The Golden Fog
Beyond the Darkness: A Biography of Bede Griffiths
by Shirley Du Boulay
New York: Doubleday, 1998
(308 pages; $24.95, cloth)
by Dale Nelson
C. S. Lewis’s admirers have long appreciated a couple of autobiographies by pupils (and friends) of Lewis, published in his lifetime—John Wain’s Sprightly Running and Bede Griffiths’ The Golden String. Wain’s account of the wartime Inklings meetings, and the popularity of Lewis’s Oxford Socratic Club debates and Charles Williams’s rhapsodic lectures on Milton, belongs to a later period of Lewis’s career than Griffiths’ record of Lewis as a young scholar and tutor at Magdalene College.
Neither Lewis nor Griffiths was a Christian in 1926 or thereabouts, when Griffiths, hoping through the poetic imagination to come closer to truth, changed the focus of his university work from classical to English literature, and acquired Lewis as tutor. They became friends, discussing their ideas, pursuing a spiritual quest that had begun with intense experiences of “Joy,” and recommending books to one another. Griffiths contributed a valuable essay to James Como’s collection, C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, recalling how Lewis commented, shortly before his death, on their nearly forty years of friendship.
Their ways diverged, however, soon after both returned to Christian faith and practice in the early 1930s. Alan Griffiths (December 17, 1906—May 13, 1993) became a Roman Catholic and, almost at the same time, a Benedictine monk; Lewis, remaining Anglican, decided against lengthy debate of their theological differences, complaining, “With other Catholics I find no difficulty in deriving much edification from religious talk on the common ground: but you refuse to show any interest except in differences.”
Alan Griffiths was clothed as a postulant in January 1933. Almost five years later, he made his solemn profession as a monk, and in March 1940 was ordained a priest. He received the name Bede. In April 1947 he became prior of St. Michael’s Abbey at Farnborough, England, where he developed something of a following as a spiritual guide to lay visitors and was the postulants’ Master of Studies. In December 1951, his abbot sent him to the northernmost Benedictine abbey in the world, Pluscarden in Scotland, perhaps concerned about an overly hospitable “apostolate of the parlour.” Here Father Bede wrote his autobiography, the “golden string” of the title referring to “the grace which is given to every soul, hidden under the circumstances of our daily life, and easily lost if we choose not to attend to it,” which leads “out of the labyrinth of life” to union with God. At Farnborough, he had met Father Benedict Alapatt, an Indian priest who fired him with the desire to set up, not missions and social work, but contemplative Christian life in India. Griffiths secured an “indult of exclaustration,” meaning official permission to leave the abbey to which he had been assigned. At the last moment the archbishop of Bangalore apparently got cold feet and sent a telegram against the trip; Griffiths ignored it, and he and Fr. Benedict arrived in India in March 1955.
It was his own bishop in India who gave him and his partner, Fr. Francis, saffron robes to wear—the identifying garment of the Hindu holy man. Early in the Indian portion of his life, Griffiths thought of Hinduism and Buddhism as providing “types and shadows of Christ” and the Church, awaiting, as did Judaism, the complete revelation of God, including the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. By 1962, though, Fr. Bede appears to have decided that the Christian’s task in India was “to discover Christ already present and active in the Hindu soul,” waiting to be born. For Christians in the Reformation tradition, this is a good example of “enthusiasm” or a “theology of glory,” at odds with the genuine theology of the Cross.
Griffiths certainly clashed with representatives of his own Church, as, for example, late in his life when he criticized Cardinal Ratzinger’s letter cautioning bishops about certain meditative practices. His Christian ashram had statuary depicting the Holy Spirit as feminine and Christ seated in lotus posture. He was ready to affirm adventitious “parallels” between faiths, e.g., that the Trinity is evident in the Hindu formula sat (being) chit (awareness) ananda (bliss). Perhaps once one has persuaded oneself that all religions are one, it is rather easy to make this sort of correlation. The root of the error seems to be in this idea: mystical experience is the summit of the life of faith; but manifestly other religions, as well as Christianity, foster mystical experience; therefore, at their best, all religions are one. If one starts with the idea that the gospel—the Atonement, the Cross, the Resurrection—is the essence of the Christian life, one does not so readily adopt the unity of religions.
The trajectory of Griffiths’ thought, then, took him far from the mere Christianity that his friend Lewis propounded in radio series and popular books. While Lewis thought Catholic authorities were right to make Pierre Teilhard de Chardin “shut up,” Griffiths sounds like the radical French priest when he writes, “This creation is in evolution towards the new creation.” In the years after Lewis’s death (1963), Griffiths achieved considerable fame, too, but as a proponent of what is now sometimes called “deep ecumenism,” and he looked to classical Hindu and Buddhist ideas and practices, and other non-Christian ways as well.
He affirmed the Kundalini Yoga conception of energy centers in the body, and eventually approved the Maharishi’s transcendental meditation. From 1968 till his death, his home was Shantivanam ashram, on the Cavery River in India. Liturgical readings incorporated passages from the Bible and from the Bhagavad Gita and other Hindu religious writings. In later years he read a book on the symbolism of Tarot cards and found it “the last word in wisdom,” and imagined the creation of a “community of love” each of whose members would be paired with one of the Tarot symbols: a married couple he was close to would have the roles of Magician and Empress, Griffiths himself would be the Hermit, etc. He said too that homosexual love could be “as normal and natural as love between people of the opposite sex.”
A month after a stroke in early 1990, Griffiths had an experience in which he felt that he was again near death; he felt a sense of unity with Christ on the cross, but “nothing happened”; and then, he felt an “inspiration . . . to surrender to the Mother.” He did so and felt overwhelming love. “Death, the Mother, the Void, all was love.” Andrew Harvey, author of The Direct Path: Creating a Journey to the Divine Through the World’s Mystical Traditions and editor of Essential Gay Mystics, reported that Griffiths “believed his stroke to be an initiation by the Mother (specifically in her Kali or Black Madonna aspect as Saving Destroyer and Killer of Illusion). [Griffiths was ‘compelled’ by her to] integrate within himself the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ powers of his mind and soul as to give birth with increasing passion, purity and intensity to the Divine Child within him, the ‘Christ-consciousness.’”
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