate philosophical position rather than an indecision that needs resolving.

I. Belonging Without Believing

There is a way of belonging to something that does not necessarily pass through believing its propositions or obeying its commandments. For example, one can belong to a landscape simply by inhabiting it, breathing its air, orienting oneself at night by stars whose names one has almost forgotten, even if one has not forgotten the habit of looking at them. I begin here because the whole difficulty of what I want to say today fits inside that image, and because any other way of beginning would lie through excess of clarity.

In this same sense, and without any doubt, I cannot say that I am a Christian in a doctrinal, practicing, militant, institutional, theological, ecclesial, confessional, or devotional sense. Nor would I say that my thought is, without further qualification, a Christian thought. My thought feeds on many traditions, many voices, and many ways of inhabiting the world. I have never felt the need to make a single tradition the exclusive name of truth. I must, however, make an exception here and say so without flinching, though with an immediate reservation. Phenomenology has occupied a place in my thought that no other tradition has occupied, not as a closed doctrine or a school to which I owe loyalty, but as the very method through which everything else comes to show itself. When I think Christianity, when I think music, when I think love, I think phenomenologically before I think in any other way, and neither Greece nor existentialism nor any of the other sources I have just named holds that priority. The reservation I must add at once is that this primacy does not turn phenomenology into a new orthodoxy, because what I take from it is not a system of theses but a discipline of looking, and that same discipline is precisely what keeps me from turning any tradition, phenomenology included, into the exclusive name of truth. It is, if one likes, the one exception that proves the rule, a method that applies even to itself, to the point of forbidding its own absolutization. My thought has been born by sedimentation, by encounters, by affinities, by readings, by experiences, and by resonances that overflow any single belonging. To reduce it to Christianity would be as false as amputating it from everything it has received from Greece, from phenomenology, from existentialism, from Marxism, from the Oviedo School of Philosophy (EFO), from poetry, from theater, from film, from music, or from so many other sources. None of these provenances remains in me as a perfectly delimited region. I would not know how to say where Greece ends and Christianity begins, where music ends and phenomenology begins, where family memory gives way to a philosophical conviction acquired much later.

Nor does a landscape present itself divided according to the causes that formed it. Stone, water, wind, human labor, and erosion compear together in a single figure. So too a consciousness. It is made of strata that can be distinguished retrospectively but are never experienced separately. My relation to Christianity belongs to that interior geology. It is not the whole of the terrain, but neither is it a layer that could be removed without altering everything that rests on it.

Now, it is clear that a belonging of this kind cannot be established solely through a genealogy of concepts. If Christianity has been for me a landscape and not only a set of affirmations, it must also be sought there where every landscape becomes experience — that is, in gestures learned before they were understood, in images that preceded any judgment about them, in the cadences of speech, in the forms of mourning, in the intimate distribution of hope and fear. What is decisive, then, is perhaps not what I once believed and explicitly represented, but what I learned to feel before I knew it could be called belief.

If, then, as I said before, one can belong to a landscape by inhabiting it, that landscape, in me, must be said at once, coincides not at all with official Catholicism, but — and I say this forcefully — absolutely not either with the atheist, "enlightened" materialism that I have nonetheless studied for years with respect and that I see constantly and wearisomely around me, nor with the contemporary liberal theology that has turned faith into an amiable, defused variant of progressive good manners. It is something else, harder to name because it resists the three cages usually on offer. And to say what that thing is, I need a prior distinction, because almost all the misunderstanding surrounding this question arises from confusing three realities that custom heaps together under a single word.

Having come this far, it might seem that what is called for is to review, one by one, the great Christian doctrines and decide which ones still hold up. But that procedure would falsify my relation to them from the outset. They do not compear before me as a list of independent propositions, laid out to receive assent or rejection, but as historical forms of articulating certain fundamental experiences — experiences such as that existence is received and not manufactured by us, that the absolute, if it compears, need not do so in the form of power, that suffering calls for a response no causal explanation satisfies, that a person's life can possess a value irreducible to its usefulness, that death does not retrospectively exhaust the meaning of a presence. My question will therefore be double — namely, what experience each doctrine tries to preserve, and at what point the formula meant to protect it begins to conceal it instead.

The first necessary clarification consists, then, in distinguishing those three realities that almost always appear conflated under a single name. Let me turn to it.

There is Christianity as historical institution, with its visible body, its hierarchy, its law, its long sedimentation of centuries. There is Christianity as doctrinal system, with its defined dogmas, its scholastic formulas, its conceptual architecture. And there is Christianity as event, as a certain way for the real to appear before anyone administers it. My relation to each of these three is different, at times even opposite, and to confuse them is the surest way to understand nothing of what follows.

The consequences of this distinction will appear again and again throughout the pages that follow. It is worth not losing sight of it.

With the institution I maintain a distance that I have no trouble acknowledging. I have never felt especially bound to the ecclesiastical machinery, and what responds in me before it is rather a discomfort with moralism, a distrust of the bureaucracies of the spirit, an almost physical refusal of authority when it tries to substitute regulation for lived experience, and a sincere allergy to that devout conformism that confuses faith with the uniform. But mind you, this is by no means anti-Christianity, and it would be clumsy to read it that way. It is an attitude I recognize in Miguel de Unamuno (1864 - 1936), at odds with his Church, in Simone Weil (1909 - 1943), who loved Catholicism to the very edge of baptism and stopped at the threshold out of fidelity to those left outside, in Søren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855), hurling pamphlets against the established Christendom of Copenhagen in the name of a barer Christianity. All of them had a tempestuous relation with the religious institutions of their time, and none of them out of tepidity. Out of excess, rather. Out of asking the house to remain faithful to the open weather that had founded it.

My distance from the institution does not imply that I consider all forms of contemporary Catholic organization equivalent. Opus Dei, the Neocatechumenal Way, the charismatic movements, ordinary parish communities, Latin American base communities, and the innumerable lay associations answer to very different human and theological needs. I am not interested in judging the sincerity of their members or reducing complex personal experiences to a sociological label. Many people have found in them friendship, discipline, material help, family continuity, a language for suffering, and the possibility of not living faith as a solitary abstraction. An ontology of compearance must acknowledge that reality before formulating any critique.

With Opus Dei my distance is especially clear, above all where the sanctification of work threatens to be confused with the sacralization of efficiency, of professional discipline, of social advancement, and of a certain bourgeois respectability. I understand the intuition that spiritual life should not be reserved for the monastery, and that one's daily occupation can be a place of responsibility, attention, and service. That intuition is valuable. But work stops being a place of incarnation when it turns success, competitive excellence, or institutional obedience into tacit signs of election. The holiness of the ordinary does not consist in professionalizing salvation or turning the working world into an ascesis of performance. It consists, if anything, in preventing work from reducing people to their function, and in learning to answer for the concrete bodies on which all efficiency rests.

The Neocatechumenal Way, the so-called "Kikos" in common speech, produces in me another kind of ambivalence, even rejection, just as strong as what I feel toward Opus Dei. I understand the force of a small community that sings, celebrates, shares life stories, introduces ruptures into urban solitude, and returns to faith a corporeality that the administrative parish had lost. There is something true in the need to be known by name and to walk through life alongside a group that does not disappear once the ceremony ends. But that communal intensity can turn into absorption, an internal language, dependency, and difficulty distinguishing between the voice of conscience, that of the community, and that of its leaders. When belonging claims to interpret its members' biographies exhaustively, the other stops compearing and begins to be read as a specimen of an itinerary set out in advance.

I feel only slightly closer, though not without a great many reservations either, to certain base ecclesial communities, when shared reading, biblical memory, and prayer arise from a concrete experience of poverty, labor, neighborhood, and oppression. There the community is not only a refuge of identity but a place where those who usually remain invisible can gain speech and the capacity to act. And yet a base community too can harden ideologically and turn a person into the representative of a class, a cause, or a political theology. No communal form is safe from the temptation to possess its members. My criterion always remains the same — namely, that a community is true only when it makes it possible for each person to compear with greater freedom, responsibility, and depth. It becomes, by contrast, absolutely false, even quite dangerous, when it demands that singularity be reduced to the role the community itself needs to assign it.

In all of them, despite their differences, I find one and the same refusal — namely, that the truth of an existence cannot be replaced by exterior knowledge of its structure. Each one, in its own way, returns thought to the point where the path stops being an observable figure and becomes something someone has to walk. The landscape thus regains temperature, risk, and night.

With Christian doctrine my relation is ambiguous, and I would rather say so with precision. My own ontology sits poorly with certain classical forms of Thomism, scholasticism, and natural theology — not out of ignorance or convenience, but because I distrust to the marrow any system that claims to close off mystery, that does not partake of the ontological prudence of the ignoramus et ignorabimus (see Emil du Bois-Reymond), and a good deal of great historical theology tries to do exactly that. Not entirely, and not always — it would be unfair to say so — but more than I can tolerate. There is in the doctrinal edifice a will to seal the crack that seems to me precisely the place through which the living breathes. Because for me, what truly compears is never finished being exhausted in its own compearing.

And yet, with what I call the Christian event, my proximity is almost vertiginous. When I think of vulnerability, of incarnation, of the wound, of loss, of love as something that happens and not as something one possesses, I move, without doubt, within a constellation of a Christian type without having decided to, not because I accept the dogmas, far from it, but because my affective and ontological structure keeps orbiting around them like a planet around a sun that has perhaps already gone out, and whose light nevertheless keeps arriving.

In other words, the further I go, the less I care about deciding whether or not I belong to Christianity, and the more I care about distinguishing what in it I consider historical, what I consider philosophical, and what I continue to recognize as originary experience. All the discussion that follows arises from that triple distinction. In this way, too, my own anthropology allows me to situate rather precisely the tradition in which I recognize myself.

The first thing that gives me away, if one reads me carefully, is that my anthropology is, on many fulcrums, more Christian than modern. For instance, dominant modernity thinks the human being as an autonomous individual, a producer of meanings, a serene center of rational decisions, an owner of himself who manages his life the way one manages an estate. I cannot manage to think it that way, and I have given up trying. In fact, what appears in its place, the moment I think of man, is vulnerability, the wound, constitutive dependence, the gift that arrives unrequested, incarnation as condition and not as accident, limit, and love understood as an event that befalls me rather than a property I exercise.

All of this is much closer to Saint Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430) scrutinizing his own opacity, to Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662) measuring man's disproportion between the two infinites, to Søren Kierkegaard, to Miguel de Unamuno with his agony, to Simone Weil with her decreated attention, than to René Descartes (1596 - 1650) founding everything on a transparent self, or to Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) legislating from reason, or to contemporary liberalism with its fiction of the sovereign subject.

And there is an irony in this that does not escape me. The man modernity presents as master of himself is, almost always, the one who knows himself least, because he has confused control with possession and inventory with intimacy. Christian thought, by contrast, began with the confession of an opacity, and that confession turns out, after centuries, to be more realistic than the whole psychology of autonomy of our present.

This anthropology of opacity and dependence leads naturally to the question of what language can do justice to a reality that never offers itself as a transparent object. For years I believed I found the closest answer in one concrete Christian tradition — namely, apophatic theology. Its prudence before the name of God seemed to prolong, on the plane of the absolute, the same resistance to objectification that I recognized in the person, in love, and in music.

If I had to point to one of the traditions with which, for years, I believed I identified almost completely, it would be the one I will now speak of. I think it deserves to be examined at some length. From here arises a temptation to a label that is worth walking through slowly, because for a long time I myself accepted it. The label is that of the apophatic. And indeed, it is true that, without doubt, there is in me an enormous affinity with negative, apophatic theology, the via remotionis (as opposed to the via causalitatis and the via eminentiae), with Meister Eckhart (1260 - 1328), with Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (circa 455 - circa 515), with Saint John of the Cross (1542 - 1591), because the idea that governs everything I think — that the essential compears and yet is never foreclosed — is first cousin to that intuition according to which God is not object, is not entity, is not thing, but that which shows itself without ever being exhausted in its showing.

The difference — one that for years seemed minor to me and today seems absolutely decisive — is that I have now tried to develop that intuition without needing to name it God, and above all without ending where pure apophaticism ends, which is in silence.

Because that is where the problem with the label lies, and today I am fairly clear about my reservation. True apophaticism ends up saying that we cannot say what it is. I do not do that. In fact, I constantly say what it is, and I want to say it. I speak of melody, of love, of voice, of compearance, of incarnation, of presence, of song, of melos, of friendship, of beauty, and I do not treat them as decorative metaphors or as consolations, but as real accesses, as places where at least something is truly given to me. I do not claim that we know nothing. I claim, without hedging, that we know something, and that this something is not known through objectification. The distance between those two statements is an entire continent. The one who FALLS SILENT before mystery and the one who SINGS before mystery do not inhabit the same night. Pure apophaticism issues into silence as into its truth, but I now try always to issue into poetry, into song, which is another matter, because poetry does not cancel the word before the inexhaustible — it offers it.

That is why I am not a clean heir of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. I am closer to Saint John of the Cross, to María Zambrano (1904 - 1991), to Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926), there where negation does not destroy images but engenders them, there where saying that one cannot say becomes, paradoxically, the beginning of a deeper saying.

And so my position ceases to be apophatic without thereby becoming fully cataphatic either, because I do not claim to possess affirmatively what I say. It is a third thing, and I already have a few tentative names for it, names I have used for months without having noticed that they resolved the problem somewhat, without closing it, of course. Ontology of compearance. Ontology of appearing. Ontology of the incarnate event. Ontology of unforecloseable presence.

The question that keeps me up is not the old question of negative theology, that of what we can affirm of the absolute. My question is another, and more concrete, and therefore more difficult. How does something compear without being reduced to its compearance. How is what is given, given, without being exhausted in the given. That question is not exactly the negative theologians' question, and that is why the label fits me too small on every side, like a jacket that warms the chest and pinches the shoulders.

It is here that my distance from certain forms of Christianity ceases to be mainly biographical and becomes a strictly ontological question. Until now the question has been what world I have received and how it goes on living in me. From this point on the question changes level. It is no longer only a matter of my provenance, but of asking what standing belongs to that toward which all these images, symbols, and experiences seemed to point from the start.

Yet it is not enough to invent a more cautious vocabulary for appearing. As long as I keep using terms like mystery, transcendence, incarnation, or presence, the question remains open whether all of them merely circle a human structure of experience or whether they point, further, toward what the religions have called God. The difference between these two possibilities can no longer be postponed.

But all this reflection would inevitably lead to a question that still remains in silence. That question is no longer only what place Christianity occupies in my biography, but what place the idea of God occupies in my ontology.

Until now I have spoken chiefly of Christianity as a received world — that is, a language, a memory, an economy of the affections, a certain imagination of suffering, of forgiveness, and of hope. But the question cannot stop there. It remains to be seen whether, behind that historical belonging, the name of God continues to point, for me, to something more than the place I come from. It is one thing to recognize that certain stars oriented the night of childhood. It is quite another to ask whether they still shine or whether we merely keep their light after they have gone out. It is at this point that memory must give way, at least provisionally, to ontology.

It is worth saying here, with all the clarity I am capable of, that my problem, in truth, has never been the idea of God. When I reread what I have written over the years, I scarcely find a serious objection to the idea of God. It is true that I do not much like it, but at least I understand it. I do not like it because, to my mind, God names precisely the objective, the anantropic [I will call "anantropic" that whose structure of appearing does not depend constitutively on human existence. From the Greek ἀν- (an-, privative, "without") + ἄνθρωπος (ánthrōpos, human being). It would mean lacking the human, foreign to man, not anthropological, not relative to human experience] — that is, a reality that, by definition, does not compear from within the human world but precedes it, grounds it, or transcends it. And my thought has always wanted to remain within the ambit of human compearance, there where meaning happens among incarnate, finite beings. It is, then, I insist, an idea, that of God, that I do not like but that at least I believe I understand. So, I insist, when I reread what I have written over the years, what I find in fact is a persistent, almost obsessive objection, not against the idea of God itself, but against certain images of God.

Against the engineer God who designs the world as a mechanism, sets it running, and withdraws to contemplate his clockwork. Against the accountant God who keeps souls' debits and credits and settles accounts at the close of the fiscal year. Against the policeman God who watches, sanctions, threatens, and turns morality into a case file. Against the explanation God, that convenient stopper placed in the hole of what we do not understand, so as not to have to keep looking at the hole.

Against all these images I have fought, and will keep fighting, because they are idols, in the exact and ancient sense of the word — manufactured things that occupy the place of what fits in no thing. But against Mystery I have absolutely nothing. And I call Mystery not an explanation we still lack, nor a supernatural region hidden behind the world, but that irreducible depth of the real that never finishes letting itself be possessed by our concepts. Mystery is not what we do not yet know, but what, even when it compears, is never exhausted in its compearing. It is the inexhaustibility of being, the irreducible singularity of the human, the superabundance of meaning, the excess of presence over any description we make of it. So, as I say, against Mystery I have absolutely nothing. On the contrary. A good part of my work — musical, philosophical, literary, if I may call it that — is nothing but a long exploration of Mystery, only carried out in other words. Where others say God I prefer to say compearance, presence, melos, love, friendship, music, suffering, longing, yearning, jubilation, appearing, discontinuity. Not out of modesty, nor intellectual cowardice, nor secular coquetry. No. Out of fidelity to a mode of things giving themselves that the word God, as it circulates today, tends to betray by turning it into an object.

Perhaps someone will ask me, then, why not simply say God and spare so many detours. The answer is simple. Because words do not arrive naked. They arrive laden with centuries of interpretations, institutions, polemics, imaginaries, and habits of thought. And today the word God tends to summon first a supreme entity rather than a mystery, first an explanation rather than a question, first an object of belief rather than a form of compearance. I do not deny that there have been great thinkers and great mystics for whom that word retained its full capacity for opening. What I am saying is that, on our cultural horizon, it rarely happens anymore. Too often, God stops being the name of what exceeds all representation and becomes, precisely, the most powerful representation of all.

My resistance, then, is not born of atheism, but of a certain phenomenological discipline. Whenever a word claims to close off what compears, I suspect the word. Whenever a concept claims to exhaust the presence that made it possible, I suspect the concept. My whole ontology consists, at bottom, in protecting the event against its reification, appearing against its capture, melos against its reduction to object. If I have tried to keep any fidelity through all these years, it has been precisely that one. Perhaps, then, the difference between my language and the believer's does not lie so much in what each of us is trying to point to as in the fear each of us has. The believer fears losing God if he stops naming him. I fear losing Mystery in the very instant I believe I have named it.

II. What the Body Does Not Abandon

That same suspicion toward any word that claims to close off what comes forward does not stay in language. It also lives in the body, which goes on repeating inherited gestures long after reason has stopped assenting to the propositions that once explained them.

All this, however, would remain too abstract a plane if I did not ask again how that same caution before the name of God keeps acting, no longer in vocabulary, but in the body. Because that inheritance does not stay still. Once its depth is acknowledged, a new difficulty immediately appears, perhaps still more complex. It is no longer only a matter of accepting that a tradition constitutes us, but of understanding how it keeps acting even when we believe we have taken distance from it.

Many of those who attribute all their conflicts to the Catholicism of their childhood believe they have definitively abandoned that anthropology. They have become "enlightened," rational, modern, "democratic." And yet it is not uncommon to discover that, tacitly, sometimes without even noticing it themselves, they go on inhabiting exactly the same affective architecture. The names have changed, but not the building. Where before they spoke of sin, now they speak of trauma. Where before there was impurity, now there is toxicity. Where before there was confession, now there is public exposure. Where before absolution was sought, now moral validation is sought. The vocabulary has changed profoundly, but the grammar remains strikingly intact.

But traditions do not survive only in our ideas. They survive, perhaps above all, in our way of inhabiting the body. Where we believe ourselves most spontaneous, we usually still speak languages much older than ourselves. And it is precisely at that level that the question of belonging stops being a cultural discussion and becomes a lived experience. Because the body retains, for much longer than the intellect, what a civilization taught it to love, to fear, to hope for, or to hide.

So, I insist, up to now I have spoken mostly of the interior landscape we inherit. But every inheritance ends by becoming flesh. No tradition remains for long at the level of ideas. Sooner or later it finds its way to the body.

The received landscape does not remain before us as a scene contemplated from outside. It enters the body. It becomes modesty, expectation, fear, permission, prohibition, desire, an image of purity, the experience of guilt, and a way of exposing oneself to another's gaze. Perhaps that is why no dimension reveals the depth of an inheritance as clearly as sexuality, because in it ideas stop being ideas and become reflexes, contractions, fantasies, reticences, and ways of judging oneself. That is why what follows is not a deviation from the initial problem. It is, on the contrary, one of its most demanding tests — namely, asking what it means still to inhabit a world whose understanding of the body one can no longer accept without reservation.

And, in fact, those who claim to have emancipated themselves from all Christian morality often retain, without noticing it, a profound discomfort with the flesh, at times paradoxically greater than that of practicing Christians. Not because they explicitly condemn it, but because they go on experiencing it under the secret regime of suspicion. Desire keeps compearing as something requiring justification, vigilance, or explanation, sometimes even shame or disgust. Erotic spontaneity rarely appears as an originary form of openness to the other, but rather as territory permanently subject to examination, associated even with filth, impurity, disgust. Even when the discourse celebrates sexual freedom, concrete experience is often shot through with an extraordinary moral anxiety. The censor has not disappeared. He has simply changed uniform.

Indeed, I insist, there are people who spent half their lives trying to escape an upbringing they considered obsessed with sex and end up thinking about sex with an intensity even greater than that from which they meant to free themselves. Not because they live it more fully — quite the opposite — but because they continue measuring everything from guilt, even though that guilt no longer bears the name of sin. It is a diffuse guilt, psychological, political, identitarian, or therapeutic, but it retains the same deep structure. Conscience keeps functioning as a permanent tribunal. Only the judges have changed.

Perhaps that reveals that ontologies are far more resistant than opinions. Opinions can be changed in an afternoon. Ontologies take generations. One can stop believing in God and still go on living within a certain Christian understanding of the body, of suffering, of forgiveness, of desire, or of purity. Just as another can remain metaphysically Platonist many years after having forgotten who Plato was. Ideas are forgotten easily. The elementary forms of inhabiting the world remain.

I insist, then, that perhaps true emancipation does not consist in inverting the signs of the received tradition, but in passing all the way through it until one understands what in it was contingent and what answered to a deeper anthropological intuition. Because simple inversion remains a form of dependence. Whoever lives constantly reacting against their origin still lets that origin determine the entire horizon of their existence. Absolute negation is, often, the most secret form of fidelity.

It would be too easy to present all this as a linear path out of darkness into emancipation. That has not been the case. Even where I have had to depart from received morality, I have not always felt that I was moving away from everything that tradition had taught me to protect. At times the critique of a given Christian norm has arisen precisely from a demand I also learned within Christianity — for instance, the resistance to reducing a person to a category, the primacy of mercy over law, the distrust of self-satisfied judgment. The conflict does not then occur between a tradition and something wholly exterior to it, but within the landscape itself, between paths that fork and each claims to be the true one.

What has been said so far allows the initial image to be refined a bit further. Belonging to a tradition consists not only in preserving its noblest symbols nor in being moved by its forms of beauty. It also means discovering it there where one would wish to be entirely autonomous — that is, in shame, in desire, in the fear of being seen, in the need to justify oneself. The landscape is not only what we contemplate, but also that from which we contemplate without noticing it. And freedom does not begin when we pretend to come from nowhere, but when we make the inherited perspective visible and learn to answer for it.

If one intuition from this whole itinerary had to be kept, it would be this: that ontologies survive far more deeply than opinions. We change ideas with relative ease. What proves much harder, by contrast, is changing the way the world compears before us, because that way of compearing has already penetrated the body, desire, memory, and affectivity.

Sexuality functions here as a limit case, not as an isolated matter. In it, something that occurs in all experience becomes especially visible — namely, that the world does not arrive first as neutral matter, to receive our opinions afterward, but already laden with permissions, fears, promises, and possibilities of appearing. Understanding how a tradition inhabits desire thus compels a broader ontological question.

What is decisive is not only what we think about the body, but what that experience reveals about the very way the world compears. Because behind these moral questions a more radical problem begins to insinuate itself. If even desire and guilt reveal themselves as inherited modes of inhabiting reality, then the question can no longer be confined to a given moral tradition. It must shift toward what makes every tradition possible — that is, toward the very way things appear, acquire meaning, and end up organizing an existence.

The question now shifts register slightly. It is no longer enough to describe how a tradition inscribes itself in us; one must also ask what all this reveals about the very structure of experience.

III. Ritual, Ceremony, and the Sapiential

That question about the very structure of experience leads directly to ritual and ceremony, that is, to the concrete forms through which a tradition inscribes its mark on the body before thought arrives to interrogate it.

I said before that a landscape becomes experience above all in the gestures learned before they are understood, in the images that preceded any judgment about them. That precedence of experience over formulation also explains my ambiguous relation to some of the most elementary gestures of Christianity. Crossing oneself before eating, entering a church, attending Mass, kneeling, taking communion, or fasting are not, for me, insignificant acts that can be cleanly divided between superstition and doctrinal assent. They are historically sedimented ways of introducing a discontinuity into the undifferentiated flow of life.

Crossing oneself before eating can become an empty automatism, of course, but it can also recall that food is not an absolute production of the individual — that eating means receiving the death and the labor of other beings, depending on a land, on hands, on a history and a community that precede us.

Going to Mass can turn into social compliance, mutual surveillance, or Sunday routine, but it can also interrupt the private sovereignty of time and return the person to a temporality that is shared, repeated, and received.

Taking communion can be reduced to a certification of ecclesiastical belonging, but its originary intuition is extraordinarily powerful — namely, that no truth remains true unless it comes to be made food, body, incorporation, and community, that what is believed cannot stand forever before us as an exterior object, but must pass through us and transform us.

Fasting, finally, can degenerate into neurotic penance, ascetic pride, or contempt for the flesh, but it can also be a discipline of availability — namely, remembering that desire has no automatic right to be satisfied, that the body is not only a machine for consumption, and that voluntary privation sometimes makes perceptible what abundance had covered over with noise.

Rising early also belongs, for me, to this same family of ambiguous practices. It too can become a moral fetish, a badge of productivity, and a particularly unpleasant form of anthropological superiority — namely, the one who gets up at five in the morning sometimes imagines himself not only more disciplined but more virtuous than one who lives by another bodily economy of time. In our age, rising early has ceased to be associated solely with prayer, peasant labor, or domestic necessity, and has been absorbed by the contemporary religion of optimization: getting up before everyone else, training while the world sleeps, answering emails before dawn, demonstrating that even sleep has been subordinated to performance. None of that interests me. A body is not morally better for answering to a given chronotype, and systematically forcing its rhythm is no nobler an asceticism than listening to it.

But there is another way of rising early that I do understand, even if it does not always suit me physiologically — namely, getting up to find the world before it has been entirely colonized by usefulness. The early morning introduces a discontinuity similar to that of fasting. It suspends for a moment the ordinary circulation of obligations, merchandise, messages, and demands, and allows one to listen to a city not yet turned into traffic and to contemplate a house before each room recovers its function. The monks who rise for matins, the peasant who goes out before the heat, the musician who practices when no one is listening, and the mother who stays awake beside a sick child are not performing the same act, but all of them know something of that hour when time seems received rather than administered. Rising early can then be a practice of availability — not a heroic conquest of the day, but the humble entry into a duration that does not yet belong to us.

That is why I would not make of rising early a universal commandment, any more than I would make of fasting, communion, or attending Mass an automatic proof of depth. Their truth depends on what they open the body to. If getting up early allows one to be more present, to listen, to care, to sing, to work without violence, or to receive the first light as an event, it holds a real wisdom. If it serves only to accumulate performance and despise those who sleep, it has become just another liturgy of the sovereign self. The question is not at what hour the day begins, but whether we are still capable of receiving it as something more than an extension of our own will.

I do not regularly practice these actions, nor do I necessarily accept the dogmatic interpretation that accompanies them, but neither can I dismiss them as irrational residues of a bygone age. At their best they contain an anthropological wisdom — namely, they teach through the body that we are not self-sufficient, that time needs thresholds, that food can be received as gift, that desire requires form, and that belonging does not exist solely in private consciousness. My distance begins when the gesture claims by itself to guarantee the truth it represents. My proximity begins, by contrast, when the gesture, without manufacturing that truth, disposes a body to receive it.

I understand by ritual, then, not a magical action that necessarily produces what it signifies, but a bodily and temporal form of shared attention. Ritual separates a before from an after, organizes space, disciplines gesture, transmits a memory, and offers a community the possibility of responding together to something none of its members invented alone. Its truth consists not in causal efficacy nor in exact repetition, but in its capacity to open a clearing within ordinary continuity.

It is worth distinguishing, however, between ritual and ceremony, even though in concrete experience the two are frequently intertwined. I would call ritual the repeatable structure of actions, times, words, and gestures by which a community inscribes a difference into the ordinary course of life. Ritual can be minimal, domestic, even intimate: lighting a candle before a photograph, keeping silence before playing, kissing a child at bedtime, pronouncing each year the names of the dead. Its force comes from reiteration and from its capacity to condense memory into the body. Ceremony, by contrast, constitutes the public, staged, and formal dimension of that structuring. It distributes places and functions, gathers witnesses, establishes a visible dramaturgy, and offers the community a shared figure of what is taking place. Every ritual contains a certain form, but not every ritual needs to become a ceremony.

The distinction matters because their pathologies are not identical either. Ritual becomes hollow when repetition turns into automatism and stops renewing attention. Ceremony is perverted when public representation, etiquette, hierarchy, and protocol become more important than the event they were meant to serve. There can be a true ritual with no ceremony at all, like the secret gesture with which someone remembers their mother, and there can be an impeccable ceremony in which no living ritual is any longer occurring, because everyone correctly performs their function and nothing compears. The opposite can also happen: a great ceremony can allow a scattered grief or joy to finally acquire a common body.

I am not, therefore, opposing the interior authenticity of ritual to the theatrical exteriority of ceremony. That opposition would be too Protestant, and too modern. Exteriority too can reveal, the scene too can know, and public form can allow a community to feel what no individual could sustain alone. What is decisive is that ceremony not claim for itself the power to produce the event automatically, and that ritual not believe itself true merely for being intimate. Both must remain at the service of a presence that precedes and exceeds them. Precisely for this reason a ceremony can fail even while being perfect, and a clumsy ritual can be true if in it a body really comes to respond.

A wedding ceremony does not manufacture love, a funeral does not produce mourning, a Mass does not mechanically create presence, and a concert does not guarantee music — but each of these forms can offer a body, a duration, and a scene in which something that was already occurring in scattered fashion finally comes to compear.

Ritual is not the opposite of spontaneity. It can be its condition, in the same way that a musical form does not eliminate melos but allows it to sustain itself without evaporating. My objection arises when ceremony forgets that it serves an event and begins serving itself, when correctness of gesture replaces attention, when the officiant's rank matters more than what is being made present, when social belonging replaces transformation, and when repetition claims to possess what it can only receive. But it would be an equally serious modern error to conclude that all authenticity must be informal, improvised, and private.

Human existence needs forms, thresholds, calendars, inherited words, and repeatable gestures. Without them, each generation would have to invent anew how to receive a birth, see off a death, celebrate a union, ask forgiveness, or give thanks for food. Ceremony is a memory of the body. It can freeze and become mask, but it can also safeguard for centuries a wisdom that no individual would have been able to preserve alone.

This memory is not preserved solely in ceremonial gestures. It is preserved also in what I would call the sapiential — sayings, proverbs, tales, formulas of courtesy, songs, domestic advice, grandparents' expressions, phrases whose authorship no one remembers because they have been polished by countless mouths. Academic modernity tends to look at all of this with a mixture of condescension and nostalgia. Either it considers it precritical superstition, or it collects it as dead folklore. But the proverb does not claim to be a scientific law or a universal proposition. It is a concentration of historical experience. It says less than it knows and knows more than it can demonstrate. "Every cloud has a silver lining," "grasp all, lose all," "better late than never," or "every man to his own trade" are not exhaustive truths. They can even contradict one another. Their intelligence consists precisely in not claiming to form a system.

The sapiential knows by sedimentation, comparison, memory, and occasion. It does not ask only whether a proposition is true, but when it must be spoken, before whom, in what tone, and within what situation. A proverb out of season can be cruelty. Spoken at the right moment, by contrast, it can give a person back an orientation that no technical explanation would have given them. Its truth is prudential, not algorithmic. It belongs less to the domain of certainty than to that of phronesis, of tact, of knowing how to live among realities that never let themselves be reduced to a single rule.

In this I find a deep affinity with my own ontology. Music too, love, mourning, and education all demand a wisdom of the occasion. It is not enough to hold correct principles; one must recognize how a situation compears and respond to its singularity. That is why I am so interested in etymology, in oral tradition, and in popular speech. In them words are not interchangeable units of information but bodies eroded by generations of use. Every proverb carries the remains of countless human scenes. We must not obey them blindly, because they also transmit prejudices, hierarchies, and cruelties. But it would be equally arrogant to imagine that an individual life, armed with a few recent theories, necessarily knows more than centuries of condensed experience. Critical freedom does not begin by destroying the sapiential, but by learning to discern when an inherited word opens the situation and when it forecloses it.

But collective memory does not transmit only prudence. Precisely because gestures, proverbs, and inherited forms reach zones prior to reflective judgment, they can safeguard an experience and also perpetuate a blindness. The same depth that makes a tradition valuable makes it harder to interrogate. Hence the recognition of the sapiential must lead, without breaking the thread, toward a more uncomfortable question — namely, how to give thanks for an inheritance without turning its antiquity into absolution.

IV. The Genealogy That Cannot Be Amputated

Giving thanks for an inheritance without turning its age into absolution demands, however, going further still, and asking also about what that same inheritance may have silenced or damaged.

It is worth clarifying from the outset, however, that belonging to a landscape does not mean finding it wholly benevolent. That which has given us a language may also have imposed silences on us; the house that sheltered us may also have confined us; the stars by which we learned to orient ourselves may have received names that later proved insufficient to us, or even harmful. Acknowledging an inheritance does not require absolving it. Nor does it require hating it, far from it. It requires, rather, resisting two symmetrical simplifications — that is, turning it into a home without shadow, and reducing it to the sum of its violences.

For all this, it would be absolutely impossible, and moreover a lie, to deny that a large part of my ontology, of my sensibility toward the symbol, of the very way I imagine the real, continues to live, without any doubt, more tacitly or more explicitly (depending on the case), within a horizon of intelligibility that is deeply Christian. Again, not in a doctrinal, institutional, or confessional sense, but in an ontological one.

Now, it is true that I recognize myself far more in the symbolic imaginary and the ontology of original Christianity, prior to its full institutionalization — that is, pre-Constantinian Christianity — than in many of its later historical formulations. Some of the deepest harmonics of my thought still resonate there. They do not make up the whole melody, but they are an essential part of its life. And not only because I arrived there intellectually, but because it was also the symbolic grammar of my childhood — that is, the spiritual language in which my parents taught me to name the world, suffering, beauty, forgiveness, hope, and mystery.

That grammar became inseparably bound to the affectivity of my first words and my first experiences as a human being. In fact, it is not an inheritance one can amputate without a great deal of violence. Nor, if I am honest, is it an inheritance I want to amputate. I could try to leave that territory, and I tried, in adolescence, with the seriousness with which one tries to give up a mother tongue. One cannot (and now I also think one should not). It is impossible. One can write in another, think in another, even dream in another, but the first goes on lying beneath, always and silently keeping time, deciding what sounds true to me before I decide it.

Perhaps an adult relation to what has formed us does not consist in deciding, once and for all, whether we are inside or outside. It is possible that certain belongings do not admit that geometry. They are not kept intact, but neither are they entirely abandoned. They change in distance, in temperature, and in authority. They stop being an enclosure and become a horizon. They no longer determine every step, but they continue to intervene in what we recognize as the path.

To stop recognizing oneself in the explicit propositions of a tradition does not amount, by any means, to leaving its world. Sometimes one abandons a doctrine without abandoning the horizon from which one learned to look. Certain words stop being spoken, and yet the form of attention those words made possible continues to act within us. A house can stop belonging to us legally and still remain the place from which we remember every other house. Something similar happens here. I do not speak, then, from a covert allegiance, nor from a shamefaced faith, but from a belonging harder to delimit — namely, that of someone who no longer obeys the map but still recognizes the terrain underfoot.

For some years I believed that the true measure of intelligence, of enlightened, liberal, civic, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, modern, "democratic" rationality, consisted precisely in breaking sharply with all of that. I tried to be a militant atheist. I tried to think from a convinced Marxism. I tried to view religion as a mere historical superstition destined to disappear. It was not a youthful game or a pose. I tried it in earnest. I read with passion, argued with fervor, adopted for a time categories that seemed to offer a total explanation of man and history. But little by little I understood that I was not changing ground. I was only laying another pavement over the same earth.

Because it is one thing to critically review the inheritance one has received, and quite another to amputate oneself from it. Critique is an act of maturity. Amputation is usually an act of resentment. One can argue with one's own parents for decades. One can abandon religious practice. One can disagree profoundly with a country's history, denounce its injustices, and feel ashamed of many of its pages. All of that belongs to freedom. But what is illusory is believing that one can stop having been born where one was born, stop having learned to name the world with the words one learned as a child, stop having been shaped by the gestures, the rhythms, the silences, and the images that preceded one.

No one tears off their skin without also tearing off part of the flesh. Traditions are not merely a set of ideas one accepts or rejects. They are a certain way of being moved, of suffering, of hoping, of experiencing time, guilt, forgiveness, death, beauty, fragility, love. They dwell in us long before becoming concepts. When we believe we have abandoned them, they often go on living in the secret and deepest syntax of our sensibility.

My failure in trying to abandon that ground entirely made me more sensitive to the unconscious ways a tradition survives in those who consider themselves its enemies. This is not a matter of accusing them of hypocrisy or claiming that "deep down" they still believe. It is a matter of observing that a doctrine can disappear while its affective structures, its forms of guilt, and its procedures of exclusion remain. From there arises my ambivalence toward a certain contemporary unbelief.

That is why it produces in me a certain sadness, even tenderness, to watch so many cultural Christians who naively feel the need to keep declaring how much they despise Christianity. There is something paradoxical in that attitude. They believe they have left behind an entire tradition they consider "oppressive," and yet they retain from it precisely what they most claim to reject. They renounce forgiveness but intensify guilt. They lose mercy and keep judgment. They reject grace and absolutize moral purity. They proclaim themselves liberated from all religion while turning every disagreement into a trial of excommunication and every mistake into an unforgivable fault. At times they become more inquisitorial toward themselves and others than many sincere believers.

Still more irritating to me is a figure very characteristic of the enlightened bourgeoisie of Western cities, the frivolous atheist who imagines not only that he does not believe in God, but that he himself already stands above all belief. He tends to regard the believer as an epistemological anomaly, as someone who has introduced into his mind an unverified proposition, while he supposes himself installed on the neutral ground of facts. But no one lives on facts alone. Even the apparently emancipated atheist believes in a certain idea of progress, of autonomy, of health, of normality, of emancipation, of science, of democracy, of sexuality, of authenticity, and of a life well lived. He believes, moreover, that these categories are self-evident, and that whoever disputes them is not merely disagreeing but revealing a moral flaw, an ignorance, or a dangerous deviation. His atheism does not bother me; it can be intellectually rigorous and existentially noble. What bothers me is his inability to recognize the fiduciary, symbolic, and almost liturgical structure of his own world. He mocks confession and practices public exposure, ridicules original sin and explains every biography through inherited traumas, despises excommunication and demands social expulsion, rejects dogma and repeats slogans whose questioning he considers obscene, denounces religious fanaticism and can show himself inquisitorially convinced that his own values are the final terminus of human reason. In that gesture there is much more than ignorance — namely, class snobbery and the confidence of an era. The bourgeois atheist believes himself superior not because he has thought religion through more deeply, but because he belongs to a milieu where despising it functions as a password of respectability. He has confused unbelief with lucidity, and belonging to a cultural majority with the absence of faith. He does not know that he too believes, and precisely for not knowing it he believes all the more rigidly, because what is not recognized as belief is exempted from all criticism.

So-called New Atheism represented the most visible public formulation of that confidence of an era, although its four leading figures were not intellectually equivalent. Richard Dawkins (1941), Sam Harris (1967), Christopher Hitchens (1949 - 2011), and Daniel Dennett (1942 - 2024) shared the conviction that religion should stop receiving special protection from criticism, and that religious claims could be examined with the same rigor as any other claim about the world. On that point I have no objection. A doctrine that intervenes in education, in sexuality, in politics, or in the understanding of suffering cannot claim argumentative immunity in the name of its sacred character. I also share their denunciation of countless cruelties legitimized by religious authorities and their rejection of the idea that faith is morally virtuous by the simple fact of being faith.

My distance appears in the poverty of the object they frequently construct in order to refute it. Christianity is reduced to the acceptance of a cosmological hypothesis about a supernatural designer, prayer to a causal request directed at an invisible superperson, dogma to a collection of empirically indemonstrable claims, and tradition to a device for transmitting errors. Once religion has been reduced to that, refuting it becomes relatively simple, but the whole landscape has vanished before the discussion even begins. Nothing remains of liturgy as shared temporality, of symbol as a form of knowledge, of sin as the experience of noncoincidence with oneself, of grace as an interruption of the economy of merit, of the cross as an image of a vulnerable transcendence, or of community as embodied memory. A childish metaphysics is defeated, and a civilization is declared surpassed.

Dawkins strikes me as especially limited when he treats religion almost exclusively as a false belief transmitted culturally and explainable through evolutionary mechanisms. That a belief has a natural genealogy does not yet decide its truth nor exhaust its function. Mathematics too, parental love, and trust in induction have biological and cultural histories, and that provenance does not automatically turn them into illusions. Jerry Coyne (1949) extends a similar orientation when he presents science and religion as incompatible modes of producing knowledge — namely, his critique is convincing against religious claims that compete directly with biology or cosmology, but insufficient when it demands that all religious experience present itself as a rival causal theory to the natural sciences.

Sam Harris strikes me as even more problematic, because he combines a strong naturalism with a selective appropriation of Eastern contemplative practices. He rejects Christian metaphysics as superstition, but grants certain states of consciousness an almost revelatory authority, provided they can be described in a neuropsychological or Buddhist vocabulary stripped of tradition. The result is a spirituality acceptable to the technoscientific bourgeoisie — namely, meditation without historical community, transcendence without inherited doctrine, and dispossession of the self without Gethsemane, guilt, promise, or forgiveness. I do not reject meditation, but the asymmetry by which an Eastern practice reinterpreted therapeutically is considered legitimate experience while a Christian rite is dismissed as irrational residue.

Hitchens possessed a far richer literary, historical, and moral intelligence, and his indignation at the alliance of religion and power could be just and necessary. But his polemical brilliance tended to gather under a single accusation religious experiences that were too different from one another, and to judge a tradition almost exclusively by its most destructive uses. Serious thought should not absolve Christianity of the Inquisition, of anti-Semitism, of colonial violence, or of the disciplining of bodies, but neither should it reduce it to those facts and set aside John of the Cross, Bach (1685 - 1750), Kierkegaard, Dorothy Day (1897 - 1980), Simone Weil, or the communities that have protected the persecuted and fed those whom no one wanted to feed.

Dennett is philosophically the most interesting of the four, because he understands religion as a natural, culturally evolved phenomenon, made up of practices, institutions, narratives, and mechanisms of transmission. But his heterophenomenology and his functionalism end up treating consciousness from an exteriority that my ontology cannot accept as sufficient. Explaining what functions an experience performs, what dispositions it produces, and how it is transmitted is not the same as understanding how it compears for the one who lives it. The exterior description can be true, but it does not hold a monopoly on reality.

My objection to the New Atheism, then, is not that it is atheist, but that it tends to be insufficiently philosophical about what it denies. It confuses the critique of a proposition with the understanding of a form of life, and believes that explaining a practice causally amounts to having exhausted its meaning. Paradoxically, it shares with religious fundamentalism the very same impoverished image of faith: both believe that what matters is the literal assertion of certain supernatural descriptions. They quarrel over the truth of the map without asking what historical experience made it necessary to draw. And this reduction prepares, moreover, the inverse movement of so many Westerners who, having abandoned a caricatured tradition, go looking afterward in an equally caricatured East for the depth they failed to recognize in their own house.

When a person fails to recognize the tradition that still organizes their sensibility, they cannot cleanly approach another one either. They carry with them categories, desires, and refusals that they will project onto whatever they claim to be discovering. Hence the superficial denial of Western Christianity so often leads, not to a genuine encounter with other religions, but to selecting from them whatever confirms the spiritual needs of one's own era. This inability to recognize one's own belonging also explains a phenomenon I have never quite managed to understand: the ease with which so many Westerners who barely know Christianity, Judaism, Greece, or Rome begin flirting with extraordinarily watered-down versions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, or some supposed universal Eastern mysticism. It does not trouble me when someone approaches another tradition seriously, since every genuine encounter can decenter us and widen our capacity to listen. What baffles me is abandoning an unknown inheritance in order to embrace a therapeutic translation of another inheritance that is known even less. Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Eckhart, John of the Cross, the liturgy, scholasticism, Greek tragedy, and Roman law are set aside unread, and a vocabulary of energy, presence, detachment, vibration, consciousness, and dissolution of the ego is adopted whose real genealogy is likewise unknown. What is being sought is not another tradition in its historical, ritual, doctrinal, political, and linguistic roughness. What is being sought is a spiritual analgesic compatible with contemporary individualism: a spirituality without Church, without history, without guilt, without judgment, without binding tradition, without demanding community, and above all without the irreducible wound of a concrete biography. It is a softened form of cosmic anantropism, a narcotic by means of which singularity, memory, conflict, desire, and suffering can be declared illusions of a self that would be better off transcended. Christianity, even when it has been distorted, forces us to look at a tortured body, a mother who loses her son, a betrayal, a tomb, and a cry of abandonment. Its symbols do not allow an easy escape into a serenity without history. Many Western appropriations of the East, by contrast, offer precisely that escape: everything is flux, everything is one, nothing should be taken too personally, suffering is born of attachment, and salvation consists in changing the consciousness with which one beholds things. My thinking cannot settle there. I do not want the self to become sovereign, but neither do I want it to disappear. I do not want to absolutize the wound, but neither do I want to declare it mere appearance. I do not want to possess my biography, but neither do I want to wake from it as from an irrelevant dream. I prefer a tradition that is difficult, contested, and truly known to an imported spirituality that hands us back, under exotic names, exactly the therapeutic fantasies of our own era.

Perhaps because the first symbolic matrices of our childhood, the first ontologies, do not disappear when we stop pronouncing them. They simply change vocabulary. They change liturgy, they change priests. But they go on organizing experience from within. A human being does not stop living according to a vision of the world merely because they have stopped explicitly believing in it. In fact, quite often they go on inhabiting it without knowing it.

Over the years I have come to think that true freedom, therefore, does not consist in reinventing oneself from scratch. That fantasy belongs more to adolescence than to philosophy. Freedom begins when one stops being ashamed of what made one possible—not in order to obey it blindly, nor to repeat it with nostalgia, but to converse with it. No tradition deserves absolute obedience. But neither does it deserve absolute hatred. Both are exactly the same form of servitude.

Because every tradition, without exception, contains blindnesses, limits, and injustices. But it also contains intuitions, symbols, forms of wisdom, and human experiences that no generation invents on its own. Maturing consists, perhaps, in learning to tell one from the other. We do not inherit only what we must overcome; we also inherit that thanks to which we remain capable of understanding, loving, thinking, and creating. True freedom does not consist in breaking with every inheritance, but in knowing how to recognize what deserves to be preserved, what must be transformed, and what should be left behind.

The hardest task consists, then, in critically reconciling oneself with one's own genealogy, with one's own personal biography. In accepting that one never thinks from nowhere, but always from somewhere. That lucidity does not require ceasing to be a child, but finally learning whose child one is, and deciding from there what deserves to remain alive and what must die. Because only what has been truly inherited can be truly transformed. Everything else is not emancipation. It is simply uprootedness disguised as originality.

I think this is enough to sketch out this first aspect of the problem. What remains, however, is a deeper difficulty—the one posed by the very name of God.

V. Mystery and the Images of the Beyond

That deeper difficulty, the one posed by the very name of God, cannot be resolved simply by describing how that name acts in the body and in memory. It demands asking what happens when that name also claims to explain the suffering of the world.

But the main difficulty with the word God does not lie only in the danger of objectifying it. It also lies in what that word seems to force us to assert in the face of suffering. If God names an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good will that governs the totality of things, then the problem of evil is not a lateral objection but the central wound of theism. I do not mean only the evil produced by human decisions, which would already be enough to call any providence into question, but the suffering that precedes all freedom: childhood diseases, catastrophes, predation, animal pain, neurological deterioration, lives destroyed before they have even acquired the capacity to understand what is happening to them. No general appeal to free will explains that excess.

Nor am I satisfied by theodicies that turn suffering into a condition for moral growth. It is true that some people develop compassion, lucidity, or strength by passing through a wound, but it does not follow that the wound was sent to produce them, or that its destructiveness is justified by the good that comes after. A dead child cannot be treated as an instrument of the spiritual maturation of those who survive him. Any explanation that views pain from the perspective of the whole runs the risk of philosophically repeating the very violence it claims to justify. It makes the victim replaceable within a universal economy of goods.

Nor can an appeal to mystery be used as too quick a safe-conduct. To say that God's ways are inscrutable can be a legitimate confession of ignorance, but it becomes immoral when it serves to keep intact an image of providence that no event could ever call into question. If every imaginable suffering turns out to be compatible with divine goodness because we do not know its reasons, then the word goodness has stopped bearing any recognizable relation to what we call good in human experience. We cannot simultaneously affirm that God is good in an intelligible sense and withdraw every human criterion of goodness whenever the facts contradict the claim.

My tragic ontology does not offer an alternative theodicy. I do not know how to explain why evil exists, nor how it could be reconciled within some future totality. I resist precisely that reconciliation. I can conceive of a presence that accompanies suffering, a transcendence that does not compear as a power capable of preventing it but as a vulnerability that runs through it. I can understand the cross as a refusal to contemplate pain from some immune height. But this image no longer fully answers the question of omnipotence. It perhaps saves one form of God by sacrificing another. The God of Gethsemane strikes me as humanly recognizable, because he trembles and does not dominate. The provident God who could have averted that night and chose not to remains, by contrast, far more problematic to me.

That is why my closeness to Christianity is not born of a solution to the problem of evil, but of the fact that, in its central symbol, God does not appear offering an explanation of suffering but suffering it and crying out his own abandonment. That gesture justifies nothing. It does not bring back the dead, it does not answer for animal pain, and it does not prove that everything will turn out well. But it prevents, at least in its deepest truth, the divinity from being imagined as an invulnerable spectator. If I can still approach the name God, it is from that shared powerlessness and not from a perfectly administered providence. And precisely because no conclusive theodicy exists for me, neither can I receive without transformation the Christian images of judgment, of hell, or of the final consummation.

Christianity's great eschatological and suprasensible images—the saints, the angels, purgatory, hell, the last judgment, and the Apocalypse—must be received from within this same difficulty. I cannot affirm them naturally as a literal geography of entities, places, and future events. Imagining incorporeal personal creatures organized into hierarchies, souls subjected after death to temporal processes of purification, a cosmic tribunal distributing eternal destinies, or a final destruction of the world described with prophetic precision exceeds what I can hold ontologically. But neither do I think these images are grotesque residues that adult reason should simply discard. For centuries they have articulated human experiences for which our secular vocabulary tends to offer far poorer equivalents.

The saints interest me, above all, as a memory that a life can take on an exemplary shape without being reduced to an abstract rule. A virtue embodied in Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Ávila, Óscar Romero, or some anonymous old woman who held a family together does not mean the same thing as a definition of goodness. The saint, in the best sense, is not a professional virtuoso nor a magical intermediary, but an existence whose way of responding makes a human possibility visible. My reservation begins when sainthood is administered through case files, certifiable miracles, models of obedience, or pedagogies of perfection that erase the real ambivalence of a biography. Exemplarity can orient us, but it must not seal the person shut beneath an edifying image.

Angels are more difficult for me literally, but powerful symbolically. The angel is a messenger. What matters is not its supernatural zoology, but that it represents the arrival of a word whose source is not controlled by whoever receives it. Something breaks in, calls one by name, alters a destiny, and demands a response. In that sense, the angelic figure belongs to a vocative ontology. It signals that not every orientation is born of our own will, and that a presence can manifest itself through the mediation of a voice, a stranger, a dream, or a coincidence without being reduced to them. I do not need to populate the cosmos with winged substances to recognize the truth of an existence traversed by messages it did not draft itself.

Purgatory contains an anthropological intuition that I find especially valuable once it is freed from its penal cartography. A life is not reconciled with itself by the mere fact of dying. There remain responsibilities never assumed, harms never repaired, loves deformed, and regions of ourselves that never managed to become true. Purgatory can poetically name the impossibility of entering into fullness without passing through what we have done and what we have become. I do not know whether some similar process exists after death, but I understand the intuition that forgiveness is not equivalent to denying the consequences, and that any true reconciliation requires a transforming exposure to the truth.

Hell, on the other hand, strikes me as morally unacceptable when it means a conscious, eternal, and irreversible punishment inflicted by a divine will on finite beings. No fault committed within a limited life can justify a torment without end. The doctrine becomes even more intolerable when damnation depends on having accepted some doctrinal formulation, belonged to a community, or correctly received some historical mediation. A God who kept suffering going eternally in order to preserve justice would have turned justice into infinite resentment. I can understand hell as the possibility of a person's radical self-closure, as an incapacity to receive the other, to ask forgiveness, or to abandon the lie that has become identity. There are real hells in life, and human structures that manufacture them. But I cannot affirm an eternal executioner who keeps them going.

The last judgment nonetheless possesses a force I do not want to lose. It expresses the hope that no victim will remain forever buried beneath the victors' version of events, that acts will not dissolve into the indifference of time, and that every life will at last be seen in its complete truth. Judgment should not have to mean a bureaucratic tribunal, but the definitive compearance of what was hidden, distorted, or denied. That there is judgment means that not everything is a matter of indifference, that anonymous suffering demands memory, and that a successful story is not morally absolved simply for having triumphed. My reservation is that this truth must not turn into a spectacle of punishment, nor into the satisfaction of the righteous at the ruin of their enemies.

The Apocalypse interests me in its original sense of revelation, or unveiling. I do not read it as an encoded calendar for the end of the world, nor as a repertoire of clues for identifying contemporary empires, technologies, or politicians. Its truth appears when an apparently stable era reveals the violence on which it was built, when powers that presented themselves as eternal show their bestial character, and when a persecuted community imagines that visible history does not have the last word. The apocalyptic names the instant when an appearance of normalcy collapses. But it can become deeply dangerous when a group considers itself the exclusive possessor of revelation, declares the common world beyond recovery, and turns destruction into a desire for purification.

I receive these images, then, not as reportage from the beyond, but as symbolic condensations of experiences that still demand language: exemplarity, the call, reparation, closure, the memory of the victims, judgment upon the powers, and the hope that history will not exhaust the meaning of those who perished within it. Their relation to the Christianity I still inhabit does not consist in my knowing the population of heaven or the architecture of the future, but in my refusal to accept that death, success, and oblivion are sufficient tribunals. But precisely in order to preserve that truth, I must prevent the symbol from turning into geography, and the hope for justice from turning into a metaphysics of cruelty.

At this point I feel close to the critique of objectification developed by Jean-Luc Marion, although my own vocabulary prefers to speak of compearance rather than of givenness.

And yet renouncing any fixed, definitive name does not leave me in an entirely undifferentiated space. Not all names open in the same way, nor do all images preserve with the same delicacy what they attempt to point to. Even someone who distrusts maps needs to find their bearings. The question, then, is not to choose between an exhaustive definition and a night without directions, but to learn to make use of words that indicate without fencing in, that lead without appropriating the journey's end. Perhaps my relationship with Christian vocabulary is precisely that: I cannot inhabit it as one who possesses an answer, but neither can I pretend that its words have not shaped my way of recognizing a question.

The ontological question of God does not, however, exhaust my relationship with Christianity, because no religion lives solely at the level of its ultimate concepts. Images of God become song, calendar, architecture, gesture, authority, and form of community. Having asked what the name might mean, it is necessary to return to the historical world where that name took on flesh and produced very different sensibilities.

But the idea of God is one thing, the Mystery another, and the historical forms that human communities have given to their religious experience something else again, quite distinct. There we are no longer speaking only of ontology, but of culture, of sensibility, of symbols, of institutions, and of ways of inhabiting the world. And it is precisely on that terrain that my closeness to and my distance from Christianity take on a far more concrete profile. Because although my philosophical language has preferred to remain at the edge of the Mystery without sealing it beneath a definitive name, my sensibility has always found in certain forms of Christianity an affinity much deeper than is usually supposed—and, at the same time, an equally deep strangeness before others. Because, I insist, all of that still belongs to the order of naming. But words never live alone. They take flesh in liturgies, in gestures, in images, in institutions, in ways of looking at one's neighbor and of inhabiting a community. And that is where my relationship with Christianity becomes still more paradoxical. Because, as I say, there are forms of Christianity I feel to be extraordinarily close, and others that produce in me a profound discomfort.

Perhaps the road traveled so far can now be summed up in a single statement. My difficulty has never consisted in rejecting the Mystery, but in distrusting all those images that claim to administer it. My resistance is not directed against transcendence, but against its reification. Up to this point, then, I have spoken above all of philosophical matters. But there also exists a lived, aesthetic, and popular Christianity, and it is precisely there that my affinity turns out to be, perhaps, most unexpected.

VI. The Sacramental as Embodied Theater

That unexpected affinity with a lived, aesthetic, popular Christianity is not a sentimental whim. It has a precise structure, that of the sacramental gesture understood as an embodied theater that makes a meaning appear that no concept exhausts.

There is, in fact, a form of Christianity that feels foreign to me, but it is not the one usually pointed to, and it is worth saying which one, because it touches closely on everything else. Popular Christianity does not bother me in the least—the Christianity of processions, of dressed images, of weeping in the street, of excess wax and painted blood. Quite the opposite: in a certain sense it is almost the one I love most. What bothers me, in fact, is the Christianity that is ashamed of all that, the one that "refines" itself until it separates from the people, the one that carries faith up to an upper floor where the smell of cheap incense no longer reaches, nor the off-key hymn of someone praying who has never read a single theological treatise. That disdainful Christianity, which begins by correcting the superstition of simple people and ends up despising simple people, is the one I do not recognize as mine—and I do not recognize it because in its gesture I detect the secret origin of something I detest even more: the snobbery of "high culture," which at bottom is nothing other than a theology of grace turned inside out and emptied of God. That is to say, where Christianity spoke of the elect, of the called, of a grace that descends without merit upon some and is denied to others, "high culture" speaks of taste, of sensibility, of distinction, and hands out an aesthetic salvation to the few who know how to appreciate while condemning the mass that consumes without understanding. It is exactly the same structure, the same contempt for the many, the same elite that believes itself in possession of a saving knowledge, only now grace is called good taste and damnation is called vulgarity. And that structure reappears intact in the music lover who trembles before a symphony but looks down his nose at the song his neighbor hums on the stairs, without noticing that his "refinement" is a form of predestination disguised as a fine ear.

In Spain, fortunately, that separation was never fully consummated, and it is one of the things I love most about my country, though I have not confessed it until now. There, the popular, the theatrical, and the religious have been fused together for centuries, to the point where they can no longer be separated without lying. Holy Week in Spain is sacred theater in the open street, with its liturgy turned into floats and canopies and the costalero sweating under the platform, with its saeta, a flamenco lament hurled at a passing image, flesh against wood, deep song against carved sorrow, and no one could say where devotion ends and art begins, because they are kneaded from the same matter. The same thing happens in religious imagery, in the autos sacramentales, in the copla that prays and the prayer that sings. And in that crossing, which to a Nordic, Protestant spirit might look like confusion or even idolatry, I recognize a truth that "high culture" lost the day it "refined" itself: the truth that the deepest meaning does not come down from above but rises up from the body of the people, from their untuned voice, from their need to see and touch and weep over what they believe.

In fact, I myself came to music from below, through song before I came to the "piece," the "work," or the "symphony," and perhaps that is why I never learned to look down on the singing of a people, and perhaps that is also why my Christianity, if it is one, resembles more the Christianity of someone sobbing in a procession than that of someone analyzing a Bach cantata in a climate-controlled classroom. Federico García Lorca (1898 - 1936) understood this like no one else. Duende does not live in conservatories; it lives in broken throats, it rises up from the soles of the feet, it has to do with death and with blood and never with "good taste" nor with the "expert" "music lovers" of the "great concert halls." A Christianity without duende does not interest me; a "high culture" without duende bores me; and both, when they cut themselves off from the popular, wither at the same root.

This defense of a bodily, theatrical, and popular religiosity is not a folkloric parenthesis. It points to the same principle that governs my aesthetics. Meaning does not exist first in some pure region only to descend afterward into a lower matter. It only becomes fully real when it becomes voice, gesture, rhythm, scene, and shared presence. That is why the link between my relationship with Christianity and my musical thought is not a later analogy, but an ontological continuity.

And it is here that my Christian bond grows strongest, precisely where it seems most absent, because it is in my way of thinking about music that I most clearly recognize its trace. I have held for years that the score is a trace and not a thing, that the work does not exist as a fixed object but rather happens, that sonorous presence is never exhausted in any single one of its realizations, that the performer (or better, the rhapsode) embodies something he does not possess and that lives only for as long as he sustains it with his body in time. And this logic, I now see with a clarity that almost astonishes me, is a kind of sacramental logic. I could put it almost in the words of an old catechism: music is not the object; music is the always-incomplete incarnation of a reality that exceeds it. A phrase like that recalls the Eucharist far more than modern aesthetics, and I do not say so as someone who has stumbled on a clever analogy, but as someone who recognizes, with a certain astonishment, that his thinking about art had been breathing theology without knowing it. Aesthetic modernity turned the work into an object, into an available thing, into a document that is owned, catalogued, and consumed. I have spent my whole life saying the opposite, and the opposite bears an unmistakable family resemblance to that old conviction according to which the invisible becomes present in the visible without being enclosed by it. The performer who bends over the note is a distant sibling of the priest who bends over the bread, even though neither of them knows it, and even though I myself am slow to say so.

Now, here I have to stop and calibrate very carefully, of course, because the word sacramental can slide toward a place I absolutely detest, and it takes only one degree too many for sacramental logic to turn into solemnity, into a religion of art (Kunstreligion), into that reverent cult of the concert hall where "classical music" occupies God's empty throne, the audience falls silent like communicants, and the performer officiates like one consecrating the host. It is the legacy of Hans von Bülow (1830 - 1894), baptizing the piano works as Old and New Testament, the sacralization of the "repertoire," the sacred silence imposed by a stern glance, the score raised to revealed scripture, and the concert lowered into the liturgy of a caste that has traded grace for good taste. That solemnity is exactly the secularized grace I was rejecting a moment ago, the very same "high culture" that split off from the popular in order to look down on it from its height. When sacramental logic turns solemn, moralistic, ceremonious, snobbish, it stops interesting me, and I prefer a thousand times over the logic of the theater, of drama, of the scene, where what compears demands not reverence but surrender, where the performer does not officiate a rite but rather embodies a character and holds it on the edge until the character dies with the last note.

If I want to keep the sacramental logic of performance from collapsing into a new religion of art, I need a less hierarchical, less priestly figure of incarnation. I find that figure in the theater. The theater preserves presence, form, repetition, and tradition, but it exposes with greater clarity that no execution automatically produces truth, and that everything depends on a body positioned before other bodies.

When I invoke theater and drama, I am not using an external metaphor. I find in the actor's work one of the most exact analogies for understanding musical performance. The actor does not carry some previously complete inner content over into a series of visible gestures, nor does he simply reproduce instructions written by an absent author. He must let a situation, a relationship, and a word become true in his present body. The character does not exist as a finished object standing behind the performance, but neither is it an arbitrary invention of the actor. It compears within a tension among text, imagination, memory, scene partner, space, breath, and audience. The very same thing happens with the musical work.

Stanislavski (1863 - 1938) proves fundamental to me precisely where he rejects exterior declamation, emotional cliché, and the mechanical reproduction of conventional signs. His questions about the given circumstances, the objectives, the actions, and scenic truth return the actor to the concrete event. It is not a matter of "showing sadness," but of acting within a situation where something is at stake—not of manufacturing an emotion, but of organizing an attention, a relationship, and an action capable of allowing the emotion to appear or not appear. This priority of action and relationship is very close to my own way of teaching music. The performer who tries to "express lyricism" tends to produce an external sign of the lyrical. The one who listens, sings, directs a phrase toward someone, and inhabits its need, by contrast, can make lyricism compear without representing it.

But the history of so-called Method acting also shows the dangers of confusing truth with private psychology. In some derivations of Stanislavski, especially when affective memory and biographical identification become the center, the actor seems obligated to excavate his own wounds in order to produce an authentic emotion. That procedure can instrumentalize a personal life, turn trauma into artistic fuel, and foster the belief that real suffering guarantees scenic truth. I do not believe it. A private emotion is not yet form, relationship, or shared presence. An actor can feel intensely and still make nothing compear before the spectator.

I feel closer to a conception in which the body, the imagination, the text, listening to one's partner, and present action carry as much weight as autobiographical memory. The character must not colonize the actor's life, nor should the actor reduce the character to a version of himself. True performance requires proximity without fusion. One must let oneself be transformed by the received form without disappearing into it. Here too, distance is the condition of encounter.

Drama matters to me because no compearance occurs in a vacuum. There is always a situation, a before, an expectation, a resistance, a direction, and something that can be lost. Even an apparently abstract melody possesses dramaturgy—not because it represents a plot, but because it organizes forces, waitings, decisions, interruptions, recognitions, and shifts of orientation. The note does not express on its own; it acts within a temporal situation. That is why musical performance needs less "expression" in the sentimental sense and more dramatic action—that is, knowing what a phrase does, whom it addresses, what it meets, what it avoids, what it remembers, and what it transforms.

I do not, however, wish to turn the musician into a gesticulating actor, nor to subject all music to a verbal narration. Drama precedes plot. It exists whenever a presence finds itself exposed to a possible transformation and a possible loss. An interval can be dramatic without representing any character. A silence can act without possessing any translatable meaning. The theater offers me, then, not a set of expressive tricks, but a practical ontology—that is, something only lives when a body agrees to sustain it publicly within an irreversible time.

The difference between acting and pretending is decisive here. Pretending consists in producing the recognizable signs of an absent experience. Acting, in the deep sense, consists in entering conditions under which something can genuinely happen, even though it cannot be guaranteed. The priest, the actor, the orator, and the musician all share that risk. None of them can manufacture presence, but all of them can betray it through automatisms, clichés, and learned solemnities. Their craft consists in rigorously preparing a form and, when the moment comes, ceasing to use it as a shield. Drama begins precisely when technique no longer protects the performer from what may compear through it.

But I must correct myself here so as not to say something I do not mean. I have nothing against solemnity in itself. On the contrary, solemnity constitutes one of the great poetic, anthropological, and artistic categories of human existence. There are moments that call for slowness, gravity, silence, verticality, distance, and a formal intensification of gesture. A funeral, a coronation, a procession, an oath, a liturgical entrance, a funeral march, a Bruckner chord, a Bach chorus, a truly irrevocable farewell, or the instant when someone utters a promise can all be solemn without falsehood. The solemn appears when a community recognizes that something exceeds the ordinary regime of utility and deserves to be received with a different kind of attention. It is a way of granting temporal and bodily weight to an event. What I reject is not solemnity but false solemnity—solemnism, prefabricated gravity that demands reverence before having made anything compear, that uses slowness as an external sign of depth, rigidity as a substitute for dignity, the audience's silence as proof of elevation, and social distance as a guarantee of worth. True solemnity does not announce itself, nor does it admire itself in the mirror. It is born of the weight of what is happening. It can appear in a cathedral, but also in a kitchen where a family keeps vigil over a dead relative. In a mass, but also in the moment when a child sings a song without yet fully understanding it. In a great concert hall, but also in the suspended breath of three people listening to a phrase. True solemnity intensifies presence. False solemnity tries to compensate for its absence. Hans von Bülow and the bourgeois religion of "high culture" and of "art as religion" did not sin by loving the solemn, but by institutionalizing it until it became a code of distinction, as though every elevated piece of music had to present itself with the face of a metaphysical notary. I love gravity when life demands it. I detest gravity used as the makeup of a life that is not actually happening.

That is why, if I accept the word sacramental for my way of thinking about music, I accept it only in a very narrow sense: that of the sacrament that has not forgotten its dramatic origin, of the mystery that is still scene and not yet dogma, of the Passion enacted in the street and not the rite frozen upon the altar. A sacrament that is poetic, tragic, lyrical, dramaturgical, a sibling of the saeta and not of the sermon, moves me to the depths. A sacrament that is edifying, ceremonious, capitalized, drives me away. The difference between the two is the same as that which separates a crowd weeping before a passing image from a subscriber at a "subscription concert" applauding on the correct beat.

Aesthetic modernity turned music into a work (opus), into an object of technique (ars or techné, which are the same thing), into an available thing that is owned, catalogued, and consumed, and I have spent my whole life fighting against that. But the reaction against the object cannot be the altar, cannot be music's secular temple, the concert hall, because that temple is another form of death, more elegant and therefore harder to denounce. The performer or rhapsode who bends over the note is indeed a distant sibling of the priest who bends over the bread—but of the priest who still knows he is inside a drama, that the mass was theater before it was regulation, that the raised host is a gesture of the scene as much as of faith, and that true trembling does not dwell in solemnity but in the flesh that risks compearing.

Reflection on scenic incarnation leads inevitably toward the Christian affirmation of the Incarnation in the strong sense. Up to now I have used the word to describe a general structure: meaning only happens bodily. Christianity, however, does not stop at that structure. It affirms that the absolute became flesh in one particular historical existence. It is in that step from the ontology of every appearance toward the unrepeatable singularity of Christ that my greatest difficulty begins.

VII. Where I Truly Part Ways

That step toward the unrepeatable singularity of Christ is precisely the place where I must speak plainly and say with full clarity where my true distance begins.

I thus arrive at the point where I truly, totally, and absolutely part ways with classical Christianity, and I want to say it without cheating, without softening it to stay in anyone's good graces, because it is the nerve of everything. Historical Christianity affirms something tremendous, and it affirms it without trembling. It affirms that the Mystery has a concrete face, and that this face is that of a man born under a Roman emperor, dead under a provincial procurator, with a name, a language, a trade. I accept many things. I accept mystery, I accept transcendence, if by transcendence we mean that excess that dwells within every true presence. I accept incarnation as the structure of the real. I accept love as ontological access; I accept compearance as the very mode in which what matters is given. What stops me, what I cannot manage to take as given, is the final step, the one that makes all of that converge definitively on one concrete historical person, on one face and not another, on one hour of the world and not on all of them. There lies my greatest distance from orthodox Christianity, and it is not a distance of rejection but of caution—the caution of someone who has seen too many times how the affirmation of a single face hardens until it becomes the exclusion of all the others.

My caution before the exclusivity of a single incarnation does not make irrelevant the formulas by which Christianity tried to think it. On the contrary, the more problematic the historical claim seems to me, the more clearly I perceive that those controversies formulated ontological difficulties that exceed the confessional sphere. They were not arguing only about a figure from the past, but about the relation between universality and body, unity and difference, form and matter.

Precisely for that reason, the ancient Christological controversies seem to me today far more than an archaeology of dogmatic errors. In them Christianity became, perhaps without knowing it, one of the greatest ontological laboratories in history. The explicit question was who Christ was and how divinity and humanity, unity and difference, person and nature, will and operation could be articulated in him. But beneath those names a question was being debated that has never stopped recurring: how can the one house the multiple without absorbing it, how can two orders relate to one another without remaining merely juxtaposed, how can a form become incarnate without reducing flesh to instrument, how can a manifestation be true without exhausting the principle it manifests. The heresies were not merely extravagant mistakes. They were primary ontological temptations. The vocabularies change, but their structure returns in philosophy, politics, psychology, art, pedagogy, and technology. Docetism reappears whenever the sensible is considered a mere appearance of an abstract truth; monophysitism, whenever a totality absorbs every difference; Nestorianism, whenever two dimensions remain externally juxtaposed without living unity; monothelitism, whenever a formal plurality is admitted but governed by a single operative will; Arianism, whenever the mediating term is ontologically downgraded to a secondary instrument; and Apollinarianism, whenever a human dimension is sacrificed to preserve the coherence of the system. Chalcedon did not definitively eliminate these temptations. It gave them a formula of limit: without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation. More than a solution, it was an ontological ethics of tension.

Docetism feels especially foreign to me because it denies that flesh is the true site of the event. Its structure reappears today in every conception according to which the musical work truly exists in the score while sound is only an accidental manifestation; in every idealism that saves meaning at the expense of the body; and in every spirituality that turns biography into mere appearance and the wound into an error of perspective. Arianism, for its part, introduces a hierarchy of being in which the mediator partakes of the higher without possessing its full dignity. Translated into our own time, this is the reduction of consciousness to epiphenomenon, of art to psychological effect, of the performer to mere executor, and of the word to a vehicle subordinated to some prior content. Apollinarianism sacrifices something essential to the human in order to save unity. Its contemporary equivalent is technique without interiority, precision without experience, rationality that eliminates desire, affect, or the body because they disorder the system.

Nestorianism represents juxtaposition without true incarnation: two natures, two centers, two orders that touch externally without constituting a living unity. It is the ontology of our specialized institutions—the composer composes, the performer executes, the theorist explains, the manager administers, and no one answers for the event as a whole. In psychology it appears when mind and body are causally connected departments; in politics, when universality and difference merely tolerate one another without ever being transformed; and in pedagogy, when knowledge and life remain separate. Monothelitism, by contrast, accepts ontological plurality but subjects it to a single will. It is the structure of contemporary technocracy: many voices and a single metric, many identities and a single operative criterion, many interpretations and one correct idea of efficiency.

Monophysitism, miaphysitism, and dyophysitism articulate my own problem with special clarity. Monophysitism absorbs one nature into the other and turns unity into the cancellation of difference. It is the temptation of every holism that declares context, system, history, class, identity, or totality to fully explain the singular gesture. Miaphysitism, understood fairly and not as simple disguised monophysitism, tries to think a concrete, composite unity in which differences remain active without being merely juxtaposed. For that reason it comes very close to an ontology of the incarnate event: the work exists only in its realization, yet is not exhausted by it, and the person exists relationally, yet is not dissolved into the relation. Chalcedonian dyophysitism holds the tension even more explicitly: two natures without confusion and without separation. There I find a structure close to Platonic symploke, because not everything mixes with everything, nor does anything remain absolutely isolated. There is real communication with limit, participation without identity, difference without incommunicability. My ontology lives precisely off that tension.

The controversies over wills and operations also possess a surprising currency. Monothelitism attempts to secure unity by attributing a single will to one who possesses two natures. Dyothelitism, by contrast, affirms that a complete humanity also requires a real human will, without this destroying the unity of the person. Translated into my own language: no true incarnation can reduce the body that receives it to a passive instrument of some higher intention. The performer does not embody a work if his will, his listening, his risk, and his decision are eliminated—he merely executes it. The student does not receive a tradition if he is denied the capacity to respond—he merely reproduces it. The body of Christ could not be truly human if it lacked what makes a human response possible. In this, ancient Christology was more radical than many contemporary pedagogies and aesthetics. It understood that a humanity without agency of its own would be only the appearance of humanity.

Sabellianism, which reduces Father, Son, and Spirit to successive modes of a single reality without true internal distinctions, represents another recurring temptation: admitting phenomenal differences while denying their ontological depth. Today it reappears whenever every person, culture, work, or religion is interpreted as an interchangeable expression of a single consciousness, energy, or structure. Tritheism falls into the opposite extreme. It preserves difference so thoroughly that it destroys the unity of relation. It would be pluralism without a common world, fragmentation into incommunicable singularities. Between these two extremes, the Trinity attempted to think a unity that is relation, without that relation being an accident added onto already constituted substances. I do not need to accept its formulation dogmatically in order to recognize its philosophical power. Very few ideas have forced the West to think with equal intensity that unity need not amount to solitude, and that difference need not mean separation.

But watch—I want to qualify this a great deal, because my distance does not exist because I find it impossible to think that the Mystery could compear fully within one concrete human existence. Quite the contrary. My whole ontology makes incarnation the very mode in which the real happens. I have never believed in an abstract absolute. Everything that truly matters always compears in a body, in a voice, in a gesture, in a biography. What I cannot bring myself to affirm is something else, something much more precise and, I think, much more demanding: that one of those compearances should definitively close off the horizon of all the others. That the Mystery, having once spoken in fullness, could no longer go on saying something irreducibly new in other lives, in other times, in other faces. My reservation is not directed against singularity, but against closure.

In fact, I find only one path toward that affirmation that does not betray what I think. It consists in understanding Christ not only as the proper name of a historical individual, but also, and perhaps far more importantly, as the name of a possibility constitutive of the human. Not in the trivial sense that we are all Christ, as though differences disappeared, but in a far more demanding sense. That is: wherever an existence comes to render the Mystery transparent without appropriating it, wherever a life becomes a place of compearance for what exceeds it, there something properly Christological happens. Jesus of Nazareth would then be the highest, most luminous, or most decisive manifestation of that possibility, but not the abolition of the possibility itself. Christ would cease to be the exception that interrupts the human condition, and would reveal himself instead as the deepest truth of that condition—a truth that can compear with different intensities, with different faces, and in different eras, without the historical singularity of Jesus of Nazareth losing one iota of its grandeur.

From that perspective, the question ceases to be whether God intervened just once in history, and becomes instead how that which no history can wholly contain compears. Every compearance possesses a strange double condition. It offers itself entirely, and yet it never lets itself be reduced to what it offers. Every authentic presence is, at the same time, manifestation and reserve. It gives itself without concealing itself, but neither is it exhausted in its giving. If this is true of any genuinely human encounter, how much more must it be true of what we call the Mystery. Precisely because it compears fully, it always remains greater than its own compearance. Fullness does not eliminate the excess; in fact, it makes it visible.

That is also why I do not understand the idea of revelation as the communication of some definitive content, but as the irreversible opening of a mode of appearing. What would be decisive is not that the Mystery had finally pronounced its last word, but that it had shown, once and for all, the very grammar with which it compears. From then on, it would not be the Mystery that changed, but our way of looking. We would learn to recognize that every truth happens incarnately, that every absolute compears in the fragility of a face, a voice, a body, and a history. If this is what Christ means, then he ceases to be merely an event located in the past and becomes also the name of an ever-open possibility of reality—the possibility that the infinite lets itself be found without ever ceasing to exceed the very thing in which it compears.

That is why, if someone wanted to place me on a kind of "spiritual map," they would have to put me much closer to Simone Weil, to Miguel de Unamuno, to Søren Kierkegaard, to María Zambrano, to Franz Rosenzweig (1886 - 1929), to Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968), to Gabriel Marcel (1889 - 1973), to Jean-Louis Chrétien (1952 - 2019), to Jean-Luc Marion (1946), to Michel Henry (1922 - 2002), to Jan Patočka (1907 - 1977), than to Richard Dawkins, to famous contemporary atheists like Sam Harris, to Daniel Dennett, to Christopher Hitchens—or even, and this is the paradoxical part, than to many contemporary Catholics whose faith has become mere Sunday sociology.

I would even say, with a formula I am willing to own, that my thought is, I believe, more Christian, ontologically speaking, than much of today's sociological Christianity, while at the same time less confessional than the Christian dogmatism of old. One could say that there is in my thought, I think, a kind of incarnational, Christian, or Christianate ontological climate—half apophatic, poetic, and incarnational—in permanent tension with any claim to doctrinal closure, and at the same time incapable of entirely abandoning the horizon from which it proceeds. That is, for now, the most honest description I can give of myself, and it carries the discomfort of every position that holds itself on the edge, without the comfort of fulfilled faith, nor the comfort of an unbelief satisfied with itself.

VIII. Christianity After Hegel

A position held on that edge, however, cannot remain mere self-description. It needs to situate itself within the philosophical conversation that makes it possible, and that conversation begins, inevitably, with Hegel.

Up to this point I have tried to describe a position. From here on it will be necessary to situate it within a much broader philosophical conversation. No philosophical position appears in a vacuum. Every thought always belongs to a prior conversation. What follows, therefore, is not meant to display erudition or hand out credit for influence. It is meant only to show the map of affinities within which I best recognize my own voice. Not all the names that appear mean the same thing. Some have formed me, others have accompanied me, and others represent precisely what I have needed to move away from in order to discover my own path. What matters is not the list, but the relief the list traces out.

So, as it stands, everything said so far could remain a mere personal narrative. And yet philosophy, in a certain sense, also begins precisely when an experience tries to measure itself against other ways of understanding the world. No biography thinks alone. That is why I now need to situate this intuition within a much older conversation, and to ask myself to what extent it coincides with, or comes into conflict with, some of the great architectures of Western thought. Not in order to seek legitimation in them, but because every mature philosophical experience eventually discovers that it belongs to a dialogue that began long before it did.

Up to this point I have tried to describe a position from within—that is, its Christian provenance, its doctrinal distances, and the structure of compearance that organizes my thought. But a philosophical experience does not mature by remaining shut up within its own autobiography. It must measure itself against other conceptual architectures, recognize kinships, withstand objections, and discover what part of its language has already been thought in other ways. What follows does not aim to gather authorities or display influences, but to situate this ontology within a historical conversation in which some authors offer affinities and others reveal, by contrast, what I cannot accept.

The first great interlocutor I need to measure myself against, on all these matters, is without doubt Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831). It is fitting to begin with the most decisive one. No other thinker has carried the attempt to philosophically think the destiny of Christianity so far, and precisely for that reason my initial agreement with him ends up becoming one of my deepest disagreements. No thought has tried, with such audacity, to show that the scattered paths of spirit belong, in the last instance, to a single intelligible itinerary. Faced with the fragmentary landscape I have described—made of incomplete inheritances, symbols that outlive their doctrines, and experiences that exceed their names—Hegel offers the promise of a reconciliation in which every loss finally finds its place within meaning. But my resistance to his thought begins precisely in the face of that promise. Not because I deny that experience can be transformed through mediation, but because I suspect that no subsequent horizon has the right to declare fully understood what once compeared as wound, absence, or unrepeatable singularity.

For Hegel, Christianity is the highest religion, and it is so because it expresses a decisive philosophical truth: that the infinite is not separate from the finite, that the Incarnation means the entry of the infinite into the finite, that the Cross means the overcoming of the separation between God and man, that Spirit realizes itself in history until God comes to be fully God through it. Truth, for Hegel, does not lie behind history, waiting to be discovered. It is being made in history, it is realizing itself, and according to him, whoever wants to find it must seek it in its unfolding and not in some motionless heaven.

There is a great deal here that draws me in, and it would be dishonest to deny it. I am drawn by Hegel's thinking of truth as event rather than as thing. I am drawn by his rejection of the image of God as a superperson lodged in some corner of the cosmos. I am drawn by his recognition, in the religious symbol, of a truth irreducible to superstition. For a stretch, I would believe I was walking alongside him. And then, suddenly, the road forks, and the fork is one of the deepest I know. Because Hegel believes, at the bottom of his immense edifice, that every separation is provisional, that every contradiction is surmountable, that every wound is reconcilable, that every distance ends up integrated into a totality that gives it meaning. For him, history advances toward reconciliation. And I do not believe that. My entire ontology rests on the opposite conviction: that the wound does not close, that discontinuity does not disappear, that the infinite is never reconciled with the world without remainder. There I move away from Hegel and move closer to Kierkegaard, who was the first to drive that objection home, and to Weil, and to Zambrano.

I could add Franz Rosenzweig here. His entire Star of Redemption can be read as an immense protest against the Hegelian temptation to turn existence into a moment of the system. Where Hegel thinks totality, Rosenzweig brings back to the foreground the event, the call, the unrepeatable face, lived time, and relation. I have never fully recognized myself within his theological horizon, but I have recognized myself in that radical resistance to letting philosophy seal singularity beneath a definitive intelligibility.

The example of the Incarnation says it all, and I prefer to think it through calmly. For Hegel, the Incarnation demonstrates that the distance between God and man can be overcome, absorbed, canceled in a higher synthesis. For me, the Incarnation would reveal something different and, I dare say, more difficult. It would reveal that distance can be inhabited. Not that it is eliminated, nor resolved, nor absorbed, but that it can become a dwelling. And the difference, which looks like a small nuance, is in reality an abyss, because it is one thing for a God to become man in order to close the gap, and quite another for a God to become man in order to inhabit it together with us without closing it—so that the gap itself, instead of being the obstacle, becomes the place of encounter.

Music teaches me this better than any treatise. Hegel would say that each note finally finds its meaning in the totality of the work, that the whole redeems the part and reconciles it. I have been thinking for some time now something far harsher: that no totality exhausts the melody, that the melody always exceeds its realizations, that it never lets itself be sealed shut, that it never finishes coinciding with itself. In that non-coincidence lives the whole of my ontology of music, and in it is staged, without the name ever appearing, the whole of my distance from Hegelian reconciliation.

But the history of this question does not end with Hegel. His legacy continues to work within a good part of contemporary thought, even if it does so in very different forms. And the first great contemporary extension of that horizon appears in Slavoj Žižek (1949).

With Žižek, who is today the loudest and most brilliant Christian Hegelian, matters become complicated in an instructive way. When Žižek says that God dies on the cross, he does not say it like some vulgar atheist rubbing his hands together. What dies, in his reading, is the big Other, the absolute guarantee, the cosmic Father, the instance that secured meaning from outside—and after the cross no exterior foundation remains, only the human community facing its own freedom without a net. There is something in this that draws me, and draws me a great deal, because I too do not believe in a cosmic supervisor, nor in a metaphysical guarantee that would eliminate uncertainty, nor in an exterior authority that would spare us the risk of living. Up to there I go along with him. But then I part ways again, because Žižek remains Hegelian to the marrow, and his negativity ends up forming part of a dialectical process that recovers it and resolves it. In my thought, negativity is not resolved. The wound remains, the absence remains, the discontinuity remains, and not as a phase of a process but as a stable condition of the real. That is why I understand Žižek, and sometimes I understand him too well, but I am not a Žižekian. His cross reconciles by way of dissolution, and mine does not reconcile by any way at all.

There exists, however, an even more radical attempt to think Christianity from within without keeping the traditional image of God intact. If Žižek radicalizes Hegel, Thomas Altizer (1927 - 2018) radicalizes that very same operation still further.

With Altizer, the closeness I feel is even greater, and that is why the disagreement hurts a little more. Altizer does not say that God merely seems absent; he says that God truly empties himself into history, that the Incarnation culminates in the death of God understood quite literally, that no transcendent God separate from the world remains, because transcendence has poured itself entirely into existence. I share his rejection of rigid dualisms, his suspicion of a beyond disconnected from the here. But he too is too Hegelian, and his death of God is an irreversible historical event, a definitive before and after. What interests me more is a permanent tension between presence and withdrawal, a pulse that gives and withdraws and gives again, rather than a disappearance consummated once and for all. Altizer eliminates distance by pouring it out into the world. I would rather make distance the very heart of the real, the place without which there would be neither desire, nor music, nor encounter. If I had to venture an intuition, even now, about what the cross reveals to me, I would say that it does not demonstrate the world's reconciliation with God, as Hegel does, nor certify the death of God, as Altizer or Žižek do, but that it points toward something I cannot yet fully put into words, a tension between what gives itself and what withdraws that neither of those two readings manages to name. And that intuition, which surprises even me, already approaches, though still imprecisely, my own ontology of compearance, more than it does any of the systems I have just traced through.

The attempt to think Christianity after the loss of its doctrinal evidence does not belong only to the theology of the death of God. Alain Badiou (1937), Giorgio Agamben (1942), and Jean-Luc Nancy (1940 - 2021) have all turned toward Paul, incarnation, community, messianicity, and Christian self-deconstruction from philosophies that cannot be considered confessional. Their interest confirms something decisive for this essay: that Christianity does not simply disappear once one stops believing its propositions. It continues to function as a conceptual machine capable of reorganizing the ideas of universality, event, time, body, and community. Jean-Luc Nancy, especially, has thought of Christianity as a tradition that carries within itself a movement of unsealing and self-deconstruction, while Badiou and Agamben have each, in their own different ways, returned to Paul.

Badiou feels close to me when he reads Saint Paul of Tarsus as a thinker of the event that breaks established identities and opens a universality not founded on ethnic, legal, or cultural belonging. Truth would not be a property available within the situation, but something that breaks in and demands fidelity. That structure comes close, quite clearly, to my own conception of compearance. The event cannot be deduced from prior conditions, and it transforms the subject who responds to it. I also share the idea that a truth does not belong exclusively to the group within which it appeared.

But Badiouan fidelity can take on an abstract hardness. The subject seems to constitute itself above all by persevering in a truth that exceeds it, and concrete singularity runs the risk of being subordinated to that truth's procedure. My fidelity is not directed only toward a universalizable event; it is also directed toward the face, toward fragility, toward memory, and toward whatever cannot be turned into a cause. A person does not matter only as the militant of a truth. She matters even when she interrupts, contradicts, or wrecks the very program through which we believed we were serving her.

Agamben interests me for his reading of messianic time as a time that coincides neither with the expectation of a chronological future nor with the possession of fulfillment. The messianic modifies the use of the present, and introduces within every institution a distance from its own claim to totality. His reflection on bare life, the state of exception, testimony, and profanation is likewise fundamental for understanding how power decides who can appear politically and who is reduced to mere administrable existence. His philosophical Christianity does not necessarily preserve a personal God, but it does preserve the structure of an interrupted time and of a law deactivated from within.

My reservation before Agamben arises from a tendency to turn exception, powerlessness, and deactivation into overly general keys. It is not enough to suspend the apparatuses, nor to recover a non-proprietary use of the world. Compearance also demands protective institutions, positive commitments, forms of duration, and responsibilities that cannot always remain on the threshold. The potentiality of not-doing is essential against productive compulsion, but a human life also needs to do, to promise, to build, to teach, and to sustain.

Jean-Luc Nancy comes even closer to my vocabulary when he thinks being as being-with, community not as a common substance but as shared exposure, and the body as opening, touch, and exteriority. His deconstruction of Christianity recognizes that the West constitutes itself through a logic of incarnation and dispossession that ends up opening up the very name of God until its closure becomes impossible. Christianity would then be, from that perspective, not merely a doctrine to be preserved or abandoned, but the historical movement by which absolute presence empties itself, exteriorizes itself, and leaves the world open.

There I feel an evident closeness. I too have affirmed that Christianity engenders from within the death of the God-object, and that its truth may consist in preventing transcendence from closing itself up again as an entity. But Nancy tends toward an ontology of sense and of being-with that is too impersonal for my sensibility. The opening of the world does not replace the tremor of a voice, nor the responsibility before this face. I need the unsealing to become incarnate in biographies, loves, mournings, and promises, and not remain merely as the ontological structure of exposure.

Badiou, Agamben, and Nancy show, in any case, that Christianity remains philosophically alive precisely where it has stopped functioning as confession. In them the event, messianism, and incarnation are secularized without thereby becoming irrelevant. My position lies close to that operation, but it resists losing the religious, poetic, and personal temperature of what it secularizes. I do not want to keep dogma intact. Nor do I want to translate it into philosophy so perfectly that no prayer, wound, song, or memory is left in it. Between the theology that seals shut and the philosophy that neutralizes, I go on looking for a word capable of opening without evaporating.

Put less technically, my difficulty appears when thought, having crossed the landscape, claims to contemplate it from a height at which every loss reveals itself as necessary for the final shape of the whole. There is something in me that resists that panoramic gaze. Someone who has lost a house does not always need to be told what place that loss occupies within universal history. Someone who has loved a person does not easily accept that her disappearance is reconciled by the intelligibility of a process. Meaning can be born of a wound, but that does not turn the wound into a mere instrument of meaning.

The difference between negativity and compearance is not played out only in metaphysics or theology. It reappears within theories of the subject, of desire, and of healing. If Christianity has historically organized modes of guilt, lack, confession, and hope, psychoanalysis constitutes one of the great modern languages that inherit and transform that territory. That is why Lacan does not arrive from outside the essay's general problem. He allows us to ask what remains of Christian fault once it is no longer called sin, and what possibility of presence remains once desire is defined by what it can never possess.

IX. A Map of the Soul Without Dogma

That question about what desire can never possess does not belong only to Lacanian psychoanalysis. It reappears, in another vocabulary, in those who have tried to draw a map of the soul that depends on no dogma.

Up to now my interlocutors have belonged mainly to the philosophical tradition. It is worth pausing now over a thinker who arrives from elsewhere, because it is precisely from there that he illuminates an essential part of the problem. The shift does not consist merely in changing authors. It also changes the very center of the problem.

I make a stop here, then, at Jacques Lacan (1901 - 1981), because his case illuminates by contrast the nerve of everything said so far. With Lacan I have affinities I will not deny. I accept that the subject does not coincide with itself, that there is a structural lack that no satisfaction fills, that desire is never fully sated, that the modern ego (not the self I lay claim to in my other essays) is largely an imaginary construction, that language does not exhaust the real. All of this I could sign almost without correcting a comma. And yet a difference appears that changes everything. For Lacan, lack (manque) is constitutive, and there he stops: there is no reconciliation, no fullness, no positive compearance of meaning; desire turns eternally around an absence, and that is the last word. My thought does not turn around lack. It turns around compearance. Lack exists—how could I deny it—but it does not have the last word. Melody exists, love exists, friendship exists, beauty exists, presence exists, even though they can never be fully possessed, and that "even though" is my whole difference. Lacan leaves me before a void that persists. I remain before a something that gives itself without letting itself be had, and that something is exactly what Lacan finds so much difficulty in thinking, because his thought is built to think what is lacking and not what compears. When Žižek repeats that there is no big Other and that only the void remains, I am with him for the first half of the sentence, in the denial of the cosmic supervisor, and I get off for the second half, because where they see void, I see appearing. I am, if it must be said in one word, a thinker of appearing and not of negativity, and that preference alone sets me apart from the whole line running from Lacan to Žižek, however much I share half its vocabulary with it.

My relationship with psychoanalysis and with psychology cannot, however, be reduced to my agreement and disagreement with Lacan. Few intellectual traditions have fascinated me so much, because few have dared to take seriously that the human being does not coincide with itself, that consciousness is not sovereign, that desire has a history, that the body remembers in ways the will does not control, and that a life can be organized by scenes, words, silences, and relationships whose meaning never becomes entirely transparent. In that respect, psychoanalysis represents an indispensable correction to modern rationalism. It destroys the fiction of a subject who knows itself through direct introspection and afterward freely administers its own contents. It forces us to admit that we are spoken before we speak, desired before we desire, looked at before we construct an image of ourselves, and wounded before we possess a language with which to name the wound.

Freud (1856 - 1939) feels close to me for his archaeology of the symptom, for his understanding of repetition, ambivalence, mourning, transference, and the way that what fails to become word returns as body, act, or fate. His greatness does not lie, for me, in having discovered some universal sexual mechanics, nor in having reduced religion to illusion, but in having understood that the meaning of a life is not found solely in what a consciousness declares about itself. The symptom is a deformed compearance, a truth that has not yet found a habitable form in which to speak itself. And yet Freud remains too tied to a drive economy, to a hermeneutics of suspicion, and to a naturalism that tends to explain the symbol by whatever it supposedly hides. My ontology does not believe that the work, the rite, love, or religion are merely elevated disguises for some more basic energy. The symbol does not only conceal. It makes appear something that would not exist in the same way without it.

Jung (1875 - 1961) attracts me for having restored dignity to the image, to the dream, to myth, and to the symbolic dimension of the psyche. He understands that individual consciousness is traversed by forms prior to its own biography, and that individuation does not simply consist in adapting to a social norm. But I am troubled by the tendency to turn symbols into manifestations of universal, relatively mappable archetypes. Wherever a singular image gets explained as a mere variant of a collective structure, it risks losing its unrepeatable event-character. Moreover, the language of integrating the shadow and the Self can tend toward a reconciled psychic totality that my ontology does not accept without remainder. Not every fracture has to become a moment of some higher fullness.

The popularity of Jordan Peterson (1962) shows just how much this archetypal reading continues to answer a real need of our time. Peterson has reminded a secularized public that biblical narratives are not simply failed attempts at science, but condensations of experiences concerning sacrifice, resentment, responsibility, chaos, order, brotherhood, violence, and transformation. In that respect his intervention seems valuable to me. Against a culture that reads Genesis as though it were competing with a geology textbook, he restores to the symbol part of its psychological and existential depth. I also share his critique of a freedom understood as the total absence of form, and his insistence that a life needs responsibilities, habits, and orientations that cannot be improvised every morning.

But his use of archetypes can turn narratives into mere illustrations of overly stable patterns. Cain, Abel, the hero, the dragon, the father, the mother, order and chaos begin to function as universal keys capable of interpreting, in advance, an enormous diversity of situations. Wherever the symbol is absorbed by its pattern, it stops compearing in its historical, literary, and religious singularity. The biblical narrative does not exist solely to illustrate a timeless psychological structure. It has a language, a people, exegetical struggles, a history of reception, and an otherness that can resist the scheme by which we try to make it relevant.

What also separates me from Peterson is the ease with which an anthropological intuition slides into a relatively conservative cultural normativity. That every life needs structure does not prove that inherited structures are necessarily the best ones, nor that questioning them leads to chaos. Tradition contains sedimented wisdom, but it also contains sedimented suffering. Its authority must arise from the form of life it makes possible, not from its antiquity nor from its correspondence to an archetype. The father can represent orientation and transmission. He can also embody domination. The mother can symbolize care. She can also smother. The archetype does not decide in advance the truth of the concrete relationship.

His language of competence hierarchies likewise contains a limited truth. Not all abilities are equal, and every complex practice requires learning, authority, and distinction. But a functional hierarchy can easily turn into an ontological justification of social position. "Musical excellence" does not make a person any worthier, nor does professional success demonstrate any superior moral adaptation. My critique of Opus Dei, of competitions, and of technocracy stems precisely from that confusion between competence, merit, election, and a person's worth.

Finally, Peterson approaches Christianity as a symbolic architecture indispensable to individual and civilizational stability, but he frequently leaves suspended the question of the religious truth of what he interprets. I understand that suspension, because I too inhabit a Christian horizon without being able to affirm all its propositions. Even so, I do not want to defend Christianity solely because it turns out to be psychologically or socially useful. A symbol is not true because it effectively organizes a life—it can organize a life and still be oppressive. Its truth must also be measured by what it makes compear, by the freedom it allows, and by its capacity to receive the singularity that does not confirm the pattern.

Peterson interests me, then, as both symptom and interlocutor. He shows the contemporary hunger for tradition, responsibility, myth, and orientation, but also the danger of satisfying that hunger with archetypal maps that are too sure of themselves. I agree with him that one cannot live without stories, but I part ways with him when the story seems to know the shape of the person before it has listened to them. The symbol should offer orientation without becoming diagnosis, and tradition should speak without claiming the right to write in advance the biography of whoever receives it.

Adler (1870 - 1937) interests me for the social dimension of the feeling of inferiority, compensation, finality, and belonging, although his psychology can seem too oriented toward adaptation and the coherence of one's life project.

Melanie Klein (1882 - 1960) impresses me with the radicality with which she thinks original ambivalence, gratitude, envy, reparation, and the early coexistence of love and destruction. Her depressive position recognizes something profoundly tragic, namely that maturing does not consist in discovering pure objects, but in bearing the fact that we love and harm the same person. That intuition lies very close to my refusal to divide reality between absolute innocence and absolute guilt. And yet the Kleinian world can take on too persecutory a temperature and end up dominated by internal fantasies that reduce the objective resistance of the other.

Winnicott (1896 - 1971) is among the psychological authors closest to me. His transitional space, his transitional object, his idea of play, his understanding of the facilitating environment, and his conviction that the true self can only emerge when it is not violated by premature adaptation come extraordinarily close to my ontology of compearance. The child neither fabricates the world nor receives it as a wholly external object, but finds-creates it within a relationship. The work of art and music too compear in that intermediate space that is neither purely subjective nor purely objective. The performer does not invent the work, nor does he extract it intact from the score. He finds-creates it in a space of fidelity and play. Winnicott makes it possible to think presence without reducing it either to projection or to thing.

Bion (1897 - 1979) strikes me as equally close for his attention to what cannot yet be thought, for the function of the container, for the transformation of raw affective elements into thinkable experience, and for his discipline of approaching the session without memory or desire. His concept of O — that ultimate thing that can be lived or become but not known as an object — brushes against my idea of a compearance that will not let itself be possessed. But I part ways with any temptation to turn the suspension of memory and desire into a general ideal of existence. Outside the analytic frame, memory and desire are not mere obstacles; they are part of singularity and of responsibility.

Ferenczi (1873 - 1933) moves me for his sensitivity to real trauma, for his critique of analytic coldness, and for having understood that technique can repeat violence when it protects itself against the patient's suffering. His concept of the confusion of tongues shows how a relationship is destroyed when the adult translates the child's tenderness into the language of his own desire and then forces the child to inhabit that translation. In this he stands very close to my conviction that violence begins when someone claims the right to name another person entirely.

I am also interested in Balint (1896 - 1970) and his basic fault, Fairbairn (1889 - 1964) and his theory of object relations, Guntrip (1901 - 1975), Bowlby (1907 - 1990) and the attachment tradition, because they shift the center from a closed drive toward an original need for relation. We are not self-sufficient individuals who afterward establish bonds; rather, our subjectivity is constituted in the presence, absence, reliability, and rupture of those bonds.

Carl Rogers (1902 - 1987)'s humanistic psychology is close to me for its attention, its congruence, its non-possessive acceptance, and its confidence that a truly receptive presence can allow the other to compear without being reduced to a diagnosis. But his optimism about an inner actualizing tendency can strike me as excessive. Human beings do not always contain a spontaneous direction toward integration; they are also traversed by destruction, repetition, self-deception, and conflicts that no atmosphere of acceptance resolves on its own.

Maslow (1908 - 1970) interests me less when he organizes needs into a hierarchy culminating in self-actualization, because that architecture retains too much of the modern fantasy of ascending plenitude.

Viktor Frankl (1905 - 1997) feels close to me in his defense of meaning, of responsibility, and of the capacity to respond even to conditions one has not chosen, but I part ways with him when suffering risks being too quickly integrated by way of a meaning. There are wounds that call for company before they call for meaning.

Gestalt attracts me for its attention to the here and now, to figure and ground, to the body and to contact, but it can turn into a religion of immediacy that underestimates memory, history, and the structures that exceed the present encounter.

Wilhelm Reich (1897 - 1957)'s body psychology understood that biography is inscribed muscularly, although his theory of orgone energy crosses the line between somatic intuition and pseudoscientific cosmology. Alexander Lowen (1910 - 2008), Feldenkrais (1904 - 1984), and other body-based pedagogies contain valuable observations about posture, breathing, habit, and availability, so long as they do not promise to liberate an authentic essence of the body through some universal technique.

Cognitive-behavioral psychology earns my respect for its empirical rigor and its effectiveness with numerous concrete problems. I have nothing against tools that reduce suffering. My reservation appears when a functional modification of thoughts and behaviors presents itself as an exhaustive understanding of the person. Someone can learn to regulate a symptom without the biographical, relational, or existential meaning that symptom carried ever having compeared. Effectiveness is not falsehood, but neither is it totality. Something similar happens with neuropsychology: knowing cerebral correlates can be extraordinarily useful, but the brain does not love, does not promise, does not remember a childhood, and does not interpret a sonata in isolation from a body, a language, a history, and a world.

The eliminative materialism of Paul (1942) and Patricia (1943) Churchland (1943) constitutes the most coherent, and for that very reason most revealing, version of the neurocentrism I reject. Their thesis does not consist merely in asserting that all mental activity depends on the brain — something I have no difficulty accepting — but in suggesting that a good part of our ordinary vocabulary about beliefs, desires, intentions, or experiences may belong to a scientifically defective folk psychology, destined perhaps to be replaced by a more precise neurobiological description. I understand the critical force of this proposal. Our everyday way of interpreting ourselves contains errors, simplifications, and mythologies, and not every inherited word about the soul, the will, or emotion deserves scientific immunity. It is entirely possible that neuroscience will profoundly transform some of our current categories.

But it is one thing to correct our psychological concepts and another to imagine that a cerebral description could replace the world of meaning within which those concepts operate. To say "he promised to come back" is not a primitive theory about neurons; it situates an act within a relationship, a temporality, and a responsibility. A promise is not a hidden inner state whose true nature will someday be revealed by a brain scan. It is a public, normative event that changes what two people can legitimately expect of one another. In the same way, to say that someone remembers his mother is not to posit some mysterious mental entity, but to describe a form of absent presence, a relation between past and present, and an affective transformation of the lived world.

The error of eliminativism lies in supposing that, because every experience has neuronal conditions, the vocabulary that articulates its meaning competes causally with neuroscience. But "pain" and "activation pattern" need not be answering the same question. One description can explain mechanisms while the other makes an experience compear, orients a response, calls for care, or acknowledges an injustice. The phrase "it hurts" is not an imperfect neurological hypothesis; it is also an ethical appeal. Whoever hears it is implicated in a way that no inventory of activations produces by itself.

My ontology need not deny the brain, nor reserve some supernatural substance for consciousness. What it must prevent is the material condition of a presence being turned into an exhaustive explanation of what that presence means. The voice depends on lungs, larynx, nervous system, and learning, but a song is not therefore an illusory epiphenomenon of those processes. It exists only within them and, at the same time, compears as something no anatomy could replace. This is precisely the incarnational logic I have recognized in Christianity: not a spirit imprisoned in matter, but a meaning that occurs bodily without being exhausted by the causality of its body.

The Churchlands thus force me to clarify that my humanism is neither anti-scientific nor dualist. I do not believe in an incorporeal mind separable from the organism, but in a person whose corporeality is historical, linguistic, relational, and normative, and who cannot be reconstructed by simply adding up internal processes. Neuroscience can say a great deal about the conditions under which someone speaks, remembers, or loves. It cannot speak, remember, or love in that person's place. And that practical and ontological irreducibility opens the space in which a psychotherapy can treat functions without forgetting that what compears before it is a life.

Having traced theories oriented toward understanding the historical and relational depth of the symptom, it is worth also examining therapies whose immediate priority is not to interpret a biography but to reduce concrete forms of suffering and expand the capacity for action. This change of register does not abandon the Christian question; it forces us to ask what happens when the old practices of examination, asceticism, acceptance, transformation, and the orientation of life reappear under a psychological and secular vocabulary.

Among contemporary behaviorally rooted therapies, dialectical behavior therapy, DBT, strikes me as especially interesting because it corrects some of the shortcomings of a cognitivism too focused on replacing mistaken thoughts. Its dialectic between acceptance and change recognizes that a person may need to transform behaviors that are destroying her without receiving the message that her present experience is illegitimate. Validation does not mean affirming that every interpretation is correct, but recognizing that a response has a history, a function, and an intelligibility within the world in which it arose. This combination is close to my refusal to choose between passive obedience to the wound and its therapeutic denial.

I am also interested in its attention to emotional regulation, distress tolerance, awareness of triggers, interpersonal effectiveness, and the concrete construction of a life worth living. Not every therapy needs to become an endless archaeology. In situations of acute suffering, learning to survive an affective wave, ask for help, set a limit, or refrain from acting impulsively can be a decisive achievement. It would be cruel to dismiss these techniques for not constituting a complete ontology of the person. My reservation appears only when regulation becomes an anthropological ideal and emotion comes to be seen above all as an intensity to be managed. The goal cannot be to manufacture a perfectly self-regulated subject, immune to all disorganization and efficient in every relationship.

The word dialectical also carries a sense that matters to me, although it is not the Hegelian one. In DBT it means learning to hold truths that seem to oppose each other. I am doing the best I can, and I need to change. My suffering is valid, and some of my responses cause harm. I need the other, and I must learn not to turn him into the guarantor of my existence. This dialectic without synthesis comes closer to my thinking than Hegelian reconciliation. It does not eliminate the tension; it teaches how to inhabit it with less destruction.

Acceptance and commitment therapy, ACT, feels close to me for other reasons. Its critique of the obsessive struggle against inner contents recognizes that the more a person tries to eliminate certain thoughts, emotions, or memories, the more she can end up organized by them. Acceptance does not mean approval or resignation, but ceasing to spend one's whole life trying to control what is an inevitable part of experience. Its emphasis on values and on committed action likewise shifts the center from "feeling good" toward living according to chosen orientations even in the presence of fear, sadness, or uncertainty.

Cognitive defusion can be useful when it lets one perceive that a thought is not identical to reality nor to the person who thinks it. But I grow distant when the relation to language becomes too instrumental, as though words were merely mental events from which it is best to take one's distance. Memory, narrative, and lexis are not simple internal contents to be observed from outside. They form part of the texture through which a life comes to compear. We do not always need to de-identify from a word; sometimes we need, at last, to find the right word and let it commit us.

I also have reservations about the image of the "self as context" when it approaches an observer-consciousness broad enough to contemplate all its contents without being altered by them. My ontology knows no intact witness. Whoever hears a truth is transformed by it. Whoever remembers does not remain external to the memory. Whoever loves cannot preserve himself as a neutral space that contains the experience. The acceptance that interests me is not the observer's immunity but the embodied capacity to remain present without being wholly governed by what reaches us.

To do justice to ACT one must recognize the philosophical and psychological horizon it comes from, namely radical behaviorism, functional contextualism, and Relational Frame Theory. My relation to that horizon is more complex than a quick opposition between behavior and experience would allow. Skinner (1904 - 1990)'s radical behaviorism does not necessarily deny that thoughts, emotions, or sensations exist; it refuses to treat them as sovereign inner causes separated from the organism and its learning history. In this it contains a legitimate critique of the little modern homunculus who supposedly decides from within and then produces behavior. My ontology likewise rejects a disembodied, self-sufficient self.

Functional contextualism adds that the meaning of a behavior is not found in its isolated form but in the function it fulfills within a context and a history. This intuition feels deeply akin to my own. A silence does not mean the same thing in a prayer, an argument, a musical performance, or an abusive relationship, and the same sentence can care for someone, mock, exclude, or ask for help depending on the situation in which it compears. Nothing human has meaning outside its relations. Attention to context corrects the diagnosis that classifies a behavior from outside without asking what world it is trying to inhabit or avoid.

Relational Frame Theory interests me because it recognizes that human language does not merely associate stimuli but creates networks of relations capable of transforming the function of whatever they name. A word can make present something absent, alter the value of an experience, link distant events, and produce suffering even where no immediate danger exists. This lets us understand why a biography can end up organized by phrases, comparisons, categories, and stories that were never simple, neutral descriptions. Human beings live within linguistic relational webs that modify what they can feel, hope for, and do.

And yet my distance appears when meaning is defined chiefly by the predictive and modifying function a verbal relation holds within a context. A word does not only change behaviors; it can also reveal, promise, remember, invoke, and make something compear whose truth is not measured by the success of an intervention. The name of a dead person may not improve adaptation or increase psychological flexibility and yet still preserve an obligation of memory. Language is not only a set of relational operations, but also lexis, the historical body of a community, and a place where a presence can survive its own disappearance.

Nor do I want truth to be wholly subordinated to function. A belief can be functional and false. An illusion can reduce suffering. A true word can disorganize a life before allowing it to take on another shape. The question of what works needs to be accompanied by the question of what we are responding to. Otherwise context becomes a closed system of contingencies, and the possibility disappears that something truly new might interrupt the functions already known.

I therefore take functional contextualism as a discipline against abstraction and mentalism, but not as a complete ontology of meaning. It helps me remember that no thought exists outside a body, a situation, and a set of consequences. My compearance adds that context, too, does not exhaustively possess what appears within it. An event can reorganize a context, introduce an unanticipated relation, and force us to learn a response that no history of reinforcement had prepared us for. ACT comes close to my thinking when it uses these tools to free up possibilities for action, and moves away from it when functional flexibility replaces truth, memory, and singularity as the criteria of a human life.

DBT and ACT contain, in sum, tools I respect and that can reduce very real suffering. They come close to my thinking when they teach how to inhabit a tension, abandon the fantasy of total control, respond according to values, and recognize that life does not begin only after every difficult emotion has disappeared. They move away from it when psychological flexibility, regulation, and effective action become an exhaustive picture of health. A life is not true merely because it functions better. It also needs memory, mourning, symbol, relation, and the possibility of being transformed by something it had not chosen beforehand as a value.

Logotherapy, existential analysis, phenomenological psychology, and certain relational currents are, taken together, the ones that most readily converse with my ontology.

Medard Boss (1903 - 1990) and Ludwig Binswanger (1881 - 1966) tried to understand suffering from modes of being in the world rather than solely from intrapsychic mechanisms. Rollo May (1909 - 1994) took seriously freedom, anxiety, love, will, and tragedy. Irvin Yalom (1931) has known how to think death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness without reducing them to correctable symptoms. But even existential psychology can slide toward a therapeutic humanism in which the ultimate horizon once again becomes an integrated, authentic life. My thinking remains more open to non-coincidence, to the wound that is not resolved, and to a compearance that transforms without guaranteeing a final psychic totality.

Among more recent authors, I am especially interested in the relational and intersubjective tradition — Stephen Mitchell, Jessica Benjamin (1946), Thomas Ogden (1946), and Philip Bromberg (1931 - 2020) — because they understand that subjectivity does not entirely precede the encounter and that the analyst participates in the field he is trying to understand. Benjamin, with her reflection on recognition and on the need to survive the other's imaginary destruction without reducing him to an object, touches on questions fundamental to me. Ogden, with the analytic third and his literary sensibility, thinks of the session as a co-created event that neither participant possesses. Bromberg, with his idea of remaining in the spaces between multiple states of self, moves away from the fantasy of an identity unified once and for all. All of them come close to my conviction that the person compears relationally without being reduced to the relation.

In sum, I align myself with the psychologies that recognize the opacity of the subject, embodiment, history, constitutive dependence, relation, imagination, symbol, event, and the impossibility of reducing a life to function or diagnosis. I part ways with those that turn the psyche into a mechanism, suffering into a cognitive error, biography into an illustration of a universal theory, symbol into code, cure into efficient adaptation, or health into the individual's total reconciliation with himself. Psychotherapy interests me when it does not promise to manufacture a perfectly integrated identity, but rather offers a space where whatever could not compear may finally find a voice, a body, a witness, and a way of being answered.

Something similar happens with psychological and epistemological constructivism. It strikes me as indispensable wherever it reminds us that we do not receive the world as a passive copy already organized, that perception, memory, narrative, and identity are formed through schemas, languages, expectations, and relations. A biography does not exist complete beforehand only to be described afterward; it takes shape in the act of being narrated, in the responses of those who listen to it, and in the categories a culture offers for recognizing suffering, desire, or belonging. Christianity too has historically constructed ways of experiencing guilt, hope, the body, and time. Recognizing this keeps us from naturalizing as eternal interpretations that in fact have a genealogy.

But I cannot accept a constructivism for which all meaningful reality is entirely produced by discourses, schemas, or practices. We construct modes of access, not necessarily what compears through them. A person can be described in different ways and resist all of them. A body falls ill even when a culture lacks the appropriate category for it. A death interrupts a life before we know how to integrate it narratively. The world is not a passive surface on which we inscribe sovereign meanings. It answers back, wounds, surprises, and gives the lie to us.

My position could be called receptive constructivism, if the phrase were not too paradoxical. Experience is formed, but it is formed by responding to something it has not entirely created. The performer constructs a realization, and yet the work compels him. A community interprets a tradition, and yet certain texts, gestures, and memories resist the reading it wishes to impose on them. There is no access without mediation, but mediation is not the same as absolute fabrication.

This distinction is decisive for my relation to Christianity. That the images of God, sin, salvation, or hell have been historically constructed does not mean that the experiences of finitude, guilt, forgiveness, hope, and evil are simple linguistic products. Doctrines gave them form, sometimes deformed them, and sometimes made visible regions that would otherwise have remained mute. The critical task consists in dismantling the construction wherever it claims to pass for exhaustive reality, without thereby believing that, once dismantled, nothing remains that continues to call for a response.

This whole itinerary, from Hegel, Žižek, and Altizer to Lacan, psychoanalysis, and contemporary therapies, lets us pin down a fundamental difference. Some traditions place their trust in reconciliation. Others turn lack into ultimate structure. Others define health through regulation, integration, or effectiveness. My thinking does not fully recognize itself in any of these exits. It affirms a positive compearance that does not eliminate the wound, a presence that does not produce total reconciliation, and a transformation that cannot be measured solely by good functioning. My philosophy is not a philosophy of synthesis, of the void, or of adaptation. It is a philosophy of embodied appearing.

But that contrast does not end with Hegel. Its consequences run through much of contemporary thought, even where it speaks in very different languages.

X. The Labels That Do Not Fit

Those consequences, however, take on languages so different that they end up overflowing any comfortable label, and it is worth saying precisely which of those labels do and do not suit me.

What follows might thus look like a search for allies. It is not, at least not in the sense of gathering authorities under a common doctrine. The thinkers I am about to approach do not inhabit a single school, do not use an interchangeable vocabulary, and in many cases contradict one another. I call on them because each has recognized a region of the landscape that systematic thought tends to erase: the singularity that cannot be substituted, the truth that compears as a call, the original passivity (or receptivity) of life, the fecundity of absence, the embodied character of all revelation, the impossibility of ever fully possessing what transforms us. They do not form a definitive cartography. They are, rather, scattered lights by which I have learned to orient myself without pretending the night has disappeared. What reappears here, under other names, is the same intuition that ran silently through the first pages of this essay.

All of this means that the usual labels almost always strike me as badly framed — not because they are empty, but because they force a choice between alternatives that already contain assumptions I do not share. Answering them one by one, as though responding to an interrogation, would betray what I think, but in a way, working through them lets me draw in negative the outline of a position that resists being portrayed head-on. It should now be easier to understand why the labels begin to fail.

So: if I am asked whether I am Christian, the short answer is no, not in the word's usual sense, and the long answer is that I feel myself heir to countless symbols, intuitions, and experiences associated with Christianity, without fully identifying with any confession or with the reduction of religious experience to a system of doctrines.

If I am asked whether I am a believer, the word begins to grate, because "believer" usually means someone who accepts propositions about supernatural entities, and my thinking does not revolve around propositions but around compearances. I do not understand faith mainly as intellectual assent to a doctrine, but as a certain relation to reality, a way of being exposed to it.

If I am asked whether I believe in God — and this is the hardest one — I first have to ask what is meant by God, because everything depends on that. If by God is meant a supreme being, a cosmic person, an overseer of the universe, an efficient cause pushing things from outside, my answer is no. If by God is meant the inexhaustible ground of compearance, that which never lets itself be closed off, the excess that inhabits every presence, then that reality interests me to the point of sleeplessness, though I am not sure the word God is the best way to name it, worn as it is by centuries of use that have turned it into almost an object among objects. For every true presence always retains an excess beyond what we manage to understand of it.

If I am asked whether I am an atheist, I say no, and with conviction, because frivolous modern atheism usually remains a prisoner of the very image of God it fights: it denies an object but goes on thinking of God as an object, and I have spent years criticizing precisely that objectification, so that the atheist and I are not even talking about the same thing when we say the same word.

If I am asked whether I am agnostic, that does not quite fit either, because the agnostic says "I don't know," and I do not simply say I don't know — I affirm many things, I affirm love, beauty, melody, compearance, presence, and the only thing I deny is that they could be turned into conceptually exhaustible objects.

If I am asked whether I am a materialist, the answer is almost certainly no, at least in the contemporary sense (perhaps a little more so in the sense of Gustavo Bueno's school, though not entirely there either), because I reject anantropism, physical reductionism, eliminativism, strong naturalism, and the neurocentrism that confuses the mind with an organ and meaning with a discharge.

And yet I am not an idealist either, nor a dualist, nor a classical spiritualist, which makes my position uncomfortable to classify — which is exactly what I ask of a true position, that it not fit comfortably on the shelf reserved for it.

The same happens with the finer labels. Catholic, in the confessional sense, I am not, because that would require accepting magisterial authority, the defined dogmas, the sacramental structure as the sole legitimate mediation, and certain concrete metaphysical formulations on which I have not affirmatively pronounced.

Confessional Christian, no either, if Christian means accepting Jesus of Nazareth as the definitive and normative revelation of the real, although there is enormous proximity if Christian means inhabiting a symbolic universe shaped by the cross, the incarnation, redemptive suffering, love, and vulnerability.

Cultural Christian, yes, and clearly so, much more than most Europeans today, because my sensibility is woven from Easter, from incarnation, from sacrifice, from compassion, from redemption, from memory, from absent presence, even when I do not use those words — and precisely when I do not use them.

Cultural Catholic too, shaped as I am by Spain, by Valencia, by the liturgy, by the imagery, by Holy Week, by sacred music, by Marian symbolism, however alien many of its institutional forms may feel to me.

The label "Catholic atheist" comes closer to me than plain "Catholic," but it does not fit me either, because the classic Catholic atheist affirms that God does not exist, and I have never affirmed that.

And "Christian atheist" brushes against Altizer and Žižek, but it does not contain me either, because Christian atheism usually says that God has died, and I say something different and more nuanced: that what has died is the objectifiable image of God, which is not the same thing, not by a long way.

Thomist I am not, though I admire things about Thomism, because Saint Thomas (1224 - 1274) presupposes an intelligibility of being much stronger than what I can sustain, and where he trusts in structure, I insist on excess, on remainder, on discontinuity, on what cannot be closed off.

Hegelian I am not, and this is perhaps the cleanest answer of all, because Hegel believes fractures are integrated, and my entire thought turns on a wound that does not disappear.

Phenomenologist, yes, very much so, more and more, though an extremely heterodox one and not at all scientistic, because of all the philosophical labels available this is the closest one, given that my question is not what reality is but how it compears, and that is a phenomenological question at its root — only I contaminate it with symbol, with poetry, with melos, with ontology, with discontinuity, until it becomes unrecognizable to a school phenomenologist. Put another way still: for me, what compears is never reduced to its compearing.

Existentialist, in part, because I care, and greatly, about finitude, vulnerability, decision, love, suffering — which brings me close to Kierkegaard, to Unamuno, to Gabriel Marcel, and takes me rather far from Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980), from his pure freedom and his bodiless anguish.

Traditionalist — let us distinguish — not politically, not metaphysically, and only in part culturally, because I am not seeking to return to any golden age, nor do I believe in the perfect restoration of the past, and what I defend is not tradition as museum but as living conversation, as a voice that keeps speaking and that can be answered.

Spiritual, yes, if that means believing that reality has dimensions of meaning irreducible to the physical, though not spiritualist, and above all not in the register of New Age, nor of esotericism, nor of a certain understanding of therapy — the three contemporary degradations of the spiritual into merchandise.

And Buddhist, no, flatly, more clearly than many would suppose, because I affirm singularity, the person, memory, concrete love, biography, melody, whereas a good part of Buddhism tends toward detachment, depersonalization, emptiness, the overcoming of the self, and because my thinking is tragic where Buddhism tends to be therapeutic, and those two temperatures of the soul do not mix well.

There are, then, three intellectual-family labels that deserve an answer even though I know none of them contains me (perennialism, Bueno-ism, Marxism). Perennialist I am not, and firmly so, because perennialism holds that all traditions express the same essential truth, and I believe there are real, irreducible, historical differences, and not some underlying metaphysical unity perfectly reconciled beneath the variety of forms.

Up to this point the labels have been examined chiefly from experience and phenomenology. But my relation to Christianity also has a historical, institutional, and political dimension that this vocabulary is not enough to grasp. Here Gustavo Bueno appears as an indispensable interlocutor, because he forces us to think the material reality of Catholicism even after denying its supernatural truth, and because he shifts the question from believing consciousness toward the civilizational power of an institution.

Not all the answers, however, come from the phenomenological or idealist tradition. Within contemporary Spanish thought, too, an indispensable interlocutor appears for this problem. And among all contemporary Spanish philosophers, none forces me to sharpen my position as much as the absolute genius of Gustavo Bueno (1924 - 2016). For many years I learned enormously from him. Precisely for that reason my disagreements with his materialism are not peripheral but decisive. So, Bueno-ist I am not, however much I have learned from him, because the points of rupture are enormous, and although I have taken on board many of his tools, my ontology moves in the opposite direction.

Marxist, no either, although Marxism has taught me a great deal and although I share certain of its critiques, because in the end Marxism privileges economic structures, thinks history in a dialectical key, interprets consciousness from material conditions, and I locate the fundamental problem elsewhere — in experience, in symbol, in compearance, in melos.

XI. Science as Landscape, Not Metaphysics

Placing the problem in experience, in symbol, and in comparecencia does not mean distrusting rigorous knowledge. It demands, rather, specifying the exact place that belongs to science within that landscape.

And at the same time I believe in the sciences, absolutely, though not as metaphysics, because I hold them to be one of the great human achievements for knowing certain aspects of the real, and the only thing I do not accept is that science exhausts everything real or that it can replace other forms of understanding. I have never fallen into denialism, nor into irrationalism, nor into cognitive relativism, and my criticism is aimed at scientism and never at science, which are as different from each other as the fanatic and the thing his fanaticism profanes.

My relation to modern astronomy and cosmology is especially intense, because few forms of knowledge have so profoundly altered the human imagination of the place we occupy. Knowing that the light of certain stars has traveled for millions or billions of years, that we behold galaxies as they were before our species existed, and that the elements of our bodies come from stellar processes inevitably changes the temperature of words like origin, distance, past, and belonging. I do not need to turn that knowledge into a cosmic religion in order to feel its poetic and philosophical power. Science does not necessarily diminish wonder; it can make it more precise.

And yet I resist the anantropic conclusion according to which the physical immensity of the universe would prove the insignificance of the human being. Size is not a sufficient moral or ontological category. A galaxy may contain hundreds of billions of stars and still not, for that, suffer the death of a child, remember a promise, compose a melody, or answer for the harm it has caused. That we are spatially minuscule does not mean that meaning is an illusion. Meaning does not compete with matter in magnitude. It compears within a form of existence capable of memory, relation, interpretation, and responsibility.

Cosmology can describe early states of the universe, large-scale structures, processes of expansion, and the physical conditions under which matter appears, but it cannot place itself outside all experience and declare what it means for there to be something, for that something to come to be lived, or for a particular life to matter. This is not a matter of inserting God into the gaps of scientific explanation. It is a matter of recognizing that a causal explanation, however complete, would not replace the experience of compearance. Knowing how a star was born does not exhaust what happens when its light guides someone who is lost, or becomes the image of a dead person's love.

The possibility of extraterrestrial life interests me from that same discipline. It would seem to me intellectually arrogant to affirm that conscious life has appeared only on Earth, but it would be equally arrogant to populate the cosmos in imagination with civilizations that merely reproduce our own fantasies, fears, and desires. Contemporary aliens frequently fulfill functions once performed by angels, demons, fabulous peoples, or gods. They are superior intelligences who come to save us, watch over us, judge us, experiment on us, or reveal to us that we are not alone. The scientific question of extraterrestrial life is legitimate, but its transformation into a compensatory mythology must be recognized as such.

If we ever encountered another form of intelligent life, the event would not abolish human singularity, but it would force it to abandon every pretension to cosmic exclusivity. It would also radically broaden ethics, since we would have to learn to recognize a non-human alterity perhaps capable of language, memory, technique, suffering, or community. But even then we would not possess a neutral vantage point on the universe. The encounter would always be a compearance between finite forms of life, each situated within its own corporeality, history, and perceptual world.

Astronomy teaches me, then, humility without nihilism. It decenters us without making us irrelevant. The modern sky is surely now infinitely vaster than that of my ancestors, but the fundamental question remains a human one: what do we do with the light we receive, how do we inhabit so improbable an existence, and what responsibility arises from being able to contemplate a cosmos that does not need us in order to exist, but that only in beings capable of contemplating it comes, as far as we know, to become a lived world.

At this point I must also situate my relation to physicists and popularizers such as Steven Weinberg (1933 - 2021) and Sean Carroll (1966), because both represent intellectually serious forms of a naturalism very different from frivolous atheism. Weinberg understood, with an almost tragic clarity, that the more intelligible the universe becomes through the sciences, the less it seems to answer our human desires for purpose, comfort, or justice. I respect that refusal to insert meaning where the data do not authorize it, and that discipline against anthropomorphic projection. It would be dishonest to ask cosmology to confirm our moral hopes. The stars do not exist to guide us, though they sometimes do, and the universe does not seem organized to protect our biographies, even though within it biographies capable of loving it have appeared.

My disagreement begins when the absence of a cosmic purpose becomes the absence of any real meaning at all. That the equations contain no mourning does not mean that mourning is an illusion. That physics finds no value in its magnitudes does not mean that value is an arbitrary projection. No score contains, as an isolable physical property, the performer's responsibility toward a phrase, and that does not make that responsibility unreal. Meaning does not have to be written into the initial conditions of the cosmos in order truly to compear within an embodied life.

Sean Carroll offers a more systematic and philosophically elaborated version of that position through his poetic naturalism. I am drawn to his willingness to recognize distinct vocabularies for distinct levels of description — that is, to speak of particles does not make it illegitimate to speak of persons, decisions, poems, or institutions. That openness sets him apart from a vulgar eliminativism and lets him admit that human realities have their own patterns, explanations, and regularities. And yet the word poetic can end up functioning as an ontologically weak concession: persons, values, and meanings would be useful ways of speaking within a reality that, in the last instance, would be entirely constituted by fundamental physical description.

My difficulty concentrates precisely on that "in the last instance." I do not believe personal language is merely a practical scale on which we summarize microscopic interactions too complex to state directly. A promise is not an abbreviation for a brain state plus a social convention; it inaugurates a normative relation that did not exist before it was uttered. A musical performance is not merely an emergent pattern over physical processes; it constitutes an event in which a work, a memory, and a community of listeners acquire a presence that no microphysical description contains or could replace. What is emergent is not less real for depending on material conditions.

With Weinberg and Carroll I share, then, the rejection of God used as causal explanation, of intelligent design, and of any cosmology that makes the universe revolve around our needs. I part ways with them when the causal closure of physical description seems also to acquire the rank of ontological closure. That every human event needs a material realization does not mean that its being consists exclusively in that realization. Incarnation is not the reduction of word to flesh, but the compearance of a meaning that exists only by becoming flesh and that nevertheless cannot be translated without remainder into a description of its matter. This difference leads inevitably toward eliminativism and toward the conceptions of mind that most radically call my anthropology into question.

The contemporary debate on consciousness makes the border between explanation and compearance even more visible. Daniel Dennett strikes me as a formidable philosophical intelligence precisely where he dismantles the Cartesian images of an inner theater, of a central spectator, and of private qualities wholly separate from behavior, language, and the functional organization of the organism. I share his rejection of a hidden soul contemplating internal representations, and his insistence that what we call the self has a narrative, distributed, constructed structure. My self, too, is not a transparent substance existing prior to all relation.

And yet Dennett's strategy tends to explain consciousness by eliminating precisely what needed to be understood: the fact that something feels a certain way to someone. Describing the discriminations, reports, dispositions, and functions associated with an experience can explain a great deal about how an organism operates, but the phenomenological question reappears: what does it mean for pain to hurt, for a timbre to be recognized as a beloved voice, for a harmony to alter the entire temperature of the world? I am not defending some magical residue. I am pointing out that the first person is not a superstition tacked onto the data, but the mode in which pain, color, memory, and meaning exist for us at all.

Thomas Nagel (1937) is much closer to me because he refuses to confuse an ever more complete objective description with the totality of the real. His question about what it is like to be an organism reminds us that every conscious being has a perspective that cannot simply be reconstructed by accumulating outer information. His critique of materialist reductionism likewise recognizes that the emergence of consciousness, reason, and value poses problems that a causal evolutionary narrative does not solve merely by describing its antecedents. I do not need to accept a strong cosmic teleology in order to share his resistance to declaring illusory whatever a given methodology does not know how to integrate.

But I also part ways in part with Nagel when subjectivity seems to function as an inner property of the organism. My concept of compearance is more relational. There is not only a private "what it is like" within each consciousness; there is also a shared world that is transformed between bodies, words, and memories. The timbre of a voice is not simply a quale of mine; it belongs to a relation, to a history, and to a form of recognition that none of the participants possesses separately. Experience is not locked inside the head and then imperfectly communicated. It is already constituted in a between.

Between Dennett and Nagel, then, a tension takes shape that my ontology tries to inhabit. Dennett is right to destroy the little inner sovereign, and Nagel is right to keep that destruction from carrying off the reality of experience along with it. The self is not a private theater, but neither is it a functional fiction without depth. It is an embodied singularity that compears narratively, affectively, and relationally, that never fully coincides with itself, and that cannot be observed from outside without loss. This question of singularity becomes still sharper when we move from philosophy of mind to ethics and ask what makes a life matter.

But scientific knowledge does not reach most of us directly through specialized articles, observations, or experiments. It arrives embodied in institutions, narrators, images, museums, magazines, documentaries, and pedagogical rituals. That is why, after distinguishing science from naturalist metaphysics, we need to examine the culture through which science becomes collective imagination and, at times, a substitute civic religion.

Alongside modern science there exists today, however, a culture of science with its own symbols, temples, narratives, and liturgies. I think of popular-science magazines, of Reader's Digest, National Geographic, Smithsonian, nature documentaries, planetariums, natural history museums, dinosaur skeletons, reconstructions of human origins, mineral display cases, maps of the solar system, and the darkened halls where a disembodied voice narrates the birth of the universe. That whole world has been decisive in the spiritual formation of the modern urban classes. It does not merely transmit knowledge. It teaches what deserves wonder, what counts as real, what account of origins must replace the religious ones, and what kind of authority has the right to speak in the world's name.

I do not say this pejoratively. As a child and as an adult I have felt, in museums, observatories, aquariums, and planetariums, a genuine emotion, at times almost religious. A great fossil skeleton, a meteorite, or the projection of a galaxy can open up a disproportion comparable to that of a cathedral. Popular science has freed millions of people from superstition, has broadened their temporal and spatial imagination, and has shown the beauty of realities no premodern tradition could know with such precision. It would be absurd to reduce it to secular propaganda.

But science culture turns into a civic-urban religion when it stops distinguishing between science and a total worldview. It then acquires a cosmology (the story running from the Big Bang to consciousness), an anthropology (the human being as a highly complex neural primate), an eschatology (space colonization, artificial intelligence, the conquest of disease, or extinction), a priestly ethics of the expert, and a liturgy of administered wonder. The presenter, the popularizer, the museum, and the documentary acquire an authority that no longer derives solely from concrete evidence, but from the general prestige of speaking "from science."

This new scientific religiosity can be especially rigid because it does not recognize itself as religiosity. It considers its symbols to be simple facts and its narratives to contain no selections, metaphors, values, or editorial decisions. But choosing to tell the story of the universe as an ascent from blind particles to a consciousness capable of knowing them is already a narrative. Presenting the human being as an insignificant speck, or as the way the cosmos comes to contemplate itself, are philosophical interpretations, not experimental results. They can be beautiful, but they must not be mistaken for measurements.

My criticism isn't directed at National Geographic, the Smithsonian, planetariums, or natural history museums, which I admire and consider essential institutions, but at the metaphysical function sometimes demanded of them. They shouldn't have to replace the church, poetry, mourning, philosophy, or community. Science can tell us how old a fossil is, how a star formed, or through what processes a species evolved. It doesn't need to also declare what living, loving, or dying ought to mean for us. When it's allowed to remain science, it enlarges the world. When it's forced to become a total religion, however, it ends up impoverishing both science and life.

Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992) occupies a particular place within this scientific imaginary. I admire him for his clarity, his encyclopedic curiosity, his confidence in intelligence, and his extraordinary ability to turn scientific, historical, and logical problems into accessible narratives. His work is part of that secular pedagogy through which entire generations learned to experience the universe as an intelligible reality, immense and open to inquiry. His robots and the Three Laws also introduced genuine questions about responsibility, obedience, the interpretation of rules, and the impossibility of reducing a moral situation to seemingly simple instructions.

But Asimov also embodies an Enlightenment confidence in planning rationality that I find problematic. The psychohistory of Foundation imagines that, on a sufficiently large scale, the behavior of populations can be predicted and administered mathematically. Although the narrative shows interruptions and limits, the fantasy remains that a competent elite, armed with knowledge, can guide the course of history and shorten centuries of barbarism. It is the galactic version of the Saint-Simonian dream: scientists replacing priests and rulers, technical foresight turned into civilizational responsibility.

What unsettles me is not the use of models, nor the possibility of understanding social regularities, but the loss of the singular face within the statistical scale. A story can be efficient for the species and devastating for each person forced to fulfill their function within the plan. No psychohistory can anticipate what it means for someone to lose a child, betray a friendship, or hear a melody that transforms their life. Singularity is not residual noise in an equation still imperfect; it belongs to the very being of human history.

Asimov's robotic universe also shows, perhaps unintentionally, that an ethics turned into code produces inevitable paradoxes. "Do no harm" requires interpreting what counts as harm, to whom, on what time scale, and at the cost of what other goods. The rule cannot apply its own meaning by itself. It needs situation, judgment, body, memory, and responsibility. In this Asimov ends up confirming something my ontology holds: that no law, however perfect it may seem, can substitute for the event of answering to a concrete presence.

I feel, then, close to the Asimov who popularizes science, the narrator of intelligence and enemy of superstition, but far from the horizon in which scientific rationality might finally administer history. Science fiction interests me when it expands our moral imagination, not when it turns the future into the stage for a technocratic salvation. Asimov's cosmos is vast and intelligible. Mine, by contrast, also contains discontinuities, events, and voices that no Seldon Plan could ever fully integrate.

Systems theory and cybernetics radicalize, with a more precise vocabulary, some of the intuitions and dangers already present in Saint-Simon (1760 - 1825) and Asimov. I am deeply interested in their refusal to explain a complex phenomenon by isolating its parts alone. An organism, a family, an orchestra, an institution, or a society do not function as simple aggregates of independent units. There are feedback loops, thresholds, dependencies, emergences, and patterns that appear only in relation. This attention to the between converges with my ontology. A melody is found in no isolated note. A community resides in none of its members. An identity is transformed through circuits of response that cross bodies and times.

Second-order cybernetics also introduces a decisive correction: that the observer is part of the system it describes. There is no wholly external gaze capable of registering without modifying what it observes. This comes very close to my critique of every anantropic perspective. The therapist participates in the therapeutic field, the teacher alters the student through his own attention, the audience modifies the interpretation, and the theorist brings to the phenomenon the very distinctions with which he hopes to recognize it. To know is always a form of relation.

But the word system contains a temptation. Once a reality is described as a system, there is a risk that every event will be interpreted solely by the function it fulfills within the totality. The symptom maintains a family equilibrium, dissent regulates an institution, suffering signals a disturbance, the person becomes a node, a subsystem, or the bearer of a function. Such descriptions can reveal invisible relations, but they can also absorb singularity. A death is not merely an alteration of the family system's equilibrium, but the disappearance of someone. A voice does not matter only for the function it performs within the orchestral texture.

My disagreement with certain systems theories reproduces my disagreement with Hegel: the whole can help us understand the part, but it has no right to exhaust its meaning. Nor is totality a superior subject that preserves itself through the legitimate sacrifice of its components. An institution may need stability, but that does not turn every voice that destabilizes it into pathology. Sometimes the element that seems dysfunctional is precisely the one through which the violence of the whole becomes visible.

I therefore receive systems theory as an instrument against atomism, not as a metaphysics of totality. It teaches me to perceive relations, loops, contexts, and unintended effects. My ontology, in turn, reminds it that something can compear by breaking the system, and that genuine novelty is not always a predictable emergent complexity foreseeable from its rules. The event is not simply a new configuration of the whole. It can force us to recognize that the whole through which we explained reality was incapable of receiving what has just appeared.

If I had to condense this whole detour through labels into a single sentence, I would say that I am neither an atheist nor a believer in the ordinary sense, that I am neither materialist nor idealist, that I am neither right-wing nor left-wing in the strict sense, that I am neither perennialist nor Marxist nor a do-gooder, and that I try to think reality from an ontology of compearance, where meaning truly appears without ever being reduced to a theory, an institution, an ideology, or a possessable object. And I suspect that this sentence is closer to me than any of the labels it denies.

The case of Asimov lets us see that cosmology, science fiction, and the philosophy of history inevitably flow into a political question: who possesses enough knowledge to guide the community, and what happens to singular lives when society is viewed from the scale of the system. The discussion about God, science, and rationality does not, therefore, remain in the heaven of ideas; it reappears as a concrete distribution of authority.

Up to this point I have traveled through very different regions, and it may be worth pausing a moment to acknowledge the common ground. I have spoken of childhood and doctrine, of the body and the name of God, of sexuality and phenomenology, of loss, of freedom. But in all these places the same difficulty has reappeared: how to receive something without being possessed by it, how to acknowledge an origin without turning it into a destiny, how to make use of a name without imprisoning within it what compears, how to keep an orientation open without turning it into dominion. If the whole essay had to be condensed into a single sentence before now entering its political consequences, it would be this: truth compears, but it never lets itself be possessed completely. That is, at bottom, the one conviction that all the preceding chapters have tried to circle from different angles.

XII. From Comparecencia to Politics

That formula which sums up everything said so far, namely that truth comes forward but is never fully possessed, cannot remain confined to the realm of ideas either. Sooner or later it demands asking what political consequences follow from it.

And all this might seem like a purely religious or philosophical discussion. Yet no ontology remains locked within the realm of ideas. Sooner or later it ends up shaping a way of understanding community, authority, freedom, tradition, education, and, finally, politics itself. Because every political decision always presupposes, though it rarely admits it, a certain image of what it means to be human and of the way a life comes to fulfillment.

Nor does any conception of compearance remain confined to metaphysics for long. The way we understand that something or someone appears also determines how much we are willing to let it say, what part of its presence we consider substitutable, and how quickly we reduce it to a function, an identity, or a case. The shared landscape is always also a distribution of visibilities: it contains main roads and erased paths, illuminated centers and regions forced to remain outside the gaze. That is why the political question does not arrive from outside. It is born at the very moment we ask who holds the right to name another entirely, and who is condemned to live inside a description they do not recognize as their own.

The passage from compearance to politics can be clarified through Elias Canetti (1905 - 1994), because few authors have described with such intensity the transformation that occurs when a person enters the crowd. In the crowd, individual distances seem to be abolished, fear of contact is inverted into a desire for fusion, and each body draws a provisional security from the density of the others. I understand the power of that experience. A procession, a demonstration, a concert, a liturgy, or a crowd in mourning can allow an emotion unbearable for the individual to acquire a common body. Not every crowd is falsehood. There are events whose public dimension cannot be reduced to the sum of private consciousnesses.

But Canetti also shows the danger of that discharge: difference becomes suspect, the common direction acquires a force of its own, and the individual can experience as liberation precisely the renunciation of having to answer for his own acts. This dynamic matters profoundly for understanding both religion and modern politics. A Christian community can make a shared memory compear, but it can also offer the pleasure of dissolving into a collective certainty. The same procession that gives body to mourning can turn into a demonstration of power, and the same liturgy that frees the individual from isolation can excuse him from listening to whoever does not take part in it.

I am equally interested in the Canettian figure of the survivor, the one who experiences power by remaining standing while others have fallen. There is a dimension of political, military, and even religious sovereignty that feeds on that position: the leader who outlives his enemies, the institution that contemplates centuries of ruins and turns its own duration into proof of truth, the elect who imagines his salvation alongside the condemnation of others. This logic is secretly present in certain representations of the last judgment and of the community of the saved. A hope that needs to behold the lost in order to experience its own election has turned salvation into the triumph of the survivor.

My ontology opposes that sovereignty of survival. Staying alive grants no superior perspective on those who died, nor does an institution's duration prove that it has faithfully guarded the event that founded it. The true survivor is not the one who turns another's death into a pedestal, but the one left responsible for a memory that can no longer defend itself. Nor is the true community the one that absorbs its members into a compact identity, but the one that lets them appear without requiring them to experience every distance as a threat.

Canetti thus serves as a hinge between religion and politics. Liturgies, ideologies, nations, and social movements all work with gathered bodies, rhythms, repetitions, symbols, and promises of liberation from solitude. We cannot understand politics if we pretend that citizens are merely rational individuals comparing platforms. But neither can we defend community without asking what happens to the face when the multitude acquires a single voice. The political question is born exactly there: how to build a common world without turning the common into a mass that punishes every singular compearance.

Now that the question of the political has suddenly appeared, then, it's worth saying how it is ordered, because here too habit poses the question badly. The question is not, for example, whether or not I should vote, but what voting means within a well-lived human life, and once it is put that way everything changes.

In that sense, my thought is neither anarchist, nor nihilist, nor quietist, and it does not hold that all political action is irrelevant. Now, and this is very important, neither does it hold that politics is the center of existence. Far from it. It holds that politics matters but is not the last word, and that double affirmation, which strikes many as lukewarm, is in fact a demanding position. Voting, for instance, in no way necessarily contradicts my ontology, which affirms incarnation, responsibility, the shared world, community, and the real consequences of acts, and all of that coexists effortlessly with going to the polls. Now, what I reject entirely is turning the vote into a kind of sacred duty, because for many people politics has become religion, and political identity has taken the place once held by faith, community, transcendence, belonging, and I distrust that transference to the core. One can vote with prudence and responsibility without making the vote the core of a life, and certainly without voting in order to have an identity, or to have an enemy, or to feel morally superior, or in hopes of a redemption that no ballot can give.

I am not, for that reason, what today is called equidistant, and it bothers me that my independence gets confused with the lukewarmness of one who divides reason equally between sides. I hold very firm judgments about technocracy, about the commodification of culture, about scientism, about political tribalism, about the destruction of living traditions, about the bureaucratization of teaching, about the aesthetic leveling that equalizes downward. I am not neutral about any of that. What I reject is the logic of the camp, of the ideological package, the one that demands that a correct position on one issue automatically require accepting the whole bundle of beliefs of that side. I can criticize economic neoliberalism without embracing cultural progressivism, I can defend tradition without embracing reactionism, and that is not equidistance, it is independence, which is nearly its opposite, because equidistance does not judge and independence judges too much to let itself be pigeonholed.

Nor am I apolitical, because I know that laws matter, that institutions matter, that education matters, that the economy has consequences for real bodies. If there is a word for what I am, it would be metapolitical, in the literal sense and not in the sense certain movements have appropriated for the term. My fundamental questions are, in a certain sense, a level above politics, because before asking which party, I ask what a person is, what a community is, what a tradition is, what a fulfilled human life is, and only afterward, on that ground, does politics appear.

Saint-Simon and Saint-Simonism belong to a genealogy that interests me precisely because it anticipates many of the ambivalences of organized modernity. Saint-Simon understands that industrial society can no longer be governed with the forms inherited from the feudal world, and that production, knowledge, and technical cooperation will profoundly transform the political structure. His desire to replace unproductive dominion with an organization oriented toward capabilities, industry, and the material improvement of the majority contains a legitimate critique of parasitic hierarchies. His concern for "the most numerous and poorest class" also keeps him from being reduced to a mere prophet of technocracy.

Yet in his thought there already appears the temptation to entrust the community's destiny to those supposedly capable of organizing it: industrialists, scientists, administrators, engineers, experts. Politics begins to be imagined as a matter of the rational management of functions, and society as an organism whose parts must be coordinated according to a plan. The Saint-Simonians would go on to develop a religiosity of progress, of industry, of fraternity, and of the material transformation of the world. The railroad, the canal, the bank, planning, and science acquire an almost sacramental dimension. Religion does not disappear, but changes its object and its priesthood. The technician takes the place of the cleric, and infrastructure becomes the promise of universal reconciliation.

This mutation interests me a great deal because it reveals that technocracy is never purely technical. It rests on an anthropology, an eschatology, and an implicit distribution of the sacred. It believes that the rational coordination of means will end up producing a reconciled human life, and that conflicts can be managed as functional maladjustments. But no society is merely a system of needs, competencies, and flows. A person does not compear as the sum of her productive capacity, nor does a community become just simply because its resources are efficiently administered. Planning can reduce avoidable suffering, but it cannot define the meaning of a life.

That is why I can recognize in Saint-Simon a lucid precursor of the social question and of the need to reorganize institutions incapable of responding to a new world, but also one of the spiritual fathers of government by experts. His "new Christianity" attempts to translate fraternity into social organization, and that intention deserves respect, but the problem begins when fraternity is entrusted to an architecture directed from above. My position stands equidistant between nostalgia for the old regime and the industrial religion of the future. We need institutions, technique, and planning, but always subordinated to the compearance of persons who are neither pieces of a system nor examples of a theory of progress.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) represents a very different response to the Saint-Simonian dream of rationally organizing society. He too rejects the idea that existing institutions are the necessary expressions of historical or economic laws, but instead of entrusting their reorganization to a technical elite, he insists on the human capacity to revise the contexts that shape us. I feel close to his refusal to treat the social order as a fixed nature and to his conviction that institutions are historical constructions open to recombination. That idea corrects both the conservatism that sacralizes what is inherited and the Marxism that interprets every social formation as a necessary stage of an objective logic.

In Unger I find a defense of institutional imagination that my political thought needs. It is not enough to criticize neoliberalism, educational bureaucracy, or cultural technocracy; one must also imagine concrete forms through which cooperation, learning, work, and participation could be organized differently. Compearance needs institutions. Without the times, spaces, resources, rights, and practices that sustain it, singularity becomes a noble word without historical efficacy. A different musical community, for example, will not be born merely by denouncing competitions and conservatories; it needs other modes of teaching, selection, funding, and encounter.

My reservation begins in the face of any strong constructivism that interprets social reality as material almost entirely available for reinvention. Institutions are transformable, but human beings do not arrive at them without a body, dependency, mortality, memory, or need for recognition. Not every limit is an ideological imposition. There are bonds, losses, and asymmetries that no institutional reorganization eliminates. Birth always hands us over to others before we can decide anything. Illness interrupts projects. Love produces obligations no one designed. Death prevents politics from being a technique of complete fulfillment.

That is why my constructivism is limited and embodied. Social categories are not eternal essences, but neither are they mere arbitrary fictions that a collective will could modify without remainder. They settle into bodies, languages, affects, and histories, and transforming them takes more than changing a discourse. At the same time, origin does not justify the persistence of an unjust form. A tradition can be deeply constitutive and still need to be altered. The entire first part of this essay has tried to show precisely that double truth with respect to Christianity: that I cannot invent myself outside it, but neither am I condemned to repeat it.

Unger thus helps me carry my ontology toward a politics of transformation without teleology. Institutions do not express a historical destiny, nor do they necessarily lead toward a final reconciliation. They can open or close possibilities of compearance. They must be judged by the capacity they offer people to act, learn, dissent, cooperate, and modify the conditions of their own lives without being reduced to resources of some plan. This requirement keeps my defense of tradition from becoming immobilism, and my critique of technocracy from ending in nostalgia. Inheritance remains alive only when it admits forms it does not yet know.

Saint-Simon shows that modern political categories differ not only in the ends they pursue, but in the image of the human being and of society they presuppose. Technocracy imagines coordinable functions, liberalism imagines autonomous individuals, socialism imagines class relations and cooperation, and conservatism imagines inherited orders. My difficulty with left and right begins precisely because none of those anthropologies fully coincides with the vulnerable, relational, unclosable person I have tried to describe.

Modern left and right both assume a prior anthropology, one emancipation and autonomy, the other order and continuity, and I do not simply accept either, because my center lies entirely elsewhere. I find truths and errors distributed across both: I am conservative in defending cultural inheritance and educational transmission, communitarian in my love of friendship and belonging, a radical humanist in defending the dignity of the person and rejecting reductionism, critical of technocracy and of the automatic progressivism that confuses the new with the good, and none of these labels captures me entirely.

The most faithful formulation would be that I am not equidistant between good and evil, nor between truth and error, and that the only thing I deny is that the boundary between them always coincides with the boundaries between parties, ideologies, or tribes. Politics is an important dimension of human life, but it has never been, is not, and never will be the supreme instance that defines the meaning of existence, because it can decide on taxes and healthcare and schools and cannot say why a melody moves us, or what love is, or what compears in beauty, or why we weep before certain memories. And whoever fails to distinguish those two planes has lost the more important one in order to save the noisier one.

My political resistance thus comes from the same place as my theological resistance. I distrust any word that, having been born to orient us, claims for itself the power to exhaust what it names. This happens with "God," but also with "people," "nation," "class," "identity," "progress," "tradition," or "humanity." None of these words is necessarily false, and some may even guard experiences we cannot renounce. They turn violent when they stop functioning as horizons of intelligibility and begin treating concrete persons as mere confirmations of their concept. In politics too there are maps that end up demanding that the terrain resemble them.

My refusal to accept ideological packages does not keep me from recognizing that critiques of modernity can also form closed systems. In fact, the more legitimate the protest against uprootedness, the market, or homogenization, the more necessary it becomes to watch for the moment when tradition, people, and civilization stop naming historical relations and start behaving like metaphysical subjects. Dugin (1962) is the extreme example of that mutation.

Aleksandr Dugin represents for me an especially clear warning about what happens when the legitimate critique of modernity turns into a geopolitical metaphysics. I can recognize some of the phenomena his protest targets: the anthropological impoverishment of economic liberalism, the reduction of the world to a market, cultural homogenization, technocracy, the destruction of traditional forms of belonging, and the Western pretension of presenting its own present as the universal destiny of humanity. It would be intellectually lazy to reject these critiques merely because they appear within an architecture that is deeply foreign to me.

But Dugin very dangerously transforms tradition into a civilizational essence, historical difference into a geopolitical bloc, and the plurality of cultures into an almost ontological antagonism between worlds. Eurasia, the West, tellurocracy, Atlanticism, tradition, and modernity stop functioning as interpretive instruments and start behaving like metaphysical subjects. Concrete persons become manifestations of historical forces that precede and exceed them. In that gesture appears exactly what my entire ontology is directed against: the map that demands the terrain resemble it, the totality that absorbs singularity, and the concept that turns lives into material for a historical mission.

What also separates me from Dugin is his appropriation of religion, esotericism, and traditionalism as legitimations of a politics of power. When tradition stops being conversation, memory, and a form of response in order to become a principle of civilizational mobilization, it has lost its living character. A liturgy is not safeguarded by using it as the emblem of a sphere of influence, nor is spirituality defended by turning it into a weapon against another civilization. The critique of liberal universalism does not justify building another, imperial universalism under the name of plurality.

My rejection of Dugin is not, then, a defensive allegiance to the liberalism he opposes. I reject both the abstract humanity of technocratic globalism and the great civilizational subjects that claim to replace it. Between the rootless individual and the civilization that devours its individuals there is another possibility: historical communities that remain open, traditions capable of self-criticism, peoples who need not absolutize themselves in order to exist, and persons whose belonging does not exhaust their identity. Political multipolarity can correct a hegemony, but once turned into the sacred ontology of empires, it reproduces the same violence under other symbols.

The rejection of a geopolitical metaphysics of tradition cannot, however, lead me to separate Christianity from the material conditions in which bodies live. There is an opposite way of linking religion and politics: not to sacralize civilizations and states, but to let historical suffering interpellate theology. It is in that direction, and not Dugin's, that I locate my critical proximity to liberation theology.

At this point I must also situate my relation to liberation theology. I feel deeply close to its refusal to turn Christianity into a private administration of salvation, and to its insistence that incarnation must acquire material, political, economic, and bodily consequences. A faith that speaks of the body of Christ and remains indifferent to bodies that are hungry, exploited, tortured, or expelled from the community contradicts itself. The preferential option for the poor contains an ontological intuition I share: that the truth of a community is revealed in the way those who lack the power to impose their own description compear within it. I am also drawn to its reading of the Exodus, of the prophets, of the cross, and of the resurrection as events that interrupt the naturalization of injustice. Poverty is not a morally purifying substance, nor is the poor person a romantic object, but the existence of avoidable social suffering constitutes an appeal that no theology can take refuge from in neutrality. My distance begins when Christian experience is absorbed by a philosophy of history, when salvation is too quickly identified with political emancipation, when the singularity of pain becomes an example of a class structure, or when the Gospel risks functioning as the transcendent legitimation of an ideological program. Liberation is indispensable, but it does not exhaust redemption. Justice is a demand we cannot renounce, but it does not by itself answer death, love, mourning, guilt, forgiveness, or the unrepeatability of a person. Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928 - 2024), Leonardo Boff (1938), Jon Sobrino (1938), and Ignacio Ellacuría (1930 - 1989) feel close to me wherever they force theology to set foot in history and let itself be judged by concrete suffering, while I grow distant when history begins to take the place of compearance and structural transformation threatens to become the exhaustive grammar of all experience. My position might be put this way: that no Christianity that ignores the liberation of bodies deserves to speak of incarnation, but no politics, however just, has the right to claim it has exhausted the mystery of those bodies.

XIII. Rome or Gethsemane

That same caution before any politics that claims to exhaust the mystery of bodies reappears, in another form, in the reckoning I still owe to the ecclesial institution and to the man who has best thought its power from within atheism, Gustavo Bueno.

There is a thinker I have already named with whom this political reckoning becomes more intimate, and that is Gustavo Bueno, because his Catholic atheism is, in certain respects only, the position against which I best measure my own. It's worth first saying what it is, without caricature, because it is a serious, even fierce, philosophical operation. Bueno does not say I am Catholic but I don't believe in God in the sentimental sense of carols and nostalgia. He says something harder. He says: God does not exist, and yet Catholicism exists, and exists with a historical, institutional, political, rational, and civilizational power that cannot be dismissed as mere private superstition. He is an atheist because he denies God's existence and considers the philosophical idea of God contradictory within his materialism. But he is also Catholic because he considers Catholicism not an intimate belief but an objective historical institution, a form of civilization, a doctrinal, juridical, imperial, cultural structure without which one cannot understand Spain, or Europe, or a great part of universal history. Bueno distinguishes precisely between theological truth, which he denies, and the historical and material reality of the Church, which he affirms with vigor, because the Church has dogmas, councils, universities, canon law, orders, architecture, music, missions, empires, scholasticism, political power, an institutional rationality accumulated over centuries. His atheism is not, therefore, the frivolous, superficial, vulgar Enlightenment atheism of today's typical bourgeois, who reduces religion to ignorance, and in fact Bueno despises that atheism, because for him many modern forms of atheism are infinitely more naive than the theology they believe they have surpassed, and the progressive atheist who believes only in Humanity, in Progress, in Values, in Peace, in Culture, may be replacing God with poorer mythologies. Hence one of his strongest ideas, that atheism too has faith, not religious faith but political, moral, historical faith. His Catholicism is, therefore, cultural, political, institutional, and philosophical, never devotional. It is not a Catholicism of prayer and personal salvation but a Catholicism as a historical form of rationality, and that is why he sees in it something more rational than Protestantism, which he judges subjectivist, fideist, fragmentary, whereas Catholicism interests him for its objective dimension, the visible Church, dogma, hierarchy, law, systematic theology. The formula would be: atheist in theology, Catholic in history, materialist in ontology, anti-Protestant in cultural politics. And there is a decisive Spanish part, because for Bueno, Spain is not understood as an abstract liberal nation but as a historical nation formed in connection with Catholicism and with the Empire, Catholicism being a structure of expansive universality and not an ethnic religion enclosed within a tribe. The paradox is that he does not want to return to faith; he wants to preserve the historical and rational force of Catholicism after having denied its supernatural foundation, a Catholicism without God but in a martial sense, the Church as institution, dogma as rational architecture, scholasticism as strong philosophy, Catholicism as a historical form of universality.

At this point I must grant Bueno an important share of the truth. The historical greatness of Christianity cannot be explained solely by the content of the evangelical preaching, nor by the Church's later political efficacy. It also consists in having served as a place of encounter, conflict, and sedimentation among three heritages that were not naturally compatible: the prophetic and eschatological interpellation of Jerusalem, the philosophical rationality of Greece, and the juridical and institutional objectivity of Rome. From Judaism it received creation, the covenant, oriented history, the irreducibility of the person before the idol, and the demand for justice. From Greece it received the logos, ontology, dialectic, argumentation, the categories of substance, nature, person, cause, act, potency, and participation. From Rome it received law, institutionality, administrative universality, the distinction of jurisdictions, the capacity to organize communities beyond tribal kinship, and an extraordinary consciousness of historical duration. Christianity did not merely add these heritages together. It forced them to argue with one another for centuries. Revelation had to learn to argue. Philosophy had to confront historical singularity. Law had to admit a dignity that did not derive exclusively from civic status. Imperial universality had to be crossed by the idea of a community that did not fully coincide with any people or state. From that friction came monstrosities, persecutions, exclusions, and violence, but also an intellectual fecundity that no serious account of the West can erase: universities, scholastic disputes, theories of natural law, concepts of the person, limits on power, charitable institutions, orders devoted to knowledge, educational systems, and a conception of the world as an intelligible, created reality worthy of investigation. To destroy that fabric retrospectively under the word superstition would not be enlightenment but historical illiteracy.

I can go even further, though the word is dangerous, and affirm that Christianity has shown, in certain respects, a historical superiority over other religions. Not a biological superiority, nor an absolute moral or demonstrated metaphysical one, and still less the right to subjugate, colonize, or despise other traditions. I am speaking of a comparative superiority in its capacity to produce and harbor internal differentiations, lasting institutions, rationally articulated conflicts, universalities not strictly ethnic, and extraordinarily plural forms of art, philosophy, science, and communal life. No other tradition has sustained for so many centuries, within a single civilization, the discussion between faith and reason, grace and freedom, Church and State, conscience and law, revelation and philosophy, universality and person, body and spirit, nature and supernature. Christianity triumphed historically not only because it had power, though it did, but because it demonstrated an exceptional capacity to translate itself, absorb foreign categories, found institutions, produce dissidence, and survive its own crises. It created cathedrals and monasteries, polyphony and counterpoint, icons and altarpieces, universities and hospitals, mysticism and canon law, scholasticism and humanism, modern science and the critique of science, empires and prophetic objections against those very empires. It also produced inquisitions, wars, colonialism, persecutions, and terrible forms of discipline, and to omit that would be indecent. But its failures do not eliminate the magnitude of the civilizational form that made them possible. Saying that it has created more art or more philosophy than other religions requires caution, because it depends on what we mean by art and philosophy and how we measure traditions of unequal historical span. Still, it can be affirmed that no religion has generated such a prolonged and structurally fruitful interaction with Greek philosophical rationality, Roman law, scientific experimentation, and the institutional autonomy of art. Its success does not prove that each of its dogmas is true. It proves that its symbolic and institutional matrix possessed an extraordinary power of historical articulation. That is precisely why it irritates me to see it treated as a mere episode of collective ignorance overcome by a few decades of urban comfort.

Now, I recognize in this whole operation something brutal and something great: killing God and preserving the Church as one of the great historical forms of material rationality, and with it I share, if I had to put a number on it, around seventy percent of its enemies and perhaps only thirty percent of its foundations. I agree with Bueno's critique of naive atheism, because when I criticize Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Hitchens, I do not do so because they are atheists but because they are metaphysically naive, imagining they have eliminated religion when they have only swapped one set of symbols for another. I agree with the critique of abstract humanitarianism, with the suspicion of Humanity, Progress, Peace, Culture, and Values turned into replacement gods, although I do it from poetics and incarnation and he does it from materialist dialectic. And I agree on the importance of institutions, because I criticize their absolutization but am no anarchist, and I know perfectly well that schools, traditions, cathedrals, conservatories, and orchestras are not illusions but real historical sedimentations, and in this I am closer to Bueno than to many contemporary spiritualisms that confuse interiority with disembodiment.

It would be unfair, however, to identify all contemporary philosophical atheism with the public style of the New Atheism. There exists a much more rigorous analytic tradition, represented in different ways by Michael Martin, Jordan Howard Sobel (1929 - 2010), Graham Oppy (1960), Felipe Leon, and J. L. Schellenberg (1959), which does not need to caricature religion in order to rationally discuss theism. Sobel subjected the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments to a logical analysis of extraordinary severity. Oppy has argued that a naturalist ontology can turn out to be theoretically more parsimonious than theism, and that the existence of the universe does not by itself require postulating a personal foundation. Martin articulated systematic defenses of both negative and positive atheism. Felipe Leon has worked on sufficient reason, causality, and a priori arguments. Schellenberg has shifted part of the discussion from the abstract existence of God toward the problem of divine hiddenness. Sobel was, in fact, one of the great representatives of atheist analytic philosophy of religion, while Felipe Leon works explicitly in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion.

Faced with these authors, my response cannot consist in saying that "they have not understood the symbol" and withdrawing from the discussion. When a tradition holds that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, creating, and providential being, it has made claims open to conceptual examination. One can ask whether those attributes are coherent with one another, whether they explain something that could not be explained with fewer assumptions, whether the evil we observe is what we would expect under that hypothesis, or whether the absence of a recognizable divine relation is in tension with the existence of a perfectly loving God. The ontology of compearance must not use the Mystery as a protective fog to shield any theological formulation from rational objection.

Graham Oppy earns my particular respect for the sobriety of his naturalism. He need not claim that religion is a pathology, or that all believers lack intelligence. His question is comparative: which general worldview best organizes what we know with the fewest problematic commitments. From that perspective, naturalism can seem sufficient and the addition of God explanatorily unnecessary. My response would not be to introduce God as a supplementary hypothesis. In this I am, paradoxically, closer to Oppy than to many apologists. I too do not believe the word God should function as a causal piece added to the universe.

My distance arises earlier, in the idea that an ontology can be evaluated primarily as a global explanatory theory. My thought does not propose compearance as an entity, nor as a rival hypothesis to naturalism. It tries to point out that any theory of the world already presupposes a lived domain of meaning, relation, evidence, trust, and responsibility that cannot be entirely reconstructed as the theoretical result of the explanation itself. Naturalism can describe the conditions under which there appeared beings who formulate promises, but that does not thereby turn the normativity of promising into a physical hypothesis. The world of compearance does not compete with science as an alternative cosmology. It is the domain in which something can count for someone as proof, reason, loss, beauty, or truth.

Sobel interests me because he shows how far theology that wishes to speak conceptually must accept the rigor of its own claims. If God is defined through precise attributes, one cannot afterward appeal to incomprehensibility every time a contradiction appears. But his logical "acid bath" affects above all the God turned into a theoretical object, precisely the image I myself have rejected. It does not prove that the word Mystery, the experience of being called, the depth of a presence, or the incarnational structure of meaning are illusions. It proves, at most, that they should not be hastily confused with a superperson defined through a catalog of maximal properties.

Michael Martin represents a broad defense of atheism as a rationally justifiable position. With him I agree that the argumentative burden cannot automatically fall on whoever does not accept a theistic claim, and that many traditional proofs fail to establish what they promise. But I do not think the alternative is exhausted by the opposition between "God exists" and "God does not exist," because both answers can share an objectivist understanding of what it is they are arguing about. Before deciding whether the term has a referent, I need to ask what mode of appearing it is trying to name, and what is lost when it is turned into a member, even a supreme one, of the inventory of existing things.

Felipe Leon feels close to me in his resistance to turning contingency, causality, or the principle of sufficient reason into automatic bridges toward theism. Not every question admits an explanation of the same type, nor does every contingent series necessarily require a transcendent person to close it. That caution converges with my rejection of the God-of-the-gaps. My difference again lies in the fact that the absence of a conclusive theistic explanation does not turn religious experience into a mere inferential error. A liturgy, a prayer, or an image were not always born as the defective conclusion of a cosmological syllogism.

My relation to analytic atheism is, therefore, far more respectful than my relation to a cultural unbelief satisfied with itself. These authors help me clean up my language, distrust demonstrations that are too quick, and recognize that classical theism raises real problems of coherence and evidence. I part ways with them when the whole question gets organized as a dispute between two theories about which entities the universe contains. My residual Christianity survives not because I have found an invulnerable argument for adding God to the world, but because the human world continues to compear for me through a grammar of incarnation, calling, guilt, forgiveness, promise, sacrifice, and absent presence that a verdict on a metaphysical hypothesis alone cannot eliminate.

Within that tradition, J. L. Schellenberg touches a region especially close to my experience, because the problem of divine hiddenness asks not only why evil exists, but why a perfectly loving God would allow people capable of a sincere relationship with him to remain in nonculpable nonbelief. The force of the objection lies in shifting the discussion from cosmology to relation. A perfect personal love, Schellenberg seems to say, should not become so inaccessible that someone open to receiving it would lack sufficient conditions to recognize its presence. The absence of God would not then be a mere deficit of information, but a difficulty internal to the very idea of divine love.

This objection affects me more than many arguments against first causes, because my ontology grants priority to compearance and to relation. If the divine were a personal presence seeking out each human being, why is its way of compearing so radically ambiguous? Why is it distributed so unequally among biographies, cultures, temperaments, and sufferings? Why can one person ask for a sign for years and receive only the echo of her own voice, while another experiences, in an instant, a certainty that will transform her whole life? To answer that God hides in order to preserve freedom seems insufficient to me. Human love does not destroy freedom by making itself recognizable. On the contrary, only a sufficiently manifest presence allows one to truly respond to it.

I cannot resolve this difficulty by appealing to the claim that God is always present even when we do not know how to recognize him, because that claim can become immune to any possible experience. If presence and absence turn out to be phenomenologically indistinguishable, the word presence has lost part of its meaning. Nor do I want to blame the nonbeliever by attributing his unbelief to pride, sin, or secret resistance. There are people who would like to believe, who have searched honestly, and who have not found what the tradition promised. Their experience must be received as philosophical and human data, not as a moral defect.

My only possible way toward an answer consists in transforming the very concept of divine compearance. Perhaps the divine does not appear as a separable, identifiable, and available interlocutor, but precisely in forms of presence that carry no supernatural signature: the demand born of the face, the gratuitousness of a friendship, the interruption of guilt through forgiveness, the beauty we cannot produce at will. But this answer has a price: it no longer clearly establishes that a divine person is communicating with us. It preserves a religious depth of experience, but it does not demonstrate the personal theism that Schellenberg's objection calls into question.

That is why I do not consider hiddenness an already-solved apologetic puzzle. It is part of my own exposure to the elements. Absence is not merely a pedagogical appearance behind which I know someone is standing. It is real absence, capable of wounding, disorienting, and making certainty impossible. If I still use religious language, it must be able to bear that experience without quickly turning it into a divine strategy. A God who hides perfectly looks too much like an absent God, and an honest faith should not pretend to know the difference from outside. This difficulty leads directly to the problem of evil, where what is at stake is no longer merely the lack of evidence, but suffering that seems to contradict any loving providence.

And yet, at the decisive layer, we diverge almost to the point of inverting each other. For Bueno, the Church is primarily an institution, and for me it is primarily a symbol, and that difference is a whole world. When Bueno contemplates a cathedral he sees an institution, a historical technology, a political structure, a doctrinal crystallization. When I contemplate a cathedral I see, first, a vertical orientation, a metaphor of transcendence, an incarnation of desire, an architecture of waiting. Bueno looks at the stone, I look at the apparition, and although we are looking at the same wall we do not see the same thing. For him the institution produces meaning; for me meaning precedes and overflows the institution, which can guard it, deform it, transmit it, but never exhaust it. Hence my constant criticism of conservatories, of competitions, of bureaucracies, of canons, which I do not deny exist, but which I denounce because they tend to forget what they claimed to be guarding, like the guard who falls in love with the key and forgets the room.

The formula that best sums up this distance for me is that Bueno recognizes Rome but not Gethsemane, recognizes Trent but not the dark night, recognizes the institution but not the apparition. He is fascinated by Rome, by Trent, by Salamanca, by the Hispanic Monarchy, by institutions, and I am fascinated by the dark night, by melos, by the voice, by vulnerability, by the wound. For him the Church is an extraordinary historical construction, and for me Christianity begins before the Church, in an experience, in an event, in a voice. If I translated my critique into an image, I would say that Bueno preserves the historical body of Christianity but loses its breath, preserves the architecture but loses the song, preserves Rome but loses the tremor that made Rome necessary. And this is not a progressive critique, because I do not want to destroy Rome. I want to remember why it appeared.

What is curious, and worth saying because it disarms a cliché, is that there is almost nothing gnostic in Bueno, far less than is usually believed, because Bueno is intensely anti-gnostic, that is, he affirms history, institutions, matter, political bodies, and the gnostic wants to escape the world while Bueno is almost literally obsessed with the world. My reproach would not be that he is gnostic but almost the opposite, that he is too reconciled with the objective dimension, too settled into history, into structure, into institution, and too little attentive to experience, to apparition, to the lived symbol, to the event. For Bueno the most real things are historical and material structures. For me the most real is what appears within them without ever fully coinciding with them: melos, presence, love, voice, wound, beauty, event. And that difference, even though we often arrive at the same enemies by opposite paths, ends up producing two nearly opposite ontologies, two ways of saying what truly exists.

The difference between Rome and Gethsemane cannot remain a merely rhetorical opposition. It forces us to ask whether there historically existed a form of Christianity in which the event retained greater visibility before being identified with its civilizational apparatus. That question leads me toward the communities that preceded Christianity's imperial conversion, not to idealize them, but to better understand what changes when a persecuted truth acquires the power to administer the world.

Now, if the disagreement with Bueno plays out as Gethsemane against Rome, there is a place in Christianity where I recognize myself almost without reservation, and it lies far from Rome and from Trent, further back in time, before scholasticism and the Thomist system and the juridical apparatus and the medieval disputes over substance and accident. I am much closer to pre-Constantinian Christianity than to modern Christianity, and much further from gnosticism than it sometimes seems. When one reads the Christians of the first three centuries, one finds something that was later forgotten under layers of concepts. One finds an experience, an event, a presence, a way. The oldest texts are obsessed with inner transformation, with vigilance, with listening, with charity, with symbol, with incarnation, with waiting, and not with the construction of closed metaphysical systems. There is a real affinity with me there, because when I write about melody, about presence, about the event, about love, about the impossibility of closure, I hear echoes of Ignatius of Antioch (35 - 110) on his way to martyrdom, of Irenaeus of Lyon (125 - 202), of Justin Martyr (110 - 168), and above all, though he already belongs to the fourth century, of Gregory of Nyssa (335 - 395) and of Gregory of Nazianzus (329 - 390).

When I say I feel closer to pre-Constantinian Christianity, I do not mean to fabricate the legend of an absolutely pure Church that was suddenly corrupted by Constantine. Before the fourth century there was already authority, doctrinal conflict, exclusion, hierarchy, discipline, and struggles over orthodoxy. After Constantine there continued to be sanctity, thought, martyrdom, prophetic criticism, and genuine religious experience. The change was not an instant fall, but a mutation of scale and structure. A community that had learned to exist at the margins, to conceive of itself as a pilgrim people, and to distinguish between the Kingdom and imperial power began to imagine itself as the principle of cohesion for a civilization. The cross, which had been an instrument of state execution, could become the emblem of the state. The event turned into a public institution, eschatological waiting turned into administrative duration, and original vulnerability had to coexist with the need to govern, legislate, and punish. My proximity to pre-Constantinian Christianity does not, then, arise from a historical primitivism, but from an ontological affinity with a community that could not yet easily confuse truth with its power to impose itself.

XIV. Ancient Heresies and the Unitarian Conscience

That mutation of scale and structure did not occur without resistance, and some of the voices that opposed it, later condemned as heresies, still guard an intuition that the unitarian conscience has never stopped reclaiming.

In this respect, that original sensibility survived in a particular way in Eastern Christianity. Not because Orthodoxy remained politically innocent, nor because Byzantium lacked caesaropapism, coercion, or institutional apparatus, but because its theological imagination more intensely preserved certain patristic traits prior to Latin juridical rationalization: the priority of liturgy over scholastic definition, mystery over exhaustive clarity, participation over causal explanation, deification as existential transformation, the eucharistic community, the icon as presence, and chant as a form of knowledge. The East maintained a much more direct linguistic and spiritual continuity with the Greek Fathers, with Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Maximus the Confessor, and later Palamas. Theology never fully separated from prayer, from asceticism, or from liturgical rhythm. That is why my imaginary Christianity, though born culturally within Spanish Catholicism, recognizes so many affinities with the East: not because it idealizes its history, but because there Christian truth allowed itself to be thought, for longer, as transformation, participated mystery, chant, and image before being thought as a juridical system of propositions. In that precise sense, Eastern Christianity retains something of the pre-Constantinian climate: not its political marginality, which it lost, but the awareness that the Mystery cannot be exhausted by the machinery that guards it.

There is an idea in Gregory of Nyssa that dwells in me, the one he called epektasis, and it is among the most beautiful things theology has ever thought. It amounts to saying that even in union with God there is no definitive possession, no final arrival, no closure; the soul advances eternally because divine infinity cannot be exhausted, and fullness consists precisely in an endless movement toward a depth that never finishes revealing itself. The first time I read it I thought of what I say about melody, about love, about apparition, about the infinite, because in my thought too there is no arrival, no terminus where desire rests satisfied. And yet a difference appears here too, and it is honest not to hide it. The Fathers of the Church and the Desert Fathers still believe, for the most part, in an ultimate reconciliation; that is, for them the distance is infinite but so is the communion, whereas for me the distance seems more constitutive, more irreducible, more tragic, without the final guarantee that sustains their vertigo. I inhabit epektasis without the ground Gregory of Nyssa placed beneath it.

Within that ancient world, Anthony the Great (251 - 356) interests me less as the legendary founder of a flight from the world than as a figure of struggle against inner dispersion. I do not admire asceticism when it means hatred of the body, hunger turned into merit, or isolation elevated into a higher form of humanity. It interests me when it strips the subject of its automatisms, of the need for approval, and of the fiction that life can be sustained solely through external stimuli. The desert would then not be a more truthful space than the city, but a limit situation in which the noise we carry within becomes audible. John Cassian (360 - 435) feels even closer to me for his extremely fine psychology of thoughts, passions, acedia, attention, and discernment. In his Conferences and his Institutes one finds a practical phenomenology of interiority far more subtle than many modern psychological classifications. I am drawn to his conviction that not every impulse should be obeyed, but neither should it be blindly repressed: it must be recognized, differentiated, and answered. My distance begins when that work is oriented toward an impassibility too close to affective immunity. I do not wish to stop being reached by the world; I wish to learn not to be mechanically governed by every affection that reaches me.

Basil of Caesarea (330 - 379) feels close to me for having held together intellectual rigor, community, ascetic life, social care, and a non-purely-individual understanding of Christian existence. His rule does not imagine perfection as a solitary feat, but as a shared form of life: work, hospitality, teaching, and attention to the needy. John Chrysostom (347 - 407) interests me for the force with which he denounces the contradiction between liturgical solemnity and the effective contempt for the poor. His insistence that one cannot honor the body of Christ on the altar and abandon it outside the church contains a critique that remains devastating. Both remind us that incarnation is not a doctrine about a divine substance, but a demand addressed to the material organization of the community. What separates me from them, as from almost all the Fathers, is their sexual asceticism, certain judgments about the body, and the confidence with which a historical anthropology can present itself as an eternal structure of creation. But their capacity to hold together symbol, word, gesture, community, and justice lies much closer to my ontology than a Christianity reduced to private adherence to a catalog of beliefs.

The proximity to Eastern apophasis might suggest that my distrust of objectivity, of institutions, and of the administered world contains a gnostic inclination. It's worth heading off that confusion. The Eastern theology that attracts me preserves mystery by incarnating it in chant, icon, body, and community. Gnosticism, in its most characteristic forms, interprets incarnation and the material world precisely as a problem from which one must be freed.

From gnosticism, by contrast, I am separated by almost everything, and it's worth saying so because the misunderstanding is tempting. What I have of gnostic is superficial: a certain distrust of institutions, a certain importance granted to inner knowledge, a certain critique of massification, a certain emphasis on direct experience. There the resemblance ends, and the absolutely frontal opposition begins. The core of classical gnosticism is that the material world is a fall, that the body is a prison, that matter is an error, that salvation consists in escape. And that is absolutely incompatible with everything I have written, because my thought is radically incarnational, born of the body, of the voice, of breath, of song, of gesture. The idea of melos is already a refutation of gnosticism, because for me meaning appears through the flesh and not despite it. The gnostic wants to escape the body; I want to inhabit it. Even my critique of much contemporary music comes from there, because when I criticize noise-art or certain avant-gardes, I do not do so because I find them too material but because I find them insufficiently human, insufficiently embodied, insufficiently habitable, and that is the exact opposite of the gnostic gesture. The gnostic is suspicious of corporeality; I am suspicious of any aesthetic that destroys it.

That distance requires, however, distinguishing very different movements that tend to get lumped together under the word gnosticism. Basilideanism, Valentinianism, Sethianism, and Ophitism elaborated diverse mythologies about the fall, the emanations, the cosmic powers, and salvific knowledge. They were not a single doctrine, nor mere caricatures of hatred for matter. Valentinus, especially, developed a theological imagination of great subtlety, and some of these movements tried, with enormous intensity, to explain the experience of strangeness, fracture, and exile that accompanies human existence. I understand the question that gives rise to them: why the world is experienced as alien, why consciousness does not coincide with itself, why suffering seems to exceed all justification. My break appears in the answer. When the wound of the world is explained through an ontological degradation of matter, when bodily singularity is subordinated to a spark coming from another plane, and when salvation consists in remembering that we do not really belong to this world, my ontology stands in frontal opposition. I do not want to return to a fullness prior to the flesh. I want to think how truth can compear precisely in mortal flesh.

Marcionism strikes me as equally revealing because it tries to save Christian novelty and mercy by radically separating them from the creator God, from history, and from the law. I understand its revulsion at certain violent images of divinity and its wish to keep the Gospel from being absorbed into the continuity of a tradition. But that solution buys grace at the price of mutilating memory. A love without creation, without genealogy, without a people, without history, and without a body risks becoming an irruption without responsibility. My thought insists on novelty, but does not believe novelty can exist without origin. Compearance transforms the landscape, but it does not arrive from a groundless void.

Montanism, for its part, interests me for its resistance to letting prophecy be closed off by ecclesiastical administration, and for its conviction that the Spirit does not become past simply because an institution has fixed a canon. That protest contains something I recognize: that no originary event is exhausted by the forms that transmit it. But the claim to a prophetic immediacy can produce another, still more dangerous, form of closure: that of the subject or group who identifies his own voice with the absolute voice of the Spirit. The institution does not possess the apparition, and neither does charisma.

Catharism, Bogomilism, Paulicianism, and Tondrakianism belong to different histories, but they share, in varying degrees, a protest against ecclesiastical wealth, sacramental mediation, clerical power, and Christianity's reconciliation with the political world. There is in them a demand for purity that can be morally powerful, especially against a Church turned into property and dominion. But that purity becomes ontologically dangerous when it needs to divide the world between an uncontaminated spiritual region and a degraded materiality, when it turns the body, sexuality, reproduction, food, or institutions into signs of the fall. I can share the protest against Rome without sharing its contempt for the world. Gethsemane does not demand hating the flesh; it demands staying beside it when it trembles.

And here a paradox I like too much to keep silent. Many contemporary movements that present themselves as materialist are considerably more gnostic than I am (and I am not gnostic at all). Transhumanism is the clearest example, with Nick Bostrom (1973), with Ray Kurzweil (1948), with Elon Musk (1971) in some of his ravings, because for them the flesh is insufficient, the body is a limit, salvation will come through technology, immortality will arrive through information, and that is almost a gnostic gospel rewritten in Silicon Valley, with its elites who possess salvific knowledge and its human condition to be overcome. The materialist who wants to digitize the mind and abandon the body is, without knowing it, the most faithful heir of the ancients who despised matter, and the supposed spiritualist of the flesh, which is what I am, turns out to be the more earthbound of the two.

My deepest kinship lies not with the gnostics, nor exactly with Eastern Orthodoxy nor with later Catholicism, but with a line running from pre-Constantinian Christianity to a certain Eastern Christian apophatic theology, from Gregory of Nyssa to Maximus the Confessor (580 - 662), from John of the Cross to Kierkegaard, from Unamuno to Zambrano. With one decisive difference, and it is the same as always: that all of them believe, in one way or another, that the wound ends up opening onto an ultimate communion, and I inhabit, I believe, a riskier position, that the wound not only leads to truth but forms a permanent part of it, and that intuition sets me apart both from gnosticism and from almost all classical theologies, and leaves me in fairly solitary territory.

Made to draw a Christian map of myself, then, I would have to say that my ontological sensibility lies closer to Eastern Orthodoxy than to Protestantism, and closer to certain Catholic mystics than to dominant scholastic Catholicism.

Protestant I am not at all, and not for lack of shared intuitions but because my world is marked by symbol, rite, incarnation, mediation, participation, living tradition, corporeality, and historical Protestantism, classical Lutheranism, Calvinism, modern evangelicalism, is precisely suspicious of all that. My idea that music is an embodied event and not mere text already sets me hugely apart from Protestant sensibility, because the Reformation, to simplify a great deal, suspects symbolic mediation, and I suspect its disappearance. My thought is sacramental without being dogmatic, sacramental in an ontological sense, because I believe the invisible becomes present in the visible, and that is much closer to Byzantium than to Geneva.

My distance from Protestantism intensifies before its fideist forms, where faith is conceived as absolute adherence to a word that need not answer to reason, experience, tradition, or symbolic mediation. I understand the impulse behind them: to protect the religious event from the pretension of domesticating it through a prior metaphysics. Karl Barth (1886 - 1968) would carry that protest to one of its most powerful forms. But fideism can turn the otherness of revelation into arbitrariness, trust into obedience, and the impossibility of possessing the truth into a prohibition against questioning it. My ontology does not require compearance to submit to a rational system. It does require, however, that whatever calls for a response be capable of being discerned, discussed, and confronted with its effects in the world. Faith that considers itself freed from all justification risks also being freed from all responsibility.

Socinianism and the Unitarian traditions feel close to me for their defense of conscience, their rejection of doctrinal coercion, their critique of trinitarian formulations turned into tests of belonging, and their wish to return Christianity to life, to teaching, and to the following of Jesus without requiring adherence to an incomprehensible metaphysics. It is worth distinguishing, however, historical realities that the name Unitarianism too easily lumps together.

The Unitarian Church of Transylvania, historically linked to the Hungarian sphere and born in the sixteenth century around figures such as Ferenc Dávid (1520 - 1579), is not simply an early version of contemporary religious liberalism. It is a historical Christian Church, with communities, liturgy, memory, discipline, hymns, and a concrete relation to the Hungarian language and identity of Transylvania. It interests me precisely because it shows that rejecting the Trinity need not lead to an individualistic spirituality without tradition. Conscience and interpretation can also produce a sedimented ecclesial form. Its historical defense of religious tolerance has an evident nobility, but what matters most to me is that this tolerance did not necessarily arise from doctrinal indifference, but from the recognition that faith loses its truth when it must be imposed by force.

In that tradition I find a real proximity: the right of conscience to answer without an institution wholly dictating the content of the answer, the refusal to turn a metaphysical formula into the absolute frontier of the community, the centrality of the life of Jesus and of its ethical consequences. But my reservation also appears. The rational simplification of dogma can lose what the trinitarian controversies were trying to preserve: that unity is not necessarily simplicity, that relation might belong to the very structure of the real, and that incarnation does not reduce to the exemplary authority of a human teacher. I too cannot affirm classical trinitarian metaphysics without reservation, but I do not want to resolve its difficulty by eliminating the ontological mystery that made it necessary.

My relation to American Unitarian Universalism is different. I admire its pluralism, its openness to believers, atheists, agnostics, and people from different traditions, its defense of conscience, of dignity, and of social justice, and its effort to build communities that do not force their members to feign a doctrinal certainty they do not possess. A religious community capable of harboring the question has something deeply valuable. I also understand that many people find there forms of ritual, mourning, education, and communal service that individual secularism does not know how to provide.

But Unitarian Universalism risks becoming a religion of American cultural liberalism, a community whose real theology coincides with the prevailing values of a particular educated urban class. When every strong content is seen as potentially exclusionary, openness can thin tradition down until only a civic ethic accompanied by optional symbols remains. Pluralism stops being a demanding encounter between irreducible differences and becomes an atmosphere of anticipated moral agreement. The community then no longer receives a word capable of interrupting it, but ritually celebrates the values its members already held before entering.

I feel, therefore, closer to Unitarianism as a discipline of conscience, tolerance, and freedom of interpretation than as a reduction of Christianity to reasonable morality. The trinitarian question does not become irrelevant because its answers produced coercion. It still holds a decisive ontological problem: how to think a unity that is not solitude and a difference that is not separation. The Unitarian tradition is right to refuse to persecute in the name of an answer, but it perhaps moves too fast when it imagines the problem disappears once the answer is simplified.

XV. Orthodox East and Catholic West

That trinitarian question, how to think a unity that is not solitude and a difference that is not separation, is not resolved by simplifying the answer. It can be seen, rather, in the very contrast between Orthodox East and Catholic West.

With Eastern Orthodoxy the deep and surprising affinities begin. Eastern theology never felt comfortable with the Western obsession with defining, classifying, closing off. In Gregory of Nyssa, in Maximus the Confessor, in Gregory Palamas (1296 - 1359), one finds the conviction that God is infinitely unknowable, that every concept fails, that truth is participated in more than possessed, that the symbol reveals precisely because it does not exhaust, and that resembles, to an astonishing degree, my insistence on non-closure, on the limit, on the impossibility of totalization, on the inexhaustible character of melody. Orthodoxy prefers mystery to definition, and so do I. And my fascination with chant, with the voice, with melos, with liturgy, draws me toward the Eastern world, because my idea that music, word, and gesture form a unity recalls the ancient Christian mousikē of the East far more than modern Western Christianity, which separated what the East kept joined. And yet I am not entirely Orthodox either, because there is something profoundly Orthodox that I would question, namely that Orthodoxy ultimately believes in a harmonization, in an ultimate unity, in an ultimate participation, in an ultimate communion, not immediate or rational but real nonetheless, and there my old objection reappears: that the wound may be constitutive, that discontinuity is not an accident, that there is no guarantee of final synthesis.

My relationship to Palamism and to hesychasm calls for particular precision. Gregory Palamas's distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies constitutes one of the most interesting theological attempts to think how the absolutely inexhaustible can be genuinely participated in without becoming an object or being reduced to its manifestations. The divine essence remains inaccessible, but the energies are not mere created effects or subjective representations: they are the true presence of that which nevertheless is never possessed. That structure comes extraordinarily close to my idea of compearance — namely, that something truly gives itself without its giving exhausting what it is. This is not a matter of choosing between a transcendence that never appears and an immanence that is fully available. Presence can be true precisely because it retains an excess over its manifestation. My reservation arises, naturally, from the transformation of this intuition into a definite theological ontology, and from the possibility of interpreting certain experiences of light as an almost objective verification of a spiritual cartography.

Hesychasm feels close to me as a discipline of recollection, breath, repetition, and bodily attention, especially because it refuses to radically separate mind and body. Prayer does not occur in a disembodied consciousness; it descends into breath, into rhythm, into posture. But I distance myself when the practice seems to offer a relatively assured method of access to spiritual states, or when the authority of the guide suspends the practitioner's critical responsibility. Breathing can dispose us, but it cannot manufacture presence. Repetition can disarm the chatter of the self, but it cannot turn the Mystery into the outcome of a technique. What interests me about hesychia is not as anesthesia, self-sufficient serenity, or the elimination of trembling, but as a silence hospitable enough for a voice to compear without being immediately drowned out by our own projections.

For me, Mount Athos represents the historical and spatial concentration of many of these affinities and reservations. It draws me as a landscape of continuity, chant, silence, manual labor, liturgical repetition, memory, and resistance to modern acceleration. In an age that treats all non-productive time as waste, the existence of communities that organize their day around prayer, the seasons, meals, vigil, and the care of a place carries a real critical force. Athos is a reminder that a life can take shape without being oriented toward indefinite growth, public exposure, or constant innovation.

I am also moved by the vocal continuity of its liturgy. There, theology exists not only in treatises but in tones, formulas, breaths, chants, icons, processions, and an architecture of duration. Song does not illustrate faith; it sustains it bodily. In that sense, Athos embodies an intuition very close to my own ontology — namely, that a tradition lives so long as it can become voice and shared time again, not so long as it preserves certain propositions intact in an archive.

But I do not idealize the mountain as a place outside history, pure of power, conflict, nationalism, hierarchy, or rigidity. No monastery eliminates human ambivalence. Renunciation of the world can turn into an inability to answer those who remain within it; spiritual obedience can turn into the suspension of judgment; and the custody of a form can turn into hostility toward everything that does not fit within it. The exclusion of women from Athonite territory also shows that a spiritual geography can be organized around a particular anthropology of the body and of difference that I do not consider universalizable.

Athos interests me, then, less as a model of society than as a sign of a possibility — namely, that human time can be received in another way, that song can constitute knowledge, that repetition need not be sterility, and that a community can order its life around something that neither produces nor consumes. I part ways when that possibility claims exclusivity, when withdrawal is taken to be a superior form of existence, or when silence is obtained by expelling from the landscape whatever might disturb it. My spirituality does not seek a mountain inaccessible to conflict. It seeks to learn something from recollection in order to return afterward to the shared world, where presence must be sustained among voices we have not chosen.

With Catholicism the answer branches, because there are many Catholicisms. The one least like me is the excessively juridical, administrative, scholastic, systematic kind, with its tendency to turn mystery into a closed conceptual architecture — which is why I have never felt close to certain contemporary Thomisms too sure of their own edifice. The one most like me is populated by figures very different from one another — John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, Pascal, Weil, Unamuno, Zambrano — and in them I find absence, night, desire, wound, exile, the impossibility of possession. When I speak of melody as something that never coincides with sound, or of love as something never finished being possessed, I sometimes resemble John of the Cross more than many contemporary philosophers, and I say this without devotion and with exactness, because the phenomenology of the night that he wrote is one of the most precise descriptions I know of how that which will not be had gives itself.

Ramon Llull (1232 - 1316) occupies a strange and fascinating place for me. I am drawn to his will to think from within a plurality of languages and traditions, his attempt to make Christianity, Islam, and Judaism converse, his conviction that thought must not be separated from love, and his intuition that truth requires combinations, relations, and figures, not definitions alone in a straight line. His Ars can be read as a logical machine of universal ambition, and that is where my distance begins — namely, that every combinatoric runs the risk of imagining that the fundamental relations of the real can be exhausted by a system. But the Llull who is poet, mystic, traveler, and lover of the Beloved is far closer to me than the maker of a universal demonstration. In him, reason and song have not yet divorced.

Miguel Servet (1511 - 1553) interests me for the radicalism of his refusal to submit conscience to a trinitarian formula turned into an instrument of persecution, and for the terrible fate that showed just how far Catholics and Reformers could converge in violence when each believed itself the owner of the truth. I do not necessarily share his theological reconstruction, nor do I need to make him a liberal precursor outside his own era. What matters to me is the singularity of a conscience crushed between systems that each claimed to defend Christian liberty. Servet is a reminder that doctrine can be born to preserve a mystery and end up burning whoever tries to formulate it otherwise.

Miguel de Molinos (1628 - 1696) strikes me as equally ambivalent. I understand his critique of the religious will that seeks to manufacture its own perfection, his insistence on passivity, abandonment, and the impossibility of conquering God through a spiritual industry. On this he shares my suspicion of every technology of transcendence. But quietism can slide into a renunciation of responsibility, an interiority without a world, and a passivity that leaves the external structures of harm untouched. My receptivity is not absolute stillness. To receive a compearance means being obligated to respond. I do not want to dominate what arrives, but neither do I want to disappear as the subject of the response. Where Molinos seeks an annihilation of one's own will, I prefer to speak of a dispossession of sovereignty — that is, a will that stops believing itself the origin of everything but keeps the capacity and the duty to answer.

Liturgically and symbolically I am close to Orthodoxy; existentially I am close to Spanish Catholic mysticism; and philosophically I am closer to Kierkegaard than to either of the two — which is why I do not fully fit into any of them. My ontology of discontinuity introduces something that neither classical Catholicism nor Orthodoxy would fully accept, because both believe that the wound has a final resolution, whereas I think the wound is not simply something to be healed but one of the very forms through which the infinite becomes present in human experience. And if I had to seek my deepest kinship, I would not find it in any particular confession but in a line that runs from Gregory of Nyssa to John of the Cross, passes through Kierkegaard, and issues into Unamuno, Weil, and Zambrano. That is where I recognize the strongest family resemblance to what I have been formulating these years.

There is, in truth, a way of inhabiting Christianity that is neither theological nor ecclesial but ontological, and it is there, perhaps, that I recognize myself best. What I call ontological Christianity does not consist in believing that certain propositions about God are true, but in understanding that reality itself has an incarnational, symbolic, and participatory structure — that the invisible manifests itself in the visible, that meaning appears in the flesh, that being gives itself without exhausting itself, that truth is not possession but participation. One can believe or not believe in God and still move within that grammar, which is why there are ontological Christians who are not even conventional believers — Unamuno, Zambrano, George Steiner (1929 - 2020), Roger Scruton (1944 - 2020) — none of them reducible to a practicing Catholic or to a theologian, and all of them thinking within a profoundly Christian ontology.

Alongside this there exists the phenomenon of Catholic atheism in a softer and more human sense than Bueno's — the atheism of those who no longer fully believe in God but continue to inhabit a Christian imagination: Albert Camus (1913 - 1960), Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922 - 1975), Emil Cioran (1911 - 1995), who are neither enlightened atheists nor triumphant materialists but people who have lost theological faith without losing the spiritual structure, and who go on living nostalgia, exile, incarnation, wound, and waiting. Unamuno said it better than anyone when he wrote that to believe is not to possess faith but to need it, and in that sentence half of contemporary Europe fits, and perhaps I fit there too.

Christian atheism properly so called has at least four forms, and it is worth distinguishing them in order to know which one I depart from and which one I approach. There is ethical Christian atheism, the simplest, which holds that God does not exist but that the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth remain true, with Jesus as a moral teacher rather than as God incarnate — Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826) trimming the miracles out of the Gospels to keep only the ethics.

There is also the by-now-famous death-of-God theology, that of Altizer, whom I have already discussed, which does not say that human beings have stopped believing but that God has died, and that the cross is the event by which transcendence definitively empties itself into history, leaving only the human community.

There is Hegelian Christian atheism, Hegel as read by Žižek, according to which Christianity culminates in the self-negation of God, and Christ's cry of abandonment on the cross would be the moment in which divinity itself experiences its own absence, until the Holy Spirit ends up identifying itself with the emancipated human community without any transcendent foundation.

And there is cultural Christian atheism, today the most widespread, that of those who do not believe in God but consider themselves heirs of Christianity because they share its moral imaginary, its idea of dignity, the centrality of suffering, compassion, forgiveness, the very idea of the person.

Of all this I am close only in part, and the distance matters. I have criticized reductive materialism and scientistic atheism, and I am likewise uncomfortable with an objectivist theism in which God would be just one more entity in the universe, but my position differs from that of Christian atheism on one decisive point.

For Altizer, for Žižek, for Paul Van Buren (1924 - 1998), transcendence disappears. For me, what is essential is not an object, not a thing, not an entity, and yet it is not reduced to a human construction either, because melody, love, beauty, compearance, being itself, all point to something that cannot be closed off or exhausted in empirical presence.

Christian atheism affirms that God does not exist but that Christ retains meaning, and my ontology is closer to something different: that God does not compear as an object precisely because every authentic compearance points to something that exceeds it. And that is no longer Christian atheism but a form of apophatic thought closer to philosophical mysticism than to contemporary thanatotheology. The death I recognize is not the death of God but the death of his objectifiable image, and with the death of that image what remains is not emptiness but appearance.

It is worth pausing once more, for a moment, on gnosticism as a structure, because it is a fertile intuition running through much of what I have been saying. Gnosticism is not only an ancient religion; it is a recurring form, a permanent temptation of the spirit, and its pattern is always recognizable: the present world is damaged, there exists an elite that possesses the knowledge, salvation will come through that knowledge, the human condition must be overcome. Wherever that sequence appears, blessed gnosticism appears, disguised as whatever is at hand. The anantropic transhumanism we have already discussed fulfills it point by point. Certain extreme versions of posthumanism do too, as I have already said, when the body becomes accessory, human difference stops mattering, consciousness is understood as program. And so do certain forms of technocratic rationalism, not because they are religious but because they imagine that human complexity can be resolved, that technique can eliminate tragedy, that optimization will replace wisdom — and that too is a promise of salvation, the driest of all, the one that promises a paradise without body and without wound, that is, without anything that makes us human.

XVI. The Husserlian Root

Naming that recurring gnostic temptation is not enough, however, to close the question. What remains is to trace the philosophical genealogy proper, that of real kinships, and that genealogy begins with Husserl.

Now that the outline of my relationship to Christianity has been drawn, what remains is to trace the genealogy — not that of my sympathies but that of my real kinships, because there are authors with whom I agree in conclusions, authors whose deep structure resembles mine, and authors from whom I historically descend without fully agreeing with them, and these are different things that should not be confused. If I had to name the impossible school to which I belong, I would not call it phenomenology, nor existentialism, nor personalism, but something like a poetic phenomenology of compearance, and that label, invented just now, says more about me than all the inherited ones.

At the root is the late Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938), without doubt — not the Husserl of the Logical Investigations nor the textbook Husserl, but the Husserl of the Bernau Manuscripts, of the C-Manuscripts, of the living present — because my obsession with appearing, with temporality, with presence, comes very close to that Husserl who ventured into the most intimate time until he nearly lost his footing, though I abandon his program the moment I introduce the symbol, love, melos.

On that root grows a trunk sustained by Jan Patočka, Gabriel Marcel, Zambrano, Unamuno. Marcel is among the closest to my own sensibility that I know, because he thinks without rest about presence, about mystery, about availability, about encounter, about fidelity, about incarnation, and above all because he distinguishes problem from mystery, and that distinction fits me like few others do, to the point that if someone asked me for a twentieth-century philosopher whose existential tone brushes against mine, Marcel would be among the first.

Zambrano remains probably one of my deepest affinities, not for her conclusions but for the ontological tone, for poetic reason, for revelation, for the impossibility of closure, for truth understood as appearance — all of that resonates in me to the very bottom.

Unamuno lends me agony, faith as need rather than possession, the man of flesh and bone against the man of concept.

With them, the question shifts. It is no longer only a matter of what we believe about the world, but of how something comes to compear and of the way we already find ourselves implicated in its appearing. The landscape does not stand first before a spectator already constituted beforehand. It is in the encounter with it that the gaze, the orientation, and the walker are formed all at once.

Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976) enters the genealogy filtered, and it is worth saying what that filter means. I do not take the Heidegger of the destiny of Being, nor the one of cryptic language, nor the one of the Black Notebooks, nor the one turned into a seminar religion, but the Heidegger of The Thing, of Building Dwelling Thinking, of The Origin of the Work of Art, of On the Way to Language, and certain aspects of Being and Time. From him I take appearing, unconcealment, the critique of technology, attentiveness to the phenomenon; and from him I reject impersonality, the abstraction of the face, the reduction of the person. Where Heidegger depersonalizes I would prefer to repersonalize, and where he says Being I would prefer to say love, friendship, melody, face — which is why I never become fully Heideggerian, because the concrete face, which he dissolves into Being, is for me the place where Being compears or fails to compear.

Kierkegaard is always close, with his singular against the system, with his instant against history. And Sergiu Celibidache (1912 - 1996) occupies a strange place, because I share with him music as event, the critique of the musical object, the centrality of experience, the rejection of recording as a substitute; and I part from him because he remains, at least at times, too holistic, too monistic, too totalizing, too close to a metaphysics of unity that my discontinuity breaks apart. Celibidache wanted the whole to resound at the end, and I have learned to love endings that gather nothing together, that leave the phrase hanging in the air, that entrust the gathering to no one.

There is a little-known name closer to me than many famous ones, and that is Max Picard (1888 - 1965). When he writes about silence, about presence, about the face, about the incarnate word, about the critique of technicization, I sometimes find more resonance with him than with Heidegger, because Picard does not ask what a thing is but how it compears, does not ask what the face means but what happens when a face is present, does not ask what silence is but how silence makes the world appear. I suspect that if I had read him before writing about compearance, I would have felt that someone else had seen a part of the same landscape — not the same conclusions, but the same territory.

Close by too are Simone Weil and her decreated attention, and Jean-Louis Chrétien, who is perhaps the contemporary Christian phenomenologist closest to my sensibility, with his call, his response, his voice, his listening, his song, his vulnerability — pages that seem written for someone obsessed with melos, to the point that if I ever developed my ontology academically, Chrétien would be an unavoidable reference.

Here religious language reappears, but under a form that I find more habitable — not as an inventory of supernatural objects, but as an attempt to respond to a precedence, a call, or a giving that consciousness does not itself produce. It remains a dangerous language, because it can immediately turn excess into entity and calling into command. But it holds on to something I would not want to lose — namely, the intuition that we are not the sole authors of the space in which we are able to respond.

Michel Henry draws me through felt life, through affectivity, through incarnation, and keeps me at a constant reserve because he interiorizes too much, and I always return to the shared world, to music, to friendship, to presence among persons. Among the living, and among those close to me in my own language, are Josep-Maria Esquirol, with his proximity, his refuge, his fragility, his intimate resistance — perhaps one of the living Spaniards closest to certain intuitions of mine — and Joan-Carles Mèlich, closer still, because he understands vulnerability, finitude, narrative, education as testimony.

Something similar happens to me with Jean-Luc Marion. I share with him a suspicion of every objectification of appearing and his effort to think that which gives itself without being reduced to the horizon of the object. His notion of the saturated phenomenon has opened up a philosophical space I consider extraordinarily fertile. And yet, where Marion speaks of givenness, I prefer to speak of compearance. The difference is not terminological. Givenness still retains a direction that, ultimately, points back to the giver. Compearance tries to remain deliberately within the very event of appearing, without deciding in advance whether that appearing must be understood as gift, as grace, or as theological revelation.

And yet the list of those close to me is longer than what I have confessed so far, and it would be disloyal to pass over in silence those who have each, on their own, thought through entire portions of the same territory. There is, first, an entire family that has taken the body seriously — not as an anatomical object but as flesh that moves, that listens, that sings — and to it my debt is enormous, if belated. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (1930) has argued that movement precedes concept, that we think because we first moved, that kinesthesia is the forgotten ground of all experience, and when I read her I recognize my own conviction that meaning is born of gesture rather than illustrated by it.

My debt to the traditions of somatic and movement education is also deeper than I have sometimes acknowledged, although my relationship to them must distinguish fertile intuitions, pedagogical systems, and therapeutic promises of very uneven worth. All of them share, to some degree, a protest against the reduction of the body to a mechanical instrument executed by an exterior mind. The body is not simply that which obeys a previously formulated intention; it perceives, anticipates, remembers, organizes, and produces meaning through its weight, its tone, its breath, and its relation to space. In this they come extraordinarily close to my conception of melos.

François Delsarte (1811 - 1871) interests me historically for having sought correspondences between gesture, emotion, voice, and meaning, and for having understood that expression is not an ornament added to a neutral technique. His classifications, however, run the risk of turning gesture into a coded vocabulary, as if a given posture or bodily direction carried a stable meaning. My thinking does not accept a universal semiotics of the body. A gesture means within a biography, a tradition, a situation, and a relationship, and it cannot be read as a sign isolated from a previously defined interiority.

Dalcroze (1865 - 1950) is far closer to me. Eurhythmics holds that musical rhythm must be lived before it is explained, that the body can know durations, weights, impulses, upbeats, resistances, and phrases through movement. That priority of movement over representation coincides with my own pedagogical practice of walking phrases, singing, moving the arm, and letting form be found bodily. Rhythm is not an external grid that the performer must execute with precision, but an organization of energies and embodied expectations. My reservation appears when eurhythmics turns into a school repertoire of exercises detached from the concrete musical event. No bodily method guarantees melos; it can only dispose the body to hear it.

Expressionist dance, from Laban (1879 - 1958) and Wigman (1886 - 1973) through its many offshoots, gave movement back its gravity, its space, its violence, its breath, and its capacity to make an interiority compear without narrating it conceptually. I am drawn to its break with ornamental beauty and its will to let the body think through tension, fall, contraction, expansion, and silence. But here too there is a danger — namely, turning "authentic expression" into a new coded style, full of gestures that announce depth before having made it appear. The body can lie as skillfully as language.

Feldenkrais strikes me as valuable for its attention to awareness through movement, to reversibility, to the distribution of effort, and to the possibility of discovering alternatives within habits that had seemed necessary. In instrumental practice, where repetition can fix tensions until they become invisible, that exploration proves extremely useful. But I do not believe the most efficient or least costly movement is always the most artistically true. Music sometimes demands resistance, asymmetry, weight, and a certain expressive violence. Somatic economy must serve compearance, not become the supreme aesthetic criterion.

Lessac (1909 - 2011) interests me for his linking of voice, resonance, consonantal energy, body, and language. He recognizes that the word does not exist entirely in lexical meaning but in vibration, articulation, direction, and physical contact with the listener. There he comes very close to my idea of lexis. But I distrust any vocal technique that turns particular sensations of resonance into universal signs of correct production. The voice should not be optimized to the point of losing its biography, its accent, its fragility, its grain.

Rolfing and the traditions of structural integration contain useful intuitions about fascia, gravity, alignment, and bodily organization, but they become problematic when they promise that a reorganization of the body will necessarily release a more authentic personality or resolve sedimented conflicts. Posture carries history, but history is not reducible to posture. No bodily manipulation can, by itself, interpret a biography, just as no verbal interpretation can substitute for the material work of a body.

My relationship to all these schools is, therefore, instrumental in the noble and non-reductive sense of the word. I receive them as traditions of attention, not as total ontologies of the body. They can help one perceive habits, discover movements, liberate possibilities, and restore to gesture an intelligence that verbal pedagogy had smothered. They become false when they promise a final alignment, a pure expression, or an authentic body hidden beneath conditioning. There is no original body waiting to be freed. There is a historical corporeality that can acquire greater availability to respond. The aim is not to achieve perfect movement, but to allow something, through movement, truly to come to compear.

Thomas Clifton (1935 - 1978) was one of the most original philosophers and theorists of music of the twentieth century, though he remains relatively little known. His importance lies in having attempted to construct a phenomenology of musical experience inspired by Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 - 1961), and Paul Ricœur. His one major work, published posthumously, is Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology (Yale University Press, 1983), considered one of the few systematic attempts to apply phenomenology to music. He wrote a phenomenology of music that I could almost sign without changing a note, because for him music is neither the score nor the physical sound but what is lived when someone sustains it in time — an embodied actualization that does not exist outside the act of hearing it.

Giovanni Piana (1940 - 2019) brought that same care to the phenomenon of sound and listening, and Enzo Paci (1911 - 1976), before him, had thought existence as relation and as time, and it was no accident that he too wrote about music, sensing that lived temporality finds its purest form in melos.

Drew Leder interests me from the reverse side, through his phenomenology of the absent body — that body which disappears when it functions and reappears only when it hurts or fails — and in that dialectic of disappearance and return I recognize something very close to my own way of thinking presence as something that gives itself by withdrawing.

Renaud Barbaras (1955) is perhaps the closest of all of them, because he has built a philosophy of desire in which distance is not an obstacle but the very condition for something to give itself, in which the desired object appears only in its withdrawal — and that sentence is so mine that it almost pains me not to have written it myself.

And Arnold Berleant (1932), from within aesthetics, has demolished the old dogma of disinterested contemplation, that reverent distance modernity placed between the spectator and the work, in order to reclaim an aesthetics of participation and immersion — and there I agree with him entirely, though his world is calmer and less tragic than mine, more naturalist and less wounded.

There is, further on, a family that has thought the event, and with them my kinship is closer still, because it touches the very heart of what I call compearance. Claude Romano (1967) has developed a hermeneutics of the event in which the true happening is not one more fact within the world but that which reconfigures the entire world of the one who undergoes it, and he calls advenant the one who is transformed by what befalls him, unable to constitute it or anticipate it, able only to respond to it. It is hard to imagine a formulation closer to my own.

László Tengelyi (1954 - 2014) thought experience as the spontaneous formation of sense, as an event in which something singular is produced and exceeds in advance every concept that would try to contain it, a wild region of experience prior to all ordering, and in that spontaneity of sense that arrives without asking permission I recognize my own suspicion of ontologies of closure.

Bernhard Waldenfels (1934) has made responsiveness the center of his thought — the idea that we always respond before choosing, that the alien addresses and claims us before we can objectify it, and that the pathos of being reached precedes all initiative — which stands very close to that call and response I already admired in Chrétien.

David Carr has shown that experience has always had a narrative form, that lived time is organized as a story before any historian writes it down, and that touches my interest in lived time and in memory.

James (1842 - 1910) Mensch has thought incarnation and alterity with a rigor I find kindred, Klaus Held (1936 - 2023) has restored philosophical dignity to the life-world and to the moods that color it, and Hans Rainer Sepp has worked on the image and on the crossing between cultures from within a phenomenology that never forgets the body.

And Hartmut Rosa (1965), who comes from sociology rather than phenomenology, has named with a fortunate word — resonance — that relation to the world in which something touches us and answers us and transforms us without ever being at our disposal, and has made unavailability, that which gives itself only when we give up trying to control it, the center of a critique of modernity that I share entirely, because what he calls the unavailable is almost the same as what I call that which compears without letting itself be possessed. None of them is a stranger to me, and several could be allies should I ever wish to give academic form to what for now I prefer to leave breathing.

XVII. Phenomenology Scattered Across Europe

None of those names, however, exhausts the real dispersion of that phenomenology, which branched across half of Europe in directions that are rarely read together.

Italy, moreover, has given me an entire tradition scarcely known outside its borders and that touches me closely. Antonio Banfi (1886 - 1957) founded a way of understanding reason as something open, critical, never closed off into system, and from him descends much of the best of Italian phenomenology.

Virgilio Melchiorre (1931 - 2020) thought symbol and analogy as forms of access to the real, not as ornaments of the concept but as the only way in which certain truths let themselves be said, and there I follow him without reservation.

Roberta De Monticelli (1952) has recovered a phenomenology of the person and of feeling, a logic of the heart inherited from Scheler (1874 - 1928), in which affects are not subjective noise but the perception of value, and that dignity granted to feeling is mine as well.

But of all of them the one who matters most to me is Luigi Pareyson (1918 - 1991), and I am surprised not to have named him sooner, because his aesthetics of formativity says almost exactly what I think about interpretation. For Pareyson the work of art is inexhaustible; every interpretation realizes it without exhausting it; form is not possessed but forms itself in the making; and every true performance is at once faithful and new. To this he added, in his last years, a tragic ontology of freedom, a thought of the abyss and of the inexhaustible that brushes against my own intuition of the wound. If I had to point to a philosopher who had already said, in an aesthetic register, the essential thing in my ontology of interpretation, it would be Pareyson.

Further back, in the German root of almost all of this, are three names that sustain me without my having said so. Max Scheler thought feeling as an access to value as rigorous as thinking is to concept; he spoke of an ordo amoris, an order of the heart that precedes and orients reason, and placed the person in a spot no psychology can occupy — all of which is so akin to my way of thinking the felt instant that I need not underline it. What separates me from him, though, is a certain confidence of his in a stable hierarchy of values, where I prefer to leave the order more open, more exposed.

Nicolai Hartmann (1882 - 1950) built an ontology of irreducible strata, layers of being that cannot be reduced one to another, and had a keen sense of the tragic, of conflicts of value that admit no synthesis, and in that refusal to reconcile everything he is more kin to me than his reputation as a systematizer would suggest.

And Edith Stein (1891 - 1942), who began with a phenomenology of empathy, of that access to the other that is not inference but a certain living-along with his experience, ended her path in John of the Cross, in the night, in the science of the cross, and that trajectory running from phenomenological rigor to Carmelite mysticism is almost a map of my own affinities.

On the English side — which will surprise anyone who takes me for purely continental — there is company I greatly appreciate. Iris Murdoch (1919 - 1999) restored to moral philosophy the word attention, which she had taken from Simone Weil, and thought the good as a reality that exceeds the will, and love as a form of knowledge, as the effort to see another as they truly are and not as my desire distorts them — and in that idea of the just gaze I recognize something central to me.

Mary Midgley (1919 - 2018) spent her life dismantling scientism, that superstition that mistakes science for a total metaphysics, and argued that we need many different maps for a world that none of them exhausts, which is exactly my position toward science and against reductionism.

And the German Robert Spaemann (1927 - 2018), more metaphysical than either of them, defended the person against its reduction to function, thought benevolence and teleology as something real rather than a useful illusion, and held that there are realities that exist only if they are treated as ends and never as means; and although his confidence in a legible nature is firmer than any I can muster, in the defense of the irreducible person we are allies without a crack between us.

Before arriving at pragmatism and William James, I must acknowledge my ambivalent relationship with American transcendentalism. In Emerson (1803 - 1882), Thoreau (1817 - 1862), Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850), and, in a different way, Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892), there appears a protest against secondhand life, against authority that substitutes for experience, and against a civilization that loses touch with what it claims to know. I find close to me their conviction that nature is not a warehouse of mute objects but a presence capable of reorienting consciousness, and also their distrust of religious institutions when these interpose an administration between the individual and that which claims him. Thoreau withdrawing to Walden is not simply fleeing society; he is trying to find out what part of life remains audible once the noise of convention subsides. That gesture of purification is understandable to me.

I also share with Emerson the idea that true thought does not consist merely in repeating a tradition but in letting it happen again within a present experience. The past should not be venerated as a deposit of dead answers. It must be received until it becomes word, gesture, and orientation once more. In this sense, transcendentalism contains something akin to my understanding of musical interpretation — that is, it is not a matter of externally obeying an authority nor of inventing oneself from scratch, but of making a provenance compear once again within a living body.

But transcendentalism retains a confidence in the self and in the correspondence between consciousness, nature, and spirit that I cannot fully assume. Emersonian self-reliance can correct herd obedience, but it also prepares an American mythology of self-sufficiency in which the individual imagines himself capable of reaching the universal directly, without acknowledging how much he owes to a language, a community, a history, and bodies that sustain him. Besides, transcendentalist nature tends to appear as one great spiritual unity in which every fragment finds its place. My experience of the world is less reconciled. Nature can move us, teach us, and exceed us, but it is also indifference, extinction, predation, and catastrophe. I do not regard it as a transparent scripture of Spirit.

That is why I feel close to transcendentalism as an ethic of attention, of critical independence, of direct experience, and of resistance to administered life, but I part from its ontological optimism. I do not believe the universe guarantees a final correspondence between the self and the All. The forest may open a clearing, but it does not necessarily promise a home. Retreat may return us to life, but it does not free us from responsibility toward those who cannot retreat. My possible transcendentalism would therefore be tragic and relational — that is, an attentiveness to what exceeds convention, but without turning the inner voice into an oracle or nature into a benevolent totality.

Precisely because I do not share the transcendentalist confidence in a spontaneous correspondence among self, nature, and spirit, my relationship to George Santayana (1863 - 1952) turns out, in certain respects, to be even closer and more uncomfortable. Santayana understood something that runs through these pages from the start — namely, that a religious tradition can cease to be accepted literally and go on being true as imagination, affective discipline, historical form of wisdom, and architecture of sensibility. His famous condition as an aesthetic, cultural, or poetic Catholic (a man incapable of accepting ecclesial metaphysics and yet deeply formed by its images, rhythms, and distinctions) comes extraordinarily close to my own way of belonging to Christianity as landscape. Not because I reduce religion to ornamental poetry, nor because I consider truth and beauty interchangeable, but because I too believe that an image can go on orienting us after its literal interpretation has stopped convincing us. A procession, an empty church, a prayer heard in childhood, or a figure of the Virgin can go on revealing something of dependence, of grief, of protection, or of hope without requiring that we first accept the whole supernatural ontology surrounding them.

I find equally close his distrust of the modern pretension of starting from zero. For Santayana, reason never floats in a vacuum free of customs, bodies, temperaments, or inheritances, but appears within an animal and historical life that precedes it. In this he is much closer to my anthropology than any rationalism that imagines consciousness as a sovereign tribunal capable of examining all its belongings from outside. I too believe that intelligence is embodied in a memory, a language, a set of affects, and a form of world it did not choose. A person can judge the tradition that formed them, but they judge with instruments at least partly received from it. Critique does not happen from nowhere.

My distance from Santayana begins where his naturalism seems to view spirit as a magnificent but ultimately impotent flower of material life — that is, a realm of essences, forms, and contemplations that illuminates existence without truly intervening in its causal texture. My ontology does not want to separate compearance and efficacy, spirit and flesh, sense and event, in that way. A melody is not merely an essence contemplated by an animal consciousness; it transforms breaths, decisions, memories, and bonds. The symbol does not float serenely above matter; it becomes flesh, wounds, gathers, mobilizes, and modifies the shared world. Nor can I fully settle into the ironic serenity with which Santayana seems to accept the distance between spiritual aspirations and the indifferent structure of nature. My relationship to that distance is more tragic and less contemplatively reconciled.

But Santayana helps me say something essential with precision — namely, that abandoning literal belief does not require destroying the symbolic world that made it possible. Between dogmatic obedience and enlightened mockery there exists a poetic fidelity capable of receiving the form without feigning a certainty it no longer holds. That fidelity does not save the propositions; it saves the depth of experience that some of them tried to safeguard. From here one can better understand why my conversation with American philosophy does not end with transcendentalism but leads on toward James, and toward a tradition in which truth must continually be measured again against lived experience.

There is also a line that has thought life, time, and sense, and with it my relationship is equal parts love and dispute. Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941) thought duration as lived time irreducible to the spatialized time of the clock, and used melody precisely as the image of that durée, of a flow in which each instant carries all the others within it, and that is very dear to me. But right there we part ways, because Bergson's duration is continuous and mine is broken, shot through with discontinuity, and where he hears a seamless flow I also hear the silences that separate and the caesuras that never close.

William James, in certain respects, is extraordinarily close to me. His radical empiricism holds that relations belong to experience with as much reality as the terms they relate, and are not mental bridges added afterward between things originally isolated. This intuition touches directly on my conviction that a melody, for instance, is not first composed of independent sounds that a consciousness later connects, nor does a person exist as a closed substance that subsequently enters into relation. The between, the transition, the felt continuity, the tension, and the direction are already real. James thus restores ontological dignity to what substantialist thought treats as secondary.

I am equally close to his pluralism, his rejection of the block universe, and his preference for a world still in process, open to novelties that no totality contains in advance. His "pluralistic universe" is not a finished system contemplated from the perspective of an absolute, but a reality in which the parts possess margins of initiative, risk, and relation. Truth itself does not compear as a motionless correspondence, but within practices, consequences, and forms of orientation. I do not accept all the consequences of pragmatism, nor would I reduce truth to what works, but I share James's refusal to separate ideas from the life in which they acquire weight, and his suspicion of any philosophy that claims to understand the world better the further it strays from concrete experience.

The Varieties of Religious Experience also strikes me as exemplary because it takes religious experience seriously without deciding in advance whether it should be explained as supernatural revelation or as pathology. James listens to the fruits, the moods, the crises, the conversions, and the forms of life before classifying them. That phenomenological patience comes very close to my own method. And yet his emphasis on individual experience can push into the background liturgy, institution, historical tradition, and the public dimension of the symbol. No religious experience begins entirely within an individual, since even the most solitary vision speaks a received language.

Josiah Royce (1855 - 1916) represents a necessary counterpoint. His philosophy of loyalty understands that the person is not realized through an unattached autonomy but by giving oneself to causes that exceed one's immediate interest. His notion of a community of interpretation likewise recognizes that truth cannot be reduced to private experience. I am deeply interested in loyalty when it means free fidelity to a relationship, a work, a community, or a promise that makes possible a life wider than one's own ego. But loyalty becomes dangerous when the cause demands sacrificing concrete singularity, or when a community claims for itself the right to interpret its members definitively. The cause must be judged by the form of presence it allows, not the person by their usefulness to the cause.

Ultimately I am closer to James's open pluralism than to Royce's communal idealism, though I need Royce to correct James's individualist temptation. James reminds me that no totality possesses in advance the meaning of its parts, and Royce, that no life is constituted without loyalties and communities of interpretation. My position tries to hold both demands without resolving them — namely, a true plurality that does not dissolve into isolation, and a real community that does not turn into totality.

Hans Jonas (1903 - 1993) thought life from the organism, from metabolism, from that needy freedom of the living being who must have need in order to be free, and he was also one of the great scholars of gnosticism and at the same time its most lucid critic, and this double condition places him right where I stand, on the side of the flesh and against every flight from the world. Iain McGilchrist (1953) has described, from the divided brain, two ways of attending — one that lets living things appear in their presence and their relation, and another that manipulates, represents, and possesses them — and his defense of the first against the empire of the second is the neurological translation of almost everything I have been saying, though his horizon sometimes tends toward a harmonious reunification that my discontinuity cannot quite sign onto. And Paul Valéry (1871 - 1945), who was no philosopher by trade, understood as few have that the poem is act and not thing, that it is never finished but only abandoned, that voice and rhythm bring forth a sense prose cannot reach — and in that poetics of making, of poiesis and technē, he is one of mine, however much his cool lucidity keeps its distance from the tragic trembling that inhabits me.

XVIII. From Russian Cosmism to the Shema of Israel

That poetics of voice and rhythm which resists all possession reappears, in another key, in thinkers who already border on the religious, from Russian cosmism to the Shema of Israel.

There remains one last family, the hardest to name because it once again borders on the religious, and in it are gathered those who have thought the person, love, the symbol, and drama from within a Christian imagination without remaining its prisoners. Paul Ricoeur (1913 - 2005) taught that the symbol gives rise to thought, that meaning is not possessed all at once but demands the detour of interpretation, and he thought testimony and the narrated self with a depth that stays with me. Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905 - 1988) built a theological aesthetics in which beauty is the mode in which depth manifests itself in form, in which glory compears in a face without being exhausted by it, and he thought reality as drama before system — and that preference for the dramatic over the doctrinal is so close to my own rejection of solemnity that I almost claim him as an ally, though his final reconciliation, fully christological, is a step I do not take. Josef Pieper (1904 - 1997) defended receptivity, true leisure, festivity, contemplation, and wrote that only the one who loves sings — a sentence that could open any of my essays, though his order is calmer and less wounded than mine. Pavel Florensky (1882 - 1937) thought truth as antinomy, as something that contains its own contradiction without resolving it, and thought the icon as presence rather than copy, and in that antinomic truth that refuses to close I recognize my own constitutive wound formulated in an Orthodox key. Christos Yannaras (1935 - 2024) has developed an apophatic personalism in which the person is relation and eros is ecstasy, a going out from oneself, and in which God is not known as object but as presence, and with him I agree almost without reservation. Nikolai Berdyaev (1874 - 1948) made the critique of objectification the center of his philosophy — that fall of the living spirit into dead thing, which is also my enemy — and defended freedom, creation, and the person with a tragic accent I feel close to, though his eschatological hope in a final transfiguration is again the reconciliation I distrust.

Vladimir Solovyov (1853 - 1900) and Sergei Bulgakov call for special consideration, because in them the Russian Christian imagination attempts to think something that touches closely on my own problem — namely, how the divine can compear in the world without the world being reduced to a mere instrument or the divine to just one more thing within it. The figure of Sophia, Wisdom, functions in Solovyov as mediation, presence, and living unity of the created in relation to the absolute. I am drawn to this refusal to choose between a wholly exterior God and a nature closed in on itself. I also find close the idea that truth appears not only as proposition but as beauty, relation, symbolic femininity, transfigured eros, and a call to a unity that must be made into life.

But sophiology troubles me when the power of the symbol begins to harden into an almost objective ontological region. Sophia can name the intelligibility, the beauty, and the responsiveness of creation, and can be an extraordinarily fertile image of divine presence within the finite. But once it becomes a hypostasis whose exact position within the trinitarian and cosmic structure must be determined, the symbol runs the risk of turning into metaphysical cartography. Then returns the temptation I have found in the kabbalah, in esotericism, and in certain Eastern cosmologies — that of describing with precision something whose truth depended on its not being possessable as an object.

Bulgakov strikes me as even closer, for his theology of creation, his desire to think matter, economy, history, and beauty without expelling them from divine life. His passage from Marxism to theology was not a simple substitution of systems but an attempt to preserve sensitivity to material suffering within a sacramental vision of the world. I am deeply interested in that will to prevent religion from becoming a disembodied spirituality. His intuition that creation possesses a vocation, an orientation, and a capacity for glory also converses with my idea that the visible can make a depth compear that is not external to it.

My break occurs again over cosmic reconciliation. Sophiology tends to imagine a final transfiguration in which the fractures of the world find their place within a higher unity. My thought cannot take that consummation as guaranteed. I can speak of repair, of response, of transformation, but I do not know whether the universe constitutes a totality whose outcome will recapitulate every wound. In Solovyov (1853 - 1900) and Bulgakov (1871 - 1944), then, I recognize allies against reductive materialism and against an extrinsic theism, but not companions all the way to the end. They want to show that the world is inwardly oriented toward a divine unity, while I try to preserve the possibility of a depth without affirming that plurality and tragedy are destined to be reconciled.

Russian cosmism radicalizes this ambition under very different religious, philosophical, scientific, and technical forms. In Nikolai Fyodorov (1829 - 1903), humanity is given the common task of conquering death and even of materially resurrecting all its ancestors through knowledge and cooperation. In Tsiolkovsky (1857 - 1935), Vernadsky (1863 - 1945), and other figures, life and intelligence acquire a cosmic dimension — the biosphere, the noosphere, the expansion of humanity through the universe. I understand the moral grandeur of Fyodorov's refusal to accept the death of others serenely, for there is something moving in considering that a progress which abandons the dead is morally insufficient. I am also interested in how the cosmos ceases to appear as an indifferent stage and becomes a horizon of responsibility.

And yet cosmism readily transforms mourning into a technological program and hope into an engineering of totality. Resurrection stops being symbol, promise, or protest against death and becomes a collective project susceptible to scientific realization. There my ontology parts ways radically. No technique can restore a presence by substituting the material reconstruction of a life for its unrepeatable event. And the cosmic expansion of intelligence can be another form of the old dream of sovereignty — namely, a species that, unable to inhabit its own finitude, colonizes the universe so as not to accept that it too can disappear. What interests me about the cosmos is disproportion, wonder, and decentering, not a territory of technological salvation. Cosmism knows that death is intolerable, but it trusts too much that the intolerable can be resolved through a common task. I remain with the protest, without turning it into cosmic planning.

Emmanuel Levinas (1906 - 1995) thought the face of the other as that place where the infinite compears without letting itself be encompassed, and thought the trace, that way in which what has already withdrawn still somehow remains — and both of these are mine to the marrow, though I part from him over his distrust of art and beauty, which he subordinates to ethics and which for me are avenues, not shadows. Martin Buber (1878 - 1965) thought the between, that das Zwischen where encounter occurs, and the relation of the I to the Thou that can never turn into an It without losing itself, and there I follow him entirely. And further back than all of them, Nicholas of Cusa (1401 - 1464) thought a docta ignorantia that is not a renunciation of knowing but a higher knowing that knows it does not comprehend the infinite, and in that I recognize myself, though his coincidence of opposites, that final gathering of every contrary into God, is once again the synthesis my discontinuity refuses to celebrate.

Franz Rosenzweig remains equally close to me for another reason. He was perhaps the first to show with full clarity that truth happens before it becomes system, that relation precedes totality, and that time is not a mere dimension of the world but the very place where revelation can take place. If I part from him it is because he still inscribes that revelation within a theological horizon that I prefer to keep open phenomenologically. But his battle against the Hegelian totality and his defense of singularity constitute one of the deepest philosophical kinships I recognize.

Rosenzweig also forces me to acknowledge something I have so far mentioned only too much in passing — namely, that my relationship to Judaism is philosophically far deeper than my Christian genealogy might suggest. Not because I feel Jewish in a religious, communal, historical, or identitarian sense that is not mine to claim, nor because I mean to appropriate a historical experience whose singularity must be respected, but because certain fundamental structures of Jewish thought lie surprisingly close to my ontology of compearance. Above all, the priority of the call over the vision, of listening over possession, of covenant over substance, of time over totality, and of response over self-sufficient contemplation. Where much of Greek metaphysics asks what the real is, the biblical tradition frequently asks who calls, who is called, from where the response comes, and what responsibility is born of having been reached by a word. That shift from essence to interpellation touches directly on the heart of what I am trying to think.

Until now I have situated my thought within internal differences of Christianity and its philosophical inheritances. But an ontology that affirms the irreducibility of compearance cannot limit itself to acknowledging only what appeared within its own tradition. Christianity was born already in relation to Judaism, and later defined itself against Islam as well. To think my own belonging requires, then, listening to those traditions without turning them into prefigurations, corrections, or variants of my own.

The "Hear, O Israel" of the Shema does not constitute merely a religious exhortation. It contains an entire ontological orientation. The first thing would not be the presence of an object before a consciousness that contemplates it, but a voice that precedes the one who listens and constitutes him as a possible respondent. The listener does not produce the call, does not constitute it, and does not master it. He discovers himself already concerned by it. In this sense, revelation does not originally appear as the transmission of information about a supreme being, but as a vocative event: something addresses itself to someone, something demands a response, something inaugurates a relation before offering itself as content. My conviction that music is fundamentally vocative before it is representative finds here an evident kinship: melos, too, calls before it signifies, reaches before it is analyzed, and transforms the listener before becoming an object of knowledge.

This is why the structure of the covenant, the berit, feels especially close to me, when it is understood not as a juridical contract between two previously constituted subjects, but as a relation that constitutes those who enter into it. The covenant does not simply befall two finished identities. It produces a form of belonging, of memory, and of responsibility that did not exist before the encounter. This converges with my idea that relation is not an accident added onto the person, but one of the places where the person truly comes to compear. We are not first closed substances that afterward establish bonds; rather, we come to be who we are in fidelity, in promise, in response, in betrayal, in forgiveness, and in shared memory. Relation does not connect two self-sufficient identities. It exposes them, transforms them, and renders them responsible.

Jewish temporality, too, strikes me as profoundly kindred. Against every metaphysics that tries to gather multiplicity into the simultaneity of a contemplable totality, Judaism insists on a truth that happens as memory, promise, waiting, repetition, and novelty. Truth is not available once and for all in a panoramic vision; rather, it is narrated, remembered, actualized, and awaited. The Exodus is not merely a past fact but an event that must be received anew in every generation. The liturgy does not externally reproduce a concluded content but reactualizes a relation. This structure is enormously close to my conception of music. A work, too, does not exist as a motionless totality situated outside time. It must compear again, become incarnate again, pass through another body, another acoustics, another memory, and another present. True repetition does not repeat the identical. It renews an origin without exhausting it.

In this sense, the rabbinic tradition interests me even more than the claim of a systematic Jewish theology. The Talmud and the midrash preserve a plurality of interpretations, discussions, objections, and voices that rarely end up reconciled into a definitive formula. Truth appears there less as a closed conclusion than as a transgenerational conversation. One interpretation does not necessarily eliminate the previous one; it can remain alongside it, argue with it, open a possibility that no synthesis manages to absorb completely. There is in this form of thought a practical resistance to totality that feels deeply familiar to me. The text does not function as a receptacle for a single meaning that the interpreter must correctly extract, but as the site of a compearance that demands reading, dispute, memory, and response. Interpretation does not possess meaning; it enters into relation with it.

This does not mean that I idealize Judaism or turn it into a pure alternative to the systematic tendencies of Christianity or of Greece. Within Judaism, too, there exist rationalizations, juridifications, identitarian closures, and dogmatisms. Halakhah can become the embodied care of everyday life, but it can also harden into exhaustive regulation. Election can be understood as specific responsibility, but it can degenerate into exceptionalism. Memory can safeguard the dead, but it can also be instrumentalized as sovereignty over the present. No tradition is preserved from the temptation to turn its orientation into domination. My affinity is directed, therefore, not toward an idealization of Judaism as an essence, but toward certain tensions that remain alive within it: between word and interpretation, presence and withdrawal, particularity and universality, promise and fulfillment, name and the prohibition against possessing what is named.

The question of the divine name is decisive here. Jewish reticence before the pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton interests me not as verbal superstition but as ontological discipline. The name points, but it does not make available. It orients, but it does not hand over what it names to linguistic manipulation. Unpronounceability protects a distance internal to naming itself. It does not mean that nothing can be said, but that no saying should be confused with possessing what is said. Here there is an evident affinity with my fear that the word God might turn the Mystery into a conceptual object. But there is also a difference. My thought does not wish to replace the unpronounceable name with absolute silence. I want to keep the word as song, invocation, poetry, and response, provided it accepts that it does not master what it is directed toward. The problem is not naming, but believing that the name captures.

The Kabbalah too attracts and disturbs me for very precise reasons. It is worth beginning by distinguishing historical Kabbalah (that of medieval Provence and Girona, the Castilian Zohar, the school of Safed, and the Hasidic renewal) from the occultist simplifications that later circulated under the name of hermetic Kabbalah. My relation to the first is philosophically serious; to the second, much more distant. I am not interested in Kabbalah as a repertoire of numerical correspondences, secret powers, theurgic procedures, or initiatory maps of the universe. That reduction turns an extremely complex speculative, exegetical, and liturgical tradition into a technology of the symbol. What interests me, instead, is where it tries to think how the infinite can become present without being contained in any of its manifestations.

The notion of Ein Sof, the Infinite without end, comes close in certain respects to my idea of an inexhaustible ground that compears without being exhausted. Ein Sof does not simply designate a maximally great being placed above the universe. It points to that which overflows every determination, every name, and every representation. The sefirot can then be understood not as ten things or supernatural regions, but as modalities of manifestation, dynamic relations through which the unlimited lets itself be found without becoming a delimited object. Understood in this way, they approach a grammar of appearing—that is, they do not say what the infinite is in itself, but how it can radiate, hide, contract, judge, give, bind, and become presence without ceasing to exceed each one of those configurations. My affinity ends, however, at the instant when that grammar solidifies into an exhaustive cartography of the divine world. The symbol is true while it opens; it begins to betray itself when it claims to describe the Mystery topographically.

Lurianic Kabbalah contains intuitions even closer to my ontology. Tzimtzum, the divine contraction or withdrawal that makes room for creation possible, offers an extraordinarily powerful image of presence compearing by withdrawing. The absolute does not manifest itself by occupying everything, but by leaving room. Its withdrawal is not mere absence but the condition of appearance for that which is not itself. This comes extraordinarily close to my idea that all true presence contains distance, reserve, and non-coincidence. To love is not to fill the other's space entirely, but to allow him to appear. To teach is not to occupy the student's consciousness, but to open a clearing in which he can respond. To interpret is not to impose an identity on a work, but to offer it a body without appropriating it. Withdrawal does not negate presence; it gives presence its ethical form.

Likewise, shevirat ha-kelim, the breaking of the vessels incapable of containing the intensity of the emanation, seems to offer an almost exact mythology of my intuition that no form exhausts what compears within it. Every vessel shatters because presence exceeds the capacity of the form that receives it. Fracture is here not a mere external contingency but a constitutive moment of the world. Dispersion, fragment, and remainder exist because plenitude cannot be contained without violence. This lies very close to my ontology of discontinuity. But I part ways again in the interpretation of tikkun, reparation. Lurianic Kabbalah ultimately maintains a horizon of cosmic restoration, namely, that the scattered sparks must be raised and the order repaired. I am not certain that every fracture can or should be restored into a final unity. I believe in care, in concrete reparation, in responsibility toward what has been wounded. I am wary, however, of a metaphysical reconciliation that turns every loss into a necessary moment of a future integrity.

The Shekhinah, understood as the divine presence that dwells, accompanies the exile, and descends with the community into its places of dispersion, feels equally close to me. It is not an intact transcendence that contemplates the world's suffering from outside, but a presence that lets itself be affected by separation and dwells precisely where totality has broken. This comes close to my intuition of a non-sovereign transcendence, a depth that compears not as power but as vulnerability, companionship, and exposure. Presence does not overcome exile from above; it passes through it. In this image I recognize something of Gethsemane, something of the dark night, and something of my own conviction that distance can be inhabited without being abolished.

Hasidism too contains elements close to me, namely, the sanctification of the everyday, the centrality of wordless song, the nigun, joy understood not as psychological optimism but as intensity of presence, and the conviction that a humble bodily action can become a place of encounter. The nigun interests me in a special way because it calls into question the separation between meaning and sound. It does not first communicate a conceptual content and then clothe it in melody. The melody itself becomes response, memory, supplication, and a form of community. Here my idea of melos finds a direct kinship: the voice signifies not only through what it says but through its breath, its pitch, its tremor, its repetition, and its way of sustaining an interval with other bodies.

If in Judaism what attracted me above all was the priority of listening over seeing, in Islam that same intuition turns in another direction: it is no longer only a matter of being called, but of thinking how the One can compear without becoming an idol.

My relation to Islam demands an equally rigorous differentiation. There is no single Islam reducible to a few theses. There is Quranic and prophetic Islam, the great Sunni juridical traditions, Shiism in its various forms, Ibadism, Muʿtazilite, Ashʿarite, and Maturidite kalām, the falsafa of al-Fārābī (872 - 950), Avicenna, and Averroes (1126 - 1198), Suhrawardī (1154 - 1191)'s philosophy of illumination, the metaphysics of Mullā Ṣadrā (1571 - 1636), and the immense plurality of the Sufi orders. Each articulates differently the relation among transcendence, reason, revelation, community, law, symbol, and experience. To treat all of that as a single "Islamic spirituality" would be exactly the kind of reduction my ontology fights against.

Tawḥīd, the affirmation of divine unity, attracts me wherever it functions as a radical critique of idolatry. Nothing finite can be absolutized. No power, image, concept, institution, nation, desire, or subject can legitimately occupy the place of the absolute. Understood this way, tawḥīd would not be merely a numerical affirmation (there is one God) but a discipline of de-absolutizing the world. Everything finite is freed from the burden of having to be everything. A person does not have to become my salvation. An ideology cannot explain the whole of history. A work does not definitively contain music. An institution does not possess the Mystery it safeguards. In this sense, tawḥīd converges with my resistance to every closure.

And yet that same unity can become a principle for absorbing difference. Where divine oneness is interpreted as the foundation of a final coherence that subordinates all plurality, my ontology resists. Multiplicity is not for me a deficiency that must be reintegrated into a higher unity. Singularity, distance, and discontinuity possess a dignity of their own. I do not believe that every voice is merely a provisional modulation of a single Voice, nor that every face finds its ultimate truth by being reabsorbed into a common metaphysical identity. Unity can prevent the idolatry of the particular, but it must not cancel the unrepeatability of the singular.

The Islamic tension between tanzīh and tashbīh strikes me as especially fertile. Tanzīh preserves God's absolute incomparability: nothing resembles Him, no image contains Him, no concept reaches His reality. Tashbīh, by contrast, recognizes the proximity, the resemblance, the names, the signs, and the forms through which the divine lets itself be found. A theology governed exclusively by tanzīh risks emptying experience into a faceless transcendence without compearance, while a theology dominated by tashbīh risks the opposite, that of turning mediations into possessions of the divine. My thought dwells precisely in that tension, though without resolving it theologically. I need distance so that presence does not become an object, but I also need appearance so that distance does not become a void. What compears is truly accessible and, at the same time, irreducible to its accessibility.

Quranic recitation interests me likewise as an ontological phenomenon and not merely as doctrinal transmission. The Quran does not exist only as a silent text or as a set of propositions. It compears in the voice, in the breath, in the rhythm, in bodily and communal memory. Tajwīd is not simple musical ornamentation added to a semantic content that was already complete beforehand; rather, it organizes the way in which the word becomes present. Revelation is inseparable from its vocalization. Here I find a radical affinity with my idea of lexis and melos. The word is not a disembodied sign that afterward receives sound. Its truth also happens in the way it is pronounced, sustained, modulated, and received by a community of listeners. Meaning does not entirely precede the chant; it compears through it.

The discussion among the different schools of kalām also interests me as an example of the difficulties that arise when revelation attempts to become a systematic ontology. The Muʿtazilites defended the rational intelligibility of divine justice and human freedom. The Ashʿarites insisted on divine omnipotence and on the radical dependence of every event on the creative act. The Maturidites sought other articulations among reason, revelation, and responsibility. I understand the philosophical necessity of these distinctions, but my thought departs when compearance is subordinated to an exhaustive causal theory. Ashʿarite occasionalism, for example, protects the absolute dependence of the world on God, but risks emptying out the proper consistency of relations, bodies, and actions. My ontology needs what compears to possess a true, though not self-sufficient, reality. A melody is not an illusion produced from outside at every instant; it exists in the embodied relation among gesture, memory, sound, world, and listening.

Of Shiism what especially attracts me is the centrality of interpretation, the memory of suffering, the figure of testimony, and the conviction that truth can remain veiled within a history dominated by power. The memory of Karbalāʾ offers an understanding of the wound that cannot be reduced to political failure or to a mere episode of the past. The martyrdom of Ḥusayn becomes an event that continues to demand response, mourning, and responsibility. Without in any way appropriating that memory, I recognize in it a structure close to my thought, namely, that truth is not identified with historical victory, and that loss is not annulled because a community later manages to give it meaning. The wound preserves its power of interpellation precisely because it has not been reconciled.

Islamic philosophy also offers extraordinarily different interlocutors. Avicenna (980 - 1037) interests me for the radicality with which he thinks contingency and the dependence of existents, but his metaphysical architecture remains too stable for my sensibility. Averroes attracts me for his confidence in reason and for his effort to distinguish levels of interpretation, though his ideal of intelligibility remains more secure than I can accept. Suhrawardī comes much closer to my language when he thinks reality in terms of light, appearance, intensity, and degrees of presence. But he moves away again when those intensities end up organized into a cosmological hierarchy susceptible to being described as an objective structure. Mullā Ṣadrā interests me enormously for his primacy of existence over essence and for his idea of substantial motion, according to which reality is not composed of motionless substances that afterward change but is becoming in its own depth. Yet his horizon ends up oriented toward a unity and an ontological intensification that my thought, more discontinuous and less hierarchical, cannot fully assume.

With Sufism my relation is perhaps the most intense and the most ambivalent. It feels close to me for the centrality of love, of listening, of remembrance, of music, of poetry, of the master as presence, and of the transformation of perception. Dhikr, understood in its deepest sense, is not a technique for producing an extraordinary state but a struggle against ontological forgetting. To remember here does not mean recovering lost information, but returning to stand before that from which everyday life separates us. In this sense, every true musical interpretation possesses something of dhikr: it does not bring an absent object into the present, but reestablishes a relation, makes an origin audible again, and allows something to compear anew without identifying itself with any of its previous appearances.

Samāʿ, the spiritual listening cultivated by various Sufi traditions, comes even closer to my thought. Listening does not consist simply in receiving sound stimuli, but in exposing oneself to a call whose origin we do not control. Music can open a disposition, intensify memory, break self-sufficiency, and make visible the affective structure of the one who listens. But my affinity depends on samāʿ not becoming a guaranteed technique of spiritual ascent. No musical form necessarily produces truth. Listening can dispose us, disarm us, or open us, but it cannot manufacture compearance. Wherever a discipline promises a necessary spiritual effect, the event begins to be replaced by the procedure.

In al-Ghazālī (1058 - 1111) I find a critique of rational self-sufficiency that interests me profoundly, as well as the conviction that transformative knowledge cannot be reduced to conceptual assent. But his final return to a determined normative and theological horizon leaves me distant. In ʿAṭṭār (1145 - 1221) I recognize the power of the journey, of the loss of false identities, and of the plurality of voices. But I am wary of the way the journey culminates in the revelation of an ultimate identity between seekers and the sought. In Rūmī (1207 - 1273) I find one of the strongest poetic kinships, namely, the reed cut off from its origin, music as nostalgia, love as wound, absence as the force that makes one sing. Rūmī moves me precisely because he does not describe an exterior transcendence but a lack that becomes voice. And yet, where his wound tends finally to resolve into the unity of lover and Beloved, I remain in the distance. For me, separation is not merely provisional ignorance; it belongs to the very condition of love.

Ibn ʿArabī (1165 - 1240) represents the metaphysically most demanding case. His doctrine of imagination, the ʿālam al-mithāl or imaginal world, and his understanding of the divine names offer extraordinary resources for thinking an appearing that is reduced neither to brute materiality nor to subjective representation. Imagination is not arbitrary fantasy but an organ of manifestation. The symbol does not conceal a reality situated behind it; rather, it constitutes the very way in which that reality can become present. In this he comes extraordinarily close to my ontology. An image, a face, a word, or a melody would not be impoverished copies of an absent essence, but real sites of compearance. However, waḥdat al-wujūd, at least in the readings that understand it as the ultimate ontological unity of everything that exists, is difficult for me to accept. I fear that singularity ends up turned into a mere theophany of a single reality, and that difference loses its irreducibility. My problem is not admitting that each being reveals more than it appears to, but preventing that "more" from ending up absorbing the irreplaceable uniqueness of what appears.

The Sufi notions of fanāʾ and baqāʾ also place me before both a proximity and a rupture. I understand fanāʾ as a dispossession of the sovereign self, the collapse of the illusion of self-sufficiency, and an opening onto a reality we do not produce. In this sense it coincides with my critique of the modern subject as owner of itself and constituting center of meaning. But I cannot accept an annulment of personal singularity. The self must lose its claim to dominion, not its unrepeatability. I do not want to dissolve the person, but to free her from the fantasy that she can exist only by possessing herself. Baqāʾ feels closer to me if it means remaining transformed within relation, returning to the world and to others without recovering the former self-sufficiency. True dispossession does not culminate in disappearance but in a more responsible form of presence.

This is why my relation to Sufism always depends on the difference between dispossession and dissolution. The first is profoundly close to me. The second is not. To be dispossessed means accepting that we are not the origin of all meaning, that beauty precedes us, that love happens to us, that music does not belong to us, that the other never fits within our representation of him. To dissolve, by contrast, means relativizing singularity, memory, biography, and the concrete face in the name of a higher unity. My whole ontology struggles against this second operation. The self is not absolute, but neither is it an indifferent illusion. It is a wound, a memory, a body, a voice, and an unrepeatable responsibility.

My distance from institutional Islam resembles, in some respects, my distance from institutional Christianity. I do not feel close to a religion turned into exhaustive regulation, political identity, bodily discipline imposed from outside, or juridical administration of transcendence. But it would be superficial to reduce Islam to its legalistic or political forms, just as it would be superficial to reduce Christianity to the curia or the catechism. There exists a Quranic, philosophical, poetic, mystical, and liturgical depth that constitutes one of humanity's great attempts to think unity, dependence, the word, listening, and the impossibility of representing the absolute. With that depth I maintain a real relation, even if it is not a relation of adherence.

If I had to condense my position, I would say that from Judaism what is especially close to me is the priority of the call, of memory, of interpretation, and of a relation that never lets itself be turned into totality. From the Kabbalah, what is close to me is the withdrawal that makes room, the breaking of the vessels, and the presence that accompanies exile, provided those images do not turn into an esoteric cartography. From Islam, the radical critique of idolatry, the tension between incomparability and proximity, and the word that exists fully only when it becomes voice. From Shiism, the unreconciled memory of the wound. And from Sufism, love, remembrance, listening, music, and the dispossession of the sovereign self. I part ways with all of them at the same place, namely, wherever plurality ends up absorbed by an ultimate unity, wherever the wound is guaranteed a cosmic reparation, wherever singularity dissolves into universal consciousness, or wherever mystery becomes a structure of the universe susceptible to being described, mapped, and administered.

I do not find, then, in these traditions an alternative doctrine by which to correct Christianity and finally arrive at a higher synthesis. That would be to fall back into the perennialism I have criticized. I find irreducible interlocutors. Judaism is not a Christianity without Christ. Islam is not a Semitic variant of the same metaphysics. The Kabbalah is not an encrypted Neoplatonism. Sufism is not an Islamic version of universal mysticism. Each tradition possesses its own language, its history, its conflicts, its memory, and its specific way of making what it considers true compear. To respect them requires not reconciling them too soon.

My relation to them is, therefore, a relation of listening and not of incorporation. I do not want to turn them into provinces of my own ontology, nor to select from each the elements that confirm what I already think. I want to allow them to introduce resistance, to reveal the limits of my vocabulary, and to compel my concept of compearance to answer before forms of appearing that were not born within my Christian and European landscape. An ontology that recognized only what it already knows how to recognize would not be an ontology of compearance but a machine of appropriation. To listen to another tradition means accepting the possibility that something compears within it for which I do not yet possess the adequate categories to receive it.

And perhaps this is precisely the most important lesson I receive from Judaism, from Islam, and from their great mystical traditions, namely, that truth can demand fidelity without becoming property, that a word can orient a life without exhausting what it names, that repetition can keep an event alive without reducing it to reproduction, that law can try to embody a memory without being identical to it, that song can know without objectifying, and that every true revelation, if the word can still be used, does not eliminate interpretation but inaugurates it. Wherever something truly compears, a responsibility begins, and a question does not end.

XIX. The Turn Toward India

That same structure, a revelation that inaugurates interpretation rather than exhausting it, is tested still more demandingly in the turn toward the traditions of India.

The move toward the traditions of India further widens the distance from the Semitic and Christian landscape. Precisely for this reason it does not constitute an encyclopedic accumulation foreign to the essay. It allows me to verify which aspects of my ontology truly derive from Christianity and which can enter into dialogue with forms of thought where creation, person, revelation, and history are organized in a radically different way.

My relation to Hinduism demands a similar caution, perhaps even greater, because few Western words produce as deceptive an illusion of unity as the word "Hinduism." Under that name coexist Vedic and Tantric traditions, theistic devotions and non-dualist speculations, meticulous ritualisms and movements of renunciation, enormously elaborate cosmologies and practices centered on the immediate presence of a personal divinity. The horizon of the Vedas is not the same as that of the Upaniṣads. The exegesis of Mīmāṃsā is not the same as the metaphysics of Vedānta. Śaṅkara (700 - 750)'s advaita is not the same as Rāmānuja (1017 - 1137)'s viśiṣṭādvaita or Madhva (1199 - 1278)'s dualism. Kashmiri Śaivism, the Śākta traditions, Vaiṣṇavism, the bhakti movement, the various forms of yoga, and the innumerable regional and popular religiosities are not interchangeable. To speak of Hinduism as if it simply affirmed that "everything is one" would be as clumsy as reducing Christianity to scholasticism or Islam to religious law. My relation to that universe is not, therefore, one of adherence or of general rejection, but of very precise proximities and ruptures.

There is, to begin with, something in the Vedic horizon that strikes me as profoundly suggestive, namely, the experience that the world does not originally compear as a collection of mute objects but as a rhythmic, vocal, ritual, and relational weave. Ṛta, before becoming an abstract notion of cosmic order, points to a living articulation among the world's cycles, the word, ritual action, and community. What especially interests me is that truth is not there merely contemplated or formulated, but recited, given rhythm, transmitted by breath, and sustained by bodily memory. The mantra is not, in its deepest origin, a proposition to which sound is added as ornament; rather, its sonority, its accentuation, its duration, and its repetition are part of its way of compearing. On this point I find an immediate affinity with my conception of lexis and melos. The word does not first possess an entirely concluded meaning that is afterward clothed in voice. The word becomes fully word in its vocal incarnation, in the breathing gesture that delivers it, and in the listening that receives it.

The notion of śruti (that which has been heard) also interests me far more than a simplistic understanding of revelation as supernatural dictation. What is originary here is not the fabrication of a content by a sovereign consciousness, but a listening. Truth precedes the one who receives it. It is not produced by the subject, although it needs a subject, a voice, and a tradition to become historically present. This priority of listening converges with my conviction that all true compearance reaches us before it is thematized. Something sounds, calls, affects, and orients before we can constitute it as an object. My affinity ends, however, where that listening is guaranteed by an absolute textual authority, or where the exact repetition of the sound seems by itself to secure access to an immutable reality. No vocal form, however venerable, can turn the event into a mechanism. Fidelity to an origin must not be confused with the material reproduction of a formula.

The thought of the Upaniṣads attracts me for the radicality with which it interrogates what we believe ourselves to be. Its critique of the immediate identification of the self with the objectified body, with passing desires, with social functions, or with the image consciousness fabricates of itself constitutes a powerful challenge to the modern subject understood as transparent owner of his own identity. The question "who am I?" ceases to seek a psychological definition and becomes a path of dispossession. Here there is a real kinship with my critique of the sovereign individual. Nor do I believe that the person coincides with the inventory of her states, functions, or representations. The self is not a substance one entirely possesses, but an existence that is received, remembered, and answered, and that always remains in excess of any description of itself.

But it is precisely in the metaphysical answer to that question that I begin to part ways. When the relation between ātman and brahman is interpreted as ultimate identity, and when liberation consists in recognizing that personal singularity was, at bottom, an appearance born of ignorance, my ontology resists. Not because I want to defend the empirical ego as a self-sufficient fortress, but because I cannot accept that the unrepeatability of a life, of a memory, of a voice, and of a face is merely a provisional form of misrecognition. The person is not, for me, the absolute, but neither is it an ontologically secondary accident that must become transparent until it disappears into a universal consciousness. The self must be dispossessed of its sovereignty, not deprived of its singularity. It must learn that it is not the origin of meaning, but not that its biography is ultimately unreal.

This is why my relation to Vedānta depends entirely on which Vedānta is at issue. Śaṅkara's advaita fascinates me for the discipline with which it undoes every pretension to turn the absolute into an object, and for its insistence that brahman cannot be contained in finite predicates. The procedure of neti neti ("not this, not that") has an evident affinity with the via negativa and with my suspicion of every name that claims to close off the Mystery. However, where the phenomenal world ends up subordinated to māyā, and difference is understood from the standpoint of a more original non-dual reality, my fundamental objection appears. Compearance is not, for me, a screen that hides the truth. It is the only place where truth can happen humanly. The phenomenon is not worth less for not being absolute. Its fragility does not turn it into illusion. A mortal voice is not a degradation of eternal sound. Precisely because it can break, because it has a history, and because it can cease to sound, it is capable of compearing as an unrepeatable presence.

Rāmānuja is, in this sense, considerably closer to me than Śaṅkara. His viśiṣṭādvaita, his qualified non-dualism, tries to preserve unity without annulling the reality of souls, bodies, and the world. Difference would not be an illusion that must disappear, but an internal articulation of a broader reality. His insistence on relation, on dependence, and on personal devotion also offers an anthropology less inclined to dissolve singularity. And yet I cannot follow him entirely either, because that plurality remains ultimately contained within a divine unity that guarantees its integration. My thought does not know whether there exists a totality capable of gathering up every wound and every difference without remainder. I can admit that relation sustains singularity, but I cannot affirm that an ultimate unity possesses in advance the meaning of all relations.

With Madhva the difficulty is reversed. His radical defense of the difference between God, souls, and the world is closer to my resistance to monistic absorption, but his ontological dualism fixes the distances with a rigidity I likewise do not share. My discontinuity does not mean that realities are closed substances, separated by absolute frontiers. Distance is, for me, the space of encounter, not the impossibility of relation. What compears does so precisely by crossing a distance it does not eliminate. This is why I need not choose between advaitic identity and dualist separation. I try to think a proximity without fusion and a difference without isolation, that is, a relation in which what gives itself remains irreducible to the relation itself, but does not therefore exist as a self-sufficient monad.

The bhakti traditions feel to me perhaps closer than the great metaphysical architectures. In them the relation with the divine is articulated through love, name, song, dance, memory, absence, and surrender. Truth is not attained solely through cognitive de-identification but is incarnated in an affective relation. The devotee does not always seek to understand the divinity but to call to her, to remember her, to sing her, to reproach her absence, to await her arrival, or to suffer her withdrawal. In the poems of Mīrābāī (1498 - 1546), of Kabīr (1440 - 1518), of Tukārām (1608 - 1650), of Nāmdev (1270 - 1350), of Sūrdās (1478 - 1583), or of the poets linked to the Vaiṣṇava traditions, there appears a phenomenology of love and distance that I find far more habitable than the abstract affirmation of a non-dual consciousness. The lover sings because he does not possess the Beloved. Absence is not merely a deficiency destined to be overcome, but the very tension that makes voice possible.

My relation to the Hare Krishna movement, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness linked to A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896 - 1977), must be situated within that affinity and that reserve. I understand the power of the repeated chanting of the mahāmantra, the creation of community through voice, dance, rhythm, and shared food, as well as its capacity to restore a ritual structure to fragmented Western lives. Kīrtan shows something my own ontology affirms, namely, that the sung word does not merely communicate a content but reorganizes breath, attention, and belonging. I also admire that the movement has recalled, in a culture dominated by abstraction, that devotion is bodily, temporal, sonorous, and communal. But what separates me from it is its literalization of a specific religious cosmology, the concentration of authority in a discipular succession that can become difficult to question, the tendency to translate the complexity of Hinduism into a closed doctrinal system, and the final subordination of singularity to a devotional relation defined in advance. The repetition of the name can open a presence, but it can also become a technique of self-suggestion or a marker of group identity. My critique is not directed at the chant, which I understand intimately, but at the claim that one particular form of chant, a determined theology, and a specific communal discipline constitute the privileged and universally normative path to ultimate reality.

Here my affinity is enormous, though not absolute either. I understand devotional chant when it is exposure, supplication, memory, and response, but I part ways when devotion demands the total subordination of singularity to a divine will, or when self-abandonment becomes a renunciation of judgment. A relation that annuls personal responsibility ceases to be relation. True love dispossesses but does not infantilize. It transforms but does not turn the person into an instrument. What interests me is the surrender that frees the self from its fantasy of self-sufficiency, not the obedience that excuses it from answering for itself. Here too the difference between dispossession and dissolution proves decisive.

The Kṛṣṇa of the Bhagavad Gītā represents for me an especially ambivalent figure. What interests me profoundly is the critique of action governed exclusively by anxiety over results, and the intuition that to act does not amount to entirely controlling the consequences of action. Karma-yoga can be read as a discipline against appropriation, that is, acting with attention and dedication without turning the fruit of the act into the agent's property. Here there is a clear affinity with my conception of musical interpretation. The performer must respond fully, must commit body, memory, and intelligence, but cannot manufacture or possess the event he hopes to make compear. He must act with rigor without confusing rigor with mastery.

However, the scene of the Bhagavad Gītā also obliges me to formulate a moral and ontological reservation. The possibility of fulfilling one's own dharma with detachment can become a dangerous separation between the agent's inner purity and the concrete suffering produced by his acts. No elevation of consciousness should render abstract the face of the one who suffers the consequences. My thought cannot accept an action purified merely because it is carried out without personal desire. Responsibility does not consist only in freeing oneself from attachment to the result, but in remaining exposed to the singularity of those whom our action reaches. Wherever a doctrine of duty risks reconciling violence in advance within a cosmic order, my ontology of the wound stops short.

The notion of dharma interests me, therefore, when it names an embodied form of orientation, a fidelity to relations, responsibilities, stages of life, occupations, and communities the individual has not invented from scratch. In this sense, it corrects the modern fiction of a freedom without origin. No one acts from nowhere. Every action responds to a prior world of bonds and debts. But dharma becomes problematic when it turns historical sedimentations into ontological order, when it legitimizes social hierarchies as though they expressed an eternal architecture, or when it demands that a person remain locked into the function she was assigned. Tradition can orient, but it cannot definitively possess the meaning of a life. To inherit a form does not mean being condemned to repeat it.

This is why my distance from the caste system is not merely political or moral but strictly ontological. Every classification that claims to exhaust a person through her birth, her function, her ritual purity, or her collective belonging contradicts my understanding of singularity. No human being compears wholly as an instance of a class. The person always exceeds the determinations that make it possible to recognize her historically. She does not exist without them, but she does not coincide with them either. Wherever a tradition turns a sedimented difference into metaphysical destiny, it ceases to safeguard compearance and begins to obstruct it.

The Tantric traditions and Kashmiri Śaivism raise another kind of proximity. What interests me in them is the refusal to reduce the body, desire, perception, and matter to mere obstacles to liberation. Consciousness would not have to flee from manifestation but recognize itself in the very intensity with which the world appears. The body can function as a site of revelation. Gesture, breath, energy, image, and sound can acquire a philosophical dignity that many Western spiritualities have denied them. This incarnational orientation is far closer to me than any asceticism grounded in contempt for the flesh.

The notion of spanda, too, the originary vibration or pulsation of reality in certain formulations of non-dual Kashmiri Śaivism, possesses an evident closeness to my musical sensibility. It allows reality to be thought not as motionless substance but as tension, pulse, manifestation, and inner movement. Being would not first be complete and only afterward express itself outwardly; rather, it would exist precisely as a capacity for manifestation. However, my reservation about unity reappears. If every difference is ultimately understood as the self-recognition of a single absolute consciousness, otherness risks becoming an internal theater of the same. I need the other to be truly other, for his appearing to be able to surprise and wound me because he is not simply a forgotten modality of my own expanded consciousness. Without real exteriority there is no call, and without a call there is no response.

The image of līlā, the divine play through which the absolute manifests itself in multiplicity, strikes me as poetically powerful but ontologically dangerous. It can free the world from a mechanistic gravity and remind us that creation contains gratuitousness, excess, invention, and dance. But it can also turn suffering into a scene of a totality playing with itself. I cannot look at the death of a person, the destruction of a community, or the pain of a child as episodes of a cosmic performance whose ultimate unity justifies them. Tragedy is not an appearance caused by our limited perspective. It is an irreducible dimension of existence. No view from the Whole holds the right to declare that the wound was, in the last instance, play.

Something similar happens with yoga. If by yoga is meant a discipline of attention, breath, posture, recollection, and embodied knowledge of one's own inertias, I find in it resources of enormous value. Ordinary consciousness lives dispersed, automated, and captured by habits that prevent it from receiving what compears. The body can learn to listen, to abandon unnecessary tensions, and to acquire a finer availability. In this sense, certain yogic practices could dialogue fruitfully with my musical pedagogy, provided they do not become a technique for controlling the body or an engineering of inner states.

My distance begins when yoga is understood as a guaranteed itinerary toward a higher consciousness, as a technique for the definitive separation between the pure witness and the world, or as a procedure for mastering the mind, breath, and energy. I am not interested in an invulnerable consciousness that contemplates without being affected. My whole ontology is born of exposure. To know does not mean withdrawing toward an intact witness, but letting oneself be reached without being destroyed by what arrives. Attention should not make us immune to the world but more capable of responding to it. A practice that eliminates trembling may produce equilibrium, but it may have lost precisely what made music, love, and compassion possible.

My general relation to Hinduism can be summed up, then, in a double proximity. I am deeply drawn to its vocal and ritual understanding of the word, the priority of listening, the critique of the sovereign ego, the dignity granted to the body in some of its currents, the centrality of devotional song, the intuition that reality radically overflows our representations, and the multiplicity of paths by which an existence tries to orient itself toward what exceeds it. I part ways with it wherever singularity is subordinated to a universal consciousness, where the phenomenal world loses ontological density, where the wound is considered an effect of ignorance, where the social order is sacralized as eternal dharma, or where liberation is understood as a definitive exit from biography, memory, and the face.

I am not, therefore, a Hindu or an Advaitin, but neither do I consider Hinduism an entirely alien spirituality. In certain of its regions I recognize questions that are also my own, namely, how to become dispossessed without disappearing, how to listen to what precedes the subject, how to make the word a presence rather than an inert sign, how to inhabit the body without being reduced to it, how to love without possessing, and how to allow the absolute to compear in the finite without turning the finite into illusion. My answer, however, remains more tragic and more personalist. I do not seek to wake up from the world, but to wake up to the world. I do not try to understand singularity as a mask of unity, but to safeguard it as the unrepeatable place where something can truly appear.

My relation to Jainism requires separate consideration, because it cannot be reduced to an ascetic variant of Hinduism, nor confused with Buddhism, although it shares with both the cultural horizon of ancient India, the problem of karma, the critique of violence, and the search for liberation. Jainism develops an extraordinarily rigorous, even harsh, ontology, based on the irreducible plurality of living beings, on the objective reality of their differences, and on the conviction that all existence is bound to every other existence through an almost inconceivably delicate network of actions, affections, and consequences. There is in it no sovereign creator who produces the world from outside, nor an absolute consciousness into which singularities end up dissolving. The universe does not constitute the emanation of a One, nor the unfolding of a Spirit that ends up recognizing itself. It is formed by a beginningless multiplicity of irreducible substances and lives. Only through this resistance to both creator-theism and metaphysical monism does Jainism deserve, in my view, a far greater attention than it is usually granted in Western simplifications of the religions of India.

Its refusal to reduce all truth to a single perspective feels especially close to me. The doctrine of anekāntavāda, the non-one-sidedness or multiplicity of aspects of the real, holds that no finite statement can exhaust that of which it speaks. Every thing possesses a complexity that exceeds the point of view from which we consider it. This is not simply to say that everyone has their own opinion, nor to fall into a relativism where every proposition is interchangeable. It is to recognize that reality is ontologically richer than any of the partial forms through which it compears before us. A statement can be true under a certain respect and yet become false when it claims to present itself as the absolute description of that which it has reached only from a given perspective. In this discipline of partiality I recognize an evident affinity with my own conviction that what compears is never exhausted in its compearing.

Syādvāda, with its insistence that every affirmation should be qualified by "from a certain perspective," strikes me as one of the historically most rigorous forms of ontological prudence. To say that something is, that it is not, that it both is and is not under different aspects, or that it is somehow indescribable, does not mean celebrating contradiction for its own sake or renouncing judgment, but preventing a limited perspective from claiming sovereignty over the whole. Nayavāda, too, the doctrine of partial viewpoints, reminds us that knowing always consists in approaching from a determined orientation, scale, purpose, and relation. No human gaze contemplates the totality from nowhere. All true knowledge is situated, but the fact that it is situated does not make it arbitrary. This combination of realism and modesty feels deeply kindred to me. The landscape exists, but no one can contemplate it simultaneously from all its paths, all its heights, all its seasons, and all the memories that have inhabited it.

However, my closeness is not complete. Jainism organizes that plurality by means of an extremely precise ontological architecture. It distinguishes between jīva and ajīva, between living beings endowed with consciousness and non-living realities. It classifies souls according to their sensory faculties, their degrees of mobility, and their forms of existence. It describes karma not only as moral consequence or narrative structure of action, but as a kind of subtle matter that adheres to the soul and obscures its knowledge. I understand the intention to preserve the effective reality of every act and to show that no action disappears without leaving a trace. This is close to my conviction that every gesture modifies the world and that a human presence is never ontologically indifferent. But I part ways when that intuition turns into an exhaustive spiritual physics, into an overly precise description of the invisible mechanism by which karmic particles enter, accumulate, ripen, and must be eliminated. Once again my old reservation appears: the symbol retains its power while it makes a dimension of experience visible, but it begins to close it off when it turns into an objective cartography of that which no human experience can fully verify.

Jain ahimsā is probably its most admirable demand, and also one of the ones that most interpellates me. In no other great religious tradition has nonviolence been thought with such ontological radicality. It is not limited to prohibiting murder or recommending benevolence toward human beings. It proceeds from the conviction that all life, even the smallest, contains a center of sensitivity of its own and an orientation toward its own persistence. Violence is then not merely a moral infraction against an external norm but an incapacity to perceive the living otherness of what we harm. In this sense, ahimsā can be read as a pedagogy of compearance, that is, learning to see that where the utilitarian gaze perceives only available matter there exists a form of life that does not coincide with the function we assign to it. Every creature exceeds its availability to us.

That sensitivity toward minimal lives powerfully corrects anthropocentrism understood as human sovereignty over the world. But it does not oblige, in my judgment, a fall into anantropism, nor a denial of the singularity of human existence. I can recognize that animals, plants, and the most elementary forms of life possess an otherness of their own without concluding that every difference between them and us is morally or ontologically irrelevant. My anthropology is strong precisely because it is embodied and relational, not because it turns the nonhuman into a mere instrument. The human being is not the only being that compears, but is the one for whom compearance can become conscious responsibility, narrative memory, promise, interpretation, mourning, and song. Human dignity does not require denying the dignity of other lives. It requires responding in a specifically human way to their vulnerability.

Aparigraha, non-possession or detachment from things, likewise contains a critique I consider indispensable in a civilization organized around accumulation. To possess does not mean merely to have juridical disposal over an object. It often means reducing what appears to the function it fulfills within my project. The desire to possess turns the world into inventory and the other into a resource, confirmation, audience, affective property, or instrument of recognition. On this point Jainism touches directly the heart of my ontology, that is, what truly compears cannot be possessed without being destroyed in its own way of appearing. A melody stops being alive when we believe we have fixed it definitively. A person stops compearing when we replace her with the representation we have fabricated of her. A tradition dies when it stops being conversation and becomes a heritage guarded like a thing.

But neither can I accept that the solution consists in progressively reducing every relation with the world until reaching an ascetic invulnerability. The dispossession I seek is not equivalent to indifference or to the cooling of bonds. I do not want to stop loving in order to avoid the suffering of loss, nor to stop acting in order to prevent all consequence, nor to withdraw the body from the world to keep consciousness uncontaminated. My thought is too bound to the risk of incarnation. To love means to be exposed. To teach means to intervene. To interpret means to affect and to be affected. To live inevitably means leaving traces that no purity can entirely eliminate. An ethics of attention must diminish violence, but it cannot promise an existence without involvement, because every embodied existence participates, alters, consumes, wounds involuntarily, and needs to be nourished by other forms of life. Responsibility begins precisely where absolute innocence is recognized as impossible.

This is why my greatest distance from Jainism appears before its ideal of liberation. The liberated soul, finally freed of all karmic matter, attains kevala-jñāna, perfect knowledge, and remains free of all affection, action, birth, and suffering. I understand the grandeur of a discipline that refuses to accept the automatism of desire and violence. But a consciousness completely freed from affection, from dependence, from temporality, and from relation ceases to seem to me a culmination of existence and begins to seem its withdrawal. My ontology does not aspire for singularity to become pure, self-sufficient, and invulnerable. Singularity compears precisely because it is exposed, because it needs, because it can be wounded, and because it is never wholly possessed. A life without attachment may be freer, but a life without the possibility of being affected would no longer be, for me, a fully human life.

The figure of the tīrthaṅkara interests me when understood as one who opens a ford, a passage across the current, and not as a savior who substitutes for others' responsibility. There is beauty in that image, namely, the master does not carry the disciple to the other shore but shows that there exists a place through which to cross. Here too I find an affinity with my idea of teaching. The true master does not manufacture the student's transformation nor possess the path he points to. He makes a possibility visible, offers an orientation, lends his voice temporarily, and must withdraw so that the other can respond from his own singularity. But my path does not lead out of the current. I do not seek to cross the world to reach a motionless shore, but to learn to inhabit its movement without becoming its master.

Even extreme practices such as sallekhana, the voluntary and ritual reduction of food intake as death approaches, reveal with special intensity both the grandeur and the danger of this horizon. I can understand it, within its context, as an attempt to receive death without panic, without possessiveness, and without narcissistic rebellion against finitude. But my sensibility remains far from any form of spiritual perfection that might measure its purity by the degree of withdrawal from the body. The dying body is not a residue that consciousness should abandon with impeccable detachment. It is still presence, relation, face, need for care, and possibility of farewell. I am not interested in a death that demonstrates the spirit's mastery over the flesh, but in a death in which fragility itself can be accompanied without being turned into failure.

My relation to Jainism can be condensed, then, into an epistemological and ethical proximity accompanied by a fundamental soteriological distance. I find extraordinarily close its perspectival pluralism, its refusal to identify a partial view with the totality, its sensitivity toward every form of life, its critique of possession, and its understanding that every action leaves a trace. I part ways with it wherever liberation is oriented toward the complete purification of the soul, the extinction of all karmic implication, and the attainment of a consciousness finally inaccessible to the wound. Jainism wants to free life from that which binds it to suffering, but I try to think that some of those bonds (memory, love, dependence, mourning, and exposure) are not merely chains but also the conditions under which an existence can come to compear as singular and unrepeatable.

I am not, therefore, a Jain, but I find in Jainism one of the most demanding corrections to any ontology that confuses appearing with availability. Its doctrine of non-one-sidedness reminds us that no formulation possesses the world. Its nonviolence reminds us that no life is exhausted in the use we make of it. Its non-possession reminds us that what we love ceases to appear when we try to appropriate it completely. My answer, however, remains again more tragic and more embodied. I do not seek the purity of a consciousness that no longer wounds and can no longer be wounded, but the responsibility of an existence that, knowing it will never be entirely innocent, tries to diminish violence, repair what can be repaired, and remain open to the otherness of what compears.

My relation to Sikhism is different and, in some ways, surprisingly more immediate. Here too it is worth avoiding reduction. Sikhism is not a conciliatory blend of Hinduism and Islam, nor a syncretic spirituality comfortably situated between the two. It is born in a context marked by both universes, dialogues with vocabularies drawn from them, and gathers voices of diverse origins in its sacred text, the Guru Granth Sahib, but it develops its own religious orientation, its own historical memory, its own community, and its own specific way of articulating the relation among name, song, work, equality, service, justice, and divine presence.

The affirmation Ik Oṅkār interests me where it does not function as a metaphysical formula absorbing multiplicity, but as a de-absolutization of every finite power. Ultimate reality is one, but it cannot be appropriated by a caste, an image, an institution, a nation, or a group of initiates. The One belongs to no one. That affirmation has a critical force that feels deeply akin to me. If the absolute belongs to no group, every human claim to administer it is radically relativized. Unity should not serve to erase differences but to prevent any of them from turning into totality.

My reservation reappears, however, before any reading in which that unity ends up ontologically subordinating plurality. My thought needs every face to possess an unrepeatability that cannot be entirely explained as the expression of a single ground. But Sikhism, at least in many of its central articulations, maintains a tension I find fruitful, namely, that divine unity does not necessarily lead to flight from the world or to the dissolution of the person, but to a more intense form of responsibility within common life. The relation with the One must be verified in the way the many are treated. Transcendence that does not become service risks being a refined form of spiritual narcissism.

The notion of nām, the Name, feels especially close to me. The Name does not function merely as the conceptual label of a transcendent entity, but as presence remembered, invoked, sung, and embodied in a form of life. Nām simran, the remembrance or recollection of the Name, can be understood as a discipline against forgetting and against the dispersion of the self. But what interests me is that this memory does not remain only in interiority. It becomes voice, repetition, song, and community. Religious knowledge is not separated from breath or from listening. Here a direct kinship with my idea of melos reappears, that is, truth is not merely affirmed, it is intoned, sustained in time, and gathers bodies that breathe together.

The centrality of kīrtan and of the rāgas in the Guru Granth Sahib, Sikhism's sacred book, strikes me as philosophically of the greatest importance. The text is not merely a semantic deposit. Its hymns are linked to melodic modes that orient their affective temperature, their temporality, and their manner of being received. Music does not externally illustrate an already complete doctrine. It forms part of the revelation of its meaning. The verse compears as sung word, and the chant does not constitute an ornament but a bodily hermeneutics. This inseparability between lexis and melos comes extraordinarily close to what I am trying to think. A truth whose vocality could be removed without loss would not yet have fully compeared.

I am also drawn to the Sikh refusal to sharply separate spiritual life and ordinary life. The figure of the householder possesses a dignity that many ascetic traditions reserve solely for the renunciant. Liberation does not require abandoning work, family, community, or the shared world. It is sought within them, through remembrance, honesty, service, and justice. This embodied orientation converges with my rejection of every salvation understood as evasion of the human condition. I do not desire a spirituality that withdraws me from the world, but a form of attention that allows me to inhabit it with greater responsibility.

The principles associated with kirat karo (working honestly), vand chhako (sharing what one has received), and nām japo (remembering the Name) contain an articulation among interiority, work, and community that I find far more convincing than any spirituality centered exclusively on elevated states of consciousness. The truth of a religious experience is not verified by its extraordinary character but by the form of presence it makes possible. A supposedly enlightened consciousness that does not transform one's relation to hunger, inequality, work, humiliation, and others' suffering seems to me ontologically empty. The langar, the open and shared communal meal, represents in this sense a powerful intuition, namely, that equality must not remain proclaimed as a concept but must become table, food, bodily proximity, and the concrete suspension of hierarchies.

There is in this a profound affinity with my understanding of incarnation. A truth that does not reach gesture, body, and the material form of community remains incomplete—not because social action exhausts the Mystery, but because what cannot become presence risks turning into ideology. The langar does not exhaustively define equality; it makes it precariously compear in a practice. That difference between defining and making appear is exactly the one that runs through my whole ontology.

I am likewise drawn to the Sikh critique of castes and ritual privileges, at least as a central normative orientation, even though every historical community can betray its own intuitions. Wherever spiritual belonging is separated from birth, from inherited purity, and from the monopoly of a priestly elite, there appears a defense of human singularity that I recognize as my own. No social origin holds the right to exhaust a person's dignity. No institutional mediation can entirely substitute for the living relation with that which calls.

The figure of the gurū, however, requires a precision. It attracts me when the master does not present himself as the owner of a hidden power, nor as a charismatic individual whose psychology must be obeyed, but as a site of transmission, orientation, and word. The evolution from the historical Gurus toward the Guru Granth Sahib and the community avoids, at least in principle, authority remaining indefinitely concentrated in a living individual turned into an object of cult. The true master should not produce dependence on his person but should open a relation with the truth that exceeds him. This coincides with my idea of teaching, namely, that the master is not the origin of what he teaches nor the owner of compearance. He lends his body, his experience, and his voice so that something can appear before another, and he must know how to withdraw so as not to occupy the place of what he helped reveal.

At the same time, I cannot accept any understanding of the gurū, of the text, or of the community that turns orientation into unquestionable obedience. Transmission needs authority, but an authority that cannot be questioned ceases to transmit and begins to possess. Fidelity does not consist in renouncing interpretation but in responding responsibly to a received word. Here too, truth inaugurates a conversation rather than ending one.

The Sikh history of resistance, persecution, martyrdom, and communal organization further introduces a dimension I find important, namely, that spirituality is not reduced to pacified interiority. The figure of the saint-soldier, sant-sipāhī, expresses the attempt to keep recollection and public responsibility, contemplation and the defense of those who suffer, united. I am drawn to that refusal to choose between a spiritual purity withdrawn from the world and a political action emptied of inner depth. However, every sacralization of struggle also contains a danger. The defense of dignity can become a closed militant identity, and the memory of persecution can harden into a permanent legitimation of antagonism. The wound must be remembered without allowing it to transform into absolute moral sovereignty.

My relation to Sikhism could thus be condensed as follows: I find profoundly akin its union of word and song, its conception of remembrance as a form of presence, its rejection of inherited spiritual privilege, its dignifying of family life and work, its insistence that truth must be embodied as service, and its resistance to separating interiority from historical responsibility. I part ways with it wherever unity might become an absorption of difference, wherever communal identity closes in on itself, or wherever fidelity to the gurū, to the text, or to historical memory ceases to admit interrogation.

Among the great religious traditions, Sikhism contains perhaps one of the articulations closest to my own sensibility among melos, incarnation, and community. The word is sung. The song gathers. The gathering shares food. The food makes visible an equality that no concept alone guarantees. Transcendence does not then compear as a higher world one must ascend to, but as a transformation of the manner of being together. This does not eliminate my ontological reservations, but it places Sikhism much closer to me than spiritualities of evasion, of pure consciousness, or of enlightenment understood as an interior privilege.

If I had to complete the map now, I would say that from Hinduism what is close to me is the originary listening of śruti, the word that becomes sonorous presence, the critique of the sovereignty of the ego, the intensity of bhakti, the dignity of the body in certain Tantric traditions, and the intuition that the absolute fits into no representation. I part ways with it when singularity becomes appearance, when the world loses density before a truer reality, when suffering is explained away by ignorance or karma, when the social order is metaphysically naturalized, or when liberation promises to overcome biography. From Sikhism, what is especially close to me is the inseparability of word, rāga, and song, the remembrance of the Name, embodied work, service, the shared table, the critique of castes, and the conviction that spirituality must become justice and community. I part ways where unity, authority, or collective memory risk closing off singularity and interpretation.

Nor do I seek in these traditions a synthesis that completes what is lacking in Christianity. I do not believe that Hinduism supplies the metaphysics, Buddhism the psychology, Islam the transcendence, Judaism the memory, Sikhism the community, and Christianity the incarnation, as if religions were complementary pieces of a universal philosophy I could assemble from outside. Such an operation would be an intellectual violence and an especially refined form of spiritual colonialism. Each tradition organizes irreducibly what it hears, what it remembers, what it awaits, and what it responds to.

What I find in all of them is not an identical doctrine but a demand directed also against my own thought, namely, not to reduce compearance to the forms my biography knows how to recognize. The Mystery, if the word still retains any sense, would have no reason to present itself only within the Christian, phenomenological, European, or personalist grammar that has formed me. But opening oneself to other traditions does not mean declaring that they all say the same thing either. It means accepting a more difficult plurality, that is, that real truths can appear, even incompatible ones, without there being a panoramic position from which to reconcile them definitively.

My dialogue with Hinduism and with Sikhism thus confirms the intuition that has run through this whole essay. Truth can compear as listening, as song, as love, as discipline, as service, as memory, as a shared table, or as dispossession of the ego. But none of those forms holds the right to declare itself exhaustive. Wherever unity annuls voices, where liberation erases biography, where the master substitutes for the response, where ritual claims necessarily to produce presence, or where a tradition turns its orientation into a total cartography of the real, I withdraw again. My place remains in inhabited distance, that is, close enough to listen and far enough not to confuse fidelity with possession.

XX. Chesterton, Tolkien (1892 - 1973), and Tragic Humanism

That same inhabited distance, close enough to listen and far enough not to confuse fidelity with possession, also defines my relation to other authors from whom I descend or whom I cross without ever fully agreeing.

From others I proceed, or I cross paths with them without coinciding, and it is worth saying so with the responsibility of judgment, without indiscriminate enthusiasm. Jacques Maritain (1882 - 1973) is closer than I sometimes think, for his defense of the dignity of the person, his critique of positivism, his rejection of reductionism, his love of art, his defense of the inner life, and farther than some friends believe, because he continues to trust in a relatively stable and articulable metaphysics, and his word is being, while mine is compearance, so that what exists between us is anthropological sympathy and ontological distance.

G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936) I like for his wonder, his paradox, his defense of the human, his critique of mechanism, but he is entirely foreign to me for his almost childlike confidence in the order of the world, for that fundamental metaphysical joy that makes the cosmos, for him, smile in the end—something I am not so sure of, because I am more tragic, more wounded, closer to Unamuno, to Weil, to Paul Celan (1920 - 1970). And yet I owe him a lesson in method: that paradox is not an ornament but an instrument of knowledge, that sometimes it is only through the edge of a well-turned contradiction that light gets in.

C. S. Lewis (1898 - 1963) feels close to me for his ability to defend the rational and imaginative density of Christianity without reducing it to a doctrine for specialists. I share his rejection of reductive materialism, his conviction that human desire contains an orientation that cannot be entirely explained as biological adaptation, and his extraordinary understanding of imagination as an organ of knowledge. In him, myth is not a childish falsehood set against the concept, but a form through which a truth can become experience before turning into proposition. This feels profoundly kindred to me. I also admire his way of showing that modern reason depends on moral, anthropological, and metaphysical assumptions it cannot justify simply by appealing to natural facts.

But Lewis retains an apologetic confidence I do not share. His arguments tend to organize themselves toward a relatively defined Christian conclusion, and my thought always stops short of that closure. I find his idea of desire fertile, but I do not believe that every profound desire guarantees the existence of a corresponding transcendent object. I am interested in his defense of a moral law not reducible to preference, but I am wary of turning the experience of value into proof of a legislator. Moreover, his Christian imagination sometimes possesses a clarity too reconciled, a confidence too firm that the pieces will end up falling into place within a providential narrative. I am closer to his grief in A Grief Observed, where experience breaks apologetic certainty and forces language to tremble, than to the Lewis who systematically orders the alternatives to lead the reader to an answer. The wounded Lewis feels truer to me than the defender Lewis, because there faith ceases to function as explanation and becomes exposition once again.

J. R. R. Tolkien strikes me, in some respects, as even closer to me than Lewis, precisely because his Christianity compears less as argument and more as a form of world. He does not construct a doctrine first and then dress it in myth afterward; instead he lets an ontology become landscape, language, genealogy, music, loss, tree, journey, and memory. His idea of subcreation interests me deeply. The artist does not create from nothing, nor compete with a prior creation, but receives languages, materials, rhythms, and forms, and responds to them by making appear a world that did not exist before that response. This structure comes extraordinarily close to my conception of interpretation. The performer, too, is neither an absolute creator nor a passive executor, but receives a trace and turns it into presence through a freedom that does not erase its provenance.

I am likewise drawn to the temporal density of Middle-earth. Nothing compears without strata of memory. The landscapes hold ruins, the names contain vanished languages, the songs remember kingdoms that no longer exist, and every victory arrives too late to restore fully what was lost. In Tolkien, the good does not triumph through a total recovery of the world. Even after Sauron's defeat, Frodo cannot fully inhabit the saved Shire. The wound remains. That impossibility of returning home intact places Tolkien much closer to a tragic ontology than his reputation as a consoling writer would allow.

The eucatastrophe, however, introduces a difference. Tolkien understands that at the moment of deepest darkness an unexpected reversal can occur, one that does not annul the suffering but opens a joy that no foresight could have manufactured. I am very interested in that structure, because grace, understood non-dogmatically, likewise names what arrives without necessarily following from our calculations. But I resist turning the eucatastrophe into a metaphysical guarantee that every deep story secretly contains a redemptive ending. Some stories end without return, without recognition, and without sufficient repair. Hope must not falsify the dead.

I likewise feel close to his critique of the Machine, understood not only as technology but as the desire to dominate matter, to accelerate processes, and to replace the organic form of growth with the imposition of a will. Saruman is not evil simply because he uses instruments, but because he no longer knows how to receive anything he cannot control, reproduce, and order. Here Tolkien touches directly on my critique of technique, of industrial pedagogy, of the conservatory, and of interpretation turned into standardized production. Technique becomes Machine when it stops serving a compearance and instead demands that everything that appears take the shape of its own procedure.

Tolkien accompanies me, then, as a poet of provenance, of loss, of friendship, of the value of the small, of resistance to domination, and of a hope that arrives in unforeseeable forms. I part from him only where his Christian universe retains an ultimate providence capable of guaranteeing that no true fidelity is ever wholly lost. I possess no such assurance. But I recognize as my own his deepest intuition, namely that the world deserves to be cared for not because it will last forever, but precisely because it is disappearing even as we love it.

Emmanuel Mounier (1905 – 1950) occupies a far more important place in my intellectual horizon than may be apparent at first glance. My debt to him is considerable. I feel profoundly close to him for his simultaneous rejection of liberal individualism and of the collectivism that dissolves the person into the mass, for his early critique of technocracy, of reification, and of every form of social organization that ends up treating the human being as a function or a mechanism, and for having placed at the center the concrete, unrepeatable, embodied person, understood not as a self-sufficient individual but as a being called to encounter, to commitment, to responsibility, and to community. I also share his conviction that philosophical truth cannot be separated from a particular way of living and responding to the world, and that thinking is never a purely speculative activity but a form of presence and fidelity.

And yet that is precisely where our difference also begins. Mounier develops a philosophy whose center of gravity remains the person and its communal realization, with a constant concern for the social, political, and historical implications of that vision. I, by contrast, try to place myself one step further back, or perhaps one stratum further down. My center is not community but compearance: not the person as first principle, but the very event by which the person, the other, the world, and even community come to make themselves present. Where Mounier asks how a person must live in order fully to realize their vocation, my prior question is what it means for something or someone to compear at all, and under what conditions it can do so without being reduced to an object. In that sense one might say that he elaborates a personalist ontology, whereas I try to think an ontology of compearance from which the person acquires precisely the whole of its dignity, not by constituting the ultimate foundation of the real, but by being one of the privileged sites where being occurs as presence, call, and response.

José Luis López Aranguren (1909 - 1996) belongs to another region of my genealogy, namely that of a moral thought that knows itself to be inevitably embodied in a character, a biography, a set of institutions, and a society. I feel close to his distinction between morality as structure and morality as content. The human being cannot not be moral, because he must always respond in some way to the possibilities that open before him, even though the concrete contents of that response are historical, debatable, and changeable. This priority of the structure of response over the catalogue of norms converges with my own ontology. We are not subjects who first exist neutrally and only afterward decide whether to commit ourselves; we are already exposed, concerned, and obliged to answer for the way we inhabit the world.

I am also interested in his attention to talante, to êthos as a way of being, and his critique of a morality reduced to outward compliance. Ethical life is not exhausted by executing correct rules, because two outwardly identical acts can be born of radically different forms of attention, fear, generosity, resentment, or love. Here Aranguren helps to think the difference between living ceremony and ceremonial correctness, between embodied tradition and formal obedience. His horizon, however, remains more bound than mine to civic ethics, to social critique, and to the political articulation of morality. I try to descend still further, toward the event by which something comes to concern us before it turns into moral judgment.

My humanism is born precisely in that prior region. I call myself a humanist not because I consider the human being the sovereign measure of all things, nor because I deny the dignity of the nonhuman, but because I know no other place from which meaning, responsibility, promise, mourning, justice, music, or love can compear for us. Every attempt to speak from the point of view of the cosmos, of nature in itself, or of a purely objective intelligence ends up being uttered by a human voice that has forgotten its own situation. My anthropism does not make man the owner of the real. It recognizes him as a being exposed to a reality he does not fabricate and to which, nonetheless, he must respond.

But my humanism is tragic. It does not believe in an indefinite perfectibility of the species, in a final reconciliation of history, or in the technical elimination of suffering, conflict, and loss. To be human means to find oneself traversed by incompatible goods, by responsibilities that cannot be fulfilled simultaneously, by loves that make us vulnerable, and by decisions that leave irreparable remainders. Tragedy does not appear when a solution is missing that a superior intelligence might find; it appears when the very structure of the situation makes it impossible to save everything. No education, revolution, therapy, or scientific progress will ever fully abolish that condition.

For this reason my hope must be distinguished from optimism. Optimism trusts in a favorable outcome, in an objective tendency of history, nature, or consciousness toward integration. The hope I can sustain has no such guarantee. It is a hope without optimism, that is, the decision to respond, to care, to create, to teach, to love, and to repair, even knowing that nothing assures victory and that part of what is lost will not return. The optimist hopes because he believes he knows the course of the world. The one who hopes, by contrast, acts without possessing it. That hope is more fragile, and precisely for that reason more ethical. It does not turn the wound into a phase of a process, but neither does it allow the wound to become an argument for sterility.

My tragic humanism does not promise to save man from his finitude. It tries to save finitude from the doctrines that regard it as an error to be overcome. The mortal body, partial memory, exposed love, the voice that can break, and the work that never reaches its definitive form are not accidental flaws in some more perfect essence. They are the conditions within which something can compear as unrepeatable. Hope does not consist in leaving those conditions behind, but in managing, within them, still to make presence, responsibility, and song possible.

This defense of singularity obliges me to clarify my relation to utilitarianism and to some of the most influential Anglophone moral philosophers of recent decades. Peter Singer (1946) earns my considerable respect for having widened the circle of moral consideration beyond the self-satisfied habits of our species, for forcing us to look at animal suffering, extreme poverty, and the real consequences of our everyday decisions. His thought interrupts a purely identitarian morality in which it suffices to consider oneself a good person while one's own way of life rests on avoidable harm. I also share his suspicion of dignity used as a solemn word that changes no practice.

My break comes when suffering, preference, or well-being becomes the fundamental metric by which to compare lives, decisions, and losses. No quantity of aggregate well-being can substitute for the singularity of the one sacrificed to produce it. Not because consequences lack importance, it would be morally absurd to deny that, but because a person does not compear as an interchangeable receptacle of positive and negative states. A mother does not lose "one especially intense unit of well-being" when her child dies. She loses that face, that story, that voice, and that irreplaceable future. Ethics needs to count, but there are truths that vanish the moment they are only counted.

Derek Parfit (1942 - 2017) is a more complex and closer case. His critique of a personal identity understood as an indivisible, permanent substance partly coincides with my rejection of the sovereign self. He is right to show that psychological continuity, memory, intentions, and relationships can matter more than the postulation of a simple metaphysical core. His impartial concern for future generations, too, responsibly widens the moral horizon. But his reduction of identity to relations of continuity and connectedness risks making too weak the embodied unrepeatability of a person. That there is no separate substantial soul does not mean a life can be replaced by a psychologically continuous copy. The lived body, provenance, concrete relation, and shared history are not accidental supports of some transferable personal information.

My ontology accepts that the self is not a thing, but it does not conclude that the self is "less deep" than we believe. It is deep in another way, namely as embodied event, vulnerable narration, received memory, and a node of relations that can never be reproduced exactly. Identity is neither a closed substance nor a mere functional bundle. It is a temporal form of compearance whose continuity depends as much on what I remember as on who remembers me, on the promises I have made, on the places I recognize, and on the bodies before which I answer.

Susan Wolf (1952) strikes me as especially close in her critique of a morality that colonizes the whole of life. Her figure of the "moral saint" shows that an existence devoted exclusively to maximizing moral good could lose humor, art, friendship, style, curiosity, play, and those concrete partialities without which a life ceases to be human. This objection touches directly on my own resistance to turning ethics into total administration. We do not live only to produce the best state of the world. We also live to love people not because they are the most needy, to play a piece of music not because it maximizes utility, to care for a minority language, to remember our dead, and to carry out activities whose value cannot be justified before an impartial calculus.

That does not mean partiality is morally absolved simply by being affectively intense. Love for one's own can turn into indifference toward others, and an artistic vocation can function as a narcissistic excuse. But an ethics that demanded justifying every hour according to its maximal contribution to well-being would abolish the very texture from which anything can matter to us. Morality needs internal limits so as not to destroy the goods it claimed to protect. The good life is not the morally optimized life, but a life in which responsibility, love, creation, loyalty, rest, beauty, and attention can enter into tensions that no single metric resolves.

My distance from utilitarianism thus reproduces my distance from theodicies and from historical systems. In all three cases, the totality risks justifying a concrete loss by means of an aggregate or future good. I do not accept that a wound becomes morally innocent because it increased the final sum of well-being, any more than I accept that it is redeemed by the progress of Spirit or by a providential plan. Consequences matter, but no total perspective has the right to make the face substitutable. This defense of singularity does not lead me, however, toward a classical liberal individualism either. Hence my interest in Roberto Mangabeira Unger and in conceptions that try to think social transformation without turning the person into a function of a structure.

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 - 1986) shares with me the critique of authority and of tradition turned into system, and parts from me because he wants to empty and I want to embody, he tends toward pure observation and consciousness without content, and I return always to memory, to melody, to friendship, to biography.

Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931) I admire more as a poet than as a philosopher, because his strength lies in image rather than conceptual precision, and although we share symbolism, love, spirituality, my thought is more tragic, more philosophical, more conflictive.

Ernst Tugendhat (1930 - 2023) is almost foreign to me, with his conceptual analysis, his language, his argumentative clarity, his analytic horizon closer to Frege and to Russell than to me.

But that distance from Tugendhat should not be confused with a general contempt for analytic philosophy, nor especially for its North American development. I owe it respect for a virtue that my own continental tradition too often forgets, namely the obligation to distinguish claims, to make inferences explicit, to define the scope of a thesis, and to allow a disagreement to be located without dissolving into rhetorical atmospheres. Clarity is not superficiality, just as obscurity does not guarantee depth. Many continental pages turn the fruitful indeterminacy of the phenomenon into simple verbal imprecision, and in such cases a well-formed analytic question can act as a discipline of honesty. Whoever claims that the Mystery cannot be closed is not thereby licensed to say just anything about it.

My distance begins when the analysis of language or of arguments presents itself as an exhaustive model of thought. A proposition can be perfectly clarified without the experience it tries to formulate having yet compeared. We can distinguish every sense of the word pain, reconstruct the truth conditions of a sentence about a loss, and analyze the reasons that justify a belief, and still not understand what it means for a particular voice to cease to exist. Not because the experience is irrational or immune to argument, but because its truth does not consist solely in the propositional content that can be extracted from it. Tone, body, situation, memory, and relation are not pragmatic accidents added to some more fundamental logical structure. They belong to the very way in which something comes to mean.

North American analytic philosophy interests me, then, where it retains a local modesty, that is, when it asks what follows from a premise, what a concept presupposes, what difference exists between two explanations, or what reasons we have for asserting something. It becomes foreign to me when it turns that tool into a tacit ontology and assumes that everything real must ultimately take the form of a proposition susceptible to public, decontextualized, stable evaluation. My objection is not to precision, but to the reduction of truth to what can be preserved after eliminating the voice that spoke it, the body that sustained it, the relation it was answering, and the irreversible time in which it appeared.

Even so, I need that tradition as a resistance against my own temptations. An ontology of compearance can easily turn into a private idiom, a conceptual music that persuades by resonance without shouldering the burden of demonstration. Analytic philosophy forces me to ask whether a distinction is real or merely stylistic, whether a new word names a phenomenon or conceals a confusion, and whether the refusal of closure does not sometimes function as protection against every possible objection. I do not want to choose between a precision without world and a world without precision. I need an argumentation capable of recognizing that not everything true presents itself as an argument, and a phenomenology willing to answer rationally for what it claims to have seen. Only from that double demand can my relation to the analytic philosophy of religion, and to its contemporary defenses of atheism, be understood.

Vilém Flusser (1920 - 1991) interests me for his critique of technique and of apparatuses, and remains secondary to me because he thinks above all about communication and media, while I think about presence and melos.

And with the Eastern traditions my relation is uneven, perhaps because I rarely find in them a global affinity, and instead find isolated intuitions of enormous depth. Zen touches me as a discipline of attention, as an exercise in dispossessing the inertias of the self, as a training in a less dominating way of looking at things. But as an ontology it feels very, very distant to me. Where I try to protect the irreducible singularity of what compears, Zen ends up oriented toward an experience in which dualities dissolve and differences cease to be decisive. My thought, on the contrary, lives precisely from them. Not because I want to absolutize them, but because I believe every compearance always occurs as difference, as distance, as interval, as a call that never fully coincides with itself. I have also always been struck by the scant importance many forms of Zen grant to symbol, metaphor, narrative, narrative memory, and the poetic word. My house, by contrast, is made precisely of symbols, images, music, language, and tradition. Not because I believe they can exhaust the mystery, but because they constitute the human way of remaining close to it without closing it off.

Laozi's Taoism feels somewhat closer to me. I deeply admire his distrust of the violence of will, his praise of non-imposition, of discretion, of the fecundity of what appears weak, and of paradox as a legitimate form of thought. When Laozi says that the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao, I nod with my whole body, because I too am suspicious of every word that claims to possess what made it possible. But when that ineffability finally issues into the harmony of the universal flow, into a reconciliation with the course of things, and into a certain cosmic continuity, that is where I stop. My thought is born less of continuity than of discontinuity, less of flow than of irruption, and less of serenity than of tremor. Where Taoism discovers balance, I discover wound, and where it finds the silent breathing of the cosmos, I find the fragile compearance of a singular being who appears and, precisely by appearing, can be lost. Its horizon is, to a great extent, cosmological. Mine remains obstinately anthropological.

Something similar happens with Vedānta. I have always been struck by the speculative power of its metaphysics and the radicalness with which it distinguishes between appearance and the absolute. Yet that is exactly where my distance begins. My ontology does not seek to pass through the phenomenal world in order to reach some truer reality situated behind or above it. Quite the opposite: it tries to show that compearance itself constitutes the place where being occurs. For me there is no ultimate plane whose perfection reduces the fragility of appearance to mere illusion. Appearance is not a veil to be lifted; it is the very place where truth can compear. That is also why I cannot share the ideal of liberation understood as the definitive overcoming of individuation. Singularity is not a prison to be escaped, but a condition of all possibility of encounter.

With Buddhism, in both its Theravāda and Mahāyāna forms, my affinity is again partial. I deeply admire its lucidity regarding suffering, desire, attachment, and the innumerable fictions with which the self tries to protect itself. Few traditions have described the instability of our existence with such precision. Yet the ultimate direction of that diagnosis does not coincide with mine. Where many Buddhist schools aspire to extinguish suffering through a radical transformation of the relation to desire and to the self, I do not try to extinguish suffering but to understand what it reveals ontologically. Suffering, loss, longing, love, joy, and death are not merely psychological afflictions from which one would do well to be freed; they constitute privileged modes of compearance. I do not want a consciousness that no longer trembles, but a consciousness capable of inhabiting the tremor without reducing it.

With Tibetan Buddhism my relation is even more ambivalent, because in it I find some of the Buddhist formulations closest to my sensibility and, at the same time, some of those that most clearly rouse my resistance. I feel profoundly close to its understanding of compassion as active responsibility toward another's suffering, to the figure of the bodhisattva who renounces a purely private liberation, to the centrality of oral transmission, of chant, of recitation, of ritual gesture, and of a symbolic imagination that does not treat images as mere ornaments of an abstract doctrine. I am also interested in the notion of the bardo, provided it is not reduced to a literal cartography of the afterlife, because it allows one to think existence as transit, threshold, and interval, not as a succession of solid states, but as a compearance continually threatened by transformation and loss. Even certain meditations on death, impermanence, and the dissolution of the self's false securities possess a tragic gravity absent from some Western vulgarizations of Buddhism as a mere technique of well-being. But I firmly part from it when that symbolic richness turns into an objective description of planes of existence, rebirths, subtle bodies, hierarchies of consciousness, and karmic mechanisms, when the mandala stops being a poetic and ritual form of orientation and becomes an exhaustive map of the real, or when the relation to the lama drifts toward an obedience that seems to suspend personal judgment and responsibility. I am also uneasy that the doctrine of emptiness, especially when vulgarized, may end up weakening the unrepeatable density of the person, of biography, of memory, and of loss. I can accept that no being possesses a self-sufficient essence and that all existence arises relationally, but I cannot accept that concrete singularity is ultimately a mirage that wisdom must see through. The sovereign self must be dispossessed, but the face must not disappear. That is why my affinity with Tibetan Buddhism lies closer to its embodied compassion, its vocal ritual, its attention to intermediate states, and its will to accompany suffering than to its ultimate soteriology. Where it invites one to remain alongside beings and to bear their vulnerability, I feel close. Where that vulnerability ends up explained as an effect of ignorance and destined to dissolve into a higher vision, I part ways again.

Nor do I feel close to Shinto or to Confucianism. From the former I admire the attention paid to places, gestures, nature, and everyday ritual. But its world remains too integrated into a cosmic order that never quite accounts for the constitutive fracture of human existence. From the latter I deeply respect its reflection on virtue, education, and responsibility, but I find in it an excessive confidence in order, cultural continuity, and the harmony of relations. My thought is born precisely where that order breaks and where every reconciliation proves premature.

The Western reception of these traditions already constitutes a problem distinct from the traditions themselves. India, China, or Buddhism were often received not in their historical density but through movements that selected elements, combined them with European occultism, and constructed universal systems of spiritual evolution. My following critique, therefore, is not directed against the Eastern religions, but against the way the West frequently turned them into esoteric cartographies adapted to its own desires.

XXI. What I Reject in Esotericism

That critique of the esoteric cartographies built in the West now demands saying with full precision what exactly I reject in esotericism when I meet it in its most explicit form.

For similar reasons I have never felt close to the Theosophy of Helena Blavatsky (1831 - 1891). Her immense edifice of occult correspondences, spiritual hierarchies, invisible planes, and esoteric syntheses gives me the impression of turning mystery into an explanatory system. My philosophical resistance has always run in exactly the opposite direction, namely to protect what compears against any theory that claims to possess it once and for all. Mystery ceases to be mystery the very instant it is transformed into cartography.

Annie Besant (1847 - 1933) strikes me as more interesting than many later figures of esotericism because her life cannot be reduced to Theosophy, she was a freethinker, a socialist, a feminist, an activist, a defender of India's autonomy, and a personality of enormous moral energy. I understand that an intelligence of that caliber would seek a vision capable of integrating justice, human evolution, religion, and universal brotherhood. But precisely in her transition toward Theosophy I find one of the temptations that most unsettles me, namely the need to turn a legitimate openness to mystery into an exhaustive cosmic history, with root races, masters, levels of evolution, and assigned spiritual functions. Her participation in the messianic construction around Krishnamurti further shows the danger of projecting onto a concrete person an architecture of expectations that ends up preventing that person from compearing outside the role the institution has prepared for him. Krishnamurti's later greatness consisted, in part, in breaking the spiritual character others had fabricated for him.

Richard Bach (1936) represents a very different spirituality, literary, light, characteristic of a culture in which flight, individual freedom, and the overcoming of limits become parables of self-realization. I can appreciate the poetic effectiveness of Jonathan Livingston Seagull or Illusions and the way they have awakened in many readers the desire not to reduce their lives to social obedience. But his universe tends to transform the resistance of the real into a pedagogy of consciousness, since limits appear as beliefs that a sufficiently awakened mind could pass through. My ontology cannot accept that softening. There are limits that do not stem from a perceptual error, and there are bodies that fall ill, dead who do not return, bonds that break, and wounds that no expansion of consciousness turns into illusion. Freedom does not consist in discovering that gravity was mental, but in responding creatively within a gravity we did not choose.

Neale Donald Walsch (1943), author of Conversations with God, represents even more clearly the transformation of revelation into a therapeutic voice perfectly adapted to contemporary individualism. The God who speaks in those books confirms the subject, relativizes judgment, harmonizes traditions, and offers consoling answers to almost every conflict. I understand its appeal, since it is a divinity without terror, without dogmatism, without condemnation, and apparently without institution. But precisely for that reason I am suspicious. A divine voice that coincides with such regularity with the psychological and moral needs of the one who receives it risks being the sacralized projection of an age. True alterity does not merely validate; it interrupts, contradicts, dislodges, and remains partially incomprehensible. I do not deny that a person can inwardly experience a transformative word. I deny that this experience licenses turning one's own inner voice into an objective conversation with the ground of the universe. Where revelation answers all our questions too well, I fear we have stopped listening and are hearing only the amplified echo of ourselves.

With Rudolf Steiner (1861 - 1925) and Anthroposophy my relation is considerably more ambivalent. I part from him where he constructs an extremely articulated spiritual cosmology, populated with entities, occult evolutions, and explanations that, by their very exhaustiveness, end up closing off appearing. Yet I find valuable intuitions in his profoundly embodied understanding of education, in his critique of the mechanization of modern culture, in the importance he grants to art as a form of knowledge, and in his insistence that learning cannot be reduced to the mere acquisition of information. There I do recognize an important affinity. I also share his conviction that imagination, symbol, rhythm, and aesthetic experience form a constitutive part of human development. But even on those points I distance myself from him, because those intuitions appear integrated into an esoteric metaphysics I cannot accept.

Something similar happens with Maria Montessori (1870 - 1952). I deeply admire her confidence in the dignity of the child, her respect for the proper rhythms of learning, her rejection of education based on coercion, and her intuition that knowledge is born of a bodily relation with the world before it is a matter of mere verbal transmission. All of this converges with many of my own pedagogical convictions. Yet I also believe Montessori retains a certain Enlightenment confidence in the spontaneous development of capacities, provided the environment is sufficiently prepared. My experience, especially in music, leads me to think that education does not consist solely in facilitating natural processes of growth, but also in introducing the student into a living tradition, demanding discipline of them, putting them in contact with works whose greatness they cannot yet grasp, and accompanying them in the discovery of what initially strikes them as strange. Education does not consist only in letting what is already inside flower, but also in letting oneself be transformed by what compears from outside. To learn is always to answer a call.

At bottom, all these differences answer to the same motive. I have never sought a philosophy that leads to perfect serenity, to definitive unity, to absolute transparency, or to reconciliation with the All. If there is one fidelity I try to keep, it is another one, namely to remain alongside the fragility of what compears without rushing to resolve it. Where many traditions ultimately seek peace, I go on seeking presence. Where they culminate in harmony, I go on listening to the tremor.

But the question of what forms a person also has its dark reverse side, not only what makes the other compear, but what prevents it.

The question of demons calls for a distinction similar to the one I have drawn between God and images of God. I do not find it easy to affirm the existence of incorporeal personal entities that causally intervene in the world, tempt individuals, or possess bodies. That demonological ontology, understood literally, raises problems I cannot resolve simply by appealing to a tradition's authority. Moreover, history shows the harm done when illnesses, psychic crises, bodily differences, dissociative experiences, or social conflicts have been interpreted as demonic possession and handed over to forms of ritual violence.

Yet rejecting that literalness does not mean the category of the demonic lacks truth. The demonic can name a form of negative presence that is not reducible to the sum of individual intentions. It appears when a structure created by human beings acquires a dynamic that in turn possesses them, when resentment, lies, cruelty, or humiliation organize themselves until they produce an atmosphere in which each participant ends up doing what, in isolation, he would have considered unthinkable. A crowd, an institution, an ideology, a family, or even an intimate relationship can acquire a demonic quality when they turn people into instruments and feed on the destruction they produce.

The demonic would then be neither a substance nor a clearly locatable being, but an anti-compearance, that is, the force by which something systematically prevents the other from appearing as other. Demonic is that which substitutes the face with a category, the voice with a file, the person with a function, or suffering with a datum useful to a cause. It is also the fascination that knows it destroys and yet promises intensity, purity, or power. Evil does not always compear as gray privation; it can possess a formal seductiveness, an energy, and a theatrical capacity that explain why mere moral information rarely suffices to fight it.

Precisely because I do not reduce the demonic to a literal creature, I am interested in contemporary authors who try to recover its symbolic intelligibility. The question is whether that recovery allows one to recognize real patterns of disintegration without reconstructing a closed demonology, or a hermeneutic capable of explaining any event before listening to it. Pageau (1976), and, at a much greater distance, Jay Dyer, should be situated within that frame.

Jonathan Pageau interests me because he recovers the intelligence of the symbol against the modern reading that treats religious narratives as simple cosmological errors. His insistence that symbolic patterns really organize experience, and that the opposition between above and below, center and periphery, order and chaos is not an arbitrary decoration, contains a valuable intuition. I also understand his effort to show that demons can name real patterns of disintegration, addiction, possession, and sacrifice, without always depending on a childish image of winged creatures circulating through physical space.

But I part from Pageau when the symbolic structure seems to acquire too closed an objectivity, and when the Orthodox tradition functions as the privileged key for interpreting practically any cultural phenomenon. The symbol then stops opening and begins exhaustively ordering. A symbolic ontology can correct materialism, but once turned into a universal system of patterns, it runs the same risk as the esotericism it claims to overcome. The world is not obliged to reproduce a single symbolic grammar.

My distance from Jay Dyer is greater. I can recognize his knowledge of theological debates, of patristics, of political philosophy, and of the historical relations between religion and power. I also understand his critique of liberalism, of naive secularism, and of a culture that believes itself free of metaphysics. But his tendency to interpret culture, geopolitics, entertainment, and institutions through networks of manipulation, covert operations, agendas, and ideological patterns can produce a hermeneutics of suspicion without limit. When everything confirms a prior plot, nothing can compear unexpectedly anymore. The theory becomes immune to the alterity of the event.

The chief demon of conspiratorial interpretation is perhaps exactly that, namely the inability to admit contingency, ambiguity, incompetence, mixture, or simple chance. Everything must have a hidden intention. The world ends up more systematic in the hands of the conspiracist than in those of the scholastic theologian. My thought needs to recognize real structures of power and manipulation, but also to preserve discontinuity, accident, and the incapacity of any intelligence to administer the totality. Evil exists, but it does not thereby constitute an omnipotent intelligence capable of ordering every sign.

And that suspicion returns me, from the other side, to a symmetrical temptation, namely that of those who, instead of seeing a hidden plot behind everything, believe they possess the secret map of the real.

Nor have I ever felt close to the world of modern occultism, of ceremonial magic, or of contemporary esotericism, represented by figures such as Aleister Crowley (1875 - 1947), Dion Fortune (1890 - 1946), Alice Bailey (1880 - 1949), or a good part of the innumerable currents descended from the New Age. My distance is not born of moral or religious rejection, but of a strictly ontological objection. In all of them I perceive the same will to turn mystery into available knowledge, transcendence into a map, compearance into a technique, and symbol into a secret code destined to be deciphered. Where I try to preserve the inexhaustibility of what compears, they offer hierarchies of invisible planes, cosmic genealogies, initiations, energies, hidden masters, and systems of correspondence that promise finally to explain that which precisely ceases to be true the instant we believe we have explained it. It has always seemed to me that modern esotericism does not protect mystery but administers it.

That is also why I do not share the fascination with spiritual power, with techniques of inner transformation understood as forms of dominion, nor with the idea that higher knowledge belongs to initiated minorities. I am deeply suspicious of any spirituality that turns growth into an accumulation of extraordinary experiences or reserved knowledge. If I have learned anything over all these years it is exactly the opposite: the truer something that compears is, the less it needs to display itself as exceptional. Authentic presence does not usually manifest in the spectacular, but in vulnerability, in friendship, in music, in shared suffering, in love, in death, in the silence that still holds words, and in the beauty that appears without announcing itself. My thought does not seek to ascend toward hidden worlds, but to learn to remain faithful to the only miracle I really know, namely that something comes to compear.

For similar reasons I do not feel close to the Christian Science of Mary Baker Eddy (1821 - 1910) either. I have always found deeply problematic her tendency to understand illness, suffering, and, ultimately, the very materiality of the world as forms of error or illusion to be corrected by a truer spiritual consciousness. My thought moves in exactly the opposite direction. The body is not for me an obstacle to truth, nor an appearance one must wake from, but the very place where all human truth compears. The wound is not simply a failure of knowledge, vulnerability does not constitute a provisional deficiency of spirit, and pain is not merely an illusion to be dispelled through a rectification of consciousness. All of this belongs to the very structure of our existence. Not because suffering is good, nor because it should be sought, but because it constitutes one of the places where reality shows itself to us with an intensity impossible to reach from pure self-sufficiency. I am suspicious of any spirituality that claims to save the human being by diminishing the ontological weight of the body, of illness, of limit, or of death. True incarnation does not consist in escaping matter, but in accepting that being compears precisely within it, with all its fragility, its beauty, and its irreducible character.

Nor do I feel close to modern religious movements such as Scientology, nor, in general, to those spiritual currents that promise a kind of engineering of salvation through techniques, protocols, levels of knowledge, or initiatic processes. My distance stems not only from a specific doctrinal controversy, though that too, but from a deeper objection. I am always suspicious of any spiritual proposal that turns mystery into a procedure, conversion into a method, truth into a series of stages, and human growth into a technology of perfection. When spiritual life begins to resemble a system of optimization, an administration of consciousness, or a progressive accumulation of inner competencies, I have the impression that precisely what was supposedly being sought has been lost. Compearance cannot be produced by manufacture. It can only be received.

Something similar happens to me with certain Christian currents born on the margins of the great historical tradition, especially when they turn faith into an absolute certainty, into a literally infallible reading of Scripture, into a closed system of answers, or into a complete explanation of the world. I do not reject those communities for being minorities, nor for departing from the major confessions. In fact, the history of Christianity shows that many fruitful intuitions were born precisely at the margins. My reservation appears when a community, whether majority or minority, stops living from mystery and begins living from the possession of mystery. Where no room is left for doubt, vulnerability, interpretation, symbol, or the inexhaustibility of truth, my thought no longer recognizes an interlocutor.

Mormonism calls for particular consideration because it fits comfortably neither within historical Protestantism nor alongside the diffuse spiritualities of the New Age. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints possesses an extraordinarily strong doctrinal, ritual, communal, and genealogical architecture. I am interested in its refusal to conceive revelation as an event entirely closed in the past, its sense of continuity between the living and the dead, its emphasis on family, on material community, on mutual responsibility, and on a religious life that effectively organizes everyday time. In a culture of fragile bonds, that capacity to produce belonging cannot be dismissed as mere manipulation.

It also contains an intuition that, isolated from its doctrinal literalization, could enter into dialogue with my thought, namely that a true revelation does not eliminate the possibility of new compearances, and that religious history need not be closed. An absolutely concluded canon always risks turning the originary event into institutional possession. Yet continuing revelation becomes equally dangerous when it is concentrated in a prophetic authority whose present word claims to interpret normatively the life of an entire community.

What distances me from Mormonism is the historical and cosmological literalization of its revealed universe, the confidence in a concrete narrative of ancient peoples, plates, angelic visitations, degrees of glory, and eternal progression presented as an objective description of transcendent realities. I do not reject the power of myth because it cannot be reduced to historical verification; I reject, precisely, that myth should need to claim itself as literal chronicle in order to retain authority. When a symbolic narrative defends itself as supernatural reportage, it loses the poetic freedom that might allow it to make a truth compear.

I am also troubled by its intense communal regulation and the way belonging, family, sexuality, the temple, and salvation can become bound together within an institutional structure very difficult to disentangle. Community can sustain the person, but it must not turn the bond with one's loved ones or with one's dead into an instrument of obedience. My criterion remains the same, namely that a tradition is true to the extent that it increases the singular capacity for response of those who inhabit it. It becomes possessive when it interprets an entire biography before the person can pronounce it themselves.

I do not consider Mormonism a mere irrational aberration or an American curiosity. It is one of the most powerful expressions of modern religious capacity to reconstruct cosmos, genealogy, rite, and community in the midst of a secularized world. Precisely for that reason it deserves a rigorous ontological critique. I understand its hunger for continuity and revelation, but I part ways when that hunger is satisfied through too precise a cartography of heaven and an authority too certain of administering it.

Something similar could be said of certain contemporary religious universalisms when they understand the unity of religions as though all were simply different expressions of one and the same deep doctrine. I understand the reconciling impulse that animates them and share the desire for dialogue among traditions. Yet it seems to me that too often this reconciliation is achieved at the cost of erasing real differences. My thought has never sought to reduce plurality to a higher unity that would explain it definitively. I prefer to think that the different traditions are irreducible approximations to a mystery none of them fully possesses. Unity does not consist in everyone saying the same thing in different words, but in none of them being able to exhaust that toward which all of them are trying to move.

At bottom, all these reservations answer to a single principle. I distrust confessional dogmatism, initiatic esotericism, therapeutic spiritualism, and the syncretism that seeks to fuse every religion into a single system, in equal measure. Their differences are enormous, but they often share a single temptation, namely believing that mystery can come to be turned into an object of possession. My entire ontology tries to resist precisely that temptation. What compears never stops exceeding its own compearing. Truth does not consist in possessing mystery, but in remaining faithful to it without closing it off.

With G. I. Gurdjieff (1866 - 1949) my relation is once again ambivalent. I find in him intuitions I consider valuable, namely his denunciation of the automatism with which we usually pass through existence, the need to awaken from a purely mechanical life, the importance of attention, of work on oneself, and, at certain moments, the depth of certain elements inherited from Neoplatonism and Sufism. All of this deserves, in my judgment, to be heard with respect. Yet the ultimate direction of his thought again moves away from mine. Where Gurdjieff ends up proposing an initiatic path, a technology of awakening, and a strongly hierarchized anthropology of spiritual development, I again grow suspicious. I am always uneasy at the idea that access to truth might depend on a privileged method, a school, a master, or a precise architecture of inner perfection. Compearance does not occur because the subject reaches a certain level of evolution; it occurs because being erupts precisely where no technique can guarantee it. Attention can prepare us, but it can never produce that toward which it remains open.

Something similar could be said of a good part of modern initiatic currents, from various forms of Rosicrucianism and Martinism to many contemporary schools of spiritual development. Though they often contain beautiful symbols, penetrating anthropological intuitions, or a legitimate concern for interiority, they tend to share an excessive confidence in the existence of privileged itineraries, reserved knowledge, or higher degrees of access to reality. My philosophical experience has always run in the opposite direction. The more deeply being compears, the less it seems to behave like a secret reserved for the few, and the more it seems like a possibility offered, always precariously, to all human existence. Mystery does not let itself be administered by any initiation.

For the same reason, I do not feel close either to the many contemporary currents of therapeutic spirituality or transcendental self-help that promise to raise consciousness, increase vibration, manifest the desired reality, or access higher states of being through psychological or energetic techniques. I do not deny that some of those practices can produce beneficial subjective effects. What I question is the ontology that often sustains them, namely the idea that being can be domesticated through the right procedures, or that fullness consists in optimizing one's own consciousness. My thought has never sought to optimize the self, but to understand what happens when the self stops occupying that kind of center and simply learns to respond to what compears.

At bottom, my whole distance from these currents could be summed up in a single suspicion. Wherever an exhaustive cartography of spirit appears, a perfectly ordered hierarchy of states of consciousness, a universal technique of awakening, or a promise of privileged access to reality, I fear the event has been replaced by procedure. And my whole ontology tries precisely to remember the opposite: that being never compears as the necessary result of a method, but always as a gift, an irruption, and a call that no discipline can manufacture, though every discipline can humbly prepare itself to receive it.

Neurolinguistic programming occupies a distinctive place within this landscape because it promises to intervene on experience by modifying patterns of language, representation, association, and behavior. Some of its elementary intuitions are not absurd, namely that the way we frame a situation alters the possibilities for action we perceive, that tone, posture, attention, and metaphor can transform a relationship, and that carefully imitating effective strategies can widen a person's repertoire. None of those observations contradicts my ontology. Language is not a neutral wrapping, and the body participates in all understanding.

My reservation begins when those intuitions are organized into a general technology of rapid change, accompanied by overconfident claims about representational systems, state programming, modeling of excellence, or the almost mechanical reconfiguration of subjectivity. The word programming reveals the problem. It suggests that a life is organized by identifiable codes a competent operator can rewrite. The therapist, trainer, or communicator then acquires the position of an engineer facing another person whose complexity seems translatable into manipulable patterns.

A word can transform, but not because it functions as a command entered into a system. It transforms when it reaches a history, when it is recognized, resisted, remembered, and answered. The same statement can liberate one person and do violence to another. There is no universal syntax of influence that can substitute for encounter. Where technique concentrates on producing a result, the other risks ceasing to compear as an interlocutor and becoming a surface for intervention.

I am also troubled by the closeness between some applications of NLP and the world of sales, leadership, seduction, or performance optimization. Attention to communication can easily turn into instrumental knowledge about how to obtain a desired response. My conception of lexis stands at the opposite extreme. To speak does not consist primarily in producing effects, but in exposing oneself before someone and becoming responsible for the relation the word inaugurates.

I can receive from NLP a limited call to observe language, metaphor, rhythm, and the bodily quality of communication. I part ways when that observation turns into a claim to mastery. Compearance is not a state a skilled technician manages to install in another. It is what can happen between two people when neither entirely uses the other as a means to a foreseen result.

Something similar could be said of a broad set of modern and contemporary spiritual currents as diverse among themselves as the visions of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 - 1772), the Spiritism of Allan Kardec (1804 - 1869), the New Thought movement, Religious Science, the Course in Miracles movement, the I AM movement, the Eckankar movement, the teachings of the Ramtha movement, Falun Gong, or the innumerable variants of the so-called "law of attraction" and of manifestation spirituality. It would be deeply unjust to treat them as though they were all the same thing, because their histories, their intentions, and their languages are very different. Some contain intuitions of great beauty, others possess an extraordinary symbolic imagination, and others represent a legitimate protest against modern materialism or against the spiritual impoverishment of our age.

In Swedenborg, for example, I have always been struck by the almost Dantesque power of his visionary universe; in Osho (1931 - 1990) I often admire the lucidity with which he unmasks religious hypocrisy and institutional rigidity; and in certain Rosicrucian or Martinist currents I find echoes of Neoplatonism, of Christian mysticism, or of Renaissance hermeticism that form part of the intellectual history of the West and deserve to be studied with respect. My distance, then, is never born of contempt.

But precisely because I try to listen to them attentively, I keep running into a difficulty that recurs again and again. Almost all of them, in very different ways, seem to trust that mystery can be turned into an administrable knowledge, an initiatic itinerary, a cartography of invisible planes, a technique of inner transformation, or even a law capable of explaining the ultimate working of reality. Where I try to protect compearance as an always-excessive, unforeseeable event, they tend to turn it into a process susceptible to learning, mastery, or programming. The symbol then stops being an opening and ends up functioning as a key, experience stops being an encounter and becomes a method, and transcendence stops compearing and becomes a system. My philosophical suspicion always begins at that precise instant.

That is also why I cannot share those spiritualities that promise to raise consciousness, increase vibration, attract the desired reality, access higher levels of being, or awaken hidden faculties through certain practices. I do not deny that some of those disciplines can produce real psychological effects, nor that many people find in them help, comfort, or even a discipline for living. What I question is the ontological presupposition that often sustains them: the idea that being can respond mechanically to our techniques, that mystery can be turned into a technology of the spirit, or that truth is the result of a progressive optimization of consciousness. My thought has learned exactly the opposite. The truer a presence is, the less it seems to let itself be manufactured. Compearance never compears as the reward of a correctly executed procedure. It arrives as gift, as interruption, as grace in the broadest sense of the word, as a call that no will can produce and before which one can only dispose oneself with humility. If my whole ontology tries to protect anything, it is precisely that radical impossibility of possessing mystery without destroying it.

For different reasons, though born of the same concern, I do not feel close to Freemasonry either, when it understands reason as the ultimate horizon of human emancipation and places excessive confidence in moral progress achieved through enlightenment, rational initiation, or the ethical perfection of institutions. I readily recognize the historical nobility of many of its aspirations, the defense of freedom of conscience, of tolerance, of dialogue, of human dignity, and of education, and it would be unjust to ignore the role it played at decisive moments of modern history. Yet my thought cannot settle into such high confidence in organizing reason, nor into the conviction that truth can be built progressively through the mere expansion of knowledge or of social structures. Compearance always overflows any rational architecture, however luminous it may be.

In the same way, I find deeply problematic the convergence, increasingly frequent in our age, between eliminativism, neurocentrism, scientism, and a certain form of democratic fundamentalism. Together, they almost look like the new form of urban religion in the West. And I reject it, not because I reject science (that would be absurd) nor because I disdain democracy (which I consider a political achievement of immense value), but because I am concerned by the absolutization of both when they stop recognizing their own limits.

Eliminativism ends up reducing consciousness, love, beauty, freedom, or suffering to neurobiological epiphenomena; neurocentrism turns the brain into the exclusive subject of existence, forgetting that we always live as whole, historical, vulnerable, embodied bodies; scientism transforms an extraordinarily fruitful method for knowing certain aspects of reality into the universal measure of everything real; and democratic fundamentalism risks identifying political legitimacy with truth itself, as though whatever a majority approves automatically exhausted the demands of justice, beauty, or the good.

All four share, in my judgment, the same monist illusion, namely believing that whatever matters most can be fully explained, quantified, administered, or legitimated by a single principle. My entire ontology is born precisely from resistance to that reduction. What compears never fully coincides with what we can measure, represent, decide, or explain. An irreducible excess always remains that no MRI, no algorithm, no parliamentary consensus, and no scientific theory will ever abolish. Not because science or democracy are false, but because reality is always broader than any of the human forms, however indispensable, of approaching it.

With the great modern gurus and with much of the globalized spirituality of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, my distance again answers to the same motive. I do not doubt the sincerity of many of them, nor do I ignore that some have helped countless people recover an inner life that modernity had impoverished. Nor would it be fair to forget the immense culture of Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877 - 1947), the metaphysical depth of some pages of Sri Aurobindo (1872 - 1950), the critical intelligence of Jiddu Krishnamurti, or the capacity of certain figures to remind the West that the human being cannot be reduced to consumption or technique. Yet even where I find admirable intuitions, I perceive an orientation that ends up moving away from mine. Too often salvation appears as an awakening of consciousness, an expansion of being, an inner illumination, or a spiritual realization that ends up relativizing the unrepeatable singularity of the human event, of the body, of history, of the wound, and of compearance. I do not try to awaken from the human condition; I try to inhabit it with the greatest fidelity possible.

That reservation extends, in very different degrees, to figures as diverse as Helena Blavatsky, Swami Vivekananda (1863 - 1902), Ramakrishna (1836 - 1886), Ananda Coomaraswamy, Paramahansa Yogananda (1893 - 1952), George Gurdjieff, Meher Baba (1894 - 1969), Sri Aurobindo, Ramana Maharshi (1879 - 1950), Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897 - 1981), Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1918 - 2008), Sathya Sai Baba (1926 - 2011), Osho, Muktananda (1908 - 1982), Swami Chinmayananda, Swami Sivananda and his many derived schools, Neem Karoli Baba, Mata Amritanandamayi (Amma, 1953), Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (1956), Sadhguru (1957) Jaggi Vasudev, Deepak Chopra (1946), Eckhart Tolle (1948), Mooji (1954), Prem Rawat (1957), Adyashanti (1962), and many other figures who have shaped the contemporary spiritual landscape down to our own day. I do not consider them equivalent to one another, nor do I mean to deny the immense differences that exist among their teachings. Some possess great philosophical depth, others are above all devotional movements, and others belong more to the realm of spiritual self-help. But in many of them the same confidence reappears, that consciousness can rise to a privileged state from which reality would finally be reconciled with itself. My thought remains deliberately more modest and, at the same time, more tragic. I do not expect a higher consciousness that resolves the drama of existence. I expect only to remain faithful to what compears without ever reducing it to a stage of a spiritual itinerary.

Perhaps the whole difference can be put this way. Many of these currents orient existence toward illumination, self-realization, the expansion of consciousness, or the recognition of an ultimate unity that relativizes the fractures of experience. I, by contrast, do not seek to leave the tremor but to understand it; I do not seek to transcend vulnerability but to recognize it as the condition of possibility of all compearance; and I do not seek to dissolve singularity into a universal consciousness, but to safeguard precisely what makes every voice, every face, every loss, every friendship, every work of art, and every act of love absolutely unrepeatable. If there is a transcendence, I do not think it consists in abandoning the world to awaken to some truer plane, but in discovering that this very world, precisely in its fragility and its finitude, always compears with a depth no illumination could ever exhaust.

The contemporary renaissance of interest in psychedelics introduces a different difficulty, because it involves not only a spiritual doctrine but substances capable of intensely modifying perception, identity, affect, and the organization of meaning. I do not deny that some psychedelic experiences can have real therapeutic effects, interrupt depressive patterns, temporarily loosen the rigidity of the self, or allow a person to view their own biography from a new perspective. Nor do I consider every chemically mediated experience false for that reason. Every human experience has bodily mediations, and the fact that a molecule alters consciousness does not by itself settle the value of what appears.

My reservation arises when intensity is confused with truth and the disorganization of the ordinary limits of the self is automatically interpreted as access to some deeper structure of the universe. Feeling the unity of all things does not metaphysically prove that all things are one; perceiving an intelligent presence does not establish the objective existence of the perceived entity; and experiencing the death of the ego does not prove that personal singularity is an illusion. Modified states need interpretation, and that interpretation always draws on the languages of a culture, an expectation, and a community.

I am interested, however, in the way psychedelics reveal the contingency of our ordinary organization of experience. Everyday consciousness is not the only possible way of articulating body, world, and self. Some boundaries that seemed natural can reveal their constructed character, and some memories can become available under a different affective temperature. That opening can produce humility toward the claim that our habitual state exhausts reality. But it can also generate a new spiritual aristocracy, namely those who have "seen" considering themselves authorized to interpret those who have not undergone the experience.

My ontology does not identify truth with normality, but neither with the extraordinary. A vision can be intense and narcissistic, while an ordinary conversation can transform a life. The proof of an experience is not found solely in the certainty it produces during its duration, but in the form of responsibility, relation, and presence it makes possible afterward. If someone returns proclaiming to have understood cosmic unity and treats those around them worse, their revelation has been ontologically disproved by its fruits.

Nor do I wish for pain, grief, or spiritual searching to be turned into problems solvable through administered experiences of rupture. A substance can open a door, but it cannot decide what is found there means, nor substitute for the temporal work of integrating a biography. My position is, therefore, one of open caution, namely I reject both automatic moral condemnation and neurochemical sacralization. No molecule manufactures the Mystery, though it can alter the defenses by which we used to prevent something from compearing. The experience afterward needs word, community, discernment, and responsibility so as not to become another object of spiritual consumption.

Taken together, integral theory, Spiral Dynamics, certain interpretations of cybernetics, NLP, and some psychedelic cultures form a new eschatology of development. One no longer necessarily speaks of salvation, sanctification, or eternal life, but of integration, complexity, flexibility, awakening, expansion of consciousness, and the actualization of potential. The vocabulary has changed, but a recognizably religious structure remains, namely there exists an insufficient ordinary condition, a knowledge capable of diagnosing it, an itinerary of transformation, and a broader state from which previous contradictions find their place.

I do not consider every aspiration to development false. We learn, we broaden perspectives, and we can become less cruel, less rigid, and more responsible. My objection is directed at the fantasy that these transformations form a complete and progressive architecture. A person can acquire enormous cognitive complexity and lose the capacity for intimacy. They can master languages of integration and be unable to bear being contradicted. They can experience cosmic unity and remain blind to concrete suffering. There is no stage from which the wound stops demanding a singular response.

Christianity too knew this temptation when it turned the spiritual path into degrees of perfection and sorted people according to their proximity to a defined sanctity. But it preserved, in its best moments, a radical correction: that grace can appear where merit did not expect it, that the last can precede the first, and that a minimal gesture can possess more truth than a lifetime of visible excellence. That discontinuity keeps salvation from becoming a curriculum. I need to preserve something similar in the face of the new pedagogies of awakening.

My ontology promises no ascent. It speaks of availability, and availability does not accumulate like a stable competence. Whoever was open yesterday can close today, while whoever seemed completely lost can suddenly receive a presence that reorganizes their life. Compearance does not respect our levels. That is why every developmental map must remain subordinate to the encounter, and prepared to be contradicted by what it did not know how to recognize.

I could say something similar about Peter Deunov (1864 - 1944) and Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov (1900 - 1986). In both I find a profound sensitivity to beauty, to nature, to music, to the pedagogical value of the spiritual life, and to the need for an ethical transformation of the human being. There is in them a sincere will to combat materialism and to remember that existence cannot be reduced to utility or calculation, and that deserves recognition. Even so, I part ways with them again where that search issues into an esoteric cosmology, into a hierarchy of spiritual planes, into a symbolic reading of the universe that ends up functioning as a global explanation of the real, and into an excessive confidence in the ascending progress of consciousness. Their spirituality retains a strong theosophical and Neoplatonic imprint: that is, the human being appears as a link within a cosmic evolution whose direction and structure can be described with relative precision. My thought, on the contrary, distrusts precisely any metaphysical architecture that claims to map the mystery. Not because I deny the spiritual depth of reality, but because I believe that depth always compears as inexhaustible and never as a system whose levels can be methodically traversed. Where they seek ascension, I seek compearance. Where they speak of spiritual evolution, I speak of fidelity to the appearing. Where they describe an ever more transparent cosmic harmony, I keep finding the wound, the discontinuity, and the vulnerability as constitutive conditions of every truly human existence.

The will to map the spirit does not disappear when it abandons classical occultism. It reappears under psychological, cultural, and evolutionary vocabularies that present themselves as academic syntheses of science, religion, and development. The difference in vocabulary matters, but the ontological question remains. If a theory manages to place every perspective within its map, has it understood plurality, or has it neutralized whatever might have contradicted it?

XXII. Wilber (1949), Perennialism, and the Romanians

That same question, whether a map has understood plurality or has simply neutralized what could contradict it, is the one I must put to the great integrative systems of our time, beginning with Ken Wilber.

There is a whole continent of names that touches very different zones of me, and I move through it in order of real closeness, because here too the responsibility of judgment calls for differentiating rather than distributing merit out of diplomacy. I am very far from Ken Wilber, because he wants to integrate everything into a great evolutionary map of levels and stages and quadrants, and although we agree in rejecting reductionism, he is too cartographic for me — he makes maps of consciousness, and I distrust maps the moment they begin to replace living compearance, and where he ranks stages hierarchically I think from wounds, appearings, discontinuities, biography, melos.

Spiral Dynamics and the many versions of integral theory make that same cartographic temptation explicit. I understand its appeal. They try to recognize that people and cultures do not organize the world by means of a single kind of rationality, that there are real transformations in the capacities for perspective, complexity, identity, and coordination, and that political or religious disputes cannot always be understood as mere disagreements over facts. They also contain a legitimate critique of the reductionisms that absolutize a single dimension — the psychological, the economic, the biological, the cultural, or the spiritual.

But organizing those differences by colors, levels, lines, states, and stages produces an illusion of panoramic visibility. Whoever handles the map can imagine that they know not only the other's position, but also the higher place from which that position must be integrated. Descriptive hierarchy easily becomes moral hierarchy, and the interlocutor stops compearing as someone who might say an unexpected truth. They come to represent a stage the analyst believes he has already surpassed. Even tolerance turns into evolutionary condescension.

My ontology does not deny that real developments, learnings, and broadenings of perspective exist. A child and an adult do not possess the same capacities. A culture can acquire more complex forms of deliberation, and a person can become less rigid. What I deny is that these transformations necessarily form a common ladder whose summit can be described from the present. Even the supposedly advanced forms lose goods that others preserved — ritual memory, communal bonds, concreteness, capacity for sacrifice, or relation to place. Complexity is not automatically equivalent to truth.

Moreover, integral models tend to interpret religion according to its supposed level of development. A mythic-literal Christianity would be superseded by a rational, pluralist, integral one. That reading can illuminate historical transformations, but it risks translating the religious event into an evolutionary psychology that already knows its own destination. San Juan de la Cruz (1542 - 1591), a popular procession, or an old woman at prayer do not simply occupy different levels of one and the same spiral. Each can make something compear that the model does not anticipate.

I part ways, then, with Wilber and with Spiral Dynamics in the same place where I part ways with Hegel, Teilhard, and the reconciling sophiologies: namely, in their confidence that plurality possesses an ascending architecture susceptible to integration. I do not want to deny connections or learn less. I want to prevent the desire to integrate from turning differences into moments of our own system. A truly integral theory should admit what it cannot integrate without violence, and recognize that maturity perhaps does not consist in placing oneself above every level, but in responding with humility from a position that also remains partial.

What separates me from Huston Smith (1919 - 2016) is perennialism, that claim of a common wisdom beneath all traditions, because I insist too much on difference, on language, on history, on the concrete wound, to accept a universal unity above the forms, so that with him I have a spiritual affinity and not a philosophical structure.

From Mircea Eliade (1907 - 1986) I take a great deal on the symbolic plane: hierophany as the appearing of the sacred within the world, the distinction between profane time and mythic time, the rite that reactivates an origin, all of which resembles my own view of music as reactivation and event, and I hold back from his overly general morphology of the sacred, because I am more carnal, more personal, more melodic, and I am less interested in the abstract homo religiosus than in the concrete face, the concrete voice, the concrete wound.

With the Romanians, in fact, things become familiar, almost domestic, because in them I recognize an air I carry within me without having chosen it. Constantin Noica (1909 - 1987) interests me more than one might expect, for his idea of thinking being from within a concrete language, from Romanian, and for his notion of întru, that word which is neither "in," nor "toward," nor "inside of," but a mixture of the three: to be already inside something and at the same time to tend toward it without having arrived, which has something of compearance about it, and for his rejection of the scientific abstraction that turns the individual into a mere variable, and his logic of Hermes, which understands the whole through the singular part. What separates me from Noica is that he remains more systematic, more the classical ontologist, more national in his metaphysics, while I am more wounded, more cross-border, more musical, more discontinuous.

Lucian Blaga (1895 - 1961), on the other hand, is perhaps the one who comes closest to my philosophical soul, because he works with mystery, revelation, symbol, creation, culture, poetry, the limits of knowledge, and above all because he does not think mystery should be eliminated but holds it to be constitutive of human existence. His distinction between paradisiac knowledge, which clarifies, and luciferic knowledge, which deepens mystery instead of dissolving it, which does not destroy the darkness but makes it fruitful, comes very close to what I am attempting with compearance. His idea that every culture inhabits an implicit metaphysical horizon, a way of experiencing the world and not merely a repertoire of customs, connects with my interest in Spain, in Romania, in melos, in identity as a way of being in the world. If I had to name a single book that produced in me that rare effect of recognizing an obsession of my own formulated by someone else, I would name his Luciferic Knowledge, because I suspect I would find there several intuitions strangely familiar that I would not accept without argument, and his Horizon and Style, and his Poems of Light, where the less systematic Blaga comes close to the territory where I feel at home.

Of Constantin Noica I would read first The Romanian Feeling of Being, not because I share its theses but because of the closeness of its question — how a concrete language reveals a concrete relation to being — which touches my love of languages and my Cratylism, and then Devenirea întru ființă, his most difficult and most profound work, where the word întru unfolds its full force, and his Six Maladies of the Contemporary Spirit, which would amuse me for its critique of technocracy, of specialization, of the loss of meaning. Among all of them, Eliade fascinates me intellectually, Cioran wounds me emotionally, Noica stimulates me philosophically, Blaga is the one who grazes the depths, and Eminescu (1850 - 1889) touches me in sensibility, through Romanticism (Romanticism in the ontological sense, from romanticus).

Emil Cioran deserves a word of his own, because he is a dangerous case. He touches my nocturnal zone, failure, lucidity, exile, the impossibility of reconciliation, hatred of false hope, nostalgia, sarcasm, the wound, and yet he is corrosive, he tends to turn lucidity into sterility, and I do not, because I always come back to melody, to my children, to friendship, to composition, to love. Cioran is the risk my own ontology would run if it lost compearance and were left with nothing but discontinuity; he is my familiar demon and not my master, the shadow that accompanies me to remind me where I would end up if I stopped singing.

Nichita Stănescu (1933 - 1983) is close to me on the poetic plane, because he thinks language as event and not as neutral vehicle, which fits with my defense of phonosemantics and with my idea that the word has a body, and he serves me more as poetic proof than as system.

Jean Gebser (1905 - 1973) interests me because he does not reduce modern consciousness to linear progress, because he understands that there are mutations of presence, distinct modes of being in the world, and I hold him at a certain reserve insofar as he turns into a theory of stages, because my discontinuity distrusts every overly harmonious evolutionary narrative, though I prefer him to Wilber for being more phenomenological and less managerial.

Eminescu touches me in sensibility, through Romanticism, melancholy, the cosmos, language, impossible love, time, nostalgia, through that sense that beauty is immense and at the same time irrecoverable, and I hold back from his romantic absolutization of genius and of the nation, because I am more critical, more self-aware.

Teilhard de Chardin (1881 - 1955) attracts me for his ambition not to separate science, spirit, and matter, and separates from me through his evolutionary optimism, through that Omega Point of final convergence which my ontology cannot believe in, because I am not moving toward unity but toward discontinuous compearance, toward unresolved wounds, toward a meaning that cannot be brought to closure.

XXIII. Twentieth-Century Theology and Mystical Neoplatonism

That same distrust of any final convergence reappears, in another language and another depth, in my relation to twentieth century Christian theology and to the mystical Neoplatonism of which I feel myself, in spite of everything, a heterodox heir.

And then there are those who are mine without being philosophers, and whom I recognize by their song more than by their concept. Federico García Lorca stands very close to my center, duende, the body, the voice, death, eros, rite, the people, blood, the popular form raised to metaphysics, because he understands that art is not decoration but dangerous appearing, and that duende is not technique but wounded presence, and that is so much mine that I hardly need to think it. Lorca is an ontologist of the wounded song, and he is one of mine. Savater (1947), on the other hand, is far from me in deep ontology, however much I appreciate his clarity, his defense of freedom, his civic ethics, his anti-fanaticism, because his tone is too enlightened, secular, ironic, rationalist for my sensibility, and where he is interested in ethical lucidity I am interested in mystery, where he prefers civil conversation I prefer the symbol that burns.

Eugenio Trías (1942 - 2013) is far more important to me than I have perhaps acknowledged, with his philosophy of the limit and his frontier reason, with his commitment to thinking what enlightened reason excluded, shadow, unreason, limit, frontier, music, symbol, and although he is more architectonic and more systematic and I am more lyrical and more biographical, if Marcel is my presence, Trías is my frontier.

Alejandro Jodorowsky (1929) attracts me through theatricality, symbol, myth, image, the rupture with narrow rationalism, and repels me through the spectacular gesture, through performative syncretism, through a spirituality that is too staged, because I do not seek symbolic shock but true compearance, and where he stages the symbol I want the symbol to burn from within. I am not an integralist, nor a perennialist, nor an occultist. I am, if anything, a poet-phenomenologist of the limit, of mystery made flesh, of wounded compearance.

An unexpected name illuminates from a lateral angle a zone that none of the great figures touches fully, and that is Takeo Doi (1920 - 2009), with his concept of amae, that trust in being able to abandon oneself to another's care, which is not simply dependency, nor need, nor attachment, but the tacit expectation that the other will sustain me even when I show myself vulnerable. Doi names something Western psychological vocabulary hardly knows how to say: welcome, intimacy, a trust prior to all reflection, belonging, trusting surrender, and there I find a resonance, because a good part of my thought turns on the idea that compearance is never purely objective but always occurs within a relation. Doi remains a psychologist, a great psychologist, and his question is how human dependency is structured, while mine is what makes it possible for something to compear as meaningful, which is another level, so that reading him is illuminating and insufficient at once. I agree with him in his suspicion that the modern ideal of absolute autonomy is a fiction, because I have often criticized the fantasy of the self-sufficient individual, the self-sufficient musician, the self-sufficient artist, and my anthropology is relational, embodied, vulnerable, in need of presence. But there is a difference that says it all, which is that Doi thinks the fundamental wound is dependency, and I think the fundamental wound runs deeper: discontinuity, separation, the impossibility of fully coinciding with what we love, be it a melody, a person, a work, a memory, be it God. There Doi falls short for me, even though he masterfully describes an experience I have pointed to many times without naming it, the human need to be received before being understood, and that phrase is closer to my ontology of love and of music than almost all of contemporary psychology.

Twentieth-century theology constitutes an especially fertile map on which to situate my affinities and my distances. Karl Barth impresses me by the force with which he confronts bourgeois cultural Christianity, the theology that confuses God with the elevation of human consciousness, and every pretension to turn revelation into an extension of our own values. His insistence on the otherness of the Word keeps God from becoming an available object. But that otherness can harden to the point of leaving too little space for experience, for human tradition, for analogy, for symbol, and for bodily mediations. Barth protects the irruption, but risks making it so exterior that the human world is reduced to obedience before a word whose provenance cannot be discussed. I need compearance to precede us, but also truly to pass through flesh, history, and interpretation.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 - 1945) feels much closer to me, especially where he speaks of a religionless Christianity, of concrete responsibility, of costly discipleship, and of the need to live before God as if God did not exist as an explanatory hypothesis. His life makes it impossible to separate thought and response. In him, faith does not serve to escape the adult world or to fill in the gaps of our ignorance; instead it obliges one to remain in the world, to answer for others, and to renounce a divinity used as refuge. Bonhoeffer comes very close to my intuition that the death of the God-object does not necessarily leave a void. What separates me from him is the christological and ecclesial firmness that I cannot fully take on, but I consider him one of the theological interlocutors closest to my position.

Karl Rahner (1904 - 1984) interests me for his effort to think the human being as constitutive openness toward a mystery that never becomes an object, and for his idea of the hearer of the word. His transcendental theology recognizes that the question of God does not arrive from outside at a closed consciousness, but belongs to the very structure of our openness to being. There is an evident affinity there with my compearance. Rahner, however, tends to integrate that openness within an overly stable conceptual architecture, and risks retroactively Christianizing every experience of transcendence through figures like the anonymous Christian. My ontology does not want to appropriate the other's openness by declaring that, even without knowing it, they are already oriented toward the Christian answer.

Paul Tillich (1886 - 1965) feels close to me for his critique of God understood as a being among other beings, and for his language of depth, ultimate concern, and the ground of being. I also admire his method of correlation, which tries to make tradition answer the real questions of an era. But the ground of being can become too abstract a category, a general ontology in which the face, the voice, and historical singularity lose intensity. My word would not be ground, but compearance: not that on which everything rests, but that which happens and reaches us without becoming possession.

Rudolf Bultmann (1884 - 1976) interests me for having understood that religious texts cannot simply be received as cosmological descriptions, and for his will to interpret myth existentially. But demythologizing risks treating the symbol as a historically outdated wrapping around an existential content translatable into another language. My ontology holds the opposite: that the symbol is not a dispensable container. Its image, its rhythm, its narrative, and its materiality all participate in what makes something compear. A myth does not simply contain a thesis the modern interpreter must rescue. It can say precisely what no conceptual paraphrase leaves intact.

Henri de Lubac (1896 - 1991) interests me for his critique of the modern separation between nature and supernature and for his recovery of the spiritual density of Scripture, of the Fathers, and of tradition. He understands that human desire cannot easily be divided between a self-sufficient natural region and a supernatural supplement added from outside. His resistance to an individualism of salvation also feels close to me.

Jean Daniélou (1905 - 1974) shares that recovery of typology, symbol, liturgy, and patristic continuity. Both remind me that theology can be historical, symbolic, and exegetical without being reduced to a scholastic system. My distance appears where that richness ends up finally gathered under a theological economy whose christological consummation is taken as guaranteed.

Hans Küng (1928 - 2021) feels close to me for his will to institutional critique, his ecumenism, his questioning of authority, and his refusal to identify Christian fidelity with automatic obedience to the magisterium. He represents a theological conscience that wants to remain within the tradition without renouncing judgment. But his Christianity can at times seem to me excessively translated into the moral categories of liberal modernity, as if reforming the institution were enough to recover the depth of the event. My problem is not limited to who governs the Church or how it formulates its dogmas; it touches the entire relation between name, presence, and closure.

Joseph Ratzinger (1927 - 2022) is, for me, a more complex interlocutor than the caricatures allow. He feels close to me in his defense of the bond between faith and reason, in his critique of the dictatorship of relativism when that phrase names the incapacity to recognize truths that exceed preference, in his love of liturgy and music, and in his conviction that Christianity must not be de-Hellenized to the point of becoming sentimental morality. I also understand his defense of a historical continuity that does not leave tradition at the mercy of every present moment. But what separates me is his confidence in the normative capacity of doctrine, his understanding of ecclesial authority, and the assurance with which the Christian event is taken as contained within a defined confessional form. Ratzinger protects the logos. I fear, instead, that the logos, when it identifies too closely with a particular doctrinal architecture, ends up defending the house at the expense of the appearing that made it necessary.

Vladimir Lossky (1903 - 1958) is much closer to me for his defense of Eastern apophatic theology, for his refusal to separate theology from mystical experience, and for his insistence that the person cannot be reduced to nature or individual. In him divine incomprehensibility does not amount to empty ignorance, but to transformative participation without conceptual possession. What separates me, once again, is the ecclesial and trinitarian certainty that organizes that experience, but his ontological climate is among the closest to mine.

Romano Guardini (1885 - 1968) feels close to me for his phenomenology of living forms, his attention to liturgy, his critique of technical modernity, his sensitivity to polarity, and his capacity to think Christianity without reducing it either to system or to private emotion. Liturgy, for Guardini, trains the individual to inhabit a form he has not manufactured and to step outside subjective caprice. That intuition interests me enormously, so long as the form does not end up absorbing singularity. His thinking of polar opposition, where contraries are not dialectically eliminated, also has a direct affinity with my inhabited distance.

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907 - 1972), although not a Christian, must compear alongside them because he touches perhaps one of my deepest affinities. His philosophy of radical amazement, of divine pathos, of sacred time, of prayer, and of prophetic responsibility opposes both religious rationalism and self-centered spirituality. Heschel does not think God as an object, but from the experience of being sought, claimed, and concerned. The human being is not only the one who asks about God. He is the one a question precedes. That inversion comes extraordinarily close to my idea of call and response. His defense of the Sabbath as a temporal architecture, as a sanctification of time against spatial possession, also coincides with my conviction that ritual can open a compearance without manufacturing it.

Among contemporary Christian thinkers who read Christianity through Hegelian categories there are a few worth placing, because measuring my distance against them means measuring it again against reconciliation. Rowan Williams (1950) is probably the closest of all — for truth as encounter, for the irreducible character of the person, for his critique of modern instrumentalization, for the importance of silence, for his resistance to turning God into an object — and that phrase of his, that reality is always deeper than our concepts, could appear in any of my essays, although he retains an ecclesial and doctrinal structure that I displace toward a more existential phenomenology of presence.

Charles Taylor (1931) is closer than he seems. I feel a deep affinity with his critique of modern individualism and reductive naturalism, his conviction that the human being never exists outside horizons of meaning it has not itself produced, his defense of the symbolic density of experience, and his insistence that every understanding of ourselves is already set within a world of inherited values, languages, and forms of life. I also owe him his recovery of the notion of moral sources, that idea that human life needs to draw on wellsprings of meaning that cannot be reduced to subjective preferences or instrumental calculations. In the same way, I share his conviction that secularization does not simply mean the disappearance of transcendence, but a transformation of the way it can be experienced and recognized. The secular world is not a world without mystery, but a world where mystery compears differently, surrounded by new difficulties, new suspicions, and new possibilities. On that point our intuitions converge unmistakably. And yet the two paths end up diverging. Taylor thinks these questions mainly from within intellectual history, cultural genealogy, and social philosophy. I, by contrast, try to do so from an ontology of compearance. Where he reconstructs the historical conditions under which certain modes of experience come to be possible, I try to describe the very structure of appearing, what makes it possible for something to manifest itself without ever being exhausted by its manifestation. His language remains tied to the cultural sources of meaning. Mine, instead, tries to shift toward the event of presence itself. Perhaps one could say that Taylor describes the historical conditions of the horizon, while my work tries to think ontologically what happens when, within any horizon whatsoever, something compears with a depth that always exceeds every possible interpretation.

John Milbank (1952) is akin to me in his critique of secular modernity, of materialism, in his recovery of symbol and of participation, and is alien to me because he still believes reality can finally be integrated into a participatory harmony, and I am suspicious of every reconciliation that is too perfect.

Cyril O'Regan (1952) would interest me enormously, not for his theses but for his extremely fine ear for detecting where a metaphysics is trying to close itself off too much, being, as he is, a great reader of Hegel, of Gnosticism, of Romanticism, of negative theology.

Peter Hodgson (1934), the most orthodox of the Hegelians, is remote from me because he believes truth unfolds historically toward ever more adequate forms, and I distrust that narrative, because for me truth does not progress linearly, compearance does not accumulate, mystery does not diminish with history.

Andrew Shanks (1954) draws me closer through his attention to historicity and moves me away through the leading role he grants to history, because my ontology is not historical in the Hegelian sense but event-based.

And Žižek, once again, is farther away than many would suppose, because his Christianity culminates in the disappearance of all transcendence, and mine does not affirm transcendence as an object but neither does it accept its dissolution. Žižek wants to resolve the tension between presence and absence, and I want to inhabit it, and in that single difference between resolving and inhabiting lies the whole distance. If Hegel is the great philosopher of reconciliation, I am a thinker of inhabited distance, and that is why I find more family resemblance in Weil, in Zambrano, in Merton, in Picard, in Unamuno, than in the whole Hegelian tradition put together.

Thomas Merton deserves to close this constellation, because with him the affinity is more human than doctrinal. He senses, tirelessly, that the truest reality does not appear as object, and that is everywhere in his journals, in his silence, in his interiority, in his attentiveness, without ever falling into subjectivism, because he does not say that everything is within him but that there is a depth to the real that manifests itself only when the will to dominate ceases, and that comes very close to my compearance. If I had to imagine with whom I could sustain a six-hour conversation without tiring, Merton would rank very high, alongside Picard, alongside Marcel, even though he does not problematize the traditional Christian structure as much as I problematize it. And Christian Wiman (1966), a contemporary poet little known outside the Anglophone world, appears at the margin as a surprise, because among the living he is one of those who come closest to a spirituality of the wound rather than of certainty, and that preposition says it all, of the wound, which is where I live.

One last zone remains to be crossed, that of mystical materialism and that of Neoplatonism, because it is in them that my relation to unity is at stake, and it is there that my discontinuity shows its true face. If by mystical materialism one means a philosophy that rejects a personal transcendent God understood as a separate being, that rejects the dualisms between soul and world, that affirms concrete, bodily reality, and that at the same time recognizes an irreducible depth or excess within reality itself, then my thought grazes that territory without fitting into it, because the word materialism still implies a certain ontological closure even in its most open versions.

The distinction between pantheism and panentheism helps to sharpen my position. Pantheism affirms, in very different ways depending on the author, that God and the totality of the real (omnitudo rerum) do not constitute two separate orders, that is, Deus sive Natura, God or Nature. Panentheism, by contrast, holds that everything is in God without God being exhausted by the totality of the world. In principle, panentheism seems closer to my vocabulary, because it preserves an excess of what manifests itself over the sum of its manifestations. It allows one to think a real immanence without closing off transcendence, and it avoids imagining God as an exterior being that intervenes causally from outside the universe.

Yet neither label contains me. Pantheism risks turning every difference into a modality of a single substance and retrospectively attributing a harmony to the totality. Panentheism can better preserve the distance, but it still holds that all beings are contained within a divine unity capable of integrating their meaning. My difficulty remains. I do not know whether there exists a Whole in which every loss, every face, and every wound is already ontologically gathered up. The idea can be consoling and philosophically fertile, but it can also, from above, appropriate the very thing whose singularity it claimed to protect.

Spinoza (1632 - 1677) is the most powerful interlocutor here. I am drawn to his critique of superstition, his rejection of an anthropomorphic God who rewards and punishes, his refusal to interpret nature through ends projected by human desire, and his understanding of freedom as an exit from affective servitude. I also deeply respect his effort to think without recourse to an exterior transcendence and to understand that the human being does not constitute "an empire within an empire." His ethics of joy, of power, and of the affects contains a lucidity no personalism should look down on.

But Spinoza's single substance remains far from me, precisely because it leaves no true ontological space for discontinuity. Every being is a mode of an infinite reality whose order could not be otherwise. Contingency, loss, and singularity appear from the limited perspective of the modes, while from eternity everything follows with necessity. That perspective sub specie aeternitatis is what I cannot accept. I do not want to contemplate a person's death from a height at which it reveals itself as the necessary consequence of the total order. Love does not seem to me more true the less singular it is. Grief is not an inferior form of knowledge that an adequate understanding of necessity ought to dissolve.

What also separates me from Spinoza is his ideal of a freedom that increases through an ever more adequate understanding of causes. Understanding can free us from superstitions and automatisms, but no causal intelligibility exhausts what a presence means. Knowing why I love, why I suffer, or why a melody moves me does not replace the event of loving, suffering, or listening. Explanation can accompany compearance. It cannot replace it. That is why I am close to Spinoza in his critique of the sovereign God and of the morality of resentment, but I move away from him where the necessity of the Whole relativizes the unrepeatability of the mode. His God-Nature possesses an impersonal grandeur I admire from a distance. My thought, instead, remains beside the face that grandeur cannot console.

Walt Whitman is closer to me, because he feels that the body is sacred, that matter is sacred, that everyday existence is sacred, without abandoning corporeality, and yet he remains cosmist, and his reality ends up being one great celebratory unity, while mine is more tragic.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty truly touches me, especially the late Merleau-Ponty, with his flesh of the world, his chair du monde, his visibility, his intertwining, his presence, all of which resonate clearly in my own texts, and even so he too is more continuous than I am, because his flesh tends toward an ontology of continuity while mine insists on discontinuity. Bueno reappears here, because some read a mystical materialism into his theory of symploke, into his account of the limits of science, into his critique of reductionism, and yet his materialist ontology remains an ontology of closure, a very sophisticated and very powerful one, but aspiring to a structural intelligibility of being, and that is where my break lies, the same break that arises in my critique of substantive music, because what wants structure I want appearing.

And Picard reappears as the closest, although he would never use the expression, because he loves the face, silence, presence, not because they point back to some separate spiritual substance, but because they hold an inexhaustible depth, and if someone asked me which author comes closest to a mystical phenomenology of presence, I would say Picard without hesitating. I would not describe myself as a mystical materialist, because my thought does not say that everything is spirit, nor that everything is matter, but that every presence points to something that cannot be reduced either to matter or to spirit conceived as objects. And if I had to invent a label for that, it would be incarnate apophaticism, or realism of compearance, or mysticism of discontinuity, because what appears again and again in my texts is not the unity of all things, as in classical mysticism, nor the self-sufficiency of matter, as in materialism, but the intuition that the most real manifests itself precisely in that which compears without letting itself be possessed.

With Neoplatonism the closeness is greater, and also more deceptive, because I am partly Neoplatonic without being metaphysically Neoplatonic. When I read Plotinus (205 - 270) I find ideas that are intimate to me, that visible reality does not exhaust the real, that beauty points beyond itself, that music possesses an anagogic dimension, that the soul recognizes something it cannot possess, that there is a distance between presence and its ground. All of that resonates deeply. And yet the decisive break appears, because Plotinus believes that all multiplicity proceeds from an originary Unity, the One, and the whole of Neoplatonic philosophy is at bottom a movement of departure and return, of procession and conversion, of emanation and reunification. There I move away, because my ontology is not oriented toward a final reunification, because for me discontinuity is not a fall but something constitutive, and there is no Unity necessarily lost to which one must return. I am closer to Plotinus than to René Guénon (1886 - 1951), and at the same time I am less Neoplatonic than Plotinus.

A clear distance separates me from the prisca theologia, that idea of a primordial wisdom transmitted from the most remote antiquity, with Hermes, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, and Moses as manifestations of one and the same originary revelation, which appears in Marsilio Ficino (1433 - 1499) and later nourishes Guénon, Frithjof Schuon (1907 - 1998), Nasr, Eliade, because I never claim that all traditions essentially say the same thing, and I have insisted too much on the fact that differences matter, and forms, and bodies, and languages, and incarnations, to embrace such a unity.

And with Sufism the relation depends on which Sufism, because Ibn Arabi (1165 - 1240) awakens enormous affinities, symbolism, the creative imagination, the depth of language, inexhaustible revelation, the impossibility of closing off the divine, and yet ends up affirming an ultimate unity of being that my discontinuity keeps me from granting, while with Rumi I connect far more, not through his metaphysics but through his language, through his poetics, through his insistence on love, the wound, absence, nostalgia, music, so that Rumi moves me more than he convinces me.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr (1933) is the most interesting case, the most sophisticated living perennialist, and he fascinates me for his critique of scientism, of reductionism, of desacralization, for his defense of symbol and tradition, right up to the decisive point, because Nasr truly believes in a Primordial Truth, one, universal, transhistorical, and there my difference reappears, the impossibility of closing off the real, because he believes in an ultimate synthesis and I do not.

All of them, Plotinus, Ibn Arabi, Guénon, Schuon, Nasr, Ficino, the prisca theologia, believe that multiplicity finally finds its foundation in an originary unity, and my thought affirms the opposite, that multiplicity is never entirely absorbed by any unity. I am closer to Plotinus than to Guénon, to Rumi than to Schuon, to Nasr than to Aleksandr Dugin, to Zambrano than to Julius Evola (1898 - 1974), to Patočka than to the prisca theologia. I am a heterodox heir of the Neoplatonic impulse, not because I believe in a primordial Unity but because I share the intuition that the visible does not exhaust the real, that beauty points beyond itself, that music is a privileged form of the compearance of that which can never fully become an object. The classical Neoplatonist says that everything proceeds from the One and returns to the One. My ontology says something more unsettling: that everything compears from a ground we never possess, and that no compearance ever manages to close it definitively. I keep the Neoplatonic wonder and renounce the final reconciliation that defines it.

XXIV. The Final Torsion

Keeping the wonder and giving up the final reconciliation is, at bottom, the torsion that runs through this entire essay, and perhaps it is worth now, after so many names, naming it once more as simply as I can.

After going through so many names, perhaps I should clarify something simpler. I am not a militant mystic, nor an ostentatious devotee, nor someone who needs to dress up every experience in religious vocabulary. I distrust the display of spirituality almost as much as the display of unbelief. But neither have I ever entirely abandoned the Catholic and Christian background from which I learned to feel the world. There is in me a sincere religious sensibility, even though it does not regularly take the form of prayer, sacramental practice, or confessional obedience. It shows itself in the way I listen, in the way I receive certain spaces, in feeling the presence of the dead, in experiencing gratitude, in perceiving a gravity in certain gestures, and in refusing to reduce love, beauty, suffering, or music to functional effects. Perhaps my spirituality is more serene and contemplative than penitential, though I do not seek serenity as anesthesia either. I do not wish to punish the body or purify myself of life, but to learn to give it a less dominating attention. I am not interested in accumulating spiritual merit, but in remaining available for what can appear without my having produced it.

That is also why I would not simply describe myself as a deist. Deism often preserves precisely the engineer-God I reject, that is, an exterior intelligence that designs the universe, establishes its laws, and withdraws. My thought does not need that causal hypothesis, nor does it find much nourishment in it. For me, the religious does not begin with the question of who fabricated the cosmos, but with the experience that something compears with a depth no explanation exhausts. If a divinity exists, I do not imagine it as the first term of a causal chain, but as the possible, and always dangerous, name for that inexhaustibility that becomes presence in the flesh, in time, and between persons. My religious sensibility does not look mainly upward, toward a supreme being, but around and inward, into the encounter, toward what in a face, a melody, a table, a loss, or a voice exceeds all availability.

The breadth of this survey may give the impression that the essay has abandoned its initial question. In fact, every interlocutor has served to test the same bond, namely, what remains of the Christian horizon when it is confronted with other ontologies of the person, of consciousness, of the cosmos, of community, of salvation, and of suffering. These affinities do not form a new confession; rather, they allow me to distinguish which elements of my thought are specifically Christian, which come from other sources, and which criterion remains constant across all of them.

Having passed through these regions, the map turns out to be even less reducible to a single affiliation. From transcendentalism I keep the demand for a non-delegated experience, but not its confidence in the self-sufficiency of the self or in the benevolence of the Whole. From James I keep pluralism, real relations, and the open universe. From Royce I keep loyalty and the community of interpretation, without accepting that the cause absorbs the person. From Solovyov, Bulgakov, and sophiology I keep the intuition of a creation capable of manifesting a depth that exceeds it, but not the guarantee of a cosmic recapitulation. From cosmism I receive the protest against an idea of progress that abandons the dead, but I reject turning that protest into an engineering of resurrection or an expansion of the species. From Aranguren I receive the moral structure of response. From Tolkien I receive subcreation, memory, and the beloved world precisely because it disappears. From the unitarian traditions I receive freedom of conscience and tolerance, but not the thinning of mystery down to a civic ethics without substance.

From the sciences I receive knowledge, disproportion, and wonder, but not a total metaphysics. From astronomy I receive humility without nihilism. From science fiction I receive possibilities of moral imagination, but not the rule of experts over history. From DBT and ACT I receive tools for inhabiting pain, holding tensions, and acting without waiting for every fear to disappear, but not a functional definition of health. From somatic traditions I receive the intelligence of movement, breath, and posture, without believing in some authentic body hidden beneath history. From Stanislavski and the theater I receive action, the scene, and the risk of a truth that must become flesh, without confusing private emotion with compearance. From religious communities I receive the need for belonging, repetition, and support, without handing them the right to interpret their members entirely.

Even my rejections form part of the map. Dugin reminds me of the danger of turning tradition into sacred geopolitics. Saint-Simonism reminds me of the danger of turning fraternity into technical administration. Literal demonology reminds me of the danger of confusing the complexity of suffering with the action of invisible entities. Conspiratorial interpretation reminds me of the danger of substituting the event for a plot that already explains everything. In every one of these cases the same boundary appears: I receive whatever increases our capacity for attention, embodiment, relation, and response, and I turn away from whatever converts that orientation into system, hierarchy, technology, or totality.

The result is nowhere near a higher synthesis that places each tradition in its proper spot. I possess no such vantage point. It is, rather, a symploke of affinities and resistances: certain things connect with others, some remain incompatible, and no structure manages to gather them without remainder. My thought does not become less coherent by admitting that plurality. Its coherence lies precisely in the criterion that reappears in every encounter: to protect whatever compears from any appropriation that would claim to exhaust it, and at the same time to protect the possibility of responding, so that non-possession does not turn into indifference.

At the end of this long journey I can finally say, without the comfort of a thesis but with the honesty of a position, where I stand. I am not a churched Christian, nor a classical doctrinal Christian, nor a devotional or confessional one, nor a modern atheist, nor a Hegelian. I inhabit the Christian horizon without taking the step that would close it, and I cannot leave it even when I try. What singles me out, if anything does, is that I do not believe the cross demonstrates the reconciliation of the world with God, nor that it certifies the death of God, but that it reveals that the essential only compears by withdrawing, and that no true presence can be possessed without remainder. The distance between the infinite and the finite is not there to be overcome, as Hegel wished, nor simply to be mourned, as Lacan wished, but to be inhabited, inhabited poetically, with the body, with the voice, with memory, with song. My whole relation to Christianity fits within that verb, to inhabit, which is neither to believe nor to deny, which is something poorer and more difficult: to remain faithful to a landscape while no longer able to live fully in its house, and without wanting to burn it down either.

The key word of Hegelian Christianity is reconciliation, and the word that returns again and again in what I write is compearance, and the two are not equivalent, because one seeks the closing of the distance and the other tries to remain faithful to what compears without ever exhausting it. My deepest spiritual family does not start from Rome, nor from Constantinople, nor from Wittenberg, but from a line that runs from Gregorio de Nisa (335 - 395) to Eckhart, from Eckhart to Juan de la Cruz, from Juan de la Cruz to Kierkegaard, from Kierkegaard to Unamuno, and from Unamuno to Zambrano, with Steiner, Chrétien, Jean-Yves Lacoste (1953), and Byung-Chul Han (1959) at the margins, and all of them share a single intuition: that the most important thing about reality cannot become an available object, that being shows itself precisely because it never finishes letting itself be possessed.

And perhaps there is, at the bottom of all this, a reason that is not philosophical but older still, and it is that I too am not transparent to myself, I too do not coincide with myself, I too cannot possess myself without remainder. If my relation to Christianity resists closing, it is because in it my own relation to myself is reflected, a relation that also remains open, wounded, without synthesis. The God I would know how to name is not the engineer, nor the accountant, nor the policeman, but the one who, hanging from a cross, cries out his own abandonment, and in that cry I recognize neither the proof of a reconciliation nor the record of a death, but the most exact image I know of what it means to be alive and exposed, a being that does not coincide with itself and that, nevertheless, keeps singing. There, in that non-coincidence that becomes voice, lies the strongest family resemblance I have with Christianity, and not in any doctrine. I do not know whether that is faith. I know that it resembles faith enough that no other word will serve me, and resembles it little enough that I do not dare to use it. And in that in-between, which is neither doubt nor certainty but exposure to the open sky, is where I write, and where, for as long as it lasts, I will go on writing.

None of this keeps me from defending Christianity as one of the great historical forms of the West, against those who believe that criticizing it requires reducing it to fanaticism, sexual repression, ignorance, and clerical power. One can reject a doctrine, abandon a practice, and fight an institution without falsifying history. The West that produced modern science, the university, the legal concept of the person, individual conscience, a good part of international law, polyphonic music, Gothic architecture, the novel of interiority, the prophetic critique of power, and the very possibility of a self-aware secularization did not appear out of a post-religious vacuum. It arose within the tension between Christianity, Greece, and Rome. Even the principles by which Christianity is judged today (universal dignity, the centrality of the victim, suspicion toward power, moral equality, freedom of conscience) have profoundly Christian genealogies, even though they are not exclusively Christian and do not today require a confessional grounding.

Defending this inheritance does not mean turning it into a pure bloc, nor denying what the West owes to Judaism, to Islam, to India, to China, to Africa, or to the countless cultures it came into contact with, often violently. Nor does it mean claiming that outside Christendom there was no rationality, science, art, or philosophy. It means something more modest and at the same time more firm: that a civilization cannot understand itself, nor preserve its critical capacities, by destroying in caricature the matrix that made them possible. Christianity deserves to be judged severely precisely because it has produced extraordinary resources for judging itself. Its greatness does not lie in having been innocent, but in having created within itself a tension between power and prophecy, institution and event, dogma and mysticism, law and mercy, universality and person. At times power won, and dogma, and law. At other times the prophet spoke, and the mystic, the martyr, the heretic, the reformer, the saint. That dispute does not belong only to the past. It continues structuring Western consciousness even in those who believe themselves completely emancipated from it.

That is why my defense of Christianity is not apologetics in the usual sense. I am not trying to prove the resurrection, the divinity of Christ, or the infallibility of a Church. I am defending the depth of a landscape against those who view it from an intellectual development built yesterday and believe themselves superior because they no longer recognize the roots beneath the pavement. I am defending the right to inherit critically, to preserve symbols without obeying them blindly, to recognize a concrete historical superiority without turning it into supremacism, and to affirm that a civilization can owe its rational capacity precisely to theological conflicts that today seem ridiculous. Christianity was not the opposite of Western reason. It was one of the principal places in which that reason learned, over centuries, to argue with itself.

The historical defense of Christianity might seem to contradict my refusal to accept its classical doctrine. But both positions come together in one final intuition. The very tradition that built one of the most powerful architectures of the West also contains the principles of its own critique, the prohibition of idols, the incarnation, kenosis, the separation of God and the world, and the demand for theological rationality. To understand why I can defend Christianity without returning to its confession, I must finally state the thesis that connects its historical greatness to its capacity to produce the atheism that denies it.

There is a thesis I have circled throughout this whole essay without daring to state it head-on, and the moment has come to say it in full, because without it everything before falls short. Christianity is, ontologically, the antechamber of atheism. I do not mean this in the sociological sense that has by now become a commonplace, the one according to which Europe became de-Christianized and Christianity was, without meaning to, the womb of its own secularization. That is true, but it is the lesser truth. What interests me is the strong thesis, the ontological one, the one that holds that it was not a historical accident but the very structure of Christianity that engendered atheism, and that it engendered it from within, out of fidelity to itself and not out of betrayal.

It is worth passing once more through Gustavo Bueno to say this properly, because he built the scaffolding I need, even though I am going to use it afterward against his own conclusion. In his philosophy of religion, Bueno distinguishes three strata. Primary religion has its core in the animal numen, in the real animals that compeared before the first humans as living and fearsome powers, true nonhuman others, and that is for him the authentic root of the sacred, long before any social projection. Secondary religion appears when those numina become humanized, when the sacred animal cedes its place to the anthropomorphic gods of the pantheons, when power becomes a figure with a face and a biography. And tertiary religion is that of the metaphysical God, the one, infinite, transcendent God of the great monotheisms and of philosophical theology, the God of the philosophers purged of all animality and all anecdote. So much for the description. The thesis comes next, and it cuts. Bueno holds that tertiary religion, carried through to the end of its own rational demand, turns against itself, because the idea of an infinite, personal, creator God, pushed to its ultimate consequences, contradicts and dissolves itself, so that atheism is not the opposite of tertiary religion but its logical outcome, its truth, that toward which it tends when it thinks itself through without fear.

I take that scheme and add something Bueno would not say. Of all the tertiary religions, the Christian one is the most rational, and not for the reason he gave, its institutional objectivity, its scholastic architecture, its law, its dogma. It is the most rational for a deeper and more uncomfortable reason, because it is the only one that does the work of atheism within itself, with its own hands, at its own center. It does so along three paths that are at bottom one.

The first is iconoclasm, that prohibition of images which it inherits from Judaism and radicalizes, because a God who forbids his own image is a God in permanent war against every objectification of the divine, and that idol-breaking machine, if it truly works, ends up reaching the last idol, which is the objectifiable God of theology itself.

The second is the incarnation, the emptying of the infinite into the finite, into a face, a date, a mortal body, the gesture by which the metaphysical absolute abandons its serene separateness and descends into history and into flesh.

And the third is kenosis and the cross, the moment when God dies, and not only dies but cries out his own abandonment, and that cry is the instant in which God himself, for one hour, is an atheist. The death of God is not something atheists did to Christianity from outside. It is the event Christianity placed at its own heart, and everything else is a footnote.

To this is added an effect that overflows theology and reaches all the way to science. Monotheism emptied the cosmos of gods, withdrew the numen from nature, left the world as a mechanism available to knowledge, and made possible what Max Weber (1864 - 1920) called the disenchantment of the world. A world swept clean of gods is already the world of science. Christianity, by expelling the sacred from things in order to concentrate it in a single God and then letting that God die on a cross, cleared the ground on which naturalism was going to rise. The antechamber of atheism is real, and I do not deny it, and I am not afraid to stand in it.

But here I make the turn that separates me from Bueno and from Altizer and from all who have walked this path before me. An antechamber does not open onto only one room. The God who dies in iconoclasm, in the incarnation, on the cross, in disenchantment, is always the same God, the idol, the object, the engineer, the accountant, the supervisor, the God of the philosophers. That God has to die, and does well to die, and I do not shed a single tear over his grave. What I dispute is what remains afterward. Bueno crosses that antechamber toward the void, or toward structures, or toward history. And I have said throughout this whole essay that the same threshold opens onto another room, because the collapse of the idol does not leave a void but clears the site for the appearing. The nothing of the atheists and that nothing, nothing, nothing of Juan de la Cruz resemble each other to the point of being mistaken for one another, and yet they are not the same, because one is the end of the road and the other is the emptying that lets presence come. Christianity is ontologically the antechamber of atheism, and by that very same structure, without changing a single piece, it is the antechamber of the apophatic. The iconoclasm that kills the idol is the mysticism that refuses to possess God. They are the same gesture read in two directions.

That is why I would correct Bueno's formula without destroying it. Atheism is the truth of tertiary religion only if by God one means the idol. If by God one means the inexhaustible, then the death of the idol is not atheism but the beginning of the apophatic. And Christianity is the most rational of the tertiary religions not because it culminates in atheism, as Bueno believed, nor because it culminates in dogma, as the scholastics believed, but because it is the only one that refuses, at its own center, to let God become an object. And a religion that does not consent to let its God become an object is a religion condemned to remain forever in the antechamber, without fully entering the temple and without fully stepping out into the open. That antechamber, that threshold, that exposure to the open sky, is the place this whole essay has been describing. I did not choose to live there. Christianity built the room and left the door open on both sides, and I am the one who stayed on the threshold, not wanting to enter and not wanting to leave, because I suspect the threshold is not a failure to arrive but the only honest place from which the inexhaustible can still be seen...

After this last turn, the initial image can be recovered with a more precise sense. The Christian landscape is not only what was left behind, nor only what my thought preserves. It is also the ground that made my departure possible, the tradition that taught me to break idols until I reached the images of God fabricated by that very tradition itself. Returning to the landscape at the end does not mean closing the circle, but recognizing that even the way out was opened from within its own territory.

Perhaps that is why I began these pages by speaking of a landscape. I understand better now what that image was trying to say before I could explain it. I do not belong to Christianity as one belongs to an institution, to a system of propositions, or to an identity that demands obedience. I belong to it, in part, the way one belongs to the place where one first learned that the sky could mean something, that a person was not exhausted by the visible, that another's suffering demanded a response, that guilt could ask for forgiveness, and that death did not have to hold the last word over a life.

None of that obliges me to accept all the names, doctrines, or forms of power through which that experience was administered. Some I must argue with. From others I must distance myself. Against still others I even have an obligation to rebel. But neither can I honestly claim that my way of rebelling was born in a space without memory. My resistance, too, breathes an inherited air. The very questions with which I depart were, in part, learned there.

Perhaps freedom does not consist in abandoning the landscape until one reaches a place with no provenance. No such place exists. It consists in learning to walk without confusing orientation with obedience, gratitude with submission, memory with nostalgia, and horizon with frontier. It consists in being able to look at the stars without demanding that they form a system, recognizing that some have burned out, that others were given names we can no longer pronounce innocently, and that, even so, their light still reaches us.

I do not know whether that form of belonging still deserves the name Christian. Nor am I sure that keeping the name is the decisive question. I know only that a part of my moral, imaginative, and philosophical life continues to move within that horizon, even when it argues with it, even when it abandons it provisionally, even when it fears that its own words may be hiding what they promised to reveal. Perhaps a tradition remains alive precisely in that way: not when it demands to be repeated, but when it is still capable of giving rise to a freedom that can contradict it.

None of this was meant to prove a thesis in the strict sense. It has been, rather, an attempt to describe as honestly as possible a way of inhabiting the world. If the reader has come this far, perhaps he can now understand why the question was never whether or not I am a Christian, but learning to be faithful to whatever made even that question possible.

In the end, to inhabit a landscape is not to possess it. It is to let oneself be affected by its distances, to know some of its paths, to lose oneself in others, to remember what happened there, and to answer for the way we continue crossing it. It may be that my relation to Christianity is, in the end, nothing more than that, that is, a way of walking among ruins, presences, wounds, and promises, without turning any of them into a totality, and a way of continuing to listen, beneath the words I can no longer wholly affirm, to the old melody that never finishes being spent.

I have written this essay slowly, over many years in fact, though I have only now given it this final form, because some questions cannot be answered quickly, and because any premature answer would have betrayed the question itself. I have not wanted to convince anyone to believe or to stop believing. I have wanted, simply, to set down a way of inhabiting the world that I first learned in a body and in a language, and that I later had to think through slowly, name by name, until I found words that did not entirely betray it.

If I have learned anything in this journey, it is that the inhabited distance is not a comfortable position, nor an elegant compromise, nor a halfway settlement between faith and unbelief. It is, rather, a discipline, that of remaining close enough to what formed me to keep listening to it, and far enough from its closed certainties not to betray what still comes forward within it. Perhaps there is no other honest way to inherit a tradition without either embalming it or abandoning it.

It remains, in closing, only to thank the reader who has come this far, and to return to the question with which I began, not whether I am or am not a Christian, but what each of us does with what constitutes us and what we will never fully understand. That question, and not a closed answer, is the only thing this essay has wanted, in the end, to leave still sounding.

Edition and citation

How to cite. Josu De Solaun, “The Inhabited Distance,” Melosías, 4 September 2026, permanent link.

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