The Depth-Dimension of Religious Dialogue
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This article has been reprinted with permission from Vidyajyoti, May 1981.
Man is Communion
Man is a social being, Already ontologically he is communion, relationship, fellowship with others. Koinonia is an intrinsic dimension of the person. There is no “person” apart from communion with others. Man discovers himself, realizes himself, only in meeting with others. And the deeper the meeting, the more man finds himself and blossoms into a “person.”
Christian revelation puts a new stress on the dignity and nature of man as a being of relation and communion. The ultimate secret of God’s life, as shared with us by Jesus, the Son by nature, is the Trinitarian mystery of the Godhead. In its very source, being is relationship. It therefore had to be that man, the apex of God’s creation, should reflect in himself the “being-one-together” of the divine Persons. Christ himself is a “corporate” being. What theologians call his “Mystical Body” is no less real and no less his than is his individual self. Each believer in Christ, nay more, each man, is, with Jesus, in Jesus, a kind of corporate being; each lives in a most intimate and ontological relationship with the whole of the Mystical Body, and with the whole of mankind.
History shows that man develops only in relation with others. In isolation, man would shrink from his own humanity; life in solitude is only possible for man after a long preparation in human fellowship, and provided also he has discovered in himself that center where no human being, indeed no other creature, is distant from him. The growth of humankind, the advance of cultures and civilizations has sprung from the combination of individual talents and abilities. Even the rising of the great civilizations came generally from a mutual fecundation between already existing cultures.
Inter-relationship between men becomes dialogue when it reaches the level of the person—that is of the consciousness and the mind. Dialogue has its principle in relationship with others, when this relationship is accepted and integrated into the person itself. It is the person freely accepting its condition of being a relation, of being a thou to others; that is, accepting to live with them on the level of exchange, of symbiosis of giving and receiving.
Accepting to be a thou for the other is accepting him as an I, with all the characteristics of “I-ness” which I experience in my own person. That means recognizing the other, no longer as an object to which I have at least a potential right, but as a subject like myself a source, an absolute, a universal center. The other becomes someone with whom I relate at the very level of my self-awareness, to whom, paradoxically, my own self-awareness is open. My meeting him as subject far surpasses all bodily and mental expression, situated as it is at the very center—or source—of my own being.
True dialogue between men is indeed at that very level. It is meeting, exchange. mutual donation. Not donation of anything one has, for the meeting is at the level not of having but of being. It implies the mutual donation of what is the most essential to both.
Two persons cannot meet without each giving himself to the other, at least in some way. Initially, perhaps, they will give part of their attention, of their consciousness, of their own life. But a true meeting takes place only in the depth; and a meeting which is not in the depth is not a meeting with my brother. The priest and the Levite went past the wounded man on the Jericho road; the Samaritan alone met him. And is not the most pressing message of the Gospel that I am called to meet God, to meet Christ in everyone of my fellowmen? God is met only in the depth.
There are meetings on the surface, no doubt, in all human lives, like those of ships abandoned on the high seas, which drift alongside for a while and then separate as they are carried by the waves. But we speak here only of meetings at the level of man as man, nothing short of which is included in true dialogue. To meet my brother in the depth does not, however, necessarily mean that I have to open to him my most intimate thoughts and feelings. The gift of myself, the oblation I make of myself to God in my brother, passes through the most common acts of exchange in human life. However, there is a difference when a man lives in the depth. In him, one can feel that each act, each, word, each gesture, even the most ordinary one, comes from the deepest and the most intimate center of his soul.
Religious Dialogue
Coming to the domain of religion, we must say that religion in itself is already a dialogue. It is first a dialogue with God, as is magnificently stressed in the Bible, and exemplified above all in Jesus, whose life was an incessant face to face dialogue with God his Father. It is also a dialogue among men. It is by exchanging their personal experiences of God that men have progressed and still progress in their knowledge and understanding of the divine mystery.
Even religious instruction, as all true education, is in the form of dialogue. It is not simply giving on one side and receiving on the other, as, alas, it is too often thought to be. Religious truths and formulations do not reach the mind of the listener as if it were simply blank, a tabula rasa. They meet in his mind something which is already there, even if only latent. They aim at awakening the mind, at helping it to bring into view intuitions which so far may have remained at the archetypal level. In the case of a divine revelation, the mind is enabled to go, in faith, beyond previous intuitions and formulations, these being at once “redeemed” and fulfilled through the grace of the Holy Spirit. If it were not so, revealed truths would remain forever, as too often happens, extrinsic to man; they would not take root in him; they would not become integrated into his own personal and deepest experience; they would never become in him something vital. Truly, divine revelation aims at awakening and bringing to completion what had already been placed by God in seed form in man through the very process of creation—the first step in God’s call to man to participate in the divine life.
Man is ceaselessly in dialogue with others. He seems less and less capable of silence. He is in dialogue at all sorts of levels. There are the levels of external activities, of techniques, of mental exchange and sharing; but above all these, there is religious dialogue which reaches in man a depth of interiority and personal commitment beyond the reach of any other dialogue. Religious dialogue is indeed immediately directed to that fundamental experience of I and Thou to which we already referred.
Obviously, we are not concerned here with a religious dialogue that remains on the plane of religious formulations or social contacts. True religious dialogue originates in the depth of man’s mind and spirit. It reaches levels to which no mere philosophical dialogue (at least in the Western sense) can attain. It aims at the ultimate concern of man, the point where man is related to the beyond—whatever name may be given to it. It is not, however, to a beyond turned into an object of speculative contemplation and brought into discussion, but the beyond which is the existential concern of man in regard to his own personal and “eternal” destiny. Dialogue at the philosophical or theological level takes its worth precisely from being rooted there; otherwise, it is purely academic discussion or even an egoistic search for self-affirmation.
Religious dialogue is concerned with that depth of human experience. It aims at awakening it and at deepening it. Such experience exists in every man, at least in an initial or latent stage. It is not the preserve of so-called mystics. We do not, however, refer here to feelings and mental impressions, even less to parapsychic phenomena which are but the outgrowth of the subliminal self. We precisely refer to that fundamental experience which each man possesses and which is the mark of his being man, namely that he is goes beyond anything he may perceive or think of himself, being something deeper and more primary than the consciousness of which he is aware on the phenomenal level.
That self-awareness has been reached, in a unique way in the philosophical and religious history of mankind, by the Hindu tradition. We may say that the Hindu sadhana is entirely directed to discovering existentially the coincidence between man’s conscious phenomenal awareness and the ultimate experience of the self in its absolute purity. It is the oversight of this fact that has brought to a deadlock most of the attempts at a dialogue between Christians on one side and Hindus—and also Buddhists—on the other.
As long as religion remains for a man—at least principally and concretely—on the level of rites, practices, formulae, structures, ethics and the like, it cannot but appear as something superimposed on what is his fundamental concern. True religion and true faith are necessarily rooted in self-awareness. Faith and revelation are precisely meant to release in man that level of self-awareness and to lead it at the level of the mind to a formulation and at the level of life to an expression which will do full justice to it. Religion could rightly be described as the relation of man with the depth of himself because it is only in the depth of his being that man reaches the depth of being itself and shares in the very mystery of the Godhead.
The main reason for the present outcry against organized religions is that they are cut off from life. And this, indeed, is often true, not only in the sense that man is cut off from the ordinary life by which he comes into contact with other men and with the world, but even more from that fundamental source of life in him which is his own experience of self-awareness.
The salvation of religions, even of cultures, in these critical times will depend on the renewal of man’s awareness of that fundamental depth. Religious dialogue, properly understood, will be an invaluable help for all religious-minded people to discover and awaken in them the primary experience.
Man is a social being, Already ontologically he is communion, relationship, fellowship with others. Koinonia is an intrinsic dimension of the person. There is no “person” apart from communion with others. Man discovers himself, realizes himself, only in meeting with others. And the deeper the meeting, the more man finds himself and blossoms into a “person.”
Christian revelation puts a new stress on the dignity and nature of man as a being of relation and communion. The ultimate secret of God’s life, as shared with us by Jesus, the Son by nature, is the Trinitarian mystery of the Godhead. In its very source, being is relationship. It therefore had to be that man, the apex of God’s creation, should reflect in himself the “being-one-together” of the divine Persons. Christ himself is a “corporate” being. What theologians call his “Mystical Body” is no less real and no less his than is his individual self. Each believer in Christ, nay more, each man, is, with Jesus, in Jesus, a kind of corporate being; each lives in a most intimate and ontological relationship with the whole of the Mystical Body, and with the whole of mankind.
History shows that man develops only in relation with others. In isolation, man would shrink from his own humanity; life in solitude is only possible for man after a long preparation in human fellowship, and provided also he has discovered in himself that center where no human being, indeed no other creature, is distant from him. The growth of humankind, the advance of cultures and civilizations has sprung from the combination of individual talents and abilities. Even the rising of the great civilizations came generally from a mutual fecundation between already existing cultures.
Inter-relationship between men becomes dialogue when it reaches the level of the person—that is of the consciousness and the mind. Dialogue has its principle in relationship with others, when this relationship is accepted and integrated into the person itself. It is the person freely accepting its condition of being a relation, of being a thou to others; that is, accepting to live with them on the level of exchange, of symbiosis of giving and receiving.
Accepting to be a thou for the other is accepting him as an I, with all the characteristics of “I-ness” which I experience in my own person. That means recognizing the other, no longer as an object to which I have at least a potential right, but as a subject like myself a source, an absolute, a universal center. The other becomes someone with whom I relate at the very level of my self-awareness, to whom, paradoxically, my own self-awareness is open. My meeting him as subject far surpasses all bodily and mental expression, situated as it is at the very center—or source—of my own being.
True dialogue between men is indeed at that very level. It is meeting, exchange. mutual donation. Not donation of anything one has, for the meeting is at the level not of having but of being. It implies the mutual donation of what is the most essential to both.
Two persons cannot meet without each giving himself to the other, at least in some way. Initially, perhaps, they will give part of their attention, of their consciousness, of their own life. But a true meeting takes place only in the depth; and a meeting which is not in the depth is not a meeting with my brother. The priest and the Levite went past the wounded man on the Jericho road; the Samaritan alone met him. And is not the most pressing message of the Gospel that I am called to meet God, to meet Christ in everyone of my fellowmen? God is met only in the depth.
There are meetings on the surface, no doubt, in all human lives, like those of ships abandoned on the high seas, which drift alongside for a while and then separate as they are carried by the waves. But we speak here only of meetings at the level of man as man, nothing short of which is included in true dialogue. To meet my brother in the depth does not, however, necessarily mean that I have to open to him my most intimate thoughts and feelings. The gift of myself, the oblation I make of myself to God in my brother, passes through the most common acts of exchange in human life. However, there is a difference when a man lives in the depth. In him, one can feel that each act, each, word, each gesture, even the most ordinary one, comes from the deepest and the most intimate center of his soul.
Religious Dialogue
Coming to the domain of religion, we must say that religion in itself is already a dialogue. It is first a dialogue with God, as is magnificently stressed in the Bible, and exemplified above all in Jesus, whose life was an incessant face to face dialogue with God his Father. It is also a dialogue among men. It is by exchanging their personal experiences of God that men have progressed and still progress in their knowledge and understanding of the divine mystery.
Even religious instruction, as all true education, is in the form of dialogue. It is not simply giving on one side and receiving on the other, as, alas, it is too often thought to be. Religious truths and formulations do not reach the mind of the listener as if it were simply blank, a tabula rasa. They meet in his mind something which is already there, even if only latent. They aim at awakening the mind, at helping it to bring into view intuitions which so far may have remained at the archetypal level. In the case of a divine revelation, the mind is enabled to go, in faith, beyond previous intuitions and formulations, these being at once “redeemed” and fulfilled through the grace of the Holy Spirit. If it were not so, revealed truths would remain forever, as too often happens, extrinsic to man; they would not take root in him; they would not become integrated into his own personal and deepest experience; they would never become in him something vital. Truly, divine revelation aims at awakening and bringing to completion what had already been placed by God in seed form in man through the very process of creation—the first step in God’s call to man to participate in the divine life.
Man is ceaselessly in dialogue with others. He seems less and less capable of silence. He is in dialogue at all sorts of levels. There are the levels of external activities, of techniques, of mental exchange and sharing; but above all these, there is religious dialogue which reaches in man a depth of interiority and personal commitment beyond the reach of any other dialogue. Religious dialogue is indeed immediately directed to that fundamental experience of I and Thou to which we already referred.
Obviously, we are not concerned here with a religious dialogue that remains on the plane of religious formulations or social contacts. True religious dialogue originates in the depth of man’s mind and spirit. It reaches levels to which no mere philosophical dialogue (at least in the Western sense) can attain. It aims at the ultimate concern of man, the point where man is related to the beyond—whatever name may be given to it. It is not, however, to a beyond turned into an object of speculative contemplation and brought into discussion, but the beyond which is the existential concern of man in regard to his own personal and “eternal” destiny. Dialogue at the philosophical or theological level takes its worth precisely from being rooted there; otherwise, it is purely academic discussion or even an egoistic search for self-affirmation.
Religious dialogue is concerned with that depth of human experience. It aims at awakening it and at deepening it. Such experience exists in every man, at least in an initial or latent stage. It is not the preserve of so-called mystics. We do not, however, refer here to feelings and mental impressions, even less to parapsychic phenomena which are but the outgrowth of the subliminal self. We precisely refer to that fundamental experience which each man possesses and which is the mark of his being man, namely that he is goes beyond anything he may perceive or think of himself, being something deeper and more primary than the consciousness of which he is aware on the phenomenal level.
That self-awareness has been reached, in a unique way in the philosophical and religious history of mankind, by the Hindu tradition. We may say that the Hindu sadhana is entirely directed to discovering existentially the coincidence between man’s conscious phenomenal awareness and the ultimate experience of the self in its absolute purity. It is the oversight of this fact that has brought to a deadlock most of the attempts at a dialogue between Christians on one side and Hindus—and also Buddhists—on the other.
As long as religion remains for a man—at least principally and concretely—on the level of rites, practices, formulae, structures, ethics and the like, it cannot but appear as something superimposed on what is his fundamental concern. True religion and true faith are necessarily rooted in self-awareness. Faith and revelation are precisely meant to release in man that level of self-awareness and to lead it at the level of the mind to a formulation and at the level of life to an expression which will do full justice to it. Religion could rightly be described as the relation of man with the depth of himself because it is only in the depth of his being that man reaches the depth of being itself and shares in the very mystery of the Godhead.
The main reason for the present outcry against organized religions is that they are cut off from life. And this, indeed, is often true, not only in the sense that man is cut off from the ordinary life by which he comes into contact with other men and with the world, but even more from that fundamental source of life in him which is his own experience of self-awareness.
The salvation of religions, even of cultures, in these critical times will depend on the renewal of man’s awareness of that fundamental depth. Religious dialogue, properly understood, will be an invaluable help for all religious-minded people to discover and awaken in them the primary experience.
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Swami Abhishiktananda (1910-1973) is the Indian name of Dom Henri Le Saux, a Benedictine monk. He co-founded in 1950, with Father Jules Monchanin, Saccidananda Ashram, a monastic institution dedicated to integrating the monastic values of the Benedictine tradition with the values of the Indian monastic tradition.