Book Review: The One Light

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Book Review: The One Light

Sr. Pascaline Coff, OSB

from Bulletin 69, August 2002

 

The One Light

Bede Griffiths' Principal Writings

Edited and with Commentary by Bruno Barnhart, OSB Cam.

Templegate Books

2001

 

In the newly published volume on Bede Griffiths called The One Light,

author Bruno Barnhart offers us not only Fr. Bede's principal

writings but with acute selectivity the principal teachings from many

of his volumes, tapes, and articles, together with an astute and

helpful commentary. While the editor/author met Fr. Bede personally

only thirteen years before his death in May of 1993, from Fr. Bruno's

in-depth study of Griffiths' teachings one could rightly say that he

knows the work of Bede Griffiths more profoundly than many who

traveled to Shantivanam or experienced Fr. Bede at home or abroad.

Bruno succinctly summarizes not only Bede Griffiths' life but also

the twentieth century and the changes it brought both to the world

and to Christianity, with the crucial phase of transformation that

led the Church to step suddenly into " adulthood. "

 

In his overview of the English monk's life and consequent thought,

Bruno sees Bede rejecting one world, searching for an alternative

world, and beginning to elaborate a sapiential vision—a myth—of such

a world, then reintegrating what had been rejected. This triple

movement defined his life! The essential nature of Bede's perfect

alternative world is a unitive world where all reality is experienced

in the one divine ground. This unitive world is Bede's personal myth.

Its basic and enduring form is the primordial wisdom and perennial

philosophy. As the author delved more deeply into the life and

writings of Bede, he found the center of gravity of Bede's myth

migrating from Self to Person, from interior Self to cosmic Person,

while the continuity of the myth itself persisted. Bruno describes

this unitive myth in helpful detail. It is a perfect alternative

world, from the center of which all reality can be grasped as one;

gradually, with Bede's changing focus, this central point shifts from

interior Self to cosmic Person.

 

Readers will join the author in being grateful that Bede was so

generous in expressing his personal experience as well as his

thoughts. It is because of this that we can experience how, with his

unbroken soaring spirit, Bede lived the myth (the vision) that he so

well sought, found, and offers us in The Marriage of East and West

and in other writings. In fact, his myth-making activity was a

permanent and dominant element in his personality.

 

Fr. Bede himself explains myth (MEW, 170–71) as being an expression

of the intuitive mind that at first is almost totally absorbed in

matter, body. The expression of it will be experienced and found in

bodily movements, in ritual and in dance, and in the beating of

drums. This, as he sees it, is accompanied by feeling, emotional

involvement in the rhythm of nature—earth, plants, animals, sun,

moon, and sky—symbolized in some concrete object such as a tree,

stone, or animal totem. It is already stirring the imagination of

archetypal images from the depths of the unconscious. Behind all

this, the intuition is at work in a self-awareness growing and

building up the myth with every contact with the external world. It

builds up the myth as the expression of this totality of experience,

structuring the universe around the self. This is so not just

individually but socially, with cosmic awareness of the self in its

interdependence and intercommunion with the cosmic mysteries.

 

Myth embraces the totality of existence, giving us a place in the

universe and organizing every aspect of our lives. But from the time

of Socrates, myth progressively gave way to reason until it survives

only as a background to poetry, while reason and science gradually

took its place. Finally, in the last hundred years, myth has died.

Science and reason have come to dominate the world. Bede believed

this was/is exactly our problem! We cannot live without myth; reason

cannot live without the imagination. Within and without, it creates a

desert and becomes the sword of destruction. Now we must go back and

recover the myth, return to the source (the title of one of his

earliest books was Return to the Center), rediscover our roots, and

restore the wholeness to the human family and creation. Bede insisted

that the myth must be reborn. According to Fr. Bruno, Bede lived the

myth.

 

The author lists for us and explicates some of Bede Griffiths' main

contributions to the recovery, the rebirth of a Christian wisdom in

our time: (1) Wisdom itself—another way of knowing, deeper than the

ordinary way we think in the contemporary West. (2) The principle of

nonduality or advaita, and of a unitive absolute, the One. This

absolute Reality became the core of Bede's vision. Identified with

God or Father, the First Person, it becomes a key to a new Christian

vision (recalling the title of another of Bede's books, A New Vision

of Reality). (3) The unitive self or Atman. It is through the Self

that the unitive ground of all reality is experienced. Here Bede

joins Merton and Abhishiktananda, and it is here that Bruno

cites " the critical further step needed from a Christian theological

perspective—the correlation of this non-dual self with baptismal

initiation. " (4) Bede's recognition of the divine dimension of the

feminine. Repeatedly he identifies the Holy Spirit with the " feminine

side " of God. (5) The vision of total integration in terms of the

three levels of being: body, soul, and spirit, or roughly speaking

God, humanity, and the universe.

 

Fr. Bruno points out for us Bede's contribution toward a new wisdom

in terms of the realization of a Christian advaita, bringing together

Hinduism and Christianity within the vital energy field of his own

spirit. And within this creative matrix there gradually occurs a

quasi-fusion of unitive Absolute and Christ-event, giving birth to a

vision of Christian nonduality in two stages. The first is a

participation in God, the nondual Absolute realized in the communion

of love that is Christian life and relationship. Secondly, the One is

known in the great event of incarnation that is the Cosmic Person,

gradually emerging as the center of Bede's synthesis.

 

Bruno traces the continuous growth of Bede Griffiths' vision of the

Marriage of East and West that marks, along with the thought of

Thomas Merton and Abhishiktananda, the dawn of a new era of

spirituality for the West. He understands the significance of Bede's

life and work unfolding in the dramatic interplay of three worlds:

the Christian Gospels, Asian Wisdom, and the Contemporary West with

its desperation and promise. Bede exemplified in his life and thought

the movement of Christianity from " containment to openness and from

defensiveness to exposure, from polemic to dialogue, himself becoming

the living model of an expansive Christianity. This was a faith which

moves forward and outward, confidently meeting and integrating

everything that it encounters, even the ancient and religious

traditions which had seemed totally alien to Christian faith. "

 

Bruno's commentary preceding each selection from Bede's teachings

offers pithy questions and challenges for the reader, making one wish

Bede were still available for such dialogue. In one of the wisely

chosen passages from The Marriage of East and West, we are introduced

to Fr. Bede's most highly developed exposition of the " discovery of

the Self, " a way of interiority. Commenting on the relation of the

human spirit to the supreme spirit in both the Katha and Svetasvatara

Upanishads, Fr. Bede images for us the soul as a glass held up to the

light of the spirit. When the glass is clouded by sin and ignorance,

then the light cannot shine through, but when the glass is clean,

then the soul is illuminated by the divine light and the whole being,

body and soul, is irradiated by the divine presence. The spirit in us

is the " fine point of the soul " —the point of contact between the

human and the divine—a reflection of the divine light in us.

 

Through the " One Light " radiating from the two minds and hearts

contained in this one volume readers will find themselves enabled and

encouraged to uncover and manifest that same One Light deep in their

own hearts.

 

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