15 - On affirmation, rejection and accommodation of the world in Greek and Indian religion

Summary

Since its coinage by Jaspers, scholars have been looking for an explanation for the changes that Indian and Greek cultures (and many others) seem to have gone through in the so-called Axial Age. This is the time in which the so-called Greek Enlightenment and the Upaniṣadic turn in Indian philosophy took place (roughly a period of several centuries from the eighth to the second century BCE). I will apply to this development a typology coined by Roy Wallis, a sociologist working on new religious movements in the 1980s. Wallis analyses par excellence new religious movements from a static perspective. However, his typology might be understood even more broadly and provide a frame within which even the dynamics of the development of cultures may find a plausible explanation. We will also see that light on the similarities between Axial Age developments may be shed by an Indian concept of human development concerning the attitudes of humans towards their environment in a widest possible sense. We should also note from the beginning that in the most ancient cultures there is no way to draw a sharp distinction between the secular and religious spheres of life, and therefore issues of both religious and philosophical character will be discussed in parallel here.

Wallis divides religious movements into three categories according to their attitudes towards the values and settings of the surrounding world. Wallis's first category is the world-affirming type wherein the world is being embraced and accepted as it appears in order to achieve goals that are immanently connected with the life within this world as such – happiness, prosperity and so on. The second type would then encompass the world-rejecting movements. They reject the values and mind-sets that derive from the world, and very often strongly renounce and negate all that comes from the world of senses. And finally the third type is the world-accommodating type wherein the world is understood and moulded in such a way that it has to be neither rejected nor fully embraced but just seen from a new perspective or engaged in a new attitude.