An Outline of the Philosophical Foundations of the Religion of Man - 1.Swami Krishnananda.

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Tuesday, November 08,  2022. 06:00.

(Spoken on November 11, 1980)

Post-1.

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I was musing within myself during these few minutes on a kind of necessity which mankind should feel at this hour, viz., the need to make religion descend from the heavens to the Earth. Often it has so happened that man's religion was confined to an idealistic concept of the Kingdom of God – idealistic in the sense that it somehow, by some freak of human thought, got isolated from the empire of the Earth. It was felt by even leaders of religions that the world is an evil, Earth is the kingdom of Satan. It is the realm of desire, the field of attraction, and temptation which has to be shunned. And so, by some peculiar logic of religious thinking, the love of God got estranged from the requirements of the world – though this was not the original intention of the religious masters or the prophets or the incarnations.

It was never the intention of the prophets of religion, the saints and the sages, that God should be estranged from the world as a transcendent invisible reality, though He is also that – accepted. God is transcendent and unreachable, inaccessible to human faculties and instruments; this is perfectly true. But it is not wholly true because while the power of God, the Almighty – the power that is invincible and indescribable – is the force that operates in the transcendent realm, it is also the law that operates on Earth.

We have a very signi­ficant term in the Veda, for instance, which defines the law of God as satya, and the law operating in the world as rita. The cosmic law is rita and the law of God, or we may say the righteousness of the Kingdom of Heaven, is satya. I have always been contemplating the hidden significance of what I regard as the supreme state of Christ available to us in the New Testament, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.” How could all these things be added unto you, if God is in heaven and not in the world? There is a logical irreconcilability between the Earth and heaven, man and God, if the world is wholly in the realm of evil, a field of vicious desires which is totally opposed to the requirements of a Godly life.

It is true the world is made in this way. It is a field of vicious temptations and an ungodly activity into which man may be gradually led into. While this is true, there is an enigma in this atmosphere around us. It is an enigma because it is a mystery how the perfection of God could be sought in this world of evil. Philosophers have been trying to solve this problem of the possibility of man living in an evil realm, reach­ing a perfection that is God, who is transcendent Absolute. If there is absolutely no connection between the perfect God and the evil world, man, who is sunk in evil, the original sinner, can have no hope of reaching God because irreconcilables are always irrecon­cilable; they cannot be reconciled.

The fact that man can be re­conciled with God, and has to be reconciled one day or the other, the fact that man lives only for God, and there seems to be no other purpose in his living, should also throw a new light into this atmosphere of the world. The world is not wholly ungodly or evil, it is not an empire of the Satan totally. God is also present here. We have to accept that God is also immanent, and not merely transcendent. This is our hope. We can hope for some solace spiritually, religiously only if God is immanent. If He is totally transcendent, there is no hope. And so, even in the worst of things that we can envisage in this world it should be possible for us to recognise an element of perfection – and in the eyes of God, perhaps, there cannot be such a thing called the worst of things. If God created the world, He could not have created the evil, or the worst of things.

To be continued 


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