Panel: TRINITY AND THE BODY: A SYSTEMATIC-PRAXEOLOGICAL APPROACH



448.4 - THE HUMAN DIMENSION IN RAIMON PANIKKAR'S COSMOTHEANDRIC VISION: A TRINITARIAN EXPERIENCE OF THE BODY

AUTHORS:
Grassi R. (École Pratique des Hautes Études ~ Paris ~ France)
Text:
For the theologian Raimon Panikkar (1918-2010), reality should be perceived as a-dual, that is, with a perspective that unifies the senses, reason, and what he refers to as the "third eye," which may also be called a mystical experience. This experience is simultaneously bodily, intellectual, and spiritual, or material, human, and divine. To systematize what this experience would be, considering the needs of the contemporary world and his understanding that contemplation and action must go hand in hand, what he terms the cosmoteandric vision emerges. Panikkar's starting point for reaching this vision is the Catholic-Christian religion—represented by the symbol of the Trinity—progressing through the advaita trinitarian vision, which he understood from his engagement with the Vedic tradition and some aspects of Buddhism, leading to his cosmological view of reality, already showing traces of what he would later term "sacred secularity." Panikkar's understanding of the Christian Trinity leads him to view reality as trinitarian, composed of the elements: God-Human-Cosmos. Thus, the human being is a synthesis of the "trinitarian mystery," being "body (cosmos), soul (humanity), and spirit (divinity) in an irreducible, differentiated, and inseparable unity" and "the meaning of life is to achieve the realization of the person in their triple dimension", participating in the perichoresis and as cocreators of all reality. Jesus Christ, therefore, is the exemplar of this synthesis, the zenith of his trinitarian comprehension, what he will call Christophany, the fulfillment of the humanum. In this chapter, I will conduct a bibliographic analysis of how Panikkar arrived at his cosmoteandric vision through the persons of the Trinity, how he perceives Christ as the synthesis of this vision, and what the role of the human being as co-creator or microcosm of the universe would be.