THE INSTITUTIONS OF MOSES AND THE HINDOOS:
THE INSTITUTIONS OF MOSES AND THE HINDOOS: Over the last 15 years of the 18th century, the translation of Sanskrit texts into English, German, and French, picked up a head of steam. By the middle of the 19th century many significant Hindu texts had been rendered into at least one of these languages, including: the Hitopadesha (“The Book of Wise Counsel,” a collection of fables), Shakuntala (or Abhijnana-shakuntalam, “The Recognition of Shakuntala,” the first Indian drama translated into a European language), the Institutes of Hindu Law, or Ordinances of Manu, several of the Upanishads, the Samkhya Karika (“Verses on Enumeration,” the oldest text on Samkhya), the Vishnu and Bhagavata Puranas, and sections of Hinduism’s holiest book, the Rig Veda.
A number of European writers and intellectuals were profoundly affected by these translations. Soon after the first translation of the Upanishads appeared in 1801, (See Sidelight) the influential German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was knocked over by what he called this “incomparable book”:
From every sentence [Schopenhauer wrote] deep, original, and sublime thoughts arise, and the whole is pervaded by a high and holy and earnest spirit....In the whole world there is no study, except that of the originals, so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Oupnekhat. It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death!
It’s reported that Schopenhauer kept an open copy on a table near his bed, and would devotedly read a few passages each night before retiring. So inspired was he that he supposedly named one of his dogs Atman, the Sanskrit word for the Self.
But one unintended side effect of these translations, and the new Eastern religion they exposed to the West, was that they also provided ammunition to Age-of-Reason anti-religionists, an assortment of Deists, agnostics and their fellow travelers, the much reviled atheists. These folks gleefully latched onto Hinduism, which they held up as a shining example of a faith that was older, purer, and closer to the divine source than any form of that bane of Western civilization, Christianity.
Not surprisingly Christians of all stripes were outraged by these attacks and vociferously defended their beliefs. One especially notable response came from Joseph Priestley, an expatriate Englishman living in what was then the wilds of western Pennsylvania.
Priestley is usually remembered as one of the premier English scientists of the 18th century. His experiments with gases were especially significant. He’s commonly credited with the discovery of oxygen, though that’s not quite accurate: what he did was to isolate oxygen, which he called “dephlogisticated air,” from “common air.” But he did discover “nitrous air”–nitrous oxide, popularly known as “laughing gas”–which in the nineteenth century was used as an anesthetic by dentists and doctors. And he also invented a way to inject “heavy air”–we call it carbon dioxide–into water, thus creating the first soda pop.
But science was actually Priestley’s avocation, he had no formal scientific training. In his day job, he was a Unitarian minister with a sweet tooth for radical politics and social reform. Because of his unorthodox, even subversive ideas and pugnacious style, he was often in hot water with the authorities, both of this world and the next. One of his many books on theology, History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782), attacked key church doctrines, among them the virgin birth of Jesus and the three-fold nature of God. Though hailed by “freethinkers” and deists (like American Thomas Jefferson), the book was predictably vilified in pulpits across England, and finally burned as heretical in–that year again–1785.
In the political arena, Priestley vociferously supported many hot-button issues of the day. For example, he championed greater civil liberties, even for far-off American colonists, though surprisingly he opposed England’s social safety net, called the Poor Laws, sternly reasoning that hunger provided the indigent a necessary impetus for self-improvement. As a result, he earned the enmity of both the government and average citizens, who emphasized their displeasure by doing to his effigy what the Church did to his book.
But his defense of the French Revolution in 1791 was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. Priestley optimistically wrote that it marked the first step toward an era of “universal peace and goodwill among all nations,” when kings would be “servants of the people and accountable to them.” Lambasted and lampooned in the press, and already branded an atheist by some, he was now accused of fomenting sedition. One night, an angry Church-and-King mob, possibly fueled by drink, torched his house in Birmingham, reducing everything, including his laboratory and scientific papers, his library, his hand-written sermons, diaries, and letters to a pile of ashes. Three years later at the age of 61, realizing his future in England was bleak at best, Priestley emigrated to the US, finally settling in rural Pennsylvania where he spent the last decade of his life.
Considering what he’d been through and his advanced age, you might think he’d want to avoid any more conflict. But he seemed to attract controversy like a magnet attracts iron. His outspoken Unitarianism antagonized his conservative, Presbyterian country neighbors, who he unkindly portrayed as swinging between “extremes of infidelity and bigoted orthodoxy.” His politics too rubbed some high-ranking officials in President John Adams’administration the wrong way, and in 1798 he was accused once again (though wrongly) of sedition and nearly deported.
Priestley was a enormously disturbed by the anti-Christian diatribes of the Deists and their ilk. At first glance, he doesn’t strike you as the ideal defender of the Christian faith: In several of his earlier theological books, he went toe-to-toe with cherished church doctrines, but always as a loyal Christian repelled by what he saw as dangerous “corruptions” of the original teaching. But in 1799 he mounted a rousing defense of Christianity, at least his Unitarian version of it, when he published A Comparison of the Institutions of Moses with Those of the Hindoos and Other Ancient Nations.
Though his mind was already made up about Christianity’s superiority over any other religion, on the plus side Priestley realized he needed to study his adversary before joining the fray. So he launched himself on an exhaustive study of available reference materials on India and Hinduism–available that is in rural, eighteenth-century Pennsylvania.
Considering the built-in limitations of his time and place, the bibliography at the front of the Institutions is quite impressive. Priestley read several first-hand narratives of English travelers to India: A New Account of the East Indies (1727) by sea captain named Alexander Hamilton, who made three trips to India in 1707, 1711 and 1719; Sketches Chiefly Relating to the History, Religion, Learning and Manners of the Hindoos (1792) by Quintin Crauford, a former EIC employee who made a large fortune in India; and A Journey Over Land to India (1796) by another sea captain, Donald Campbell, who was in India in the late 1780s. He also read about seven or eight “studies” of Asian culture in general or Indian culture in particular.
A few of these books have interesting stories in themselves, like The Agreement of the Customs of the East-Indians, with Those of the Jews, and Other Ancient People (Conformite des coutumes des Indiens orientaux, avec celles des Juifs & des autres peuples de l’antiquite), published in 1705. Written by a Frenchman named de la Crequiniere, the real story behind this book is that of its English translator, John Toland, who died in 1721. I’m not sure if Priestley knew who this man was, but their lives had a couple of curious parallels. Born in 1670 to a Catholic family in Ireland, Toland converted to Protestantism at 16. At 26 he published his first and most notorious book, Christianity Not Mysterious, prudently attributed to that prolific author of controversial positions, Anonymous. In it, he proposed that all the teachings of Christianity are ultimately amenable to human reason, that God would never expect us to believe in anything deemed “mysterious.” The orthodox clergy immediately jumped all over this position, taking it as a subtle refutation of the “mystery” of the Trinity. This is much like what would dump our Unitarian friend in hot water 90 years later, when he called the doctrine of the Trinity a “corruption.” Toland’s book was an immediate best seller, apparently in large part because of the negative publicly given it by defenders of the faith. The Irish parliament branded it heretical, and ordered it publicly toasted–the same fate of Priestley’s Corruptions–and its author arrested.
When his cover was blown, Toland quickly relocated to London, but his damaged reputation couldn’t be repaired. Someone said of him, “This poor man, by his imprudent conduct, has raised against himself so universal a commotion that it was dangerous to be known to have spoken with him even once.” Ironically he was the first person ever labeled a “freethinker,” and so the spiritual “godfather” of many of those contentious children who were motivating Priestley to write the Institutions. It’s likely though that Priestley would have agreed with one of Toland’s parting shots: “It is better to never command anyone,” he wrote in his last book, published in 1720 a year or so before his death, “than to obey someone.”
Priestley got his visual information about India from The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World (1722,1728). This nine-volume encyclopedia was illustrated by Frenchman Bernard Picart, one of the most famous engravers of his time. His drawings had an enormous influence on the way eighteenth-century Europeans pictured the religious life of non-Europeans. Unfortunately, while he had access to some rare Indian paintings, Picart never actually went to India. So his drawings of the worshipers of “Ixora” (Ishvara or Shiva) and “Quenavadi” (Ganapati or Ganesha) seem straight out of some alternative-universe fantasy, and surely left their audience wide-eyed with both wonder and horror.
There were also a couple of very odd birds in Priestley’s library. One was titled A Code of Gentoo Laws (1777), “gentoo” here being a corruption of the Portuguese gentio, that is, a “gentile” or heathen, used to name the Hindus as opposed to the moros or “Moors,” the Moslems. This book was commissioned in 1772 by the Governor of Bengal, our old friend Warren Hastings. Gentoo was an attempt by EIC officials to definitively codify what was, to them, the hodge-podge of local Hindu laws, the better to settle disputes in colonial courts–not incidentally, it’s been asserted, to their own advantage. Compiled in Sanskrit by 11 hired Brahmins, it was first translated into Persian and then into English by a young EIC employee named Nathaniel Halhed, the author of the Bengali grammar printed by Charles Wilkins.
But if nothing else Priestly was resilient and dedicated. On the last day of his life he was still making corrections to pamphlets he was writing. It’s reported that when he was satisfied with the work at hand, he said to his assistant, “That is right, I have done,” and a half-hour later was both figuratively and literally “done.”
His published works, spread out across 40-odd years, run to over 150 books and pamphlets on an amazingly wide range of subjects, not only government and theology, but also education and grammar, philosophy, chemistry and electricity, perspective and light ... and what today is called comparative religion.
A number of European writers and intellectuals were profoundly affected by these translations. Soon after the first translation of the Upanishads appeared in 1801, (See Sidelight) the influential German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was knocked over by what he called this “incomparable book”:
From every sentence [Schopenhauer wrote] deep, original, and sublime thoughts arise, and the whole is pervaded by a high and holy and earnest spirit....In the whole world there is no study, except that of the originals, so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Oupnekhat. It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death!
It’s reported that Schopenhauer kept an open copy on a table near his bed, and would devotedly read a few passages each night before retiring. So inspired was he that he supposedly named one of his dogs Atman, the Sanskrit word for the Self.
But one unintended side effect of these translations, and the new Eastern religion they exposed to the West, was that they also provided ammunition to Age-of-Reason anti-religionists, an assortment of Deists, agnostics and their fellow travelers, the much reviled atheists. These folks gleefully latched onto Hinduism, which they held up as a shining example of a faith that was older, purer, and closer to the divine source than any form of that bane of Western civilization, Christianity.
Not surprisingly Christians of all stripes were outraged by these attacks and vociferously defended their beliefs. One especially notable response came from Joseph Priestley, an expatriate Englishman living in what was then the wilds of western Pennsylvania.
Priestley is usually remembered as one of the premier English scientists of the 18th century. His experiments with gases were especially significant. He’s commonly credited with the discovery of oxygen, though that’s not quite accurate: what he did was to isolate oxygen, which he called “dephlogisticated air,” from “common air.” But he did discover “nitrous air”–nitrous oxide, popularly known as “laughing gas”–which in the nineteenth century was used as an anesthetic by dentists and doctors. And he also invented a way to inject “heavy air”–we call it carbon dioxide–into water, thus creating the first soda pop.
But science was actually Priestley’s avocation, he had no formal scientific training. In his day job, he was a Unitarian minister with a sweet tooth for radical politics and social reform. Because of his unorthodox, even subversive ideas and pugnacious style, he was often in hot water with the authorities, both of this world and the next. One of his many books on theology, History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782), attacked key church doctrines, among them the virgin birth of Jesus and the three-fold nature of God. Though hailed by “freethinkers” and deists (like American Thomas Jefferson), the book was predictably vilified in pulpits across England, and finally burned as heretical in–that year again–1785.
In the political arena, Priestley vociferously supported many hot-button issues of the day. For example, he championed greater civil liberties, even for far-off American colonists, though surprisingly he opposed England’s social safety net, called the Poor Laws, sternly reasoning that hunger provided the indigent a necessary impetus for self-improvement. As a result, he earned the enmity of both the government and average citizens, who emphasized their displeasure by doing to his effigy what the Church did to his book.
But his defense of the French Revolution in 1791 was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. Priestley optimistically wrote that it marked the first step toward an era of “universal peace and goodwill among all nations,” when kings would be “servants of the people and accountable to them.” Lambasted and lampooned in the press, and already branded an atheist by some, he was now accused of fomenting sedition. One night, an angry Church-and-King mob, possibly fueled by drink, torched his house in Birmingham, reducing everything, including his laboratory and scientific papers, his library, his hand-written sermons, diaries, and letters to a pile of ashes. Three years later at the age of 61, realizing his future in England was bleak at best, Priestley emigrated to the US, finally settling in rural Pennsylvania where he spent the last decade of his life.
Considering what he’d been through and his advanced age, you might think he’d want to avoid any more conflict. But he seemed to attract controversy like a magnet attracts iron. His outspoken Unitarianism antagonized his conservative, Presbyterian country neighbors, who he unkindly portrayed as swinging between “extremes of infidelity and bigoted orthodoxy.” His politics too rubbed some high-ranking officials in President John Adams’administration the wrong way, and in 1798 he was accused once again (though wrongly) of sedition and nearly deported.
Priestley was a enormously disturbed by the anti-Christian diatribes of the Deists and their ilk. At first glance, he doesn’t strike you as the ideal defender of the Christian faith: In several of his earlier theological books, he went toe-to-toe with cherished church doctrines, but always as a loyal Christian repelled by what he saw as dangerous “corruptions” of the original teaching. But in 1799 he mounted a rousing defense of Christianity, at least his Unitarian version of it, when he published A Comparison of the Institutions of Moses with Those of the Hindoos and Other Ancient Nations.
Though his mind was already made up about Christianity’s superiority over any other religion, on the plus side Priestley realized he needed to study his adversary before joining the fray. So he launched himself on an exhaustive study of available reference materials on India and Hinduism–available that is in rural, eighteenth-century Pennsylvania.
Considering the built-in limitations of his time and place, the bibliography at the front of the Institutions is quite impressive. Priestley read several first-hand narratives of English travelers to India: A New Account of the East Indies (1727) by sea captain named Alexander Hamilton, who made three trips to India in 1707, 1711 and 1719; Sketches Chiefly Relating to the History, Religion, Learning and Manners of the Hindoos (1792) by Quintin Crauford, a former EIC employee who made a large fortune in India; and A Journey Over Land to India (1796) by another sea captain, Donald Campbell, who was in India in the late 1780s. He also read about seven or eight “studies” of Asian culture in general or Indian culture in particular.
A few of these books have interesting stories in themselves, like The Agreement of the Customs of the East-Indians, with Those of the Jews, and Other Ancient People (Conformite des coutumes des Indiens orientaux, avec celles des Juifs & des autres peuples de l’antiquite), published in 1705. Written by a Frenchman named de la Crequiniere, the real story behind this book is that of its English translator, John Toland, who died in 1721. I’m not sure if Priestley knew who this man was, but their lives had a couple of curious parallels. Born in 1670 to a Catholic family in Ireland, Toland converted to Protestantism at 16. At 26 he published his first and most notorious book, Christianity Not Mysterious, prudently attributed to that prolific author of controversial positions, Anonymous. In it, he proposed that all the teachings of Christianity are ultimately amenable to human reason, that God would never expect us to believe in anything deemed “mysterious.” The orthodox clergy immediately jumped all over this position, taking it as a subtle refutation of the “mystery” of the Trinity. This is much like what would dump our Unitarian friend in hot water 90 years later, when he called the doctrine of the Trinity a “corruption.” Toland’s book was an immediate best seller, apparently in large part because of the negative publicly given it by defenders of the faith. The Irish parliament branded it heretical, and ordered it publicly toasted–the same fate of Priestley’s Corruptions–and its author arrested.
When his cover was blown, Toland quickly relocated to London, but his damaged reputation couldn’t be repaired. Someone said of him, “This poor man, by his imprudent conduct, has raised against himself so universal a commotion that it was dangerous to be known to have spoken with him even once.” Ironically he was the first person ever labeled a “freethinker,” and so the spiritual “godfather” of many of those contentious children who were motivating Priestley to write the Institutions. It’s likely though that Priestley would have agreed with one of Toland’s parting shots: “It is better to never command anyone,” he wrote in his last book, published in 1720 a year or so before his death, “than to obey someone.”
Priestley got his visual information about India from The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World (1722,1728). This nine-volume encyclopedia was illustrated by Frenchman Bernard Picart, one of the most famous engravers of his time. His drawings had an enormous influence on the way eighteenth-century Europeans pictured the religious life of non-Europeans. Unfortunately, while he had access to some rare Indian paintings, Picart never actually went to India. So his drawings of the worshipers of “Ixora” (Ishvara or Shiva) and “Quenavadi” (Ganapati or Ganesha) seem straight out of some alternative-universe fantasy, and surely left their audience wide-eyed with both wonder and horror.
There were also a couple of very odd birds in Priestley’s library. One was titled A Code of Gentoo Laws (1777), “gentoo” here being a corruption of the Portuguese gentio, that is, a “gentile” or heathen, used to name the Hindus as opposed to the moros or “Moors,” the Moslems. This book was commissioned in 1772 by the Governor of Bengal, our old friend Warren Hastings. Gentoo was an attempt by EIC officials to definitively codify what was, to them, the hodge-podge of local Hindu laws, the better to settle disputes in colonial courts–not incidentally, it’s been asserted, to their own advantage. Compiled in Sanskrit by 11 hired Brahmins, it was first translated into Persian and then into English by a young EIC employee named Nathaniel Halhed, the author of the Bengali grammar printed by Charles Wilkins.
But if nothing else Priestly was resilient and dedicated. On the last day of his life he was still making corrections to pamphlets he was writing. It’s reported that when he was satisfied with the work at hand, he said to his assistant, “That is right, I have done,” and a half-hour later was both figuratively and literally “done.”
His published works, spread out across 40-odd years, run to over 150 books and pamphlets on an amazingly wide range of subjects, not only government and theology, but also education and grammar, philosophy, chemistry and electricity, perspective and light ... and what today is called comparative religion.
