Heinrich Zimmer has called the preemption of divine prerogatives and confusion of human and divine attributes the "heresy of Titanism," and it could be that the deification of Gautama, Krishna, Mahavira, Jesus, and other religious figures may constitute a form of spiritual Titanism. Zimmer observes that Titans are not only superhuman, but they, as we have seen above, are superdivine; and as such, they are involved in a supergodly task. Even the gods accrue karma, so the human savior will also become the redeemer of the gods. To my knowledge, no one has ever worked out the details of Zimmer's thesis with regard to Indian forms of Titanism. Standing in the shadow of a giant in his own right, I presume to take up that task in this book.

    Titanism is an extreme form of humanism that does not recognize that there are limits to what humans can become and what they should do. The Greek Titans were known for their boundless pride (hubris) and for their violence. Titanism is humanism gone berserk; it is anthropocentricism and anthropomorphism taken to their limits. The Titan insists that human experience is the norm. Titans deliberately reverse the positions of humanity and divinity; they take over divine prerogatives, and as a result of their hubris, they lose sight of their proper place in the universe. This book will define a deity as any being who is omniscient, omnipotent, infinite, and omnipresent. We maintain that a human being is a spiritual Titan by claiming any or all of these attributes. Even if there is no God, humans obviously delude themselves if they believe they can become divine in the sense of these attributes.

    Asian Titanism has expressed itself almost exclusively in an internal, spiritual way; therefore, one can say that it is a rather benign form of extreme humanism. By contrast, the expressions of Western Titanism are primarily external, and with the aid of technology, a Titanistic spirit can be said to inspire militarism, environmental pollution and degradation, and the possible misuse of genetic engineering. If left unchecked, the Titanistic spirit might destroy or radically change life as we know it on earth. Even though it is Western Titanism that poses the real threat, it is essential to show that Eastern Titans share some of the same views as their Western counterparts, viz., anthropocentrism and autonomous selfhood. Some Indian views of self--particularly the Sankhya-Yoga and Jainism--express a view of human autonomy just as extreme as Western existentialism. Therefore, early Indian and Western philosophy share a basic conceptual bond that has been rarely discerned or mentioned.

The term "Titan" comes from a race of older gods, who, under the leadership of Prometheus, contended with Zeus and the other Olympian deities for the control of the universe. Western humanists have generally viewed the Promethean revolt not only as a necessary transgression but as a good one. Byron claimed that Prometheus' only "crime" was that he liberated humanity:

Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
to render with thy precepts less
the sum of human wretchedness
And strengthen Man with his own mind.

In his preface to Prometheus Unbound Shelly claimed that "Prometheus is . . . the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives of the best and noblest ends." Mary Shelly described her husband as a spiritual Titan: he thought that "man could be so perfectionized as to be able to expel evil from his own nature, and from the greater part of the creation . . . ."

    Goethe's poem "Prometheus" is remarkable both in terms of the liberties he takes with the myth and the insights that he nonetheless offers for this study. First, Goethe makes the Greek gods just as dependent on the sacrifice as the Vedic gods:

I know of nothing more wretched
Under the sun than you gods!
Meagerly you nourish
Your majesty
On dues of sacrifice
And breath of prayers
And would suffer want
But for children and beggars,
Poor hopeful fools.

Goethe allows Zeus to have his heaven and to play his games there, but Prometheus has given the earth to humanity and to them alone. Zeus can only envy humans, and they, in turn can only pity the gods. As Lord of the Earth, as Protoanthropos, Prometheus proclaims:

Here I sit, forming men
In my image,
A race to resemble me:
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy, to be glad--
and never to heed you,
like me!
to have no regard for you.

In fragments of a play Goethe wrote on Prometheus, Epimetheus urges his brother to take Zeus' offer to reside on Mt. Olympus. Asserting the stubborn independence that the Greek writers gave him, Prometheus' answer anticipates Milton's Satan: it is far preferable to rule on earth rather than to serve in heaven. Staying on earth the Titan possesses a power that even the gods do not have, the power to create a living world:

Here is my world, my all!
Here I know who I am!
Here--all my wishes
Embodied in these figures,
My spirit split a thousand ways
Yet whole in my beloved children.

    The hymns of the Rigveda were not yet known to Europeans, but Goethe had created an image very similar to the Purusha hymn, a thousand-headed cosmic man who forms the very body and contents of the universe. But unlike this Vedic hymn, which only hints at the necessity of a corollary feminine power in the word viraj, Goethe follows one version of the Greek myth that has Athene actively aiding Prometheus in his earthly creations. Unlike the great Indian yogis, Prometheus realizes that "you [Minerva=Athene] are to my spirit as it is to itself" and that his creative powers grow in her presence, which is "the sources of all life." We will discover that this joining of animus and anima is one significant difference between Prometheanism and the spiritual Titanism of India.

    There are too many parallels, however, between Satan and Prometheus for most Christians to be completely comfortable with Prometheus as a model for human action. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, however, saw more contrasts than similarities:

Some of the early Church fathers actually agreed with Browning, and they saw Prometheus as one who, like Job, prefigures Christ. Some of them noted the parallel in the creation of humanity out of clay and their descent into Hell, and Tertullian was willing to grant a mythical foreshadowing of the Passion of Christ in "the stories of the sacrifices of the Taurians . . . the torments of the Caucasus." Simone Weil's view of Prometheus represents a 20th Century extension of Tertullian's view: "The story of Prometheus is like the refraction into eternity of the Passion of Christ. Prometheus is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." In Chapter Three I will analyze mitigating factors in the Prometheus myth that lead me to distinguished between Prometheanism and Titanism.

    Even though I have chosen to give the term "Titanism" a negative connotation, I do not wish to give the impression that more knowledge or even new technology are undesirable; and I certainly do not mean to imply that we do not need heroes or saints. In the West they sometimes say that their heroes are "larger than life," or alternatively they say that "we stand on the shoulders of giants" in relation to them. I contend that these images represent a distortion of how heroes are actually made. These ideas are also most likely responsible for the mistaken view, expressed variously in Hobbes' monarch or Raskalnikov's Napoleon, that some people are beyond our ken and above the law. Therefore, I believe that we require a new vision of human nature, one that breaks with both the Western autonomous self and the yogic self, which is exhorted to be totally independent from others and separate from an unredeemable nature.

    Humanism arose during the so-called "axial period," and it is commonly observed that while Western people generally responded to the discovery of human individuality by externalizing their new desires in a positive way, the Indians turned inward in an attempt to reconcile anxieties caused by an increased awareness of the self-world split. But even in their world-denying practices, many Indian thinkers have remained very much attached to the human form. They have made it the prototype for the shape and origin of the universe (some Jains are most explicit on this point); they have made it the locus of all spiritual liberation--to be saved the gods must eventually have a human incarnation. Even if this anthropocentric and anthropomorphic cosmos is not taken literally, the image itself is sufficient to indicate a distorted view of human beings and their relation to the world. Not only are the gods supplanted, but nature in general is denigrated in status and value. This becomes an especially serious problem when human beings develop technological means to control and alter nature. . . .

TITANISM IN THE WEST (excerpts from Chapter One)

    In American culture humanism has not been a term widely used until the 1980s, when the Religious Right began to employ it to execrate everything that it is against. It used to be that all of America's ills were blamed on a "Communist conspiracy," but now this has been replaced with a "humanist" conspiracy. Humanists are being targeted as one source of every evil, from homosexuality to one-world government. This attack is truly incredible if one considers the fact that humanism is one of the greatest achievements of Western civilization. The humanism of Socrates has become the basis for ethical individualism; the humanism of the Greek Sophists gave law its adversarial system and inspired Renaissance humanists to extend education to the masses as well as to the aristocracy; the Christian humanism of Aquinas and Erasmus helped temper negative views of human nature found in the biblical tradition; and the humanism of the Enlightenment gave us political rights, representative government, and free market economics.

    Most of the distortion of the humanist tradition has come from the Religious Right, but equal blame must go to some secular humanists who insist that only their views are "true" humanism. These humanists, fundamentalists, and too many knowledgeable Christians continue to believe that all humanists are atheists. Humanists are most often described as those who attempt to move God aside and take God's place; in other words, the Religious Right conceives of all humanists as Titans. Such a view simply does an injustice to the Western humanist tradition, which, since Plato and Aristotle, has been dominated by confirmed theists and moderate humanists. Secular humanism has its origins in Protagoras and his belief that human beings are the measure of all things. This was definitely a minority tradition until the Enlightenment, but even then theistic humanists like the American Founding Fathers still prevailed. It has only been during the last two centuries that secular humanism has made any progress, culminating in our time with atheistic existentialism and other secular philosophies.

    Western humanism can be defined as the view which holds that all human beings have intrinsic value and dignity. Humanists believe that human beings are individual centers of value with moral freedom and responsibility. Western humanists also trust reason rather than revelation as a guide to truth, but they must realize that even their own principles cannot be strictly demonstrated as true. The limited scope of human reason does allow theistic humanists to appeal to divine revelation, but only if these revealed truths do not undermine basic humanist principles. For example, Calvin and Luther's rejection of reason (particularly Luther), their belief in utter human depravity, and their affirmation of total divine determinism definitely remove them from the humanist camp. While humanists East and West differ on the exact nature of human freedom, a basic humanist assumption will be the belief that human beings play a principal role in shaping their own destinies.

    If properly conceived, humanism does not involve the displacement of God in favor of humankind. True theistic humanism will let God be God and humans be humans. This is what could be called the "Hebraic principle," based on the greatest discovery of the ancient Hebrews, namely, the transcendence of God. The Hebrew writers of the Sixth Century B.C.E. not only overcame the primitive anthropomorphisms of earlier writers, but also made a clean break with other Near Eastern views in which, for example, gods battled with sea dragons or mated with humans. This of course thoroughly confused the distinction between the divine and the nondivine.

    Confucianism and Buddhism are the only Eastern philosophies that have been called humanisms. (See Chapter Eight for more on Buddhist humanism.) Confucius' strong focus on human dignity and right human relationships and deemphasis on divine powers establish his humanist credentials. Confucian humanism can be summarized best by a passage from the Analects: "It is humans that make the Way great and not the Way that can make humans great.". Analects 15:28. Confucius also respects the Hebraic principle by refusing to humanize Heaven and rejecting the divinization of human beings. This will be the main topic of Chapters Nine and Ten.

    We must be careful in formulating a general definition of humanism that will encompass both East and West. The humanism of the Greeks and the Chinese focuses on this-worldly concerns without giving up the idea of a transcendent realm altogether. In other words, humanism's principal concerns in Greece and China were secular. Both the Greeks (especially after Socrates) and Confucians turned from cosmology and metaphysics to what they considered to be the more pressing concerns of ethics and politics. The crucial agenda for both Socrates and Confucius was to establish correct human relationships. Most Indian thought can hardly be described as secular philosophy; therefore, the common worldly concerns we find in Western and Chinese humanism cannot be the base line of a comprehensive view of humanism. The emphasis here is more on speculative metaphysics and cosmology, and this contrasts sharply with the humanism of Socrates, the Sophists, and modern existentialists.

    As for a comprehensive definition of humanism, the entry from Websters Ninth Collegiate Dictionary serves our purposes very well: "A doctrine, attitude, or way of life centered on human interests or values, especially a philosophy that usually rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual's dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason." The Indian ascetic tradition, by virtue of its focus on humanity and its deemphasis on the role of the gods, fits this broad definition of humanism. In the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jaina traditions human beings realize themselves through spiritual discipline (tapas), not through reason. Reason also plays a more subordinate role in Confucianism. Whereas for Aristotle "reason more than anything else is man," for Confucius true humanity (ren) consists in reciprocity and loving others. Even with the Buddha's great dialectical skills, it is clear that the lay Buddhist is never liberated by reason but by virtuous action. Therefore, for both Confucianism and some forms of Buddhism substituting "self-realization through virtue" for reason would serve to make this definition of humanism more universal.

    The Greek Protagoras could be called the father of secular humanism in the West. His homo mensura thesis becomes the basis for the extreme humanism of Titanism. Secular humanism need not be Titanistic if it remains within the bounds of human limitations. But when we find that humans are the measure of everything in the universe, then we have encountered the radical anthropomorphism and superhumanism that gives rise to Titanism. In the M¹ndØkya Upani¬ad, the human mouth becomes an analogue for basic cosmic sounds, and the yogi who reaches the third stage of "deep sleep" is able to "measure the whole universe in very deed and is absorbed (into it)." In Western humanism the Titans celebrate their radical autonomy and control over their destinies; likewise, the yogi "attains to independent sovereignty, attains to the lord of the mind." In the Kau¬§taki Upani¬ad the liberated one is even beyond good and evil, a point that Karl Potter emphasized in an earlier discussion.

    Extreme humanism East and West does converge on one pervasive cosmological image: parts of the natural world are analogized as parts of the human body. One widespread expression of this is the idea that human beings are microcosms of the macrocosm. The Church Father Origen said that "you are another world in miniature and in you are the sun, the moon, and also the stars." Renaissance humanist Robert Grossetteste, in a small piece called "Man is a Smaller World," suggests that the "head refers to the heavens: in it are the two eyes, like the lights of the sun and moon. The breast corresponds to the air. . . but the belly is likened to the sea. . . [and] the soles of the feet are likened to the earth." The Swedish mystic Immanuel Swedenborg continues this same tradition: "The multitude of these little glands [of the brain] may also be compared to the multitude of angelic societies. . . ." But he also reproduces the Indian cosmotheandric view: "The whole of heaven has this resemblance to man, because God is a Man." This is the ultimate goal of Titanism East and West: to become God in God's absence or to dethrone the gods and humanize the entire universe.