Faithful conflict:

...The pagan left Abba Olympius's cell a pagan, who had no doubt learned something from his visit with a Christian monk...

...By the same token, the monk gives him a respectful listening, and his elders agree with what the pagan priest has said...

...I also think it is quite wrong...

...On the other hand, there are irreconcilable differences between some of the great religious traditions...

...Athanasius...

...If we are wrong about this we are wrong about something that matters infinitely...

...Any Christian (or for that matter anyone from any religious tradition) could benefit from a reading of the late Chogyam Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Sham-bhala Press) which is, among other things, a clear-eyed critique of a very American approach to religion...

...This encounter may be fruitful...

...Anthony the Great, the father of Christian monasticism, was a friend and ally of the very orthodox St...

...Truly, if you see nothing, then it is because you have impure thoughts in your heart, which separate you from your God, and for this reason his mysteries are not revealed to you.' So I went to report the priest's words to the old men...

...We can sharpen our appreciation for our own tradition in this encounter, and the more seriously and respectfully we consider the radical Buddhist alternative, the more we will understand the real nature of our own belief...

...in any case, it can be inferred that Christianity and the lives of the monks made him curious...

...In one sense Christian orthodoxy, in its purest, noncontentious sense, could be said to include even what lies beyond it, as the best poetry is surrounded by and points to silence...

...and you, giving yourself so much hardship, vigils, prayer, and asceticism, say that you see nothing...

...It was initially a lay movement, and according to many historians it was also, at least in part, a reaction against the legalization of Christianity, an attempt to preserve its original nature in the face of a respectability which could dilute and distort it...

...It is still not at all uncommon to hear Christian preachers speak of "what the Jews believed'' (as if there were none left), and contrasts are frequently drawn between "the old law" and Jesus' teaching...

...I have heard Christian preachers suggest that the Jews failed to heed their own messianic prophecies when they rejected Jesus...

...But where we try to live it and understand it more humbly, we can begin to see something of the point of the tale from the desert fathers...

...On the other hand, in some monasteries there was a more-or-less syncretistic approach to gnosticism and to such non-Christian traditions as Zoroastrianism, and this could be the sort of monastery the pagan priest was visiting...

...There are places, however, where Buddhism is directly helpful to Christianity...

...wisdom consists in seeing what is best and true in all of them, rejecting or at least minimizing particular allegiances...

...Buddhism, on the other hand, believes the idea of any subsistent individual identity to be an illusion...

...On the one hand, St...

...Maximus the Confessor) resemble Buddhist writing...

...Recent years have seen many changes for the better, but the strain continues...

...No other religious tradition has dealt so minutely with the phenomenon of simple awareness, and it is remarkable how closely some Christian monastic works (for example, those of St...

...Here it is: Abba Olympius said this, "One of the pagan priests came down from Scetis one day and came to my cell and slept there...

...Anti-Semites have, for centuries, conveniently forgotten the facts of Jesus' Judaism, and the Jesus of sentimental religious art is frequently so Aryan it is hard for some people not to picture our redeemer as a Swede...

...While it is important to see what is shared (and C.S...

...There is obviously one central point upon which the two traditions cannot be reconciled...

...For impure thoughts separated God from man...

...But here is a pagan priest, being received as a guest by a Christian monk, discussing religion with him in an obviously courteous, if pointed, way...

...Lewis's appendix to The Abolition of Man is a good beginning for those who don't believe in a common human wisdom-tradition), our differences matter greatly, perhaps even more than our similarities...

...so are some of the Christian ones...

...Its most recent derives from Jung...

...There is a real condescension in believing that we can see all of this, as it were, from above, as if we were capable of understanding from some uninvolved distance the essence of Judaism and Hinduism and Taoism, drawing from all the best and most important lessons...

...As one Jewish writer has put it, we live in a world which has obviously not been redeemed (Karl Barth, however, compared humanity's situation to that of an army which keeps fighting because it has not yet heard the news of the truce...

...The late Joseph Campbell is probably the best-known exponent of this point of view, which has had ancient forms...

...One of them involves the background of the desert fathers, the people (there were desert mothers too-I use the common term because "desert persons" really looks silly, and "fathers and mothers of the desert" too selfconsciously nonsexist) who made up the early Christian monastic movement...

...So do misunderstandings and misrepresentations on both sides...

...Some of the Buddhist arguments are particularly pointed...

...One explanation for this could be the fact that there were occasionally conflicting approaches to orthodoxy within early monasticism...

...Perhaps the most difficult relationship between religious traditions is the one which exists between Christianity and Judaism...

...Christians must try to understand, as sympathetically as they can, how dreadful and even blasphemous, how idolatrous the Christian claim must seem...

...I do not believe we are-but our belief in Jesus' divinity must be held in fear and trembling, and we must understand that there are many who reject it, not blindly, but for the very best and most reverent of reasons...

...Truth finally cannot be said completely, and words point beyond themselves...

...On the third hand (we have moved to another planet, now), the Apophthegmata Patrum, from which the story comes, is an orthodox work...

...It is marked, among other things, by the history of Christian anti-Semitism...

...They were filled with admiration and said this was true...

...The reality at the heart of this desire is what orthodoxy proceeds from, but it transcends orthodoxy, insofar as orthodoxy means the articulation of what has happened to men and women who have encountered the living God in revelation and prayer...

...This seems unusually courteous...

...but the views of Christianity and Buddhism may never be reconciled on this point...

...The pagan priest evidently thought that he and the monk, Abba Olympius, had something in common, and perhaps believed that he might learn something...

...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey FAITHFUL CONFLICT REJECTING CAMPBELL'S SOUP I was reading Benedicta Ward's excellent translation of the sayings of the desert fathers, The Desert Christians (Macmillan, 1980), and came across a fascinating passage...

...I think there is something important in this story which lies at a more basic level, and can teach something about the encounter between religious traditions in our own time...

...What is intriguing about this passage is that so much early Christian writing consists of polemics against paganism, and so much ancient non-Christian writing is equally polemical where Christianity is concerned...

...It is seductive...

...but in fact the Messiah was to be a worldly leader, and the glory that accompanied his triumph was to be obvious...

...Having reflected on the monks' way of life, he said to me, 'Since you live like this, do you not receive any visions from your God?' I said to him, 'No.' Then the priest said to me, 'Yet when we make a sacrifice to our God, he hides nothing from us, but discloses his mysteries...

...Christians see an eternal affirmation of life-even the particular lives of individuals-in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ...

...While there certainly is a difference, the equation of the law in Jewish teaching with mere legalism is a grotesque distortion, and people inclined to make it would do well to read Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel...

...Where we allow our allegiance to a tradition to become a club with which we can bash those who disagree, we have reduced the truth to something we hope to wield and manage to our own satisfaction...

...The monastic life was, among other things, an attempt to meet the living God, to know God as much as it was possible to know him...

...This quest for the vision of God and the revelation of his mysteries is not unorthodox...

...The monks remained Christian, having learned something from a pagan...

...There is an approach to religion which argues that all traditions are telling the same story in different ways...

...When truth becomes a political commodity, a token in the game of argument, orthodoxy is defined more by what it stands against than by the mystery it points towards...

...But if it is left at that, as if it were only a matter of getting the facts wrong, an important lesson is missed...

...On the point of Jesus' divinity, Christians believe Jews to be wrong...

...The point is that we can learn much more from compassionate and respectful disagreement than from smug and condescending agreement.ending agreement...

...There are several interesting things here...