Politics continued
(FromSri Kesava Iyengar’s introduction to his own “Thiruppaadukamaalai)
Politics has become the game of Letting Ioose animality on humanity. The game has In recent years developed into a contagious disease and has taken an epidemic form. Many are the individuals and states that have already fallen victims to it. The survivors have. however, in a sense of false, perhaps dubious, security taken to building air-castles. It does not seem unlikely that they will soon be engaged in pumping out the air and in that engagement pumping themselves out of their own castles. The phenomenon is but the truth of history repeating Itself, That history is the history of the nemesis of cuius est regio eius est religio. To trace that history one has perhaps to go back to pre historic days. The Danava emperor (42) was, the founder and the first pontifex rnaximus of that religion -the imperialistic religion of geo-ethnic theocracy. He incorporated the entire ge in Danava ethnos and founded his universal empire in that incorporation. That was his constitution and his law was the law of that constitution. Vedanta (Philosophy) was repugnant to that Yaw and he therefore repealed philosophy in the omnicompetence of his Legislative rage. He not merely put his Iaw on the statute book, which to him in his practical clarity was a mere euphemism for the dust-heap of the legislative chamber, but expanded all his imperialistic energy on the propagation of that law. He took particular care not to Ieave in doubt the import of the all- important word “cuius” in that statute. He declared that 'cuius' means ‘Danava's’. He being the primate of all Danavas and therefore of the regio, the religio was, as It must be, his. None else could poach upon his preserves, That the regio was his was to him a fact, an ethnic fact, from which flowed in law the conse- quence of his religio- the political religion of group-egoism, and geo- ethnic imperialism Ex facto oritur jus (from fact arises law). Good Logic and good law. He was so much convinced that there was no fault in that logic and no flaw In that law, that he convinced himself of the infallibility of his own political judgment and in that infallibility he effected the repeal of ''philosophy” and enacted his “theocracy” into a Universal religion. That was his rule of law and that law was to him immutable. He thought that his security was established in the immutability of the law which he enacted. But alas ! it proved to be, not a· law but an explosive, which in its explosion consumed its very discoverer. All later history is but the history of the recrudescence of that prehistoric explosion. Suffice it to mention only one such recrudescence. It was in the year 529 A. D. during the historic reign of the ' Roman" emperor, Justinian. It was the fitting culmination of the process of conflict and disintegration which had already begun centuries before with the capture of Alexandria by the Romans and which functioned in that process to such completeness as to result In the words of Vinogradoff in "the Romanization of the provinces and the barbarization of Rome''. To the imperialistic genius of the Roman, law and engineering alone appealed. They alone had a value to him. All else, and particularly philosophy, were wholly barren and worthless. The emperor therefore codified law and crucified philosophy. He had all schools of philosophy closed in 529 A. D. and Ieft Europe to darkness and to ‘Iaw'. The great plague of Europe followed soon after. The plague was undoubtedly post hoc. Whether, however, it was propter hoc Iet discerning students of history judge for themselves. The imperialistic could only close the colleges of philosophy, but he could not close the communion of philosophers. The philosophers migrated to the east leaving the west to its law and darkness. Ex oriente lux,ex occidente lex! (From the east light, from the west law!) The philosophers of the west came into communion with the philosophers of the east and the result of that communion was the restoration to the west by east after a lapse of nearly a thousand years of its light of philosophy in integrum. What a magnificent restitutio in integrum! Aristotle was preserved and commented upon by Averroes. That commentary in Latin translation became the second Bible of St.Thomas Aquinas. The service rendered to the cause of human culture by the Jewish philosophers, who were at once great thinkers and translators of great thought by their translations into Latin was unique. It was the very triumph of cultural fellowship over geo-ethnic obscurantism. That fellowship was a union and a republic of philosophy. It was a union in cordiality of the philosophic culture of the “Pagan” Aristotle, the “Moslem” Averroes, the “Jewish” Maimonides, and the “Dominican” St.Thomas aquinas. What a luminous galaxy, what an illuminating society, of noble souls! And yet man has taken to preaching and propagating the creed of darkness – the one darkness of barrack-burial, in the smoking bigotry of his geo-ethnic theocracy.
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42.: Hiranyakasipu: The above is an interpretation of the allegory. The
story is an elucidation of the supremacy of universal oneness over
individual and group egoism. It is an elucidation of the apparent
paradox that the ethical process though born of the ‘cosmic’ process
is at enmity with its parent. It is an elucidation of the Upanishadic “Neti
Neti”.
