Should there be one religion?

Last year Canadian religious commentator and broadcaster Tom Harpur had a column in the Toronto Star headed "Fresh thought a light to hope"--a title reminiscent of the Holy Father's book Crossing the Threshold of Hope. When he was growing up, Harpur said, he sang missionary hymns about the necessity of delivering the heathens, including the Hindus, from blind superstition and idolatry. Later as a divinity student, "It never dawned on me that Hindus had been worshipping the one God for centuries before the Bible was written. I never knew I would one day go to India and see the light of God's presence in a Hindu holy person."

Reading the Bhagavad-Gita he was "moved to find passages written about 500 B.C. that could have been penned by Paul or have been said by Jesus Christ." "Nobody could read this work," he claimed, "and not find that behind the multiplicity of energies is the one true God (Brahman) worshipped by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike.

Harpur comes to the following conclusion: "There is no `one, true religion' except that common core that can be found at the heart of all the world's major faiths once you get beneath the `wrappings'." What is more, he adds, the world will never know peace until the devotees of every faith expand their consciousness, and their knowledge, to see that this is so.

Hinduism

As John Cotter showed in a book entitled Syncretism a few years ago, the idea that a synthesis can be made of the world's religions, that the best can be taken out of them all to produce a harmonious creed, is arrant nonsense. Many have tried to make a synthesis of East and West. Four years after writing Brave New World, which deals partly with the need for religion but the absence of any believable form of it, the British writer Aldous Huxley wrote Eyeless in Gaza, the first of a succession of novels in which he presented the figure of a "soul doctor" who had a prescription for man's ills and unbelief. In a number of non-fictional works which followed, he did try to bring East and West together. Christian mystics like St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, he maintained, were following much the same methods and seeking much the same goal as were the Hindu mystics.

In his later life, he himself showed an earnest yearning for mystical experience; he even thought that psychedelic drugs would give him entry into that other world he wanted to reach. But in Eyeless in Gaza he had a character named Anthony keep a diary in which he wrote. "God--a person or not a person? Quien sabe? Only revelation can decide such metaphysical questions. And revelation isn't playing the game--is equivalent to pulling three aces of trumps from up your sleeve."

Christians believe in a personal God. Huxley did not. He wrongly thought that St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa sought and reached the same "divine ground" as the Hindu mystics did.

Buddhist "salvation" is not Christian

In the section on "Buddha?" in his Crossing the Threshold of Hope, the Holy Father explains the difference very clearly. The Buddhist notion of salvation is not at all like the Christian one. The "enlightenment" experienced by Buddha comes down to the conviction that the world is the source of evil and suffering for man. One must free oneself from this world, in fact break the ties which join us to our human nature, our psyche, and our bodies. We do not free ourselves from evil through the good which comes from God; we liberate ourselves only through detachment from the world, which is the source of evil. The fullness of such a detachment is not union with God, but nirvana, a state of perfect indifference to the world.

When St. John of the Cross writes of the need for purification, for detachment from the world of the senses, he does not conceive of that detachment as an end in itself but as a means of uniting oneself to that which is outside of the world--to a personal God, through the human soul being permeated with the living flame of love.

Christian mysticism is not born of negative "enlightenment." It is born of the Revelation of the living God, who "opens Himself to union with man, arousing in him the capacity to be united with Him, especially by means of the theological virtues--faith, hope, and, above all, love."

For Christians, the world is not something from which we have to be absolutely detached. The world has been created and is sustained by the Creator's love; it is enslaved by sin but has been redeemed by the crucified and resurrected Christ. So the Pope cautions those Christians attracted to the religious traditions of the East to first know their own spiritual heritage well and consider whether it is right to set it aside.

In this area as in so many others, John Paul II offers us excellent guidance. It is easy to be misled by popular religious columnists; when in doubt, turn to Peter, or, in our terms, to Peter's successor.