Dawson defended the historic culture of Christianity and Catholic theology in these terms: This letter gave Dawson the opportunity to reply to some of Dom Bede's views, without directly challenging him. "The fact is that the philosophies of Sankara and Romanuja, the great commentators on the Hindu Upanishads, are closer to Catholic theology than any other philosophical system." "A cardinal principle of modern missiology is that all the irrelevant Western trimmings of our theology and religious practice must be ruthlessly cut away if Christianity is not to be regarded as something alien to the cultural heritages of the East. The attempt to teach Orientals to see Christian Truth through the eyes of Aristotle and Plato is doomed to failure, and we ourselves miss much by restricting our field of vision and excluding from our viewpoint the ancient philosophical systems of China and India. It is our duty to bring the truths of Christianity to the great peoples of the East and to do so effectively means divesting the original Hebrew thought of Our Lord of its rationalist Greek dress. "It is too easily forgotten that two principal sources of our Western Christian civilization were Greece and Rome and that the philosophical heritage derived from these two centres has played absolutely no part in the cultural development of the East. The exchange was occasioned by Griffiths' review of Gilson's Unity of Philosophical Experience, Although I do not have the review, the nature of Dom Bede's position on philosophy in the West becomes clear in the course of the exchange.Ĭhristopher Dawson's first letter to The Herald was occasioned by a letter from an English correspondent who probably overstated the case which Griffiths had originally made. These letters dealt with the idea of Dom Bede that Catholic missionary activity in India must be prepared to accept a great deal of Hindu spirituality if it was to have any impact on the Hindus. The death of Dom Bede Griffiths in May of this year, after many years of his living in India and adapting the Catholic ritual to Hindu symbols and readings from the religious texts of Hinduism, makes especially significant the letters which the Benedictine monk and Christopher Dawson wrote to The Catholic Herald of London back in 1956. CHRISTOPHER DAWSON AND DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS ON CATHOLIC EVANGELIZATION OF INDIA
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