Olle Bengtsson

It is perfectly reasonable to consider further elaboration of my brief account of the Abrahamitic worldview necessary, as does one commentator.

This was my brief outline: “This is the teaching of the Creation of Man, the Fall of Man from his Original State in Paradise, the Promises of God to Man in History, the Salvation of Man from Sin, the Damnation of some in Hell and the Salvation of others, as Bodily Resurrected, in a Future Messianic Kingdom, a New Jerusalem, a New Earth, or a Heaven that is simply a continuation of the present Human Existence with all its ordinary human desires fulfilled.” It is certainly the case that more needs to be said about this for the purposes of a deeper analysis.

The teaching seems first to have to some extent at least the appearance of a purely tribal religious “ideology” of worldly conquest and power. Such thinking was perhaps not uncommon, although, at least from our perspective, the Abrahamitic version seems exceptionally ambitious. This tribal God promises, through his Prophets, future domination for its People, which, having fulfilled the Command to conquer the Land and subdue or Genocide those who stood in its way, is to convert other “nations” to the worship of the God. This thinking is still clearly visible in the Christian Gospels. Originally, there was hardly any clear and developed ideas of an afterlife at all, and even at the time of Jesus this was simply denied by the Sadducees. The religion was about the worldly well-being, success and Historical Mission of the People through their keeping the Covenant with and obeying the Law of the God. Gradually, the ideology is developed. The God, originally just one of many such Gods, the Gods of other tribes, is elevated above them, and at a late stage is even proclaimed to be the Only God, the others now no longer even existing. And this God is then also the Creator of All, of the World, even out of Nothing – no longer, as at an earlier stage, the demiurge who orders some original chaotic matter and creates forms out of it.

The Promises to the Hebrews, and all of the Hebrew scriptures, are of course reinterpreted by the Christians and the Muslims. The Salvation from the Fall is likewise differently conceived in the three branches of Abrahamism. Yet the soteriological and eschatological visions also have many things in common. They are notoriously obscure and contradictory, something that is often accounted for by reference to mystery and the nature of religious language. But at the same time they are part of Dogma and somehow still to be taken literally.

Basically, Salvation seems to signify the Restoration of the Lost Paradise. It is, in other words, a state of created, earthly perfection without sin or disobedience, in accordance with the sanctified thisworldliness of the Hebrew Scriptures. But it involves a theological development of the original idea of the future worldly Kingdom Promised to the People. Since people (psycho-physical Created Men) obviously die, the question arises who among the individuals of the People will be saved and enjoy the fulfillment of the Promises. According to the Sadducean position corresponding to those Scriptures, it could of course only be future generations of the People and perhaps other peoples converted to the God, those who happen to live at the time of the Messiah. But others came up with the idea that the dead, Created Men would Rise from their graves and take part in the future Restored Paradise. This idea was taken over by Christianity as Dogma.

Then there was the question of how, when, and precisely where this state would be achieved. This is simply impossible to understand from the various Scriptural accounts of the three religions. The Apocalyptic literature is here added, and it all becomes just a hopeless maze of contradictions. For the Jews, continued or renewed obedience to the Law is all that is needed for future life in the Messianic Kingdom, and the Muslim teaching is similar in this regard. For the Christians, faith in the Incarnation (emphatically quite as psycho-physical in one of its two natures as Created Man) of the God, or of One of what is by them considered to be the Three Persons of the God, and some sanctification through the Spirit and the Sacraments is needed. There is a Second Advent of the Second Person, a Judgement, a Thousand Years’ Kingdom, a New Jerusalem “coming down” to earth, indeed, a New Earth and a New Heaven, where the Saved, the Resurrected psycho-physical Created Men, according to St. Paul transformed by the Spirit, will ultimately live in some temporal everlastingness.

It is impossible to get a coherent idea of all of this. But what is clear is that it is all situated in the superficial realm of illusion, of passing phenomenal appearance. And that it is starkly incompatible with the few Scriptural passages pointing towards transcendence and eternity rather than the future, and in which some degree of esoteric or philosophical thinking can be discerned. There are people ascending to “Heaven” in the present: after death or even while still alive. Best known are perhaps the sayings of Jesus to the effect that the Kingdom is actually “within”, and that one of the bandits crucified together with him would be with him in Paradise “today” (although Jesus would not be there on that day). But they too would be there as Created Men…

Such, it seems to me, is the Abrahamitic worldview, in a little more detail. Still further detail is found in the Personalism category in the fragmentary notes (in Swedish) on some aspects of the history of the concept of person.

To those who have taken the first step in meditation that I described earlier, who begin to study the Vedantic literature, and receive the blessing of guru, the path of spiritual enlightenment will open. Higher knowledge, bliss, and grace will be showered down upon them from the divine realm.

It will become possible for them to see that humanity lives in the darkness of ignorance, and precisely in what that ignorance consists and how it has arisen. They will be able to understand not only that all the knowledge of science is on a lower, relative level, but that this is true also of almost all the insights of philosophy as known in the West (and of its counterparts in some other parts of the world).

Indeed, they will see that the religion of the Abrahamitic traditions too is adapted to, or a product of, a lower level of understanding, aimed at people living on a certain level of ignorance, in particular historical circumstances. Their value as religious, moral and cultural forces on that level throughout the last few thousand years is certainly great in many respects. But their basic teaching, which not even their greatest mystics have been able or allowed wholly and definitively to break through and go beyond, is not the ultimate truth and is in some respects misleading.

This is the teaching of the Creation of Man, the Fall of Man from his Original State in Paradise, the Promises of God to Man in History, the Salvation of Man from sin, the Damnation of some in Hell and the Salvation of others, as Bodily Resurrected, in a Future Messianic Kingdom, a New Jerusalem, a New Earth, or a Heaven that is simply a continuation of the present Human Existence with all its ordinary human desires fulfilled.

This exotericism is all on the level of anthropocentric, psycho-physical illusion and ignorance, no matter what piety, moral elevation, and cultural values have resulted from it, and regardless of what metaphysical sophistication has been added by some philosophical theologians. Highly cultured thinkers of European antiquity could certainly to a considerable extent see this, as those religions began to spread.

Today, however, despite the extent to which the genuine traditional spiritual insights are distorted in pop-psychology, social-humanitarian ideology, residual hippiedom, corporeal health-obsession and other concerns and disturbances of ordinary moderns, there are, as a result of the work of Vedanta-inspired spiritual teachers, a few individuals in the West who are beginning to understand some of this, in the way described above. Having taken the first step in meditation, studying Vedanta, and obtaining the grace of guru, they are slowly rediscovering the full, ancient spiritual truths, including the truths of the real nature of man, of this world, and of the life in it.

Others, although these truths are available to them, although they have become aware that there is something more to be learned there, are prevented from doing so by their attachment to European (or Western) cultural and aesthetic forms, and feel alienated by the outer appearance and accoutrements of “Hinduism”. Not least, due to the constitutive historical process of “differentiation” set in motion quite as much by Greek philosophy as by Abrahamitic religion, they have problems with the various expressions and manifestations of “Hindu” mythology, as they are found in the totality of a traditional culture surviving to this day.

All of this is perfectly understandable. And the achievements of science, the partial insights and intellectual instruments of philosophy, and the morality, piety, spirituality and cultural values of the Abrahamitic traditions should certainly not be given up but preserved.

In order to break through the worldview limitations of Western philosophy and religion, it is necessary that the obstacles standing in the way of the full introduction and reception of the complete spiritual truths, the truths beyond the psycho-physical, body-soul-spirit paradigm as the ultimate horizon, be removed. These truths must be represented in the West in forms and contexts that are congenial to people directly and indirectly shaped by those cultural forces.

As they begin to awaken in true spiritual realization, not only the universality of those truths, inevitably present and glimpsed to some extent everywhere, will become evident, regardless of specific cultural conditionings. Their innate familiarity with them, which was only temporarily covered by ignorance, will also become evident. Moreover, those elements of European thought that are closest to them will become immediately recognizable and identifiable, and can thus be strengthened.

In this way, cultural bridge-building, in the sense of the presentation of spiritual truths of Vedanta in ways that are outwardly accessible to Westerners, will, I think, merge and become identical with a rediscovery of these truths in Western terms, or the terms of the current cultural situatedness of the people of the West, as they reinterpret their own tradition.

Rather than a rejection of Western culture, Western thought, and Western religion, the spiritual enlightenment and traditional restoration will be a process of their supplementation, adjustment, and rectification.

Gallimard/Folio, 1994 (1927)

Quatrième de couverture:

Un des caractères particuliers du monde moderne, c’est la scission qu’on y remarque entre l’Orient et l’Occident. Il peut y avoir une sorte d’équivalence entre des civilisations de formes très différentes, dès lors qu’elles reposent toutes sur les mêmes principes fondamentaux, dont elles représentent seulement des applications conditionnées par des circonstances variées. Tel est le cas de toutes les civilisations que nous pouvons appeler normales, ou encore traditionnelles; il n’y a entre elles aucune opposition essentielle, et les divergences, s’il en existe, ne sont qu’extérieures et superficielles. Par contre, une civilisation qui ne reconnaît aucun principe supérieur, qui n’est même fondée en réalité que sur une négation des principes, est par là même dépourvue de tout moyen d’entente avec les autres, car cette entente, pour être vraiment profonde et efficace, ne peut s’établir que par en haut, c’est-à-dire précisément par ce qui manque à cette civilisation anormale et déviée. Dans l’état présent du monde, nous avons donc, d’un côté, toutes les civilisations qui sont demeurées fidèles à l’esprit traditionnel, et qui sont les civilisations orientales, et, de l’autre, une civilisation proprement antitraditionnelle, qui est la civilisation occidentale moderne.    RG