Man, divinity and sin

Dr Satish K Kapoor

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One of the greatest contributions of Swami Vivekananda to the world of thought is his concept of man. To him man is not just a prototype –imago dei – of God, as in the Bible, but God himself; he is not simply axis mundi, fulcrum of world, but the world, not the microcosm– brachys kosmos – but the macrocosm. The infinite is contained in the apparently finite; the eternal resides in the outwardly evanescent. Life pulsates in everything, from stones, plants, trees and invisible beings to animals and man – the difference is only in the manifestation of life-force. Man can become God and control the universe by elevating his level of consciousness to the optimum level.

Original sin vs innate divinity

The belief that human beings inherit the guilt of Adam may be of doctrinal interest, but is bereft of any rational basis. In his paper on Hinduism at the World’s Parliament of Religions, 1893, Vivekananda disapproved of the concept of Original Sin, and described man as a manifestation of the Supreme Self. ‘Ye are the children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth – sinners! It is a sin to call a man so. It is a standing libel on human nature….You are souls immortal, spirits blest and eternal, ye are not matter, ye are not bodies. Matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter.’

The concept of divinity of man is as old as the Upanishads. While Confucius described man as ‘the heart of heaven and earth, the ethereal essence of five elements, the union of active and passive principles’, and so on, the Vedic sages viewed him as ‘the sole doorway to the mystery of existence’. The Bhagavadgita speaks of his eternal glory. So does Shrimad Bhagvatam which hails him as the crown of creation. Vivekananda’s observation, in this respect, created a stir in the West because his emphasis on the inherent divinity of human beings was juxtaposed with the Christian belief in Original Sin, and presented virtually as doctrine, in the presence of world’s topmost divines and scholars.

Lecture tours

During his lecture tours in America and Europe, Vivekananda continued to stress that man is not a pathetic weakling, a freak of nature but a spark of divinity. At Memphis, he observed that nothing was baser than ‘calling our brother’ a sinner. He asserted that it was irrational to teach that God was far away in some distant corner of the universe ‘when our real nature, our immortal principle is God’. At Detroit, he observed that those who regarded themselves as sinners were like lions masquerading as sheep. He spoke in a similar vein in Boston, New York, London and other cities, emphasising that man is not a creature of destiny but its creator. At Thousand Island Park he extolled the splendour of man, in an inimitable way, ‘Never forget the glory of human nature! We are the greatest God that ever was or ever will be. Christs and Buddhas are but waves on the boundless ocean which I am’.

The moral degeneration of man is visible from the prevalence of hedonistic culture, excessive individualism and artificiality in life. Man is viewed as merely a biological organism — a conglomeration of chemicals which can be purchased from a chemist’s shop for paltry amount. While man as spirit is infinite, he is finite in his embodied form and remains on the move towards achieving final perfection. There are various grades and types of human minds who prefer different paths to reach the same goal.

Like Meuersault, the hero of Camus’ The Outsider, man has come to feel the meaninglessness of life. In this situation, Vivekananda’s ennobling view of man remains relevant.

(Dr Kapoor is a noted educationist, historian and spiritualist)