On August 26 Raimon Panikkar died at age 91, in a village near Barcelona, the city in which he was raised. There have been obituaries in both the religious and the secular press. I read a fairly extensive one in The National Catholic Reporter of October 1.
Panikkar was a key figure in the development of interfaith dialogue in the twentieth century. His personal background was clearly helpful for this role. His father was an upper-caste Hindu, active in the movement against British rule in India. Forced to flee from his home country, he ended up settling in Spain and marrying Raimon’s mother, a Catalan woman from an affluent family. (Incidentally, Pannikar kept changing the spelling of his first name—in his early writings he used the Spanish “Raimundo”, after some time of teaching in America he switched to “Raymond”, ending up with “Raimon”—which, I think, is a Catalan version. I have had no cause to emulate this procedure, intriguing though it is).
Panikkar received a Catholic education in Barcelona. As a young man he met Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, the founder of the conservative Catholic order Opus Dei, and was influenced by him to study for the priesthood. Given Panikkar’s later career, this is somewhat ironic—he moved far away indeed from Catholic orthodoxy as understood by Opus Dei. He was ordained as a priest, studied at various universities, finally obtained a doctorate in theology in 1961 from the Lateran University in Rome. But a few years earlier his life took a decisive turn, when in 1954 he visited India for the first time. In Varanasi (Benares) he encountered a group of Catholic monks who tried to express their Christianity by living as much as possible like Hindu ascetics. The rich world of Indian religion overwhelmed Panikkar. For the rest of his life he tried to follow the example of these monks by seeking to integrate that world with his Christian faith.
His first book, a revision of his doctoral dissertation, received immediate widespread attention. The Unknown Christ of Hinduism was a detailed comparison of Thomas Aquinas, arguably the greatest medieval Catholic theologian, with Shankara, whose writings are generally regarded as representing the very peak of Hindu thought. In this book Panikkar defined the theme he was to develop throughout his later work—Christ as “the universal symbol of divine-human unity, the human face of God”. This cosmic Christ, under many different names, can be discovered in traditions far removed from what Hindus like to call “the religions of western Asia”—the “Abrahamic” faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This discovery, Panikkar believed, could be the foundation both of fruitful interfaith dialogue and of a Catholic “theology of religions”. He published some thirty books after this one (a collection is being prepared by an Italian publisher), endlessly expanding his original insight. His magnum opus is a huge volume, The Vedic Experience,a systematic exposition of the core scriptures of Hinduism. The Rhythm of Being, the text of his Gifford Lectures, was published posthumously in English.
Panikkar taught for many years at the University of California in Santa Barbara. It is there that I met him, only once, and was impressed by his learning and warm personality. But I came to know him indirectly through Ivan Illich, with whom I worked in the early 1970s. Illich was another cosmopolitan and idiosyncratic Catholic priest—born in Austria of a Croatian father and a German-Jewish mother—founder of a somewhat chaotic think-tank in Cuernavaca, Mexico. While living in America, Panikkar spent several months every year at an ashram in Varanasi. Illich would meet him there and join with him on forays into the tumultuous religious landscape of India, some of them on foot. I don’t know what they talked about (Illich, as far as I know, did not write about interfaith questions, though I imagine that they interested him). The two men could choose among any number of languages to converse in—beginning with Spanish, Italian and French. Illich said that he discovered India in Panikkar’s company.
The global pluralism of our age led, invariably, to multiple encounters between religious traditions, and to theological efforts to come to terms with this situation. Conventionally, three approaches have been distinguished—“exclusivism”, “pluralism” and “inclusivism”. The “exclusivists” feistily reaffirm the unique truth of their faith, with minimal if any concessions to the truth claims of others. Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian who cast his shadow over Protestantism throughout the twentieth century, was an “exclusivist” par excellence, especially in his younger years. Once asked how he could know that Hinduism was utterly false in its truth claims, when he had admitted to great ignorance about that religion, he replied: “I know it a priori”. There is something refreshing about such robust self-confidence, especially if one has experienced the wimpishness of so much inter-religious dialogue. But it is a position that is hard to maintain in the face of serious encounters with the great traditions of religious history, especially if this includes conversations with their contemporary adherents. At the other end of the spectrum are the “pluralists”, who look on all the traditions as partial but valid perspectives on the ultimate reality. One of the most prolific (and, I may add, appealing) representatives of this approach is the British Protestant John Hick. He has been advocating a “Copernican revolution” in theology—moving from regarding one’s own tradition as the center of truth, to regarding it as one of many planets circling the sun of the ultimate reality. In the title of one of his books, God has Many Names—and each “name” (Yahweh, Krishna, Allah, and so on) represents a valid perspective on the truth. This is a very attractive vision. But it leaves out the possibility that from some “planets” one cannot see the “sun” at all—one sits, as it were, in a dark location which permanently faces the other way. The “pluralists” of course are very much in favor of dialogue—with anybody and anything. There has now developed a cottage industry of dialogue activities—many of them, I hasten to say, serious and useful. But their tone has been mostly non-judgmental, expressing an all-embracing spirit of tolerance. This is a bit hard to maintain in a dialogue with, say, a Jihadist who believes that the killing of infidel children is a virtuous deed. Pan-tolerance here comes upon some moral limits. But there are also cognitive limits—say, in dialogue with a shaman who believes that he can summon the dead (not to mention some instances closer to home).
The “inclusivists” also favor dialogue in a spirit of respect and complete openness, but they do not shy away from affirming certain truth claims of their own. In other words, they are prepared to say no to “the other”, while trying as far as possible to say yes. An impressive representative of this approach was the German Catholic Karl Rahner, who taught for many years at the University of Innsbruck. He coined the phrase “anonymous Christians”—in Panikkar’s terms, Hindus worshipping Christ without knowing it. The phrase has been criticized as arrogant, but I think that this is unfair to Rahner. What he meant to say, I think, was that Christ is a cosmic reality, which reveals itself in many places, not only in those that bear his name. Panikkar did not attain Rahner’s reputation as a “theologian of religions”. But, with enormous erudition, he persisted in a lifelong pursuit of the same inclusive vision. In the service of full disclosure, let me confess that, qua lay (that is, unaccredited) theologian, I also consider myself as an “inclusivist”. But, qua (reasonably accredited) sociologist of religion, I would propose that “inclusivism” is likely the most productive approach to global religious pluralism—productive intellectually, as leading to provocative insights—and productive practically, as promoting civic peace between adherents of different faiths.