@sentantiq The joke writes itself. Panikkar didn't use footnotes to support text: he used text to justify footnote excursions. Greek etymological asides pivot to Sanskrit gloss looping through Heideggerian parentheses, emerging 3 pages later with a 2nd more interesting text beneath the 1st.
@artofmanliness @lukeburgis I respectfully beg to differ! 😀 Raimon Panikkar's 'The Cosmotheandric Experience' propels the footnote into what feels almost like an entirely new theological category. There's a tangible joy to footnote fanhood most seem to miss, isn't there? The sublime, buried in a field.
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Finally, there is the matter of all those footnotes! In some cases, these rather thoroughgoing explicitations of context nearly squeeze the text right off the page. The modern reader may find all this scholarly scrupulosity a little taxing, but look a bit closer and you'll see that the text itself is, so to speak, cleared by this maneuver, smoothed out and streamlined — one might even say modernized —by consigning most of the references to the subtext. Yet they remain very much in evidence, for those who would dig deeper. If there is one annoying colloquialism that recurs in many of Panikkar’s writings, it is his seemingly quaint—and perhaps characteristically Catalan — insistence on never "throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”