DIALECTICAL METHODOLOGY

By Nataraja Guru

"The unreal cannot have becoming,
And the real cannot exist without becoming;
The inner secret in respect of the two
Is seen only by a real seer."
Bhagavad Gita II. 4

CONTENTS

"When a person starts on the discovery of the Absolute by the light of the reason only, without the assistance of the senses, and never desists until by pure intelligence he arrives at the perception of the Absolute Good, he at last finds himself at the end of the intellectual world. . . . dialectics then is the coping stone of the sciences, and is set over them; it would not be right to place any other science higher, the nature of knowledge cannot further go."
Plato

I. DIALECTICAL METHODOLOGY

       From "Bread" as a fundamental necessity to "Freedom" with a capital letter is the amplitude of human concern within whose range the inner being of man ever oscillates alternately. Man is ever engaged in matching means with ends, small with great, near or far, involving shorter or longer spans of interest. When ends and means tally, he is satisfied and happy.

       There is a whole hierarchy of interests natural to man. The stage of life and the type of person, according to variations of mood or the unraveling of instincts, give room for many varieties of satisfaction possible in human life, when ends and means are brought together through intelligence.

       Methodology emerges when orderliness is attempted in this constant task of matching ends and means, of which life mainly consists. Dialectical methodology is that crowning approach to life's problems, independent of outside things or objects, whereby satisfactions take place through the matching of means with ends or vice versa, within pure consciousness itself. . .

       Dialectics has been called by Plato the coping stone of wisdom, and the dialectical method is the exercise of a faculty which is the precious privilege and heritage which distinguishes mankind.

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       Although known and used by great minds throughout the ages, it is a method that has still to be positively formulated in unitive and universal terms, free from parochialisms and closed orthodoxies. The mystery of the dialectical way has once again to be stated in broad daylight, so that modern civilization may be saved from lopsided or one-legged progression, as at present. What is still available in disjunct regions, in distinct traditions of wisdom, has to be restated in universally open, dynamic and revalued terms through the clarification of the methodology which alone would apply to the highest aspiration of man, namely, the attainment of the Absolute.

VARIETIES OF METHOD USED HITHERTO

       From simple trial and error methods leading to the measurements and experiments of the physical sciences, and to the methods of pure mathematics where axiomatic verities are examined and interpreted through hypothesis and deduction, we have a whole range of methods suited for different branches of science or reasoning. Inductive and deductive inferences alternate with ones which are a priori and a posteriori. The general and the particular lend degrees of certitude to one another.

       By muddling through a combination of hypothesis and fact, the physical world which is man's habitat has been interpreted according to the intelligent notions of thinkers from the time of Pythagoras to Eddington. Newton's universe is not the same as that of Einstein. The geological age of the earth is different from its thermodynamic age. This is because the methods used, the norms selected, and the scope of the particular branch of knowledge of the scientists themselves, vary. The methodology is adapted to suit the requirements and objectives of each.
There is at present no unified methodology common to all the sciences. When statistical, historical, descriptive, and psychological methods are all admitted as valid, and when questionnaires are relied upon to arrive at certitudes, what passes for scientific method in general has at present no common basis or universal validity. Even in arriving at a correct notion of the empirical world, much of what passes for method is really not different from a glorified form of guesswork.

       If we leave behind such human ambitions as the conquest of outer space, where a unified methodology seems least to apply, and come to more theoretical fields such as matching action with reaction, and cause with its effect, in order to live more intelligently in a utilitarian world, thinking of the greatest good of the greatest number; we come to what we might call the ratiocinative methodology by which ends and means are brought together, though dualistically. According to J. S. Mill there are five ways of studying cause-and-effect relations, namely: by agreement, by difference, by both these together, by concomitant variations, and by residue. What is interesting here is to note that both cause and effect are given an equal status and brought together so that the one might suggest the other and help to bridge the gap between ends and means in our life where many utilitarian problems have to be solved. The dialectical method is only foreshadowed here.

PURER METHODS OF RATIONALISM AND IDEALISM

        If we follow still further the development of method into the higher domain of non-utilitarian thought, we come to philosophers such as Descartes, Spinoza and Kant. Maxims like cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) and the possibility of a priori reasoning which was Kant's characteristic, may be seen to belong to a world of purer reason where inner values become realities by their own right.

       The body-mind duality of Descartes and the difference between "pure" and "practical" reason in Kant left the unitive Absolute untouched, and to this extent their methodology was not fully dialectical. In Spinoza, however, who thought in terms of a central "substance" that has an absolute status, we come very near to a form of reasoning which serves the same purpose as that of a fully dialectical method. The method of Hegel, which claimed to be based on dialectics, can be credited to be dialectical only to the extent that the counterparts of a given historical situation were treated unitively by Mill, with the names of thesis, antithesis and synthesis applied to them.

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       This dialectical way of reasoning with a historical bias is a brand of dialectical method which is very partial in its scope and application. Pre-Socratic philosophers like Zeno and Parmenides applied the fully dialectical method to certain problems such as the big and the small and the one and the many, in a purer form. Much wider, however, in its scope and application, is the dialectical methodology as used in such books as the Bhagavad Gita and as implied in many parts of the Upanishads. When the Absolute is the subject matter, the scope of this method attains to its fullest development in human thought.

       Thus, from the trial and error method known to the empirical sciences, where either a generic or a specific verity counts at a given moment, we gradually pass on through intermediate stages of the development of methods in thinking, where ratiocination yields place to pure reasoning. Soon we pass further on to idealistic thought where dialectical counterparts emerge in the thesis and the antithesis, which resolve themselves into the unitive terms of the synthesis. We find that even at this last stage, vestiges of duality as between ends and means persist. When action and reaction, cause and effect, as well as ends and means come together unitively round a central reality that has an Absolute status, then dialectical methodology may be said to have come into its own.

THE MARKS OF DIALECTICAL METHODOLOGY PROPER

          A methodology still tainted or vitiated by expressions such as "but", "if", or "either-or" may be said to be hesitant or faltering in its approach to Verity or Value. These are terms man uses when he does not know what he wants.
When epistemological duality has been abolished in thinking, and when a wholehearted or one-pointed interest which is legitimate and natural to man is initiated in his attitude, he begins to speak in terms of a greater certitude. An affiliation to or initiation into dialectical methodology may be said to take place when the "either-or" mentality or attitude of luke-warm compromise gives way to a more radical and one-pointed interest in the end within his means in a given case.

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          The target and the arrow have to fall into unitive agreement. Right means and right ends would then justify both together, and the mean where major and minor terms meet with equal and reciprocal status would represent the goal of wisdom.

       The expression api-cha (also too) which repeats itself so profusely in such dialectically conceived texts as the Bhagavad Gita (at least two hundred times), is a clear indication of the dialectical methodology employed by its author. This same methodology is twice referred to with different normative concepts in the Isa Upanishad where the pair of values called vidya (knowledge) and avidya (nescience), and the pair of values called sambhuti (becoming) and vinasa (destruction), one pair being psychological and the other cosmological in content, are unitively revalued according to a dialectical method that was once consciously employed by Indian thinkers and afterwards lapsed into disuse. Similarly, when cause and effect, father and son, or master and servant relationships are considered, they can either be treated dialectically or else treated unilaterally in a one-legged or lame fashion. The father and son relationship, unitively conceived, should not slant even a little to the side of one or the other. The son's father and the father's son should refer to one and the same human value or regulating principle in human life. The verity that is thus neutral and central between two terms of reciprocal propositions may be said to represent the Absolute norm of that context in the light of the dialectical method dealt with here.

THE ABSOLUTE IS NOT A THING

       The Absolute is not a thing, a meaning, or even an "ism" exclusive of others. The methodology of such a reality is indifferent to the stimulant words which, whatever context it might belong to, can evoke the normative principle proper to science.

       As a set of cooking pots of different sizes but of the same shape can be fitted serially into one another like the sections of a portable telescope, the larger of the series having the same centre of gravity as the smaller; so in dialectical methodology, all worlds or values in outer or inner life can be unitively treated with no reference to outer specific attributes.

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       Thus it is that Vedanta can include all previous darsanas (philosophic points of view) and regard them as dialectical revaluations of the same Absolute principle.
      

       Each darsana or system is free to have its own central norm to which it can give primacy for the time being, without hurting or affecting the absolutist content, which remains the same anyway. The Upanishads thus sometimes place "Food" in the central position as representing the Absolute, and at other times the "Word" that is neutral between a Guru or teacher and a sisya (disciple) is put as the Absolute norm at the centre of another way of approaching the Absolute through dialectical methodology.

       A wholehearted bipolar relation as between subject and object,  seer and  seen, knowledge and known, is all that requires to be established to justify the use of dialectical methodology in respect of the unitive and neutral value implicit in that relationship. Thus a wife could treat her husband (or vice versa) as the representative of the adorable value or the Absolute and attain to supreme felicity, which is in principle no other than the ultimate term of spiritual life. The unconditioned happiness that results is proof of the final or ultimate character of the value involved, which is independent of both husband and wife at the same time.

       Even attachment to an inanimate object, when established in correct compliance with the principles of dialectical methodology, and as referring to the Absolute, would serve the same purpose. From a stone or wooden stump to the cosmic principle, all grades of reality can be viewed unitively as the same from inside, as it were, without violating the tenets of dialectical methodology. Thus it is that each chapter of the Bhagavad Gita takes a different human value-factor to serve in its discussion of the Absolute, while still retaining its strict unity and universality of subject and treatment. Pantheism, eclecticism, solipsism, syncretism, nominalism, monism, and conceptualism become, thus viewed, only corollaries or aspects of dialectical methodology as applied to the Absolute which is reality in its perfect totality.

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THE INITIAL AFFILIATIVE STEP

       Though not in a theological or mystical sense, one has to be "initiated" into the way of dialectical reasoning. The change-over from a Newtonian or Euclidean world to that, say, of Einstein or Eddington takes long years of soaking into the epistemology, methodology, and value factors that hang together, giving unity to them. The notion of the Absolute which we have said is the end which has to be unitively understood with the means thereof, has many particularities and peculiarities which take some time to sink into consciousness. A person lost in the middle of a large city which is new to him, and with only confused directions, would take some time to orientate himself correctly.

       The rational, cogitative, meditative, and contemplative approaches to philosophical problems may again vary. The dualist methodology of the empiricists might also gradually change complexion as we ascend from the ontological, supporting ourselves through mechanistic Aristotelian logic or more truly dialectical reasoning, through the successive levels of existence or subsistence or value. Even the matter of riding a bicycle cannot be taught by one or even a few instructions. The force used on the pedals has to alternate, and the balance has to be kept, depending on which way the bicycle slants or where the pedal concerned has arrived in its revolution. If a simple matter such as this takes experience and the sympathetic understanding of a number of factors that hang together, it should not be difficult to concede that the Science of the Absolute requires personal guidance and initiation.

       A bipolar rapport or sympathy has to be established between the teacher of wisdom and the student so that the wisdom baby may safely see the light of day. Although the giving birth to wisdom can be one's own, at least the midwife's role in the affair is that of a Guru who initiates. In some rare cases Nature itself and God as a vague invisible factor may serve the role of such a Guru.

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       All we want to indicate here is that when ends and means have to be treated unitively in dialectical methodology, it also follows, at least as a corollary of the same, that the teacher and the taught have to enter into what may be called a unitive pact so that, through a sort of osmosis, as it were, dialectical wisdom may flow normally from the one person to the other. Guruhood and initiation are thus part and parcel of dia-lectical methodology. The Self and the non-Self are related here.

DIALECTICS UNCONSCIOUSLY IMPLIED IN ALL PHILOSOPHISING

       Dialectics, no more than philosophising, cannot operate in a vacuum. If the Absolute could be existent and non-existent at once, the method that leads to such a notion has, for the sake of argument at least, to postulate a process called "knowing" which can take place within a split second or within eternal duration.

       All speculative philosophies in the whole world have epistemological, methodological or value-notions hanging together and connected with some sort of explicit or implicit process of knowing or emancipation. Being and becoming, treated together, would admit of the normal employment of a method. In their speculations, different branches of philosophy or their schools invariably employ paired expressions which recur as twins again and again in the literature proper to that particular school. Ontology and teleology, the necessary and the contingent, the immanent and the transcendent, the subjective and the objective, the practical and the pure, the phenomenon and the noumenon, are paired expressions without which no philosopher can outshine another. These expressions are seen further to have a subtle reciprocity, interdependence, polarity, antinomy, or ambivalence between them.

       If we turn again to the Indian scene of philosophical speculation we find expressions such as jnana (wisdom) and karma (action), samanya (generic) and visesa (specific), sadhana (means) and sadhya (ends), para (transcendent) and apara (immanent), which refer to the dichotomous or dual aspects of the Absolute. To reduce bheda (difference) into abheda (non--difference) is the aim of advaita (non-duality). The jiva (life principle) here, and the brahman (the cosmic principle) there, have to be equated or, in the merely cosmological context, the pindanda (microcosm) has to be related to the brahmanda (macrocosm).

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       Such is the course of speculation, whether in the East or the West. Dialectical methodology proper has the task of matching these pairs of concepts into one system which is globally and universally conceived instead of in a piecemeal, haphazard or closed and relativistic fashion, as at present.

THE ASCENT AND DESCENT INVOLVED

       When in common parlance it is even now stated that the Absolute is perfect or that God is absolute, being omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent, the essence of dialectical methodology is already tacitly admitted.

       If God created all, then what about evil? If God is omnipresent, then, is he not present in hell too? If God is omniscient, does he not know the workings of Satan? If God is omnipotent does he not connive at Satan's work? These are some of the corollaries which could be derived from the absolute attributes of God which popular theology might fight shy of and try to evade. The bolder dialectical stand takes a more unitive view in which good and evil cancel out in the perfection of the Absolute. In fact in the Arian controversy the consubstantiality of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost was a doctrine that could never be settled except by the intervention of the pagan Emperor Constantine who forced the doctrine on the Catholic Church. On that day dialectics may be said to have been tacitly though not openly accepted by the orthodox churches. The converse phenomenon of the ascension of Christ refers to a doctrine which is similar in its content. Theology readily accepts an ascent and a descent in the closed world of contemplative values. The pagan Mysteries held this secret as their own, much anterior to its hesitant acceptance in the world of scholastic and patristic theology. The Hermetics had the dictum that what was above was also here below and the Upanishadic mantra (incantation) purnam adah, purnam idam (plenitude there and plenitude here) has the same principle of dialectical ascent and descent implied. Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are based on the same movement as in Dante's Divine Comedy. The Bhagavad Gita and the philosophy of Plotinus contain elements of these twin movements with more microscopic scrutiny into their mechanism.
 
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       This dialectical way is therefore one of great antiquity and universality. The archetypal pattern of human thought itself may be said to contain this subtle secret at its core.

       Even modern speculation has not totally got rid of this pattern, and herein is a hope for modern thought to be able to catch up once more with this way which has been conserved by the best of philosophers for successive generations through millenia, and still survives today as the secret of popular teachers in disjunct corners of the world. In his report published in the Annuaire du Collège de France, Paris for the year 1948, Prof. Louis Lavelle, summarizing his course during the year, states:

"Finally the question poses itself as to how the unity of the spirit could engender the multiplicity of ideas; and if it is possible for one to ascend from the world to the world of ideas by way of an ascending dialectic, it is descending dialectic which is the proper object of metaphysics ...

       Already in the days of antiquity Aristotle had made Platonic thought take a decisive step forward, substituting for the opposition of the two worlds (of ideas and of things), of which one is a changeless model of the other, the conversion of power into action which realized itself at the core of the individual in such a manner that; while for Aristotle it was primarily a question of showing how the idea incarnated itself; for Plato it was a question of showing, on the contrary, how it disincarnated".1

THE MARXIST TYPE OF MATERIALIST DIALECTICS

       In order to clarify the application of the dialectical method in a living situation which is available for us to study, we have the example of the Marxist school of philosophers who avowedly employ the dialectical method.

       Three eminent spokesmen of this school, which holds much topical interest in contemporary thought, have taken special care to explain before the Indian Philosophical Congress held at Srinagar, Kashmir, 1957, that it would be completely wrong to mix up the materialism of Marx with mere materialism or even with pragmatism as understood in America which, one of these Russians said, was akin to the philosophy of selfish profit-making. Prof. A. Shishkin of the Institute of Philosophy, Moscow, stated categorically:

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"Dialectics and historical materialism serve as the philosophic foundation of the Marxist theory of social revo-lution. Does this statement mean that the Marxist materialism pays all attention to the material side of society and rejects the necessity and importance of the human ideals, the necessity and importance of the high development of the human mind and human emotions?
But it is not so in the least. Marxism does not deny the importance of ideals Marxism does not put aside the task of spiritual and moral renovation of man." 2

         Prof: P.V. Kopnin of the same Institute used more enigmatic language à propos the relation between thought and action. In using the more correctly and balanced dialectical method to correlate these two counterparts in human life, the eminent professor stated:

"The criterion of practice is both absolute and relative. It is absolute because it proves the objective truth of thought. It is relative because at a certain definite stage of history it is incapable of fully confirming or disproving all the existing theoretical constructions. Therefore it is only in the process of its own development that practice may serve as a criterion for the truth of a developing thought." 3

        What we can roughly glean out of such paragraphs of apology or defense of the methodology of dialectical materialism is that, by putting the stress on the materialist side, the purer methodo-logy that properly belonged to dialectics in the hands of Hegel (from which Marx avowedly derived his own theory) has been adapted and modified by later Marxists in order to serve or justify an impending revolution.

       Now that the high winds of revolution have blown past the country, dialectics is again coming to its own through the help of its present exponents. 

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        Although this in itself is acceptable as an encouraging sign of the times, we have still to hope that dialectical methodology itself will receive proper attention so that it could be formulated with less vagueness.

       To our own way of thinking, the thesis and the antithesis in a given situation have to be equated and treated unitively before the synthesis can be treated naturally. To put emphasis on any one of them would be like wanting to touch the pan of a weighing machine when the true weight is being determined. In other words, materialism should not be accentuated more than could be perfectly justified by the actual historical necessity of the given moment. When the counterparts are made to neutralize one another without interfering considerations, dialectical methodology may be expected to yield results that could be called correct according to a completely formulated Science of the Absolute which, unfortunately, is still to be openly formulated.

       Prof. A. Shishkin, concluding his paper at the same conference, struck a rather pessimistic note when he said:

"It would be Utopian to think that in our day there is possible a general philosophy for all, that the variety and the contradictory character of the philosophical convictions and views could be smelted into an entity acceptable to all people, to all classes and nations."4

        If dialectical materialism has done a great service in bringing the warring elements within the U S.S.R. under the aegis of a dominant philosophy, it would not be too wrong to hope that with the correct formulation of dialectical methodology as a complete science, with an epistemology and the theory of values proper to it, it might one day help to spell human solidarity and peace. No doctor has any right to say that the patient will die before he is actually dead.

VYASA AND MARX AS DIALECTICIANS

       Prof. M. Bakhitov at the same conference made a heartening reference to the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita  "as an outstanding example of a philosophical poem" containing "ethical teachings, sometimes in a religious form".

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       He made eulogistic reference to the "philosophy and social thought of the great Indian people."5  Dialectics with a materialistic, social, and historical bias is only a very limited and partial aspect of the scope of Dialectics taken as a whole, even when free from one-sided weightage.

       The glaring ignorance of the nature of the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita revealed in such statements by those who in other respects are sympathetic to Indian thought, has to be laid equally on the shoulders of both Indians who have not so far commented on the Bhagavad Gita in the light of dialectics, of which it is perhaps one of the world's greatest masterpieces; and of outsiders who still take only a passing interest in such writings.

       The eighteen chapters of this great work show how the dialectical method can be applied to different life-values covering the whole range of worthwhile human interests, with all the realism of an impending war. The "Yoga" of the Bhagavad Gita is none other than dialectics, and it has been methodologically presented as a science there. The limited application of dialectics with a materialist tilt given to it, with the vague idea of historical necessity as a thesis with which the synthesis is to be rightly struck, is a form of speculation not far different from the theology of the Middle Ages which it was itself meant to counter, with only this difference: that while heaven served as the thesis in scholastic philosophy the earth fulfils the same role here. The use of dialectics, without tamper-ng with either scale of the balance and according to a scientifically established methodology, is still to come. A telescope can magnify or reduce the size of the moon depending on which end is used. The science of dialectical method must not distort reality one way or the other.

       In ushering such a science into being we have much to learn from such textbooks as the Bhagavad Gita.

THE KEY-WORD IN DIALECTICAL METHODOLOGY

       Samya (sameness) is the key-word put into the mouth of Arjuna, the hero of the Bhagavad Gita, to characterize the fundamental nature of the teaching there.
 
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       The word as used in Chapter VI, Verse 33 is purposely meant by Vyasa to characterise the chief feature and secret of dialectics. Earlier in the work, (II. 48) in the definition of Yoga itself, Vyasa states: "Sameness is yoga".  (samatvam yoga ucyate). The same key word is further underlined more explicitly. Samya and samadhi (state of identity) are related by definition to the same root. The target to be attained by a science of the Absolute is supreme identity with the Absolute.
The true balance between thesis and antithesis for the emergent value of the synthesis is what may be said to be implicit in this "sameness" of the Bhagavad Gita context.

       Loka-samgraha (the welfare of society) is the only allusion to the social aspect of life in the whole range of the Bhagavad Gita (in III. 20, 25) which incidentally and secondarily refers to social thought, as coming anywhere near to Marxist thought. When (in XVIII. 66) Arjuna is advised to transcend all social duty and take refuge in the Absolute alone, the supra-social character of the thought in the Bhagavad Gita becomes all the more patent. Notions like justice, however, come within the natural scope of the Bhagavad Gita, as stressed in the concluding verse.

       Dialectics in the Bhagavad Gita is a comprehensive method of understanding the Absolute: a method which is unitive and knows no distinction even between the dual aspects of the relative and the absolute treated dualistically. The social question is one of the many questions in life, the whole range of which is brought under the light of dialectical methodology in the Bhagavad Gita.

       Samya just means agreement, equality, sameness, or redu-cing a conflict in terms of unity. It corresponds to the synthesis of the Hegel-Marx context. When once understood apart from its particular application, then, as with pure mathematics, the key of a dialectical method based on the true synthesis, equation or canceling out of counterparts will open many doors.

       Contemporary Marxism, as reflected in statements like the one quoted above, "The criterion of practice is both absolute and relative", is hard to fit backward into the total context of dialectical idealism where it properly belongs.

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       If we should scrutinize the method implicit here, it is easy to see that the central concept of a criterion of practice is related to the two poles of the unitive Absolute which are referred to as the relative and the absolute respectively. These may also be referred to as the thesis and antithesis of the notion of the practical criterion, which is the unknown principle to be determined as the synthesis of the other two. A materialist bias has to be given to this central notion, and revolution has also to be introduced as a progressive factor of evolution, in order to give modernity and scientific finish to the method that is implied. How all these can hang together by one peg is hard to see, except either as a policy suited to a great nation at the present phase of its evolution, or as speculation stretched beyond its limits.

       The further elaboration of dialectical methodology would take us outside the scope of methodology proper and involve us in considerations of epistemology and the theory of values, which are inseparable, for a detailed methodological study. We shall devote separate articles to them under respective headings.

REFERENCES

1. p 121, translated.

2. pp 185 - 6, of  Proceedings.

3. p 118, Ibid.

4. p 190, Ibid.

5. p 154, Ibid.

II.  THE DIALECTICS OF THE GODS

       A perfected man is the same as a visible God on earth. One and the same person could be the Son of Man and the Son of God at once, as in the case of Jesus. Likewise, all teachers of higher wisdom gain a divine status as representatives of God on earth.

       A god is superior to the extent that there is the touch of humanity in him, and a mortal can gain an immortal reputation by a good life. To be a good rival to God, as Mephistopheles was thought to be, gives even the Devil a respectable status in the context of contemplative spirituality. An insight into the esoterics of the gods would be of help in order to distinguish the plus and minus sides of god-hood; as well as to say what is outside the scope of the contemplative scheme of values; and in order to guide ourselves between the dualities of the sacred and the profane, the godly and the satanic, the permissive and the obligatory, the active and the quiet ways of contemplative life.

       Much mystical doctrine could be derived therefrom. The two- way traffic between the domain of the gods and that of man has been tacitly recognized in all wisdom writings, although such have yet to be properly formulated and made part of a Science of the Absolute. To put Man and God in the correct dialectical perspective proper to both of them at once is then the first step in understanding the various gods, whether Egyptian, Hellenic, Hindu or Chinese.

THE MECHANISTIC APPROACH FAVOURS SCEPTICISM

       The truth of God, seen as it were with over-emphasis on the actual, empirical or mechanistic side of life, necessarily leads to a static and closed concept of God, which is bound to leave the thinking man of modern times cold and unconvinced about spiritual life altogether.

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       The logical and ratiocinative reasons advanced for a belief in God sound sterile, one-legged and laboured, even in spite of many years of preaching from pulpits or proving through the press. Some of the arguments seem very clever, but are soon forgotten. Passing through the stages of cogitation and meditation, thought becomes frustrated and beats its wings in vain without arriving at the correct contemplative way of dialectics. Mythology and theology, deism and theism, are mistrusted nowadays, making of modern man, though dissatisfied, a very respectable type of sceptic.

       In disjunct contexts of time or of clime, however, the heri-tage of human wisdom has always been present. The mysteries, rites, initiations and orgies surviving in different regions to the present day, indicate how even the common man still hankers for some higher or secret knowledge. The human soul, babbling inarticulately, still hopes to formulate all the scattered secrets of this domain into a positive, codified system of thought scientifically stated in universal terms, so that closed idolatries may no more demand sacrifices in human blood, as has happened in the past.

       A comparative study of gods, with the myths, songs, rituals and observances connected with them, might help the Absolute Truth make man free, which he is consciously or unconsciously striving to become in the name of Happiness, the common goal of all mankind.

       Only a properly formulated Science of the Absolute which will bring together into a systematic whole the scattered secrets found in esoterics the world over, especially in relation to the gods, whether of Olympus in Greece or Mount Kailasa in the Himalayas, can help the cause of integrated education which humanity needs for its security, peace and solidarity. Absolute Truth has to save humanity from the stagnant waters of unbelief prevailing at present, due to closed and static forms of wisdom teaching.

THE TWO INTERPENETRATING WORLDS OF MAN AND GOD

         Although the domain of Caesar is different from that of God, there is at least one point of contact between them.

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       The vision of God is not normally given to man; even Moses was only vouchsafed a passing glimpse of the Lord, from behind and from a protected position, as is mentioned in the Bible (Exodus, XXXIII, 18 ff). The Bhagavad Gita  (XV, X and XI. B) refers to the "yogic eye" or the "eye of wisdom" required to see contemplative spiritual secrets. Mythology also knows how disastrous it is for a mere mortal to gaze on the forms of immortals.

       Actaeon, the young hunter who happened to look at Artemis bathing in the forest spring, was changed into a stag, soon to be torn apart by his own hounds.
Olympus itself is situated away from human haunts, so that mortals may not pry too easily into godly affairs. In spite of all these difficulties, Hercules has access to heaven through his promotion to godhood, and the god of medicine (Aesculapius) belongs to the human and divine worlds at once.

       Dionysos is the most versatile and changeful god of the whole Greek pantheon, for he could change at the horizontal level from one form of animal into another, and visit all the vertical levels of the different graded interests that the various other gods were concerned with or responsible for under the leadership of Zeus. He could even pass from death to life at will.

       Hermes the Messenger could also travel downwards or upwards at the command of Zeus, the most high god of the twelve Olympians. Human frailties are found in a magnified form in Eros and Aphrodite. Bacchus or Dionysos can touch the lowest and the highest chords of the range of human interests. Hades of the under-world is still a god of Olympus, and the earth goddess Demeter is not too undignified to sit with the bright celestials of heaven, although she might be expected to be of the earth, earthy, to a superlative degree.

        Such are some of the secrets of mythology which are available for us to reconstitute and reconstruct the total world of the gods. Infra-human entities such as the fish and the stag, the snake and the divine bird, the fecund earth and the fertilizing river, mere man and woman, are all included in the contemplative or spirit-ual hierarchy of presences in the Hindu context.

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       There is even a tortoise and a boar incarnation of Vishnu among the ten forms of this God. It is not hard to see that divinities, gods, and presences bring the whole range of human interests together into a focal point, cosmologically and psychologically at once.

       Further, we can see that the normative central notion is the Absolute and that neither mere objectivity nor subjectivity is recognized in the approach to the gods. Instead, we have what may be called the contemplative or dialectical way, in which subject and object come together in terms of value. The various gods or divine entities may thus be looked upon as a vertical series of contemplative interests or values, natural and legitimate for man to recognize in the fulfillment of his high purpose in life, viewed both prospectively and retrospectively at once.

       We can therefore get started in this study with this simple generalization: namely that while Caesar's domain consists of a horizontally spread-out world of enjoyable things which satisfy man's outer cravings; the world of the gods is a contemplative one where time and pure duration gain primacy over mere objectivity. Olympus, Kailasa or Vaikuntha are worlds given to pure contemplation, in which all ideas, feelings, dispositions, and natural instincts have free play. All the strings of the lyre of life could be fingered successively here in harmonious fulfillment, freed from man-made taboos and bans.

THE NEED FOR INITIATION INTO THE MYSTERIES OF THE GODS

       Mankind's normal world of interests and activities may be said to lie along a horizontal axis where space has primacy; while the worlds in which the gods live may be said to be piled one above the other.

       Naturally man, when he is innocent and free like a child, as represented by Hermes, may be said to mark the point of contact between the human and the divine worlds. It is because the two worlds are mutually exclusive except to those who, like children, belong to the kingdom of God, that baptism, conversion, rebirth and initiation become necessary.

       All ancient mystery schools have had their initiates. This only means that the contemplative, dialectical way to the higher secrets of wisdom proper is not readily given to man in the normal course of secular education.
 
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       One has to consciously affiliate oneself to the contemplative way.

       After initiation, the status of the gods themselves may be conferred in principle on the initiates so that humans get included in the world of the gods. By conscious affiliation to the contemplative world of values, as seen from the absolutist standpoint, one becomes an equal to God. The culminating point in the supreme initiation to the mysteries of the gods is marked in a striking passage in the Enneads of Plotinus:

"No doubt we should not speak of "seeing", but instead of  "seen" and "seer", speak boldly of a simple unity. For in this seeing we neither see, nor distinguish, nor are there two. The man (the initiate) is changed, no longer himself nor self-belonging; he is merged with the Supreme, sunken into It, one with It; only in separation is there duality." II (VI. ix. 10)

        Later in the same Ennead he has his famous words:

 "This is the life of gods and of godlike and blessed men,- liberation from the alien that besets us here, a life taking no pleasure in the things of earth - a flight of the alone to the Alone,"(VI. ix. 11)

         Although human life is disposed to move and have its being in the world of horizontal values, by conscious affiliation to the Wisdom of the Absolute, according to a Science of the Absolute, it is possible for man to enter the vertical world of contemplative values and finally achieve identification in spirit with the Absolute who is none other than the Most High God or the Purushottama as He is named in the  Bhagavad Gita  (XV, 18).

ENIGMA OR PARADOX NORMAL WITH THE GODS

        If God is good, how then comes all the evil of reaction? Theology has not been able to give a straight answer to this question which has been persistently asked through the ages. In reality there is no getting round this enigma or paradox by the ratiocinative method. Dialectics accommodates paradox, and when the middle ground between opposites is given full scope, dialectical verities emerge into being.

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       The Absolute is both existent and non-existent (sat and asat in Sanskrit). Zeus is too radiant to be seen and his wrath would be unbearable, but his favour brings the highest good.

       In the Indian context, images of gods have many hands, a pair of which might have complementary functions, such as blessing with one and holding aloft a punishing weapon in the other. The mystery of the gods always has a great element of the unexpected. Even the most civilized or proportionately conceived god of the Greek pantheon, Apollo, who in many respects could be contrasted with Dionysos from the point of view of civilized respectability, has the strange appellation of "the Ambiguous", suggesting paradox. Dr. Seltman even goes so far as to generalize and say, "Any study of the origins of the cult of the Olympians reveals the fact that most goddesses and gods show traces of a dual personality." 1

        In none of the gods does the enigmatic or paradoxical element show itself in a more pronounced manner than in Dionysos, whose origins are lost sight of, possibly towards the East. He was the unconventional or heterodox god of mystical abandon and freedom. Both tragedy and comedy are said to have originated around the "temple", or rather the theatre, of Dionysos at the foot of the Acropolis at Athens. Though a god, Dionysos had to be saved and brought to life again. His limbs were separated one from the other by the Titans, as the myth represents. We read in Plutarch (De Esu Carnium, vii), commenting on this myth:

"The sufferings and dismemberment told of Dionysos and the audacity of the Titans with regard to him; of the Titans who taste murder; the scoldings the Titans were subjected to and their quick extinction by thunder: all this is part of the pertinent mythology... In effect that part which is not reasonable, indisciplined and violent, which is in us as the non-divine but demoniac, is what the ancients have called the Titans, and it is this part which is subjected to scoldings and punishment."2

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        It has always been an open secret therefore that the world of the gods tried to relate cosmology, psychology and ethics into one whole. As Dr. Seltman again generalizes, "Thoughts about Deity tend to correspond to human interests and emotions, ambitions, and loves."3  The same author concludes his chapter on Zeus with the following pithy sentence:      
"It is for humanism that Zeus ultimately stands."4 

FROM DIONYSOS TO THE MOHENJO-DARO SHIVA

         Before they can see the dialectical revaluation of the gods of the Mediterranean region, which resulted from the mingling of secret mystical doctrines with Neo-Platonic philosophy about two thousand years ago, the Hellenist, the Egyptologist and the Indologist have first to visualize the spice-wine axis that reached from South India to Alexandria and Palestine and then on to Greece and Rome.

       The role of the god Dionysos bears a strange resemblance to that of the crescent wearing, skin-dressed, twig-and-flame-carrying frenzied god of death and life, known as the Tandava Nataraja or Shiva of South Indian origin. This is not the first time that such a possible link has been suggested, and although Indian orthodoxy has resented the association of their holy Shiva with the seemingly licentious god of wine, Bacchus, or "Evoé" (as they shouted his name in the Dionysiac orgies), the kinship is striking. Seltman explains the difference when he says:

"The Greeks were very fortunate, since mysticism learnt through Dionysos was not comprehended by way of abnegation and mortification of the flesh, but by way of oblivion and abandonment to the body's clean desires." 5

        The atmosphere of the two gods in question becomes more strikingly similar still when, describing the sacrifices and rituals associated with this ancient god of mysterious origin in the East, the same author continues: .

"The blood of the goat runs out to the altar down to the pavement. Strange that either fasting or raw meat, the scourge or the thyrsos (the twig with ivy on top), the tolled bell or the beaten drum, the body buried in the hooded habit, or the naked limbs dancing upon the mountain top, may equally produce a sense of mystical union with God." 6

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         One has to wander about in the Catacombs, on the islands of Cyprus, Crete and Sicily, around the scattered archipelago off the Greek coast or in the estuary of the Nile, to properly soak in the melting pot of cultures and mysteries that combined from different points of the compass, roughly at the time when philosophers such as Ammonius Saccus, Plotinus, Philo the Jew, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Porphyry, Iamblichus the Syrian theologian, and others, contributed together to a doctrinal body based on the various gods worshipped in those regions in their time.  A comparative study of the religio-mystical doctrines of South India and the Mediterranean regions would be of fruitful interest to the modern sceptic who wishes to understand globa-lly the whole range of spiritual wisdom on a revised world basis.

ASCENDING AND DESCENDING DIALECTICS IMPLIED IN MYTHS

       Initiation ritual into the mysteries of the gods has made it evident that what is true of the gods is also true of the human soul in its ascent or descent from bondage or freedom. Plentiful hints in the mystical literature of the day are unmistakable in regard to the ascent and descent of the soul of man. The various gods woven into the antique mythological fabric enable the thinker endowed with even a small degree of imaginative intuition to see clearly spiritual progress as it was then understood.

       While the outward language of popular myth supplied the warp, the woof consisted of subtler contemplative verities, which could not be stated as numbered articles of faith without making the letter dead.

       Dialectics has always to be understood in living terms, like an ever-flowing stream of wisdom in its course of ever-creative becoming. Whole epics like Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost have been found necessary to work out the details of the ascent or descent of the soul or of spiritual progress generally. The same dialectical frame of reference is to be discerned in modified forms in works like Goethe's Faust, where a range of worlds of value systems, piled one over the other in a vertical series, is to be found.

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       As we cannot go into elaborate details here, we shall quote again a paragraph from Magnien's Mysteries of Eleusis:

"The disappearance of Persephone, taken by Hades and carried away to inferno, represents the descent of the soul into the world of generation. Dionysos torn into pieces by the Titans is the soul which becomes multiple by becoming present in different parts of the body; Prometheus attached to a rock and the Titans who devour Dionysos, who is con-sumed with avidity in Tartarus: that means the soul attached to the body which is itself attached to the earth. Hercules engag-ed in many tasks: that is the soul which prepares itself for its deliverance. Apollo the god who purifies and Athena the Goddess who saves, permit the soul to gather once again its strength. Demeter brings back the soul to its first source." 7

        Read together with the mystical doctrine that initiation is a form of death and that the final initiation, as we have noted, consists of the "flight of the alone to the Alone", we can get the skeleton framework and the mode of operation of the ascent or descent of the soul in its spiritual progression within the world of the Olympian gods. And in passing, we note that there is no fundamental difference between the idea here and the wisdom doctrines of the Vedic context, extending into Vedanta in a revalued form, as known in India itself.

VEDANTIC ABSOLUTISM INDEPENDENT OF DEISM AS WELL AS THEISM

       Vedantic Absolutism is the result of the revaluation of the relativistic approach of the Vedas. The cosmological and psychological frame of reference is, however, common to both. Belief in any god, holiness, piety, and duty are all foreign to the Upanishadic way of life which belongs to Vedanta proper. Pantheism, polytheism and henotheism can all be accommodated with the open and universally valid dynamism of the Vedanta, and it is quite in order even to dispense with an Isvara or demiurge if the philosophical attitude in the seeker of wisdom is sound and proper.

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       Isvara (God) is referred to only in the third person in the Bhagavad Gita  (XVIII. 16) while chapter XII, Verses 5 and 20 read together will show that deism or theism are only second best alternatives to a true Vedantin. Even Jaimini, the basic authority on the anterior critique (Purva Mimamsa), accepts the frame of Vedic relativism in the absolutist context and maintains neutral indifference to theism or atheism. This is pointed out by K.F. Leidecker in his short note on Mimamsa in Rune's Dictionary of Philosophy8  :  "It...is indifferent to a concept of God". The Samkhya system is a rational branch which is free from theism (called the Nirisvara Samkhya), and when we know that Vedanta is even one flight of steps higher in the scale of the development of dialectical wisdom as formulated by Badarayana (reputed author of the Brahma Sutras), it is not hard to see that gods are only permissible requisites for Vedantic discipline, and not at all obligatory.

       However, this does not mean that the methodological and epistemological frame of reference common to both Veda and Vedanta, as also to the other four systems, is to be discarded. Just as the dialectics of the Old Testament continues valid in revalued terms in the New Testament of Christianity, so also in the teaching of Advaita Vedanta. Vedanta aims at expressing the Absolute unitively as a final triumph of Absolutism over relativism by the process of double negation.

       The whole of the Bhagavad Gita may be considered as a text in which the various aspects of such a revaluation are developed stage by stage through its eighteen masterly chapters.

       Those who wish to examine in detail the nature of the revaluation in all its intermediary implications would do well to study the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad where gods, rituals and secret doctrines are interestingly interlaced as the process of revaluation of Vedic Deism took forward strides. Not without a certain touch of sarcasm does this Upanishad allude (I. iv.10) to the uneasiness of the gods if men should get out of their possessive control through wisdom in respect of "that" (the Absolute).

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THE VEDANTICALLY REVALUED GODS OF THE INDIAN CONTEXT

       By the writings of the chief teachers on Vedanta, the status of the Most High God or Puroshottama, with full Absolute stature, has been conferred on three ancient divinities on the Indian soil, without a review of which our consideration of the dialectics of the gods would be incomplete.

       The Shiva Family which historically, is perhaps the most ancient of the three, with Shiva and the dialectical implications of his two sons Ganesa and Subrahmanya as well as the more unitive aspect of Shiva as the Ardha-Narisvara, have already been touched upon in another study.9

       Here we shall only add that, like Dionysos, this God fills the whole range or field in which the notion of the Absolute may be said to live and move. The most wonderful powers of a Supreme God, and exploits that belong to the lowest rungs of the ladder of human interests at the everyday level of human beings are all attributed to Shiva, while he remains with his middle eye in eternal contemplation. He is the unconventional God of mystic abandon and fulfillment. He may be said to fill the heavenly and the nether regions at once by his dynamic presence. Instead of being subject to time, he wears Time itself as snakes round his neck while he dances with the crescent moon in his matted locks. Those who understand Dionysiac frenzy in the West can easily imagine what this God of Absolutist status represents. Like Olympus for Zeus, Shiva's domain is in high Kailasa in the Himalayas.

       We can make only a passing reference to Vishnu, who lives in Vaikuntha on the eastern peak of Mount Meru. Here there is a snake with a thousand hoods called Ananta (the Endless) which represents pure duration, and on which Vishnu, ever in meditative repose, reclines. The snake itself is represented as floating in an ocean of milk, which stands for the pure life-value of abundance or mercy, which is boundless. Vishnu is the continuation of the pre-Vedic Pancharatra tradition which had Adi-Narayana and Vasudeva as its anterior and posterior developments.
 
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       Like Apollo or Phoebus, Vishnu is a civilized or refined God with no excesses like Shiva, and with consorts who resemble Athena more than any other Olympian goddess.

       Brahma is more of a cosmological deity and is given a relativistic position only, as seated in a lotus arising from the navel of the reclining Vishnu we have pictured above. Brahma as a god has four (sometimes five) faces looking at the four directions (and above). As a member of this trio of divinities (Trimurti), his status would be fully absolute only if we should treat this God as representing the Vedas, or as the Golden Germ of Creation  (hiranya-garbha), which is still only the lower aspect of the Absolute, with its own higher dialectical counterpart,  para-brahman, which is not a deity, but is in the neuter gender and stands for the neutral Vedantic Absolute. The term sabda (verbal) Brahma is said to refer to the Vedas, but the philosopher who seeks the Absolute is said to transcend this Brahma of the Vedas by his sheer interest in pure Absolutist wisdom, as stated in the Bhagavad Gita  (vi, 44), the relevant part of which verse reads:

"By merely being one desirous of yoga (dialectical wisdom) one transcends (the domain of) the articulated (Vedic) aspect of Brahma (as a god)."

         Para and apara Brahman, which refer to the transcendent and immanent aspects of the Absolute, or rather to the relativistic and the absolutist aspects of the Absolute, have to be dialectically revalued again in terms of the neutral Absolute.

       Although the three gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva have equality of status as the triune divinities fused into one - called the  Trimurti, which is a composite Godhead popularly adored by the masses of India -  nirguna (pure) brahman or the brahman which is both immanent and transcendent at once (described as the  para-apara), is alone to be given full Absolute status side by side with the other two members of the trio who enjoy a fully revalued status as representing the Absolute. If to these three we should add a goddess such as Saraswati, representing Sophia or wisdom and also give a place to the central Sun (Pusan or Surya) as the adorable representative of the Absolute, we shall have touched summarily upon all the principal Upanishadic divinities.

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       The divine or semi-divine entities of the three worlds of the Hindu psycho-cosmology are legion, The followers of the Guru Madhvacharya give graded positions to all Hindu gods in their hierarchy, always presided over by Vishnu, as Zeus rules over all the different divinities in Olympus. We shall only just mention the instance of the tulsi (the sacred basil) plant, which enjoys the status of a consort of Vishnu and is worshipped as a presence by the followers of Madhva.

AVATARA AND VYUHA DOCTRINES

       The dialectical way of wisdom as it pertains to divinities and divine presences has the theory of the avatara (descent of God on earth) for the salvation of mankind. The Ramayana and the  Mahabharata are built on such a theory, but such puranas  (traditional lore), though containing Vedantic teaching, are not taken very seriously by those who claim to be more advanced in their ideas of spiritual life.

       The Bhagavata Religion, built around the God Vasudeva, flourished in India three or four centuries BCE. According to this religion, besides the highest God Vasudeva, there were three others in descending order, which were considered hypostatic representatives of the highest God, and were named Samkarshana, Pradyumna, and Aniruddha. The doctrine of vyuha  presupposes that one and the same God could manifest himself at different hypostatic levels.

       Finally, if we add to the idea of the avatara and the vyuha doctrines just mentioned, the possibility of the manifestation of the Absolute in various presences on the earth, such as those enumerated serially in the tenth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita. (Verse 20 onwards), we shall have touched upon almost all the aspects of contemplative divine beings in the world of Indian antiquity.

THE VEDANTA OF RAMANUJA AND IMAGE WORSHIP

         The extreme possible limit of the dialectical approach to divinities and divine presences can be found in the writings of the Guru Ramanujacharya of South India, (c.11th century).

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        If we concede, as we have already mentioned, that the Absolute is a supreme paradox where contraries and contradictions naturally get effaced, it should be possible and more than permissible to see God in any consecrated object on earth. God is omnipresent and can be invoked anywhere by a devotee who knows the right way to reach Him.

       Ramanuja's position here, which may be said to sometimes excel Sankara's in its thoroughgoing application of the dialectical method to the problem of the Absolute, is summed up in the following paragraph by Professor O.Lacombe of the University of Paris, with which we shall for the present conclude our review of the gods or divinities familiar to us as regarded in the light of the dialectics of Absolutist Wisdom.

"Narayana consents to (an even) greater humility (than that of descent to save mankind): he wishes to inhabit the stone, the lump of bronze or wood of the images that we might set up for sustaining the first babblings of our prayer. By that is justified the adoration of consecrated idols; by means of a body consisting of glory, Isvara  (God) resides there specially, in order from there to receive our homage and to manifest to us sensibly his presence. Although omniscient, he appears as if ignorant; although spiritual, as if material; although master of himself, as if he were within the power of men; although all-powerful, as if powerless; although entirely free from all wants, as if feeling wants; although master, as if servant; although invisible, as if visible; although beyond reach, as if within reach." 10

       Dialectics cannot be pushed any further in bringing the Absolute nearer to human life by the common consent of both the sides, as suggested in the Bhagavad Gita  (III. 11):

"With this nourish ye the gods, and let the gods nourish ye; thus nourishing one the other, ye shall attain to supreme Good.

REFERENCES

1. p 92, The Twelve Olympians, C. Seltman, Pan Books, 1952.

2. p 130, Les Mystères d'Eleusis, Victor Magnien, Payot, Paris - Translated

3. p 53, The Twelve Olympians, C. Seltman, Pan Books, 1952.

4. p 50, Ibid.

5. p 170, Ibid.

6. p 176, Ibid.

7. p 68, Les Mystères d'Eleusis, Victor Magnien, Payot, Paris - Translated

8. Jaico, Bombay, 1957

9. See articles, The Androgynous God of South India, and The Philosophy of the Divine Family of Shiva, by Nataraja Guru, on this Website.

10.  p 328, L'Absolu selon le Vedanta, by O. Lacombe, Paris, 1937,  - translated.

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III. THE DIALECTICS OF ROMANCE AND TRAGEDY

        Art begins when the Absolute is imitated in creative action. Action can refer to the inner world as well as to the outer. It can have a field or ground both cosmological and psychological. The Self is its living core. When we sit back and enjoy a play that is filled with action, we are sometimes moved to tears or overpowered by laughter. Our own interior is what the play represents as possibilities in a fluid form. There is an interplay that takes place subtly between overt or innate action, whether subjectively or objectively or both, in the harmonious unraveling of which the greatness of the artist consists. An element of conflict or a complicating factor, whether in the mild form of a frustrated love or in the intense form of a life-and- death struggle, is common to both tragedy and comedy. Romance and tragedy both arise from the same stem of the tree of life.

       In the West the mystery rites surrounding the figure of Dionysos offered the archetypal pattern for the later development of both tragedy and romance or comedy and also of that intermediate type under which much modern literature could be included indifferently. The split between classicism and romanticism after the eighteenth century, of which latter school Victor Hugo may be said to be the champion or high priest, was merely in the name of greater "liberalism in art", as he himself explains in his preface to Hernani (para. 2), which play itself has much in common with Greek tragedy.

       In the Oriental literary tradition, pure tragedy with its gruesome outwardness tended to be toned down. Tragic elements became blended and subdued more harmoniously in a general mystical and contemplative setting.

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        In Kalidasa's Kumara Sambhava, where the central figure is Shiva instead of Dionysos, tragic and romantic elements are brought into focal unity with great artistic perfection. Human life mixes freely with the supra- or infra-human, representing life as a confection of both ingredients. It is dialectics which enters into the creative technique of art in general and of tragedy and romance in particular. The world of art is, in the first place, a world apart. It has much to do with mental distraction, reverie or contemplation, in which dialectical laws prevail. Conflict or agony (agon) as between the Self and the non-Self or other dichotomous aspects of reality, which is no other than the Absolute, is at the core of tragedy, which gave birth to comedy and romance in turn. The principle of dithyrambos associated with the dancing god Dionysos, also known as "The One of Two Doors" is another secret known to the Greeks whose significance is to be sought through dialectics.

       Similarly, the principle of nemesis in which divinities like Zeus and Hades take sides has to be understood in the light of dialectics. How Chance, Providence or Fate enter into tragedy or romance without violating laws of poetic justice is again a subject for intuition of the contemplative order to explain or resolve. The excesses of revenge or retribution on the one hand, and of Bacchanalian orgiastic elements on the other, both of which are to be found in all classical or romantic drama, have to be fitted into a coherent scheme of infra-human, human, or supra-human life.

       Whether in Kalidasa, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Goethe or Hugo, a subtle dialectics is implied in their bold creations. To miss this essence would be to ignore the best flavour of art altogether and with it what is the most precious part of the wisdom heritage of humanity. The highest role of art, especially in romance or tragedy, is not to "assert eternal Providence, and justify the ways of God to men", as Milton put it. 1 

       Such are some of the random items which indicate broadly the scope and purpose of the present essay.

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SUBJECT AND OBJECT OF THE PRINCIPLE OF MIMESIS

       Both Plato and his great disciple Aristotle conceived of art generally as a form of imitation. With Plato it was a perfect World of the Intelligibles which was the original imitated. Aristotle thought that imitation referred to reality here and now, as implied in existence itself, without rising to the world of ideas. These two positions have first to be reconciled dialectically. Both statements are true when understood in the spirit of dialectics. Whether we say "a mother's son", or conversely, "the son's mother" - we refer to one and the same central relationship. The central verity implied in both propositions is the same as when cause and effect, master and servant, and similar dialectical pairs are unitively understood.

       Mimesis is a double-doored, double-faced or double-edged principle which works both ways. The secret of the dithyrambos, to which we shall come presently, pertains to the same dialectical order. When we read in Hamlet, "The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King"2  we will notice that equal status is given to the objective and the subjective aspects. Art holds up a mirror to life and life can likewise be a mirror to art. The play here and the conscience revealed in the features of the King are to be looked upon as dialectal counterparts which are brought together and equated so as to reveal the Absolute Reality which is neither subjective nor objective.

SECRET OF DITHYRAMB IN TRAGEDY AND ROMANCE

      Aristotle wrote:

"Tragedy as also comedy was at first mere improvisation - the one (tragedy) originated with the leaders of the Dithyramb."3

       Dithyrambos was one of the names of Dionysos who is the Leaper, the Dancer and the Life-Giver. The Dithyramb is the song of the birth of Dionysos sung at the spring festival.

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       The suggestion that this name referred to the double-birth of a twice-born spirit of springtime was well known to the Greeks, but speculation on the etymology of this word is still in progress even in modern times, as is evidenced by the following extract from Ancient Art and Ritual by Dr. Jane Allen Harrison. She writes:

"By a false analogy they explained the word Dithyrambos as meaning "He of the double door". They were quite mistaken;  Dithyrambos, modern philology tells us, is the Divine Leaper, Dancer, and Life-Giver," 4

       To those who are familiar with the dialectical notion of the eternal present, which is ever being born while ever dying, the double-door device attributed to the God Dionysos, as the spirit of Spring or pure Becoming, will not be an enigma as it seems to be to this author. She seems to recognize tacitly the value of the original Greek etymology, however, when she continues in the same paragraph as follows:

"But their false etymology is important to us, because it shows that they believed the Dithyrambos was the twice-born. Dionysos was born, they fabled, once of his mother like all men, once of his father's thigh like no man".
   
       This mythological explanation is in reality only a vul-garized version of the dialectical verity of pure duration, which is known even in modern times to philosophers like Bergson, besides being once known to Parmenides and Zeno in pre-Socratic times.

       In fact the mystery of Dionysos refers to the absolute nature of the essence or substance of Reality which is both a Wonder and a high Value. Those who are familiar with the tandava (Leaper) or the  nataraja  (Dancer) who is Shiva, the Eastern counterpart of the same Dionysos, will have no difficulty in seeing the dialectical verity which this myth represents. Modern philosophically-minded persons who can understand a philosophical statement such as "a Monad has no windows" must have no real difficulty with the two doors of becoming, one opening prospectively and the other opening retrospectively into the domain of eternal pure duration. As in the problem of the one and the many, herein enters a subtle dialectic which refers to a way of wisdom outmoded and gone into disuse. The double-phased secret of the Dithyramb, as applied to tragedy and to romance like Hernani, which are made almost of the same tragic stuff, thus becomes solved in the light of dialectics.

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UNITIVE TREATMENT OF ACTION AND ACTOR

       If the secret of romance and tragedy is to be extracted, and full benefits derived from the lesson, we have to learn to view the actor and the action of the play or romance as brought under one unitive dialectical treatment. The action is not to be under-stood as separate from the actor, or even from the setting in which the actor is put. They can effectively set one another off or belong to subject and object at once. An immobile actor like the hero in Prometheus Bound, as represented by Aeschylus, fulfils the requirements of both actor and action as they are to be understood unitively and together in the sense we mean here. Prof. W.J.Oates, Professor of Classics at Princeton University, utterly misses the significance of this immobility of Prometheus when he writes:

"In the Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus was faced with a difficult problem of dramaturgy since he had to build a play in which his central character could not move in the very literal sense of the word. Consequently the poet found himself considerably limited in scope and was practically forced to eliminate from his play anything which we might call 'action'. Aeschylus solves the problem by introducing several characters who in one way or another set off the central figure" 5

        If we remember that tragedy arose out of the Mysteries of Eleusis, where the action was the death of Dionysos and his arising therefrom, it is not hard to see how Prometheus, as the central figure here, conforms to the same archetypal pattern or type of action which is of the essence of tragedy itself.

       Mobility and immobility are meant to be dialectically juxtaposed in this central figure of Prometheus, who will be unbound in a later drama belonging to the same series.
 
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       The hero and his action here have to be understood against the drama's own background of myth and allegory, which conforms to an interplay of value factors which must be understood in the light of both ascending and descending dialectics. The wrath of Zeus on high and the degradation in which mankind lived without fire, are the dialectical value-counterparts within whose range the agony of Prometheus is masterfully depicted. No overt action, however ingeniously con-ceived, could ever be an effective substitute for this movement of the spirit in its intensity of tragic suffering, which is a form of action in inaction. The apology of the critic for Aeschylus can thus be seen to be quite out of place. Similarly it might be asked what action there is in the tears shed by a banished Sita of Bhavabhuti or in the inner anguish of a Sakuntala in the central scene of Kalidasa's play. Tragedy could consist equally of inner or outer events when art is conceived according to correct dialectical requirements, as it always is in the best instances. The actor's inner anguish could be offset by outer events and vice-versa, bringing action and actor into unitive interplay.

DRAMA AND DRUMENON AS INTERCHANGEABLE TERMS

       The distinction between pure and practical action is a dialectical subtlety which we have to grasp with clarity in regard to drama understood as consisting of overt action with a practical end, and drama meant as an end in itself.  The Greek terms drama, denoting something done, and drumenon, also meaning something done, but in the context of ritual, were both of the same origin.

       The Greeks acted their tragedies round an altar as an offering to Dionysos, who was required to be present himself or to be represented by his high priest at such annual solemn festivals. It was almost obligatory for a respectable Athenian to attend this ritual. This circumstance throws light on the same problem of overt and innate action just mentioned. An Alcestis on the stage who is brought back from the hands of death hardly does any overt act herself, but her innate action in a virtual or potential form is the centre of all active interest. Thus there are two actions: one that could be said to be natural to a Heracles or an Atlas or another titan, and the other that might consist of the silent tears of a suffering hero or heroine. Prometheus himself repre-sents the middle of the scale in which action could only move vertically, as he was rock-fixed between the hypostatic and hierophantic value-worlds.
 
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       His opposition to Zeus is evident when he calls him "the new tyrant of heaven"6  and his interest in the world of mortals here below is expressed through the device of the chorus in the lines addressed to him:

       "Ay, fearing not Zeus, in self-will

       To much thou honourest mortals"7

       Thus, in a vertical scale of action reaching from the world of the Olympian gods to that of mere mortals, is the amplitude within which the agony of Prometheus moves. His action is neither all overt nor merely virtual, but real in a unitive or centrally neutral sense. Bacchus himself, in the later and more mature work of Euripides, as represented by Dionysos, has no action as such. His excellence merely consists of eluding all the effects of action brought against him by the power of Pentheus, who represents in himself horizontal aspects of action. The vertical and horizontal aspects of dramatic action are very cleverly contrasted in The Bacchae of Euripides. The intended contrast may be seen from the examination of a few lines from the drama, when Dionysos finds fault with Pentheus in the following words:

"Come, perverse man, greedy, for sights you should not see, impatient for deeds you should not do" 8

       As against this horizontal aspect of life or action hinted at here, we have Dio nysos describing his own attitude to life when he says, on coming out of the dark dungeon into which Pentheus threw him:

"I alone with effortless ease delivered myself". 9

THE AXES OF REFERENCE

       In the structure of romance and tragedy a tragic hero or two romantic heroes, one a man and other a woman, are to be placed at the very core of the composition. They may be exposed to conflicts as between outer and inner or higher or lower worlds.

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       Horizontal action may develop round them; or the action may be in the purer domain of feelings or passions which trace their course feebly or strongly in time or duration.

       All dramatic structures can be examined with these axes of reference in the mind of the critic, who would then discover the unitive and subtle dialectical pattern which underlies all the great masterpieces of this kind, whether called romantic, lyric, or tragic.  A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hernani or Hamlet may be examined in the light of these axes of reference. That Greek drama was conceived with the same frame of reference would be patent to the keen critic of any time. Vertical worlds of value systems are piled one on the other in works like Goethe's Faust, which imitates Dante's Divine Comedy, from which Milton in his Paradise Lost may have also gained inspiration.

       Serial worlds, mundane or celestial, vertically arranged, with interests of the here and now giving the centre of each such system its proper embellishment in the form of flesh and blood (which latter is the horizontal aspect that should belong to the vertical value at each given level): such is the structure of the great creations of masterminds who in their bold flights of imagination seek to assert Providence and justify the ways of God to man.

       The discussion of examples would take us beyond the legi-timate limits of this essay. Only slight indications can be attempted here.

       Let us take A Midsummer Night's Dream, so popular with the scholastic world. Oberon and Puck are space-minded spirits. They live in a spring or maypole world of colourful luxury, of which Bottom brings up the extremely earthy tail end.

       When Oberon sings, "We the globe can compass soon swifter than the wandering moon". Or when Puck says,  "I'll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes", there is no mistaking the touch of Bacchus and the spring festival they represent. In other words they belong to a horizontal axis of life-values, as apart from more enduring values which have to be related to the vertical axis or pure scale of values within the core of human life.

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       When the horizontal has been thus distinguished, it would be easier to see what values belong to the more mystical or contemplative world which the youthful yet tragic god Dionysos represents in his own person. When re-read in the light of the above remarks, The Bacchae of Euripides would yield much evidence that there are two distinct yet interpenetra-ting value-systems which co-exist in harmony in all great dramatic creations.

THE THREE UNITIES APPLIED TO THE CORE OF DRAMA

       Like the Self, the core of drama is to be determined and correctly fixed by means of three unities, namely those of time, place and action. The ritualistic and idolatrous origin of drama, which we have referred to already, must be responsible for the rigid insistence on these three unities in classical times. At the time of the romantic revolt this was somewhat relaxed and modified but not altogether abandoned. Greater latitude or liberality was allowed to the free-lance knights-errant in the domain of art. It was also the case with reformed religion in Europe...

       In the rules of the Tantra of India we have the same insis-tence on time, place, and ritualistic action, to be focussed together on the one point of an existent or spiritual presence. The Absolute was thus given a local habitation and a name, although it was an airy nothing. Drama was to be the meeting point of the theoretical Absolute as well as the practical one. Like ritual, when correctly applied to the Absolute, art was an end in itself. Its value was both mediate and immediate. Art was a bridge on which the human soul could pass backwards or forwards between the relative and absolute poles of the mystery of the unknown. When not contaminated by mere mercantilism or commercialism, all pure drama must still adhere to this high purpose of interpreting the ways of God to Man.

       Even when there happen to be two heroes, or a hero and a heroine, as in works that were not tragically conceived in the classical sense, but in a more liberalized version, the interest has to be centralized upon both of them enclosed in brackets, unitively as it were, if drama is to fulfil this high role as it did in the hands of the great classical masters.

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        Hugo's hero, Hernani, has Doña Sol, the heroine, as his dialectical counterpart, and the interest is round these two personalities taken together. They are to be looked upon as the obverse and reverse of the same soul. When the midnight hour strikes in the last scene of the last act we find Don Ruy Gomez rising to truly tragic heights representing the Fate or Providence which really stands for the Absolute in the lives of men. The requirements of tragedy, as defined by Aristotle, could be seen to apply equally to this part of Hugo's great creation as to the best examples of Greek tragedy proper.

       The definition reads as follows:

"Tragedy is an imitation of an action of high importance; complete and of a certain amplitude in language, enhanced by distinct and varying beauties; acted, not narrated; by means of pity and fear effecting its purgation of these emotions."

       In the case of Hernani the fear of the inexorable hand of Fate and the pity of two loving souls who drink poison from the hands of each other, to drop dead side by side at the very striking of their nuptial hour, effects the same purgation that touches the high watermark of romance and tragedy at once.

ESSENTIAL COUNTERPARTS OF A TRAGIC SITUATION

       Tragedy, which is of the essence of drama, revolves round a hero of tragic stature. It depends on a subtle dialectical situation in which counterparts of absolute reality of a philosophical or contemplative order enter or interact.

       It requires the prophet, philosopher or poet to discover the crux or essence of the situation involved in true tragedy. The madman  and the lover can also be admitted into this company of raving, loud-voiced, exalted, excited or frenzied personalities who resemble mystics or philosophers and belong to the world of tragedy as characters therein.

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         The tragic hero is the Shiva or the Dionysos principle, which represents human life as understood in toto. The counterparts of such an absolutist character have a polarity, dichotomy, or ambivalence, as between the two reciprocal aspects of the Absolute itself: one of which could be labeled negative and the other positive.

       These counterparts present varying degrees of unity or conflict. Vertically viewed they merge into one another without overtly tragic circumstances developing round them. When viewed horizontally or slanting at an intermediate angle, tragic situations develop according to the degree of deviation from the vertical axis.

       The tragic situation between Othello and Desdemona involves the murder of the latter through a jealousy which attains to an absolute status and takes possession of the whole person of the hero in that play. Alcestis presents quite another picture. Instead of a wife suspected of infidelity there is here a wife willing to die to save the life of her husband. She is brought back to life by the intervention of Heracles who is both a titan and a god at once. He represents Dionysos in a milder form. When two lovers commit suicide because a third factor called Fate intervenes to separate them cruelly in this life, promising unity in the life hereafter, as in the case of Hugo's Hernani, the split or tragic situation consists of the horizontal aspects of life-values only. The bridal bed on which they did not lie implies only a here-and-now value which was frustrated in this tragic romance of dual negation. In Alcestis, however, double assertion is the secret. Her spirit was tuned and dedicated to a higher value grounded in the pure or vertical Absolute. The horizontal expression here is almost nil as dramatic action in the Shakespearean sense. Her touching adieu to her children and her ceremonial preparation of herself are the only expressions depicted. Even these may still be said to lie in the ritualistic, symbolic, perceptual, or purely vertical axis of dramatic movement. In the Bacchae of Euripides the vertical movement is perfectly represented in the role of Dionysos, who may be said to act and not to act and at one the same time throughout the play.

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TRAGEDY AS DRAMATIZATION OF THE MYSTERIES OF ELEUSIS

          The Mysteries of Eleusis touched the culminating point indicated by the saying of Plotinus concerning "the flight of the alone to the Alone." It is as if the dewdrop slipped into the shining sea, to put this secret in its more Eastern context. The phoenix, which gets burnt to rise again alive from the same fire, indicates the same secret as enshrined in the myth or allegory of the Near East. A careful critical scrutiny must be made of the structure of the scheme of values involved in great dramatic compositions and the role played by the various characters, and more especially by the Greek choruses. These are brought into the play, supplying the philosophy of the author himself as the play unravels, in order to make the drama significant and meaningful in the wisdom context. They reveal beyond doubt that the drama in its best instances shares and teaches the high hope of eternal life that distinguishes mankind.

       No drama could afford to miss this aspect. A drama would be inferior to the extent that it glosses over this timeless and climeless reality. Even in a drama like Hugo's Hernani, the double tragedy of the death of the two lovers is not without this idea of resurrection being at least suggested before they die. Doña Sol, still pale and dying while her lover who is also in the throes of death, watches on in pity and sympathy says the following hopeful words:

 "Vers des clartés nouvelles
  Nous allons tout à l'heure ensemble ouvrir nos ailes;
  Partons d'un vol égal vers un monde meilleur".

"Toward new clarities
 We shall be going soon together to open our wings;
 Let us depart in equal flight towards a better world."
  (Act V.)

         The transfiguration, passion, or ascension of Christ strangely conforms to the dialectics understood and implicit in the best examples of Greek tragedy. In fact this was the most precious part of the wisdom of the ancients which left its imprint equally on the pagan or Christian, Jewish or Gentile, literature of the Mediterranean civilization. When Shiva, who may be said to belong to South India, is compared with the absolutist doctrines and artistic creations built round the counterpart of Dionysos, the student is bound to see striking resemblan-ces which establish a common bond between the innermost wisdom teachings of both these cultural growths.
 

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       The nature of the common dialectical secret involved could best be brought out here, without getting ourselves lost in subtle theorisations, by merely quoting the following words put into the mouth of a prophet, as he is referred to in The Bacchae, whose author, Euripides, lived about 480-406 before Christ. Tiresias the prophet addresses the following to his maternal grandson Pentheus who objected to Dionysos and the doings of the Bacchae. The wise man justifies the Bacchae in the following words:

"There are two powers, young man, which are supreme in human affairs: first, the goddess Demeter; she is the Earth, call her by what name you will, and she supplies mankind with solid food. Second, Dionysos, the son of Semele: the blessing he provides is the counterpart to the blessing of bread; he discovered and bestowed on men the service of drink, the juice that streams from the vine clusters - men have but to take their fill of wine and the sufferings of an unhappy race are banished, each day's troubles are forgotten in sleep, indeed this is our only cure for the weariness of life. Dionysos, himself a god, is poured out in offering to the gods, so that through him mankind receives blessing.  " 10

           If we take care here to understand that the wine and the offering of it is to be understood as a symbolic rite rather than as a real act in its modern sense, it would not be difficult to see how this resembles the rite of the Eucharist in Christianity, which was formulated in the same region several centuries later. The grace of God in material form is not unknown in the context of Tantric ritual in India, either. The last sentence (italicized) which refers to the god himself as an offering to the gods, is fully dialectical in its import, to leave which unnoticed would be to miss the whole point of this essay.

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       From the days of Aristotle on, literary criticism has made bold efforts to define and fix the characteristics of romance and tragedy. Much speculative subtlety has been allowed and tolerated. The nature of the tragic hero; what makes for the tragic situation; the action that has tragic grandeur or stature; not to speak of what is often referred to as the true spirit or experience of tragedy; all of these have been profusely dwelt upon by various critics and writers both ancient and modern.

        Having come to the point of recognizing that there is a deep, unitive mystery underlying both romance and tragedy, as understood from the most ancient times, we shall now try to take a closer view in order to bring to light the inner structure and the dialectical interplay of the ambivalent factors involved, and thus see the plan of drama in better relation with human life. The Absolute, understood in all its bearings, whether cosmological or psychological, has to be given a central place in aesthetics if the subject is to be treated as having universally valid norms in a world context free from cultural parochialisms and prejudices.

WISDOM INSPIRED BOTH PHILOSOPHY AND ART

            Art and philosophy had their common source in Wisdom. Kavi (poet) in Sanskrit is synonymous with jnani (wisdom-seer) and in the Greco-Roman context Socrates and Euripides had much common life together. It is said of Socrates that "he seldom went to the theatre, except to see some new of play of Euripides" and H.B.Cotterill (Ancient Greece, p, 358) even suspects Socrates "of having a hand in some of these plays." Aristotle called Euripides the "most tragic of poets."

       The divorce of art from philosophy as also from religion and ritual was a later development: and as we travel down the alleys of time to our own modern age, the estrangement between art and philosophy becomes wider than ever.

       By such compartmentalization both branches have suffered and the central theme of both, the mystery of the Absolute, which both are to unravel, has become more and more forgotten and left behind.

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         Philosophy itself in turn tended to become analytical, and the first bifurcation of its scope took place quite early in the history of thought, when Aristotle had to part company with his teacher Plato on the issue of the world of the intelligibles of the latter and the world of actualities or prime realities of the former. Ascending and descending dialectics, instead of being considered as applying to one and the same central notion of the Absolute, were understood to refer to two distinct realities. The Aristotelian tradition has had a more pronounced influence on later thought. If we therefore look upon Aristotle with a certain respect here in the matter of understanding the unitive secret of drama, we should feel fully justified.

ARISTOTLE'S DEFINITION RE-EXAMINED

         Aristotle's definition, which we have already quoted, contains some significant phrases which should not pass unnoticed. In the first place tragedy is said to imitate some original. According to Plato the original of this imitation is in the world of the Intelligibles. To Aristotle on the other hand the reality imitated is nearer at hand, right here below in the world of humans.

        When we know that the whole zig-zag course of Western philosophy represents the dialectical interplay between the two worlds of these twin yet rival philosophers, it is not hard to see how a central notion of the Absolute has merely to be supplied by us for vestiges of duality to be finally abolished by this unitive non-dual concept wherein the apparent conflict between the theories of the two philosophers could be effectively resolved.

       We simply said that it is the Absolute that art imitates. The second phrase that concerns us in Aristotle's definition is what refers to the subject-matter of Tragedy which should be "of high importance, complete, and of a certain amplitude". What the three epithets are meant to indicate is not clear to a modern reader, but in the mind of Aristotle and in the minds of many of his contemporaries they must have made more meaning than to us, to whom they are but pointers towards some unitive or central value in life which, according to what we have stated, cannot be anything other than what the Absolute represents.

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        The other hints thrown out in Aristotle's Poetics are his remarks: "A thing can be whole and yet lacking in amplitude", and again, referring to the "pattern" of a "fable" that should be given a correct tragic "disclosure", he indicates that it must have a "beginning," a "middle" and an "end." The beginning is to be recognized by the fact that there is no beginning before it and the end by the fact that nothing follows or is to follow naturally by the very nature of the fable. The middle is where the complication is to be located and has to refer to both the others. All these requirements are easily understandable. What makes us suspect, however, that Aristotle had really in his mind a dialectically and not merely an organically conceived pattern for true Tragedy, is brought to light when he stipulates that the "end" has to be the "opposite" of what constitutes the "beginning"

       The third phrase of the definition which is of importance to us is the stipulation that the tragedy should be "acted and not narrated". It is in the Self that action which is overt and action which is innate could exist together in a unitive and therefore living and tragic form, instead of being a second-hand reality of narration. A bound Prometheus can be a representative of such a Self and thus reveal those tragic absolutist traits that give dignity to Mankind.

AMBIVALENT ASPECTS OF THE SOUL OF TRAGEDY

       In Tragedy then, we see our own self with all the possibi-lities and probabilities of natural, legitimate, or just action disclosing itself round it in a form that is full of the breath of life. To write a tragedy in this sense, as the classical sages understood drama at its best, the Self has first to be visualized in its own proper setting, both in dialectical terms and in the context of the Absolute.

       This was the reason why, in the Sanskrit literature of ancient India, nataka (drama) was the ultimate limit of poetic genius as enshrined in the adage natakuntam kavitvam (poet-hood culminates in drama). When a child acts out, say, an accident that he might have witnessed on the road before he has learnt to describe it in the form of a narrative, he is really nearer to the original and greater than a mere narrative poet, attaining to a truer status as a dramatist, for action is a more direct expression of the Self.
 
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        He puts into it something of his inner sense of wonder and identifies himself unconsciously with what he acts. No pseudo-art can find place in such genuine stuff. What he means from inside himself and what the action is meant to imitate in the world of actual happenings meet in the child, who, though helplessly dumb, is eloquent through art, even in spite of his omissions and errors. Dramatic action is the meeting place of overt and inner action. These two classes of action really refer to two ambivalent aspects of the Absolute which meet in the human psyche or self. In drawing the difference between Comedy and Tragedy, Aristotle himself refers to these aspects when he writes of two kinds of characters in drama as follows:

"This is the difference that marks Comedy from Tragedy: Comedy is inclined to imitate persons below the level of the world; Tragedy persons above it".

        Evidently Platonic or hypostatic values are under reference here when Aristotle writes of persons above the level of the world. As with characters, actions may be similarly classified. When we keep in mind the secret of dithyrambos which refers to the central figure of Dionysos, who in turn represents the Absolute Self, as we have already touched upon; and we try to understand this ambivalent principle in the light of other sayings we have cited, such as the one which refers to the "blessing" of Dionysos as the counterpart of the "blessing of bread"; and finally also that other  enigma in which the God Dionysos himself is spoken of as being "poured out in offering to the Gods" - the modern mind, given a little intuitive understanding or imagination, cannot fail to see the mystical doctrine that underlines this kind of allegorical language.

       The Bhagavad Gita puts the paradox involved masterfully when it states that one has to be able to see action in inaction and inaction in action to be called wise among men. Unitively understood in this way, it will be seen that elements of Romance and Tragedy meet and fuse into each other dialectically in any drama worth the name. As J. W. Krutch would put it,

"Tragedy is essentially an expression, not of despair, but of the triumph over despair and of confidence in the value of human life." He adds elsewhere: "All works of art which deserve their name have a happy end… It is a profession of faith and a sort of religion".

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        I. A. Richards in his Principles of Literary Criticism puts his finger on this very point of balancing counterparts in Tragedy when he writes:

"It is the relation between the two sets of impulses, pity and terror, which gives its specific character to Tragedy, and from their relation the peculiar poise of the tragic experience springs." 11

THE COMMON CRITERIA OF BOTH ROMANCE AND TRAGEDY

       The pattern or scheme to which both Romance and Tragedy must conform to make them an elevating, serious, noble or sub-lime work of art, may first be centralized round the personality of Man himself. The divine and the satanic are ambivalent aspects of human nature, with heaven and hell as worlds corres-ponding to each of these poles of life.

       Satan is an immortal with the secret of double negation implicit in the human value he represents. The omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent God or Zeus on high is also immortal, and belongs to the same contemplative context of double assertion. Between them there is a subtle reciprocity of relation as between the Absolute and the Relative. Satan himself could be considered very respectable because he represents the necessary counterpart of the free or contingent aspect of life.

       In the more correct dialectics of pre-Christian thought, Pluto and the Goddess Demeter, together with Persephone, represent the aspect of bread, which is negative or necessary; while the God Zeus brings up the vanguard of free divine values.

      Thoroughgoing pagan dialectics prevailed before the new Gods of Olympus came into vogue, and the central figure here was that of Dionysos, who was known to be the counterpart of bread as a blessing to life. He represented freedom.

       Between the plus and minus poles of contemplative values we have to imagine an axis of graded intermediate values. Jacob's ladder upon which angels went up or down represents this axis in myth.

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       This same myth has been modified in other similar myths of later origin, as for example, in Goethe's Faust where the Powers of Nature ascend and descend and reach to each other golden vessels filled with the waters of life. One who reads Dante or Milton will be able to discern these graded value-worlds described with great minuteness of detail. In Goethe's Faust, a drama which conforms to the required pattern in its structure and amplitude, we have several sub-human and supra-human worlds introduced. Faust again proves that the worst tragedy in a horizontal or outer sense could be the sublimest of happy romances when viewed vertically. The middle of the play is punctuated by the worst of tragic events imaginable, but at the end of the second part of Faust full amends are made in this matter. This is evident in the words of her who on earth was called Gretchen but was glorified above as Marguerite:

"0 Mary, hear me!
 From realms supernal
 Of light eternal
 Incline thy countenance upon my bliss!
 My loved, my lover,
 His trials over
 In yonder world returns to me in this."
 (Translation by H.B. Cotterill)

A COMMON STRUCTURAL SCHEME FOR ROMANCE AND TRAGEDY

       A central Self or Soul caught between heaven and earth is pictured in both Romance and Tragedy. The dominant note of both is the supreme bliss of happiness when the Soul or Self is able to transcend horizontal forces that intervene disastrously in the middle of the play.

       If we take the case of Othello, we see him a changed man after he becomes aware of the innocence of Desdemona. He is no more a murderer. His heroism as a soldier was interrupted by suspicion, but he soon caught up with his own nature and rose to tragic stature. His tragic exaltation gives him a new status, although the end aspect of the pattern of the play has been made very abrupt.

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       The hero transcends pleasure and pain and attains a degree of exalted bliss that has an absolute chara-cter when playing on the words "kiss" and "kill', as if they were interchangeable terms. He stabs himself saying: "Killing myself, I die upon a kiss" 12

       In the case of Alcestis, as we have already seen, the vertical and horizontal aspects of the structure of the play are perfectly and symmetrically conceived. Coming back to life is the core of vertical action, and dying to make King Admetus, her consort, the most unhappy of men, belongs to the dualistic context of the horizontal amplitude of the play. The dualistic and unitive attitudes are juxtaposed cleverly by Euripides himself when he makes Admetus say: "Those who are about to die are dead, and the dead are nothing", to which Herakles replies in a unitive spirit, "Men hold that to be and not to be are different things."13

       In Hernani the double suicide marks the dualism of the horizontal; and the vertical amplitude is merely suggested to the imagination of the reader or spectator. Elements of the vertical amplitude are present in the character of Doña Sol, as it were below the level of the world, and in the adventurous Hernani above. The flight of the two souls together, if it had also been acted out, would have given the play a more complete structure and revealed the truly tragic heights which, as it is, are merely implicit rather than explicit. The words, "Let us depart in equal flight towards a better world" are perhaps the only ones which refer to the positive aspects of the vertical amplitude. Making allowances for differences of structure of this kind, we can therefore see how both Romance and Tragedy conform to the same basic pattern.

       If we take the case of Kalidasa's Sakuntala, the structure reveals the same scheme of value references. Although she occupies the centre of the play like Alcestis, Sakuntala scarcely speaks and the action consists mostly of the wrong done to her rather than of anything she does herself. The element of wonder is brought in by a heavenly voice and she finally rises into the higher world merely by her truthfulness to her own pure nature.

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NEMESIS AND KATHARSIS UNITIVELY UNDERSTOOD

       When the structure of a play, whether romance or tragedy, is understood as having a beginning, a middle, and an end; and if we should also grant that the end has to have an opposite character to the beginning - then it is easy to concede that the middle is the seat of the complication or conflict. When the conflict has an amplitude which lies along the horizontal axis, we have the tragic phenomenon known as nemesis. When this is transcended through sublimation into a higher state of mind and the central hero, twin spirits, or heroine, as the case may be, avails of the sweet uses of adversity, we have the phenomenon known as katharsis. By the rapport between the onlooker and the actor, katharsis works as a purifying influence on both. If the doctrine of vicarious suffering is to have any sense at all, it is in this way.

       Affiliated to the context of wisdom, man is capable of transcending horizontal and mutually exclusive conflicts by a unitive and absolutist attitude whereby he feels happy at a higher level and thus solves even the worst problems that life can present. He outlives pain by transcending the worst outer or mechanistic circumstances. He lives in the golden mean of the middle way where the four different aspects of reality cancel themselves out into a neutrality which belongs to the Absolute.

       These four aspects of reality are: (1) the virtual and (2} the actual of the horizontal axis, (3) the negative and (4) the positive of the vertical axis, in the scheme of the Absolute viewed as the supreme cosmological and psychological Person, both subjecti-vely and objectively. These terms have to be placed in their proper philosophical perspective to be grasped. Aesthetics has to be treated as part and parcel of a unitive and absolutist view of life. We shall not dare to enter into this task here, but content ourselves in the remaining portion of this essay with trying to distinguish the limbs or component parts of the structure of drama, so as to justify and exemplify the generalisations we have made in the course of our discussion.

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THE VERTICAL SERIES OF WORLDS IN HEROIC POETRY

        The highest role of poetry is where it fulfils the requirements of pure morality and religion, and culminates in revealing Man and the World of Man in the light of supreme wisdom. Man is haunted by strange anxieties and fears. Despair and hope alternate in him minute after minute and stage after stage in life.  Doubts are of all grades and are his worst enemies. Man seeks with all his heart, whether consciously or unconciously, to know the Beyond and how he has to attune himself with that great Beyond which is the Absolute in himself. The great epics of all peoples and civilizations have given broad hints in this matter. The lasting popular interest in such works as those of a Homer, a Valmiki or a Vyasa are meant to feed and satisfy the eternal craving for wisdom in the heart of humanity. Here again it is around personalities called heroes who have some absolutist trait, that the grand poems unravel in heroic metres the story concerning some heroic episode.

       Great men and women with this stature, which is no other than that of the tragic character, are capable equally of great mistakes and of great acts of nobility or bravery, and are presented in their proper living settings in epics so as to enable the reader to place his own self or the soul or the personality of Man similarly within its proper setting. Freedom and necessity regulate their movements and actions from two opposing poles. Their struggles represent the normal and natural agony of the human spirit. Dante, Milton and Goethe have kept alive this tradition in literature and made their striking immortal contributions. Tennyson and others have written similar poetry of lasting appeal to the popular mind.

       In every case a careful reader will be able to distinguish a vertical and a horizontal scale of values involved. There is an ascent and a descent, if not in cosmological terms, then implied in psychological terms. Gods and men and the subhuman world come into dialectical interplay. Romance and Tragedy could be said to belong to the same context as heroic poetry, implying the same conflicts or trials of heroes. In Romance and Tragedy the conflict is only brought into greater relief and amplified, the drama as a whole being built round the central conflict.

52

THE STRUCTURE OF GOETHE'S FAUST

          In Goethe's Faust, which has the structure of an epic as well as a tragedy, the various graded worlds of value begin with the lowest level, described by Faust himself as a "scene of swinish bestiality" where brawling and tipsy students drink and make merry in Auerbach's Cellar.

       Next in the scale is the Witch's Kitchen which is meant to be sub-human and out of the actual world. It is a kind of under-world where Mephistopheles feels quite at home and in good company among the Meerkatzer - queer male and female ape-forms - sitting stirring a witch's cauldron. Faust finds this world more disgusting than the one before. When the cauldron boils over with a hocus pocus of incantations, the witch, who comes down the chimney from the flames