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realization of its truth. This is why Advaita so carefully writes into the Text definite expectations about the identity of its reader, stating inner and exterior qualifications prerequisite to reading. To use the Sanskrit term, reading is a samskara, a (ritual) transformation of the reader. Though "transformation" may suggest purely interior and personal events which pertain to the person's inner capacities, here it needs to be spoken of also as the event of right education, cultivation.
48 The implications of this reconstitution of the reader from the subject matter of Chapter 4. |
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Advaita's high expectations about the potency of a gradually accomplished literacy and about the event of intelligent reading increase both the difficulties and the possibilities of a true cross-religious understanding which face the theologian who begins to read Advaita without prior restrictions on what and how one is to read or what might be produced by careful reading; skill in reading is at stake, truth is at stake, the identity of the comparativist is at stake. These possibilities and risks constitute the topic of Chapter 5, where I examine how the process of reading and rereading reshapes the project of a desired return to the Christian tradition and the reading, and writing, of Christian theological texts. For although the extended study of Advaita is posterior to the (Christian) comparativist's original knowledge, commitments and literacy, it henceforth precedes reappropriations of that background. The issues taken up respectively in Chapters 2, 3 and 4the Text, its Truth, its Readerare thus taken up again in Chapter 5: Part 2 of Chapter 5, where we begin to reconstruct the textuality of the Christian theological tradition in preparation for comparative theology, recalls Chapter 2; Part 3 of Chapter 5, where we recast the question of the truth of theology and the knowledge of God in light of the posttextual inscription of truth in Advaita, and in response to that truth insofar as it is provisionally available to the reader, recalls Chapter 3; Part 4 of Chapter 5, where we recalculate our understanding of the theologian as student and teacher and of the pedagogical and communicative strategies of comparative theology, recalls Chapter 4. |
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