The Immanence and Transcendence of Christ

Understanding the deepest Christian mystery through an abandoned Gnostic novel.

In my early twenties, I had an idea for a novel. It would be titled “The Stereoscopist.”

A stereoscope is an odd device, now almost entirely obsolete. Essentially, it holds two nearly identical photographs, with very subtle differences, and the viewer, through a pair of binoculars, can see a third image, different from the original two and richer than both.

I had never used a stereoscope. However, in my childhood, I had encountered something similar, albeit more childish. Perhaps, like me, the reader might have had access to one of those 3D magazines – Magic Eye, for instance. The principle was stereoscopic: various almost identical images are placed side by side. Through a certain focus trick – which I was quite proud to master – suddenly, beyond those monotonous sequential images, a completely different image would reveal itself.

In my unwritten novel, the protagonist would also traverse between two worlds. In his everyday life, he would live in the universe of common, mundane, horizontal, repetitive, un-mysterious images. But, through a special ability, he would see beyond the everyday images. The protagonist – the stereoscopist – would have access to a hidden reality, concealed behind ordinary life.

Ideas for texts don’t come out of nothing. This is especially true for novels – even those never written. In my case, there was a deep unease behind it. An unease undoubtedly Gnostic in nature.

A Gnostic unease can be described as a diffuse, misunderstood sensation of living in two worlds. On the one hand, the ordinary world: a common world, with repetitive, often boring relationships; a world of obligations, routines, misfits, vain ambitions, ephemeral achievements, frustrations. On the other hand, a world of sublime mysteries, hidden truths, unknown beings, eternity, infinity: a world of perfect achievements, perfect happiness; perfection, in short.

I knew a bit about philosophy. Not much, but enough to have some notion that this other world corresponded, roughly speaking, to Plato’s world of ideas. It’s the world of true lights, as opposed to my daily experience of shadows, which is what I knew. Only years later did I begin to understand that, still in Platonic (and Neoplatonic) terms, that world of perfection is – we could say, albeit in simplistic terms – closer to the One, while the common world of ordinary realities is a world originated from the Dyad. And the Dyad, the generator of divisions and multiplicities, is also the origin of evil, of which each of our daily lives is a gloomy example.

The stereoscopist in the novel would be lost between these two worlds. He would seek reconciliation and would not succeed. For long periods, great efforts in the pursuit of absolute transcendence. In other moments – perhaps out of resignation – his efforts would turn towards the everyday, material world. And indeed, I couldn’t see a possible solution – neither for the story of the stereoscopist in the novel, nor for my very own life.

Some Gnostic ideas have always attracted me. I’m not talking about crude Gnosticism (the Gnostic paths can go incredibly low), but those, we could say, more aligned with the Platonic scheme I poorly outlined above. I’m talking about Gnostic ideas that treat this earthly world as illusory, dark, and hopeless, while defending the existence of a superior world, much more real and blissful, to which there is a promise of access through a certain mysterious initiatory path.

The stereoscopist in the novel would indeed be a Gnostic. Trapped in this material world – and it is well known that Gnosticism takes concrete life as a prison – he would seek the mysterious path of transcendence. He would try to contemplate life as he contemplated his books from childhood: behind the repetitive and monotonous images of everyday life, he would seek the hidden image, more real than reality itself. It would be his way out of the Matrix or the Truman Show: two decidedly Gnostic films that marked any teenager from the late 90s.

The novel remained in the world of ideas.

Time passed. And, by these mysteries of life, the Gnostic of yesterday (and I’m obviously not talking about the stereoscopist, but about myself) finally recognizes his ingrained Gnosticism – and does not see it as something good. He seeks another path, which he begins to find.

I believe that, apart from some very exceptional cases – not everyone converts by falling from a horse and having a mystical experience – conversion journeys are labyrinthine in all fields.

In the intellectual field, for example, certain themes arise, are slightly understood, and soon forgotten; then, they return – perhaps in a higher octave, in musical language. We understand a little, set it aside, and then understand a little more, and so on.

I don’t know how many more comings and goings will be necessary for me to understand the mystery of the incarnation. I would guess about seven hundred, at least. But, for now, I just want to share one of those bits of increased understanding that I believe I’ve had on the subject. An increase that – yes! – has to do with our stereoscopist.

What did our hero of the never-written novel do? He wandered, lost between two worlds. Feeling trapped in immanence, in the everyday world, he desperately sought transcendence; tiring of his efforts towards the desired superior world, he would fall back into pure immanence, and live his mundane life. And so, he spent his days, between here and there, up and down, dreaming and returning; and his days, in his stereoscopic wanderings, would get lost along with the protagonist. A life wasted amidst the highest dreams – and how many lives are not wasted this way?

For how long was I like the stereoscopist? For how long did I imagine, more or less consciously, that the most real world, the world of ultimate truth, was elsewhere? There’s too much Gnosticism in my story; and, I’m sure, not just in mine. How could a conversion to a completely different way of living not be labyrinthine? How could I, in a short span, understand the mystery of mysteries – which for so many years completely eluded me?

I had no philosophical background to understand that, while seeking mysterious Gnostic paths, it was the so-neglected Christianity that hid the secret key – the true secret key – to my deepest existential unease. Writing these lines, I see myself in that text by Chesterton, about the navigator who travels the entire globe only to discover that the answer he so longed for had always been by his side. Or I see myself in that Beatles song that, repeating some verses from the Tao Te Ching, says: “Without going out of my door / I can know all things of earth. / Without looking out of my window / I could know the ways of heaven. / The farther one travels / The less one knows / The less one really knows” (a song, I’m certain, without any exactly Christian intention; but the song went out into the world, and one takes it as they will).

In my case, I truly (and there’s no metaphor here) spent my entire childhood in front of a large and beautiful Catholic Church. A church to which I paid no mind.

In my adolescence and youth, I sought hidden secrets. At a certain point, I recognized myself as someone lost between two worlds – like the stereoscopist. I saw no way out. I sought more and more a secret key, searching for mysterious paths made for very few, a handful of special ones – no! It wouldn’t cross my mind that I could perhaps find it in a banal thing, in something so overdone, so childish, so silly, so cheesy, so outdated as… Jesus Christ.

This is not a theological or densely philosophical text about the incarnation of the Word. My intention here is simply to mark my astonishment at this discovery so simple and yet so hard to grasp. Jesus Christ, the divine Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, through His incarnation, resolves the irreconcilable ambivalence of the One and the Dyad.

He resolves the seemingly irreconcilable dichotomy between Heaven and earth, transcendence and immanence. He resolves the drama of the Matrix or The Truman Show by showing that the way, the only real way towards ultimate truth, is, mysteriously, at the same time here and there. It’s the mystery of omnipresence, which encompasses all of creation; and all of creation includes this makeshift office where I write these lines, in a tiny and seemingly insignificant spot on the map. The magnificent apex of existence – which our stereoscopist, in his Gnostic dreams, imagined to be only in the infinitely distant – reveals its splendor also here, in this world, on this earth.

The magnificent apex of existence is not – this is what the incarnate Logos reveals – only infinitely beyond this prison-body. In fact, there is no prison-body, as the Gnostics believe. The pulsating animality of instincts of this odd body of mine, whose thin skin hides horrifying innards, is not a mistake, nor is it something that would be better off not being (it is even said that the Cathars, Gnostics of the 11th to 13th centuries, advocated for non-procreation, because to bring someone into this world is to condemn a spiritual spark to imprisonment). The magnificent apex of existence is not, or at least not only, infinitely beyond this ordinary life, this dull makeshift office, this endless daily routine, in which work obligations and family duties, virtual court hearings and sleepless nights rocking the baby, intermingle.

The mystery of the incarnation resolves not just the – arguably – deepest of all philosophical problems, of the One and the Dyad, of transcendence and immanence. For me, it’s much more important than that. It resolves my deepest existential dilemma. And it gives direction to the deepest yearning of my restless soul.

The Stereoscopist was never written – it remained in the world of ideas.

Perhaps it was for the best: it would be one more story, like so many others, that add layers of confusion to our already so confused life.

Maybe one day I will face writing it again. But then, it will no longer be the lost stereoscopist originally conceived – I assure you. It will be a stereoscopist who finds the mysterious key, for which he longed all his life. It will be a Christian stereoscopist.

How else would he find the key?

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