4 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 2 2 He significantly influenced interreligious thinking in the last century, yet his life and work have only begun to be addressed recently. While his ideas have been studied and adopted by prominent thinkers in both the West and the East, some aspects of his life have remained out of reach. The publication of extracts from Panikkar’s diary is good news for the scholarship surrounding him. He was notoriously protective of his private life, including his most intimate thoughts. The publication of some of his personal notes opens to scholarly inquiry a more personal Panikkar – Panikkar the man, not the public figure. An extract of Panikkar’s notebook was, in fact, published in 2018 and in several languages. The title, The Water of the Drop: Fragments from Panikkar Diaries (henceforth, Fragments), illustrates both the theme of the book, the interplay between the divine and the human experiences, and the eschatological state in which the drop is already water without ceasing to be a drop (Panikkar 2018a and 2018b) [1]. However, the title is also a reminder that the whole is in the fragment (Panikkar 2018a, 48, 64–65, 123, 200, 231). The book is, according to editor Milena Carrara Pavan, a prelude to publication of the entire diary, a volume still in the making (Panikkar 2018a, x) [2]. Panikkar himself selected the fragments included and he did so in 2009, just one year before he died. The criteria for the selections remain unknown. In an enclosed letter to Carrara, Panikkar pointed out that the selected notes are his life and yet they are not. Fragments is an attempt, according to Carrara, to detect Panikkar’s “true identity” (Panikkar 2018a, 318). Panikkar famously distinguished identification from identity, the former being the biography and the latter the true being. Maybe Fragments can operate – and this is Carrara’s opinion – as a window into Panikkar’s life and into his “true identity.” According to Carrara, Panikkar “was a mystic who concealed his spirituality under an intellectual mantle” (Panikkar 2018a, 318). In brief, he was an intellectual mystic. Despite forming only a small portion of the entire diary, the published fragments confirm some hypotheses that Panikkar scholars have already articulated, although not yet confirmed. Here I offer a brief and incomplete list: Panikkar’s self-perception as a mystic, his monastic vocation, the importance of his sacerdotal status, his sense of spiritual superiority over Abhishiktananda (born Henri Le Saux) (Panikkar 2018a, 147, 148), his intellectual distance from the other founder of Shantivanam, Jules Monchanin, and his friendship with Bede Griffiths (Panikkar 2018a, 17). The book also reveals aspects of Panikkar never before brought to light: his sense of solitude and isolation, his need for friends and friendly relationships, his association with female disciples, and his apparent estrangement from the rest of human race [3]. This article is not a review of the book; rather, it is an interpretation of Panikkar against the details offered in Fragments. At first approximation, the scope is to reframe the scholarly understanding of Panikkar the man to better understand Panikkar the thinker. Henri Bergson has written that every great philosopher thinks only one inexhaustible thought and spends his whole life trying to express it: “Et c’est pourquoi il a parle toute sa vie” (Fr. “And that is why he has been speaking for the whole of his life.” Bergson 1970, 1347). Over the half-century of his intellectual life, Panikkar insisted that his thought was an extension of his life: his life was the source of his thought. However, the truth is, defining and articulating the connection between Panikkar’s life and thought has proven to be no easy matter for his commentators. In Fragments he proceeded one step further: he clarified that his entire life was an attempt to manifest an interior insight, a movement of the spirit inward, a mystical vision. Thus, the goal of this article can be better framed in terms of drawing a connection between what seems to be a simple spiritual insight and a complex and tortuous life. By drawing that connection, I subject the scholarship on Panikkar to a reassessment regarding a few issues related to his thought, life, and work. Another way to put it is this: in this article I suggest an architecture to make sense of a portion of the notes offered by Fragments, personal notes written in the context of a life in the move that now need a scholarly reorganization. The compilation mirrors the man in the sense that, in Fragments, Panikkar’s project is himself – self-creation and self-improvement in a written form that may align the real with the ideal and overcome his inadequacy. He was uninterested in the details of life, including the people he encountered, focused only on his own responses and feelings emerging from these encounters. Accordingly, in this article, Panikkar is problematically depicted as an intellectual mystic and a troubled man with no home in the universe. With “an intellectual mystic” I intend a man who believed he experienced the “beyond” and then he had trouble contextualizing that experience in ordinary life. By “troubled and homeless man” I mean a man who concretely lived in an eschatological horizon. A reading of his personal notes lends the impression that Panikkar lived a life in a pathless land, a land without visible lines and clear demarcation. In that bare land, Panikkar found himself disoriented, even confused. He did not find his place in the world (Panikkar 2018a, 24, 50, 65–66). In that
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