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The scandal of pursuing the Science of the Spirit amidst the Art of Religion
It took me a lifetime of research, reflection and suffering to intuit the almost indefeasible nature of religion and the logic of its popular appeal. The appeal of religion is quite different from the appeal of science. Religion appeals primarily because it is art. Let me explain.
The Greeks understood that art maintains people in apparent normalcy. According to Aristotle, witnessing a tragedy on stage contributes to personal and social health by purifying the individual psyche of pity and fear, both of which weaken manly temper. Aristotle has, of course a specific definition of “pity” and of “fear”, (which you can look up, if you like). For the moment the point that I want to emphasise is that the cathartic effect of tragedy has therapeutic value. To the Greeks, the therapeutic value of the arts was most evident in the case of music. No Greek tragedy was complete without its chorus, just like a church service today would be incomplete without a choir. The Greek chorus was analogous in function to the church choir. Both are artistic. The role of the choir is to sing beautifully, not to sing profoundly or prophetically.
Art serves as buffer between individuals and the world of reality. The secular person has recourse to the theatre much like a religious person falling back on the church. Their common desideratum is that both the theatre-frequenter and the church-goer need relief. They differ in the means they adopt for securing the sorely needed relief.
This is the reason that the dramatic (sight, sound, and other means to enhance the aesthetic appeal for the senses) plays a prominent role in church worship. If you divest the Sunday service of its dramatic and spectacular complements, you are left with something drab and disappointing. Having grown up in this matrix of conventions and experiences, we assume that this appeal is spiritual or divine. In fact, it is aesthetic, not spiritual, as Soren Kierkegaard, the foremost Christian philosopher of Europe in the 19th century, pointed out. To him, the hallmark of spirituality is the power to disturb, to unsettle in order to bring about transformative changes. Kierkegaard was merely rephrasing the insight of St Paul which is given to us in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, chapter 5, verse 17. According to Paul, if are in Christ, we are a new creation. The implication of which is that, if we are only parochially religious, we will stay faithful to the individual denominational confessions to which we happen to belong.
Spirituality is akin to science. The goal of science is to facilitate the material wellbeing of humankind via progress. Progress in secular science parallels transformation in religion. In the religious context transformation is often presented and understood, quite erroneously, in a magical light. It becomes an instantaneously accomplished and perfected fact, like in a magical sleight of hand. If that were the case, Jesus would not have had to invest so much time, effort, and patience into training his disciples. Even after all that, they remained under-baked and vulnerable in their spiritual life.
In the course of the discussion between Jesus and the woman of Samaria, the latter realizes that Jesus is a prophet. What does this signify? Why did she do so? Well, it was because she experienced in him something she never did through the religiosity she practised with much zeal and for long. Her religiosity helped her to preserve herself, so to speak. But, since no one can preserve oneself in a frozen fashion for long, she had been degenerating by gradual measures all the while. That was neither an issue for those who ran the temple atop of Mt. Gerizim, nor for her as long as she went there faithfully. Change became a challenge for her only when Jesus encountered her. For the first time, she experienced an inward impulsion to change. It had to be due to something she had never encountered before in the zone of religion. Mercifully, she had just enough sense to realize that the person she was encountering could take her way beyond the scope of routine religiosity, which is predicated on self-preservation and the perpetuation of the status quo.
It is not realized adequately that it was for this reason that Jesus prescribed ‘taking up one’s own cross’ as basic to spirituality. In doing so, Jesus urged a shift from religion to spirituality. Religiosity per se does not mandate the transformation of the self. As a matter of fact, the popular appeal of religion –all religions, without exception- stems from the help it proffers for maintaining or preserving oneself as one is. Religion may preach transformation but cannot mandate or facilitate it. It cannot even accommodate it. What will happen, let us ask ourselves, to our churches tomorrow if their members change today in respect of the basic assumptions on which they are established and developed? Change is a religious nightmare, whereas it is the logic of humankind’s spiritual hope – the hope for transformation, liberation and salvation. The contradiction inherent in religion, as Tolstoy argued, is that it romanticises transformation even as it inhibits change of every kind. Religious dogmatism, Ernest Renan argued in The Future of the Sciences, implies insensitivity to God.
This explains the tension between religion on one hand and science-and-technology on the other (please note that I will now use the word “science” in the rest of this para to include technology). Any tension with science is superfluous to spirituality. Truth to tell, spirituality and science are akin to each other, perhaps with this one important difference. Science seeks to ameliorate the material-empirical conditions of human existence on the earth, whereas spirituality aims at ‘life in its fullness’. That ‘fullness’ includes physical life but includes also a whole horizon beyond that. Progress, not wholeness of life, is the scientific goal. The pathos of progress is that it may undermine wholeness of life. Life becomes a burden when its wholeness is lost. That is why, when progress is pursued to the neglect of the guiding light of wholeness, it tends to degrade and endanger life. In this context, it is worth reflecting on Dante’s words in relation to particular individuals, though here applicable also to much of what is called modern civilization: ‘Their going up is their coming down’.
At this point, we can afford an aside. Why did Gandhi term his spiritual struggles an ‘experiment’? His autobiography is titled, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. I am surprised that the word ‘experiment’ in this title hasn’t surprised or intrigued anyone. Perhaps, I should not be surprised by that, because Gandhi was as little interested in religion as he was earnest about spirituality. His political experiments, Gandhi wrote in his autobiography, were nothing compared to his spiritual experiments. The factor common to both –Gandhi’s politics and his spirituality- was progress: progress from slavery to freedom. Jesus could not have been the Liberator, had he been only a religious functionary like the high priest of his days. No religious functionary has, strictly in that capacity, practised the spirituality of human liberation, as against ad hoc individual alleviation. Political liberation is usually costly. An spiritual liberation is a revolutionary as well as forbiddingly costly goal, as witnessed to in silence by the Cross of Calvary.
This is also the symbolic truth that underlies the contrast between Gandhi and Godse. The latter cannot liberate. He can only preserve. (It is not an accident that Veer Savarkar and the RSS did not play any role in the freedom struggle of India.) In the famous statement Godse made before the appeal court –the text of it can be accessed on the Internet- the main charge he levelled against Gandhi was that he enfeebled Hinduism and compromised its interests. Increasingly, people in this country are veering towards Godse’s viewpoint. The more religiously zealous one becomes as a Hindu, the more Godse-oriented he or she is bound to be. This manifest fact stares us in the face, and we have no excuse for continuing to be in ignorance or denial of the same.
Why is that? The hallmark of art is that it limits itself to the elaboration of past ideals. Even today, the highest compliment we pay to an Indian playwright in any of the Indian languages is that he is the modern Kalidasa. (Strangely, even professors of Sanskrit eulogize Kalidasa as the Shakespeare of India, even though Kalidasa lived centuries before Shakespeare! Rather, the truth is that Shakespeare is the Kalidasa of the West.) In art, we tend to look backwards. The same with religion too. By contrast, in science, in contrast, we look forwards. Likewise, in spirituality. Jesus came to ‘fulfil’ the law and the prophets (as Matthew records in his biography of Jesus, chapter 5, verse 17). Fulfilling is a forward-looking process. It parallels the dynamics of science. It is too much to expect of religion, as religion, to accommodate this dynamic. Hence the irreconcilable and paradigmatic tension between Jesus and the custodians of Judaism. The pseudo-judicial murder of Jesus was a religious imperative. Jesus knew it from the start.
We are now in a position to afford ourselves an intuitive glimpse of the power of Jesus’s personality; something that the Roman centurion felt, but did not, perhaps, understand for what it is. Let us start with the obvious; something that, except to the wilfully blind and deaf, no one can fail to see. Jesus was not religious in the stereotypical fashion that we are religious. No one can be the son of God and a religious fixture at the same time! Universality is basic to being the son of God.
Compare, for a moment, Jesus with the religious personages he encountered. The one attribute Jesus attached to them was ‘hypocrisy’. The essence of hypocrisy is the contradiction between form and substance. This is native, or natural, to art. For instance, if you are an actor, you are obliged to seem what you are not. If you have to play the role, say, of Judas, you cannot protest, while acting, that you are not a Judas. Paradoxically, your not being a Judas is the precondition for acting as one! Your aesthetic value lies in your being convincingly on stage what you are not in real life. The technical term for this capacity to dissemble, this institutionalised hypocrisy, is ‘negative capability’. Malayalam has a far superior word for it: apara-kaya pravesanam; literally, entering the body of someone other than you. (Apara= the other; kaya =body; pravesanam=entering). For while you are enacting the role of Judas, you have to be Judas convincingly, even if in real life you may be a saint.
This is credited to one’s merit as an actor. But it is a demerit in the sphere of spirituality. Because, unlike art –which is a sphere of appearances- spirituality, is the domain of truth. The essence of truth is that form and substance –appearance and reality- become indissolubly one. This organic oneness of form and substance is the secret of spiritual power. Any discord or divergence between the two weakens a human being spiritually. That is why Jesus said, ‘Let your “Yes” be a “Yes” and let your “No” be a “No”’– nothing more and nothing less. Don’t say ‘yes’ while meaning ‘no’. Doing that denotes not cleverness but weakness. I have been accused of tactlessness whenever I tried to practise this, which I have to admit, to my sorrow, has not been frequently or consistently enough. If we are honest with ourselves, we’d admit that, as regards the realm of religion, tact is valued above truth. It is not unlikely that Jesus valued Peter for his tactlessness. He was impulsive. That also meant that he was less capable, compared to the rest, of being what he was not. This is precisely what hypocrisy entails.
It is impossible to think of Jesus in terms of the appearance-reality dichotomy. In his case, the reality is also the appearance. Or, what he seems, that is exactly what he is; and vice versa. That is the benchmark of truth. It is anybody’s guess as to how we would fare if measured by this yardstick. But this is the sole yardstick applicable to our power or weakness as spiritual beings. It is spiritual power alone that can bring about changes, of which liberation is the most radical and revolutionary. It is at once surprising and embarrassing that we can preach the liberation and salvation offered through Jesus Christ in indifference to all this!
Those who were transformed by coming into contact with Jesus were transformed because they were capable of responding to the power of the spiritual. That power is the power of truth, of which the integration –the perfect oneness- of form and substance is the essence. Jesus could see this oneness, this harmony, only in infants and children; the reason he urged his followers to ‘become like them’. Growth into adulthood is also usually a process of suffering an increasing existential cleavage between appearance and reality. Through worldly conditioning, we grow into what we are not, and we call that maturity!
But there is something deeply disturbing in all this. It is not easy to live with a revolutionary. It is like dwelling in a house built atop booming Mt. Vesuvius! No individual, or society, welcomes change. Dostoevsky’s old Cardinal in the story, “The Grand Inquisitor” (which is a story within the larger story in The Brothers Karamazov) was more candid about it than most others of his ilk. Human nature is anchored in inertia. Given a choice, almost everyone would prefer to stay as and where one is: ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’. Why? We too would rather sleep, right? The bed on which we sleep existentially is termed the status quo. Jesus’s core mission was and is to disturb, and transcend, the status quo. Not because he was or is a vandal, or trigger-happy iconoclast; but because he was and is the truth. It is in the nature of truth to liberate. Liberation presupposes the need to change; in particular, the need to challenge and change the status quo.
‘Change’ is the litmus test of human nurture, of human nature, and of human stature. It reflects the ambivalence of human nature as nothing else can. We fear and desire change with equal intensity. Change implies the forfeiture of extant advantages, perceived or real. At the same time, change alone affords hope for the future. Chronologically, change is the midwife of tomorrow. The individuals that history cannot afford to forget are those who brought about changes. The measure of individual immortality is the significance and scope of the changes he or she has brought into the story of our species. Too many people, Kierkegaard laments, are like autumnal leaves that wither and fall. The wind of time sweeps them away into the deep forest, never to be seen or remembered thereafter. Why so? Well, they chose to subsist parasitically on the status quo. They mistook their role in the theatre of worldly existence as their only, and true, self. In them appearance was the operating reality.
In contrast, spirituality is about reality and appearance becoming one in the authenticity of the life one leads. That was what John the Baptist meant when he exhorted, ‘Produce the fruits of repentance’. To repent is to change. There was only one basic strength –the sole eligibility – that Jesus too required of individuals: their willingness to change. Without that, how is one to make a new beginning? This explains why he preferred sinners to the Pharisees. The latter were too ossified and hard-set to change. Change meant faithlessness to them, as it does in respect of anything religious at the present time as well!
Only ask this one last question: In the eyes of Jesus, who was superior: Nicodemus or Zacchaeus?
Zacchaeus was willing to change. Else, he wouldn’t have climbed the sycamore tree or came down from it post-haste. He moved from the tree to immortality. So long as the Gospel is preached and Jesus heeded, Zacchaeus will be remembered. Nicodemus too will be; but he stands, at best, between Zacchaeus and the rich, young man (about whom we are told in chapter 19 of the biography of Jesus recorded by Matthew) who sought out Jesus, but went away from him sorrowful.
Let me put it like this: Jesus incarnated the science of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is like the wind; no one sees where it comes from, or where it is going. Progress, secular as well as spiritual, is under the sole authority of God. Millions work; each in his or her appointed sphere. Each person lives and works as per one’s own personal goals. None of them may be aware, as Kant pointed out in his reflections on the patterns of universal history, of the larger patterns being fulfilled through his or her role. But it happens continually. Thanks to human limitations, it is given to us to realize ‘our pattern’ (and perhaps “the pattern”), at best, only in retrospect.
A great human being is not one who does something to attain personal immortality or undying fame; but one who puts one more brick to the mansion of humaneness that being built continually even in the midst of all the inhumaneness. ‘In my father’s house,’ said Jesus, ‘there are many mansions’. He left its inference to his hearers, as a mark of his faith in their capacity to do so. Each one of us is God’s co-workers in building those many mansions.
Only those mansions, to the building of which the best is contributed while in this world, will be available to us on the shore of eternity.
The science of spirituality, not the art of religion, is relevant to this metaphysical building project.
Is that not the only ‘Life Mission’ that matters in the end?
