What is Axial About the Axial Age?

What is Axial About the Axial Age?
Robert Bellah
Arch.europ.sociol., XLVI, 2005
http://genealogyreligion.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Axial-Age-Bellah.pdf

Ritual in tribal societies involves the participation of all or most of the members of the group in classic Durkheimian fashion, if the ritual goes well, it leaves the group filled with energy and solidarity

In stark contrast, ritual in archaic societies focuses above all on one person, the divine or quasi-divine king, and only a few people, priests or members of the royal lineage, participate. The rest of society acts sometimes as audience, but sometimes knows only of the great rituals by hearsay, since their presence would profane the high mysteries.

It would seem that maintaining the coherence of such large and extensive societies required that the attention and energy that tribal ritual focused on the whole society now be concentrated on the ruler, elevated beyond normal human status, in relation to beings who were now not only powerful, but required worship. The elevation of rulers into a status unknown in tribal societies went hand in hand with the elevation of gods into a status higher in authority than the powerful beings they were gradually replacing.

A dramatic symbolism that combined dominance and nurturance produced a new sense of divine power combined with social power, enacted in entirely new forms of ritual, involving, centrally, sacrifice ¢ even human sacrifice as a concrete expression of radical status difference.

Intermittent periods of state breakdown raised serious questions about the cosmological order: Where is the king? Where is the god? Why are we hungry? Why are we being killed by attackers and no one is defending us?

a central principle that has governed all my work on religious evolution: Nothing is ever lost. Just as the face-to-face rituals of tribal society continue in disguised form among us, so the unity of political and religious power, the archaic ‘‘mortgage'', as Voegelin called it, reappears continually in societies that have experienced the axial ‘‘breakthrough''

two aspects of the axial age that we will have to consider in more detail. One refers to the background features of societies that are in several ways ‘‘more developed'' than the societies that preceded them. The other refers to new developments in the realm of thought ¢ political, ethical, religious, philosophical ¢ that he sums up with the significant term ‘‘criticism''

The Origin and Goal of History implies. His dates are slightly different: He finds that the ‘‘axis of history is to be found in the period around 500 B.C., in the spiritual process that occurred between 800 and 200 B.C.'' It is there, he writes, that ‘‘Man, as we know him today, came into being

none of what he calls the axial ‘‘breakthroughs'', a term we will need to consider further below , occurred in the centers of great empires. Rather, in all cases, ‘‘There were a multitude of small States and cities, a struggle of all against all, which to begin with nevertheless permitted an astonishing prosperity, an unfolding of vigour and wealth''

the competition between small states created the possibility for the emergence of itinerant intellectuals not functioning within cen-tralized priesthoods or bureaucracies, and therefore more structurally capable of the criticism that Momigliano found central to the axial age, and that Jaspers defined as the capacity for ‘‘questioning all human activity and conferring upon it a new meaning''

it is only in the axial age that coinage became widespread trade was increasing all across the old world market relations tend to destabilize long-established kinship and status relationships incessant warfare between small states rise of large territorial states militarily more efficient than their Bronze Age predecessors,

all the axial cases except China experienced Persian pressure at critical moments in their development.

basic tension between the transcendental and mundane orders'', and on ‘‘the new type of intellectual elite'' concerned with the possible restructuring of the world in accordance with the transcendental vision

Johann Arnason has pointed out that Jaspers's ‘‘most condensed statement'' of the axial age, describing it as the moment when ‘‘man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations'', and ‘‘experiences absoluteness in the depths of selfhood and in the lucidity of transcendence'', is remarkably similar to Jaspers's own version of existential philosophy

mythic culture, which Donald describes as ‘‘a unified, collectively held system of explanatory and regulatory metaphors. The mind has expanded its reach beyond the episodic perception of events, beyond the mimetic reconstruction of episodes, to a comprehensive modeling of the entire human universe''

episodic culture, with which humans along with all higher mammals learn to understand and respond to the immediate situation they are in.

mimetic culture, the pre-linguistic, but not necessarily pre-vocal, use of the body both to imaginatively enact events and to communicate with others through expressive gesture

Theoretic culture is the fourth and most recent of Donald's stages. Since it will be my argument that the axial breakthrough was essentially the breakthrough of theoretic culture in dialogue with mythic culture as a means for the ‘‘comprehensive modeling of the entire human universe''

The key elements of theoretic culture developed gradually; they consisted in graphic invention, external memory, and theory construction

External memory is a critical feature of modern human cognition, if we are trying to build an evolutionary bridge from Neolithic to modern cognitive capabilities or a structural bridge from mythic to theoretic culture. The brain may not have changed recently in it genetic makeup, but its link to an accumulating external memory network affords it cognitive powers that would not have been possible in isolation. This is more than a metaphor; each time the brain carries out an operation in concert with the external symbolic storage system, it becomes part of a network.

theoretic culture, which is the ability to think analytically rather than narratively, to construct theories that can be criticized logically and empirically .

What made first millennium Greece unique in Donald's eyes was ‘‘reflection for its own sake'', going ‘‘beyond pragmatic or opportunistic science'', and eventuating in ‘‘what might be called the theoretic attitude''

Second-order thinking is ‘‘thinking about thinking'', that is, it attempts to understand how the rational exposition is possible and can be defended. One of the earliest examples is geometric proof, associated with Pythagoras in early Greece.

it is precisely the emergence of second-order thinking, the idea that there are alternatives that have to be argued for, that marks the axial age.

New models of reality, either mystically or prophetically or rationally apprehended, are propounded as a criticism of, and alternative to, the prevailing models''

second-order think-ing about cosmology, which for societies just emerging from the archaic age meant thinking about the religio-political premises of society itself.

‘‘Transcendental breakthrough occurred when in the wake of second-order weighing of clashing alternatives there followed an almost unbearable tension threatening to break up the fabric of society, and the resolution of the tension was found by creating a transcendental realm and then finding a soteriological bridge between the mundane world and the transcendental''

Because transcendental realms are not subject to disproof the way scientific theories are, they inevitably require a new form of narrative, that is, a new form of myth, myth with an element of reflective theory in it,

The way to change a mythic culture is to tell a different story, usually only a somewhat different story, which does not involve denying any previous story .

The monotheistic revolution of Akhenaten was not only the first but also the most radical and violent eruption of a counter-religion in the history of humankind.

The Aten, the sun disk, is the source of light, and light is the source of life and of time itself. Ritual and myth are not abandoned, but they focus exclusively on Aten.

But though Akhenaten cut to the root of traditional myth, he did not leave the mythic mode in finding light to be the fundamental reality of the cosmos, Akhenaten was more a ‘‘natural philosopher'', a precursor of the pre-Socratics

Akhenaten's religion reaffirmed the archaic unity of god and king, and however much a precursor of the axial age, it failed to raise the critical question of the relation between god and king, the very hallmark of the axial transformation.

Theoretic culture is added to mythic and mimetic culture which are reorganized in the process but they remain in their respective spheres indispensable. Theoretic culture is a remarkable achievement, but always a specialized one, usually involving written language in fields inaccessible to ordinary people. Everyday life continues to be lived in the face-to-face interaction of individuals and groups and in the patient activities of making a living in the physical world. It is first of all mimetic

daily life consists in endless ‘‘interaction ritual chains''. ‘‘Ritual'', he says, ‘‘is essentially a bodily process''. He argues that ritual requires bodily presence, mimetic (enactive, embodied) culture does not just continue to exist alongside theoretic culture: it reclaims, so to speak, some of the achievements of theoretic culture. Hubert Dreyfus has shown in detail how skills learned with painstaking attention to explicit rules, through becoming embodied and largely unavailable to consciousness, are in the end far more efficient

If mimetic culture has interacted vigorously with theoretic culture once the latter has appeared, such is also the case with narrative culture. There are things that narrative does that theory cannot do. The psychologist, Jerome Bruner, has noted that narrative actually constitutes the self, ‘‘the self is a telling''. Not only do we get to know persons by sharing our stories, we understand our membership in groups to the extent that we understand the story that defines the group

Note: Self as narrative and show group membership. So, is abandonment of self abandonment of both narrative and membership? That would certainly be the case for sanyasin

in important spheres of life stories cannot be replaced by theories. when utilitarians say that ethics should be based on the consideration of the greatest good for the greatest number, they require a substantive account of the good to get started: they still need a story about the good.

Efforts to create a ‘‘religion within the bounds of reason alone'' run up against the same problem: they end up replacing old stories with new ones.

Note:
So what Bellah calls narrative, Karen Armstrong calls mythos

Narrative is not only the way we understand our personal and collective identities; it is the source of our ethics, our politics and our religion.

Mythic (narrative) culture is not a subset of theoretic culture, nor will it ever be. It is older than theoretic culture and remains to this day an indispensable way of relating to the world.

The earliest writing seems to have been largely utilitarian, keeping accounts of income and outgo in temple and palace economies. However, when writing was used for extended texts, those texts were apt to be narrative not theoretic. They recorded, but did not replace, spoken language.

The oral word, as we have noted, never exists in a simply verbal context, as a written word does. Spoken words are always modifications of a total, existential, situation, which always engages the body . Bodily activity beyond mere vocalization is not adventitious or contrived in oral communication, but is natural and even inevitable.

Breakthroughs involve not only a critical reassessment of what has been handed down, but also a new understanding of the nature of reality, a conception of truth against which the falsity of the world can be judged, and a claim that that truth is universal, not merely local

periods of severe social stress which raise doubts about the adequacy of the existing understanding of reality,

He suggests it was the threat of the Persians to the kind of city that the Greeks thought necessary for human life that may have stimulated the Greek breakthrough; the pressure of Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia on the ancient Israelites that made them seek a transcendent cause; and possibly similar disruptions in ancient China and India that lay behind the axial innovations there.

second-order thinking is, by its very nature, limited to an intellectual elite

Formal theoretic developments seem virtually absent in ancient Israel. Compared to the other three cases, Israel approaches theoretic culture only asymptotically, yet it was there, perhaps, that the revolution in mythospeculation was most profound.

those responsible for the most radical innovations were seldom successful. In the short run they usually failed

The Axial Period too ended in failure. History went on''

The insights, however, at least the ones we know of, survived.