Advaita, Christianity and the Third Space

Plainly, to examine religious meeting with a clear focus, examples of such meeting are required, and preferably meeting that has produced a body of theological thought. The writings of two Benedictine monks, Abhishiktananda and Bede Griffiths, provide excellent material for such an examination, both producing appreciable bodies of theological reflection. They led, in turn, a Christian ashram in India in which interreligious conversation took place between Christianity and Advaita Vedanta, which is a major tradition of religious non-duality in Hinduism. In studying their writing, I have attempted to understand what was happening in the encounter between the two traditions. To do this, I used methods from comparative theology and postcolonial theory, the latter providing a way of looking at how cultures influence each other.

Obviously, a great deal is going on in a space in which two religious traditions are meeting. There is often anxiety about perceived threats to one’s own tradition, sometimes one tradition will try to import a notion wholesale from another tradition or mimic it, sometimes a middle ground will appear in which some sort of hybrid understanding will present itself, which owes something to both religions but does not quite belong to either. There can be anxiety about maintaining the integrity of one’s own tradition.

The notion of a ‘space’ of meeting is a central theme of this book, and theories developed around the concept of a ‘Third Space’, particularly those of Homi Bhabha, will be deployed, although much re-understood in the context of this study. Third Space theory proposes that when two cultures meet, usually in a colonial or post-colonial setting, there is a space of encounter between the two cultures, a Third Space, in which various processes take place. Probably the most obvious process is the formation of a hybridity which shares elements of both cultures but is distinct from them. This study is proposing that in the meeting between two religions, even in a situation in which vastly unequal institutional power is not a major factor in the meeting, elements of Third Space theory can be used to throw a light on the interplay between two religious systems.

The greater the extent to which two traditions are meeting in lives and practice the more applicable an approach which borrows postcolonial theory is likely to be. It is a group of theories about what happens ‘on the ground’, and how personal belief and allegiance are affected, rather than concerning itself only with conceptual expression. Also necessary, however, is a theology emerging out of the meeting which can be analysed to show what movements and processes are taking place.

The work of Abhishiktananda and Bede Griffiths, and the meeting of Christianity and Advaita in their lives and writings, provide an eminently suitable source of information for such an examination of this Third Space. Abhishiktananda and Bede Griffiths began their journey as ‘orthodox’ Christians. Advaita, with which they engaged, is considered to be the most prominent Brahminical tradition in Hinduism, and is concerned with the belief in the radical non-dualism existing between the supreme Being, human beings and, arguably, the world. As will become clear in the following pages, religious traditions are hybrid by nature and experience a mix of influences. Advaita is no exception and as seems most appropriate from the work of these two authors I will focus mainly on the ‘classic’ Advaita represented in the work of Śankara, whose thinking is represented throughout Advaita, while recognizing that there are many offshoots which there is not space to deal with in detail.

Abhishiktananda and Griffiths were prominent in the Christian Ashram movement in the second half of the twentieth century. Both were involved in the most well-known Christian ashram, Shantivanam. Their experience of the religion of India was highly immersive – they adopted the clothes of Indian religious, they used ancient Indian scripture in their Christian worship, and adopted aspects of Indian religious imagery. It is because of the depth of their involvement in these two religions and the extent to which they themselves occupied an in-between space which shared aspects of both Christianity and Advaita that their work has been chosen as an example of a Third Space of meeting.

Indian Christianity had also been deeply influenced during the colonial period, and that influence remained in Protestant and Roman Catholic traditions into post-colonial times. Had this book been about Indian Christianity, it would be entirely appropriate to deal more fully with the way in which the colonial period had led to a development of a Western-originated Christianity, distinct from the indigenous Syriac tradition, and how that developed into postcolonial influences upon the culture of India. However, Abhishiktananda and Griffiths almost completely omit the contemporary theology of Indian Christianity from their writing, ignoring, for example, Dalit theology. Their interest in indigenous Christianity is limited to Syriac texts, some of which they used in liturgy.