Prophets of the New India by Romain Rolland

Prophets of the new India

PROPHETS OF THE NEW INDIA

them. The Government kept a strict watch over the

Mission, but it continued to preach its ideal of social service ;

it publicly reproved all sectarian and vengeful spirit, 'and

even condemned selfish patriotism, pointing out that eventu-

ally it led to degradation and ruin. It replied alike to the

accusations of the patriots and the suspicions of the govern-

ment by these words of Vivekananda, which it inscribed

on the covers of its publications : " The national ideals

of India are Renunciation and Service. Intensify her in

those channels and the rest will take care of itself."

Nevertheless, the struggle grew more bitter. According

to their usual tactics of compromising all independent

spirits, the revolutionary agitators used portions of the

religious and philosophical publications of the Mission in

a twisted form. In spite of its public declaration in April,

1914, the Governing Committee of Bengal in its Report

of 1915 accused the Mission and its founders of having

been the first instigators of Indian nationalism.

And in 1916 the first Governor of Bengal, N. D. Car-

michael, although he sympathized with Ramakrishna's

work, announced publicly that terrorists were becoming

members of the order in order to achieve their ends with more

ease ; nothing more was needed for the dissolution of the

Mission. Fortunately devoted English and American friends

in high places came forward and warmly supported its

defence in a long Memoir of January 22, 1917, so that

the danger was averted,

It has been seen that, like Gandhi, the Ramakrishna

Mission absolutely repudiates violence in politics. But it

is remarkable that the violent have more than once invoked

it, despite its protestations : a thing that I believe they

have never dreamed of doing in the case of Gandhi. And

yet Ramakrishna's followers, more absolutely than Gandhi,

reject all compromise, not only with certain forms of politics,

but with them all.

This seeming paradox comes from the individual charac-

ter. ... I might almost say from the temperament of

Vivekananda, their Master. His fighting and ardent Ksha-

triya nature appears even in his renunciation and Ahimsa

(Non-Resistance).

" He used to say that the Vedanta may be professed

THE RAMAKRISHNA MATH AND MISSION

J>y a coward, but it could be put into practice only by

the most stout-hearted. The Vedanta was strong meat

for weak stomachs. One of his favourite illustrations used

to be that the doctrine of non-resistance necessarily in-

volved the capacity and ability to resist and a conscious

refraining from having recourse to resistance. If a strong

man, he used to say, deliberately refrained from making

use of his strength against either a rash or weak opponent,

then he could legitimately claim higher motives for his

action. If, on the other hand, there was no obvious superi-

ority of strength or the strength really lay on the side of

his opponent, then the absence of the use of strength

naturally raised the suspicion of cowardice. He used to

say that that was the real essence of the advice by Sri

Krishna to Arjuna."

And talking to Sister Nivedita in 1898 he said :

" I preach only the Upanishads. And of the Upanishads,

it is only that one idea strength. The quintessence of Vedas

and Vedanta and all, lies in that one word. Buddha's

teaching was Non-Resistance or Non-Injury. But I think

this a better way of teaching the same thing. For behind

that Non-Injury lay dreadful weakness. It is weakness

that conceives the idea of resistance. I do not think of

punishing or escaping from a drop of sea-spray. It is

nothing to me. Yet to the mosquito it would be serious.

Now I would make all injury like that. Strength and

fearlessness. My own ideal is that giant of a saint whom

they killed in the Mutiny, and who broke his silence,

when stabbed to the heart, to say ' And thou also art

He ! ' "

Here we can recognize Gandhi's conception : a Non-

Resistance in name, that is in reality the most potent of

Resistances, a N on- Acceptation, only fit for spiritual heroes.

There is no place in it for cowards. . . . 7 But if, in practice,

7 The temperament of a born fighter like Vivekananda could

only have arrived at this heroic ideal of Non-Acceptation without

violence, by violating his own nature. And he did not attain to

it without a long struggle.

Even in 1898 before the pilgrimage to the cave of Amarnath,

which produced a moral revolution in him, when he was asked :

11 What should we do when we see the strong oppress the weak ? "

He replied :

PROPHETS OF THE NEW INDIA

Gandhi's ideal is akin to that of Vivekananda, to whafc

passionate heights Vivekananda carried it. With Gandhi

all things are moderated, calm and constant. With Vive-

kananda everything is a paroxysm, of pride, of faith, or

of love. Beneath each of his words can be felt the brazier

of the burning Atman the Soul-God. It is then easy to

understand that exalted revolutionary individualism has

wished to use these flames in social incendiarism, and

this is a danger that the wise successors of the great

Swami, who have charge of his heritage, have often had

to avoid.

Further the tenacious and unwavering moderation of

Gandhi's action is mixed up with politics, and sometimes

becomes their leader, but Vivekananda's heroic passion

(that of Krishna in battle) rejects politics of all kinds, so

that the followers of Ramakrishna have kept themselves

aloof from the campaigns of Gandhi.

It is regrettable that the name, the example and the

words of Vivekananda have not been invoked as often

as I could have wished in the innumerable writings of

Gandhi and his disciples. 8 The two movements, although

independent of each other and each going its own way,

" Why, thrash the strong, of course."

On another occasion he said :

" Even forgiveness, if weak and passive, is not true : fight is

better. Forgive when you could bring (if you wished) legions of

angels to an easy victory/' (That is to say, forgive when you are

the stronger.)

Another asked him:

" Swami ji, ought one to seek an opportunity of death in defence

of right, or ought one to learn never to react ? "

" I am for no reaction," replied the Swami slowly, and after a

long pause added, " for Sannyasins. Self-defence for the house-

holder."

(Cf. Life of Vivekananda, 1915 edition, Vol. Ill, p. 279.)

But on January 30, 1921, Gandhi went on a pilgrimage with his

wife and several of his lieutenants (Pandit Motilal Nehru, Mulana

Muhammed Ali, etc.) to the sanctuary of Belur for the anniversary

festival of Vivekananda's birth ; and from the balcony of his room

declared to the people his veneration for the great Hindu, whose

word had lighted in him the flame of love for India.

OnjMarch|i4, 1929, Gandhi presided at Rangoon over the festival

of the Ramakrishna Sevashrama, in honour of the 94th anniver-

sary of Ramakrishna. And while the followers of Ramakrishna

THE RAMAKRISHNA MATH AND MISSION

have none the less the same object. They may be found

side by side in the task of service devoted to public well-

being; and both of them though with different tactics

follow the great design the national unity of the whole

of India. The one advances to the great day by his

patient Non-Co-operation struggles the other by peaceful

but irresistible universal Co-operation. Take for example

the tragic question of Untouchability. The Ramakrishna

Mission does not conduct a Crusade against it like Gandhi,

but better still, denies it according to the words of Vive-

kananda, that I have just quoted : " It is weakness which

conceives the idea of resistance."

" We think/ 1 Swami Ashokananda wrote to me, " that

a rear attack is better than a frontal one. We invite

people of all classes, beliefs and races, to all our festivals,

and we sit and eat together, even Christians. In our

Ashrams we do not keep any distinction of caste, either

among the permanent residents or among visitors. Quite

recently at Trivandium, the capital of the Hindu state of

Travancore, notorious for its extreme orthodoxy and its

obstinate maintenance of untouchability, all the Brahmin

and non-Brahmin castes sat together to take their meals

on the occasion of the opening of our new monastery in

that town ; and no social objection was raised. It is by

indirect methods that we try to put an end to the evil,

and we think that thus we can avoid a great deal of irrita-

tion and opposition.' 1

And so, while the great liberal Hindu sects like the

Brahmo Samaj, the Prathana Samaj, etc., storm ortho-

doxy from the front, with the result that, having broken

their bridges behind them, they find themselves separated

saluted in Him the realization of Ramakrishna's ideal in a life

of action, Gandhi paid a beautiful tribute to the Ramakrishna

Mission :

" Wherever I go," he said, " the followers of Ramakrishna invite

me to meet them ; I feel that their blessings go ^ith me. Their

rescue works are spread over India. There is no point where they

are not established on a large or a small scale. I pray God that

they will grow, and that to them will be united all who are pure

and who love India. "

After him his Mohammedan lieutenant, Maulana Muhammed Ah,

extolled Vivekananda.

PROPHETS OF THE NEW INDIA

from the mass of their people, and partially rejected by

the mother Church, so that their reforms are lost .upon

it the Ramakrishna Mission believes in never losing con-

tact with the Hindu rank and file ; it remains within the

bosom of the Church and of society, and from thence carries

out reforms for the benefit of the whole community. There

is nothing aggressive or iconoclastic, nothing to wound like

that attitude of Protestant rigidity, which, although armed

with reason, has too often torn the universe by schism.

Keep within the Catholic fold, but maintain a patient and

humanized reason, so that you cany out reform from within,

and never from without.

" Our idea," Swami Ashokananda wrote in another place,

"is to awaken the higher conscience of Hinduism. That

done, all necessary reforms will follow automatically."

The results already achieved speak volumes for these

tactics. For example the amelioration of the condition of

women has been vigorously pursued by the Brahmo Samaj,

their self-constituted and chivalrous champion. But the

suggested reforms have often been too radical and their

means too heterodox. " Vivekananda said that the new

ought to be a development rather than a condemnation

and rejection of the old. . . . The female institutions of

the Ramakrishna Mission combining all that is best in

Hinduism and the West, are to-day considered models of

what the education of women ought to be." It is the

same with regard to service of the lower classes, but I

have already emphasized this point sufficiently and need

not return to it. The excellent effect of a spirit that weds

the new to the old has been also felt in the renaissance

of Indian culture, to which other powerful elements have

contributed, such as the glorious influence of the Tagores

and their school at Shantiniketan. But it must never be

forgotten that Vivekananda and his devoted Western dis-

ciple, Sister Nivedita, were their predecessors ; and that

the great current of popular Hindu education began with

Vivekananda's return to Colombo. Vivekananda was in-

dignant that the Indian Scriptures, the Upanishads, Gita,

Vedanta, etc., were practically unknown to the people,

and reserved for the learned. To-day Bengal is flooded

with translations of the Sacred Writings in the vernacular

THE RAMAKRISHNA MATH AND MISSION

, and with commentaries upon them. The Ramakrishna

schools have spread a knowledge of them throughout

India.

Nevertheless (and this is the most beautiful character-

istic of the movement) the Indian national renaissance is

not accompanied, as is the general rule, by a sentiment

of hostility or superiority towards the alien. On the con-

trary : it holds out the hand of fellowship to the West.

The followers of Sri Ramakrishna admit Westerners, not

only into their sanctuaries but into their ranks (an un-

heard of thing in India) into their holy order of Sannyasins,

and have insisted on their reception on an equal footing

by all, even by the orthodox monks. Moreover the latter,

the orthodox Sannyasins who in their hundreds of thousands

exercise a constant influence on the Hindu masses, have

gradually adopted the ways and the ideas of Ramakrishna's

followers, to whom they were at first opposed, and whom

they accused of heresy. Finally the hereditary Order of

Ramakrishna and Vivekananda has made it a rule never

to take anything into the world that makes for division,

but only what makes for union.

" Its sole object/' it was said at the public meeting of

the Extraordinary General Convention of the Mission in

1926, " is to bring about harmony and co-operation between

the beliefs and doctrines of the whole of humanity" to

reconcile religions among themselves and to free reason

to reconcile classes and nations to found the brotherhood

of all men and all peoples.

And further, because the Ramakrishna Mission is per-

meated with a belief in the quasi-identity of the Macrocosm

and the Microcosm, of the universal Self and the individual

Self because it knows that no reform can be deep and

lasting in a society unless it is first rooted in an inner

reformation of the individual soul it is on the formation

of the universal man that it expends its greatest care. It

seeks to create a new human type, wherein the highest

powers, at present scattered and fragmentary, and the

diverse and complementary energies of man shall be com-

binedthe heights of intelligence towering above the clouds,

the sacred wood of love, and the rivers of action. The great

Rhythm of the soul beats from Pole to Pole, from intense

PROPHETS OF THE NEW INDIA

concentration to : " Seid umschlungen, Mttlionem \ " 9 with,

its universal appeal. As it is possible in spite of diffi-

culties to attain this ideal in the case of a single man,' the

Ramakrishna Mission is trying to realize the same ideal in

its Universal Church the symbol of its Master "his Math,

which represents the physical body of Ramakrishna." 10

Here we can see the rhythm of history repeating itself.

To European Christians such a dream recalls that of the

Church of Christ. The two are sisters. And if a man

wishes to study the dream that is nineteen hundred years

old, he would do better, instead of looking for it in books

that perish, to listen at the breast of the other to its young

heart-beats. There is no question of comparison between

the two figures of the Man-Gods. The elder will always

have the privilege over the younger on account of the

crown of thorns and the spear-thrust upon the Cross, while

the younger will always have an irresistible attraction on

account of his happy smile in the midst of agonizing suffer-

ing. Neither can yield anything to the other in grace and

power, in divinity of heart and universality. But is it not

true that the scrupulous historian of the Eternal Gospel,

who writes at its dictation, always finds that at each of

its new editions, the Gospel has grown with humanity ?

f The Ode to Joy of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

10 Vivekananda.

II

THE AWAKENING OF INDIA AFTER VIVEKANANDA, RABIN**

DRANATH TAGORE AND AUROBINDO GHOSE

PERHAPS it may be useful for European readers to

include a sketch of the progress of Indian thought

during the period separating the death of Vivekananda

from the advent of Gandhi as the moral dictator of his

nation. It will then be easier to allot to each of the two

leaders the two " Judges of Israel " his proper place and

to form a better appreciation of the continuity of their

action.

The Indian nationalist movement smouldered for a long

time until Vivekananda's breath blew the ashes into flame,

and erupted violently three years after his death in 1905. 1

The occasion was Lord Curzon's 2 partition of the ancient

Province of Bengal into two divisions, of which one, Western

Bengal, was united to Assam. This was a death blow aimed

at the brain and the heart of India ; for Bengal was her

most keenly alive Province and the one from whose intelli-

gence and attachment to her great past British supremacy

had most to fear : and the whole of Bengal was effected.

Before the measure was carried into effect the Bengal

leaders on August 7, 1905, decided upon a general boycott

of British goods, by way of protest. They were obeyed

1 Cf . the excellent work of one of the most intelligent and ener-

getic leaders of India nationalism, who has just fallen a victim

to his cause, Lajput Rai, Gandhi's friend, and one who honoured

us also with his friendship Young India, the Nationalist Movement,

New York, Huebsch, 1917.

1 Ren6 Grousset (The Awakening of Asia, Plon, 1924) clearly

depicts the inauspicious part played by Lord Curzon. He it was

who engineered the defeat of Russia by Japan, and Japan's victory

had a tremendous repercussion throughout Asia. The Russian

Revolution of 1905 was a second lesson of fate. It taught India

terrorism.

497 KK

PROPHETS OF THE NEW INDIA

with enthusiasm. Amid cries of " Swadeshi," goods manu-

factured in India were opposed to English products^ and-

it was further decided to found a national university.

Lord Curzon persisted in his course and on October 16

Bengal was divided.

It revolted. In a few months the face of the country

was changed. Press, gallery, temples, theatres, literature,

all became national. Everywhere the song was heard, that

has since become so famous : " Bande mataram " (Hail,

Motherland !), G. K. Gokhale, the only member of the Indian

National Congress 8 except the President Dadabhai, to wield

uncontested authority and whose influence upon Gandhi the

latter hats since respectfully acknowledged, organized The

Servants of India Society " with the object of forming

national missionaries for the service of India."

That was the historic moment, which has all too soon

been allowed to fade into oblivion of Rabindranath Tagore.

It marked the pinnacle of his political action and of his

popularity. He condemned the timidity of the Congress

in " begging " f or a Constitution from its English masters,

boldly proclaimed Swaraj (Home Rule), ignored the British

Government and strove to create a National Indian Govern-

ment to take its place. An indefatigable orator, his wonder-

ful eloquence was heard on all sides. Unfortunately too

few echoes have reached our ears, for most of his speeches

were extempore and few have been preserved. 4 He also

wrote poems and national songs, which became immediately

popular and were passed from mouth to mouth among the

ardent youth of his countrymen. Lastly he sought to

develop native industries and national education, and de-

voted all his personal resources to those objects. But when

the independence movement took on a violent character,

The National Indian Congress was assembled for the first time

in 1885. Until about 1900 the moderate loyalists of the shade of

Dadabhai Nacroji had had the ascendancy. During the following

years the struggle became very tense between the radicals and th'e

moderates. After December, 1907, the real leader of Indian opinion

was the Radical Tilak (1855-1920) who appealed openly to national

revolution. Some particulars of Dadabhai, Gokhale and Tilak may

be found in my Life of Mahatma Gandhi.

4 .They have been published in a pamphlet, Greater India, Ganesan,

Madras.

THE AWAKENING OF INDIA AFTER VIVEKANANDA

the poet left it and retired to Shantiniketan. He was " a

.lost leader " ; and Indian nationalists have never forgiven

him.'

Another personality the greatest after him thrown

into the limelight by the independence movement, was his

young friend, Aurobindo Ghose. He was the real intellec-

tual heir of Vivekananda. He had just completed a brilliant

education at Cambridge. Very learned, brought up in

the classical culture of Europe, he was in the service of

the Gaekwar of Baroda. He gave up his lucrative post

and accepted for a very modest stipend the headship of

the National College at Calcutta. His aim was to mould

the character of Bengal youth by uniting education closely

to the religion, politics and life of the nation. Under his

inspiration, combined with that of Tagore, colleges and

national schools rose against Lord Curzon. On all sides

societies and gymnasiums were formed, where young Ben-

galis practised sports and fencing as an answer to the out-

rageous criticisms of English writers like Macaulay and

Kipling. Numbers of newspapers in Bengal and English,

inspired by Aurobindo and his friends, kept up the agitation.

As the boycott continued, Lord Curzon sent troops to

Barisal in Western Bengal, but in spite of violent language

India did not depart from passive resistance until 1907.

The patriots allowed themselves to be prosecuted and im-

prisoned amid the applause of the nation but without

coming to blows. The sudden deportation of Lajput Rai

without any previous charge or condemnation in May set

fire to the train. The first shot was fired in December,

1907, the first bomb thrown in April or May, 1908. ^ The

Lieutenant Governor of Bengal was attacked three times.

The new Viceroy of India, Lord Minto, was attacked in

November, 1909, at Ahmedabad. The Political Secretary

of Lord Morley, the Secretary of State for India, was killed

in London. Strikes, sabotage, destruction of railways

pillaging of gunsmiths' shops, violence of all kinds incre;

The British Government redoubled its repressive measi

Within a few months practically all the nationalist "

had been thrown into prison, Aurobindo was +*

conspiracy, and Tilak condemned to six years' d(

to Burma. 1908 and 1909 saw the fever at it

PROPHETS OF THE NEW INDIA

The two subsequent years were marked by a deceptive

calm ; King George V visited India in December, 1911,,

and appeared to agree to a re-establishment of the admin-'

istrative unity of Bengal. But in December, 1912, a new

attempt, more serious than any of the former ones, greeted

the first entry of the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, into Delhi,

the ancient and new capital of Bengal. Lord Hardinge

was wounded, several of his suite were killed, and the

murderer eluded all efforts to trace him, in spite of an

enormous sum placed upon his head. 1912 and 1913 saw

the revolutionary movements in full swing. The World

War created a diversion and brought about a calculated

but insincere rapprochement between the Government of

the Empire and India. Under the growing influence of

Gandhi, who had just returned from South Africa, India

trusted its promises only too well and bitter disillusion was

the result, as is well known. There followed the powerful

Passive Resistance campaign inaugurated by Gandhi.

But according to the definite statement of Lajput Rai,

one of the chief leaders of the period before 1914, the ele-

ments of religious thought associated with and leavening

the national Awakening were as follows :

Whatever the complexion of the nationalist parties

whether they supported terrorist means, or organized

rebellion, or patient and constructive preparation for Indian

Home Rule, they were all represented in the great religious

groups; the Arya Samaj, the Brahmo Samaj, the Rama-

krishna Mission, the disciples of Kali, Neo Vedantists or

Deists or Theists. All believed that their first duty of

worship was to their Mother Country, the symbol of the

Supreme Mother of the universe. And this is one of the

most striking phenomena in the immense sea of nationalism,

which flooded humanity during the ten years preceding the

World War. There has been a childish desire to ascribe it

to individual or local causes, when without a shadow of

doubt for those capable of judging things in their entirety,

it was a simultaneous feverish hour when the whole great

tree of Humanity grew and expanded. But it is only

natufal that our limited intelligence in each country should

have mistaken its cosmic significance and interpreted it

ea^h according to its own selfishly limited point of view.

THE AWAKENING OF INDIA AFTER VIVEKANANDA

It is not in the least surprising that in India the for-

.midable flame of collective religious hallucination possessing

her three hundred million men, should have immediately

taken the form of the country. Mother India, sung in the

Indian Marseillaise by Bankin Chandra, the Rouget de

Lisle of Bengal, is the Mother, Kali, reincarnated in the

body of the Nation.

It may easily be imagined that Vivekananda's Neo-Vedan-

tism, magnifying as it does the power of the Soul and its

essential union with God, spread like burning alcohol in

the veins of his intoxicated nation. " To these two classes,"

Lajput Rai declared explicitly, " to the Vedantists and to

the worshippers of the Mother belong the majority of Bengal

nationalists." The similarity of their belief, and their per-

sonal disinterestedness, had no check on the extreme violence

of their political action. On the contrary 1 These sancti-

fied their violent acts. It is always so when religion is

united to politics. " All individual licence of thought and

action was excused in the struggle, for the simple reason that

the saviours of the nation were like fakirs and sannyasins,

above all law."

And is it to be wondered at that Vivekananda's name

should have been mixed up with these political violences

in all sincerity despite his formal condemnation of politics

when Brahmos belonging to the Brahmo Samaj, the

church of reason and moderate theism, were to be found

in the ranks of the assassins !

The British Government was therefore not altogether

wrong at that time to keep a close wa,tch over religious

organizations, although the official directors of those organ-

izations were opposed to violence and worked for the slow

and lawful evolution of the nation towards the common

end : the independence of India.

* * *

It is an undoubted fact that the Neo-Vedantism of Vive-

kananda 5 materially contributed to this evolution. Lajput

8 We have seen above that it was in his capacity of patriot that

Vivekananda influenced Gandhi (who is moreover no metaphysician

and has little curiosity about mental research). When from the

balcony of Belur, Gandhi rendered public homage to his great fore-

PROPHETS OF THE NEW INDIA

Rai attributes to him the honour of creating a new spirit

of national tolerance, so that since his death Indian patriots

have gradually freed themselves from their ancient 'pre-

judices of caste and family.

The most noble representative of this great Neo-Vedantic

spirit was and still is Aurobindo Ghose, the foremost of

Indian thinkers, from whom intellectual and religious India

is awaiting a new revelation.

At the period I am considering, he was the voice of

Vivekananda risen from the pyre. He had the same con-

ception of the identity of India's national ideal and her

spiritual mission, and the same universal hope. Nothing

was farther from his thoughts than a gross nationalism,

whose aim was the purely political supremacy of his people

confined within a proud and narrow " parochial life " (as

Aurobindo expressed it) . His nation was to be the servant

of humanity ; and the first duty of the nation was to work

for the unity of humanity not by force of arms, but by

the force of the spirit. And the very essence of this force

is spirituality in the form of energy, called religious, but

in as widely different a sense as possible from all confession

in the profound Self and its reserves of eternity, the Atman.

No nation has had such age-long knowledge and free access

to it as India. Her real mission then should be to lead

the rest of humanity to it.

" An awakening of the real Self of a nation is the con-

dition of national greatness. The supreme Indian idea of

the Unity of all men in God, and the realization of this

idea, outwardly and inwardly, in social relation and in

the structure of society, are destined to govern all progress

of the human kind. India can, if she wishes, lead the

world."

Such language sounds strangely different from that of

our European politicians. But is it really so ? Does it

not differ (I am speaking of those loyal souls in the West

who are working for the co-operation of all the forces

of civilization) only in that it has taken one step further

in its intensity of faith in the common cause ; the United

runner, his actual words were that " the reading of Vivekananda's

books had increased his patriotism." (Communicated by the Rama-

krishna Mission.)

THE AWAKENING OF INDIA AFTER VIVEKANANDA

States of humanity ? Our European thinkers are too timid

to dare to assert the God hidden in man, the Eternal who

is the support and living reason for the very existence of

Humanity, an unstable and hollow entity without Him.

The old political leader of the Bengal revolt, who is

now one of the greatest thinkers of modern India, has

realized the most complete synthesis achieved up to the

present between the genius of the West and of the East.

In 1910 he retired from politics 8 although he has not

severed his connection with the political freedom of his

country ; but he feels that she is certain to obtain it and

therefore has no further use for him. He believes that

he serves India better by turning his energies to a deepening

of her wisdom and science, and he has devoted the con-

centration of his vast mind to reconquering the use of the

rusty "key" of the spirit, which is destined, according to

his belief, to open to humanity new fields of knowledge

and power. 7 He was brought up on modern science and

the wisdom of the Hindu Scriptures he is their daring

interpreter in India to-day he speaks and writes Sanskrit,

From his retirement since 1910 at Pondicherry, whither he fled

to escape the political persecution of England, Aurobindo Ghose

published during the World War a review of the greatest import-

ance (unfortunately difficult to procure to-day) Arya, a Review of

Philosophical Synthesis. A French edition of the first year appeared

(from August 15, 1914), under the collaboration of Paul and Mirra

Richard. In it Aurobindo Ghose published his chief works : " The

Divine Life " and " The Synthesis of the Yogas." (I note in pass-

ing that this last work rests from first to last on Vivekananda's

authority.) At the same time he gave learned and original inter-

pretations of the Hindu Scriptures, the discussion of which we

must leave to Sanskrit scholars, while at the same time he bore

unequivocal witness to their philosophic depth and fascination :

" The Secret of the Veda." Two volumes of his Essays on the Gita

have just appeared (1928) and have aroused animated discussion

in India.

7 " India possesses in its past, a little rusty and out of use, the

key to the progress of humanity. It is to this side that I am now

turning my energies, rather than towards mediocre politics. Hence

the reason for my withdrawal. I believe in the necessity for tapasya

(a life of meditation and concentration) in silence for education and

self-knowledge and for the unloosing of spiritual energies. Our

ancestors used these means under different forms ; for they axe

the best for becoming an efficient worker in the great hours of the

world/ 1 (Interview at Madras, 1917.)

503 .,

PROPHETS OF THE NEW INDIA

Greek, Latin, English, French and German, and at this

very moment he is engaged in bringing a new message

to his people, the result of eighteen years' meditation. He

is seeking to harmonize the spiritual strivings of India

and the activities of the West, and in pursuance of that

aim he is training all the forces of the spirit towards an

ascendancy of action. The West with its customary opinion

of the East as passive, static, ataraxic, will be astonished

to see in a little while an India who will outstrip her -in

the madness of progress and upward advance. If, like

Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and Ghose she withdraws her-

self for a space into the profundities of thought, it is only

to gain fresh impetus for the next forward leap. Auro-

bindo Ghose is fired with an unparalleled faith in the limit-

less powers of the soul and of human progress. His accepta-

tion of the material and scientific conquests of Europe is

complete, but he regards them not as the end but as the

beginning ; he wishes to see India outstrip the field by the

use of the same methods. 8 For he believes that " humanity

is on the point of enlarging its domain by new knowledge,

new powers, new capacities, such as will create a revolution

in human life as great as did the physical sciences of the

nineteenth century."

This is to be achieved by the methodical and deliberate

incorporation of intuition in integral science as the enlight-

ener and quartermaster of the mind, to which logical reason

acts as the rank and file that makes victory certain. There

will no longer be a break in the continuity between the

divine Unity and aspiring man ! The question of renounc-

ing illusory Nature to be free in God will no longer exist.

Complete freedom will be attained by a joyful acceptation,

espousal, and subjugation of integral Nature. There will

be no renunciation, no constriction. With all our energies

" The past ought to be sacred to us, but the future still more

so ... The thought of India must come forth from the school

of philosophy and renew contact with life. The spirituality of

India, emerging from the cave and the temple, must adapt itself

to new forms and set its hand to the world." There follows the

phrase quoted above about the belief in the imminent enlargement

of the field of humanity, in the next revolution to be accomplished

in human Life, and the " rusty key " of India, which is to open

the door to the new progress. (Interview at Madras.)

THE AWAKENING OF INDIA AFTER VIVEKANANDA

in their infinite multiplicity and with open eyes we shall

embrace life as a whole, cosmic Joy, from the heart of the

achieved Unity of the serene and unattached Being. God

works in and through man, and in Him liberated men

become body and soul " canals of action in this world." 9

Hence the most complete knowledge is being fused to

the most intense action by religious, wise and heroic India

now in process of being resuscitated. The last of the great

Rishis holds in his outstretched hands the bow of Creative

Impulse. It is an uninterrupted tide flowing from the

most distant yesterdays to the most distant tomorrows.

The whole spiritual life of history is one : The One that

advances. ...

" Usha (the Dawn) follows to the goal of those that are

passing on beyond. She is the first in the eternal succession

of the dawns that are coming Usha widens, bringing out

that which lives, awakening that which was dead. . . .

What scope is hers when she harmonizes with the dawns

that shone out before those that now must shine ! She

desires the ancient mornings and fulfils their light ; pro-

jecting forwards her illumination she enters into communion

with the rest that are to come." 10

We are beginning to perceive the meaning of the pro-

digious curve of the human Spirit throughout three cen-

turies from the Aufklarung of the eighteenth century

its emancipation from the too narrow confines of ancient

classical synthesis by the weapon of negative and revolution-

ary critical rationalism, the sublime flight of experimental

and positive science in the nineteenth century with its

colossal hopes and fabulous promises its partial bank-

ruptcy at the end of the nineteenth century the seismic

upheavals of the beginning of the twentieth century, shaking

the whole edifice of the spirit to its foundations the insta-

bility of scientific laws that evolve and vary like humanity

" The Synthesis of the Yogas " (Arya Review, December 15,

1914). Aurobindo depended largely on this character of action

in his new commentaries on the Gita. (Essays on the Gita, 3 Vols.,

1921-28, Calcutta.)

10 Quotation from the Kutsa Angirasa Rig- Veda, inscribed by

Aurobindo Ghose in French as the foreword of one of his chief

works : " The Divine Life " (first number of the Arya Review,

August 15, 1914).

PROPHETS OF THE NEW INDIA

itself, the entry into play of Relativity, the invasion of

the Subconscious, the threat to ancient rationalism and

its transition from an attitude of attack to one of defence,

all making it impossible for the ancient Faiths to discover

their old foundations on the ground so undermined by

reason, in order to begin rebuilding. . . .

And lo ! for the benefit of mankind as a whole comes

the promise of an age of new synthesis, where a new and

larger rationalism, although aware of its limitations, will

be allied to a new Science of intuition established on a

surer basis. The combined efforts of the East and the

West will create a new order of freer and more universal

thought. And, as is always the way in times of plenty,

the immediate result of this inner order will be an afflux

of power and audacious confidence, a flame of action in-

spiring and nourishing the spirit, a renewal of individual

and social life. . . .

" Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high ;

Where knowledge is free ;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow

domestic walls ;

Where words come out from the depth of truth ; . . .

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the

dreary desert sand of dead habit ;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought

and action. . . ." "

There we will walk in the midst of tempests guided by

our stars. . . .

11 Rabindranath Tagore : Gitanjali.

APPENDICES TO THE UNIVERSAL

GOSPEL OF VIVEKANANDA

CONCERNING MYSTIC INTROVERSION AND ITS SCIENTIFIC

VALUE FOR THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE REAL

THE intuitive workings of the " religious " spirit in the

wide sense in which I have consistently used the word

have been insufficiently studied by modern psychological

science in the West and too often by observers, who are them-

selves lacking in every kind of " religious " inclination and so

are ill equipped for its study and involuntarily prone to depre-

ciate an inner sense they do not themselves possess. 1

One of the best works devoted to this important subject is

M. Ferdinand Morel's Essay on Mystic Introversion. 2 It is

firmly founded on the principles and methods of pathological

psycho-physiology and on the psycho-analysis of Freud, Janet,

Jung, Bleuler, etc., and it handles the psychological study of

several representative types of Hellenic-Christian mysticism

with scrupulous care. His analysis of the Pseudo-Denis is

particularly interesting ; 3 and his description of him is on the

whole correct in spite of the fact that the author does not manage

1 I except from this criticism several beautiful and recent essays

rehabilitating intuition on scientific grounds more or less the off-

spring of the dynamic " Impetus " of Bergson and the penetrating

analysis of Edouard le Roy also of the first order.

1 Essai sur I' Introversion mystique ; ttude psychologique de

Pseudo-Denys I'Arfopagite et de quelques autres cas de mysticism,

Geneva, Kundig, 1918, in 80, 338 pp.

As far as the author is aware the term " introversion " was used

for the first time in the sense of scientific psychology by Dr. C. G.

Jung of Zurich.

1 The second part of the work, devoted to " several other cases

of mysticism, 11 is unfortunately very inferior Eastern mysticism

(" forty centuries of Introversion " as the author says) is studied

in a few pages from third-hand information and Christian mysti-

cism in the West is summarized into a quite arbitrary and inadequate

choice of types, including a number of definitely diseased people

like Madame Guyon and Antoinette Bourignon, and superior and

complete personalities like St. Bernard and Francis of Sales.

They are, moreover, all mutilated by a very distorted representa-

APPENDICES

to free himself from his preconceived theories drawn from the

scientific pathology of his age in his appreciation of the works

of Denis and the conclusions he draws from them.

Without being able within the limits of this note to enter

into a close discussion such as his theses deserve, I should

like, however briefly, to point out their weak spots as I see

them and the truer interpretation that ought to be put upon

them.

Almost all psychologists are possessed by the theory 4 of

Regression, which appears to have been started by Th. Ribot.

It is undoubtedly a true one within the limited bounds of his

psycho-pathological studies on functional disorganization, but

it has been erroneously extended to the whole realm of the

mind, whether abnormal or normal.

Ribot laid down that " the psychological functions most

rapidly attacked by disease were the most recently constituted

ones, the last in point of time in the development of the indivi-

dual (ontogenesis), and then reproduced on a general scale in

the evolution of the species (phylogenesis)/ 1 Janet, Freud, and

their followers have applied this statement to all the nervous

affections, and from them to all the activities of the mind.

From this it is for them only a step for us a false step, to the

conclusion that the most recently effected operations and the

most rapidly worn out are the highest in hierarchy, and that

a return to the others is a retrogression in a backward sense,

a fall of the mind.

At the outset let us determine what is meant by " the supreme

function " of the mind. It is what Janet calls " the function

of the real/' and he defines it as awareness of the present, of

present action, the enjoyment of the present. He places " dis-

interested action and thought," which does not keep an exact

account of present reality, on a lower level, then imaginary

representation at the bottom of the scale, that is to say the

tion : for the mighty elements of energy and social action which

in the case of these great men were closely bound up with mystic

contemplation, are taken out of the picture.

4 With one notable exception, the fine school of educational

psychology at Geneva, grouped round the Institute J. J. Rousseau

and the International Bureau of Education. One of the chiefs of

this group, Ch. Baudouin, has in these very last months protested

against the confusion caused by the term regression, attached in-

discriminately to all the phenomena of recoil psychologically, so

varied and sometimes so different. (Cf. Journal of Psychology,

Paris, November, December, 1928.)

APPENDICES

whole world of imagination and fancy. Freud with his custo-

mary energy, asserts that reverie and all that emerges from it,

is nothing but the debris of the first stage of evolution. And

they all agree in opposing, like Bleuler, a "function of the

unreal " akin to pure thought, to the so-called " function of

the real/ 1 which they would term " the fine point of the soul,"

(to misuse the famous phrase of Francis of Sales by applying

it what irony ! to the opposite extreme). 6

Such a classification, which ascribes the highest rank to

" interested " action and the lowest rank to concentration of

thought, seems to me to be self-convicted in the light of simple

practical and moral common sense. And this depreciation of

the most indispensable operation of the active mind : the with-

drawal into oneself, to dream, to imagine, to reason, is in danger

of becoming a pathological aberration. The irreverent observer

is tempted to say : " Physician, heal thyself ! "

It seems to me that the transcendant value attributed by

science to the idea of evolution should be taken with a pinch

of salt. The admission of its indestructibility and universality

without any exception, is in fact nothing more than the declar-

ation of a continuous series (or sometimes discontinuous) of

modifications and of differentiations in living matter. This

biological process is not worthy to be elevated into a dogma,

forcing us to see far above and beyond us, suspended to some

vague " greasy pole," some equally vague mysterious supreme

" Realization " of the living being not much less supernatural

than the " Realization " below and behind us (or in the depths)

presupposed by religion in its various myths of primitive Eden.

Eventually, vital evolution would culminate in the inevitable

extinction of the species by a process of exhaustion. How can

we decide the exact moment when the path begins to go down

on the further side instead of going up ? There are as many

reasons for believing that the most important of the diverse

operations and functions of the mind are those which disappear

last : for they are the very foundations of Being and that

the part so easily destroyed belongs to a superficial level of

existence.

" A great aesthete, who is at the same time a scientist and

a creative artist a complete man endowed with both reason

and intuition, Edouard Monod-Herzen, has thus expressed it :

B With quite unconscious irony a great " introvert " like Plotinus,

sincerely pities the " extraverts," the " wanderers outside them-

selves " (Enn. TV, III, 17), for they seem to him to have lost the

" function of the real."

APPENDICES

" The effects of the Cosmos antecedent to a. given individual,

whose substance still bears their trace, are to be distinguished,

from the contemporary effects which set their mark upon* him

each day. The first are his own inner property, and constitute

his heredity. The second are his acquired property, and con-

stitute his adaptation."

In what way then are his " acquired properties " superior in

hierarchical order to his " Innate possessions " ? They are only

so in point of time. And, continues E. Monod-Herzen, " the

actual condition of the individual results from a combination

of the two groups of possessions/' 6

Why should they be dissociated ? If it is to meet the exi-

gences of scientific investigation, it is not superfluous to remark

that by its very definition primitive or " innate possessions "

accommodate themselves better to such dissociation than

" acquired possessions " for the simple reason that the latter

are posterior and necessarily presuppose what went before them.

As Ch. Baudouin, when he was trying to correct the depre-

catory tendencies of psycho-analysis with regard to psychological

" phenomena of recoil/' wrote on the subject of evolution :

" Evolution is not conceived as going from the reflex to

instinct, from instinct to the higher psychological life, without

appealing to successive inhibitions and their resultant intro-

versions. At each step new inhibitions must intervene to

prevent energy from immediately discharging itself in motive

channels together with introversions, inward storings of energy

until little by little thought is substituted for the inhibited

action. . . . Thought (as John Dewey has shown) may be

regarded as the result of suspended action, which the subject

does not allow to proceed to its full realization. Our reasonings

are attempts in effigy. ... It would therefore be a pity to

confound introversion with open retrogression, since the latter

marks a step backwards in the line of evolution " (and I

would add that it is a retreat " without any idea of regaining

lost ground and advancing again ") " while introversion is the

indispensable condition of evolution and if it is a recoil, it is

one of those recoils that render a forward thrust possible." 7

' Science et Esthttique : Principe s de morphologic gtntrale, 1917*

Paris, Gauthier-Villars.

f Of. cit ;t pp. 808-09.

This is just what I have been led to observe and what I have

noted in the last chapter of this volume on " The Awakening of

APPENDICES

But let us come frankly to the case of great introversion,

no longer in the mitigated form of normal thought but complete,

'absolute, unmitigated, as we have been studying it in this

volume in the case of the highest mystics.

To pathological psychology (and M. Ferdinard Morel accepts

these conclusions) 8 it is a return to a primary stage, to a intra-

uterine state. And the symbolic words used to explain absorp-

tion in the Unity by the masters of mysticism, whether of India

or of Alexandria, or the Areopagite or the two fourteenth-century

whirlwinds of the soul, Eckhart and Tauler : " Grund, Urgrund,

Boden, Wurzel, Wesen ohne Wesen, Indefinite suressentidle . . .

etc./ 1 add weight to this assumption, no less than the curious

instinct which has given birth in Ramakrishna's India to the

passionate worship of " the Mother, 1 ' and in Christianity to

that of the " Virgin Mother/'

It must be granted that we are impartial. 9

Is it then only a similar replunging of conscious thought

into the distant abysses of prenatal life ? For a careful study

of mysticism establishes clearly that consciousness exists un-

dimmed in this gigantic ascent backwards up the ladder of the

past, compared to which Wells's Time Machine is mere child's

play : and M. F. Morel returns to it on several occasions.

" In the most complete introversion (that of Denis the

Areopagite) there is no loss of consciousness, but a displacement

of attention. . . . Ecstatic experiences remain deeply engraven

upon those who experience them, and this wpuld not be the

case if they were simply empty or void of meaning. . . . Con-

India " ; " If the mystic thought of contemporary India seems to

us, in the case of Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and Aurobindo Ghose,

to recoil at times into the recesses of primitive evolution, it is only

to collect itself for a further leap forward."

The deep-seated narcisism of honest introversion is a profound

retrogression into the bosom of the mother ; thus the individual

epitomizes the whole development of the race."

9 As a starting-point. But the great analysts of this intuitive

11 ebbing " such as Ed. le Roy, show wherein the final " simplicity "

to which they have already attained, differs from the " simplicity

anterior to the discursive intricacy, belonging solely to the con-

fused preintuition of a child." It is "a rich and luminous sim-

plicity, which achieves the dispersion of analysis by surpassing and

overcoming it. It alone is the fruit of true intuition, the state of

inner freedom, of fusion of the pacified soul with (the Being) ^non-

passive peace, which is action at its highest power. . . ." (" The

Discipline of Intuition," Review Vers I' Unite, 1925, Nos. 35-6.)

There is not one of these sayings to which Vivekananda would

not have subscribed.

513 LL

APPENDICES

sciousness is in fact something intensely mobile. When the

exterior world has disappeared, the circle of consciousness

contracts and seems to withdraw entirely into some unknown

and usually ignored cortical centre. Consciousness seems to

gather itself together, to confine itself within some unknown

psychic pineal gland and to withdraw into a kind of centre

wherein all organic functions and all psychic forces meet, and

there it enjoys unity . . . nothing else." 10

" Nothing else ? " What more do you want I There, accord-

ing to your own admission you have an instrument for pene-

trating to the depths of functional consciousness, of subliminal

life and yet you do not use it in order to complete your know-

ledge of the whole activity of the mind. You, doctors of the

Unconscious, instead of making yourselves citizens of this

boundless empire and possessing yourselves of it, do you ever

enter it except as foreigners, imbued with the preconceived

idea of the superiority of your own country and incapable of

ridding yourselves of the need, which itself deforms your vision

of reducing whatever you catch a glimpse of in this unknown

world to the measure of the one already familiar to you ? n

Think of the extraordinary interest of these striking descrip-

tions a succession of Indian, Alexandrine and Christian mystics

of all sects without mutual knowledge of each other have all

with the same clarity gone through the same experiences

the triple movement of thought, 12 and especially the " circu-

lar movement," which they have tested thoroughly and " which

represents exactly the psychic movement of pure and simple

introversion, withdrawing itself from the periphery and collecting

itself towards the centre " the mighty Stygian river that goes

seven times round the Being, the round dance with its powerful

attraction towards the centre, the centripetal force of the inner

soul corresponding to that exercised in the exterior universe by

universal gravitation ! Is it a slight thing to be able by means

of direct perception to realize the great cosmic laws and the

forces which govern the universe controlled by our senses?

"E. Morel: Op. cit. t p. 112.

11 Cf . my first note in the first volume of this work on the Physiology

of Indian Asceticism, the yoghic descriptions of the ascent of the

Koundalini Shakti up to the " lotus with the thousand petals," in.

the cerebral hemispheres.

11 The three movements : " Circular," when the thought turns

entirely towards itself : " spiral," when it reflects and reasons in

a discursive fashion : " in a straight line/' when it is directed

towards the exterior. (Cf. Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Hennias,

Denis the Areopagite, etc., and F. Morel's analysis of them.)

APPENDICES

If a scientist maintains that such knowledge of psychic pro-

fundities teaches us nothing about exterior realities, he really,

though perhaps unwittingly, is obeying a prejudice of proud

incomprehension as one-eyed as that of those religious spirit-

ualists who set up an insurmountable barrier between spirit

and matter. What is the " function of the real " of which

scientific psychology claims to be the standard-bearer? And

what is the " real " ? Is it what can be observed by extra-

spection or by introspection like that of St. John in Raphael's

Dispute, who gazes into the depths with his closed eyes?

Is it " the movement in a straight line " or "in spirals " or

" in a circle " ? There are not two realities. That which exists

in one exists equally in the other. 14 The laws of the inner

psychic substance are of necessity the same as those of outside

reality. And if you succeed in reading one properly, the chances

are that you will find the confirmation (if not, the presentiment)

of what you have read or will read in the other. Laotse's deep

thought that " a wheel is made up of thirty perceptible spokes,

but it is because of the central non-perceptible void of the nave

that it turns," leads me to think of the latest hypotheses of

astronomical science, which claim to have discovered gulfs of

cosmic emptiness to be the homes of the various universes. . . .

Do you suppose that Laotse would ever have been able to

imagine such a thought if it had not secretly contained the

form of the universal cosmic Substance and its forgotten laws ?

Hypothesis do you say ? Neither more nor less so than your

most firmly established fruitful scientific hypotheses. And quite

11 An allusion to Raphael's fresco of the Holy Sacrament in the

Vatican known as the Dispute (or the Discussion).

14 1 am glad to find myself here in accord with the thought of

one of the masters of the " new Education/' Dr. Adolphe Ferriere,

the founder-president of the International Bureau of Education in

his monumental work : Spiritual Progress (Vol. I of Constructive

Education, 1927, Geneva).

" If individual reasons are reducible as to a single common

denominator, to Reason conceived as super-individual and im-

personal ... it is because at bottom each mind and what it is

convenient to call nature, share the saine reality, have the same

origin, are the issue of the same cosmic Energy " (p. 45).

If then introspection makes it possible to go back, I do not say

to the origin but nearer to the origin, the vital source that is one

of the forms of universal Energy, why ignore it ?

(Cf. in the same work of Dr. A. Ferriere, Chapter III, I, The

Human Microcosm replies to the Macrocosm, its very title and

basic idea correspond to the Vedantic conception explained by Vive-

kananda in several of the most famous lectures of his Jnana-yoga.)

APPENDICES

logically probable : for it satisfies the strict economy of the laws

of the universe and partakes of their natural harmony.

But if this is true the judicious use of deep introversion opens

to the scientist a mine of unexplored resources : for it consti-

tutes a new method of experiment, having the advantage that

the observer identifies himself with the object observed. . . . fyis

6q&aa. The Plotinian identity of the seer and the thing seen. 15

The clear intuition of Plotinus, who united in himself the

spirit of Greek observation and Eastern introspection, has thus

described the operation :

" It may happen that the soul possesses a thing without

being aware of it ; 16 it therefore possesses it better than if

it were aware of it ; in fact when it is aware of it, it possesses

it as a thing that is alien to it ; when on the contrary it is not

aware of it, it is a real possession/' 17

And that is exactly the idea that one of the greatest thinkers

11 As a matter of fact every great scientific experimenter identi-

fies himself more or less with the object of his experiment. It is

an attribute of all passion, whatever its object, whether carnal or

intellectual, that it embraces the object, and tends to infuse itself

into it. The great physicist biologist, J. Ch. Bose, has told me

that he feels himself becoming one with the plants that he is observ-

ing and that now, before he begins an experiment, he pre-conceives

their reactions within himself, and with poets and artists this is

still more the case. I refer my reader to the chapter in this book

on Walt Whitman.

lf The word " knowledge " stands here for " discursive intellectual

knowledge." It is quite evident that a superior knowledge takes

its place : this knowledge may be called " functional," as in M. F.

Morel, or " perfect reason " as in Plotinus who adds this comment :

" A man only considers discursively that which he does not yet

possess . . . Perfect reason no longer seeks ; it rests upon the

evidence of that with which it is filled. (Enn. t III, VIII, (2), (5).)

" Enn. t LV, IV (4).

Cf . the analysis of intuitive thought by my contemporary French

master Edouard le Roy :

" It is essential that the mind . . . should free itself from all

disuniting egoism, and be led to a ' state of docility ' analogous to

the purification of the conscience by ascetics, an attitude of gener-

osity resembling the workings of love that divines and understands

because it forgets itself, because it accepts the effort of the necessary-

transformations in order to lose itself in its object and to attain

perfect objectivity ..." etc.

"The Discipline of Intuition," Review Vers V Unite, 1925, Nos.

35-6-

And in conclusion :

" The three stages in the course of intuitive thought are :

APPENDICES

of modern India, Aurobindo Ghose, is trying to incorporate

.in science as I have shown in the last chapter of this

voltfme he wishes to reintegrate generative intuition in its

legitimate place as advance guard of the army of the spirit

marching forward to the scientific conquest of the universe.

Part of this great effort is rejected with the disdainful gesture

of the exclusive rationalists, and particularly of psycho-patholo-

gists, who throw discredit on " the standard of intellectual

satisfaction " or, as the great Freud said with austere scorn,

on " the principle of pleasure/' which in his eyes is that of

" the unsuitable/' those who reject it are far less the servants

of the " real/' as they imagine themselves to be, than of a proud

and Puritanical faith, whose prejudices they no longer see

because those prejudices have become second nature. There

is no normal reason why, on the plausible hypothesis of a unity

of substance and cosmic laws, the conquest, the full perception,

and the " fruitio " by the mind of the logical ordering of the

universe should not be accompanied by a feeling of sovereign

well-being. And it would be strange if mental joy were a sign

of error. The mistrust shown by some masters of psycho-

analysis for the free natural play of the mind, rejoicing in its

own possession the stigma they imprint upon it of " narcissism "

and " auterotism " 18 betray all unconsciously a kind of per-

verted ascetism and religious renunciation.

They are, it is true, quite right to denounce the dangers of

introversion, and in so doing no one will contradict them. But

every experiment has its own dangers for the mind. Sense

and reason itself are dangerous instruments and have to be

constantly supervised ; and no close scientific observation is

carried out on a tabula rasa. Whatever it is doing, the eye

interprets before it has seen ; 19 and in the case of P. Lowell,

1. The ' ascese ' preparatory to the renunciation of the usual

forms of speech ;

2. The final union of the spirit with that which started as a

separate object from it ;

3. The simplicity of knowledge or rather of perception when

it has been rediscovered after passing through the dispersion of

analysis, and going beyond and below it, but a simplicity which is

the result of wealth and not poverty." (Ibid.) Are there not close

analogies here to the Jnana-Yoga of India ? (Cf. Intuitive Thought

by the same author, E. le Roy, 1925-)

11 That is to say : the state of Narcissus who was in love with

himself.

lf Cf. the definition of scientific hypothesis by J. Pemn, one of

the intuitive savants of to-day, as " a form of intuitive intelligence

APPENDICES

the astronomer, he has never ceased to see upon the surface

of Mars the canals his own ,eyes have put there. ... By all

means let us continue to doubt, even alter having proof 1 My '

attitude is always one of profound Doubt, which is hidden in

my cave like a strong, bitter but healthgiving tonic, for the

use of the strong.

But in the world of the " real "that is to say, of the " rela-

tive " where we must needs labour and build our dwelling

places, I maintain that the principle whereby we ought to attempt

to satisfy the operations of the mind is that of proportion, of

equilibrium between the diverse forces of the mind. All ten-

dency to inclusiveness is dangerous and defective. Man has

different and complementary means of knowledge at his dis-

posal. 20 If it is necessary to divide them in order to probe

with them into the depths of an object of study, synthesis

must always be re-established afterwards. Strong personalities

accomplish this by instinct. A great " introvert " will know how

to be a great " extravert " at the same time. Here the example

of Vivekananda seems to me to be conclusive. 21 Interiorization

has never led in principle to diminution of action. The hypo-

theses based upon the supposed social passivity of mystic India

are entirely erroneous : here what is nothing but Ersatz is taken

for the cause. The physical and moral devitalization of India

during several centuries is due to quite different factors of

climate and social economy. But we shall see with our own

eyes that her interiorization, where the fires of her threatened

life have taken refuge, is the principle of her national resurrec-

tion. 12 And it will shortly appear how potent a brazier of

action is this Atman, over which she has brooded for several

... to divine the existence or the essential faculties of objects

which are still beyond our consciousness, to explain the complicated

visible by the simple invisible." (The Atoms, 1912.)

10 In the study by Charles Baudouin already quoted, see his

analysis of complementary instincts (the combative instinct and

the instinct of withdrawal ; activity, passivity) and their rhythmic

connexion. In the cases we are considering the tendencies of

recoil and of introversion are complementary to forward impulse

and extraversion. Together they form a system in unstable equi-

librium which can always be tipped to one side or the other.

11 IB it necessary to remind the reader that his example is not in

the least unique ? The genius for action ihown by the greatest of

mystic Christian introverts : St. Bernard, St. Theresa, St. Ignatius,

is well known.

11 1 refer the reader to the chapter in this volume on the

Awakening of India and to the pages devoted to Dayananda and

the Arya Samaj.

APPENDICES

thousand years. I advise the " extravert " peoples of the West

to rediscover in the depths of themselves the same sources of

actiye and creative " introversion." If they fail, there is not

much hope for the future. Their gigantic technical knowledge,

far from being a source of protection, will bring about their

annihilation.

But I am not anxious. The same sources sleep in the depths

of the soul of the West. At the last hour but one they will

spring up anew.

April, 1929.

II

ON THE HELLENIC-CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM OF THE FIRST CENTURIES

AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO HINDU MYSTICISM : PLOTINUS

OF ALEXANDRIA AND DENIS THE AREOPAGITE

IT is one of my chief desires to see Lectureships of Compara-

tive Eastern and Western Metaphysics and Mysticism

founded in India and Europe. The two should be mutually

complementary, for their work is really essential if the human

spirit is to learn to know itself in its entirety. Its object would

not be a kind of puerile steeple-chase seeking to establish the

primitive chronology of each group of thought. Such research

would be meaningless : religious historians who try only to

discover the intellectual interdependence of systems forget the

vital point : the knowledge that religions are not ordinary

matters of intellectual dialectic, but facts of experience, and

that although reason steps in afterwards to construct systems

upon these facts, they would not hold good for an hour if they

were not based upon the solid foundation of experience. Hence

the facts must first be discovered and studied. I do not know

whether any modern psycho-physiologist, armed with all the

latest instruments of the new sciences of the soul, will be able

to attain to a full knowledge of them one day, 1 but I am willing

1 One of the first to attempt an objective study of them was

William James in his famous book on Religious Experience, an

Essay of Descriptive Psychology, which appeared in New York in

1902 under the title : The Varieties of Religious Experience. It is

very remarkable that by the scrupulous honesty of his intellect

alone, this man, though not in the least gifted for the attainment

of subliminal reality, as he himself frankly declared : " My tempera-

ment prohibited me from almost all mystic experience " should

have arrived at the positive statement of the objective existence of

those very realities and should have commended them to the re-

spect of scientists. To his efforts were added those of the learned

Frederick W. H. Myers, who in 1886 discovered " the subliminal

consciousness," a theory propounded in a posthumous work, later

than that of William James : Human Personality. (Myers, like

James, had known Vivekananda personally.) The most interesting

part of James's book appears to be the collection of mystic wit-

APPENDICES

to believe it. In the meanwhile such simple observation as

we have at our present disposal leads us to recognize the exist-

ence of the same religious facts as the foundations of all the

great organized religions, spread over the face of the earth

during the march of the centuries. At the same time it is

impossible to attribute to the mutual actions and reactions of

peoples any appreciable effect on their productions : for their

uprising is spontaneous ; it grows from the soil under certain

influences in the life of humanity almost " seasonal " in their

recurrence, like the grain that springs up in natural life with

the return of spring.

The first result of an objective study of Comparative Meta-

physics and Mysticism would be to demonstrate the universality

and perennial occurrence of the great facts of religious experience,

their close resemblance under the diverse costumes of race and

time, attesting to the persistent unity of the human spirit

or rather, for it goes deeper than the spirit, which itself is obliged

to delve for it the identity of the materials constituting hu-

manity. 2 But before entering into any discussion of the corn-

ness coming from his Western contemporaries, chiefly from laymen

who were strangers to religious or metaphysical speculation, so that

they did not try to attach to it the facts of inner experience, often

very striking, which had come to them unawares like the fall of

a thunderbolt (Tennyson, Ch. Kingsley, J. A. Symonds, Dr. R. M.

Bucke, etc.) ; all unknowingly, they realized states identical with

the characteristic Samadhis of India. Others whose natural intelli-

gence cut them off from mysticism, found themselves led as was

James himself, by artificial means (chloroform, ether, etc.) to an

astounding intuition of the absolute Unity where all contraries are

dissolved : a conception quite outside their ordinary ken. And

with the intellectual lucidity of the West, these " amateurs " in

ecstasy have given perfect descriptions of it. The hypothetical

conclusions to which James arrived, testify to a rare mental freedom.

Certain of them are the same as Vivekananda's and Gandhi's, for

example that religions are necessarily diverse, and that their " com-

plete meaning can only be deciphered by their universal collabora-

tion." Others curiously enough admit a " polytheism of the Ego."

1 That is also the conclusion to which one of the exceptionally

religious men of the West has reached after a careful and scientific

study of the comparative Mysticism of India and Europe : Pro-

fessor Rudolf Otto of Marburg. Having lived for fourteen years in

India and Japan he has devoted a whole series of remarkable works

to Asiatic mysticism. The most important for our purpose is West-

ocstliche Mystik-Vergkich und Unterschiedung xur Wesensdeutung

(1926, Gotha, Leopold Klotzverlag), which takes as types the two

mystics, Sankara and Meister Eckhart.

His main thesis establishes the extraordinary similarity of the

APPENDICES

parative value of ideological structures erected by religion aiid

metaphysics in India and Alexandria (to illustrate the point

from the case with which we are dealing here) it is necessary

to establish the fact that at bottom the illuminations of Philo,

the great ecstasies of Plotinus and Porphyry, so similar to the

samadhis of Indian yogins, were identical experiences. Hence

we must not use the term Christianity to the exclusion of the

other thousands of mystic experiences on whose basis it was

built up not in one feverish birth, but by a series of births

throughout the centuries, fresh shoots sprouting from the ancient

tree with each spring.

And that is, indeed, the heart of the problem. If these

great experiences have once been established, compared and

classified, comparative Mysticism would then and only then

have the right to pass on to a study of systems. Systems

exist solely to provide the mind with a means for registering

the results of enlightenment and to classify in one complete

and co-ordinated whole the claims of the senses, reason and

intuition (by whatever name we may choose to call the eighth

sense or the second reason, which those who have experienced

it call the first). Systems, then, are a continually renewed effort

to bring about the synthesis of what a man, a race or an epoch

has experienced (by the use of all the various instruments at

the disposal of knowledge). And of necessity the particular

temperament of that man, race, or epoch is always reflected

in each system.

Moreover, it is intensely interesting that all kinds of minds

morally akin, but scattered through space and time in different

countries and different ages, know that the varieties of their

own thought, produced by all these different temperaments,

are simultaneously the limits and the womb of force. India

and Europe are equally concerned to enrich themselves by a

knowledge of all the forms developed by this same mental or

vital power, a theme upon which each of their diverse races,

epochs and cultures has embroidered its o^yn variations.

Hence, to return to the subject that is occupying us here,

I do not believe modern Indian metaphysics can remain any

Urmotiven (the fundamental motives) of humanity's spiritual ex-

perience, exclusive of race, age or climate. Mysticism is always

and everywhere the same. And the profound unity of the human

spirit is a fact. Naturally this does not exclude variations between

different mystic personalities. But such variations are not the

result of race, age or country. They may be found side by side

in the same surroundings.

APPENDICES

longer in ignorance of Alexandrine and Christian Mysticism

any more than our Western intellectuals can be allowed in

future to stop short their study of the " Divine Infinity " * at

the borders of Greece. When two types of humanity as magni-

ficent as India and Greece have dealt with the same subject,

it is obvious that each will have enriched it with its own par-

ticular splendours, and that the double masterpiece will harmonize

with the new spirit of universal humanity we are seeking to

establish.

In these pages I can do no more than point out the way to

the intelligence of my readers, and here in addressing myself

especially to the Vedantists of India, I want to give them at

least a glimpse of the characteristics wherein Mediterranean

Mysticism and their own are alike and wherein they differ.

I shall particularly insist on the chief monument of early Chris-

tian Mysticism the work of the Pseudo-Denis because as it

came from the East it possessed already the characteristics

which it was to impose upon the metaphysical physiognomy

of the West throughout six centuries of Christianity.

* * *

It is generally conceded that the Greek spirit, while eminently

endowed for art and science, was almost a closed book to the

idea of Infinity, and that it only accepted the idea with mis-

trust. Although the Infinite is included in principle by Anaxi-

mander and Anaxagoras, they give it a material character and

stamp it with the imprint of scientific instinct. Plato, who in

his Republic touched in passing on the conception of the Idea

of Good, superior to being, essence and intelligence, did not

dwell upon it and seemed to regard it merely as an idea of

perfection and not of infinity. To Aristotle, the infinite was

imperfect. To the Stoics, it was unreal. 4

1 This is the title of an excellent doctorate thesis, written by

Henri Guyot : The Divine Infinity from Philo the Jew to Phtinus,

with an introduction on the same subject on Greek philosophy before

Plato. (Paris, Alcan, 1906.) I have made profitable use of it.

4 It must not be forgotten that during the Alexandrine epoch

there was an intimate connexion between India and the Hellenic

West. But the history of thought has not taken it into account

and even at the present time is very insufficiently aware of it.

Several years ago in India a society was formed to study the radia-

tions of " greater India " and its forgotten Empire in the past. (The

Greater India Society, President, Professor Jadunath Sarkar, the

Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta ; Honorary Secretary,

Dr. Kalidas Nag.) Since November, 1926, it has published a regular

APPENDICES

It is not until we reach the first century that we find Philo,

a Jew of Alexandria, who had been brought up in Greek thought,

embracing it with the notion of Infinity derived from his people,

and attempting to hold the balance between the two currents.

The balance, however, remained an unstable one, and all through

his life Philo oscillated between the two temperaments. In

spite of the fact that He was indeterminate, the God of the

Jews kept a very strong personal flavour, of which Philo's

nostrils could not rid themselves. On the other hand his Greek

education allowed him to analyse with rationalist precision

those obscure powers of his prophetic people, that had brought

them into contact with God. His theory of ecstasy, first by

withdrawal into oneself, then by the flight of the ego and the

total negation of the senses, reason and being itself, so that

they might be identified with the One, is, in the main, precisely

the same as that always practised by the Indian in the East.

Philo eventually sketches an attempt to attach the Infinite to

the finite by means of intermediary powers, from whence emerges

the " second God," the Word, " the only Begotten Son of God "

TQ&ioyovov t5ioi>), with him, perhaps unwittingly (for he never

lost the thumb-print of his rough modellers : Jehovah) the

Infinite of the East entered the Mediterranean world.

A hundred facts testify to what an extent the East was

mingled with Hellenic thought during the second century of

our era. Let us recall only three or four of the most charac-

teristic I Plutarch quoted Zoroaster and devoted a whole trea-

tise to Egyptian mythology. The historian, Eusebius, was a

witness to the interest felt in his day in Asiatic philosophies

and religions. One of the first builders of Alexandrinism,

Numenius, who extolled Pythagoras above all other Greeks,

sought for the spirit of his age in the past, and believed that

Pythagoras had spread in Greece the august wisdom of the

Egyptians, the Magi, the Indians and the Jews. 6 Plotinus, a

Greek of Egypt, departed with Gordian's army, in .order to

study Persian and Indian philosophy. And although Gordian's

death, in Mesopotamia, stopped him half-way, his intention

Bulletin and the first number included an Essay by Dr. Kalidas

Nag, containing a very interesting historical account of the spread

of the Indian spirit beyond its own frontiers : " Greater India, a

Study in Indian Internationalism."

* Numenius, whose influence over Plotinus was of capital im-

portance, " had directed all his efforts," says Eusebius, " towards

a fusion of Pythagoras and Plato, while seeking for a confirmation

of their philosophical doctrines in the religious dogmas of the

Brahmins, the Indians, the Magi, and the Egyptians/'

APPENDICES

shows his intellectual kinship with the Indian spirit. 6 But at

the same time he was in communion with the Christians. One

of his listeners was a Doctor of the New Church, Origen ; and

they mutually respected each other. Plotinus was not merely

a book philosopher. He was, at the same time, a saint and a

great yogin. His pure image, that of Ramakrishna in certain

characteristics, 7 deserves to be more piously remembered by

both the East and the West.

It would be lacking in the respect his great work deserves,

to summarize it here. But I must enumerate the most striking

characteristics that are analogous to Indian thought.

Plotinus' First Being, who is " before all things " (ng6

navr&v) no less than in all that comes after him is the

Absolute. " Absolutely infinite, indeterminate, incomprehen-

sible/' he can only be defined by negation. " Let us take all

things from Him, let us affirm nothing about Him, let us not

lie by saying that there is anything in Him, but let Him simply

be."

He is above good and ill, act and knowledge, being and essence.

He has neither face nor form, neither movement nor number,

neither virtue nor feeling. We cannot even say that He wishes

or that He does. ..." We say that He is not : we cannot

say what He is." ... In brief Plotinus collects the whole

litany of " Noes," so dear to the Indian mystic (and to the

Christian), in order to express the Absolute. But without

the self-satisfaction mingled with childish conceit that most

men bring to it, Plotinus impregnates it always with his beautiful

6 His theory of reincarnation bears the stamp of Indian thought.

All actions and thoughts count. The purified and detached are

not reborn into the corporeal, they remain in the world of the

mind and of bliss, without reason, remembrance or speech ; their

liberty is absolute ; they are made one with the Perfect, and are

absorbed into It without losing themselves in It. Such bliss can

be obtained in the present by ecstasy.

His theory of matter and his definitions of it evoke the Hindu

Maya.

His vision of the universe, as a divine Game, where " the actors

constantly change their costumes," where social revolutions, the

crash of Empires, are " changes of scene and character, the tears

and cries of the actors " is the same as the Indian.

Above all his profound science of " deification," identification

with God by the path of Negation is, as I shall show, one of its

most magnificent expressions and might have come from one of

the great Indian yogins. ,.,jv,

7 His exquisite kindness and delicate, pure and rather childlike

temperament.

APPENDICES

modesty, a fact that makes it very touching, and that I should

say is more Christlike than many Christians (such as the author

of Mystic Theology, which I shall examine later)

" When we say," he wrote, " that He is above being, we

do not say that He is this or that. We affirm nothing ; we

do not give Him any name. . . . We do not try to understand

Him :* it would in fact be laughable to try to understand that

incomprehensible nature. But we being men, with doubts like

the sorrows of childhood, do not know what to call Him, and

so we try to name the Ineffable. ... He must have indulgence

for our language. . . . Even the name of the One expresses

no more than the negation of His plurality. . . . The problem

must be given up, and research relapse into silence. What

is the good of seeking when further progress is impossible ?

... If we wish to speak of God, or to conceive Him, let us

give up everything! (navra dyes I). When this has been

done, (let us not add anything to Him but) let us examine

rather whether there is still not something to be given up I

In the path of negation has India ever said anything more

perfect or more humble ?

Nevertheless, it is not a question of negation. This incon-

ceivable Absolute is the supreme and superabundant Perfection,

whose continual expansion engenders the universe. He is sus-

pended to it by love and He fills it entirely : for, without ever

coming out of Himself, He is present everywhere in His entirety.

In the effort of the human spirit to distinguish the successive

degrees of this divine procession of worlds, the mystic Greek

in a splendid outburst of enlightened enthusiasm salutes Intelli-

gence as the first-born of God, the best after Him (pel dtiti),

itself "a great God" (fc u$ pe yas), "the second God"

(& Cctfeeoc), the first Hypostasis, which engenders the second,

the Soul, the one and the multiple, the mother of all living

things. There follows the unfolding of the whole world of the

senses within the bounds whereof Matter is found, and matter

is the last degree of being, or rather of non-being (p^fo),

the Infinite negative, the absolute and unattained limit at the

opposite antipodes, of the thrust of Divine Power.

So, this Absolute, which our minds can only approach through

negation, is affirmed in all that is. And It is in ourselves.

It is the very basis of our being. And we can be rejoined to

It by concentration. Yoga, the great path of divine union,

as described by Plotinus, is a combination of jnana-yoga and

Enneades, V, 5, 6 ; VI, 9, 4 ; VI, 8, 13, etc.

APPENDICES

bhakti-yoga. After a first and long stage of purification, the

soul, as it enters the phase of contemplation, must renounce

knowledge as a starting-point. " The soul withdraws from the

One, and is no longer one entity when it acquires know-

ledge. Knowledge in effect is a discourse (Actyoc), and a dis-

course is multiplicity (rcoAAd g& 6 Aoyoc). In order to contemplate

the first Being a man must be raised above knowledge.

Ecstasy begins. And the door of ecstasy for the Hellenic

spirit, always tenacious of its rights, is Beauty. Through it

the inflamed soul soars towards the light of the Good, above

which there is nothing. And this divine flight of the mystic

Alexandrine is precisely the same that Beethoven has translated

into the phrase written during the evening of his life :

(1823.) The Beautiful to the Good.

This description of ecstasy is like the descriptions 10 of both

Hindus and Christians : for there is only one form of union

with the Absolute, by whatever name the mind primarily or

eventually seeks to clothe the Absolute. According to Plotinus,

the Soul ought to empty itself of all form and content, of all

evil and good, of all thought of union with That which is neither

form, nor content, nor evil, nor good, nor thought. 11 It should

Enn. t VI, 91 4 \ V L 9, 10.

Cf. the analysis of intuitive thought by Ed. le Roy, quoted in

Note I.

10 This admirable conception drawn from the most sacred essence

of the West with its passion for Beauty, has its source in our divine

Plato :

" In the domain of love/' said Socrates to the Stranger of Man-

tineus, "to do well one must pass from the love of a beautiful

form to the love of all beautiful forms or to physical beauty in

general ; then from love of beautiful bodies to the love of beautiful

souls, beautiful actions and beautiful thoughts. In this ascension

of the spirit through moral beauty a marvellous beauty will sud-

denly appear to him, eternal, exempt from all generation, from all

corruption, absolutely beautiful : not consisting either in a beau-

tiful face, nor in any body nor in any thought nor in any science ;

not residing anywhere but in itself, whether in heaven, or on earth,

but existing eternally in itself and for itself in its absolute and

perfect unity." (Banquet: Summary.)

Therein is contained a yoga of Beauty where Bhakta to a cer-

tain extent is joined to Jnana. I do not say that it is peculiar to

the West, for we have traces of it in India, but it is the form natural

and dear to us above all others.

11 Not to know but to be is also taught by the Vedanta : " To

APPENDICES

even empty itself of the thought of God in order to become

one with Him. 12 When it has reached this point He appears

within it, He is it. " It has become God or rather it is God. 18

A centre which coincides with another centre. . . /' They are

one. There is perfect identity. The soul has returned to itself

(otia &v dAAo> otJcra Iv

know/' said Vivekananda, " is to descend a step. We are It already.

How then can we speak of knowing It ? " (Jnana-yoga : " The

Real and the Apparent Man/')

This is also the famous doctrine of the Docta Ignorantia, belong-

ing to Christian mysticism : the knowledge above all knowledge.

No man in the world has described it with such power and psycho-

logical detail as St. John-of-the-Cross in his famous treatise on

the Nuit Obscure the double Night : of the senses and of the

spirit.

11 " The soul ought to be without form (dvttdeov), if it wishes

no obstacle to stop it from being filled and illuminated by the first

Nature. (VI, 9, 7.) The first Principle, not having any difference

in Him, is always present and we are ourselves present in Him,

when we no longer possess anything. (VI, 9. 8.) The soul ought

to drive out evil, good, and everything else to receive God only in

itself. ... It will not even know that it has been joined to the

first Principle. (VI, 9, 7.) It is no longer soul, nor intelligence,

nor movement . . . Resemblance (6poiovOa) to God ought to be

complete. The soul eventually does not even think of God because

it no longer thinks . . . (VI, 7, 3, 5.) When the soul has become

like Him, it sees Him appear all of a sudden ; separation and

duality are no more ; both are one (h tivya)). . . . This union is

imitated on earth by those who love and are loved and who seek

to become one flesh. (VI, 7, 34.) "

11 Oedv yiv6pevov pcMov de Svla. (VI, 9, 9.)

14 Plotinus often experienced this great ecstasy, according to the

definite testimony of Porphyry : "To him the God appeared

who had neither form nor face, who is above intelligence. I

myself, Porphyry, once in my life approached Him and was

united to Him. I was seventy-eight. This union formed the

sum total of Plotinus 1 desires. He had this divine joy four times

while I was staying with him. What then happened was ineff-

able/*

So it is of the greatest interest to know from the mouth of

Plotinus himself what were his impressions during the ecstatic state.

The most striking is the anguish of the soul as it approached Divine

Union ; for it was unable to sustain the intensity long. " Cer-

tainly here below each time that the soul approaches That without

form, it shrinks, it trembles at having before it only That which

is nothing" ^ dvdev hrf).

And these lines remind me of the mortal terror of young Vive-

APPENDICES

I have said enough to awaken in every Hindu reader the

desire to know more of this great fellow-yogin, who, in the

last hour of Greece, in her majestic sunset, wedded Plato and

India. In this divine marriage the male Hellenic genius, as

he embraced the female Kirtana the inspired Bacchante im-

posed upon her mind an ordered beauty and intelligent harmony,

resulting in one of the most beautiful strains of spiritual music.

And the great Christian mysticism of the first centuries was

the firstborn of the union.

In the following pages I shall try to paint, however imper-

fectly, a portrait of the most beautiful type, in my opinion,

of early Christian thought that issued from this marriage of

East and West : Denis (Dionysius) the Areopagite.

* * *

I have often had occasion in the course of this book to notice

analogies and even traces of kinship between the conceptions

of Hindu and Christian mysticism at their highest moments.

This likeness is the more striking as one approaches the source

of Christianity ; 15 and I want to demonstrate it to my Eastern

kananda during his first visits to Ramakrishna, when the enlight-

ened Master made him aware for the first time of the dizzy contact

with the formless Absolute.

" The soul/' continues Plotinus (and the rest of his description

would serve for Vivekananda's experience) returns with joy ...

it lets itself fall until it meets some sensible object whereon to

stop and rest . . . (VI, 9, 3, 9, 10.)

J. A. Symonds says the same thing : " Space, time, sensation

were quickly blotted out step by step . . . The world lost all form

and all content. But my ego remained in the terrible emptiness,

feeling with anguish that reality would annihilate it like a soap-

bubble. . . . The fear of the next dissolution, the frightful con-

viction that this moment was my last, that I had arrived at the

edge of the abyss, at the certainty of eternal illusion, dragged me

back from my dream. . . . The first sense that returned to me

was that of touch. ... I was happy to have escaped the abyss.

..." (One of the many contemporary witnesses quoted by William

James, in his chapter on Mysticism in Religious Experience.)

But a great mystic like Plotinus had hardly set foot again on

the earth before he longed for that from which he had fled. . . . The

deadly vertigo did not cease to attract. The soul that has once

tasted the terrible Union yearns to find it again, and it must return

to the Infinite.

15 The blind fury of certain neophytes of modern literary Catholi-

cism in the West in their denunciation of the danger of the East,

is a fit subject for irony. They make it irrevocably the antithesis

529 MM

APPENDICES

readers. They will profit by it more than those of the West ;

for as I have already stated, they are all too ignorant of the

marvellous treasures contained in the Christian metaphysics of

Europe. 16

The polemics that have been delivered round the name of

the Areopagite whether he be called Denis or Pseudo-Denis 17

matter little to us here, for all accounts agree that his au-

of the West, forgetting that the whole faith they proclaim comes

to them from the East, and that in the ritual of the first centuries,

as decreed by Denis the Areopagite, the West is represented by

doctors of the faith, as " the region of shades " making the cate-

chumen " hold up his hands as a sign of anathema " and " blow

on Satan three times." (Cf. Book of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy,

II. 2, 6.)

lf The fault lies partly in the political conditions that interpose

between India and Europe the thick screen of the British Empire

with its mind more tightly closed than any other in Europe to

suggestions of Catholic (or even Pre-Reformation Christian) mysti-

cism, as well as to music in the profound sense of the German masters,

the other fountain of intuition.

17 For a thousand years this greatest master of Christian mysti-

cism was supposed to be Denis the Anchorite, a member of the

Athenian Areopagus at the time of St. Paul, was converted by

him about A.D. 5, and later became Bishop of Athens : (he has

even been identified with St. Denis of France). First Laurence

Valla, then Erasmus, then the Reformation brutally wronging his

legend, and being wickedly desirous of discrediting the work, which

was sufficiently powerful to lose nothing by it, they changed the

name of the author and tried to make him anonymous. Modern

research seems to have agreed that the writer of these books li ved

about 500, and that at all events, although he may have been

earlier than that date (according to the testimony of some of his

learned disciples in the ninth century when they revived a con-

troversy in existence about 400, on the subject of the authenticity

of his writings) he cannot possibly have been later than Justinian,

who quoted him as an authority. Cf. Stiglmayr : Das Aufkommen

der Pseudo-Dionysischen Schnften und ihr Eindrungen in die christ-

liche Literatur bis zum Lateran-concil 649- -Feldkirch, 1895.

Hugo Koch : Psettdo-Dionysius Areop. in seinen Beziehungen zum

Neo-Platonismus und Mysterienwesen, 1900.

A French translation of the Works of St. Denis the Areopagite ,

by Mgr. Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, shot in the Commune of

1871, appeared in 1845, and was re-edited in 1887. For the benefit

of my French readers I have used it in my quotations.

[An English translation of The Works of St. Denis the Areopagite

is in existence by the Rev. John Parker (1897), and, wherever

possible, the translator has used it.]

APPENDICES

thentic writings fall within the period round about 532 or 533,"

and that from that date their authority became law in the

Christian Church and was invoked by Popes, Patriarchs and

learned Doctors in the Synods and Councils of the seventh

and eighth centuries 19 down to the ninth century. They were

then triumphantly installed in Paris by Charles the Bald, who

had them translated by Scot Erigene whence they impreg-

nated the mystic thought of the Western Church. Their power

is attested by St. Anselm, by St. Bonaventura, and by St.

Thomas, who wrote commentaries upon them ; the great doctors

of the thirteenth century put them above the writings of the

Church Fathers. In the fourteenth century the mystic furnaces

of Meister Eckhart, and still more those of Ruysbroeck, were

fed on their fires : again, at the time of the Italian Renaissance,

they were the delectation of the great Christian Platonists,

Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola ; and they continued to

be the substance of our Berullians, our Salesians, 20 and the

greatest mystics of the seventeenth century in France, as the

recent works of the Abb Br^mond have shown.

Hence, whatever the name of the architect, they form the

monumental substructures of all Christian thought in the West

18 On the occasion of a religious conference summoned to Con-

stantinople by Justinian. It is also noteworthy that the writings

of Denis were invoked by the Severian heretics. A strong argu-

ment in then: favour is that the orthodox, from instincts of defence

or resentment, made no attempt to throw doubt on their authenticity !

And from that time onwards they were invoked and paraphrased

until they almost became " holy oracles/ 1 to use the words of the

sacred texts.

1 Here are some vital facts, showing then: uncontested authority

in the Christian Church, both Eastern and Western : In the sixth

century Denis was venerated by St. Gregory as " antiquus videlicet

et venerabilis Pater.'' In the seventh century Pope Martin I quoted

him textually in the Lateran Council of 640, to prove Catholic

dogma against heresy. His works were again used at the third

Council of Constantinople, 692, and at the second Council of Nicea.

In the eighth century the great Eastern Father, St. John the

Damascene, " the St. Thomas of the Greeks of the Lower Empire/'

became his disciple. In 824 or 827 the Emperor of Constantinople,

Michael the Lame, made a gift of his writings to Louis the Good.

Scot Erigene, who translated them for Charles the Bald, was en-

tirely reborn by his spirit. He infused his own ardent breath into

it and made it into a leaven of pantheistic mysticism for the West.

Since then Denis has been associated with all mental contests.

w I would remind the reader that these names designate the

French religious school of Francis of Sales, or Berulle, in the

seventeenth century.

APPENDICES

during the ten most important centuries of its development.

And they are more than that to the man who has eyes to see

they form one of the most harmonious cathedrals that* has

sprung from Christian thought and that still remains a living

witness to it.

Its singular value is that it stands just at the junction of

the East and the West, at the exact moment when their teach-

ings were united. 21 Whether its architect has borrowed his

art from Alexandrine masters or whether they borrowed it

largely from him, the result is the same for us a union of the

highest Hellenic and the purest Christian thought a marriage

regularly consecrated in the eyes of the Church and acknow-

ledged by her throughout the West.

Before tasting its fruits, I must remove from the minds of

my readers the impression of discredit thrown over the old

master in advance by the unfortunate word, Pseudo, which has

in it the taint of falsehood. There is, for instance, a beautiful

picture called a " false Rembrandt " that is still scorned, because

the idea of false implies imitation ! But if it pleases an artist

to hide his work under the name of somebody who never left

any work behind him, is that any argument against his origi-

nality ? At most the scheme might lead to a suspicion of the

masked man's honesty. But this is less explicable after a study

of Denis's works : for if there is one impression left by them

it is that of the highest moral integrity ; it is unthinkable

that so lofty a mind could have stooped to subterfuge, even

in the interest of his faith ; and I prefer to think that after

his death he was exploited by others. At all events and in

spite of quite definite interpolations and retouches in the original

11 If the date, 500, generally accepted to-day, is taken as the

central point of Denis's career, he must have seen the end of Alex-

andria (Proclus 410-185) and of the Nee-Platonic school of Athens

in 529. He therefore in a sense closed the eyes of Greek Philosophy.

It is certain at least that both arise from the common metaphysical

depths, wherein the wealth of Platonism, early Christianity, and

the ancient East were mingled, and that from this storehouse the

first five centuries of our era drew with open hands. It was a

period of universalism of thought. According to the tradition

(based on one of his extant letters) Denis visited Egypt in his youth

with a friend, Apollophanes, who followed the Sophist philosophy,

and had remained a pagan. Apollophanes never forgave him for

his conversion to Christianity, and in this letter accuses him of

"parricide," because, as Denis explains, " I lacked filial piety in

using against the Greeks what I had learned from the Greeks/'

The affiliation of Greece and Christianity is here specifically

acknowledged.

APPENDICES

text, the text still presents from end to end both treatises

and letters a unity and harmony that leave in the memory

of those who have read them an indelible impression of the

serene face of the old master, more vivid than that left by

many living people. aa

The keystone of the edifice and the whole edifice itself

the alpha and omega of the work is " Super-eminent Unity "

" Unity the mother of all other unity." And the grandeur of

his definitions and negations, which seek less to attain than

to invoke It, 23 is equal and parallel to Vedantic language. . . .

" Without reason, without understanding, without name. . . .

Author of all things, nevertheless It is not because It surpasses

all that is. ..." 24 Itself not being the cause of being to all, 25

and that which is included in the same title as the Non-Being.

Everything is reduced to this unique object, which is at

11 It is to be regretted on behalf of Christianity that this work

should be so difficult of access : for very few religious texts give

a higher and at the same time more human, more compassionate

or purer representation of Christian thought than these pages. In

them no word of intolerance, animosity, and vain and bitter polemic,

comes to destroy the beautiful concord of intelligence and goodness

whether he is explaining with affectionate and broad understand-

ing the problem of evil, and embracing all, even the worst, in the

rays of Divine Good, or whether he is recalling a monk of malicious

faith to meekness by telling him the admirable legend (which would

have enchanted old Tolstoy) of Christ coming down again from

heaven to defend a renegade about to die against one of his own

sect, with this rebuke to the inhuman Christianity : " Strike against

Me in future, for I am ready, even again, to suffer for the salvation

of men." (Letter VIII.)

18 M. Ferdinand Morel in his Essai sur I' introversion mystique

(1918) has submitted Denis the Areopagite to a psycho-analytical

examination, and has picked out the words he uses most frequently

faeg (always applied to God) and avr6. They might imply the

double impetus of returning within the self and the expansion of

the inner Being (psycho-analysts would say : the projection of an

introvert I). M. F. Morel further recognizes the powerful activity

expended in great intuition, and the acuteness of regard necessary

to explore the subconscious world.

14 Book of Divine Names, I, i.

" Ibid., Vol. I, p. 2, of the English translation by the Rev. John

Parker, 1897 ed.

" The non-being, this transcendental appellation only belongs to

that which exists in sovereign good in a super-eminent fashion . . .

Since the latter (the Sovereign Good) surpasses infinitely the Being,

it follows that in a certain way non-being finds a place in Him."

(Ibid.. IV, V.)

APPENDICES

the same time the unique subject. It is an intoxication of

unity, 86 wherein intelligence without ever losing its clarity gives

itself to the torrential flood of immense Love and its " circular "

river:

" Divine Love (which is the smooth flowing of the ineffable

Unity) indicates distinctly its own unending and unbeginning,

as it were, a sort of everlasting circle whirling round in unerring

combination, by reason of the Good . . . and ever advancing

and remaining and returning in the same and throughout the

same." B7

The whole world then is subject to divine gravitation, and

the movement of all things is a march towards God. The

sole aim of all conscious spirits is to " find their perfection in

being carried to the Divine imitation . . . and, what is more

Divine than all, in becoming a fellow- worker with God." M

And the " imitation " may be done in an infinite number

of ways, for " each . . . find their perfection in being carried

to Divine imitation in their own proper degree ; " * 9 and he

will become most like Him who " have participated in it, in

many forms." 80

But there are three principal ways of approach to Him. And

each of the three may be followed in two ways, by Affirmation

or by Negation.

This intoxication discovers images of Unity to the spirit in

all the words that invoke It. Hence the most daring etymologies :

the sun, MIOC is II ooAA^;, " He who collects and maintains Him-

self in unity," beauty, ^oA^c is xoA&o, " i cs ^ t j collect," etc. The

spirit is truly haunted with unity.

" Book of Divine Names, IV, 14.

This conception of the " ring of Love," going and coming, is

preserved in the mystic theology of the seventeenth century, which

Henri Br6mond has analysed for us.

It is the double " Profession " of divine Persons of the Dominican

Chardon generation and grace. " The one is the eternal reason

for the production of creatures and for their emergence from their

cause. The other is the model of their return . . . And both

together they form the circle of love, begun by God to come to

us, begun by us to and in God. They are one production ..."

(The Cross of Jesus, 1647.)

And the Bemllian, Claude Sequenot, says the same (1634) :

" We come out of God through the Creation, which is ascribed

to the Father by the Son ; we return to Him by grace which is

attributed to the Holy Spirit."

11 Book of the Celestial Hierarchy, III, 2 based upon St. Paul :

I Corinthians iii. 9.

The Celestial Hierarchy, III, 2. ' Ibid., IV, x.

APPENDICES

The two affirmative ways are :

1. By a knowledge of the qualities and attributes of God,

attained by the symbols of the Divine Names, which " the

divine oracles " (that is to say, the Scriptures) have provided

for our infirmity of spirit.

2. By the method of all that exists the created worlds:

for God is in all creatures, and the imprint of His seal may be

found on all matter, although the mark of the seal varies accord-

ing to the different kinds of matter. 81 All the worlds are united

in one river. The laws of the physical world correspond to

the laws of the higher world. 32 It is then lawful to seek God

under the veil of the most humble forms, for "all the streams

of love (even animal love ; which therein finds its justifica-

tion) 8S participate in holy Love, their unique source.

3. But all these means that we possess, thanks to the tender-

ness of God, who proportions His light to the weak eyes of

humanity and " places forms and shapes around the formless

and shapeless " and under the manifold and the complex con-

ceals Unity, 84 are imperfect. And the other path, that of

negation, is higher, and more worthy, 86 it is more certain,

and goes further.

Few there are, " even in the sacred ranks," who attain to

the One, and yet some exist. " There are spirits among us

called to a like grace, as far as it is possible for man. . . . They

are those who, by the suspension of all intellectual operation,

11 " Even matter, inasmuch as it is matter, participates in the good

(The Book of Divine Names, II, 6, p. 214 of the French translation).

" The Celestial Hierarchy, XIII, 3.

" The Divine Names : Extracts from pious hymns of the for-

tunate Hierotheus :

" Love, whether we speak of Divine, or Angelic, or intelligent,

or psychical, or physical, let us regard as a certain unifying and

combining power . . . Collecting these again into one, let us say

that it is a certain simplex power, which of itself moves to a sort

of unifying combination from the Good, to the lowest of things

existing, and from that again in due order, circling round again,

through all the Good from itself, and through itself, and by itself,

and rolling back to itself always in the same way."

For Hierotheus, the master and friend of the Pseudo-Denis, cf.

Langen : Die Schule des Hierotheus, 1893.

14 The Divine Names, I, 4.

" The Celestial Hierarchy, II, 3.

Ibid., II, 5. " Divine things should be honoured

negatives."

" The negatives respecting things Divine are true

mations are inharmonious."

APPENDICES

enter into intimate union with the ineffable light. And they

speak of God only through negations. . . ." M

The great path of Negation is the object of a special treatise,

famous from medieval to modern times : The Treatise of Mystic

Theology.

Denis instructed an initiate, Timotheus, in it although he

told him to keep the mysteries a strict secret (for their know-

ledge is dangerous to unprepared minds). He taught him the

entry into what he calls " Divine gloom," and which he ex-

plained in his letters 37 as " unapproachable light/' and also into

that " mystic ignorance," which being different from ordinary

ignorance " in its superior sense, is a knowledge of Him, Who

is above all known things."

Man must " abandon moderate negations for stronger and

stronger ones. . . . And we may venture to deny everything

about God in order to penetrate into this sublime ignorance,"

which is in verity sovereign knowledge. He uses the beautiful

simile of the sculptor's chisel removing the covering of stone,

and " bringing forth the inner form to view, freeing the hidden

beauty by the sole process of curtailment." M

The first task is to tear aside the veil of " sensible things." 89

The second task is to remove the last garments, the wrappings

of " Intelligible things." 40

The actual words deserve to be quoted :

" It is neither soul nor mind ; nor has imagination, or opinion,

or reason, or conception ; neither is expressed nor conceived ;

neither is number nor order ; nor greatness nor littleness ;

nor equality nor inequality ; nor similarity nor dissimilarity ;

neither is standing, nor moving ; nor at rest ; neither has

power, nor is power nor light ; neither lives nor is life ; neither

is essence nor eternity nor time ; neither is Its touch intelligible,

neither is It science nor truth ; nor kingdom, nor wisdom ;

neither one nor oneness ; neither Deity, nor Goodness ; nor is

it Spirit according to our understanding ; nor Sonship nor

Paternity ; nor any other thing of those known .. to us, or to

any other existing being ; neither is It any of non-existing

nor existing things, nor do things existing know It, as It is ;

"Divine Nfrmes, I, 5.

17 Letter I to Gaius Therapeutes ; Letter V to Deacon Dorotheus.

"Mystic Theology, II.

* Ibid., IV : " That the pre-eminent Cause of every object of

sensible perception is none of the objects of sensible perception.

40 Ibid., V : " That the pre-eminent Cause of every object of in-

telligible perception is none of the objects of intelligible perception."

APPENDICES

nor does It know existing things, qua existing; neither is

there expression of It, nor name, nor knowledge ; neither is Is

darkness nor light ; nor error nor truth ; neither is there any

definition of all of It, nor ^ny abstraction. But when making

the predications and abstractions of things after It, we neither

predicate nor abstract from It ; since the all-perfect and uniform

Cause of all is both above every definition and the pre-eminence

of Him, who is absolutely freed from all and beyond the whole,

is also above every abstraction." 41

Is there any religious Hindu who will not recognize in the

intellectual intoxication of this total Negation, the Advaitic

teachings of absolute Jnana-yoga, after it has arrived at the

fact of realization ?

At this point in the conquest of the Divine, the achievement

of the " Unreasonable, the cause of all reason/' 42 the liberated

and enlightened soul enters into the Peace and Silence of Unity. 48

41 Cf. " Deus propter excelkntiam non immerito Nihil vocatur."

(Scot Erigene.)

" L' Amour Primordial n'est rien par rapport a autre chose"

(Primordial Love is nothing in relation to anything else.) (Jacob

Boehme.)

" Gott ist lauter Nichts, ihn ruhrt kein Nun nach Hier." (God is

mere nothing ; to Him belongs neither Now nor Here.) (Angelus

Silesius.)

Negation is not more forcibly emphasized in the famous verses

of Sankara which Vivekananda recited to the dying Ramakrishna

in the garden of Cossipore :

" I am neither spirit, nor intelligence, nor the ego, nor the sub-

stance of the spirit,

I am neither the senses . . . nor ether, nor the earth, fire nor air,

I am neither aversion, nor attachment, nor desire . . .

I am neither sin, nor virtue, nor pleasure, nor pain . . . etc.

I am Absolute Existence, Absolute Knowledge, Absolute Bliss.

I am He, I am He. ..." (Quoted by the Prabuddha Bharata,

March, 1929.)

I would go so far as to say that on this occasion Hindu thought is

less daring than Christian thought, since after each strophe of

negation it hastens to find foothold in " Existence, Knowledge

and Bliss," even though it is absolute, and Christian mystics, the

descendants of Denis, make a clean sweep of everything, blotting

out even Existence and Essence from their conception of God.

41 " Divine Wisdom, which his excellence renders unreasonable,

is the cause of all reason." (Divine Names, VII.)

48 Cf. in Divine Names the beautiful Chapter XI on the Divine

Peace that Divine Peace and Repose which the holy Justus

calls unutterableness and immobility " marvellously active."

That is the theme of Denis, used again and again after him by

APPENDICES

It does not see God, it does not know Him : " it rests there." 44

It is deified. 45 It no longer speaks of God: it is Himself:

" But you will find that the Word of God calls gods, both

the Heavenly Beings above us, and the most beloved of God,

and holy men amongst us, although the Divine Hiddenness is

transcendentally elevated, established above all, and created

Being can properly and wholly be said to be like unto It, except

those intellectual and rational Beings, who are entirely and

wholly turned to Its Oneness, as far as possible, and who elevate

themselves incessantly to its Divine illuminations, as far as

attainable, by their imitation of God, if I may so speak, according

to their power, and are deemed worthy of the same divine

name. 1 '

From that moment the " deified " the saint, who is united

to God, having drunk from the source of the Divine sun, becomes

in his turn a sun to those below. " By ordinance, and for

Divine imitation, the relatively superior (is source) for each

after it, by the fact, that the Divine rays are poured through

it to that." 47

And gradually the light spreads through all the ranks of

the double Hierarchy of the celestial and the human, in an

unbroken chain linking the humblest to the highest. Moreover,

this hierarchy is reflected in each individual. ' ' Each heavenly and

all the great Christian mystics for ten centuries in their canticle of

" Dark Silence," similarly Suso :

" Without knowing where, I enter into silence,

And I dwell in ignorance,

Above all knowledge . . .

A place without light, an effect without a cause ..."

(Strophes of St. John-of-the-Cross on " obscure contemplation.")

" The silent desert of the Divinity . . . who is properly no

being . . ." said Eckhart.

The French seventeenth century kept pure and unadulterated

the great motif of the " darkness " and the " silence " of God, which

it drew from the source of the Areopagite (often quoted) ; but it

brought to the description of the Inner Voyage all the psychological

resources of its race and time. There is nothing more astounding

of its kind, except the Dark Night of St. Jean-de-la-Croix than the

pages of the Dominican Chardon (The Cross of Jesus, 1647), quoted

by Henri Bremond, in his Metaphysique des Saints, Vol. II, pp. 59-68.

44 Letter to Dorotheas.

41 " (Preservation) cannot otherwise take place, except those who

are being saved are being deified. Now the assimilation to, union

with, God, as far as attainable, is deification." (Book of the Ecclesi-

astic Hierarchy, I, 3.)

4i The Celestial Hierarchy, XII, 3, and XIII, 2. 4 Ibid., XIII, 3.

APPENDICES

human mind has within itself its own special proof, and middle,

and last ranks, and powers, manifested severally in due degree,

for the aforesaid particular mythical meanings of the Hierarchical

illuminations ... for there is nothing that is self-perfectexcept

the really Self-Perfect and pre-eminently Perfect." **

This perfecting is the object of initiation, whereby souls are

made to pass through three stages : i. Purification ; 2. Illum-

ination ; 3. Consummation in the perfect knowledge of the

splendours. 49

To the first rank of the initiated belong those religious monas-

tics, who, like the sannyasins of India, are under the vow of

complete purification. They " remove their mind from the dis-

traction of multiple things and precipitate themselves towards

Divine unity and the perfection of holy love/ 1 60 Their perfect

philosophy " is trained to the knowledge of the commandments

whose aim is the union of man and God." 51

But it is not necessary to belong to a privileged order to

attain this knowledge of the Divine Unity. For It is inscribed

in each one. " The Divine Light is always unfolded beneficially

to the intellectual visions ; " even to those who reject it. 52

If it is not seen, it is because man cannot see it. And the proper

business of initiation is to teach him to see it. " Inasmuch

as the Divine Being is source of sacred order, within which

the holy minds regulate themselves, he, who recurs to the proper

view of Nature, will see his proper self in what he was originally."

He has only to contemplate himself with " unbiased eyes." 63

Purification, symbolized by ritual ablutions, does not only con-

cern the body and the senses ; but the spirit as well. The

unalterable condition of realizing communion (in the sense of

the eucharistic sacrifice) 64 is to be " purified even to the re-

motest illusions of the soul." 65

This word " illusions " used in such a sense is like an echo

of the Hindu Maya. 66 I was often reminded of the latter when

" Ibid., X, 3.

" The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, VI, 3. 60 Ibid., VI, 3.

81 Ibid., VI, 3. " Ibid., II, Part 3, 3. " Ibid., II, Part 3, 4.

14 Denis gives it the mysterious name of Synaxe, <5w*f*c, mean-

ing the act of going back to unity through absolute concentration.

" The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, III, 10.

But the reader, being informed to a certain extent of the

trend of Hindu Vedantic thought, will have discovered resemblances

at each step of my summary between the two mysticisms : The

path of negation, the " deification " of individual souls, Christian

sannyasins forcing themselves from multiplicity and the passionate

return to unity, the science of divine unity, etc.

APPENDICES

I was reading the long and beautiful explanation of Evil, in

the system of the Areopagite. Both use the same terms to

deny both being and non-being :

" Evil is non-existing ; if this be not the case, it is not

altogether evil, nor non-existing, for the absolutely non-existing

will be nothing, unless it should be spoken of as in the Good

super-essentially . 67

" Evil has neither fixity, nor identity; it is varied, indefinite,

as if floating in subjects that do not possess immutability in

themselves . . . Evil, as evil, is not a reality. It is not a being.

, . . Evil as evil is nowhere. . . ." M

Everything exists only of and through the Good, which is

the " Super-eminent Unity."

At every moment there is the feeling that the links with

the East are still intact, and it is difficult to disentangle them.

When he describes the ceremonies to be rendered to the dead,

Denis thinks of the " loud laugh " or disdainful smile of some

profane persons when brought face to face with rites implying

a belief that seems to them absurd. And he alludes to the

opposite belief in Reincarnation. But he does not treat it

with the pitying scorn that he expects from his own opponents.

He says with admirable forbearance that in his opinion it is wrong :

" Some of them imagine that the souls depart into other

bodies ; but this seems to me unjust to the bodies who have

shared the works of holy souls, since they are unworthily de-

prived of the divine rewards awaiting them at the end of the

way. . . ."

* * *

The Areopagite uses many materials in his religious edifice

that are to be found in the constructions of Indian thought.

And if there is nothing to justify the view that the one has

borrowed from the other, it must be granted that they both

come from a common quarry. I have neither the means nor

the desire to find out what it is. My knowledge of the human

spirit leads me to discover it in the unity of thought and laws

governing that spirit. The primordial instinct, the desire for

mystic union with the Absolute that is embedded in each in-

dividual and that urges each man towards It, has very limited

means of expression ; and its great paths have been traced once

and for all by the exigences and limitations of nature itself.

67 Divine Names, IV, 19, p. 30 of the French translation.

" Evil, to Plotinus, is merely a lesser good. And absolute Evil,

infinite Matter, symbolized the limit of the less good, the last stage

of the " Divine Procession."

"Divine Names, VII, i, 2.

APPENDICES

Different races merely take with them over the same roads

their different temperaments, habits and preferences.

In my opinion what distinguishes a Christian mystic imbued

with the Hellenic spirit from the Indian Vedantist is as follows :

It is quite obvious that the former possesses a genius of

imperial order, which demands good government. A harmo-

nious and strict " Hierarchy " controls the whole edifice of the

Areopagite. The associated elements cohere and are ordered

with justice, prudence, and lucidity. And in that union each

one keeps its own place and its own identity. 60 The vital

instinct of the European is to cling to the smallest portions

of his individuality and to desire to perpetuate them, and this

instinct is curiously wedded to the elementary force of mystic

gravitation which tends to lose the multiplicity of beings and

forms in the incandescent gulf of Unity. " The Divine Peace "

described by Denis in one of his most beautiful hymns, 61 is

that perfect peace which ought to reign over the entire universe

and in each individual, and which both unites and distinguishes

all the elements that constitute the general harmony. It

" reconciles " the diverse substances with each other and re-

unites them without altering them, so that in their alliance

there is neither separation nor distance, but they kept the

integrity of their own proper sphere and do not lose their own

nature by an admixture of contrary elements ; nothing disturbs

either their unanimous concert or the purity of their own par-

ticular essence. 62

This desire to safeguard the integrity and the continuance

of individuals even in the bosom of the absolute Being is so

powerful in Denis's case that he justifies not only natural in-

equality, 68 but (within Divine Peace itself) the fighting instinct

60 This desire for order, and this majestic Hierarchy, are directly

inspired by the " Divine Procession " (ngdeicnv) of Plotmus.

" There is a procession between the first and the last ; and in

this procession each keeps his own proper place. The created

being is subordinate to the creative being. Nevertheless it remains

similar to the Principle to which it is attached in so far as it is

attached."

61 Divine Names, XI.

61 Ibid., pp. 260-61 of the French translation.

8 He only condemns inequalities " resulting from a lack of pro-

portion. For if by inequality we wish to imply the differences that

characterize and distinguish living beings, we should say that it is

divine justice that keeps them, to see that disorder an4 confusion

are not re-established in the world." (Divine Names.)

" Goethe's saying is surpassed. Denis does not love 'injustice^'

more than ' disorder ' disorder to him is the supreme injustice."

APPENDICES

that drives each individual to defend the preservation of its

essence, 64 and even the cruelties of nature, so long as they

correspond to the laws of types and elements. 65

Another dominant characteristic of Christian mysticism is

the super-eminent place it gives to Goodness and Beauty.

This comes from its double descent noble on both sides

from Christ and Greece. The word Beauty appears in

the very first words of Denis. 66 Beauty is the very quality

4 It was observed to Denis that men and things do not seem

to lend themselves to peace that they " rejoice in diversity and

division and would not be willingly in repose." He replied that if

this implied that no being wished to lose his own nature, he saw

even in this tendency a desire for peace. " For all things love to

dwell at peace, and to be united amongst themselves, and to be

unmoved and unfallen from themselves, and the things of them-

selves. And the perfect Peace seeks to guard the idiosyncrasy of

each unmoved and unconfused, by its peace-giving forethought,

preserving everything unmoved and unconfused, both as regards

themselves and each other, and establishes all things by a stable

and unswerving power towards their own peace and immobility.

And if all things in motion desire, not repose, but ever to make

known their own proper movement, even this is an aspiration after

the Divine Peace of the whole, which preserves all things from

falling away of their own accord, and guards the idiosyncrasy and

moving life of all moving things unmoved and free from falling,

so that the things moved, being at peace amongst themselves, and

always in the same condition, perform their own proper functions."

(Divine Names, XL, 3 and 4, p. 262 of the French translation.)

Peace here denotes the Spinozan tendency to persevere in being,

and cannot be described, any more than can Spinozan Peace, as

41 belli privatio sed virtus est quae ex animi fortitudine oritur." (A

translation of Spinoza's thought : " Peace is not lack of war, but

an inner virtue, which has its source in the courage of the soul.")

I think that Vivekananda would have subscribed to this defini-

tion.

* Neither is the evil in irrational creatures, for if you should

take away anger and lust and the other things which we speak of,

and which are not absolutely evil in their own nature, the lion

having lost his boldness and fierceness will not be a lion ... So

the fact that nature is not destroyed is not an evil, but a destruc-

tion of nature, weakness and failure of the natural habitudes and

energies and powers."

" And if all things through generation in time have their perfec-

tion, the imperfect is not altogether contrary to universal nature."

(Divine Names, LV, 25, pp. 64-65 of the English translation.)

" All things are very beautiful. . . ."

" Nothing that exists is radically devoid of all beauty."

" Matter . . . having had its beginning from the Essentially

APPENDICES

of the Infinite. It is the source and the end of humanity. 67

And Goodness to a still higher degree. It is the very source

of Being. It is the Divine Origin. The Areopagite puts it

in the place of the Gaurisankar of the Divine Himalayas, at

the zenith of the Attributes of God. It is the sun, but infinitely

more powerful. 68 From it issues everything else that is : light,

intelligence, love, union, order, harmony, eternal life. Even

Being, " the first of all the gifts of God/ 1 is the offspring of

Goodness. It is the firstborn. 69

This point of view is apparently very different from Hindu

Mysticism, where the Absolute reigns supreme above good and

evil. But it communicates to the Areopagite's whole thought

a serenity, a tranquil and certain joy, without any of the tragic

shades of a Vivekananda. 70

But we must not deceive ourselves : the word Goodness in

the mouth of Denis has little in common with Christian senti-

mentalism. Neither " Divine Peace/' nor Divine Goodness,

passes over in its scheme of things the mass of weakness, violence

and suffering in the universe : they all go to make up its sym-

phony ; and each dissonance, if it is in the right place, adds

to the richness of the harmony. It does not even forbid the

chastisement of error, if that error violates the laws inherent

in human nature ; for nature has endowed every man with

liberty ; " and it is not a function of Providence to destroy

Beautiful, has throughout the whole range of matter some echoes

of the intellectual comeliness."

(Concerning the Celestial Hierarchy, II, 3 and 4.)

7 " The Beautiful is the origin of all things, as a creating cause,

both by moving the whole, and holding it together by the love of

its own peculiar Beauty ; and end of all things, and beloved as

final Cause (for all things exist for the sake of the Beautiful) and

exemplary (Cause), because all things are determined according to

It ... Yea, reason will dare to say even this, that even the non-

existing participates in the Beautiful and Good/' (Divine Names,

IV, 7.)

All this part of the chapter is a hymn to Beauty.

68 Ibid., the whole of Chapter IV.

M Ibid., V, 5 and 6. " Absolute and infinite goodness produces

the being as its first good action."

70 And I recall that even Ramakrishna, who lived in a continual

state of bliss, loving Maya as a son, was not blind to the tragic

face of the universe, and showed on occasions the stupidity of

characterizing God as good. He did not deny the apparent cruelty

of nature, but he forbade any judgment of the divine will directing

it ; and his piety bowed down before the inscrutable decrees of the

infinite Force.

APPENDICES

nature. 11 71 On the contrary it must " watch " that the in-

tegrity of each individual nature is maintained, and with it the

integrity of the whole universe and of each of its parts. And

that is what is meant by " universal salvation." 72

It is clear that all these different terms : Providence, Salva-

tion, Goodness and Peace express no shallow optimism. Their

conception arises from an uncompromising and disillusioned

view of nature. They demand an intrepidity of heart and

mind, 78 not far removed from the heroism of Vivekananda,

but better able to maintain the unshakable serenity of a great

soul that is one with the Sovereign Unity and wedded to its

eternal designs.

The atmosphere in which Denis's ideas are steeped is less

moral, in the ordinary sense, than cosmic, and its temperature

is closer to that of Indian Mysticism than to simple Christian

thought, which rallies round the Crucified nameless multitudes

of the humble and oppressed. The energies are maintained by

the impersonal command of nature's laws, which combine and

unite the elements in all their multiplicity. But the order of

71 " We will not admit the vain statement of the multitude, that

Providence ought to lead us to virtue even against our will. For

to destroy nature is not a function of Providence. Hence, as

Providence is conservative of the nature of each, it provides for

the free, as free ; and for the whole and individual, according to

the wants of all and each . . . distributed proportionally to each."

(Divine Names, IV, 33.)

Even Plotinus's conception of Liberty has traces of it ; for he

reproved Stoic fatalism. Man is the master of his actions. 4 ' Liberty

is included in the plan of the universe from all eternity." (Enn.,

Ill, 3, 7, I, 255.)

71 " Divine justice is celebrated also even as preservation of the

whole, as preserving and guarding the excuse and order of each

district apart from the rest." (Divine Names, VIII, 9.)

7 * Ibid., VIII, 8. Compare his quiet reply to those who were

astonished and grumbled that " good people are abandoned without

redress to the vexations of the wicked." It was one of two things,

he said, either that so-called good people set their affections upon

worldly things, which were torn from them ; and therefore they

were " entirely cut off " from the quality they had usurped and

from Divine Love. Or else they really loved eternal things and

then they ought to rejoice in all the tribulations whereby they were

made worthy to enjoy them.

I have already quoted his conception of Christ as the " chief of

the athletes," leading his band into the lists " to fight for liberty."

(The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, II, Part 3, 6.) I have compared this

passage to words of Vivekananda.

APPENDICES

the Areopagite has this advantage over the Indian, that it

partakes of the harmony of Greek reason and the Roman genius

of imperial organization. Denis, so we feel strongly, is obliged

to satisfy the double exigencies of the Hellenic mind, nourished

on Eastern thought, and the evangelistic heart filled with the

dream of the crucified Saviour. He has encircled the Christ

with a rich halo of Alexandrine speculation, and as a result

the fascination of the halo has in a measure eclipsed the Christ.

The first who approached its circle of light, like John Scot

Erigene, was blinded by it. He was the only man of his century

to come into contact with them, and to live in long and secret

communion with this mysterious work ; for he was almost the

only living man of his age who understood the language in which

it was written. He drank of the mystic draught, and from it

he imbibed the secret, so dangerous to orthodoxy, of the freedom

of the mind intoxicated by symbols, wherein the letter of the

Christian faith is little by little drowned in the limitless and

unfathomable ocean of the One. By way of Denis, Plotinus,

Philo, the Infinite of Asia filtered through him into the religious

soul of the West. The Church condemned him in vain during

the thirteenth century. He flourished openly in the enchanted

philter of the great mystics of the fourteenth century the

most intoxicated of them, Meister Eckhart, being condemned

by the Avignon Papacy.

That is why it is easy to understand the caution wherewith

the Church to-day conceals even while it honours " the Pseudo-

Denis " that old, equivocal, obscure, uncertain and dangerous

master/ 1 as he was called by the French historian best qualified

to write of Western mysticism. 74 Nobody can deny that the

judgment was correct from the orthodox point of view although

ten centuries of orthodoxy had been nourished upon Denis ;

and were none the worse for it I But we, who do not trouble

about orthodoxy, who are only guided by the attraction of the

great sources of intelligence and a common love of humanity,

have rejoiced to discover and to show in the work of the Areo-

pagite (to use again Ramakrishna's ingenious parable) one of

the flights of steps leading to the reservoir with several ghats. 76

There from one of the ghats, Hindus fetch the water they call

74 Henri BrSraond : Historic UtUraire du sentiment religieux en

France, VII. La Metaphysique des Saints, Vol. I, p. 158.

71 And in the West on the other side of the Atlantic, Emerson's

voice was an echo of Ramakrishna's :

" All beings proceed from the same spirit, which bears different

names, love, justice or wisdom, in its different manifestations, just

APPENDICES

Brahman. And from another Christians draw the water they

call Christ. But it is always the same water.

* * *

To sum up : the following in my opinion are the three chief

lessons that Hindu religious thought should be interested to

learn, and to take from European mysticism :

1. The architectural sense of Christian metaphysicians. I

have just described it in the work of Denis ; and his sovereign

art is to be found throughout the Middle Ages. The men who

raised the cathedrals, carried into the construction of the mind

the same genius of intelligent order and harmonious balance

that made them the master builders of the arches linking the

Infinite to the finite. 76

2. The psychological science of the Christian explorers of

the " Dark Night " of the Infinite. In it they expended a

genius, at least equal (sometimes superior) to that which has

since been diverted into profane literature through the theatre

and the novel. The psychology of the mystic masters of the

sixteenth century in Spain and the seventeenth century in

France foreshadowed that of the classical poets ; and modern

thinkers who imagine that they have discovered the Subconscious

have scarcely reached the same level. It goes without saying

that their interpretations differ. But the essential point is not

the interpretation, the name given by the mind to what it sees

but what it sees. The eyes of Western mysticism reached

to the limits of the inaccessible.

3. The formidable energies that Western mysticism uses to

achieve Divine Union, in particular the passionate violence of

the European accustomed to battle and action. It devoured

Ruysbroeck, so that his Bhakti (Love) sometimes took on the

guise of the Seven Deadly Sins : " Implacable Desire," the

fury of mortal " Combat," the " torrent of delights," the em-

brace of carnal possession, 77 and the colossal hunger of the

as the Ocean receives other names when it bathes other shores. 1 '

(Lecture at Harvard, 1838.)

"In this they differ from intellectual logicians who strive to

separate the mind into compartments. And the difference between

St. John-of-the-Cross and Calvin, who were almost contemporary,

has often been remarked : the latter sacrificed the finite to the

infinite, the former established at the same time the difference and

the connexion between the two conceptions.

" See, in the magnificent French translation by Ernest Hello

(new edition, Perrin, 1912), extracts from De ornatu spiritalium

nuptiarum (" concerning insatiable hunger," pp. 38-9 ; " The com-

bat " between the spirit of God and the soul, a description of un-

APPENDICES

% ,

Epicurean. Similarly the " irascibilis" of Eckhart whose Soul

being identical with God's, " cannot bear anything above it

even. God Himself/' and so seizes Him by force. 78

In these three directions I believe that Indian Mysticism

might find sources of enrichment. 79 And, I believe further,

heard of brutality and crudity, pp. 40-41 ; or again " The Meeting

on the Mountain," pp. 54-5 ; and " the Embrace," pp. 71 et seq.)

and from De Septem Custodiis Libellus (the description of the " tem-

pest of love," pp. 106-11). A French reader who had been fore-

warned would have little difficulty in recognizing in this burning

torrent the reflected face of more than one illustrious Catholic poet

like Claudel, who has borrowed from it.

78 Eckhart 's third proposition was condemned by a Papal Bull.

It declared that " man with God has created the heaven and the

earth " and that " God can do nothing without man." In a sermon

he enumerated the three highest virtues, ascribing " irascibilis " to

the second place under the definition of " Violent upward aspira-

tion." And he added that the lack of it was a sin ; " Die Seele

kann nichts erttragen dass irgend etwas uber ihr sei. Ich glaube, sie

kann nicht einmal das ertragen dass Gott uber ihr sei." " Thanks to

this power," he says, " God is seized (ergreifen) by the soul."

(P. 236-37 of the edition of Insel-Verlag, Leipzig : Meister Eck-

hart Deutsche Predigten und Traktate, 1927.)

79 We do not claim as do so many Western thinkers in particular

M. Rudolf Otto, in his fine study of " Fichte and the Advaita "

(published hi West-Ostliche Mystik, 1926) that the superiority of

Western Mysticism is in " Lebendige Tatigkeit," in its character of

action coupled to divine contemplation. What is the Gita but a

heroic exaltation of action ?

" . . . It is not enough to abstain from action to free oneself

from the act. . . . Activity is superior to inaction. . . . The

former carries a man away, who controls his senses by the spirit,

and fully detached, imposes on them disciplined effort. . . . There

is not, O son of Pritha, in the three worlds anything that I am

bound to do, nothing in which I am lacking, nothing which I have

to acquire, and nevertheless I dwell in action. The worlds would

cease to exist, if I did not accomplish my work ; I would be the

cause of universal confusion and of the end of all creatures. The

ignorant work through attachment to the act while the wise also

work but without attachment and simply for the good of the

worlds ! . . ."

These famous words, which have for so many centuries nourished

Indian thought, are still a breviary of action and of inspiration to

Gandhi and Aurobindo Ghose, as they were to Vivekananda. Auro-

bindo shows in the God of the Gita not only the God who is un^

veiled through the consciousness of the spirit, but the God who

moves to action, to all our struggles, all our progress, the supreme

Master of work and sacrifice, the friend of the people who toil and

struggle our Denis the Areopagite would say : " the chief of the

APPENDICES

that it is part of Vivekananda's own spirit to point them out

to it. His great Advaitism was continually preoccupied in

enlarging and completing his conception of Unity. He so.ught

to annex all the energies that other races and other religions

had used in the service of this heroic conquest. And his faith

in the " God-Man " was so disinterested that, in order to serve

it, he lowered his high Indian pride and his ardent patriotism

before any people, whoever they might be, if they seemed to

him to be striving more effectively for the common cause.

Without really realizing the depths hidden in the mystic soul

of the West, he had an intuition that the East might find abun-

dant spiritual resources in the West, so that together they might

realize complete Advaitism that is to say the religious Unity

of the whole human family. 80 It is then under his aegis that

I present to India this short summary of Christian Advaitism,

from its Attic cradle in Alexandria. Over that cradle, as over

the manger, the Star of the East came to rest.

April, 1929.

athletes in the lists." (Cf. Essays on the Gita, 2 Vols., 1921-28.)

80 From a letter of Vivekananda to an Englishman, August 9,

I ^95, recently published by the Prabuddha Bharata, February, 1929,

I extract the following (freely condensed) :

"... I believe firmly that there are periodic fermentations of

religion in human society and that it is at present traversing one

of those periods. . . . The religious fermentation spreading at

present has this characteristic, that all the small eddies of thought

are flowing to one single end : the vision and the search for the

Unity of the Being. ... In India, in America, in England (the

only countries that I know), hundreds of these movements are

striving with each other. All represent more or less consciously

or unconsciously Advaitic thought, the most noble philosophy of

Unity that man has ever had. . . . Further, if anything is clear

to me, it is that one of these movements ought to absorb all the

rest. . . . Which should it be ? ... The group that shows the

most intense and marked character of life. . . . One word, on

this subject ! Yes, in truth, I love India. But each day my vision

becomes dearer, and whether India or America or England, we

are all the servants of that God, who by the ignorant is called

Man. He who waters the roots does he not also water the whole

tree ? There is only one basis for social, political or religious

welfare : it is to know that I and my brother are ONE. This is

jtrue for all countries and for all men. And let me tell you that

the Westerners realize this better than the Easterners, who almost

exhaust themselves in formulating the idea and carrying it out in

a few individual cases. Let us work then without desire for name

or fame or domination over others 1 ..."

Printed in Great Britain

by Butler & Tanner Ltd.,

Frome and London

F2S-930

- www.vivekananda.net edited by Frank Parlato Jr.

Swami Vivekananda