Ontology of God - Religion Series - Axial Age - Reference notes

In these analysis of the Axial Age, one thing is certain. This age of change (one of several) was not the last change in religious thought - Christianity was next, as was Islam, etc.

The Axial Age - http://www.aquinas.edu/homepages/brookdan/CWCtext/chap6/ch6b.html In characterizing this period as the "Axial Age," Jaspers suggests that it represents the "axis of world history." He distinguishes it from what he refers to as the "Mythic Age," which the axial period replaced and transcended:

What is new about this age, in all three areas of the world [i.e., in "China, India, and the West"], is that man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations. He experiences the terror of the world and his own powerlessness. He asks radical questions. Face to face with the void he strives for liberation and redemption.... All this took place in reflection. Consciousness became once more conscious of itself, thinking became its own object.... In this age were born the fundamental categories within which we still think today, and the beginnings of the world religions, by which human being still live, were created. The step into universality was taken in every sense.1

This is not to say that all of these religious and ethical thinkers produced similar responses to the fundamental questions of what life is how we are to live it. Even within each culture the spiritual responses were varied, even conflicting. But the kinds of questions being posed were inherently similar. 1Jaspers, p. 2.

China The birth of ethical thought in China resembles to some extent the parallel developments in Greece in that many individual thinkers and their followers began to reflect on the ethical and metaphysical implications of human existence. While we will only be examining the two most influential schools of thought from the period, Chinese tradition commonly refers to "the one hundred schools"—a number they mean quite literally.

The teachings of Confucius (551-479 BCE) can be described as precepts on how to carry out properly the life of a traditional Chinese gentleman. This may not sound like a revolution in moral thought, but it was the ability of Confucius to put into practice himself the kind of life he prescribed that left a great impression on Chinese tradition. According to his teaching, the goal of social well being was achieved through the attempts of each individual to find harmony in his or her station in life as well as in personal and social relationships. The concept of gentility for Confucius did not refer to noble birth, but rather to the manner in which one lived according to what was perceived as a natural, cosmic order.

While the legendary source of Taoism, a scholar referred to as Lao-tzu ("The Old Master"), predates Confucius, the formation of a philosophical school did not appear until the fourth century BCE. As with Confucianism, the goal of the Tao (or "the way") is harmony with the cosmic order. It is more concerned, however, with a personal rather than social relation to nature. Its fundamental teaching is to return to a child-like simplicity that frees the individual from desire. The Lao-tzu and Chang-tzu are its foundational texts.

India - The authors of the Upanishads, which were composed between 800-500 BCE, continued the Vedic tradition, a priest-centered and caste-oriented religion in the Aryanized northern portion of the Indian subcontinent. In doing so, however, they expanded the scope of their explorations to include metaphysical thinking—the search for ultimate truth in the meaning of life and death. Brahman is the changeless ultimate reality as opposed to the ordinary impermanent reality of daily life. All things in our ordinary existence will pass and are continually changing; only Brahman remains the same. The moral principles that guide one’s social, political, and personal life is dharma, in which one pursues merit and avoids fault en route to a possible rebirth in heaven and an end to the continual cycle of life, death, and rebirth in this world.

Siddhartha Gautama was born (ca. 566 BCE) north of the Ganges and south of the Himalayas into a wealthy family. At the age of 29, he experienced a spiritual crisis in which he recognized the inevitability of aging and death. He abandoned his family, renounced his comfortable existence and devoted his life to ascetic discipline and self-mortification. Continuing to search for ultimate truth, he took up the practice of intense meditation, and finally, during the course of what has become a famous night in spiritual history, he achieved, while under a pipal tree, full enlightenment, in which the reality of the cycle of life and death was made clear. From this time on he is known as the Buddha, or "enlightened one." What he experienced is summed up in the "four noble truths" of the Buddhist faith:

1. All of life consists of suffering (dukkha); 2. Desire is the source of suffering; 3. The elimination of desire brings the elimination of suffering; 4. One achieves the elimination of desire by following the "eight-fold path" of right understanding, thought, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration.

At the heart of this teaching (or dharma) is what is called the "middle path"—the avoidance of both sensual pleasure and extreme mortification.

The influence of the Upanishads on the Buddha’s teaching is evident in establishing its dharma, a practical application of spiritual beliefs in daily life. The core principle of desire being the root of suffering is also to be found in the Upanishad tradition. Buddhism’s appeal was in its emphasis on one’s personal experience of enlightenment. It was spirituality accessible for all and free of the rituals and elitism of the traditional brahmanistic religion.

Persia - While some regard Zoroastrianism as perhaps the first monotheistic religion, most see it as dualistic because it recognizes two fundamental principles—of good and of evil. Its founder is Zoroaster or Zarathustra (born around 660 BCE), who conceived of a cosmos in which Ahura Mazda was in conflict with its twin spirit Ahriman. Ahura Mazda brought all things to life, and already existed before the world was born.

Zoroastrians looked forward to the final victory of Ahura Mazda over the forces of evil and believed a savior would come to raise the dead for final judgment. Like Buddhism, it was a personal religion that had no prescribed rituals, but unlike Buddhism and most other religions had no priests or temples either, at least in its early stages. It emphasized the adoption of an ethical stance in our everyday existence without the extremes of celibacy, self-mortification, or poverty. Zoroastrians migrated during subsequent invasions by Greek (under Alexander) and Muslim armies, and survive (in much smaller numbers) today in India in what is known as the Parsi religion.

Palestine - Judaism is the first truly monotheistic religion, asserting the belief in a single god and creator of all things whom they called Yahweh, but whose name, in fact (which means "I am"). This reflects an attempt to refrain from attaching a name to the Supreme Being who transcends nature and the phenomena of physical existence. There is no one founder of Judaism, but its tradition is grounded in the experience of two ancient patriarchs, Abraham and Moses. Abraham, who lived in the Mesopotamian city of Ur, was called by Yahweh in the first half of the second millennium to settle in Palestine. His clan grew there, but eventually migrated to Egypt, where they were gradually pressed as an underclass into slavery. Moses was a charismatic leader who confronted the pharaoh, won the release of his people, and led them out of Egypt and back to the land where Abraham and his children had settled.

During the Exodus, Moses received from Yahweh his law (which includes the Ten Commandments), and he transmitted it to the Hebrew people. Judaism’s primary emphasis is on the idea of covenant, a kind of mutual contract between Yahweh and the Israelites, his Chosen People. It is a unique concept, in which an individual as well as a community relationship is established between Yahweh and the Israelites. While his law is demanding, containing a rigorous collection of moral and legal prescriptions, Yahweh is also merciful and forgiving, promising never to break the covenant with them, even though they might out of human weakness turn away from him. The Israelite history from the Exodus (around 1300 BCE) until the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem and subsequent dispersion of Jews by the Romans in 70 CE thus follows a cyclic pattern: the Israelites establish a covenant with Yahweh, stray from it to be more like the other states and ethic groups in Palestine (particularly in the form of worshiping their pagan idols), and are admonished by a series of prophets to return to the law and renew their covenant with Yahweh, who remains ever faithful.

The Israelites established themselves as a nation under Kings David and Solomon in the 10th century BCE, but became divided politically, and then were conquered by both the Assyrians and the Neo-Babylonians. From the sixth century to 70 CE, they were ruled by three successive empires: the Persians, the Greeks under Alexander, and the Romans. While the law and moral code of the Israelites dates back to before the Axial Age, the teachings of the prophets and the evolution of these teachings into scriptural texts for the moral edification of the people correspond with the larger trend toward ethical thought throughout southern Asia.

Greece - The contribution of Greek thinkers was more philosophical than spiritual, as they, beginning in the sixth century BCE, speculated about nature and human life by looking for natural rather than divine causes. The early or "Pre-Socratic" philosophers of Greece are too numerous to list here, but the scope of their teachings range from Thales and Xenophanes, who first attempted to account for the nature of existence independent of divine intervention, to Heraclitus, who regarded all existence to be in a state of flux,1 to Parmenides, who discoursed on the nature of permanent "being" as opposed to "becoming," to Democritus, who devised the first atomistic theory of nature. The variety of perspective of these early thinkers is impressive, but what they have in common is a thirst for discovering the fundamental principles of existence and the implications they have on human life and behavior.

The works of these early philosophers informed the teachings of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the three most important philosophers of classical Greece. Socrates, who never wrote down his thoughts (and thus making it impossible for us to have a true reading of his philosophy apart from what Plato and others have written about him), was concerned largely with the question of morality in the course of human life. Plato's dualistic representation of the world recognized a pure, changeless realm of being in what he called the Ideas or Forms. Aristotle, the true empirical philosopher, taught that there cannot be any realm of existence outside of our experience of nature, and that our knowledge of the world and the moral principles derived from it must result from our examination of existence itself.

1It was Heraclitus who made the analogy that just as one cannot step into the same river twice (as the nature of the river changes with the passing of each second), so is being itself continually changing.

Christianity and Islam - After the Axial Age, there was a secondary stage of spiritual transformation that included the founding of the current world’s two other major religions, Christianity and Islam, as well as others that were not as dominant and that eventually died out or were absorbed into other traditions, like Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity. To follow up on Jaspers’ examination of this period in world history, its significance lies in the fact that the major world religions that were established in it are the ones that continue to drive moral thought today.

Spread and variations of Christianity - The early Christian church spread through Palestine and other parts of the eastern Mediterranean region, but it found its greatest institutional foundation in Rome, and spread through most of Europe during the last centuries of the Roman Empire. Nestorian Christians, who followed the teaching of Nestorius that asserted a highly controversial theological doctrine about Jesus’ dual nature as being both human and divine, flourished for centuries in the eastern Mesopotamia and Persia, and established communities as far east as India and China. They did not enjoy the same kind of imperial support as the Roman church, however, as they were persecuted in Persia because they came into conflict with the indigenous Zoroastrian religion, and throughout the region when it was overtaken by Islamic expansion in the seventh century. They continued to migrate to the east, and eventually were absorbed into the established religions there.

Manichaeism was something of a cosmopolitan variation of Christian belief that was also heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. Mani (216-277 CE) was a prophet who traveled widely and whose message was one that combined teachings of the various religions he encountered. He regarded the founders of the major religions as prophets of the same divine message adapted to the culture and tradition of a specific region—Zoroaster to Persia, Buddha to India, and Jesus to Palestine and Europe. Manichaeism flourished, even though it too was attacked in Zoroastrian Persia and condemned by the Christian church. Like the Nestorians, Manichaeians continued eastward and established communities in China that existed for centuries.

Ideas spread by trade - II. Commercial and Cultural Expansion Trade between the various peoples of the Eurasian land mass was active even in prehistoric times. As discussed in previous chapters, the lack of written documentation of commercial endeavors has made it difficult to determine exactly the influence of one culture upon another, but the general economic picture is fairly clear for us even in early ancient history. As long as urban communities have existed, people from them have traveled and migrated, either voluntarily or as a result of warfare, disease, or natural disaster. The result of this human movement is what historian Jerry Bentley calls "cross-cultural encounters," in which not only people but also their beliefs, values, and cultural practices brush up against each other, producing a variety of effects:

These encounters naturally occasioned a great deal of conflict, since the parties involved often held different or even contradictory expectations concerning their proper relations and the results of their interaction. Quite apart from inspiring conflict, however, cross-cultural encounters served as remarkably effective agents of change in the pre-modern world. They encouraged the spread of technologies, ideas, beliefs, values, religions, and civilizations themselves.1

It is significant that commerce, and not only warfare and political domination, has been a major agent of change in the world since early historic times. By the second century BCE, a network of well-traveled trade routes commonly referred to as the ancient silk roads had been established that stretched from the Yellow River Valley to the Mediterranean. (Click on the hyperlink to view a map of ancient trade routes.)

Of significance too is the contribution of this commercial network to the establishment and expansion of religions during the Axial Age. While the period is characterized by the appearance in many lands of original philosophical and ethical thinking, it was along the road of trade that these new ideas spread and collided, sometimes resulting in suspicion and persecution, but just as often leading to a fruitful exchange of ideas and sometimes the assimilation of portions of one culture’s values and customs into another.

We can trace to some extent how the spread of ideas is influenced by the movement of ethnic and cultural communities described earlier in the chapter. Post-exilic Jews were influenced by the messianic teachings of Zoroastrianism; this in turn had a significant impact on Christianity, which emerged out of the Judaic tradition. Buddha was clearly inspired by important themes in the Upanishads when he developed his path to release from desire and human suffering; his teaching, as well as Confucian and Taoist beliefs, influenced the communities of Nestorians and Manichaeians, who were migrating eastward to avoid persecution in the Christian west, Zoroastrian Persia, and the Islamic nations that succeeded them.

The expansion of many of the new religions also seems to have been enhanced by their direct connection to trade and their concern for the needs of merchants. Buddhism, for example, became very popular among traveling merchants. This is due, in part, to the building of monasteries along trade routes, where monks provided hospitality for merchants and other travelers, who in turn became generous in supporting the monasteries. Islam’s long tradition of commerce goes back to its founder Muhammed, who was himself of an established merchant family in Arabia. Even prior to this, however, Arabs had made a name for themselves in the world of commerce by domesticating the camel and developing a saddle for it that improved both travel, trade, and warfare in an otherwise forbidding desert environment. Manichaeism’s appeal for merchants and travelers was that it integrated concepts from a variety of the spiritual traditions of southwest Asia, and that while it had a distinct missionary agenda it was also maintained an open mind to cultural traditions other than its own.

As monotheism emerged during the expansion of world religions, an impulse other than the commercial became increasingly prominent. If one thinks of monotheism as not only the belief in a single god, but belief in this deity to the exclusion of all others, it is possible to understand how the expansion of Christianity and Islam became increasingly missionary and militant. Believers in what they feel is the one true faith might naturally feel a duty to bring it to others outside their own spiritual community. Coupled with this tendency is another that seeks to extend the values and cultural practices linked with a dominant religion to the secular and political realm as well. This was the case with Christianity, which was first outlawed in the Roman Empire but eventually became its official religion, and Islam. Together, these two world religions demonstrated that the "defining characteristic of late antiquity...was its conviction that knowledge of the one God both justifies and exercise of imperial power and makes it more effective."2

In summary, the significance of the combination of flourishing trade and religious expansion during the Axial Age, which continued during Christian and Islamic expansion, is not just that there was commerce, or just that there was a blooming of spiritual thought: it is that it created a vast network of cultural contact and exchange that spanned the entire Eurasian land mass and touched portions of northern and eastern Africa as well. Cultures influenced and learned from each other, and technology and literacy spread as well as religious beliefs. It was to establish a foundation for what was later to be called a world economic system that would link all the lands surrounding the Indian Ocean.

In the western world, the decline of the Roman Empire is often associated with subsequent "barbarian migrations" and political instability. But while Europe remained in a politically latent stage, it was connected with the extensive economic network to the east. Here is Bentley’s assessment of the period:

In light of the traditional characterization of this period from 600 to 1000 as a dark age, one point bears special emphasis: the seventh to tenth centuries without doubt witnessed more political and imperial expansion, more commercial and cultural exchange than any previous period of human history. Expansion and exchange in turn brought about the spread of literacy and technology, of faiths and values, and indeed of civilization itself. Cross-cultural encounters...left rather deep impressions whose outlines remained visible for a long term, continuing in many cases even to the present day.3

1Old World Encounters, p. 5. 2Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, p. 3. 3p. 110.

http://campus.northpark.edu/history/WebChron/World/Axial.html :

800-500 BC: The Upanishads Vedic Era Chronology
630-553 BC: ZarathustraPersian Empire Chronology
b. 604 BC: Lao Tse Early China Chronology
c. 585 BC: Thales of MiletusGreek Philosopohy Chronology
611-546 BC: Anaximander of MiletusGreek Philosophy Chronology
550-480 BC: Siddhartha Gautama called the Buddha Buddhism Chronology
c. 550 BC: Mahavira Rivals to Hinduiam Chronology
d. 585 BC: JeremiahAncient Israel Chronology
511-479 BC: Kung Fu-tse (Confucious)Early China Chronology
ca. 428 BC- 347BC: PlatoHellenistic Greece Chronology

Resources

Primary Sources

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0SOR/is_3_60/ai_57533384#continue Several historians and philosophers have stressed the key role that certain periods in history have played in developing techniques, political structures, or worldviews which were to dominate the foreground of the next centuries or millennia before being, in turn, questioned, then replaced, or altered and inserted into new systems. "Man seems to have started again from scratch four times," Karl Jaspers wrote (1954: 37-38): with the Neolithic age, with the earliest civilizations, with the emergence of the great empires, and with modernity. Each of these axial turns produced a general reshaping of the "symbolic field," to use Pierre Bourdieu's term, and a great religious commotion which led to disappearances, redefinitions, and emergences. Each period finally led to new religious configurations, respectively: oral agrarian religions, religions of antiquity, religions of salvation (universalist religions), modern changes. Of the religions of antiquity, only Judaism and Hinduism survived the preceding axial age, abeit greatly changed and keeping typically pre-universalist traits (at least up to modernity): a large number of prohibitions, important domestic rites, transmission by descent. We may assume that modernity also stands as a major challenge to established religions as well as a potential source of religious innovation, especially if it is about to be radicalized and generalized, as Giddens argues (1991). In addition, the hypothesis of modernity as a new axial turn leads us to consider very long-term effects; this enables us to perform comparative research, and proposes an interpretation accounting not only for religious decline, but also for revivals, mutations, and inventions.

The concept of "axial age" has been used to refer to one historical period: the emergence of universalism, philosophy, great religions, early science (see, e.g., Jaspers 1954; Bellah 1976: 20-50; Eisenstadt 1986; Hick 1989: 21-35). This is especially true of the sixth to fifth centuries BCE, which were a key stage in this process (Deutero-Isaiah, the era of Pericles, Upanishads, Jain, Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tze), of which Christianity and Islam are offsprings. This age is considered as "axial" because we continue to be its heirs, particularly through the great religions. However there is no reason that we cannot also consider the Neolithic age, the earliest civilizations, the great empires, and modernity as such axial ages, since they too mark a general reshaping of collective thought. Therefore, our definition of "axial age" (or axial period) shall include these four ages. At its beginning, an axial age is a kind of cinematic fade; it is marked by critical moments of crisis and shifts of thought which lead to a reshaping of the symbolic field which creates a new period of stability. These critical phases vary in duration from, for example, a thousand years for universalism (from the sixth century BCE to the emergence of Islam) to several millennia for the Neolithic age (from its first emergence to its eventual global expansion and triumph).

Jaspers, while in fact considering modernity as being a new axial period, regarded the turn taken by modernity in the nineteenth century as the harbinger of a probable "second axial period" (Jaspers 1954: 38). He hesitated because globalization was not yet a widespread phenomenon when he first wrote this in 1949, although we can assume that this is the case today. Jaspers identified modernity with four fundamental distinguishing features: modern science and technology, a craving for freedom, the emergence of the masses on the historical stage (nationalism, democracy, socialism, social movements), and globalization. We find it relevant to add to this list the primacy of reason (a point that Jaspers implicitly includes in the four features), the development of capitalism, and functional differentiation (the rise of the modern state, and Parsons's and Luhmann's concept of differentiation of the spheres of activity in society).

This notion of axial age has not been utilized by sociologists to analyze modernity. However Arpad Szakolczai and Laszlo Fustos (1996) refer to the "axial age," and they use the concept of "axial moment" in ways that are relevant to this analysis. They define this notion as follows: "An axial moment occurs whenever there is a global collapse of the established order of things, including the political system, the social order of everyday life, and the system of beliefs - a very rare event - and a major spiritual revival. . . . Such a period happened in the first centuries (collapse of the Roman republic and rise of Christianity), in the fifth-seventh centuries (collapse of the Roman Empire and rise of Islam), in the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries (the waning of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Protestantism), and finally the two majors stages of the dissolution of absolutist politics and the traditional European social order, Enlightenment and socialism." Thus, that which they choose to define as an axial moment corresponds to key phases that occur within an axial age. For example, the rise of Christianity and of Islam are two key phases of the previous axial age (universalism), and the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries, the Enlightenment, and socialism (or more accurately the rise of industrial society) are the three key phases of modernity. Nonetheless, I believe that it is useful to employ the term "axial moment" to define such phases within an axial period.

In a very schematic fashion we can therefore periodize modernity. It begins with this axial moment of the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries, which is not only the beginning of what historians call "the modern age," but also that of modern science, and of the birth of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. But modernity only becomes a major phenomenon at the end of this period with the Enlightenment, the English and, especially, the American and French Revolutions, the birth of scientific method and thought, and the birth of industry (second axial moment). The third axial moment should include the development and triumph of industrial society and of capitalism (nineteenth-mid-twentieth centuries), first in England, and then throughout Europe and North America, the development of socialism, the building of the nation-state, the spread of nationalism and colonialism to its breaking point with the two world wars, and finally, decoIonization, globalization and, in the West, the triumph of democracy, of the affluent society, and of the welfare state. Modernity also resulted in the Cold War and the threat of nuclear destruction. The 1960s are often considered as a turning point: the beginning of the so-called post-industrial, post-fordian society, the information or knowledge society, and the beginning of the moral revolution. Ever since, the tertiary sector has become increasingly dominant, intangible factors of production (information, communication, and knowledge) and new technologies (computers and electronics) have become more important; and the family is becoming less and less traditional. In addition, globalization is complete, the middle class is getting more and more powerful, new problems (unemployment and pollution) and new social movements (feminism, regionalism, ecology, etc.) are emerging, and finally, Communism has collapsed.

Are we still in the era of modernity or in postmodernity? I share the opinion of Anthony Giddens (1991:3) who writes that "rather than entering a period of post-modernism, we are moving into one in which the consequences of modernity are becoming more radicalized and universalized than before." In fact, that which is supposed to define postmodernity is far from featuring these fundamentally new traits that characterize an axial turn, but could constitute a new "axial moment" (as Szakolczai thinks) that could be explained in terms of generalized, radicalized, and reflexive modernity. The hallmark of postmodernity is the "disqualification of 'great narratives'": great religions, great ideologies (nationalism, Communism, fascism), and the ideology of endless progress. But this only allows us to differentiate ourselves from the prior phase (axial moment) of modernity, and it is partly refuted by new forms of nationalism and by religious fundamentalism. The relativization of science and technology is not new, but is increasing precisely because the excesses and dangers of the former are becoming dramatically threatening (nuclear threat, pollution). One could continue and show that the other features attributed to postmodernity are the logical extension of trends within modernity, as are the nuclear threat and pollution: the detraditionalization of the life-world, the anti-authoritarian revolt, hedonism, new social movements, and above all, individualization. The same even holds true for the selective return to certain traditions, once modernity has prevailed over tradition, or for the repeated claim to local identities, which is a reaction against globalization. So I agree with Beckford's criticism (1996: 30-47) of the concept of postmodernity.