SELECTED LETTERS of Ananda K

^/\nanda Coomaraswamy SELECTED LETTERS OF Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Edited by A l v in M o o r e , J r . and R a m a P o o n a m b u l a m C oomaraswamy INDIRA GANDHI NATIONAL CENTRE FOR THE ARTS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS DELHI BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS 1988 ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy at 52 years frontispiece facing page 2. “Progress” by Denis Tegetmcier, in Eric Gill, Unholy Trinity, London, Dent, 1942 32 3. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy at 58 years 108 4. An example of Coomaraswamy’s manuscripts—letter to Eric Gill 208 5. Coomaraswamy’s study in his home at Needham, Massachusetts 258 6. A room in Norman Chapel, Coomaraswamy’s home at Broad Campton, Gloucestershire, about. 1908 328 7. Albrecht Diirer’s ‘Virgin on the Crescent’ from his Life of the Virgin (1511) 362 8. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy at 70 years 440 FOREWORD In the wake of Ananda Coomaraswamy’s extensive writings, volumes of accolades have come forth in praise of his enormous erudition. But here in these letters for the first time we sec the man writing intimately about himself; not in an autobio graphical sense, which he detested, considering such portrai ture “a vulgar catering to illegitimate curiosity” (p 25), “a rather ghoulish and despicable trade” (p 25). This attitude was with him, moreover, “not a matter of ‘modesty’, but one of principle” (p 25). His writing of himself was rather in the sense of establishing a personal contact with each correspondent through the painstaking effort of getting a questioner to see the why and wherefore of his thought processes. Reading these letters is like looking over his shoulder and watching how his perceptions and ideas flow. Eric Gill said it all when he wrote to the Doctor: “You hit bloody straight, bloody hard, and bloody often.” For Coomaraswamy was uncompromisingly honest; thus in a letter to Albert Schweitzer on this missionary’s Christianity and the Religions of the World: “[I] would like to let you know that I regard it as a fundamentally dishonest work.” Uncompromisingly charitable, as in a six-page letter to a psychiatrist: “Your letter. .brought tears to my eyes. Yours is a personal instance of the whole modern world of impover ished reality. You caught the very sickness you were treating. You did not shake off the effluvium from your fingers after laying on your hands.” Pages of appropriate counsel follow. And uncompromisingly generous, instanced for example in his long answers to letters from the Gandhian Richard Gregg who was seeking clarification on such matters as realism and nominalism, being and knowing, knowledge and opinion, being and becoming, rcincarnationist theories, and the question °f “psychic residues”. Rama Coomaraswamy had first considered calling this collection of his father’s correspondence Letters from a Hindu to His Christian Friends. But although the young Ananda received the investiture of the Sacred Thread in Ceylon in 1897, he was cducatcd in England and later lived as a Westerner, and was Platonist and a Medievalist as much as a Vedantist. And his correspondents were with few exceptions not religious by vocation but academicians, albeit of Christian heritage. He situated his own position as “a follower of the Philosophia Perennis, or if required to be more specific, a Vcdandn.” We sec from these letters that Coomaraswamy was totally realistic in his assessment of Eastern and Western values. To Professor F. S. C. Northrup, he says that he tells Western inquirers: “Why seek wisdom in India? The value of the Eastern tradition for you is not that of a difference, but that it can remind you of what you have forgotten,” adding that “the notion of a common humanity is not enough for peace; what is needed is our common divinity.” Elsewhere he writes that “East and West have a common problem.” And he complains to the German art historian, Herman Goetz, that the great majority of Indian students in the West arc really “disorganized barbarians” and “cultural illiterates.” “The modern young Indian (with exceptions) is in no position to meet the really cultured and spiritual European.” Again to Northrup, he says, “I am still fully convinced that the metaphysics of East and West are essentially the same until the time of the Western deviation from the common norms,” when Western thought shifted (ca 1300) from realism to nominalism. Now he writes to the New English Weekly, “the ‘civilization’ that men are supposed to be fighting for is already a museum piece.” Elsewhere: “The magnitude of our means and the multiplicity of our ideas arc in fact the measure of our decadence.” And near the close of his life, in his address (included here) on “the Renaissance of Indian Culture”, given at Harvard on August 15, 1947, he says: “our problem is not so much one of the rebirth of an Indian eulture, as it is one of preserving what remains of it. This culture is valid for us not so much bccausc it is Indian as because it is culture.” In a letter addressing the need for a realistic ground of understanding, he writes that he can “sec no basis for such a common understand ing other than that of the common universe of discourse of the Philosophia Perennis, which was the lingua franca of all cultures before the ‘confusion of tongues’.” And he reiterates time and again in his letters the necessity for people to turn to the traditional authorities of our age in order to get their metaphysical bearings: men like Frithjof Schuon, Rene Guenon and Marco Pallis. As foremost heir to Medieval wisdom the Catholic Church in Coomaraswamy’s eyes bore a priceless legacy coupled with an enormous responsibility; and although continually inviting Christians to share with him in the rediscovery of this treasure, the Doctor was with few exceptions thwarted by their incapacity for adequate response. Conversion, they exclaimed, not reciprocal comprehension, was the only way to salvation. “Please do not pray that I may become a Christian,” replied Coomaraswamy to a nun’s entreaties; “pray only that I may know God better every day.” And he foresaw what was coming to the Church when he wrote to another Catholic: “The humanisation, ie, secularisation of scripture accompanies the humanisation of Christ.” His attitude on an esoteric aspect of Christianity is disclosed in his words to Eric Gill about a “wonderful Mary legend” he has read, saying that “there is a Vedic parallel too, where Wisdom is said to reveal her very body to some. Perhaps you can print this legend someday, and I could write a few words of introduction. On the other hand, perhaps the world does not deserve such things nowadays!” Regarding his own path, Coomaraswamy wrote, “I fully hold that labore est orare and do regard my work as a vocation.” But “when I go to India,” he said in a letter to Marco Pallis, “it will be to drop writing . my object in ‘retiring’ being to verify what I already ‘know’.” Meanwhile, in his seventieth year he wrote, “the Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads are daily reading for me.” These letters convey a constant tone of the Doctor’s own self-effacement. He puts forth his principles unflaggingly, while never putting forth himself, saying he is only an exponent for the ideas of others: “[I] try to say nothing that can properly be attributed to me individually.” To the traditional Catholic, Bernard Kelley, he wrote: “It can only be said that the mystic is acting ‘selfishly’ when there really remains in him a ‘self.” The word idiot, he reminds another correspondent, means “virtually ‘one who thinks for himself.” And in another place: “Satan was the first to think of himself as a genius.” All this touches on the axis around which Coomaraswamy’s later exposition revolved, namely, the postulate of the two selves or “minds”—duo sunt in homine—and its ineluctable corollary, on the necessity for self-naughting. With incredible thoroughness he pursued parallels from Western and Eastern sources, to Sankara’s presentation of Advaita Vedanta, the doctrine of monism or non-duality. And Coomaraswamy’s intransigence regarding the sole true reality of our Higher Self—“the One and Only Transmigrant”, St Paul’s “not I, but [the] Christ [that] livcth in me”—was compounded by his insistence on the infallibility of immutable archetype and myth over mutable accident and history, to the point even of permitting himself an expression of doubt concerning the historicity of Christ and the Buddha. In order to situate the paradox of this tendency to excess at the expense of fact, we have to remind ourselves that Coomaraswamy found himself confronting a blind generation with timeless truths, in an age of “impoverished reality” wherein most people no longer “see” what is beyond their senses. In a world where religion for the multitude has become equated with moral precepts on the level of “Be good, dear child”, the metaphysician felt the need to repost with the thunder of ultimates on the level of “Every thing will perish save God’s Countenance” (Q u’ran xxviii, 88). To reply that the Doctor could better have struck a happy medium in these matters is to ask that Coomaraswamy not be Coomaraswamy. He admits the Plotinian concept of “distinction without difference” in the Noumenal Sphere where “all souls are one”, yet in actual exegesis he virtually reduces the human soul to a “process” of becoming, without final reality. In part his emphasis on this point was to refute the popular notion of reincarnation, currently a dogma in India and one particularly vexing to him as it lends an exaggerated import ance to the accidental ego of this man so-and-so, and also because his insistence on the fallacy of the belief invited criticism from erudite Hindus who otherwise admired his writings.

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