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Our Savage God: The Perverse Use of Eastern Thought
A book about the perverse use of Eastern thought & the connection between Eastern religions & violence.
319 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1974
About the author
R.C. Zaehner
35 books15 followersRobert Charles Zaehner had a gift for languages and became an expert in Oriental languages. As a result, he was chosen as a British counterintelligence agent in Tehran, Persia during World War II and an MI6 agent there after the war. He returned to academia and became Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College, writing numerous books on religion, both eastern and western.
Information adapted from Wikipedia and the back cover of The Bhagavad-Gita which he translated and authored
Information adapted from Wikipedia and the back cover of The Bhagavad-Gita which he translated and authored
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 30, 2014
This is one odd book. I'd picked it up solely because I knew Zaehner as a translator of texts read for courses in Eastern religions. He having been an Oxford Sanskritist, I'd expected something scholarly. Well, that's not what this is, though his background in asian religions is quite apparent.
What this is is a treatment of both Western and Eastern religions and philosophies going back to the pre-Socratics (about whom he is no expert) and the earliest Vedas (about which he is) and going up to the time of composition, namely the mid-seventies, all in reference to mystico-theological beliefs and practices. It is about what Tillich called 'the Ground of Being', what Zaehner, a Catholic, is content to call 'God', as it is given to us to understand experientially. For want of any better term, I'll go along with him and call it 'mystical experience'.
But, as noted, this is not scholarship, nor does it pretend to be objective. Indeed, Zaehner comes off as a very opinionated critic of most everything--except the one he calls, repeatedly, 'Father' Aristotle, the Peripatetic being about the only person in world history who got It right.
The crux of the matter is the common mystical experience of Oneness: the oneness of all things, the union of opposites, the 'thou art that' or the 'not this, not that'--in other words that virtually inexpressable, yet supremely important, wisdom vouchsafed the mystical adept. Here, despite his vocational devotion to the Eastern--mostly subcontinental--traditions, Zaehner thinks most everyone has gotten such indubitably real and important illuminations wrong, everyone except Aristotle and such of his followers as Aquinas. The big problems are, as he puts it, basically two.
The deeper problem, intellectually speaking, is adapting the mystic insight to quotidian realities. Discovering Oneness doesn't imply any kind of worldly, any practical wisdom. From a commonsense standpoint the utterances of the mystics are just that, mysterious if not just downright silly or irrelevant. The Buddhists, the really old school Buddhists, avoid the embarrassment by rejecting this world and going for extinction, but of those mystics who stay on, involving themselves in worldly matters, Zaehner has little respect--except, of course, for Aristotle, who, in his opinion, got the relationship of the One ('God' or whatever) to the many (the world) down right.
One of the problems resulting from the common misapprehension of the mystic experience, the problem this book most focuses on, is that many true mystics, having discovered oneness in the union of opposites, are morally adrift from the day-to-day world of humans living together. Here Zaehner takes Charlie Manson as his case in point, accepting as given that Manson had had profound mystical experiences and a pretty thorough familiarity with biblical and other religions. Yet he, and those like him--Thugs and left-hand Tantrists are mentioned--are sociopaths.
Well, the problem with Charlie and the rest is that they didn't study Father Aristotle or Saint Thomas well enough (nor did I, for that matter--I found Zaehner's exposition of the former to be obscure). If they had done so, if they had been intelligent enough to be able to do so (Zaehner has a rather low opinion of the intelligence of most everyone), then this apparently wouldn't have been possible...
...or would it?
The last chapter of this book, entitled 'Islam' and meaning, as the word does, 'submission' and having little reference to Koranic religion, goes off on an interesting, and, to me, even more obscure consideration of the Judeo-Christian God whereby Zaehner tries to argue that the biblical god, whom he acknowledges to be a moral monster by any human standard, is worthy of worship. Here Manson gets compared to Jesus, the Jesus who came with a sword, the Christ of Revelation, in something like a sympathetic light--as one might admire a hurricane, a tornado or a volcanic eruption. This is all quite self-consciously reminiscent of C.G. Jung's Answer to Job (a better, if only because more accessible, book) and there is a point to it in that, yes, we all die and in that along the way most everyone will have all sorts of misfortunes, social and natural misfortunes. Manson, like Jesus, wasn't fit for this world of ours and Manson, like the 'Ram-of-God'-Jesus of the Apocalypse of John, serves as a reminder of just how agonizingly hazardous life can be.
What this is is a treatment of both Western and Eastern religions and philosophies going back to the pre-Socratics (about whom he is no expert) and the earliest Vedas (about which he is) and going up to the time of composition, namely the mid-seventies, all in reference to mystico-theological beliefs and practices. It is about what Tillich called 'the Ground of Being', what Zaehner, a Catholic, is content to call 'God', as it is given to us to understand experientially. For want of any better term, I'll go along with him and call it 'mystical experience'.
But, as noted, this is not scholarship, nor does it pretend to be objective. Indeed, Zaehner comes off as a very opinionated critic of most everything--except the one he calls, repeatedly, 'Father' Aristotle, the Peripatetic being about the only person in world history who got It right.
The crux of the matter is the common mystical experience of Oneness: the oneness of all things, the union of opposites, the 'thou art that' or the 'not this, not that'--in other words that virtually inexpressable, yet supremely important, wisdom vouchsafed the mystical adept. Here, despite his vocational devotion to the Eastern--mostly subcontinental--traditions, Zaehner thinks most everyone has gotten such indubitably real and important illuminations wrong, everyone except Aristotle and such of his followers as Aquinas. The big problems are, as he puts it, basically two.
The deeper problem, intellectually speaking, is adapting the mystic insight to quotidian realities. Discovering Oneness doesn't imply any kind of worldly, any practical wisdom. From a commonsense standpoint the utterances of the mystics are just that, mysterious if not just downright silly or irrelevant. The Buddhists, the really old school Buddhists, avoid the embarrassment by rejecting this world and going for extinction, but of those mystics who stay on, involving themselves in worldly matters, Zaehner has little respect--except, of course, for Aristotle, who, in his opinion, got the relationship of the One ('God' or whatever) to the many (the world) down right.
One of the problems resulting from the common misapprehension of the mystic experience, the problem this book most focuses on, is that many true mystics, having discovered oneness in the union of opposites, are morally adrift from the day-to-day world of humans living together. Here Zaehner takes Charlie Manson as his case in point, accepting as given that Manson had had profound mystical experiences and a pretty thorough familiarity with biblical and other religions. Yet he, and those like him--Thugs and left-hand Tantrists are mentioned--are sociopaths.
Well, the problem with Charlie and the rest is that they didn't study Father Aristotle or Saint Thomas well enough (nor did I, for that matter--I found Zaehner's exposition of the former to be obscure). If they had done so, if they had been intelligent enough to be able to do so (Zaehner has a rather low opinion of the intelligence of most everyone), then this apparently wouldn't have been possible...
...or would it?
The last chapter of this book, entitled 'Islam' and meaning, as the word does, 'submission' and having little reference to Koranic religion, goes off on an interesting, and, to me, even more obscure consideration of the Judeo-Christian God whereby Zaehner tries to argue that the biblical god, whom he acknowledges to be a moral monster by any human standard, is worthy of worship. Here Manson gets compared to Jesus, the Jesus who came with a sword, the Christ of Revelation, in something like a sympathetic light--as one might admire a hurricane, a tornado or a volcanic eruption. This is all quite self-consciously reminiscent of C.G. Jung's Answer to Job (a better, if only because more accessible, book) and there is a point to it in that, yes, we all die and in that along the way most everyone will have all sorts of misfortunes, social and natural misfortunes. Manson, like Jesus, wasn't fit for this world of ours and Manson, like the 'Ram-of-God'-Jesus of the Apocalypse of John, serves as a reminder of just how agonizingly hazardous life can be.
December 14, 2008
Most of this is Zaehner trying to draw a connection between Charles Manson and the darkside of eastern religion and philosophy. He does this from the viewpoint of an egghead academic, not, as you might have expected, a right wing Christian. I thought this might be interesting in a mental masterbatory kind of way or that Zaehner might make a few valid and/or interesting points. Its not and he doesn't.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews