The Integral Message

Panikkar's Creator-Creature Polarity

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We can now turn our attention to the third of the three ultimate polarities. As Panikkar moves to describe the Cosmotheandric experience, he turns his attention specifically to the God-human relationship. He speaks of this relationship through the advaitic reality which opens our mind to the reality of the polarity created by the two poles (God and human). Already, I have described much relevant information through the Creator-Creation inter-dependent relationship. However, Panikkar makes clear the creature is not separate from creation but rather the point of conscious meeting. The creature carries the gift of knowing and making meaning of that knowing. As Creation is not separate from the Creator, neither is the Creature. The Creature is an expression of Being in its Becoming. The Creature has opportunity to grow in its’ knowing within the time-space reality of existence. This knowing of the Creature is matured through the interactive relationality existing within the Creature-Creator polarity. 

 

Panikkar elaborates:

We are not isolated beings. Man bears the burden, the responsibility, but also the joy and the beauty of the universe. “He who knows himself knows the Lord” goes a traditional saying of Islam that is constantly repeated by Sufis. “He who knows himself knows all things”; so Meister Eckhart completed the famous injunction of the Sybil of Delphos: “Know yourself” The three are here brought together: God, the World, Man. I call this the Cosmotheandric experience.[1]

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Panikkar describes further how this inter-relational, or conjoint knowing of self and knowing God, is a universal reality. He elaborates upon this by reference to the insights of great minds from numerous traditions:

… “The way to ascend to God is to descend into oneself,” said Hugh of St. Victor, echoing Plato, the Upanishads, Sankara, Ibn ‘Arabi, and the entire tradition that urges us to cleanse the mirror of the self, the icon of the Deity. Richard of St. Victor seems to complement this thought by recommending, again in tune with the Orient, “let Man ascend through himself above himself.” [2]

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The various ways we speak of God in this relationship presents its challenge. We are speaking of knowing in ontological terms. The Divine as the creating dynamic gives expression to that part of creation that shares consciousness. Speaking of the human as the ‘image of God’ is the common expression of the Judeo-Christian tradition. So, just as creation cannot be divided from the Divine, neither can the human be divided as if an independent and a separate expression of existence from creation. God as Being in Becoming, perceived non-dually, raises the concept of God creating creation by lovingly becoming creation. God is all and in all. Hence humans are gifted with the calling to know Godness. This is the loving purpose of God, for it is the greatest joy of God to share the experience of Godness.

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Panikkar elucidates by discussing the use of various pronouns as the means of clarifying and identifying the dimensions of experience in the Cosmotheandric reality. We cannot properly speak of the Divine in the third person as if it were a thing, an object. We are obliged by language to use the word “it”. ... The Divine, if at all, can only be said to be an "am" and not an "is". ... The Divine Mystery is the ultimate "am" – of everything. Yet we also experience the "art" and the "is". This is the Cosmotheandric experience: the undivided experience of the three pronouns simultaneously. Without the Divine, we cannot say "I" and without Consciousness we cannot say "Thou"; nor without the World, we cannot say "It". The “three” pronouns, however, are not three, they belong together. They are pro-nouns, or rather pro-noun; they stand for the same (unnameable) noun .... There are not three Names. It is only one Name in three pro-nouns. The noun is in its pronouns. Each pronoun is the whole noun in its pronominal way. One could speak here of three dimensions which totally inter-and intra-penetrate each other. This is the perichoresis repeatedly referred to.[3]

[1] Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being: The Gifford Lectures, 34. 
[2] ibid. 
[3] ibid., 191.