Again, belief in the otherness of God entails belief that grace alone is effective in procuring salvation and that works and a systematic cultivation of the inner life are useless. There is nothing fortuitous in the fact that the first and most ruthless capitalists were men brought up in the tradition of Calvinism. Believing that good works and the inner life were without any eternal significance, they gave up charity and self-education and turned all their attention to getting on in the world. Borrowing from the Old Testament the sordid doctrine that virtue deserves a material reward, they were able to amass wealth and oppress the poor with a thoroughly good conscience; their wealth, they were convinced, was a sign of God’s favour, the other fellow’s poverty, of moral turpitude.
It would be possible to multiply such instances of the disastrous practical effects of wrong metaphysical beliefs. ‘All that we are,’ writes the author of the Dhammapada, ‘is the result of what we have thought.’ If we think wrongly, our being and our actions will be unsatisfactory. Thus, the Aztecs believed that the sun was a living person who required for his food the blood of human victims. If the blood were not provided in sufficient quantities, the sun would die and all life on the earth would come to an end. Therefore the Aztecs had to devote a great part of their energy to making war in order that they might have enough prisoners to satisfy the sun’s appetite.
Another case. In the basement of the London Museum there hangs a broadsheet describing the trial in the late eighteen-thirties of two men who had been accused of homosexual practices. Condemning them, the judge pointed out that, by their crime, these two men were gravely endangering their country. Sodom had been destroyed because of sodomy. There was every reason to suppose that, if homosexuality were allowed to flourish there, London would suffer the same fate. It followed therefore that the two delinquents richly deserved their death. Accordingly it was ordered that they should be hanged—on a different scaffold from that on which the other criminals were executed, lest by their presence they should somehow contaminate the relatively innocent murderers, coiners and housebreakers condemned at the same assize.
Yet another instance. Hitlerian theology affirms that there is a Nordic race, inherently superior to all others. Hence it is right that Nordics should organize themselves for conquest and should do their best to exterminate people like the Jews, who are members of inferior races.
It is worth remarking that, in all these cases, the presiding deity was personal. For the Aztecs the sun was a person, capable of feeling hunger for blood. The God, who, it was feared, would destroy London because of the sexual eccentricities of its male inhabitants, was the all-too-personal God of the Old Testament. Hitler’s God is a rejuvenated version of the Kaiser’s ‘old German God’—a divine person deeply concerned in the fate of Bismarck’s empire and ready to fight on the side of its armies, as Athena fought on the side of the Greeks. Theological beliefs leading to undesirable conduct need not necessarily be associated with the dogma of the personality of God. But as a matter of historical fact, the more eccentric theological errors have very often been associated with a belief in God’s personality. This is only natural. A person has passions and caprices; and it is therefore natural that he should do odd things—clamour for the hearts of sacrificial victims, demand the persecution of the Jews, threaten destruction to whole cities because a few of their inhabitants happen to be homosexuals.
The dangers of bhakti-marga are manifest; but unfortunately the fact that its results are often pernicious does nothing to lessen its attractiveness to human beings of a certain psychological type. Many people enjoy the actual process of bhakti-marga too much to be able to pay any attention to its effects on themselves and on society at large. History shows that, where the emotional method has once taken root, it tends to remain in possession of the field.
I have already mentioned the Bhagavata reformation which so profoundly changed the nature of Indian religion during the Middle Ages. To this day bhakti-marga retains the popularity it won between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. Japanese Buddhism, as readers of The Tale of Genji will recall, had become in Lady Murasaki’s day (at the beginning of the eleventh century) predominantly a religion of personal devotion. ‘The Indian founder of Buddhism,’ to quote Professor Geden, ‘was hardly more than a figure and a name.’ Sakyamuni’s religion, a combination of karma-marga with jñana-marga, had been replaced by bhakti-marga directed towards Amida Buddha. ‘A reform movement was initiated in Japan in the thirteenth century, the object of which was to reinstate Sakyamuni in the supreme place. It proved, however, an entire failure.’ The way of devotion seemed more agreeable to the Japanese than the ways of knowledge and duty.
In Christianity bhakti towards a personal being has always been the most popular form of religious practice. Up to the time of the Counter-Reformation, however, the way of knowledge (‘mystical theology’ as it is called in Christian language) was accorded an honourable place beside the way of devotion. From the middle of the sixteenth century onwards the way of knowledge came to be neglected and even condemned. We are told by Dom John Chapman that ‘Mercurian, who was general of the society (of Jesus) from 1573 to 1580, forbade the use of the works of Tauler, Ruysbroeck, Suso, Harphius, St. Gertrude, and St Mechtilde.’ Every effort was made by the Counter-Reformers to heighten the worshipper’s devotion to a personal divinity. The literary content of baroque art is hysterical, almost epileptic, in the violence of its emotionality.
It even becomes necessary to call in physiology as an aid to feeling. The ecstasies of the saints are represented by seventeenth-century artists as being frankly sexual. Seventeenth-century drapery writhes like so much tripe. In the equivocal personage of Margaret Mary Alacocque, seventeenth-century piety pores over a bleeding and palpitating heart. From this orgy of emotionalism and sensationalism Catholic Christianity seems never completely to have recovered.
The significance of bhakti in its relation to cosmological belief is discussed in the next chapter. Our business here is only with its psychological and social aspects. Its results, as we have already seen, are generally good up to a certain point, but bad beyond that point. Nevertheless, bhakti is so enjoyable, especially to people of viscerotonic habit, that it is bound to survive. In our own day a majority of Europeans find it intellectually impossible to pay devotion to the supernatural persons who were the objects of worship during the Counter-Reformation period. But the desire to worship persists, the process of worshipping still retains its attraction. The masses continue to tread the path of devotion; but the objects of this bhakti are no longer saints and a personal God; they are the personified nation or class, and the deified Leader. The change is wholly for the worse.
It is clear that, given the existence of viscerotonic and somatotonic types, religious practices of the emotional and physiological kind will always be popular. Physiological practices can adapt themselves to almost any sort of belief. The emotional method, on the other hand, inevitably imposes upon those who practise it a personalistic theology. Those who enjoy bhakti can never be persuaded to give up their pleasurable practices and the belief correlated with them. In these circumstances, what is the rational idealist to do? So far as I can see, he has two main tasks. He must do his best to advertise the fact that the physiological and the emotional are not the only methods of religious self-education, and especially that there is an alternative to bhakti and the almost certainly false beliefs with which bhakti is always associated.
Owing to the disparagement during recent centuries of mystical theology, or the way of knowledge, many religiously minded Europeans are not even aware that an alternative to bhakti exists. The existence of that alternative must be proclaimed and its practical uses and cosmological implications set forth. The second task before the rational idealist is the harder of the two. Accepting as inevitable the continued existence of a large residuum of practisers of bhakti-marga, he will have to do all in his power to turn this irrepressible stream of bhakti into the channels in which it will do the least mischief. For example, it is manifest that bhakti directed towards deified leaders and personified nations, classes or parties must result in evil, not only for society, but ultimately (whatever the immediate good effects in regard to the minor virtues) for the individual as well.
To repeat this obvious fact in and out of season is perhaps the most wearisome but also the most necessary of the tasks which the rational idealist must undertake. Towards the transcendental religions his attitude should be discriminatingly critical. The point that he must always remember and of which he must remind the world is that, whenever God is thought of, in Aristotle’s phrase, as the commander-in-chief
