A New Axial Age - Karen Armstrong on the History—and the Future—of God

[Guest guest]

A New Axial Age

Karen Armstrong on the History—and the Future—of God

by Jessica Roemischer

 

 

Shortly following the terrorist attacks in Britain last July, I sat

with world-renowned theologian Karen Armstrong in her historic London

home. As we spoke about the spiritual challenges of our time and why

it behooves us to learn from religious history, police sirens blared

in the background, a reminder of the violent and unstable conditions

we face as a human species at the outset of the third millennium.

 

Driven from a young age by a thirst for the spiritual life, Armstrong

entered a convent at seventeen and left seven years later,

disillusioned by the traditional structures and mores that, despite

her passion for the divine, simply could not bring her spiritual

yearning to fruition. In the nearly four decades since then, she has

turned that passion into a prolific investigation into the essence

and evolution of the great traditions. Her best-selling book, A

History of God, now published in more than thirty languages, is a

compelling retrospective of religious history. In it, she

provocatively and exhaustively illustrates how humans have had to

redefine the sacred at critical historical junctures in order to meet

new spiritual needs created by changing cultural conditions and large-

scale crises.

 

As we spoke together in an atmosphere permeated by disquiet and

uncertainty, Armstrong pointed me back to the dawn of the great

religious traditions and simultaneously brought my attention to the

present—a time when once again, she believes, we will need to

redefine the notion of the sacred so it can become relevant and enter

our lives anew.

 

 

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What Is Enlightenment: In your book A History of God, you take us

through the emergence of the world's religious traditions, which

occurred during what is known as the Axial Age—a period you feel is

particularly relevant to our own time. To begin with, why is this

historic era called the Axial Age?

 

Karen Armstrong: The period 800–200 BCE has been termed the Axial Age

because it proved pivotal to humanity. Society had grown much more

aggressive. Iron had been discovered, and this was the beginning of

the Iron Age. Better weapons had been invented, and while those

weapons look puny compared to what we're dealing with now, it was

still a shock.

 

The first Axial Age also occurred at a time when individualism was

just beginning. As a result of urbanization and a new market economy,

people were no longer living on lonely hilltops but in a thriving,

aggressive, commercial economy. Power was shifting from king and

priest, palace and temple to the marketplace. Inequality and

exploitation became more apparent as the pace of change accelerated

in the cities and people began to realize that their own behavior

could affect the fate of future generations.

 

So the Axial Age marks the beginning of humanity as we now know it.

During this period, men and women became conscious of their

existence, their own nature, and their limitations in an

unprecedented way. In the Axial Age countries, a few men sensed fresh

possibilities and broke away from the old traditions. People who

participated in this great transformation were convinced that they

were on the brink of a new era and that nothing would ever be the

same. They sought change in the deepest reaches of their beings,

looked for greater inwardness in their spiritual lives, and tried to

become one with a transcendent reality. After this pivotal era, it

was felt that only by reaching beyond their limits could human beings

become most fully themselves.

 

 

WIE: Can you further describe the ways in which this " great

transformation " manifested?

 

Armstrong: Most significantly, it is the time when all the great

world religions came into being. And in every single case, the

spiritualities that emerged during the Axial Age—Taoism and

Confucianism in China, monotheism in Israel, Hinduism, Buddhism, and

Jainism in India, and Greek rationalism in Europe—began with a recoil

from violence, with looking into the heart to find the sources of

violence in the human psyche. The conviction that the world was awry

was fundamental to these spiritualities. One of the things that is

very striking is that all the great sages were living in a time like

our own—a time full of fear, violence, and horror. Their experience

of utter impotence in a cruel world impelled them to seek the highest

goals and an absolute reality in the depths of their beings.

 

For example, the China of Confucius and Lao-tzu was engaged for

centuries in one war after another. The whole of the very ancient

civilization of China was becoming more aggressive. And you have that

understanding very strongly in Confucius as he looks out on the world

and laments loudly while, at the same time, he tries to rebuild it by

recrafting the old rituals in a way that brings forward their

compassionate and altruistic potential. That essential dynamic of

compassion is summed up in the Golden Rule, which was first

enunciated by Confucius around 500 BCE: " Do not do unto others as you

would not have them do unto you. "

 

On the Indian subcontinent at this time, there was a major economic

and political turnaround. Suddenly powerful kingdoms and empires were

being created, and they relied on force. People all over India were

equating horror with the new violence in their society and in the

marketplace, where merchants were preying aggressively upon one

another. Many of their philosophies developed a doctrine of

nonviolence as a way to counter violence by refusing any form of it

whatsoever.

 

The fifth century was terrifying in Greece as well. While it was a

time of great artistic creativity, it was also a time of huge

violence. The Greeks were, in many respects, a terrible people, and

yet every year in Athens they would stage the political events of

that year in their great tragedies. These were written as ways of

looking at the tragic implications of what was going on in their

midst, of calling everything into question and really plumbing the

human experience of suffering. So violence and suffering seem to be a

sine qua non of a spiritual quantum leap forward.

 

 

WIE: Why do you believe it's so important for us to reflect upon the

traditional religions and the age in which they emerged?

 

Armstrong: Today we are amid a second Axial Age and are undergoing a

period of transition similar to that of the first Axial Age. Its

roots lie in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the modern

era, when the people of Western Europe began to evolve a different

type of society. Since that time, Western civilization has

transformed the world. The economic changes of the last four hundred

years have been accompanied by immense social, political, and

intellectual revolutions, with the development of an entirely

different scientific and rational concept of the nature of truth. But

despite the cult of rationality, modern history has been punctuated

by witch hunts and world wars which have been explosions of unreason.

 

So, I feel that we are—all of us—at one of those junctions in history

when we are holding ourselves, our past, our future, and our

integrity in the palms of our own hands. This is a moment when, if we

allow that integrity to fall out, we might never recover it in the

same way. Once again, a radical change has become necessary.

 

 

WIE: How do you see us responding to our own pivotal moment in

history?

 

Armstrong: All over the world, people are struggling with these new

conditions and have been forced to reassess their religious

traditions, which were designed for a very different type of society.

They are finding that the old forms of faith no longer work for them;

they cannot provide the enlightenment and consolation that human

beings seem to need. As a result, men and women are trying to find

new ways of being religious. Like the reformers and prophets of the

first Axial Age, they are attempting to build upon the insights of

the past in a way that will take human beings forward into the new

world they have created for themselves.

 

We have, from the very beginning of our existence as a species,

created works of art and created religions to give us the sense that,

against all the aggressive and spirited evidence to the contrary,

life really does have some ultimate meaning, value, and sacredness.

And the notion of the sacred has a history, since it has always meant

something slightly different to different groups of people at various

points in time. If we look at our three major monotheistic religions,

it becomes clear that there is no objective " God " ; each generation

has to create the image of God that works for them. When one

conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has

been discarded and replaced by a new theology. Had the notion of God

not had this flexibility, it would not have survived.

 

In that context, atheism takes on a different meaning. Atheism is

often a transitional state: Jews, Christians, and Muslims were all

called atheists by their pagan contemporaries because they had

adopted a revolutionary notion of divinity and transcendence. The

people who have been dubbed atheists over the years have always

denied a particular conception of the divine. But is the God who is

rejected by atheists today the God of the patriarchs, the God of the

prophets, the God of the philosophers, the God of the mystics, or the

God of the eighteenth-century deists? All these deities have been

venerated, but they are very different from one another. Perhaps

modern atheism is a similar denial of a God that is no longer

adequate to the problems of our time.

 

WIE: So, we are again at a point when religion and the notion of God,

or the sacred, may need to be redefined.

 

 

Armstrong: Religion is highly pragmatic, despite its other-

worldliness. It should not only transform us, but it should also

transform the world. Religion should make a difference. And as soon

as it ceases to be effective, it will be changed. So we should be

working now to make our religion and our faith effective in this

lost, suffering, and terrifying world. But first, before we can make

a proper difference, we must transform ourselves. There's a very good

verse in the Qur'an where God says, " Therein God will not change the

state of the people unless they change the state of their own

selves. " And that's what we must do now.

 

WIE: In what way do you see this occurring?

 

 

Armstrong: At this moment in history, I believe that we need a new

spiritual revolution. We need a new faith. Now, you can say, " Look,

give us a break. This is hardly the time to start a new spiritual

revolution. At this juncture, we've got war. We've got the prospect

of terrorism. The economy is bad. Let's have a bit of peace and quiet

so that we can go up a mountain, collect ourselves, and then begin

this spiritual effort. " But suffering, fear, violence, and despair

are the prime conditions for such a renewal.

 

I think the sages and prophets of the first Axial Age knew very well

about our destructive potentials. What was happening in their own

society was a tremendous shock to them. They had to look into their

own hearts, discover what gave them pain, and then rigorously refrain

from inflicting this suffering upon other people. In order to counter

aggression, they taught their followers to cultivate the habit of

sympathy for all living things. They discovered that greed and

selfishness were the cause of our personal misery and that egotism

imprisoned us in an inferior version of ourselves and impeded our

enlightenment.

 

Our present Axial Age is characterized by globalization. We live in

one world, and we have to learn to live with difference, at home and

abroad. We have to see that we have very big brains and very puny

bodies, and because of our big brains, we've been able to create a

technology that compensates for our small size. But we don't seem to

have the ability to keep our aggression in check. Unfortunately, as

our technological expertise advances, our spiritual wisdom isn't

growing up alongside it. Yet that's what we need now in this world

that, as we're speaking, is falling apart. We've seen the bombs here

in London, on 9/11, in Auschwitz, in Bosnia. We have lost all sense

of the sacredness of human life. And that has to be cultivated.

 

We can't think " God " without thinking " human " now. We can't

think " human " without thinking " God. " Because the sacred is not just

something tacked on to our natural existence. It's no longer

something out there. The sacred must be that to which we all aspire.

It must become, in the best possible sense, deeply natural to us. It

should fulfill our being so that we can all, as the Greek Orthodox

said, be like Jesus even in this life, if we live right, in this

certain way.

 

During the first Axial Age, the great sages worked at this. Everyone

was prepared to be creative and spend as much time on this as people

spend today on discovering a new computer. And that requires

discipline. But we've lost the sense that spirituality is hard work.

It is often turned into a commodity to make us feel good. But it

isn't just wandering lonely as a cloud and hoping you'll see a clump

of daffodils to enthuse about. I believe the Dalai Lama was reduced

to tears when an American audience asked him how they could get

instant enlightenment. He hadn't realized things were that bad. So we

have to make a constant effort of imagination, which is the great

religious faculty. As Sartre says, " The imagination is the ability to

see what is not present, what is hidden. " We must exercise this

faculty fully, whereby we apprehend, in a new way, the inscrutable

and ever-elusive divine.

 

A New Axial Age

Karen Armstrong on the History—and the Future—of God

by Jessica Roemischer

http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j31/armstrong.asp?page=1

[Guest guest]

http://www.adishakti.org/_/a_new_axial_age_by_karen_armstrong.htm