Programme
Joseph Chandrakanthan
Associate Professor
Department and
Centre for the Study of Religion
University of Toronto
E/
joseph.chandrakanthan@utoronto.ca
The Development of the Concept of Person in Christian Theology and
its Influence on Tamil Christian Literatures of the 17th and 18th Centuries
(w/ Victor Pilendran)
The notion of the person became a central issue in Christian theology with the Arian Controversy in the fourth century. From that period onward till the 13th century Greco-Roman philosophy and Judeo-Hellenistic literatures have periodically sought to refine the religio-philosophical use of the concept of person in response to their contemporaneous theological trends. In the western Christian tradition, the definition of person as given by Boethius and later developed by Thomas Aquinas have remained unchallenged in their quintessence. Since the 16th century Christian missionary efforts coupled with the intellectual dialogue initiated by such pioneering oriental scholars as De Nobili, Giuseppe Beschi and others have consciously and otherwise influenced the understanding and application of the notion of person to the divine and human realities. The strong influence of the intellectual currents of western-Christian thought on the twin schools of Advaitha and Duvaitha within the world of the Vedanta tradition is evidenced in the post-colonial interpretation of the Mahavakyas pertaining to the Vedanta Bhasyas. Here the notion of the inexpressible Supreme reality is conceptualized in “personal categories.”
This paper will focus on a brief analysis of the notion of person as found in Biblical literatures, the nuances of its application to the Divine and human personhood and the roots of the western philosophical development of the concept of person. An etymological and philological survey of all terms that approximate or appropriate the meaning and sense of person in the Aramaic, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and Tamil languages will be undertaken and their conceptual nuances and interconnectedness will be explored. The different notions of person as used in post-colonial Tamil religious literatures will also be analysed against the backdrop of the major shifts in the Indian philosophical understanding of the Person, spearheaded by such leading Indologists of the last century as T.M. P Mahadevan and Richard V. De Smet, S.J.
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Prof. Chandrakanthan was the founding Head of the Department of Christian and
Islamic Studies at the University of Jaffna and was earlier Professor of
Theology at Concordia University in Montreal. His special areas of research and
interest include: End of Life Care, Psychiatry and Ethics, Spirituality and
Ethics, Ethics and Culture especially Hindu-Saivite Tamil Ethics and Islamic
Ethics, and International Research Ethics in the Developing countries.