Introduction

Who Was Bernard Kelly?

At the young age of 51, Bernard Philip Kelly1 died in November of

1958, less than a month after the election of Pope Saint John XXIII,
and two months before that pope would make known his intention
to convoke an ecumenical council. This is significant in approach-
ing Kelly’s writings, as his untimely departure spared him confron-
tation with many of the issues and debates occasioned by the
Second Vatican Council. We can only wonder what might have been
his reaction to the changes soon to come. In retrospect, however, it
is perhaps a blessing that his work stands clear of much of the fuss
and fury soon to afflict Catholicism—from both progressive and
conservative quarters. His reflections enjoy the kind of measure,
nuance and depth one finds only in a mind not overly distracted by
polemics.
Bernard Kelly was neither a clergyman nor an academic, although
his affinity for St. Thomas Aquinas drew him to become a tertiary of
the Dominican order. By profession, like his contemporary T.S.
Eliot, he was a bank-clerk, just barely managing to feed his large
family of six children. Born in Croydon, England, third of five sons,
his father had guided him early on to a career in banking. He mar-
ried Brenda Evans in 1932, and finally settled in Windsor, raising his
children and cultivating life-long interests in rugby, target-shooting,
long walks through the English countryside, Egyptology, and sculpt-
ing (the few pieces the present writer saw in his daughter’s home
were quite impressive). Aside from being spotted as a particularly
bright child by his teachers, his early biography hardly seems to
presage a high-caliber philosophical vocation. Nonetheless, while

1. Not to be confused with roughly contemporary and prolific Catholic author,

Rev. Bernard Joseph Kelly, C.S.Sp.

1
 A Catholic Mind Awake

perusing the pages of the present book, one will find a level of dis-
course that easily emulates, and often surpasses, much of what aca-
demic philosophy churned out in the twentieth century.
Under a kind of contemplative compulsion—during a short life
with multiple practical commitments and avocations—he found
himself taking pen in hand and writing. He once compared his urge
to writing as a kind of call to prayer. Most of the texts included here
were printed, only once, in the Dominican journal Blackfriars,
which is itself a witness to their sophistication. An uncommon wis-
dom breathes forth from Kelly’s writing, and one wonders how
such treasures could have remained unpublished beyond their
inaugural appearance in a specialized academic journal.
Those who knew him best spoke of his unassuming nature and
profound Catholic piety. Close friend Barbara Wall referred to him
as “the self-effacing stammering teacher, the visionary.” He was a
great fan and reader of G.K. Chesterton, and personal friend of
sculptor and engraver Eric Gill.
Kelly’s intellectual trajectory in some ways foreshadows the
struggles Catholic thought would undergo in the decades after his
passing. His first wave of writings, from the early 30s until just after
World War II, puts him in the company of the best Catholic apolo-
gists, philosophers, and theologians of his day, such as Fr. Thomas
Gilby OP, E.I. Watkin, and Chesterton himself. Book reviews,
essays, poems, and a fine short study of the poetry of Gerard Man-
ley Hopkins appeared during this period. Early on, he also displays
an uncanny grasp of one of the most recondite dimensions of Tho-
mistic metaphysics, the analogia entis. Initial and quite penetrating
discussions of the question are conspicuous in his writing of this
period, later to be brought to full articulation in his very last article,
published in the year of his death.
However, his Catholic Church was destined to be increasingly
summoned to deeper reflection on both its nature and its position
among the world’s multiple traditions, as reams of scholarship on
non-Christian religions and metaphysical traditions began to
demand theological attention. Also, the contemporary movements
of ressourcement and what came to be known (at first disapprov-
ingly) as the nouvelle theologie, in their recapturing of Patristic
2
 Introduction

thought and its pre-Scholastic approach to the data of revelation,

would finally issue in Vatican II documents on ecumenism and
inter-religious understanding. Kelly had his own rehearsal of the
same challenge. In the year 1940, Gill introduced him to the writ-
ings of one of the most searching contemporary expositors of com-
parative studies: the art historian and scholar of comparative art
and metaphysics, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Thus ensued a rich
correspondence between Kelly and Coomaraswamy, from the early
40s until the latter’s death in 1947.
In these letters, we find Kelly and his Hindu interlocutor discuss-
ing metaphysical, epistemological, and anthropological notions
both in their Greek and Sanskrit formulations. Together, they iden-
tified and discussed common themes in a perennial tradition, native
to both East and West. Kelly will write reviews of some of Coomar-
aswamy’s works and also an obituary, included in the present collec-
tion. All the while, he will remain true to his Catholic commitments
and pursue inclusive and yet distinctive ways to defend the singular-
ity of Christ.
From the mid-40s until the mid-50s, ten years follow in which
Kelly published nothing at all except a single essay at the beginning
and three at the end, book-ending a long silence and a kind of res-
sourcement of his own. A two-year struggle with tuberculosis marks
the middle of these years, and at their conclusion, the cancer to
which he would finally succumb. But although these maladies forced
his body to look to the sunset of his life, his mind was looking to the
East. All four of these late essays address the speculative challenges
posed to Western philosophy and theology by Eastern thought: first,
“How May We Approach the Spiritual Traditions of the East?”
(1946), and then, a decade later, “Notes on the Light of the Eastern
Religions” (1954), “A Thomist Approach to the Vedanta” (1956), and,
what could be regarded as his consummate metaphysical statement
(germane as perhaps no other to the encounter between East and
West): “The Metaphysical Background of Analogy” (1958).
The encounter with Coomaraswamy’s encyclopedic scholarship
and intellectual hospitality seems to have occasioned years of medi-
tation and a maturing of Kelly’s own philosophic vision. He won-
dered especially how Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the analogy of
3
 A Catholic Mind Awake

being could show a Catholic mind the way towards a fruitful

engagement with India. He undertook the study of Sanskrit to aid
in identifying common conceptual roots, bringing Thomas’s deep-
est metaphysical inquiries into dialogue with perhaps its most cog-
nate counterpart in India: the Advaita Vedanta. For anyone who has
studied Thomism in earnest, and has also found a way to access the
metaphysical speculation of the Vedanta (not as easy as it might
sound), these last articles are nothing less than masterpieces. It was
in discovering these essays that the present writer decided to search
out the other writings of Kelly, and finally to anthologize them.
Although these pieces are probably his most accomplished writings,
the earlier texts collected here do not disappoint, and often serve as
intricate foils to these four philosophical gems.
One last published piece of Kelly’s writing, as he was already in
declining health, turned in a special way to his faith and the mystery
of the Redemption: “The Divisions of the Way of the Cross” (1956),
also included here. He no doubt would have wanted these Holy
Week meditations to supplement the luminosity of his last theoreti-
cal essays with the warmth of prayer and devotion. For Kelly, it
would only be in the Paschal Mystery of Christ that the metaphysi-
cal drama of Aquinas’s view of God as Ipsum Esse Subsistens (Subsis-
tent Being Itself) would find its dramatic and most revealing
articulation: the encounter with the God who is Love.
Upon reading everything Kelly wrote, at least that which was
published—for he left a pile of unpublished notes and hundreds of
letters seen only by his correspondents—an inner division of their
dominant themes becomes evident. A first group of articles includes
the four later works mentioned above, together with a few other
texts and reviews bearing reflections on metaphysical questions;
these are, for the most part, framed within a context of comparative
philosophy, inviting mutual illumination from both sides of the
Indus. This selection has been entitled: “From the Mind: Metaphys-
ics East and West.”
A second group of writings addresses the world of spirituality,
prayer, and—an association that might put Kelly in the company of
Hans Urs von Balthasar—beauty. This section bears the title: “From
the Heart: Spirituality and Beauty.”
4
 Introduction

Kelly’s love for the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and for the
philosophy of art on exhibition in Coomaraswamy’s writings
inspired a small book, an article and two book reviews regarding
Hopkins, plus two further reviews of works by Coomaraswamy, all
collected in Part 3: “From the Muse: Poetry and the Arts.”
Kelly, however, like Chesterton before him, did not restrict his
writing exclusively to the poetic, metaphysical, and spiritual, but
looked also to the issues addressed in the Catholic Church’s ever-
growing body of social doctrine. These are collected in Part 4: “For
the World: Reflections on Society.”
Most of Kelly’s book reviews address matters that also fall under
one of these four headings, and accordingly the most notable of
them have been included as a supplement to each chapter.

The Importance of Bernard Kelly

Kelly’s beloved Hopkins had been received into the Catholic Church
by that other great convert, Bl. John Henry Newman, in 1866. The
twenty some years of Kelly’s literary productivity would straddle
two generations of further British converts, from Chesterton, E.I.
Watkin, Christopher Dawson, and Ronald Knox earlier in the cen-
tury, to Peter Geach, Elizabeth Anscombe, Michael Dummett, E.E.
Evans-Pritchard, and R.C. Zaehner (all five dons at Oxford) in the
40s. This influx of high British intellectuality into the Church of
Rome produced a period of rich apologetic activity, and Kelly found
his modest niche in this movement through his contributions to
Blackfriars. But what increasingly marked his writing was a readi-
ness to look first as deeply as possible into the mind of the Church’s
greatest metaphysician, and then to follow his most far-reaching
insights as they impinge upon questions raised by perennial Indian
thought. It was his contact with Coomaraswamy that first seeded
this second engagement, but it also introduced him to the French
esoteric thinker René Guénon (1886–1951) and to the younger Swiss
philosopher Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998).
This trio of writers has been grouped by posterity (especially
through the followers of Schuon) into a “school” with a philosophi-
cal orientation alternatively called “perennialism” (highlighting its
5
 A Catholic Mind Awake

attention to enduring, unchanging truth) or “traditionalism” (ref-

erencing its marked aversion to modern thought and culture). Each
of these writers emphasizes a common core of truth and guidance
beneath the outer appearances of the great religious traditions, or,
to change the metaphor, an underlying language beneath the appar-
ently dissimilar religious dialects. Kelly died too soon to read or
evaluate the multiple books to be written by Schuon in coming
decades, and only mentions a few of his texts. Although he speaks
highly of the Swiss writer, traveled once to Switzerland to meet him,
and showed growing appreciation of his thought in his last letters,
his relationship to Schuon remained inchoate. He did read selec-
tively from the works of Guénon, and duly celebrates the man’s role
in drawing attention to traditional metaphysical discourse, but it
was to Coomaraswamy that Kelly had grown particularly close
through their correspondence. It was the latter’s approach to
“perennial” studies that we find most emulated and exemplified in
Kelly. Guénon’s writings on Christianity—for anyone at all well-
read in Church history and theology—are flawed by strange blind-
spots and shortcomings in objectivity and scholarship. Kelly refers
once, disapprovingly, to Guénon’s “ultra-traditional,” and even
“pontifical” way of speaking at times, and maintained a certain dis-
tance from the Frenchman’s more radical views.
Coomaraswamy’s meticulous scholarship and more deferential
attitude to his sources—insisting, as he said, never to make a claim
that could not be supported by chapter and verse in some tradi-
tional Scripture—seems to have appealed more to Kelly. In contrast
to Guénon, both Coomaraswamy and Schuon emphasized also the
aesthetic dimension of perennial studies, an interest strongly shared
by Kelly and in evidence in several of the essays in this anthology.
There was also another feature of the perennialist galaxy that
could not have been lost on Kelly. Guénon and Schuon both left
their Christian affiliations (Catholic and Protestant, respectively)
and found what they held to be more suitable vehicles for their con-
victions within the Islamic tradition—and in Schuon’s case, also in
Native American lore and ritual. Many of today’s self-identified
perennialists have followed suit. The few Christians who might cur-
rently be found in their ranks will either be of Eastern Orthodox
6
 Introduction

persuasion, or perhaps among small groups of sede-vacantist Catho-

lics.2 Erstwhile perennialists today in communion with Rome will
likely have distanced themselves from “strict observance” perennial-
ism, and only selectively partake of the more proven insights of the
movement’s many authors. A notable case of this is the French phi-
losopher Jean Borella.3 Another Catholic author (recently deceased)
who acknowledges the importance of the perennialist authors, but
also of careful discernment in approaching them, was Stratford Cal-
decott.4 Some strict Guénonians—a somewhat maverick group,
present especially in France—may still hold that the Catholic sacra-
ments have lost their “initiatic” character (a point on which Guénon
and Schuon differed); nonetheless, even a more nuanced view of the
whereabouts of “esoteric Christianity” in the modern world—a
world most perennialists view as increasingly lost in a downward
spin—would seem to logically demand a rejection of Catholic
aggiornamento and the legacy of the Second Vatican Council.
The paradox, however, is this: it has only been since, and because
of, that council, that the Catholic Church has taken a more welcom-
ing view of non-Christian religious traditions. By and large, more
traditionalist Catholics who reject or are suspicious of Vatican II
will also tend to be distrustful of engagements with Oriental reli-
gious thought, and perhaps view the perennialists as “gnostics.” But
even in the face of this more welcoming attitude in contemporary
Catholicism, most theologians would agree that joining a robust
Christianity with perennialism tout court is not always an obvious
or easy fit; it would seem to involve serious qualification of some of
the faith’s more distinctive claims. Such radical reinterpretations of
a traditional faith do not seem to be demanded, at least in the same
measure, by other major religions to which perennialism customar-
ily attaches.

2. Those of the view that the Chair of Peter is not occupied currently by a true
pope.
3. As an introduction to Borella’s many works, one might recommend the
anthology The Secret of the Christian Way, ed. G. John Champoux, SUNY Press,
2001.
4. One example would be in his chapter on “Non-Dualism” in The Radiance of
Being, Angelico Press, 2013.

7
 A Catholic Mind Awake

Hinduism, Islam, and even Buddhism appear able to find com-

fortable beds within the perennialist household; Christianity’s
appointed berth, however, seems to many followers of Christ to
look a tad Procrustean. Hinduism’s doctrinal hospitality and pro-
tean adaptability made it, according to Guénon, the most integral
vehicle of perennialist doctrine. Hence Coomaraswamy is usually
claimed as one of their own. And despite Guénon’s initial hesita-
tion, Buddhism’s apophatic emphasis (that is, its penchant for
“negative theology”) and—in many of its forms—acceptance of a
large variety of upayas (“skillful means”) as roads to enlightenment,
might also serve to open multiple doors to a perennialist construal.
Even Islam, especially when seen through the more inclusive eyes of
Sufi mystics, allows generous approaches to potentially numerous
cases of prophets and messengers preceding Mohammed.
The peculiar challenge of fitting Christianity into the scheme is
perhaps especially due to the following: Most perennialists will
underscore the importance of the binary pattern of exoteric/eso-
teric as the conceptual key for the differentiation of that which is
extrinsic and diverse in both ritual and doctrinal expression in the
world’s religions (the “exoteric”) from the single and identical body
of doctrine and practice of a metaphysical and mystical nature
within and behind these exteriors (the “esoteric”). This approach,
however, comes up against a stubborn problem in Christian teach-
ing. Although there is clearly a progress in divine revelation from
Old to New Testaments, and also within each (e.g., from Law to
Wisdom to Prophecy, from Gospel to Epistle to Apocalypse); and
although there is a pronounced historical gradient of interpretative
appropriation in the understanding of its content (Newman’s
“development of Christian doctrine”); and although there are like-
wise stages of spiritual growth for every soul, which lead to unveil-
ings of ever-deeper dimensions of the mysteries of the faith; still, the
very core of Christian revelation—something non-negotiable for
most mainline believers—is that God has revealed His innermost
mystery in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. This is no
metaphor for the metaphysical mystery of the Trinity, but rather its
manifestation. And these events are believed in as hard, historical
facts, and emphatically not as symbols of some esoteric abstraction.
8
 Introduction

Thus, the “inner secret” of God as Love is overtly on display in the

crucified and risen Lord, and to that extent the distinction between
exoteric and esoteric is transcended. Any attempt to get “behind”
the revelatory Fact of the Paschal Mystery to something esoteric and
hence more important or more essential, is not easy to square with
orthodox Christian theology. Also the “availability” of this mystery
to one and all—including the simplest and unlettered—is at the
very heart of the Gospel message. A functional elite exists (the cleri-
cal hierarchy); a spiritual elite does not.
In any case, there is nothing in Kelly’s writings that would suggest
he ever contemplated modulating his central Christian convictions
to adapt them to some meta-religious ideology, or of severing his
fidelity to the See of Peter. As mentioned before, St. John XXIII was
just commencing his pontificate and Kelly had no opportunity to
pronounce on the direction the Church would soon take. The
present writer’s best guess is that he would have joined Etienne Gil-
son, Jacques Maritain, Henri de Lubac, and Dietrich von Hilde-
brand—in the mid and late 60s—in decrying abuses arising after
the 21st Ecumenical Council, and perhaps published a book of dis-
crete criticisms, as each of those writers did.
Whatever may have been Kelly’s reaction to imminent reforms in
his church, at least his openness to Eastern thought was something
quite in step with the changes to come. Furthermore, it makes more
sense to understand Kelly’s interest in Eastern thought as due, not
in the first instance to perennialist influences, but rather to some-
thing deeper in his makeup. It was that something which attracted
him to selective engagement with this circle of authors to begin
with. Some of his most important metaphysical—and indeed
“perennial”—insights are already present in the years before his
correspondence with Coomaraswamy. We can see this already in his
writing of the 1930s, such as the essay, “Passage through Beauty”
(1935) and the book-review of Symbolism and Belief (1938), both
included in the present anthology. What led him to learn from his
Hindu friend, and then to a lesser extent from Guénon and Schuon,
was the example of his beloved Thomas Aquinas. The Dominican
saint had learned eagerly from the pagan Aristotle, from the non-
and sometimes anti-Christian Neo-Platonists, from the Jew Mai-
9
 A Catholic Mind Awake

monides, from the Muslims Avicenna and Averroës, and indeed

from anyone else who seemed to have an eye on important truths.
Aquinas, after all, had written that “all truth, by whomever it is spo-
ken, is of the Holy Spirit.”5
Far from surrendering to a shadowy theosophy, Kelly simply fol-
lowed Aquinas in venturing, like a missionary, into new territories
of human thought, mapping truths wherever they might be found.
Like Aquinas too, he was free of the antiseptic attitude of some
believers who are fearful of alien wisdom. He would regard such
purists as standing in peril of losing what wisdom they had by trying
to build impervious blockades around endogamous doctrines. A
Christian mind oriented to perennial truth, Kelly might have said,
prefers to live in the typically gated communities of Catholic
thought, with sentinels adroit in discernment indeed, but also enliv-
ened by charity and philosophical hospitality. Catholic truth is a liv-
ing thing, and interacts with the world around it and even with
ideas that have yet to find a place within its scope. It is decidedly not
a static museum piece or something that can be pickled in vinegar.
Kelly’s reflections suggest that the difference between East and
West does indeed diminish to the extent one accesses the deeper
metaphysical traditions of either, and yet the light that those tradi-
tions in turn shed upon one another illuminates contrasts no less
important than similarities. More yet, the light is often especially
illuminating precisely because its provenance in one tradition
enables it to reveal dimensions of the other tradition easily over-
looked, and often enough habitually forgotten. This Kelly learned
from Coomaraswamy, and the insight took him not into rarefied
theosophical generalizations, but, rather, deeper into the details of
his own faith. What he wrote in Coomaraswamy’s obituary of his
Hindu friend could well be said of Kelly himself:
“To read such work, even with an understanding lagging far
behind his scholarship, and the angelic simplicity of his exposition,
is not to be assailed by any superficial, because generalized, theory
of the universality of religions, but to be made witness, if not partic-

5. “Omne verum, a quocumque dicatur, a Spiritu Sancto est,”Summa Theol., I-

II, 109, 1, 1m.

10
 Introduction

ipant in, the penetration of light by light: East and West respectively
illuminating each other while retaining their distinctive idioms.”
The general development of comparative philosophy and theol-
ogy in recent times would seem to confirm Kelly’s intuitions.6
When one sees, for example, that comparisons between Christianity
and Islam are only imperfectly aided by pursuing parallels between
Christ and Mohammed, or between the Bible and the Qur’an, but
are brought forward when it is Christ and the Qur’an that are com-
pared and contrasted: both claiming, though in very different ways,
to be the Word of God, mediated by the selfsame angel (Gabriel),
and both destined for recipients—that is, the Virgin Mary and
Mohammad—who were open in the fullest sense possible (one in a
virginal relationship to conception, the other in an unlettered rela-
tionship to writing). Here is a juxtaposition that provokes reflection
and invites further inquiry, discouraging both facile conflations and
unnecessary antagonisms. Another approach would be to affirm
that there are analogues indeed in Christianity to Muslim messen-
gers and prophets, Hindu avataras, and Buddhist boddhisatvas, but
that they lie not in the Incarnate Word but rather in the angels and
prophets so abundant in the Bible.
All this is only to say that when deep readings of the respective
traditions are pursued, a coherent pattern of mythical, metaphysi-
cal, moral, and mystical correspondences emerges to be sure, and
they may well imply, in significant measure, a primordial source
common to all. Still, its proper delineation and theological interpre-
tation—if performed in a manner true to the peculiar character of
Christian revelation—will serve also as the needed backdrop for the
identification of equally important differences. Neglecting such dif-
ferences can only frustrate authentic understanding.
Divergence, however, need not entail contradiction, which can
only exist, at any rate, when one tradition patently denies what
another just as patently affirms. In the last analysis, Christian teach-

6. Two of countless possible examples: Scharfstein, Ben-Ami. A Comparative

History of World Philosophy: From the Upanishads to Kant. Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1998; and Clooney, Francis X. Comparative Theology: Deep
Learning Across Religious Borders. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

11
 A Catholic Mind Awake

ings about who Christ is and what he did possess a kind of incarna-
tional, historical, and personalist edge not found with the same
prominence in the key figures of other traditions, nor is its peculiar
metaphysical character even addressed. And that which has not
been addressed can hardly be denied.
That the creation is non-divine, but a true manifestation of the
divine; that the Incarnate Word is something distinct from (but not
opposed to) a prophet, an avatara, or a bodhisattva; that the Holy
Trinity involves metaphysical personhood in God that goes “all the
way up,” and is not a mere façade or accommodation; and, finally,
that love is not secondary or servile in regard to knowledge in the
divine mystery, but at least co-equal—these are just a few of the exi-
gencies Christian faith imposes on a believing mind that is truly
awake. Still, in no way do they preclude that other traditions may
not only throw new light on our understanding of each of these
convictions, but at times even cause them to stand in a new and
unexpected context. Is it not the very character of a mystery that it
can never be fully understood, and yet invites us to enter ever more
deeply into its unending light? If God is indeed Infinite Mystery,
then even our most cherished theological principles can only hope
to serve as curbs on the road of the mind’s journey into God’s inti-
macy, keeping us securely on the pavement and free of the mud on
either side. But they need not map out in advance all the curves and
surprises in the long pilgrimage ahead.
Perhaps the greatest challenges all of us face in attempting to
understand other religions revolve around the question of how one
philosophically, and theologically, articulates the relationship
between the Absolute and the Relative, or, in Abrahamic terms: God
and Creation. This has always produced a rough terrain of semantic
snares for the theistic traditions. The respective metaphysical
demands of God’s transcendence and immanence are not easily
negotiated. But the understanding of the functioning of analogy in
the way we use words about anything at all—and a fortiori how we
use words to speak of a God who is utterly beyond, and yet ever-so
near—is something Kelly intuited in a time in which the issue was
just beginning to gain profile in contemporary theology and meta-
physics. Karl Barth famously rejected the Catholic view of analogia
12
 Introduction

entis, and it was left to an obscure but brilliant Jesuit philosopher,

Eric Przywara, to reply by writing a dense tract in its defense in the
1930s. To be fair, Barth’s own view would become more nuanced as
he grew older, favored probably by his friendship with Hans Urs
von Balthasar, himself an eloquent proponent of the analogy of
being.
Bernard Kelly’s final article, and probably his densest, deals with
analogy, and significantly, his treatment takes its bearings not from
the East, but from Aquinas, Meister Eckhardt, and (Pseudo-)
Dionysius the Aeropagite. The Upanishads, Guénon, and Ibn Arabi
are cited, but only as footnotes to ideas highlighted from within the
Western tradition. In one of his final letters Kelly makes mention of
numerous projects he had in mind for future research and writing;
nonetheless, it is hard not to see the appropriateness of his reflec-
tions on analogy serving as his intellectual swan song. Philosophers
and theologians were to be increasingly occupied with this question
far beyond the death of Kelly. It is a tribute to his understanding of
Aquinas, and to his grasp of the wide-ranging implications of anal-
ogy for comparative studies, that this short essay by a British bank-
clerk could arguably serve as one of the best introductions to the
topic.7
A distant echo will confirm this, all the way from India. Another
little-known author, whose articles were spread over an array of
Indian journals for over forty years, and, like Kelly’s, only recently
anthologized, was Richard de Smet, S.J.8 Among the studies this
Belgian Jesuit contributed to our understanding of the Advaita
Vedanta—and specifically of its foremost exponent, Shankara—are

7. Examples of treatments of analogy in recent times: E. Przywara, Analogia

Entis, transl. J.R. Betz and D.B. Hart, Eerdmans, 2014; The Analogy of Being, ed. T.J.
White OP, Eerdmans, 2011; J. Borella, Penser l’analogie, Ad Solem, 2000; and other
notable treatments of analogy by S. Ramírez, M. Penido, G. Söhngen, G. Kluber-
tanz, B. Montagnes, R. MacInerny, D. Burrell, among others, and passim in the the-
ology of Hans Urs von Balthasar and the philosophy of Cornelio Fabro.
8. R. de Smet, Brahman and Person, ed. I. Coelho, Delhi, 2010; Understanding
Shankara, ed. I. Coelho, Delhi, 2013. Also: New Perspectives on Advaita Vedanta:
Essays in Commemoration of Prof. Richard De Smet S.J., ed. Bradley J. Malkovsky,
Brill, 2000.

13
 A Catholic Mind Awake

articles highlighting the hitherto underestimated use the Indian

Advaitin made of the notion of analogy (as he translates the San-
skrit term lakshana). De Smet shows it to be an essential key both to
understanding the intended philosophical and theological stance of
Shankara, and to bringing his thought into meaningful dialogue
with the metaphysics of Aquinas. Here again, Kelly anticipated the
destiny of a particularly abstruse and novel approach to inter-reli-
gious thought in the decades that were to follow his death.
Although most of the material in Parts 2 through 4 of our anthol-
ogy were written before these last seminal articles, and treat more of
spiritual, aesthetic, and social questions, they stand in obvious con-
tinuity through their “setting of the scene” for those later metaphys-
ical inquiries. They also can be read with greater understanding
when the matured reflections contained in the later texts cast their
retrospective light upon the earlier essays.
It is hoped that by providing this anthology of Bernard Kelly’s
mostly forgotten writings that some may find access to a wisdom
present in the best of Eastern thought, but often understated or for-
gotten in its Christian articulation. The range of Kelly’s mind is the
range of the Catholic intellect—from poetry to philosophy to social
questions and finally to spirituality. His willingness to look east geo-
graphically—as well as back chronologically—makes the essays in
this anthology singularly contemporary for the twenty-first century
reader. Sometimes only rays of light from unsuspected corners of
the globe, or of history, will be able to draw attention to parts of our
own legacy that have always been there, but not always been noticed.
And of course, it is at least equally true that the light of Christ,
refracted correctly from within the deepest reaches of the Christian
tradition, can perform the same service for the philosophies of the
East.
Note to the Reader
Bernard Kelly is not an easy read. His “metaphysical” texts have
been put first in the order of this anthology, not because they are
the easiest, but because they philosophically underpin just about
everything he wrote (even pieces he wrote in years anterior to these
texts). Nonetheless, the reader may choose to go directly to the spir-

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 Introduction

itual (Part 2), the poetical (Part 3), or the social texts (Part 4),
according to personal aptitude or preference. The various articles
and book reviews were written over a period of some 25 years, most
of them as individual pieces designed to be read on their own. Thus,
one can easily enter the anthology wherever one chooses and move
about at will. Still, in the end, it is hoped that the reader will see that
the overall structuring of the anthology makes sense, and perhaps
one day can read the four parts in sequence and gain a fuller appre-
ciation of both the range and coherence of Kelly’s thought.

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