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The Western Conception of Moral Order
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
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In an age when the interactions between East and West are multiplying and the once-dominant characteristics of Western life appear to be disintegrating, the search for some “principle of coherence” which characterizes a given civilization assumes special significance. None of the many explanations of the distinctive character of Western civilization which have been advanced by generations of scholars seem fully convincing when the latter is seen in both its structural and chronological aspects. Indeed, neither its devotion to technological innovation nor its Christian messianism can account for the kaleidoscopic elements in Western culture. It is also fruitless to attempt to find the underlying principle of unity in some unique world-view that would ostensibly be applicable at all times and in all social and geographical contexts—unless one would arbitrarily reduce the concept of civilization to the outlook or behavior of an educated elite, drawn from one or two relatively small social classes.
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- Copyright © 1970 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
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1 Jacques Ellul writes: "This is why we must take seriously man's claims upon justice in the Bible even though they have certain demonic overtones. The poor and the weak, in particular, deserve a hearing, since they are those who have rights before God." (The Theological Foundation of Law [trans. Marguerite Wieser; Garden City, N. Y., Doubleday, 1960], p. 82). On the notion that man has a claim to certain rights because of his status as God's partner, responding to God and to His covenant with man, see ibid., pp. 102-3.
2 Hsun Tzu writes: "Water and fire have subtle spirits (chhi; somewhat analogous to the pneuma of the Greeks) but not life (seng). Plants and trees have life (seng) but not perception (chih); birds and animals have perception (chih) but not a sense of justice (i). Man has spirits, life, and perception, and in addition the sense of justice; therefore he is the noblest of earthly beings. In strength he does not equal the ox, nor in power of running the horse, and yet he uses them; how can this be? Man is able to form social organisations (chhun) and they are not. How is it that men can do this? Because they can cooperatively play their parts and receive their portions (fen). How is it that they can carry this out? Because of justice and righteousness (i), which unite the parts into a harmony, and therefore a unity, and lead to strength, and in the end to triumph." Cited in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. II: History of Scientific Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1956), p. 23.
3 On the point that in "Eastern" consciousness there are no determinate categories of good and evil, though there is an absolute ground of indeterminate moral value, see Filmer S. C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West; An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding (New York, Macmillan, 1947), pp. 386-88.
To Mencius, evils in the world are, in the words of I. A. Richards, "a gigantic reflection of a frustration in the mind of man." (Mencius on the Mind; Experiments in Multiple Definitions; London, Routledge & K. Paul, 1964; p. 76).
4 I. A. Richards writes, "There is no officially recognized war in the Chinese mind between the Soul and the Body, between will and desire. Hence that absence of a sense of sin which used so to puzzle missionaries. The result may even be a difference in the basic lines of division in the Chinese mind between the Ego, the Ego-Ideal, and the rest of the personality." (Mencius on the Mind, pp. 74-75). On the absence of the sense of "sin" in Chinese moral consciousness, see also Marcel Granet, La Pensée Chinoise, in L'Evolution de l'Humanité; Synthèse Collective, dirigée par Henri Berr, Vol. XXV bis; Paris, La Renaissance du Livre, 1934; p. 401.
5 On the significance of the notion of eschatology as regards the Western conception of justice and law, see Ellul, The Theological Foundation of Law, pp. 41, 94, 99, also 101, 104-5.
6 See for example the discussion of voluntarism in Catholic theology by a critic and defender of the Natural Law position, in Heinrich A. Rommen, Natural Law; A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy [trans. Thomas R. Hanley, O.S.B.; St. Louis, B. Herder, 1947], pp. 57-60.
7 See for example the citation from Grotius' argument (in De iure belli ac pacis) that just " as God cannot cause two times two to be anything but four, so He cannot cause that which is intrinsically evil to be not evil," in A. P. d'Entreves, Natural Law, An Introduction to Legal Philosophy (London, Hutchinson University Library 1951), p. 53. Josef Fuchs, S. J., argues that in the theonomous conception of Natural Law, there is room for the notion of the good "in itself," and not merely as a consequence of arbitrary divine will. For the good arises from God's being, or from his very nature. Thus the moral order is not the expression of an arbitrary act of God, nor on the other hand does it exist independently of Him (Natural Law, A Theological Investigation [trans. Helmut Rickert, S. J., and John A. Dowling, New York, Sheed & Ward, 1965], pp. 65, 67-70).
8 Expressing the classical Chinese view on this point, Wang An-Shih wrote: "Nature in the heavenly sphere is not without faults, as witness irregularities in the seasons, eclipses, etc. Nature in the earthly sphere also has its faults, earthquakes, floods, desiccation, and the like. But yet Heaven and Earth continue to cover and support all things, being in no wise hindered by their defects from so doing. That is because they possess the capacity of reverting to the normal." (cited in H. R. Williamson, Wang An Shih, A Chinese Statesman and Educationalist of the Sung Dynasty, 2 vols. [Probsthain's Oriental Series, Vol. XXII (London, A. Probsthain, 1937], II, 327).
9 Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan writes: "The law of karma is the counterpart in the moral world of the physical law of uniformity. It is the law of the conservation of moral energy." (Indian Philosophy, 2 vols. ["Library of Philosophy," ed. by J. M. Muirhead (London: Allen & Unwin, 1952-1953)], I, 244). He adds: "The vision of law and order is revealed in the Rta of the Rg-Veda. According to the principle of karma there is nothing uncertain or capricious in the moral world. We reap what we sow. The good seed brings a harvest of good, the evil of evil." (ibid., I, 244-45).
10 As Surendranath Dasgupta puts it: "All sufferings and limitations are true only so long as we do not know our self. Emancipation is the natural and only goal of man simply because it represents the true nature and essence of man. It is the realization of our own nature that is called emancipation. Since we are all already and always in our own true nature and as such emancipated, the only thing necessary for us is to know that we are so. Self-knowledge is therefore the only desideratum which can wipe off all false knowledge, all illusions of death and rebirth." (A History of Indian Philosophy, 5 vols.; Cambridge, University Press, 1957; I, 58-59).
11 In the Western tradition, goodness, is not so much a quality of being as an impulse to action and an object of will (Heinrich A. Rommen, Natural Law, pp. 47 ff.). Rommen remarks that "good is to be done" (ital. added; ibid., pp. 48-51).
12 Contrasting the Chakti tradition in India with Judaism and Christianity, Rudolf Otto writes: "The central point of their [the Hebrew prophets'] preaching is this, that Jahveh's kingdom ought to be, and, alas! is not, but that at the appointed time it will be, in spite of resistance and disobedience on the part of his people, carried on through judgment and flaming wrath to the consummation. And so thought the young Christian community also. God's kingdom will come: this they knew, and in glowing expectation of the advent they stood, and hoped, and waited. The expectation of the advent, in humble reserve and in supplicating expectation in view of the final breaking forth of the ‘wholly other,' is the soul of this religion from the days of the original Church on—an attitude of the soul altogether unknown in India…. [Christianity] gives precedence over the idea of simply individual beatification and rescue, to this whole great objective eschatological value—viz., that Jahveh's reign is certainly ‘coming,' and will become real, and that the ‘end of things' in time and eternity will be the realized ‘kingdom of God'." (India's Religion of Grace and Christianity Compared and Contrasted [trans. Frank Hugh Foster; New York, Macmillan, 1930 ], pp. 71-72).
Dasgupta uses the term "eschatology" in the different sense of any doctrine based on the notion of a transcendent, ultimate "soul" (atman) [A History of Indian Philosophy, I, 25 f.]. Mysore Hiriyanna regards the notion of moksa (deliverance) as an ideal that has eschatological implications (Outlines of Indian Philosophy; London, Allen & Unwin, 1932; pp. 19-20, 77). The same notion of an eschatology, he argues, has been mistakenly applied to the Buddhist teaching of karma (ibid., p. 136), which is in fact rationalistic and positivistic. But Hiriyanna here is using the term eschatology to distinguish liberation achieved in an afterlife from a state of release attained within this one. Such a use of the word is different from the conventional, and more precise, definition of eschatology as the absolute Self-manifestation of God to the world, the final completion of the universe at the end of a linear, temporal evolution, and the ultimate goal to which all Creation is inexorably moving. This second conception of eschatological, as for example in the idea of Judgment Day, remains wholly alien to Buddhist time-consciousness and to the Brahmanic frame of awareness.
13 On the distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary actions in Hinduism, and the point that moral responsibility applies only to the former, see Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy, II, 222.
14 Of the nature and role of dharma in Hindu consciousness, Heinrich Zimmer remarks that it is better for a man to carry out his own dharma poorly than someone else's well (Philosophies of India, ed. by Joseph Campbell [Bollingen Series, XXVI; New York, Pantheon Books, 1951], p. 160).
15 For some, dharma constituted an end in itself, but generally its purpose was to permit the attainment of moksa (M. Hiriyanna, "Philosophy of Values," in The Cultural Heritage of India, ed. by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, et al., Vol. III [The Philosophies, ed. by Haridas Bhattacharyya, Calcutta: Ramakrishna Mission, 1953], pp. 648-50). But it should be noted that dharma is essentially a positive obligation, doing what is right for its own sake; see Charles A. Moore, "Metaphysics and Ethics in East and West," in Essays in East-West Philosophy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1951), pp. 411 f.
16 It is this basic and universal principle of Hinduism that served to justify the inequality of the caste system and the severity of treatment, including the forms of legal punishment, of the low-born. Referring to the conception of crime during the Vedic age, V. M. Apte writes: "It is curious that even a minor bodily defect such as the possession of bad nails, or the violation of a purely conventional practice was looked upon as a crime. But we should remember that the implicit belief in rebirth, and the fixed notion that for every defect or mishap in this life a person himself is responsible through actions committed either in this life or in a past one, can explain a number of anomalies in the judicial or social code of the Hindus. This is often forgotten when the charge of an inhuman and brutal outlook is preferred against their legal and social structure." ("Political and Legal Institutions," in The Bharatiya Itikasa Samiti's History and Culture of the Indian People, ed. by R. C. Majumdar and A. D. Pusalker [London, Allen & Unwin, 1951], Vol. I [The Vedic Age], p. 434). Because the rewards and sufferings of karma and samsara were the true consequences of the individual's inner moral life, determining his future condition, it followed that the ideal of social (distributive) justice and the ruler's function of corrective (retributive) justice could, by contrast, be entirely "exteriorized." Thus public justice, in contrast to the inner justice of karma, was a response to the ritual and formal aspects of behavior, or to outward acts, showing little concern for the individual's intention and state of mind. That is the main psychological reason why it was possible for a highly ethical system to combine a rigid, traditionalist social structure, often characterized by harsh punishments (see for example A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India [London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1954], pp. 118-19; also L. D. Barnett, Antiquities of India [Calcutta, P. Pustak, 1964 ed.], pp. 150, 151) with an intense concern for the spiritual freedom of the enlightened man. It also helps to explain the unconcerned juxtaposition of elevated moral ideals with the most cynically Machiavellian view of political life.
17 See Bhattacharyya, "Indian Ethics," in The Cultural Heritage of India, Vol. III (The Philosophies), pp. 620-22 ff. On the humane qualities of Hindu ethics, see ibid., pp. 642-43. See also M. Hiriyanna's discussion of the moral values in the notion of dharma ("Philosophy of Values," loc. cit., III 647-48. The enlightened person seeks to spread enlightenment to others, and in many schools the road to self-realization is through universal good (ibid., III 653).
18 Moore, "Metaphysics and Ethics in East and West," in Essays in East-West Philosophy, pp. 411-12.
19 On the fundamental optimism in the Hindu outlook, implicit in the idea of liberation from bondage, see M. Hiriyanna, "Philosophy of Values," in The Cultural Heritage of India, Vol. III (The Phiiosophies), p. 654.
20 There is in Hinduism a pessimism with regard to life and the world and to the inevitability of suffering but there is no despair with regard to the possibility of ultimate release therefrom (see Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom [trans. Willard R. Trask; Bollingen Series, LVII; New York, Pantheon Books, 1958], pp. 11-14).
21 The two aids to the attainment of moksa are morality and knowledge (Hiriyanna, "Philosophy of Values," in The Cultural Heritage of India, Vol. III [The Philosophies], p. 651).
22 As Dasgupta writes commenting on the Upanisadic teaching, "The true self manifests itself in all the processes of our phenomenal existences, but ultimately when it retires back to itself, it can no longer be found in them.'' (A History of Indian Philosophy, I, 61).
23 The liberated soul stands above the moral code (Bhattacharyya, "Indian Ethics," in The Cultural Heritage of India, Vol. III [The Philosophies], p. 635).
24 As Karl H. Potter points out, good habits bind a man to karma just as surely as do bad habits (Presuppositions of India's Philosophies; Englewood, N. J., Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 13. In Radhakrishnan's view, the ethic of the Upanisads requires that the enlightened man give up Kama, or personal pleasure and selfish desire, but not that he renounce desire as such—that is, desire for the good (Indian Philosophy, I, 215). Indeed, Radhakrishnan points out that in the early Upanisadic teachings, the desire for salvation and knowledge was highly commended, while neither piety nor affection and devotion were regarded as faults (ibid., I, 215). Only long afterwards did this ideal degenerate into the "insane asceticism of a later day." (ibid., I, 216).
25 On the concern in Chinese jurisprudence with a person's intention, and the role of attenuating circumstances, etc., see Jean Escarra, Chinese Law (Peking and Paris, 1936), trans. Gertrude R. Browne (Seattle, University of Washington MSS—Works Progress Administration, W. P. 2798 [Harvard Law School, and East Asian Research Center, Photocopy]), p. 104.
26 In Han jurisprudence, premeditation or intention constituted an essential ingredient of the judgment of the criminality of acts and of responsibility (A.F.P. Hulswewe, Remnants of Han Law, Vol. I: Introductory Studies and an Annotated Translation of Chapters 22 and 23 of the History of the Former Han Dynasty [Sinica Leidensia, edidit Institutum Sinologicum Lugduno-Batavum, Vol. IX; Leiden, Brill, 1955], pp. 251-54 ff., 262-65 ff.). The infliction of an accidental injury was generally not regarded as a crime, though occasionally an unintentional offense was punished (ibid., pp. 262-64); even the slave's punishment might be mitigated by the unpremeditated nature of his action (ibid., p. 59).
27 Owen Lattimore writes: "To begin with the Chinese method appears, in practice, to fix responsibility not in terms of ‘who has done something,' but of ‘what has happened.' When something has once happened, responsibility must be assigned; and hence there is always an underlying tendency to try to prevent decisive things from happening, and to diffuse responsibility. In legal practice, for instance, this leads to the convention that when a murder has been committed, a murderer must be produced to match the corpse. If the individual cannot be apprehended by the police, the family or the village or some larger community must be made responsible and made to produce ‘satisfaction'." (Manchuria, Cradle of Conflict [New York, Macmillan, 1932], pp. 80-81).
28 On collective responsibility and punishment, see Hulswewe, Remnants of Han Law, I, 103. In severe cases, this included the "extermination of the three clans" (ibid., pp. 112-16 ff.). Opposition to the idea of collective guilt can be found, but despite such occasional protest, it always found its way back into practice (ibid., pp. 114-15, 271-73 ff.), being extended to groups of neighboring peasants (pi wu; ibid., p. 273).
29 Not only was the death penalty inflicted but atrocious mutilations were practiced (Hulswewe, Remnants of Han Law, I, 109-12, including for example boiling the prisoner; ibid., pp. 122 ff.). But it should be noted that legal torture was practiced in the West with equivalent cruelty until quite recent times, and that the unparalled savagery of the Nazis was a Western, not a Chinese, phenomenon.
30 In a comparable vein, see what Fuchs refers to as "theonomy" and "theonomous ethics" (Natural Law. A Theological Investigation, pp. 67-73).
31 Carl G. Jung, "Christ, A Symbol of the Self," in Aion, Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. IX, Pt. II), (trans. R.F.C. Hull [Bollingen Series, XX], New York, Pantheon Books, 1959), p. 38.
32 "Alone among created beings, man is called to participate intellectually and actively in the rational order of the universe. He is called to do so because of his rational nature. Reason is the essence of man, the divine spark which makes for his greatness. It is the ‘light of natural reason' which enables us to ‘discern good from evil'." (see A. P. d'Entreves' discussion of St. Thomas' conception of Natural Law, Natural Law, An Introduction to Legal Philosophy, p. 40). Rommen writes: "St. Thomas … starts from the likeness of human nature to the divine nature. Understanding and free will are the most essential marks that distinguish man from every other earthly creature. It is precisely through them that man is in a special degree the image and likeness of God. Man's intellect and free will constitute the closest image of God in the material universe. His creation." (The Natural Law; A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy, p. 45).
In Catholicism, the eternal law comprises the laws of the natural sciences, including both the physical sciences and the biological sciences with their entelechal elements, and the rational laws of moral virtue. (ibid., p. 46).
33 In the Judaic and Christian view, Man is made in the image of God; in Jaina cosmology, the cosmos itself is of human form—a sort of First Man (Zimmer, Philosophies of India, p. 241).
34 Lien-shen Yang writes: "Worldly rationalism ascribes the same reasoning to Heaven and to man and, in so doing, brings Heaven down to earth rather than lifts man up to the heights above." ("The Concept of Pao as a Basis for Social Relations in China," in John K. Fairbank, ed., Chinese Thought and Institutions; Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1957, p. 302). Needham cites the view of Wang Chung criticizing the traditional Chinese habit of "making inferences from the ways of men [to those of Heaven]" (Science and Civilization in China, Vol. III [Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth], p. 480).
35 Writing of the limited but real autonomy of man under God, Fuchs remarks: "One of the reasons for man's likeness to God is precisely the fact that he participates in the autonomy of God. Similarly the definition of what is good is not given us by God's arbitrary will but is taken from his being and nature. So, man can know what is good by analysing his own being and nature. Man's autonomy is a gift because God revealed himself by creating his image." (Natural Law, A Theological Investigation, p. 70). In a similar vein, Jacques Ellul writes: "For the Scholastics, natural law belongs to the nature of man. It is written in his heart and derives entirely from the principle that man must do good and shun evil. It is a kind of yardstick for discriminating between the just and the unjust in law as it exists. The just is what is in agreement with the law inscribed by God in the human heart … thus justice itself is closely bound up with human nature. Man is capable of discovering by himself what is truly just and of applying it in the world, because he is not totally depraved and retains a spark of divine truth. This natural law in the heart of man is the reflection of the divine law, inducing man spontaneously to accept the common good as the goal of law, normally determined by those who govern." (The Theological Foundation of Law, p. 23).
36 See Jung, "Christ, A Symbol of the Self," in Aion, Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Collected Works, Vol. IX, Pt. II, p. 67.
37 According to Jung, "Christ exemplifies the archetype of the self. He represents a totality of a divine or heavenly kind, a glorified man, a son of God sine macula peccati, unspotted by sin. As Adam secundus he corresponds to the first Adam before the Fall, when the latter was still a pure image of God, of which Tertullian (d. 222) says: ‘And this therefore is to be considered as the image of God in man, that the human spirit has the same motions and senses as God has, though not in the same way as God has them.' …
"St. Augustine (354-430) distinguishes between the God-image which is Christ and the image which is implanted in man as a means or possibility of becoming like God." ("Christ, A Symbol of the Self," in Aion, Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Collected Works, Vol. IX, Pt. II, pp. 37-38).
38 For Eckhart, according to Rudolf Otto, "the soul is a counterpart and image of the Godhead." (Mysticism East and West; A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism [trans. Bertha L. Bracey and Richenda C. Payne; New York, Macmillan, 1932], p. 206).
39 We should note that C. K. Yang argues against the prevalent thesis that Chinese civilization has been pre-eminently a-religious (Religion in Chinese Society; Berkeley, Cal., University of California Press, 1961; pp. 3-6). Arguing partly from the wide diffusion of temples, Yang states that Chinese life has in fact been permeated by religious currents (ibid., pp. 6-16). But the question here is whether one defines the term "religion" to include all popular beliefs in ancestral spirits, demons or ghosts, were-tigers and feng shui, or whether one limits its use to forms of personal theism. As regards Chinese culture, and particularly Confucianism, the perennial question remains whether theistic notions were relevant to, or even implicit in, its rational ordering of the universe and the ethical philosophy of the scholar-gentry, and the very nature of the Tao. (Cf. discussion, ibid., Ch. X). In any case, Yang emphasizes what he regards as the religious aspects of Confucianism with respect to its supernatural and theistic elements (at least in its popularized rituals) and to its view of fate and Heaven, which he sees as non-rational features within a generally rationalistic system (ibid., pp. 244-77, esp. 246-50, 255-56, 257, 269).
On this point, see notably Henry Maspero, Les Religions Chinoises (Mélanges posthumes sur les religions et l'histoire de la Chine), Vol. I [Publications du Musée Guimet; Bibliothèque de Diffusion; Vol. LVII], (Paris, Civilisations du Sud—S.A.E.P., 1950), pp. 137-38.
40 See Granet, La Pensée Chinoise, p. 591.
41 See especially Needham, Science and Civilization in China, Vol. II (History of Scientific Thought), pp. 214-15, 286-87, esp. 563-64, 581. Joseph R. Levenson contrasts the Western (or rather the Byzantine) tradition of absolute monarchy, in which the magnificence and despotic authority of the ruler appeared as a copy of God's majesty and rule in Heaven, with the imperial tradition in China, which lacked such a transcendent referent since Confucianism did not presume a divine Creator. The consequent absence of an " in-the-beginning " perspective of time meant that the role of the emperor was conceived ideally as that of passive adjustment of the social order to nature and to the hidden yet immanent reason of heaven. See "The Suggestiveness of Vestiges: Confucianism and Monarchy at the Last," in Confucianism in Action, ed. by David S. Nivison and Arthur F. Wright (Stanford, Cal., Stanford University Press, 1959), pp. 257-58.
42 On the idea of divine retribution and justice in China, see Lien-shen Yang, "The Concept of Pao as a Basis for Social Relations in China," in Chinese Thought and Institutions, pp. 298 ff. But the author points out that divine retribution did not always work out (ibid., pp. 298-99). As evidence of the irrationality of the Mandate of Heaven, Homer H. Dubs notes that in Confucianism the emperor ideally acquires his mandate to rule through benevolence, justice and virtue (Hsuntze, The Moulder of Ancient Confu cianism [Probsthain's Oriental Series, Vol. XV; London, Probsthain, 1927], pp. 276-80 ff.) but the fact remains of reconciling fact with theory in the successes of various bad emperors. (ibid., pp. 285-88).
43 However, Yang argues that while Confucianism constituted a generally rationalistic system—though not simply a mechanistic one—it was closely connected with Chinese religious beliefs in a personalized Heaven ("The Functional Relationship Between Confucian Thought and Chinese Religion," in Chinese Thought and Institutions, pp. 272-74). He sees Confucianism as readily adaptable to religion (ibid., pp. 271-72 ff., 278, 285, 289-90) citing the implicit personification of the predetermining power in Mencian thought (ibid., p. 274). But Yang here uses the term "religion" in a broader meaning than is usually intended, covering a wide range of magic and rituals (ibid., pp. 288-89), Yin-Yang and Five Elements divination (ibid., pp. 275-76), ancestor worship (ibid., pp. 276-78), and indeed any beliefs in spirits, spirit-forces or the supernatural.
44 "Heaven … does not invariably reward the good man nor does it always punish the wicked. We must look to mankind for our own reward, the reward of a good or bad name." Burton Watson, Ssu-Ma Ch'ien, Grand Historian of China (New York, Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 157-158.
45 Heaven is the origin of all things, and it governs the world; see Alfred Forke, The World-Conception of the Chinese; Their Astronomical, Cosmological and Physio-Philosophical Speculations (Probsthain's Oriental Series, Vol. XIV; London, A. Probsthain, 1925), pp. 147-49. Thus heaven is the source of justice and of rewards; but Forke notes, "heaven is not only the donor of happiness, he also may send misfortune and is often unkind." (ibid., p. 150). We may note that Forke here refers to heaven as "he." Indeed, Forke remarks, "Heaven is not a man, but he acts like one." (ibid., p. 151). But this anthropomorphic usage does not disclaim the prevailing Chinese conception of heaven, especially in the Neo-Confucianism of Chu Hsi, as an abstract, impersonal principle (ibid., pp. 157-58, 160).
46 In Samkara's Advaita Vedanta, according to Zimmer, it is God himself who constitutes the supreme illusion; for God seems to delude himself (though actually he is only engaged in sport, or a pantomime play) that he has the attributes of godliness, though these are but the sheer illusion of passive, impersonal Brahman (Philosophies of India, pp. 425-27). Thus in the end, "God's Ego, the ultimate personal entity, is fundamentally as unreal as the human ego, as much an illusion as the universe, …" (ibid., p. 426). Dasgupta remarks: "In the Vedanta system Isvara [God] has but little importance, for he is a phenomenal being; he may be better, purer and much more powerful than we, but yet he is as much phenomenal as any of us. The highest truth is the self, the reality, the Brahman, and both jiva [the empirical ego] and Isvara are but illusory impositions on it." (A History of Indian Philosophy, I, 447).
47 See Northrop on the "indeterminate or undifferentiated aesthetic corrtinuum T' of being in the consciousness of Eastern civilizations (The Meeting of East and West, pp. 335-37, passim, esp. 395 ff.).
48 In traditional Hinduism, the personality of the individual is the result of the manifestation of Absolute Consciousness, due basically to Maya, and to the workings of Prkrti and Karma (see Bhattacharyya, "Types of Human Nature," in The Cultural Heritage of India, Vol. III [The Philosophies], pp. 610-11).
49 See Ruth Reyna's comment on the attributes and personality of Brahman in Ramanuja's view (The Concept of Maya, from the Vedas to the Twentieth Century [Bombay, Asia Publishing House, 1962], pp. 20 f.).
50 On the sharp differentiation between the self and the holy Being in Madhva's dualist teaching, see Ninian Smart, Doctrine and Argument in Indian Philosophy (London, Allen & Unwin, 1964), p. 27. Madhva's dualism distinguishes the self from non-intelligent substances (ibid., pp. 115-21). The reaction against Samkara developed by Ramanuja is carried further by Madhva's teaching (ibid., p. 115) and Saivism, which Madhva's teachings influenced (ibid., p. 123). To Samkara, Madhva opposes the argument that unqualified non-dualism "cuts at the root of worship and devotion" (ibid., p. 120), and he consequently seeks to adapt "soul pluralism to the needs of theism." (ibid., p. 122). In a sense, Madhva's thought provides a psychological link between atheistic mysticism such as that of the Jains and the theist devotionalism of the Ramanuja school (ibid., p. 121).
51 Madhva's dualism stands closer in one sense to the theism of the West than does Ramanuja's thought, yet there is a paradoxical situation here, "For although the separation of God from the world and from the selves is radical in Dualism [i.e., Madhva's teaching], and although Qualified Non-Dualism [i.e., Ramanuja's teaching] has something of a monistic air and thus superficially resembles pantheism, the concept of grace is much more strongly stressed in the latter." (Smart, Doctrine and Argument in Indian Philosophy, p. 120). Thus while Madhva's dualism seems closer to Western orthodox thinking, in fact it is the devotionalism basic to what appears to be the pantheism of Ramanuja that, in another sense, stands nearer to the Western outlook (ibid., p. 120). Nonetheless it is true that the parallelism between Madhva's position and Western thinking is sufficiently noteworthy to explain the probably unfounded belief that the former has been the subject of Christian influence (ibid., pp. 118-19).
52 Otto points out that the bhakti-tradition bears notable psychological and theological similarities to the teaching on salvation and redemption in Christianity, but that in the end there remains a fundamental difference in soteriological conceptions between Christianity and all forms of Hinduism. This difference is rooted in the Christian notions of sin and grace, exemplified in the meaning of the Passion and the Cross, and characteristically manifest in the expectation of God's Kingdom (see India's Religion of Grace and Christianity Compared and Contrasted, pp. 101-8 and 71-72). William S. Haas argues that the distinctive Western notions of love, from the Greek eros to the Christian caritas, are alien to the Eastern tradition, even where surface similarities appear as in the Hindu concept of bhakti (The Destiny of the Mind, East and West [New York: Macmillan Co., 1956], pp. 190-91).
53 For Ramanuja as for Western theists, there remained the key problem of reconciling the transcendence and immanence of God (Satischandra Chatterjee and Dhirendramohan Datta, An Introduction to Indian Philosophy [Calcutta, University of Calcutta Press, 1950], p. 396), but his approach to the problem was different from theirs. Smart comments that in the qualified non-dualism of Ramanuja, everything is part of the one holy Power which as the Absolute has two sides, namely "the Lord as supreme Self and the cosmos as his body." (Doctrine and Argument in Indian Philosophy, p. 109). According to Ramanuja's philosophy, "there are many finite selves distinguished in some manner from God," yet these life-monads too were part of the one holy Power." (ibid., p. 110). Thus Ramanuja's system "introduces a distinction between the self and the Lord, while retaining a sort of non-dualism or monism." (ibid., p. 111). Smart remarks that in Ramanuja's thought there is "not the radical distinction that one might expect by analogy with the similarly oriented theism of the West." (ibid., p. 114). For Smart notes that "the doctrine of the world as God's body looks rather like pantheism" but that a critical difference in fact remains (ibid., p. 114).
54 Concerning Madhva's doctrine of grace, and his teaching of God's determination of the Elect and the Damned, see Potter, Presuppositions of India's Philosophies, pp. 249-50. See also Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy, IV, 57-58. On God as the source of human bondage, and on the prospects of liberation and damnation in Madhva's system, see ibid., IV, 317-18.
55 See Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, p. 40. For the Gods, Eliade explains, remain only magicians and cannot attain true liberation like man (ibid., pp. 89-90). Zimmer remarks upon the Hindu deification of man in the sense that it is he who is capable of gaining release (Philosophies of India, pp. 232-33). Thereby man is superior to the gods (ibid., p. 291). But Zimmer points out that the Hindu conception of man is not that of Western humanism (ibid., pp. 231-32).
56 Referring to, and then quoting, St. Augustine, Jung writes: "The God-image is not in the corporeal man, but in the anima rationalis, the possession of which distinguishes man from the animals. ‘The God-image is within, not in the body… Where the understanding is, where the mind is, where the power of investigating truth is, there God has his image.' Therefore we should remind ourselves, says Augustine, that we are fashioned after the image of God nowhere save in the understanding: ‘…but where man knows himself to be made after the image of God, there he knows there is something more in him than is given to the beasts.' From this it is clear that the God-image is, so to speak, identical with the anima rationalis."' ("Christ, A Symbol of the Self," in Aion, Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Collected Works, Vol. IX, Pt. II, pp. 38-39).
57 Referring to the polis, Haas comments that it was not a natural product but "the product of the mind at its highest level, an intentional creation that sprang full-armed from theoretical thought." (The Destiny of the Mind, p. 24). See also ibid., pp. 79-82 ff. Haas adds: "The polis introduced the logos into the political and social sphere. A product of pure reason, it sanctioned the free citizen as the only adequate agent and representative of civilized life." (ibid., p. 82).
58 Jung writes: "Like Adam before the Fall, Christ is an embodiment of the God-image, whose totality is specifically emphasized by St. Augustine. ‘The Word,' he says, ‘took on complete manhood, as it were in its fulness: the soul and body of a man. And if you would have me put it more exactly—since even a beast of the fields has a "soul" and a body—when I say a human soul and human flesh, I mean he took upon him a complete human soul.'" ("Christ, A Symbol of the Self," in Aion, Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Collected Works, Vol. IX, Pt. II, p. 39).
59 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York, Macmillan, 1925), pp. 5-6, 15-17, 20.
60 On the common root of the Natural Law of the jurists and the Laws of Nature in the framework of Western consciousness, see notably Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, Vol. II (History of Scientific Thought), pp. 519-20, 582.
61 Ellul writes: "For the century of Enlightenment natural law is essentially in agreement with reason. Reason is no longer understood as a means of discovering natural law, as had been the case with Scholasticism, but as the very expression of this law. As a result, what is in accord with reason in the domain of law, indeed everything that accords with reason, constitutes natural law. Natural law is no abstract and ideal law; rather, it is a product of autonomous reason. Although the underlying principles may vary, they are unfailingly based on a natural attribute, reason, which is common to all men." (The Theological Foundation of Law, p. 25).
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