CHAPTER ONE
BEDE GRIFFITHS:
A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION
This work is an effort to understand inter-religious dialogue
as practiced by Bede
Griffiths from the perspective of his specific advaitic
vision. A study of the historical and intellectual background of Griffiths can
enrich our understanding
of his gradual movement to
a non-dualistic appraisal of various religious traditions
. Moreover, since he himself
is more of an experiential mystic than a speculative theologian, his own
mystical insights would not at all be understandable to us without grasping the
actual and tedious path he travelled to arrive at them. So we proceed in this
first chapter to a brief biographical outline of what influenced him in his
personal life and religious experiences
. We give special attention
only to those details that would deepen the insights of our later reflections.
As more detailed biographies of Griffiths are already available30 it
is not our intention to give a vivid biography of Griffiths here, but only to
situate the advaitic insights and his understanding of religious
pluralism in his own Lebenswelt
.31
His way of life was his path of theologizing and that of his mystical
experience
s and insights. So our life
sketch of Griffiths is brief, selective and even at times abrupt.
We have further tried to subdivide his life journey into three major
parts, as indicated by Trapnell
.32 The first part
would correspond to his initial search for God in nature and in the community
and ends by his discovery of the Catholic Church
(1931). This part is vital
for us, since it enables us to examine the various earlier influences on his
life and therefore is elaborated more than the other parts. This phase is
described in his first autobiography, The Golden Strings.
It is followed by the second
phase, that is, by his joining the Benedictine
Order and living as a monk.
His journey to India
and his life in the
Kuri_umala
__ram33 also
become part of this phase, when he had the initial contacts, some of which are
quite deep, with Indian
culture
and religiosity. This would
be the second phase of his life as we understand it (1968) and would be found
mainly in his second autobiography, that is, Marriage of East and West.
The
third phase, where his insights deepened and matured, begins with his becoming
fully an Indian sanny_si
and
living as an integral member of Saccid_nanda
__ram
in __ntivanam and will last till his death in 1993. It is at this
stage that we find in him well developed and integrated views on advaita
and
on religious pluralism.
FIRST PHASE (-1931): A CATHOLIC IN THE ROMAN CHURCH
Alan Richard was the youngest of the four children of the Griffiths'
family, a typical middle-class family, at Walton-on-Thames
, in England
. He was born on 17 December
1906. After the preparatory school near New Milton
, he was sent to Christ's
Hospital, which functioned as a grammar school and was intended primarily for
the "relief of the poor,"34 recognizing no class
distinctions.
Initial Encounters and Literary Influences
From his early childhood onwards, he was encouraged to think and read for
himself. His first initiation to literature was to the romantic poets Wordsworth
, Shelley and Keats. Further,
he devoured with passionate enthusiasm the complete works of Jane Austen, George
Meredith, Henry Fielding, Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy. He busied himself in
Shakespeare
's dramas and in Milton
's Paradise Lost and
admits that there was more enthusiasm than discrimination in the selection and
absorption of the readings.
Moreover, his reading of Hardy's novels and his regular walks in the
country-side gave him not only an appreciation of the English countryside but
also "a sense of the intertwining of human destiny with the life of
nature."35 He found the rhythm of nature in the rhythm of the
life of the villagers.
He further traced the development of thought from Shakespeare
's early comedies and
histories through the critical period of Troilus and Cressida
and Measure for Measure and then to the tragedies. The
tragedies, culminating in King Lear, imparted to him some profound
insights into human life, or into "the criticism of life,"36 quoting
Matthew Arnold's
telling phrase. This view was
further corroborated by the reading of the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus
and Sophocles
. Again he says that Giovanni
Papini's
Story of Christ
and Leo Tolstoy
's Kingdom of Heaven
filled him with a deep devotion to the Sermon on the Mount
, which for him became the
ideal of conduct. In this time George Bernard Shaw
, along with Ibsen and
Galsworthy, contributed much to a rigorous criticism against the whole
social order of the days. Though Shaw's skeptical attitude towards Christianity
had made a profound
impression on him, he was much more influenced by Shaw's mentor, Samuel Butler's
critique of Christianity. So
his readings and reflections of this time led him to a deeply skeptical
and critical view of Christianity and to a strong prejudice against every
"dogma" and institution. His socialist views and political idealism
were understandable from this background. Thus, he did not believe in any
authority beyond that of his own reason.
Though he was opposed to an absolute morality, that is "any
conception of an absolute moral law, which we were required to obey,"37
he had his own code of behavior, based on general conventions or on a
poetic admiration of reality
. But he had no notion of sin
or of moral law. His favorite poet at this time was Swinburne
. But Shelley, who had the
rhythm of Swinburne and who had his own kind of "pagan" religion,
influenced him far more seriously.38
It is in the context of these influences that he experienced
a mystical exaltation
in the presence
of nature during his last
term at school in 1925. One day during an evening walk he had a tremendous
experience which would remain with him all through his life. This was a crucial
experience for him; to which he would constantly return and which would in turn
shape his whole life. During that experience of deeper encounter
with nature, he came upon
some hawthorn trees in full bloom and he felt that "I had never seen such a
sight or experienced such a sweetness before."39 And he
continues describing this experience: "I remember now the feeling of
awe which came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had
been standing in the presence of an angel
; and I hardly dared to look
on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the
face of God."40
Here of course he had experienced
deeply, with Wordsworth
the closeness and glory of
nature
as he quotes elsewhere in his
biography:41
For I have learned
To look on nature not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence
which disturbs me with the
joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things all objects of all thoughts,
And rolls through all things.
Experiments in Common Life
After finishing schooling, he was awarded a scholarship and went to
Oxford
in October 1925 and joined
Magdalen Col
lege. He had to live as
cheaply as possible, although his mother helped him financially whenever it was
needed.
After his initial participation in political action, during a miners'
strike, he was soon fed up even with his cherished socialistic ideals. "My
faith in socialism and any form
of political action soon
declined as I began to question the whole character of our civilization
."42 It was
not the poverty of the industrial workers which troubled him then, but the sense
that human life was being impoverished and degraded by being deprived of that
beauty which belongs to it by right.43 This led him to question the
whole of Western civilization,44 seeing the inevitable similarities
to the Roman civilization just before its fall. This was made easier by the fact
that Spengler's Decline of the West
was
enjoying much publicity at that time. Further, T. S. Eliot's Wasteland
and Hollow Men brought to him an awareness of the disease of the
great Western civilization. And James Joyce's
Ulysees, read
surreptitiously, instilled in him a sense of impending doom.
Soon after finishing the classical Honor Moderation, he went on to pursue
literary works in English. He thought it would bring him nearer to the
truth
for which he was frantically
searching. He was consistently crusading against the ideas of Dryden
, Pope and against the general
attitudes of the Age of Reason. He was lucky to have
as his tutor C.S. Lewis, who
became both his guide and friend. His readings made him seek a state of ecstasy
like that of Keats. Even here he was seeking a deepening of his earlier
experience
with nature. So he says:
"[M]y experience at school in the presence
of nature seemed to be the
one real thing in my life to which I constantly returned and I thought that
poetic imagination
was the one means by which
one could make contact with reality
."45
Sense of the Divine Presence
.
Along with two friends, Martyn Skinner
and Hugh Waterman
, he went out whenever he
could into the surrounding country.46 In order to find
communion with nature they went on a motor tour starting from Cambridge up to
the Lake District of Wordsworth. He tells of one such experience
there:
We felt that here among the hills we could find that communion with
nature in which the source
of all beauty
was to be found. . . . I went
once alone among the hills when a mist began to gather and I felt myself alone
in that mysterious solitude as though I had been at the bottom of the sea, cut
off from all the haunts of men; and once again the sense of that Presence
which I had experienced
at school took possession of
me. But such experiences were never more than transitory.47
Again, he describes a camping experience
on the West Coast of Ireland
, a few yards from the
Atlantic ocean. He recalls with fond memories:48
We would generally go out alone each day and find some place where we
could sit still in solitude, and read or write or just meditate. Some of us were
interested in Celtic lore and mythology, but for the most part it was just the
presence
of wild nature which we
sought and the sense of being alone between the hills and the sky and the sea.
It would be difficult to define what we were seeking but I think that in an
obscure way without knowing it we were seeking God.
These experiences
enabled him to act and think
in terms of Keats' later Hyperion
and
prompted him to go beyond the beauty of the senses and emotions in
order to discover the beauty which comes from suffering. This was certainly a
crucial step for him in his journey to mature religious commitment.
Further, the last plays of Shakespeare
, Cymbeline, The
Winter's Tale and The Tempest helped him to
pass through the storms of tragedy
to reach a new vision of life
beyond. He also enjoyed the last "Quartets" of Beethoven
and passed from the human
emotions into a world where "pain and joy were reconciled." These were
the important sources
of inspiration
for him. He expresses his own
convictions on the meaning of life thus:49
To feel all the forces of evil, to let it sweep over one and enter into
the very depths of one's being and to conquer it by not resisting it, this
seemed to us the height of perfection and this is what we felt had been realized
in the depth of Christ. We did not believe in the resurrection
. Christ's death had given
meaning to life just as Shakespeare
and Beethoven
had given new meaning to
life. Keat's idea of `dying into life
' as the expression
of that mystery
underlies all great poetry
and all great art, but we
were far from realizing its implication in our own lives.
Moreover, at that time he was convinced that "Religion without
imagination and morality without love were the two great sources
of evil
in human life and in our own
civilization
in particular."50
During that time, he reports that another friend, Hugh l'Anson Fausset
was writing a series of critical books on Keats, Shelly, Wordsworth and
Coleridge
, and subjecting the whole of
Romanticism "to a far deeper criticism than I was able to do."51 He
was actually analyzing the split in the modern mind which took place at the
Renaissance
and which reached its
culmination in Tolstoy
and Dostoyevsky. His
analysis, together with his reading of D. H. Lawrence's Fantasia of
the Unconscious
,
made him realize the causes of the disease of modern civilization
. He recognized that all
through his life he had been repressing his conscious mind and unconscious
instincts, and Lawrence taught him "the power of sex
as one of the poles of our
being which can only be suppressed at the risk of destruction."52 He
realized that sex
is essentially holy and
sacred. The evil of immorality is the profanation of something sacred, also true
in the case of sex.
There was also the visible growth of technology and science. With all our
progress in science and reason, our morality lost its sense of the sacred, and
so our works became ugly and our mind sterile.53
C.S. Lewis and the Philosophical Influence
. At
the prompting of C. S. Lewis
, Griffiths began to be fully
immersed in philosophy
. "I kept up a constant
correspondence with him and it was through him that my mind was gradually
brought back to Christianity
."54 Both of
them were excited by William Law's
Serious Call
and
Samuel Butler's
Analogy of Reason
.
"An unseen hand seemed to be leading us both to the same goal. Our ways
were to part in the end, but I owe to this friendship more than I can say, and
no differences which later arose between us were able to disturb it. We had
learnt to recognize the value of what we held in common and neither of us could
ever forget the miracle of grace which changed us from pagans into
Christians."55
Inspired by Lewis
, Bede Griffiths began his
philosophical
venture with Descartes' Meditations
and Discourse on Method
. He
went on to read Spinoza
, a philosopher "after my
own heart." Further, Marcus Aurelius
engaged him. He attempted to
follow also Thomas Browne
and Dryden
, Swift
and Defoe
. Berkeley's Principles
of Human Understanding was impressive. He had a certain
respect for Berkeley, since he was a bishop and it gave him a sense of being a
bit orthodox. He writes, "I saw quite clearly that it was absolutely
impossible to conceive of things existing without a mind to know them,
that things were essentially ideas, ideas not of our minds but of that
universal mind or spirit of the universe."56 A new light had
indeed dawned on him.
So, he could assert even beyond Spinoza
, that "God was mind, a
pure Spirit
." He further recognized
that the "eternal Spirit" of Berkeley was "one with that presence
which I had experienced
in nature and now for the
first time I perceived that it might have some relation with the God of
Christian orthodoxy. This was a momentous event in my life."57 Further,
he asserts, "I knew that Berkeley had a mind immeasurably superior to that
of Shaw or Samuel Butler or anyone whose opinion I had accepted in the past, and
I conceived a new respect for orthodoxy."58
He also studied briefly Hobbes, Locke and Hume and then made a serious
effort to read Kant
's Critique of Pure
Reason
. He
comments:59 "I do not think that I ever accepted his view that
our knowledge [at the phenomenal or at the noumenal level]
depends on the structure of our own minds and tells us nothing of reality
as it is." In
this he was helped by Coleridge
, who was recommended by Lewis
. Coleridge, being a poet and
philosopher, answered his problem by reconciling reason and imagination.
"In all my readings I was seeking, perhaps half consciously, to find
rational evidence for the existence of that which I had experienced
in the presence
of nature at school and at
Oxford
. But more and more I was
becoming aware of the limitations of my own experience."60
Even at this time of philosophical
search, the Beatitudes of the
Gospels had an immense attraction for him. He could sense there a kind of
"imaginative
idealism" which made it
impossible to look on philosophy
merely as an academic
exercise and it had on him a profound personal impact.
From Augustine
to Aquinas
and Others.
Two other books which influenced him profoundly were the Confessions
of
St. Augustine
and the Divine Comedy
of
Dante
. C.S. Lewis
had advised him to read them
in the original. Taking it as a challenge, he learnt Latin and Italian to
read and devour them. It was well worth the labor.
By means of the Confessions
,61
the sense of contact with a mind which was consumed with an ardor for
truth
penetrated into the depths of
his own soul. It was much more than the vague emotionalism of Swinburne
. It was truly a passion of
religious love of an intensity he had never known before. So Griffiths quotes
with deep respect Augustine
's prayer, which had made a
profound impression on him:62
O thou supreme, most powerful, most merciful, most just, most secret,
most present, most beautiful, most mighty; most constant, and incomprehensible,
immutable and yet changing all things; never new and never old, yet renewing all
things, and drawing such as are proud into decay though they know it not. Ever
in action and ever quiet; heaping up yet needing nothing, upholding, filling and
protecting, creating, nourishing and perfecting all things.
Further, St. Augustine
's interpretation
of the Bible revealed to him
a depth of meaning which had never occurred to him personally. It was actually
from Augustine that he first heard of the Catholic Church
. So it was clear for him that
"St. Augustine took his place in my mind along with Marcus Aurelius
and Spinoza,
and I felt no more called on
to be a Christian than to be a Jew or an ancient Roman."63
It was in this spirit that he began to read Dante
. Since he had learnt Italian
to read it in the original, he could perceive it "in pure sound" and
he adds: "I suppose no lovelier language than the Italian of Dante has ever
been known."64 In Dante he found a criticism of life on a level
deeper than that of Shakespeare
. Shakespeare's heroes,
Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth
, Anthony and Cleopatra
, Romeo and Juliet
are all in their own ways the
slaves of passion, and the tragedy
of this surrender to passion
had seemed to touch the deepest level of human experience
. But Dante showed him that in
the victory over passion there is something greater than tragedy. Neither by
surrender to passion, nor by suppression of it, but by its transformation was
the victory of love and life to be won. In Dante's love of Beatrice
, he could see the first
passion of romantic love to its final transfiguration in the love of God in
Paradise. So for Griffiths the mind of Dante was greater than that of
Shakespeare and Milton
.
At the same time, he began to discover the painting of Giotto
and saw in him a power of
imagination
greater than that of
Botticelli
and Michelangelo
. A neighbor and painter
Stanley Spencer,
made him realize Giotto's
greatness and also the music of Bach
. He could not help seeing
behind Bach, no less than behind Dante
and Giotto, a massive power
of religion which did not cramp the natural powers of human beings, but
developed them to their highest point.
It was in this period that he began to realize the inner meaning of
Gothic architecture
. He saw behind all this the
power of a vast intelligence and a whole philosophy
of life. Till then he had
never heard of Thomas Aquinas
. Lewis
told him that one of his
friends had begun to read Dante
and then later went on to
study Aquinas. "I saw his [Aquinas'] shadow cast on the poetry
of Dante
and I recognized in the
ordered structure of Dante's thought and the compre
hensiveness
of his vision
something of the
grandeur and immensity of a great cathedral. I had still only a very imperfect
conception of its real significance."65
He describes the immense effect of these ideas on him:66
My mind was moving now towards the thirteenth century as the supreme
period of European art and philosophy
, and already I began to see
the Renaissance
as the initial stage in that
decline of culture
and spread of
"civilization
" of which we are
witnessing the last stages at the present day. . . . [T]he actual process of
thought has left such an impression on my mind that even after all these years I
seem to live through it all again as I attempt to recall it. The effort of
thought was so intense, the desire for a new life which I experienced
was so fervent, the light
which I received penetrated so deeply into my mind, that the marks of it remain
in my soul like the grain in a tree, and I still feel it as part of a living
process of thought which has never ceased.
Three other books of a totally different nature also entered into his
current thought of this time. They were the Bhagavad G_t_
,
Buddha
's Way of Virtue
and The Sayings of Lao Tzu
in
the Wisdom
of the East series.67 He
was introduced to these by a theosophist. About the influence these books had on
him, he writes:68
The influence of these books upon my life was later to be immense, and I
still look on them as the three greatest books of spiritual wisdom outside the
New Testament
. I still possess the three
little books with the markings in them which I made when I first read them. They
were to act as a secret ferment in my soul and to color my thought almost
without knowing it. After lying quiescent for many years, they again came back
to me through a series of unexpected encounters and led on to a deeper study of
the three great spiritual traditions
for which they stand.
From April 1930 Alan with his two friends were experimenting with a simple form