In Spite of Social Crises, Each Person Has a
Connection with Eternal Truth and the One Law
Ivan A. Il’in
Ivan A. Il’in (1883-1954)
The historical epoch now being
experienced by the nations must be comprehended as an epoch of great spiritual unmasking and revision.
The calamity
of world wars and revolutions, which has overtaken the world and shaken the
entire life of nations to its very root, is in essence a natural phenomenon,
and therefore it can have only natural causes and grounds. But everywhere
nature flares up, where it, once ignited, seizes possessions of people’s
affairs and fates, everywhere that people find themselves helpless before its
blind and shattering upsurge, there is everywhere hidden the imperfection, or
immaturity, or degeneracy, of the spiritual
culture of humanity: for the business of this culture consists precisely in
subordinating every element of nature whatever to its law, to its
development and to its end. A natural
calamity always reveals the defeat,
the limitation and the failure of spirit, for the creative transformation of
nature remains its highest task. And however great this calamity, and however
vast and overwhelming the sufferings caused by it, the human spirit must accept its failure and in the very
acuteness of its suffering discern a call to rebirth and regeneration. But that
means comprehending the disaster befalling us as a great spiritual unmasking.
The nature
that by now has involved humanity in the immeasurable misfortune of great wars
and upheavals is the nature of a
disordered and embittered human soul.
However great
the significance of the material factor in history, with whatever power the
needs of the body rivet to themselves the interest and attention of the human soul,
the human spirit is never reduced, and never will be reduced, to a passive,
non-acting medium subordinated to material influences and the demands of the
body. Moreover, a blind, unconscious obedience to these influences and demands
diminishes spirit’s dignity, for its dignity consists in being a creative cause, creating its life in accordance with higher ends, and not in being
a passive medium of natural processes in matter. Every influence entering into
the human soul ceases to be a dead weight of causality and becomes a living
inducement, attraction, reason, subject to spiritual transformation and
rational guidance. To the very essence of the human spirit belongs this gift:
to apprehend, interpret, transform and direct anew every influence intruding from
without. And to the extent that the human spirit does not possess this gift in
sufficient measure, to that extent natural elements of the world oppress it and
fracture its life; to that extent its immaturity
is unmasked and revealed, to that extent new tasks and the possibility of new achievements open up before it.
But in order
to take possession of this gift and use it in all its world-transforming power,
the human spirit must take possession of its
own nature: the nature of the irrational and semi-rational soul. It is
impossible to organize the world of matter not having organized the world of
the soul, for the soul is the essential creative instrument for organizing the
world. A soul submissive to chaos is powerless to bring about a cosmos in the external
world: for a cosmos is created in accordance with higher ends, while a psychic chaos rushes about, confused, among a
multiplicity of trivial, contradictory “ends”, obedient to blind instinct. The
unsettled soul retains a real potentiality for spirit: it perceives and
refracts, but does not transform and direct anew the influences intruding from
without. Its “ends” remain passive marks of causal pressures, and their
confusion is always fraught with new calamities. Internally unsettled in its
tasks, strivings, and abilities, the human soul vainly seeks salvation in
mastery over the external world: in technically conquering matter, it creates
for itself only a new helplessness; in overcoming external nature, it prepares
an insurrection of internal chaos; its successes forge the mould for a new,
unexpected defeat.
Presently,
before our eyes, the modern world repeats the path of ancient suffering; the
new experience leads to old conclusions. These conclusions once again teach
that self-knowledge and the self-transformation of the human spirit must lie at
the basis of all life, so that life should not fall victim to chaos and
degradation; they teach that the inner disintegration of the human soul renders
social order impossible and that disintegration of social organization leads
the life of a people to ignominy and despair. And still more, these conclusions
teach that the formal orderedness of the individual soul and of the social
economy doesn’t make the life of a human being secure from substantive degeneration
and criminal ways. Through all the sufferings of the world the ancient truth
arises and flares up, and summons people to a new understanding, recognition
and realization: the life of a human
being is justified only when his soul lives from a single, objective center,
moved by an authentic love of Divinity as the supreme good. This love and
the will born of it lies at the base of the entire developing spiritual life of
a human being, and outside of it the soul wanders, becomes blind, and stumbles.
Outside of it knowledge becomes a
parody of knowledge, art degenerates into an empty and banal form, religion is
converted into a dishonest self-intoxication, virtue is replaced by hypocrisy,
law and the State become instruments of evil. Outside of it a human being
cannot find a single suitable end in life
that would convert all of his “activities” and “business” into a single affair of Spirit and would assure the
human spirit of its victory. Only a vital and authentic craving for Perfection
ensures this victory, for it is itself the source of the greatest power, invincible by any “circumstances”
whatever, and introducing order into the inner and the outer world. This is
explained by the very nature of spirit: it is that creative power of the soul that seeks authentic knowledge, virtue and
beauty, and intuiting the Divinity as the real focal point of any perfection
whatsoever, cognizes the world in order to realize His law in it as its own.
But the soul, ever preserving within itself the potentiality for spirit, can
convert this possibility into actuality only when within the soul flares up, as
a holistic and joyous fire, a love for the Divine and a craving to become Spirit, to find a path to it,
and to reveal it to others.
History shows that it is not easy for a
human being to find this path, that it is difficult to follow it, and easy to
lose it. The chaos of trivial desires and petty ends imperceptibly disperses
the powers of the soul, and human passions extinguish its fire.
The soul loses its access to spiritual
contents and therefore cannot maintain the form of spirit: for it can be in the
shape of spirit only when it lives authentically by means of spirit’s real
contents. Having lost the shape of spirit, it becomes a victim of its own chaos
and gets carried away by its spinning to collapse and calamities. And then its
task is to perceive in these very calamities and sufferings its own falling
away from God, to hear His call, to recognize His voice, and subject its own
false path to unmasking and reexamination.
At present philosophy has the great and
responsible task of initiating this reconsideration and unmasking. Such a
staggering spiritual failure of humanity as a stream of unheard of wars and
unprecedented revolutions witnesses with unquestionable power and clarity to
the fact that all aspects of
spiritual existence lived and developed along false paths, that all of them are in a state of deep and
severe crisis. Humanity lost its way in its spiritual life, and chaos overtook
it with unheard-of calamity. This witnesses to the fact that the very
mode of spiritual life was false[1],
that it must be reexamined to the roots, and renewed and regenerated from the
roots up.
And if the task of organizing a peaceful
and just community of people on earth is a task for law and legal
consciousness, then the contemporary crisis lays bare above all the profound disease of contemporary legal
consciousness.
In the souls of people there are always
such aspects that can for a long time not attract sufficient attention to themselves,
dwelling in obscurity from generation to generation, only partly recognized.
This occurs not only because these aspects possess in their very essence an
instinctive character and are, as it were, crowded out from the field of
consciousness; and not only because they are in themselves spiritually
insignificant or secondary in practical terms and, as it were, get lost among
other equally inessential nuances of life - but also because the cultivation of
them requires a particular effort of will and attention, while their spiritual
significance, in terms of their basic nature, stands opposed to the
self-interestedness and myopia of everyday consciousness.
One can always find quite a few people
prepared to be sincerely surprised at the fact that in them dwells a certain
worldview, that they possess their particular aesthetic taste, that they stand in a certain constant relation to
the voice of conscience, that they
possess a legal consciousness
characteristic for their souls.[2]
And meanwhile each person, independently of his age, education, intellect and
talent, lives by these aspects or functions of the soul, even when he himself
has no suspicion of it. In such case his judgments and actions are formed
directly under the guidance of instinctive attractions and impulses and express
the structure of his psyche, his personal character, his individual level of
life, despite the fact that he perhaps knows nothing of this and does not even
suppose that people inevitably have a worldview and a legal consciousness, that
they inevitably live according to an aesthetic taste and a conscience. A
limited, narrow, obtuse worldview remains a view of the world; undeveloped,
perverted, bad taste makes an aesthetic choice in its own way; a suppressed,
deadened conscience, not listened to, still struggles and calls from within,
and a deformed, unfree, weak legal consciousness directs people’s acts and
creates their relations throughout life.
It is impossible for a human being not to
possess legal consciousness; everyone who realizes that there are other people
in the world besides himself possesses it. A human being possesses legal
consciousness independently of whether he knows it or does not know it, values
this asset or looks upon it with disdain. The entire life of a human being and
his entire fate are formed with the participation of legal consciousness and
under its guidance; moreover, to live means for a human being to live by means
of legal consciousness, within its function and within its terms: for it always
remains one of the great and necessary forms of human life. It also lives in
the soul even when positive law is as yet lacking, when there is as yet neither
“law” nor “custom”, when no “authority” whatever has yet spoken of “rightful”,
correct behavior. A naive, half-conscious, immediate conviction that not all
the external acts of people are equally admissible and “correct”, that there
are completely intolerable actions and there are “just” outcomes and decisions
- this conviction, as yet unaware of the distinction between “law” and
“morality”, lies at the basis of any “law” and “custom” and genetically
precedes any law-creating activity. And even in those cases when the content of
custom and law is defined by the self-interest of the powerful, when law is “unjust”
or “bad” law - at its basis lies nevertheless an immediate conviction of the
necessity and possibility of distinguishing “correct” and “admissible” from
“incorrect” and “inadmissible” behavior and of regulating people’s lives on the
basis of this generally-obligatory criterion.
In this is revealed the distinctive
tragi-comedy of living under law: deformed, perverted legal consciousness
remains legal consciousness, but it perverts its content; it addresses the idea of law, but takes from this idea only
a schema, uses it in its own way,
abuses it and fills it with unworthy, perverted content; there arises unjust law which however is called “law”
and is presented as law, compromising the very idea of law in people’s minds and undermining faith in it.
This tragicomedy
is characteristic not only of law-creating activity; it is the tragicomedy of
the entire spiritual life of humanity. Every person possesses within his exclusive individual
inner experience the sole medium connecting him with the heights of spirit -
with the true, the good, the beautiful, with revelation and the law - and the
sole source for cognizing them and for judgements concerning them; each one
knows concerning these objects only that which he has independently and
authentically experienced and creatively verified. [3]
And so people
continually forget about these fundamental conditions of spiritual activity:
they do not seek authenticity in experience and objectivity in research, but
base themselves on personal inclinations and satisfy themselves with subjective
opinions. And as a result of this there arises an unworthy and comical
spectacle: people make judgments concerning what is most important and supreme,
not knowing what they judge; each one makes claims, and encroaches, having no
basis for it; supra-personal self-manifesting truth is replaced by personal
certainty; there arises an endless multiplicity of disagreements, the mind
wanders, vacillates, and arrives at a fruitless “subjectivism” and a groundless
“relativism”. Belief in the possibility of genuine knowledge, in the unity of
the good, in the objective value of beauty, in the possibility of genuine
revelation, in just and spiritually true law, is lost, and with it inevitably
the will to discover the true path to the cognition and realization of these
supreme contents withers. Personal interest remains the sole guide, and life
imperceptibly degenerates.
This objectivity of the content of the
object as it relates to law can be described such that in the external
relations of person to person there is a certain unitary and objective rightness which it is possible to cognize
only through inner experience,
through an authentic, objective
examination and disclosing of natural law. The experience of natural law is
inherent in every person, but for the majority it remains a vague, uncertain
and unrecognized “feeling of right”, as it were an “instinct for the right”, or
in the best case an “intuition of right”. To become aware of the content of
this natural law and to disclose it means to initiate a mature natural legal consciousness, to make it
an object of will and justified
emotion, i.e., to convert this unitary and objective rightness into a needed
and desired end in life - it means to develop and realize in oneself a natural
legal consciousness.
In particular, a natural legal consciousness as the object of knowledge of the
“most” “genuine” unitary law itself must lie at the basis of any judgment of “law” and of any legal
or judicial decision, and for that reason it must also lie at the basis of
those “laws” which are established in various communities and States by
authorized representatives under the name of “positive law”. The more
developed, mature, and profound the natural legal consciousness, the more
perfect will be in such a case both “positive law” and the external life of the
people guided by it; and conversely: vagueness, inconsistency, lack of
objectivity and weakness of natural legal consciousness will create
“non-objective”, i.e., senseless, false, unjust “positive law” not
corresponding to its prototype. Then the “law”, unitary and true according to
its idea, bifurcates and enters into a peculiar internal contradiction with
itself: natural legal consciousness does not affirm what a knowledge of
positive law speaks of, and as a result the soul acquires two different legal consciousnesses, for side by side with natural
legal consciousness there arises a positive
legal consciousness, not corresponding with it in terms of content. Such a
bifurcation of the law, such a contradiction of legal consciousnesses,
witnesses, of course, to a spiritual failure befalling a human being: he
doesn’t succeed - owing to lack of will or insufficient ability - in becoming
aware of the content of natural law and placing it in the unshakable foundation
of any judgement concerning “positive”
law; but since the ability always depends upon the heart which loves, and upon
the will which forges and cultivates the ability, then all that great spiritual failure in the matter of
law-creating activity rests upon the universal, historically stable hardening of hearts and lack of will to just
law.
From this it is already clear that normal
legal consciousness leads not to a bifurcated, but to a unitary and holistic
life, and if that consciousness sees before it an historically given
bifurcation of law, then it wholly devotes itself to the struggle for a
unitary, just law, and for the restoration of its own inner, objective
spiritual unity. At the same time, it, as a spiritually true and holistic relation of the soul to the Law,
is not reduced to “consciousness” and “cognition”, but lives always in the form
of a will to perfection, justice and right, awakened by the heart and
conscience. Normal legal consciousness knows
its object; it is a knowing will to the law; recognizing it in its objective significance and obligatoriness,
and recognizing it because the will recognizes its end. Therefore, normal legal consciousness is above all a will to
law as an end, and for that reason also a will to the law; and from this the
necessity arises for it to know the
law and the necessity to realize it in life, i.e., to struggle for the law. Only in this holistic form does legal
consciousness appear as normal legal
consciousness and become a noble and inexorable power, nourishing itself
from the life of spirit, and in turn determining and cultivating spirit’s life
on earth.
Normal legal consciousness can be depicted
as a particular mode of life by which the soul lives, objectively and truly experiencing the law in its fundamental idea
and in its singular modifications (institutions). This order of psychic life is
of course something ideal, though not in the sense that this “ideal” would be
unrealizable. On the contrary, this mode of life is already given in embryo to each person, and depends
upon each of us to become aware of, develop and establish this embryo in
ourselves. And in this self-training the closest dependence is discovered
between the “awareness” and the vital “strengthening”: the investigation of
normal legal consciousness succeeds only in the presence of a creative will to
the law as an end, but precisely an objective cognition of this end strengthens
the vital will to it.
The scholar putting before himself this
task enters inevitably into a struggle with a whole multiplicity of prejudices:
a relativist viewpoint on the law
will be perhaps the most persistent of them.
Seemingly, the very conditions for the
creation and realization of the law favor this prejudice. Within the law,
apparently, everything is relative. Human consciousness gets accustomed
surprisingly easily and firmly to the idea that the law is “conditioned” by
time and place, interest and power, persistent will and blind chance. What is
“now” and “here” the law may “tomorrow” and “here”, or “now” and “there”, not be law; what is forbidden
today may be permitted tomorrow and perhaps imposed as obligatory a month from
now; organized interest becomes a power
and pronounces as “just” what tomorrow will be overthrown as an “accidental”
confluence of circumstances. Within the
archives are preserved piles of “outmoded norms” and entire codes, and a
resourceful mind, serving a momentary interest, is able to interpret and adapt
“prevailing” law however one wishes. The content of the law is always sufficiently
“indefinite” and “conditional”, and its meaning is always “provisional” and
“relative”.
Contemporary legal
consciousness grows and lives in this conviction; it is deeply penetrated by
relativism and doesn’t know about itself that it can and must be other. The
conviction that law is something “relative” - both in terms of its content and
its obligatoriness - arises imperceptibly, unconsciously, and for that reason
is rooted in souls particularly strongly and deeply: this conviction converges
with selfish and myopic interest, is nourished by it, and in its turn, serves
such interest. There arises a vitally important vicious circle: darkness begets
evil, and evil supports the darkness. “Educated” and uneducated circles of
people identically decline to believe in the objective value of law and do not
respect its prescriptions; they see in it either an unpleasant constraint, or
in the best case, a convenient means for defense and attack. Legal
consciousness is reduced to a stock of unreasoned bits of information from the
sphere of positive law and to the ability to “make use” of them; but behind
this “knowledge” and “use” it conceals in itself the most profound failures and
defects, inward degeneracy and spiritual impotence.
A blind, self-interested, unprincipled,
and impotent legal consciousness directs the life of humanity. And thus these
diseases of legal consciousness unleashed the natural element of the soul and
prepared its spiritual failure.
The life of spirit requires
indeed a profound re-examination and renewal.
NOTES:
[1]
This is a particularly significant point in the original teachings of
theosophy. See for instance Letter 10 in
“The Mahatma Letters”. The volume “The Mahatma Letters” is available in PDF in
our associated websites. (CCA)
[2] The voice of conscience is the voice of what
theosophists call Antahkarana, the abstract
bridge between the lower self and the
spiritual soul. Legal consciousness is a sense of right and wrong and includes a
commitment to right action. (CCA)
[3] A
powerful description of Antahkarana. (CCA)
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The above text is reproduced from the book “On the Essence of Legal Consciousness”,
by Ivan A. Il’in; Wildy, Simmonds & Hill Publishing, 2014, UK, 391 pp., see
pp. 115-123. The volume was introduced and translated by William E. Butler,
Philip T. Grier and Vladimir A. Tomsinov. Notes of the editors are not included
in the present transcription.
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The content of pages 115-117 in “On the Essence of Legal Consciousness” was also published at the
December 2015 edition of “The Aquarian Theosophist”, under the title of “Taking
Possession of Our Own Nature”.
Ivan A. Il’in was born on 9 April 1883 (or 28 March 1883, old style), and died on 21 December 1954.
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Readers are invited to see in our associated websites the articles “Theosophy as Natural Law”, by Carlos
Cardoso Aveline, and “Spiritual Respect
for Oneself”, by Ivan A. Il’in.
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