Book Review:" Brahman and Person: Essays by Richard De Smet"
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Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies Volume 25 Article 21 November 2012 Book Review: "Brahman and Person: Essays by Richard De Smet" Bradley Malkovsky Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/jhcs Part of the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Malkovsky, Bradley (2012) "Book Review: "Brahman and Person: Essays by Richard De Smet"," Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies: Vol. 25, Article 21. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7825/2164-6279.1527 The Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies is a publication of the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. The digital version is made available by Digital Commons @ Butler University. For questions about the Journal or the Society, please contact [email protected]. For more information about Digital Commons @ Butler University, please contact [email protected]. Malkovsky: Book Review: "Brahman and Person: Essays by Richard De Smet" Book Reviews 77 Brahman and Person: Essays by Richard De Smet. Edited with introduction by Ivo Coelho. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2010, 294 pp. RICHARD De Smet (1916-1997) was a Belgian projecting his own Christian doctrinal beliefs Jesuit priest and professor of Indian thought and convictions onto Śaṅkara’s writings. But who spent almost his entire professional life in even a traditional Śaṅkara scholar with the India at the Catholic faculty of Jnana-Deepa authority of T. M. P. Mahadevan eventually Vidyapeeth in Pune. He is widely regarded as came to profess the personhood of the supreme one of the greatest Christian philosophers and brahman in opposition to his earlier indologists living in India in the twentieth convictions, and he did this under the influence century. His contributions to Hindu-Christian of De Smet’s participation in national metaphysical comparison were wide-ranging congresses of Indian philosophy. and deep, and, though his writings are little The editor of this volume, Ivo Coelho, who known in the West, they continue to exert is a Salesian priest and philosophy professor in considerable influence on Christian Nashik and Jerusalem, was a student and friend philosophers and theologians working in India of De Smet for many years. He is also the who are wrestling with the meaning and foremost authority on De Smet’s work today. significance of Hindu systematic thought for The present volume is a labor of love, Christian theology. I consider myself fortunate posthumously honoring a teacher by bringing to have spent numerous conversations with together fourteen of De Smet’s most important Father Richard in his little room at the Jesuit essays on the topic of person, articles in which seminary in Pune when I was first discovering he reflects on both human and divine Vedānta, during which time he corrected and personhood, as they are articulated in both refined my clumsy attempts at grasping the Indian and Western contexts. Coelho’s subtlety of Śaṅkara’s thought. eighteen page introductory essay, which is Although De Smet’s expertise was in divided into sections on “Divine Personality,” Śaṅkara-Vedānta he was well aware that his “Human Personality,” and “Dialogue and was a minority interpretation among scholars Theology,” provides a very helpful summary of of Advaita. The great majority of Śaṅkara’s the book’s contents. This is important, as De interpreters, whether Hindu or Christian, see Smet’s essays were written in a style the great ācārya as espousing an ontology characterized not only by remarkable which De Smet called “acosmic illusionism,” as precision, but also by an extraordinary density well as a theology that rejected the notion that and an extreme economy of expression, so that the supreme brahman, i.e. the para brahman, was one must ponder them slowly, sometimes in any sense personal. De Smet was opposed to reading them many times over in order to both these renderings of Śaṅkara’s teaching. grasp their full import. He argued, in accord with the exegetical The articles gathered in this book are method applied to Śaṅkara’s writings by Paul ordered according to their chronological Hacker and against Advaita tradition, that the publication, starting in 1957 and ending in best way to grasp the authentic teaching of 1996. Some of the material therefore overlaps Śaṅkara was to bypass the Advaita from one essay to the other, as De Smet builds commentaries on the ācārya and return to the on and develops his earlier insights. His master himself to see what he taught. There intended audience is sometimes Hindu, at other you will find, says De Smet, Śaṅkara’s very times Christian. Despite the various themes subtle teaching on a real creation as well as the covered in the book there are two main affirmation of real personhood in the para contributions De Smet makes to the topic of brahman. The obvious question here is whether person that remain visible throughout, De Smet was – knowingly or unknowingly - according to Coelho. They are 1. his teaching Published by Digital Commons @ Butler University, 2012 1 Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, Vol. 25 [2012], Art. 21 78 Book Reviews on the personhood of Śaṅkara’s para brahman De Smet came to realize, against his earlier and 2. his working out of “an Indian view of the position, that the Indian religions do contain [human] person and even an Indian much material for an authentic humanism, humanism.” (10) both in the bodhisattva ideal of Buddhists and De Smet works both historically and in the rise of Hindu bhakti movements with systematically, tracing developments in India, their practice of selfless compassion which from the Vedas and early Buddhism up to emulates the selfless love and grace of God. modern Indian thought, and in the West, The greatest obstacle in India to the holistic starting with Christian theology and then concept of human person, adds De Smet, one tracing the development of the concept of that would embrace the dignity of the human person in Western philosophy as it gradually person in their entirety as both body and soul, divorces itself from its Christian theological is the doctrine of reincarnation, which, at least moorings. It is because of the loss of a holistic on the popular level of understanding, is understanding of person and its reduction in clearly dualistic, as the body here in no way can the West to the human individual’s subjective belong to the human individual’s true identity. and limited consciousness (“atomic It was one of the more noteworthy features individualism”) that the concept became more of De Smet’s development as a Christian difficult to apply to the Divine in any proper student of Indian thought that he eventually way. The result, writes De Smet, was came to recognize a greater convergence of detrimental for cross-cultural studies. Western Indian and Western values over the long course indologists, especially the Germans, in their of history than he did during his early years in translation of Sanskrit texts, began to apply the India. De Smet therefore serves as a model of modern impoverished understanding of person what good comparative work should be, one to the saguṇa brahman, thereby relegating any that involves a readiness to grow in insight and notion of a personal God to an inferior position to revise one’s original convictions while in theology. And because Christians used the remaining faithful to the best of one’s home same term, “person,” for God, it was tradition. understandable that many Hindus, especially At the end of the book Coelho has provided Advaitins, would understand the Christian a forty-four page bibliography of De Smet’s conception of an ultimate reality to be a limited writings (757 entries!) and three pages more of anthropomorphic conception. And so one of the most important essays on De Smet by his the purposes of De Smet’s essays on person was admirers and critics. Those who are interested to make clear how the notion of person, when in comparative systematic studies will be understood properly, can apply to the Absolute grateful for this valuable work. It serves to without entailing the loss of Its transcendence, deepen our understanding of the mystery of independence and simplicity. This proper our own personhood and our intrinsic understanding of the Divine is what he called connection to the Divine. the “retrieval of the person.” Though there is no term in Indian Bradley Malkovsky languages that corresponds exactly to “person” University of Notre Dame https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/jhcs/vol25/iss1/21 DOI: 10.7825/2164-6279.1527 2.