Bede Griffiths

Wayne Teasdale

Description

One of today's foremost mystics introduces readers to the thought of one of the most important spiritual teachers of the past century.

Bede Griffiths—English Benedictine monk and lifelong friend of C.S. Lewis, who was his tutor at Oxford—wrote in 1955 to a friend: "I'm going out to India to seek the other half of my soul." There, he explored the intersection of Hinduism and Christianity and was a driving force behind the growth of interspiritual awareness so common today, yet almost unheard of a half-century ago.

Wayne Teasdale, a longtime personal friend and student of Griffiths, provides readers with an intriguing view into the thoughts, beliefs, and life of this champion of interreligious acceptance and harmony. This volume is the first in-depth study of Bede Griffiths' contemplative experience and thought.

Fully exploring the antecedents and development of Griffiths' theory that the Christian mystery can be expressed through the worldview of Hinduism, Bede Griffiths: An Introduction to His Interspiritual Thought is a vital starting point for any spiritual seeker who wants to understand the shared territories of these two great faiths.

Foreword by Bede Griffiths vii
Preface xiii
Part One: Background to a Christian Vedanta
1. Bede's Quest for the Absolute 3
2. The Historical Context as Sannyasic Monasticism 17
3. Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Contemplative
Theology 43
Part Two: The Possibility of a Christian Vedanta
4. Bede’s Theological Scheme, Myth, and the Cosmic
Revelation 73
5. Christian Vedanta: Advaita, Saccida¯nanda, and
the Trinity 93
6. Christology, Tantrism, Sannya¯sa, and the Future of
the Church 136
7. Conclusion and Implications 177
Epilogue 195
Notes 205
Glossary 230
Select Bibliography 234
Index 252
About SkyLight Paths 259

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Bede Griffiths
• Spirituality
• Religion
• C. S. Lewis
• Oxford

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 18 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781594734915
• Langue: English

Extrait

BEDE GRIFFITHS

AN INTRODUCTION TO HIS INTERSPIRITUAL THOUGHT
WAYNE TEASDALE FOREWORD BY BEDE GRIFFITHS
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To the contemplatives around the world
in all traditions
who are slowly transforming
the consciousness of society.
Contents
Foreword by Bede Griffiths
Preface
Part One : Background to a Christian Vedanta
1 . Bede s Quest for the Absolute
2 . The Historical Context as Sannyasic Monasticism
3 . Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Contemplative Theology
Part Two : The Possibility of a Christian Vedanta
4 . Bede s Theological Scheme, Myth, and the Cosmic Revelation
5 . Christian Vedanta: Advaita, Saccid nanda, and the Trinity
6 . Christology, Tantrism, Sanny sa , and the Future of the Church
7 . Conclusion and Implications
Epilogue
Notes
Glossary
Select Bibliography
Index

About the Author
Copyright
Also Available
About SkyLight Paths
Foreword

I T IS ONLY SLOWLY that we are beginning to realize how totally Western are the structures of the Catholic Church. Christianity began as a religion of the Middle East, Semitic in culture and Judaic in its forms of belief and worship. Jesus was a Jew who spoke Aramaic, attended the services in the synagogue, worshiped in the temple, and celebrated the Last Supper according to Jewish rites. His thinking, moreover, was molded by the traditions and customs of the Palestine in which he lived. But as Christianity came to break with Judaism, so this Jewish Christianity faded into the past. With Saint Paul, Christianity moved out into the Gentile world, that is, the Greco-Roman world of the Roman Empire. It passed from Jerusalem through Greece to Rome, and adopted the culture of the Greco-Roman world. The Gospels themselves were written in Greek, though a tradition that Matthew wrote his Gospel in Aramaic has survived. The New Testament itself is a translation of the original Christian message into the language of the West.
From this time onward, Christianity pursued its course in the West. Its liturgy, its theology, its canon law were all the products of the Greek genius. As it passed from eastern to western Europe, it began to speak Latin, and gradually a Latin Catholicism arose. The liturgy was celebrated in Latin; Plato and Aristotle were translated into Latin, and scholastic theology came to translate the Christian Gospel into terms of Western philosophy. Canon law was also developed as an instrument for organizing the Church around the center of the Papacy. Thus the great system of medieval Catholicism arose, expressing the Christian religion in the language and structures of western Europe.
There was, however, another movement of the Gospel toward the East. Early in the second century, Edessa on the borders of Syria and Mesopotamia became the center of a Syriac Christianity (Syriac being a form of Aramaic). This Syrian Christianity spread through Persia to India and China, and in the seventh and eighth centuries there were Christian churches spread throughout Asia. But the Mongol invasions swallowed them up, and they were eventually overwhelmed by Islam. A few churches survived, however, of which the most conspicuous is that of the Syrian Christians in Kerala. This was originally an authentic form of Eastern Christianity, but missionaries from Europe, first of all Latin Catholics and then Anglicans and Protestants, gradually changed it into another form of Western Christianity, only its Syrian liturgy being retained.
The Reformation attempted to break away from this traditional form of Latin Christianity, by a return to the Bible, but it was the Bible interpreted by the Western mind, and its structures remained as firmly Western as those of Roman Catholicism or Greek Orthodoxy. The Christianity that we have inherited today remains a totally Western form of religion. It has never been touched, except in the most superficial way, by the genius of India or China or the people of Asia as a whole. There was, however, a movement toward an Asian form of Christianity begun by two men of genius in the sixteenth century. Matteo Ricci in China and Roberto de Nobili in India attempted a genuine indigenization of Christianity. They became masters of Mandarin Chinese and of Sanskrit and Tamil, respectively, and lived entirely according to Chinese and Indian customs, thus providing a model for the inculturation of Christianity in Asia. But their experiment was short-lived, and the Church soon returned to its Western ways.
The movement toward inculturation was taken up in the twentieth century, first of all by the great brahmin convert Brahmabandhab Upadhyay. His attempt was frustrated by the Polish Papal Nuncio, who was unable to conceive of anything other than a Latin Catholicism. After him it was revived by two French fathers, Jules Monchanin and Henri Le Saux, who were both men of genius. They founded the ashram of Shantivanam in Tamil Nadu, giving it the name of Saccidananda Ashram, and there the movement toward inculturation finally took root. The present work of Dr. Wayne Teasdale is an attempt to make known the growth of this movement and to expound the principles on which it has been built up. The movement has now spread all over India, and many theologians are engaged in seeking to express the Christian Gospel in terms that are meaningful to the people of India.
The focus of theology in India today is, however, mainly centered on social justice and the option for the poor. Considering the immensity of the poverty and suffering of the people of India this development is necessary and inevitable. But it should not allow us to forget that the need for change in church and society in India goes far beyond the need for economic and social change. The Christian message has to be rethought and restated in the language and thought forms of the people of India; it has to embrace the culture of India in all its richness and variety. But this means that it must go back to the roots of that culture in the Vedas, the Upani ads, and the Bhagavad Gita, and follow it through all its developments in the Epics, the Puranas, the Dar anas, and the astras down to its encounter with western science and democracy today. Christianity has to become as deeply rooted in the culture of India as it once was in the culture of Greece and Rome.
This is the real subject of this book. How can the Church in India learn to shed its Western forms and structures and become, in the words of the founder of Shantivanam, totally Indian and totally Christian ? Perhaps the key to the answer to this question was given in the words of the great French theologian Henri de Lubac addressed to his friend Jules Monchanin when he departed for India: You have to rethink everything in terms of theology and rethink theology in terms of mysticism. It is this mystical dimension that is essential to any theology in India. The Greek genius was a genius for rational thought, for abstract, logical analytical thought; the Roman genius was for law and morality, but was no less essentially based on abstract rational thought, on universal ideas and propositions It is this that has given to Western Christianity its strength but also its limitations. The West has never been at home in mysticism. It has had great mystics and its greatest theologians, like Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, have been touched by mystical experience, but the structure of its life and thought remains basically rational and logical.
Today, with the spread of Western science and technology, we are discovering the disastrous limitations of this mode of thinking. We are discovering that it comes from using one half of the brain; the other half of the brain, which is responsible for concrete, intuitive thought, has been neglected. Our civilization remains fundamentally unbalanced, so that it threatens the actual destruction of the world. We are realizing that our Western culture is a patriarchal culture and that it has developed the masculine mind, what the Chinese call the Yang, at the expense of the feminine mind, the Yin. If the world is to recover its balance, it has to rediscover the feminine mind. While the masculine mind is abstract, logical, analytical, scientific, and rational, the feminine mind is concrete, symbolic, synthetic, imaginative, and intuitive. These two minds are complementary, and human health and wholeness depend on the balance of these opposites.
It is at this point that the meeting of East and West has to take place. Although the Western mind is predominantly rational, the other faculties are, of course, never wholly lost; the Eastern mind is predominantly intuitive, and it is the intuitive wisdom of the East that the Western world and the Western Church have to learn. This work is only a small beginning in this direction, but it is hoped that it will inspire others to take up the challenge and release the Church from its bondage to the West.
Bede Griffiths
Shantivanam
December 1986
Preface

T HIS BOOK WAS originally my doctoral dissertation in the theology department at Fordham University in 1985, entitled Toward a Christian Vedanta: The Encounter of Hinduism and Christianity According to Bede Griffiths ; it was subsequently published in India in 1987 by a press called Asia