What is faith? Is it a belief in otherworldly realities, in which imagination reigns supreme, and perhaps in truths expressed by sacred scriptures defined outside of all rationality, whose interpretation allows us to deduce everything and its opposite? Or is it the path of intelligence, indeed of the whole being, towards the Absolute, which precisely for this reason removes everything relative, all pretended knowledge, empties our soul and leads us into nothingness, into that “night” , from which alone the dawn can rise, or rather, the eternal light can reveal itself? These two questions belong, I believe, to every thinking consciousness of all time, but even more so in our time, that is, after the Enlightenment, after contemporary philology, which makes that faith as belief and that adherence to Scripture that was perhaps possible for a man of the Middle Ages extremely problematic. Must we pretend to believe in the existence of biblical characters and events that have been shown to have the same historical reality as the Homeric heroes and the Trojan War?

It must be understood that the silence referred to by the adjective ‘mystical’ is not external, esoteric silence, intended to conceal secret truths from the ‘uninitiated’, but rather inner silence, which consists in silencing one’s thoughts, however profound they may be, and therefore in detachment, especially from all our supposed knowledge. Detachment is the work of intelligence, which incessantly recognizes the finiteness of its own contents and, at the same time, of the will, which incessantly recognizes in those same contents the presence of egoism, of that amor sui that is truly the root of all evil.

Interviewer: How do philosophy and theology coexist in you? Vannini: Since the age of reason, I have felt a certain love and interest for deeply philosophical and theological issues, according to the Hegelian interpretation that philosophy has the absolute in common with religion.

I think it is possible to speak of “a Christian philosophy” as long as it is understood in the sense in which the Fathers of the Greek Church, Origen, or Gregory of Nyssa could understand it. Certainly, Christianity, in the strong sense, is itself philosophy, but not because there is a Christian philosophy ideologically placed alongside others, but because the life of the Christian as such is profoundly “philosophy.” The expression “Christian philosophy,” therefore, taken in a certain sense, does not bother me at all, precisely because I believe that Christianity is the true philosophy, without prejudice to the universal and absolute value given to both terms, Christianity and philosophy.

I don't believe there is a “calling” to mystical experience. I think that what is rather ambiguously called mysticism is nothing more than the experience of the spirit, or rather the experience of the truest and deepest reality of man: something that each of us is “called” to accomplish if we want to become what we really are. Of course, this requires a precise willingness not to be satisfied with the relative, to move towards the Absolute _ therefore a strong religious and philosophical need _ , but this also seems to me to be something absolutely “normal,” even if, perhaps, it is not so from a statistical point of view, so to speak.

Interviewer: Professor Vannini, how did your interest in mysticism come about? Vannini: It arose spontaneously, from the religious education I received in childhood (this was before the Council!) and, at the same time, from my encounter with and passion for philosophy, which developed during my adolescence. It was precisely by following my own disordered but passionate paths of research that I discovered, in the Marucelliana Library in Florence, the little book edited by Professor Giuseppe Faggin, La nascita eterna (The Eternal Birth), which was the only anthology of Eckhart available in Italian at the time. Although I was only a high school student, I was certain that I had stumbled upon something extraordinary, infinitely deeper (or higher) than anything I had known – or been taught – until then, a certainty that today, half a century later, is, if possible, even stronger for me. Obviously, I did not understand everything, and in order to understand, I began to study philosophy and then theology, devoting myself in particular to the authors and currents that most related to this field. Thus, little by little, I became familiar with that world which, somewhat improperly and, above all, unfortunately in a very ambiguous way, is called “mysticism.”

Almighty God the Father is the one who can be prayed to, and prayed to for help, both for eternal life and – above all – for the needs and desires of this earthly life. It is therefore not surprising that religions continue to thrive, particularly in those parts of the world and among those sections of the population that feel the harshness of existence most acutely. In this sense, Karl Marx's old definition of religion as the opium of the people and the groaning of the oppressed creature is still valid, and is necessarily expressed precisely through the image of Almighty God the Father. The picture is completely different among the educated classes. Since the Enlightenment, since the days of Reimarus and Lessing, historical criticism and philological analysis have destroyed that image, as they have dismantled the supernatural claim of the Bible, the foundation of that image throughout our world, through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. From this perspective, God is truly dead, as in Nietzsche's famous passage, and the fact that businesspeople have not noticed this does not detract from the fact itself: the biblical God died the moment people realized that they themselves had constructed his image.

For me, Meister Eckhart is truly Meister, magister, as his contemporaries called him. He is the Christian who most deeply understood the Gospel message and, at the same time, the medieval philosopher who was able to gather the best of the classical heritage. His works are all equally important, both those in the vernacular, intended for the people, and those in Latin, created for the university environment. From a more philosophical-theoretical point of view, however, it can be said that the ‘'Commentary on the Gospel of John’' is the most dense and relevant work, while for a more immediate access to his thought and experience, it is certainly the works in the vernacular, the ‘'Sermons’' or the so-called ‘'Treatises’' that are most useful. They are also the most fascinating, profound and at the same time simple works, accessible to all, as only a great teacher of life – ‘Lebemeister’, and not just ‘Lesemeister’, or professor, as Heidegger noted about him – can be.

The depths of the soul are not a faculty, a “power” of the soul, but rather the place where uncreated grace operates, God himself who “works with the soul to such an extent that he frees it from itself, as a creature, so that nothing remains but God and the soul itself, without mediation.”

Philosophy in the strong, classical sense shares with religion the object, truth, the Absolute in and of itself, and is therefore properly a stripping away, a removal of everything that is relative and accidental, in order to get to the essential. This concerns first and foremost ourselves, according to the precept of the Delphic Apollo: ‘Know thyself’. It is the ‘sculpting of one's own statue’ that Plotinus speaks of, removing the marble that covers it and prevents it from coming to light.