Ananda Coomaraswamy
"Prophet" of Neo-Pagan Triumphalism!
Exposing Neo-Paganism Masquerading As A False "Traditionalism"!
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This article is part of a triology:
- Ananda Coomaraswamy: Prophet of Neo-Pagan Triumphalism
- The Slime Is Churning!
- Perennialism & The Coomaraswamies
Ever since I found that Carrie Tomko (http://runningoff.blogspot.com) had featured an article on one of my pages (linking it to the question of Ryan St. Anne), I have been visiting her blog off-and-on.
Another reason I kept visiting her blog, among others, was my interest in investigating the means of creating an "Internet Community"....
It was her blog that finally got me to create my own blog (http://goanpatriot.blogspot.com), although I am still deeply dissatisfied with what it offers me in terms of reaching out to souls with my message.
Recently, I saw in her blog, a series of posts (October 6 onwards) that mentioned "Traditionalism", Ananda Coomaraswamy and Freemasonry in the same breath, and being intrigued, I began to investigate once again.
In her post of October 6, 2004, entitled "A TRADITIONALIST WEBSITE", she says:
The whole concept of Traditionalism as presented in these two websites and in The Foundation for Traditional Studies website appears to be syncretistic in the sense that a foundation spirituality or "perennial philosophy" is said to be the source for all religions. While it is currently being acknowledged that different paths have grown out of the common source, the emphasis still remains on the commonality. Albert Pike said much the same thing in Morals and Dogma.This is a heresy that I was not particularly aware of. But on searching through Google on the subject of Ananda Coomaraswamy, I found a wealth of information that I had previously not known.
One interesting and detailed page is this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditionalist_School):
The Traditionalist School was founded in its current form by the French metaphysician René Guénon, although its precepts are considered to be timeless and to be found in all authentic traditions. It is also known as Perennialism, the Perennial Philosophy, or Sophia Perennis, and as a philosophy it is known by Aristasians as Essentialism. The term Philosophia Perennis goes back to the Renaissance, while the Hindu expression Sanatana Dharma - Eternal Doctrine - has precisely the same signification.Years ago, when I was intrigued by the question of Ananda Coomaraswamy, I had found only sparse information. The only substantial information was provided by a B. Srinivasa Rao on FreeIndia.org, and spread over several pages that I then collated into a single page: http://www.oocities.org/orthopapism/akk.html.
The other founding figures of the Traditionalist School were Ananda Coomaraswamy, the Ceylonese scholar and the Swiss Mystic Frithjof Schuon. To these were added over time such imposing figures as Titus Burckhardt and Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Other major figures of the twentieth century have been profoundly influenced by the school, including T.S. Eliot, the Roumanian anthropologist Mircea Eliade and the Italian esotericist and political thinker Julius Evola.
The fundamental tenets of this school or philosophy may be stated as follows:In addition to this, the Western world, unlike other cultures, has lost its connexion to the Primordial Tradition. This took place first in the Classical era, was rectified by Christianity, which re-introduced a modified form of the Primordial Tradition, but the severance began again at the time of the renaissance (this is a somewhat truncated account. The reader is referred to Guénon's Crisis of the Modern World for a fuller one).
- All authentic religious traditions are true, deriving from the Primordial Tradition. Guénon's work draws extensively on Hindu, Taoist, Moslem, Judaic, Christian and Masonic sources. At first, following certain Hindu schools, he rejected Buddhism as heretical, but Dr. Coomaraswamy, at the instigation of Marco Pallis (a Traditionalist convert to Tibetan Buddhism) demonstrated the essential orthodoxy of Buddhism and its consistency with Vedanta. Guenon, accordingly, authorised amendments to references to Buddhism in his earlier works.
- Contrary to the modern idea of "progress", and in accordance with all traditions, the world is in a state of intellectual and spiritual decline, inevitable from the very start of an historical cycle. We are present in what the Classical West called the Age of Iron, and the Hindus Kali Yuga.
The Aristasian theorist, Alice Lucy Trent has elaborated the theory further by an application of the Hindu science of the three Gunas to the process of the Western history of the past millennium, accounting for both the descent into "modernism" at the time of the renaissance and the "post-modernist cultural collapse" of the twentieth century. (Vide The Feminine Universe, by A.L. Trent).
In accordance with the two preceding positions, Traditionalists accord a high value to the intellectual activities of the pre-modern world and non-Western societies, and a good deal of their work lies in the sciences of metaphysics and symbolism, as well as the discussion and elucidation of the various spiritual traditions. Where they venture into such realms as social criticism it is clearly from a Traditionalist perspective which turns the progressist / Evolutionist assumptions of modernist theorists (both "left" and "right"), and of post-modernists alike, on their heads.
A recent history of the Traditionalist School and its influence in various different spheres and countries has been written by Dr. Mark Sedgewick under the title Against the Modern World.
But after reading the wealth of new information available, my knowledge of this subject is vastly improved.
The following are the pages that have provided me with my information:
- http://stateless.freehosting.net/ANANDAkCOOMARASWAMY.htm (Dr.T.Wignesan, Ancien-Chercheur au C.N.R.S./E.H.E.S.S., Centre de Recherches sur les Etudes Asiatiques, 5, Boulevard Pablo Picasso, B.P. 90145, 94004, Créteil Cedex, Paris, France. E-Mail: Wignesh@aol.com. URL: http://twignesan.fr.st/). I will use the Indian form of his name, "Vigneshan"
- http://www.ignca.nic.in/nl001601.htm Dr. Lalit Gujral (http://www.ignca.nic.in/lmgujral.htm)
- http://libweb.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/aids/bloch/
- http://kataragama.org/research/primordial_tradition.htm A Lecture by Ranjit Fernando
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditionalist_School
- http://www.movinghere.org.uk/stories/story105/story105.htm Biography of Mutu Coomaraswamy (1834-1879)
- http://www.movinghere.org.uk/stories/story104/story104.htm
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananda_Coomaraswamy
- http://www.tamilnation.org/hundredtamils/coomaraswamy.htm
- http://origin.dailynews.lk/2002/08/22/fea05.html
- http://kataragama.org/centers/akc_oration99.htm
- http://the-manifest.org/14/cooma.html
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rene_Guenon
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frithjof_Schuon
These pictures may also be of interest:
- http://libweb.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/aids/bloch/blochcoomaraswamy.jpg
- http://libweb.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/aids/bloch/stellacoomaraswamy1918.jpg
- http://libweb.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/aids/bloch/coomaraswamy.jpg
- http://www.aucegypt.edu/faculty/sedgwick/trad/photo/ac1.jpg
- http://www.zen-it.com/studitradizionali/imago/coomaraswamy.jpg
This is a summary of what I learnt:
A Concise Biography
Muthu Coomaraswamy1, born 1834, a Tamil Vellala Brahmin from Jaffna, (also having family names "Poonambalam" and "Mudaliar") became a very successful barrister in Ceylon, and was knighted. He met and married an Englishwoman, Elizabeth Clay-Beeby, belonging to a wealthy aristocratic family from Broad Campden, near Stratford-upon-Avon, Kent.
[The internal evidence available from these pages demonstrates that Beeby was originally a Protestant; however, Dr. Vigneshan explicitly and confidently claims that she was a Catholic. The "Movinghere.org" page, however, explicitly states:Coomaraswamy had met Beeby in the course of regularly attending non-denominational church services in central London. Elizabeth Beeby's family had a longstanding business interest in India and Sri Lanka....This account meshes in with my own surmises of the affair: that Beeby belonged among English families that settled Ceylon and established plantations after the transfer of Ceylon from Dutch rule to England by the post-Napoleonic Wars Congress of Vienna.
We are told that Muthu Coomaraswamy and Beeby met at "Non-Denominational Services church services in central London", that is, Protestant services. No Catholic at that time would be caught attending one dead!]
A son, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, was born August 22, 1877 at Kollupitiya, Ceylon. Muthu Coomaraswamy died on May 4, 1879.
Ananda Coomaraswamy was educated at the Wycliffe College and then at the University of London, from which he graduated in geology (or mineralogy and botany?), in 1901.
Ananda Coomaraswamy married, on June 19, 1902, an Englishwoman, Ethel Mary Partridge, (his fellow-student at London University). They lived in Ceylon 1902-1905, and were divorced 1909-1910.
While in Ceylon, Coomaraswamy had founded, with the participation of prominent Tamil and Sinhala social leaders, "The Ceylon Social Reform Society", 1905-1907, «in order to encourage and initiate reform in social customs amongst the Ceylonese, and to discourage the thoughtless imitation of unsuitable European habits and customs».
We are also told: «Ananda Coomaraswamy had an utter contempt for both Europeanized Indians as well as Europeanized Ceylonese. He once remarked that these were Indian or Ceylonese only by name. He always pointed out that schools and churches (emphases added) hastened the decay of eastern culture and remarked: "If you teach a man that what he has thought right is wrong, he will be apt to think that what he has thought wrong is right"» (Lúcio: Is that logical? I think not! I believe that this is merely a fatuous argument!).
«The Ceylon Social Reform Society's aims were to attack de-nationalization, protect national traditions and customs, and promote the use of national languages. Coomaraswamy had written an article 'Borrowed Plumes' (1905), in which he argued for the Ceylonese developing a sense of their own traditions and national culture, promoting a complete nationalism in dress and manners»]
Coomaraswamy next married an Englishwoman Alice Richardson (2nd wife) who had gone "native" under the name "Ratna Devi" (Srivinasa Rao) or "Ratan Dev" (which would be a wrong form, as being masculine), and who studied and performed Indian music. By her he had a son, Narad (1912), and a daughter Rohini (1914).
After leaving Ceylon in 1905, he traveled Europe and South Asia until about 1917, when he settled down at Needham, near Boston, Massachusetts, as the Curator of the Indian Arts Department of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
During the First World War, he had difficulties with the English government.
[According to one account: «During the First World War he was proscribed for his open support of the Indian independence movement (swadeshi or the boycotting of British imports and the development of native cottage industries) and his refusal to take up arms, refusing even conscription as a conscientious objector in a special detachment, and that his British passport and some of his inherited fortune was officially confiscated»
Dr. Vigneshan informs us that: «In 1917, England had confiscated Coomaraswamy’s ancestral properties at Broad Campden, proscribed him from entering the territory of the Empire and had placed a prize of £3000 on his head. Invited to give a talk in Canada in his last days, he had had to decline on hearing that bounty hunters had dispersed in the area in expectation of his visit»
By this, we must necessarily understand that between 1917, when Coomaraswamy settled in the U.S., and 1947, when he died, he was considered an outlaw with a prize on his head, and therefore liable to be seized, by the British and that therefore he never set foot in British territory during this time.
Yet Dr. Vigneshan’s account clashes with the fact (see "Stella Bloch papers") that Coomaraswamy had visited British India during the 1920-1921 Expedition....
Another major difficulty that shows this account on the whole inconsistent: The English would have been absurd in forbidding him entry, and yet desiring his capture to be brought to trial! Logically, they would have sought either the one or the other.
I believe that what they would have done was to initiate judicial proceedings against him, and summon him, and when he refused, to declare him an outlaw, a "proclaimed offender", and as absconding from justice, and therefore inviting him to surrender himself, and putting a prize on his capture. Again, I believe that this was soon withdrawn... with the end of World War I, since he was permitted into British India during 1920-1921. ]
In about 1917, an American, Dr. Denman W. Ross, an influential patron of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, purchased Coomaraswamy's collection of Indian art for the museum and persuaded the museum to appoint him curator of the new department of Indian art.
Coomaraswamy met a Polish Jewess, Stella Bloch (3rd wife), at one of Alice Richardson’s performances in New York: he was 39, she 17. Coomaraswamy and Alice Richardson were divorced 1919-1920.
In 1920-1921, Coomaraswamy, accompanied by Stella Bloch, against her mother's protests, went on an expedition to South and South-East Asia. Coomaraswamy married Stella Bloch November 1922. However, they lived for most of their time separately: he at Needham, she at New York.
Coomaraswamy, then aged 53, next divorced Stella Bloch in November 1930, and shortly thereafter, married the Argentinian Jewess, Luisa Runstein (4th wife), aged 25, on November 18, 1930. They had a son, Rama (b. 1932).
Coomaraswamy died at Needham, Massachusetts, on September 9, 1947 of a heart attack.
Refutation Of Guenon's Heresy: Pseudo-Traditionalism or "Perennialism".
From the viewpoint of orthodox Catholic theology, there is no possibility of accepting or countenancing in any manner this heresy. That this is a heresy is proven by the fact that it fundamentally contradicts the internal logic of Christianity; contradicts its very foundations.
Christianity sees the world divided into two camps or parties; those for God and those against. Christianity in itself represents the Tradition of Truth that God first imparted to Adam and Eve in the Garden, before their Fall, when they were on intimate terms with Him. It was continued in the Traditions of a Saviour-Redeemer to come, again imparted by Him to Adam and Eve after the Fall, and continued by Abel and Seth, and their descendants, by Methusale and Enoch, and by Noe, Shem and Japhetha, by Abram, Isaac, and Jacob-Israel, by Moses, Josue, and the line of prophets and judges down to Samuel, by Kings David and Solomon, by the prophets, and by Christ Himself, the Incarnate, Theandric God. On the opposite side is the False Tradition, made by rebellious man. Before the Deluge, men had rebelled also, but this Tradition, which originates fundamentally in the Rebellion of Satan, once the Angel of Light, and his allies, the Fallen Angels, was continued after the Deluge, in the Traditions of Ham, Canaan, and of Nimrod, etc.
Most of the ancient Paganisms — e.g., Hinduism, the native paganisms of the Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, Celts, Teutons, Shintoism, Taoism, Vodunism, the sundry "Animisms", etc. — demonstrate a sharp similarity, and prove a common origin, in the Rebellious Tradition of Paganism and Idolatry since the commencement of the Post-Deluvian period. In addition to these, are particular "reform" movements that began as reactions against the gross immoralities of these ancient paganisms: the various Greek "philosophies"; Zoroastrianism, Jainism and Buddhism, Sikhism, etc., which arose as reactions against Hinduism, and so on.
"Perennialism" by pretending that both Traditions originated in one Tradition, therefore fundamentally contradicts Christianity, and thereby demonstrates itself a Heresy!
"Perennialism" demonstrates itself as yet another, disingenuous, fraud designed to seduce Christians away from the Living God, the God of Israel!
Any Christian should be able to see this for himself: It is too very evident that the Tradition of the Living God, who rescued Israel from Egypt, and gave us the 10 Commandment, CANNOT EVER be the SAME TRADITION as that of the Baals, Bel, Chemosh, Moloch, Dagun, Astarte, etc.
Yet, THIS is exactly what the heresy of "Perennialism" postulates! A disingenous lie! A disingenous fraud on Christianity and Christians!
Freemasonry & Guenonism
The origins of this pernicious and vile heresy becomes much more clear and evident when we reject the deliberate myth of the Catholic origins of Ananda Coomaraswamy and of his mother; this is augmented by the revelation that Guenon, nominally a Catholic, was himself a Mason, and drew inspiration from Masonism.It should not be surprising that a Frenchman, one brought up in the traditions of Revolutionary France, which was created by the Anti-Christian Revolution which itself was wrought by the Freemasons, should be, despite being a nominal Catholic, a Freemason at the same time.
We must also bear in mind that Liberal, Protestant England, which produced both Elizabeth Beeby and Ananda Coomaraswamy, was and is eminently Masonic.
Putting the two together supplies us with the hidden answers to our conundrum: What made Ananda Coomaraswamy tick?
The Answer is: Freemasonry!
Fraud Mongering
It is also necessary to point out that "Perennialism", the heresy co-founded by Guenon, Schuon and Coomaraswamy, is an outright-and-outright fraud.No such tradition ever existed. It was invented. And, despite being invented, it was sold as if it were the truth, rather than a mere hypothesis!
Coomaraswamy: Neo-Paganism's Prophet Of Pseudo-Traditonalism
The above cited pages verify the claim made by Tomko, regarding Coomaraswamy’s heresy. But none of them verifies this more than Ranjit Fernando's Coomaraswamy Memorial Lecture.
[Ranjit Fernando: "What was it that Coomaraswamy represented? He called it by many names: The Perennial Philosophy, the Sanatana or Akalika Dharma, the Lex Eterna."[One interesting fact is that, despite the implied pretension that Ananda Coomaraswamy represented his father Sir Muthu Coomaraswamy’s ideals, as a matter of fact, his father’s ideals were exactly the same ideals that the son contemned and derogated, and which he made his life’s mission to war upon.... Sir Muthu was himself a Westerniser, and an advocate of Westernisation. The son’s ideas came not from his father, but from influences in England itself (John Ruskin, William Morris, etc.)!
Elsewhere, Coomaraswamy wrote: "Who that has breathed the clear mountain air of the Upanishads, of Goutama, Sankara and Kabir, of Rumi, Laotse and Jesus2 can be alien to those who have sat at the feet of Plato and Kant, Tauler Behman and Ruysbroeck, Whitman, Nietzsche and Blake."
We are also told... that Coomaraswamy hoped for a more fruitful era in ‘East West Cultural Relations’ and wrote that "men like the English De Morgan and George Boole, the American Emerson and the contemporary Frenchmen Rene Guenon and Jacques de Marquette were able to make a real and vital contact with Indian metaphysic which became for them a transforming experience."]
Research on the subject of Ananda Coomaraswamy has also been of great benefit to me, in that it has provided me for the long sought understanding of the making of the mind of "Mahatma Ghandi" (Mohandas Caramchand Gandhi). It is obvious that both were the product of the same degenerate, auto-destructive ideological tendencies among English Protestants, who increasing, since their contumacious secession from Christ and Holy Mother Church, have boldly and contemptuously thrown themselves into an ever increasing degeneracy and "de-toxification" from Christianity.
I can perceive that William Morris, etc., have been the formative influences upon both Ghandi and Coomaraswamy, and also explains Ghandi’s philosophy of "Swadeshi" and of "Ruralism" that has wrought so much social and economic havoc upon India, forcing millions to live a substandard life... it also explains why Ghandi choose the Fabian-Socialist Nehru as his heir to rule and to remake India, since Nehru’s ideas approximated the closest to Ghandi’s own....
It is interesting that the same ideologies and influences that produced Ghandi and Coomaraswamy also produced the Unabomber!]
The names that the votaries of this heresy use for it are confusing, to say the least. However, it is not too difficult to penetrate the camouflage and to unmask this heresy as being nothing more than a disingenuous attempt at neo-pagan triumphalism combined with a not-too-subtle effort to subvert and co-opt Christianity.
It is also very evident, from the internal logic of this heresy that it did NOT originate among true pagans, but among apostates from the pseudo-Christian sects who wished to return to and restore Paganism....
This heresy also resembles vaguely that Branch Heresy that the Church had condemned. The difference between the classic Branch Heresy and Coomaraswamy’s ideology, is that the Branch Heresy is restricted to claiming that all sects that pretend to be Christian are parts or Branches (hence the name) of a single, invisibly united, mystical Church.
Coomaraswamy’s idea is more expansive, in that it claims a common origin for all religious systems in the world.
Such a claim makes shipwreck of Christianity.
History is full of the formation and establishment of religions and sects. In every case, men have fashioned for themselves as they have thought fit. Yet in the case of Israel, a system was established and imposed, that was against the wishes of the people, who would have been happier to be left to the ways of wantonness that was permitted their neighbors, and which they strove to achieve at several times. This proves that the Israelitic religion was far from being man-made, and that it was rather, as it claimed, uniquely inspired by the one and only true, transcendent God.
This, in fact, is the very basis and foundation of Christianity, and to deny it is to make shipwreck of Christianity, to secede from the God of Israel and to go forth into the wantonness of the pagans.
Yet it is exactly this false idea that Ananda Coomaraswamy sought to inveigle... among Christians. It is true that this program has met with spectacular success among certain sections of "Western" society, but it is but natural that this program of subversion should have progressed with little hitch and with great success among the degenerate and falsely self-styled Christians of the various schismatic sects... whose very cause for schism was always the ancient desire to break-free into wantonness.
It is necessary to stress that it is extremely important for true Christians to totally deny and exclude the false and subversive ideas of Ananda Coomaraswamy.
Yet in so doing, one must not lose sight of the fact that Coomaraswamy was hardly original in his heresy. Rather, as these pages make amply clear [Lipsey, his biographer: "Coomaraswamy had been dourly and profoundly influenced during his English boyhood days by John Ruskin and William Morris’s anti-industrialist, back-to-nature writings and activities], he was far from having initiated this heresy, but he merely picked it up from the milieu in which he was born, in which milieu his mother was born and brought up, and in which she had found no scruples to betray the God of Israel for the false, coarse, obscene and teratomorphic "deities" of Hindustan....
Dr. Vigneshan pretends that Elizabeth Beeby, Coomaraswamy’s mother, and her family, was Catholic, and that Coomaraswamy himself was brought up a Catholic, until he formally apostatized to Hinduism in 1907.
That version (of his Catholic origins) is contradicted by Srivinasa Rao, and also by the fact that Coomaraswamy was sent to the Wycliffe3 College for his education. It is hardly probable that a Catholic family would have sent a member to an educational institution commemorating a heretic! Again, this pretension is further disproved by the "Movinghere.org" biography of Muthu Coomaraswamy (See above).
It is more probable that the Beebys were Protestants.... Liberal Protestants alone could have had no scruples in entertaining the pagan, Muthu Coomaraswamy, and in permitting their daughter to marry him; and to have permitted her to raise her son a pagan.... It is extremely improbable that a truly Catholic family would have countenanced any of this... and not have disowned Elizabeth Beeby!4
Nor are we to forget that in England even until quite recently, Catholics have labored under a siege mentality, being encumbered by several civil and legal disabilities... which would have prevented the existence of "Liberal" Catholics such as could have been found on the Continent.
It is evident therefore that Ananda Coomaraswamy was a degenerate product of a degenerate culture — a culture that was definitely Protestant... Liberal Protestant!
The Art of Cultivating Obscurancy...
We are told of Coomaraswamy, that:He... had an utter contempt for both Europeanized Indians as well as Europeanized Ceylonese. He once remarked that these were Indian or Ceylonese only by name. He always pointed out that schools and churches hastened the decay of eastern culture.... Coomaraswamy had written an article 'Borrowed Plumes' (1905), in which he argued for the Ceylonese developing a sense of their own traditions and national culture, promoting a complete nationalism in dress and manners.All over the world, people have confronted change, and it was not always that they had to adopt absolutely and without mitigation, the forms and customs of another culture.
Frequently, in fact, such changes were very much an integral part of progress for those peoples.
We have, for example, the absorption of Greek culture by the Etruscans and Romans. We have the assimilation to the composite Roman culture of subject peoples of Gaul, Iberia, etc.
Islamic Arabs assimilated many tribes of sub-Saharan Africa, a process that finally resulted in the Empire of Mali.
China absorbed Indian influences, merged them with her own indigenous products (Taoism & Confucianism), and this composite culture was then exported to Korea and Japan, contributing to their advancement into civilization.
When Christianity spread into the world, the people of the Roman empires adhered to various national paganisms, and they were, some of them, superior in morals, and some of them inferior in morals, to the pagans of Hindustan, etc. The spread of Christianity did not "de-nationalize" these peoples, or Judeanize them. The adoption, by these peoples, of Christianity, did not result in a worsened morality; these peoples, being taught by Christianity, that "all that they had believed to be right was wrong, did not come to believe that all that they believed to be wrong, was now right," as Coomaraswamy fatuously alleges!
History is the history of change, of adoption of new forms. The only peoples who refused to change, became fossilized and eventually collapsed.
In modern days, East Asia has followed a different set of ideas than South Asia. They have embraced and absorbed elements from Western cultures without losing their own identity, and in fact, even strengthening their own identities and enabling them to compete in the increasingly globalized world.
This is proven, more than anything else, by the near universal adoption of the distinctly Western attire, the Suit, which is worn by all professional businessmen and politicians. The exceptions are obscurantists, who wish to live in backwaters, and who compel their communities to close themselves to the outside world, and to be reduced to backwaters.
Such is, for example, the Indian Union, where the Suit is contemned and politicians wear the Ghandi-Nehru attire, looking ridiculous, venial and idiotic in the process.
Upto 1947, the vast majority of British Indian natives chose to wear their traditional attire as a mark of resistance to English rule. But, with independence, there has come a near universal switch-over to shirts and pants. Yet, politicians are a hang-over, hanging onto the outmoded Ghandi-Nehru attire.
[Some may argue, that if every institution should be open to change, why not the Church?
The Church is not merely a human institution. It is divine, established by God, by His Supernatural intervention.
Yet, even then, the Church is not and never was closed to change and to the outer world; it always presented itself to the outer world in the form and language that it could understand.
For doing this, it did not change its basic foundation... the Depositum of Public Revelation, which cannot be changed, if one is to be truly Christian. Nor is there any real need to change this. The Church has its internal logic, which is a rejection of all false gods, religions and human traditions. As such, it's ideology transcends the Dialectic of change.]
Fatuity = Profundity
We are also told that:Ananda Coomaraswamy had an utter contempt for both Europeanized Indians as well as Europeanized Ceylonese. He once remarked that these were Indian or Ceylonese only by name. He always pointed out that schools and churches hastened the decay of eastern culture and remarked:For two thousand years, Christianity has been doing exactly that what Ananda Coomaraswamy condemned: teach a man that what he had thought right, is wrong!"If you teach a man that what he has thought right is wrong, he will be apt to think that what he has thought wrong is right"
For two thousand years, Christianity has taught the pagans that their paganism and their idolatry, and their "gods"—anthropomorphic, teratomorphic and immoral caricatures of the Deity—their very religion and moral system, all, in sum that he had believed and been taught from his infancy to esteem as being right and moral, is actually all wrong.
Yet, did this result in those who accepted this (Christian) view, and therefore became Christians, in becoming immoral and evil? This is exactly what we must believe if we accept Coomaraswamy's thesis.
But to accept this is to assault and batter and rubbish the whole sum of Christianity, and of its very foundations. We must believe that all the Christian saints and martyrs and virgins and other exemplars that Christianity has held up to our adulation and emulation, were in fact, not moral men and women, but the most degenerate and debased men and women that walked this planet.
It should be crystal clear to the Christian, and the Christian must not entertain any foolish delusions as to what the malicious implications of this, Coomaraswamy's, thesis, is.
"Kill the Christians! Destroy their Churches!"
Another aspect of Coomaraswamy's heretical ideas, is that it is logical to proceed from a verbal condemnation of the spread of Christianity as an alleged Westernizing influence or agent, to an attitude of a legal proscription or "co-option-cum-domestication" of the Church in the East, and even further to the Agenda of the "Nativists" (Pagan Reactionism) in Ceylon and the Indian Union:"Kill the Christians! Destroy their Churches!"Ghandi, faced with the spectacle of souls continually escaping, despite all his shenanigans designed to overawe, bedazzle, delude and anaesthetize souls against escaping from the Maws of his diabolic, Satanic paganism—Hinduism—"piteously" begged Christians, especially Christian missionaries, to apostatize, and offered them in exchange, the "pleasures" of playing with his baubles.... Ghandi went on record that in a "free India", the law would proscribe Christian missions, and not permit free proselytization.
"Kill the Christians! Destroy their Churches!"
"Kill the Christians! Destroy their Churches!"
"Kill the Christians! Destroy their Churches!"
It is a short — and logical — step from contemning the spread of the churches, to the murders—the burning-alive—of Dr. Graham Staines and his two young sons by "Dara Singh" and his cult of cow-worshippers, the rape of nuns, the murder of priests, the desecration of churches and Protestant houses of worship and the tearing up of bibles by the Hindu Right, is it not?
This is an Agenda that has been vigorously prosecuted in both Ceylon and the Indian Union ever since their independence, both by the Governments and by the Hindu and Buddhist socio-religious leadership.
In Ceylon, under the impetus of such anti-Christian ideas, one prominent family of Christians apostatized to Buddhism and now spearheads the Program of "Nativism". These are the Bandara-naikes, from which the first Prime Minister and most of the rulers since Independence have come, including Mrs. Kumaratunga, the present President....
Incidentally, the contrasting and conflicting claims of the Hindu Tamils and of the Buddhist Sinhala have led Ceylon into a long civil war, and into a cycle of mutual genocides. The Sinhala believe in Sinhala nativism, but have no place for Coomaraswamy's pretension that Ceylon is an extension of India. The Sinhalization Program of the Bandaranaikes has resulted in the alienation of the minority Tamils, and their effort at secession.
Thanks to Ghandi, Coomaraswamy, etc.?
Nehru, first Prime Minister of the Indian Union, ardently shared these values. It was one of the main reasons that he contemned the retention of Goa in Portugal, and demanded its transfer, regardless of the rights and desires of the Goans themselves. The ideals, therefore, of Ananda Coomaraswamy, the ideals also, of Tagore, Tilac, Gokhale, Ghandi, etc., is what created the Rape of Goa.
It was an attitude that condescended and contemned the Goans for integrating themselves into Portuguese society, for their Lusitanisation, their "de-Indianisation"!
Lúcio Mascarenhas, formerly "Prakash"
Footnotes
1. From my rather limited knowledge of Tamil names and surnames, it seems to me that Mudaliar is the surname, the Hindu demi-god Kumara-swami the "kul-devta" (family's patron "deity"), and Poonambalam, which is the name of a temple ("ambalam"), the family temple name.2. Nothing can be more insulting and provocative to the Christian than to have the name of our Lord Christ Jesus dragged in and equated with the founders of false religions! The heretics demand that we respect them, and not attack them, who themselves attack and insult our God!
3. Wycliffe was the precursor of Luther and Calvin in England. His heresy was propagated by John Hus in the Czech country, and was put down by the Council of Constance, which had Hus burnt at the stake.
4. I am not opposed to inter-racial marriages, but to inter-religious marriages, for this makes shipwreck of the Christian faith of the Christian party. I believe that only bad Christians will marry Protestants or pagans! The Catholic Church passionately dislikes such alliances so that, usually it solemnizes such ceremonies only in the Sacristy and not in the main Church, in order to show its disapproval.
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