Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals by John Gray

Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals by John Gray

Author:John Gray [Gray, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780374270933
Amazon: 0374270937
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2002-01-01T23:00:00+00:00


1

SAVIOURS

The Buddha promised release from something we all understand – suffering. By contrast, no one can say what was humankind’s original sin, and no one understands how the suffering of Christ can redeem it.

Christianity began as a Jewish sect. For the early followers of Jesus, sin meant disobedience to God, and the punishment for sinful mankind was the end of the world. These mythic beliefs were linked with the figure of a messiah, a divine messenger who brought retribution to the world and redemption to the obedient few.

It was Saint Paul, not Jesus, who founded Christianity. Paul turned a Jewish messianic cult into a Greco-Roman mystery religion; but he could not free the faith he invented from Jesus’s inheritance. It is not only that beliefs about sin and redemption were at the heart of Jesus’s teaching. Without some such beliefs, the Christian promise of redemption has no meaning. If we are not sinners we do not need to be redeemed, and the promise of redemption cannot help us endure our sorrows. As Borges writes of Jesus:

Night has fallen. He has died now.

A fly crawls over the still flesh.

Of what use is it to me that this man has suffered,

If I am suffering now?

In D. H. Lawrence’s story The Escaped Cock, Jesus comes back from the dead only to give up the idea of saving mankind. He views the world with wonder and asks himself: ‘From what, and to what, could this infinite whirl be saved?’

Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals. At the same time they never cease trying to escape from what they imagine themselves to be. Their religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom they have never possessed. In the twentieth century, the utopias of Right and Left served the same function. Today, when politics is unconvincing even as entertainment, science has taken on the role of mankind’s deliverer.

One may imagine an esoteric teaching that says there is nothing from which to seek deliverance, a teaching whose aim is to free humanity from the yoke of salvation. In Report to Greco, Nikos Kazantzakis has the Buddha telling his faithful disciple Ananda:

Whoever says salvation exists is a slave, because he keeps weighing each of his words and deeds at every moment. ‘Will I be saved or damned?’ he tremblingly asks.… Salvation means deliverance from all saviours … now you understand who is the perfect Saviour.… It is the Saviour who shall deliver mankind from salvation.

A pretty notion, but who needs it? Animals like any other, but more restless than most, humans find fulfilment, in Robinson Jeffers’s words:

in the

Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses,

the dance of the

Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

Average humanity takes its saviours too lightly to need saving from them. Its would-be deliverers need it more than it needs them. When it looks to its deliverers it is for distraction, not salvation.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.