The Experience of God, Icons of the Mystery

Raimon Panikkar

The Experience of God, Icons of the Mystery

tr. Joseph Cunneen

Knopf, 2007, xxiii + 534pp. $30

Christophany, the Fullness of Man

tr. Alfred DiLascia

Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2004, 214 pp., $30.

Author of The Vedic Experience, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, and The Silence of God: the answer of the Buddha, Raimon Panikkar has offered steady criticism of our largely parochial, mediterranean Christianity. Growing up in Spain as the son of a Spanish mother and an Indian father, he was told at his Jesuit grammar school that his father was surely going to hell because he was a Hindu. This had a strong effect, motivating him in later years, after being ordained a Catholic priest, to spend at least half the year in India in order to become steeped in the Vedas. Retired from his position as professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he lives in a small village near Barcelona, while continuing to write and lecture.

Panikkar has a deserved reputation as a demanding writer, largely because he draws on his extensive linguistic skills in presenting his ideas. This should give The Experience of God, a book without footnotes, a special appeal to readers who are not scholars. Its four chapters--"Speaking of God," "The experience of God," "Christian Experience of God," and "Privileged places of the experience of God"--present a reader's guide that proceeds through the stages of consciousness with clarifications needed to initiate the reader into the experience of God, an experience including both God's experience, and one's own human and cosmic experience.

Panikkar's primary audience is Christian, but philosophers, scientists and all who seek to understand connections among the major religions of the world will benefit from this book. His is an apophatic or negative approach to God, as beautifully shaped as its classical predecessors, but based on the pluralist foundations of religious traditions around the world and including many affirmations that engage the experience of divine mystery.

At the outset Panikkar reminds us of the etymology of the name or symbol "God"--who is neither a concept nor an idea, neither object nor idol. Correcting the reader's false assumptions, the author's non-dualist method allows the mind to focus on the meaning of his message. Nine steps make up the short first chapter, introducing Panikkar's method of refining our speech about God. It requires a preliminary silence to activate the "inner eye" of faith. God-talk is not reducible to scientific method. It involves our whole being, not just reason, but language, feeling, and consciousness. As symbolic, such speech reaches another order that uproots human absolutisms, expressing the contingency of all human enterprises, including political and religious agendas.

There is no primary analogue for God, no super-concept or abstract definition. Even though we compare different ideas of divinity in the study of religions, what is under consideration is a relationship with a symbol. We should accept pluralism rather than seek a universal theory about God because the divine is a dimension of reality itself. Eventually, as the last chapter emphasizes, God-speech "leads back to a new silence."

Next Panikkar offers guidelines to quiet one's mind, memory, sense, and desires, in order to open the inner "third eye" to prepare our experience. Overall, experience is structured by four "moments": 1. immediate, pure, instant life; 2. memory of a pure experience; 3. the interpretation of the experience as sensitive, spiritual, loving, of Being, God, etc.; and 4. reception of our experience in a resonant cultural environment. These moments can be seen in the experience of Jesus, the Christ. It was preserved by strong memories among his contemporaries, by spoken words and written documents which were interpreted by different communities. The reception progressed by tradition and eventually affected a "whole civilization". Experience writ large is the process of an initial mystical experience, followed by its memory, interpretation, and reception. Knowledge of this fourfold process is urgent because it allows us to relate to the religions of the world with an "ecumenical ecumenism".

Panikkar distinguishes faith, the capacity for God, which is deep in every human being, from belief. Stereotyping people into "believers and infidels" is insulting. God nourishes all people, though human institutions present difficulties. We should protest abuses of power, but we live in a human condition of disharmony, a kingdom of disjointedness, which requires maturity to negotiate. Structures need to adapt and become transparent, but they are needed as human social processes to provide wide access to the experience of God.

The mystery of divinity has three horizons, cosmological, anthropological, and ontological. The first provides the space and time metaphors common to classical views of the divine as it relates to heaven and earth. Anthropological horizons touch our inner sense of freedom and destiny, which is realized in Atman-Brahman, the Christ, Purusha, or symbols of justice and the perfect society. The ontological horizon opens to the divine beyond nature, the origin of all reality, the relation between immanence and transcendence.