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November 24 - December 14, 2022
By chance – but it is not by chance – I open the preface to the Veda of my friend and master and ask whoever will listen to me: What would you save from a house in flames? A precious, irreplaceable manuscript containing a message of salvation for the human race or a small number of people threatened by that fire? The dilemma is real and not only for the writer: how can one only be an ‘intellectual, interested in the truth, or only a ‘spiritual person’ engaged in goodness, when people desperately beg for food and justice? How can one follow a contemplative, philosophical or even religious path
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«I have not lived to write, but I have written in order to live in a more conscious manner, to help my brothers with thoughts that do not spring solely from my mind but also from a superior Fountain that can perhaps be called Spirit – even if I do not claim that my writings are ‘inspired’». His writings can stimulate the growth of a more profound and complete existence,
«Whoever wants to be lightning must know, for a long time, how to remain a cloud». From time to time. the landscape of the lake, mountains and clouds, is sometimes shaken by a bolt of lightning from the look of who is admiring it.
Our existences are linked, and we – life and work and library – are sisters.
When night time falls and there is no one around me, I move between these spaces, and holding the book Tao Te Ching in my hands, I read on the first page: «The Tao is beyond words and beyond comprehension. The Tao existed before words and names, before the sky and the earth, before tens of thousands of things. The Tao and its innumerable manifestations come from the same source: a subtle marvel in mysterious obscurity».
Tsu, which simply means ‘old teacher’, and who lived in China in the 4th/5th century
With time his thought changed and the idea of mission was replaced with an attitude of dialogue. I was near to him in this development that even enriched me, for which I am grateful.
«MC». Such associations are found, for example in the book by J. Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries, 1987, read by Panikkar in 1992, thirty three years after reading the Tao
In the blink of an eye I see reflections traced centuries ago by a Chinese person on cloth which goes across space and time, manuscripts and print, translations and interpretations and, like flying carpets, they arrive at the table of one of the many readers, my friend and master, who reads them for decades, in different places with different thoughts, growing, changing and ever remaining the same.
When she finished playing the piano, Señora Carmen Magdalena Alemany Pánikar, Raimundo’s mother, would sit on the armchair and turn to reading her favourite interests; poetry and spirituality. While observing her I had the impression that her reading touched on prayer, and from the expression on her face I perceived that her mind was flying.
I remember also Fyodor Dostoyevski, while he was in ‘the house of the dead’, meaning in prison in Siberia, carrying the little book of the Gospels. Since prisoners were not allowed to write, he underlined words or sentences and made short notes with his fingernail or a toothpick. This book of Gospels was fortunately brought back from exile, saved, preserved and published. Thus today, thanks to very careful study and to advanced technology, knowing the works of the Russian author, and being able to decipher his signs, we can enter the mysterious space of his mind while he read.
Between the distance covered by the text he was reading, the passages underlined by his fingernail, his barely visible notes and his entire literary works, an immense enchanting world has opened to be studied and interpreted.
«such enormous progress has made man diminutive».
Thus Panikkar wrote the word «advaita» in the margins, when he read that one of the merits of the poet was his capacity to unite opposites such as spirit and body, human and divine, beauty and truth, tradition and freedom. Two great spirits with much in common.
Panikkar’s thought, his ‘incarnate spirit’ resides in the various languages he spoke and wrote: Spanish, Catalan, German, English, Latin, Italian and French. His work is multilingual and by definition, not reducible to a single language. Referring to one of his expressions: «not everything can be said in English», it must be stated that ‘all of Panikkar’ cannot be limited to any one single language.
into consideration the fact that some of these books (now ‘disappeared’ because they are ‘scattered’) used to have their well designed structure, already creating per se a now banished message. In this new arrangement some important passages are difficult to track down, for example,
it permits the collection of many fundamental traits of Panikkar, even if it does not contain his works in toto.
From all of this, it can be deduced that Panikkar for decades was a passionate student of Teilhard de Chardin’s thought. But more careful investigation shows that the reviews were not read. Many of Teilhard de Chardin’s books were not even opened.
There was an age difference of 37 years between Teilhard de Chardin and Panikkar
At the age of 18 Teilhard de Chardin became a Jesuit and Raimon, at the age of 21, became a member of Opus Dei.
Teilhard de Chardin was much more than a paleontologist and Raimon was not only a metaphysician. In both there existed a marked tension between science and theology, between faith and reason.
The French Jesuit’s vision that perceived the entire world as a host between the fingers of God’s two hands is famous: one that creates it and the other that saves it. Panikkar’s vision, according to which the world is co-involved with the eternal process of a sacrifice in which the divine and the world itself participate, is no less significant.
Indeed Chardin speaks of pleroma, by which he means an «organic God-world complex» which he perceives as something dynamic and in which God is humanized and made worldly, while the world is personified and divinized. It’s a vision that embraces everything, thinks big, excludes nothing. His is a way to think inclusively. Panikkar on the contrary considers all of reality as a mysterious relationship between the human, divine and cosmic elements and calls it «cosmotheandrism».
On the contrary, Panikkar strikes the term «Cristofania» to speak of the divinization of man and the humanization of God, including cosmic and material. The Christic dimension shines through each fragment of reality.
To simplify, it can be said that the French Jesuit sees everything in Christ; the philosopher from Tavertet sees Christ in everything.
Plato speaks of the hen kaì pollà (one and multiple, Filebo, 15d),
Upanishads refer to ekam ava advityam (one without duality, CU VI.2.2.).
«The one is multiple. Whence the dispersion?
Having said all this, almost spontaneously, I arrive at a fundamental question. Is the diversity present in reality found within an evolutionary movement toward a unification, as Teilhard de Chardin would like it? Or perhaps evolution is only one of the many ways to perceive reality, as Panikkar would like it? In other words: is multiplicity part of evolution (Teilhard de Chardin) or is evolution part of a harmonious multiplicity (Panikkar)?
A lively mind is in constant search of new books.
Catalan, French, English, Italian, Latin, Spanish and German.
He easily entered into the microcosm of each, and while reading, succeeded in thinking in the language he was reading, using the same language to make signs, notes and comments in the margins.
It is enough for me to pick up the book of T. R. V. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (1955), which Raimon was reading between March 1957 and February 1958, or H. A Wolfson, The Philosophy of Church Fathers (1964), which he read in the period between 1968 and 1969 and then re-read in October 1976.
I sing about his reading: interactive and dialogic. He read by writing and wrote by reading.
He was a thinker, not a scholar.
see his weakness in a subjectivity, a self-reference, or at least an exploitation of whatever material he had at hand. In a negative sense, I would say that Panikkar ‘panikkarized’ everything.
If, on the one hand, his mother was by nature introverted and intellectual, his father, Ramuni Pániker, an Indian from Kerala, was a man of action, an adventurer, who could be an epic figure, a hero in a novel.
Octavio Paz, the well-known Mexican writer and recipient of the 1990 Nobel Prize in literature. If my memory serves me, the relationship beween Panikkar and
The dedications in his books which I possess help me to remember.
«Now I really have to leave you» and ran out of the room. I remained alone in the house. But even worse than the feeling of abandonment was the fear of ending in flames, which was the fate of many of my sisters in various times and places. Luckily nothing happened to me.
(1912)
My books, one by one, began to leave the shelves, but instead of falling to the floor they began to twirl around him, the pages rustling a melody and I found myself dancing while singing:
He was not a spendthrift – on the contrary, there was something austere in his character, except for books.
I remember that one of his friends from Madrid once told him: «Raimundo, part of you is as tightfisted as a Catalonian and then sometimes you spend like an Indian».
By that I mean that he was the one to search and find, but books themselves sought him out and found him.
He also wrote, but once, taken with the spirit of detachment, he even threw his diaries in a river.
My master, however, did not behave like Nicolás Gómez Dávila, who during a 60-year period had collected over 25,000 very rare and unique bibliophile editions in his Tudor style house built in a section of Bogotá – all of which he read with pleasure and dedication.
Filocalia is a collection of Byzantine mystical texts composed between the Fourth and Fourteenth centuries.
who began to read it on 25th May 1961.
While reading Simeone the New Theologian (page 100) he wrote in English: «All these pages express the classical doctrine lived in monasteries of past centuries. But today, aren’t we evolving toward a new religious awareness?
