A Follower of Christ
and
a Disciple of Sri Aurobindo
CORRESPONDENCE
between
BEDE GRIFFITHS AND K. D. SETHNA (AMAL KIRAN)
The Integral Life Foundation
P.O. Box 239
Waterford CT. 06385
USA
First published 1996
(Typeset in 10.5/13 Palatino)
© Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna)
Published by
The Integral Life Foundation, U.S.A.
Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry
PRINTED IN INDIA
From K. D. Sethna to Father John Martin
25.4.82
Your extremely friendly letter and the enclosed fine-feeling'd articles of Bede Griffiths have been lying in front of me for quite a time. Now at last I have sufficient leisure to give them the lengthy consideration they deserve.
Let me at the very start tell you that I remember our meeting in the Ashram with great warmth and also that I have never wavered in my general admiration for Bede Griffiths ever since I came across a pamphlet of his on Hinduism and Christianity. Recently I went through his Return to the Centre, marking several passages of keen insight which go beyond the conventional and traditional in common Christianity and make a living contact with the basic truths of all mystical experience. Orthodox Roman Catholicism might get shocked on finding grounds to suspect what may be called "panpsychism" or even "pantheism" - but actually these "heresies" appear not in their European form which can be taken to exclude or negate the transcendent Divine but in their Indian version in which, as far back as the Rigveda, the Seers perceived about the Supreme Purusha (Person) that "one quarter of him is here on earth, three quarters are above in heaven". In these matters as well as in many others one would not be wrong to term Griffiths an Aurobindonian Christian.
How indeed can he be essentially anything else when his book contains the truest and greatest compliment ever paid to Sri Aurobindo by any Roman Catholic? Perhaps he is the only Roman Catholic interpreter - except for Abbé Monchanin and Beatrice Bruteau - who gives Sri Aurobindo his due. Compared to him, writers like Father Feys, for all their show of intellectual acumen, are plausible frauds in the end. What,
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for instance, can be more false than the assertion that Sri Aurobindo is all for an impersonal Brahman and gives no importance to the Personal Divine and man's relationship with Him of love and service? Self-surrender to the Divine Mother is the whole heart of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga. He1 has emphatically declared it as something "simple and familiar" that the entire reason of his Yoga has always been "that to follow after the Impersonal only brings inner experience, or at the most mukti [=liberation]. Without the action of the integral Divine there is no change of the whole nature. If it were not so, the Mother would not be here and I would not be here if a realisation of the Impersonal were sufficient". So memorable is Griffith's passage on Sri Aurobindo that I should like to cull it for you from his book:
"In his philosophy there is a wonderful synthesis, based on the Vedanta, of ancient and modern thought. In him the values of being and becoming, of Spirit and matter, of the One and the many, of the eternal and the temporal, of the universal and the individual, of the personal God and the absolute Godhead, are integrated in a vision of the whole, which has never been surpassed in depth and comprehensiveness. In the integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo the values of matter and life and human consciousness and the experience of a personal God are not lost in the ultimate Reality, the divine Sachchidananda. Matter and life and consciousness in man are seen to be evolving towards the divine life and the divine consciousness, in which they are not annihilated but fulfilled." (p. 137)
The Supramental Physical and the Body of the Resurrection
Just after these words Griffiths writes:
"This is the goal of a Christian Yoga. Body and soul are to be transfigured by the divine life and to participate in the divine consciousness. There is a descent of the Spirit into matter and a corresponding ascent, by which matter is transformed by the indwelling power of the Spirit and the
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body is transfigured..." (pp. 137-8)
I can understand Griffiths's seeing a general analogue of Aurobindonianism in Christianity, but what he says here applies to every via mystica, especially the Sufi kind, which is a blend of Vedanta and Vaishnavism. The comparison can bear uniquely on Christianity if Griffiths's next paragraph can hold true. He continues:
"For a Christian this has already taken place in the resurrection of Christ. In his body matter has already been transformed, so as to become a spiritual body, which is the medium of the divine life..." {Ibid.)
In the address delivered at the International Transpersonal Conference held in Bombay from the 14th till the 20th February this year, Griffiths touches on the theme again and, referring to Sri Aurobindo, says:
"He conceived that...the Supermind descends not only into the soul or psychic consciousness but also into the body or physical consciousness. In fact, it is well known that he and the Mother, who accompanied him in all his work, were both attempting to transform the body, so that it would not be subject to death. Their attempt was not successful, but it corresponds to a deep human instinct, which urges us to seek for an immortal body, a diamond body, as it has been called in Buddhist tradition..."
"In the Christian belief the body of Jesus in the resurrection underwent precisely this transformation..."
Surely, Griffiths must know that both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were aware of all that had happened or been sought for in spiritual human history. They knew their Bible very well and never hesitated to point out in it legends or symbols, visions or intuitions having some link or other with their own spiritual quest just as they noted doctrinal or experiential affinities elsewhere to their integral Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation. If they were trying to repeat in their bodies and hoping to achieve in those of their followers what had taken place in Jesus, why did they not ever give a hint of it? It should be clear to us that
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there were radical differences between the Aurobindonian transformation and what the Resurrection of Jesus could be.
First of all, Jesus died before he was "raised". Neither Sri Aurobindo nor the Mother thought of a post-mortem transformation.
Secondly, the Resurrection, whether as actualised in Jesus or as potential for his followers, was never conceived in terms of a crowning evolution. There was no question of an aeonic development of earth-history by an evolutionary process starting with matter, passing through vital and mental stages and culminating in a supramental race. Nor was there any question of a prolonged Yoga, a concentrated and accelerated evolution by a mystical growth over self-dedicated years, moving gradually through what Sri Aurobindo has named psychicisation and spiritualisation, which would cover all that the via mystica attempted to compass in the past, and then progressing towards supramentalisation which, according to Sri Aurobindo, was mostly something new though, since the Divine Supermind is at the back of all earth-history in however concealed a form, there has always been a striving not only after an illuminated mind, a love-suffused heart, an ultra-capable life-force but also after a body of radiant health, free from the encroachment of tempus edax, "time the devourer". The resurrection implies no practice of sustained mysticism: St. Paul tells the Christians of his day that it would happen to them and to him "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye" (I Corinthians 15:52) - a sheer sudden miracle with merely a faith in Jesus and an ordinary religious piety as its antecedent or its conditio sine qua non.
Thirdly, the Resurrection is promised solely at the end of time. No one doing the Christian Yoga gained or even hoped to gain by his inner development a body such as is attributed to the risen Christ. I don't understand what Griffiths means in his book (p. 139) by writing: "The body of the Virgin Mary is said to have been transformed in the same way, and doubtless there are other saints and Yogis of whom this is
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true." I have not come across a reference to the Virgin Mary's body in the Gospels or in the Epistles of St. Paul. Indeed, St. Paul does not refer even to the virginal conception of Jesus by Mary, which one or two verses in the infancy accounts in a couple of books (Matthew and Luke) out of the twenty-seven comprising the New Testament state or suggest. Actually, St. Paul, whose Epistles are the earliest Christian documents, simply speaks of Jesus as having been "made of a woman, made under the law" (Galatians 4:4) or, as the Roman Catholic Jerusalem Bible phrases it, "born of a woman, born a subject of the Law".2 St. Paul's two expressions are invariably associated everywhere else in the Bible with natural humanity. To him the birth of Jesus was like that of any other man. But, even granting that there is scriptural authority for something extraordinary happening to Mary's body, how can it be compared to that of the resurrected Christ when Griffiths compares it also to those of "other saints and Yogis"? Has any saint or Yogi obtained a body comparable to "the body of Chirst, which is no longer limited by space and time" (p. 138)? On a certain instance in Griffiths's mind I shall touch a little later. Here I shall express my opinion that it would be a mistake of Christian thought to ascribe a Christlike resurrectionist body to any person before the end of time. For, the transformed body, which Griffiths mentions, is necessarily eschatological. The transformation à la Sri Aurobindo was envisaged as a goal to be reached in the present age, as Griffiths himself admits when he alludes to the lack of success in the efforts of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to accomplish here and now a transformation of the body by the Supermind's descent into the physical no less than the psychic consciousness. The objective of the Christian Yoga is poles apart from that of the Aurobindonian.
Fourthly and lastly, Christ's resurrected body is not an example of transformation that has stayed on the earth. It is reported to have appeared and disappeared, a mysterious visitant acting occasionally as grossly physical and occasionally as subtly substantial, and never in any case meaning to
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be a permanent part of terrestrial life in the course of history. It was not intended to be an achievement by a revolutionary evolution, as it were, which would serve as the beginning of a race of Supermen carrying to perfection both the inner and the outer existence, the individual and the collective being, in the immediate or near future. The physical transformation, divinisation, supramentalisation at which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother aimed has no anticipatory parallel in the resurrected body which Matthew, Luke and John and the author of the Acts picture Christ as possessing.
Ramalingam's "Golden Body" and the Supramental Physical
In addition, quite relevantly in the Griffiths-context, I may deny any presaging likeness to the Aurobindonian goal in the body of light which the songs of the nineteenth century's South-Indian saint Ramalingam describe. Griffiths has written an Introduction to a full-length biography and interpretation of Ramalingam by G. Vanmikanathan,3 who argues that the Saint's celebration of a "golden body", won by him and enjoying deathless life or immortality, is an inner experience consequent on the soul's union with the Supreme and its liberation thereby from our doomed physical existence. Griffiths demurs to such a gloss which harks back simply to the famous Upanishadic passage "from the unreal to the Real, from the darkness to the Light, from death to Immortality". Part of his comment4 on Ramalingam's spirituality runs: "This idea of an immortal body is found in Taoist mysticism and in the concept of a 'diamond body' in Tibetan mysticism as also in the 'spiritual body' of St. Paul and Christian tradition. Mr. Vanmikanathan seems to diminish the significance of this state of deathlessness by reducing it to the state of the delivered soul freed from the body in videha mukti."
No doubt, Vanmikanathan's terms are too general. But the shade of the Vedantic liberation cannot be washed away
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from a cry like Ramalingam's
Oh men of the delusive world!
It is not fair to perish in this world of ignorance.
Come along to live the great deathless life.
Come here and settle down in the status
Of (a member) of the purposeful Pure Blissful True Creed!5
or from a proclamation by Ramalingam like:
The talk of the adepts and the Jeewan-mukthas is about me.
What have I to do any more in this reviling world?
All the miseries of birth and death have vanished from today!6
What can legitimately be said by Griffiths is that the Vedantic mukti is not all in all in Ramalingam. Then his objection would be both correct and salutary. However, he errs in taking the Saint too literally. He overlooks the fact that Ramalingam speaks of "the primeval Civam", who is "transcendental Brahman",7 having a "golden body" and of Ramalingam "embracing" it and, as a result of that "moment" of "union", becoming "transformed into the form of eternal bliss .that is Civam".8 Here is indeed something ignored by Vanmikanathan, a sense of another state of corporeality than the gross and no bare infinite of illumination. And yet to suggest a change of the gross body into a golden one is to overshoot the mark: all that can be read is a subtle occult form of light experienced within the gross and felt as infiltrating it: Shiva's "golden body", his "form of eternal bliss", is then realised as the devotee's own inner body-sense - possibly leading now and again to some extraordinary functioning in the natural organism.
This is no exclusive or utterly new realisation of Ramalingam's. Manikavachakar, 3rd century AD, sings also of two bodies, a beatific imperishable one replacing in awareness the ordinary mortal sheath. In his Thiruvachakam, a book to
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which Ramalingam was much attached,9 Manikavachakar10 records:
The Superb One...
that effulgent Being
Who, for my sake, coming today,
Without any effort on my part,
did away with the body which spells ruin...
and abode in me;...
He made for me a body which yields ecstasy...
This is precisely Ramalingam's "form of eternal bliss", about which he has further chanted:
My Lord comes to give me a blissful form...
The Great Effulgence of Grace
Who has transcended the Fourth State is coming
To give me a form of bliss..."
I have gained the boon of the mortal body
turning into a golden body!12
I hugged the golden form,
which he pressed on me,
and rejoiced!...13
I am experiencing the great Fourth State,
I have joined the Universal True Path,
And, gaining the embrace of my Husband...
I have become His form;
I live, delighting in it...14
Mysticism of a high order is before us, joining up, as Griffiths15 remarks, with "that kind of bridal mysticism, which is so well known in Tamil Nadu and which has its parallels in both Islamic and Christian mysticism". But no question arises here of what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother intended by a supramental divinisation of the actual physical substance and shape. The Taoist "immortal body" and the Tibetan "diamond body" are also inner subtle realities which, it is hoped, will produce a marvellous exterior effect
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at some future period of the Divine Manifestation, like the Resurrection looked forward to by St. Paul as the taking on of a "spiritual body". Nowhere is any evidence of an already established lasting transfiguration of the gross physical.
The very description we have of Ramalingam's person by a long-standing eye-witness is enough to disprove the claim on his behalf. Vanmikanathan16 informs us: "Photography had come to India in the life-time of our Swamikal, but no photograph of him is available to us. It is said that attempts to photograph him always ended in failure. Nor do we have any portrait of the Swamikal. What we have today and what appears now in Books and periodicals is a modern artist's impression of the Swamikal, a product of the imagination based on certain accounts of the appearance of the Swamikal and on certain of his poems. Fortunately, we have on record a vivid description... by one of his contemporaries, Sri Velayutha Muthaliyar of Tholuvoor, a disciple of the Swamikal."
As Vanmikanathan17 records, Muthaliyar was a disciple for a quarter century and survived Ramalingam. From intimate knowledge he18 writes: "In personal appearance, Ramalingam was a moderately tall, spare man - so spare, indeed, as to virtually appear a skeleton - yet withal a strong man, erect in stature, and walking very rapidly; with a face of a clear brown complexion, a straight nose, very large fiery eyes, and with a look of constant sorrow on his face. Towards the end, he let his hair grow long; and what is rather unusual with Yogis, he wore shoes." Then Muthaliyar goes on to speak of Ramalingam's abstemious habits and his abnormal capacity to fast for long periods. But not the slightest hint of a material body of golden light is here.
Even if we go along with Griffiths about Ramalingam, what do we reach? He19 writes: "Ramalingam's mysticism does not involve the loss of the body in the final state of liberation but its transfiguration.... It is filled with the divine life and becomes a spiritual body no longer conditioned by the present laws of matter, but transfigured in the divine
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light. The story of his own passing that he simply disappeared, whether it is literally true or not, is surely of deep symbolic value in this respect." The last sentence is my cue for an Aurobindonian comment.
In one of his letters Sri Aurobindo20 observes: "Whatever may have happened to Chaitanya or Ramalingam, whatever physical transformation they may have gone through is quite irrelevant to the aim of the supramentalisation of the body. Their new body was either a non-physical or subtle physical body not adapted for life on the earth. If it were not so, they would not have disappeared..." Another letter21 says: "The idea of a transformation of the body occurs in different traditions, but I have never been quite sure that it meant the change in this very matter. There was a yogi some time ago in this region who taught it, but he hoped when the change was complete, to disappear in light. The Vaishnavas speak of a divine body which will replace this one when there is the complete siddhi [=spiritual perfection]; but, again, is this a divine physical or supraphysical body?" A body of light perpetually present amongst men has not been known so far: one that does not stay on the earth to mark a novel evolutionary turn in physical existence is certainly not the sort Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had in view as the grand finale of their all-harmonising, all-fulfilling Yoga.
Sri Aurobindo does not refuse to see some approach or other in the past to his ideal. But he is explicit about the basic divergence even where an apparent similarity may be discerned. He22 speaks of "the transformation of the whole physical mind, vital, material nature - not by imposing siddhis [=abnormal faculties] on them, but by creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the supra-mental being in a new evolution". And he continues: "I am not aware that this has been done by any Hathayogic or other process. Mental or vital occult power can only bring siddhis of the higher plane into the individual life - like the Sannyasi who could take any poison without harm, but he died of a poison after all when he forgot to observe the conditions of
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the siddhi. The working of the supramental power envisaged is not an influence on the physical giving it abnormal faculties but an entrance and permeation changing it wholly into a supramental physical." Again, Sri Aurobindo23 points out: "...the endeavour towards this achievement is not new and some yogis have achieved it, I believe - but not in the way I want it. They achieved it as a personal siddhi maintained by yogasiddhi - not a dharma [=inherent law] of the nature." The Aurobindonian supramentalisation has to be an intrinsic permanent state of the body by the junction of the descending free Supermind from above the mental plane with the Supermind evoked from matter where, according to Sri Aurobindo, it lies involved. Both the spiritual vision and the spiritual dynamics of his Integral Yoga differ from those recognisable in past "saints and Yogis".
We may pause a little over Sri Aurobindo's words: "this achievement" - and then the following "some yogis have achieved it, I believe". His meaning is not quite clear. What "this achievement" signifies is most probably "the transformation of the whole physical mind, vital, material nature" spoken of in the other letter, as a result of "siddhis" imposed by "mental or vital occult power". The term "transformation" can cover many Yogic changes. A supramental transformation by means of "siddhis" is not likely to be intended. But, even if it is, how does it bear on the case of Ramalingam?
His case is of particular relevance because not only did Sri Aurobindo and the Mother show special interest in him at one time but also because the Mother on two occasions made a remark on what Ramalingam had named "Grace-Light" or, as Vanmikanathan puts it, "Effulgence of Grace". On July 12, 1970 she greatly appreciated the term and the experience it stood for, which corresponded to one of her own experiences. She was even reported as equating the Grace-Light to the supramental consciousness and as saying that a number of individuals, known or unknown, are likely to have brought this consciousness to the earth throughout the ages but that now instead of an individual possibility Sri Aurobindo
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and she were working to establish it as a collective possibility, as a terrestrial fact and a possibility for all. On July 22 the topic was raised once more. She was pointedly asked whether the Grace-Light and the Supramental Light were one and the same thing and whether she had meant that Ramalingam had already worked out the individual supra-mentalisation rather than that this was specifically her endeavour and Sri Aurobindo's. She replied: "It is a pity, but you make me say what I have not said. Thus I have nothing to answer to your conclusions which are unfounded." Asked if she had really implied Ramalingam to have been directly in contact with the Supramental, her reaction was: "Why not?... I have the feeling that men have big scissors and always want to cut off bits of the Lord!"* However, she categorically countered the earlier report which had equated the Supramental Light with the Grace-Light. She declared: "The Grace-Light is not the Supramental Light but one aspect of it, rather one activity of the Supramental."24
The last statement is a decisive clarification. Face to face with it we should be absolutely illogical if we attributed to Ramalingam a supramentalised body. How can just a single aspect or activity of the multifarious Supermind, which is not only light but also consciousness, force, bliss and whose light even is not confined to being "Grace-Light", be claimed to have accomplished so radical and extreme a phenomenon as the total supramentalisation of the body - a most difficult task which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who were in possession of the entire Supermind in their inner consciousness and had suffused with it even their subtle forms, considered nobody to have done and which they were themselves still seeking to do?
With the help of Grace-Light Ramalingam must have had a remarkable result in his subtle form, as compared to most other Yogis of the past, but even there the supramentalisation could be no more than partial. As for the physical body, the
* Letter to the author by Satprem after an interview with the Mother.
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consequences are bound to have been still less - certainly the powerful sense of a rare glory outflowing from the inner self and yet as certainly falling short of any appreciable physical supramentalisation, no matter what unusual capacities it may have brought about. The question whether by means of them Ramalingam, as Griffiths words it, "simply disappeared" cannot be settled. Griffiths, for one, is not sure that the story "is literally true".
Have we any sign of the Mother's attitude here? Her outlook can be gauged from a talk in January I960.25 The problem was put to her: "I have read that the bodies of some saints, after their death, have disappeared and become flowers or just vanished into the sky. Can such a thing happen?" The Mother replied: "Everything is possible, it could have happened, but I do not believe it did. We cannot always believe what is said in books. Nor is there a necessary connection between such a phenomenon and sainthood." Then the Mother affirmed that some "mediums", who are often people of very low character, perform dematerialisation and rematerialisation under the strictest scientific control. So such phenomena do genuinely occur in rare instances. After this, the Mother returns to the point originally raised and concludes: "In connection with great or holy men all sorts of stories get started. When Sri Aurobindo had not left his body, there was circulated a story that he used to go out of the roof of his room - yes, physically - and move about in all kinds of places. If is even written down in a book. He told me about it himself."
Returning from Ramalingam to Griffiths's main theme, namely Christ, I may reiterate in conclusion on this subject that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother knew what Christ's resurrected body might connote and they did not regard the description of it as reflecting the transformation they had in mind. Not without significance did the Mother, in evident reference to religious history in general and to Christianity in particular, give the New Year Message of 1957: "It is not the crucified body but the glorified body that will save the
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world." As a later talk (September 13, 1967) clarifies, if Christ had a glorified body it belonged not to the world but to heaven.
Christianity, Reincarnation and Krishna
In Griffiths's remarkably wide-visioned book as well as in his recent elevating speech another sad deficiency is in regard to Reincarnation. He quotes Shankara to the effect that "the Lord is the only transmigrator". Reasoning from this, he infers that the one Self dwelling in humanity as in everything is alone the reality that passes from life to life. In support he quotes Aquinas's dictum: "All men are one Man." The whole argument strikes me as an evasion of what the theory of reincarnation implies.
Did not Aquinas write at some length on the individual soul created by God at birth? And did not Shankara too grant a "jivatman"? He may have regarded the "jivatman" as ultimately an illusion, but then he regarded the "Lord" also as the highest illusion and believed the birthless and deathless, undivided and qualitiless Atman or Brahman, a-cosmic and free from name and form, to be the one and only Existent. In the world which for all practical purposes he took as real, even though for the final spiritual experience it might be mere Maya, he granted the traditional Indian view of the individual soul reincarnating or transmigrating. Aquinas can escape just as little as Shankara the destiny, whatever it may be, of each separate man. Both Shankara and Aquinas are brought in by Griffiths in order not to abandon the dogma of a new soul called into existence ex nihilo at every birth and to evade the concept of a soul going through many lives, getting diverse experiences, gradually rising higher and higher. If evolution is a fact and if it is to have a spiritual meaning, the spiritual evolution can proceed only through the progress of an individual soul through a series of lives across the ages. Reincarnation in a literal sense is unavoidable in a spiritually evolutionary world-vision.
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Doubtless, there is a host of subtleties and the popular idea is too school-masterish: Sri Aurobindo has discussed all the aspects of "rebirth" in a few exceedingly insightful chapters of The Life Divine and put it in the right framework. If Griffiths is drawing strength, as he does, from modern science for his spiritual outlook he can ill afford to get round the individual soul's spiritual evolution. He has accepted many truths of the Spirit from India, which his too conservative co-religionists would be inclined to look askance at. It is best not to jib at literal reincarnation. Perhaps it should be enough for him to believe that the soul was created out of nothing at the very start of the evolutionary process and that afterwards it goes on getting reborn in the manner Sri Aurobindo expounds.
I personally don't fancy this compromise. It is a pity that one so profound in his spiritual practice and so finely touched by the tremendous truths of Indian seerhood should have to make concessions to his accepted religion and feel compelled not only here but in a number of other instances to argue the superiority of that religion: thus "Christian love" is sought to be made out so much greater than the love that flows from the heart of both Hinduism and Buddhism to all creatures and not merely to human beings. Similarly, Krishna, though appreciated, is cut down in comparison to Christ and also relegated to the world of myth. Krishna is obviously historical in the Chhandogya Upanishad. In the Mahabharata he is depicted fully as a human being who is the Divine Incarnate. Even in the Brindavan story the substratum of reality is clear in the midst of the poetry and the symbolism. And why does Griffiths sidetrack to the Brindavan-context the phrase quoted from Chapter XVIII.65 of the Bhagavad Gita and declared to have been spoken on the battlefield of Kurukshetra: "Give me thy mind and give me thy heart and thy sacrifice and thy adoration. This is my word of promise: thou shalt in truth come to me, for thou art dear to me"? R. C. Zaehner,26 a convert to Catholicism, looks on the Gita as "the most significant sacred text in the whole history of
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religion", and indeed the range of spiritual vision and experience it sets before us cannot be matched by anything in any other scripture. (Here I hold no brief for the Gathas of Zarathustra, though I was born a Parsi.) The Krishna who emerges from whatever myth and legend have grown around his historicity is a uniquely many-sided and magnificently soul-satisfying figure at once ideal and actual, immense and intense, oceanic and intimate, Himalayan and heart-luring -Lord and lover, Master and life-companion. Those who inwardly know him are not just indulging in poetic ecstasy: he is to them both the Supreme and a fact of history. It is out of such knowledge that Sri Aurobindo has said that in Krishna we have the certainty of the Divine having at least once touched the earth.
Scriptural Translation
There are some other points in the Book and in Griffiths's conference-address which I could question, but I'll pass over them at the moment, for they are mostly concerned with secondary matters like scriptural translation - I mean rendering of some Biblical passages, which strike me as misguided. Only one text I'll mention in passing. The famous "Logos"-prelude in John's Gospel has a controversial reading at one point (1:13). The commonly accepted version uses the third-person plural, but the Jerusalem Bible prepared by French scholars differs from it, although admitting in a footnote the general opinion against which it runs. The eminent Roman Catholic scholar Raymond E. Brown is quite frank about the untenableness of the minority view to which Griffiths subscribes. He27 remarks: "The third-person singular reading in John 1:13: 'He who was begotten, not by blood, nor by carnal desire, nor by man's desires, but of God', is considered by most an early patristic change from the original plural in order to make the text christologically useful." Brown28 expresses his surprise at quite a number of French-speaking exegetes favouring this reading although it
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is "not found in a single Greek Gospel ms". I don't know why Griffiths flouts the scholarly consensus. But I won't dwell overmuch on these things lest I should convey to you a wrong impression of my attitude to him. I should like to turn to his scientific deliverances.
But here there is a danger of my being carried away by the fascination of the subject. Already my letter has lengthened out inordinately. The new discussion must be reserved for some other time. I am not at home with Rupert Sheldrake's New Science of Life; so I shan't venture to treat it. Fritjof Capra's Tao of Modern Physics has been in my hands for quite a time and I think I can comment on it a little as well as on Griffiths's understanding of it. In the meanwhile please acknowledge this letter and accept my regards and convey the same to your teacher whom I have esteemed for several years.
K. D. Sethna
References
1.Sri Aurobindo on Himself, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 26, p. 449.
2.The Jerusalem Bible (Longman, Darton and Todd, London, 1966), p. 326 of the New Testament.
3.Pathway to God trod by Ramalingam Swamikal (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay, 1976).
4.Ibid., p. xviii.
5.Ibid., p. 677.
6.Ibid., p.659.
7.Ibid., p. 728.
8.Ibid., p. 730.
9.Ibid., p. 46.
10.Ibid.
11.Ibid., p. 710.
12.Ibid., p. 730.
13.Ibid., p. 731.
14.Ibid.
15.Ibid., p. xvii.
16.Ibid., p. 44.
17.Ibid.
18.Ibid.
19.Ibid., p. xviii.
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20.Letters on Yoga, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, 1972, Vol. 22, p. 94.
21.Ibid., Vol. 24, p. 1237.
22.Ibid., Vol. 22, pp. 78-79.
23.Ibid., p. 95.
24.Ibid.
25.Words of the Mother, The Centenary Edition (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1980), Vol. 15, p. 395.
26.Concordant Discord: The Interdependence of Faiths (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 117.
27.Raymond Brown, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus (Paulist Press, New York, 1973), p. 59.
28.Ibid., fn. 96.
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Saccidananda Ashram, Shantivanam,
Tannirpalli - 639 107
Kulittallai, Tiruchi Dt.,
Tamil Nadu
February 11th 1983
Dear Mr. Sethna,
I was interested to read your letter on the Aurobindonian Christian in Mother India. I do indeed owe a great deal to Sri Aurobindo and feel nearer to him than to any other Indian thinker. As regards the criticism which you make, I did not mean to suggest that the resurrection of Jesus corresponded with the transformation of the body as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother conceived it, but simply that the final transformation and transfiguration of the body which they were seeking did actually take place in the resurrection.
My difficulty with the conception of Sri Aurobindo is that he seems to have conceived the supermental manifestation as taking place in time and space. But my understanding of the final state of man is that it transcends both time and space. This seems more in accord with the present understanding of time and space as conditions of our present mode of consciousness. When we transcend our present state of consciousness, we shall transcend time and space. In my understanding this is what happened to the body of Jesus at the resurrection. He appeared in time and space for a short time, and then he passed beyond into a final state beyond time and space - that is, the eternal state.
On this theory death is a passage to this higher state of consciousness. Jesus opened the way through death so that others can now pass through death into eternal life. This was a cosmic event - as Sri Aurobindo conceives the supermental manifestation - which has its effect throughout space and time.
It has not been customary to conceive this in terms of
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evolution, but just as Sri Aurobindo introduced this concept of evolution into the Vedic tradition, so I think we can conceive the resurrection as the culmination of the evolutionary process - the passage beyond matter and life and mental consciousness into transcendent, divine consciousness.
The reference to the Virgin Mary is based on the doctrine of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, body and soul, into heaven, which is a defined doctrine in the Roman Church. It is not found in the New Testament but appears in late tradition. Karl Rahner, a leading Catholic theologian, has suggested that there is no reason why other saints should not have had the same experience. In any case, at the end of time, this will take place in all men. We have to think in terms of past, present and future, but in the ultimate state all time is realised in a single Now.
The reference to St. John's Gospel was not to 1.13, but to 1.3-4, where there is an alternative reading: "Everything that was words was life in him."
I shall be interested to see your succeeding letter. Do you know Capra's Turning Point, which is even more remarkable than The Tao of Physics?
Yours sincerely,
BEDE GRIFFITHS
21 rue Francois Martin, Pondicherry - 605 001
16.2.83
Dear Father Griffiths,
I was glad to hear from you. I have been keeping in touch with your writings over many years. Recently Father Martin sent me your Marriage of East and West. I have read it carefully and enjoyed reading it. I have many things marked in it, mostly the insights but here and there also its oversights. When I have more time I should like to write to you about these things. The first time I referred to you was in my book, The Spirituality of the Future: A Search apropos of R. C. Zaehner's
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Study in Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin (Associated University Presses, Inc., New Jersey, 1981), pp. 168-9:
"Surely, the Roman Catholic Christianity that might be a vital component of the complex modern soul would not altogether be that of Teilhard but one that, along with the Teilhardian idea of a superhumanity achieved through evolution, would find in itself something of the wideness one perceives in the New Catholic Encyclopedia (published by the Catholic University of America, 1967). There Dom Bede Griffiths, at the end of a twenty-four-column article on Hinduism, writes: 'To a Christian. Hinduism presents on the whole the most profound preparatio Evangelica the world has seen.' Even in this there is a soupçon of patronage, but the attempt to understand and evaluate correctly is evident and the Christian bias is far indeed from being offensive. In fact, since the author is a Christian minister, it is perfectly natural; yet it does not vitiate in the least the genuine appreciation shown of the Indian vision."
As regards your explanation of what you meant by paralleling the resurrected body of Jesus with the supramental transformed body towards which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were working, I find it difficult to see that just because two kinds of bodies are both transcendent of time and space they are essentially of the same kind. All subtle bodies go beyond the temporal and spatial conditions under which the gross body operates. Even the bodies which Sri Aurobindo calls subtle-physical, vital, mental and which many Yogis have brought into action exceed our laws of time and space. But all of them can act under our conditions and manifest in relation to the gross body. Indeed they are meant to manifest in evolution if evolution is going to be some sort of fulfilment on earth and not just a passage towards the supra-terrestrial. If you conceive the gross body as a closed system and not as having all the other bodies behind it and involved in it and waiting to be evolved and manifested, then there is no possibility of a terrestrial fulfilment. According to Sri Aurobindo all that is beyond is also implicit here and the
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aim of evolution is to use the urge we have towards the Beyond to call the powers of the Beyond to help free their own hidden counterparts here below. Our time and space are not forever restrictive of the transcendent state: they are what they are because evolution has reached a certain level: they, as we know them, are, in your words, "conditions of our present mode of consciousness". You ignore the words I have inserted: "as we know them". For you, when our mode of consciousness changes and becomes spiritual, they will cease: for me they will cease to be what they are and grow instruments or media of a higher mode of consciousness.
Perhaps ultimately the two differing ways of seeing "first and last things" depend on the old view that the whole aim of life and earth is to make us ready to go elsewhere to find our consummation, and the new view of Sri Aurobindo that there has to be not only an ascent into the Spirit but also a full descent of the Spirit. You also speak of the double movement in your writings but in the final resort you lean to the Zoroastrian-Christian-Islamic emphasis on the paradisal otherwhere. Even the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, which testified to the importance of earth-life by accepting numerous rebirths, put their hope of total liberation in a flight to the supra-cosmic. Possibly the basic reason was that no power, however "divine", was known which could divinise in the most concrete manner embodied existence. In the vision of the Platonic Archetype and much more in that of the Causal Body, kārana sharīra, in the Upanishads a hint was caught of something that could lead to the Supramental Manifestation. Even the secular search for the elixir vitae and the semi-esoteric quest of the philosopher's stone had some glint of what Sri Aurobindo knew and wanted to establish. But short of the Aurobindonian philosophy and Yoga there has been no solid ground of theory and practice for what he envisaged as total supramentalisation of individual and collective life.
Now to other matters. I won't discuss the doctrine of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary nor Karl Rahner's generalising
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suggestion. It may interest you that the feast of the Assumption which falls on 15 August coincides with the birthday of Sri Aurobindo. Both he and the Mother regard it as symbolic of the elevation of matter into the Divine Nature, which is a cardinal point in the Aurobindonian evolutionary Yoga: only, in that Yoga the elevation does not make the body disappear into the Divine Nature but rather makes the Divine Nature appear in matter in an all-fulfilling culmination.
I am afraid you have forgotten what you actually quoted from St. John's Gospel. It was in reference to the Virgin Birth, and that has nothing to do with 1.3-4: "everything that was made was life in him." Here is the quote from Return to the Centre (pp. 64-5):
"The Virgin birth of Jesus is a sign of the emergence of the new man, a further stage in the evolution of humanity. It marks the transcendence of sexuality, the achievement of human perfection. The new man is not born of sexual generation - 'not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.' This is achieved because a woman is found who can make the total surrender of herself in love."
Here you are alluding to 1.13. The same occurs in your Marriage of East and West (p. 34): "The birth of Jesus from a virgin was the sign of the birth of a new humanity, born 'not of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God.' "
In commenting on your choice of the Johannine wording I have drawn attention to the fact that the reading you have adopted does not occur in any Greek MS and is a later modification by the Fathers to make St. John support the idea of the Virgin Birth. What St. John says is not said about Jesus at all but about his followers and it indirectly suggests the Virgin Birth to be nothing save a symbol; for, if these followers, simply by believing in Jesus, could be in a state describable in the very same terms that would apply to the Virgin Birth spoken of in a short sentence at the start of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke - a sentence to whose contents there is not the least harking back in the rest of these Gospels - then the contents of this sentence cannot but be symbolic
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rather than factual to St. John. You have yourself taken St. John 1.13 as a sign of the new man, a new humanity and not exclusively as a description of Jesus - thus seeing in it a wide symbol - but you have linked the verse to Jesus' birth "from a Virgin" by accepting the patristic insertion of "who was born" in place of the original "who were born". You have tried to make the best of both sides. I think this is self-contradictory and, as far as the Fourth Gospel is concerned, one has to come down on one side or the other. In view of what is generally taken to be the original phrase, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth must be dissociated from St. John and an oblique implication acknowledged of the basically symbolic character of that doctrine from the Johannine standpoint.
Capra's Turning Point hasn't come my way yet. I have recently gone through The Dancing Wu-Li Masters and glanced at Talbot's Eastern Mysticism and the New Science. All such books contain fascinating matter and afford some glimpses of modern physics in its paradoxical aspects, but there is a sensational trend in these publications and too easy jumping to comparisons with the revelations of Indian and Chinese spirituality. Serious scientific commentators don't take such books into account in the final reckoning and The Turning Point has come in for criticism at their hands. What I have seen highly recommended as a truly scientific survey is Pagel's The Cosmic Code (Simon & Schuster, New York).
After writing to Father Martin in connection with you I wrote out a long piece on The Tao of Physics. It has been lying among my papers and one of these days I'll put it in Mother India and let you have a copy of the issue. In the meantime my regards - as also my admiration which has remained in spite of all my little fault-findings.
P.S. I have misplaced the pamphlet which first drew me to you. In it you had surveyed all the various Indian spiritual systems as well as referred to Ramana Maharshi.
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February 23rd 1983
Thank you for your letter. I don't think that you have got my point about the relation of the resurrection to Sri Aurobindo's conception of the Supermental manifestation. To me the great significance of Sri Aurobindo was that he conceived the ultimate state of man and the universe not as a 'flight to the supra-cosmic', as you say, but as the 'divinisation' of 'embodied existence'. But this is to me exactly what the resurrection signifies. Jesus did not just drop his mortal body and ascend to a higher sphere, but body and soul were transfigured by the divine, and this is what is implied in the resurrection of all men. St. Paul speaks of a 'new creation', when 'the creation will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God'. This 'glorious liberty' comes with what he calls the 'redemption of the body7, that is the divinisation of the body as well as the soul. Is not this extremely close to Aurobindo's conception of the Supramental manifestation? I would agree with you that when time and space are transcended, they will become instruments of 'a higher mode of consciousness'. Everything in our present mode of consciousness and existence is transfigured, not destroyed, in the final state.
As regards the Virgin Birth, I was not really intending to adopt the alternative reading of John 1.13. In both instances, which you quote, it applies primarily to the new birth of humanity, but I think that the Virgin Birth of Jesus is 'typical' or symbolic of this new birth of humanity (born of 'water and the spirit'). Though the virgin birth of Jesus is symbolic in this way, I don't see any reason to question that it was an actual event. The stories in Matthew and Luke date from 70 to 80 AD, so that by that time they must have become widely accepted. From that time onwards it becomes an accepted fact in the church and 'born of the Virgin Mary' appears in a baptismal confession at the end of the 1st century. But you think that this kind of transformation of the flesh by the spirit can be seen as part of the process of 'supramental manifestation',
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which in my view actually took place in the birth of Jesus. My suggestion is that the supramental manifestation was actually initiated in the birth, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, and this has released a power in the world by which humanity as a whole is destined to be transformed and become a new creation. This is already aj work in our present space-time consciousness, but will be fulfilled only when space and time are themselves transformed.
I am not quite sure which pamphlet of mine you refer to. I gave some lectures in Madras once which were published under the title Vedanta and Christian Faith. This is on the lines which you mention.
Yours very sincerely,
27.2.83
It is always a pleasure to hear from you. But I don't know whether we can bring our visions into perfect accord except that both of us look forward to a transfiguration of earth-existence, comprising soul and body. Sri Aurobindo, gazing back at all that spirituality had attained in the past, saw that everything had carried a hint or glint of the luminous terrestrial fulfilment he envisaged but also that the full sense of this fulfilment had never been caught because the plane of spiritual consciousness which he called Supermind had not been perfectly entered and explored. When I say "gazing back" I don't mean "mentally contemplating": he intuitively or experientially insighted the past realisations and their implications. He found nothing that could concretely, inherently, be compared to what he termed the Supramental Manifestation on earth as the result of an all-round Yoga accelerating a process which Nature, by the Supermind involved or implicit in it, has been laboriously following under the conditions of an agelong evolution which started
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with apparently the very opposite of the Divine Reality.
In the doctrines of the Resurrection and the Virgin Birth, as also in that of the Assumption of Mary, the Supermind which Sri Aurobindo sees as working at the back of earth's evolving history has put forth some anticipatory flashes. Even before Christianity there were small bright presages. But nowhere can we put our finger on any clear fore-glimpse of what Sri Aurobindo has laid out vastly as well as minutely in his works. Everyone is inclined to stick to one past religion or another and discover in it an older formulation of whatever is newly revealed. I am a Parsi Zoroastrian and I could try to pick out from the Avesta and the religious traditions following it a "prescience" of the Aurobindonian spirituality and philosophy. As you must know, much of early Christianity - including the doctrines of the Last Judgment and the Resurrection - is akin to Zoroastrianism, if not directly then at least through the Judaism, orthodox as well as Hellenised, which developed after the Babylonian captivity to which Cyrus the Persian put an end. I should think it a futile and obscuring endeavour, were I to attempt putting the new wine of Sri Aurobindo into old bottles and thereby limiting its superb undreamt-of possibilities of God-intoxication.
You strike me as going to an utter extreme of forcing new wine into old bottles when you say: "My suggestion is that the supramental manifestation was actually initiated in the birth, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus and this has released a power in the world by which humanity is destined to be transformed and become a new creation." Perhaps you will protest that the "extreme" with which I charge you is avoided by the word "initiated" instead of "accomplished". But if you do mean something less than "accomplished" may it not be that Christianity still leaves something of the spiritually new to be given by Sri Aurobindo and that he was not spending more than 40 years of a many-sided Yoga in doing no more really than putting old wine into new bottles?
Not that Sri Aurobindo himself cared whether people
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considered his work new or not. All he wanted is that they should have a proper sense of the tremendous Yogic labour he was at for bringing divinity to humanity and that they might endeavour to collaborate with it in order to bring about on a collective no less than an individual scale an evolutionary breakthrough. To me it is a pity that the response is so poor or else so conditional. Some hold that he, with his dream of a total divinisation of man, was pursuing a chimera: they have not grasped the meaning of those two lines of Savitri:
Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven,
The impossible God's sign of things to be.
Others hold that there appears to have been no special need for the mighty exertion Sri Aurobindo termed the Integral Yoga and himself underwent for nearly half a century: what he strove after is all there in Vaishnava or Tantric or Sufi mysticism or has been enshrined in the Christian religion ever since St. Paul spoke of a "new creation".
Mention of St. Paul brings me to the topic of the Virgin Birth. The idea of the Virgin Birth or, more accurately as Father Raymond Brown insists, the idea of the Virginal Conception is one of the finest and profoundest in Christianity, signifying that the Avatar is essentially born of the Divine Super-Nature, the Ever-pure One through whom we have to be new-born and who is addressed in Savitri -
O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the Universe,
Creatrix, the Eternal's artist-bride!
But whoever argues that this idea is part of the earliest original Christianity and reflects an actual physical historical event has, first of all, to face the totally negative evidence of St. Paul whose epistles are the most early documents of the Christian religion. St. Paul precedes both Matthew and Luke and his epistles are wholly devoid of any notion that the mother of Jesus bore her child in any way different from other women. To support the epistles in this respect there is
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the Gospel of Mark which comes definitely before those of Matthew and Luke. Not only does Mark lack the story of the Virginal Conception: he also presents Mary as if she never knew the mission of Jesus and Jesus as if he had no knowledge of his mother as an extraordinary vessel of God's grace. She and the rest of her children think Jesus had gone crazy and he on his side regards the disciples around him as closer to him in spirit than his mother or his brothers or his sisters. This tension between the two recurs in one form or another also in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke: even apart from that, nothing in them harks back in any manner to the contents of the single phrase implying the Virgin Birth in their opening sections. It should be obvious that the earliest Christian tradition had no sign of any extraordinary nativity.
Nor can we affirm that soon after Matthew and Luke their infancy narratives were universally accepted. The Gospel of John, which from the general theologico-spiritual viewpoint is perhaps the most important document after St. Paul's letters, exhibits no knowledge of the Virgin Birth - unless we gratuitously accept as genuine a patristic alteration in the first chapter. I don't understand why you have accepted it. The symbolic sense which you stress of spiritual re-birth through adherence to Jesus is best and directly served by the true reading which has a third-person plural and not a third-person singular. In fact, the symbolic interpretation is destroyed if you bring in the latter, which concentrates exclusively on one single example. As I said before, you want both the symbolic and the historical stand. And, in my opinion, you choose the wrong reading because you "don't see any reason to question" that the Virgin Birth "was an actual event". You are free to believe that an actual event took place as well as to look on it as a symbol for all humanity but you can't base yourself on John's Gospel, from which we can derive only a symbolic significance of the infancy narrative which found its way into Matthew and Luke yet which John completely ignores. I may add that even in John there are glimmers of the lack of recognition by son and
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mother of the exceptional character we should expect them to know in each other.
I don't doubt that "born of the Virgin Mother" appears in a baptismal confession at the end of the 1st Century, but the appearance of it makes no odds to what I have pointed out in relation to St. Paul, Mark and John, leave aside all the post-Matthew and post-Luke non-Gospel contents of the New Testament where too we miss the slightest allusion to the Virgin Birth. Whoever first introduced the doctrine was deeply inspired, most probably by some influence of Indian or at least Oriental wisdom, but scriptural evidence shows that it was no part of the earliest Christianity as well as that originally it was a purely symbolic vision and that the earliest traditions about Jesus and his mother constitute a strange disturbing comment on what Matthew and Luke suggest at the start of their Gospels.
Please don't get offended by my frank criticism. I am not talking out of any animus against Christianity or at random: I have made a prolonged study of the question and have a whole unpublished book on it apropos of Father Raymond Brown's open-minded treatment of the subject. Out of fear of being misunderstood I have refrained from serialising the book in Mother India. I would not like to pain any of the simple good-natured nuns who often come with their friends to the Samadhi of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
If you have any spare copy of the lectures you speak of, I shall be thankful to receive it from you.
Very sincerely,
K. D. SETHNA
March 2nd 1983
Thank you for your letter. As you say, we may not reach perfect agreement but I think that we can advance a little further. I would agree that while all religions have contributed their own insights into the final state of man,
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Sri Aurobindo has given us a new insight, and, in fact, what I am attempting in part is to see the 'new creation' of St. Paul and the whole concept of resurrection in the light of Sri Aurobindo's vision. I feel that he introduced two important insights; one was that the Supramental descends and penetrates the whole world of matter and mind. The other was that this was to be a collective phenomenon. In my understanding the body and soul of Jesus at resurrection were penetrated by the power of the spirit and underwent a supramental transformation, so that he actually became identified with the transcendent Reality. At the same time this released a power of the Spirit in the world which was a collective phenomenon, described by St. Luke as the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. I believe that this power of spiritual transformation remains permanently in the world, but it was only initiated by Christ and the apostles.
What Sri Aurobindo has done is to give a philosophical explanation of this phenomenon and to show how the process of transformation can be 'accelerated' as you say. What I feel is happening to-day is that we are beginning to understand the 'mechanics', as it were, of what was revealed in the ancient traditions under myths and symbols. To me Sri Aurobindo is one of the leaders in this process of understanding and forwarding the process of transformation.
As regards the Virgin Birth, I don't find the argument from silence very convincing. After all, the Sermon on the Mount is not found in Mark or John or only partially in Luke, and St. Paul seems to know next to nothing of it. Yet most people would regard this as the most authentic summary of the teaching of Jesus which we possess. I think that it is recognised now that the New Testament brings together several streams of tradition which were originally separate, and are often difficult to reconcile. This is seen, as Raymond Brown shows, in the stories of the Resurrection. I would therefore consider the Virgin Birth as a distinct tradition, found in two different sources, and accepted by Matthew and Luke as authentic between 70 and 80 AD. That it became
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part of the creed of the universal church in the 2nd century shows that it was eventually accepted as an authentic tradition. Of course, one can't prove that it is authentic, but it seems to me to be consistent with the whole tradition, especially in the light of the concept of the new creation. I did not intend to suggest that St. John refers to the Virgin Birth in. that text, but it is perfectly consistent with it. Don't forget that St. John does not describe the institution of the Eucharist, yet he must surely have been aware of it. There are so many puzzles in the New Testament!
With kind regards,
20.3.83
I am sorry I couldn't reply earlier. For one thing, there was a lot of work on my hands. For another, I felt a little discouraged by what seemed to me a rather facile use of certain terms of Sri Aurobindo's. He has specifically said that terms like "Supermind" and "Transformation" which he made current and into which he put a definite content were being taken up by others to cover what appeared to them to be the ultimate in spirituality or what was a favourite theme in the religion they professed. The Supermind is not equivalent to the Spirit or the Divine as generally understood: of course it is a divine and a spiritual state and power, but a state and power that has not been openly manifest in the world's religious history and the pursuit and realisation of which was the mission and life-work of Sri Aurobindo. He said several times that if he had found traces of its realisation in the past he would not have worked as he had done, hewing out paths and facing perils, but gone easily over charted routes. In none of India's own scriptures, in no religion either of East or West, in the depth of no mystical experience available to his insight into inner achievements did he find direct traces of the Supramental Consciousness
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and Force. So when you write of the "body and soul of Jesus" undergoing "at the resurrection... a supramental transformation", you make me very uneasy.
Of course, since Sri Aurobindo held that the Supermind was at the back of all evolution and history in order to prepare the way for its own emergence or manifestation, he has pointed to various signs of its secret working in the career of earth's spirituality or even in the course of the secular terrestrial adventure, but nowhere has he found any true sign of its open presence - not even in the highest revelations of India, the country whose many-sided comprehensive spiritual search was most likely to strike upon the Aurobindonian Gnosis. Indeed in these revelations he has discovered a background and a basis for his own further explorations and arrivals, but no concrete direct epiphany of the Supramental. He has written enough to render quite clear what precisely the Gnostic Supermind is and what it implies in a religio-philosophical vision. We must be on guard not to let the cherished substance of our own faiths assume a light which never was intended to be there and to see everything in them sub specie Aurobindonis and forget that neither in Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity nor Islam has Sri Aurobindo discerned the immediate knowledge of the Supermind - he has not hesitated even to declare that multifarious'Hinduism itself cannot be equated to his own final vision and message - and all this he has done not in a self-glorifying manner but with patient accurate detailed description of the characteristics of the Supermind both as the creative and the transformative divinity. If we do not attend to his clarifications and expositions we shall always be tempted to read into past spiritual teachings and events what could never have been there and we shall miss the great evolutive impact of Sri Aurobindo's appearance on our earth and the glorious future to which he calls us and for which his Avataric influence through the Integral Yoga is preparing us.
Things which are new as well as true must be perceived in
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their proper aura and ambience. Through their novel disclosures we may be able better to appreciate and understand several past phases of spirituality. We can observe with deeper sight the trend of both Zoroastrianism and Christianity towards a universal Resurrection. In particular the story - or, if you like, the history - of Jesus' resurrection shows aspects and implications never before seized. All this is to the good, but to identify the body of the resurrection, whether that of Jesus or of every man as envisaged by Paul, would be a sad mistake. The letter I wrote to Father Martin about your enlightened qualities on the one hand and your brilliant misapprehensions on the other should have left no doubt of the radical difference between the supramentalised body à la Sri Aurobindo and the resurrected body attributed to Jesus and expected by Paul for everyone at the end of time.
I am afraid the tendency to engraft new visions on to old spiritual doctrines and discoveries has vitiated all attempts, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, to focus the exalted vision that Teilhard de Chardin had of the Cosmic Christ. Again and again St. Paul and Gregory of Nyssa have been dragged in. Teilhard himself, eager not to be found too heterodox, started the confusion. Although some affinities are certainly to be noted between the Pauline-cum-Gregorian Cosmic Christ and the Teilhardian, yet it should be evident that the latter is inseparable from a world-view in which the fact of evolution is central and so cannot be reduced fundamentally to anything thought of or known in the early Christian centuries. In addition the Teilhard who was "born with a pantheist soul", as he himself declared, should not be forgotten. Here and there Teilhard realises all this quite sharply but he is ever ready to obscure it and thus give a lead to his followers to try Churchianising Teilhard instead of what he truly wanted - namely, the Teilhardisation of the Church. But I am digressing. Let me return to nos moutons.
I agree that an argumentum e silentio is not necessarily convincing. But there are various kinds of silences. The Rigveda never mentions salt, for example, or the banyan
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tree. But the Punjab was full of salt ranges and the ficus religiosa can surely be assumed to have been there since the immediately succeeding scriptures refer to the banyan tree no less than to salt. On the other hand the Rigveda does not mention that the community which gave rise to this scripture came from outside India - and this silence is repeated and supported by all Indian literature: at no place in the Brah-manas or the Upanishads or the Sutras or the Puranas do we have the slightest hint of an "Aryan invasion" of India. Such a silence is surely a very strong argument. Similar is the argument from silence as regards cotton. The Rigvedics flourished in the very Indus Valley where the Harappa Culture cultivated cotton for nearly a thousand years. And yet the Rigveda which is commonly considered to have been composed from 1500 to 1200 or 1000 B.C. - that is, to have started immediately at the end of the Harappa Culture whose usually accepted date is 2500-1500 B.C. - has not the faintest reference to cotton. And no Indian literature succeeding it refers to cotton, either - until we reach the time of the Sutras which are dated about a thousand years after the early hymns of the Rigveda. Here is a silence which speaks emphatically and unavoidably. Combined with the other silence it makes us think that the Rigveda must have been earlier than the Harappa Culture in the Indus Valley and that its composers must have been for all practical historical purposes autochthones in India.
I am afraid I have once more digressed. But I wanted to remove from your mind the burden of inconsequence which the argument from silence often lays. Your repudiation of this argument as regards the Sermon on the Mount is legitimate. But I believe you are mistaken in reasoning that St. Paul's silence about the Virgin Birth means very little. The fact is that Paul does not rest with keeping mum about the Virgin Birth. What he says of the birth of Jesus is, as I have said in my letter to Father Martin, clear enough to convince us that he looked upon Jesus as born exactly in the same natural way as every other man "born of a woman". There is
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another context too (Philippians 2.7) which conveys the identical idea that the Jesus who was exalted by the resurrection had been born under the very conditions under which every human being takes birth. The earliest Christian documents are not merely silent: they unmistakably contradict any such notion as the Virgin Birth. St. John is not so direct in denying it but if you grant, as you do, that he does not refer to the Virgin Birth in the text we were talking about, I don't see how you can say that this text "is perfectly consistent with it"? I should say that it reduces a birth not from flesh or desire or blood but from God to a pure symbol by applying it to all who have faith in Jesus. If all can be born in the very way Jesus is made to be born by Matthew and Luke, does not that way become a sheer symbol of a spiritual birth which has nothing to do with physical conditions such as Matthew and Luke suggest? I have also pointed out that the tale unfolded by Mark in particular though also in general by Matthew, Luke and John about the relationship between Jesus and his mother conflicts with the assumption that Mary knew of the mission of Jesus or that Jesus was aware of the special grace of God ascribed to Mary. Mark at least is not just silent: he presents a crucial situation which renders anything like a Virgin Birth impossible. In his own manner, as much as Paul, he positively refuses it.
I must stop now.
With kind thoughts,
March 25th 1983
Thank you for your letter. 1 am afraid that I must plead guilty to what you say about using Sri Aurobindo's terms in a way not intended by him. The reason for this is that when I read The Life Divine, I found in it concepts which seemed to me to be absent from all Indian religions but which had for
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me an astonishing resemblance to Christian doctrines. There were three especially: 1) the descent of the Supermind, 2) the descent not only into the soul but into the body, so as to transform the body itself, 3) the fact that this was a cosmic event which affected not merely the individual but humanity as a whole. This seemed to me to correspond so closely to the Christian conception of the descent of the Spirit, so as to transform both body and soul in the resurrection and the resultant 'new creation', by which both nature and humanity are transformed, that I have always interpreted Aurobindo in these terms. But I can see that this is not the way in which he would have understood it.
I am still not convinced by what you say about the Virgin Birth. My understanding is that the gospel story was handed down in different Christian communities independently so that it took a somewhat different form in each community. I see no difficulty therefore in the fact that the Virgin Birth was not present in the tradition of the community from which Mark derived his gospel (just as the Sermon on the Mount was not). On the other hand, two quite separate traditions (with notable differences) were handed down in the communities from which Matthew and Luke derived their gospels. The important thing in my view is that all these different traditions together with those of the Johannine community were accepted by all the churches in the second century and so became part of the orthodox tradition.
I would make it clear, though, that though I see no reason to reject the tradition of the Virgin Birth (like the resurrection) as a physical event, it is as a symbolic fact that it is most important. The Virgin Birth of Jesus signifies the new birth of all humanity, as John describes it, 'not of blood, or of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God'. This is the sense in which 1 quoted this text. In the same way, the resurrection of Jesus signifies the resurrection of all men and the new creation as a cosmic event.
One last point. Of course, Sri Aurobindo's introduction of the concept of evolution into Vedanta and its implications for
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a modern understanding of the Gospel also impressed me very much. I hope this makes clear my point of view. Obviously, 1 am not a true disciple of Aurobindo, but have used his insights in attempting to understand the Christian Gospel. Perhaps that is as far as this discussion can take us.
30.3.83
I am glad you have clarified your position and acknowledged that you have been adapting Aurobindonian insights to non-Aurobindonian contexts. Perhaps "non-Aurobindonian" is not quite correct. Both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother saw the Aurobindonian truths peeping out of various phases of spiritual history and so it is not a mistake to educe from old religious experience arid events what they were shadowing forth. In the new light the traditional interpretations prove inadequate and a re-vision of Christianity as well as of other spiritual testimonies should be quite in order. The only thing we must guard against is the belief that old religious experiences and events actually anticipated and revealed the realisation which Sri Aurobindo called "supramental". I am afraid you have frequently given the impression of holding such a belief, which would reduce the whole achievement and work and teaching of Sri Aurobindo to being no more than a brilliant modern Indian gloss on the ne-plus-ultra disclosures of Christianity two thousand years ago. But the very fact that you could not see Christianity anew except through the eyes of Sri Aurobindo should give pause. And now that you admit that your interpretation of Christianity as the ultimate spiritual apocalypse is "not the way in which Sri Aurobindo would have understood the message of Christ or his own message" of Supermind and Integral Transformation, perhaps you will give Sri Aurobindo his due more
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directly than you have hitherto done. Actually, you have estimated him in the highest terms possible in your Return to the Centre - nobody outside his own disciples has caught his all-roundedness more acutely and praised him from so many sides; what surprised me in such a keen and profound mind as yours was your attempt to show that he had only put in a different language and tried to accomplish in his own manner something that Jesus had said and consummated long before. In my letter to Father Martin I called you an Aurobindonian Christian. I wish I could call you a Christian Aurobindonian, meaning thereby that according to you Sri Aurobindo completes and lays bare in its full luminosity what the Christian religion in its full final expression in the second century seized in glorious glimmers.
I would agree with you that when all the churches accepted all the different traditions that had grown up in separate communities a far-reaching many-faceted whole was created which cannot be ignored and of which the doctrine of the Virgin Birth is an inalienable part. I consider this doctrine the most beautiful component of the ensemble, bringing into the new religion the vision of God the Mother in a deeper fashion than the various Mother-cults of the time had done and with a finer and closer approach to the Indian insight of the Adya Shakti, the Para-Prakriti, whom Sri Aurobindo, as I have said before, addresses in his Savitri:
O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe,
Creatrix, the Eternal's artist Bride!
But, when the second-century churches attributed to the physical mother of Jesus the transcendent act by which the ever-pure divine Consciousness-Force brings forth the Avatar into the world in a special manner unlike that in which other souls come into birth - when the theological truth of the Virgin Birth was given a literal material interpretation there was no end to the absurdity attached to it. In spite of the baby Jesus making his way through the vagina in order to be born, Mary was deemed a virgo intacta with her hymen
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unbroken. Furthermore, she was regarded as a perpetual virgin in spite of all the Gospels clearly speaking of the brothers and sisters of Jesus. No doubt, the terms "brothers" and "sisters" are applicable to members of a religious community, but where family relationships are concerned the New Testament is quite explicit in distinguishing brothers and sisters from cousins. The Church has been dishonest to argue the contrary. When Paul, for instance, speaks of the Lord's brother James he is clear in not dubbing him "brother" in the sense that the members of his group were a fraternity. All the Evangelists are equally unequivocal in their meaning.
Even if, like many modern Catholics (e.g. Father Raymond Brown), we turn away from the absurdity of the second-century churches, can we on scriptural authority look on Mary as anything else than a symbol of the Divine Creative-Power from whom the Avatar directly emerges? You write as if all the traditions were equally old and as if they were different merely because of separate localities. But surely Mark was known totally in the very localities from which Matthew and Luke came, for a good deal of him is recognisably incorporated in their Gospels. He is also certainly older than they, as is evident from the fact of his incorporation in their work. The question is: how old is the non-Marcan element in them? I think the answer is to be found by scrutinising Paul.
Paul was a great traveller: he covered all the places from which the Gospels of Matthew and Luke could have come. And he not only knows nothing of the Virgin Birth but also makes it perfectly plain that Jesus was born in the natural way in which all men born of women come into the world. To say that Paul's words are vague and that he leaves the issue open is to indulge in sophistry. His testimony proves that in the earliest Christianity there could be no possibility of the Virgin-Birth doctrine: in fact it is negated by implication.
As for Mark, what Matthew and Luke accept from him is not only shown by their acceptance to be old undeniable
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tradition but also shown to be such that it goes against the import of their nativity stories. Nobody reading it can escape the conviction that the family of Jesus, including his mother, thought his ministry to be craziness and that Jesus on his part had no sense of his mother being anybody who had the special grace of God. Neither Matthew nor Luke has been able to avoid the essence of Mark's attestation in this regard: the tradition was too old to be set at naught. They would have lost credit if they had thrown it overboard: it must have been very well known in their own localities. But it flies in the face of the significance of their nativity narratives. Mark's non-mention of the Virgin Birth is consistent with his account of the strange relationship between Jesus and Mary. In whatever Matthew and Luke are constrained to take from Mark they are inconsistent with their tales of the Virgin Birth. Their inability to escape inconsistency points to the new-fangledness of these tales. Paul and Mark definitely rule out the doctrine of the Virgin Birth from being a part of the earliest Christianity.
You may protest: "If Paul visited the places from which Matthew and Luke might have hailed yet never knew of the Virgin Birth, what about Matthew and Luke not knowing Paul's teaching even though he had been in their places? Shouldn't we put the two ignorances on a par and say that Paul's ignorance is as unimportant as that of Matthew and Luke?" The reply would be: "The details of Paul's teaching weren't necessary to their purpose: his central theme of the resurrection of Jesus was part of their message too - all the rest was of secondary value. The case was quite other with Paul. His central theme would have been most appropriately rnatched with the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. That doctrine cannot be considered as lying outside his main purpose. His not knowing of it argues against its having been a component of the earliest Christianity whereas Matthew's and Luke's lack of knowledge of much of Paulinism has no fundamental bearing on whether Paulinism was or was not such a component."
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Perhaps you will again bring in the Sermon on the Mount: "Would it be ruled out of the earliest Christianity just because neither Paul nor Mark contains it?" Here the answer would run: "Paul's message, centred on the Resurrection, did not need it: its absence from it has little meaning. Besides, he was not writing the life of Jesus. One doesn't-exactly know what to say about its absence from Mark's Gospel. What one can affirm is that there is much in Mark which can be counted as that Sermon in seed-form: 'If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last of all, and servant of all' (IX.35) - 'Whosoever shall receive one of such children in my name, receiveth me: and whosoever shall receive me, receiveth not me but him that sent me' (IX.37) -'It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God' (X.25) -'Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospels, the same shall save it' (VIII.34-5), etc., etc. There is also the question whether the Sermon on the Mount as one whole could ever have been a part of the earliest Christianity. Who could have reported it? It fills three long chapters (V-VII) in Matthew. True, shorthand (notatio) was not unknown to the Romans, but can we suggest that there was a stenographer among the followers of Jesus? It seems very likely that Matthew has put together speeches delivered on different occasions and has supplied connections. If it was really a single piece, who could have learned it by heart from one hearing and written it down fifty years or so later? The problem is complicated by the fact that every sentiment in the lengthy discourse is to be found in the Old Testament, the Talmud and contemporary moralists. As far back as 1968 H. Rodrigues made a thorough study of the problem in Les Origines du Sermon de la Montagne and J. McCabe who was a scholarly priest for nearly a dozen years but afterwards left the Church has given parallels for each clause in the Sermon in his Sources of the Morality of the Gospels (1914, Ch. IX).
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Matthew's V-VII is splendid but it hardly bears the stamp of a straight sustained report, even if it not be a finely woven variation played on old or current themes which are not exclusively Christian. In any case I don't think we can confidently assert the Sermon in its present form to have been something extremely early in Christianity which somehow Mark failed to transmit simply because he didn't belong to the locality of Matthew."
At that I shall leave this topic, but if you have something more to say against my conclusion from both Paul and Mark and portions of Matthew-Luke that the Virgin-Birth doctrine was wholly unknown to Christianity in its earliest phase and was even rendered impossible by the texts to which I have pointed, I shall be glad to get your letter. If, however, our discussion is becoming unpleasant for you, I can only apologise and shut up, and shall not take amiss your decision not to answer me.
Thanking you for so courteously giving your time to me,
April 5th 1983
I don't want to prolong this correspondence unnecessarily, but the points which you raise are of sufficient interest to make a reply worth while. First of all, as regards Sri Aurobindo and ancient tradition, my position is that the great 'revelations' of the past are fundamental. In a sense we can never go beyond what has been revealed in the Vedas, the Buddhist scriptures, the Bible and the Koran. But we can have ever new insights into the value and significance of these scriptures. For me Sri Aurobindo brought a new and profound insight into the understanding of the Vedic revelation, especially, as I said, through his concept of the descent of the Supermind, the transformation of matter and
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the body and the evolution of the universe towards super-mental consciousness. Teilhard de Chardin did something similar for the Christian revelation. For me Sri Aurobindo is a great philosopher - in the deepest sense of the word - and he illumines my understanding of the Christian revelation, but he does not supersede it in any way. Did he not conceive himself as revealing the eternal dharma in modern terms?
As regards the Virgin Birth, I admit that a good case can be made, in the lines on which you do, for holding that the doctrine of the Virgin Birth did not belong to the earliest tradition of the Church. It is quite possible, as you say, that it was not known in the Pauline churches or in the community where St. Mark's Gospel originated. But some time between 70 and 80 AD at the latest this doctrine came to be accepted in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and since it is found in quite different forms, the doctrine must have originated some time before this. What is decisive is that it was accepted as congruous with the gospel tradition as a whole - both Matthew and Luke, as you say, probably made use of Mark and found no difficulty in inserting this tradition in the gospel story - and by the second century or even earlier it was accepted as part of the creed of the universal church.
To me it is important because I think that the transformation of the body is an essential element in Christian doctrine. The physical transformation which took place in Mary was seen as related to the physical transformation of the body of Christ in the resurrection, and this again as foreshadowing the physical transformation of man and the universe. This is where I find Aurobindo's insistence on the transformation of matter and the body so significant.
If you feel inspired to reply, I have no objection, but I don't want to prolong our correspondence unnecessarily. It has been very interesting for me and has helped me to clarify my views.
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11.4.83
Thanks for not bringing the curtain down for good on our exchange of friendly differences - differences which yet make no difference to each one's sense of the other's spiritual sincerity and legitimate freedom to follow where the heart leads.
I am glad to see an explicit honesty accompanying your sincerity. You have frankly stated: "I admit that a good case can be made, on the lines on which you do, for holding that the doctrine of the Virgin Birth did not belong to the earliest tradition of the Church. It is quite possible, as you say, that it was not known in the Pauline churches or in the community where St. Mark's Gospel originated."
It is true, as you point out, that this doctrine must have originated some time before the decade (70-80 AD) during which the Gospels of Matthew and Luke embodied it in quite different forms implying a common essence-nucleus earlier. But how can you say that they "found no difficulty in inserting this tradition in the Gospel story"? All Biblical scholars admit that both Matthew and Luke incorporated much of Mark, sometimes in almost the same words, along with some other matter derived from a non-Marcan source, but in view of the Virgin-Birth doctrine these evangelists had to garble the Marcan matter to a certain extent. Even so, this matter being fundamental, they could not water it down sufficiently and thus there is, as I have said, some discrepancy between the infancy narrative and the rest of the story. A little difficulty in inserting the former is undeniable. And, of course, neither Matthew nor Luke implies anything like the unbroken hymen and the perpetual virginhood we find m "the creed of the universal Church" by "the second century or even earlier". On the contrary, their implications are strikingly against what the universal Church chose to assert. Father Raymond Brown, aware of them, is careful not *° speak even of the Virgin Birth but only of the Virginal Conception and he goes on to observe that the doctrine of the
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Virginal Conception itself is not yet affirmed by the highest levels of the Roman Catholic Church as a compulsory dogma. You seem to have an undue reverence for the pronouncement of the early "universal Church" and to think that what it declared is automatically shown as "congruous with the Gospel tradition as a whole".
What this tradition in the round suggests is the Incarnational character of Jesus. In tune with that character, the intuition arose that he must have been born by a process of derivation from the Supreme Creative Power, which could not have been the same process as obtains in the birth of non-Incarnations. Such a theological insight brought in the sense of a Mother-element in the Divine and precipitated itself in popular religion by transferring that element to the physical mother of Jesus and raising her in spirit to the status of "Queen of Heaven". It is very easy to understand this transference as well as that up-raising. The legend-milieu of early Christianity was chockful of divine beings impregnating human women no less than of cultic goddesses: Isis, Astarte, Anahita, etc. The Christian transference was a very refined act which isolated from the mixture of spiritual and physical impregnations current in Egyptian and Greek myths the purely spiritual component. Mariolatry was also a purer and profounder movement than the worship of the various near-Eastern "Queens of Heaven". I am a great admirer of this whole Mother-mysticism that entered Christianity and aligns it to the Indian Shakti-vision rather than to the near-Eastern goddess-cultism but I cannot help seeing it - from all the available evidence not only in Paul but also in the common bulk of the four Gospels - as far from being "congruous" with the original Christianity.
How the foreign Mother-mysticism grew into the corpus of original Christianity is still not clear to me. The efforts of James Charlesworth (Catholic Biblical Quarterly 31 [1969], 357-69; Semitics I [1970], 12-26; Revue Biblique 77 [1970], 522-49) to establish for the Odes of Solomon, a Jewish-Christian work, a first-century date against the common ascription of the
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second century are perhaps the most helpful. Ode 19:6-9 associates Mary's virginity with the thesis of a painless birth and a feminine Holy Spirit. The combination of Mary with the feminine Holy Spirit appears to have induced new interpretations of the developing doctrine of the Divine Trinity so that a feminine member of the Godhead was in the course of being enunciated. Not much direct progress seems to have been made along this line - except that Clement of Alexandria (3rd century AD) actually affirmed a feminine element in God and, with the logic of reflecting the sacred in the secular, the equality of men and women.1 But what in all likelihood happened is that the psychological atmosphere of the Odes fused with the "theologoumenon" which several modern Biblical scholars, both Catholic and Protestant, posit with their theory that some time in the 60s of the first century one or more Christian thinkers solved the Christological problem by affirming symbolically Jesus to have been the Son of God from the moment of his conception and that they employed an imagery of virginal conception whose symbolic origins were forgotten in the process of its being disseminated among diverse Christian communities and being recorded by Matthew and Luke. If the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke cannot be traced to the earliest Christianity, the picture I have drawn strikes me as the only way we can account for them.
The later history of Marianism is not difficult to lay out. We begin with the earliest of the apocryphal Gospels, the Protevangelium of James. In its present form it dates from the fifth century but the greater part of it was written probably before the middle of the second century and was known to Origen (c. 185-253 AD) as the "Book of James". Here the early life of Mary was built up in a way that seemed fitting for one chosen to be the mother of the Saviour. The Protevangelium led to such veneration of Mary that ultimately she was adored as the Regina Coeli. The fullness of its effect is first seen at the same time that Clement of Alexandria wrote of a feminine element in God. It is in the mid-third century that
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the first evidence for the invocation of the Virgin Mary comes.2
Why am I telling you all this? You must know it already, but you may not have quite focussed how the mythopoeic tendency of the popular mind of Christianity in the time of Matthew's and Luke's Gospels set to work on the poetry-cum-theology which was exploring imaginatively and intuitively the spiritual mystery of Jesus' birth through Mary.
One point you make in connection with the doctrine of the Virgin Birth puzzles me somewhat. You say that the acceptance by the universal Church of this doctrine is "important" to you "because... the transformation of the body is an essential element in Christian doctrine" and "the physical transformation which took place in Mary was seen as related to the physical transformation of the body of Christ in the Resurrection..." What is the physical transformation of Mary you speak of? Her being a "Virgin Mother" can be regarded as a miracle but how can it amount to a physical transformation comparable to Jesus being raised from the dead and acquiring a body which transcends the laws of our space and time? It is as if you were mixing up the Virgin Motherhood with the Assumption of Mary bodily into heaven. A body which has not only escaped death but also passes out of sight into the transmundane spiritual world can be said to have undergone transformation. To give birth to a baby without being impregnated by a human husband can imply no such thing. The transformation implied in the Assumption may be considered a fitting end to the earthly career of a Virgin Mother but to be a Virgin Mother is not in itself to be a physically transformed being.
Now I come to the position you adopt at the start of your letter: "...the great 'revelations' of the past are fundamental. In a sense we can never go beyond what has been revealed in the Vedas, the Buddhist scriptures, the Bible and the Koran. But we can have ever new insights into the value and significance of these scriptures. For me Sri Aurobindo brought a new and profound insight into the understanding
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of the Vedic revelation, especially, as I said, through his concept of the descent of the Supermind, the transformation of matter and the body and the evolution of the universe towards supermental consciousness. Teilhard de Chardin did something similar for the Christian revelation. For me Sri Aurobindo is a great philosopher in the deepest sense of the word - and he illumines my understanding of the Christian revelation, but he does not supersede it in any way. Did he not conceive himself as revealing the eternal dharma in modern terms?"
Let me begin by wondering whether the term "philosopher" in however deep a sense is sufficient to cover Sri Aurobindo. Surely a master of the Integral Yoga cannot be just a profound philosopher. Neither can his "insights" be described as the results of intellectual perspicacity. Nor is it correct to put him in regard to the Vedic revelation on the same level as Teilhard de Chardin in regard to the Christian. Teilhard was gifted with a fine intuitive sensitivity to the Cosmic Divine Presence in its growing evolutionary form: he was not a seer in the true spiritual connotation of the word, not a yogi in any connotation which might bring him into the Aurobindonian universe of discourse. We cannot put him alongside the great Christian saints and mystics. Sri Aurobindo will be set in the company of the greatest givers of spiritual revelation. Perhaps he will be in a class by himself, the integrality of his philosophical vision corresponding to the all-embracing plentitude of his spiritual realisation. The tremendous compliment you have paid him as a philosopher in your Return to the Centre measures in the mystical sphere his attainment as a yogi. Even Teilhard was more than a philosopher: he stood on the threshold of mysticism. Sri Aurobindo would be miserably served if he were placed under the category of "philosopher" alone. Just because he has philosophised his Yogic experience he cannot be kept out of the company of the supreme revealers. Can Shankara or Plotinus, just because of their philosophising, be kept outside the sacred circle of spiritual adepts? And Sri Aurobindo,
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as any reader can judge, outstrips both of them in spirituality as well as philosophy. Perhaps you have expressed yourself a little carelessly and do not mean what your words appear to imply. I note that in your last sentence you do bring in "revealing" as Sri Aurobindo's function. So possibly one should take it as a saving grace.
It is true that Sri Aurobindo spoke of revealing the eternal dharma in modern terms but that is not all he spoke. His references to the sanātana dharma go back mostly to the commencement of his spiritual career. He referred to it after he had compassed the experience of Nirvana or Silent Brahman on the one hand and that of the cosmic Divine Person, Vāsudevah sarvam, on the other and had been on the way to the initial "overhead" planes. Even later he declared that he was basing himself in his expositions on the old Yogic vision of Sachchidananda, or infinite and everlasting Brahman, in the three aspects: Atman, Purusha, Ishwara. All this is what you call "the Vedic revelation". But what about the specific status and power of the Divine which Sri Aurobindo calls "Supermind"? According to him, the supramental secret of the Godhead has never been brought forth in its essential significance before and therefore the ultimate aim of the Aurobindonian yoga has never been plenarily envisaged. On 11.9.1936 he wrote to a disciple: "The physical Nature does not mean the body alone but the phrase includes the transformation of the whole physical mind, vital, material nature - not by imposing Siddhis on them, but by creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the Supramental being in a new evolution. I am not aware that this has been done by any Hathayogic or other process. Mental or vital occult power can only bring Siddhis of the higher plane into the individual life... The working of the Supramental power envisaged is not an influence on the physical giving it abnormal faculties, but an entrance and penetration changing it wholly into a Supramentalised physical. I did not learn the idea from Veda or Upanishad and I do not know if there is anything of the kind there. What
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I received about the Supermind was a direct, not a derived knowledge given to me; it was only, afterwards that I found certain confirmatory revelations in the Upanishad and Veda."3
Mark the turns: "a new evolution" - and "a direct, not a derived knowledge" of the Supermind. The "certain confirmatory revelations in the Upanishad and Veda" allude to general hints or glimpses, almost by the way or at best in a kind of broad background. They could not be anything else since the concrete conscious possession of the Veda's satyam ritam brihat ("the true, the right, the vast") and of the Upanishads' vijnana or prajna would bring the knowledge and the force towards working out a novel evolutionary change going far beyond "the psycho-spiritual-occult range of experience" to which the old yogas, the old mysticisms were confined, "in which the higher experiences come into the still mind or the concentrated heart by a sort of filtration or reflection" and "one can get mukti but not perfection or transformation (except a relative psycho-spiritual change)".4 After writing this on 11.6.1936 Sri Aurobindo adds: "But if I say that, there will be a general howl against the unpardonable presumption of claiming to have a knowledge not possessed by the ancient saints and sages and pretending to transcend them... I may say that in the Upanishads (especially the Taittiriya) there are some indications of these higher planes and their nature and the possibility of gathering up the whole consciousness and rising into them. But this was forgotten afterwards and people spoke only of the buddhi as the highest thing with the Purusha or Self just above, but there was no clear idea of these higher planes."5
If I don't tire you I should like to quote another passage from Sri Aurobindo's letters. It is in a letter to me: "If spiritual and Supramental were the same thing, as you say ttiy readers imagine, then all the sages and devotees and Yogis and sadhaks throughout the ages would have been Supramental beings and all I have written about the Supermind would be so much superfluous stuff, useless and
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otiose. Anybody who had spiritual experiences would then be a Supramental being; the Ashram would be chockfull of Supramental beings and every other Ashram in India also. Spiritual experiences can fix themselves in the inner consciousness and alter it, transform it, if you like; one can realise the Divine everywhere, the Self in all and all in the Self, the universal Shakti doing all things; one can feel merged in the Cosmic Self or full of ecstatic bhakti or Ananda. But one may and usually does still go on in the outer parts of nature thinking with the intellect or at best the intuitive mind, willing with a mental will, feeling joy and sorrow on the vital surface, undergoing physical afflictions and suffering from the struggle of life in the body with death and disease. The change then only will be that the inner self will watch all that without getting disturbed or bewildered, with a perfect equality, taking it as an inevitable part of Nature, inevitable at least so long as one does not withdraw to the Self out of Nature. That is not the transformation I envisage. It is quite another power of knowledge, another kind of will, another luminous nature of emotion and aesthesis, another constitution of the physical consciousness that must come in by the Supramental change."6
No doubt, Sri Aurobindo did not complete for the world what he had set out to do: the first accomplishment of the Supramental change in the very body. But some notion of the stage reached even as far back as August 1936 may be had from a letter penned in that month: "We have not sought perfection for our own separate sake, but as part of a general change - creating a possibility of perfection for others. That could not have been done without our accepting and facing the difficulties of the realisation and transformation and overcoming them for ourselves. It has been done to a sufficient degree on the other planes - but not yet on the most material part of the physical plane. Till it is done, the fight there continues and, though there may be and is a force of Yogic action and defence, there cannot be immunity. The Mother's difficulties are not her own; she bears the difficulties
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of others and those that are inherent in the general action and working for the transformation. If it had been otherwise, it would be a very different matter."7
I am afraid we would be watering down Sri Aurobindo's realisation and work if we took his "new evolution" under the Supermind's pressure as illustrating ho more than a new insight into what had been achieved in the past - what, according to you, Christianity had done 2000 years ago and what, according to others, Vedism or Buddhism or Islam had accomplished earlier or later. Sri Aurobindo's specific mission is intimately linked with the fact of evolution - the rising by some means or other from lower grades of embodied consciousness to higher ones and finally (or at least so at the present stage) from man the mental being to the supramental Superman. This rising is not to be equated to man getting psychicised and spiritualised, becoming a saint or a jivan-mukta but to transforming the human into a superhuman species by a process of conscious accelerated evolution. Whether anyone following Sri Aurobindo now will reach this goal or not, the movement has been started by his bringing down the Supermind as an active force and this movement cannot be equated in its essence to the old via mystica, however much it is bound to resemble it in its initial and even in some of its advanced stages. The spiritualities which were in no position to be aware of the fact of evolution and to proceed on that awareness cannot be said to be the same as the Aurobindonian Yoga. Since the Supermind has been behind all the inward and upward trend of the human soul throughout history, there naturally have been general intimations of the Aurobindonian ideal but always under a non-Aurobindonian aspect because of the lack of possession of the Supermind and its evolutionary nisus towards total perfection. To forget the basic differentia of the Supermind and the special drive in it of what modern science has come to know in its own fumbling over-externalised terms as evolution is to mis-see both past spirituality and the revelation communicated by Sri Aurobindo.
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This brings me to a last word. If there is genuine evolution, we cannot assert that "we can never go beyond what has been revealed in the Vedas, the Buddhist scriptures, the Bible and the Koran". Doubtless, the ultimate Divine is what He is, but in an evolutionary manifestation new depths and heights of Him necessarily manifest themselves. Certain fundamental modes of the Divine have already been known and they cannot be bypassed by the present-day explorer and it would be the acme of folly for that explorer to assume an air of superiority because horizons undreamt-of have swum into view. The Aurobindonians have always to keep in mind the warning uttered by their Master on 3.4.1936 to a disciple against a "swelled head": "From where did you get this singular attitude towards the old Yogas and Yogis? Is the wisdom of the Vedanta and Tantra a small and trifling thing? Have then the sadhaks of this Ashram attained to self-realisation and are they liberated Jivanmuktas, free from ego and ignorance? If not, why then do you say, 'it is not a very difficult stage', 'their goal is not high', 'Is it such a long process?' I have said that this Yoga is 'new' because it aims at the integrality of the Divine in this world and not only beyond it and at a supramental realisation. But how does that justify a superior contempt for the spiritual realisation which is as much the aim of this Yoga as of any other?"8
At the same time, however, an earlier letter (18.8.1935) has to be borne in mind apropos of a question about the past and the future spiritual development and Sri Aurobindo's mentioning certain names: "I have had no inspirations from the sadhana of Bejoy Goswami, though a good deal at one time from Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. My remarks simply meant that I regard the spiritual history of mankind and specially of India as a constant development of a divine purpose, not a book that is closed, the lines of which have to be constantly repeated. Even the Upanishads and the Gita were not final though everything may be there in seed. In this development the recent spiritual history of India is a very important stage and the names I mentioned had a special
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prominence in my thought at the time - they seemed to me to indicate the lines from which the future spiritual development had most directly to proceed, not staying but passing on.
I don't know how you will react to my long harangue. If you don't like to answer, just put this letter away. I won't take any offence. Or merely say, "I am sorry I don't agree." That will shut me up. In my heart of hearts, of course, there is always a wish to hear more and more from a mind and soul like Bede Griffiths.
April 19th 1983
Thank you very much for your letter. You raise so many important matters which require an answer, that I feel that I ought to reply as far as I can, and with a typewritten reply!
In the first place when I spoke of Sri Aurobindo as a 'philosopher in the deep sense of the word', I meant one of the kind of Sankara or Plotinus and that is how I think of him meaning, of course, one who is also a spiritual master. But now as to the question of Sri Aurobindo being more than this, this depends on how one understands his relation to Christianity. In one of your earlier letters you said that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had both studied Christianity and knew all about it. But my impression from reading the majority of Sri Aurobindo's writings and a good deal of the Mother's Agenda is that neither of them had ever made a deep study of Christianity. They seem to have accepted the ordinary conventional view of Christianity, which they rightly regarded as irrelevant. But, as I said, what strikes me so strongly is that Sri Aurobindo's conception of the descent of the Supermind, the penetration of matter and the body and their consequent transformation by the Supermind and the cosmic character of this event, are conceptions which are
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all so close to Christian doctrine, that I cannot help thinking that he was at least unconsciously influenced by Christianity.
I don't know whether you realise that the understanding of the Resurrection in St. Paul and in all subsequent Christian thought is that the body of Christ in the resurrection was 'divinised'. It was a radical transformation of the whole being, physical, vital and mental, so that body and soul participated in the Divine mode of existence and consciousness. In him, says St. Paul, 'dwelt the fullness (the pleroma) or the Godhead bodily'. This is surely exactly what Sri Aurobindo meant by the supermental transformation. But further according to St. Paul the resurrection of Christ released a new power in the world by which the whole creation and the whole of humanity was destined to be transformed in a similar way. So he says in the letter to the Romans: 'the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail until now and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for the adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies' (Romans 8.21-23). Is not this exactly Sri Aurobindo's idea that we have already received the Spirit, that is, a new consciousness, but the Spirit has now to penetrate the body itself and then the whole creation will be transformed by the indwelling Spirit? The one difference, as I understand it, is that Sri Aurobindo seems to have thought that this transformation would take place in space and time. But surely space and time are simply conditions of our present mode of existence and consciousness, and the final transformation will be a passage beyond space and time in which everything will be transformed in the eternal mode of being and consciousness. In the Christian view the body of Jesus in the resurrection transcends space and time. It appeared for a short time to the disciples to confirm their faith, but then it entered into its final state beyond space and time. The end will come when the whole creation and the whole of
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humanity will pass beyond its present mode of existence in space and time and enter into the final state of participation in the divine mode of existence.
If this is so what would be the contribution of Sri Aurobindo to our understanding of the final state of man and the universe? I think that first of all, he showed how this divinisation of man was the final flower of millions of years of evolution - as Teilhard de Chardin did. This means in my view that the divine power was present - involved - in matter from the beginning, and by its hidden power gradually brought forth life in matter and then consciousness. We are now, as Sri Aurobindo understood, in the stage of evolution from mental to supermental or divine consciousness. The enlightenment of the Buddha and the revelation of Krishna in the Gita and later the revelation to Mahomet in the Koran were stages in this evolution of humanity towards divine consciousness. In my view the resurrection of Jesus marks the point when the body of man and through it the matter of the universe were finally divinised and the term of evolution was reached in that one man and a nucleus for the creation of a new humanity was formed.
Another contribution of Sri Aurobindo would be this. In the Christian churches while the social transformation of humanity into the mystical body of Christ has always been recognised, the transformation of the body has been understood as taking place only after death. But Sri Aurobindo has shown that this transformation can begin even now. His Yoga is a method of transforming not only the mental consciousness but the physical and the vital. It seems to me that we are entering an era when this physical and vital transformation will be seen as something which can take place even now though I would still say that the final transformation can only take place after death when we are finally freed from the conditions of space and time. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother seem to have thought that it could take place before death or rather that death would no more intervene. But they were unable to realise this them-
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selves, and as I said this is where I would differ from their understanding of the divinisation of man.
Of course, I would agree that this cosmic view of Christianity has been largely lost especially among the Protestant churches, but it is firmly established in the Greek Fathers, in St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. I myself was more or less brought up on it, and what Sri Aurobindo did for me was to confirm from the point of view of philosophy and psychology what I had come to believe, and also to show how it could be related to the whole theory of evolution.
To return to the subject of the Virgin Birth. I would make a firm distinction between the doctrine of the Virginal Conception of Jesus, which though never actually defined is yet part of the creed of the Church from the earliest times and all theories about the 'unbroken hymen' etc. which are no more than speculations. I would hold that when a doctrine becomes part of the creed of the universal Church, it forms part of that body of doctrine in which the essential truth of the Gospel is essentially a 'mystery' transcending human understanding, which cannot properly be put into words like all the mystical traditions of the world.
I hope that this makes my position reasonably clear. I will be interested to hear your reactions to it.
Yours ever sincerely,
P.S. I forgot to say that I would regard the Virginal Conception of Jesus like the miracles of multiplying food, changing water into wine, healing the sick and casting out evil spirits (in healing psychological disease), like similar phenomena in other religious traditions, as 'psychic phenomena' showing the power of mind over matter, but not as the actual divinisation of matter as in the resurrection.
Perhaps I should also add that in the resurrection Jesus is
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said to have triumphed over the 'cosmic powers' - the 'principalities and powers, the world-rulers of this present darkness'. These would correspond with the 'hostile forces' working in the world today with which Sri Aurobindo was conscious of contending. This means that these powers have been conquered in principle, but we still have to contend with them until we also reach the supermental state.
21.4.83
I am very glad you have thought fit to reply to me and even to ask for my reactions. Let me start with the first point you make. You have expressed reservations about Sri Aurobindo being more than a spiritual master along with being a philosopher in the deep sense of the word. You make him out to be another Shankara, another Plotinus, but you wouldn't put him with Buddha or Mahavira or perhaps even Mohammed and certainly you wouldn't speak of him in the same breath with Jesus. I would agree with you wholly in this sweeping discrimination but from the opposite pole. To me who have not only steeped myself in his writings but also lived vibrantly in his glorious atmosphere for nearly 50 years, seen him face to face, put my head on his feet, taken his blessings, communicated with him both by the written word and by the inner contact, felt his love and compassion, known his wisdom and wideness and serenity, experienced his power to open up the hidden recesses of my being, received from him a vast peace and a constant flow of the inner heart towards the Divine - to me who have been most humbly, most gratefully, most intimately, most rapturously an Aurobindonian he is nothing short of the Avatar of Avatars and the culmination of the Divine's manifold self-revelation in the world, one in whose supreme light all past religions and spiritualities lay bare the heart of their meaning and at the same time confess their falling short of the Vision Splendid he offers us both in writing and in living, by
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personal embodiment side by side with illuminating expression. How then am I to take seriously the criterion you set up - that Sri Aurobindo's being more than a spiritual master plus a profound philosopher "depends on how one understands his relation to Christianity"? And the relation you determine by saying that he, like the Mother, "had never made a deep study of Christianity" and that rather than going beyond Christianity "he was at least unconsciously influenced by Christianity" in his "conception of the descent of the Supermind, the penetration of matter and the body and their consequent transformation by the Supermind and the cosmic character of this event".
But are you not contradicting yourself here? On the one hand you say that he did not know the depth of the Christian revelation and doctrine and on the other you declare that this very depth which was unknown to him had a basic influence on him. I also remember your telling me that Sri Aurobindo helped you to see the inmost sense of the Christian weltanschauung in the context of the fact of Evolution and even in the latest letter you make two points on Sri Aurobindo's contribution to our understanding of the final state of man and the universe. They may be summarised: (1) Man will be divinised, both soul and body, as "the final flower of millions of years of evolution": (2) the divinisation of the body can begin to take place even now by means of the Aurobindonian Yoga - that is, during our earthly life - and not only after death. These two points disclose, according to you, the fundamental meaning of Christianity in evolutionary modern terms - the meaning which naturally before the time of the evolutionary world-view could not be explicated and which, so far as the second point is concerned, was never conceived by the Christian Church which, while recognising "the social transformation of humanity into the mystical body of Christ", understood the body's transformation as taking place not before one was dead. Obviously, something momentously new has been brought into our ken with regard to Christianity and, with the help of the illumination
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this has given you, you make the statement: "In my view the resurrection of Jesus marks the point when the body of man and through it the matter of the universe were finally divinised and the term of evolution was reached in that one Man and a nucleus for the creation of a new humanity was formed." Whether Christianity in some incomprehensible manner influenced Sri Aurobindo or not, it is clear that the Christianity you conceive and profess has been fundamentally influenced by Sri Aurobindo.
Here some questions arise: "Is this Christianity of yours a true version of the religion historically going by that name? Is it not really Sri Aurobindo forcibly Christianised? Is it even consistent in itself?" Perhaps they can be best answered by a few counter-questions.
Can a religion which did not have the slightest awareness of an Evolution over millions of years be the Christianity you see through Aurobindonian eyes? Can Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga of total inner-outer transformation by the power and grace of the Supramental Ishwara and Shakti, a process which is a conscious accelerated form of the Evolution that has been going on for millions of years, be equated to a sudden change of soul-body "in the twinkling of an eye" with no accelerated evolution behind it but merely a common life touched by conventional religious faith in the proclaimed Risen Christ? Lastly, after postulating an evolution over millions of years flowering in man's progressive spiritual history through the aspiring mind towards a Supermind which is still in the future, is it logical or reasonable or consistent to affirm that all evolution was summed up two thousand years ago in one man who did not exemplify an evolutionary transformation in his life-time but is alleged to have acquired a divinised body after his death? Again, can a post-mortem transformation form a nucleus for the creation of a new humanity ante-mortem?
To me the whole concept of transformation which you try to find in Christianity is inadequate in relation both to the demands of evolution and to those of the Aurobindonian
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Yoga. Evolution implies in its spiritual meaning a fulfilment by divinisation of the inner and outer being on earth itself during a life-time. If, as you say in agreement with Sri Aurobindo, the Divine is involved in matter, the Divine must get evolved in matter itself, in embodied existence - and this evolution must be a process moving from less to more divinisation, from partial to complete transformation and cannot be an abrupt miracle after death or even during life. The whole Christian idea of divinisation flies in the face of an evolutionary spirituality. And to say that the resurrected Jesus was divinised in the sense of the Aurobindonian supramentalisation is to ignore the basic condition of the change Sri Aurobindo envisaged: the supramentalised body is not only achieved while one is alive but is also an achievement which stays for good: a divine immortality upon earth is enjoyed by the body that is supramentalised. If Jesus got a supramentalised body he would be still on earth. Whatever divine body he may be credited with, it cannot be called supramentalised in the Aurobindonian connotation of the word. And this connotation is logically the sole one compatible with what I have termed evolutionary spirituality. You, like Teilhard, stop short of the inherent implication of such a spirituality. You as well as he speak of a final breakaway from the terrestrial scene. That would be the frustration of a spiritual evolution starting with the Divine's involution in material substance. I am afraid you shirk the logic of the spiritual consummation called for, simply because of the Christian preconception of a Parousia which posits a final transformation only after death. You are certainly welcome to this preconception but then you must give up the notion of an evolutionary spirituality which implies a transformation "even now", as you put it - and you must cease to designate the transformation you have in mind as the Aurobindonian supramentalisation.
Perhaps you will argue, as you seem to do at the end of the second page of your letter, that the very fact of Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's death instead of physical
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divinisation proves you right and shows that the final transformation cannot take place while one is alive. I fear you haven't gauged the reason why their bodies ended as they did. The Mother has explained that Sri Aurobindo and she faced two alternatives at the very start of their spiritual work: (1) to cut themselves off from the mass of humanity and pursue a lonely path towards supramentalisation, including the total divinisation of the living body; (2) to be in the midst of the human mass and assume all the difficulties of that mass and try to carry it along and go as far as one can under the burden of a collective Yoga. The choice was at once made in favour of the second alternative. If they had accepted the first, they would have finished their individual supramentalisation but there would have been an impassable gulf between them and the race and perhaps even a cataclysmic effect like the explosion of a spiritual hydrogen bomb. Instead, a slow Yoga was adopted and set in rhythm with the ordinary human capacity of spiritual growth, the infirmities and difficulties of us all were taken into the consciousness of the Gurus themselves and sought to be worked out there. The result was an Ashram in which all kinds of aspirants were given a chance, every type of humanity was taken on as an experiment for its benefit and a general movement was carried on, bringing a terrific strain on the Gurus in a venture that had never before been undertaken in spiritual history - namely, the manifestation of a special power of the Supreme that might transform the human being in all his parts. There came a point when it was seen that under the conditions adopted the Gurus would have to let their bodies go. The supramental Force is still active, but without its double physical centre at present. How the work is to be continued from behind the scene is now the problem for our Gurus.
A word on the topics with which you close. First, the Virgin Birth. Why do you still say that the doctrine of the Virginal Conception is "part of the creed of the Church from the earliest times" - when you have already granted that a
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good case can be made for its not having been an element of the earliest Christianity? If it was not known to any of the numerous churches Paul visited and guided and moulded and if it runs against the grain of what he and the first evangelist Mark have to say in different ways about Jesus in relation to his mother, it was surely a mythopoeic mistranslation of the theological insight that Jesus was the Son of God from the moment he was conceived and could not be considered human like other children just because like them he had a human father. This insight would be in tune with the Pauline (and the later Johannine) view of a pre-existent Christ. The Virginal Conception in the sheer physical sense would be a romantically pious fiction in the wake of the "theologoumenon" set forth by Christologists in the immediately post-Pauline post-Marcan 60s of the 1st century AD.
Another point is your distinguishing the doctrine of the Virginal Conception from what you term "no more than speculations" such as the "unbroken hymen". It is true that the Old Roman Baptismal Creed, the Apostles' Creed and the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed imply only that Mary was a Virgin from whom Jesus was born: they mean simply that Jesus had no human father and that the Holy Spirit alone was responsible for his birth. But there is the 4th-century triad about Mary having been a virgin ante partum, in partu et post partum ("before, in and after birth"). Traditionally, Roman Catholicism has regarded all these stages of Mary's virginity as revealed doctrine. The highest magisterium has never officially given its seal to them together, but the Church has always taken them as inalienable components of its creed. Not before our own time have Catholic theologians felt scruples about virginitas in partu and virginitas post partum. The very persistence of the description "Virgin Birth" would seem to assume the in-partu doctrine of the unbroken hymen, though in general discussion we do not realise it.
In your postscript you clarify - in response to my question - that in your opinion the Virgin Birth would be classed, along with the various "miracles" in the Gospel as well as in
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other religious traditions, as a "psychic phenomenon", but "not as an actual divinisation of matter as in the resurrection". However, if we go by Paul who is the first to talk of the resurrection and puts all the instances previous to his own experience on the road to Damascus on a par with what he was a witness to, we should be inclined to look upon all the "appearances" of Jesus after death as "visions" - that is, psychic phenomena, though of a different order than the ones you list as examples of "the power of mind over matter". Then no physicality continuing from the crucified body would be involved, but since the "visions" were evidently objective a temporary materialisation must be assumed. On the evidence of Paul we have no ground to speak of an empty tomb: in fact there is no mention of an empty tomb in any of his epistles. All we are told is that Jesus was raised on the third day. What was raised is not specified except that it was the same being who had been crucified. The glorious fact to Paul was that death had been overcome. John Hick, a prominent English philosopher-cum-theologian, supposes that since survival of death by one who had been alive is no part of Judaic thought, the "visions" on so large a scale were a revolutionary occurrence, and proved that Jesus had accomplished a triumph over the grave and served by his extraordinary example as a promise of such triumph to all who believed in him. The Judaic mind, unable to conceive a subtle spiritual survival, physicalised the visions and declared that there was a conquest of death by the same body that had been crucified. I can't say whether Hick is right at every point: I should postulate an actual materialisation on several occasions if I am to base myself on Paul. Paulinely speaking, we might have to bring in, as in the case of the Virgin Birth, a mythopoeic process in which the objective visions were understood to show the crucified body of Jesus as literally raised and acting as described in Matthew, Luke, John and Acts. Pious fictions would have to be read by us in the accounts.
Were the reporters capable of them? Sir Alistair Hardy, a
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deeply religious biologist, asked in that fine book of his, The Divine Flame (p. 215): "would the theologians who proclaim the sanctity of the written word of the gospels have us believe Matthew, 27, verse 52?" The text referred to reads: "...and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his [Jesus'] resurrection, and went into the holy city and appeared unto many." Certainly the reporters could be sensational inventors. But as certainly there must have been some correct reports too. How do we judge? I am not quite competent on this whole problem. Perhaps you can shed some light?
April 28th 1983
Thank you for your interesting letter. I think that we have probably reached the point when further discussion will not help. It has become clear that what divides us is really a matter of faith. You are committed by faith to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and their vision of a Supermental Manifestation, while I am committed to faith in Jesus and the Resurrection. From what you say of your experience with Sri Aurobindo I can see how much he must mean to you and how his vision of reality inspires you. I on the other hand have come to faith in Jesus not only through much study but also through a deep experience of conversion. I think that we have to respect our different points of view and recognise that they lead to a different conception of the nature of life and reality.
As regards my own debt to Sri Aurobindo, though I have come to admire him greatly, yet I obviously don't share your conception of him and I don't want to exaggerate his influence on me. I did not owe my understanding of evolution
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in Christianity to him. I learned it first of all from St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine for the general principle, and then from Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner (in his essay on Christology in an evolutionary perspective) for a more detailed understanding. Sri Aurobindo confirmed this view and gave it a wider and deeper perspective. I would certainly say that my understanding of Christianity is a true version of historical Christianity. I am only doing what St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas did, when they interpreted Christianity in the light of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. I feel that the call of the Church to-day is to interpret the Gospel in the light of oriental philosophy, that is, the whole tradition of the Vedanta (as also of Mahayana Buddhism). It is here that I found Sri Aurobindo so enlightening as he introduced new concepts into Vedanta, which were so close to the Christian view. Whether this was due to an unconscious influence as I suggested, I don't know but it never ceases to astonish me that he never seems to have realised how close some of his ideas were to Christianity.
I don't think that it is of much use for us to continue to discuss the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. For me they are integral elements in a divine revelation - or a 'supernatural manifestation' - which derives from the witness of the disciples of Jesus to what they had experienced and has been preserved in the Church under trie guidance of the Holy Spirit ever since. But, as I said, I would distinguish always between what is strictly of divine revelation - the actual fact of the Virgin Birth - the birth of Jesus from a virgin - and the Resurrection - the bodily resurrection of Jesus -and the various problems which these facts raise which are matters of speculation.
I hope that this makes my position clear. As I said, I doubt whether further discussion would take us much further.
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30.4.83
I certainly respect your faith just as you respect mine -and while I hold, as you surely do, that all genuine faith has to be respected, there can be different degrees of respect and what I extend to you is a deep respect because you, like me, have a background or basis of a true "conversion", a spiritual experience bringing one in inner touch with the Divine. Your experience brought you into profounder relation with the religion in which you had been born. Mine took me out of the Zoroastrianism which is natural to every Parsi, as well as out of the Christian soul-milieu which too was natural to me in another manner because of my education at St. Xavier's School and College in Bombay under European Jesuits. Perhaps I should say I was taken out of what seem to be sister religions. Zoroastrianism is fundamentally monotheistic but pragmatically dualistic with its powers of Light fighting those of darkness through world-history. It has a heaven and a hell, with some sort of purgatory. There is no rebirth but only one life and at the end of it the Judgment. At the end of time there will be a resurrection and a final division of the good and the bad. It has all of Christianity without the original sin, the Incarnation, the plan of Atonement. It has even a Virgin Birth, but its founder is a Prophet and not the Logos embodied, though there is distinctly the idea of the Messiah at the world's termination. Possibly there was a hint of a movement towards incarnationism in the legend of Luke's Three Wise Men who go by the Persian title of Magi and who in the earliest tradition have all Iranian names. Everything I had prized both in Zoroastrianism and in Christianity I found in Sri Aurobindo's spiritual vision and in his Integral Yoga and, what was most soul-satisfying and body-entrancing, the immediate living physical presence with the utmost aura of Avatarhood. My turn, during late college-life, towards the Vedanta got also illuminated and carried to a fulfilment of insight by all that Sri Aurobindo had revealed about the Supermind, evolutionary spirituality and
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total psycho-physical transformation whether in the present life or in other earth-lives to come.
I personally don't feel that you and I are very much apart. A Christianity interpreted not only in the light of Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas but also in that of Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner and finally Sri Aurobindo who, as you say, gave your Christianity's modernised view "a wider and deeper perspective" - a Christianity so interpreted, and with an interpretation of "the Gospel in the light of oriental philosophy", is pretty close to my Aurobindonianism except that I look at all the past, including Christ, through Sri Aurobindo while you look at Sri Aurobindo (as well as Veda and Vedanta and Buddhism) through Christ. But what a grand way you have had of looking at Sri Aurobindo! If your Christianity makes you write what you have written on him in your Return to the Centre, it must be a Christianity Aurobindonian to the nth degree, for your words put him as a philosopher of the Spirit in a category which in general terms overtops Teilhard and Rahner as your modern tutors. It is on that visionary glow in your mind and heart that I fix my eyes, and then I fail to find any real gulf dividing your acceptance of the Virgin Birth of Jesus and his bodily Resurrection in a literal sense from my acceptance of them in a symbolic and subtle aspect.
As you wish, we shall not prolong our discussion further. But I should like to make a brief reflection on your phrase: "the witness of the disciples of Jesus to what they had experienced..." I can do it best by quoting Father Raymond Brown from pp. 16 and 32-33 of The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus (New York, Paulist Press, 1973):
"The Gospel accounts of the ministry of Jesus were written anywhere from thirty to sixty years after the events they narrate. The evangelists were second-generation Christians who had not been eye-witnesses themselves... The author of the Gospel that we call 'according to Matthew' was not Matthew the tax collector and companion of Jesus, but an unknown Christian who used as his source Mark's Gospel
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(and other traditions)... Luke's Gospel...is also dependent in part on Mark...
"While Matthew and Luke apparently accepted the virginal conception as historical, we cannot be certain where they got their information on this point. The older thesis that all the information in Luke's infancy narrative came straight from Mary's side of the family, while Matthew's information came from Joseph's side, is no longer tenable in modern exegesis - even though family origins for some information cannot be a priori excluded. Consequently, we must face the possibility that in good faith the evangelists have taken over an earlier belief in virginal conception that does not have an authentic historical basis..."
I don't think I have anything more to say to you and, even if something strikes me, I shan't bother you. I beg forgiveness if in any way I have offended or hurt you. I hope you have found our friendly controversy stimulating. I have liked receiving your letters. Do you think you can permit me to publish our correspondence in Mother India some time in the future?
With kindest thoughts,
May 4th 1983
Thank you for your letter. You raise so many interesting points, that I feel urged to continue our correspondence a little more. First of all, to try to clear up this question of the Virgin Birth. I want to distinguish clearly between what I regard as fundamental to Christian faith and what I consider secondary and debatable. As regards the Virgin Birth, we cannot say how or when or where the doctrine originated, and all theories about it are only speculation. What we know for certain is that in the second half of the first century the doctrine was introduced into the Gospels of Matthew and
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Luke, and by the end of the first or the beginning of the second century was included in the creed - that is, the profession of faith at baptism - of the Church. This is what I meant in a previous letter by saying that it was believed 'from the earliest times'. From that time onwards, though never formally defined, it has been part of the Creed of the universal Church.
Why I consider it important is that if the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection (which is, of course, much more solidly based historically) were only symbolic, as you suggest, then Christianity would differ very little from Hinduism or Buddhism. Its basis would be essentially mythological (understanding by myth a symbolic account of ultimate realities). What for me distinguishes Christian faith is the belief in certain historical facts and physical transformations. This is why I find Sri Aurobindo so important. He and the Mother realised that it is not sufficient to change the spiritual consciousness; it is the physical base of consciousness which has to be changed. I have been reading Satprem's Adventure of Consciousness and find it fascinating in this respect. He explains (page 340) that 'the body of the pioneer of transformation is like a battlefield and it is the battle of the whole world which is fought there; everything meets there, resists there. There is a central point right below, a knot of life and death, where the destiny of the world is at stake... And he must face all the difficulties, even death not to destroy but to change all'. Now this is exactly what Christians believe took place in the death of Jesus on the cross. It was precisely at this point that the power of death, the resistance of nature to the supernatural life was met and overcome. He quotes the Mother as saying that 'It is not a crucified body which will save the world, but a glorified body!' But, of course, in Christian belief the body of Jesus which had surrendered to death on the cross was raised up in the resurrection and became a 'glorified body'. The very expression 'glorified body' is a Christian term. This is one of the many occasions when the Mother and Sri Aurobindo seem just to have
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missed the significance of the Christian faith. I cannot resist the conviction that Jesus did exactly what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were attempting to do. He overcame the power of death and transformed the human body into a divine body, that is, a body filled with divine consciousness. In other words he initiated the 'supermental manifestation'. Where the Christian view of it differs from that of Sri Aurobindo, as I mentioned, is that Aurobindo seems to have envisaged the supermental manifestation taking place in this world, that is under the present conditions of space and time. But in the Christian view the body of Jesus in the Resurrection had transcended space and time (at least our space and time) and was not naturally visible. He made himself visible to his disciples from time to time to confirm their faith but the spiritual body as such is not visible to our present sense consciousness. The resurrection released a power of transformation in human life seen in the lives of the martyrs and saints but the final transformation will come at the end of 'time' when the whole creation will pass into the transcendent state undergoing a physical transformation, such as Sri Aurobindo envisaged.
What, it seems to me, one could claim for Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is that they realised, as scarcely anyone had done before, the implications of the resurrection in terms of the transformation of the body here and now (much as Gandhiji realised the implications of the Sermon on the Mount in social and political life more than any Christian had done). Would you be prepared to consider the possibility that the Supermental manifestation actually took place in the death and resurrection of Jesus - on the principle as the Mother said that 'the body is everywhere. One must conquer for all the bodies and for the whole earth'. The work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother would have been to realise, as no one else had done, how this principle could be applied in the physical and psychological transformation of mankind today.
I am afraid that I have introduced an extremely controversial
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issue but it came to me recently when reading Satprem and it fits so exactly with what I have been thinking that I thought that I should put it before you.
I would be interested to hear your comments on this.
6.5.83
I am glad to find you willing to carry on our discussion a little further. I am glad also that you are reading Satprem's Adventure of Consciousness and that the book fascinates you. Yes, it is an excellent piece of exposition written from the heart of its subject and therefore with an experiential power. When it was penned, Satprem was still one of us and shared with us a vision of Sri Aurobindo's work in all its integrality, with its background of the world's whole spiritual history, its broad basis of a many-sided Yoga compassing a diversity of inner realisation, its triple movement of psychic, spiritual and supramental transformation, its insistence on the first two as unavoidable preparations for the third. At present it seems he puts all emphasis on what may be called the Yoga of the Cells and ignores the necessary precedence of it or else the requisite accompaniment of it by a wide range of inner development whose core is union with the Divine by oneness with the infinite and eternal Stability as well as by a constant gesture of "Remember and Offer" in relation to the dynamic Personal God - a process without which the outer self and the bodily being cannot undergo a radical and permanent change down to the very cells.
What you write again about the Virgin Birth calls for a little comment. In your preceding letter you termed it, along with the Resurrection of Jesus, an integral element in "a divine revelation" or "a supernatural manifestation". You believe that the Virgin Birth has been affirmed by the Church
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as a revelatory truth or fact, as if Jesus' incarnational status were negatived by our abandonment of the Virgin-Birth doctrine and as if a symbolic understanding of it must deny his avatarhood. I think you are mistaken here. At least Father Raymond Brown10 has the following to say:
"...the Virgin Birth has not yet been proposed by the Church officially through its creeds and ecumenical councils as an intrinsic constituent of divine revelation...
"The vehemence of conservative Christian feeling with regard to the virginal conception may best be explained by the fact that in the past the denial of virginal conception has often been accompanied by a denial that Jesus is the Son of God. Nevertheless, ...while the doctrine of the virginal conception draws attention to the fact that Jesus was not simply a man like all others and is God's Son in a unique way, it would be impossible to prove theologically that the Son of God could not have become incarnate as the product of a marital union between Joseph and Mary. Both Protestant and Catholic theologians have stated clearly that the bodily fatherhood of Joseph would not have excluded the fatherhood of God. Indeed, it is doubtful that if there had been no infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke (and thus there were no mention in the New Testament of the virginal conception), the Christian faith in Jesus as God's Son would have been really different. The idea of divine Sonship is substantiated in the Synoptic accounts of the baptism and the transfiguration, and in Pauline and Johannine christology; it is not dependent upon the infancy narratives."
In short, the higher magisterium of the Church has not proclaimed the Virgin Birth and this doctrine is not in the least essential to show Jesus' true nature or his world-mission. Perhaps in the future the higher magisterium will come out in favour of it, but its theological non-essentiality cannot be controverted. In any case, you would be committing a mistake to bring it in to distinguish the Christian faith from Hinduism on the ground that the virginal conception is to be considered "historical". You go as far as to say that it is
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much less solidly based historically than the Resurrection. Actually it has no basis at all that can be regarded as historical. You have yourself granted that a good case can be made for its being no part of the earliest Christianity. Hence there is every reason to look at it as the result of a familiar mythopoeic process by which a symbolic account gets "historicised". And even the historicisation stands rather oddly in the very Gospels where it occurs. Although Matthew has suppressed the passage in Mark in which Jesus' own family which surely includes his mother declares him as gone crazy he includes the passage in which that family, having reached where Jesus was, gets neglected and even castigated by him as no mother or brothers or sisters of his because, in comparison with his disciples, they are not true servitors of God. Luke too has this episode in a shorter form and not so clear-cut, but his second chapter is evidently based on a tradition which knew nothing of the Virgin Birth suggested in the first, for there not only is Joseph repeatedly spoken of as Jesus' father in the same breath that Mary is named as his mother but also we have a picture of both Mary and Joseph as people ignorant of the fact that their son was born to do his Divine Father's business.
Only after Jesus' crucifixion Mary became a "Christian" -and she must have become such a prominent member of the post-crucifixion following of Jesus that the mythopoeic process to which I have alluded was fairly easy. And I for one am happy that Marianism and Mariolatry arose, for though there is no historical basis of any kind in favour of the Virgin-Birth doctrine, the mistake, which made her a special vessel of God's grace in the period after the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, introduced into Roman Catholic Christianity its most outstanding truth, an image of the Divine Mother. I am afraid the temper which looked on Jesus as the sole embodiment of the Supreme and on his message as the one and only divine communication and thus bred the spirit of sectarian narrowness and persecuting intolerance and a certain superiority complex in religious matters, a complex
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which still persists in however faint a manner in even the most enlightened Christian - I am afraid the temper concentrating on the all-excluding single Son of God has been a breeder of much falsehood and evil whereas the worship turned towards "Holy Mary, full of grace" breathes of the deep soul and reaches the authentic Divine Reality. This worship is Roman Catholicism's secret link with the work of Sri Aurobindo in whose Yoga the inner and outer self-surrender to the Divine Mother, the Parameshwara's Para-shakti, the Purushottama's Para-prakriti is the central "sunlit" path to the Supermind and the most dynamic channel for the descent of the all-transforming Supramental Light and Love. I feel it is no accident but a profoundly significant sign that the feast of the Assumption of Mary which to Sri Aurobindo is a symbol of the divinisation of Material Nature, the historical womb of all evolution, should fall on August 15, the date of Sri Aurobindo's birth, and flash out the essence, as it were, of the work undertaken by him.
Christianity does have subtle connections with the aim of the Integral Yoga but they are either lost to the outer mind or taken off the track. The old Indian Yogas also have them in other ways and there too the real sense is not grasped. The reason is that the true Supermind as understood and experienced by Sri Aurobindo directly and comprehensively has never come into play. The search for perfect knowledge, for unfailing force, for a body radiant with a soul-expressive perpetual health (the basic definition of the "glorified body") has been operative in general from time immemorial in all countries where the mystic tradition has been strong. The shortcoming in the search lay in the fact that the founts tapped for realising the goal were all below the Supermind, sometimes far below - often the plane called "vital" by Sri Aurobindo, from which most of the "miracles" are performed, including those of Satya Sai Baba who, as the biologist Lyall Watson* observes, has duplicated all the startling phenomena
* The Romeo Error: A Matter of Life and Death (Coronet Books, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1980), p. 204.
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attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. Even the most surprising of them all, the Lazarus-phenomenon, has been vouched for by apparently reliable witnesses, among them is the new "Lazarus"'s own doctor. Satya Sai Baba has not talked of his own resurrection or of the general transfiguration of the body for mankind: there Christianity has a big edge on him, but it appears to have got all wrong the two fundamental truths involved here: (1) the whole man is a perfect body-soul unity and not an immortal soul alone; (2) the body-soul perfection or "divinisation" is to be achieved as the fulfilment of the history of the earth on which the soul's embodiment has taken place again and again in a series of lives or rebirths. If your interpretation of the resurrection-doctrine is correct, the body-soul unity is contradicted by the body being not properly physical but an invisible one with a capacity to materialise for a while, and the divinisation as a fulfilment of terrestrial history loses its point by being complete only after death so that a divinised physicality in the true sense is absent. By the way, I wonder what would be meant by the physical cosmos getting transformed along with the sons of God if everything becomes invisible in accord with the invisibility of the bodies of God's sons. And what significance remains in the description "glorified body" if this entity is really discontinuous with the "crucified body" inasmuch as it is no longer visibly physical and an inalienable part of earth's career through the ages? The entire sense of evolutionary development and consummation is missing. Unless that is there, we cannot speak of the supramental manifestation. When the Mother's attention was drawn to the claim about the resurrected body of Jesus she at once remarked that Jesus' "glorified body" did not remain on earth as the supramentalised body would but went to heaven and stayed there. No doubt, the expression "glorified body" is found in Christian terminology, but it is not exclusively Christian. It is part of an old mystical tradition and is one of the esoteric terms in Alchemy and all who have insight into spiritual occultism are aware of various
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subtle sheaths which are certainly bodies with their own concrete substantiality capable of affecting the gross material body and even getting partly assimilated in it. The Taittiriya Upanishad speaks of five bodies (koshas) and Sri Aurobindo has recognised in its vijnanamaya kosha the supramental body which has to manifest in our earthly one. The same holds for the Mandukya Upanishad's karana sharira which is the causal "body of bliss with the mouth (or face) of knowledge". The attempt to bring some of the hidden bodies into action in the physical is a well-known aspect of occult-spiritual practice. But whatever was done or sought to be achieved was necessarily a superimposition of the ultra-physical on the physical, the two were amalgamated by means of a special power, siddhi, and not the result of a cooperative venture between the ultra-physical above and the same below. In Sri Aurobindo's vision, the Supermind with its divine substance, consciousness-force, delight and truth is not only a free power beyond earth-life but also an involved or hidden power in matter itself, and the supramentalisation occurs by a descent from the beyond and an emergence from within or below. The fusion of the two or rather the manifestation of the one from two modes of itself will constitute total transformation by the very dharma of matter, matter's intrinsic law, and not just by an extraordinary possession of the lower by the higher, an artificial instead of a natural supernaturalisation. If the Supermind is already involved in material substance and evolves out of it by its own push upward and by the downward pressure and eventual descent of the uninvolved Supermind, a divinised physical body which can be concrete and palpable and visible is exactly what we should expect in the course of earth's evolutionary growth. This is the Aurobindonian supramentalisation of the body. I don't see in what fashion Jesus can be considered to have initiated such supramentalisation. All I can say is that the resurrection-doctrine foreshadows in a vague manner and in a mistranslated form an Aurobindonian motif more vividly and more suggestively than any
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other faint presage of the final consequence visualised by Sri Aurobindo of earth's spiritual evolution.
Then there is the ultimate question: "What lies behind this doctrine?" Is there a historical fact of whatever kind? You refer to the resurrection as "solidly based historically". Surely you know that debate still goes on in both theological and scientific circles. Some years ago the Hibbert Journal published a masterly article by an eminent surgeon: "A Surgeon looks at the Crucifixion." On the basis of clues from John's Gospel considered in the light of medical knowledge the author concluded that Jesus did not die on the cross - and that, if the Shroud of Turin could be regarded as that of Jesus, there was all the more reason to believe in his having been still alive. Here, I may remark en passant, that the surgeon was not quite perspicacious. He took for granted the possibility that the Shroud might have been of Jesus. But, while the Shroud is one piece, John's Gospel offers a quite different picture. Let me quote to you 20:3-7: "Peter therefore went forth, and that other disciple, and came to the sepulchre. So they ran both together; and the other disciple did outrun Peter and came first to the sepulchre. And he stooping down and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying; yet went he not in. Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie, and the napkin, that was about his head; not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself." Clearly, the body of Jesus was wrapped with two separate linens. How can his image be on the single-piece Turin Shroud? Whatever may be the conclusion by scientists on the latter, no inferences from it about Jesus can be valid, for the Shroud itself proves to be irrelevant if John is to be credited.
To return to our subject: what is the evidence for the resurrection? In the form of direct evidence, there is only the testimony of Paul to an "appearance" to him of Jesus some time after the latter's death. Paul has also reported several other "appearances" but he lists them as things told to him. Most of them have supporting statements from the Gospels.
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But the most spectacular - namely, the one in which Jesus is said to have appeared to more than 500 brethren - is not corroborated from any book of the New Testament and the appearance to "James, brother of the Lord" can be paralleled only by reference to the 2nd-century apocryphal Gospel of the Hebrews. Even those mentioned in the accepted Gospels of the 1st century are secondhand reports and that too by writers who had never met Jesus. However, on Paul's personal word, we may accept that an extraordinary non-"natural" event took place, to which some people could bear witness as Paul did. But what precisely was this event? How far can we aver that it was connected with Jesus' physical body - and, if it was connected, what was the character of the "transformation" undergone by it? From the fact that Jesus is said to have disappeared we may be inclined to say that it could not have been a physical body that had originally appeared - and, in view of the belief that whatever did appear was never meant to stay for good, there could be no question of an Aurobindonian supramental physical body. This disqualification is apart from all the others that put the resurrection in a different category from the evolutionarily consequent and Yogically developed corps glorieux - the physical instrument itself enjoying total transformation by the grace of the Supermind while still alive and not after death.
If, contrary to all seeming, the very body of the crucified Jesus underwent a surprising change, we must grant it a new power to dematerialise and rematerialise at will and in that respect exceed the limitations of our space and time, but it still bears all the signs of the crucifixion and there is no marked glorification of the material substance. But can we believe the stories told of its strange doings? Can we believe that finally it rose into the sky and vanished among the clouds? If we cannot - and no modern man will - there is no reason to give credence to the other reports: they are not to be taken literally - that is, historically. At many points in the New Testament a literal historical acceptance is impossible
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e.g., Luke 3:21-22 "...and Jesus also being baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him..." Repeatedly we get physicalisations of inner subtle events or truths: what you term "myths". Indeed all Biblical exegetists agree that the Gospels and other documents were never intended to be history as we understand it: there was a great freedom to physicalise the spiritual realities in which the writer believed. So around a small kernel of reported facts a large penumbra of legend and symbolic representation fanned out. The accounts of the resurrection are nearly as challengeable from the historical angle as those of the Virgin Birth. I am not denying all the "appearances" of Jesus after the crucifixion. Something which was wonderful in the eyes of his followers - and, in Paul's case, in those of an enemy -did happen, but to put it wholesale in the realm of physical history is unwarranted. I don't think you can be considered justified in distinguishing "Christian faith" from Hinduism or Buddhism on the ground of "certain historical facts and physical transformations".
You'll be disappointed to find me so critical and, by and large, rather negative, but I have to be honest and, where fundamental issues are concerned, as forthright and clear as I can. One issue I have not touched upon. It has just struck me as relevant. You speak of "the final transformation" coming "at the end of 'time'" and you seem to imply that this long vista of the future was part of the Christian expectation. But I am prepared, with a good number of exegetists, to prove that Jesus and his immediate followers as well as Paul thought in terms of a Parousia very soon after the crucifixion and the alleged resurrection. The end of time was to be not later than 1st century AD. The long developmental historical process towards the universal "final transformation" was never envisaged in the original Christianity.
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P.S. Apropos of "the realm of physical history" in connection with the resurrection-accounts, I may cite three passages from Father Raymond Brown's book on which I have already drawn:
"Certainly, from Paul's description one would never suspect that a risen body could eat, as Luke reports. Moreover, Paul distinguishes between the risen body that can enter heaven and 'flesh and blood' that cannot enter heaven - a distinction that does not agree with the emphasis in Luke 24:39 on the 'flesh and bones' of the risen Jesus" (p. 87).
"Other features in the Gospel accounts may also represent the theological outlook of the evangelists. For instance, only John reports that Thomas was absent when Jesus appeared to the Twelve, and so John has Jesus appear to Thomas a week later. In my commentary on John (n. 169 above), pp. 1031-33, I suggest that his second appearance may be the evangelist's dramatization in which Thomas serves to personify an attitude. The other Gospels mention fright or disbelief when Jesus appears, but John transferred this doubt to a separate episode and personified it in Thomas. Such free dramatization is characteristic of the Fourth Gospel" (p. 106, fn. 176).
"Most scholars regard the story of the guard as a Christian apologetic response to the contention that the body had been stolen. P. Benoit, The Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), p. 226, lists three serious objections against its historicity" (p. 115, fn. 192).
P.P.S. I am enclosing a copy of a letter of Sri Aurobindo to Dilip Kumar Roy in the thirties. It is related to some of the matters we have been discussing.
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Enclosed Letter
THE OLD YOGAS AND THE INTEGRAL YOGA*
I believe K's comment was on a passage in which I wrote that this Yoga was not like the old ones in that it aimed not at an ascent or passing beyond life but at a descent of the divine consciousness into life. Its aim is double - two movements fusing themselves into one - an ascending into the divine consciousness and a transformation of earth-life by the divine consciousness coming down here. All the old Yogas put the emphasis on going to Nirvana or to heaven, Vai-kuntha, Goloka, Brahmaloka etc. for good and so getting rid of rebirth. My emphasis is on life here and its transformation and I put that as the aim at once of my Yoga and of the terrestrial manifestation. I am quite unaware that any of the old Yogas hold this as the aim before them. Even Vaishna-vism and Tantra are in the end otherworldly; mukti* is the aim of their efforts and anything else could be only incidental and subordinate or a result on the way. If my view is correct, then my statement was not an error.
I have not denied that the ideal of a change on earth is of old standing. It is there vaguely in the human mind perhaps since the beginning, though more often perfection is put in some golden age of the past and deterioration and a cataclysm is the law of the future. Christianity foresees a descent of Christ and *his rule on earth, but this is figured as an outward event, not as a change produced by an inward power and process or by Yoga. A reign of the saints is also foreshadowed in some Hindu scriptures, but that equally is something different from my conception. As for sainthood itself or the siddhis† of Yoga including a siddha‡ body, that too
*First published in the Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, November 1980, pp. 52, 54.
*Liberation
†Occult powers.
‡Perfected
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is not what I mean by transformation - it is a radical change of consciousness and nature itself that I envisage. I do not know also that these things were sought by the process of descent - the Tamil Shaiva saints for instance sought for the siddha body by tremendous austerities; the siddhis they sought were all there in the sūksma* mental and vital worlds and by a stupendous effort and mastery of the body they brought them down into the physical instrument. I have always said that these things and these methods are out of my scope and eschewed by me in my Yoga. I tried some of them once but after achieving some initial results I saw it was a bypath and I left it.
To get rid of or mastery over Kama-krodha† is not the transformation, it is at best a preliminary step towards it provided it is done not in the moral way by mental self-control but in the spiritual way. Sainthood is not my object. I do not know how far Ramakrishna had gone towards the transformation as I conceive it; the metaphors you quote contain nothing precise with which I can compare my own experience or my own intuitions about the change. According to certain accounts there was a descent of Kali into his body which made it luminous, but he repressed it as something contrary to what he was seeking after. If there is something anywhere in the past which coincides with the aim and conceived process of my Yoga I shall be glad to know of it; for that would certainly be an aid to me. I put no value on the newness of what I am doing or trying to do. If the path was already there open and complete, it is a great pity that I should have wasted all my life cleaving it out anew with much difficulty and peril when I could just have walked on a clear and safe avenue towards the goal of my endeavour. But the nearest I could get to it were some things in the Veda and Upanishads (secret words, veiled hints) which seemed to coincide with or point towards certain things in my own knowledge and experience. But after incorporating
*Subtle
†Desire and anger
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certain parts of the Vedic method as far as I could interpret or recover it, I found it was insuffident and I had to seek farther.
SRI AUROBINDO
May 13th 1983
Thank you for your letter. I am afraid that we are up against a difference in faith again. You attach much more importance than I do to Biblical criticism. I think that it is useful in its place, but one's faith does not depend on the opinion of scholars. Scholarly criticism of sources may modify one's understanding of the mystery of faith in some respects, but it cannot affect its basis. The faith which I hold is essentially the same as that of St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Pascal, Newman and Teilhard de Chardin, to name typical representatives through the centuries. One of the basic elements in this faith is belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. 'He died and was buried and rose again' has been the core of Christian faith from the beginning until now. One may question the value and significance of the different stories of the empty tomb and the appearances, but all alike in their different ways witness to the same central fact - the bodily resurrection.
What surprises me is that you seem anxious to discredit just those elements in the Christian faith, to which the experience of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother give confirmation. To me the witness of Sri Aurobindo has come as an extraordinary support to the basic truth of the Christian faith. His understanding of the fact that the physical basis of human nature had to be changed and that this would have an effect on the whole universe is an extremely profound insight. I am not surprised that Sri Aurobindo could find no support for his Yoga in the Vedic tradition because it is not there, but I believe that he could have found it in the Christian tradition if he had known where to look. For instance, as far as I know
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he knew nothing of the Greek fathers (in spite of his knowledge of Greek) or of the tradition of the Eastern Church, where he would have found much to interest him. To me it is quite uncanny the way Aurobindo and the Mother through their sadhana obtained insights into the human condition, which bear out so remarkably the deeper aspects of Christian faith. For instance, the example which I quoted from Satprem of the Mother's insight, that if one person could effect the transformation of the body, it would affect the body everywhere because 'there is but one body'. This is an extraordinary insight, which exactly bears out the contention of St. Paul: 'If the dead are not raised then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised your faith is in vain.' (1 Cor.15.16,17)
The resurrection of Christ is a physical event, which has affected all humanity and the whole creation. If this is not the same as the belief of Aurobindo and the Mother it is extraordinarily close to their idea of the supermental manifestation.
However, I don't want to argue this. I only want to maintain that the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother throws an extraordinary light on the fundamental truth of the Christian revelation, namely the physical transformation of the body of Jesus and the consequent physical transformation of the body of humanity (the 'mystical body' of Christ) and eventually of the whole universe (the new creation of St. Paul).
To return to the subject of the Virgin Birth, I am not inclined to accept the view of Father Raymond Brown, because I believe that the physical transformation of the body of Mary - both in the virgin birth and the assumption -belongs to this same mystery of cosmic transformation. As I understand it, the divine power was present in nature from the beginning working in matter to bring forth life, and in life to bring forth consciousness to transform matter so that it will transcend the present laws of matter, space and time. The various siddhis of holy people, Hindu, Buddhist and
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others, and the miracles of Christ are examples of the action of this divine power on matter. I would see the virginal conception of Jesus as a transformation of this kind. But the final conquest of matter was achieved in the resurrection, when a human body went through death and the matter of the universe was set free from the power of death and corruption. The same power continues to work until the end of 'time' when the whole creation will be renewed. I would consider the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as an extraordinary insight into this process of transformation which has enabled me at least to see the meaning of the resurrection and the new creation in a new light. Compared with this, the speculations of Biblical critics seem to me of very little importance. They write from books, but they had not the experience of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
I have no objection to your publishing this correspondence, if you wish.
With best wishes,
P.S. In regard to time and space, I take these to be entirely relative so that a transformation of consciousness as in the resurrection will make entirely new conditions of time and space and eventually transcend them altogether.
18.5.83
Our discussion seems to provoke that old question by a student of physics: "What will happen if an irresistible force knocks against an unbreakable wall?" Perhaps in the course of the hopeless-looking situation the bystander will be able to observe some interesting unsuspected aspects of Christo-Aurobindonian interaction.
I should like to offer a few comments on your latest confessio fidel. You say: "The faith which I hold is essentially
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the same as that of St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Pascal, Newman and Teilhard de Chardin, to name typical representatives through the centuries." I am acquainted with the deliverances of all of them and have a special psychological affinity with Augustine and Teilhard -except where Augustine, as R. C. Zaehner" has pointed out, lent his full weight to the persecution of "heretics" and where Teilhard, as again Zaehner12 has indicated, showed the poorest possible understanding of Indian mysticism. The central truth of my life has been given the most beautiful and moving expression by Augustine's: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." As regards doctrinal faith - and that is what you are talking about - I wonder how you can claim all the names listed by you as partners with you. Paul, as I have said again and again, considered Jesus as born in the same natural way as all human beings: the Virgin Birth is ruled out by his pronouncements. Augustine not merely rejected but scorned the Papal claim of supremacy and resented the cult of Mary and of the martyrs which was then introduced. Aquinas was a Dominican and the Dominicans opposed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception from about 1140 AD onward. In 1384, not long after the time of Aquinas, the opposition reached a peak-point and John de Montesano who revived the discussion in Paris was excluded, along with his fellow Dominicans, from the University in 1389. Also, for several decades after the death of Aquinas, this great schoolman's works were under suspicion and even condemnation. I have admired parts of Pascal's Pensées but his general attitude, which is summed up in his well-known phrase "II faut parier" (We must bet or take sides) in favour of God's existence because it is the safe side, has never appealed to me and I am sure you don't endorse its "business" or "gambler" frame of mind. Teilhard de Chardin was greatly embarrassed by the Mariolatry of Pope Pius XII who made the dogma of Mary's bodily ascension into heaven a compulsory belief. I don't think he accepted the bodily ascension of Jesus either -
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and his acceptance of the resurrection of Jesus is bound up with a view of the cosmicity of Christ whose pantheistic-evolutionary status or nature accords ill with orthodoxy, as Jacques Maritain, most famous of modern Thomists, recognised long ago in The Peasant of the Garonne. Your implication that all the names you have cited are a natural sequence marking an interlinked development of Christian thought is hardly borne out by a close study of them. Actually I consider Teilhard as the only figure with whom you could be in true sympathy as far as Christianity is concerned, although you differ toto caelo from his position vis-à-vis Oriental religions. That is why your Christianity has strong shades of both panpsychism and pantheism in their real sense which will hardly find favour with the Vatican if it is really in a mood to sit in judgment on you.
Your Christianity is miles removed from the established creed. It is through and through coloured by the Indian vision in general and the Aurobindonian revelation in particular. For instance, you write: "...the divine power was present in nature from the beginning working in matter to bring forth life, and in life to bring forth consciousness..." This is a view of nature in terms of Aurobindonian involution and evolution which must be anathema to orthodox Christianity where matter is extrinsic to the Divine and God's omnipresence is not substantial in any manner but simply effective ab extra. In no wise is life an emergent from matter in the eyes of Christianity nor does consciousness evolve from life for Christian orthodoxy. Both life and consciousness are in Christianity special creations from the outside by a transcendental deity. Sri Aurobindo does not deny a power from beyond the material universe pressing on it and descending into it, but he sees also the same power embedded in the material universe and ascending in it to bring about life and consciousness in co-operation with the descending movement, for nothing can emerge which is not in some form already intrinsic to matter or life. Teilhard too holds the same axiom, though in a less clear-cut mode. Owing to pulls from
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orthodoxy in one direction and from his own mysticobiological intuition in another, he is often ambivalent if not even confused. The religious position you hold is in outer shape Teilhardian and joins up with historical Christianity through the Teilhardian turn towards the so-called "cosmic Christ" of the Greek fathers, but actually your Christianity for all its colour from the Greek fathers and from Teilhard is what it is because of the light shed by Sri Aurobindo on cosmic evolution and the future transformation of the race and the world. You have been frank in acknowledging your debt to him again and again. In the present letter too you have given voice to it. Of course you have taken him to be an unconscious supporter of the Christian truth and to have disclosed in an extensive fashion the kernel of Christ's work; but apart from what I deem to be a sort of topsyturvyness in this viewpoint I see clearly how much Sri Aurobindo has meant to you in a final assessment and appreciation of Christianity when you write: "To me it is quite uncanny the way Aurobindo and the Mother through their sadhana obtained insights into the human condition which bear out so remarkably the deeper aspects of Christian faith... I would consider the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as an extraordinary insight into this process of transformation which has enabled me at least to see the meaning of the resurrrection and the new creation in a new light."
You are surprised that I should seem anxious to discredit just those elements of the Christian faith to which the experience of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother give confirmation. What I have tried to do is to open your eyes to the fact that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's work is not intended essentially to "come as an extraordinary support to the basic truths of the Christian faith". On the authority of original Christianity itself there is nothing like a virginal conception of Jesus. On that I am absolutely positive and am prepared to send you a whole book of mine on the theme. In respect to the resurrection I have no final opinion yet. I am prepared to accept a most unusual event following the death of Jesus, but
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on the basis of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother I fail to see here anything approximating to your vision. The resurrection, for all its unusualness, has nothing directly to do with what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother understand and know as the Supramental Manifestation. Nor is there in the Gospels or anywhere else in the Bible the Teilhardian-Aurobindonian vista of an immense future of spiritual development. You have overlooked my proposal to prove that to Jesus and his followers the "end of time" meant a generation or two after the death on the cross. In fact I have a long essay on this issue which I shall be glad to send you for consideration if you care to take a look at it. In Christianity, as in other ancient revelations, there is a fore-glint on a very small scale of the ideal of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. They always admitted faint anticipations since the Supermind's presence secretly behind all history is bound to bring them about in the spiritual sphere. But to say that Christianity accomplished the Supramental Manifestation in the sense in which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother knew of it is to overshoot the mark very much. It is precisely because Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's experience did not support the elements you stress that I attempt to put them in their proper place and appear to "discredit" them.
Now I come to a very important point on which I fear you are rather mixed up. I want to work it out from your own words: "the experience of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother" -"Sri Aurobindo* and the Mother through their sadhana obtained insights" - "[Biblical critics] write from books, but they had not the experience of Aurobindo and the Mother". Evidently you perceive and grant that both these Gurus go by their Yogic perspicacity, their special insights born of direct inner experience and sadhana. They don't go by reading books and mere external knowledge or information. If you are aware of this how can you write: "I am not surprised that Sri Aurobindo could find no support for his Yoga in the Vedic tradition because it is not there, but I believe that he could have found it in the Christian tradition
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if he had known where to look. For instance, as far as I know, he knew nothing of the Greek fathers (in spite of his knowledge of Greek) or of the tradition of the Eastern Church where he would have found much to interest him." Supreme Yogis, master occultists, at home on various subtle planes, recipients of knowledge from the cosmic consciousness, readers of the traces left in the inner dimensions by all that past spirituality has done, viewers of the paths traversed in the in-worlds by saint and seer and prophet and avatar of every age, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother do not have to depend on mere writing by a Gregory of Nyssa or any other Greek father or on any Biblical record to know whether the Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation, both individual and collective, was ever practised or even enunciated in the long spiritual past of the earth. When they state repeatedly that what they were doing was never done before and that because of its newness on the whole they had to go through tremendous difficulties and perils, they are talking fundamentally from the occult and spiritual standpoint. What they read serves also to provide them with an in-look and it is finally by the marks left in the world's subtle history that they judge whether their Yoga was ever essayed previously. Your suggestions strike me as lacking in a proper understanding of people like Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. But how can you fall short of the truth in this context when you recognise them to be adepts of spiritual experience, of Yogic sadhana, of illuminating insights? Sri Aurobindo spent 14 years - from the age of 7 to that of 21 - in Christian England. Then and later he knew his Bible very well.* Do you think that so spectacular an account as of the resurrection would produce no impression on him, during his Yogic career, that something akin to his own work had already been accomplished 2000 years ago? If he had found anything in Christianity affined to his specific labour he would have asked the world to turn to Christ and tried to integrate all
* Sri Aurobindo's own statement is: "I read the Bible - very assiduously at one time" (Centenary Ed., Vol. 24, p. 1237).
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Eastern wisdom with the Epistles of Paul and the four Gospels. When he avers that he had to hew his path to the Supermind through a virgin forest, as it were, we have to take his word and* not make comparisons, especially as all the criteria he has set up for a supramentalised physical are absent from whatever is reported about Jesus' body: particularly a body which disappears in 1 day as said in Luke's Gospel and in 40 days as told in Acts and does not remain luminously established on earth is not the corps glorieux demanded by the culmination of the Aurobindonian Yoga.
To insist, in face of Sri Aurobindo's authoritative testimony and all possible signs, that Sri Aurobindo did nothing more than render the achievement of Christianity intelligible and applicable in the context of modern evolutionary thought, is to waste him. What a diminution of his colossal stature, his Herculean labour, to understand him as having come just to confirm Christianity and to establish a person more firmly in it! If he and the Mother have nothing really momentously new to give us, since everything was there in the Christian vision, all of us who are striving to live up to their teaching and example are misguided fools who could do much better to get baptised and join hands with the priests and nuns of Pondicherry. You have quoted St. Paul: "If the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, our faith is in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:16-17). Paulinely I would say: "If to follow Sri Aurobindo is to believe all to have been done with the raising of Christ reported in the Bible, then Sri Aurobindo has toiled and taught irrelevantly, his life has been a Himalayan blunder and our faith in him is in vain." And I would add in Paul's own words a little further - with the repositioning of one word: "If in this life we have hope only in Christ, we are of all men most miserable." This, of course, does not hold for people like you to whom Christ is the most living reality. But we who are steeped in Sri Aurbindo, if we are to turn him essentially to a Christian significance, we would reduce him to absurdity and futility. And I have the conviction that the
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world at large will agree with us.
I am rather puzzled over one sentence of yours: "The resurrection of Christ is a physical event, which has affected all humanity and the whole creation." If the resurrection attributed to Christ were a physical event in the full sense in which Sri Aurobindo would regard a supramentalised material body, "all humanity and the whole creation" would not be what they are now. Such a stupendous spiritual phenomenon would have had a revolutionary effect both outward and inward in at least European history in general and especially the history of the church that formed in the wake of the alleged supramentalisation. If a real supramentalisa-tion had been achieved, the "Holy Spirit" which Jesus left behind to animate a corporate body representing him would have had a different career than the church which called itself Christ's. Zaehner,13 although a Roman Catholic, is honest enough to ask pointedly: "But - and it is an enormous 'but' -if - and it is an enormous 'if - if the Church is indeed the 'mystical' body of Christ, living by the breath of the Holy Spirit, how are we to account for its disgraceful, bloodstained history? We have already suggested that the root-sin of the Church has, ever since the conversion of Constantine, been its betrayal of its spiritual mission in the interests of worldly power, and its total loss of Christ's gift of love, which was made manifest in its mad and criminal career of persecution and intolerance... What we have advertised as Christianity has rarely been more than a caricature - make-believe, which makes fewer and fewer believe. Very few of us feel as a living reality that unity in diversity suffused by love that not only Christianity proclaims but also the Saiva Siddhanta and the Vedanta according to Ramanuja which have grown up independently on Indian soil."
Zaehner14 does not lose hope: "It may be millions of years before the corporate ideal of the Church as the body of Christ even begins to look like reality, but the Holy Spirit has all eternity in which to work..." No doubt, Jesus brought great things into the world, but evidently not enough illumination
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and power to change the face of the earth such as an authentic and entire supramentalisation of matter would bring along with an influx of love. It should be obvious that the truly "glorified body" which alone can "conquer evil" was not compassed. Whatever resurrection may be claimed for him has definitely not affected all humanity, leave aside the whole creation. What Sri Aurobindo leads us to expect from a physical event like bodily supramentalisation has not shown even a thousandth part of itself in "post-resurrection" European history. Both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have looked on Jesus as a genuine avatar whose speciality of manifestation was love, a being of beauty sprung from the Divine Mother's heart (a spiritual fact which was mythopoeicised as the Virgin Birth) to impart to gross earth a spark of the Supreme Bliss, but they have also recognised that the vast knowledge-light and the all-transforming force which they have seen in the sovereign Supermind and which they strove to incarnate in the most concrete outer terms of life were not there, although a number of glints of what we may designate Aurobindonianism may be caught in some of the happenings as well as legends and symbols associated with Jesus, just as they may be caught here and there from non-Christian religious movements. But nothing bears out and everything disproves that the Supermind proper was manifested in Christianity - or in any other religion. I am afraid you speak too easily, too lightly of so radical a thing as bodily supramentalisation and of its universal consequences.
By the way, Father Raymond Brown is a believer in both the Virgin Birth and the bodily resurrection but he has a remarkably open mind as to what he calls "scientifically controllable evidence" and full cognisance of genuine Bible criticism.
Thanks for your permission to publish our correspondence at some suitable time.
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May 25th 1983
Thank you for your letter. As I said in my last letter, the difference between us is a matter of faith - your faith in Sri Aurobindo and the Supermental Manifestation and my faith in Jesus and the Resurrection. We are not likely to agree-on the matters of faith but perhaps we may come to a better understanding of each other's faith and their relation to one another. You question a good many elements in my faith and so I must try to explain how I understand them.
In the first place I would make a distinction between the object of faith and our understanding of that object. When I said that I shared the faith of St. Paul and the rest, I did not mean that we share the same understanding of the object of faith in all respects, but that the object of faith itself is the same for all. That object is what St. Paul called the 'mystery of Christ'. This mystery of Christ is a supernatural mystery (I would call it a supermental mystery, but I refrain out of deference to you) which cannot be comprehended by human reason (that is by what Aurobindo calls the 'mental'). It is known by a supernatural intuition, a transcendent wisdom, which is beyond ordinary human understanding (by what both St. Paul and Aurobindo would call 'gnosis'). This supernatural mystery was revealed in the New Testament and is preserved in the tradition of the Church. Our understanding this mystery is subject to continuous growth and has taken many different forms in the history of the Church, but the substance of the faith remains for ever the same. I forget whether you have read my book, The Golden String, in which I explained all the stages of my growth in understanding of this mystery and also my recent book, The Marriage of East and West, in which I showed a further growth of understanding in the light of Eastern thought, but most of what I have to say is to be found in those books. The essential thing is to distinguish between the mystery of faith itself which is beyond word and thought and is nothing less than the ultimate Reality and the human understanding of the
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mystery, which is subject to continuous growth.
The book which finally convinced me of the truth of the Catholic faith was Newman's Development of Christian Doctrine. In this he showed how the original mystery of faith was revealed in the Person of Jesus himself and how Christian doctrine is in process of a gradual development over the centuries as one aspect and then another of the original mystery comes to be understood in a new light and to be related to the others. From this point of view it is quite irrelevant when a particular doctrine came to be defined. The whole Christian doctrine is implicit in the original revelation, and becomes explicit in the course of history. It is therefore quite irrelevant to ask when precisely the doctrine of the Virgin Birth came to be accepted. We know that it was accepted at the end of the first century in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and that it was accepted after that in the Creeds and the Councils of the Church as an integral element in the Christian faith. The doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and Assumption of Mary were accepted much later and were only defined in the 19th century, but they also are integral elements in the total mystery of Christ. It is the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ in whom the Holy Spirit dwells, in which the original divine revelation is preserved and which is able to discern what belongs to the substance of faith and what does not.
I would like to make it clear that you are quite wrong in suggesting that 'my Christianity' is miles removed from the established creed. I accept without reserve the total mystery of Christ as a revelation of ultimate truth. My understanding of it may differ in some respects from that of others, but none has ever suggested that it is not in accordance with the Catholic faith. It is my belief, as I said, that as our understanding of the Christian mystery has grown through the centuries through the influence of Aristotle and modern philosophy, so it may now grow through the influence of Oriental thought and not least of Sri Aurobindo! I would make it clear that you are mistaken in thinking that Christianity
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knows only a transcendent God acting ab extra. St. Thomas Aquinas affirms categorically that God is 'in' all things by his power, his presence and his essence! It is true that the emphasis in Christianity is always on the transcendence of God rather than on his immanence but the doctrine of immanence is there, just as the emphasis in Hinduism is always on the immanence of God but the conception of transcendence is there. The truth is that God is totally immanent and totally transcendent. As regards evolution of course the idea is new in Christianity, just as Sri Aurobindo's concept of evolution was new in Hinduism. But it is now generally accepted and is an example of the 'development' of doctrine in Newman's sense. Karl Rahner has some excellent articles on it. Teilhard de Chardin's basic ideas are now accepted by most theologians.
As regards the 'end of time' I had not altogether overlooked your remark and put in a postscript that I consider all time and space to be relative. The Christian mystery itself is essentially eternal. It is a manifestation in space and time of the eternal Reality. The resurrection itself is not an event in time. It is the passage from time to eternity or, as T. S. Eliot put it, 'the point of intersection of eternity with time'. This is why the 'time' of the Resurrection and the 'time' of the final manifestation are not strictly determined. The body of Jesus in the Resurrection was not found in the tomb and appeared to some of his disciples but it then passed out of this time-space and entered into the eternal Reality. I would suggest that the gross body of Jesus which was laid in the tomb was transformed into a subtle body, in which he appeared to his disciples but was not bound by the ordinary laws of space and time - it appeared and disappeared. Then at the Ascension it became a 'spiritual body' that is a body wholly permeated by the Spirit, so that it was no longer in space-time at all. I always find it difficult to understand why Sri Aurobindo seemed to think that the supermental manifestation would take place in this world or, as you say 'on this earth'. Surely, the present space-time world as we perceive
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it, as both western science and eastern mysticism agree, is an appearance based on our present mode of perception through the senses and the categories of the mental consciousness. When the Supermind descends and we pass into super-mental consciousness, then our perception of reality will change and we shall no longer be conditioned by space and time.
This is how I understand the Resurrection. It is the passage beyond space and time accomplished once in Jesus and later according to Catholic belief in Mary, and destined to be accomplished in all men. The Church itself is essentially the 'communion of saints', that is, the company of those who have passed 'from death to life', from the temporal to the eternal. The Church on earth with all its 'blood-stained history' is a passing phenomenon: it is humanity on its painful progress from sin to salvation, from the temporal to the eternal, and subject to all the ills which beset humanity. But I would emphasise against Zaehner, who always exaggerates, that there has never been a time when it failed to manifest 'Christ's gift of love'. From the martyrs like Ignatius and Poly carp to the Fathers of the Desert like St. Antony and St. Pachomius to the great monastic leaders like St. Benedict and St. Bernard, to St. Francis and St. Dominic, St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, right up to Mother Teresa at the present time, there have always been hot only individual saints who have revealed the love of Christ, but whole communities who have borne witness to the mystery of Christ and its power to transform human life. When I became a Catholic, as I recorded in The Golden String, it was precisely because 'I saw visibly present in the Church the spirit of Christ' in the monastic community which I joined.
I don't know whether I have covered all the points which you raise, but I hope that this makes clear how I understand the Christian faith. As regards Sri Aurobindo, I don't, of course, expect you to accept my point of view, but I don't see why you should not agree that Sri Aurobindo's teaching and experience throw a great deal of light on the Christian
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mystery as I understand it and that this understanding is quite compatible with an orthodox Catholic faith. To me this is a 'development' of doctrine in Newman's sense, a further understanding of the mystery of faith which is quite compatible with Christian doctrine as a whole and makes it meaningful to modern man.
With all good wishes,
29.5.83
I like very much the basic spirit of your letter - the deep faith you have in what you, after Paul, term "the mystery of Christ". I wouldn't ever deny this mystery or seek to profane it. But when you link it with certain dogmas or make some assertions as if of indubitable historical events or give a particular world-view as final or offer general explanations, I am rather at a loss and am obliged to ask a number of questions. I hope you will excuse my puzzlement and inquiries.
My overall impression is that, although your contact with the mystery of Christ is direct, your mind as distinguished from the soul in you with its own light and intuitions is coloured and ruled by an institution which took shape by the end of the first century AD. Essentially you are a true Christian but in doctrinal matters you are a Roman Catholic - no doubt a very tolerant and noble-tempered one with a sympathetic and even an assimilative attitude towards Eastern wisdom but still limited in several respects by the assumption that Roman Catholicism is the whole and sole Christianity as well as the one and only fullness of truth and by a blurring of shades in words like "immanence" and "omnipresence" or in psychological-spiritual states and activities like sainthood and love.
You don't seem to be particularly interested in the historical
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Jesus although you claim that the differentia of Christianity from religions like Hinduism and Buddhism is the historical events connected with it. Even when admitting that the earliest Christianity knew nothing of the Virgin Birth you accept the latter as historical because the Church towards the end of the first century took up the late tradition found in a couple of phrases in Matthew and Luke and nowhere else in the entire New Testament and even rendered inappropriate by the evidence in the rest of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, not to mention the clear implication against it in Christianity's two earliest documents, the Epistles of Paul and the Gospel of Mark, as well as the utter absence of it from the latest Gospel which is John's and the equally late Acts of the Apostles. When I am prepared to demonstrate to you with absolute finality that according to Jesus and his immediate successors the Second Coming of Christ was to be very soon after the crucifixion, you brush aside the historical evidence and bring in the essential eternity of the Christian mystery to argue that the "time" of the Second Coming is not strictly determined. But surely "the point of intersection of eternity with time", which you press on me with Eliot must still have some chronological locus? The birth of Jesus for those like us who regard him as a divine manifestation is a point where eternity and time intersect, yet on that account we" do not consider a phrase like Anno Domini irrelevant or inapplicable and do not hesitate to locate the birth in the reigns of Herod and Caesar Augustus with as much precision as we can manage. The Church, finding that the reports of Paul and the Evangelists about "last things" had proved wrong, naturally shifted the eschatological moment to an undetermined future or at least a future fairly distant from the crucifixion. This is reasonable and I find no fault with Rahner or Teilhard moving that moment to millions of years hence into the long vista of human evolutionary development. I do not quarrel with Newman's thesis that Christian Doctrine continually develops in the light of new events and new outlooks. But that should
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not make us forget what has been reliably recorded as the testimony of Jesus himself. The Church is rational in moving with the time in such matters but most irrational in saying that Jesus never meant what he explicitly announced. Perhaps you who follow the Church here have not properly attended to the scriptural evidence and should glance at my setting forth of it. Would you allow me to send you my essay?
The blurring of issues in respect of the Second Coming brings me to the topic of the Church as the vehicle of the Holy Spirit. As I said, I am with the Church in its dealings with eschatology. However, I find it impossible to think that it represents the historical Jesus and his specific teachings in every point. It is also difficult for me to envisage the Holy Spirit of Jesus permitting so "blood-stained" a career in its earthly representative. True, Jesus did say that he had not come to bring peace but a sword, but this was in relation to the rupture he was bound to cause between family ties and the pursuit of the disciple-cum-missionary life for a wholehearted Christian. There is no question of persecuting people unto death. True, too, that Jesus was vehement in condemning "sinners" to the everlasting fire of hell and to the worm that dies not, but there is no soupçon of a jihad such as is openly advocated in the Koran by Mohammed when he enjoins slaughter of the non-believers as a religious duty and the surest passport to paradise. A certain claim to monopoly of revelation in the name of Jesus is discernible in Paul and John but there is no push towards persecution. Here, however, was a dangerous claim and it served as a seed for that enormous religious self-righteousness, that aggressive spiritual exclusiveness leading to the bigot's swollen head and the fanatic's narrow heart which mark much of the Church's subsequent history.
You plead that, in spite of what Zaehner condemns historical Christianity for, "there has never been a time when the Church failed to manifest 'Christ's gift of love'". You add a list of martyrs and saints "right up to Mother Teresa at the
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present time" and even whole communities who have revealed the love of Christ and the power of Christ's mystery to transform human life. I would be a fool to deny fine individuals and enlightened communities: every religion breeds them and especially in modern times when humanitarianism of a secular kind came into play in Europe and the old religious divisiveness was more and more set aside. But I tend to look a little askance at most of the historical Christian saints in one important respect where "love" loses all meaning. In my last letter I alluded to a great stain on the sainthood of Augustine. Apropos of Gandhi's calling "untouchableness" an ineffaceable blot and a curse that Hinduism carries with it, Zaehner15 writes: "Substitute the word 'persecution' for 'untouchableness', and the same must hold for the Catholic Church. It has been the 'ineffaceable blot' and 'the curse' that Western Christianity has carried with it ever since Augustine of Hippo gave the full weight of his authority to the persecution of heretics - persecution, that is, in the name of Catholicity and unity, no matter at what cost to the real organic unity that St. Paul had called the body of Christ." Here Zaehner is free from any "exaggeration" you may accuse him of and what gets pinpointed is the hollow-ness of the "love" you associate with Christian saints, for one of the greatest -names among them stands pilloried. Or take St. Dominic who figures on your list as an example of "Christ's gift of love". Look at his conduct towards the Albigensians.
As a result of modern research the old blackwashing of the Albigensians does not hold. The province to which they belonged was the most prosperous in Christian Europe nor was there any notable looseness of life in it. Even Pope Innocent III who launched the crusade against them and had at least 100,000 men, women and children brutally slaughtered and the area where they had lived thoroughly devastated - even Innocent III said nothing about moral licence or social interests and, according to all authorities, the sternest critics of the vices of the Christian clergy in the Middle Ages
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were the Albigensians. P. Alphandery,16 who has made the most serious attempt in our day to understand the ideas and conduct of the Albigensians, shows that the life-style of the initiated or esoteric members (perfecti) was "ascetic to the point of cruelty" - the same conduct including strict celibacy, fasting, etc., which made saints of Catholic monks and nuns in conventional Christendom. The great body of ordinary members lived decent human lives, according to Alphandery. The only fault of the community was doctrinal difference. St. Dominic was prominent in the group that tried to convert the Albigensians. He failed and became one of the chief persons to urge the Pope to launch a military crusade against them. How can I accept such a saint as revealing the love of Christ and the power of Christ's mystery to transform human life? In fact the Order he founded was from the beginning tainted with unscrupulous fanaticism and his followers were the worst agents of the Inquisition before their rivals the Franciscans challenged the monopoly.
Mention of the Inquisition reminds me of another saint, whom you have not mentioned but who stands high among "Christ's soldiers": Francis Xavier. I was educated at the school and college in Bombay that goes under his name. I do not question Francis Xavier7 s religious experiences or his devotion to Jesus, but I jib at the ascription of "love" to him when I know that he urged the King of Portugal to make the Inquisition active in Goa. Murderous hate of non-Christians is ingrained in the past of the Church.
You will be surprised that the Church's Canon Law has still not abandoned the principle that heretics must be put to death. Father Marianus de Luca, who was the author of the Latin version published by the Vatican Press in 2 volumes in 1901 with the Pope's approval in a letter, reproves in several passages liberal Catholics who mistakenly say that the Church has surrendered "the right of the sword". He argues for the Church the right and even the duty to put apostates to death.17 In 1910 Cardinal Lépicier published De Stabilite et Progressu Dogmatis, again an authoritative exposition of
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Church Law in our century, and proves that apostates "may justly be put to death" (p. 194) and then goes on to claim that they are all in "bad faith" since "no one can lose the faith except by the very gravest sin" (p. 201).
I am sorry to underline all these painful facts. They are not intended to run down the Church in its totality. My friend, Dr. J. N. Chubb, who teaches philosophy in America, tells me that modern Catholics are the most broad-minded of Christians he has come across and I personally know of nuns in the USA who are deeply Aurobindonian in a direct manner without being harasssed by Church authorities. On the other hand, the old narrowness persists in some quarters. An American girl told me of her life among nuns, the Mother Superior of whom had dubbed Pope John XXIII a devil for being so large-hearted towards non-Catholics and even Marxists. That this Mother Superior was not a complete anachronism comes home to us in another way from the treatment meted out to Teilhard during his whole life. His fellow-Jesuits were fairly enlightened minds as we can see from his Lettres Intimes18 (not yet translated into English as far as I know) to Péres Auguste Valensin, Bruno de Solages, Henri de Lubac and André Ravier from 1919 to 1955. But Rome, with its "suffocating subhuman atmosphere", as Teilhard himself said, was utterly devoid of intellectual charity, although the Pope whom Sri Aurobindo considered perhaps the most liberal in Roman Catholic history - Pius XII - was in power in the last two decades of Teilhard's life. After Teilhard's death he is made much of, but at the cost of true Teilhardism. It is sought to be shown that he was not saying anything else than what his fellow Catholics were saying all the time. Teilhard surely knew what was being said by his fellow-Catholics and yet he pleaded for a new Christianity. Now that he is no more there to assert his Cosmic Christ his interpreters are taking advantage of his own attempt to run with the pantheist hare and hunt with the orthodox Christian hound and declaring that there was no really pantheist hare at all and that the pantheist-seeming animal was just a wrong
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labelling of the cosmicality of Christ which had been present in Christianity from the time of Paul and the Greek Fathers.
If we attend closely to Teilhard we may stand by his own uncertainties and quote him as declaring that he was developing the Cosmic Christ along the lines of Paul and Greek patristic literature. This means that he took up their emphasis on Christ's cosmicality and, without stopping with them or merely dressing them up in different language, went on to read a momentous new shade in this aspect of Christ. That a new shade exists and constitutes the essence of Teilhard has to be vividly realised. I don't think you realise the need or the fact sufficiently. Else you would not write on "immanence" as you do and react by saying that your Christianity is exactly in all fundamentals the established creed of the Church. Of course, even within that creed we find permissible shades of difference, like Aquinas's dictum that Christ would never have taken birth if Adam had not "sinned" and Duns Scotus's thesis that Christ's birth was the natural completion of God's plan and did not depend on Adam's "sin" except that the latter gave Christ the additional role of Saviour. But in the matter of God's immanence and omnipresence there can be no two opinions if the world was created by God ex nihilo by "efficient causality" as one makes an artefact and if the world was not manifested or "loosed forth" (as Indian spiritual metaphysics holds) from God's own being. Of course, "efficient causality" is not the only factor at work. Christian philosophy recognises also that God or Christ was the "exemplary cause" and the "final cause", but neither of these causes equates that philosophy to the Indian metaphysical position. A universe emanating from the very being of God and existing basically as a particular mode of this being must imply an immanence and omnipresence significantly different from the Christian, although including the Christian kind. A panpsyche and a pantheos which yet do not exhaust the divine nature, as they would in a non-Christian European view, but leave the divine transcendence undiminished - surely they cannot be the automatic consequence
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of a vision in which God is an extrinsic artificer of the cosmos, in whom the cosmos exists as an idea and who is the divine exemplar or archetype of the cosmos and for whom as the goal or end the cosmos exists. None of the Catholic theologians speak of evolution in the same manner as you do. Even Teilhard does not quite anticipate your manner, though he has much of it. Your manner is Aurobindonian, except that you do not yet see how logical and necessary it is to postulate rebirth if you are to postulate spiritual evolution and if it is in souls that this evolution is carried on. Life being involved in matter, and mind in life, and spirit and supermind in mind, and the evolution proceeding from such involution - this is thoroughly Aurobindonian and makes room for panpsychism and pantheism in a way that is both Teilhardian and Aurobindonian without jeopardising in the slightest (as sheer Spinozism would) the status of the transcendent deity, the Super-Person, the absolute Purusha who, as the Vedas appreciatively quoted by you in your books say at the dawn of Indian civilisation, came down in one-fourth of himself and kept three-fourths above. The Catholic Church can never accept the immanence and omnipresence resulting from such a manifestation or "self-creation". And, because Teilhard brought in a pantheism Christified and a Christ pantheised in a sense radically at variance with whatever immanence and omnipresence his fellow-Catholics expounded in terms similar-sounding to his own, he was under suspicion all his life while Péres Fernand Prat and Joseph Huby and Pierre Benoit were free to cosmicalise Christ to their heart's content.
I remember your quoting a translation of the Pauline "Omnis creatura usque adhuc ingemiscit et parturit". You had no doctrinal reservations when you cited these words. But surely, if the whole material creation - the so-called "inanimate" universe - can act like this, it must be basically a living universe, one single whole with consciousness in various modes of manifestation everywhere. To see the universe thus is to see it under a certain aspect of pantheism,
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the aspect that one may designate panpsychism. A friend of Teilhard, Father C. C. Martindale,19 writes in an article on Teilhard: "Since the Consummation is not yet reached, Saint Paul can say (Romans 8:22) that all creation is still 'groaning and suffering birth-pangs along with us and joins in our yearning' for the ransom of our humanity. We agree that a certain timidity has been felt about this apparent equipping all creation with a sort of consciousness: even the late Monsignor Ronald Knox said that if Saint Paul was referring to the whole of creation, he must be speaking with 'something of a poetic outlook'." Martindale20 also remarks: "When speaking of such matters it is hard not to sound pantheist, at least at times." In the Teilhardian philosophy of a cosmo-genesis which is really a Christogenesis and in which the Universal Christ functions as the universe's "physical, natural centre", "the bond running through all things", and makes himself "one with all" and "enters into contact with every one of the zones of the creation" and wears the earth as a "raiment", the cosmos is secretly a living tissue capable of "groaning", charged with "travail" for a supreme goal and meant from the beginning to be increasingly the Creator's "Mystical Body", and growing, ever since his incarnation in a human form, more and more swiftly and extensively "Christified" and turned into a sacramental "Host" by means of "the universal function of the incarnate God". It is with this philosophy that Teilhard makes use not only of the Pauline phrase I have quoted but also of that other phrase of Paul's which has perhaps an even more unconventional look for the orthodox Christian: "In eo vivimus, movemur et sumus" - "In him we live, and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). Teilhard wants us to take this statement "quite literally".21
A literal interpretation conjures up at once the historical background of Stoic thought to Paul's pronouncements in the midst of Mars' Hill. As everybody knows, Paul himself refers to it when immediately after that great formula he declares: "As certain of your own poets have said, for we also
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are his offspring." The poet in question is Aratus (Phaenomena, 5), who, like Paul, was a native of Cilicia. Paul is couching his own gospel to the "men of Athens" in the terms of the Stoic God-mysticism which is pantheistic and which conceives God literally as the essence of all the forces at work in nature. One may wonder whether he was just being "all things to all men" in order to get his non-pantheistic message across or was actually harmonising with his doctrine of the transcendent God the immanence of divine substance visioned by Stoic pantheism - an immanence in which the universe is God's own stuff, the outer form of a divine World-Soul. Whatever we may opine about Paul, there can be no doubt about Teilhard. To take "quite literally" our living and moving and having our being in God is to pass beyond the omnipresence such as Christianity conceives -namely, a power that is external to the cosmos and separate from it and that is everywhere only by its causative action supporting the existence of the cosmos and serving as the ground for the universe's dynamic continuance but never functioning as the inner soul of the world, as the Cosmic Christ, who is the all-evolver as well as the all-evolving, the very universe in development no less than the hidden all-consummator. If you are Teilhardian you cannot escape exceeding the old Christian "immanence" which always accompanied the concept of transcendence'. As a Teilhardian you will never be a mere "immanentist" denying God's transcendence as the European pantheist à la Spinoza would, but most certainly you will be a pantheist in the Indian sense, though in a modern evolutionary framework as Sri Aurobindo is. When you write that "Teilhard's basic ideas are now accepted by most theologians," you are looking at him through the eyes of Karl Rahner and company who have evolutionised Christianity without combining pantheistic immanence and theistic transcendence as the evolutionist Teilhard does in his pan-Christism. "Most theologians" have a good deal of expressed or implicit reservations and their Teilhard is the real article considerably watered down. An
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honest clear-cut instance is Pére Olivier Rabut. Commenting on certain phrases in Teilhard's Divine Milieu, Rabut22 writes:
"We must be careful not to imagine that there is such a thing as a 'pan-Christism', in which everything contains a fragment of Christ. Christ is linked with the cosmos, but the universe is not, and never will be, a vaster Incarnation of him. It is better, then, not to speak of 'a silently accruing presence of Christ in things'. Earth is not (even if we add 'beyond itself) 'the body of him who is and him who is coming.' There is no such thing as a cosmic Host; the phrase has only a metaphorical meaning, and is too misleading to be retained. The universe is an extension of the body of Christ; this concept, which is very profound, is well worth an elaboration; but we must be careful to distinguish the body of Christ from its adjuncts. And the insistence on the physical or biological reality of the Mystical Body is also misleading; the vital (and real) bonds which unite are all supernatural."
Contrast these statements with Teilhard's plainly put conviction in Christianity and Evolution:23 "It is Christ who in a real and unmetaphorical sense of the word holds up the universe. So incredible a cosmic function may well be too much for our imagination, but I do not see how we could possibly avoid attributing it to the Son of Mary. The Incarnate Word could not be the supernatural (hyper-physical) centre of the universe if he did not function first as its physical, natural centre... When, through the priest, Christ says, 'Hoc est corpus meum', 'This is my body', the words reach out infinitely far beyond the morsel of bread over which they are pronounced: they bring the entire mystical body into being. The priestly act extends beyond the transubstantiated Host to the cosmos itself, which, century after century, is gradually being transformed by the incarnation, itself never complete. From age to age, there is but one single mass in the world: the true Host, the total Host, is the universe which is continually being more intimately penetrated and vivified by Christ..."
In the light of such assertions we have to interpret
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Teilhardian "immanence" and understand it as differing very significantly from what you mean when you say: "Thomas Aquinas affirms categorically that God is 'in' all things..." The Thomist "immanence" is a synonym for the kind of cosmicality which inheres in the idea of "omnipresence" in non-pantheistic religions. Guarding against the restricted form which is European pantheism and which excludes not only transcendence but also - in Teilhard's view - the existence of individual souls, Teilhard brought in "Christian pantheism". However, he was positive that it went much further than just seeing the old "omnipresence" in another way. Even those who dilute Teilhardism realise this without plumbing the full depth of Teilhard's metamorphosis of both European pantheism and traditional Christianity. Thus his co-religionist editors of Writings in Time of War summarise his stand:24
"It is faith in the divine Omnipresence, completed by the doctrine of the Universal Christ, that will provide the antidote to the temptation of pantheism."
Obviously, "omnipresence" in its Thomist garb is found inapplicable, yet in seeing Teilhard as supplementing it the editors fall short of his intention, for their notion of his Universal Christ is as if he were expressing the doctrine of the Mystical Body in a more "organic" fashion than before and giving value to the evolutionary aspect of the world emphasised by modern science. So the editors appear to take away with one hand what they concede with the other. Such, I suspect, is also your attitude - quite honest but mistaken because in Teilhard's "Christian pantheism" you fail, as he himself most egregiously failed, to read the Indian pantheistic variety. The failure vitiates the proper comprehension of the Mystical Body as envisaged by Teilhard. I may jot down here the note I made on the subject after reading Henri de Lubac's fine and fascinating book Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (London: Burns & Oates, 1962):
"The difference between the organic nature of the Mystical Body as accepted by the Catholic Church and the organic
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nature of it as understood by Teilhard is that the former accepts organicity in the supernatural form of this Body and not in the natural form which is the Church: it is not and never will be an organism in the true sense: it will always be an organisation, however close-knit and comprehensive it may be. According to Teilhard, even the natural form of the Mystical Body will be an organism comparable in its essence to a biological body. He finds it illogical to hold that in supernature Christ is the organic centre whereas in nature he is merely juxtaposed and is just the juridical centre of a community, a congregation, a social group. The unity of mankind which Catholic orthodoxy desires as a help to the formation of the supernatural Body of Christ differs from the unity which Teilhard visions: he speaks of a super-organism with a super-consciousness - a unanimisation which is far more than an harmonious ensemble: it is an ultra-biological phenomenon, the crossing of a 'critical threshold' beyond that which gave rise to thinking man. It is a super-human or ultra-human state corresponding in physical terms to the super-natural state."
I am afraid I have gone on and on and made several digressions though none, I hope, quite irrelevant in general to the various issues we have been discussing. Let me close now with mentioning that I haven't read your Golden String but have carefully perused The Return to the Centre as well as The Marriage of East and West, noting at the same time their many wonderful insights and their few yet momentous oversights which are saved from being particulary offensive by the liberal, gracious, India-enchanted personality of the author.
June 9th 1983
Thank you for your letter. Our argument seems to have changed from a discussion of the relation of Sri Aurobindo's
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philosophy to Christian faith and doctrine to the pros and cons of Christian faith itself. I have no objection to this, though it takes us rather far afield. As I said I came to Christian and Catholic faith from rational conviction over fifty years ago and all my study and experience since then has only gone to confirm it. I will send you a copy of The Golden String, so that you can see the stages of my conversion.
To come to your criticisms. In the first place I would like to make it clear in regard to religion in general, that I believe that the transcendent mystery of Being or the 'Holy Mystery' as Karl Rahner calls it, is present in some measure in every genuine religion from the most primitive tribal religion to the great world religions. But in each religion the divine mystery, when it comes to be expressed, both in doctrine and ritual, is subject to the limitations of language, culture and historical circumstances of the people to whom it is revealed. This applies to all religions, which are necessarily conditioned by their historical situation. But in addition every religion is exposed to the forces of sin and evil in the world and every religion is thus exposed to corruption both in theory and practice. All that we can ask of any religion is that in spite of all its inevitable limitations and corruptions the divine mystery is always preserved in it so that it can be discovered by those who seek it with a sincere heart. Consequently I do not regard as of great importance the manifold errors and corruptions which can be found in Christianity as in Hinduism provided that it can be shown that the divine Truth and Goodness has always been preserved both in the life and the teaching of its adherents.
To come now to Christianity in particular. I believe, as I said, that the divine Mystery was revealed to the disciples of Jesus in its fullness and has been preserved in the Scriptures and Tradition of the Church. The expression of this Mystery was inevitably conditioned by the historical circumstances of the people to whom it was revealed and has therefore its inevitable limitations but the essential truth is always preserved in the Church by the presence of the indwelling
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Spirit. This essential truth is to be found in the tradition of all the orthodox or 'main line' churches, as they are sometimes called, and is found in the New Testament and in the creeds of the early Church (such as the Apostles' Creed and the Nicaean). I believe that the fullness of the divine revelation is to be found in the communion of the Roman Church, but the others also possess the essential truth.
Of this essential truth the Virgin Birth is an integral element, which has been preserved both in the Scriptures and in the Creeds of the churches. I am afraid that I do not find your arguments about the Virgin Birth at all convincing. As I said in a previous letter, the Christian faith does not depend on the opinions of scholars and historians, but even so I find the evidence for the Virgin Birth quite sufficient. It is recorded in the gospels of Matthew and Luke in the second half of the first century, but the records of the written gospels in turn depend on an oral tradition which goes back to the evidence of eye witnesses at the time. I do not find the argument from silence in Mark and John at all convincing. In John in particular, it is practically certain that writing at the end of the first century, he was aware of the doctrine. That he does not mention it is no more significant than the fact that he does not mention the institution of the Eucharist of which it is quite certain that he knew. The argument from silence proves nothing and there is nothing in the New Testament which is positively against the doctrine. In any case the judgment as to what belongs to divine revelation depends not on scholars and historians (though their opinions have to be taken into account) but on the Church to which the divine revelation was entrusted.
To come now to the specific charges which you make against the Church, I entirely agree with Zaehner when he says that intolerance has been a blot on the Church like untouchability in Hinduism. Unfortunately this derives from the Bible itself and disfigures Judaism and Islam as well as Christianity. I put this down to the cultural limitations of the Semitic people, who had an extreme sense of moral dualism.
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This is where I feel that Christianity and Hinduism need to meet in order to correct each other's cultural limitations. Christianity has been excessively intolerant (and I feel as much as you do the scandal of it), but Hinduism has been on the contrary excessively tolerant of evil, allowing everything from human sacrifice and temple prostitution to untouchability and, what is more serious, making God himself the cause of evil. Hinduism lacks the deep sense of sin which makes Judaism and Islam and Christianity intolerant. (One must always remember that the motive for persecuting heretics was that they were not only endangering their own salvation but were depriving others of eternal life by their teaching and example.) Perhaps this is connected with another matter which you mention, the question of transcendence and immanence. Jews, Christians and Muslims have a profound sense of the transcendence of God but lack a sufficient sense of his immanence. Hindus, on the other hand, have a profound sense of the immanence of God but lack an adequate sense of his transcendence. I don't know of any system of Hindu doctrine, including that of Sri Aurobindo, which fully safeguards the transcendence of God. Aurobindo himself allows that God 'becomes' the world. But this Christian doctrine will never admit. The world is the effect of the creative-intelligence and will of God, but the divine nature is in no way affected by this action of the cit-sakti or 'consciousness-force', as Sri Aurobindo calls it. Here again it seems to me that the two traditions, the Semitic and the Oriental, need to meet and to correct each other's imbalance.
This is the last point which I want to make. I believe that we have reached a stage in human evolution, when the different religions of the world need to meet and share each other's insights, and in this meeting I believe that Sri Aurobindo has an important, if not a unique, part to play. By his understanding of the fact that matter itself needs to be transformed and the human body to be transformed in the 'supermental manifestation', he introduced into Hinduism ideas which are closely akin to the Christian idea of the 'new
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creation' (that is, the transformation of the material universe by the power of the Spirit) and the resurrection of the body through the descent of the Holy Spirit. At the same time by his development of the idea of evolution seeing the Spirit at work in matter and life and mental consciousness leading to supermental consciousness, he has given an insight which Christians need into the means by which the transformation of matter and the body is to take place. It is here that the place of Teilhard de Chardin in Catholicism is so important. It is true as you say that his ideas have not been accepted in full by many theologians, but the whole subject is still being debated and many would go a long way to meet him. I myself would be willing to go almost the whole way. In fact, I had come to something very like his view by the study of St. Paul and the Greek Fathers. The key text for me is that of the Letter to the Colossians: 'In him all things were created visible and invisible... all things were created through him and for him... and in him all things hold together' (Col. 1.15-17). I believe that in the light of this one can say that the whole creation becomes in a real sense the 'body of Christ' and that he is at work through his spirit in the whole course of evolution. But this would not imply any form of pantheism. The Spirit of Christ works in and through the matter of the universe but is not affected or changed by it. This is, of course, my own view but I believe that it is consistent with orthodox theology and in fact I have put it forward in my books and none has objected to it.
I hope that that covers all the points which you have raised. I don't want to underestimate the appalling effects of intolerance in the Roman Church, which remain to some extent to the present day. But you are wrong in saying that Canon Law still allows for the persecution of heretics. Perhaps you are not aware that a new code of Canon Law has just been published (only last month), based on the teaching of the second Vatican Council, in which all that spirit of intolerance has been removed. The second Vatican Council has effectively overcome all the disastrous effects of the first
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Council and has created a spirit of universal tolerance in the Church though naturally there are many in Rome itself not least, who are slow to realise all its implications.
I will be going abroad next month, so I may not be able to continue this correspondence much longer, but I am ready for one more round, if you wish.
I would hope that you would agree that the Christian faith as I conceive it is a reasonable form of religion, and that the teaching of Sri Aurobindo can be seen to have real significance in the future development of religion, helping to bring the different religious traditions together in a new creative synthesis.
P.S. I forgot to answer your point about the Second Coming. I don't think that this raises any serious problem. I said this belongs essentially to the world of 'mystery', that is, to the state beyond space and time. Jesus himself used the language of Jewish apocalyptic to express this mystery, and it cannot be properly expressed in human terms. There is a sense in which the kingdom of heaven 'came' with the resurrection itself. At this point, as I said, time and space were transcended and Jesus passed into the divine being and consciousness. This world is essentially the world of space and time as conceived by our ordinary mental consciousness. When Jesus passed beyond into the supermental state, he revealed the final state of man and the universe, which are both destined to pass beyond their present state so as to participate in the divine being and consciousness. In this sense the kingdom of heaven is always 'at hand' and I think that Jesus deliberately left his disciples with the expectation of his imminent return, because we always have to be living in the expectation of the end (and at no time more than at the present, when we may see the destruction of this world at any time). In any case, it caused no problem to the early Church. When it was realised that the 'second coming'
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(which is really the manifestation of the eternal Reality) was being delayed, the second letter of Peter answered the problem quite simply by saying: 'do you not know that in his sight a thousand years are but a day?'. They were much less dominated by the time sense than we are!
12.6.83
I am always glad to hear from you and it is with pleasure that I shall receive your Golden String. All your published works that I have seen - especially the two books I mentioned in my last letter and your Vedanta and Christian Faith which first acquainted me with you and which I have now managed to dig up from among my books after many years -are very well written as well as breathe a sincere and wide-ranging spirit. The last-named brings up some foundational issues on which I should like to comment if I have space and time enough after touching on the points of your latest letter.
You say that my argument at present deals with the pros and cons of the Christian faith itself. Isn't there a bit of misunderstanding here? I know what you mean, for you follow up with the phrase about your coming "to Christian and Catholic faith". Christianity to you is basically Roman Catholicism. To me basic Christianity is what we can gather of the original Christian faith by a direct approach to the New Testament. So, when I find Catholicism not in conformity with what is given there on the whole, my reservations about some beliefs of your church strike you as a challenge to Christianity. What makes me further uncomfortable is that your assumption of the Holy Spirit infallibly guiding this church in doctrines leads you to accept positions out of accord with all evidence just because "Rome has spoken". I wonder how you can be said to come "to the Catholic faith from rational conviction". When I shall read your Golden String I shall know how you originally came to it, but at the moment it is difficult to drive home a point. At the back of
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your mind is the assurance that if the church has taken up a certain stand all arguments against it must be wrong. The case of the Virgin Birth is a recurrent example. You harp on my having resorted to the argument from silence: I have often made it clear that Paul and Mark provide material which is positively against the doctrine. I am afraid I shall have to repeat myself in more detail before we close our correspondence.
Here I go. Take Galatians 4:3-5. The Jerusalem Bible, a strictly Roman Catholic product, translates the passage: "Now before we come of age we were as good as slaves to the elemental principles of this world, but when the appointed time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born a subject to the Law, to redeem the subjects of the Law and to enable us to be adopted as sons."25
The sense is complex. To begin with: here are two epochs, the ordinary before Jesus' birth and the Messianic after it. The former is one in which human beings were a part and parcel of the common unredeemed world with its constituents ruled by an established universal Law; the latter epoch is one in which we outgrow the servile childhood of our earlier state and enter the mature freedom of sonship to God akin to the relation of Jesus, God's Son par excellence, to his Divine Father. But - and here is the crucial factor - our liberation comes because Jesus, in spite of his inherent divinity, took on our humanity and was missioned by God to appear in our world exactly like any one of us - "born of a woman, born a subject to the Law" - so that by his complete equality and organic unity with us he might communicate to us and evoke in us an image of his own origin from the Supreme. The words - "born of a woman" - provide just another facet of the same condition as is hit off in the words "born a subject to the Law".
At this point Paul is reiterating a theme which is typically his. In Philippians he combines Jesus' subjection to the law with an explicit vision of his pre-existence as God's Son before the creation of the universe, a vision to be found also
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in Colossians 1:15-17. Philippians 2:6-7 in the Jerusalem Bible runs
His state was divine,
yet he did not cling
to his equality with God
but emptied himself
to assume the condition of a slave,
and became as men are.26
Now in Galatians the "pre-existence"-idea is couched only in the flash of "God sent his Son", and the emptying of himself by Jesus - technically called "kenosis" by biblical theologians - comes, as I have said, two-faceted, a mutually corresponding pair of descriptions. The first description - "born of a woman" - is as much "kenosis" as the second. This should be obvious from the very bearing of the phrase. The phrase is an ageold turn of speech to characterise the undistinguished, long-prevalent, ever-repeating habitual mode of human birth: Paul's use of it about Jesus is meant to convey that Jesus was born in no matter different from Paul himself and those whom he was addressing: it completely obviates the suggestion of anything out of the way, leave aside something so stupendously unusual as virginal conception.
The Gospel of Luke which speaks of this conception employs the same phrase apropos of John the Baptist who, although his birth was to be favoured by God (1:14-17), was still to be a product of Zacchariah's marital relations with Elizabeth (1:13). Luke (7:28) puts into Jesus' own mouth the very phrase of Paul. The words are: "I tell you, of all the children born of women, there is no greater than John; yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he is."27 Matthew, who is the other reporter of the virginal conception, has, almost verbatim, the same report of Jesus' statement on the Baptist (11:11).28
Paul, the earliest evidence on Christianity, is more than merely silent on the Virgin Birth: a direct and emphatic implication against it is to be read in him. The Christian mind
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of the Pauline period - a mind spread over a large area -covering not only the Galatians, Philippians and Colossians but also the Thessalonians, Corinthians and Romans - was charged with this implication.
Now for Mark, the next earliest witness. Let us start with 3:20-21 about Jesus: "He went home again, and once more such a crowd collected that they [the just chosen Twelve Apostles and Jesus himself] could not even have a meal. When his relatives heard of this, they set out to take charge of him, convinced he was out of his mind."29 Ten verses later, during which Jesus has not moved out of his "home" and is talking to the "scribes" who are trying to confuse him, we read in the Jerusalem Bible: "His mother and brothers now arrived and, standing outside, sent in a message asking for him. A crowd was sitting round him at the time the message was passed to him, 'Your mother and brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you'. He replied, 'Who are my mother and my brothers?' And looking round at those sitting in a circle about him, he said, 'Here are my mother and my brothers. Anyone who does the will of God, that person is my brother and sister and mother'."(3:31-35)30
It is indeed impossible to differentiate from the "relatives" who "set out to take charge" of Jesus, "his mother and brothers" who "now arrived" where he was. How can any wedge be driven between "his mother and brothers" who are themselves his relatives and the relatives mentioned a little earlier? Why should we ever think of two different batches of family members looking for him? And where did the first batch, who considered him crazy, go after setting out to remove him from the public scene? D. E. Nineham31 is surely right in taking Mark to have seen verses 20-21 and 31ff "as two parts of a single story, with w. 22-30 as an interlude, inserted in his usual manner...to give events time to develop".
It is also impossible to avoid perceiving that while Jesus was in his own "home" the "relatives" and "his mother and brothers" came from somewhere else, as though Jesus had
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his dwelling separate from theirs owing to incompatibility. His reply, too, when the arrival of his family is told him, shows indifference and what he says at the end is as if not they but his disciples were doing the will of God. Some sort of mutual incomprehension appears to be at work, his family not understanding his mission, he not attaching any importance to his family and obliquely criticising them. This is hardly the relationship we may expect between a mother who had conceived him of the Holy Spirit and a son who, if he had been so conceived, was bound to know of God's special favour to her.
The two incidents are complementary and constitute a significant balance of inner estrangements. Both Matthew (12:46-50) and Luke (8:19-21) have parallels to the second incident but none to the first. Without the background supplied by the first as in Mark, it may just be possible to explain away the second as does an annotation by the Jerusalem Bible: "The claims of physical relationship come after those of spiritual."32 But how is one to ignore the subtle suggestion of something wanting in those to whom Jesus is physically related? Matthew's version (12:46-50) is almost the same as Mark's, while Luke's (8:19-21) is shorter yet equally pointed: "He was told, 'Your mother and brothers are standing outside and want to see you'. But he said in answer, 'My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and put it into practice'." The abbreviated form must not trick us into believing that, since the disciples are not mentioned, it is not such as they who are referred to and that Jesus' statement refers to his family. We must not overlook the meaningful conjunction "But" which implies non-acceptance and opposition and turning away. The sense here is that those who are hearers of God's word and practitioners of it and therefore deserving of being called Jesus' mother and brothers should not be equated to his actual mother and brothers: the latter fall short of what would make him consider them his family. This interpretation is unavoidable once the other incident is seen to lead on to the present one.
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Neither Matthew nor Luke has copied that incident from Mark. But no exegete has disputed its authenticity.
Even the Roman Catholic commentator Father Raymond Brown accepts it. Only, he would like to separate the two incidents. In his book The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus (pp. 68-9) he observes: "Exegetes who join Mark 3:21 to 3:31-35 would have Jesus' 'mother and brothers' (3:31) thinking that Jesus was 'out of his mind' - an attitude scarcely reconcilable with Mary's knowledge of the uniqueness of her son's conception - but the relation of the two texts is not lucidly clear in Mark." Brown's observation here is as though he were throwing dust in our eyes. Realising his own verbal sophistry of drawing a significant line between the clear and the lucidly clear, he takes up a different posture in his later book The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke (New York: Image Books, 1979, p. 520). Translating as "his own" the phrase which the Jerusalem Bible renders "his relatives", Brown avoids disingenuousness and comments: "Apparently, Mark includes Jesus' mother among 'his own' who thought he was frenzied." But in a footnote Brown adds: "I suspect that Mark has joined two separate traditions and that originally the 'his own' did not include his mother." It is a pity that doctrinal obedience should lead even so honest and impartial a scholar as Brown astray and allow a false note to creep in again, though in a minor place like a footnote. No evidence exists for two separate traditions and by no stretch of exegesis can Jesus' mother be excluded from those counted as "his own".
I hope you will no longer represent me as capitalising on an argumentum e silentio. Even such an argument would carry good weight by being based on the fourteen or fifteen earliest documents of Christianity - and let us not forget that they are supported in however passive a manner by all the rest of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament except the Gospels of Matthew and Luke which themselves are absolutely silent on the theme after a short single phrase at the
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beginning (Matthew 1:20, Luke 1:35). Those fourteen or fifteen earliest documents should be sufficiently probative merely by their omission of the Virgin Birth. But when they definitely render impossible to their authors the acceptance of it, I marvel how you can assert that "the Virgin Birth is an integral element" of "the essential truth" of Christianity. As a profound symbol, yes; as a historical fact never. It is even inconsistent with things in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke themselves. For instance, Luke's second chapter. After informing us of the "considerable agreement" that it may have derived from "a tradition independent of" Luke's account of the angel Gabriel's reference to virginal conception, a tradition "ignorant" of such a supernatural origin of Jesus, Brown33 has remarked: "Certainly Mary's puzzlement in 2:48-49 is explained more easily on this supposition." Her puzzlement counters her having been aware of any divinely granted birth of her son.
I may add that even if we identify Catholic faith with Christian faith, the Virgin Birth cannot be deemed "an integral element": that is, from the technical point of view, for, as Brown34 categorically informs us, the higher magisterium of the Catholic Church has not yet officially proposed and proclaimed the Virgin Birth "as an intrinsic constituent of divine revelation". Do you think Brown could have been allowed to mis-state the situation in a book bearing the Church's Nihil obstat? Here is not a matter of personal opinion or the envisaging of a doctrinal possibility: the reporting of a fact is involved. The ecclesiastical authorities could never shut their eyes on such an issue.
Finally, it is a surprise to me that you should write, in the context of the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, that the oral tradition behind their records "goes back to the evidence of eye-witnesses at the time". What possible testimony would you expect for an event like the Virgin Birth? We can rely on a basis of eye-witness testimony by the disciples of Jesus for Jesus' public ministry, but who would be in a position to know the intimate details of his conception?
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A priori we cannot deny the existence of family witness by Mary or Joseph, but how could it have bypassed Paul and Mark? Even without raising this question, modern exegesis -as Brown35 tells us - has found untenable the old thesis that all the information in Luke's infancy narrative came straight from Mary's side of the family while Matthew's hailed from Joseph's side. So your bringing eye-witness evidence into the picture in the present connection is arbitrary no less than unrealistic.
My next point as regards historic Christianity in contrast to historic Catholicism is about the Second Coming. Whether or not it "belongs essentially to the world of 'mystery', that is the state beyond space and time", space and time cannot be ignored at Eternity's intersection with them, and it is important in our view of the historic Jesus to determine what precisely he meant. You say apropos of the Biblical phrase about the kingdom of heaven being "at hand": "...I think that Jesus deliberately left his disciples with the expectation of his imminent return, because we always have to be living in the expectation of the end (and at no time more than at the present when we may see the destruction of this world at any time)." Aren't you rather evading the real issue? Jesus never said that the Second Coming might be the next day or in the next thousand years or at some indefinite time in the far future and that we must always be ready for it whenever it happens. In various ways - some extremely clear-cut, some a little generalised, some slightly ambiguous to us until we get the proper hang of the terms used - he declared that although the very hour was known only to God the hour was to strike in a very short while within a generation or two following his life-time. An undeniable chronological limit is set, and the sense of it is most vivid in our earliest documents, the Epistles of Paul. In I Thessalonians 4:5 he has the phrase: "...we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord." Romans 13:11 tells us: "...now is high time to awake out of sleep; for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed..." In I Corinthians 7:29-31 he is most
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specific and insistent: "But this I say, brethren, the time is short: it remaineth that both they that have wives be as though they had none; and they that weep, as though they wept not; and they that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not; and they that buy, as though they possessed not; and they that use this world, as not abusing it; for the fashion of this world passeth away." At all places Paul's picture is basically the same. The sole change noticeable over the years is that at first he anticipated he would live to see the Last Day (I Thessalonians 5:3; Philippians 1:23). This makes no fundamental difference in the preaching of the imminent Second Coming, based on the prophecy of Jesus himself such as we see widespread in the synoptic Gospels.
The text you quote in your P.S. from II Peter, which on realisation that the Second Coming was delayed says: "Do you not know that in his sight a thousand years are but a day?" - this very text is preceded by proof positive that Jesus envisaged his return soon after his ministry. It reads: "...knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation..." (3:3-4). Here is the confrontation of a keen crisis of faith. The period considered "the last days" is running to its close. The "fathers" of the first Christian generation are dead. What should have happened while they were alive has not taken place. Everything is going on as usual. The cause of the crisis of faith is that the Second Coming which had been promised as an early event has failed to materialise. Peter, which is a late piece of writing (perhaps 150 AD), clinches the literal sense in which Jesus' prophecy is to be understood. And a literal understanding - unavoidable in the face of a textual embarras de richesse - precludes any doctrinal development à la Newman. The Second Coming visioned by Jesus cannot be reinterpreted in terms of the developing human sense of history and given an evolutionary meaning according to Teilhard or Sri Aurobindo, as if such a meaning were
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implicit in Jesus' words and could be elicited from them in the light of later world-knowledge. If Jesus had set no specific limit, a reinterpretation of some sort would have been possible. As things are, the Christianity of Christ himself - in contrast to the Church's adaptation of it - admits of no comparison with the Aurobindonian or even the Teilhardian view of the "apocalypse".
Of course, you may urge an essential comparison on the ground of Jesus' passing into a state beyond the embodied mental consciousness in which humanity exists and his view of humanity getting transfigured "so as to participate in the divine being and consciousness". Yet here also you cannot bring in Sri Aurobindo. For, although both Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard look forward to an evolutionary "apocalypse", Teilhard lets go the logic of his own argument which calls for a "super-organism" with a "super-consciousness", both individual and collective, on this very earth where evolution progressively occurs: he opts for a trans-mundane fulfilment. However much he may differ from the picture of the "Parousia" current in his day - a sudden "rupture" which has nothing to do with humanity's slow "maturation" - he betrays his own proper trend of inspired thought and submits to the Church's concept of a consummation beyond earth and space-time. Space-time earth as such has no divine destiny; which means that, unlike Life and Mind which were "involved" and have their "evolved" expression in a terrestrial context, Supermind has no "involution" and therefore will have no "evolution" in the same context. Such a view is radically un-Aurobindonian. Neither traditional Christianity, whether Christie or Catholic, nor Christianity as renewed by Teilhard, can here claim to be an anticipation of Sri Aurobindo's weltanschauung. It is only a less stringent version of what is still an "other-worldly" religion unaware of an inbuilt divine destiny of earth and thereby showing that thetrue Supermind is not its inspirer, for it is the essence of the Supermind to both descend from above and ascend from below and to effect a totally transformed existence in space-
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time as an expression of its eternal archetype of all that is to be worked out by evolution. If, as you hold, the full exceeding of embodied mental life can come only after death, Sri Aurobindo differs radically from whatever significance one may read in the reported resurrection of Jesus and in the "new creation" it is said to herald.
Now we have come back to the starting-point of our correspondence: "the discussion of the relation of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy to Christian faith", as you put it. The point you have now raised is: "I don't know of any system of Hindu doctrine, including that of Sri Aurobindo, which fully safeguards the transcendence of God. Aurobindo himself allows that God 'becomes the world'. But this Christian doctrine will never admit. The world is the effect of the creative intelligence and will of God but the divine nature is in no way affected by this action of the cit-śakti or 'consciousness-force' as Sri Aurobindo calls it." The same point comes up a little later indirectly in connection with how Teilhard fares at present with Catholic theologians. You state: "I myself would be willing to go almost the whole way [with him]. In fact I had come to something very like his view by the study of St. Paul and the Greek Fathers. The key text for me is that of the Letter to the Colossians: 'In him all things were created visible and invisible...all things were created through him and for him...and in him all things hold together1 (1:15-17). I believe that in the light of this one can say that the whole creation becomes in a real sense the 'body of Christ' and that he is at work through his Spirit in the whole course of evolution. But this would not imply any form of pantheism. The Spirit of Christ works in and through the matter of the universe but is not affected or changed by it. This is, of course, my own view but I believe that it is consistent with orthodox theology and in fact I have put it forward in my books and no one has objected to it."
Well, if no one has objected, it means that you have been understood as basically orthodox in spite of your Teilhardian turns of speech and on the strength of your repudiation of
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"any form of pantheism". You are un-Teilhardian in this repudiation and perhaps you are conscious of it when you say that you would go with Teilhard "almost the whole way" instead of "unreservedly the whole way". It is a constant scandal with all Catholic commentators on Teilhard that he just can't keep out some form of pantheism. His entire work may be summarised as that "of bringing out what one might call the Christian soul of pantheism or the pantheist aspect of Christianity".36 We shall go to the heart of the matter if we glance at Teilhard's attitude to Spinoza, the arch-pantheist in Catholic eyes, the greatest religio-philosophical danger in European thought to Christianity. Wanting to avoid for the "consummated Christ" of the Pleroma at the world's end "what could be read into the language censored in some mystics (Eckhart, for example)", he37 writes: "This concept of a hypostatic union extended to the whole universe (which, incidentally, is simply Spinoza's pantheism) is not in itself either contradictory or absurd; but it conflicts with the whole Christian view of individual freedom and personal salvation." Here Spinozism indirectly becomes the doctrine of a divine person whose incarnation is the entire universe. The "hypostatic union" of God and matter, which constitutes, in the eyes of the Church, the unique phenomenon of the Incarnate Word in the historical Jesus is seen to apply on a cosmically extended scale. Also, by judging Spinozism to be neither contradictory nor absurd in itself, Teilhard is shown to be quite ready to embrace pantheism provided it did not prevent human beings from exercising free will or experiencing salvation from their sins: in short, they must retain their soul-personality as distinct from the infinite "I" with whom they would get identified and thus absorbed by it in a final fulfilment if a Spinozist pantheism translated into Christian-Eckhartian terms were accepted. Further, we have Teilhard's letter of 17 December 1922 to his friend Pére Auguste Valensin who had contributed an article on pantheism to the Dictionnaire apologétique de la foi catholique: "You leave the reader with the impression that Spinoza's position...is sim-
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pliciter mala, falsa. How is it that you have not suggested that between Spinoza's 'Incarnation', in which the whole is hypostatically divine, and the 'Incarnation' of the overcautious, extrinsicist theologians, in which the pleroma is no more than a social aggregate, there is room for an Incarnation that culminates in the building up of an organic whole, in which physical union with God is at different levels? You contrast Christian morality with the morality of Spinoza by saying that the former tells us only that we must become 'like unto God'. I don't accept the distinction. For the Christian, to be summorphos Christo is to participate, under a similarity of behaviour, in a common being; it is really 'to become Christ', 'to become God'." Teilhard is asserting that Spinoza's position is not "absolutely evil, false" but requires only a little modification to be acceptable. Another type of cosmic "Incarnation" - that is, a new kind of pantheism - is needed, in which the truth of Spinozism is preserved but its unchristian implications removed. Teilhard's solution is that the cosmic Christ is certainly both the Soul and the body of the universe, Christ the Evolver as well as Christ the stuff that evolves but he is more than such, he has a transcendent reality too and also a historically manifested individuality expressing the transcendent no less than the cosmic.
Teilhard's Christian pantheism or pantheist Christianity or Pan-Christism goes beyond your Teilhardian stance. It understands the Pauline formula you have underlined in a very unorthodox manner, whereas you are not far from orthodoxy at all. You are nearer Fernand Prat, the greatest orthodox authority on Paul, than to Teilhard. Commenting on Paul's assertion about Christ that "all things are by him", Prat38 observes that the Greek grammatical tense - the perfect - used by Paul, rather than the aorist as in John 1:3, subsumes under the category of Christ's creative activity - in other words, his efficient causality - two concepts. The reference is not solely to "the first production of created beings": Paul "also designates the present relation of creatures to the Son as their Creator. They have been created by
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him, and 'they consist in him'... He it is who preserves their existence, cohesion and harmony". Prat's translation "they consist in him" corresponds to Colossians 1:17: "In quo omnia constant" which you, after Teilhard, render "in him [literally, "whom"] all things hold together". Thus, according to Prat, Paul is stressing a certain aspect of Christ's role as efficient cause. And, as the efficient cause, the Pauline Christ who holds things together deals with a world of continuing existence, which is other than God himself because God did not "become" it but "created" it to be something extrinsic to his own being. Teilhard's God or Christ is more than a sustainer of the cosmos: he is an intrinsic divine principle, he has in creating it united himself to his work, partially immersed himself in it, involved himself in it by a universal incarnation - without ceasing to be transcendent, without his divinity being exhausted by the dimensions of the universe. Teilhard at the same time breaks through the limits of Spinozist pantheism and of orthodox Christianity or, in his own phraseology, he has Christianised pantheism and pantheised Christianity. You differ from him. In abjuring any form of pantheism you are merely rendering more vivid, more evolutionarily significant the old immanence, the old omnipresence. When you affirm about Christ that "In him all things were created", you are no more than repeating the idea of Christ being the "exemplary cause". Prat is quite explicit here that as an exemplary cause the Christ of Paul, in spite of the preposition "in", does not contain the world literally. Prat39 rests his interpretation on the Greek patristic tradition itself as to how the world was created in Christ: "Many of the Fathers, following St. Hippolytus and Origen, suppose that it is in his quality as a divine exemplar, as the home of ideas and universal archetype." Although one must carefully avoid ascribing to the Pauline concept of Christ "Platonian and Philonian speculations in the intelligible world", the cosmos "was in him and could be in him only in an intelligible way, as its model or exemplar". Such an exclusive gloss would hardly be acceptable to Teilhard: his Christ is not
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confined to being "a home of ideas". Besides constituting the "universal archetype", he is one with the movement of evolution.
I have said that Teilhard's Cosmic Christ is not only the Soul of the world but also the world-stuff. This double vision should leave no doubt of Teilhard's pantheism. You seem to realise the point about the world-stuff even less than about the evolutionary cosmos being a result of Christ's cosmic incarnation by a Christianly Spinozist activity. According to Teilhard, to create is to unify what he designates as the Pure Multiple. The unifying is the self-incarnation of Christ on a cosmic scale and Teilhard safeguards transcendence in spite of his pan-Christism by a reference to the traditional concept of God as Triune, a trinity in unity, three persons in one. He40 says: "If God were not 'triune' (if, that is, he contained no inner self-distinction)...we could not conceive the possibility of his creating (and in consequence being incarnate) without totally immersing himself in the world he brings into being." This is tantamount to saying that creation is a progressive universal incarnation that yet leaves God "transcendent" -subsisting free, independent, self-fulfilled. Here Teilhard offers what you demand - namely, that God's nature is in no way affected by the action of the chit-shakti - without compromising his pantheism. As for the world-stuff he hardly satisfies Christian theology's demand that there should be no pre-existing substratum for God to work upon. Teilhard41 confronts the traditional nihil with the words: "No-being coincides, and is one, with completely realised plurality. Pure nothingness is an empty concept. True nothingness, physical nothingness, the nothing found in the threshold of being, that on which at their lowest levels all possible worlds converge, is pure Multiple, is Multitude." Teilhard rejects orthodoxy's "pure nothingness" as a pseudo-idea.
His ecclesiastical editors have at this point the footnote: "This questionable proposition is to be found in Bergson, too."42 Evidently, Teilhard has proved heterodox in a subtle fashion. He has brought in a pseudo-nothingness. He goes
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on to call the negative that precedes creation "a sort of positive non-being" and adds that the operation of creative union implies that "the creator found outside himself a purchase-point, or at least a reaction". Teilhard admits that this concept raises "grave difficulties" from the orthodox angle but they have to be faced because to him the traditional explanations would be "purely verbal". Piqued by this jibe, the editors again sourly remark: "A metaphysician would comment that it is more the expression 'positive non-being' that is a purely verbal explanation."43 Matter existing in a chaotic, an infinitely divided and dispersed state is implicit in Teilhard's picture of creation. But this matter, for all its internal dissociation, is not dissociated from God. "In the beginning," writes Teilhard44 in a visual vein, "there were, at the two poles of existence, God and pure multiplicity. Even so, God was all alone... For all eternity God saw the shadow of his unity in a diffused state of disarray beneath his feet; and this shadow was not another God." The suggestion is that the same existence has two aspects and that this existence is basically God, and what is non-basic is the shadow of the basic so that God's own substance of unity is in a shadowy form the multiplicity at the opposite pole. A brand of monism or pantheism peeps out here, though Teilhard tries not to accord it any recognition. But once he45 is bold enough to face the issue squarely and assert straightforwardly: "We without doubt present a very incomplete idea of the Godhead if we described it exclusively by personal attributes: some aspects of the supreme Being can be interpreted only in terms that I might call material and cosmic..." Most often Teilhard indulges in a species of doublespeak, but the outcome of all his labyrinthine thinking is that the phantasmal pre-existing substratum can only be a certain aspect of God himself. Adopting the ex-nihilo framework, we may conclude that God creates the world out of nothing except his own single yet multiformative reality. Thus Christ is the world-stuff no less than the World-Soul, the latter working upon the former to build up cosmically the Mystical Body
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and the work going on all the time constitutes what Teilhard names the "Divine Milieu".
Whatever the mode of thought, I believe that we cannot escape God's own reality as the substance of his creation. I appreciate the scholastic ingenuity you have employed in your Vedanta and Christian Faith to get round the spectre of pantheism or rather the bogey of God becoming the world, the Transcendent loosing itself forth as Pantheos to form the universe. You write: "The world comes wholly from God; it derives everything that it has, even its very existence, from God" (pp. 25-26). This must imply that God is the sole existence. If so, the world can be nothing except his existence willed and moulded by him to be this or that. You also write: "Every created thing existing in time and space has its 'idea', which exists eternally in the mind of God" and you add that "when the world is created, then God causes these ideas, which exist eternally in him in an identity of being, to begin to exist in themselves, in distinction from him. Creation is the act by which God wills the distinct existence of each person and thing and causes those ideas which exist eternally in him to exist separately in time and space" (pp. 26-27). Again, if this is so, the world is of the substance of God - like the Upanishad's thread put forth by the spider. Ultimate pantheism cannot be avoided. If it is sought to be avoided, then we have a God external to his creation and time-space is not a derivate of his own existence. To be put forth as distinct from himself in any but a pragmatic sense, for a certain purpose in which an appearance of distinction is needed, is a self-contradiction in an "idea" projected spatio-temporally from God's own mind.
When we come to your treatment of individual souls, the logic grows still more unconvincing. "The purpose of creation," you say, "is that mankind should share in the life, that is the being, knowledge and bliss, of God" (pp. 30-31). But how can the sharing be done if mankind is essentially distinct from God? The sharing would be extrinsic and indirect and therefore no real participation at all. Furthermore, you
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affirm: "For the Hindu seer the experience of God is an experience of 'identity', of pure being in conscious bliss. This is certainly a profound experience, a genuine experience of God, but it is not the same as the experience of Christ. His was an experience of identity in relationship" (p. 31). How can the Hindu seer's experience be a genuine one if the human soul is essentially different from God? A genuine experience of "identity" must imply oneness of fundamental being with God. Earlier you have the remark: "The Indian mind has never been content to know 'about God', it has always sought to know God, to 'realise' him, to experience his presence not in the imagination or in the intellect but in the 'ground' of the soul, the substance of the soul from which all the faculties spring. This is the inner meaning of the Upanishads" (p. 4). Most perspicacious words, these; not many Christians would write them. But if the "ground" of the soul which you speak of gives the soul a realisation of God, the "ground" has to be God himself manifested as soul. There can be ultimately no difference or distinction of substance between the soul and God. The same conclusion follows from another statement of yours apropos of the Chhandogya Upanishad's "Thou, Svetaketu, art That". You comment: "This is the record of the decisive moment in Indian history, the discovery of the identity of the Brahman and the Atman. Behind all the appearances of the visible world is the one reality of the Brahman, and behind all the appearances of the body with its imagination and its thought is the reality of the Atman, the Self. This underlying reality is known not by reasoning but by direct experience. The Self is experienced in its own 'ground', in the substance of its being, and knows itself in its identity with the 'ground' or substance of the universe. This experience underlies all the teaching of the Upanishads and all subsequent Hindu thought. It was the experience of Ramana Maharshi, to name but one, in the present century, as it was the experience of Sankara in the 8th and of the seers of the Upanishads in the 6th century before Christ" (p. 5). Well, if you grant that this has been
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an authentic experience down the ages, what becomes of the Christian dogma of a soul forever different from God and having an existence given to it by God and with no intrinsic existence of its own, with no "ground" of identity with God?
There is a summing-up sentence of yours: "The Christian doctrine of creation, as we have seen, maintains that the world does not add anything to the being of God or take anything away. God alone is being, and nothing else 'exists' in the same way as God exists. But the world can be said to exist as an 'image' of God, a reflection of his being" (p. 39). I would observe here: "This is really the same as saying that the world is an emanation or manifestation of God. The emanation does not exist in the same way as That from which it derives, but it has an essential unity with it behind its phenomenal appearance. Here, too, as the Isha Upanishad's invocation quoted by you (p. 18) says - 'That is full, this is full. The full comes out of the full. Taking the full from the full, the full itself remains' - God essentially remains unchanged ('full') in his infinity."
I am afraid the whole Christian doctrine of creation instead of the Divine's self-loosing forth into manifestation arises in order to avoid the sort of pantheism which excludes other ways of God's existence. Indian thought with its pantheism which accompanies divine transcendentalism as well as what I may term divine individualism has no need to fall into a "creatio ex nihilo". And I consider it mistaken to assert that a God so conceived cannot remain unaffected in his nature by loosing forth the universe - unaffected basically as much as a God who creates from no pre-existing matter. You submit that the act of creation in God is an eternal act identical with his eternal being and that space and time are the conditions under which the eternal and infinite being of God is reflected and that thus creation does not cause any change in God by adding anything to or taking away anything from the being of God (p. 27). I submit that the same can hold for the act of God loosing himself forth as the
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space-time universe from his transcendental eternity and infinity of being.
Towards the end of your third talk in Vedanta and Christian Faith you dwell on Christian mysticism which, unlike the Indian variety, does not take the universe and its creatures to be essentially of the same nature as God. You tell us: "...according to Christian doctrine, though man and nature are created really distinct and different from God, yet by a free act of grace God communicates to them a participation in his own nature. The soul by grace participates in the divine being, knowledge and bliss. It exists no longer merely in its own separate nature but in the nature of God himself" (p. 45). I should say that this is to eat one's cake and still have it. If God can do what you say he does, he can do anything that you tend to rule out for him in the Indian metaphysical visions - remaining transcendentally unchanged while cosmically displaying variations. Actually the description you offer of the Christian soul existing by God's grace in God's nature is unconvincing: "A Christian will never say that the soul is of the same essence as God. He will never use the analogy of the pot and the clay or of sparks coming from a fire or of a drop of water mingling with the ocean. All these images imply a sameness of essence. The Christian mystics speak rather of iron which is heated by the fire, so that it becomes red-hot and is wholly penetrated by the fire, so as to be transformed by it and yet remains iron and does not actually become fire. Or again they compare the soul to air, which is wholly filled with light and manifests the light, but yet does not become light" (p. 45). Surely, if iron is different from fire, it cannot be wholly penetrated by fire; nor can air, if different from light, be wholly filled with it. The Christian soul cannot wholly participate in God if it is different in essence.
However, contrary to theory, even Christian mystics speak in the Indian vein at times. Teilhard46 himself notes Vedantic "fusionism" in them: "Mystically speaking, it is difficult not to be aware of considerable traces of fusionism in
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the appeals directed towards the inexpressible by an Eckhart or even a St. John of the Cross." The fact is that the actual via mystica at its height sets doctrinal demarcations at nought and realises the so-called converse forms as merely variants of the same God-experience. The Scholastic theologian Richard of St. Victor (12th century) tells us of the third degree of love in which "the mind of man...passes out completely into God"47 and in this exalted state, we learn from Walter Hilton, "God and the soul are no longer two but one".48 Suso addresses God: "Thou...in virtue of Thy being absolutely all in all, pourest Thyself so utterly into the soul's essence that no part of Thee remains outside."49 Ruysbroeck writes at the same time of "our created being" during our state of self-consciousness and our feeling during the mystical state that we are "swallowed up in the fathomless abyss of our eternal blessedness, wherein we can never find any distinction between ourselves and God". He adds: "whenever we feel this union, we are one being and one life and one blessedness with God."50 Luis de Leon describes his experience to be such that "in very truth the soul not only has God dwelling in it, but is indeed God".51 Although by tuition the Catholic mystics repeat the metaphor of iron and fire, their realisation of love-union with God is full of "fusionism".
The truth of the integral mystical life is many-faceted. Sri Aurobindo has refused to make water-tight compartments and brought all the three great systems of Indian spiritual philosophy together in experiential terms. His words52 are worth attending to:
"God is the All and that which exceeds, transcends the All; there is nothing in existence which is not God but God is not anything in that existence, except symbolically, in image to his own consciousness.... He is always one in his being, yet both one with and separate from his symbols and in that differentiated oneness able to stand quite apart from them ... It is the privilege of spirit that though indivisible in its pure being, it is freely self-divisible in its conscious experience and can concentrate itself in many states at a time. It is by this
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tapas, by this varied concentration of self-knowledge that Divine Existence creates and supports the world and is at once the same God and Nature and world, Personal and Impersonal, Pure and Varied, Qualified and without qualities, Krishna and Kali, and Shiva and Brahma and Vishnu, man and animal and vegetable and stone, all aspects of Himself and all symbols. We need not doubt therefore that we, recovering our divine reality, shall not be bound to a single condition or aspect... we too in our ultimate divine realisation, when we have become one with our divine Self, may and should be able also to stand out as the self at once of all things and beings, yet differentiated in the symbol, so as to enjoy a blissful divided closeness such as that of the Lover and Beloved mingling yet separate in their rapture; and may and should even be able to stand away from God with a sort of entire separateness holding His hand still, unlike the pure dualist, but still standing away from Him so that we may enjoy that infinity of human relation with God which is the wonder and beauty and joy of dualistic religions. To accomplish this is the full or the Purna Yoga and the Sadhak who can attain to it is in his condition the complete Yogin."
When we are face to face with Sri Aurobindo's spiritual integration, problems like those you raise assume a different look and grow amenable to manifold solutions. Even otherwise, God's becoming the world does not render the riddle of Evil and suffering more acute than if he is distinct from it. I should think it is the other way round. A God of Goodness and Love allowing Evil and Suffering to be rampant in his creation while he exists above it and aloof from it and at most sends his Son just once to undergo their effects is more difficult to adore than a God who in his cosmic aspect subjects himself to all that we labour under and even in us is subjected to it since a hidden oneness with us subsists. I also don't see why the Aurobindonian God who is the All-free in consciousness-force cannot enjoy and exercise free-will in us who are ultimately limited projections of his own being under cosmic conditions - free-will which you regard as
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responsible for human depravity and a host of ills and as exonerative of God. It is doubtful whether in terms of our conventional morality God who is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent can ever be completely exonerated no matter what final view we take of his nature. In thinking of God we have to enlarge our vision enormously and not apply ordinary criteria. In Sri Aurobindo's world-view and God-view, diverse kinds of manifestation are brought about by the Chit-Shakti. In the course of infinite possibilities one possibility can be said to have come up for getting worked out: the possibility of a universe starting from utter Inconscience, the very opposite of the Divine, and evolutionarily manifesting the Divine Fullness through aeons of travail due to the dark beginning of things, and reaching at last a series of epiphanic accomplishments on earth, the Supramental Manifestation and all the revelations of the Divine in man and nature that will follow in its wake, the result of the human soul ascending beyond the mind and establishing its station there but calling a descent of the supreme plenitude into the soul's instrumental being of mind, life-force and body to express in them their own truth-forms that are eternally present in the Supramental Godhead and that have helped to evoke and evolve the secret counterparts of themselves latent and involved in the Inconscient, the Rigvedic "darkness wrapped within darkness" which too is really the Superconscient itself in disguise.
It is high time I came to a halt. I am glad you regret as much as I the heretic-hunt of the past and it is good news that the Canon Law about the heretics has totally changed. On my part I am far from justifying whatever "blots" Hindu society has allowed to develop by what you call its "excessive tolerance", but the degradation of certain practices which began with creditable motives - e.g., functional divisions in society, dedication of "vestals" to houses of gods - are much lesser evils than cold-bloodedly massacring those whose religious convictions differ from our own. Human sacrifice, of course, I do not defend on any score, but as a rare cruel
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practice it is nowhere in quantity comparable to the persecutions that amount to prolific human sacrifices at the altar of a monolithic truth-monopolising religiosity. But, as you say, a new age of mutual understanding and a sharing of each other's insights has dawned. Let us pray we may prove worthy of the clearer and intenser and larger Light that is now abroad.
With good wishes for your trip out of India,
P.S. I read your Vedanta and Christian Faith twelve and a half years back and made marginal remarks almost everywhere. Some of the critical ones I have incorporated in my letters, but I must not give you the overall impression of criticism. On 19.11.1970 I put down my general estimate thus: "This is an admirable book, even if certain sides of Vedanta are not wholly grasped and even if it does not realise how actually ultimate Christianity must shade off into a species of Vedanta in order to be consistent and have all that it claims. On this subject I have not read any book as good as this. What a contrast in its profound attempt at understanding Vedanta to Teilhard de Chardin's ignorant boosting of Christianity! All the best of Teilhard is here and all the worst is absent. Teilhard is truly fine only in respect of his vision of evolution fused with a search for a meta-Christian religion."
July 7th 1983
Thank you for your two letters. I am laid up in hospital at the moment with hepatitis and don't expect to be out for another ten days, so I can't answer your long letter at present. But I hope to be able to do so before I leave for the U.S.A. probably on July 26th. I don't know whether our correspondence is sufficient for a booklet, but I have no objection if you prefer it - provided that I can get my next
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contribution written, in which I would try to sum things up. So let us hope that I get better soon.
August 4th, 1983
I am afraid that I cannot get an answer done to your letter before I leave for the U.S.A. I came back from hospital only on Sunday and am leaving this evening for Madras. Do you mind if I hold it over till my return in September? You raise some important points that need an answer.
I am glad that you liked the beginning of The Golden String and hope that the end did not disappoint you. When I was in hospital I was brought your Secret Splendour. I was tremendously impressed by it. You have succeeded in describing mystical experience in concrete terms. You have the real poet's gift of the magic of words. What impressed me most was the way you made spiritual reality appear more real than the sense world which most people (and most poets) take for reality. I can see how Aurobindo's philosophy has inspired you. I read most of the poems several times and each time the impact was no less fresh and powerful. It is a real achievement, especially for one whose native language is not English.
October 14th 1983
I returned from America last week and am now at last in a position to answer your letter of June 12th. I am afraid that I cannot deal with it at great length, as I am still rather occupied after my return, but I will try to answer the main points.
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You return at some length to the subject of the Virgin Birth, of which you have obviously made considerable study. My difference from you lies in this. You think that the truth of Christianity is to be found by a 'direct approach to the New Testament'. I on the contrary believe that the truth of Christianity is a divine revelation which was communicated by Christ to his disciples to whom he promised the gift of the Spirit, which was to lead them into all truth. In other words Jesus did not commit the Gospel to scholars and historians, who were to discover its meaning by study of historical documents. He committed it by word of mouth or rather by his presence among them to chosen disciples and endowed them with the gift of the Holy Spirit to guide them in their understanding of it. Scholars and historians may throw light on various aspects of the Gospel, but they cannot alter its fundamental character which derives by divine revelation from Christ. This is true of all revelations. They cannot be understood by scholars and critics but only by those who received the gift of the Spirit by which the Scriptures were inspired. You have only to think of the nonsense written about the Vedas and the Upanishads by European scholars to realise the truth of this.
To come now to the subject of the Virgin Birth. This doctrine was revealed clearly and explicitly in two of the Gospels and was incorporated in the Creed of the Church early in the second century, and has been accepted by all orthodox Christian churches ever since. It may not have been formally defined as a matter of faith but it is implicit in the Creeds as I have said from at least the second century. Scholars may question as to exactly how and when and where the doctrine came into existence but that is all. It may well be that it was not known in some of the early churches -we recognise a gradual development of Christian doctrine in the New Testament itself. But what you have to explain is why, if as you say this was an invention of later times, it was incorporated in two of the Gospels and in the Creeds, and no one raised any objection. Surely, if it was an alien doctrine
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imposed on the Church, one would expect some opposition to it but in fact it seems to have been accepted without any difficulty. I would remind you that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception (of the Virgin Mary) which was clearly not part of the New Testament tradition and only developed in the fourth and fifth centuries was opposed by doctors of the Church like St. Bernard and St. Thomas Aquinas, but was eventually declared to be an integral element in the mystery of faith.
It is this principle of the mystery of faith or the mystery of Christ as St. Paul calls it, which is fundamental in our understanding of Christianity. Christianity like any other serious religion is not a product of rational understanding and cannot be understood by human reason. It is a transcendent mystery (like the mystery of Brahman, of Nirvana or the Tao) which can only be understood by the illumined mind (as Aurobindo might have called it). The presence of the Holy Spirit (which is the divine Spirit) in the Church enables the Church (that is, the Community of Christians) to discern what belongs to this mystery, this total divine reality, and what is contrary to it. Thus the total divine mystery is revealed in the beginning in the Person of Christ, and the Church (the community of believers) grows gradually in understanding of all the implications of this mystery and expresses it in the form of doctrines. But these doctrines, even those of the New Testament, are all formulated in human terms and can never express the total reality which transcends both word and thought.
This applies to the second question which you raise about the second coming of Christ. Jesus expressed himself in regard to the second coming in terms of Jewish apocalyptic. This is essentially a symbolic mode of expressing a transcendent reality. The early Church certainly understood it in terms of his returning in the life-time of the first disciples but when it became clear that it was not to be, the second letter of Peter (which I would certainly not date as late as 150 AD, though it certainly came late in the New Testament period)
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had no difficulty in explaining that if the second coming was delayed, it was because 'a thousand years in his sight are but a day'. It is exactly the same with us now. We don't know when the end of the world will be; it might be next year if there is a nuclear holocaust or it may be in ten thousand or a hundred thousand years. Again you have to ask yourself why if Jesus and the early Church were completely mistaken about it there was not any greater disturbance, but the expectation was simply removed into the indefinite future.
Here again it is the understanding of the divine mystery which gives the key to understanding. The mystery of Christ is essentially an eternal mystery, that is a mystery beyond space and time. It is, in fact, the revelation of the ultimate meaning and purpose of the whole space-time reality. The second coming is simply a symbolic way of speaking of the final consummation of all things. It must be remembered that divine mysteries have always to be expressed in symbolic terms. This is the law of all religion, and applies to Hinduism and Buddhism as to Christianity. It is here that we have to learn to interpret the symbols in the light of a growing human understanding. This is where the interpretation in the light of evolution and of Sri Aurobindo's teaching comes into play. The Christian mystery was presented in terms of Jewish symbolism and apocalyptic, but this has to be translated into the language of modern science and philosophy -just as the Greek Fathers interpreted it in the light of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. I feel perfectly justified therefore in interpreting the second coming of Christ and the New Creation of St. Paul in terms of evolution. Of course my interpretation will have to be judged in the light of Christian orthodoxy. Incidentally in regard to this, I consider that all the 'mainline' Christian churches inherit an orthodox tradition of the faith, but I regard the Roman Church (as St. Irenaeus did as early as the second century) as. the 'centre' of orthodoxy and the ultimate criterion. But it is important to understand that Christian doctrine is in a continuous state of development; each generation interprets the mystery of faith
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in the light of its own understanding which is never adequate to the reality and so a new understanding in the light of growing knowledge is always possible. But ultimately the Church as a whole with the Roman Church at its centre will judge the orthodoxy of the interpretation.
You raise the question of pantheism in the context of Aurobindo's philosophy. I think that this is partly a matter of terminology but there is a basic principle underlying it. I think that the position was put clearly by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita when he said: 'All this visible universe comes from my invisible being. All beings have their rest in me, but I have not my rest in them'. By this Krishna shows that creation comes from him but he in no wise depends on it. And then lest any mistake should be made about it, he says: 'And in truth they rest not in me'. Thus he affirms categorically that though the whole universe comes from God and is sustained in existence by him, yet he in no way depends on it. This is my position and that of Christianity. The universe comes forth from God; he is the sole source of its being. He is also present in the universe and in every particle of matter, but he is in no way affected by it. He draws back the whole creation to himself, but again this makes no change in him. In other words the one absolute eternal Reality projects the universe of space and time by an act of his creative power and is immanent in the whole creation, but is not changed or affected by it. The point is that the earth is not God: life in plants and animals is not the life of God, it is an effect of his power. Consciousness in man is an effect of the divine consciousness; in other words, the divine being acts in us to cause our consciousness. But there is this difference. The human consciousness can be raised to participation in the divine consciousness. This is an effect of divine grace. The human consciousness is penetrated by the divine consciousness, so that no difference is experienced, yet the difference remains. It is like light shining in a mirror. The mirror may be totally filled with light and reflect nothing but light, but the mirror is not the light. When Christian mystics speak of
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being one with God and seeing no difference, they must be understood in this sense.
I think that this is important because if you say that everything is God, then you have to affirm that God is responsible for evil. When I do an evil act, commit adultery or murder it is God who is acting in me. A man like Hitler or Stalin is moved by God no less than a Buddha or a Christ. This is surely nonsense; it makes no sense of God or of man. Evil, of course, remains a mystery which human reason can never penetrate but it should not lead to absurdity. On the Christian understanding, evil is a defect of being; it is a failure of the creature to act in accordance with the will of the creator. This is the result of freewill in men and in angels. God permits the evil, but only that he may bring good out of the evil and eventually restore the whole creation to unity with himself. This is how I understand the process of creation. The world comes forth from God as a created manifestation of the divine being. The divine is present in matter from the beginning, moving it towards life and consciousness. There are defects in life and matter from the beginning but in man these defects become conscious and sin enters the world. By the redemptive death of Christ on the cross both matter and man are delivered from the power of sin and death and the whole creation is restored to life in God. This transformation of matter and man is taking place in the course of evolution, but the final transformation of the universe (which is equivalent to the second coming of Christ) can take place only at the end of time, that is when time and space are finally transcended and the whole creation participates in the divine being, knowledge and bliss. This is not to deny that creatures retain their freewill and only by consent to the divine will, that is, the divine action in them, can they enter this final state of bliss.
I am afraid that this is rather crudely expressed, but you have forced me to attempt an exposition of Christian doctrine for which I was not really prepared. I was interested in the resemblance between Sri Aurobindo's teaching and the kind
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of evolutionary view of Christianity which I uphold. I may say that though I follow Teilhard de Chardin in his general evolutionary perspective, I am not a disciple of his and would reject a good deal of what he says as being not well expressed, though I think he had something very important to say. I follow Karl Rahner generally in his understanding of Christ in an evolutionary perspective. I still think that Sri Aurobindo has something very important to say from a Christian point of view on this subject, but I cannot claim to be his disciple. For me, as I said, the supermental manifestation took place at the Resurrection of Christ, when the matter of his human body was transformed by the power of the Spirit and body and soul were assumed into the divine life. This had an effect on the whole cosmos. Through this event a power was released in the world by which matter and life and human consciousness are destined to be transformed, so as to participate in the divine life and consciousness. In that final state, time and space are transcended and the whole universe and mankind is assumed into the divine life, so as to share in the divine mode of consciousness, which is also supreme bliss. In this state man and universe do not become God. They remain distinct and yet united, transfigured by the divine light but not identified with it.
I must confess that I don't find this kind of argument very useful. I write from the perspective of Christian faith and revelation, while you write from belief in the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo. I think that there is much in common between us, but there are differences which no argument will overcome. If you feel that it is worth while publishing this correspondence I have no objection, but I don't find it very meaningful. When we were discussing the relation between Aurobindo's philosophy and Christian faith, as I understand it, I was really interested. But when you question the very basis of Christian faith and substitute your own ideas about it, I don't find much meaning in it. You have every right to your own point of view, but it is only the view of an individual scholar who does not share the Christian faith. In
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the same way, of course, my view of Aurobindo is not of much interest to you, as I am an outsider and judge him from a different point of view. So I end with thanks for the interest you have shown and my continued appreciation of Aurobindo as a philosopher and spiritual guide.
Please excuse the bad typing. I am getting a new typewriter.
18.10.83
Your long-awaited letter has reached me. I don't think I can resist replying to it. I have already started writing but before I send the reply I should like to post you my "transcreation" of the last canto of Dante's Divina Commedia. It is bound to please you more than my letter.
27.11.83
I feel somewhat concerned about you. Is your health all it should be or are you again laid up with something or other? I am asking because I haven't had any word from you in connection with the Dante-piece I sent you several weeks back.
December 3rd 1983
Thank you for your card. I received the poem but was waiting for your letter which has not yet arrived. When did
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you send it? I think that your translation of Dante is most remarkable or rather truly inspired. I have compared it with the original and see how deeply you have penetrated the meaning.
6.12.83
My dear Father Griffiths,
I was delighted to get your card expressing your delight in my Dante-adaptation. Yours is indeed a response from what I can only call the "soul". Both heart and mind merge in that inmost element and, from the single truth of them, speak the word of truth, at once spontaneous and discerning. Very few readers let poetry reach so deep and still fewer respond to its call straight from the bright depth attained. Your estimate is couched in no more than three or four lines but they speak a great deal to me both about my own work and about yourself. Thank you for this gift. I appreciate especially your going to the original. It must have told you that we come so close together through my verse because I have a strong Christian turn in the midst of my Aurobindonian commitment while you have a profound Aurobindonian strain within the general Christian creed to which you are pledged.
As you must have gathered from The Secret Splendour, Dante attracts me immensely. Sri Aurobindo once noted that Dante always inspired me to my best. Indeed I seem to live with the great Rorentine if not even in him and share his devotion to and transformation by that Smile he visions in Beatrice, first dolce and then santo. Believing as I do, both philosophically and by an inner sense, in reincarnation I feel sure I must have been many times born in Christian Europe -the age of Augustine, the age of Dante, the age of Leonardo are familiar to my being, just as are the period of ancient Athens and that of Augustan Rome as well as some post-medieval epochs in England and elsewhere.
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Mention of the Secret Splendour sends me back to another postcard of yours, the one you sent me before your trip to the USA. I have been waiting for a chance to thank you for your most encouraging comment - a comment which makes a number of vital points with an admirable economy of expression. Rarely have I had such a penetrating and significant statement on my poetry in a few phrases.
Before I send you the letter in which I have touched on the salient features of your ''summing-up'' after your return from the States, I should like to say something about your Golden String. I have already told you how it fascinated me the moment I plunged into it. It started speaking at once to me out of my own generation and my own psychology as a young man, extremely westernised, in search of some ultimate to be experienced on one's very pulse, through nature, through literature, through life's vicissitudes, through empathy with all who in the past or in the present have longed and looked for the "Secret Splendour". The books that meant much to you were my own boon companions - Plato and Marcus Aurelius and Spinoza, Wordsworth and Shelley and Swinburne and many others. I studied Roman Catholic thought with great interest, starting with St. Augustine and ending with Chesterton's Everlasting Man and Papini's book on Jesus. We were also in the same boat inasmuch as neither of us was a born Roman Catholic, though perhaps I was more influenced by Roman Catholicism, having had as my educational background St. Xavier's School and College and the association with European Jesuits from early boyhood at the same time that I steeped myself in Zoroastrian lore. It is clear from your book that the wideness and richness of your inner life is due to the fact that you came to Catholic Christianity from the outside. If you had been born to it, you would never have sought out so much that is non-Catholic to form the many-sidedness of your mind. For instance, I feel that a Catholic could never have entered into the high and lucid spirit of Spinoza the "God-intoxicated" pantheist who is the bugbear of the Catholic Church; nor
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perhaps would he have responded so exultantly to the panpsychic or pantheistic Nature-mysticism of the young Wordsworth. I don't remember your mentioning Luther anywhere, but I would not have been surprised if, like Chesterton, a fellow-convert, you had called him, in spite of his crudities, "a great man", a compliment which only of late has become possible to Catholics. But converts have a certain tendency too, which is not very agreeable and which possibly a born Catholic may not so often indulge in - namely, to keep extolling and exalting the new faith in comparison with other religions notwithstanding an instinctive sense of their wonderful value, as you do repeatedly in the last two chapters of your book - "Catholicism" and "Epilogue" -which from p. 172 are unnecessarily and in my opinion unjustifiably provocative in several places and, for all the widening viewpoint praised at times, impress me as shortsighted on the whole. One can hardly believe that what you criticise and belittle in comparison with Christianity is the India of the glorious vari-visioned Upanishads and of the Gita's vast as well as supple and diversely convergent synthesis, not to mention the medieval saints and devotees and the marvellous modern Ramakrishna. When you wrote your book you had no idea of Sri Aurobindo, but what could be known was enough to prevent the "superior" self-congratulatory variety of Christianity from breaking out here and there in so charming and authentic a document of the soul. I would wish the offensive matter could be expunged or modified. But let me not dwell on the blind spots towards the conclusion of your narrative. Despite the jarring notes at the tail-end, I shall always remember how almost the entire book is both beautiful and profound with a straightforward simplicity across which a keen subtlety of mind shines out.
I don't think any inward-looking autobiography that I have read of the Christian genre can match yours - not even Newman's Apologia. I could find no mystico-spiritual urge in Newman, only a very cultured religious fervour. Even as a piece of writing, I found nothing memorable other than the
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great set passage on the sense of some "aboriginal calamity" in man's inner history, the haunting presence of what Catholicism designates the "Fall". You have, again and again, inspired pages. I have never wanted to read Newman a second time, whereas I am just waiting for a spot of leisure to go back to your life-story, and enjoy and appreciate the vivid account of the long search that brought you, as a Christian with a deep need of historical background, into the Catholic fold - a search that is highly illuminative up to the point I have indicated - and even beyond that point if we ignore what I have considered instances of short-sight. Perhaps I should be less distressed even by them after having known you intimately through our correspondence and come in contact with your personal tolerance, courtesy, honesty, sensitive response to all genuine mysticism. Anyway, in a final estimate nothing can obstruct my gratitude to you for sending me a copy of The Golden String.
The letter which you have been awaiting will be delayed a little more. I have to redo a section of it. In the meantime it will be a pleasure to hear from you apropos of the present communication.
December 11th 1983
Thank you very much for your letter. I am glad to know that you were so much impressed by The Golden String. As regards the last two chapters, they were written nearly thirty years ago, before I came to India, and I would certainly express myself differently in some respects, though my basic understanding of Christianity remains the same. In particular, whereas before I followed the 'fulfilment' theory of Christianity, I now accept the view of 'complementarity'. Each religion has a unique understanding of the one Mystery of Being and expresses it in its own images and concepts, but
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all are ultimately complementary. I think that Return to the Centre and The Marriage of East and West express my present understanding better. I agree that coming to Catholicism from outside enables one to see it in a more critical way and often gives new insights, though people brought up in the Catholic faith (like Karl Rahner) may go deeper than all. As I see it today our future depends on the ability to see Christianity and other religions in their true relationship, neither confusing nor separating them. Ultimately all are perspectives on the one absolute reality. Of course, mysticism holds the key to all religious understanding and that is where you and I meet.
12.12.83
I have received your short note in answer to my letter of the 6th. It has gladdened me with its clear statement in brief of your present position in regard to the various religions -the "complementarity" view rather than the "fulfilment" theory which, to my mind, had scattered some offensive blemish-spots over the beauty and sincerity of The Golden String. Yes, Return to the Centre and The Marriage of East and West show a good deal of your new understanding but the ghost of the old attitude is perhaps not quite laid and a third book may be wished for in which the complementary view will itself find its fulfilment by a modern many-sided elucidation of that old definition of God - by St. Augustine, I think - as a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere. The book will show the omnipresence of the Divine in all religions as well as the Divine's infinity which goes beyond all of them into a mysticism approached through the special perspectives of the whole lot and reached by exceeding them so that we emerge - if I may put it in Aurobindonian phraseology - from the dawns of the past
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into the noons of the future where shall be consummated not only the marriage of East and West but also that of Heaven and Earth. The mysticism which is at play at present and which you rightly see as holding the key to all religious understanding and providing us with our meeting-place is a promise of that greater ultimate realisation, a marvellous light transcendent of our minds and a wonderful warmth immanent in our hearts.
I am attaching the long letter I spoke of as being redone in part. It tries to carry to a close our always lively yet never unfriendly discussion.
Sincerely yours,
10.12.83
I am sorry if I have struck again and again a note unpleasant to you and if I have seemed, as you put it, to "question the very basis of Christian faith", a procedure which you appear to consider off the line of the discussion with which we began. But, as far as I recollect, it is you who unintentionally prompted me to it by declaring that the Virgin Birth, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Ascension of Jesus actually initiated what Sri Aurobindo calls the supramental manifestation and that, as compared with Hinduism or Buddhism, Christianity was a religion based on "certain historical facts and physical transformation". I immediately took up the challenge in regard to the Virgin Birth: the very starting-point of the alleged uniqueness could easily be shown, on the strength of the earliest Christian evidence, to be a non-fact, and no more though also no less than a beautiful and profound symbol. One thing led to another and we got immersed in reflection on various Christian topics which are of fundamental relevance in any survey of man's religio-spiritual vision.
Our discussion has proved inconclusive but I feel it has
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led to several clarifications of thought and even some new insights. Your reply to the long letter I wrote before you left for the USA seems to be a rounding-off with your usual courteous and considerate tone and I would have let it be the last word, leaving it to whatever reader it may get to note its unconvincingness, if Bede Griffiths had not been the correspondent. But, realising the general high quality of your mind, I feel compelled to answer,when I have the impression that this high quality has not been sufficiently exercised in places.
You deprecate my "direct approach to the New Testament" and say that the truth of Christianity "was communicated by Christ to chosen disciples" whom he "endowed" with "the gift of the Holy Spirit to guide them in their understanding of it". Now, whom can we designate "chosen disciples"? The nearest we can get to them are the writers of the New Testament. Are we to overlook them and resort to Christians of the beginning of the second century who gave us by the early creeds the nucleus of Roman Catholicism? You yourself point to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke for your support of the Virgin-Birth doctrine. If some writer outside the NT had referred to the Virgin Birth, would you have given adherence to the creed enunciated at the turn of the first century? A direct approach to the NT is unavoidable and fundamental. In making it one does not become a mere historical scholar with no touch on the deliverances of the Holy Spirit.
Historical scholarship can rightly start only after those deliverances have been attended to. What are the deliverances about the Virgin Birth? A couple of short phrases in just two out of twenty-seven books of the NT. Even the Gospels that carry the allusions develop as if they never existed and actually contain material dissonant with them as though they reflected some new-fangled legend tagged on to the bulk of tradition from the time of Jesus. You not only ignore these facts but also neglect the earliest documents of the NT: the fourteen or fifteen letters of Paul and the Gospel
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of Mark. I shan't repeat here how, as I have already shown, these documents go beyond mere silence: they have passages rendering any belief in a supernatural nativity positively impossible. I shall simply draw your attention to a new point that has gone home to me while dipping into the Catholic commentator John J. Dougherty. Dougherty adverting to the earliest evangelist, Mark, writes:*
"What we call the Gospel of St. Mark was considered the preaching of St. Peter, as Clement and others testify. In fact, its early title was 'The Memoirs of Peter'... Can we reconstruct the history that lies between the preached Gospel and our four written Gospels?... Peter's sermon in Acts 10:34-43 may serve as an example of the primitive oral catechesis. Observe the outline of the sermon: 1) the preaching of the Baptist and the Baptism of Jesus, 2) the Galilean ministry, 3) the Passion, death, and Resurrection. It is interesting that we find the same plan in the Gospel of St. Mark. Now a very early witness, Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis, affirms about 130 A.D. that 'Mark, having been the interpreter of Peter, wrote down carefully, though not in order, all that he remembered, both words and deeds of the Lord... - he took care to omit or falsify nothing which he had heard.' The correlation of these texts suggests an intimate link between the preaching of Peter and the written Mark."
What does this Christian tradition indicate? Indeed that Mark's omission of the Virgin-Birth story and his beginning the "biography" of Jesus with his baptism by John echoes the knowledge of Jesus' life by one who should be the most knowledgeable about it because he had personally been with Jesus: namely, Peter.
In the face of all this, how are we to conceive of spiritual truth? Are we to regard as unimportant everything other than those two brief phrases in Matthew and Luke? Did the Holy Spirit speak exclusively through them and through Churchmen in the post-NT period? I don't understand your argument.
* John J. Dougherty, Searching the Scriptures: A Popular Introduction to the Bible (A Doubleday Image Book, Garden City, New York, 1963), pp. 114, 116
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Nor do I understand how you can speak of nobody raising any objection when the Church affirmed the Virgin Birth. What about the several groups of Christians in the second century itself who in spite of the official stand denied it? There were the Christian Gnostics (Cerdo, Cerinthus, Satornilus, the Carpocratians, Marcion and the Manicheans). More significant, there were some Jewish Christians, quite a number constituting the sect of the "Ebionites", who did not preach a "docetic" Messiah like the Gnostics but a physical one and yet deemed him of strictly human origin. The Ebionites were declared heretics by the Church. This provides us with evidence from the Church's own side that objections were raised to the Virgin-Birth assertion. What lends further point to the situation is that the basic text of the Ebionites was the Gospel of Matthew suitably edited. Obviously it was their favourite because it was the most Jewish of the four Gospels and they cut out the Virgin Birth as no genuine part of its Jewishness. And well they might think of it thus, for the most meaningful fact about them is marked by Father Raymond Brown when he honestly comments:* "The roots of these groups in Palestine raise the possibility, albeit slight, of a tradition of natural conception coming down in Palestine from the original Jews who believed in Jesus." That "slight" is, of course, rather arbitrary. The Palestinian roots admitted by Brown of the Ebionites no less than of the Christian Gnostics suggest very impressively a line of belief going back to Jesus' own day in his own locale. The mere trickle of a seeming tradition in Matthew and Luke, later unsupported even by themselves, has no such source traceable.
I contemplate also with amazement your argument that if nobody objected to the Virgin-Birth doctrine in the second century it would show itself as an authentic tradition of Christianity. Supposing that no one opposed it (which is not a fact), we cannot affirm it as an element of the original
* Raymond Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke (Image Books, New York, 1979), p. 528.
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Christian religion and much less as inevitably true. Miracle-avid believers in an epoch when not only were human figures (e.g., Plato, Apollonius of Tyana, Augustus Caesar, the last two Jesus' own contempories) said to have been virginally born but also Mother-Goddesses were rife - such believers were most likely to support the Creed-makers, particularly as Matthew and Luke had alluded to the supernatural nativity, and a miraculous event of this sort at the beginning of Jesus' life would match ideally the miraculous event - the Resurrection - alleged to have occurred at the end of it. What we have to explain in that epoch is the disagreement and not the concurrence of a lot of people. With credulity and religious competition and sense of narrative balance rampant, it is the disagreement that would tend to point to actuality and truth.
The opposition of Bernard and Thomas Aquinas to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary is quite understandable in view of the utter absence of the doctrine in the NT. But if ultimately the doctrine was declared an integral feature of the mystery of faith we see the irrelevance of concurrence or disagreement to the question of rightness or wrongness of a controversy raging for nearly 700 years and at one time the whole Order of the di ssenting Dominicans being forbidden the University of Paris. Opposition did not weigh with the Church finally as a sign of the dubiousness of the Immaculate Conception. Concurrence therefore in the case of the Virgin Birth - even if one hundred percent cannot be cited as a sign of the doctrine's authenticity. We have to go by the testimony of the earliest tradition, the record of those who were present in time or physically closest to Jesus. These certainly can be read as better instruments of the Holy Spirit than the Churchmen of the second or later centuries.
I am afraid you have not applied your mind sharply enough to the subject of the Second Coming as well. Your contention is: Jesus spoke in terms of Jewish symbolism and apocalyptic without providing actual ground for the early
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Church's understanding it in terms of his returning in the life-time of the first disciples. Such a plea implies that he has been thoroughly misreported by the evangelists and that Paul's repeated reference to the imminent advent of Jesus for the new creation has no basis in the verba ipsissima of the Saviour. Don't we make a mockery of the NT by an implication of this kind? Again, do we not misrepresent the very nature of Jewish apocalyptic thereby? A typical example of the genre is the Book of Daniel, nowadays dated between 167 and 164 B.C., a scripture of which Jesus can be proved quite cognisant. Daniel's Messiah is at the same time "the son of David" and the transcendent Saviour. When Jesus was on trial for his life, Matthew 26:64 makes him quote Daniel 7:13 and the very title Jesus preferred for himself during his life was Daniel's "Son of Man". What does the Book of Daniel illustrate? Doubtless, it has a general relevance for all ages when the City of God is under onslaught, but we should do well to hearken to the wise words of Dougherty:53
"One should sedulously avoid twisting the imagery of Daniel to fit situations never intended by the author. All too many, even now, engage in this ill-advised and unscientific endeavour. The beasts and the symbols of Daniel represent the Chaldeans, the Persians, the Greeks, and his centre of interest is that paragon of persecutors, Antiochus IV Epiphanes. To interpret these figures in terms of medieval or contemporary history is to make a plaything of the Word of God and to employ the venerable authority of the Scriptures in the cause of whims and fancies."
It is worth listening to Dougherty on the Apocalypse of St. John too:54 "Its message of consolation is timeless, and its promise is the ultimate victory of good over evil, of Christ over Antichrist." But on its actual contents and bearing in time Dougherty is quite explicit:55 "In symbolic imagery the Apocalypse portrays the conflict between the Christian Church and imperial Rome. Rome is the beast of the Apocalypse, agent of Satan who seeks to destroy the Church. It is contrary to the nature of the book to read into it the
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events of twentieth-century history or to use it as a calendar to prophesy the end of the world... Its message was intended for first-century Christianity, and in figurative language it speaks of political and religious conditions contemporary with its readers. The eschatological meaning must be linked to its contemporary message. It flows out of the historical meaning, for behind the struggle between the Christian Church and the Roman Empire were aligned the heavenly and the infernal powers. The struggle between pagan Rome and Christianity was really a struggle between Satan and God, a rehearsal for that final great conflict between them when God's victory will mark the end of the world and the beginning of the other world." Towards the end of the Apocalypse Jesus is made to say: "I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches..." (22:16) and John adds: "He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus" (22:20).
Everywhere in the Gospels and the Apocalypse of John Jesus is figured as announcing his own return soon in the wake of his death and Resurrection and Ascension. As you write, when it was plain that the return was not to be as understood by the followers of Jesus they explained the delay by saying that "a thousand years" in God's "sight are but a day". You argue that since they found no difficulty in the explanation the original meaning of the eschatological prophecy cannot be pinned down in the events in the immediate post-Jesus age. In other words, you imply that when Jesus spoke of that age in clear-cut language he did not mean it at all but simply signified any period of history after him. This is to me unacceptable. And just because what 2 Peter says is true about God's "sight" it does not follow that Jesus had that truth in mind. I knew that certain declarations by prophets and avatars acquire large meanings as time goes on, but here we are not in a realm where development of doctrine is natural. We have here the realm of the explicit, the specific, the particular and we cannot dodge it without
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falsifying fact. The post-Jesus church, facing the non-fulfilment of his prophecy, was very clever, very ingenious and got out of the corner without disturbance: does this prove that Jesus never meant what all the early Christians without exception unequivocally took him to mean - in accordance with the very character of Jewish symbolism and apocalyptic which dealt always with their own time or the extremely near future? You point to the Greek Fathers who interpreted Jewish symbolism and apocalyptic in the light of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, and affirm: "I feel perfectly justified therefore in interpreting the second coming of Christ and the New Creation of St. Paul in terms of evolution." I fail to see how you can. It is only on the basis of 2 Peter that you can, but on the basis of Paul's Epistles, the Gospels or the Apocalypse you can't. You are in tune with the second-century Church; you as a Roman Catholic are within your rights. The lack comes only when Jesus himself and his close followers are in question. You stand on the working of the Holy Spirit in the later Church. I stand on its working in Paul's Epistles the Gospels and the Apocalypse. And, in regard to the Second Coming, the Christianity I discern there - the Christianity of Jesus rather than of the Roman Catholic Church - does not by any chance lend itself to an evolutionary interpretation.
Now I reach that ticklish topic: pantheism. Pantheos has been the experience of numerous mystics. He is a fact of realisation. No use denying Him. But surely He is not the sole truth of divine existence. Krishna in the Gita is much more than Pantheos. Still, your attempt to repudiate pantheism in the teaching of Krishna of the Gita on the basis of Krishna's own words is misguided. One of the great vākyas that have issued from this scripture is: vāsudevah sarvam iti -"The son of Vasudeva is all." The Krishna who said this and who speaks of his own birth after birth as well as Arjuna's and declares the human soul a portion of God cannot be converted into a Christian on the strength of the slokas you have quoted and tried to interpret à la Augustine or Aquinas.
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Let me quote to you the ample Indian comprehension of the paradoxical-seeming phrases (IX. 4-6) which run:
By Me, all this universe has been extended in the ineffable
mystery of My being; all existences are situated in Me, not
I in them.
And yet all existences are not situated in Me, behold My
divine Yoga; Myself is that which supports all being and
constitutes their existence.
It is as the great, the all-pervading aerial principle dwells
in the etheric that all existences dwell in Me, that is how
you have to conceive of it.
Sri Aurobindo writes in his Essays on the Gita: 56
"The supreme being of the Divine is beyond manifestation: the true sempiternal image of him is not revealed in matter, nor is it seized by life, nor is it cognisable by mind, achintyarūpa, avyaktamūrti. What we see is only a self-created form, rūpa, not the eternal form of the Divinity, svarūpa. There is someone or there is something that is other than the universe, inexpressible, unimaginable, an ineffably infinite Godhead beyond anything that our largest or subtlest conceptions of infinity can shadow. All this weft of things to which we give the name of universe, all this immense sum of motion to which we can fix no limits and vainly seek in its forms and movements for any stable reality, any status, level and point of cosmic leverage, has been spun out, shaped, extended by this highest Infinite, founded upon his ineffable supracosmic Mystery. It is founded upon a self-formulation which is itself unmanifest and unthinkable. All this mass of becomings always changing and in motion, all these creatures, existences, things, breathing and living forms, cannot contain him either in their sum or in their separate existence. He is not in them; it is not in them or by them that he lives, moves or has his being, - God is not the Becoming. It is they that are in him, it is they that live and move in him and draw their truth from him; they are his becomings, he is their
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being. In the unthinkable timeless and spaceless infinity of his existence he has extended this minor phenomenon of a boundless universe in an endless space and time.
"And even to say of him that all exists in him is not the whole truth of the matter, not the entirely real relation: for it is to speak of him with the idea of space, and the Divine is spaceless and timeless. Space and time, immanence and pervasion and exceeding are all of them terms and images of his consciousness. There is a Yoga of divine Power, me yoga aiśvarah, by which the Supreme creates phenomenon of himself in a spiritual, not a material, self-fermulation of his own extended infinity, an extension of which the material is only an image. He sees himself as one with that, is identified with that and all it harbours. In that infinite self-seeing, which is not his whole seeing, - the pantheist's identity of God and universe is a still more limited view, - he is at once one with all that is and yet exceeds it; but he is other also than this self or extended infinity of spiritual being which contains and exceeds the universe. All exists here in his world-conscious infinite, but that again is upheld as a self-conception by the supracosmic reality of the Godhead which exceeds all our terms of world and being and consciousness. This is the mystery of his being that he is supracosmic, yet not in any exclusive sense extracosmic. For he prevades it all as its self; there is a luminous uninvolved presence of the self-being of God, mamaātmā, which is in constant relation with the becoming and brings all its existences into manifestation by his simple presence. Therefore it is that we have these terms of Being and becoming, existence in itself, ātman, and existences dependent upon it, bhūtāni, mutable beings and immutable being. But the highest truth of these two relations and the resolution of their antinomy must be found in that which exceeds it; it is the supreme Godhead who manifests both containing self and its contained phenomena by the power of his spiritual consciousness, yogamāyā. And it is only through union with him in our spiritual consciousness that we can arrive at our real relations with his being....
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"These statements are only in appearance inconsistent with each other. It is as the supracosmic Godhead that he is not in existences, nor even they in him; for the distinction we make between Being and becoming applies only to the manifestation in the phenomenal universe. In the supracosmic existence all is eternal Being and all, if there too there is any multiplicity, are eternal beings, nor can the spatial idea of indwelling come in, since a supracosmic absolute being is not affected by the concepts of time and space which are created here by the Lord's Yogamaya. There a spiritual, not a spatial or temporal co-existence, a spiritual identity and coincidence must be the foundation. But, on the other hand, in the cosmic manifestation there is an extension of universe in space and time by the supreme unmanifest supracosmic Being, and in that extension he appears first as a self who supports all these existences; bhūtabhrt, he bears them in his all-pervading self-existence. And, even, through this omnipresent self the supreme Self too, the Paramatman, can be said to bear the universe; he is its invisible spiritual foundation and the hidden spiritual cause of the becoming of all existences. He bears the universe as the secret spirit in us bears our thoughts, works, movements. He seems to pervade and to contain mind, life and body, to support them by his presence: but this pervasion is itself an act of consciousness, not material; the body itself is only a constant act of consciousness of the spirit.
"This divine Self contains all existences; all are situated in him, not materially in essence, but in that extended spiritual conception of self-being of which our too rigid notion of a material and etheric space is only a rendering in the terms of the physical mind and senses. In reality all even here is spiritual co-existence, identity and coincidence; but that is a fundamental truth which we cannot apply until we get back to the supreme consciousness. Till then such an idea would only be an intellectual concept to which nothing corresponds in our practical experience. We have to say, then, using these terms of relation in space and time, that the
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universe and all its beings exist in the divine Self-existent as everything else exists in the spatial primacy of the ether... The Self does not dwell in all these existences or in any of them; that is to say, he is not contained by any, - just as the ether here is not contained in any form, though all forms are derived ultimately from the ether. Nor is he contained in or constituted by all existences together - any more than the ether is contained in the mobile extension of the aerial principle or is constituted by the sum of its forms or its forces.....
"Metaphysically stated, this is the intention of these verses of the Gita: but they rest founded not upon any intellectual speculation, but on spiritual experience; they synthetise because they arise globally from certain truths of spiritual consciousness. When we attempt to put ourselves into conscious relations with whatever supreme or universal Being there exists concealed or manifest in the world, we arrive at a very various experience and one or other variant term of this experience is turned by different intellectual conceptions into their fundamental idea of existence...."
Sri Aurobindo lists all the diverse experiences and ideas which are yet reconcilable. For your interest I shall quote just a few words on pantheism: "But, on the other hand, we get another revealing spiritual experience in which we are forced to see as the very Divine all things, not only that Spirit which dwells immutable in the universe and in its countless creatures, but all this inward and outward becoming. All is then to us a divine Reality manifesting himself in us and in the cosmos. If this experience is exclusive, we get the pantheistic identity, the One that is all: but the pantheistic vision is only a partial seeing. This extended universe is not all that the Spirit is, there is an Eternal greater than it by which alone its existence is possible. Cosmos is not the Divine in all his utter reality, but a single self-expression, a true but minor motion of his being...."57
Apropos of pantheism, you have asserted that it leads to
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"nonsense" and "absurdity", but what may seem so may not be such if one aspect of God is not taken in isolation as done by you and if we understand that even in this aspect the inner reality which is Pantheos is not uniformly manifest. Obviously in the wide diversity of form and form, in the marked difference of force and force, there are gradations of disclosure and in some of them Pantheos can appear to be at a vanishing point: the gradations disappear only to an inner spiritual realisation and not even the most convinced pantheist will declare the Cosmic Spirit to be equally expressive everywhere, to have been just as manifest in a Hitler or Stalin as in a Jesus or Buddha. Along with such a recognition, the Gita brings a multi-minded approach in which pantheism is but one feature - and this approach must yield another vision and valuation of the Ultimate than the one you envisage from the exclusively pantheist postulate. Going by that vision and valuation we may be entitled to say that a God who, among his many aspects, does not include Pantheos is nonsensical and absurd.
Especially when you are constrained to admit that "Evil is a mystery which human reason can never penetrate" you should hesitate to sit in judgment on an experience repeatedly had by mystics western no less than eastern. From the level of thought that passes a verdict like yours, I should urge with atheists that the presence of evil and the vast amount of apparently inexplicable suffering and seemingly gratuitous inequality makes no sense of an omniscient, omnipotent, all-good, all-loving God in connection with a world he has freely made and constantly oversees.
To urge that all this evil, suffering and inequality is due to man's freewill and that it is rendered somewhat reasonable by saying that God permits it only in order to bring good out of it is merely covering up the problem and refusing to think beyond certain limited and rigid Semitic categories. Rebirth, karma, God himself in one way the very world he has made -these notions which are quite foreign to the Semitic mind go somewhat towards lightening the mystery. Even freewill as
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conceived by that mind is an incomprehensible assumption ill-fitting in its general scheme of things. If we can get the problem of freewill into the right focus within a wide, varied, multifaceted God-view and world-view, we shall perhaps be able to shed some light on most matters vexing the philosopher, the theologian, the God-seeker. Years ago this problem obsessed me. Arguing to and fro within myself I became almost crazy. The mind was in such a whirl that I felt like smashing my head against the wall of my room. I was in the Ashram at that time. I asked the Mother to give me an interview. She must have thought I had some trouble like resurgent sex or some maladjustment with fellow-sadhaks. I went up to her and said to her surprise: "Please tell me from your illumined consciousness whether I have any freewill or not." She was intrigued by the strange Yogic difficulty I had and began to make an explanatory statement. I stopped her and said: "Please, Mother, don't offer me any argument. I have argued enough and am nearly mad. Just tell me whether I have freedom of will or not, in however restricted a degree. I want nothing else than a Yes or No." She softly answered, "Yes." "That's all I need." I left her and stopped thinking of the matter. After about 10 years one day I felt an opening in my mind and suddenly seemed to see a way out of the fog that had haunted every thinker I had consulted from the time of Kapila to our own, from the antiquity of Plato and Aristotle to the modernity of Maritain and Sartre. I wrote down what seemed to open up before me and sent my short compressed essay to Sri Aurobindo. It was called: "Freewill in Sri Aurobindo's Vision." My friend Nirodbaran read it out to him and sent me his opinion: "It is excellent. In fact it could not be bettered." Imagine my astonishment and joy. Perhaps the writing will please you too, in spite of whatever preconceptions you may have? It is part of my book, The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo. Unfortunately the book is out of print. Otherwise I would have sent you a copy. What I shall do is to get the essay typed and send it.
I shall close now - after touching on a couple of themes
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left over. I must not let pass your explanation of how Christian mystics are to be understood when they speak of being one with God and seeing no difference. Are you not being rather doctrinaire? Must apologetics lead you to consider all Indian spirituality dead wrong in asserting from experience the essential oneness of the soul with God and the existential difference in the manifested world? Must Church-dogma make you refuse to believe in their revelation that, although a variety of relations with God in the cosmic drama is a fact and even a necessity as if man and his source were discrete, there is basically - in the words of the Mundaka Upanishad - "the one Fire that goes forth as many sparks"? Are you theoretically bound to interpret every mystical realisation in terms of a fundamental dualism vis-à-vis the Supreme? Poor Vishwamitra and Yajnavalkya, poor Shankara and Ramana Maharshi - they were all deluded in their poise of tat tvam asi ("That art thou")! No doubt, the truth of the final identity of Atman with Brahman is not the only one. Sri Aurobindo, like the Gita and several parts of the Rigveda and Upanishads, insists on a diversity of spiritual poise, as you well know, because the Divine is not only the Self of selves but also the Lord and Mother and Playmate and, from age to age, the Avatar, but even while relating man to the Divine under all these aspects Sri Aurobindo, in tune with his own spirituality as well as that of the whole Indian past, never denies the Gita's vision of the human soul as being in its last reality a portion of the Divine and knowing in a certain experience utter non-difference from Him. Europe too has known this - in an Eckhart and a St. John of the Cross and not merely in a Plotinus, though unfortunately on account of doctrinal preconceptions the first two would waver and equivocate if catechised in their role of Church-members as distinguished from that of mystics. My quotations from you on Yogis like Ramana Maharshi show you as unable to refuse recognition of their experience of oneness with the Ultimate Ground in the essence of their selves. You will have to unsay several things if you want to picture them
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as no more than mirrors of light instead of light itself in the depths of their being.
In regard to Teilhard, to reject a good deal of what he says and follow him in his general evolutionary perspective alone is to ignore the organic link between this perspective and his spiritual-scientific vision. The former is only another name for his Cosmic Christ, Christ the Evolver who is also Christ the Evolute without becoming a mere Pantheos but still including a World-Soul within a hyper-physics and a hyper-biology which are religiously subsumed under what he termed hyper-Catholicism. We may interpret this triple "hyper" more broadly as Pan-en-theism rather than Pantheism and relate the pan-en-theistic outlook and inlook and uplook to the many-faceted spiritual synthesis of the Gita whose epiphany of the universal Time-Spirit radiating from a Divine Incarnation may be attuned to Teilhard's evolutionism of the universal Christ-Body through an ever-increasing "resonance to the All" both in terms of religious feeling and in modes of scientific co-operation to bring about a collective super-complexity embodying a totalised super-consciousness. Here my mention of the Gita can serve to remind us that in many respects Teilhard the Roman Catholic was in affinity at once with modern science which he well understood and with ancient Vedanta which he mostly misconstrued. By means of a proper insight into Teilhardism a three-fold Weltanschauung can take shape in which Christianity can fuse with the progressive thrust the theory of evolution can provide towards a this-worldly spiritual fulfilment and, while fusing with it, get charged with India's multiform Yogic aspiration, especially in that wide-ranging comprehensive modern version of it which is Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation. I don't believe that in following "Karl Rahner generally in his understanding of Christ in an evolutionary perspective" you can arrive at anything so dynamically fruitful. If you "still think", as you say you do, "that Sri Aurobindo has something very important to say from a Christian point of view on
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this subject", your preference of Rahner over Teilhard seems to me somewhat obscurantist. Of course I mean that true Teilhard who has to be extricated from his own often self-contradicting theology and saved from his present-day coreligionists' attempt to "orthodoxise" him.
I must stop here. I don't know whether you will let this letter be the last in our series or will take issue with me again. An alternative I may surmise is some such statement as: "Holding the Roman Church to be guided by the Holy Spirit, I accept all that it decides to believe about original and essential Christianity, no matter if you appear to have cogency on your side from the viewpoint of direct research, history, scholarship or 'logic'. Further discussion cannot lead anywhere." I can respect this stand - one of deep faith in a long-enduring institution of considerable religious power, which has greatly inspired you. But, except for several precious legacies of the past, I have moved away from fixed dogma, creed, church, even from the fixities of the religion I was born in. Maybe I am mistaken in doing so, but I can't help it, having got immersed in the oceanic spirituality of Sri Aurobindo with its wide diversity matching its detailed immensity and with its face carrying the most splendid memories of the past yet turned towards an adventure of consciousness and an exploration of unprecedented possibilities.
In any case, whatever we may argue please remember that I have had great pleasure in coming in contact with you. Whether we differ or not, I have never failed to appreciate the fineness of your being and the Ideal you have tried to make your life.
December 20th 1983
Thank you for your letter. There are a good many misunderstandings in it which need to be cleared up, though
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I don't want to prolong this correspondence much more. The first is that I don't think that you have appreciated what I said about Christianity being based on a divine revelation. Every genuine religion is derived from an experience of transcendent reality, which can never be comprehended by the rational mind. As the Katha Upanishad says: 'This doctrine cannot be obtained by argument, but when it is declared by another then it is easy to understand.' Faith, as St. Paul says, comes by hearing, and faith is essentially an illumination of the mind, which enables it to transcend the rational order and grasp the transcendent reality. For this reason all attacks on revealed doctrine by an unbeliever are questionable, though of course a revealed doctrine can always be examined by the critical reason and that is what constitutes theology.
The second point is that, as I said, the Christian gospel was revealed to a definite community. You seem to have missed this point. All the New Testament bears witness to the fact that its writers were conscious of belonging to a definite community. All three synoptic gospels record how Jesus chose twelve disciples, whom he called apostles and committed the gospel to them. This apostolic community received the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost and from that time this community based on the teaching of the Apostles continued to grow and to bear witness to its common faith. I showed in The Golden String how I became convinced that this apostolic community could be shown to have continued in history down to the present time. It is in the light of this apostolic tradition therefore that the testimony of the New Testament is to be judged, since the New Testament is itself the record of the faith of the apostolic community.
When it comes therefore to the question of the Virgin Birth I maintain that this is part of the faith of the apostolic community as recorded in the New Testament by Matthew and Luke, and that this has been preserved in the apostolic community down to the present day. When I said that the doctrine met with no opposition, I mean from within the
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apostolic community. If Mark and Paul really contradict Matthew and Luke why were they all included in the New Testament by the Church in the second century?
Of course, this does not mean that the evidence of the New Testament cannot be critically examined. But I must honestly say that I do not find your arguments against the Virgin Birth at all convincing from the point of view of history, scholarship or logic. For me the last word on the subject has been said by Raymond Brown in his study of the Virginal Conception and his later more exhaustive book The Birth of the Messiah. His conclusion in the first book, as you may remember, was that 'the totality of the scientifically controlled evidence leaves an unresolved problem'. But in the later book he adds that in his opinion 'it is easier to explain the New Testament evidence by positing a historical basis than by positing a purely theological creation'. This is, of course, only the opinion of one scholar. I would simply insist that the doctrine of the Virgin Birth cannot be proved either way on the evidence of the New Testament, but that it rests on the faith of the apostolic community from the time of Matthew and Luke until the present day.
As regards the end of the world, I think that you misunderstood my position. I maintain that Jesus conceived the coming end in terms of Jewish Apocalyptic. The basis of this is that the coming end of the world and final revelation is always conceived in the context of the seer's actual situation. Thus Daniel sees the coming end in terms of the capture of Jerusalem by Antiochus Epiphanes and St. John sees it in terms of the Roman Empire of his time. Jesus, it seems certain, saw it -in terms of the coming destruction of Jerusalem, which he foresaw. In each case the actual human situation is seen as a sign of the ultimate fulfilment. The fact is, of course, that the end is not properly a temporal event. It is the passage from time to eternity. The seer is not so much concerned with the temporal sequence as with the eternal reality which he sees mirrored in the temporal event. This is why, as I said, the Church had no difficulty in postponing
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the coming of the end, when it was clear that it was not to take place in the lifetime of the Apostles. In all this it is the insight into the eternal reality behind the temporal signs which determines one's attitude.
To come now to the question of pantheism, I find a great deal of misunderstanding here. You quote a long passage from Sri Aurobindo's Essays on the Gita apparently to refute what I said, but I find that this almost exactly expresses my own understanding, which I believe to he perfectly compatible with Catholic faith. In fact, I realise how much I owe to Sri Aurobindo in my understanding of the creative process. The one point of disagreement comes when God is identified with the universe. I believe in total immanence and total transcendence, and I hold that this is the essential Hindu doctrine in the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita. This is sometimes described as panentheism. The objection to pantheism is that it involves holding God responsible for sin and evil. When someone commits murder or adultery or theft or lies or cheats or deceives, it is a will independent of God which is responsible for the action. In no way can it be said that God is responsible for the evil will in man. The subject of freewill is very subtle and complex, and I must say that I found your explanation very interesting. But I don't really feel competent to discuss the subject.
In fact, I have to admit that this correspondence has developed along lines which I find disagreeable. We started by comparing the teaching of Sri Aurobindo with Christian doctrine and this is a subject which interests me profoundly. But it was soon deflected into an attack and defence of Christian doctrine, and this is something which I don't find of much interest. I have worked out my own faith over many years and every year brings new conviction to me. The dogmas of faith which you think are irrational ideas imposed by the Church, are for me profound insights into the ultimate mystery of existence. I do not deny the profound insight and experience of Shankara and Ramana Maharshi, but I find their theoretical interpretation extremely unsatisfactory.
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Infact, this is one of the points where I feel that Sri Aurobindo has been most effective, in showing up the limitations of Shankara's doctrine of advaita. I find far greater understanding of the ultimate reality in Tibetan Buddhism and also in the Sufi doctrine of Ibn Arabi. But for me the greatest insight into ultimate truth is to be found in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity - that the ultimate reality is not a pure identity but a dynamic relationship, a communion of love. I was lecturing on this in many places in America and everywhere I found great interest in it. But it would take too long to go into it now.
So you see I am not really interested in arguing about these things. It is in contemplation of the Mystery as revealed in Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist thought and for me in the doctrine of the Church that I find my greatest joy. Sri Aurobindo is for me one who has a most profound insight into this mystery and I am always grateful to him for this. To have discussed this with you would have been meaningful for me, but to have to go back and argue about the basis of Christian belief I find rather tiresome. In the same way as regards publication I think that a debate between us on the relevance of Sri Aurobindo to Christian thought would have been interesting, but to argue about Christianity and the Catholic Church is not really meaningful.
P.S. Perhaps I should add that in my visit to America where I spoke to Christian, Hindu, Buddhist and other communities especially in California, I became more than ever convinced that there is one divine reality manifesting in all the different religious traditions, which are all distinct but interrelated. No religious tradition can claim to embody the absolute truth which transcends all human limitations. We have to learn to see through the various cultural limitations to the eternal
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reality. This would not be so far from your position or that of Sri Aurobindo.
FIRST INSTALMENT OF THE PAMPHLET-LETTER
21.12.83
I am sorry if part of my discussion has proved disagreeable and tiresome to you. But I think you are off the mark when you presume that I was attacking the foundation of Christian belief. This foundation is the incarnate divinity of Jesus. I have never questioned that. Belief in the Virgin Birth has been opposed by several Christian theologians of today, even Roman Catholic ones, as Raymond Brown has frankly recorded. And Brown himself has said that opposition here does not at all throw doubt on Jesus' being the Son of God in the basic sense understood by Christianity, Roman Catholic no less than Protestant. Among Roman Catholic theologians, either seriously sceptical or openly negative, Brown has listed J. Ratzinger, O. Knoch, K. S. Frank, G. Lanke, at none of whom the Vatican - unlike the case with Hans Kiing and Edward Schillebeeckx - has raised its eyebrows. I may not hold that Jesus is the one and sole and final Incarnation, but I should think that the "complementarity" view which you now profess instead of the old "fulfilment" theory should make room for the possibility of other Avatars.
Where "foundations" are concerned it is not I but you who were negative. You can be said to have questioned the basis of an Aurobindonian's faith, the tremendous Avataric phenomenon that to an Aurobindonian is the person of his Master. You have put Sri Aurobindo on a par with Plotinus and Shankara and asserted that the problem whether he could be considered anything more would depend on how he would relate to Christianity. No doubt, Sri Aurobindo has given the world a monumental philosophy systematizing his spiritual experience, just as Plotinus and Shankara did, but to
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miss the immensity and variety of his spiritual knowledge and fail altogether to feel that the author of such expositions as The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, The Secret of the Veda, Essays on the Gita, not to speak of the enormous illuminating corpus of his letters, seems to be the author of the universe - surely your lack of sympathy here is almost at the other pole to my attitude towards Christian belief. The comparison merely to Plotinus and Shankara would appear to refuse Sri Aurobindo the status even of Krishna or Buddha. Have I ever complained of anything disagreeable or tiresome because of the contrast this comparison makes to a statement like the Mother's on 14 February 1961: "What Sri Aurobindo represents in the world's history is not a teaching, not even a revelation; it is a decisive action direct from the Supreme"?
Then there is your declaration in effect that what Sri Aurobindo attempted during several decades, convinced that he was on the way to achieving something new for the earth - the Supramental Manifestation - had already been done two thousand years ago by Jesus. Thus the Aurobindonian ideal was really "old hat" and not a crowning innovation. Not only this, but even after Herculean labour he fell short of attainment and died, whereas Jesus succeeded in three days and that too after he had been dead! Obviously, Sri Aurobindo lived and toiled in colossal ignorance of spiritual history and, although he said he had read the Bible assiduously at one time, he never grasped what it was all about. Even in trying to redo the work of Jesus he got it all wrong by saying that a divinised body should be a lasting accomplishment on earth in order to fulfil terrestrial evolution: he should rather have said that a totally divinised body as the result of an evolutionary spirituality is possible only after death and by passing beyond earth's space-time. He should have known that he was reviving or developing Christianity in semi-Vedantic semi-scientific terms and an Aurobindonian like me should stop committing the mistake of affirming, as the Mother did on 2 April 1967: "Sri
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Aurobindo does not belong to the past nor to history. Sri Aurobindo is the Future advancing towards its realisation." According to you, Sri Aurobindo prepares simply a great future for the wonderful past in which the history of Christianity commenced.
You will protest that I am caricaturing your position, but the caricature, if any, is not more than is implied in your dubbing me "an outsider" to Christianity and "an unbeliever" who has "deflected" to a matter of attack on and defence of Christian doctrine our correspondence which "started by comparing the teaching of Sri Aurobindo with Christian doctrine". What has grown out of the initial theme is perfectly natural: the points of difference were bound to arise side by side with the points of resemblance. In fact the former were there from the beginning, for you were not merely a keen admirer of Sri Aurobindo in several respects: you were also a critic of him directly or indirectly wherever he did not give the impression of a Christianity Indianised and modernised. But did I ever write: "this is something which I don't find of much interest"?
Of course, since you wish it, we shall not prolong "much more" a correspondence which has always struck me as friendly and mutually helpful. I am glad you have corrected some "misunderstandings" on my part, but in one instance you have perhaps missed my position. I know well that Christianity is based on a revelation, like every genuine religion; yet one can't say about any religion that all truth is present in it in however seedlike a form or that its interpretation by its own followers is invariably right at all points. The "complementarity" view should imply certain gaps in every religion which a different religion is likely to fill. And it should not rule out the possibility of new religions arising, which bring in truths uncompassed by the old ones. You have yourself admitted the human fallible element of the Roman Church as in-every institution and you have honestly regretted its occasional aberrations in conduct. Isn't it illogical to aver that while the Holy Spirit may fail to guide an
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institution in conduct it is bound to guide it accurately in doctrine at all times? Even if the "apostolic community" agreed on the Virgin Birth around 100 AD, its agreement need not imply that the earliest original Christianity had this doctrine. Your argument - apart from the assumption of the "apostolic community"'s inherent infallibility - is: "If Mark and Paul really contradict Matthew and Luke, why were they all included in the New Testament by the Church in the second century?" The answer is easy.
First of all, Paul and Mark were too well established as scripture among several of the Christian groups to be quite bypassed or else expurgated in a substantial way. Attempts, however, are clear at omission or addition. Brown58 notes Mark 6:4 and 3:21, 31-35 as bespeaking a "low estimate of the relations between Jesus and his family", and he comments: "Such an uncomplimentary view of Mary's relationship to Jesus is scarcely reconcilable with the knowledge of the virginal conception. Matthew and Luke... delete the first and most offensive part of the Marcan scene, where 'his own' think that Jesus is beside himself (even as in their parallel to Mark 6:4 they delete Jesus' uncomplimentary reference to relatives who do not honor the prophet). Moreover, Luke drastically modifies the last part of the Marcan scene so that Jesus no longer replaces his natural family but rather includes his mother and brothers among those who hear God's word and do it (8:19-21)." From Brown's observations we can see not only that Matthew and Luke are aware of danger-spots in Mark and try to modify them but also that Mark indirectly implies the incongruity of a doctrine like the Virgin Birth and is silent about such a doctrine not merely because, unlike the case with Matthew and Luke, the tradition of it has not come his way. In regard to Paul - a witness earlier than Mark who is the earliest Evangelist - Brown59 dismisses, on the ground of Galatians 4:4, Romans 1:3 and Philippians 2:7, the two pleas that have been made to show "Paul's knowledge of the virginal conception".
According to Brown,60 none of the so-called "implicit
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references" that are brought forward to set off the indisputable absence of explicit reference to the Virgin Birth in the NT outside Matthew 1:18-25 and Luke 1:26-39 "has any compelling force". After weighing a number of implications of this fact, Brown61 concludes: "What the silence of the rest of the NT does call into question is the theory that the memory of the virginal conception was handed down by the family of Jesus to the apostolic preachers and was universally accepted as fundamental Christian belief." In the face of such a conclusion, your argument from the inclusion of Paul and Mark in the NT by the apostolic community in the early second century can hardly show that these writers did not contradict Matthew and Luke. Brown62 implies the contradiction once more when he discusses the Magnificat in Luke: "I am rejecting the thesis that there were pre-Lucan Marian hymns in the early Church... J. McHugh has assumed that this hymn is pre-Lucan, and so 'there is nothing improbable in the suggestion that early Christians sang hymns of praise in honour of Mary.' However, such a suggestion is really quite improbable if one judges the early Christian situation from our earliest writings, the Pauline letters and Mark. Paul never mentions Mary by name and shows no interest in her, and the Marcan scene in which she features is scarcely favourable to her."
Consequently, the original non-exclusion of Paul and Mark from the NT has to be explained in non-Griffiths terms. Besides saying that scripturally they were too widely accepted by people to be excluded or much tampered with, all we can affirm is that the apostolic community - anticipating modern exegetes like Zahn, Miguens, Cooke, Danell and Robinson, with none of whom Brown agrees63 - either read "implicit references" or refused to interpret the almost universal silence as disproving the knowledge of the Virgin Birth and the historicity of it.
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January 10th 1984
Thank you for your card. I had not read your previous card carefully and was expecting your reply. As regards Raymond Brown, I only meant that after an exhaustive study (especially in his longer book The Birth of the Messiah) he concludes that the historicity of the Virgin Birth on the actual evidence cannot be proved nor can it be disproved. This seems to me as far as actual historical evidence can go.
January 28th 1984
Thank you for your card. I am afraid that I can't deal with your 'pamphlet' just now. I am beginning a book (which is being tape-recorded) on Christianity in the light of Western science (in new physics) and Eastern mysticism. It will take weeks and I shall not have time to attend to other things.
I have just been given an excellent book on Aurobindo by Beatrice Bruteau, whom I met in America. It is called Worthy is the World. Do you know of it? She is a Catholic but accepts Aurobindo's philosophy almost in toto!
February 4th 1984
Thank you for your card and the first instalment of your reply. As regards the latter, I can see that my view of Sri Aurobindo may have been disturbing to you, though by comparing him to Sankara, whom many Hindus regard as an avatara and a supreme Master, I don't think that I was too
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uncomplimentary. In any case, as far as I remember, I pointed out that what divided us was a difference of faiths, yours in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and mine in Jesus and the Resurrection. Where I feel the argument went astray was in your sustained attack on the doctrine of the Virgin Birth and then introducing the prophecy of the end of the world and the question of creation and pantheism. I don't think that debates on matters of faith are really useful, as we start from different premises and argument usually only leads to frustration. So I quoted from the Katha Upanishad: "This doctrine is not to be gained by argument."
Of course, I admit that there is a place for rational criticism of the articles of one's faith, and I agree that the Virgin Birth is not one of the foundation doctrines of Christian faith (as the Resurrection is), and I respect the critical methods used by Raymond Brown and others. But this is a matter of scriptural exegesis which is a matter of expert study and I don't personally feel attracted by it. As for your arguments (no doubt because we start from different premises), I just don't find your arguments convincing. I can't see why even if we admit that the Pauline churches and the church in which St. Mark's gospel was written (? the Roman Church) in the fifties and sixties did not know of the Virgin Birth, this should be a reason for denying its historicity. There must have been at least two distinct traditions of the Virgin Birth in other Christian communities, which were incorporated in St. Matthew and St. Luke in the seventies and eighties, and these were accepted as an authentic part of the gospel message in the early years of the 2nd century. This seems to me good enough by way of evidence, though of course it does not prove anything.
I am glad that you know Beatrice Bruteau's book on Sri Aurobindo. We have her Evolution Towards Divinity, which she sent us together with a lot of other books recently, and we are reading it during our meals in the refectory. It seems to me first class. That is what really interests me - the interpretation of Christianity in the light of evolution and I
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would have liked our discussion to go on these lines. I would like to see your review of The Tao of Physics.
7.2.84
As always, I was looking forward to your letter and was glad when it came yesterday.
I note that you have realised I could have as much cause to grouse over your reflections on Sri Aurobindo as you over what you call my "sustained attack" on the Virgin Birth, etc. But you forget that I challenged the Virgin Birth when you made a claim for Christianity as being unique because of certain extraordinary historical phenomena. While I am prepared to grant the extraordinary in the Resurrection although I can never grant that it in any way conforms to the conditions Sri Aurobindo has clearly laid down for what he terms the supramental transformation of the body - while I accept the Resurrection as a fact of history so far as a limited group of believers was concerned, I cannot bring myself at all to discern any historical element in the other alleged occurrence. But before I comment on your latest brief for the latter I should like to say a word on the quotation you have made from the Katha Upanishad. As far as I can see, the quotation, like similar ones from the Upanishads, refers to matters of spiritual- experience and realisation. The supreme Self of selves, Atman, cannot "be gained by argument" - it has to be known in our very substance by sadhana or it enters into the life of our depths by a sudden revelation of its more-than-mental reality. "Doctrine" as an article of faith or belief such as people have in the Virgin Birth is not involved here in the least.
Now for your brief for a tradition of Virgin Birth running
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alongside the neutral or negative one incorporated in Paul and Mark, our earliest witnesses. The "other Christian communities" than those in which the Pauline and the Marcan churches had formed must be proved to have some source for the positive traditions you attribute to them. The source has ultimately to be the family of Jesus or else any of the Apostles who knew Jesus personally. Lacking family evidence, we naturally turn to the Acts of the Apostles in our search for the source. What do we find there? We scan eagerly the speeches of Peter, the chief Apostle, an intimate companion of Jesus. In a previous letter I cited what the Roman Catholic commentator John J. Dougherty had to say in this connection. Let me revive your memory of it.
Dougherty reconstructs the oral or preached Gospel which went before the four written ones. Taking Peter's sermon in Acts 10:34-43 as an example of the primitive oral catechesis, he observes how its brief survey of Jesus' life and activity is exactly an outline of the plan followed in Mark's Gospel which begins with the baptism of Jesus. Next, Dougherty notes the testimony of Papias, Bishop of Hiera-polis in about 130 AD, that Mark who was Peter's interpreter wrote down all that he remembered of this Apostle's account of Jesus' words and deeds. The correlation of Mark's story with Acts 10:34-43 suggests a close link between the preaching of Peter and the first written Gospel.
Recent research* has tended to sever a direct harking back to Peter in Mark but leaves something basic à la Peter as still very likely at one or two removes. Dougherty's picture is not essentially changed and in any case his parallelism between the Gospel of Mark and Peter's sermon in Acts stands. This parallelism makes the author of Acts confirm not Luke's Gospel with its prominent Virgin-Birth declaration but Mark's with its complete lack of an infancy narrative and its emphasis on the Baptism as the initial revelation of Jesus' divine Sonship. Peter, who could have been the source par
* D. E. Nineham, The Gospel of St. Mark (The Pelican New Testament Commentaries, Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 26-7 with fn. + .
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excellence for Luke's as well as Matthew's speciality, has proved a definite anti-witness.
If you hold, as I am sure you do, the Luke of the Gospel to be the author of Acts, the situation becomes most ironically destructive. Now the former not only demonstrates the absence of knowledge of the Virgin Birth where it should have been vividly present and thus that there was no such Birth: he also counters his own narrative and exposes its contents to be a new-fangled thing with no real foundation. Luke totally against himself and nullifying his most Lucan evangelism: this is what you confront on considering Acts to be his work.
There could have been no tradition of Virgin Birth (in two forms, Matthean and Lucan, as you say) running pari passu with the Pauline and Marcan tradition devoid of such nativity. The Virgin-Birth doctrine was a late development without any roots in early original Christianity. How did it arise? Lacking roots, it could arise only as the historicising of a theologoumenon. Theological thought, after recognising Jesus as God's Son on account of the Resurrection, moved to his ministry and showed him as such with the Baptism by John: then it moved further back and sought to understand him as God's Son from his very birth. It posited a special divine quality there, as if not Joseph but God were really his father. The symbolism of a spiritual virginity on Mary's part was put forth. The symbolic form of the theological insight was turned into history: the spiritual truth was made physical fact. This process must be set between the 60s and the 80s, with the Gospels of Matthew and Luke the result. The difference of Matthew's presentation from Luke's has to be explained according to the psychological environment of the two Evangelists. In the second instalment of my long reply to you, this point no less than several others apropos of Brown has been tackled. What I have written now is a sort of introduction to that instalment, stimulated by your latest letter.
I may add that this process of converting spiritual truth
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into physical fact as regards the Christology of Jesus' birth did not go beyond the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The fourth Gospel - John's - bypassed the birth altogether and started like Mark round the ministry, except that it shifted the divinity of Jesus to a pre-existence which is foreshadowed first in Paul's Colossians and Philippians. In spite of the complete absence of the Virgin-Birth doctrine in twenty-five out of the NT's twenty-seven books and in spite of the doctrine's not having any basis in any early reliable tradition, the Church made it - in your phrase - "authentic part of the Gospel message in the early years of the 2nd century". According to you, it is the Holy Spirit of Truth that infallibly guided the Church. According to me, one impelling factor was what we might call the aesthetics of spiritual vision: pre-existence, Virgin Birth, Baptismal Revelation, Resurrection, Ascension made a beautiful rounded whole. Secondly, such a whole was the right fighting model against the various cults of the time which had many of these features. Great men with Virgin Birth to their credit were part of the religio-psychological climate. So were Mother-goddesses. No doubt, the sense of Mystical Fact had a role to play, but in view of what we can gather about the earliest Christianity it could not have been an all-pervading power: otherwise how could it have ignored this Christianity's clear-cut deliverance on the subject we have been discussing?
P.S. I'll be shortly posting you the offprints of my review. Please let me know when you are ready for the second and third instalments of my letter. The second is practically a review of Brown's Birth of the Messiah in relation to the Virgin Birth.
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February 10th 1984
Thank you for your letter, but I am afraid that it still leaves me totally unconvinced. Everyone agrees that the Virgin Birth was not part of the original 'Kerugma', the proclamation of the Gospel. St. Luke in the Acts gives a specimen of this proclamation in the speech of Peter after Pentecost. This remained the pattern of evangelical preaching and forms the basis of St. Mark's Gospel which preserves this framework. But later writers like Matthew and Luke sought for more detailed knowledge of the life of Christ and incorporated large portions of his teaching like the Sermon on the Mount, which are not found in St. Mark - but that does not mean that Matthew and Luke invented them! They then sought to fill in the details of Jesus' birth and childhood, relying as in everything else on the traditions which had come down to them. There is no reason to suppose that they invented anything. St. Luke says clearly that he was attempting to put in order what was "delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the Word".
Everyone agrees that the Gospel existed originally in oral tradition. From AD 30-60 there was no other source. The Gospel-writers simply put into writing and made a coherent whole of this oral tradition. Each wrote from his own perspective and arranged his material accordingly. St. Mark kept closely to the original Kerugma and omitted most of the 'didache', the teaching of Jesus. St. Luke clearly found "nothing inconsistent" in putting the Kerugma in the mouth of Peter, but in his gospel filling in the teaching and the stories of the infancy and the Resurrection. Matthew again arranged the stories and the teaching in another way, and John writing it at a later date elaborated it still further and brought out the spiritual meaning. No one 'invented' anything. They were simply expounding, in the light of their own understanding under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the 'mystery' of Christ which had come down to them from
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"the apostles and ministers of the Word". As I said, this 'mystery' cannot be understood by argument; it has to be spiritually discerned. Faith is the illumination of the mind which gives one insight into this mystery. There is no reason at all why one should accept the evidence for the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection. The Gospel evidence cannot 'prove' anything. For those who have faith, it is sufficient, for those who have not, it will never be convincing. The stories of the Resurrection and the miracles of Christ are just as much open to negative criticism as those of the childhood.
So I don't really see the point of arguing about this. For that reason I feel loth to go through your criticism of Raymond Brown. I am not a Biblical scholar and I rely for my knowledge of Biblical criticism on well-known scholars and in this case I find Raymond Brown generally convincing. But I am not prepared to go in for a detailed criticism of him. You should contact a Biblical scholar like Father Legrand at St. Peter's Seminary, Bangalore. In any case, as I said, though such discussions can be interesting and informative, I don't regard them as of great importance.
My interest is not in these things but in such things as the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo! So we come back to the point where we share a common interest, even though here also we differ in our approach. But here it is you who have the insight of faith while I am without it. So as I said before what divides us is a difference of faith and no amount of argument will bridge it.
14.2.84
I was rather distressed by your latest letter - not because you don't want to read the rest of my "pamphlet"-reply but because there is a sort of "extremist" note which was never
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present before. You begin by saying that you are "totally unconvinced" by anything I have written. This suggests that no amount of even highly plausible evidence submitted by me can ever affect your judgment. Of course I can understand how faith can remain unshaken, but the word "unconvinced" pertains to the universe of rational discourse and there such an absolute denial has a strange ring and seems to spring out of a refusal to consider any argument or evidence as cogent if it contradicts a fixed belief. Then there is to my ear a kind of desperation in your huddling together various issues on which I may be expected to hold various opinions, and not simply one negative outlook covering everything. It is not true - and you have yourself said it in the past - that the "evidence" for the Resurrection is on a par with that for the Virgin Birth. Nor is it true that "the stories of the Resurrection and the miracles of Christ are just as much open to negative criticism as those of the childhood". After we have examined all that is recorded about the Resurrection and about the miracles a residue or nucleus of extraordinary fact which deserves the name of "supernatural", though not everywhere with the same quality or level, remains. These events belong to a series to which attestation could be made and has been made in a sense which could very well be valid. We have no reason, except stark prejudice, to deny them, however much we may choose to prune certain accounts. The Virgin Birth is in quite another category. Family tradition is here the sole possible basis for its verity. No doubt, even family tradition can be questioned, but at least its existence will have to be faced, as well as its right to be examined granted. The glaring fact is its most suggestive absence. You have frankly stated: "Everyone agrees that the Virgin Birth was not part of the original 'Kerugma', the proclamation of the Gospel. St. Luke in the Acts gives a specimen of this proclamation in the speech of Peter after Pentecost." But you don't seem to realise that if Peter, who knew Jesus personally and is said in Acts 1:13-14 to know Jesus' mother and brothers as well, completely bypasses the Virgin Birth, there
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can have been not an iota of family tradition. In addition we have Peter's associate, Paul, who not only shows himself unaware of any family-tradition but in Galatians 4:4 employs a phrase - "born of a woman, born under the Law" - which equates Jesus' birth to a mode applicable to all human beings in their natural state. Mark who, as you write, "preserves" in the Gospel - the earliest of the four - the "framework" of "the original pattern of evangelical preaching" goes even beyond Peter's significant omission and Paul's negative hint. Raymond Brown64 has referred to Mark 6:4 "where Jesus compares himself to a prophet without honor in his own country, among his own relatives and in his own home". Next, Brown65 writes: "A similar low estimate of the relations between Jesus and his family is found in 3:21, 31-35", in the latter of which Jesus' mother no less than his brothers is slightingly referred to by Jesus. Brown comments: "Such an uncomplimentary view of Mary's relationship to Jesus is scarcely reconcilable with a knowledge of the virginal conception." Brown is discussing whether any knowledge of an extraordinary nativity can be traced in Mark. What emerges in general is that the Marcan view positively rules out the possibilities of any family tradition having existed. Evidently, Mary and Jesus' brothers became converts after the Resurrection. None of them had the least inkling of Jesus' divinity before. And, if there was not and never could have been a family tradition about the Virgin Birth, Luke and Matthew had nothing even possibly reliable to draw upon. What they found was a fiction, an invention, a historicising of the theologoumenon which arose in the course of a developing Christology. They dealt with this invention, each in his own way. They were not responsible for the invention as such: what they were responsible for was the elaboration of it, a continuation of the inventive process.
All sorts of inventions crop up in connection with great men, especially great spiritual figures. The Mother once told us how Sri Aurobindo had laughingly recounted to her that he had come across even in print the story that every night
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he went out bodily through the ceiling of his room to visit places. As for the Gospels, every student knows that they were meant to be neither history nor biography as we understand these genres. A lot of history and biography is in them, but they were essentially preachment and, in the best sense, religious propaganda. If you think that Roman Catholicism forbids you to ascribe invention to Luke or Matthew you must be behind the times, out of touch with the liberalism set flowing by Pius XII. Brown66 has an illuminating observation apropos of the "thesis of a Marian source". A footnote of his reads: "The classic argument is that, since Mary is pictured alone on the occasion of the annunciation, only she could be the source of the dialogue found therein. This argument has lost much of its force since it is now clear in Roman Catholic thought that inspiration of the Scripture does not guarantee historicity. There is no reason why a Roman Catholic could not judge the scene to be the product of Luke's creative imagination, so long as he or she did not deny the theological truths contained therein."
An instance of undeniable invention is made to stare us in the face in a passage in the book The Resurrection of Christ67 by Michael Ramsay, Archbishop of York, one of the best books on the subject, finely conservative and discreetly critical. He asks: "What signs of embellishment in the traditions are noticeable?" and begins the answer:
"The possibilities of embellishment in the tradition will be apparent at once to a reader who will examine in turn the accounts of the. visit of the women to the tomb in Mark and in Matthew. In Mark the miracle is implied but not described. The story is told in utter simplicity. The women arrive wondering who will move the stone so that they may enter. They see that the stone is no longer there. They enter. The tomb is empty. A young man in a white robe tells them that Jesus is not there, and bids them tell the disciples that He will go before them into Galilee. They flee in fear, and tell no one. The reticence of the story tells us of the great event which has come to pass. How great a contrast is seen in Matthew's
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narrative. In place of the quiet simplification of a miracle there is an elaborate description. There was a great earthquake; an angel of the Lord descended and rolled away the stone; his appearance was like lightning, and the soldiers on guard trembled and became as dead men. Such is an editor's embroidery of his source; and if elaboration of the tradition took place in the written stage it is reasonable to think that it took place in the oral stage too."
A little later, Ramsay68 harks back to one feature in Matthew's account and writes after listing some other instances of embellishment: "There is also a narrative in which many of the most conservative scholars have been ready to admit the likelihood of a legendary element. This is the story of the guard at the tomb in Matthew xxvii. 62-66, xxviii. 11-15: it contains a number of distinct improbabilities, and it is akin to a cycle of stories used (though not often) by Matthew, which arouse the suspicion that they present Christian mid-rash rather than history." On the same point Bernard W. Anderson,69 Professor of Old Testament Interpretation at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, U.S.A., comments: "Practically all scholars agree that the story of the sealing of the tomb and the placing of the Roman guard (27:62-66; 28:11-15) developed in the Gospel tradition to refute the criticism by non-Christians who maintained that Jesus' body had been stolen."
Before I close I can't help expressing regret again at what I feel to be extremism and desperation on your part when you counter my charge of "invention" in regard to the Virgin Birth by telling me: "later writers like Matthew and Luke sought for a more detailed knowledge of the life of Christ and incorporated large portions of his teaching like the Sermon on the Mount, which are not found in St. Mark - but that does not mean that Matthew and Luke invented them!" May I urge that the Sermon on the Mount and the Virgin Birth stand on entirely different footings? Jesus' "teaching" was a theme always mentioned. Paul refers to the Lord's sayings and even quotes two or three. Mark, as I once wrote to you,
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has several sayings of Jesus which are in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount and may be looked upon as that Sermon in seed-form. Peter's sermon (Acts 10:36-43) declares to the Gentiles about God and Jesus: "You know the word which he sent to Israel, preaching good news of peace by Jesus Christ (he is Lord of all), the word which was proclaimed throughout Judaea..." Peter ends by saying of Jesus: "And he commanded us to preach to the people, and to testify that he is the one ordained by God to be judge of the living and the dead..." Everywhere, before Matthew and Luke, we have evidence of Jesus speaking, preaching, commanding. We are told not only of his deeds but also of his words. There is no comparable anticipation, even in embryo, of the Virgin Birth. So, as regards the latter, I find irrelevant and mistaken your affirmation: No one invented anything. They were simply expounding, in the light of their own understanding under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the 'mystery' of Christ which had come down to them from 'the apostles and ministers of the Word'."
I can sympathise with your being sick of the whole business of our discussion of the Virgin Birth. I am tired too. But "what's writ is writ" and I can't tear up the rest of my "pamphlet". But to keep it without letting you see it is not fair either to you or to myself. What I shall have ultimately to do is to send it to you and face the chance of your not reading it. But I may tell you that the remaining sheets contain a number of other themes in addition to the Virgin Birth. Also I don't understand how you can at the same time say that you "find Raymond Brown generally convincing" and that you are "not prepared to go in for a detailed criticism of him".
Thank you for mentioning to me Father Legrand who is, according to you, a Biblical scholar. Perhaps I shall contact St. Peter's Seminary, Bangalore. But how can I substitute Father Legrand for you to whom I have been drawn ever since I first read you? I am happy to have known you in whatever manner. There is some inner bond between us. I don't know whether you are conscious of it but I am very much aware
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and I am not carrying on with you merely an academic debate. Behind the debate there is on the one side the man who wrote The Secret Splendour and "The Close of Dante's Divina Commedia" and on the other the man who has responded both profoundly and acutely to these works and who has penned that little personal masterpiece of religio-spiritual seeking, The Golden String, not to mention luminous parts of some other books, as well as made the most enlightened and rounded summing up of Sri Aurobindo's spiritually philosophic status I have ever seen in so brief a compass as in Return to the Centre.
P.S. I haven't been able to lay my hands on all the offprints of my review of Capra. I shall post you the three issues of Mother India in which it appeared during last year. The review is called "Eastern Mysticism and Modern Physics".
February 24th 1984
Thank you for your letter. If there is an element of 'desperation' in my response to your arguments about the Virgin Birth, it is because I find your arguments, which you seem to find convincing, to be utterly unconvincing. We approach the subject from a different point of view, and I can understand that you find your arguments convincing, but I don't seem to be able to make you see how unconvincing they are to me.
Let me take up again your argument about St. Mark's Gospel. You think that because St. Mark does not mention the Virgin Birth, it shows that it was unknown in the Church at that time. I think that it simply shows that it was unknown to the Christian community in which St. Mark was writing. It is a well recognised fact that different traditions came down
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in different churches and grew up independently. St. Mark seems to be quite ignorant, as I pointed out, of the Sermon on the Mount, as he is also ignorant of the great parables of St. Luke and of course of the whole Johannine tradition. Mark's Gospel in other words is a very short, truncated Gospel, which required to be filled out with the other traditions known to the other evangelists. There is nothing to show that traditions of the Virgin Birth did not exist in other communities just as the traditions of the teachings and parables and the sources of St. John's Gospel existed in other communities.
The same applies to the stories of the Resurrection. I entirely disagree with the view that St. Mark's Gospel represents the authentic story and the other stories were 'invented'. The other stories all came down in traditions which were just as valid as those of Mark. The Resurrection was a supernatural event, which could not be described in ordinary language, and the different accounts were traditions which grew up in the different churches which seek to bring out its significance. On the other hand, I do not agree with you that the stories of the Resurrection can only be rejected by 'stark prejudice'. The stories are full of conflicting elements and are generally rejected by those who don't believe that the Resurrection really took place as described. So also with the miracles. Those who don't believe in miracles can find excellent reasons for rejecting them or explaining them on psychological grounds.
In all this everything depends on your pre-suppositions. The Gospels will never convince anybody of the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection or the miracles, if they are not disposed to believe in them. You are not disposed to believe in the Virgin Birth and therefore all your arguments appear to you quite convincing. I have reason to believe in the Virgin Birth and therefore I do not find your reasons convincing. My reason for being disposed to believe in it is that I consider that the distinctive mark of Christianity compared with other religions is that it maintains that the divine entered history and
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transformed the matter of the universe. The supreme example of this was the Resurrection, but the miracles and the Virgin Birth are to me other signs of this transformation of matter by spirit. I don't maintain that there is any proof of the historicity of the Virgin Birth in the New Testament, but I deny that there is any evidence which makes it unbelievable. Of. course, it has not the same degree of importance as the Resurrection, but it is 'congruous' with the whole Biblical tradition.
I must honestly say that I find all this argument a waste of time. I can see that you are quite sincere in your convictions but I am not convinced by your arguments. Incidentally I don't agree with Ramsey's treatment of the Resurrection narratives. I think that the 'legendary' element is part of the tradition, and is the way in which ancient people always tried to communicate the reality of a supranatural event. It is not 'embroidery' by an editor. But this is by the way. I am afraid that I did not appreciate your criticism of Capra either. I felt that your whole approach was mistaken. The question is not whether Capra had an adequate understanding of Eastern mysticism, but whether he did not show extraordinary insight as a scientist in recognising how much the view of modern physics has in common with mystical tradition. I don't agree either with your understanding of 'Eastern mysticism'. What you say may apply to a good deal of Hindu mysticism and to the views of Sri Aurobindo, but there are other views to be found in the Tantra and especially in Mahayana Buddhism which are much nearer to Capra's view. I find that most people in the West find Buddhism far more congenial than Hinduism as a philosophy of life.
So you see we really differ very profoundly. I agree that there is an 'inner bond' between us, but when you get on to critical analysis I find myself altogether out of sympathy with you. I don't mind reading your 'pamphlet' on Raymond Brown, but that kind of Biblical criticism does not really interest me. I recognise its importance, but I have not the inclination for it and tend to leave it to experts. It is on the
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mystical level that you and I find some degree of understanding.
1.3.84
I appreciate your frankness and forthrightness, but there are some misconceptions about me and about my attitude which must be corrected. I do not approach any religion with a sceptic's mind. I have had sufficient experience of the supernatural in my own life and in my relationship with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to be ready to perceive and recognise it elsewhere - especially in connection with Jesus to whom I was most drawn before I came to know Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and whom both of them considered an emanation from the Divine and an embodiment of the Divine's Love and as manifesting in particular what they have called the inmost soul, the true psychic being, and as figuring, therefore, on earth in the role of the Child of the Supernal Shakti that has numerous lines addressed to her in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, not only those two I have quoted more than once -
Creatrix, the Eternal's Artist Bride -
but also others like
The undying Truth appeared, the enduring Power
Of all that here is made and then destroyed,
The Mother of all godheads and all strengths
Who, mediatrix, binds earth to the Supreme,
O radiant fountain of the world's delight,
World-free and unattainable above,
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O Bliss who ever dwellst deep hid within
While men seek Thee outside and never find...
What Christianity has caught of the Shakti-vision in its Marianism and Mariolatry has been to me for a long time this religion's profoundest and finest as well as most attractive feature in the sense that it has never been mixed up with the fanaticism, aggressiveness and exclusivism that has often gone with the claim of the One True God and the one and only Saviour by the Christian monotheist and Jesus-preacher. So I should be expected to be very eager to see a link between Christianity's intuition of the Divine Shakti and the historical figure of Jesus' mother. To say, as you do, that I am "not disposed to believe in the Virgin Birth" is both insensitive and senseless. You have completely misconceived and misrepresented me. And by making the assumption that I bring an a priori and temperamental prejudice you have shut yourself to whatever point and cogency there may be in my arguments. If you could understand for a moment that it is in spite of my inclination to believe in the Virgin Birth that I refuse to do so, your eyes would be opened to my line of thought and you would not run to the extreme of saying that to a Bible-reader like me the evidence for the miracles and the Resurrection would be as futile as that for the Virgin Birth. I am amazed at your attributing to me "pre-suppositions" that would render everything "supranatural" in the New Testament incredible. No wonder you react so violently to my submissions as to the crude criticisms of an anti-Christian unbeliever. If I bring an analytic judicious mind to scripture, as even eminent Catholic exegetes like Raymond Brown do under the encouragement of Vatican II, I need not be labelled as an enemy of it sworn to reject what you hold sacred.
Now let me briefly attend to your present counter-plea about the Virgin Birth. I agree that different traditions and more frequently versions of the same tradition came down in different churches and often grew up independently. But don't you see that to every tradition there has to be a possible
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source? The tradition of the Virgin Birth can have but one single source: Jesus' parents or, more generally, his family including those who are called his brothers and sisters and who may be taken as having been informed by his parents and, still more generally, the Apostles who might have been in contact with that family. I drew your attention to the Apostle leader Peter who not only knew Jesus personally but is also shown in Acts 1:13-14 to know Jesus' mother and brothers. If he is proved by his sermons in Acts to be totally unaware of the Virgin Birth and if his companion Paul goes still further and puts Jesus on a par with every man "born of a woman, born under the Law" (Galatians 4:4), how can we conceive any source for the Virgin-Birth tradition? Furthermore, if you, with most Catholics, believe that Mark was directly or at least at one or two removes an interpreter of Peter how can you postulate that he omits the Virgin Birth merely because the community in which he wrote his Gospel did not happen to have the tradition of it and not because there was no such tradition to be known by him?
Of course, every Gospel has a certain aim, a particular message to which it is oriented and some traditions may fall beyond the scheme. With the Petrine background to Mark's Gospel we cannot plead this reason for its omission of an infancy narrative. But we can urge it in connection with the omission of the Sermon on the Mount, of which you seem to make much. The Jerusalem Bible (The New Testament, p. 11) speaks of the central interest of the Marcan Gospel "i.e. how Jesus, while remaining misunderstood and rejected by men, was at the same time God's triumphant envoy". Then we read: "The Gospel is not particularly concerned with elaborating the Master's teaching and it records few of his Sayings: the real point of its message is the manifestation of the crucified Messiah."
According to Catholic belief, Mark is bound to bring Paul also into the picture and with Paul the diverse Christian communities spread far and wide to which Paul was the missionary, at times with Mark assisting him (Acts 12:25; 13:15,13; Philemon 24; 2 Timothy 4:11). Along with Paul,
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Mark would be aware that in none of the numerous churches dealt with by Paul was there the slightest breath of the Virgin-Birth doctrine. And there are so many places that not only Mark who is from one of them (Jerusalem) according to Acts 12:12 but also Matthew and Luke are most likely to hail from some two of them and would know that during the entire early period of Christianity no sign of this doctrine existed anywhere because Mary had not spoken of any Virgin Birth to the original preachers. Whatever tradition came later had no genuine source.
The same realisation must hold for the Evangelist Luke if he was the "beloved physician" of Paul's Colossians 4:14, as the Jerusalem Bible tells us, and the author of Acts, as again we are told by the JB, one who is said to have accompanied Paul on the latter's second (Acts 16:10f) and third (Acts 20:5f) missionary journeys. In place after place up to the time of Paul's last captivity at Rome which he shared (2 Timothy 4:11) the future Evangelist must have noticed not a word about the theme of his Gospel's opening chapter. Declared by some authorities (JB, p. 5) to have been born at Antioch in Syria, a locality prominent in Paul's travels, Luke was bound to know of its Christianity as devoid of that theme. The star-feature of his first chapter was a sudden growth without an ancient root.
As for Matthew, the JB (p. 5) refers us to Matthew the publican, one of the apostles (Matthew 9:9; 10:3), as the writer of a first Gospel in Palestine for Christians converted from Judaism, a Gospel in Aramaic, subsequently translated into Greek. The translated version came into the hands of an unknown editor who decided to rewrite the first Aramaic Gospel. "This he filled out and made more detailed, using for his narrative parts of the work of Mark his predecessor, to which he added one thing only of importance, i.e. the two chapters of the Infancy Narrative" (JB, p. 8). But Mark and Matthew Aramaic "were not his only sources. The author had access to some information not so generally available, and this not only for his narratives but also for the Sayings:
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this accounts for the material which is peculiarly his own, notably in the narrative of the Infancy". (Ibid.) Evidently, Matthew Aramaic was lacking in Matthew Greek's most characteristic initial points: the Holy Spirit's activity in Mary's pregnancy, the three Magi and the star, Herod's order to massacre the innocents. These points arose from traditions which were no part of the original Christian kerygma, whether Petrine or Pauline, where there was no dwelling at all on Jesus' infancy and where his family had nothing to say on the nature of his birth.
To make my position doubly secure in this matter I may qualify the JB's statement that the publican Apostle Matthew wrote the first Gospel. JB (p. 5) claims to base its statement on "tradition dating from the 2nd century". Here is a clear error. The report about a Matthean Gospel in Aramaic for converted Jews dates from considerably later. The Catholic commentator John J. Dougherty70 quotes from "Origen in the first half of the third century" the declaration: "The Gospel according to Matthew, who was first a publican and later the Apostle of Jesus Christ, was the first to be written; it was written in the Hebrew [Aramaic] language for the believers from Judaism." The real 2nd-century testimony is from Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis, about 130 AD. Drawing on The Ante-Nicene Fathers, edited by Roberts and Donaldson, Vol. I, p. 155, Harry Emerson Fosdick71 tells us: "Papias says that Matthew, the disciple, 'put together the oracles of the Lord in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best they could.' This certainly was not our present Gospel of Matthew, which was written in Greek, but it may well have been an early record of Jesus' teaching by one of the first disciples, which in its original form we no longer possess, but which the writers of our first and third Gospels knew and used." Here two things have to be marked. First, we have a conceivable source for the various sayings of Jesus used by both Matthew and Luke, composers of the conventionally ranked first and third Gospels with their longer or shorter Sermon on the Mount. Secondly, this source did not go
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beyond preserving the words of Jesus. Neither Jesus' infancy nor later life was delineated in any way. With perfect definiteness we may observe that Matthew Greek had no early available tradition of the Virgin Birth or any other alleged event of Jesus' youngest years.
Thus the Virgin-Birth doctrine can never be put on the same footing as the ministry, the teaching, the miracles, the passion and the Resurrection of Jesus. In fact it cannot be put on any footing supported by original Christianity taken in any aspect. No doubt, you can choose to believe in it, thinking it, "congruous with the whole Biblical tradition", but on the ground of various communities having various traditions you can have no right to assert: "I deny that there is any evidence which makes it unbelievable."
This is quite aside from the still more forbidding palpable evidence in Mark 3:21, 31-35; Matthew 12:46-50; John 2:4, 7:5, which either depicts Mary and her family as uncomprehending of Jesus' divinely ordained role or else shows Jesus himself excluding them from his life as ignorant of his mission and as even hostile to it.
I shall end by touching on your disagreement with Ramsey's charge of embroidery and embellishment by New-Testament writers. Your stand shows how out of step you can be with the recent Roman Catholic liberation. I remarked on your backwardness in my last letter. Let me cite now a relevant passage from Brown's Virginal Conception (pp. 19-20):
"As we have said, the Second Vatican Council reversed a tendency of applying inerrancy to almost every aspect of the Bible and applied it only in a very general way.... The recognition that the Bible can be fallible as regards details of historical accuracy is very important for the logic of our discussions in this book. For instance, we shall see that the various Gospels give different reports of what happened at the empty tomb of Jesus, especially in the details of the angelic appearance. In the past Catholic scholars have spent much energy trying to harmonize these diverse accounts, often with the supposition that they must preserve the
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historical accuracy of each. Today we would be free to say that one or all the accounts have been influenced and shaped by popular imagination during the stage of oral transmission and also by the editorial goals of the sacred writer who used earlier traditions. Again, Matthew and Luke give very different accounts of Jesus' conception and birth. In times past we would have assumed that, because these infancy stories were recounted by inspired writers, both were accurate and had to be harmonized. Today, if the evidence is strong enough, we would be free to consider either or both of the narratives as not historical. Obviously this is a conclusion that should not be reached quickly; but we cannot deny a priori that, since there were no apostolic eyewitnesses for the events accompanying the birth of Jesus, traditions about birth could have been produced by popular imagination."
With hope of a less "desperate" judgement on me than in your latest letter,
March 5th 1984
Thank you for your letter. I am sorry if you think that I misrepresented your point of view. But I don't think that I was so far away from it as you suggested. My understanding is that you would regard the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection as spiritual phenomena, having a deep symbolic meaning but not actual historicity. Where I differ is that I believe that the central affirmation of Christian faith is that the 'The Word became flesh', that Spirit entered into matter and transformed it from within. This is why I have a particular interest in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, because they both believed that the matter of the universe was to be transformed and a new kind of existence inaugurated. It is my belief that in the Resurrection of Jesus the matter of his body was transformed by the Spirit; the actual cells were trans-
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formed, appearing first as a 'subtle' body, then at the ascension as a 'spiritual' body no longer subject to the laws of space, time and causality.
I admit that the Virgin Birth does not stand at the same level as the Resurrection. It is not one of the foundation beliefs of Christianity and as Raymond Brown says, it could be interpreted as a 'theologoumenon', a theological insight but not a historical fact. My reason for preferring to believe that it was historical is that the Christian revelation as a whole is distinguished by its historical character - it is essentially the revelation of God's action in history. I therefore think that it is probable that the Virgin Birth was also a historical fact and not merely a symbolic event. When I find therefore that Matthew and Luke in their Gospels written in the 70s or 80s of the first century affirm the historical character of the Virgin Birth and that it was accepted as a historical fact by the whole church in the second century, my belief in its reality is confirmed. I don't say that it is essential to Christian faith, and I respect those who think otherwise, but given the character of the Christian Gospel as a whole I prefer to think that it is true.
As for the arguments which you produce against it, I can only say that I just don't find them convincing. We simply don't know how and when the doctrine arose. All we know is that it was formally proclaimed in two of the four gospels and has been believed in the Church ever since. To my mind it is most unlikely that it was 'invented'. It is part of a divine revelation which extended over the whole of the first century and has been an integral element in Christian faith ever since. All the arguments which can be advanced from critical analysis of the texts are speculation and innumerable different views have been put forward, some of which I find attractive, others seem to me quite unconvincing. I find inconsistency in your argument, for instance, that St. Peter in the Acts proclaims the Gospel without reference to the Virgin Birth. But St. Luke, who put this speech into the mouth of Peter, himself believed in the Virgin Birth and found no
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inconsistency in this. As I said before, the obvious answer is that Peter was proclaiming the original Kerygma, which everybody admits did not include the Virgin Birth. But St. Luke when he came to write his gospel made up for this deficiency. I only mention this by the way, because I feel that all this kind of argument cannot get us anywhere. I have given reasons for believing that the Virgin Birth was historical. If I found that an overwhelming consensus of Biblical scholars were convinced that it was untenable on the evidence of the New Testament, I would be prepared to bow to their verdict. But my conviction remains that it can neither be proved nor disproved on strict evidence.
I really don't think that it is worth while going on with this argument. I would rather that we kept to matters on which we can agree.
7.3.84
It is strange that in spite of my saying it several times that I do not put the Resurrection on the same footing as the Virgin Birth you keep repeating that I regard the former, like the latter, to be no more than a spiritual phenomenon having a deep symbolic meaning but not actual historicity. By what I can't help considering valid biblical evidence I accept the Resurrection as having been real: the only problem is to discover from the material of the NT at our disposal what kind of change the physical body of Jesus underwent. I intend to make a short study of it for my own satisfaction, not necessarily to bother you with it unless you are interested. What you write has a point but at the end you go a little wrong: a body that could enter a room whose doors and windows were shut, and that could appear and disappear at will is already "no longer subject to the laws of space, time and causality". On the evidence of both Luke and John (if
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acceptable as factual and not, as Catholic exegetes are now free to believe, exemplifying "dramatisation"), we do not have to wait for the ascension to regard the resurrected body as flouting or transcending those laws. Perhaps even the line you draw between the "subtle" and the "spiritual" is dubious if we are to attend to Paul. The resurrected body goes straight from being psychicon (natural, animal, ruled by the sense-soul) to being pneumaticon (spiritual).
I'll accept your request that we should stop our discussion on the Virgin Birth. But a word I must say on the issue of "inconsistency". Luke's whole story of Jesus' parents finding him in the temple at Jerusalem with the "doctors" shows them and Jesus in a state of mutual incomprehension, which is totally inconsistent with Luke's earlier Virgin-Birth story implying deep understanding on Mary's part of Jesus' role on earth. Besides, in the temple-story Joseph is called Jesus' father in a way quite inconsistent with his alleged non-participation in the conception of Jesus. Brown even remarks that from the rest of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke we would never guess that at the start of their books we had the Virgin-Birth account. Again, he has noted how inconsistent with that account is Matthew's report of what happened when Jesus' mother and brothers came to where he was among his disciples. Just because Luke as the author of Acts has Peter omitting any Virgin Birth and as the author of the Gospel has himself mentioning it, we cannot surmise that the Virgin-Birth report had a source as old as the kerygma we find in Peter and Paul or even Mark. Luke's not finding any inconsistency raises questions unrelated to what you conclude. It does not imply his making up for the "deficiency" he found in Peter's kerygma. If the NT has no evidence of Mary telling the early apostles of the "Annunciation", the Virgin Birth is necessarily a late "invention", the historicising of a "theologoumenon" current in the communities to which Matthew and Luke belonged, most probably two of the numerous communities which were known to Paul and Peter and which in their days had no such historicisation.
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Talking of inconsistency, let me point out a radical example in Luke's Gospel and in Acts. Brown (The Virginal Conception..., pp. 102-103) asks apropos of Jesus' "appearance": "How are we to reconcile what is said at the end of the Gospel (departure/ascension on Easter Sunday night) and what is said at the beginning of Acts (ascension forty days later)?" Would you say that this discrepancy is there because Luke "found no inconsistency in this"? Surely other questions arise. Attempts have been made to explain away the discrepancy but none of them blandly assumes that Luke saw nothing inconsistent here. Brown in fn. 171 comments: "To solve the problem it has been suggested that Luke did not write Acts 1:1-5, but that it was the awkward composition of an unknown Christian scribe, necessitated when Luke-Acts, originally one book, was split into two. The scribe, supposedly, wrote an introduction for the second book by imitating the style of the introduction to the first (cf. Luke 1:3 and Acts 1:1). Another suggestion is that Luke the theologian wrote one way when terminating the Gospel-story of Jesus, while Luke the would-be historian wrote another way when beginning the Acts-story of the Church. By associating exaltation or ascension closely with resurrection, the Gospel was truer to the original theological understanding of the resurrection, while Acts divided resurrection from ascension in order to make both a part of a continuous story."
As for the remainder of that long letter which I wrote to you some time back but did not post lest you should be overburdened, I have to send it to you in fairness both to you and to me. You may do with it as you like. Of course if you don't want me to post it I shan't, but I can't tear it up.
As a bit of diversion I have a mind - on hearing from you - to send you a short story which has to do with my beloved Dante. I think it will be in its own way something "on which we can agree".
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March 13th 1984
Thank you for your letter. I admire your persistence in pursuing this subject. Yet I am surprised that you attach so much importance to this kind of critical analysis. I can see that it has its importance and should not be neglected, but it can lead to such fantastic results (and often has done in Biblical criticism), that I am always wary of it and of the whole functioning of the critical reason whether in science or philosophy or theology. In all these matters everything depends on the original intuitive insight and if this is defective the whole system proves wrong (as has happened in science and philosophy again and again).
I have just received a book on Mary in the New Testament edited by Raymond Brown and others containing the findings of a group of Catholic and Lutheran scholars on this subject. On the subject of the Virgin Birth their conclusion was this. Some scholars hold that it has a purely theological origin; others that it has a mixed theological and historical origin and others still hold it has a purely historical origin. They felt that all these theories have difficulties, but they all agreed with some difference of emphasis on the possibility and even probability of a pre-Gospel acceptance of the virginal conception'. This seems to me to represent a fair example of scholarly opinion on the subject. Of course, you are free to hold the first view, but I think that you have to recognise that good scholars differ from you. My position is that it can neither be proved nor disproved from the New Testament. How you weigh the evidence depends on your original intuition about the testimony of the New Testament as a whole. To me it is part of a total divine revelation and in that context I see no reason to deny that it has a historical character. But I can understand that others like yourself may feel that it has none.
As regards the resurrection, my point was that the appearances of Jesus after the resurrection were in space and time, though his body did not obey the normal laws of
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causality. That is why I spoke of a subtle body. It was only after the ascension that it became a spiritual body beyond time and space. But this again depends on how you conceive the whole 'mystery' of the resurrection, which is essentially a supernatural event transcending rational understanding. I don't mind going through your long letter, but you will understand that I won't feel inclined to give it a great deal of attention. I would like also to see your story about Dante.
15.3.84
Your letters are always welcome, whatever they may contain - agreement or dissent. For always behind the words I feel the quality of the being at work. I remember the Mother once saying that in her dealings with people she paid little attention to a person's mental beliefs. What she tried to sense was the stuff of which he was made. If she found the stuff fine she would be happy to keep in touch with the person and work on him in the spiritual way. It wouldn't matter to her if the person happened be an atheist. If there was fineness in his being, she could give him her grace and love. In spite of his beliefs being quite contrary to Sri Aurobindo's philosophy, she could help his soul. Of course I cannot claim to be able to act like her, but I always feel that coming in contact with a fine being, one would oneself benefit and, if one kept one's best part in relation to the other party, one would bring him also some inner profit - however acute the mental differences.
I am enclosing my storyette. Would you be able to lend me for a short time the book, Mary in the New Testament? The name of Raymond Brown is always like a torch to me - and I should very much like to see how Catholic and Lutheran scholars stand in the problem concerned. Brown's study of
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the Virgin Birth is the best I have known, although I may not at present see eye to eye in the ultimate issue. As for his treatment of the Resurrection, I think there is no one to beat him. Any study of mine would have the same conclusion as his, although I may have different stresses on my material on the way to it, stresses which would themselves be guided by the data he presents with such an impartial mind.
I shall really appreciate a loan of the book you have named.
26.3.84
I thank you very much for sending without delay Mary in the New Testament. I have started reading it and find it excellent. Will you please tell me where in India I can order a copy of it myself? Did" it come to you from any shop of Christian literature in either Madras or Bangalore?
Contrary to what your postcard of the 21st supposes, my Dante-story is not based on fact. That it should have seemed to you to be such is perhaps a compliment to its "creativity"? I should like to have your explicit reaction. Your appraisal, one way or the other, will be of value to me.
As suggested by myself, I am sending the cost of posting Mary in the New Testament to me. Please accept the Rs. 6 enclosed.
With regards,
March 31st 1984
Thank you for your letter. I got the book from America, but you might be able to get it from Asian Trading Corporation,
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150 Brigade Road, Bangalore 25 or from The Examiner Press Bookshop, 35 Dalai St., Bombay 23. Thank you also for the Rs. 6/-.
I thought that your story was highly dramatic, and brought out the moral dilemma very powerfully. But I am off literature in general at present. I am in search of the Absolute!
Second Instalment of the Pamphlet Letter
10.4.84
As threatened, I am sending the rest of my "pamphlet-letter":
Now I shall touch on your statement: "For me the last word on this subject has been said by Raymond Brown in his study of the Virginal Conception and his later more exhaustive book The Birth of the Messiah. His conclusion in the first book, as you may remember, was that 'the totality of the scientifically controlled evidence leaves an unresolved problem'. But in the later book he adds that in his opinion 'it is easier to explain the New Testament evidence by positing a historical basis than by positing a purely theological creation'." There are three errors in your statement. In Appendix IV, which alone in the later book deals at some length with the subject, Brown writes (The Birth, p. 518): "Since I have written a small book on the virginal conception, I shall not attempt to make this appendix exhaustive." Secondly, your suggestion that in the later treatment he has gone further than in the earlier is gratuitous. In The Virginal Conception (p. 132) we can already read: "Scripturally I judge that it is harder to explain the tradition about the virginal conception by positing theological creation than by positing fact." Thirdly, in The Birth he does not at all refer to his old
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conclusion as something exceeded now. On the contrary he (p. 527) tells us: "In my book on the virginal conception, written before I did this commentary, I came to the conclusion that the scientifically controllable biblical evidence leaves the question of the historicity of the virginal conception unresolved. The resurvey of the evidence necessitated by the commentary leaves me even more convinced of that."
If the situation is truly such, then a little bit of straight thinking should tell us which way the wind is really blowing. What Brown is conveying to us without appearing to gauge its import is: "In spite of two open and specific affirmations of the Virgin Birth - in spite of a pair of independent positive declarations of it - the rest of the biblical evidence which nowhere consists of a direct negation of it is yet so strongly against it by various implications that Matthew's and Luke's clear-cut 'Yes' is completely balanced out by a neutral-seeming silence and we are left undecided as to the historicity of the event couched in the double direct message of Matthew and Luke." If for all the loading of the dice in favour of these two evangelists, the question still remains unresolved, the verdict must be considered to go against them and their evidence be regarded as negligible. Brown's conclusion cannot be taken to mean that on the total testimony available the historicity of the Virgin Birth can be neither proved nor disproved. In view of the distinct initial advantage on the side of Matthew and Luke, Brown's being forced to suspend judgement from the historical standpoint is a damning sentence passed on them. If in his new book he is "even more convinced" than before of the scales not tilting historically on the one side or the other the case for the Virgin Birth is lost and no attempt outside the historical sphere will avail.
On the heels of such a posture of things Brown's dictum in the same context (pp. 527-28) - ".. .1 think that it is easier to explain the NT evidence by positing a historical basis than by positing pure theological creation" - sounds rather fatuous. Even taken by itself, it is surprising: on the one hand an
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event that is supposed to have happened only once in human history is posited and on the other the process of historicising what was originally a "theologoumenon" or theological statement, a process quite within common knowledge. In his earlier book Brown himself comments (p. 105, fn. 174) on how Luke transposes realities of a spiritual character into categories of the physical world: "Exaltation [of Jesus] at God's right hand and the giving of the [Holy] Spirit [to the Apostles] are theological concepts, but Luke has brought them into the realm of the sensible by portraying Jesus lifted up on a cloud that takes him out of sight [Luke 24:51, echoed in Acts 1:9] and by describing a mighty gust of spirit-wind (the one Hebrew word ruah can be rendered 'spirit' and 'wind') sweeping down from heaven [Acts 2:2]." Although aware of theological creation getting historicised or physicalised, Brown poises against this known phenomenon an utmost rarity and follows up with a cool decision in favour of the latter. No reason is offered and even the dictum is framed casually, put within brackets and tossed to us as if it were self-evident. Here is a gesture which is totally a non-sequitur to the extreme uncertainty voiced just before it and which at the same time carries an irresponsible air and still you seem to be confident and happy over it.
When we search The Birth for arguments we discover nothing we can grip satisfactorily. In a footnote on p. 308 Brown remarks: "One must explain why the christology of divine sonship, when it was associated with Jesus' birth, found expression in terms of a virginal conception. In Appendix IV I shall suggest that a historical catalyst was required; and so I do not regard the theologoumenon interpretation of the virginal conception as adequate, as if the concept of divine sonship would have automatically led to the conclusion that Jesus had no human father." We turn to Appendix IV, expecting Brown to pinpoint some historical catalyst. Section 2 is entitled "Historical Catalyst". It comes after a discussion of whether stories of virginal conceptions in pagan or world-religions or in the traditions of Judaism in
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the age of Matthew and Luke inspired the early Christians to express in similar terms their faith that Jesus was God's son from the first moment of his existence on earth. Setting aside examples too remote and stressing that in all nearby non-Christian parallels a divine sexual act, a hieros gamos (sacred marriage) was present and involved the impregnation of a woman by a male deity or element, whereas Mary gave birth to Jesus through the creative power of the Holy Spirit and not by any divine sexual act, Brown (p. 525) informs us: "precisely because the idea of a virginal conception is not easily explicable through pagan or Jewish parallels, a reasonable number of critical scholars posit a historical substratum. They contend that early Christians phrased their theological insight about the begetting of God's Son through the Holy Spirit in terms of a virginal conception because that is what happened." Already there is some moderation of tone by means of the words - "not easily explicable" - as though with an amount of labour we could bring about explication. What Brown says next goes much further in watering down the force of the contention of the scholars mentioned. He asks us to "note the order of ideas in this contention" and explains himself: "We are not discussing here a simple view whereby it was revealed at the moment of the virginal conception that Jesus was the Son of God. Rather, accepting the common scholarly agreement that such a revelation was post-resurrectional, we are discussing whether the post-resurrectional insight was attached to (and thus came to interpret) a factual virginal conception. If we leave aside the objection that a miracle such as the virginal conception cannot be factual (a prejudice or, at least, unprovable presupposition), we must still ask how the knowledge of the extraordinary way in which Jesus was conceived would have reached Christians, and why it would have surfaced relatively late and only in two NT writings." Then Brown considers the several proposed solutions to these questions. First comes "Family Tradition". After more than a page of investigating the probability of it, he arrives at the conclusion
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(p. 526): "The family tradition thesis is not impossible, but it faces formidable difficulties." Then he studies the implication of both Matthew and Luke that Mary became pregnant before she started living with her husband. "In the logic of the narrative, this means that at least one fact pertaining to Jesus' conception may have entered the public domain, namely that Jesus was born noticeably early after his parents came to live together. Is this a historical fact?" (pp. 526-27). Brown looks at all the "pros" which bring in various suppositions, and he sums up: "This complicated solution, although it reflects items from the meagre evidence we possess, leaves many questions unanswered; and so it remains quite tenuous." Brown has not found the required historical catalyst that would establish the inadequacy of the theologoumenon thesis.
Towards the end of Appendix IV (p. 530) he opines that "a too early birth may be implied in the tradition as far back as we can trace it". He points out that under such circumstances the alternative to the virginal conception is Jesus' illegitimacy through adultery by Mary. Here, of course, is no genuine argument for the Virgin Birth and Brown agrees that those who insist "that an irregular begetting involves no sin by Jesus himself" do so "quite rightly". But he sees that "illegitimacy would destroy the images of sanctity and purity with which Matthew and Luke surround Jesus' origins": in other words, Mary's traditional status would be greatly lowered. The alternative to the Virgin Birth is, as the older book (p. 66) puts it, "very unpleasant"; but surely the avoidance of extreme unpleasantness by accepting the Virgin Birth would be a purely emotional and not at all a rational move.
Actually the entire issue of "early birth" is a false trail, as there is no evidence outside Matthew's story to support the opinion that "tradition, as far as we can trace it", implies any ground for a Jewish allegation. In his other book Brown presumes that the illegitimacy-charge "may be as old as Christianity itself" (p. 66). In The Birth he examines again the
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allegations and comes to the conclusion: "there is no way to know with certainty whether the post-NT Jewish charge of illegitimacy is an authentic recollection of Jewish charges that were circulating before Matthew composed his narrative." Brown (p. 541) also examines the claim that Mark 6:3 and John 8:41 offer corroboration for the existence of a Jewish charge and his final comments are: "Mark 6:3 offers no firm support for a Jewish charge of illegitimacy during the ministry or even at a period contemporary with the evangelists" (p. 541) - "Since illegitimacy and true fatherhood are a concern in John 8, the hint of a Jewish charge of illegitimacy is more plausible here than in Mark 6:3. Yet, the charge is far from certain.* Thus, as a result of studying both the later and the earliest evidence, I would have to judge that we simply do not know whether the Jewish charge of illegitimacy, which appears clearly in the second century, had a source independent of the infancy narrative tradition - a source that would help to confirm as historical the chronology of an early birth supposed by Matthew and (implicitly) by Luke" (pp. 541-42).
Brown might have stepped beyond this general Nescio if he had not concentrated merely on whether in the early period of Christianity certain Jewish statements could imply Jesus' illegitimacy. Has he not himself indicated that around 260 AD and more abundantly somewhat later yet still within much of the 2nd century Jesus was regarded by a number of Christians as normally born from the marriage of Joseph and Mary? In his Virginal Conception (pp. 47-49), with the aid of H. von Campenhausen and others, he explores the terrain of
* If Brown thinks that the high degree of uncertainty is actually in a context of concern about "illegitimacy and true fatherhood" in a literal sense, he is entirely off the track. In several places The Jerusalem Bible shows us, as note (p. 1451 of the Old Testament, col. 1, note b) says, that "the prophets denounce idolatry as 'prostitution' or 'adultery'..." On the verse in John the JB comments: "The prophets call religious infidelity 'prostitution'...; here, therefore the Jews are objecting that they have been faithful to God's covenant" (p. 165 of the New Testament, col. 2, note 1). The point in the passage is purely religious, not physiological-biological at all.
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belief from 100 to 200 AD and lights upon two camps of non-believers in the Virgin Birth - "Gnostics and Jewish Christians" - and writes (p. 48, fn. 69) in reference to both: "...Cerinthus, the Carpocratians, and the Acts of Thomas agree with the Jewish Christian evidence in asserting that Jesus was the natural son of Joseph." Brown also brings in Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho 48.4: "In mid-second century Justin, who himself believed that Jesus was conceived of a virgin, acknowledged the existence of Jews who accepted Jesus as the Messiah but declared that he was of merely human origin" (p. 48, fn. 70). The early accompaniment of Matthew's tale is invariably an affirmation of Jesus' legitimate birth, contradicting that tale. Matthew's opening chapter is simply ignored, and this climate of critical heterodox opinion among Christian Jews is not unlikely to have pervaded the non-Christian Jewish mind too.
Indeed, Brown could have put his finger on the exact time of a turn of thought in Jewry if he had realised that no Jewish charge can be traced earlier than the anti-Christian work of Celsus, c. 177-180 AD (according to Brown, The Birth, p. 535) and reported by Origen in Against Celsus (I, 28, 32, 69), written c. 248 AD (Brown, p. 535, fn. 6). In this context Brown completely overlooks passages XVI:4, XVII:l-3, LXXI:1f. in the "mid-second century" Dialogue with Trypho. There Justin heatedly dilates upon various subjects and recounts numerous defamations of Christianity by the Jews but he never accuses them of jeering at Jesus as having been born out of wedlock.* Therefore, quite definitely, the Jewish allegation arose only in the interval between Justin's Dialogue and Celsus's anti-Christian work, although as yet it could not have been in wide circulation since Irenaeus writing Against Heresies in about 180 AD has no sign of it, nor has the Jewish Mishnah which was nearing completion in that period. Only around the end of the 2nd century it seems to have suddenly become widespread. "In North Africa, Tertullian, writing ca.
* All the defamations are detailed in W. D. Davies, The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount (Cambridge: the University Press, 1966), pp. 278-9, 282.
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AD 197, mentions among the charges against Jesus (of Jewish origin) the defamation that he was the son of a prostitute (quaestuiaria - De Spectaculis xxx 3)" (Brown, p. 535). Most probably the defamation arose in a violent reaction to the strong diatribes of Justin who was a staunch proclaimer of the Virgin Birth. His diatribes may have stimulated pointed attention to Matthew's narrative and provoked a Jewish polemic against it. Most assuredly, the Jewish charge represents no tradition independent of this narrative and thus no indirect confirmation of it. Matthew becomes suspect of indulging in a pure invention with his account of Joseph's predicament face to face with Mary's pre-marital pregnancy.
Were Brown to read my last sentence he would retort with two quotations from The Birth. He would first argue: "If the marital situation between Joseph and Mary were not a fact and could have been created according to the dictates of Christian imagination, it is difficult to see why a situation less open to scandal was not contrived" (p. 142). Next, with some inconsistency and a rather mixed-up mind on whether or not the illegitimacy-accusation by the Jews was prior to Matthew's Gospel and stirred Matthew to offer a Christian explanation as against the Jewish calumny, Brown might argue, as in footnote 28 (continued on p. 143): "If the situation described by Matthew is not a factual one but is the product of Christian romantic imagination, one must deem it a great religious blunder; for it gave rise to the charge of illegitimacy against Jesus that was the mainstay of anti-Christian polemic for many centuries." The epithet "romantic" is in relation to the opening part of the same footnote: "It is true that in Hellenistic literature favourable to heroes or immortals, sometimes a superficially scandalous birth situation is part of the legend."
Brown's wondering why Matthew should invent a story so fraught with danger is due to his failure to perceive that in the time of Matthew there was already the development of the "heresy" of Gnostic Docetism which looked upon Jesus as just a temporary vehicle into whom the eternal Aeon
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Christ entered at the baptism recounted by the earlier Evangelist Mark. Brown (The Birth, p. 28, fn. 13) admits: "In later Christianity the creedal slogans 'Born of the Virgin Mary' and 'Suffered under Pontius Pilate' were employed to refute the Docetist claim that Jesus was not really human; they proved that he was born and died like other human beings. But I fail to detect anti-Docetist apologetics in the infancy narrative." This footnote is to a sentence in which Brown, weighing the question why infancy narratives were composed, says that some commentators "would see an anti-Docetist aspect in the emphasis on the birth of Jesus". Brown's own hesitation here but admission about the creedal slogans does not really push him appreciably far from the epoch of Matthew. For the earliest of the slogans come in the Old Roman Baptismal Creed which took shape, as William Barclay72 says, "not long after AD 100" and "bears the closest possible resemblance" to the later expressions. Nor, in fact, are these slogans the first clear signs of early Christianity's awareness of Gnostic Docetism. In the NT documents 1 and 2 John the "heresy" is explicitly identified with "the deceiver and the antichrist". 2 John:7 is urgent with the menace that "there are many deceivers about in the world refusing to admit that Jesus Christ came in the flesh". Thus we may aver that the "heresy" became full-fledged a little later than Matthew. But distinct beginnings may' be spotted earlier. Reviewing the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) in the immediate wake of Paul or even at the term of Paul's own time if they can be attributed to him, Earnest F. Scott73 underlines one of their "main interests" thus: "[The Letters] proclaim the necessity of right belief. The false teachings which had invaded the Church in Paul's lifetime had now grown into dangerous heresies. Christian ideas were thrown into strange combinations with the wildest extravagances of Paganism, with the result that they were utterly distorted. In view of this Gnostic peril, the writer demands a return to 'sound doctrine'." Scott footnotes the last two words: 1 Timothy 1:10; 2 Timothy 1:13 and 4:3; Titus 1:9; 2:1. The
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"false teachings" which Scott puts in "Paul's lifetime" can be traced in both Ephesians and Colossians. The Roman Catholic commentator John H. Dougherty74 writes: "From the doctrinal view both letters are eminently Christological. The error that occasioned their writing was a syncretism of Judaism and Gnosticism. From Gnosticism came the cosmological concept, a theory about 'the elements of the world' (Col. 2:8)." We should then hardly be surprised when Benjamin W. Bacon75 tells us how in Matthew's period - c. 90 AD according to Bacon, which is almost the same as Brown's estimate* - Gnostic Docetism, with the Jew Cerinthus at Ephesus as its principal exponent, was trying to reduce Jesus to a "phantom", a mere receptacle of the Spirit. Against all Docetic dualism, Matthew's story "maintains that the Son of God is such from birth to death" as well as that he was born in a special divine way. But, if Jesus were said to have taken extraordinary birth after Mary had started to live with Joseph, nobody would believe that she had no sexual relations with him: the agency of the Holy Spirit could be claimed only by declaring her pregnant earlier - of course at the risk of inciting a charge of Jesus' illegitimacy. Matthew's was a perilous venture but the presence of Gnostic Docetism drove him to it.
Here the natural question will be: "How about Luke suggesting not a breath of scandal in spite of Mary's having become pregnant at a time when she was still a virgin?" As Brown (The Birth, p. 397) says, "there is no hint of a suspicion of illegitimacy in Luke." To account for this difference from Matthew we must imagine the annunciation by Gabriel taking place shortly before she came over to Joseph's place; then Jesus' birth would not be noticeably early. We may even imagine the annunciation on the very day Mary entered Joseph's house but before she could be his bed-partner. We are free to choose either possibility; for as Brown (Ibid.,
* The Birth of the Messiah, p. 27, fn. 5: "The majority scholarly opinion is that Mark was written in the late 60s; Matthew and Luke in the 80s; and John in the 90s - approximations allowing a five-to-ten year margin of error."
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p. 299, fn. 6) admits: "Indeed, Luke omits all mention of when the conception took place or of when Joseph took her to his home." But what is the explanation of the fact that Luke is not forced to create a scandalous situation though he shares with Matthew the concern to show Jesus as born in a special divine manner from a virgin? The sole answer would seem to be: "He did not have Docetism in his milieu to combat. According to Brown (Ibid., p. 236), his Gospel, in several respects, 'is in marked contrast to Matthew', leading 'many scholars' to judge Luke's audience to be... quite different in membership from Matthew's... - evidently because of a place appreciably removed from that of his roughly contemporary fellow-Evangelist. It is perfectly possible for Christian communities to have been in pockets where the heresy which was most powerfully fanning out from Ephesus in Matthew's and Luke's epoch had scarcely an echo."
How the two Evangelists' concern for Jesus to have a special divine birth was occasioned and why Jesus' being the Son of God should involve his having no human father are problems which both the books of Brown leave unsettled. I shall briefly deal with them before I close. At the moment I should like to tackle a point Brown presses more positively in The Virginal Conception than in The Birth.
On p. 65 he endeavours to make out that the Christian idea of the virginal conception was essentially without a parallel in either Judaism or any non-Judaic religion and that such a new and unique idea could not have occurred unless the thing it conveyed really happened. In the later book a contention on similar lines is - as we have marked - toned down by various reservations commencing with the affirmation that the virginal conception was thought of in the post-resurrection period. An approach like this is in tune with the whole temper of The Birth where Brown, while seeming to pose cruxes to sceptical thought, goes on in the end to prove every alleged Biblical support to be insufficient. He has in fact penned the most devastating critique ever of the Virgin-Birth doctrine, and his greatest piece of destruction is that by
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diverse strokes in different sections (pp. 33-35, 238, 521 and, extra-cogently, 526) he has reduced to nullity the sole source possible to it; the family of Jesus. P. 526 carries also the significant footnote 25 - significant because it reveals the most resistant stronghold of the doctrine as crumbling: "The arguments against a family tradition have been strongly advanced by the Roman Catholic scholar A. Vogtle, 'Offene'." In the wake of these strokes every recommendation of the doctrine is bound to be ingenious special pleading - and that is what we find Brown's stand even in the earlier book to be, for all its comparatively more confident tone.
First of all, there is the broad issue whether it is logical to think that a fact must be postulated if an idea is new and unique. Is it not always possible to physicalise a truth of the metaphysical plane by a mythologising process? I have cited Brown himself for a couple of examples in Luke and Acts in which theological concepts were brought into the realm of the sensible. If the happenings were to correspond to a unique idea, would we accept them as "fact" rather than as the consequence of a theologoumenon, the conversion of a religious insight into historical terms? Much before the report of Jesus' "exaltation" and disappearance after being lifted up on a cloud, Elijah the prophet was said to have made a bodily entry into heaven (2 Kings 2:11). Enoch's mysterious disappearance was even earlier: "Enoch walked with God. Then he vanished because God took him" (Genesis 5:24).76 No precedent in the Bible can be found to this account. Would that by itself vouch for the historical reality of the incident mentioned?
To return to Matthew. Actually he never believed he was thinking of the Virgin Birth for the first time in the ancient world. His belief was that when Mary was discovered to be with child owing to the Holy Spirit's action before she could start her married life with Joseph, "all this took place to fulfil the words spoken by the Lord through the prophet" (1:8).77 The reference is to Isaiah 7:14. Even on keeping Isaiah out of the picture and simplifying the situation, it is still open to
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dispute whether the Virgin-Birth idea can be regarded as unprecedented in the sense Brown intends. True, it does not allude to any fertilisation of the ovum, whereas in the ancient stories the fertilised ovum by a divine male, in human or other form, either through normal sexual intercourse or through some substitute form of penetration, is never absent. But neither can we assert that along with the fertilisation there is nothing in them akin to the ethereal kind of conception attributed to Jesus' mother. In a footnote on p. 525 of The Birth Brown harks back to what he has written in The Virginal Conception at more length. While pointing out that nowhere in non-Christian tales is an exclusion of sexual suggestion, he notices the kinship with the Christian idea in what he terms "a few seeming exceptions" to the clear-cut anecdotes of the hieros gamos. Thus he78 calls attention to "(a) Plutarch, Life of Numa, 4: 'The Egyptians believe, not implausibly, that it is not impossible for the Spirit of a god to approach a woman and procure in her certain beginnings of parturition... (b) Aeschylus, Suppliants, w. 17-19, speaks of Zeus making Io a mother 'with a mystic breath' (which could be interpreted as spirit)... (c) Plutarch, Table-Talk, VIII: 1, 2-3 (Loeb. Moralia, 9, 114-19), has Apollo engender Plato not by seed, but by power... (d) The cult of Dusares at Petra and Hebron (and sometimes associated with Bethlehem) which is related to the mystery-cult acclamation of the virgin-mother goddess who has brought forth a son." As Brown repeats in the footnote in The Birth on the "seeming exceptions": "I show that divine intercourse is really presupposed in all four."
Yes, but to perceive that the instances are not pure parallels to the Christian idea need not lead us to overlook that one side of them exactly equals it. The stories have two aspects: merely the divine intercourse is not taken as effective - non-sexual afflatus as of a "Holy Spirit" is present too. In the instance of Plato it is made quite explicit. Brown has quoted Plutarch's mention of the primary role of the divine non-sexual impetus: the engendering "not by seed but by power."
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I may add an interesting relevant point. M. T. Barnyeat, reviewing Alice Swift- Rijink's Platonica in the Times Literary Supplement, 23 December 1978 (p. 1501), writes: "Did you know that Plato was born by virgin birth? His real father was the god Apollo who appeared in a vision to his mother's husband, Ariston, forbidding him intercourse with his wife until after the child was born." We are at once reminded of the angel of the Lord appearing to Joseph in Matthew and announcing that the child begotten in his wife Mary "is through the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 1:20, Brown's translation in The Birth, p. 122) - and we cannot help remembering also Matthew 1:25, "...he had no sexual relationship with her before she gave birth to a son" (Brown's translation). Furthermore, Apollo's engendering of Plato "by power" directs us to Luke 1:35 b & c in Brown's rendering (p. 286): "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and power from the Most High will overshadow you."
The Christian idea is not wholly unprecedented, it has genuine partial precedents in paganism. What was needed was only to separate from the double-aspected stories the basic spiritual aspect and focus on it exclusively in figuring Jesus' Virgin Birth. The originality lay in such separation. But what was separated existed already. A refining process is here, not an utterly original and unique notion. The message "not easily explicable" can still be explained with some acumen in interpretation. We do not have to be amazed into postulating an "historical substratum".
May we not even go further and suspect that the separation and refinement in their totality were themselves a later process and that to the Evangelists and their close successors the Holy Spirit, like Apollo's "power" and Zeus' "mystic breath", was not quite devoid of a physically coloured suggestion? The minds of Matthew and Luke were hardly those of acute theologians. In Matthew 3:16, Jesus, after he had been baptised by John, "saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming down on him".79 Luke 3:22 tells us of the same incident with an emphasised physicality
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in it: "and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily shape, like a dove."80 The very terms chosen by Luke 1:35 in the angel Gabriel's prediction of how Mary would conceive Jesus virginally seem in that particular context to bear subtle-physical male-ish overtones: as Brown's version in The Virginal Conception (p. 29 and fn. 35) has it, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you... and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow." We may legitimately doubt whether the first-century Evangelists had already appreciated what "historical Christianity" has "resisted" - namely, attempts to interpret Jesus' Divine Sonship "in any sense that would have the deity as the male element unite with Mary as the female element, to produce the human Son of God - in other words, a form of hieros gamos" 81 As an example of historical Christianity's stand, Brown82 tells us: "In AD 675.... the Eleventh Council of Toledo... rejected the contention that, since Mary conceived by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit was the father of Jesus." But surely AD 675 is a far cry from AD 80-90, the epoch of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, according to Brown.83
Around that epoch it was not impossible to match in a Christian manner what the Greek myth in Aeschylus's Suppliants represents. Although it speaks of Zeus making Io a mother with "a mystic breath" which Brown finds it possible to understand as "spirit", Brown84 comments: "a few lines later on we hear that Io was 'quickened with Zeus' veritable seed'..." Keeping these words in sight, look at 1 John 3:9 - "It was to undo all that the devil has done that the Son of God appeared. No one who has been begotten by God sins; because God's seed remains inside him, he cannot sin when he has been begotten by God."85 "God's seed" as a begetter is an image as of a physically quickening agent. And, when we scan the same document for some light on the expression, we meet 2:20, 29, in which "everyone whose life is righteous has been begotten" by "the Holy One"86 who is evidently the Holy Spirit, particularly as it is given in the same text an "anointing" function which harks back to the anointing
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"spirit of the Lord" in Isaiah 6:1.87 So it is the Holy Spirit that we are referred to by "God's seed", and the suggestive Greek word for "seed" is sperma.
Early Christians can be shown to have been not very much concerned about the separation of the subtle aspect from the gross of divine action in the old stories and about dwelling exclusively on the former. What was of vital importance to them was simply the absence of bodily interfusion between the human sexes. Brown himself, apropos of "recent predispositions" running "against the thesis that Jesus, who was like us in all but sin, should have been conceived differently from other men", remarks in a footnote: "even in antiquity there was an instinctive reluctance to make the virginal conception appear too marvellous, too unique. Already in Origen, Contra Celsum I, 37... there is a search for analogies in the instances of animal parthenogenesis." Clearly, the exact "how", the out-of-the ordinary way in which this particular parthenogenesis took place, falls into the background. That way itself fails to be marked out as incomparable when, still earlier than Origen, Justin in the mid-second century could argue with a pagan sceptic as follows: "When we declare that the Word, who is the firstborn of God, came into being without sexual intercourse... we do not report anything different from your view about those called sons of Zeus" (First Apology, 21).88 It is apparent that the action of a Zeus or any other god on a woman in some sort of sexual manner along with a spiritual non-sexual influx did not, for Justin, put it in a different category from that of the Holy Spirit's action on Mary.
I may venture to affine the mind of Matthew to that of Justin. Complementary to Justin's indifference to the mode of the divine action, we have Justin's emphasis on Mary's freedom from the contact of human sexuality. Brown (The Birth, p. 146, fn. 38) has quoted it: "Justin, Dialogue lxvi 3, states: 'Now it is plain that in the race of Abraham according to the flesh, no one has ever been born from a virgin, nor has been said to be so born, save this our Christ.'" With both the
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statements of Justin in mind, look at Matthew 1:22-23 which introduces in a slightly adapted form the Septuagint's Isaiah 7:14 and, referring to it, affirms about Mary and the Holy Spirit: "All this took place to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet who said, 'Behold the virgin will be with child and give birth to a son...'" (Brown's translation, The Birth, p. 122). The Isaiah-quotation is concerned only with the birth-giving woman being a "virgin": that is, one who has not had sexual intercourse with a man. Thus the emphasis, in what took place in the instance of Mary, falls on her not having had sex-relations with Joseph. To Matthew the prophecy of Isaiah bears exclusively on Mary's virginity in regard to the man whose "betrothed" or "wife" she was. Whether or not the relation with the Holy Spirit had any touch of a hieros gamos is not his main concern.
However, as things stand, a touch of it seems to have been in his imagination if we legitimately raise a linguistic issue in connection with verses 18 and 20 of his opening chapter, which must automatically bear on Luke's introductory section as well in a general sense. These verses link the Holy Spirit to Jesus' birth from Mary who was Joseph's "betrothed" or "wife". The Jerusalem Bible translates the pertinent portions: "...before they came to live together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit" - "she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit."89 Brown's rendering in The Birth (p. 122) has "through" in both places. The prepositions "through" and "by" may serve to obviate the suggestion that the Holy Spirit stands for the male element in a union with Mary and that it provides the husband's part in the conception of Jesus. But these prepositions misguide the reader. The original Greek expressions -ek Pneumatos Hagiou and ek Pneumatos estin Hagiou - are, as Brown (p. 124) knows, genitive, besides having no definite article, and must literally connote: "of a Holy Spirit" - "of a Spirit which is Holy". Whatever the meaning to be put into the lack of the definite article, the natural impression from the phrase is undoubtedly that a divine agent or being is the
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father of Mary's child. The Authorised King James Version, although substituting like the Jerusalem Bible as well as Brown "the" for the original "a" out of theological considerations, does justice to the natural impression of the Greek and lets the obvious sense filter through. It gives: "before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost" - "...that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost." Here the Holy Ghost, whose "child" is Jesus, figures by virtue of the genitive case as the child's father, a supernatural male element contributing to "that which is conceived in" Mary.
What does Brown have to say? He90 admits the "impression that Matthew has said that the Holy Spirit is the father of the child" but deprecates it by calling it "false" and by asserting that "there is never a suggestion in Matthew or in Luke that the Holy Spirit is the male element..." Then he91 adds: "Not only is the Holy Spirit not male (feminine in Hebrew; neuter in Greek) but also the manner of begetting is implicitly creative rather than sexual. The lack of the definite article (also missing in the parallel description of pregnancy in Luke 1:35) tempts one to speak of 'a holy spirit', but that is too indefinite to do justice to Matthew's theology." On the other hand, Brown92 does not want us to assume, from the definite article supplied by most commentators before "Holy Spirit", that "either Matthew or Luke had developed a theology of the Spirit as a person, much less the Third Person of the Trinity. Perhaps the broader category of divine agent best covers the evaluation of the Spirit throughout most of NT Christian thought (with the Johannine Paraclete passages moving towards personality)."
Brown's point is that Matthew and Luke could not ever have thought of a male nature in the Holy Spirit, much less endowed it with a personality. An impersonal creative force is all that can be read into them. But it is sheer sophistry to argue against the implication of a divine male element by reminding us that the Holy Spirit is feminine in Hebrew and neuter in Greek (the language of Matthew's Gospel no less
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than of Luke's). Can the arbitrary gender of a noun in a certain language decide a theological issue? Are we to think of the Old Testament's Spirit of God or its God-given life-breath as a divine female element because the OT is written in Hebrew? And should we aver that there would have been unmistakably a male element if the Gospels of Matthew and Luke had been composed in French where Spirit (Esprit) is masculine? Not through the conventions of the grammatically masculine, feminine or neuter but from significant turns of speech and from interrelations of syntax can linguistics offer help in a discussion.
Again, how are we to lay down that in Matthew and Luke the manner of begetting is implicitly creative rather than sexual? Of course, in neither of the Evangelists is a gross sexuality visualised. If there is a sexual aspect plus the subtle, it is itself subtilised beyond the character of the gross aspect accompanying the subtle in the Pagan anecdotes. In Luke the context of the phrase that the Holy Spirit "will cover" Mary "with its shadow" is such that, in spite of the phrase's delicate suggestion of a sexual physical posture, we are prompted to regard the Holy Spirit as impersonal since it is termed "the power of the Most High" (1:35). But we must bear also in mind that the context involves conceiving and giving birth (1:31) and cannot sweepingly be disinfected of a soupçon of male personality. Brown is hardly justified in expressing surprise that even the Spanish post-Reformation theologian Cardinal Toletus (1523-96) should interpret the power overshadowing Mary as a euphemism for a quasi-sexual union, a hieros gamos.93 Nor is he on unequivocal ground in holding that the Holy Spirit as a personality is a very late development. In Luke himself (12:10-13), is not the Holy Spirit spoken of in terms of personality? Jesus is made to declare: "Everyone who says a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. When they take you before synagogues and magistrates and authorities, do not worry about how to defend yourselves or what to say, because
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when the time comes, the Holy Spirit will teach you what you must say."94 In Matthew (10:20) and Mark (13:11) the substance of the last part of the declaration is to be found, except that the Holy Spirit will not "teach" anything to be spoken but directly "speak" through the Apostles. Here all the three Evangelists anticipate the Paraclete's office in John. The name "Paraclete" is a personal designation and the activities predicated of the Paraclete are all personal. Both the words "teach" and "speak" link up most suggestively with the functions of the Paraclete listed by R. Birch Hoyle:95 "teaching, reminding, witnessing, convincing, leading, speaking, hearing, glorifying (John 14:46; 15:26; 16:8-15)." Not that the NT never figures the Holy Spirit as impersonal, but personality comes in just as much. Scanning Acts, Hoyle96 concludes about the Spirit in the communal life of the Ecclesia (Church): "It is described impersonally as a gift, which God gives or the Son outpours (Acts 11:17; 15:8; 2:33, 35), more usually as power (1:8), yet personal actions are attributed to the Spirit: it 'speaks', 'bears witness', 'separates' for service, 'approves' a counciliar decision, 'forbids', 'appoints overseers', and can be 'related', 'tempted', and 'lied against'. In these last cases the Spirit is co-ordinated with God." Perhaps the most personal impression we get is when, as Hoyle says, it "separates" for service. In the story in Acts (13:2) of the Church's first deliberate expedition to the Gentile world, the Holy Spirit said: "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." The "power" that the Holy Spirit is can choose to take even a living shape, a visible and tangible one according to Luke when it "descended" on Jesus at his baptism "in bodily shape, like a dove" (13:22).
I may observe that the dove-image is especially apt to a situation of creating and conceiving. We think immediately of Genesis 1:1f, where the Spirit hovers over the face of the primeval waters, and we are scarcely surprised at Milton's invocation in the opening of Paradise Lost to the Spirit:
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Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant....
Milton is writing in consonance with the early Christians' imaginative tendency to give a supernatural power a subtle-physical form and a personal-looking function.
This tendency the early Christians continued from both their Jewish and their Hellenistic backgrounds and it is specially active in the Jews' outlook on the Holy Spirit's part in human procreation. Brown has failed to notice that outlook. William Barclay97 puts the matter very well: "The Jews believed that no child was ever born without the Spirit of God. Since a child is not born from every act of intercourse when a child is born, the Spirit of God, the Glory, has been present there. The Jewish teachers had many sayings about this... 'When husband and wife are worthy the glory of God is with them.' 'There are three partners in the production of any human being - the Holy One, blessed be he, the father and the mother' [Niddah, 31a]." Evidently the Holy Spirit is the cause of sexual fertility. If the man is removed and only the woman is left, as in the story by Matthew and Luke, the Holy Spirit, .while working through the woman as usual in a secret way, would assume in an open manner the man's role - which would not be unnatural to one designated as "he" -though still with something of the mystery which the third partner in the production of a human being brings on normal occasions. That something, accompanying the now openly assumed fertilising function of the man, is what we find in Luke's delicately powerful picture of the Holy Spirit coming upon Mary and overshadowing her in order to bring about the birth of her child. As soon as we set the Holy Spirit in the right Jewish perspective of procreation instead of looking at Luke's picture as if it were a rare vision we perceive the appropriateness of Cardinal Toletus's interpretation of the Lucan passage, no less than the naturalness of the Matthean
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genitive's implication that the Holy Spirit was the father of the child conceived in Mary.
All in all, I fear that Brown's effort to distinguish the Virgin-Birth ideas with any radicalness from the Hellenistic stories of births not humanly engendered breaks down badly. The argument making a transition to "fact" from the. alleged newness and uniqueness of the Christian idea is rather lame.
Now I shall take up the matter postponed in the course of my disquisition: the cause of the common concern of Matthew and Luke to show Jesus as born in a special divine manner and the reason why such a manner should involve having no human father or, to put it positively, the mother being a virgo intacta. As Matthew and Luke, while differing altogether in their infancy narratives, are at one in the Virgin-Birth phenomenon as such, the tradition of it has to be regarded as preceding their Gospels although the precedence cannot be dated to a time much before since neither Paul nor Mark are cognisant of it and it cannot be considered as widespread since neither John's Gospel nor any other book of the NT posterior to Matthew's and Luke's Gospels displays any awareness of it. Brown has asked for "a historical catalyst" for the tradition but in his Appendix IV, as we saw, he found all the proposed solutions seriously defective. There is only one factor left, which Brown has noticed yet not felt to be inevitably the explanation of both Matthew's and Luke's bypassing the human father and picturing Mary as a virgin. In my view, we have - in the absence of any feasible alternative - a straight clue in Matthew's citation of the Septuagint version of Isaiah 7:14.
Brown (The Birth, p. 142) has himself noted: "Matthew does not stress the virginal conception as a miracle but as the fulfilment of God's plan made known in prophecy." Still he fights shy of the direct pointer Isaiah supplies, by its term "virgin", to Jesus having no human paternity. He (p. 149) opposes "the suggestion that reflection on Isa 7:14 and on its prediction that a virgin would give birth gave rise to the
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Christian belief in the virginal conception of Jesus". He maintains that "there was nothing in the Jewish understanding of Isa 7:14 that would give rise to such a belief nor, a fortiori, to the idea of begetting through the creative activity of the Holy Spirit, an idea found explicitly in both Matthew and Luke but not in Isa 7:14". Brown holds that "at most, reflection on Isa 7:14 coloured the expression of an already existing Christian belief in the virginal conception of Jesus". And he (ibid., fn 50) adds: "it is not clear to what extent, if at all, Isa 7:14 entered into Luke's description of the virginal conception." But where Matthew is concerned, Brown misses the central issue. What the Jewish understanding was does not matter here. That understanding does not in the least mean that Matthew took Isaiah's passage in the same way. His Gospel explicitly shows that he took the passage as containing a prophecy that was fulfilled by a Virgin Birth from Mary. The Holy Spirit's absence from the passage is irrelevant. The issue simply is whether or not Matthew considers the Virgin Birth as compelled by Isaiah's prediction. We must remember too that here is an event outside the general course of things. A Virgin Birth is not just an occurrence which we may ordinarily expect and to which we may append some statements out of the past impressing us as a piece, of foresight. All the more in view of the event's out-of-the-run character Matthew's phrase about fulfilment leaves us in no doubt. It is so formed as if nothing else than what had been foreseen could occur. Because the prophet had spoken, the birth had to be virginal, had to be without a human father. In Matthew's mind there was no escaping Isaiah. The foresight was infallible and, once the human father had to be set aside, the Holy Spirit which was a persistent feature in early Christian preaching (Brown, p. 160) no less than in Judaism had to come in as the cause of Jesus' getting born from Mary the virgin. Even an oblique sign in the direction of the Holy Spirit's work of expressing God's presence on earth can be traced in Isaiah. For, the last sentence of 7:14 about the strangely begotten child is: "And
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they will call his name Emmanuel (which means 'God with us')" (Brown, pp. 122, 150). Everything fits together the moment we see the Isaiah-verse as the origin of Matthew's tradition of the Virgin Birth.
Matthew is chockful of "formula citations" indicating that in his eyes the NT events took place in order to fulfil the OT passages which he cites. And among the citations Isaiah easily takes the lead. Brown98 has counted ten to fourteen "formula citations" in Matthew, with "eight of them citations from Isaiah". So much is Matthew Isaiah-minded in his fulfilment messages that even when a story has come to him ready-made he adds to it with the aim of making it a "formula citation" from Isaiah. We can cull from Brown99 the striking information: "Mark 1:14 and Luke 4:14 agree that after his baptism Jesus went to Galilee, but only Matt 4:12-16 comments on this with a formula citation from Isa 8:23-9:1... which speaks of the land of Zebulun and Naphtali, towards the sea, Galilee of the Gentiles. Matthew prepared for the introduction of the citation by reporting not only that Jesus went to Galilee, but also that he went to Capernaum by the sea in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali." Brown100 takes Matthew's preparation as indicating the Evangelist's employment of OT prophecies merely to give more body to known acts or previous narrations. He reasons: "The citation could not have caused Matthew to create the story of Jesus' going to Galilee - he had that in Mark - but it did cause him to color and adapt the Marcan narratives, so that the correspondence to the prophecy might be more obvious. We have a good analogy then for arguing that the same process occurred in the infancy narratives where we do not have a control coming from comparative Synoptic material." Brown may be right in some instances but a generalisation is uncalled for. He forgets how obsessed with OT prophecy the Evangelists were, yet elsewhere he101 has himself recorded: "Before the advent of the modern critical method it was generally accepted by religious Jews and Christians that the Hebrew prophets foresaw the distant future. In particular, Christians
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thought that the prophets had foreseen the life and circumstances of Jesus the Messiah." Even if Mark had already the Galilee-story, Matthew could surely believe that an OT prediction was there to make it true, and that as Isaiah had Zebulun and Naphtali connected with Galilee Jesus must have had something to do with them.
Matthew's belief is quite in accord with Mark's own psychology, as D. E. Nineham102 explains it with reference to the early Christians and the Old Testament: "to the early Christians, with their deep conviction of its inerrancy, it may well have seemed a safer guide than the fallible memories of human witnesses, however well informed. There are pages in Mark where it is impossible to be certain whether a particular story rests on a tradition derived from witnesses or whether it represents a deduction from Old Testament prophecy about what 'must have' happened when the Messiah came." To declare that essentially a "formula citation" does not posit something happening as a consequence of its having been foreseen in the OT is to misunderstand the whole mentality of primitive Christianity. Not that Matthew must be read as if always he himself fleshed out the anatomy of an event shown by the OT. The Virgin Birth, being common to him and Luke, could not be the invention of either of them; but this does not mean that the tale of it emerged from a fact rather than from the appositeness of Isaiah 7:14 to the new Christology shaping at the time. The way Matthew relates this verse to the tale clarifies completely how the latter emerged.
As for Luke, we may grant no directly avowed role to this verse since he does not allude to it, yet his knowledge of it and tacit dependence on it may well be surmised, as by Brown's fellow Catholic scholar Vogtle ("Offene", 46). Not only is Luke's 1:31, particularly as worded in the King James Authorised Version - "behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus" -an echo of the Isaiah-text as rendered in the same Version: "Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call
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his name Immanuel." Luke also makes the echo more vivid by the soon-succeeding phrase "...the throne of his father David" (1:32) which is a flashback to the phrase "... O house of David" in Isaiah 7:13 shortly preceding the prophecy. Furthermore, Luke shows throughout his Gospel a predilection for Isaiah. His 1:67 draws for its content on Isaiah 9 and Malachi 4. His 2:29-31 incorporates themes from 2 Isaiah. In Jesus' sermon in the synagogue of Nazareth (Luke 4:16-30) the passage chosen to be read is Isaiah 61:1-2 which serves as a kind of programme for the ministry of Jesus as Luke represents it. The link between that great eschatological poem of Isaiah and the activity of Jesus is made explicit in the words attributed to Jesus: "This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears" (Luke 4:21). Then there is 22:37 citing Isaiah 53:12. Brown103 himself has mentioned it, noting a linguistic difference from Matthew's practice: "Luke speaks of accomplishing (telein) rather than of fulfilling (pleroun)." Luke is as Isaiah-haunted as Matthew and it is idle to plead, as Brown104 does, that Luke 1:31 resembles not only Isaiah 7:14 in expression but also other Old-Testament annunciations of birth, like the saying to Hagar: "Behold, you are with child and will give birth to a son, and you will call his name..." (Genesis 16:11). Just because such sayings have features in common with Luke it does not follow that he did not have Isaiah 7:14 in mind - and all uncertainty vanishes when we realise that none of these sayings involves a virgin whereas in Luke 1:27 which prepares 1:31 Mary is twice called a "virgin" and again once in 1:34. Thus she is brought into line with Isaiah explicitly and exclusively.
When the Christology of divine sonship came to be associated with the birth of Jesus and not only with his baptism as in Mark (1:11) or with his resurrection as in Paul (Romans 1:4), the Septuagint's Isaiah 7:14 proved most apt to the preachers in the two communities among which the Gospels of Matthew and Luke got written - communities with different memberships and at different places which scholarship has not identified yet with any degree of certainty
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although many researchers incline to allot Matthew to Syria.105 The psychological and the geographical differences account for the unlike and often conflicting trends of imaginative reconstruction of Jesus' infancy from the common starting-point of the Virgin Birth by means of the same Holy Spirit found at work in the Marcan baptism and the Pauline resurrection.
That Matthew, despite his Gospel being the most Jewish of the Synoptic writings, was dependent - in the course of his own Greek composition - on the Greek Septuagint much more than on any Hebrew text of the Old Testament is undeniable. Howard Clark Kee has pointed out:106 "... in some instances the argument turns on the details of the text as found in the Septuagint (LXX). The quotation from Psalm 8:2 in Matthew 21:16, for example, makes sense in the Greek wording of the LXX but would not in the Hebrew original." Luke also exhibits in his own fashion his greater affinity to the Greek text than to the Hebrew. The Jerusalem Bible's Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels, analysing the Greek of Mark, Matthew and Luke, ends with the observation on the last-named: "Occasionally he goes out of his way to give a good imitation of Septuagint Greek."107 Brown108 reports: "Many have detected a strong influence of the LXX upon Luke."
Here I may end, having reviewed Brown's presentation, emphasised his basically destructive trend, exposed the inadequacy of his few efforts to be constructive and tried to fill satisfactorily the gaps he has left. Of course I admire his honesty and fair play in respect of several issues where the majority of his co-religionists would incline to toe the orthodox line. But if he has been for you "the last word" on the subject of our discussion, I am afraid you have been ill served.
I wish to make these few preceding typed sheets my "last word" and I hope not to bother you any more on this head.
Coming to the "terms of Jewish apocalyptic" I am at a loss to assess your meaning. When you say that "the coming end
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of the world and final revelation is always conceived in the context of the seer's actual situation" and so Jesus phrased his vision of the end in the terms of the sequel to the destruction of Jerusalem which he foresaw as certain in the near future, do you imply that he did not really prophesy the world's end in the lifetime of the Apostles? Did the Apostles misunderstand and misrepresent his announcements? All the evidence shows that he was not resorting to merely a literary-religious convention or expressing a non-temporal event, a passing from time to eternity, with only symbolic signposts towards the immediate future. Like his predecessors he meant what he said. Daniel intended to tell his followers that in the wake of the capture by Antiochus Epiphanes of Jerusalem the world's end would come. So also John of Patmos actually meant the conflict of the Roman Empire with Christianity to be the sign of the end of the world. The universal belief of the Apostles that the ultimate fulfilment was extremely near points without a doubt to Jesus' having predicted it literally and not just conventionally. From the statement in 2 Peter 3:8, essentially echoing psalm 90.4 - "one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day" - you seem to feel that it was easy and natural for the Church to accept the apparent non-fulfilment of Jesus' prediction, especially as a passage from time to eternity was involved. But the psychological atmosphere of this statement is of sadness and behind it is severe heartache. Besides, what is of prime importance to mark is that the statement is preceded by the strong sense that the writer of the epistle and his readers are still in the shadow of the predicted end and that what is happening is itself a sign of its imminence: the writer asks them to be "mindful... knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation" (3:2-4). The writer goes on to remind the scoffers of what "they willingly are ignorant of": namely,
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that, as "by the word of God" the world was once deluged and destroyed, so too "the heavens and earth, which now, by the same word, are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgement and perdition of ungodly men" (3:5-7). Even after the statement about the thousand years and about one day, the writer asserts: "The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness, but is long-suffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will corneas a thief in the night..." (3:9-10). The statement in question implies no more than that God to whom time can be short or long as he wishes should not be disbelieved simply because there is a little purposive delay in the expected accomplishment of Jesus' prediction. The readers are still described as "looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God" (3:12). 2 Peter is the latest book in the NT: its writer exhibits no acceptance of any genuine uncertainty about the Second Coming, "the last days", fairly soon on the heels of Jesus' departure. To make that famous statement of his a bridge between him and the Church's later position that Jesus' precise prophecy can legitimately be turned into an indefinite vision of the Second Coming is to make improper use of it.
Some way is sought, time and again, to get round the failure of the prophecy. In one place the Jerusalem Bible goes even so far as to give the word "end" a non-committal sense. Matthew 24:14 runs: "This good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed to the whole world as a witness to all the nations. And then the end will come."109 The JB annotates "the whole world": "The 'inhabited world' (oikoumene), i.e. the Graeco-Roman world. All the Jews of the empire are destined to hear the good news before punishment comes to Israel. Cf. Rm. 10:18. The earliest 'witness' will be directed against the faithlessness of Judaism. Cf. Mt. 10:18. Before 70 AD the gospel had already reached the main parts of the Roman empire. Cf. 1 Th. 1:8; Rm. 1:5,8; Col. 1:6,23."110 The next JB note is to the words: "the end". Here we are told: "The fall of
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Jerusalem."111 Don't you agree that this is pure fraudulence?
Less patently false but still as fraudulent is the attempt to evade the Biblical evidence by telling us: "There is no complete commitment to the hope that the End will come soon. Jesus disclaimed knowledge of the exact date. His followers mistakenly interpreted him but later realised their mistake and that is what enabled them to survive the disappointment of their hopes." The basis of this plea is Mark's statement on the Second Coming: "Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the Angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father" (13:32). Support to it is drawn from Matthew 24:36: "Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only." Here Jesus does not include himself openly, yet the concluding "only" can be taken to sweep him in. Such being the case, how can we attribute to him the notion of an imminent Second Coming? The event can be centuries or even millennia later. So runs the argument.
The inference is fallacious. What is unknown, except to God, is simply the precise day of the End. There is no hint that the End would not come in the life-time of Jesus' first followers. Within that period the End may arrive at any moment: the moment is hidden but the period, which is several times affirmed in the Gospels, remains unchanged thereby.
The full light on this point is shed by some words of Paul in the very letter - the first out of the two to the Thessalo-nians - in which the expectation of the Second Coming is most immediate (e.g., 1.4:11-17). Here Paul's words are: "...the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night" (1.5:2). Even in this context just the suddenness of the Day is stressed and against it the Thessalonians are alerted with the admonition: "therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober" (5:6). What is signified is: "The Last Day, although sudden, will dawn in our midst any time now and we should be ready for it." This explains the drift of the Gospels. In no way does it negate the closeness of the end.
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The single quality unknown except to the Father is the very hour.
We should note that the uncertainty of knowledge of the very hour is mentioned by both Mark (13:32) and Matthew (24:36) in the same context that insists in Mark that "this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done" (13:30) and in Matthew that "this generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled" (24:34). There is no cleavage of periods at all. The argument brought forward to permit centuries or even millennia to pass is in vacuo, with no roots in the actual locus of the words.
Further, Paul's thief-simile reappears in one form or another in both Mark and Matthew in the context of the supposed uncertain period itself. Mark says: "Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cock-crow, or in the morning: lest coming suddenly he finds you sleeping" (13:35). Matthew brings in even the word "thief" when he reports Jesus: "Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come. But know this that if the Goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up. Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh" (24:42-44). Surely the End is to be awaited by the hearers themselves.
We cannot escape the fact that the world's termination with the Second Coming of Jesus was set by him fairly soon after his crucifixion, as well as the fact that the apocalypse, as he had timed, did not occur. Whatever consequences there may be to the recognition of these two facts in our theological account or in our ecclesiastical perspective we must face squarely.
Now for another try to tackle that bête noire of Roman Catholics: pantheism. You seem to see no difference between a pantheist position simpliciter and one in which pantheism plays a minor role and God is much more than the universe. Let me repeat in brief one point from my essay "Freewill in
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Sri Aurobindo's Vision". The sheer Pantheos raising the fear that every activity - even theft, lechery, murder - might be considered God-done is set off for Sri Aurobindo by the Divine as the submerged God evolving ever higher in the milieu of the God who is the cosmos, and laying upon all forms in the universe the pressure to reject activities like theft, lechery, murder. Even to be able to cultivate the pantheistic experience, the Cosmic Consciousness, the realisation of God as the All, one has to purify oneself of propensities like those of the thief, the lecher, the murderer. Such are the "pragmatics" of mysticism. Still more insistent on the choice of Light as against Darkness is the direct functioning of the archetypal transcendent Divine moving towards the embodiment of a luminous perfection whose extreme truth and beauty and good would be the supra-mental manifestation. All this nicety seems lost on you and you stick to the stark pantheistic position as leading to absurdities even in the complex Aurobindonian God-view.
Here I may point out that no stark pantheist ever says that when a man has the sense of choosing between alternatives he is aware of God directly doing it. Until a man - by an exalted mystical experience of God the All, in which the urge to be thievish, lecherous, murderous is impossible - clearly feels God acting through him, at all times, he has no right to attribute anything to God. Of course, one in his ordinary consciousness may theorise pantheistically and justify his misbehaviour, but I don't think such justification would be confined to pantheists. People holding that there is no Pantheos claim to be God-guided in their fanaticisms and cruelties. Then there is the question: Does it really make a world of difference between a belief in a Pantheos and a belief in an Almighty God, the sole Ens, who freely created a world in which Evil abounds? The sense of divine almightiness has led Paul (Ephesians 1:11; Romans 8:30) to affirm the predestination of the elect by God who works all things after the counsel of his will. The Jerusalem Bible112 has a note on Romans 9:18,19: "Like the OT writers Paul attributes to God
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as their ultimate cause the good and bad actions of men." Wherever the sense of God's existence and power comes with any fulness it is bound to overwhelm the religious mind, be that mind pledged to the notion of shrishti, a loosing forth of something of the Divine himself into cosmic manifestation or to the idea of a creatio ex nihilo, a making of the universe not from his own substance but as a distinct entity. And in neither case is there a denial of man's experience as though he were acting by his own volition. We are up against a mystery which closely or distantly has haunted most leaders of religious thought: among Roman Catholics, Augustine and Aquinas. It is not soluble by such a simplistic attitude as yours: "The objection to pantheism is that it involves holding God responsible for sin and evil." As I hinted in an earlier letter, an approach to a solution may be made by a correct assessment of the problem of human freewill. And I have attempted such an assessment in the essay I sent you. That a mind like Sri Aurobindo's, at once most profound and acute, expressed satisfaction with it makes me regard as deficient your response to the passages I quoted from Essays on the Gita, your suggestion that they go all the way towards the truth of things except for their inclusion of pantheism as one note in their manifold strain.
You bring in the term "panentheism" as opposed to "pantheism". But surely you are still thinking of the latter in its stark form which bars transcendence. I fail to see how genuine panentheism, "all-in-God", can exclude the weltstoff from being in some way one aspect of God's substance. To avoid pantheism's restriction of God to the world-stuff as well as to avoid transcendentalism's division of the world-stuff from God, this all-inclusive philosophy was born. I have always understood it as its originator Karl C. F. Krause (1781-1882) set it forth. It was constructed precisely to reconcile pantheism with them. The first implication of panentheism is: "God neither is the world nor stands outside the world but has the world in himself and extends beyond it."113 The second implication is: "God interpenetrates everything
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without cancelling the relative independent existence of the world of entities."114 This implication is the converse corollary of the first. Thus Panentheism means not only that all is in God but also that God is in all and leaves the human soul unsubmerged. It is pantheistic in the sense that God is ultimately the constituent of everything: it is theistic in the sense that God is not exhausted by being this constituent and is "transcendent in the sense that though the created is dependent upon the Creator, the Creator is not dependent upon the created. God thus is held to be the highest type of Unity, viz., a Unity in Multiplicity". I may remark that the words "created" and "Creator" used here are not in the Christian connotation but in the Vedantic-Gita connotation which is also the Aurobindonian: namely, that the world and its creatures are a formulation by the Divine of his own being under certain spatio-temporal terms that are contained within his supracosmic infinity and eternity.
In this particular it is not irrelevantly that in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (The Macmillan Company & The Free Press, New York, 1967) the entry "Panentheism" refers us to "Emanationism" which informs us (Vol. 2, p. 473):
"Emanationism explains the origin and structure of reality by postulating a perfect and transcendent principle from which everything is derived through a process called emanation which is comparable to an efflux or radiation... Emanationism is... opposed to creationism, according to which the principle creates the rest of reality (from which it differs absolutely), either out of nothing or by transforming a pre-existent, chaotic matter into a cosmos. There is some affinity between emanationism and pantheism, except that the latter teaches the immanence of the principle in its product. Some philosophers characterize emanationism as panentheism."
The true significance of Panentheism would come into relation with the topic you raise towards the end of your letter: the theoretical interpretations by Shankara and Ramana Maharshi of their own profound insight into the ultimate mystery of existence. You are right in finding these inter-
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pretations "extremely unsatisfactory" and in appreciating how Sri Aurobindo has demonstrated their shortcomings. But we are not concerned with the interpretations being right or wrong. What concerns us is: "Was the insight authentic and did it mean what Shankara and Maharshi took it to mean?" Sri Aurobindo never denied its authenticity. What he denied is their taking it to be final and all-exclusive and their building their theoretical interpretations on such a posture. How indeed could Sri Aurobindo deny it when he himself had gone through the Adwaita experience, the oneness of the human and the Divine in the single Super-Self, an experience which in its extreme form makes the whole ordinarily sensed world seem a floating phantasm? Without annulling the essence of the tat-twam-asi ("thou-art-That") realisation but not supporting its world-illusionist impression, a host of other experiences of the Divine Reality found room in the Aurobindonian consciousness leading to a rare spiritual and mystical integralism. In general we may describe Sri Aurobindo's alternative to the illusionist Adwaita as a Panentheism properly understood plus a spiritual evolutionism of the Superrnind rising from its self-involution below to meet the descent of its free divinity from above.
This alternative is capable of diverse affinities: it can be shown to validate several aspects of Catholic Christianity no less than those of Vaishnavism and Tantra", not to mention Tibetan Buddhism and Ibn Arabi's Sufism. But I should think that the nearest approach to it as a whole is Teilhard de Chardin's Hyper-Catholicism as deducible in detail not so much from his set works, penetrative and brilliant though they are, as from his uninhibited private correspondence: Letters to Léontine Zanta, Letters to Two Friends and Lettres Intimes (to his Jesuit colleagues).
You have a tantalising remark in your penultimate para. You refer to your lecturing in the USA on the Trinity and of the great interest taken in the matter everywhere. Then you say: "But it would take too long to go into it now." I would be happy to hear in some detail about your tour and the reli-
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gious discussions during it. First of all, what made you go to the States? Was there a specific mission? And did my friend Father Martin play any role in your movements and your lecturings?
Your P.S. is excellent. The basic Bede Griffiths stands out there - with his breadth of understanding and kindness of insight. You are right in saying that Sri Aurobindo's position as well as mine would not be far from the one you have sketched with fine brevity. But I may add that Sri Aurobindo does not look only at the past continuing into a unified present. While the one eternal divine reality has revealed various aspects of itself which are distinct yet interrelated, it can also open up in the course of evolution new vistas of its dynamic possibilities: it may not be enough to synthetase the great religions - clues have to be found in them to something beyond them all - a power for a vita nuova which will ultimately be consummated on earth itself but into which the whole supra-terrestrial will have descended.
April 20th 1984
Thank you for your letter and the 'pamphlet'. I have been through the latter, though only rather cursorily. The trouble is that I disagree with your whole method. I find it difficult to understand why you who write mystical poetry and believe in the mystical philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, when you come to the question of the Virgin Birth, treat it on purely rationalistic lines. You don't seem to realise that it is essentially a 'sacred mystery', a revelation of the eternal in time, of the Spirit in the flesh. It cannot be understood by any rational argument but by a spiritual illumination. In my understanding this revelation was committed to the Church (that is, the disciples of Christ) and is preserved in the churches which derive from the apostolic Church. The writings of the New
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Testament are documents of the Church dating from the first century and therefore of particular importance, but they can only be properly understood in the light of the revelation made to the Church. The Virgin Birth is part of this divine revelation, the total 'mystery of Christ', which is preserved in the Church. It cannot be 'proved' from the New Testament, but neither can it be disproved. The theories which you advance are simply theories, derived from your reading of the texts, with which other scholars disagree. You are perfectly entitled to your opinion about it, but it remains only a personal opinion based on your own particular insights. Other scholars disagree on this as on almost everything else in the New Testament. Such arguments prove nothing. They depend on the point of view of the scholar in question. The realm of the sacred is not open to rational argument. It can be shown that it is not contrary to reason but it cannot be proved. That is why I said that for me Raymond Brown has said the last word. He is a wholly reliable Biblical scholar, who after an exhaustive study of the texts has said that the historicity of the Virgin Birth can neither be proved nor disproved. You are at liberty to disagree but you are only one scholar among many and your opinion has no more weight than any other scholar's. As I said, the doctrine in question does not depend on the opinion of scholars but on a divine revelation given to the Church and preserved in the Church from the first century onwards.
I am afraid that this is only repeating what I have said before and we are not likely to come to any agreement. The same applies to the question of the end of the world. You seem to think that this is an ordinary temporal event which can be determined by ordinary means. But the end of the world (or the 'second coming') is the end of time; it is the point where time is transcended. I believe that Jesus left his disciples with the expectation that the world would end in their own lifetime, because we all have to live in that expectation. Time and eternity are not on the same level of being. You cannot say 'when' the end of the world takes
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place. Again it is a matter of a 'mystery', which cannot be understood by rational means.
Finally, to come to something where we are nearer to agreement I think that the question of pantheism is largely a matter of terms. I prefer to call myself an advaitin. I believe that the divine mystery is totally transcendent and totally immanent. The eternal and infinite is manifesting in time and space. The world is like a reflection in a mirror. It has no reality in itself but derives its whole reality from the divine. That is what is meant by creation 'out of nothing'. On the other hand the divine is not changed in any way by the manifestation. It remains eternally one and the same. All this temporal reality is included in the divine reality but in a transcendent manner. This needs more careful statement, but I hope that you see the point.
I am going away on Monday. I am going first to Rome and then to Jerusalem and expect to be away for about a month. I don't think that much can be added to our argument. I will not convince you and you will not convince me. But there are other spheres where we are nearer to agreement.
24.4.84
I appreciate your patience, tolerance and good will, but surely you can't expect me not to be a rationalistic critic in face of a claim such as you once made that Christianity is distinguished from all other religions by having a historical intervention by God in human affairs. One of the items of the alleged intervention is the Virgin Birth. If the evidence of the Virgin Birth is not to be found in the New Testament itself but only in what the Church says, the claim is bound to be unconvincing. And if what the Church says is the last word, you make a mockery of Biblical scholarship such as Raymond
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Brown practises and as is found in admirable co-operation efforts by both Catholics and Protestants in books like Mary in the New Testament. You have yourself pursued several argumentative ways on the basis of the New Testament in order to counter my use of it. You might as well have said at the very start that the NT is useless for establishing any doctrine of the Roman Church. What is more, I remember your granting that in the early Church - the Church of the first Apostles - the kerygma did not include the Virgin Birth. From whom then does the later Church derive the doctrine? The derivation can come only from Jesus' own family, including Jesus himself. Brown finds "family tradition" facing formidable difficulties - and the following passage from The Virginal Conception (p. 37) is worth contemplation by you:
"Of course, it is almost axiomatic in Catholic theology that what the Church teaches does not draw its validity from the arguments used to reach that teaching, because the Church has an insight into revelation (through a type of spiritual connaturality) by which it transcends pure logic. But it is not clear how this principle applies to a question of biological fact such as is involved in the virginal conception. There is not much evidence that the Church had another chain of tradition back to the facts about Jesus' conception besides the-affirmation common to Matthew and Luke. If that affirmation is called into question (as we shall see in Part V below), can one avoid seeing difficult implications for the Church's teaching on this subject?"
As for the end of the world and Second Coming you say: "I believe that Jesus left his disciples with the expectation that the world would end in their own lifetime, because we all have to live in that expectation." I am afraid you are missing the exact posture of the problem. If Jesus had said, "The world may come to an end any time and it may well be that in your lifetime this will happen and it is best to live as if it will, for then we are spiritually most prepared to face God" - if this had been his position I would have had nothing to argue about. But he asserted not the mere possibility or even
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the probability but the absolute certainty of the Second Coming in the next generation or two, even though the exact day within this period could not be told by anybody except God. Such an assertion can't help being seen as a total mistake and it gives us a new perspective on the development of his religion beyond the general limit set by him for his work and for his church. Your contention that the end of the world is the end of time and is the point where time is transcended is irrelevant here. We are not discussing metaphysical subtleties. We are trying to make out the meaning of Jesus' prediction. You yourself have come down to brass tacks saying that in the disciples' lifetime was the expectation left by Jesus, even though you interpret the fact in a sense quite out of accord with Paul's Epistles or the Gospels.
About pantheism I shan't say much more since you reduce our apparent difference to "largely a matter of terms" - except that where you speak of God's creation of the world "out of nothing" I would add: "out of nothing but himself". This, of course, does not simplify the problem, but it does not complicate it more than your formula does. Only, the complication is in another way - and this way, let me remind you, is not to be equated to the purely Spinozistic which tends to exclude the transcendent. Sri Aurobindo is not Spinozistic: the pantheistic element in his experience and philosophy is along Indian lines which take the transcendent fully into account, and it goes even beyond these lines because of his deeper knowledge of what ancient India called Satyam-ritam-brihat, Vijnana, Mahas and he terms Super-mind, Truth-Consciousness, Gnosis.
I would be interested to be told of your activity in Rome and Jerusalem. By the way, do you have a record of the talks you gave in the USA? You once hinted that you spoke on the Trinity. I wish I could benefit by getting a chance to read your talks.
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June 16th 1984
I returned from abroad on June 10th to find your letter written on April 24th awaiting me. I am not too anxious to continue this discussion on the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. As I have said before, I am not a Biblical scholar and on a subject such as this I am guided by the best Biblical scholarship that I know and that I think you will agree is to be found in Father Raymond Brown. You quote from his book on the Virginal Conception that 'there are difficult implications for the Church's teaching on this subject'. But you don't continue the quotation where he says: 'Please understand: I am not saying that there is no longer impressive evidence for the virginal conception - personally I think that it is far more impressive than many who deny the virginal conception will admit.' You will also remember that his final conclusion is that it can neither be proved nor disproved from the evidence of the New Testament. This is my own position. We know that it was accepted in the churches to which the gospels of Matthew and Luke were addressed around 80 AD and that as these accounts are quite different, they must have been preceded by an earlier account. This takes us back to around the middle of the century. How and when it arose before that, we simply don't know. That it was accepted by all orthodox churches in the second century and has remained an accepted belief in the Church until the present day, is for me sufficient reason for holding it as true. If the Church should at any future date decide that there is not sufficient evidence for it and that it is to be accepted as a theologoumenon - like the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary -1 should have no objection. It is not a matter of fundamental importance, and I don't understand why you make so much fuss about it. In any case, it is a question which has to be decided by the Church as a whole and not by any individual scholar or group of scholars.
As regards the second coming, I think that you are trying to read back into the New Testament a conception of time
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which is not there. The Resurrection of Christ has always been considered as an 'echatological' event. It does not belong to ordinary time. It is what T.S. Eliot called the 'point of intersection of the timeless with time'. In one sense the end of the world came with the resurrection. It marked the passage of the temporal and spatial world into the eternal. In another sense it can be said to come at any time - at the moment of death, for instance, for each person. That is why the New Testament uses different languages about it. As you know the 2nd letter of Peter pointed out: 'A thousand years in his sight are but a day'. In all this, it seems to me, that you adopt a kind of rationalist approach, and miss the mystical dimension. The New Testament is essentially a record of this revelation of the eternal in time, of the absolute in history. I would have thought that this was congenial to a disciple of Sri Aurobindo.
I visited Italy, Israel, Germany, Austria, Denmark and Sweden in my travels talking on the 'marriage of East and West'. There is considerable interest in the West about this. I did not like the 'holy land' at all. It is most unholy. I felt no Christian presence there. I thought of the words of the angel at the resurrection: 'Why do you seek the living among the dead, He is not here.'
There are some tapes of my talks in the U.S. but I haven't any available. But I am writing a book which will incorporate what I said, though it may take some time.
18.6.84
Thanks for attending to my letter in spite of the boredom the discussion of the subject causes you. I am pretty bored too. But a few extra words will not quite bore you to extinction. The sentences I did not quote from Brown sound
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to my ears unduly exaggerative and over-apologetic for having committed the crime of questioning whether the Church could ever have any chain of tradition beyond what Matthew and Luke have to say on a matter of biological fact such as the virginal conception involves. The point is: Can the Church here have any valid ground to make a pronouncement beyond the Biblical evidence? Brown's implicit if not explicit answer is: Hardly. This seems rather unlike your position.
The second point is whether Brown's final conclusion that the virginal conception can neither be proved nor disproved from the NT evidence has real force. I have discussed it in considerable detail and at fair length at the beginning of the second part of my pamphlet-letter which, according to your own admission, you have not thoroughly perused. From several points of view I try to show Brown to be mistaken.
By the way, if he holds the opinion that the scientifically controllable evidence cannot lead us to tilt one way or the other, how can he say that such evidence for that conception is far more impressive than many who would deny the virginal conception will admit? He appears to be contradicting the neutral stand to which he has himself arrived.
I am very much interested in your statement that the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary are no more than theologoumenons. Will you kindly expatiate on this theme just a little?
As to the Second Coming, it is irrelevant to cite Eliot's "intersection of the timeless with time" and to see the Resurrection and Parousia as events which by being "eschatological" have nothing to do with definite time-periods. Paul, the other Apostles and all the Evangelists knew quite well the eschatology implied in Jesus' words but that never prevented them from dating the Resurrection to "the third day" after the crucifixion and expecting the Parousia within a generation or two after that event. All of them based their conviction about the "unpredictable imminence" of the Second Coming on Jesus' ipsissima verba. You have again
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brought in II Peter. I thought I had said enough by now about its proper bearing on the matter.
If I had known throughout our controversy that the virginal conception was "not a matter of fundamental importance" to you I would have made less "fuss", as you put it.
Whatever you have said during your travels will be of much interest to me. Your remarks on the unholiness of the Holy Land intrigue me a great deal. Are they in relation to the present mind of Israel? Or do they refer only to the actual Christians living in Palestine?
I must tell you how happy I am to have been able to secure The Jerome Biblical Commentary from the Christian Literature Society of Madras. It is really a treasure. I couldn't get Peter in the New Testament. Have you a copy of it? I shall return your copy of Mary in the New Testament in a day or so. Thank you for lending it to me. Have you brought back from your European tour any books I should read?
With kind regards always,
June 23rd 1984
Thank you for your letter. I have been going through our correspondence and I see that it has now been going on for over a year. I think that it is definitely time that we brought it to an end. I propose to give a kind of summary of my arguments bringing them up to date, leaving you to reply and so to close the correspondence.
It became clear, I think, at a fairly early stage that what divided us was a matter of faith. We began by discussing the bearing of the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on Christian faith - a subject which really interests me deeply. But the discussion gradually turned to the question of Christian faith in general and in particular the Virgin Birth.
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I have always regretted this, I do not think that the question of the Virgin Birth can usefully be discussed by those who differ in faith. It belongs to a whole system of beliefs which form an integrated whole and cannot usefully be discussed in isolation.
You have consistently maintained that the content of Christian faith can be discovered by the study of the documents of the New Testament or as you once said 'by direct approach to the New Testament'. I dissent from this view on several grounds. In the first place I think that it is based on a misreading of history. The Christian faith did not originate in the New Testament. It was communicated to a group of disciples by its author, who transmitted it by word of mouth. It was only after many years - at least thirty or forty - that the message was put into writing and the documents of the New Testament were produced and approved by the Church (that is, the disciples of Christ) as an expression of their faith. This was a gradual process. The letters of St. Paul some of which were written within twenty to thirty years were all written before the Gospels were put into writing and some of the later letters were written at a later date. But the documents of the New Testament were all intended as expressions of the faith of the disciples of Christ and can only be properly understood in the light of that faith.
I would support this point of view by reference to the modern understanding of science and history. Scientists today recognise that there is no such thing as a purely objective knowledge. In the light of relativity and quantum physics we know that the observer is always involved in what he observes. As Heisenberg said: 'What we observe is not nature herself but nature exposed to our method of questioning'. It is the same with history. There are no such things as purely objective 'facts'. You can isolate certain temporal events and determine their order of succession, but this is an abstraction from the total reality and is of very limited importance.
Applying this to the New Testament, the meaning which
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you find in the documents will depend on the mind which you bring to them. An atheist will find simply fantasies and delusions; a humanist may find a humanist Christ. It is only the illumination of the faith, which enables one to understand the meaning of the New Testament, as it was understood by the writers themselves who shared the same faith.'
To come to the Virgin Birth, this is not, as you seem to suggest, a mere 'biological fact'. It is a mystery of faith. As such it has three components. First there is the historical or physical fact of the birth from a Virgin. Second, there is the psychological fact, of the experience of Mary, who underwent a profound spiritual experience, in which she was assured that she would give birth to the Son of God. Thirdly, there is the Spiritual Reality behind the physical and psychological appearance, namely a divine revelation in which the action of God in the history of the world was revealed, showing how human nature is to be transformed by the action of the Holy Spirit.
Obviously it is this spiritual component which is of supreme importance. Second to this is the psychological experience of Mary, conceiving the word of God in her heart. Finally there is the physical aspect. As I have said many times there is no 'proof in the New Testament of this. I still hold with Father Raymond Brown and against you that it cannot be disproved and that, as he said, the evidence is stronger than many scholars are prepared to admit. There is a gap of only forty or fifty years, as for nearly all the events of the New Testament, and it is clearly affirmed in two of the four fundamental sources. For this reason I still prefer to say that it derives like other facts of the New Testament from a historical tradition. But, as I said in my last letter, it could be a 'theologoumenon', that is, a doctrine derived not from historical evidence but from theological reflection on the mystery of faith. In this case, it would be like the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary a doctrine derived from reflection on the mystery of the Incarnation and its implications for the mother of Jesus. If
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Jesus was really the Son of God and if he redeemed the world from sin and death, what implications has this for the mother who bore him? But the difference is that the two other doctrines only arose after theological reflection on the mystery of the Incarnation in the fourth and fifth century, whereas the doctrine of the Virgin Birth arose in the first century among the earliest witnesses to the mystery of faith.
To bring this back to where we began with the relation of Aurobindo's philosophy to Christian faith, I would say that by the 'mystery of faith' I mean the belief that the Supreme Reality, the divine Sachchidananda, has been revealing himself in the whole creation from the beginning of the world, first of all in those energies which make up the matter of the universe, then in the phenomena of life, of plant and of animal, and finally in man. In the human being the universe awakes to consciousness and begins to 'know itself. But we are still in the process of evolution from our present mental consciousness to the divine consciousness. In Jesus, I believe that the point in evolution was reached, when the human consciousness was raised to union with the divine consciousness. But this was not (as Aurobindo also envisaged) merely a transformation of the human mind, but involved also the transformation of the human body. This was what took place in the Resurrection of Jesus. The human body and soul of Jesus were transformed by the divine Spirit and he was finally taken up into the divine life beyond space and time. This in turn reveals the destiny of all men, that we shall all be transformed, body and soul, and experience the bliss of Sachchidananda.
In this perspective it seems to me wholly reasonable to believe that when Mary conceived Jesus she underwent not only a spiritual but also a physical transformation, as the Spirit began to take possession of human nature, so that Jesus was born 'not of blood or of the will of the flesh but of God'. In other words, the Virgin Birth was a sign of the eventual transformation of human nature by which we shall all undergo that experience of being 'born of God'. If you
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look again at what I have said about the Virgin Birth in the Marriage of East and West, I think that you will see my point.
Well, that is my point of view. I will expect a reply from you and then as I said, I think that we ought to close this correspondence. If you still feel that you would like to have it printed, I have no objection. You have put a lot of work into it - much more than I have - and may like to see your labours rewarded.
My reactions to the 'holy land' were mainly in response to the Israel-Arab conflict, but I felt that Jews, Christians and Muslims all need to learn from the wisdom of the East, if they are ever to resolve their problems.
P.S. I can send Peter in the New Testament when you return the other.
6.7.84
When I opened your letter of June 23rd, I felt you would be unanswerable, because I could hardly read you, so faint was the ribbon of your typewriter. You seemed to make a symbolic gesture fitting your idea that our subject should fade away. But I made an effort to pierce the semi-invisibility and arrive at a glimmer of your summing-up.
You say you have been going through our correspondence. I wonder whether you have attended carefully enough to what I have been writing. It is evident you have not gone attentively through my long "pamphlet'-letter, for you don't show the slightest awareness of what I have said there apropos of Brown. But even my penultimate letter appears to have gone almost un-noticed in its particulars. How else could you write: "To come to the Virgin Birth, this is not, as you seem to suggest, a mere 'biological fact'...!" The words
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"biological fact" are not coined by me: they are a quotation from Brown. Let me refresh your memory with the passage I culled from him about the supposed spiritual ability of the Church to decide whether a doctrine is right or wrong, irrespective of what scholars may say on the strength of scriptures:
"Of course, it is almost axiomatic that what the Church teaches does not draw its validity from the arguments used to reach that teaching, because the Church has an insight into revelation (through a type of spiritual connaturality) by which it transcends pure logic. But it is not clear how this principle applies to a question of biological fact such as is involved in the virginal conception. There is not much evidence that the Church had another chain of tradition back to the facts about Jesus' conception besides the affirmation common to Matthew and Luke. If that affirmation is called into question (as we shall see in Part V below), can one avoid seeing difficult implications for the Church's teaching on this subject?"
You will notice the phrase: "a question of biological fact" (italics Brown's). I am sure you can't fail to observe that Brown's whole statement, shorn of its guarded language, means that the Church has no right, in this particular matter, to go by anything except one or two short affirmations by Matthew and Luke and that the claim to an independent chain of evidence by means of apostolic tradition handed down cannot be maintained. In short, one can come to any conclusion on the subject by nothing save whatever authority one can attach to Matthew's and Luke's brief references. No doubt, it is possible to take the subject out of the Biblical context and discuss it in general, but in that case the Church, which in Brown's view cannot go past this context in "a question of biological fact", would be on a par with all who discuss the pros and cons on non-scriptural grounds.
On strictly scriptural grounds you remind me that Brown's stand is that the virginal conception cannot be proved or disproved, but you poinf out also Brown's assertion of there
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being "far more impressive [evidence] than many who deny the virginal conception will-admit." In my preceding letter I felt that Brown was contradicting himself, but now I think that here he is referring to non-scriptural grounds. In my "pamphlet"-letter I have devoted a lot of pages both to the question whether scripture is at all neutral on the whole and to the question whether the argument Brown has set forth on what he considers general grounds in favour of the historicity of the virginal conception has any force. You have completely ignored my study and met not even a single point of it. Just a blanket statement by you that you remain utterly unconvinced is all I have received in the past. If, as your latest letter says, you hold with Brown not only that scripturally the virginal conception cannot be disproved but also that non-scripturally the evidence for it is strong, you should give my arguments on either head serious consideration. Perhaps it is too late in the day for you to do so and we are both tired, but I have to draw your attention to all from me that has gone unconsidered by you.
Even the argument Brown brings forward independently of scripture is tacitly based on his understanding of what is implied in Matthew and Luke. He says that the virginal conception as presented by these two evangelists has, contrary to the ordinary contention, no real parallel in the cases cited from pagan sources and that such a new and unique idea could not have arisen unless what it conveyed was an actual fact. In my "pamphlet'-letter I strove to show that just the novelty or even uniqueness of an idea does not necessarily point to a physical occurrence and that the idea as interpreted by Brown is not unique and that his interpretation itself extrapolates a much later mentality into what Matthew and Luke have presented: their presentation has in a somewhat refined and selective form all the basic elements of the pagan cases ordinarily submitted.
As I have gone only or at least essentially by analysis of scripture, your suggestion that I can be likened to an atheist or a humanist who will find either fantasies and delusions or
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else merely a moral and social thinker in the NT is quite off the mark. I do not come to the NT with a mind already made up in the anti-religious or non-religious manner. I am not at all non-religious and am miles away from being anti-religious. I keep myself within the universe of scriptural discourse and with neither an atheistic nor a humanist mind look at the declarations of the NT and try to understand them not only in the immediate context of each of them but also in the context of the whole mass of the NT. And I put myself along the lines drawn by Brown and see where they really lead. You appear to think the NT to be of one piece when you say: "It is only the illumination of faith, which enables one to understand the meaning of the New Testament, as it was understood by the writers themselves who shared the same faith." I may note first that here you are appealing to the writers of the New Testament and not to the Church's authority. Secondly I may say that Brown's statement that the virginal conception can be neither proved nor disproved on the evidence of the NT means that "the writers themselves" of the NT were at variance with one another and had no single uniform outlook on the virginal conception. In one of your letters, referring to my pitting Paul and Mark against Matthew and Luke, you asked how the Church could have included the former two in the canon if they really contradicted the latter pair. I cited Brown as clearly admitting that Paul and Mark can never be taken as being in accord with Matthew and Luke: quite the contrary. The Church fondly believed that Paul and Mark could be said to have implicit though not explicit acceptance of the doctrine at issue. From what Brown thinks, this is a mistake - and the mistake is more underlined in his Birth of the Messiah than in his earlier Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus.
In connection with the NT, I must touch on what strikes me as a little tangle at almost the start of your letter. You dub my "direct approach to the New Testament" a mistake due to a misreading of history, for the Christian faith did not originate in the NT but was communicated to a group of
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disciples of Christ by word of mouth and considerably later put down in writing. At the same time you say that the documents of the NT were produced and approved by the disciples of Christ as an expression of their faith. If this is so, where am I wrong in approaching these documents through which alone we can reach the original disciples of Christ?
Perhaps you will argue that there is a living line of Christ's disciples from the early times up to now in the form of the Church. But does this mean that the NT is an inadequate expression of Christian faith? Was it not already approved by the early Christians? And does it not contain reports of the faith of the first disciples? And has it not the direct documents of one who personally knew Peter and James "the Lord's brother" - namely Paul? Not only does Paul, when he has the chance to speak of Mary, mention her anonymously and make her out to be just a woman like any other and giving birth to Jesus in the way all women do to their children. He also shows thereby that neither Peter nor James, who could have known of the virginal conception if there had been one, ever breathed a word to him about such a thing. Catholics believe that I Peter to be the work of Peter the Apostle using Sylvanus (5:12) as his secretary for the excellent Greek which would be impossible to attribute to the Galilean fisherman. They also hold it probable that the Epistle of James is the work of James of Jerusalem and even that in' view of the Qumran parallels the Gospel of John may be an early creation with the Apostle John as its author. None of these documents hint at the virginal conception. Then there is Acts where Peter along with Paul is rendered frequently vocal - and yet not a trace of it. If all this is not proof enough that the earliest disciples who should know best the role to be assigned to Mary are utterly in the dark about the story Matthew and Luke relate, I'll be hanged if I know what proving is. You have yourself conceded that the earliest kerygma was devoid of the virginal conception. And yet you incline to believe that what the earliest followers of Jesus never knew came to be known later. The logical
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conclusion is that Matthew and Luke were spreading a piece of fiction. And merely the fact that the idea of the virginal conception, being common to them, must have preceded them does not indicate that it was anything else than fiction. To put it more learnedly, it was the historicisation of a theologoumenon.
In passing, you grant this possibility, yet you retract immediately from setting it beside the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary -because, unlike their occurrence in the fourth and fifth centuries, the doctrine of the virginal conception arose in the first century and, according to you, "among the earliest witnesses to the mystery of faith". But precisely there you are wrong. The earliest witnesses lacked it totally, as I have emphasised just a little before. It is most probably in the 80s that it arose - nearly 30 years after the earliest written witnesses and 20 years after even the earliest Gospel, the Gospel of Mark, which, as Brown openly concedes, pictures Mary in such an adverse light and Jesus at such tension with her that it is impossible to attribute to her any knowledge of Jesus' divine mission or to Jesus any awareness of the special grace of God awarded to her in the first chapters of Matthew and Luke.
Part of the real reason for the early emergence of the doctrine in question as compared to that of the Immaculate Conception or of Mary's Assumption is to be sought in the psycho-religious condition of the pagan world in which Christianity was born. It was a world chockful of Mother-Goddesses, some of them even virgins. But it had no cult of anything comparable to the two other doctrines. They sprang from leisurely theological reflection whereas this came about in religiously competitive circumstances. Theological reflection was certainly there, but it was hastened into historicisation by - among other factors - rivalry. You may recollect how St. Gregory the Great ordered the missionaries he had sent to heathen lands to "baptise the pagan idols and places of worship". Christianity was wise in trying to utilise for its
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own ends the age-old customs of the people it permeated. The most popular example of this practice is the institution of Christmas on 25th December. The date was chosen in order to Christianise and supplant the Mithraic festival of Sol invictus. Similarly pagan converts would be saved from a feeling of loss if they did not lack a virgin mother to Jesus. The immediate historicising of the theologoumenon was, to a certain extent, a psycho-religious necessity.
Somehow, however, it does not appear to have been very effective. Even the faithful do not seem to have taken note of it very much. In none of the 25 books of the NT other than the Gospels of Matthew and Luke is it paid any attention. Nor is any cult of Mary noticeable in spite of the Councils asserting her virginal role under the overshadowing by the Holy Spirit. Only when the Roman emperors became Christian did the cult spread. Epiphanius (Haereses, LXXIX) locates its beginning in the East where the imperial decrees against the old religions first took effect: he mentions Arabia and Thrace and the details he provides show that it replaced the popular cult of Ceres and Cybele. In Armenia it supplanted the cult of Anahita. In places like Rome where paganism continued a long time and the general mentality was more developed and critical, Marianism and Mariolatry were the slowest to progress. St. Augustine, for instance, never admitted it for all his being a pillar of the Church. Whatever sermons of his are commonly quoted in favour of it are known to scholars to be spurious. Not till paganism was suppressed everywhere did it start flourishing, and the pagans found satisfaction in filling with Mary the gap left by the lost glories of Cybele, Ceres, Isis, Ishtar, Maia and Flora.
All this is rather by the way. To go back to our theme proper, I may sum up by saying: "The original apostolic evidence no less than the evidence of the later books of the NT except Matthew and Luke (and there too almost the first chapters alone) rule out the possibility of the virginal conception being historical in any acceptable sense. After reading all that you have had to say I can't help maintaining on
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this subject the protest I registered when you first suggested that Christianity differed from other religions of antiquity by having, in a genuine historical mode and not in a merely mythical one, the intervention of God in the affairs of man."
A few matters of varying significance need to be touched upon before I close. I must correct a slip again on your part to which I drew attention even in my very first comment on you, "An Aurobindonian Christian", which set off our long discussion. Quoting words from John's Prologue you write: ".. .Jesus was born 'not of blood or of the will of the flesh but of God'." Scripturally these words are not at all applicable to Jesus and cannot be mustered in favour of the virginal conception to which you have linked them. They cannot be used as if John hinted at it. Let me quote Brown115 as before: "The third-person singular reading in John 1:13: 'He who was begotten, not by blood, nor by carnal desire, nor by man's will, but of God' is considered by most an early patristic change from the original plural in order to make the text christologically useful." To the word "most", Brown has a footnote expressing his surprise that "although not found in a single Greek Gospel ms", the third-person singular is still accepted by a good number of French-speaking exegetes. In following them you flout the opinion of the majority of scholars, including your favourite Brown himself.
What follows your misapplication is a little puzzling. As you bring it in apropos of your mention of Mary having virginally conceived Jesus, one gets the impression that you mean to support by it Jesus' special status. But since you regard it as a prefigure of what will eventually happen to all human beings as though all will be virginally conceived one gets the counter-impression that you are talking symbolically. What you basically intend appears to be that Mary did in fact virginally conceive Jesus so that he was historically born of God by such a mode of coming into earthly existence, but that all of us will in the long run undergo a transformation of our common human nature and become divine-natured. I think the implication of factuality does not hold together
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with the later generalisation. John, by employing the third-person plural, posited our birth into divine nature by the power of Jesus, without implying a special virginal conception of him.
In taking this birth to cover both body and soul instead of soul alone you put Christianity en rapport with Sri Aurobindo's vision. And indeed the idea of a resurrection which is not only a resuscitation but also a total transformation - an idea most explicitly expressed by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 -broadly presages the Aurobindonian teaching of supramen-talisation as the destiny of man. However, it has several serious shortcomings which put it out of accord with that teaching. A process is wanting: the transformation is said to occur in the twinkling of an eye instead of by a progressive evolution, a systematic sadhana, a Yoga of integral spirituality. Except for those who happen to be alive at the time of the general resurrection, Paul involves a great problem by his analogy between the resurrection of the Christian and the resurrection of Jesus. As Brown116 phrases it, "the earthly bodies of Christians... will have decomposed or have been lost by the time of the general resurrection of the just, whereas Jesus was raised 'on the third day'." The element of death separates Christianity's resurrection from the supra-mentalisation à la Sri Aurobindo. Even the three-day death of Jesus sets it apart. Death can be accepted if there is multiple rebirth to finish what could not be done in one lifetime. Finally, the prospect of leaving the earth-scene by the transformative resurrection makes little sense for Sri Aurobindo. The lasting fulfilment of embodied life on earth, a divinisation of terrestrial existence in all its members and aspects and not a glorified escape from it, is the goal of supramentalisation. Inwardly realising all the spiritual splendour that is beyond earth, free from the limitations of space and time and yet physically so changed as to be able to live masterfully in spatio-temporal terms: such is the state of him who, in one birth or after many, has consummated Sri Aurobindo's Yoga of supramental ascent and descent.
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I may well stop here. But I am tempted to continue a little further by some remarks you have made on modern physics: "Scientists to-day recognise that there is no such thing as a merely objective knowledge. In the light of relativity and quantum physics we know that the observer is always involved in what he observes. As Heisenberg said: 'What we observe is not nature herself but nature exposed to our method of questioning'." The way you have illustrated Heisenberg - by comparing the approaches of the atheist, the humanist and the believer to the New Testament - implies merely that different minds are bound to see the same thing differently. The involvement of the observer in what things are found to be like is a common-sense truism and has nothing to do with relativity and quantum physics. This truism transported to the philosophical domain leads to the controversy over solipsism. And surely no scientific worker can hold truck with the solipsist idea - namely, that he is the sole existent perceiver-knower. Science is a social, collective, collaborative venture, and the pronouncements of scientists like Wigner, Sarfatti et al, to which - though without mentioning them - you have assimilated Heisenberg's dictum, relate fundamentally to the micro and not the macro level: they never declare that, scientifically speaking, objects of their daily life which could include their laboratory-equipment are not themselves nature but nature exposed to their methods of questioning. I believe you have taken science out of a specific field and, blurring its meaning, misapplied it.
Even in the specific field you overlook the fact that there is a variety of schools of thought about the subatomic realm: (1) The Copenhagen Interpretation, (2) The Hidden Variable Theories, (3) The Many Worlds Hypothesis, (4) The Matter/ Mind Connection. You are writing from the standpoint of the fourth school. "In my opinion," says Sarfatti, "the quantum principle involves mind in an essential way... mind creates matter." Walker, another member of the fourth school, assuming the hidden variables, equates them with con-
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sciousness. But David Bohm, the chief exponent of hidden variables, criticises the tendency to conclude that observation by mind is needed to produce matter (measurement): "The introduction of the conscious mind into physics by Wigner is motivated by certain general considerations that have little to do with quantum mechanics itself... Indeed this is often carried to such an extreme that it appears as if nothing ever happens without the observer. However, we know of many physical processes, even at the level of quantum phenomena, that do occur without any direct intervention of the observer." Ken Wilber, an eminent philosopher of science, referring to the level of quantum phenomena where the debate is really relevant, writes: "As for the so-called participant/observer in physics, or the necessity for the object to be perceived by mind in order to collapse its state vector,... many new-age theorists think they must believe in the idea because they confuse the events occurring on the merely physical level with the entire Tao; they think that because Buddha Nature or God is one with all things in the act of perceiving-creating them, the human mind itself must try to do the same thing for electrons." And Wilber adds that "most physicists reject this version of the Quantum Mechanics interpretation".
Among the beneficial repercussions coming from the new physics and from what is termed the "holographic paradigm" there is, as Wilber says, "the interest of influential physicists in metaphysics". Wilber elaborates: "This has taken two different forms. First, the willingness to postulate unmeasurable and undetectable orders of physis lying behind or subscending explicate energy mass. This is Bohm's quantum potential implicate order. Second, the willingness of physicists to acknowledge the necessity of ultimately including levels higher than physis in their accounts of physis. As Wheeler puts it, 'No theory of physics will ever explain physics'... And Sarfatti: 'Therefore, meta-physical statements are absolutely vital for the evolution of physics', whereupon Sarfatti introduces the notion of 'mind creating matter'."
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After this much digression I must cry halt. We have both had our says and I hope that, though standing fortiter in re,* we have acted sufficiently suaviter in modo.† The inner link of a personal-spiritual kind has persisted in spite of all our outer disagreements. We shouldn't be sour about them. God's world is wide enough for all sorts of sincere seekers of the Highest and our hearts should mirror that wideness with love and understanding.
July 14th 1984
Thank you for your letter and the money. I am sending Jesus: God and Man by separate post. I am going to Bangalore this evening but will be back on Monday, 23rd.
I think I can say that our disagreement is now total - that any further discussion would be useless. So it is well that we should cease.
I would only recommend a book I have just been reading - Knowledge and the Sacred by Sayyed Hussain Nasr. They were the Gifford Lectures for 1981, and the finest exposition of the 'perennial philosophy', which I have ever read.
It is essential reading - the most profound basis for inter-religious understanding that I know.
Bede Griffiths
November 26 1984
As an appendix to our correspondence, I have just been
* Boldly in deed.
†Gently in manner.
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reading the thirteenth volume of the Mother's Agenda and am deeply impressed by it. I "have no doubt at all of the genuineness of her experience and the mode of consciousness which she experienced. The awareness that consciousness must penetrate to the level of matter and transform the body itself, which both she and Aurobindo realised, is something of extreme importance and has not been realised in the same way before. But it seems to me that both Aurobindo and the Mother made the mistake of thinking that the supermental manifestation could come without going through death. Surely it is obvious that the supermental manifestation must transcend the present order of space and time, which belongs to our present mode of consciousness. But it is only possible to transcend this world of space and time by going through death. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo both learnt this by painful experience.
As you know, I believe that in the Resurrection Jesus went through death into a transcendent state, in which the body itself was transformed exactly as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had hoped it would be. The cells of the physical body of Jesus were transformed, so that his body was no longer subject to the present laws of matter nor to the conditions of space and time. He could appear and disappear at will, and was apparently able to eat and drink (which the Mother found such a problem) in a new way. Finally, of course, he passed beyond the present space-time order altogether and he is now physically present in the Eucharist for those who have the eyes of faith. For me the significance of Aurobindo and the Mother is that they realised that matter and the body are destined to be transformed and to become what St. Paul called a "new creation". But they did not realise that this new state of being and consciousness could only be realised through death. This is what the doctrine of the Resurrection enables us to see. Of course, in Catholic doctrine the Virgin Mary also entered into the state of the resurrection in her body. This, as I said, is a "theologoumenon" and in no way depends on the legendary stories which were current at a
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later date, though they do show how this doctrine was conceived in the popular mind.
I thought that you might be interested in this further insight into the thought and experience of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, but I don't want to begin another correspondence!
28.11.84
I am always glad to hear from you, not invariably because of what you write but essentially because of what you have striven to be. As for your writing, I once described it as being full of many fine insights and at the same time containing some rather grave oversights. Your present letter strikes me as in part a suitable appendix to our correspondence but also in part - if you will forgive the awful witticism - a serious case of appendicitis. Like you, I don't want to begin another lengthened-out correspondence. Still, a few comments by way of reply are unavoidable.
The Mother's Agenda is indeed impressive but one has to clear it of the delusive colour Satprem has tried to give it here and there by means of his malicious footnotes and misleading observations which frequently amount to downright perversion of fact and truth. There is also another proviso. The Agenda presents the Mother in a certain aspect which, while being genuine and profound, is yet partial. The Mother whom we knew from day to day over years by close physical intimacy which Satprem never seems to have done was far greater and sweeter and, I may say, diviner than what can be gathered from this record.
Most of the thoughts which the thirteenth volume has occasioned in you are, to my mind, somewhat off the right track. The stress on the spiritual consciousness penetrating to the level of matter in order to transform the body itself
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comes very vividly through in this volume, and the sense you have of its communication by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as having been done as never before them is genuine. But your failure to grasp the depth and power of their consciousness and to understand what exactly they meant by the supramental manifestation on which they were set is quite surprising. Their writings and their pronouncements on this subject have never been ambiguous. I wonder how you can underrate the magnitude of their spiritual experience and their direct knowledge of the highest truth - how you can be so gauche as to say that in the very thing to which they devoted their whole Yogic lives they committed a basic mistake.
Sri Aurobindo has made it very clear that the Supermind is a Divine Power which has never directly manifested in the earth's spiritual history although shining shadows, as it were, of it have been caught without being properly understood: so one must refrain from speaking of it loosely. It is not only the original creative consciousness-force but also the ultimately transformative dynamism of the Spirit. It holds in itself the supernal archetype, the perfect model, of all that evolves here: a divine mind, a divine life-energy, a divine matter await in it for manifestation in our world. What it seeks to manifest is a state of integral divinisation in evolutionary terrestrial terms, a realisation of the Eternal within time and space fulfilling in a permanent form the whole agelong travail of human aspiration which, however fumblingly and stumblingly, has sought not only for a union with the infinite and omniscient All-Beloved in our inmost recesses and by ascent to a hidden Beyond, but also for a reception of that supreme Reality here below, giving rise to an illuminated mentality, an irresistible godlike vitality, a radiant disease-proof death-free physicality. Talk of a supramental manifestation through death and after death is meaningless to an Aurobindonian, nor, once the significance of the Supermind is grasped, can it have any actuality. In fact, it is self-contradictory.
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Whatever the "Resurrection" of Jesus may be, it is certainly not what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had in view. When Satprem once put to the Mother the notion of the body which has been claimed to be Jesus' resurrected one, she said: "But that body went to heaven!" - meaning that it could not be a supramental body which has to be heavenly on earth - and not, as I might say, earthly in heaven!
May I point out that even in Christianity the death-motive in relation to the resurrection is not obligatory? Of course, Jesus is said to have died and then been raised to life, but when you speak of Paul's "New Creation" and assert that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother did not realise that "this new state of being and consciousness could only be realised through death", you forget the most momentous part of Paul's statement on the subject. Here is 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17: "At the trumpet of God, the voice of the archangel will call out the command and the Lord himself will come down from heaven; those who have died in Christ will be the first to rise, and then those of us and who are still alive will be taken up in the clouds, together with them to meet the Lord in the air" (The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 352). Now take 1 Corinthians 15:51-53: "I will tell you something that has been secret: that we are not all going to die, but we shall all be changed. This will be instantaneous, in the twinkling of an eye, when the last trumpet sounds. It will sound, and the dead will be raised, imperishable, and we shall be changed as well, because our present perishable nature must put on imperishability and this mortal nature must put on immortality" (Ibid., p. 308). The Jerusalem Bible has the note on the first passage: "Paul included himself among those who will be present at the parousia..." (p. 353, col. 2,i). The second passage gets a note containing the words: "...those who will be alive at the time, among whom Paul could theoretically have been included..." (p. 309, col. 2,o). Paul's startling message is that one could be in one's living body and yet undergo the transforming, the immortalising
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experience: death is not the sine qua non. Missing this "something that has been" secret", traditional Christianity has shut the one door it had of glorious anticipation - in however inadequate a manner - of Sri Aurobindo's supramental truth. Paul has no idea of the race's evolutionary development towards what Teilhard has termed the "Ultra-human" or of the individual soul's evolution through the ages by a series of rebirths or of the Yogic evolving process by which one can pack into one lifetime the slow march of the reincarnating soul. Still he has - to quote a line from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri -
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.
What Jesus is taken to have prepared for man by means of his death - a new form that "embodies the spirit" which is "imperishable" and "immortal" - is figured in the Pauline vision as possible without death. Actually, Jesus himself too implies the same when he says that some of those who are alive at the time of his preaching will see the Son of Man come from heaven (Mark 9:1). A part of his very generation is expected to be living when the final resurrection of the dead takes place and the last judgement is given (Matthew 24:34-35): this part evidently will experience the all-transforming change at the parousia without dying. In the Gospels, as in the Epistles, there is the same lack of knowledge of the conditions required for such a change - the via mystica, the spiritual sadhana. But a faint far-off touch on the Aurobindonian revelation shines out from the first century AD. Instead of pointing to it you draw my attention to something quite different as "what the doctrine of the Resurrection enables us to see".
I am sorry to say that the whole conception you put forth in your letter is out of focus. This applies also to the fantastic notion that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had to learn by the "painful experience" of death that only thus could the supramental manifestation occur. The fact is that because of their death the wanted manifestation did not occur. Why
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they accepted to die is another story. But surely it is not analogous to Jesus' acceptance of his death. The death on the cross was inalienable part of a preconceived project in which man's sins were to be expiated by a sacrifice. And because of this project the alleged resurrection had to be through death. There does not seem to be any intrinsic reason why the transformative change of the mortal into the immortal should involve dying. Jesus' assurance to his followers about the parousia and Paul's hope of remaining alive and yet finding his perishable nature put on imperishability shows that Christians need see no inevitable logic in dying in order to undergo the transition from a human to a divine body.
Will this letter provoke you to break the peace upon which we have agreed?
December 4, 1984
Thank you for your letter. Our correspondence began because of my great interest in the way the experience of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother confirmed and illumined my faith in the Gospel. I wrote again because the Mother's Agenda brought such striking new confirmation. But we disagree in our understanding of the significance both of Sri Aurobindo and of the Gospel.
Your letter shows, I think, the precise point of our disagreement, and I think we have to stop at that.
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1.Henry Chad wick, "The Paths of Heresy", review of Elaine Paget's The Gnostic Gospels in the Times Literary Supplement, March 21, 1980, p. 409, col.4.
2.Ibid., loc. cit.
3.Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry 1953), pp. 172-3.
4.Ibid., pp. 174-5.
5.Ibid., pp. 175-6.
6.Ibid., pp. 171-2.
7.Ibid., pp. 390-1.
8.Ibid., p. 205.
9.Ibid., pp. 194-5.
10.The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, pp. 36, 38, 41-2.
11.Evolution in Religion: A Study in Sri Aurobindo and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971), p. 89.
12.Ibid., p. 17.
13.Zaehner, op. cit., pp. 112, 113.
14.Ibid., p. 113
15.Ibid., p. 89.
16.Les idees morales chez les heterodoxes Latins au debut du XIII siecle (1903), in Vol. XVI of the Bibliotheque des Hautes Etudes.
17.Vol. I, pp. 132 and 270.
18.Aubier Montaigne, Paris, 1974.
19."Thy Labour under the Sun" in Teilhard de Chardin: Pilgrim of the Future, edited by Neville Braybrooke (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, Libra Books, 1966), p. 94.
20.Ibid., p. 93.
21.Christianity and Evolution (London: Collins, 1971), p. 72.
22.Dialogue with Teilhard de Chardin (London: Sheed and Ward, 1961), pp. 189-90.
23.Ibid., Pp. 71-2, 73-4.
24.Ibid.,, P. 121, n. 10.
25.The Jerusalem Bible, The New-Testament Section, p. 326.
26.Ibid., pp. 339-40.
27.Ibid., p. 103.
28.Ibid., p. 32.
29.Ibid., p. 68.
30.Ibid., p. 69.
31.The Gospel of St. Mark (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1972), p. 123.
32.Ibid., p. 35, col. 2, note p.
33.The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, p. 59.
34.Ibid., p. 37.
35.Ibid., pp. 31-32.
36.Christianity and Evolution, p. 56.
37.Ibid., p. 69.
38.The Theology of Saint Paul, trans. John L. Stodd, 2 vols. (London and Dublin: Brown, Oates and Washbourne, 1945), Vol. I, p. 291.
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39.Ibid., p. 292.
40.Christianity and Evolution, pp. 157-58.
41.Writings in Time of War (London: Collins, 1973), p. 95.
42.Ibid., n. 4.
43.Ibid., p. 163.
44.Ibid., p. 95.
45.Ibid., p. 104.
46.Activation of Energy (London: Collins, 1970), p. 225.
47.Selected Writings on Contemplation, p. 228.
48.The Ladder of Perfection (trans, by L. Sherley-Price), I: 8.
49.The Life of Blessed Henry Suso by Himself, p. 227.
50.The Sparkling Stone: Chs. 10. 12.
51.E. A. Peers, Studies of the Spanish Mystics, I: 334.
52.The Hour of God (1959), pp. 31, 38-40.
53.Dougherty, op. cit., p. 100.
54.Ibid., p. 140.
55.Ibid.
56.Essays on the Gita, The Centenary Edition, Vol. 13, pp. 297-99, 303-05, 299.
57.Ibid., p. 301.
58.The Birth of the Messiah, p. 520.
59.Ibid., p. 519.
60.Ibid., p. 521.
61.Ibid.
62.Ibid., p. 340.
63.Ibid., p. 519.
64.The Birth of the Messiah, p. 520.
65.Ibid.
66.Ibid., p. 245: fn. 33.
67.Michael Ramsey, The Resurrection of Christ (Collins, Fontana Books, London, 1961), pp. 60-61.
68.Ibid., p. 61.
69.Rediscovering the Bible (Association Press, New York, 1951), p. 218.
70.Searching the Scriptures, p. 118.
71.The Man from Nazareth, pp. 16-17.
72.Barclay, The Plain Man Looks at the Apostles' Creed (Collins Fount Paperbacks, 1979), pp. 11-12.
73.The First Age of Christianity (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926), p. 209.
74.Searching the Scriptures (Image Books, New York, 1963), p. 133.
75.The Making of the New Testament (London: Williams and Norgate), pp. 126, 208.
76.The Jerusalem Bible, p. 20 of the Old Testament.
77.Ibid., p. 16 of The New Testament.
78.Pp. 62-3, fn. 104.
79.Ibid., p. 18 of The New Testament.
80.Ibid., p. 96.
81.The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, p. 41.
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82.Ibid., p.
83.Ibid., p.
84.Ibid., p. 62, fn. 104.
85.The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 415.
86.Ibid., pp. 413, 414.
87.Ibid., The Old Testament, p. 1239.
88.Quoted by Henry Emerson Fosdick, The Man from Nazareth (New York: Pocket Books, Inc., 1953), p. 118.
89.The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 16.
90.The Birth of the Messiah, p. 124.
91.Ibid., pp. 124-5.
92.Ibid., p. 125.
93.Ibid., p. 290.
94.The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 114.
95."Spirit Holy", Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, edited by James Hastings (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1954), Vol. XI, p. 795, col. 2.
96.Ibid., p. 792. col. 2.
97.The Plain Man Looks at the Apostles' Creed, pp. 83-84.
98.Ibid., p. 97.
99.Ibid., p.
100.Ibid., pp.
101.Ibid., p. 146.
102.The Gospel of St. Mark (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1972), Introduction, p. 21.
103.Ibid., p.
104.Ibid., p. 300.
105.Ibid., p.
106.Jesus in History: An Approach to the Study of the Gospels (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1977), p. 184.
107.The Jerusalem Bible, p.
108.The Birth of the Messiah, p.
109.The Jerusalem Bible, p.
110.[bid., p.
111.Ibid., col. l,h.
112.Ibid., p.
113.Richard Falkenberg, History of Modern Philosophy (Calcutta, 1953), pp. 471-2.
114.The Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. by Dagobert D. Runes (Jaico Books, Bombay, 1957), "Panentheism".
115.The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, p. 59.
116.Ibid., continuation on p. 87 of fn. 147.
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