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We notice the Axial pattern in terms of
creative individuals. Its philosophers and sages are the tip of the iceberg, and
behind them we see whole cultural regions, out of the blue, proceed rapidly to a
new stage of culture. Note however that it is essential to induce change through
individuals seeding cultures with new ideas. This does not explain the overall
coordination over time of complex emergent events, i.e. the birth of democracy.
Actually changing the mechanics of culture in those periods is less easy, and
may prove abortive. The clearest and best-documented case is that of
Archaic/Classical Greece. Roughly we have the following remarkable surge:
Early tribal history of the Greeks
–1200-900 Mycenaean period, Greek Dark Ages
–900-600 Dark Ages/Archaic period
–600-400 The great take-off period, the Greek ‘Miracle’
–400 onward: We enter the Hellenistic, it’s over
Compare this now to
Israel:
Early Canaanite history
–1200-900 ? The onset of the ‘Israel/Judah’ kingdoms
–900-600 The history of ‘Israel/Judah’, emergence of Prophets
–600-400 The Exile period, crystallization of texts
–400 onward: A new religion has come into existence
This periodization is
slightly formulaic. The interval from –900 to –400 encloses the basic mystery.
But the three centuries from –900 to –600 show the field of action, with a
‘divide’ point about –600, as the ‘output productions’ proceed from the ‘Axial’
causation. Similar periodizations break through their disguises in
Rome, China and India. Note the isomorphic character
of these two histories. It is impossible to distinguish ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’,
once we see the connection. This is the embedded ‘transition’ pattern. In the
middle of continuous stream of culture a sudden relative speed up occurs. We
must realize the high level at which this dynamic is operating. And remarkably
in both cases a great literature comes into existence, the Greek and Old
Testament epics. Note that ‘Israel/Judah’ disappears near the Exile, depriving
us of a flowering or realization period, but enforcing a mysterious extra-state
character to what will be a ‘cultural complex’ that travels transculturally.
Note that our system treats states and religions equally in its dynamics, and it
is the case that the core Axial period for ‘Israel/Judah’ is about a state, and
not about a ‘world religion’. Judaism as we know it comes much later, as do
Christianity and Islam.
The five centuries from –900
to –400 enclose the principal effect. But the real interval is very early, from
–900 to –600. This periodization in turn shows us what’s going on in the case of Israel. The case of Archaic Greece
is
especially telling because we aren’t distracted by religious questions. Its
clarity is enhanced by the fact that its earlier Mycenaean phase collapses and Greece
goes into what is called its Dark Age. This is the ‘stream and sequence’ effect.
The stream of Greek cultures shows many civilizations, but that part that we
call the ‘Axial interval’ stands out. Why? Because, as we shall see it
intersects with a greater sequence. In the same way the Old Testament is
confusing, because it includes, just as does the Iliad, the prior tales
and chronicles of a Canaanite people, the stream history, but the crucial era is
the Axial interval and this occurs in exact concert with that of Archaic Greece.
It is clear that the Israelites were aware of something strange happening in
their history: they noticed their ‘Axial’ transformation.
The sudden reawakening of
Greek history in the Archaic period after the collapse of the Mycenaean is the
classic clue. Thus its sudden resurgence, as if on cue and in parallel with the
other regions of the Eurasian continent, is the more remarkable. We are stunned,
by zooming out to see the whole pattern, to see that the Greek Archaic is
exploding on schedule in a larger system, not solely as the result of
antecedent influences. Against the backdrop of world history as a whole this
brief period from around –900 to –400 induces an immensity of innovative
advances, with an intensity that has never been matched to this day, although
the rise of the modern is a fair competitor. Note that we cannot ascribe
simple causal/local influences as the cause of this phenomenon, since we are
observing a part of a total Eurasian phenomenon. Each of five regions, Rome,
Greece, Israel/Judah, India, and China, has an analogous interval in this
fashion (the Roman being a bit late), although the Chinese and Indian are less
well-known. The case of (early) Rome
is really an aspect or variant of the Greek case, and can be considered, at this
level of generality, in the same category. We can see that Rome arrives a bit later,
for the obvious reason that it waits on diffusion from the Greek system.
We have the clue to the Old
Testament: it contains a core account of precisely this interval, with a great
deal of other material tacked on as lead-up history. The Axial interval is more
about the emergence of the Bible than of Israelite history. Much of the content
of the Bible distracts us from the crucial Axial interval. The tales of Abraham,
Moses, the Exodus, are clearly the mythical lore of a Canaanite people who,
especially during the Axial interval, accumulate a literature that, at the end
of this interval, becomes what we know of as the Bible. Note the resemblance of
this to the way the Greek Iliad and Odyssey come into existence.
Achilles and Odysseus are not Axial figures, but the crystallization of the
Greek epics is a prime Axial effect! The Homeric period in the eighth century is
followed by an immense flowering of literature, which becomes incandescent in
the period of Greek Tragedy. The latter lasts barely a century, and is gone.
Stand back from this analogous biblical phenomenon, which casts its spell to
this day. Is it not a very odd and historically embedded text? We see that its
correlation with the Axial interval reveals at once its real significance. Our
approach almost does better justice to this history. It makes almost no sense
stripped of its religious mythology until we see its Axial context.
Note the way the historical
facticity behind the Biblical myths changes its character after around –900 in
the wake of the David/Solomon era myths and we have the histories of
Israel/Judah or general Canaan up to the Exile. As foundational religious history,
this is quite peculiar stuff, but in light of the Axial context it becomes
precious historical lore indeed, the first documentation in writing of the
genesis of a religious formation, a world historical moment. Note how various
traditions of prophets suddenly without warning turn into the remarkable string
of the classic Prophetic cluster in concert with the Greek timing. The sameness
in difference from the Greek example is beguiling. We note how just around
the Exile the Biblical corpus comes into something resembling its final
form, and that from –400 onward the phenomenon is essentially finished, as the
record is codified. The seeds of a ‘world religion’ or the materials for several
have appeared and crystallized. Remarkably, as it happens, ‘Israel/Judah’
suddenly disappears at the period of the Exile, and we don’t see the analogous
sudden flowering that we find in Greece after –600. It makes no
difference, however, to the overall effect. There is an irony to this
circumstance, it almost feeds the phenomenon itself by separating a literature
from a region!
Let us not forget that our
discussions of religion in the abstract can forget the obvious: the Bible
records the actual history of a Canaanite kingdom during the Axial interval. The
religions arise later. Once that interval closes, the record stops. From that
point onward, a tradition is born and its adherents are looking backward. The
material, here as in the other cases, flows outward into its environment to have
what effects it will have. For the peoples of that era, the Biblical corpus was
a tremendous new cultural asset, an almanac of Civilization. It spread through
the regions of the Roman Empire and beyond because it was of great help in
the assimilation of tribal peoples to the shock of expanding civilization. We
constantly think of religion in terms of metaphysical abstractions, but that
misses the historical point that, sourcing in the Axial interval, a cultural
instrument appears that assists the process of tribal integration into the world
system. For its time the Bible was ‘state of the art’.
We can be certain that the
Biblical history is only one aspect of what must have been a far more complex
‘Axial interval’ in the regions of the Middle East
as a whole. As our strange phenomenon shows it is trying to balance itself, as
it were, across Eurasia. In the context of monotheism, the phenomenon of
Zoroastrianism, and much else, should join our account. It is not clear just
when Zarathustra lived, but it is highly significant that just at the Exile
there is a blending of the Biblical and Zoroastrian literatures. Be wary of
thinking that this period invents monotheism. That probably already
existed, and is in fact a primordial belief fairly well known to the Paleolithic
in the Great Spirit cultures, for example. What we are seeing here is the effect
of the Axial interval on what is, as primordial monotheism, already probably in
existence, mixed no doubt in a melee of polytheistic beliefs. That effect is to
spawn a world religion. But the Axial Age as
such has nothing to do with religion, and in fact the term requires adjustment
to historical realities: we see that religion in one sense, and speaking
in broad strokes, is simply the ad hoc output of the Axial interval. It is
important to see that the actual world religions we now speak of are
constructs outside of the Axial Age, created by men recalling unsuccessfully
the histories of that period.
In general the whole case of
the Axial interval in the
Middle East must be larger than what we see
now. But the case of Israel/Judah is put in writing, and somehow carries the day
because, and this is the whole point, it produces a literature and cultural
record that outlasts everything else from this time and zone. We will brutally
secularize this history, thus bringing out its true beauty, but let us note
forget how remarkable Israelite history is. Just as the Israelites suspected,
there is a Big History at work. And we have stumbled on something else of
significance. As we move to complete our pattern, we will see that
Sumer
and Egypt
comprise an earlier version of this kind of phenomenon, millennia before. But
these centers of earlier advance are silent in the Axial Age. Why is that?
The clue here is to see that Greece, and ‘Israel/Judah’ are
essentially frontier areas, for their time, and that the drama of the great
Empires, such as the Assyrian, which are the legacy in decline of these earlier
periods, is being bypassed by clusters of innovation on their fringes. These
empires are dinosaurs of an earlier age period. Note how the Greeks barely
survived these attempts by Empire to destroy their world, that the
‘Israel/Judah’ is a dramatic account of the history of surviving or not
surviving these destructive empires. The Axial Age here is a record of
innovation outsmarting the momentum of the legacy of a previous cycle of
civilizations. This frontier effect will help resolve one of the puzzles
of the isolation of the rise of the modern on the fringes of the European
system. Thus if you factor out the Sumerian core area, and the Egyptian zone,
and consider the Occidental zone of the Eastern Mediterranean and South Asia,
you suddenly realize there are very few innovation zones available. One is
precisely the Canaanite region, another the Greek, conveniently buffered by
Aegean. The Indian, Chinese, and Roman cases automatically fulfill
this requirement also.
We have the essential
framework for what is happening in the Roman, Indian, and Chinese cases. In many
ways the Roman phenomenon is part of the Greek, which spawned an immense network
of city-states and republican experiments, from the Black Sea to southern Italy, some of them producing
democracy, the classic Athenian. Thus
Rome
springs into existence in the wake of this network and is essentially a variant
of it. We must keep in mind the obvious fact that all these cultural zones are
extremely different in character and that we can’t be talking about the
autonomous mechanics of these cultures or civilizations. The Axial phenomenon
simply happens independently of the prior histories and cultural mechanics of
each region. In the Greek case we do see, however, the expenditure of Axial
impetus on innovative cultural forms, among them Greek democracy. Note that this
appears suddenly in the wake of Solon, –600, and that it doesn’t last very long.
Later we will realize even these particulars, down to the decades of a
half-century interval, are not accident.
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