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Theology by Other Means
| Article
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19533 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
2,456 Words |
| Author
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Mary Farrell Bednarowski
Mary Farrell Bednarowski is professor of religious studies at
United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities and is the
author of New Religions and the Theological Imagination in
American Culture. |
Holy Madness is part of Paragon House's New Age series, "dedicated to classic and contemporary works about higher human development and the nature of ultimate reality." As the title and subtitle suggest, the book is an examination of the behavioral excesses of spiritual teachers in a variety of traditions, times, and cultures, with emphasis on the Eastern guru and particular attention to Da Love-Ananda, with whom Georg Feuerstein studied in community for five years.
In the preface, Feuerstein is candid about the fact that he is "passionately interested in reflecting on his own experiences," and that he is concerned with furthering recognition of "holy madness" as a universal category of religious life. But it is also in the preface that the reader receives an early clue that this book has a much more ambitious agenda than either the title or the subtitle suggests. Feuerstein claims that what is at stake in the consideration of holy madness "is nothing less than our conventional picture of the universe and the morality that accompanies it."
At this broader level of concern, Holy Madness is its own form of jeremiad, calling for Western culture to repent of its transcendence--denying reliance on scientific materialism and conventional religion. It offers the beginnings of Feuerstein's agenda for an authentic spirituality for the West that, in his view, will be transforming rather than merely consoling. And it provides the outlines of at least part of Feuerstein's spiritual journey--sometimes stated directly but just as often found between the lines.
Overview
Feuerstein divides Holy Madness into three parts. The first section, "The Phenomenon," comprises anecdotal material about many different spiritual leaders who range from the moderately eccentric to the pathological. He describes the holy fools and ritual clowns of the Middle Ages, Indian holy persons of various kinds, Sufi and Tibetan adepts, Chinese and Japanese Zen masters, and "contemporary crazy-wisdom adepts" such as Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley, Bhagwan Rajneesh, Chogyam Trungpa, and Lee Lozowick. Feuerstein devotes an entire chapter to Da Love-Ananda, the teacher to whom he gives credit for his interest in the phenomenon of holy madness. His gratitude, he says, is not "naively enthusiastic," since Feuerstein has serious concerns about Da Love-Ananda's teaching style.
What these spiritual leaders have in common is their desire to shock those they encounter into the kind of
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