Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World that Never Was

Notes

129 Notes Introduction 1 I am alluding here to the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which describes United States vice president Al Gore’s campaign to educate people about global warming. 2 Writers on the axial age tend to differ on whether and when they capitalize axial and age. For the sake of consistency, I shall in this book (except in headings and where I am quoting others) never capitalize either. 3 Bron Taylor, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (Berkeley: University of California, 2010). 4 Bobbi S. Low, “Behavioral Ecology of Conservation in Traditional Societies,” Human Nature 7 (1996): 353–79 (355). Chapter 1 1 Johann P. Arnason, “The Axial Age and Its Interpreters: Reopening a Debate,” in Arnason, Eisenstadt and Wittrock, Axial Civilizations and World History, 19–49. 2 Karl Jaspers, “The Axial Age of Human History: A Base for the Unity of Mankind ,” Commentary 6 (1948): 430–35. The editors of the journal in which this essay appears inform us that it is a translation from the German, but they do not tell us of what it is a translation. It appears to be a translation, however, of much of what will appear in the following year as chapter 1 of part 1 of Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Zurich: Artemis, 1949), translated later as The Origin and the Goal of History, trans. M. Bullock (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953). 3 Jaspers, “Age,” 430. 4 Jaspers, “Age,” 431, 432, 434. 5 Jaspers, “Age,” 434. 130 Notes to pp. 10–13 6 Jaspers, “Age,” 435. 7 Jaspers, Origin, 213–14, 226–27, 228. He is, of course, writing against the background of the preceding period of National Socialism in Germany and then the Second World War. 8 We do nevertheless see some embrace of it in the immediately succeeding decades. Indeed, writing in 1975 Arnaldo Momigliano tells us that “it has become commonplace . . . to speak of the Achsenzeit, of the axial age. . . . There is a very real element of truth in this formulation.” Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 8. See further the various papers in Daedalus 104, no. 2 (1975), among them the introductory essay by Benjamin I. Schwartz, “The Age of Transcendence” (1–7). 9 See the World Commission on Global Consciousness and Spirituality website, http://globalspirit.org/, accessed May 5, 2011. 10 Ewert Cousins, “Spirituality in Today’s World,” in Religion in Today’s World: The Religious Situation of the World from 1945 to the Present Day, ed. Frank Whaling (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987), 306–34 (307). His first name is misspelled in the book itself as Ewart—a common mistake, it seems. 11 Cousins, “Spirituality,” 307, 326. 12 Cousins, “Spirituality,” 327. 13 Cousins, “Spirituality,” 330–31. 14 Cousins, “Spirituality,” 331–33. A good example of what this project looks like from Cousins’ point of view is found in Ewert H. Cousins, “Male-Female Aspects of the Trinity in Christian Mysticism,” in Sexual Archetypes, East and West, ed. Bina Gupta (New York: Paragon House, 1987), 37–50. Whereas the new consciousness of the first axial age possessed “male modes of thought and . . . patriarchal priorities,” suppressing the feminine, alienating the person from nature and community, and producing an otherworldly attitude (48), in the second axial age “the human community is rediscovering on a global level the female characteristics of the consciousness of the Pre-Axial Period without losing the distinctive male values of Axial consciousness” (49). This requires us to revisit the question of male-female archetypes in the world’s religions—something that Cousins himself does in this essay, from the perspective of Christian faith, as he explores “the female dimension of the Trinitarian archetype, bringing this to light through dialogue with other religions in which the feminine has been more prominent than in the West” (49). 15 Cousins, “Spirituality,” 334. 16 Wayne Teasdale, “Concluding Reflections: Toward a Second Axial Age,” in Embracing Earth: Catholic Approaches to Ecology, ed. Albert J. LaChance and John E. Carroll (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1994), 255–75 (263–64, 273–74). 17 Carlton H. Tucker, “From the Axial Age to the New Age: Religion as a Dynamic of World History,” History Teacher 27 (1994): 449–64 (454, 455). 18 Yves Lambert, “Religion in Modernity as a New Axial Age: Secularization or New Religious Forms?” Sociology of Religion 60 (1999): 303–33. 19 Michael H. Barnes, Stages of Thought: The Co-evolution of Religious Thought and Science (Oxford...