Raimon Panikkar

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Raimon Panikkar, 2007

Raimon Panikkar i Alemany (born November 3, 1918 in Barcelona , † August 26, 2010 in Tavertes , province of Barcelona ) was a Spanish - Catalan , Roman Catholic priest , professor of religious philosophy and an important representative of interreligious dialogue . He achieved international fame as the author of numerous books on spiritual and mystical subjects.

biography

His mother was a Catholic middle class Catalan ; his father was Hindu , came from South India and worked as a foreign agent for a German company in Barcelona. After attending a Jesuit school , Panikkar studied chemistry and philosophy at the universities of Barcelona , Bonn and Madrid , as well as Catholic theology in Madrid and Rome . He had three doctorates in philosophy (1945), chemistry (1958) and in theology (1961, Pontifical Lateran University in Rome). In 1946, Raimon Panikkar was ordained a priest .

From 1946 to 1953 Raimon Panikkar was professor of philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid . From 1953 he worked on Indian philosophy and Hinduism at the universities of Mysore and Varanasi (Benares). At this time he began to get involved in the Christian-Hindu dialogue. After a professorship in Rome from 1962 to 1963, he taught from 1967 to 1971 at Harvard University (USA), and from 1971 to 1978 at the University of California, Santa Barbara . Panikkar had been a member of Opus Dei since his ordination , from which he turned away in a dispute in 1966. Most recently he lived in Tavertes ( Comarca Osona ), in the mountains of Catalonia , near Barcelona. Panikkar has written over 30 books and more than 900 articles.

His brother Salvador Pániker is also a well-known author, philosopher and publisher.

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Intercultural dialogue

Raimon Panikkar's work is a mediation between different “worlds” in several ways. First of all, many of his writings attempt to promote understanding between the Christian and Hindu traditions by making common ground clear. Panikkar concentrates more on the spiritual part of the religions in contrast to Hans Küng , for example , who looks more closely at the ethical foundations and similarities. Panikkar always sees religious dialogue in the entire context of culture, philosophy and especially spirituality.

A real dialogue is therefore only possible when one can open oneself to one another in "love and sympathy" and share the other's experience of reality . Panikkar wants to refer to the limits that a purely intellectual dialogue brings with it, since some basic philosophical assumptions that are self-evident in European intellectual history are alien to many other cultures. This leads him to the “return to myth ”, which intellectually and linguistically cannot be exhaustively described and reduced and thus becomes a connecting, because comprehensive, element between people and cultures. For Panikkar, reality is always richer than any philosophical or religious concept, and any intercultural understanding should therefore be based on the direct experience of everyday reality and not on intellectual concepts.

He is not interested in mixing cultures and religions. Nor is it necessary for anyone to convert to another religion. Rather, Panikkar emphasizes the possibility for every person to be able to find their own "liberation" in their ancestral religion.

theology

Panikkar speaks of a trinitarian being of reality consisting of man , God (or divine principle) and cosmos . Neither is conceivable without the other. He is directed against a purely anthropocentric understanding of the world, in which man appears as the sole ruler over man. He already sees a consequent, comprehensive crisis - even the Third World War - in the living conditions of the poor in the cities of the third world. The solution could only be to establish a holistic “cosmotheandric” view that grants rights to the “world” as well as to people. The practical way to get there is a holistic experience that some cultures still take for granted.

Philosophy and ecosophy

Based on his work on intercultural dialogue , Panikkar criticizes one-sided western standards for a comparative philosophy . A meaningful comparison would have to be worked out from a superhuman standpoint, since the culture-specific, philosophical standpoint cannot be separated from humans.

Like Arne Naess , Raimon Panikkar also coined the term ecosophy. At Panikkar, ecosophy describes the art of dealing with nature. “Ecosophy” is a holistic view of nature that takes people, animals and plants into account as parts of creation or as co- creation . From an ecosophical perspective, nature is not an object, but a subject. The needs and expressions of life of nature should therefore be perceived and taken into account by humans. According to Francis D'Sa , ecosophy for humans is about recognizing the wisdom of nature. A symbiotic context of life can then be entered into. From an ecosophical perspective , the world is understood as a fabric woven from three dimensions, namely the divine, the human and the cosmic.

Works

German

  • Cult mystery in Hinduism and Christianity. A contribution to comparative theology of religion. Karl Alber, Freiburg i. Br. And Munich 1964.
  • Return to the myth . Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-458-14241-X .
  • Discover the monk within . Kösel, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-466-20307-4 .
  • The new religious way. Live in the dialogue of religions. Kösel, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-466-20320-1 .
  • Prepare a dwelling for wisdom . Kösel, Munich 1991; Revised and abridged new edition 2002 as an introduction to wisdom. Herder spectrum, Freiburg i. Br., ISBN 3-451-05256-3 .
  • God's silence. The Buddha's answer for our time . Translated from the chip. by Susanne Schaup , Kösel, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-466-20359-7 .
  • Trinity. About the center of human experience . Translated from the chip. by Susanne Schaup, Kösel, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-466-20378-3 .
  • God, man and world: the three unity of reality . Verlag Via Nova, Petersberg 1999, ISBN 3-928632-40-X .
  • Christophanie. Experience of the holy as the appearance of Christ . Translated from the chip. by Ruth Heimbach. Herder, Freiburg i. Br. 2006, ISBN 978-3-451-29097-8 .

literature

German

  • Hans-Peter Dürr / Raimon Panikkar: Love - the source of the cosmos - a conversation about science and religion. Herder, Freiburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-451-05965-0 . The volume clarifies the concept of the 'cosmotheandric vision' emphasized by Panikkar in the interreligious dialogue.
  • Bettina Bäumer (Ed.): Raimon Panikkar. The adventure is reality. Conversations about spiritual transformation. Run with Constantin von Barloewen and Axel Matthes. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-88221804-5 .
  • Francis X. D'Sa SJ: Mission of Dialogue. A hermeneutical consideration . In: Thomas Franz, Hanjo Sauer (ed.): Faith in the world of today. Theology and Church after the Second Vatican Council. Festschrift for Elmar Klinger. Vol. 2: Discourse fields . Echter Verlag, Würzburg 2006, ISBN 978-3-429-02854-1 , pp. 370-388. (on Panikkar's interpretation of religion as "understanding" and the language of a world of symbols)
  • Manuel Gogos: Raimon Panikkar. Matthias-Grünewald, Ostfildern 2000, ISBN 3786722765
  • Bernhard Nitsche: God - World - Human: Raimon Panikkar's Thinking of God - Paradigm For A Theology in Interreligious Perspective? (Contributions to a Theology of Religions 6) , Theologischer Verlag Zurich, 2008, ISBN 978-3-290-17476-7 .
  • Bernhard Nitsche (Ed.): Thinking about God in an interreligious perspective: Raimon Panikkar's Trinity theology in discussion. Lembeck, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-87476-449-4 .
  • Roland R. Ropers (ed.): God, man and world: The three unit of reality. Verlag Via Nova, Petersberg, 1999. ISBN 978-3-928632-40-9 .

English

  • Aporias in the comparative philosophy of religion , Man and World , vol 13, 1980, pp. 357-83.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Muere el filósofo y escritor Raimon Panikkar a los 91 años
  2. ↑ Victorino Pérez Prieto: El intento de recuperación de la figura de Panikkar por parte del Opus Dei. In: Religión Digital , March 19, 2018, accessed August 22, 2019 (Spanish).
  3. ↑ Raimon Panikkar: God, Man and World . Publisher Via Nova, Petersberg 1999, p. 132.
  4. ↑ Francis Xavier D'Sa : Rainbow of Revelation. The Universe of Faith and the Pluriverse of Confessions . IKO - publisher for intercultural communication. Frankfurt am Main 2006.
  5. ↑ Raimon Panikkar: Ökosophie, or: The cosmotheandric approach to nature . In: Kessler, H. (Ed.): Ecological Global Ethic in the Dialogue of Cultures and Religions . Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1996, 58-66.
personal data
SURNAME Panikkar, Raimon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pániker Alemany, Raimundo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Indian theologian, professor of religious philosophy and representative of interreligious dialogue
DATE OF BIRTH November 3, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Barcelona , Spain
DATE OF DEATH August 26, 2010
Place of death Tavertes , Province of Barcelona