Many Faiths and One

The Meeting of Love and Knowledge: Perennial Wisdom. By Martin C. D'Arcy, SJ. (Allen and Unwin, 12s. od.) The Freedom of the Will. By Austin Farrer. (A. and C. Black, 28s.) COMPARATIVE religion is sometimes looked on as a dangerous subject for Christians. Faith is known to have been lost that way, though leading believers have excelled in it. Certainly it is an occupational temptation or disease of social scientists—better called social students—to seek to impose general rules on the infinite variety of human life. Psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, criminologists, economists (whose material gives them slightly more excuse)—all are

liable to fall into the same excess. Nor are philosophers always immune.

The historian, whose first task is to chronicle the individual unique event, should be their natural corrective in assessing not only the dig' tinctiveness but the validity of the Christian religion, which claims to be unique or nothing,' And theology must be added for even a minimal understanding of the full claim. The great H. W. V. Joseph used to treat the expression

'rather unique' as a good example of slovenly speech. You are either unique or you aren't. But Christians can afford to be generous to the in- sights achieved by other faiths. They can hardly afford not to be if they wish to prevail on the higher planes of argument.

Through all these perils we are escorted here by a philosopher-theologian of unsurpassed Catholic influence and (to adapt Churchill on Keynes) of almost clairvoyant intelligence; and by the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics. They cover much the same ground. Each is concerned with the relationship between The religions of East and West at their most sig- nificant. But Fr. D'Arcy distils the spiritual meditations of many years; Professor Zaehner embellishes a lecture course of astonishing bril- liance. Fr. D'Arcy allows his wisdom to blow where it listeth; Professor Zaehner organises ,srverything in the service of his theme. Inevitably erhaps, he neglects ethics, returning to them, one opes, on another occasion when,the originality of , hristian ethics could be treated more attentively.

Fr. D'Arcy dedicates himself to a considera- tion of the claims of Coomaraswamy, Aldous Huxley and others on behalf of a perennial Wisdom. They insist that such a wisdom runs through what is deepest in all the great religions. lie sums up adversely, but magnaminously :

There is a scattered wisdom throughout the world and there have been manifestations of it in all ages, `sages standing in God's holy fire as in the gold mosaic of the world.' If the attempt of the new school of perennial wisdom to find a highest common factor in the religious philo- sophies of East is stillborn, that does not mean that God has not revealed himself in sundry places and at sundry times. .

These last words have given Professor Zaehner the title for his book, quite independently. Nothing could be clearer, more effectively argued or more historically dogmatic than his conclusion :

Christianity, then, does falfil both the myitical tradition of India as finally expressed in the Bhagavad-Gita and the Bodhisattva doctrine, and the hopes of Zoroaster, , the Prophet of ancient Iran. In Christ the two streams meet and are harmonized and reconciled at they are nowhere else; for Christ fulfils both the law and the prophets in Israel and the 'gospel according to the Gentiles' as it was preached in

India and Iran. . .

He sees Muhammad as the worst potential stumbling-block in the way of his contention. For chronologically Muhammad cannot have been fulfilled in Christ. But much subtlety is em- ployed in an appendix to prove that 'so far as his Christology is concerned Muhammad in the

Qur'an nowhere denies and sometimes affirms specifically Christian beliefs.' If his followers have strayed from the real teaching of The Book, the error, and it is a grave one, is theirs.

Fr. D'Arcy does not use the language of historical fulfilment. He is less interested in the development through time of the various religions, but no less ready to respond to their noblest expression. `What more personal,' he asks, `than a stanza of the Bhagavad-Gita beginning : Give me your whole heart, Love and adore me,

' Worship me always,

Bow to me only, And you shall find me : This is my promise Who love you dearly . .

But again and again he insists that Christianity is in the last analysis a more personal religion than any other. 'The difference between the Christian and the Hindoo or Buddhist conception of self-denial is that the former aims to keep the person, the latter to dissolve it.' For him there is always the great gulf fixed between what is helpful and good and what is true and perfect. If the gap seems narrower at times in Professor Zaehner, the same point comes out no less strongly in his final comment on Muhammad: The mystical bond of love which Christ in his own ,person brings to fill out the hopes of the

Prophets is lacking, as it was bound to be.. . . Muhammad was 'a Prophet and no more than a Prophet.'

Dr. Farrer's latest work is described as one of pure philosophy and this time as being 'hardly theological at all.' It would be as impertinent, however, to omit it altogether from a survey of the latest religious literature as it must inevit. ably be to dispose of it in a few lines. Dr. Farrel' conducts a running debate between the Libel: tarians and the Determinists. If the `Whig Dogs (i.e. the Determinists) are seldom allowed to get the best of it he forces the Libertarians to face not only the paradoxes of their positions but the awkward issue of whether it makes much differ. ence in practice whether one does or doesn't believe in free will.

Many indeed are the distinctions which he draws or incites us to draw for ourselves. But none more fruitful than that on the one hand between humanity as it is, and on the other the Divine Image or, for the unbeliever, the human ideal. He forces us to ask ourselves afresh v■IlY we are so passionately anxious to be free; what in the last resort is the point of it, what is there in our volitions to hold so sacred?

Dr. Farrer remains the psychological purist to the'end. He scrupulously refrains from claiming to 'prove' his theology by psychological reasofl. ing alone. To show' (my italics) 'that nothing but a doctrine of Divine volitions will do justice to the moral sense would be a task indeed.' But anyone who wishes to be sure that theology can be reconciled with the finest contemporary psY• chology has only to read this book. And anyone bewildered by the eternal dialectic of the argo- ment between free will and determinism must on no account neglect the possibility that here iS

the clue to the labyrinth.

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