‘The World’s Unborn Soul’

There are many excellent things written by Professor Radhakrishnan, but the Inaugural Address, which he delivered at Oxford as the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics, is a piece of writing in which he appears to me to excel himself. The first part of it is a survey of Western Thought, the second of Eastern Religions; and the Address is in part a philosophy of History and in part a philosophy of Religion. Philosophy is neither Eastern nor Western, but I want to show how the idealism of Eastern Religions and of Western Thought meet and balance in Radhakrishnan’s vision of the moving image of History, and of man’s destiny in its evolution.

I

The greatest work of Plato, The Republic, turns on the antithesis between the individual and the State: on their parallelism and on their inter-dependence. Plato passes from the rightness or wrongness of the one to the other, and throughout assumes rather than demonstrates ‘so facile a parallelism’ between the individual and the social aggregate. In Radhakrishnan, there is another ‘facile parallelism’; also assumed than demonstrated: that between the Man and the Age in which he lives. “To attempt to understand one’s Age”, he says, “is an undertaking full of difficulties; but we cannot help asking what modern life in all its intense activity and rapid change signifies, for the noblest of all investigations is the study of what man should be and what he should pursue.” The ‘man’ is not ‘you’ ‘I’ and ‘me’, but the colossal man; as he was to Plato, whose good and bad qualities creep–and Plato observed then–into the State to Plato, into the Age to Radhakrishnan, in which he lives. “Plato attempts”, said Jowett, “a task really impossible, which is to unite the past of Greek History with the future of Philosophy.” Radhakrishnan, I think, attempts a task like Plato ‘really impossible’, we may say, which is to unite the past History of man with the future of Religion, and to see in the travail of human history the coming into being of a Soul –The World’s Unborn Soul.

What does Radhakrishnan, then, see in History? He sees in it a ‘meaning’ and pattern, not merely battles and victories; a meaning immanent in the historical process and informing it. It is ‘always on the move’; is summed up in its most outstanding epochs ‘and periods of intense cultural change’. Each epoch is a Type or Pattern; and each is an ‘integration’, a thing complete and self-sufficient, as it were, but really and truly moving towards a larger harmony: indeed, ‘towards more and more comprehensive harmonies’. The plot of this Action or Drama is to be found in the depths of the human soul, “in the tension between the limited effort of man and the sovereign purpose of the Universe”. But this tension has somehow to be resolved; man must seek and find Harmony but not in a mere compromise; in ‘adjustment’, may be, but not in ‘political adjustment’. In spiritual adjustment alone: the kind of adjustment that happens in a dialectical advance of the spirit. History, then, is a ‘meaningful process’. It is an evolution; not an evolution merely but a revelation and, for those who can see, it is as meaningful as the revelations in traditional religions!

To Radhakrishnan, History is not Historiography; it is not, also, the Heraclitean River into which we cannot step twice. History is not a mere passage, like ‘the passage of Nature’. History is Tradition. Elsewhere he says: “Centuries of history make a little tradition.” The fluidity of history is caught up in the rigidity of a tradition. Tradition is the nutshell that contains the film. To be a tradition is to be the solid state of being a history Tradition is the old worn reservoir which, through the centuries, gathers history like rainfall. It is not only the pastness of the past or the greatness of authority that makes a tradition; if it were, many customs and practices, social and religious, which have somehow survived would have to be called ‘traditions’. But they are not. Plato said the soul is immortal; therefore it is able to endure, he said, every sort of good and evil. So is Tradition. What entitles a fluid something to be called a tradition is its ability to endure ‘every sort of good and evil’. While the West has all the historic sense, the East has all the respect for tradition. A tradition has its roots in the past but is also alive. The traditions of that ‘ancient University’–like which may our universities become some day–to which Radhakrishnan was invited to occupy the chair of Eastern Religions and Ethics, are alive, and are immobile. They are alive in its restive undergraduates and immobile in the dullness and scholarship of its Dons. A tradition has its habitations what Plato calls the ‘Music’ of the State, and is the guardian of order. Plato was, therefore, so reluctant to change the original forms of Music to introduce innovations; for, “when modes of music change”, he warned, “the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.” In the Vision of Er in The Republic, Plato speaks of one who “was one of those came from heaven, and in a former life had dwelt in a well-ordered state, but his virtue was a matter of habit only, and he had no philosophy”. Therefore he could not choose his destiny well! So it is good to have a tradition, but it is a virtue which is ‘a matter of habit only’. It is not as great and glorious as having indeed a Philosophy! Age is no more near than youth, said the Poet, to the Sceptre and the Crown; so is tradition. It is no more near the Truth than is Modernism. To Radhakrishnan, a tradition is an ‘average’ thing: “The average general mind”, he says, “is respectful of the status quo and disinclined to great adventures, in which the security and isolation of the past have to be given up.” Radhakrishnan longs for adventure and is not without the pang of immortal youth. Tradition might have had its source in something divinely revealed, but why, asks Radhakrishnan, treat Divine Revelation as a finished and closed thing? This will, no doubt, appear to the orthodox, at least, as irrefutable sophistry. But the truth is this: There is an unplumbed profundity of the human spirit which gives meaning to Revelation and Tradition, to Myth and History, to Dialectic and Devotion. On this Radhakrishnan abundantly draws; on this have others abundantly drawn; it is the region, as he says, which Plato enters when he speaks in myths. That unplumbed profundity of the human spirit which is neither Western nor Eastern, neither ancient nor modern, it is that makes Plato’s myths, as indeed all the myths of all climes and ages, contemporary in their meaning to us.

II

We have to distinguish however, between the spirit of Politics and the spirit of History: between ‘political adjustment’ and historical continuity. Even the celebrated Hegel was apt to take a merely political view of history; History was to Hegel the ‘slaughter-bench of Nations’. Empires decay and fall, or are overthrown. When they cease to exist, the civilization and the traditions they created endure. A tradition, if I may so speak, ‘transmigrates’: the Greek into the Roman, the Greco-Roman into the Christian, etc. In times of crisis, one Age borrows from the other. Walter, Pater draws, in Plato and Platonism, what to my mind is a fascinating distinction between the centripetal and the centrifugal tendency in a Culture. The latter, is ‘the irresponsible’; it flies from the centre; it delights in new forms; in versatility. It drives towards the assertion of the principles of individualism and of separatism. While the centripetal tendency moves towards simplicity, towards ‘reasonable sanity’; towards the linking of individual units: “of States to States, one period of organic growth to another, under the reign of a strictly composed, self-conscious order, in the universal light of the understanding.” Now all this is very true; and all this is, now, very old too, for the centripetal tendency, at least in European Culture, has meant a return to the classical times. The Renaissance drew its strength by drinking at the springs of Hellas, and so the Renaissance was a re-assertion in life of the Hellenic principles of the human reason, cool and sane. But the present crisis in human affairs is such that the centripetal tendency of the human mind cannot be a mere return to this or that Culture, to this or that Tradition. What is wrong with the world is not the absence of order; the world is not wanting in that ‘political’ unity which was impossible to the Greeks. What the present crisis needs is not change of form–of outward form only, with which actual history abounds. What we need is a ‘change of heart’: to turn our ‘stony heart into a heart of flesh’, as Ezekiel said. All the efforts of the past are ‘irrelevant’ to our times, and so Radhakrishnan brushes aside all the ‘adjustments’ of history as if with a sureness of diagnosis.

III

The centripetal tendency of the human mind, the tendency which is corrective of the centrifugal, is to be found in Religion and not Science, according to Radhakrishnan. Whether it is Religion or Philosophy makes no essential difference, since Philosophy and Religion are aspects of a single movement: and are nursed on the self-same hill. For Plato the centripetal tendency of the human mind was to be found in Philosophy: it was an escape from the evils of the world; it was ‘a being made like to God’ and it satisfied not the intelligence of man only but his sense, his faith, and his affections. Philosophy has not the same ‘greatness of claim’ to us, alas, that it had to Plato or to the Upanishadic seers. If Philosophy was star-gazing to a few of the Ancients and a condition of Doubt to the more modern ‘rational’ Cartesian, to the contemporary logical Positivist it is something wholly linguistic, whose propositions have no sense and are not verifiable. I fear many an educationist, also, looks upon Philosophy as but an academic, useless survival. Now, the same greatness of claim made by Plato for Philosophy is made by Radhakrishnan for Religion. Walter Pater, that most Platonic of Plato’s critics so he seems to me–remarked on Plato’s greatness of claim for Philosophy and said: “You must recall to mind the greatness of claim Plato makes for Philosophy,–a promise you may perhaps think larger than anything in the way of a Philosophic revelation justifies.” Likewise we must recall to mind that greatness of claim Radhakrishnan makes for Religion–a promise, we may say, larger than anything in history and practice of Religion justifies. But ‘Religion’ is to Radhakrishnan what ‘Philosophy’ was for Plato,–and what both are not yet to us in the fullness of their reality,–an experience which transforms you, not merely bewilders you. Religion is not dogmas or ceremonies, or these merely; it is neither a ‘faith’ nor even a ‘notion of God’. It is easy to deny God but not easy to deny what denies God, which is part of divine essence and is ever lasting. This, indeed, is the fathomless mystery of spiritual awakening; a self-discovery, pre-supposing a Way and a Method, not a discovery made by the way as it were, as a passing traveller of a stream to assuage his passing thirst, but a possession. Religion is ‘the art of conscious self-discovery’; and he who discovers himself cannot discover himself in isolation from others, and so, the awakening to one’s self is the way also to an awakening of one’s fellowship with others, for, “fellowship is life, lack of fellowship is death”. The world must awaken to the reality of Fellowship without being content with the external, global oneness, a linking up after all of transportation systems, which the cunning of Science has brought about. Without aiming at it, Science has brought about a unity; the world is ‘one’ in its weapons and in the mere wake of danger that War brings. If this is world-unity, it has been achieved every now and then, by self-seeking designs and by passion and greed, but is not a conscious ideal and a conscious self-discovery uniting us and “moving us to feel the dignity of common citizenship and the call of a common duty”. The world has all the appearance of oneness now more than before; let it be transformed into the reality that it ever is. The transforming experience is ‘Religion’ for Radhakrishnan. It is not the old idea of looking up to a ‘saviour’, then, which is the essence of religion, because that is as bad as star-gazing is in Philosophy; if Philosophy was ever star-gazing! Religion is not like getting eyes, but like the turning of the gaze within. “And this is conversion; and the art will be”, said Plato, “how to accomplish this as easily and completely as possible; not implanting eyes, for they exist already, but giving them a right direction, which they have not.” Religion is not concerned only with the problems of a hereafter–not svargapara–but an urgent practical necessity on the battle-field of life, transforming the worry of the hour to the peace that is eternity. Religion is spiritual and is intensively human. It is the consciousness of tenderness and sympathy with all that lives, “a consciousness of universal life of which nations and races are but specific articulations”. It is, this consciousness that will help to save the world and not a ‘saviour’, and, with this consciousness, there comes the dawn of a new Age. There is nothing in the Age itself. “States are not made of oak and rock, but grow out of the constitutions of men.” The Age is made by ‘the constitutions of men’; by what is good or bad in them, and what is good or bad in them flows out into the institutions,–indeed into the Age–making it good or bad. There is before us, now, a new Age. “Mortal Souls”, said the Prophet in the ‘Vision of Er’ in the Republic of Plato, behold a new cycle of mortal life before you. Your genius will not choose you, but you will choose your genius.” The Idealism of the Oxford Lecture on ‘The World’s Unborn Soul’ has something of this vision, and of this warning.

* Walter Pater