From prayer to creativity

CONTRARY to all interpretations, Karl Marx did not say that "religion is the opium of the people". What he said in Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right is this: "Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. The demand to give up illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flower from the chain, not so that men will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation, but that they will break the chain and cull the living flower."

It continues in this vein - the relevant passage is just about 600 words - but the most cursory reading makes it plain that Marx had a serious understanding of religious belief. Of course he was anticlerical because of the cynical way in which the ruling class (in the civil war in France) deceived its people by means of a Christianity it did not itself believe. But unlike many of his contemporaries (the tribe still exists) he did not believe religion could be legislated away. Nor did he believe that mere advances in social and economic emancipation would make the supernatural redundant.

Much of what Marx, who is taken as the guru by many of us, said was dumbed down over the years primarily because of the Russian revolution and Stalinism with its crude foot-soldiers of the Left. But Marx himself realised that philosophically all great literature led to the heart of very difficult questions and that it must, sooner or later, come around that immensely difficult corner, towards theology. What distinguished great writers and what made them similar was this theological dimension, the question of the evidence of God. Put another way, certain dimensions in literature ( also music, philosophy and so on) could not be attained if the existence or non-existence of God was ruled out to be nonsense.

In fact, it is the riposte to fundamental religious philosophies expounded primarily in the Bible and its offshoots like Philokalia that provides the basis of much western classical literature. The Western Canon with Shakespeare at its centre ("There's a divinity that shapes our ends/ Rough-hew them how we will"), Dante, Cervantes, Milton's Satan, Goethe's Faust, Tolstoy and Dostoevesky ( The Grand Inquistor in Brothers Karamazov says that more than bread man needs "miracle, mystery, authority"), all take their point of departure from the Bible. And much the same for the 20th-century canonists - Proust, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Borges, Neruda, Beckett who all deal, one way or another with the existential question or the music of chance in life.

The Philokalia or Love of God has been distilled from the Old Testament (primarily the Ecclesiastes, the Book of Job and the Proverbs) by the Fathers of the eastern Church from the earliest times since Constantine the Great, the first Christian Roman Emperor (c. 280-373) who established toleration of Christianity through the Empire. Like all religious texts, it is a collection of writings that date from the fourth to the 14th Century in Greek, Slavonic and Russian. It is the Russian text consisting of five volumes which is the most complete of all the three versions from which a condensed version for the common reader has been prepared.

The Philokalia shows ways to concentrate the mind: to awaken attention and consciousness and to further develop them. It elaborates the proposition asked by the Aryans that " the world only exists if consciousness perceives it as existing. And if consciousness perceives it, within that consciousness there must be another consciousness that perceives the consciousness that perceives". It also shows the means to acquire the quickest and most effective conditions for training in the "art of arts and science of sciences leading a man towards the highest perfection open to him". The primordial condition and absolute necessity was to know oneself. To gain this knowledge the beginner had to be alive to the many-sided possibilities of the ego; and he had to eliminate all obstacles, personal and external, to acquire the best conditions for success. For this, silence and quiet were indispensable for concentration.

For us, with a long tradition of yogic practice and penance, this could be small change. But the value of Philokalia lies in revealing how the holy scriptures, liturgical texts and church sermons led to the universalisation of classical western literature, especially 19th-century Russian literature. From the outset, the aesthetic principle was paramount along with an awareness of the seriousness and uniqueness of words, an awareness that was transferred from a ritual level to a secular one, from a conversation with God to a literature that led naturally to a respect, in both reader and writer, for the printed word. Western spirituality, accumulated during centuries of the Church's dominating rule, overflowed into secular literature with ease and generosity. And the view of the book as a repository of wisdom, mystery, truth, the plentitude of all that exists, and not merely as the outcome of skilful writing, came to be widely held.

Another characteristic whose roots can be traced to the Old Testament and Philokalia was the moral tendency in most western, especially Russian literature. A thirst for justice, both higher and earthly, became the determining motive power in this literature. And since justice was unattainable, it had to be compensated for by compassion - for all those who were deprived, unfortunate. The pain that secretly gnawed at man attracted the classical western writer. He sought it out in people who were unsuccessful, ridiculous, unattractive, repulsive, even in those who were evil - not to speak of the insulted and the injured. In fact, the whole concept of the anti-hero flowed directly out of Philokalia. A vocabulary developed that conveyed the subtle nuances of compassion. Feeling sorry for the criminal, drunkard, the beggar and the down-and-out became an abiding characteristic of much 19th-century European literature.

Because the whole purpose of Philokalia was to heighten consciousness, literature brought within its fold religion, politics, philosophy and social thought and assumed the functions of preacher, teacher, judge and legislator. It turned into a kind of second reality, quite often more immediate and actual than real life. For the man who read books, Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment), Bezuhov and Pierre (War and Peace) and others became more real than characters in contemporary newspapers. Accordingly, writers and books acquired an exclusive position and literature was increasingly pushed into the service of the so- called "progressive idea" - the alleviation of the national lot, the struggle against oppression.

And not merely did literature become increasingly politicised, it increasingly took on the role of politics itself, gravitating towards works that demanded the alteration of the existing order or at least hinted towards the necessity for such alteration. The Russian philosopher, Alexander Herzen for instance, talking about Gogol, said the author of Dead Souls was an "unconscious revolutionary." In fact, 19th-century European critics, all steeped in the doctrines of the Greek and Russian Orthodox Church, made no bones about it, and openly declared that "literature was an auxiliary force, the importance of which lies in propaganda, and its merit is defined by what and how it propagandises."

But it would be wrong to suggest that all European literature was reduced to the political declarations of revolutionary criticism. The great writers, with rare exceptions, wrote without considerations of the ideas of criticism. Like the Philokalia that bears in mind the many-sided egos, there are bends and turns, the thinning and thickening of lines where nothing is absolutely clear. The Christian apologetic and mathematician, Blaise Pascal had defined a secular model of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and circumference nowhere much as Philokalia does but with instructions on how to get at the elusive centre of things. Prima facie, the simplicity of the logic seems easy to follow but it is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end. Besides, it demands a discipline of the highest order that is outside the pale of ordinary mortals. But from the "indirections many directions can be found" about life's little fevers.

RAVI VYAS

Writings from the Philokalia, translated by E. Kadloubvsky and G.E.H. Palmer, Faber and Faber, this translation first published 1951, Special Indian Price $9.99

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