The ground of faith

Author(s): Kathleen Raine

Source: India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 26/27, Vol. 26, no. 4/Vol. 27, no. 1: Faith (
Winter 1999/Spring 2000), pp. 1-6
Published by: India International Centre
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23005621
Accessed: 25-01-2016 21:06 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

India International Centre is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to India International Centre
Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 150.131.192.151 on Mon, 25 Jan 2016 21:06:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Kathleen Raine

The ground of faith

aith is one of the three 'theological virtues' of the Christian

religion, together with Hope and Charity (love) and is

described by St. Paul as "the substance of things hoped for, the
JL evidence of things not seen". The passage continues, "Through
faith we understand that worlds were formed by the word of God, so
that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear"
(Hebrews 11.1-3). The
reigning Sovereign of England bears the title

Jidei defensor' (defender of the faith). The faith, within Christendom, is

understood to be the Christian religion as such, and in England to be
Church of England 'as by law established', but our Prince of Wales in
a broadcast speech to the nation expressed his intention to be the
'defender of faith', which includes, in modern England, not only Jews
and Catholics but also Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains, Muslims
and all world religions. Of course,
the belief that the world of appear
ances is formed by invisible causes is common to all spiritual tradi
tions, including the Hellenistic philosophy.
The opposite of faith is doubt, which is so prevalent in the modern
West and westernized world as to have become itself a kind of or

thodoxy, claiming the authority of science, culminating in the latest

theory that the universe was created not by the 'word of God' but by
a 'big bang', purposeless and meaningless. Thus 'faith' has become

radically undermined, and is no longer regarded as a virtue rather the

reverse, since the ground of 'faith' has simply disappeared from
modern cosmology. The reversal of values this implies may well be
the cause of the psychological breakdown of whole societies, who have
lost that sense of security which is essential to life itself. In this respect
'faith' is innate.

This content downloaded from 150.131.192.151 on Mon, 25 Jan 2016 21:06:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
2 / The ground offaith

We open our eyes at birth on a world whose reality and security

we do not doubtthe love of our nurturing mother, shared with the
whole animal kingdom, the certainty of day and night, earth and sky,
the whole phenomenal world is firmly established and we ourselves
in it. In this sense faith is a norm, proper to our nature as human beings

adapted to our given world. The sanatana dharma, the 'perennial

philosophy', relates us to our reality and adapts us to our environment

in the most immediate sense, and also in the larger sense as our

knowledge grows.
The Vedic hymns, civilization's heritage from time immemorial,
express the dawning of faith in this sense, as mankind experienced the

emergence of living agents, the 'gods', of both inner and outer worlds,
still inseparably one: Usha, goddess of dawn and of promise, Savitr
the rising sun and awakening consciousness, beginning and setting

forth, Surya the sun in his glory and the fullness of life. The world is

experienced as an eternal epiphany, as it is in St. Paul's words, formed

not by 'things which do appear' but 'by the word of God'.
Loss of this so-to-say innate biological faith in the phenomenal
worlds is a psychological malady, a sort of insanity. This indeed I

experienced for myself when at the age of twelve or thirteen, shaken

by the sudden death of a cousin, the surrounding world became unreal

to me and I walked in a nihil from which I found
relief only by holding

my father's hand. This can, I think, be described as a 'loss of faith' of

an extreme kind: nothing was itself, things were visible and tangible
but not present in any other sense. Blake, England's one prophetic

poet, described this state when he wrote

If the sun and moon should doubt
They'd immediately go out.
Mine was a passing psychological crisis, but Blake in these words
was challenging the mentality of doubt which was already invading

England and France at the end of the the eighteenth century: in the
wake of the French Revolution it was already becoming current to

Charge visionaries with deceiving

And call men wise for not believing.
Blake writes of 'the Void outside Existence' and he was referring
to the rationalist materialist atheism already current at that time, and
he names Voltaire and Rousseau as mockers of faith:
Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,
Mock on, mock on, 'tis all in vain,

This content downloaded from 150.131.192.151 on Mon, 25 Jan 2016 21:06:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Kathleen Raine / 3

You throw the sand against the wind

And the wind throws it back again.
And every sand becomes a Gem

Reflected in the beams divine,

Blown back, they blind the mocking eye
But still in Israel's tents they shine.
Blake's lonely prophetic voice denounced the encroaching loss of
faith in the name of the Imagination, which Blake saw as the divine

presence in man, the 'divine humanity' which he identifies with the

universal Christ, 'Jesus, the Imagination'. In his poem Milton (type of
the 'inspired man') the poet whose 'Saviour' is 'the Divine Humanity/
the Imagination, declares that he comes 'in the grandeur of Inspiration'
To cast off rational demonstration by faith in the Saviour and
To cast off Bacon and Locke and Newton from Albion's covering
To take off his filthy garments and clothe him with Imagination
and

To cast aside from Poetry all that is not Inspiration

That it shall no longer dare to mock with the aspersion of Madness
Cast on the Inspired....
To cast off the idiot Questioner who is always questioning
But is never capable of answering...
Who publishes doubt and calls if knowledge, whose Science is
Despair,
Whose pretence to knowledge is envy, whose whole Science is
To destroy the wisdom of ages to gratify ravenous Envy.
Blake's eloquent words are also exact, and during the nineteenth

century the claim of doubt to be knowledge made great headway and

the attitude voiced by Tennyson in the words 'There is more faith in
honest doubt than half the creeds'
was widespread.
But 'faith' is not a matter of credulity or credence. The Apostle's
Creed, central to both Catholic and Anglican weekly services, and

repeated by the whole congregation, begins with the words 'I Believe
..." and is followed by a string of affirmations of belief to which every
Christian is asked to subscribe. But 'belief' is not 'faith': belief is
rational andvoluntary, or may be mere opinion, whereas faith is a

living experience, which turns sand-grains into gems, and by which

the earth becomes 'full of gods' and (to quote Blake again) the sun is
no longer 'a round disk, somewhat like a guinea' but 'an Innumerable

company of the Heavenly host crying Holy, Holy Holy is the Lord God

Almighty'. Blake's vision is that of the Vedic hymns. The phenomena

are created and preserved by the 'word of God' which, both for Blake

This content downloaded from 150.131.192.151 on Mon, 25 Jan 2016 21:06:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
4 / The ground offaith

and for the mainstream Indian tradition,is the divine presence in man,
called by Blake the 'divine humanity' or (Jesus being God made Man
in the Christian creed) 'Jesus the Imagination', an understanding that
comes close to the Upanishadic understanding of the Self. Faith is an

imaginative experience, not a formulated 'belief'.

Of this experience not factual information but the arts are the
normal expression. India, the supreme civilization of the arts of the

Imagination, has from time immemorial flowered not only in the arts
of poetry, painting, music, sculpture and architecture but also in the

grassroots culture of making pottery and textiles, household everyday

thingslamps, mirrors, boxes, nut-crackers, musical instruments

things of imaginative beauty and delight. In the words of Jesus, "Man

does not live by bread alone but by every word of God." Materialist
societies both communist and capitalist have disregarded these words
and created social systems providing whole populations with 'bread

alone', and in the capitalist West material goods in excess, but without

beauty and without imaginative food for the soul. No amount of

psychological 'therapy' can make up for the lost vision.

I had the honour to know India's great daughter, the late Kamala
devi Chattopadhyay, who accomplished the miracle of restoring
thousands of displaced people entering India from Pakistan at the time
of Partition, from despair to hope. She restored their sense of dignity

by founding a co-operative community which was self-sufficient in

producing its own food and means of livelihood, but at the same time
she understood that the soul too must be fed, and she encouraged
theatre and music and above all, the arts and crafts produced by
human hands, the marvellous skills of the innate creativity of India's

simplest beauty and delight, she understood,

people: are not a luxury
but a necessityand that surely has been the secret of India's civiliza

tion, in which pottery, textiles, metal-work and carved wood, carpets

and beads and bracelets are of priceless value not only because they
are things of beauty but because they give those who make them the
fulfillment of giving expression to their imaginative creativity.
Machines can never satisfy the need not only to admire beautiful

objects but to create them; Blake called poetry, music and painting 'the
three Powers in man of conversing with Paradise'. Might we not say
that 'Paradise' is the object of 'faith' and is both created and ex

perienced by the Imagination?

This content downloaded from 150.131.192.151 on Mon, 25 Jan 2016 21:06:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Kathleen Raine / 5

Why was it that 'doubt' gained ground, credence, and respect

ability throughout the nineteenth century, and 'loss of faith' became a

vogue among the educated classes? The Protestant Reformation called

in question many things that had passed as certitudes, and Western

Christianity had no tradition of spiritual practise such as has always

been central in the Orient; Christianity has always been an exoteric not
an esoteric religion, whence its reliance on creeds rather than ex

perience. Was it because the Industrial Revolution deprived whole

populations of the simple satisfactions of making and doing creative

handiwork? That sanatana dharma which Blake calls 'the wisdom of

ages' has been progressively undermined by Western education, and

especially by scientific 'research'. The world of science is an ever

changing world, innately unstable, always holding out promises but

at the same time undermining certainties. In modern universities
students are encouraged to 'think for themselves'; teaching has moved
from the older norm of imparting and transmitting knowledge to the
Socratic method of evoking knowledge from the student. Well and

good for Socrates demonstrating by questioning an ignorant boy in

order to demonstrate that mathematical knowledge is innate and
needs only to be evoked, but not so good when F. R. Leavis in

Cambridge trained students to call in question the images of Shelley's

'Ode to the West Wind' rather than experiencing them as imaginative

symbols.
Yeats gave a simple answer when near the end of his life he wrote
in a letter: "It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I
seek to put all in a phrase I say 'Man can embody truth but he cannot
know it.' I must embody it in the completion of my life. The abstract
is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute

Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence..." Yeats, it should be
remembered, is Blake's first editor and greatest
disciple and he too

proclaims the supremacy of the Imagination. It is not surprising that

Yeats proceeded from his early studies of Blake to his final commit
ment to the teachings of the Upanishads, of ten of which he made, with
his teacher Shree Purohit Swami, a most beautiful translation. Yeats's
words seem to me a statement of 'faith' in its true sense, as obedience
to a reality beyond human reason, better described as 'revelation'.
We ourselves live in a culture which has broughtitself, through

questioning the phenomena rather than experiencing them, through

'doubt' (honest or otherwise) leading to disbelief, to a nihil, a state of

This content downloaded from 150.131.192.151 on Mon, 25 Jan 2016 21:06:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
6 / The ground offaith

mind in which the phenomena have been emptied of divinity, emptied

of life. Sun and moon have gone out. Modern scientific method has

pla/ed its part, rejecting 'value-judgments' as scientifically inadmis

sible. Our 'revealed' world has given us water, ice, snow-crystals,
steam, rivers and fountains, clouds and ocean, but science has given
us H2O, an abstraction not a phenomenon. Life has delighted the soul
with the rose, but science seeks to discover the nature of things by

analysis, as if the rose could be found by removing its petals one by

one. Trees and gardens, flowers and birds and all the living creatures
science has reduced to chemistry instead of life, reflexes instead of

feelings, a 'big bang' for the divine creation of the world Keats calls 'a
vale of soul-making'.

Technologyapplying a materialist ideology derived from a

science which has assumed, in our modern world, an authority which
once belonged to Godhas progressively built a world, beautiless and

joyless, in the likeness of the materialist mentality which created

itmachines, robots,
computerswhile treating the living world of
animals and plants, earth itself and ultimately humanity also, as pieces
of mechanism. Need we be surprised that the same mentality has

produced cloning, genetic engineering, vivisection with all the rest of

those loveless crimes against nature which science makes possible?
Have too many changes that have destroyed the world in which

'Everything that lives is Holy' already taken place for us to restore the
old certainties and securities? Or can we, even now, raise our vision

beyond the nihil to the unknown unknowable source, once called God,
whether that source be in ourselves, or in and beyond the marvels of
the phenomenal world, rediscover 'that things which are seen were
not made of things which do appear'the ground of 'faith'?

This content downloaded from 150.131.192.151 on Mon, 25 Jan 2016 21:06:25 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions