“I give the name ontonomy to the recognition or the development of the laws proper to each sphere of being or of human activity, distinguishing higher and lower spheres but without separation or unjustified interferences. Ontonomy is sensitive to the peculiarities of each being or class of beings, without absolutizing such regularities as if other beings did not exist and without enslaving them in the service of higher entities, as if lower beings did not also have their own laws.” (Ontonomía de la ciencia. Sobre el sentido de la ciencia y sus relaciones con la filosofía, Madrid 1961).
Ontonomy is one of the most fundamental concepts in Panikkar’s thought. It regards the nómos toû óntos, the intimate and constitutive nomos of each being, a contribution “to the mutual understanding and fertilization of the distinct fields of human activity and spheres of being, allowing for (ontonomic) growth without rupturing the harmony”. It is a concept that may be as crucial for the world of thought (scientific, philosophical, theologico–spiritual) as for the political, economic and every other area of human life.
It entails both the exclusion of the separate disconnected independence of the various spheres of being (autonomy) and the predominance of some spheres over others (heteronomy), in order to achieve a harmonious integration of the distinct parts in the whole (ontonomy). The person is the reality that makes possible the attaining of an ontonomic order, inasmuch as he is “the conjugation of all pronouns”. In addition to dealing with the phase of heteronomy in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (which represents an attitude that may also be defined as theonomic), and the humanist critique which lead to the attitude of autonomy, our author also speaks of ontonomy as a new conception of the relationship between the creature and God:
“The creature is not God. God is not the creature … The relationship between God and the creature is neither heteronomous nor autonomous … The creature is certainly not God, but it is not certain that God is not also the creature … [because] all that is must, in some way, be God … The creature is not God, but he is of God, in God and through God … he is with God … The ontic structure that ontonomy seeks is neither an intrinsic bond nor an extrinsic relationship …
“Ontonomy reveals the mysterious and intrinsic laws that enable a being to develop harmoniously according to his intimate constitution without doing violence to the other beings. There exists an ontonomic order that we must discover, because it alone can reveal to us the true structure of the world” (Misterio y Revelacion).
The concept of ontonomy is fundamental to Panikkar’s religious conception. In another of his early books, Religion and Religions, he expresses the idea of ontonomy thus: “The nature of religion does not depend on the autonomous nature of Man, but rather on his ontonomic structure as a being in, with and through God (Religión y religiones, Madrid 1965). Years later, in the new edition of an early book, he again refers to his concept of ontonomy in speaking of the relationship between God and beings:
“The humanist reaction to a certain divine heteronomy causes Man to fall into the extreme opposite, i.e. into human autonomy. This makes him a slave to himself and a “victim of the elevated concept that he has formed of himself.” As opposed to this, Panikkar proposes ontonomy as the expression of the middle way of the Buddha: “a way that we would call ontonomic, in order to free Man as much from the apotheosis of an exterior God as from the absolutization of the human.”