_Historic Forces Carried Early Christianity West and Not East. The
Far-Reaching Results of This Process_
Christianity in its beginning belonged neither to the East nor the West;
it was born where they met and its subsequent development was greatly
governed by the direction of the dominant tides of historical
development. But from the beginning of the Christian era the main
currents of human action flowed West and they carried Christianity with
them. It is, therefore, outstandingly an occidental development. This is
not to minimize the influence of the East in the earlier phases of
Christianity. There was doubtless a measure of give and take, some
blowing of the winds of the spirit in changing directions across vast
regions and a confused time, which carried the germinal forces from one
religion to another. But in the main, Christianity, to use Gardner's
fine phrase, was baptized into the forms and forces of the West. I say
in the main, for Asia Minor was in the time of St. Paul the meeting
place of manifold religions and his first Gentile converts brought with
them into their new faith a very great deal of what their old faiths had
made them.
There was, generally, in the Apostolic world a very great longing for a
spiritual deliverance and a mystic temper which easily took over and
transformed those elements in Christianity which lent themselves to
mystic interpretations. Something of this we discover in the Pauline
Epistles themselves; Paul's use of the word "mystery" shows how he
adapted his teaching to the understanding of those to whom he addressed
himself. To quote Gardner: "In the growth and spread of popular
superstition, if we may call them by so harsh a name, we may well
discern a gradual preparation for Christianity.... These religions stand
toward Christianity, to continue my biological comparison, as the wings
of a penguin stand toward those of an eagle, and it is surely no slight
on Christianity to say that it met the blind longings of a pagan nation
and showed them a path toward which they had, for long generations, been
trying to find their way. The religious needs which were very
imperfectly met by the initiations and ceremonies and prayers of the
cults of the pagan saving deities found a complete and perfect
satisfaction from faith in an exalted Christ."[63]
[Footnote 63: "The Growth of Christianity," Gardner, p. 136. For fuller
treatment with suggestive detail see Fraser "The Golden Bough," chapter
37.]
Christianity could not do this really very great thing without at the
same time being affected by that which it, in a measure, took over and
completed. The influence of Asia upon Christianity is, therefore, a
very real influence. One can only wonder what would have happened had
the course of empire been East instead of West. Christianity might then
have been carried into India and China and through long centuries been
given so distinctly an oriental content as to have taken on a character
radically different from its Western form. But this did not happen. To
follow Gardner's figure still farther, it was baptized into Greek
philosophy and Roman imperialism and the power of the nascent nations of
western Europe, and into the medieval spirit, and so we have become its
heirs. More than that, the East took its own way, uninfluenced by the
West, until two entirely different types of culture, civilization,
religion and approach to reality had been developed, as far apart as the
East is from the West, and each, until almost our own time,
substantially uninfluenced by the other.
_The West Rediscovers the East; the East Returns Upon the West_
Given the contacts of the modern world this massive isolation of
cultures could not continue. The East and the West were bound to meet
and religion was bound to be affected by their meeting. Western
Christianity has for more than a hundred years now been sending its
missionaries to the Orient and oriental religions are beginning to send
their missionaries to the West. More justly the return of the East upon
the West is not so much in a missionary propaganda, though there is a
measure of that, as in a more subtle indoctrination of Western
speculation by the fascination and mystery of the Eastern cults. It is
not possible to follow this process in detail but it has gone on long
enough now for us to begin to see the outcome of it and to appraise its
force. It began with New Thought. One discovers oriental names on the
programs of New Thought conventions; the Vedanta Philosophy was
expounded by East Indian speakers at the Greenacre conference in Maine
in the late nineties; B.F. Mills was lecturing on Oriental Scriptures in
1907; and a lecture on the Vedanta Philosophy appears on the program of
the second convention of the International Metaphysical League held in
New York City in the year 1900. The New Thought movement in England
naturally reflected the same tendency to look for light to Eastern
speculation even more markedly than the American movement.
All this was natural enough because New Thought, once divorced from
inherited Christianity and committed to pure speculation about the
sources and meanings of life, was sure to find out that the Orient had
been doing just this for a thousand years. Two things happened. First,
New Thought welcomed Eastern teachers to its conventions in the hope of
receiving thereby some measure of enlightenment, and second, many of
these seekers, finding that the East had a wealth of speculation
compared with which the West is poor indeed, took over the Eastern cults
bodily, gave themselves up to their study and became their ardent
devotees and missionaries.
Generalizations are always dangerous and though the East has, until the
West began to exploit it, remained practically unchanged, the West has
changed so often that whatever one may say about it must immediately be
qualified. But, on the whole, Eastern and Western life are organized
around utterly different centers. The West in its present phase is
predominantly scientific. Our laboratories are perhaps the
distinguishing hall-mark of our civilization. We are always asking
questions of the outside world; we are hungry for facts; we are always
seeking to discover the law and direction of physical force; we have
taken small account, comparatively, of our own inner states, but we have
taken immense account of the universe of which we are a part and the
forces which play around us. Our realities are what we touch and see. We
have given to our sight an immense increase of searching power through
the microscope and telescope, but we are slow to venture beyond what
they reveal to us. We have increased the sensitiveness of our touch
through the instruments of our laboratories. We have organs to sensibly
register the vibrations of an etheric force and even to weigh light. But
we are slow to recognize any range of reality not thus revealed to us.
We have gained in such ways a really illuminating understanding of the
physical universe; we have formulated its laws, chronicled its sequence
and made it in a marvellous way the instrument of our material
well-being. If we have speculated at all it has been rather in the
direction of the ultimate nature of matter and force, as these have
supplied us material for speculation, than in any other direction. We
have been generally and soundly suspicious of conclusions which cannot
be verified by the scientific method, and so have built about ourselves
restraining limitations of thought which we are wholesomely unwilling to
pass. We have found our real joy in action rather than meditation. Our
scientific achievements have supplied material for our restless energy
and our restless energy has urged us on to new achievement.
True enough, there has been of late signs of a changing temper. We are
beginning to discover that science has marked limitations; there are
ranges of reality of which our laboratories can make no possible report
which we are beginning to take into account. But in a large way the
matured Western outlook upon life has been conditioned by the scientific
interpretation of the universe.
_Chesterton's Two Saints_
The East has taken an entirely different line; its laboratories have
been the laboratories of the soul. The East has had little concern about
outside things; it has had an immense concern for its own inner life.
The East has made little attempt to master outer forces; it has been
generally content to let them have their way with it, realizing, maybe,
that after all what the outside world can do for the inner life is
negligible compared with what the soul can do for itself. Race and
climate and the sequence of history have all conspired to produce this
temper. The history of the East is a strange combination of drive and
quiescence; its more vigorous races have had their periods of conquest
and fierce mastery, but sooner or later what they have conquered has
conquered them and they have accepted, with a kind of inevitable
fatalism, the pressure of forces which they were powerless to subdue to
their own weakening purposes. They have populated their lands to the
limit and accepted the poverty which a dense population without
scientific resource, on a poor soil and in a trying climate, inevitably
engenders. The more helpless have fallen back upon fate and accepted
with a pathetic resignation their hard estate, asking only to be freed
from the weariness of it. "It is better," says an Eastern proverb, "to
sit than to stand, it is better to lie than to sit, it is better to
sleep than to lie, and death is the best of all."
There is an immensity of weariness and disillusionment in such an
interpretation of life, which needs no comment. But the Eastern mind is
subtle and speculative, possessing a peculiar penetrating power; and,
for the want of any other field in which to act, it turned in upon
itself.
Chesterton has both hit and missed the immense difference between the
East and the West in one of his brilliant paragraphs.[64] "No two ideals
could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and
a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every
point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist
saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has
them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious
body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The medieval saint's
body is wasted to crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There
cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced
symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are
extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real
divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist
is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards; the Christian is staring
with a frantic intentness outwards. If we follow that clue steadily we
shall find some interesting things."
[Footnote 64: "Orthodoxy," p. 243.]
But to follow Chesterton's own method, the saint with the open eyes may
still be blind while the saint with his eyes shut may really see a vast
deal, and the East has seen much. Whether what it sees be true or not,
is another matter, but there is no denying the range of his conjecture.
The Eastern saint has sought to answer for himself and in his own way
those compelling questions which lie behind all religion--Whence? and
Whither? and Why? He, too, has sought to come into right relations with
the power which manifests itself in the universe and he has sought, with
an intensity of effort to which the West is strange, for a real
communion with the power he has discovered. And above all, he has sought
deliverance.
_Why the West Questions the East_
He has not been so conscious of the need of forgiveness, since
forgiveness plays no great part in his understanding of the sequences of
life, but he is anxious enough to be set free from pain and weariness
and at his best he has traced the relation of moral cause and effect far
more analytically than his Western brother. He has, indeed, introduced
greatly speculative elements in his balancing of life's accounts, but
the West has done that also, for the accounts of life persistently
refuse to be balanced unless something beyond ordinary experience is
taken into account. The longing of the East for deliverance has, on the
whole, however, been less theological and more simple than the longing
of the West. The West has been led to turn to the East for teaching and
deliverance through a combination of forces. I have noticed already the
very direct way in which New Thought, once committed to free speculation
about life and God, found congenial guidance in the Eastern cults, but
other elements enter. The West has begun to share something of the
disillusionment of the East; so many things which promised to deliver us
have seemingly failed us. Our sciences have immeasurably enlarged our
knowledge and increased our power; they have added to our material
well-being; they have worked their miracles for us; but they have
brought us neither peace nor true happiness. They have instead added
their own disturbances to our other perplexities and they have
ultimately simply extended the frontiers of the mysterious and given a
new and vaster quality to our problems.
Our democracies and our humanitarian movements have shown us that the
keys both to liberty and progress are still in human nature and not in
forms of organization and government. As our civilizations have grown
older and particularly as they have wasted themselves in war, some
shadow of the age-old weariness of the East has begun to fall across our
Western world. We have also reacted strongly against materialism in
thought and life; we have begun to see, as has been said, how the need
and force of personality have the right to assert themselves against the
dominance of things. We are beginning to recognize the right of religion
and philosophy to suggest terms to science, and all these tendencies
have combined to produce a considerable group of people who, having
found, for one reason or another, no real satisfaction in their
inherited Christianity, have welcomed the Eastern solution of the
problems of life, or else have positively turned to the East in the hope
of discovering what Western Christianity has not been able to give them.
One should add also that the pure love of speculation which is one of
the phases of modern thought has made an opening in the West for the
East. If unlimited speculation is the main business of life, the East
has certainly everything to offer us, and for warning, as we shall
presently see, as well as for guidance.
_Pantheism and Its Problems_
The older Eastern religions are, to begin with, Pantheistic. We have
seen how religion generally in its development takes form and content
from its governing conception of God. We have seen also that there are
three governing conceptions of God: He is conceived as Transcendent or
Immanent, or else He is simply identified with the range and force of
the universe. Pantheism is generally the creation of brooding wonder and
uncritical thought; Pantheism feels rather than thinks; it accepts
rather than seeks to explain. It may be devout enough but its devotion
is passive rather than active. Pantheism is never scientific in the
accepted sense of that term; it has little concern for law; it explains
by personalizing the forces with which it has to deal; it is akin to the
temper which finds some animating spirit in all natural phenomena. The
flow of waters, the growth of things, the drift of clouds across the sky
are all, for Pantheism, simply the revelation of the action of some
indwelling spirit or other, without which they could neither exist nor
go on.
At its worst Pantheism issues in a grotesque mythology and an
inconceivable multiplication of divinity; the gods in the Hindu Pantheon
are numbered by the thousands. At its best Pantheism issues in a kind of
mystic poetry and creates a devotee sensitive as Tagore to the fugitive
gleams of beauty through the murk of things, voicing his prayers and
insights in rare phrases which are, on the whole, in arresting contrast
to the actuality of life about him. Western devotion has been caught by
the mystic and poetical character of Pantheism and is, on the whole,
strangely blind to its actual outcome in the life of its devotees.
We all feel the suggestion of it in certain of our tempers. If we should
take out of much of our finest poetry suggestions akin to the
suggestions of Pantheism at its best, we should leave even Western
poetry strangely poor, and we have beside, particularly in the
contemplation of rare natural beauty, a feeling of kinship with the
spirit which clothes itself in dawn and twilight, or speaks through the
rhythmic beat of sea waves, or lifts itself against the skyline in far
blue mountain summits, which helps us to understand this old, old faith.
And if modern cults had done nothing more than appropriate the poetry of
Pantheism they would have lent only a touch of oriental colour to the
somberness of Western life.
But Theosophy and kindred cults have gone farther, since Pantheism
itself must go farther. Directly you have identified creation and the
creative power so intimately as Pantheism does, then you are under
bonds, if you have any curiosity at all or any speculative force, to try
to explain the ways in which a God, who is just to begin with all that
there is, has managed to reveal Himself in such an infinitude of minute
and sometimes ungodlike ways. So Pantheism has its own scheme, not of
creation, for there is no place in Pantheism for creation, but rather of
emanation. Eastern thought substitutes for the cosmogony of the Old
Testament which simply carries the world back to a creative God and
seeks to go no farther, and for the methods of Western science which
carries creation back to ultimate force and is unable to go any farther,
an entirely different system.
_How the One Becomes the Many_
A paragraph in Mrs. Besant's "The Ancient Wisdom" (page 41) may help us
here. "Coming forth from the depths of the One Existence, from the One
beyond all thought and all speech, a Logos, by imposing on Himself a
limit, circumscribing voluntarily the range of His own Being, becomes
the manifested God, and tracing the limiting sphere of His activity thus
outlines the area of His universe. Within that sphere the universe is
born, is evolved, and dies; it lives, it moves, it has its being in Him;
its matter is His emanation; its forces and energies are currents of His
life; He is immanent in every atom, all-pervading, all-sustaining,
all-evolving; He is its source and its end, its cause and its object,
its centre and circumference; it is built on Him as its sure foundation,
it breathes in Him as its encircling space; He is in everything and
everything in Him. Thus have the Sages of the Ancient Wisdom taught us
of the beginning of the manifested worlds."
It is not, of course, fair to say that here is something entirely
different from the line of Western scientific and philosophic thought or
wholly alien to elements in modern Christianity.[65] The real problem of
modern Theism is to connect what science discovers with what faith
assumes. The broader generalization of science resolves action and
existence into the unities of an underlying and self-conserving force
which grows more and more subtle and tenuous as we follow it from
molecules to atoms, from atoms to eons and electrons, and even discern
beneath these something more impalpable than themselves, and there must
be some way in which a creative power conceived by faith in terms of
personality has released the forces which have built themselves into the
universe. The difference is, however, that Christian Theism refuses
completely to identify God and His universe.
[Footnote 65: Indeed this is a better commentary on the prologue to the
Gospel of John and certain passages of Colossians than most of the
orthodox theologies, and the self-limitation of God is the key to the
moral freedom of the individual.]
There is, after all, a profound distinction between creating and
becoming. Theosophy undertakes to explain for us how "the One beyond all
thought and all speech" has become us and our universe. It attempts also
to provide a way by which we, who are entangled, to our pain and sorrow,
in the web of things thus woven, may escape from it and lose ourselves
again in the One. It takes the wheel for its symbol in more senses than
one. Everything is a turning and returning and we ourselves are bound
upon the wheel, carried down or up and finally to be set free, only by
the acceptance of a certain discipline of life.
Theosophy, then, is both speculative and practical. Its speculations
take an immense range necessarily; it is no simple thing to follow the
One from the depths of His hidden existence to our earth-born lives and
the forces which flow about them. Only an expert deeply versed in
Eastern literature would be able to say whether Mrs. Besant follows her
Eastern masters faithfully in reporting their conclusions, but she has
plainly availed herself of many of the terms and suggestions of modern
science in interpreting them to us. If one could use a figure borrowed
from electricity, the One is "stepped-down" through a series of planes
and manifestations. Theosophy makes much of sevens--no use to ask
why--and bridges the gulf between ultimate and present realities by a
series of seven planes in which what is coarsest in the plane above
becomes the germ of what is finest in the plane beneath. Even so, the
One does not directly touch even the highest of these seven planes.
(Theosophy is, first of all, a study in descents and not in ascents;
ascent comes later.) There are between the One and the topmost plane
three emanations (but perhaps we would better let Mrs. Besant speak to
us herself): "The self-unfolding of the Logos in a threefold form: the
first Logos the root of all being, from Him the second manifesting the
two aspects of life and form, then the third Logos, the universal mind,
that in which all archetypically exists, the source of beings, the fount
of fashioning energies."[66]
[Footnote 66: "The Ancient Wisdom," p. 41.]
_Evolution and Involution_
It would seem to the uninitiated that all this is a kind of smoke-screen
of words to conceal our real ignorance of what we can never know and
really have no need to know. It is evidently just an attempt to bridge
the abyss between the immaterial and the material. If Theosophy wishes
to bridge this abyss with conjecture, well and good, but its conjectures
really leave us more deeply perplexed than we should be if we frankly
recognized and accepted the limitations of our ignorance. Once within
sight of the topmost of her seven planes, Mrs. Besant goes on a little
more definitely though she confesses "of what occurs on the two higher
planes of the universe, the seventh and the sixth, we can form but the
haziest conception." Each plane has what she calls its own "spirit
matter"; this spirit matter becomes coarser as we descend; each plane is
an emanation from the plane above it and the spirit matter of each plane
winds one more veil around those emanations of the immaterial One in
whom or which the whole process took its beginning.
Theosophy does not speak of evolution as it attempts to account for our
material world, it speaks of involution. Here it reverses what is most
distinctive in modern Western religious thought as far as modern Western
religious thought has accepted evolution. For us evolution, if we seek
to give it a Theistic content, is God making manifest, in the vast
ascent of form and existence, an always fuller revelation of Himself.
Our familiar phrase "the self-revelation of God" posits a power which
can never for a moment be contained in all that is, but which may always
be more clearly known as we follow His creative record from stage to
ascending stage. A grass blade is a richer revelation than a crystal, a
bird than a grass blade; personality is almost infinitely richer than
the lower forms, some personalities are more perfectly the instruments
of the divine self-revelation than others, and Christian faith accepts
in Jesus Christ the supreme self-revelation of God in terms of human
experience.
_Theosophy Undertakes to Offer Deliverance to the Entangled Soul_
But Theosophy reverses all this. As the One comes down from emanation to
emanation and from plane to plane He is always more deeply entangled in
the veil of things, until on our last and lowest plane He is seven times
enwrapped and smothered. We must not, however, confuse this last and
lowest plane with our little world, or even our universe; these are but
sensible aspects of it and they are really the manifestation of the
deeply enwrapped Divine trying to struggle up and out again and so
building our realities about us and eventually bringing us, with all our
conscious powers, into being. (Here the theosophist has more in common
with the evolutionist than one or two of the preceding paragraphs would
seem to indicate.) If we follow the figure of the wheel our present
plane, the last and lowest of them all, is really the turning point of
the wheel; now it begins to turn back upon that from which it descended,
and according to Theosophy our practical human task is so to avail
ourselves of its upward movement as to be carried back with it toward
the high planes of perfect being.
Theosophy undertakes to account for personality as it accounts for our
sensible universe and along much the same line of speculation. Just as
the whole physical plane on which our world exists has really somewhere
deep wrapped up within it some emanation of the One from whom everything
flows out, so our true selves, which have really come down from the One
and should thence return, are wrapped up so deeply as also to be near
lost and smothered with, nevertheless, the power to get themselves
unwrapped. Our wrappings are our bodies, but we do not begin to
understand Theosophy if we think of body in the ordinary sense; our
physical body is only one and that the coarsest of the seven veils, for
there are seven here also, in which the true soul is enmeshed. We have
really seven bodies and we are not any one of them though each of them
is useful and each one of them puts us in touch with a certain order of
existence. Some of these bodies are mortal, others of them belong to the
truly enduring order.
Now we are lost here unless we recognize the profound difference between
all our usual ways of thinking or talking and the wisdom of Theosophy.
Theosophy begins at the top and comes down, at least until it reaches
our present world; it also begins at the inside and works out. We think
of our physical bodies as the instruments, on one side at least, through
which the physical world communicates with us, but for the theosophist
they are only instruments through which we communicate with the world.
Not quite so, however, for Theosophy recognizes the give and take of
experience. The soul may slip out of the physical body in sleep and
it--our physical body--is at the best a stupid, imprisoning, misleading
sort of a husk which has its practical uses but ought by no means to be
taken too seriously.[67] Its coarse matter may be refined by discipline
and diet and apparently the physical body of a vegetarian is a finer
instrument than the physical body of one who feeds on the flesh of
animals.
[Footnote 67: For a striking modern phrasing of this see Edward
Carpenter's Free Verse "The Stupid Old Body."]
_But Becomes Deeply Entangled Itself_
The physical body has also an etheric double which duplicates in a more
subtle way the constitution of the physical body. This is the vehicle of
the life force, whatever that means. The physical body and its double
are in a rough way the vehicles of the give and take of physical
existence, but for the experiences of pain and pleasure and for the
dwelling place of the passions, desires and emotions, we have an astral
body. Here the theosophist makes much use of vibrations and colours, and
apparently our changing play of emotion is reflected in a play of colour
which puts the chameleon to shame and makes us in our most excited
moment rivals of the rainbow itself. The astral body shows upon occasion
browns, dark reds and greens and their combinations, lit from time to
time with flashes of scarlet. Our better feelings reveal themselves in
finer colours; rose indicates love, blue, religious feeling, yellow,
intelligence, and violet, spirituality. The Theosophist believes that we
can be trained to see all this and illustrates it in coloured plates
which are, to the uninitiated, not over convincing. Beside the body of
physical existence and the astral body we possess also a mental body.
This is the seat of thought and mental action. In a sentence, maybe, the
theosophist is trying to say that we have a body for each phase of
personality through which we come into contact with the finer realities
of the ascending planes of existence, and that the matter of these
bodies is more subtly refined as we pass from mere sensation to higher
spiritual states.
So within the astral body there is the mental body which, says Mrs.
Besant, is of finer material than the astral as the astral is finer than
the physical. This is the body which answers by its vibrations to our
changes of thought. The mental body may be refined by fitting
disciplines as it is coarsened by evil thoughts. These thoughts may
become "veritable diseases and maimings of the mental body incurable
during its period of life." These bodies we discard in due time, the
physical at death and the astral when ready to enter the heaven world.
What becomes of the mental body Mrs. Besant does not say.
Beyond these are bodies which belong to man's timeless existence,
curiously named and obscurely defined. There is apparently a causal body
which is possibly the vehicle of will and, more involved still, a
super-spiritual body which is the reality of God deep within us, and the
carrier and vehicle of our supreme and enduring personal values. All
this is a curious enough mingling of psychology, a subtle materialism,
and unbounded speculation; it is equally beyond proof and denial, though
for the proof of it the theosophist offers the testimony of those whose
senses are so refined by peculiar disciplines as to see in and about
physical form a play of light and colour which are themselves the
revelation of mental and emotional states. We literally go about,
according to this testimony, "trailing clouds of glory" or of gloom.
While for the denial of it there is the deep-seated protest of Western
reason, that personality, complex as it is, cannot possibly be so
bafflingly complex as this.
_The West Accepts Suffering as a Challenge and Looks to Personal
Immortality for Victory_
We are, therefore, according to the theosophist, emanations from the
Divine; deeply enveiled and much enshrouded within us is a timeless and
changeless self descended from the mysterious All which lies back of all
things and under high compulsion to seek again, in some vast turning of
the wheel of Being, that from which we sprang. Theosophy becomes more
understandable in its practical reaction upon life, for this many veiled
self is deeply involved in forces and states to which it is not really
akin, and since it suffers greatly in being so involved the end of
existence is, in discipline and ascent, to be set free from the pain and
weariness of conscious existence, and to be absorbed in the changeless
peace of that ultimate reality out of which we have issued and back
again to which we are destined to go. We cannot be insensible to the
vast scope of such a speculation as this for in one form or another
there are, in all religion and in the deeper yearnings of life, elements
akin to it.
The order of which we are a part bears hard upon the soul. No one who
meditates deeply upon the strangeness of human destiny can fail to
recognize the arresting estate of sensitive personality enmeshed in laws
and forces which drive on with so little apparent consideration for
those who are caught in the turning of their wheels, or ridden down in
their drive. Western faith has generally seen in this situation a
challenge to personality to assert its own supremacy over the impersonal
and subject its encompassing order to the high purposes of the soul. If
we are wounded in the fight we take our wounds as good soldiers; if the
forces which face us are challengingly strong we fall back upon our
deeper resources and in the end assert our own vaster powers.
We accept the conditions of the struggle as a part of the discipline of
life and in our braver moments win from the fight itself those elements
of personal steadfastness which, matured in character, give moral
meaning to the endeavour, and though we anticipate an ultimate release
and blessed compensation for the present travail of our souls, we find
that release and those compensations in a personal immortality which
attends the termination of the individual life in the present order, and
continues that life conscious, free and triumphant in an immortal order,
and even there we ask neither to be released from effort nor denied
progress. We challenge the fortunes of the Unknown in the poet's phrase,
and seek "other heights in other lives, God willing."
_The East Balances the Accounts of Life in a Series of Reincarnations_
But just as the East casts the glamour of its speculation over the
processes by which we have come to be where and what we are, so it casts
the glamour of its speculation over the process of our release. The
West stakes everything on the issue of one individual life even if death
ends it, or else it assumes a conscious continuity of life rich in
memory and persistent in individuality in whatever progress lies beyond
the grave. Those whom Dante saw ascending from terrace to terrace of the
Mount of Purgation were in all stages continuously and truly themselves.
They knew the faults for which they made atonement and looked back with
unclouded vision along all the stages by which they had climbed. The
East makes little of the continuity of individual life and everything of
the sequence of individual lives. It offers for the solution of our
problem of ultimate destiny and also for its solution of the problem of
pain and sorrow and manifest inequality in human states, two simple and
unescapable laws--the law of moral consequence and the law of
reincarnation. The East and the West both believe that "whatsoever a man
soweth that shall he also reap" but the West believes he gathers his
harvests of pain or punishment in a continuity of conscious existence,
the vaster part of which is lived beyond death, with no rebirth and with
no travelling again the light or shadowed ways of earth and time. The
Christian West believes also in redemption which is just that sharing of
God in the process which makes faith and repentance definite and saving
elements in the struggle of the soul.
The East believes in a series of reincarnations, each reincarnate state
taking its character from the quality of the life before. The fact that
the doors of recollection are shut and locked between each incarnate
existence makes no difference to the East. If a man has lived well and
justly and followed his light, he will hereafter be born higher up; if
he has loved darkness because his deeds are evil, he will be born into
some low estate; he may descend into the beast or ascend into the saint.
He will pay for present injustice with future suffering--
"Or reach a hand through time to catch
The far-off interest of tears"
even though he have no conscious remembrance of the faults for which he
atones, or the sorrow for which he is recompensed. If he is steadfast
through countless rebirths, the slow turning wheel will bear him higher
and higher until he begins to ascend the successive planes, discovering
in each plane for which he has fitted himself a new wealth and reality
of existence, until at last he is lost in the Infinite Existence and his
struggle is ended.
Perhaps the word "struggle" as here used is wrong. Deliverance for the
East is not so much struggle as acquiescence. For the theosophist desire
is the master mischief maker. Desire leads us in wrong directions,
complicates our spiritual problems and thrusts us against the turn of
the wheel. We are rather, according to the theosophist, to reduce desire
to its simplest terms, thereby freeing ourselves from restlessness,
above all taking care not to hurt or embitter others.
_Theosophy Produces a Distinct Type of Character_
There is no denying that here is a faith capable of producing a
distinctive type of character. It tends at its best toward an extreme
conscientiousness and an always excessive introspection; it creates also
a vast and brooding patience. "In countries where reincarnation and
karma [the law of Cause and Effect] are taken for granted by every
peasant and labourer, the belief spreads a certain quiet acceptance of
inevitable troubles that conduces much to the calm and contentment of
ordinary life. A man overwhelmed by misfortunes rails neither against
God nor against his neighbours, but regards his troubles as the result
of his own past mistakes and ill-doings. He accepts them resignedly and
makes the best of them.... He realizes that his future lives depend on
his own exertions and that the law which brings him pain will bring him
joy just as inevitably if he sows the seed of good. Hence a certain
large patience and philosophic view of life tending directly to social
stability and to general contentment."[68]
[Footnote 68: "The Ancient Wisdom," Besant, p. 273.]
If such a faith as this be informed with humaneness and be deeply
tempered with the principle of sacrifice, it may, and does, result in a
distinct type of real goodness. It is possibly a good faith for helpless
and more or less despairing folk, though it likely creates many of the
evils from which it desires to escape. The very reach and subtlety and
even splendour of its speculation will make a strong appeal to minds of
a certain type.
Two elements in the whole system doubtless account for what hold it has
upon the Western mind. It does offer, to begin with, a coherent
explanation of the problem of pain and sorrow. As we have seen more than
once in this study, Western Christianity has been deficient just here.
The accepted explanations of the shadowed side of life have not been
great enough to meet the facts. Practically every cult we have studied
has found its opportunity just here. Christian Science solves the
problem by denying the essential reality of pain and disease. New
Thought believes in an underlying and loving good to which life may be
so attuned as to bring us generally into the current of health and
happiness. Theosophy accepts pain, sorrow and all unhappy forces and
explains them as the inevitable result of wrong action either in this or
a previous existence.
_Theosophy a "Tour de Force" of the Imagination_
Christian Science saves the justice and affirms the love of God by
making Him just a God with apparently no concern for and no
participation in the shadowed side of life. New Thought saves the love
and justice of God by discovering in pain and unhappiness our lack of
harmony with Him. Theosophy meets the whole shadowed order along its
full front and explains everything in terms of compensation. Now there
is much in this to appeal to our modern temper. Directly we recognize
the scales in which the consequences of our actions are weighed as being
so sensitive that not even a thought can be thrown in the one balance
without disturbing the equilibrium, directly we recognize ourselves as
involved in a sweep of law from whose consequences there is no possible
escape, we have at least a consistent scheme in which there is room for
no evasion, and if we balance the manifold inequalities of one life by
what has been done or left undone in some previous life, we are always
able to add weight enough to the scales to make them hang level. True
enough, there is nothing to guide us here but imaginative ingenuity, but
it is always possible to imagine some fault in a previous existence
which we pay for in pain or loss or disappointment, or some good deed
done in a previous existence which accounts for our happy fortune in
this. And so justice is saved if only by a tour de force of the
imagination. (Mrs. Besant, for example, explains the untimely death of a
child as a penalty due the parents for unkindness to a child in an
earlier incarnation.)
The speculative aspects of Theosophy also appeal to tempers which love
to dream without accepting the laborious discipline of a truly reasoned
speculation. To quote a phrase of Macaulay's quoted in turn by William
James in one of his letters, there is a type of mind "utterly wanting in
the faculty by which a demonstrated truth is distinguished from a
plausible supposition," and there has been amongst us of late a marked
increase of this type of mind. There has been up to our own time no
great amount of such speculation as this in the West. It is not native
to the occidental temper and it has been held in control by our
scientific approach to the facts of our world and our experiences
therein. We have demanded for our speculations generally the
demonstration of fact and this has heretofore held us to a rather
narrow range, but that widening of the frontiers of the possible which
has attended the new psychology with its emphasis upon the subconscious,
along with the rather baffling character of psychic phenomena, has
opened the flood gates and released a tide of speculation which goes far
beyond the proved fact and accepts no limits but its own ingenious
audacity. We have already seen how evident deficiencies in the
discipline of present-day education and the loose state of mind too much
in evidence amongst us has contributed to all this. There are everywhere
a great number of perplexed people who want to believe something and
find it far easier to believe in dreams and guesses and cloud-built
systems than in restraining facts or even the rather clearly
demonstrated realities of the moral order, and such as these have found
a wealth of material in Eastern speculation.
_A Bridge of Clouds_
In trying to appraise the truth of Theosophy we have to disentangle the
system and the needs and the seekings which lead its adherents to accept
it. These needs and seekings are, after all, near and familiar; they are
only our old questions Whence? and Whither? and Why? Theosophy is at
least the attempt to really answer some of the questions which Western
science is either content or compelled to leave unanswered. The creative
point of contact between personality and matter and force is deeply
enwrapped in mystery. Orthodox Christianity has been content to affirm
the facts of creation without asking any questions at all as to its
methods. It has affirmed the omnipotence of the Creator and has found in
His omnipotence a satisfactory resting place. God is great enough to do
what has been done and the detail of it is rather an affair for God than
man. Scientific speculation generally has gone back as far as it can go
in the resolution of its forces and laws and recognized its own
limitations, leaving the rest to the theologian and the philosopher. The
result has been a gap which has not been bridged over. Theosophy has
undertaken to bridge that gap. But, examined more carefully, one sees
that the abyss has been crossed by nothing more solid than a fabric of
cloudy speculation. True enough these speculations are ingenious and
touched with suggestive light, but they are strangely insubstantial.
After all they do absolutely nothing more than our Western affirmation
of the immanence of God in life and force and law, and our Western
thought has the advantage alike in simplicity, in scientific basis and
reverent self-restraint.
We might as well recognize, and be done with it, that there are
questions here which in all human probability are insoluble. There are
elements of mystery in life and the universe beyond our present and
likely our future power to definitely resolve. In the end faith can do
nothing more than rest in God and accept as an aspect of life itself the
necessary limits of our position. Our organized knowledge all too
quickly brings us to regions where faith and faith alone completes the
inquiry. But on the other hand, a faith which too far outruns either in
the reach or audacity of its speculation those elements which organized
knowledge supplies and reason validates, loses itself in futilities or
else misleads us altogether. Eastern speculation is too far beyond
either ordered knowledge or right reason to be of any practical use in
the fruitful conduct of life. Believing too much does just as much harm
as believing too little.
Theosophy's seven planes and ascending emanations and sevenfold veils
and all the rest really explain nothing. On the other hand they tempt
their faithful to take conjecture for reality; they create a credulous
and uncritical temper; they are hostile to that honest dealing with fact
which is just one condition of getting on at all. A brave confession of
ignorance is often more truly reverent than knowing too many things
which are not so. As we approach more nearly the reality of things as
they are we find them always unexpectedly simple. The burden of proof is
always upon the murky and the complex. Those who try to escape the
difficulties in which our deeper understanding of the world order and
our own personalities involve us, by taking refuge in Eastern occultism
are on the wrong line.
_The Difficulties of Reincarnation_
The same criticism holds true of Reincarnation. It is involved in
hopeless difficulties. There are apparent injustices and inequalities in
life--so much is beyond debate--but we have in general, if we are honest
enough to follow it through, the clue to even these. We are all parts
of a struggling and, we trust, ascending order, an order which on the
whole is not so greatly concerned for the individual as we are concerned
for ourselves. We are hampered by our ignorance and we are deeply
involved one with the other. The orthodox theology which blames
everything upon sin as an abstraction is not convincing, but sin as the
projection of wrong desires, through self-will, into the field of human
action is a fact to be constantly reckoned with. The individual and
social consequences of it are enormous, nor can they be confined either
to one individual or one generation. Heredity continues weakness as well
as strength. A vast deal of our bitter reaping is due to the wrong or
foolish sowing of others, though fortunately we share the good as well
as the bad. The laws of heredity will account for a vast deal in any one
generation; the laws of social action and reaction for a great deal of
the rest, and there is finally not a little for which we ourselves are
responsible. A good many of our problems ought to be approached from the
point of view of the well-being of humanity generally and not our own
individual destiny.
We may safely trust our individual destiny to brave and unselfish
living. I ought not to test what I do or leave undone by its effect upon
me in some future reincarnation; I ought to test it by the effect which
it has now upon the world of which I am a part, upon the generation
which is to follow me and upon the quality of my own present life. True
enough, the theosophist and myself find ourselves here in substantial
agreement as to many of the things which a man ought practically to do
to secure a happier future, but I maintain that the motives just named
are far more solid and worthy motives than the camouflaged selfishness
of Theosophy, and they are certainly in far deeper accord with the
ascertained facts of life. If we recognize that the more shadowed side
of life is partly the result of social and individual development
conditioned by weakness, ignorance and sin, if we recognize that the
present reaps what the past has sown, if we recognize that we suffer for
the faults of others and that no one of us may hope to climb far until
his neighbour climbs with him, if we recognize that pain and suffering
are disciplinary, illuminating, educative, and finally, if we recognize
that we do possess the power to take all the more difficult elements in
experience and subdue them to an increased wealth of personality, we
have really all the elements in hand for the solution of the problem of
pain and sorrow in terms of action and understanding, and we do not need
a series of reincarnations to help us out.
Reincarnation really explains, as it claims to explain, neither the
exceptional individual nor the apparently unmerited sufferings of the
individual, and it has beside inescapable difficulties of its own. It
has to parallel the course of human existence with a range of supernal
existence for which there is absolutely no proof; it has to numerically
equalize birth and death--and these are not equal in an increasing
terrestrial population--or else it has to assume, as it does of course,
on other planes a storehouse of souls from which to draw. And more than
that, it involves itself in a perfect tangle of heavenly bookkeeping.
Here is the best Mrs. Besant can do to explain the difficulties of
reincarnation. "We have seen that man during his passage to physical
death loses, one after the other, his various bodies.... These are all
disintegrated and their particles remixed with the materials of their
several planes.... At this stage, then, only the man himself is left,
the labourer who has brought his harvest home and has lived upon it till
it is all worked up into himself. The dawn of a new life begins."[69]
[Footnote 69: "The Ancient Wisdom," p. 202--passim.]
To condense, he now proceeds to build up for himself a new body for his
coming life on the lower mental level. "This again exactly represents
his desire nature, faithfully reproducing the qualities he evolved in
the past; ... thus the man stands fully equipped for his next
incarnation.... Meanwhile action external to himself is being taken to
provide him with a physical body suitable for the expression of his
qualities.... All this is done by certain mighty spiritual Intelligences
often spoken of as the lords of Karma because it is their function to
superintend the working out of causes continually set going by thoughts,
desires and actions. They hold the threads of destiny which each man has
woven, and guide the reincarnating man to the environment determined by
his past. The race, the nation, the family thus determined, what may be
called the mould of the physical body ... is built within the mother's
womb by the agency of an elemental, the thought of the Karmic lords
being its motive power." The difficulties which this statement evades
are enormous, its conjectures are even more enormous.
This is the subversion of all the facts of biology and heredity to a
capricious scheme, built up just to answer a few practical
questions--Why do we differ? Why do we suffer? Why are we happy? Surely
there are far more simple and reasonable answers to these questions than
the answer of Theosophy, and the willingness of so many people to rest
in such an answer as this can prove only one of two things--the capacity
of the mind for credulity or the arresting failure of those whose
business it is to interpret life to the perplexed, to have even begun
their task.
_Immortality a Nobler, Juster and Simpler Balancing of Life's
Account-Book_
If there be a want of opportunity in our present existence for a true
balancing of the scales of justice, and if some future existence be
needed to make things right, then the Christian doctrine of immortality
has an immense advantage over the reincarnations of Theosophy. We have
no right to underestimate the difficulties of a reasonable faith in
immortality, but they are simplicity itself as compared with the
difficulties of reincarnation, for reincarnation must answer every
question which the possibility of immortality raises and answer even
more difficult questions of its own. It is far simpler to believe that
having survived the shock of death we go on with the same essential
individuality we had before death, than to believe that having survived
we are sent back again through the gates of birth and are really
reincarnated in another individuality. More than that, the Christian
belief in immortality is more ethical. The action and reaction of life
have real meaning for me only as I know and remember. No theosophic
evasion can take the force out of this.
If I consciously connect to-day's pain with yesterday's pain with the
folly or fault of a previous existence of which I am really unconscious,
the chain has been broken and no speculative question can supply the
missing link. Very likely the accepted Christian doctrine of the
finality of life after death has given Theosophy an opportunity in the
West. Protestantism particularly has allowed absolutely no place after
death for repentance, has offered no new chance to the adventuring soul;
its Hell and its Heaven have been final states. Catholicism has eased
the strain of this with purgatory, a belief wholly without Scriptural
basis, but nevertheless evolved in answer to great necessities of life.
We need neither purgatory nor reincarnation; we need only the
recognition of what is so centrally a part of any conception of
immortality as to make one wonder why we have so greatly missed it; the
reasonable confidence, that is, that we really go on very much as we
left off here.
If there be in a future existence--and there must be if there be a
future existence--any room for repentance born of a clearer recognition
of fault and new and holier purposes born of a clearer understanding of
the true values of life, then we shall go on in a truly moral process of
growth, availing ourselves always of the teachings of experience and
working toward the true well-being of our souls, and if the mercy and
justice of God be not the figment of our imagination those who have been
hardly dealt with here will be given new opportunity, the deficient and
the handicapped released from what weighed them down will find a new
departure, and the justices of eternity complete what time began. All
this will be accomplished not in a series of existences, separated one
from the other by abysms of forgetfulness, but in a remembered
continuity of life deepening through endless growth. If this be only
faith and speculation it is at least a far more reasonable faith and
speculation than the alternative which Theosophy offers. Theosophy is a
side issue in the real solution of the problems of life.
_Pantheism at Its Best--and Its Worst_
Finally, though this is possibly unfair, Eastern Pantheism generally
must be tested by its fruits. We ought not, if we are to deal justly
with it, to ignore its better side. The East at its best has been strong
in a type of life wanting in the West; the East has been rich in
patience and gentleness and in consideration for every kind of life,
even the ant in the dust or the beast in the jungle. The East at its
best has weighed conduct in delicate balances and traced the play of
cause and effect in character far, far beyond the West; it has been
content with simple things and found its true wealth in the inner life.
It has willingly, for the sake of truth and goodness, subjected itself
to disciplines, some of which are admirable, others of which are
loathsome. It has at its best ventured everything for the well-being of
the soul, even when it has misconceived that well-being. It has had
little of the hard driving quality of the West. Not a little of the
teaching of Jesus fits in better with the temper and devotion of the
Orient than the competitive materialism of the Occident. It is easily
possible to pass not a little of the Gospels through the interpretation
of Eastern mysticism and find therein arresting correspondences. For
example, a little book called "At the Feet of the Master" by a young
Indian student, has in it a wealth of insight and an understanding of
the balanced conduct of life which is wanting in a good many of the
Western interpretations of life, but none the less, things must be
judged by their massed outcome and the massed outcome of Eastern
Pantheism does not commend itself.
The larger part of the religious literature of the East is upon a
distinctly lower level than those parts of it which are brought to us by
its devotees, and when Pantheism--and the basis of all Eastern
speculation is Pantheistic--comes down from its high places and begins
practically to express itself in worship and the conduct of the crowd,
then it is such as to give us pause. What Kipling calls "the sculptured
horrors" of the carved fronts of the temples in Benares are no accident;
they are simply the logical outcome of a faith which lifts the whole to
the level of the divine and has nothing beyond to correct what is by
what ought or ought not to be. Almost inevitably Pantheistic religions
unduly exalt those powers which make for fertility of field and the
increase of life. As they do this they have on their side the elemental
forces in human nature. When we begin to make gods of what after all
must be sternly subordinated to higher things, and the East has done
this in spite of its mystics and its dreamers, then we are not only in
danger of sculpturing symbolic horrors on the fronts of our temples but
of setting up therein strange altars to strange gods who are best
worshipped by strange rites. All this, inevitably enough, has given to
Eastern worship a more than earthly character, and has invested with the
sanction of religion forces which it must always be the business of
religion to subordinate and control.
Along with all this has gone a grotesque mythology and an inconceivable
multiplication of divinity. Since no one but an expert can hope to
understand the complexities of a faith like this, the East has developed
a priestly class which bears harder upon its devotees and at the same
time more contemptuously separates itself from them than perhaps any
priestly class in the world. If the East is to return upon the West in
substituting a refined and more or less mystic Pantheism for the sterner
forms of Western faith, we ought at least to understand what it is
which, with all its implications, is beginning to set up its altars
amongst us. No one can follow the theosophic religion of the West
without recognizing how largely Western Theosophy avails itself of
Western science and informs itself with what Christianity has given to
the West. If these were taken out of it it would be hopeless. Since,
therefore, its speculations carry us beyond reason or science, since its
solution of the problems of life is far too complex, since whatever is
good in it may be found more richly and simply in what we already
possess and since the practical outcome of it in the East itself is an
arrested civilization which has many depths but few heights, one must
inevitably conclude that Theosophy has no real meaning for those who
possess already the knowledge which we have so laboriously gained and
the faith and insight which Christianity has brought us.
X