Raimon Panikkar (1918–2010)

In my superficial way, I took dialogue as a conversation between different speakers. But of course, that literal dialogue never takes place without the dictation of “inner self” setting the agenda; the inner voices have their say. After reading Panikkar’s “The Intra-religious Dialogue”, I am surprised by the insight and tools he brings to nascent consciousness, especially in the context of religious beliefs.

Panikkar focuses on an “inner voice” that has dialogue with itself. This is a “self” process that Panikkar schools. Panikkar discusses internal thoughts and feelings as dialogue. He calls this an “intra-religious dialogue”, the inner voice which “catches hold of our entire person and removes our many masks”. [xvi] This event takes place “in the core of our being”, and is itself a religious act, an often involuntary search for truth, or a prayer “open in all directions”—looking above (transcendent), behind (toward tradition), and horizontally (toward the world and others on other paths). [xvii]

One fruitful conceit of the book is that this Self-talk is universal, and as a dialectic, it links us to Others. Panikkar introduces tools of dialectic to the presumed interior dialogue in which one struggles with oneself. [xvii] He is not doing this out of curiosity or compassion. He stands in liminal space, and declares that “we are in search for salvation”. [xvii] Labeling this “Intrareligious dialogue”, he notes that the “it” which does this, does so by seeking “to assimilate the transcendent into our immanence”. [xvii] His dialogical dialogue is reduced to what he calls "diatopical hermeneutics". [26], which is more than the purely morphological or diachronical one, applied to interpretation of scripture through respective cultural loci. The method he limns is "for the encounter" within and between persons and doctrines. [27]

I agree with him in noting that this assimilation is universally available, complex and transcendent—it is not limited to sociology or history. “It belongs to the realm of philosophical anthropology.” Our intrareligious dialogue is a constitutive element of Man, who is “a knot of relationships”. While he does not label this as Conscious or Unconscious, he makes the claim that it is human nature “that beckons to discover within ourselves the whole human world and also the entire reality”, and is also responding. [xviii]
I begin to wonder what the role of “awareness” is, how conscious the process is, and how much time is spent waiting—he never uses this word or ponders the interval—for the “other”, or the thought or “your self” to show up. The RgVeda (I,164,37) speaks of reality that is shared, and in dialogue. Reality is happening and it is having a constant conversation. [xix]

Panikkar's double fivefold “rhetoric of the dialogue” [22] provides a proto-model for opening up the dialogue in the meeting of religious traditions and situating its openings across a polyvalent liminal space. His five “attitudes” actually create and are the encounter, particularly as the metaphor is studied and valued: Exclusivism, Inclusivism, Parallelism, Interpenetration, Pluralism.

As different problems arise, their articulation requires more root metaphors, and here Panikkar proposes five paradigms or models for expressing views: Geographical (mountain peak), Physical (rainbow), Topological invariant (e.g. Hindu advaita in early Buddhism), Anthropological (esp. linguistic, living symbols), and finally Silence, which he labels “Mystical”. It appears to me to be particularly helpful the way he ventilates these tools of encountering rhetoric while constraining the use of models for criticism – he urges the use of these tools for the encounter, but not for judgment or criticism of “good” or “bad” religion.

I see this focus and modeling as useful tools for both intra-religious and inter-religious dialogue in the encounter with others inside and outside one’s incarnate being. For example, as Christ stands at my door and knocks, and my inner Buddha answers the door, and I hear the nymphs laughing and weeping and the Dao fills the wait with the great spectacle of nothingness and wonder. Panikkar is writing about the process of “answering” the knock on the door.… (more)