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THE QUALITIES OF MATTER and therewith competent, ultimately, for the role of the supreme teacher and savior of all beings, including the beasts and the gods. The life-monad mature enough for this super-godly task descends to earth from the high realm of heavenly beatitude, as did the monad of the Jaina Savior, Pārsvanātha,54 the temporary delights and powers of the gods having become meaningless for his ripened insight. And then, in a final cxistence among men, the savior himself achieves perfect enlightenment and therewith release, and by his teaching renews the timeless doctrine of the way to reach this goal.
This amazing ideal, expressed in the legendary biographies of the Buddhas and Tīrthankaras, was taken seriously and literally as an ideal for all. It was actually regarded as open to man, and steps were taken to realize it. Apparently, it was a non-Brāhman, pre-Aryan vision of man's role in the cosmos native to the Indian sub-continent. The way of perfectibility taught was that of yogic asceticism and self-abnegation, while the image constantly held before the mind's eye was that of the human savior as the redeemer even of the gods.
In the West such thinking has been suppressed systematically as heresy-a heresy of titanism. Already for the Greeks, it was the classic fault of the suffering hero, the üßpus of the anti-gods or titans, while in the Christian Church such presumption has been mocked as simply incredible. Nevertheless, in our modern Western Christian poetry there can be pointed out at least one great instance of the idea of the coming of a human being to the rescue of God. For when Parsifal, in the third act of Wagner's opera, brings back the holy spear, cures Amfortas, the sick guardian of the holy grail, and restores the grail itself to its beneficent func
54 Supra, pp. 194-195.
66 See, for example, the accounts of Simon Magus given by Justin Martyr (Dial. cum Tryph. cxx. 16). Tertullian (De Idol. 9, de Fuga, 12, de Anima, 34, Apol. 18), and Origen (C. Celsum, i. 57. vi. 11), or any modern Christian missionary's account of Indian belief.
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