This is a transcript of a talk given by Fr Bede at Shantivanam on 3rd April 1984. The transcript was made by the late Elizabeth Hayes, a Sangha member from Worthing. It was first published in the Sangha Newsletter in September 2004.
We have followed the growth of understanding of God from the ground and origin of all things and from the Power behind the universe, to the wisdom and intelligence and then, finally, the understanding of God as love and compassion which develops in the later forms of religion. Particularly in the Hebrew tradition we have seen the moral conception of God’s supreme holiness and righteousness, and sometimes God as mercy and love.
Now we want to go on to think of the personal aspect of God. From the earliest times God is conceived in a personal manner that this is natural in one sense of course, because man sees the world in his own image to a large extent, for the way we see the world depends on the structure of our own mind. And it is very interesting, you know, to look back and realise that human beings saw the world in a very different way to or three thousand years ago. You see, we only have to reflect on all ancient religions that they were habitually communicating with God’s and Goddesses; the whole world was peopled with Gods. It is an extraordinary thing, you see. And what has happened in the last three hundred years or so is that we have been gradually educated in this rational system of mind, which has developed to its fullest extent in the 20th century. We now see the whole world though this way of thinking – they call it a cultural grid – in which we see the world in rational scientific terms. From infancy or from a very early age, we develop our outlook from the language that we use and the culture which we inherit. Now we have practically lost the capacity to see the world in terms of God’s and spirits, but before this, and in India until recent times, in fact in many parts of India still today, people live in the world of the god’s and this is just as real as our world.
We have simply composed a picture of the world, in our rational system, which is structured in the form of earth and trees, plants and animals and man. Earlier people did no see or experience in this way at all; they experienced it as powers surrounding them. And these powers normally took a personal form, you see. Take Agni, the God of fire. The fire leaps up, you see, you light sticks and this God leaps up, this flaming God, with his tremendous power. He can burn up the whole forest. It is the same with the wind; this power suddenly sweeps down upon you. We have this echoed in the Psalms; for instance. Psalm 29 contains a wonderful description of a thunderstorm, with the voice of the Lord, breaking the cedars of Lebanon, and so on. So they were surrounded by these powers.
The concept of God is originally of a power, Sakti, that acts on the universe. The power was seen manifesting in many forms, and so you have the Gods. In the first millennium BC a comparatively rational view of the universe began to emerge. The other went on of course, but today people think it is largely a question of the brain. The right side of the brain is the intuitive side, and that is where we see Gods and so on; the left side is the rational side of the brain. We have gone on developing the rational, the left side of the brain, almost exclusively – not quite so fortunately – and consequently we have this extraordinary rational and scientific view of the universe. But ancient man had the right side of the brain marvellously developed and was aware of the other dimension of the reality. We have simply lost one dimension – that is all. Ancient man had not developed the other dimension and we have lost their dimension. Even we see in the last century, Ramakrishna for instance is quite typical, when he was a boy he could see Krishna running about in the fields and so on. He could see these Gods and the ancient people could see theirs and so on. We think of fairies and the elves as fairy stories but they saw the fairies and the elves. They were there. It is simply the way in which you perceive these powers. The powers are there and the way you perceive them depends on the mechanism of your senses, above all your conceptual framework. That is how you see the world, you see.
Now these things go into the unconscious. The rational mind suppresses them all and they come up in dreams and in psychoanalysis they allow things to come up and you know that Jung found many people dreamed the ancient myths. The same Gods and Goddesses, and all these powers, come up in their dreams. But in ancient times they came up regularly, and the dream was not separated from living in the waking world. Many ancient people would live just as much in the dream world as in the waking world and often, if you had some serious problem to solve you would say I will go and dream about it. And as you dream the right side of your brain would tell you things that the left side cannot do.
I was reading a story a day or two ago about a man who lived in a forest alone and had apparently grown up by himself and lived by himself, and he had the most extraordinary sort of intuitive understanding. He was found and people tried to teach him letters and to think in a rational way and the more he learned to think and to read and to write, the more he gradually lost all these intuitive powers. So there are these two faculties, and each is necessary, you see, and you cannot do without the rational side of your mind, but equally you cannot, as we are learning, do without the other side.
The reason why we are in such a terrible state today is because we have concentrated on the left side of the brain, and we see the rational, analytical scientific side of the brain instead of the intuitive, sympathetic, rather mystical understanding. In the ancient world they were surrounded by all these powers, of the earth, the air and the sky, the sea and the water, the fire and so on. And they were surrounded by human powers, and of course the human beings had much greater powers. There is a word, mana that is used by the Pacific island people, which exactly signifies this power, which can be in the earth, or in a storm, in thunder and so on, and it can be in certain people, particularly a King, a priest or a prophet, you see. Such people have mana, have power, and they would be conceived as God-like beings. And in this way you have your Gods of nature, the powers of nature, and then you have the more personal God, and any heroic person, the founder of a tribe or so on, would in the course of time be seen to be a divine person.
In this way human Gods, or, if you like, personal Gods, gradually develop all over the world; and these were real, you see, they were not just imaginations but they were felt as powers, and eventually, don’t forget, I said they lived in the world of dreams and they also lived in the world of the dead. Ancient peoples never supposed the dead had departed; they merely had gone beyond the present sphere of nature, and were acting upon the tribe and the tribal consciousness from beyond.. In this way people were always in contact with the spirits of the dead and the spirits beyond, and don’t forget in our Christian tradition see, right all through the Middle Ages until the 17th century or so, people lived in the same world. They were always having visions of angels and saints, and at the mass you know, we have a beautiful description of this when we say in the preface, “now with all the saints, angels and all the company of heaven we sing your glory” People used to be aware of all the saints and the angels around them in a tremendous way and they were filled with awe: it is extraordinary that we have lost all of it.
So we get the whole world of God’s in which people live and some of the Gods, obviously, are more powerful than others and always you get a hierarchy of Gods and the lesser spirits, the elves and the fairies and so on, Then there are intermediate spirits and the greater ones, the heavenly spirits, the powers of heaven and usually, almost invariably, the supreme power above.
In the Bible, El is the name for this God, this spirit and in the multitude of these Els. There is El Helion, the most high El, and don’t forget (it has suddenly occurred to me) when Jesus was on the cross he cried out, “Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani”, that is, My El, my God, why have you forsaken me. It is the same word. You have the world of God and the supreme God above all. In India, of course, we have the most wonderful fullness of the Indian mythology which has a continuous history of about 5000 years.
The Vedas were probably written down about 1500 years BC but they go back to about 3000 years, and we have a continuous history after that. And we can see all these Gods in the Vedas; Agni the God of fire, and Usha the God of the Dawn and there is the Goddess of the night, and there were two Gods who were gradually assuming supreme power. One was Varuna, maybe the God of heaven, but also associated with the waters, and there were many hymns addressed to him, in which he is becoming rather like Yahweh, a moral God and lord of the universe, and you express your sorrow for sin and ask for forgiveness and so on. A wonderful figure. But he disappeared after a time, you see, then it was Vishwamithra, the old father and Prajapati the lord of creatures. All these high God’s disappeared in Hinduism and it is interesting that instead of becoming dominant they disappeared, and two Gods, Vishnu and Shiva, emerged as the forms of the supreme God, and practically all Hindus are either Vishnavites or Shaivites, and whether you regard Vishnu as the name or the form of the supreme, or Shiva, you see they are obviously typical of these supreme powers.
And we were reading that hymn to Shiva today you see, their various attributes gradually grow in the course of time, and they seem to have all these powers over all creation and over all humanity, power over the mind and the body and everything. So Vishnu and Shiva emerge as the personal God, the supreme power. Now this is very important. These Gods can be high above in heaven but they can also come down to earth and in Rama and Krishna you see have the two forms which Vishnu appeared on earth and that is a kind of incarnation. The word avatara means a descent of God. Rama is a great Kind and is seen as a model of righteousness, and Krishna is the great warrior in the Bhagavad-Gita. But of course, more and more the personification of the divine in all his attributes, Krishna is said to be a purnam avatara, a full manifestation of God. And in the Bhagavad-Gita , in the10th and 11th books, you get the supreme revelation, the great theophany where Krishna is seen as the Lord of the Universe, the whole creation is contained within himself..
So this is how the whole concept of God evolves. You see it is a fascinating subject, and you see it is so important to realise that they are real. You see we think of it as fairy stories and myths or legends and so on, and we just read about them and dismiss them, and we forget that people lived in that world of the Gods. These things are more real to them that are trees and earth and such like to us.
So that is our background theme. Now we can go to the Old Testament and we can see the same process taking place. The powers were seen collectively as the elohim. A curious example of the elohim, you know is when Saul consults the witch of Endor and she calls up the ghost of Samuel and he says, I see an Elohim coming our of the earth. You see a spirit coming out of the earth, and so you see the ghosts of the dead were among the Elohim. The whole supernatural world are the Elohim, the spirits of the dead, the spirits of the earth, plants, animals, the spirits of sky and heaven, you see, all these are contained in the Elohim.
And then gradually the figure of Yahweh appears as the supreme God. Nobody knows exactly what the origin was – it was a revelation to Moses when he had an overwhelming experience of God, or Yahweh, on Mount Sinai, and it obliterated everything else and became the supreme manifestation of God.
Out of this great theophany on Mount Sinai the figure of Yahweh appears and it is typical throughout the Old Testament. He is a personal God and normally the personal God is seen in human form. He says things such as my right hand shall overcome them, he flies on the wings of the wind and he walks with Adam in the garden. It is all the divine seen in personal form. But don’t forget these things are always evolving and whereas in early chapters of Genesis he is walking in the garden of Adam and he is much nearer to man. He comes to Abraham and has along conversation with him about Sodom and about sparing the life of the people. But that is more primitive way of speaking and gradually he becomes more remote, he is seen only beyond in heaven and as a religious develops he becomes more and more the absolute transcendent deity, “no man can see me and live”. He is beyond everything and everybody, and he has his home in heaven. So you have this figure of supreme God and he gradually acquires this totally moral character; total holiness, total righteousness and mercy. This is the great evolution of the idea of God. In human history there had been nothing that had been quite equal to that.
Now that was the world into which Jesus came. He came into that world of Judaic religion with Yahweh as supreme God and elohim as another name for him. And with the Angel, and that is another interesting thing. In the early stages god appeared on earth. Three men appeared to Abraham. They go out and prepare a meal for them, and then two of them go on and one remains and that one is Yahweh himself. The angels are only appearances of God. But as things develop and Yahweh was more and more transcendent in heaven, his appearances were given to angels and particularly after the captivity, probably through Persian influences, there was a tremendous development of the concept of angels in Israel. And so you have the supreme God dwelling in heaven above and all the hosts of angels surrounding him. That is what we have inherited.
Jesus, who has inherited that fully says (remember in the garden of Gethsemane) “Do you not think that if I were to ask, my Father would not send legions of angels”. It is the same with demons, as the angels appear manifesting the power of God, so the demons appear the contrary forces, the hostile forces, which Sri Auribindo them. In every religion inevitable when you see the world around you, you see all these powers, some of them are marvellous and good and are a blessing, while others are hostile, violent and dark. In India we have the devas, the powers of light, and Asuras, the powers of darkness. In Israel the angels are the heavenly messengers and the deamons, and eventually diabolus, that is the deceiver. The devil is the deceiver. It is very interesting in the book of Job, Satan is one of the sons of God, one of the angels, and God says what have you been doing Satan? He says, walking down up and down the earth. He is going on harming people. But that figure again, you see, from the more mythological appearance, gradually gathers a deeper meaning and becomes seen as the source of evil., of hostilities, of deceit, the great liar, the deceiver. Jesus inherits that concept of Satan as the great deceiver.
Now we come to the important development in which the Gods tend to assume the personal form but equally as they become more transcendent, we get the idea that the descend to earth in a human form. They are properly human forms in which God reveals himself and manifests himself. In the Rig Veda you have this very interesting figure of the Purusha which means a man properly, and it is said of this man he has a thousand arms, a thousand eyes, a thousand faces. A thousand is a number of completeness and totality and it means he is manifesting in all the arms, eyes and faces of the world. He is the one person manifesting in all the persons of the world. That is the great Purusha. It is said of him that three-quarters of him is above in heaven and one quarter is here on earth. So this man manifests in all the earth, all the peoples of the earth but he also transcends the whole creation and all people. So he is transcendent and immanent, so it is a marvellous figure.
The whole Hindu concept of the personal God really centres around the concept of Purusha. It comes very much in the Svetasvaka Upanishad which is fascinating from the point of view as personal God. And in the Bhagavad Gita Krishna is reealed as Purshothama, the Supreme Person. So Hinduism arrives at this idea of the supereme person who manifests as a man. Purusha is a man yet he is God.
Now we get the same figure, most interestingly in Buddhism. The Buddha himself, so far as we know, discarded all these Gods, and the sacrifices and the rituals of the Vedas. Buddhism is a philosophical system which is why it appeals to so many people today. And it is a moral religion too. He preached the moral way, the eightfold noble path and you get beyond all appearances, Gods, people and you reach to the absolute reality, Nirvana, they beyond. But as Buddhism develops, human beings felt the need for very few human beings can contemplate the absolute deity, pure nirvana, absolute being, transcendent reality. It is too remote. They need a figure, an image, a form. That is why we get always these forms of God and in Buddhism we get gradually the form of Bodhisattva, one who realises Bodhi, enlightenment, the enlightened one. There are many Buddhas, and we get the Tathagata, the one who is thus – literally one who has transcended the world and realised the fullness of reality. The Buddhists say that in that form they have three bodies, the mismanakaya, the body by which he appears on earth, the sambogyakaya, the body by which he appears in heaven and the dhamakaya, the body, the absolute reality where he transcends everything. In this way you have a personal God in Mahayana Buddhism. First of all he discards all the Gods and had a very pure psychological and philosophical and moral religions, but gradually the human need is no great that these forms return and you get the Tathagata, with his dharmakaya, the supreme body of reality, which is almost a form of God.
Another most important one akin to this is the archetypal man of Islam. Sufism is a mystical tradition, which grew up in the seventh or eighth century, and spread all over the Islamic world, conceived of the idea of archetypal man who is almost exactly the same as Purusha. He is the man, the archetype of all men, and every man has within himself this archetypal form which is manifesting in all the different men, and in the whole creation. The archetypal man is the summit of the whole creation. The whol creation comes together in man and man comes together in the universal man or archetypal man. He is said to be the eye through which God sees the whole universe, and through which the world sees God. God is the mediator between God and the world. It is a marvellous figure. It is to be found in the writings of Ibn Al-Arabi.
So in these three religions we have this figure of the heavenly man, who is transcendent in heaven and yet manifesting on earth. Purusha and Tathagata and the archetypal man. Now when we come to Jesus in the New Testament, we see a similar development. First of all of course you have Yahweh as the supreme, as this expectation of a messiah, that is, of a king. And the king was normally the representative of God and was often God himself. In the ancient world the king is the supreme form in which God manifests himself and therefore the king is divine. In all the ancient world the emperor was seen as a divine symbol, and in India all the rajas were divine beings and were very closely connected with the temple. It is something we lost – all these prime ministers etc are very drab people. But these rajas were wonderfully holy people; very immoral often, it is true, but still they have this dignity.
And so, in the time of Jesus, they had this figure of messiah, and he was to be the son. “Behold this day I have begotten thee”. The king is raised and adopted by God and he becomes a representative of God on earth. That is what they expected. And you get other figures in the Old Testament, a great prophet, who is to come. Moses says a great prophet like me will come, you have to listen to him. You get this wonderful figure of the suffering servant of Isaiah, who bears the sins of the people. Various figures emerged in Israel in these hopes and expectations. But the most important of them is the Son of Man, Jesus spoke and thought of himself as the Son of Man habitually. It has three senses: one is simply man, as mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel God says, “Son of Man stand on your feet”. In the psalms it says, “what is man that thou art mindful of him, and son of man though visiteth him”. It is simly a synonym for man. Secondly in the Book of Daniel in chapter 7, he has a vision of one “Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven to him were given the power, the kingdom, the dominion”. A sort of messianic figure appearing at the end of the clouds of heaven. Jesus certainly identified with him. When the High Priest asks him “Are you the Messiah?” he does not answer directly but says, “You will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven in power and great glory.” So that is the figure of the son of Man coming at the end. Thirdly, the son of man was also the primeval man, the primeval Adam, and this is where it links up with the archetypal man of Islam and the Purusha of Hinduism. Adam was that man in whom God was manifesting and St Luke’s gospel traces the genealogy of Jesus to Adam. He says that Adam was the Son of God. So you have this primeval man, this primordial man.
There is no doubt that Jesus used the phrase the Son of Man in a sense which could include all these things. It could be simply man, but it also looked forward to the coming of the end and looked backwards to the beginning. Jesus could say, “Before Abraham was I am” because he is that primordial man, that Son of Man.
And so I think this is the key to understanding Jesus, who really is the Son of Man, who is man fully, who is to appear at the end as the judge of all, and who also goes back to the beginning. He is the primordial man, and that primordial man is not temporal, but is the universal man who is in eternity and is manifesting in time. So that was an ideal image which he could find for himself. To me that is the most attractive approach to the understanding of Jesus because he is fully man and as he appears as a man at the same time he is beyond man. This is where I find Karl Rahner has the most interesting understanding, and incidentally, Karl Rahner is the greatest living theologian., and he knows nothing about the oriental thought but he is so profound that he gives a sort of key, to my mind, to integrate the oriental thought with Christian. And one of his most profound ideas is that human nature is constituted by the capacity for self transcendence. We all have a limited human self – a body, soul and so on, but in every human being there is the capacity to transcend oneself, to go beyond and to become aware of what he calls the Holy mystery. We are all in the presence of this mystery, this transcendent reality. It is this that we find in all ancient history. Ancient people were aware of this transcendent mystery, the world of God, angels, the saints, all these surround them, but it has no particular form, but is the holy mystery.
So we are open to the holy mystery, and this is the key to original sin. That man is created wit the body, which is part of the whole physical organism, of nature, with the soul, part of the psychological organism, and beyond both of them is the spirit, pneuma, which is open to the transcendent. If he lives by the spirit then the spirit guides the body and the soul, and his whole life is in harmony. If he falls away from the spirit into the soul and body then he loses himself and that is the fall of man from the pneuma into the psyche and into the body, the soma., then to the matter of the world. And St Paul beautifully distinguishes the anthropos pneumaticos and the anthropos pychicos, the man of the psyche, the soul, the natural man. The pneumaticos is the spiritual man, man who is living from that spirit, united with the spirit of God. So with the fall of man from the spirit, we are all living in the psyche and most people do not think beyond the psyche which is the sense of imagination, will, science, philosophy, theology. But beyond this is the spirit, the experience of the transcendent mystery. And in Rahner’s theology, you see, Jesus is the man in whom the gift of this spirit is restored. He has a human body and human soul, but at the point of the spirit, instead of falling away from it as man has done, he is totally open to it; he receives the fullness of spirit into himself. In him dwells the fullness of the Godhead and in this way he transcends humanity. He is the great Purusha – one quarter of him is here on earth, three quarters of him are above in heaven, and he uses that kind of language. In St John’s gospel he saws, “No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the son of Man who is in heaven.” He was aware of all this world, the Gods and the angels, you see, and habitually speaks in those terms. When he was in the desert the devil came and tempted and he overcame the temptation of the devil, and the angels came and ministered to him. He lived in that world of angels and he was constantly in communion with that being he called his father. The son does nothing but what he sees the father doing, he is living from that world of spirits, angels and heaven, the transcendent, but at the same time living a perfectly human life. And that is what incarnation means. Rahner puts it very beautifully as man opens himself to God, to the transcendent Holy one and the holy one communicates himself to man. The movements, of man ascending towards God and of God descending towards man meet. The incarnation means the fullness of the Godhead giving itself to man and man opening himself to the fullness of the Godhead.
The last thing is the understanding of the Godhead. We have to distinguish between God and the Godhead. The God head is the absolute reality, the source of all power, wisdom and eventually love. And that godhead manifests in all these Gods, in all these forms. In the Hindu view all the Gods, goddesses are the names of forms, the nama-rupa of the one who has no name nor form. God is the form of this Godhead, and Yahweh is one form of the Godhead. So Jesus knows the Godhead under this form of Yahweh, one he calls Father. And he knows himself as the self-expression of Yahweh, and that is why St John calls him the Word of God. The word is the self-expression: we express ourselves through words and the Godhead expresses itself in Jesus, reveals itself and manifests itself. And so Jesus can say non one knows the Father but the Son and no one knows the Son except the Father. He is aware of this intimate and unique relationship with the Godhead, the source of all, manifesting himself in him. Secondly as he reveals the Father he communicates the spirit. The spirit is ruah in Hebrew, and it is the spirit that moves over the water in the beginning. The spirit is the power of life in the whole creation, but especially it is this manifestation of God communicating himself. At first it is rather crude as with Samson who receives the spirit of God and then goes and overcomes the Philistines. But then the spirit descends upon the prophets and inspires them to speak and finally Ezekiel makes the great prophecy, “I will take away your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh and I shall put my spirit in you.” The spirit of God is to be communicated to man and that was the expectation, and Jesus is the one in whom that spirit was totally present and who can therefore communicate it to man.
So we get three aspects of God. God the source, the godhead, the Father, the one beyond all. Then there is the self manifestation, the revelation of the Father in the son, the communication of the Father in the spirit. This then leads to the doctrine of the Trinity developed by the fathers of the church in the first four centuries, but which is basically in the New Testament. Jesus speaks in the language of the Father, the source of himself, the son and the spirit he would give. The fathers of the church saw God as the source, the ground and origin with beginning and the Father eternally manifesting and speaks himself in this world, and eternally communicates himself in the spirit. So the son in the knowledge of the father, self revelation of the father, and the holy Spirit is the love of the father and the son, the self communication of the father and the son. And that is the Christian idea of the ultimate reality. That means that the godhead is intra-personal. This is very important and there is a great danger. It is very strong in Hinduism, where you get the ultimate as pure identity, all difference disappears in Saccidananda. But actually in that ultimate reality there is fullness of being and the fullness of being is personal. A person means knowledge and love and a person is capable of knowledge and love in a human sense. But the word person points to a reality in God as near as we can. God does not know in the way we do but nevertheless something corresponding to love exists in the Godhead, and therefore the fullness of personal being, of knowledge and love, is found in the Godhead.
I find that important because for most people personal relationships are most important in their lives, and if in the end all that is going to disappear most people would feel it was going to be rather a blank. It is not going to be very interesting. But the reality is the opposite and the fullness of your personal being is realised. What you dimly experiences with your wife, children father and mother, the totality of experience in the Godhead, the fullness of personal being, knowledge and love is finally realised. That is the understanding of the Trinity. That is only one approach of course to this great complex mystery and everything we say about it is analogical and pointing towards it, but nothing can describe or express it properly. Godhead by itself is beyond words and thoughts. As the Buddha says we use the words to go beyond the words to reach the word in its essence. We use concepts to go beyond concepts to reach the unconceivable reality. So God is beyond but we use these words and form these theologies to point ourselves, to relate ourselves and bring ourselves into touch with that reality. We must remember that all words, formulas and dogmas are words pointing towards the transcendent mystery which can never be expressed.