Problems of Early Christianity

Christ's Kingdom of God

A Letter and a Reply Apropos of the Article "

Sri Aurobindo and the Kingdom of God"

Mother India, in its issue of December 5, 1970, published "Sri Aurobindo and the Kingdom of God" by Dick Batstone. In one place it carried the following footnote by the Editor: "The author has overlooked one reference in the New Testament, Luke 17:20-21: 'And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the Kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation; neither shall they say, Lo here! or, Io there! for, behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.' Ronald Knox has the gloss to his modern translation:' "Within you": the Greek might also mean "among you."' The Revised Version says in the margin: 'The Kingdom of God is in your midst.

In the course of a letter to the Editor, the author of the article discussed this footnote. We are reproducing his letter and the Editor's reply in view of the importance, in Biblical exegesis, of the point involved.

Dick Batstone's Letter

1 Baskerville Road, London S.W.18, England. 20 May 1971.

Dear Mr. Sethna,

When not receiving an answer from an Ashramite, I never know whether (a) he has not got my letter because of hazards of the post, or (b) he has got it, but, being so absorbed in a phase of concentrated sadhana, he has
simply found it irrelevant and scrunched it up.

Never mind! Let me thank you again for publishing my article. Yes, maybe I should have mentioned Luke 17, Vs. 20-21. It was not exactly that I "overlooked" them - it is the quotation that immediately comes to mind on this topic - but it is again an ambiguous passage and, as you point out, can be

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translated in different ways. Scholars won't agree on it, and I suppose I took the easy way by not bringing it in!

Otto says Jesus is pointing to the paradox of the future and present aspects of the Kingdom - not only is it the eschato-logical Kingdom, to come with "flaming lightning, with the appearance of the Son of Man, his angels and the heavenly tribunal", but also it is the here and now Kingdom of power over devils and sickness, and the fellowship of Jesus and his disciples in righteousness, peace, and joy. Always, says Otto, the kingdom is seen as external, transcendent, not immanent, and Jesus has nothing mystical in mind.

Another recent writer, Perrin, says, "... the decisive observation is that if the word entos is to be translated 'within', then we have here an understanding of Kingdom of God without further parallel in the recorded teaching of Jesus."

On the other hand, C.G. Jung in Psychology and Alchemy says, "The Western attitude, with its emphasis on the object, tends to fix the ideal - Christ - in its outward aspect and thus rob it of its mysterious relation to the inner man. It is this prejudice, for instance, which impels the Protestant interpreters of the Bible to interpret entos uinim (referring to the Kingdom of God) as 'among you' instead of 'within you'."

It is a tormenting subject, perhaps best left alone, and the effort used to find the Kingdom for oneself—

With all best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

 Dick Batstone

The Editor's Reply

Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry 2, South India.

23 June 1971.

Dear Mr. Batstone,

Living in erstwhile French India I am inclined to tilt my head sideways, raise my shoulders, open my palms and cry, "I am infinitely sorry!" in answering your letter so late. But

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perhaps the Gallic tendency of "infiniment" has a subtle secret affinity to spiritual India, the Aurobindonian India, in that the greatest seeker and manifester of the Infinite in modern times came to Pondicherry to do his Yoga. The affinity may be seen even more openly when we remember Sri Aurobindo saying that the country which he felt to be a sort of second motherland was not England, where he spent fourteen years, but one in which he never set foot in this life: France. And, of course, the affinity declares itself from the house-tops as soon as we take into consideration France's gift of the Mother, for whose presence amongst us Indians we can say to both that country and the Unknown, in the profoundest sense of the adverb, "Merci infiniment!"

All this talk of infinity, however, does not mean that an Ashramite is too inwardly or upwardly absorbed to notice, or care for, finite things like friends' letters. No doubt, what concerns him is more the spirit than the letter, but he never makes such a universal sweep of a statement as: "the letter killeth." He does not do it even when he is the Editor of Mother India, to whom communications often come in tidal waves, a veritable "sea of troubles" undreamed of in Hamlet's philosophy. And surely the Editor wouldn't do it face-to-face with a bright and graceful undulation of ideas like your letter of last month. Maybe it was a bit cheeky of me to write in that footnote that Luke 17:20-21 had been overlooked (or should it be "overLuked"?) by you. I might have guessed from the well-knownness of the verses that you had a purpose in not bringing them in. But I am in a way glad I perpetrated the impudence, for otherwise I should never have received so interesting a discussion.

May I tell you what strikes me in this matter? Otto and Perrin have more support than Jung from the language used by Jesus in general. And, if the emphasis is to fall on the language elsewhere, we must translate our Luke-passage by "the Kingdom of God is among you" rather than "...within you". But here we may attend to a remark of Sidney Spencer's.

"Although there is little," observes Spencer,¹ "in the teach-

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ing of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels which bears a specifically mystical character, yet the total impression which the gospel story leaves upon us is of one who lived in the constant awareness of the divine Presence." And where is this Presence with Jesus? Is it just a supreme Glory from a heaven above, which is now all about him active like an accompanying nimbus since that moment of his life when he was baptised in the Jordan and "he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove" (Mark 1:10)? We may note that at that moment Jesus heard, as Mark recounts (1:11), "a voice from heaven saying, 'Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.'" Here is evidently an intense spiritual awakening or self-recognition, by which Jesus realises his Messianic mission: the divinity he had come on earth to manifest is now no longer latent but dynamic in his person. Spencer² refers to the'"Western text of Luke 1:22" where "the words are said to have been: 'Thou art my Son; this day I have begotten thee.'" The event suggested by this text was sometimes described in the early Church as "Christ's second nativity". And, if we may pay heed to an ancient MS of Mark which speaks of the Spirit descending not "upon him" but "into him",³ we may have a composite picture of the Spirit alighting upon Jesus from beyond to penetrate him and enkindle his inmost self, and thus equip him for his world-work. But surely in this experience nothing entirely new was given to Jesus? He was already the Son of God: divinity was in him already, born with him, and it was this divinity that was now made to be born again, so to speak, and brought forth into action in the world by the Spirit.

The inner divinity is strongly indicated by the Fourth Gospel: "I am in the Father and the Father is in me" (John 14:10). The transcendent God is immanent here without the immanent God's excluding the transcendent. And with John such a phenomenon has a wide bearing. To him, Christ is the Logos (a la Philo), the universal Word, an immanent principle of eternal Life and Light as well as a personal being, the Son of God. It is also "the Light of men" (1:4), "the true light that

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enlightens every man" (1:9). And the work of Christ as the incarnate Logos, the Word made flesh, is, as Spencer⁴ aptly puts it, "to bring to men the life and the light which are the inmost principle of their being."

In view of the Logos-doctrine, which is after all the philosophical core of the doctrine of Christ's Sonship common to the other Gospels, would we be mistaken in thinking of the Kingdom of God as within men no less than among them in those verses of Luke? It is what is within that shall be among - the outer life manifesting the inner God-principle which is one in all and therefore capable of effecting an outer corporate organised spiritual kingdom. If, behind the language of Jesus' teaching in the Synoptic Gospels, there is a play of genuine mysticism, may we not discern in the Luke-passage one of the glimmerings-out of that background radiance? Jung, with his sense of the "inner man", may be here a better and more illuminated exegete than Otto and Perrin.

An eminent student of Comparative Religion, R.C. Zaeh-ner, has some pertinent things to say in the fourth part, "Unity in Diversity - Vedantin and Christian", of his most recent book.⁵ He starts with the Chhandogya Upanishad's two terms ksetrajna and a-ksetrajfia, "knower of the field" and "non-knower of the field" and goes on to quote from it the passage (8.3.2): "Just as [a group of people] who do not know the country (aksetrajnd) might wander about and pass over a hidden hoard of gold time and again without finding it, so do all these creatures go on day after day without finding the Brahman-world within them, for they are led astray by unreality." Zaehner comments: "To find this treasure within is the overriding passion of Hindu and Buddhist alike; for 'this is the Self, exempt from evil, untouched by age or death or sorrow, untouched by hunger or thirst, [the Self] whose desire is the real, whose idea is the real.⁶'" Then Zaehner turns to Christiaraty and, saying that "we find precisely the same simile in the Gospel of St. Matthew", he quotes 13:44: "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field which someone has found; he hides it again, goes off happy, sells

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everything he owns and buys the field." Zaehner's comment⁷ now runs:

"The treasure which Jesus calls the 'kingdom of heaven' is also 'discernment' (viveka), the 'fear of the Lord' (meaning almost exactly what Hindus understand by bhakti), and the 'knowledge of God' (jnana). For we read in Proverbs on which the passage from Matthew is based:

If your plea is for clear perception,

If you cry out for discernment,

if you look for it as if it were silver,

and search for it as for buried treasure,

you will then understand what the fear of Yahweh is,

and discover the knowledge of God.⁸

"This surely is the Self whose desire is the real, whose idea is the real and this is the 'kingdom of God within you'⁹,... the

true abiding Self anchored in God____And it is also the 'self

of which Jesus speaks: 'what gain,' he asks, 'is it for a man to have won the whole world and to have lost or ruined his very self?'¹⁰"

The last quotation is from Luke. So, if we follow Zaehner, two of the Synoptic Gospels, of which one is Luke itself, allude to a Kingdom of God which is not only to be formed by a communion of the faithful with Jesus the Messiah but also to be animated by a core of spiritual inwardness in each individual.

To be able to enlist Luke is perhaps the crucial test for my contention, for this Gospel is the immediate context in general of the phrase that is our problem. And I may add a still more direct chapter and verse. Just ponder over Luke 18:16-17 - "But Jesus... said, Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein." A particular inner attitude or state of receptivity, a happy harmonious within, appears to be implied as a prerequisite of the Christ-centred new world which has to take shape.

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Perhaps here I cannot do better than bring in Sri Aurobindo, whom the title of your article couples with the Kingdom of God. I shall draw upon the last passage of Sri Aurobindo's booklet on Heraclitus. The passage tries to sum up the drift of the Heraclitean vision, one expression of which is caught in that saying of his, "the profoundest of all Heraclitus' utterances, 'the kingdom is of the child.'" Sri Aurobindo's passage runs: "... Force by itself can only produce a balance of forces, the strife that is justice; in that strife there takes place a constant exchange and, once this need of exchange is seen, there arises the possibility of modifying and replacing war by reason as the determinant principle of the exchange. This is the second effort of man, of which Heraclitus did not clearly see the possibility. From exchange we can rise to the highest possible idea of interchange, a mutual dependency of self-giving as the hidden secret of life; from that can grow the power of Love replacing strife and exceeding the cold balance of reason. There is the gate of the divine ecstasy. Heraclitus could not see it, and yet his one saying about the kingdom of the child touches, almost reaches the heart of the secret. For this kingdom is evidently spiritual, it is the crown, the mastery to which the perfected man arrives; and the perfect man is. a divine child! He is the soul which awakens to the divine play, accepts it without fear or reserve, gives itself up in a spiritual purity to the Divine, allows the careful and troubled force of man to be freed from care and grief and become the joyous play of the divine Will, his relative and stumbling reason to be replaced by that divine knowledge which to the Greek, the rational man, is foolishness and the laborious pleasure-seeking of the bound mentality to lose itself in the spontaneity of the divine Ananda; 'for of such is the kingdom of heaven.' The Paramhansa, the liberated man, is, in his soul balavat, even as if a child."¹¹

In the above, Sri Aurobindo makes a combined allusion to Luke 17:20-21 and 18:16-17, and endows both with a mystic colour. In an old conversation he is reported to have opined that the Kingdom of God within may denote a moral king-

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dom.¹² A moral rather than a mystic colour may be more plausible from the surface indications of the Synoptic Gospels; but if the within-ness of God's Kingdom is accepted, there can be no definitive bar to a hint of genuine mysticism, particularly with a crosslight provided by a passage on children, whose innate innocence, free from wrestlings of the will over virtue and vice, would seem to fall outside the moral universe of discourse, and point, as Sri Aurobindo himself says, to a mystic liberation of soul.

If all that I have submitted has any cogency, the question arises: How is the Greek word entos, which the Authorized Version translates as "within", to be correctly rendered in its double inner-outer suggestion? "Among", which the original permits, goes to the other extreme. The Revised Version's marginal note for the full turn is: "in your midst." Possibly this is not quite bound to an external sense and may imply each individual's central being, his soul-core, the heart of his self, but the usual understanding of "your midst" is "among you". At a pinch I can only propose as a double-toned translation of the entire phrase: "the Kingdom of God pervades you."

Or perhaps we can indicate the double tone more faithfully by putting a hyphen between the two syllables of the Authorised Version's own word, thus: "with-in"?

With kind thoughts, Yours sincerely, K.D.Sethna

References

1. Sidney Spencer, Mysticism in World Religion (Harmondsworth: A Pelican Original, 1963), p. 214.

2. Ibid., p. 212.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., p. 220.

5. R.C. Zaehner, Evolution in Religion: A Study in Sri Aurobindo and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 92.

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6. Chhandogya Upanishad, 8.1.5.

7. Zaehner, cp. cit., p. 93.

8. Proverbs, 2.3-5.

9. Luke, 17. 21.

10. Luke, 9. 25.

11. Sri Aurobindo, Heraclitus (Calcutta: 1947), pp. 60-61.

12. Mother India, August 15, 1971, "Sri Aurobindo at Evening Talk", compiled by V. Chidanandam, p. 452.

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