Perennial Phil Ch 24 RITUAL, SYMBOL, SACRAMENT [8,4420]

Perennial Phil Ch 24 RITUAL, SYMBOL, SACRAMENT [8,4420]

의식, 상징, 성찬식 - 영원으로 통하는 문인가, 속박의 도구인가

ASWALA: Yajnavalkya, since everything connected with the sacrifice is pervaded by death and is subject to death, by what means can the sacrificer overcome death?

YAJNAVALKYA: By the knowledge of the identity between the sacrificer, the fire and the ritual word. For the ritual word is indeed the sacrificer, and the ritual word is the fire, and the fire, which is one with Brahman, is the sacrificer. This knowledge leads to liberation. This knowledge leads one beyond death.

Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad

IN other words, rites, sacraments, and ceremonials are valu­able to the extent that they remind those who take part in them of the true Nature of Things, remind them of what ought to be and (if only they would be docile to the immanent and transcendent Spirit) of what actually might be their own rela­tion to the world and its divine Ground. 

Theoretically any ritual or sacrament is as good as any other ritual or sacrament, provided always that the object symbolized be in fact some aspect of divine Reality and that the relation between symbol and fact be clearly defined and constant. 

1] In the same way, one language is theoretically as good as another.

 Human experi­ence can be thought about as effectively in Chinese as in English or French. But in practice Chinese is the best lan­guage for those brought up in China, English for those brought up in England and French for those brought up in France. It is, of course, much easier to learn the order of a rite and to understand its doctrinal significance than to master the intri­cacies of a foreign language.

1'] Nevertheless what has been said of language is true, in large measure, of religious ritual. For persons who have been brought up to think of God by means of one set of symbols, it is very hard to think of Him in terms of other and, in their eyes, unhallowed sets of words, cere­monies and images.   301  302 

The Lord Buddha then warned Subhuti, saying, 'Subhuti, do not think that the Tathagata ever considers in his own mind: I ought to enunciate a system of teaching for the elucidation of the Dharma. You should never cherish such a thought. And why? Because if any disciple harboured such a thought he would not only be misunderstanding the Tathagata's teaching, but he would be slandering him as well. Moreover, the expression "a system of teaching" has no meaning; for Truth (in the sense of Reality) cannot be cut up into pieces and arranged into a system. The words can only be used as a figure of speech.'

Diamond Sutra

But for all their inadequacy and their radical unlikeness to the facts to which they refer, words remain the most reliable and accurate of our symbols. 

Whenever we want to have a precise report of facts or ideas, we must resort to words. 

2] A ceremony, a carved or painted image, may convey more meanings and overtones of meaning in a smaller compass and with greater vividness than can a verbal formula; but it is liable to convey them in a form that is much more vague and indefinite. 

2'] One often meets, in modern literature, with the notion that medi­aeval churches were the architectural, sculptural and pictorial equivalents of a theological summa, and that mediaeval wor­shippers who admired the works of art around them were thereby enlightened on the subject of doctrine. 

This view was evidently not shared by the more earnest churchmen of the Middle Ages. Coulton cites the utterances of preachers who complained that congregations were getting entirely false ideas of Catholicism by looking at the pictures in the churches instead of listening to sermons. 

(Similarly, in our own day the Catholic Indians of Central America have evolved the wildest heresies by brooding on the carved and painted symbols with which the Conquistadors filled their churches.) 

St. Bernard's objection to the richness of Cluniac architecture, sculpture and ceremonial was motivated by intellectual as well as strictly moral considerations. 303 So great and marvellous a variety of divers forms meets the eye that one is tempted to read in the marbles rather than in the books, to pass the whole day looking at these carvings one after another rather than in meditating on the law of God.' 

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3] It is in imageless contemplation that the soul comes to the unitive knowledge of Reality; consequently, for those who, like St. Bernard and his Cistercians, are really concerned to achieve man's final end, the fewer distracting symbols the better.

Most men worship the gods because they want success in their worldly undertakings. This kind of material success can be gained very quickly (by such worship), here on earth.

Bagagavad-Gita

Among those who are purified by their good deeds there are four kinds of men who worship Me:

•  1] the world-weary,
•  2] the seeker for knowledge,
•  3] the seeker for happiness and
•  4] the man of spiritual discrimination.

feeling or indicating feelings of weariness, boredom, or cynicism as a result of long experience of life.  "a tired and slightly world-weary voice"

The man of discrimination is the highest of these. He is continually united with Me. He devotes himself to Me always, and to no other. For I am very dear to that man, and he to Me.

Certainly, all these are noble;

But the man of discrimination

I see as my very Self. 

For he alone loves Me 

Because I am Myself, 

The last and only goal 

Of his devoted heart.

Through many a long life 

His discrimination ripens; 

He makes Me his refuge, 

Knows that Brahman is all. 

How rare are such great ones!

Men whose discrimination has been blunted by worldly desires,

establish this or that ritual or cult and resort to various deities,

according to the impulse of their inborn nature.

But no matter what deity a devotee chooses to worship, if he has faith, 1 make his faith unwavering. Endowed with the faith I give him, he worships that deity and gets from it everything he prays for. In reality, I alone am the giver.

But these men of small understanding pray only for what is transient and perishable. The worshippers of the devas will go to the devas. Those who worship Me will come to Me.

Bkagavad-Gita

304 
If sacramental rites are constantly repeated in a spirit of faith and devotion, a more or less enduring effect is produced in the psychic medium, in which individual minds bathe and from which they have, so to speak, been crystallized out into per­sonalities more or less fully developed, 

according to the more or less perfect development of the bodies with which they are associated. 

(Of this psychic medium an eminent contempo­rary philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, has written, in an essay on telepathy contributed to the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, as follows: 

'We must therefore consider seriously the possibility that a person's experience initiates more or less permanent modifications of structure or process in something which is neither his mind nor his brain. There is no reason to suppose that this substratum would be any­thing to which possessive adjectives, such as "mine" and "yours" and "his," could properly be applied, as they can be to minds and animated bodies.... 

Modifications which have been produced in the substratum by certain of M's past experi­ences are activated by N's present experiences or interests, and they become cause factors in producing or modifying N's later experiences.')  305  

Within this psychic medium or non-personal substratum of individual minds, something which we may think of metaphorically as a vortex persists as an independent exist­ence, possessing its own derived and secondary objectivity, so that, wherever the rites are performed, those whose faith and  devotion are sufficiently intense actually discover something out there,' as distinct from the subjective something in their own imaginations. 

And so long as this projected psychic entity is nourished by the faith and love of its worshippers, it will possess, not merely objectivity, but power to get people's prayers answered. 

Ultimately, of course, 'I alone am the giver,' in the sense that 

all this happens in accordance with the divine laws governing the universe in its psychic and spiritual, no less than in its material, aspects. 

Nevertheless, the devas (those imperfect forms under which, because of their own voluntary ignorance, men worship the divine Ground) may be thought of as relatively independent powers. 

The primitive notion that the gods feed on the sacrifices made to them is simply the crude expression of a profound truth. When their worship falls off, when faith and devotion lose their intensity, the devas sicken and finally die. 

Europe is full of old shrines, whose saints and Virgins and relics have lost the power and the second-hand psychic objectivity which they once possessed. Thus, when Chaucer lived and wrote, the deva called Thomas Becket was giving to any Canterbury pilgrim, who had suffi­cient faith, all the boons he could ask for. 

This once-powerful deity is now stone-dead; but there are still certain churches in the West, certain mosques and temples in the East, where even the most irreligious and un-psychic tourist cannot fail to be aware of some intensely 'numinous' presence. 

It would, of course, be a mistake to imagine that this presence is the presence of that God who is a Spirit and must be worshipped in spirit; it is rather the psychic presence of men's thoughts and feelings about the particular, limited form of God, to which they have resorted 'according to the impulse of their inborn nature'—thoughts and feelings projected into objectivity and haunting the sacred place in the same way as thoughts and feelings of another kind, but of equal intensity, haunt the scenes of some past suffering or crime. 

The presence in these consecrated buildings, the presence evoked by the performance of tradi­tional rites, the presence inherent in a sacramental object, name or formula—all these are real presences, 

but real presences, not of God or the Avatar, 

but of something which, though it may reflect the divine Reality, 

is yet less and other than it. 3o6 

Dukis Jesu memoria 

dan.s vera cordi gaudia 

sed super mel et omnia 

ejus dulcis praesentia.

'Sweet is the memory of Jesus, 

giving true joys to the heart; 

but sweeter beyond honey 

and all else is his presence.' 

This opening stanza of the famous twelfth-century hymn sum­marizes in fifteen words the relations subsisting between ritual and real presence and the character of the worshipper's reaction to each. 

Systematically cultivated memoria (a thing in itself full of sweetness) 

first contributes to the evocation, then results, for certain souls, in the immediate apprehension of praeseistia, which brings with it joys of a totally different and higher kind. 

This presence (whose projected objectivity is occasionally so complete as to be apprehensible not merely by the devout worshipper, but by more or less indifferent outsiders) is always that of the divine being who has been previously remembered, Jesus here, Krishna or Amitabha Buddha there.

The value of this practice (repetition of the name of Amitabha Buddha) is this.

So long as one person practises his method (of spirituality) and another practises a different method, they coun­terbalance one another and their meeting is just the same as their not meeting.

Whereas if two persons practise the same method, their mindfulness tends to become deeper and deeper, and they tend to remember each other and to develop affinities for each other, life after life.

Moreover, whoever recites the name of Amitabha Buddha, whether in the present time or in future time, will surely see the Buddha Amitabha and never become separated from him. By reason of that association, just as -one associating with a maker of perfumes becomes permeated with the same per­fumes, so he will become perfumed by Amitabha's compassion, and will become enlightened without resort to any other ex­pedient means.

Surangama Sutra

307
We see then that intense faith and devotion, coupled with perseverance by many persons in the same forms of worship or spiritual exercise, have a tendency to objectify the idea or memory which is their content and so to create, in some sort, a numinous real presence, which worshippers actually find 'out there' no less, and in quite another way, than 'in here.' 

In so far as this is the case, the ritualist is perfectly correct in attributing to his hallowed acts and words a power which, in another context, would be called magical. The mantram works, the sacrifice really does something, the sacrament confers grace ex opere operato: these are, or rather may be, matters of direct experience, facts which anyone who chooses to fulfil the neces­sary conditions can verify empirically for himself. But the grace conferred ex opere operato is not always spiritual grace and the hallowed acts and formulae have a power which is not necessarily from God. Worshippers can, and very often do, get grace and power from one another and from the faith and devotion of their predecessors, projected into independent psychic existences that are hauntingly associated with certain places, words and acts. 

A great deal of ritualistic religion is not spirituality, but occultism, a refined and well-meaning kind of white magic. Now, just as there is no harm in art, say, or science, but a great deal of good, provided always that these activities are not regarded as ends, but simply as means to the final end of all life, so too there is no harm in white magic, 

but the possibilities of much good, so long as it is treated, not as true religion, but as one of the roads to true religion—an effective way of reminding people with a certain kind of psycho-physical make-up that there is a God, 'in knowledge of whom standeth their eternal life.'    308   

 If ritualistic white magic is regarded as being in itself true religion; if the real presences it evokes are taken to be God in Himself and not the projec­tions of human thoughts and feelings about God or even about something less than God; and if the sacramental rites are per­formed and attended for the sake of the 'spiritual sweetness' experienced and the powers and advantages conferred—then there is idolatry. This idolatry is, at its best, a very lofty and, in many ways, beneficent kind of religion. But the conse­quences of worshipping God as anything but Spirit and in any way except in spirit and in truth are necessarily undesirable in this sense—that they lead only to a partial salvation and delay the soul's ultimate reunion with the eternal Ground.

That very large numbers of men and women have an in­eradicable desire for rites and ceremonies is clearly demon­strated by the history of religion. Almost all the Hebrew prophets were opposed to ritualism. 'Rend your hearts and not your garments.' 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice.' 'I hate, I despise your feasts; I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.' 

And yet, in spite of the fact that what the prophets wrote was regarded as divinely inspired, the Temple at Jerusalem continued to be, for hundreds of years after their time, the centre of a religion of rites, ceremonials and blood sacrifice. 

(It may be remarked in passing that the shed­ding of blood, one's own or that of animals or other human beings, seems to be a peculiarly efficacious way of constrain­ing the 'occult' or psychic world to answer petitions and con­fer supernormal powers. If this is a fact, as from the anthropo­logical and antiquarian evidence it appears to be, it would supply yet another cogent reason for avoiding animal sacri­fices, savage bodily austerities and even, since thought is a form of action, that imaginative gloating over spilled blood which is so common in certain Christian circles.) 

What the Jews did in spite of their prophets, Christians have done in spite of Christ. The Christ of the Gospels is a preacher and not a dispenser of sacraments or performer of rites; he speaks against vain repetitions; he insists on the supreme importance of private worship; he has no use for sacrifices and not much use for the Temple. But this did not prevent historic Chris­tianity from going its own, all too human, way. 

A precisely similar development took place in Buddhism.  For the Buddha  of the Pall scriptures, ritual was one of the fetters holding back the soul from enlightenment and liberation. Nevertheless, the religion he founded has made full use of ceremonies, vain repetitions and sacramental rites.  309 

There would seem to be two main reasons for the observed developments of the historical religions. 

• First, most people do not want spirituality or deliverance, but rather a religion that gives them emotional satisfactions, answers to prayer, super­normal powers and partial salvation in some sort of posthu­mous heaven. 
• Second, some of those few who do desire spirit­uality and deliverance find that, for them, the most effective means to those ends are ceremonies, 'vain repetitions' and sacramental rites. 

It is by participating in these acts and utter­ing these formulae 

that they are most powerfully reminded of the eternal Ground of all being; 

it is by immersing themselves in the symbols that they can most easily come through to that which is symbolized. 

Every thing, event or thought is a point of intersection between creature and Creator, between a more or less distant manifestation of God and a ray, so to speak, of the unmanifest Godhead; 

every thing, event or thought can therefore be made the doorway through which a soul may pass out of time into eternity. That is why ritualistic and sacra­mental religion can lead to deliverance. 

But at the same time every human being loves power and self-enhancement, and every hallowed ceremony, form of words or sacramental rite is a channel through which power can flow out of the fascinating psychic universe into the universe of embodied selves. That is why ritualistic and sacramental religion can also lead away from deliverance.

There is another disadvantage inherent in any system of organized sacramentalism, and that is that it gives to the priestly caste a power which it is all too natural for them to abuse. In a society which has been taught that salvation is exclusively or mainly through certain sacraments, and that these sacraments can be administered effectively only by a pro­fessional priesthood, that professional priesthood will possess an enormous coercive power. 310 

The possession of such power is a standing temptation to use it for individual satisfaction and corporate aggrandizement. To a temptation of this kind, if repeated often enough, most human beings who are not saints almost inevitably succumb. That is why Christ taught his disciples to pray that they should not be led into temptation. 

This is, or should be, the guiding principle of all social reform —to organize the economic, political and social relationships between human beings in such a way that there shall be, for any given individual or group within the society, a minimum of temptations to covetousness, pride, cruelty and lust for power. 

Men and women being what they are, it is only by reducing the number and intensity of temptations that human societies can be, in some measure at least, delivered from evil. Now, the sort of temptations to which a priestly caste is exposed in a society that accepts a predominantly sacramental religion are such that none but the most saintly persons can be expected consistently to resist them. 

What happens when ministers of religion are led into these temptations is clearly illustrated by the history of the Roman Church. 

Because Catholic Chris­tianity taught a version of the Perennial Philosophy, it produced a succession of great saints. But because the Perennial Philo­sophy was overlaid with an excessive amount of sacramentalism and with an idolatrous preoccupation with things in time, the less saintly members of its hierarchy were exposed to enormous and quite unnecessary temptations and, duly suc­cumbing to them, launched out into persecution, simony, power politics, secret diplomacy, high finance and collabora­tion with despots.

I very much doubt whether, since the Lord by his grace brought me into the faith of his dear Son, I have ever broken bread or drunk wine, even in the ordinary course of life, without remem­brance of, and some devout feeling regarding, the broken body and the blood-shedding of my dear Lord and Saviour.

Stephen Grellet

We have seen that, 

when they are promoted to be the central core of organized religious worship, ritualism and sacramentalism are by no means unmixed blessings. 311 

But that the whole of a man's workaday life should be transformed by him into 

a kind of continuous ritual, 

• that every object in the world around him should be regarded as a symbol of the world's eternal Ground, 
• that all his actions should be performed sacramentally —this would seem to be wholly desirable. 

All the masters of the spiritual life, 

from the authors of the Upanishads to Socrates, from Buddha to St. Bernard, 

are agreed 

• that without self-knowledge there cannot be adequate knowledge of God,
• that without a constant recollectedness there can be no complete deliverance. 

The man who has learnt to regard 

• things as symbols, 
• persons as temples of the Holy Spirit and 
• actions as sacraments, 

is a man who has learned constantly to remind himself 

• who he is, 
• where he stands in relation to the universe and its Ground, 
• how he should behave towards his fellows and 
• what he must do to come to his final end.

'Because of this indwelling of the Logos,' writes Mr. Kenneth Saunders in his valuable study of the Fourth Gospel, the Gita and the Lotus Sutra, 

'all things have a reality. They are sacra­ments, not illusions like the phenomenal word of the Vedanta.' 

That the Logos is in things, lives and conscious minds, and 

they in the Logos, 

was taught much more emphatically and explicitly by the Vedantists than by the author of the Fourth Gospel; and 

the same idea is, of course, basic in the theology of Taoism. 

But though all things in fact exist 

at the inter­section between a divine manifestation and a ray of the unmanifest Godhead, it by no means follows that everyone always knows that this is so. 

On the contrary, the vast majority of human beings believe that their own selfness and the objects around them possess a reality in themselves, wholly independ­ent of the Logos. 

This belief leads them to identify their being with their sensations, cravings and private notions, and in its turn this self-identification with what they are not effectively walls them off from divine influence and the very possibility of deliverance. To most of us on most occasions 

things are not symbols and actions are not sacramental; and 

we have to teach ourselves, consciously and deliberately, to remember that they are.  312 

The world is imprisoned in its own activity, except when actions are performed as worship of God. Therefore you must perform every action sacramentally (as if it were yajncz, the sacrifice that, in its divine Logos-essence, is identical with the Godhead to whom it is offered), and be free from all attachment to results.

Bhagavad-Gita

Precisely similar teachings are found in Christian writers, who recommend 

• that persons and even things should be regarded as temples of the Holy Ghost
•  and that everything done or suffered should be constantly 'offered to God.'

It is hardly necessary to add that this process of conscious sacramentalization can be applied only to such actions as are not intrinsically evil. 

Somewhat unfortunately, the Gita was not originally published as an independent work, but as a theo­logical digression within an epic poem; and since, like most epics, the Mahabharata is largely concerned with the exploits of warriors, it is primarily in relation to warfare that the Gita's advice to act with non-attachment and for God's sake only is given. 

Now, war is accompanied and followed, among other things, by a widespread dissemination of anger and hatred, pride, cruelty and fear. But, it may be asked, is it possible (the Nature of Things being what it is) to sacramentalize actions whose psychological by-products are so completely God-eclipsing as are these passions?

 The Buddha of the Pali scrip­tures would certainly have answered this question in the nega­tive. So would the Lao Tzu of the Tao Teh King. So would the Christ of the Synoptic Gospels. The Krishna of the Gita (who is also, by a kind of literary accident, the Krishna of the Mahabharata) gives an affirmative answer. 

But this affirma­tive answer, it should be remembered, is hedged around with limiting conditions. Non-attached slaughter is recommended only to those who are warriors by caste, and to whom warfare is a duty and vocation.313 

But what is duty or dharma for the Kshatriya is adharma and forbidden to the Brahman; nor is it any part of the normal vocation or caste duty of the mercantile and labouring classes. 

Any confusion of castes, any assump­tion by one man of another man's vocation and duties of state, is always, say the Hindus, a moral evil and a menace to social stability. Thus, it is the business of the Brahmans to fit them­selves to be seers, so that they may be able to explain to their fellow-men the nature of the universe, of man's last end and of the way to liberation. 

When soldiers or administrators, or usurers, or manufacturers or workers usurp the functions of the Brahmans and formulate a philosophy of life in accordance with their variously distorted notions of the universe, then society is thrown into confusion. 

Similarly, confusion reigns when the Brahman, the man of non-coercive spiritual author­ity, assumes the coercive power of the Kshatriya, or when the Kshatriya's job of ruling is usurped by bankers and stock­jobbers, or finally when the warrior caste's dizarma of fighting is imposed, by conscription, on Brahman, Vaisya and Sudra alike. 

The history of Europe during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance is largely a history of the social confusions that arise when large numbers of those who should be seers aban­don spiritual authority in favour of money and political power. 

And contemporary history is the hideous record of what happens when political bosses, business men or class-conscious proletarians assume the Brahman's function of formulating a philosophy of life; 

when usurers dictate policy and debate the issues of war and peace; and 

when the warrior's caste duty is imposed on-all and sundry, regardless of psycho-physical make­up and vocation.

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'numinous'   ˈn(y)o͞omənəs

Adjective

1

having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity.

the strange, numinous beauty of this ancient landmark

Synonyms:

spiritual religious divine holy sacred mysterious otherworldly unearthly awe-inspiring transcendent

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