Can a Catholic be a Hindu, a Hindu a Catholic? This question hovers over Francis X. Clooney’s new memoir. While plural religious identities are common in Asia, they are less so in cultures shaped by the Abrahamic faiths, where an exclusive religious identity is the presumed norm. For much of Christian history, churchmen and theologians regarded other faiths as positively pernicious: false gods, idols planted by Satan to lure the faithful from the one true path. In Canto 28 of the Inferno, Dante luridly captures this reality, placing Muhammad and Ali in hell among the heretics, fated to rip their own bodies for all eternity: “As they tore others apart, so are they torn.”
But times change. Bringing the tools of ressourcement to the Catholic tradition for the purpose of aggiornamento, the drafters of Vatican II’s Nostra aetate (Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions) begged to differ. Developing a minority, inclusivist line of inquiry, traceable to Church fathers such as Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria, they arrived at a more sanguine outlook on other faiths, writing of Hinduism that its adherents “contemplate the divine mystery and express it through an inexhaustible abundance of myths and through searching philosophical inquiry. They seek freedom from the anguish of our human condition either through ascetical practices or profound meditation or a flight to God with love and trust.” If Catholics can learn from this tradition, as well as from other faith traditions, so be it. The document adds:
The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.
These lines made possible Francis Clooney’s vocation, one he has pursued with admirable integrity. He has attempted to lead the life of a devout Jesuit priest in the tradition of his namesake while also learning deeply from Hindu traditions, especially Vedanta, the speculative, sapiential thinking that developed in South Asia during the late Vedic period; Mimamsaka, the hermeneutics of traditional rules governing Hindu rituals; and Sri Vaishnavism, the mystical, devotional poetry addressed to Vishnu and his avatars, written in Tamil. “I do not profess an alternate Hindu creed, and I do not worship as a Hindu,” Clooney writes. “But neither do I stand apart, unaffected…by what Hindus believe and what I have learned over fifty years.” A devout Catholic, he nonetheless summarizes his life as “hover[ing] on the edge of double participation.”
For many readers, Clooney’s life holds interest because he, along with his former Boston College colleague Catherine Cornille, developed the field of “comparative theology.” At the risk of oversimplification, one might regard it as a third option in a long-running debate between theologians thinking from within a single faith tradition and religious-studies or religious-history scholars methodologically committed to a more neutral stance toward all traditions. This debate has produced a false choice, Clooney and his intellectual kin have argued. Why not root oneself deeply in one tradition (Catholicism in his case) while engaging in “deep learning” from another (e.g. Hinduism), recognizing that its adherents, too, are created in the image of God and presumably possess the same restless heart that Augustine famously described? Or, as Clooney memorably wrote in his Comparative Theology: Deep Learning Across Religious Borders (2010):
Comparative theology…marks acts of faith seeking understanding which are rooted in a particular tradition but which, from this foundation, venture into learning from one or more other faith traditions. This learning is sought for the sake of fresh theological insights that are indebted to the newly encountered tradition/s as well as the home tradition.
Not surprisingly, Clooney’s path toward comparative theology grew from the soil of his own life experiences. Born in Brooklyn, Clooney had a mystical experience as a teenager that led him to become a Jesuit (taking his vows in 1970). He received his education at the Jesuit novitiate in upstate New York, Fordham University, Weston Theological Seminary, and then at the University of Chicago, where he studied Indology, writing his dissertation on aspects of the Mimamsa ritual tradition. Along the way, he learned Sanskrit and benefited from extended trips to Asia, first to Nepal and later to India, where he also learned Tamil.
Having benefited from Jesuit superiors who permitted him to follow his intellectual interests, Clooney makes much of the fact that his path to comparative theology was possible precisely because he did not study comparative religion or the “history of religions.” Rather, he received a thoroughly post–Vatican II Catholic theological education, reading then au courant theologians such as Karl Rahner, Teilhard de Chardin, and Bernard Lonergan before plunging into Indology as a PhD student at the University of Chicago. The fruitful tension between these two worlds, in addition to the expansive Logos theology that he gained from the former, validated his interest in Hindu thought and spirituality and paved the way to his signature comparative theology.
Later chapters in the book recount his teaching career, first at Boston College and then at Harvard Divinity School. As with many biographies or autobiographies, these parts of the book are less interesting than the parts about his childhood and youth, but they do help the reader understand how comparative theology worked itself out in Clooney’s classes, in his mature professional engagements, and in various publications, such as Hindu God, Christian God (2001) and Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary (2004). One also gets a taste of Clooney’s Hindu-inflected Christian homiletics.
Those inclined to read this book should prepare themselves for three blemishes. First, one wishes Clooney had summarized more rather than quoting so much from his own writings, journals, grant applications, and, yes, undergraduate papers. In some places, the prose reads like a dry string of snippets from his curriculum vitae. Second, some material that deals with more intimate aspects of his life could have been omitted without loss—“oversharing,” we call this now.
Finally, and more substantively, I wonder if Clooney’s approach to Hinduism sometimes seems to border on the purely historical and overly idealized, too much the product of study and not enough of lived experience—despite his extensive time in India. Roughly coinciding with his career, the very Hindu traditions that Clooney loves have been instrumentalized politically by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led now by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. The BJP’s Hindu nationalist ideology, or “Hindutva,” gives political expression to an even more rabidly nationalist pro-Hindu, quasi-paramilitary movement, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Pundits and scholars agree that this ideology bears considerable responsibility for the waves of violence and repression that have plagued the Muslim and Christian minorities in India in recent decades. Given its numerical strength, some have even called it the largest and most worrisome religio-nationalist movement in modern history. Clooney does not even mention this.
The lesson? Perhaps anyone inclined to model their life on Clooney’s (and there is much to admire in his life and career) would be well advised to emerge from the study and take stock of what’s going on in the world around them. Of course, this would not preclude admiration of Hindu traditions, but it might provide a sobering insight into how they—and other religious traditions—can and have been tragically manipulated. Despite his silence about this in the book, Clooney might well agree. And that silence is certainly no reason not to read this engaging, informative, and often uplifting memoir—of an estimable scholar and priest, a committed Catholic, and, perhaps in a looser sense, a Hindu too.
Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar
A Love Story
Francis X. Clooney, SJ
T&T Clark
$22.45 | 208 pp.
