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BEDE GRIFFITHS AND THE FUTURE OF WISDOM by Bruno Barnhart, OSB Cam While Father Bede was first of all a man of the Spirit, he was also a philosopher and theologian. He is, in fact, one of several monastic thinkers who have opened before us the prospect of a rebirth of the Christian sapiential tradition in our time. I would like to look back briefly at the development of his vision, and then look forward at the road which still lies before us. While wisdom is first of all a quality of heart and of life, the contemplative wisdom with which we shall be concerned here is that which evolves into a quality of consciousness and of vision, and finds articulation in words. This is the legacy of Bede that is accessible to us, and it is his contribution toward a sapiential renaissance in the West. i. After Wisdom: Bede and the Modern West Bede Griffiths found the modern West totally dominated by a ‘ scientific’ way of knowing, having forgotten—or traded off—‘ wisdom,’ the sapiential way of knowing. He understood ‘science’ as an objective, impersonal, rational, dualistic, non-participative, analytical way of knowing: ‘knowing from outside.’ Wisdom, in contrast, he knew as an intuitive, participative (thus both objective and subjective), personal, holistic awareness and knowledge, a ‘ knowing from inside.’ In his profound revulsion at this abandonment of wisdom for science began what would become the quest of his life. This aversion to the science of the modern West, however, was part of a wider sense of disillusionment with western civilization that he and his companions shared with their generation – a generation that had come of age immediately after the first world war.(1) The common defect which Bede came to recognize in the rationalized culture of the modern West was an epistemology of reductionist materialistism which collapsed reality into its merely physical elements. It was from this point that Bede launched his quest for a comprehensive wisdom that would embrace the worlds of spirit and psyche/consciousness as well as the world of body and matter. ii. A western secular wisdom: the English Romantic poets Bede’s awakening to the spiritual world took place almost simultaneously in the natural context of the English countryside and in reading the works of poets and philosophers who had themselves experienced a divine immanence in nature. The Romantic tradition to which these writers—both German and English—belonged, had arisen in reaction to the same “Enlightenment’ rationalism from which Bede had turned in revulsion. The Romantic tradition was a secular wisdom movement. In the language of literary critic M.H. Abrams, it was a ‘natural supernaturalism’: Divinity, embodied in nature and in the human person, became manifest through the activity of creative individuals, re-establishing a unity between humanity and nature. This Romantic wisdom spoke very deeply to Bede’s soul, and its attraction never left him. For awhile during his youth a ‘worship of nature’ took the place of religion for him.(2) Here, in Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, was a side of modernity that Bede could resonate with; later, he would encounter a similar vision in a new kind of western science. iii. The wisdom of the Bible During his quasi-monastic experiment of austere community life with his two friends, young Griffiths began to read the Old Testament and the Gospels. In keeping with his literary education and leanings, he first appreciated these writings as a kind of literature—superior, in its depth and power, to the classics that he had known. He was attracted particularly to the density of truth and of reality, the sheer sense of authenticity, that he found in the New Testament. But here he became conscious of encountering a force deeper and stronger than his own thoughts and feelings, a force which drew forth much resistance. He experienced an agon, a moral and intellectual wrestling. Bede writes in his autobiography of this struggle, which culminated in the surrender of his stubborn ”reason,” followed by an overwhelming flood of light and love(.3) This was not something he could fit into an intellectual system; instead, as if blinded by its light, he accepted it as a whole and then sorted things out later. Here was a classical conversion story, and a ‘wisdom’ that refused to stay comfortably within the mind and feelings, that would not be tamed into an aesthetic or a philosophy. He knew that what he was seeking was all here, in this fullness—luminous and dark at the same time—that overwhelmed him. iv. The two great traditions: Nonduality and the Word. Bede Griffiths, in a 1972 essay, set side by side the Eastern religious experience of “ brahman or atman or nirvana or Tao” with the experience of God in Israel—both taking place in the ‘Axial time’ about five centuries BCE.
In this simple world-map of the great religions, the major traditions seem to fall clearly into two great groups or families—not quite along the lines of East and West. Distinct and related are the three religions of Biblical Revelations: traditions of the divine Word: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. On the other side we find the Asian traditions—not centered upon a divine Word, a personal Revelation ‘as if from outside and above’ but sharing a common unitive perspective. Following David Loy (5), we can designate the three great Asian traditions of Hinduism (Vedanta especially), Buddhism and Taoism as religions of Nonduality. I shall continue to use this simple distinction as we proceed, between 1) religions of the Word and 2) religions of Nonduality – or of the One. Bede refers to the former group of religions as ‘Semitic,’ and often seems reluctant to attribute to the biblical Word the unique and authoritative integrity with which it is commonly credited as divine revelation. The closest western approximation to the Asian traditions of Nonduality or the One is found in the ‘Neoplatonism’ of Plotinus and his successors. Bede Griffiths was strongly attracted to this tradition. Within these two terms—Word and Nonduality—are compressed two worlds of culture and history. Something of the respective shape and relationship of the two great ‘ways’ which they designate can be inferred from a double series of analogous terms: relationship and identity, revelation and contemplation, history and interiority, Word and Self, prophecy and wisdom, Bible and metaphysics, signs and wisdom (see 1 Cor 1:22-25). The problem which Bede Griffiths has set before himself is that of the relationship of these two primary axes of the life of the spirit. As we proceed, it may be helpful to imagine the ‘historical’ religion of the Jews and the ‘metaphysical’ traditions of the East as horizontal and vertical axes, intersecting in the figure and the event of Jesus Christ. v. The perennial philosophy Bede Griffiths’ life and thought unfolded under the light and the attraction of a single star. He was drawn forward by a unitive principle which seemed to press forth towards manifestation everywhere he turned, in everything upon which he looked. A primary and enduring expression of this unitive principle was Bede’s idea of the ‘perennial philosophy’ or ‘ traditional wisdom’: a consciousness and culture of the unitive absolute reality which he believed to be shared by all the great religious traditions of the world before the emergence of the modern West with its peculiarly dualistic scientific rationality. Bede presented the perennial philosophy from two perspectives, at different moments. Frequently he spoke of it as being—or being centered in – the unitive experience, or experience of the Self: advaita, atman. At other times he described the perennial philosophy or universal wisdom as a vision of reality as consisting of the three interrelated worlds of matter, consciousness and pure spirit – or of body, psyche and spirit. The two perspectives are complementary. The inner unity of the world religions is constituted by a unitive principle, which Bede found most explicitly articulated in the Hindu Vedanta. This is the 'advaitan' principle of a nondual absolute Being and of a nondual knowledge which is a participation in this ultimate reality. He found this truth not only at the heart of the great Asian traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism but in the West as well, particularly in the Platonist and Neoplatonist traditions. Through Plato and Plotinus it has come into the western philosophical tradition; through Augustine and Aquinas it has been integrated into the core of the Catholic theological tradition. At different moments Bede designated this common core of the world religions by different expressions:”the universal tradition,” “the eternal philosophy,” “the traditional order,” “the universal metaphysical tradition,” “the perennial philosophy,” “the universal wisdom.” He was already convinced of this central truth before moving to India, and would later speak of it as the basis of all his thinking. Bede Griffiths envisioned the major existing wisdom traditions as originating, in the Axial period during the millennium before Christ, as different forms of the one perennial philosophy. The Axial time is sometimes denoted as the historical moment when an individual or personal consciousness emerged almost simultaneously at different, widely separated, points around the globe. Bede Griffiths, however, is proposing that this was the moment of “experience of ultimate reality.” Further, he asserts that the very different developments of human consciousness in the Asian traditions of India and China and in the ‘Western’ traditions of Greece and Israel derive from an initial experience of the same ultimate reality. The immediate—and profound—corollaries of this thesis demand further reflection: 1) that the awakening of personal consciousness and the experience of ‘ultimate reality’ are two faces of the same event, and 2) that the ‘nondual’ realizations of Hindu Vedanta and of Buddhism, the rational consciousness of the Greek philosophical tradition and its Christian derivatives and the relational God-consciousness of Jewish religion derive from different experiences of the same ultimate divine reality. The implications of this comprehensive unitive principle for theology, for anthropology and for an understanding of history, are revolutionary. Bede Griffiths’ assertion of the basic unity of human experience and of the religious traditions of the world is bold indeed. It is already apparent, in this assertion of an all-embracing initial unity which was preserved in a common tradition until recent times, where he will invite us to look for a reconciliation of the divided humanity of our time: that is, in a recovery of the perennial philosophy. vi. The wisdom of the Vedanta When Bede discovered the unitive depths (the nondual metaphysic, anthropology and epistemology) of the Vedanta, he had once again found his ‘home’ – as he had found his home earlier in a nature suffused with Divinity, in Romantic poetry, in the Roman Catholic church and in the monastery. This time—with a new sense of finality—he found himself at home in the vision of an Absolute which was also his deepest “I,” his ultimate identity. For awhile he seemed to find this perspective completely adequate.(6) It was impossible for him to go beyond it, and he could only put it alongside the Christian vision without really integrating the two. Bede understood the new interaction of Christian theology and spirituality with the Asian religions in our time through analogy with the situation of the Church Fathers in the first four or five centuries, as they sought to integrate Christian revelation with their classical cultural heritage and environment: particularly with the Greek philosophical tradition of Platonism and Neoplatonism. Implicitly, then, Bede understood his own spiritual and theological calling in the same terms: to work towards a ‘marriage of East and West’ as the integration of the essential Christ-mystery, or the Gospel, with the traditional wisdom of the Asian traditions – particularly of Hinduism. Within Hinduism, he focused particularly on the Vedantan way of the “knowledge of the self.”
vii. Bede’s epistemology Bede’s own theory of knowledge (developed most fully in The Marriage of East and West) is a theory of intuitive knowing, which he finds marginalized in the modern West by abstract reason. This intuition is a way of knowing which embraces every level of human life– bodily, sexual, psychological, imaginative, intellectual and spiritual, ultimately emerging into the unitive light of the Absolute. “The Way of Intuitive Wisdom,”(8) surprisingly, introduces the book’s fourth part, which presents the Christian tradition. The culminating phase of intuitive experience is found in “spiritual intuition.”
At this point Bede’s theory of intuition converges with the “knowledge of the self” which he had found in the Upanishads, at the heart of the Vedanta.(9) viii. Toward the marriage of East and West At the time of the Second Vatican Council, western Christians – whether Catholic or Protestant—had lived for over four centuries within a dualistic theological climate in which God (or the divine Word) was sharply separated from—and often seemed opposed to—nature and the human self. We can speak, not too unfairly, of the ‘Augustinian container’ of post-Reformation western Christianity. The attraction of Asian religious traditions for Christians in this climate can be accounted for in part by the spiritual pressure generated by this distortion of the Christian revelation. In the ‘turning to the East’ of Thomas Merton, of Abhishiktananda, of Bede Griffiths, we can observe the influence of a tide of unitive attraction. Each of these spiritual explorers is then confronted with the challenge or reconciling nonduality and historical revelation, unitive Self and divine Word. Bede Griffiths continued to respond to this challenge throughout the second half of his life. As he posed the problem in The Marriage of East and West (10), he brought the two great traditions side by side in a homogenized language of ‘myth’ and ‘revelation,’ and projected its resolution “in an experience of ‘non-duality.” This, his most extended attempt to reconcile the nondual Self (or simply nonduality) of Hindu Vedanta with the Christian Word of Revelation, does not arrive at a balanced view. Further work remains to be done along several related lines: 1) a confrontation of the way of interiority and intuitive wisdom with the Word of God – in the fullness and authority which this term carries in the Christian sapiential tradition; 2) a fuller integration with the event of Christ, as this becomes accessible to us once again in the era of Vatican II; 3) a more open reconception of the synthetic goal, avoiding the ‘Vedantic’ predetermination implicit in Bede’s phrase, “an experience of nonduality.”(11) Two contemporaries of Bede bring some further light to our endeavor to understand the relation between ‘Self ‘and ‘Word,’ pointing to two promising lines of further exploration. Karl Rahner brings together the theological principle of the primacy of the Word of God (as reestablished for Catholics by Vatican II) and an interpretation of Thomist epistemology which might qualify as an expression of Bede’s perennial philosophy. He defines the human person both in terms of a ‘transcendent horizon’ which is equivalent to nonduality, and in terms of receptiveness to a divine revelation in history. To exist as a human being is to live in expectation of a divine self-communication, a ‘word’ of revelation.(12) Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux) carried further Bede’s suggestion of a meeting between Hindu and Christian mysticism (or nonduality and biblical revelation) in the experience of Pentecost. For Abhishiktananda, the point of emergence of nonduality (or Atman, nondual Self) in the New Testament is the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan – which is to be understood as theologically equivalent to our own baptism and the initiation of our own new divine identity in Christ. I believe that this intuition is correct, and that implicit within it is the key to a ‘nondual’ interpretation of the New Testament. This is seen most readily in the Gospel of John, as Abhishiktananda realized. Though his orientation was very different from Bede’s, he too leaned (and even more strongly) toward the ‘Eastern’ side of nonduality. In Karl Rahner and in Abhishiktananda we find, respectively, a metaphysical anthropology and a (largely implicit) sacramental theology which offer us a way of understanding the relationship of nonduality or nondual self, on the one hand, and the divine Word on the other hand. Abhishiktananda complements Bede on the ‘left’ side of nonduality and identity, while Rahner complements him on the ‘right’ side of the divine Word. On the other hand, Rahner offers a basic metaphysical—nd therefore universal—view of the relation of Self and Word, while Abhishiktananda indicates the precise point at which the theological convergence occurs: that is, in baptismal initiation. ix. The New Testament integration: a reflection that continues It is in the New Testament—and particularly in the Pauline and Johannine writings—that we find the beginning of Christian wisdom. Where, in these writings which took form within the nuclear flash of the Christ-event, do we find the fusion of ‘Word’ and ‘Self’, of revelation and metaphysics, of biblical history and nonduality, of Covenant and identity? First of all, the meeting and fusion appears in the God-man, the Jesus of the New Testament. Secondly, this meeting between nonduality and Word (or Covenant relationship) is experienced in the baptismal initiation of the believer. The divine-human identity is communicated through the paschal event of Christ, received through faith and baptism. In John’s Gospel and first letter, as Abhishiktananda intuited, we have the ‘Upanishads’ of the New Testament.The prologues of these two writings reveal the principle of Christian nonduality in the divine Word which has become incarnate in Jesus. The Gospel Prologue, which stands in the place of the narrative of Jesus’ baptism in Mark’s Gospel, can be interpreted in the light of baptism – at once the baptism of Jesus and of the Christian disciple. In the first half of this Prologue, the divine ‘Nonduality’ is presented in the Word, which is also the divine Light. At the center of the Prologue (vv. 12-14) is placed the baptismal event – at once the baptism of Jesus and of the Christian. The second half of the Prologue is a mystagogical exposition of the meaning of Christian baptism in terms of ‘divinization’ – the communication of ‘nondual’ divine life to the human person.
How has the only Son made known this God who cannot be seen? By the very ‘oneness’ (cf John 17) which is denoted by the metaphor, “in the bosom of the Father.” The founders of Shantivanam set themselves the problem of ‘Christian nonduality’ in terms of the reconciliation of Trinity and nonduality. Jules Monchanin, Bede Griffiths and Henri Le Saux arrived at very different responses to the question. Monchanin came to doubt the possibility of an ‘advaitan’ interpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity, and hence of a true Christian nonduality. Griffiths saw the Christian experience of nonduality as a participation in Jesus’ communion of love with the Father. Abhishiktananda, journeying in his own experience and thought further toward the Vedantan experience of nonduality, found Christian advaita in the baptism of Jesus and in the Johannine ‘I am’ sayings, and then in the baptismal new birth and divine-human identity of the Christian. This, I believe, is the most fundamental—and rewarding—line of theological exploration. The baptism of Jesus and our baptism, however, bring us beyond the question of ‘Trinity and nonduality,’ for at this point we have stepped into the economy of Incarnation. The problem as originally posed by Monchanin – Trinity and advaita – remained essentially ‘pre-christian’; it did not really involve the Christ-event. When the problem is reformulated in terms of nonduality and Incarnation, however, the New Testament opens to a new sapiential reading. (See, for example, 1 Jn 1:1-3, Col 2:2-10; text after text opens to this key)
Here we are led into Paul’s theology of the body of Christ, in which the ‘divine Nonduality’ has become embodied, embracing our own humanity. Emile Mersch’s major works powerfully demonstrate that the ‘whole Christ’ – head and body – is the unitive principle of Christian theology. ‘Christian nonduality’ begins with the divine incarnation in Jesus Christ; the incarnation of ‘divine Nonduality’ continues along the sacramental path, bringing together humanity as the body of Christ. x. Bede’s turn toward the West While Bede Griffiths had vigorously rejected the dominant scientific rationality of the modern West in his youth, he encountered toward the end of his life a new western science which envisioned nature as an organic whole rather than a a mechanical assembly of individual elements. He had become acquainted with the writings of Rupert Sheldrake (who wrote much of his first book, A New Science of Life, while living at Shantivanam), of Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics, The Turning Point), of David Bohm and of Ken Wilber. These thinkers, working on the boundary of science and philosophy, broke out of the container of reductionist materialism which, for Bede, had vitiated western scientific thought since Descartes and Newton. In the thought of Capra and Wilber, Bede found cosmology and psychology opened to the ancient wisdom of the Asian traditions, and he was encouraged to develop his own thinking more extensively in these areas. He began to elaborate a grand synthesis in which the unitive Asian wisdom (or ‘perennial philosophy’), Christian revelation and the new science would converge to illuminate the evolution of the material universe, of life, of human consciousness and historical existence. An early sketch of the great synthesis can be found in Bede’s address to the 1982 meeting of the International Transpersonal Association in Bombay. Its fullest development appeared as the twelfth chapter of A New Vision of Reality. It is not too surprising that Bede was able to embrace this ‘new science’: most of its proponents were reacting against the same Cartesian-Newtonian ‘old paradigm’ which he had himself rejected, and the direction of their journey – reaching out from the flat materialistic view of reality into the spheres of consciousness, of psyche and of spirit – was from a metaphysically diminished ‘science’ back into the threefold universe of traditional wisdom. Theirs was—to varying degrees—a ‘sapiential science.’ The holistic and organismic master-concepts of this new science had been present earlier in the philosophical vision of that Romantic tradition with which the young Griffiths had aligned himself. The subtitle of A New Vision of Reality, Bede’s final major synthetic work, is “Western Science, Eastern Mysticism and Christian Faith.” We have noticed the interior strains which had remained in Bede’s earlier attempts at a ‘marriage of East and West’ – specifically, of Vedanta and Christian revelation. The introduction of a third element—a new, holistic and evolutionary science/philosophy—further compounds the inner tensions. Bede’s unitive drive and intellectual enthusiasm bring it all swiftly together. Whatever be the final verdict of theological reflection upon the specifics—the daring junctures involved—I am sure that history will vindicate Bede’s confident synthetic spirit. xi. The incarnation of Wisdom In his later years, without ever turning away from the ‘perennial philosophy’ and its Asian roots, Bede began to turn back toward the West, with its creative and historical dynamism. He recognized the invaluable modern western achievements of human rationality, dignity and human rights, of personal freedom and democracy. Yet he remained deeply distrustful of the whole modern development. Bede’s ambivalence about history – and particularly about the history of the West – does not begin with the Renaissance or the scientific or industrial revolution. To the end of his life, it was apparently difficult for him not to feel that the summit of human history had been reached in the Axial breakthrough to absolute reality and to the spiritual identity of the human person, five or six centuries before the time of Christ. The tensions within Bede’s vision, between the Axial awakening, the Christ-event, the historical progress evident in the modern West, and the overall evolutionary paradigm that he had adopted, remained unresolved until the end. Crudely oversimplifying this picture, we can imagine Bede’s thought stretched between the Axial ‘perennial philosophy’ and the Christocentric evolutionism of Teilhard de Chardin, this latter trusting in an ultimate teleology beneath the progress of the modern West. Bede’s difficulty arises in part from his persistent tendency to see the Christ-event—or the ‘cosmic Christ’—as a consummation in strict continuity with an overall ascending dynamic of the evolution of consciousness. We have already seen how Bede’s epistemology of ‘absolute subjectivity’ requires a confrontation with the traditional sapiential view of the centrality and sovereign power of the divine Word. Again, the patristic Christian sapiential tradition offers an indispensable complement to Bede’s evolutionary synthesis. This complement (the word is too weak) is globally contained in Irenaeus’ answer to his own question: What new did Christ bring? Simply, he brought all newness – in bringing himself! The newness of Christ—whether with respect to the Jewish law or with respect to the evolutionary process—involves a transformation, a true revolution. Jesus does not appear simply as the capstone which consummates a long process, as the final word of the sentence, but brings a change in form as decisive as the blossom upon a stem. While the one ‘revolution’ of Jesus unfolds in more than one direction (cf the Pauline letters to the Romans, Galatians, Colossians, Ephesians etc.), I would like to focus upon one pivotal aspect. Jesus’ revolution brings a dramatic change from the ascending ‘evolution of consciousness.’ The basic change is from an ascending trajectory of ‘awakening’ to a descending (and outward moving) path of embodiment, of incarnation, which unfolds in the obscurity both of personal faith and of our collective history. It is a striking fact that Christianity appears to beget both a postchristian and a postsapiential secular world dominated by empirical rationality. The old sapiential consciousness is eclipsed and before long the church and Christian faith itself appear to be left behind by the forward rush of western history. Is it conceivable that this series of apparent disasters has been brought about by the Christ-event? Is it possible that all of this is the—unimaginably ambiguous—consequence of the liberation of the human person by the paschal event? Can it be that this historical progression – which Bede was tempted to see as a nearly unmitigated disaster – follows (however deviously) an interior principle of the Christian charism, a law of incarnation ? Is there not, after all, a positive historical process beneath the eclipse of wisdom? We are aware of the positive ‘humanistic’ achievements of the modern West and we may even have kept the theological confidence to see them as fruits of the Christ-event. But how can we reconcile this positive picture with the appalling events—including what appears to be a total eclipse of a sapiential faith and theology—that have taken place in the modern West? Can we imagine an ‘incarnation of wisdom’ —a further stage in the unfolding of Christian wisdom—in which it is no longer understood primarily as something by itself, something cultivated, but has become – once again—the human person, has become identical with the human being so that the person moves freely with it? Or, to put it in other words, can we imagine a disappearance of the ‘culture’ of wisdom into the actuality of life, from which sapiential consciousness—and culture—will be regenerated in a new plurality and transparency? This happened once in the world of antiquity—in the person of Jesus Christ. We seem nearly to see it happening again in the West, at the time of the eclipse of monastic wisdom—in the archetypical figure of Francis of Assisi. Can it be that the essential wisdom is utterly simple, a light that shines within everyone, and is recognized and responded to by those in whom the Word is truly becoming flesh? The history of the modern West does not look like this. We do not see ‘on the front page’ an embodiment of divine Wisdom in a new simplicity and freedom, in a liberating illumination of faith. Rather, we witness a progressive abandonment of faith and a rationalization of western civilization through science, technology and the burgeoning institutions of power, replacing a Christian and human culture with what seems a mindless and soulless mass culture. Turning to the inside pages of our history, however, we begin to observe the emergence and growth of a collective consciousness which is both deeply personal and deeply compassionate, which begins to work convergently toward a truly human world. There comes gradually into view, in our time, a leavening of humanity – a rising of the whole mass of dough. The high and narrow spirituality of the past has largely disappeared into the deep and broad humanity of the present. The process is still very incomplete. We are emerging from a long intermediate period dominated by rationalism and forgetful of wisdom, but the birth of the person is progressing – the birth of the individual person, conscious and free, and the birth of the one human person, embodiment of God’s Wisdom. Within this vision, the ambiguous ‘progress’ of the modern West may signify a deeper progression which is properly theological: an incarnational movement in the history of the world. From this perspective, western civilization and culture—particularly the modern secular culture—can be seen as a stage of transition between historical Christianity and a global society, one humanity. xii. After Bede: the future of wisdom The West has lost its memory, and speeds forward in a deceptive half-light. We can begin to imagine a recovery of memory and a corresponding rebirth of wisdom. The rebirth is already taking place, less than obvious in the complexity of our world and in its ‘implicit’ character, in the humble quietness of its emergences. In concluding, I would like to underline a few of the directions in which the sapiential rebirth can be expected: first of all, in a rediscovery of Christian wisdom as, primarily, a simple light, an awakening to the interior depths of the ‘ Presence’ in which we already live; secondly, in an understanding of the New Testament writings and of the mystery of Christ in the light of the principle of nonduality; thirdly, in a new and immediate awareness of the relation of our own existence—and of the movement of history around us—to the event of Christ; lastly, in a new ‘historical gnosis,’ as we learn to read the history of these last two thousand years in the light of the Christ-event—much as the sapiential writers of patristic times read the history of Israel. Bede has brought us face to face with questions that – as he well knew – will be crucial for the future of Christianity and the world. Two of these questions particularly concern the‘ future of wisdom.’ Firstly, what further transformation is required so that our sapiential vision may be animated by the creative historical energy of the Christ-event? Secondly, how can our western history – and particularly the ‘progress’ of the modern West – be redeemed? That is, how can we reconcile our instinctive western sense of identity—the ‘post-Copernican’ consciousness of a free person, actively participating in a meaningful history—with the mystery of Christ and with the nondual light of the ‘perennial philosophy’? The two questions are deeply related; perhaps they are a single question. Their solution depends upon a recovery of sapiential memory in the West. In the ‘incarnational’ movement of the modern West—pulling the world behind it—the dynamic of the Gospel is to be found which carries wisdom beyond wisdom into embodiment. This ‘secular incarnation’ is ever subject to the demonic metamorphoses that we have experienced in the twentieth century—until we recover our memory. It is to this recovery of memory—memory of ‘the beginning’ in its fullest sense—that Bede Griffiths invites us. No one has made wisdom’s call audible in our time more gracefully, more brilliantly, more passionately. But—whatever may be our personal arrivals—the theological journey will not be concluded soon. Notes: 1.The Golden String, p. 13
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