Perennial Phil Ch 12 TIME AND ETERNITY [11,6279] God, Providence; Fate, eternity-philosophy, the Quakers

Perennial Phil Ch 12 TIME AND ETERNITY [11,6279]

THE universe is an everlasting succession of events; but its ground, according to the Perennial Philosophy, is the time­less now of the divine Spirit. 

A classical statement of the relationship between time and eternity may be found in the later chapters of the Consolations of Philosophy, where Boethius summarizes the conceptions of his predecessors, notably of Plotinus.

It is one thing to be carried through an endless life, another thing to embrace the whole presence of an endless life together, which is manifestly proper to the divine Mind.
The temporal world seems to emulate in part that which it can­not fully obtain or express, tying itself to whatever presence there is in this exiguous and fleeting moment—a presence which, since it carries a certain image of that abiding Presence, gives to what­ever may partake of it the quality of seeming to have being. But because it could not stay, it undertook an infinite journey of time; and so it came to pass that, by going, it continued that life, whose plenitude it could not comprehend by staying.

Boethius

Since God hadi always an eternal and present state, His know­ledge, surpassing time's notions, remaineth in the simplicity of His presence and, comprehending the infinite of what is past and to come, considereth all things as though they were in the act of being accomplished.

Boethius

Knowledge of what is happening now does not determine the event. What is ordinarily called God's foreknowledge is in reality a timeless now-knowledge, which is compatible with the freedom of the human creature's will in time.

212  213

The manifest world and whatever is moved in any sort take their causes, order and forms from the stability of the divine Mind. This hath determined manifold ways for doing things; which ways being considered in the purity of God's understanding are named Providence; but being referred to those things which He moveth and disposeth are called Fate.... Providence is the very divine Reason itself, which disposeth all things. But Fate is a disposition inherent in changeable things, by which Providence connecteth all things in their due order.

For Providence equally embraceth all things together, though diverse, though infinite; but Fate puts into motion all things, distributed by places, forms and times; so that the unfolding of the temporal order, being united in the foresight of the divine Mind, is Providence, and the same uniting, being digested and unfolded in time, is called Fate.
As a workman conceiving the form of anything in his mind, taketh his work in hand and executeth by order of time that which he had simply and in a moment foreseen, so God by his Provi­dence disposeth whatever is to be done with simplicity and stabil­ity, and by Fate effecteth by manifold ways and in the order of time those very things which He disposeth. . . . All that is under Fate is also subject to Providence. But some things which are under Providence are above the course of Fate. For they are those things which, being stably fixed in virtue of their nearness to the first divinity, exceed the order of Fate's mobility.

Boethius

The concept of a clock enfolds all succession in time. In the con­cept the sixth hour is not earlier than the seventh or eighth, although the clock never strikes the hour, save when the concept biddeth.

Nicholas of Cusa

From Hobbes onwards, the enemies of the Perennial Philo­sophy have denied the existence of an eternal now. According to these thinkers, time and change are fundamental; there is no other reality. Moreover, future events are completely inde­terminate, and even God can have no knowledge of them.

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Consequently God cannot be described as Alpha and Omega-­merely as Alpha and Lambda, or whatever other intermediate letter of the temporal alphabet is now in process of being spelled out. But the anecdotal evidence collected by the Society for Psychical Research and the statistical evidence accumulated during many thousands of laboratory tests for extra-sensory perception point inescapably to the conclusion that even human minds are capable of foreknowledge. And if a finite conscious­ness can know what card is going to be turned up three seconds from now, or what shipwreck is going to take place next week, then there is nothing impossible or even intrinsically improb­able in the idea of an infinite consciousness that can know now events indefinitely remote in what, for us, is future time. The 'specious present' in which human beings live may be, and perhaps always is, something more than a brief section of tran­sition from known past to unknown future, regarded, because of the vividness of memory, as the instant we call 'now'; it may and perhaps always does contain a portion of the immedi­ate and even of the relatively distant future. For the Godhead, the specious present may be precisely that interminabiis vitae tota simul et perpetua possessio,the end of all life together and everlasting possession , of which Boethius speaks.

The existence of the eternal now is sometimes denied on the ground that a temporal order cannot co-exist with another order which is non-temporal; and that it is impossible for a changing substance to be united with a changeless substance. This objection, it is obvious, would be valid if the non-temporal order were of a mechanical nature, or if the changeless sub­stance were possessed of spatial and material qualities. But according to the Perennial Philosophy, the eternal now is a consciousness; the divine Ground is spirit; the being of Brahman is chit, or knowledge. That a temporal world should be known and, in being known, sustained and perpetually created by an eternal consciousness is an idea which contains nothing self-contradictory. 215

Finally we come to the arguments directed against those who have asserted that the eternal Ground can be unitively known by human minds. 

This claim is regarded as absurd because it involves the assertion, 'At one time I am eternal, at another time I am in time.' 

But this statement is absurd only if man is a being of a twofold nature, capable of living on only one level. 

But if, as the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy have always maintained, man is not only a body and a psyche, but also a spirit, 

and if he can at will live either on the merely human plane or else in harmony and even in union with the divine Ground of his being, then the statement makes perfectly good sense. 

The body is always in time, the spirit is always timeless and the psyche is an amphibious creature compelled by the laws of man's being to associate itself to some extent with its body, but capable, if it so desires, of experiencing and being identified with its spirit and, through its spirit, with the divine Ground. 

The spirit remains always what it eternally is; but man is so constituted that his psyche cannot always remain identified with the spirit. In the statement, 'At one time I am eternal, at another time I am in time,' the word 'I' stands for the psyche, which passes from time to eternity when it is identified with the spirit and passes again from eternity to time, either voluntarily or by involuntary necessity, when it chooses or is compelled to identify itself with the body.
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• 'The Sufi,' says Jalal-uddin Rumi, 'is the son of time present.' Spiritual progress is a spiral advance. 
• We start as infants in the animal eternity of life in the moment, without anxiety for the future or regret for the past; 
• we grow up into the specifically human condition of those who look before and after, who live to a great extent, not in the present but in memory and anticipation, not spontaneously but by rule and with prudence, in repentance and fear and hope; 
• and we can continue, if we so desire, up and on in a returning sweep towards a point corresponding to our starting place in animality, but incommensurably above it.

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• Jalal-uddin Rumi는 '수피 족은 현재의 시간의 아들'이라고 말합니다. 영적 진보는 나선형 전진입니다. 
• 우리는 미래에 대한 불안이나 과거에 대한 후회 없이 순간이라는 동물적 영원 속에서 유아로 시작합니다. 
• 우리는 현재가 아니라 기억과 기대 속에서, 자발적으로가 아니라 규칙에 따라 신중하게, 회개와 두려움과 희망 속에서 크게 사는 사람들의 특별한 인간적 조건으로 성장합니다. 
• 그리고 우리는 우리가 원한다면 동물성에서 우리의 출발점에 해당하지만 비교할 수 없을 정도로 그 위에 있는 지점을 향해 계속해서 되돌아갈 수 있습니다.

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 Once more life is lived in the moment—the life now, not of a sub-human creature, but of a being in whom charity has cast out fear, vision has taken the place of hope, selflessness has put a stop to the posi­tive egotism of complacent reminiscence and the negative egotism of remorse. 

The present moment is the only aperture  through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which charity can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time. 

That is why the Sufi and, along with him, every other practising exponent of the Perennial Philo­sophy is, or tries to be, a son of time present.216  

Past and future veil God from our sight;
Burn up both of them with fire. How long
Wilt thou be partitioned by these segments, like a reed?

So long as a reed is partitioned, it is not privy to secrets, Nor is it vocal in response to lip and breathing.

Jalal-uddin Rumi

This emptying of the memory, though the advantages of it are not so great as those of the state of union, yet merely because it delivers souls from much sorrow, grief and sadness, besides im­perfections and sins, is in reality a great good.

Sr. John of the Cross

In the idealistic cosmology of Mahayana Buddhism memory plays the part of a rather maleficent demiurge. 

'When the triple world is surveyed by the Bodhisattva, he perceives that its existence is due to memory that has been accumulated since the beginningless past, but wrongly interpreted' (Lankavatara Sutra). 

The word here translated as 'memory' means literally 'perfuming.' The mind-body carries with it the ineradicable smell of all that has been thought and done, desired and felt, throughout its racial and personal past. The Chinese translate the Sanskrit term by two symbols, signifying 'habit-energy.' The world is what (in our eyes) it is, because of all the con­sciously or unconsciously and physiologically remembered habits formed by our ancestors or by ourselves, either in our present life or in previous existences. These remembered bad habits cause us to believe that multiplicity is the sole reality and that the idea of 'I,' 'me,' 'mine' represents the ultimate truth. 

Nirvana consists in 'seeing into the abode of reality as  it is and not reality quoad nos, as it seems to us.217 Obviously, this cannot be achieved so long as there is an 'us,' to which reality can be relative. 

Hence the need, stressed by every exponent of the Perennial Philosophy, for mortification, for dying to self. And this must be a mortification not only of the appetites, the feelings and the will, but also of the reasoning powers, of consciousness itself and of that which makes our consciousness what it is—our personal memory and our in­herited habit-energies. To achieve complete deliverance, con­version from sin is not enough; there must also be a conversion of the mind, aparawitti, as the Mahayanists call it, or revulsion in the very depths of consciousness. As the result of this revulsion, the habit-energies of accumulated memory are de­stroyed and, along with them, the sense of being a separate ego. Reality is no longer perceived quoad nos (for the good reason that there is no longer a nos to perceive it), but as it is in itself. In Blake's words, 'If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would be seen as it is, infinite.' By those who are pure in heart and poor in spirit, sarnsara and nirvana, appear­ance and reality, time and eternity are experienced as one and the same.

Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time. And not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections; not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.

Eckhart

Rejoice in God all the time, says St. Paul. He rejoices all the time who rejoices above time and free from time. Three things prevent a man from knowing God. The first is time, the second is corporeality, the third is multiplicity. That God may come in, these things must go out—except thou have them in a higher, better way: multitude summed up to one in thee.

Eckhart

218 
Whenever God is thought of as being wholly in time, there is a tendency to regard Him as a 'numinous' rather than a moral being, 

a God of mere unmitigated Power rather than a God of Power, Wisdom and Love, 

an inscrutable and danger­ous potentate to be propitiated by sacrifices, 

not a Spirit to be worshipped in spirit. 

All this is only natural; for time is a perpetual perishing and a God who is wholly in time is a God who destroys as fast as He creates. 

Nature is as incompre­hensibly appalling as it is lovely and bountiful. 

If the Divine does not transcend the temporal order in which it is immanent, and if the human spirit does not transcend its time-bound soul, then there is no possibility of 'justifying the ways of God to man.' 

God as manifested in the universe is the irresistible Being who speaks to Job out of the whirlwind, and 

whose emblems are Behemoth and Leviathan, the war horse and the eagle. 

It is this same Being who is described in the apocalyptic eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita. '0 Supreme Spirit,' says Arjuna, addressing himself to the Krishna whom he now knows to be the incarnation of the Godhead, 

'I long to see your Isvara-form'—that is to say, his form as God of the world, Nature, the temporal order. 

Krishna answers, 'You shall behold the whole universe, with all things animate and inanimate, within this body of mine.' Arjuna's reaction to the revelation is one of amazement and fear.  

Ah, my God, I see all gods within your body;

Each in his degree, the multitude of creatures;

See Lord Brahma seated upon his lotus,

See all the sages and the holy serpents.
Universal Form, I see you without limit,

Infinite of eyes, arms, mouths and bellies

—See, and find no end, midst or beginning.

There follows a long passage, enlarging on the omnipotence and all-comprehensiveness of God in his Isvara-form. 

Then the quality of the vision changes, 

and Arjuna realizes, with fear and trembling, 

that the God of the universe is a God of destruction as well as of creation.219

Now with frightful tusks your mouths are gnashing, Flaring like the fires of Doomsday morning—North, south, east and west seem all confounded—Lord of devas, world's abode, have mercy!...

Swift as many rivers streaming to the ocean, Rush the heroes to your fiery gullets, Moth-like to meet the flame of their destruction. Headlong these plunge into you and perish.

Tell me who you are, and were from the beginning,
You of aspect grim. 0 God of gods, be gracious.
Take my homage, Lord. From me your ways are hidden.

'Tell roe who you are.' The answer is clear and unequivocal.

I am come as Time, the waster of the peoples, Ready for the hour that ripens to their ruin.

But the God who comes so terribly as Time also exists time­lessly as the Godhead, as Brahman, whose essence is Sat, Chit, Ananda, Being, Awareness, Bliss; 

and within and beyond man's time-tortured psyche is his spirit, 'uncreated and uncreatable,' as Eckhart says, the Atman which is akin to or even identical with Brahman. 

The Gita, like all other formulations of the Perennial Philosophy, justifies God's ways to man by affirming —and the affirmation is based upon observation and immediate experience that man can, if he so desires, die to his separate temporal selfness and so come to union with timeless Spirit. 

It affirms, too, that the Avatar becomes incarnate in order to assist human beings to achieve this union. 

This he does in three ways—

• by teaching the true doctrine in a world blinded by voluntary ignorance; 
• by inviting souls to a 'carnal love' of his humanity, not indeed as an end in itself, but as the means to spiritual love-knowledge of Spirit; and 
• finally by serving as a channel of grace.220 

God who is Spirit can only be worshipped in spirit and for his own sake; 

but God in time is normally worshipped by material means with a view to achieving temporal ends. 

God. in time is manifestly the destroyer as well as the creator; and because this is so, it has seemed proper to worship him by methods which are as terrible as the destructions he himself inflicts. 

Hence, in India, the blood sacrifices to Kali, in her aspect as Nature-the-Destroyer; hence those offerings of chil­dren to 'the Moloclis,' denounced by the Hebrew prophets; hence the human sacrifices practised, for example, by the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Druids, the Aztecs. 

In all such cases the divinity addressed was a god in time, or a per­sonification of Nature, which is nothing else but Time itself; the devourer of its own offspring; and in all cases the purpose of the rite was to obtain a future benefit or to avoid one of the enormous evils which Time and Nature for ever hold in store. 

For this it was thought to be worth while to pay a high price in that currency of suffering, which the Destroyer so evidently valued. The importance of the temporal end justified the use of means that were intrinsically terrible, because intrin­sically time-like. 

Sublimated traces of these ancient patterns of thought and behaviour are still to be found in certain theories of the Atonement, and in the conception of the Mass as a perpetually repeated sacrifice of the God-Man.

In the modern world the gods to whom human sacrifice is offered are personifications, not of Nature, but of man's own, home-made political ideals.

These, of course, all refer to events in time—actual events in the past or the present, fancied events in the future. And here it should be noted that the philosophy which affirms the existence and the immediate realizableness of eternity is related to one kind of political theory and practice; 

the philosophy which affirms that what goes on in time is the only reality, results in a different kind of theory and justifies quite another kind of political practice. 

This has been clearly recognized by Marxist writers,' who point out that when Christianity is mainly preoccupied with events in time, it is a 'revolutionary religion,' and that 

when, under mystical influences, it stresses the Eternal Gospel, of which the historical or pseudo-historical facts recorded in Scripture 

are but symbols, it becomes politically 'static' and 'reactionary.'221

This Marxjan account of the matter is somewhat over­simplified. It is not quite true to say that all theologies and philosophies whose primary concern is with time, rather than eternity, are necessarily revolutionary. 

The aim of all revolu­tions is to make the future radically different from and better than the past. But some time-obsessed philosophies are primarily concerned with the past, not the future, and their politics are entirely a matter of preserving or restoring the status quo and getting back to the good old days. 

But the retrospective time-worshippers have one thing in common with the revolutionary devotees of the bigger and better future; 

they are prepared to use unlimited violence to achieve their ends. It is here that we discover the essential difference between the politics of eternity-philosophers and the politics of time-philosophers. 

For the latter, the ultimate good is to be found in the temporal world—in a future, where everyone will be happy because all are doing and, thinking something either entirely new and unprecedented or, alternatively, some­thing old, traditional and hallowed. 

And because the ultimate good lies in time, they feel justified in making use of any temporal means for achieving it. 

The Inquisition burns and tortures in order to perpetuate a creed, a ritual and an ecclesi-astico-politico-financial organization regarded as necessary to men's eternal salvation. 

Bible-worshipping Protestants fighit long and savage wars, in order to make the world safe for what they fondly imagine to be the genuinely antique Christianity of apostolic times. 

Jacobins and Bolsheviks are ready to sacri­fice millions of human lives for the sake of a political and economic future gorgeously unlike the present. 

* See, for example, Professor J. B. S. Haldane's The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences.

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And now all Europe and most of Asia has had to be sacrificed to a crystal-gazer's vision of perpetual Co-Prosperity and the Thousand-Year Reich. From the records of history it seems to be abund­antly clear that most of the religions and philosophies which take time too seriously are correlated with political theories that inculcate and justify the use of large-scale violence. The only exceptions are those simple Epicurean faiths, in which the reac­tion to an all too real time is 'Eat, drink and be merry, for to­morrow we die.' This is not a very noble, nor even a very realistic kind of morality. But it seems to make a good deal more sense than the revolutionary ethic: 'Die (and kill), for tomorrow someone else will eat, drink and be merry.' In practice, of course, the prospect even of somebody else's future merriment is extremely precarious. For the process of whole­sale dying and killing creates material, social and psychological conditions that practically guarantee the revolution against the achievement of its beneficent ends.

For those whose philosophy does not compel them to take time with an excessive seriousness the ultimate good is to be sought neither in the revolutionary's progressive social apoca­lypse, nor in the reactionary's revived and perpetuated past, but in an eternal divine now which those who sufficiently desire this good can realize as a fact of immediate experience. 

The mere act of dying is not in itself a passport to eternity; 

nor can wholesale killing do anything to bring deliverance either to the slayers or the slain or their posterity. 

The peace that passes all understanding is the fruit of liberation into eternity; 

but in its ordinary everyday form peace is also the root of liberation. 

For where there are violent passions and compelling distrac­tions, this ultimate good can never be realized. That is one of the reasons why the policy correlated with eternity-philosophies is tolerant and non-violent. 

The other reason is that the eter­nity, whose realization is the ultimate good, is a kingdom of heaven within. 

Thou art That; and though That is immortal and impassible, the killing and torturing of individual 'thous' is a matter of cosmic significance, inasmuch as it interferes with the normal and natural relationship between individual souls and the divine eternal Ground of all being. 

Every violence is, over and above everything else, a sacrilegious rebellion against the divine order.  223
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Passing now from theory to historical fact, we find that the religions, whose theology has been least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently the least violent and the most humane in political practice. Unlike early Judaism, Christianity and Moham­medanism (all of them obsessed with time), Hinduism and Buddhism have never been persecuting faiths, have preached almost no holy wars and have refrained from that proselytizing religious imperialism, which has gone hand in hand with the political and economic oppression of the coloured peoples. 

For four hundred years, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, most of the Chris­tian nations of Europe have spent a good part of their time and energy in attacking, conquering and exploiting their non-Christian neighbours in other continents. In the course of these centuries many individual churchmen did their best to mitigate the consequences of such iniquities; but none of the major Christian churches officially condemned them. 

The first collective protest against the slave system, introduced by the English and the Spaniards into the New World, was made in 1688 by the Quaker Meeting of Germantown. This fact is highly significant.

 Of all Christian sects in the seventeenth century, the Quakers were the least obsessed with history, the least addicted to the idolatry of things in time. They believed that the inner light was in all human beings and that salvation came to those who lived in conformity with that light and was not dependent on the profession of belief in historical or pseudo-historical events, nor on the performance of certain rites, nor on the support of a particular ecclesiastical organiza­tion. Moreover, their eternity-philosophy preserved them from the materialistic apocalypticism of that progress-worship which in recent times has justified every kind of iniquity from war and revolution to sweated labour, slavery and the exploitation of savages and children—has justified them on the ground that the supreme good is in future time and that any temporal means, however intrinsically horrible, may be used to achieve that good. 

Because Quaker theology was a form of eternity-philosophy, Quaker political theory rejected war and persecu­tion as means to ideal ends, denounced slavery and proclaimed racial equality. Members of other denominations had done good work for the African victims of the white man's rapacity. 

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One thinks, for example, of St. Peter Claver at Cartagena. But this heroically charitable 'slave of the slaves' never raised his voice against the institution of slavery or the criminal trade by which it was sustained; nor, so far as the extant documents reveal, did he ever, like John Woolman, attempt to persuade the slave-owners to free their human chattels. The reason, presumably, was that Claver was a Jesuit, vowed to perfect obedience and constrained by his theology to regard a certain political and ecclesiastical organization as being the mystical body of Christ. The heads of this organization had not pro­nounced against slavery or the slave trade. Who was he, Pedro Claver, to express a thought not officially approved by his superiors?

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Another practical corollary of the great historical eternity-philosophies, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, is a morality inculcating kindness to animals. Judaism and orthodox Chris­tianity taught that animals might be used as things, for the realization of man's temporal ends. Even St. Francis' attitude towards the brute creation was not entirely unequivocal. True, he converted a wolf and preached sermons to birds; but when Brother Juniper hacked the feet off a living pig in order to satisfy a sick man's craving for fried trotters, the saint merely blamed his disciple's intemperate zeal in damaging a valuable piece of private property.

It was not until the nineteenth cen­tury, when orthodox Christianity had lost much of its power over European minds, that the idea that it might be a good thing to behave humanely towards animals began to make headway. 

This new morality was correlated with the new interest in Nature, which had been stimulated by the romantic poets and the men of science. Because it was not founded upon an eternity-philosophy, a doctrine of divinity dwelling in all living creatures, the modern movement in favour of kindness to animals was and is perfectly compatible with intolerance, persecution and systematic cruelty towards human beings. Young Nazis are taught to be gentle with dogs and cats, ruth­less with Jews. That is because Nazism is a typical time-philosophy, which regards the ultimate good as existing, not in eternity, but in the future. Jews are, ex kypot/zesi, obstacles in the way of the realization of the supreme good; dogs and cats are not. The rest follows logically. 225

Selfishness and partiality are very inhuman and base qualities even in the things of this world; but in the doctrines of religion they are of a baser nature. Now, this is the greatest evil that the division of the church has brought forth; it raises in every com­munion a selfish, partial orthodoxy, which consists in courage­ously defending all that it has, and condemning all that it has not.         

And thus every champion is trained up in defence of their own truth, their own learning and their own church, and he has the most merit, the most honour, who likes everything, defends everything, among themselves, and leaves nothing uncensored in those that are of a different communion.

Now, how can truth and goodness and union and religion be more struck at than by such defenders of it? If you ask why the great Bishop of Meaux wrote so many learned books against all parts of the Reformation, it is because he was born in France and bred up in the bosom of Mother Church. Had he been born in England, had Oxford or Cambridge been his Alma Mater, he might have rivalled our great Bishop Stillingfleet, and would have wrote as many learned folios against the Church of Rome as he has done.

- And yet I will venture to say that if each Church could produce but one man apiece that had the piety of an apostle and the impartial love of the first Christians in the first Church at Jerusalem, that a Pro­testant and a Papist of this stamp would not want half a sheet of paper to hold their articles of union, nor be half an hour before they were of one religion.

- If, therefore, it should be said that churches are divided, estranged and made unfriendly to one another by a learning, a logic, a history, a criticism in the hands of partiality, it would be saying that which each particular church too much proves to be true.

- Ask wily even the best amongst the Catholics are very shy of owning the validity of the orders of our Church; it is because they are afraid of removing any odium from the Reformation.

- Ask why no Protestants anywhere touch upon the benefit or necessity of celibacy in those who are separ­ated from worldly business to preach the gospel; it is because that would be seeming to lessen the Roman error of not suffering marriage in her clergy.

- Ask why even the most worthy and pious among the clergy of the Established Church are afraid to assert the sufficiency of the Divine Light, the necessity of seeking only the guidance and inspiration of the Holy Spirit; it is because the Quakers, who have broke off from the church, have made this doctrine their corner-stone. If we loved truth as such, if we sought for it for its own sake, if we loved our neighbour as our­selves, if we desired nothing by our religion but to be acceptable to God, if we equally desired the salvation of all men, if we were afraid of error only because of its harmful nature to us and our fellow-creatures, then nothing of this spirit could have any place in us.

There is therefore a catholic spirit, a communion of saints in the love of God and all goodness, which no one can learn from that which is called orthodoxy in particular churches, but is only to be had by a total dying to all worldly views, by a pure love of God, and by such an unction from above as delivers the mind from all selfishness and makes it love truth and goodness with an equality of affection in every man, whether he is Christian, Jew or Gentile.

- He that would obtain this divine and catholic spirit in this disordered, divided state of things, and live in a divided part of the church without partaking of its division, must have these three truths deeply fixed in his mind.

First, that universal love, which gives the whole strength of the heart to God, and makes us love every man as we love ourselves, is the noblest, the most divine, the Godlike state of the soul, and is the utmost per­fection to which the most perfect religion can raise us; and that no religion does any man any good but so far as it brings this per‑fection of love into him. This truth will show us that true ortho­doxy can nowhere be found but in a pure disinterested love of God and our neighbour.

Second, that in this present divided state of the church, truth itself is torn and divided asunder; and that, therefore, he can be the only true catholic who has more of truth and less of error than is hedged in by any divided part. This truth will enable us to live in a divided part unhurt by its division, and keep us in a true liberty and fitness to be edified and assisted by all the good that we hear or see in any other part of the church.

Thirdly, he must always have in mind this great truth, that it is the glory of the Divine Justice to have no respect of parties or persons, but to stand equally disposed to that which is right and wrong as well in the Jew as in the Gentile. He therefore that would like as God likes, and condemn as God condemns, must have neither the eyes of the Papist nor the Protestant; he must like no truth the less because Ignatius Loyola or John Bunyan were very zealous for it, nor have the less aversion to any error, because Dr. Trapp or George Fox had brought it forth.

William Law

Dr. Trapp was the author of a religious tract entitled 'On the Nature, Folly, Sin and Danger of Being Righteous Overmuch.' One of Law's controversial pieces was an answer to this work.

Benares is to the East, Mecca to the West; but explore your own heart, for there are both Rama and Allah.

Kabir

Like the bee gathering honey from different flowers, the wise man accepts the essence of different Scriptures and sees only the good in all religions.

From the Srimad Bhagavatam

228 

His Sacred Majesty the King does reverence to men of all sects, whether ascetics or householders, by gifts and various forms of reverence. His Sacred Majesty, however, cares not so much for gifts or external reverence as that there should be a growth in the essence of the matter in all sects.

The growth of the essence of the matter assumes various forms, but the root of it is restraint of speech, to wit, a man must not do reverence to his own sect or disparage that of another without reason. Depreciation should be for specific reasons only; for the sects of other people all deserve reverence for one reason or another.... He who does reverence to his own sect, while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own, with intent to enhance the glory of his own sect, in reality by such conduct inflicts the severest injury on his own sect. Concord therefore is meritorious, to wit, hearkening and hearkening willingly to the Law of Piety, as accepted by other people.

Edict of Asoka

It would be difficult, alas, to find any edict of a Christian king to match Asoka's. In the West the good old rule, the simple plan, was glorification of one's own sect, disparagement and even persecution of all others. Recently, however, govern­ments have changed their policy. Proselytizing and persecut­ing zeal is reserved for the political pseudo-religions, such as Communism, Fascism and nationalism; and unless they are thought to stand in the way of advance towards the temporal ends professed by such pseudo-religions, the various mani­festations of the Perennial Philosophy are treated with a contemptuously tolerant indifference.

The children of God are very dear but very queer, very nice but very narrow.

Sadiu Sundar Singh

Such was the conclusion to which the most celebrated of Indian converts was forced after some years of association with his fellow Christians. There are many honourable exceptions, of course; but the rule even among learned Protestants and Catholics is a certain blandly bumptious provincialism which, if it did not constitute such a grave offence against charity and truth, would be just uproariously funny.  229

A hundred years ago, hardly anything was known of Sanskrit, Pali or Chinese. The ignorance of European scholars was sufficient reason for their provincialism. Today, when more or less adequate trans­lations are available in plenty, there is not only no reason for it, there is no excuse. And yet most European and American authors of books about religion and metaphysics write as though nobody had ever thought about these subjects, except the Jews, the Greeks and the Christians of the Mediterranean basin and western Europe. This display of what, in the twen­tieth century, is an entirely voluntary and deliberate ignorance is not only absurd and discreditable; it is also socially danger­ous. Like any other form of imperialism, theological imperial­ism is a menace to permanent world peace. The reign of violence will never come to an end until, 

• first, most human beings accept the same, true philosophy of life; until, 
• second, this Perennial Philosophy is recognized as the highest factor common to all the world religions; until, 
• third, the adherents of every religion renounce the idolatrous time-philosophies, with which, in their own particular faith, the Perennial Philo­sophy of eternity has been overlaid; until, 
• fourth, there is a world-wide rejection of all the political pseudo-religions, which place man's supreme good in future time and therefore justify and commend the commission of every sort of present iniquity as a means to that end. 

If these conditions are not fulfilled, no amount of political planning, no economic blue-prints however ingeniously drawn, can prevent the recrudescence of war and revolution.

Perennial Phil Ch 8 RELIGION AND TEMPERAMENT

Perennial Phil. Ch 8. RELIGION AND TEMPERAMENT  [11, 584]

IT seems best at this point to turn back for a moment from ethics to psychology, where a very important problem awaits us—a problem to which the exponents of the Perennial Philo­sophy have given a great deal of attention. 

What precisely is the relation between individual constitution and temperament on the one hand and the kind and degree of spiritual knowledge on the other? 

The materials for a comprehensively accurate answer to this question are not available—except, perhaps, in the form of that incommunicable science, based upon intuition and long practice, that exists in the minds of experienced 'spiritual directors.' But the answer that can be given, though incomplete, is highly significant.

All knowledge, as we have seen, is a function of being. Or, to phrase the same idea in scholastic terms, the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower. In the Introduction reference was made to the effect upon knowledge of changes of being along what may be called its vertical axis, in the direction of sanctity or its opposite. But there is also variation in the horizontal plane.

 Congenitally by psycho-physical constitution, each one of us is born into a certain position on this horizontal plane. It is a vast territory, still imperfectly explored, a continent stretching all the way 

from imbecility to genius, 

from shrinking weakness to aggressive strength, 

from cruelty to Pickwickian kindliness, naive, generous

from self-revealing sociability to taciturn misanthropy and love of soli­tude, 

from an almost frantic lasciviousness to an almost Un-tempted continence. 

From any point on this huge expanse of possible human nature an individual can move almost indefi­nitely up or down, 

towards union with the divine Ground of his own and all other beings, 

or towards the last, the infernal extremes of separateness and selfhood. 

But where horizontal movement is concerned there is far less freedom. 

It is impos­sible for one kind of physical constitution to transform itself into another kind; and 

the particular temperament associated with a given physical constitution can be modified only within narrow limits. 

With the best will in the world and the best social environment, 

all that anyone can hope to do is to make the best of his congenital psycho-physical make-up; to change the fundamental patterns of constitution and temperament is beyond his power.

In the course of the last thirty centuries many attempts have been made to work out a classification system in terms of which human differences could be measured and described. 

For example, 

1. there is the ancient Hindu method of classifying people according to the psycho-physico-social categories of caste. 
2. There are the primarily medical classifications associ­ated with the name of Hippocrates, classifications in terms of two main 'habits'—the phthisic and the apoplectic—or of the four humours (blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile) and the four qualities (hot, cold, moist and dry). 
3. More recently there have been the various physiognomic systems of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the crude and merely psychological dichotomy of introversion and extra­version;
4. the more complete, but still inadequate, psycho-physical classifications proposed by Kretschmer, Stockard, Viola and others; and
5.  finally the system, more comprehensive, more flexibly adequate to the complex facts than all those which preceded it, worked out by Dr. William Sheldon and his collaborators.

In the present section our concern is with classifications of human differences in relation to the problems of the spiritual life. Traditional systems will be described and illustrated, and the findings of the Perennial Philosophy will be compared with the conclusions reached by the most recent scientific research.

===

In the West, the traditional Catholic classification of human beings is based upon the Gospel anecdote of Martha and Mary. 

The way of Martha is the way of salvation through action, 

the way of Mary is the way through contemplation. 

Following Aristotle, who in this as in many other matters was in accord with the Perennial Philosophy, 

Catholic thinkers have regarded contemplation (the highest term of which is the unitive know­ledge of the Godhead) as man's final end, and therefore have always held that Mary's was indeed the better way.

Significantly enough, it is in essentially similar terms that Dr. Radin classifies and (by implication) evaluates primitive human beings in so far as they are philosophers and religious devotees. 

For him there is no doubt that the higher mono­theistic forms of primitive religion are created (or should one rather say, with Plato, discovered) by people belonging to the first of the two great psycho-physical classes of human beings 

—the men of thought. To those belonging to the other class, the men of action, is due the creation or discovery of the lower, unphilosophical, polytheistic kinds of religion.

This simple dichotomy is a classification of human differ­ences that is valid so far as it goes. But like all such dichoto­mies, whether physical (like Hippocrates' division of humanity into those of phthisic and those of apoplectic habit) or psycho­logical (like Jung's classification in terms of introvert and extravert), 

this grouping of the religious 

into those who think and those who act, 

those who follow the way of Martha and those who follow the way of Mary, 

is inadequate to the facts. 

And of course no director of souls, no head of a religious organization, is ever, in actual practice, content with this all too simple system. 

Underlying the best Catholic writing on prayer and the best Catholic practice in the matter of recog­nizing vocations and assigning duties, 

we sense the existence of an implicit and unformulated classification of human differ­ences more complete and more realistic than the explicit dichotomy of action and contemplation.
==
In Hindu thought the outlines of this completer and more adequate classification are clearly indicated. The ways leading to the delivering union with God are not two, but three—

• the way of works, 
• the way of knowledge and 
• the way of devotion. 

In the Bhagavad-Gita Sri Krishna instructs Arjuna in all three paths—

• liberation through action without attachment; 
• liberation through knowledge of the Self and the Absolute Ground of all being with which it is identical; and 
• liberation through intense devotion to the personal God or the divine incarnation.

Do without attachment the work you have to do;

 for a man who does his work without attachment attains the Supreme Goal verily. By action alone men like Janaka attained perfection.

But there is also the way of Mary.

Freed from passion, fear and anger,

absorbed in Me, taking refuge in Me, and purified by the fires of Knowledge, many have become one with my Being.

And again:

Those who have completely controlled their senses and

are of even mind under all conditions

and thus contemplate the Im­perishable, the Ineffable, the Unmanifest, the Omnipresent, the Incomprehensible, the Eternal—they, devoted to the welfare of all beings, attain Me alone and none else.

But the path of contemplation is not easy.

The task of those whose minds are set on the Unmanifest is the more difficult;

for, to those who are in the body, the realization of the Unmanifest is hard. But those who consecrate all their actions to Me (as the personal God, or as the divine Incarnation), who regard Me as the supreme Goal, who worship Me and medi­tate upon Me with single-minded concentration—for those whose minds are thus absorbed in Me, I become ere long the Saviour from the world's ocean of mortality.

===

These three ways of deliverance are precisely correlated with the three categories, in terms of which Sheldon has worked out what is, without question, the best and most adequate classification of human differences. 

Human beings, he has shown, vary continuously between the viable extremes of a tri-polar system; and physical and psychological measure­ments can be devised, whereby any given individual may be accurately located in relation to the three co-ordinates. Or we can put the matter differently and say that any given individual is a mixture, in varying proportions, of three physical and three closely related psychological components. 

The strength of each component can be measured according to empirically determined procedures. To the three physical components Sheldon gives the names of endomorphy 내배엽 , mesomorphy 중형  and ectomorphy 외배엽 . 

The individual with a high degree of endo-morphy is predominantly soft and rounded and may easily become grossly fat. 

The high mesomorph is hard, big-boned and strong-muscled. 

The high ectomorph is slender and has small bones and stringy, weak, unemphatic muscles. 

The endomorph has a huge gut, a gut that may be more than twice as heavy and twice as long as that of the extreme ectomorph. In a real sense his or her body is built around the digestive tract. The centrally significant fact of mesomorphic physique, on the other hand, is the powerful musculature, while that of the ectomorph is the over-sensitive and (since the ratio of body surface to mass is higher in ectomorphs than in either of the other types) relatively unprotected nervous system.

With endomorphic constitution is closely correlated a tem­peramental pattern, which Sheldon calls viscerotonia. Signifi­cant among the viscerotonic traits are love of food and, characteristically, love of eating in common; love of comfort and luxury; love of ceremoniousness; indiscriminate amia­bility and love of people as such; fear of solitude and craving for company; uninhibited expression of emotion; love of childhood, in the form of nostalgia towards one's own past and in an intense enjoyment of family life; craving for affec­tion and social support, and need of people when in trouble. The temperament that is related to mesomorphy is called somatotonia. In this the dominating traits are love of muscular activity, aggressiveness and lust for power; indifference to pain; callousness in regard to other people's feelings; a love of combat and competitiveness; a high degree of physical courage; a nostalgic feeling, not for childhood, but for youth, the period of maximum muscular power; a need for activity when in trouble.

From the foregoing descriptions it will be seen how inade­quate is the Jungian conception of extraversion, as a simple antithesis to introversion. 

Extraversion is not simple; it is of two radically different kinds. 

---

There is the emotional, sociable extraversion of the viscerotonic endomorph—the person who is always seeking company and telling everybody just what he feels.

And there is the extraversion of the big-muscled soma-totonic—the person who looks outward on the world as a place where he can exercise power, where he can bend people to his will and shape things to his heart's desire. 

One is the genial extraversion of the salesman, the Rotarian good mixer, the liberal Protestant clergyman. 

The other is the extraversion 

• of the engineer who works off his lust for power on things, 
• of the sportsman and the professional blood-and-iron soldier, 
• of the ambitious business executive and politician, 
• of the dictator, whether in the home or at the head of a state.

With cerebrotonia, the temperament that is correlated with ectomorphic physique, we leave the genial world of Pickwick, the strenuously competitive world of Hotspur, and pass into an entirely different and somewhat disquieting kind of universe —that of Hamlet and Ivan Karamazov. 

The extreme cerebrotonic is the over-alert, over-sensitive introvert, 

who is more concerned with what goes on behind his eyes—with the con­structions of thought and imagination, with the variations of feeling and consciousness—than with that external world, to which, in their different ways, the viscerotonic and the soma-totonic pay their primary attention and allegiance. 

Cerebro-tonics have little or no desire to dominate, nor do they feel the viscerotonic's indiscriminate liking for people as people; 

on the contrary they want to live and let live, and their passion for privacy is intense. 

Solitary confinement, the most terrible punishment that can be inflicted on the soft, round, genial per­son, is, for the cerebrotonic, no punishment at all. 

For him the ultimate horror is the boarding school and the barracks. 

In company cerebrotonics are nervous and shy, .tensely inhibited and unpredictably moody. (It is a significant fact that no ex­treme cerebrotonic has ever been a good actor or actress.) 

Cerebrotonics hate to slam doors or raise their voices, and suffer acutely from the unrestrained bellowing and trampling of the somatotonic. 

Their manner is restrained, and when it comes to expressing their feelings they are extremely reserved. 

The emotional gush of the viscerotonic strikes them as offen­sively shallow and even insincere, nor have they any patience with viscerotonic ceremoniousness and love of luxury and magnificence. They do not easily form habits and find it hard to adapt their lives to the routines which come so naturally to somatotonics. 

Owing to their over-sensitiveness, cerebrotonics are often extremely, almost insanely sexual; but they are hardly ever tempted to take to drink—for alcohol, which heightens the natural aggressiveness of the somatotonic and increases the relaxed amiability of the viscerotonic, merely makes them feel ill and depressed. 

Each in his own way, the viscerotonic and the somatotonic are well adapted to the world they live in; but the introverted cerebrotonic is in some sort incommensurable with the things and people and insti­tutions that surround him.

 Consequently a remarkably high proportion of extreme cerebrotonics fail to make good as normal citizens and average pillars of society. But if many fail, many also become abnormal on the higher side of the average. In universities, monasteries and research laboratories —wherever sheltered conditions are provided for those whose small guts and feeble muscles do not permit them to eat or fight their way through the ordinary rough and tumble—the percentage of outstandingly gifted and accomplished cerebro-tonics will almost always be very high. Realizing the im­portance of this extreme, over-evolved and scarcely viable type of human being, all civilizations have provided in one way or another for its protection.

---

In the light of these descriptions we can understand more clearly the Bhagavad-Gita's classification of paths to salvation.

The path of devotion is the path naturally followed by the per­son in whom the viscerotonic component is high. 

His inborn tendency to externalize the emotions he spontaneously feels in regard to persons can be disciplined and canalized, so that a merely animal gregariousness and a merely human kindliness become transformed into charity—devotion to the personal God and universal goodwill and compassion towards all sentient beings.

The path of works is for those whose extraversion is of the somatotonic kind, those who in all circumstances feel the need to 'do something.' In the unregenerate somatotonic this craving for action is always associated with aggressiveness, self-assertion and the lust for power. 

For the born Kskatrya, or warrior-ruler, the task, as Krishna explains to Arjuna, is to get rid of those fatal accompaniments to the love of action and to work without regard to the fruits of work, in a state of complete non-attachment to self. Which is, of course, like everything else, a good deal easier said than done.

Finally, there is the way of knowledge, through the modi­fication of consciousness, until it ceases to be ego-centred and ]ecomes centred in and united with the divine Ground. 

This is the way to which the extreme cerebrotonic is naturally drawn. His special discipline consists in the mortification of his innate tendency towards introversion for its own sake, towards thought and imagination and self-analysis as ends in themselves rather than as means towards the ultimate tran­scendence of phantasy and discursive reasoning in the timeless act of pure intellectual intuition.

Within the general population, as we have seen, variation is continuous, and in most people the three components are fairly evenly mixed.

Those exhibiting extreme predominance of any one component are relatively rare. And yet, in spite of their rarity, it is by the thought-patterns characteristic of these ex­treme individuals that theology and ethics, at any rate on the theoretical side, have been mainly dominated. 

The reason for this is simple. Any extreme position is more uncompromis­ingly clear and therefore more easily recognized and understood than the intermediate positions, which are the natural thought-pattern of the person in whom the constituent components of personality are evenly balanced. 

These intermediate positions, it should be noted, do not in any sense contain or reconcile the extreme positions; they are merely other thought-patterns added to the list of possible systems. The construction of an all-embracing system of metaphysics, ethics and psychology is a task that can never be accomplished by any single individual, for the sufficient reason that he is an individual with one par­ticular kind of constitution and temperament and therefore capable of knowing only according to the mode of his own being. Hence the advantages inherent in what may be called the anthological approach to truth.

The Sanskrit dharma—one of the key words in Indian formulations of the Perennial Philosophy—has two principal meanings. 

The dharma of an individual is, first of all, 1] is essential nature, the intrinsic law of his being and develop­ment. 

But dharma also signifies 2] the law of righteousness and piety. 

--

In Hinduism, dharma is the religious and moral law governing individual conduct and is one of the four ends of life. ... In Buddhism, dharma is the doctrine, the universal truth common to all individuals at all times, proclaimed by the Buddha

---

The implications of this double meaning are clear: 

a man's duty, how he ought to live, what he ought to believe and what he ought to do about his beliefs—these things are 

conditioned by his essential nature, his constitution and tem­perament. 

Going a good deal further than do the Catholics, with their doctrine of vocations, the Indians admit the right of individuals with different dharmas 

to worship different aspects or conceptions of the divine. 

Hence the almost total absence, among Hindus and Buddhists, 

of bloody persecutions, religious wars and proselytizing imperialism.

It should, however, be remarked that, within its own ecclesi­astical fold, Catholicism has been almost as tolerant as Hindu­ism and Mahayana Buddhism. 

Nominally one, each of these religions consists, in fact, of a number of very different reli­gions, covering the whole gamut of thought and behaviour from fetishism, through polytheism, through legalistic mono­theism, through devotion to the sacred humanity of the Avatar, to the profession of the Perennial Philosophy and the practice of a purely spiritual religion that seeks the unitive knowledge of the Absolute Godhead. 

These tolerated religions-within-a-religion are not, of course, regarded as equally valuable or equally true. 

To worship polytheistically maybe one's dharma; nevertheless the fact remains that man's final end is the unitive knowledge of the Godhead, and 

all the historical formulations of the Perennial Philosophy are agreed that every human being ought, and perhaps in some way or other actually will, achieve that end. 

'All souls,' writes Father Garrigou-Lagrange, 'receive a general remote call to the mystical life; and if all were faithful in avoiding, as they should, not merely mortal but venial sin, if they were, each according to his condition, docile to the Holy Ghost, and if they lived long enough, a day would come when they would receive the proximate and efficacious vocation to a high perfection and to the mystical life properly so called.

' With this statement Hindu and Buddhist theologians would probably agree; 

but they would add that every soul will in fact eventually attain this 'high perfection.' 

All are called, but in any given generation few are chosen, because few choose themselves. 

But the series of conscious existences, corporeal or incorporeal, is indefinitely long; there is therefore time and opportunity for everyone to learn the necessary lessons. Moreover, there will always be helpers. 

For periodi­cally there are 'descents' of the Godhead into physical form; and at all times there are future Buddhas ready, on the threshold of reunion with the Intelligible Light, to renounce the bliss of immediate liberation in order to return as saviours and teachers again and again into the world of suffering and time and evil, until at last every sentient being shall have been delivered into eternity.

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The practical consequences of this doctrine are clear enough. 

The lower forms of religion, whether emotional, active or intellectual, are never to be accepted as final. 

True, each of them comes naturally to persons of a certain kind of constitution and temperament; 

but the dharma or duty of any given individual is not to remain complacently fixed in the imperfect religion that happens to suit him; 

it is rather to transcend it, not by impossibly denying the modes of thought, behaviour and feeling that are natural to him, but by making use of them, so that by means of nature he may pass beyond nature. 

Thus the introvert uses "discrimination" (in the Indian phrase), and so learns to distinguish the mental activities of the ego from the principial Consciousness of the Self, which is akin to, or identical with, the divine Ground. 

The emotional extravert learns to 'hate his father and mother' (in other words, to give up his selfish attachment to the pleasures of indiscriminately loving and being loved), concentrates his devotion on the per­sonal or incarnate aspect of God, and comes at last to love the Absolute Godhead by an act, no longer of feeling, but of will illuminated by knowledge. 

And finally there is that other kind of extravert, whose concern is not with the pleasures of giving or receiving affection, but with the satisfaction of his lust for power over things, events and persons. 

Using his own nature to transcend his own nature, he must follow the path laid down in the Bhagavad-Gita for the bewildered Arjuna—the path of work without attachment to the fruits of work, the path of what St. François de Sales calls 'holy indifference,' the path that leads through the forgetting of self to the discovery of the Self.

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In the course of history it has often happened that one or other of the imperfect religions has been taken too seriously and regarded as good and true in itself, instead of as a means to the ultimate end of all religion. 

The effects of such mistakes are often disastrous. For example, many Protestant sects have insisted on the necessity, or at least the extreme desirability, of a violent conversion. 

But violent conversion, as Sheldon has pointed out, is a phenomenon confined almost exclusively to persons with a high degree of somatotonia. 

These persons are so intensely extraverted as to be quite unaware of what is hap­pening in the lower levels of their minds. If for any reason their attention comes to be turned inwards, the resulting self-knowledge, because of its novelty and strangeness, presents itself with the force and quality of a revelation and their metwwia, or change of mind, is sudden and thrilling. 

This change may be to religion, or it may be to something else for example, to psycho-analysis. To insist upon the necessity of violent conversion as the only means to salvation is about as sensible as it would be to insist upon the necessity of having a large face, heavy bones and powerful muscles. To those natujally subject to this kind of emotional upheaval, the doctrine that makes salvation dependent on conversion gives a complacency that is quite fatal to spiritual growth, while those who are incapable of it are filled with a no less fatal despair.

 Other examples of inadequate theologies based upon psycho­logical ignorance could easily be cited. 

One remembers, for instance, the sad case of Calvin, the cerebrotonic who took his own intellectual constructions so seriously that he lost all sense of reality, both human and spiritual. 

And then there is our liberal Protestantism, that predominantly viscerotonic heresy, which seems to have forgotten the very existence of the Father, Spirit and Logos and equates Christianity with an emotional attachment to Christ's humanity or (to use the currently popular phrase) 'the personality of Jesus,' worshipped idola­trously as though there were no other God. 

Even within all-comprehensive Catholicism we constantly hear complaints of the ignorant and self-centred directors, who impose upon the souls under their charge a religious dharma wholly unsuited to their nature—with results which writers such as St. John of the Cross describe as wholly pernicious. 

We see, then, that it is natural for us to think of God as possessed of the qualities which our temperament tends to make us perceive in Him; but unless nature finds a way of transcending itself by means of itself, we are lost.

 In the last analysis Philo is quite right in saying that those who do not conceive God purely and simply as the One injure, not God of course, but themselves and, along with themselves, their fellows.

The way of knowledge comes most naturally to persons whose temperament is predominantly cerebrotonic. By this I do not mean that the following of this way is easy for the cere-brotonic. His specially besetting sins are just as difficult to overcome as are the sins which beset the power-loving soma-totonic and the extreme viscerotonic with his gluttony for food and comfort and social approval.

 Rather I mean that the idea that such a way exists and can be followed (either by discrimin­ation, or through non-attached work and one-pointed devo­tion) is one which spontaneously occurs to the cerebrotonic. 

At all levels of culture he is the natural monotheist; and this natural monotheist, as Dr. Radin's examples of primitive theo­logy clearly show, is often a monotheist of the tat tvam asi, inner-light school. Persons committed by their temperament to one or other of the two kinds of extraversion are natural polytheists. 

But natural polytheists can, without much diffi­culty, be convinced of the theoretical superiority of mono­theism. The nature of human reason is such that there is an intrinsic plausibility about any hypothesis which seeks to explain the manifold in terms of unity, to reduce apparent multiplicity to essential identity. 

And from this theoretical monotheism the half-converted polytheist can, if he chooses, go on (through practices suitable to his own particular tem­perament) to the actual realization of the divine Ground of his own and all other beings. 

He can, I repeat, and sometimes he actually does. But very often he does not. There are many theoretical monotheists whose whole life and every action prove that in reality they are still what their temperament inclines them to be—polytheists, worshippers not of the one God they sometimes talk about, but of the many gods, national­istic and technological, financial and familial, to whom in practice they pay all their allegiance.

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In Christian art the Saviour has almost invariably been represented as slender, small-boned, unemphatically muscled. Large, powerful Christs are a rather shocking exception to a very ancient rule. Of Rubens' crucifixions William Blake contemptuously wrote:

I understood Christ was a carpenter

And not a brewer's servant, my good sir.

In a word, the traditional Jesus is thought of as a man of predominantly ectomorphic physique and therefore, by impli­cation, of predominantly cerebrotonic temperament. The central core of primitive Christian doctrine confirms the essen­tial correctness of the iconographic tradition.

 The religion of the Gospels is what we should expect from a cerebrotonic—not, of course, from any cerebrotonic, but from one who had used the psycho-physical peculiarities of his own nature to transcend nature, who had followed his particular dharma to its spiritual goal.

 The insistence that 

• the Kingdom of Heaven is within; 
• the ignoring of ritual; 
• the slightly contemptuous attitude towards legalism, 
• towards the ceremonial routines of organized religion, 
• towards hallowed days and places; 
• the general other-worldliness; 
• the emphasis laid upon restraint, not merely of overt action, 
• but even of desire and unexpressed intention; 
• the indifference to the splendours of material civil­ization and the love of poverty as one of the greatest of goods; 
• the doctrine that non-attachment must be carried even into the sphere of family relationships and that even devotion to the highest goals of merely human ideals, even the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, may be idolatrous distractions from the love of God

—all these are characteristically cerebrotonic ideas, such as would never have occurred spontaneously to the extraverted power lover or the equally extraverted viscerotonic.



Primitive Buddhism is no less predominantly cerebrotonic than primitive Christianity, and so is Vedanta, the metaphysi­cal discipline which lies at the heart of Hinduism. 

Confucian­ism, on the contrary, is a mainly viscerotonic system—familial, ceremonious and thoroughly this-worldly. And in Moham­medanism we find a system which incorporates strongly soma-totonic elements. Hence Islam's black record of holy wars and persecutions—a record comparable to that of later Christian­ity, after that religion had so far compromised with unregener­ate somatotonia as to call its ecclesiastical organization 'the Church Militant.'

So far as the achievement of man's final end is concerned, it is as much of a handicap to be an extreme cerebrotonic or an extreme viscerotonic as it is to be an extreme somatotonic. But whereas the cerebrotonic and the viscerotonic cannot do much harm except to themselves and those in immediate contact with them, the extreme somatotonic, with his native aggres­siveness, plays havoc with whole societies. 

From one point of view civilization may be defined as a complex of religious, legal and educational devices for preventing extreme somatotonics from doing too much mischief, and for directing their irre­pressible energies into socially desirable channels. 

Confucian­ism and Chinese culture have sought to achieve this end by inculcating filial piety, good manners and an amiably viscero-tonic epicureanism—the whole reinforced somewhat incon­gruously by the cerebrotonic spirituality and restraints of Buddhism and classical Taoism. 

In India the caste system represents an attempt to subordinate military, political and financial power to spiritual authority; and the education given to all classes still insists so strongly upon the fact that man's final end is unitive knowledge of God that even at the present time, even after nearly two hundred years of gradually acceler­ating Europeanization, successful somatotonics will, in middle life, give up wealth, position and power to end their days as humble seekers after enlightenment. 

In Catholic Europe, as in India, there was an effort to subordinate temporal power to spiritual authority; but since the Church itself exercised tem­poral power through the agency of political prelates and mitred business men, the effort was never more than partially success­ful. 

After the Reformation even the pious wish to limit temporal power by means of spiritual authority was com­pletely abandoned. Henry VIII made himself, in Stubbs's words, the Pope, the whole Pope, and something more than the Pope,' and his example has been followed by most heads of states ever since. Power has been limited only by other powers, not by an appeal to first principles as interpreted by those who are morally and spiritually qualified to know what they are talking about. 

Meanwhile, the interest in religion has everywhere declined and even among believing Christians the Perennial Philosophy has been to a great extent replaced by a metaphysic of inevitable progress and an evolving God, by a passionate concern, not with eternity, but with future time. And almost suddenly, within the last quarter of a century, there has been consummated what Sheldon calls a 'somatotonic revolution,' directed against all that is characteristically cerebro-tonic in the theory and practice of traditional Christian culture. Here are a few symptoms of this somatotonic revolution.

In traditional Christianity, as in all the great religious formu­lations of the Perennial Philosophy, it was axiomatic that contemplation is the end and purpose of action. Today the great majority even of professed Christians regard action (directed towards material and social progress) as the end, and analytic thought (there is no question any longer of integral thought, or contemplation) as the means to that end.

In traditional Christianity, as in the other formulations of the Perennial Philosophy, the secret of happiness and the way to salvation were to be sought, not in the external environment, but in the individual's state of mind with regard to the environ­ment. 

Today the all-important thing is not the state of the mind, but the state of the environment. Happiness and moral progress depend, it is thought, on bigger and better gadgets and a higher standard of living.

In traditional Christian education the stress was all on restraint; with the recent rise of the 'progressive school' it is all on activity and 'self-expression.'

Traditionally Christian good manners outlawed all expres­sions of pleasure in the satisfaction of physical appetites. 'You may love a screeching owl, but you must not love a roasted fowl'—such was the rhyme on which children were brought up in the nurseries of only fifty years ago. 

Today the young unceasingly proclaim how much they 'love' and 'adore' differ­ent kinds of food and drink; adolescents and adults talk about the 'thrills' they derive from the stimulation of their sexuality. 

The popular philosophy of life has ceased to be based on the classics of devotion and the rules of aristocratic good breeding, and is now moulded by the writers of advertising copy, whose one idea is to persuade everybody to be as extraverted and uninhibitedly greedy as possible, since of course it is only the possessive, the restless, the distracted, who spend money on the things that advertisers want to sell. 

Technological progress is in part the product of the somatotonic revolution, in part the producer and sustainer of that revolution. The extraverted attention results in technological discoveries. (Significantly enough, a high degree of material civilization has always been associated with the large-scale and officially sanctioned practice of polytheism.) 

In their turn, technological discoveries have resulted in mass-production; and mass-production, it is obvi­ous, cannot be kept going at full blast except by persuading the whole population to accept the somatotonic Weltanschauung and act accordingly.

Like technological progress, with which it is so closely associated in so many ways, modern war is at once a cause and a result of the somatotonic revolution. Nazi education, which was specifically education for war, had two principal aims: to encourage the manifestation of somatotonia in those most richly endowed with that component of personality, and to make the rest of the population feel ashamed of its relaxed amiability or its inward-looking sensitiveness and tendency towards self-restraint and tender-mindedness. 

During the war the enemies of Nazism have been compelled, of course, to borrow from the Nazis' educational philosophy. All over the world millions of young men and even of young women are being systematically educated to be 'tough' and to value 'toughness' beyond every other moral quality. 

With this system of somatotonic ethics is associated the idolatrous and polytheistic theology of nationalism—a pseudo-religion far stronger at the present time for evil and division than is Chris­tianity, or any other monotheistic religion, for unification and good. 

In the past most societies tried systematically to dis­courage somatotonia. This was a measure of self-defence; they did not want to be physically destroyed by the power-loving aggressiveness of their most active minority, and they did not want to be spiritually blinded by an excess of extra­version. 

During the last few years all this has been changed. What, we may apprehensively wonder, will be the result of the current world-wide reversal of an immemorial social policy? Time alone will show.

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somatotonic

Designating a personality type characterised as aggressive and extroverted.