Modern Religious Cults and Movements Part 14

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 superst.i.tion, 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 ma.s.sive 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 pa.s.s. 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 a.n.a.lytically 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.sert 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 G.o.d. We have seen also that there are three governing conceptions of G.o.d: 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 pa.s.sive 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.d, who is just to begin with all that there is, has managed to reveal Himself in such an infinitude of minute and sometimes unG.o.dlike 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 subst.i.tutes for the cosmogony of the Old Testament which simply carries the world back to a creative G.o.d 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, circ.u.mscribing voluntarily the range of His own Being, becomes the manifested G.o.d, 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 circ.u.mference; it is built on Him as its sure foundation, it breathes in Him as its encircling s.p.a.ce; 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 a.s.sumes. 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 G.o.d and His universe.

[Footnote 65: Indeed this is a better commentary on the prologue to the Gospel of John and certain pa.s.sages of Colossians than most of the orthodox theologies, and the self-limitation of G.o.d 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 coa.r.s.est 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 coa.r.s.er 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 G.o.d making manifest, in the vast ascent of form and existence, an always fuller revelation of Himself.

Our familiar phrase "the self-revelation of G.o.d" 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 gra.s.s blade is a richer revelation than a crystal, a bird than a gra.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 coa.r.s.est 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 coa.r.s.e 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 const.i.tution 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 pa.s.sions, 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 ill.u.s.trates 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 pa.s.s 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 coa.r.s.ened 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.