Axial Age
In his 1949 Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (The Origin and Goal of History) philosopher Karl Jaspers popularized the Axial Age, the three centuries before and after 500 bcb, in which regions across Eurasia witnessed revolutionary developments, parallel but independent, in religion and sci- ence.35 In part motivated by the Holocaust, he pointedly avoided a focus on
Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp.
224-62; Frits Staal, “The science of language”, in Gavin D. Flood (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), pp. 357-8.34 For example, Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Lissa Roberts, “Situating science in global history: Local exchanges and networks of circulation”, Itinerario 33 (2009), 9-30.
35 Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (The Origin and Goal of History), Michael Bullock (trans.) (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1953).
Europe alone.[206] These were the centuries of Confucius, the Buddha, Socrates and other Greek philosophers, Daoism's shadowy Laozi, and a dozen Hebrew prophets. As any concept so grand and vast might, the Axial Age met sharp criticisms, especially charges of a lack of specificity or empiricism, or that it secularized salvation.
In some ways, the Axial Age appears to be to religion what the Scientific Revolution is to science, and through the Greeks science enters the Age too. Its historiographical effects, however, tend to work in the opposite direction to those of the Scientific Revolution. While the Scientific Revolution is important for creating and privileging one tradition, the Axial Age dazzles precisely for the plurality of traditions it produces.
The sociologically inclined might see in this plurality only a superficial cover over an essential unity, but G. K. Chesterton held rather that the only common ground between religions, fundamentally different, was precisely that superficial cover, those “same external methods”.[207] It is very difficult to compare religions without constructing a highly artificial common ground that could almost be described as secular, and a neo-orthodox theologian like Karl Barth might object even to desecrating what he considers truth by calling it “religion” at all, for “religion is unbelief”.[208] Cross-cultural connections tend to be less relevant in the Axial Age than in the Scientific Revolution, in part because there were fewer, and in part because this is a plurality not about to become the single, universal Euro-religion. In many ways the Axial Age is less important for what happened in it than for the story we tell about it. Few of these figures probably intended to found a religious tradition in our modern sense; it is subsequent generations in a line from them to us who look backward to award these thinkers special status.Scholars of the Axial Age revel in the Wider World; at its very soul the concept has a Wider World significance. Some scholars see in this geographical universalism a concrete certainty somewhat analogous to that of modern science. Karen Armstrong, for example, imagines a real religious truth - broadly speaking, compassion - that humanity essentially discovered in this period (“we have never surpassed the insights of the Axial Age”). In her writings, the sense of this objective religious truth is clear enough to her that she can spot flaws in earlier manifestations of religion: “The Axial Age was not perfect”, she writes, “a major failing was its indifference to women.”[209] By implication, Jesus' “Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34) would presumably show that he never really “got” Christianity.
Although this bias is not explicitly Euro-centric, it is teleological in that “our” modern religious sensibility is the yardstick by which others could be judged, and it inherits the Euro-centrism in which this modernism emerged. This may be the Euro-religion conjectured in the beginning of this chapter. My informal survey of bookstores in India reveals that the Armstrong corpus commands more shelf space than do the ancient Indian religious texts.Rodney Stark's Discovering God attempts to get around Euro-centrism, and indeed around the Euro-centric de-privileging of religion. Here bc becomes bcb, but Christ becoming “Common Era” turns a particular birthday that happens to be in common use into a “common” chronological marker normative for the planet. Then the usual “God” becomes “Gods”, an attempt to get around the monotheism of the West, but notice the capital letter: he has created a pantheon stocked by multiples (almost in a Warholian sense) of the monotheistic Judaeo-Christian-Islamic God, a pantheon alien to religious eyes, alien if not blasphemous.[210] At places Stark appeals to God's revelations as historical explanations, but as this fails to make his overall narrative unusual, the role of God appears to be only a rhetorical flourish. His brave sortie out of Euro-centrism fails.[211]