Intuitive Wisdom - Part 1

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Intuitive Wisdom[3] - Part 1

 

(p.36) [bruno Barnhart]: Bede's 'golden string' of wisdom had begun with an

experience which opened both the world around him and the world within him to a

new magnitude, depth and luminosity. The experience would be interpreted against

the background of a growing aversion to the culture of the modern West, which he

saw dominated by the cold rationality of empirical science. In opposition to

this merely 'logical' mind, Bede begins to develop a theory of intuition. This

is a knowing through contact, through participation, through union. Its organ is

not merely the brain but the whole person: body, mind, soul, spirit. Philosophy,

poetry and religion, for Bede, converge upon a single point, which is the

transcendent and unitive Mystery.

 

[bede Griffiths]: Poetry and mysticism both derive from a common source, the

ground or depth of the soul, where the Mystery of Being is experienced. But the

poet is always driven to 'symbolize' his experience, to express it in words or

in paint or in music. The mystic seeks the experience in itself, beyond words or

sounds or images.[4]

 

[bruno]: The poet's way is that of word and image, the 'kataphatic' or positive

way. The mystic's way toward the same Mystery is the 'apophatic' or negative way

of pure union. Bede himself, his intellect drawn both to the pure contemplative

fullness and to the immanence of the divine in nature, would journey between the

two paths.

 

In 'The Marriage of East and West', Bede Griffiths presents in succession the

Vedic Revelation, the Judaic Revelation and the Christian Revelation.

Significantly, this latter is subtitled 'The Rebirth of the Myth'. (p.37)

Further, Bede begins this part not with a presentation of the Christian

revelation but with a long discourse on the 'Way of Intuitive Wisdom.' It is

primarily through the perspective of intuitive truth and myth that Christian

truth is meaningful for him at this time. Once again the epistemology[5] is

primary. Bede is attempting to bring to life once again a Christian wisdom which

had been virtually absent from the western world for centuries. It is through

intuition and imagination that this wisdom is to be newly appropriated. Bede

writes at length of a subject which is obviously of central importance to him.

Never quite systematic, he presents his view with depth and thoroughness. He

writes first of the rationalistic one-sidedness of western culture since the

time of the Renaissance, when the harmony of medieval Christianity was lost.

Encountering more fully the wisdom of the Vedanta, Bede felt that he had

rediscovered the truth of imagination at its source.[6] Western rational

consciousness, at this point, appears to surrender its primacy completely before

this fuller way of knowing that has belonged to the human person from earliest

times.

 

Intuition, approaching its greatest purity, becomes self-reflection. We recall

Bede's interpretation of his initiatory experience as a self-discovery; he will

come to see the central axis of the spiritual life as the realization of the

atman, or unitive self.

 

As Bede writes beautifully of the mind in terms of a polarity of 'masculine' and

'feminine' dimensions, we feel the strong preferential inclination toward the

feminine side which pervades 'The Marriage of East and West'. 'Feeling

intellect,' the organ of intuitive knowing through which we are able to know the

divine Absolute, appears on the feminine side of the balance rather than as the

marriage of the 'feminine' feeling with 'masculine' intellect. Bede will employ

the profound symbolism of male and female to express the inner structures of the

human person, of the cosmos, and even of God. This perspective has strong

foundations in the biblical writings.[7]

 

[bede]: The balance can only be restored when a meeting takes place between East

and West. This meeting must take place at the deepest level of the human

consciousness. It is an encounter ultimately between the two fundamental

dimensions of human nature: the male and the female - the masculine, rational,

active, dominating power of the mind, and the feminine, intuitive, passive and

receptive power. Of course, these two dimensions exist in every human being and

in every people and race. (p.38) But for the past two thousand years, coming to

a climax in the present century, the masculine, rational mind has gradually come

to dominate Western Europe and has now spread its influence all over the world.

 

The western world - and with it the rest of the world which has succumbed to its

influence - has now to discover the power of the feminine intuitive mind, which

has largely shaped the cultures of Asia and Africa and of tribal people

everywhere. This is a problem not only of the world as a whole, but also of

religion. The Christian churches, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant, have all

been shaped by the western mind. They have built up structures of doctrine and

discipline, of law and morality, which all bear the impress of the western

genius. The eastern churches have retained something of an oriental character

but are still dominated by the Greek mind. Even the original Semitic tradition

which gave birth to Christianity, though deeply intuitive, has still a

dominantly masculine character. All the Christian churches, eastern and western,

have to turn to the religions of the East, to Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and the

subtle blend of all these in Oriental culture, and to the deep intuitions of

tribal religion in Africa and elsewhere, if they are to recover their balance

and evolve an authentic form of religion which will answer to the needs of the

modern world.

 

What then do I mean by intuition as distinct from reason, by this feminine power

of the mind? This is a question which has been with me from the time when I

began to think at all for myself. I tried to answer it when I first began to

study philosophy, in two essays on " The Power of the Imagination " and " The Power

of Intuition. " Both these essays, it may be remarked, were rejected by Catholic

periodicals at the time because they were not sufficiently 'Thomistic.' And

indeed, I felt at the time that this is the great weakness of the philosophy of

St Thomas Aquinas, magnificent as it is in its own way, that it has no place for

the power of intuition. It is true that St Thomas allows in a roundabout way for

a power of knowledge by 'connaturality' or 'sympathy', an 'affective' knowledge,

but it has very little place in his strictly rational system. For him, as for

the Greeks and for modern Western man, knowledge is to be found in concepts and

judgements, in logic and reason, in systematic thought. (p.39) Western science,

for all its concern with observation and experiment, remains firmly attached to

this mode of thought and as such is an inheritance from Greek and scholastic

philosophy.

 

The One Light - Bede Griffiths' Principal Writings

Chapter I, Mind, World and Spirit, p. 36-39

Edited and with Commentary by Bruno Barnhart

Templegate Publishers, Springfield, Illinois

ISBN 0-87243-254-8

 

Notes:

 

[3] 'The Marriage of East and West', 151-159.

 

[4] 'Return to the Center', 75.

 

[5] 'Epistemology' is the philosophical inquiry into the nature and origins of

knowledge.

 

[6] 'The Marriage of East and West', 46-47.

 

[7] See Genesis 1:26-27, 2:18-25; John 2:1-11; Ephesians 5:25-32.