Essays on the Gita, First Series (Arya Publishing House, 1922)

For to the modern mind Avatarhood is one of the most difficult ,to accept or to understand of all the ideas that are streaming in from the East uj>on the rationalised human consciousness„. It is apt to take it at the best for a mere figure for some high manifestation of human power, character, genius, ^eat work done for the world or in the world, and at the worst to regard it as a superstition, — to the heathen a foolishness and to the Greeks a stumbling- block. /The materialisL necessarily, cannot ever look at It, since he does not believe in God ; to the rationalist or the DeFst it is a folly and a thing of derision ; to the thoroughgoing dualist who sees an unbridgeable gulf between the human and the divine nature, it sounds like a blasphemy. The rationalist objects that if Gkxi exists, he is extra2cosmic or supracosmic and does not intervene in the affairs of the world, but allows them to be governed by a fixed machinery of law, — he is, in fact, a sort of far-off constitutional monarch or spiritual King Log, at the best an indifferent inactive Spirit behind the amvity of Nature^ like some generalised or abstract witness Purusha of'the Sankhyas ; he is pure Spirit and cannot put on a Body, infinite and cannot be finite as the human being is finite, the ever unborn creator and cannot be the creature born into the world, — the^ things are impossible even to his absolute omnipotence. To these objections the thoroughgoing dualist would add that Go d is in his person, his role and his natu re different and~ separate from man ; the jirfect can not put on human imperfection ; the imbom personal God cannot be bom as a human personality ; the Ruler of the worlds cannot be liihited in a nature-bound human action and in a perishable human body. These objections, so formidable at first sight to the reason, seem to have been present to the mind of the Teacher in the Gita when he says that although the Divine is unborn, imperishable in his self-existence, the Lord of alL beings, yet hie assumes bjirth by.„a supreme resort to the action of his Nature and by f orce o f self- Maya ;) that he whom the deluded despise becaif^ Todged in a human body, is verily in his supreme being the Lord of all ; that he is in the action of the divine consciousness the creator of the fourfold Law and the doer of the works of the world