Religion in Human Evolution by Robert N. Bellah (review)

This is a book about the natural origins and historical development of religion on planet Earth. Bellah knows that no one scholar is capable of telling this story; there is thus a generous collaborative spirit pervading the book. The greatest interest lies in his rehabilitation, by sheer volume of historical exegesis, of Karl Jaspers’s idea of an “axial age”: an upheaval that occurred between roughly 800 and 200 BCE across the major world civilizations in which tribal and archaic religion gave way to new forms of religious thought. These were characterized by ethical and social criticism, universalizing theory, individualized asceticism, and an increasing friction between transcendent and everyday reality. We are, according to Bellah, still living within the axial frame; this book is part of its legacy.

Yet the study leaves one hungry for systematic reflection on the implications of the axial fault line. Bellah is more attentive to the particularities of his rich case studies than to their cumulative significance. We are given hints of what was gained and lost. Axial thought created a transcendent moral perspective from which to judge the specious divinity of social power. Yet that perspective undermined the sense that social life and ritual practice participated in the divine rhythms of the cosmos. Preaxial religion unconsciously accepts the world’s moral ambivalence, whereas axial religion wants either to remake the world or to cultivate an interior state that resists its confusions, the price of which is homelessness. The normative question consistently raised is: Can one resuscitate the imaginative wealth and existential rootedness of preaxial religion after absorbing the axial critique?

Bellah seems to hope so. And it may be this hope that connects his (uncertainly integrated) explorations into evolutionary science with his sociohistorical analysis. The exigencies of survival generate capacities for narrative, play, and symbolic representation, which eventually generate early religious myth and ritual, which eventually generate axial religions, which eventually generate theory and science, which eventually attenuate religion. But science, Bellah suggests, tells us that preaxial religion is in our DNA, and theory tells us that it is dependent upon particular traditions. If we cannot go home again, he insists that we emphasize continuity over discontinuity. And so this book, made possible by the axial revolution, aims to demonstrate that it was not quite so revolutionary after all.