The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Karen Armstrong spent seven years as a nun, has written 16 previous books about religious matters, and is a prominent commentator on religious affairs in Britain. Her views have changed considerably since her earlier days in the convent, but she maintains tremendous respect for the world's great religions. She is a self-proclaimed "monotheist," but her writings seem to merely support and encourage a spiritual approach toward life - rather than a belief in any deity..."Human beings are spiritual animals...homo sapiens is also homo religiosus."

Armstrong's topic in this book is the Axial Age - those seven centuries from 900BCE to 200BCE that were marked by violence and warfare. In four different regions of the world, four great theologies (or ideologies) arose specifically to oppose these violent trends:

China - Daoism and Confucianism

India - Hinduism and Buddhism

Palestine - Judaism, which led to Christianity and Islam

Greece - philosophical rationalism

In all four geographical regions, the initial teaching was of tolerance, love, and humane treatment of others - despite the tendency for some of these to evolve into something else. Each tradition formulated its own version of the Golden Rule because what mattered was how one acts - putting ethical behavior at the heart of the spiritual life. The original prophets never relied on dogma - their emphasis was consistently on compassion. "The consensus of these four areas is an eloquent testimony to the unanimity of the spiritual quest of the human race. The Axial peoples all found that the compassionate ethic worked."

When secondary prophets or philosophers did start to insist on obligatory doctrines, it was usually a sign that the movement was losing its momentum. In our religious institutions and their dogmas, we are at times creating the exact type of religiosity that the prophets from the Axial Age were trying to get rid of.

Armstrong follows the progress of the religious development of the four Axial peoples side by side, charting their progress, sometimes in fits and starts. According to the author, we have never surpassed the insights of the Axial Age. Each generation since has tried to adapt the original insights to their particular situation and that is our task today.

The following themes are apparent throughout:

1. God is made in man's image rather than the other way around. He is a projection of man's cultural needs, changing as culture evolves, and as new charismatic leaders present themselves.

2. Each tradition wrestled with Mythos versus Logos - the more mystical, spiritual, and tolerant approach versus the one more analytical and theological. An emphasis shift from a mystical, unknowable God to a more personal God has its advantages, but tends to allow intolerance and fundamentalism.

3. When concentrating on the similarities as to how humanity has always searched for God, they are more obvious than the differences.

Armstrong started life with a conservative faith which has changed over the years to a more liberal and mystical one in her quest for God, sans dogma. Many Christians have lived a similar scenario, yet maintained their original beliefs. This book is not a polemic, and I think most people of any faith would not be offended by her approach. In "The Great Transformation," Armstrong is her usual scholarly and convincing self, with insightful comments on every page that would be hard to find elsewhere. "Religion is like a raft," she has said, explaining the Buddhist view of it. "Once you get across the river, moor the raft and go on. Don't lug it with you if you don't need it any more."

The Great Transformation is a history of the Axial Age, the period in the approximate first millenium B.C.E. when nearly all of our present day religions and philosophies were born. The Axial Age was a time when religion and philosophy evolved from the mere worship of something out of fear it could hurt you to a true ethical, compassionate belief. Karen Armstrong is a brilliant writer and thinker, and this is her finest work.

In a series of well organized and clearly developed chapters Armstrong traces the development of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Greek philosophy, Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Armstrong provides context for the developments of these thought systems by succinctly describing the troubles of the time: invasions, epidemics, and the ebb and flow of cultural diffusion and change. She then relates these problems to the developing thought systems and shows how their influence penetrated the minds of the seers, prophets, and philosophers who were at work throughout the turmoil. Most interestingly, she interconnects the ideas with each other, showing how similar circumstances and contacts created philosophies and religions which shared the same concerns and often advocated many of the same solutions.

The Great Transformation should be on the shelves of all who seek to better understand the origins of so much of our human cultural heritage.

Karen Armstrong has written many shorter books dealing with the history of specific religious traditions, and has earned wide respect for her learning and insights. In "The Great Transformation" she attempts a grand synthesis of many of these traditions.

She gives us richly detailed accounts of the flow of religious thought within four cultural geographies over a vast period of time, but centering on what is labeled the "Axial Age": from around the 10th century BCE to approximately 200 BCE. China, India, Greece, and Israel are the geographical loci of her account. She interweaves these accounts in chronological fashion, seldom drawing explicit parallels until she reaches her concluding chapter.

In her introduction however, Armstrong makes clear her intent and her thesis. She says that "we have never surpassed the insights of the Axial Age" and that "[t]he Axial sages have an important message for our time." A reader will naturally go forward wondering if she will succeed in convincing us of that age's cohesion and its relevance to our own.

The amount of information in this book of almost 500 pages is undeniably impressive. It is organized effectively and embeds over 25 maps and other clarifying tables. The Bibliography is excellent.

When describing one of the phases of religious thinking that rolled across the Indian subcontinent, Ms. Armstrong writes "To an outsider, this sounds frankly incredible - a series of abstract statements that are impossible to verify. ... The sages did not give us rational demonstrations of their ideas." This fairly describes most of what she presents. Although this kind of editorial comment is rare in the main text, that text makes clear that "rational demonstrations" are seldom what religious teaching is about. One notable omission in the book is any substantive reference to the cognitive processes that might have underlain the developments that she describes. Any book that purports to treat the early history of religious thought (she actually begins in the 17th century BCE), should at least touch on current research into the evolutionary and cognitive basis of such thought. This could have added significant clarity to the work.

In describing what Armstrong takes to be the deliberate lack of certainty in Socrates' teachings, she writes that "at this time of anxiety and war, people did not want to be confused ... They wanted certainty." Since the author's thesis is that the great spiritual advances she surveys were made at exactly those kinds of violent, high-stress times, a reader may begin to wonder how influential any of these movements were among the majority of the populace.

And this very suspicion undermines the synthesis that Armstrong is clearly trying to forge. In her reading of these widely dispersed movements, the common elements turn out to be these: "the abandonment of selfishness and the spirituality of compassion." She writes, "For them (the Axial sages), religion was the Golden Rule." This may not be banal, but it borders on the simplistic. It seems as if, faced with the complexity of each of the Axial traditions, she has had, in the end, to bleed out that complexity and reduce their insights to one which is notoriously easy to state (and apparently impossible for cultures as a whole to follow).

Near the end of her recounting of the Chinese Axial Age, she writes of the unease spawned by the great variety of spiritual movements that had developed. She writes that "many people felt confused and found it hard to choose between the different schools." A reader of "The Great Transformation" may wind up with similar feelings: the promised synthesis is not convincing and the great accumulation of detailed material is otherwise hard to digest. I will rely on the book's encyclopedic nature for future reference, but feel that the author allowed her hopes for cultural salvation to outpace what the narrative could support.