A religion without the religious or, in the words of Lovejoy, a goodness without the good [TGCB, p.82]. This seems to be the exact reverse of the medieval mindset, and the fatal continuation of the humanistic tradition of the Enlightenment, which has in fact never for once receded in the last 300 years. If this were our only hope, then there would be no hope. Sri Aurobindo has correctly pointed out our high predicament in his latter and, I presume you meant “more cautious”, remarks.
The same has been repeated by many over the XXth century. I will quote extensively. Some of the views (Dewey for example), I obviously do not entirely subscribe to.
“But this revolution in mankind's political organization can be brought about only as a consequence of a far more radical and more profound revolution, a revolution in our fundamental ideas and ideals. For a true and lasting peace, a religious revolution is, I am sure, a sine qua non. By religion, [..] I mean the overcoming of self-centredness, in both individuals and communities, by getting into communion with the spiritual presence behind the universe and by bringing our wills into harmony with it. I think this is the only key to peace, but we are very far from picking up this key and using it, and, until we do, the survival of the human race will continue to be in doubt.” (A. Toynbee, Religion: A Perennial Need?, 1971, p.66-67)
“Man has increased his material power to a degree at which he has become a menace to the biosphere's survival; but he has not increased his spiritual potentiality; the gap between this and his material power has consequently been widening; and this growing discrepancy is disconcerting; for an increase in Man's spiritual potentiality is now the only conceivable change in the constitution of the biosphere that can insure the biosphere -and, in the biosphere, Man himself- against being destroyed by a greed that is now armed with the ability to defeat its own intentions.” (A. Toynbee, Mankind and Mother Earth, 1975, p.575)
“And then, when Man's mind has reached the limits of the scientific study of human affairs, perhaps this chastening intellectual experience may re-open an avenue leading to Religion along a new line of approach which, if humbler, will be spiritually more promising. [..] In these circumstances it might be forecast that, in the next chapter of the World's history, Mankind would seek compensation for the loss of much of its political, economic, and perhaps even domestic freedom by putting more of its treasure into its spiritual freedom, and that the public authorities would tolerate this inclination among their subjects in an age in which Religion had come to seem as harmless as Technology had seemed 300 years back.”
(A. Toynbee, An Historian Approach to Religion, 1952, p.238,246)
“A religious attitude, however, needs the sense of a connection of man, in the way of both dependence and support, with the enveloping world that the imagination feels is a universe. [..] Even if it be asserted, as it is by some religionists, that all the new movements and interests of any value grew up under the auspices of a church and received their impetus from the same source, it must be admitted that once the vessels have been launched, they are sailing on strange seas to far lands. [..] The conception that "religious" signifies a certain attitude and outlook, independent of the supernatural, necessitates no such division. It does not shut religious values up within a particular compartment, nor assume that a particular form of association bears a unique relation to it. Upon the social side the future of the religious function seems preeminently bound up with its emancipation from religions and a particular religion.”
(J. Dewey, A Common Faith, 1934, p.49, p.61-62)
“We see concretely that the world is lost if it does not recover, through a spiritual revolution, a transcendent end that is nonetheless immanent, already present, an end the presence of which should be perceptible also in the rarefied world of techniques. [..] In a civilization that no longer knows what life is, the most useful thing that Christians can do is precisely to live, and the life held in faith has a remarkably explosive power. We no longer realize it, because we no longer believe in anything but efficiency, and life is not efficient.”
(J. Ellul, Presence in the Modern World, 1948, p.58, p.61)
“Rome conquered the world when it had freed itself from all religions. The same is happening, only to a greater extent, among the Christian nations. They all share in common an absence of religion and consequently, despite internal dissension, are united in one federate band of criminals where theft, plunder, debauchery, individual and mass murder are performed without the slightest pang of conscience and even with utmost self-complacency [..] Some do not believe in anything and are proud of it. Others pretend to believe in what for their own advantage they have persuaded the masses to believe in beneath the guise of faith. The rest, the great majority of the population, accept as faith the hypnotism excercised over them and slavishly submit to everything demanded of them by their non-believing rulers and persuaders. And these persuaders make the same demand as has always been made by Nero and his like, who have tried somehow to fill the emptiness of their lives: the satisfaction of their senseless and over-abundant luxury.” (L. Tolstoy, What Is Religion?, 1902, p.103)
“Religions commit suicide when they find their inspirations in their dogmas. The inspiration of religion lies in the history of religion. By this I mean that it is to be found in the primary expressions of the intuitions of the finest types of religious lives.” (ANW, Religion in the Making, 1926, p.129)
“But it may be that a new Christian world will begin through an immanently transcendent Christ. It would be anachronistic to return to the middles ages. Perhaps taking our cue from Shinran's effortless acceptance of the grace of Amida, we will find the true God in the place where there is no God. From the perspective of present-day global history, it will perhaps be Buddhism that contributes to the formation of the new historical age. But if it too is only the conventional Buddhism of bygone days, it will merely be a relic of the past. The universal religions, insofar as they are already crystallized, have distinctive features corresponding to the times and the places of the races that formed them. While each thus partakes of the essence of religion, none has exhausted it. The religion of the future, I think, will evolve in the direction of the immanently transcendent rather than the transcendently immanent.” (NK, Last Writings, 1945, p.121)
I heartily agree with Toynbee, I only would qualify that the greater spiritual freedom, rooted in a genuinely spiritualized consciousness, does not imply any loss of genuine freedom, inasmuch as “much of mankind’s political, economic, and perhaps even domestic freedom” is a completely illusory freedom. Freedom becomes real to the extent that the puppets discover or recover their identity with the puppeteer and through it their mutual identity.
While I do not put stock in Ellul’s theology, I value greatly his penetrating insight into the prime characteristic of mental consciousness, how this consciousness works, how it understands, how it devises and acts, in contrast to the original creative consciousness which belongs to the “ultimate puppeteer,” which is supramental, and which is on the point of evolving or manifesting itself. That characteristic is *technique*, and to Ellul *technique* “does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end.” It is “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency ... in every field of human activity.” (The Technological Society, Knopf, 1964)
I also can’t find fault with the great Nishida Kitaro.
But let me add this, which I believe to be unique to Sri Aurobindo. My excerpts from his chapter on the religion of humanity ended with this sentence: “There must be the realisation by the race that only on the free and full life of the individual can its own perfection and permanent happiness be founded.” The two sentences that follow are:
“There must be too a discipline and a way of salvation in accordance with this religion, that is to say, a means by which it can be developed by each man within himself, so that it may be developed in the life of the race. To go into all that this implies would be too large a subject to be entered upon here; it is enough to point out that in this direction lies the eventual road.”
This discipline, this means, he laid out in considerable detail in his magnum opus “The Synthesis of Yoga,” which he first published serially in the Arya, in parallel with all of the works upon which his reputation as a philosopher, Sanskrit scholar, political scientist and literary critic is based. He called it the Integral Yoga.
A religion without the religious or, in the words of Lovejoy, a goodness without the good [TGCB, p.82]. This seems to be the exact reverse of the medieval mindset, and the fatal continuation of the humanistic tradition of the Enlightenment, which has in fact never for once receded in the last 300 years. If this were our only hope, then there would be no hope. Sri Aurobindo has correctly pointed out our high predicament in his latter and, I presume you meant “more cautious”, remarks.
The same has been repeated by many over the XXth century. I will quote extensively. Some of the views (Dewey for example), I obviously do not entirely subscribe to.
“But this revolution in mankind's political organization can be brought about only as a consequence of a far more radical and more profound revolution, a revolution in our fundamental ideas and ideals. For a true and lasting peace, a religious revolution is, I am sure, a sine qua non. By religion, [..] I mean the overcoming of self-centredness, in both individuals and communities, by getting into communion with the spiritual presence behind the universe and by bringing our wills into harmony with it. I think this is the only key to peace, but we are very far from picking up this key and using it, and, until we do, the survival of the human race will continue to be in doubt.” (A. Toynbee, Religion: A Perennial Need?, 1971, p.66-67)
“Man has increased his material power to a degree at which he has become a menace to the biosphere's survival; but he has not increased his spiritual potentiality; the gap between this and his material power has consequently been widening; and this growing discrepancy is disconcerting; for an increase in Man's spiritual potentiality is now the only conceivable change in the constitution of the biosphere that can insure the biosphere -and, in the biosphere, Man himself- against being destroyed by a greed that is now armed with the ability to defeat its own intentions.” (A. Toynbee, Mankind and Mother Earth, 1975, p.575)
“And then, when Man's mind has reached the limits of the scientific study of human affairs, perhaps this chastening intellectual experience may re-open an avenue leading to Religion along a new line of approach which, if humbler, will be spiritually more promising. [..] In these circumstances it might be forecast that, in the next chapter of the World's history, Mankind would seek compensation for the loss of much of its political, economic, and perhaps even domestic freedom by putting more of its treasure into its spiritual freedom, and that the public authorities would tolerate this inclination among their subjects in an age in which Religion had come to seem as harmless as Technology had seemed 300 years back.”
(A. Toynbee, An Historian Approach to Religion, 1952, p.238,246)
“A religious attitude, however, needs the sense of a connection of man, in the way of both dependence and support, with the enveloping world that the imagination feels is a universe. [..] Even if it be asserted, as it is by some religionists, that all the new movements and interests of any value grew up under the auspices of a church and received their impetus from the same source, it must be admitted that once the vessels have been launched, they are sailing on strange seas to far lands. [..] The conception that "religious" signifies a certain attitude and outlook, independent of the supernatural, necessitates no such division. It does not shut religious values up within a particular compartment, nor assume that a particular form of association bears a unique relation to it. Upon the social side the future of the religious function seems preeminently bound up with its emancipation from religions and a particular religion.”
(J. Dewey, A Common Faith, 1934, p.49, p.61-62)
“We see concretely that the world is lost if it does not recover, through a spiritual revolution, a transcendent end that is nonetheless immanent, already present, an end the presence of which should be perceptible also in the rarefied world of techniques. [..] In a civilization that no longer knows what life is, the most useful thing that Christians can do is precisely to live, and the life held in faith has a remarkably explosive power. We no longer realize it, because we no longer believe in anything but efficiency, and life is not efficient.”
(J. Ellul, Presence in the Modern World, 1948, p.58, p.61)
“Rome conquered the world when it had freed itself from all religions. The same is happening, only to a greater extent, among the Christian nations. They all share in common an absence of religion and consequently, despite internal dissension, are united in one federate band of criminals where theft, plunder, debauchery, individual and mass murder are performed without the slightest pang of conscience and even with utmost self-complacency [..] Some do not believe in anything and are proud of it. Others pretend to believe in what for their own advantage they have persuaded the masses to believe in beneath the guise of faith. The rest, the great majority of the population, accept as faith the hypnotism excercised over them and slavishly submit to everything demanded of them by their non-believing rulers and persuaders. And these persuaders make the same demand as has always been made by Nero and his like, who have tried somehow to fill the emptiness of their lives: the satisfaction of their senseless and over-abundant luxury.” (L. Tolstoy, What Is Religion?, 1902, p.103)
“Religions commit suicide when they find their inspirations in their dogmas. The inspiration of religion lies in the history of religion. By this I mean that it is to be found in the primary expressions of the intuitions of the finest types of religious lives.” (ANW, Religion in the Making, 1926, p.129)
“But it may be that a new Christian world will begin through an immanently transcendent Christ. It would be anachronistic to return to the middles ages. Perhaps taking our cue from Shinran's effortless acceptance of the grace of Amida, we will find the true God in the place where there is no God. From the perspective of present-day global history, it will perhaps be Buddhism that contributes to the formation of the new historical age. But if it too is only the conventional Buddhism of bygone days, it will merely be a relic of the past. The universal religions, insofar as they are already crystallized, have distinctive features corresponding to the times and the places of the races that formed them. While each thus partakes of the essence of religion, none has exhausted it. The religion of the future, I think, will evolve in the direction of the immanently transcendent rather than the transcendently immanent.” (NK, Last Writings, 1945, p.121)
Thanks, AI, for these fine quotes.
I heartily agree with Toynbee, I only would qualify that the greater spiritual freedom, rooted in a genuinely spiritualized consciousness, does not imply any loss of genuine freedom, inasmuch as “much of mankind’s political, economic, and perhaps even domestic freedom” is a completely illusory freedom. Freedom becomes real to the extent that the puppets discover or recover their identity with the puppeteer and through it their mutual identity.
While I do not put stock in Ellul’s theology, I value greatly his penetrating insight into the prime characteristic of mental consciousness, how this consciousness works, how it understands, how it devises and acts, in contrast to the original creative consciousness which belongs to the “ultimate puppeteer,” which is supramental, and which is on the point of evolving or manifesting itself. That characteristic is *technique*, and to Ellul *technique* “does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end.” It is “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency ... in every field of human activity.” (The Technological Society, Knopf, 1964)
I also can’t find fault with the great Nishida Kitaro.
But let me add this, which I believe to be unique to Sri Aurobindo. My excerpts from his chapter on the religion of humanity ended with this sentence: “There must be the realisation by the race that only on the free and full life of the individual can its own perfection and permanent happiness be founded.” The two sentences that follow are:
“There must be too a discipline and a way of salvation in accordance with this religion, that is to say, a means by which it can be developed by each man within himself, so that it may be developed in the life of the race. To go into all that this implies would be too large a subject to be entered upon here; it is enough to point out that in this direction lies the eventual road.”
This discipline, this means, he laid out in considerable detail in his magnum opus “The Synthesis of Yoga,” which he first published serially in the Arya, in parallel with all of the works upon which his reputation as a philosopher, Sanskrit scholar, political scientist and literary critic is based. He called it the Integral Yoga.