{"id":3068,"date":"2013-07-13T01:45:44","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3068"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:45:44","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:44","slug":"19-religion-as-the-law-of-life-vol-25-the-human-cycle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/25-the-human-cycle\/19-religion-as-the-law-of-life-vol-25-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-19_Religion as the Law of Life.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n

\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tChapter XVII <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tReligion as the Law of Life <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tS<\/font>INCE<\/b> the infinite, the absolute and transcendent, the universal, the One is the secret summit of existence and to
\n reach the spiritual consciousness and the Divine the ultimate goal and aim of our being and therefore of the whole development of the individual and the collectivity in all its parts
\nand all its activities, reason cannot be the last and highest guide; culture, as it is understood ordinarily, cannot be the directing
\nlight or find out the regulating and harmonising principle of all our life and action. For reason stops short of the Divine and
\nonly compromises with the problems of life, and culture in order to attain the Transcendent and Infinite must become spiritual
\nculture, something much more than an intellectual, aesthetic, ethical and practical training. Where then are we to find the
\ndirecting light and the regulating and harmonising principle? The first answer which will suggest itself, the answer constantly
\ngiven by the Asiatic mind, is that we shall find it directly and immediately in religion. And this seems a reasonable and at
\nfirst sight a satisfying solution; for religion is that instinct, idea, activity, discipline in man which aims directly at the Divine,
\nwhile all the rest seem to aim at it only indirectly and reach it with difficulty after much wandering and stumbling in the
\npursuit of the outward and imperfect appearances of things. To make all life religion and to govern all activities by the religious
\nidea would seem to be the right way to the development of the ideal individual and ideal society and the lifting of the whole life
\nof man into the Divine. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA certain pre-eminence of religion, the overshadowing or at
\nleast the colouring of life, an overtopping of all the other instincts and fundamental ideas by the religious instinct and the religious
\nidea is, we may note, not peculiar to Asiatic civilisations, but has always been more or less the normal state of the human mind
\n \t\t\tand of human societies, or if not quite that, yet a notable and
\n\t\t\tprominent part of their complex tendencies, except in certain
\n\t\t\tcomparatively brief periods of their history, in one of which we
\n\t\t\tfind ourselves today and are half turning indeed to emerge from it
\n\t\t\tbut have not yet emerged.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u201317<\/font>3<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWe must suppose then that in this leading, this predominant part assigned to religion by the
\nnormal human collectivity there is some great need and truth of our natural being to which we must always after however long
\nan infidelity return. On the other hand, we must recognise the fact that in a time of great activity, of high aspiration, of deep
\nsowing, of rich fruit-bearing, such as the modern age with all its faults and errors has been, a time especially when humanity
\ngot rid of much that was cruel, evil, ignorant, dark, odious, not by the power of religion, but by the power of the awakened
\nintelligence and of human idealism and sympathy, this predominance of religion has been violently attacked and rejected by
\nthat portion of humanity which was for that time the standardbearer of thought and progress, Europe after the Renascence,
\nmodern Europe. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis revolt in its extreme form tried to destroy religion altogether, boasted indeed of having killed the religious instinct in man,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 a vain and ignorant boast, as we now see, for the
\nreligious instinct in man is most of all the one instinct in him that cannot be killed, it only changes its form. In its more moderate movements the revolt put religion aside into a corner of the soul by itself and banished its intermiscence in the intellectual, aesthetic, practical life and even in the ethical; and it did this on the ground that the intermiscence of religion in science,
\nthought, politics, society, life in general had been and must be a force for retardation, superstition, oppressive ignorance. The
\nreligionist may say that this accusation was an error and an atheistic perversity, or he may say that a religious retardation, a
\npious ignorance, a contented static condition or even an orderly stagnation full of holy thoughts of the Beyond is much better
\nthan a continuous endeavour after greater knowledge, greater mastery, more happiness, joy, light upon this transient earth.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 174 <\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut the catholic thinker cannot accept such a plea; he is obliged to
\nsee that so long as man has not realised the divine and the ideal in his life, \u2014 and it may well be even when he has realised it, since
\nthe divine is the infinite, \u2014 progress and not unmoving status is the necessary and desirable law of his life,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 not indeed any
\nbreathless rush after novelties, but a constant motion towards a greater and greater truth of the spirit, the thought and the life not
\nonly in the individual, but in the collectivity, in the communal endeavour, in the turn, ideals, temperament, make of the society,
\nin its strivings towards perfection. And he is obliged too to see that the indictment against religion, not in its conclusion, but
\nin its premiss had something, had even much to justify it, \u2014 not that religion in itself must be, but that historically and as
\na matter of fact the accredited religions and their hierarchs and exponents have too often been a force for retardation, have too
\noften thrown their weight on the side of darkness, oppression and ignorance, and that it has needed a denial, a revolt of the
\noppressed human mind and heart to correct these errors and set religion right. And why should this have been if religion is the
\ntrue and sufficient guide and regulator of all human activities and the whole of human life? <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWe need not follow the rationalistic or atheistic mind through all its aggressive indictment of religion. We need not
\nfor instance lay a too excessive stress on the superstitions, aberrations, violences,
\n\t\t\tcrimes even, which Churches and cults and creeds have favoured,
\n\t\t\tadmitted, sanctioned, supported or exploited for their own benefit,
\n\t\t\tthe mere hostile enumeration of which might lead one to echo the cry
\n\t\t\tof the atheistic Roman poet, "To such a mass of ills could religion
\n\t\t\tpersuade mankind." As well might one cite the crimes and errors
\n\t\t\twhich have been committed in the name of liberty or of order as a
\n\t\t\tsufficient condemnation of the ideal of liberty or the ideal of
\n\t\t\tsocial order. But we have to note the fact that such a thing was
\n\t\t\tpossible and to find its explanation. We cannot ignore for instance
\n\t\t\tthe bloodstained and fiery track which formal external Christianity
\n\t\t\thas left furrowed across the mediaeval history of Europe almost from
\n\t\t\tthe days of Constantine, its first hour of secular triumph, down to
\n\t\t\tvery recent times, or the sanguinary comment which such an
\n\t\t\tinstitution as the Inquisition affords on the claim of religion to
\n\t\t\tbe the directing light and regulating power in ethics and society,
\n\t\t\tor religious wars and wide-spread State persecutions on its claim to
\n\t\t\tguide the political life of mankind. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013175<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut we must
\nobserve the root of this evil, which is not in true religion itself, but in its infrarational parts, not in spiritual faith and aspiration, but in our ignorant human confusion of religion with a particular creed, sect, cult, religious society or Church. So strong
\nis the human tendency to this error that even the old tolerant Paganism slew Socrates in the name of religion and morality,
\nfeebly persecuted non-national faiths like the cult of Isis or the cult of Mithra and more vigorously what it conceived to be
\nthe subversive and anti-social religion of the early Christians; and even in still more fundamentally tolerant Hinduism with
\nall its spiritual broadness and enlightenment it led at one time to the milder mutual hatred and occasional though brief-lived
\npersecution of Buddhist, Jain, Shaiva, Vaishnava. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe whole root of the historic insufficiency of religion as
\na guide and control of human society lies there. Churches and creeds have, for example, stood violently in the way of philosophy and science, burned a Giordano Bruno, imprisoned a Galileo, and so generally misconducted themselves in this matter
\nthat philosophy and science had in self-defence to turn upon Religion and rend her to pieces in order to get a free field for their
\nlegitimate development; and this because men in the passion and darkness of their vital nature had chosen to think that religion
\nwas bound up with certain fixed intellectual conceptions about God and the world which could not stand scrutiny, and therefore
\nscrutiny had to be put down by fire and sword; scientific and philosophical truth had to be denied in order that religious error
\nmight survive. We see too that a narrow religious spirit often oppresses and impoverishes the joy and beauty of life, either
\nfrom an intolerant asceticism or, as the Puritans attempted it, because they could not see that religious austerity is not the
\nwhole of religion, though it may be an important side of it, is not the sole ethico-religious approach to God, since love, charity,
\ngentleness, tolerance, kindliness are also and even more divine,   <\/p>\n

\nand they forgot or never knew that God is love and beauty as well as purity. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 176 <\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn politics religion has often thrown itself on
\nthe side of power and resisted the coming of larger political ideals, because it was itself, in the form of a Church, supported
\nby power and because it confused religion with the Church, or because it stood for a false theocracy, forgetting that true
\ntheocracy is the kingdom of God in man and not the kingdom of a Pope, a priesthood or a sacerdotal class. So too it has often
\nsupported a rigid and outworn social system, because it thought its own life bound up with social forms with which it happened
\nto have been associated during a long portion of its own history and erroneously concluded that even a necessary change there
\nwould be a violation of religion and a danger to its existence. As if so mighty and inward a power as the religious spirit in man
\ncould be destroyed by anything so small as the change of a social form or so outward as a social readjustment! This error in its
\nmany shapes has been the great weakness of religion as practised in the past and the opportunity and justification for the revolt
\nof the intelligence, the aesthetic sense, the social and political idealism, even the ethical spirit of the human being against what
\nshould have been its own highest tendency and law. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHere then lies one secret of the divergence between the ancient and the modern, the Eastern and Western ideal, and here also one clue to their reconciliation. Both rest upon a certain
\nstrong justification and their quarrel is due to a misunderstanding. It is true in a sense that religion should be the dominant
\nthing in life, its light and law, but religion as it should be and is in its inner nature, its fundamental law of being, a seeking after
\nGod, the cult of spirituality, the opening of the deepest life of the soul to the indwelling Godhead, the eternal Omnipresence. On
\nthe other hand, it is true that religion when it identifies itself only with a creed, a cult, a Church, a system of ceremonial forms,
\nmay well become a retarding force and there may therefore arise a necessity for the human spirit to reject its control over
\nthe varied activities of life. There are two aspects of religion, true religion and religionism. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013177<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tTrue religion is spiritual religion, that which seeks to live in the
\n\t\t\tspirit, in what is beyond the
\nintellect, beyond the aesthetic and ethical and practical being of man, and to inform and govern these members of our being
\nby the higher light and law of the spirit. Religionism, on the contrary, entrenches itself in some narrow pietistic exaltation of
\nthe lower members or lays exclusive stress on intellectual dogmas, forms and ceremonies, on some fixed and rigid moral code,
\non some religio-political or religio-social system. Not that these things are altogether negligible or that they must be unworthy
\nor unnecessary or that a spiritual religion need disdain the aid of forms, ceremonies, creeds or systems. On the contrary, they are
\nneeded by man because the lower members have to be exalted and raised before they can be fully spiritualised, before they can
\ndirectly feel the spirit and obey its law. An intellectual formula is often needed by the thinking and reasoning mind, a form or
\nceremony by the aesthetic temperament or other parts of the infrarational being, a set moral code by man’s vital nature in
\ntheir turn towards the inner life. But these things are aids and supports, not the essence; precisely because they belong to the
\nrational and infrarational parts, they can be nothing more and, if too blindly insisted on, may even hamper the suprarational
\nlight. Such as they are, they have to be offered to man and used by him, but not to be imposed on him as his sole law by a
\nforced and inflexible domination. In the use of them toleration and free permission of variation is the first rule which should be
\nobserved. The spiritual essence of religion is alone the one thing supremely needful, the thing to which we have always to hold
\nand subordinate to it every other element or motive. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut here comes in an ambiguity which brings in a deeper
\nsource of divergence. For by spirituality religion seems often to mean something remote from earthly life, different from it,
\nhostile to it. It seems to condemn the pursuit of earthly aims as a trend opposed to the turn to a spiritual life and the hopes
\nof man on earth as an illusion or a vanity incompatible with the hope of man in heaven. The spirit then becomes something
\naloof which man can only reach by throwing away the life of his lower members. Either he must abandon this nether life after a
\ncertain point, when it has served its purpose, or must persistently
\ndiscourage, mortify and kill it.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 178 <\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIf that be the true sense of religion, then obviously religion has no positive message for human
\nsociety in the proper field of social effort, hope and aspiration or for the individual in any of the lower members of his being.
\nFor each principle of our nature seeks naturally for perfection in its own sphere and, if it is to obey a higher power, it must
\nbe because that power gives it a greater perfection and a fuller satisfaction even in its own field. But if perfectibility is denied
\nto it and therefore the aspiration to perfection taken away by the spiritual urge, then it must either lose faith in itself and
\nthe power to pursue the natural expansion of its energies and activities or it must reject the call of the spirit in order to follow
\nits own bend and law, dharma<\/i>. This quarrel between earth and heaven, between the spirit and its members becomes still more
\nsterilising if spirituality takes the form of a religion of sorrow and suffering and austere mortification and the gospel of the vanity
\nof things; in its exaggeration it leads to such nightmares of the soul as that terrible gloom and hopelessness of the Middle Ages
\nin their worst moment when the one hope of mankind seemed to be in the approaching and expected end of the world, an
\ninevitable and desirable Pralaya. But even in less pronounced and intolerant forms of this pessimistic attitude with regard to
\nthe world, it becomes a force for the discouragement of life and cannot, therefore, be a true law and guide for life. All pessimism
\nis to that extent a denial of the Spirit, of its fullness and power, an impatience with the ways of God in the world, an insufficient
\nfaith in the divine Wisdom and Will that created the world and for ever guide it. It admits a wrong notion about that supreme
\nWisdom and Power and therefore cannot itself be the supreme wisdom and power of the spirit to which the world can look
\nfor guidance and for the uplifting of its whole life towards the Divine. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Western recoil from religion, that minimising of its claim and insistence by which Europe progressed from the
\nmediaeval religious attitude through the Renascence and the Reformation to the modern rationalistic attitude, that making
\nof the ordinary earthly life our one preoccupation, that labour to fulfil
\n\t\t\tourselves by the law of the lower members, divorced from all
\n\t\t\tspiritual seeking, was an opposite error, the contrary ignorant
\n\t\t\textreme, the blind swing of the pendulum from a wrong affirmation to
\n\t\t\ta wrong negation.  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013179<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt is an error because
\nperfection cannot be found in such a limitation and restriction; for it denies the complete law of human existence, its deepest
\nurge, its most secret impulse. Only by the light and power of the highest can the lower be perfectly guided, uplifted and
\naccomplished. The lower life of man is in form undivine, though in it there is the secret of the divine, and it can only be divinised
\nby finding the higher law and the spiritual illumination. On the other hand, the impatience which condemns or despairs of life
\nor discourages its growth because it is at present undivine and is not in harmony with the spiritual life, is an equal ignorance,
\n˙<\/i> andham tamah<\/i>. The world-shunning monk, the mere ascetic
\n.<\/i> may indeed well find by this turn his own individual and
\npeculiar salvation, the spiritual recompense of his renunciation and Tapasya, as the materialist may find by his own exclusive
\nmethod the appropriate rewards of his energy and concentrated seeking; but neither can be the true guide of mankind and its
\nlaw-giver. The monastic attitude implies a fear, an aversion, a distrust of life and its aspirations, and one cannot wisely guide
\nthat with which one is entirely out of sympathy, that which one wishes to minimise and discourage. The sheer ascetic spirit, if
\nit directed life and human society, could only prepare it to be a means for denying itself and getting away from its own motives.
\nAn ascetic guidance might tolerate the lower activities, but only with a view to persuade them in the end to minimise and finally
\ncease from their own action. But a spirituality which draws back from life to envelop it without being dominated by it does not
\nlabour under this disability. The spiritual man who can guide human life towards its perfection is typified in the ancient Indian
\nidea of the Rishi, one who has lived fully the life of man and found the word of the supra-intellectual, supramental, spiritual
\ntruth. He has risen above these lower limitations and can view all things from above, but also he is in sympathy with their
\neffort and can view them from within; he has the complete inner
\nknowledge and the higher surpassing knowledge.  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 180 <\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t Therefore he can guide the world humanly as God guides it divinely, because
\nlike the Divine he is in the life of the world and yet above it. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn spirituality, then, understood in this sense, we must seek
\nfor the directing light and the harmonising law, and in religion only in proportion as it identifies itself with this spirituality.
\nSo long as it falls short of this, it is one human activity and power among others, and, even if it be considered the most
\nimportant and the most powerful, it cannot wholly guide the others. If it seeks always to fix them into the limits of a creed,
\nan unchangeable law, a particular system, it must be prepared to see them revolting from its control; for although they may
\naccept this impress for a time and greatly profit by it, in the end they must move by the law of their being towards a freer activity
\nand an untrammelled movement. Spirituality respects the freedom of the human soul, because it is itself fulfilled by freedom;
\nand the deepest meaning of freedom is the power to expand and grow towards perfection by the law of one’s own nature,
\ndharma<\/i>. This liberty it will give to all the fundamental parts of our being. It will give that freedom to philosophy and science
\nwhich ancient Indian religion gave, \u2014 freedom even to deny the spirit, if they will,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 as a result of which philosophy and science
\nnever felt in ancient India any necessity of divorcing themselves from religion, but grew rather into it and under its light. It will
\ngive the same freedom to man’s seeking for political and social perfection and to all his other powers and aspirations. Only it
\nwill be vigilant to illuminate them so that they may grow into the light and law of the spirit, not by suppression and restriction,
\nbut by a self-searching, self-controlled expansion and a manysided finding of their greatest, highest and deepest potentialities.
\nFor all these are potentialities of the spirit.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013181<\/font><\/p>\n

\t\t\t<\/font> <\/span> <\/p>\n

\t\t\t
\n\t<\/font> <\/font>\n\t\t\t<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chapter XVII   Religion as the Law of Life   SINCE the infinite, the absolute and transcendent, the universal, the One is the secret summit…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-25-the-human-cycle","wpcat-58-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3068\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}