Barua, Ankur - Christian Visions of Vedānta - The Spiritual Exercises of Bede Griffiths and Henri Le Saux PDF

Christian Visions of Vedānta: The Spiritual Exercises of
Bede Griffiths and Henri Le Saux
Ankur Barua
Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Volume 51, Number 4, Fall 2016, pp. 524-551
(Article)
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ecu.2016.0048
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/648083
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Christian Visions of Vedānta:
The Spiritual Exercises of Bede Griffiths and
Henri Le Saux
Ankur Barua
precis
Various Roman Catholic figures during the last hundred years have engaged with
vedāntic themes relating to self-enquiry. Two Benedictine pioneers of these spiritual ex-
ercises, Bede Griffiths and Henri Le Saux (Swami Abhishiktananda), elaborated and
practiced these themes through which they sought to articulate visions of the divine pres-
ence within humanity. This essay discusses one central aspect of their “experiments with
truth,” namely, their experiential and conceptual struggles to point toward the “trini-
tarian mystery” with the terminology of Advaita Vedānta.
•
Introduction
The vedāntic traditions have been viewed by various Roman Catholic fig-
ures over the last hundred years or so as spiritual locales that resonate with
certain dimensions of Christian experience. Vedāntic themes relating to
self-inquiry have often been appropriated from Christian horizons as spiri-
tual instruments that can direct Christians to the presence of God within
humanity. Two Benedictine pioneers of these spiritual exercises, Bede Grif-
fiths (1906–93) and Henri Le Saux (Swami Abhishiktananda) (1910–73),
elaborated and practiced these themes during the second half of the twenti-
eth century. As they wrestled with these standpoints across several decades,
they left behind records of their spiritual anguish as well as ecstasy as they
sought in the heart of Advaita Vedānta certain insights that they alternately
jour na l of ecumenica l studies
vol . 5 1, no. 4 (fa ll 2016) © 2016
Barua • Christian Visions of Vedānta 525
viewed as preparatory to, complementary with, or even seemingly identical

with Christian trinitarian intuitions. In this essay, I discuss one central as-
pect of their “experiments with truth”—their experiential and conceptual
struggles to point toward the “trinitarian mystery” using the terminology of
Advaita Vedānta.
Griffiths and Le Saux were, of course, not complete newcomers to this
terrain of Hindu-Catholic contemplative spirituality, for the ground had
been prepared by Indian Christians such as Brahmabandhab Upadhyay
(1861–1907), as well as European Catholics such as Jules Monchanin (1895–
1957), Pierre Johanns (1882–1955), Richard de Smet (1916–97), Sara Grant
(1922–2002), and others. Upadhyay believed that, just as Thomas Aquinas
had appropriated Aristotelianism into the Catholic faith, Indian Christians
could restate Christian trinitarian doctrine into the Upanis.adic vocabulary
of the divine as sat-cit-ānanda (being, consciousness, bliss).1
Echoing this emphasis on a dialogical exchange between Christian trin-
itarian mysticism and the Hindu quest for the absolute, Monchanin, who
was Le Saux’s collaborator in establishing the Saccidananda Ashram in
south India in 1950, wrote about the mystery of the Trinity, which is neither
an undifferentiated unity nor a “triplicity of Gods.”2 Affirming Upadhyay’s
themes of inculturation of the gospel into Indic categories, Monchanin and
Le Saux argued that monasticism would be the true meeting ground for the
church and the contemplative dimensions of Hindu universes: “A day will
come—no matter how long hence—when God . . . w ill make Indian monas-
ticism come into its own and give it a form at once traditional and new,
adorned with the purified spiritual splendour of its past legacies.”3
After arriving in India in 1955, Griffiths initially tried to establish a
Benedictine monastery, moving in 1968 to the Saccidananda Ashram, to
revive a community that would be grounded in contemplative forms of liv-
ing. Like some of his predecessors in the field of Hindu-Catholic engage-
1
See Julius Lipner and George Gispért-Sauch, The Writings of Brahmabandhab Upad-
hyay (including a Resumé of His Life and Thought) (Bangalore: United Theological College,
Division of Research and Post-Graduate Studies, [1991]–2002).
2
J. G. Weber, ed. and tr., In Quest of the Absolute: The Life and Work of Jules Monchanin,
Cistercian Studies Series 51 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, and London: A. R.
Mowbray, 1976), p. 182.
3
Abbe J[ules] Monchanin and Dom Henri Le Saux, A Benedictine Ashram (Douglas,
Isle of Man: Times Press, 1956; rev. ed., 1964), p. 28.
526 Journal of Ecumenical Studies • 51:4
ment, Griffiths continued to wrestle throughout his life in India with

Upanis.adic themes—and in particular the thought of the vedāntic com-
mentator Śam.kara (c. 800 c.e.)—as he sought to develop a “Christian ad-
vaita” that would highlight the “unity in relationship” in the intradivine
life. 4 Referring to Monchanin, Griffiths phrased the problem in these
terms: “Interestingly, the founder of Saccidananda Ashram, Father Mon-
chanin, once said that our aim is advaita and the Trinity: nonduality and
the Trinity. They are often opposed, of course. Many think of advaita as
monism, in that it sort of removes all differences; and then the Trinity be-
comes three solid persons, all separated. But really it is a nondual
mystery.” 5
While these themes appear in the works of many of the other figures we
have noted, this essay will focus on Griffiths and Abhishiktananda as two
key figures who struggled, in their somewhat different ways, to transplant
Benedictine monasticism onto Hindu soil as they continued to write about
the trinitarian mystery by using vedāntic notions and experiences. While
both of them, in their published work, engaged more extensively than did
Monchanin with vedāntic thought, they charted somewhat distinctive
courses through vedāntic terrain. Abhishiktananda pursued the journey of
Hindu monasticism (sannyāsa) to the “other shore” in an uncompromising
manner, while Griffiths tried to adapt certain aspects of Hindu monastic
existence to everyday living, in the church and in the world. Toward the end
of the 1960’s, Abhishiktananda retreated to the Himalayas, and Griffiths
took over the Saccidananda Ashram, where he tried to embed the monastic
community into the local life of the nearby village, while cultivating the
practice of prayer and meditation.6
I. The Unitive Principle of Advaita Vedānta

One of the reasons that the project of “Christian Vedānta” has exercised the
imaginations and the intellects of Christian monastics and theologians is
because vedāntic resources would seem to help them to address a perennial
4
See Judson B. Trapnell, Bede Griffiths: A Life in Dialogue, SUNY Series in Religious
Dialogue (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 169.
5
Bruno Barnhart, ed., The One Light: Bede Griffiths’ Principal Writings (Springfield,
IL: Templegate Publishers, 2001), p. 219.
6
See Trapnell, Bede Griffiths, pp. 114–115.
issue in Christian theology: namely, how to explicate the conjunction in

the phrase “God and the world.” For, while most Christian theologians
have accepted a metaphysically realist view of the physical world, regarding
it as a created but substantive reality, they have also emphasized that God
should not be viewed as another “being” over against the world. That is, the
“and” in the phrase should not be regarded as enumerative: God “and” the
world are not two distinct beings that can be laid out on an ontic continuum.
Rather, God is (to use the medieval scholastic term) Being-itself, within
whose ontological horizons creaturely beings are encompassed and contin-
ually sustained in existence. Therefore, to the question of the “causal joint”
through which Being-itself endows beings with their finite existences,
Christian theologians have usually responded with the doctrine of the
“mystery of creation” that is said to defy ordinary human comprehension
and verbalization.
We may phrase the theological dialectic in slightly different terms in the
following manner. On the one hand, the world is not “external” to God if
such externality implies that God confronts the world as a being or a divine
Thou, but, on the other hand, neither is the world to be “assimilated” to God
through an ontological identification between the finite and the infinite.
Both arms of the dialectic need to be emphasized because, if transcendence
is understood in terms of a direct “spatial” opposition with the nondivine
world, the deity is reduced to a (finite) object by this very opposition. Hence,
an emphasis on God’s transcendence must go simultaneously with a parallel
accent on the divine involvement with the world and immanent presence in
it. Kathryn Tanner has therefore argued, “If Christians presume that God is
somehow beyond this world and is therefore not to be identified with it in
part or as a whole, the theologian in the interest of Christian coherence adds
that this non-identity must not amount to a simple contrast.”7
The traditions of Advaita Vedānta, associated most famously with Śam.kara,
have struggled from the distinctive starting point of Upanis.adic exegesis, with a
somewhat analogous version of this problem of explicating the relationship be-
tween the transcendent and the finite. According to advaitic thought, the tran-
scendental Reality is the transpersonal, indivisible, and timeless Brahman,
which is utterly self-existent, while finite beings seem to have emerged only be-
7
Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment?
(Oxford, U.K., and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 47.
cause of the principle of spiritual ignorance (avidyā), out of the unchanging

Ground. The phenomenal world and Brahman are not-two (advaita); the former
is substantively grounded in the latter, just as, to use a stock Advaita example,
different pots of clay are substantially lumps of clay. One of the most contro-
verted questions in Advaita scholarship relates to what kind of, or “how much,”
reality is possessed by the empirical world.8
While this is not the place to settle these exegetical-philosophical mat-
ters, we note that some Christian theologians in India—such as de Smet,9
followed by Grant and others—have put forward “realist” interpretations
of Śam.kara. They have argued that the famous “illusionism” (māyāvāda) of
Śam.kara should be understood not in the sense that for enlightened indi-
viduals the phenomenal world itself ceases to exist but that their false per-
ceptions of the world as not being rooted in the nondual Absolute are
overcome. The Advaita traditions, by this reading, accord some measure of
provisional reality (saṁvr. tti satya) to our everyday wakeful experiences and
treat our phenomenal distinctions as useful fictions, inasmuch as they facil-
itate social existence. However, we fail to see through these layers of con-
ventionalized reality and realize that they are substantially nondual from
the ultimate reality (pāramārthika satya), which is the transpersonal Brah-
man.10 D. R. Satapathy brought together these emphases when he argued
that Advaita does not obliterate all empirical distinctions in favor of “a
blind monism” but, rather, affirms that all these distinctions, being conven-
tionally valid, are metaphysically nondifferent from their unitary ground.11
In other words, liberation (moks. a) is a transfigured vision of the plurality of
the world’s beings as grounded in the foundational unity of Brahman, so
that the negation of the world in Advaita is to be understood, through these
readings, as an epistemic reevaluation of the world, not its ontological
annihilation.
8
See Bradley J. Malkovsky, The Role of Divine Grace in the Soteriology of Samkaracarya
(Brill: Leiden, 2001), pp. 45–50.
9
See Richard de Smet, “Forward Steps in Sankara Research,” Darshana Interna-
tional, vol. 26 (1987), pp. 33–46.
10
See Anantanand Rambachan, The Advaita Worldview: God, World, and Humanity
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006).
11
See D. R. Satapathy, The Doctrine of Māyā in Advaita Vedānta (Calcutta: Punthi Pus-
tak, 1992), p. 41.
II. The Advaitic One on Christian Horizons

According to T. M. P. Mahadevan, a basic question that the advaitic tradi-
tions have struggled with down the centuries is this: “Truth, knowledge,
infinitude is Brahman. Mutable, non-intelligent, finite and perishing is the
world. . . . The problem for the Advaitin is to solve how from the pure Brah-
man the impure world of men and things came into existence.”12 While the
Christian theological “solution” to this cosmic riddle is sharply divergent in
certain respects from the advaitic one, the basic terms of the problem as laid
out by Mahadevan resonate with certain aspects of the Christian doctrine
of creation. Echoing Mahadevan, one could state the Christian challenge in
this manner: The problem for the Christian theologian is to solve how from
the Triune God of holy love the world of sinful human beings and things
structured by evil came into existence. While the Christian traditions have
been more unambiguously realist than the advaitic ones about the empirical
domain, they have also struggled with the question of the senses in which
God can be said to be “other” to the world.
In recent Protestant Christian theology, Paul Tillich has perhaps most
famously emphasized that the God of biblical personalism is not a being
alongside, beside, or with the phenomenal world but is the creative ground
that embraces all finite reality. Tillich’s thought is structured by a concep-
tual tension between, on the one hand, his notion of the suprapersonal di-
vine that is not a mere cosmic “ego” or “Thou” that confronts humans, and,
on the other hand, his development of a biblical theism in which God en-
counters human persons in and through their response of faith, prayer,
and worship. Tillich reported that a Hindu had explained to him that “he
stood in the transpersonalistic thinking of India’s classical tradition but
that, as a religious Hindu, he would say that the Brahman power makes itself
personal for us. He did not attribute the personal element in religion only to
man’s [sic] subjectivity. He did not call it illusion; he described it as an inner
quality of the transpersonal Brahman power.”13
12
T.M. P. Mahadevan, The Philosophy of Advaita, rev. ed. (Madras: Ganesh Co.; Lon-
don: Luzac and Co., 1957; orig., 1938), p. 227.
13
Paul Tillich, Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, The James W. Rich-
ard Lectures in the Christian Religion, University of Virginia, 1951–52 (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press; London: James Nisbet & Co., Ltd., 1955), p. 26.
In another place, after pointing out that Being can be understood as the
power of being that resists nonbeing, he noted: “In this sense the notion of
being was understood alike by such people as Parmenides in Greece and
Shankara in India.”14 According to Tillich, God, who unconditionally is,
cannot be a finite object beside, or even most supremely exalted above, the
empirical world. In language that is resonant of vedāntic vocabulary and
that, as we will see, also appears in Griffiths and Abhishiktananda, Tillich
claimed that, as we search for the “really real,” we move from one level to
another till we reach “a point where we cannot speak of level any more,
where we must ask for that which is the ground of all levels, giving them
their structure and their power of being.”15
We can see that Tillich’s doctrine of God seeks to hold together two con-
trasting types of affirmation. On the one hand, God is not a being, thing,
power, or cause, or part of the totality of events, or the highest being. Rather,
God is the ground of being, the power of being and being-itself.16 In the tra-
dition of medieval Christian mysticism, Tillich argued that God is the
“supra-d ivinity” beyond the “highest names” that are used in theology; God
is, in fact, “beyond any possible highest being.”17 On the other hand, Tillich
was aware that some of his critics objected to the term “Being-Itself ” be-
cause of its impersonal tone, and he responded that God is properly under-
stood to be suprapersonal.18 Just as the notion of a finite God who is a being
is transcended by that of God who is Being-Itself, the notion of a personal
God is transcended by that of “God who is the Personal-Itself, the ground
and abyss of every person.”19
Tillich’s contemporaries, Griffiths and Abhishiktananda, engaged with
this dialectic, while living on Indian terrain, of denying that God is a person
and affirming that God is the personal ground of all creaturely reality. From
their Christian horizons, they discerned in the advaitic emphasis that the
Ground of finite reality is “within,” “above,” and “beyond” all things; the
14
Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2: Existence and the Christ (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press; London: James Nisbet & Co., 1957), p. 11.
15
Tillich, Biblical Religion, p. 13.
16
See Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (Oxford, U.K., and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 130.
17
Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought, ed. Carl E. Braaten, 2nd ed., rev. (New
York and Evanston, IL: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 92.
18
See Tillich, Systematic Theology vol. 2, p. 12.
19
Tillich, Biblical Religion, p. 83.
parallel statement in Christian mystical theology is that the “Godhead” is

the unnamable source of Being. They creatively appropriated certain ad-
vaitic themes—that the ultimate ground of Reality is inexpressible and that
all human categories applied to Reality are provisional—for their distinc-
tive elaborations of the doctrines of God, the Trinity, and the salvific death
of Christ. Underlying these engagements with advaitic thought was their
conviction that a “Christian Vedānta” can express some of the fundamental
patterns of Christian experience. Biographers of Griffiths and Abhishik-
tananda have discussed in great detail certain intellectual and spiritual
shifts that they underwent during their decades on Indian soil. However,
our focus is primarily on the conceptual tensions that exist across their nu-
merous texts between, on the one hand, their meditations on trinitarian
doctrine, and, on the other hand, their engagements with the advaitic view
that the ultimate destiny of the individual lies in the sublation of personal
categories.
III. Brahman and the Christian God

Griffiths regarded the advaitic statement that the Self (ātman), the ground
of personal being, is nondual with the ground of universal being (Brahman)
to be the great discovery of Indian thought. Brahman is that from which all
things emerge and into which all things return, but which itself never ap-
pears in finite existence.20 While everything exists in the uncreated ground
of Brahman, which is beyond words and thoughts, this truth cannot be
reached through rational argumentation, for Brahman transcends all con-
ceptual descriptions.21 Reflecting the “realist” interpretations of Śam.kara
noted earlier, Griffiths argued that the deep truth of Advaita Vedānta is that
the world has no reality at all if it is considered apart from Brahman; indeed,
it has no more independent reality than a conjuror’s show. However, when
an individual realizes that all finite things are grounded in Brahman, “the
world recovers all its reality.”22 Therefore, Brahman must be carefully distin-
guished from these finite beings because Brahman is absolute Being and not
20
See Bede Griffiths, Return to the Center (London: Collins, 1976; U.S. ed.: Spring-
field, IL: Templegate, 1977), pp. 19–20.
21
See ibid., p. 16.
22
Ibid., p. 23.
a being; in this sense Brahman, which transcends every empirical mode of

being, can be said to be not-being.23
Griffiths argued, in advaitically charged vocabulary, that, while the real
world exists eternally in God, the empirical world, where we experience ob-
jects in their fragmentary natures, is a shadow. He even said that the created
world is a “reflection” of the uncreated world, and, like an image in a mirror,
it “has only a relative existence. Its existence is constituted by this relation
to God.”24 However, Griffiths was also careful to mark the distinction be-
tween the advaitic view that the empirical world is an “appearance” or a
“manifestation” of Brahman and the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo,
noting that, while according to the former “the world has no real existence
in itself,” according to the latter the world has “a real, though relative, exis-
tence dependent on God.”25
The subtle distinctions between the advaitic and the Christian notions of
“creation” indicated here—according to the former, the world has no sub-
stantive existence in itself, while, according to the latter, the world has a sub-
stantively dependent existence—are highlighted in his distinctive elaboration
of a Tillich-like dialectic. On the one hand, every creature, in itself, is noth-
ing, for it is a want of being; on the other hand, every creature is not absolute
not-being either, since it has a capacity for being. In other words, the creature
is a limited finite being in which the fullness of God, who is Being-itself, is
reflected.26 Therefore, since both Brahman and the Christian God are not
another being in addition to worldly beings, advaitic thinkers and Christian
theologians have grappled with the following problem in their distinctive
contexts. The relation between the finite self (jīvātman) and the supreme
Self (paramātman), or between the soul and God, cannot be properly ex-
pressed in language because in both cases the latter term “is the absolute
Transcendence which is beyond our comprehension.”27
23
See ibid., p. 122.
24
Bede Griffiths, The Marriage of East and West: A Sequel to The Golden String (London:
Collins; Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1982), pp. 84–85.
25
Griffiths, Return to the Center, p. 84.
26
See ibid., p. 43.
27
Ibid., p. 132.
IV. Sat-Cit-Ānanda and the Trinity

The advaitic theme of the “unity of being” also structures Griffiths’s elabora-
tions of the mystery of the Trinity. Seeking to express trinitarian doctrine
through the advaitic indication of Brahman as Being-Consciousness-Bliss
(Sat-Cit-Ānanda), he argued that every created being participates in the one
Being, the one Consciousness, and the one Bliss of love.28 The advaitic un-
derstanding of the ultimate reality as Sat-Cit-Ānanda also provides a lens
through which to interpret the experience of Jesus. The Father is the ground
of Being (Sat), the eternal “I am,” and the source of all; the Son is the knowl-
edge (Cit) of the Father, the presence of the eternal One to itself in Self-
consciousness; and the Spirit is the Bliss (Ānanda) that courses through the
intradivine life, the Love that unites Father and Son.29
Recasting the advaitic understanding of Brahman as that which is be-
yond all names and forms into the terminology of Meister Eckhart, Griffiths
indicated that the “Godhead,” the ultimate Truth, is the abyss that exceeds
even the category of “existence.” Strictly speaking, we cannot say that this
Ground “exists”; rather, “It is that by which all things, including God the
Creator, exist.”30 This abyss of Being, the One beyond being, revealed itself
to Jesus as the Father, and the divine Bliss (Ānanda) of the Supreme revealed
itself to him as the Spirit of love, eternally emerging from the depths of the
Godhead and returning to its source. Griffiths insisted, along with Chris-
tian orthodoxy, that the “ultimate Mystery of being” is love: The Father
gives himself in love to the Son, who is the very form of his love, and this love
returns to the Father in the Holy Spirit who unites the Father and the Son in
the “eternal embrace of love.”31 The Trinity therefore provides Christians
with a model of how one may speak, in a Christian Advaita, of a unity in re-
lationship between the soul and God.
More concretely, Griffiths claimed that a possible source of a Christian
Advaita are some texts from John’s Gospel. He read Jn. 17:21 as indicating
that Jesus is in the nondual relationship of a perfect communion with the
Father, because, while Jesus and the Father are not one, they are yet not two
“things” either. Jesus calls upon human beings to share in his nonduality
28
See ibid., p. 43.
29
See Griffiths, Marriage of East and West, p. 190.
30
Griffiths, Return to the Center, pp. 24–25.
31
Ibid., pp. 60–61.
with the Father, the unity of love in the nondual being of God.32 Therefore,
in the trinitarian pattern of existence, we may speak of the experiences both
of union with God and of a loving communion with God, for the trinitarian
God is not simply identity of being but also an interrelation of knowledge
and love within its divine life.33 The purpose of creation is that every finite
being should participate in the divine Being, Knowledge, and Bliss without
losing its distinctiveness. These beings are indeed “lost” in the sense that
they lose their separate modes of being; however, they are “found” in their
eternal truth, which is their being in the Word.34
V. The Plenitude of Being and the Grace of Christ

The ability of human beings to attain a more or less perfect “reflection” of
God’s plenitude of Being provides a key to understanding Griffiths’s notion
of sin. He argued that the human self is not a self-complete and static but a
relational entity. It has the power of self-transcendence by which it surren-
ders itself to the higher Self, the inner Spirit.35 The “fall” of humanity is pre-
cisely the falling away of human beings from this Self into their subjection
to the material world through the “serpent” of reason. Through this falling
away into self-consciousness, individuals become disconnected from the
eternal ground of consciousness, the true Self. They develop a sense of a di-
vided self—a fragmented self that is illusory, since it has lost touch with its
true being in God. Sin is this refusal to recognize our own nothingness,
whereas to recognize that our existence is from God is the truth. Therefore,
redemption is to be set free from one’s immersion in the physical world so
that one discovers one’s true ground in the Self, which is the inner Word of
God.
Each individual is a word within the one Word of God, and to realize
one’s self is also to realize oneself in the Word.36 Through this self-realization
in the one consciousness of the Word, one would learn to see all things in
32
See Bede Griffiths, The New Creation in Christ: Christian Meditation and Community,
ed. Robert Kiely and Laurence Freeman (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1992;
repr.: Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1994), p. 55.
33
34
35
See ibid., p. 15.
36
See ibid., p. 28.
their essential natures and in their interconnectedness, in the manner in

which an integral vision can grasp the minute details of a symphony, a poem,
or a painting in its indivisible unity. Such an integral wholeness is “promised
us in the beatific vision—to know ourselves and everyone and everything in
their integral and indivisible unity in the Word.”37 The distinctions between
human beings and a God who stands over against them will be dissolved,
and what will remain is the abyss of the Godhead. We will be drops that have
become part of the ocean of Being, yet without ceasing to exist. Our trans-
historical destiny is therefore “to be one with God in a unity which
transcends all distinctions, and yet in which each individual being is found
in his [sic] integral wholeness.” 38
However, Griffiths argued that human beings are able to “recover” their
true source in God, not through their own unaided efforts but through the
grace of Christ who is the indwelling Spirit in the universe redeeming it
from its spatiotemporal dispersion. Christ communicates to his disciples
the ability to become children of God (Jn. 1:12), so that it is through the gift
of the Holy Spirit that they are “raised to share in the life and consciousness
of God.”39 The divine mystery of love “revealed itself in an agony of self-
surrender on the Cross, and only makes itself known to those who are pre-
pared to make the same surrender.”40 Human beings can participate in
Christ’s sacrificial death in this manner because Christ summed up—and
transmuted—all the sufferings of humanity to a “single point” through his
death on the cross. Because he experienced the sufferings of the whole world
in the Word, which is “before all things and in all things and above all
things,” through this experience the world was reconciled to God and
brought into the unity of God.41
VI. Griffiths and Christian Vedānta

Griffiths’s employment of advaitic terminology to express Christian doc-
trines thus results in highly creative “hybridized” texts. On the one hand, he
37
Ibid., p. 29.
38
Ibid., p. 146.
39
See Bede Griffiths, Vedanta and Christian Faith, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Dawn Horse
Press, 1991), p. 55.
40
Bede Griffiths, The Golden String (London: Harvill Press, 1954), p. 167.
41
can speak, with distinctive advaitic turns of phrase, of redemption as the

return to unity, which is the Source beyond being and not-being, the One
without a second. Sin is described as “the consent to unreality, the willing
acceptance of an illusion,” which was shattered by the cross, so that, for
those who have died to the self, by accepting the cross the illusion has no
more power.42 On the other hand, he reflects more traditional Christian vo-
cabulary when he states that our destiny is to participate in the one con-
sciousness of the Word and to love with the love of the blissful Holy Spirit.
Sin is precisely the failure to respond to the movement of the grace of the
Holy Spirit, who is “drawing us out of ourselves into the divine life.”43
Through our surrender to the love of the Holy Spirit, our human nature be-
comes “divinized” by the work of grace, a transformation that human be-
ings await at the end of time.44
Therefore, Griffiths rejected the “pure advaita” view that there are no
metaphysical distinctions between human beings and the divine in the ulti-
mate state, affirming that the distinctions are retained in the Christian view,
according to which human beings are creatures of God who have their be-
ings raised by grace to participation in the divine life. Through this commu-
nion, by knowledge and love, and not identity of being, human beings
remain distinct from God even when they share in the divine modes of
knowledge. Even Jesus, who experiences a profound union with God, speaks
not of an undifferentiated identity with God but of a relationship with
God.45 As Griffiths noted: “If Jesus had been an advaitin he would have said,
‘I am the Father’ or ‘I am God.’ Jesus never says that. In saying, ‘I am in the
Father and the Father in me’, . . . Jesus is affirming total interpersonal rela-
tionship.”46 For Griffiths, we may find a model of Christian Advaita in Eck-
hart. Although some of Eckhart’s statements are doctrinally suspect,
Griffiths argued that Eckhart did not annul the distinctions that are neces-
sary for relationships between God and the world. He interpreted Eckhart
as having claimed that, through grace, we may rise to God in Christ, so that
42
Ibid., p. 90.
43
Ibid., p. 47.
44
See ibid., p. 139.
45
46
Bede Griffiths, A New Vision of Reality: Western Science, Eastern Mysticism, and
Christian Faith (London: William Collins and Sons, 1989; U.S. ed.: Springfield, IL: Tem-
plegate Publishers, 1990), p. 168.
we may participate through a nondual experience in God’s own self-

expression in the Word. In other words, by sharing in Jesus’ experience of
God the Father, we, too, may participate through grace in the life of the di-
vine persons in such a manner that the soul and God are united and yet re-
main distinct.47
We may therefore sketch the contours of Griffiths’s visions of Advaita
Vedānta in this manner. On the one hand, he believed that the advaitic
theme of the One beyond thought and language could help Christians to see
their faith not as a system of rational categories but as a divine mystery of
grace that transcends the reach of reason.48 He sought to remind his Chris-
tian audiences that the dogmas of faith, which are the terms through which
the mysteries of faith are presented to human beings, are not the proper ob-
ject of faith, for that is God alone. Rather, the dogmas are similar to the sac-
raments, which are signs that should not be confused with the mysteries
that infinitely transcend them.49 Thus, encounters with Advaita Vedānta
could help Christians to revitalize the contemplative dimensions of the
Christian traditions and to approach the depths of “[t]he Christian mystical
experience [that] springs from the contemplation of the life and death of
Jesus of Nazareth.”50 Therefore, in distinctively Christian forms of medita-
tion, one would approach the depths of the Holy Spirit, who is the “stream of
love” between the persons of the Trinity, such that multiplicity would not be
annulled into an undifferentiated unity but contained or integrated in the
mystery of trinitarian life.51
On the other hand, he also believed that the trinitarian intuition is a
deeper and more ultimate experience of the mystery of being, which can
enrich the Advaita experience by speaking of the relationship of love be-
tween the soul and God and affirming the metaphysical reality of the
world.52 Griffiths could, therefore, speak of a Christian tradition of Advaita
47
See Trapnell, Bede Griffiths, p. 97.
48
See Bede Griffiths, Christ in India: Essays towards a Hindu-Christian Dialogue (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966; Springfield, IL: Templegate Publishers, 1984), pp.
101–102.
49
See Griffiths, Golden String, p. 166.
50
Griffiths, Marriage of East and West, pp. 178–179.
51
See Griffiths, New Creation in Christ, p. 23.
52
See Wayne R. Teasdale, Toward a Christian Vedanta: The Encounter of Hinduism and
Christianity according to Bede Griffiths (Bangalore: Asian Trading Corporation, 1987), p.
129.
as holding that God is without duality, God’s knowledge is without duality,

and the destiny of human beings is to participate in a “nondual” mode of
being and consciousness in God.53 Through meditation, individuals can go
beyond their ordinary rational consciousness and enter into the depths of
their souls, encountering the free gift of God in the Holy Spirit, who is the
source of being and consciousness.54
Several themes that we have noted in Griffiths’s visions of a Christian
Advaita are also reflected in Abhishiktananda’s engagements with Advaita.
Abhishiktananda believed that the Catholic Church had become over-
institutionalized and attached to specific philosophical vocabularies that
obstructed the freedom of the Spirit. He spoke of being torn between his
membership in the historical Church and his search for the depths of the
transhistorical Church.55 Arguing that only contemplatives would be able
to find the “pearl of India,” he wrote: “What India essentially needs are con-
templative Christian souls who are ready to plunge into the depths of her
mystical experience . . . trusting in the grace of the Lord who will enable
them to bring to light the marvelous pearl of Saccidananda which the Spirit
has hidden and sustained there.”56
VII. The Upanis.ads and Christian Interiority

A recurring theme in Abhishiktananda’s numerous writings—ranging from
prayerful meditations on the Upanis.adic, letters, and poems—is that the
Upanis.ads indicate the mystery of the Self that was glimpsed by the ancient
seers, a mystery that Christians, under the guidance of the Spirit, may ap-
proach.57 We should view the Upanis.ads not as a collection of propositional
statements that seek to communicate information but as a series of intu-
itions that lead us away from our immersion in the empirical. Through
words, images, and symbols they seek to shift us toward the Self that lies
53
See Griffiths, Vedanta and Christian Faith, pp. 151–152.
54
55
See Shirley du Boulay, The Cave of the Heart: The Life of Swami Abhishiktananda
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), p. 165.
56
Ibid., p. 180, quoting TJ (a Carmelite of Lisieux, later in India), November 23, 1959,
in Letters Spiritual and Theological, Kergonan Archives.
57
See Abhishiktananda, Hindu-Christian Meeting Point: Within the Cave of the Heart
(Delhi: ISPCK, 1969; 2nd ed., 1976; orig.: La rencontre de l’hindouisme et du christianisme
[Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1965]), p. xiii.
“beyond” the world.58 The Hindu sage (jñānī) has realized this Self through
an intuition that transcends conceptual thought and reached the “further
shore” that is beyond names and forms.
Abhishiktananda argued that the Christian search for truth in the ad-
vaitic experience did not endanger a Christian’s disposition of faith or open-
ness to the Spirit, because “the attitude of deep faith . . . contains within
itself all the essentials of the advaitic experience; for it is always and every-
where in his [sic] faith in the revealed Word that the Christian hears and lis-
tens to the Spirit.”59 While Christians cannot speak of the relation between
the self and God in terms of a “pure advaita” of complete identity, they can
hear in faith the Father addressing to them the same call with which He ad-
dresses the Son, and find the word uttered by the Spirit in the depths of their
soul: Abba, Father. Through this unity with the Son, they will find them-
selves one with Christ “in the Father’s presence, and yet distinct and for ever
unique in that Father’s love.”60 Therefore, Christians may discover, through
faith, in the heart of the advaitic experience of unity (ekatvam) a reciprocity
and communion of love.
Abhishiktananda strikingly referred to the Prologue of John’s Gospel as
the “supreme Christian Upanishad,” because, just as the Upanis.ads speak of
“successive identifications” between the human and the divine through
statements such as “I am Brahman” and “That thou art,” he noted that the
Prologue, too, seeks, by elaborating a series of mysterious connections, not
to solve intellectual conundrums about the “one and the three” but to draw
us toward the divine abyss. There are other scriptural passages that express
the mystery of the human and God through correspondences that unaided
human reason could not have discovered, such as “God is love” (1 Jn. 4:16)
and “If I have not love, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 13:2).61
The Christian “nonduality” indicated by statements such as “God is
Love” forms the core, according to Abhishiktananda, of a Christian’s expe-
rience of the indwelling Lord. Since Christians know that whatever they
have are only gifts of the Spirit, therefore, in the “last resort” they do not
have an independent standing ground, apart from the gift of grace, from
58
See ibid., pp. 47–48.
59
Ibid., p. 32.
60
Ibid., p. 74; also see p. 73.
61
Ibid., p. 82.
which they can acknowledge the Giver, for even this offering of praise is ul-
timately enabled by divine grace. Thus, we have a case of nonduality
grounded in Christ’s grace: “I exist, but only within and at the heart of an act
of giving, the very act in which God gives himself to me.” However, while
the silence of the Christian mystic in this manner is at one with the silence
of the Advaitin seer, the “aloneness” of the latter has been enriched with the
trinitarian communion.62 The advaitic experience can also help Christians
to apprehend the “essential non-duality of the Paschal mystery,” in which
human beings, through their free and spontaneous response of faith, itself
guided by the Spirit, awaken to God.63 Those who have not experienced this
nonduality will look “upon God as ‘another’ in the sense in which” their
neighbors are “others” to them. However, “[t]he ultimate mystery lies at the
very heart of non-duality. Only the Spirit of unity can silently teach this mu-
tual gaze of love in the depths of Being, of which all earthly ‘otherness’ is
simply the sign.”64
VIII. Advaitic “Reflection” and Christian “Creation”

In a manner similar to Griffiths, Abhishiktananda often spoke of finite real-
ity in distinctive advaitic turns of phrase, while also distinguishing advaitic
views about the empirical world from the Christian doctrine of creation.
Abhishiktananda, too, articulated a “realist” standpoint on Advaita, argu-
ing that the empirical world is not a “mere illusion” but real for both the sage
and the unwise. However, the sage “has access to a higher level of reality,”
which the unwise does not know.65 At the same time, Advaita is a reminder,
for the Christian, that one should not seek to “add up” the world and God,
for the mystery of being is constituted neither by God alone, nor the crea-
ture alone, nor God and the creature, but “an indefinable nonduality which
transcends at once all separation and all confusion.” 66 That is, “God’s other-
ness from [humanity] . . . surpasses . . . every kind of otherness found”
62
Ibid., p. 76.
63
Ibid., p. 92.
64
Ibid., p. 93.
65
Abhishiktānanda, Saccidānanda: A Christian Approach to Advaitic Experience
(Delhi: ISPCK, 1974; orig.: Sagesse Hindoue Mystique Chrétienne [Paris: Editions du Cen-
turion, 1965]), p. 43.
66
Abhishiktananda, Hindu-Christian Meeting Point, p. 98.
among finite creatures.67 There are moments when the Lord, the innermost
reality present in the soul, self-reveals more “as an Absence than as a Pres-
ence.”68 Therefore, Abhishiktananda reminds us that the medieval Catholic
mystics often spoke of a “wise ignorance” in approaching God, for God can
be known neither through knowledge nor through ignorance, since both of
these involve conceptual thoughts that cannot grasp the divine infinity.69
Since God is the fullness of Being who graciously gives being to finite
creatures, when Christians plunge into themselves seeking the “apex” of the
soul where they might be an I saying Thou to God, they find that God is al-
ready present there. This is the complete renunciation, the “loss of self,” that
Christians must undergo, through their baptism into the death of Christ, as
they seek to return with Christ “to the Father, the Source and Principle of
all.”70 Indeed, without such a complete surrender before Christ, “[t]o set
God in front of me, and myself as creature and sinner over against him,
could well be—at least sometimes—only a more subtle means of self-
expression . . . of asserting my ‘I’ despite all.”71
While emphasizing the advaitic point that Christians should not view
their Lord, before whom they prostrate themselves, as other in some addi-
tive manner, Abhishiktananda could also, on occasion, clearly distinguish
advaitic notions of the world from the Christian doctrine of creation. In a
volume coauthored with Monchanin toward the beginning of his time in
India, he wrote that God created the world neither out of preexisting matter
nor out of the divine essence, but ex nihilo; therefore, God and the creatures
cannot merge into one Being.72 However, as he struggled with advaitic spir-
ituality through the 1950’s and 1960’s, he often wrote of being torn between
two “absolutes”—one the pinnacle of the advaitic unity where all empirical
distinctions are insubstantial and the other the Christian way.73 As he wrote
in a letter to his sister in 1972: “[W]hen you have discovered this I am, scorch-
ing, devastating, then no longer even (can you say) God is—for who is there
67
Abhishiktananda, Saccidānanda, p. 86.
68
69
See ibid., p. 70.
70
71
72
See Monchanin and le Saux, A Benedictine Ashram, p. 18.
73
See Edward T. Ulrich, “Swami Abhishiktananda’s Interreligious Hermeneutics of
the Upanishads,” Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, vol. 16 (2003), pp. 22–29.
to dare to speak of God? This is the great grace of India, which makes us
discover the ‘I am’ at the heart of the Gospel (John 8). May the devastating
joy of this ‘I am’ fill your soul.”74
IX. Unitive Being and Christian Grace

While Abhishiktananda freely expressed Christian themes through ad-
vaitic terminologies, he also often emphasized the “gap” between Christian
faith and the advaitic nonduality. Indeed, he believed that the passage from
the advaitic intuition to the experience of God in Christ is not possible with-
out a leap of faith—a leap that constitutes a breach of continuity that can be
transcended only through grace.75 Therefore, we should not expect a
“smooth and effortless ascent” of the world to God, for the world can arrive
at God only through the cross of Christ. Positioned “between” Advaita and
the Christian faith, this is how Abhishiktananda described his situation in a
letter in 1952: “I am torn, rent in two, between Christ and my brothers . . .
When I pray per Christum, they cannot follow me. . . . A nd I cannot unite
myself to my people [that is, Hindu friends] in their symbolic religion, be-
cause I am a priest of the true religion, and thus I fail to have communion with
my people in what is the highest and most divine in them.” 76
From the spiritual volatility of this “Hindu-Christian meeting point,”
Abhishiktananda argued that the advaitic experience is already present at
the heart of Christian experience, for it points toward the basic mystery of
unity—that God and the world are not two in the manner of distinct objects
placed in a straightforward contrast. Therefore, the Advaitin sage (jñānī)
who responds with faith to Christ is led by the Spirit to the”heart of the
Trinitarian mystery” and “will regain his own inalienable personality in the
‘Thou’ by which God calls him into existence in the unity of the Spirit of
Love. . . . He will be entirely ‘lost’ in the Son . . . and yet he will be totally
and inalienably himself in his essential truth, because now he has found
74
du Boulay, Cave of the Heart, p. 222; quoting letter to “MT” (Sr. Marie-Thérèse Le
Saux), January 29, 1972, in James Stuart, Swami Abhishiktananda: His Life Told through His
Letters (Delhi: ISPCK, 1989), pp. 293–294.
75
See Abhishiktananda, Hindu-Christian Meeting Point, p. 45.
76
du Boulay, Cave of the Heart, p. 97; emphasis added in du Boulay; quoting letter to
“L” (Canon J. Lemarié), February 10, 1952, in Henri Le Saux, Lettres d’un sannyasi chrétien
à Joseph Lemarié (Paris: Cerf, 1999), pp. 36–37.
himself at the very heart of God.” 77 That is, for the sage, the loss of oneself in
the nonduality intimated by Advaita will itself disappear “in the abysses of
the Trinity, in the unity of the Spirit.” 78 The “Christian jñānī” will be led by
the Spirit’s working at the depths of the soul from the Advaita of Being
toward the inner communion of the Trinity and in Christ will be enabled to
enter into an I-Thou relation with the Father.79 From a Christian standpoint,
the advaitic experience can then be seen as the essential moment of “dying”
to self before an individual can be prepared by the Spirit for the full revela-
tion of the divine glory in the mystery of grace. Jesus was the first to receive
this revelation, and to those who participate in the unique experience of
Jesus is revealed the “ultimate secret of Being.”80
Abhishiktananda viewed all reality as structured by the “indivisible mys-
tery of koinonia (communion) and ekatvam (non-duality) . . . between the
divine Persons,” a mystery to which the Spirit at work in the depths of human
beings gives them experiential access.81 The Upanis.adic truth that nothing
exists that is not the Self (ātman) has been revealed by Jesus who, by incar-
nating himself, consecrated the whole universe and continues to be present
through his metatemporal existence as the risen One. Thereby, according to
Abhishiktananda, Jesus has provided a solution to the paradoxes of Advaita
that had been sought by the sages of ancient India.82 Referring to Jn. 14:9
(“He who has seen me has seen the Father”), he argued that Jesus’ experience
includes the advaitic experience.83 Therefore, once again, while Christianity
can resolve the dilemmas of Advaita, by accepting what is essential in the
advaitic experience under the guidance of the Spirit, this resolution is a mat-
ter of faith that cannot be settled through rational disputation.
X. The Advaitic Visions of Abhishiktananda and Griffiths

In several respects, Abhishiktananda was a forerunner in the formulation of
Christian Advaita. Arriving in India in 1948, he set up, with Monchanin, the
77
78
Ibid., p. 102.
79
See Abhishiktananda, Saccidānanda, p. 110.
80
Ibid., p. 84.
81
82
See ibid., p. 90.
83
See Abhishiktananda, Saccidānanda, pp. 82–83.
Saccidananda Ashram on the banks of the river Cauvery in south India. He

spent time in the presence of Hindu sages such as Ramana Maharshi, as well
as long periods of silent meditation in caves on the Arunachala hill and in
his hermitage in the Himalayas. By the end of 1952, he began to dress, eat,
and live as a sādhu, a Hindu-Christian monk.84 Referring to Lk. 9:58, he ar-
gued that the life of a Christian who “literally obeys the Gospel” is similar to
that of the Hindu renouncers (sannyāsin), for, wherever they go, unbound to
any worldly structures, they live as strangers, and yet they find themselves at
home.85 As he tried to live as a Christian sannyāsin and immerse himself in
Hindu life-worlds, Abhishiktananda grappled with advaitic spirituality at
several levels.
First, throughout his decades in India that spanned the Vatican II di-
vide, Abhishiktananda insisted that the true dialogue between Hinduism
and Christianity can take place only in the cave of the heart. When western
Christians first encounter the Hindu religious traditions, if they have al-
ready been sensitized by the Spirit to the inner depths of the soul and the
profound silence of God, they will be able to discern the presence of the
Spirit in these traditions. Such a Christian who wishes to enter deeply into
the scriptures and the mystical traditions of Hinduism needs a habitus of
contemplation, the “knowledge” of the innermost depths of the self.86 He
argued that it is wrong to think that the advaitic experience is completely
foreign to the Christian experience, for Christians who have carefully stud-
ied the Bible and the great mystics of the Church and are open to the prompt-
ings of the Spirit will “feel at home” with the basic intuitions and teachings
of the Upanis.ads and other Hindu texts.87 If the Church’s claim that Chris-
tianity is the definitive word of God to humanity is true, then, according to
Abhishiktananda, whatever human beings have found to be true, beautiful,
and good can be integrated into Christian experience.88 Therefore, Chris-
tians who listen to the summons of the Spirit mediated to them by the an-
cient seers of Hindu spirituality will be led toward the abyss of the soul, and
the Spirit will work on those depths, bringing about a renewal of the con-
84
See du Boulay, Cave of the Heart, p. 75.
85
86
87
88
See ibid., p. 47.
templative life not only in the religious Orders of Roman Catholicism but
also in everyday Christians who walk in the Spirit.89
Second, he believed that, while both western and eastern sages have dis-
covered in the depths of the heart a mystery that they cannot grasp, there is
an important difference regarding the characteristic ways in which they ap-
proach this mystery. The former view the mystery as confronting them and
seek to give it a name, while the latter simply remain silent because they do
not view it as apart from them. That is, the mystery of being in the religious
West is typically projected “outside” or “beside” the self, while the “integra-
tion of the worshipper with the numinous” is more characteristic of the reli-
gious East. Abhishiktananda argued that “the time has . . . come to re-
integrate into the Christian consciousness the complementary approach of
the East, so that when these two modes of experience come together in
Christian hearts, they may mutually refine each other and be set free from
the limitations which each inevitably entails.”90 Therefore, while the bibli-
cal symbol for the divine inaccessibility is God’s dwelling in heaven, and the
Upanis.adic texts speak not of ascending higher into the heavens but of
plunging deeper into the center of the self, these two symbolisms are com-
plementary to each other, for they point to an experience that they both
share—that God is beyond human comprehension.91
Third, perhaps more intensely than Griffiths, Abhishiktananda plunged
into the very depths of the advaitic experience. Already in 1953 he wrote:
What gnaws away at my body as well as my mind is this: after having
found in advaita a peace and bliss never experienced before, to live with the
dread that perhaps, most probably, all that my latent Christianity suggests
to me is none the less true, and that therefore advaita must be sacrificed to
it. . . . I n committing myself totally to advaita, if Christianity is true, I risk
committing myself to a false path for eternity.92
In seeking God in the innermost center of the self, he had to struggle to

address God as a Thou, and thus the agonized query: “How then can I live as
89
See ibid., p. 71.
90
91
92
du Boulay, Cave of the Heart, p. 106, quoting entry of September 25, 1953, in Abhi-
shiktananda, Ascent to the Depth of the Heart: The Spiritual Diary (1948–1973), ed. Rai-
mundo Panikkar (Delhi: ISPCK, 1998), p. 73.
a Christian? . . . It is as if You had driven me from the very place, at the very
depth of myself, in the innermost centre of myself, in the most wonderful
mystery of my consciousness, where I used to adore You.”93 Indeed, in the
months before his death, Abhishiktananda would seem to have transcended
all religious categories; he spoke of Christ as the very mystery of “I AM” that
burns away all the formulations of ontology, history, and theology.94 How-
ever, a good overall summary of his “hybrid” Hindu-Christian locations
during the years between 1948 and 1973 is perhaps contained in these lines:
“If anyone asks the Christian why he [sic] believes in the validity of his expe-
rience, he has in the end only one answer. All his faith rests on the experi-
ence of his Lord and Sadguru [real Teacher], Jesus. But there is also
something else—the testimony of the Spirit who has awakened him in the
depths of his soul to the mystery of Jesus, the Son.”95
Several of these themes are also reflected, as we have noted, in Griffiths’s
numerous writings, discourses, and lectures on Hindu spirituality. First,
Griffiths often wrote about the contemplative dimension of human exis-
tence, which he believed “the West had almost lost and the East is losing.”96
However, the West could still receive from the East visions of cosmic unity in
which the human and the natural worlds are sustained by an all-encompassing
Spirit. For Griffiths, as for Abhishiktananda, there were two complementary
ways of thinking of God: One can think of God as above the world and ask for
divine grace to descend, or one can think of God as immanent in the self and
yet present in everything else.97 Every revelation unveils a specific aspect of
the ultimate mystery: The Abrahamic religions reveal the transcendent as-
pect with “incomparable power,” and the eastern religions the divine imma-
nence with “immeasurable depth.” However, each set of traditions contains
the opposite aspect, even if in a hidden manner, and the inner relationships
between these aspects have to be discovered and united.98
93
Ibid., p. 142, quoting entry of November 24, 1956, in Abhishiktananda, Ascent, p.
171.
94
See Bradley J. Malkovsky, “Advaita Vedanta and Christian Faith,” J.E.S. 36
(Summer–Fall, 1999): 397–422.
95
96
97
See Kuruvilla Pandikattu, Religious Dialogue as Hermeneutics: Bede Griffiths’s Ad-
vaitic Approach to Religions, Indian Philosophical Studies 3 (Washington, DC: The Coun-
cil for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2001), p. 174.
98
Second, for Griffiths, Christian theology is rooted in a mystical experi-

ence, and it should lead to the contemplative realization of God. The words
and images of theology would become idols unless these were constantly
referred to the inexpressible mystery, for what we truly believe in, according
to him, is not dogmas such as the Incarnation but the Mystery of Christ who
is beyond all conceptual forms. Griffiths noted that to go beyond the sign is
to move, along with Aquinas, from the sign (sacramentum) to the thing sig-
nified (res).99 While myth, ritual, and sacraments are indeed necessary, be-
cause they are the means through which individuals may be awakened to
the presence of the mystery within them, these can lose their inner vitality
and degenerate into a “slavish literalism” or a “crude rationalism” by losing
the inner spirit.100 The Christian sannyāsis are therefore called to move be-
yond all religious systems, human institutions, and scriptural horizons, on
their journey toward that which cannot be named by any of the former.101
Third, Griffiths, too, went through various stages during his experiential
encounters with Advaita. When Griffiths wrote The Golden String (1954), he
accepted a version of the fulfilment theory according to which the other re-
ligions contain elements of truth that play a propaedeutic role in “preparing”
individuals for the reception of Christian truth. He believed that, just as
Greek philosophy had led to the development of Christian theology, the
contact between the Church and the philosophical and religious systems of
Hinduism would lead to another development of Christian thought.102 By
the time of his Return to the Centre (1976), he accepted a type of complemen-
tarity theory, according to which all religious traditions have received com-
plementary insights into the divine mystery that has been revealing itself to
the world from the beginning of history.103 However, while Griffiths often
echoed Abhishiktananda’s statements about the translinguistic nature of
the mystery of being, he, too, held that the inexpressible Truth that the reli-
gious traditions approach is the mystery of love. In this vein, he argued that
“[t]here is one expression of the Spirit which is more meaningful than all
others and that is love. . . . Jesus spoke of the Spirit, which he would send as
99
100
See Griffiths, Return to the Center, p. 118.
101
102
103
See Griffiths, Vedanta and Christian Faith, pp. vii–viii.
Truth but also as Love.”104 There is, then, according to Griffiths, a funda-
mental trinitarian pattern at the heart of reality: The mystery of being inte-
grates both a principle of differentiation (through which the hidden reality
is manifested) and an internal dynamism (or the “Spirit”) through which
the wholeness is related to all its manifestations.
Conclusion
Griffiths and Abhishiktananda are two influential names in a galaxy of
Christian figures—including Monchanin, de Smet, Grant, and others—
who have, in somewhat divergent ways, grappled with the advaitic tradi-
tions and sought to recast certain aspects of Christian doctrine and
experience in advaitic terminology. The translation of Christian theology
into vedāntic themes was a central focus also of the work of thinkers such as
Raimundo Panikkar and Jacques Dupuis, who grappled with a central ques-
tion in the literature on the “Christian theology of religion,” namely, the re-
lation between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.105
From the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy, one major concern with
any form of “Christian Advaita” is, of course, that the advaitic ontological
horizon, which speaks of the divine as dwelling in the cave of the heart,
seems to annul the distinctions between God and the creature.106 Thus,
Monchanin was clear that advaitic thought “so deeply focused on the One-
ness of the One . . . cannot be sublimated into trinitarian thought without a
crucifying dark night of the soul.” 107 More recently, Christian theologians
such as Michael von Brück have sought to respond to this concern by devel-
oping forms of “personal Advaita,” which indicate a complementarity be-
tween advaitic intuitions of nonduality and the relationality of love between
God and the creature.108 Von Brück’s “advaitic personalism” is grounded in
104
Trapnell, Bede Griffiths, p. 191.
105
See Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis Books, 1997), p. 191.
106
See Sara Grant, “Translator’s Foreword,” in Abhishiktananda, Hindu–Christian
Meeting Point, p. vii.
107
Weber, In Quest of the Absolute, p. 132.
108
See Michael von Brück, The Unity of Reality: God, God-E xperience, and Meditation
in the Hindu-Christian Dialogue, tr. James V. Zeitz (New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist
Press, 1991; orig.: Einheit der Wirklichkeit [Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1986]), p. 201.
the nondual experience of Jesus with God, an experience which is contin-

ued, in faith, in Christians today.
Abhishiktananda himself noted that Christianity is rooted in the mys-
tery of a “face to face” encounter between human beings and God, while in
the advaitic experience there is ultimately no conceptual space for such a
dialogical encounter.109 At the same time, in developing a “Christian per-
sonalism” we should guard, according to him, against the conceptual ten-
dency to think of God and the world as two entities that are exterior to each
other. The spatial symbolisms indicated by words such as “in,” “inner,” and
“within” should be understood as attempts to direct the mind toward the
mystery that cannot be expressed in words, because there is no “within” or
“without” for either the God of the Abrahamic monotheisms or the Brah-
man of the Upanis.adic traditions.110 Consequently, neither the advaitic non-
duality of Being nor the Christian experience of divinization through grace
can be explicated through conceptual categories.111 Indeed, Abhishik-
tananda asked whether individuals who have not “had the overwhelming
experience of the simultaneous proximity and remoteness of Being” are
truly contemplating God in their meditation.112 However, as we noted ear-
lier, the “leap” from the advaitic intuition to the Christian God requires a
surrender through faith to Christ.
For a Christian, the advaitic experience does not have ultimate value, for
the Spirit in the depths of their hearts “will ceaselessly cry out that it is not
yet enough.” 113 To what extent Abhishiktananda succeeded in synthesizing
an advaitic apophaticism with a trinitarian vision is a question that remains
a disputed one in the scholarship related to Abhishiktananda. Griffiths him-
self believed that Abhishiktananda had “failed to experience the final sur-
render in which all the distinctions lost through self-transcendence are
reintegrated within the unity.” 114 Perhaps it is best to allow Abhishik-
tananda to have the final word on his vision of Advaita’s relationship to
Christianity: “Christians may boldly assert that the encounter between
Christian faith and advaitic experience will on the one hand be an agonizing
109
110
See ibid., pp. 132–133, n. 2.
111
112
113
Ibid., p. 197.
114
Trapnell, Bede Griffiths, pp. 179–180.
process of mutual integration as each appropriates the truth of the other . . .

but that, on the other, it will finally lead to the most glorious resurrection of
both in the innermost depths of the Spirit.”115
Griffiths articulated some of these themes in his distinctive ways by ar-
guing that Christians can, in the depths of meditation, transcend all em-
pirical things and seek the ground, the One without a second, from which
they all come into being in the Word.116 He argued that each religious tra-
dition has to return to the source in the “eternal religion,” which cannot be
found exclusively through any one tradition, and free itself from various
historical and cultural limitations it might have acquired. Griffiths empha-
sized that he was not seeking a syncretism that would annul the distinc-
tiveness of the religious traditions but, rather, an “organic growth” in
which each religion would purify itself, discover its inner depths, and re-
late itself to the inner depths of other religions. He noted that this process
would perhaps not be completed in this world; however, in this way we may
move toward the goal of unity in truth.117 To approach this goal, we have to
move beyond these historical revelations to “the inner depths of the heart,
beyond words and thoughts, where the divine Word is spoken and the mys-
tery of Being is made known.”118 Therefore, as with Abhishiktananda, Grif-
fiths pointed toward the personal foundation of reality: on the one hand,
we have a personal communion with God, but, on the other hand, the
depths of the divine being transcend the empirical limitations of a
person.119
With their advaitically inflected vocabulary, both Griffiths and Abhish-
iktananda were struggling with one of the most profound themes in Chris-
tian philosophical theology—how to speak of the otherness of God in a man-
ner that does not “objectify” God and reduce God to a condition of
finitude.120 The results of their existential and conceptual struggles with the
dimension of depth in Advaita can provide resources for Christian theology
in a social milieu where, according to Grant, the acceptance of “a God ‘up
115
116
See Griffiths, Return to the Center, pp. 35–36.
117
118
119
120
See Beatrice Bruteau, “In the Cave of the Heart: Silence and Realization,” New
Blackfriars 65 (July/August, 1984): 301–319.
there’ is no longer culturally or theologically possible.”121 Their forms of

Christian Vedānta continue to be lived in locations such as the Christa
Prema Seva Ashram near Pune, India, which was founded in 1927 by the An-
glican J. C. Winslow and continues to thrive as a place of retreat and interre-
ligious dialogue. They viewed Advaita as a constant reminder to Christians
that God cannot be wholly contained within conceptual categories and also
as a providential means offered by God to help Christians become aware of
the dimensions of interiority in their own spiritual traditions —d imensions
that have perhaps been underemphasized but never forgotten.
Ankur Barua (Hindu) is a lecturer in Hindu studies at the University of Cambridge (U.K.)
Faculty of Divinity, where he has taught since 2013, following a position at the University of
Delhi, 2007–13. He holds a B.Sc. in physics from the University of Delhi and both an M.A.
and a Ph.D. (2005) in theology and religious studies from Trinity College, University of
Cambridge. His books include Debating “Conversion” in Hinduism and Christianity (Rout-
ledge, 2015) and The Divine Body in History: A Comparative Study of Time and Embodiment in
the Theologies of St. Augustine and Ramanuja (Peter Lang, 2009). Nearly two dozen of his
articles have appeared in such journals as Oxford Journal of Hindu Studies, Journal of Hindu-
Christian Studies, Religions of South Asia, Sophia, and J.E.S.
121
Sara Grant, Toward an Alternative Theology: Confessions of a Non-Dualist Christian,
The Teape Lecture, 1989 (Bangalore: Asian Trading Corp., 1991; repr.: Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), p. 51.

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Christian Visions of Vedānta: The Spiritual Exercises of

Bede Griffiths and Henri Le Saux

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

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viewed as preparatory to, complementary with, or even seemingly identical

ment, Griffiths continued to wrestle throughout his life in India with

I. The Unitive Principle of Advaita Vedānta

issue in Christian theology: namely, how to explicate the conjunction in

cause of the principle of spiritual ignorance (avidyā), out of the unchanging

II. The Advaitic One on Christian Horizons

parallel statement in Christian mystical theology is that the “Godhead” is

III. Brahman and the Christian God

a being; in this sense Brahman, which transcends every empirical mode of

IV. Sat-­Cit-­Ānanda and the Trinity

V. The Plenitude of Being and the Grace of Christ

their essential natures and in their interconnectedness, in the manner in

VI. Griffiths and Christian Vedānta

can speak, with distinctive advaitic turns of phrase, of redemption as the

we may participate through a nondual experience in God’s own self-­

as holding that God is without duality, God’s knowledge is without duality,

VII. The Upanis.ads and Christian Interiority

VIII. Advaitic “Reflection” and Christian “Creation”

IX. Unitive Being and Christian Grace

X. The Advaitic Visions of Abhishiktananda and Griffiths

Saccidananda Ashram on the banks of the river Cauvery in south India. He

In seeking God in the innermost center of the self, he had to struggle to

Second, for Griffiths, Christian theology is rooted in a mystical experi-

the nondual experience of Jesus with God, an experience which is contin-

process of mutual integration as each appropriates the truth of the other . . . ​

there’ is no longer culturally or theologically possible.”121 Their forms of

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IV. Sat-Cit-Ānanda and the Trinity

we may participate through a nondual experience in God’s own self-

process of mutual integration as each appropriates the truth of the other . . .