“We never fear, but kill tigers in the plain, because we can see them. Artificial tigers we do fear, because they can neither be seen nor killed by us.” [Dobrizhoffer 1822]
With the Axial Age (die Achsenzeit), the German philosopher Karl Jaspers described a current of thought that washed over the Eurasian continent during the first millennium before our era, transforming all ideological frameworks in its passage.
Geographically, this movement spreads from the China of Confucius to the Greece of Pythagoras and Plato. It starts around 1,000 with Zoroaster, and culminates between the seventh and the fourth centuries with the philosophers and prophets who so profoundly mark this period. This period comes to a conclusion in the seventh century CE with Muhammad, the last great prophet of the Abrahamic tradition.
In the wake of this current, new religious and philosophical systems will arise, distributed around four centers of thought.
- In China where two semi-religious movements come to light: the Confucianism of Confucius (551-479) and the Taoism of Lao Tzu, his contemporary
- In India, with two important religious movements: Buddhism revealed by Siddhârta Gautama (624-544) and Jainism founded by Mahâvîra (599-527)
- In the Middle East, a group of prophets propagates a new message: Zarathustra and Mithra in Persia; the prophets of Judaism during the seventh and sixth centuries, and particularly Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel in Palestine; and the last two great prophets of Abrahamic monotheism, Jesus Christ in Palestine (first century CE) and Muhammad in the Arabian Peninsula (seventh century CE)
- In Greece finally, which witnesses the birth of philosophy and of science with Thales of Milet (625-547), Pythagoras (580-497), Heraclites (around 544-480), Socrates (470-399), Plato (428-347) and Aristotle (384-322)
It is difficult to establish if the transformations taking place at the four corners of the known world at the time are connected together. Two reasons have been given to explain this phenomenon: rapid urbanization and political instability that predispose populations to accept new ideas, on the one hand, and economic transformations that see the emergence of a new class of citizens, the merchants, who play a more influential role in the society, on the other hand. To these social and economic factors can be added the necessity of replacing outdated religious systems, maladjusted to the needs of the different societies.
However, the various contexts impregnated by this new current of thought are far from homogeneous. The differences existing between the political, economic and cultural situation of China when Confucianism appears, and those of the nomadic tribe of the Israelites at the time of the prophets, are profound. Similarly, the Greece of Plato and Aristotle and the world of the Arabian tribes in Muhammad's time are worlds apart.
Yet, two features seem to have been remarkably absent until the Axial Age, and characterize the new ideologies from one side of the planet to the other, whatever the ambient cultural landscape might be: individualism and abstract thought. A third characteristic is the fact that all these transformations lift the masses: the ideas put forward are not meant for an elite, but embrace whole populations, spreading contagiously beyond all borders.
These three elements typify the transcendental thought powering Levantine monotheism as well, although it will experience some difficulties in detaching itself from the contextual approach of polytheism.
At this turning point of our history, the relationship between the divinity and its public radically changes with the appearance of a key element: the individual. In the polytheistic system, this relationship was dictated by one’s request, and by finding the best way to use cults and offerings to secure the divine will. The most powerful or capable gods and goddesses were the most popular divinities and possessed the richest temples. No requirement other than what the priest prescribed was imposed on the follower, no special code of conduct was asked of him or her: one notes a total absence of moral or ideological framework aside from preserving the hierarchy in power.
With the transformations brought by the Axial Age, the roles are reversed: it is now the divinity that asks, that even requires from its supporters a certain code of conduct and the practice of precise rituals. To be worthy of the divinity, the followers must accept these requirements. These codes of conduct will become the norm on which the follower adjusts his or her life. In Mithraism, for example, the codes of friendship and loyalty determine the conduct of its adherents. A similar tendency is found in other religious and semi-religious movements: in Confucianism, with its strict domestic and social codes; in the Way the Taoist must follow; in the Laws of Manu (India) that distribute the rights and duties according to castes and age; in the precepts of Buddhism that indicate to its disciples the means to escape suffering and annihilate desire; in Jainism that, on the contrary, incites to personal suffering. They are also present in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in which the divinity imposes very specific requirements on its followers. The Book of Deuteronomy, for example, considers every individual accountable for their acts. It breaks with the ancestral tradition that allowed a son to be punished in place of his father (and vice versa): everyone must now receive the punishment they deserve, and every individual is unique and responsible when dealing with the divinity.
This focus on the individual is also found in the philosophical and scientific thought that takes the person as starting point of its analysis, from the atomism of Democritus to the teachings of Socrates and Epicurus. Everywhere, one observes the advent of what Fernand Braudel called the dissocialized individual.
The empowerment of individuals in the new religious order acquires an extra dimension with the introduction of a new character in the doctrinal landscape: the prophet [5]. Whereas the religious dogma rested, until then, on myths and rituals imposed by tradition and approved by the sovereign authority, the new ideology will break this mold by introducing revelation as vehicle of transmission. The prophet becomes the carrier of a message that he directly receives from the highest authority, the divinity itself. Recipient of its messages, he gives shape to its discourse and spreads it. As the mediator between the divinity and the people, his intervention marks a will to dissociate religion from its political anchor. In other words, the divine message transmitted by the prophets is meant for all, for ordinary people as well as for priests and kings. The monarch, who until then represented the divine law, must now accept the law as formulated by the prophets [6].
One fundamental consequence of introducing prophetic revelation will be the emergence of faith: “by revelation the mystery was made known to me.” [Eph 3:3] Associated for the first time with the perception of the divine message and in relation with the divinity, faith will be sustained by the fear of death and oriented toward the individualized promise of acquiring eternal life.
The mysteries of nature that gave birth to the spirits and sustained their existence have now become a personal and interiorized quest. The new religions deal with the realities confronting the individuals, with their difficulties and their sufferings. Most of them propose a better world to come, projection into the future that one uses as support for the present. Personal salvation, immortality, and paradise are the words expressing this new belief. And to achieve their “destiny” – whether to reach the promised Eden, to escape the cycle of (re)births, or to reach a state of beatitude or of total extinction in nirvana – the supporters must follow the precepts established by the prophets.
To guide them on the path of the destiny that is promised to them, the prophets will draw a definitive line between good and evil. This aspect is already apparent in the dualism proposed by Zoroaster: the one doing good will join Mazda in the heavens, while the evil person will serve Aryaman in the abysses of hell [7].
From Chinese Taoism to the renewed interest in karma in India, to the development of science in Greece, it is on the individual that all eyes now converge. On the global stage, the human being has become the main actor, the microcosm that serves as referent to any macrocosm, the new unit by which all things are measured.
Another distinctive quality of the ideologies born during the Axial Age is abstraction. One of its manifestations, as we have seen, is the introduction of revelation to transmit the message of the divinity, a pure abstraction in itself. But the passage from a concrete environment to a more abstract system of thought is also conspicuous in the way the polytheistic functional relationship is transformed into a more mystical tie with the divinity: the divinity becomes an entity internal to the human being, while transcending it at the same time. Buddhism and Jainism place deliverance inside every individual, the first through renouncement, the second through personal suffering.
A similar process takes place in all other manifestations emanating from the ideological current of the Axial Age. Its latest realization, Islam, will be the most abstract of all religious systems born in the Middle East. Banishing all representations of the divinity, the divine is placed beyond dialectics, beyond conceptualization, beyond reason: it cannot be described, it cannot be apprehended, it can only be revealed. Even rituals get a more abstract tint, the relation with the divinity not leaning any more on donations and sacrifices, but on an inner practice that each must exercise, that each must interiorize and live [8].
Monotheism can be distinguished from polytheism not only by the way its supporters are submitted to their god, but also by the fact it liberates its divinity from any contextual definition. First, the divine message is not attached to a specific geographical or political situation anymore, and is not limited by any border or secular authority. Besides, it is transmitted from individual to individual, what will enable missionaries to bring the divine “word” to the most remote corners of our planet. Pulled out of its geographical and social constraints, the divinity has become exportable. The fact that its message does not vary with the different context and remains the same for all, will facilitate its diffusion.
Freed of its spatial context, the divinity will also escape the ascendancy of time: defined as having no past, present, nor future, it becomes timeless.
All in all, the process of transcendentalization that was started with the spirits, and that was used to counterbalance the imminence of the natural world takes with this divinity its most achieved form, totally eclipsing nature from its realm.