The Bugbear 
of Literacy 

By 

ANANDA K. COOMARAS WAMY 

With an Introduction by Robert Allerton Parker 
 



CONTENTS 



Introduction by Robert Atterton Parker vii 

I 

Am I My Brother's Keeper ? I 

II 
The Bugbear of Literacy 23 

III 
Paths That Lead to the Same Summit 42 

IV 
Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge 64 

V 
East and West 78 

VI 
"Spiritual Paternity" and the "Puppet Complex" 92 

VII 
Gradation, Evolution, and Reincarnation 122 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

The essays in this volume have been slightly revised, and 
notes have been added. " Am I My Brother's Keeper ? " 
appeared first in Asia and the Americas, March, 1943; 
" The Bugbear of Literacy " in Asia and the Americas , 
February, 1944 ; " Paths That Lead to the Same Sum- 
mit " in Motive, May, 1944 ; " Eastern Wisdom and 
Western Knowledge " in Isis XXIV, Part 4, 1943 ; " East 
and West " in Biosophical Review, VIII, 1945, and in The 
Religious Basis of the Forms of Indian Society, New York, 
1946 ; " ' Spiritual Paternity ' and the ' Puppet Complex* " 
in Psychiatry, August, 1945 ; and " Gradation, Evolution, 
and Reincarnation " in Main Currents in Modern Thought, 
Summer, 1946. The author's thanks are due to the editors 
of these publications and to Mrs. Eric Gill for permission 
to use the woodcut " Progress." 



INTRODUCTION 



TO certain readers, Coomaraswamy's ideas may 
seem highly controversial and destructive of commonly 
accepted assumptions. Such antagonists may object 
that this indictment of modern Western civilization 
is based upon obstinate age-old Oriental prejudices. 
But Ananda Coomaraswamy is not merely " an 
eminent Orientalist " (as Aldous Huxley characterizes 
him in The Perennial Philosophy) ; nor is he merely an 
authority on Oriental art. The ideas he formulates 
in these essays and reviews are expressed with the 
authority of a lifetime of scholarship. He writes, as 
he has elsewhere explained, " from a strictly orthodox 
point of view . . . endeavouring to speak with mathe- 
matical precision, but never employing words of our 
own, or making any affirmations for which authority 
could not be cited by chapter and verse ; in this way 
making even our technique characteristically Indian." 
Since Dr. Coomaraswamy deprecated personality 
and personalism, and condemned the contemporary 
mania for exhibitionary self-exploitation, he was the 
most reticent of men in furnishing biographical details. 
Yet, for lay readers, such details, and an outline of his 
crowded career, seem necessary for an understanding 
of the broad foundations of his thought. It may 
come as a surprise, for instance, to know that his 
mother was English ; that he began his career as a 
geologist a petrologist ; that he held a degree as a 
Doctor of Science from the University of London ; 
and that though he was without doubt the most 

vii 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

distinguished exponent of the Philosophic* Perennis 
in the English-speaking world, he was by no means the 
advocate of the vague, synthetic " theosophy " vul- 
garized in our Western world, nor of that theory of 
" reincarnation " meaning the return of deceased 
individuals to rebirth on this earth which is popularly 
and erroneously associated in certain circles with 
Hindu "philosophy." In the hope of clearing the 
air of such prejudices and misconceptions, I have 
collected the following biographical details : 

Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy was born on 
August 22, 1877, in Colombo, Ceylon, the son of a 
distinguished Cingalese gentleman, Sir Mutu Coomara- 
swamy, the first Hindu to have been called to the bar 
in London, and author of the first translation into 
English of a Pali Buddhist text. Sir Mutu died 
before his son was two years old, and the child was 
brought up in England by his British mother (who 
survived until 1942). 

Ananda Coomaraswamy did not return to his native 
land until nearly a quarter of a century later. He 
was educated first at Wycliffe College, at Stonehouse in 
Gloucestershire, and later at the University of London. 
Although, without doubt, the Cingalese youth felt the 
all-pervading influences of John Ruskin and William 
Morris in the awakening nineties, his deeper interests 
were focused upon science in particular upon geology 
and mineralogy. At twenty-two he contributed a 
paper on " Ceylon Rocks and Graphite " to the 
Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society ; and at 
twenty-five he was appointed director of the Mineral- 
ogical Survey of Ceylon. A few yearp later his work on 
the geology of Ceylon won him the degree of Doctor of 
Science from the University of London. 

viii 



Introduction 

Life in Ceylon opened his eyes to the withering 
blight cast upon her native arts and crafts by the 
invasion of Occidental industrialism. Courageously 
and unequivocally the young Coomaraswamy became 
the champion of those " native " cultures and handi- 
crafts which were threatened with extermination by 
the " proselytizing fury " of Occidental civilization. 

From 1917 until 1947 (the year of his death) Coo- 
maraswamy was with the Boston Museum of Fine 
Arts, as a research fellow in Oriental art, building up 
its unsurpassed department of Indian art ; collecting, 
interpreting, expounding to museum curators the 
traditional philosophy of life and the function of art in 
human society ; demonstrating that all significant 
expressions, whether in the crafts or in games and other 
" play," are varying dialects and symbolic activities 
of one language of the spirit. 

Coomaraswamy has been labelled as an expert in 
Oriental art : but his " Orientalism " had nothing 
in common with the pseudo-occultism and syncretic 
theosophistry that are volatilized by the self-appointed 
prophets of the "cults." He liked to puncture the 
stereotyped fallacy of the " mysterious " and " mysti- 
fying " East, and asserted that a faithful account of 
Hinduism might be attained by a categorical denial of 
most of the statements (e.g. about " reincarnation ") 
that have been made about it not only by European 
scholars, but even by Indians trained in the contem- 
porary sceptical and evolutionary habits of thinking. 

His pen was an instrument of precision. His 
closely and tightly woven fabric of thought was the 
very model of explicit denotation a virtue of written 
expression that is nowadays being rediscovered. For 
this scholar the exegesis of ancient texts was above all 

ix 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

else a scientific pursuit, considered as means to a more 
abundant life. He prided himself upon never intro- 
ducing phrases of his own and never made any claims 
for which he could not cite chapter and verse. His 
compact, condensed prose often presented a forbidding 
mosaic on the printed page, offering nothing in the way 
of enticement to slothful contemporary eyes, but 
challenging attention none the less because of its rigorous 
exactitude, like that of a mathematical demonstration. 
Not infrequently matter that would suffice for a whole 
article was compressed into a footnote. But even 
when he was thus writing for scholars, it was certainly 
not only for scholars ; and when expressly for those 
who are not scholars, he could, as the essays in the 
present collection show, write very simply, relegating 
footnotes to concluding pages where the reader can 
ignore them if he so desires. 

In the unfolding of this " myriad-minded " intellect 
from geology to archaeology and thence to all the 
arts and expressions, from the humblest to the highest 
aspirations of all mankind one is tempted to find a 
parallel to Leonardo's universal interests. 

Beginning, as .we have seen, with geology and 
mineralogy, Coomaraswamy's researches became uni- 
versal and all-embracing, ranging from philology in a 
dozen languages to music and iconography, and from 
the most ancient metaphysics to the most contemporary 
problems in politics, sociology, and anthropology. 
As an admirer has recently stated: "Never has he 
had time for, nor interest in, presenting personal ideas 
or novel theories, so constantly and so tirelessly has 
he devoted his energies to the rediscovery of the 
truth and the relating of the principles by which 
cultures rise and fall." Nor did he ever compromise 

x 



Introduction 

or pull his punches in stating these truths as he has 
discovered them. 

This courage was especially manifest in Coomara- 
swamy's essays devoted to art. He was our most 
eloquent defender of the traditional philosophy of art 
the doctrine exemplified in the artifacts that have 
come down to us from the Middle Ages and the Orient. 
This philosophy Coomaraswamy interpreted many 
times and with a wealth of explicit reference ; and in 
contrast he pointed out the pathological aspects of 
our contemporary aesthetes who collect the exotic 
and the primitive with the greediness of the magpie 
snatching up bits of coloured ribbon with which to 
" decorate " its nest ! The arts of the great time- 
less tradition move ever from within outward, and are 
never concerned merely with the idealization of 
objective fact. Modern art, on the other hand, has no 
resource or end beyond itself ; it is too " fine " to be 
applied, and too " significant " to mean anything 
precisely. 

For Coomaraswamy, as spokesman of tradition, 
" disinterested aesthetic contemplation " was a con- 
tradiction in terms, and nonsense. The purpose of 
art has always been, and still should be, effective 
communication. But what, ask the critics, can works 
of art communicate ? " Let us tell the painful 
truth," Coomaraswamy retorts, " that most of these 
works are about God, whom nowadays we never men- 
tion in polite society ! " One is reminded of the fact 
that our modern treatises on ukiyoye rarely mention, 
the hetaerae upon whose lives the great part of this 
art centres. Youthful anthropologists, like Deacon 
or Tom Harrisson, retracing the continuous-line sand 
drawings on a lonely beach of the New Hebrides, 

xi 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

reenacting the dromenon of the last survivors of a for- 
gotten culture, in this process of feeling-with, may come 
closer toward understanding alien races, to the heart 
of true art, than does the most ecstatic and hysterical 
of Picassolaters in a Fifty-seventh Street gallery. 
For, to understand and to appreciate the art of any 
people, one must become united with it in spirit ; 
one must have learned to feel and to understand the 
cosmos as they have felt and understood it never 
approaching them with condescension or contempt, 
or even with the sort of " objectivity " that, while it 
may succeed in depicting, always fails to interpret their 
works and days. 

This is not the place to enlarge upon these arresting 
and challenging ideas. If we are " off the beam " 
to-day in our " appreciation of art," as Coomaraswamy 
diagnosed our current ailment, it may be, as he asserted, 
because we are living through " one of the two most 
conspicuous ages of human decadence " that first 
being the late classical. Narcissistic exhibitionism 
and magpie aestheticism with its greedy acquisition 
of the irrelevant are but twin symptoms of our 
cultural schizophrenia. The manufacture of " art " 
in studios, coupled with the artless facture of the 
things that are made in factories, represented for him 
a reduction of the standard of living to subhuman 
levels. The coincidence of beauty and utility, 
significance and aptitude, must determine all human 
values. Artifacts serving such values are possible 
only in a co-operative society of free and responsible 
craftsmen a vocational society in which men are free 
to be concerned with the good of the work to be done, 
and individually responsible for its quality. Coomara- 
swamy's ideas on art may be studied in Why Exhibit 

xii 



Introduction 

Works of Art ? and Figures of Speech or Figures of 
Thought? (London : Luzac & Co., 1943, 1946.) 

Now this traditional philosophy of art is integrated 
with the whole traditional philosophy of human society, 
or in other words, and as the readers of the following 
essays will learn, with the concept of a kingdom of 
God on earth. Coomaraswamy's work is a monumental 
achievement in integration : he has become the fore- 
most exponent of the Philosophia Perennis, of St. 
Augustine's " wisdom uncreate, the same now that it 
ever was, and the same to be forevermore." Across 
far continents and over centuries and millennia of re- 
corded and unrecorded time, this doctrine speaks in 
varying dialects, but with a single voice. It is the sand- 
tana dharma, the hagia sophia, the "justice" or " righte- 
ousness" of the tradition, unanimous and universal. 
All of Coomaraswamy's " myriad-minded " concen- 
tration, together with an almost fabulous self- 
discipline and purposive " drive," were yoked together 
to demonstrate the single voice of human aspiration. 
It is we, the contemporaries, with our genius for fission 
and division, who are lost nous sommes les egares I 
" We are at war with ourselves," as Coomaraswamy 
insists at the end of his compact essay on Rene Gu&ion, 
" and therefore at war with one another. Western 
man is unbalanced, and the question, Can he recover 
himself ? is a very real one." 

Coomaraswamy's essay on Gu^non, included in this 
book, may be studied as a model of his precision, 
accuracy, and mathematical brevity. Within the 
space of a few pages, we are presented with a com- 
plete and accurate guide to the intellectual career of 
one of the most arresting and most significant of con- 
temporary thinkers. This introduction to Gu^non is 

xiii 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

worth the price of admission ; for the author of The 
Reign of Quantity, of East and West, and The Crisis 
of the Modern World seems to have been, for the 
American public at least, one of the casualties of the 
war. It is reassuring to know that the tudes Tra- 
ditionnelles, the monthly periodical which for many 
years had been the vehicle of Guenon's expression, has 
now resumed publication. And Le rtgne de la quantite 
has appeared in book form in Paris. 

I can only hope that the present volume may open 
the door, to some readers at least, to a whole " new " 
realm of thought, as did my belated discovery of 
Coomaraswamy some years ago. Even his footnotes 
contain more provocative reading and point the way 
to more explorations and discoveries than one can ever 
find in any of the standard-brand, ready-made, ready- 
to-wear opinions proffered in many noisily advertised 
best sellers. 

Robert Allerton Parker 
New York 
March, 1946 



xiv 



I : Am I My Brother's Keeper ? 



CAIN, who killed his brother Abel, the herdsman, 
and built himself a city, prefigures modern civilization, 
one that has been described from within as " a murder- 
ous machine, with no conscience and no ideals," 1 
" neither human nor normal nor Christian/ 12 and in 
fact " an anomaly, not to say a monstrosity." 3 It 
has been said : " The values of life are slowly ebbing. 
There remains the show of civilization, without any of 
its realities." 4 Criticisms such as these could be cited 
without end. Modern civilization, by its divorce 
from any principle, can be likened to a headless 
corpse of which the last motions are convulsive and 
insignificant. It is not, however, of suicide, but of 
murder that we propose to speak. 

The modern traveller " thy name is legion " 
proposing to visit some " lost paradise " such as Bali, 
often asks whether or not it has yet been " spoiled." 
It makes a naive, and even tragic, confession. For 
this man does not reflect that he is condemning him- 
self ; that what his question asks is whether or not the 
sources of equilibrium and grace in the other civilizations 
have yet been poisoned by contact with men like him- 
self and the culture of which he is a product. " The 
Balinese," as Covarrubias says, "have lived well 
under a self-sufficient co-operative system, the founda- 
tion of which is reciprocal assistance, with money used 
only as a secondary commodity. Being extremely 
limited in means to obtain the cash scarcer every day 
to pay taxes and satisfy new needs, it is to be feared 
that the gradual breaking down of their institutions, 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

together with the drain on their national wealth, will 
make coolies, thieves, beggars and prostitutes of the 
proud and honourable Balinese of this generation, 
and will, in the long run, bring a social and moral 
catastrophe. ... It would be futile to recommend 
measures to prevent the relentless march of Westerni- 
zation ; tourists cannot be kept out, the needs of trade 
will not be restricted for sentimental [or moral] reasons, 
and missionary societies are often powerful." 5 

Sir George Watt in 1912 wrote that " however 
much Indian art may be injured, or individuals suffer, 
progression in line with the manufacturing enter- 
prise of civilization must be allowed free course. 1 ' 6 
In the same year Gandhi said that " India is being 
ground down, not under the English heel, but under 
that of modern civilization." In an open letter to 
Gilbert Murray, the late Rabindranath Tagore said, 
" There is no people in the whole of Asia which does not 
look upon Europe with fear and suspicion." 7 When 
I said to a working woman that what the Germans 
were doing in Belgium was very dreadful, she retorted, 
" Yes, too bad the Belgians should be treated as if 
they were Congo Negroes." 

Modern civilization takes it for granted that people 
are better off the more things they want and are able to 
get ; its values are quantitative and material. Now, 
How much is he worth ? means How much money has 
he got ? A speaker at Boston College lately described 
modern Western civilization as a " curse to humanity "; 
and those who now recognize its reflection in the Japan- 
ese mirror are evidently of the same opinion. Neverthe- 
less Henry A. Wallace, then vice-president, in a well- 
meant speech, promised that when the war should be 
over, " Older [!] nations will have the privilege to help 

2 



Am I My Brother's Keeper? 

younger nations get started on the path to industriali- 
zation. ... As their masses learn to read and write, 
and as they become productive mechanics, their 
standard of living will double and treble/ 18 He did 
not speak of the price to be paid, or reflect that an 
incessant "progress," never ending in contentment, 
means the condemnation of all men to a state of 
irremediable poverty. But, as Plato already knew, 
" poverty consists, not in the decrease of one's posses- 
sions, but in the increase of one's greed," 9 and in the 
words of St. Gregory Nazazien, 

Could you from all the world all wealth procure. 
More would remain, whose lack would leave you poor! 

As for reading and writing, I shall only say that the 
association of these with " productive mechanics " 
(and the " chain belt " that suggests the " chain 
gang ") is significant, since these arts are only of 
paramount importance to the masses in a quantitative 
culture, where one must be able to read both warnings 
and advertisements if one is to earn money safely and 
" raise one's standard of living " : that if reading and 
writing are to enable the Indian and Chinese masses to 
read what the Western proletariat reads, they will 
remain better off , from any cultural point of view, with 
their own more classical literature of which all have 
oral knowledge ; and add that it is still true that, as 
Sir George Birdwood wrote in 1880, " Our education 
has destroyed their love of their own literature . . . 
their delight in their own arts and, worst of all, their 
repose in their own traditional and national religion. 
It has disgusted them with their own homes their 
parents, their sisters, their very wives. It has brought 

3 B 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

discontent into every family so far as its baneful 
influences have reached." 10 

Systems of education should be extensions of the 
cultures of the peoples concerned ; but of these the 
Western educator knows little and cares less. For 
example, O. L. Reiser assumed that, after the war, 
American ideals and policies, so far from allowing for 
other peoples' cultural self-determination, would 
dominate the world and that all divergent religions and 
philosophies could and should be discarded in favour of 
the " scientific humanism " which should now become 
11 the religion of humanity." 11 We can only say that if 
Western races are in the future to do anything for the 
peoples whose cultures have been broken down in the 
interests of commerce and " religion," they must begin 
by renouncing what has been aptly called their 
" proselytizing fury " " hypocrites, for ye compass 
sea and land to make one proselyte." 12 

It is overlooked that while many Asiatic peoples, for 
reasons sufficiently obvious, are inadequately provided 
with the necessities of life, this is by no means true of 
all Asiatic peoples. In any case it is overlooked that 
it is a basic Asiatic conception that, given the neces- 
saries of life, it is a fallacy to suppose that the further 
we can go beyond that the better. Where the Euro- 
pean seeks to become economically independent in old 
age, the Indian map of life proposes for old age an 
independence of economics. The " guinea pigs " of 
a well-known book, in other words you and I, whose 
wants are perpetually exacerbated by the sight and 
sound of advertisements (it has been recognized 
that " Whole industries are pooling their strength to 
ram home a higher standard of living " 13 ), have been 

4 



Am I My Brother's Keeper? 

compared by an Indian writer 14 to another animal 
" the donkey before which the driver has dangled a 
much coveted carrot hanging from a stick fastened to 
its own harness. The more the animal runs to get at 
the carrot, the further is the cart drawn " ; i.e. the 
higher the dividends paid. We are the donkey, the 
manufacturer the driver, and this situation pleases us 
so well that we, in the kindness of our hearts, would 
like to make donkeys also of the Balinese at the same 
time that we ask, " Have they been spoiled yet ? " 
" Spoiled " means " degraded " ; but the word has 
also another sinister meaning, that of " plundered," 
and there are ways of life as well as material goods of 
which one can be robbed. 

Let us make it clear that if we approach the problem 
of inter-cultural relationships largely on the ground of 
art, it is not with the special modern and aesthetic or 
sentimental concept of art in mind, but from that 
Platonic and once universally human point of view in 
which " art " is the principle of manufacture and 
nothing but the science of the making of any things 
whatever for man's good use, physical and meta- 
physical ; and in which, accordingly, agriculture and 
cookery, weaving and fishing are just as much arts as 
painting and music. However strange this may 
appear to us, let us remember that we cannot pretend 
to think for others unless we can think with them. 
In these contexts, then, " art " involves the whole of 
the active life, and presupposes the contemplative. 
The disintegration of a people's art is the destruction 
of their life, by which they are reduced to the 
proletarian status of hewers of wood and drawers of 
water, in the interests of a foreign trader, whose is the 

5 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

profit. The employment of Malays on rubber estates, 
for example, in no way contributes to their culture and 
certainly cannot have made them our friends : they 
owe us nothing. We are irresponsible, in a way that 
Orientals are not yet, for the most part, irresponsible. 

Let me illustrate what I mean by responsibility. 
I have known Indians who indignantly refused to buy 
shares in a profitable hotel company, because they 
would not make money out of hospitality, and an 
Indian woman who refused to buy a washing machine, 
because then, " What would become of the washer- 
man's livelihood ? " For an equal sense of responsi- 
bility in a European I can cite the infinite pains that 
Marco Pallis took, in selecting gifts for his Tibetan 
friends, not to choose anything that might tend to- 
ward a destruction of the quality of their standard of 
living. 

The modern world has, in fact (as was recently re- 
marked by Aldous Huxley), abandoned the concept of 
" right livelihood," according to which a man could 
not be considered a Christian in good standing if he 
made his living by usury or speculation, or considered 
a Buddhist if he made his living by the manufacture 
of weapons or of intoxicating drinks. And as I have 
said elsewhere, if there are any occupations that are 
not consistent with human dignity, or manufactures 
however profitable that are not of real goods, such 
occupations and manufactures must be abandoned by 
any society that has in view the dignity of all its 
members. It is only when measured in terms of 
dignity and not merely in terms of comfort that a 
" standard of living " can properly be called 
" high." 

The bases of modern civilization are to such a degree 

6 



Am I My Brother's Keeper? 

rotten to the core that it has been forgotten even by 
the learned that man ever attempted to live other- 
wise than by bread alone. It had been assumed by 
Plato that " it is contrary to the nature of the arts to 
seek the good of anything but their object/' 15 and 
by St. Thomas Aquinas that "the craftsman is 
naturally inclined by justice to do his work faithfully." 16 
To what a level industrialism must have lowered the 
workman's sense of honour and natural will to do a 
" good job " if, in a reference to the mechanics and 
groundmen who make and service airplanes, Gilbert 
Murray could propound that it is " a quite wonderful 
fact that masses of men have been made so trustworthy 
and reliable " and could say that "it is the Age of 
Machines that, for the first time in history, has made 
them so/' 17 That was a part of his apology for 
Western civilization, in an open letter to Rabindranath 
Tagore. All that this cock and bull airplane story 
really means, of course, is that where production is 
really for use, and not mainly or only for profit, the 
workman is still " naturally inclined to do his work 
faithfully." Even to-day, as Mrs. Handy has re- 
marked, " Technical perfection remains the ideal of 
the Marquesas Island craftsman." 18 In Europe, the 
instinct of workmanship has not been extinguished 
in human nature, but only suppressed in human 
beings working irresponsibly. 

Anthropologists, as impartial observers who do not 
attempt to consider the arts in vacuo, but in their 
relation to the whole structure of society, mince no 
words in their description of the effects of Western 
contacts on traditional cultures. Mrs. Handy's record 
of the Marquesas Islanders, that " the external aspects 

7 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

of their culture have been almost wiped out by the 
white man's devastating activities/' 18 is typical of 
what could be cited from a hundred other sources. 
Of the " savages " of New Guinea Raymond Firth 
says that " their art as an expression of complex 
social values is of basic importance," but that under 
European influence " in nearly every case the quality 
of their art has begun to fall off." 19 C. F. Ikte writes 
that due to the influence of the Western world 
" which is so ready to flood the remainder of our globe 
with inferior mass products, thus destroying among 
native peoples the concepts of quality and beauty, 
together with the joy of creation ... it is a question 
whether the beautiful art of Ikat weaving can long 
survive in the Dutch East Indies." 20 

It is true that we have learned to appreciate the 
" primitive arts " ; but only when we have " col- 
lected " them. We " preserve " folk songs, at the 
same time that our way of life destroys the singer. 
We are proud of our museums, where we display 
the damning evidence of a way of living that we have 
made impossible. These museum " treasures " were 
originally the everyday productions of live men ; 
but now, " due to the breakdown of culture in the 
islands where the objects were made, they may be 
studied more satisfactorily in museums," while at their 
source these " highly developed and beautiful 
techniques have died, or are dying." 21 "Dying," 
because in the words of the knighted fatalist, " pro- 
gression in line with the manufacturing enterprise of 
modern civilization must be allowed free course " ! 
To which we can only rejoin that, if it must be that 
offences come, " Woe unto them through whom they 
come." What, indeed, has lately happened to the 

8 



Am I My Brother's Keeper? 

cities that Cain built ? Let us not assume that " it 
can't happen here." 

Our " love of art " and " appreciation " of primitive 
art, as we call whatever art is abstract and impersonal, 
rather than self -expressive or exhibitionist, has not 
aroused in our hearts any love for the primitive artist 
himself. A more loveless, and at the same time more 
sentimentally cynical, culture than that of modern 
Europe and America it would be impossible to imagine. 
" Seeing through," as it supposes, everything, it cares 
for nothing but itself. The passionless reason of its 
" objective " scholarship, applied to the study of 
" what men have believed," is only a sort of frivolity, 
in which the real problem, that of knowing what should 
be believed, is evaded. Values are to such an extent 
inverted that action, properly means to an end, has 
been made an end in itself, and contemplation, pre- 
requisite to action, has come to be disparaged as an 
" escape " from the responsibilities of activity. 

In the present essay we are concerned, not with the 
political or economic, but with the cultural relations 
that have actually subsisted, and on the other hand 
should subsist, as between the peoples who call them- 
selves progressive and those whom they call backward, 
a type of nomenclature that belongs to the genus of 
" the lion painted by himself." Not that we over- 
look the sinister relationships that connect your 
cultural activities abroad with your political and 
economic interests, but that there is the imminent 
danger that even when you have made up your minds 
to establish political and economic relations with others 
on a basis of justice, you will still believe that you have 
been entrusted with a " civilizing mission." There is 
more than political and economic interest behind the 

9 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

proselytizing fury ; behind all this there is a fanaticism 
that cannot away with any sort of wisdom that is not 
of its own date and kind and the product of its own 
pragmatic calculations : " there is a rancour," as 
Hermes Trismegistus said, " that is contemptuous of 
immortality, and will not let us recognize what is 
divine in us." 22 

That is why the export of your " education " is 
even more nefarious than your traffic in arms. What 
was attempted by the English in India when they 
proposed to build up a class of persons " Indian in 
blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinion, 
in morals and in intellect " (Lord Macaulay) is just 
what Middletown, substituting " American " for 
" English," would like to do to-day. It is what the 
British tried to do in Ireland where " in thirty years 
Irish was killed off so rapidly that the whole island 
contained fewer speakers in 1891 than the small 
province of Connaught alone did thirty years before. 
. . . The amount of horrible suffering entailed by this 
policy . . . counted for nothing with the Board of 
National Education, compared with their great object 
of ... the attainment of one Anglified uniformity. 
. . . The children are taught, if nothing else, to be 
ashamed of their own parents, ashamed of their own 
nationality, ashamed of their own names." 23 Every- 
one will recognize the pattern, repeated alike in the 
case of the " English-educated " Indian and in that of 
the American Indian who has been subjected to the 
untaught ignorance of public school teachers who can- 
not speak his mother tongue. 

Such are the fruits of " civilization," and the fruit 
betrays the tree. All that can only be atoned for by 

10 



Am I My Brother's Keeper? 

repentance, recantation, and restitution. Of these, 
the last is a virtual impossibility ; the fallen redwood 
cannot be replanted. A traditional culture still, 
however, survives precariously in " unspoiled " oases, 
and the least that we can say to the modern world is 
this : Whatever else you dispense in " wars of pacifica- 
tion " or by way of " peaceful penetration," be good 
enough to reserve your " college education " and your 
" finishing schools " for home consumption. What you 
call your " civilizing mission " is in our eyes nothing 
but a form of megalomania. Whatever we need to 
learn from you, we shall come to ask you for as the 
need is felt. At the same time, if you choose to visit 
us, you will be welcome guests, and if there is anything 
of ours that you admire, we shall say, " It is yours." 

For the rest, it is much more for its own sake than in 
order to make restitution that the modern world must 
" change its mind " (repent) ; for, as Philosophia said 
to Boethius in his distress, " You have forgotten who 
you are." But how can this " reasoning and mortal 
animal," this extroverted mentality, be awakened, 
reminded of itself, and converted from its senti- 
mentality and its sole reliance on estimative know- 
ledge to the life of the intellect ? How can this world 
be given back its meaning ? Not, of course, by a 
return to the outward forms of the Middle Ages nor, 
on the other hand, by assimilation to any surviving, 
Oriental or other, pattern of life. But why not by a 
recognition of the principles on which the patterns were 
based ? These principles, on which the " unspoiled " 
life of the East is still supported, must at least be 
grasped, respected, and understood if ever the Western 
provincial is to become a citizen of the world. Even 
the goodness of the modern world is unprincipled ; 

ii 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

its " altruism " is no longer founded on a knowledge 
of the Self of all beings and therefore in the love of 
Self, but only on selfish inclination. And what of 
those who are not inclined to be unselfish ; is there 
any intellectual standard by which they can be 
blamed ? 

If ever the gulf between East and West, of which 
we are made continually more aware as physical 
intimacies are forced upon us, is to be bridged, it will 
be only by an agreement on principles, and not by any 
participation in common forms of government or 
methods of manufacture and distribution. It is not, 
as Kierkegaard said, new forms of government, but 
another Socrates that the world needs. A philosophy 
identical with Plato's is still a living force in the East. 
We called the modern world a headless body ; in the 
Eastern books there is a teaching, how to put heads on 
bodies again. It is one of sacrifice and of preoccupa- 
tion with realities ; outwardly a rite and inwardly a 
being born again. 

To propose an agreement on principles does not 
involve or imply that the Western world should be 
Orientalized; propaganda is out of the question as 
between gentlemen, and everyone must make use of 
the forms appropriate to his own psychophysical 
constitution. It is the European that wants to practice 
Yoga ; the Oriental points out that he has already 
contemplative disciplines of his own. What is implied 
is that a recognition of the principles by which the 
East still lives, and which can, therefore, be seen in 
operation (and few will question that peoples as yet 
" unspoiled " are happier than those that have been 
"spoiled"), could lead the modern "world of im- 
poverished reality," in which it is maintained that 

12 



Am 1 My Brother's Keeper ? 

" such knowledge as is not empirical is meaningless," 
back to the philosopher who denied the dependence of 
knowledge on sensation and maintained that all learn- 
ing is recollection. 

They cannot help us who, in the words of Plato, 
" think that nothing is, except what they can grasp 
firmly with their hands." I repeat what I have said 
elsewhere, that " the European, for his own sake and 
all men's sake in a future world, must not only cease to 
harm and exploit the other peoples of the world, but 
must also give up the cherished and flattering belief 
that he can do them any good otherwise than by being 
good himself." I am far from believing that the 
European is incapable of goodness. 

In conclusion, let me say that the few European 
workers in the Eastern field to whom my criticisms 
do not apply will be the last to disagree with them. 
Also, that what I have been saying is not what you will 
hear from the already English-educated and too often 
" spoiled " Orientals with whom you are able to con- 
verse. 24 I am speaking for a majority, literate and 
illiterate, that is not vocal, partly by inclination, and 
partly because, in more than one sense, they do not 
speak your language. I am speaking for those who 
once before " bowed low before the West in patient, 
deep disdain," and are not less a power to-day because 
you cannot know or hear them. 

REFERENCES 

1 G. La Piana, in Harvard Divinity School Bulletin, 
XXVII, p. 27. 

2 Eric Gill, Autobiography (New York, 1942), p. 174. 
8 Rene Gunon, East and West (London, 1941), p. 43. 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

4 A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1933), p. 358. 

6 M. Covarrubias, Island of Bali (1942). Cf. Colin 
McPhee, " Ankloeng Gamelans in Bali," Djawa, Nos. 5 
and 6, 17de Jaargang (September-December, 1937), p. 348 : 
" The last five years, what with the changing tempo of life, 
the benefits of education, have seen the most rapid changes 
of all, the most irresponsible patching together of hetero- 
geneous elements in music and drama. One wonders what 
will survive in ten years of what was once an art." Before 
we can talk wisely about co-operation it must first of all be 
realized that, as the editor of the New English Weekly 
recently remarked, " practically the whole of Oriental 
humanity, the greater portion of the human race, including 
the U.S.S.R., lives in a social aspiration which is the polar 
opposite of the American." Any possibilities of co-operation 
are bound up with agreement about ends, whereas almost 
every proposal nowadays brought forward has only to do 
with means, and usually with the application of Western 
means to Eastern situations. 

Sir George Watt, Indian Art at Delhi (London, 1912), 
p. 72. This is the modern form of the Amaurian 
(Amalrician) heresy ; the economically determined man, 
without free will, is by the same token irresponsible ; no 
blame to him, the fault is fate's ! Cf . Sir George Birdwood, 
Sva, pp. 84-5 : " England . . . where every national 
interest is sacrificed to the shibboleth of unrestricted inter- 
national competition ; and where as a consequence, 
agriculture, the only sure foundation of society, languishes 
... its last result, the bitter, stark and cruel contrast 
presented between the West End of London and the East. 
And do Europe and America desire to reduce all Asia to an 
East End ? " And K. E. Barlow (in Purpose, XI, 1939, 
p. 245) : " In our everyday world the principle of exploita- 
tion without responsibility has brought a disorder in society 
and in Nature which stupefies all of us who think. ... It 
has become clear that our civilization is pursuing a course 
which cannot long be maintained." 

But : " Above all a missionary must be a social reformer, 
for life under anything but Christianity is a distortion of 

14 



Am I My Brother's Keeper? 

human nature. . . . Take the native ... get him to act 
like a European " (Nicholas Humphries, O.P., and Finbar 
Synnot, O.P., in Blackfriars 28, 1947, pp. 316, 321) ! 
Pallis, Peaks and Lamas, p. 154 : " Rebirth in the humblest 
station in Tibet offers fuller possibilities than life in a factory 
town of Europe or America, or even life in a manager's 
office of a great firm." P. 8 : Tibet " one of the earth's 
most civilized peoples." 

7 Rabindranath Tagore and Gilbert Murray, Open Letters, 
East and West (Paris, 1932), p. 44. 

8 Henry A. Wallace, then vice-president, in a speech, 
1943. And as the late President Roosevelt truly said, 
" Never again must we in the United States isolate our- 
selves from the rest of humanity " ; but he showed by 
his next words, " I am confident that the foreign trade of 
the United States can be trebled after the war providing 
millions more jobs," that he had not in mind the root of the 
matter, that is, an abandonment of America's cultural 
isolation. As for the " price " of industrialism, it must be 
recognized, in the first place, that the American " standard 
of living," judged by qualitative standards, is beneath 
contempt, at the same time that the artist, no longer a 
member of society but a parasite upon it, " has become the 
Pekinese of the rich " (Erich Meissner's phrase in Germany 
in Peril, 1942, p. 42). " The standardized products of our 
mills and factories are a disgrace to American civilization " 
(Msgr. G. B. O'Toole in Foreword to Krzesinski, 7s Modern 
Culture Doomed ? 1942). On the salesman's and producer's 
side : " Modern machinery and its irresistible advance fills 
these men with mystic frenzy " (Meissner, ibid., p. 115) : 
and, " Eventually Man . . . adopts a discipline which 
transforms him into a machine himself " (Ernst Niekisch, 
quoted by Meissner, ibid.). Vice-President Wallace's words 
and two current, and very revealing, American advertise- 
ments are a dramatic demonstration. Of the advertise- 
ments, one, depicting a salesman behind his counter, puts 
into his mouth the words : " Handmade ? Of course not ! 
Why, most everything in this store is made by machines 
nowadays. If it weren't I wouldn't be selling half these 

15 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

things, and you couldn't buy them. They'd cost too much." 
The other prints a " poem," called " My Machine," and its 
first lines are : 

There are many other machines, but this one is mine. 
It is a part of me, I am a part of it. 

We are one. 
It does not stop unless I forget. 

There is no reference to the quality, either of man or of 
product, in either case. 

" On peut remarquer que la machine est, en un certain 
sens, le contraire de 1'outil, et non point un ' outil per- 
fectionn ' comme beaucoup se 1'imaginent, car 1'outil est 
en quelque sort un ' prolongement ' de 1'homme lui-m&ne, 
tandis que la machine reduit celui-^i & n'tre plus que son 
serviteur (" minder ") ; et, si Ton a pu dire que ' 1'outil 
engendra le metier,' il n'est pas moins vrai que la machine 
le tue ; les reactions instinctives des artisans contre les 
premieres machines s'expliquent par Ik d'elle-mmes " 
(Rene Gu6non, Le regne de la quantite et les signes des temps, 
2nd ed. ; Paris, 1945, p. 64, note). In Ruskin's words, 
" The great cry that rises from all our manufacturing 
cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for 
this, that we manufacture everything there except men " 
Stones of Venice, in Ruskin's works, Vol. X, p. 196) : and, 
" This evil cannot be cured through higher wages, good 
housing conditions and improved nutrition " (Meissner, 
ibid., p. 42). " If your real ideals are those of materialistic 
efficiency, then the sooner you know your own mind, and 
face the consequences, the better. . . . The more highly 
industrialized a country, the more easily a materialistic 
philosophy will flourish in it, and the more deadly that 
philosophy will be. ... And the tendency of unlimited 
industrialism is to create masses of men and women 
detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and 
susceptible to mass suggestion : in other words, a mob. 
And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, 
well housed, and well disciplined " (T. S. Eliot in The Idea 
of a Christian Society). 

16 



Am I My Brother's Keeper? 

To-day : " the scientific conception of man . . . 
supplants an older and more natural pattern of thought, 
the theological conception of man. . . . The theological 
conception is based on certain assumptions. First, that 
each man has a sacred and indestructible aspect. . . . 
Naive (!) as this idea is, the theological conception gave 
each individual an inalienable dignity. . . . (Later,) the 
political and utilitarian conception of man . . . began to 
dominate his worldly existence. This deterioration was 
fatal to the preservation of the dignity of the individual 
. . . half of him became a commodity like potatoes, a used 
object whose value fluctuated with demand . . . This 
deterioration was naturally hastened by the machine, whose 
attributes man gradually assumed . . . the matter of 
survival reduces itself to the question of whether the science 
of man can progress more rapidly than the tendency of man 
to destroy himself " (Abram Kardiner, " Western 
Personality and Social Crisis," Commentary 2, Nov., 1946, 

PP. 437;8). 

"It is doubtful whether life can be significantly lived 
without conscious relation to some tradition. Those who 
do live without it live as a kind of moral proletariat, 
without roots and without loyalties. For to be significant 
life needs form, and form is the outcome of a quality of 
thought and feeling which shapes a tradition " (Dorothy 
M. Emmet in The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking, 1946, 

P- 163). 

More than a physical well-being is necessary for felicity. 
An Indian peasant's face has neither the vacancy of the 
greedy children, grinning apes and whores that are the ideal 
of the American advertiser, nor the expression of anxiety 
that marks the American " common man " in real life. 
" In spite of our enormous technological advances we are 
spiritually, and as humane beings, not the equals of the 
average Australian aboriginal or the average Eskimo we 
are very definitely their inferiors " (M. F. Ashley Montagu, 
" Socio-Biology of Man," Scientific Monthly, June, 1942, 

P- 49). 
Cf. Traherne, Centuries 3.12 : " Verily, there is no savage 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

nation under the cope of Heaven, that is more absurdly 
barbarous than the Christian world." 

Plato, Laws 737E. 

10 Sir John Birdwood, Industrial Arts of India (1880). 

11 0. L. Reiser, A New Earth and a New Humanity (New 
York, 1942), p. 209. 

12 Matthew xxiii.is. 

18 " It is open to question whether anything a machine 
turns out for direct human use is productive of human 
good " (in the Nation, November 27, 1943). Cf. L. Ziegler 
in Forum Philosophicum I, 86, 87, 88 : " Work is first and 
foremost no financial, but a human and social expression of 
one's being. Every ware which does not answer an 
existing need is above all the most superfluous thing in the 
world ... it must first artificially rouse up a need in 
places where a need does not exist. . . . Present day 
economic management is framed for the stimulation, yes, 
even for the ' creation ' of needs ... as if wages and income 
could in any way keep pace with this artificially aroused 
need for a commodity. . . . The fashionably altering 
display of goods attaches to so unlimited a mass and variety 
of wares a label of necessity, that in the face of it even the 
purchasing power of the rich is beaten, whereas the poor 
seem doomed to a poverty hitherto undreamt of. From 
this point of view modern finance reveals itself as the 
enemy of society, yes, even as the destroyer of society." 
For, observe that, as Albert Schweitzer says, " Whenever 
the timber trade is good, permanent famine reigns in the 
Ogowe region." Modern wars, in fact, are fought for 
world markets ; in other words, in order that all 
" backward " peoples may be forced to purchase an 
annual quota of gadgets from those who call themselves 
" advanced." 

Here it is, however, with the moral effects of manufacture 
for profit that we are concerned, and especially with its 
effect on those who are forced on the one hand to provide 
the raw materials, and on the other to buy the manufactured 
gadgets. It is not merely that the change from a barter to 
a money economy is actually " from an economy of 

18 



Am I My Brother's Keeper? 

abundance to one of scarcity " (Parsons, Pueblo Indian 
Religion, 1939, p. 1144), but that it is a matter of the 
poisoning of the lives of contented peoples, whose culture 
is destroyed to satisfy the saurian greed of the plutocratic 
" democracies." In the Balkans, for example, " There 
were two sorts of people. There was the people as it had 
been since the beginning of time, working in the villages, 
small towns and capitals. But there was also a new people, 
begotten by the new towns which the industrial and 
financial development of the nineteenth century had raised 
all over Europe. . . . This new sort of people [was one 
that] had been defrauded of their racial tradition, they 
enjoyed no inheritance of wisdom ; brought up without 
gardens, to work on machines, all but a few lacked the 
education which is given by craftsmanship ; and they 
needed this wisdom and this education as never before, 
because they were living in conditions of unprecedented 
frustration and insecurity " (Rebecca West, in Black Lamb 
and Grey Falcon). 

" The rise of science, the discrediting of religion, and the 
abiding triumph of capitalism have focused the basic 
personality of Western man upon one goal, success, the 
only proof of which is the endless acquisition of money. . . . 
But this kind of training, as it emphasizes striving for self- 
esteem and success, releases at the same time the extra- 
ordinary aggressiveness which takes so many cruel forms. 
Aggressiveness turned inward results in masochism, feelings 
of inferiority, passivity, and other kinds of weakness. 
Turned outward, the result is sadism, extreme rivalry, 
envy, and conflict, the social climax being war. Competi- 
tion, which motivates the entire psychological formation, is 
not in itself evil, since it may create a strong and self-reliant 
human being ; but in a scarcity economy such as ours the 
combination of the social system with a basic personality 
focused on competition for success overburdens the lives 
of most human beings with tensions and insecurities for 
which only one term is adequate lifelong neuroticism" 
(Delmore Schwartz, reviewing Abram Kardiner, The 
Individual and His Society and The Psychological Frontiers 

19 c 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

of Society, 1939 and 1945, in The Nation, Jan. 12, 1946, 
pp. 46-48). 

" To-day under the centralized economic order, we appear 
to be descending below the level of the beast, hating, 
exploiting each other on a world scale, and reducing the 
average man to a standardized automaton incapable of 
thinking for himself " (Bharatan Kumarappa, Capitalism, 
Socialism, or Villagism ?, 1946, p. 194). " Validation of 
success in terms of externals has become the mark of our 
civilization. In such a value-system human relations take 
on the values of the salesman. . . . Competition is the 
most powerful law of the land. Under such conditions men 
everywhere become nasty, brutish, and cruel. . . . Unless 
Western man is able to release himself from the degrading 
tyranny of his enslavement to the religion of economics he is 
as certainly doomed to self-destruction as all the portents 
indicate that he is. 11 (M. F. Ashley Montagu in School and 
Society, vol. 65, No. 1696, 1947, pp. 465-469). 

There can be no possible doubt that what men now 
understand by " civilization " is an essentially vicious and 
destructive force, or that what is called " progress " is both 
suicidal and murderous. " Civilization, as we now have it, 
can only end in disaster " (G. H. Estabrooks, Man the 
Mechanical Misfit, New York, 1941, p. 246) ; or as C. H. 
Grattan and G. R. Leighton so well say, " No one looking 
for peace and quiet has any business talking about inter- 
national trade." (in Harper's Magazine, August, 1944). Of 
all these things the catastrophes of to-day are only a 
beginning. 

14 J. C. Kumarappa. Cf. Philo Judaeus, De specialibus 
legibus IV, 80 f. 

" Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can 
be trusted with machines. Only such a people will so 
contrive and control those machines that their products are 
an enhancement of biological needs, and not a denial of 
them. Only such a people will be secure from the debili- 
tating effects of mass production and mass unemployment 
(miscalled ' leisure '). Only such a people, with sensations 
still vivid and intelligence ever active, can hope to form a 

20 



Am I My Brother's Keeper ? 

stable and integrated society in the industrial world of the 
future." (Herbert Read, The Grass Roots of Art, 1946). 

15 Republic, 342 B, 347 A, etc, 

18 Summa Theologica, I-II, 57, 3 and 2. Justitia here = 
8ixatooih>77 = dharma, here as in Plato, Republic, 433 A, 
and in Matthew vi:33, where the word is rendered by 
" righteousness," with some loss of force. 

17 Open Letters, East and West. 

18 Art des lies Marquises (1938). Cf. the words of two 
reviewers of J. F. Embree's Suye Mura, a Japanese Village : 
One remarks that here " we see a little group of Japanese 
families living, working, struggling in their daily life to earn 
their bread, to educate their children, and to live out lives of 
ordinary usefulness, in the way common to people every- 
where " ; the other that " his book offers good evidence 
that it will take many a long year to Westernize the 
Japanese peasant." The more " long years " the better for 
the peace and happiness of the Japanese peasants and of 
the world ! 

David N. Rowe China Among the Powers (New York) 
" the psychology of the Chinese industrial labourer is not 
in harmony with modern machine industry as it is known 
in the West." 

Contrast also the words of H. N. Brailsford, " The caste 
line will have to be broken, if industrial work is to be 
provided for the superfluous cultivators," with those of the 
sociologist S. Chandrasekhar, who points out that " the 
development of cotton textile-mill industry in India, which 
to-day employs about 430,000 workers, has actually been 
responsible for throwing out of employment an estimated 
total of 6 million handloom workers, who have been forced 
to fall back upon an already overcrowded agrarian 
economy " ; and consider whether Gandhi's cult of the 
spinning wheel is not a more practical and realistic way of 
dealing with India's poverty than Mr. Brailsford's. 

It is rather obvious that " labour-saving " devices are 
causes of unemployment. What does Mr. Brailsford propose 
to do with his superfluous hands ? Pay them a dole ? " We 
can find labour (i.e., a livelihood) for our people only if we 

21 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

turn away from large-scale factory production and take to 
small-scale cottage enterprise " (Bh. Kumarappa, Capital- 
ism, Socialism or Villagism ?, p. 127). 

19 Art and Life in New Guinea (1936), pp. 31, 32. Cf. Tom 
Harrisson, Savage Civilisation, passim. 

20 Bobbin and Needle Club (New York, 1931), XV, p. 56. 
21 G. A. Reichard, Melanesian Design (1931), pp. i, 90. 
" As one looks backward at the road Whites and Indians 

have travelled together, and at their relationships to-day, 
one cannot help wondering if America is really prepared to 
lead the world in race tolerance and international peace " 
(A. H. and D. C. Leighton, The Navaho Door, Cambridge, 
1944). 

A Ceylonese correspondent recently asked me : " If God 
appeared on earth, and inquired for the Aztecs, Incas, Red 
Indians, Australian aborigines, and other slowly dis- 
appearing races, would the civilized nations take him to 
your great museum ? " 

22 Asclepius 1. 12 b (Scott, Hermetica, 1.309). 

28 Douglas Hyde, Literary History of Ireland (1899), 
pp. 630-44- 

24 For example, Professor F. S. C. Northrop in his Meeting 
of East and West, 1946, p. 434, quotes the " cultivated 
humanist " Jawaharlal Nehru to prove that " the younger 
Indians and other Orientals " are anxious to learn " what 
the West has to teach of science and its applications," which 
is true enough, but hardly to the point in a book intended 
to show that Eastern and Western ideologies are unlike ; he 
overlooks Shri Bharatan Kumarappa, who says that " we 
must be clear in our minds as to what exactly we want to 
work for mere material prosperity or human develop- 
ment," and complains that among socialists " the question 
of whether aa abundance of goods is necessary for human 
well-being is never so much as raised." 



II : The Bugbear of Literacy 



IT was possible for Aristotle, 1 starting from the 
premise that a man, being actually cultured, may also 
become literate, to ask whether there is a necessary 
or merely an accidental connection of literacy with 
culture. Such a question can hardly arise for those 
to whom illiteracy implies, as a matter of course, 
ignorance, backwardness, unfitness for self-govern- 
ment : for you, unlettered peoples are uncivilized 
peoples, and vice versa as a recent publisher's blurb 
expresses it : " The greatest force in civilization is the 
collective wisdom of a literate people." 

There are reasons for this point of view ; they inhere 
in the distinction of a people, or folk, from a proletariat, 
that of a social organism from a human ant heap. 
For a proletariat, literacy is a practical and cultural 
necessity. We may remark in passing that necessities 
are not always goods in themselves, out of their con- 
text ; some, like wooden legs, are advantageous only 
to men already maimed. However that may be, it 
remains that literacy is a necessity for you, and 
from both points of view ; (i) because our indus- 
trial system can only be operated and profits can 
only be made by men provided with at least an 
elementary knowledge of the " three R's " ; and (2) 
because, where there is no longer any necessary con- 
nection between one's " skill " (now a timesaving 
" economy of motion " rather than a control of the 
product) and one's "wisdom," the possibility of 
culture depends so much on an ability to read the best 
books. I say " possibility " here because, whereas 

23 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

the literacy actually produced by compulsory mass 
education often involves little or no more than an 
ability and the will to read the newspapers and adver- 
tisements, an actually cultured man under these con- 
ditions will be one who has studied many books in 
many languages, and this is not a kind of knowledge 
that can be handed out to everyone under " compul- 
sion " (even if any nation could afford the needed 
quantity and quality of teachers) or that could be 
acquired by everyone, however ambitious. 

I have allowed that in industrial societies, where it is 
assumed that man is made for commerce and where men 
are cultured, if at all, in spite of rather than because of 
their environment, literacy is a necessary skill. It will 
naturally follow that if, on the principle that misery 
loves company, you are planning to industrialize the 
rest of the world, you are also in duty bound to train it 
in Basic English, or words to that effect American is 
already a language of exclusively external relationships, 
a tradesman's tongue lest the other peoples should 
be unable to compete effectively with us. Competition 
is the life of trade, and gangsters must have rivals. 

In the present article we are concerned with some- 
thing else, viz., the assumption that, even for societies 
not yet industrialized, literacy is "an unqualified 
good and an indispensible condition of culture." 2 
The vast majority of the world's population is still 
unindustrialized and unlettered, and there are peoples 
still " unspoiled " (in the interior of Borneo) : but the 
average American who knows of no other way of 
living than his own, judges that " unlettered " means 
" uncultured," as if this majority consisted only of a 
depressed class in the context of his own environment. 
It is because of this, as well as for some meaner reasons, 

24 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

not unrelated to " imperial " interests, that when men 
propose not merely to exploit but also to educate 
" the lesser breeds without the [i.e. their] law " they 
inflict upon them profound, and often lethal, injuries. 
I say " lethal " rather than " fatal " here because it 
is precisely a destruction of their memories that is 
involved. Men overlook that " education " is never 
creative, but a two-edged weapon, always destructive ; 
whether of ignorance or of knowledge depending upon 
the educator's wisdom or folly. Too often fools rush 
in where angels might fear to tread. 

As against the complacent prejudice we shall essay 
to show (i) that there is no necessary connection of 
literacy with culture, and (2) that to impose our 
literacy (and our contemporary "literature ") upon a 
cultured but illiterate people is to destroy their culture 
in the name of our own. For the sake of brevity we 
shall assume without argument that " culture " implies 
an ideal quality and a good form that can be realized 
by all men irrespective of condition : and, since we are 
treating of culture chiefly as expressed in words, we 
shall identify culture with " poetry " ; not having in 
view the kind of poetry that nowadays babbles of 
green fields or that merely reflects social behaviour 
or our private reactions to passing events, but with 
reference to that whole class of prophetic literature that 
includes the Bible, the Vedas, the Edda, the great 
epics, and in general the world's " best books," and 
the most philosophical if we agree with Plato that 
" wonder is the beginning of philosophy." Of these 
" books " many existed long before they were written 
down, many have never been written down, and others 
have been or will be lost. 

I shall have now to make some quotations from the 

25 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

works of men whose " culture " cannot be called in 
question ; for while the merely literate are often very 
proud of their literacy, such as it is, it is only by men 
who are " not only literate but also cultured " that it 
has been widely recognized that " letters " at their best 
are only a means to an end and never an end in them- 
selves, or, indeed, that " the letter kills." A " liter- 
ary " man, if ever there was one, the late Professor 
G. L. Kittredge writes: 8 "It requires a combined 
"effort of the reason and the imagination to conceive a 
poet as a person who cannot write, singing or reciting 
his verses to an audience that cannot read. . . . The 
ability of oral tradition to transmit great masses of 
verse for hundreds of years is proved and admitted. 
... To this oral literature, as the French call it, 
education is no friend. Culture destroys it, sometimes 
with amazing rapidity. When a nation begins to read 
. . . what was once the possession of the folk as a whole, 
becomes the heritage of the illiterate only, and soon, 
unless it is gathered up by the antiquary, vanishes 
altogether." Mark, too, that this oral literature once 
belonged " to the whole people . . . the community 
whose intellectual interests are the same from the top 
of the social structure to the bottom," while in the 
reading society it is accessible only to antiquaries, and 
is no longer bound up with everyday life. A point of 
further importance is this : that the traditional oral 
literatures interested not only all classes, but also all 
ages of the population ; while the books that are nowa- 
days written expressly " for children " are such as no 
mature mind could tolerate ; it is now only the comic 
strips that appeal alike to children who have been 
given nothing better and at the same time to " adults " 
who have never grown up. 

26 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

It is in just the same way that music is thrown away ; 
folk songs are lost to the people at the same time that 
. they are collected and " put in a bag " ; and in the 
same way that the " preservation " of a people's art 
in folk museums is a funeral rite, for preservatives are 
only necessary when the patient has already died. 
Nor must we suppose that " community singing " can 
take the place of folk song ; its level can be no higher 
than that of the Basic English in which our under- 
graduates must be similarly drilled, if they are to under- 
stand even the language of their elementary text- 
books. 

In other words, " Universal compulsory education, 
of the type introduced at the end of the last century, 
has not fulfilled expectations by producing happier 
and more effective citizens ; on the contrary, it has 
created readers of the yellow press and cinema-goers lj 
(Karl Otten) . A master who can himself not only read, 
but also write good classical Latin and Greek, remarks 
that " there is no doubt of the quantitative increase in 
literacy of a kind, and amid the general satisfaction 
that something is being multiplied it escapes enquiry 
whether the something is profit or deficit. " He is 
discussing only the " worst effects " of enforced literacy, 
and concludes : " Learning and wisdom have often 
been divided ; perhaps the clearest result of modem 
literacy has been to maintain and enlarge the 
gulf/' 2 

Douglas Hyde remarks that " in vain have disin- 
terested visitors opened wide eyes of astonishment at 
schoolmasters who knew no Irish being appointed to 
teach pupils who knew no English. . . . Intelligent 
children endowed with a vacabulary in every day use ol 
about three thousand words enter the Schools of the 

27 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

Chief Commissioner, to come out at the end with their 
natural vivacity gone, their intelligence almost com- 
pletely sapped, their splendid command of their native 
language lost for ever, and a vocabulary of five or six 
hundred English words, badly pronounced and bar- 
barously employed, substituted for it. ... Story, lay, 
poem, song, aphorism, proverb, and the unique stock 
in trade of an Irish speaker's mind, is gone for ever, and 
replaced by nothing. . . . The children are taught, if 
nothing else, to be ashamed of their own parents, 
ashamed of their own nationality, ashamed of their own 
names. ... It is a remarkable system of ' educa- 
tion ' " 4 this system that you, " civilized and 
literate " Americans, have inflicted upon your own 
Amerindians, and that all imperial races are still 
inflicting upon their subjected peoples, and would 
like to impose upon their allies the Chinese, for 
example. 

The problem involved is both of languages and what 
is said in them. As for language, let us bear in mind, 
in the first place, that no such thing as a " primitive 
language," in the sense of one having a limited vocabu- 
lary fitted only to express the simplest external 
relationships, is known. Much rather, that is a 
condition to which, under certain circumstances and 
as the result of " nothing-morist " philosophies, 
languages tend, rather than one from which they 
originate ; for example, 90 per cent of our American 
" literacy " is a two-syllabled affair. 6 

In the seventeenth century Robert Knox said of the 
Cingalese that " their ordinary Plough-men and 
Husbandmen do speak elegantly, and are full of 
complement. And there is no difference of ability 
and speech of a Country-man and a Courtier." 6 

28 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

Abundant testimony to the like effect could be cited 
from all over the world. Thus of Gaelic, J. F. Camp- 
bell wrote, " I am inclined to think that dialect the 
best which is spoken by the most illiterate in the islands 
. . . men with clear heads and wonderful memories, 
generally very poor and old, living in remote corners 
of remote islands, and speaking only Gaelic," 7 and 
he quotes Hector Maclean, who says that the loss of 
their oral literature is due " partly to reading . . . 
partly to bigoted religious ideas, and partly to narrow 
utilitarian views " which are, precisely, the three 
typical forms in which modern civilization impresses 
itself upon the older cultures. Alexander Carmichael 
says that " the people of Lews, like the people of the 
Highlands and Islands generally, carry the Scriptures 
in their minds and apply them in their speech. . . . 
Perhaps no people had a fuller ritual of song and story, 
of secular rite and religious ceremony . . . than the 
ill-understood and so-called illiterate Highlanders 
of Scotland." 8 

St. Barbe Baker tells us that in Central Africa " my 
trusted friend and companion was an old man who 
could not read or write, though well versed in 
stories of the past. . . . The old chiefs listened 
enthralled. . . . Under the present system of educa- 
tion there is grave risk that much of this may be lost."' 
W. G. Archer points out that " unlike the English 
system in which one could pass one's life without com- 
ing into contact with poetry, the Uraon tribal system 
uses poetry as a vital appendix to dancing, marriages 
and the cultivation of a crop functions in which all 
Uraons join as a part of their tribal life," adding that 
" if we have to single out the factor which caused the 
decline of English village culture, we should have to say 

29 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

it was literacy. 1 ' 10 In an older England, as Prior and 
Gardner remind us, " even the ignorant and unlettered 
man could read the meaning of sculptures that now 
only trained archeologists can interpret." 11 

The anthropologist Paul Radin points out that " the 
distortion in our whole psychic life and in our whole 
apperception of the external realities produced by the 
invention of the alphabet, the whole tendency of which 
has been to elevate thought and thinking to the rank of 
the exclusive proof of all verities, never occurred 
among primitive peoples," adding that "it must be 
explicitly recognized that in temperament and in 
capacity for logical and symbolical thought, there is 
no difference between civilized and primitive man," 
and as to " progress," that none in ethnology will ever 
be achieved " until scholars rid themselves, once and 
for all, of the curious notion that everything possesses 
an evolutionary history ; until they realize that certain 
ideas and certain concepts are as ultimate for man " ia 
as his physical constitution. " The distinction of 
peoples in a state of nature from civilized peoples can 
no longer be maintained." 18 

We have so far considered only the dicta of literary 
men. A really " savage " situation and point of view 
are recorded by Tom Harrisson, from the New Hebrides. 
" The children are educated by listening and watching. 
. . . Without writing, memory is perfect, tradition 
exact. The growing child is taught all that is known. 
. . . Intangible things co-operate in every effort of 
making, from conception to canoe-building. . . . Songs 
are a form of story-telling. . . . The lay-out and con- 
tent in the thousand myths which every child learns 
(often word perfect, and one story may last for hours) 
are a whole library . . . the hearers are held in a web 

30 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

of spun words " ; they converse together " with 
that accuracy and pattern of beauty in words that we 
have lost." And what do they think of us ? " The 
natives easily learn to write after white impact. 
They regard it as a curious and useless performance. 
They say : ' Cannot a man remember and speak ? ' " 14 
They consider us " mad," and may be right. 

When you set out to " educate " the South Sea 
Islanders it is generally in order to make them more 
useful to yourselves (this was admittedly the begin- 
ning of "English education" in India), or to "con- 
vert " them to your way of thinking ; not having in 
view to introduce them to Plato. But if we or they 
should happen upon Plato, it might startle both to 
find that their protest, " Cannot a man remember ? " 
is also his. 15 " For," he says, " this invention [of 
letters] will produce forget fulness in the mind of those 
who learn to use it, because they will not exercise their 
memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external 
characters which are no part of themselves, will dis- 
courage the use of their own memory within thenu 
You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of 
reminding ; and you offer your pupils the appearance 
of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many 
things without teaching, and will therefore seem to 
know many things [Professor E. K. Rand's "more 
and more of less and less "], when they are for the most 
part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are 
not wise but only wiseacres." He goes on to say that 
there is another kind of " word," of higher origin and 
greater power than the written (or as we should say, 
the printed) word ; and maintains that the wise man, 
" when in earnest, will not write in ink " dead words 
that cannot teach the truth effectively, but will sow 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

the seeds of wisdom in souls that are able to receive 
them and so " to pass them on for ever." 

There is nothing strange or peculiar in Plato's 
point of view ; it is one, for example, with which every 
cultured Indian unaffected by modern European 
influences would agree wholly. It will suffice to cite 
that great scholar of Indian languages, Sir George A. 
Grierson, who says that " the ancient Indian system 
by which literature is recorded not on paper but on the 
memory, and carried down from generation to genera- 
tion of teachers and pupils, is still [1920] in complete 
survival in Kashmir. Such fleshly tables of the heart 
are often more trustworthy than birch bark or paper 
manuscripts. The reciters, even when learned Pandits, 
take every care to deliver the messages word for word," 
and records taken down from professional storytellers 
are thus " in some respects more valuable than any 
written manuscript. '" lfl 

From the Indian point of view a man can only be 
said to know what he knows by heart ; what he must go 
to a book to be reminded of, he merely knows of. 
There are hundreds of thousands of Indians even now 
who daily repeat from knowledge by heart either the 
whole or some large part of the Bhagavad Gttd ; others 
more learned can recite hundreds of thousands of 
verses of longer texts. It was from a travelling village 
singer in Kashmir that I first heard sung the Odes of 
the classical Persian poet, Jalalu'd-DIn Rumi. From 
the earliest times, Indians have thought of the learned 
man, not as one who has read much, but as one who 
has been profoundly taught. It is much rather from 
a master than from any book that wisdom can be 
learned. 

We come now to the last part of our problem, which 

32 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

has to do with the characteristic preoccupations of the 
oral and the written literature ; for although no hard 
and fast line can be drawn between them, there is a 
qualitative and thematic distinction, as between 
literatures that were originally oral and those that are 
created, so to speak, on paper " In the beginning was 
the WORD." The distinction is largely of poetry from 
prose and myth from fact. The quality of oral litera- 
ture is essentially poetical, its content essentially 
mythical, and its preoccupation with the spiritual 
adventures of heroes : the quality of originally written 
literature is essentially prosaic, its content literal, and 
its preoccupation with secular events and with person- 
alities. In saying "poetical" we mean to imply 
" mantic," and are naturally taking for granted that 
the " poetic " is a literary quality, and not merely a 
literary (versified) form. Contemporary poetry is 
essentially and inevitably of the same calibre as modern 
prose ; both are equally opinionated, and the best in 
either embodies a few " happy thoughts " rather than 
any certainty. As a famous gloss expresses it, " Un- 
belief is for the mob." We who can call an art 
" significant/ 1 knowing not of what, are also proud to 
" progress/ 1 we know not whither. 

Plato maintains that one who is in earnest will not 
write, but teach ; and that if the wise man writes at 
all, it will be either only for amusement mere " belles 
lettres " or to provide reminders for himself when his 
memory is weakened by old age. We know exactly 
what Plato means by the words " in earnest " ; it is 
not about human affairs or personalities, but about the 
eternal verities, the nature of real being, and the 
nourishment of our immortal part, that the wise man 
will be in earnest. Our mortal part can survive " by 

33 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

bread alone," but it is by the Myth that our Inner Man 
is fed ; or, if we substitute for the true myths the 
propagandist myths of " race," " uplift," " progress," 
and " civilizing mission," the Inner Man starves. The 
written text, as Plato says, can serve those whose 
memories have been weakened by old age. Thus it is 
that in the senility of culture it has been found neces- 
sary to " preserve " the masterpieces of art in museums, 
and at the same time to record in writing and so also 
to " preserve " (if only for scholars) as much as can be 
" collected " of oral literatures that would otherwise 
be lost for ever; and this must be done before it is 
too late. 

All serious students of human societies are agreed 
that agriculture and handicraft are essential founda- 
tions of any civilization ; the primary meaning of the 
word being that of making a home for oneself. But, as 
Albert Schweitzer says, " We proceed as if not agri- 
culture and handicraft, but reading and writing 
were the beginning of civilization," and, " from schools 
which are mere copies of those of Europe they 
[natives] are turned out as 'educated* persons, that 
is, who think themselves superior to manual work, 
and want to follow only commercial or intellectual 
callings . . . those who go through the schools are 
mostly lost to agriculture and handicraft." 17 As that 
great missionary, Charles Johnson of Zululand, also 
said, " the central idea [of the mission schools] was to 
prize individuals off the mass of the national life." 

Our literary figures of thought, for example, the 
notions of " culture " (analogous to agriculture), 
"wisdom" (originally "skill"), and "asceticism" 
(originally " hard work "), are derived from the pro- 
ductive and constructive arts ; for, as St. Bonaventura 

34 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

says, " There is nothing therein which does not bespeak 
a true wisdom, and it is for this reason that Holy 
Scripture very properly makes use of such similes." 18 
In normal societies, the necessary labours of production 
and construction are no mere " jobs," but also rites, 
and the poetry and music that are associated with them 
are a kind of liturgy. The " lesser mysteries " of the 
crafts are a natural preparation for the greater 
" mysteries of the kingdom of heaven." But for us, 
who can no longer think in terms of Plato's divine 
" justice " of which the social aspect is vocational, 
that Christ was a carpenter and the son of a carpenter 
was only an historical accident ; we read, but do not 
understand that where we speak of primary matter as 
" wood/' we must also speak of Him " through whom 
all things were made " as a " carpenter." At the best, 
we interpret the classical figures of thought, not in 
their universality but as figures of speech invented by 
individual authors. Where literacy becomes an only 
skill, " the collective wisdom of a literate people " 
may be only a collective ignorance while " back- 
ward communities are the oral libraries of the world's 
ancient cultures." 19 

The purpose of your educational activities abroad is 
to assimilate our pupils to your own ways of thinking 
and living. It is not easy for any foreign teacher to 
acknowledge Ruskin's truth, that there is one way only 
to help others, and that that is, not to train them in 
one's own way of living (however bigoted our faith in 
it may be), but to find out what they have been trying 
to do, and were doing before we came, and if possible 
help them to do it better. Some Jesuit missionaries 
in China are actually sent to remote villages and re- 
quired to earn their living there by the practice of an 

35 D 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

indigenous craft for at least two years before they are 
allowed to teach at all. Some such condition as this 
ought to be imposed upon all foreign teachers, whether 
in mission or government schools. How dare you 
forget that you are dealing with peoples "whose 
intellectual interests are the same from the top of the 
social structure to the bottom," and for whom your 
unfortunate distinctions of religious from secular learn- 
ing, fine from applied art, and significance from use 
have not yet been made ? When you have introduced 
these distinctions and have divided an " educated " 
from a still " illiterate " class, it is to the latter that we 
must turn if we want to study the language, the poetry, 
and the whole culture of these peoples, " before it is 
too late." 

In speaking of a " proselytizing fury " in a former 
article I had not only in view the activities of professed 
missionaries but more generally those of everyone bent 
by the weight of the white man's burden and anxious 
to confer the " blessings " of their own civilization 
upon others. What lies below this fury, of which your 
punitive expeditions and " wars of pacification " are 
only more evident manifestations ? It would not be 
too much to say that educational activities abroad (a 
word that must be taken to include the American 
Indian reservations) are motivated by an intention 
to destroy existing cultures. And that is not only, 
I think, because of your conviction of the absolute 
superiority of your Kultur, and consequent contempt 
and hatred for whatever else you have not understood 
(all those for whom the economic motive is not decisive) , 
but grounded in an unconscious and deep-rooted envy 
of the serenity and leisure that we cannot help but 
recognize in people whom we call " unspoiled." It 

36 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

irks you that these others, who are neither, as you are, 
industrialized nor, as you are, " democratic," should 
nevertheless be contented ; you feel bound to discontent 
them, and especially to discontent their women, who 
might learn from us to work in factories or to find 
careers. I used the word Kultur deliberately just now, 
because there is not much real difference between the 
Germans' will to enforce their culture upon the back- 
ward races of the rest of Europe and our determination 
to enforce our own upon the rest of the world ; the 
methods employed in their case may be more evidently 
brutal, but the kind of will involved is the same. 20 
As I implied above, that " misery loves company " 
is the true and unacknowledged basis of our will to 
create a brave new world of uniformly literate mechan- 
ics. This was recently repeated to a group of young 
American workmen, one of whom responded, " And 
are we miserable ! " 

But however you may be whistling in the dark when 
you pride yourselves upon " the collective wisdom of a 
literate people/ 1 regardless of what is read by the 
" literates," the primary concern of the present essay 
is not with the limitations and defects of modern 
Western education in situ, but with the spread of an 
education of this type elsewhere. My real concern is 
with the fallacy involved in the attachment of an 
absolute value to literacy, and the very dangerous 
consequences that are involved in the setting up of 
" literacy " as a standard by which to measure the 
cultures of unlettered peoples. Your blind faith in 
literacy not only obscures for us the significance of 
other skills, so that you care not under what subhuman 
conditions a man may have to earn his living, if only he 
can read, no matter what, in his hours of leisure ; it 

37 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

is also one of the fundamental grounds of inter-racial 
prejudice and becomes a prime factor in the spiritual 
impoverishment of all the " backward " people whom 
you propose to " civilize." 



REFERENCES 

1 Metaphysics, VI : 2, 4, and XI : 8, 12. " Reading, for 
a man devoid of prior-understanding, is like a blind man's 
looking in a mirror " (Garuda Pur ana t XVI : 82). 

" It is far better for an individual not to know how to 
read than not to know how to choose the subject of his 
reading (Fernando Nobre, The Demophile Government, 1947, 
118) ; " The illiteracy of Pachperwa seemed infinitely 
preferable to the literacy of New York " (Gertrude Emerson, 
Voiceless India). 

2 Walter Shewring, " Literacy," in the Dictionary of 
World Literature, 1943. " We are becoming culturally 
illiterate faster than all these agencies are managing to 
make us literate in the use of the potentialities of the 
culture" (Robert S. Lynd, in Knowledge for What?). 
Professor John U. Nef of Chicago, speaking at Mainline 
University in 1944, remarked : " In spite of the alleged 
great spread of literacy [in America] . . . the proportion 
of the population who can communicate with each other 
on a relatively high level of discourse is very much smaller 
than it was." A recent study sponsored by the Carnegie 
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching found that 
" the average senior in six colleges recognized only 61 out 
of 100 words in familiar use by educated people " ! In view 
of all the facts, it is indeed astonishing to find Lord Raglan 
saying : " By savage I mean illiterate " (in the Rationalist 
Annual, 1946, p. 43). There was a time, indeed, when the 
English bourgeoisie thought of the Gaelic Highlanders as 
" savages " ; but from an anthropologist one would expect 
a refutation of such " myths," rather than their revival ! 

8 F, G. Childe, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 

38 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

Introduction by G. L. Kittredge. Cf. W. W. Comfort, 
Chrdtien de Troyes (Everyman's Library), Introduction : 
Chretien's poetry " was intended for a society that was still 
homogeneous, and to it at the outset doubtless all classes 
of the population listened with equal interest." Nothing of 
this kind is or can be achieved by the organized and com- 
pulsory education of to-day " a province of its own, 
detached from life " with its " atmosphere of intense bore- 
dom that damps the vitality of the young " and of which 
" the result is : the young people do not know anything 
really well," or as " it would be more exact to say, they do 
not know what knowledge is," which " explains the danger- 
ous gullibility which propaganda exploits " (Erich Meissner, 
Germany in Peril, 1942, pp. 47, 48). 

4 Douglas Hyde, Literary History of Ireland, 1903, p. 633. 

6 American is already " a one-dimensional public 
language, a language oriented to the description of external 
aspects of behaviour, weak in overtones . . . our words 
lack . . . the formal precision which comes from awareness 
of past and different usage " (Margaret Mead, And Keep 
Your Powder Dry, 1942, p. 82). Any author who uses words 
precisely is liable to be misunderstood. 

" Perhaps at no other time have men been so knowing 
and yet so unaware, so burdened with purposes and so 
purposeless, so disillusioned and so completely the victims 
of illusion. This strange contradiction pervades our entire 
modern culture, our science and our philosophy, our 
literature and our art" (W. M. Urban, The Intelligible 
World, 1929, p. 172). Under such conditions, ability to 
read a printed page becomes a mere trick, and is no 
guarantee whatever of power to grasp or to communicate 
ideas. 

6 Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon, 1681 
(1911 ed., p. 168). 

7 J. F. Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands 
(1890 ed., pp. v, xxiii, cxxii). 

8 Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica, Vol. I, 1900, 
pp. xxiii, xxix. Cf. J. G. Mackay, More West Highland 
Tales, 1940, General Preface : " The poorest classes 

39 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

generally speak the language admirably. . . . Some 
recited thousands of lines of ancient heroic poems. . . . 
Another cause of the fragmentary character of some tales 
is the obliterating effect of modern civilization " ; and J. 
Watson, ibid., Introduction : " This intellectual inheritance 
. . . this ancient culture extended over all the north and 
northerly midlands of Scotland. The people who possessed 
this culture may have been, and usually were, unlettered. 
They were far from being uneducated. It is sad to think 
that its decay has been partly due to the schools and the 
Church ! " It is, in fact, precisely by " the schools and the 
Church " that the decay of cultures all over the world has 
been hastened in the last hundred years. 

H. J. Massingham in This Plot of Earth (1944, p. 233) tells 
of " the old man, Seonardh Coinbeul, who could neither 
read nor write and carried 4500 lines of his own bardic 
composition in his head, together with all manner of songs 
and stories." 

A. Solonylsin in the Asiatic Review (NS. XLI, Jan., 1945, 
p. 86) remarks that the recording of the Kirghiz epic is still 
incomplete, although over 1,100,000 lines have already been 
taken down by the Kirghiz Research Institute " Bards 
who recite the ' Manasr or ' Manaschi ' have pheno- 
menal memories in addition to poetic talent. Only this can 
explain the fact that hundreds of thousands of verses have 
been handed down orally." A writer reviewing Manas, 
Kirghiski Narodni Epos in the Journal of American Folklore, 
58, 1945, p. 65, observes that " general education has 
already done much to remove the raison d'etre of the 
minstrel's position in tribal life. . . . With acculturation 
becoming a rolling Juggernaut it is not surprising that what 
remains of epic singing may soon degenerate into an artificial 
and ostentatiously national publicity device." 

R. St. Barbe Baker, Africa Drums, 1942, p. 145. 

10 W. G. Archer, The Blue Grove, 1940, Preface ; and in 
JBORS, Vol. XXIX, p. 68. 

11 Edward Schroder Prior and Arthur Gardner, An 
Account of Medieval Figure-Sculpture in England, 1912, p. 

25- 

40 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

12 Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher, 1927. 
18 J. Strzygowski, Spuren indogermanische Glaubens in 
der bildenden Kunst, 1936, p. 344. 

14 Tom Hanisson, Savage Civilisation, 1937, pp. 45, 344, 

35i> 353- 

15 Plato, Phaedrus, 275 f. Cf. H. Gauss, Plato's Concep- 
tion of Philosophy, 1937, pp. 262-5. 

" Most of us to-day can hardly credit the achievement of 
the illiterati who knew the Koran by heart or carried the 
entire Iliad or Odyssey in their minds. But nowadays who- 
ever trusts his library and notebooks may no longer trust 
his remembrance. . . . Among wholly illiterate (but not 
therefore uncivilized) races there may flourish fully 
organized literatures of unrestricted range and high 
artistic merit " (Rhys Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction and 
Saga in the Homeric Epics, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1946, 

P- 3). 
18 Sir George A. Grierson, Lalla Vakyani, 1920, p. 3. 

17 Albert Schweitzer, On the Edge of the Primeval Forest. 

18 De reductione artium ad theologiam, 14. 

19 N. K. Chadwick, Poetry and Prophecy, 1942, Preface, 
further, " The experience of exclusively literate com- 
munities is too narrow." " Ever learning, and never able 
to come to the knowledge of the truth" (2 Timothy iii. 7) ! 

20 Modern " education " imposed upon traditional 
cultures (e.g. Gaelic, Indian, Polynesian, American Indian) 
is only less deliberately, not less actually, destructive than 
the Nazi destruction of Polish libraries, which was intended 
to wipe out their racial memories ; the Germans acted 
consciously, but those who Anglicize or Americanize or 
Frenchify are driven by a rancour that they do not recog- 
nize and could not confess. This rancour is, in fact, their 
reaction to a superiority that they resent and therefore 
would like to destroy. 



Ill : Paths That Lead to the Same Summit 

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON COMPARATIVE RELIGION 

There is no Natural Religion As all men are alike 
(though infinitely various), so all Religions, as all 
similars, have one source. William Blake. 

There is but one salvation for all mankind, and that is 
the life of God in the soul. William Law. 



THE constant increase of contacts between our- 
selves, who for the purposes of the present essay may 
be assumed to be Christians, and other peoples who 
belong to the great non-Christian majority has made it 
more than ever before an urgent necessity for us to 
understand the faiths by which they live. Such an 
understanding is at the same time intrinsically to be 
desired, and indispensable for the solution by agree- 
ment of the economic and political problems by which 
the peoples of the world are at present more divided 
than united. We cannot establish human relationships 
with other peoples if we are convinced of our own 
superiority or superior wisdom, and only want to con- 
vert them to our way of thinking. The modern 
Christian, who thinks of the world as his parish, is 
faced with the painful necessity of becoming himself a 
citizen of the world ; he is invited to participate in a 
symposium and a convivium ; not to preside for 
there is Another who presides unseen but as one of 
many guests. 

It is no longer only for the professed missionary that 
a study of other religions than his own is required. 

42 



Paths That Lead to the Same Summit 

This very essay, for example, is based upon an address 
given to a large group of schoolteachers in a series 
entitled "How to Teach about Other Peoples," 
sponsored by the New York School Board and the East 
and West Association. It has, too, been proposed 
that in all the schools and universities of the post- 
war world stress should be laid on the teaching of the 
basic principles of the great world religions as a means of 
promoting international understanding and develop- 
ing a concept of world citizenship. 

The question next arises, By whom can such teaching 
be properly given ? It will be self-evident that no one 
can have understood, and so be qualified to teach, a 
religion, who is opposed to all religion ; this will rule 
out the rationalist and scientific humanist, and ulti- 
mately all those whose conception of religion is not 
theological, but merely ethical. The obvious ideal 
would be for the great religions to be taught only by 
those who confess them ; but this is an ideal that could 
only be realized, for the present, in our larger uni- 
versities. It has been proposed to establish a school 
of this kind at Oxford. 

As things are, a teaching about other than Christian 
faiths is mainly given in theological seminaries and, 
missionary colleges by men who do believe that 
Christianity is the only true faith, who approve of 
foreign missions, and who wish to prepare the mission- 
ary for his work. Under these conditions, the study of 
comparative religion necessarily assumes a character 
quite different from that of other disciplines ; it can- 
not but be biased. It is obvious that if we are to teach 
at all it should be our intention to communicate only 
truth : but where a teaching takes for granted that the 
subject matter to be dealt with is intrinsically of 

43 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

inferior significance, and the subject is taught, not con 
amove, but only to instruct the future schoolmaster in 
the problems that he will have to cope with, one can- 
not but suspect that at least a part of the truth will be 
suppressed, if not intentionally, at least unknowingly. 

If comparative religion is to be taught as other 
sciences are taught, the teacher must surely have 
recognized that his own religion is only one of those 
that are to be " compared " ; he may not expound 
any " pet theories " of his own, but is to present the 
truth without bias, to the extent that it lies in his 
power. In other words, it will be " necessary to recog- 
nize that those institutions which are based on the 
same premises, let us say the supernatural, must be 
considered together, our own amongst the rest/' 
whereas " to-day, whether it is a question of imperial- 
ism, or of race prejudice, or of a comparison between 
Christianity and paganism, we are still preoccupied 
with the uniqueness ... of our own institutions and 
achievements, our own civilization." 1 One cannot 
but ask whether the Christian whose conviction is 
ineradicable that his is the only true faith can con- 
scientiously permit himself to expound another religion, 
knowing that he cannot do so honestly. 

How completely pragmatic the missionary point of 
view can be is illustrated by the comment of one who 
after spending over thirty years in India could speak 
of " the presence in the country of six million profes- 
sional beggars, most of them ' holy men ' who are 
entirely unproductive." (L. W. Bryce, India at the 
Threshold, New York, 1946, p. 113). Shades of St. 
Francis d'Assisi ! 

We are, then, in proposing to teach about other 

44 



Paths That Lead to the Same Summit 

peoples, faced with the problem of tolerance. The 
word is not a pretty one ; to tolerate is to put up with, 
endure, or suffer the existence of what are or appear 
to be other ways of thinking than our own ; and it is 
neither very pleasant merely " to put up with " our 
neighbours and fellow guests, not very pleasant to 
feel that one's own deepest institutions and beliefs are 
being patiently " endured." Moreover, if the Western 
world is actually more tolerant to-day than it was some 
centuries ago, or has been since the fall of Rome, it is 
largely because men are no longer sure that there is any 
truth of which we can be certain, and are inclined to the 
" democratic " belief that one man's opinion is as good 
as another's, especially in the fields of politics, art, and 
religion. Tolerance, then, is a merely negative virtue, 
demanding no sacrifice of spiritual pride and involving 
no abrogation of our sense of superiority ; it can be 
commended only in so far as it means that we shall 
refrain from hating or persecuting others who differ 
or seem to differ from ourselves in habit or belief. 
Tolerance still allows us to pity those who differ from 
ourselves, and are consequently to be pitied ! 

Tolerance, carried further, implies indifference, and 
becomes intolerable. Our proposal is not that we 
should tolerate heresies, but rather come to some agree- 
ment about the truth. Our proposition is that the 
proper objective of an education in comparative religion 
should be to enable the pupil to discuss with other 
believers the validity of particular doctrines, 2 , leaving 
the problem of the truth or falsity, superiority or 
inferiority, of whole bodies of doctrine in abeyance 
until we have had at least an opportunity to know in 
what respects they really differ from one another, and 
whether in essentials or in accidentals. We take it 

45 



The 



for granted, of cour* se> that they wiu i nev i tably differ 

accidentaUy, sincW "nothing can be known except 

in the mode of ta^ e knower." One must at least have 

been taught ^<j. o recognize equivalent symbols, e.g., 

rose and loi J us (R osa Mundi and Padmavati) ; that 

Soma is t>e " bread and water of life " ; or that the 

Maker $f ail things is by no means accidentally, but 

neces^farily a " carpenter " wherever the material of 

whifih the world is made is hylic. The proposed 

objective has this further and inmediate advantage, 

JiSiat it is not in conflict with even the most rigid 

'Christian orthodoxy; it has never been denied that 

some truths are embodied in the pagan beliefs, and even 

St. Thomas Aquinas was ready and willing to find in 

the works of the pagan philosophers " extrinsic and 

probable proofs " of the truths of Christianity. He 

was, indeed, acquainted only with the ancients and 

with the Jews and some Arabians ; but there is no 

reason why the modern Christian, if his mental equip- 

ment is adequate, should not learn to recognize or 

be delighted to find in, let us say, Vedantic, Sufi, 

Taoist, or American Indian formulations extrinsic 

and probable proofs of the truth as he knows it. It 

is more than probable, indeed, that his contacts with 

other believers will be of very great advantage to the 

Christian student in his exegesis and understanding of 

Christian doctrine ; for though himself a believer, this is 

in spite of the nominalist intellectual environment in 

which he was born and bred, and by which he cannot 

but be to some degree affected ; while the Oriental 

(to whom the miracles attributed to Christ present 

no problem) is still a realist, born and bred in a realistic 

environment, and is therefore in a position to approach 

Plato or St. John, Dante or Meister Eckhart more 

46 



Paths That Lead to the Same Summit 

simply and directly than the Western scholar who can- 
not but have been affected to some extent by the 
doubts and difficulties that force themselves upon 
those whose education and environment have been for 
the greater part profane. 

Such a procedure as we have suggested provides us 
immediately with a basis for a common understanding 
and for co-operation. What we have in view is an 
ultimate " reunion of the churches " in a far wider 
sense than that in which this expression is commonly 
employed : the substitution of active alliances let 
us say of Christianity and Hinduism or Islam, on the 
basis of commonly recognized first principles, and with 
a view to an effective co-operation in the application 
of these principles to the contingent fields of art 
(manufacture) and prudence for what is at present 
nothing better than a civil war between the members 
of one human family, children of one and the same God, 
" whom," as Philo said, " with one accord all Greeks 
and Barbarians acknowledge together." 8 It is with 
reference to this statement that Professor Goodenough 
remarks that, " So far as I can see Philo was telling the 
simple truth about paganism as he saw it, not as 
Christian propaganda has ever since misrepresented 
it." 

It need not be concealed that such alliances will 
necessarily involve an abandonment of all missionary 
enterprises such as they are now ; interdenominational 
conferences will take the place of those proselytizing 
expeditions of which the only permanent result is the 
secularization and destruction of existing cultures and 
the pulling up of individuals by their roots. You 
have already reached the point in which culture and 
religion, utility and meaning, have been divorced and 

47 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

can be considered apart, but this is not true of those 
peoples whom you propose to convert, whose religion 
and culture are one and the same thing and none of 
the functions of whose life are necessarily profane or 
unprincipled. If ever you should succeed in persuad- 
ing the Hindus that their revealed scriptures are valid 
only " as literature," you will have reduced them to the 
level of your own college men who read the Bible, if at 
all, only as literature. Christianity in India, as Sister 
Nivedita (Patrick Geddes' distinguished pupil, and 
author of The Web of Indian Life) once remarked, 
" carries drunkenness in its wake " 4 for if you teach 
a man that what he has thought right is wrong, 
he will be apt to think that what he has thought 
wrong is right. 

We are all alike in need of repentance and conversion, 
a " change of mind " and a " turning round " : not, 
however, from one form of belief to another, but from 
unbelief to belief. There can be no more vicious kind 
of tolerance than to approach another man, to tell him 
that " We are both serving the same God, you in your 
way and I in His ! " The " compassing of sea and 
land to make one proselyte " can be carried on as an 
institution only for so long as our ignorance of other 
peoples' faiths persists. The subsidizing of educational 
or medical services accessory to the primary purpose 
of conversion is a form of simony and an infringe- 
ment of the instruction, " Heal the sick . . . provide 
neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses, nor 
scrip for your journey . . . [but go] forth as sheep in 
the midst of wolves." Wherever you go, it must be 
not as masters or superiors but as guests, or as we might 
say nowadays, " exchange professors " ; you must not 
return to betray the confidences of your hosts by any 



Paths That Lead to the Same Summit 

libel. Your vocation must be purged of any notion 
of a " civilizing mission " ; for what you think of as 
" the white man's burden " here is a matter of " white 
shadows in the South Seas " there. Your " Christian " 
civilization is ending in disaster and you are bold 
enough to offer it to others ! Realize that, as Professor 
Plumer has said, " the surest way to betray our 
Chinese allies is to sell, give or lend-lease them our 
[American] standard of living, 1 ' 5 and that the hardest 
task you could undertake for the present and im- 
mediate future is to convince the Orient that the 
civilization of Europe is in any sense a Christian 
civilization, or that there redly are reasonable, just, 
and tolerable Europeans amongst the " barbarians " 
of whom the Orient lives in terror. 

The word " heresy " means choice, the having 
opinions of one's own, and thinking what we like to 
think : we can only grasp its real meaning to-day, 
when " thinking for oneself " is so highly recom- 
mended (with the proviso that the thinking must be 
" 100 per cent."), if we realize that the modern equiva- 
lent of heresy is " treason." The one outstanding, 
and perhaps the only, real heresy of modern Christianity 
in the eyes of other believers is its claim to exclusive 
truth ; for this is treason against Him who " never 
left himself without a witness," and can only be 
paralleled by Peter's denial of Christ ; and whoever 
says to his pagan friends that " the light that is in you 
is darkness," in offending these is offending the Father 
of lights. In view of St. Ambrose's well-known 
gloss on i Corinthians xii. 3, "all that is true, by 
whomsoever it has been said, is from the Holy Ghost " 
(a dictum endorsed by St. Thomas Aquinas), you may 
be asked, " On what grounds do you propose to 

49 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

distinguish between your own ' revealed ' religion and 
our ' natural ' religion, for which, in fact, we also claim 
a supernatural origin ? " You may find this question 
hard to answer. 

The claim to an exclusive validity is by no means 
calculated to make for the survival of Christianity in a 
world prepared to prove all things. On the con- 
trary, it may weaken enormously its prestige in relation 
to other traditions in which a very different attitude 
prevails, and which are under no necessity of engaging 
in any polemic. As a great German theologian has 
said, " human culture [Menschheitsbildung] is a unitary 
whole, and its separate cultures are the dialects of one 
and the same language of the spirit." 6 The quarrel 
of Christianity with other religions seems to an Oriental 
as much a tactical error in the conflict of ideal with 
sensate motivations as it would have been for the 
Allies to turn against the Chinese on the battlefield. 
Nor will he participate in such a quarrel ; much 
rather he will say, what I have often said to Christian 
friends, " Even if you are not on our side, we are on 
yours." 7 The converse attitude is rarely expressed ; 
but twice in my life I have met a Roman Catholic 
who could freely admit that for a Hindu to become a 
professing Christian was not essential to salvation. 
Yet, could we believe it, the Truth or Justice with 
which we are all alike and unconditionally concerned 
is like the Round Table to which " al the worlde crysten 
and hethen repayren " to eat of one and the same bread 
and drink the same wine, and at which " all are equal, 
the high and the low." I do know also of one European 
Trappist monk, whose brother is a Moslem ; both are 
men of prayer ; neither has any wish to convert the 
other. A very learned Roman Catholic friend of mine 

50 



Paths That Lead to the Same Summit 

in correspondence, speaks of Sri Ramakrishna as 
" another Christ . . . Christ's own self." 

Let us now, for a moment, consider the points of 
view that have been expressed by the ancients and 
other non-Christians when they speak of religions other 
than their own. We have already quoted Philo. 
Plutarch, first with bitter irony disposing of the Greek 
euhemerists " who spread atheism all over the world 
by obliterating the Gods of our belief and turning them 
all alike into the names of generals, admirals and 
kings," and of the Greeks who could no longer dis- 
tinguish Apollo (the intelligible Sun) from Helios (the 
sensible sun), goes on to say : " Nor do we speak of the 
' different Gods ' of different peoples, or of the Gods 
as ' Barbarian ' and ' Greek,' but as common to all, 
though differently named by different peoples, so that 
for the One Reason (Logos) that orders all these things, 
and the One Providence that oversees them, and for 
the minor powers [i.e., gods, angels] that are appointed 
to care for all things, there have arisen among different 
peoples different epithets and services, according to 
their different manners and customs." 8 Apuleius 
recognizes that the Egyptian Isis (our Mother Nature 
and Madonna, Natura Naturans, Creatric, Deus) " is 
adored throughout the world in divers manners, in 
variable customs and by many names." 9 

The Musalman Emperor of India, Jahangur, 
writing of his friend and teacher, the Hindu 
hermit Jadrup, says that "his Vedanta is the 
same as our Taawwuf " : in the same way 
Prince Muhiammad Dara Shikuh (through whose 
Persian version the Upanishads first reached Europe) 
in his Mingling of the Two Oceans (of Islam and 

51 E 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

Hinduism) finds, as regards their enunciation of Truth, 
" only verbal differences " between the Sufis and the 
" Indian monotheists " ; and, in fact, Northern 
India abounds in a type of religious literature in which 
it is often difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish 
Musalman from Hindu factors. 10 The indifference of 
religious forms is indeed, as Professor Nicholson 
remarks, " a cardinal Sufi doctrine." So we find 
ibn-ul-'Arabi saying : 

My heart is capable of every form : it is a pasture for 

gazelles and a convent for Christian monks, 
And idol-temple and the pilgrim's Ka'ba [Mecca], and 

the tables of the Torah and the book of the Koran ; 
I follow the religion of Love, whichever way his 

camels take ; my religion and my faith is the true 

religion. 11 

That is to say that you and I, whose religions are 
distinguishable, can each of us say that " mine is the 
true religion," and to one another that " yours is the 
true religion " whether or not either or both of us be 
truly religious depending not upon the form of our 
religion but upon ourselves and on grace. So, too, 
Shams-i-Tabriz : 

If the notion of my Beloved is to be found in an idol- 
temple, 

Twere mortal sin to circumscribe the Ka'ba ! 

The Ka'ba is but a church if there His trace be lost : 

My Ka'ba is whatever " church " in which His trace 
is found ! 12 

Similarly in Hinduism ; the Tamil poet-saint 
Tayumanavar, for example, says in a hymn to Siva : 



Paths That Lead to the Same Summit 

Thou didst fittingly . . . inspire as Teacher millions 
of religions. 

Thou didst in each religion, while it like the rest 
showed in splendid fulness of treatises, disputa- 
tions, sciences, [make] each its tenet to be the 
truth, the final goal. 18 

The Bhaktakalpadruma of Pratapa Siriiha maintains 
that " every man should, as far as in him lieth, help 
the reading of the Scriptures, whether those of his 
own church or those of another." 14 

In the Bhagavad Gita (VII, 21) Sri Krishna proclaims : 
" If any lover whatsoever seeks with faith to worship 
any form [of God] whatever, it is I who am the founder 
of his faith/' and (IV, n), "However men approach 
Me, even do I reward them, for the path men take 
from every side is Mine." 15 

We have the word of Christ himself that he came to 
call not the just, but sinners (Matthew ix.i3). What 
can we make out of that, but that, as St. Justin said, 
" God is the Word of whom the whole human race are 
partakers, and those who lived according to Reason 
are Christians even though accounted atheists. . . . 
Socrates and Heracleitus, and of the barbarians 
Abraham and many others." So, too, Meister Eckhart, 
greatest of the Christian mystics, speaks of Plato 
(whom the Moslem Jill saw in a vision, "filling the 
world with light ") as " that great priest," and as 
having " found the way ere ever Christ was born." 
Was St. Augustine wrong when he affirmed that " the 
very thing that is now called the Christian religion 
was not wanting amongst the ancients from the begin- 
ning of the human race, until Christ came in the flesh, 
after which the true religion, which already existed, 

53 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

began to be called ' Christian ' " ? Had he not re- 
tracted these brave words, the bloodstained history of 
Christianity might have been otherwise written ! 

We have come to think of religion more as a set of 
rules of conduct than as a doctrine about God ; less 
as a doctrine about what we should be, than one of what 
we ought to do ; and because there is necessarily an 
element of contingency in every application of 
principles to particular cases, we have come to believe 
that theory differs as practice must. This confusion 
of necessary means with transcendent ends (as if the 
vision of God could be earned by works) has had un- 
fortunate results for Christianity, both at home and 
abroad. The more the Church has devoted herself to 
" social service," the more her influence has declined ; 
an age that regards monasticism as an almost immoral 
retreat is itself unarmed. It is mainly because religion 
has been offered to modern men in nauseatingly 
sentimental terms ("Be good, sweet child," etc.), 
and no longer as an intellectual challenge, that so 
many have been revolted, thinking that that " is all 
there is to " religion. Such an emphasis on ethics 
(and, incidentally, forgetfulness that Christian doc- 
trine has as much to do with art, i.e. manufacture, 
making, what and how, as it has to do with behaviour) 
plays into the sceptic's hands ; for the desirability 
and convenience of the social virtues is such and so 
evident that it is felt that if that is all that religion 
means, why bring in a God to sanction forms of conduct 
of which no one denies the propriety ? Why indeed ? 16 
At the same time this excessive emphasis upon the 
moral, and neglect of the intellectual virtues (which 
last alone, in orthodox Christian teaching, are held to 
survive our dissolution) invite the retorts of the 

54 



Paths That Lead to the Same Summit 

rationalists who maintain that religion has never been 
anything but a means of drugging the lower classes and 
keeping them quiet. 

Against all that, the severe intellectual discipline 
that any serious study of Eastern, or even " primitive," 
religion and philosophy demands can serve as a useful 
corrective. The task of co-operation in the field of 
comparative religion is one that demands the highest 
possible qualifications ; if we cannot give our best to 
the task, it would be safer not to undertake it. The 
time is fast coming when it will be as necessary for the 
man who is to be called " educated " to know either 
Arabic, Sanskrit, or Chinese as it is now for him to 
read Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. And this, above all, 
in the case of those who are to teach about other 
peoples' faiths ; for existing translations are often 
in many different ways inadequate, and if we are to 
know whether or not it is true that all believing men 
have hitherto worshipped and still worship one and the 
same God, whether by his English, Latin, Arabic, 
Chinese, or Navajo names, one must have searched 
the scriptures of the world never forgetting that 
sine desiderio mens non intelligit. 

Nor may we undertake these activities of instruction 
with ulterior motives : as in all other educational 
activities, so here the teacher's effort must be directed 
to the interest and advantage of the pupil himself, 
not that he may do good, but that he may be good. 
The dictum that "charity begins at home" is by no 
means necessarily a cynicism : it rather takes for 
granted that to do good is only possible when we are 
good, and that if we are good we shall do good, whether 
by action or inaction, speech or silence. It is sound 
Christian doctrine that a man must first have known 

55 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

and loved himself, his inner man, before he loves his 
neighbour. 

It is, then, the pupil who comes first in our concep- 
tion of the teaching of comparative religion. He will 
be astounded by the effect upon his understanding of 
Christian doctrine that can be induced by the recogni- 
tion of similar doctrines stated in another language and 
by means of what are to him strange or even grotesque 
figures of thought. In the following of the vestigia 
pedis, the soul " in hot pursuit of her quarry, Christ," 
he will recognize an idiom of the language of the spirit 
that has come down to us from the hunting cultures of 
the Stone Age ; a cannibal philosophy in that of the 
Eucharist and the Soma sacrifice ; and the doctrine of 
the " seven rays " of the intelligible Sun in that of the 
Seven Gifts of the Spirit and in the " seven eyes " of 
the Apocalyptic Lamb and of Cuchulainn. He may 
find himself far less inclined than he is now to recoil 
from Christ's harder sayings, or those of St. Paul on the 
" sundering of soul from spirit." If he balks at the 
command to hate, not merely his earthly relatives, 
but, " yea, and his own soul also," and prefers the 
milder wording of the Authorized Version, where " life " 
replaces " soul," or if he would like to interpret in a 
merely ethical sense the command to " deny himself," 
although the word that is rendered by " deny " means 
" utterly reject " ; if he now begins to realize that the 
" soul " is of the dust that returns to the dust when the 
spirit returns to God who gave it, and that equally for 
Hebrew and Arabic theologians this " soul " (nefesh, 
nafs) imports that carnal " individuality " of which 
the Christian mystics are thinking when they say that 
" the soul must put itself to death " ; or that our 
existence (distinguishing esse from essentia, 

56 



Paths That Lead to the Same Summit 

from oucrta, bhu from as) is a crime ; and if he cor- 
relates all these ideas with the Islamic and Indian 
exhortation to " die before you die " and with St. 
Paul's " I live, yet not I," then he may be less inclined 
to read into Christian doctrine any promise of eternal 
life for any " soul " that has been concreated with the 
body and better equipped to show that the spiritual- 
ists' " proofs " of the survival of human personality, 
however valid, have no religious bearings whatever. 

The mind of the democratic student to whom the 
very name of the concept of a " divine right " may be 
unintelligible is likely to be roughly awakened if he ever 
realizes that, as Professor Buckler often reminds us, 
the very notion of a kingdom of God on earth " depends 
for its revelation on the inner meaning of eastern 
kingship," for he may have forgotten in his righteous 
destestation of all dictatorships, that the classical 
definition of " tyranny " is that of " a king ruling in his 
own interests." 

Nor is this a one-sided transaction ; it would not be 
easy to exaggerate the alteration that can be brought 
about in the Hindu's or Buddhist's estimate of 
Christianity when the opportunity is given him to 
come into closer contact with the quality of thought 
that led Vincent of Beauvais to speak of Christ's 
" ferocity " and Dante to marvel at " the multitude 
of teeth with which this Love bites." 

" Some contemplate one Name, and some another ? 
Which of these is the best ? All are eminent clues to 
the transcendent, immortal, unembodied Brahma : 
these Names are to be contemplated, lauded, and at 
last denied. For by them one rises higher and higher 
in these worlds ; but where all comes to its end, there 
he attains to the Unity of the Person " (Maitri 

57 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

Upanishatf). Whoever knows this text, but nothing of 
Western technique, will assuredly be moved by a 
sympathetic understanding when he learns that the 
Christian also follows a via affirmativa and a via re- 
motionis I Whoever has been taught a doctrine of 
" liberation from the pairs of opposites " (past and 
future, pleasure and pain, etc., the Symplegades of 
"folklore'') will be stirred by Nicholas of Cusa's 
description of the wall of Paradise wherein God dwells 
as " built of contradictories," and by Dante's of what 
lies beyond this wall as " not in space, nor hath it 
poles," but "where every where and every when is 
focused." We all need to realize, with Xenophon, 
that " when God is our teacher, we come to think alike." 
For there are as many of these Hindus and Buddhists 
whose knowledge of Christianity and of the greatest 
Christian writers is virtually nil, as there are Christians, 
equally learned, whose real knowledge of any other 
religion but their own is virtually nil, because they have 
never imagined what it might be to live these other 
faiths. Just as there can be no real knowledge of a 
language if we have never even imaginatively par- 
ticipated in the activities to which the language refers, 
so there can be no real knowledge of any " life " that 
one has not in some measure lived. The greatest of 
modern Indian saints actually practised Christian and 
Islamic disciplines, that is, worshipped Christ and 
Allah, and found that all led to the same goal : he 
could speak from experience of the equal validity of all 
these "ways," and feel the same respect for each, 
while still preferring for himself the one to which his 
whole being was naturally attuned by nativity, 
temperament, and training. What a loss it would 
have been to his countrymen and to the world, and 

58 



Paths That Lead to the Same Summit 

even to Christianity, if he had " become a Christian " ! 
There are many paths that lead to the summit of one 
and the same mountain ; their differences will be the 
more apparent the lower down we are, but they 
vanish at the peak ; each will naturally take the 
one that starts from the point at which he finds 
himself ; he who goes round about the mountain 
looking for another is not climbing. Never let us 
approach another believer to ask him to become " one 
of us" but approach him with respect as one who is 
already " one of His" who is, and from whose invari- 
able beauty all contingent being depends ! 17 



REFERENCES 

1 Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 1934, p. 5- 

An illustration of Ruth Benedict's comment can be cited 
from C. S. Lewis, Miracles, 1947, p. 140 : " Democrats by 
birth and education, we should prefer to think that all 
nations and individuals start level in the search for God, or 
even that all religions are equally true. It must be admitted 
at once that Christianity makes no concessions to this point 
of view." What a trial for the poor Christian to have to 
admit that he is right and that everybody else is wrong 1 
Still, somehow or other, he manages to bear up under this 
supposedly God-imposed burclen. 

2 To illustrate what I mean by " discussion " here, I refer 
the reader to my article entitled, " On Being in One's Right 
Mind," in the Review of Religion, Vol. VII, New York, 1942, 
pp. 32-40. Although in fact by one author, this article is in 
effect a collaboration of Christian, Platonist, and Hindu, 
expounding a doctrine held in common. 

8 Philo Judaeus, De specialibus legibus II, 65 ; E. R. 
Goodenough, Introduction to Philo Judaeus, 1940, pp. 105, 
108. 

4 Lambs among Wolves^igo^. See also my "Christian 

" 59 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

Missions in India " in Essays in National Idealism (ist ed., 
1909 ; or 2nd ed.). 

5 J. M. Plumer, " China's High Standard of Living/' Asia 
and the Americas, February, 1944. 

6 Alfred Jeremias, Altorientalische Geisteskultur, Vorwort. 
" A long metaphysical chain runs throughout the world and 
connects all races " (Johannes Sauter, in Archil) fur Rechts- 
und Sozialphilosophie, Berlin, October, 1934). 

7 Cf. D. S. Sarma : Hinduism " has out-lived the 
Christian propaganda of modern times ... It is now able 
to meet any of these world religions on equal terms as their 
friend and ally in a common cause " (Renaissance of Hindu- 
ism, 1944, p. 70, italics mine). What might not be 
accomplished if Christians would but open their eyes ! 

8 Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 67 (Moralia, 377). So William 
Law, in continuation of the citation above, " There is not 
one [salvation] for the Jew, another for the Christian, and a 
third for the heathen. No, God is one, human nature is one, 
and the way to it is one ; and that is, the desire of the soul 
turned to God." Actually, this refers to " the baptism of 
desire," or " of the Spirit " (as distinguished from baptism 
by water, which involves an actual membership in the 
Christian community) and only modifies the Christian 
dogma extra Ecclesiam nulla solus. The real problem is that 
of the proper meaning of the words " Catholic Church " ; 
we say that this should mean not any one religion as such, 
but the community, or universe of experience, of all those 
who love God. As William Law says also : " The chief hurt 
of a sect is this, that it takes itself to be necessary to the 
truth, whereas the truth is only then found when it is known 
to be of no sect but as free and universal as the goodness of 
God and as common to all names and nations as the air and 
light of this world." 

Cf. F. W. Buckler : " The layman, Dissenter, schismatic 
or the heathen, who wittingly or unwittingly has taken up 
his Cross, is a child of the kingdom of God on earth and a 
Khallfah of our Lord, as the priest or bishop, who has not 
taken up his Cross, however unquestionable his Apostolic 
continuity, is not " (The Epiphany of the Cross, 1938). It 

60 



Paths That Lead to the Same Summit 

should also be borne in mind that (as the last mentioned 
author has often shown) the Christian concept of the 
" kingdom of God " cannot be properly understood except 
in the light of the Oriental theory of Kingship and Divine 
Right. 

9 Apuleius, Golden Ass, XI, 5. 

Cf. Alfred Jeremias, Der Kosmos von Sumer (Dev Alte 
Orient, 32, Leipzig, 1932), Ch. Ill, " Die eine Madonna'' 

10 Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri (Memoirs of Jahangir), in the version 
by Rogers and Beveridge, 1905, p. 356, M. Mahfuz-ul-Haq, 
Majma'ul-Bahrein (translation, Bib. Ind. 246, Calcutta, 
1929) ; V. Raghavan, " Dara Shikoh's Majma-ul-Bahrein," 
Journal of Oriental Research 15, 1947, 150-158. 

11 R. A. Nicholson, Mystics of Islam, 1914, p. 105. 
Similarly, " If he [the follower of any particular religion] 
understood the saying of Junayd, ' The colour of the water 
is the colour of the vessel containing it/ he would not 
interfere with the beliefs of others, but would perceive God 
in every form and in every belief " (ibn-ul-'Arabi, Nichol- 
son, Studies in Islamic Mysticism, 1921, p. 159). And, 
" Henceforth I knew that there were not many gods of 
human worship, but one God only, who was polyonomous 
and polymorphous, being figured and named according to 
the variety of the outward condition of things " (Sir George 
Birdwood, Sva, 1915, p. 28). 

12 R. A. Nicholson, Diwanl Shams-i-Tabriz t 1898, p. 238, 
cf. 221. 

Cf. Faridu'd Dm 'Attar, in the Mantiqu't Tayr : " Since, 
then, there are different ways of making the journey, no 
two [soul-] birds will fly alike. Each finds a way of his own, 
on this road of mystic knowledge, one by means of the 
Mihrab, and another through the Idol." 

18 Sir P. Arunachalam, Studies and Translations, 
Colombo, 1937, p. 201. 

14 Translation by Sir George Grierson, JRAS, 1908, 

P- 347- 

15 Schleiermacher rightly maintains (Reden t V) that the 
multiplicity of religions is grounded in the nature of religion 
itself, and necessary for its complete manifestation " Nur 

61 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

in der Totalitdt oiler solcher moglichen Formen kann die ganze 
Religion wirklich gegeben werden" But Schleiermacher 
claims the highest position for Christianity on the grounds 
of its freedom from exclusiveness ! 

Una veritas in variis signis varie resplendeat : and in the 
words of Marsilio Ficino, " Perhaps, indeed, this kind of 
variety, ordained by God himself, displays a certain 
admirable adornment of the universe " (De Christiana 
religione, c. 4). 

Cf. also Ernest Cassirer's exposition of Pico della 
Mirandola's " defence of the libertas credendi" in the 
Journal of the History of Ideas, III, 335. 

16 The answer can be given in the words of Christopher 
Dawson : " For when once morality has been deprived of 
its religious and metaphysical foundations, it inevitably 
becomes subordinated to lower ends/ 1 As he also says, the 
need for a restoration of the ethics of vocation has become 
the central problem of society " vocation " being that 
station of life to which it has pleased God to call us, and not 
the " job " to which our own ambitions drive. 

17 The following books are commended to the reader's 
attention : 

Sister Nivedita, Lambs among Wolves (1903) and The Web 
of Indian Life (1904 or later editions). 

Demetra Vaka, Haremlik (1911). 

Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher (1927). 

Father W. Schmidt, The High Gods of North America 
(1933) and Origin and Growth of Religion (2nd ed., 1935). 

Lord Raglan, The Hero (1936). 

Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means (1937) ; The Perennial 
Philosophy (1945) ; Science, Liberty t and Peace (1946). 

Ren6 Gu&ion, East and West (1941) ; Crisis of the Modern 
World (1942) ; General Introduction to the Hindu Doctrines 
(1946). 

Marco Pallis, Peaks and Lamas (1941). 

R. St. Barbe Baker, Africa Drums (1942). 

Swami Nikhilananda, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna 
(1942). 

N. K. Chadwick, Poetry and Prophecy (1942). 

62 



Paths That Lead to the Same Summit 

A. K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism (1943) 
The Religious Basis of the Forms of Indian Society (1946). 
Sir P. Arunachalam, Studies and Translations (1937). 
Sir George Birdwood, Sva (1915). 
J. C. Archer, The Sikhs (1946). 



IV : Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge 



East and West, The Crisis of the Modern World, Intro- 
duction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines, and Man and 
His Becoming (Luzac, London, 1941-46) are the first 
of a series in which the majority of Ren6 Gu&ion's 
works already published in French will appear in 
English. Another version of Man and His Becoming 
had appeared earlier. 1 M. Ren6 Gu&ion is not an 
" Orientalist " but what the Hindus would call a 
" master/ 1 formerly resident in Paris, and now for 
many years in Egypt, where his affiliations are Islamic. 
His Introduction generate d I* etude des doctrines hindoues 
appeared in 1921. 2 As a preliminary to his further 
expositions of the traditional philosophy, sometimes 
called the Philosophia Perennis (et Universalis must be 
understood, for this " philosophy " has been the 
common inheritance of all mankind without exception), 
Gu^non cleared the ground of all possible misconcep- 
tion in two large and rather tedious, but by no means 
unnecessary, volumes, L'Erreur spirite (i.e. " Fallacy 
of Spiritualism/' a work for which Bhagavad Gitd, 
XVII, 4, " Men of darkness are they who make a cult 
of the departed and of spirits/' might have served as a 
motto), 3 and Le Theosophisme, histoire d'une pseudo- 
religion.* These are followed by L'Homme et son 
devenir selon le Vedanta and L'Esot&risme de Dante* 
Le roi du monde, 9 St. Bernard, 1 Orient et Occident and 
Autorite spirituelle et pouvoir temporel* Le symbolisme 
de la croix* Les itats multiples de I'live and La m6ta- 
physique orientale. 11 More recently M. Gunon has 
published in mimeographed, and subsequently printed, 

64 



Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge 

editions Le r&gne de la quantite et les signes des temps, 1 * 
Les principes de calcul infinitesimal, 1 * Aperfus sur 
^initiation, and La grande triade. 1 * 

In the meantime important articles from Gu&ion's 
pen appeared monthly in La Voile d'Isis, later Etudes 
Traditionnelles, a journal of which the appearance was 
interrupted by the war, but which has been continued 
as from September-October, 1945. Etudes Tradition- 
nelles is devoted to "La Tradition Perpetuelle et 
Unanime, revtlee tant par les dogmes et les rites des 
religions orthodoxes que par la langue universelle des 
symboles initiatiques." Of articles that have appeared 
elsewhere attention may be called to " L'Esoterisme 
Islamique " in Cahiers de Sud (1935). Excerpts from 
Gu&ion's writings, with some comment have appeared 
in Triveni (1935) and in the Vi&vabharatl Quarterly 
(1935, 1938). A work by L. de Gaigneron entitled 
Vers la connaissance interdite is closely connected with 
Guenon's ; it is presented in the form of a discussion 
in which the Atman (Spiritus), Mentalte ("Reason," 
in the current, not the Platonic, sense), and a Roman 
abbe take part ; the " forbidden knowledge " is that 
of the gnosis which the modern Church and the rational- 
ist alike reject, though for very different reasons the 
former because it cannot tolerate a point of view which 
considers Christianity only as one amongst other 
orthodox religions and the latter because, as a great 
Orientalist (Professor A. B. Keith) has remarked, 
"-such knowledge as is not empirical is meaningless 
to us and should not be described as knowledge " 16 
an almost classical confession of the limitations of the 
" scientific " position. 

Gudnon's French is at once precise and limpid, and 
inevitably loses in translation ; his subject matter is 

65 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

of absorbing interest, at least to anyone who cares for 
what Plato calls the really serious things. 17 Neverthe- 
less it has often been found unpalatable ; partly for 
reasons given below, but also for reasons that have 
been stated, paradoxically enough, by a reviewer of 
Blakney's Meister Eckhart in the Harvard Divinity 
School Bulletin, 16 who says that "To an age which 
believes in personality and personalism, the impersonal- 
ity of mysticism is baffling ; and to an age which is 
trying to quicken its insight into history the indifference 
of the mystics to events in time is disconcerting." 
As for history, Gu^non's " he who cannot escape from 
the standpoint of temporal succession so as to see all 
things in their simultaneity is incapable of the least 
conception of the metaphysical order " 19 adequately 
complements Jacob Behmen's designation of the 
" history that was once brought to pass " as " merely 
the (outward) form of Christianity." 20 For the 
Hindu, the events of the Rgveda are nowever and 
dateless, and the Krishna Lila " not an historical 
event " ; and the reliance of Christianity upon sup- 
posedly historical " facts " seems to be its greatest 
weakness. The value of literary history for doxo- 
graphy is very little, and it is for this reason that so 
many orthodox Hindus have thought of Western 
scholarship as a " crime " : their interest is not in 
" what men have believed," but in the truth. A 
further difficulty is presented by Gu&ion's uncom- 
promising language : " Western civilization is an 
anomaly, not to say a monstrosity." Of this a re- 
viewer 21 has remarked that " such sweeping remarks 
cannot be shared even by critics of Western achieve- 
ments." I should have thought that now that its 
denouement is before our eyes, the truth of such a 

66 



Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge 

statement might have been recognized by every un- 
prejudiced European ; at any rate Sir George Birdwood 
in 1915 described modern Western civilization as 
" secular, joyless, inane, and self -destructive " and 
Professor La Piana has said that " what we call our 
civilization is but a murderous machine with no 
conscience and no ideals " 22 and might well have 
said suicidal as well as murderous. It would be very 
easy to cite innumerable criticisms of the same kind ; 
Sir S. Radhakrishnan holds, for example, that 
" civilization is not worth saving if it continues on its 
present foundations," 23 and this it would be hard to 
deny ; Professor A. N. Whitehead has spoken quite 
as forcibly " There remains the show of civilization, 
without any of its realities." 24 

In any case, if we are to read Gudnon at all, we must 
have outgrown the temporally provincial view that 
has for so long and so complacently envisaged a con- 
tinuous progress of humanity culminating in the 
twentieth century and be willing at least to ask our- 
selves whether there has not been rather a continued 
decline, " from the stone age until now," as one of the 
most learned men in the U.S.A. once put it to me. It 
is not by " science " that we can be saved : "the 
possession of the sciences as a whole, if it does not 
include the best, will in some few cases aid but more 
often harm the owner." 26 " We are obliged to admit 
that our European culture is a culture of the mind and 
senses only"; 26 "The prostitution of science may 
lead to world catastrophe"; 27 "Our dignity and 
our interests require that we shall be the directors and 
not the victims of technical and scientific advance "; 28 
" Few will deny that the twentieth century thus far 
has brought us bitter disappointment." 29 "We are 

67 F 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

of absorbing interest, at least to anyone who cares for 
what Plato calls the really serious things. 17 Neverthe- 
less it has often been found unpalatable ; partly for 
reasons given below, but also for reasons that have 
been stated, paradoxically enough, by a reviewer of 
Blakney's Meister Eckhart in the Harvard Divinity 
School Bulletin who says that " To an age which 
believes in personality and personalism, the impersonal- 
ity of mysticism is baffling ; and to an age which is 
trying to quicken its insight into history the indifference 
of the mystics to events in time is disconcerting." 
As for history, Gudnon's " he who cannot escape from 
the standpoint of temporal succession so as to see all 
things in their simultaneity is incapable of the least 
conception of the metaphysical order " lft adequately 
complements Jacob Behmen's designation of the 
" history that was once brought to pass " as " merely 
the ( outward) form of Christianity." 20 For the 
Hindu, the events of the Rgveda are nowever and 
dateless, and the Krishna Lila " not an historical 
event " ; and the reliance of Christianity upon sup- 
posedly historical " facts " seems to be its greatest 
weakness. The value of literary history for doxo- 
graphy is very little, and it is for this reason that so 
many orthodox Hindus have thought of Western 
scholarship as a " crime " : their interest is not in 
" what men have believed," but in the truth. A 
further difficulty is presented by Gu&ion's uncom- 
promising language : " Western civilization is an 
anomaly, not to say a monstrosity." Of this a re- 
viewer 21 has remarked that " such sweeping remarks 
cannot be shared even by critics of Western achieve- 
ments." I should have thought that now that its 
denouement is before our eyes, the truth of such a 

66 



Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge 

statement might have been recognized by every un- 
prejudiced European ; at any rate Sir George Birdwood 
in 1915 described modern Western civilization as 
" secular, joyless, inane, and self-destructive " and 
Professor La Piana has said that " what we call our 
civilization is but a murderous machine with no 
conscience and no ideals " 22 and might well have 
said suicidal as well as murderous. It would be very 
easy to cite innumerable criticisms of the same kind ; 
Sir S. Radhakrishnan holds, for example, that 
" civilization is not worth saving if it continues on its 
present foundations," 23 and this it would be hard to 
deny ; Professor A. N. Whitehead has spoken quite 
as forcibly " There remains the show of civilization, 
without any of its realities/' 24 

In any case, if we are to read Gu&ion at all, we must 
have outgrown the temporally provincial view that 
has for so long and so complacently envisaged a con- 
tinuous progress of humanity culminating in the 
twentieth century and be willing at least to ask our- 
selves whether there has not been rather a continued 
decline, " from the stone age until now," as one of the 
most learned men in the U.S.A. once put it to me. It 
is not by " science " that we can be saved : " the 
possession of the sciences as a whole, if it does not 
include the best, will in some few cases aid but more 
often harm the owner." 26 " We are obliged to admit 
that our European culture is a culture of the mind and 
senses only " ; 26 " The prostitution of science may 
lead to world catastrophe"; 27 "Our dignity and 
our interests require that we shall be the directors and 
not the victims of technical and scientific advance "; M 
" Few will deny that the twentieth century thus far 
has brought us bitter disappointment." 29 "We are 

67 F 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

of absorbing interest, at least to anyone who cares for 
what Plato calls the really serious things. 17 Neverthe- 
less it has often been found unpalatable ; partly for 
reasons given below, but also for reasons that have 
been stated, paradoxically enough, by a reviewer of 
Blakney's Meister Eckhart in the Harvard Divinity 
School Bulletin, 1 * who says that " To an age which 
believes in personality and personalism, the impersonal- 
ity of mysticism is baffling ; and to an age which is 
trying to quicken its insight into history the indifference 
of the mystics to events in time is disconcerting." 
As for history, Guenon's " he who cannot escape from 
the standpoint of temporal succession so as to see all 
things in their simultaneity is incapable of the least 
conception of the metaphysical order " lft adequately 
complements Jacob Behmen's designation of the 
" history that was once brought to pass " as " merely 
the (outward) form of Christianity." 20 For the 
Hindu, the events of the Rgveda are nowever and 
dateless, and the Krishna Lila " not an historical 
event " ; and the reliance of Christianity upon sup- 
posedly historical " facts " seems to be its greatest 
weakness. The value of literary history for doxo- 
graphy is very little, and it is for this reason that so 
many orthodox Hindus have thought of Western 
scholarship as a " crime " : their interest is not in 
" what men have believed," but in the truth. A 
further difficulty is presented by Gu&ion's uncom- 
promising language : " Western civilization is an 
anomaly, not to say a monstrosity." Of this a re- 
viewer 21 has remarked that " such sweeping remarks 
cannot be shared even by critics of Western achieve- 
ments." I should have thought that now that its 
denouement is before our eyes, the truth of such a 

66 



Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge 

statement might have been recognized by every un- 
prejudiced European ; at any rate Sir George Birdwood 
in 1915 described modern Western civilization as 
" secular, joyless, inane, and self -destructive " and 
Professor La Piana has said that " what we call our 
civilization is but a murderous machine with no 
conscience and no ideals " 22 and might well have 
said suicidal as well as murderous. It would be very 
easy to cite innumerable criticisms of the same kind ; 
Sir S. Radhakrishnan holds, for example, that 
" civilization is not worth saving if it continues on its 
present foundations," 23 and this it would be hard to 
deny ; Professor A. N. Whitehead has spoken quite 
as forcibly " There remains the show of civilization, 
without any of its realities." 24 

In any case, if we are to read Gu6non at all, we must 
have outgrown the temporally provincial view that 
has for so long and so complacently envisaged a con- 
tinuous progress of humanity culminating in the 
twentieth century and be willing at least to ask our- 
selves whether there has not been rather a continued 
decline, " from the stone age until now," as one of the 
most learned men in the U.S.A. once put it to me. It 
is not by " science " that we can be saved : " the 
possession of the sciences as a whole, if it does not 
include the best, will in some few cases aid but more 
often harm the owner." 26 " We are obliged to admit 
that our European culture is a culture of the mind and 
senses only " ; 28 " The prostitution of science may 
lead to world catastrophe"; 27 "Our dignity and 
our interests require that we shall be the directors and 
not the victims of technical and scientific advance "; M 
" Few will deny that the twentieth century thus far 
has brought us bitter disappointment." 29 "We are 

67 F 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

of absorbing interest, at least to anyone who cares for 
what Plato calls the really serious things. 17 Neverthe- 
less it has often been found unpalatable ; partly for 
reasons given below, but also for reasons that have 
been stated, paradoxically enough, by a reviewer of 
Blakney's Meister Eckhart in the Harvard Divinity 
School Bulletin, who says that " To an age which 
believes in personality and personalism, the impersonal- 
ity of mysticism is baffling ; and to an age which is 
trying to quicken its insight into history the indifference 
of the mystics to events in time is disconcerting." 
As for history, Guenon's " he who cannot escape from 
the standpoint of temporal succession so as to see all 
things in their simultaneity is incapable of the least 
conception of the metaphysical order " 19 adequately 
complements Jacob Behmen's designation of the 
" history that was once brought to pass " as " merely 
the ( outward) form of Christianity. 1 ' 20 For the 
Hindu, the events of the Rgveda are nowever and 
dateless, and the Krishna Lila " not an historical 
event " ; and the reliance of Christianity upon sup- 
posedly historical " facts " seems to be its greatest 
weakness. The value of literary history for doxo- 
graphy is very little, and it is for this reason that so 
many orthodox Hindus have thought of Western 
scholarship as a " crime " : their interest is not in 
"what men have believed," but in the truth. A 
further difficulty is presented by Gu&ion's uncom- 
promising language : " Western civilization is an 
anomaly, not to say a monstrosity." Of this a re- 
viewer 21 has remarked that " such sweeping remarks 
cannot be shared even by critics of Western achieve- 
ments." I should have thought that now that its 
denouement is before our eyes, the truth of such a 

66 



Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge 

statement might have been recognized by every un- 
prejudiced European ; at any rate Sir George Birdwood 
in 1915 described modern Western civilization as 
" secular, joyless, inane, and self -destructive " and 
Professor La Piana has said that " what we call our 
civilization is but a murderous machine with no 
conscience and no ideals" 22 and might well have 
said suicidal as well as murderous. It would be very 
easy to cite innumerable criticisms of the same kind ; 
Sir S. Radhakrishnan holds, for example, that 
" civilization is not worth saving if it continues on its 
present foundations/' 23 and this it would be hard to 
deny ; Professor A, N. Whitehead has spoken quite 
as forcibly " There remains the show of civilization, 
without any of its realities." 24 

In any case, if we are to read Guenon at all, we must 
have outgrown the temporally provincial view that 
has for so long and so complacently envisaged a con- 
tinuous progress of humanity culminating in the 
twentieth century and be willing at least to ask our- 
selves whether there has not been rather a continued 
decline, " from the stone age until now," as one of the 
most learned men in the U.S.A. once put it to me. It 
is not by "science" that we can be saved: "the 
possession of the sciences as a whole, if it does not 
include the best, will in some few cases aid but more 
often harm the owner." 25 " We are obliged to admit 
that our European culture is a culture of the mind and 
senses only " ; 26 " The prostitution of science may 
lead to world catastrophe"; 27 "Our dignity and 
our interests require that we shall be the directors and 
not the victims of technical and scientific advance "; 28 
" Few will deny that the twentieth century thus far 
has brought us bitter disappointment." 29 "We are 

67 F 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

of absorbing interest, at least to anyone who cares for 
what Plato calls the really serious things. 17 Neverthe- 
less it has often been found unpalatable ; partly for 
reasons given below, but also for reasons that have 
been stated, paradoxically enough, by a reviewer of 
Blakney's Meister Eckhart in the Harvard Divinity 
School Bulletin who says that "To an age which 
believes in personality and personalism, the impersonal- 
ity of mysticism is baffling ; and to an age which is 
trying to quicken its insight into history the indifference 
of the mystics to events in time is disconcerting/ 1 
As for history, Guenon's " he who cannot escape from 
the standpoint of temporal succession so as to see all 
things in their simultaneity is incapable of the least 
conception of the metaphysical order " lft adequately 
complements Jacob Behmen's designation of the 
" history that was once brought to pass " as " merely 
the ( outward) form of Christianity." 20 For the 
Hindu, the events of the Rgveda are nowever and 
dateless, and the Krishna Lila " not an historical 
event " ; and the reliance of Christianity upon sup- 
posedly historical " facts " seems to be its greatest 
weakness. The value of literary history for doxo- 
graphy is very little, and it is for this reason that so 
many orthodox Hindus have thought of Western 
scholarship as a " crime " : their interest is not in 
" what men have believed," but in the truth. A 
further difficulty is presented by Gu&ion's uncom- 
promising language : " Western civilization is an 
anomaly, not to say a monstrosity." Of this a re- 
viewer 21 has remarked that " such sweeping remarks 
cannot be shared even by critics of Western achieve- 
ments." I should have thought that now that its 
denouement is before our eyes, the truth of such a 

66 



Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge 

statement might have been recognized by every un- 
prejudiced European ; at any rate Sir George Birdwood 
in 1915 described modern Western civilization as 
" secular, joyless, inane, and self-destructive " and 
Professor La Piana has said that " what we call our 
civilization is but a murderous machine with no 
conscience and no ideals " 22 and might well have 
said suicidal as well as murderous. It would be very 
easy to cite innumerable criticisms of the same kind ; 
Sir S. Radhakrishnan holds, for example, that 
" civilization is not worth saving if it continues on its 
present foundations," 23 and this it would be hard to 
deny ; Professor A. N. Whitehead has spoken quite 
as forcibly " There remains the show of civilization, 
without any of its realities/' 24 

In any case, if we are to read Gu&ion at all, we must 
have outgrown the temporally provincial view that 
has for so long and so complacently envisaged a con- 
tinuous progress of humanity culminating in the 
twentieth century and be willing at least to ask our- 
selves whether there has not been rather a continued 
decline, " from the stone age until now," as one of the 
most learned men in the U.S.A. once put it to me. It 
is not by " science " that we can be saved : " the 
possession of the sciences as a whole, if it does not 
include the best, will in some few cases aid but more 
often harm the owner." 26 " We are obliged to admit 
that our European culture is a culture of the mind and 
senses only"; 26 "The prostitution of science may 
lead to world catastrophe"; 27 "Our dignity and 
our interests require that we shall be the directors and 
not the victims of technical and scientific advance "; 28 
" Few will deny that the twentieth century thus far 
has brought us bitter disappointment." 29 "We are 

67 F 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

now faced with the prospect of complete bankruptcy 
in every department of life." 30 Eric Gill speaks of the 
" monstrous inhumanity " of industrialism, and of the 
modern way of life, as " neither human nor normal nor 
Christian. ... It is our way of thinking that is odd 
and unnatural/' 31 This sense of frustration is perhaps 
the most encouraging sign of the times. We have laid 
stress on these things because it is only to those who 
feel this frustration, and not to those who still believe 
in progress, that Guenon addresses himself ; to those 
who are complacent everything that he has to say will 
seem to be preposterous. 

The reactions of Roman Catholics to Guenon are 
illuminating. One has pointed out that he is a " serious 
metaphysician," i.e. one convinced of the truth he 
expounds and eager to show the unanimity of the 
Eastern and scholastic traditions, and observes that 
" in such matters belief and understanding must go 
together." 32 Crede ut intelligas is a piece of advice 
that modern scholars would, indeed, do well to con- 
sider ; it is, perhaps, just because we have not believed 
that we have not yet understood the East. The same 
author writes of East and West, " Ren Guenon is one 
of the few writers of our time whose work is really of 
importance ... he stands for the primacy of pure 
metaphysics over all other forms of knowledge, and 
presents himself as the exponent of a major tradition 
of thought, predominantly Eastern, but shared in the 
Middle Ages by the scholastics of the West . . . clearly 
Gu&ion's position is not that of Christian orthodoxy, 
but many, perhaps most, of his theses are, in fact, 
better in accord with authentic Thomist doctrine than 
are many opinions of devout but ill-instructed 
Christians." 83 We should do well to remember that 

68 



Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge 

even St. Thomas Aquinas did not disdain to make use 
of " intrinsic and probable proofs " derived from the 
" pagan " philosophers. 

Gerald Vann, on the other hand, makes the mistake 
which the title of his review, " Ren Guenon's Oriental- 
ism," 34 announces; for this is not another "ism/ 1 
nor a geographical antithesis, but one of modern 
empiricism and traditional theory. Vann springs to 
the defence of the very Christianity in which Guenon 
himself sees almost the only possibility of salvation 
for the West ; only possibility, not because there is 
no other body of truth, but because the mentality of the 
West is adapted to and needs a religion of just this 
sort. But if Christianity should fail, it is just because 
its intellectual aspects have been submerged, and it 
has become a code of ethics rather than a doctrine 
from which all other applications can and should be 
derived ; hardly two consecutive sentences of some of 
Meister Eckhart's sermons would be intelligible to an 
average modern congregation, which does not expect 
doctrine, and only expects to be told how to behave. 
If Guenon wants the West to turn to Eastern meta- 
physics, it is not because they are Eastern but because 
this is metaphysics. If " Eastern " metaphysics 
differed from a "Western" metaphysics as true 
philosophy differs from what is often so called in our 
modern universities one or the other would not be 
metaphysics. It is from metaphysics that the West 
has turned away in its desperate endeavour to live by 
bread alone, an endeavour of which the Dead Sea 
fruits are before our eyes. It is only because this 
metaphysics still survives as a living power in Eastern 
societies, in so far as they have not been corrupted by 
the withering touch of Western, or rather, modern 

69 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

civilization (for the contrast is not of East or West as 
such, but of " those paths that the rest of mankind 
follows as a matter of course " with those post- 
Renaissance paths that have brought us to our present 
impasse), and not to Orientalize the West, but to bring 
back the West to a consciousness of the roots of her 
own life and of values that have been transvalued in the 
most sinister sense, that Gu&ion asks us to turn to the 
East. He does not mean, and makes it very clear that 
he does not mean, that Europeans ought to become 
Hindus or Buddhists, but much rather that they, who 
are getting nowhere by the study of " the Bible as 
literature," or that of Dante " as a poet," should 
rediscover Christianity, or what amounts to the same 
thing, Plato (" that great priest," as Meister Eckhart 
calls him). I often marvel at men's immunity to the 
Apology and Phaedo or the seventh chapter of the 
Republic ; I suppose it is because they would not hear, 
" though one rose from the dead." 

The issue of " East and West " is not merely a 
theoretical (we must remind the modern reader that 
from the standpoint of the traditional philosophy, 
" theoretical " is anything but a term of disparagement) 
but also an urgent practical problem. Pearl Buck 
asks, "Why should prejudices be so strong at this 
moment ? The answer it seems to me is simple. 
Physical conveyance and other circumstances have 
forced parts of the world once remote from each other 
into actual intimacy for which peoples are not mentally 
or spiritually prepared. ... It is not necessary to 
believe that this initial stage must continue. If 
those prepared to act as interpreters will do their 
proper work, we may find that within another genera- 
tion or two, or even sooner, dislike and prejudice may 

70 



Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge 

be gone. This is only possible if prompt and strong 
measures are taken by peoples to keep step mentally 
with the increasing closeness to which the war is com- 
pelling us." 35 But if this is to happen, the West will 
have to abandon what Guenon calls its " proselytizing 
fury," an expression that must not be taken to refer 
only to the activities of Christian missionaries, re- 
grettable as these often are, but to those of all the 
distributors of modern " civilization " and those of 
practically all those " educators " who feel that they 
have more to give than to learn from what are often 
called the " backward " or " unprogressive " peoples ; 
to whom it does not occur that one may not wish or 
need to " progress " if one has reached a state of 
equilibrium that already provides for the realization 
of what one regards as the greatest purposes of life. 
It is an expression of good will and of the best intentions 
that this proselytizing fury takes on its most dangerous 
aspects. To many this " fury " can only suggest the 
fable of the fox that lost its tail, and persuaded the 
other foxes to cut off theirs. An industrialization of 
the East may be inevitable, but do not let us call it a 
blessing that a folk should be reduced to the level of a 
proletariat, or assume that materially higher standards 
of living necessarily make for greater happiness. The 
West is only just discovering, to its great astonish- 
ment, that " material inducements, that is, money or 
the things that money can buy " are by no means so 
cogent a force as has been supposed ; " Beyond the 
subsistence level, the theory that this incentive is 
decisive is largely an illusion." 86 As for the East, as 
Guenon says, " The only impression that, for example, 
mechanical inventions make on most Orientals is one 
of deep repulsion ; certainly it all seems to them far 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

more harmful than beneficial, and if they find them- 
selves obliged to accept certain things which the present 
epoch has made necessary, they do so in the hope of 
future riddance . . . what the people of the West 
call ' rising ' would be called by some ' sinking ' ; 
that is what all true Orientals think/ 137 It must not 
be supposed that because so iftany Eastern peoples 
have imitated us in self-defence that they have there- 
fore accepted our values ; on the contrary, it is just 
because the conservative East still challenges all the 
presuppositions on which our illusion of progress 
rests, that it deserves our most serious consideration. 

There is nothing in economic intimacies that is likely 
to reduce prejudice or promote mutual understandings 
automatically. Even when Europeans live amongst 
Orientals, " economic contact between the Eastern and 
Western groups is practically the only contact there is. 
There is very little social or religious give and take 
between the two. Each lives in a world almost entirely 
closed to the other and by ' closed ' we mean not 
only ' unknown ' but more : incomprehensible and 
unattainable." 38 That is an inhuman relationship, 
by which both parties are degraded. 

Neither must it be assumed that the Orient thinks it 
important that the masses should learn to read and 
write. Literacy is a practical necessity in an industrial 
society, where the keeping of accounts is all important. 
But in India, in so far as Western methods of education 
have not been imposed from without, all higher educa- 
tion is imparted orally, and to have heard is far more 
important than to have read. At the same time the 
peasant, prevented by his illiteracy and poverty from 
devouring the newspapers and magazines that form the 
daily and almost the only reading of the vast majority 

72 



Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge 

of Western "literates/' is, like Hesiod's Boeotian 
farmers, and still more like the Gaelic-speaking High- 
landers before the era of the board schools, thoroughly 
familiar with an epic literature of profound spiritual 
significance and a body of poetry and music of in- 
calculable value ; and one can only regret the spread 
of an " education " that involves the destruction of all 
these things, or only preserves them as curiosities 
within the covers of books. For cultural purposes it is 
not important that the masses should be literate ; it 
is not necessary that anyone should be literate ; it is 
only necessary that there should be amongst the people 
philosophers (in the traditional, not the modern sense 
of the word), and that there should be preserved deep 
respect on the part of laymen for true learning that is 
the antithesis of the American attitude to a " pro- 
fessor." In these respects the whole East is still far 
in advance of the West, and hence the learning of the 
elite exerts a far profounder influence upon society as a 
whole than the Western specialist " thinker " can ever 
hope to wield. 

It is not, however, primarily with a protection of the 
East against the subversive inroads of Western " cul- 
ture " that Guenon is concerned, but rather with the 
question, What possibility of regeneration, if any, can 
be envisaged for the West ? The possibility exists 
only in the event of a return to first principles and to 
the normal ways of living that proceed from the 
application of first piinciples to contingent circum- 
stances ; and as it is only in the East that these things 
are still alive, it is to the East that the West must 
turn. " It is the West that must take the initiative, 
but she must be prepared really to go towards the East, 
not merely seeking to draw the East towards herself, 

73 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

more harmful than beneficial, and if they find them- 
selves obliged to accept certain things which the present 
epoch has made necessary, they do so in the hope of 
future riddance . . . what the people of the West 
call ' rising ' would be called by some ' sinking ' ; 
that is what all true Orientals think." 37 It must not 
be supposed that because so rflany Eastern peoples 
have imitated us in self-defence that they have there- 
fore accepted our values ; on the contrary, it is just 
because the conservative East still challenges all the 
presuppositions on which our illusion of progress 
rests, that it deserves our most serious consideration. 

There is nothing in economic intimacies that is likely 
to reduce prejudice or promote mutual understandings 
automatically. Even when Europeans live amongst 
Orientals, " economic contact between the Eastern and 
Western groups is practically the only contact there is. 
There is very little social or religious give and take 
between the two. Each lives in a world almost entirely 
closed to the other and by ' closed ' we mean not 
only ' unknown ' but more : incomprehensible and 
unattainable." 38 That is an inhuman relationship, 
by which both parties are degraded. 

Neither must it be assumed that the Orient thinks it 
important that the masses should learn to read and 
write. Literacy is a practical necessity in an industrial 
society, where the keeping of accounts is all important. 
But in India, in so far as Western methods of education 
have not been imposed from without, all higher educa- 
tion is imparted orally, and to have heard is far more 
important than to have read. At the same time the 
peasant, prevented by his illiteracy and poverty from 
devouring the newspapers and magazines that form the 
daily and almost the only reading of the vast majority 

72 



Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge 

of Western " literates," is, like Hesiod's Boeotian 
farmers, and still more like the Gaelic-speaking High- 
landers before the era of the board schools, thoroughly 
familiar with an epic literature of profound spiritual 
significance and a body of poetry and music of in- 
calculable value ; and one can only regret the spread 
of an " education " that involves the destruction of all 
these things, or only preserves them as curiosities 
within the covers of books. For cultural purposes it is 
not important that the masses should be literate ; it 
is not necessary that anyone should be literate ; it is 
only necessary that there should be amongst the people 
philosophers (in the traditional, not the modern sense 
of the word), and that there should be preserved deep 
respect on the part of laymen for true learning that is 
the antithesis of the American attitude to a " pro- 
fessor." In these respects the whole East is still far 
in advance of the West, and hence the learning of the 
elite exerts a far profounder influence upon society as a 
whole than the Western specialist " thinker " can ever 
hope to wield. 

It is not, however, primarily with a protection of the 
East against the subversive inroads of Western " cul- 
ture" that Guenon is concerned, but rather with the 
question, What possibility of regeneration, if any, can 
be envisaged for the West ? The possibility exists 
only in the event of a return to first principles and to 
the normal ways of living that proceed from the 
application of first piinciples to contingent circum- 
stances ; and as it is only in the East that these things 
are still alive, it is to the East that the West must 
turn. " It is the West that must take the initiative, 
but she must be prepared really to go towards the East, 
not merely seeking to draw the East towards herself, 

73 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

as she has tried to do so far. There is no reason why 
the East should take this initiative, and there would 
still be none, even if the Western world were not in 
such a state as to make any effort in this direction 
useless. ... It now remains for us to show how the 
West might attempt to approach the East/' 39 

He proceeds to show that the work is to be done in 
the two fields of metaphysics and religion, and that it 
can only be carried out on the highest intellectual 
levels, where agreement on first principles can be 
reached and apart from any propaganda on behalf of 
or even apology for " Western civilization." 

The work must be undertaken, therefore, by an 
" elite." And as it is here more than anywhere that 
Guenon's meaning is likely to be wilfully misinter- 
preted, we must understand clearly what he means 
by such an elite. The divergence of the West and 
East being only " accidental," " the bringing of these 
two portions of mankind together and the return of the 
West to a normal civilization are really just one and 
the same thing." An elite will necessarily work in the 
first place " for itself, since its members will naturally 
reap from their own development an immediate and 
altogether unfailing benefit." An indirect result 
" indirect," because on this intellectual level one does 
not think of " doing good " to others, or in terms of 
" service," but seeks truth because one needs it one- 
self would, or might under favourable conditions, 
bring about " a return of the West to a traditional 
civilization/' i.e. one in which " everything is seen as 
the application and extension of a doctrine whose 
essence is purely intellectual and metaphysical." 40 

It is emphasized again and again that such an elite 
does not mean a body of specialists or scholars who 

74 



Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge 

would absorb and put over on the West the forms of an 
alien culture, nor even persuade the West to return to 
such a traditional civilization as existed in the Middle 
Ages. Traditional cultures develop by the applica- 
tion of principles to conditions ; the principles, in- 
deed, are unchangeable and universal, but just as 
nothing can be known except in the mode of the knower, 
so nothing valid can be accomplished socially without 
taking into account the character of those concerned 
and the particular circumstances of the period in which 
they live. There is no " fusion " of cultures to be 
hoped for ; it would be nothing like an " eclecticism " 
or " syncretism " that an elite would have in view. 
Neither would such an elite be organized in any way 
so as to exercise such a direct influence as that which, 
for example, the Technocrats would like to exercise 
for the good of mankind. If such an elite ever came 
into being, the vast majority of Western men would 
never know of it ; it would operate only as a sort of 
leaven, and certainly on behalf of rather than against 
whatever survives of traditional essence in, for example, 
the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic domains. 
It is, indeed, a curious fact that some of the most 
powerful defenders of Christian dogma are to be found 
amongst Orientals who are not themselves Christians, 
or ever likely to become Christians, but recognize in 
the Christian tradition an embodiment of the universal 
truth to which God has never nor anywhere left 
himself without a witness. 

In the meantime, M. Gu&ion asks, " Is this really 
' the beginning of an end ' for the modern civilization ? 
... At least there are many signs which should give 
food for reflection to those who are still capable of it ; 
will the West be able to regain control of herself in 

75 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

time ? " Few would deny that we are faced with the 
possibility of a total disintegration of culture. We are 
at war with ourselves, and therefore at war with one 
another. Western man is unbalanced, and the ques- 
tion, Can he recover himself ? is a very real one. No 
one to whom the question presents itself can afford to 
ignore the writings of the leading living exponent of a 
traditional wisdom that is no more essentially Oriental 
than it is Occidental, though it may be only in the 
uttermost parts of the earth that it is still remembered 
and must be sought. 



REFERENCES 

1 London, Rider, 1928. 

2 Paris, 2nd ed., 1932. 

8 Paris, 1923, 2nd ed., 1930. 

4 Paris, 1921, 2nd ed., 1930. 

5 Both Paris, 1925. 

6 Paris, 1927. 

7 Marseille, 1929. 

8 Both Paris, 1930. 

9 Paris, 1931. 

10 Paris, 1932. 

11 Paris, 1939 a lecture delivered at the Sorbonne in 
1925 ; 2nd ed. 1946. 

12 Cairo, 1943, and London, 1944. 

13 Cairo, 1943. Printed Paris, 1946. 

14 22me ann6e, 1935. 

15 Paris, 1935. 

16 Aitareya Aranyaka, Oxford, 1909, p. 42. 

17 Laws, 803 B, C ; Philebus, 58 A ; Republic, 521 C, D ; 
Timaeus, 47 B, etc. 

18 XXXIX, 1942, p. 107. 

19 La mdtaphysique orientate, p. 17. 

20 Signatura rerum, XV, 24. 



Eastern Wisdom and Western Knowledge 

21 Betty Heiman in BSOAS., X, 1943, p. 1048. 

22 Harvard Divinity School Bulletin, XXVII, 27. 

23 Eastern Religions and Western Thought, p. 257. 

24 Adventures of Ideas, 1933, p. 358. 

25 Plato, Alcibiades, II, 144 D. 

26 Worrington, Form in Gothic, p. 75. 

27 Leroy Waterman in JAOS, LVIII, 410. 

28 Rt. Hon. Herbert Morrison in the British Association 
Report, Science and World Order, January, 1942, p. 33. 

29 Professor J. M. Mecklin in Passing of the Saint, p. 197. 
80 Lionel Giles in Luzac's Oriental List. 

31 Autobiography, pp. 145, 174, 279. 

32 Walter Shewring in the Weekly Review, January, 1939. 

88 Weekly Review, August 28, 1941. 

84 In the New English Weekly, September, 1941. 

36 Asia, March, 1942, italics mine. 

86 National Research Council, Fatigue of Workers, 1942, 

P- 143. 

37 East and West, pp. 44, 71. 

38 J. H. Boeke, Structure of Netherlands Indian Economy, 
1942, p. 68. 

89 East and West, p. 162. 
40 East and West, p. 241. 



77 



V : East and West 



' ' EAST and West " imports a cultural ]; rather 
than a geographical antithesis : an opposition of the 
traditional or ordinary way of life that survives in the 
East to the modern and irregular way of life that now 
prevails in the West. It is because such an opposition 
as this could not have been felt before the Renaissance 
that we say that the problem is one that presents itself 
only accidentally in terms of geography ; it is one of 
times much more than of places. For if we leave out 
of account the " modernistic " and individual philo- 
sophies of to-day, and consider only the great tradition 
of the magnanimous philosophers, whose philosophy 
was also a religion that had to be lived if it was to be 
understood, it will soon be found that the distinctions 
of culture in East and West, or for that matter North 
and South, are comparable only to those of dialects ; 
all are speaking what is essentially one and the same 
spiritual language, employing different words, but 
expressing the same ideas, and very often by means of 
identical idioms. Otherwise stated, there is a univers- 
ally intelligible language, not only verbal but also 
visual, of the fundamental ideas on which the different 
civilizations have been founded. 

There exists, then, in this commonly accepted 
axiology or body of first principles a common universe 
of discourse ; and this provides us with the necessary 
basis for communication, understanding, and agree- 
ment, and so for effective co-operation in the applica- 
tion of commonly recognized spiritual values to the 
solution of contingent problems of organization and 

78 



East and West 

conduct. It is clear, however, that all this under- 
standing and agreement can be reached and verified 
only by philosophers or scholars, if such are to be found, 
who are more than philologues and to whom their 
knowledge of the great tradition has been a vital and 
transforming experience; of such is the leaven or 
ferment by which the epigonous and decaying civiliza- 
tions of to-day might be "renewed in knowledge." 
I quote St. Paul's " in knowledge," not with reference 
to a knowledge of the " facts of science " or any power 
to " conquer nature," but as referring to the know- 
ledge of our Self which the true philosophers of East and 
West alike have always considered the sine qua non 
of wisdom ; and because this is not a matter of any- 
one's " illiteracy " or ignorance of " facts," but one 
of the restoration of meaning or value to a world of 
" impoverished reality." East and West are at cross- 
purposes only because the West is determined, i.e. at 
once resolved and economically " determined," to 
keep on going it knows not where, and calls this 
rudderless voyage (see the woodcut by Eric Gill, 
on page one) " progress." 

It is far more, of course, by what our ideal 
philosophers and scholars, functioning as mediators, 
might be, far more by the simple fact of their presence, 
as of a catalyst, than by any kind of intervention in 
political or economic activities that they could operate 
effectively ; they would have no use for yqj 
to " represent " their several natioj 
and remaining unseen, they could arj 
At the present moment I can thinkJ 
of this kind : " Ren6 Gu&ion, Frjjfhjj 
Pallis ; one cannot consider from 
who know only the West or only 

79 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

On the other hand, no mere good will or philan- 
thropy will suffice ; and while it is true that correct 
solutions will necessarily be good ones, it by no means 
follows that what to the altruist seems to be good will 
also be right. There is no room here for the prose- 
lytizing fury of any " idealists/ 1 What " the century 
of the common man " actually predicates is the century 
of the economic man, the economically determined man 
whose best and worst are equally unprincipled a man 
who is far too common for our ends. How many of 
our " communists/' I wonder, realize that the reference 
of " the common man/' communis homo, was originally 
not to the man in the street as such, but to the im- 
manent deity, the very Man in everyman ! In the 
meantime, what " free enterprise " means is " his 
hand the common man's in our sense against every 
man's, and every man's hand against him " : and there 
lie the fertile seeds of future wars. What we demand is 
something other than a quantitative standard of living ; 
a form of society in which, in the words of St. 
Augustine, " everyone has his divinely co-ordinated 
place, and his security, and honour, and content 
therein ; and no one is envious of another's high estate, 
and reverence, and happiness ; where God is sought, 
and is found, and is magnified in everything " ; one 
in which, in the words of Pius XII, "all work has an 
inherent dignity and at the same time a close con- 
nection with the perfection of the person " an almost 
literal summary of the true philosophy of work as it 
has been propounded by Plato and in the Bhagavad 
dta. I know of no form of society in which such a 
condition has been more nearly realized than the 
Indian, of which the late Sir George Birdwood, himself 
a convinced and exemplary Christian, said that " such 

80 



East and West 

an ideal order we should have held impossible of 
realization, but that it continues to exist [however 
precariously], and to afford us, in the yet living results 
of its daily operation in India, a proof of the superiority, 
in so many unsuspected ways, of -the hieratic civiliza- 
tion of antiquity over the secular, joyless, inane, and 
self-destructive civilization of the West." 1 

We have got to reckon with the fact that almost all 
Western nations are either feared or hated and dis- 
trusted by almost all Eastern peoples, and to ask 
ourselves why this should be so, and whether the 
former are unchangeably of such a sort as to seem to 
be destroyers everywhere, makers of deserts and 
calling them peace. Already in 1761 William Law 
asked men to " look at all European Christendom 
sailing round the globe with fire and sword and every 
murdering art of war to seize the possessions and kill 
the inhabitants of both the Indies. What natural 
right of man, what supernatural virtue, which Christ 
brought down from Heaven, was not here trodden 
under foot ? All that you have ever read or heard of 
heathen barbarity was here outdone by Christian 
conquerors. And to this day, what wars of Christians 
against Christians ... for a miserable share in the 
spoils of a plundered heathen world." Written 
immediately after a year of British military triumphs 
" in every quarter of the world," these words, like 
those of the concluding chapters of Gulliver's Travels, 
might have been written twenty years ago when the 
news of the Amritsar massacre had first leaked out, 
or when it was officially admitted that at the 
beginning of the last war British soldiers repeat- 
edly fired on unarmed crowds, when flogging was a 
common punishment for political offences, and 

81 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

thousands of elected representatives and other 
" political offenders " (most of them committed to the 
employment of only " nonviolent " means) were 
long in prison without charge or trial, and no man 
knew when he might not be arrested and detained 
incommunicado in the same way. And all that because 
" the loss of India would consummate the downfall of 
the British Empire," and the British Government, the 
" Holdfast " (Namuci the Indian Fafnir or 
" Pharaoh " as described in Ezekiel xxix.3) of the 
present age, means to " hold its own " ill-gotten gains 
in the name of a " moral responsibility " to peoples who 
may have been divided against themselves (divide et 
impera), but are certainly not divided in wanting 
to be freed to solve their own difficulties. It is no 
wonder that the heathen rage ; not in their " blind- 
ness," but because they see only too clearly that empire 
is a commercial-financial institution having theft as 
its final object. 2 

But politics and economics, although they cannot 
be ignored, are the most external and the least part of 
our problem ; it is not through them that understand- 
ing and agreement can be reached, but on the contrary 
through understanding that the political and economic 
problems can be solved. The first spiritual problem in 
the solution of which there must be a co-operation 
(if we are thinking of anything better than a mere 
imposition of our own manners and customs on other 
peoples), and with respect to which a common theory 
has been entertained, is that of the elimination of the 
profit motive by which capital and labour are nowadays 
equally dominated and inhibited. In other words, 
the problem is that of the restoration of the concept 
of vocation, not as a matter of arbitrary " choice/ 1 

82 



East and West 

or of passive determination by monetary needs or 
social ambition, but of occupations to which one is 
imperiously summoned by one's own nature and in 
which, accordingly,' every man can be working out at 
the same time the perfection of his product and his own 
entelechy. For it is inevitably true that in this way, 
as Plato says, " more will be done, and better done, 
and more easily than in any other way," a proposition 
of which the command, " Seek first the kingdom of 
God and his righteousness" (Si/cauxnnnj dharma), 
and the promise that " all these things shall be added 
unto you," is an almost literal paraphrase. 

In a vocational order it is assumed that every trade 
(i.e. " walk " of life) is appropriate to someone, and 
consonant with human dignity ; and this means in 
the final analysis, that if there are any occupations that 
are not consistent with human dignity, or any things 
intrinsically worthless, such occupations and manu- 
factures must be abandoned by a society that has in 
view the dignity of all its members. This is, then, the 
problem of the use and abuse of machines : use, if the 
instrument enables the workman to make well what is 
needed and in the making of which he can delight, or 
abuse if the instrument, in which some other party has 
a vested interest opposed to the workman's own, 
itself controls the kind and quality of his product. 
The distinction is that of the tool (however com- 
plicated) that helps the man to make the thing he wants 
to make, from the machine (however simple) that must 
be served by the man whom it, in fact, controls. 
This is a problem that must be solved if the world is 
to be made " safe for democracy " and safe from 
exploitation ; and that can be solved by agreement 
only when the intentions of the traditional " caste " 

83 G 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

systems have been understood, and it has been fully 
realized that these intentions can never be fulfilled 
within the framework of a capitalist industrialism, 
however " democratic," and can only be fulfilled 
where production is primarily " for good use." Nor is 
this a matter to be regarded only from the producer's 
point of view ; there are values also from a consumer's 
point of view, and who is not a consumer ? It must 
be recognized (the proofs are ready to hand in any 
good museum) that machines, as defined above, are 
not the equivalent of tools, but substitutes for tools, 
and that whatever is made by such machines directly 
for human use is qualitatively inferior to what can be 
made with the help of tools. I have observed the 
standing advertisement of a dealer in used carpets ; 
up to $50 is offered for "Americans" and up to $500 
for " Orientals." It is ultimately for the consumer 
to decide whether he wants to live on a $50 or a $500 
level; and no society organized upon the basis of 
" the law of the sharks " can expect to do the latter. 
The combination of quality with quantity is a chimera 
in the likeness of the service of God and Mammon, and 
equally impossible. Where we shall not be able to 
agree is in thinking that " wealth " or " high standards 
of living " can be measured in terms of quantity and 
competitive pricing. 8 

Failing an understanding and agreement on the 
higher levels of reference, there is the imminent danger 
that in bringing forth a brave new world in which all 
men shall fraternize, this may amount to nothing more 
than, if even to so much as, that they may eat, drink, 
and be merry together in the intervals of the so- 
called peace that occasionally interrupts the wars of 
acquisition, pacification, and education. The work of 



East and West 

"missionaries," whether of a given religion, of scientific 
humanism, or industrialism, is a levelling rather than 
an elevating force, fundamentally incompatible with 
anything but a reduction of the cultures of the world 
to their lowest common denominator "Father, for- 
give them ; for they know not what they do ! " 
Merely to have set up elsewhere replicas of the modern 
institutions in which the West for the most part still 
believes, although these are the very ways of living 
that have already bred disaster, merely to dream of 
mixing the oil of " economic justice " with the acid 
of a competitive "world trade," is not enough for 
felicity ; the backward East, in so far as it is still 
" backward," is very much happier, calmer, and less 
afraid of life and death than the " forward " West has 
ever been or can be. To have set about to " conquer " 
nature, to have thought of discontent as " divine," 
to have honoured the discoverers of " new wants," 4 
to have sacrificed spontaneity to the concept of an 
inevitable " progress " 5 these positions of the " Social 
Gospel " are none of those that the East has ever 
thought of as making for happiness. 

It emerges from what has been said above that 
motion toward a rapprochement must originate in the 
West ; if only because it is the modern West that first 
abandoned the once common norms, while the sur- 
viving East that is still in a majority, however dimin- 
ished and diminishing, still adheres to them. It is 
true that there is another and modernized, uprooted 
East, with which the West can compete : but it is only 
with the surviving, the superstitious East Gandhi's 
East, the one that has never attempted to live by bread 
alone that the West can co-operate. Who knows 
this East ? It is from our philosophers, scholars, and 

85 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

theologians that we have a right to expect such a 
knowledge ; and it is actually, in the first place, upon 
our Western universities and churches, our " educa- 
tors," that the responsibility of the future of inter- 
national relations rests, however little they are 
presently and really able to play their part in " dissi- 
pating the clouds of ignorance which hide the East 
from the West." We need scholars (and that in the 
pulpit, in college classrooms, and " on the air ") to 
whom not only Latin and Greek, but also Arabic or 
Persian, Sanskrit or Tamil, and Chinese or Tibetan 
are still living languages in the sense that there are 
to be found formulations of principles pertinent to all 
men's lives ; we need translators, bearing in mind that 
to translate without betrayal one must have experi- 
enced oneself the content that is to be " carried across." 
We need theologians who can think no more or less in 
terms of Christian than of Islamic, Hindu or Taoist 
theology, and who have realized by a personal verifica- 
tion that, as Philo said, all men " whether Greek or 
barbarians " actually recognize and serve one and the 
same God, by whatever names, or, if you prefer it, 
one and the same immanent " Son of Man," the Son of 
whom Meister Eckhart spoke when he said that " he 
who sees me, sees my child." We need anthropologists 
of the calibre of Richard St. Barbe Baker, Karl von 
Spiess, Father W. Schmidt, and Nora K. Chadwick 
and such folklorists as were the late J. F. Campbell 
and Alexander Carmichael the value of such 
men as the late Professor A. A. Macdonell and 
Sir J. G. Frazer b&ng only that of hewers of wood 
and drawers of water for those who "understand their 
material." 

We need mediators to whom the common universe 

86 



East and West 

of discourse is still a reality, men of a sort that is rarely 
bred in public schools or trained in modern univer- 
sities ; and this means that the primary problem is 
that of the re-education of Western literati. 6 More 
than one has told me how it had taken him ten years 
to outgrow even a Harvard education ; I have no idea 
how many it might take to outgrow a missionary college 
education, or to recover from a course of lectures on 
comparative religion offered by a Calvinist. We 
need " reactionaries," able to start over again from 
scratch from an in principio in the logical rather than 
any temporal sense, and very surely not merely in the 
ante quo bellum sense, the point at which the education 
of the amnesic " common man " of to-day begins. 
I mean by " reactionaries " men who, when an impasse 
had been reached, are not afraid of being told that " we 
cannot put back the hands of the clock" or that 
" the machine has come to stay." The real intention 
of my reactionaries, for whom there is no such thing as a 
" dead past," is not to put back the hands but to put 
them forward to another noonday. We need men who 
are not afraid of being told that " human nature is 
unchangeable " ; which is true enough in its proper 
sense, but not if we are under the delusion that human 
nature is nothing but an economic nature. What 
should we think of a man who has lost his way and 
reached the brink of a precipice and is it not " down 
a steep place into the sea " that European civilization, 
for all its possibly good intentions, is gliding now ? 
and is too stupid or too proud to retrace his steps ? 
Who, indeed, would not now retrace his steps, if he 
only knew how ! The proof of this can be seen in the 
multiplicity of the current " plans " for a better world 
that men pursue, never remembering that there is 

87 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

only " one thing needful." The modern West must be 
" renewed in knowledge." 

Again, we must beware ; for there are two possible, 
and very different, consequences that can follow from 
the cultural contact of East and West. One can, like 
Jawaharlal Nehru, and in his own words, " become a 
queer mixture of East and West, out of place every- 
where, at home nowhere " ; or, being still oneself, 
one can learn to find oneself " in place " anywhere, and 
"at home" everywhere in the profoundest sense, a 
citizen of the world. 

The problem is " educational," or in other words, 
one of " recollection " ; and when it has been solved, 
when the West has found herself again the Self of all 
other men the problem of understanding the " mys- 
terious " East will have been solved at the same time, 
and nothing will remain but the practical task of 
putting into practice what has been remembered. 
The alternative is that of a reduction of the whole 
world to the present state of Europe. The choice lies 
finally between a deliberately directed movement 
toward a foreseen goal or " destiny," and a passive 
submission to an inexorable progress or " fate " ; 
between an evaluated and significant and a valueless 
and insignificant way of living. 



REFERENCES 

1 Cf. Traherne, Centuries 3.12 : " Verily, there is no 
savage under the cope of Heaven, that is more absurdly 
barbarous than the Christian world." This is still the 
world that Professor Robert Ulich of Harvard so often calls 
an " organized barbarism " to-day, and to which he refers 
when he says : " The moral record of the white race can 

88 



East and West 

cause no other group on earth to bow in admiration. Let 
us say in plain words : ' It is shameful ' " (Conditions of 
Civilized Living, 1946, p. 169). 

2 " It is very proper that in England a good share of the 
produce of the earth should be appropriated to support 
certain families in affluence, to produce senators, sages and 
heroes for the service and defence of the state . . . but in 
India, that haughty spirit, independence and deep thought, 
which the possession of great wealth sometimes gives, ought 
to be suppressed. They are directly adverse to our political 
power " (Skeen Commission Report, H.M. Stationery Office, 
London ; and London Times, August, 1927, p. 9) italics 
mine. 

Such frank cynicism is infinitely preferable to the 
sentimentality of those who wonder why the people of India 
are not " grateful " for all the benefits that British rule has 
conferred upon them. The British civil servant, paid with 
Indian money, has no right to devote himself to anything 
but the good of India ; he may or may not be personally 
lovable, but his work is nothing but his duty, which, if well 
done, should earn respect, but hardly gratitude. But 
" foreign rule is a terrible curse and the minor benefits it 
may confer can never compensate for the spiritual degrada- 
tion it involves " (Hindustan Times, November 25, 

1945). 

8 " If he is not to be disappointed, man must judge well of 
those objects which he appoints as his goods . . . certain 
things are perfective of him, and others not. He who thinks 
that his own love determines things to be good has the 
falsity of his love to reveal itself in tragedy. If the thing is 
not truly a good of man, it not only will not perfect him, but 
he cannot unite it successfully to himself ; between man 
and the things that are improper to him there is incon- 
gruity " (B. J. Diggs, Love and Being, 1947, p. 160). 

4 " The common factor of the whole situation lies in the 
simple fact that at any given period the material require- 
ments of the individual are quite definitely limited that 
any attempt to expand them artificially is an interference 
with the plain trend of evolution, which is to subordinate 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

material to mental and psychological necessity ; and that 
the impulse behind unbridled industrialism is not pro- 
gressive but reactionary " (Douglas, Economic Democracy, 
1918, quoted in Lionel Birch, The Waggoner on the Foot- 
plate, 1933, p. 130). " The best virtues of a nation nearly 
always begin to disappear when mutual obligations are 
converted into money values, because the sense of partner- 
ship and obligation becomes lost in a welter of legal without 
moral contract. It is not unfair to say that the villein of the 
Middle Ages was a freer man and had more security and 
dignity of status than the wage-slave of to-day. This aspect 
has been overlooked and denied by the Whig historians who 
genuinely believed in the glories of laissez-faire and in the 
spiritual beauties of ' devil take the hindmost ' " (Earl of 
Portsmouth, Alternative to Death, 1944, p. 87). 

6 " Dans I'lnde chaque occupation est un sacerdoce. . . . 
Les metiers et les rites ne peuvent se distinguer exactement et 
le mot Sanskrit karma, ' action,' ' oeuvre,' s'applique aux 
deux. ... On peut chasser un mercenaire mais non un 
serviteur herdditaire. Done pour rdcolter la tranquillitd et un 
bon service, il faut user de tact et de bonnes manibres. Le 
service hfreditaire est tout a fait incompatible avec 
Vindustrialisme actuel et c'est pourquoi il est peint sous des 
couleurs aussi sombres " (A. M. Hocart, Les castes, 1938, 
pp. 27, 28, 238). " The most potent factor [in the illusion 
called Progress], however, was the triumph of Mammon in 
the industrial revolution, which disorganized the Church, 
created a new feudalism, and reduced the son of man once 
more to servitude, this time to a machine and a machine- 
made law. The effect of the last phase is illustrated by the 
stress the nineteenth century has laid on punctuality as a 
virtue, not as a matter of consideration for the convenience 
of others but because an employer could not be expected to 
keep a machine waiting for any man ' the son of man/ 
He became a cog in the great machine, while to the 
industrialist, the Holy Spirit, whose divinity he recognized, 
was steam. . . . Has the Church, through all her 
vicissitudes, retained sufficient of our Lord's teaching and 
triumph to restore ' the son of man ' to his due to be seated 

99 



East and West 

on the right hand of power ? " (F. W. Buckler, The Epiphany 
of the Cross, 1938, pp. 64, 69). 

6 " And if our unconscious nationalistic prejudices have 
thus prevented any significant philosophical co-operation in 
this limited [i.e. European] area, still more completely has 
our Occidental superiority complex (which apparently 
dominates philosophers as much as other people) blocked 
any genuine co-operation between Western and Eastern 
thinkers. We just pre-suppose as a matter of course that all 
tenable solutions of all real problems can or will be found in 
the Western tradition. 

" This smug and Pharisaic complacency is one of the 
causes of war ; it is also a factor in other causes. And it is 
the cause that philosophers are primarily responsible to 
remove. They can remove it only by acquiring a deep and 
persistent interest in other philosophical perspectives than 
their own, especially those in Latin America, Russia, China, 
and India. Such an interest will express itself in the expan- 
sion of philosophy departments to include teachers of these 
subjects ; in increased travel on the part of philosophers, 
aided by the establishment of visiting fellowships and 
exchange professorships ; and in more general mastery of 
the necessary linguistic tools " (E. A. Burtt in The Journal 
of Philosophy, 42, 1945, p. 490). 

" It is not the so-called realism of power politics, which 
because of its neglect of ideas and values is blind and stupid 
rather than realistic, but the informed realism of philoso- 
phical understanding which is the key to international 
relations " (F. S. C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and 
West, 1947, pp. 428-9). 



VI : " Spiritual Paternity " and the " Puppet 
Complex " 

These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages 
and lands, they are not original with me. If they 
are not yours as much as mine, they are nothing, or 
next to nothing. Walt Whitman. 



THE purpose of this chapter is methodological, and 
mainly to suggest that the anthropologist is rather too 
much inclined to consider the peculiarities of " primi- 
tive people Naturvolker in isolation, neglecting the 
possibility or probability that these peculiarities may 
not be of local origin, but may represent only pro- 
vincial or peripheral survivals of theories held by some 
or all of the more sophisticated communities from 
which the primitive peoples may have declined. 

The first example will be that of the belief of some 
Pacific and Australian peoples in a spiritual paternity. 
The subject is so well known to anthropologists that it 
will suffice to cite from a recent article by Dr. M. F. 
Ashley Montagu, 1 who remarks that "practically 
everywhere in Australia . . . intercourse is associated 
with conception, but not as a cause of conception or 
childbirth. 2 . . . The belief is rather that a spirit- 
child has entered into her ... it is the official doctrine 
of spiritual conception that looms largely in their 
thinking . . . intercourse serves to prepare the woman 
for the entry of the spirit-child." Further, with 
reference to Roheim's data, Professor Montagu re- 
marks that "it would seem probable that until the 
native is initiated into the social interpretation of the 

92 



" Spiritual Paternity" and " Puppet Complex " 

nature of things he is under the impression that inter- 
course is closely connected with childbirth ; when, 
however, he has been initiated into the traditional 
teachings he discovers his former elementary knowledge 
to have been incomplete, and he gradually shifts the 
emphasis from a belief in material reproduction to one 
in favour of spiritual reproduction." 

In these citations mark the words " associated 
with . . . but not as a cause," " official doctrine," 
and "traditional teachings." Before we proceed 
further it should be noted that it is evidence of a 
rather considerable intellectual development to be 
able to distinguish a post hoc from a propter hoc, con- 
comitance from causation. Nor is this by any means 
the only available evidence of the " intellectuality " 
of the Australian aborigines. But are they any more 
likely than any other peoples to have invented, in 
any datable sense, their own " official doctrines " ? 
Or should an explanation of such phenomena as the 
universality of the Symplegades motive be sought in 
the motion of the " common denominator " ? One 
might as well try to account for the cognate forms of 
words in related languages as to try to explain the dis- 
tribution of cognate ideas in that way ! 

The Pacific doctrine of spiritual conception is any- 
thing but an isolated phenomenon. For example, it is 
explicitly stated in the Buddhist canonical literature 
that three things are necessary for conception : the 
union of father and mother, the mother's period, 
and the presence of the Gandharva* the divine and 
solar Eros. The Gandharva here corresponds to the 
divine Nature that Philo calls " the highest, elder and 
true cause " of generation, while the parents are merely 
concomitant causes ; 4 and to Plato's " ever-productive 

93 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

Nature " 6 and to St. Paul's " Father " ex quo omnis 
paternitas in coelis et terra nominator. 9 It would be 
difficult to distinguish these formulations from that 
of the Australian aborigines with their initiatory 
" official doctrine " in which sexual intercourse is 
associated with conception, but not as its cause. It 
would be equally difficult to distinguish the Australian 
from Aristotle's doctrine that " Man and the Sun 7 
generate man," 8 or from Dante's designation of the 
Sun, 7 a pregnant light, as " the father of each mortal 
life," whose reglowing rays enable each to say, Sub- 
sisto* These formulations, in turn, correspond to 
those of the Satapatha Brdhmana where it is inasmuch 
as they are " kissed," that is breathed upon, by the 
Sun 7 that each of the children of men can say " I am " 
(asmi) or, in the Commentator's words, " acquires a 
self." 10 Again, the Australian distinction of the 
mediate from the first cause of conception is closely 
paralleled in the Jaiminlya Upani$ad Brdhmana : 
" When the [human] father thus emits him as seed into 
the womb, it is really the Sun 7 that emits him as seed 
into the womb . . . thence is he born, after that seed, 
that Breath." 11 One cannot, indeed, distinguish him 
" who puts the seed in plants, in cows, in mares and 
in women " 12 from Dante's " Sun," or from the " fer- 
tility spirit " of the " primitives." 

In greater detail, "Say not, 'From semen/ but 
' from what is alive ' [therein] " ; 18 that is, " He who, 
present in [tithan=instans] the semen, whom the 
semen knoweth not . . . whose body [vehicle] the 
semen is ... the Immortal " ; 14 " it is that prescient- 
spiritual-Self \prajftatman t the Sun] 15 that grasps and 
erects the flesh. ' a 6 This, or in other words that ' ' Light 
is the progenitive power " 17 are familiar Christian 

94 



" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex " 

doctrines. " Present in the semen," for example, has 
its equivalent in St. Thomas Aquinas : " The power 
of the soul, which is in the semen through the Spirit 
enclosed therein, fashions the body/' 18 and so "the 
power of generation belongs to God," 19 and in the 
words of Schiller, " Es ist der Geist der sich den Kdrper 
schaft." 

Similarly, St. Bonaventura wrote : " Generatio non 
potest fieri in materia generabili et corruptibili secundum 
rationes seminales nisi beneficio luminis corporum super 
caelestium, quae elongatur a generatione et corruptione, 
scilicet a sole, lune et stellis"; 21 and, Jalalu'd Din 
Rumi : "When the time comes for the embryo to 
receive the vital spirit, at that time the Sun becomes its 
helper. This embryo is brought into movement by 
the Sun, for the Sun is quickly endowing it with spirit. 
From the other stars this embryo received only an 
impression, until the Sun shone upon it. By which 
way did it become connected in the womb with the 
beauteous Sun ? By the hidden way that is remote 
from our sense-perception." 22 

It would be possible to cite still more material from 
other sources, for example, from the American Indians, 
in whose mythologies " virgin " is expressed by " non- 
sunstruck." But enough has been said to show that 
there is, or has been, a more or less general agreement 
that Spiritus est qui vivificat, caro non prodest quic- 
quam ; 23 and even to-day there are many who can take 
seriously the commandment : " Call no man your 
father on earth : for one is your Father, which is in 
heaven." 24 It is difficult to see how these distinctions 
of social from spiritual paternity differ essentially from 
the " official doctrine " of the Australian aborigines. 

It seems to me that one cannot claim to have 

95 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

considered their " traditional teachings " in their true 
perspective if their universality is ignored. In any 
case, for so long as their beliefs are considered somewhat 
strange and peculiar, and as the products of an alien 
type of mentality, the question, How is it that so many 
and different kinds of men have thought alike ? will 
also be ignored. And is not this a question of the most 
absorbing interest, and one that is most essentially 
" anthropological " ? If it be true, as Alfred Jeremias 
said, that the various human cultures are really only 
the dialects of one and the same spiritual language 25 
it is surely proper for the student of man to ask him- 
self when and where this spiritual language may have 
originated. In any event, how much easier it becomes 
to understand another people's culture, how much 
easier to recognize their full humanity, to think with 
them rather than merely of or even for them, if the 
scholar realizes that their " official doctrines " are the 
same as those that have long been current and even 
now survive in his own environment ! 

A second example is that of the " puppet complex." 
Dr. Margaret Mead makes use of this expression in her 
account of Balinese character, where she remarks : 
"The animated puppet, the doll which dances on a 
string, the leather puppets manipulated by the 
puppeteer, and finally the little girl trance dancers 
who themselves become exaggeratedly limp and soft 
as they dance to the commands of the audience, all 
dramatize this whole picture of involuntary learning, in 
which it is not the will of the learner, but the pattern 
of the situation and the manipulation of the teacher 
which prevail " ; and speaks of " the fantasy of the 
body made of separate independent parts . . . the 
nation that the body is like a puppet, just pinned 

96 



" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex " 

together at the joints." 26 It is implied that these are 
especially Balinese peculiarities. Although the obser- 
vation is unrelated to any governing first principle, 
and so not fully understood, it is excellent in itself : 
for it is realized that the dancer's puppet-like relaxa- 
tion is that of an obedient pupil, who would be guided 
not by her own will, but by a teacher's. One cannot 
but recall the words of Christ : " I do nothing of 
myself," and " not what I will, but what thou wilt." 27 
So said Boehme : " Thou shalt do nothing but forsake 
thy own will, viz. that which thou callest ' I/ or ' thy- 
self.' By which means all thy evil properties will 
grow weak, faint, and ready to die ; and then thou 
wilt sink down again into that one thing, from which 
thou art originally sprung." 28 The dancer is not, in 
fact, expressing " herself," but altogether an artist, 
inspired, ivOeos : her condition is quite properly 
described as one of trance or ecstasy. The whole pro- 
cedure is a carrying over into art of the vital principle 
of resignation. Religion and culture, sacred and pro- 
fane, are undivided. 

Actually, this " complex," " fantasy," or " notion " 
terms that are employed all too condescendingly 
is nothing peculiarly Balinese, but typically both 
Indian and Platonic, and almost as certainly of Indian 
origin in Bali as it is of Platonic- Aristotelian derivation 
in Europe. It is, moreover, bound up with and 
implies two other doctrines, those of Lila 29 and the 
Sutratman, 80 and with the traditional symbolism of the 
theatre. 31 Plato sees in puppets (Oav^ra) with their 
automatic, autokinetic motions, a typical example 
of the wonder (ro Oavpdfav) that is the source or 
beginning of philosophy : it is " as regards the best in 
us that we are really God's toys " and tmght to dance 

97 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

accordingly, obeying only the control of that one cord 
by which the puppet is suspended from above and not 
the contrary and unregulated pulls by which external 
things drag each one to and fro in accordance with 
his own likes and dislikes. 82 For as Philo also says, 
" our five senses," together with the powers of speech 
and generation, " all these, as in puppet-shows are 
drawn by cords by their Director Kye/iowxos], 38 
now resting, now moving, each in the attitudes and 
motions appropriate to it/ 134 For a puppet to behave 
as it might like were indeed against nature ; the 
movements that are induced by personal appetites are 
not free, but uncalculated and irregular. But " Nous 
is never wrong," 36 and " the Daimon always holds me 
back from what ' I ' want to do, and never eggs me 
on "; 36 and its truth, unlike that of this man Socrates, 
is irrefutable. 37 

Dr. Margaret Mead refers to the puppet's joints, and 
these are indeed to be regarded as the cogwheels of a 
mechanism of which the pins are axles. 38 But what is 
more important in the puppet symbolism is the 
thread on which its parts are strung and without 
which it would fall down inanimate, as actually 
happens when one " gives up the ghost " and is " cut 
off'" The " notion that the body is like a puppet " 
does not depend upon a merely external resemblance 
but far more upon the relation of the guiding thread or 
threads that the hand of the puppeteer controls, as 
reins are held by the driver of a vehicle. " Bear in* 
mind that what pulls the string is that Being hidden 
within us : that makes our speech, that is our speech, our 
life, our Man . . . something more Godlike than the 
passions that make us literally puppets and naught 
else." 39 



" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex " 

The analogy is formulated in the Mahdbhdrata 
thus : " Human gestures are harnessed by another, 
as with a wooden doll strung on a thread." 40 And so 
the question is asked " Do you know that Thread, by 
which, and that Inner Controller by whom this world 
and the other and all beings are strung together and 
controlled from within, so that they move like a 
puppet, performing their respective functions ? " 41 
or, to ask the same question in other words, know Him 
questi nei cor mortali I permotore ? 42 know Him questi 
la terra in se stringe?** "Elegant wooden shafts 
well and newly painted, fastened by threads and 
pins . . . such is the likeness of these limbs of ours." 44 
" Who made this (wooden) doll ? Where is its maker ? 
Whence has it arisen ? How will it perish ? " 45 The 
answers to all these questions had long since been given : 
" The Sun is the fastening to which these worlds are 
linked. ... He strings these worlds to himself by a 
thread, the thread of the Gale." 46 So it is that " all 
this universe is strung on Me, like rows of gems on a 
thread " ; 47 and, " verily, he who knows that thread, 
and the Inner Controller who from within controls 
this and the other world and all beings, he knows 
Brahma, he knows the Gods, the Vedas, Being, Self 
and everything." 48 This is the background of the 
" puppet complex " of the Balinese, apart from which 
it cannot be said that their " character " has been 
explained, however carefully it may have been 
observed. 49 

Puppets seem to move of themselves, but are really 
activated and controlled from within by the thread 
from which they are suspended from above, and only 
move intelligently in obedience to this leash : and it is 
in this automatism, or appearance of free will and 

99 H 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

self-motion, that the puppet most of all resembles man. 
Puppets are " automata," yes ; but actually no more 
than any other machines able to move without a 
power put into them or continuously transmitted to 
them by an intelligent principle distinct from any or all 
of their moving parts. 50 Could they also speak the 
language of the traditional philosophy they would say, 
" It is not my self, that of these wooden parts, but 
another Self, the Self of all puppets, that moves me ; 
and if I seem to move of my own will, this is only true 
to the extent that I have identified myself and all my 
being and willing with the Puppeteer's 51 who made 
and moves me." Man-made automata are imitations 
of the creations of the mythical craftsmen, Si?/uoiy>yot, 
such as Maya, Hephaistos, Daedalus, Regin ; and if 
one is not to misunderstand their significance, it must 
always be borne in mind that " automatic," which 
nowadays implies an involuntary and merely reflex 
activity, had originally an almost exactly opposite 
meaning, that of " acting of one's own will " or that of 
" self-moving." 52 The "automatic doors" of the 
Janua Coeli, 53 the Symplegades generally, and their 
" automatic " janitors, will be misinterpreted if it is not 
realized that it is meant that they are " alive," an 
animation that is explicitly denoted by the representa- 
tion of the doors as winged in the iconography of the 
Sundoor on Babylonian seals. 

. One may now be in a position to understand the 
transparent myth of the City of Wooden Automata in 
the Kathd Sarit Sdgara** Here the hero, Naravah- 
anadatta "Theodore" reaches a marvellous city 
(aScaryam puram) in which the whole citizenry (paura- 
janam) consists of wooden engines or automata 
(ka$thamaya-yantram) all behaving as if alive (ce$tam- 

100 



" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex " 

dnam safivavaF*) although recognizable as lifeless by 
their want of speech ; and this arouses his wonder 
(vismayanOavpa.)** He enters the palace, and sees 
there a comely man (bhavyam* 1 puru?am) enthroned 
and surrounded by janissaries and female guards ; 
this man is the only consciousness (ekakam cetanam**) 
there, and is the cause of motion in the insensible folk, 
" even as the Spirit overstands the powers of perception 
and action " indriydnam ivdtmdnam adhisthdtftayd 
sthitam In reply to questions, the King explains 
that he, Rajyadhara the royal power is one of the 
two sons of King Bahubala " Armstrong " and 
that his brother Pranadhara the pneumatic power 
having robbed his father's treasury and dallied with his 
fortune, both have fled. " Both of us," he says, " are 
carpenters, 61 expert in the making of artful wooden 
and other automata or engines, like those produced 
by Maya " 60 tak$anau . . . mdyd-praniteva darvddi- 
maya-yantra-vicak$anau. Rajyadhara continues in 
saying, " I finally reached this empty city [iunyam 
pur am] and entered the palace." There in the heart of 
the palace he is fed by invisible hands : and " all these 
automata [yantra] are no mere products of my imagina- 
tion, for I made them. It is by the will of the Disposer 
that I, even being a carpenter, have come here, and am 
enjoying the sport of a king, as a God all alone by my- 
self " (ihdgatya tak$dpi devaikdki karomy aham rdjfto 
ttldyitam) 

No one at all familiar with the traditia 
Greek psychology will doubt that they 
Automata is macrocosmically the 
cosmically man the man whose 
is so called because of his being 
"body." 62 The "golc 
101 




The Bugbear of Literacy 

" heart " of the " Golden City," the centre from which 
all its operations are directed. To Rajyadhara his 
retainers, the psychic powers of perception and action, 
like the subjects of earthly kings, bring all kinds of 
food by which the Spirit is nourished when it thus 
comes eating and drinking. 63 That his food of all 
kinds is thus served by invisible hands, and that he 
repeoples a Waste Land (iunyam pur am), is a re- 
minder that he is effectively the " Rich King " of a 
" Grail Castle." As the " sole consciousness " in the 
City of Wooden Automata, Rajyadhara corresponds 
to the " Only Thinker, your Self, the Inner Controller, 
Immortal" of the Upanisads. 64 The original "rob- 
bery " referred to is that of the sources of life, the 
Indian Rape of Soma and the Greek Promethean theft 
of fire ; it is only by such a " theft " that the world 
can be quickened, but it necessarily involves the 
separation or exile of the immanent principles from 
their transcendent source. Rajyadhara rightly speaks 
of himself as a God. 

If there could be any doubt that these are the real 
meanings of the story of the Golden City (hemapura) 
or that this would have been obvious to almost any 
Indian hearer, it can be dissipated not only by a 
consideration of the parallel wordings of the scriptural 
passages already cited, but also by a comparison with 
the Tripurd Rahasya,** where it is again the question 
of a " city " and its citizens, and it is told that the 
Migrant or Precedent (pracara),** though single, 
"multiplies himself, manifests as the city and its 
citizens and pervades them all, protects and holds 
them," and that "without him they would all be 
scattered and lost like pearls without the string of the 
necklace," 67 and it is perfectly clear that, as the text 

102 



" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex " 

itself later explains, the Migrant is the Breath or 
Life -prdna and the city the body, of which the parts 
are strung on Him. 

All these formulations, furthermore, clarify the mean- 
ings of the term sutra-dhdra as stage manager and 
carpenter or architect ; for these are one and the same 
in divinis, and so far as the puppet play is concerned 
may be one and the same in human practice. One 
does not have to suppose with Pischel 68 that the Indian 
drama originated in a puppet play of unknown 
antiquity; or, on the other hand, that the sutra- 
dhdra is a " carpenter " merely because he carries a 
measuring line. The origins of drama and of architec- 
ture are mythical, and both are equally " imitations " 
of divine prototypes. 69 It is because, whether as the 
Artist who makes or as the Controller who manages 
his " toys," as Plato calls them, the All-Maker, Vi- 
vakarma, is the " Holder of every Thread " (viva- 
sutra-dhrk), 7Q that the human artist and the stage 
manager are, in the likeness and image of God, equally 
" Holders of a Thread." 71 

Enough has been said to show that the doctrine of 
" spiritual paternity " is nothing peculiarly Pacific or 
Australian, and that the so-called " puppet complex " 
is nothing peculiarly Balinese ; enough also to show 
that the Australian " official doctrine " is an intellectual 
formulation rather than a proof of nescience, 72 and 
that the expression " complex/ 1 implying a psychosis, 
is quite irrelevant to describe what is in fact a meta- 
physical " theory." Such formulations cannot be 
properly evaluated or seen in any true perspective as 
long as they are treated as purely local phenomena to 
be explained in some evolutionary or psychological 
way on the sole premise of the environment in which 

103 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

they happen to have been observed; but only if they are 
related to the whole spiritual-cultural horizon into the 
pattern of which they naturally fit, and of which they 
may be only the peripheral " superstitions," in the 
strictly etymological sense of this excellent but much 
abused term. 73 The student of " primitive beliefs " 
and of " folklore " must be, if he is not to betray his 
vocation, not so much a psychologist in the current 
sense as he must be an accomplished theologian and 
metaphysician. 

These general considerations are also of the highest 
importance if anthropology is to amount to any- 
thing more than another satisfaction of our curiosity ; 
if, that is to say, it is to subserve the good of mankind 
by enabling men to understand one another, and even 
to think with one another, rather than merely of one 
another as strangers. For example, Marsilio Ficino, 
Meister Eckhart, William Law, and Hafiz are thinking 
with one another when all employ the figure of the 
" hook " with which the Fisher King angles for his 
human prey ; 74 or the Celt is thinking with the Buddhist 
when both are agreed that " He who would be chief, 
let him be your bridge." 75 Even so the Australian is 
thinking with Christ when in fact, having been initiated, 
he too calls "no man father on earth." And so, as 
was previously indicated, there is a real connection, 
though it may have been prehistoric, between Margaret 
Mead's observation " limp and soft," Jacob Boehme's 
" weak, faint and ready to die," and the fact that 
" all scripture cries aloud for freedom from self." 
It is because of their acceptance of this point of view 
that, to the modern mentality to which it is so re- 
pugnant, the members of traditional and "unani- 
mous" societies seem not yet to -have distinguished 

104 



" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex " 

themselves from their environment ; and the irony of 
the situation is this, that the modern proletarians, to 
whom the notions of individuality and self-expression 
are so important, are themselves of all peoples the 
least individualized and the most like a herd. 76 

A culture such as the Balinese is so completely 
moulded and pervaded by its inherited "official 
doctrine " that a " correct " or " orthodox " deport- 
ment in any given situation has become a second 
nature : it is now no longer necessary to remember the 
rules of the game because the habit of the art of life is 
now engrained. 77 In " forsaking her own will, viz. 
that which thou callest ' I,' or ' thyself. 1 " the Balinese 
dancer in her rapt ecstasy is not a product of any 
peculiarly Balinese " complex," but of the Philosophia 
Perennis. 

Plato says that it is as regards the best in human beings 
that they are most really God's playthings. And this 
notion, that what is called " their " life is really a 
divine sporting, in which their part is free and active 
only to the extent that their wills are merged in his 
who plays the game, is one of man's deepest insights. 
As Jalalu'd Dm Rumi states, " Who so hath not 
surrendered will, no, will hath he. 1 ' So says also 
Angelus Silesius : 

Dieses A lies ist ein Spiel, das ihr der Gottheit macht ; 
Sie hat die Kreatur urn ihretwillen gedacht. 

Whoever accepts this point of view will feel that he 
" ought " to act accordingly ; and as the expression 
"walking with God," Plato's Oc<*> ^woTraSciv, Skr. 
brahmacarya, implies, this is for the puppet his true 
Way. The only alternative is that of a passive sub- 
jection to the " pullings and haulings " of the " ruling 

105 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

passions," rightly so called when they become the 
determinants of conduct. 78 " Ought " is expressed in 
Greek by Set, from Wo>, " bind," the root in Sccr/ios, 
that is, the " bond " by which, as Plutarch says, 
Apollo binds (owSe?) all things to himself and 
orders them. 79 That bond is precisely Plato's " golden 
cord " by which the puppet should be guided if it is to 
play its proper part, avoiding the disorderly move- 
ments that are provoked by its own desires ; and the 
" rein " by which the sensitive steeds must be con- 
trolled if they are not to miss the way. This is the 
" clue " to which one must hold fast, if one is to play 
the game intelligently, and spontaneously, or " auto- 
matically." 

In the Tripurd Rahasya* the picture is drawn of an 
ideal city-state, that of a characteristically Indian 
Utopia and at the same time very like Plato's Republic. 
The Prince, instructed by his wife, has become a free 
man (jwan-mukta) liberated in this life, here and now 
from all the " knots of the heart " and above all from 
the strongest of these, that of the " identification of the 
flesh with the Self, which identification in its turn 
gives rise to the incessant flux of happiness and misery," 
and being liberated, he performs his royal duties 
efficiently but absent-mindedly and " like an actor on 
the stage" (natavad rangamandale). Following his 
example and instruction, all the citizens attain a like 
liberty, and are no longer motivated by their passions, 
although still possessing them. The consequences are 
by no means " antisocial " ; on the contrary, worldly 
affairs are still carried on in this ideal free state, in 
which its citizens continue to play their parts, by force 
of former preoccupation, but now "without thinking 
of past good or evil fortune, or counting on future joys 

106 



" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex " 

or pains ; 81 in their everyday life laughing, rejoicing, 
wearied or angered, like men intoxicated and in- 
different to their own affairs. 82 Wherefore Sanaka and 
other sages who visited there called it the ' City of 
Resplendent Wisdom.' " 

That in this ideal City of God it is the actor that 
represents the norm of conduct is especially pertinent 
in the present context. Here " all the world's a 
stage," without distinction of action as conduct from 
action as drama, and everyone still plays the part that 
he " ought " to play, if the city is to prosper. 85 The 
true actor, then, whether in life or in his own profession, 
" acts without acting " in the sense of the Bhagavad 
Gita and the Taoist wei wu wei doctrine. He does not 
identity himself with the part, and is not infected 
(na lipyate) by what he does on the stage : his role, as 
men regard it, may be that of either saint or sinner, 
but like God he remains himself and untroubled by the 
thought, " Thus I did right," or " Thus I did wrong," 84 
being above the battle. 85 

So the Balinese dancer, who is not " expressing 
herself," but playing her part impersonally, is by no 
means the victim of a " complex," but merely a perfect 
actress : and the members of any other society, all of 
whom have their part to play but for the most part 
want to be " stars," might learn from her, if they 
would, what is the distinction of acting from merely 
behaving, which is that of spontaneity from licence. 
It is not enough to have " observed," however 
accurately: it is only when the anthropologist has 
profoundly understood what he sees, when he has 
really entertained the ideas of which the spectacle is a 
demonstration, that it can become for him a serious 
experience. 88 

107 



The Bugbear of Literacy 



REFERENCES 

1 Montagu, M. F. Ashley, " Nescience, Science and 
Psycho-Analysis," Psychiatry (1941) 4.45-60. References 
to the literature will be found in this article. 

2 The italics here are original. Those in the two following 
quotations are mine. 

3 Majjhima Nikdya 1:265-266. Gandharvas and 
Apsarases are the rulers with respect to progeny or lack of 
progeny Pancavimsa Brahmana 1X13.1. 

4 Philo Judaeus, Quis rerum divinarum heres 115. 

5 Plato, Laws 773 E. 
6 Ephesians iii.15. 

7 In all these contexts in which " Sun " has been 
capitalized the reference is, of course, to the " inward Sun " 
as distinguished from " the outward sun, which receives its 
power and lustre from the inward " Boehme, Jacob, 
Signatura rerum XI 75, to the " Sun of the Angels " as 
distinguished from the " sun of sense " Dante, Paradise 
X:53-54 ; compare Convito III:i2, 50-60. This " Sun of the 
sun " Philo Judaeus, De specialis legibus 1:279 ; compare 
De cherubim 97 Apollo as distinguished from Helios 
Plato, Laws 898 D, Plutarch, Moralia 393 D, 400 C, D is 
not " the sun whom all men see " but " the Sun whom not 
all know with the mind " Atharva Veda X:8.i4, " whose 
body the sun is " Brhadaranyaka Vpanisad 111:7.9. The 
traditional distinction of intelligible from sensible, invisible 
from visible " suns " is essential to any adequate under- 
standing of " solar mythologies " and " solar cults. 11 

8 Aristotle, Physics 11:2. 

9 Dante, Paradise XXII:n6 and XXIX:i5. 

10 Satapatha Brahmana VII:3.2.i2. See Coomaraswamy, 
Ananda K., " Sunkiss," JAOS (1940) 60:46-67; and 
" Primitive Mentality," Quarterly Journal of the Mytho- 
logical Society (1940) 31:69-91. To the Sunkiss corresponds 
" the caress of Zeus by his on-breathing " ^Eschylus, 
Suppliants ; 344-345 P. W. Smyth's version. 

108 



" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex " 

11 Jaiminlya Upanisad Brdhmana III:io.4. Compare 
PancavimSa Brdhmana XVI:i4.5. 

12 Rgveda VII:i02.2. One hardly needs to say or seek to 
demonstrate that the Christian and pagan solar symbolisms 
are homologous. An illustration can be cited, however, hi 
St. Ambrose's Hymnus Matutinus : 

Verusque sol, illabere 
Micans nitore perpeti ; 
Jubarque Sancti Spiritfts 
Infunde nostris sensibus 

which is an almost literal equivalent of the Vedic Gayatri, 
Rgveda III:62.io. 

13 Brhaddranyaka Upanisad 111:9.28. 

14 Reference footnote 13 ; 111:7.23. 

15 This equation is explicit in Aitareya Aranyaka 111:2.3, 
where also Keith remarks that this is " the most common 
doctrine in the Upanisads." The " Sun " hi question is the 
Sun of Rgveda 1:115.1, " the Spiritual-Self [atmari) of all 
that is mobile or immobile." 

Kausitaki Upanisad 111:3. 

17 Taitiiriya Samhitd VII:i.i.i, Satapatha Brdhmana 
VIII:7.i.i6. Cf. John i.4 " the life was the light." From 
the same point of view : Prima substantiarum est lux . . . 
Unumquodque quantum habet de luce tantum retinet esse 
divini Witelo, Liber de intelligentiis t VI, VIII. 

18 Summa Theologica III:zi. This is essentially Pytha- 
gorean doctrine : " the seed is an efflux of brain containing 
hot vapour (Btppov dr/xov) within it ... soul and 
sensibility are from the vapour within " (Diogenes Laertius 
VIII.28). Here arp,6s = irvevpa = spirit, and etymo- 
logically Skr. atman. 

19 Reference footnote 18 ; 1:45.5. 

20 von Schiller, Johann C., Wallenstein III:i3. 

21 St. Bonaventura, De reductione artium ad theologian 
21 ; cf. Philo Judaeus, Quis rerum divinarum heres 115, 
" Are not the parents, as it were, concomitant causes only, 
while [the divine] Nature is the highest, elder and true cause 

109 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

of the begetting of children ? " I add " the divine," only to 
remind the reader that Philo's " Nature " is not the visible 
and objective world, but that aspect of God's power by 
which he creates, Plato's aictycvrjs $v<n$, "the eternal 
Nature " that we acknowledge in the begetting of 
descendants Laws 773 E. 

It comes to the same thing to say that " the Breath is the 
progenitive power " and so that " man is propagated from 
the Breath " Pancavimsa Brahmana XVI:i4.5, since the 
Breath pranah is commonly identified with the Sun, the 
pneumatic with the luminous principle. 

22 Jalalu'd Din Rumi, Mathnawi 1:3775-3779. 

28 John vi.63. 

24 Matthew xxiii.g. 

25 Jeremias, Alfred Handbuch der Altorientalischen Geistes- 
kultur [2nd ed.] ; Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1929 (xvii and 
508 pp.) ; in particular, the Foreword. 

28 Bateson, Gregory, and Mead, Margaret, Balinesc 
Character : A Photographic Analysis, New York, New York 
Academy of Sciences, 1942 (xvi and 277 pp.), pp. 17 and 
91. 

27 John viii.28 ; Mark xiv.36. 

28 Boehme, Jacob, "Discourse Between Two Souls," 
Signatura rerum, New York, Dutton, n. d. (288 pp.). 

29 Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., " Lila," JAOS (1941) 
61:98-101 ; and " Play and Seriousness," Journal of 
Philosophy (1942) 39-'55-552- 

80 Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., Figures of Speech or 
Figures of Thought, 1946, reference footnote 30, p. 236 ; 
"Symbolism," Dictionary of World Literature; "The 
Iconography of Diirer's * Knots ' and Leonardo's ' Con- 
catenation/ " Art Quarterly (1944) 7:109-128. See also 
Sankaracarya, Sata&oki 12 and 55 : man is a bead strung 
on the thread of the conscious Self, and just as wooden 
puppets are worked by strings, so the world is operated by 
the Thread-Spirit. 

81 Cf. Gu&ion, Ren6, " Le symbolisme du Mdtre" Le Voile 
d'Isis (1932) 37:65-70. 

82 Plato, Theatetus 155 D ; and Laws 644 and 803-844. 

no 



" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex " 

83 Dux, Duke, Leader, Guide ; the solar Leader ; net? of 
Rgoeda Vrso.i and " Self of self, the Immortal Leader " 
atmano' tma netamrtah, of Maitri Upanisad VI:?. 

34 Philo Judaeus, De opificio mundi 117. 

86 Aristotle, De anima Illno, 433 A. 

36 Plato, Apology 31 D ; and Phaedrus 242 B. 

37 Plato, Symposium 201 C. 

88 It is not so much the function of the pins to hold the 
joints together as to enable the limbs to move freely. Pegs 
(yo^oL, Plato, Timaeus 43 A) on which the joints (apOpa) 
move, and comparable to the hinges (7/0/^01) of doors 
(Parmenides in Sextus Empiricus, Adversus dogmatos in) 
are, indeed, employed ; and these are also called pivots 
(orpd^tyye?), but the limbs are bound together by the 
sinews (vcvpa) that tighten and loosen round the pivots, 
and so move the parts of the body as if on hinges Timaeus 
74 B. These sinews are the physical counterparts of the 
psychic " bonds of life " Timaeus 73 B that are dissolved 
at death Timaeus 81 E ; Philo Judaeus, Quis rerum 
divinarum heres 242, Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 11:7.2 ; 
Maitri Upanisad 1:4. It is by the "thread " that the parts 
are really co-ordinated and moved : as in man " it is by the 
Breath that the joints are united," prdnena sarvdni parvani 
samdadhati, the vital Breath that is called the " Thread- 
Spirit," sutratman, " that links up [samtanoti] this world " 
Aitareya Aranyaka 1:4.2,3. See other references in 
reference footnote 30. 

89 Marcus Aurelius, X:38 and XII:ig ; cf. 11:2, III:i6, 
VI:i6, VII:3, VH:2g. 

The puppet symbolism is closely related to the Indian, 
Platonic, Neoplatonic, and later symbolism of the chariot, 
of which the steeds are the sensitive powers that seek their 
own pastures and must be curbed and guided by the know- 
ing driver, the Reason, who only knows the Way or " Royal 
Road." 

40 Mahdbharata, Udyoga Parvan 32:12. 

41 Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 111:7.1; cf. 4.1, combined 
with Sankara's commentaries. 

42 Dante, Paradiso I:ii6 : corresponding to Maitri 

Hi 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

Upanisad 11:6, " from within this heart of ours, the Mover," 
asmad-dhfd-antarat pracodayitr. 

43 Dante, reference footnote 42, 1:117. 

44 Therigatha 390, 391. 

45 Samyutta Nikaya 1:134. 

M $atapatha Brahmana 1:7.1.17 and 111:7.3.10. 

47 Bhagavad Glta VII 7 ; compare Tripura Rahasya, 
Jfiana Khanda, V:ii9-i24 reference footnote 65. 

48 Brhadaranyaka Upanisad III:7.i. 

49 The reviewer of another work of Dr. Margaret Mead's, 
The American Character, one of the Pelican Books, justly 
remarks on " the danger of ... providing psychological, 
or even biological reasons for traits which should be treated 
metaphysically " New English Weekly (1944) 25:132. The 
" psychological " explanations themselves will be in- 
adequate if the traditional psychology, for example, that of 
Philo and the Bhagavad Glta, is overlooked. In this 
traditional psychology it is maintained that there can be no 
greater error or source of evil than to conceive that " / am 
the doer." From the point of view of anyone who accepts 
this axiology,the behaviour of the Balinese dancer is simply 
natural, and that of the modern, self-expressive " artist," 
unnatural. 

60 For example, when La Met trie says, " The human body 
is a machine that winds its own springs," he is " explaining " 
a phenomenon by something else of a sort that never was on 
sea or land, something as inconceivable as " the son of a 
barren woman." When he continues by saying that " the 
soul is but a principle of motion or material and sensible 
part of the brain," he is propounding two entirely different 
theories, of which the first is Plato's, and the second reverts 
to his own unthinkable " machine." My citation of La 
Mettrie is taken from Urban, Wilbur Marshall, Language 
and Reality, New York, Macmillan, 1939 (755 pp.) ; in 
particular p. 314. 

In what sense man can be properly compared to a 
machine is discussed by Schrodinger, Erwin, What is Life ?, 
Cambridge, Macmillan, 1945. 

"Skr. $&tra-dhara, " holder of the thread," and so 

112 



" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex " 

" puppeteer/ 1 " stage manager," and " carpenter." It is 
not insignificant, also, that the puppets are " wooden " ; 
the " primary matter " of which the world is made being a 
" wood " v Xrj, Skr. vana and the maker therefore a 
" carpenter." 

62 Iliad 11:408 ; Hesiod, Marriage of Ceyz 2 and Opus 
103, where the term is used of persons or personified powers. 
Aristotle, Physics 11:6, indeed, interprets " automaton " to 
mean " in itself to no purpose," and so " accidental " or 
" random " ; but this is inconsistent with the meanings 
already cited and with the use of avroparov with <f>va) t 
" grow " cf. Skr. svaruh = avro</>vri$ and according to 
most scholars the root meaning is that of " acting of one's 
own will." The true analogy is with TO cavro /avciv, 
" self-motion," which is the highest kind of motion Plato, 
Phaedrus 264 A, Laws 895. The problem turns, as usual, 
upon the question, What or which is the " self " implied, 
outer mortal or inner immortal? the latter being the true 



63 Iliad V:4og ; compare Suparnddhydya XXV:i, and the 
" Active Doors " of Celtic mythology. 

64 Kathd Sarit Sdgara 11:9.1-59 tar. 43, see Penzer, 
N. M., Ocean of the Streams of Story (1925) 3 : begin p. 280, 
and further 3:56 and 9:149 ; Penzer discusses automata, but 
he has not the least conception of their theory. 

56 Cestamdnam corresponding to cestate in the Mahdb- 
hdrata t reference footnote 40. 

56 Such " wonder " as is the beginning of philosophy, 
Plato, Theatetus 155 D, and Aristotle, Metaphysics 982 B. 

67 Bhavya, future participle of bhu, " become," takes on 
the sense of " comely " in the same way that English 
" becoming " takes on the meaning " suitable," " as it 
should be." 

58 The formulas here are very closely related to those of 
Maitri Upanisad 11:6 and Bhagavad GUd XVIII:6i. In the 
Upanisad, Prajapayi, " from within the heart," animates 
and motivates his otherwise lifeless offspring, setting them 
up in possession of consciousness (cetanavat). In the Gita 
Sri Krishna, speaking of himself, says : " The Lord, seated 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

in the heart of all beings, maketh them all, by his art, to 
wander about, mounted on their engines/ 1 iivarah 
sarvabhutdndm hrddese . . . tisfhati, bhrdmayan sarvab- 
hutdni yantrdrudhdni mdyayd. 

69 This is, again, a statement of the traditional psychology 
that everywhere underlies the " puppet complex " and the 
chariot symbolism ; cf . reference footnote 49. 

60 The Titan Maya, who may be compared to Hephaistos, 
Daedalus, Wayland, and Regin, is the great Artist whose 
daughter, in the Kathd Sarit Sdgara VI:3, Penzer 3:42, 
Somaprabha, exhibits a variety of engines or automata, and 
explains that these artful and self-empowered wooden dolls, 
these crafty mechanical works of art (kdsthamayih sva- 
mdyd-yantra-putrikdh . . . mdyd-yantrddi-s'ilpdni) were 
originally " emanated (srstdni) by my father of old," and 
that there are five sorts corresponding, like " that great 
engine, the world " (cf. Marsilio Ficino, Symposium IV.5, 
" machine del mondo "), to the five elements, " but the 
Wheel that guards the Water of Life, that he alone, and no 
other, understands." 

61 On this royal " sport " see reference footnote 29, and cf. 
also Clement of Alexandria, Instructor I ; chapter 5 : " O 
wise sport, laughter assisted by endurance, and the king as 
spectator . . . and this is the divine sport. ' Such a sport 
of his own, Jove sports, 1 says Heracleitus. The King, then, 
who is Christ, beholds from above our laughter, and looking 
through the window, views the thanksgiving and the 
blessing." Clement's " spectator " corresponds to the 
preksaka of Maitri Upanisad II: j. 

" But the Nitya and the Lila are the two aspects of the 
same reality. . . . The Absolute plays in many ways : as 
Igvara, as the gods, as man, and as the universe. The 
Incarnation is the play of the Absolute as man . . . The 
formless God is real, and equally real is God with form." 
The Gospel of Sri Rdmakrishna, New York, Ramakrishna- 
Vivekananda Centre, 1942 (xxiii and 1063 pp.), pp. 358-359. 

62 This assumes the etymology of purusa as given in 
Brhaddrayyaka Upanisad 11:5.18, and the connection of & 
with KiaQcu. I have dealt more fully with the Indian and 

114 



" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex " 

corresponding Greek concept of man as a City of God 
brahmapura, Hieropolis, Civitas Dei in my " Civilization " 
in the Albert Schweitzer Jubilee Volume (ed. A. Roback, 
Cambridge, 1946). 

63 " That Golden Person in the Sun, who from his golden 
place looks down upon this earth, is even He who dwells in 
the lotus of the heart, and eateth there of food," Maitri 
Upanisad V:i ; cf. Rgveda X:go.2, " When He rises up by 
food." " He, indeed, is the great, unborn Spiritual-Self, 
who is the Discriminant amongst the powers of the soul. 
In the ether of the heart reclines the Ruler of All, the Lord 
of All, the King of All," Brhaddranyaka Upanisad IV:4.22 ; 
cf. Chdndogya Upanisad VIII:i.i-6. "To this same Life 
[prdna] as Brahma, all these divinities bring tribute un- 
asked," Kausitaki Upanisad II:i, cf. Atharva Veda X:7.39 
and 8.15. In all these contexts, as for Plato, " food " is 
whatever aliment nourishes the physical or psychic powers, 
body or mind. 

64 Brhaddranyaka Upanisad 111:8.23 ; " He who sets up 
this body in possession of consciousness, and moves it," 
Maitri Upanisad n.6. 

66 Jnana Khanda 1119-124 Iyer, M. S. Venkatarama 
[tr.], Jnana Khanda. Quart. J. Myth. Soc. (1937) 28:170- 
219, 269-289 ; (1938) 29:39-57, 189-207 ; (1939) 29:329-351, 
466-499 the text in the Sarasvati Bhavana Texts, Number 

15 (1925-1933)- 

66 In theology, " procession " is the coming forth or 
manifestation of the deity as or in a Person. This appear- 
ance on the stage of the world is a " descent " avatar aria 
strictly comparable to that of the actor who emerges from 
the greenroom to appear in some disguise. The reference 
of the text is to the procession of the Spirit, prajndtman or 
prdria. 

67 As in the Bhagavad Gltd VII.7. Cf. reference footnote 
30- 

68 Pischel, Richard, Die Heimat des Puppenspiels t Halle, 
Hallesche Rektorreden II, 1900 ; for the English version 
refer to Tawney, Mildred C., The Home of the Puppet Play, 
London , Luzac, 1902 (32 pp.). 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

61 " Human works of art are imitations of divine proto- 
types." Aitareya Brahmana VI:27. 

70 This term occurs with reference to Vishnu as the 
Creator. 

71 It has been well said by the late Professor Arthur 
Berriedale Keith that " it is indeed to ignore how essentially 
religion enters into the life of the Hindu to imagine that it is 
possible to trace the beginnings of drama to a detached love 
of amusement." The Sanskrit Drama, Oxford, Clarendon 
Press, 1924 (405 pp.), p. 52. In dealing with any traditional 
civilization it must always be realized that no real distinc- 
tion can be drawn there as of culture from religion or 
profane from sacred. Such distinctions, like that of utility 
or value from meaning or beauty, are the products of a 
modern schizophrenia. 

72 A blind faith in " progress " makes it all too easy to 
accuse the " backward races " of ignorance or a " prelogical 
mentality." " Lorsque nous ne comprenons pas un 
ph&nomene iconographique, nous sommes toujours tenths de 
dire que nous comprenons fort bien mais que c'est indigene 
qui est maladroit ou ria pas compris," Hentze, Carl, Ob jets 
rituels, croyances et dieux de la Chine antique et de I'Amerique, 
Anvers, " De Sikkel " Editions, 1936 (119 pp., 230 figs., 12 
plates) ; in particular p. 33. "Das Marchenhaft-Wunderbare 
muss daher mit ganz anderen Augen als mit unseren natur- 
wissenschaftlich geschulten angesehen werden," Preuss, K. 
Th., in Thurnwald, R., Lehrbuch der Vdlkerkunde (1939), 
P- 127. 

73 " Backward communities are the oral libraries of the 
world's ancient cultures " (Chadwick, N. K., Poetry and 
Prophecy, Cambridge University Press, 1942 [xvi and no 
pp.] , xv) . ' ' These beliefs of theirs have been preserved until 
now as a relic of former knowledge " (Aristotle, Metaphysics 
XII:8.io). " La memoire collective conserve quelquefois 
certains details precis d'une ' thiorie ' devenue depuis long- 
temps inintelligible . . . des symboles archatques d'essence 
purement mtiaphysique " Eliade, Mircea, Les livres popu- 
laires dans la literature roumaine t if Zalmoxis (1939) 11:78. 
If the fundamental sources of custom and belief are those of 

116 



" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex " 

a metaphysical tradition, the anthropologist in search of 
explanation and understanding must be familiar with this 
tradition. 

74 Marsilio Ficino, ". . . . the soul inflamed by the divine 
splendour ... is secretly lifted up by it as if by a hook in 
order to become God/ 1 Opera Omnia, p. 306, cited by 
Kristeller, P. O., The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, New 
York, Columbia University Press, 1943 (xiv and 441 pp.) 
half title : " Columbia Studies in Philosophy," Number 6 ; 
p. 267. " For love is like the fisherman's hook " Pfeiffer, 
Franz, Meister Eckhart, Gottingen, Vandenhoek and 
Ruprecht, 1924 (x and 686 pp.), p. 29. " Love is my bait 
. , . it will put its hook into your heart," William Law, 
cited by Stephen Hobhouse, William Law, 1943, p. 109. 
Hafiz, " Fish-like in the sea behold me swimming, till he 
with his hook my rescue maketh," Leaf, Walter, Versions 
from Hafiz (1898) n:XII. All implied by Mark 1.17, " I will 
make you fishers of men." There are but few doctrines or 
symbols that can be adequately studied on the basis of single 
sources to which they seem to be peculiar if their 
universality is overlooked. 

76 See Coomaraswamy, Dona Luisa, " The Perilous Bridge 
of Welfare," HJAS (1944) 8:196-213. Cf. the Roman 
Imperator, who was also the Pontifex Maximus. 

76 Nothing, of course, is stranger or more unwelcome to 
the modern mentality than is the idea of " self-naughting." 
Liberty of choice has become an obsession ; the superior 
liberty of spontaneity is no longer understood. For those 
who are afraid I cite : "I can no more doubt . . . what to 
me is fact, perceived truth ; namely, that any person would 
be infinitely happier if he could accept the loss of his 
' individual self ' and let nature pursue her uncharted 
course." Hadley, Ernest E., Psychiatry (1942) 5:131-134 ; 
p. 134. Cf. Sullivan, Harry Stack, Psychiatry (1938) 
1:121-134. " Here (in the emphasized individuality of each 
of us, ' myself ') we have the very mother of illusions, the 
ever pregnant source of preconceptions that invalidate all 
our efforts to understand other peoples. The psychiatrist 
may, in his more objective moments, hold the correct view 

117 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

of personality, that it is the hypothetical entity that one 
postulates to account for the doings of people ... in his 
less specialized moments the same psychiatrist joins the 
throng in exploiting his delusions of unique individuality. 
He conceives himself to be a self-limited unit that alternates 
between a state of insular detachment and varying degrees 
of contact with other people and with cultural entities. He 
arrogates to himself the principal role in such of his actions 
as he ' happens ' to notice." To believe in one's own or 
another's " personality " or " individuality " is animism. 
In the traditional philosophy it is emphasized that " per- 
sonalities " are inconstants, ever changing and never 
stopping to " be " ; " we " are not entities, but processes. 
Dr. Sullivan's words are whether or not by intention an 
admirable summary of the Buddhist doctrine of anatta. An 
attachment of permanent value to personality will be 
impossible for anyone who has seen things " as become " 
yathd-bhutam, objectively, as causally determined processes. 
The first step on the way to a liberation from " the mother 
of illusions/' and so toward an " infinite happiness," is to 
have realized by a demonstration that " this (body and 
mind) is not my Self," that there is no such thing as a 
" personality " anywhere to be found in the world. Life in 
a world of time and space is a condition of incessant change ; 
and, as Plato asks, " How can that which is never in the 
same state be anything ? " Cratylus 439 E. Almost the 
first step in clear thinking is to distinguish becoming from 
being. The important thing is to know what " we " really 
are ; but this is a knowledge that can only be acquired to 
the extent that " we " eliminate from our consciousness of 
being, all that We are not. This is the Platonic KaOapms, 
Skr. Buddha karana. 

77 Contemporary western dancing is hardly more than a 
kind of calisthenics, and a spectacle ; in the traditional art, 
which survives elsewhere, " all the dancer's gestures are 
signs of things, and the dance is called rational, because it 
aptly signifies and displays something over and above the 
pleasure of the senses." St. Augustine, De ordine 34 : cf. 
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., and Duggirala, G, K., Mirror 

118 



" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex " 

of Gesture, New York, Weyhe, 1936 (81 pp. and 20 plates). 
" Physical exercise, the type of the former, while it may 
induce a certain kinesthetic enjoyment, does not, in its net 
effect, go far beyond the muscles, the lungs, the circulatory 
system, and so on. Play activity, on the other hand, has as 
a result a restoration of what we may generally term a 
rational balance [note : Andrae's ' polar balance of physical 
and metaphysical ']. It is true that, in so far as play is 
recreation, it is escape. It is an escape from the relative 
chaos of ordinary experience to a world where there is a 
rational and moral order, plainly visible, and not simply the 
object of faith. The play is, then, like art, a clarification of 
experience . . . almost identical with a sense of freedom. 
The real hindrance to freedom is not rules but chance ; the 
rules and the game make possible the freedom within its 
framework." Seward, George, Journal of Philosophy (1944) 
41:184. It is just this " clarification " that the anthropolo- 
gist misses, when he merely " observes " with scientific 
" objectivity " and " detachment, 1 ' hardly to be dis- 
tinguished from condescension. "This, in fact, is the 
Western way of hiding one's own heart under the cloak of 
so-called scientific understanding. We do it partly because 
of the miserable vanitd des savants which fears and rejects 
with horror any sign of living sympathy, and partly 
because an understanding that reaches the feelings might 
allow contact with the foreign spirit to become a serious 
experience/' Jung, C. G., and Wilhelm, Richard, Secret of 
the Golden Flower, London, Kegan, Paul, 1932 (ix and 151 
pp., 10 plates) ; in particular p. 77. I say that anthropology 
is useless, or almost useless, if it does not lead to any 
" serious " experience. 

It hardly needs to be said that I am not accusing either of 
the two authors cited of "vanity" or want of "living 
sympathy." Professor Ashley Montagu, at any rate, has 
said that " in spite of our enormous technological advances 
we are spiritually, and as humane beings, not the equals of 
the average Australian aboriginal or the average Eskimo 
we are very definitely their inferiors." Montagu, M. F. 
Ashley, " Socio-Biology of Man," Sri. Monthly (1940) 

119 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

50:483-490. It is to such writers as Sir J. G. Frazer and 
L6vy-Bruhl that Jung's critique really applies. 

Cf. J. Layard, Stone Men of Malekula, p. 701, on 
" spurious scientific objectivity." 

78 On this passive subjection compare Chdndogya 
Upanisad VIII:i.5 and Philo Judaeus, Quis rerum divinarum 
heres, 186. The distinction involved is that of will from 
desire : " the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." To do 
as one " likes " is the antithesis of free will ; the free man 
much rather likes what he does than does what he likes. 

79 Plutarch, Moralia, 393/.,and cf . references in footnote 30. 

80 Jfiana Khanda X:43-62 ; reference footnote 65. 

81 In other words, " letting their dead bury their dead/ 1 
and " taking no thought for the morrow " ; living as nearly 
as possible in the eternal now. 

82 The method in their madness being that they still lived 
naturally, placing no forcible restraints on their feelings and 
so, as another translator adds, " dissipating their latent 
tendencies." One may recall Blake's saying, " Desires 
suppressed breed pestilence." 

88 The persons mentioned include the princes, men, 
women, young and old, actors, singers, fools, professors, 
ministers, artisans and hetaerae. 

84 Brhadaranyaka Upanisad IV:4.22. 

88 It is expressly said that the Prince regarded gain and 
loss, friend and foe, impartially : as in the Bhagavad Gitd 
the principle is enunciated, " Thy concern is with the action 
only, not with the result." One remembers, with Walt 
Whitman, that " battles are lost in the same spirit in which 
they are won " ; and that the soldier's vocation does not 
require him to hate, but only to fight well. This last is 
admirably illustrated by the well-known story of 'Ali who, 
engaged in single combat, was on the point of victory, but 
when his opponent spat in his face, withdrew, because he 
would not fight in anger. 

86 On the distinction of understanding from psychological 
analysis, see Urban, Wilbur Marshall, The Intelligible 
World, London, Allen and Unwin, and New York, Mac- 
millan, 1929 (479 pp.), pp. 184, 185. Understanding 

120 



" Spiritual Paternity " and " Puppet Complex " 

requires a recognition of common values. For so long as 
men cannot think with other peoples they have not under- 
stood, but only known them ; and in this situation it is 
largely an ignorance of their own intellectual heritage that 
stands in the way of understanding and makes an unfamiliar 
way of thinking seem to be " queer." It lies peculiarly 
within the province of anthropology to enable men to 
understand one another. 



121 



VII: Gradation, Evolution and Reincarnation 1 



THE so-called conflicts of religion and science are, 
for the most part, the result of a mutual misunder- 
standing of their respective terms and range. As to 
range : one deals with the why of things, the other 
with their how ; one with intangibles, the other with 
things that can be measured, whether directly or in- 
directly. The question of terms is important. At 
first sight the notion of a creation completed " in the 
beginning " seems to conflict with the observed 
origin of species in temporal succession. But iv 
apxfi, in principle, agre do not mean only "in the 
beginning " with respect to a period of time, but also 
11 in principle," that is, in an ultimate source logically 
rather than temporally prior to all secondary causes, 
and no more before than after the supposed beginning 
of their operation. So, as Dante says, " Neither 
before nor after was God's moving on the face of the 
waters " 2 ; we must think of God as doing all things at 
once . . . and Philo, " At that time, all things took 
place simultaneously . . . but a sequence was neces- 
sarily written into the narrative because of their sub- 
sequent generation from one another " 3 ; and Boehme, 
" It was an everlasting beginning." 4 

As Aristotle says, " Eternal beings are not in time." 5 
God's existence is, therefore, now the eternal now that 
separates past from future durations but is not itself a 
duration, however short. There, in Meister Eckhart's 
words "... and there is au <md, then, of the notion 
that the universe came into being in ' six days V 
So ' ' God worketh now", 6 still working and remaining " 7 ; 

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Gradation, Evolution, and Reincarnation 

God is creating the world now, this instant ". 8 Again, 
no sooner has some time elapsed, however little, 
but everything is changed ; ir&vra, p, " you cannot 
dip your feet twice in the same waters." 9 So, then, as 
for Jalalu'd Din Rumi, "Every instant thou art 
dying, and returning ; Muhammad hath said that this 
world is but a moment. . . . Every moment the world 
is renewed, life is ever arriving anew, like the stream. 
. . . The beginning, which is thought, eventuates in 
action ; know that in such wise was the construction 
of the world in eternity." 10 

In all this there is nothing to which the natural 
scientist can object ; he may, indeed, reply that his 
interest is confined to the operation of mediate causes, 
and that it does not extend to questions of a first 
cause or of the whatness of life ; but that is simply 
a definition of his self-chosen field. The Ego is the 
only content of the Self that can be known objectively, 
and therefore the only one that he is willing to con- 
sider. His concern is only with behaviour. 

Empirical observation is always of things that 
change, that is, of individual things or classes of 
individual things ; of which, as all philosophers are 
agreed, it cannot be said that they are, but only that 
they become or evolve. The physiologist, for example, 
investigates the body, and the psychologist the soul or 
individuality. The latter is perfectly aware that the 
continued being of individualities is only a postulate, 
convenient and even necessary for practical purposes, 
but intellectually untenable ; and in this respect he is 
in complete agreement with the Buddhist, who is never 
tired of insisting that body and soul composite and 
changeable, and therefore wholly mortal " are not 
my Self," not the Reality that must be known if we are 

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The Bugbear of Literacy 

to "become what we are.' 1 In the same way St. 
Augustine 11 points out that those who saw that both of 
these, body and soul, are mutable, have sought for what 
is immutable, and so found God that One, of which 
or whom the Upanishads declare that " that art thou." 
Theology, accordingly, coinciding with autology, pres- 
cinds from all that is emotional, to consider only that 
which does not move " Change and decay in all around 
I see, O Thou who changest not." It finds him in that 
eternal now that always separates the past from the 
future and without which these paired terms would 
have no meaning whatever, just as space would have 
no meaning were it not for the point that distinguishes 
here from there. Moment without duration, point 
without extension these are the Golden Mean, and 
inconceivably Strait Way leading out of time into 
eternity, from death to immortality. 12 . 

Our experience of " life " is evolutionary : what 
evolves ? Evolution is reincarnation, the death of one 
and the rebirth of another in momentary continuity : 
who reincarnates ? Metaphysics prescinds from the 
animistic proposition of Descartes, Cogito ergo sum, to 
say, Cogito ergo EST ; and to the question, Quid 
est ? answers that this is an improper question, because 
its subject is not a what amongst others but the 
whatness of them all and of all that they are not. 
Reincarnation as currently understood to mean the 
return of individual souls to other bodies here on earth 
is not an orthodox Indian doctrine, but only a popular 
belief. So, for example, as Dr. B. C. Law remarks, 
" It goes without saying that the Buddhist thinker 
repudiates the notion of the passing of an ego from one 
embodiment to another. 1 ' 18 We take our stand with 
Sri Sankaracarya when he says, " In truth, there is no 

124 



Gradation, Evolution, and Reincarnation 

other transmigrant but the Lord " 14 he who is both 
transcendently himself and the immanent Self in all 
beings, but never himself becomes anyone ; for which 
there could be cited abundant authority from the Vedas 
and Upanishads. If, then, we find Sri Krishna 
saying to Arjuna, and the Buddha to his Mendicants, 
" Long is the road that we have trodden, and many are 
the births that you and I have known," the reference 
is not to a plurality of essences, but to the Common 
Man in everyman, who in most men has forgotten 
himself, but in the reawakened has reached the end of 
the road, and having done with all becoming, is no 
longer a personality in time, no longer anyone, no 
longer one of whom one can speak by a proper 
name. 

The Lord is the only transmigrant. That art thou 
the very Man in everyman. So, as Blake says : 

" Man looks out in tree, herb, fish, beast, collect- 
ing up the scattered portions of his immortal 
body . . . 

Wherever a grass grows or a leaf buds, the Eternal 
Man is seen, is heard, is felt, 
And all his sorrows, till he reassumes his ancient 
bliss " 15 ; 

Manikka Vaagar: 

" Grass, shrub was I, worm, tree, full many a sort 
of beast, bird, snake, stone, man and demon . . . 

In every species born, Great Lord ! this day I've 
gained release " lfl ; 

Apollonius of Tyana : 

" The passion of phenomenal beings is not that of 
each but rather that of ONE in ever-each ; and this 
ONE cannot be rightly spoken of except we name it 
125 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

the * First Essence '. For this alone is both the 
agent and the patient, making Itself all things unto 
all and throughout all God Eternal, the idio- 
syncracy of Whose Essence is wronged when it is 
detracted from by names and masks " 17 . 

Ovid: 

" The spirit wanders, comes now here, now there, 
and occupies whatever frame it pleases. From 
beasts it passes into human bodies, and from our 
bodies into beasts, but never perishes/' 18 

Taliesin : 

" I was in many a guise before I was disenchanted, 
I was the hero in trouble, I am old and I am 
young " 19 ; 

Empedocles : 

" Before now I was born a youth and a maiden, a 
bush and a bird, and a dumb fish leaping out of the 
sea" 20 ; 

Jalalu'd Dm Rumi : 

" First came he from the realm of the inorganic, 
long years dwelt he in the vegetable state, passed 
into the animal condition, thence towards humanity : 
whence, again, there is another migration to be 
made" 21 ; 

Aitareya Arayyaka : 

" He who knows the Self more and more clearly is 
more and more fully manifested. In whatever 
plants and trees and animals there are, he knows the 
Self more and more fully manifested. For in plants 
and trees only the plasm is seen, but in animals 
intelligence. In them the Self becomes more and 
more evident. In man the Self is yet more and 

126 



Gradation, Evolution, and Reincarnation 

more evident ; for he is most endowed with provi- 
dence, he says what he has known, he sees what he 
has known, he knows the morrow, he knows what is 
and is not mundane, and by the mortal seeks the 
immortal. But as for the others, animals, hunger 
and thirst are the degree of their discrimination " 22 . 

In sum, in the words of Faridu'd Din 'Attar : 

" Pilgrim, Pilgrimage, and Road was but Myself 
toward Myself/' 28 

This is the traditional doctrine, not of " reincarna- 
tion " in the popular and animistic sense, but of the 
transmigration and evolution of " the ever-productive 
Nature " ; it is one that in no way conflicts with or 
excludes the actuality of the process of evolution as 
envisaged by the modern naturalist. On the contrary, 
it is precisely the conclusion to which, for example, 
Erwin Schrodinger is led by his enquiry into the facts 
of heredity in his book entitled What is Life ? In his 
concluding chapter on "Determinism and Freewill," 
his " only possible inference " is that " I in the widest 
meaning of the word that is to say every conscious 
mind that has ever said or felt ' I ' am the person, if 
any, who controls ' the motion of the atoms ' according 
to the Laws of Nature. . . . Consciousness is a singular 
of which the plural is unknown." 

Schr6dinger is perfectly aware that this is the 
position enunciated in the Upanishads, and most 
succinctly in the formulas, " That art thou . . . other 
than Whom there is no other seer, hearer, thinker or 
agent." 

I cite him here not because I hold that the truth of 
traditional doctrines can be proved by laboratory 
methods, but because his position so well illustrates 

127 



The Bugbear of Literacy 

the main point I am making, namely that there are no 
necessary conflicts of science with religion, but only 
the possibility of a confusion of their respective fields ; 
and the fact that for the whole man, in whom the 
integration of the Ego with the Self has been effected, 
there is no impassable barrier between the fields of 
science and religion. Natural scientist and meta- 
physician one and the same man can be both ; there 
need be no betrayal of either scientific objectivity on 
the one hand or of principles on the other. 24 



REFERENCES 

1 Reprinted from Main Currents in Modern Thought, 
summer 1946, and Blackfriars, November 1946. In 
Blackfriars the following introduction by Bernard Kelly 
preceded the article : 

The following essay by Dr. Coomaraswamy is offered to 
Blackfriars readers for the very high degree of interest 
which attaches to the approach from an unfamiliar stand- 
point to the familiar problem of the relation of science to 
religion. 

The metaphysical focus of the essay may perhaps be best 
obtained from the brilliant paragraph on the Cogito of 
Descartes. Here the startling character of the thought is 
due to the contrast of the respective ways in which the 
imagination of East and West lends support to the concept 
of being. If the West, especially in that caricature of itself 
which is called modern philosophy, has tended to imagine 
reality in terms of visible solids, thus colouring the concept 
of being with an externality and a rigidity of outline not 
wholly its own, the imagination of the East has generally 
been more suggestive of a conception of being as an act, 
personal or impersonal as the point of view changes. 

128 



Gradation, Evolution, and Reincarnation 

For St. Thomas also, being is an " act " to which, 
ultimately, even substance among the categories is 
potential, and, to that extent, relative. From no other 
position available to the West can fruitful contact be made 
with the tradition Dr. Coomaraswamy represents. 

From a deepened understanding of the principles of St. 
Thomas's metaphysics, it may be possible, now that 
Eastern writers are more readily available to explain their 
own thought to us, to carry the understanding of Eastern 
tradition further than the position outlined in the De 
Unitate Intellectus contra Averrhoistas. In any case it is 
certain that the unity, or rather the non-duality, of 
consciousness of which Dr. Coomaraswamy speaks, has 
nothing to do with the evolutionary and sentimental con- 
ceptions of theological modernism. 

BERNARD KELLY. 

2 Paradiso 29.20-21. 

3 Opif. 13 and 67 LA 1.20. 

4 Mysterium Pansophicum 4.9. 
6 John 5.17. 

6 St. Augustine, Conf. 7.15. 

7 Physics 4.12 (221 B). 

8 Meister Eckhart, Pfeiffer p. 207 = Evans 1.164. 

9 Heracleitus fr. 41. 

10 Mathnawi 1.1142 f. 2.97. 

11 Sermo 241.3.3, cf. De musica 6.5.9.10. 

12 See my " Symplegades " in Studies . . . offered in 
Homage to George Sarton on his sixtieth Birthday, New York, 
and Time and Eternity, Ascona 1947. 

18 Concepts of Buddhism, 1937, p. 45. Cf. T. W. Rhys 
Davids in SBE 3.43 and 26.142, E. W. Hopkins in JRAS 
1906, p. 581, and J. Takakusu in Philosophy East and West, 
ed. C. A. Moore, New York, 1944, pp. 78-81. Also my On 
the One and Only Transmigrant, JAOS Suppl. 3, 1944. 

14 Brahma Sutra Bhasya 1.1.5. 

16 The Four Zoas, Night 8. 

16 G. U. Pope, TiruvZfagam, Oxford, 1900, p. 3. 

"Epistle to Valerius (Ep. 58 in the Loeb Library 
Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana. 

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The Bugbear of Literacy 

18 Metamorphoses 15.165-168. This and the preceding 
items are Pythagorean. 

19 J. G. Evans, Poems from the Book of Taliesin, 1915 ; 
R. D. Scott, The Thumb of Knowledge, 1930, 124 ft. Cf. 
Amergin in The Oxford Book of Mystical Verse, p. I. 

20 Fr. 117 D in Diogenes Laertius 8.77. 

81 Mathnawi 4.3637 f., cf. 3.3901-3907, and 6.126-128. 

22 Aitareya Aranyaka 2.3.2. Cf. St. Augustine, De musica 
6.5.9.10 in H. M. Carr Realists and Nominalists t Oxford, 
1946, pp. 13, 14. 

28 Mantiqu't-Tair, version by Fitzgerald. 

24 The short essay above summarizes a position outlined 
in my " On the One and Only Transmigrant " (AOS Suppl. 
3, 1944) and to be more fully developed with adequate 
documentation in a work on reincarnation to be completed 
shortly. The position assumed is that all the traditional 
texts, Indian, Islamic, and Greek, that seem to assert a 
reincarnation of individual essences are expressions in 
terms of a popular, pragmatic animism " animistic " in 
the sense that they assume the reality of the postulated Ego 
and should be understood metaphysically as having 
reference only to the universality of the immanent Spirit, 
Daimon, or Eternal Man-in-this-man, who realizes his own 
ex tempore omnipresence when he " reassumes his ancient 
bliss." 



130