TAGORE

AND THE REALISATION OF GOD

 

Dr Sir S. RADHAKRISHNAN

 

            India has 85 per cent of its people Hindu, but the Constitution makers refused to establish Hinduism as a State religion. They have said, here, the State will not identify itself with any religion. It will give absolute freedom of worship to all religions to practise their own ways, to grow according to their own genius, fully assured that the invisible Supreme is sustaining every genuine seeker of truth and will help him to reach the Supreme. The routes are the same and the lights are exactly the same. William Penn said when we reach the Supreme we throw of our liveries which divide us one from another and we stand face to face as members of the one household of God, whether we worship that God in the form of Christ or Buddha or Allah or anything like that.

 

            The most important thing is the spiritual change, the transmuta­tion of personality, the complete overthrow of your narrow egoistic self, and the establishment of a universal altruistic nature if you are a religious man; if not, you are not. Therefore, Tagore writes somewhere in his “Religion of Man”: “We should remember that the doctrine of special creation is out of date and the idea of a specially favoured race belongs to a barbarian age. We have come to understand that any special truth or special culture which is wholly isolated from the universal is not true at all, there are no chosen races, there are no chosen creeds, there are no chosen nations, we all belong to the household of God, whether we worship him one way or the other. He is there, looking into the depths of our heart, assisting us in our endeavour to grow upwards and change ourselves.”

 

            If all this is so, the practical consequence of it is service of man. He called his lectures by the name: “The Religion of Man”. Man is the potential candidate of spiritual transformation, every man, whatever may be his caste or community. He knew that in our country we allowed so many social disabilities and restrictions to impede the progress of ordinary people, and when he looked at these deviations from the truth, from the practice of love, he said: My head is bowed in sorrow, my eyes keep back the tears, my heart is hurt by this reproach, I am humiliated, I am dishonoured in my native depths, I feel that I have done something of which I am not worthy; and so he said, he called to his country: Get rid of these social disabilities, remove the shackles which cripple men, which enslave their minds, which make of them slaves - so to say - either in religion, or in social affairs, or in other things. He asked us for developing the freedom of the human spirit and establishing the dignity of man. So he was not unaware of all the troubles we passed through, and he traced them to our disloyalty and fundamental principles which we proclaim with a loud voice and practise in an illiberal way. He knew the difficulties from which we were passing. If it is so, if the human individual has the essential spirit in him, he need not consider himself to be a victim of necessity.

 

            Tagore writes in one of his poems: At one pole of my being I am one with stocks and stones, at another I am separate from all, in other words, each human being has so much of nature in him but also an element of super-nature. There is in him the temporal, there is also the timeless, the successive and “the non-successive, or both of them to be found in every human being. Time and eternity are there found together, we are victims of necessity so long as we ignore the eternal in us, so long as we don’t recognise that we are sparks of spirit, race of the divine and merely reduce ourselves to an item in the series of cosmic happenings. If we make ourselves into an object, if the pure inwardness, the freedom, the subjectivity in us is reduced to nothing, we become split souls, our freedom is reduced to routine, we are not able to achieve anything. Everything in this world has been achieved by fighting against fatality, by fighting against necessity, by fighting against what seems to us to be inevitable. If we forget it, if we say it is inevitable, we are helpless, we can’t do anything, we are refusing to assert our human responsibility. To abstain from choice is itself making a choice. You are giving up your responsibility and saying that we are pawns in a cosmic chess game played by impersonal forces of nature. We are nothing of the kind to say that men have always been, that men will always be, that nothing is going to change human nature. It is a counsel of despair, it is to lose faith in God, lose faith in yourself.

 

            It is, therefore, essential for every human being in these critical times when the seemingly inevitable is so castastrophic in character, to stand up against the force of circumstances, to assert a superiority of the human will and proclaim that man has changed this world considerably and will be able to change this world again. It will be possible for him to withstand the force of circumstances, change the current of events.

 

            History is an interplay between creative personality on one side and geographical factors and historical forces on the other. It is the interaction between the two that has developed history to the extent to which it has come today. If we give up our creative personalities, if we make the human subject into a mere object, if the thinking being becomes merely a thing, then we have abdicated our right, we have ceased to be human beings, we have given in to the claim of a series of objects. Danger today is the non-assertion of the will of the human individual. If people only had the conscience to protest against their leaders, against their powerful dictators, against people who take hold of them and twist their minds in any way they choose. If they are able to do it, then nothing is inevitable here. Man is a moulder of history in an ultimate sense of the term, he is the one significant being in this world. He will be able to change the course of events, provided he will act sufficiently.

 

            People have told: Never has it happened in history, that any nation which had power, gave up its power, and any people who were enslaved attained their freedom without bloodshed and suffering. That is what he was told, yet he stood against that doctrine of history and won freedom for the country in a way which did not alterate his conscience, did not lose for him the esteem of the world. He was able to get both and change the course of history. That is what he was able to do. What one man was able to do, his genius touched the heart of many people who followed him. So also today, when we are face to face wits things which make us feel despair of the future of humanity, it is the purpose of the human being to say after all, all these scientific achievements show if anything the superiority of the human mind and not the omnipotence of matter. Scientific conquests or conquests of nature, the whole civiliza­tion has been a continuous conquest of nature of man and there is no reason to stop that process of conquering nature, nature of human beings, nature of the surrounding forces, these things can be altered, can be reshaped to suit to the will of the individual the pattern which we have.

 

            The will is to march forward towards a new society, a new civilization. The circumstances which have brought us to the present position, they are a challenge to us, and it is essential that we should face the challenge, use the opportunity and try to control events and make them work for different kinds of purposes altogether. Tagore in his last address on the crisis of civilization, has said:

 

            “Even though I am faced with this enormous mess of futility, with this unnecessary slaughter of human beings, with the kind of de­struction which we are having. I shall never commit the grievous sin of losing faith in the nature of man. I die an optimist, I die with hope in my heart and with faith in the future of humanity. I do not believe that man is so helpless, so impotent, that he can’t withstand the forces which are there set against him.”

 

            He asks us to cling to ultimate common sense in the midst of all this confusion. He believed in regeneration through love and personal suffering. His voice was the conscience of the age. He became a guide for his generation. He led a life which had no littleness about it. He was concerned with the profundities of life, with the invisible spirit of man. He is a symbol of that undying spirit which gives us hope that we can yet overcome the difficulties, build a new society, a new civilization.

 

From a talk at Stuttgart, 23.10.1961.

 

 

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