Ivo Coelho sdb NASHIK, JUNE 25, 2009: I gave my lecture at the 36th Lonergan Workshop, Boston College, on Monday, June 22, 2009, at 7.30 p.m. Risky time, because it comes at the end of a long and full day, with 4 lectures in the morning, a workshop in the afternoon, and another 2 lectures after that. But there was a decent crowd, and they all sat up when they heard that I was going to try to apply part of Lonergan's method to a reading of Sankara as interpreted by Richard De Smet, SJ.
De Smet, as most of those who have studied either at JDV or Divyadaan will remember, was our Indology professor at JDV (he died 10 years ago). What I did was to use Lonergan to go over De Smet's work on Sankara. De Smet clarified the concept of person, showed how it was hammered out by Christian theologians precisely in their effort to speak about God (Trinity and Christology), and how it was then applied to all human beings (where the Romans had considered only Roman citizens as persons, slaves, for example, being non-persons). De Smet then went on to clarify how the Brahman of the Upanishads was really personal, and not impersonal as most Indologists seem to hold, because 'person' simply means a being who is intelligent and free. He also suggested that Sankara provided a good notion of the human person - most of the other systems in India being somehow dualistic.
In my paper, I used Lonergan's transposition of the metaphysical category of person into the 'psychological' category of subject in order to read Sankara again. My hunch was that it would be easier to find matter on consciousness and subject in Sankara and the Indian tradition, than matter on person. I suggested that there were clues in Sankara that suggested that we could find both divine and human subjects in his work.
The participants of the conference were impressed by the kind of dialogue work that De Smet had been doing. Very few of them had even heard of him. I think this was a good tribute to this great and good man, who is considered by some Indologists as one of the contemporary Vedantins of India.
Perhaps we could look forward to using Lonergan to read the Indian texts further.