Indian Christianity: A Side View -- A critique on Dr. Valson Thampu’s Arti

Dante walks down the dark forest of Hell only to be guided by the luminous light to the glory of heaven. Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid goes down the Hades and returns the wiser. Nachiketas descends to the realm of the dead and receives from Yama the secret of what lies beyond death. In The New Indian Express article of 11 August 2018, Dr. Valson Thampu goes down the inclines of Kerala’s Christian world and finds in it spiritual rot, putrid and scabby. He sees its members stuck in “infantile dispositions”. The real reason for the rot, h says, is that the present day Christians in Kerala couldn’t care less for the spiritual greatness latent in other religions. For the last two thousand years Christianity, its intellectual history and its theology included, has been researched and debated thread bare by scholars the world over.

Christian discourse has emerged out of Judaism with thousands of years of religious history. Ideas of other civilisations have over the years telescoped into Jewish thought. Which, of course, intersects intellectually other Semitic religions as a whole. But look at the radical nature of Christ’s moral teachings. To cite but one single point for elucidation: The sages in other civilisations have taught about love. Sporadic references to love of others can be seen in all the pre-Christian myths; Plato himself speaks of Eros in a mystical manner in The Republic. No where can anyone find the sweep and grandeur of love of one’s neighbour and that, too, for the neighbour’s own sake (agape, as St. Paul phrases it) as in the teaching of Christ. It is unique. It is radical and revolutionary. Christ’s teaching, be it on altruistic love or any other subject, is not a syncretic conglomerate of “Xenophon’s Cyropedia”or other Persian or Greek lore, as the revered and emeritus principal of St. Stephen’s College thinks. Dharma and, for that matter, a sense of righteousness play out as moral principle regulating the life of the individual in all religions. But When Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington says that justice understood in the sense of giving each one his due irrespective of his caste, gender or colour is an idea disseminated by the Christian West, he has his finger on the radical nature of Christ’s teaching on justice. As far back as the thirteenth century, Dante introduced justice as a dominant theme in Paradiso (the third book of the Divine Comedy) and hell or inferno itself is fitted with sins of injustice in its wildest sense. Human rights, touted by our leaders, are rooted in this Christian perspective of justice and disseminated by the West in the second half of the last century.

Dr. Thampu’s discovery that the Johannean statement “My Father and I are one” (10. 29-30) is quintessentially Advaitic Vedanta is dismally wrong. In quintessence, the statement is not metaphysical. It does not lend itself to philosophical quest as when Vedanta teaches Tat Tuam Asi—one ’s self or Atman is identical with the Ultimate Reality or Brahman. This Upanishadic great saying points to show that there is only one single Reality of the Self, and the world, which is its diversified expression, is axiologically illusory. It is monism. It is mysticism at its depth. Does the Bible teach quintessential mysticism? Christianity is not a mystical discourse, nor is Islam or Judaism for that matter.

The verse of St. John is not to be interpreted in terms of “essence and hypostasis and all the rest of the metaphysical and philosophical notions about which the makers of the creed fought and argued.” It is a statement about personal relationships between Christ and God, based on love. It is unity of Son with Father, based on Son’s obedience to Father. In this unity with Father, Son does not lose his identity and fuse into the Godhead leading to one Absolute Reality as in Vedanta. St. John’s narrative glosses Son’s unity with Father and projects it as template for unity between believers in Christ. To read metaphysics into the Gospel narrative is to dress up Christianity with borrowed clothes and undermine it from within. St. Augustine was conversant with classical philosophy, as both the Confessions and the City of God, more especially Nostra Philosophia amply show. His writings frequently foray into the fourth Gospel and one can note his painful efforts to comment upon the text of the Gospel even when he writes on other topics. But never does he equate the content of the Gospel narrative with the philosophical template of Roman thinkers nor with the categories of Plato or other Greek philosophers. To the bishop of Hippo, the logos of Christianity was unique revealed to mankind as the guiding principle of historical process, the principle of order and intelligibility in the universe. Great mystic thinkers like Meister Eckhart have dilated on non-dualism in the context of Christian thought and failed to hold the field in the intellectual circles of Europe.

The ultimate problem with Dr. Thampu’s article of 11 August 2018 is his marked inability to make the valid distinction between respect for other religions and adherence to one’s faith as a unique and indispensable experience. It is my freedom to believe in any creed of my choice. If I choose to believe in Christ and his teaching, I choose it only because I perceive it as the Ultimate Truth revealed by Father in Christ. This is how one acts when one has to make assent to religious truths. Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, adheres to such a principle and does not dilly dally with it. The Christianity that appears in Dr. Thampus’s article is a sort of broad social gathering where a cocktail mix of many a faith can be the staple food for the believer. It was against this St. Augustine wrote the City of God. The whole book written in the opening decade of the fifth century is an explanation of why the Christian faith is different from the Roman religion and that respect for the latter is not the same as watering down the tenets of Christianity.

The concluding part of Dr. Thampu’s article refers to the revered Narayana Guru’s social reforms and its corollaries as guidelines for Kerala Christians to beat a redeemed path. The Guru, like Mahatma Gandhi. Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghose and Tagore, is a post-Renaissance religious and social reformer. In this, like Gandhi, Tagore and others, he has drawn upon Christian discourse. Liberation of the individual seen on a par with liberation of society is not classical Hinduism. Hinduism is a great contemplative discourse, and in it there is very little interest in the objective world for the obvious metaphysical reason that the world outside is not the reality proper.

Vivekananda Swami speaks of the celibacy of the Catholic priesthood and sees it as spiritual source that has empowered many admirable men in the Church. Dr. Thampu speaks of spiritual decay erupting in the Christian diaspora at regular intervals, a covert reference to sexual lapses on the part of clerics hitting headlines in the electronic media. He has also wallowed in it in a previous article that appeared in The New Indian Express. Nobody defends it if such an aberration breaks the law of the land. Let the law take its course and catch up with the wrong doer. From the Old Testament tribal morality, morality in the New Testament has evolved to its apex point in the teachings of Christ. It is definitive and final. But it is tempered in the New Testament with mercy. While morality in Christian thought is indispensably linked with spirituality, historically spirituality was seen dissociated from morality. Which explains why Rudolf Otto argues in The Idea of the Holy that morality in primitive and old religions is not a necessary constituent of spirituality. I say this to argue that making a media spectacle of sexual aberrations of clergy and writing frequently about it as proof of spiritual decay in their community betrays gaps in knowledge about history of moral growth and its evolutionary process in the world.

When erstwhile American President Bill Clinton’s affairs with the 22-year old White House intern Monica Lewinsky came out into the public domain in January 1998, Americans were upset not so much by his fling with the girl but by the lie he had uttered to the public about the matter. Graham Greene calls his priest- hero in The Power and Glory a whisky priest and makes him father a natural child. But the heroic and selfless sacrifices he makes to bring the last rites to the dying in the 1938-Mexican Revolution, even at the point of putting his life on the line till he is captured and executed, unfolds him into being a triumphant representative of the power and glory of the priesthood. Interestingly, Hermann Hesse makes his austere Samana monk Siddhartha stray into the profligate world of Kamala the Courtesan, who finds herself enamoured of the young monk and, in the course of time, with a child by him. When the novel ends Siddhartha continues to quest and emerge as a heroic representation of profound renunciation and Buddhist ideal. Sexual degradation is employed as a symbol of decadence by writers like Eliot, and they are certainly right. But it is equally right to say that over-reaction to human frailties, the more so to man’s intimate and personal world of sex is a sign of low culture.

Christianity on the Malabar Coast has existed for the last two thousand years and culturally it has imbibed the traditional values of the Indian milieu. It has remained as the source of, and catalyst for, social change. Which explains why Christianity as a religion is the closest analogue of Marxist vision of millennial liberation. Reform is required to firm up any form of society, religious or otherwise. The way out is not syncretism, nor blanket denunciation of one’s own religion, but return to the centre of the Christian faith—the Gospels of Christ and norms set by the early Fathers of the Church.