Bede Griffiths - Quo Vadis

BEDE GRIFFITHS

QUO VADIS?

Publisher’s Preface

First Published in 1991

The publication of this booklet may seem to be out of keeping with the Catholic Church’s relaxed attitude towards non-Christian religions.  After Vatican II many efforts were made to establish dialogue with non-Christian religions.  Catholics were encouraged to appreciate what was ‘good and true’ in these religions, and Hindus were among those that most warmly responded to these overtures.

The regret, however, was expressed in Hinduism Today (February 1990) that the ’30 year excursion into eastern thought’ was rapidly drawing to a close with the publication on 14 December 1989, of a letter of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to 3000 bishops warning of the ‘dangers and errors’ in non-Christian forms of meditation.

The letter explains and defends how and why eastern methods are incompatible with Catholic doctrine.  Cardinal Ratzinger cites four objections:  meditation can imprison the person praying in a spiritual privatism which is incapable of a free openness to the transcendental God;  the Hindu concept of absorbing the human self into the divine self is never possible, not even in the highest states of grace;  all the aspirations which the prayer of other religions expresses are fulfilled in the reality of Christianity beyond all measure, and finally, it is impossible to arrive at a perfect love of God if one ignores his giving of himself to us through Jesus Christ.

Hinduism Today, says it remains to be seen how these meditative and mystical influences are to be purged from the Church, and states: ‘There are literally hundreds of monasteries and thousands of clergy actively involved in one or another form of eastern mysticism.’

This makes this booklet very much in keeping with the thought of the Church.  What makes his work all the more significant is that he was one of the ‘thousands’ who at one stage was part of the ’30 year excursion’.  He took a course for a year in Transcendental Meditation and was at the point of taking an advanced Siddhis course.  But, he discovered some things strange.....

Having turned back, he asks another excursionist: ‘Quo vadis?’ -  ‘whither are you going?’, and by implication, ‘whither are you taking those who follow you?’

In this age of increasing apostasy it is an honour to publish the work.  His conviction is that the oriental cosmology and that of the Judaeo-Christian tradition are incompatible and that a choice between one or the other must be made:  ‘I believe that if we mix the two we may lose what Pope John Paul II has called “the most precious gift of all, our faith”.

May this booklet succeed in the purpose with which the author wrote it:  ‘Having met a lot of missionaries from different parts of the world I have found many of them perplexed by what Bede Griffiths actually believes, as they find his writings so ambiguous.  I hope this booklet will help to clarify a few issues.  Also, I hope it will confirm missionaries in their calling to preach the Word with boldness in this final decade of the 20^th century which the Pope has named the Decade of Evangelisation.  His new encyclical Redemptoris Missio  talks of the urgency of converting non-believers to Christ since ‘salvation can only come from Jesus

Christ’. (cf. Acts 4:12)

                                                                                             Margaret Mollett

                                                                                             Publisher

                                                                                                    Dynamedia

N.B.  C.S. Lewis dedicated his book “Surprised by Joy” to “Dom Bede Griffiths O.S.B.” before the latter went to India.  The friendship was to end later.

“A scholarly and timely corrective to trends within Catholicism against spreading the gospel of Christ, and towards a dangerous and undiscerning dabbling in Eastern spirituality”.

- Michael Gilchrist

Ass. Editor, AD 2000, Melbourne Australia

“This paper provides a knowledgeable and perceptive critique of Eastern and New Age thinking in general, and of its unfortunate influence on Fr Bede Griffiths in particular.  In line with Scripture and Christian Tradition, explains the uniqueness of Christ and the greatness of our need for Christ”.

- Professor Hugh G. Cauch Jnr.

Senior Research Specialist in Botany, Cornell University, U.S.A.,

Visiting Professor at Potchefstroom University for C.H.E.

And author of ECOLOGICAL STATISTICS.

“...gives a thorough explanation of altered states of consciousness and their relevance to eastern mystical experience and contrasts this with the experience of God’s love in Christian mysticism.  He points to a misapplication of inculturation as the major culprit behind the syncretism that has exploded within the mission-field and at home”.

- Johnnette Benkovic

Director, LIVING HIS LIFE ABUNDANTLY MINISTRIES,

Clearwater, Florida, U.S.A.

“Author’s knowledge and research are to be admired”.

- Dr C. Kilgallon, U.K.

“Very impressive and very alarming.  Fr Bede has betrayed the very cause that brought him to India”.

- Peter Milward S.J.,

Sophia University, Tokyo.

“A marvellous piece of work...... cites good sources and presents solid arguments”.

- Dr Mitch Pacwa S.J., author

Loyola University, Chicago.

“A wonderful work”.

- Edmond Robillard O.P., author

Canada.

“Illuminating and profound.  I agree with every single word”.

- Owen Williams,

Southern Cross writer.

BEDE GRIFFITHS QUO VADIS?

Formerly a monk of Prinknash Abbey and Prior of Farnborough Abbey in England, Bede Griffiths went to India     in 1955 and assisted in the foundation of Kurisumala Ashram, a monastery of the Syrian rite in Kerala.  In 1968 he came with two monks from Kurisumala to Saccidananda Ashram, Shantivanam, in Tamil Nadu.  This ashram had been founded in 1950 by two Frenchmen, Jules Mochanin and Henri Le Saux.  It was the first Christian community in India that followed the customs of an Indian ashram and adapted itself to Hindu beliefs and practices.

Bede Griffiths’s autobiography The Golden String – written prior to his departure for India in 1955 – is a beautiful and moving book which made a big impression on me many years ago when I was a novice. Since The Golden String he has produced a number of books and each one seems to move further away from the Biblical worldview.  In his book Christian Ashram, published in 1966, he says ‘the danger in the encounter with Hinduism is always that of a superficial syncretism which would regard all religions as “essentially” the same and only differing in their “accidental” characteristics’.  (1) Living so long in a totally Hindu world, Fr Bede seems to be in danger of this as well.

For example, in Christian Ashram he mentions Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy and says:  ‘It shows how far the fusion of eastern and western thought has already gone.’  But adds: ‘Mr Huxley’s conception ... is of course not satisfactory from a Christian point of view’. (2)  But then Fr Bede goes on to praise the perennial philosophy unreservedly in subsequent books like Return to the Centre and The Universal Christ.  In these books he talks approvingly of the perennial philosophy, or the eternal religion, and that this ‘eternal religion cannot be discovered now exclusively in any one religion’.  Bit by bit the uniqueness of Jesus and his body, the Church, disappears until we come to his latest book A New Vision of Reality which is so eclectic that it can be found in the popular New Age section in many bookshops.  In England it is published by the leading New Age publishing house, Element Books, and in the U.S.A. by Amity House, who also published Meditations on the Tarot, a hodge-podge of occult, theosophical, alchemical, esoteric, astrological and reincarnational ideas stirred together with Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Sufism.

Basic Experience

The Golden String begins with a beautiful description the author had of a ‘mystical exaltation in the presence of nature’.  This occurred when the author was a boy during the last term at school and it seems to have profoundly affected him because he refers to it again and again in his books.  He refers to it eight times in The Golden String and alludes to it in Christian Ashram, Return to the Centre and The Universal Christ.

Later in The Golden String he recounts an experience similar to what William Johnston S.J.  (3) experienced and described as the ‘baptism in the Spirit’ in one of his books.  This deeply Christian experience Fr Bede (4) had was a profound insight into God’s love, and he states that he never really knew the meaning of love until that moment.  But this experience does not seem to have been regarded as so important as the natural aesthetic, mystical one mentioned above.  This is probably because Fr Bede does not want to emphasise something so uniquely Christian when he is a guest in a non-Christian society where natural mysticism is so strong that this could supposedly be seen as an obstacle to Hindu-Christian dialogue.  In Christian Ashram (5) Fr Bede talks of the sense of the presence of God in nature and the soul, a kind of natural mysticism which is the basis of all Indian spirituality.

I think that it is a great pity that Fr Bede does not expand on this experience of love because natural mysticism or ecstasy in the midst of aesthetic beauty is a common enough worldwide phenomena even in non-Christian or atheistic societies.  William Johnston (6) says that what makes Christian mysticism so unique is love.  This is something we Christians should stress in dialogue with other religions and not ignore, because it’s uniquely Christian.  It’s Christianity’s greatest contribution to the question of mysticism – and mankind’s future – as it gets away from purely cerebral psychological experiences which are so often described as ‘mystical’ or ‘transcendent’.  But God cannot be reached by the intellect or the mind but can only be embraced by the heart in love, according to The Cloud of Unknowing.

It is the heart felt love which is totally outward looking and self giving in the fashion of Mother Theresa of Calcutta; a love which is the essence of Christianity and is popularised so  beautifully in the theology of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  True Christian holiness is not an introverted contemplation of one’s status before God, but a complete selflessness and a feeling for the grim realities of the plight of the poor which is certainly not illusory (maya).

In his books Fr Bede refers many times to Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy which he regards as the universal wisdom, the eternal religion and the divine law.  But Fr Louis Bouyer, the great expert on Christian spirituality writes of the syncretist tendencies of the Perennial Philosophy, and books like it, which ‘believe that once the depths of the soul are reached in the last analysis, the religious experience... of a Catholic (or a Buddhist) are basically the same’. (7)  He maintains that they are not.

Aldous Huxley, in his books, talks of the ‘self-validating certainty of direct awareness’, (8)  and quotes Lao Tzu favourably for observing: ‘He who knows does not speak.  He who speaks does not know’.  But this is a very ambiguous and ambivalent world and certainly not the world of Catholic Christianity where fidelity to Revelation (The Word of God and Tradition) is the greatest value.  The Word talks of us being examined in the spiritual fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity and self-control (cf Gal 5), and that at the final judgement it is not mystical experience, or even charismatic phenomena, no matter how real or authentic, but how we have fulfilled the corporal and spiritual works of mercy (Mt 25) in our imitation of God who is Himself mercy and compassion.

True Catholic Christianity emphasises love and mercy as being everything – in obedience to the Word of God.  The Church has never canonised anyone for having extraordinary powers, mystical or charismatic.

Huxley’s self-validating certainty of direct awareness has no place in Christianity.  The Bible warns of the need for discernment as not every spirit comes from God, but we are to test them (1 Jn 4:1).  Both the New Testament and the Rules of Discernment in the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola are of great help in this respect.  This is necessary as The Cloud of Unknowing observes:  ‘Even the Devil has his mystics’.

This discernment will help us to avoid the dangerous pitfalls and errors that can lie in wait for the unwary in the mystical world.  For example, the artist and feminist mystical writer, Meinrad Craighead, was a Roman Catholic nun for fourteen years, but in fidelity to a mystical experience she abandoned the religious life altogether.

Her ‘self-validating certainty of direct awareness’ involved her pet dog at home in America.  Once she was looking into its eyes and realised: ‘I would never travel further than this animal’s eyes.  They were as deep, as bewildering, as unattainable as a night sky.  Just as mysterious was a clear awareness of water inside me, the sound in my ears, yet resounding from my breast.  I gazed into the dog’s eyes and listened to the sound of rushing water inside me.  I understood: “This is who God is”.  My mother is water, and she is inside me and I am in water’.  Later when she stumbled across a photograph of the bulbous and faceless fertility goddess, the Venus of Willendorf, she recalled: ‘I knew this was she whom I had heard in the water and beyond the dog’s eyes’. (9)

Obviously a ‘mystical’ experience like this which can make a woman break her vow of fourteen years to God needs rigorous discernment.  We seem to disregard all the wisdom of Catholicism today in our haste to make ourselves acceptable to the prevailing zeitgeist which extols the ancient wisdom of animists, yogis, shamans, et al!

Before proceeding with more specific aspects of Fr Bede’s teaching, an excursus into eastern concepts of altered states of consciousness is necessary.  Although all the points raised do not refer directly back to Fr Bede, they demarcate the framework in which Fr Bede’s beliefs and practices are to be understood.

An Excursus : Altered States of Consciousness

Often associated with mystical experience is enlightenment through meditation techniques, such as Transcendental Meditation.  Many writers have speculated on the meaning of this experience in non-Christian religions.  For example, William Johnston S.J. says that a person can sit quietly and let go of all discursive reasoning and thinking and focus his attention inwardly, and do this for many weeks.  Eventually he may come to ‘a shattering enlightenment’ which fills him with joy and exaltation, liberating him from craving and anxiety, even allowing him to experience a timeless moment of illumination. But William Johnston (10) states that this is not mysticism as it is not knowledge that comes from love.  Relevant here is the remark of the author of The Cloud: ‘I am trying to make clear with words what experience teaches more convincingly, that techniques and methods are ultimately useless for awakening contemplative love’. (11)  Practitioners of Transcendental Meditation and its offshoot, Centering Prayer, take note!

Archimandrite Sophrony, an Orthodox monk, warns of the dangers of ‘artificial practices such as Transcendental Meditation’.  He admits that such techniques have enabled people to rise to ‘supra-rational contemplation of being; to experience a certain mystical trepidation...  But the God of Truth, the Living God, is not in all this...  The tragedy of the matter lies in the fact that man sees a mirage which, in his longing for eternal life, he mistakes for a genuine oasis.  This impersonal form of ascetism leads finally to an assertion of the divine principle in the very nature of man...  The man who is blinded by the imaginary majesty of what he contemplates has, in fact, set his foot on the path to self-destruction.  He has discarded the revelation of a Personal God...  the movement into the depths of his own being is nothing else but attraction towards the non-being from which we were called by the will of the creator’.  (12)

Thomas Merton writes: ‘There is a natural metaphysical intuition of being, even of Absolute being, or of the metaphysical ground of being’ and that this intuition is found in all the great world religions as well as in certain philosophies.  Aristotle believed that it was the highest achievement possible to man.  William Inge would, however, see the ecstasy of a philosopher like Plotinus as ‘a type of intellectual fainting which has only superficial similarities to true love ecstacy’. (13)  However, Harvey Egan S.J. says: ‘There is little in Plotinus, or in Transcendental Meditation to indicate a motor force of anything more than nescience and nescience alone’.  (14)

I believe that this ‘pure awareness’, ‘enlightenment’ or ‘mystical unity’ experienced in prolonged TM meditation is due to psychological factors.  When I did a TM weekend retreat for those pondering taking an advanced Siddhis course (which teaches one to levitate or become invisible) we did a lot of prolonged meditation or ‘rounding’ as they called it.  It was interspersed with other activities as it was found that too much concentrated mantra work can have bad effects.  This recitation of the mantra was one reason for my breaking with TM.  I discovered that unknowingly I had chanted the name of a Hindu God in the mantra I had been given.  Like so many, I had been deceived into believing it was a meaningless word.

The work of the psychologist, Robert Ornstein, seems to indicate that the recitation of the mantra, as in TM, produces effects on the nervous system similar to ‘experimental uniform stimulation of a sense’. (15)  It seems that the consequence of the structure of our central nervous system is that if awareness is restricted to one unchanging source of stimulation, e.g. the TM mantra, a ‘turning-off of consciousness of the external world follows’. (16)  The altered states of consciousness resulting from the suppression of both perception and thought by the monotonous repetition of the mantra seem eventually to lead to an experience of unity in which the self seems to merge inwardly with the universe; the ground of being or the ‘field of Creative intelligence’ as TM puts it. (17)  The writer, William Oddle, has humorously referred to Paul Tillich’s ‘ground of being’ as ‘a post-biblical Deity’. (18)

TMers deceive themselves, therefore, in equating a psychological experience with God Himself.  This seems strange as their leader Maharishi is quite clear in admitting that enlightenment is the result of a psycho-physiological conditioning of the nervous system (19) but does not explain how one’s nervous system should hold the key to reality after it has been subjected to a process of conditioning.  Of course, there may have been an element of this self-deception in all mysticism, including Christianity, but in Christianity the fundamental test of true mysticism is its fruits.  To judge the validity or genuineness of interior happenings is difficult, but the external actions or ‘fruits’ are apparent to all.  There may have been many mystics in church history, but not all have been canonised as worthy of emulation.  For example, Meister Eckhart.  In the light of this, one can understand the wisdom of the Church’s insistence on the need for discernment.

Agehananda Bharati says that ‘mystical experience’, as he calls it, can be sought, ‘not because it is noble as wisdom or goodness are noble, but because it is an additional skill... which confers delight’. (20)  He says it is a skill which can be learned and ‘it does not confer any supernatural or superhuman status at all, nor any moral excellence’, nor does it confer ‘existential status’ on its content, in the manner in which one’s experience of a chair confers existence upon it.  Mircea Eliade notes that to be a master of yoga and have extraordinary powers in no way implies spiritual superiority.  He gives, as an example, Haridas, ‘a man of loose morals’. (21)

Contrary to Bharati, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of TM, believes that his mystical enlightenment authenticates the content and gives it ‘existential status’.  This is dangerous, as it means that one’s self-induced psychological high becomes identified with God.  Also the Maharishi believes that this self-induced experience makes one automatically better, and this too is dangerous, for it makes one’s own self the measure, or yardstick of right or wrong, and reduces objective morality to pure subjectivism.  If these beautiful altered states persist, irrespective of whether one is a moral person or not, it may give practitioners the idea that God does not care if one is good or evil.  So this may lead to many oriental religions being indifferent to good or evil – antinomianism in fact.

To briefly summarise at this point – it seems clear that enlightenment, or sartori, as the Buddhists call it, is learned behaviour.  It seems to come about as Ornstein indicates from an altered state of consciousness resulting from the suppression of both perception and thought by the monotonous repetition of a mantra or other technique.  This leads to an experience of unity in which the self seems to merge inwardly with the universe and give an experience of oneness with creation, or ‘all is one’.

Dr Stanislav Grof in his research into drugs and altered states of consciousness shows that the so-called mystical experiences can be induced by drugs.  He has shown that people close to death can often experience ASCs. (22)  I say so-called mystical experiences because genuine mysticism, as William Johnston shows, involves love, not a self-induced psychological high.  Colin Wilson (23) maintains that the power of the mind to establish direct union with ‘reality’ may be produced by the reaction of a chemical called serotonin on the pineal gland.  The bo-tree, under which the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment, produces figs with an exceptionally high serotonin content.  No wonder the Buddha is frequently shown smiling to himself.

In his Return to the Centre, Fr Bede says that ‘opium or any other hallucinatory drug opens up the world of the unconscious, the world of the gods and demons in which man lived before the scientific age – a dangerous world, which can lead to madness, but can also lead to God’. (24)  The question is, what God is this leading to?  God can, of course, not be reached by any technique.  In The River of Compassion Fr Bede shows the importance of soma, one of the hallucinatory drugs and says, ‘in Vedic tradition the drinking of soma was an essential part of the Vedic sacrifice.  Wonderful poems were written on the ecstacy induced by soma’. (25)  Once again, God cannot be reached by drug-induced ecstacy – this is self-delusion, not self-transcendence.

Dr Grof maintains that people who had these ASCs experienced ‘mystical’ states of consciousness characterised by losing a sense of time and space and by feelings of spiritual rebirth and unity with other human beings, the entire universe and ‘God’. (26)

Techniques for restricting the supply of oxygen or simulating anoxia have been widely used throughout the ages in eastern religions in inducing ASCs.  Pranayama, which I was taught in TM classes and other eastern techniques, use alternate periods of hyperventilation with prolonged withholding of the breath to induce ASCs.  According to Grof, all these techniques can trigger off various mystical and ecstatic states.

In his book on reincarnation Fr Edmund Robillard O.P. (27) says that breathing techniques, when they aim to augment significantly the quantity of oxygen inhaled by the organism, can actually procure the same state of euphoria that pilots of supersonic jet planes experience if they inhale more oxygen than necessary.  Robillard quotes R.B. Maharaj, who was trained by his parents from childhood in TM, and who, as a medical student in London, discovered the astonishing similarity between the effects of yoga and those of LSD. (28)

I think that the reason that Monism (all is one) and pantheism are so widespread in religions of the Far East is due to the fact that so many people in these areas use mind-altering drugs that lead to monistic, pantheistic experiences as in Hinduism, Buddhism as well as in the adepts at Zen and Yoga.  Douglas Groothuis says ‘such experiences may come as a result of meditation, yoga, drugs, biofeedback, sensory deprivation, visualisation, martial arts, hypnosis or other “psycho-technologies”, as Marilynn Ferguson calls them.  Consciousness raising seminars such as EST, Lifespring or Silva Mind Control employ various methods to trigger this awareness. (29)  Perhaps this can explain what happened to Ramana Maharishi, mentioned by Fr Bede (30) as having a near-death experience similar to those investigated by Dr Grof.  This experience was a profound advaitic (or non-dualist) one, though Ramana knew nothing of this advaitic and monistic doctrine beforehand.

Propagators of Eastern mysticism make much of the ‘deep rest’ – joy, peace and relaxation supposedly the result of union with the absolute and divine.  The Flemish mystic, Ruysbroeck, talks of a form of rest that is purely natural and not induced by the action of God on the soul: ‘... when a man is bare and imageless in his senses, and empty and idle in his higher powers, he enters into rest through mere nature; and this rest may be found and possessed within themselves in mere nature by all creatures without the grace of God whenever they can strip themselves of images and all activity ... now mark the way in which this natural rest is practised.  It is sitting still, without either outward or inward acts, in vacancy, in order that rest may be found and may remain untroubled.  In this bare vacancy, the rest is pleasant and great’. (31)

The emphases are mine to show that the Christian tradition is not unaware of this great relaxation and deep rest, but it does not try to insinuate divine intervention or spiritual significance as do the propagators of TM.  In fact, the following caution given by Ruysbroeck is one that they should consider with all their emphasis on technique.: ‘These people err gravely, they immerse themselves in an absolute silence that is purely natural and a false liberty of spirit is born from this.  The body drawn in upon itself, they are mute, unmoving, to silence their senses, to empty them of every image and to concentrate ... and they mistake these types of simplicity for those reached through God.  In reality they have lost God!’

Hans Urs von Balthasar (32) holds that technique is opposed to the Gospel’s grace of childlikeness.  He is not poor in spirit who uses exercises and techniques – whether by TM, yoga or zen, for expansion of his ‘inner space’.  Rather he is full of ‘ability’ and capability; he belongs to the rich who do not pass through the eye of a needle, to the wise and clever from whom the father has concealed it. Von Balthasar says that he is ultimately a Pharisee who relies on his works instead of entrusting himself to God in faith, for technique is achievement, even if its goal is attainment of inner poverty.

He believes that precisely because one who meditates in Eastern fashion has nothing before him that actively imparts information out of itself about itself, he must attain passivity by his own efforts.  For the Christian contemplative, on the other hand, that which reveals itself has already in advance accomplished a truth that is not alien to him, but his own intimate truth, which he needs only to recognise.  That Mary is the handmaid of the Lord, on whom he can act as he sees fit, is expressive of her ‘poverty’, ‘lowliness’, her humility, and not an attained spiritual level; indeed she knows that God casts down the mighty from their seats.

Consideration of technique and ASCs would be incomplete without looking at biofeedback.  This is a technique which uses electrical monitoring of brainwaves to bring normally unconscious involuntary bodily functions under conscious voluntary control.  This may be extended to include altered states of consciousness and psychic experiences. (33)  Dr Barbara Brown, the great pioneer in biofeedback research, and student of world religions for over twenty-five years, says that ‘there is unquestionably a similarity between what biofeedback can accomplish and what practice of Indian arts of yoga could accomplish.  In the early days of biofeedback, when the ability to control one’s own brainwave alpha activity was seized upon as instant zen or instant yoga, it was a new problem for scientists; many of them promptly became converts to oriental mind-body control philosophies’. (34)

Some scientific researchers like Fritjof Capra, in his Tao of Physics experiencing altered states of consciousness have talked of how scientific theories have become mystical realities and how this pointed up the wisdom of the yogis and zen masters.  Capra (35) sees this as particularly true in quantum physics; the electron does not have objective properties independent of the mind, he believes.

New Age advocates say that because the nature of reality is consciousness, therefore our minds are able to construct reality.  If a person cannot observe a quantum particle without changing the particle’s state, the mind of the observer directly influences the state of the quantum realm.  Dean Halverson maintains that ‘New Agers are certainly correct when they say that we influence the quantum realm to some extent whenever we observe it, yet the influence is an indirect one.  We don’t influence the quantum realm by our minds, but by our means of observation’.  He quotes Ian Barbour in noting that it is the detection apparatus, not the observer as a human being, that influences the measurement obtained. (36)

Finally, the relation between mid-altering techniques and memory of so-called past-life experiences must be considered.  The unconscious mind, it seems, is a vast repository of facts and figures, and forgets absolutely nothing.  The brilliant Canadian neuro-surgeon, Dr Wilder Penfield, by inserting electrodes into a patient’s temporal lobe, witnessed patients suddenly relive a complete moment from earlier in their lives as if a moving picture was being run in front of them. (37)  It seems that every fact of history, novel, play, character study and snatch of conversation we have hard is stored away in our unconscious mind. (38)

Research into near-death experiences have shown that people faced with this experience often rerun in their own minds every single item from their past in incredible detail.  Drugs, as well as mind-altering meditation techniques can have the same effect and lead to the illusion of having had past lives and of being reincarnated in this one.  For example, a newspaper reported that at a Christmas party in London in 1987, a student laced mince pies with mind-bending drugs like cannabis and LSD which led to one woman going on a trip back into past life as she drove home.  ‘It was dark, but to her amazement it was a summer’s evening back in the 18^th century. She saw what she believed to be real people lighting street lamps and horse-drawn carriages passing’. (39)

Mind-altering Hindu or Buddhist meditation techniques have probably triggered the minds of many religious adherents to remember unconscious material and think it was due to having lived in previous incarnations.  This could have led to the doctrine of reincarnation in Hindu/Buddhist theology.  People today, triggering off the same experiences by various techniques and use of drugs like LSD and cannabis, may believe that they too have had previous incarnations, and this has led to the astonishingly widespread belief in reincarnation.

Of course the demonic cannot be overlooked.  These visions can be produced by the action of evil spirits.  The Scriptures warn us against deceitful spirits and false visions (1 Tim 4:11; 2 Thes 2:9; Zech 10:2), and Christian writers down the ages assure us that evil spirits have such historical knowledge that they can draw upon to deceive us. (40)  Of course, drug abuse can weaken the will and provide an opening for demonic activity.

In one of the most exhaustive studies to date into the claims of reincarnation, the Oxford historian, Ian Wilson, concludes by suggesting that the claims are false and may be due to ‘a stress induced amalgam of unconsciously remembered reading or listening’. (41)  Of course, Christianity has always been opposed to the idea of reincarnation, as Dr Alan Shreck (42) points out.

This investigation into the nature and effects of altered states of consciousness serves to bring so much of the ‘mystic East’ into perspective.  This needs to be constantly borne in mind as one ventures further into the world of Bede Griffiths.

Revelation

In his earlier books Fr Bede warns of the dangers of the encounter with Hinduism: ‘Of a superficial syncretism which would regard all religions as “essentially” the same, and only differing in their “accidental” characteristics’.  He says the Christian faith is always in danger of simply being absorbed into Hinduism, just as in the early centuries Christ was in danger of becoming one of the gods of the Roman empire, (43) because ‘the Hindu has very little sense of religious differences’. (44)

But gradually in Fr Bede’s later books the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and the unique claims of his Body, the Church, get watered down.  So much so that later books like River of Compassion and A New Vision of Reality are perfectly acceptable to New Age publishers who have no time for the scandal of particularity which is Christ and his Church.  In fact, in his latest book Fr Bede (45) demands, as so many New Age books have done, that Christianity give up its ‘exclusive claims’ and recognise the limited character of its original revelation, coming as it did from within a semitic culture in the limited world and thought-forms of the ancient Near East.

I prefer Fr Bede’s earlier statements in The Golden String before he went to India and got so heavily involved with Hinduism.  For example: ‘We must hold with equal certainty that God chose to reveal himself to one particular people and established among them a unique way of salvation.  All religious traditions contain some element of truth, but there is only one absolutely true religion; all religions have taught something of the way of salvation but there is only one absolute way: Christ is the Way.  In the same way we must believe that there is one Church, which was founded by Christ upon the Rock of Peter, to be the way of salvation for all mankind.  In this Church all those elements of truth which have been dispersed among the different peoples of the earth are gathered into unity; it is the centre from which they derive their value and significance.  The Church with her hierarchy and sacraments is the sole basis for the unity of mankind...’ (48)

Here Fr Bede anticipates what Vatican II was to teach some years later: ‘Basing itself upon sacred Scripture and tradition it (the Synod) teaches that the Church... is necessary for salvation.

For Christ is ... the unique way of salvation ... he affirmed the necessity of the Church ... whosoever knowing that the Catholic Church was made necessary by God through Jesus Christ would refuse to enter her, or remain in her could not be saved’. (47)  The emphases are mine.  The decree on Ecumenism was also explicitly clear: ‘For it is through Christ’s Catholic Church alone, which is the all embracing means of salvation, that the fullness of the means of salvation can be obtained’. (48)

In contrast to The Golden String Fr Bede maintains in his latest work that in the New Testament there is ‘neither papacy, episcopacy nor priesthood’. (49)

The Judeo-Christian scheme of things teaches that we cannot reach God or save ourselves, and so God stooped down to us.  ‘The central difference between Christianity and all other religions is that God came to us in Christ.  He reached down to us.  All others, however sincerely and with noble intentions reach upwards to God and the truth is that man’s arms are not long enough’. (50)

Pope Paul VI makes this quite clear in his urgent call to evangelisation Evangelii Nuntiandi (no 53) (51)  Cardinal Hamer says that one of the only values in the prayer of other religions is the confession of an incapacity, the waiting for a salvation that human efforts alone cannot attain.  He goes on to say that the different non-Christian religions are above all an expression of a search on the part of man while Christian faith is unique in having its basis in the revelation of God to man. (52)

Cardinal Arinze, President of the Secretariat for Non-Christian Religions in an address given at Bangalore, India, in January 1990, on the subject ‘World Religions and the Unity of Mankind’ said that Catholic theologians have no option but to maintain the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word of God. He is not to be put beside Abraham, Moses, Isaiah and the prophets.  Jesus is not to be put alongside Buddha and Mohammed as if he were just a founder of a religion.  ‘At various times in the past and in different ways, God spoke to our ancestors through His Son, the Son that He has appointed to inherit everything’ (Heb 1:1f).  ‘Jesus Christ is the only mediator between God and mankind’ (1 Tim 2:5); ‘... the Saviour of the world’ (Jn 4:42), who came ‘to gather together in unity the scattered children of God’ (Jn 11:52); ‘There is no salvation in any other name.  For all the names given to men, this is the only one by which we can be saved’, Cardinal Arinze said quoting Acts 4:12.

The Supernatural and the Occult

In my experience of working with Hindus in Africa I have noticed that they are greatly troubled with the demonic.  I, and others, have often been invited to their homes to deal with evil spirits.  This, of course, was one of the main ministries carried out by Jesus to show the reign of God had arrived.  However, many books on comparative religion ignore this dark and disturbing world altogether so graphically portrayed by the ex-Brahmin in Death of a Guru. (53)  So much of the colonial literature of India prior to independence is aware of this strange occult and paranormal world.

Fr Bede (54) refers to this occult world in many of his books, but unfortunately he does not adhere to the clear Biblical guidelines on this subject but mixes up the Hindu and Biblical cosmologies in a confusing way.  This is particularly true in his latest books where he sees demons and devils as unconscious projections and as products of the collective unconscious.

The Bible makes it very clear that there is an unseen, but real world of angels and demons, and that we are not permitted to contact the latter or to consult the dead or mediums (cf Deut 18:9f).  But in his books Fr Bede (55) talks favourably of the New Age centre, Findhorn in Scotland, with which David Spangler was associated.  This is a place where a medium is used to contact spirits and enlist their co-operation.  The medium also ‘consults the trees and plants as to what they want and where they would like to be planted, and as a medium she interprets these messages as coming to her from angels’. (56)

In fact Fr Bede’s latest book A New Vision of Reality really is heavily influenced by the whole New Age world with its theosophy, cabbalism, alchemy, channelling and other paranormal ideas.  In the same section of New Age bookshops which display Fr Bede’s books, one can find The Aquarian Guide to the New Age (57) by Campbell and Brennan which is an excellent companion to Fr Bede’s latest book, I am sorry to say, as it contains nearly 100 references to people and concepts in The New Vision of Reality.  Sadly it shows that Fr Bede has really moved into this strange esoteric occult world, which is not surprising as it is an intrinsic part of Hinduism since the Vedas, the ancient scriptures of India, move in this world.  For example, the Atharta Veda consists to a large extent of oracles, charms and magical spells, all of which are an abomination in the Biblical worldview.  This is why mixing up the Hindu and Biblical cosmologies, as Fr Bede attempts to do, is so dangerous as it relativises those passages that warn Christians to avoid oracles, charms, magic spells and other occult phenomena (cf Deut 18:9-12; Acts 13:6-12; 16:16-18; 19:2-20).

I think there is a lot of ambivalence here in Fr Bede’s analysis of the psychic, spiritualist, paranormal world.  He says, ‘All ancient peoples it seems, had the experience of being surrounded by spirits’. (58)  But he sees these as images or archetypes of forces which arise in consciousness, e.g. the ‘concept of demons and devils arises when the ego is trying to repress unacceptable parts of the self’. (59)  But he says these experiences occur not merely in the individual soul but in the collective unconscious so that they are experienced as cosmic forces. (60)  The psychic faculty, he maintains, can give rise to all sorts of visionary experiences of angels, gods, fairies, elves, goblins, nymphs and dryads etc.  Fr Bede says that westerners today have largely lost these psychic powers whereas all ancient peoples, in India and elsewhere, lived to a large extent in that psychic world (61) – perhaps demonic world would be a better term!

He mentions some of these psychic powers such as telepathy, palmistry, astrology, astral travel and that these powers are latent in all of us and can be developed.  He praises the wisdom of the old pagan shamans who had extraordinary psychic powers, but adds that they were usually odd people who did ‘not fit in with the ordinary way of life’. (62)  Fr Bede states that these latent powers in man can be realised when man is freed from sin and transformed by the ‘indwelling spirit’. (63)  But what is this ‘sin’ and what ‘indwelling spirit’ does Fr Bede refer to?  He defines sin as ‘the refusal to recognise our own nothingness’ (64) which is not the Biblical definition.  The latter defines sin as missing the mark (hamartia) set by God’s plan which is revealed in the Bible.

Mircea Eliade, (65) in contrast to Fr Bede, notes that to be a master of yoga and to have extraordinary powers in no way implies spiritual superiority.  Fr Bede himself mentions Sai Baba, the well-known Indian miracle worker and controversial figure who presumes to be ‘more than Jesus’. (66)  Rasputin, of course, had extraordinary powers, but what spirit possessed him?  Paul Tillich, according to his wife’s biography of him, was able, through yoga, to develop his psychic powers, clairvoyance and interest in astrology.  Close to his death he was given a choice between a last reading from the Bible or the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and chose the latter!  What spirit possessed this once Christian theologian to lose all sense of good and evil and get so heavily involved in sexual promiscuity? (67)

Fr Bede goes on to link his psychic experiences with great prophets and events in the Bible.  For example, according to him Moses and the burning bush as well as the column of fire were all psychic experiences, as were Ezekiel’s visions.  The latter he maintains led to the development of a mystical tradition.  He says, ‘fully mystical doctrine did not develop in the Bible, it developed later in Judaism with the Qabala which has a complete mystical theology’. (68) 

Now this Qabala, according to the Aquarian Guide to the New Age, mentioned above, is ‘the body of esoteric doctrines which contain the heart of the Jewish mystical and magical traditions’.  The Qabala was considered to be an exceptional tool for the invocation of spiritual powers and could be used to call up demons, the Aquarian Guide states.

Fr Bede talks approvingly of Christians developing the psychic energies of the chakras like the Kundalini or serpent power.  In The Universal Christ he says that ‘the serpent energy’ becomes the saviour, as stated in St John’s gospel: ‘As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him might have eternal life’. (Jn 3:14-15) (69)

This is very clearly syncretism and a dangerous form at that, as the whole psychic, spiritualist world is severely to be left alone according to the Bible.  Whilst admitting that the powers do exist, the Bible strongly warns against their use.  King Saul was punished by death for his disobedience in these matters (1 Chron 10:13).  The Bible warns us again and again of the need to discern spirits to see where their power comes from.  Pharoah’s magicians had power similar to that of Moses, but it did not come from God.

As mentioned above, Fr Bede is full of praise for the Findhorn New Age community where mediums contact the spirits even though the Bible and the Church condemn mediumship.  But then, Fr Bede says, ‘evil is not a real being’. (70)  However, Pope Paul VI teaches, ‘Evil is not merely a lack of something, but an effective agent, a living spiritual being, perverted and perverting.  A terrible reality – mysterious and frightening’. (71)

Books on yoga usually encourage readers to develop their mediumistic and psychic powers.  But a survey in Latin America of psychologists and psychiatrists into the wisdom of developing mediumistic powers concluded in ‘virtual unanimity in seeing these practices as contributing to madness’. (72)

Fr Kloppenburg OFM, who conducted this survey, listed among the real causes of superstition, ‘the collective unconscious’ of the school of Jung.  ‘We could recognise’, Charles Darwin wrote, ‘that man carries in this physical makeup the indelible mark of the lowest origin’.  Fr Kloppenburg refers to Jung as supposing something similar for the soul:

Archaic psychology is not only the psychology of primitive peoples, but also of civilised man today; it is not only the psychology of some shock phenomena present once more in modern society, but rather that of any civilised man who, in spite of his high degree of consciousness, continues to be an archaic man at the deepest levels of his psyche.  Just as our body is still that of a mammal with a certain number of remnants of even older states analogous to cold-blooded animals, so also our soul is the product of evolution which, if we go back to its origins, always presents innumerable archaisms’. (73)

Unfortunately Fr Bede accepts both the Jungian collective unconscious and the theory of evolution.  Alasdair McIntyre points out, ‘it is worth noting that we possess no statistical evidence of a worthwhile kind about the efficacy of Jungian psychotherapy’.

Lacking this evidence we are forced to conclude that although Jung established a psychological system of some complexity, there are as yet no grounds for believing any of its propositions which go beyond recording empirical data, either as to the nature of personality or as to the process of cure. (74)  Colin Wilson maintains that Jung ‘was determined to drag in his mythic theories whether they fitted or not’.  This could explain why ‘a surprising number of Jung’s cases ... ended in failure’. (75)

Evolution

Besides Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious, another of the pillars of Fr Bede’s A New Vision of Reality is the theory of evolution.  It’s strange that Fr Bede’s books should be so enamoured with this theory which for Darwin, the materialist, hostile to religion, was an attempt to describe the origin of life as the result of mechanical laws rather than the wilful act of a Creator.  Fr Bede may be influenced by the many Hindu writers who take evolution as a scientific fact, e.g. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

In an article George Johnston points out that evolution is only a theory: ‘possibilities were promoted into probabilities and probabilities into certainties’. (77)  The Dictionnaire Encyclopedique des Sciences dismissed Darwin’s theories as ‘a fiction, a poetical accumulation of probabilities without proof, and of attractive explanations without demonstrations’.  The biologist, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, said, ‘that a theory so vague, so insufficiently verifiable, and so far from criteria otherwise applied to hard science, has become a dogma, can only be explained on sociological grounds’. (78)

Obviously Fr Bede is fascinated with the New Age science writers like Fritjof Capra, Rupert Sheldrake and Ken Wilbur, whose books, incidentally, are published by the Theosophical Press.  New Age scientists have talked of how scientific theories have become mystical realities and how this pointed up the wisdom of the ancient masters, yogis and gurus of the Far East.

Elliot Miller, Douglas Groothuis and others have done a careful analysis of New Age science.  Miller says the latter can only be adequately understood by reference to mystical experience.  It seems that ‘psycho-technologies’ (as prominent New Age writer, Marilynn Ferguson, calls them) such as meditation, yoga, drugs, biofeedback, sensory deprivation, visualisation martial arts, hypnosis etc., can lead to altered states of consciousness (ASCs) which can produce a profound mystical sense of transcendence of individuality and identification with everything.  Such experiences of undifferentiated consciousness suggest to the seeker that ultimate reality itself is undifferentiated, everything is one, and the nature of the one must be consciousness, since at the peak of the mystical state consciousness is virtually all that is experienced. (79)

R.M. Bucke, the-turn-of-the-century psychiatrist who popularised the term ‘cosmic consciousness’ to describe these states, puts it this way: ‘This consciousness shows the cosmos to consist not of dead matter governed by unconscious, rigid and unintending law; it shows that death is an absurdity, that everyone and everything has eternal life; it shows that the universe is God and that God is the universe, and that no evil does, or ever did enter into it’. (80)

This sounds like the old theory of panpsychism which states that ‘all reality, including inorganic matter, is animated and possesses a psychic nature similar to that of the human soul’. (81)

Fr Bede seems to hold this position in A New Vision of Reality when he says, ‘we are coming to grasp that the whole material world is pervaded by consciousness’ (82) and, ‘in Jesus the matter of the universe was totally conscious and became one with God, in the Godhead’. (83)

Elliot Miller says that these ‘mystical states impart a sense of absolute certainty and that after such experiences New Agers tend to think that they understand reality, while other, less enlightened souls can only believe it to be a certain way. (84)  One is reminded again of Aldous Huxley’s ‘self-validating certainty of direct awareness’.

Miller maintains that one of the strong appeals of the New Age Movement is its attempt to bridge the gap between the old scientific naturalistic worldview and the new mystical one.  It seemingly allows one to accept modern evolutionary science while still offering the comforts of religion.

Miller goes on to say, ‘It would seem that this deep-seated psychological factor has already strongly contributed to such New Age intellectual efforts such as Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics and Ken Wilbur’s Up from Eden, and their rapid widespread acceptance.  New Agers from a wide variety of disciplines and backgrounds would very much like to “matchmake” a union of science and eastern, occultic religion.  Not only would such a marriage vindicate the mystical worldview in their own minds, it would offer powerful propagandistic leverage in a culture where science speaks almost ex cathedra’. (85)  In this context one should look at Fr Bede’s Marriage of East and West.

In The Golden String Fr Bede says he thought, ‘the source of all evil to which we are opposed was to be found in the scientific mind’, (86) and his books have shown a consistent and laudable critique of ‘culture’, where science speaks almost ex cathedra.  So it is not surprising that Fr Bede, in his Foreword to A New Vision of Reality, states how much he is indebted to the New Age scientists mentioned above by Elliot Miller, namely, Ken Wilbur and Fritjof Capra.

G.S. Johnston shows convincingly that we don’t need to look to New Agers for an explanation of reality as the Biblical explanation is still coherent and convincing.  He says, ‘the book of Genesis has held up well under the scrutiny of modern geology and archaeology.  Twentieth century physics, moreover, describes the beginning of the universe in virtually the same cosmological terms as Genesis.  Roughly 18 million years ago, space, time and matter came out of nothing in a single burst of light exactly calibrated to bring forth carbon-based life.  Biologists now tell us that life had its origins from clay templates (cf Genesis 2:7), while geneticists assert that we are all descended from one woman – another embarrassment for Darwinists whose scenarios do not allow for a single progenitor so late in pre-history’. (87)

The German philosopher, Hegel, rejected Hindu systems of philosophy as no philosophy at all according to R.H. Pirsig, (88) and H. Van Straelen points out that the cosmology and theology of monism denies the principle of contradiction which states that a thing cannot be and not be at the same time.  So for Fr Bede to base his ‘New Vision of Reality’ on such shaky metaphysics is not wise.  Van Straelen points out that it is the western philosophical view of reality which is taught in Indian universities, not the Hindu non-duality of subject and object, of self and world which is central to the most important systems of Asian philosophy and religion. (89)

Robert Burrows says that the New Age vision seems to thrive in cultures where misery is perpetually rampant and corruption rife – India being a case in point.  Burrows says that the problem is human perversity not human perception, holiness not holism. (90)  Thousands of years of this vision has done nothing to alleviate distress or misery in India.

Social Realities

Fr Bede does admit this truth about Hinduism: ‘I cannot help feeling that the present situation in India, with its masses of poor, illiterate people, of people suffering from disease and being left to die in the streets really stems from this basic philosophy – all are caught in this wheel of samsara.  Your karma has brought you to this state where you are dying in the street ... If you can help somebody else ... that is good, but there is no obligation to do it, karma is working itself out’. (91)  Wayne Teasdale points out, ‘Hinduism has no Mother Teresa and while the compassion of the Buddha is laudable, it is not the same as the charity of Christ’. (92)

If, as Fr Bede maintains, Christianity is unique, and as Wayne Teasdale states he does, (The New Vision of Reality makes me wonder!), then I find it difficult to see why Hindu readings are used in Fr Bede’s liturgies.  ‘Yes, God spoke in various different ways in the past, but now in these last days he has spoken clearly and definitively through His Son (cf Heb 1:1).  More exposure to the Biblical readings would seem called for, not less, otherwise there is a danger of lapsing back and being submerged in the ‘sea of surrounding Hinduism’ as Fr Bede (93) puts it.

Fr Bede admits to the terrible poverty in India and that Gandhi’s finding God in the service of humanity is due largely to the influence of Christianity since Gandhi ‘was deeply influenced by the gospel’. (94)  Also Fr Bede says, ‘the great Vivekananda introduced social work as an integral element in the monastic life ... under the Christian influence’. (95)  So surely our Lord’s command to preach the gospel, or at least witness to it as Mother Teresa does, is imperative.  So I find it strange that Fr Bede should be opposed to this.  The gospel will always provoke controversy and be rejected by some whilst others with ‘a noble and generous heart will take the message to themselves and produce a rich harvest’ (Lk 8:16).  Fr Bede says strangely that we should ‘not preach the gospel to everybody.  One should only preach it to those who are ready for it...’ (96)  And the others?  Preach the Vedas?

In his Cosmic Revelation published in 1983, Fr Bede says that the Bhavagad Gita ‘can become a manual of spiritual guidance for the west’ (97) and that we should ‘look on the Gita as a revelation analogous to that of the Gospel’. (98)  The problem with the Gita is that it is ambivalent and one can read into it whatever one likes.  This is brought out in the Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Vol 4: ‘Since it is a religious poem, rather than a systematic exposition, the relation between the varied theological and metaphysical elements in the Gita is not always clear and consistent; this is one reason why different commentators have given it rather different interpretation.  Thus Sankara managed to interpret it in the line of his non-dualistic doctrines’, (99) and Fr Bede manages to interpret it in line with his understanding of the gospel.

Fr Bede admits, ‘the stories of Krishna, or almost any of the gods of Hinduism, are full of immoral incidents’, (100) and these stories have been interpreted in ways that have led to extreme eroticism and gross immorality.  Fr Bede talks of the work’s ‘moral ambivalence’.  I think the Indian scholar and writer Agehananda Bharati would agree.  He writes of Krishna and Arjuna slaying their way through their enemies without a qualm of remorse and their behaviour often condoned by ‘gentle Hindu scholars who would not kill a single fly or eat a single fish’. (101)

Professor Arthur Danto says that the picture of Krishna and Arjuna slaying their way ‘dispassionately across the field of conflict, as though they were cutting their way with scythes through a field of wheat ... is not a pretty picture.  It is the picture, however, of a self that has located itself beyond good and evil.  This is a dangerous space.  It has been occupied by Nietzsche’s superman and by those who thought themselves as supermen’. (102)

Fr Bede points out that Solomon too had as many concubines and wives as Krishna did, but the Bible makes it very clear that God disapproved, and punished both Solomon and his father David for their promiscuity and violence.  So I would tend to disagree with Fr Bede that the Bhavagad Gita ‘can become a manual of spiritual guidance for the west’.  I think that it should be avoided if we value our faith.  The Gita and other similar writings with their amoral attitude have helped.  I fear, to spread a terrifying antinomianism in India, as the famous American writer Tal Brooke (103) shows in his studies on some of the most renowned and vastly influential gurus ever to arise in India, e.g. Sai Baba, Muktananda and Rajneesh.  Brooke once held a privileged position in the inner circle of Sai Baba devotees, and his book on Sai Baba, Avatar of the Night, has been a bestseller in India for some years.

I fear that some of the ambivalence and ambiguity of Hinduism has begun to affect Fr Bede.  A critique of an article by Fr Bede in The Tablet (104) talks of his ‘ambiguous tone’ and ‘blurred thinking’.

And Lord Longford, in a review of A New Vision of Reality in The Catholic Herald (105) says he regrets to conclude that Fr Bede (once his best friend at school) has thrown away something essential to Christianity and doubts if Fr Bede still believes in the divinity of Christ,

How fortunate we are in having the Judaeo-Christian Revelation in the Bible – all of it inspired by God (2 Tim 3:15).  Both Old and New Testaments are ‘God’s message and not some human thinking’ (1 Thes 2:13).  Here we find no amorality, but the highest standard of ethical behaviour.  C.S. Lewis, in his beautiful book Reflections on the Psalms, describes the psalmist poring over God’s Holy Word as ‘a man ravished by a moral beauty’ (106) for the law of Revelation was beautiful compared to the awful immorality of surrounding nations.  We too need to delight in God’s word if we value our faith and the Biblical worldview as well as the Judaeo-Christian cosmology as opposed to a Gnostic oriental one.

Ninian Smart says that the canon of Hindu scriptures is ‘somewhat fluid’, (107) and Fr Bede admits that ‘words in Indian thought are fluid’, (108) and that Hindu myths are somewhat fluid. Yet he is very sure that his own interpretation of the Gita is the right one.  He says that it shows that God is a person who is love and responds to love.  But this is not what Hindus believe.  For them God is beyond personality; only those less advanced view him as a person.  The Indian guru and writer, Rajneesh, cautions that there is no relationship in or with the divine.  A relationship takes at least two people, but all is one.  He says: ‘The Divine has no self so you cannot be related to it.  A bhakti, or devotee, can never reach the divine because he thinks in terms of relationship; God the Father, God the lover, God the beloved ... he goes on thinking of God as the other!’ (109)  The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s popular Penguin Books commentary on the Gita is also clearly monistic according to Harvey Egan S.J.  Can these popular Hindu writers be wrong about their own religious traditions and the western Christian, Bede Griffiths, be right?

Harvey Egan has observed that the root of evil of his day was men’s despairing of God’s personality for he knew that love cannot survive if it is only in contact with the nameless and impersonal, and to search for an impersonal ‘diffuse immensity’ or a ‘shoreless ocean’, leads only to the eventual dissolution of personality. In Christianity, a true union of love unites and also ‘differentiates the lover and the beloved ... true love means indwelling, union with differentiation, and not merging, absorption and undifferentiated unity’. (110)

The great Indian writer, V.S. Naipaul, in his latest bestseller, India : A Million Mutinies Now, examines the current breakdown of the whole fabric of India.  Reviewer of the book in The Tablet, Philip Mason, says that this cruel and shocking social system was justified to Hindus by the belief in reincarnation ... ‘because it was so ancient and so completely interwoven with culture and religion, its crumbling is a devastating experience for almost everyone in India’. (111)

The collapse of the Marxist monolithic system in the U.S.S.R. is also devastating for its people.  Fr Bede, in his fascination with the monistic, pantheistic system which is destroying India, reminds me of those naive apologists for Soviet Marxism who even today still refuse to believe it was all a system of falsehood and untruth and was bound to fail.  It is ironic that this devastating Oriental cosmology is now being hailed enthusiastically in the west under its new guise: the New Age Movement.

An Indian writer has observed: ‘In contemporary Indian society, both Christian and Hindu, there is an excess of doctrine and devotion, but very little of social concern.  Christian charity is often a denial of human justice to the oppressed.  Nearly 80% of the social work in India is done by the Christian minority of 1.7%’. (112)  So another good reason for increasing the Christian minority by preaching the gospel and exposing it to the Biblical worldview.

When I began reading Fr Bede’s first book from India, Christian Ashram, with photographs of monks working in the fields with the people, and the essays on Gandhi, the great Vinoba and the social aspect of the gospel, I thought Fr Bede was going to address the criticism of Swami Vikrant, the Indian writer quoted above.  As Fr Bede’s books progress they seem to become more and more introspective and self-conscious and the atmosphere becomes more rarefied until we come to the most recent works which are speculations about the Cosmic Christ and his place in the Universe of Faiths, and the Christ present in the poor and oppressed is forgotten or scarcely mentioned.  One is reminded of the remark of being so heavenly minded as to be of no earthly good!

I believe the future of the Church in India lies in an unambiguous fidelity to the Biblical option for the poor.  Mother Teresa is an outstanding example, and she does not need to water down the faith to be effective.  She and her sisters wear saris as is the custom among women in Indian culture, but do not compromise with the Word of God which supersedes all other sacred writings.

In the Publisher’s Note to Fr Bede’s autobiography, The Golden String, it is stated that the great Mahatma Gandhi was very impressed by his visit to the famous Mariannhill Monastery in South Africa and wrote:

They get up at 2.30 a.m., they eat a purely vegetarian diet; they strictly observe the silence; only two or three go to the nearest market or speak to visitors ... they add a calling to their learning.  They are gardeners, carpenters, tailors, shoemakers, cooks etc.  I still live under the spell of the sweet silence of their calls.  It would be my very ideal to found such an institute, but it needs followers who would dedicate body and soul for the rest of their lives, (113)

Now Gandhi was impressed by this community which made no bones about its Christianity, nor tried to apologise for it.  But he was even more impressed with the famous Mariannhiller, Fr Bernard Huss, who was a remarkable educationalist and ecologist long before Fritz Schumacher of Small is Beautiful fame.  Huss’s educational theories made a lasting impression on Gandhi, and he confessed to Fr Huss that had he met him before he would never have made the statement about admiring Christ, but being disenchanted with his followers.

Mariannhill’s incredible record of missionary endeavour in Southern Africa, and yet uncompromising fidelity to the Bible, gives a model for future missionary work in India – and with an excellent accolade from the Mahatma!  So to be successful in our missionary work we don’t need to water down our faith, just live it like the Mariannhillers above, and show that it really works for the betterment of man, especially the poorest.  I say this because some in India have become so bewitched by the watchwords of ‘inculturation’ and ‘indianisation’ and have gone so far in this direction that they have had to be restrained by legal action of Hindus concerned at Christians using their symbols in churches. (114)

Fr Bede is in the forefront of this process, which writers refer to as a ‘Hinduisation of Catholicism’.  An examination of his understanding and application of inculturation neatly ties together his total outlook, and shows whither he is going, or indeed has already arrived.

Inculturation

Speaking of the Church’s mission in non-Christian cultures, the Nigerian Cardinal Arinze says, ‘Inculturation requires that our faith evangelises culture, culture must not alter the faith’. (115)  And Ralph Martin has rightly observed, ‘much spreading syncretism in the Church’s missionary work takes place under the rubric of cultural adaptation of the gospel to indigenous cultures’, but added, ‘uniquely western values should not be presented as essential elements of faith ...  This would be a form of cultural imperialism, and some missionaries have been guilty of it’. (118)

Fr Bede has put a lot of stress on the importance of inculturation as he believes this was the way of the early Church which expressed itself in categories derived largely from Greek philosophy’. Authors like Bernard Lonergan and Sergius Wroblewski in the Leslie Dewart Future of Belief debate, argue that there was no hellenisation of dogma of Christianity.  The liturgy of the Church, especially the central action of the Mass, is still remarkably Biblical in outlook after nearly 2000 years.  Fr Peter Stravinskas (118) shows that virtually every word in the Mass comes from the Bible.

Already in one of his early books, The Marriage of East and West, Fr Bede shows that his idea of inculturation is more than establishing points of contact by using Hindu phrases or concepts, but an actual “hinduisation” of the Church.

On making the first foundation in Kerala, India, Fr Bede and his companions adopted the  Christianity, which though it owes something to the Greek world through its centre in Antioch, remains rooted in the semitic world of the Middle East.  As Fr Bede puts it: ‘It is though it sprang from the same soil as the Bible, using the same language as was used in Palestine and expressing itself not in the metaphysical terms of Greek theology but in the rich symbolic language of the Bible’. (119)

Not long after, this rite no longer satisfied him as he found that it ‘had nothing in common’ (120) with the Far East, or with Indian and Chinese thought, though it is more oriental than accidental, and has affinities with Islam.  On moving from Kerala to another ashram in Tamil Nadu he faced the challenge of ‘genuine religious ecumenism’.  Taking over from Fathers Mochanin and Le Saux, he and two monks started a new community, now conceived as an ‘ashram’- a grouping of disciples around a teacher, or guru.  The most novel introduction was that of readings from the scriptures of different religions, as well as psalms and readings from the Bible.  ‘In the morning we read from the Granth Sahib of the Sikhs, and in the evening from the devotional poets, especially those of Tamil Nadu like the great Tamil mystic, Manikkar Vasagar’. (122)

Writing in 1988, Victor Kulanday, editor of The Laity and author of The Paganisation of the Church of India, discusses some of the forms of idol-worship that are rampant in India and observes how far Fr Bede has progressed in his process of inculturation: ‘In certain places the worship of snakes has started. It is yet not so popular.  Bede Griffiths has a figure of a snake with its hood up right in front of the altar, behind which he squats to offer his OM chanting illicit mass’. (123)

This development is the culmination of a series of liturgical changes effected since Vatican 2 in the name of ‘Indianisation of the Church’.  A 12 point revision of the liturgy submitted to the Vatican provided for inter alia, the priest officiating while sitting on the floor, the genuflection being replaced by the Anjali Haste – a form of salutation whereby the hands are joined together and lifted above the head.  Victor Kulanday (124) points out that these and other practices are not only contrary to Christianity, but are even a corruption of the Hindu religion they are supposed to represent.

A practice not included in the 12 Point Revision, and which was rejected by the Vatican, but which has nevertheless been widely adopted, is the chanting of the OM – sometimes up to 33 times during a Mass – which in Hinduism is a name synonymous with one of their gods, Krishna, besides having associations with Tantric eroticism.

In the meanwhile, quietly working away in the background, evangelising, baptising and fulfilling the Great Commission, are the Eastern Rite Catholic churches whose members are unmistakably and uncompromisingly Catholic, and yet as Indian as any other citizen.  Their churches are not museum places.  Gina Valente says, ‘The number of the faithful is continually growing and their missionary fervour is evident to all’. (125)  In the new Malabar dioceses, erected since Vatican II, in Northern and Central India, in regions where Christianity has not yet penetrated, there have been thousands of conversions.  As for vocations 70% of the missionaries in India are from the Eastern Rite churches.

The Land of no Return

In conclusion I would like to answer a question that has been put to me, and indeed a fitting one while we are on the subject, ‘Bede Griffiths Quo Vadis?’: why is it that priests (and indeed laymen too) educated and formed in Christian education and spirituality – like Fr Bede – have turned to Eastern religions, and entered what seems, to a land of no return?  How do we know we will not end up going the same way?

Perhaps a look at some Biblical theology will shed some light here.  When we are converted to Jesus, the Holy Spirit begins to work radically in our lives, according to the New Testament.  It states that we are no longer to conform to the pattern of this world, but be completely transformed by the renewing of our minds (Rom 12:1-2).  This is the only way to know God’s will or plan for our lives, and to avoid sin as the Greek word hamartia means ‘to miss the mark’ set by God.  When we are in sin we are estranged from God, our loving Father, and our minds are alienated from Him (cf Col 1:21f).

We are exhorted to be made new in mind and spirit and put on the new nature (cf Eph 4:23).  We are not to behave in the way that we liked to before we learnt the truth (1 Pet 1:14), but see things from God’s point of view (Col 1:9) and make every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Cor 10:5).  So, if we live our whole lives according to Christ (Col 2:6) until Christ’s nature is formed in us (Gal 4:19) we become a new being (2 Cor 5:17), and this ‘new being’ personifies a heart and intelligence that are different – in eating and drinking, waking and sleeping, in living and dying.  It is a mental revolution.  In fact our Biblical faith is so demanding that St Paul can say that ‘everything that does not come from faith is sin’ (cf Rom 14:23).  But if this seems too difficult we need to remember that God ‘keeps him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Him’ (cf Is 26:3).

The question, however, remains: why then do priests and religious, or laymen for that matter who presumably have undergone this transformation, and have all the resources for growth at their disposal still get attracted to eastern religion?

Yes indeed, these people may have access to daily Mass, the Divine Office, community prayer, Bible study, retreats etc., yet for some inexplicable reason they begin to neglect these resources and allow their minds to be formed by material other than the Word of God and our Catholic tradition of spirituality.  Maybe they forget the text from the Bible: ‘we ought then to turn our minds more attentively than before to what we have been taught so that we do not drift away’ (Heb 2:1)

Underlining the vital importance of Scripture, St Jerome said: ‘Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ’.  So if we remain faithful to getting to know Christ and putting on the mind of Christ by meditating frequently on Scripture, something really wonderful begins to happen; something attested to by countless Christians down the centuries who have undergone the wonderful experience of conversion.  But, as the ancient hymn puts it: ‘None can understand the grace, until He becomes the place wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling’:  One of the wonderful things that happens – one that basically distinguishes the Christian from the New Ager – is that the mind, given over to daily meditation on the Bible begins to see the whole cosmos as a forest of symbols pointing beyond themselves to Christ, ‘For in Him were created all things in heaven and on earth’ (Col 1:15).  G.M. Hopkins said ‘all things are charged with love are charged with God ... and flow and ring and tell of Him’.

There is a revelation of God in nature.  The Psalmist knew it: ‘The heavens declare the glory of God’ (Ps 19:1); the author of the song of the three young men in Daniel, chapter 3, shouted it!  St Paul knew it: ‘Ever since the creation of the world His invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity has clearly been perceived in the things that have been made (Rom 1:2).  An early Father of the Church, Pope St Leo, knew it: ‘the wonderful beauty of these inferior elements of nature demand that we intelligent beings should give thanks to God’.  St Francis knew it: ‘He beheld in fair things Him who is most fair’.  The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning knew it: ‘Earth’s crammed with heaven and every common bush aflame with God’.  G.M. Hopkins knew it: ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’.  The Irish poet, J.M. Plunkett, knew it: ‘I see His blood upon the rose and in the stars the glory of His eyes’.  The Franciscan musician, John Michael Talbot, knows this and exults in this in every one of his best-selling albums.

In fact, every converted Christian who has died to sin and lives only for God knows it, as a cursory look at any Christian hymnbook ever compiled shows – almost an intoxication and reverence for the beauties of creation as symbols pointing beyond themselves to God – every sunrise and sunset, spring and winter day and night ‘ring out and tell of him’.  Truly in all things God works for good with those who love Him and are called according to his plan.

But today many people are estranged from Christ and his word and complain that Christianity has no time for creation and so leave to join the New Age Movement which at root shares two variations of the oriental worldview: The one, that all creation is merely maya, or illusion and therefore must be escaped from into nothingness or nirvana.  The other that God and creation are equal and one, and that nature and material things are therefore divine in themselves.

The Biblical worldview sees the world as real, good and destined to be transfigured in the new heavens and new earth (cf Rev 21:`1), not destroyed.  It also, however, recognises a clear distinction between the Creator and his creature.  Writing about the nature worshippers of his time the author of the Book of Wisdom observes:

People were so delighted with the beauty of these things that they thought they must be gods, but they should have realised that these things have a master and that he is much greater than all of them, for he is the creator of beauty, and he created them.  Since people are amazed at the power of these things, and how they behave they ought to learn from them that their creator is more powerful.  When we realise how vast and beautiful the creation is, we are learning about the creator at the same time (Wis 13:3-5. Good News Bible).

And yet when all is said and done, the revelation of God through nature is of secondary importance.  Something far more earth-shattering happened at Sinai: God spoke to Moses as a friend.  This unique revelation which we find in the Bible reveals the very mind of God to us.  That God became man, lived among us, pointed out the extraordinary beauty of the flowers of the field (Mt 6:30) but found in man created in God’s image and likeness the supreme value, and revealed to us that our eternal destiny is to be decided on how we have responded, not to the beauty of creation but to the poor, hungry and naked and imprisoned (Mt 25) – all the inconvenient dirty, smelly and repellent individuals that Jesus sought out and searched for with his compassionate shepherd’s heart, and which we with or preoccupation with fastidiousness often reject!  Aesthetic values were the very last thing in Christ’s hierarchy of values.

Harry Blamires (126) criticises those who do not strive to transform their minds, as stated above, for rejecting the religious view of life, the view which sets all earthly values within the context of the eternal, the view which relates all human problems – social, political, cultural – to the doctrinal foundations of the Christian faith’; the view which sees all things here below in terms of God’s supremacy and earth’s transitoriness in terms of heaven and hell.

St Paul says that as ‘new beings we received grace to call people from among all the gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith’ (Rom 1:5-6).  In St Paul’s language faith is almost coterminous with obedience to the Word; ‘and faith comes from hearing and obeying the Word of God and the Holy Spirit is God’s gift to those who obey him’ (Acts 5:22).

But if we substitute the unique Bible for the Bhagavad Gita which Fr Bede says we should look on as “a revelation analogous to that of the gospel” (127) then our faith is in danger.  We begin to follow another drummer, another worldview, another set of beliefs which Fr Bede admits are full of ‘immoral incidents’ and which have led to ‘extreme eroticism’.

Both the Bible and our Catholic tradition warn of syncretism as being a danger to the faith based on Christ’s unique Revelation.  So to repeat: if we priests, religious. or laity, allow our minds to be formed by material other than the Word of God and our Catholic tradition of spirituality there is always a danger of losing our faith and following another drummer – not Christ.

If we Christians are not a listening people, constantly alert to his call, we will not be a people any more.  The Hebrew word for ‘to hear’ = shamah, is also the word to obey or to answer.  What makes us the people of God is first and foremost openness towards God, time spent in hearing what the voice of the Lord is saying to us through his word, and this word demands holiness (Heb 12:14), which means belonging to God, being taken up into the reality of God’s life, sharing divine life and love.  It means being immersed in the mystery of God who is other.  Holiness means seeing life and the world from God’s point of view, and living a lifestyle that flows from that point of view and to be immersed in God’s point of view requires listening to God.

If we don’t make an effort to fill our minds with what is good, true, holy, pure and lovable (Phil 4:8) it will be filled for us as the ‘environment evangelises’, and the current environment fits between empty secularism and New Age spirituality to fill the awful vacuum, which is an obnoxious mixture of orientalism and occultism.

A few years ago I read of an ex TM teacher who returned to the faith.  He said we can so easily lose our faith: ‘It starts with Catholicism and a bit of TM.  Then successively TM becomes a part, eventually a major part, and finally totally displaces Catholicism’.  In my own experience I have seen people going into Zen, Yoga, or any of the New Age philosophies based on the oriental worldview – they soon cross into the land of no return.

The Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, was one.  He died for all intents and purposes as a Buddhist.  Is Bede Griffiths another – has he not to all intents and purposes become a Hindu?

For Further Reading:

Sine-Glossa.blogspot.com

on Hinduism; Centering “Prayer”; Desire for God (and mantra prayer).

Jung, C. G.;
Teilhard de Chardin.
Israel and the New Age.

References

1.             Bede Griffiths, Christian Ashram, p. 105

2.             Ibid

3.             William Johnston, Christian Zen, p. 101

4.             Bede Griffiths, The Golden String, p. 108

5.             Bede Griffiths, Christian Ashram, p. 17

6.             William Johnston, The Inner Eye of Love, p.63

7.             Louis Bouyer, Introduction to Spirituality, p. 18

8.             Aldous Huxley, Perennial Phylosophy, p.5

9.             William Oddie, Feminism and the Reconstruction of Christian Belief

10.          William Johnston, The Inner Eye of Love, p. 63

11.          Anon, The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 34

12.          Archimandrite Sophrony, His Life is Mine, p. 10

13.          Harvey Egan, Çhristian Apophatic and Kataphatic Mysticisms’,

                Theological Studies 39, p.407

14.          Ibid

15.          C. Naranjo ad R. Ornstein, On the Psychology of Meditation, p. 166

16.          David Haddon, Transcendental Meditation, p.111

17.          Ibid

18.          William Oddie, Feminism and the Reconstruction of Christian Belief, p.

19.          Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, On the Bhagavad Gita, p.226

20.          A. Bharati, The Light at the Center, p.75

21.          Mircea Eliade, Patanyali and Yoga, p. 76

22.          Cf Finbarr Flanagan, ‘Reflections on Moody’s Life After Life,

                Clergy Review, p.404, November 1981

23.          Colin Wilson, The Occult, p. 2

24.          Bede Griffiths, Return to the Centre, p. 18

25.          Bede Griffiths, River of Compassion, p.269

26.          Stanislav Grof, The Human Encounter with Death, p.153

27.          Edmund Robillard, Reincarnation: Illusion or Reality, p.20

28.          Ibid

29.          Douglas Groothuis, New Age Movement, p. 14

30.          Bede Griffiths, Christian Ashram, p.205

31.          John Ruysbroeck, Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, p. 155f

32.          Hans Urs von Balthasar, ‘On Unceasing Prayer’, Communio,

                Summer 1977

33.          Douglas Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age, p. 60

34.          Barbara Brown, New Mind, New Body

35.          Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point, p. 87

36.          Karen Hoyt, The New Age Rage, p. 82

37.          Ian Wilson, Mind out of Time, p.116

38.          Ibisd

39.          ‘Student Brings Terror to Party’, Natal Mercury, 31 July 1987

40.          Andrew Miles, Reincarnation

41.          Ian Wilson, Mind out of Time, p. 116

42.          Alan Schreck, ‘Reincarnation All Over Again’ New Covenant, May 1990

43.          Bede Griffiths, Christian Ashram, p. 105

44.          Ibid, p. 130

45.          Bede Griffiths, A New Vision of Reality, p. 287

46.          Bede Griffiths, The Golden String, p. 176

47.          Lumen Gentium, (14)

48.          Decree on Ecumenism (3)

49.          Bede Griffiths, A New Vision of Reality, p. 38

50.          Christopher Noble, Catholic Evangelization Trainer’s Program, p. 35

51.          Evangelii Nuntiandi (53)

52.          Lucia Brunelli, ‘Beware of the Abyss’, 30 Days, Feb. 1990, p. 72

53.          R.B. Maharaj, quoted in Robillard, Reincarnation, p. 20

54.          Bede Griffiths, A New Vision of Reality, p. 48

55.          Bede Griffiths, River of Compassion, p. 236

56.          Ibid

57.          Eileen Campbell and J.H. Brennan, Aquarian Guide to the New Age

58.          Bede Griffiths, A New Vision of Reality, p. 38

59.          Ibid

60.          Ibid

61.          Ibid

62.          Ibid

63.          Bede Griffiths, Return to the Centre, p. 55

64.          Ibid, p. 64

65.          Mircea Eliade, Patanyali and Yoga, p. 4

66.          Bede Griffiths, The Cosmic Revelation, p. 124

67.          Hannah Tillich, From Time to Time, pp. 103, 241

68.          Bede Griffiths, A New Vision of Reality

69.          Bede Griffiths, The Universal Christ, p. 26

70.          Bede Griffiths, River of Compassion, p.214

71.          Pope Paul VI, General Audience, Nov. 15, 1972

72.          B. Kloppenburg, Pastoral Practice and the Paranormal, p. 56

73.          Ibid, p. 83

74.          Paul Edwards (Ed), Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, p. 286

75.          Colin Wilson, Lord of the Underworld, p. 131

76.          Cf. Finbarr Flanagan, ‘Transcendental Meditation’, Doctrine and Life,

                July, 1979, p.343

77.          G.S. Johnston, ‘The Genesis Controversy’, Crisis, May 1989, p. 14

78.          Ibid, p. 17

79.          E. Miller, A Crash Course in the New Age Movement, p. 36

80.          Ibid

81.          New Catholic Encyclopaedia X. 746

82.          Bede Griffiths, A New Vision of Reality, p. 235

83.          Ibid, p. 168

84.          E. Miller, A Crash Course in the New Age Movement, p. 37

85.          Ibid, p. 38

86.          Bede Griffiths, The Golden String, p. 38

87.          G.S. Johnston, ‘The Genesis Controversy’, Crisis, May 1989, p. 38

88.          R.H. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, p. 253 cf 137

89.          H. Van Straelen, The Catholic Encounter with World Religions, p. 37f

90.          Robert Burrows, Christianity Today, May 16, p. 19

91.          Bede Griffiths, Cosmic Revelation, p. 118

92.          Wane Teasdale, ‘Bede Griffiths and the Uniqueness of Christianity’,

                Communio, Vol 11 No. 2, p. 184

93.          Bede Griffiths, Christian Ashram, p. 106

94.          Ibid, p. 126

95.          Ibid, p. 17

96.          Bede Griffiths, River of Compassion, p. 322

97.          Bede Griffiths, Cosmic Revelation, p. 92

98.          Bede Griffiths, River of Compassion, p. 322

99.          Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, p. 2

100.        Bede Griffiths, Cosmic Revelation, p. 116

101.        A. Bharati, The Light at the Center

102.        A.C. Danto, Mysticism and Morality, p. 98f

103.        Tal Brooke, Riders of the Cosmic Circuit

104.        Gavin Dorey, ‘The M-Word’, The Tablet, 1 September 1990

105.        Frank Longford, ‘Spiritual man of the East’, The Catholic Herald,

                24 November 1989

106.        C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms

107.        Bede Griffiths, Cosmic Revelation, p. 104

108.        Ibid, p. 115

109.        Douglas Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age, p. 143

110.        Harvey Egan, Theological Studies 39, 1978, p. 401

111.        The Tablet, 20 October 1990, p. 1341

112.        Swami Vikrant, Indian Missiological Review, July 1985, p.301

113.        Bede Griffiths, The Golden String, Publisher’s Note.

114.        Victor Kulanday, The Paganisation of the Church in India, p. 150

115.        Cardinal Arinze, ‘Religious Plurality and the Role of Theologians’

116.        Ralph Martin, A Crisis of Truth, p. 60-61

117.        Bernard Lonergan, America, 17 December 1966

118.        Peter Stravinskas, The Bible and the Mass

119.        Bede Griffiths, The Marriage of East and West, p. 21

120.        Ibid, p. 22

121.        Ibid, p. 23

122.        Ibid, p. 24

123.        Victor Kulanday, The Paganisation of the Church in India, p. 151

124.        Ibid, p. 168

125.        Gina Valente, ‘The Restless Sons of St Thomas’, in 30 Days,

                September 1990, p. 24f

126.        Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind

127.        Bede Griffiths, River of Compassion, p. 322

 

               

  

                               

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