LANGUAGE AND TRUTH IN GOD-TALK VISÀ-VIS GOD-EXPERIENCE

Abstract

This is a review article on The Experience of God: Icons of the Mystery, written by Raimon Panikkar and translated by Joseph Cunneen from L’Experience de dieu: Icons du mistere, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006. The book, according to Panikkar himself, grew out of a week of conferences he gave to theology professors at the Benedictine monastery of Silos. I take this well written book as “something for a philosophical treatment,”1 after Wittgenstein, as it inspired me to thoughts of my own. We experience more than we can speak about and we speak about more than we could systematise. Experience and language, belief and practice, though distinct, are inseparable. They get their significance and meaning only in the stream of life. It is not the question of what they are in themselves, but what lies around them, the hurly-burly of our ordinary life that gives them their value in our lives. God-experience and God-talk, though unique, are also interwoven in the stream of life giving ultimate meaning and purpose for our being human. Panikkar sees the fundamental relations between God, human and world and presents a cosmotheandric vision of reality in this work. It is a religious view of life, showing the universality and fundamental nature of the religious dimension of human life. Reality, according to Panikkar, is non-dual and Trinitarian. God, human, and world are neither one nor two nor three; they form a unity in diversity. In his meditations, he mediates between the Trinitarian view of God and the advaitic view of reality.