A RELIGION FOR THE WORLD CITIZEN Eastern Religions and Western
Thought. By Sir S. Radha- krishnan. (Clarendon Press. 15s.) THE theme of this book may be simply stated. The present generation has witnessed the decay of religion in the West. AS a result, large numbers of people in this country are left without belief in another world and without a purpose in this one, and men and women wander aimlessly down the road of life without knowing or, indeed, caring whither it leads. The symptoms may be interpreted as those of decay or of transition. Professor Radhakrishnan opts for transition. Human nature abhors a spiritual vacuum, and religion, he holds, is a permanent need of man. Already within the matrix of the old, the new is in process of gestation, and the pains from which we suffer are those associated with growing What form should the new assume? To answer that ques- tion is the object of the book. If our civilisation is to survive, it must, he holds, as a condition of survival, supersede the conception of the absolute sovereign State and substitute for a purely nationalist patriotism a new loyalty to humanity as a whole. Our age, in fact, is big with the world State. The task of the theologian is to effect a similar enlargement of the religious consciousness and to supersede purely tribal and national religions by one in which the adult citizen of a world order can find a spiritual home. As Professor Radhakrishnan puts it, "the supreme task of our generation is to give a soul to the growing world-consciousness, to develop ideals and institutions necessary for the creative expression of the world soul, to transmit these loyalties and impulses to future genera- tions and train them into world citizens." To the accom- plishment of this task the insights of the Eastern religions, and particularly of Hinduism and Buddhism, are, he claims, in a pre-eminent degree relevant. Professor Radhakrishnan divides religions into two main categories—those which emphasise the object of the religious experience, and those which insist upon the significance of the experience itself. The former tend to exert a separatist influence : men make gods in their own images and, since the men are different, the gods reflect their differences. Hence arise the contro-
versies, the persecutions, and the warring of rival creeds which have disgraced the name of religion in the past. The Hindu religion places its emphasis on religious experience. We have two selves—an apparent and a real. The real is continuous with—indeed, it is an expression of—the underlying reality of the universe, the Brahman, which in Hindu thought answers to the conception of the Absolute in Western. The object of religion is to uncover the true self, and in so doing to reveal reality ; religious salvation is, in fact, nothing more or less than the attainment of the true self. In a religion so conceived, ceremony and ritual are unimportant, and creeds subordinate ; for though in religious experience we may intuit the nature of the real, we cannot convey the content of our intuition in a series of affirmations. As for conduct, since the object of Hindu worship is not a god conceived of as external to ourselves, but is the worshipful lodged in the soul of man, it is sufficient to bid us realise the divine in ourselves.
By what method? Not by intellectual analysis, but by the mastery and integration of the self. It is not true, says Radhakrishnan, that if we think rightly we shall act properly ; we shall act properly only if we succeed in laying ourselves open to the influence of the real, and that this influence may play upon us, we must be in a position to receive it. The soul can attain this position only by the mastery of the appe- tites and the integration of its various elements.
A religion so conceived is, it is claimed, peculiarly adapted to the consciousness of the citizen of the world, and adapted in two ways. First, on the negative side it has shed the divi- sive elements in religion, the creeds, the dogmas and the cere- monies; secondly, on the positive side, its discipline and its objective are the same for all, for the real nature of man, the true self which is also the divine self, is the same in us all.
At the same time, it is urged that this conception of reli- gion is congenial to the sceptical consciousness of a generation which has hem brought up to worship science and to accept the scientific scheme. Scientists ask for a proof of the exist- ence of God, and find none ; but Hinduism substitutes for the conception of logical proof the fact of empirical evidence. This evidence is found in the very fact of religious conscious- ness. "Our longing for perfection, our sense of lack, our striving to attain consciousness of infinity, our urge to the ideal, are the sources of divine revelation." Even "the chil- dren of science and reason . . . must submit to the fact of spiritual experience which is primary and positive." Thus, though we cannot prove the truth of religion, we have in our own consciousness the empirical evidence which science ha, taught us to revere.
Such is the theme which is developed in a book of great richness and profundity. After expounding the main prin- ciples of Hindu thought and the way of life in which they find expression—a task which Professor Radhakrishnan has set himself in earlier books, but which he has never per- formed more convincingly—he proceeds to an account of the main sources of religious thought in the West, and seeks to disentangle the separate threads of Hebraic, Greek and Hindu influence in the complex skein of Christian thought.
It is of the wisdom of the East that the West stands today in urgent need. For the West suffers from a failure to develop ethical and political ends commensurate with our mastery of means. We seem unable both in politics and religion to gain the width of outlook which the responsibilities of a world civili- sation demand. To illustrate his point, Professor Radhakrish- nan draws a highly intriguing analogy between the religious sectionalism of Karl Barth which claims absolute and unique truth for Christianity, and denounces compromise with "humanism, liberalism, psychology and philosophy of religion," and the political sectionalism of Herr Hitler which claims absolute and unicr re virtues for Aryans, and also denounces compromise with humanism and the rest. It is only by learning to transcend this sectionalism of outlook that the West can survive: To transcend it politically means to develop an international order; to transcend it spirituallY means to develop a universal faith. Now every widening in the scope of religion, every advance in the direction or universality, is also an advance in the direction of the religion.; of India. And so we come to the conclusion that "the fate of the human race hangs on a rapid assimilation of the qualities associated with the mystic religions of the East. The stage
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