THE GOD-MAN The Life, Journeys and Work of Meher Baba with an ...

THE MAN 401with each other. When one is committed to a particular religion, as indeed one must be to be able toappreciate the inwardness of religion at all, it is hard to avoid a somewhat equivocal attitude towards otherreligions; one seems bound to assert that one's own religion is in some way superior to or more completethan others. The best treatment of the subject known to me is contained in the works of the Swiss scholar,Fruthjof Schuon, in particular, The Transcendent Unity of Religions (1953). An excellent discussion on theGod-Man is by the Russian Vladimir Soloryer (1853-1900) in Lectures on God-Manhood (1878). Thesubject has certainly not been ignored by others, whose conclusions, however, I find uneasy. FruthjofSchuon is Christian, Protestant, with a profound knowledge of Islam and Eastern religions, while Soloryerwas Christian Orthodox with a deep knowledge of the Eastern and Roman theologies and some knowledgeof Eastern religions; I refer the reader to their books. Schuon says:If Christ had been the only manifestation of the Word, supposing such uniqueness of manifestation to bepossible, the effect of His birth would have been the instantaneous reduction of the universe to ashes.My own conclusion is that no satisfactory answer to the question of the relation between Jesus and Babais possible unless we can agree that both manifest the same Eternal Consciousness; they are not identicalpersons, neither are they repetitions of each other: the work of each is unique. Therefore, to suppose thatBaba is the Palestinian Jesus come again, is a fundamental error.There are pictures of Baba in which he is represented as the suffering Jesus, as there are pictures of him asKrishna. This kind of devotion is sometimes to be found in the treatment of the lives of Christian saints, inparticular St Francis of Assisi, whose life has been presented in such a way as to resemble the life of Christ.Dante himself is not innocent of this for he found in St Francis, to use Baron von Hügel's words, 'thereproduction of the divine paradox of the life of Jesus'. It is true that the Christian does aim to be, asKierkegaard said, 'contemporaneous with Christ', but that does not mean that he repeats in himself the life ofChrist, which was once for all, but that he sees with Christ's eyes the reality of God in the changing andimperfect world. It is a fact that to see Baba walking through the streets of Indian villages, when he givesdarshan, is to see what is not unlike what must have taken place when Jesus walked in Judea and Galilee. Inthe same way the people press upon him, mothers carry their children, the old