The One Light: Bede Griffiths' Principal Writings (review)

Western Europe rejected the perennial philosophy at the Renaissance and has been led step by step to the materialistic philosophy which rejects fundamental human values and exposes humankind to the contrary forces at work in the universe. The only way of recovery is to rediscover the perennial philosophy, the traditional wisdom, which is found in all ancient religions and especially in the great religions of the world. But those religions have in turn become fossilized and have each to be renewed, not only in themselves but also in relation to one another, so that a cosmic, universal religion can emerge, in which the essential values of Christian religion will be preserved in living relationship with the other religious traditions of the world. This is a task for the coming centuries as the present world order breaks down and a new world order emerges from the ashes of the old (449).

These challenging statements by Bede Griffiths OSB Cam (1906-1993) illustrate the prophetic character of his intercultural vision and the dialogical context of his essentially contemplative spirituality. The above quote also discloses the major theme of Bruno Barnhart's anthology, "Bede's developing vision of a unitive wisdom" (30), one that integrates the related polarities he experienced in his life: East and West, intuition and reason, feminine and masculine, cyclical time and history, perennialist and evolutionary perspectives.

Griffiths spent the first forty-eight years of his life in England, where he studied at Oxford, opened himself to mystical depths during walks in the countryside, converted to Roman Catholicism, and lived in Benedictine houses as monk and priest for over two decades. In 1955 he emigrated to India explicitly to pursue "the other half of my soul" (179)—the half relatively neglected by Western and Christian culture. In helping to found three contemplative ashrams (spiritual communities), by studying Indian scriptures and spiritual practices, and through dialogue with non-Christians, Griffiths envisioned what he called "the marriage of East and West": an integration of epistemological, cultural, and religious polarities (19-21, 178-79, 331-33, 338-40). Committed to bringing a spirituality enriched through his encounter with India to the Church, Griffiths worked with caution and devotion to articulate a path that was both true to the Gospel and to his own experience, producing over a dozen books and hundreds of articles that are judiciously excerpted in this anthology. Multiple levels of meaning, then, are suggested in Barnhart's title: a single light radiates within and through the diverse facets of Griffiths himself (as of all persons), within and through the varied cultures he explored, and within and through the religions he studied with their diverse images of the sacred mystery, that light uniting multiplicity at each level in a comprehensive, yet differentiated whole.

Bruno Barnhart is a sympathetic and eminently qualified anthologist for this work. In addition to being a fellow Camaldolese Benedictine monk and Roman Catholic priest, Barnhart brings his own similar vision for renewing Christianity informed by contemplative and interreligious sensibilities. The book represents, then, not a simple collecting of Griffiths' primary writings but a dialogue between author and commentator. In his substantive introduction, Barnhart proposes creative strategies for making sense of Griffiths' diverse writings, sensitive to how their author matured through his encounters with Eastern wisdom and Western science. In his remarks before each text, Barnhart skillfully sets not only the biographical but the theoretical context, suggesting tensions within Griffiths' viewpoint, and, at times, weaknesses as well. This volume provides an ample bibliography and a detailed index that are particularly useful since most of Griffiths' books as currently published do not.

In Part I of his anthology, Barnhart begins very effectively with a selection of passages that focuses Griffiths' "discovery of a new way of knowing" (31) in contrast to the primarily rational means of the West. This discovery...