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.Wepoint out here a fact of fundamental importance that all the great religious teachings ofAsia are creations of intellectuals.The salvation teachings of Buddhism and Jainism, aswell as all related doctrines, were carried by a lay intellectual who received the training inthe Vedas.This training, though not always of a strictly scholarly nature, was appropriateto the education of Hindu aristocrats, particularly members of the Kshatriya nobility, whostood in opposition to the Brahmins.In China the carriers of Confucianism, beginningwith the founder himself and including Lao Tzu, who is officially regarded as the initiatorof Taoism, were either officials who had received a classical literary education orphilosophers with corresponding training.The religions of China and India display counterparts of practically all the theoreticalvariants of Greek philosophy, though frequently in modified form.Confucianism, as theofficial ethic of China, was entirely carried by the officials and their candidates by agroup of aspirants to official positions who had received a classical literary education,while Taoism became a popular enterprise of practical magic.The great reforms ofHinduism were accomplished by aristocratic intellectuals who had received a Brahminiceducation, although subsequently the organization of communities frequently fell into thehands of members of lower castes.Thus, the process of reform in India took anotherdirection from that of the Reformation in Northern Europe, which was also led byeducated humans who had received professional clerical training, as well as from that ofthe Catholic Counter-Reformation, which at first found its chief support from Jesuitstrained in logical argument, like Salmeron and Lainez.The course of the reformmovement in India differed also from the reconstruction of Islamic doctrine by Al-Ghazali (AD 1058-1111), which combined mysticism and orthodoxy, with leadershipremaining partly in the hands of the official hierarchy and partly in the hands of a newlydeveloped office nobility with theological training.So too, Manichaeism and Gnosticism,the salvation religions of the Near East, are both specifically religions of intellectuals.This is true of their founders, their chief carriers, and the character of their salvationteachings as well.PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.comIn all these cases, in spite of various differences among the religions in question, theintellectual strata were relatively high in the social status and possessed philosophicaltraining that corresponded to that of the Greek schools of philosophy or to the mostlearned types of monastic or secular humanistic training of the late medieval period.These groups were the bearers of the ethic or the salvation doctrine in each case.Thusintellectual strata might, within a given religious situation, constitute an academicenterprise comparable to that of the Platonic academy and the related schools ofphilosophy in Greece.In that case the intellectual strata, like those in Greece, would takeno official position regarding existing religious practice.They often ignored orphilosophically reinterpreted the existing religious practice rather than directlywithdrawing themselves from it.On their part, the official representatives of the cult, likethe state officials charged with cultic obligation in China or the Brahmins in India, tendedto treat the doctrine of the intellectuals as either orthodox or heterodox, the latter in thecases of the materialistic doctrine of China and the dualist Sankhya philosophy of India.We cannot enter into any additional details here regarding these movements, which havea primarily academic orientation and are only indirectly related to practical religiosity.Our chief interest is rather in those other movements, previously mentioned, which areparticularly concerned with the creation of a religious ethic.Our best examples inclassical Antiquity are the Pythagoreans and Neo-Platonists.These movements ofintellectuals have uniformly arisen among socially privileged strata or have been led ordecisively influenced by people from these strata.(F.2) Intellectual Salvation(F.2.a) Social ConditionsThe rise of a salvation religion by socially privileged strata normally has the best chancewhen demilitarization has set in for these strata and when they have lost either thepossibility of political activity or the interest in it.Consequently, a salvation religionusually emerges when the privileged manorial or citizenry strata have lost their politicalpower to a bureaucratic-militaristic unitary state, or when they have withdrawn frompolitics, for whatever reason.A salvation religion also emerges when the privilegedstrata, as a consequence of intellectual education, regard the ultimate meaning of theirphilosophical and psychological existence far more important than their practical activityin the external affairs of this world.This does not mean that the salvation religions ariseonly at such times.On the contrary, the inner conceptions of salvation may sometimesarise without the stimulus of such circumstantial conditions, as a result of free reflectionin periods of dynamic political or social change.But in that case such modes of thinkingtend to be a kind of underground existence, normally becoming dominant only when theintellectuals have undergone depoliticization.(F.2.b) AsiaConfucianism, the ethic of a powerful officialdom, rejected all teachings of salvation.Onthe other hand, Jainism and Buddhism, which provide radical antitheses to Confucianistaccommodation to the world, were objective expressions of the utterly anti-political,PDF Creator - PDF4Free v2.0 http://www.pdf4free.compacifistic, and world-rejecting attitude of the intellectuals.We do not know, however,whether the sometimes considerable following of these two religions in India wasincreased where the depoliticization of the intellectual had undergone.The lack of anysort of political pathos for unification among tiny states headed by minor Hindu princesbefore the time of Alexander, was contrasted with the impressive unity of Brahmanism(which was gradually forging to the front everywhere in India).This condition was initself enough to induce the intellectual educated circles of the nobility to seek fulfillmentof their interests outside of politics.Therefore the scripturally praised world-renunciationof the Brahmin forest dwellers (vanaprastha), who surrender his portion in old age, andthe popular veneration of them resulted in the development of non-Brahminic ascetics(shramanas).[79] In any case, the shramanas, as the possessors of ascetic charisma, soonoutstripped the official priesthood in popular veneration.This monastic form of politicalindifference had been prevalent among the nobles of India since very early times, longbefore apolitical philosophical doctrines of salvation arose in the 6th century BC.(F.2.c) Near East and WestThe Near Eastern salvation religions, whether of a mystic cult or prophetic type, as wellas the Oriental and Hellenistic salvation doctrines, whether of a more religious type or amore philosophical type of which lay intellectuals were the carriers, were, insofar as theyincluded the socially privileged strata at all, virtually without exception the consequenceof the educated strata's enforced or voluntary withdrawal from political influence andactivity.In Babylonia the turn to salvation religion, intersected by components whoseprovenience was outside Babylonia, appeared first in Mandaeanism in the 3rd centuryAD [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]