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 7 Enrico Beltramini material level is not the ultimate reality; yet it is the translation of the pure experience at the material level. I signal this interplay between the level of the ontological and that of the concrete, human level, because it is, in my opinion, the organizing principle of Fragments. Accordingly, it is in the cleavage between the two levels that Panikkar’s legacy must be assessed. Panikkar tells of but does not show his mystical experiences. He mentioned his encounters with the Spirit, but he did not describe them (Panikkar 2018a, 178). He believed he shared the same experiences of Abhishiktananda (Panikkar 2018a, 166) and Marc Chaduc (Panikkar 2018a, 130) [8]. But he took a Wittgensteinean orientation and maintained his silence on his mystical experiences: “The ineffable is ineffable” (Panikkar 2018a, 202) [9]. This situation leaves Panikkar’s scholars with no other option than assuming a mystical source which tells the truth about the philosophical and theological results as they emerge from nowhere. In this regard, Abhishiktananda asked himself a question about Panikkar: “Did he realize what he was writing?” (Abhishiktananda 1998, 286). It is a legitimate question. Abhishiktananda did not answer his own question, so I suppose scholars must live with his same doubt. Ultimately, whether the “divine” experience was real or rather the result of psychological phenomena is irrelevant: what is relevant is that Panikkar believed so much that it happened that he framed his life accordingly. To explain this relationship between the experience at an ontological level and that at a material level, I consider the case of Abhishiktananda. In his diary, Abhishiktananda noted that Christ had made Himself known to Abhishiktananda through the mediation of Hindus (Abhishiktananda 1998, 162). He did not mean that the experience exhibited certain structural features that linked it to the experiences of Hindu mystics; the experience for him, in fact, transcended the particularities of the Hindu tradition. Abhishiktananda was rather saying that his post-experiential interpretation assigned that experience to the Hindu context. To put it differently, Abhishiktananda was not saying that his experience was shaped by the religious tradition of Hinduism, but that he was interpreting and framing his experience within the context of Hinduism (mostly because he established a relationship between the experience and his pre-experiential immersion in Hindu monastic spirituality). Basically, he was assigning his experience, as a means of translation, to the realm of Hinduism (rather than, say, Christianity). The same can be said of Panikkar: the “divine”, “pure” experience preceded the human experience. He framed his experience in terms of “Cosmic Christ”. In the case of Panikkar, the translation of the experience on the ontological level to the one on the concrete, material level, as he called them, included a call to action. In his personal notes Panikkar is adamant that his vision (or state) came with a “noetic” component. It involved knowledge, but it also came with a certain urgency to translate that noetic component into action. Of course, action did not mean “doing” something. Panikkar was very clear that his job, so to speak, was being, simply being. However, in this finite, concrete, material reality, being assumes a certain level of doing; it implies a certain action (Panikkar 2018a, 82) [10]. The problem is that, according to Panikkar himself, he was not “a man of action” (Panikkar 2018a, 21). In the rest of the article, I will frame Panikkar’s problem with action in the same way he framed it, namely, as a problem of character. Here, instead, I address Panikkar’s problem with action in the light of his mysticism. Panikkar was a man between two worlds, the world outside time and the world in the mists of humanity, and in search of an existential and intellectual synthesis between the two. A tension is detectable throughout most of his diary between his acosmism and his cosmic existence, a tension that his peculiar interpretation of priesthood as cosmic priesthood (a priesthood that mediates between and belongs – according to Panikkar – to both worlds) should have helped to resolve, but it did not. Or better, he found a synthesis at an intellectual level but not at the level of action (Panikkar 2018a, 176) [11]. This unresolved tension between the freedom of acosmism and the constraint of this cosmic existence brings the reader once again back to Abhishiktananda. Both Abhishiktananda and Panikkar shared the problem of reconciling an acosmic orientation with a cosmic existence, but the source of the problem was different: for Abhishiktananda, it was at the level of orthodoxy, while for Panikkar it stood at the level of orthopraxy. In 1980, at 62 years of age, Panikkar confessed his problem in words of rare clarity: “The somewhat doctrinal and theoretical torment… of Abhishiktananda is not my own. Mine is existential, personal, and related to orthopraxis: it [note: i.e. , the torment] is…what I must do, carry out; it is… being… as action” (Panikkar 2018b, 110–11). How to translate in concrete terms the cosmic priesthood, the priesthood of a Church which extends to the edge of the universe, was the existential challenge of his life. He became a theologian, a philosopher, a monk (within), a guru, and a spouse. All of these dimensions somehow failed to round out the original, sacerdotal vocation, but cumulated over it. In Panikkar’s words, “all of my words are an effort of incarnation: Silence becomes Word and
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