Panikkar and Heidegger

It seems to me that Panikkar is drawing heavily from Heidegger, especially from his critique of Being as presence, his attack on Substance, and his critique of onto-theology; but Panikkar himself seems to opt for a more 'clearly' 'theistic' - or 'religious' - position than Heidegger himself.

Still reading Panikkar ...

Some days ago I was bored reading Panikkar. Today I find I am irritated. He jumps about, he is not serious. Or is it that he is - too profound? Or perhaps I am not in the mood to jump into the deep waters he is indicating - God and Being, God and Being and Person, and all that. Ground trod by, opened up by, people like Heidegger and Whitehead, to name just two. Heidegger who questioned the whole of the Western tradition's identification of Being and God, God and Being. Whitehead who questioned the primacy of substance, working out, I think, alternative categories, and certainly an alternative metaphysics.

But my impression reading Panikkar is that his objections, his problems w.r.t. evil, for example, are too - flippant, can easily be answered. He has made a straw man, a paper man, and he proceeds happily to demolish it. 

Panikkar and onto-theology

I am surprised. Panikkar is smack into the middle of Heidegger ground: I think he is spinning out, in his own way, Heidegger's proscriptions of onto-theology. He does make reference to Heidegger from time to time.

There is also, interestingly, his first published effort on F.H. Jacobi. Jacobi also, if I understand rightly, made a disjunction between reason and faith: hence his leap of faith. According to De Smet, it was Jacobi's restriction of 'person' to the human being that led to the great translators of Sanskrit texts rendering nirguna as impersonal and saguna as personal.

So a nest of problems here: voluntarism; the disjunction between God, reason, Being; Duns Scotus; Heidegger (with his Scotist influences); Lonergan; Benedict XVI; Islam (with its tendency towards voluntarism); Hauerwas's proscriptions of Duns Scotus and postmodernism. 

Reading Panikkar...

I have begun reading Panikkar, beginning from The Silence of God. I can't help noting that I am bored.... Which was not the case years ago, when I first began reading Panikkar, during my theology days. At that time, it was an experience of excitement and light upon light. What is the difference? The reasons could be many. But one that rises to the surface of my mind is: now I have waded through Lonergan. And I find - or I come away with the impression - that Panikkar is brilliant, but often just that: brilliant. For one who has passed through Lonergan, too many questions arise upon reading Panikkar. And he is (too) clever by far...

Might this irritate some lover of Panikkar? Maybe. But: this is my experience. And: I have come to no firm conclusion so far. So: no offence indicated. Just process.

But I do not (as of now) exclude the possibility of coming to some conclusion.

I am particularly intrigued by Panikkar's constant calling into question, in this book, the equation between Being and Thinking. Have to penetrate this. An old old conundrum.