[I need to do a little homework—give some background. And so here I’m less asserting things as much as I’m trying to tell a story. Whether this story is true or not is of course open to question. And certainly the story is much more complicated than I’m going to make it out to be. But I want to get down the general outlines of what some call “the axial revolution.” And I will also quote occasionally from Radical Secularization?—a collection of essays that I found most useful in understanding shifts in religious thought.]
I’m reading Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, to help me better understand what are called axial religions. Already, beginning as she does with more so-called primitive religions, I’m getting the picture of how God or the gods or deities or spirits could actually be embedded in daily life, existing in objects, and so rendering our distinction between higher and lower, transcendent and immanent, largely beside the point. The axial revolution has to do with monotheism, yes, but more interestingly with a God who goes thataway—farther away from us, into another realm. In other words, to put it simplistically, two realms came to appear where once there was only one (even if that one was a very complicated mashup). Marcel Gauchet calls this new religion, after the axial revolution (which she locates between 900 and 200BC, whereas Karl Jaspers, who coined the term axial, dated it slightly differently), “transcendent religion.” A part of this transcendence obviously has to do with God, who exists in his own realm, but there is also for the first time a distinction between ordinary humans and those who can, for one reason or another, make better contact with this realm beyond the human. (There was, according to this idea, an egalitarianism gradually replaced by a hierarchy—and a corresponding politics.) God becomes larger, more monotheistically powerful, but has also takes on a certain unknowableness—and hence the quest to know him, make contact with him, and to figure out exactly what he wants.
Andreas Michel explains this new predicament in this way: “For human beings, the result of this revolution in transcendence is that they are now completely separated from the source of the divine, unlike before when gods dwelt among them.” That’s the bad news. The good news has to do with the various possibilities of reaching God, of knowing Him—and so here is introduced a kind of striving that is probably easiest for us to understand by thinking of a quest (for absolution, for higher meaning, for good standing in the eyes of God). We live in one world, the profane world, and we strive to gain access to the other world, the sacred (transcendent) world. In this sense, theology becomes possible because the transcendent must be interpreted. Gauchet calls this “speculation about the absent.”
At bottom, then, a duality is introduced in human history—the sacred and the profane, the invisible and the visible, the transcendent and the immanent, this world and the other world. Consequently, according to this idea of an axial revolution, there is for the first time the idea of a universal good that goes beyond the idea of human flourishing. Such notions of flourishing are no longer good enough. Meaning is not to found in simply living daily life (with its stumbling upon deities at every turn), or looking to the past, but in seeking a higher life, a better life. Laurens ten Kate has an interesting way of putting this: “The axial God is always the invisible God, he who is by not being or by being beyond being.” Being is no longer itself sufficient. And in this picture of the world, God is now an outsider, an intruder, a specter in history. God becomes a dimension beyond the world, outside of the world, as opposed to the gods of more primitive religions who existed in the midst of humans.
This is scary stuff, I think. It definitely involves a shift in how human beings think of themselves. It might be useful to think of this shift in terms of ownership. After all, who owns the world, or what is now the world that might be owned? The world does not own us—that would be a return to the non-axial experience of the world; and yet we don’t own the world, not the way that God might own the world. We are somehow caught in the middle—neither owned nor owning. There is something downright uncomfortable about this predicament, at least in contrast to what life must’ve meant for people who lived in pre-axial days. Taylor speaks of those people of more primitive religions, or folks nowadays living in the aboriginal world, as possessing a “mood of assent,” not feeling the kind of “quarrel with life” that comes from living from an axial point of view, suffering a duality of existence that might leave a human being feeling unmoored or caught in the middle.
And yet, on the other hand, it’s easy to see a kind of freedom here—a space that opens up where before it didn’t exist. It doesn’t make sense to think of pre-axial peoples as less free, since the possibility of this freedom didn’t even exist. The new duality is what creates a space whereby we can make our own path, create our own ways to climb the ladder to a higher, better place. Where we stand is not where we want to stand. And so now what?
hayesmcgowan 