Modern Historical Consciousness: Its Cause and Cure

Ravindra Svarupa dasa


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The following is a lecture delivered by His Holiness Ravindra Svarupa dasa 
during the Second European Communications Seminar at the German 
Nava-Jiyada-Nrsimha-Ksetra farm in January, 1992. In this talk, Ravindra 
Svarupa dasa endeavors to help devotees understand a certain mentality they 
encounter when dealing with modern intellectuals and academics, a mentality he 
calls "modern historical consciousness." He shows how this historical 
consciousness arose out of the breakdown of the world view that dominated 
Europe from the 2nd century AD until the 18th century. That world view has 
striking similarities to the Vedic world picture that ISKCON devotees have 
learned from the Gaudiya Vaisnava tradition. Ravindra Svarupa dasa suggests 
that in preaching Krishna consciousness we are not introducing something new 
in Western thought; rather we are bringing back to Western thought something 
it has lost.

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Part I: The Great Chain


Our subject is modern historical consciousness, its causes and cure. The 
mentality I call "historical consciousness" stands as one of the pillars of 
the modern outlook. Historical consciousness is the disposition to perceive 
every human and natural phenomenon as something given birth and form by the 
actions of historical forces; indeed, such phenomena are viewed as essentially 
temporal, as constituted by a process that is articulated in developmental and 
evolutionary terms. This sort of thinking is second nature to modern people. 
They seek to understand things in the world by delving in their pasts, by 
learning how they got that way over the course of time, how they grew and 
developed historically. The systematic application of such historical 
consciousness is the common ground of the three great patriarchs of the modern 
world, Darwin, Marx, and Freud, who propounded theories of historical 
development to explain the natural world, human society, and the individual 
human psyche respectively. While people may disagree about one such theory or 
another, they do not question the historical outlook itself, and are apt to 
assume that it is the natural and self-evident way of looking at humankind and 
the world. Yet as we shall see, historical consciousness has emerged only 
fairly recently in European history. In other words, historical consciousness 
is itself an historical phenomenon, as my subtitle ("Its Cause and Cure") 
suggests. "Cause" implies that it has a origin, and whatever has a beginning 
will also have an end, and indeed the word "cure" in my title suggests that it 
ought to have an end. 

Thus, I shall be presenting an historical account of historical consciousness 
itself. It may be objected that in so doing I participate quite lavishly in 
historical consciousness myself, even as I advocate its demise. This is true; 
but it does not make my enterprise contradictory or hypocritical. As a modern 
thinker, my mind has been thoroughly steeped--even pickled--in "modern 
historical consciousness." I recognize that this inherited mentality is 
"un-Vedic." Having now engaged myself in the practices of Krishna 
consciousness, I could just wait for it to go away, along with other forms of 
acquired material conditioning. However, one discovers that when modern 
historical consciousness comes under the sustained scrutiny of its own 
gaze--when historical consciousness is examined historically--we discover some 
things about it that help us free ourselves from its grasp. Srila Prabhupada 
compares such a procedure to felling a tree with an ax whose handle is 
fashioned from the tree's own limb.

It is important to recognize that this particular way of viewing the world has 
a history. It began developing in Europe during the last half of the 18th 
century, reached full flower in the 19th century, and of course continues 
largely unabated today. Yet modern thinkers who see the historicity of 
everything tend to overlook the historicity of their own historical 
consciousness. They don't recognize it as contingent, relative, peculiar, and 
subject to destruction--even self-destruction--in the course of time.

Modern historical consciousness arose as the chief expression of a vast shift 
in consciousness that took place in Europe beginning in the 18th century and 
attaining full bloom in the 19th. To understand the particular form it took, 
we have to look first at the standard world view that had dominated European 
thought from the beginning of Christian times until about the 18th century. 
The central conception in this world view is summarized in the expression "the 
great chain of being." The history of this important idea was investigated by 
an American philosopher named Arthur O. Lovejoy. He published his work under 
the title The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea 
(Cambridge: Harvard University, 1936; paperback reprint, New York: Harper 
Torchbooks, 1960); the book originated as a series of lectures delivered at 
Harvard University in 1933. Lovejoy's impressive study established him as 
pioneer in the field called "history of ideas" and at the same time 
established history of ideas as a recognized academic discipline, an event 
that in itself was a benchmark in the advancement of modern historical 
consciousness.

Lovejoy traces the idea of the great chain of being back to its entrance into 
Western culture through Plato, especially in the famous fifth and sixth books 
of The Republic. The idea of the chain of being is connected intimately with 
the concept of what we will call here the Absolute Truth, that is, the 
self-existent ultimate source of all there is. This conception is clearly 
articulated, for example, in Plato's dialogue on cosmology named the Timaeus.

Although Plato suggests that direct spiritual experience lies at the 
foundation of his doctrine of the Absolute Truth, philosophically he arrives 
at his conception of the Absolute Truth through a sustained process of 
abstraction, rising gradually from the concrete individuals of sense 
experience, through the realm of the "forms" or "ideas," to the Absolute Truth 
itself.

Many people are vaguely acquainted with the Platonic idea that there's a 
higher unchanging realm, a realm of "ideas" or of ideal "forms"--the Greek 
word translated into English as "idea" or "form" is "eidon." When you mention 
"Platonic form" to an ISKCON devotee, he or she usually thinks you mean 
"rupa," thinking the "realm of ideal forms" to be something like Goloka 
Vrindavana, with its varieties of individuals--most of them bearing proper 
names--in different sorts of spiritual forms or bodies. This comparison is 
quite erroneous. In Plato's realm of "forms" dwell no individuals but rather a 
collection of abstract essences, each of which corresponds to a class name. 
There are no animals, humans or cows, but there is a a single "form" for 
"animal," a "form" for "cow," a "form" for "human being," and so on. In other 
words, when you have the word "cow," there's some objective essence of 
"cowness" that corresponds to that word. All those individual entities denoted 
by the word "cow" must share something in common, an essence. In Plato's 
notion, this essence has an eternal existence independent from all particular 
cows. Cows may come and go, but "go-tva," cowness, the "form" of cow, remains. 
It is found with other such abstract essences in a higher realm of "ideas." 
The philosophical doctrine, by the way, that the essences or the referents of 
class names objectively exist outside the mind in some fashion or another is 
called "realism"; the opposite doctrine is "nominalism."

There is some truth to Plato's realism. As I have mentioned, the param padam, 
the transcendent realm of Vaikuntha, hardly resembles Plato's realm of the 
ideas. Yet the realm of the forms does seem to correspond closely to something 
the Vedic traditions regard as existent, and that is the Vedas themselves. 

The Vedas are eternal, it is said, while the material world is temporary. How 
is that possible, it may be asked, when the Vedas contain the names of 
temporary entities in them, like "Indra," "Candra," and so on, all of whom are 
destroyed during the dissolution. The answer is that the names of the 
demigods, as well as other names like "tree", "cow" and so on in the Vedas, 
are names of types or rather archetypes, which are instantiated in concrete 
particulars whenever there is a creation. The Vedas, then, contain the 
blueprints and assembly instructions as well, for all the creation in the 
material world. Brahma, the created creator, becomes impregnated with the 
Vedas (veda-garbha), and so inspired, brings into manifestation the material 
world. Interestingly, the Timaeus of Plato also posits a creator god--called a 
demiurgos in Greek--who has a vision of the Absolute Truth and of the forms, 
and is thus able to instantiate those forms in pre-existing matter, thus 
imposing order on chaos. Of course, Lord Brahma, the creator deity, similarly 
has a direct vision of Vaikuntha according to the Bhagavatam, and of Goloka 
Vrindavana, according to the Brahma-samhita, but Plato gives no indication of 
any knowledge of a realm of transcendental variegatedness. The Absolute Truth 
is described in impersonal terms. The Platonic realm of ideal forms, which is 
subordinate to that Truth, does not therefore, as some devotees have claimed, 
correspond to the spiritual world. However, it does seem to correspond closely 
to the Vedas. It is also possible to find a correspondence between the 
Platonic forms and the creative potentiality latent in the brahmajyoti. We 
know from the Vedas that the brahmajyoti contains the bija, the seeds, for all 
the species in the world, and that Brahma creates by making the various seeds 
manifest. The bija seems to be like a Platonic form, at least as these forms 
are understood in later Neoplatonism, where they are thought to possess a 
creative potency.

By a process of abstraction, then, Plato arrives at the idea of a realm 
containing a multiplicity of ideal forms or separated, abstract essences. He 
carries his speculative ascent still further and concludes that all these 
forms must have a single, ultimate source, which is the Form of the forms 
themselves. Each individual cow, say, is a cow by virtue of its participating 
in the form of "cow." In the same way, each form is a form by virtue of its 
participating in the Form of forms. In this way the process of abstraction is 
carried one final step further to the Form of all the forms, the essence of 
all the essences. Plato called this the Form of the Good. In fact, three 
different names are given this ultimate source--the Good, the True, and the 
Beautiful. You may notice that this triple characterization corresponds fairly 
closely with the Vedic characterization of Brahman as sat (the Good), cit (the 
True), and ananda (the Beautiful.) The Form of the Good is thus extremely 
abstract. The source of everything, it can be defined only by negation; it is 
completely ineffable, or inexpressible in words. Thus we discover, at the apex 
of Plato's ontology--and at the root of much of subsequent European 
theological thought--a fairly standard version of the well-known impersonal 
Absolute.

The Form of the Good is perfect, self-sufficient, self-contained, and needs 
nothing other than itself. Yet this self-sufficient Absolute boils over, as it 
were, effervesces, and out of the immutable One devolves the world of changing 
things. Here's a single entity, without name, form, diversity, multiplicity of 
any sort, and then out of it wells, in a falling away from perfection, a 
multiplicity--initially a multiplicity of abstract essences, the realm of the 
forms. Those forms then engender a further multiplicity and instantiate 
themselves into a gross material world of concrete individuals. Lovejoy points 
out that two contrary tendencies are fused in the Platonic idea of the 
Absolute. On the one side, there is an "other-worldliness" which produces the 
idea of a remote, detached, self-contained, self-sufficient Absolute in no 
need of any other creature, any other thing, indeed of any world at all. On 
the other side, there is the idea of an Absolute that needs to create, to 
express itself, to bubble over with joy or zest, to become many. In the 
Platonic scheme, the impersonal Absolute cannot of course at some point make a 
free decision to create; rather, the world flows from it out of its own 
necessity.

Lovejoy clearly detects a contradiction in Plato's articulation of the 
impersonal Absolute. In all consistency, there should be no creation at all. 
The fact is that creation, emanation, entails a personal Absolute, a being 
which completes itself, attains self-fulfillment, in relationships with 
others. So the linking of a world, a creation, with an impersonal absolute 
just won't do, as Sankaracarya realized. Sankara is more single-minded and 
consistent than Plato in following out the implications of the "other 
worldliness" that produces the conception of the impersonal Absolute. He holds 
that Brahman does not produce a world. It has no energies. It is one without a 
second. The world is false, an illusory superimposition on the Absolute, and 
not an emanation from it. But that's another story. 

In Hellenistic times an influential Neoplatonic school of thought arose. In 
its hands the Platonic conception of the Absolute and its emanations underwent 
further development and dissemination. From there it entered decisively into 
mainstream Christian thought through two theologians. One is St. Augustine, 
who before his conversion was greatly influenced by the writing of Plotinus, 
the great pagan Neoplatonist. The other is a mystical theologian who wrote 
under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. This name originally appears in 
the Acts of the Apostle as that of the convert St. Paul made while preaching 
in Athens at the Hills of Mars, Areopagus. Sometime around the 6th century AD, 
a collection of four treatises of mystical theology, deeply Neoplatonic in 
character, surfaced in Europe under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. 
Christian authorities accepted them as the works of the direct disciple of St. 
Paul, and hence as highly authoritative. Not until the 17th century did 
scholars begin to look at them critically and agree that the language and the 
ideas indicate a much later date of origin. It's now thought that these 
writing were the product of a monk of the 5th century, probably from Syria. 
The author of these works is now referred to as "pseudo-Dionysius the 
Areopagite." 

These writings of pseudo-Dionysius had an immense prestige, and they are 
through-and-through Neoplatonic. They are notable for a radical theology of 
negation and for the elaborate articulation of the idea of hierarchy. The word 
"hierarchy" comes from two Greek words: "hieros," which means "holy," and 
"arche," which means "order." Hierarchy is "sacred" or "holy order." The 
structure of being is hierarchical, a divine order, with God as its origin and 
cause. From the Absolute the rest of reality proceeds in the form of ordered, 
graded steps falling away from the One, each step further from the origin 
bringing a unit decrease in being or power. At the top, is the One--the 
ultimate perfection, the most perfect being. Then you move down, through all 
gradations of being, to chaos at the bottom. A good theologian will conclude 
that the span from the bottom level to the beginning of the hierarchy is 
infinite. 

According to The Heavenly Hierarchy of Dionysius, God was followed first of 
all by the angelic hierarchies. There are nine tiers of angels in descending 
rank: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Powers, 
Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. Medieval Christians took angels very 
seriously. Each rank of angels was thought to be responsible for running a 
corresponding level of the material cosmos further down. The cosmos is also 
hierarchical in structure, a descending series of spheres centered on the 
fixed earth. The outer edge was what Aristotle called the primum mobile, which 
imparted motion to the spheres below. The primum mobile is followed by the 
fixed stars, then Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. 
Dionysius also finds a correspondence between the angelic and celestial 
hierarchies, and the ecclesiastical hierarchy here on earth. In this way 
hierarchy is the principle of ordering reality. Everything has its proper 
place within the whole. Those entities higher up the ladder, closer to God, 
partake more of the divine nature--have more perfection--than those below. Yet 
everything is perfect in its own place.

During the Middle Ages and beyond, European thinkers worked out the 
implications of the idea of the great chain of being. One of the more 
consequential implications is the idea that there could be no gaps, no missing 
forms, in the hierarchical ladder of creation. This "principle of plenitude" 
as it was called, is implied by the idea that the production of the world out 
of the absolute proceeds by necessity and not by arbitrary, capricious decree. 
The One produces the forms of the material world of its own necessity. If that 
is so, then which particular forms does it produce? There can be only one 
answer: All possible forms. If some possible forms were absent, then there 
would have been a logically arbitrary, irrational act; but the Absolute is, 
above all things, logical and rational. Hence: the principle of plenitude. 
There are no gaps in creation. The creation displays all possible forms, 
organized in minute gradations.

Created reality thus exhibits a lavish profusion of forms organized into a 
unified, rational order of being, a single overarching hierarchy. The 
hierarchical order of the whole is in turn mirrored within each of its 
sub-divisions. Each category of beings neatly reflects the order of the whole. 
There are thus hierarchies nested within hierarchies. As God is supreme among 
all beings, so the king is supreme among men, and the lion among animals, the 
eagle among birds, the dolphin among aquatics, gold among minerals, ether 
among elements. Thus the magnificent, awesome order of creation, in which the 
same clear stamp of divine handiwork exhibits itself anywhere one can look, 
opens itself up to the contemplative mind, which received a great deal of 
satisfaction in meditating on the fullness, the rationality, the sublime 
harmony, the magnificence of this divine production.

Much of this hierarchical vision sounds familiar to us because it is indeed 
very similar to what we have learned from Vedic tradition.

This conception of a great chain of being decisively shaped the world view of 
European people all the way from around the second century AD up until the 
18th century. Everybody believed it implicitly or explicitly. You may find a 
convenient capsule description of this world view in a small book entitled The 
Elizabethan World Picture, by the Cambridge don E.M.W. Tillyard (Vintage 
Books: New York, n.d.). This work has been used in English literature courses 
for a half a century to help modern people understand writers like 
Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne and John Milton. However, the 
world picture described by Tillyard was not solely Elizabethan--as we have 
seen, it went back into the Middle Ages and late antiquity, and persisted 
onwards until the Enlightenment. Thus we should understand that the eventual 
collapse of this world picture, the destruction of the great chain of being--a 
destruction which was part and parcel of what Frederick Nietzsche described 
(after the fact) as the "murder of God"--was an immense and revolutionary 
change in consciousness. That change was so profound that modern Westerners 
now have to approach their own not-so-distant past as something completely 
foreign and strange. It is also interesting that the worldview we devotees are 
learning from our Gaudiya Vaisnava tradition, imported recently into the West 
from far-off, exotic, alien India, should so profoundly resemble the main 
features of a lost view that dominated the West for so long. As a result, much 
in Shakespeare's plays, say, would make immediate intuitive sense to a 
contemporary ISKCON devotee, schooled in Srimad Bhagavatam, whereas a 
contemporary modernist has to go through a special study in the history of 
ideas, an exercise in intellectual archeology, to reconstruct what Shakespeare 
is about. Shakespeare's world is much more our "Vaisnava" world than the world 
of modern Westerners.

One of the most elegant and concise descriptions of the great chain of being 
comes late, in the eighteenth century. We find these lines in Alexander Pope's 
poem called Essay on Man:

Vast chain of being! which from God began, 
Natures aethereal, human, angel, man,
Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see [that is, microscopic],
No glass can reach, from Infinite to thee [that is, a human being],
From thee to nothing.

In our modern era of rapid turnover in ideas and ideologies, the sheer 
persistence of the idea of the great chain over the centuries may seem 
astonishing. For example, if we go back some thirteen centuries from Pope, we 
find this influential depiction of the concept written in the early fifth 
century by Macrobius--(who, in turn, is really only presenting a condensed 
version of Plotinus's doctrines):

"Since, from the Supreme God Mind arises and from Mind, Soul [these are 
Neoplatonic ideas], and since this in turn creates all subsequent things and 
fills them all with life, and since the single radiance illuminates all and is 
reflected in each [the "single radiance" is the Original Being] as a single 
face might be reflected in many mirrors placed in a series; and since all 
things follow in continuous succession, degenerating in sequence to the very 
bottom of the series, the attentive observer will discover a connection of 
parts from the Supreme God down to the last dregs of things, mutually linked 
together and without a break. And this is Homer's golden chain, which God, he 
says, bade hang down from heaven to earth." [There's a story in Homer in which 
Jupiter lets down a golden chain--this is the origin of the the chain 
metaphor.]

Of course, the idea underwent a great deal of development and modification 
over the centuries. Thinkers worked out various implications of the idea 
(e.g., the principles of plenitude), and wrestled with some inherent 
contradictions. For example, Christian thinkers who tried to cement the 
Christian revelation of a personal creator onto this Neoplatonic concept of an 
impersonal emanation met with mixed success, as you can imagine. In orthodox 
Christian thought, creation has to be an act of free will, yet whenever 
theologians tried to think about creation, this idea of God inherited from 
Plato and Plotinus was always in their mind, a God whose creation was an 
emanation out of necessity. Lovejoy is quite good at exploring this conflict. 

I want to mention now one difficulty with this notion of the great chain in 
its European context that Lovejoy does not deal with. Part of the idea of the 
chain from its Platonic and Neoplatonic origins was that even as the chain is 
a structure descending from God, it also serves at the same time as one going 
back to God, a ladder of ascent. It formed the path of the ascent of the soul 
to God. In the Christian context, this path of ascent could be followed only 
in contemplation, as the mind rose step by step to the summit. However, in the 
original Platonic and Neoplatonic context, the chain was not only a path for 
contemplation, but also it was the path of the ascent of the soul through the 
process of transmigration. 

Christian thinkers retained the idea of the chain as a path leading up to God, 
but the Church rejected the allied doctrine of transmigration of the soul. One 
of the consequences of this rejection was eventually an increasing sense of 
stasis, of frustration. The possibility of evolving up the chain through one's 
improved karma is absent--you are stuck where you are. The hierarchies of 
human society are, after all, seamlessly part of the cosmic universal 
hierarchy. Gradually, then, the whole system began to seem enormously 
oppressive to many people. The idea of transmigration having been ruled out, 
individual progress within the world system was ruled out. The concept of the 
great chain naturally supported a thoroughgoing social and political 
conservatism; the perfection for each person consisted in conforming to the 
requirements of his own place, and not in striving to rise to another's (this 
idea is also found in Bhagavad-gita). Yet people still need some sort of hope 
for betterment, some prospect for progress. The loss of the notion of 
transmigration, once an integral part of the idea of the chain, turned the 
social conservatism of the hierarchy into oppression, and when common people 
in frustration sought to overthrow kings and nobles in order to advance 
themselves, they brought down around them, as it were, the whole cosmos.

The chain collapsed. This event was part and parcel of the disappearance of 
the Absolute Truth, the God of Parmenides, and Plato, and Plotinus, the root 
of existence as a coherent divinely ordered structure. On their deepest level, 
Shakespeare's great tragedies, King Lear, Hamlet, and Othello are about this 
collapse. In them the protagonists face the uttermost dire consequences when 
people transgress the proper actions of their ordained place in the divine 
scheme. That is why Othello therefore says, of his chaste wife: "When I love 
thee not, chaos is come again." And the villain Iago expresses explicit 
disbelief in the idea that any of us have ordained natures or essences and 
proclaims that it is only in our wills that we are what we are. Edmund the 
Bastard, the villain in King Lear, has a new vision of nature, a nature not of 
order and harmony but of strife and struggle, a nature whose gods will "now 
stand up for bastards!" Shakespeare's villains all speak modern philosophy.

The foundations were shaking in Shakespeare's time, and he felt it deeply; his 
heroes peered into the abyss. 

Lovejoy tells us something quite interesting about the collapse. It had a 
structure. The result was not simply chaos. If the chain can be imagined as a 
rigid ladder, when it lost its transcendental mooring in the divine, it did 
not crumble into a disordered heap but rather fell over, as it were, onto its 
side. Retaining its sequential hierarchical structure, the chain became 
temporalized; its axis was no longer the vertical, ontological axis from chaos 
to God, but a horizontal, temporal axis from the primitive chaos of the past, 
to the present human development, to the future progression toward greater and 
greater perfection. This transposition of the axis of the chain of being to 
the temporal dimension is the origin of modern historical consciousness.

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The following in the second part of a lecture delivered by Ravindra Svarupa 
dasa during the Second European Communications Seminar at the German 
Nava-Jiyada-Nrsimha-Ksetra farm in January, 1992. In the first part (published 
in ICJ, no. 2, July-December, 1993), Ravindra Svarupa dasa outlined the 
history and content of the idea of the "Great Chain of Being," a paradigm of 
reality that ruled European thought from the 2nd Century AD until the 18th 
Century. The author bases his description largely on the great work of Arthur 
O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea. In 
this part, Ravindra Svarupa dasa describes how "modern historical 
consciousness" arose out of the temporalization of the Chain. By doing this, 
he tries to give devotees an understanding of what is at stake in the 
difference in outlook between ISKCON devotees and modern academicians. 
Finally, he tries to give some remedial measures to bring about the "cure" of 
modern historical consciousness, as it affects both ourselves and the world.

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Part II: The Breaking of the Chain


Modern historical consciousness originates with the toppling of the Great 
Chain of Being. Although Lovejoy does not bring the reflections of Friedrich 
Nietzsche into his examination of that event, in my view the breaking down of 
the Chain should be recognized as part and parcel of the event that Nietzsche 
called "death of God"--and even "the murder of God." Nietzsche understood the 
word "God" to mean precisely the concept of God we have been discussing, the 
philosophical concept expropriated by Christianity from Plato and Plotinus. 
This is God understood not simply as the controller but as the Absolute Truth, 
the anchor of the entire order of being, a God from whom and on whom depends 
the entire hierarchy of creation. The "death of God" would naturally include 
the destruction of the entire cosmic order.

Of course we can only reject the utterly absurd notion of the Absolute Truth 
"dying." Yet Nietzsche's proclamation is true if we recognize it as an 
acknowledgement of a momentous event in European cultural history. That event 
was not as recent as Nietzsche seems to have thought. Yet Nietzsche was right 
in seeing that people did not allow themselves to be fully conscious of what 
they had done--that is, murdered God; they still could not comprehend that the 
churches in which they dutifully worshiped were now God's tombs. Nor did they 
have the courage to face the possibilities opened to them by their deicide. In 
short, they were unworthy of their crime (See Froehliche Wissenschaft, 
aphorism 125).

For Nietzsche, the death of God frees man, if he were strong enough to 
recognize and utilize his freedom, to create himself, to evolve by the power 
of his own will into something greater that himself: man can re-create 
himself, transcend himself, and in so doing become the uebermensch, superman. 
This future, perfectional state, reached by a process of willful 
self-transformation, functions for Nietzsche as a secular replacement for the 
traditional transcendental God of European civilization.

I have tried to show that we can find anxiety about the collapse of the 
medieval world order as a major motif in Shakespeare. Lovejoy, focusing his 
discussion of direct, explicit philosophical reflections on the idea of the 
Chain of Being, is able to trace the breakdown of the Chain back into the 
early part of the eighteenth century. There, he finds thinkers beginning to 
articulate revolutionary notions of perfection and of progress, notions 
commonly considered to belong exclusively to the nineteenth century. This idea 
of perfection, so revised, does not at all fit with the ideas previously 
associated with the Chain of Being.

The medieval notion of perfection entailed that any one occupant of a 
particular place in the Chain would achieve perfection by staying in his 
ordained place, perfectly fulfilling the requirements of his station. The 
Chain, by exemplifying all possible degrees of being, was perfect and 
complete, and for one to think of improving oneself by going up the Chain, was 
to do violence to the whole. Moreover, the state of perfection denoted 
something so complete as to be incapable of improvement. Any alteration would 
be for the worse. Perfection thus entailed fixity and stasis. Here is Lovejoy 
(206):

"The doctrine of the Chain of Being thus gave a metaphysical sanction to the 
injunction of the Anglican catechism: each should labor truly 'to do his duty 
in that state of life'--whether in the cosmical or the social scale--'to which 
it shall please God to call him.' To seek to leave one's place in society is 
also 'to invert the law of Order.'"

However, some thinkers begin to sound a new note. Lovejoy quotes the famous 
English essayist Addison, who in 1711 wrote: "There is not, in my opinion, a 
more pleasing and triumphant consideration in religion than this of perpetual 
progress which the soul makes toward the perfection of its nature, without 
ever arriving at a period in it." (247) Again, the philosopher Leibniz in 1718 
expresses similar sentiments:

"Our happiness will never consist, and ought not to consist, in a full 
enjoyment in which there is nothing more to desire, and which would make our 
minds dull, but in a perpetual progress to new pleasures and new perfections." 
(248)

In the new idea of perfection, Lovejoy sees a "new eschatology" associated 
with a "new conception of value." 

The Platonic identification of the consummate good with... cessation of 
desire--"he who possesses it has always the most perfect sufficiency and is 
never in need of anything else"--was giving place to its opposite: no 
finality, no ultimate perfection, no arrest of the outreach of the will. Such 
passages as those which I have quoted from Leibniz and Addison and Law were 
plainly foreshadowing of the Faust-ideal. Man is by nature insatiable, and it 
is the will of his Maker that he should be so... The tendency to substitute 
the idea of a Streben nach dem Unendlichen, an interminable pursuit of an 
unattainable goal, for that of a final rest of the soul in the contemplation 
of Perfection ...has usually been post-dated by historians. It was no 
invention of Goethe, nor of the German Romanticists... (250)

In this way, the idea of perfection starts to include ideas of alteration, 
variation, growth, continual increase and improvement--not toward any ultimate 
terminus but as ends in themselves. The idea of perfection takes on temporal 
attributes.

When I read the passages collected by Lovejoy, I receive the strong impression 
that these eighteenth century thinkers--Leibniz especially--were hinting at 
transmigration of the soul. I have mentioned earlier the notion of 
transmigration was integral to the idea of the Chain of Being as originally 
propounded by Plato and Plotinus, but Christian orthodoxy eventually accepted 
the Chain shorn of the notion of transmigration. While the Chain for Platonic 
philosophy was a route for every soul back to God by gradual ascent through 
transmigration, it became for the Christian thinker merely the 'ascensio 
mentis ad Deum per scalas creaturarum', the ascent of the mind to God in 
contemplation through the scale of the creatures. When the notion of the Chain 
as a path of real individual improvement reentered, it had the effect of 
temporalizing the whole Chain.

Here, Lovejoy summarizes his thesis:

One of the principal happenings in eighteenth-century thought was the 
temporalizing of the Chain of Being. The plenum formarum came to be conceived 
by some, not as the inventory but as the program of nature, which is being 
carried out gradually and exceedingly slowly in the cosmic history. While all 
the possibles demand realization, they are not accorded it all at once. Some 
have attained it in the past and have apparently since lost it; many are 
embodied in the kind of creatures which now exist; doubtless infinitely many 
more are destined to receive the gift of actual existence in the ages that are 
to come. It is only of the universe in its entire temporal span that the 
principle of plenitude holds good. (244)

It is important to note that even though the Chain toppled, it retained even 
in its fallen state its basic structure. The idea of the world as a Chain of 
Being, an ordered hierarchy of forms from low to high, simple to complex, 
primate to sophisticated, certainly did not disappear. Rather, the Chain 
itself, structure intact, rotated, as it were, on its axis, shifting one 
hundred and eight degrees, from vertical to horizontal.

Imagine an upright ladder. It is secured at the top. The resting place at the 
top crumbles. The ladder then falls over onto its side. In a similar way the 
Chain became temporalized. It no longer linked all creatures to their eternal 
source, yet even in its fallen state it retained its old structure of a 
ordered, ranked series of beings. Perfection is now posited as the direction 
of a temporal series, rather than the actual apex of a fix ontological 
hierarchy. The origin of the Chain becomes not the top but the bottom, 
something that is a bare minimum above nothing. 

In Lovejoy's judgment, "The static and permanently complete Chain of Being 
broke down largely from its own weight" (245). By this he means that when 
various implication of the idea of the Chain had been drawn out over centuries 
of thought, it amounted to an kind of enormous reductio ad absurdum argument. 
From the very beginning, the notion of the Chain, as articulated in European 
thought, was incoherent--an unworkable fusion of "other-worldliness" with 
"this-worldliness. The former tendency resulted in the conception of an 
impersonal Absolute--which, on strict logical grounds, could not be coupled to 
any creation whatsoever. Strictly speaking, the creation ought to have been 
devalorized to the point of nonexistence--as was done by Sankaracarya or by 
the presocratic philosopher Parmenides. Yet the tendency of this-worldliness 
cemented a creation to the impersonal Absolute, holding that the Absolute 
overflowed into the production of a world both real and good.

Often in the history of Christian thought it seems that one encounters a sort 
of schizophrenia. God as the object of worship was not the same as God the 
object of thought. Although Christian orthodoxy held that god to be personal, 
yet Christian speculation tended to slide into a theology of negation and 
promulgate impersonal ideas. This happened in speculations about creation. 
Creation was seen as the impersonal working out of a rigid, program, 
mechanically driven by logical necessity. All possible forms had to be 
realized in material production. God had no choice in this matter. There could 
be no willful, or logically arbitrary, preferences. Such free choices are 
characteristics of persons, and perfectly within the rights of the Supreme 
Person, but in this matter, thinking was driven by impersonal philosophy. With 
a theistic revelation, there was no need to adhere to such an impersonal 
creation--adhere to a "rationality" that, when carried through with rigid and 
undeviating obsessiveness, became a kind of insanity.

This then was the conception: Since creation was the working out of a rational 
necessity, in creating the world God was bound to produce at one time all 
possible forms. This is the "principle of plenitude." Creation had to be a 
seamless continuum from top to bottom, with not the slight jump or gap 
anywhere. Furthermore, since God is good, this creation itself had to be "the 
best of all possible worlds." Therefore, all the particular deficiencies or 
evils which we see must be necessary to the goodness of the whole. To justify 
as good all degrees of being, all kinds of deficiencies, deprivations, 
depravities, and apparent distortions, became the now infamous project of 
eighteenth century theodicy. By the eighteenth century, the overwhelming 
empirical absences of the required intermediate forms of species--and the 
theory demanded that here be huge numbers of them differing from each other in 
the smallest possible degree--had began to seem a serious problem. More and 
more it was becoming recognized that the fossil record gave evidence of 
apparently extinct species. In short, the world increasingly began to seem 
neither so "rational" nor so "good" as the theory demanded.

These are the factors Lovejoy considers, and I have suggested other factors he 
does not touch on. In any case, the point I want focus on here is Lovejoy's 
observation that breaking down of the Chain of Being was not a collapse into 
chaos. On the contrary, it was a rather stately, structured event, in which 
the Chain remained basically intact as a graded hierarchy of beings, but 
simply shifted into a temporal dimension. It became "not the inventory but the 
program of Nature."

In this temporalized version of the Chain of Being, we recognize, of course, 
the framework of the Darwinian theory of evolution. It is important to note, 
that this toppling of the Chain, this temporalization, preceded the Darwinian 
theory of evolution by over a century. (Origin of the Species was published in 
1859.) In other words, many people had already accepted the theoretical 
framework for the Darwinian theory of evolution long before the theory itself 
was produced. The Darwinian theory is an articulation of the concept of the 
temporalized Chain into the area of biology and anthropology, giving a 
"scientific" justification for what was already "known" true. It answered a 
felt need, an a priori demand. People had already started to think and feel in 
evolutionary, developmental terms. They viewed the world though the lens of a 
new paradigm, through a new set of categorical spectacles. In Krishna 
conscious terms, there had been a shift in their intelligence, and 
consequently they felt and perceived the world in a whole new way. Darwin and 
others just knew that nature had to answer the new sort of interrogatories 
they put to her. As indeed she did: the theory of evolution concretely filled 
in the framework that had already come to determine their mind-set.

This can be strikingly illustrated by looking at the early work of the German 
philosopher F.W.J. Schelling. Here we find the doctrine of evolution as part 
and parcel of a theology of an Absolute that itself develops and evolves in 
time. In 1810, a friend and disciple of Schelling named Oken wrote this:

"The philosophy of Nature is the science of the eternal transformation of God 
into the world. It has the task of showing the phases of the world's evolution 
from the primal nothingness: how the heavenly bodies and the elements arose, 
how these advanced to higher forms, how finally organisms appeared and in man 
attained to reason. These phases constitute the history of the generation of 
the universe..." (320)

In the beginning, God is a nullity, but the evolution of the universe is the 
same as the evolution of God, the gradual realization (Realwerden) or 
self-realization of God that is achieved through conflict and struggle in time 
and history. The full achievement of God's self-realization is finally 
achieved--guess where? 

"Man is the creation in which God fully becomes an object to himself. Man is 
God represented by God. God is a man representing God in self-consciousness... 
Man is God wholly manifested, der ganz erschienene Gott." (321)

Here is Schelling himself (in 1812), explicating the same evolutionary 
theology:

"I posit God as the first and the last, and the Alpha and the Omega; but as 
Alpha he is not what he is as Omega, and in so far as he is only the one--God 
in an eminent sense'--he can not be the other God, in the same sense, or, in 
strictness, be called God. For in that case, let it be expressly said, the 
unevolved (unentfaltete) God, Deus implicitus, would already be what, as 
Omega, the Deus explicitus is." (323)

Interestingly, even at this early date, Schelling justifies his evolutionary 
theology with an appeal to our first-hand experience of "nature itself, 
[which] as all know who have the requisite acquaintance with the subject, has 
gradually risen from the production of more meager and inchoate creatures to 
the production of more perfect and more finely formed ones." (323)

It is also interesting to note how Schelling sees the necessity of revising 
even the principles of logic in order to make them compatible with 
evolutionary ideas:

"Always and necessarily that from which development proceeds (der 
Entwicklungsgrund) is lower than that which is developed; the former raises 
the latter above itself and subjects itself to it, inasmuch as it serves as 
the matter, the organ, the condition, for the other's development." (325)

In this way, the cosmos necessarily develops from nothing, and proceeds always 
from less to more. For you can indeed give, after all, what you have not got.

All this amounts to a huge shift in human consciousness which expressed itself 
in the temporalizing of The Chain of Being. The shift gradually produced that 
characteristic mentality called "the romantic temperament," a ceaseless, 
restless yearning for an ever elusive goal, a sense of life as driven endless 
quest, an appetite for experience that would always want more and more, that 
would never say "Stop! I'm satisfied." 

Having discovered the Upanishads, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer 
published a study in 1818 (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) in which he 
enthusiastically embraced the concept of a single undifferentiated reality 
lying behind all appearances. But in Schopenhauer's philosophy, the 
Upanishadic Brahman becomes recast as "the Will" (der Wille). The unified 
substrate of all appearance is not luminous, peaceful consciousness but rather 
blind, voracious, unslackable appetite. Everywhere in nineteenth century 
Europe we encounter a sense of vast energies released and on the move, of an 
unstoppable engine of progress roaring along. Nature progresses, Humanity 
progresses. God progresses.

In the nineteenth century, European civilization became captivated by the idea 
of progress. The steady production of technical discoveries that, organized by 
laissez-faire capitalism, produced the industrial revolution, was all the 
proof most people needed. When the Darwinian theory of evolution was 
propounded, it gave further reinforcement to the gospel of progress. Moreover, 
in its original context, the Darwinian theory, which saw struggle and 
competition as the mechanism of progress, was immediately applied to progress 
in human society. Social Darwinism, as it was called, was a ruthless 
justification for the worst abuses of wealth and power--for exploitation of 
labor at home, for colonialism abroad.

Now I want to turn to the question which I believe Lovejoy really doesn't 
answer very well: Why did this collapse take place, this turning on its axis 
of this Chain of Being? When we look at the entire scope of the alteration, 
the immense shift in consciousness involved, we see that Lovejoy doesn't do it 
justice. The collapse of the Chain seems itself a symptom of a more 
comprehensive transformation. Why did that transformation happen? 

I have given that question a good deal of thought, and it will require more 
research from a Krishna conscious point of view to consider all the aspects of 
the issue. Yet it seems to me that one can basically describe it as a 
change--a shift of consciousness--from the mode of goodness to the mode of 
passion. Certainly, this notion of an endless restless striving, this ever 
onward seeking, this never being satisfied--the "Faust-ideal" in short--is a 
text-book description of the mode of passion ("born of unlimited desires and 
longings"). And all the activities associated with the modern idea of 
"progress" exemplify the mode of passion in action. Nor could you ask for any 
indication more stark and explicit than Schopenhauer's metaphysical 
substitution of Will for Brahman.

In Bhagavad-gita (14.7 purport), Prabhupada remarks that "Modern civilization 
is considered to be advanced in the standard of the mode of passion. Formerly, 
the advanced condition was considered to be in the mode of goodness." However, 
in the Renaissance the shift began, revolutionary and explicitly trying to 
destroy the old traditions, and by the eighteenth century we have philosophers 
like Diderot declaring that mankind will never be free until the last king is 
strangled by the entrails of the last priest.

Here we can understand this great historical shift in terms of something we 
can understand--the modes of material nature. We ourselves are trying to 
create--or rather re-create--a culture in which goodness is reestablished as 
the standard of advancement. The Bhagavad-gita teaches that knowledge depends 
upon goodness. The mode of goodness is the existential condition for the 
development of knowledge. What is that knowledge? It is knowledge of the 
Absolute Truth. The Absolute Truth is the ultimate source of all emanations. 
Much of the medieval world-picture, with its transcendent eternal source that 
is perfect and complete, with its production of a structured world of 
iterations of hierarchies, with its systems of correspondences, with its 
notion of perfection as the fulfillment of one's own--well--dharma, seems 
familiar to ISKCON devotees because what devotees are getting from our 
tradition, even though it seems an exotic import from far-off mysterious 
India, is in fact astonishingly close to the world-picture of medieval times. 
Our ways of thinking and acting are near kin to what was the European standard 
until a few hundred years ago. Thus, Srila Prabhupada may then be said to be 
restoring to us as Europeans our own lost cultural heritage. Restoring it, I 
should add, in a form free from defects in thought and action that lead to its 
abrogation a few hundred years ago. In the future, we may look back at 
"modernity" as merely a nasty interruption in the true advance of Western 
civilization.

A few hundred years ago a disaster took place, and now knowledge is in the 
mode of passion. A certain picture forms the mental backdrop for all our 
actions. You start with nothing, or something near to it, a point 
infinitesimal in size and infinite in mass and somehow, for some reason that 
nobody can figure out, that point "explodes", beginning to expand (space 
expanding with it) and to cool down. Entities began to precipitate out of the 
cooling primordial plasma: a whole zoo of subatomic particles, which 
eventually come together as atoms, and the atoms, as molecules. The molecules 
become longer and more elaborate, especially those containing carbon atoms, 
and then those molecules began to form more complicated structures, and lo and 
behold! life appears. Simpler forms lead to more complex ones: one-celled 
followed by multi-celled; more and more sophisticated forms of plants, 
insects, animals, vertebrates, hominids, humans, and finally, Scientists. Thus 
we have molecular evolution, chemical evolution, biological evolution, human 
evolution--all fitting into one big scheme. Such picture is today said to be 
the outcome of long, painstaking empirical scientific investigation. Yet it 
is, after all, still a temporalized version of the old Chain of Being. Such 
productions have a venerable history. It is well to remember that in 
1755--when the French and British were fighting each other in wilderness of 
North America--the philosopher Immanuel Kant published a theory of pre-organic 
cosmic evolution. And, as we have seen, Schelling outlined the entire picture, 
complete with philosophical and logical justification, in the year Napoleon 
invaded Russia.

When I attempt to understand the transformation in consciousness--of which the 
temporalization of the Chain of Being is a major component--in the most 
general possible terms, I see it as the birth of "historical consciousness." 
It is the characteristic of historical consciousness to understand everything 
genetically, in terms of, development, progression, evolution. When you 
attempt to understand something in the world, you automatically ask how did it 
come to be that way, how did it evolve or develop from simpler, more primitive 
units. This is historical consciousness. 

In the field of linguistics, there is a technical term for this sort of 
historical view: "diachronic." It means the study of a language as an 
historical entity, with reference to how it evolves and changes through time. 
The oppose way is called "synchronic." A synchronic approach to language 
studies it descriptively, not historically, without reference to what may have 
gone before or after... You might say that the one view of creation is 
synchronic--everything is present simultaneously in all fullness, having come 
from God. The other is diachronic: the creation grows, develops, and changes 
over time. Historical consciousness is the most comprehensive form of the 
diachronic vision. 

I learned the terms "synchronic" and "diachronic" in an university Sanskrit 
course. The way we devotees approach Sanskrit--the traditional way--is 
synchronic, while academicians employ the diachronic. Tradition says that 
Sanskrit is a perfected language spoken by the devatas; the academicians see 
its as a mundane historical creation, a language that evolved from more humble 
origins. This attitude toward Sanskrit was developed in the nineteenth century 
by German scholars who devised the historical science then called 
"Indo-European philology." (Today the word "philology" has been replaced by 
"linguistics.") In 1786 the English scholar Ernest Jones had noted affinities 
among Sanskrit, Persian, Greek and Latin. Inspired by evolutionary ideas, 
German scholars applied them to the history of languages and traced branching 
paths of evolution of a vast family of languages that includes Sanskrit, 
Persian, Latin, Italian, ancient and modern Greek, Gaelic, Swedish, French, 
German, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Armenian, and so on. The result is 
considered one of the most well-established of scholarly achievements. 

Prabhupada has taught us that Sanskrit is the mother of all languages, but the 
philologists place Sanskrit as one among a group of ancient languages which 
evolved from an original, parent language which they called 
Proto-Indo-European, the Indo-European Ursprache. If you look up the 
derivation of a modern English word you'll see sometimes that the English word 
is traced back--let us say--to a French word, then a Old French word, then 
Latin, then Sanskrit word, and finally a Proto-Indo-European word. That word 
will have an asterisk before it. This sign means that the word is imaginary, 
or hypothetical. There is no attestation for it, no written appearance of the 
word. It has been imaginatively constructed--they would say reconstructed--as 
has indeed the entire Proto-Indo-European language. 

When I took a Sanskrit course at the University of Pennsylvania the graduate 
assistant in the class would like to give us the diachronic view of Sanskrit. 
I must say it's a persuasive account. Panini's classical Sanskrit grammar as 
some four of five thousands rules, but there are a number of them which have 
only one application. These are the anomalies or exceptions. Why should they 
be there? Well, our grad assistant would account for the otherwise 
inexplicable anomaly by showing how the anomalous form in Sanskrit was 
standard in, say, Avestan, and then go on to show how both evolved out of 
earlier forms in Proto-Indo-Aryan which in turn evolved out of Proto-Indo- 
European. Granting them their presuppositions, the entire structure seemed to 
make sense on its own terms, and to account for things which on the face of it 
seem otherwise inexplicable. It tidied up a whole area of thought. It was 
enormously clever. Yet I did not for a moment accept it as true. I recognized 
it as the product of modern historical consciousness, and I realized that the 
graduate assistant and I were simply inhabitants of two different cognitive 
universes. My coin of truth--a citation from sastra--had no value whatsoever 
in his kingdom. 

Similarly, any modern academic scholar of religion is operating out of a 
similar evolutionary view of religion, the same diachronic mentality. For 
instance, I read an article about the worship of Jagannatha in Puri. At one 
point the author describes how some village or tribal people in Orissa worship 
wooden posts. Without bothering to make an argument, the author understands at 
once that the worship of the wooden Jagannatha image has evolved out of the 
primitive worship of wooden posts. It did not cross his mind to consider even 
the possibility that tribal people may have been imitating in their own way 
the elaborate worship of Jagannatha.

The academic study of religion (Religionswissenschaft) looks at every aspect 
of our tradition as a human product, the result of social, cultural, economic, 
psychological forces interacting in history. Scripture--sastra--is especially 
subject to the same considerations. It is a human construct that grew and 
developed over time, and critical analysis shows how a text thought to be 
"revealed", entire and complete at one time and place, contains within the 
traces of the submerged histories of its parts.

This academic discipline is called textual criticism, and to a great degree 
it's what the modern scholarly study of religion is about. In the nineteenth 
century, when it was established as a formal discipline it was called "higher 
criticism," in contrast to basic textual analysis--dealing with things like 
variant reading, scribal errors and the like--which was called "lower 
criticism." But higher criticism attempts to understand the various social and 
historical circumstances in which a particular work came to be composed, and 
thus rediscover its original meaning.

Let us take the first five books of the Bible--Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, 
Numbers, and Deuteronomy--traditionally attributed, of course, to a single 
author, Moses.

Yet a close critical inspection of the Genesis account of creation, for 
instance, shows that Genesis actually has two creation stories, one after 
another (Genesis 1:1-2:3 and Genesis 2:4-25) Each has its own focus, and the 
two do not form a seamless, continuous narrative. Now how did that happen? 
Where did these two different stories come from? As the result of this and 
many similar considerations, it is now held that the five books of Moses are 
the outcome of the work of a number of unknown writers and editors. The first, 
earliest writer is known as the "Yahwist writer", or "J" for short, because he 
(or she) refers to God by the proper name "Yahweh." Scholars believed 
themselves to have detected a second old stratum of material, or "E," composed 
by the "Elohist writer," who preferred the plural name "Elohim," for God. 
Then, latter, a Compiler put J and E together and added other material.

This account is so well accepted that any Christian or Jew who rejects its 
invites the charge of "fundamentalist." Of course, a similar sort of 
historical criticism is brought to bear on the Vedic texts. There's much less 
consensus about dates, and even the agreed upon dates are uncomfortably 
lacking in foundation. Yet that doesn't put a stop to the speculation. 

Recently I ran across a new historical-critical study of the Bhagavad-gita 
that attempts (yet again!) to isolate the real and original part of the work, 
by freeing it from the later additions and accretions on the part of various 
interested parties. With an implicit polemical allusion to Srila Prabhupada's 
title of his own presentation of the Bhagavad-gita, the author titled his work 
The Bhagavad Gita As It Was. The approach that views the Bhagavad-gita as some 
kind of eternal or timeless document, revealed one and for all, and capable of 
being transmitted without change and alternation across all sorts of temporal 
and cultural divides--in short, our approach to the Bhagavad-gita--is regard 
by such professors as infuriatingly backwards and simpleminded. It also can 
anger them that such an unenlightened view of these texts is being so actively 
promulgated, thus countering their own efforts at education and enlightenment.

The evolutionary, historical perspective is the shared, unquestioning 
assumption of modern scholarship. Go into a department of religious studies 
and say "I believe this text was revealed by God, and was transmitted intact. 
I believe that a tradition can preserve its original teachings intact in spite 
of all kinds of..."--nobody will believe you for a minute. Not just that: they 
will know you are not worth taking seriously. For the premise is that such 
things just doesn't happen, and the matter is not up for discussion. To 
suggest otherwise is not merely to make a wrong claim; it is to step outside 
of the very rules by which they operate.

You would be like the person who sees some people playing tennis. He notices 
they are having a hard time getting the ball across the net. So he says to 
them, "Look, just take the net down, it would be a whole lot easier." They 
would be incredulous. The game is played by certain rules.

In a similar way, it is the ground-rule--not the conclusion--of modern science 
that there is no God. A number of years ago I read an account of a conference 
of cosmologists dealing with the origin of the universe. One cosmologist 
presented a mathematical proof that if the initial conditions at the very 
origin were completely at random, then, within the requisite amount of time, 
there is no way how order could have arisen simply by chance. He proposed 
therefore at the very beginning there must have been some order. A vigorous 
debate ensued. The "stacked-deck theory" of the origin of the universe was 
opposed to "the shuffled-deck theory." Apparently the "stacked deck" made 
people nervous. Initial order begged for an explanation. If the deck was 
stacked, how did it get stacked? Well, the traditional stacker of decks is 
God, and finally somebody actually brought up that name. "But," my account 
tersely reported, "most scientists prefer not to take that cop-out route." 
This shows that it is the rule of the game of science to keep out God. It 
would be like removing the tennis net. If you bring in God, you are not doing 
science any more, you're playing some other game.

When devotees run up against Indo-European philology, or textual criticism, or 
the historical study of religion, we are confronted not just with the supposed 
facts of this or that discipline. We are confronted with various outgrowths of 
historical consciousness.

Let us suppose now that in the course of things I come across a professor who 
invokes the authority of Indo-European philology, an incredibly formidable 
intellectual structure which makes sense in its own terms. How do I come to 
grips with this? Little use trying to argue with the professor. Citing 
scripture to show him wrong begs the question; I am simply making a move in a 
game he isn't even playing. Even if I cannot change him, at least for my own 
sake, I should understand what is going on in our encounter. I can understand 
what he cannot--that this Indo-European philology is a product of knowledge in 
the mode of passion.

I should also be aware of the way the process of knowledge works. The theory 
of knowledge expounded by St. Augustine is fairly accurate. Augustine rejects 
the epistemological theory that in acquiring knowledge of the world the 
subject is completely passive and contributes nothing to the process. 
Augustine propounds the doctrine of the "primacy of the will in knowledge." 
Augustine observes that what we know is what we are first of all interested 
in. Before there is knowledge there has to be interest. And this interest, 
this attraction, is a movement of the will. When interest is most fully 
developed, it is called love. In this way Augustine sought to explain why 
loving God was a prerequisite for knowing Him, and conversely, how for those 
who by an act of will turned away from God, God becomes invisible-- 
unrecognized, unacknowledged. So the movement of the soul toward or away from 
God, toward knowledge of God or lack of knowledge of God, is really owing to a 
prior disposition or direction of the will, which, Augustine says, is 
determined by grace.

What Augustine identifies as an act of the "will" Krishna consciousness refers 
to as the determination of buddhi. The director of the buddhi is Supersoul. "I 
am situated in everyone's heart [as the Supersoul] and from Me comes 
remembrance, knowledge, and forgetfulness" (matah smrtir jnanam apohanam ca). 
Apohanam means literally "shoving aside." Shoving aside what? Shoving aside 
Krishna. Prabhupada explained this phenomenon by saying that if you want to 
forget Krishna He will give you the intelligence to forget, and if you want to 
remember Krishna, He will give you the intelligence to remember. Prabhupada 
asked once where do all these arguments come from--that there is no God, or 
God is dead or the creation can arise by chance from nothing, and so on. These 
are clever arguments; people who are otherwise reasonably bright accept them. 
Where do these arguments come from? They come from Krishna, Srila Prabhupada 
said. Krishna Himself gives the intelligence they can forget Him. 

It is buddhi which determines the mind-set, the paradigm which determines the 
most fundamental categories by which we view the world, which determines what 
we acknowledge and cannot acknowledge, recognize and cannot recognize. 
Sometimes in history there are great collective shifts in intelligence, a 
cultural reorientation on the platform of buddhi. I see the rise of historical 
consciousness, signaled by the temporalization of the Chain of Being, as one 
of them. If you make yourselves aware of it, you'll see just how instinctive 
and pervasive this historical way of looking at things is. If you want to know
why a person is the way he is, what do you look at? You look at his 
childhood--his development. Historical consciousness is the instinctive habit 
of the modern mind.* Where does it come from? As we have seen, it began to 
arise in the eighteenth century. It's hard to pin down a cause. You can't say 
this consciousness is a result of the facts of biological, sociological, or 
psychological development discovered by Darwin, Marx, and Freud: rather, this 
consciousness produced those "facts." So where then did it come from?

If we are to succeed in the mission Srila Prabhupada gave us, it will be our 
task, somehow or another, to take the temporalized Chain of Being and set it 
upright again. How will we accomplish that? I do not now know anyone in our 
movement who can deconstruct Indo-European philology, for example. Yet I am 
convinced that if there is a Krishna conscious intellectual who can look at 
all the relevant historical data--including that which Indo-European 
philosophy has had to overlook--that person will be able to see formerly 
invisible things.

Another important study in the history of ideas is by Thomas Kuhn, called The 
Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn shows that scientific progress is 
not a linear advancement composed of the accumulation of data and adding of a 
series of congruent theories on top of each other. Rather, there are period of 
change so sweeping and total--and so destructive of what went before--that 
they deserve the name revolutions, and Kuhn studies the way these revolutions 
take place. For instance, there was a time in which chemistry posited the 
existence of a theoretical substance called phlogiston to explain combustion 
and other phenomena. The replacement of the phlogiston theory with the atomic 
theory constituted a revolution, or a paradigm shift. 

A paradigm is a fundamental framework for looking at things; it establishes 
not only the theoretical terms for explanation, but also an orientation which 
determines what avenues are worth exploring, what problems are worthwhile 
addressing. A paradigm shift in science even changes what kinds of equipment 
you use, what a laboratory or observatory looks like. The proponents of 
conflicting paradigms, Kuhn says, in a significant sense live in different 
universes. When a paradigm is well established, and routine work goes on 
within its parameters we have "normal science." But then there is the 
encounter with anomalous data or results which do not fit the established 
paradigm. The paradigm has endured because it has explained a lot of things 
and pointed the way for further research; it has brought intelligible order 
into the world and promises to keep on doing so. In that case, a few anomalies 
encountered here and there doesn't bother anyone too much. You put it aside to 
deal with later, you forget about it. But if gradually the anomalies 
accumulate so much that they can no longer be ignored, science enters a period 
of crisis. At that point, someone may come up with a radically different way 
of doing science, something that, theoretically speaking, starts afresh. It 
accounts for the anomalous material, and sets research off in an entirely new 
direction. Quite often the new paradigm is provided by an outsider, someone 
free from the mindset of normal science. For example, the atomic theory was 
proposed by John Dalton who was not a chemist but a meteorologist.

Modern historical consciousness is a name for a very wide-spread and deeply 
rooted paradigm. Lovejoy's description of the temporalization of the Chain of 
Being has the characteristics of one of Kuhn's paradigm shifts.

Our job is to effect another such shift. I am very encouraged by the work done 
by Sadaputa Prabhu and Drutakarma Prabhu, published in Forbidden Archeology. 
They have gone back to the original reports of excavations, and looked at the 
way anomalies in the evidence for human evolution have been dealt with. The 
anomaly collection is surprisingly large. It is clear that there has been a 
double-standard of rigor for accepting data: what appears to agree with theory 
is easily accepted, and what appears to conflict is subject to much more 
intense level of doubt. If the same standards of unambiguity were applied to 
all the data, there would be little evidence for anything at all. The 
formidable defense mechanism of modern science to keep anomalies from 
interfering with their evolutionary paradigm shows that the stakes are very 
high. The whole of modern life may rest upon it.

From the very beginning, Prabhupada indicated that evolution is the weakest 
point in the edifice of modern consciousness. If that theory goes, then it 
would seem that the whole mind of modern humanity is up for grabs. The 
evolutionary paradigm puts a frame around people's lives; it tells them "this 
is who I am and this is how the world came into being, and this is how I got 
here." If the theory of evolution is abandoned as discredited, people are 
going to say, "Here I am, here you are, here's this world around us--and I 
have no idea of how I or you or this civilization or this world got here." 
Then anything is possible. I think it's simply a matter of time before this 
happens.

Once you start looking at things through a new paradigm, looking at the facts, 
you'll start to see things you were unable to see before. One has to do some 
serious excavation to get down to the root evidence, because, even what gets 
acknowledged and recognized as a fact, even the very criteria of what 
constitutes a fact, is often determined by a paradigm. A new paradigm lights 
up a whole new world. Knowledge is not a simple thing--it depends on what you 
want, on what you love, on what your hopes and fears are. You must learn to 
love the right things, to hope and fear the right things in order to know. 
Knowledge depends upon goodness.

We know through sabda, through proper hearing, that the theory of evolution is 
wrong. The paradigm given to us by sabda, delivered by the mercy of Krishna 
and guru, has much affinity to that of the Great Chain of Being, but the Vedic 
version is much improved over the earlier European account. Now we want to 
help bring about a total revolution in human consciousness. If we don't do 
that, Krishna consciousness will not survive. Krishna consciousness is so 
incompatible with the modern temperament that if we don't eradicate it, it 
will eradicate Krishna consciousness. That's my conviction, and I think 
Krishna will give us the tools and show us the way, on the condition that our 
faith is unflinching. I haven't the slightest doubt, for example, that if the 
formidable edifice of Indo-European philology is subjected to the same sort of 
scrutiny Sadaputa and Drutakarma are giving human evolution, it will prove to 
be equally full of anomalies and double-standards. Kuhn notes, by the way, 
that in science, at least, an old paradigm is left behind only when there is a 
new, more satisfactory one to replace it. We also have to provide that as 
well.

To sum it up: The cure for modern historical consciousness is Krishna 
consciousness. If people actually take to the process of Krishna 
consciousness, and a trusted brahminical class in the mode of goodness 
develops to guide society, then another sort of science will be 
established--we should say reestablished--that will defeat this "knowledge" in
the mode of passion and ignorance. That is our mission.

