KAREN ARMSTRONG'S AXIAL AGE: ORIGINS AND ETHICS

• The Heythrop Journal
  
  
  
  • Monotheism emerged among the Jews, the philosophical foundations of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism were laid down in northern India; Confucianism and Daoism appeared in China, while the Western intellectual tradition began in Greece

  
  
  • her feeling that the world religions hit upon something profound and true in their inception – in the Axial Age – but have since ossified in unfortunate ways. That something is ethics, no less – and not much more. This, in turn, can be condensed as the Golden Rule:

  
  
  • all the Axial teachers insisted that kindness should not be guided by kinship or kingship; everyone now belonged to the great tribe of the suffering

  
  
  • most other scholars have located it in something called the ‘transcendentalist breakthrough’

  
  
  • Eisenstadt has defined the transcendentalist breakthrough as the erection of two sharply distinguished orders of reality and modes of behaviour. This is indeed a powerful way of lending coherence to the apparently disparate ancient philosophies.

  
  
  • Once could condense her story thus: the religious vision of the early civilizations was on the whole quite benign – before climate change, increasing competition for land and the arrival of charioteer nomads brought cataclysm. A dark age followed and the religious imagination darkened too. Warrior gods come to the fore, myths revealed the power of chaos to tear apart human society or were structured by agonistic struggle

  
  
  • traditional means of ameliorating and explaining suffering through ritual and myth must also come to seem inadequate.

  
  
  • pain appears to be equated with an anxiety about impermanence

  
  
  • urbanization, growing trade, introduction of new metals, formation of state power

  
  
  • reality was now outstripping the old rites and old stories simply too quickly.

  
  
  • An answer could be found in a vision of the transcendent, which floats free and serene above ‘reality’ by virtue of its ineffability

  
  
  • Change was not only witnessed in people's lifetimes, it was also being tracked over generations thanks to the new technologies of memorization: literacy or exacting methods of oral repetition.

  
  
  • The relativizing powers of historical consciousness were unleashed.

  
  
  • Thus the Axial Age: the pursuit of meaning not the practice of ritual – because just doing the rituals doesn't work any more; inwardness not exteriority – because we have mastery over our minds but little else; challenge not status quo – because the status quo is obviously deficient; ethics not law – because the law is the creature of power. These indicate a loss of faith in man's ability to better himself through mundane activity. This is also a loss of faith in politics.

  
  
  • As Karl Jaspers recognized, all occur in ‘an interregnum between two great ages of empire, a pause for liberty, a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness’– between the collapse of the Zhou dynasty and the unification of the warring states under the Qin in China, between Harappan civilization and the Mauryan empire in India, between Mycenae and Alexander in Greece.

  
  
  • Breakthroughs have therefore tended to emerge from the ruins of dead empires – or on the margins of ones that are very much alive.

  
  
  • demand for moral self-scrutiny

  
  
  • The warrior god was no longer merely fighting on behalf of his people but challenging them to fight their own evil within.

  
  
  • origins in collective rather than personal suffering, in the need to make sense of political disaster.

  
  
  • The Axial Age vision is the achievement of a new breed of peripatetic intellectual, who roamed this fragmented political landscape offering their minds for hire.

  
  
  • Already living outside the normal flow of life and its round of assumption and convenience, they then drew a breach across reality entire

  
  
  • the Greeks cannot seem to get beyond the First Noble Truth, determinedly staring into the abyss without straining to look up into the immensity above

  
  
  • Debate having become a spectator sport and a means to celebrity, any proposition inherited or invented now became subject to scrutiny, and the chains of reason abstract, dense and open-ended. The difference is that in India this dialogic exuberance was yoked to techniques of sustained introspection and altered consciousness: meditation and yoga. These brought not only cognitive illumination but a more wholesale transformation of being, a lightening of one's mortal load. This is why India's philosophical sea-change was poured into the vessel of religion. If here too reason brushed aside traditional habits of thought, it was to clear the ground for a fully-realized and intimately-explored vision of the transcendent.

  
  
  • the most analytically useful formulation of that breakthrough (as the conception of two sharply distinguished orders of reality and modes of behaviour) may not serve to define all the traditions. We have noted that this seems to be an awkward image to apply to Chinese philosophy, and some scholars of the Theravada would even object to the characterization of early Buddhism as a transcendentalist system, given its rejection of any form of absolutism. Moreover, the concept seems ultimately marginal to the Greek breakthrough.

  
  
  • her text does disclose a more profound connection between ethics and transcendence: it arises from what happens to the self. This is most clearly seen in the Indian tradition, a great deal of the logical energy of which was directed towards trying to grapple with the nature of consciousness – this thing at once ungraspable yet unavoidably fundamental,

  
  
  • all the Axial movements evince a sense that as soon as the self has been identified it has become something to worry about

  
  
  • One might say, that just as the self was discovered so too was mankind, which makes its first appearance here as an undifferentiated moral community.

  
  
  • all transcendentalisms have to destroy our normal understanding of life in order to imagine its continuation

  
  
  • But the logic is clear: one asserts that divine forms do exist and can be known, that our shadowy cave can be left behind for the light of the sun, but that since these things are entirely hidden from everyday life then apprehending them is not exactly like falling off a log. That task will fall to the moral and intellectual virtuosi, who will return to the cave with a unique authority: their account of reality is unimpeachable, and their desire to re-order it in accordance with their vision the most important message in the world.