Buddhist Romanticism

Huxley then quotes approvingly a passage from William Law, an 18th
century mystic, to the effect that this Ground, both within and without, is
infinite.
“This depth is the unity, the eternity—I had almost said the
infinity—of the soul; for it is so infinite that nothing can satisfy it or
give it rest but the infinity of God.” 40
Although Huxley presents this Ground—God in his various names—as
both transcendent and immanent, he gives something of a Romantic twist
to the idea of God’s immanence. In a peculiar passage, explaining the
existence of evil in a universe that is the expression of a single divine
power, Huxley falls back on an organic model to explain the relationship of
all creation to God: We are all individual organs within a much larger
organism permeated with God. From this analogy, Huxley argues a
position similar to Hölderlin’s: that the universe, being infinite, ultimately
lies beyond good and evil, and that peace can be found only by adopting
this universal view. After pointing out that many individuals—i.e., other
organs in the universal organism—behave selfishly, Huxley states:
“In such circumstances it would be extraordinary if the innocent
and righteous did not suffer—just as it would be extraordinary if the
innocent kidneys and the righteous heart were not to suffer for the
sins of a licorous palate and overloaded stomach, sins, we may add,
imposed upon those organs by the will of the gluttonous individual
to whom they belong.… The righteous man can escape suffering only
by accepting it and passing beyond it; and he can accomplish this
only by being converted from righteousness to total selflessness and
God-centredness.” 41
In making this point, however, Huxley doesn’t seem to realize that he
has portrayed God as a glutton and a lush. Thus the passage has the double
effect of adding confusion to the problem it attempts to solve, at the same
time undermining much of the rest of his book.
This unfortunate passage aside, there are other features of Romantic
religion that Huxley transmits in a fairly unaltered manner.
For example, his definition of the basic spiritual problem is that people
suffer from their sense of having a separate self. This sense of separation
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