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Once the texts have been read together, and reread a number of times in that mutual proximity, one can usefully proceed to notice certain similarities and differences. |
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As one might expect from the fact of my choice, the texts are indeed somewhat alike. Aquinas, like Amalananda, wants to preserve the unity of God and also the meaningfulness of the multiplicity of namings of God found in scripture. Those names can serve, as in Advaita, to foster or exclude certain ways of talking about the relationship of the creator and the created. As Aquinas adds, they can also signify, from the multiplicity of created experience, the perfections which exist in perfect simplicity only in God; each moment of awareness of the possible perfection of a part of created reality undergirds a possible different naming of God as the source and realization of that perfection. Amalananda and Aquinas agree that there is a point to using multiple, inadequate "namings" for Brahman and God, respectively. |
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Both Aquinas and Amalananda are theologians who respect the scriptural basis of their work. Both want to prevent the collapse of scriptural and theological language in the face of the perfectly simple unity of the transcendent, and to show how the rich variety of that (imperfect) language needs to be appreciated if we are to know the transcendent better. Though description must remain connected to the practical, gradual and shifting compositions of theology undertaken in each tradition, and though one needs to take into account the sources of theological writing about either God or Brahman in either tradition, it is still possible to recognize in such descriptive endeavors a real ability to speak of God and of Brahmanand in an objective fashion, even if the features of this speaking might still have to be described according to the distinctive temporal and spatial features of each tradition. |
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A careful reading that continues along these lines, however complexly, will confirm all the more strongly the initial impression that the comparison is plausible and the similarities real, and with such texts it would be possible to construct more com- |
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