Bede Griffiths

Originally Teasdale's 1985 doctoral dissertation published two years later in India, this introduction to the work and thought of Fr. Bede Griffiths has been reissued in the United States with minimal editing but with an epilogue, newly detailed notes and an expanded bibliography. A student and personal friend of Bede, Teasdale includes in these additions insight from taped conversations and lectures as well as other sources dating from 1985 to Bede's death in 1993. The author offers the current publication as his contribution toward a greater understanding of the English Benedictine and the growing movement of interspirituality, "the activity and process of exploring other traditions in more than an academic sense." As a slightly revised dissertation, this volume does not offer casual reading. But it does present a rewarding introduction to, and perhaps summary of, Bede Griffiths' quest to discover intersections of Hindu and Christian theology and spirituality so as to create an authentic Indian Christianity.

After Bede's 1986 foreword and his own preface, Teasdale divides the book into two major parts: historical context, including Bede's "method" of mystical or contemplative theology, and theological scheme, focusing on the central issue of parallels between Saccidananda and Trinity. This second section also includes Bede's interspiritual insights on Christology, "monkhood" in both religious traditions, and the future of the Church, as well as the author's original conclusions and several implications of Bede's interspirituality. Teasdale concludes the book with an epilogue, a brief glossary of Hindu terms and a seventeen-page bibliography of works by and about Bede Griffiths, who was also known as Dayananda, "Bliss or Joy of Compassion." Readers unfamiliar with Hinduism will find themselves consulting the glossary often, and serious students of Hindu/Christian interspirituality will delight in searching the rich collection of articles, books and theses.

Teasdale places the English monk in a movement begun in the seventeenth century, with particular attention to the work of two of his more immediate predecessors, Jules Monchanin and Henri le Saux (Abhishiktananda). These men were, in turn, taking up a task articulated by theologian Henri de Lubac: "rethinking everything" in light of theology and rethinking theology in light of mysticism. Bede made this work his lifelong effort, seeking a new synthesis of Eastern and Western mysticism and Christian faith. The author emphasizes that Bede's way of knowing included comparative study and reflection but functioned most fundamentally in symbolic and intuitive modes, grounded in contemplative experience.

According to Teasdale, Bede's interspirituality cannot be dismissed as mere syncretism. What the monk envisioned as a convergence of Hindu and Christian doctrine and practice presupposes a unity behind religious and cultural experience, that unity being Ultimate Reality. Hindu and Christian alike experience and therefore understand the Divine as at once transcendent and immanent, known both in the cosmos and in the "cave of the heart." What is experienced in contemplation is One Truth, but this experience finds expression in various symbolic modes in different religions.

In Bede's interspiritual thought, both Christian monasticism and its Hindu counterpart (sannyasa) seek, through ascetical and contemplative life, the experience of non-duality (advaita), unity of the self with Ultimate Reality. Differing symbols for this single Reality are Saccidananda and Trinity, and it is here that Bede identifies the central point of convergence and possibility of a true meeting between Hindu and Christian. The author judges Bede more cautious and prudent than his predecessor Abhishiktananda, who saw an identity of Saccidananda and Trinity. Bede, on the other hand, advocated "theological adaptation and appropriation