The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations

Introduction: The Axial Age Breakthroughs-Their Characteristics and Origins

INTRODUCTION: The Axial Age BreakthroughsTheir Characteristics and Origins S.N. EISENSTADT INTRODUCTION: The Axial Age and the Emergence of Transcendental Visions In the first millennium before the Christian era a revolution took place in the realm of ideas and their institutional bases which had irreversible effects on several major civilizations and on human history in general. The revolution or series of revolutions, which are related to Karl Jaspers' "Axial Age," have to do with the emergence, conceptualization, and institutionalization of a basic tension between the transcendental and mundane orders. This revolutionary process took place in several major civilizations including Ancient Israel, Ancient Greece, Early Christianity, Zoroastrian Iran, early Imperial China, and the Hindu and Buddhist civilizations. Although beyond the Axial Age proper, it also took place in Islam.' These conceptions were developed and articulated by a relatively new social element. A new type of intellectual elite became aware of the necessity to actively construct the world according to some transcendental vision. The successful institutionalization of such conceptions and visions gave rise to extensive re-ordering of the internal contours of societies as well as their internal relations. This changed the dynamics of history and introduced the possibility of world history or histories. The importance of these revolutionary changes has been recognized to some degree in the sociological and historical literature. The recognition of their importance was in the background of Weber's monumental comparative study of world religions, which focused 2 S.N. EISENSTADT on the rationalization of these world religions.2 Jasper's original insight into the Axial Age, concisely presented in his "Yom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte," was taken up in a conference organized on the initiative of Benjamin Schwartz and published in 1975 as a Daedalus volume under the title: Wisdom, Revelation and Doubt.3 A rather parallel trend of thought and analysis, focusing mainly on Ancient Israel and Greece, has been developed by Eric Voegelin in his volume Order and History.4 But all these works notwithstanding, no full, systematic analysis of the impact of this series of revolutions on the structuring of human societies and history is available. Starting from the insights of these scholars, we shall attempt such a systematic analysis of the ways in which this series of revolutions has transformed the shape of human societies and history in what seems to be an irreversible manner. The Nature ofAxial Revolutions What then is the nature of these Axial Age revolutions? We may quote here Benjamin Schwartz: "If there is nevertheless some common underlying impulse in all these "axial" movements, it might be called the strain towards transcendence. . . . What I refer to here is something close to the etymological meaning of the word-a kind of standing back and looking beyond-a kind of critical, reflective questioning of the actual and a new vision of what lies beyond. . . . In concentrating our attention on those transcendental breakthroughs we are of course stressing the significance of changes in man's conscious life. What is more, we are stressing the consciousness of small groups of prophets, philosophers, and wise men who may have had a very small impact on their immediate environment."5 These conceptions of a basic tension between the transcendental and the mundane orders differed greatly from the "homologous" perceptions of the relation between these two orders which were prevalent in so-called pagan religions in those very societies and civilizations from which these post-Axial Age civilizations emerged. Certainly, the transmundane order has, in all human societies, been perceived as somewhat different, usually higher and stronger, than the mundane one. But in the pre-Axial Age "pagan" civilizations this higher world was symbolically structured according to principles very similar to those of the mundane or lower one. Relatively similar symbolic terms were used for the definition of God(s) and man, of the mundane and transmundane orders-even if there always was a continuous stress on the difference between them. In most such societies the transmundane world was usually equated with a concrete The Axial Age Breakthroughs 3 setting, "the other world," which was the abode of the dead, the world of spirits, and not entirely unlike the mundane world in detail.6 These pagan societies, of course, always recognized the moral frailty of man, the failure of people to live up to prevalent social and moral ideals. However, a conception of an autonomous, distinct moral order which is qualitatively different from both this world and "the other world" developed only to a...