Blessed simplicity, Fr. Panikkar explains, is the monastic principle par excellence. But for the modern-day monk, the spiritual quest is more likely to be known as a search for harmonious complexity. And for every human being, the monastic dimension tends more toward the cultivation of integration and fullness.
The religious person today finds that the quest for Oneness cannot exclude the world as it is in its complexity and contradictions. The authenticity of any spirituality, Christian or non-christian, is called into question on the basis of the attitudes it fosters towards the body, sexuality, and politics, the most universal challenges of modernity.
Based on the symposium, “The Monk as Universal Archetype,” in November, 1980, at Holyoke, Massachusetts, Panikkar describes the “New Monk” and considers the impact of a transformed image of monasticism on the world as a whole.