What If Christ Is True in the Only Universe I Can Know?

There is something a Christian cannot do, at least not in the scientific sense of the word: prove that Jesus Christ is God. Science can investigate the historical Jesus, examine ancient manuscripts, reconstruct the emergence of the first Christian communities and study the historical circumstances surrounding the birth of Christianity. It can ask what the earliest Christians believed, when particular texts were written and how the Christian tradition developed. But the proposition that Jesus is God belongs to another order of questions. There is no experiment capable of placing divine nature under observation, no instrument capable of measuring transcendence, and no scientific procedure capable of turning a metaphysical claim into an empirical fact. If Christianity depends upon the ability to produce such a proof, then Christianity is asking science to answer a question that science was never designed to answer.

The Gospel Before Certainty

For a contemporary human being, however, Christianity does not necessarily have to begin with the intellectual certainty that Jesus is God. It can begin with something more immediate: the encounter with the Gospel itself and with the extraordinary vision of human life that it proposes. Love your enemy. Forgive those who have harmed you. Refuse to answer violence with violence. Do not make money, status or power the measure of your existence. Care for those who cannot repay you. Resist the temptation to reduce other people to categories and judgments. Serve rather than dominate. These principles do not constitute scientific propositions, but they can become a way of living. And this creates an unusual possibility: perhaps the first Christian experiment is not theological but existential. One can ask what happens when a human being genuinely attempts to live according to these principles rather than merely admiring them as beautiful ideas.

In that sense, the laboratory is no longer outside us. It is our own life.

This does not prove Christianity in the scientific sense, and it should not be confused with proof. But it changes the nature of the question. Instead of asking only whether Christianity can win an argument about God, we can ask what kind of human being emerges when the Gospel is taken seriously enough to influence choices, relationships, ambitions, failures and responses to suffering.

The Difference Between Truth and Certainty

There is a distinction that is often lost in discussions about religion: the difference between truth and certainty. Something may be true even when I cannot demonstrate it scientifically, while something may be deeply believed without becoming true simply because I believe it. My conviction does not manufacture reality. Therefore I cannot legitimately say that Christ is God merely because I have decided that He is. What I can say is that I believe Christ is God and that I have chosen to organize my life around that belief.

This is not a scientific statement. It is an existential commitment. Faith, understood in this way, is not necessarily the possession of intellectual certainty but the decision to entrust one's life to a reality that one cannot completely capture with concepts or demonstrate through empirical methods. The believer does not necessarily possess God as an object of knowledge; rather, the believer accepts the possibility that his own life can become a response to God.

That distinction also protects faith from becoming a form of intellectual arrogance. The moment I claim to have scientifically demonstrated God, I have reduced the infinite to the limits of my own method. The moment I admit that I believe without possessing absolute empirical proof, I acknowledge both the seriousness of the claim and the limitations of the person making it.

What If Reality Is Not What I Think It Is?

At this point the philosophical problem can be pushed to an almost absurd extreme. What if solipsism were true? What if the only reality I could ever know directly were my own consciousness? What if the external world, other people, history and even my own memories were inaccessible to me except through the experience occurring within my mind? And what if, in one of those strange cosmological thought experiments, I were nothing more than a Boltzmann brain: a conscious observer appearing as an extraordinarily improbable fluctuation, complete with memories of a past that had never actually happened?

I do not need to believe that such a scenario is true. The thought experiment is valuable precisely because it exposes a fundamental limitation of human knowledge: I never experience reality from outside myself. I experience reality from within consciousness. I can build theories about the external world, test them, compare them with other people's observations and develop extraordinarily reliable scientific models, but I cannot somehow step outside the condition of being an observer in order to look at existence from an absolute point of view.

Taken to its extreme, the thought experiment leads to a provocative statement: in my universe, Christ is God. This does not mean that my belief creates God, nor does it mean that whatever I believe automatically becomes true. It means that whatever the ultimate nature of reality may be, I have to live from within the reality available to me. I cannot postpone existence until I have solved metaphysics.

The Truth I Cannot Possess

Perhaps this is also one of the great temptations of religion: confusing a doctrine about God with possession of God Himself. A theological system can describe God, a sacred text can speak about God, and a religious tradition can preserve centuries of reflection about God, but none of these things necessarily means that a human being has contained the infinite within a set of propositions. If God exists, God cannot simply become another object among the objects we encounter in the world.

This is why I find a certain intellectual humility essential to faith. I can believe, doubt, study, pray, question and search, but I cannot turn the mystery of existence into personal property. The sentence that seems more intellectually honest to me is therefore not, “I can prove that Christ is God,” but rather, “I believe that Christ is God, and I am willing to let that belief transform the way I live.” The first sentence claims a kind of knowledge that cannot be established scientifically; the second openly acknowledges the difference between evidence, belief and commitment.

Christianity as Testimony

If this is so, perhaps the Christian's task is not primarily to win an argument about God. It is to become a testimony to what happens when the Gospel is taken seriously. A Christian who speaks constantly about forgiveness but refuses to forgive, who speaks about love while treating people as instruments, or who proclaims freedom from materialism while organizing life entirely around money and status creates a contradiction between doctrine and existence. The problem is not that the theology has been scientifically disproved; it is that the person's life has failed to make the theology credible as an existential possibility.

The opposite is also true. When the Gospel begins to influence the way a person responds to humiliation, power, money, betrayal, loneliness, weakness and death, something can become visible that no theological argument can fully communicate. Such a life does not constitute scientific evidence that Christ is God. It is something different: testimony. It says, in effect, “I have lived according to this word, and this is what it has done to me.”

Perhaps this is one of the few forms of religious argument that remains meaningful in a pluralistic world. It does not demand that everyone accept the conclusion before examining the experience. It simply places a life in front of the observer and allows the observer to ask whether the Gospel has actually produced what it claims to produce.

Maybe Faith Begins Here

While reflecting on these questions, I found myself thinking about a sentence that came to me almost like an interior response: “It is not true only because it is objectively true; it becomes true for you when you are willing to live by it.” Taken literally, such a statement could become simple relativism, and I do not think relativism is the point. Reality does not change merely because I believe something. What changes is my relationship with what I believe to be true.

I may never possess absolute certainty about the ultimate structure of reality. Nevertheless, I cannot suspend my life until every metaphysical question has been resolved. I still have to decide how I will treat another human being, what I will do with money and power, whether I will seek revenge or forgiveness, whether I will live primarily for myself or remain open to something greater than myself. Every human being makes these decisions, whether consciously or not.

Perhaps this is where Christianity can begin again in the contemporary world: not with the demand that a person first solve the metaphysical problem of God, but with an invitation to encounter the Gospel and seriously consider what kind of existence it proposes. The question is no longer simply whether someone can prove Christ in a laboratory. The deeper question is what happens to a human being who chooses to live as though Christ's words are true.

That experiment cannot be performed with instruments. It can only be performed with a life.

And perhaps that is why, in the end, the Christian does not possess a proof.

The Christian possesses a testimony.

What Is God, Really? When Human Beings Try to Define the Absolute

A few evenings ago, while talking with a friend, we arrived at a question that seems to have accompanied humanity from the very beginning and that, precisely because of this, we tend to take for granted: what is God, really? Not who God is according to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or any of the countless religious traditions human beings have developed over thousands of years, but what God actually is, beyond our representations, our symbols, our doctrines, and even our words.

The distinction is enormous, because when we ask, “Who is God?” we are already operating within a relationship, a narrative, a tradition. We can answer that He is the Father, the Creator, the Supreme Being, the One, the Absolute, Love, the Trinity, the God of Abraham, or the God proclaimed by Jesus. But when we ask what God is, the question changes completely, because we are immediately confronted with the limits of human knowledge itself. We are finite beings trying to understand the infinite; we are immersed in time and attempting to think about what is supposed to exist beyond time; we are part of the universe and yet try to understand what, according to our own definitions, would be its origin and foundation.

So I find myself wondering: are we really sure that the categories through which we think about God are adequate to God?

The problem is not only God, but man

Perhaps the question of God cannot be approached without first passing through an even more difficult question: what is a human being?

It sounds like a simpler question because we have direct experience of ourselves. Yet it only takes a moment of reflection to realize how difficult it is to answer. We can say that a human being is what he thinks, what he does, what he desires, what he loves, what he creates, what he remembers, what he dreams. We can define humanity through reason, consciousness, language, or the ability to create culture and art. But every definition inevitably captures only a part.

We might say, for example, that a human being is what he does. It is an attractive definition and, to some extent, a convincing one. We reveal ourselves through our works: music, literature, science, technology, religion, war, architecture, politics, love. But is that enough to define us? Obviously not. Human beings build cathedrals and atomic bombs; they write love poems and organize wars; they save lives and can, at the same time, destroy other human lives. If we define humanity through what human beings do, we obtain an image of humanity, but not necessarily its essence.

And this is where a word that may seem unnecessarily technical becomes useful: synecdoche. We take a part and use it to represent the whole. The problem is that when we speak about humanity and then use humanity as a means of speaking about God, we risk constructing what might be called a synecdoche of synecdoches: one part of the human being becomes the whole human being, and that partial image of humanity then becomes, in turn, our image of God.

At that point, we may have the impression that we have found an answer, when perhaps all we have done is multiply our representations.

Is the God we name really God?

This, to me, is one of the fundamental problems of every religion.

We cannot speak about God except through human language. We call Him Father because we know what it means to be a father; we call Him Creator because we know what it means to create; we call Him Judge because we know what judgment is; we call Him Love because we have experienced love. Even when we use apparently more abstract terms such as Absolute, Infinite, or Being, we are still using concepts created by the human mind.

That does not necessarily mean they are false. It means they are ours.

And I think that distinction is crucial.

When someone says, “God is love,” are they necessarily telling us something about God, or are they telling us something about their own understanding of love and, through that understanding, attempting to approach God? When we call God Father, are we describing a reality we know directly, or are we using a human metaphor to indicate something we cannot otherwise define?

I do not think these questions destroy faith. On the contrary, they might make faith much more conscious, because they force believers to distinguish between God and the image of God they have constructed.

And the same distinction applies to those who do not believe.

Because even an atheist, when saying that he does not believe in God, must first establish which God he is rejecting. The personal God of a particular religion? The Creator God of classical metaphysics? An anthropomorphic God who intervenes in history? The Absolute of philosophers? The God of Christian tradition? Rejecting one representation of God does not necessarily demonstrate the nonexistence of everything that the word “God” has attempted, throughout history, to indicate.

And what about Jesus?

The issue becomes even more delicate when we arrive at Jesus, because we are no longer dealing merely with a philosophical concept, but with a historical person around whom one of the greatest religious experiences in human history developed.

My friend reminded me of something that I consider far from insignificant: Jesus speaks of the Father, speaks of unity, speaks about the relationship between human beings and God, and, above all, makes statements that Christianity has come to regard as extraordinary. But precisely here, I think, we need to distinguish the historical Jesus from the theological development that subsequently grew around his figure.

I am not saying that Christian theology is false. I am saying that it is something different from simply recording the words of a man who lived two thousand years ago.

When we read the New Testament, after all, we are not listening to a recording of every word Jesus ever spoke. We are reading texts that emerged within the earliest Christian communities, were transmitted and interpreted within those communities, and eventually became part of the tradition of the Church. Paul of Tarsus played an enormous role in the spread of Christianity and in its theological development, but he did not know Jesus during Jesus' earthly life. The councils of the following centuries then formulated fundamental doctrines concerning the nature of Christ and the relationship between his human and divine natures.

All of this belongs to the history of Christianity and cannot simply be erased. But precisely because it belongs to history, it should remind us that there is a historical process between Jesus and the theological image of Jesus, and that this process deserves to be studied and understood.

In the Gospels, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” That is an immense statement, but it is not the same thing as literally saying, “I am God.” Christianity has interpreted this and other statements in light of the whole story of Jesus, his death, the resurrection believed in by his disciples, and the subsequent reflection of Christian communities. The divinity of Christ is therefore not simply the result of one isolated sentence, but of an entire theological construction based on the interpretation of his person and his life.

And here, personally, I find the question more interesting than the answer.

What did his first disciples see in that man that led them to recognize in him something beyond a man?

It is a fascinating question even if, for a moment, we put faith aside.

Perhaps art knows something reason cannot express

Art also came up in our conversation, and I don't think that was incidental.

Art has a peculiar quality: it can often suggest what it cannot explain. Music can communicate something that cannot be translated into a definition; a painting can make us perceive a dimension of existence that no description could completely reproduce; poetry can connect experiences that ordinary language would otherwise keep apart.

Perhaps this is also why religions have always needed art. When reason reaches something it can no longer contain through precise concepts, symbols, parables, rituals, images, and songs appear.

Not necessarily because the symbol is more truthful than reason, but because sometimes a symbol can point toward something that reason cannot fully circumscribe.

An arrow is not the thing toward which it points.

Perhaps much of religious language works in precisely this way: it does not necessarily claim to be the object itself; it attempts to point toward it.

The problem begins when we forget the distinction and turn the arrow into the target.

The temptation of dogma

This is where, paradoxically, I think both traditional religion and certain forms of esotericism and Gnosticism can fail.

Historically, Gnosticism emerged through many different movements and experiences, and it would be simplistic to reduce it to a single system. Yet whenever the idea of a higher knowledge becomes the conviction that one finally possesses the key to the Absolute, the risk is that one dogma is simply being replaced by another.

The priest says, “The truth is this.”

The initiate answers, “No, the true knowledge is this.”

But if both believe they have definitively possessed something that no finite being should be able to possess in its entirety, the distance between them may be much smaller than they imagine.

The words change, the symbols change, the hierarchies change, the sacred books change, but the temptation remains the same: to turn a possible path toward the Absolute into the Absolute itself.

And this is where, in my view, humility should enter the picture.

Not the humility of someone who gives up searching, but the humility of someone who continues searching while knowing that every answer may contain only a fragment of the truth.

Perhaps the problem lies in our very concept of “existence”

There is an even more radical question.

We ask whether God “exists,” but what does it mean to exist?

A tree exists. A person exists. A galaxy exists. An atom exists. These are realities that we can, at least to some degree, place within space and time and subject to different forms of observation.

But if God is truly what some philosophical traditions call the Absolute, the foundation of being itself, can we use the same concept of existence for God that we use for things that are part of the universe?

Perhaps the question itself is badly framed.

It is somewhat like asking where the origin of space is located. The question appears meaningful because we are accustomed to thinking that everything must be “somewhere.” But if we are speaking about space as a whole, that “where” no longer has its ordinary meaning.

Likewise, if God were that upon which being itself depends, asking whether God “exists” in the same sense in which a thing exists might mean applying a category to something for which that category was never designed.

This is not a proof of God's existence.

But neither is it a proof of His nonexistence.

It is simply an acknowledgment of a conceptual limit.

Perhaps the most honest answer is a question

In the end, perhaps the real issue is not finding a better definition of God, but understanding why human beings have always felt the need to ask the question in the first place.

Why have human beings, in every civilization we know, looked beyond themselves?

Why have they built temples, prayed, sacrificed, painted gods on cave walls, written prayers, developed cosmologies, invented myths, and searched for a meaning that extended beyond their individual existence?

We could explain all of this as fear of death, the need for order, the desire for consolation, social construction, or psychological illusion. Some of these explanations may certainly capture part of the phenomenon. But even then we return to the original problem: we have explained one manifestation of humanity, not necessarily its essence.

And so we are back where we started.

What is a human being?

And through the human being, what can we really know about God?

Perhaps not much.

Perhaps far more than we imagine.

But certainly not everything.

That is why I am less interested in deciding which religion has “won” the contest for truth and more interested in observing the mechanism through which human beings construct their certainties, because that may be where the greatest error is hidden: confusing what we have understood with what actually exists.

The word “God” is ours. The symbols are ours. The theologies are ours. The philosophies are ours. Even the concept of the Absolute is formulated by our minds.

And so the question remains, apparently simple and perhaps impossible:

What is God, really, once we remove everything human beings have said about God?

I do not know whether there is an answer.

But perhaps that is precisely the point.

As long as we continue searching without turning every intuition into a dogma, we remain within the search.

The moment we believe we have finally possessed the Absolute, perhaps we have stopped searching for God and simply begun worshiping one of our own representations of Him.

The Real Enemy of Islamic Fundamentalism Is Not Christianity — It’s the Shopping Mall

When we talk about Islam, especially in the West, the conversation almost inevitably turns to terrorism, fundamentalism, immigration, and the so-called clash of civilizations. But this way of looking at the issue can make us lose sight of something deeper: the relationship between Islam and modernity.

Because perhaps the most interesting question is not simply whether Islam is compatible with the West. It is this:

What happens to a religion when the society in which it exists gradually becomes secular?

And this is where the comparison with European Christianity becomes unavoidable.

A Christianity That Had a Church to Rebel Against

European secularization followed a particular path partly because Christianity had a very specific institution at its center: the Church.

There was a clergy. There was a hierarchy. There was the papacy. There were religious institutions with enormous political, economic, and cultural power.

For centuries, European society could therefore identify religion with concrete institutions against which, sooner or later, a reaction would emerge.

The Enlightenment, liberalism, anticlericalism, socialism, and modernity could fight a very tangible battle: a battle against ecclesiastical power.

The situation within Sunni Islam is different.

An imam is not a Catholic priest. He does not possess an equivalent sacramental authority, nor does he belong to a universal hierarchy. In many respects, he is closer to a Protestant pastor: he leads prayers, teaches, interprets religious tradition, and performs religious functions, but he is not part of a universal Church governed by a centralized hierarchy.

There are, of course, major institutions of Sunni scholarship, with al-Azhar in Cairo being perhaps the best-known example. But there is no single Sunni authority comparable to the Catholic Church.

And that changes things considerably.

In Europe, secularization could take the form of a rebellion against organized religion.

Within Sunni Islam, it can happen in a much quieter way.

Secularization Without a Revolution

A person can continue to identify as Muslim because their parents are Muslim, because their family is Muslim, because their country is Muslim, because that is the identity they inherited.

They may continue to pray, fast during Ramadan, observe certain religious rules, and participate in religious celebrations.

But that does not necessarily mean that faith still has the same inner force.

We know this perfectly well in Europe. How many Italians still describe themselves as Catholic simply because they always have, while rarely going to church? How many celebrate Christmas, Easter, religious weddings, and funerals without faith actually occupying a central place in their lives?

Religion can survive as an identity even after losing part of its spiritual power.

In Muslim societies, this process may be harder to see precisely because it does not necessarily involve an explicit declaration of rupture.

It is not necessarily apostasy.

It is more like silent secularization, in which religion remains present but can gradually become a social habit.

Of course, it would be absurd to generalize and suggest that Muslims are somehow less sincere in their faith than Christians. Millions of Muslims live their religion with profound spiritual conviction.

But the sociological phenomenon is worth considering: a society can remain formally religious while becoming progressively more secular in its behavior, desires, and mindset.

Islam Is Certainly Not Devoid of the Supernatural

There is another distinction worth making.

Islam is not a religion without the supernatural. Quite the opposite. Angels, jinn, prophets, revelation, the Last Judgment, Paradise, and Hell are fundamental elements of its worldview.

The difference lies more in how the supernatural is expressed in everyday religious life.

Catholic Christianity developed an extraordinary culture of miracles: saints, relics, apparitions, healings, stigmata, pilgrimages, and sacred images.

In orthodox Sunni Islam, the relationship with God is less mediated by a priestly class and by a vast network of saints and sacraments.

This does not mean that the supernatural is absent.

It means that it takes a different religious form.

Wahhabism and the Fear of Religious Decline

From this perspective, Wahhabism can be understood as a response to the fear of religious decline.

The idea was simple and radical: return to the Islam of the earliest generations, eliminate religious innovations, purify the faith, and bring religious life back to the Qur'an and the Prophetic tradition.

Then modernity arrived.

European colonialism arrived. The Ottoman Empire collapsed. Nation-states emerged. Capitalism, urbanization, technology, Western culture, and eventually globalization transformed Muslim societies.

And the Muslim world found itself facing the same question that had already tormented Europe:

How can a society become modern without ceasing to be religious?

The answers have been numerous, and often deeply incompatible with one another.

Fundamentalism is only one of them.

But Fundamentalists May Be Underestimating Something

For decades, parts of the radical Islamist worldview have imagined the West as a civilization destined to decline.

Conquest was supposed to come through demographics, immigration, conversion, and the gradual replacement of Western laws with Islamic law.

But this vision may have underestimated the real power of the West.

Because the West is not simply parliament, constitutions, democracy, or a legal system.

It is also a vast cultural system built around desire.

And the real competitor of Islamic radicalism may be precisely that.

Not Christianity.

The shopping mall.

The Devil of the Shopping Mall

It may sound provocative, but think about it.

A young man raised in a madrasa in a poor country may be told that the West is corrupt, decadent, and morally bankrupt.

Then he picks up a smartphone.

And through that smartphone, he sees the world.

He sees cars, universities, hospitals, skyscrapers, restaurants, travel, video games, music, fashion, technology.

He sees an enormous range of possibilities.

And above all, he sees something incredibly simple:

the possibility of desire.

Consumer culture does not ask him to convert.

It does not ask him to read a philosophy book.

It does not even ask him to believe in anything.

It simply tells him:

you can have more.

You can choose.

You can buy.

You can travel.

You can have fun.

You can change.

You can become whoever you want to be.

That is an extraordinarily powerful promise.

And it is very difficult to fight it simply by saying that it is sinful.

Paradise After Death Versus Paradise Now

Here we encounter a curious paradox.

Fundamentalism promises Paradise after death.

Consumer society, by contrast, tries to construct a small version of paradise before death.

It does not necessarily offer salvation.

It offers something more immediate: pleasure, comfort, entertainment, choice.

But consumerism has a huge weakness of its own.

It can satisfy many desires, but it has no answer to death.

It can sell you a car, a house, a holiday, a computer, and increasingly sophisticated virtual experiences.

But it still cannot sell you immortality.

And that may be its greatest weakness.

Because Eventually, the Same Question Always Returns

We can become wealthy.

We can live longer.

We can modify our bodies.

We can use technology to overcome limitations that, only a few decades ago, seemed impossible to overcome.

We can desire almost anything.

But sooner or later, death arrives.

And in the face of death, the shopping mall suddenly becomes silent.

Consumption is no longer enough.

Technology is no longer enough.

Success is no longer enough.

And the question humanity has asked since the beginning returns:

What comes after?

Perhaps this is precisely where fundamentalism continues to find its strength. Not necessarily because it is stronger than modernity, but because it addresses a question that modernity, by itself, has never been able to answer.

That is also why I do not believe the future can simply be described as a victory of the West over Islam.

The real struggle may be much deeper.

On one side is a religion that promises meaning, belonging, and eternal life.

On the other is a secular civilization offering freedom, wealth, technology, and an unprecedented range of individual possibilities.

And in the middle, there are all of us.

Human beings who want to live well, be free, have everything they can possibly desire and, if possible, never die.

We can desire everything.

We can buy almost everything.

We can conquer almost everything.

But we still cannot buy immortality.

And perhaps, if God really exists, it is precisely there — in the face of death, when every other promise comes to an end — that He may yet have the last word.

The Devil of Progress: When Consumption Replaced Faith

When we think about the secularization of the West, we tend to look for its causes in ideas: the Enlightenment, science, liberalism, social movements, the decline of religious authority. All of these things matter. But there is something even more concrete that we often forget:

the way we live has changed.

For thousands of years, most Europeans lived in predominantly agricultural and pastoral societies. The family was an economic unit as much as an emotional one. Land meant survival. The community was where people were born, lived, worked, married, and died. Religion was not something practiced only on Sundays. It was woven into everyday life: the calendar, festivals, marriages, funerals, births, moments of fear, and moments of hope.

Then, within just a few generations, everything changed.

People left the countryside and moved to cities. Work moved from farms and family workshops into factories, offices, shops, and eventually the service economy. The family gradually lost many of its economic functions. Local communities became less important. Individuals acquired a degree of freedom their ancestors could hardly have imagined.

And along with that freedom came something new:

mass consumption.

This, I believe, is one of the keys to understanding the contemporary West.

The peasant produced. The industrial worker worked. Modern man increasingly consumes.

This is not a condemnation of supermarkets. I go to them too. The question is much deeper: what happens when consumption stops being merely a means of satisfying our needs and becomes one of the main ways in which we define ourselves?

You only have to walk into a modern shopping mall to get a sense of it.

It is curious. The old temples were places where people went to remind themselves that something existed beyond them. Shopping malls are places where people go to discover how many things they can possibly desire.

The comparison is deliberately provocative, but it says something.

Advertising no longer simply tells us, "You need this product." It tells us that the product can make us more attractive, younger, happier, more desirable, more successful, more free.

It doesn't merely sell objects.

It sells possibilities.

And a society built around possibilities inevitably begins to look suspiciously at limits.

This also helps explain the transformation of social values.

In a traditional agricultural society, people were born into a series of identities they had not chosen: a family, a village, a religion, a social class, a trade, a community. That did not necessarily make them happy. But their identity was deeply connected to something that existed before them.

Modernity broke many of those constraints.

And in many respects, that was a good thing.

Women gained rights that had previously been denied to them. Minorities gained the ability to demand dignity and equality. Millions of people acquired freedoms that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.

When we see today's Woke movement challenging patriarchy, we should remember that behind it lie decades—and in some cases centuries—of struggles for women's rights and the rights of minorities.

And when we see a Gay Pride parade, we should not make the mistake of thinking that homosexuality itself was invented by modernity.

It wasn't.

Homosexuality has existed throughout human history.

But the contemporary Gay Pride movement is a product of modernity.

In a traditional agricultural and pastoral society, it would have been essentially inconceivable to see thousands of people marching publicly to assert a sexual identity. Not because homosexual people did not exist, but because the social conditions that make such a phenomenon possible did not exist: large cities, individualism, anonymity, mass communication, modern political organization, individual rights, and a radically different understanding of personal identity.

The world in which we live changed.

And as the world changed, so did the way we understand ourselves.

But there is something else that I find even more interesting.

Capitalism does not necessarily need to destroy a cultural revolution.

It can sell it.

A protest can become an event. An identity can become a market. A political cause can become an advertising campaign. A difference can become a brand.

This does not mean that LGBT rights were created by corporations, any more than feminism was invented by the market.

It means that contemporary capitalism possesses an extraordinary ability:

it can absorb almost anything.

Even things that were originally created in opposition to it.

And this brings us to religion.

Why did the West become secular?

Part of the answer certainly lies in ideas. But another part lies in everyday life.

For centuries, God was present in an enormous number of aspects of human existence. Today, many of the functions once associated with religion have been taken over by other institutions.

Medicine protects us from disease.

The welfare state protects us from poverty.

Schools provide knowledge.

Science explains the physical world.

Technology solves problems.

Entertainment fills our free time.

And the market offers us an astonishing range of things to buy.

And so God can gradually become less necessary.

Not necessarily because someone actively fought against Him.

Simply because He is no longer needed to organize everyday life in the way He once was.

Perhaps this is the deepest form of secularization.

Not the denial of God.

His irrelevance.

This is why I find it difficult to take seriously those theories that explain the religious crisis of the West through black masses, satanic rituals supposedly performed by global elites, Beelzebub, or mysterious Masonic lodges.

We do not need to imagine a global elite gathering in a dark room to understand what happened.

If we want to use the word "devil," I would rather use it as a metaphor.

The devil of the modern world would not need to perform a black mass.

It would only need to convince us that there are no limits to what we should desire.

Its temple would not be a crypt.

It would be a shopping mall.

And its ritual would not be an occult ceremony.

It would be the shopping cart.

We enter. We choose. We desire. We buy.

And tomorrow we desire something else.

It is a religion without God and without transcendence, but it has its own daily rituals: advertising, purchasing, gratification, replacement, desire.

The problem, of course, is not progress itself.

Without progress, we would still be living with diseases we can now treat, widespread illiteracy, high infant mortality, extreme poverty, and countless injustices that humanity has rightly fought to overcome.

The problem begins when progress stops being a tool and becomes a faith.

When we assume that every change is necessarily an improvement.

When we confuse freedom with the absence of all limits.

When consumption becomes the answer to our anxieties.

When family, community, tradition, and even patriotism are perceived merely as outdated obstacles to individual freedom.

And yet, in the end, there is one limit that even the most powerful economic system will never be able to erase.

We can desire everything.

We can buy cars, houses, holidays, clothes, experiences, medicines, technology, comfort. We can build increasingly sophisticated machines and imagine a future in which technology will solve problems that today seem impossible.

But we cannot buy immortality.

And this is precisely where, for those who believe, God might have the last word.

Because we may eventually conquer almost everything that belongs to the material world, but one question remains before which money, markets, and technology all come to a halt:

What happens when our life ends?

Perhaps death is the one limit that the consumer society will never be able to turn into a commodity.

And there is another irony.

In our attempt to consume more and more, we may end up consuming the very world that makes our consumption possible.

Land, water, energy, forests, biodiversity, raw materials: everything has limits. A civilization built on the assumption of virtually unlimited material growth must eventually confront the finite nature of the planet.

We do not know where the breaking point lies, nor whether humanity will actually experience an ecological collapse. But we can imagine the extreme scenario.

A post-apocalyptic society.

Not necessarily a simple return to the Stone Age. It could be something much stranger:

advanced technologies surviving alongside surprisingly archaic forms of social organization.

Intermittent electricity grids, drones, artificial intelligence and computer systems existing alongside self-sufficient local communities. The ruins of great cities standing beside fortified villages. Scientific knowledge preserved by small elites while much of the population returns to agriculture, animal husbandry, local production, and barter.

A new Middle Ages, perhaps.

Not the historical Middle Ages, of course, but a new age in which technology and archaism coexist.

History, after all, is not a staircase on which every generation automatically climbs one step higher than the previous one.

We like to imagine progress as a straight line: every generation richer, better educated, more technologically advanced and more free than the one before it.

But history does not always work that way.

There have been collapses, fractures, political breakdowns, economic crises, epidemics, wars, migrations, and cultural regressions. The fall of the Western Roman Empire is certainly one of the most famous examples, but it is hardly the only moment in history when complex systems entered into crisis and were replaced by very different forms of organization.

Every generation is new compared with the generations that came before it.

And no generation is guaranteed to be better.

Perhaps that is the lesson we have forgotten.

Progress is not a benevolent deity leading humanity inevitably toward an earthly paradise.

It is a tool.

And like every tool, it can be used to build or to destroy.

We have built an extraordinarily powerful civilization. Now we must discover whether we are wise enough not to consume the conditions that make that civilization possible.

Because perhaps the real "Devil of Progress" is not the one that tells us what to do.

It is the one that convinces us that we can have everything.

Everything except immortality.

And perhaps, precisely at that boundary, modern man may discover that God was never dead.

He was simply waiting.

Germany as an Archetype: Guido von List, the Runes, Reincarnation, and the Lost Search for the State

There are places that are more than places. They become symbols. They become inner landscapes that accompany a person throughout life, returning again and again without always revealing the reason why.

For some, that symbol is Rome. For others, Jerusalem, Athens, or another civilization that represents a deeper idea of humanity.

For me, the recurring symbol has always been Germany: not merely the modern nation, but the broader Germanic world in its historical, philosophical, and spiritual dimension.

This attraction is not simply political. It is connected to deeper questions: the meaning of identity, the relationship between the individual and the State, the nature of community, and the eternal search for order in a world that often appears fragmented.

Guido von List and the Hidden Memory of Origins

Any reflection on Germany and esoteric thought inevitably leads to the figure of Guido von List (1848–1919), one of the most influential representatives of Ariosophy.

His best-known work, The Secret of the Runes, presented runes not merely as an ancient writing system, but as symbols containing a hidden spiritual wisdom.

For List, runes represented cosmic forces, inner principles, and stages of human transformation. He believed they preserved fragments of an ancient knowledge that had been transmitted through generations.

His ideas combined elements of Norse mythology, nineteenth-century occultism, and Theosophy.

From a historical and academic perspective, many of List’s interpretations are not accepted by modern archaeology or linguistics. Yet his importance lies not only in historical accuracy, but in the symbolic power of his vision.

List was searching for origins. He was searching for a lost continuity between the present and an imagined ancient world.

And perhaps it is precisely this search for continuity that continues to fascinate many people today.

Reincarnation and the Attraction Toward Distant Worlds

One of the deepest questions of human experience concerns why certain individuals feel an almost inexplicable connection to a particular culture, historical period, or civilization.

Traditions that believe in reincarnation have often interpreted these attractions as traces of previous experiences: fragments of a memory that does not belong to the rational mind alone.

Psychologically, Carl Gustav Jung offered another interpretation through the concept of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Certain symbols may emerge because they represent profound structures of human experience.

In this sense, Germany can become an archetype: the image of order against chaos, discipline against fragmentation, community against isolation.

Perhaps the attraction is not truly toward a nation itself, but toward what that nation represents in the inner world of the individual.

The City and the Birth of Politics

The word “politics” comes from the ancient Greek polis.

The polis was not simply a city. It was a community of citizens who participated in the creation of a common order.

For Aristotle, human beings were political animals because they could only fully realize themselves within a community.

Modern society faces a profound challenge precisely because it often separates individuals from genuine belonging.

The city becomes only a physical space rather than a living civic reality.

The German concept of Gemeinschaft, later analyzed by Ferdinand Tönnies, expresses this distinction: a community based on deep bonds and shared identity, as opposed to a society dominated by impersonal relationships.

Perhaps part of the fascination with the German cultural world comes from this idea of an organized community, one connected to historical memory and a sense of collective responsibility.

The Holy Roman Empire and the Forgotten Europe

For centuries, the Germanic territories and parts of Italy existed within the same political framework: the Holy Roman Empire.

It was not a modern nation-state, but a complex imperial structure where different peoples and territories coexisted under the symbolic authority of the emperor.

The figure of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen represents one of the most remarkable examples of this connection. Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Sicily, he created in Palermo one of the most extraordinary cultural environments of medieval Europe.

His life reminds us that medieval Europe cannot be understood through modern national categories.

The identities that today seem natural are the result of centuries of historical transformation.

Italy and the Challenge of Political Community

Italian history is a story of extraordinary creativity, but also of fragmentation.

The medieval city-states produced art, philosophy, trade, and innovation. Florence, Venice, Genoa, and many others contributed enormously to Western civilization.

Yet this political fragmentation also created difficulties in building a continuous centralized state comparable to other European monarchies.

The medieval conflict between Guelphs and Ghibellines, the relationship between the Papacy and the Empire, and the presence of the Papal States at the heart of the peninsula all shaped Italy’s unique political development.

Southern Italy, meanwhile, experienced long periods of political unity, from the Norman Kingdom to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, following a different historical path from Central and Northern Europe.

The Search for Order and the Danger of Absolutes

History, however, teaches a fundamental lesson.

The search for order is a genuine human need. Societies require law, institutions, responsibility, and shared values.

But when the desire for order becomes absolute and attempts to eliminate human complexity, it can become destructive.

Twentieth-century Europe demonstrated this tragic contradiction.

The need for identity, belonging, and community is real. Yet history also shows that no nation, culture, or ideology possesses inherent superiority over others.

The real challenge is to create a strong community without transforming it into domination.

Conclusion: The Search for a Spiritual Homeland

Perhaps the attraction toward Germany is not merely historical or political.

Perhaps it represents the search for a lost form: an ideal city where law, culture, responsibility, and identity can exist together.

Maybe what we seek in the civilizations of the past is not the past itself, but an answer to the anxieties of the present.

The final question is not only:

“Where do we come from?”

The deeper question is:

“What kind of community do we want to build in the future?”

Because every human being, in the end, searches for a city.

Not only a city made of stones, but an inner city — a place where one can recognize oneself.

Keeping a Funeral Urn at Home: Is It Really the Best Choice?

Over the past few decades, cremation has become increasingly common across much of the world. Alongside this trend, more families have chosen to keep the cremated remains of their loved ones at home. The reasons vary: a desire to keep the deceased close, respect for their final wishes, or simply the wish to avoid the ongoing costs of cemetery burial or columbarium niches.

While these motivations are understandable, an important question remains: is a private home truly the most appropriate place to keep a loved one's ashes? Looking at the issue from psychological, religious, cultural, and spiritual perspectives, many experts suggest that it may not be.

From a psychological standpoint, grief is a process that requires time and gradual emotional adjustment. For some individuals, the constant presence of a funeral urn in the home may make it harder to move through the natural stages of bereavement. Rather than allowing the memory of the deceased to become a peaceful part of one's life, it may prolong emotional attachment and make acceptance more difficult. This does not happen in every case, but many psychologists encourage families to consider whether keeping the ashes at home truly supports healthy grieving.

Religious traditions also offer valuable insight. The Catholic Church, while accepting cremation, recommends that ashes be kept in a cemetery or another sacred place. A cemetery is more than a burial ground; it is a place of remembrance, prayer, and dignity, where the deceased remain part of the wider community even after death.

Many spiritual and esoteric traditions, despite their differences, share a similar principle: the living and the dead belong to different realms that should remain in balance. From this perspective, keeping a person's ashes permanently inside the home may symbolically encourage an unhealthy attachment, making it more difficult for the living to let go and, according to some beliefs, for the departed soul to continue its spiritual journey. These ideas belong to the realm of spiritual belief rather than scientific evidence, yet they have been part of human culture for centuries.

There is also a practical consideration that is often overlooked. Families move, homes are sold, inheritances are divided, and relationships change over time. An urn kept in a private residence can eventually become a source of uncertainty or disagreement among future generations, especially when family members hold different beliefs or are unsure how to care for the ashes. A permanent resting place in a cemetery provides continuity, stability, and lasting respect.

Financial concerns are often cited as the main reason for keeping an urn at home, and such concerns are understandable in difficult economic times. However, short-term savings should be weighed against the symbolic and emotional significance of providing a permanent and dignified resting place. Throughout history, nearly every civilization has recognized the importance of separating the spaces of daily life from the places dedicated to remembering the dead.

There is no scientific evidence demonstrating that keeping an urn at home causes harm to either the living or the deceased. Nevertheless, the convergence of psychological reflections, religious teachings, and longstanding spiritual traditions suggests that caution is warranted. The home is fundamentally a place for life, family, hope, and the future; the cemetery is a place for remembrance, reflection, and peaceful rest.

For these reasons, while fully respecting individual freedom and personal beliefs, keeping funeral urns inside private homes appears to be a less appropriate choice than placing them in a cemetery or a columbarium. This is not merely a matter of tradition, but of recognizing the profound symbolic value of maintaining a respectful distinction between the world of the living and the world of the dead—a distinction that has shaped human civilization since its earliest beginnings.

The Brandenburg Gate and the Memory of Germany | Das Brandenburger Tor und die Erinnerung an Deutschland

The day after October 7, when I saw the Brandenburg Gate illuminated with the colors of the Israeli flag, I experienced a feeling that is difficult to explain rationally. It was as if that image had awakened another image, one that belonged to a Germany of more than eighty years ago, when the same monument stood beneath banners bearing the swastika.

I do not ask anyone to believe in reincarnation, metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls. These belong to the realm of philosophy, religion, and personal experience, not historical proof. Yet I cannot deny that, whenever I write in German for a German-speaking audience, I often feel an inexplicable familiarity with that country and with that period of its history. It is as though fragments of a memory surfaced from somewhere beyond my own biography.

Perhaps they are nothing more than the product of imagination. Perhaps they are symbols created by the unconscious. Or perhaps they belong to what many Eastern traditions call the continuity of the soul through successive lives.

This idea is not foreign to German intellectual history. Hermann Hesse devoted much of his work to Indian philosophy, Buddhism, and the spiritual search that transcends a single earthly existence. The fascination with the East, with ancient traditions, and with questions about the destiny of the soul has always had a presence in European culture.

Even within National Socialist Germany there were figures, such as Heinrich Himmler, who cultivated highly unorthodox beliefs and developed ideas connected to ancient symbols and historical figures. These beliefs, which were often distorted and placed at the service of a destructive ideology, nevertheless demonstrate how powerful the human search for origins, identity, and transcendence can be.

Within my own reflections, two names often emerge: Ernst Kölle and Albert von Berrer. I cannot demonstrate that they have anything to do with me. They may simply represent symbols through which my mind tries to understand history. But if they continue to "speak" to me, their message is not about war, revenge, or nostalgia for the Third Reich.

Their message concerns Germany itself.

For decades, Germany has carried the enormous moral burden of the crimes committed under National Socialism. That responsibility cannot and should not be forgotten. Historical memory is an essential safeguard against repeating the darkest chapters of the past. Yet memory should not become a permanent sentence imposed on an entire nation, preventing it from moving forward.

Since 1945, humanity has witnessed many other wars, genocides, persecutions, and humanitarian tragedies. History did not end with the fall of Berlin. The challenge of our time is to preserve historical responsibility without reducing the identity of a people to the crimes of a single regime.

Sometimes contemporary Germany appears to search for its moral and political identity through very strong symbolic gestures. These gestures may be interpreted in different ways, but they reveal a country still seeking the right balance between remembrance, responsibility, and the confidence to look toward the future.

Aristotle taught that virtue lies in the mean, avoiding excess in either direction. This ancient lesson remains surprisingly relevant today.

If those impressions are more than imagination—if they truly represent echoes of lives lived before—then they cannot exist merely to awaken memories. Memory, by itself, serves no purpose unless it becomes wisdom.

Their meaning, as I understand it, is not to reopen the wounds of history or to seek revenge for the past, but to encourage Germany to rediscover the best of its own tradition: its culture, its philosophy, its scientific spirit, its sense of discipline and responsibility, and its capacity to contribute to European civilization.

A Germany that is strong without being aggressive, conscious of its history without being imprisoned by it, and capable of inspiring Europe not through domination but through example.

Europe does not need a Germany trapped by its past, nor a Germany that forgets it. It needs a Germany capable of leading with confidence, responsibility, and moderation together with the other European nations.

The European Union remains one of the greatest political experiments in history. It can become a true reality only if it becomes not merely a union of institutions and financial interests, but a genuine community of peoples.

An Europe capable of cooperating with all its allies while preserving its own political, cultural, and strategic autonomy. An Europe that is not built only by elites and economic mechanisms, but by citizens who recognize themselves in a common destiny.

If there is indeed a mission entrusted to each generation—or, for those who believe in reincarnation, to each soul returning to the world—it is not to revive the conflicts of the past, but to transform memory into wisdom and history into a foundation for a more balanced, peaceful, and human future.