“The idea of God is the productive and conservative principle
of civilisation; as is the religion of a community, so will be
in the main its morals, its laws, its general history.”
Vico and Michelet (Prof. Flint’s Philosophy of History).
In some measure, then, we understand how Hindu polytheism, theism, and pantheism are related to each other; we realise in some measure the openness of the Indian mind, and we now ask ourselves how far the Christian doctrine of God has impressed itself upon that open mind. Of the polytheistic masses it has already been pointed out that intelligent individuals will now readily acknowledge that there is truly one God only. Further, that the polytheistic idolatry which is now associated with the masses once extended far higher up the scale, is evident to anyone reading the observations made early in the nineteenth century. Early travellers in India, like the French traveller Tavernier of the seventeenth century, speak of the Indians without distinction as idolaters, contrasting them with the Mahomedans of India. In the Calcutta Gazette of 1816, Raja Rammohan Roy, the learned opponent of Hindu idolatry, the Erasmus of the new era, is called the of theism in the sacred books of the Hindus. Rammohan Roy himself disclaimed the title, but writing in 1817, he speaks of “the system of idolatry into which Hindus are now completely sunk.” [71] Many learned brahmans, he says in the same pamphlet, are perfectly aware of the absurdity of idol worship, indicating that the knowledge belonged only to the scholars. His own object, he said, was to declare the unity of God as the real thought of the Hindu Scriptures. Across India, on the Bombay side, we find clear evidence of the state of opinion among the middle class in 1830, from the report of a public debate on the Christian and Hindu religions. The antagonists were, on the one side, the Scottish missionary Dr. John Wilson and others, and on the other side two leading officials of the highest Government Appellate Court, men who would now rank as eminent representatives of the educated class. One of these demanded proof that there was only one God. [72]
Returning to Bengal, it would seem from Rammohan Roy’s evidence that in 1820 the standpoint of the learned at that time was exactly what we have called the standpoint of an intelligent individual among the masses to-day, namely, a plea that the multitude of gods were agents of the one Supreme God. “Debased and despicable,” he writes, “as is the belief of the Hindus in three hundred and thirty millions of gods, they (the learned) pretend to reconcile this persuasion with the doctrine of the unity of God, alleging that the three hundred and thirty millions of gods are subordinate agents assuming various offices and preserving the harmony of the universe under one Godhead, as innumerable rays issue from one sun.” [73] Turning to testimony of a different kind, we find Macaulay speaking about the polytheistic idolatry he knew between 1834 and 1838. “The great majority of the population,” he writes, “consists of idolaters.” Macaulay’s belief was that idolatry would not survive many years of English education, and we shall now take note how in the century the sphere of idolatry and polytheism has been limited. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, we may now say that Indian Hindu society consisted of a vast polytheistic mass with a very thin, an often invisible, film of pantheists on the top. The nineteenth century of enlightenment and contact with Christianity has seen the wide acceptance of the monotheistic conception by the new-educated India. The founding of the Brāhma Samāj or Theistic Association in 1828 by Rammohan Roy has already been called the commencement of an indigenous theistic church outside the transplanted theism of Indian Christianity and Indian Mahomedanism. Strictly rendered, the divine name Brahmā, adopted by the Brāhmas, expresses the pantheistic idea that God is the One without a second, not the theistic idea of one personal God; but what we are concerned with is, that it was in the monotheistic sense that Rammohan Roy adopted the term. To him Brahmā was a personal God, with whom men spoke in prayer and praise. As a matter of fact the pantheistic formula, “One only, no second,” occurs in the creeds of all three new monotheistic bodies, Brāhmas, Prārthanā Samājists, and Āryas, but in the same monotheistic sense. The original Sanscrit of the formula (Ekam eva advityam), three words from the Chhāndogya Upanishad, is regularly intoned (droned) in the public worship of Brāhmas. Like a wedge between the polytheism of the masses below and the pantheism of the brahmanically educated above, there came in this naturalised theism, a body of opinion ever widening as modern education enlarges its domain. It is one of the events of Indian history. Now, pantheistic in argument and polytheistic in domestic practices as educated Hindus still are, they never call themselves pantheists, and would resent being called polytheists; they call themselves theists. “Every intelligent man is now a monotheist,” writes the late Dr. John Murdoch of Madras, an experienced observer. [74] “Many” (of the educated Hindus), says a Hindu writer, “—I may say most of them—are in reality monotheists, but monotheists of a different type from those who belong to the Brāhma Samāj. They are, if we may so call them, passive monotheists…. The influence of the Hindu environment is as much perceptible in them as that of the Christian environment.” [75] Professor Max Müller and Sir M. Monier Williams are of the same opinion. “The educated classes look with contempt upon idolatry…. A complete disintegration of ancient faiths is in progress in the upper strata of society. Most of the ablest thinkers become pure Theists or Unitarians.” [76] That change took place within the nineteenth century, a testimony to the force of Christian theism in building up belief, and to the power of the modern Indian atmosphere to dissipate irrational and unpractical beliefs. For, in contact with the practical instincts of Europe, the pantheistic denial of one’s own personality—a disbelief in one’s own consciousness, the thought that there is no thinker—was bound to give way, as well as the irrational polytheism. Very unphilosophical may have been Lord Byron’s attitude to the idealism of Berkeley: “When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter, ‘twas no matter what he said.” But that represents the modern atmosphere which New India is breathing, and it is fatal to pantheism.
It is interesting to note how monotheism spread. The Brāhma Samāj of Madras was founded in 1864, theistic like the mother society, the Brāhma Samāj of Bengal. Three years later the first of similar bodies on the west side of India was founded, the Prārthanā Samājes or Prayer Associations of Bombay. Their very name, the Prayer Associations, implies the dual conception of God and Man, for the pantheistic conception does not admit of the idea of prayer any more than it admits of the other dualistic conceptions of revelation, of worship, and of sin. These movements, again, were followed in the United Provinces and the North-West of India by the founding of the Ārya Samāj, or, as I have called it, the Vedic Theistic Association, also professedly theistic. Polytheism and pantheism alike, the Āryas repudiate. For the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon, the founder of the Āryas declared there was no recognition in the Vedas. Demonstrable or not, that is the Ārya position. The rejection of pantheism by such a body is noteworthy, for pantheism is identified with India and the Vedanta, the most widely accepted of the six systems of Indian philosophy, and the Ārya Samāj is nothing if not patriotic. It is above all pro-Indian and pro-Vedic. Their direct repudiation of pantheism may not be apparent to Western minds. Āryas predicate three eternal entities, God, the Soul, and Matter, [77] and this declaration of the reality of the soul and of matter is a direct denial of the pantheistic conception, its very antithesis. One pantheistic formula is: “Brahma is reality, the world unreality” (Brahma satyam, jagan mithyā). The Pantheist must declare, and does declare in his doctrine of Maya or Delusion, that the soul and matter are illusions.
A very striking illustration of the present insufficiency of the pantheistic conception of God and of the movement of educated India towards theism is to be found where one would least expect it—in connection with the Hindu Revival. In 1903 an Advanced Text-book of Hindu Religion and Ethics was published by the Board of Trustees of the Hindu College, Benares, a body representing the movement for a revival of Hinduism. It was a heroic undertaking to reconcile, in the one Text-book, Vedic, philosophic, and popular Hinduism, to harmonise all the six schools of philosophy, to embrace all the aspects of modern Hinduism, and lastly to satisfy the monotheistic opinions of modern enlightened Hindus.
To appreciate the testimony of the Text-book, we must enter more fully into the orthodox Hindu theological position. Pantheism, or the doctrine that God is all and all is God—what does it imply? Pantheism is a theory of creation, that God is all, that there are in truth no creatures, but only unreal phantasies appearing to darkened human minds, because darkened and half-blind. As such, its nearest Christian analogue would be the thought that in every phenomenon we have God’s fiat and God’s reason, and that “in Him we live and move and have our being.” Pantheism is a theory of spiritual culture, that our individuality is ours only to merge it in His, although on this line, the Christian soon parts company with the Indian pantheistic devotee, who seeks to merge his consciousness in God, not to train himself into active sonship. Pantheism is a theory of God’s omnipresence, and may be little more than enthusiastic feeling of God’s omnipresence, such as we have in the 139th psalm, “Whither shall I go from Thy presence? and whither shall I flee from Thy spirit?” That Oriental mysticism and loyalty to an idea we can allow for. It is in that aspect that pantheism is in closest contact with the belief of the new educated Hindu. But in brahmanical philosophy, pantheism is nothing else than the inability to pass beyond the initial idea of infinite preexistent, unconditioned, Deity. To the pantheist, let us remember, there is Deity, but there are no real deities; there is a Godhead, but there are no real persons in the Godhead. In the view of the pantheist, when we see aught else divine or human than this all-embracing Deity or Godhead, it is only a self-created mist of the dim human eye, in which there play the flickering phantasms of deities and human individuals and things. “In the Absolute, there is no thou, nor I, nor God,” said Ramkrishna, a great Hindu saint who died in 1886. [78] In Hindu phraseology, every conception other than this all-comprehending Deity is Maya or delusion, and salvation is “saving knowledge” of the delusion, and therefore deliverance from it. The perception of manifoldness is Maya or illusion, says a modern pro-Hindu writer. And again, “To India, all that exists is but a mighty curtain of appearances, tremulous now and again with breaths from the unseen that it conceals.” [79]
The doctrine of Maya is, of course, a postulate, a necessity of Pantheism. Brahma is the name of the impersonal pantheistic deity. First among the unrealities, the outcome of Maya or Illusion or Ignorance, is the idea of a supreme personal God, Parameswar, from whom, or in whom, next come the three great personal deities, namely, the Hindu Triad, Brahmā (not Brahma), Vishnu, and Siva,—Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer respectively. These and all the other deities are the product of Maya, and thus belong to the realm of unreality along with Parameswar. [80] Popular theology, on the other hand, begins with the three great personal deities.
Now come we again to the Text-book. Rightly, as scholars would agree, it describes the predominant philosophy of Hinduism as pantheistic. The Text-book, however, goes farther, and declares all the six systems of Hindu philosophy to be parts of one pantheistic system. [81] The word pantheism, I ought to say, does not occur in the Text-book. But here is its teaching. “All six systems,” we are told, “are designed to lead man to the One Science, the One Wisdom which saw One Self Real and all else as Unreal.” And again, “Man learns to climb from the idea of himself as separate from Brahma to the thought that he is a part of Brahma that can unite with Him, and finally [to the thought] that he is and ever has been Brahma, veiled from himself by Avidyā” (that is, Ignorance or Maya). Our point is that the Text-book of Hindu Religion is professedly pantheistic, and the above is clearly pantheism and its postulate Maya. But in the final exposition of this pantheism, what do we find? To meet the modern thought of educated India, the pantheism is virtually given up. [82] Brahma, the One and the All, becomes simply the Deity Unmanifested; who shone forth to men as the Deity Manifested, Parameswar; of whom the Hindu Triad, Brahmā and Vishnu and Siva, are only three names. Maya or Delusion, the foundation postulate of pantheism, by which things seem to be,—by which the One seems to be many,—is identified with the creative will of Parameswar. In fact, Pantheism has been virtually transformed into Theism, Brahma into a Creator, and Maya into his creative and sustaining fiat. The Text-book of the Hindu Religion is finally monotheistic, as the times will have it.
As further confirmation of the change in the Indian mind, we may cite the paper read at the Congress on the History of Religions, Basel, 1904, by the Deputy High-priest of the Parsees, Bombay. The dualism of the Zoroastrian theology has hitherto been regarded as its distinctive feature, but the paper sought to show “that the religion of the Parsees was largely monotheistic, not dualistic.”
The theistic standpoint of the younger members of the educated class of to-day is easily discoverable. The word God used in their English compositions or speeches, plainly implies a person. The commonplace of the anxious student is that the pass desired, the failure feared, is dependent upon the will of God—language manifestly not pantheistic. Religious expressions, we may remark, are natural to a Hindu.
In the new theism of educated Indians we may note that the conception of the deity as female is practically gone. Not so among the masses, particularly of the provinces of Bengal and Gujerat, the provinces distinctively of goddesses. The sight of a man in Calcutta in the first hour of his sore bereavement calling upon Mother Kali has left a deep impression upon me. [83] Be it remembered, however, what his cry meant, and what the name Mother in such cases means. It is a honorific form of address, not the symbol for devoted love. The goddesses of India, not the gods, are the deities to be particularly feared and to be propitiated with blood. It is energy, often destructive energy, not woman’s tenderness that they represent, even according to Hindu philosophy and modern rationalisers. We may nevertheless well believe that contact with Christian ideas will yet soften and sweeten this title of the goddesses.
The new theism of educated India is more and more emphatically Christian theism. Anyone may observe that the name, other than “God,” by which the Deity is almost universally named by educated Hindus is “The Father,” or “Our Heavenly Father,” or some such name. The new name is not a rendering of any of the vernacular names in use in modern India; it is due directly to its use in English literature and in Christian preaching and teaching. The late Keshub Chunder Sen’s Lectures in India, addressed to Hindu audiences, abound in the use of the name. The fatherhood of God is in fact one of the articles of the Brāhma creed. In his last years, the Brahma leader, Keshub Chunder Sen, frequently spoke of God as the divine Mother, but we are not to suppose that it expresses a radical change of thought about God. Keshub Chunder Sen’s last recorded prayer begins: “I have come, O Mother, into thy sanctuary”; his last, almost inarticulate, cries were: “Father,” “Mother.” Where modern Indian religious teachers address God as Mother, it is a modernism, an echo of the thought of the Fatherhood of God. The name is altered because the name of Mother better suits the ecstasies of Indian devotion, where the ecstatic mood is cultivated. A case in point is the Hindu devotee, Ramkrishna Paramhansa, who died near Calcutta in 1886. “Why,” Ramkrishna Paramhansa asks, “does the God-lover find such pleasure in addressing the Deity as Mother? Because,” his answer is, “the child is more free with its mother, and consequently she is dearer to the child than anyone else. [84] Another instance we find in the appeal issued by a committee of Hindu gentlemen for subscriptions towards the rebuilding of the temple at Kangra, destroyed by the earthquake of 1905. The president of the committee, signing the appeal, was a Hindu judge of the High Court at Lahore, a graduate from a Mission College. “There are Hindus,” thus runs the appeal, “who by the grace of the Divine Mother could give the [whole] amount … and not feel the poorer for it.” [85]
The Ārya Samāj, on the other hand, seems set against speaking or thinking of God as the Father. Specially present to their minds and in their preaching is the thought of God’s absolute justice; and they hold that His Justice and His Fatherhood are contradictory attributes. Virtue will have its reward, they assert, and Sin its punishment, both in this and the following existences. We recognise the working of their doctrine of transmigration, perhaps also the effect of a feeble presentation of the Christian doctrine of the Father’s forgiveness of sin. Nevertheless, we may note in a hymn-book published in London for the use of members of the Ārya Samāj resident there, such hymns as “My God and Father, while I stray,” and “My God, my Father, blissful name,” as if the name were not explicitly excluded. We also read that the very last parting words of the founder of the Āryas himself were: “Let Thy will be done, O Father!” [86] The heart of man will not be denied the name and the feeling of “God who is our home.” Turning again from the Āryas to the new citadel of Benares, and Hinduism, the Hindu College, Benares, we find that along with the Text-book already mentioned, there was published a Catechism in Hindu Religion and Morals for boys and girls. One question is, “Can we know that eternal Being (the “One only without a second,” or “The All,” i.e. pantheistic Deity)? The answer is, “Only when revealed as Ishwar, the Lord, the loving Father of all the worlds and of all the creatures who live in them.” That idea of the loving Father, of divine Law and Love in one person, is new to Hinduism. The law of God may be only imperfectly apprehended, but the loving Fatherhood of God, the approachable one, has become manifest in India—one of Christianity’s dynamic doctrines. Strangest confirmation of all, a Mahomedan preacher of Behar a few years ago was expounding from the Koran the Fatherhood of God. The name and thought of the divine Father established, we may leave name and thought to be invested with their full significance in the fulness of time.
“It is with Pantheism, not Polytheism, that a rising morality will have to reckon,” says Sir Alfred Lyall. [87] The result of all our observation has been different. Pantheism is melting out of the sky of the educated, and if nothing else take its place, it will be a selfish materialism or agnosticism, not avowed or formulated yet shaping every motive, that the new morality will have to reckon with.