Welcome to this course on Thomas Berry and his life and thought. We're going to begin with a discussion of our meeting with Thomas Berry, encountering him. But also his encounter of the worlds' religions, which he was into in the 60s and 70s, way before most people were talking about other religions. I remember meeting him when I came back from Japan. I had been in Japan 73, 74 and the year after that 75, just after I arrived home I went to meet him. It was February, was cold crisp day along the Hudson. He was in the Riverdale Center there, which we'll show a picture of soon. And he was filled with zest for life and joy, knowing the problems of the world. But he had this sense already of understanding other religions. And as I had just gotten back from Japan and had been dealing with What is Buddhism? What is Hinduism? Even as I travelled through Asia. I was beginning to try and grapple with this notion, the world is filled with many, many ways of looking at the religions, of looking at how we are human and so on. This is one encounter I wanted to share that kind of exemplifies what Thomas did for me as I was finding my way forward. I was in the parking lot. I come back after class with him, and the classes were terrific. And I'd go out and have a cheese sandwich afterwards in the Howard Johnson's nearby. And I realized the car wasn't starting. Something was the matter with the motor or the battery. And I got a hold of him and explained the situation, because no one, out of the the security guards at Fordham, seemed to be able to help. Well, he got an old rope. [LAUGH] >> Mm-hm. >> He tied it to my car and to his car. And he pulled me along the Bronx River Parkway and the Hutchison Parkway to Pelham, where my parents lived and I was living. And that was somehow exemplary of his health to me but too many, many other people on our journeys. >> Mm-hm. >> So that's part of my encounter with Thomas. >> Yes. There's an image of Thomas too. Let's look at that. I remember meeting Thomas in 1968 when i came to New York, and he was much younger than this picture. Probably when he was in his later 70s or 80s. Samuel was very vigorous in the 60s, and I had occasion then to undertake studies with Thomas in the history of religion, I'd come with a history under degree major and theology major. And in the course of time I moved from studies in Buddhism to Native American traditions, because of an interest in healing practitioners. Eventually I would visit out West to Anishinaabe people, and I returned, and then lived at Riverdale Center with Thomas Berry and other colleagues who were studying. And it was time of dissertation writing, and those can be very onerous, and burdensome times we're trying to gather ideas, and present them in a coherent manner, and one occasion, especially memorable for me. In that region of Riverdale, there were some overgrown areas, and I found a group of pheasants that I would go and visit. Coming from North Dakota, that was very meaningful to me. And when I came back to the Riverdale center after a session of visiting with pheasants, I was ruminating through the ideas of this dissertation, and sitting working on the sofa that was in the sun room at the time, sewing it a bit. And Thomas came in, and this image on the screen now is so indicative of that, that perceptive physiognomy. It is the face of a penetrating mind, and someone whose compassion reaches out. And he saw me at that moment, and could see the burden of the dissertation that I was writing. And he sat down, and he said John, what you need is what Virgil gave to Dante. At that moment in the divine comedy, where Dante was going on to Paradise in Heaven, and Virgil could not go from leading Dante through the Inferno, and the Purgatorial. And Dante was distraught that the thought of losing his guide, and Virgil looked at him, and said alza la barba, lift up your beard. And Thomas is just now laughing, and I'm rapt on his words, and Thomas looked at me, and he said crown and miter yourself over yourself. There was just so much about him, that capacity to transmit confidence, and not a confidence that's borrowed or lent. He's not a closed fist teachers. One of these open poem teachers. He's giving something that's self realisation. And that stays with me to this day. >> Yes, and he never wanted us as graduate students or others to re-imitate himself, either in style or method or content. I mean, you studied Native American traditions. I studied East Asian traditions, and he had a breadth and a range that was remarkable. >> Yes, his initial studies in Giambattista Vico, and writing a dissertation on that philosophers thought. >> Yes, just an amazing library at Riverdale. And we want to share then this personal encounter, with his encounter with other religions and cultures. Here he was at this Riverdale center, this huge tree, this great red oak. And in that center, along the Hudson river, he had a library of possibly 10,000 books. Eventually, we would take it apart when he was 80 years old, and he moved down to North Carolina. But at this center so much happened. >> Yes. >> This oak was 400-years-old, and it was a place of gathering for people from all over the world. We had monthly meetings there. Association meetings. He would give talks, and we'd have pot lucks, and so on. So at that River Dale Center, this role of culture and religion became more and more clear that he was encountering the global interaction of world religions way before it was fashionable in any particular way. And we wanted to share this first quote of his, to just illustrate something of this encounter. >> Yes, it's very helpful for entering into Thomas's early thought before he had turned especially to environmental thinking. In this quote he says, all human traditions are dimensions of each other. If, as Christians, we assert the Christian dimension of the entire world, we must not refuse to be a dimension of the Hindu world, of the the Buddhist world, of the Islamic world. Upon this intercommunion on a planetary scale depends the future development of the human community. This is the creative task of our times, To foster the global meeting of the nations and of the world's spiritual traditions. What do you see in that Miriam? >> Well, what's so fascinating to me, as I mentioned, coming back from Japan, seeing these various traditions right in Japan, Buddhism and Confucianism and Shinto. And they were all interacting with each other in ways that we don't see in the West, where these traditions are very separate. And where each claims exclusive truth. But in other parts of the world, especially East Asia, these are interacting traditions. And in that sense, they are very fully a dimension of each other. But you can be, you would have a Buddhist funeral. But you would have an early childhood coming of age as a Shinto. And you would have all your ethics for your family and society from Confucianism. So these are continually interacting syncretic traditions. Now what he's saying here, is something I think very special. And that is, to foster this meaning, to appreciate the particularity of these traditions, the cultural context, and so on. But also, to understand their global meaning. >> Yes. >> As never before. >> Yes, especially in this period of the emergence of the United Nations in Thomas' travels, then as a chaplain into Germany with the army. And his own encounter, growing encounter in the late '40s, he had gone to China in 1948. So Thomas was aware of the interaction of traditions. And I find this quote very interesting in terms of the emphasis upon particularity, world religions or specific religions, and universality, that sense of completing one another. There's something about the inward character of the traditions and their outward meeting. Something about the intimacy of these traditions to themselves and the distance that they have that he would see the need to travel in order to encounter the other. So Thomas was situating this encounter of the world religions on a planetary scale. I think this is what is calling him forward into his later understandings. >> Right. And as we know, this is so critical for our own times, but when you think that he was doing this 50 years ago. And it's important to remember that in the second Vatican council in the early '60s, said that for the first time, the Catholic Church of more than a billion people, said there is actually truth in other religions. And Thomas had this great phrase, not only truth in the other religions. >> Yes, he would quote from one of the encyclicals from the Vatican, too, of the statement of rays of truth in other traditions. The recognition by the Catholic Church of rays of truth, and Thomas would look at us for a moment, and he'd laugh and he'd say, my goodness, rays of truth? There's floods of truth in these traditions. That was well springing out of his sense that the encounter of Christianity, of Roman Catholicism form of Christianity with other traditions opened up these floods of inter-spiritualities within these traditions, and that they had something to say to each other, not simply as a dialogue in separate spaces, but in a communion, a meeting together, and a participatory exchange. >> Right, at the same time, what's so striking in the fact that we were trained as historians of religion, is he is a historian as well, of the world's cultures and religions And he actually went into great depth in each of these traditions. He knew languages. He had studied Sanskrit. He taught us Sanskrit. He wrote a book on the religions of India that's still in print from Columbia. He did a book on Buddhism that's still in print. >> Yes. >> He's written many, many essays on the Chinese tradition which are powerful. And Confucianism in particular affected me. So he did the history, the culture, the texts, often the language of these traditions. And that Riverdale Library had the church fathers as well. >> Well, that's an important point to make, that the library was not simply an assembly of secondary text or commentary. Certainly, there were significant commentaries on the tradition. But at the heart of it were the scriptures, or the recognized texts of these traditions, the Tripitaka of Buddhism, the sense of the heart of the tradition in the Chinese, in the original languages. So, the library held a resource for those of us who are studying in world religions to encounter these traditions in their literate forms especially. >> Right, and that included the Western religions as well, and so on. >> Wasn't there another quote we were going to look at, too? >> Yes. So here we have, continuing this discussion of the meeting of traditions, but also the study of them. Within this larger world of humankind, the multiple spiritual and humanist traditions implicate each other, complete each other, and evoke from each other higher developments which each is capable. These traditions implicate each other, for each has a universal mission to humankind. Each is panhuman in its significance. None can be fully itself without the others. Each has a distinctive contribution to make to human development that can only be made by itself. So once again, distinctive but universal, particular but planetary. >> Mm-hm, and drawing out the nature of the human. What is the character of the human? So central to each one of these traditions. And generally, we collapse these traditions into separate realities but Thomas is seeing in our contemporary challenge, they're reaching out, not simply in dialogue, but to understand how these traditions are implicated in each other, to understand the relationship of this universal mission and particular expression. >> And one reason we like this quote is because he chose to talk about not only the spiritual traditions, but the humanist traditions. >> Yes. >> He had a tremendous feeling for humanism, for culture, for the arts and so on, even the so called secular world. And for him, these were very fluid. And how traditions, namely philosophies, world views, implicate each other was a continual source of fascination for him. >> Yes, then the second part of this quote too, it goes on. Each tradition, each must therefore be kept distinctive even as it reaches a universal diffusion among humans. For any tradition to withhold itself from the other societies of humankind or for any to exclude the other traditions is to vitiate and stultify its own tradition and development, to condemn itself to sterile isolation from the only forces that can give it life and creativity. All human traditions are dimensions of each other. It's a, the last line is almost a mantra, or a phrase that has deeper meanings in Thomas's thought, this sense that all human traditions are dimensions of each other. >> Yeah, and it's been such a joy, I think, for us to teach world religions for nearly 40 years, and to realize that they are feeding the human community still. These are wisdom traditions, they're constantly changing. They're processes in fact, and that's what Thomas helped us to understand, they're not static. They're changing, they're responding. And eventually, this is where he would bring us all to understand the need to respond to the ecological and social crises of our time. >> Exactly, and Thomas would use the image of the rose window, those beautiful windows in Gothic cathedrals. And reflecting upon, them and talking about the central window in relation to the outer windows. Say for example the window altar at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, the sense of this spirit image in the middle, the bird. And then these beautiful outer windows. And he would talk about the inner window as the core spiritual religion. Often a religious tradition that one is given, and sometimes not a religious tradition. But a deep spiritual value or ethical value and outside it then the world religions. And then a person can become fixated on the middle and that's what I think he's after in this quote also. And that's the sense of what is lost by binding one's self, simply to what one has been given in youth? And not to understand that the beauty and the delight of these other traditions. And of course we're also aware that some people play in the field of these beautiful traditions and lose their central core. So Thomas is interested in exploring these very subtle psychological realities also, how traditions speak to one another. And yet we have to be very aware and nurture that central window of ourselves, to the outer window and central windows and their relationship to one another. >> Well I think that brings us to this final section here where he says, there are presently four main religious issues facing the human community in its spiritual aspect. The first is the grounding of the various spiritual traditions, just as John was saying. There's a sense, they are grounded in their own particular belief systems, worldviews. >> Yes. Scriptures, traditions, history, dogma, even. So there's a grounding of these particular traditions, and that's what we need to study. At the same time, as so many of them are interacting, they're syncretic. The spread of Buddhism across Asia from India through Afghanistan and the Silk Road all the way to China and Korea and Japan and how it changed. But there's this sense of a shared understanding of Buddhists' beliefs and values and practices >> Yes, this is a very good point, this first one of grounding and the place-space character of traditions that are still able to move beyond. Thomas was himself grappling with some of these deep methodological issues or approaches in the study of religions. About how they form particularity but they're also interacting with one another. And this second point then is the activation of the macrophase of each tradition. And again you can sense in these earlier quotes when they encounter one another, how they begin to realize and reflect upon dimensions of themselves that are reaching out. The sense of inner creativity towards a larger calling. >> Right, and even at that macrophase, sometimes we see this complementarity, a sense of cosmic Christ of the Universe that 's in Saint Paul. And the sense of the Buddha nature and all things. And that becomes interesting for this comparative study of world religions as well. >> Yes. >> His third point was this intercommunion of traditions, which we've spoken a great deal about in this talk right now. But I think we still have to emphasise that this is not easy. That these traditions are committed often to their own path and therefore there's obstacles to this intercommunion. >> Yes and we've emphasised the particularity in relationship to the universality. and that particularity we might also describe as a subjectivity, that Thomas was very aware of the unique voices within a tradition. That the tradition as a whole, Buddhism as a whole might be described as having a subjectivity. But within that are these many different voices, the great scholars of Buddhism, the great missionaries who carry Buddhism both across Asia. And then from Asia, from China especially the rediscovery of traditions by Chinese monks returning to India. That this intercommunion then, is situating Thomas to understand subjectivity as embedded in the grounding of these traditions and how this subjectivity is speaking across traditions. >> And the final point here- >> Is the entry of the traditions into alliance with the newly developed cosmological myth of modern science. This is a major step that Thomas would take in the late 60s and early 70s. >> Right, and it brings us, as well to our next talk on Teilhard. Because Thomas realized the religions were insufficient for our times that they needed to be in dialogue with science. And that's exactly what Teilhard was doing. >> That's it, that's the increasing attention that Thomas saw, not simply again, in the dialogue, or speaking across from separated positions and trying to find a realm of tolerance. But rather this exchange, which lead to an intercommunion and a deeper meeting of the subjectivities, the voices of this tradition. Leading towards a new expression of these traditions, a macro phase of these traditions. >> Thank you very much. >> It's good. [MUSIC]
