Toward an Alternative Theology: Confessions of a Non-dualist Christian: Sara Grant RCSJ’s contribution to Catholic Theological and Spiritual Encounter with Hinduism

Introduction

Sr. Sara Grant RCSJ (1922-2000) was by any reckoning a remarkable woman, who found in the encounter with Hinduism an answer to the deep spiritual yearnings that had troubled her since childhood, the relentless searching of the ‘Questing Beast’ as she would often describe herself. Grant made an important, though often overlooked, contribution to the wider Catholic encounter with Hinduism in the 20th century. She was an accomplished academic, engaged in the study of Hinduism, especially the Non-dualist (Advaita) Vedanta of Shankara. She was also a leading participant in the Christian immersion in the experience of Hindu spirituality found in the Christian ashramic movement. Grant managed to hold together the intellectual and experiential dimensions of the engagement, something that tended not to be the case in work and lives of many others. By so doing Grant might be said to have been the one who most completely fulfilled the project started at the beginning of the 20th century by Brahmabandhab Upadhyay (1861-1907), who had wanted to develop a Hindu Christianity expressed using the conceptual resources of Advaita Vedanta and lived in out in the spirituality of a Catholic-Hindu ashram.1

Grant was influenced profoundly by two pioneering figures in the Catholic encounter with Hinduism in this century. Her intellectual study was guided by and modelled on that of the Belgian Jesuit Richard de Smet (1918-1998), one of the ‘Calcutta School’ of Jesuit scholars who undertook serious and sympathetic study of the various religious traditions of India. De Smet, like Upadhyay, sought to identify common ground between Advaita Vedanta and Thomist Christianity. On the other hand, Grant’s experience of Hindu spirituality was shaped by her encounter with the French Benedictine Henri le Saux (1910-1973), better known as Swami Abhishiktananda, who founded the Saccidananda Ashram with Fr. Jules Monchanin (1895-1957) and who gave himself entirely to a deep immersion into Advaitic spirituality.2 De Smet and Abhishiktananda were poles apart in their engagement with Advaita, the one a brilliant theologian, the other a passionate contemplative. It was Grant who combined these two approaches to non-dualist Hinduism in her own life and work.

Grant was also an ardent and successful advocate of the significance of Hinduism for contemporary Christian theology and spirituality in Europe and America as well as in India. The Teape lectures, given in Cambridge in 1989 were subsequently published as a book, Toward an Alternative Theology: Confessions of a Non-Dualist Christian, from which the title of this article is taken as an apt summary of Grant’s work. The book is a fascinating theological autobiography and the fruit of many years of theological reflection and personal spiritual search. Grant calls on her fellow Christians to consider seriously the suggestion that they could learn something from Hinduism in addressing the challenges facing the Christian community in the modern world. The American theologian, Bradley Malkovsky, describes the book as a

1 The best account of this is given in Julius Lipner Brahmabandhab Upadhyay: The Life and thought of a Revolutionary (Delhi:Oxford University Press, 1999).2 The contrasting approaches of these two pioneering figures has been explored by Bradley Malkovsky (1999) ‘Advaita Vedanta and Christian Faith’ in Journal of Ecumencial Studies Vol XXXVI, pp.397-422

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contribution to a new genre of literature that developed from the 1960s, the ‘blending of Christian theological reflection with firsthand experience of Hinduism,’ in which there is a tendency toward a ‘greater appreciation of not only the challenge, but also the enrichment offered to Christian thought by the world’s third largest religion.’3 And it was Grant’s ability to hold together the intellectual and experiential sides of her own encounter with Hinduism that enabled her to convey this challenge and enrichment with particular force and clarity.

1. The Confesssions of a Non-Dualist Christian: The Life of Sara Grant. 4

Born in 1922, Sara Grant’s connection with the Sisters of the Sacred Heart began early, being sent to school at Sacred Heart Convents, first at Roehampton and then at Hove. Looking back at her childhood she sensed that she was a non-dualist from birth, experiencing from early on the ‘presence as well as the absence of God in all things’ and aware of the ‘transcendence-in-immanence’ of the divine in the world and of the ineffability of the divine Mystery.’5

In 1941, just a year after leaving school, she entered the novitiate of the Society, then at Kinross House on Loch Leven, Scotland. The entry of the ‘Questing Beast’ into the life of a religious congregation founded in the 19th century and dominated by a very pre-Vatican II spirituality and discipline was, however, far from easy. She recounts her unhappiness at the apparent dualism entrenched in Christian theology and spirituality, with its enthusiasm for upright moral behaviour and devotion to the person of Jesus, but its fear of personal experience and mysticism. Her disquiet was directed especially at the constitutions of the Society, which promoted the worship of the Sacred Heart of Jesus as the ‘end which all those who become members must propose for themselves.’ Grant’s reaction was hardly in keeping with the religious docility expected at the time. As she says:

This it seemed to me I could never do: how could anything be an end of my life but the immense and unfathomable Mystery who was not only my Beginning and End, the Source without a source, but also the Origin and End of Jesus himself as Word made flesh?6

Grant did, however, find a kindred spirit in the person of her novice mistress, Margaret Shepherd, who was herself a mystic and also felt the even the incarnation of Jesus had to be a means rather than an end in itself.7 Grant also found nourishment in reading the work of Thomas Aquinas, in which, she says, she ‘dimly apprehended the non-dual intuition underlying the immense and orderly detail of Thomas’ exposition

3 Sara Grant RSCJ, Toward an Alternative Theology: Confessions of a Non-Dualist Christian, edited with an introduction by Bradley J. Malkovsky. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), p. ix. It was first published in 1991 (Bangalore: Asian trading Corporation).4 Apart from the Teape lectures, Grant’s published work includes The Lord of the Dance, (Bangalore: Asian Trading Corporation, 1987), Descent to the Source, (Bangalore: Asian Trading Corporation, 1987) and Sankaracarya’s Concept of Relation, (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1999); also, ‘Christian Theologizing and the Challenge of Advaita,’ in ed M.Amaladoss et al., Theologizing in India (Bangalore: Bangalore Theological Publications, 1981), ‘The Contemporary Relevance of the Advaita of Sankaracarya’ in ed. Bradley Malkovsky, New Perspectives on Advaita Vedanta (Leiden: Brill, 2000)5 Grant (2002), 76 Grant (2002), 157 Grant (2002), 15

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of Christian theology.’8 In particular, she was delighted by the apophatic theology she found in his commentary on Pseudo-Denys and, as she puts it, ‘ the Questing Beast, still very much alive, fell upon them ravenously.’ She found the following words of Aquinas especially striking: in fine nostrae cognitationis, Deum tamquam ignotum congnoscimus – Deo tamquam omnino ignoto conjungimur.9

Having struggled on against the odds through the novitiate, she was sent to study Greats at Oxford. Grant remained deeply troubled by the Society’s spirituality, whose ‘forms of expression’ she says, ‘were too alien to me and raised the problem of the apparent absolutizing of Jesus as an object of devotion in a way that seemed to underplay the mystery of the Godhead in its ultimate transcendence.’10 Still struggling on, after Oxford Grant was sent to teach at her old school, doing a part-time degree in theology at the same time. Her tutor, Fr Cedric Hardwick, impressed her with words that were to define her own encounter with Advaita in later years, telling her:

There are two ways of knowing God – theological study and contemplative prayer, and the more we give ourselves to theological study the more God gives himself to us in contemplative prayer.11

Despite her happiness at the school the Questing Beast stirred once again six years later and she felt motivated to volunteer to go to Brazil, only to be told that she was to go to India instead; a prospect that filled her with the deepest horror at the time.

Arriving in India in 1956, she began an academic and teaching career that was to last for the rest of her life. Grant was immediately made head of the philosophy department at Sophia College for Women in Bombay, run by the Society. Given the task of teaching Indian philosophy, she was expected to teach Advaita (Non-dualism) from textbooks prescribed for the course. Her initial reaction to the greatest teacher of Advaita, Shankara, was mixed:

I and my students found Sankara’s thought as there presented thoroughly mystifying, but it was clear that there was here some very profound and exciting intuition. 12

In these books she found Shankara depicted as a ‘world-negating pessimist,’ so that his account was completely incompatible with Christianity’s doctrine of creation. Moreover, Grant was none too impressed by the monthly publication she received from the ashram of Sri Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950), whom later she would come to regard as, ‘ the greatest Advaitin of modern times.’13 In those early years, however, she tore the publications up and discarded them as soon as she received them.

Her perplexity about what to make of Shankara did, however, prompt her to choose Shankara as the research topic, when asked to do doctoral studies ten years later. It was at this point that Grant began to discover in Shankara the echo and confirmation of her own non-dualist inklings. Uncertain about how to proceed with her studies, 8 Grant (2002), 169 At the end of all our knowing, we know God as unknown:we are united to God as something wholly unknown Grant (2002), 17. 10 Grant (2002), 2011 Grant (200), 2112 Grant (2002), 2713 Grant (2002), 23

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Grant consulted Fr. Richard de Smet, then teaching at De Nobili College, Pune. He encouraged her to study Shankara’s concept of relation and to compare it with that found in the work of Thomas Aquinas. De Smet was to become the unofficial supervisor of her thesis and her life-long academic colleague. As she embarked on this study she was also impressed by the comment of another Jesuit, Fr. Julian Bayart, who told her ‘never to forget that Shankara was primarily teaching not a philosophy of being, but a way of salvation through knowledge.’14 At the same time, she encountered Swami Abhishiktananda in his person and through his work, an encounter that she describes as ‘epoch-making.’15

Another phase of her encounter with Hinduism began in 1972, when she volunteered to join the Christa Prema Seva Ashram in Pune, which had just restarted as an ecumenical venture for women, jointly run by members of the Society of the Sacred Heart from Sophia College and sisters from the Anglican community of St May the Virgin, from Panch, Howd.16 Grant became the co-head (acarya) of the ashram until 1992.17 The ashram was the context in which she able to live out the deepening insights of her theological and spiritual encounter with Advaita and other Hindu traditions. What Grant found in Shankara was the idea that theology ought to be a process of coming to know the Supreme Reality, which integrates intellectual reflection with spiritual experience and moral development, something that required the total commitment as well as the transformation of the one pursuing it.18 Such a model of theology accorded well with her own approach as she combined an academic career with life in the ashram centred on community living, prayer and hospitality.

2. Theology and Spiritual Experience: the Influence of Fr. Richard de Smet and Swami Abhishiktananda.

2.1: Richard de Smet

Shankara and Advaita Vedanta had been the central focus of de Smet’s own pioneering and influential work since coming to India in 1946. His doctoral dissertation was on The Theological Method of Sankara19 in which he argues that Shankara should be seen as primarily a theologian and scriptural exegete, rather than 14 Grant (2002), 3215 Grant (2002), 2916 The Ashram had originally been founded in 1929 by the Anglican Father Jack Winslow for men. For her own account of the ashram see Sara Grant, ‘Reflections on Hindu-Christian Dialogue in an Ashramic Context,’ in Lord of the Dance and Other Papers (1987), pp. 107-128. On this and other ashrams see also the work of another founding member of the ashram, Sr Vandana Gurus, Ashrams and Christians (London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd, 1978), especially pp.72-77. 17 Eventually, Grant and the other Sacred Heart sisters left the ashram in 1996, when it came under threat of closure, as Charlie Pye-Smith Rebels and Outcasts: a Journey Through Christian Indian (London: Penguin, 1998) p. 71.18 In Shankara’s Vedanta the final human goal is the knowledge of the Supreme Being, Brahman. The one who desires to know Brahman undertakes study of and meditation on the Upanishads, the sacred texts that reveal Brahman, under the guidance of a guru, leading gradually to the individual’s own realisation of the reality they point to. Such a process can only take place if the person is well-disposed attitudinally and ethically for such a realisation, free from attachment to anything else. For an excellent and accessible account of the process of learning involved in Shankara’s Vedanta see J.G. Suthren Hirst, Samkara’s Advaita Vedanta: a Way of teaching (Abingdon: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005)19Richard de Smet The Theological Method of Sankara. (Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, 1953)

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as a philosopher in the modern Western sense of the term, something that became common in the modern period. De Smet also argued for the recognition of fundamental common ground between the Christian account found in Aquinas and the non-dualism of the Vedanta of Shankara.20 He advised Grant to study Shankara’s concept of relation, in particular the relation between the Supreme Reality, Brahman, and the world, because he felt it to be the key to understanding Shankara’s work.21 He also suggested she compare it with Aquinas, since he thought the two accounts to be fundamentally similar, but no longer had the time to pursue this himself. Grant took up his suggestions concerning a thesis topic and her doctoral thesis was a detailed and painstaking account of Shankara’s own work set in comparison with the Thomist account of relations.22 As a result of de Smet’s influence and her own study, she came, like him, to reject the common description of Shankara as a ‘world-negating pessimist.’ Instead, she argued that Shankara affirms the reality of the world as dependent on the Supreme Reality, Brahman.

This stood in marked contrast to what had become a standard understanding of Advaita in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, according to which Advaita teaches ‘acosmic illusionism’ or the idea that the world is ultimately not real, but illusory in nature. A fundamental feature of Advaita is a distinction between between two levels of reality, the paramarthika-satya or ultimate reality and the vyavaharika –satya, the practical reality. Only the Supreme Reality, Brahman is ultimately real. The material world as we experience it, is practically real. According to the standard understanding, Advavita teaches that this is an illusion, created from ignorance. The finite self (atman), the spiritual core of any individual man or woman, is real but identical with Brahman, and the idea that there are many different finite selves is also a product of ignorance. Hence the description ‘acosmic illusionism.’ It is on this basis that Shankara could be characterised as a ‘world-negating pessimist.’ 23

De Smet’s own interpretation of Shankara was part of a distinctive Catholic re-reading of Advaita that developed in the 20th century and proved very important in the attempt to develop an Indian expression of Christian faith. Upadhyay had early on sought to establish that there were convergences between Advaita and the Thomist account, but his work was often little more than just an assimilation of Advaita into Thomas terms, rather than a demonstration that the two accounts were actually similar.24 It was Richard de Smet, who developed Upadhyay’s project in greater detail and sophistication. For de Smet this involved distinguishing Shankara’s teaching from that of the later Advaitic tradition. Shankara, taken by himself, he argued, is a realist, who wants to affirm the unconditional contingency of the world, rather than its illusory nature. Shankara and Aquinas are both trying to express a unique relationship of total dependence. Aquinas articulates this through his doctrine

20 For example, de Smet ‘Sankara and Aquinas on Creation’ in The Indian Philosophical Annual 6 197021 Grant (2002), 3222 Eventually published as Sankaracaraya’s Concept of Relation (1999)23 For a more detailed examination of how and why this came to be the view of Western scholarship see Wilhelm Halbfass (1981). India and Europe: an Essay in Understanding. Albany, NY: SUNY Press; and Richard King (1999). Orientalism and religion: Postcolonial theory, India and the “The Mystic East.” London: Routlege24 Julius Lipner (1999). Brahmabandhab Upadhyay: the Life and Thought of a Revolutionary, Delhi: OUP, especially pp. 267-271

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of creation and the language of uncreated and participated being, while Shankara expresses through his doctrine of non-dualism and the language of ultimately and practically real. It is here that Shankara uses negative language that seems to downplay the reality of the world. Shankara is, de Smet argued:

a radical valuationist who measures everything to the absolute Value, the Brahman, and declares its inequality to it rather than the degree of its participation of it. This manner of thinking and speaking is legitimate but it has misled many into acosmic interpretations of his doctrine.25

Grant took up and further articulated this approach in her doctoral studies on the concept of relation in Shankara. A central feature of her account is to argue for a realist interpretation of certain key terms in Shankara’s account. The standard account of Advaita maintains that the key terms, tadatmya (having its self in that) and ananyatva (not being other than), which Shankara uses to describe the relationship between the world and the Supreme Reality, Brahman, are meant to denote strict identity. The only way such identity can be true is if the world is finally unreal, revealing the pure identity of Brahman, the only reality. Grant, however, argued that these terms teach that there is a ‘unity–in-dependence,’ between the world and Brahman. The world has ‘its self,’ its causal basis, in Brahman and is ‘not other than’ Brahman, on whom it depends at all times. For Grant, any talk in Shankara of the non-reality of world has to be understood in the light of this relationship. Thus, when Shankara says that the knowledge of Brahman brings about the annihilation of the world, this means the destruction of our ordinary perception of the world as existing independently, rather than the realisation of the unreality of the world as such:

The annihilation of the phenomenal world is epistemological not metaphysical. It involves not the physical destruction of the world, but the destruction of the illusion that the world of namarupa is real in the sense of ‘ultimately real.’ 26

Moreover, when Shankara says that the finite self comes to know itself as nothing other than the Supreme Reality, Brahman, this expresses the overwhelming experience of its dependence and relative non-being, not necessarily the loss of its individuality. She describes this as:

the finite self-awareness ‘exploding’ so to speak into awareness of [Brahman] the Supreme Self, as ultimately the only Existent’ - the direct metaphysical experience of contingency qua contingency and in and through that experience the equally immediate… experience of absolute Existence27

If we read Shankara this way, he and Aquinas are fundamentally in agreement. They both reject the idea that the world has any independence of being or, in more Advaitic terms, would state the non-being of anything that does not depend on God. As Grant puts it, both could endorse the sentiment of the 14th western mystic, ‘He is thy being, but thou art not his being.’28

However, for Grant what is especially attractive about Shankara’s account was not that it turns out to be fundamentally similar to that of Aquinas, but that it expresses the creational relationship in a distinctive manner in its own right as Advaita Vedanta. In her opinion Shankara is even more successful than Aquinas in expressing what is 25 Quoted from Malkovsky p16.26 Grant (1999), 7127 Grant (1999), 7128 Grant (2002), 42

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fundamental and unique in the relation between the world and God: its non-duality. The world is not other than God. It is not separate from God. Shankara’s thought echoed and confirmed Grant’s own deep intuition of the ‘transcendence –in-immanence’ of the divine in the world. At the end of her study of Shankara’s concept of relation, she argues that his account has thus something of unique value to offer to all people in relating the ‘realm of the spirit and the realm of ordinary life’:

The radical non-dualism of Shankaracarya, understood as I have interpreted it, could be of greatest assistance here, for of all the metaphysical ventures of man, it alone, it seems to me, does full justice to both the immanence of the creator and his absolute transcendence, to the creature’s utter contingency and its paradoxical autonomy.29

As an integral part of this non-dual account, Grant was deeply attracted by Shankara’s Vedantic description of Brahman as the Supreme Self, the Supreme Subject within all things and intimately present in all, rather than as the Supreme Object, outside of all things, the ‘God up there’ or ‘out there’ as she would label it, which many forms of Christian theology and spirituality seemed to uphold in a dualist manner that she found so difficult to accept.

De Smet, then, motivated Grant to pursue an intellectual encounter with Advaita Vedanta in the form of Shankara and she furthered the Catholic reading of Advaita as compatible with the realist metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas. She continued de Smet’s own study of Shankara as her doctoral thesis manifests. As such her work remains an important part of this distinctive Christian approach to Vedanta in the 20th century. However, Grant’s own engagement with Hinduism was far more experiential and personal than that of de Smet. De Smet was primarily an academic and teacher, whose interest in Shankara was conceptual. Grant, on the other hand, found in Shankara and Advaita the answer to her own deepest spiritual yearnings. And it was here that her encounter with Hinduism resonated with that of Swami Abhishiktananda.

2.2: Swami Abhishiktananda

Grant leaves us in no doubt about the impact Swami Abhishiktananda had on her. ‘This encounter,’ she says, ‘with non-dualism through the person of Swamiji hit me like a bomb.’30 In particular she was impressed by his presentation of Sri Ramana Maharshi in Sagesse Hindoue, Mystique Chrétienne. 31 As she goes on to comment:

What had struck me as alien and somehow as repulsive when Ramana Maharshi first appeared upon my desk I now recognised as insidiously and dangerously connatural, rousing all the old craving for an absolute and ultimate unity which would justify the realtivising of all conceptualisations. I could not see how to argue with this enemy within the gates, so large a part of me insistently affirmed its truth.32

29 Grant (1999), 19230 Grant (2002), 3131 Abhishiktananda (1965). This was later translated into English and reissued as Saccidananda: a Christian Approach to Advaitic Experience (1974) Delhi: ISPCK. Grant herself translated another work by Abhishiktananda, La rencontre de l’Hinduisme et du Christianisme, as Hindu-Christian Meeting Point – within the cave of the Heart (1969) Bombay: Examiner’s press. Grant recalls the deep impression Abhishiktananda has on her in ‘Swamiji –The Man’ in Grant (1987), 57-6632 Grant (2002), 31

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For his part, Abhishiktananda had entered into a deep and all consuming personal engagement with Advaitic spirituality, informed by his own reading of the Upanishads, the foundational revealed texts for Vedanta, and his personal encounter with Ramana Maharshi, rather than by the work of Shankara. Towards the end of his life he reported studying Shankara as he struggled to finish his own commentary on the Upanishads, but he did not feel that Shankara had much to offer him:

Shankara is not much help; it is as if one were to look for the Council of Trent in the words of the Gospel.33

This brief comment tells us much about Abhishiktananda’s approach and how different it was from the theological project of de Smet and Grant. Abhishiktananda was distrustful of any conceptual or philosophical approach to Advaita by Christians, as well as of any philosophical Advaitic system developed by Hindus, even the great Advaitin Shankara himself. For Abhishiktananda it was the experiential and existential engagement that was valuable, the encounter with Advaita through immersion into the ‘interiority of Hindu spirituality,’ carried out in ‘within the Cave of the Heart.’ 34

His criticism of his fellow monk and co-founder of Saccidananda Ashram, Jules Monchanin, was that he was ‘too Greek,’ too committed to the conceptual theology of the sort found in the work of Thomas Aquinas. Abhishiktananda saw this as resulting in Monchanin’s inability to reach any reconciliation between Christianity and Vedanta:

J. Monchanin, in his last year, became more and more sceptical about the possibility of a harmony between Vedanta and Christianity; and failing to see once more the disappearance of his faith in Greek rationalism which with difficultly he had recovered, preferred to give up Vedanta.35

Abhishiktananda opposed the involvement of those, like de Smet, who approached Vedanta philosophically, when he organised the famous ‘Cuttat Group’ for the Swiss ambassador J-A Cuttat as a context for the meeting of Christian and Hindu spirituality. He was aggrieved when they were included in later meetings. 36

Grant kept in contact with Abhishiktananda and her admiration for him never declined. He came to the Christa Prema Seva Ashram in the first month of its refounding to advise the sisters on how to proceed. However, he made clear his doubts about the value of her own efforts to engage with Shankara:

I hardly share your optimism about Christian theologizing, starting from Shankara. Perhaps it is possible at the level of Upanishadic flashes? I can only feel questions now. Yet we have to try to discover at an angle through which a path may open.37

33 James Stuart (1995 Revised ed.). Swami Abhishiktananda: His life told through his letters Delhi:ISPCK, p. 27334 Refs35 Stuart (1995), 24136 Stuart (1995), 144. As Malkovsky comments, it is difficult to know precisely what Abhishiktananda thought of Richard de Smet because he never refers to him. Malkovsky (1999), 41637 Stuart (1995), 244

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Grant clearly had much in common with Abhishiktananda. Like him, she always maintained the importance of religious experience, not least against what she saw as an overemphasis on external religion in the Christianity she had been brought up in. She lived out a deep personal engagement with Hindu spirituality in her many years at the Christa Prema Seva Ashram. It was, however, her abiding commitment to the value of theology, Christian and Hindu, that made her encounter with Advaita so different from that of Abhishiktananda. Because of this she was able to avoid the tension that Abhishiktananda felt between his immersion in Advaitic experience and the doctrines of his Christian faith. Grant was able to integrate them in a way that eluded Abhishiktananda more and more as time went on.

For Abhishiktananda Christians and Hindus could meet one another within the Advaitic experience, not on the level of doctrines or concepts which only created obstacles to such encounter.38 Abhishiktananda came to think it inevitable that Christianity, when translated into Vedantic terms, would turn out to be just another religion on the lower level of practical reality (vyavaharika-satya), to be superseded by the experience of the non-dual ultimate reality. Christian theology and traditional religion of any sort would seem to be only a path or means to enable us to reach that ultimate experience.39 The primacy of the Advaitic experience itself was forcefully expressed in the more radical statements made in his final years after his heart attack at Rishikesh in 1973. His final attitude towards Christ and the formulations of Christology make this clear. For Abhishiktananda the fundamental reality and importance of Christ is as one who fully manifests the core Advaitic reality of ‘I am.’ The he individual realisation of this same reality is the point at which Christian religion ceases to be important:

The discovery of Christ’s I AM is the ruin of any Christian theology, for all notions are burnt within the fire of experience. .. I feel too much, more and more, the blazing fire of this I AM, in which all notions about Christ’s personality, ontology, history etc have disappeared. And I find his real mystery shining in every awakening man, in every mythos. 40

In an essay on Abhishiktananda, ‘Swamiji-the Man,’ Grant comments on the pain that Abhishiktananda experienced as he wrestled with the implications of the Advaitic experience for himself:

It is certain, however, that the most searching suffering of all came from within his own spirit, faced by the terrible challenge of the radical interiority and transcendence of the Advaitic tradition which can, and perhaps must..appear to threaten the very foundations of the traditional interpretation of the Christian mystery, the reality, uniqueness and permanent significance of the incarnation and the very being of Christ, so totally does it seem to relativize not only the Hebraeo-Christian cultural and spiritual traditions, but also the whole created order in which the incarnation is necessarily rooted. 41

In his earlier work, Sagesse, Abhiskiktananda had attempted to show how the Advaitic experience might find its fulfilment in Christian faith in God and Christ. As he came to the end of his life, however, it was really the Advaitic experience of a non-dual ultimate reality (paramarthika-satya) that was the fulfilment of Christian faith.42

38 e.g. Abhishiktananda (1969), 105-6. This is the main point Grant brings this out in her translator’s note to this work (1969), vi-viii39 e.g. Stuart (1995), 246ff40 Stuart (1995), 31141 Grant (1987), pp 60-61

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Grant, like Abhishiktananda, had from her early years been unable to accept any absolutising of Christian religious practice or doctrines, even the Incarnation, as ends in themselves over against the final mystery of God. She records that after her early encounter with Abhishiktananda she likewise:

was completely overwhelmed by a sense of ultimate reality which seemed to relativize everything – all names and forms,’ in the traditional Hindu phrase, all images and concepts, all myths and symbols.43

However, despite an empathy with Abhishiktananda rooted in her own life-long search, Grant was far more able to accommodate the theological and doctrinal dimensions of traditional Christian faith as a result of her own study of Aquinas and Shankara. She was able to hold on to the abiding salvific significance of the humanity of Christ, while affirming the Advaitic distinction between ultimate (paramarthika) and practical (vyavaharika) reality.

In her Teape lectures, Grant argues that Advaita and the traditional Christian understanding of the Incarnation can be reconciled. She notes Gispert-Sauch’s review of Swami Abhishiktananda:His Life Told Through His Letters, in which he had raised the question of whether Advaita inevitably undermines the value of the Resurrection and rejects the implication that through it history itself has been redeemed and ennobled, since in Advaita all these things belong to the vyavaharika world and are transcended in the experience of the paramarthika. In answer to this Grant argues that Advaita is compatible with Christian faith and Advaita. And it is her theological reading of Shankara as a realist that makes this possible. The vyavharika, or created order is totally dependent on the paramarthika, but this does not mean it is unreal or lacking in value in itself. Jesus, in his humanity, in his life, death and resurrection, perfectly realises the fundamental relationship of dependence that characterises creation as a whole. For Abhishiktananda, Jesus is the one who manifests the fullness of the Advaitic experience, the ‘I am,’ and his humanity ultimately has no abiding significance. For Grant, on the other hand, to say that Jesus is ‘fully God and fully man’ means both that he communicates God fully to human beings in his humanity and that he manifests the total dependence of humanity on God:

We obviously have here a particular and privileged instance of the relationship established by the primordial act of creation. There was in the man Jesus no tendency at all to claim a false autonomy, no shadow of avidya: ‘First-born among many brethren,’ ‘like us in all things but sin,’ he could say with a depth of truth no other man could ever claim: ‘he who sees me sees the Father.’ 44

In his resurrected humanity Jesus brings to fulfilment the overcoming of the false sense of autonomy that characterises human history and manifests the proper dependence that all things have on God and which other human beings will realise themselves:

Its sudden manifestation, whether to individuals at the their time of ‘passing away from this world to the father,’ or at the ‘end of the ages’ when ‘ the Lord hands back the kingdom to the Father and God will be all in all,’ would seem to me to provide a perfectly adequate form of consummation for the universe which came into being in and through the Word, and finds its fulfilment in and through him

42 Abhishiktananda expressed his dissatisfaction with the relationship he had worked out in Sagesse as he prepared the English translation, in his letters and in his preface to the book. Stuart (1995). 43 (Brill: 149). 44 Grant (2002), 83; for a similar discussion see ‘Lord of the Dance’ in Grant (1987), pp 187-197.

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by dying to the impulse to a false and self-destructive autonomy in the centripetal movement of the sacrificial return to the Source. 45

It is because Grant has the resources the distinctive Catholic reading of Shankara she worked out with the help of de Smet that she is able to hold onto the value of the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ. Grant’s concern to hold together the experiential and intellectual aspects of her own encounter with Hinduism and to hold together what she learned from both Swami Abhishitananda and de Smet, was integral to what she had to say about Hinduism’s contribution to the wider needs of Christian theology as done outside of India.46

3. Towards an Alternative Theology: Grant and the Challenge of Advaita for Christian theology

As Malkovsky states, part of Grant’s contribution to Catholic encounter with Hinduism was to encourage a ‘greater appreciation of not only the challenge, but also the enrichment offered to Christian thought by the world’s third largest religion.’47 The idea that Hinduism (along with other religions) might have something of value to offer for the doing of Christian theology globally represents an aspect of Catholic reflection that has only come to prominence from the second half of the twentieth century. In her Teape lectures, Grant identifies three ways in which the Advaita of the Upanishads and Shankara might challenge contemporary Christian theology, ways in which Advaita had answered her own spiritual and theological quest and where she had shared many insights with Swami Abhishiktananda and de Smet.

First, she argues, Advaita challenges Christian theologians to resist the idea that theology can be done as a purely academic subject.48 In Shankara’s Vedanta, knowledge of the Supreme Reality, Brahman, only comes about as the result of a process that involves the whole person.49 The one who desires knowledge of Brahman must be suitably disposed in manner of life as well as intellectually and then must pursue the path of gradual realisation of the truth, which is revealed in the scriptures, guided by a suitable teacher. Theology for Shankara is a practical and holistic discipline, a process of becoming, not merely one of learning. Advaita challenges the tendency for Christian theology to become like any other academic study:

45 Grant (2002), 92-346 Grant is closer here to the third founding figure of Saccidananda Ashram, Fr. Bede Griffiths. Griffiths likewise developed a Christian form of non-dualism, drawing on his own spiritual longings and intuitions from childhood. Initially Griffiths was very critical of Hindu Advaita as incompatible with the Christian non-dualism he espoused, but came to a more sympathetic view of Shankara through encounter with de Smet and Grant. For Griffiths Abhishiktanada went too far in his immersion in Advaitic experience. Instead Griffiths held on to the validity of religious traditions and their formulations as symbolic disclosures of ultimate reality. Judson Trapnell, Chapter 8, n.1. See account of Shankara and Aquinas in ‘Christianity and Vedanta.’ 47 Sara Grant RSCJ, Toward an Alternative Theology: Confessions of a Non-Dualist Christian, edited with an introduction by Bradley J. Malkovsky. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), p. ix.48 Grant (1982). 49 Eg The Thousand teachings, prerequisites for study of Vedanta.

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By its uncompromising insistence and spelling out in detail of the demands the theological quest makes on a human being; one cannot “do” theology as one may “do” mathematics or history or any other branch of academic study. Unless our value systems are in harmony with the demands of the Truth we are pursuing, we cannot hope for real enlightenment.50

From early on Grant herself insisted on the centrality of personal experience in theological enquiry, not least as an authority for the judgment of theological truth alongside doctrinal tradition.51 It was the experiential path of encounter with Advaita that Abhishiktananda pursued and which Grant felt herself compelled to follow in the course of her life. In the light of Advaita she came to think of authentic theologising as always rooted in the personal contemplation and moral development of the theologian.52 For Grant this model of theologising was in any case that found in classical Christian theology in the Eastern and Western traditions.

Second, Advaita challenges Christian theologians to affirm that the divine reality remains a transcendent mystery, beyond any conceptualisation:

By the apophatic character of advaitic teaching about the Supreme, a dimension which has been heavily overlaid in Christian tradition in recent centuries and yet appeals so strongly to modern man, starved of transcendence and mystery...[that] might stem the tide of disillusionment created by taking for granted, as still sufficient for us today, the myths and symbols which satisfied older and less scientifically sophisticated generations.53

Again this is where her own spiritual quest and that of Abhishiktananda had much in common. We have seen that from her early years Grant sensed that the transcendent divine mystery was beyond the traditional formulations and devotions of Christianity and which she felt were often made ends in themselves. From her early years in the Society Grant was taken with Aquinas’ phrase, ‘At the end of all our knowing, we know God as unknown:we are united to God as something wholly unknown.’ In her encounter with Advaita this was echoed and re-enforced by an Upanishadic text, ‘That from which speech turns back, together with the mind, unable to reach it’54 Advaita’s apophatic approach, she argues, is especially helpful to contemporary people, faced by many different viewpoints, and uneasy with exclusive claims or the identification of the mystery with any particular doctrinal formulation.

For Grant Shankara’s Advaita theology provides a good way of reconciling different religious traditions and points of view, without excluding the value of the doctrines and theologies that express them. Such formulations are relativised against the transcendent mystery of the divine, but not excluded. Reflecting on her many years of meeting with people of different traditions and of reading the Christian and Hindu scriptures together in her ashram, she comments that:

50 Grant (2002), p.5451 Grant (2002), p. 6052 Grant (1982), p. 7953 Grant (2002), p.5554 Taittiriya Upanishad, 2.4.1

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Shankara’s approach provides an excellent basis for unself-conscious sharing of insights across boundaries of race, nationhood and belief, often making it possible to reconcile different points of view not by cancelling one or the other out, but by transcending both in a fuller synthesis. 55

Third, and most important, Advaita challenges Christian theologians to recognise the non-duality of the relationship between God and the world and to be open to the type of expression found in Advaita. As Grant says:

By the Copernican revolution which would be brought about in our theological expression of our faith if we adopted as our basis the experience of “God” as the immanent yet transcendent Self instead of the “God up there” or ‘out there” of traditional imagery, to whom contemporary man finds it increasingly hard to relate. We have to face the fact that acceptance of either a heaven or a God “up there” is no longer culturally or theologically possible.56

This third aspect is what she and de Smet found so richly expressed in the Vedantic theology of Shankara. This was for Grant the inkling that she had had from childhood and which she found expressed best of all in Advaita, that the divine is immanent in all things and that the divine reality is the Supreme Subject, not the Supreme Object. Grant finds the Advaitic perspective encapsulated in the saying of the medieval Hindu saint Sadashiva, for whom worship of God, as if exterior and other, was impossible, and who said, ‘I can find no corner within my heart where I may take my stand to worship him, ‘for in every ‘I’ which I attempt to utter, his ‘I’ is already glowing.’57 For Grant the non-dual relationship of Creator and creation is more clearly expressed in Shankara than any other account and so represents the unique contribution of Advaita to Christian theology.

Conclusion

Grant’s presentation of Shankara’s non-dualism and of what it might have to offer for Christian reflection has no gone unnoticed, largely thanks to the exposure she received through her Teape lectures. In a number of articles on the doctrine of creation in Western scholastic thought the contemporary American Thomist David Burrell acknowledges after hearing Grant that the non-dualism of the sort taught by Shankara can help Christian theological accounts of creation get out of what has remained an abiding problem: that to avoid pantheism they tend to make God separate from his creation in a dualist manner. As he comments:

Indeed it is to avoid such infelicities of imagination that Sara Gant has recourse to Sankara’s sophisticated notion of ‘non-duality’: to call our attention in an arresting way to the utter uniqueness of ‘the distinction’ which must indeed hold between creator and creation, but cannot be pictured in any contrastive manner.58

That it was about Grant’s work that Burrell makes this comment makes the nature of her contribution clear. Burrell could never have made this comment about Abhishiktananda whose particular journey into Advaitic experience ended up with him rejecting theology altogether rather than its enrichment. De Smet, on the other

55 Brill:157

56 Grant (2002), p. 5657 Grant (2002), p.6258 Burrell, p.40

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hand, was certainly concerned for theology, but mainly with how Christianity in India might be expressed in Vedantic terms and how to get Hindu Advaitins to take Christianity more seriously. It was Grant who succeeded in combining experience with theology and who found in Advaita something that all Christians everywhere might learn from.

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