The Great Savior — A Savior More Savior Than the Savior Himself!
2006/4/18 21:29:10
In Western society — particularly in Christianized Western society — a so-called "Great Savior" does not exist. What they have instead is the Messiah, the Savior. The biggest difference between the Great Savior and the Messiah is: the former is human, the latter is divine. For Western society, which believes in or advocates human equality, no person can replace God — therefore there naturally can be no human Great Savior. This is quite obvious within Western logic. For Chinese society, there is essentially no concept of divinity. Chinese gods are basically humans: an old man riding an ox became divine; a man wielding a great blade has been deified for two thousand years. That's the Chinese way. In Chinese society, since there are no gods, there is no Messiah — hence the Great Savior.
The Chinese belief in a Great Savior didn't start yesterday — it goes back probably two thousand years before Confucius. Back then, the Great Savior had a common name: the Sage. From the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors onward, this game continued throughout Chinese history. The Great Savior also has a common literary image — the so-called North Star (Polaris). Du Fu's lines "每依北斗望京华" ("Always gazing toward the capital by the light of the Big Dipper") and "北极朝廷终不改" ("The North Star court shall never change") are perhaps the most literary expressions of this Great Savior imagery. Of course, compared to Du Fu's own "锦江春色来天地，玉垒浮云变古今" ("The spring colors of the Brocade River span heaven and earth; the floating clouds of Jade Fortress transform ancient and modern"), those lines fall short by N to the Nth power of North Stars.
The Great Savior — a human's game in a society that does not believe in gods — even with the directional sense of the North Star added, would probably be nothing more than a joke (of people who don't even believe in gods) in the eyes of Engels, who equally did not believe in gods. Engels had an excellent metaphor for the direction of human social development. Simply put: each person's movement constitutes a vector, and the superposition of all vectors constitutes the resultant vector — that direction being the direction of human social development. Since every person is constantly changing — that is, every component constituting the resultant vector of social development is a variable — for one component or some combination of components to always equal the resultant vector of social development is something probably even God wouldn't hope to accomplish, unless someone is more foolish than God himself.
Setting aside the above mathematical analysis, the progress of science has already made the following conclusion common knowledge: even "permanent" stars are not actually permanent. Therefore, the North Star literary image of the Great Savior shall forever remain just a literary image. The Great Savior — a savior more savior than the Savior himself! The Messiah merely represents humanity's fear and delusion; a savior more savior than the Savior is merely the superposition of the same joke. There is no savior in this world, and even less a Great Savior. What exists is only the resultant direction of social development constituted by each person's development and change superimposed — on this point, Engels needed no literary imagination. And this, of course, is not merely because he was a Westerner who did not believe in God!