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BHATTACHARYYA : THE BASIC IDEA OF GOD him; but divinity attaches, not to the ephemeral and the transitory aspect of the creatures nature but to what is eternal and fundamental in it.
A word of caution is necessary again when recognising the divinity in the essential nature of man, an ordinary animal suffering from the vicissitudes of the ordinary life, is not God; it is only his pure nature to which divinity can be attributed; and in this sense, it is but natural to look upon the high souled beings, – the super-ordinary persons who by their self-culture and self-development have realised their pure selves, as divine beings. This is done in most of the positive religions and is justifiable. But this would not warrant one to confine Godhood within the limited number of the prophets or messiahs of those religions. We must, on the other hand, recognise that every living being is essentially pure and has the capacity of fully developing its own nature. We must recognise, in other words, that every conscious creature is a God in potentiality and that when thus developed to perfection, this potential God in a living being appears in its true light, i.e., as a full-fledged God with his four-fold attributes.
The basic idea of God in all religions is thus one in which he is characterised by the four-fold features of infinite 'power', infinite 'apprehension', infinite 'knowledge and infinite “joy'. This fundamental God-idea when rationalised is found to be attributable not to any external transcendent being, but to the essential nature of every living being. The central feature in a conceivable universal religion is thus the recognition of the fundamental nature of all conscious beings, high or low, as divine.
It would be interesting to see how Jainism which is ordinarily dubbed as atheistic, fully recognises divinity of a rationalised religion, as described above. God in Jainism is not an outside being, creating the world. Divinity is to be attributed to the nature of man, as suggested by the Comtian school; but unlike Comte, Jainism refuses to recognise God in the empirical man; it holds that man and, for the matter of that, - every animal is a divine potentiality, so that when perfected and fully developed, this potentiality is realised as the true God with the four-fold glories of infinite Power, Knowledge, Apprehension and Joy, - 'Ananta-catustaya' as they are called by the Jainas.
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