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gether of compared texts a manageable but not reductive reflection; ii. the temporal arrangements by which one text is allowed to enhance the other; iii. the engagement in multiple texts as the initiation of an ongoing and necessarily unpredictable conversation; iv. the construction of tensions by which the texts taken together are allowed to communicate more than either of them alone; v. the visualization of proximities by which the texts marginalize and destabilize one another. |
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Such value of these practices will be known only in their performance, as their potential benefits are available only after their enactment; and so we must leave open the question of the use of the models in any particular comparison, while inviting the reader to complete the process initiated here. In each case, the active contextualization of the texts of Aquinas and Amalananda, or other such pairs, demands a commitment to reading and an increasing skill in reading, along with a deferral of those strategies of systematization which would obviate the arduous path back and forth through the juxtaposed texts. The demands of Text and texture imposed on us by the Advaitademands doubled in the moment of retrieval of another Text such as the Summa Theologiaerequire persistently textual responses, self-conscious strategies of reading and writing which achieve resolution only through and after the event of a properly enacted rereading. |
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2. Are There Incomparable Texts? The Example of ST III.46.3 |
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With just one example we have embarked on a rereading of the entirety of the two Texts involved; the expected rereading is a comprehensive one, and no part of a Text, however central, can be appealed to as an excuse for not reading other parts of it; and no part can be ignored merely on the grounds that it is inconsistent with the general trajectory of the reading that is undertaken. We must therefore take into account the possibility that there are at least some parts of texts which resist comparison, which are so significantly unlike what is found in other texts that any possible comparison is likely to be unwarranted. Let us examine one such text, Aquinas' treatment of the Passion |
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