Swami Abhishiktananda (1910–73), originally Fr. Henri Le Saux of Saint Anne’s Abbey in Kergonan, France, is well known for his deep immersion into the Advaitic spirituality of India. Also, he and Fr. Jules Monchanin founded the monastery of Shantivanam in south India, which Bede Griffiths later established as a major center of Hindu-Christian interchange. During 2010 centenary celebrations are being held across the globe to celebrate Abhishiktananda’s life. William Skudlarek, a monk of Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, published this book as a way of celebrating Abhishiktananda’s legacy and drawing attention to the writings that will emerge from the year’s symposiums and conferences. (For instance, proceedings from a conference held at Shantivanam will be published with Lantern Books.) This book consists of eleven essays drawn from the bulletin of the now-defunct Abhishiktananda Society and from the bulletin of the North American Commission of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue.

Abhishiktananda came to India in 1948 as a missionary with the concrete goal of establishing a form of Benedictine monasticism inculturated to the Indian context. In his first years in India he toured ashrams to gain an idea of Hindu monasticism and was deeply taken when he visited the ashram of the famous holy man Ramana Maharshi in Tamil Nadu. This led to a growing appreciation of Advaita Vedanta on its own terms, apart from any desire to convert Hindus to Christianity. For two decades, to the end of his life, Abhishiktananda pursued the Advaitic goal of immersion into pure, unqualified consciousness, beyond personal identity. At the same time, Abhishiktananda maintained his identity as a Catholic priest, celebrating Mass and praying the psalms to the end of his life. His deep fidelity to two traditions made for an extremely valuable experiment. Different people draw different conclusions from his life, but for good or for ill, his life was, in the words of Bettina Bäumer, “a laboratory of spiritual alchemy” (117).

The alchemists wrote of the violence that the elements of their experiments undergo before being transformed into gold. Indeed, Abhishiktananda’s life was fraught with strain and tension. Advaita calls one beyond names and forms, whereas most expressions of Christianity are rooted in the world of history, intellect, religious imagery, etc. Exhibiting fidelity to both traditions, Abhishiktananda went to the boundary “where the two oceans” of Hinduism and Christianity “mingle their waters in a dangerous and troubling way” (Wiseman quoting Abhishiktananda, 100).

So, what gold, what synthesis, emerged from the alchemical retort of Abhishiktananda’s life? Rather than creating a synthesis of disparate elements, Abhishiktananda found a resolution, according to Bettina Bäumer, by transcending altogether the concrete historical expressions of both traditions. Doctrinally, Advaita and Christianity contradict each other, and there is no sense in trying to combine or resolve these doctrinal expressions. However, the experience itself of Advaita transcends conceptual expression and hence, according to Abhishiktananda, does not conflict with Christian doctrine. In Bäumer’s words, “Abhishiktananda took the traditions seriously, not only in their peak experience, but also with the whole burden of their cultural, religious, historical, and philosophical differences. It was not an easy relativization, not a simple denial of the one in favor of the other. In fact, Abhishiktananda did not deny anything of what he previously believed; but everything was elevated to a level where the ‘names and forms’ became insignificant” (56).

Far from losing contact with Christ in this relativization, Abhishiktananda felt that his experience and understanding of him was being greatly expanded. In his words, “The Gospel is not bound to the Jewish world in which it was disclosed. Its universal and ontic value burns and melts the honey combs of the Judeo-Greek expressions in which this honey is stored” (11–12). There is a general concurrence on this point among the essays in Skudlarek’s volume. Significantly, this includes Swami Nityananda Giri, who is by no means a naive enthusiast of Hindu-Christian dialogue, and who is in many ways a very traditional Hindu swami (77–79).

The majority of people who write on Hindu-Christian and Buddhist-Christian dialogues are generally sanguine about these dialogues and critical voices can be rare. The one critical voice in God’s Harp String is that of James Wiseman, OSB. Like Bäumer he highly values Abhishiktananda’s journey beyond names and forms (99–102). However, he comes to a somewhat different assessment than Bäumer. In Abhishiktananda’s switch from the level of conceptualization to the level of Advaitic experience, Wiseman detects a devaluation of Christian theology. An example is Abhishiktananda’s statement that “the terms Three Persons and Nature have to be given up as misleading and, at least in translation, as wrong. . . . I think no real theology of the Trinity-Incarnation is possible as long as we do not turn back to the fundamental anubhava (experience) which they express” (Wiseman quoting Abhishiktananda, 98). Wiseman responds, “How, after all, could anyone be so certain that the speculations of theologians like Saint Athanasius, Saint Basil, Saint Augustine, or Saint Thomas Aquinas on the Incarnation or the Trinity did not arise out of their own deep experience of these mysteries?” (99). (Another scholar who both admires Abhishiktananda but raises critical questions is Jacques Dupuis, Jesus Christ at the Encounter of World Religions, trans. Robert R. Barr [Maryknoll: Orbis, 1991], 81–86).

William Skudlarek, with the guidance of Bettina Bäumer, made an important contribution with this book. By sifting through a large volume of materials, including bulletins from the Abhishiktananda Society that are not easily found, they have made salient essays readily available. A person new to Abhishiktananda will find the book to be a good introduction to the topic, and the Abhishiktananda scholar will find some gems herein.