The religion of Logos and Sophia : from the writings of Dimitrije Mitrinović on Christianity

It is necessary to distinguish the needs of the mind and the needs of the human heart. Mitrinovié insisted that we must penetrate as far as we can with our minds, and not accept mentally anything which we do not understand; certainly we must not pretend to believe that which our reason rejects—though some expounders of Christianity seem to want us to do so! At the same time an inner faith and confidence is necessary to give value and meaning to life. And it is our own will that life should have meaning. Valuation is an act of our own creative will. ‘Faith’ wrote Mitrinovié ‘is the mother of understanding’.

This twofold attitude Mitrinovié expressed as ‘mentally, scepticism; spiritually, affirmation’, and it is particularly well exemplified in the opening sentences of his second World Affairs

‘Certainly, life; and certainly, future; novelty too and not failure; but effectiveness and accomplishment; these are in front of us humans. Not simply stoppage and planetary failure; for at least the book of the Gospel of John has been written and read in our world. The future is in front of us and our life will be a victory and a meaning.’

Most of this passage is affirmation spiritually of confidence in Man’s attainment, but the only statement on which it is based goes no further than the most exacting mental scepticism will allow; and in another passage he qualifies it still further by adding about the Gospel of St. John that ‘there must have been at least some righteous souls who have read it with understanding’.

And so it is with the affirmation of Man’s Divinity and his centrality in the Universe. It is indeed a spiritual affirmation, but it can be critically understood. In Vedanta it is affirmed that Atman is Brahman. The centre principle in man’s nature is the absolute reality in the whole universe. The reality of realities is the unlimited immaterial wholeness of Spirit, and worlds are created as it were by a stress disturbing this wholeness and dividing it into the Triunity of Being, Consciousness and Bliss. This stress is of the nature of reason and consciousness, as if God as subject saw himself as an outer being as object, and it is this division of subject and object that divides us into separate egos and makes the world of matter.

From this briefest indication, the Vedanta approach sounds

8