Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism

4. The Axial Age and the Separation of State and Religion: Monotheism as an Axial Movement

76 4 The Axial Age and the Separation of State and Religion Monotheism as an Axial Movement The emancipation from the politico-cosmological power structure of the ancient world is certainly not the exclusive achievement of biblical monotheism. Rather, it belongs within the wider context of cultural transformations commonly believed to have affected almost all of the high civilizations of the ancient world from Rome to China and to have taken place more or less simultaneously around the middle of the first millennium BCE.1 The common denominator of these different movements may be seen in various forms of “standing back and looking beyond ,”2 that is, in adopting positions whereby the conditions and institutions of mundane life could be viewed from a distance and critiqued in the light of new “transcendental” concepts of truth and order. These “transcendental visions” enabled extraordinary individuals to look beyond the given by subjecting it to criticism, reformation, or even revolution . This is how a pastoral theologian and a psychologist have summarized the popular version of this theory: “The period between 600 and 300 BCE witnessed an explosion of human consciousness. Simultaneously in the geographically disparate cultures of China, India and the Mediterranean region, urgent questions about the meaning of human life arose. From Confucius in China to Socrates in Greece, from Buddha in India to the prophet Jeremiah in Israel, thoughtful people confronted anew the puzzle of humanity. What is the purpose of living? Are our lives governed by more than fate? For what are we responsible? How are we to make sense of suffering and death?”3 This theory, which Karl Jaspers popularized by coining the term Achsenzeit (Axial Age), was first formulated during the latter part of the eighteenth century by A. H. Anquetil-Duperron, a scholar of Zoroastrianism , who postulated a “grande révolution du genre humain” (a great revolution of humankind). This was to have taken place around 500 BCE when charismatic individuals arose in the East and West who founded new religions and philosophical systems, such as Confucius and Laotse, Buddha, Zoroaster, the Hebrew prophets, and the early Greek philosophers.4 However, it was taken up and elaborated again only after a period of latency of more than 150 years by three thinkers: sociologist Alfred Weber, whose Kultursoziologie (Sociology of Culture) appeared in 1935; philosopher Karl Jaspers, whose Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (On the Origin and Aim of History) followed in 1949; and political philosopher Eric Voegelin, whose monumental Order and History began to appear in 1956.5 Alfred Weber stressed the synchronicity and similarity of events and processes over huge distances. Although Jaspers coined the term “Axial Age” and popularized the theory, it was Voegelin who gave a comparably clear description of the “pre-axial” world, the world that Israel and Greece left behind. A theory that in Weber’s and Jaspers’ reconstruction was nothing more than a pale counterimage of Europe, a mere “not yet,” assumed a positive coloring in Voegelin’s description as a world in its own right, a positive alternative to monotheism and philosophy . Voegelin’s term for the pre-axial world was “cosmological.” Voegelin explained the decisive axial transformation as a breakthrough (or “leap in being”) from the “cosmological myth,” leading in Israel to history and monotheism and in Greece to philosophy and metaphysics. He described this breakthrough as a process of conceptual transformation from “compactness” to “differentiation.” Israel and Greece were able to recognize differences and to draw distinctions, whereas the oriental societies used “compact” concepts that blurred these differences in a systematic way. The Egyptian evidence confirms this approach, especially with regard to the distinction between the political and religious spheres.6 The specific axial transformation that the Bible represents as the Exodus from Egypt by the children of Israel and their entering into a new form of religious and political order primarily involves the distinction between and separation of state and religion and must be reconstructed and interpreted in terms of political theology. However, what Voegelin was unable to see and what only Egyptology is able to bring to light is The Axial Age 77 that this axial breakthrough had forerunners or foreshadowings in Egyptian history, a fact that profoundly affects the chronological implications of the Axial Age theory. These forerunners may be explained historically by breakdowns and disappointments in the political sphere, historical experiences of a rather traumatic character. The ancient Egyptian evidence invites...