2. The Eonic Effect:
Climbing
Mt. Improbable
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| 2.6.1 Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation | ||||
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The
appearance of The Great Transformation
by Karen Armstrong has introduced a new set of confusions into the question of
the Axial Age. Our previous remarks about a so-called ‘Second Axial Age’ show
how the analysis can go awry if we identify the Axial period with the phenomenon
of religion. Thus the subtitle of her work, “The Beginning Of Our Religious
Traditions”, is already a distortion of the broader balance we can see if we
take into account the total phenomenon, especially the at first anomalous case
of the Greek transition. Armstrong’s distinction of
mythos and logos, with the
comparative puzzlement or denigration of the later, shows the result of the
misplaced emphasis on religion. This prejudice against rationality is a
reflection of the current postmodern critique of the modern theme of reason so
evident in many New Age attacks on modernity, as they call for a new era of
spirituality. Armstrong, evidently aware of the first edition of
World History and The Eonic Effect,
seems uncertain how to proceed, on the one hand noting the modern transformation
and yet pointing to the need for a second Axial Age to solve the problem of the
dreaded ‘rationality’ spawned by Greeks, the black sheep of the previous Axial
Age. The rise of the modern is that ‘second’ Axial Age and it is about a
different business than religion.[i] We see that the Axial
interval is only secondarily a question of religion. In the first place, the
religions that do appear in the wake of the Axial interval are not absolute
innovations but, in our terminology, relative stages or transformations in place
of outstanding religious traditions. Thus this period is not as such the
beginning of our religious traditions, this having long since occurred. It is
nonetheless close enough to see the emergence of the major religions such as
Buddhism and the Occidental monotheisms in the context of the Axial Age, if we
remember that, strictly speaking, they do not emerge exactly in the Axial
interval but after it. They are mideonic phenomena. Thus, significantly,
Armstrong is hard-pressed to explicate the emergence of Islam long after the
Axial interval. But this is no problem in our approach. Islam shows a clear
lineage from the Axial period but is an independent mideonic process initiated
for reasons explicable on other grounds than Axial analysis. Armstrong then
proceeds to downplay the element of synchrony in the Axial phenomenon,
attempting thence to collapse the distinct transitional cultures quite wrongly
into a set of ‘Axial peoples’ (there is no such distinction between peoples),
proceeding to a kind of sausage interpretation of quite different things in
terms of an ‘Axial ethos’. But the range of Axial transitions shows multiple
distinct outcomes sharing an abstract character of ‘innovation’ or creative
renewal, with or without any echoes of content. Our eonic sequence seems to
exploit diversity rather than impose some unified cultural matrix. This
confusion becomes quite drastic if we try to find the common denominator between
a theistic and atheistic religion! The eonic sequence is about many things and the prime moment of the
emergence of the so-called great religions is only one aspect of that. Our
system never repeats itself and the outcome of the modern transition shows the
diminuendo rather than the amplification of religion. The question of religion
for the future is not answered by our eonic model, but we can say that anything
that will resemble the Axial Age creation of religions will have only the
elements of the modern transition to work with, anything else likely to be ad
hoc reformations of earlier elements. A closer look shows that the Age of Reason
quietly proceeded in its own vein, especially if we look closely at figures such
as Spinoza, the emergence of Biblical Criticism, and the German Enlightenment.
The issue is not the regurgitation of religious doctrines but, ironically, the
critique of reason itself that challenges the core of the ideological
distortions and metaphysical extravagance of the Axial descendants. The works of
Hegel and Schopenhauer show two branching explorations, one toward reconstituted
post-Christianity, the other toward Buddhism, appearing almost instantaneously
at the Great Divide of the modern transition. Schopenhauer outwitted the
literature of ancient sutras almost without trying, and without realizing what
he had done. These formulations are, of course, only momentary philosophic
gestures, but they show how our modern transition, with what almost seems like
cunning, seizes the high ground against the postmodern flood of religious
restoration attempted in the various New Movements reflecting the traditions of
antiquity. The question of a Second Axial is thus solved in disguise by the
Enlightenment era. The question of rationality needs to be seen in its full
scope, from the rationality of science, to the critique of reason, religion
within the limits of reason, to the Hegelian Reason in history, to the
confusions of scientism and its technocratic nemesis. Hegel’s ‘reason in
history’ is a genuine upgrade, whatever we think of it, of the vulgar theism
spawned in the Old Testament. These issues can’t be resolved with eclectic
ideological concoctions of postmodern ‘spirituality’ or the ministrations of New
Age gurus. In general the complexity of the Axial Age should caution us against
simplifications or generalized interpretations. Our strategy is first to map the
phenomenon in its broader context. The attempt to interpret the content of the
particular transitions is a second and very difficult task requiring an
independently expanded scale.
[i]
Karen Armstrong, The Great
Transformation ( |
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