The ambiguity of the words ‘religious’, ‘spiritual’, and ‘secular’

Minor, Robert N., The Religious the Spiritual and the Secular ... File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML Minor, Robert N., The Religious the Spiritual and the Secular:Auroville and Secular India. State University of New YorkPress, Albany, 1999. ISBN 0-7914-3992-5. $19.95

Academic disciplines worry sometimes very differently about ethnocentrism and cultural bias. Religious Studies, a disciplinethat has developed in the last half-century almost exclusively inNorth America, takes as axiomatic that religious advocacy isethnocentric and has no part in disciplinary discourse.Objectivity is to be achieved through methods sometimesdesignated phenomenology (after the philosophic movement) orthrough imitation of anthropology. Conveniently, horror atadvocacy plays well against a backdrop of a political tradition ofseparation of Church and State, and state-funded universities(who find money for Religious Studies chairs and specialprograms among those who go to church) are able to disclaimreligious promotion. Of course, it would be unfair to paint Religious Studiesprofessors as all following the same methodology. Among them interdisciplinary studies flourish, in particular (as hardly needsmentioning to this audience) scholarship in classical literaturesincluding Greek, Hebrew, and Sanskrit. Nevertheless, I speak ofa deep-set tendency to valorize—to use a favorite word offounding father Mircea Eliade—description over advocacy andobject-level argument. But not everyone need be restricted todescription and anti-advocacy prejudice. Thus there is irony—and a lesson to be learned—from the ethnocentrism of projectingsuch descriptivism on a political culture with a different historyof relation with religion. The lesson is that the ‘‘religious’’ asmarked off by American professionals need not be roped offfrom responsible and legitimate argument and that ‘‘religious’’advocacy in politics is not everywhere eo ipso wrong.Robert Minor expresses shock at the role of the IndianGovernment in l’affaire Auroville, shock both at the Acts passedby Parliament and by the decisions of the Supreme Court. Hiscomplaint is that there is self-deception or pretense in theGovernment’s sponsorship of the utopian community viewed inthe light of Constitutional protection of religious institutions(among which Auroville should be counted, says Minor, contraryto the decisions of the Supreme Court). He alleges that the ambiguity of the words ‘religious’, ‘spiritual’, and ‘secular’ have allowed legislators and judges to fool themselves into believing that the yogic teaching of Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950), after whom the city is named and whose ideals its Charter expresses, is as spiritual not religious and as universalist or egalitarian (i.e.,‘‘open to all’’) is secular.

Minor parleys this into an indictment of a wedding between Hinduism and politics in the chapel ofwhat he calls Neo-Advaita. The Indian officials, who, heinsinuates, are probably themselves Neo-Advaitins, are plainlymotivated by pride and worried about national prestige in theirendorsement of Auroville and by implication Aurobindo’s teaching, and thus their equivocal language. The Governmenthas its own Constitutionally mandated concerns which shouldpreclude promotion of what is, Minor tries to show, a religiousand sectarian institution and teaching. Minor is be to taken to task principally, I think, for being deafto legitimate endorsement of values distinct from those of hisown academic ethos. He is deaf to the peculiar languageemployed, missing the appropriateness, for example, of theimprecision of the words spiritual and the like. But beforedeveloping this criticism, let me give a different reading ofl’affaire, giving it a positive spin. I’d like to show by contrasthow negative Minor’s is if nothing else. Aurobindo, Cambridge-educated and with exceptional literarytalent demonstrated from a young age, had in India an earlycareer as a speech-writer and academic, turned to nationalistpolitics in his thirties, and to yoga and mysticism in later life.His writings are directed mainly to yogic teaching organized around a mystic psychology. His philosophy is Veda-ntic inconcept and outlook, but it is not classically Veda-ntic inargumentation. Aurobindo endorses no scripture as revelation,holding that his views are supported by mystical evidence (andarguing that the Upanis.ads themselves are reports of andreasonings based on yogic experiences). The experiences towhich yogic practice leads have cognitive value, Aurobindo says.But he also complains about the difficulty of capturing in preciselanguage what the experiences indicate. More broadly, he findsarguments of ‘‘natural theology,’’ as we would say in the West,to converge with the testimony of mystical experiences.Like all free-thinking metaphysicians not parroting somepredecessor, Aurobindo has his own peculiar ontological positions.

For Minor this seems to be why the views arereligious. Apparently, all metaphysical views as distinct fromrival views are arbitrary and as arbitrary are religious. The bestwe can do is admit that our own view, our own religion, is oneamong many, all without reason staking their claims. Aurobindo’s views center on the reality of what he calls the Divine in relation to the world as explained by science and inrelation to us as revealed mystically. For Minor, the religion of Aurobindoism centers on (an irrational) acceptance of theseviews. But it seems a bit rash, and worse, to pronounce, in effect,a philosopher’s arguments irrelevant to acceptance of hisconclusions without digging into those arguments, and no suchdigging do we find in Minor, for whose purposes much aboutAurobindo’s philosophy has simply to be assumed. It may well be that the philosophy has nothing whatsoever to say in its favor,but my point is that Minor takes for granted its being religious incharacter according to an irrationalist view of religion.There is, to be sure, a chapter where Aurobindo’s philosophy is sketched. But one can also see my point in the fact that thereMinor neglects the non- or anti-intellectual element inAurobindo’s message. The yogin himself says that a non-intellectual contact with the Divine is the heart of his teaching.He says his statements about the Divine are speculative andcorrigible. The point of his writing including the philosophicalis, he tells us, pragmatic, to encourage people to try to havemystical experiences and to guide them. The experiences, notbeliefs, have value intrinsically. However for Minor it’s allabout (irrational, non-empirical) belief. Aurobindo himself apparently personally guided the yogictraining of some, and in his fifties founded an ashram, entrustingits management to a woman whom he had come to see as asadvanced as himself in yogic endeavors. ‘‘The Mother’’ (MirraAlfassa, 1878-1973) picked up his anti-intellectualism, though,like him, she also had a lot to say about how one might makeprogress spiritually. She insisted to a growing number ofdisciples that beliefs could be severe obstacles on a yogic path,and that not even Aurobindo’s philosophy should be believeddogmatically, that a person’s own experiences are what matter.

Minor depicts Aurobindoism as the religion where the Mother’swords, as well as Aurobindo’s, have to be obeyed, whereas what in fact they teach is that no words are to be obeyed but rather amysterious Divine contact is to be fostered. Now the verypossibility of this is something they may well be wrong about.But neither this nor any other issue of the right way to interpretthem or yogic discipline in general is engaged by Minor, who, Irepeat, simply presumes arbitrariness and baseless authority.And such presumption feeds his political judgment.Various moral and aesthetic qualities are supposed to developin people beginning to have yogic experiences according to Aurobindo and the Mother. They encouraged their followers totry to express the Divine in action. Meditative effort andopenness to the Divine (which, again, Minor interprets assurrender to the words of Aurobindo and the Mother) were toextend to all dimensions of life with a goal of transforming theeveryday consciousness, which they saw as the summum bonum.(For Minor, this soteriology is the heart of the cult.) But ofcourse many found, and would find, the discipline too difficult, their natures too bound to habits and natural desires to be veryexpressive of the spiritual or Divine. In part to have a place tosend aspirants for whom celibacy and other yogic attitudescommon in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram were impractical, theMother founded Auroville in 1967. It would be a communitarianexperiment in consciously harmonious living, as individuals triedand achieved varying degrees of expression of the Divine in life.It would be international initially as reflective of the diversenational origins of its residents (mainly young Europeans andNorth Indians during its first decade) and ultimately as a newform of social organization more attuned to prospects of Divinelife.Very few Aurovillians were living in the land purchased underthe Auroville banner when the Mother died in 1973, maybe 50 asopposed to about 1,200 in 1999. She had put in place only ahandful of rules and administrative policies, apparently out of asense of people’s variable natures and the individuality of Divineexpression. No successor emerged, and money collected had tobe distributed by committee. A conflict arose between theAurovillians and the group (the SAS, the Sri Aurobindo Society)that had raised the money for the initial Auroville land purchaseswho did not live in Auroville. Graft and mismanagement werealleged. To resolve the conflict, the Indian Parliament passed a series of Acts structuring the governance of Auroville.

The Government also won approval of the project from UNESCO, and provided some funding. And there were some ratherremarkable discussions of yoga and matters spiritual in the Lokand Rajya Sabhas (the Indian Parliament). The Acts were challenged in court by the SAS, the originaloverseers of Auroville. The Indian Supreme Court, whosejustices took the time to read and interpret Aurobindo (with anadroitness visible despite the distortions in Minor’s account),sided with Parliament and the Aurovillians. The Courtconcluded that Aurobindo’s teaching is not religious and thusthat an institution based thereon is not protected from Parliamentary regulation. Minor is outraged at the breach ofseparation of Church and State. Now, the term spiritual is indeed vague, but its crucial usagesby the justices and legislators are not ambiguous in the way Minor excoriates, namely, as the equivalents of religious in theIndian political context. The spiritual, for Aurobindo and his Government interpreters, is the province of the Divine andaccessible through yogic practice and experience. It is alsoconsidered the underpinning of a wide range of moral andaesthetic values. No one is supposed to be able to say veryprecisely what it is because its nature eludes description, being amatter of experience, of immediate acquaintance as opposed tointellectual understanding. An endorsement of Aurobindo as aspiritual philosopher is an endorsement of yoga and meditationand roughly of the moral and aesthetic values that Aurobindo andthe Mother taught. The Supreme Court found nothingobjectionable in Parliament’s endorsement of those values whichthey themselves apparently approved of, too (in an appropriately, I would say, general manner, something like, ‘‘Meditation and the practice of compassion and self-sacrifice are largely goodthings’’). Furthermore, though Minor rarely mentions Islam orMuslims today in India, Muslims are Constitutionally granted aseparate civil code such that religious categorization is ofmomentous consequence. The considerations (a) that admissionto Auroville is ‘‘open to all,’’ and (b) that Aurobindo teaches thatnothing about prior culture need block spiritual accomplishment(anyone can become a yogin) apparently led the justices toconclude that the philosophy is universalist and secular, not religious, and so too the institution.

Beyond equivocation, Minor cites another basis for thejustices’ delusions, pride in ‘‘Neo-Advaita’’ or Hinduismconnected to the idea that as inclusivist it is better thanexclusivist (religious) positions. Minor correctly attributes thejudgment to Vivekananda and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. But itis not, I think, in Aurobindo, and it has no relevance to theAuroville case. (Furthermore, at least Vivekananda meant less toglorify Hinduism than to affirm others’ religions from his ownpoint of view.) Minor wants us to see that Hinduism is thoughtof not only as universalist and secular but ‘‘more secular’’ whichshows that it is not secular at all. And maybe some do so regardit. But the justices’ reading of Aurobindo has nothing to do withthis; Minor unfairly projects an apologetical pride.The true political issues that Auroville raises are much deeperthan those discussed by Minor, but we may align his instinctswith a certain libertarianism which I would like briefly to review.Libertarian political philosophy proclaims that the State shouldbe neutral concerning the content of the good, that markets andindividual preference (for religion, for art, for employment) areto be respected absolutely. Taxation used to support arts orhumanities (much less religion!) would not treat all citizensequally. An equal liberty for all is thought to prohibit Statepromotions in these areas of variable preference. An Aristotelianpolitical philosophy, in contrast, finds a State duty to further thewelfare of its citizenry, including moral and aestheticdevelopment. Now, what actual State, let us ask, conforms to thelibertarian to the exclusion of the paternalist or Aristotelian line?And that line presupposes determinate views about goodcharacter. Why, then, should we presume that the IndianGovernment is wrong to promote yoga and such moral values ascompassion and self-sacrifice? What commits us to theminimalism of the libertarian position? And any non-libertarianreason that might be given in favor of positive program or policyX would appear available to the Indian Government regarding itspolicy on Auroville.‘‘But in this case the Indian Government is promoting yoga etcetera by endorsing in effect Aurobindo’s philosophy which is areligious metaphysics just as arbitrary as other religioussystems.’’

True, in the United States politicians rarely try to articulate the metaphysical foundations of values. True, fewacademics claim to know what these could be (the dominantmaterialism being hard to square with human values). True,there is in India a peculiarly Indian, or Hindu, or Veda-ntictradition of finding values underpinned in a Divine Absoluteaccessible through ascetic discipline. But I fail to find pretenseor self-deception but rather a legitimate (Aristotelian) attempt tonurture—according to Veda-ntic conceptions of good character.What is most remarkable is that the Indian Government wouldbe willing to give up some sovereignty on such high-mindedgrounds (in allowing, for instance, Auroville to determine whogets to immigrate and live permanently in that portion of India).Aurovillians have a lot to live up to. Auroville’s projects includeecological development and ‘‘first-world’’ integration of villagesocieties sorely needed throughout India as well as meditationaldiscipline that is more a matter of individual pursuit. It isunfortunate that Minor would give it such bad press. Stephen Phillips The University of Texas at Austin