Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

The Cathars took this docetism from a mixture of Buddhist psychology and Zoroastrian dualism. Manicheanism had its origin not in Indian thought but when it re-passed through Persia. (After all Mani was a Persian by birth though he had been to India and was profoundly influenced by Indian thought.) In fact the origin of dialectic might itself be the Ahuramazda. (For Plato, evil was about as true as it is to the Indian today — a thing to be expiated with a dove or a coconut.) But when Light and Darkness play against one another you have the hero, the saint. Strange that Nietzsche should have evoked Zarathustra, from which arose Hitlerism.

The Parsees sometimes remind one of the Zuni Indians— the best tribal society is also the most moral one. There, good and evil are distinct, known categories of phenomena like the night and the day, sun and moon, monsoon and summer. In the whole Parsee community for a century no man has been committed for murder, they say, but nor has any man been known to rise to the heights of many a Hindu sage. Parsee honesty has led them to banking, just as it led the Quakers to make chocolates. If the Cathars had remained they would have built a city of steel, in which virtue and vice would have been tested by electro-magnetic oscillographs. And inside you would have seen beautiful men and women walk through well- heated corridors, almost naked; and they might have produced children in crucibles, and through chemical tests created the Cathar that would have no evil thought or bacilli. Only when he went out — when he crossed the iron wall — would he catch cold, and be sold to a prostitute. The Cathars created the noblest Communist society of the western world.

No wonder therefore, I argued, that early Buddhism was fought against by Hinduism, which ultimately defeated Buddhist moralism and integrated Buddhism into itself so that today one does not know in what way Mahayana differs essentially from Vedanta. Similarly Catholicism, with its virile tradition that came not only from the Church but a great deal from the pagans too, had such truth about it that had Catharism not been destroyed European humanity might have been. The war was not between Christianity and the Cathars, but between the living principle of Europe — from the time of Homer on to the present day — and this defeatism of life, against the endura and the slow death: Darwinism may not only be a biological principle, it may well be a spiritual one too. The Bhagavad Gita, however Gandhiji might interpret it, is an affirmation not of the good but of Truth. Truth can take no sides — it is involved in both sides. Krishna is the hero of the battle, but seemingly a hero greater than he is Bhisma, the great warrior. Yet Bhisma’s courage was Krishna’s gift. Krishna fought himself against himself, through himself, and in himself, and what remained is ever and ever himself — the Truth.

The Cathars were the Theosophists of the thirteenth century. If I had been a contemporary I would have joined Simon de Montfort, not for the love of money or of glory, not even for an indulgence — I would rather have fought against indulgences than against the Cathars — but I would have fought for the clear stream of truth that runs through Roman Catholicism. There’s always a Karna and an Uttara in every battle, whether their names be changed to Innocent III or Hugues de Noyers, bishop of Auxerre, ‘ce prélat guerrier, âpre au gain… ce pourvoyeur de bûchers …’ It was the same battle between Pascal and the Jesuit Fathers.

Pau, with the purity of its air and the intimacy with oneself it gave — because one could see and participate of space — allowed me, strange as it may seem, an insight into Christianity as nothing else, so far, had done. It was from here that Henry IV, that noble prince, went over from the Protestant side to the Catholic, for he didn’t want the French to become bankers, he wanted them to be saints and men of heroic thought. And Hitler’s enemy was not Churchill alone, but verily, Saint Louis and Henry IV as well. France would one day have to become a monarchy: Georges, that strange Russian fanatic, was right. If you knew and loved France truly you could only be a royalist, even if the Bourbons committed all the crimes of humanity, and poor Monsieur Vincent Auriol did not. Despite all the sins of Pope Innocent III, or later on of Pious XII with his pact with the Fascists, it is the papacy and not the British House of Commons, as people believe, that has saved Europe from destruction. The Resistance created a spiritual climate in which the abstract research of the Existentialists, those crypto-Catholics, was made possible. And the inspirer of the Resistance was not some Rousseau, it was Péguy — and Jeanne d’Arc. And so on…

France alone has universal history. Every battle of France is a battle for humanity. India is free today not because of Jeremy Bentham but because of Napoleon. Napoleon was not, as historians think, a child of the encyclopedists, but of those superstitious Catholics of the Maquis. He made himself an emperor, by the grace of God, anointed by the Church of St Peter.

India has no history, for Truth cannot have history. If every battle of France has been fought for humanity, then it would be honest to say no battle in India was ever fought for humanity’s sake. Or if fought, it was soon forgotten. Krishna fought against Bhisma by giving Bhisma courage. Mahatma Gandhi fought against the Muslims by fighting for them. He died a Hindu martyr for an Indian cause. He died for Truth.

Lezo was my constant companion in Pau. He had been to Biarritz to visit his friends, and heard I was in Pau — perhaps I had told him myself. I saw him walking along the Promenade des Pyrénées, with his bent and learned air, and no sooner did he see me than he ran to me as a schoolboy to his master. After that he made me visit several of his refugee friends, the Cathars who had left because of the new Inquisitor. Little as I approved of the Cathar heresy, I would not join Franco or fight for this jackal royalist. I was ‘corrupted’ by noble Socialist ideals, and my monarchy would be the ideal society of castes and functions equally distributed. I would have cooked for Enfantin and for Saint Simon, but I would have shouted ‘Vive le Roil’A stupid idea indeed.

Lezo and I discussed Buddhism a great deal. His learning was almost alarming: he could quote Chinese, Japanese and Indian texts with a facility that astonished me. He not only quoted, he seemed to understand. He also knew modern India and Mahatma Gandhi. I was always introduced to his Basque friends as ‘ce monsieur qui vient du pays de Gandhi’. Lezo said to me one day, ‘You know, as a student in Germany I became a vegetarian for a trial period. I shall try it once again when I get back to Aix. I want to go to India, a Buddhist mendicant.’

Of Madeleine we almost never talked. He mentioned her only once to ask if she would soon be in Aix. I told him yes, in two weeks.

I did not propose to Lezo, interesting as it might have been, that he should come along with me as I went visiting the various Cathar sanctuaries, day after day, talking to the peasants and to heads of monasteries. The Albigensian traditions, I had heard, still remained alive everywhere. They even spoke of a mysterious cave where the Cathars had hidden their treasures, and on some nights one could see on that particular hill near Ornolac a bright star shine, of a blue that touched more the red than the yellow. Shepherds still saw it from their hills, and when you saw it you automatically said a Pater Noster, for it was some soul from beneath, some heretic, who must at last be going to heaven. I, who have a feel of presences in places historic, I should have liked to have looked on a pure, a Cathar. I am sure I would have loved him as I loved the Buddhists. But Lezo was too crude for my sensibilities. I did not want merely to write a thesis, but to write a thesis which would also be an Indian attempt at a philosophy of history. I wanted to absorb more than to know.