Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  In dealing with the axial age, roughly the middle centuries of the first millennium BCE, we will need to consider a number of definitional issues and the degree to which apparently parallel developments were really similar. But I would like to begin the consideration of the axial phenomena rather concretely. As we have seen, king and god emerged together in archaic society and continued their close association throughout its history. It is not surprising, then, that the axial age sees some dramatic new twists in the relation between god and king. It is not that these symbols or the close relation between them were abandoned, but they were transformed in remarkable new ways. One of the questions that recurs is, Who is the (true) king, the one who really reflects divine justice?

  In Greece, Plato tells the Athenians not to look at Achilles, the hero of aristocratic Greek culture (we should remember that Achilles was a kinglet and his mother a goddess), but at Socrates, not an aristocrat at all, but a stonemason and a busybody, asking questions people would rather not think about. For it is Socrates, the lover of wisdom, the philosopher, who should be king, who would be the only truly legitimate king.

  In China, it is Mencius, living 200 years after Confucius (conventional dates, 551-479 BCE), who tells us that Confucius, the failed official who gathered a few followers as he traveled from state to state in ancient China, never achieving real influence anywhere, who was the uncrowned king, the one around whom the empire could have been rightly ordered, and by implication, he, Mencius, was another who ought to have been crowned, though his worldly success was no greater than Confucius’s.

  In India, who was the Buddha? He was the son of a king and ought to have succeeded his father, but instead he abandoned his kingdom and his family to become an ascetic in the forest seeking enlightenment.

  In Israel, the tension between God and king was endemic in the period of the monarchy: at times God seems to have made an eternal covenant with the House of David, giving the monarchy quasi-divine status, but often kings, including David, are portrayed as sinners or even enemies of Yahweh who were punished for their bad deeds. Yet in the Babylonian exile, when the Davidic monarchy, the Jerusalem temple, and the land itself were all lost, Yahweh was proclaimed as the only God there is, and a God who can chose whomever he wants to serve his purposes-even the Persian king could be God’s messiah. Christianity played its own changes on this theme, using the old royal epithet of the king as Son of God (and Jesus’s Davidic lineage was affirmed) in a new way, proclaiming the reign of Christ the King even on the cross. And Muhammad, God’s chosen prophet, was, like Moses, a king and not a king, but surely a ruler of a people. Those who led the community after Muhammad’s death would affirm their claim to rule as successors (khalifa) to the The old unity of God and king was broken through dramatically in every case, and yet reaffirmed paradoxically in the new axial formulations.

  At this point it might be well to remember one of the central principles of this inquiry: Nothing is ever lost. Just as the face-to-face rituals of tribal society continue in disguised form among us, so the unity of political and religious power, the archaic “mortgage,” as Voegelin called it,’ reappears continually in societies that have experienced the axial “breakthrough.” Kings who ruled “by divine right,” are obvious examples, but so are presidents who claim to act in accordance with a “higher power.” At every point as our story unfolds, we will have to consider the relation between political and religious power. But one thing is certain: the issue never goes away.

  As a first approximation to an understanding of the axial age, let us turn to the elegant prose of Arnaldo Momigliano, who has this to say of “the classical situation of the ancient world between 600 and 300 BC”:

  It has become a commonplace, after Karl Jaspers’s Vom Ursprung and Ziel der Geschichte-the first original book on history to appear in postwar Germany in 1949-to speak of the Achsenzeit, of the axial age, which included the China of Confucius and Lao-Tse, the India of Buddha, the Iran of Zoroaster, the Palestine of the Prophets and the Greece of the philosophers, the tragedians and the historians. There is a very real element of truth in this formulation. All these civilizations display literacy, a complex political organization combining central government and local authorities, elaborate town-planning, advanced metal technology and the practice of international diplomacy. In all these civilizations there is a profound tension between political powers and intellectual movements. Everywhere one notices attempts to introduce greater purity, greater justice, greater perfection and a more universal explanation of things. New models of reality, either mystically or prophetically or rationally apprehended, are propounded as a criticism of, and alternative to, the prevailing models. We are in the age of criticism.6

  Momigliano points to two aspects of the axial age that we will have to consider in more detail. One is the background features of societies that are in several ways “more developed” than the societies that preceded them. The other is new developments in the realm of thought-political, ethical, religious, philosophical-that he sums up with the significant term “criticism.”

  If we turn to Jaspers himself, we will find that he, like Momigliano, is interested in a historically empirical description of the axial age, but his concern is primarily existential-where are we in history?-as the title of his book in English, The Origin and Goal of History, implies. His dates are slightly different: He finds that the “axis of history is to be found in the period around 500 BC, in the spiritual process that occurred between 800 and 200 BC.” It is there, he writes, that “Man, as we know him today, came into being.“7 Both Jaspers and Momigliano say that the figures of the axial ageConfucius, Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, the Greek philosophers-are alive to us, are contemporary with us, in a way that no earlier figures are. Our cultural world and the great traditions that still in so many ways define us, all originate in the axial age. Jaspers asks the question whether modernity is the beginning of a new axial age, but he leaves the answer open. In any case, though we have enormously elaborated the axial insights, we have not outgrown them, not yet, at least.

  Before attempting to define more carefully the nature of the cultural innovations of the axial age, we must consider in a bit more detail the social context in which they arose. Several features mentioned by Momigliano- central government, town planning, international diplomacy-were already present in archaic societies, as were literacy and metallurgy. But there were significant changes in these last two features. Iron was replacing bronze in both agriculture and warfare, but the transition was uneven and gradual: the “Iron Age” was not itself the cause of the other changes. In particular it would seem that iron was more important in increasing the efficiency of warfare than in transforming the means of production. Still, the use of iron tools must have contributed to the gradual increase of population that characterized the first millennium BCE and the use of iron weapons to the ferocity of first-millennium warfare. And although literacy goes back as far as 3000 BCE, it is true that it remained largely a craft literacy, confined to small groups of scribes, until well into the first millennium. Alphabetic scripts were replacing Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics, and were in use in Greece, Israel, and India, considerably widening the circle of literacy. China maintained the use of characters that might seem to rival cuneiform and hieroglyphics in difficulty, but although they required a great deal of memory, they were easier to use than the archaic scripts of the West, and literacy was clearly growing in late first-millennium China.

  An important feature that Jaspers emphasizes is that none of what he calls the axial “breakthroughs,” a term we will need to consider further below, occurred in the centers of great empires. Rather, in all cases, “there were a multitude of small States and cities, a struggle of all against all, which to begin with nevertheless permitted an astonishing prosperity, an unfolding of vigour and wealth.“8 We will have to examine more carefully how this sitution worked out in each case, but in general the competition between small states created the p
ossibility for the emergence of itinerant intellectuals not functioning within centralized priesthoods or bureaucracies, and therefore more structurally capable of the criticism that Momigliano found central to the axial age, and that Jaspers defined as the capacity for “questioning all human activity and conferring upon it a new meaning.“9

  Jaspers’s mention of the combination of prosperity involving an increase in wealth and vigor with incessant warfare brings up two additional points about the axial age that require mention. Although standard weights of precious metals had been used in economic transactions in archaic societies, it is only in the axial age that coinage became widespread, originating perhaps in Asia Minor, but rapidly coming into use in the Greek and Phoenician cities, the Near East, India, and China. The Phoenicians invented the earliest form of the abacus. What these developments tell us is that trade was increasing all across the old world. The market economy was surely only incipient in the middle of the first millennium, and many rural areas were largely unaffected by it, but we know that market relations tend to destabilize long-established kinship and status relationships, so this too has to be added as a background factor contributing to the social volatility of the axial age.10

  Jaspers’s reference to warfare amounting almost to a war of all against all seems to refer to the incessant warfare between small states as we see it in early Greece, the Israelite monarchies, northern India, and northern China in the axial age. But there was another factor adding to military instability: the rise of large territorial states militarily more efficient than their Bronze Age predecessors, especially in the Near East. These impinged on and acted to destabilize the incipient axial societies. The first obvious example is the Neo-Assyrian Empire (934-610 BCE).11 As anyone familiar with the Hebrew Bible knows, Assyria destroyed the northern Israelite kingdom, the Kingdom of Israel, in 722 BCE, and made the southern kingdom, the Kingdom of Judah, a vassal state through most of the seventh century. Assyrian pressure on the Phoenician cities on the Mediterranean coast stimulated Phoenician colonization on the North African coast, where the most important colony, Carthage, was founded early in the millennium, in Sicily, and throughout the western Mediterranean. Though the Assyrians did not impinge directly on the Greeks, the Phoenician expansion helped stimulate Greek colonization from the Black Sea coast to the western Mediterranean. The brief neoBabylonian expansion finished off the Kingdom of Judah in 587 BCE, immediately followed by the Achaemenid Persian Empire (ca. 550-330 BCE), which became the territorially most extended empire in history up to its time, powerfully influencing Judah in the postexilic period, thoroughly challenging the Greeks in their homeland, with major cultural consequences, and ruling the Indus Valley in India at just the moment of axial efflorescence in the Ganges Valley. Thus all the axial cases except China experienced Persian pressure at critical moments in their development. Persia itself is often included as an axial case, but everything about Zoroaster (including his dates, which vary, according to different authorities, from the middle of the second millennium to the middle of the first), Zoroastrianism (including the contents and dating of Zoroastrian scriptures), and the degree to which and the way in which Zoroastrianism was institutionalized in Achaemenid Persia, is in dispute due to enormous problems with very limited sources. For this reason I will regretfully omit Zoroastrianism from my discussion of axial cases in this chapter. We are left in the uncomfortable position of recognizing a significant Persian impact on three of the four well-documented axial cases, while Persia itself remains largely a historical cipher.12

  Although Jaspers credits Alfred Weber as one of the sources of the idea of the axial age, almost certainly Max Weber, an important early associate of Jaspers’s, was also an influence. Though Max Weber’s comparative treatment of the world religions implies something like the axial-age hypothesis, the only place in his writings where I have found a definite assertion of something like the axial age is his reference to a “prophetic age,” involving prophetic movements in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, reaching even into the sixth and fifth centuries, in Israel, Persia, and India, with analogues in China. Such movements appear to be the background for the later emergence of the world religions.”

  After mentioning Max Weber as a precursor, I need to mention two other scholars who developed Jaspers’s idea further after he had put “the axial age” on the map. One of these is Eric Voegelin in his massive five-volume Order and History,14 where he speaks of “multiple and parallel leaps in being” in the first millennium BCE. Specifically, a leap in being describes a movement from compact cosmological symbolization, characteristic of what we have called archaic societies, to a differentiated symbolism of individual soul, society, and transcendent reality in the axial cases. Voegelin does not mention Jaspers until volume 2, and then critically, but he appears to owe him a larger dept than he acknowledges.”

  The other scholar influenced by Jaspers who deserves mention is S. N. Eisenstadt, who has done more than anyone to make the axial age central for comparative historical sociology. Eisenstadt focuses on one central aspect of Jaspers’s analysis, the “basic tension between the transcendental and mundane orders,” and on “the new type of intellectual elite” concerned with the possible restructuring of the world in accordance with the transcendental vision.16 He emphasizes the appearance of what he calls “reflexivity,” the capacity to examine one’s own assumptions, in the axial age, which is similar, I believe, to what Momigliano meant by “criticism.” Eisenstadt has stimulated scholars in many fields to write about the axial age, and in what follows I will often be drawing on their work as well as on that of Eisenstadt himself.

  I will return, after examining the individual cases, to the question of how much we can generalize about the social conditions that were the context of axial developments. But it is necessary, before considering the cases, to characterize a bit more specifically the cultural content of the axial age: in a word, what made the axial age axial? This question has stimulated more than a little disagreement and some questions about whether we can even speak of an axial age at all, given the differences among the several cases. For example, Eisenstadt’s emphasis on the distinction between transcendental and mundane has been questioned in the case of China because of its inveterate “this-worldliness.“17 Johann Arnason has pointed out that Jaspers’s “most condensed statement” of the axial age, describing it as the moment when “man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations,” and “experiences absoluteness in the depths of selfhood and in the lucidity of transcendence,” is remarkably similar to Jaspers’s own version of existential philosophy.18 In discussing the axial age it is all too easy to read in our own presuppositions or to take one of the four cases (usually Israel or Greece) as paradigmatic for all the others. Is there a theoretical framework in which to place the axial age that will help us avoid these pitfalls as much as possible? I believe there is: the framework of the evolution of human culture and cognition that I outlined in Chapter 3.

  We saw there that Merlin Donald describes the evolution of human culture as unfolding in four stages. Earliest is episodic culture, in which humans, along with all higher mammals, learn to understand and respond to the immediate situation they are in. Then, perhaps beginning as early as 2 million years ago, came mimetic culture, the prelinguistic, but not necessarily prevocal, use of the body both to imaginatively enact events and to communicate with others through expressive gesture. Then, some 100,000 or more years ago, with the development of language as we know it, came mythic culture, which Donald describes as “a unified, collectively held system of explanatory and regulatory metaphors. The mind has expanded its reach beyond the episodic perception of events, beyond the mimetic reconstruction of episodes, to a comprehensive modeling of the entire human universe.” Every aspect of life, he says, “is permeated by myth.”” Although myth gives a comprehensive understanding of life, it does so exclusively by the use of metaphor and narrative. Also, mythic culture until very late in i
ts history was, except for drawings of various kinds, an exclusively oral culture. In Chapter 3 I referred to, but did not describe, theoretic culture, the most recent of Donald’s stages. It will be my argument that the axial breakthrough involved the emergence of theoretic culture in dialogue with mythic culture as a means for the “comprehensive modeling of the entire human universe,” so I must now turn to a description of theoretic culture.

  Donald begins his description of theoretic culture negatively, telling us that it involved “a break with the dominance of spoken language and narrative styles of but a break with dominance does not mean the abandonment of earlier forms of cognitive adaptation. Humans are still episodic, mimetic, and mythic creatures, although, as in earlier transitions, the emergence of a new form of cultural cognition eventually involves reorganization of the earlier forms.

  The key elements of theoretic culture developed gradually; they consisted in graphic invention, external memory, and theory construction.21 Graphic invention began relatively early, with body painting, sand painting, the great Paleolithic cave painting, and such, but its key contribution to the emergence of theoretic culture was its ability to provide external memory storage-that is, memory outside the human brain. Early writing is clearly a significant step beyond painting in the amount of cognitive information that could be stored, but the unwieldy early writing systems and the limited number of people who could use them meant that they were precursors to, rather than full realizations of, the possibilities of theoretic culture. Not surprisingly, Donald sees Greek culture in the first millennium BCE as the place where theoretic culture first clearly emerged, and the efficient external memory system provided by a fully alphabetic writing system as an aspect (not a cause) of that emergence. He describes the importance of external memory as follows: