Beyond the Darkness: A Biography of Bede Griffiths.

Shirley Du Boulay Doubleday, $24.95, 308 pp.

David Toolan

At age seventy, Dom Bede Griffiths was able to say, "I always feel about twenty-one, just beginning to explore life and always finding new things." Even after suffering a series of strokes in 1990 and vowing never again to leave Shantivanam ("forest of peace"), his ashram in South India, he soon broke that promise and took off on two years of round-the-world speaking tours, visiting Canada, the United States, England, Germany, Austria, Italy, Australia, and Singapore. "My message," he said, "was always to transcend our divisions - religious, social, psychological linguistic - the fragmented state of humanity - and recover the wholeness." The religions of the world, he felt, complement each other. "I have to be a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Jain, a Parsee, a Sikh, a Muslim, and a Jew, as well as a Christian," wrote Bede in Return to the Center (1976), "if I am to know the Truth and find the point of reconciliation in all religion."

The older he got, the more outspoken he became. In letters to the London Tablet he criticized the "inordinate claims" of the papacy, holding that there could be no hope of Christian reunion "until the Roman church publicly acknowledges its past errors and admits that it does not have the answers to all the difficult problems of sexual morality and other matters which trouble humanity today." He favored a married clergy, and regarded the church's difficulty in conceiving God as mother as one of Christianity's greatest defects, writing in the Tablet: "Perhaps it is only when we have learned to recognize God as mother that woman will find her rightful place in the church."

Before picking up Shirley Du Boulay's new biography of Dom Bede, I had been roughly familiar with his story - born Alan Griffiths in 1906, raised in the Hampshire countryside, an incorrigible romantic and Oxford "aesthete," a longtime friend of C.S. Lewis, convert to Catholicism and monk of Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire, and finally pioneer of interreligious dialogue in India. What was new to me was the complete picture of Bede's final years - the most revealing and moving part of Du Boulay's book.

At age eighty-four, just two years before his death in May 1993, Bede still couldn't contain himself; he was bursting with energy and new plans for a worldwide network of lay contemplatives. His strokes, he believed, had opened up the "other half of my soul" - the intuitive, feminine, and unconscious dimension. Ever since he had left his monastery in England in 1955, he had been looking for this other side of himself in India. And now, after thirty-five years there, his mind had been "blown," as he put it, by an experience of the feminine in all its forms: as the Mother of God, as Earth Mother, as Black Madonna manifest in rocks and caves, in all nature and in his own mother and the Hindu concept of Shakti, the feminine aspect of divine energy. When Bede surrendered to this dark energy - a kind of death like Christ's on the cross - he experienced overwhelming love, a love that he felt took him beyond the rational mind to the depths of the divine mystery. The day after he had this experience on February 25, 1990, he sprang out of bed and for the first time in months began to walk without a cane. Thereafter, this very reserved Englishman took to hugging people.

For all too many Westerners, Bede often observed, Christianity had become a formal, dogmatic, moralistic religion that had the effect of preventing interior growth. These vagrant souls had been coming to see him by the thousands since the early 1970s, fascinated by the idea of a Benedictine monk living like a barefoot Hindu holy man. "Love just poured out of him," visitors would remark. "He doesn't advise or give directions," reported another, "he just walks with you, follows you with an understanding heart and encourages you."

In 1955, at age forty-nine, Bede had left England to establish a Christian contemplative center in India. His aim was not to convert anyone but to provide a meeting place between Hindus and Christians at the deepest level. "I am so tired of the childish pretense," he would write to a friend in the midseventies, "that Christianity is the only true religion and must be shown to be superior to others." "A Christian ashram," he wrote, "must be a place where a meeting can take place in 'the cave of the heart' between the Christian experience of God through faith in Jesus Christ and the Hindu experience of 'Brahman,' the One 'without a second,' the Ground of all creation and the 'Atman,' the Spirit, dwelling in the heart of every man." This meeting, he insisted, has to take place "in the depth of the contemplative experience, which is only possible in a life dedicated to the search for God, the quest for the Absolute, that has always been the goal of monastic life." The great mistake of missionaries, he thought, was to imagine they could preach the gospel and receive nothing themselves from Hindu culture.

Du Boulay is unsure of Bede's intellectual contribution to interfaith dialogue. She has reason to be. If I understand him, Bede went beyond Vatican II's inclusivism - the idea, as in Karl Rahner's "anonymous Christianity," that Christianity embraces the truth of all the world's religions. Such an approach remains imperialistic; it implicitly reduces the otherness of other religions to a version of one's own tradition. This kind of inclusivism gives the impression that orthodoxy must be repressive, that by its very nature any Christian truth claim will assault the integrity of other religions.

In contrast, Bede's approach to the interfaith dialogue tried to be pluralistic. But like many other contemporary pluralists, the key to his reconciliation of opposites lay in assuming that all religions point to the same ultimate truth. The trouble comes as soon as one specifies what that single truth is. For many pluralists, it sounds like modern Western liberalism. For Bede it came across sounding like the monism of Advaita Vedanta. "All meditation," he wrote, "should lead into silence, into the world of 'non-duality,' when all differences - and conflicts - in this world are transcended - not that they are simply annulled, but that they are taken up into a deeper unity of being in which all conflicts are resolved - rather like colors being absorbed into pure white light, which contains all the colors but resolves their differences." What's the problem here? Frankly, this merely exchanges the imperialism of Western metaphysics for an imperialism of Eastern metaphysics. The distinctive differences of diverse religions are swallowed up in a bland transcendental unity. On these terms, figures like the prophets Amos and Hosea would be barred from ecumenical conferences as being entirely too noisy and ill-tempered. In short, "open-minded" Christians could only enter the interfaith dialogue if they left some of their basic commitments at the door.

Bede Griffiths may have been a saint. He seems to have gotten an awful lot very right in practice. But when it came to understanding how Christianity is to relate to the other great faiths of the planet, he and we have more figuring to do.

David Toolan, S.J., is an associate editor of America magazine.