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II
PANTHEISM
Poe's Eureka is his only writing containing anything like a systematic statement of his religious conceptions. There, if anywhere, is to be discovered the manner of God the poet held in his thoughts. The book begins and ends with God as all in all. Nowhere is the writer's spirituality — his anti-materialism — more manifest. In words often so beautiful as to entitle him to call the work a prose poem he unfolds his dream of the beginning and end of the universe.(1) But what kind of a Deity and universe does he reveal?
Here we are left in no doubt. Not monotheism, not even theism, underlies the work, but pantheism. The universe has emanated from an eternal Essence. Ultimately it will be drawn back into the same Essence. Thence in eons of the future it will proceed again. Even to eternity of eternity and infinity of infinity will the cycles of emanation and absorption, of re-emanation and re-absorption go on. Let us hear Poe's own words in brief:
Just as it is in your power to expand or concentrate your pleasures (the absolute amount of happiness remaining [page 20:] always the same) so did and does a similar capability appertain to this Divine Being, who thus passes his Eternity in perpetual variation of Concentrated Self and almost Infinite Self-Diffusion. What you call the Universe is but his present expansive existence. He now feels his life through an infinity of imperfect pleasures — the partial and pain-entangled pleasures of those inconceivably numerous things which you designate as his creatures, but which are really but infinite individualizations of Himself.(2)
Then, to turn back a little in Poe's book:
Matter, finally, expelling the Ether, shall have returned into absolute Unity, — it will then (to speak paradoxically for the moment) be Matter without Attraction and without Repulsion — in other words, Matter without Matter — in other words, again, Matter no more. In sinking into Unity, it will sink at once into that Nothingness which, to all Finite Perception, Unity must be — into that material Nihility from which alone we can conceive it to have been evoked — to have been created by the Volition of God.
I repeat then — that the final globe of globes will instantaneously disappear, and that God will remain all in all.
But are we here to pause? Not so. On the Universal agglomeration and dissolution, we can readily conceive that a new and perhaps totally different series of conditions may ensue — another creation and irradiation, returning into itself — another action and reaction of the Divine Will. ... Are we not, indeed, more than justified ... in indulging a hope that the process we have here ventured to contemplate will be renewed forever, and forever, and forever; a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Divine Heart.(3) [page 21:]
That this philosophy is not Hebrew is manifest to everyone familiar with the Bible.(4) That it has points of contact with Greek speculation is apparent to those acquainted with Plato's idealism. But it is essentially of India, resembling a scheme of thought first outlined in the Vedas, then developed in the Upanishads, and finally perfected in the Vedanta philosophy.(5) Thus in the Upanishads we read: “Assuredly this universe is Brahman.” In commenting upon that sentence the noted Vedantist, Shankaracharya, says: “From this Brahman by development into fire, water, earth, etc., the universe has arisen. ... So on the reverse path to that by which it has arisen it disappears into the very same Brahman, that is it is absorbed into his essence.”(6) And again, the Upanishads tell us, as Poe does, that this end of all things is only precedent to a new beginning: “That which he created he then takes back again, becoming one with the being of being, in order then ... to begin the work afresh.”(7) Or as it is elsewhere expressed: “He, at the destruction of the universe, alone is on the watch. He wakes all this world, which consists of thought only.”(8) From a later time the Bhagavad Gita speaks to the same effect: “All living beings ... return back into my [page 22:] nature at the end of the world; at the world's beginning I recreate them anew.”(9)
No less striking are Poe's resemblances to the Vedanta when he speaks of the relation of all souls to the universal soul. To him there is nothing inanimate — stones, trees, animals, man, all partake of the divine life. As early as 1841, in his Island of the Fay, Poe contends that all the universe is endowed with vitality, that our planet is alive:
We are madly erring, through self-esteem, in believing man, in either his temporal or future destinies, to be of more moment in the universe than that vast “clod of the valley” which he tills and contemns, and to which he denies a soul for no more profound reason than that he does not behold it in operation.(10)
So in Eureka he declares:
All these creatures — all — those which you term animate, as well as those to whom you deny life for no better reason than that you do not behold it in operation — all these creatures have, in greater or less degree, a capacity for pleasure and for pain: — but the general sum of their sensations is precisely that amount of Happiness which appertains by right to the Divine Being when concentrated within Himself.(11)
This all-animating cosmic soul is explained by the Vedantist to be the Effect God, an emanation from the Highest Brahman, or God, who transcends finite [page 23:] existence and thought. Sitanath Tattvabhushan, a modern Vedantist, thus puts the matter:
This Effect God, then, the first and highest emanation from the Supreme Cause, is the totality of created existence — the whole, of which so-called inanimate objects as well as finite souls are parts. Things that seem to us quite apart from any conscious life, events that appear to be entirely objective — all cosmic changes in fact — are apprehended in the all-containing consciousness of Brahma.(12)
The philosopher, of course, hastens to assure us that all these distinctions of Causal God, Effect God and the things seeming to result therefrom, are nonexistent: “Simply so many standpoints from which the same Being is looked at ... him who though variously contemplated, is one and indivisible.”(13)
Before passing from the soul of things to the soul of man it is interesting to notice that this panpsychism of Poe and the Vedantist, which now has prominent advocates among Occidental thinkers,(14) is not altogether absent from the Christian scriptures. In the Old Testament the weeping of furrows, skipping of hills, and rejoicing of trees are readily explained as poetic personification. But in the New Testament St. Paul declares that the whole creation is waiting in pain and earnest longing for the coming of its release and its glorification in the day of the full redemption of the children of God.(15) [page 24:]
Poe's round declaration that the souls of men are God would have passed as a truism in India any time within the past thirty-five centuries. But the people who heard his lecture in New York in 1848, or read Eureka in the modest volume that appeared a little later, must have found his assertion startling, and thought it verging upon blasphemy. To the present day many see in Eureka convincing evidence of Poe's insanity. After representing the universe as God in infinite diffusion, the result of the “throb of the Heart Divine,” he asked: “And now — this Heart Divine — what is it? It is our own.”(16) Then at the end of the lecture he said:
Think that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness — that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah.(17)
Perhaps two and a half milleniums before Poe's time the thought he uttered was being taught to an Indian lad by his father. It runs through the Chandogya Upanishad as an oft-repeated refrain:
When a man departs from hence his speech is merged in his mind, his mind in his breath, his breath in heat, heat in the Highest Being. Now that which is that subtile essence, the root of all, in it all that exists has itself. It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, O Shvetaketu, art it.(18) [page 25:]
All enlightened souls of that olden time had learned to say:
I am Brahman [the Supreme God] . ... Now if a man worships another deity, thinking the deity is one, and he another, he does not know.(19)
Again it was taught:
He who is in the fire, and he who is in the heart, and he who is in the sun, they are one and the same. He who knows this becomes one with the one.(20)
If that was blasphemy to Poe's auditors it at least was not such to India's sages. To them it meant only that the soul had come into its own by recognizing its oneness with God.(21)
Poe knew his conception might seem irreverent.(22) He also realized that his doctrine of the loss of the personal soul in the soul of the universe would seem repellent. Hence he added this note to his printed lecture:
The pain of the consideration that we shall lose our individual identity, ceases at once when we further reflect that the process as above described, is neither more nor less than that of the absorption by each individual intelligence of all other intelligences (that is, of the Universe) into its own. That God may become all and in all, each must become God.(23) [page 26:]
The doctrine is the solace of hundreds of millions of souls living under the influence of Hinduism and Buddhism. They see struggling, imprisoned souls in all things: “Some enter the womb in order to have a body, as organic beings, others go into inorganic matter, according to their work, and according to their knowledge.”(24)
To them the problem of salvation is how to escape from the wheel of life — of life with its passions and desires and miseries, of life following life in inexorable succession. The burden of it is expressed by a South Indian poet:
How many births are past, I cannot tell;
How many yet to come, no man can say.
But this alone I know, and know full well
That pain and grief embitter all the way.(25)
When, therefore, the soul is set free by the knowledge that it is not, that all things are not, that only Brahman is, it loses itself with joy in the shoreless sea of “the one only, without a second.”(26) Hence the great exhortation: “That from whence these beings are born, that by which, when born, they live, that into which they enter at their death, try to know that. That is Brahman.”(27) Hence also the satisfaction with which the return to Brahman was contemplated: “As from a blazing fire sparks, being like unto the fire, fly forth a thousandfold, thus are various beings brought [page 27:] forth from the Imperishable, my friend, and return thither again.”(28)
That this doctrine of transmigration exerted a fascination over Poe's mind cannot be questioned. It comes to expression in Morella, Ligeia, Metzengerstein, The Oval Portrait, and The Tale of the Ragged Mountains. How seriously he took it is uncertain. But in the miseries of his life, heightened as they were by his morbid fancy, intensified by his sense of wrongdoing, and projected to infinity by his belief in his foreordained damnation,(29) what wonder that he longed for the time when “the fever called Living” would be “conquered at last”!
To such a man the thought of an eternal sleep, or the merging of his individuality in the Over-Soul, would have comfort. It has for some besides Orientals, and possibly for all thinkers in certain moods. Schopenhauer declared the Upanishads had been the solace of his life, and would be the solace of his death.(30) Max Müller could learn from philosophy no better preparation for a happy death than that taught in the Vedanta.(31) That its fascination for Poe did not begin as late as Eureka seems evident from early utterances which voice a longing for freedom from the oppressive thought of eternal life. In 1829 he sang of maiden angel and seraph lover: [page 28:]
Sweet was their death — with them to die was rife
With the last ecstasy of satiate life —
Beyond that death no immortality —
But sleep that pondereth and is not “to be” —
And there — oh? may my weary spirit dwell —
Apart from Heaven's Eternity — and yet how far from Hell!(32)
And he prays for the Sleeper, dead in all her youthful beauty:
Oh, may her sleep,
Which is enduring, so be deep?
. ... ..... .
I pray to God that she may lie
Forever with unopened eye.(33)
There is one other phase of this pantheism that may be considered before inquiring how Poe acquired it. The clearest expression of it is in Berenice, in a paragraph having the added interest of being thought autobiographical.(34)
To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device on the margin, or in the typography of a book; to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day, in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the door; to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire; to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower; to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the .mind; to lose all [page 29:] sense of motion or physical existence, by means of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in.(35)
All this, which in the story is pronounced disease and madness, and the like of which in Poe went far toward establishing his insanity, has been the highest wisdom of India for ages. Men carrying the process to its greatest extreme are there honored and worshiped, along with those who proclaim themselves divine. Occidentals in condemning such passages in Berenice and Eureka as insane and blasphemous convict themselves before the bar of high Orientalism of calling wisdom folly, and good evil.
The process described in the paragraph quoted is akin to the practices of the devotees of the Yoga system of philosophy. Like the Vedanta, it is based upon the Upanishads, and its purpose is to aid the soul to overcome ignorance and illusion, in order that it may lose itself in union with the All-Sou1.(36) As such it is perfectly consistent and intelligible. To know self is to know Brahman. Therefore rigorous abstraction, the overcoming of all action and desire and thought — anything that will shake off the hold of the phenomenal, illusory universe. The best means to that end are such as the hero of Berenice used — musing on nothing; gazing fixedly at a light, or the tip of one's nose; repeating meaningless sounds, especially the mystic syllable, Om, the unintelligible symbol of the unknowable deity; bodily quiescence persisted [page 30:] in until the limbs become atrophied. So an ancient sage of India declares with fine rapture:
When the works of the mind are dissolved, then arises that bliss which requires no other witness, that is Brahman, the immortal, the brilliant; that is the way, that is the true world. And thus it has been said elsewhere: He who has his senses hidden as in sleep, and who, while in his body but no longer ruled by his senses, sees, as in a dream, with the purest intellect, Him who is called Om, the leader, the bright, the sleepless, free from old “age, from death, and sorrow, he is himself also ... a leader, bright, sleepless, free from old age, from death, and sorrow.(37)
Before giving our final verdict upon the sanity of Poe or of his mystical kinsmen beyond the seas, we should be at pains to know them both, and the rationale of their extraordinary ways. Says a profound German philosopher, who was also a learned Sanskritist and student of Indian thought and life:
The phenomena of yoga are akin, not only, as has often been asserted, to certain diseased conditions that exist also among ourselves, but also with the entirely healthy and joyous phenomenon of aesthetic contemplation. The more than earthly joy which we experience at the sight of the beautiful in nature or in art, depends upon a forgetfulness of one's own individuality, and a union of subject and object, similar to that which the yoga endeavors to secure by artificial means.(38)
There can be no reasonable doubt that Poe's reflection [page 31:] of Vedantism and Yoginism was due to contact with Indian thought. There was much in him that made such thought congenial; much that in the absence of outside influence might have led him independently to similar fancies and conclusions. But at the time of his literary career such independence was unnecessary, and hardly possible. Indian thought had just burst upon the Western world with all the charm of novelty. A brilliant company of German scholars had newly exploited the language, literature, and philosophy of ancient India and opened its treasures to the world. Fried. von Schlegel,(39) August Wilhelm Schlegel,(40) Schelling,(41) Schopenhauer,(42) and Fichte(43) had all steeped their souls in that ancient wisdom, and become fascinated thereby. As early as 1828 Victor Cousin, in France, was able to assert truthfully that a knowledge of Indian philosophy had spread over all Europe.(44)
Of the eminent scholars just mentioned, Schelling has long been recognized as one of Poe's masters.(45) In [page 32:] Morella Poe makes the hero and his wife devotees of “the wild Pantheism of Fichte ... and, above all, the doctrines of Identity as urged by Schelling.”(46) He repeatedly declared Wilhelm Schlegel a teacher with whom he was familiar.(47) That he knew and admired the writings of Cousin is evident from a sentence in his literary criticisms.(48) As for the others, acquaintance with them was involved in a knowledge of the men he certainly followed.
Much of the spirit of India at work in Germany had found its way into English literary circles through translations from the German. Aside from that, Poe certainly had sufficient mastery of German and French to read his masters in their own language. From the great sages of India, through their noted German interpreters, we may then be sure that Poe, directly or indirectly, obtained his pantheism.(49)
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 19:]
1 Poe's greatest sin against the fitness of things in his writings is in the introduction of his flippant Mellonta Tauta into this lecture. Such was the name he gave the grotesque thing when he published it separately the next year. How he came to commit such a crime against beauty and good taste is inexplicable, unless it was his way of trying to make his lecture popular. See Eureka, XVL 187-198: Tales, VI. 197-215.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 20:]
2 Eureka, XVI. 314.
3 Ibid., 310, 311.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 21:]
4 For the theory of emanation in Christian thought see Max Müller, Theosophy, or Psychological Religion, pp. 296. 297; 512-518.
5 A brief popular statement of this philosophy may be found in Monier Williams, Hinduism, 203-206. See works cited below for more elaborate treatment.
6 Deussen, The Upanishads, 180, 181.
7 Shvetashvarara Upanishad, VI. 3, 4. (All quotations from the Indian Scriptures are from Max Muller's ed., Sacred Books of the East, unless otherwise indicated.)
8 Maitrayana Brahman Upanishad, VI. 17.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 22:]
9 Bhagavad Gita, IX. 7: cf. Deussen. The Upanishads, 220-224.
10 Tales, IV. 195.
11 XVI. 314. See also Fall of the House of Usher, III. 286.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 23:]
12 The Vedanta and Its Relation to Modern Thought, 84.
13 Ibid.
14 F. Paulsen. Einleitung in die Philosophie; Carveth Read. The Metaphysics of Nature.
15 Romans 8:18-25.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 24:]
16 XVI. 311.
17 XVI. 314, 315.
18 Chandogya Upanishad VI. 8:6. 7.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 25:]
19 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad I. 4:10.
20 Maitrayana Brahmana Upanishad VI. 17.
21 “All this, we must always remember. is not meant as an apotheosis of man in the Greek sense of the word. but, if I may form such a word, as an Anatheosis, a return of man into the divine nature” (Max Müller, The Vedanta Philosophy, 107) .
22 XVI. 311.
23 XVI. 336.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 26:]
24 Katha Upanishad II. 5:7.
25 Quoted by Murdock, Popular Hinduism, 62.
26 Chandogva Upanishad VI. 2:1.
27 Taittirivaka Upanishad III. 5.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 27:]
28 Mundaka Upanishad II. 1: 1.
29 Griswold, Ludwig Article in Harrison's Biography. I. 355.
30 Parerga II. 426.
31 The Vedanta Philosophy, 8.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 28:]
32 Al Aaraaf, VII. 36.
33 The Sleeper, VII. 52 (written in 1831 and revised in 1843) .
34 Harrison. Biography, I. 131.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 29:]
35 II. 19, 20.
36 For a brief statement of this philosophy see Monier-Williams, Hinduism, 200, 201.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 30:]
37 Maitrayana Brahmans Upanishad VI. 24, 25.
38 Denssen. Philosophy of the Upanishads, 383.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 31:]
39 He introduced Germany to Indian thought by his Sprache und Weisheit der Indier in 1808.
40 From the time of his appointment as professor at Bonn in 1818 he devoted himself to Oriental studies, publishing Indische Bibliothek (3 vols.) , 1823-30; the Bhagavad Gita, 1823; the Ramayana, 1829, thereby laying the foundation of Sanskrit studies in Germany.
41 His father before him was a noted Orientalist. He was an enthusiastic follower of Fichte and a devotee of romanticism. For his mysticism see his Philosophische Untersuchungen weber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit printed in the Philosophische Schriften, Vol. I. 1809.
42 He was a devotee of Hinduism and Buddhism from 1813, having then fallen in with a Latin translation of the Upanishads and like works. See his Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 818.
43 His most important philosophical works appeared 1794-1798.
44 Max Müller, Vedanta Philosophy, 8.
45 Harrison: “Somehow — somewhere — he became saturated with the doctrines of Schelling” (Biography, I. 154) .
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 32:]
46 Tales, II. 28, 29.
47 Criticism, VIII. 126; compare VIII. 46. 47; XII. 131: XIII. 43; and see Book of the Poe Centenary, Smith, Americanism of Poe, 169-173.
48 Criticism, XI. 256.
49 In Mesmeric Revelation (V. 241-254) much of Eureka is contradicted. Its spiritualism is more materialized, it denies that God can return upon himself, or man ever become God. Like the Power of Words (VI. 139-144) and certain other tales, it reflects Greek rather than Indian thought. But consistency is not to be sought in Poe. The idea in Eureka of an infinite number of infinite universes, each with its own God, has no parallel in Indian philosophy or any other philosophy, so far as is known to the present writer.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - WMF28, 1928] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Biblical Allusions in Poe (Forrest)