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Panikkar, Raimon

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Raimon Panikkar: Mann's Quick Notes (Mark Mann, 1997)

Raimon Panikkar: Mann's Quick Notes

Mark Mann, 1997

 

The son of a Catholic mother and Hindu father, became a Catholic priest; has numerous doctorates

His goal: to devise a "cosmotheandric spirituality that helps persons to embrace the reality of God within the diversity of pluralism through dialogue

Methodology

  1. He is a comparative religionist who attempts to relate different religions and ideological traditions at the level of their internal philosophical structure
  2. Through dialogue there emerges the One who is the divine source whose presence can be known under the conditions of modernity only within such encounters: it is dialogue that reveals this One! The dialogical encounter reveals progressively deeper layers of truth in such a way that the process itself becomes revelatory; the human capacity for knowing will finally be fulfilled and rest secure in that love where "heart speaks to heart"
  3. Metatheology: the religious endeavor to understand that primordial human relatedness we perceive in dealing with ultimate problems

God:

  1. God is the Absolute that is revealed at the term of limit (Horizon) of all human aspiration and striving (NeoThomist); God is the "powerful engine" and goal that drives the search for truth: Truth creating the conditions for its own apprehension
  2. God is utterly beyond, yet entirely within
  3. The true essence of Western thought about God is aided by Eastern thought which has a much more radical sense that God is beyond all categories or thought: God is found best in silence!

Christ:

  1. Christology is primarily a function of the trinitarian structrue that is the expression of God’s relation to humankind and the cosmos
  2. Father, Son and Spirit describe the poles of the God-human-world relatedness within God’s own being and thus are about the "cosmotheandric" center of all being
  3. Thinking of Jesus in historical terms is a symptom of the obsession with historical time that is a disease in the West and which leads to imperialistic claims about universal truth

Humanity:

  1. Theandric: God is revealed in human nature just as human nature is understood to have its existence within God
  2. Individual persons are infinitely complex but there is a unity and simplicity at the heart of human existence
  3. There is a great unity between the human and transhuman

Evil:

  1. All that would disrupt the rich complexity, depth, and fullness of the self-revealing trinitarian God and the theandric human nature, all that spoils the harmony of unity-in-diversity of the cosmotheandric world
  2. Remythologizes Babel: God has created confusion now so that all persons must learn the hard lessons of coming to understand the neighbor through the indirectness of poetry, myth and symbol

Salvation:

  1. It is a "second naivete" or "New innocence" (like ecstasy in mysticism)
  2. It is the living of wisdom about the nature of reality in which true freedom and love are experienced

Religious Pluralism

  1. Pluralism s a gift from God and particularly critical at this juncture in history!
  2. Each tradition can be enriched through dialogue with other traditions as the deepest truths of each are enable to shine more brightly
  3. Different experiences can neither be seen as having an impassable gulf between them (dualism) or as being all ultimately the same (monism)
  4. A tradition can only be truly known from the inside
  5. "There is no reason for Christians to abandon the conviction that they have the true religion, if they well understand that they must find all their truth in a Christianity that is open and dynamic. This will lead to an authentic religious dialogue."

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