Shelley and the Vedanta

Stopford Brooke describes the philosophy of Shelley as "idealistic, pantheism". It resembles the Vedanta so much that a discussion of how Shelley arrived at his philosophy may be interesting. But it may at once be said that Shelley was not like Emerson, for example, a student of Indian philosophy. Shelley’s philosophy was merely a reaction from the Calvinistic theology that prevailed in his time. Stopford Brooke refers to that theology in one place in his writings as a "dreadful theology" Whether the description is fully justified or not, there can be no doubt that Shelley believed the theology to be dreadful. Shelley chose for attack three principal dogmas of the Calvinistic creed (as he understood it); and it is in reaction from those doctrines that he developed his own philosophy, (in so far as the intuitions of a poet may be described as his philosophy).

II

The first dogma attacked by Shelley was the doctrine of a "jealous", anthropomorphic deity, hurling thunderbolts from the skies and ordaining the "reprobation" of the greater part of mankind. Shelley revolted from the conception and described the Calvinistic God as a Moloch of vindictiveness: -

The avenging God,
Who, prototype of human misrule, sits
High in heaven’s realm, upon a golden throne,
Even like an earthly king.

(Queen Mab)

The next dogma was the doctrine of an eternal hell. Shelley rejected it and pronounced the horrors of hell to be but figments of theological invention: -

There needeth not the hell that bigots frame
To punish those who err.

(Queen Mab)

The third dogma was the doctrine of Original Sin, the doctrine which, in the words of Stopford Brooke, "stains the child with evil from its birth and brings it into the world as the child of the devil". Shelley treated this doctrine with scorn and proclaimed that the soul was untainted with sin: -

Soul is not more polluted than the beams
Of heaven’s pure orb ere round their rapid lines
The taint of earth-born atmospheres arise.

III

In reaction from the conception of a "jealous", anthropomorphic Deity, sitting high in the heavens, Shelley conceived of God as the Eternal Love pervading and animating creation. In this he was not alone. The barren deism of the 18th century, and the revival of Calvinism in the early years of the 19th century, made other poets in England, such as Wordsworth, seek for God in Nature and in Man, Wordsworth spoke of his feeling

A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

(Tintern Abbey Revisited)

Shelley felt this sense in an acuter way. He could acknowledge fraternity with the elemental Beings of Earth and Air and Ocean and proclaim that they participate equally with man in the Divine life.

Earth, Ocean, Air, beloved brotherhood!
If our great mother has imbued my soul
With aught of natural piety to feel
Your love and recompense the boon with mine,
…………………………………………….
…………………………………..withdraw
No portion of your wonted favour now.

(Alastor)

To Shelley, the whole world, with its trees and rivers and lakes and mountains, was a manifestation of the Divine Life and an attestation to the Divine Love:

The One Spirit’s plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear,
……………………………………………….
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the heaven’s light.

(Adonais)

The Deity was, to Shelley, often the Spirit of Love with whom he could commune:

Thou art the wine whose drunkenness is all
We can desire, O Love!

(Prince Athanase)

The Deity was also the Spirit of Beauty whom he addressed thus:

Spirit of Beauty, thou dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine up on
Of human thought or form.

(Hymn to Intellectual Beauty)

But though often the Deity to Shelley was impersonal, the personal aspect of God was not absolutely excluded. For Shelley could also write:

Day had awakened all things that be: -
The lark and the thrush and the swallow free,
And the milkmaid’s song, and the mower’s scythe,
……………………………………………………
All rose to do the task He set to each
Who shaped us to His ends and not our own.

(Boat on the Serchio)

IV

In reaction from the Calvinistic doctrine of an eternal hell and of everlasting damnation for the greater portion of mankind, Shelley propounded the doctrine of what may be called Life-in-Death or Salvation-in-Death. Shelley was an ardent student of Plato. Plato not merely held that the world is a scene of misery and illusion but that, to use the words of Walter Peter, "for the soul to have come into a human body at all was the seed of disease in it, the beginning of its own proper death". Shelley imbibed these ideas and declared that human life was a dim, vast vale of tears and illusion:

This life
Of error and ignorance and strife
Where nothing is but all things seem
And we the shadows of a dream.

(Sensitive Plant)

Shelley at times soared into the highest flights idealism and found the world to be an unsubstantial pageant and ‘such stuff as dreams are made on’:

This whole
Of suns, and worlds and men and beasts and flowers,
………………………………………………………
Is but a vision: all that it inherits
Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams.

(Hellas)

But to Shelley the escape from this vale of misery was through Death:

Death is a gate of deariness and gloom
That leads to azure isles and beaming skies,
And happy regions of eternal hope

(Queen Mab)

Shelley held that the period of man’s stay in this world was a period when his heavenly radiance was dimmed by the vapours of mortal life but that the mystagogue of Death would transport man to his true realm:

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Till Death tramples it to fragments.

(Adonais)

It is unfortunate that Shelley did not live long enough to study Indian philosophy, with its teaching of the evolution of the ordinary human soul though a series of incarnates in this world and of the advanced soul through a series of stages in the other worlds. The Greeks, no doubt, often referred to the theory of re-incarnation, but they more or less played with that doctrine. Shelley, too, played with that theory as a fancy, as for, example, in his poem. "With a Guitar, to Jane." But there is nothing to show that Shelley held the theory of re-incarnation seriously. The result has been that, while his theory of Salvation-in-Death may be true of the most perfect saints (called Jeevanmuktas in India), it is not easy to accept it as true of all mankind. Between the perfectibility of man and his actual perfection Shelley’s idealism could see no distinction.

V

The last dogma of Calvinism attacked by Shelley was the dogma of Original Sin. This dogma took no account of the innate divinity in man. But, modifying so as to suit the requirements of pantheism the doctrine of Love expounded by Plato in the dialogues of the Symposium and Pheedrus, Shelley advanced the counter doctrine of what may be called the divinity of man. He maintained that far from being tainted with sin from the hour of its birth, the soul of man is a portion of the being of God, a spark from the Dive Fire:

An atom of the Eternal whose own smile
Enfolds itself, and may be felt, not seen,
O’er the grey rocks, blue waves, and forests green.

(Epipsychidion)

Combining this belief with his doctrine of Life-in-Death, Shelley declared that after death the soul awakes to a consciousness of its native dignity and dwells in an everlasting union of love and bliss with the eternal God:

The pure spirit shall flow

to the burning fountain whence it came,
A portion of the Eternal, which must glow
Through time and change, unquenchably the same.

(Adonais)

Shelley therefore asserted with jubilant enthusiasm that, disburdened of its corporeal frame, the soul of Keats was merged in the glory of the Divine:

He is made one with Nature. There is heard
His voice in all her music. ……………..
………………………………………….
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself to where’er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own.

(Adonais)

Indeed, so strong was Shelley’s faith in the high destiny of man to partake in the Being of God that he claimed that he himself would realise the consummation designed for all the world:

That sustaining Love
Which, through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of mortality.

(Adonais)

The Adonais was published in July 1821. The fire that Shelley referred to in the above lines took him to its abode in July 1822.