Friday, January 14, 2005
Neil Dhingra on Jacques Dupuis
I can’t claim to read every Catholic blog. Nevertheless, I think that I can say that there is a paucity of serious discussion about ecumenism and interreligious dialogue at St. Blog’s. Now the Tablet has reported that the Jesuit priest Jacques Dupuis, a scholar of religious pluralism, has died. Fr Dupuis had been the primary author of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue’s own document on Dialogue and Proclamation. Nevertheless, John Allen has written about how much the last few years of his life were marked by “suffering - both physical, in the sense of declining health, and emotional, related to a lengthy Vatican doctrinal investigation and its aftermath.” I’d like to say a few words about interreligious dialogue based on the work of Fr Dupuis, obviously accomplished at great personal cost.
Perhaps Fr Dupuis’ last article was entitled “Renewal of Christianity through Interreligious Dialogue” (Bijdragen 65 [2004]). There Dupuis clearly states, “There can be no doubt that the Christian identity must be preserved in its integrity in the process of encountering and entering into dialogue with the other religious traditions.” But this preservation must not lead to isolation – Dupuis even says, “a renewal of Christianity is more likely to take place through interreligious dialogue than in opposition to the other traditions.” More likely? How can this be?
First, we really should define what we mean by “interreligious dialogue.” Dupuis writes - “Each partner in the dialogue must enter into the experience of the other, in an effort to grasp that experience from within. In order to do this, he or she must rise above the level of the concepts in which this experience is imperfectly expressed, to attain, insofar as possible, through and beyond the concepts, to the experience itself.” This “passing over and returning” does not mean that the practitioner eventually finds herself living equally by the revelation that God has given in Jesus Christ and (for instance) the experience of identity in the Upanishads. This would simply be theologically incoherent.
So what happens when, as the Benedictine monk Henri Le Saux (Swami Abhishiktanada) put it, “I reach, as it were, in the very depth of myself to the experience of my brother, freeing my own experience from all accretions, so that my brother can recognize in me his own experience of my depth”? Certainly not a facile eclecticism (Le Saux also said “Interreligious dialogue is something too important to be taken lightly”), but we should expect mutual enrichment. Dupuis writes, “The Christian partners will not only give but will receive as well. The ‘fullness’ of revelation in Jesus Christ does not dispense them from listening and receiving. They possess no monopoly on truth; they must rather let themselves be possessed by it. Indeed, their dialogue partners, even without having heard God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, may be more deeply submitted to this truth that they are still seeking, but whose rays shine on their religious tradition (cf Nostra Aetate, 2).” The Christian partner’s receiving can happen in two ways. Through the experience of other religions, Christians discover dimensions of the Divine Mystery that have been communicated less clearly by their tradition; the “shock of the encounter” might also force us to purify ourselves of certain gratuitous assumptions and prejudices. Much has been recently said about the continuous need for reformation (ecclesia semper reformanda) and updating (aggiornamento) – interreligious dialogue can contribute to this renewal.
So we can speak of a complementarity, a “two-way traffic” between the religions. But Fr Dupuis is careful to note: “The complementarity under consideration is a mutual, asymmetrical complementarity. The reason is that Christian faith holds that the Jesus Christ event represents the climax of God’s personal dealings with humankind in history: the word which God speaks to humankind through Jesus Christ is, by virtue of his personal identity as the Son of God made man, the ‘fullness’ of divine revelation, and similarly, the historical event of his human life, and in particular the Paschal mystery of his death and resurrection, the culminating point of salvation history in which God’s will to save is fully realized.” Dupuis suggests that we try to see the revelation of God in Jesus Christ and in other religions as “mutually related” in “the intrinsic consistency of God’s unique design for humankind” with Jesus Christ as the “centre,” the “key of understanding,” the “climax of what God had through the centuries been achieving among the peoples of the world.” This “asymmetrical complementarity” and “mutual relatedness” means that we do not have to decide between dialogue and mission – they go together. As the Asian bishops have said, “Proclamation is the affirmation of and witness to God’s action in oneself. Dialogue is the openness and attention to the mystery of God’s action in the other believer. It is a perspective of faith that we cannot speak of the one without the other.”
Fr Dupuis believes that “convergence between the religious traditions will attain its goal in the fullness of the Reign of God. An eschatological ‘recapitulation’ (Eph 1:10) in Christ of the religious traditions of the world will take place in the eschaton.” Jesus Christ will be the “end” and the “central axis,” omega and alpha, and will preserve “the irreducible character, which the distinct self-manifestations of God in history have impressed upon the various traditions.” Perhaps this can be our prayer as well. And may Fr Dupuis rest in peace and the perpetual light shine upon him.
PS: Jacques Dupuis’ “The Church’s Evangelizing Mission in the Context of Religious Pluralism” can be read here.
