Foreword to Religion of Man

Philip Novak

"The Real is one; the wise call it by many names." Uttered by an unknown
Vedic seer some three thousand years ago, this mighty insight, so ancient
and so new, has been the central inspiration for many of India's greatest
religious thinkers. When Mother India gave birth to Rabindranath Tagore in
1861, she endowed him, too, with the gift for seeing the One behind and
within the many-- and much else besides.  The scion of a wealthy Calcutta
family, Rabindranath showed signs even in childhood of the prodigious
literary talent that would characterize his adult life. In his fiftieth year
he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature -the first Asian ever to have
received this honor -- and two years later England knighted him. In 1930 Sir
Rabindranath delivered the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford which are the
substance of this book. His concern is to help us to see what he sees so
clearly: that the various religions of humankind are evolving expressions of
the one Religion of Humanity, an eternal essence that lies within and beyond
humanity's historical religions, drawing the human family steadily forward
toward greater and richer realizations of unity, love and freedom.

Sir Rabindranath grew to manhood as Darwin's ideas made their claims upon
the world's attention. As the book opens, evolution is much on his mind.
Since Darwin there seem to be two kinds of religious thinkers: those who
battle evolution as antithetical to God; and those who celebrate evolution
as God's most stupendous self-disclosure.  If God is too small to encompass
evolution, Sir Rabindranath would surely say, it is a failure not of God but
of our imagination. His early chapters are lyrical accounts of the cosmic
and biological evolutions that shaped the universe prior to human emergence.
Out of matter arose life. Yet how is it possible for life to appear out of
sheer lifelessness? Can a stream rise higher than its source?  Doesn't
life's appearance on the evolutionary stage suggest that a deeper Life had
been there all the while, awaiting its cue? And in life's immense journey
through aeons of time do we not already perceive in its most characteristic
impulse-the formation of complex unities-- the very mark of love?

And out of life arose mind. Yet how is it possible for mind to arise from
sheer mindlessness? Doesn't the appearance of the human mind on the
evolutionary stage suggest that a deeper Mind had been there all along,
awaiting its cue?    For Sir Rabindranath, the emergence of the human mind
is the decisive spiritual moment.  The material cosmos may be stunning in
its immensity but it is marked in its every atom by  profound limitation and
finitude.  Mind introduces a power of which no mere lump of matter can ever
dream, a power to imagine and know the boundlessness of God and the freedom
of the Infinite. In reaching out for God, human beings overcome themselves.
This is the secret of spiritual evolution, and "our soul withers when it has
no object of profound interest that demands of it clarity of mind and heroic
attention to maintain and nurture it" (121). The task of the poet and the
artist is keep the Infinite before our eyes and to remind us that it ever
dwells within our souls.

The "Infinite" sounds remote, cold. Sir Rabindranath surprises us. His
"Infinite" is profoundly personal, a Unity-in-relationship of all the
relationships that constitute the world. The Infinite's freedom is not
freedom from relationship but the freedom of relationship, and the royal
road to that freedom is the yoga of love. Love anticipates God's freedom
because, as every lover knows, when love is truly present it is always
'enough'.  Tellingly, Sir Rabindranath defines the Buddha's "nirvana" as the
"elimination of all barriers to love."  We are related to everyone and
everything, if we but knew it. "The consciousness of God transcends the
limitiations of race and gathers together all human beings within one
spiritual circle of union" (79-80). 

The history of human religions on their way to the Religion of Humanity is
the record of a groping, uncertain journey, often as terrifying as
uplifting.   In one of the loveliest passages in the book Sir Rabindranath
honors Zarathustra as the first of the great prophets to call human beings
away from their long habit of manipulating tribal gods with magic rituals
toward the moral self-transformation that is the noblest mode of spiritual
life.  A glance around our world will suffice to show that this great shift
is still very much in progress. We are still calling upon tribal gods in
hope of tribal victories. But the Infinite's slow and steady pull gathers us
increasingly into the sacred web of relationship where one day each of us
will reach out in love toward all others.

"I am a singer," says Sir Rabindranath, "ever attracted by the house of
songs." Science gives us facts, but spiritual experience alone engenders the
joy that is the surest mark of truth. "All that I feel about religion is
from vision and not from knowledge," he says. "I cannot satisfactorily
answer any questions about evil, or about what happens after death... [All I
know is that] my soul has touched the infinite and has become intensely
conscious of it through the illumination of joy. " 


Philip Novak
Program in Religion and Philosophy
Dept. of Humanities
Dominican University of California