Raum-zeitliche Vermittlung der Transzendenz: Zur "sakramentalen" Dimension religioser Tradition.

• Author: Clooney, Francis V.
• Position: Review

Raum-zeitliche Vermittlung der Transzendenz: Zur "sakramentalen" Dimension religioser Tradition. Edited by GERHARD OBERHAMMER and MARCUS SCHMUCKER. Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil-hist. Kl., Sitzungberichte, no. 665 (Beitrage zur Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte Asiens, vol. 30). Vienna: VERLAG DER OSTERREICHISCHEN AKADEMIE DER WISSENSCHAFTEN 1999). Pp. 432. OS 792 (paper).

This volume collects fifteen papers from a 1996 Vienna conference on the temporal and spatial dimensions of the experience of transcendence. The conference's particular focus was on the way in which concrete material realities (including rituals, images, and particular persons such as teachers) are used by religious traditions to make human access to higher, transcendent realities possible. The conference and this volume are the products of the ongoing commitment of Gerhard Oberhammer, retired Director of the Indological Institute at the University of Vienna, to comparative studies in Asian and Western thought (primarily Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian). His aim throughout has been to foster comparative studies at a sophisticated theological level, on the grounds that the Indian and Western Christian religious traditions share at least interestingly similar categories (such as "transcendence" and "sacrament") which are not reducible to sociological or even philosophical concepts. Theological comparison is frui tful, and by it one can better understand both the Indian and Western traditions. Earlier volumes in Oberhammer's ongoing comparative theological project have examined the experience of transcendence, the manifestation of the salvific, the nature of theological hermeneutics, and "encounter" as a useful category in the interpretation of religion and religions. [1]

It is clear from his introduction to this volume that Oberhammer is well aware of the perils inherent in comparative study, since terms like "epiphany," "transcendence," "encounter," and "sacrament" are richly rooted not only in Western thought, but also in technical Christian theology, and it would be easy to reduce the complexities of Indian thought to settled Christian categories. Arguing by analogy, though, Oberhammer forthrightly insists that if religious traditions such as the Vedic, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions of India claim to lead practitioners beyond the confines of this temporal-spatial world, then there have to be ways in which mundane limitations are assessed, ruptured, and...