Tradition and Dialogue: Reflections on Ravi Gupta’s ‘Walking a Theological Tightrope’

Francis X. Clooney, SJ

In the final issue of the ISKCON Communications Journal, Ravi Gupta wrote an article on the controversies of tradition (sampradāya) in eighteenth-century Caitanya Vaiṣṇavism. Here, Francis Clooney responds to that article from a dialogical perspective, drawing from his own Catholic tradition as well as his extensive research on the Śrīvaiṣṇava sampradāya of South India. Clooney reflects on the tension between maintaining fidelity to tradition while also allowing for originality and innovation. He discusses the special status of founders of traditions – such as Jesus and Caitanya – as well as the role of theologians. He suggests that there is both ‘the danger of too little tradition (in the guise of individual inquiry), or too much tradition (in the guise of supervision and scrutiny)’ and that ‘it is a matter of the times whether one accents the teaching’s continuity or freshness’. Clooney shows the importance of these issues for interreligious dialogue between Vaiṣṇavas and Catholics or, more broadly, Hindus and Christians. He concludes that tradition-based dialogues ‘demand more of their participants than do dialogues bereft of tradition, but their result is richer and of greater benefit to the traditions involved’.

Ravi Gupta’s ‘Walking a Theological Tightrope’ is an insightful scholarly study of a controversy involving the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition and, to a certain extent, also, the Madhva tradition. It is provocative and interesting on multiple levels. First, it raises issues regarding the identity of the Gauḍīya tradition and, by implication, ISKCON’s identity in its relation to the Gauḍīya tradition. Second, related to this is a question about Caitanya’s identity and his location as a member of an older tradition – or is he, as many would testify, a genuinely unprecedented and innovative religious figure, and can such figures be linked to traditions older than themselves and how should they be? Third, the reflection raises the larger issue of how sampradāya works as a religious and social notion and, on a still broader level, how ‘tradition’ functions with respect to individual and communal religious identities. Or, more simply, why should tradition matter? And if it does, how does it matter? We can ask such questions, even if people in pre-modern, pre-critical cultures had a hard time doing so. Fourth, we can ask about parallels in the Christian West to the topic Gupta deals with. Fifth, all of this seems important with respect to dialogue between Hindus and Christians, since for both religious communities, and in most of their varieties, ‘tradition’ matters greatly in principle, and individuals have a religious role insofar as they speak from and for communities. So we need to reflect on the dynamics at work when individuals engage in dialogue, ideally for the benefit of the communities to which they belong. I will do so under the headings of ‘tradition’, ‘founders’, and ‘theologians’ and, in a reprise, all three dimensions with respect to dialogue.¹

Traditions

From my own research I am familiar with the importance of sampradāya in the Indian context; the Śrīvaiṣṇavas of Tamil Nadu, whose tradition I have studied in a number of ways, put great stress on tradition.² While I have benefited from learning the unfamiliar details of the Gauḍīya case that Gupta has put before us in his informative essay, that such concerns and debates should arise is not surprising and makes good sense (and largely confirms my own expectations); it is always good to remind ourselves that sampradāyas have histories, and individuals in those sampradāyas make choices in determining the meanings of those histories.

The struggle to identify the Gauḍīya community as plausibly and coherently connected to the Madhva sampradāya yields interesting insights of a broader sort, into how communities think of themselves, their founders, and the other traditions and communities with which they enter into contested relationships. For it seems that doctrinal continuity can matter, though not necessarily – and when it does matter, the continuity may be either formal (in the consensus that there is continuity) or substantive (with respect to actual details of what is believed and whence those beliefs were derived). It might in some cases be that continuity in doctrine proves religious continuity as well; and yet the participants in the debate recognised, as we may as well, that differences in doctrine may occur within a sampradāya, and similarities may occur even when there is no sampradāya. In particular, it is striking that the act of commenting on the Uttara Mimamsa Sūtras achieves a symbolic status as indicative of continuity with tradition. While the Uttara Mimamsa Sūtras are themselves synthetic and aimed at demonstrating the coherence of the Upaniṣads’ teachings in theory and practice, it was by no means inevitable – despite the older Vedānta expectation regarding the prasthanastraya – that a Sūtras commentary would become normative in a dispute such as Gupta describes, and with the consequence that Baladeva would be motivated to compose a proper commentary, at least partly with the intention of resolving the issue of the lineage of the Gauḍīya community. All of this also reminds us how traditions must find symbolic issues – some doctrine or rite, a view of their founder, a point of history – by which to distinguish themselves from or relate themselves to other such entities.

By way of clarification, we can look, very briefly, at Christian parallels to the issues Gupta discusses. To begin, we must point to the need for clarity regarding notions such as ‘church’, ‘communion’, and ‘tradition’ with respect to sampradāya; for while there are continuities in the dynamics of such terms and the values behind them, it is also true that real differences in meaning, strategy, and implications ought not to be overlooked. In the pages that follow, I write as if sampradāya and tradition are commensurate terms, while hoping that readers will also keep in mind the differences.

In the Christian context, too, of course, tradition is highly prized, and here, too, doctrinal continuity is only one factor contributing to tradition’s importance. There is, in a sense, a simpler underlying focus to the Christian tradition – commitment to the one book, the Bible, as understood in ‘the Church’ and in accord with the great councils of the early Church, and, even more deeply, commitment to Jesus Christ. The Roman Catholic tradition (to which I belong) greatly values theology, but it also looks to these more basic religious values and practice in deciding who is a member of the tradition.³ ‘Tradition’ can never, therefore, be reduced to an issue of conceptual consistency.

The Church also has a strong sense of continuity in the transmission of authority from generation to generation – particularly with respect to ordination, the laying on of hands that marks the transmission of ecclesial and priestly authority from generation to generation. We know all too well from history that the Christian communities have split any number of times, and many of these splits – Roman–Orthodox, Catholic–Lutheran, Catholic–Anglican, for example – raise issues of the authenticity of individual churches’ traditions, particularly with respect to ordination and liturgy. For example, one might consider the Roman Catholic–Anglican debates about the validity of Anglican Orders (and hence the validity of Anglican sacraments, at least on the objective level) and, more basically, whether the Anglican community stands in unbroken continuity with the ancient Christian tradition. In Apostolicae Curae, an 1896 document that has become somewhat notorious, Pope Leo XIII posed the problem of that validity:

For an opinion already prevalent, confirmed more than once by the action and constant practice of the Church, maintained that when in England, shortly after it was rent from the centre of Christian Unity, a new rite for conferring Holy Orders was publicly introduced under Edward VI, the true Sacrament of Order as instituted by Christ lapsed, and with it the hierarchical succession. For some time, however, and in these last years especially, a controversy has sprung up as to whether the Sacred Orders conferred according to the Edwardine Ordinal possessed the nature and effect of a Sacrament, those in favour of the absolute validity, or of a doubtful validity, being not only certain Anglican writers, but some few Catholics, chiefly non-English. The consideration of the excellency of the Christian priesthood moved Anglican writers in this matter, desirous as they were that their own people should not lack the twofold power over the Body of Christ. Catholic writers were impelled by a wish to smooth the way for the return of Anglicans to holy unity. Both, indeed, thought that in view of studies brought up to the level of recent research, and of new documents rescued from oblivion, it was not inopportune to re-examine the question by our authority. (n. 3)

After recounting the process of deliberation, he (in)famously concluded in the negative:

Wherefore, strictly adhering, in this matter, to the decrees of the pontiffs, our predecessors, and confirming them most fully, and, as it were, renewing them by our authority, of our own initiative and certain knowledge, we pronounce and declare that ordinations carried out according to the Anglican rite have been, and are, absolutely null and utterly void. (n. 36)⁴

While many concerned Roman Catholics and Anglicans have, in the past forty years, put aside this 1896 document and its seemingly definitive judgment against the Anglican tradition, in 1998 Joseph Ratzinger, then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and now Pope Benedict XVI, reaffirmed the judgment against Anglican Orders as definite and binding:

With regard to those truths connected to revelation by historical necessity and which are to be held definitively, but are not able to be declared as divinely revealed, the following examples can be given: the legitimacy of the election of the Supreme Pontiff or of the celebration of an ecumenical council, the canonisations of saints (dogmatic facts), the declaration of Pope Leo XIII in the Apostolic Letter Apostolicae Curae on the invalidity of Anglican ordinations.⁵

Even today, the matter is not resolved on an official level or in the ongoing dialogue of the two Churches, even if, for other reasons, the Roman and Anglican communities continue to adjust their relationship, in some ways deepening the relationship (as was recently signified by the November 2006 cordial visit of Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, to Benedict XVI in the Vatican) and in other ways moving further apart (for instance, regarding the ordination of women, and of gay and lesbian Christians).

Founders

It is of particular interest to think about the role of Śrī Caitanya. Depending on one’s evaluation of tradition and the experiences of individuals in relation to one another, the impulse may be, as Gupta suggests, to insist that Caitanya is part of a tradition – or, by contrast, a divine innovator whose insights were entirely unprecedented. The same could be said to some extent for Baladeva, regarding the extent to which his commentary is groundbreaking. I can note one Christian parallel here: in the earliest Church there were doubts about Jesus in relation to his Jewish tradition – and whether or not he brought an entirely new message. At times, Jesus is portrayed as speaking with unprecedented authority, yet, too, he is shown as insisting on the continuity of his teaching with that of Moses and the prophets. Thus, in the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus makes clear his continuity with the tradition of Israel:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. (5.17–18)

Yet, at the end of the Sermon, people recognise something startlingly new in him:

Now when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes. (7.28–9)

The following Matthean exchange of Jesus with John the Baptist – whom some thought to be the messiah – is also illustrative:

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptised by him. John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptised by you, and do you come to me?’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness.’ Then he consented.

It was an uncomfortable fact, we gather, that Jesus seems to have been baptised by John – as if Jesus were a sinner, or in need of conversion – and so Matthew indicates that his submission to John was a good example and an act of righteousness. Then, moreover, divine vindication makes clear Jesus’ special status:

And when Jesus had been baptised, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’ (Matthew 3:13–17)⁶

Perhaps we can say that from a modern perspective, where tradition is often suspect and originality given priority, even figures like Jesus and Caitanya will be praised particularly for their unique contribution. In more traditional contexts, and perhaps again in a post-modern age, the most revered and sacred figures are those who are explicitly and deeply rooted in traditions irreducible to their individuality, divine or human.⁷

Theologians

Within the framework of respect for tradition, and apart from the special status of the founder, how does originality matter with respect to the contributions of later thinkers? It would be appropriate here to explore more deeply the contribution of Baladeva with respect to its traditionality and originality, but more briefly, and staying closer to my own research, I think here of several claims in Vedānta Desika’s fourteenth-century Srimad Rahasyatrayasara. In that work, Desika – surely one of the greatest creative thinkers of Indian tradition – both praises his teachers and their creativity, yet also denies that he himself is creative at all. Even in his preface, the Guruparamparasara, he is lavish in praising the tradition of teachers, beginning with the alvars:

Poykai Muni, Bhutattar, Peyalvar, Kurukesan coming at the cool Tamraparni, Visnucittan,

pure Kulasekhara, our Pananathan, Tontaratippoti, the light coming in Malicai,

the prince of Mankai with sword and spear, illumining the Veda throughout all the world –

reciting with clarity the beautiful garlands of Tamil they sung with delight,

we understand clearly the unclear meaning of the clearly recited Vedas.

He also traces his own lineage back from his own teacher to the divine couple, Nārāyaṇa and Śrī:

Entering refuge with him who graciously gave me my life’s breath,

then by grace I reverence in succession the lineage of his gurus,

I put to the fore that flood rising in Perumputur,⁸ and

Periyanampi, Alavantar, Manakkalanampi, and

Uyyakontar who taught him the good path, and

Nathamuni, Satakopan, Senai Nathan, and

the sweet ambrosia of the sacred Lady, and then, at last,

I took refuge at the holy feet of my Lord.

[Tamil verses 1, 3]

As for himself, Desika insists that he was able to compose the Srimad Rahasyatrayasara simply because he had heard everything from his teachers and repeated it flawlessly:

I heard all these prior and following verses about the three mysteries – the word of Mataippalli, by tradition known as Vedānta Udayana, as he had heard them from his teacher. Kitampi Appullar made me learn, at his feet, as a parrot learns, in accord with the mercy of his own heart, just as the Lord illumines all this and makes it clear. Preserving it despite my forgetfulness, he has made me speak without error.

Indeed, God alone – Nārāyaṇa as the white horse, Hayagrīva – has inscribed what he knows within him:

We are at the feet of the white horse because of our teachers,

and what is written inside us we have put on palm leaf –

so what are we in all this?

Whether people accept and venture it or despise it for some fault,

O you with clever minds,

that is neither joy nor contempt in my radiant mind.

Key for us is to understand what it means to say that one is repeating only what one has heard from the tradition, neither adding nor subtracting. It seems to me that while there is a crucial value to exact transmission without deviation, an overly material signification of tradition would make it impossible to actually teach tradition in one’s own time and place. Perhaps every scholar is both a vehicle of tradition and a counterpoint to what she or he has received, and it is matter of the times whether one accents the teaching’s continuity or freshness.

In lieu of attempting here to assess the self-understanding of any given Christian theologian by way of comparison, the general issue can be approached by attention to recent discussions about the role of the theologian in the Catholic Church. On the one hand, modern academic theologians are expected to value and demonstrate individual scholarship, deliberation, and judgment, and appropriate expression in writing and in conversation with colleagues and students, all without undue constraint from the Church. On the other, the Church is very often quite concerned about the status of the individual over against the community, and wishes to place limits on the individual and her or his capacity to offer new insights that might conceivably change the community. In the Church in the United States, the issues have been worked out in the context of the 1990 papal instruction, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, and through the promotion of the so-called mandatum – ‘license’ to teach – that is meant to insure that even academic theologians in universities write and teach in communion with the local bishop. In the Application of Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1999) for the United States,⁹ promulgated by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, we read rather succinctly, in section 4:

Mutual trust goes beyond the personalities of those involved in the relationship. The trust is grounded in a shared baptismal belief in the truths that are rooted in Scripture and Tradition, as interpreted by the Church, concerning the mystery of the Trinity: God the Father and Creator, who works even until now; God the Son and incarnate Redeemer, who is the Way and the Truth and the Life; and God the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, whom the Father and Son send.

This larger spiritual and ecclesial unity has to be worked out in particular instances, even on college campuses:

In the spirit of communio, the relationship of trust between university and Church authorities, based on these shared beliefs with their secular and religious implications, is fostered by mutual listening, by collaboration that respects differing responsibilities and gifts, and by a solidarity that mutually recognises respective statutory limitations and responsibilities.

The implications of this for faculty at colleges and universities is spelled out later in the document (IV.4), where it is stated:

Both the university and the bishops, aware of the contributions made by theologians to Church and academy, have a right to expect them to present authentic Catholic teaching. Catholic professors of the theological disciplines have a corresponding duty to be faithful to the Church’s magisterium as the authoritative interpreter of Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition.

To implement this ideal, the document goes on to present the balancing act in this way:

Catholics who teach the theological disciplines in a Catholic university are required to have a mandatum granted by competent ecclesiastical authority.

1. The mandatum is fundamentally an acknowledgment by Church authority that a Catholic professor of a theological discipline is a teacher within the full communion of the Catholic Church.

And yet:

2. The mandatum should not be construed as an appointment, authorisation, delegation or approbation of one’s teaching by Church authorities. Those who have received a mandatum teach in their own name in virtue of their baptism and their academic and professional competence, not in the name of the Bishop or of the Church’s magisterium.

But still:

3. The mandatum recognises the professor’s commitment and responsibility to teach authentic Catholic doctrine and to refrain from putting forth as Catholic teaching anything contrary to the Church’s magisterium.

Here too, the process of implementing the norms is unfinished today, and there is much to be done. But it is clear that there is the danger of too little tradition (in the guise of individual inquiry) or too much tradition (in the guise of supervision and scrutiny) as both individual theologians and the hierarchy try to define an authentic relationship. In all of this, however, a key point is that one should maintain a meaning for ‘Catholic theologian’ while not mistaking the theologian for the voice or mouthpiece of a local bishop.

Dialogue in light of tradition, tradition in light of dialogue

I conclude this reflection on Gupta by some observations pertaining to interreligious dialogue – such as might ideally occur between a Vaiṣṇava and a Roman Catholic, or between Roman Catholicism and Vaiṣṇavism – in light of the preceding comments on tradition, founders (and originality), and theologians. For we need to consider not only how religious communities conceive and reconceive of themselves in light of origins and (complex) traditions, but also how they can in some way engage other religious communities with their own (complex) traditions, for the sake of a learning that by definition cannot be limited to what is already known from any single set of traditional sources. Dialogue is, after all, about religious communities reaching beyond their own established boundaries.

Communities are almost by definition unprepared for this endeavour, if it is undertaken in a properly radical fashion, since the notion of other integral traditions is somewhat unsettling. This is so, even if communities can observe, in their histories, earlier moments when they encountered other persons and communities ‘arriving’ from the outside. A religious community may also be more or less resistant to the implication that learning is possible or desirable, particularly if its leaders insist with great passion on the uniqueness of the community’s origins and on its sharp difference from other historically older communities. If a community judges its founder/s to be entirely new in authority and teaching, a claim about original uniqueness may also foreclose the messier process of sorting out what the current community does or does not have in common with other living faith traditions. Different is the situation of a community that admits borrowing from or building on a lineage older than itself, admitting, too, that its founder(s) did not start entirely afresh but drew upon older truths and practices; members of a community thus understood will probably find it easier to engage in dialogue today. Thus, when Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism is construed as in continuity with the Madhva sampradāya and when Caitanya himself is understood to be part of a longer tradition, however precious his personal contribution, it is all the more likely that dialogue will be possible. Similarly, Christians who actively affirm the Jewishness of Jesus and Jewish roots for Christianity – roots that are never merely superseded – and who also admit the fact of other elements from ‘outside’ the Bible that are ‘in’ the Bible and earliest Church, will also be able to engage more easily in dialogue. Reading their histories in this complex way, such Vaiṣṇavas and Christians will be able to admit that even today identity is not reducible to being entirely distinct, entirely pure of ‘the other’.¹⁰

Then too, there is the role of the individual theologian who claims both to belong to a tradition and also to engage in dialogue, precisely as a faithful member of her or his tradition. Even if dialogue most substantively matters only if it is tradition-based, there is no way to avoid the input of individuals. After all, it is individuals in dialogue who are agents for communities which, after all, can engage in serious dialogue not merely by talking about dialogue, but through the work of actual people who participate in actual dialogues. While it is clear that the dialogue of traditions is, or should be, of greater import than what particular individuals have to say, and that the impact of what individuals say has to be assessed in light of their relation to their communities, nevertheless those individuals are still bearers of change: indeed, the more traditional they are, the more they are likely to infuse their traditions with the fruits of the dialogue. In their ideas, words, listening, and adapting, they serve as conduits for powerful new ideas that enter their home tradition on every level, the originality and sacredness of the tradition and the founder(s) notwithstanding. Or, this can be stated in terms of a commonly observed experience in dialogue: it is a Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava who takes very seriously the richness of the Gauḍīya tradition and the power of Caitanya’s contribution – while reading these in a sophisticated way, as does Gupta – who can mostly interestingly and fruitfully be in conversation with a Roman Catholic who likewise takes seriously Christian roots and the sacred power and identity of Jesus, while yet understanding these with a nuanced historical consciousness. Such dialogues demand more of their participants than do dialogues bereft of tradition, but their result is richer and of greater benefit to the traditions involved.

It may still be, of course, that this ‘tradition-based dialogue’ will be perceived as threatening those communities with respect to their continuity in their traditions and the special status of their origins. As long as traditions have histories and are comprised of human individuals who make choices, they may still choose to attempt to exclude or eject what is novel, and to defeat outsiders – and dangerous insiders – who shed a stark light on the home tradition itself. Our best hope, of course, is that the work of dialogue, when intelligently rooted in tradition, will aid religious communities in being as bold about shaping their futures as they have been about shaping their pasts. I am grateful to Ravi Gupta for his insightful reminder of the complexities of even the most revered of traditions, and for his invitation to extend his reflection in this dialogical context.

Notes

1. I am presuming knowledge of the Gupta essay, and do not attempt to summarise it here. It is available at www.iskconstudies.org.

2. See my ‘From Person to Person: A Study of Tradition in the Guruparamparasara of Vedanta Desika’s Srimat Rahasyatrayasara’, in Boundaries, Dynamics and Construction of Traditions in South Asia, edited by Federico Squarcini, Firenze University Press/Munshiram Manoharlal, 2005, pp. 203–24.

3. On the Christian notion of tradition and its theological import, see for instance, David Brown, Tradition and Imagination (1999) and Discipleship and Imagination (2000), New York: Oxford University Press, and also Yves Congar’s classic Tradition and Traditions: the Biblical, Historical, and Theological Evidence for Catholic Teaching on Tradition (Needham Heights: Simon and Schuster, 1997 [1966]).

4. The full text is available in numerous documentary collections, and on the web at various sites, including www.newadvent.org/library/docs_le13ac.htm.

5. From the ‘Doctrinal Commentary on the Concluding Formula of the Professio Fidei’, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued in 1998 along with the promulgation of Ad tuendam fidem (To Protect the Faith) by Pope John Paul II. On the controversy up to 1998, see Francis A. Sullivan, SJ, ‘A New Obstacle to Anglican – Roman Catholic Dialogue’, America, August 1, 1998.

6. I have used the New Revised Standard Version.

7. Gupta’s brief mention of the seemingly extreme case of the Ramanandis is another helpful reminder; it seems to have been only in the twentieth century that they discovered their independence from the Rāmānuja sampradāya; in such a case, the very idea of tradition, and the act of breaking with tradition, become variables in a larger move toward self-identity.

8. That is, Rāmānuja.

9. The full document is available at www.nccbuscc.org/bishops/application_of_excordeecclesiae.shtml

10. On the impact on dialogue of an appreciation of the Jewish roots of Christianity, see my essay, ‘Matthew’s Christian-Jewish Community and Interreligious Encounter Today’, in When Judaism and Christianity Began: Essays in Memory of Anthony J. Saldarini. Edited by Jacob Neusner and Alan Avery-Peck. (Brill, 2004). Vol. 1, 529–44.