Indian Philosophy v1.c8.s3.3

v1.c8.s3.3

Monotheism is inevitable with any true conception of God. The Supreme can only be one. We cannot have two supreme and unlimited beings. Everywhere the question was asked whether a god was himself the creation of another. A created god is no God at all. With the growing insight into the workings of the world and the nature of godhead the many gods tended to melt into one. The perception of unity realised in the idea of Ṛta worked in support of monotheism. If the varied phenomena of nature demand many gods, should not the unity of nature require a single god who embraces all things that are? Trust in natural law means faith in one God. The advance of this conception implies the paralysis of superstition. An orderly system of nature has no room for miraculous interferences in which alone superstition and confused thought find the signs of polytheism. In the worship of Varuṇa we have the nearest approach to monotheism. Attributes moral and spiritual, such as justice, beneficence, righteousness, and even pity were ascribed to him. There has been a growing emphasis on the higher and more idealistic side to the suppression or comparative neglect of the gross or material side. Varuṇa is the god to whom man and nature, this world and the other all belong. He cares not only for external conduct but also for inner purity of life. The implicit demand of the religious consciousness for one supreme God made itself manifest in what is characterised as the henotheism of the Vedas. It is, according to Max Müller, who coined the term, the worshipping of each divinity in turn, as if it were the greatest and even the only god. But the whole position is a logical contradiction, where the heart showed the right path of progress and belief contradicted it. We cannot have a plurality of gods, for religious consciousness is against it. Henotheism is an unconscious groping towards monotheism. The weak mind of man is yet seeking for its object. The Vedic Aryan felt keenly the mystery of the ultimate and the inadequacy of the prevailing conceptions. The gods worshipped as supreme stand side by side, though for the moment only one holds the highest position. The one god is not the denial of the other gods. Even minor gods sometimes assume the highest rank. It all depends upon the devotion of the poet and the special object he has in view. "Varuṇa is the heaven, Varuṇa the earth, Varuṇa the air, Varuṇa is the universe and all besides." Sometimes Agni is all the gods. Sometimes Indra is greater than all gods. For the moment each god seems to become a composite photograph of all others. Self-surrender of man to God, the central fact of religious experience, is possible only with one God. Thus henotheism seems to be the result of the logic of religion. It is not, as Bloomfield suggests, "polytheism grown cold in service, and unnice in its distinctions, leading to an opportunist monotheism, in which every god takes hold of the sceptre and none keeps it."¹