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The Religion of Humanity
A religion of humanity may be either an intellectual and sentimental ideal,
a living dogma with intellectual, psychological and practical effects,
or else a spiritual aspiration and rule of living, partly the sign, partly
the cause of a change of soul in humanity. The intellectual religion of
humanity already to a certain extent exists, partly as a conscious creed
in the minds of a few, partly as a potent shadow in the consciousness
of the race. It is the shadow of a spirit that is yet unborn, but is preparing
for its birth. This material world of ours, besides its fully embodied
things of the present, is peopled by such powerful shadows, ghosts of
things dead and the spirit of things yet unborn. The ghosts of things
dead are very troublesome actualities and they now abound, ghosts of dead
religions, dead arts, dead moralities, dead political theories, which
still claim either to keep their rotting bodies or to animate partly the
existing body of things. Repeating obstinately their sacred formulas of
the past, they hypnotise backward-looking minds and daunt even the progressive
portion of humanity. But there are too those unborn spirits which are
still unable to take a definite body, but are already mind-born and exist
as influences of which the human mind is aware and to which it now responds
in a desultory and confused fashion. The religion of humanity was mind-born
in the eighteenth century, the manasa putra [= Mind-born child, an
idea and expression of Indian Puranic cosmology.] of the rationalist
thinkers who brought it forward as a substitute for the formal spiritualism
of ecclesiastical Christianity. It tried to give itself a body in Positivism,
which was an attempt to formulate the dogmas of this religion, but on
too heavily and severely rationalistic a basis for acceptance even by
an Age of Reason. Humanitarianism has been its most prominent emotional
result. Philanthropy, social service and other kindred activities have
been its outward expression of good works. Democracy, socialism, pacificism
are to a great extent its by-products or at least owe much of their vigour
to its inner presence.
The fundamental idea is that mankind is the godhead to be worshipped and
served by man and that the respect, the service, the progress of the human
being and human life are the chief duty and the chief aim of the human
spirit. No other idol, neither the nation, the State, the family nor anything
else ought to take its place; they are only worthy of respect so far as
they are images of the human spirit and enshrine its presence and aid
its self-manifestation. But where the cult of these idols seeks to usurp
the place of the spirit and makes demands inconsistent with its service,
they should be put aside. No injunctions of old creeds, religious, political,
social or cultural, are valid when they go against its claims. Science
even, though it is one of the chief modern idols, must not be allowed
to make claims contrary to its ethical temperament and aim, for science
is only valuable in so far as it helps and serves by knowledge and progress
the religion of humanity. War, capital punishment, the taking of human
life, cruelty of all kinds whether committed by the individual, the State
or society, not only physical cruelty, but moral cruelty, the degradation
of any human being or any class of human beings under whatever specious
plea or in whatever interest, the oppression and exploitation of man by
man, of class by class, of nation by nation and all those habits of life
and institutions of society of a similar kind which religion and ethics
formerly tolerated or even favoured in practice, whatever they might do
in their ideal rule or creed, are crimes against the religion of humanity,
abominable to its ethical mind, forbidden by its primary tenets, to be
fought against always, in no degree to be tolerated. Man must be sacred
to man regardless of all distinctions of race, creed, colour, nationality,
status, political or social advancement. The body of man is to be respected,
made immune from violence and outrage, fortified by science against disease
and preventable death. The life of man is to be held sacred, preserved,
strengthened, ennobled, uplifted. The heart of man is to be held sacred
also, given scope, protected from violation, from suppression, from mechanisation,
freed from belittling influences. The mind of man is to be released from
all bonds, allowed freedom and range and opportunity, given all its means
of self-training and self-development and organised in the play of its
powers for the service of humanity. And all this too is not to be held
as an abstract or pious sentiment, but given full and practical recognition
in the persons of men and nations and mankind. This, speaking largely,
is the idea and spirit of the intellectual religion of humanity.
One has only to compare human life and thought and feeling a century or
two ago with human life, thought and feeling in the pre-war period to
see how great an influence this religion of humanity has exercised and
how fruitful a work it has done. It accomplished rapidly many things which
orthodox religion failed to do effectively, largely because it acted as
a constant intellectual and critical solvent, an unsparing assailant of
the thing that is and an unflinching champion of the thing to be, faithful
always to the future, while orthodox religion allied itself with the powers
of the present, even of the past, bound itself by its pact with them and
could act only at best as a moderating but not as a reforming force. Moreover,
this religion has faith in humanity and its earthly future and can therefore
aid its earthly progress, while the orthodox religions looked with eyes
of pious sorrow and gloom on the earthly life of man and were very ready
to bid him bear peacefully and contentedly, even to welcome its crudities,
cruelties, oppressions, tribulations as a means for learning to appreciate
and for earning the better life which will be given us hereafter. Faith,
even an intellectual faith, must always be a worker of miracles, and this
religion of humanity, even without taking bodily shape or a compelling
form or a visible means of self-effectuation, was yet able to effect comparatively
much of what it set out to do. It to some degree humanised society, humanised
law and punishment, humanised the outlook of man on man, abolished legalised
torture and the cruder forms of slavery, raised those who were depressed
and fallen, gave large hopes to humanity, stimulated philanthropy and
charity and the service of mankind, encouraged everywhere the desire of
freedom, put a curb on oppression and greatly minimised its more brutal
expressions. It had almost succeeded in humanising war and would perhaps
have succeeded entirely but for the contrary trend of modern Science.
It made it possible for man to conceive of a world free from war as imaginable
even without waiting for the Christian millennium. At any rate, this much
change came about that, while peace was formerly a rare interlude of constant
war, war became an interlude, if a much too frequent interlude of peace,
though as yet only of an armed peace. That may not be a great step, but
still it was a step forward. It gave new conceptions of the dignity of
the human being and opened new ideas and new vistas of his education,
self-development and potentiality. It spread enlightenment; it made man
feel more his responsibility for the progress and happiness of the race;
it raised the average self-respect and capacity of mankind; it gave hope
to the serf, self-assertion to the down-trodden and made the labourer
in his manhood the potential equal of the rich and powerful . True, if
we compare what is with what should be, the actual achievement with the
ideal, all this will seem only a scanty work of preparation. But it was
a remarkable record for a century and a half or a little more and for
an unembodied spirit which had to work through what instruments it could
find and had as yet no form, habitation or visible engine of its own concentrated
workings. But perhaps it was in this that lay its power and advantage,
since that saved it from crystallising into a form and getting petrified
or at least losing its more free and subtle action.
But still in order to accomplish all its future this idea and religion
of humanity has to make itself more explicit, insistent and categorically
imperative. For otherwise it can only work with clarity in the minds of
the few and with the mass it will be only a modifying influence, but will
not be the rule of human life. And so long as that is so, it cannot entirely
prevail over its own principal enemy. That enemy, the enemy of all real
religion, is human egoism, the egoism of the individual, the egoism of
class and nation. These it could for a time soften, modify, force to curb
their more arrogant, open and brutal expressions, oblige to adopt better
institutions, but not to give place to the love of mankind, not to recognise
a real unity between man and man. For that essentially must be the aim
of the religion of humanity, as it must be the earthly aim of all human
religion, love, mutual recognition of human brotherhood, a living sense
of human oneness and practice of human oneness in thought, feeling and
life, the ideal which was expressed first some thousands of years ago
in the ancient Vedic hymn [= Rig Veda, X. 191] and must always
remain the highest injunction of the Spirit within us to human life upon
earth. Till that is brought about, the religion of humanity remains unaccomplished.
With that done, the one necessary psychological change will have been
effected without which no formal and mechanical, no political and administrative
unity can be real and secure. If it is done, that outward unification
may not even be indispensable or, if indispensable, it will come about
naturally, not, as now it seems likely to be, by catastrophic means, but
by the demand of the human mind, and will be held secure by an essential
need of our perfected and developed human nature.
But this is the question whether a purely intellectual and sentimental
religion of humanity will be sufficient to bring about so great a change
in our psychology.
The weakness of the intellectual idea, even when it supports itself by
an appeal to the sentiments and emotions, is that it does not get at the
centre of man's being.
The intellect and the feelings are only instruments of the being and they
may be the instruments of either its lower and external form or of the
inner and higher man, servants of the ego or channels of the soul. The
aim of the religion of humanity was formulated in the eighteenth century
by a sort of primal intuition; that aim was and it is still to re-create
human society in the image of three kindred ideas, liberty, equality and
fraternity. None of these has really been won in spite of all the progress
that has been achieved. The liberty that has been so loudly proclaimed
as an essential of modern progress is an outward, mechanical and unreal
liberty. The equality that has been so much sought after and battled for
is equally an outward and mechanical and will turn out to be an unreal
equality. Fraternity is not even claimed to be a practicable principle
of the ordering of life and what is put forward as its substitute is the
outward and mechanical principle of equal association or at the best a
comradeship of labour. This is because the idea of humanity has been obliged
in an intellectual age to mask its true character of a religion and a
thing of the soul and the spirit and to appeal to the vital and physical
mind of man rather than his inner being. It has limited his effort to
the attempt to revolutionise political and social institutions and to
bring about such a modification of the ideas and sentiments of the common
mind of mankind as would make these institutions practicable; it has worked
at the machinery of human life and on the outer mind much more than upon
the soul of the race. It has laboured to establish a political, social
and legal liberty, equality and mutual help in an equal association.
But though these aims are of great importance in their own field, they
are not the central thing; they can only be secure when founded upon a
change of the inner human nature and inner way of living; they are themselves
of importance only as means for giving a greater scope and a better field
for man's development towards that change and, when it is once achieved,
as an outward expression of the larger inward life. Freedom, equality,
brotherhood are three godheads of the soul; they cannot be really achieved
through the external machinery of society or by man so long as he lives
only in the individual and the communal ego. When the ego claims liberty,
it arrives at competitive individualism. When it asserts equality, it
arrives first at strife, then at an attempt to ignore the variations of
Nature, and, as the sole way of doing that successfully, it constructs
an artificial and machine-made society. A society that pursues liberty
as its ideal is unable to achieve equality; a society that aims at equality
will be obliged to sacrifice liberty. For the ego to speak of fraternity
is for it to speak of something contrary to its nature. All that it knows
is association for the pursuit of common egoistic ends and the utmost
that it can arrive at is a closer organisation for the equal distribution
of labour, production, consumption and enjoyment.
Yet is brotherhood the real key to the triple gospel of the idea of humanity.
The union of liberty and equality can only be achieved by the power of
human brotherhood and it cannot be founded on anything else. But brotherhood
exists only in the soul and by the soul; it can exist by nothing else.
For this brotherhood is not a matter either of physical kinship or of
vital association or of intellectual agreement. When the soul claims freedom,
it is the freedom of its self-development, the self-development of the
divine in man in all his being. When it claims equality, what it is claiming
is that freedom equally for all and the recognition of the same soul,
the same godhead in all human beings. When it strives for brotherhood,
it is founding that equal freedom of self-development on a common aim,
a common life, a unity of mind and feeling founded upon the recognition
of this inner spiritual unity. These three things are in fact the nature
of the soul; for freedom, equality, unity are the eternal attributes of
the Spirit. It is the practical recognition of this truth, it is the awakening
of the soul in man and the attempt to get him to live from his soul and
not from his ego which is the inner meaning of religion, and it is that
to which the religion of humanity also must arrive before it can fulfil
itself in the life of the race.
Sri Aurobindo
in "Social and Political Thought" - "The Ideal of Human
Unity"
SABCL Volume 15
published by Sri
Aurobindo Ashram - Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA
or
Lotus Light Publications
U.S.A. - Pages 541-547
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