Recommended article: Matthew Milliner's "The Tree of India"

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If you’re looking for something worth your while to read this evening, I urge you to click here and read Matthew Milliner’s latest article in Comment. The teaser line reads: “Can Hindu ‘non-duality’ rescue fragmented Western Christianity? I went to a famous Christian ashram—now run entirely by Indians—to find out.”

A snippet to whet the appetite:

From my conversations with the monks at Shantivanam, I detected not a uniform theological outlook but thoughtful ferment born from deep experience. The Hindu insight of non-duality is fashionable in advanced Christian theological discussions of late. David Bentley Hart, for example, frequently appeals to the Vedas and bookended his publication You Are Gods with epigraphic Sanskrit clips. Such a unitive vision promises deliverance from bifurcated Western categories that overplay the separation of nature and grace. While I applaud this maneuver, here at Shantivanam non-duality is not a theological appeal but a birthright. In his book Fully Human, Fully Divine, one of the brothers, John Martin Sahajananda, summarizes the wide-ranging discussions about non-duality over the centuries in Indian thought: there was the above-mentioned Sankara (eighth century), who preached pure non-duality (advaita); Ramanuja, who offered qualified non-duality (vishishtadavaita); and Madhva, who promoted a duality (dvaita) that many would see as more compatible with Christian and Jewish thought, where Creator and creation remain distinct. What makes Jesus original, according to John Martin, is that he did not choose between these schools but encapsulated all three: Sankara (“the Father and I are one”), Ramanuja (“I am in the Father and the Father is in me”), and Madhva (“my Father is greater than I”).

In his writings, John Martin leavens the gospel with the principles of non-duality but offers no slapdash equation of the soul with God. “The ‘I’ which says ‘God and I are one,’” he insists, “is not an individual ‘I’ or collective ‘I’ or universal ‘I’ but it is the divine ‘I.’” Offering a Christian commentary on the famous Hindu formula “Atman [i.e., the soul] is Brahman,” John Martin insists, “It is God [not the individual ego] who says I am Brahman.” I might not be willing to follow John Martin to all the radical conclusions that result from his Indianized Christianity, but one thing is clear: it is fathoms deeper than Eat, Pray, Love.

The Indian Catholics who now run Shantivanam have picked up where the European founders concluded, and they’ve learned some lessons along the way. One of the monks told me that even if a Christian ashram must be centred on Jesus, the late Bede Griffiths had (somewhat unwillingly) become a guru. This monk described to me Griffiths’s foibles without in any way maligning his character. The lesson was clear: keeping Jesus Christ, and not some other personality, at the centre takes serious work—the work of shunning celebrity and getting out of the way. This is the kind of labour that the current monks of Shantivanam seem eager to undertake. This insight, moreover, is materially expressed. It is fascinating to compare the marble statue of the guru Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) at his ashram in Tiruvannamalai, swarming with meditating Westerners, with the similar marble statue at Shantivanam of Jesus the guru, in the lotus pose of course.

In addition to this piece, I recommend Milliner’s other pieces in Comment, as well as his two excellent books, Mother of the Lamb: The Story of a Global Icon and The Everlasting People: G. K. Chesterton and the First Nations (Hansen Lectureship Series).