BOOKS
Zeik, Michael
Contemplative Christianity AELRED GRAHAM Seabury, $6.95 MICHAEL ZEIK Whenever I read a book these days by a western author writing about eastern spirituality, or comparing Christianity with the...
...Even discounting for the faddism, there is some truth to the idea that this generation is after the raw experience of God...
...But this is me, and not Graham...
...But when all is said and done, we have here a thoughtful book by a probing mind on a difficult subject, and Dom Aelred enables his readers even to disagree with him more literately than they would otherwise have been able...
...To me, however, when it has been thus far 'advanced' it is not recognizable as Christianity...
...Hier stehe ich...
...We ought never indulge a 'protes-tant' mind-set against the great insights, spiritual seeds, broadcast by the lavish hand of God, as He scattered logos over the earth...
...Ich kann nicht anders...
...Dom Aelred believes, as I do, that it is as "Catholic" for us to be open to the values of Buddhism in 1976, as it was for Thomas Aquinas to be open to the values of that pagan, Aristotle, in 1276...
...I love and respect Buddhism...
...He quotes Ananda Coomaraswamy to the effect that Maha-yana Buddhists must be forewarned that their scriptures deal not with history but with spiritual processes in the heart of man, and "that matters of historical fact are without religious significance...
...Here, says Graham, no doubt thinking of the world of Calcutta, "we are taken too far in the non-historical direction...
...Contemplative Christianity AELRED GRAHAM Seabury, $6.95 MICHAEL ZEIK Whenever I read a book these days by a western author writing about eastern spirituality, or comparing Christianity with the eastern religions, I look first of all to see if he has been "snowed...
...At this point, however, the balance tilts...
...Agreed...
...To return to the question of balance, the author is aware of the limitations of the East, as he certainly is of those of the West...
...Paul) with Coomaraswamy to this extent: the death and resurrection of Christ, besides being historic facts, are also intended to be a "process forever unfolded in the heart of man...
...Would that the contemplative orders would offer our students the appropriate retreats...
...But we have no religion...
...Streeter to the effect that "to isolate divine sonship to Jesus Christ"- and not, presumably, to extend the privilege to Buddha, Confucius, Yaj-navalkya, and Gandhi-defeats "the attempt to produce a satisfactory doctrine of the Incarnation...
...We Catholic intellectuals have been so hypocritical on this point...
...Yet he agrees (as does St...
...Nevertheless," writes Graham, "though Western Christianity still has something to give to the East, it has probably more to gain from the encounter...
...Does he compare the worst moments of the history, the baser elements of the culture of Christendom, with the high points exclusively, of Hinduism, Buddhism, etc...
...Anyone who expects otherwise has neither read Confucius, understood Buddha's Eightfold Way, nor really appreciated the meaning of Incarnation...
...I have spoken to Zen monks, as has he...
...It is now the former which is fashionable, and, for that reason, more corrosive of the truth...
...The opposite bias, of course, had been operative, until this decade, for two and a half centuries...
...I am thinking of the not-insignificant number of western students, Christian and Jewish, who have left their respective faiths to embrace the Buddhist discipline-and I mean discipline...
...We have half-Easters because we have half-Lents...
...chastity...
...What actually happens in the world of space and time can be of immense significance, if it is a means whereby men are delivered from selfishness and attain a state of being beyond the temporal order...
...Just many customs...
...and (in 1976...
...This makes them happy...
...I tell them that I and my friends are Buddhist...
...but there is a difference between "openness" and "Catholicity" on the one hand, and formlessness and syncretism on the other...
...The author may be guilty of nothing more than ambiguity here, I don't know...
...But do we think it will not take love to get the West to eat less meat in a global 'triage' situation...
...frequently, manual labor...
...In fact it was their brutal honesty on the subject that endeared them to me...
...After insisting on the dignity of the body, and the intimacy (if not unity) of the body-soul relationship, we drop the practices of fasting, penance, etc., and still expect to have 'human' religious experiences...
...Amen...
...Italics, my own...
...Hours of daily meditation and silence...
...But as for the double-Christ theory, even the Buddhists say "the world would explode if it contained more than one Buddha...
...While all our sermons and newly sophisticated theologies are fingers pointing to God, they are not God...
...Dom Aelred Graham, Benedictine monk, scholar, presently leading a contemplative life at Ampleforth Abbey in England, does, much of the time, keep his balance and his sense of reality in this book-which is, for all practical purposes, a dialogue with eastern spirituality...
...Americans seemed so shocked when I answered their questions honestly about religion in Japan, that now I lie...
...Frankly, many of the monks I spoke to said that real Buddhism was virtually 'finished' in Japan...
...In this, he overlooks the more plausible theory of the noted scholar Edward Conze, that it was Christianity which appears to have influenced the development of Mahayana Buddhism...
...Difficult questions of historical research aside, I have been to Japan, as has Dom Aelred...
...And Christianity has never been timid or niggardly about this...
...More and more we are making Christianity into an "intellectual experience...
...Indeed, we must not only be open, we must be ready to emulate whatever in the eastern spiritual tradition is worth emulating...
...And let the rigor be...
...Of course the main point is "love...
...Here I must part with the author -unless he refers to the "sonship" that is open to every human being ever born...
...Gott helff mir...
...He should be read...
...Or he may believe in the equal divinity of Jesus, Buddha, et al., and feel he is advancing Christianity...
...There has been, after all, a nuclear bomb, a revolution in sex and morals, and people are in a hurry...
...But looking down one's long, white, aristocratic nose at the lesser breeds of mankind is no longer even socially, let alone academically, respectable...
...The culmination of Graham's attitude is found in his approving quote of B.H...
...I might add the story related to me by one of my Japanese students in her recent term paper...
...More than that, he accepts uncritically the dubious thesis of Edgar Bruns that Mahayana has already infiltrated Christianity through the fourth Gospel (edited in Alexandria, where Buddhist influence was supposedly operative...
...They have, it seems to me, a less rosy view of the condition of Buddhism, and what the West might gain from them, than he...
Vol. 103 • September 1976 • No. 20
