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.
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.
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.
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