The Axial Age and Its Consequences

The Axial Age and Its Consequences
The Axial Age

and Its Consequences
Edited by
Robert N. Bellah and

Hans Joas
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England • 2012
Copyright © 2012 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Axial Age and its consequences / edited by Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas.
p. cm.
Rev. papers delivered at a conference held July 3–5, 2008 at the University of Erfurt.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 674- 06649- 6 (alk. paper)
1. Civilization, Ancient— Congresses. 2. Comparative civilization— Congresses.
3. Philosophy, Comparative—Congresses. 4. Religions—Congresses. I. Bellah,
Robert Neelly, 1927– II. Joas, Hans, 1948–
CB311.A885 2012
930—dc23 2012008329
To the memory of Karl Jaspers
Contents
Introduction 1
robert n. bellah and hans joas
Fundamental Questions
1. The Axial Age Debate as Religious Discourse 9
hans joas
2. What Was the Axial Revolution? 30

charles taylor
3. An Evolutionary Approach to Culture:

Implications for the Study of the Axial Age 47
merlin donald
4. Embodiment, Transcendence, and Contingency:

Anthropological Features of the Axial Age 77
matthias jung
5. The Axial Age in Global History:

Cultural Crystallizations and Societal Transformations 102
björn wittrock
6. The Buddha’s Meditative Trance:

Visionary Knowledge, Aphoristic Thinking, and
Axial Age Rationality in Early Buddhism 126
gananath obeyesekere
7. The Idea of Transcendence 146

ingolf u. dalferth
viii Contents
A Comparative Perspective
8. Religion, the Axial Age, and Secular Modernity in
Bellah’s Theory of Religious Evolution 191
josé casanova
9. Where Do Axial Commitments Reside?

Problems in Thinking about the African Case 222
ann swidler
10. The Axial Age Theory: A Challenge to Historism or

an Explanatory Device of Civilization Analysis?
With a Look at the Normative Discourse
in Axial Age China 248
heiner roetz
Destructive Possibilities?
11. The Axial Conundrum between Transcendental
Visions and Vicissitudes of Their Institutionalizations:
Constructive and Destructive Possibilities 277
shmuel n. eisenstadt
12. Axial Religions and the Problem of Violence 294

david martin
13. Righteous Rebels: When, Where, and Why? 317

w. g. runciman
Reevaluations
14. Rehistoricizing the Axial Age 337
johann p. arnason
15. Cultural Memory and the Myth of the Axial Age 366
jan assmann
Contents ix
Perspectives on the Future

16. The Axial Invention of Education and Today’s
Global Knowledge Culture 411
william m. sullivan
17. The Future of Transcendence: A Sociological Agenda 430

richard madsen
18. The Heritage of the Axial Age: Resource or Burden? 447

robert n. bellah
Bibliography: Works on the Axial Age 469

Contributors 539
Index 543
The Axial Age and Its Consequences
Introduction
robert n. bellah and hans joas
The notion that in significant parts of Eurasia the middle centuries of the
first millennium bce mark a significant transition in human cultural his-
tory, and that this period can be referred to as the Axial Age, has become
widely, but not universally, accepted. Since the very term “Axial Age” is un-
familiar to many, we may begin with a brief explication of it. It has become
common to refer to certain texts in literature, philosophy, and even theol-
ogy as “classics,” that is, as enduring subjects of interpretation, commentary,
and argument that make them, whenever they were first composed, con-
temporary and part of the common heritage of educated people in our now
cosmopolitan world. But if we ask when do the first classics appear, the an-
swer is in the middle centuries of the first millennium bce. The canonical
Hebrew prophets, Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, among others; the central
texts of Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle in particular; the early texts of
Chinese thought, the Analects of Confucius and the Daodejing (perhaps the
most frequently translated text in the world); and early Indian texts such as
the Bhagavadgita, and the teachings of the Buddha in the Pali Canon: these
and others from the same period can be cited. We refer to these as texts, for
that is how we know them, but many of them were composed orally and
were not written down for some time. This fact, together with the fact that
writing was in use in several areas in the third and second millennia bce,
indicates that it was not writing as such that led to the creation of “classics,”
though writing was essential for their later dissemination. It was Karl Jas-
pers who thought that the appearance of these classics at the beginning of
several major living traditions in the world justified the term “Axial Age” to
describe the period in which they appeared. Hans Joas in his chapter de-
scribes the reasons Jaspers gave for this choice of terminology and the history
2 Introduction
of earlier attempts to understand the contemporaneous emergence of these

traditions.
By seeing the Axial Age as the period of the emergence of formative tra-
ditions of religious and philosophical thought, traditions that have been
greatly elaborated subsequently without the original formulations being left
behind, the contributors to this volume are not implying that culture began
in the Axial Age and that what went before it can be ignored. It is true that
there are no classics in the sense defined above that precede the first millen-
nium bce. The tale of Gilgamesh might be cited as an exception, though it
has only marginally entered the canon of world literature, but if so, it is the
exception that proves the rule. Nevertheless, the Axial Age is only intelligi-
ble in terms of what went before it: a very long and very significant history in
which human culture did emerge as a way of relating to the world shared by
no other animal.
The chapters in this volume are revised versions of papers presented at a
conference on “The Axial Age and Its Consequences for Subsequent History
and the Present” held at the Max Weber Center of the University of Erfurt in
Germany on July 3 to 5, 2008. The chapters on the Axial Age in Robert Bel-
lah’s then work in progress Religion in Human Evolution1 were distributed
to the participants in the Erfurt Conference not as the focus of the confer-
ence itself, but only as a stimulus to which the participants could react or
which they could ignore as they chose. It is, however, worth noting that these
are the last four of eight substantive chapters in Bellah’s book, and that they
are preceded by chapters on the deep biological evolution of capacities that
would make religion possible once our species had evolved; on religion among
largely egalitarian tribal peoples; religion among chiefdoms, that is, early hi-
erarchical societies; and religion in the great Bronze Age monarchies of the
third and second millennia bce: Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. Bellah’s
book ends with the Axial Age and is much more concerned with its back-
ground than its consequences. So, while our conference from the beginning
contemplated including papers dealing with consequences of the Axial Age
right up to the present, Bellah, though he alludes briefly to some of those
consequences in the final chapter of his book, is there mainly concerned
with the Axial Age itself in relation to what preceded it. The editors left the
matter of whether contributors would write about the Axial Age, its back-
ground, or its consequences entirely up to the contributors.
Introduction 3
The evolutionary psychologist Merlin Donald has profoundly influenced

Bellah’s work on religion in human evolution, and it is Donald’s chapter in
this book that goes most deeply into the background without which the
Axial Age is unintelligible. Donald has traced the evolution of human cul-
ture through four stages, with the first, episodic culture, being shared with
other higher mammals. Distinctly human culture begins with mimetic cul-
ture in which meanings were expressed through bodily actions and gestures
and language was absent or only incipient, and then goes on to mythical
culture where full human language allowed narratives to arise and myth to
form the focus of cultural organization. The fourth cultural capacity arose
with the emergence of theoretic culture in the Axial Age, giving the possibil-
ity of universalizable discourse, but not replacing any earlier cultural form.
In Donald’s scheme each form of culture is reorganized with the emergence
of successive capacities, but not abandoned. The details of Donald’s position
can be found in his chapter, but it is worth quoting from it in summary as to
the relation between the various capacities:
This notion, that every stage of human cognitive evolution found a per-
manent home in the evolving collective system, is somewhat similar to
the evolutionary principle of conservation of previous gains. Previous
successful adaptations remained in the system where they proved them-
selves effective, and the system slowly became more robust and capable
of surviving almost any major blow. This occurred without changing
the basic facts of human biology, or the existential dilemma facing
every human being.
The modern mind reflects this fact. It is a complex mix of mimetic,
mythic, and theoretic elements. Art, ritual, and music reflect the con-
tinuation of the mimetic dimension of culture in modern life. The
narratives of the great religious books reflect the mythic dimension,
as do the many secular myths of modern society. These two great
domains—the mimetic and the mythic—are mandatory, hard-wired,
and extremely subtle and powerful ways of thinking. They cannot be
matched by analytic thought for intuitive speed, complexity, and shrewd-
ness. They will continue to be crucially important in the future, because
they reside in innate capacities without which human beings could not
function.
4 Introduction
In close relationship to Donald’s work, the German philosopher Matthias

Jung focuses on another aspect of the Axial Age: semiotic transcendence.
For him—and one could say that this idea had already been adumbrated by
Ernst Cassirer in his philosophy of symbolic forms, particularly in his way
of distinguishing between myth and religion—the characteristic feature of the
Axial Age is the recognition of symbolicity as symbolicity, the understand-
ing of symbolic signs as pointing to a meaning that can never be fully ex-
hausted by these signs. Jung connects this point with the debates in contem-
porary philosophy of language and hints at the complex consequences this
insight has for our understanding of cultural evolution.
Although several chapters in this book refer to periods earlier than the
Axial Age, it is Jan Assmann’s chapter that deals most extensively with a
pre-Axial culture, that of ancient Egypt. His chapter usefully reminds us of
the richness of thought and reflection in ancient Egypt, the degree to which
it anticipated elements of Axial culture, and its significant contribution to
Axial developments in ancient Israel and Greece.2 Similar arguments could
be made about ancient Mesopotamian contributions to Israel and Greece
and second-millennium bce Chinese contributions to developments in China
in the second half of the first millennium bce. A deeper understanding of
the roots of the Axial revolution in the immediate past of the Axial societies
as well as in the deep past of human culture is a problem that is in need of
continuous research and rethinking, a problem that this book can only raise
in hopes of stimulating further work.
A number of chapters in the book help us to better understand the Axial
Age itself, or to raise questions about it. Charles Taylor provides a useful
overview of the Axial cultures and focuses on the emergence of the idea of
an unqualified good around which the other aspects of Axial culture can be
understood. Johann Arnason and Björn Wittrock in different ways suggest
the importance of close historical understanding of each case and an aware-
ness of profound differences as well as similarities among them, each sug-
gesting a “pluralist” rather than a homogenizing approach to the cultures
denoted as axial. Two essays provide deep and novel insight into particular
Axial cultures, that of Heiner Roetz on Axial Age China and that of Gananath
Obeyesekere on early Buddhism.
Roetz gives a close reading of tendencies toward universal ethics in Axial
Age China, but he insists on holding a high standard in terms of which vari-
Introduction 5
ous tendencies can be so evaluated. This leads him to the conclusion that in
the case of China, and by implication the other Axial cases as well, the uni-
versalization of ethics was incomplete, with the possibility of regression to
more particularistic ethics left open. For Roetz the Axial Age, rather than
being celebrated for its particular achievements, should be a challenge to us
to overcome its failures in the long-term quest of a truly universal human
ethic.
Obeyesekere, with respect to early Buddhism, takes almost an opposite
approach. He suggests that our modern notion of the theoretic, what he calls
“conceptualism,” though found in Axial India, is inadequate as an exclusive
way of understanding what was happening. He emphasizes the presence of
visionary experience and aphoristic thinking as moving beyond purely ra-
tional thought, though with universalizing consequences.
Ingolf Dalferth’s essay is the only one that was commissioned after the
conference. Reviewers suggested that, since “transcendence” is such a central
term in Jaspers’ conception of the Axial Age, a chapter on this idea would be
helpful. Dalferth begins by explicating Jaspers’ conception and gives the
philosophical background upon which Jaspers drew. He then offers a con-
trasting theological conception of transcendence that is helpful in under-
standing the Abrahamic, particularly Christian, use of the term, but which
would have less applicability to other Axial traditions.
Quite a few chapters in this book take a perspective from the Axial Age
and then follow out implications for later ages, in some cases even for the
present. W. G. Runciman asks why, if universal ethics has implications for
politics, what he calls “righteous rebels” arise in so few and so particular
situations. José Casanova asks whether our present preoccupation with the
“religious-secular binary” has roots in the Axial Age and what we can learn
from such an inquiry. David Martin raises the question of religious violence
and the degree to which Axial religions have contributed to it. Shmuel N.
Eisenstadt suggests the profound ambivalence of the Axial heritage, from
which both constructive and destructive consequences have emerged. Wil-
liam Sullivan contrasts the Axial invention of education as a kind of ethical/
spiritual formation with current ideas of education in advanced modern
societies and suggests that we still have much to learn from earlier under-
standings. Ann Swidler uses her work in contemporary Africa to suggest
that pre-Axial and Axial cultures are still in tension in many parts of the
6 Introduction
world and that the problems raised in the Axial traditions are live issues in
much of the world.
Richard Madsen has tackled one of Jaspers’ most unsettling questions: Is
it possible that we have entered a new Axial Age? Is the world of globalized
culture where no single tradition can be sealed off against all the others the
possible seedbed of new forms of cultural and religious innovation? He uses
his extensive knowledge of recent developments in Asian religions to illus-
trate the questions he asks.
We have decided that detailed outlines of the chapters contained in this
book would be redundant in this introduction. We have merely tried to sug-
gest the riches that these chapters provide, including some of the tensions
between them. Using our brief comments and the chapter titles, the reader
can decide how to navigate the volume and discover what a diverse and dis-
tinguished group of scholars has to offer. The bibliography provides the reader
with the opportunity to delve deeper into the large body of literature on the
Axial Age. It does not simply comprise the references cited in the book, but
lists as primary sources those formulations of the “Axial Age” concept that
precede Jaspers’ famous 1949 book Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, as
well as the extensive secondary literature that Jaspers inspired.
Joas and Bellah in the opening and concluding chapters of the book sug-
gest that the question of the Axial Age is not just academic: the deep self-
understanding of educated people of all the world’s cultures is at stake. The
Axial Age was a moment of great religious creativity; no one can seriously
think about it without some response to the issues raised in that fertile
period. How we think about the Axial Age is to some extent how we think
about ourselves and the human project at this perilous moment in history.
Notes
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Christian Scherer, who has not
only compiled the bibliography to this volume, but also been of invaluable assis-
tance in the whole process of preparing this volume for publication.
1. Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the
Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).
2. For more detail the reader is referred to Assmann’s comprehensive book The
Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs (New York: Metro-
politan Books, 2002), which is a translation of Ägypten: Eine Sinngeschichte
(Munich: Hanser, 1996).
Fundamental Questions
1
The Axial Age Debate as
Religious Discourse
hans joas
It is an undisputed fact that Karl Jaspers invented the term “Axial Age” in
his 1949 book Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, but it is also uncon-
tested that the basic idea behind the new term is much older and was not
first developed by Jaspers himself. While these facts seem to be clear, the
same cannot be said about the exact meaning of the concept of an Axial
Age, the origins of the term, and the origins of the idea behind it. In the fol-
lowing, I will offer some material that could help to clarify these three mat-
ters, but the main purpose of this chapter is not a contribution to conceptual
history. These reflections are only necessary as a presupposition for my main
argument. I will argue that the Axial Age debate of the last decades is not
only one of the most important developments in the area of the comparative-
historical social sciences, but also a religious discourse—a series of highly
complex attempts of intellectuals to position themselves with regard to the
problem of “transcendence,” its role in history, and viable forms of its artic-
ulation in the present.
But let me first briefly return to the question of the origin of Jaspers’ idea
and concept. For all readers familiar with Georg Simmel’s last book Lebens-
anschauung, the term “axis” would seem to have been inspired by him, be-
cause in Simmel we find the idea of an “axial rotation” as the crucial step in
the genesis of ideal validities.1 Love, according to Simmel, may have been
induced by corporeal impulses, but when the original desire has led to the
formation of intense personal relationships, then these relationships take on
their own independent existence and become the source of demands and
norms. What Simmel means by “axial rotation” is the genesis of autonomous
10 F u n da m e n ta l Q u e s t i o n s
forms of culture that, although being a product of life-processes, now have a

retroactive effect on these processes of life themselves. Religion for Simmel
is the most perfect rotation around the forms which life produces in itself.
The leading American expert on Simmel, Donald Levine, has speculatively
claimed that Simmel’s idea is the origin of Jaspers’ expression.2 But this
seems to me to be not really plausible since Jaspers does not have the auton-
omy of cultural products in mind when he speaks of an axial turn, but the
“axis” of world history—the one point in history that allows a dichotomous
distinction between everything that came before or after it.
Moreover, Jaspers himself does not refer to Simmel in the relevant pas-
sage, but to Hegel. He saw Hegel as the last great representative of a long
tradition of Occidental thinking about history for which since Augustine
there was no doubt that the self-revelatory acts of God constitute the deci-
sive turning points in world history. He indirectly quotes Hegel,3 for whom
the birth of Christ was the crucial dividing line, the axis of world history.
For Jaspers, writing after World War II, such a Christo-centric claim was no
longer acceptable and had to be replaced by an empirically tenable and uni-
versally acceptable alternative. The problem with his reference to Hegel is,
however, that no such passage has so far been detected in Hegel’s entire
work. What comes closest to it is a passage in his lectures on the philosophy
of history in which Hegel calls the idea of the trinity of God the decisive
principle—“the axis on which the History of the World turns. This is the
goal and starting point of History.”4 While these sentences may sound like
the source of Jaspers’ book title, the problem with the whole quotation is
that Hegel in the German original does not use the word “axis,” but “Angel”—a
word that is normally translated as “hinge” or “pivot.” Could it be that Jaspers’
confusion of “Achse” and “Angel” is the origin of the term we all use today?
More interesting than this whole philological question, however, is the
problem of the intellectual origin of the idea itself. Here Jaspers was indubi-
tably influenced by the writings of Max Weber, his brother Alfred Weber,
and through them by Weber’s close colleague and longtime friend Ernst
Troeltsch and Troeltsch’s friend Wilhelm Bousset. They all wrote about
similarities between the ancient Hebrew prophets and comparable phenom-
ena in other civilizations and used terms like “prophetic age” or “synchronis-
tic age” to designate these similarities as the common features of a specific
phase in world history. They were in turn influenced by important scholars
The Axial Age Debate as Religious Discourse 11
from the field of religious studies (Hermann Siebeck) and Indology (Rhys
Davids) so that one could already speak of an “Axial Age debate” around
1900.5 But all these authors were not the first debaters either. Jaspers himself
mentioned two forerunners: the Sinologist Victor von Strauss and the clas-
sicist and philosopher Ernst von Lasaulx. While von Strauss had only a few
words to say on this topic in his commentary on Lao Tse,6 Lasaulx truly de-
veloped at length the idea taken up by Jaspers in a remarkable and almost
completely forgotten book of 1856, Neuer Versuch einer alten, auf die Wahr-
heit der Tatsachen gegründeten Philosophie der Geschichte.7 But Lasaulx
himself also mentioned some forerunners,8 and at the moment it looks as if
the earliest formulation of the Axial Age thesis is from Abraham-Hyacinthe
Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805). He was a deeply Catholic and royalist French
scholar who spent almost six years in India, wrote an empirically founded
work on “oriental” forms of political rule, criticizing Montesquieu’s distorted
ideas about oriental despotism, and studied the ancient Iranian religious
traditions. He has long been considered one of the founders of Iranian stud-
ies. In the year 1771 he claimed that the ideas articulated by Zoroaster prob-
ably in the sixth century bce were part of a more general “revolution” in dif-
ferent parts of the world.9 I take it to be an empirical question whether even
earlier formulations of this thesis will be found in the future. In any case, one
must not assume that later authors were always influenced by earlier writers
in this regard.
But what exactly does the Axial Age thesis refer to—beyond an observa-
tion of a certain parallelism in the cultural transformation of four or five
major civilizations between 800 and 200 bce? The best shorthand charac-
terization is from the American Sinologist Benjamin Schwartz, who called
the Axial Age “the age of transcendence”;10 it would perhaps be even more
precise, although maybe a bit pedantic, to speak of the age of the emergence
of the idea of transcendence. A cosmological chasm between a transcenden-
tal sphere and a mundane one is then seen as the defining characteristic of
axiality. Others, for example Arnaldo Momigliano, speak of an “age of criti-
cism”11 and emphasize the relativization of all mundane realities as the cru-
cial feature of the age—an aspect that also plays the greatest role in Shmuel
Eisenstadt’s sociological elaboration of the Axial Age thesis. The main em-
phasis in Eisenstadt’s work is on the desacralization of political domination
that is a result of the emergence of transcendence, on the Axial Age as the
origin of new forms of criticism, controversial claims about the true mean-
ing of divine commandments, a growing separation between ethnic and re-
ligious collectivities, and a new historical dynamic.
There is no serious contradiction between the two characterizations, but
only a difference in emphasis. The emphasis is either on a profound trans-
formation of religious presuppositions or on the social and political conse-
quences of this religious transformation. But this image changes when the
focus on “transcendence” itself is questioned. Björn Wittrock has explicitly
denied the view that the Axial Age can be characterized by its reference to
transcendence. He proposes to consider “an increasing reflexivity of human
beings and their ability to overcome the bounds of a perceived inevitability
of given conditions in temporal and social orderings” as its defining charac-
teristic instead.12 For him it is a matter of context and contingency whether
this transformation leads to a cosmology in terms of transcendence or im-
manence. Empirically, the most contentious case in this connection is an-
cient China.13 A similar view is expressed by Johann Arnason, Eisenstadt,
and Wittrock in their introduction to a jointly edited volume when they call
the “epoch-making innovation that gave rise to enduring civilizational iden-
tities as well as to religious visions of universal community” in the Axial
Age the most striking manifestation of social creativity in human history.14
Creativity here, it seems to me, replaces the assumption of a divine revela-
tion of truth without any further discussion. When Wittrock speaks of
cases without a cosmology of transcendence, one could, of course, exclude
them from the set of relevant cases and restrict the investigation to those in
which the idea of transcendence did indeed play a role. What I am aiming at
is the fact that all contributions to the Axial Age debate are permeated by
assumptions about and attitudes toward religion. It is difficult to find a lan-
guage for the transformations of the Axial Age that is neither bound to a
specific religious faith nor to unreflected secularist premises. When I spoke
of the “emergence” of the idea of transcendence, I chose this expression in
order to avoid speaking either of its “discovery” or its “invention”—because
“discovery” refers to an understanding of religious evolution that considers
the Axial breakthrough as progress, whereas “invention” is a term that can
only be plausible from a secularist perspective for the creative achievements
of mankind in that period. Furthermore, if “transcendence” is not the de-
fining characteristic of the Axial Age, a possible loss of transcendence in our
age is much less dramatic, much less of a threat to moral universalism than
if it is. A return to the original claims of the Axial Age can be seen as a pro-
phetic plea for a forceful liberation from later attenuated versions of the fun-
damental impulses of post-Axial religion and of philosophy—or as a danger-
ous regression to obsolete fanaticisms. Not only can the different versions of
the Axial Age be played out against one another: Athens or Jerusalem?—there
can also be a nostalgia for pre-Axial myths and cosmologies or a radical mod-
ernism that sees the heritage of the Axial Age as a mere preparation for a mo-
dernity that is in its core independent from it. This affects the implicit views on
our relationship to the Axial turn—whether we think of it in terms of replace-
ment and supersession or in terms of addition and integration.15
We can use, therefore, the contributions to the Axial Age debate on the
one hand as a probe to find out the tacit religious (or antireligious) assump-
tions in important theories of history and social change, and on the other as
a means to provide contemporary debates about religion with additional
material from history and sociology. This chapter restricts itself to three main
contributors: Ernst von Lasaulx, Max Weber, and Karl Jaspers. It leaves out
the oldest predecessors as well as Alfred Weber and Eric Voegelin (who had
studied with Jaspers and Alfred Weber) and all contemporary figures.
I. Lasaulx’s Organicist Defense of Revelation
Lasaulx’s name and work, once admired by great historians like Lord Acton
and Jacob Burckhardt, are so completely forgotten today that it is probably
appropriate to offer some biographical information about him first.16 Born
in 1805 into an aristocratic German-speaking family of Luxemburgian ori-
gin, he had strong connections with several major figures of the conservative-
Catholic milieu in nineteenth-century Bavaria. He was a student of Joseph
Görres, the former Jacobin revolutionary, who had turned into the leading
figure among Catholic intellectuals. Lasaulx was married to a daughter of
Franz von Baader, another leading Catholic thinker of the time. As a young
classicist he was invited to join the entourage of the Bavarian prince Otto
when he became the first king of Greece after its independence from the Ot-
toman Empire in 1832. This brought him to Greece, and from there he trav-
eled through the Middle East, returning with the deep conviction that Chris-
tianity can only be understood as the fusion of components from ancient
Greece and ancient Judaism. For him Greek thinking appeared to be a kind
of second, apocryphal Old Testament. When he returned to Germany, his
academic career led to a professorial position at the University of Munich,
where, among others, Lord Acton was one of his students. Interestingly, he
also became involved in political matters, protesting against the Bavarian
king when he tried to provide his lover—the dancer Lola Montez—with an
aristocratic title; he was suspended from his academic position and became
a member of the national assembly in Frankfurt during the revolution of
1848.
His main scholarly ambition was to reconstitute a Christian perspective
in the writing of universal history, and this in an age of an increasing na-
tionalization of historiography. Until the seventeenth century such a Chris-
tian perspective had dominated historiography in Europe, but since then
it had gradually lost out to a strict separation of empirically grounded histori-
ography and a theological discourse about the history of salvation. Lasaulx
and other romantic thinkers assumed that a new “organicist” understand-
ing of history would enable them to revitalize the older unity of theology and
historiography—not by a return, though, to dogmatic or biblically founded
statements about history, but in an empirically defensible manner. The title
of his main work of 1856, literally translated, is “A new attempt at an old
philosophy of history, based on the truth of facts.” I interpret this title as
referring to a new attempt indeed in an area that had been given up—an at-
tempt “at an old philosophy of history,” and this in an empirically grounded
manner. Lasaulx distinguished himself from other conservative Catholic
thinkers of his time by going beyond an understanding of the teachings of
the Catholic Church as revealed truth in opposition to all other versions of
Christianity and all other religions. Instead, he defended an “inclusivist”
understanding of religion in which all religions belong to one process of
the religious development of mankind.17 Such an inclusivist understanding
was the logical presupposition of an application of “organicist” metaphors or
theorems to the history of religion. Lasaulx draws a strict parallel between
the development of the individual and the development of whole peoples.
For him religious faith is always the point of departure. A kind of adolescent
doubt is a necessary but transitory phase, after which there are two possible
outcomes: desperation or a reconciliation with faith. He extends the analogy
to the point where a weakening of vitality, a process of aging, is considered
to be as relevant for peoples as it is for individuals. This is also the reason

why some have misleadingly called Lasaulx a kind of forerunner to Oswald
Spengler’s speculations on history. This analogy also allows Lasaulx to in-
terpret phenomena of secularization as indicators of a general “organismic”
decline. For him religious indifference, a lack of respect with regard to the
existing religious tradition, the reception of other forms of faith, the forma-
tion of sects, skepticism, or complete loss of faith are all called characteristic
symptoms of degeneration, and he claims they can mostly be found among
the higher and better educated strata, although he calls their representatives
“Halbwisser.”18 According to Lasaulx, the immortality of the soul and the
existence of divine entities become the object of intellectual speculations
only when the original vitality, for which doubt in them is absurd, is being
lost. Whereas the vital forces of a people believe in such a situation that the
Gods have become angry at them or that humans have betrayed the Gods of
their fathers, among the educated nothing but superstition survives.
But this analogy of biological and religious evolution has a clear limita-
tion in Lasaulx.19 Religion itself does not develop in accordance with the
laws of organismic development. Religious institutions do not grow older
and decay—on the contrary: while the Catholic Church had witnessed the
emergence of the European dynasties, it will also—he speculates—be pres-
ent at their demise and survive them. The main difference here between
older theological views of history and Lasaulx’s new version is that he seems
to exclude a religious revitalization of an aging people. In his framework,
other peoples take over the role of major proponents of a particular faith,
instilling it with new vitality. While these speculations may sound quite
plausible today with regard to the globalization of Christianity (and, inci-
dentally, the low fertility rates of secularized countries),20 their intellectual
foundation is obviously very shaky. But the “inclusivist” and “developmen-
talist” understanding of religion and its relationship to philosophy predis-
poses Lasaulx to go beyond a culturalist understanding of the emergence of
Greek philosophy. It is in immediate connection with the passages that de-
scribe the parallels between the adolescence of individuals and that of peo-
ples that he clearly spells out the Axial Age thesis avant la lettre: “It can by
no means be coincidental that at about the same time, 600 before Christ,
there appear in Persia Zoroaster, in India Gautama Buddha, in China Con-
fucius, among the Jews the prophets, in Rome the king Numa and in Hellas
the first philosophers . . . as reformers of popular religion; this remarkable

coincidence can have its foundation only in the inner substantial unity of
mankind and the life of peoples . . . , not in the particular effervescence of
one national spirit.”21 It would seem as if Jaspers had directly taken it up
from here.
Jesus Christ is, for Lasaulx, the most important of the heroes of human
history; but for him not only Moses participates in the history of revelation
and salvation, but also Socrates, Buddha, Zoroaster, and others. There is a
subterranean move in Lasaulx from the observation of parallels between the
Judeo-Christian history of salvation and other religious breakthroughs to a
merely hero-centered view of history. In his book he gives a long list of such
heroes, which includes almost contemporary figures like Hamann, Kant,
Goethe, Gluck, Mozart, and, unsurprisingly, Görres. This intellectual move
did not remain unnoticed by the Catholic Church. A few years after its pub-
lication, his book was put on the index of prohibited writings. Lasaulx died
in 1861 and did not live to see his writings classified as heretic. He seems to
have been willing to submit to such a verdict. But whatever his personal re-
action would have been, the decision of the Congregation of the Index was a
fatal blow for his work because it led to its complete neglect in Catholic cir-
cles, while it was perceived as overly Catholic and reactionary among liberal
historians and philosophers.22 Even liberal Catholics, however, like the great
Church historian Ignaz von Döllinger, distanced themselves from Lasaulx
because of his leveling of the difference between Christ’s role in salvation
and a mere secular understanding of religious history. Characteristically,
resurrection and the expectation of Christ’s coming again did not play a role
in Lasaulx’s philosophy of history.
But one could also turn this judgment around. Whereas the pope and the
Catholic theologians of the time perceived the difference between the offi-
cial doctrine of the Church and Lasaulx’s speculations—and they were un-
doubtedly correct in this regard—one could also see Lasaulx’s book as an
attempt to reintegrate the history of religion with religious discourse in a
way that is similar to the intellectual path Troeltsch was to take later. The
parallels between different “world religions” have been and must continue
to be a challenge for all religious believers, but also for secular minds. The
question of “revelation” cannot simply be put to rest. It is the problem of one
or several revelations, and the problem of revelation in the perspective of
philosophy that Lasaulx had touched upon. This is the point where Jaspers,
coming from a totally different background and pursuing his own philo-
sophical project, would take up the thread from Lasaulx almost a century
later.
II. Max Weber’s Reductionist View of Sacramental Experience

Although he never used the expression “Axial Age,” Max Weber has to fig-
ure prominently in any serious reconstruction of this debate. There is a brief
passage in the subchapter on prophets of the “sociology of religion” chapter
in Economy and Society where Weber refers to Greek and Indian parallels to
the Hebrew prophets—probably under the influence of Bousset, but without
mentioning him at this point;23 there is also a famous footnote in Weber’s
study on Hinduism with an additional reference to China and a refutation
of Eduard Meyer’s “strange” (as Weber says) attempt to find a biological ex-
planation of this coincidence.24 But much more relevant than these brief
passages is the fact that Weber’s whole analysis of the role of the prophets
plays such an important role in his understanding of the history of religion.
It is not an exaggeration to say that for Weber the prophets or the prophetic
age constitute the crucial event in the history of religion—the turning point
between tens of thousands of years of “magical” religion and the new age of
postmagical “salvation religions.” In the last few decades we have witnessed
an enormous output of research on the sources of Weber’s analyses, on his
specific achievements, and on the empirical adequacy of his views.25 It obvi-
ously does not make sense to even try to characterize this literature here; in
our context, I will restrict myself to one single point that is, however, at least
in my eyes, of enormous strategic importance for the reevaluation of We-
ber’s contribution. The point I have in mind is Weber’s understanding of
what “sacraments” are, what their relationship to magic is, and what their
role in the modern age could be. Are sacraments the mere post-Axial equiv-
alents of magic or are they radically different from everything pre-Axial?
In large parts of the secondary literature on Weber26 one can find a sharp
contrast between the writings on the history of religion that formed the
backdrop to Weber’s work and his own writings. Whereas the writings of
other late-nineteenth-century German scholars are often characterized—
and rightly so—as biased in favor of Protestant Christianity according to
which Protestant Christianity is the highest and final point of religious evo-
lution, Weber’s own work is seen as free from such inclinations, as a sober
and historically extremely well-informed sociologically oriented systemati-
zation and conceptual clarification of a huge amount of material from the
global history of religion. Against this widespread view, my claim is that
even the so-called chapter on “sociology of religion”—that is, the text on
“Religious Communities”—and the famous “Zwischenbetrachtung” (“In-
termediate Reflections”) in Weber’s comparative studies have a latent nar-
rative structure. For the story that is contained in this text a certain view of
Calvinist Protestantism, its past and its future, is absolutely constitutive.
And, of course, a certain view of the given superiority of the “West.” Others
have argued before that Weber’s purpose in his comparative research was
not so much “a broad comparative analysis per se, but rather to discover, in
the study of non-European contexts, points of comparison to ‘our occiden-
tal cultural religions.’ Weber had a certain view of the uniqueness of the
West that has to be called extremely problematical, if not untenable accord-
ing to our current knowledge, for example, about China,”27 and that has
become less and less plausible even for the superficial observer because of
the economic transformation of Asia in our time. I am mentioning this ar-
gument because it bolsters my claim of a narrative structure in Weber that
should be made visible so that it can be critically evaluated.
This narrative structure is of enormous importance for Weber’s assump-
tions about nonascetic Protestantism and about China, but above all about
Catholicism. Perhaps the shortest way to make clear what I have in mind is
to draw attention to the hyphen between magic and sacramental that one
finds so frequently in Weber’s work: “magical-sacramental.” On the analyti-
cal level, the distinction between magic and sacramental, between human
attempts to use superhuman forces for their own purposes (“magic”) and a
willingness to serve God and to open oneself up to the mundane presence of
the transcendent (“sacramental”), is absolutely crucial—and Weber is very
well aware of that. Weber also points out that—sociologically—the contrast
is often blurred.28 And there is no doubt that this is to some extent empiri-
cally correct. The “demagicization” of religion is a long process that started
in the Axial Age, but certainly did not end then.29 It had and has to be
achieved again and again whenever a post-Axial religion was or is transferred
to a pre-Axial culture as, for example, in the Christianization of Europe. But

if we pay attention not just to the explicit definitions in Weber’s work but
also—in a “deconstructive” way—to his examples and asides, we realize that
his text is shot through with remarks about Catholicism that reduce Catholic
practices, if not doctrines, to pure magic. Right at the beginning of the text
on “Religious Communities” he mentions southern Europeans spitting at the
image of a saint if the expected result does not come about; no church doc-
trine, no declaration of a church council that distinguishes between the ado-
ration of God and the mere veneration of a saint, does help here, Weber
claims.30 While this certainly is a realistic description of features in the world
of popular Catholicism, there are many other passages where Weber—and
not the theologically uneducated religious practitioner—is responsible for
blurring the relevant distinction. For Weber, the Catholic priest during the
Mass and in absolving from sins seems to be a magician.31 Weber observes
that in the Catholic Mass the sermon plays a smaller role than in Protestant
ser vices and sees in this fact the inverse proportionality of magic and ethi-
cal teaching.32 The sacrament of the Eucharist, the physical fusion with the
divine body of Christ, is explicitly called “essentially magical” by Weber.33
Most readers of Weber’s texts today are probably not even aware of the
fact that these statements sound like insults to Catholic ears. They may have
internalized a Protestant image of Catholicism, or as secularists they may
consider these denominational differences to be mere hairsplitting. They
therefore don’t realize that Weber’s seemingly value-neutral characterizations
are in direct continuity with Protestant anti-Catholic polemics from the time
of the Reformation on. In other contexts, Weber even goes so far as to de-
scribe Catholicism as a form of polytheism. Weber’s understanding of mono-
theism was neither based on an appropriate view of trinitarian doctrine nor
of the cult of canonized saints, who certainly cannot be seen as “indepen-
dent deities who have undergone a semi-involution.”34 It is not necessary to
go into greater detail here. My point is not that Weber had an overly positive
image of Protestantism—he detested Lutheranism and was deeply ambiva-
lent about Calvinism—but that his analysis has a narrative structure and is
couched in temporal categories like “disenchantment” and “rationalization”
that are only seemingly neutral. While the notion of “rationalization” had
not been a driving force for Weber’s analyses from the beginning but had
only gradually emerged in his thinking as a conceptual roof under which he

could store his various diverging investigations and therefore had to cover
so many different phenomena that I often have difficulties seeing what their
common denominator allegedly is, the meaning of “disenchantment” seems
to me to be clear: it is certainly not—as has frequently been assumed—
secularization (whatever that exactly means), but “demagicization,” a process
that occurs when processes in the world lose their “magical meaning”; they
happen but do not “mean” anything.35 By construing the sacraments and the
human experience connected with them as quasi-magical, as remnants of or
relapses into the world of magic, Weber treats Catholicism, and to a certain
extent even Lutheranism, as pre-Axial and excludes it from any claim to be-
ing a serious contemporary option. For him all religions demand at some
point a sacrifice of the intellect,36 and Catholicism to a particular degree. We
should not forget that this was written at a time when Catholic modernism
played an important role in international intellectual debates and when the
so-called liturgical movement was about to emerge.
Even in the “Zwischenbetrachtung,” which can be read as a mere typol-
ogy of conflicts between value spheres and religious orientations, Weber
makes claims about the inner consistency of religious orientations that should
not be taken at face value. For him it is either Puritanism with its belief in
the predestination of salvation or an “acosmistic” ethos of fraternity as in
India that is fully consistent; everything else for him is mere compromise or
lack of clarity and self-reflection. But this view, which is presented as the
result of a purely rational schematization of options, is based on a problem-
atic understanding of the relationship between religious experience and in-
tellectual treatments of the problems of theodicy;37 it thus misses the inner
consistency of an understanding of religion based on “sacramental experi-
ence”38 and the radical transformation of religious experience in the frame-
work of post-Axial religion, and therefore distorts the range of options un-
der contemporary conditions.
An interpretation of Weber’s sociology of religion as it is proposed here
helps to reembed Weber in his intellectual milieu; many of his pronounce-
ments lose their canonical character. They can be seen again as depending
on the specific views of his sources of information and as contributing to a
scholarly, but also to a quasi-religious discourse. It fits with attempts, for
example, to show how much Weber’s overly sharp distinction between Lu-
theranism and Calvinism with regard to their political implications is a re-

sult of interconfessional Protestant polemics within Protestantism in Ger-
man nineteenth-century theology.39 Eckart Otto in his turn has compared
the understanding of the Hebrew prophets in Weber’s and Troeltsch’s think-
ing and demonstrated that—despite certain similarities—their deep-seated
motivations were different and not without influence on their conclusions.
“When E. Troeltsch characterizes theodicy as ‘practical’ which means that
explanation is not in the centre of prophetic interest because the prophets do
not want ‘to explain destiny, but to bring about a practical decision and at-
titude’ (Troeltsch), then this dialectic of inner experience and post factum
reflection in E. Troeltsch is directed against rationalist misinterpretations of
the role of the prophets. In Max Weber, however, the goal is to demonstrate
the ‘purely religious’ motivation and political and economic independence
of the prophets and to mark the point where charisma is transformed in the
process of rationalization and ‘Veralltäglichung.’ ”40 Troeltsch’s analysis of
the role of the Hebrew prophets was an attempt to learn from a historical
case how a religious tradition can be renewed in a time of crisis, whereas
Weber looked at the formative influences a religion could have on economic,
social, and political processes and the effect these processes can have on re-
ligion. Both research programs are, of course, legitimate. But the differences
between them are connected with crucial differences in their diagnoses
of contemporary religion. Whereas both Troeltsch and Weber came to the
conclusion that Puritanism was exhausted, this meant for Weber that the
most consistent form of Christianity had reached its end, while for Troeltsch
(and myself) this meant that other forms of Christianity—both doctrinally
and institutionally—would be important in the future. A powerful role of
the post-Axial religions in the contemporary world can probably not be ar-
ticulated in Weber’s theoretical framework. This, however, is not an empiri-
cal finding of Weber, but an inherent consequence of the narrative structure
of his presentation of religious history.41
III. Karl Jaspers: Communication about Transcendence
In the philosophical literature on Karl Jaspers, his Axial Age thesis plays
only a surprisingly modest role. Philosophers apparently tend to leave the
empirical merits of this thesis to historians, sociologists, and others. The
nonphilosophers, in their turn, mostly simply take up the thesis, ignoring its
ramifications in Jaspers’ oeuvre.42 Contextualization here often means only
an emphasis on the fact that the relevant book came out shortly after World
War II, and there is indeed no doubt that it is a reaction to the shattering
experiences of Nazism and the war. But it would be terribly simplistic to in-
terpret the book as just one more contribution to the booming literature on
the specificities of the “Abendland” at that time. Jaspers’ book was not as
self-congratulatory as most of this literature was, and it tried to deal with
Europe in a non-Eurocentric way. Moreover, it did not criticize Eurocen-
trism, as later academic radicals have done, out of a self-hatred of the West,
but attempted to offer a new defense of universalism. Such a new defense
was directed against the ideologies of the time: communist tyranny and the
secularization enforced by it, the Nazi attempts to return to Germanic, pre-
Christian, pre-Axial religion and other political and philosophical moves of
a “detranscendentalist” kind, an ideology of scientism, a mere continuation
of European religious traditions as if nothing had happened, all teleologi-
cal philosophies of history, a complete split between philosophy and reli-
gious questions. Against all these ideologies Jaspers’ plea was to recognize
the plurality of existing universalisms and to develop a philosophical con-
ception of the possibilities of their mutual understanding.43 Jaspers himself
came from a Protestant background, but made it very clear in his writings
and interviews that he was not a believer.44 He said, for example, that not
only did he not believe in revelation or in Christ as an incarnation of God,
but that he did not even understand what exactly was meant when Christ
was called the son of God, an incarnation of God. He had, however, the
greatest respect for the post-Axial religious traditions. He called his discov-
ery of the coincidence of religious innovations in the Axial Age an “incred-
ibly exciting facticity”—not just one empirical phenomenon among innu-
merable others, but an empirical fact and not an article of faith so that all
peoples and religions could accept it. His way out of the seemingly aporetic
situation of a plurality of and the threats to universalism was not the claim
that philosophers could reconstruct everything that is reasonable in the
faith of believers, but that philosophy could serve as the mediator in the
communication of believers. That is why I see in his work an important in-
spiration not only for the comparative-historical sociology of religion, but
also for a theory of the specificities of our communication about our funda-
mental values and our experiences of transcendence. Such a communica-

tion, according to Jaspers, presupposes seeing other faiths, and not only our
own, as attempts to articulate the never-fully expressible experiences of the
divine, but it also modifies our relationship to our own religious tradition
because we learn to see our own religious traditions not as dogmatically
fi xed doctrines, but as never-completed attempts at articulation. In this
view, we are not expected to break with our formative religious experiences
and traditions, but to rearticulate them in authentic ways. Interreligious di-
alogue, but also the dialogue between philosophy and religion(s), thus can
lead to a better self-understanding on all sides.45
When Jürgen Habermas was awarded the Karl Jaspers Prize in 1995, he
pointed out in his speech that Jaspers’ whole philosophy has to be seen as an
attempt to find a third way between a relativist historicism and an abstract
universalism.46 This philosophy can in a certain sense also be seen as a con-
tinuation of Weber’s and Troeltsch’s work. Jaspers was not only influenced by
Weber’s writings on the “world religions” when he developed the Axial Age
thesis, but also wanted to get out of what he perceived as an impasse in We-
ber’s thinking.47 The strong emphasis on ultimate value commitments in
Weber and on the inevitability of an Either-Or, of existential decisions among
competing values, should not be read in a decisionist and arbitrary sense as if
such a choice is ultimately arbitrary and as if no reasonable communication
between the proponents of different values were possible. In order to reach
that goal, we need a theory of the communication about such values and of
the experiences in which our commitment to them is founded. This commu-
nication cannot be mere empathy, but it cannot be mere rational-argumentative
discourse either. Jaspers’ reconstruction of the fundamental innovations of
the Axial Age is intended as a basis for such a dialogue between philosophy
and the post-Axial religions and also among these religions. In that sense,
Jaspers’ constitutive contribution to the Axial Age debate does not simply
have an explicit religious dimension (as in Lasaulx) or an implicit one (as in
Weber); it is itself an attempt to provide the foundation for a contemporary
discourse that is open to all religious articulations of the transcendent and to
nonreligious forms of moral universalism.
Jaspers’ thinking, if this interpretation is correct, is close to other at-
tempts to get beyond historical relativism without breaking with the insight
that even universalistic validity claims are not founded in “reason” as such,
but have a contingent history of emergence that is not irrelevant for their
evaluation. As one can interpret Georg Jellinek’s book on human rights as
an attempt to reconstruct the inviolability of human rights in a historicist
framework,48 and as one can see Troeltsch’s whole life-work as arising out of
this tension,49 one can interpret Jaspers’ Axial Age thesis as a reconstruction
of the ideas of transcendence and revelation in a framework that could be
called an existentially transformed historicism. This claim makes sense only,
of course, if we do not fall prey to the assumption that there was a complete
rupture between pre-World War I historicism and post-World War I phi-
losophies of existence; there were more elements of “existential reasoning”
before the war and there was more historicism after the war than this con-
ventional view admits. I do not think, however, that Jaspers’ own philoso-
phy is the last word in this debate. On the contrary, as the writings of Eisen-
stadt and Robert Bellah demonstrate so convincingly, they are more a point
of departure than a final statement, both with regard to historico-sociological
questions and with regard to a theory of the communication about values.
Bellah writes in his masterful essay “What Is Axial about the Axial Age?”
that “transcendental realms are not subject to disproof the way scientific
theories are,” but “inevitably require a new form of narrative, that is, a new
form of myth”50 and we can derive from that statement that not only did the
structure of myths change in the Axial Age, but that our debate on the Axial
Age also goes beyond empirical questions and addresses the mythical struc-
ture of our contemporary self-understanding. My emphasis on the religious
dimensions of the Axial Age debate has therefore not been intended as a
debunking effort, nor as a critique of ideology, but as an encouragement to
consciously connect empirical research on the history of religion with the
most fundamental questions of our orientation in the contemporary world.
Notes
1. Georg Simmel, Lebensanschauung (Munich and Leipzig, 1918). An English

translation of this important work has now been published, more than ninety
years after the original: The View of Life (Chicago, 2010). On the concept of “Ach-
sendrehung” (“axial rotation”) in Simmel, see Hans Joas, The Genesis of Values
(Chicago, 2000), 78ff. Simmel’s book influenced the early Heidegger and his under-
standing of death: Michael Großheim, Von Georg Simmel zu Martin Heidegger:
Philosophie zwischen Leben und Existenz (Bonn, 1991). See also John E. Jalbert,
“Time, Death, and History in Simmel and Heidegger,” Human Studies 26 (2003):
259–283, and the instructive introduction to the English translation of Simmel’s
book by Donald Levine and Daniel Silver, ix–xxxii.
2. Donald N. Levine, “Note on the Concept of an Axial Turning in Human
History,” in Said Amir Arjomand and Edward A. Tiryakian, eds., Rethinking Civi-
lizational Analysis (London, 2004), 67–70. One could argue indeed that Simmel, in
his essay on Michelangelo, interprets the “detranscendentalization” of Renaissance
art as an axial turn and in that sense applies his terminology to the rise and decline
of “transcendence,” but he does not speak of that change as a turning point in
world history. See Georg Simmel, Philosophische Kultur (Potsdam, 1923), 168.
3. Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Munich, 1949), 19. En-
glish: The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven, 1953), 1.
4. The English quotation is from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philos-
ophy of History (New York, 1956), 319. See Austin Harrington, “Europa in Wei-
mar: German Intellectuals and the Idea of the West, 1914–1933” (manuscript
“Habilitationsschrift,” University of Erfurt, 2009, 215, n. 60).
5. Martin Riesebrodt, “Ethische und exemplarische Prophetie,” in Hans Ger-
hard Kippenberg and Martin Riesebrodt, eds., Max Webers Religionssystematik
(Tübingen, 2001), 193–208.
6. Victor von Strauss writes in his commentary on Lao Tse (Leipzig, 1870)
about these similarities, calls them very mysterious, and explains them by the
unitary origin of mankind, on the one hand, and the effects of a higher spiritual
power, on the other. On Lasaulx see below.
7. Subsequent page references to Lasaulx refer to the new edition of this book,
ed. Eugen Thurnher (Munich, 1952).
8. Lasaulx mentions August Friedrich Gfrörer, Urgeschichte des menschlichen
Geschlechts (Schaff hausen, 1855), 206–207, and Eduard Röth, Die ägyptische und
die zoroastrische Glaubenslehre als die ältesten Quellen unserer spekulativen Ideen
(Mannheim, 1846), 348, who refers to Anquetil-Duperron as his source.
9. Dietrich Metzler, “A. H. Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805) und das Konzept
der Achsenzeit,” Achaemenid History 7 (1991): 123–133. He refers to Anquetil-
Duperron’s translation and edition of the Zend Avesta of Zoroaster (Paris, 1771).
For a characterization of Anquetil-Duperron’s achievement, see Jürgen Oster-
hammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens: Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahr-
hundert (Munich, 1998), 293–296. He calls Anquetil-Duperron’s work “the foun-
dational document of a truly polyphonic world historiography” (293).
10. Benjamin I. Schwartz, “The Age of Transcendence,” Daedalus 104, no. 2
(1975): 1–7.
11. Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cam-
bridge, 1975), 8–9. For Eisenstadt, see his chapter “The Axial Age in World His-
tory” in Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt, eds., The Cultural Values of Europe (Liv-
erpool, 2008), 22– 42.
12. Björn Wittrock, “Cultural Crystallization and Civilization Change: Axial-

ity and Modernity,” in Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg, eds., Comparing
Modernities: Pluralism versus Homogenity [sic]; Essays in Homage to Shmuel N. Eisen-
stadt (Leiden, 2005), 83–123, here 112.
13. Both Benjamin Schwartz, in “The Age of Transcendence,” and Robert Bel-
lah strongly make the claim that there are terms for transcendence in several of
the Chinese traditions and that Confucianism should definitely be considered a
religion with post-Axial traits.
14. Johann Arnason et al., “General Introduction,” in Arnason et al., eds., Ax-
ial Civilizations and World History (Leiden, 2005), 1–12, here 7. This volume also
contains an article by Arnason on the history of the Axial Age thesis—an article,
however, that is more programmatic than historical: “The Axial Age and Its Inter-
preters: Reopening a Debate,” 19– 49.
15. I find it remarkable that Jürgen Habermas referred to Jaspers’ Axial Age
thesis in his contribution to the reconstruction of historical materialism. See Jür-
gen Habermas, “Geschichte und Evolution,” in Habermas, Zur Rekonstruktion
des Historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1976), 200–259, here 241.
But it is also remarkable that he prefers the idea of “replacement” over the idea of
“integration” without even discussing the alternative—for example with regard to
the relationship between “narrative” and “argumentative” explanations. This is a
major difference between his views (at that time, at least) and those of Robert
Bellah.
16. The main sources for this biographical information are Axel Schwaiger,
Christliche Geschichtsdeutung in der Moderne: Eine Untersuchung zum Geschichts-
denken von Juan Donoso Cortés, Ernst von Lasaulx und Vladimir Solov’ev in der
Zusammenschau christlicher Historiographieentwicklung (Berlin, 2001), 236ff.,
and the introduction by Eugen Thurnher to the reprint of Lasaulx’s book Neuer
Versuch einer alten, auf die Wahrheit der Tatsachen gegründeten Philosophie der
Geschichte, 7– 60. See also Friedrich Engel-Janosi, “The Historical Thought of
Ernst von Lasaulx,” Theological Studies 14 (1953): 377– 401. For a general charac-
terization of this intellectual milieu, see the unsurpassed chapter “Die Ausein-
andersetzung mit dem Zeitgeist” in Franz Schnabel’s 1937 history of the nine-
teenth century: Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. 4: Die
religiösen Kräfte (Munich, 1937), 164–202. He calls Lasaulx a nephew of Görres,
which is not correct (ibid., 168). Görres was in fact married to Catherine von La-
saulx, a cousin of Ernst von Lasaulx.
17. See Schwaiger, Christliche Geschichtsdeutung, 267.
18. Lasaulx, Neuer Versuch, 159.
19. In this regard my interpretation is different from that of Schwaiger, Christ-
liche Geschichtsdeutung, 267.
20. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Poli-
tics Worldwide (Cambridge, 2004). For a brilliant critique of this influential book,
see Daniel Silver, “Religion without Instrumentalization,” Archives Européennes

de Sociologie 47 (2006): 421– 434.
21. Lasaulx, Neuer Versuch, 137 (my translation).
22. Schwaiger, Christliche Geschichtsdeutung, 244.
23. Max Weber, “Religiöse Gemeinschaften,” in Max-Weber-Gesamtausgabe
[Collected works of Max Weber] I/22-2, 183–184. He does mention Bousset later in
the text (276).
24. Max Weber, “Hinduismus und Buddhismus,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur
Religionssoziologie II (Tübingen, 1921, 7th ed., 1988), 155.
25. Wolfgang Schluchter’s work is particularly worth mentioning here: Reli-
gion und Lebensführung, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1988).
26. An exemplary case: Edith Hanke, “Erlösungsreligionen,” in Kippenberg
and Riesebrodt, eds., Max Webers Religionssystematik, 209–226, particularly 214.
27. Björn Wittrock, “Cultural Crystallizations and World History: The Age of
Ecumenical Renaissance,” in Johann Arnason and Björn Wittrock, eds., Eurasian
Transformations, Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries (Leiden, 2004), 41–73, here 42–43.
28. Max Weber, “Religiöse Gemeinschaften,” 157–158.
29. On the complexities of the developments in postmedieval European Chris-
tianity in this regard, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New
York, 1991), and now Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, 2007), and my
review essay on this book: Hans Joas, “Die säkulare Option. Ihr Aufstieg und ihre
Folgen,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 57 (2009): 293–300. The present study
is not the right place to delve into the theological attempts to formulate a consis-
tent theory of the sacrament, from Augustine through the medieval scholastics to
contemporary thinking. For an overview, see the excellent entry “sacrament” in
Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche (Freiburg, 1999), vol. 8, 1437–1455.
30. Weber, “Religiöse Gemeinschaften,” 123.
31. Ibid., 154.
32. Ibid., 124.
33. Ibid., 343.
34. The best study on this specific point still is Werner Stark, “The Place of
Catholicism in Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion,” Sociological Analysis 29 (1968):
202–210, here 203. A rather polemical attempt to criticize Weber’s sociology as part
of the “liberal Protestant metanarrative” can also be found in John Milbank, The-
ology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford, 1990), 92–98. On Mil-
bank, see my critical response: “Sophisticated Fundamentalism from the Left?” in
Hans Joas, Do We Need Religion? On the Experience of Self-Transcendence (Boulder,
2008), 65–80. The British Jesuit Anthony Carroll has published the most extensive
study on this topic: Protestant Modernity: Weber, Secularization, and Protestant-
ism (Scranton, 2007). See also my review of this book in The Journal of Religion 90
(2010): 445– 447, and Manuel Borutta, Antikatholizismus: Deutschland und Italien
im Zeitalter der europäischen Kulturkämpfe (Göttingen, 2010), 116–120 (on Weber).
It is a remarkable fact that Ernst Troeltsch, the Lutheran theologian, explicitly

defended the Catholic understanding of the sacraments against a “magical” inter-
pretation by emphasizing the ethical character of the preparation for them and of
their effects. See Ernst Troeltsch, “Protestantisches Christentum und Kirche in
der Neuzeit” (1909), in Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7 (Berlin, 2004), 114ff.
35. Weber, “Religiöse Gemeinschaften,” 273.
36. Max Weber, “Zwischenbetrachtung,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religions-
soziologie, vol. 1, 566.
37. See Joas, Do We Need Religion?, 16.
38. Robert Bellah, “Flaws in the Protestant Code: Some Religious Sources of
America’s Troubles,” Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000): 288–299.
39. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “The German Theological Sources and Protestant
Church Politics,” in Hartmut Lehmann and Guenter Roth, eds., Weber’s Protes-
tant Ethic: Origin, Evidence, Contexts (Cambridge, 1987), 27–50.
40. Eckart Otto, Max Webers Studien des Antiken Judentums (Tübingen,
2002), 246–275, here 270 (my translation).
41. In his polemical critique of A Secular Age, the book of the (Catholic) Cana-
dian philosopher Charles Taylor, Charles Larmore uses Weber’s views on religion
as if they were the last word of an empirically founded sociology of religion (see
“How Much Can We Stand?” The New Republic, April 9, 2008, 39– 44). This shows
how important a contextualization of Weber’s views is.
42. Among the few exceptions are two articles by Aleida Assmann, “Jaspers’
Achsenzeit, oder Schwierigkeiten mit der Zentralperspektive in der Geschichte,”
in Dietrich Harth, ed., Karl Jaspers: Denken zwischen Wissenschaft, Politik und
Philosophie (Stuttgart, 1989), 187–205, and “Einheit und Vielfalt in der Geschichte.
Jaspers’ Begriff der Achsenzeit neu betrachtet,” in Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ed., Kul-
turen der Achsenzeit, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), 330–340. See also the fol-
lowing publications: Norbert J. Rigali, “A New Axis: Karl Jaspers’ Philosophy of
History,” International Philosophical Quarterly 10 (1970): 441–457; Georges Goe-
dert, “Die universalgeschichtliche Einheitsidee bei Karl Jaspers,” Jahrbuch der Ös-
terreichischen Karl-Jaspers-Gesellschaft 11 (1998): 9–27.
43. Karl Jaspers, Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung (Munich,
1962).
44. For example: “Philosophie und Offenbarungsglaube. Ein Gespräch mit
Heinz Zahrnt,” in Hans Saner, ed., Karl Jaspers: Provokationen; Gespräche und
Interviews (Munich, 1969), 63–92, here 89 and 85.
45. On Jaspers’ importance in this regard, see Jörg Dittmer, “Jaspers’ ‘Achsen-
zeit’ und das interkulturelle Gespräch,” in Dieter Becker, ed., Globaler Kampf der
Kulturen? Analysen und Orientierungen (Stuttgart, 1999), 191–214.
46. Jürgen Habermas, “Vom Kampf der Glaubensmächte. Karl Jaspers zum
Konflikt der Kulturen,” in Habermas, Vom sinnlichen Eindruck zum symbolischen
Ausdruck (Frankfurt am Main, 1997), 41–58.
47. On the relevance of Weber for Jaspers, see Dieter Henrich, “Karl Jaspers:
Denken im Blick auf Max Weber,” in Wolfgang Mommsen and Wolfgang Schwent-
ker, eds., Max Weber und seine Zeitgenossen (Göttingen, 1988), 722–739. Henrich
does not comment on the Axial Age topic at all!
48. Hans Joas, “Max Weber and the Origin of Human Rights,” in Charles Camic
et al., eds., Max Weber’s “Economy and Society”: A Critical Companion (Stanford,
2005), 366–382.
49. See my “Ernst Cassirer Lecture”: “A German Idea of Freedom? Cassirer and
Troeltsch between Germany and the West,” Occasional Paper of the Swedish Ernst
Cassirer Society 2 (2005).
50. Robert Bellah, “What Is Axial about the Axial Age?” Archives Européennes
de Sociologie 46 (2005): 69–89, here 81.
2
What Was the Axial Revolution?
charles taylor
Any view about the long-term history of religion turns on an interpretation

of the Axial Age. What was the nature of the Axial revolution? This is some-
times spoken of the coming to be of a new tension “between the transcen-
dental and mundane orders,” involving a new conception of the “transcen-
dental.”1 But “transcendental” has more than one meaning. It can designate
something like a “going beyond” the human world or the cosmos (1). But it
also can mean the discovery or invention of a new standpoint from which
the existing order in the cosmos or society can be criticized or denounced
(2). Moreover, these two meanings can be linked. The place or being beyond
the cosmos may yield the new locus from which critique becomes possible.
The Hebrew prophets condemning the practices of Israel in the name of
God come to mind.
Again, potentially linked to these two is another change: the introduction
of second-order thinking (3), in which the formulae we use to describe or
operate in the world themselves come under critical examination.
Possibly linked with these three is another change: what Jan Assmann
calls “implied globality” (4).2 The notion here is that the transcendent be-
ing, or the principles of criticism, may be seen as of relevance not just to
our society, but to the whole of humanity. But the link with our own society
may be weakened in another way. Any of the above changes may bring with
them a new notion of the philosophical or religious vocation of individuals.
Indeed, the changes may themselves be introduced by such individuals
who invent or discover new forms of religious or philosophical life. The
Buddha or Socrates come to mind. This can be the origin point of a process
of “disembedding” (5), a process I would like to deal with in the following
discussion.
What Was the Axial Revolution? 31
These five may be seen as rival accounts of what axiality consists in, but it
might be better to see them as potentially linked changes, in which case the
issue between them would be more like this: Which of these changes pro-
vides the best starting point from which to understand the linkages in the
whole set?
Without wanting to challenge any of these readings, I would like to sug-
gest a sixth way of conceiving the change. It was a shift from a mode of reli-
gious life which involved “feeding the gods”—where the understanding of
human good was that of prospering or flourishing (as this was understood),
and where the “gods” or spirits were not necessarily unambiguously on the
side of human good—to a mode in which (a) there is notion of a higher, more
complete human good, a notion of complete virtue, or even of a salvation
beyond human flourishing (Buddha) while at the same time (b) the higher
powers according to this view are unambiguously on the side of human
good. What may survive is a notion of Satan or Mara, spirits which are not
ambivalent, but rather totally against human good. I make some of the links
clear from the outset, because I would like to present this change in our under-
standing of the good (6) as a facet of the change I call disembedding (5).
The full scale of this far-reaching change becomes clearer if we focus on

some features of the religious life of earlier, smaller-scale societies, insofar
as we can trace this. There must have been a phase in which all humans lived
in such small-scale societies, even though much of the life of this epoch can
only be guessed at. If we examine (what we know of) these earlier forms of
religion (which coincide partly with what Robert Bellah called “archaic reli-
gion”),3 we note how profoundly these forms of life “embed” the agent. And
that happens in three crucial ways.
First, socially: in Paleolithic and even certain Neolithic tribal societies,
religious life is inseparably linked with social life. This meant first of all that
the primary agency of important religious action—invoking, praying to, sac-
rificing to, or propitiating Gods or spirits, coming close to these powers, get-
ting healing, protection from them, divining under their guidance, and so
forth—was the social group as a whole, or some more specialized agency rec-
ognized as acting for the group. In early religion, we primarily relate to God
as a society.
This kind of collective ritual action, where the principal agents are acting
on behalf of a community, which also in its own way becomes involved in
the action, seems to figure virtually everywhere in early religion, and con-
tinues in some ways up till our day. Certainly it goes on occupying an im-
portant place as long as people live in an enchanted world. The ceremony of
“beating the bounds” of the agricultural village, for instance, involved the
whole parish, and could only be effective as a collective act of this whole.4
This embedding in social ritual usually carries with it another feature. Just
because the most important religious action was that of the collective, and
because it often required that certain functionaries—priests, shamans, medi-
cine men, diviners, chiefs, and so on—fill crucial roles in the action, the social
order in which these roles were defined tended to be sacrosanct. This is, of
course, the aspect of religious life which was most centrally identified and
pilloried by the radical Enlightenment. The crime laid bare here was the
entrenchment of forms of inequality, domination, and exploitation through
their identification with the untouchable, sacred structure of things. Hence
the longing to see the day “when the last king had been strangled in the en-
trails of the last priest.” But this identification is in fact very old, and goes
back to a time when many of the later, more egregious and vicious forms of
inequality had not yet been developed, before there were kings and hierar-
chies of priests.
Behind the issue of inequality and justice lies something deeper, which
touches what we would call today the “identity” of the human beings in
those earlier societies. Just because their most important actions were the
doings of whole groups (tribe, clan, subtribe, lineage), articulated in a cer-
tain way (the actions were led by chiefs, shamans, masters of the fishing
spear), they couldn’t conceive of themselves as potentially disconnected from
this social matrix. It would probably never even occur to them to try.
In this way people are embedded in society. But this also brings with it an
embedding in the cosmos. For in early religion, the spirits and forces with
whom we are dealing are in numerous ways intricated in the world. We can
see this if we look at the enchanted world of our medieval ancestors: for all
that the God they worshipped transcended the world, they nevertheless also
had to do with intracosmic spirits, and they dealt with causal powers which
were embedded in things: relics, sacred places, and the like. In early religion,
even the high gods are often identified with certain features of the world;
and where the phenomenon which has come to be called “totemism” exists,
we can even say that some feature of the world, an animal or plant species, for
instance, is central to the identity of a group.5 It may even be that a particu-
lar geographical terrain is essential to our religious life. Certain places are
sacred. Or the layout of the land speaks to us of the original disposition of
things in sacred time. We relate to the ancestors and to this higher time
through this landscape.6
Besides this relation to society and the cosmos, there is a third form of
embedding in existing reality which we can see in early religion. This is
what makes the most striking contrast with what we tend to think of as the
“higher” religions. What the people ask for when they invoke or placate di-
vinities and powers is prosperity, health, long life, fertility; what they ask to
be preserved from is disease, dearth, sterility, premature death. There is a
certain understanding of human flourishing here which we can immedi-
ately understand, and which, however much we might want to add to it,
seems to us quite “natural.” What there isn’t, and what seems central to the
later “higher” religions, is the idea that we have to question radically this
ordinary understanding, that we are called in some way to go beyond it.
This is not to say that human flourishing is the end sought by all things.
The divine may also have other purposes, some of which impact harmfully
on us. There is a sense in which, for early religions, the divine is always more
than just well disposed toward us; it may also be in some ways indifferent; or
there may also be hostility, or jealousy, or anger, which we have to deflect.
Although benevolence, in principle, may have the upper hand, this process
may have to be helped along, by propitiation, or even by the action of “trick-
ster” figures. But through all this, what remains true is that divinity’s be-
nign purposes are defined in terms of ordinary human flourishing. Again,
there may be capacities which some people can attain, which go way beyond
the ordinary human ones, which, say, prophets or shamans have. But these
in the end subserve well-being as ordinarily understood.
By contrast, with Christianity or Buddhism, for instance, there is a notion
of our good which goes beyond human flourishing, which we may gain even
while failing utterly on the scales of human flourishing, even through such a
failing (like dying young on a cross); or which involves leaving the field of
flourishing altogether (ending the cycle of rebirth). The paradox of Chris-
tianity, in relation to early religion, is that, on one hand, it seems to assert the
unconditional benevolence of God toward humans; there is none of the

ambivalence of early divinity in this respect; yet, on the other hand, it rede-
fines our ends so as to take us beyond flourishing.
In this respect, early religion has something in common with modern
exclusive humanism, and this has been felt and expressed in the sympathy
of many modern post-Enlightenment people for “paganism”; “pagan self-
assertion,” thought John Stuart Mill, was much superior to “Christian self-
denial.”7 (This is related to, but not quite the same as, the sympathy felt for
“polytheism,” which I want to discuss later.) What makes modern human-
ism unprecedented, of course, is the idea that this flourishing involves no
relation to anything higher.
The portrait of the early triple embeddedness is well drawn by Francis
Oakley, in his discussion of the history of monarchy:
Kingship . . . emerged from an “archaic” mentality that appears to have

been thoroughly monistic, to have perceived no impermeable barrier
between the human and divine, to have intuited the divine as imma-
nent in the cyclic rhythms of the natural world and civil society as
somehow enmeshed in these natural processes, and to have viewed its
primary function, therefore, as a fundamentally religious one, involv-
ing the preservation of the cosmic order and the “harmonious integra-
tion” of human beings with the natural world.8
Human agents are embedded in society, society in the cosmos, and the cos-
mos incorporates the divine.
Now as earlier mentions suggest, I have been speaking of “early religion” to
contrast with what many people have called “post-Axial” religions.9 The refer-
ence is to what Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age,”10 the extraordinary period
in the last millennium bce when various “higher” forms of religion appeared
seemingly independently in different civilizations, marked by such founding
figures as Confucius, Gautama, Socrates, and the Hebrew prophets.
The surprising feature of the Axial religions, compared with what went
before, what would in other words have made them hard to predict before-
hand, is that they initiate a break in all three dimensions of embeddedness:
social order, cosmos, human good. Not in all cases and all at once: perhaps
in some ways Buddhism is the most far-reaching, because it radically under-
cuts the second dimension: the order of the world itself is called into ques-
tion, because the wheel of rebirth means suffering. In Christianity there is
something analogous: our world is disordered and must be made anew. But
some post-Axial outlooks keep the sense of relation to an ordered cosmos,
as we see in very different ways with Confucius and Plato; however, they
mark a distinction between this and the actual, highly imperfect social or-
der, so that the close link to the cosmos through collective religious life is
made problematic.
But perhaps the most fundamental novelty of all is the revisionary stance
toward the human good in Axial religions. More or less radically, they all
call into question the received, seemingly unquestionable understandings of
human flourishing and hence inevitably also the structures of society and
the features of the cosmos through which this flourishing was supposedly
achieved. The change was double, as I mentioned above. On one hand, the
“transcendent” realm, the world of God, or gods, of spirits, or Heaven, how-
ever defined, which previously contained elements which were both favor-
able and unfavorable to the human good, becomes unambiguously affirma-
tive of this good. But on the other hand, both the crucial terms here, both
the transcendent and the human good, are reconceived in the process.
We have already noted the changes in the first term. The transcendent
may now be quite beyond or outside of the cosmos, as with the Creator God
of Genesis, or the Nirvana of Buddhism. Or if it remains cosmic, it loses its
original ambivalent character, and exhibits an order of unalloyed goodness,
as with the “Heaven,” guarantor of just rule in Chinese thought,11 or the or-
der of Ideas of Plato, whose key is the Good.
But the second term must perforce also change. The highest human goal
can no longer just be to flourish, as it was before. Either a new goal is pos-
ited, of a salvation which takes us beyond what we usually understand as
human flourishing, or else Heaven or the Good lays the demand on us to
imitate or embody its unambiguous goodness, and hence to alter the mun-
dane order of things down here. This may, indeed usually does, involve
flourishing on a wider scale, but our own flourishing (as individual, family,
clan, or tribe) can no longer be our highest goal. And of course, this may be
expressed by a redefinition of what “flourishing” consists in.
Seen from another angle, this means a change in our attitude to evil as
the destructive, harm-inflicting side of reality. This is no longer just part of
the order of things, to be accepted as such. Something has to be done about

it. This may be conceived as an escape through self-transformation, or it
may be seen as a struggle to contain or eliminate the bad, but in either case
evil is not something just to be lived with as part of the inevitable balance of
things. Of course, the very sense of the term “evil” also changes here, once it
is no longer just the negative side of the cosmos, and comes to be branded as
an imperfection.12
We might try to put the contrast in this way: unlike post-Axial religion,
early religion involved an acceptance of the order of things, in the three di-
mensions I have been discussing. In a remarkable series of articles on Aus-
tralian Aboriginal religion, W. E. H. Stanner speaks of “the mood of assent”
which is central to this spirituality. Aboriginals had not set up the “kind of
quarrel with life” which springs from the various post-Axial religious initia-
tives.13 The contrast is in some ways easy to miss, because Aboriginal my-
thology, in relating the way in which the order of things came to be in the
Dream Time—the original time out of time, which is also “everywhen”—
contains a number of stories of catastrophe, brought on by trickery, deceit,
and violence, from which human life recouped and reemerged, but in an
impaired and divided fashion, so that there remains the intrinsic connec-
tion between life and suffering, and unity is inseparable from division. Now
this may seem reminiscent of other stories of a Fall, including that related in
Genesis. But in contrast with what Christianity has made of this last, for the
Aboriginals the imperative to “follow up” the Dreaming, to recover through
ritual and insight their contact with the order of the original time, relates to
this riven and impaired dispensation, in which good and evil are interwoven.
There is no question of reparation of the original rift, or of a compensation,
or of making good of the original loss. What is more, ritual and the wisdom
that goes with it can even bring them to accept the inexorable, and “celebrate
joyously what could not be changed.”14 The original catastrophe doesn’t sepa-
rate or alienate us from the sacred or Higher, as in the Genesis story; it rather
contributes to shaping the sacred order we are trying to “follow up.”
I can perhaps sum up this post-Axial notion of higher good, in terms of
four features. (a) It is defined as going beyond (whatever is locally under-
stood as) ordinary human flourishing: long life, prosperity, freedom from
disease, drought, natural catastrophe, and so on. (b) There were vocations
with special higher powers before, like shamans, for instance; but now the
higher good doesn’t just consist of special powers; it is in some sense a goal
for all human beings. This is so even if this aspect is downplayed or counter-
vailed by notions of hierarchy. Thus for Plato, the philosophical life is not for
everyone; but at the same time it amounts to the fullest realization of the
nature which all human beings share. (c) This good is our goal as human
beings in virtue of the way things are—whether the demands of God, or the
nature of things, or the Fourfold Noble Truth, or whatever. In consequence,
the goal is endorsed by whatever higher beings, gods, spirits, or the cosmos
are recognized by the culture concerned. This contrasts with the pre-Axial
ambivalence of many of these beings to human flourishing. (d) Grounded in
the way things are, endorsed by higher powers, this goal is unitary, harmo-
nious, and inwardly consistent.
The resulting religious life in the post-Axial age combines elements of the
pre-Axial in some kind of amalgam, one that is often unstable. The post-
Axial pushes toward individual spiritual “virtuosi,” to use Max Weber’s
word (which includes monks, Bhikkus, Platonist sages, and so on). The great
“higher” religions, which become entrenched within and help to shape civi-
lizations, have this hybrid character and the resultant tensions.
Axial religion didn’t in fact do away with early religious life. It doesn’t at
once totally change the religious life of whole societies. But it does open
new possibilities of disembedded religion: seeking a relation to the divine
or the higher, which severely revises the going notions of flourishing, or
even goes beyond them, and can be carried through by individuals on
their own, and/or in new kinds of sociality, unlinked to the established sa-
cred order. So, monks, Bhikkus, sanyassi, devotees of some avatar or God
strike out on their own; and from this springs unprecedented modes of
sociality: initiation groups, sects of devotees, the sangha, monastic orders,
and so on.
In all these cases, there is some kind of hiatus, difference, or even break in
relation to the religious life of the whole larger society. This may itself be to
some extent differentiated, with different strata, castes, or classes, and a new
religious outlook may lodge in one of them. But very often a new devotion
may cut across all of these, particularly where there is a break in the third
dimension, with a “higher” idea of the human good.
There is inevitably a tension here, but there often is also an attempt to se-
cure the unity of the whole, to recover some sense of complementarity be-
tween the different religious forms. So that those who are fully dedicated to
the “higher” forms can, on one hand, be seen as a standing reproach to those
who remain in the earlier forms, supplicating the powers for human flour-
ishing, and, on the other hand, nevertheless can also be seen as in a relation-
ship of mutual help with them. The laity feed the monks, and by this they
earn “merit,” which can be understood as taking them a little farther along
the “higher” road, but also serves to protect them against the dangers of life,
and increases their health, prosperity, fertility.
So strong is the pull toward complementarity that even in those cases
where a “higher” religion took over the whole society, as we see with Bud-
dhism, Christianity, and Islam, and there is nothing supposedly left to con-
trast with, the difference between dedicated minorities of religious “virtu-
osi” (to use Max Weber’s term again) and the mass religion of the social
sacred, still largely oriented to flourishing, survived or reconstituted itself,
with the same combination of strain, on one hand, and hierarchical comple-
mentarity, on the other.
From our modern perspective, with 20/20 hindsight, it appears as though
the Axial spiritualities were prevented from producing their full disembed-
ding effect because they were, so to speak, hemmed in by the force of the
majority religious life, which remained firmly in the old mold. They did
bring about a certain form of religious individualism, but this was what
Louis Dumont called the charter for “l’individu hors du monde”:15 that is, it
was the way of life of elite minorities, and it was in some ways marginal to, or
in some tension with, the “world,” where this means not just the cosmos which
is ordered in relation to the Higher or the Sacred but also the society which is
ordered in relation to both the cosmos and the sacred. This “world” was still
a matrix of embeddedness, and it still provided the inescapable framework
for social life, including that of the individuals who tried to turn their backs
on it, insofar as they remained in some sense within its reach.16
I have described these as “unstable” amalgams, but this feature is perhaps
a potentiality, which isn’t always actualized. Let’s look at some of the possi-
ble sites of tension in these religious forms.
First, (i) to return to the reference to polytheism above, the new under-
standing of our higher good, which is itself endorsed by God or the Cosmos,
Heaven, or some other higher reality, is itself unitary and coherent. The
good human being for Plato was harmonious; to attain Nirvana is to come
to perfect peace; the sage is in ideal equilibrium. This contrasts very sharply
with a potentiality of pre-Axial religions, realized in certain forms of poly-
theism. The demands of higher beings on us may be in tension with each
other. Insofar as our good (flourishing) is bound up with our meeting these
demands, the human good itself can be seen as combining elements which
are at best in tension, in more dire straits even contradictory.
Take the story of Hippolytos, dragged into a disastrous love triangle with
his father and Phaedra, in which he loses his life. Hippolytos is portrayed as
devoted to Artemis, so devoted that he is celibate. But this too great attach-
ment is bound to rouse the jealousy of Aphrodite, the goddess of marriage
and sexual love. Her hand is visible in the love entanglement into which he
is unwittingly and unwillingly drawn, and which costs him his life.
There is an ambivalence in the story. There is something heroic and admi-
rable in Hippolytos’ single-mindedness. In a sense it aspires to go above the
human condition. For mortals the prudent thing is to “pay one’s dues” to all
the immortals, and to navigate at our own level between the rocks they lay
out for us. Perhaps a similar moral can be drawn from the story of Oedipus,
whose ability to see overt reality with exceptional acuity is paid for by a
blindness to the inarticulate depths (which Tiresias for his part is aware of).
We might recognize a “disenchanted” analogue of this insight in, for in-
stance, the philosophy of Isaiah Berlin, with his insistence on the potential
conflict between the goods we subscribe to.
Another potential site of instability is (ii) what I described above as the
second level of embedding, that of social order in cosmic order. Axial revo-
lutions, which relate to a new, unitary higher good, transform this cosmic
embedding. The surrounding order now perhaps really merits the attribute
“cosmic” with the full resonance of harmonious unity which attaches to this
Greek term. Previously, the various gods, spirits, or higher beings could
make incompatible demands on humans, as we have just seen, and were not
all unambiguously favorable to human welfare. Now the proper cosmic or-
der is frequently unified and aligned with the higher human good; indeed
the cosmic frame can set the standard by which human social orders are to
be judged and criticized. In some cases, as with Buddhism or the Hebrew
Bible, the potentiality is opened for a standpoint of critique that can judge
the condition of the cosmos itself. But this didn’t inhibit the development of
a normative understanding of cosmic order even in the civilizations ani-
mated by Buddhism, or by postbiblical revelations.17
These post-Axial “higher” religions can still have a place for spirits who
are ill-disposed toward the human good, such as Satan or Mara. But now
they are classed as radical enemies of the normative order, and are destined
in the end to be defeated. Or else a god can retain his or her Janus-faced
ambivalence, as with Pattini or the Isvara form of Shiva in Sri Lankan Bud-
dhism; but the destructive side is clearly marked as against and the restor-
ative side as for the normative order.18 Or else, taking purchase in a higher
good from which the cosmos itself can be judged, a god who wreaks de-
struction of worldly things can be seen as working for the good, as doing a
work of purification, as with certain understandings of Shiva or Kali.
But the cosmic battle itself is not the site of potential instability. This lies
rather in the fact that the two-tiered normative order, that of society in cos-
mos, can itself be seen as not fully self-sufficient, as needing to draw on its
opposite, its negation, to sustain itself.
I want to mention two types, which deserve much fuller discussion, but
which I can only briefly indicate here.
(1) The equilibrium in tension of Latin Christendom emerged and be-
came evident in Carnival and similar festivities, such as the feasts of mis-
rule, or boy bishops, and the like. These were periods in which the ordinary
order of things was inverted, or “the world was turned upside down.” For a
while, there was a ludic interval, in which people played out a condition of
reversal of the usual order. Boys wore the miter, or fools were made kings for
a day; what was ordinarily revered was mocked, and people permitted them-
selves various forms of license, not just sexually but also in close-to-violent
acts and the like.
(2) The example of the second type is drawn from Sri Lankan Buddhism.
I draw here on Bruce Kapferer’s fascinating study of sorcery and exorcism.19
A sorcerer’s spell binds me, impedes, even paralyzes my life. It cuts me off
from the sources of health and goodness. In this way, it contravenes the nor-
mative order. The origin stories, which are called on to understand sorcery
and to underpin the ceremonies of exorcism, make this relation clear. They
relate ur-events in which the ideal normative order was attacked and deeply
damaged. These provide the paradigm for the sorcerer’s aggression. And the
myths also relate how the damage was undone. But in these it becomes clear
that the healing could only be effected and the order restored by drawing on
the same power of sorcery which disrupted the order in the first place. This
ambivalent stance toward the sorcerer’s power is reenacted in the various
rites of exorcism.
Thus on one level it is clear that there is an ideal, Buddha-inspired norma-
tive order, that established by King Mahasammata in the beginning. This is
utterly opposed to the forces of disruption which various demon-figures at-
tempt to inflict. But on another level, the act of restoration has to draw on
these same forces. Restorer figures are ambivalently placed toward this or-
der, as their myths of origin indicate.20
We get a result which is similar and yet different from the previous type. As
with Carnival, we reveal the normative order to be not really self-sufficient. It
must somehow draw on its opposite. But where with Carnival (at least as read
by Victor Turner) the opposite of order is simply its dissolution, a chaos which
contains restorative powers, here we are dealing with its active negation. Or-
der must draw on the forces of its enemy. In both cases, the tension, which can
easily be seen as a contradiction, is a source of potential instability.
In Latin Christendom, we get an upsetting of this shaky equilibrium, in the

long movement of reform (beginning with Hildebrand, but carrying through
the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and so on). Here the site of the pre-
vious instability, the two-tiered order of society-in-cosmos, is what is un-
dermined and then destroyed.
What had yet to happen in the first post-Axial millennium was for the
two-tiered matrix to be itself transformed, to be made over according to
some of the principles of Axial spirituality, so that the “world” itself would
come to be seen as constituted by individuals. This would be the charter for
“l’individu dans le monde,” in Dumont’s terms: the agent who in his ordi-
nary “worldly” life sees himself as primordially an individual, that is, the
human agent of modernity.
And something like this did come about in the long movement of reform in
Latin Christendom from the eleventh century. This involved the development
among important elites of a buffered identity, impervious to the enchanted

cosmos. This both animated and was rendered firmer by disciplines of thought
and conduct. These disciplines in turn aimed not only at the reform of per-
sonal conduct, but at reforming and remaking societies so as to render them
more peaceful, more ordered, more industrious.
The newly remade society was to embody unequivocally the demands of
the Gospel in a stable and, as it was increasingly understood, a rational or-
der. This had no place for the ambivalent complementarities of the older
enchanted world: between worldly life and monastic renunciation, between
proper order and its periodic suspension in Carnival, between the acknowl-
edged power of spirits and forces and their relegation by divine power. The
new order was coherent, uncompromising, all of a piece. Disenchantment
brought a new uniformity of purpose and principle.
The progressive imposition of this order meant the end of the unstable
post-Axial equilibrium. The compromise between the individuated religion
of devotion, obedience, or rationally understood virtue on one hand, and
the collective often cosmos-related rituals of whole societies on the other,
was broken, and in favor of the former. Disenchantment, reform, and per-
sonal religion went together. Just as the Church was at its most perfect when
each of its members adhered to it on their own individual responsibility—
and in certain places, like Congregational Connecticut, this became an ex-
plicit requirement of membership—so society itself comes to be reconceived
as made up of individuals. The great disembedding, as I propose to call it,
implicit in the Axial revolution, reaches its logical conclusion.
This involved the growth and entrenchment of a new self-understanding
of our social existence, one which gave an unprecedented primacy to the
individual.
This project of transformation was an attempt to make over society in a
thoroughgoing way according to the demands of a Christian order, while
purging it of its connection to an enchanted cosmos, and removing all ves-
tiges of the old complementarities, between spiritual and temporal, between
life devoted to God and life in the “world,” between order and the chaos on
which it draws.
This project was thoroughly disembedding just by virtue of its form or
mode of operation: the disciplined remaking of behavior and social forms
through objectification and an instrumental stance. But its ends were also
intrinsically concerned with disembedding. This is clear with the drive to

disenchantment, which destroys the second dimension of embeddedness;
but we can also see it in the Christian context. In one way, Christianity here
operates like any Axial spirituality; indeed, it operates in conjunction with
another such, namely, Stoicism. But there also were specifically Christian
modes. The New Testament is full of calls to leave or relativize solidarities of
family, clan, society, to be part of the Kingdom. We see this seriously re-
flected in the way certain Protestant churches operated, where one was not
simply a member by virtue of birth, but had to join by answering a personal
call. This in turn helped to give force to a conception of society as founded
on covenant, and hence as ultimately constituted by the decision of free
individuals.
This is a relatively obvious filiation. But my thesis is that the effect of the
Christian, or Christian-Stoic, attempt to remake society in bringing about
the modern “individual in the world” was much more pervasive, and multi-
tracked. It helped to nudge first the moral, then the social imaginary in the
direction of modern individualism. This becomes evident in the new con-
ception of moral order which we see emerging in modern natural law the-
ory. This was heavily indebted to Stoicism, and its originators were arguably
the Netherlands neo-Stoics Justus Lipsius and Hugo Grotius. But this was a
Christianized Stoicism, and a modern one, in the sense that it gave a crucial
place to a willed remaking of human society.
So the great disembedding occurs as a revolution in our understanding of
moral order. And it goes on being accompanied by ideas of moral order.
This revolution disembeds us from the cosmic sacred—altogether, and not
just partially and for certain people as in earlier post-Axial moves. It disem-
beds us from the social sacred and posits a new relation to God, as designer.
This new relation will in fact turn out to be dispensable, because the design
underlying the moral order can be seen as directed to ordinary human flour-
ishing. This, the transcendent aspect of the Axial revolution, is partly rolled
back, or can be, given a neat separation of this-worldly from other-worldly
good. But only partly, because notions of flourishing remain under surveil-
lance in our modern moral view: they have to fit with the demands of the
moral order itself, of justice, equality, nondomination, if they are to escape
condemnation. Our notions of flourishing can thus always be revised. This
belongs to our post-Axial condition.
The developments I have described in the last section not only show up cer-
tain instabilities of post-Axial religion, they also liquidated the whole unsta-
ble amalgam which was their locus. And along with this, they also elimi-
nated instabilities (i) and (ii). We now live within the primacy of moral codes
which are meant to define the entirety of our moral obligation, and to have
ironed out all contradictions and tensions. The big question which is posed
by this entire evolution is whether we have gained or lost crucial insights into
the human condition through the transformations they have wrought.
This raises a crucial question about the place of the Axial transformation
in human history. Granted that these introduced changes were of immense
importance in human history (which is why we think it worthwhile to de-
fine just what those changes were), what are we to think of the pre-Axial life
which they transformed?
Is this merely superseded, relegated to an unrecoverable past? Or is it
in various ways still present, and inescapably so, in post-Axial life? Bellah’s
crucial insight, formulated in the phrase that “nothing is ever lost,” points
us toward some version of the second answer. Following him, I would find
it incredible that our history has been one of unadulterated gain, for this
would mean that the features I have outlined in the pre-Axial past have been
indeed well lost.
Notes
This chapter was originally published in a collection of my articles, Dilemmas and Connections:
Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 367–379.
Copyright © 2011 by Charles Taylor; reprinted by permission of the publisher.
1. S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Al-
bany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 1.
2. See his contribution in this volume.
3. See his “Religious Evolution,” chap. 2 of Beyond Belief (New York: Harper &
Row, 1970).
4. Robert Bellah, in his article “What Is Axial about the Axial Age?” Archives
Européennes de Sociologie 46, no. 1 (2005): 69–89, makes a similar point about what
he calls “tribal religion”: “Ritual in tribal societies involves the participation of all or
most members of the group” (69). He contrasts these with “archaic societies,” which
term designates the large-scale states that arose in the ancient world, and subjugated
many of the smaller face-to-face societies. These were hierarchical, and their crucial
rituals focused on crucial figures, kings or priests. But the face-to-face rituals con-
tinued, down at the base, and in Bellah’s mind, do so right up to our time. I have
been greatly helped here by the much richer account of religious development in
Bellah’s work: first in his “Religious Evolution” in Beyond Belief, and more recently
in the article quoted above. The contrast I want to make in this chapter is much
simpler than the series of stages which Bellah identifies; the “tribal” and the “ar-
chaic” are fused in my category of “early” or “pre-Axial” religion. My point is to
bring into sharp relief the disembedding thrust of the Axial formulations.
5. See, e.g., Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience (Oxford University
Press, 1961), chap. 3; Roger Caillois, L’Homme et le Sacré (Paris: Gallimard, 1963),
chap. 3.
6. This is a much commented upon feature of Aboriginal religion in Austra-
lia; see Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, L’Expérience mystique et les symboles chez les primitifs
(Paris: Alcan, 1937), 180ff.; Caillois, L’Homme et le Sacré, 143–145; W. E. H. Stan-
ner, “On Aboriginal Religion,” a series of six articles in Oceania 30–33, (1959–
1963). The same connection to the land has been noted with the Okanagan in
British Columbia; see J. Mander and E. Goldsmith, The Case against the Global
Economy (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996), chap. 39.
7. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in Three Essays (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975), 77.
8. Francis Oakley, Kingship (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 7. Bellah makes a fun-
damentally similar point, I believe, in “What Is Axial”: “Both tribal and archaic
religions are ‘cosmological,’ in that supernature, nature and society were all fused
in a single cosmos” (70).
9. See, for instance, Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age
Civilizations; see also Bellah, “What Is Axial.”
10. Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Zurich: Artemis,
1949). In using these terms, “Axial” and “post-Axial,” I am groping for an expres-
sion to distinguish two quite different forms of religious life, one of which goes
back much further than the other. But I am not necessarily accepting much of
what Jaspers associated with this term. For instance, I have no final view on
whether we can identify a par ticu lar “Axial Age” (Achsenzeit) when these impor-
tant changes occurred in civilizations far removed from each other more or less
simultaneously. The issue of what these important changes consist in has recently
come back to the center of scholarly attention, along with the renewed concern
with defining different civilizational traditions, after a long infertile period in
which Western thinkers remained spellbound by the extraordinary idea that
there was a single path, from “tradition” to “modernity,” which all societies were
bound to travel, some much earlier than others. See, for instance, Johann Arna-
son, S. N. Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock, Axial Civilizations and World History
(Leiden: Brill, 2005). I don’t want to take a stand in their very interesting debates,
for instance that between Eisenstadt and Wittrock about which changes were
crucial to the transitions. For my purposes here, the contrast between pre- and
post-Axial is defined by the features I enumerate in my text.
11. See Cho-Yun Hsu, “Historical Conditions of the Emergence and Crystalli-
zation of the Confucian System,” in Axial Age Civilizations, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt,
306–324.
12. In this sense, I agree with Eisenstadt’s formulation of one of the key changes
of the Axial period, “the emergence, conceptualization and institutionalization of
a basic tension between the transcendental and mundane orders”; with, of course,
the understanding that the “transcendental” order itself changes when the tension
arises. Eisenstadt, Axial Age Civilizations, 1.
13. Stanner, “On Aboriginal Religion”; the expression quoted figures in article 2,
Oceania 30, no. 4 (June 1960): 276. See also by the same author “The Dreaming,” in
Reader in Comparative Religion, ed. W. Lessa and E. Z. Vogt (Evanston: Row, Peter-
son, 1958), 158–167.
14. Stanner, “On Aboriginal Religion,” article 6, Oceania 33, no. 4 (June 1963):
269.
15. Louis Dumont, “De l’individu-hors-du-monde à l’individu-dans-le-monde,”
in Essais sur l’individualisme (Paris: Seuil, 1983).
16. I want to take account of Stanley Tambiah’s reservations about Dumont’s
formula “individual outside the world” in relation to the Buddhist renouncer; see
S. J. Tambiah, “The Reflexive and Institutional Achievements of Early Buddhism,”
in Axial Age Civilizations, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt, 466. The Bhikku is outside the
“world,” in the sense of the life of the society relating to the cosmos and gods. But
this doesn’t prevent, even perhaps renders inevitable, (a) a new kind of sociability
in which renouncers come together (the Sangha), and (b) relations of complemen-
tarity between renouncers and those in the world, whereby the latter can have
some part in what the renouncers are directly seeking (“merit”), or even (al-
though this may appear a deviation) whereby the spiritual power of monks can be
directed to the ordinary life-goals of the laity.
17. I have discussed this at greater length in A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2007), 45–54.
18. Bruce Kapferer, The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and
Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
19. Kapferer, The Feast of the Sorcerer.
20. Ibid., chap. 3.
3
An Evolutionary Approach to Culture
Implications for the Study of the Axial Age
merlin donald
One of my early heroes was the great literary theorist Northrop Frye. His
book Anatomy of Criticism took my young undergraduate imagination by
storm. Frye was a system builder, and I saw in his approach the possibility of
exploring the deepest interactions between the flow of cultural change, and
the reactions of creative minds to their situated historical contexts. Great
writers obviously held a high place in the governance of ideas and beliefs in
the cultures he examined. Yet their minds were also, unavoidably, creatures
of the cultural moment. The deep structure of their minds—the shifts in
cultural contexts that Frye was tracking—could not be understood outside
their specific time and place.
A little later, in graduate school, the neuropsychological theories of D. O.
Hebb revealed to me another possibility: that it might be possible to dis-
cover the deep structure of the mind by focusing on the workings of the
brain. Some years later, acknowledging this, I wrote: “Hebb was also a system-
builder, but he worked down in the dark mechanistic depths of the mind.
Where Frye had been on the bridge, surveying the passing landscape of
human culture, Hebb was in the engine room, tinkering with the mental ma-
chinery below. For the past twenty years I have worked down in the engine
room, and this is my attempt to connect what is happening at the cultural
surface with what little we know about what is happening below” (Donald
1991, 403). The last sentence still applies.
Most of the contributors to this book fall more into the Frye tradition
than I do and survey the landscape of culture with far more expertise than I
can muster. But they at least doff their caps to those of us who work down in
the engine room, and I hope this will lead to more interdisciplinary ex-
changes between the biological and cultural spheres of academe.
Robert Bellah’s (2011) ideas about a theoretic revolution during the Axial
Age address some of the earliest events in the long, painful, bloody (and still
unfinished) transition from the governance of Mythic culture to that of Theo-
retic culture. In the cognitive domain, this translates into a changed relation-
ship between two powerful ways of representing reality, and two uniquely
human cognitive systems, each derived from both biology and culture. How-
ever, on reading his chapters, I find myself challenged to clarify exactly what
I meant by proposing the Mythic and Theoretic categories in the first place.
Their origins lie in the most elemental cognitive components of the systems
needed to generate such cultures: memory mechanisms, representational
tools, and the new possibilities these create in the public arena. Obviously
(and unsurprisingly), these broad categories carry different baggage for dif-
ferent disciplines, and leave plenty of room for differences of opinion over
the definition of the Theoretic mode and the appropriate methodology for
its investigation in historical, as opposed to experimental, contexts.
It should be understood that the transition from the Mythic to the Theo-
retic mode, although a radical step in human cognitive evolution, was cul-
tural in its origins. Biologically, we are the same creatures as the people who
lived during the Axial Age; and, in the cognitive domain, they were proba-
bly similar to their ancestors of a few thousand years earlier. There is no
good evidence suggesting otherwise. Theoretic culture emerged largely from
a series of cumulative cultural innovations on the part of creative individu-
als. However, these innovations changed the nature of the cognitive games
people played, and eventually altered how we perceive, think, remember,
and conceive of reality; they even changed our sense of selfhood. These were
radical changes. However, we should not assume that there was any seri-
ous evolution of basic mental capacity, in the biological sense, during the
Axial Age.
The transition to Theoretic culture involved much more than a shift in the
direction of intellectual reflection or abstraction. It also entailed a major
change in the way human beings constructed reality and remembered what
they knew. This was also true of earlier transition periods in human evolu-
tion, with the difference that this transition was less dependent on changes
in biological memory, and more on the invention of efficient artificial mem-
ory media—that is, on various symbolic technologies that could store repre-
An Evolutionary Approach to Culture 49
sentations outside the brain. However, there was much more to it than ex-
ternal memory storage: new media also enabled human beings to restructure
their cognitive system, especially on the collective level. The new organiza-
tional and institutional structures that emerged from this process were truly
revolutionary in their effect. Before reviewing the principles underlying the
notion of Theoretic culture, it might be useful to review the underlying ra-
tionale for developing a cognitive classification of human culture in the first
place (Donald 1991, 1993, 1998a, 2008).
Basic Principles Underlying the Cognitive Classification

of Hominid Culture
Human cultures are by nature cognizing entities; that is, cognitive activity
is an integral part of their definition. Thus human cultures can perceive,
remember, decide, construct worldviews, and represent reality. The field of
cognitive science is typically identified with the study of single individuals,
as if the mind were locked in a brain box (which, to a large degree, it is).
However, human beings have a shared knowledge base, anchored in culture,
which is not restricted to the experience of individuals and is substantially
wider and deeper than any single person’s comprehension of it. The cogni-
tive activities of a culture are organized, governed, and distributed across an
entire population group. No individual mind can encompass the knowledge
of an entire culture. Rather, a cultural knowledge base is stored “in culture,”
that is, displayed and refined in the public domain and remembered by the
group. Moreover, a shared knowledge base can be highly idiosyncratic, which
explains the tremendous variety found in human cultures.
The gradual process of coevolving of the hominid brain and culture, so
that individuals increasingly fall under the sway of their cultures, might be
called “emergent enculturation.” This is the reverse side of the evolution of
representational skill at the species level. Once representations become pub-
lic, the public domain soon outstrips the capacities of individuals, and they
become heavily dependent on the state of the group knowledge. Brain evolu-
tion ceased at one point to be the dominant partner in this interaction. As a
consequence of this shift, the human brain has been adapting to the pres-
ence of cognizing culture for a very long time.
This scenario of human cognitive evolution revolves around a radical
shift from the “isolated minds” of other mammals toward the “collective”
mental work that characterizes symbol-using cultures. The collective knowl-

edge bank of culture is not, strictly speaking, a mind. Cognitive activity de-
pends ultimately on individual capacity; however, the latter constitutes a
major part of a distributed cognitive system. Enculturation has been a crucial
factor in establishing the parameters of capacity in individuals. Rapid hom-
inid enculturation has undoubtedly interacted with galloping brain evolu-
tion. The ability of individuals to cope with a rapidly evolving representa-
tional culture had immediate, and at times drastic, fitness implications.
Humans work and think together; isolated humans have always had a very
poor chance of survival and reproduction.
Our genetic proximity to primates emphasizes the uniqueness of human
cognitive evolution. Much larger genetic distances between species can exist
without correspondingly massive cognitive differences. Chimpanzees are
genetically closer to humans than they are to most other primates, and yet
their cognitive profile is far closer to that of other primates than it is to that
of humans. This suggests that, to account for the enormous cognitive gap
between chimpanzees and humans, genetics is not enough, we need to in-
voke an additional factor: brain-culture coevolution.
This entails a series of changes progressing in parallel. Culture establishes
the environment within which ontogenesis will take place, but the develop-
ing individual also contributes to the cultural environment. The representa-
tional environment can change, to a degree, during a person’s lifetime, and
it changes dramatically across generations. However, the primary creative
source of that change is the individual mind and brain. The level of intel-
lectual capacity of the group, visible at the cultural surface, is thus a product
of both factors, enculturation and raw brain capacity.
Nothing quite like this takes place in other species. There may be shared
patterns of learning (even mollusks have “local traditions” for feeding), and
there are parent–child interactions in many complex animals, but these can
be accounted for in terms of basic conditioning and learning theory and
should not be confused with the shared representational cultures of hu-
mans, whereby ideas, memories, and world models are shared.
Other species start at the same point in each generation; not so humans.
We do it from a new cultural base. The cognitive environment created by
culture deeply affects the way individual brains deploy their resources. Based
on archaeological data, the process of deep enculturation must have started
slowly in the Lower Paleolithic, or perhaps even earlier, with gradual incre-
ments to a primate-like knowledge base. It has accelerated exponentially in
anatomically modern sapient humans. Throughout this coevolutionary pro-
cess, one aspect of selection pressure has never been diluted: the more rapid
and substantial the change at the level of culture, the more crucial for survival
is the individual’s capacity to assimilate the current state of that culture.
Hominid cultures are classifiable in terms of their underlying cognitive
support systems and their governing styles of representation. Various features
of hominid society may be used as a basis for classifying them. A classification
by stone-tool technology gives us Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic cul-
tures; metal technology yields Copper, Bronze, and Iron Age cultures; diet-
based classifications give us preagricultural and agricultural societies; writing
technology yields preliterate and literate cultures; kinship systems lead to pa-
triarchal and matriarchal societies, and so on. These kinds of classifications
typically do not address cognition directly, although they might single out
aspects of behavior that are directly influenced by cognition.
However, the cognitive dimension is one of the most fundamental in set-
ting the parameters of a culture. Most other classifications of culture simply
assume certain levels of cognitive development in the members of the cul-
ture, without making this explicit. While the surface of cultural evolution is
marked by various concurrent changes, such as the presence of better tools,
different dwellings, complex social organization, elaborate decoration, and
the presence of symbols, the source of the changes observable at the cultural
surface often lies deeper, in the cognitive system.
This leaves us with many candidates to define the dimensions of human
cognition, and it is not immediately evident which of them are most impor-
tant. At first glance, language might appear to be the most obvious cognitive
dimension to single out. The emergence of language is often presented as the
major cause of cognitive evolution in hominids. But what is language, re-
duced to its fundamentals? In the Behaviorist and Connectionist traditions,
one might single out generally improved learning capacity as a more basic
variable; or one might choose the capacity to form new associations (see
Jerison 1973). There are many other traditional semiotic and cognitive clas-
sifications, usually based on theories of symbolic communication. However,
none of these seems to do justice to the collective dimension of cognition, or
deal adequately with the apparent qualitative changes in the brain that marked
the succession of hominid cultures as they progressed from one stage to the
next; hence the need for a more comprehensive theory.
Many cognitive functions underwent radical change in hominids. These
include a wide range of voluntary nonverbal expression, iconic and meta-
phoric gesture, mutual sharing and management of attention, self-cued re-
hearsal, refinement and imitation of skills, generative (self-cued and inno-
vative) imagery, improved pedagogy, and other means of diff using skill and
knowledge (such as social ritual). In addition, there was also faster commu-
nication, increased memory storage, a capacity for voluntary (explicit) re-
trieval from memory, new forms of representation (including words and
larger narrative structures), autobiographical memory, shared representa-
tional control of emotions and instinctual reactions, more complex overall
structure (architecture) of representation and memory, and, finally, the inte-
gration of material culture into a distributed cognitive-cultural process. The
list could easily be extended to include many other features and traits.
The features special to human culture and cognition are extraordinarily
complex, general in their applications, and interrelated; and it appears un-
likely that they evolved in parallel, each for a separate reason. There must be
simplicity in any underlying Darwinian process, even one that supports the
emergence of very complex features. The tentative list of evolving primate
functions may be reduced to a much shorter list: (1) evidence for qualitatively
new governing representations, (2) which are inherently public in their man-
ner of expressing knowledge, (3) and a novel, semiautonomous layer of cul-
ture that follows from the emergence of the first two factors.
My criterion for establishing three major evolutionary “transitions” in
cognition (as opposed to minor changes) was that all of these fundamentals
had to converge in any proposed cognitive-cultural transition period. In this
case, archaeological and genetic evidence can establish a rough chronology,
and cognitive neuroscience can provide a reference model for a logical se-
quence of change.
Memory retrievability was one of the first requirements. Human beings
can search their memory banks; other species cannot. Language is one of
the major benefits of this ability, but, paradoxically, language also vastly
amplifies this ability to recall. The most basic benefit of voluntary access to
memory is skill; the refinement of skill demands that previous performances
become available to voluntary recall. This ability is more basic than lan-
guage, because the retrievability of morphemes (a skill) is a logical precon-

dition of language, and therefore recall cannot be attributed exclusively to
language itself. On the contrary, no morphophonology could have evolved
without a prior capacity for voluntarily retrieving the procedural memories
that encode morphemes. Language must have emerged long after our ability
to rehearse and refine skill (Donald 1991).
There are two possible routes to evolving improved procedural memory
retrieval. The first would be a brain-based feature, such as a precise address-
able system for locating specific memories in the brain, perhaps something
resembling a fi le allocation table. However, since this does not exist in non-
human mammals, an address system would have to have evolved in such a
way as to impose something resembling a file allocation table on preexisting
primate cognitive architectures. This seems highly unlikely, to say the least,
given the complex design of the ner vous system. The second possibility is to
evolve a system based partly in culture, which could yield accessible repre-
sentations by hanging a cultural coding system on a more primitive brain-
based recall feature, without invoking any radical changes in the design of
the primate neural address system.
In the light of current research, the second route is the only feasible ap-
proach to language evolution. A new representational process with this fea-
ture of self-retrievability would provide a new memory storage strategy for
the hominid brain. Public systems are necessarily based on output (knowl-
edge that cannot be “expressed” would stay locked inside the individual
brain). Therefore, this adaptation must have engaged the production sys-
tems of the brain, especially the voluntary movement systems.
A rule thus emerges as a basis for a valid cultural-cognitive classification
system: at each new stage of cognitive evolution, there should be evidence of
an expanded range of voluntary expressive outputs, resulting in an increase
in the variability of behavior and thought, and a change in public culture.
This holds equally for each stage in human cognitive evolution, although the
degree of change might be quite different at each stage. Thus, to establish an
evidential foundation for each stage or transition, there should be proof of a
major change in each of the three parameters listed above: (1) a new cate-
gory of memory representation (2) that is inherently public and (3) sup-
ports a distinct cognitive-cultural “layer,” which has its own mechanism and
rationale.
Establishing a Rough Chronology of

Hominid Cognitive Evolution
Using these criteria, the first two major transition periods in hominid cogni-
tive evolution seem to correspond roughly to two important speciation events
in the prehistory of our species: first, the emergence of species Homo over
two million years ago, and then the emergence of sapient Homo from archaic
forms, over the past half million years. These two extended evolutionary
events coincide approximately with the first two major cognitive-cultural
periods of change in human evolution, with the first leading to advanced mo-
tor skills, and Mimetic culture; and the second to language, storytelling, and
Mythic culture. Of course, specialists may want to propose finer distinctions
within these wide time periods, and such distinctions may be justified. More-
over, it is possible that stone toolmaking was achieved first by late australo-
pithecines, several hundred thousand years before the speciation of Homo.
But toolmaking advanced further only after the appearance of Homo, with
the appearance of Acheulean industries, and there seems to be no doubt that
these two speciation events coincide with major anatomical changes in
Homo, as well as changes in the survival strategy of the species.
Table 3.1 summarizes some of the main features of the model (Donald
1991, 1993, 1998a, 2001). Cultures are classified here primarily in terms of
their dominant or governing representations. The labels given to each stage—
Episodic, Mimetic, Mythic, and Theoretic—correspond to the nature of the
“top” representational structures that control thought, memory, and per-
ception in the corresponding stages of human cognitive and cultural evolu-
tion. As hominids evolved better mimetic and linguistic abilities, first mi-
metic and then narrative thought dominated the hominid cognitive agenda.
This is a cascade, or cumulative, model: previous adaptations are preserved,
following the principle of conservation of gains. Top or governing represen-
tations were thus not the only cognitive-cultural representations circulating
in the human matrix as evolution moved forward; they were the ones with
the most influence at that stage. For example, in Mythic cultures, the gov-
erning ideas tend to be narrative constructs, which dominate whatever mi-
metic and episodic representations are present in those societies.
The starting point for this scenario is Miocene primate culture. This was
approximated by comparing the two ape species closest to humans, gorillas
Table 3.1. Proposed successive stages, or “layers,” in the evolution of primate/hominid culture, using a cognitive criterion for
classification
Novel forms of
Stage Species/period representation Manifest change Cognitive governance
Episodic Primate Complex episodic Improved self-awareness Episodic and reactive;

event-perceptions and event-sensitivity limited voluntary
expressive morphology
Mimetic Early hominids, peaking Nonverbal Revolution in skill, gesture Mimetic; increased
(1st transition) in H. erectus; action-modeling (including vocal), variability of custom,
4M– 0.4 mya nonverbal communica- cultural “archetypes”
tion, shared attention
Mythic Sapient humans, peaking Linguistic modeling High-speed phonology, Lexical invention,
(2nd transition) in H. sapiens sapiens; oral language; oral social narrative thought, mythic
0.5 mya–present record framework of governance
Theoretic Recent sapient cultures Extensive external Formalisms, large-scale Institutionalized
(3rd transition) symbolization, both theoretic artifacts, and paradigmatic thought
verbal and massive external memory and invention
nonverbal storage
Note: mya = million years ago. Each stage persists into the next and continues to occupy its cultural niche; thus fully modern human societies
incorporate aspects of all four stages of hominid culture. The upper Paleolithic seems to be situated pretty clearly in the oral/mythic cultural tradition,
but it set the stage for the expansion.
and chimpanzees, and drawing out common cognitive traits. Following

standard evolutionary logic, a trait common to both of these modern spe-
cies must have been present in the primate ancestor we share with them. On
this basis, it is fair to label the representational style of apes as “episodic,”
that is, concrete and reactive, and bound to their sophisticated mastery of
social and environmental events.
A key contrast between these apes and humans is their remarkably lim-
ited and stereotyped range of expressive outputs. This applies even to Savage-
Rumbaugh et al.’s (1993) demonstration of symbolic skills in bonobos. They
can comprehend a surprising amount of gesture and speech in an episodic
context, but cannot invent such representations de novo, or transcend a spe-
cific context. Their gesturing is very limited, and they cannot generate even
the simplest kinds of pantomime or metaphoric gesture. It may appear ironic
that modern apes find it much easier to learn a human symbolic system,
such as an electronic keyboard of symbols, than a simple set of gestures. But
this is because the keyboard is a means of bypassing mimesis and the need
to self-generate a set of expressions. In sum, though their powers of under-
standing are formidable, modern apes evidently find it impossibly difficult
to construct meaningful expressive actions that encapsulate and reflect their
own understanding of events. By extension, their Miocene common ances-
tor with humans must have also lacked that expressive capacity.
During the evolution of the hominid line, this expressive limitation was
obviously overcome, inasmuch as hominids have evolved both mimesis and
language. I have proposed that mimesis came first, because it is a logical
precondition for the evolution of language (Donald 1998b). Moreover, mi-
metic expression would have been sufficient to sustain the type of culture
that characterized hominids for millions of years. Mimesis is the conceptual
“missing link” between the episodic cultures of apes and the classic preliter-
ate oral cultures of most documented human societies.
Mimesis is an embodied, analog, gestural mode of expression that is in-
herently reduplicative and collective in nature. It turns the public arena of
action into theater. Hence, in a sense, the primal form of distinctly human
culture is theatrical, embodied, and performance-oriented. Humans are ac-
tors, and initially, in its archaic form, the public face of Mimetic culture was
a theater of embodied action, manifest especially in the well-documented
proliferation of refined skills among archaic hominids. It was also evident in
their ability to coordinate their hunting behavior (suggesting at least some

limited conventionalized gesturing) and in the emergence of ritualized pat-
terns of cultural practice, such as coordinated seasonal migrations, shared
campsites, and some division of labor.
Mimesis is easy to misunderstand (and even to miss altogether) if one
subscribes to a logic-based account of thought and language. For example,
C. S. Peirce’s system of classifying symbols steps from the indexical to the
symbolic in a single saltation, and leaves out mimetic expression completely.
This is the heart of my objection to Deacon’s (1997) theory of language evo-
lution. The same applies to many other attempts to reduce thought to some
form of formal logic or Language of Thought (as in Fodor 1975). Mimesis
does not easily fit this mold, because it is an analog form of expression, with-
out explicit symbols or grammars. Mimetic pantomimes are closer to the
logic of neural nets: holistic, impression-forming reduplications of prior
events that amount to vague, impressionistic, and imprecise performances.
Mimesis is pure embodied action. It entails a revolution in primate motor
skill at the highest level of control. In mimetic performances, action is con-
nected directly to event-perception. Why would such a capacity have evolved?
The answer is skill. The primary selection advantage of mimetic capacity is
being able to refine and disseminate skills. Early hominids were highly
skilled—much more so than apes. This is evident in the archaeological re-
cord from finished stone tools that are 2.6 to 3.4 million years old. Conceiv-
ably, mimesis might have started to evolve much earlier. Based on stone
tools alone, we know that late australopithecines, Homo habilis, and certainly
Homo erectus, had the ability to rehearse and evaluate, and thus refine, their
own actions. This is direct evidence for mimetic capacity. Rehearsal is essen-
tially a mimetic action: the individual must reenact a previous performance
in order to practice and improve it.
Human mimetic performances are supramodal; that is, they can engage
any voluntary action system. The implications of evolving a supramodal
capacity to review and rehearse action were tremendous: the entire skeleto-
motor repertoire of hominids became voluntarily modifiable, and the re-
finement of skill became possible. Moreover, given the close relation of ac-
tion to emotion, there was a major emotional dimension to mimetic skill.
Mimesis would have changed the primate repertoire for expressing emo-
tion, which was inherited by hominids.
One corollary of this development was increased variability in the mor-

phology of action in hominids. The body became a plaything, something
with which to experiment. As a result, mimesis greatly increased the vari-
ability of behavior and emotional expression in society, while simulta-
neously increasing the pressure to conform, which is also inherently mimetic.
The result was the rapid emergence of largely nonsymbolic forms of human
culture; the public surface of such a culture can be seen as “reflective” of
coordinated group action patterns, while individuals “reflect” the group.
Mimetic culture still forms the underpinning of human culture. It per-
sists in numerous cultural variations in expression, body language, and ex-
pressive custom (most of which people are unaware of and cannot describe
verbally), as well as in elementary craft and tool use, pantomime, dance,
athletic skill, and prosodic vocalization, including group displays. The mi-
metic dimension of modern culture is recognizable by its primarily analog
mode of imagining, which is sometimes (inappropriately) called “simula-
tion.” This type of imagination—mimetic imagination—recreates an expe-
rience in real time. It survives in the performing arts and in the essentially
theatrical nature of human relationships and living patterns. It also survives
in music and visual art. Most visibly, it is the basis of role-playing, fantasy,
and self-identification with various roles.
Although its evolution was originally driven by selection pressure favor-
ing the obvious utilitarian advantages of skills such as toolmaking, mimesis
inadvertently presented a revolutionary opportunity for the human species.
It provided the basis for a shared collective memory system for the group. By
this I mean a system of remembrance that is able to “store” the customs and
styles of a group in distributed social-cognitive networks of practice. Such
networks are distributed across many brains, and they are held together by
social and emotional bonds that cause the interacting members of a culture
to cohere into working groups. These networks efficiently consolidate and
transmit the mimetic “knowledge base” for any given culture, passing it on
to the next generation. Although mimetic actions are always played out in
individuals, the mimetic knowledge base of any culture is larger than any
individual, and in its complete form resides only in the cultural plexus,
which thus serves as a collective memory record, even in cultures that lack
language. It records and transmits the customs, styles of emotional expres-
sion, skills, and rituals of the group in and to the networked minds that
make up the culture. Although such networks may exist in rudimentary

form in other species, they had to expand to sustain the kind of cultures that
were characteristic of early Homo.
In its early form, this collective social-cognitive process had to rely en-
tirely on the brain’s innate procedural and emotional memory systems, dis-
tributed across many brains, rather than in those of any single individual.
This knowledge base contained an enormous amount of information about
skill and the conventional expression and control of emotion. Emotional
expression is for the most part culturally idiosyncratic in its details, and its
specific forms are learned in the context of mimetic scenarios. Children
must learn how to react emotionally in a way that is compatible with their
culture, and they achieve this by reduplicating observed cultural parame-
ters in action and feeling. This can lead to wide disparities between cultures.
For example, where one culture might prohibit ambition and rebelliousness,
another might promote them. One consequence of this is that the surface of
social life can vary significantly between human cultures, much more so
than between other primate cultures. Learning was thus central to hominid
social life very early in human evolution, and was critical not just for the
improvement of skills but also for emotional expression.
Mimetic communication, independently of language, can support lim-
ited public storage and transmission of knowledge by nonverbal means,
such as gaze, gesture, and mimetically coordinated group behavior. Mimetic
capacities generated a new class of hominid representations that accumulated
over generations, shaping the forms and standards of behavior in emerging
hominid cultures, and preserving both motor and social skills in the context
of consensual body language, accepted convention, and group gesture. This
became a defining feature of hominid life and remained as the prototype of
later human cultures, even after we evolved language. Mimesis was a success-
ful adaptation that endured for well over two million years without language.
This does not rule out the presence of the mimetic equivalent of words—
simple conventionalized gestures—long before language emerged at the level
of narrative, much later in hominid evolution.
The second major hominid cognitive transition mediated the shift from a
purely mimetic form of culture to speech, storytelling, and fully developed
oral-mythic culture. This revolutionary development precipitated a repre-
sentational shift away from slow-moving mimetic customs, toward group
storytelling, which can convey huge amounts of knowledge at speeds that

are inconceivable in a mimetic context. With language, the collective knowl-
edge base would thus have accelerated its development to the point where
narrative became the dominant, or governing, cognitive mode of hominids,
replacing mimetic governance with an allegorical form of thinking that I
have labeled “Mythic.” This radical new capacity was scaffolded on the pre-
existing mimetic competence, and would have been impossible to evolve
without it (see Donald 1998b).
Judging from archaeological and paleontological evidence, this radical
change emerged only recently, over the past three or four hundred thousand
years, and culminated in the speciation of modern Homo sapiens. Oral cul-
ture is the signature of our species. It is a specialized adaptation that supple-
ments, but does not replace, the cognitive functions served by Mimetic cul-
ture. This adaptation introduced a new layer of culture, so that both human
cognition and its associated cultural domains became more complex and
multilayered.
Mythic culture is so named because its governing representations cohere,
in any given culture, in a shared narrative tradition: an oral, public, stan-
dardized version of reality, full of mythic archetypes and allegories, can ex-
ert direct influence over the form of individual thought. The central struc-
tures of oral-mythic culture emerged as the hominid capacity for language
became universal. It was a direct product of language, and it introduced both
a level of culture that remains firmly at the center of human social existence,
and a powerful means of recall from memory that proved faster and more
precise than the imagery-driven retrieval enabled by mimetic representation.
Language also revolutionized thought. The essence of language lies in its
power to address, define, and organize knowledge and to make it accessible
to further reflection.
The advent of language also provided a novel means of collective remem-
brance, a shared narrative. This shared record affected the developmental
process, providing the grounding for autobiographical memory, that is, for a
personal narrative of the self. This process emerged from the same semantic
foundation as mimetic expression itself: the event-representation. Narrative
acts, like mimetic acts, are constructed from event-representations, and the
whole elaborate cognitive system of Homo, including mimesis and language,
is effectively an increasingly abstract and powerful hierarchy of event-

representations (Donald 1991; Nelson 1996). This has had many ramifica-
tions on human brain design. The power of language to parse and reduce
very large and complex events into compact coded messages required sig-
nificant changes to the executive and metacognitive systems of the brain,
and to memory capacity (Donald 2001).
The public expressive offspring of this budding new narrative ability was
a liberated imagination that enabled human beings to rearrange complex
events in imagination or even to invent fictitious ones, as in storytelling and
fantasy, allowing limitless variations in how the shared reality of the group
might be construed. This powerful ability is exclusive to our species, and is
one of our signature cognitive traits, but it complicated social life immensely.
The search for coherence and trust dictated a set of social controls, and cog-
nitive governance became a survival-related necessity. The ruling myths of
human society, including stories of origin, rationalizations of power, leg-
ends of tribal identity, allegories of correct behavior, and many other ruling
ideas, have provided top governance for all the classic forms of society and
have had an enormous impact on how human life is lived.
The depth of enculturation that a human infant typically experiences has
no equivalent elsewhere in the biosphere, when examined in terms of the
intimate cognitive embrace of the society into which it is born. Exposure to
this kind of deep enculturation can result, quite literally, in an alteration
of one’s mental structure, or cognitive architecture. This can occur because
culture not only influences mental development but sets up the actual ap-
paratus with which one conceives reality. This shaping influence continues
throughout life, on every level, and various scholars (perhaps most notably
Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self ) have tried to find a way to reconcile this
all-encompassing cultural embrace with our Western notions of individual-
ity and autonomy.
In the context of what we know about the brain and its relationship to the
cognitive system, the effect of culture on the human mind amounts to
a virtual symbiosis. The human brain has coevolved alongside its cognizing
cultures for two million years and has reached a point where it cannot realize
its design potential outside of culture. The apparatus of mind itself, and the
operational configuration of the brain, which regulates it, are, in significant
part, a result of enculturation. This is due to the extreme plasticity inherent in

the expansion of the cerebral cortex that occurred during human evolution.
We are a species that, above all, adapts and learns, and does this in groups.
Our personal experiences can translate into group knowledge and thus give
a human society the potential to function as a cognitive network. We share
mind. Our cultures are vast mindsharing networks that enable us to think,
remember, decide, and plan in the context of what the group knows, in-
tends, tolerates, or condemns. This property, found only in humans, gives
human culture a cognitive dimension that structures the individual brain.
Cognizing cultures are highly unpredictable; they generate an unprece-
dented amount of continually changing knowledge—as in common gossip,
for example—and tracking the state of that social knowledge bank is a
survival-related cognitive skill. One of the primary drivers for the evolu-
tion of language may have been the need to track the fast-changing state of
social knowledge in groups. A human mind that has never developed lan-
guage is nevertheless distinctly human in many ways; but it is tremendously
impaired in the domain of social knowledge. Even the episodic memory sys-
tem, the most personal and vivid of our memory systems, is deeply impaired
in those who lack language. Deaf people who have acquired sign language as
adults have great difficulty remembering anything about their prelanguage
lives or selves. Language is thus a vital component of human autobiographi-
cal memory.
However, language does not self-install in an infant who is isolated from
society. It is acquired only after the individual joins a social group (even a
group of two) and assimilates the codes, rules, and associated meanings of
whatever communication system the group may have. This is usually a grad-
ual, guided process, involving the acquisition of attention skills that make it
possible for the child to know where to look in order to narrow the range of
possible meanings that could be affixed to the chaos of sound emitted by
adults speaking. Culturally embedded human infants can pick up language in
a seemingly effortless manner, yet the isolated human infant cannot even con-
ceive of the possibility of language when left on its own. Such a child, even if
instructed later as an adolescent or adult, will never be able to master lan-
guage or symbolic thinking. Here, as the work of Trevarthen (1980), Toma-
sello (1999), and Nelson (1996), among others, has shown, early socialization
is the key factor. Moreover, an understanding of reciprocal attention and an

awareness of knowledge in others are crucial for language learning. Schaller
(1991) has shown that deaf people raised without sign, but who are otherwise
normally socialized, can acquire language as adults, provided their emotional
and attentional connections with society were established early enough.
In summary, the organizational structures of two critical cognitive sub-
systems, mimesis and language, are dependent on growing up in a specific
kind of social-cognitive ecology. This insight has moved experimental liter-
ature away from the idea of innate, self-organizing language modules to-
ward the investigation of such basic cognitive skills as joint attention, play
and mimetic games, imitation, triadic gaze, and the child’s awareness of
others, a complex epistemological domain sometimes known as intersubjec-
tivity, or theory of mind. This work is nicely summarized in Nelson’s book
Young Minds in Social Worlds (2008).
An important corollary to this idea is that, as hominid culture has evolved,
so has the human mind. While the early emergence of mimetic capacity must
have been entirely dependent on the biological evolution of the brain, the evo-
lution of language was interwoven with social and cultural evolution. This
was a coevolutionary scenario: as one of the two factors (culture and biology)
changed, so, inevitably, did the other. The direction of hominid cognitive evo-
lution was increasingly dependent on hominid cultural evolution. Hominids
were becoming the ultimate social species, whereby the mind was merging
with culture.
These two changes, mimesis and language, set the stage for the later ex-
plosion of material culture in modern humans. In the human evolutionary
succession, the two early adaptations that gave humans, first, distinctive
nonverbal intellectual skills, and then verbal intellectual capacities, were
biologically driven. Moreover, they were interrelated, inasmuch as the sec-
ond transition undoubtedly triggered a further expansion of nonverbal mi-
metic capacities. Oral-mythic culture, as documented in anthropology, en-
compasses both the mimetic and mythic capacities of humans. Typically, in
such cultures, despite the strong presence of mimetic representations, the
oral realm dominates. This complex cultural structure, grafted onto an under-
lying cognitive architecture that remained basically primate, defined the
cognitive inheritance of all humans in the Upper Paleolithic.
The Third Transition: The Rise of Theoretic Culture

The third transition, a cultural explosion that has gradually led humanity
from preliterate cultures to symbolically literate societies and theoretic gov-
ernance, has been marked by a long, sporadic but nevertheless culturally
cumulative history.
The invention of new memory media was an event of prime importance in
this transition, because it readjusted the parameters of communication and
memory in the collective social-cognitive structures of society. This culmi-
nated in advanced systems of writing and the subsequent externalization of
memory storage, which gradually changed the governance hierarchy so that
ideas and images, and especially the historical record, were brought under
centralized control.
This shift was facilitated by the technology of writing and other crafted
symbolic devices, including built structures such as temples and monu-
ments. The revolutionary nature of these developments is not immediately
obvious, but reflection leads to the conclusion that the cognitive properties
of external memory (as opposed to internal or “biological” memory) are
fundamentally different from those of the memory systems of the brain.
Table 3.2 illustrates some of these special properties.
Using a computational analogy, it is evident that a distributed system of
computers with the memory features listed in the right column of Table 3.2
(external memory media) would have radically different capabilities from a
system limited to those features found in the left column (internal or biologi-
cal memory media). The same applies to a distributed memory system con-
sisting of brains in culture. Under the right circumstances, the addition of
external memory devices will afford an increase in the cognitive potential of
the system, in direct proportion to the sophistication of those devices. The
differences between the two columns imply that, in some historical circum-
stances, symbolic media could give human beings a technologically driven
increase in the capability of the distributed social-cognitive system that gov-
erns society. The changes in this system also would have affected individuals
born into the network, by changing the course of cognitive development.
Artificial memory media are crucial because they can remove some of the
memory load imposed by a task and turn many difficult mental operations
into simple automatic rituals: for example, addition and subtraction can
Table 3.2. Comparison of the properties of internal and external memory
Internal memory External memory
Internal memory record (engram). External memory record (exogram).

Fixed physiological media. Virtually unlimited physical media.
Constrained format, depending on Unconstrained format, and may be
type of record, and cannot be reformatted.
reformatted.
Impermanent and easily distorted. May be made much more permanent.
Large but limited capacity. Overall capacity unlimited.
Limited size of single entries (e.g., Single entries may be very large (e.g.,
names, words, images, narratives). novels, encyclopedic reports; legal
systems).
Retrieval paths constrained; main Retrieval paths unconstrained; any feature
cues for recall are proximity, or attribute of the items can be used for
similarity, meaning. recall.
Limited perceptual access in Unlimited perceptual access, especially in
audition, virtually none in vision. vision.
Orga nization is determined by the Spatial structure, temporal juxtaposition
modality and manner of initial may be used as an organizational device.
experience.
The “working” area of memory is The “working” area of memory is an
restricted to a few innate systems, external display which can be orga nized
such as speaking or subvocalizing to in a rich 3-D spatial environment.
oneself, or visual imagination.
Literal retrieval from internal Retrieval from external memory produces
memory achieved with weak full activation of perceptual brain areas;
activation of perceptual brain areas; external activation of memory can
precise and literal recall is very rare, actually appear to be clearer and more
often misleading. intense than “reality.”
become trivial tasks, whereas they are next to impossible without appropri-
ate written notations. Symbolic devices can influence the representational
process itself, by changing the constraints on imagination. External sym-
bolic technologies can also create stable displays that allow iterative cycles of
refinement and permit completely new types of representations. Examples of
revolutionary symbolic systems might include currencies, monetary systems,
paintings and sculptures, symbolic buildings such as churches, maps, math-

ematical equations, scientific diagrams, novels, architectural schemes, eco-
nomic reports, archives, and records of trade. The availability of such things
can greatly improve the ability of a society to think clearly.
Another revolutionary development following the invention of symbolic
technology was cognitive engineering, that is, the deliberate design of de-
vices designed to serve a purely cognitive end: the creation of a mind-state
in a specific audience. Books, plays, musical performances, and public spec-
tacles assumed great importance because they could set up states of mind in
individuals that simply cannot be brought into existence any other way. This
empowered a new class of creative individuals and changed the political
demands placed on governments. This demonstrates the wide influence of a
changed cognitive ecology.
External symbols have supported the growth of a novel, semiautonomous
realm of human culture, including an institutionalized literate elite. It has
also generated a new layer of culture, not yet universal, but already placed in
a governing position globally: Theoretic culture. The emergence of Theoretic
culture depends upon an entrenched change in how humans think and
solve problems. The thought process itself can be changed by means of cul-
tural algorithms driven by interactions with external symbols, which grad-
ually develop into mental habits that support paradigmatic thought; these
are epitomized in bureaucracies. These habits of mind, after thousands of
years of experience with symbolically literate cultures, remain difficult to
transmit to cultures that lack them. Theoretic skills include a variety of
thought-algorithms that are by no means innate and whose genesis is incon-
ceivable outside the context of a highly symbol-dependent society.
I have called the outcome of this third cognitive stage Theoretic culture
because, where the superstructure of external symbolic control has become
established to a sufficiently high degree, it has become the governing mode
of representation. Paradigmatic or logico-scientific thought, a style of group
thinking that is quite different from the narrative thought skills that govern
traditional culture, is not innate to the human brain or even to the larger
collective structures of culture. It consists of certain habits of thought—
algorithms that function in a close iterative symbiosis with external sym-
bols and that are governed by institutional structures in society.
Theoretic culture is dominated by a relatively small elite with highly de-

veloped literacy-dependent cognitive skills, and its principal instruments of
control, such as codified laws, economic and bureaucratic management, and
reflective scientific and cultural institutions, are external to the individual
memory system. This type of representation has gradually emerged as the
governing level of representation in some modern societies. Although it dom-
inates science, engineering, education, government, and the management of
the economy, it includes only a minority of humanity, and even in that mi-
nority, its influence remains somewhat tenuous.
Theoretic culture is thus still in the formative stage, and the third transition
is incomplete. Human beings have retained—and indeed have little choice in
this—the major elements of the first two transitions, because they are, in ef-
fect, hardwired, whereas the algorithms of Theoretic culture are not. Even the
most recent, cutting-edge postindustrial cultures encompass all these collec-
tive cognitive mechanisms and cultural levels at once, and certain aspects of
the culture of the developed world remain totally dominated by the mimetic
and mythic domains. Recent research on child development supports this no-
tion; the cognitive enculturation of modern children is highly complex, as
they are led through a tangled web of representational modes and intricate
institutionalized algorithms. In effect, we have become complex, multilay-
ered, hybrid minds, carrying within ourselves, both as individuals and as so-
cieties, the entire evolutionary heritage of the past few million years.
Sophisticated external memory technology (writing included) is too re-
cent an innovation for the human brain to have adapted, in the Darwinian
sense, to its presence. Perhaps the most convincing evidence of this is the
simple fact that most children, from any culture, can acquire full literacy in
virtually any system of writing. This argues strongly against a built-in brain
adaptation for reading and in favor of a universal human property of excep-
tional neural plasticity. The “literacy brain,” those circuits that have been
identified as the neural foundation of reading and writing, is evidence of
that plasticity. Entirely cultural in origin, the literacy brain is superimposed
on the brain’s innate wiring. There is now a growing experimental literature
on this topic (see Dehaene 2007; Donald 2010).
Minds that have acquired full literacy in some domain are made at once
more powerful, because they gain access to a shared external resource of
ideas and operations, and more vulnerable, because their deeply condi-
tioned interface in the brain of a literate person constitutes a direct path into
the deepest semantic systems of the brain. The interface architecture, nor-
mally acquired in childhood, continues to change throughout life. Its acqui-
sition requires considerable resources and probably involves trade-offs against
the brain’s capacities in other areas.
The Axial Age and the Initial Shift toward Theoretic Culture
During the first millennium bce, certain cultures were sufficiently devel-
oped that they built cities of some size, could rely on efficient food supply
systems that produced a surplus in most years, and had governments whose
tentacles extended far beyond the boundaries of the city. At the same time,
these cultures had to absorb the harsh realities of the new order: absolute
authority at the top and a very clear signal that the individual was reduced
in stature, relative to the power of the social hierarchy as a whole. In their
distinctive ways, each of the cultures discussed by Bellah (2011) adapted to
new conditions of life. These new conditions included a variety of major
cultural changes, including centralized state control over wealth and prop-
erty, a state monopoly on violence, and the adoption of literacy and record-
keeping. These conditions had already emerged in some earlier civilizations,
notably Egypt and Sumer, but by the time of the Axial Age, humanity had
accumulated much longer experience with a densely populated, hierarchi-
cal, and city-ruled lifestyle.
The technology of thinking and recording data also changed in important
ways. With the wide use of visual symbolism and ritual, along with more
sophisticated systems of writing, there were new opportunities, inherent in
the radical display and retrieval properties afforded by the improved media
of external symbolization to review and refine ideas, and to list and record
the reflections of individual thinkers for later public examination. There was
also an extensive division of cognitive labor (in all four Axial societies cov-
ered in Bellah’s book) introduced by the new order, with a rigid class struc-
ture and enormous discrepancies in access to knowledge and education.
This produced a class of people who had a more focused and intellectually
oriented way of life, as well as a literate audience, and created a demand for
what one might call performers in the “public metacognitive” domain, that
is, a domain whose principal concern was the oversight and analysis of hu-
man life itself, its origin, purpose, and subtleties. This generated a rich the-
matic narrative tradition, mostly in the form of selected stories, anecdotes,
and archetypes. The last were often portrayed in visual art and epitomized
certain strata of society, or areas of cultish interest.
This constituted a more formal kind of public reflection on every aspect
of life, from astronomy to zoology, including, of course, morality and the
social order. This systematization of inquiry was a relatively new phenome-
non, and the relative stability of society enabled this activity to be carried
out at a sufficiently safe distance from bare survival needs that it afforded
the extraction of abstract principles and practices. The latter went far be-
yond the compilation of simple folk aphorisms and generated a tradition of
learned specialists to whom most people, including the ruling class, looked
for guidance. Those traditions transcended space and time, even in India,
because they were supported by a rich variety of artificial memory devices,
ranging from monuments and sacred buildings to various forms of visual
art. This enabled the continuation of those traditions over long periods of
time, even after major disruptions due to wars, famines, and other disasters.
Then, as now, the scholars paid very close attention to the surviving work of
their forebears. Whether the reference points were written documents or
built environments did not matter, provided there was some sort of perma-
nent record against which to measure present action. Buddhism, Confu-
cianism, and monotheistic Judaism are highly distinctive traditions, and
one is hesitant to generalize across such diversity, but it seems reasonably
safe to conclude that they shared at least this enduring structural property.
In Greece, this trend became even more pronounced. The people in charge
of the tradition were, for the most part, professionals or semiprofessionals:
scribes and scholars, philosophers, poets, playwrights, artists, and literate
aristocrats. The Greek process was more public, more diverse, more special-
ized, and less arcane. For a brief period in Greece, this public intellectual
reflective activity developed into an evidence-based, analytic approach that
bore a significant resemblance to the modern methodology of analytic
thought. This was less true of other Axial Age civilizations, with the possible
exception of China in some limited domains. However, it is important to
note that Theoretic culture, as a governing force, did not spring fully armed
from this situation, even in Greece.
The Axial Age might be considered the first period that germinated the
seeds of later full-blown Theoretic cultures, such as those currently govern-
ing the developed world. The evolutionary trend in the direction of institu-
tionalized analytic thinking grew very slowly, and one valuable lesson we
can draw from the diversity of views summarized in Bellah’s (2011) survey
is that there were many possible responses to civilized life in the first millen-
nium. For example, whereas the Greek experiment depended heavily on
the habits of written scholarly reflection, India did not. It is debatable
whether the germs of true Theoretic culture existed anywhere but Greece at
that time. But the habit of analysis, reflection, careful defi nition of terms,
and the recording of debates carried over generations, and often at a great
distance, slowly grew, spread, and sowed the methodological seeds of a future
revolution.
That revolution can be viewed as a long historical shift from mythic to
theoretic cognitive governance, a shift that has taken over two thousand
years, and is still not complete. The dominance of the theoretic mode has
been consolidated only in the past two centuries, and it is far from being
universal or permanent. There are residual tensions that emerge from deep
structural incompatibilities between mythic and theoretic cultural-cognitive
governance. These are outlined briefly in Table 3.3.
The tendency of mythic traditions to be deep and slow to change stems
from their highly emotional roots in the mimetic domain: ritual, custom,
and rigid networks of practice, as well as stories that strongly support group
solidarity at the expense of inclusion and tolerance. Mythic cultures are by
nature authoritarian, and Theoretic cultures are able to become less authori-
tarian (although they too can fall back into rigid authoritarianism). It is
clear that these two cultural domains are difficult to reconcile. Yet they col-
lide daily in a globalized economy. There is no alternative to this, and their
reconciliation poses an urgent challenge in the modern world.
The evolutionary context leads to at least one major insight: cognitive-
cultural adaptations occurred in cascade, with each previous stage remain-
ing in certain domains where it served its purpose well. Thus the mimetic
still dominates in certain areas of cultural activity, and the mythic in others.
The cognitive system available to human beings has become wider, richer,
and much more flexible over time. This has happened despite the uneven
historical trajectory produced by the combination of sudden spurts of ad-
Table 3.3. Some apparent incompatibilities between mythic and theoretic styles of
cognitive governance
Mythic Theoretic
Narrative Analytic/paradigmatic
Authority-based Evidence-based
Slow, deep Fast, shallow
Inner focus Outer focus
Implicit analog logic Explicit symbolic logic
Highly emotive Much less emotive
Closed beliefs Open-ended beliefs
Allegorically grounded Analytically grounded
Largely oral mediation Largely technological mediation
Fixed, stable Change-oriented, unstable
vancement, long periods of stagnation, and many periods where this trend
toward increased complexity was severely reversed.
The trend widened to incorporate the institutional arena, with the emer-
gence of formal religious organizations, often identified with government,
and later, the educational system. The collective memory record also ex-
panded in a deeper cognitive sense, in that the accumulated wisdom was
written down, reviewed critically, edited, and often reformulated for future
generations. Above all, writing enabled scholars to build an apparatus of
thought that stepped outside the normal restrictions of time and space and
enabled conversations and debates to endure much longer than the life spans
of any of the participants. This was also possible without an extensive writ-
ten tradition, through rigidly preserved oral customs embedded in a physi-
cal environment that preserved memory by consolidating practice. In both
cases, artificial memory supplements were crucial to the preservation of the
tradition. However, there is no doubting the advantages of having a written
tradition. Writing added precision, and lent itself to wider variations in
opinion.
This notion, that every stage of human cognitive evolution found a per-
manent home in the evolving collective system, is somewhat similar to the
evolutionary principle of conservation of previous gains. Previous success-

ful adaptations remained in the system where they proved themselves effec-
tive, and the system slowly became more robust and capable of surviving
almost any major blow. This occurred without changing the basic facts of
human biology, or the existential dilemma facing every human being.
The modern mind reflects this fact. It is a complex mix of mimetic, mythic,
and theoretic elements. Art, ritual, and music reflect the continuation of the
mimetic dimension of culture in modern life. The narratives of the great
religious books reflect the mythic dimension, as do the many secular myths
of modern society. These two great domains—the mimetic and the mythic—
are mandatory, hardwired, and extremely subtle and powerful ways of think-
ing. They cannot be matched by analytic thought for intuitive speed, com-
plexity, and shrewdness. They will continue to be crucially important in the
future, because they reside in innate capacities without which human beings
could not function.
All of this must be placed in perspective. The Axial Age was not all things
to all men, so to speak. It did not see the invention of writing or literacy,
which were crucial cognitive innovations. These had emerged much earlier,
in Egypt and Sumer. The same was true of numeracy, central governments,
currencies, trade, bureaucracies, archival data, and libraries, all of which
came before. The Axial Age profited from these developments, but it did not
invent them. However, taken together, these prior developments set the
stage for the Axial Age and led to the creation of a new kind of social orga-
nization that was better able to deal with much larger population densities,
and the ensuing complications of daily life, than societies of any previous
era. They led eventually to a more specialized division of cognitive labor,
which allowed the cognitive activities of a society to be governed in a man-
aged corporate hierarchy, that is, a bureaucracy.
Viewed as cognitive networks, bureaucracies were revolutionary in their
function. Despite the fact that they are universally reviled, their emergence
was a major innovation. Bureaucracies are distributed cognitive networks
whose main functions are usually cognitive in nature: classification, decision-
making, planning, oversight, review, prioritizing, and control. They have
undoubtedly had a major effect on the ability of human beings to carry out
their cognitive business in the public domain, including such activities as
remembering, deciding, planning, and representing reality in large groups.
However, bureaucracies also preceded the Axial Age in some degree, and
once again, it cannot take the credit for their invention. Thus we must con-
clude that the unique genius of the Axial Age did not reside in this particu-
lar contribution either.
The Axial Age reaped the benefits of these earlier innovations. The stage
had been set for a different kind of cognitive innovation, on a more abstract
conceptual level. The central feature of the Axial Age, if there was a com-
mon feature in these four highly diverse societies, was a representational, or
worldview, revolution. These societies had each achieved a significant de-
gree of literacy (with the possible exception of India, but Bellah [2011] made
a good case for regarding their unique oral tradition as an effective substi-
tute), an existing bureaucracy, and a basic framework of social institutions.
However, they did not yet have the conceptual coherence that large societies
need to function smoothly. A new vision of human destiny was needed, one
that could harness the potential inherent in these powerful new societies. In
each case, a vision emerged, and each was revolutionary in its effect. Axial
societies provided their citizens with a means of connecting with a shared
conceptual framework to cope with the intellectual and spiritual challenges
of living in a new kind of social context.
As indicated at the beginning of this section, the Axial Age might be re-
garded as the time when humanity went through a major evolutionary step
in self-monitoring and supervision that can be described as metacognition.
This capacity is really an abstract form of self-awareness, a feature of mind
that is essential for planning action and for conscious self-regulation in
general. Metacognitive oversight also occurs at the group level, and even at
the population level, especially in the various arms of government. Social-
cognitive networks are able to develop perceptions, plans, and memories,
and to make decisions; and all of this requires metacognitive oversight, that
is, constant evaluative feedback on the effectiveness of these activities. This
is characteristic of governments and corporations, as well as smaller organi-
zations, and the successful functioning of such groups is contingent on es-
sentially the same mechanism of oversight—a collective equivalent of
metacognition—implemented for the benefit of the whole society.
Axial Age religions provided metacognitive oversight at the group level,
enforced by theocratic bureaucracies. This took different specific forms in
each society, but there was a common pattern: these cognitive-regulatory
agencies became prominent somewhere in the power structure. This over-

sight function also played out on the level of the individual life, in the form
of ritualized procedures for self-examination, self-correction, and self-
directed improvement toward the attainment of a personal ideal. The details
were different, but the underlying trend was the same.
The Axial Age was, above all, a period when human society began to re-
flect consciously on how to construct an institutional process of collective
self-regulation. It saw the establishment of several traditions whereby a pub-
lic process could institutionalize the metacognitive supervision of both in-
dividual and collective behavior. Although the process was always monopo-
lized by an elite (perhaps less so in Greece), it nevertheless provided a vital
feedback loop from individual to society, and returned a degree of responsi-
bility back to the individual. Reflection on the process of thought and action
became an essential part of public and private life.
Humanity, or rather, that part of humanity confronted with the need to
solve the problems of an increasingly urban and literate society, was experi-
menting with novel ways to view the human world. For some time, these
societies had been trying to cope with a new way of life that was different
from anything that had come before. The old visions and worldviews were
apparently not adequate to the task of carry ing people through these new
times. Perhaps old ideas had failed to make societies cohere as they had in
the past, in simpler tribal structures. Perhaps they had failed in the impor-
tant task of keeping the peace or establishing an enduring social order.
These stresses all present cognitive challenges to the basic assumptions that
people make when they live in a community and share resources. The an-
swer to the challenge was a formal process of metacognitive oversight.
This is admittedly a speculative thesis. Careful historical analyses will
be needed to expand, disprove, or verify many of these assertions. The Axial
Age is often associated with the birth of the modern world’s most successful
and enduring religions and philosophies, and with the beginnings of sys-
tematic science and philosophy. But I argue that it was much more than this,
because those developments are not what they might seem on a superficial
examination. In the evolutionary scenario described above, one must view
religious thinking, and especially the religious innovations of the Axial Age,
as the absolute cutting edge of human experience at that time. It is revealing
that the focus of this effort was not so much the analysis of the physical uni-
verse, but rather of the challenges presented by the new conditions of life in
a civilized environment.
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4
Embodiment, Transcendence,
and Contingency
Anthropological Features of the Axial Age
matthias jung
The process most often invoked in describing the hallmark of the Axial
Age—or, to circumvent tricky problems of timing and synchronicity, of the
Axial cultures—is the “discovery of transcendence.” “Transcendence,” how-
ever, covers a wide range of meanings. When applied to the distinction be-
tween our cognitive grasp of the world and its internal structure, for example,
it denotes an epistemological conviction that is entirely neutral with regard to
religious truth claims. The Axial Age debate emphasizes another aspect: it
takes the religions and philosophical worldviews developed in the Axial cul-
tures to be focused on a transcendent realm, a divine higher reality conceived
of as a normative criterion for the mundane order of society. This develop-
ment obviously has many facets and is embedded within a wide range of re-
lated changes spanning from technology to means of transportation, to politi-
cal organization. But one way or another, the sharp distinction between this
world and the transcendent realm of truth and normativity seems to be at the
center of the decisive developments. Yet it is far from clear what that means in
terms of its anthropological preconditions and possible consequences. If we
follow Karl Jaspers’ reading of the Axial Age, the main anthropological point
was Vergeistigung (“intellectualization” or “spiritualization”). But Vergeisti-
gung is a tricky and precarious achievement for organisms whose relation to
the world is shaped by their corporeality. Consequently, my essay tries to tackle
these problems from the perspective of a philosophical anthropology rooted
in a conception of the human being as an embodied symbol-user.
From this vantage point, it seems helpful to start by distinguishing be-

tween two facets of the concept of transcendence: one placing the emphasis
on content, the other on semiotic structure. Both aspects are interdependent
and rooted in characteristic properties of human, that is, symbolic language
and the corresponding modes of consciousness. Most symbols relate to their
referents indirectly, by relating to other symbols (among them iconic and
indexical signs, which refer directly) and thus enable speakers to refer to
“objects” which transcend the here and now: the world in its entirety, pos-
sible worlds, etc. In terms of the content of articulation, this symbolic refer-
ence to a realm of meaning that transcends the local settings is the dominant
aspect. In comprehensive worldviews as they emerged in the Axial Age, it
leads to new forms of symbolization in which the contrast between universal
aspirations and particular contexts generates a previously unknown dynam-
ics of change. A prominent case is the emergence of the Confucian concept of
ren (humaneness), in which an egalitarian anthropology is put up against all
traditional forms of group morality.1 Parallel developments can, for example,
be found in ancient Israel (the prophets shunning the established practices of
sacrifice) or Greece (phi losophers like Xenophanes criticizing anthropo-
morphic conceptions of the gods).
These fascinating developments, however, have a structural, semiotic side
as well, and a full understanding of the Axial Age’s impact requires the inte-
gration of both: if symbols refer indirectly, their content inevitably tran-
scends the immediate experience of the symbol-users. The discovery or con-
struction of transcendent realms of meaning is one side of the coin, the
awareness of their remoteness from the conceptual abilities of human be-
ings the other. An example of the dominance of the latter can be found in
classic Chinese Daoism with its emphasis on the semiotic gap between the
deeper reality and its linguistic representations. If we follow the hints of
evolutionary anthropology, this double-sided achievement appears to be the
conscious historic appropriation of something already implicit in the earlier
phylogeny of symbolic competences, namely their power to release commu-
nication from the constraints of physical contact with the environment. As
I would like to show later on, we need this distinction between the primor-
dial acquisition of symbolic means and their reflexive, higher-order use in
order to connect anthropological and historical discourse. Without it, it
would be very difficult to employ Merlin Donald’s stages of human evolu-
Embodiment, Transcendence, and Contingency 79
tion for the understanding of the Axial Age, as Robert Bellah does for
example.
In the picture I would like to draw, it is essential that the Axial civiliza-
tions encountered transcendence in a twofold manner: on the level of reli-
gious and philosophical worldviews and on the level of the process of sym-
bolizing itself. Naturally, both levels are intimately connected, and this is
where historical anthropology, concerned with reconstructing contingent
paths of human culture, meets philosophical and evolutionary anthropology—
both are concerned, in different ways, with reconstructing the overarching
structural conditions of this cultural diversity. This aspect of the concept
“Axial Age” is crucial because it points to conceptual alternatives to the
clear-cut dichotomy between universal features of mankind on the one hand
and cultural variables on the other. Some properties of homo sapiens’ cogni-
tive development in general may open up historical possibilities that are only
realized in some cultures but, once realized, produce universal possibilities
for all. I find this insight captured succinctly in Paul Ricoeur’s term “incho-
ate universals.”2
But even if the Axial Age’s discovery of transcendence can be interpreted
in this manner, as a contingent event of universal importance, the transcen-
dence of the signified over signification is still only one side of a semiotic
coin whose other side remains physiological and physical embodiment. This
is what Jaspers completely ignores in his original account of the Axial Age.
For him, the decisive point is the displacement of the mythical by the ratio-
nal, and in his existentialist, tragic account, the Axial Age’s upheaval of
thought failed, and did so—among other reasons—because the chasm be-
tween the intellectual avant-garde and ordinary people became too deep.
But this leaves out another possibility, for which I will argue here: that the
discovery of transcendence is misconceived as the move to freestanding,
second-order thought alone and, for reasons connected with the internal
logic of symbol-usage, that it had to find a new place for embodiment and
interactive, contextualized forms of meaning as well. This necessity created a
hitherto unknown tension, which to me seems among the worthiest candi-
dates for Ricoeur’s inchoate universals in anthropology. Symbolic meaning,
in establishing reference by creating inferential patterns between symbols
horizontally, introduces the possibility of transcending local and historical
limitations, but it can never rid itself of corporeal relations to the world in
the form of qualitative situations and local interactions. Thus ever since the
Axial Age, human beings have been confronted with the challenge to ac-
knowledge both the contingency and universality introduced by the tran-
scendence of meaning over symbols and the equally inescapable embodied-
ness of meaning. If we consider the range of problems in which this challenge
can be seen, spanning from philosophy of religion to the cognitive sciences,
it is close to impossible to overestimate the significance of the Axial Age.
My essay starts with an examination of the Bellah/Donald scheme of evo-
lution, placing it in the context of anthropological considerations centered
on the concept of “making it explicit.” This necessitates a closer look at the
models of sequentiality that are implied in the use of evolutionary schemes.
The main challenge will be to conceptualize the relation between the earlier
and the later stages of anthropological evolution in such a manner that nei-
ther embodiment nor symbolic universality are lost in the process. Two ex-
amples from the Axial Age will historically flesh out these rather abstract
deliberations, and finally I will suggest an anthropology of embedded tran-
scendence as the appropriate conceptual framework for dealing with the
Axial Age and its contemporary importance.
Four Rungs on the Ladder of Explication
Bellah relies on Donald’s Origins of the Modern Mind to integrate his own
account of religious evolution and his interpretation of the Axial Age into
the larger framework of mankind’s phylogeny. In this book, the anthropoge-
netic development has three phases: a mimetic period is followed by a myth-
ical and finally a theoretic one, each transition constituting a new level of
consciousness, relegating the evolutionarily older ways of relating to the
world to some cultural niche—yet always preserving, never replacing them,
so that all stages are simultaneously present in modern societies. In a later
book, A Mind So Rare, Donald tackled the problem of consciousness and
argued forcefully against reductionists like Daniel Dennett, the “capo di
tutti capi of the Hardliner School,”3 that it is not the subpersonal function-
ing of cognitive modules that dominates the human stage, as Dennett and
large parts of contemporary cognitive psychology would have it, but rather
consciousness itself as a “multilayered, multifocal capacity.” 4 Donald’s ap-
proach emphasizes the conscious mind and its achievements to such a de-
gree that it sees “culture itself, as well as its two principal by-products, lan-
guages and symbols” as “consequences of a radical change in the nature of
consciousness.”5
Donald’s critique of Dennett’s epiphenomenalistic view of consciousness
is entirely convincing and supported by impressive empirical findings. But
do the causal relations between consciousness and symbolic forms really
only flow from the former to the latter, as Donald’s talk about culture and
language as “by-products” seems to imply? This is obviously a crucial point
when it comes to the relation between the humanities and the life sciences,
but, less obviously, it is crucial for an understanding of the anthropological
importance of the Axial Age as well. This is clear upon further consider-
ation of the significance of Bellah’s first principle of inquiry, “nothing is ever
lost,”6 in light of the relationship between pre-Axial stages of sign-usage and
the Axial breakthroughs. My suggestion is therefore to supplement the Don-
ald/Bellah scheme of human evolution in two ways: first, by systematically
integrating mutually reinforcing feedback loops between levels of conscious-
ness and different modes of sign-usage. For this I will rely on Terrence Dea-
con’s account of the coevolution of brain and language in his book The
Symbolic Species.7 Second, I will situate it within the anthropological frame-
work of “making it explicit,” to borrow a phrase from Robert Brandom. For
Brandom, this phrase is meant to capture the distinctly human capability of
using symbols to create a “space of reasons” (Wilfrid Sellars), in which the
implicit meaning of practices is made explicit in propositions exchanged
and criticized in conversation—the “great good for discursive creatures”
like us.8 Here I will use the phrase somewhat liberally to stand for the an-
thropological insight that we are expressive beings all the way down, con-
stantly engaged in symbolic interpretation of what we are feeling and doing.
In this way, I place myself in a tradition of thought leading from Wilhelm
von Humboldt to Ernst Cassirer and Helmuth Plessner, while giving it a
pragmatic twist that borrows some elements of Brandom’s thought.
Thus we arrive at an anthropological ladder of explication with four dis-
tinct but functionally connected rungs, each of which relates a mode of
consciousness (Donald/Bellah) to a step on the way from the implicit to the
explicit (Brandom) and a specific form of sign-usage (Deacon). This pre-
pares the ground for the question I take to be crucial for understanding the
Axial Age in its relationship to Modernity, namely: How is the sequentiality
of this explication process related to the holistic and integrative nature of

symbolic communication and hence of religious and otherwise comprehen-
sive worldviews?
The ladder of explication, following Donald and Bellah, is erected on the
ground of the “episodic culture” we share with other primates, in which re-
ality is structured and individuated by feelings and habits which respond to
situations. The first transition then leads to “mimetic culture,” in Donald’s
words “the murky realm of eye contact, facial expressions, poses, attitude,
body-language, self-decoration and tones of voice.”9 Mimetic consciousness
marks the presymbolic starting point of symbolic meaning, the first rung
on the ladder of explication. It transforms events that simply happen and
conduct that simply occurs into structured, meaningful sequences, in which
meaning is shared via mutual embodiment. As recent research in cognitive
science, for example by Shaun Gallagher,10 has established beyond doubt,
mimetic meanings are operative not only in the phylogeny of humanity but
in ontogeny and in the everyday experience of competent adults as well. Long
before cognitive capabilities like theories of other minds are established, we
are related to our conspecifics via the direct coupling of our sensory-motor
systems, in which empathy is acted out mimetically. In the terms of Brandom’s
pragmatic linguistics, one could talk about meaning implicit in practices and
in the norms established when things are done in a specific manner.
Donald’s second transition, leading to the second rung of my ladder, re-
sults in mythic, narratively structured consciousness and can be identified
with the use of ordinary language—yet without the employment of its built-
in logical features of reflexivity, which is the hallmark of theoretical culture.
In Donald’s evolutionary scheme, which provides the framework for Bel-
lah’s account of the Axial Age, mythical culture is oral symbolic culture.
The third transition, starting about forty thousand years ago and finally
leading to rung number three, theoretical culture, is brought about not
by the acquisition of a new type of signing and reference, but rather by a
new internal sophistication of language, a revolution in the technology of
symbols, namely the development of external symbolic devices, first of all
of inscription systems. It is here that I want to introduce Deacon’s story of
symbolic evolution. Deacon and Donald both highlight the continuity of
the human brain structure with the “old primate brain” and the qualitative
novelty of human consciousness, and Donald even underlines the “spiraling
coevolution of thought and symbol,”11 but for him the emphasis is on the
phylogeny of consciousness and cognitive evolution, whereas Deacon fo-
cuses on the reciprocity of brain and sign-usage development. His under-
standing of the latter is inspired by the semiotics of Charles Peirce, which he
takes as a guideline to structure phylogeny. The basic distinction is between
three types of signs, Peirce’s famous trichotomy of icon, index, and symbol,
and the main transitions occur between three forms of reference and mean-
ing corresponding to iconicity, indexality, and symbolicity. If we try to map
Deacon’s threefold distinctions onto the Donald/Bellah scheme, some inter-
esting difficulties arise that are highly instructive for our understanding of
the Axial Age.
Starting with mimetic consciousness, it seems plausible to identify it se-
miotically with the stage of iconicity. Mimesis dwells on likenesses and cor-
responds to the phenomenal aspect of cognition, to Dewey’s “underlying
and pervasive quality”12 and to Peirce’s firstness. Likewise, it comes quite
naturally to connect mythical consciousness, the second transition, to in-
dexality: causal or pseudocausal one-to-one relations between entities. When
Cassirer talks about mythical concrescence and its universalized physiog-
nomic view, he seems to imply that mythical worldviews expand the iconic-
ity of face-to-face situations into a system of indexical correspondences. The
same line of thought is pursued by Lévi-Strauss in his reflections on the bi-
nary nature of the mythical. But this does not fit into Donald’s schema, in
which the mythical period is already characterized by the use of symbolic
representation. And symbolicity, in Peirce’s semiotics, clearly marks a higher
and decisive level of sign-usage, one which incorporates the early stages but
creates something qualitatively new, namely indirect reference, reference via
the horizontal connection of symbols through inferences. Now I think it is
possible and helpful to reconcile and synthesize Deacon’s and Donald’s
accounts by paying attention to the temporal lag between the emergence of
a new means of signification and its conscious appropriation. In that way,
the mythical period might be reconstructed as the time when symbolic
competences evolved, but as far as worldviews are concerned were still used
primarily for indexical purposes, for communicating systems of binary re-
lations between persons and social groups on the one hand and, roughly, the
world on the other. The introduction of Deacon’s model and its construction
along the lines of the icon/index/symbol-distinction sensitizes us to the
functional relatedness of Donald’s layers or stages—I will come back to this

later—and to the possibility of asynchronicities. The emergence of semiotic
means and their full-fledged, reflective usage do not necessarily coincide; on
the contrary, a long time may elapse until the possibilities implicit in semi-
otic performances are realized. This is another implication of the anthropol-
ogy of “making it explicit”: the dynamics leading from meanings implicitly
embedded in practices to their explicit formulation is not restricted to the
transition from extralinguistic practices to language. It might be operative
within language as well, as becomes apparent on the two higher rungs of my
Brandomian ladder.
The third rung, as I have already hinted at, is characterized by modern,
theoretic culture, supported by an “external symbolic universe.”13 In Bran-
domian terms, this amounts to explicit reasoning. The symbolic structure of
language with its indirect reference and its logical operators, which allow
for the explication of inferential networks, are explicitly put to use. Donald
connects this stage primarily with memory and storage technology, with
written language, which undoubtedly plays an important part. Neverthe-
less, I want to emphasize that the possibility of higher-order thought is al-
ready implicit in the emergence of symbolicity. Relating symbolically to the
word, be it in face-to-face communication or in reading and writing, im-
plies the use of indirect reference, and thus a gap between the sign and the
signified is introduced that is not found in sign-systems based on iconicity
and indexicality alone. Of course, to stress the importance of symbolicity is
not to exclude the possibility that some of its specific properties are only
expressed once additional devices are invented and the necessary “external
scaffoldings”14 are in place. But these scaffoldings, if my interpretation is
correct, were only able to trigger the development of theoretic culture because
the emergence and use of symbolic language made it possible to loosen the
representational tie between the sign and the signified. This must have hap-
pened in a twofold manner: the introduction of indirect reference, inferential
reference between signs, had the effect of relegating direct reference in iconic
and indexical relations to the second place in the functioning of language—
thus enabling seemingly “freestanding” symbolizations, in which indirect
reference is used to articulate beliefs with universal validity claims. But in
doing so, in a process that fully deserves to be characterized as “dialectic,”
inferential reference also produced the possibility of semiotic transcendence,
the experience of the arbitrariness of signs and hence the underdetermi-

nation of reference. Ever since, the Axial tension between the transcen-
dence of content and its semiotic counterpart has prompted attempts to
reconcile both.
If we relate these considerations to the evolutionary ladder of explication,
it seems clear that Donald’s transition between mythic and theoretic cul-
ture should be seen as an internal development of symbolic culture. From the
perspective of content, theoretical culture is, as Bellah also emphasizes,
the attempt to reflectively come to terms with the narrative ordering of the
world on the mythical level, and on the structural side it elaborates the an-
thropological consequences of symbol-usage with its twofold transcendence.
Once again it seems helpful to use the notion of asynchronicity, of a time-
lag between plain usage and reflective usage, in this case of the kind of
second-order thought that is only possible within a system of indirect refer-
ence that allows for the embedding of clauses in higher-order clauses. Con-
necting the changes brought about in the theoretic stage of culture with the
perfecting of external scaffoldings and in particular with the internal devel-
opment of symbolicity helps to solve two problems that arise when one tries
to situate the Axial Age within Donald’s scheme. The first problem is that
theoretic culture is conceived as an anthropological universal, but the Axial
breakthrough happened only in some, not in all civilizations. Did the others
never reach the level of theoretic culture? The second problem relates to
questions of timing: the transition to theoretic culture started about forty
thousand years ago, and if we connect its emergence primarily with the ex-
ternalization of memory, it is hard to see how this might be taken as a con-
vincing explanation for the discovery of transcendence and why it took so
long to occur. But if we emphasize the importance of the discovery of sym-
bolic as opposed to directly referential communication, the two problems
disappear: we can establish an internal but contingent relationship between
the properties of symbolicity and the discovery of transcendence, and fur-
thermore we can employ the notion of a time-lag between possibilities as
performatively enacted and possibilities as explicitly appropriated in order
to understand the Axial cultures as different attempts to make explicit what
happens when living beings acquire a symbolic relationship to the world.
Theoretic culture can thus be seen as a universal step in the development of
humanity that is not restricted to the Axial cultures, while these cultures
nevertheless take on a special importance since it was only there that the
anthropological possibilities emerging with the invention of symbols were
actually made explicit.
So far, my Brandomian ladder comprises only three rungs, and in the
Donald/Bellah scheme there is no fourth. Donald himself has suggested
that the invention of mass media and computational cognitive tools might
be interpreted as a new phase in the erecting of external scaffoldings and
thereby as a cognitive revolution. But even independently of how much in-
fluence we are willing to grant technologies in the development of Moder-
nity, I would like to emphasize that the dynamics of reflective symbolic us-
age are not exhausted with the establishment of theoretic culture. I have so
far distinguished three stages in the process of making it explicit: (1) mean-
ing embodied in mimetic practices, (2) the prereflective use of symbolic
language in narrative-mythological culture, and (3) its reflective turn in
theoretic culture. When theoretic culture emerges, the logical powers of
symbolic languages are put to use to make explicit the inferential relations
between the discursive commitments implicit in what we have said or are
willing to say. This is what Brandom calls “rational”15 expressivity. When
rational expressivity is used to make explicit what is implicit in its own per-
formances, “logical”16 expressivity emerges, the use of reason for reasoning
about reason (4). I am tempted to point out the parallels between this fourth
rung of the ladder of explication and the condition of Modernity. Such an
interpretation would underline the continuity between the Axial Age, in
which the intertwined character of transcendence and contingency came to
be experienced for the first time, and the consciousness of both universality
and pluralism that has manifested itself in Modernity. But the main line of
my argument does not depend on the plausibility of these tempting paral-
lels; rather, it rests on an interpretation of the Axial Age as an important
move in the self-explication of embodied symbol-users. This raises another
question that I regard as being of the utmost anthropological importance:
How are the rungs of the ladder related?
Three Models of Sequentiality
The ladder metaphor I have chosen suggests an ordered sequence and some
sort of cognitive gain involved in mounting the higher rungs. But aside from
this, it is open to various interpretations: Does having mounted the ladder

make its lower rungs obsolete, as implied in Wittgenstein’s famous picture
at the end of his Tractatus about finally throwing away the ladder? Or is
it rather the case that even reflective propositional language embodies and
presupposes earlier versions of sign-usage? The answer to this question is
closely connected to our judgments about the impact of the Axial Age. If, as
I have argued, the Axial breakthrough consisted in the reflective explication
of possibilities already implicit in the mastery of symbolic language, its rel-
evance lies precisely in the combination of historical contingency, pertain-
ing to path-dependent developments, and anthropological universality, per-
taining to the evolution of cognition describable as climbing the ladder of
explication. About the evolutionary processes that finally brought about the
unlikely feat of symbolic reference we can only guess. Deacon speculates,
interestingly enough, about the advantages “the regulation of reproductive
relationships by symbolic means”17 might have offered for solving the socio-
ecological dilemma of hunting as a strategy for subsistence. But given the
availability of semiotic means for indirect reference, it was a question of
contingent historic development, not of anthropological necessity, that those
means, tens of thousands of years later, were used to make explicit the tran-
scendence of the symbolized over the symbol itself more or less simultane-
ously and in at least four different regions of the world. Thus part of the
fascination of the Axial Age stems from the fact that it marks the point of
convergence where historical and evolutionary anthropology meet. My the-
sis is that when comprehensive worldviews were formed in the Axial cul-
tures, the problem of the relation of symbols to other signs, of language to
meaning embodied in the iconicity of feelings and the indexicality of direct
interaction, gained a new urgency. (Obviously this way of describing it is a
retrospective and hopefully a helpful framework from the standpoint of
philosophical anthropology, not the operative language of the Axial Age.
The problem I am hinting at can be seen on the level of content in new opin-
ions about the relation between king and state, in a new assessment of the
importance of rituals, in the formation and codification of Holy Scriptures,
etc., but it is also prominent in the prohibition on images in Exodus and
Deuteronomy, which in my view relates to semiotic transcendence.)
On Bellah’s principle “nothing is ever lost,” it seems evident that the theo-
retic culture of the Axial breakthrough proceeded in dialogue with mythic
culture, which is already symbolic in terms of linguistic capabilities, but less

so in terms of its generalized worldview. Mythic culture was itself largely
based on the sensory-motor mimetic culture, which in turn relied upon the
qualitative immediacy of episodic culture. To further clarify the interdepen-
dencies at work here, I suggest distinguishing three different explanations
of this sequence, the supplemented Enlightenment scheme, the hybrid-mind
scheme, and the holistic-difference-plus-continuity scheme.
The first scheme highlights the gain in rationality and the aspect of liber-
ation implied in the transition from direct to indirect reference, and I find
its best expression in Jürgen Habermas’s commentaries on the Axial Age.
For him, the first commandment signifies, above all, emancipation: “Philo-
sophically, the momentous cognitive spurt of the Axial Age is captured in
the First Commandment—the emancipation from the chain of lineages and
the arbitrariness of mythical powers. Back then, the great world religions . . .
reached straight through the uniformly even plain of narratively linked
contingent appearances and tore open the rift between the deep and the
surface structure, between essence and appearance, that first gave humanity
the freedom of reflection, the power to distance themselves from the sway-
ing immediacy.”18 Once again the important question is: How exactly should
the liberating transition from the contingencies of qualitative immediacy
and narrative structure to reflective thought be conceptualized? The literal
meaning of Habermas’s formulation leaves it open whether the transition
lies in reflective rearticulation and thus reappropriation of particular identi-
ties or in their abolishment in favor of freestanding discourse, while the
negative connotations of Habermas’s metaphors suggest that “swaying im-
mediacy” and the “even plain of narratively linked contingent appearances”
are somehow left behind when the cognitive ladder of explication has been
climbed. But Habermas realizes—and that seems to distinguish him from
Brandom’s expressive rationalism—that the gains of propositional and logi-
cal clarity on the higher rungs of the ladder entail a loss in expressive pow-
ers as well. Thus he supplements the classic Enlightenment perspective inso-
far as he constantly stresses the importance and indispensability of cultural
traditions as “semantic resources” that await “translation” or that can never
be translated into propositional discourse. This picture concedes the em-
bodiment of semantic practices, but the philosophical emphasis is almost
entirely on the indirect reference of symbolic discourse, which is also seen

as the normative foundation of ethics.
The Enlightenment scheme with its emphasis on rationality accentuates
the categorical difference of human cognition from the earlier rungs of my
ladder. In Donald’s books—and in Bellah’s work on religious evolution, as
far as he follows Donald—we find a different picture. On the one hand,
Donald’s evolutionary account of human cognition constantly underlines
the continuity with other life-forms and the shared ancestry with other
mammals; on the other hand, he depicts the evolution of collective con-
scious abilities as “the great hominid escape from the ner vous system.”19
Qualitative immediacy is seen as something shared across species (“the raw
feeling of being human is probably not qualitatively different from the raw
feeling of being any kind of primate”),20 but we also vastly transcend the
biological realm through our cultural devices, shared cognitions, and exter-
nal scaffoldings. Thus the unity of human consciousness is conceptualized
as a functional unity comprised of several layers or concentric rings, and the
dominant metaphor is “hybridity.” “We are hybrids, half analogizers, with
direct experience of the world, and half symbolizers, embedded in a cultural
web.”21 From the vantage point of the hybrid-mind scheme adopted by Bel-
lah, the evolutionary sequence is seen as the acquisition of new layers that
functionally integrate the previous capabilities on the level of the organism
without essentially changing it. The bonds between embodied and symbolic
components of experience are stronger than in the classical or the supple-
mented Enlightenment scheme, but still the layers are seen as independent.
Hybridity connects logically and factually independent entities, like in a
hybrid car, where the combustion engine and the electrical one are func-
tionally integrated in order to produce ecofriendly locomotion without be-
ing essentially related to one another. I am convinced that the hybrid-mind
scheme still underrates the holistic nature of our embedded semiotic rela-
tion to the world. And since, as I have argued, the Axial development of
second-order thought should, on the semiotic level, be understood as the
conscious appropriation of symbolicity, this is potentially misleading when
the impact of the Axial cultures is at stake.
What we need, then, is an anthropological scheme that does justice both to
the fact that symbol-usage transforms a being’s relation to its environment
holistically, in all its aspects, and to the evolutionary continuity implied in

the transitions that Donald describes. Such an account, which I have some-
what clumsily called the holistic-difference-plus-continuity scheme, helps us
to understand how the discovery of transcendence simultaneously gave rise
to a new awareness of embodiment, thus generating a dynamic tension be-
tween transcendence and embodiment that has characterized cultural devel-
opments since then and that has gained new momentum in Modernity. On
this view, the climb up the ladder of explication in phylogeny and ontogeny
not only entails the mastery of higher semiotic competences on each rung,
which presupposes the earlier ones, but also the qualitative alteration of
episodic, mimetic, and mythic culture as they become functional elements
within a holistic structure. To my knowledge, it was the tradition of expres-
sivism from Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt to Wil-
helm Dilthey, later given an evolutionary turn by the American pragmatists,
that first developed such an account. In his book The Symbolic Species, Dea-
con refers to an important part of this tradition, the semiotics of Peirce. For
Deacon, the “unbroken continuity between human and nonhuman brains”
coexists with a “singular discontinuity between human and nonhuman
minds,”22 since we are the symbolic species. Symbolicity constitutes some-
thing genuinely new, namely indirect reference, but it is based on the direct
reference embedded in the signs for communication that other mammals
and especially primates use as well. And being “based on” for Deacon does
not just mean presupposing it, but functionally integrating and thus altering
it. Taking up Peirce’s trichotomy of icon, index, and symbol, Deacon recog-
nizes that there exist simple forms of communication based on similarities of
which organisms are qualitatively aware, and I associate that with Donald’s
episodic culture. Mimetic culture is based on the sensory-motor coupling of
the communicating organisms and on established indexical reference, cor-
respondences between types of events. According to Deacon, in the func-
tional hierarchy of semiotics it presupposes iconic reference in the same way
as the symbolic reference of mythic and then theoretical culture presupposes
both icons and indices. And that means that meaning is always embodied.
Icons are rooted in qualitative awareness and indices in the regularities of
motor-exchange with the environment. The indirect reference of symbols
enables its users to transcend the local limitations of embodiment and thus
allows for the discovery of the transcendent and universal. But this type of
reference is never freestanding; it always relies on embodied relationships to

the world in order to establish itself and to distinguish transcendent mean-
ing, however problematic, from the mere flight of fancy. “Language,” as Gal-
lagher has aptly put it, “transcends embodiment at the same time that it de-
pends on it.”23 The point of the holistic-difference scheme is that the genuinely
new character of symbol-usage as transcending the local environment—the
“difference” part—comes not from the abandonment but the functional rein-
tegration of embodied relationships to the world—the “holistic” part. Ac-
cordingly, if we see the Axial cultures embedded in the framework of cul-
tural evolution suggested here, we arrive not just at a multilayered cognitive
architecture but an intricate entanglement between the three types of signs
and the corresponding cultures. It is my conviction that we need this holistic
notion of entanglement if we are to understand the dynamics of the Axial
cultures. The following two examples should demonstrate why I consider the
framework sketched above helpful for this enterprise.
Two Examples from Israel and the Christian Tradition
My first example is taken from Bellah’s discussion of the Axial breakthrough

in Israel, which he connects with the books of Exodus and above all Deuter-
onomy. The historical background, as Bellah points out, is one of “unparal-
leled violence”:24 the northern kingdom already destroyed, Judah in a vassal
relation to Assyria. It was against this background that the idea of a cove-
nant between Yahweh and his people developed, modeled on the vassal
covenants widespread in the Near East, but transcending it by rejecting
sacral kingship. Two aspects of Bellah’s interpretation are of special impor-
tance: the invention of a “portable religion” and the ambivalent figure of
Moses. When in Deuteronomy 4 the occupation of the promised land is
made dependent upon the observance of the divine law and the latter identi-
fied with the text itself, the indexical relations between a people and a prom-
ised homeland are made contingent upon the symbolic, inferential relations
established horizontally in the text itself. The prohibition on images found
in the same chapter fits perfectly into this framework of inverting the bottom-
up order of reference. Pictures are icons which, when used in the ser vice of
representation, gain an indexical structure: the present picture stands for the
absent entity. Accordingly, one plausible way to understand the prohibition
on images is to see it as the prohibition of iconic and indexical reference in-

sofar as they are not imbedded in the framework of indirect, symbolic refer-
ence, which allows for an articulation of the difference between sign and
signified. The decisive lines seem to be Deuteronomy 4:15: “. . . for ye saw no
manner of similitude on the day that the lord spake unto you in Horeb out
of the midst of the fire.” Thus it is not permitted to reiconify symbolic mean-
ing.25 In the overall structure of Deuteronomy, it seems that the truth con-
tained in the inferential network of the text and its normative performance
through living by the law are the necessary preconditions of the “lower” in-
dexical truth, namely possession of the promised land.
This creates a portable religion, in which the umbilical cord to a particu-
lar form of physical existence is not cut but stretched and made contingent
upon a normatively structured way of living. This produces an inevitable
tension: for the inversion of the order of justification, so to speak, from di-
rect experience to norms explicit in symbols, can only be accomplished in
the name of direct experience. Local experiences, embodied in feelings and
in physical interaction, concisely summarized in unifying narrations, form
the motivational backdrop to the development of the idea of a covenant sig-
nified not indexically but only symbolically. But even this move to transcen-
dence cannot rid itself of the impact of embodiment; it only virtualizes the
promised land. In the Hebrew Bible, this tension between the portability of
religion and the local context of its emergence and its hopes for the future is
made explicit in the intermediate setting of Deuteronomy’s narrative: the
exodus has already taken place, the promised land not yet been reached. In
the interim, which is the temporal structure of religious experience, the in-
dexical relations relate to a formative past which had to be left behind—
Egypt—but as it concerns the future, they are replaced by merely symbolic
relationships to the promised land.
The same structure can be found in the figure of Moses, whose leadership
in embodied religion is confined to the way out of Egypt and who himself
only points (indexically) to the promised land, the direct reference of reli-
gious experience, but never qualitatively experiences it, receiving instead
the revelation of the Word. This revelation is strongly connected with vio-
lence, which permeates the experiential background of the Mosaic narra-
tion, and he acts violently himself. In Exodus 32, immediately after having
received the two tablets, Moses proceeds to order the sons of Levi to kill
three thousand men after the prohibition on images was broken. But this is
not the whole story: Bellah refers to Michael Walzer’s discussion of the two
faces of Moses as a leader: the Leninist and the social-democrat, the first
seen in acts like that mentioned above, the second in his reform work as a
teacher and a prophet. My thesis is that this deep and disturbing ambiguity
reflects the semiotic ambiguity of the discovery of transcendence: the inter-
nal relation between transcendence and contingence, which has been a source
of violence ever since.
Transcendence on the level of content is inevitably coupled with the expe-
rience of contingency, because the move from local indexicality to universal
symbolicity can never be a substitution, as I have tried to show above, but
only a functional reframing of the earlier forms of reference based on physi-
cal interchange and direct experience. As Hans Joas and Bellah put it in the
proposal for the conference this essay was originally written for, in each of
the Axial cases an “appreciation of the particular history and cultural tradi-
tion had to be reconciled, however uneasily, with the aspiration for religious
and ethical understandings that would be universally human.”26 The con-
tingency of local beliefs and cults, as long as these were articulated in a lan-
guage that, albeit already symbolic in structure, focused on narrative sum-
maries of embodied feelings and practices only, remained hidden for the
people engaged in them and can only be seen from the third-person per-
spective. But in the course of the Axial breakthroughs the quest for univer-
sal content could reveal not only the contingent contingency, so to speak, of
the older, polytheistic worldviews which were to be overcome, but also the
necessary contingency of the new, monotheistic articulations of meaning.
I am convinced that the proclivity to violence, which Jan Assmann sees as
the hallmark of the “Mosaic distinction” between pairs of predicates like
universally true and toto coelo false etc. is closely connected to this uncer-
tainty that inevitably accompanies universal aspirations. The Bible offers
ample proof of the resulting violent quest for certainty, even if most of it
took place on the narrative rather than the factual level. Assmann definitely
has an important point to make here, but there is another side to the coin as
well, which we can see symbolized in Moses the reformer.
In his account, Bellah emphasizes that Moses was a teacher and prophet,
not a king, and that at the heart of the stories surrounding him is the search
for a new kind of political community in which kingship is stripped of its
religious connotations and the covenant between a people and God provides
the rules of living. This is a decisive move beyond the traditional identifica-
tion of God and king, and it can be understood as a forceful expression of
the consciousness of transcendence. And if I am right in insisting that the
price to be paid for the elevation of local deities to universal transcendence
consisted in a corresponding and unsettling rise of the consciousness of
contingency, the other side of monotheistic intolerance becomes visible: an
ability to acknowledge the limited nature of the symbols in which the expe-
rience of transcendence is articulated. Over the course of time, this led to
ambitious theories of analogic expression, most prominently at the Fourth
Council of the Lateran, where the relation between creator and created is
determined as follows: “inter creatorem et creaturam non potest tanta si-
militudo notari quin inter eos maior sit dissimilitudo notanda.”27 All artic-
ulations of the transcendent thus inevitably produce inarticulacy—albeit a
reflective one. In this manner, the grasp on universality is combined with
the concession that all attempts to do so are in vain. The Fourth Council of
the Lateran distorts this fascinating insight by not putting it to use self-
reflectively and instead placing it within the rigid context of the damnation
of heretics. Nevertheless, it is plausible to see the doctrine of analogy as a
late result of a process that was triggered when the Axial cultures first ex-
perienced the entanglement of content transcendence with its semiotic
counterpart.
A second example of this semiotic consciousness of embedded transcen-
dence, the possibility of which is the result of Axial Age developments, can
be found in the Gospel according to Matthew, in the parable of the weeds
(Matt. 13:24–30). Wheat and weeds are planted together, and the field’s owner
refuses to let his servants pull the weeds out, “lest in gathering the weeds you
root up the wheat along with them.” This can be given a semiotic interpreta-
tion: since the transcendent good is only accessible through symbolic mean-
ings permeated with contingency, and since there is no way to tell the similar
and the dissimilar parts of the analogy apart, it is wise to be tolerant and re-
frain from constructing dualisms.
Rainer Forst has argued28 that this is one of the main passages in the Bible
that support Christian tolerance, but that the parable nonetheless remains
embedded within a violent picture of the Judgment Day, and thus shows the
ambivalence of the Christian arguments for tolerance. Forst’s interpretation
is convincing to a great extent and makes it very clear how closely the quest
for certainty and the acknowledgment of its opposite can be intertwined,
and how often they are. However, it should be amended in two important
points: first, the eschatological framing of the parable with its violent lan-
guage (“fiery furnace,” “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” etc.) is at least
partly due to the well-known rhetorical figure of depicting the worst in a
drastic manner to keep it from happening. The images of doomsday vio-
lence are something more than and different from sadistic dreams of re-
venge projected into the future; they describe an outcome to be avoided by
living righteously, which includes tolerance. Second, Forst argues: “All the
reasons provided for horizontal tolerance presuppose that there is just as
little doubt concerning the knowledge of the truth of God as there is about
His authority and the coming of His final judgment. Tolerance is indebted
to this knowledge of a higher truth and justice.”29 While I do not deny that
tolerance was in point of fact often counteracted by such eschatological vi-
sions of divine intolerance, I still want to emphasize that the Axial discovery
of semiotic transcendence also enabled a mode of thought in which, strictly
speaking, there was no such thing as true knowledge of God, not even in
revelation, because every sign had to be seen as revealing more dissimilarity
from the signified than similarity. In the parable of the weeds, the tension
between the demand for tolerance on the one hand and the revenge motifs
on the other reflects the Axial tension between the universality of transcen-
dent validity claims and the semiotic contingency of reflective symbol-usage.
In this respect, it is important to realize that the consciousness of semi-
otic contingency, even if it can only be made explicit in theoretical, second-
order language as used for the first time in classical Greece (and also in the
Fourth Council of the Lateran’s doctrine of analogy cited above), may well
be operative in narrative speech as well—long before and alongside its entry
into propositional, discursive language. This is exactly what we should ex-
pect considering the time lag and the gap of historic contingency between
developmental possibilities and their reflective appropriation. A closer ex-
amination of this point would require a semiotic account of the possibili-
ties that narrative structures offer for a reflective stance that considers al-
ternatives and frames reality within the context of possibilities. The use of
parables—such as that of the weeds—to highlight similarities against a
background of obvious differences and the accompanying analogical mode
of thought would have to play an important role in such considerations,

though that exceeds the scope of my essay. What my two examples were
supposed to show was that both the story of Moses, carefully set in a context
of transition, and the use of parables as a means of expression should be in-
terpreted as instances of embedded transcendence—a form of symbol-usage
which combines the experience of transcendent meanings with an implicit
acknowledgment of both the inevitable difference between sign and signi-
fied and of the embodied setting in which it arose.
The Elementary Unit of Symbolic Explication:

Anthropological Consequences
On the Brandomian ladder of “making it explicit” described above, the Ax-

ial breakthrough involves the internally connected discoveries of second-
order thought and transcendence and thus belongs to its third rung. But
“belonging” seems too weak a term, since it was only after and by means
of this factual, contingent discovery that the possibility for metareflective
thought on the fourth rung eventually emerged and thus enabled Moder-
nity to construct ladders of explication at all. From this point of view, the
anthropological impact of the Axial Age can be understood as the emer-
gence of inchoate universals for the reflective self-appropriation of embod-
ied symbol-users. The plural “universals” is fully justified here, because in
each of the paradigm cases China, India, Israel, and Greece the relation be-
tween embodiment and transcendence was framed in a particular manner—
but so is the talk about universality, for in each case the local starting point
is transformed into comprehensive worldviews with universal aspirations.
And the perennial tension between transcendent and mundane orders, be-
tween symbolic reference and corporeal experience, which emerged as the
heritage of the Axial breakthroughs, reveals the semiotic structure of ex-
perience that is the hallmark of our “symbolic species.” For this reason, the
holistic-difference-plus-continuity scheme of anthropological development
sketched above proves useful. It enables us to capture both the historical and
logical sequentiality implied in the three moves from episodic to mythic to
theoretical culture as well as the fact that “nothing is ever lost,” as Bellah
puts it. From an anthropological standpoint inspired by truth-conditional
concepts of meaning focused on propositional content, Bellah’s principle is
far from evident, but in the evolutionary perspective opened up by Donald,

it is. As Charles Taylor has convincingly argued in his well-known articles
on theories of meaning and on the question of human action,30 we need an
expressivist anthropology to do justice to this embodied character of our
relation to the world. Otherwise we are in danger of distorting the meaning
of “making it explicit,” by overestimating the expressive—not the reflective—
powers of rational discourse, into “leaving us implicit.” But feelings and
embodied interactions are constitutive dimensions of meaning, not merely
as vestiges of the evolutionary past, but as functionally indispensable com-
ponents of symbolic communication.
In this regard the expressivist tradition increasingly fits with evidence
taken from the cognitive sciences and neuroscience. Donald’s books offer pow-
erful support for this antireductionist stance, and Deacon has recently shown
in great detail how the evolutionary formation and everyday operation of
symbolic competences depend upon indexical relationships that are in turn
dependent upon iconic relationships. The shift in mnemonic strategy that
leads from learning sets of indices to grasping logical relationships between
symbolic tokens enables indirect reference and in the long run makes the dis-
covery of transcendence possible. But this indirect type of reference is a rela-
tion between tokens indexically related to instances of their use, and this use
refers to instances of qualitative immediacy, direct experience. The outcome
of all this is that nothing ever gets lost, but everything is changed forever
when experience becomes mediated by symbolic competencies. What emerges
in a theoretical culture is a holistic unity of behavior and semantic explica-
tion, in which the indirect reference of symbolic language is both enabled
and restricted by embodied forms of signification working via direct refer-
ence. This functional holism and unity, however, is only one side of the coin;
the other is the inevitable tension between the local and the universal aspects
of meaning. And that implies that climbing the ladder of explication is both
a loss and a gain. Greater reflexivity entails less qualitative immediacy and
sensory-motor interaction, and iconic and indexical meanings cannot be
translated into propositional discourse without loss.
For the remainder of this essay, I want to explore the consequences this
anthropological framework has for our understanding of the Axial Age. I
take as my starting point the relation between the embodiedness of symbol-
usage and the cultural embeddedness of symbol-users. In his recent book,
A Secular Age, Taylor included a chapter titled “The Great Disembedding,”31

which deals with the disturbing effects of the Axial revolutions on the triple
pre-Axial dimensions of embeddedness: human good, social order, cosmos.
As he points out, in early religion human flourishing was conceived of in
terms of “prosperity, health, long life, fertility,”32 which is to say as an abun-
dance of natural goods and the fulfillment of natural desires. This “natural-
istic” embeddedness of the human good into the corporeal well-being of the
organism in its environment was itself embedded in a social order for which
the “primary agency was the social group as a whole,”33 not the individual.
And finally, both dimensions were related to the ordered cosmos, because
“in early religion, the spirits and forces with whom we are dealing are in
numerous ways intricated in the world.”34 In this way, “human agents are
embedded in society, society in the cosmos, and the cosmos incorporates
the divine.”35
To me it seems evident that the three dimensions of pre-Axial embed-
dedness correspond to different rungs on the ladder of explication and ac-
cordingly to different types of sign-usage. The naturalistic conception of the
good emphasizes the importance of immediate, qualitative experience. As
far as well-being on the physical level is concerned, what you feel is what you
get, and semiotically we are on the level of iconic presentation. The primacy
of the social group as an actor is reflected by the incorporation of the indi-
viduals in the quite literal sense of mutual integration of sensory-motor
schemes, and this is what happens in collective ritual. Emerging from col-
lective experience, rituals—here I follow the interpretation developed by
Deacon—establish enacted, highly redundant sets of indexical relationships
between the individual actors, the group, and the respective focus of the
ritual and in that way play an important role in preparing the move from
direct to indirect reference, which can only take place when a sufficient
number of indexical relationships have already been established. When we
finally reach the symbolic stage, indirect reference to everything, to the
world as such, can be and actually is added. But as long as symbols are used
within the range of immediate and group experiences only—and Deacon
suggests that the evolutionary driving force for their development actually
was the need to stabilize social relations connected with reproductive needs—
their ability to transcend the local context of iconic and indexical meaning
could not endanger the triple embeddedness which Taylor sees as the hall-
mark of “early” religion.
Mapping the features of this triple embeddedness onto the anthropologi-
cal ladder of explications thus has two consequences. First, it shows that
Taylor’s triple embeddedness reflects the triadic structure of embodied sign-
use and its development and functional integration from icons over indices
to symbols. Second, and more important, it enriches our understanding of
what Taylor calls “the Great Disembedding.” This process plays a crucial role
in his account of Modernity, and it is reconstructed in terms of the Axial
revolution and its consequences in subsequent history. In Taylor’s account,
the triple move, at least in Latin Christendom, toward personal religion, so-
cial reform, and cosmological disenchantment is the “logical conclusion”36 of
the decontextualization that was implicit in the Axial revolution: the human
good is no longer framed in terms of naturalistic well-being, society is no lon-
ger seen as a well-functioning social body, and the world is conceived of as
different from its creator, in the same way as the transcendent referent of the
sign differs from it. My thesis is that these undeniable processes of disembed-
ding, since they all presuppose the reflective use of symbols, are not only still
functionally related to the qualitative immediacy of feeling and the indexical
structure of bodily interaction but inevitably produce new modes of direct
reference, either internally or in accompanying countermovements. Symbol-
users can escape embodiment only by reasserting it.
Lutheran Pietism is a good example.37 It began with Luther’s sola scrip-
tura, a new affirmation of symbolic truth that represented a new thrust of
post-Axial disembedding. This Lutheran move, seen, for example, in Johann
Arndt’s famous Four Books on True Christianity, becomes radicalized into
the negation of the world achieved through the “Bußkampf” (“inner strug-
gle of penitence”) indispensable for salvation. And the negation of the world
especially includes the pre-Axial, naturalistic conception of qualitative well-
being. But the necessity to ground indirect reference in its direct forms re-
asserts itself and finally leads to an unprecedented emphasis on lived experi-
ence in its immediacy, to a craving for certain qualities of feeling alleged to
authenticate the meaning of the scripture. In this way, the disembedding
that can be seen in the emphasis on the individual, in doing away with me-
diating rites and institutions, etc., produces new and, so to speak, artificial
forms of embodiment in lived experience. And the story does not end there,
because the impossibility of recognizing the correct and thus salvational
form of relationship between personal lived experience and symbolic mean-
ing even reintroduced social mediation. When in 1670 Philipp Jakob Spener
initiated the collegium pietatis in Frankfurt am Main, the piety of inward-
ness was supplemented with social interaction, and necessarily so, because
there is no way to correlate symbolic and qualitative meaning without the
mediation of intersubjectivity. As the example of Pietism shows, even the
“Great Disembedding” can only rearrange the conditions of embodiment—it
can never abandon them.
Notes
Wolfgang Knöbl read an earlier version of this essay. I am very grateful for his helpful comments.
1. See Heiner Roetz, Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age: A Reconstruction un-
der the Aspect of the Breakthrough towards Postconventional Thinking (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1993), chap. 10.
2. Paul Ricoeur, Das Selbst als ein Anderer [Soi-même comme un autre] (Mu-
nich: Fink, 1996), 350 (my translation).
3. Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness
(New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002), 39.
4. Ibid., 10.
5. Ibid., xiv.
6. Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the
Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2011), 13.
7. See Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Lan-
guage and the Brain (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1998).
8. Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive
Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 644.
9. Donald, A Mind So Rare, 265.
10. See Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2006).
12. John Dewey, “Qualitative Thought” [1930], in Larry A. Hickman and
Thomas M. Alexander, eds., The Essential Dewey, vol. 1: Pragmatism, Education,
Democracy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998),
195–205, here 197.
14. See Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 45– 47.
15. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 650.
16. Ibid.
17. Deacon, The Symbolic Species, 400.
18. Jürgen Habermas, Zeit der Übergänge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
2001), 185–186 (my translation).
20. Ibid., 320.
21. Ibid., 157.
22. Deacon, The Symbolic Species, 13.
23. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 127.
24. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, p. 308.
25. I find this semiotic line of interpretation supported by recent research in
biblical exegesis. See Christian Frevel, “Du sollst Dir kein Bildnis machen!—und
wenn doch? Überlegungen zur Kultbildlosigkeit der Religion Israels” in Bernd
Janowski and Nino Zchomelidse, eds., Die Sichtbarkeit des Unsichtbaren: Zur
Korrelation von Text und Bild im Wirkungskreis der Bibel (Stuttgart: Deutsche
Bibelgesellschaft, 2003), 23– 48, here 45.
26. Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas, Proposal for a Conference to Be Held at the
Max Weber Center of the University of Erfurt, July 3–4, 2008.
27. Denzinger-Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum Definitionum et Decla-
rationum de rebus fidei et morum, 36th ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 1976), 806 (p. 262).
28. Rainer Forst, Toleranz im Konflikt: Geschichte, Gehalt und Gegenwart eines
umstrittenen Begriffs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 65– 66.
29. Ibid., 66.
30. See Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers 1: Human Agency and Language
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
31. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2007), 146–158.
32. Ibid., 150.
33. Ibid., 148.
34. Ibid., 150.
35. Ibid., 152.
36. Ibid., 146.
37. My interpretation is indebted to Magnus Schlette’s philosophical reading
of Pietism. See Magnus Schlette, Die Selbst(er)findung des Neuen Menschen: Zur
Entstehung narrativer Identitätsmuster im Pietismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2005).
5
The Axial Age in Global History
Cultural Crystallizations and Societal Transformations
björn wittrock
The Axial Age denotes a series of profound cultural transformations that

occurred in some of the major civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean,
the Near East, and South and East Asia in the centuries around the middle
of the first millennium bce. The term was coined by Karl Jaspers in a small
book, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, which appeared in 1949.1
Jaspers, who at the time had played an important role, together with Al-
fred Weber and others, in trying to reconstitute the University of Heidel-
berg after the end of Nazi rule, erroneously believed he was using a term
from Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history. His objective, however,
was not to reenact a version of Hegelian historicism. Instead the book, like
Friedrich Meinecke’s Die deutsche Katastrophe (1946), was an effort to re-
think the intellectual legacy of Europe against the background of the com-
plete human and cultural catastrophe of totalitarian rule, war, and the Ho-
locaust. It was not an effort to abandon historical reasoning but rather to
search for an understanding of history that did not take the European expe-
rience as the self-evident vantage point or the Christian idea of the birth of
Jesus Christ as the only important turning point in history.
Perhaps one might read Jaspers’ book as one of the first efforts by a lead-
ing European philosopher and intellectual to decenter our understanding of
history and to prepare the stage for a view of history as a set of analogous
quests within different civilizations that had hitherto been regarded in iso-
lation from each other or as involved in conflict-ridden contestation. When
historians today write about cultural encounters and entangled histories,
they seem to owe a debt of gratitude to Jaspers’ early contribution.
The Axial Age in Global History 103
However, there were also a series of precursors to Jaspers, including Hegel,

but also several thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well
as Max and Alfred Weber and others in the early twentieth century. Jaspers
himself was aware of this and paid homage not least to Alfred Weber. How-
ever, compared to most of his precursors and contemporaries, Jaspers’ for-
mulations were more explicitly aimed at overcoming a sense of European
self-sufficiency. In this respect, his approach differed from Max Weber’s soci-
ology of the great world religions, first published in 1920 and 1921 in three
massive volumes—undoubtedly one of the most fascinating comparative
studies in the history of the social sciences.2
These volumes are full of empirical synthesis and comparative reflections,
yet Weber’s declared purpose is not to engage in a broad comparative analy-
sis per se but rather to discover, in the study of non-European contexts,
points of comparison to “our occidental cultural religions.”3 In fact, the whole
introduction, Vorbemerkung, starts with a passage highlighting the specific-
ity and unique character of Western science and then asserts the unique
nature of the major societal institutions in the Occident that are ultimately
constituted by a specifically Western notion of rationality. The very first
question formulated by Weber in the introduction is: “which chain of condi-
tions has entailed that precisely on the terrain of the Occident, and only here,
cultural manifestations appeared, which, however,—as we like to imagine—
were placed in a direction of development of universal importance and va-
lidity?”4 The immediately following sentence then reads: “Only in the Occi-
dent is there ‘science’ at the stage of development that we today recognize as
‘valid.’ ”
The words “as we like to imagine” signal a skeptical stance toward such
claims. However, it is probably not coincidental that Weber begins the col-
lection with his famous analysis of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of
capitalism. The achievements of the West implicitly serve as the point of
departure for comparative reflection. This entails that comparative interpre-
tations tend to be cast “in terms of the absence of certain preconditions.”5
In the introduction Weber also ventures a number of statements about
the unique nature of Western cultural, economic, political, and administra-
tive institutions, as in the assertion that “the legally trained civil servant as
carrier of the most important functions of everyday life has not been known
in any country as in the modern Occident.”6 Against the background of our
current knowledge of the history of, for example, China, a statement of this
type may look untenable. More importantly, however, the key question is by
which categories a comparative study of institutional and conceptual trans-
formation across civilizations might be conducted. In this context, studies
inspired by Jaspers’ notion of the Axial Age have provided a number of cat-
egories that may be fruitfully applied in comparative and historical research
beyond the Axial Age proper, and also in the study of deep-seated cultural
and institutional transformations more generally.
One element in this type of analysis is the effort to link conceptual change
to processes of sociopolitical transformations and upheavals. Another element
is to explore different varieties of social formations both in ancient times and
in the contemporary period. In this context, it has been argued that it is more
fruitful and reasonable to discern different varieties of both modernity and
axiality, “multiple modernities” and “multiple axialities,” than to subsume
significant variations under all-embracing categories.7
In the following, I shall propose a way of conceptualizing the nature of
major societal transformations. I shall firstly outline some of the character-
istics that Jaspers attributed to the Axial Age.
Secondly, I shall give a more systematic conceptualization of the changes
in human reflexivity that occurred in the Axial Age.
Thirdly, I shall take up the problem of the societal and cultural back-
ground of the Axial Age transformations. In particular, I shall discuss the
extent to which the cultural transformations entailed ruptures or continu-
ities relative to earlier patterns of development.
Fourthly, the focus will shift to an analysis of the Axial Age per se. In par-
ticular, I shall indicate what I consider the main paths of development that
emerged during this period in different parts of the Old World.8
An important question, which I can only indicate in this contribution, is
whether it is possible to outline a comparative framework that may account
for the cultural and societal transformations of the Axial Age across the dif-
ferent civilizations in which it emerged. I shall argue that this is indeed the
case. There seem to be three key conditions for the emergence not only of
the Axial Age but, more generally, for periods of deep-seated transforma-
tions that may be labeled periods of cultural crystallization. Essentially,
these conditions refer to the destabilizing but also enabling conditions in-
herent in new economic opportunities and in the introduction of new tech-
nologies. In the Axial Age, such changes were often related to the introduc-
tion of tools and weapons based on iron production that eventually resulted
in economic, agricultural, urban, and population growth—but also in war-
fare of a more violent nature with more pervasive consequences. Changes of
these types have historically tended to exert a powerful pressure in the di-
rection of new forms of social organization, including forms of inheritance,
ownership, and production. A second class of conditions refers to the exis-
tence or at least widespread perception of political crisis or even crisis of
civilized life itself. This may to some extent have to do with civil strife and
conflict but also with imminent external threats. However, the possibility
that a conjunction of economic-technological opportunities and of acute
political and societal crisis will give rise to a profound rethinking that may
open up fundamentally new institutional pathways crucially depends on the
existence of fora, of some arenas where interpreters of new ideas may elabo-
rate and articulate these ideas; in other words, on both the existence of a
stratum of literati and of some degree of autonomy from central political
power for a significant segment of this stratum of literati.
In the concluding section, I shall point to one major problem inherent in
all comparative-historical research, and indicate how it might be addressed
in the comparative study of conceptual and societal change that I defend.9
In passing, I shall indicate some of the consequences of the research on the
Axial Age for our conceptualization of later periods of cultural crystalliza-
tions and societal transformations, for example, the changes occurring in
high cultures across Eurasia in the early second millennium ce or the for-
mation of different varieties of modernity.10
The Idea of the Axial Age
In Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, Jaspers argued that our under-
standing of history is related to the emergence and institutionalization of
forms of critical reflexivity. Needless to say, this emergence is dependent on
a range of human capacities, most fundamentally perhaps the emergence of
language itself, but also that of external systems for the storage of human
memory, notably the existence of systems of inscribing events in a form that
allows for preservation and for retrieval at later points in time. Jaspers also
recognized the complexity and sophistication of the long history of narra-
tive accounts in the form of myths and of rituals associated with such
myths.
However, the distinctive feature of the Axial Age was, Jaspers argued, the
emergence of not only forms of thought that involved transpositions and
variations of mythical narratives, but also new forms of thinking that clearly
transcended the limits of existing practices of human society. The Axial Age
entailed the possibility of humans giving expression to visions and ideas of
the world beyond the constraints of existence at a specific time and place.
For Jaspers, this marked the transition from mythos to logos, a breakthrough
in critical reflection and indeed the emergence of history in the sense of the
epoch in human existence characterized by a reflexive, historical conscious-
ness.11 Others, including Yehuda Elkana, have described this transition as
the emergence of second-order reflexivity, that is, reflection on the forms
and substance of thought itself. In other words, it had to be possible to re-
flect not only upon the course of day-to-day activities but upon the condi-
tions of thinking itself.
In earlier tribal societies, the invocation and articulation of mythical be-
liefs in ritualistic practices would normally serve the social and cultural
coherence of a collective. They would, of course, involve practices outside of
the bounds of day-to-day practices of production and reproduction. They
might also involve or usher in changes in the collective life of a community.
In this way, myths could be reinterpreted and supplanted or even replaced
by additional myths, as could imaginations about the primacy of different
forces or divinities associated with the different forms of myths. However,
this is only a question of continuation or partial adaption, not yet of a criti-
cal reflection and rejection of some myth by way of questioning its premises
or engaging in a comparative exposition of its merits and shortcomings in a,
say, Aristotelian, dialogical form. This started only in some societies in the
Old World around the middle of the first millennium bce.
In some, but not all, cases, this capacity for transcending the bounds of
given reality and given beliefs was closely tied to the emergence of cosmolo-
gies that made an explicit and sharp distinction between a mundane and a
transcendental sphere. In such cases, practices existing in a mundane sphere
could be reflected upon and criticized as failing and deficient or even funda-
mentally flawed from the vantage point of requirements and demands im-
posed by a transcendental sphere. In this sense, Axial Age thinking had
deep implications for the practices of the early states of archaic societies of
Bronze and Iron civilizations. These early states involved rule over extensive
territories and often a hierarchical order where new rituals emerged and
supplanted those of earlier tribal societies.
These new rituals tended to be performed within relatively small elite cir-
cles and involved an articulation of the role of the supreme political ruler as
embodying divine features. Inevitable societal misfortunes and catastrophic
events could lead to cracks in the cosmology and practice of these early states
as well as to elaborate processes of reinterpretation of myths, what some ob-
servers have termed mytho-speculation. However, the forms of thought that
emerged in the Axial Age allowed for a principled critique of rulership; they
prevented rulers, “kings,” from being gods and subjected them to potential
critique for not ruling properly according to the callings of divine grace or
to the Mandate of Heaven.12
The idea of the Axial Age as outlined by Jaspers had the character of a
bold idea briefly sketched. The same is true of earlier analogous statements
by Alfred Weber and his brother Max, who in certain formulations came to
venture very similar notions without using the term itself. Later, Eric Voe-
gelin, with his own elaborate conceptual schemes, followed a similar line of
reasoning in his magnum opus Order and History. In the 1970s, the Har-
vard sinologist Benjamin Schwartz and a group of prominent scholars, in-
cluding Peter Brown, Louis Dumont, Eric Weil, and Robert Darnton, took
up the notion of the Axial Age in a path-breaking special issue of the journal
Daedalus, devoted to the theme “Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspec-
tives on the First Millennium bce.”13
However, the scholar who “has done more than anyone to make the Axial
Age significant for comparative historical sociology”14 is Shmuel Noah
Eisenstadt. Together with the leading Weberian scholar Wolfgang Schluchter,
Eisenstadt made it the focus of a sustained research program. In collabora-
tion with a large number of historians and linguists, Eisenstadt extended
the analysis considerably. In fact, it is largely due to him and to Robert Bel-
lah that humanistic scholars in fields such as Egyptology, Assyriology, San-
skrit studies, history of religion, Sinology, and many others have come to
gain respect for and interest in historical social science. It is also due to
Eisenstadt and Bellah that the idea of the Axial Age has in later years come
to be center stage in social science debates and theorizing with theoretically
orientated scholars such as Jürgen Habermas, Hans Joas, José Casanova,
and Charles Taylor now deeply engaged in the dialogue about the Axial Age.
Bellah and Eisenstadt represent different intellectual styles, but both of them
have been crucial in transmitting to the scholarly community at large a
strong sense of the intellectual urgency of the debates around the idea of the
Axial Age. This idea has been the subject of an increasingly intense but also
increasingly well-informed debate, involving ancient historians, historians
of religion and philosophy, and linguists.15 As a result, the Axial Age debate
emerged as one of the great scholarly discussions of the last century.16
A Systematic Conceptualization of the Axial Age
The concept of the Axial Age in Jaspers’ original formulations encompasses

deep-seated intellectual and cosmological shifts that occurred in different
forms but with striking, if relative, simultaneity in some societies across the
Eurasian hemisphere, specifically in ancient Israel, Greece, India, and China.
These shifts were manifested in such different forms as the thought of Con-
fucius and, two centuries later, Mencius in China, Buddha in India, the He-
brew prophetical movement, and the classical age in Greek philosophy. Nei-
ther in Jaspers’ early formulations nor in the more recent ones by scholars
collaborating with Shmuel Eisenstadt has there been an entirely successful
effort to relate these cosmological shifts to other types of human activities.
Maybe the most important direction in future research will be to spell out
the links between the set of intellectual and cosmological breakthroughs
and the sea-changing institutional transformations that a limited sense of
the concept of the Axial Age denotes.
Jaspers’ position rests on the assumption that in the centuries around the
middle of the first millennium bce a major shift occurred in the way reflec-
tively articulate human beings in some of the high cultures in the Eurasian
hemisphere reconceptualized their existential position. The breakthrough
was manifested in different ways in the different civilizations. However, in
all forms it involved the textual articulation of an increasing human reflex-
ivity and reflexive consciousness, the ability to use reason to transcend the
immediately given. This reflexivity was manifested in dramatic shifts in
four major dimensions:
• Firstly, an elaboration of more reflective cosmologies, often in terms of

positing a more or less fundamental and discursively argued separa-
tion between a mundane and a transcendental sphere. This also

involved an articulation and interpretation of such cosmologies in
terms of their oral mediation as well as their textual inscription, and
the emergence of a set of rules for the authoritative interpretation of
such texts. Such processes of codification and standardization inevita-
bly entailed breaches with some previously coexisting set of beliefs and
practices. They also entailed the potentials for new interpretative con-
testations. This set the stage not only for the articulation and diff usion
of orthodoxy but also for heterodox challenges.
• Secondly, the articulation and inscription of an increasing historical
consciousness, an awareness of the temporal location and the limita-
tions of human existence and thereby a sense of relative contingency.
• Thirdly, new conceptualizations of social bonds and connectedness,
that is, imaginations of what might be called sociality.
• Fourthly, an increasing awareness of the malleability of human
existence, of the potentials of human action and human agentiality
within the bounds of human mundane temporality or, as in the case of
Iranian culture, with respect to the relationship between actions in a
mundane and a transcendental sphere. Conceptualizations of agential-
ity became increasingly premised on more individualistic assumptions
than had previously been the case.
This, I maintain, is a valid description even if this core of the meaning of the
Axial Age in its original formulation has subsequently been elaborated in
various ways. It is important to see that any particular articulation of a posi-
tion on any of these existential dimensions will inevitably involve some as-
sumptions that are contextually bound and culturally specific. It would, for
instance, be illegitimate to tie the meaning of the Axial Age to an insistence
on the occurrence of some specific cosmology, say, premised on notions of
transcendence as opposed to immanence, or on some specific account of the
dramatic increase in historical consciousness that we associate with the
Axial Age. What is not culturally specific is the idea that the Axial Age is a
period of deep change in fundamental dimensions of human existence,
namely radical shifts, as textually manifested, in reflexive consciousness con-
cerning cosmology, historical consciousness, and conceptions of sociality and
of human agency.
This change is broadly contemporaneous across vast regions of the Old

World. It entails the consolidation or the emergence of a set of different cos-
mologies and makes possible a set of different institutional paths of develop-
ment of lasting importance.
For all contestations about historical accounts, such a delimitation of the
notion of the Axial Age provides not only a fruitful starting point for the
study of global history and for an understanding of its relevance to the so-
cial and human sciences at large. Such a conceptualization has the addi-
tional advantage that it is not based on an unjustifiable teleology or some
form of cultural imposition.
Some interpretations, most notably those of Merlin Donald and Bellah,
highlight the Axial Age as the beginning of a fourth evolutionary stage in
the development of human culture, coming after the earliest forms of human
interaction in so-called episodic culture, mimetic culture, and, with the de-
velopment of language and the possibility of constructing “a unified, collec-
tively held system of explanatory and regulatory metaphors,” a “comprehen-
sive modeling of the entire human universe” in so-called mythic culture.17
The Axial Age in this type of evolutionary scheme represents a fourth funda-
mental stage marking the so-called theoretic age that allows for a new type of
critically reflexive activities complementing those of bodily reactions and
mimetic imitation and gesturing, and those of mythical narratives.
The Cultural and Societal Contexts of Axial Transformations
One problematic question is that of the relationship of societal and cultural

formations before and after the so-called Axial breakthrough. Jaspers ar-
gued that the Axial Age constitutes the origin of history, in the sense of the
history of human beings who have consciously reflected on their own loca-
tion in temporal and cosmological terms and tried to form their own exis-
tence from the vantage point of such reflections. This is an argument that
might easily be read so as to deny the historicity of previous civilizations in
a way that cannot be made compatible with available historical and archaeo-
logical research. However, there is no need to draw such a drastic conclu-
sion. In fact, virtually all scholars after—and before—Jaspers have taken
great care to elaborate on the nature of the societal predecessors of Axial
Age civilizations. Most of these scholars have tended to highlight the degree
to which the transformations of this age have to be seen as continuations

and intensifications of features inherent in earlier cultures and societies.
Several of the contributors to the volume on Axial Civilizations and World
History, for example, have highlighted the fact that in China, Greece, and the
Near East a key factor behind the dramatic increase in reflexivity and criti-
cal discussion may have been precisely the breakdown of the established prac-
tices and assumptions prevailing in earlier civilizations. Whether we look at
Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, or China during the Shang and Zhou empires,
these civilizations clearly do not fall “outside of history.” On the contrary, the
Axial transformations involved significant continuities relative to these ear-
lier civilizations.
Maybe the most fruitful way to approach this problematique is to focus
on the relationship between two types of components: the interpretation
and redefinition by key Axial Age writers of an imagined legacy of their
own societies and civilizations, and their own linguistic strategies and con-
ceptual innovations that often involve the generalization, or rather univer-
salization, of key characteristics in their interpretations of these traditions.
Thus the Confucian ethic is not a completely new conceptualization, but
rather an articulation of a tradition, synthetic in its own ways, and the uni-
versalization of some of the most important virtues that had traditionally
been seen as limited to the aristocratic strata. In this case, as in several oth-
ers, axiality is a reaction to a new type of human condition where neither
the structures of kinship and physical proximity nor those of a self-legitimizing
empire suffice any longer to embed the individual in a context of meaning and
familiarity.
Some preliminary observations can be put forward concerning the back-
ground of the Axial Age transformations:
Firstly, these transformations had as their background not tribal societies
but the early states of archaic societies, that is, forms of political and cultural
order with considerable spatial extension and with highly regulated forms
of elite ritual linked to the center of political power.
Secondly, because of the extensiveness and centralization of political
power and of cults and rituals linked to the center, there were inevitable and
recurring strains and tensions that in themselves tended to engender condi-
tions that were propitious for the kind of deep-seated transformations that
the Axial transformations involved. Furthermore, some of the most powerful
early states came to impinge upon and pose a threat to a range of neighbor-
ing societies. The Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian states are obvious exam-
ples, and the Achaemenid Empire in the Iranian, Near Eastern, Eastern
Mediterranean, and Western Indic worlds, the most extensive political en-
tity up till then, is perhaps the archetypical case in point. (In the Chinese
case, the threat to life as it was known was to some extent, but much less
than at many other points in time, related to nomadic incursions. Neverthe-
less, it had to do with the breakdown of political order and with upheavals
and civil wars in the wake of the downfall of the Zhou dynasty and the
threat this posed for orderly, civilized life.)
Thirdly, the Axial transformations were initiated and had their intellectual
source of inspiration and articulation in sites outside the direct political cen-
ter, where there was awareness of activities in the political center and where
the consequences of these activities were tangibly perceived. These sites, how-
ever, were also peripheral enough to allow for a stratum of interpreters that
could elaborate on alternative cosmologies in some degree of autonomy from
the center. This crucial role of the interpreters, the “Träger,” of a new world-
view has been particularly emphasized by Eisenstadt.18 The emergence of the
world religions is also part of this problematique.
Fourthly, the relationship between the Axial Age and the emergence and
diff usion of the great world religions has been extensively examined. The
idea of such a relationship has been at the core of much reasoning concern-
ing the Axial Age hypothesis. It seems undeniable that the intellectual and
ontological shift, described in terms of a breakthrough, has important links
to deep-seated shifts in religious practices. It is, however, also clear that the
exact nature of such links is in many cases open to different interpretations.
In the simplest and perhaps most succinct formulation, it could be stated
that the great world religions had their origins in the Axial Age and that
subsequent religious revelations and visions and their textual inscription,
codification, and the religious movements they gave rise to, had the Axial
breakthroughs as a necessary background.
It is also true that many previous forms of ritualistic practice were, in a
different guise, continued in religious practice after the Axial breakthroughs.
Furthermore, in the core epoch of transformation, the fact that the most
important proponents of the transformations had a peripheral and hetero-
dox position vis-à-vis mainstream cultural and political order led to an
opening of horizons and the emergence of a variety of critical voices. Even-

tually, however, the Axial ruptures were either marginalized or else given
a standardized form and became more or less closely tied to new political
centers and to new cultural-religious orthodoxies. But there still remained
the potential for the emergence of new heterodox interpretations that could
easily and rapidly take the form of a serious threat to central political power,
no matter how closely linked the clerical and religious interpreters had
become to that center.
Five Paths of Axial Transformations
In most interpretations of the Axial Age, a relationship is discerned between

the Axial Age as a shift in cosmology and ontology, on the one hand, and the
emergence of imperial-like political orders, on the other. This raises three
questions that concern, firstly, the imagined nature of Axial- and pre-Axial
Age political orders; secondly, the continuities of such orders; and thirdly,
the consequences of the Axial breakthrough for political orders.
As to the first question, Jaspers’ characterization of pre-Axial political
orders in terms of “small states and cities” is not tenable.19 On the contrary,
as we have seen in the previous section, it was precisely the extensiveness
and power of some of the early imperial-like states that constitute the back-
ground for the emergence of the Axial Age. In this section, I shall briefly
and in schematic form touch upon the second and third questions.
As we have seen, it is possible to delineate a meaningful conceptualiza-
tion of the Axial Age as an epoch in global history that involved profound
shifts in at least four fundamental and inescapable dimensions of human
existence, namely cosmology, historical consciousness, and the emergence
of new conceptions of sociality and human agency. The Axial Age is not the
only period where deep-seated shifts of this type occurred. It is, however,
the most consequential cultural crystallization before the Common Era.
The redefinitions that characterize a period of cultural crystallization al-
ways occur in a given historical context. The practical and institutional im-
plications of these shifts open up a range, though not an unlimited range, of
new horizons of human practice. Thus while there is no one-to-one relation
between a given shift in culture and cosmology and a particular institu-
tional path of development, it is still possible to argue that in a given context
some institutional paths are made conceivable, in a literal sense of the word,
and others are not.
There are five distinctly different paths of Axial transformations linking
cultural and cosmological shifts to institutional transformations, none of
which should be given either empirical or normative preferred status. In the
present context, I shall briefly outline their differences.
Firstly, there is the development in the Near East whereby, in a complex pro-
cess of influence and juxtaposition, the Mosaic distinction (to use Jan Ass-
mann’s terminology) between true and false in religion and, as a consequence,
a distinction between religion and politics is drawn in ancient Israel (but
not, despite several preparatory steps, in ancient Egypt). Eventually, this dis-
tinction, in the prophetic age and in Second Temple Judaism, gave rise to a
path of development that may be termed transcendental-interpretative.
Significant elements include processes of textual inscription and stan-
dardization as well as interpretative contestation and the interplay between
carriers of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. The participants in these contesta-
tions exhibit a remarkable independence relative to political power. Some-
times this leads to a withdrawal from political power. However, more often
their activities impinge upon the world of rulership, sometimes explicitly,
sometimes inadvertently, sometimes as heterodox dissent or even rebellion,
and sometimes as support for established power.
Secondly, there is a related path, fundamentally influenced by Near East-
ern developments, but in key respects distinctly different. It is a tradition that
gradually emerges in the Greek world and that may be termed a philosophical-
political path of development. It involves contestation and deliberation that
exhibit intense concern about human potentials and action, about the loca-
tion of human beings in history, and constant reflection on the human con-
dition. In this case, a clear distinction between a transcendental and a mun-
dane sphere, absolutely central to the transcendental-interpretative tradition,
is relatively insignificant. There is no standardized religious cosmology in-
scribed in codified texts. Instead, contestation is dialogical, if often textually
transmitted, and has a philosophical and largely pragmatic character with
regard to the political and moral life of a given community, a polis, as an
inevitable reference point. The key protagonists in these contestations act in
a context that is characterized by a previously unknown combination of in-
tellectual independence, institutional autonomy, and political engagement.
Thirdly, there is the particular Chinese path that involves, at least from a
period a millennium earlier than the Axial Age proper, the gradual merging
and synthesis of different regional ritualistic practices and political orders
in a broad cultural tradition that may be termed universal-inclusive. Key
features of the cultural and political orders are clearly articulated hundreds
of years before the Axial Age; in some respects, Confucius, Mozi, and later
Mencius and the legalists write against the background of a perceived loss of
cohesion, and indeed the demise of this earlier order, and seek a renewed
articulation of it. Cultural and scientific developments can be and have been
described as stepwise shifts, nevertheless they exhibit important ruptures
and advances in the period of the Axial Age, as do certain aspects of politi-
cal and social thought that show a renewed emphasis on tradition, history,
and human agency.20
A fundamental feature of this path of axiality is that it is universal-
inclusive but at the same time characterized by a high degree of contin-
gency, even in the political sphere. Thus already in pre-Axial Zhou political
thought the Mandate of Heaven transfers the ultimate legitimacy to politi-
cal order. However, it is a revocable mandate and improper conduct is incom-
patible with the maintenance of this mandate. Therefore, heavenly sanc-
tioned imperial rule is nonetheless contingent and open to doubt, critique,
and potentially revolt. Similarly, there is a synthetic cultural order com-
posed of highly different original traditions, some of which may perhaps
best be understood as forms of moral philosophy, and two of which, Confu-
cianism and Daoism, have little if any concern for a distinction between
transcendental and mundane spheres. Precisely for this reason the universal-
inclusive path of the Sinic world allows for and involves constant philo-
sophical contestation between different traditions. In a sense, a Mosaic dis-
tinction need not be drawn in a context where the relationship between
political and religious order has always been much more open-ended than
in the early Near East polities of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Fourthly, in India early Buddhism constitutes an Axial challenge to Vedic
religion.21 This challenge involves, through a process of semantic appropria-
tion, transvaluation, and contestation, a focus on history and agentiality,
and thereby brings out the potentials of a critical stance toward what are
no longer seminaturalistic practices but rather conventions that may be
transgressed.
It is precisely in reaction to this challenge that an articulation of Vedic

religion occurs. The Indic world of Vedic religion may have been distinctly
non-Axial, but Vedic religion could not avoid an engagement with the cul-
tural systems that grew out of the early Axial transformations. Whereas the
philosophical-political axiality of Greece and the universal-inclusive axial-
ity of the Sinic world had political order as its explicit or implicit center of
attention, the political implications of the Indic path—let us call it pluralistic-
semantic—largely remained potential or entirely contingent (with the pos-
sible exception of the Maurya Empire under Ashoka).
Fift hly, the geographical and political space where all of the major tradi-
tions of Eurasia actually interacted is the area of the Achaemenid Empire
and its Hellenistic and Iranian successors. In many ways, cultural traditions
in the Iranian lands came to serve as direct or indirect sources of inspira-
tion for several of the world religions and imperial orders. However, knowl-
edge of key aspects of religious and even political practices not only in the
Achaemenid Empire but also the Sassanian Empire is lacking. Nevertheless,
the path of development in the Iranian lands may be termed one of a dualistic-
agential tradition, where the relationship between political and religious
order is seen as one of mutual dependence and close interaction, where there
is a distinction between a transcendental and a mundane sphere, but where
the battles within these spheres have direct implications for all actions in
the mundane sphere.
It is a tradition with an articulated cosmology, but in its dualistic concep-
tualization of this cosmology it differs fundamentally from the cosmology
of the mainstream of Judaism, Christendom, and Islam. This also means
that the cosmological distinction between a transcendental and a mundane
sphere is consistent with a strong this-worldly orientation of practical en-
gagement and action in the realm of political order. The relationship of the
main intellectual-religious carriers of this cosmology to political power is
characterized by proximity and reciprocal dependence. As in other forms of
axiality, there are also forms of heterodoxy and dissent. However, on the
whole, there is a more explicit and direct link to imperial power here than is
found along the other paths of axiality.
The Achaemenid Empire came to exert a far-reaching influence on later
types of imperial orders in the region of the Mediterranean and the Near
East. In the first millennium ce, the Sassanian Empire saw itself as the le-
gitimate heir of the Achaemenid Empire.
The Byzantine Empire—for half a millennium the main competitor of the
Sassanian Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern region—
with its Hellenistic and urban legacy was structurally different from the
Sassanian Empire. However, from the seventh century onward and as a re-
sult of the loss of rich urban centers in Syria and Egypt in the wake of the
original Islamic onslaught, it increasingly came to exhibit many features
reminiscent of the Iranian imperial model. This was so in terms of changes
in military-territorial organization in a direction that in medieval Western
Europe came to be called feudal. It was also the case in terms of a gradual
change in relationships between political and religious orders.
The Achaemenid Empire was the first imperial political order that was
premised on an Axial cosmology and that involved a close reciprocal, but not
symmetric, relationship between the leading representatives of political and
cosmological-religious orders. The same is true for the Sassanian Empire and
for the successor of that empire, namely the new Islamic political order, at
least as it emerged with the establishment of the Abbasid Caliphate.
As was the case with the Roman Empire, the Achaemenid Empire was
characterized by a tolerance toward minority cultures and languages. Un-
like the Roman Empire, however, it did not engage in efforts to promote the
language of the rulers, that is, Old Persian, relative to the language of other
peoples of the empire. However, the Iranian empires, as well as the classical
Roman Empire, involved elements of, to use Sheldon Pollock’s term, ethno-
transcendence, that is, the assignment of a crucial place in the imperial
project to an ethnically defined people that is linked both to the temporal
extension of empire and to its divine protection.
Both the Roman and Iranian imperial patterns are distinctly different
from that of India, but also from the cultural-political order of ancient Israel
and ancient Greece during the early Axial transformations—and of course
also from that of non-Roman and non-Axial Europe. In both ancient Greece
and ancient Israel, the position of the intellectual carriers of interpretative
elaborations was characterized by greater independence relative to the hold-
ers of political power. This is one reason why it would be erroneous to as-
sume a necessary relationship between axiality and imperial order. One
Table 5.1. Carriers of Axial thought and their role in different civilizations
Region of Cultural-cosmological Relation to Ethnolinguistic

emergence focus political power force
Ancient Israel Transcendental- Strong indepen- Autonomous

interpretative dence
Greece Philosophical-political Strong indepen- Weakly ecumenical
dence
China Universal-inclusive Weak depen- Strongly ecumenical
dence
India Pluralistic-semantic Strong indepen- Weakly ecumenical
dence
Iran Dualistic-agential Strong depen- Ethnotranscendence
dence cum linguistic
pluralism
may indeed argue that the post-Axial imperial orders, while often embracing
a cosmology of Axial origins, often involved severe institutional constraints
and a reduction in intellectual autonomy for the carriers of Axial thought.
Some of these points are summarized in Table 5.1.
The table highlights the three conclusions indicated above. Firstly, a qualita-
tive increase in reflexivity, historical consciousness, sociality, and agential-
ity is characteristic of the Axial Age and is the very premise for the distinc-
tion between political order and religious-cultural order and hence for the
possibility of a challenge to the legitimacy of political order. “Kings can no
longer claim to be gods.” Once this possibility has been conceptually per-
mitted, it is a potential that can never be “unthought,” that is, the potential
of a fundamental challenge of established order can never again be perma-
nently removed. However, the cultural-cosmological construct that allows
for such a distinction may, but does not need to, rest on a crucial distinction
between the transcendental and mundane spheres. In fact, in four of the five
paths of axiality this is not the case.
Secondly, the institutional position of the interpreters of a given cultural-
religious cosmology determines whether the potentials of the increased re-
flexivity are being realized or not. Within each of the five paths of axiality,
there was always interplay between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and there
were always contending articulations of a given cultural-cosmological or-

der. Often, as in the cases of India and China, there was also contention be-
tween deeply different cosmologies. Even in the case of Sassanian Iran, Zo-
roastrian orthodoxy had always to contend with heterodox interpretations
(Zurvanism, Mazdakism).
Th irdly, there is a complex interplay between three broad sets of fac-
tors that determine and release the potentials of a cultural crystallization,
namely the confluence of a deep-seated political and cultural crisis; an immi-
nent threat to the survival of a culture and its political manifestation; a surge
of economic opportunities and potentials of growth; and the creation of are-
nas of articulation and interpretation with a relative distance and indepen-
dence of immediate subjugation and subservience to political power.
There are also fundamental differences in terms of the ethnolinguistic
force of the different paths of axiality. From the perspective of our own age,
it is difficult not to reflect upon the fact that virtually all modern imperial
orders exhibit a form of Roman, Eastern Mediterranean path rather than
the less impositional path of other Axial civilizations, or the more ecumeni-
cal path of China. From the point of view of modern social thought and
with the newly awakened interest in imperial orders, it seems that the study
of the Axial Age, if nothing else, might serve an urgent need to broaden the
range of imagination of modern social and political thought.
Meaning and Action in Historical Context
A perennial problem in historically orientated research is that of formulat-

ing criteria of adequacy for the assignment of meaning to historical phe-
nomena. One broad category of such efforts is constituted by what is some-
times labeled historicism. As an encompassing term for a wide range of
different historical research programs in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, it refers to a general tendency to see meaning as a category that is
immanent in the historical process itself. The task of the historian is then to
explicate or articulate this meaning by way of a historical reflection and
reasoning that is able to grasp in its categories the essential nature of the
historical process itself. Studies with a focus on the Axial Age have often
been accused of engaging in a form of historicism whereby value is assigned
to the outcome of historical processes to the extent that they are seen as
teleologically defined achievements of human development. In this contribu-

tion, I have tried to demonstrate that such an assessment is not accurate.
While it is true that a notion of the self-reflexivity of humanity is crucial to
thinkers as different as Hegel and Jaspers, it is also clear that the study of
global history in terms of cultural crystallizations cannot legitimately be
characterized as a form of historicism.
Neither Jaspers nor Eisenstadt can be characterized as engaging in his-
toricist reasoning. It is simply a non sequitur to draw the conclusion that the
rejection of a teleological imposition of meaning onto historical processes
also entails the rejection of any notion of meaning in historical processes.
Why would meaning have to be a property that could only be ascribed to
broad historical trends and their explications in abstract reason by a privi-
leged group of interpreters, be they state philosophers or the political van-
guard of historical progress? In some contemporary forms of reasoning it is
asserted that there can be no assignment of meaning outside of the actual
range of subjective perceptions of events. If so, historical research will not
only begin but also end with a given multiplicity of subjective impressions
and their linguistic expressions.22
Is there a way of avoiding both a teleological imposition of meaning and
the reproductive fallacy of extreme subjectivism? One obvious alternative is
the historical research inspired by speech act theory. This type of theory
provides a method for reformulating questions of meaning in history as ques-
tions of language use in particular contexts. Texts and utterances will then
be analyzed against the background of conventions of language use and can-
ons of discourse that obtained in a given context. The problem is, however, to
what extent such an analysis permits statements that go beyond the analysis
of a range of particular speech acts.23
Most speech act theorists would probably say that this is a question that
should be tackled pragmatically and as well as possible given our knowledge
of conventions in given contexts. What cannot be handled in this way falls
outside the realm of questions that can be posed from a scholarly point of
view. This is reasonable enough, but it may not be sufficient for us to give a
focus to such wider questions. In the field of social theory, Habermas solves
the problem by elaborating a form of universal pragmatics that takes the
most general preconditions of dialogical speech as its starting point. That is
an obvious advantage for normative analysis but less so for empirical re-
search, particularly of a historical nature.
It is here that scholars such as Jaspers and Eisenstadt raise important
questions beyond those that most speech act theorists find interesting or
indeed legitimate. Thus beyond the speech acts proper and beyond the given
conventions, there are certain unavoidable dilemmas posed by our very ex-
istence as reflecting human beings. These existential dimensions pertain to
the finitude of our own existence, to universal anthropological necessities of
drawing boundaries between the inside and outside of a community, and of
recognizing the temporal and social location of our own existence relative
to that of others. This stance reflects basic properties inherent in reflexive
human existence.
Our capacity to reflect upon our own situation entails the inevitability of
a boundary between the world and ourselves; the world is no longer a seam-
less web from which we cannot even reflectively distance ourselves. This, of
course, is what Jaspers saw as the origin of history, in the sense not of bio-
logical reproduction but of the self-reflexivity of humankind. Reflexivity
entails the unavoidability of some boundary between inside and outside, no
matter where this boundary is drawn and how it is constructed. Our realiza-
tion of the finitude of our own existence entails a reflection on our temporal
and historical location. These types of reflexivity and our realization of the
existence of orderings in relations between oneself and other human beings
entail the potential of concepts of changing states of the world, of what so-
cial scientists today would call agentiality. The idea of the Axial Age as a
form of cultural crystallization involves precisely an analysis of shifts in the
interpretation of such notions of human reflexivity and of their institutional
implications.
Here, two statements of caution are necessary. Firstly, the recognition of
these inevitable dimensions of reflexive human life does not entail any spe-
cific theory of meaning. It is compatible both with an analysis—as that of
the Cambridge contextualists—that emphasizes the role of conventions and
rejects that of hermeneutic interpretation, as well as a hermeneutic or his-
torical intentionalist analysis. Secondly, the particular positions adopted
along these phenomenological dimensions may of course vary dramatically
across historical epochs and civilizations. A critic might then say that these
dimensions are so general that they are of little interest or importance. Such
a comment would, however, be mistaken. On the contrary, an analysis of
this type has two invaluable characteristics. Firstly, it provides an analytical
focus for the study of individual speech acts and contestations. I have sug-
gested the term cultural crystallization to denote periods of fundamental
reconceptualizations of positions on these phenomenological dimensions,
leading to basic reconfigurations or reassertions of macroinstitutional prac-
tices. Secondly, an analysis in this vein opens up the possibility of reintro-
ducing civilizational analysis into empirical historical research.
Ultimately, the cultural crystallizations that constitute formative moments
in global history involve an institutional articulation and interpretation of the
human condition, of what it means to conceptualize the finitude of our own
existence in a world premised on assumptions of the potentially infinite mal-
leability of the world upon which and into which our actions impinge, and of
what historical existence may mean in such a world. As already argued, such a
methodological stance does not presuppose an idealistic theory of history. On
the contrary, the comparative materials at hand suggest that transformations
and reformulations tend to be cast against the background of a profound crisis
of established political order and of new possibilities in the realm of economic
practices, including trends toward increasing productivity and growth in key
sectors of the economy. However, they do presuppose, in order to become
historically efficacious, arenas that grant at least a minimal degree of auton-
omy to intellectual practices, a certain protection from the powers-that-be to
groups of literati who try to articulate conceptions of new societal arrange-
ments or rather arrangements that are seen to safeguard key components of a
cultural legacy or cultures of a threatened life-world.
This seems to be the case whether we focus on events during the so-called
Axial Age or on the period in the tenth to thirteenth centuries when new
macroinstitutional patterns emerged on the far Western and far Eastern
edges of the Old World, that is, in Western Europe and in China during the
Song-Yuan-Ming transition, or in Japan in the crucial period of the emer-
gence of Japanese “feudalism.”24 It is also true for the period of the transi-
tion from early modern more or less absolutistic polities to other forms of
order during the emergence of multiple modernities in the course of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, the institutional practices
that emerged out of these formative periods were proposed on the basis of
reinterpretations of social practices in terms of key dimensions of sociality,

historical consciousness, agentiality, and cosmology by means of which hu-
man beings interpret their conditions of existence.
Finally, however, the ways in which various institutional projects were
realized—or, to use another terminology, the ways in which promissory notes
became institutional realities25—are protracted contestations and confronta-
tions. The outcome of these contestations rests on the ability of different ac-
tors to draw on and mobilize available resources. However, resources them-
selves do not articulate institutional choices, only human beings do, and they
do so in terms of what it means to be a human being with a finite existence
and endowed with capacities to act in the world and to change it.
Notes
1. Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Zurich: Artemis/Munich:
Piper). English translation: The Origin and Goal of History, trans. Michael Bullock
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul / New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953).
2. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 1: Die protes-
tantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus; Die protestantischen Sekten und
der Geist des Kapitalismus; Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen—part I: Kon-
fuzianismus und Taoismus; vol. 2: Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen—part
II: Hinduismus und Buddhismus; vol. 3: Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen—
part III: Das antike Judentum (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1920–1921).
3. Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze, vol. 1, 15.
4. Ibid., 3. The translations of these quotations from Weber’s work are mine.
5. Said Amir Arjomand, “Transformation of the Islamicate Civilization: A
Turning-Point in the Thirteenth Century?” Medieval Encounters 10, no. 1 (2004):
213–245, here 213 (italics in the original). The quotation refers to a broad tradition
in the analysis of civilizations. The whole issue is also published in book form with
the same editors as that of the triple issue, namely Johann P. Arnason and Björn
Wittrock, Eurasian Transformations, Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries: Crystallizations,
Divergences, Renaissances (Leiden: Brill, 2004); paperback edition, 2011.
6. Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze, vol. 1, 15.
7. See, for example, the issue of Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000), reprinted as Shmuel
N. Eisenstadt, ed., Multiple Modernities (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002).
8. The first four parts of the present contribution constitute a revised and ex-
tended version of my chapter “The Meaning of the Axial Age” in Johann P. Arna-
son, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock, eds., Axial Civilizations and
World History (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 51–85.
9. This section draws on my contribution “Cultural Crystallization and Con-

ceptual Change: Modernity, Axiality, and Meaning in History” to the Festschrift
dedicated to Reinhart Koselleck, Zeit, Geschichte und Politik / Time, History and
Politics, ed. Kari Palonen and Jussi Kurunmäki (Jyväskylä: Jyväskylä University,
2003), 105–134.
10. For a more detailed account, see Wittrock, “The Age of Ecumenical Renais-
sances,” in Arnason and Wittrock, Eurasian Transformations, 41–73.
11. Jaspers’ notion may be said to have some distant affinity with what Hegel
proposed in his lectures on the philosophy of history, although both their styles of
reasoning and their conclusions are quite different. Hegel’s ascription of such a
capacity, as in the case of Iran, has, perhaps unsurprisingly, caused much less at-
tention and controversy than his denial of it in the case of India. As to these pre-
cise cases, both Jaspers and Bellah tend to take the opposite stance, whereas Max
Weber in his discussion of the “prophetic age” includes both India and Iran in the
analysis.
12. The Egyptologist Jan Assmann has, perhaps more consistently than any-
body else, insisted on this point. He has highlighted the way in which Pharaonic
Egypt was on the verge of an Axial breakthrough without ever fully achieving it.
For a succinct statement of Assmann’s position, see for example his “Axial ‘Break-
throughs’ and Semantic ‘Relocations’ in Ancient Egypt and Israel,” in Arnason,
Eisenstadt, and Wittrock, Axial Civilizations, 133–156.
13. Daedalus 104, no. 2 (Spring 1975).
14. Robert N. Bellah, “What Is Axial about the Axial Age?” European Journal
of Sociology 46 (2005): 69–89, here 76. This article gives an excellent and succinct
statement of Bellah’s basic position and attests to his lasting contribution to the
Axial Age debate.
15. This fact is most evident in the following publications edited by Eisenstadt:
The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1986); Kulturen der Achsenzeit I: Ihre Ursprünge und ihre Vielfalt,
part 1: Griechenland, Israel, Mesopotamien, part 2: Spätantike, Indien, China, Islam
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987); Kulturen der Achsenzeit II: Ihre institutio-
nelle und kulturelle Dynamik, part 1: China, Japan, part 2: Indien, part 3: Buddhis-
mus, Islam, Altägypten, westliche Kultur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992).
16. In the recent past, efforts have been made to take stock of this debate and to
indicate the long-term consequences and relevance of this debate to key problems
in present-day historically oriented scholarship on major transformations of soci-
eties and civilizations. See especially Arnason, Eisenstadt, and Wittrock, Axial
Civilizations. This effort is continued in the present volume.
17. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution
of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 214.
18. See, for example, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Cultural Traditions and Political
Dynamics: The Origins and Modes of Ideological Politics,” British Journal of Soci-
ology 32 (1981): 155–181; reprinted in Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and

Multiple Modernities I (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 219–247.
19. See Johann P. Arnason, “The Axial Age and Its Interpreters: Reopening a
Debate,” in Arnason, Eisenstadt, and Wittrock, Axial Civilizations, 19– 48.
20. Christoph Harbsmeier, “The Axial Millennium in China: A Brief Survey,” in
Arnason, Eisenstadt, and Wittrock, Axial Civilizations, 469–507; Hsu Cho-yun,
“Rethinking the Axial Age—The Case of Chinese Culture,” in Arnason, Eisenstadt,
and Wittrock, Axial Civilizations, 451– 467.
21. See Sheldon Pollock, “Axialism and Empire,” in Arnason, Eisenstadt, and
Wittrock, Axial Civilizations, 397– 450.
22. See Reinhart Koselleck, “Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte,” Merkur
51 (1997): 319–334, here 324f.
23. I have taken up these issues extensively in my contribution to a Festschrift
dedicated to Hans Joas: “Menschliches Handeln, Geschichte und sozialer Wan-
del: Rekonstruktion der Sozialtheorie in drei Kontexten” in Bettina Hollstein,
Matthias Jung, and Wolfgang Knöbl, eds., Handlung und Erfahrung: Das Erbe von
Historismus und Pragmatismus und die Zukunft der Sozialtheorie (Frankfurt and
New York: Campus, 2011), 343–375.
24. See Paul Yakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds., The Song-Yuan-Ming
Transition in Chinese History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center,
2003), and Arnason and Wittrock, Eurasian Transformations.
25. See my “Modernity: One, None, or Many?” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (Winter
2000): 31– 60.
6
The Buddha’s Meditative Trance
Visionary Knowledge, Aphoristic Thinking, and
Axial Age Rationality in Early Buddhism
gananath obeyesekere
Meditative Trance
Discussions of the great historical religions that developed during the Axial
Age centered on their preoccupation with universal transcendental reli-
gious soteriologies and ethics that spilled over the confines of earlier small-
scale societies. They also entailed a preoccupation with theoretical or con-
ceptual thinking, an attempt to understand the world through the mediation
of abstract concepts. I do not know how far these issues are relevant for all
Axial Age religions, but they are perhaps true of most of them. However, it is
also the case that our theoretical discussions could ill afford to neglect what
I think is true of most of these religions, namely, an antecedent or conse-
quent preoccupation with visionary experience and the derivation of knowl-
edge outside of reason. Perhaps the neglect of visionary knowledge is due to
our formulating Axial Age thinking on the model of Enlightenment ratio-
nality, particularly as it developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. While Axial Age visionary experiences have strong family resem-
blances to such phenomena as shamanism, spirit possession, and medium-
ship found in small-scale societies, the former tend to transcend the values
of the local community and are articulated with transcendental salvific
goals and ethics. These are some of the themes that I want to explore in rela-
tion to early Buddhism, using as my model the Buddha’s own deep medita-
tive trance, and focusing on the derivation of visionary knowledge during
The Buddha’s Meditative Trance 127
his so-called Enlightenment, a term that has European rationalistic reso-

nances. For me the Pali term bodhi is best translated as “Awakening.”
I begin with the well-known Buddha mythobiography where the Buddha-
to-be (Bodhisattva) lives in luxury as a prisoner of hedonism confined to his
father’s palace, undistracted by the world’s ills. He decides to leave the im-
prisoning palace with his charioteer, and during four consecutive visits he
sees the “four signs”: that of a feeble old man, a sick man, a dead man with
relatives weeping over the bier, and finally the detached figure of a yellow-
robed renouncer. Disillusioned with hedonism, the Bodhisattva comes to
the royal palace, and there he sees the sleeping women of the harem in pos-
tures of disgust, snoring, with spittle forming around their mouths—the
skull beneath the skin, as it were. He then finds that a son has been born to
him. He steels his heart and, bidding his wife and infant silent farewell, leaves
the palace for the “homeless” life because, it should be remembered, from the
Buddhist viewpoint, the life of domesticity is also a kind of prison. Cutting
off his hair and shedding his royal clothes for the vestment of the renouncer,
he studies under ascetic gurus of his time, practicing extreme asceticism and
body mortification. He has now become a prisoner of asceticism. Buddhist
texts and sculptures vividly portray the emaciated and suffering Buddha
who, the myth affirms, experienced a kind of death. Abandoning asceticism
and adopting the “middle path,” the Buddha moves from the banyan tree to
the bodhi tree (Ficus religiosa) nearby, the tree under which he would achieve
his spiritual “Awakening.” Facing the East, again symbolizing a rising, he
decides not to move until he finds out the truth of existence. The next
mythic episode occurs when, meditating under the bodhi tree, he is assailed
by Mara, Death himself (who is also Eros of the Buddhist imagination)
waging war against the Buddha. This grand episode is described in graphic
detail in the popular traditions, and I shall not deal with it here except to say
that Mara attacked the Buddha with multiple weapons, but the sage remained
untouched, such being the power of the perfections (pāramitā), the moral
heroisms practiced in past births.
According to the Bhayabherava Sutta (“The discourse on fear and dread”)
the Buddha, during the first watch of the night, entered into the four states
of meditative trance ( jhāna [Pali], or dhyāna [Sanskrit]) leading to com-
plete equanimity which permitted him to recollect in all details his former
existences. Thus: “I recollected all my manifold past lives, that is, one birth,
two births, three births, forty births, fift y births, a hundred births, a thou-
sand births, a hundred thousand births, many eons of world-contraction
and expansion: ‘There I was so named, of such a clan, with such an appear-
ance, such was my nutriment, such my experience of pleasure and pain,
such my life-term; and passing from there, I reappeared elsewhere; and
there too I was so named, of such a clan, with such an appearance, such was
my nutriment, such my experience of pleasure and pain, such my life-term;
and passing away from there, I reappeared here.’ ” Immediately follows the
Buddha’s assessment of truth-realization through vision: “This was the first
true knowledge attained by me in the first watch of the night. Ignorance was
banished and true knowledge arose, darkness was banished and light arose,
as happens in one who abides diligent, ardent, and resolute.”
During the second watch, “true knowledge” continued to appear to the
Buddha when, with his “divine eye,” he redirected his mind to the long pan-
orama of the passing and rising of human beings such that he could see
them “passing away and reappearing, inferior and superior, fair and ugly,
fortunate and unfortunate” through the operation of the universal action of
karma and rebirth.1 And in the last watch, which must surely be close to
dawn and to a literal awakening, he discovered the nature of error and the
Four Noble Truths of Buddhism and, according to some accounts, the critical
theory of causal interconnectedness of things known as paticcasamuppāda
(Sanskrit: pratītya samutpāda), translated as “dependent origination” or
“conditioned genesis,” the fundamental idea being that things have no real-
ity on their own but are relative and dependent on one another and conse-
quently lack inherent existence. No form of essence underlies the changing
world of existence.
After this first Awakening when he becomes Buddha or the Awakened
One, popular accounts tell us that he spent another seven weeks (or seven
days) in meditation, in which he met with further spiritual adventures in an
entirely vivid imagistic medium. The most famous of these is where Mara’s
daughters entice him with erotic pleasures. They tell their father that some
men desire virgins, others women in the prime of life, while yet others pre-
fer middle-aged or old women and that they would take all these guises to
seduce the Bodhisattva. But the Buddha, still meditating on his moral per-
fections or heroisms (pāramitā), remained unmoved. One can say that the
daughters of Mara constitute the return of the women of the harem, but
without their masks and marks of disgust. It is also the return of the re-
pressed threatening to break through the controls imposed by asceticism.
Yet eroticism cannot tempt the sage because his deep trances ( jhānas) have
taken him beyond desire and therefore he cannot succumb to temptation.
After the seven weeks (or days) are over, the hero is reborn again, or in Bud-
dhist terminology, he is the “Fully Awakened One” (sammā sambuddha), a
term that European scholars influenced, I think, by their own Enlighten-
ment have generously sanctified as “the Enlightenment.” The double enten-
dre of “awakened” is very significant: first, the Buddha has passed the lim-
inal stage and emerged into a new life-form and the founding of a new
order; second, his is a spiritual Awakening, a discovery of a way of salvific
knowledge. The term “awakened” therefore can be employed as a designa-
tion for those who have achieved this state through the initiatory spiritual
model based on a symbolic death and rebirth, once again aligning the Bud-
dha’s experience with those virtuosos in small-scale societies without of
course subsuming the former into the latter. I think one can even say that
the Buddha’s experience under the bodhi tree is the mysterium tremendum
of Buddhism.
Time and Space in Visionary Experience
My preceding discussion is a reminder that the Buddha’s experience under

the tree of Awakening is uniquely Buddhist, but from a purely formal or
structural viewpoint it can be related to similar experiences outside of the
Buddhist tradition. Consider the Buddha’s meditative experience during the
second watch where, employing his “divine eye,” he sees human beings pass-
ing through endless existences (samsāra), from their human lives to their
fate in heavens and hells, dependent on their karma. The “divine eye” that
unfolds his visionary experiences is not part of his ordinary sensory appara-
tus but an inner “eye” that other visionaries also possessed. Note that during
the first watch the Buddha recollected or remembered his past existences,
including eons of world expansion and contraction, but whether this is
“remembering” in our conventional usage is open to doubt. In the second
watch also the past lives of others appear before him in visual form, each
watch being a period of four hours. In this kind of experience, empirical
time, or time as we normally understand it in our waking lives, gets stretched

in incredible ways. There is a disparity between normal time and dream
time (or empirical and mythic time) such that we can dream of long epi-
sodes in a few short time-bound moments. Yet these “timeless” experiences
are, according to our texts, framed within four-hour time-bound periods
(“watches”).
I would like to make the case that in many ways the Buddha’s experience
of vast episodes appearing in a brief span of time has its parallel in the dream
experience so brilliantly examined by Freud, who noted a similar compression-
expansion of time as a feature of dreams. Freud mentions the case of a “dra-
matic author” named Casimir Bonjour, who wanted to sit with the audience
during the first performance of his play. But being fatigued, “he dozed off just
at the moment the curtain went up. During his sleep he went through the
whole five acts of the play, and observed the various signs of emotion shown
by the audience during the different scenes. At the end of the performance he
was delighted to hear his name being shouted with the liveliest demonstra-
tions of applause. Suddenly he woke up. He could not believe either his eyes
or his ears for the performance had not gone beyond the first few lines of the
first scene; he could not have been asleep for more than two minutes.”2 Al-
though Freud himself did not think of the contrast between empirical and
mythic time as a function of the dream work, every dreamer has surely expe-
rienced it. And so have the mad in their hallucinations.
What about space and how are visions related to space? This is a compli-
cated question because Buddhist visionaries fill space in incredible ways and
engage in space adventures of a fantastic nature, surpassing shamanic vir-
tuosos in their cosmic travels. For now, following the preceding argument, I
will deal with the visionary expansion of limited empirical space, that is, a
distinction between empirical space and mythic space that, once again, I be-
lieve has its parallel in the dream life. I shall give two illustrative examples of
the telescoping of space from both within and outside the Indian tradition.
1. The first is a well-known story from the Bhagavata Purāna, the great
text of devotional Hinduism: “One day, when Krishna was still a little baby,
some boys saw him eating mud. When his foster mother, Yasoda, learned of
it, she asked the baby to open his mouth. Krishna opened his tiny mouth,
and, wonder of wonders! Yasoda saw the whole universe—the earth, the
stars, the planets, the sun, and the moon and innumerable beings—within
the mouth of Baby Krishna. For a moment Yasoda was bewildered thinking,
‘Is this a dream or a hallucination? Or is it a real vision, the vision of my lit-
tle baby as God himself?’ ”3
2. The following appears in Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Nor-
wich (c. 1342–1416): “And I was still awake, and then our Lord opened my
spiritual eyes and showed me my soul in the middle of my heart. I saw my
soul as large as it were a kingdom; and from the properties that I saw in it, it
seemed to me to be a glorious city. In the centre of that city sits our Lord
Jesus, true God and true man, glorious, highest Lord: and I saw him dressed
imposingly in glory.”4
In both the Bhagavata Purāna and Revelations of Divine Love, the vision
of expanded space could be simultaneously literal and symbolic, at the very
least a visualization of the idea that the Kingdom of God is within oneself.
As Julian says: “He sits in the soul, in the very centre, in peace and rest, and
he rules and protects heaven and earth and all that is.”5
The reverse process, wherein a large space is contracted into a small one,
also occurs, but not as commonly. Here is the Tibetan space-traveler and
“treasure-seeker” Pemalingpa (1450–1519) writing of this kind of experi-
ence: “I had a bamboo hut erected on the hill called Sershong. . . . While I
was staying in retreat there for three months I had sight of the whole world
like a myrobalan flower placed in the palm of one’s hand, entirely clear and
pure.”6 Reverse telescoping of space is also beautifully expressed in the Ti-
betan theory of meditation wherein the virtuoso might be able to visualize
the entire man.d.ala (the imagined circle of deities with the guru or personal
deity at the center) reduced to “a drop the size of a mustard seed at the tip
of one’s nose, with such clarity that one can see the whites of the eyes of all
722 deities—and can maintain this visualization with uninterrupted one-
pointed concentration for four hours.”7
Visionary Knowledge
The kind of visionary knowledge that I have discussed thus far entails, I
think, the abdication of the Cartesian cogito, at least when knowledge ap-
pears before the “eye” of the seer, irrespective of the religious tradition in-
volved. Thus Julian’s characterization of her visions as “showings.”8 The
Buddha’s showings during the first and second watches of the night occur
when discursive thought is in abeyance, as is clearly recognized in early

Buddhist texts. This means that the thinking-I is suspended during trance,
dreaming, and psychotic fantasies and also in fleeting moments when pic-
tures as well as thoughts of a nondiscursive nature float into our ken. One
must not assume that cerebral activity is suspended during this state. I am
inclined to postulate the idea of passive cerebration as against the active
I-dependent cerebral activity involved in our rational discursive thinking
processes. Going back to Christianity’s past, John of the Cross tells us that
one hears God with the hearing of the soul and one sees God “with the eye
of the passive intellect,” a kind of passive thinking that arises from the soul
and not to be identified with ratio or reason.9 And speaking of locutions,
John perceptively adds that the “soul receives God’s communication pas-
sively” and that the “reception of the light infused supernaturally into the
soul is passive knowing.”10 Meister Eckhart posits the idea of man’s active
intellect, “but when the action at hand is undertaken by God, the mind must
remain passive.”11 As with the Buddha, when thoughts are received by the
passive intellect, they can be and often are re-cognized through the work of
the active ego. Nietzsche had a similar idea: “A thought comes when ‘it’
wishes and not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the
case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think.’ It
thinks: but that this ‘it’ is precisely the famous old ‘ego’ is, to put it mildly,
only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an immediate certainty.”
For Nietzsche, even “It-thinking” is tainted with agency, compelling one to
think “according to grammatical habit.”12 For convenience I shall occasion-
ally use Nietzsche’s trope, reformulated as “I-thinking” and “It-thinking.”
Given the preceding discussion, the conventional view of Buddhism as
an exclusively rational religion has to be seriously reconsidered. It was the
theosophist-cum-rationalist Colonel H. S. Olcott who asserted that “Bud-
dhism was, in a word, a philosophy, and not a creed,” and this credo has
become the standard view of native intellectuals in contemporary Buddhist
societies.13 Yet contrary to modern Buddhist intellectuals, the Buddhist ra-
tio is radically different from both the Greek and the European Enlighten-
ments.14 The European Enlightenment with its reification of rationality ig-
nored or condemned visionary experiences; not so the Greek, it seems to me.
Plato employed reason for discovering true knowledge, but neither he nor
Socrates condemned or ignored such things as the work of visionaries and
prophets and personally believed in the oracle at Delphi. By contrast, the

Buddha condemned all sorts of popular “superstitions” as base or beastly arts
in a famed discourse known as the Brahmajāla Sutta (“The net of Brahma”)
but never visions and knowledge emerging through meditative trance
( jhāna).15 During the first and second watches the Buddha sees his own life
histories that then are extended to include those of human beings in general,
their births and rebirths in various realms of existence. Through the “picto-
rialization” of births and rebirths, the Buddha can grasp the doctrine of
karma and rebirth, can see it operating. During the third watch he discov-
ered the existential foundation of Buddhism, these being the Four Noble
Truths of Buddhism: dukkha, suffering, the unsatisfactory nature of exis-
tence owing to the fact of impermanency; samudaya, how dukkha arises ow-
ing to tanhā, thirst, attachment, greed, desire, or craving; nirodha, cessation
of craving that might ultimately lead to nirvana; and magga, or the path that
can help us realize nirvana, also known as the “noble eightfold path” includ-
ing right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right liveli-
hood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Right concen-
tration is samādhi or the meditative disciplines leading to complexly graded
states of trance ( jhāna, dhyāna) that permitted the Buddha to intuit the very
truths mentioned above.
We do not know how the Four Noble Truths appeared to the sage in the
dawn watch. An early text, however, gives us a clue regarding the manner in
which intuitively derived knowledge is given rational reworking. It says that
when an Awakened Being has arisen in the world, there is a great light and
radiance (associated with direct visionary knowledge), and then “there is
the explaining, teaching, proclaiming, establishing, disclosing, analyzing,
and elucidating of the Four Noble Truths.”16 The Buddha adds: “This, bhik-
khus [monks], is the middle way awakened by the Tathagata [Buddha], which
gives rise to vision, which gives rise to knowledge, which leads to peace, to
direct knowledge, to enlightenment, to Nibbana [nirvana].”17
We have noted that some texts say that while in trance the Buddha dis-
covered the doctrine of conditioned genesis or dependent origination, the
central doctrine highlighting the interdependence of all actions and giving
philosophical justification for the world of becoming, change, and instabil-
ity. Conditioned genesis provides the epistemological or theoretical justifi-
cation for the Four Noble Truths. Yet in contrast to the first two watches, in
the third, or dawn watch, thoughts are no longer represented in picture

form but rather as ideas that enter into the passive consciousness of the
thinker when deep trance is thinning out into daybreak. Unlike the discov-
ery of the Four Noble Truths, we can make an informed guess as to how
conditioned genesis entered the mind of the Buddha. There are detailed
discussions of this doctrine in Buddhist texts, but one enigmatic formula
repeats itself in many with only minor variations. For example, in one dis-
course the Buddha tells an inquirer named Sakuludayin: “I shall teach you
the Dhamma: when this exists, that comes to be; with the arising of this,
that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be; with the ces-
sation of this, that ceases.”18 In this discourse the Buddha equates condi-
tioned genesis with the Buddhist doctrine itself, anticipating similar formu-
lations by later Mahayana thinkers. Moreover, this formula exists by itself,
whereas in the very next discourse it is incorporated in a larger context and
then given a conceptual label: paticcasamuppāda. Here one of his disciples
asks: “In what way can a bhikkhu [monk] be called skilled in dependent
origination?” The Buddha responds:
When this is, that comes to be;

With the arising of this, that arises.
When this does not arise, that does not come to be;
With the cessation of this, that ceases.
He then briefly explains the enigmatic formula thus: “That is, with igno-
rance as condition, formations [come to be]; with formations as condition,
consciousness; with consciousness as condition, mentality-materiality; with
mentality-materiality as condition, the six-fold base; with the six-fold base
as condition, contact; with contact as condition, feeling; with feeling as con-
dition, craving; with craving as condition, clinging; with clinging as condi-
tion, being; with being as condition, birth; with birth as condition, ageing
and death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair come to be. Such is
the origin of this whole mass of suffering.”19 The discursive strategy is rea-
sonably clear. The formulaic statement is elaborated in various degrees of
complexity and length in Buddhist texts.20
In my current research I am examining that manner in which whole or
partial texts are received by the passive consciousness of the visionary,
whether it be a Mahayana or Vajrayana Buddhist; or a Christian penitent in

the Middle Ages; or a later dreamer like William Blake or Madame Bla-
vatsky; or for that matter someone like Joseph Smith. Unfortunately, many
of us ordinary intellectuals do not have the gift of vision and even if we had
there is no way that our astral, visionary, or dream manuscripts would be
taken seriously by our respective professions! Hence my suggesting that the
Buddha’s formula of conditioned genesis not only fits the third watch or
dawn/daybreak, it is also a mode of thought that is not at all alien to us. It
is expressed as an aphorism. While the Buddha is not given to aphoristic
thinking in general, Mahayana thinkers such as Nagarjuna were masters of
the aphorism, as were some Western thinkers, such as Nietzsche and Witt-
genstein. I have no space to deal with Wittgenstein’s aphoristic thinking at
length and therefore shall confine myself primarily to Nietzsche.
“The gestation of all really great creation,” Nietzsche mused sentimen-
tally, “lies in loneliness.”21 Loneliness did not mean an aversion to human
company but rather the cultivation of solitude that permits thoughts to en-
ter Nietzsche’s field of “awareness.” He, like the Buddha, was a wanderer but
one living under the shadow of chronic disease and dread of madness, never
in one place for long, and rarely in his German homeland. Victor Helling
dubbed him the “great hermit of Sils-Maria” (CN, 21). According to Sebas-
tian Hausmann, a stranger with whom Nietzsche once walked, “He spouted
his thoughts forth, more in the form of aphorisms, always leaping one to the
other” (CN, 139). Paul Lanzky thought that Nietzsche really valued human
company; yet he also mentioned his “longing for stillness, indeed this tem-
porary reveling in the idyllic” (CN, 174, 178). Nietzsche’s ambivalence to-
ward his solitariness was intrinsic to his character, and although he com-
plained of his isolation and loneliness, he also seemed to enjoy it and could
not do without it. That longing was probably best realized in Sils-Maria with
its secluded forest paths tempting the wanderer to be alone with himself
(CN, 182–183). It was in this kind of solitude that the aphorisms of Day-
break, The Joyful Science, and Beyond Good and Evil were written.
I suggest that it is in such silent meditative contexts that aphoristic think-
ing emerges into consciousness without an intrusive “I”; no wonder that
Nietzsche, like other wanderers, could speak to his shadow on the impor-
tance of “It-thinking.” Visions are not Nietzsche’s forte. Not so with the
nondiscursive silent thoughts he reexpressed through the literary genre of
aphorisms. For Nietzsche, as for Wittgenstein, aphorisms became the vehi-

cle for the expression of thoughts that occurred outside of the cogito. What I
call “aphoristic thinking” is not necessarily congruent with the literary genre
of aphorism; they can be expressed in other genres also, as in Blake’s “prov-
erbs of hell” and in his Laocoön. Similar “fragments” appear in the well-
known enigmatic sayings of Zen masters.
The aphoristic mentality—the mentality that converts nonreflexive thought
into aphorisms and similar literary forms—does not necessarily arise from
trance or similar conditions of suspended consciousness. It only requires
moments when active egoistic thinking is in abeyance. As in the case of
dreams, one cannot capture such thoughts as they emerge into conscious-
ness, but, as with dreams, one has to be satisfied with the remembered text.
It is difficult to fully recollect aphoristic thoughts, although, as with Nietz-
sche, one can be trained to do so. Reinhardt von Seydlitz reports that in
1877, a year before Nietzsche left the University of Basel to become a wan-
dering ascetic, he “kept next to his bed a slate tablet on which, in the dark,
he jotted down the thoughts that came to him on sleepless nights” (CN, 91).
Much later, in 1884, in his favorite Sils-Maria, Resa von Schirnhofer re-
counts a marvelous piece of advice given by Nietzsche himself: “keep paper
and pencil on hand at night, as he himself did, since at night we are often
visited by rare thoughts, which we should record immediately on awakening
in the night, for by morning we can usually not find them again, they have
fluttered away with the nocturnal darkness” (CN, 149). For Nietzsche, the
aphoristic mode of work had practical purpose, as he noted in 1882: “I felt
close to death and therefore pressed to say some things which I had been
carry ing around with me for years. Illness compelled me to use the briefest
mode of expression; the individual sentences were dictated directly to a
friend; systematic realization was out of the question. That is how the book
Human, All Too Human was written. Thus the choice of the aphorism will
be understandable only from the accompanying circumstances” (CN, 129).
Let me now get back to the Buddha’s discovery of dependent origination
during the dawn watch. It is immaterial to me whether the empirical Bud-
dha actually had this experience; often enough mythos represents in sym-
bolic form the reality of the truth-seeker. The Buddha’s dawn watch or
Nietzsche’s “daybreak” opens one’s dimmed consciousness to aphoristic
thinking wherein one can observe again the “passive intellect” at work. To
my mind the formula of conditioned genesis is fully consonant with the

third and final watch opening into daybreak. Aphoristic thinking condenses
It-thoughts, just as dreams might be condensations of images. Even with
Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, the written aphorism can be interspersed with
I-thinking. Yet when written aphorisms are close to their original thought
processes, they possess the kind of enigmatic quality we noted in the Bud-
dha’s formula on conditioned genesis. Not only are they thick with meaning,
but they also frequently require exegeses, either by the author or by others,
for them to be fully comprehended. The enigmatic, thick, often poetic na-
ture of aphorisms defies translation and is amply demonstrated in Nietz-
sche’s work and in the work of another wandering ascetic and “mystic,”
Wittgenstein, another man with no fi xed abode.
I have affirmed that solitude is something cultivated like the meditative
space in Andrew Marvell’s poem “The Garden,” and the poet’s garden tempts
me to speculate on the role of gardens in the meditative askeses of different
places and times. Prior to his Awakening, the Buddha was in the town of
Uruvela, where he saw “an agreeable piece of ground, a delightful grove with
a clear-flowing river with pleasant, smooth banks and a nearby village for
alms resort.”22 Monasteries in the Buddha’s own time contained spaces for
meditative solitude. Indeed donors gifted their orchards and gardens to
monks in the earliest period of Buddhism. When Buddhism was introduced
to Sri Lanka in the third century bce, the evidence is clearer: monasteries
were associated with forest groves, gardens, or orchards. In some myths the
forest is tamed or enclosed and converted into a space for solitude.
It is in gardens or in similar spaces of solitude that the enigmatic or apho-
ristic utterances of Zen monks occurred. Solitude is not the search for lone-
liness: the Buddha, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Zen monks, and others like
them enjoyed congenial human company whenever it was available; and
some of us know that such company is hard to find. Meditating monks were
“hermits,” but they rarely lived in total isolation from the world. They en-
joyed the company of fellow meditators and lay folk without losing the ca-
pacity to be absorbed unto themselves, living alone like the single horn of
the rhinoceros [or unicorn], as one Buddhist text puts it.23 Wittgenstein
once spoke of his sojourn at Red Cross in Ireland, where mental solitude was
conjoined with physical isolation: “Sometimes my ideas come so quickly
that I feel as if my pen was being guided”—something impossible to realize
in the stuff y academic world of Cambridge with its overwhelming preoccu-

pation with Enlightenment rationality.24 I am not sure whether Wittgen-
stein was aware of his spiritual affinity in this regard with some of the vision-
aries in his European tradition such as Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila,
William Blake, and Madame Blavatsky, all of whom claimed that large chunks
of texts simply came to them through some divine or astral source, thoughts
without a thinker, as it were.
Unlike Nietzsche, Wittgenstein was not exclusively an aphoristic thinker.
His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was written in aphoristic form, but not
all of his work was. Yet aphorisms sparkle everywhere in his writing. Ber-
trand Russell pointed out the significance of this mode of work in the Trac-
tatus when in an admirable understatement he described some of its propo-
sitions as “obscure through brevity.”25 Wittgenstein’s aphoristic density of
expression eluded the brilliance of his two mentors, Russell and Gottlob
Frege. When he was given a copy, Frege could barely begin to read it; and
Wittgenstein thought that Russell did not understand a word of it. Neither
could most philosophers until painful exegeses by Wittgenstein’s disciples
made his thoughts accessible to a larger audience of philosophers. Those
enigmatic statements are evident in the opening propositions of the Tracta-
tus, perhaps the very ones that baffled Frege and put him off:
1. The world is all that is the case.

1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.
1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also
whatever is not the case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2 The world divides into facts.
1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else
remains the same.26
And so on and so on. In fairness to Wittgenstein it must be said that the

aphoristic statements in the Tractatus, we now know, were less haphazard than
Nietzsche’s but ordered into a systemic totality through I-thinking without,
however, losing their aphoristic quality. Nevertheless, whether it is Nietzsche
or Wittgenstein, aphoristic thought is hostile to footnotes or bibliographical
references. One could even say that it is meaningless to have such things in
aphorisms. They would distract from, and dilute, the power of the aphoristic
message.
Rationality
I am sympathetic to Karl Jaspers’ idea of the Axial Age transformation of the
religious life, but I resist any strict periodization. In Jaspers’ work and in Shm-
uel Eisenstadt’s and Robert Bellah’s recent reformulations, this transforma-
tion entailed a preoccupation with soteriology and an ethics that transcended
the world of everyday reality and the preexisting forms of the religious life loca-
lized in the small community.27 The Axial religions of India, as elsewhere,
tended to be “universal” in the sense that their soteriology was meant for all.
Following the creative thought of the mathematician turned Indologist, D. D.
Kosambi, one could relate that expansion of thought to the changes taking
place in India’s “second urbanization.”28 This period saw profound changes
in political and economic life in India that I shall now briefly describe.
First, two new emerging empires, Kosala and Magadha, violently swal-
lowed the many small independent Ksatriya “republics” like the Buddha’s
own place of birth that had collective decision-making assemblies known as
sanghas or ganas. To deal with this threat, some small republics banded to-
gether in a loose political alliance known as the Vajjian confederacy; but
this too was short-lived. Other republics lasted much longer. The “full and
frequent assemblies” of these sanghas and ganas were so much idealized by
the Buddha that he not only named the Buddhist order after them but also
borrowed their organizational principles and transferred them to the mo-
nastic assembly, as did his rival Mahavira, the spiritual leader of the Jainas.
Second, there was the emergence of new cities and the development of
trade and commerce and concomitantly a new class of wealthy traders,
bankers, and entrepreneurs, generally known as setthis. Many of these sup-
ported the new salvation religions. Kosambi argues that the development of
trade and the movement of caravans transcended local groups and tradi-
tional political boundaries. Two caravan routes were especially significant:
the uttarāpatha, the northern route into the Indus region of Brahmanic
culture, and the dakshināpatha that went south into the modern Deccan,
both routes providing access for Buddhist monks and other teachers to
spread their faiths.29 These trade routes needed policing, which the new
empires provided. Thus, says Kosambi, an alliance was forged between the
merchant classes and the kings. He adds that the time was right for the emer-
gence of universalizing and transcendent religions that paralleled the obso-
lescence of older political communities and the creation of wider ones.30
These changes in turn paralleled the outward looking and universalizing
orientations of the new religions, the one probably influencing the other.
Nevertheless, an “orientation” cannot account for the content of a doctrine;
therefore a direct tie-in between economic and political change and the
thought of the new religions of the Ganges Valley is difficult to substantiate.
Some scholars have suggested that the sense of pessimism and the emphasis
on suffering that these religions formulated can be related to the social dis-
ruptions and dislocations of traditional life-forms of the sort that Durkheim
conceptualized as “anomie.” But one can as easily argue that such condi-
tions could lead to a preoccupation with hedonism instead of postulating a
world of impermanence and hopelessness. Indeed, the Buddha myth recog-
nizes that hedonism is no solution to the ills of the world.
What seems to be occurring at this time is the emergence of thinkers
questioning preexisting values and proposing a variety of salvific and non-
salvific solutions to the problems of existence. The Buddhist texts describe
nonreligious thinkers such as various kinds of materialists, sophists, and
nihilists. The social changes of the time provoked thinkers to deal with a
variety of existential issues, almost all geared to general and universalized
knowledge that transcended, though not necessarily replaced, the values
and ideals of the local community. For example, the Buddha borrowed the
model of the sangha from the republican organization of the time; but his
sangha was no longer tied to a specific political unit; it was the universal
church, “the sangha of the four quarters.” So with the religious doctrine or
dhamma/dharma: it was not localized in any specific community or groups
but contained a salvific message for all. The figure of the founder is also not
exempt from this process. Once the Buddha decides to become a renouncer,
he ceases to be a member of the local community; furthermore, as the Bud-
dha he is one of a long line of redeemers, previous Buddhas. Thus the three
main axes of the religion—the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha—are
all universalizing conceptions.
Is there any concept that one can employ to designate the multiple strands
of the Indic reform that I have highlighted thus far? These ideas, namely,
“ethicization,” or the conversion of local moral values into those geared to-
ward salvation; the universalizing (and transcendental) thrusts in soteriol-
ogy; and “axiologization,” where every aspect of species existence is given
ethical and soteriological significance, are part of the systematization of
thought and life-forms that one might, following Max Weber, label as “ratio-
nalization.” Although Weber used the term “rationalization” in bewildering
ways, it is fair to say that one important sense of rationalization is “system-
atization of thought.” However, this meaning of rationalization is useful
only for identifying the general or totalizing sweep of thought, not for speci-
fying its components. Weber did have a restricted and more useful defini-
tion of rationalization as the kind of intellectual action that “the systematic
thinker performs on the image of the world: an increasing theoretical mas-
tery of reality by means of increasingly precise and abstract concepts.”31 I
borrow the term “conceptualism” from European scholasticism for describ-
ing an intermediate position between realism and nominalism, but I give it
a different twist to designate the invention and use of abstract terms and
formulations. Thus my use of conceptualism is not synonymous with ratio-
nalization but is one component of it and close to what Bellah perhaps
meant by theoretic thinking.
While conceptualism is intrinsically associated with the systematization
of thought or rationalization, one can have the systematization of thought
without conceptualism. The unifying worldview of the ethical prophet might
entail a systematization of thought; and I suspect that there are many spe-
cialists in small-scale societies given to rationalization in this sense.32 Yet,
while the biblical prophet had abstract ideals, he hardly used abstract con-
cepts to understand the world; and indeed he shunned concepts or found
them irrelevant to his passionate and intense soteriological vision. Concep-
tualism, as I am using it, is rarely found in the Bible. It is only in the Platonic
heritage of later Christian, Judaic, and Islamic thinkers that one encounters
careful and deliberate conceptualism. To conclude: what is unique to Axial
Age religions is a form of “rationalization” that includes the development of
transcendental and universalizing soteriologies; and ethicization is a basic
feature of that universal and transcendental vision. These soteriologies do
require systematic probing into the nature of existence, but I am not sure
whether they necessarily involve “conceptualism.” The latter entails the su-
pervening of abstract concepts for grasping the nature of the world, and it is
religions like Buddhism that exemplify it. In the Buddhist doctrinal tradi-
tion, the conceptual imperative is so strong that one could reasonably speak
of a “Buddhist Enlightenment” that parallels the Greek and the European,
provided we do not confuse the Buddha’s “Awakening” with his later “En-
lightenment,” wherein ideas that emerged through vision are retrospectively
given conceptual and systemic formulation. Hence such things as the Four
Noble Truths and the theory of dependent origination that I have already
discussed; the doctrine of the impermanence of things (anicca); the five
atomic principles or skandhas that constitute the ever-changing body; the
doctrine of “no soul” (anatta); the idea of rebirth linking consciousness;
complex theories of perception and consciousness; the classification and
analysis of states of concentration or absorption ( jhāna, dhyāna); and so on.
These ideas are rarely presented as purely abstract discourse until we come
to the later philosophical and psychological analyses known as the Abhi-
dhamma (Sanskrit: Abhidharma).33 Rather, concepts are woven into the dia-
logues of the Buddha that deal for the most part with the nature of existence
and the transcendence of the everyday world. Yet although Buddhist con-
ceptualism is necessary for an intellectual understanding of the religion, it
has to be abandoned at a certain point in the salvation quest, along with
discursive thought in general.
One can have a feel for the kind of speculative thought characteristic of
the period by dealing with those thinkers whom the Buddha labeled “eel-
wrigglers” and “hair-splitters.” The reference to these dialecticians comes
from the Brahmajāla Sutta, the fascinating text mentioned earlier. In it the
Buddha discusses eleven false theories (vāda, lit. “arguments”) about the
soul.34 Among the dialecticians of these theories are the eel-wrigglers. When
a question is put to one of them, “he resorts to eel-wriggling, to equivoca-
tion, and says: ‘I don’t take it thus. I don’t take it the other way. But I advance
no different opinion. And I don’t deny your position. And I don’t say it is
neither the one, nor the other.’ ”35 Or he might say: “There is not another-
world. There both is, and is not, another-world. There neither is, nor is not,
another-world. . . . There is fruit, result, of good and bad actions. There is
not. There both is, and is not. There neither is, nor is not.”36
Eel-wrigglers are familiar to us in academia; so are the hairsplitters, a subclass

of the eel-wrigglers who, like the author of this essay, engage in “breaking to
pieces by their wisdom the speculations of others.”37 These kinds of dialectics are
used by the Buddha himself when dealing with ideas that cannot be expressed in
ordinary discursive language. Paradox and equivocation are part of the lan-
guage the religious virtuoso uses to describe ineffable states, or the unity of self
with god, or of all existence as refractions of the deity. It is “neither this nor
that,” in the language of Eckhart; or the “not this—not this” of the Upanishadic
formula; it is the language of T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday.” And it is the language
of Parmenides in Plato’s Parmenides.38 Though parodied by the Buddha because
of the extremes to which it is carried, the dialectics of the eel-wrigglers and
hairsplitters indicate a powerful rationalizing impulse in any society.
Notes
Portions of this essay are reprinted, with permission of the publishers, from my recent book, The
Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2012, © 2012 Columbia University Press), and my earlier book, Imagining Karma: Ethical
Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007).
1. This and the preceding quotation from Bhayabherava Sutta are from the
translation of the Majjhima Nikāya or “The Middle Length Sayings of the Bud-
dha” by Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi (Boston: Wisdom Publications,
1995), 105–106.
2. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 2 vols. (London: The Ho-
garth Press, 1981), 498.
3. Srimad Bhagavatam, The Wisdom of God, trans. Swami Prabhavananda
(Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1943), 190.
4. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Elizabeth Spearing
(London: Penguin Books, 1998), 33.
5. Ibid.
6. Michael Aris, Hidden Treasures and Secret Lives: A Study of Pemalingpa
(1450–1521) and the Sixth Dalai Lama (1683–1706) (London: Kegan Paul, 1989), 43.
7. Geoff rey Samuel, Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies (Wash-
ington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution, 1993), 236.
8. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, 41.
9. John of the Cross, “Spiritual Canticle,” in Kieran Kavanaugh, ed., John of
the Cross: Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 211–283, here 249.
10. Ibid., 119.
11. Raymond B. Blakney, trans., Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation (New

York: Harper and Row, 1941), 110.
12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the
Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 24. To resolve
this issue let me consider in more detail Nietzsche’s notion of It-thinking formu-
lated in Beyond Good and Evil (1886). In it he lampoons those “harmless self-
observers who believe there are ‘immediate certainties,’ for example, ‘I think,’ or
as the superstition of Schopenhauer put it, ‘I will’; as though knowledge here got
hold of its object purely and nakedly as ‘the thing in itself,’ without any falsifica-
tion on the part of either the subject or the object.” These ideas are further ham-
mered out in his late work Twilight of the Idols (1888) before his own reason was
finally blotted out. Nietzsche’s terrible wrath is focused on Descartes and Kant,
who represent for him the folly of Western metaphysics. “It is this [reason] which
sees everywhere deed and doer; this which believes in will as cause in general; this
which believes in the ‘ego,’ in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and which
projects its belief in the ego-substance on to all things. . . . Being is everywhere
thought in, foisted on, as cause; it is only from the conception ‘ego’ that there fol-
lows, derivatively, the concept of ‘being.’ ” These references are from Beyond Good
and Evil, 20–24, from B. J. Hollingdale, trans., Twilight of the Angels / The Anti-
Christ (London: Penguin, 1990), 61 (italics in the original).
13. Henry Steele Olcott, Old Diary Leaves: The History of the Theosophical So-
ciety, vol. 2: Adyar (Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1974), 169.
14. See Imagining Karma, especially 283–287, for a discussion of the three
Enlightenments.
15. “The Brahmajala Sutta: The Supreme Net,” in Maurice Walsh, trans. and
ed., The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Dīgha Nikāya (Boston:
Wisdom Publications, 1995), 67–90.
16. Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation
of the Sam . yutta Nikāya, 2 vols. (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2000), vol. 1, 1862.
17. Ibid., 1844 (my italics).
18. “The Shorter Discourse to Sakuladayin,” in Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhik-
khu Bodhi, trans., The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 654– 662, here 655.
19. “The Many Kinds of Elements,” in Nanamoli and Bodhi, trans., The Middle
Length Discourses, 925–930, here 927.
20. See, for example, “Dependant Origination,” in Nidāna Sam . yutta (“Con-
nected Discourses on Causation”), in Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Connected Discourses,
vol. 1, 533–554.
21. Sander L. Gilman, ed., Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of
His Contemporaries, trans. David J. Parent (New York: Oxford University Press,
1991), 128. Hereafter this work is abbreviated as “CN.”
22. Ariyapariyesana Sutta (“The Noble Search”) in Nanamoli and Bodhi,
trans., The Middle Length Discourses, 253–277, here 259.
23. See “The Unicorn’s Horn,” in Sutta Nipāta, trans. H. Saddhatissa (London:
Curzon Press, 1987), 4–8, here 4.
24. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage
Books, 1991), 521.
25. Ibid., 166.
26. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears
and B. F. McGuinness (London and New York: Routledge, 1974), 5 (emphasis in
original).
27. Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Zurich: Artemis,
1949); Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “The Axial Age: The Emergence of Transcendental
Visions and the Rise of Clerics,” European Journal of Sociology 23 (1982): 294–314;
and of course Robert Bellah’s chapter in this volume.
28. In D. D. Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (Bombay:
Popu lar Book Depot, 1956), and The Culture and Civilization of Ancient India in
Historical Outline (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing, 1976). The first urbanization
refers to the Indus Valley civilizations of India.
29. Kosambi, The Culture and Civilization, 111–120, 124–126.
30. D. D. Kosambi, Ancient India (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 101–103.
31. Max Weber, “Social Psychology of the World Religions,” in From Max We-
ber, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press,
1976), 293–294.
32. Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Hans Gerth and Don Martindale
(Glencoe: Free Press, 58–59).
33. Abhidhamma is the third and, historically, the last part of the canon deal-
ing with obsessively classificatory philosophical and psychological commentaries
by monks.
34. In this instance I shall use the older edition, see Rhys Davids, trans.,
Brahmajāla Sutta (“The Perfect Net”), Dialogues of the Buddha, part 1 (Sacred
Books of the Buddhists, vol. 2) (London: Pali Text Society, 1995 [1899]), 1–55.
35. Ibid., 37–38.
36. Ibid., 40– 41.
37. Ibid., 38–39.
38. See especially statements by Parmenides in Parmenides 147b and 166c, in
Albert Keith Whitaker, trans., Plato’s Parmenides (Newburyport: Focus Publish-
ing, 1966), 55 and 89.
7
The Idea of Transcendence
ingolf u. dalferth
The idea of an Axial Age has many facets. However, in Karl Jaspers’ thought
its decisive feature “is man’s reaching out beyond himself by growing aware
of himself within the whole of Being.”1 “In some way or other man becomes
certain of transcendence,” and thereby becomes human in a new and deci-
sive sense: “It is impossible for man to lose transcendence, without ceasing
to be man.”2 Reference to transcendence is the defining characteristic of
Axial man.3 Its correlate in human life is “faith”—not the faith of a particu-
lar religious tradition but what Jaspers calls “philosophic faith,”4 a faith that
can be spelled out as a “[f]aith in God, faith in man, faith in possibilities in
the world.”5 Transcendence is “the infinitude of the Comprehensive,”6 the
ultimate encompassing reality that exists beyond the world of time and
space. It cannot be objectified in our immanent terms of subjectivity and
objectivity but is the ultimate nonobjective One that grounds them. Faith,
on the other hand, is the immanent mode of existence that is aware of and
directed to transcendence. “Faith alone sets in motion the forces that master
man’s basic animal instincts, deprive them of overlordship, and transform
them into motors of upsurging humanity.”7 Since humanity is defined by
reference to a transcendence that by its very nature will never be fully pres-
ent in this life, being oriented by transcendence manifests itself in perma-
nent human transcending. Thus human search for unity in a common his-
tory will be an unending task. “Unity as the goal . . . cannot become real. . . .
The One is rather the infinitely remote point of reference, which is origin
and goal at one and the same time; it is the One of transcendence. . . . If
universal history as a whole proceeds from the One to the One, it does so
in such a way that everything accessible to us lies between these ultimate
poles.”8
The Idea of Transcendence 147
The quest for transcendence, then, is the humanizing force of human his-
tory. It is that which sets history in motion and directs it toward its end. But
it is a quest for a reality that can never become fully present in history but
overcomes history. Jaspers echoes a long Western tradition when he writes:
“To the transcendent consciousness of existence, history vanishes in the ever-
lasting present.”9 It is the eternal beyond of history, the true world of Being
beyond this world of unending change and becoming. But what is the point
of referring to such a transcendent world? What is its ontological character,
force, and status? Is there such a beyond? Or is longing for it “a moral-
optical illusion,”10 as Nietzsche decried it, because the “ ‘apparent world’ is
the only world: the ‘true world’ is just a lie added to it”?11
I. Paradigms of Transcendence
Jaspers’ view of transcendence grows out of a long tradition of mystic expe-

rience and thought in the West (Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa) and the
East (Buddhism). It reworks in its own existential way (as philosophic faith)
the (neo-)Platonic contrast between a changing temporal world of imma-
nence and an unchanging eternal world of transcendence. But this vision of
a true world beyond the phenomenal world of experience and history is only
one strand of understanding transcendence. The term has a long and com-
plex history with many different meanings that cannot be merged into a
single coherent concept. To indicate its range of meaning, let me briefly re-
call five major paradigms of (understanding) transcendence in the Western
tradition.
1. True World
One of the most influential paradigms in Western thought is exemplified by

Plato’s allegory of the cave.12 What the people in the cave take to be the real
world is in fact only an illusion. They do not see the things as they are but
only the shadows of the things projected on the wall of the cave of the things
that pass in front of the fire behind them. The philosopher who has left the
cave and acclimatized to the brightness of the sun knows better. He has seen
the real world beyond the cave, and he can and should tell the others in the
cave that what they take to be real is in fact an illusion even though they
won’t believe him and ridicule him. The contrast on which Plato’s allegory
draws is the difference between the apparent and the real world, the onto-
logical transcendence of the true or real world, and our confusion about the
true world: inside the cave we take the apparent world to be the true one, but
as soon as we leave the cave we can see that we were mistaken.
The allegory draws on a spatial—and, in a metaphorical sense, epistemic
and ontological—difference between inside and outside that suggests not
only that there are two “spaces”13 (immanent world / transcendent world)
but that we can move from the immanent world inside the cave to the tran-
scendent world outside the cave. This requires someone (the philosopher)
who can see both the immanent world and the transcendent world and
compare them critically. It is precisely this position of a “third” who is tied
neither to the immanent nor to the transcendent world but who can freely
move between them that has become radically questioned in modernity. If,
as Nietzsche points out, there is no other place than the world in which we
live, then the philosopher cannot move to and fro but will always stay inside
the cave, and the idea of a transcendent world will not be the idea of a true
world beyond the apparent one but just an illusion. However, in its secular-
ized modern version Plato’s view is not simply reversed and the true world
identified with the illusionary world of Plato’s cave, but rather the whole
distinction between immanence and transcendence suggested by the alle-
gory is rejected: we do not live in an immanent world in which we have lost
the feeling for transcendence, but we live in the only world there is and have
no need any more to describe our situation in terms of the distinction be-
tween immanence and transcendence. The idea of an ontological transcen-
dence has lost its point where this world is no longer experienced as an im-
manent world.
2. Eternal Truth
Another major paradigm of transcendence is the Christian reworking of the

Platonic tradition of ontological transcendence in the idea of divine tran-
scendence. In light of the radical distinction between creator and creation
and, at the same time, utter dependence of the creature’s nature and exis-
tence on the creator, the transcending movement of the creature was seen as
being confined in principle to the realm of creation and not able to tran-
scend its limits and scrutinize the mind of the creator. The decisive line di-
viding immanence and transcendence is drawn not between temporal
phenomena and permanent structures of the created world, between the po-
tentiality of matter and the actuality of form, or between the changing reali-
ties of the physical world and the unchanging truths of mathematics and
metaphysics, but rather between all this on the one side and the creator on
the other. The ideas in the divine mind are the paradigms of everything that
is possible, actual, or necessary in creation. Since from an Aristotelian per-
spective everything is possible that was, is, or will be actual, and everything
is necessary that is not impossible nor merely possible or contingent, the
divine ideas are in principle different from everything that is actual, possi-
ble, and necessary in creation. They are the source and standard of all truth,
but they are not one of the truths in creation or as such accessible to us. Our
mind can grasp truths insofar as what we know (intellectus) corresponds
(adequatio) to what is the case (res) in creation, but the criterion of this cor-
respondence is to be found neither in the world nor in our mind but solely in
the eternal ideas of the divine mind, which are the paradigms both of what
there is in creation and of our knowledge of it.
Thus the Christian paradigm of eternal truths is not merely built on the
difference between the actual, the possible, and the necessary but on the
more fundamental difference between creator and creation, the eternal truths
in the divine mind and their partial and incomplete actualization in the
analogous counterparts that are embedded in the created order and acces-
sible to our created minds. We can only infer the eternal truths from their
incomplete analogs in creation, but we can never penetrate the divine mind
and grasp the paradigms immediately and as such. Divine transcendence is
more radical than ontological transcendence and hence accessible only in a
purely negative way: we know that we can know anything true only because
of it, but we also know that we can never know this truth as such. At best we
can know that we cannot know the truth but only some inkling of it accord-
ing to the principle that the differences are greater than the similarities. We
are tied to the ignorance of our immanence and can never penetrate into the
transcendence of divine truth.
The idea of divine transcendence became secularized when in early mo-
dernity the relation of truth was no longer conceived in terms of an essential
reference to the paradigms in the divine mind but as a relation between
human mind and the world. The criteria of the true are no longer the para-
digm ideas in the divine mind, nor the clear and distinct ideas of the human
mind as Descartes suggested, but the facts; and the facts are not merely what
we come to know by observation, as Descartes thought, but through cre-
ation and invention, as Vico argued: verum et ipsum factum convertunter.14 In
a full sense we can only know what we know how to make, and in order to find
this out we must explore our human capacities, not divine transcendence.
3. True Knowledge
A third major paradigm of transcendence is the epistemic transcendence

that takes center stage when divine transcendence is abandoned as the ulti-
mate criterion of truth, unity, and completeness of knowledge.15 Since knowl-
edge always involves a distinction between knower (subject) and what is
known (object), the paradigm takes on two forms: the infinity and inex-
haustibility of what can be known (epistemic transcendence) and the in-
scrutability of the knower (subjective transcendence). Epistemic transcen-
dence is a corollary of the insight that there is always more to be known than
we in fact know; that the world is more complex than the most complex ac-
count we can give of it; and since the totality of what can be known is no
longer defined by the paradigmatic ideas in the divine mind, true and com-
prehensive knowledge is only possible as an open-ended epistemic process
in time. There is always more to be known, and everything known can be
known better: any given state of knowledge can be transcended extensively
(more knowledge) and intensively (better knowledge). Epistemic transcen-
dence is the hallmark of human knowledge after the demise of divine
transcendence.
4. True Self
However, since the totality of knowledge is no longer determined by the to-

tality of paradigmatic truths but by an open-ended process of research and
discovery in time, the totality of knowledge at any given time can only be
defined by reference to the knowing subject that synthesizes it into a tempo-
ral unity and whole. There is no epistemic unity that is not the result of an
epistemic unifying; and there is no epistemic whole that is not the result of
an epistemic synthesizing. However, precisely here we hit upon the fourth
paradigm of transcendence: subjective transcendence or the transcendence of

the ego.16 In post-Cartesian philosophy “transcendence” refers not merely to
that which lies outside the subject, for example the outside world or the
other. Rather, there is no unity of knowledge without the I (subject) as the
unifying principle. But when the I seeks to know itself (self-knowledge) it
discovers that whatever it knows (the “I known”) is not the same as the “I
that knows” (the “knowing I”). There is an abyss between the knowing sub-
ject and the very same subject known as an object by this subject. We may
say with Kant: “The I think must be able to accompany all my representa-
tions: for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be
thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would ei-
ther be impossible or else at least would be nothing to me.”17 But when the I
think accompanies a representation of myself, there is an irreducible differ-
ence between what is thought (the representation of me) and the fact that it
is thought (my I think). Therefore, Kant rejects Descartes’ view that we have
a more direct knowledge of our existence as a mind than of the existence of
bodies outside us, including our own.18 What we do know is the difference
between the knower and the known even in cases of self-knowledge. We are
different from the one whom we know when we know ourselves.
This is the subjective transcendence that soon becomes elaborated in
other respects as well. In Kant it becomes the starting point for a transcen-
dental account of the free and autonomous self that cannot be reduced to
the empirical self that acts in time and space. Yet it can also be described in
psychological terms by reference to Bovarysme, for example, which Jules de
Gaultier understands as a special manifestation of the general human “fac-
ulty of believing one is different from what one is.”19 The difference between
me and I that is experienced in subjective transcendence cannot be over-
come from a third-person perspective because the difference becomes man-
ifest only to the experiencing and thinking self but not to others. Whatever
answers are given to the question “Who am I?,” whether by myself or by
others, I can always, and with reasons, insist on being different. Subjective
transcendence seems to be a corollary of the irreducible difference between
third-person and first-person descriptions: I cannot describe myself from
an objectifying perspective without at the same time distinguishing myself
from it. The act of the description and the content of the description never
coincide.
5. True Other
A fift h paradigm of transcendence, which has been of particular relevance

in recent years, is the ethical transcendence of the other.20 “Transcendence as
such,” as Emmanuel Levinas put it, “is ‘moral consciousness.’ Moral con-
sciousness accomplishes metaphysics, if metaphysics consists in transcen-
dence. . . . The being as being is only produced in morality.”21 Real transcen-
dence is not experienced in the epistemic self-transcendence of the ego that
cannot know itself without thereby distinguishing itself from itself, for this
remains completely within the bounds and the horizon of the ego. It is
rather a relational human affair that is experienced “as a pressure, a ‘call’
that is recognized only in the response that one is compelled to make to it.”22
Only when the presence of the irreducibly other person in a face-to-face
situation compels me to respond to it am I forced to leave the horizon of my
own intentionality and step beyond myself. “The Other—absolutely other—
paralyzes possession, which it contests by its epiphany in the face.”23 While
it is true that I see the other from my point of view and hence construe him
to some extent in my terms, it is also true that “the relation with the other is
a relation with a Mystery.”24 For the “Other, insofar as Other, is not only an
alter ego; the Other is that which I myself am not.”25 This puts my subjectiv-
ity into crisis.26 As a knowing subject I can return “to myself through the
detour of the object” without being fundamentally changed. But from the
encounter with the Other I return not to me as I was before but as “put into
question or awakened by the Other. . . . To be in question—this is to be unto
God. . . . Uprooted from the concept of an Ego by the question of the Infinite,
I am responsible for the Other [autrui], my neighbor. Someone starts to
speak in the first person. There is no more Ego in his being put into question—
neither as substance nor as concept.”27 Ethical transcendence is not merely a
challenge to move beyond the bounds of my ego but rather the experience of
becoming another in the experience of the Other. Who I become is not of
my own making. In being put into question by the other I become passively
what I could never have become actively: the neighbor of my neighbor.
Some have described the shifts in the meaning of “transcendence” marked
by the sequence of the paradigms of ontological, divine, epistemic, subjective,
and ethical transcendence as a change from “vertical”28 to a “lateral”29 or
“horizontal transcendence.” Whereas a “ ‘vertical transcendence’ suggests
leaving the immanent world, leaving the phenomenal, for another world, ei-
ther in a transcendence to the heights or a transcendence to the depths,”
“horizontal transcendence” “is the project of self-transcendence, the under-
standing that we are incomplete, thrusting ourselves into an incomplete fu-
ture,” but it “also includes the rethinking of transcendence in the context of
ethics.”30 But the problem is more complex, as not only Levinas’s account of
transcendence shows.31 The “categories—vertical and horizontal—are heuris-
tic distinctions that ultimately break down, for the vertical inflects the hori-
zontal, and vice versa.”32 But how exactly? And how does this affect the use of
the idea of transcendence in a philosophical project like that of Jaspers?
II. The Logic of Transcendence
1. Drawing a Distinction
In order to address these issues, we have to discuss the problem from a

larger and more differentiated perspective. I start with the obvious: “tran-
scendence” is one term of a pair that always has to be considered together:
transcendence/immanence. Just as transcendence is the reverse of imma-
nence, so immanence is the reverse of transcendence: you cannot use the
one without implying the other.
This has far-reaching consequences. According to Niklas Luhmann, for
example, religions are not concerned solely with transcendence nor merely
with immanence but rather “with the distinction as such,”33 that is, the unity
of the difference between immanence and transcendence.34 Thus the code of
all religious communication is the distinction between immanence and tran-
scendence, the observable and the unobservable.35 Religions try to observe
not merely one side of this distinction but rather the paradoxical unity of the
difference between the observable and the unobservable, and they do so “in
the realm of the observable,”36 that is, in the sphere of immanence. “Imma-
nence is everything that the world as it is offers to innerworldly observa-
tion. . . . Transcendence is the same—but viewed otherwise. The immanent
representation [communication] operates with a point of reference outside
the world. It treats the world as if it could be viewed from outside.”37
This, of course, is impossible, not for metaphysical but for methodological
reasons. On the one hand, one cannot observe from where one observes
while one does so (the blind spot of every observation); on the other hand,
an observer can never observe both sides of the distinction that makes the
observation possible, at least not at the same time. I may be here or there,
but if I use the distinction “here/there,” I use it here and not there. Similarly,
religions use the distinction “immanence (observable) / transcendence (un-
observable)” in the realm of immanence, not transcendence, but since they
can never operate in the realm of the unobservable but only of the observ-
able, the unity of the difference between immanence and transcendence
becomes a paradoxical unity in a twofold sense: religions cannot observe the
transcendent side but only the immanent side of the distinction, and they
cannot observe the unity of the distinction because of the blind spot of
every observation.38
2. The Reentry of the Distinction
Thus, the distinction between immanence and transcendence (immanence/

transcendence) is always a distinction drawn in the realm of immanence and
thereby recurs or reenters on the side of immanence. In terms of Spencer
Brown’s Laws of Form,39 it is a distinction between a marked space (imma-
nence) and an unmarked space (transcendence) that is repeated (“reentry”)
in the marked space: immanence (immanence/transcendence).40
This distinction is drawn in order to avoid a problematic closure of im-
manence, a cutoff of the world as it is from what it may, will, should, ought
to, or might be. The reason for doing this need not primarily be—as Nietz-
sche thought—an illusory interest in a world beyond but an interest in the
world in which we live: only by placing our world as it is against the back-
drop of a different world can we see what might or ought to be different, how
it could or should be changed to become the world we wish it to be, or why
we cannot change it in such a way. Of course, if we do not speak of transcen-
dence, then there is no point in speaking of immanence either: to ignore the
one side of the distinction dissolves not merely that side but the whole dis-
tinction. As Nietzsche clearly saw in “How the ‘true world’ finally became a
fable,” when the “true world” has become “an obsolete, superfluous idea,”
when the “true world is gone: which world is left? The illusory one, per-
haps? . . . But no! We got rid of the illusory world along with the true one!”41
We do not live in a merely immanent world when we stop contrasting it to a
transcendent world. The world becomes flat but not an immanent world
when it is no longer seen against the backdrop of transcendence. This is true
whether we regard this as a loss or a gain. The loss of the idea of transcen-
dence is not merely the loss of a “lie added to” the real world in which we live
but a radical transformation of the meaning of this world, and so, too, is the
inverse process, the discovery of the idea of transcendence.
3. Absolute and Relative Transcendence
Understood in this sense, the meaning of the idea of transcendence is deter-

mined by the difference between immanence/transcendence construed
from the side of immanence. This introduces a fundamental ambiguity into
the understanding of transcendence that has been part of its history from
the very beginning. On the one hand, “transcendence” points to something
beyond all immanence, something—it cannot even be called a “something”
in any meaningful sense—that is different in principle from anything im-
manent and at the same time necessary for it: without it, there would be no
immanence. I call this “Transcendence” (with a capital “T”) or “Absolute
Transcendence.” On the other hand, it is one side of a distinction made in
the realm of immanence and as such marks a dimension within immanence,
a dimension that is possible within immanence without going beyond im-
manence. I call this “transcendence” (with a lowercase “t”) or “relative tran-
scendence.” Relative transcendence can only occur in the marked space of
immanence that is contrasted to the unmarked space of Absolute Transcen-
dence. And just as the contrast to Absolute Transcendence marks imma-
nence as Immanence (with a capital “I”), so the reentry of the distinction on
the side of Immanence establishes the contrast between transcendence
and immanence (with a lowercase “i”) within Immanence. Only within the
marked space of Immanence can we distinguish between transcendence
and immanence, so that the difference between immanent immanence and
transcending immanence (or relative transcendence) is a dependent or sec-
ondary contrast between marked and unmarked spaces within the marked
space of Immanence.42
Now the positing of the difference, or the drawing of the distinction,
between Immanence and Absolute Transcendence is an act that takes
place in the marked space of Immanence and is therefore a move of relative
transcending or transcending immanence. However, according to its own

self-understanding, this move would be impossible as a move within Imma-
nence without presupposing the difference between Immanence and Abso-
lute Transcendence.43 Absolute Transcendence is the absolute presupposi-
tion of making this move, whether one is aware of this or not, not only in
Collingwood’s semantic sense44 (because what one states cannot be true or
false without presupposing Absolute Transcendence) but also in the prag-
matic sense that making this move or drawing this distinction would be im-
possible without Absolute Transcendence. But then, just as Absolute Tran-
scendence is necessary for Immanence (and for the distinction between
immanent immanence and transcending immanence to be possible), so
Immanence (and hence also the possibility of distinguishing between im-
manent immanence and transcending immanence) is necessary for Abso-
lute Transcendence: it is impossible that there is Immanence without Abso-
lute Transcendence, and vice versa. However, whereas the distinction between
Immanence and Absolute Transcendence is the condition of the possibility
of distinguishing between immanent immanence and transcending imma-
nence, it is not necessary to construe the goal of transcending immanence
as Absolute Transcendence when distinguishing it from immanent imma-
nence. Therefore there is an asymmetry between the first and the second
distinction: the difference between Immanence / Absolute Transcendence as
such does not require the difference between immanent immanence / tran-
scending immanence to be made (the meaning of the former does not de-
pend on the reentry of the distinction on the marked side of Immanence).
But you cannot distinguish between Immanence and Absolute Transcen-
dence without thereby also distinguishing between immanent immanence
and transcending immanence, and making the latter presupposes the former
even where relative transcendence is not construed as implementing Abso-
lute Transcendence.
It follows that the very making of a distinction between immanence and
transcendence makes it possible to distinguish between two kinds of tran-
scendence and immanence in the horizon of immanence: Absolute Tran-
scendence, which is the absolute other of the horizon of Immanence (and
thereby defines it as a horizon of Immanence), and relative transcendence or
transcending immanence, which is a relative other within the horizon of
Immanence (and never more than a case of what Taylor calls “immanent
transcendence”).45 Both distinctions help to orient human life in this world

by placing it against a backdrop conceived as an absolute contrast between
Immanence and Absolute Transcendence or as a relative contrast between
immanence and transcendence within Immanence.
4. Multiple Meanings of the Distinction
This orienting distinction between immanence and transcendence can be

implemented in different ways and thus takes on very different meanings in
different contexts. Luhmann interprets it in terms of the binary code observ-
able/unobservable in the context of his functional analysis of religious com-
munication in modern society. This interpretation can be applied to the ab-
solute difference between Immanence / Absolute Transcendence as well as
to the relative distinction between immanent immanence and transcending
immanence. But this is not always the case. Sometimes a reading can only
be applied to the dependent distinction: matter/form or old/new, for exam-
ple, can be used in the horizon of Immanence in a recursive way so that
whatever state is distinguished from “form” (or “new”) as “matter” (or “old”)
can, when the “form” or the “new” have been reached, become the “matter”
(or the “old”) of a new transcending toward a new “form” (or the “new”) that
has not yet been actualized. In this sense Nietzsche expects human beings
today to be just the “matter” of their future form as supermen, and Luther
can describe human beings in this life to be the mere matter of what God
will make of them in the future life: “homo huius vitae est pura materia Dei
ad futurae formae suae vitam.”46 But at other times the interpretations of-
fered apply only, or primarily, to the distinction between Immanence and
Absolute Transcendence. Thus it can be interpreted from different perspec-
tives not only as the difference between observable/unobservable but also as
being/Being (ontological perspective), conditioned/unconditioned (cosmologi-
cal perspective), apparent/true (cognitive perspective), knowable/unknowable
(epistemological perspective), intelligible/unintelligible (semiotic perspective).
The point to be noted is that whenever these interpretations are applied to
the Immanence / Absolute Transcendence distinction, they are construed as
mutually exclusive and complete: there is only a marked and an unmarked
space but not a neutral space (neither marked nor unmarked). But when ap-
plied to the reentry of the distinction on the side of Immanence (which does
not always make sense), the interpretations are transformed from dual into
trial markers47 which allow for a marked (observable, conditioned, apparent,
knowable, intelligible, and so on), an unmarked (unobservable, unconditioned,
true, unknowable, unintelligible, and so on), and a neutral space (neither
observable nor unobservable, neither conditioned nor unconditioned, neither
apparent nor true, neither knowable nor unknowable, neither intelligible nor
unintelligible, and so on). This unmarked space is important if there is to be
a movement from the marked to the unmarked space that does not lead
beyond Immanence to Absolute Transcendence but rather to a new marked
space within Immanence that was before an unmarked space within Imma-
nence. Thus if “we ‘transcend’ this world for another world and then reach
it, it becomes immanent, hence transcendence is not beyond the world;
rather, it is a passage from one world to another.”48 But such a passage is only
possible if there is also a neutral space that is neither marked nor unmarked.
And it is in this betwixt and between that the important rituals and rites de
passage are situated that allow a culture to perform in ordered (and not cha-
otic and interruptive) way the move from the marked to the unmarked side,
from the old to the new, from the immanent immanence to the transcending
immanence.
5. “Transcendence” as a Descriptive and a Limit Term
What Jaspers calls the discovery of transcendence can thus be understood

as the conscious reentry of the distinction between immanence and tran-
scendence on the side of immanence, which establishes (the possibility of)
two distinctions: the difference between Immanence and Absolute Transcen-
dence, and the difference between immanent immanence and transcending
immanence (or relative transcendence). Both allow for different interpreta-
tions. But, as we have seen, the sense of the distinction between Imma-
nence / Absolute Transcendence cannot be construed in a completely parallel
fashion to the sense of the distinction between immanent immanence / tran-
scending immanence (relative transcendence). The latter marks a boundary
that can be transcended; the former a limit that cannot be transcended.
It was a central insight of Kant’s critical philosophy that we must distin-
guish between boundaries or bounds (Grenzen) and limits (Schranken). The
former can be transgressed and point, in a positive sense, to a beyond,
whereas the latter do not. “Bounds (in extended beings) always presuppose a
space existing outside of a certain definite place, and enclosing it; limits do
not require this, but are mere negations, which affect a quantity, so far as it
is not absolutely complete.”49 Limits are horizons that can neither be reached
nor transcended, only pushed back. Boundaries, on the other hand, can
only be identified if we have a mechanism that allows us to look at them
from the other side. “In mathematics and natural philosophy human reason
admits of limits but not of bounds, viz., that something indeed lies without
it, at which it can never arrive, but not that it will at any point find completion
in its internal progress. The enlarging of our views in mathematics, and the
possibility of new discoveries, are infinite; and the same is the case with the
discovery of new properties of nature, of new powers and laws, by continued
experience and its rational combination.”50 Thus mathematics and the sci-
ences have both limits and boundaries: they have limits insofar as no given
state of mathematical or scientific knowledge exhausts the infinite possibil-
ity of progress in mathematical and scientific insight. But they also have
boundaries. To claim that all knowledge is mathematical or scientific is a
dogmatism that cannot be critically justified. However, that there is a be-
yond of mathematical and scientific knowledge cannot be spelled out or stated
in mathematical or scientific terms but only from a perspective that allows
us to see both the realm of mathematics and science and the realm beyond
mathematics and science in a certain way. There is no way of showing, in
purely mathematical or scientific terms, that mathematical and scientific
knowledge is all the knowledge there is, that is, it is an account of knowledge
that is both epistemically consistent and complete in that it comprises not
only all possible mathematical and scientific knowledge but all knowledge
that is possible.
If we apply Kant’s distinction to the problem before us, we can see the
important difference between understanding “transcendence” as a descrip-
tive term or a limiting term. In the first sense the distinction between im-
manence and transcendence is construed as a distinction between two realms
or “spaces,” a marked space where we are (immanence) and an unmarked
space beyond the space where we are (transcendence). This is relatively un-
problematic in the case of relative transcendence because by a change of
place (here/there), by the passage of time (today/tomorrow), by improving
our self-knowledge (my self-knowledge now / my self-knowledge then), or
by learning from others (our culture / foreign culture) we arrive at a new and
different state that was “transcendent” when we started but has now become
“immanent.” Whatever boundary or borderline we transcend in this way
makes what was transcendent at the start become something immanent at
the end: we do not reach for a world beyond but merely move from one
world to another.
However, in the case of Absolute Transcendence this becomes highly
problematic, in whatever way we construe it. There is no way of moving
from our position on the marked side of Immanence to the unmarked side
of Absolute Transcendence, whether we construe the difference in a cosmo-
logical sense (natural world / supernatural world), metaphysical sense (tem-
poral/eternal), theological sense (creation/creator), ethical sense (self/other),
or eschatological sense (old life / new life). In doing so, we are always on the
Immanence side of the difference and not on the side of Absolute Transcen-
dence. Therefore, the distinction between Immanence / Absolute Transcen-
dence marks not a boundary but a limit, and the term “Transcendence” does
function here not as a descriptive but as a limit term: it marks the decisive
difference in terms of which we understand our situation as immanence in-
dependent of, and presupposed by, any particular move we make in it.51
III. Interpreting Transcendence
The importance of the difference between descriptive and limit terms has not
always been understood. This shows in the three major ways of reading or in-
terpreting the distinction between immanence and transcendence (or Tran-
scendence) in the course of history, each resulting in a type with many dif-
ferent implementations. Thus we can understand the distinction from the
perspective of immanence as immanent transcending, or from the perspective
of transcendence as transcendence becoming immanent, or from the perspec-
tive of the positing the difference between immanence and transcendence as
either an immanent or a transcendent positing of the distinction or difference.
1. Immanent Transcending
From the side of Immanence the distinction can be construed in spatial,

temporal, anthropological, or historical (cultural) terms as transcending
one’s place, time, or self-understanding, or cultural tradition. This can be

described in a positive and a negative respect. In a negative respect (moving
away from) it involves departing from or abandoning one’s situation so far
(discontinuation of one’s earlier orientation). In a positive respect (moving
to) it is a move either to another “marked state,” that is, another place, time,
self-understanding, or historical culture (new orientation), or to an “un-
marked state” that is no longer that from which one departs in transcending
but has not yet been determined in a new way (lack of orientation). In the
former sense life has changed in fact, but not in principle: it is still a life of
immanence lived in a particular way even though we describe it in new and
different terms (we live no longer in medieval but modern times). In the lat-
ter sense one has not arrived anywhere but is “on the move.” This seems to
be a characteristic feature of the self-understanding of human life in moder-
nity, which has broken with its traditions but has not (yet?) arrived at a
clearly defined new place, time, self-understanding, or culture. We charac-
terize our contemporary situation retrospectively in contrastive terms as
postmodern, post-Christian, postsecular, postcolonial, and so on by mark-
ing it off from something taken to be past; but we have no clear vision of
how to describe or call it in positive terms. Or we restrict what we mean by
“transcending” to the moves described by Alfred Schütz, Thomas Luck-
mann, and others52 in the many “small” ways of “transcending the everyday
world” or the “great” transcendences that “occur in sleep and dream, in day-
dreaming and ecstasies, in crises and death and finally in theoretical orien-
tations.”53 However, whatever these transcending moves lead to, they will
never lead us beyond the determining horizon of immanence but stay within
immanence. So whether we transcend in these “small” or “great” ways, whether
we arrive at a new orientation or not (yet), we orient ourselves within imma-
nence, not by reference to a transcendent beyond, and a fortiori not by tran-
scending per impossibile into Transcendence.
Where human beings attempt to do this, or where the transcendence in
terms of which they seek to understand and orient themselves in their
immanence is construed as Absolute Transcendence, they frequently de-
velop radically negative conceptions of Transcendence. The point is not that
there is nothing of which one could speak but, on the contrary, that there
is something of which one cannot speak. Transcendence is not construed
as “Failed Immanence”54 but as a positive beyond of immanence. Th is is
obvious in the Platonic, or rather Philonic, traditions of negative theology,

which speak of the Transcendent (ἕν) not in terms of what it is but what it is
not (ἐπέκείυα τὴς οὐσίας) because it is not one of the many, but that which is
beyond the many but presupposed by it because it is constituting the differ-
ence between one and many (ontological transcendence). But it is also the
case in those recent traditions that, like Levinas, construe the Transcendent
as the other (person) whom we can never fully and adequately understand
in our own terms, but who remains radically and irreducibly different from
us (ethical transcendence). And it is the case with those radically subject-
centered epistemic accounts of Transcendence—from Augustine to Descartes
or Kant—that construe the fundamental beyond of all human striving not in
terms of the limits of knowledge (what we can know) but of the paradox of
self-knowledge (what we discover when we seek to know ourselves): whatever
we come to know about ourselves is not identical to we who know it. The I
who knows in “I know myself” is different from the I that is known, because
the performance of the act of knowing cannot be reduced to another deter-
mination added to what is known. There is an abyss in the very center of the
self, as Augustine thought, even though this can be explained in terms of
the irreducible difference between a self-representation (a representation of
myself by me) and the act of self-representing (my representing my self-
representation to me), as Kant saw. Just as in the first case the One remains a
mystery, so in the second case the Other and in the third case, the Self.
Whether we call the first a case of vertical transcending and the others cases
of horizontal or lateral transcending 55 does not make a difference to the fact
that they are all types of immanent transcending—types of human tran-
scending toward (what is taken to be) the Transcendent (whether conceived
in ontological, theological, epistemological, ethical, or whatever terms) that
take place, and remain, in Immanence and never cross the decisive line to
the Absolute Transcendence.
2. Transcendent Transcending
In the light of this the other option of reading the difference between im-
manence and Transcendence has always been to start not from Immanence,
nor from the difference between immanent immanence and transcending
immanence on the side of Immanence, but rather from the side of Absolute
Transcendence. This involves a change of what is taken to be the marked

and the unmarked space of the distinction. Whereas in all cases of imma-
nent transcending the side of Immanence is marked and the side of Absolute
Transcendence is unmarked, this is just the other way around in all cases of
transcendent transcending: now the side of Absolute Transcendence is the
marked side, and the side of Immanence the unmarked one. Thus the Im-
manent or conditioned is seen as a consequence of the self-differentiation of
the Absolute Transcendent or Unconditioned. By distinguishing itself from
itself the Transcendent becomes the Unconditioned that, without ceasing to
be the Transcendent, constitutes the difference between Immanence and
Absolute Transcendence not merely by distinguishing itself from Imma-
nence (Immanence / Absolute Transcendence) but rather by breaking into the
Immanent in such a way that its reentry makes it impossible not to distin-
guish between immanence and transcendence within Immanence (imma-
nent immanence / transcending immanence). Absolute Transcendence is thus
at the same time, but in different respects, the other side of Immanence or
immanence as such (Immanence / Absolute Transcendence), and that which
posits the difference between immanence and transcendence within imma-
nence (immanent immanence / transcending immanence).
The Platonic tradition has interpreted this as the difference between, on
the one hand, the completely transcendent and inaccessible ἕν and, on the
other, the υου̃ς in which the ἕν differentiates itself into knower and known
and as such takes the first step from the utterly unknown and unknowable
One to the many. Christian theology has reinterpreted this in the light of its
radical distinction between creator and creation as the difference between
God (Absolute Transcendence), Creator (Absolute Transcendence as the con-
dition of the possibility of the reality of the difference between immanence
and transcendence), and Revealer (Absolute Transcendence that discloses it-
self as Creator by presenting itself as Revealer to his creatures). Moreover,
Christian theology made clear, first, that God was free but not forced to cre-
ate: God could have been God but not creator, and precisely this shows that
the contingent fact of creation is not an accident or a mistake but some-
thing that God willed and hence something good for which it is appropri-
ate to be grateful. And Christian theology also made clear, second, that the
knowledge of God as Creator can, in the last resort, not be read off from
creation as such but becomes clear only in the light of God’s self-revelation
in creation: only those who know themselves to be God’s creatures because

God reveals himself to them as their God can experience and see the world
as God’s creation and God as its Creator. Thus, for us to know God is to know
God as Creator, to know God as Creator is to know oneself as God’s creature,
and to know oneself as God’s creature is possible only if, and insofar as, God
discloses himself to his creatures as their God and creator, helper and savior,
redeemer and final consummator of the goal of their lives.
The whole complicated train of thought bears witness to the difficulty of
this approach: since we have no access to Absolute Transcendence as the
beyond of our Immanence but only to the various transcendences within
our Immanence, the whole dynamic and point of establishing the difference
between Immanence and Absolute Transcendence as well as between im-
manent immanence and transcending immanence must be situated in Ab-
solute Transcendence itself. But this requires us to construe the difference
between Immanence and Absolute Transcendence not as a limit (i.e., in
terms of a negative theology) but as a boundary (i.e., in terms of a positive
theology); and this in turn is only possible if Absolute Transcendence itself
can be understood to create a perspective for us from which we can mean-
ingfully interpret that which is a limit from our perspective as a boundary.
We cannot see it this way from our perspective; we can only come to see it as
a boundary if we have reason to speak of both Immanence and Absolute
Transcendence in descriptive terms; and this is only possible if Absolute
Transcendence discloses itself to us in our Immanence as that which consti-
tutes the difference between Immanence and Absolute Transcendence by
making us posit the difference between immanence and transcendence in
such a way that we construe “transcendence” as “Absolute Transcendence,”
and “Absolute Transcendence” not as a limit concept but as a descriptive
term—a term that designates an activity in its own right and not merely a
limit of the immanent activities that we can describe from our own perspec-
tive. Thus only by enlarging our possibilities in such a way that we see the
difference between Immanence and Absolute Transcendence not merely
from our immanent perspective in negative terms as a limit, but also from
the perspective of Absolute Transcendence as a boundary, we can meaning-
fully speak of Absolute Transcendence in positive terms. This, however, is
only possible if we distinguish between our transcending (which always
transcends from our immanent immanence toward Absolute Transcen-
dence without ever being able to pass this line) and the transcending of Ab-
solute Transcendence (which transcends from Absolute Transcendence into
our immanence by, first, establishing Immanence and, then, by breaking
into it and presenting itself as Absolute Transcendence under the conditions
of Immanence). But this shows that the difference between Immanence
(conditioned) and Absolute Transcendence (unconditioned) cannot be con-
strued from the side of the unconditioned without thinking a movement of
self-differentiation on the side of Absolute Transcendence (absolute activity)
and an enrichment or empowerment on the side of Immanence (absolute
passivity). And this is the third interpretation we can find in the history of
Western thought.
3. The Positing of the Difference
The third way of interpreting the distinction between immanence and tran-
scendence (or Transcendence) takes its starting point neither from the side
of immanence nor from the side of transcendence (or Transcendence) but
from the very act of positing the difference in the first place. But since there
is nothing possible or actual that is not either immanent or transcendent or
both, there is no third position beyond the difference between Immanence
and Absolute Transcendence from which this distinction could be drawn.
In particular, there is no neutral space between the marked space of Imma-
nence (or, conversely, Absolute Transcendence) and the unmarked space of
Absolute Transcendence (or, conversely, Immanence). No cut of Apelles will
allow us to posit ourselves or anyone else on the very dividing line between
Immanence and Absolute Transcendence, whether understood as a limit or
a boundary. You cannot locate yourself (or anyone else) on the horizon
(limit), and you cannot locate yourself (or anyone else) in the betwixt and
between (boundary) of strict (i.e., mutually exclusive) and all-comprehensive
(i.e., not allowing a neutral position that is neither here nor there) dualities
such as creator/creation, sin/faith, new/old, this world / next world, and so
on.56 Therefore, the movement of differentiation or the positing of the differ-
ence must itself be located either on the side of Absolute Transcendence or
on the side of Immanence.
In the first case it is a movement of Absolute Transcendence (or, rather,
the Absolute Transcendent)57 that posits the difference between Immanence
and Absolute Transcendence by re-presenting itself as Absolute Transcen-

dence in Immanence; and this has been worked out (in different ways) by
Karl Barth58 and Karl Rahner in their accounts of divine self-transcending
in God’s self-revelation. For Rahner, God is self-communicating, that is,
“God in his own most proper reality makes himself the innermost constitu-
tive element of man.”59 Accordingly, “man is the event of God’s absolute
self-communication,” and “this says at the same time that on the one hand
God is present for man in his absolute transcendentality not only as the ab-
solute, always distant, radically remote term and source of his transcen-
dence which man always grasps only asymptotically, but also that he offers
himself in his own reality.”60 Thus the decisive act of transcending is not the
human self-transcending toward that which is (taken to be) beyond but, on
the contrary, the divine self-transcending in which God changes from the
unmarked side of Absolute Transcendence to the marked side of Imma-
nence without thereby ceasing to be God. This amounts to nothing less than
a radical reversal of the marked and unmarked sides: what used to be the
unmarked side now turns out to be the marked side (Absolute Transcen-
dence), and what was taken to be the marked side now proves to be the un-
marked side (Immanence). This involves a fundamental inversion of activi-
ties: it is not humans who self-transcend to the side of God, but God who
self-transcends to the side of his creation. Indeed, it is precisely this un-
forced self-transcending move to the side of human immanence that shows
God to be God by disclosing God to be utter and unrestricted love for the
creation that ignores him.
In the second case the movement is situated on the side of Immanence in
human transcending, but this can never be more than the positing of a dif-
ference between immanence and transcendence in the horizon of Imma-
nence. Transcendence (relative transcendence) here becomes, in Jacques
Derrida’s terms, a movement of the self-differentiating immanence that in
principle remains immanent and can conceive of Absolute Transcendence
only in negative terms (negative theology)61 or in terms of pointing to a gap
that might but cannot be filled (a trace of something that never was pres-
ent).62 Derrida unfolds his view of transcendence in the context of his criti-
cism of metaphysics. He criticizes metaphysics for its structural “closure,”
which needs to be interrupted or opened up by deconstruction. However, to
overcome metaphysics by transcending it is impossible because there is no
“outside” from which one could criticize or deconstruct metaphysics. Since

metaphysics is an “excess over the totality, without which no totality would
appear,”63 its very idea depends on a movement of transcendence that can-
not be transcended. It is only from within that metaphysics can be decon-
structed. However, the transcending movement immanent to metaphysics
can never be made present as such, even though it is at work everywhere in
metaphysics. One can criticize it from within only by tracing its traces,
which mark “the disappearance of any originary presence.”64 This is what
Derrida calls différance, a “difference still more unthought than the differ-
ence between Being and beings,” the ontological difference in Heidegger.65
“Beyond Being and beings, this difference, ceaselessly differing from and
deferring (itself), would trace (itself) (by itself)—this différance would be
the first or last trace if one still could speak, here, of origin and end.”66 Tran-
scendence in the sense of différance “ ‘is’ neither this nor that, neither sensi-
ble nor intelligible, neither inside nor outside, neither positive nor negative,
neither superior nor inferior, neither active nor passive, neither present nor
absent, not even neutral, not even subject to a dialectic with a third moment,
without any possible sublation (Auf hebung). Despite appearances, then, this
[différance] is neither a concept nor even a name; it does lend itself to a series
of names, but calls for another syntax, and exceeds even the order and the
structure of predicative discourse. It ‘is’ not and does not say what ‘is.’ It is
written completely otherwise.”67 In short, Absolute Transcendence is nei-
ther the utter beyond of Neoplatonist metaphysical transcendence nor the
total Other of Levinas’s ethical transcendence,68 but rather the immanent
trace of “something missing” that can only obliquely be indicated or re-
ferred to by pointing to the gap or absence of that without whose presence
immanence could not even be named “immanence” in a meaningful way.
IV. Transcendence as Self-Transcending and Event
The systematic sketch of the various ways of understanding “transcendence,”

or the distinction between transcendence and immanence, makes it quite
clear that we may mean very different things when defining the “Axial Age”
in terms of the discovery or emergence of transcendence. There is not just
one contrast to be taken into account, and before we compare the different
contrasts drawn in different cultures, we must be careful to identify the
precise meaning and point of “transcendence” in the cultures we want

to compare. The mere fact of first- or second-order “breakthroughs” or the
emergence of a capacity for “questioning all human activity and conferring
upon it a new meaning”69 (Jaspers) is not enough to justify the collapsing of
all distinctions into a common notion of “transcendence.”
On the other hand, the differentiated view of transcendence, which I
have sketched, leaves us with basically two alternative perspectives on
transcendence.
1. Anthropological Perspectives
The first or anthropological perspective understands “transcendence” as the

methodological correlate of our transcending, whether in the sense of “as-
cent” to mystery or in the sense of “lateral transcendence . . . within this
world, by transforming it.”70 In either case the paradigmatic phenomenon is
self-transcending, that is, the moving beyond where and what we are by what
we do or what happens to us; the beyond is unspecified and merely indicates
the direction in which we transcend or transgress our current position or
context; and depending on where and how the self-transcending takes place,
we might describe it, for example, as everyday, epistemic, ethical, religious, or
some other form of self-transcending. Thus in psychological self-transcending
the genesis of the self is understood as a process of internalizing social
norms. The self is not an isolated ego but a social being that becomes what it
is by and through its interactions with others. To be a social being is a per-
manent “going beyond itself,” a being related to others, a responding to oth-
ers, and a making others respond to oneself. At no point is the self a fi xed or
stable entity but always in the process of becoming. To be a self is to be self-
transcending, to make—in a multitude of different ways and contexts—the
experience of being seized, ruptured, or opened up by something or some-
one beyond oneself, which may, or may not, be interpreted religiously.71 The
experience of self-transcending is not as such a religious phenomenon, but it
can lay the experiential ground for religious life because it cries out for in-
terpretation and is often best interpreted in religious terms. However, to be
self-transcending and to be seized by something beyond oneself will never
lead beyond the self but only produce another stage, mode, or character of
the self. It is an immanent experience (an experience in Immanence) in
which the self discovers the possibility, potentiality, and attractiveness of a

beyond that discloses the self to be not completely determined by its past
history and the actualities of a given situation. As a self-transcending self,
the self is not limited to what or how someone is at a given time and in a
given situation. There is always more to a self than what it actually is, and
this is manifested by its capacity for self-transcending.
This can be understood in at least two ways. On the one hand, self-
transcendence can be construed as a discovering, creating, or emerging of a
“true self” from its everyday or cultural construction, a liberating creation
of an authentic self in contrast to the pre-givens of a particular social and
cultural situation. To become a “true self” is to break through the closed
circle of a given identity and define what one “truly” is in contrast to it. For
just as to be a self is to have the “capacity for self-transcendence,” so to be-
come a “true self” (e.g., in the experience of grace) is to have an “unrestricted
openness to the intelligible, the true, the good.”72 On the other hand, self-
transcendence can also be construed as a critical deconstruction of self-
identity, the permanent breaking-open of a closed and consistent identity
not in order to replace it by (the construction of) a “true self” but rather by
becoming open toward the presence of others and their different values,
norms, and ideals.73 The first type of self-transcending is a creative enhance-
ment of self-identity that aims at establishing a “true self” (ipse) in contrast
to the social self that appears to others (idem). The second type of self-
transcending is permanent overcoming, loss, or surrender of self-identity, a
move beyond what one is in order to become accessible to and for others. In
religious terms, the first provides the paradigm experience for searching
one’s “true self” beyond what one actually is (self-enlarging, self-centering,
or ego-centric self-transcendence),74 the second is the paradigm experience for
seeing one’s ego as a permanent hindrance of becoming one with true reality
(self-surrendering, decentering, or onto-centric self-transcendence). In the
first sense the goal is the becoming of the self, in the second sense the over-
coming of the self.
Common to both types of self-transcending is the concentration on the
self, whether as goal or as starting point of the self-transcending movement.
In either case the self is seen as being able to move or be moved from one
place, mode, or state to another; from a marked space to what was formerly
an unmarked space that now becomes (part of) a new marked space, thereby
redefining the boundary line between marked and unmarked spaces. What it
does not allow us to do is to exchange the marked and the unmarked space in
a radical manner, because the marked space is wherever we are (the self is)
and we can only hypothetically imagine it to be, but not actually perform it,
the other way around. In a very important sense, the self of self-transcending
never moves beyond the immanent side of the Immanence / Absolute Tran-
scendence distinction which functions as its horizon of transcending.75
2. Theological Perspectives
This is different in the second or theological perspective. Here the transcend-

ing movement is not one of the self that moves beyond itself within the ho-
rizon of Immanence but rather of the Transcendent which occurs in what
thereby becomes “the immanent horizon” (Immanence) and which, in oc-
curring in this way, constitutes the self to which it occurs. It is a truth-
event76 that occurs as something to someone in a radical sense: it was unpre-
dictable, it brings out the truth of the situation in which it occurs, and it
redefines the self to whom it occurs. That is to say, it is experienced by a self
as a break-in of something utterly new, unexpected, and unforeseeable, some-
thing that emerges ex nihilo, which cannot be accounted for in terms of the
given situation; it brings out what is the truth of this situation, if necessary
against the common view or against its own self-understanding; and it de-
termines the self in a way that goes beyond anything it could have achieved
through self-transcending because it is not merely a modification of the
mode of a pre-given self but a constitution of a “new self,” the self in a new
mode of being. Whereas in self-transcending, to use traditional language,
the finite seeks to participate in the infinite;77 in transcendence occurring as
an event the infinite participates in the finite, thereby transforming it into
something radically new. The self becomes aware of herself as given, as not
of her own making, of being what she could never become by herself: a new
self that receives her being through a becoming that she can only describe as
pure passivity preceding all her own activity.
This event is not an answer to a problem or a making good for a lack or
defect that may have provoked or occasioned a self-transcending on the side
of the self. It is not the answer to an expectation or hope but “an experience
in which we are confronted by a world that contradicts our desires, and by
an other who is not an extension of the images we have of him or her.”78 But
it is wrong to couch the experience merely in negative terms. On the con-
trary, what occurs in the event of transcendence is an enrichment or em-
powering that goes beyond anything the “old self” could have imagined or
foreseen, and for this reason is experienced as a completely gratuitous gift
and enrichment, a “new creation.”
The “new self,” therefore, is who or what it is due to this event. What de-
fines it is not its previous history but the occurrence of the event and its fi-
delity to this event. The new self comes after the event and persists in dis-
cerning its traces within its situation. It now lives in a situation constituted
by the breaking-in of a Transcendence that establishes an irreversible dis-
tinction between the immanence of the life of the self and the transcendence
that occurred as event. It may symbolize the event in everyday, epistemic,
ethical, religious, and other such terms, but the event is always and irreduc-
ibly more than anything that can be symbolized or expressed in language. It
is different from its symbolizations because it precedes and transcends them
in a principal way: it is not a result of acts of symbolizations, rather it is that
without which these acts of symbolization would not be possible.
This is how theologies have come to speak of transcendence and, in par-
ticular, of Absolute Transcendence. There is no way of reaching the Absolute
Transcendence by human self-transcending, because all self-transcending
will take place in the horizon of Immanence and not go beyond it. The only
way Absolute Transcendence can become accessible in noncontradictory
terms is by becoming present as Absolute Transcendence in the present that
is constituted by the event of its becoming present.79 This requires thinking
Absolute Transcendence as that which becomes present as Absolute Tran-
scendence in the immanence, which it thereby constitutes. This in turn is
only possible if Absolute Transcendence is in itself a Self-Transcending that
establishes the difference between Immanence and Absolute Transcendence
precisely by becoming present within the horizon of Immanence as Abso-
lute Transcendence. Absolute Transcendence is not a dimension of Imma-
nence that can be found and addressed in everything that is and becomes in
the horizon of Immanence. It is rather that which posits the difference be-
tween Immanence / Absolute Transcendence in such a way that it becomes
possible, on the one hand, to distinguish between “old” and “new” selves
relative to this positing, and on the other, to see the defining feature of
Absolute Transcendence not in its self-possession, difference, and seclusion

from Immanence and everything that is and can be in the horizon of Im-
manence, but rather in its Self-Transcending from the beyond of Absolute
Transcendence into the horizon of Immanence without thereby ceasing to
be Absolute Transcendence.
3. Divine Self-Transcending
In this sense, the transcendence of Absolute Transcendence is not the com-

pletely inaccessible transcendence of the Wholly Other that can only be
hinted at in negative terms or in a language of analogy that is dominated by
the principle of negative theology that “between the Creator and the crea-
ture so great a likeness cannot be noted without the necessity of noting a
greater dissimilarity between them.”80 Rather, it is the Self-Transcending of
Absolute Transcendence (or, more precisely, of the Absolute Transcendent)
into the horizons of those who live in Immanence, without Absolute Tran-
scendence thereby ceasing to be Absolute Transcendence.
In Christian terms—and something similar can be said in terms of other
religious traditions that define themselves by their fidelity to such a founda-
tional event—God is not the Wholly Other but the one who becomes pres-
ent to creatures in the horizon of Immanence in Jesus Christ and through
the Spirit (i.e., in what those to whom this breaking-in of Absolute Tran-
scendence occurs symbolize as “Jesus Christ,” “the Spirit,” and “God”). God
does not cease to be God in becoming present in this way, but actually de-
fines his divinity in the very act of this divine self-transcending into imma-
nence. By occurring in this contingent way (Jesus’ life and death), at this
contingent place and time (Roman Judea), and to these contingent people
(Jesus’ Jewish disciples), the break-in of God’s transcendence becomes ex-
pressed and symbolized in the imagery of their life and tradition. But it
sparked off a semantic revolution that led to a new life and language (Chris-
tian faith and theology) and transformed the cultural system of meaning in
the Roman Empire and beyond. For Christians, all central questions are
now answered by reference to this event. “Who is God?” (i.e., who becomes
present in this way?) is answered: the one who discloses himself as love in
the life and death of Jesus; “What is God?” (i.e., what is it that becomes pres-
ent as God?) is answered: the unbounded love exemplified by Jesus Christ;
“How is God?” (i.e., how does God become present?) is answered: as the
event of divine self-transcending that constitutes a “new life” by marking it
off from an “old life,” and so on.
In short, the transcendence of God is no longer that which makes God
wholly other and inaccessible to human self-transcending but rather the di-
vine Self-Transcending that makes God present as God to humans in the
horizon of Immanence before they can even begin to self-transcend. Whereas
human beings cannot self-transcend into the horizon of God, God is God
precisely by being, in Christian terms, a self-transcending love into the ho-
rizon of what is not God. What is a self-transcending activity on God’s side
is a dislocating passivity on the side of the human self, which thereby be-
comes divided into an “old self” and a “new self.” This distinction between
the old self and the new self is in principle inaccessible to the self-transcending
self by itself. The difference between “old” and “new” is visible only from the
standpoint of the event, not from the standpoint of the self. Its truth and ac-
cessibility depend on the self-transcending event of the Absolute Transcen-
dent becoming present in the horizon of Immanence to those who can never
break through this horizon into the presence of Absolute Transcendence by
their own self-transcending. It is the truth-event of life—the event that
brings out the truth of a life coram deo that is hidden to itself when merely
lived as a life of human self-transcending.
This general pattern has been worked out in a number of different ways in
twentieth-century theology, in the Protestant tradition typically by concen-
trating either on the That of divine self-transcending (Paul Tillich), or on its
How (Barth).
4. Divine Transcending as Breaking-In
Tillich describes the divine self-transcending in phenomenological terms as

the breaking-in of eternity into time, the infinite into the finite, the uncon-
ditional into the conditioned, or of being itself into being. This breaking-in
or rupture can occur at any time, any place, and in any culture. It is the
event (that) of transcendence that counts, not how the event is symbolized
in terms of the symbolic material provided by the situation of the breaking-
in. The breaking-in of transcendence into immanence ruptures the struc-
tures of immanence and thereby presents or opens up a glimpse on the
universal dimension of reality, whereas the way it is re-presented or symbol-

ized is always particular and due to the particularities of the situation or
context in which the rupture occurred. What counts in understanding the
symbols of a religious tradition are not the particularities of the symbols as
such (their particular, historical, cultural, or “immanent” features) but that
which they make present or re-present in their distinctive ways (the univer-
sal, transhistorical, transcultural, or “transcendent” reality to which they
point as their source and origin). Thus the symbols of a religion are impor-
tant not in themselves but only insofar as they present and point to this
event of the rupture of immanence by the breaking-in of transcendence.
This is also true of the symbol of “God.” “As the power of being, God tran-
scends every being and also the totality of beings—the world. Being-itself is
beyond finitude and infinity; otherwise it would be conditioned by some-
thing other than itself, and the real power of being would lie beyond both it
and that which conditioned it.”81 Religion, therefore, is not a specific cultural
phenomenon alongside others but the permanent and culturally changing
reminder of that which grounds all cultural phenomena. No religion is made
for eternity. Rather, “a particular religion will be lasting to the degree in
which it negates itself as a religion. Thus Christianity will be a bearer of a re-
ligious answer as long as it breaks through its own particularity.”82 It is only
by negating their own particular symbolic re-presentation of Transcendence
that immanent symbols can direct our attention to the transcendent dimen-
sion that has manifested itself by rapturing human experience and thereby
occasioned its symbolic re-presentation. “This power of unconditional reality
in every conditioned actuality is that which is the supporting ground in ev-
ery thing (Ding), its very root of being, its absolute seriousness, its unfathom-
able depth, and its holiness.”83 (Absolute) Transcendence is thus described as
the self-actualizing unconditional deep structure of conditioned being that
can never be exhausted by any re-presentation of it, but which can only be-
come present again and again by and through itself and which thereby occa-
sions its symbolic re-presentation in a multitude of ways in the course of
history. Therefore, while there is no question about the “that” of Transcen-
dence; its “what” is ineffable and inexhaustible. The symbolic re-presentations
of the event do not provide a basis for analogical reasoning about Transcen-
dence but only re-present its breaking-in into Immanence. They are backward-
looking, not Transcendence-depicting.
Tillich understood this breaking-in of transcendence in a realist sense:

the unconditional is the ontological correlate of the conditioned world of
phenomena; it cannot be construed or comprehended from within the con-
ditioned but only symbolically gestured at when it breaks into the condi-
tioned; this breaking-in or rupture is what human consciousness perceives
as a manifestation of transcendence in immanence. However, “manifesta-
tion” can be construed not merely as “manifestation of something or some-
one” but also as “manifestation to somebody.” By stressing this second aspect
of manifestation, Tillich’s realist account of rupture can be changed into a
phenomenological account that is indifferent to the ontological question.
Thus Martin J. De Nys understands religion “as a human response to some
manifestation of sacred transcendence, putative or real.”84 This amounts to
saying that religions spring from what they take to be a manifestation of the
transcendent, whether that is the case or not. They are human responses to
“the intentional correlate of a consciousness of something supposed to sur-
pass the limits of finite imperfection and to present itself as the final end of
human commitment and striving.”85 Since the claim is not that there is
something that manifests itself, “transcendence” is here merely a supposed
transcendence, and the “manifestation of transcendence” not a rupture oc-
casioned by the breaking-in of the unconditional into the conditioned, but
rather the retrospective positing of a religion of that to which it believes it-
self to be a response.
5. Divine Self-Transcending as Self-Revelation
Neither the phenomenological nor Tillich’s ontological view of transcen-

dence went far enough for Barth. He construed transcendence not as phe-
nomenological revelation but as divine self-revelation. Revelation must be
God’s self-revelation or it does not deserve to be called “revelation”: “Revela-
tion is Dei loquentis persona [God speaking in person],”86 and unless God’s
trinitarian self-interpretation as Father, Son, and Spirit is communicating
who God is in Godself, it is not God’s self-revelation and hence no revela-
tion. The point of self-revelation is that in and through it God “reiterates” for
humans in history who, what, and how God is in Godself from all eternity.
“In reiteration, that which is reiterated lets itself be known. In God’s being
for us, God’s being for himself makes itself known to us as a being which
grounds and makes possible God’s being-for-us.”87 In his revelation God

reiterates himself for humans in such a way that God can be known as God
is in Godself. If it were otherwise, if God’s revelation would not be self-
revelation in a strict sense, what is called “revelation” would not reveal God
but at best something about God who, as God, would remain dark, inacces-
sible, and ambiguous in himself. In fact, revelation would not reveal God
but that God cannot be revealed; and faith would not be faith in God but
belief that God is incomprehensible (negative theology) or that there is al-
ways more that is incomprehensible about God than what is comprehensible
(analogical theology). Only if revelation is divine self-revelation strictu sensu
can the act of self-revelation as perceived and acknowledged by faith pro-
vide a basis for analogical reasoning about God—not in terms of an analogy
of being but of an analogy of faith. In revealing himself to humankind in
Jesus Christ and through the Spirit, God reiterates himself in history as God
is in Godself from all eternity; and since God reveals himself in Christ
as redeeming love for his creation, redeeming love is also the essence of the
trinitarian life of God. Thus divine self-revelation is not merely the breaking-in
of transcendence into the immanence of human life and history but rather
the self-presentation and self-communication of God as God to that which
is different from God; and since this event “reiterates” for us what God is in
Godself, the capacity, power, and potentiality of becoming immanent as
God (i.e., a God for us or Immanuel) is precisely what characterizes God’s
transcendence and being: God’s being is in becoming—in becoming present
to us as creative and transforming love.88
In short, God is Wholly Other not because God is completely and abso-
lutely beyond all human grasp, but rather because God is eternally self-
transcending toward us. The transcendence of God does not signify that
God is in principle beyond human comprehensibility, but on the contrary
that God has in fact become comprehensible as God to humankind even
though the mystery of what this means and involves will never be exhausted.
Divine transcendence is the inexhaustible comprehensibility of God rather
than God’s infinite incomprehensibility. And this comprehensibility is not
grounded in the immanent structure of human reason but in the creative
self-presentation of God as God in human history and to human life. Divine
transcendence is God becoming God for humankind by making himself ac-
cessible and comprehensible as God in human terms. To be accessible as
God under the conditions of immanence is what characterizes God’s tran-

scendence.89 God is the one who becomes present to us, and God is how God
becomes present to us: as creative and transforming love.
6. Aspiring and Anaphoric Self-Transcendence
Reference to such a breaking-in of Absolute Transcendence into Immanence

is impossible without interpreting or symbolizing it. This symbolization is
contingent on the situation in which it occurs, that is, it uses interpretative
possibilities and symbolic materials available in that situation. However, the
way the breaking-in of Absolute Transcendence is symbolized is not merely
an interpretation of the event (descriptive interpretation) but always involves
at the same time a corresponding interpretation of those who define or under-
stand themselves in terms of the breaking-in event in question (orienting
interpretation). Just as the event is inaccessible without reference to those
who understand themselves in the light of this event, so the identity of those
who refer to this event depends on the event to which they refer: event and
interpreting community mutually determine each other.
This in turn allows us to distinguish two kinds of human self-transcending
in Immanence. The fi rst is an aspiring after a beyond that the self can
never reach because it can only move within Immanence (aspiring self-
transcending). The second is a being opened-up to the presence—in Chris-
tian terms—of the self-communicating God in God’s Word and Spirit, a
human self-transcending into the divine self-transcending of God (ana-
phoric self-transcending). When God communicates Godself to the crea-
ture, the creature cannot not react, but rather reacts by either communicat-
ing or not communicating with God. Similarly, when God becomes present
as God, the creature cannot stay unchanged. Rather, it becomes disclosed
and uncovered as a creature that ignores or objects to God’s presence (sin-
ner), or it becomes transformed into a creature that looks back on its past as
sinner by living a new life through God’s grace in the creative presence of
God ( justified sinner). Human self-transcending in this second sense does
not (seek to) break out of its immanence into a transcendent beyond, but
rather relates within immanence to God’s self-transcending presence as
God in this immanence. God is not far away or beyond but rather closer to
the creature than it is to itself. God’s transcendence, therefore, is not an
inaccessible remoteness but rather an unfathomable closeness of God, the

creative present of the Transcendent to human life in immanence.
By relating to this creative presence of God, the creature is transformed
from a God-ignoring being to a God-adoring creature. It is not the old self
that recasts itself in a new way, but rather the new self emerges from God’s
self-communication, creating a distinction within the addressee between an
old self bound to dissolve and a new self that is made a companion of God’s
immanent self-transcending toward the sinner. This new self perceives itself
not as a goal that it has achieved but as a gift that it has received; and the gift
is not something given to the self, but rather the very being of the new self is
the gift.
V. Transcendence as a Theological Category
1. “Transcendence” as an Interpretative Term
Transcendence in the sense outlined is human self-transcending into the di-

vine self-transcending provoked and enabled by the divine self-transcending
toward human persons. Understood in this sense, “transcendence” is neither
a descriptive term nor a limit term but rather an interpretative theological
category that helps to make sense of human life in the dynamic and creative
presence of God.
Methodologically, this is the third use of the term “transcendence” that
we must distinguish: in its descriptive use the distinction between imma-
nence and transcendence (immanent/transcendent) is read (in a Platonist
way) as the difference between two kinds of reality, a natural and a super-
natural reality (natural/supernatural). In its use as a limit term the distinc-
tion is used critically to mark the difference between a meaningful use of
such terms as “natural,” “experience,” “value,” “person,” and so on (imma-
nent) and usages beyond the realm of categorically determined experience
where they become meaningless (transcendent). And in its interpretative
use they do not describe a specific reality or regulate a particular usage of
terms but rather are used to signify a way in which phenomena of this life
are reinterpreted in the light of a particular meaning perspective and scheme
of orientation.
2. The Structure of Interpretation
Interpretation is a meaning-making procedure in which something (p) is

understood or interpreted by someone or something (x) as something (q) to
someone (y). The first (p) functions as interpretandum, the second (x) as in-
terpreter, the third (q) as an interpretans. The interpretans can only achieve
its end of explaining (making sense of) the interpretandum if it is composed
of terms that are sufficiently clear to the addressee (y)—who could, of course,
be also the interpreter (x) herself—in the context of explication, explana-
tion, or interpretation. You cannot explain the dark by the darker or inter-
pret the unclear by something that is even less clear.
Interpretation can concentrate either on interpreting transcendence or
on interpreting something as transcendent. In the first case transcendence
is explained as something (theory of transcendence), in the second case
something is explained as transcendent (phenomena of transcendence). If
“transcendence” functions as the interpretandum, the question is what it
means and how it is to be understood, and the answer has to explain tran-
scendence as something. On the other hand, if it functions as interpretans,
that is, if something is explained as transcendence, its meaning must be suf-
ficiently clear for the purpose of making sense of that to which it is applied,
and this is normally the case when the term is defined in the context of a
theory with respect to and in contrast to the other terms of that theory. Just
as “revelation” is not a name of an event but a theological category to make
sense of certain events in a religious tradition, so “transcendence” is used
not as a description of a phenomenon but as a philosophical category to
make sense of certain (types of) phenomena.
When the distinction immanent/transcendent is used to interpret phe-
nomena that are already understood or interpreted in a particular way, its
point is to relate those phenomena to other phenomena (immanence) in such
a way that it makes explicit the point of reference (transcendence) in terms
of which they are integrated in a comprehensive total perspective or scheme
(ordering or structuring use) in which everything, the phenomena described
(interpretandum) as well as those who describe them (interpreter), can be
located (localizing use). Thus the term “transcendence” is used not to describe
a supernatural reality beyond natural or empirical reality but rather to mark
the point of reference or the signifier in light of which all actual and possible
phenomena in question are understood, as (for example) “creation,” “sin,” or
“salvation.” Used as an interpretative theological category, “transcendence”
does not interpret phenomena but rather reinterprets the interpretation of
phenomena in a particular theological way: the world is interpreted as cre-
ation, living beings as creatures, human persons as images of God, evildoing
as sin, forgiveness as redemption, and so on.
When “transcendence” is used as an interpretative theological category
in this way, its meaning and point are not determined by that to which it is
applied or to which it refers (its referents) but rather by the network of theo-
logical terms and concepts to which it belongs. It cannot be used in isolation
but only by applying the whole system of theological terms and concepts in
the attempt to make sense of human life and experience. Theological sys-
tems are meaning-making procedures that help to orient human life in this
world by providing a way of ordering human life and experience (scheme of
orientation) and a way of locating oneself and others in that scheme of ori-
entation (localizing procedures).
3. The Emergence of Transcendence
However, theological systems differ and the meaning of terms like “God,”
“creation,” “revelation,” “sin,” “redemption,” “eternal life,” or “transcendence”
is determined in different ways. There is not one theological understanding
of “transcendence”; the term is used differently in Roman Catholic theolo-
gies and in Protestant theologies, in seventeenth-century dogmatics and in
contemporary systematic theologies, in theistic traditions and in pan(en)-
theistic or a-theistic conceptions. In each case, however, it cannot be under-
stood in isolation but only as one side of the contrast between immanence
and transcendence, and this distinction is determined differently in differ-
ent theologies. Thus we must not only distinguish between different concep-
tions of transcendence in different theological systems but also between
theological systems that use the categories of transcendence and imma-
nence and those that do not.
It is against this backdrop that we can understand Jaspers’ thesis of the
emergence of transcendence in the Axial Age. Its point is not the variety of
ways the term “transcendence” is used and of what it signifies but the fact
that the distinction between immanence and transcendence in one of its
many interpretations is used at all. When religious reflection and cultural
thinking started to use this orienting distinction, a new way of locating and
orienting human life in the world began to emerge. This has not come to an
end, as Jaspers feared, in the twentieth century. What has become deeply
questionable is a particular interpretation of this distinction: the Platonist
view, that beyond the immanence where we live (natural world) there is a
transcendence for which we strive but at which we can never arrive (super-
natural world). Even though this Platonist tradition with its ontological du-
alism has deeply influenced theological thinking in the West, the point of
the message of the great religions of the West is different. Pace Nietzsche,
their message of God is not to be equated with the propagation of a Platonist
Absolute Transcendent beyond all human grasp and experience. Christian-
ity in particular has emphasized that God is not beyond our striving but, on
the contrary, that God’s divinity consists precisely in God transcending the
human absence from God by becoming present to humans as God: God
is not far away but close, not because God is immanent in everything that is
but because nothing that is, is without God, whereas God “is” in no way in
which anything else is. God is neither a transcendent (supernatural) nor an
immanent (natural) being but rather the creative presence that occurs
again and again as the rupturing event that breaks through the boundaries
of created being by coming close to us as God. In doing so God opens up
possibilities of orienting human life by reference to that which is in every
sense beyond what we can control and influence. In anthropological terms,
God’s self-transcending self-presentation and self-communication to cre-
ated life constitutes the fundamental passivity that grounds all human life
and activity and illumines the contingency of life as a gift. Life is a gift that
not only opens up possibilities but also resonates with possibilities that in-
terrupt the course of life and allow us to transcend ourselves by going be-
yond what we are to what we can be—not because we have the competence
to do it but because we have been given the chance and opportunity to be-
come it.90
Notes
I thank Marlene Block and the editors of this volume for helpful comments.
1. K. Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Munich: Piper, 1988
[1949]; English: The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1953); new edition (London: Routledge, 2010), 4. All subsequent references
to Jaspers refer to this edition.
2. Jaspers, The Origin and Goal, 219.
3. There clearly is a problem in this view, which Jaspers fails to address. If be-
coming aware of transcendence is what makes human beings human, “pre-Axial
man” is as much an oxymoron as “post-Axial man”: both fail to qualify as man on
Jaspers’ criterion. What he has in mind may be less confusingly stated not as a
difference between human beings (human animals) and nonhuman beings (other
animals) but between inhumane and humane ways of being a human being. That
is to say, the decisive distinction in terms of which Jaspers’ thesis should be read is
not human / not human (human animal / nonhuman animal) but humane/inhu-
mane (humane human / inhumane human). It is not a thesis about the difference
between humans and other creatures in the category of “animal” but a humanist
thesis about the difference between humane and inhumane ways of living a hu-
man life in the category of “human being.”
4. Jaspers, The Origin and Goal, 213–228; see K. Jaspers, Der philosophische
Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung (Munich, 1962).
6. Ibid., 259.
7. Ibid., 220.
8. Ibid., 264–265.
9. Ibid., 276.
10. F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “ ‘Reason’ in Philosophy” §6, in Nietz-
sche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. A.
Ridley and J. Norman (Cambridge, 2005), 170.
11. Nietzsche, Twilight, “ ‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” §3, 168 (emphasis in origi-
nal).
12. Plato, The Republic, Book VII, 514a–520a. See J. N. Findlay, The Discipline
of the Cave (London and New York, 1966); The Transcendence of the Cave (London
and New York, 1967).
13. On the use of spatial language and its misreading in light of the homogeni-
zation of space in modern science, see W. C. Placher, The Domestication of Tran-
scendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong (Louisville, 1996).
14. See G. B. Vico, Liber metaphysicus (Naples, 1710); it is the first and only
volume of De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae Latinae originibus eru-
enda libri tres (Naples, 1710).
15. I use the term “epistemic transcendence” differently from M. Westphal,

Transcendence and Self-Transcendence: On God and the Soul (Bloomington and
Indianapolis, 2004), 93–174, who uses it to refer to discussions of the incompre-
hensibility of God in Augustine, Pseud-Dionysius, Aquinas, and Barth.
16. See J. P. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: A Sketch for a Phenomenologi-
cal Description (Abingdon, 2004 [1988]); M. Csikszentmihalyi, The Evolving Self:
A Psychology for the Third Millennium (New York, 1993), 207–251.
17. I. Kant, KrV B131–132 (emphasis in original).
18. Ibid., A366–379. See KrV B276.
19. J. de Gaultier, Le Bovarysme: La psychologie dans l’oeuvre de Flaubert, an-
noté et présenté par Didier Philippot, suivi de neuf études réunies et coordonnées
par Per Buvik (Paris, 2007 [1892]. See G. Agamben, The Time That Remains: A
Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford, 2005), 37.
20. See B. Forthomme, Une philosophie de la transcendance: La métaphysique
d’Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris, 1979); É. Feron, De l’idée de transcendance à la ques-
tion du langage: L’itinéraire philosophique d’Emmanuel Levinas (Grenoble, 1992);
M. Westphal, Transcendence and Self-Transcendence: On God and the Soul (Bloom-
ington and Indianapolis, 2004), 177–226 (on Levinas and Kierkegaard).
21. E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh, 1969),
261ff.
22. R. Horner, “The Betrayal of Transcendence,” in R. Schwarz, ed., Transcen-
dence: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology Approach the Beyond (New York and
London, 2004), 61–79, here 61– 62.
23. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 171.
24. E. Levinas, Time and the Other and Additional Essays, trans. R. A. Cohen
(Pittsburgh, 1987), 75.
25. Ibid., 83.
26. See P. Hayat, Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. M. B.
Smith (New York, 1999), xiv.
27. E. Levinas, “Philosophy and Positivity,” in Schwarz, ed., Transcendence,
31– 42, here 41.
28. See C. Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Phi-
losophy (Oxford, 1998), 183; M. Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolo-
nial Theology of God (Louisville and London, 2007), chap. 1.
29. W. Lowe, “Second Thoughts about Transcendence,” in J. D. Caputo, ed.,
The Religious (Malden, 2002), 241–251, here 248.
30. R. Schwarz, “Introduction. Transcendence: Beyond . . . ,” in Schwarz, ed.,
Transcendence, vii–xii, here x–xi.
31. For a feminist critique of Levinas’ notion of transcendence, see D. Perpich,
“From the Caress to the Word: Transcendence and the Feminine in the Philoso-
phy of Emmanuel Levinas,” in T. Chanter, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Em-
manuel Levinas (University Park, 2001); C. Keller, “Rumors of Transcendence:
The Movement, State, and Sex of ‘Beyond,’ ” in J. D. Caputo and M. J. Scanlon,
eds., Transcendence and Beyond: A Postmodern Inquiry (Bloomington and India-
napolis, 2007).
32. Schwarz, “Introduction,” xi.
33. N. Luhmann, “Die Sinnform Religion,” Soziale Systeme 2 (1996): 3–33, here
20.
34. N. Luhmann, Ökologische Kommunikation (Opladen, 1986), 186: “Die Ein-
heit der Differenz (und nicht etwa: die Transzendenz als solche) ist der Code der
Religion.”
35. N. Luhmann, “Die Ausdifferenzierung der Religion,” in Luhmann, Gesell-
schaftsstruktur und Semantik: Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesell-
schaft, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 259–357; Die Religion der Gesellschaft
(Frankfurt am Main, 2000).
36. Luhmann, “Die Sinnform Religion,” 20.
37. Luhmann, “Die Ausdifferenzierung der Religion,” 313. Translation by R.
Laermans and G. Verschraegen, “ ‘The Late Niklas Luhmann’ on Religion: An
Overview,” Social Compass 48 (2001): 7–20, here 18.
38. See N. Luhmann, “Das Erkenntnisprogramm des Konstruktivismus und
die unbekannt bleibende Realität,” in Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 5: Kon-
struktivistische Perspektiven (Opladen, 1990), 31–58.
39. G. Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form (New York, 1979 [1969]).
40. I call a “marked space” the space where we are located in making the dis-
tinction and the “unmarked space” everything that is on the other side of the
distinction.
41. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 171 (emphasis in original).
42. What sometimes has been called “immanent transcendence” (see Charles
Taylor, A Secular Age [Cambridge, 2007], 726) is thus reconstructed here as “tran-
scending immanence.”
43. This is why the breakthrough of distinguishing between Absolute Tran-
scendence and Immanence is experienced as a discovery and not as an invention
or a mere emergence that takes place in a par ticu lar culture or society.
44. R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, revised edition (Oxford, 1998
[1940]), 47. See R. J. Festin, “Collingwood’s Absolute Presuppositions and the Non-
propositionality,” Collingwood and British Idealism Studies 14 (2008): 65–91.
45. See Taylor, A Secular Age, 726.
46. M. Luther, “Disputatio de homine,” prop. 35, in G. Ebeling, Disputatio de
Homine: Erster Teil; Text und Traditionshintergrund (Tübingen, 1977), 23. It is
obvious that Nietzsche and Luther use a similar idea in very different ways: in
Nietzsche it is a development solely within Immanence that he hopes will lead to
the future superman, whereas in Luther it is precisely not a move within Imma-
nence that will produce this future form of human life but only the transforming
activity of God from the side of the Absolute Transcendence.
47. See the grammatical numbers “dual” (two) and “trial” (three), which refer
to two or three items respectively, in contrast to “singular” and “plural,” which
refer to one or more than one items respectively.
48. Schwartz, “Introduction,” xi.
49. I. Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissen-
schaft wird auftreten können §57, AA IV, 352.
50. Kant, Prolegomena §57, AA IV, 352.
51. For a discussion of the idea of limit concepts, see H. Schröder, “Zur reli-
gionsphilosophischen Bedeutung von Grenzbegriffen: Ein Versuch als Diskus-
sionsgrundlage,” www.kaththeol.uni-frankfurt.de/relphil/mitarbeiter/schroedter
/Grenzbegriffe.pdf.
52. A. Schütz and T. Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World, vol. 2 (Evans-
ton, 1989), 177–130; T. Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in
Modern Society (New York, 1967); T. Luckmann, ed., Die unsichtbare Religion
(Frankfurt am Main, 1991), 164–182; H. Knoblauch, “Die Verflüchtigung der Reli-
gion ins Religiöse,” in Luckmann, ed., Die unsichtbare Religion, 7–41; G. Thomas,
Implizite Religion: Theoriegeschichtliche und theoretische Untersuchungen zum
Problem ihrer Identifikation (Würzburg, 2001).
53. H. Streib and R. W. Hood, “Modeling the Religious Field: Religion, Spiritu-
ality, Mysticism and Related World Views,” www.uni-bielefeld.de/theologie/CIR
RuS-downloads/Streib-Hood _2010_Modeling-the-Religious-Field-CIRRuS-WP9
.pdf (p. 2).
54. See E. Wyschogrod, “Intending Transcendence: Desiring God,” in Cross-
over Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy’s Others (New York,
2006), 13–28, here 25.
55. See U. Goodenough, “Vertical and Horizontal Transcendence,” Zygon 36
(2001): 21–31; R. W. Hood, P. C. Hill, and B. Spilka, The Psychology of Religion: An
Empirical Approach, 4th ed. (New York, 2009), 282 and 286; Chr. Bachmann, Re-
ligion und Sexualität: Die Sehnsucht nach Transzendenz (Stuttgart, Berlin, and
Cologne, 1994); A Halsema, “Horizontal Transcendence: Irigaray’s Religion after
Ontotheology,” in H. de Vries, ed., Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York, 2008),
813–994; Streib and Hood, “Modeling the Religious Field,” 4– 6.
56. As ritual theorists remind us, this is exactly where we are in liminal situations.
We are, so to speak, neither here nor there, we are betwixt and between, conflating
and seeming to interrupt all dualities. This, however, is not a neutral position. It
can be disorienting, dangerous, creative, and sometimes destructive. Ritual “expe-
rience” will not choose sides (Absolute Transcendence or Immanence), it is the
enacted experience of an exception. However, it takes place in Immanence (and not
in Absolute Transcendence), and there it is possible only as a symbolic (ritual) en-
actment of an impossibility—the impossibility of being here neither here nor there.
57. “Absolute Transcendence” is the character of the Absolute Transcendent; the
Absolute Transcendent is the concrete instantiation of Absolute Transcendence.
58. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1–IV, 3 (Edinburgh, 1956–1967). Hence-

forth cited as “CD.”
59. K. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of
Christianity, trans. W. V. Dych (New York, 1987), 116.
60. Rahner, Foundations, 119.
61. J. Derrida, On the Name, trans. D. Wood, J. P. Leavey Jr., and I. McLeod
(Stanford, 1995), 69: “I trust no text that is not in some way contaminated with
negative theology, and even among those texts that apparently do not have, want,
or believe they have any relation with theology in general.”
62. J. Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. D. Attridge (London, 1992), 74. See D. E.
Smith, “Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in
Recent French Thought,” in P. Patton and J. Protevi, eds., Between Deleuze and
Derrida (London, 2003), 46– 66.
63. J. Derrida, Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago, 1981), 168.
64. Ibid.
65. J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago, 1982), 67.
66. Ibid.
67. J. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Derrida and Negative
Theology, ed. H. Coward and T. Foshay (Albany, 1992), 74.
68. E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, 1969); Other-
wise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Dordrecht and Boston, 1978).
See F. Ciaramelli, Transcendance et éthique: Essai sur Lévinas (Brussels, 1989).
70. Lowe, “Second Thoughts,” 248.
71. See H. Joas, Do We Need Religion? On the Experience of Self-Transcendence
(Boulder, 2008), esp. 3–19.
72. B. J. F. Lonergan, “Mission and the Spirit,” in A Third Collection: Papers by
Bernhard J. F. Lonergan, S.J., ed. Frederick E. Crowe (New York, 1985), 32–33:
“Experience of grace . . . is experience of man’s capacity for self-transcendence, of
his unrestricted openness to the intelligible, the true, the good.”
73. See H. Joas, The Creativity of Action (Chicago, 1996), 148–167; The Genesis
of Values (Cambridge, 2000).
74. See R. A. Jonas, Becoming the True Self: Spiritual and Psychological Perspec-
tives for the 21st Century, www.emptybell.org/articles/Becoming%20the%20True
%20Self.pdf.
75. But note the important difference between (what I call) “aspiring self-
transcending” and “anaphoric self-transcending” in section IV, 6 below, that is, a
self-transcending move within Immanence tout court (aspiring self-transcending)
and a self-transcending move within Immanence into the self-transcending of the
Absolute Transcendent into Immanence (anaphoric self-transcending). The latter
is always presupposing, and responding to, a prior activity of the Absolute Tran-
scendent that is experienced as pure passivity (“being grasped,” “being inter-

rupted”) on the side of the human self.
76. See A. Badiou, Being and Event (New York, 2007), parts VII and VIII; The
Logic of Worlds: Being and Event II (New York, 2009). A truth-event is not part of
(the knowledge or description of) a situation but breaks into it and thereby brings
out its truth by opening up a truth-procedure that unfolds what the situation in
question truly is.
77. Lowe, “Second Thoughts,” seeks “to disengage the notion of transcendence
from that of the infinite” as he finds it in “Plato, Augustine and even Descartes”
(242). But this “Cult of the Infinite” cannot be continued in “the air modernity
breathes” since “ ‘[t]here is no infinite God put there, just time and space going on
and on,’ which is to say that time and space go on indefinitely” (244). However,
postmodernity’s turn to “lateral transcendence” (248) is no viable alternative, as
he rightly sees. Therefore he suggests that we should conceive of transcendence as
something that “would cease to be the opposite of immanence; for a God of free-
dom [who] would not be isolated in some loft y place, but would be capable of be-
ing immanent precisely because of being transcendent” (250). But his reflections
end where it could become interesting.
78. P. Moyaert, “On Faith and the Experience of Transcendence: An Existential
Reflection on Negative Theology,” in I. N. Bulhof and L. ten Kate, eds., Flight of the
Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology (New York, 2000), 380.
79. See I. U. Dalferth, Becoming Present: An Inquiry into the Christian Sense of
the Presence of God (Leuven, Paris, and Dudley, 2006).
80. Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, §432, trans. R. J. Defarrari (St.
Louis and London, 1957), 171.
81. P. Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (London, 1988), 237.
82. P. Tillich, Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1963), 97.
83. P. Tillich, “The Conquest of the Concept of Religion in the Philosophy of
Religion,” in What Is Religion?, ed. J. L. Adams (New York, 1969), 140.
84. M. J. De Nys, Considering Transcendence: Elements of a Philosophical The-
ology (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2009), 14 (my emphasis).
85. Ibid., 10.
86. CD I/1, 304.
87. E. Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the
Theology of Karl Barth. A Paraphrase, trans. J. Webster (Edinburgh, 2001), 121.
88. See E. Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the
Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism, part V:
On the Humanity of God, trans. D. L. Guder (Grand Rapids, 1983), 299–396.
89. It is not enough, therefore, to say as Martin Luther King, Jr., does: “God
must be both ‘in’ and ‘beyond’ the world. If he is absolutely beyond, then he is not
in; if absolutely in, then not beyond; but remove the absolutely, and he may be
both. The doctrines of transcendence and immanence are both half-truths in
need of the tension of each other to give the more inclusive truth.” (“ ‘A Compari-
son of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson
Wieman’: Abstract of a Dissertation,” Boston University Graduate School, 1955,
in C. Carson, R. Luker, P. A. Ruessell, and P. Holloran, eds., The Papers of Martin
Luther King, Jr., vol. 2: Rediscovering Precious Values, July 1951–November 1955
[Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994], 517). To argue in this way is to
operate with an opposition between transcendence and immanence that is over-
come by Barth. God is not marked off from creation by being both transcendent
and immanent, but rather God’s becoming immanently present as the transcen-
dent God redefines “transcendence” as “God’s self-transcending toward us.”
90. See I. U. Dalferth, Umsonst: Eine Erinnerung an die kreative Passivität des
Menschen (Tübingen, 2011).
A Comparative Perspective
8
Religion, the Axial Age, and Secular
Modernity in Bellah’s Theory of
Religious Evolution
josé casanova
In this essay I propose to bring together into critical reflection Robert Bel-
lah’s theory of religious evolution, debates concerning the Axial Age, and
the most recent debates concerning our modern “secular age,” in order to
examine some of the ambiguities, equivocal meanings, and aporetic ten-
sions built into our modern category of “religion.”1 I will proceed in three
steps. First, I want to examine some of the difficulties built into any theory
of religious evolution that needs to function with some unitary, trans-
historical, and transcultural, indeed universally “human” category of “reli-
gion” that somehow cuts across pre-Axial, Axial, and modern secular con-
texts. The difficulties in matching or fitting together the three very different
binary classificatory schemes, “sacred-profane,” “transcendent-mundane,”
and “religious-secular” may serve as a telling indication. The pre-Axial sa-
cred, the Axial transcendent, and the modern religious are not necessarily
synonymous concepts, much less do they point to some identical concep-
tion of reality. In fact, they need to be understood in terms of their corre-
sponding binary opposites—profane, mundane, and secular—which point
also to very different structures of meaning and phenomenological concep-
tions of “worldly” reality.
Secondly, I want to interrogate the meaning of “axiality” within theories of
the Axial Age, particularly within Bellah’s theory of religious evolution. What
is so “Axial” about the Axial Age?2 How is an epochal theory of Axial emer-
gence in world history congruent with a developmental theory of multiple
192 A C o m pa r at i v e Pe r s pe c t i v e
stages of religious evolution, both pre-Axial and post-Axial? Is the place and
role of “religion” in the multiple Axial breakthroughs equivalent? Is “tran-
scendence” necessarily “religious” and are all Axial “theoretic” break-
throughs grounded equally in “religion”?
Finally, I want to briefly examine the relation between theories of the Axial
Age and theories of secular modernity, with respect to our modern “religious-
secular” system of classification. Is our modern global secular age the teleo-
logical unfolding of potentials implicit in the Axial breakthroughs, namely
the full crystallization of Axial “theoretic” culture? Or does modernity consti-
tute a post-Axial secular breakthrough of its own? How is the singularity of the
development of secular modernity in the Christian West and its globalization
through Western colonial expansion and American imperial projects congru-
ent with evolutionary frameworks of human development?
Bellah himself has offered somewhat ambiguous responses to some of
these questions, seemingly abandoning or at least significantly revising some
of the most modernist, progressive, and teleological evolutionary premises
of his two seminal essays of the 1960s, “Religious Evolution” and “Civil Re-
ligion in America.” In the process he has adopted a much more critical atti-
tude toward one-sided and exaggerated crystallizations of post-Axial theo-
retic culture and immanentist modern secular trends.3 The new critical,
more reflexively “prophetic,” attitude is normatively anchored in a concep-
tion of the Axial Age and of human evolution that wants not only to reaffirm
Axial transcendence but also to rehabilitate “myth” and “ritual” as consti-
tutive elements of the human condition, and as constitutive “religious” ele-
ments of any viable human society and human culture.
Ambiguities in the Category and the Phenomenon of “Religion”
Bellah’s theory of religious evolution takes for granted that “religion,” both as
an evolving sociocultural phenomenon and as an object of study, is histori-
cally constituted. As a student of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Bellah also takes
for granted that “in its modern usage, the term ‘religion’ is only about two
hundred years old.”4 The original Latin term, religio, is of course more than
two thousand years old, but its usage also changed dramatically from Varro’s
tripartite division of religion into theologia naturalis, civilis, and mythica, to
Augustine’s De vera religione, which incorporates what Jan Assmann has
Religion, the Axial Age, and Secular Modernity 193
called “the Mosaic distinction,” to the elevation of the “religious” life of the
ascetic monk in medieval Christendom as the paradigmatic form of reli-
gion.5 It is well known that most non-Western cultures did not have terms
into which the modern Western category of “religion” could be easily trans-
lated and had to invent neologisms, such as shukyo in Japanese or zongjiao in
Chinese, to designate what was viewed as a novel foreign phenomenon. Even
in ancient Greek there was no single word equivalent to the Latin religio.
Indeed, as pointed out by Guy Stroumsa, “it is notoriously difficult to define
religion in the Greek world.”6 Tellingly, there is also no native word for reli-
gion in Byzantine or Slavic Orthodox Christianity, and all Orthodox cul-
tures eventually borrowed the Latin word. But all these examples only prove
that religion is indeed historically and culturally constituted and that one
must avoid reducing religion or its study to its modern secular, to its Axial
Christian, or to its ancient Latin meanings.
But this only sharpens the question of which kind of phenomena are to be
designated as “religious” and thus to be included in any theory of religious
evolution. In his 1964 essay “Religious Evolution,” Bellah defined religion
most abstractly as “a set of symbolic forms and acts that relate man to the
ultimate conditions of his existence.”7 For Bellah, neither man, who in the
broadest sense is and will remain homo religiosus, nor the structure of man’s
ultimate conditions of existence evolve. Leaving aside the ambiguity in the
definition of the unit of analysis, which leaves unspecified whether “man”
refers to individual humans, to particular societies, or to the human species,
the definition presupposes that the ultimate conditions of human existence
remain structurally unchanged and that humans and/or human societies
cannot but relate somehow to those ultimate conditions. It is the way in
which humans and/or societies relate to those ultimate conditions that, ac-
cording to Bellah, evolves historically. “Neither religious man nor the struc-
ture of man’s ultimate religious situation evolves then, but rather religion as
symbol system.”8 Without assuming that evolution is “inevitable, irrevers-
ible, or must follow any single particular course,” Bellah claims that one
may speak of religious evolution insofar as the pattern of change of the reli-
gious symbol system appears to be one from “compact” to more “complex”
and “differentiated” religious symbolization.9
However, Bellah also recognizes that one could “look at a few of the mas-
sive facts of human religious history”10 in strictly historical terms, as emer-
gent historical phenomena, without necessarily framing these historical

changes in terms of a scheme of religious evolution. Following Max Weber’s
scheme of religious rationalization, Bellah clearly refers to the emergence of
the Axial Age and the emergence of modernity as the two crucial or axial
turning points in human religious history:
The first of these facts is the emergence in the first millennium b.c. all
across the Old World, at least in centers of high culture, of the phenom-
enon of religious rejection of the world characterized by an extremely
negative evaluation of man and society and the exaltation of another
realm of reality as alone true and infinitely valuable. This theme emerges
in Greece through a long development into Plato’s classic formulation
in the Phaedo that the body is the tomb or prison of the soul. . . . A very
different formulation is found in Israel, but there too the world is pro-
foundly devalued in the face of the transcendent God. . . . In India we
find perhaps the most radical of all versions of world rejection, culmi-
nating in the great image of the Buddha. . . . In China, Taoist ascetics
urged the transvaluation of all the accepted values and withdrawal
from human society. . . .
Nor was this a brief or passing phenomenon. For over two thousand
years great pulses of world rejection spread over the civilized world. . . .
I want to insist on this fact because I want to contrast it with an equally
striking fact, namely the virtual absence of world rejection in primitive
religions, in religion prior to the first millennium b.c., and in the mod-
ern world.11
Although Bellah acknowledges that one could account for “this sequence of
presence and absence of world rejection” without ever raising the issue of
religious evolution, by simply describing or explaining the transformation
from pre-Axial, to Axial, to modern systems of religious symbolization, he
chooses to frame these transformations within an evolutionary scheme com-
posed of a series of five stages that he calls “primitive, archaic, historic, early
modern, and modern.”12
Bellah is careful to disclaim that religious evolution needs to imply “reli-
gious progress” in an ethical sense, pointing out that “a complex and differ-
entiated religious symbolization is not therefore a better or a truer or a more
beautiful one than a compact religious symbolization.”13 Yet following the

evolutionary dynamic of the five stages in the 1964 essay, it is hard to avoid
the impression that human religious evolution, at least for the time being,
finds its teleological culmination in the religious symbol system one finds in
the American society of the 1960s. Uniquely striking about Bellah’s evolu-
tionary scheme is the fact that he can simultaneously and without evident
tension (a) affirm with Mircea Eliade that “primitive man is as fully reli-
gious as man at any stage of existence,” but, Bellah adds, countering Eliade,
not necessarily more religious than man in modern secular society;14 (b)
affirm with Émile Durkheim against Lucien Lévy-Bruhl that the paradig-
matic “mythical” and “ritual” compact symbol systems of Australian “prim-
itives,” despite the apparent absence of any “religious” differentiation from
“the social,” should not be viewed as a form of “prereligion” but rather as
“the elementary form of religious life,” which somehow already contains
within itself or “foreshadows” every posterior religious development;15 (c)
affirm with Durkheim that religion is the symbolic self-interpretation of hu-
man cultures and the symbolic self-representation of society and that in this
respect every society, every collectivity, every social group needs to have some
religious dimension, some form of “religious” symbolic self-representation.
Following Weber, he can (d) conceptualize the evolutionary dynamics of
religious development as a process of religious rationalization that entails
increasing demythologization and deritualization culminating in the disen-
chanted modern secular order; (e) affirm with Weber that the Protestant
Reformation was the single paradigmatic expression of “early modern reli-
gion” and therefore the privileged carrier of the world-historical process of
religious rationalization that culminates in secular modernity; (f) affirm
against Weber that this process of radical Entzauberung der Welt does not
necessarily entail “a collapse of meaning and a failure of moral standards.”
Instead of interpreting modern religious trends as evidence of “indifference
and secularization,” Bellah prefers to see in them “the increasing acceptance
of the notion that each individual must work out his own ultimate solu-
tions,” arguing that “the search for adequate standards of action, which is at
the same time a search for personal maturity and social relevance, is in itself
the heart of the modern quest for salvation.”16 Bellah can (g) affirm with
Durkheim that this radical individualism is an expression of the social sa-
cralization of the individual and constitutes the “religion” of modernity;
and (h) affirm with Talcott Parsons that American society represents a par-
ticular form of institutionalization of Christian Protestant values and that
therefore the process of modern secularization does not entail so much reli-
gious decline as the transformation and relocation of religious symbols and
practices into secular forms. By means of such a semantic relocation of the
religious symbolization of the “ultimate conditions of existence” the sacred
evolves or mutates from the “social collectivity” to divine “transcendence”
to the modern secular individual, without apparently losing its religious
identity or diminishing its force in the process.
Briefly summarizing the key characteristics of the five stages of religious
evolution, one may say that primitive religions are oriented to a single cosmos,
are concerned with the maintenance of personal, social, and cosmic harmony,
pursue mainly worldly goods, and express no need for salvation.17 Following
W. E. H. Stanner, Bellah characterizes primitive religion as a “one possibility
thing,” which gives practically no leverage from which to change the world. Its
very “fluidity and flexibility” is a barrier to radical innovation.18
Religious differentiation proper begins with archaic religion. Its charac-
teristic feature is “the emergence of true cult with the complex of gods,
priests, worship, sacrifice, and in some cases divine or priestly kingship.”19
The myth and ritual complex continues and the basic worldview remains
monistic. There is still a single cosmos in which the gods, humans, society,
and nature are all interrelated, without clear differentiation of the natural,
social, and moral orders.
Historic religions break through the cosmological monism of the previ-
ous two stages and proclaim a new, higher, and transcendent realm of uni-
versal reality. Despite the significant differences in their symbol systems, all
historic religions are “dualistic” and “universalistic.” They offer new paths
of individual salvation, which make possible for the first time “a clearly
structured conception of the self” and the self-conception “of man as such.”
The religious concern is relocated from the mundane, which now becomes
devalued, to a superior transcendent realm. Differentiated religious collec-
tivities and new elites of religious virtuosi and literati differentiated from the
laity emerge for the first time. The single religio-political hierarchy of ar-
chaic society also tends to split into two partially autonomous hierarchies.
This differentiation and the transcendent standards promoted by the new
religious elites bring a new level of tension and a possibility of conflict and
change. “Religion” begins to provide “the ideology and social cohesion for
many rebellions and reform movements,” although it continues to play its
traditional function of legitimation and reinforcement of the social order.20
The ideal-typical construction of early modern religion, unlike the previ-
ous general ideal types, which were based on a variety of cases, derives from
a single historical development, the Protestant Reformation. Bellah points
out that rather than a distinct evolutionary stage, it could be viewed as just
“a transitional phase” between “Axial” and “modern” religion. Defining char-
acteristics of early modern religion are “the collapse of the hierarchical
structuring of both this and the other world,” the relocation of the quest for
salvation into worldly “callings,” the dissolution of the mediated system of
salvation through sacramental rituals and religious virtuosi, which gives
way to direct relation between the individual and transcendent reality. Bel-
lah reasserts the Weberian thesis of the importance of the Protestant Refor-
mation, especially in its Calvinist wing, for modern developments in econom-
ics, science, politics, education, and law. But following Parsons, he stresses
that “for the first time pressures to social change in the direction of greater
realization of religious values are actually institutionalized as part of the
structure of society itself.” Supposedly, religious orientations now become
mediated through secular institutions “in which religious values have been
expressed.”21
Modern religion represents in Bellah’s view a radicalization and the cul-
mination of processes initiated by the Protestant Reformation. It marks the
final collapse of the dualism of the historic religions. But it should not be
interpreted as a return to “primitive monism.” Bellah is not sure whether
one can still speak of a modern religious symbol system in our post-Kantian
and postmetaphysic condition, when the very nature of symbolization is
open to increasing reflexive critical analysis and when religion becomes
necessarily grounded not only in ethical life but “in the structure of the hu-
man situation itself.” For Bellah, using a postmodern-sounding discourse
avant la lettre, an infinitely multiplex world has replaced the simple duplex
structure and life “has become an infinite possibility thing.” “The symbol-
ization of man’s relation to the ultimate conditions of his existence” is “no
longer the monopoly of any groups explicitly labeled religious . . . every fi xed
position has become open to question . . . the fundamental symbolization of
modern man and his situation is that of a dynamic multidimensional self
capable, within limits, of continual self-transformation and capable, again

within limits, of remaking the world, including the very symbolic forms
with which he deals with it, even the forms that state the unalterable condi-
tions of his own existence.”22
One could say that in primitive societies, before the emergence of any re-
ligious differentiation, “religion” was diff used throughout the social system.
In modern secular societies “religion” becomes once again diff used once its
values become institutionalized in secular structures, and individual au-
thenticity and self-expression become its main private “invisible” forms. In
between these two beginning and ending stages of religious evolution one
finds the world-historical process of religious rationalization so poignantly
analyzed by Weber. In this way, religion, while a changing reality, can be
affirmed as a permanent social fact that is equally congruous with the pre-
Axial sacred, with Axial transcendence, and with the modern secular order.
Bellah is well aware that one could offer radically different interpretations of
the same evolutionary process either in negative terms as the decline of
homo religiosus, the Death of God, and postmodern moral relativism, or in
positive secularist terms as the triumph of scientific knowledge and reason
and the progressive emancipation of humanity from magical rituals, myths,
and religion. Ultimately, Bellah understands his own evolutionary scheme
not as positivist social science but as an analytically grounded theoretic ex-
pression of modern man’s effort at self-interpretation and therefore part of
the enduring human exercise of religious symbolization.
In the last decades, Bellah has significantly revised his theory of religious
evolution, while maintaining that much of the analytical framework of his
1964 essay remains still valid. Without being able in the context of this essay
to develop a more systematic analysis, I perceive three major new develop-
ments in his revised theory of religious evolution, when compared to the
earlier formulation.
Most significantly, as indicated by the title of the book Religion in Human
Evolution, his theory of religious evolution is now embedded in a much
more ambitious and more broadly elaborated theory of the evolution of hu-
man consciousness, grounded in significant novel contributions made by
developmental cognitive and evolutionary psychology. Most crucially, he
has incorporated into his own theory the work of the evolutionary psycholo-
gist Merlin Donald, particularly Donald’s central thesis of three stages in
the evolutionary development of human consciousness and culture: from

primate episodic to mimetic, to mythic, and to theoretic.23 This allows Bel-
lah to reconstruct the crucial role of “religious” ritual and myth in the long
process of hominization of the species, culminating in the full linguistifica-
tion of homo sapiens. Religious developments now become embedded within
a theory of human cultural evolution, which itself becomes embedded within
a theory of human biological evolution.
According to Donald,
around 100,000 years ago, Mousterian culture emerged, and toolmaking

became gradually more refined, until it was revolutionized in the Meso-
lithic and Neolithic cultures. The correlation with brain size breaks
down during this period; cultural change, once it began to accelerate,
proceeded without any further change in brain size or, as far as can be
determined, brain structure. Whereas change had been agonizingly slow
during the period of Homo erectus, it now became an increasingly visible
characteristic of human society. Ritual, art, myth, and social organiza-
tions developed and flourished in rapid succession. A new cognitive fac-
tor had obviously been introduced into the equation. The human capac-
ity for continuous innovation and cultural change became our most
prominent characteristic.24
The second major revision is the reconceptualization of the Axial Age as the
passage from narrative mythic to theoretic culture. Axiality, now defined as
“instances of the radical reformulation of myth in the light of theoretic criti-
cism,” becomes much more central in Bellah’s scheme of religious evolution
and, paradoxically, attains a new critical normative relevance vis-à-vis the
misguided theoretic self-understanding of the modern rationalist Enlight-
enment project.25
Finally, the revaluation of ritual as the embodiment of mimetic culture and
of myth as the expression of narrative culture leads Bellah to revise his over-
reliance on Weber’s theory of religious rationalization as demagicization and
demythologization and to revise significantly his Protestant modernist evalu-
ation of modern religious trends. Embedding his revised theory of religious
evolution within a history of the human species that incorporates “the entire
human biosociocultural experience” leads Bellah to “critically reappropriate
its mimetic and mythic dimensions in a constant dialectic with the theo-
retic.”26 “We are,” Bellah insists again and again, “embodied, storytelling ani-
mals, and it is a ‘myth’ in the pejorative sense to imagine otherwise.”27
Those are undoubtedly critically important contributions, but I have the
sense that Bellah’s reformulation of religious evolution is still overburdened
by an overly broad and almost protean or, as Bellah himself recognizes,
“pervasive” concept of religion which preserves most of the ambiguities and
equivocal meanings already indicated concerning the apparently homolo-
gous character of the three different binary systems of classification, sacred-
profane, transcendent-mundane, and religious-secular, which in my view cor-
respond to the pre-Axial, Axial, and modern-secular phases.28 The model has
now the additional burden of having to offer some credible criteria in order to
be able to distinguish in concrete historical settings, but also transhistorically
and transculturally, “religious” ritual from nonreligious one, “religious” myth
from nonreligious one, and “religious” Axial theoretic breakthroughs from
nonreligious ones, since to define every ritual, every myth, and every theoretic
breakthrough (theoria) as “religious” would only make the categorical quali-
fier “religious” analytically meaningless.
Even if one grants some of the basic premises of Bellah’s theoretic recon-
struction of the processes of human sociocultural evolution, such as “every-
thing starts with religion,” “ritual is the key to understanding mimetic cul-
ture,” and “ritual is the phenomenological basis of all religion,” one will still
need some criteria for distinguishing between “religious” and “nonreligious”
ritual.29 This will be even more necessary if one holds the view, as Bellah
does, following Erving Goffman and Randall Collins, that even now in our
secular societies daily life consists in endless “interaction ritual chains.”30
Either one begins with the premise that “once upon a time” all ritual was
“religious” and then the task is to develop some kind of interpretation of the
process of “desacralization” of ritual through which “sacred” and “profane”
or “religious” and “secular” rituals become differentiated. Or, alternatively,
one assumes that all societies have made some kind of distinction between
ordinary daily profane interaction rituals and extraordinary “sacred ritu-
als” or “ritual culture” proper and then, given a modern “secular” con-
sciousness, one has the double task of explaining in the first place, as Durk-
heim did, the origins or the social sources of the sacred.
Having accomplished that, one has then the additional task of developing
some kind of theory of the differentiation of spheres of nonreligious ritual
culture, such as the arts, science, education, politics, law, and so on, from
the core or compact sacred ritual culture of primitive and archaic societies.
Concomitantly, one has to explain how a separate and differentiated sphere
of “religious” ritual, which also differs somewhat from archaic sacred ritual,
becomes constituted. Weber’s theory of religious rationalization or disen-
chantment from magical to ethical religion, as well as his theory of differen-
tiation of the various spheres (economic, political, intellectual-scientific,
aesthetic, erotic, and so on), and Habermas’s theory of “linguistification of
the sacred” constitute two such paradigmatic attempts.31 While drawing
upon both theories critically, Bellah evidently considers some crucial as-
pects of both theories either insufficient or misguided. One can therefore
view Bellah’s ambitious project of religious evolution as an attempt to offer a
better version of both theories.32
In the remaining space I would like to interrogate some of these interre-
lated issues with respect to Bellah’s revised theory of axiality and his critical
reevaluation of modernity.
What Is Religiously Axial about the Axial Age?
In Religion in Human Evolution, Bellah offers extremely rich, detailed, and

illuminating narrative reconstructions of what he considers to be the para-
digmatic Axial breakthroughs in the four settings of ancient Israel (Axial
Age I), ancient Greece (Axial Age II), China in the first millennium bce
(Axial Age III), and ancient India (Axial Age IV).33 In this respect, Bellah
begins where any comparative-historical sociological study of the Axial Age
should begin, that is, with serious historization of each of the cases.34 The
chapters stand as parallel stories that, while following similar related themes,
present radically diverse variations in the four different contexts. They are
also devoid of the kind of comparative analysis that would try to draw out
some of the basic similarities and differences between the cases. In this re-
spect, Bellah’s analysis avoids premature analytical theorization that would
tend to blend all the cases into versions of the same process. Each story, at least
to a reader like me, who can claim no expertise in any of the cases, appears
extremely suggestive and compelling and seems to be well grounded in the

best scholarly and most up-to-date secondary literature.
Nevertheless, even after granting that each of the stories is basically right
and narratively compelling, the theoretic, comparative-analytical task of
answering the central question “What is Axial about the Axial Age?” still
remains. Bellah, in my view, offers a persuasive answer to the more general
and, one could say, more relevant question from the perspective of human
cultural evolution, namely “What made the axial age axial?”35 But the more
specific and narrow question, yet the one which is more pertinent from the
particular perspective of this essay, namely “What is so Axially ‘religious’
about the Axial Age?,” finds a less satisfactory answer.
Bellah’s basic claim is that in all four cases an (evolutionarily) new form of
“theoretic” culture was applied to the reformulation of some of the basic cul-
tural premises that had been grounded so far in archaic sacred “ritual” and
“myth.” Though “mimetic” and “narrative” traditions that had been central
in older civilizations continued to be significant, they now became reformu-
lated in the light of the new theoretical understandings. The claim therefore
is not that theoretic culture triumphed over and superseded “ritual” and
“myth,” but rather that a new sphere of theoretic culture emerged and that
this led to various reformulations of mimetic and narrative culture. Most
significantly, Bellah insists that the four cases are far from homogeneous and
the cultural transformations “by no means uniform,” so that he seems to ac-
cept the notion of “multiple axialities” along with “multiple modernities.”36
It is at this point that Bellah’s ambitious research project on religious evolu-
tion encounters Shmuel Eisenstadt’s no less ambitious research project on the
Axial Age, Axial Age civilizations, and multiple modernities.37 I will not re-
visit here the central debates concerning the Axial Age and Axial civilizations
and must restrict myself to raising some critical issues concerning the “reli-
gious” aspects of the Axial transformations. In any case, Bellah’s own refer-
ence to “multiple axialities” highlights the need to distinguish, as stressed re-
peatedly by Johann P. Arnason, between (a) those aspects of the transformations
that are “culturally unique,” (b) those aspects that are “specifically Axial,” and
(c) those that appear to be more “universal or evolutionary.”38
Culturally unique would be those “civilizational” aspects that are specifi-
cally “Greek,” “Chinese,” “Indic,” “Judaic,” and so on, which therefore must
be understood and interpreted within their concrete hermeneutic sociocul-
tural contexts and unique historical trajectories and/or cultural memories,

histories which always precede the Axial Age and may have some continuous
development well beyond the Axial Age. The entire problematique of “Axial
civilizations” and “civilizational” analysis and the extent to which one may
speak of Axial and non-Axial civilizations is related to those issues.39
Specifically “Axial” would be those aspects that are “epochal,” that emerge
simultaneously by some still not fully clarified “mysterious synchronicity”
roughly at the middle of the first millennium bce at those four particular
civilizational settings, but not in others (Egypt, Mesopotamia, or Phoenicia),
and that allow us to speak meaningfully of a world-historical “age” (in Karl
Jaspers’ sense of the term). Axial here, as a “global” epochal category, has to
mean something more than simply interesting parallel “types” of transfor-
mations one may find happening simultaneously, and apparently unrelat-
edly, across various civilizations, so that we may speak of typical “Axial” or
“classical” ages within each of these civilizations. Axial here has to mean that
each of these “ages” is not only “classical” or “Axial” for each of these civiliza-
tions but is somehow also of unique significance and relevance for world his-
tory and for all of humanity. Obviously, such “significance” or “relevance” is
one that emerges only from “the present,” that is, from the particular herme-
neutic horizon of “our” present global age. For that very reason, it is not pos-
sible to separate “evaluations” and “understandings,” that is, “the meaning of
the Axial Age,” from our own “modern” self-understandings.40
Finally, “universal” or “evolutionary” aspects would be those aspects of the
Axial transformations that are connected with what today we would con-
sider as generally and distinctly “human” characteristics that distinguish
homo sapiens as an animal species, but that appear to have found various
manifest cultural crystallizations first during the Axial Age. One may speak
most specifically, following Yehuda Elkana, of “second-order thinking,” more
broadly, as does Bellah, of “theoretic culture,” or most broadly, as does Björn
Wittrock, of enhanced “reflexivity,” “historicity,” and “agentiality.”41 This is
the sense in which Assmann talks of “axiality” as a cultural development
that should not be circumscribed chronologically to the Axial Age, even
if it may have found in this epoch its fi rst full historical manifestation and
crystallization.
In fact, Assmann’s own work has shown magistrally some of the prelimi-
nary and preparatory, one could even say anticipatory, manifestations of
axiality (or at least of protoaxiality) in ancient Egypt, a supposedly non-

Axial civilization.42 Similarly, “axiality” or “theoretic culture,” as Bellah
himself recognizes, may have found further development in later crystalli-
zations, let’s say in late antiquity or in the first centuries of the second mil-
lennium ce, and “full” institutionalization only in modernity. But once we
talk of different epochal crystallizations of “axiality,” in various periods of
global history, then the unique meaning of the Axial Age for global history
and the very category of “axiality” loses some of its symbolic power and
significance.
Bellah’s evolutionary approach, and his claim that the Axial Age can be
best conceptualized as the first historical emergence of phenomena that
now, from our present standpoint, can be identified as prototypical mani-
festations of “theoretic culture,” does not need to circumscribe the break-
through from mythic to theoretic culture within one single historical age or
within some kind of synchronous development. The multiple independent
emergence of similar yet very diverse phenomena in different civilizational
contexts, all indicating some “breakthrough” to theoretic culture, is more
central for an evolutionary approach than its synchronicity or simultaneity.
Such an evolutionary approach also does not need to deny the impor-
tance of intermediate, preparatory, and anticipatory steps already present in
archaic civilizations or the fact that, as Donald has pointed out, Bellah’s
ideas about a theoretic revolution during the Axial Age simply address
“some of the earliest events in the long, painful, bloody (and still unfin-
ished) transition from the governance of Mythic culture to that of Theoretic
culture.”43 Thus an evolutionary approach could easily accommodate and
stretch chronologically the conditions for the emergence of elements of “ax-
iality” back into the second millennium bce and forward into modernity,
for as Bellah himself indicates, “theoretic culture purged of mythic content
did not appear until the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.”44
Addressing finally the role of “religion” in the Axial Age’s beginning tran-
sition to “theoretic culture,” one can accept as a starting point the premise
suggested by Donald, namely that in the cognitive evolutionary scenario he
describes, “one must view religious thinking, and especially the religious in-
novations of the Axial Age, as the absolute cutting edge of human experience
at that time.”45 Yet, in my view, one should distinguish the broader question
concerning the role of “religious thinking,” whatever this may mean, in the
general cognitive evolutionary transition from “mythic” to “theoretic” cul-

ture, from the narrower question of “religious evolution” per se. Namely,
does the transition to “theoretic culture” necessarily entail the concomitant
transition from “archaic” to “Axial” religion, and if so, which would be the
specifically “Axial religious innovations” that are characteristic of “Axial”
religion? Furthermore, how do we distinguish those “religious innovations”
that may be said to be culturally unique for each of the four civilizational set-
tings, from those that are specifically “Axial”? Are all the transformations
similarly “religious” in nature and are the outcomes everywhere equally “re-
ligious,” or is the diversity of those multiple Axial transformations such that
some of them appear more “secular” or “mundane” or “this-worldly” in char-
acter than others? Bellah acknowledges that in the cases of China and an-
cient Greece critics have raised valid questions concerning Eisenstadt’s em-
phasis on the distinction between “transcendental” and “mundane” orders as
the most fundamental characteristic of “axiality.”46
Finally, is “religious axiality,” like theoretic culture, something that finds
its first clear historical manifestations during the Axial Age but only reaches
fuller development and institutionalization in late antiquity or even in mo-
dernity, so that “early modern” and “modern religions” could be understood
as more developed and differentiated forms of “religious axiality,” which
seems to be Bellah’s earlier position? Or does Axial religion truly represent
the paradigmatic form of religious axiality, so that all attempts to construct
a modern theoretic religion “within the bounds of reason alone” or modern
individual “invisible” forms are eventually revealed as misguided attempts
that misunderstand the structure of man’s ultimate conditions, not only
as homo religiosus but as a symbolic sociocultural animal? There could be a
third alternative, which I will sketch briefly in the final section of my essay,
suggesting that our modern secular age creates the social conditions for the
synchronous and nonhierarchic, that is, “free and equal” coexistence of all
forms of “religion” (pre-Axial, Axial, and post-Axial) and that our modern
“religious-secular” binary classification is markedly different from any kind
of ontological classification we may define as “Axial” or “pre-Axial.”
The distinction between “uniquely civilizational,” “specifically Axial,”
and more “universal normative” assumptions about the kind of religion that
we assume is compatible with further developments in theoretic culture is
important if we want to avoid the two traps that, as Wittrock has pointed
out, are almost inherent to Axial Age theorizing.47 The first, the ethnocen-
tric trap, would be the tendency to elevate one particular form of religion,
which will inevitably be “our” Western form of “Axial religion,” either Judeo-
Christian or Greek or some combination of the two, into the paradigmatic
form of “axiality,” so that other non-Western forms appear as somewhat defi-
cient and not fully “Axial.” The second trap, the teleological modernist one,
would be the tendency to characterize as “Axial” those phenomena that ap-
pear to be conducive to our own modernity. As Assmann has so eloquently
pointed out, the relevant question appears to be not so much about the “Axial
past” per se, “but about the roots of modernity,” an impulse that he identifies
as the typical mythical question of origins.48
There is a relative scholarly consensus concerning the fact that pre-Axial
religions, both tribal as well as archaic, can be characterized as manifesta-
tions of ontological monism or, in Bellah’s new formulation, as “cosmologi-
cal,” “in that supernature, nature, and society were all fused in a single cos-
mos.”49 There appears to be also some relative consensus that the passage to
axiality represents some break in this ontological monism. But there is
much less agreement about the kind of dualism, or the kind of multiple and
competing ontological visions, that are supposed to be characteristic of the
Axial Age. Particularly disputed is the assertion that the new ontological
dualism is grounded in every Axial case on a radical gap between a higher
“transcendent” order of reality and a devalued order of “mundane” reality.
Such analytical characterization appears certainly appropriate for the Israeli
path of Axial development, and partially so for the Buddhist challenge to ar-
chaic Vedic religion, but much less appropriate for the Greek philosophical-
political path of development or for the Sinic universal-inclusive path.50
Even assuming that every Axial path implies some transformation of pre-
Axial ontological monism into some kind of new ontological dualist dis-
tinction between a higher ultimate and a more derivative order of reality,
the question is whether this necessarily implies the emergence of some no-
tion of “transcendence.” Moreover, even if one accepts the premise that ev-
ery Axial path implies some notion of transcendence in the sense that tran-
scendence constitutes the very condition of possibility to gain some reflexive
distance from “the world,” it does not follow that “transcendence” is always
and necessarily “religious” by definition or that the “world” is therefore de-
valued as “mundane.”
Following Durkheim, one may conceptualize “sacred” and “profane” as a

general dichotomous classificatory system of reality, characteristic of pre-
Axial sociocultural systems, that encompasses within one single, that is,
monistic, ontological order various realms which later will be differentiated
into different cosmic, earthly, social, and moral orders. All reality, gods and
spirits, nature and cosmic forces, humans and other animal species, and the
kinship, political, social, and moral orders are integrated into a single order
of things precisely according to the dichotomous classificatory system of
sacred and profane. The entire system, moreover, is an immanent “this-
worldly” one, if one is allowed to use anachronistically another dichoto-
mous category that will only emerge with the Axial breakthroughs, since
the very idea of “world,” as Rémi Brague has shown, is an Axial one.51
Indeed one may postulate that every Axial breakthrough entails some
kind of redrawing of the boundaries between sacred and profane, which may
be interpreted as a form of semantic relocation of the sacred, which may
imply simultaneous processes of desacralization of some aspects of reality
and the potential resacralization of other aspects. In the case of ancient Is-
rael, “the Mosaic distinction” entails first a radical exclusive monolatric sa-
cralization of YHWH as the God of the covenant, and eventually in the
prophetic age its elevation to the one and only transcendent Holy God, cre-
ator of heaven and earth, universal lawgiver, God of history and Lord of all
peoples. Such a sacralization of transcendence entails, indeed, an equally
radical desacralization of all creatures and of all cosmic and natural forces
and, most of all, the demotion of all gods and supernatural beings into
“false” idols and evil demonic forces. But in and of itself, all of creation, as
God’s work, is intrinsically “good” and not profane. Mundane immanent
reality, in this respect, is devalued only in relation to God, and it becomes
“profane” and “evil” insofar as it refuses to recognize the transcendent sov-
ereignty of God.
Surely the Axial breakthrough in ancient Greece from the Homeric age to
the classical age of Athenian democracy entails an equally radical redraw-
ing of the boundaries between sacred and profane, breaking through the
archaic ontological monism. But the dynamics of desacralization, the re-
drawing of the boundaries between various ontological realms and the radi-
cal reformulation of myth in the light of theoretical criticism evince signifi-
cantly different dynamics, dimensions, and directions, which in my view it
would be problematic to characterize as “religious” even if the initial dy-

namics had “sacred” or “divine” dimensions. The very tripartite theological
differentiation of archaic divine reality into mythike (or the mythical world
of the gods), physike (or the cosmic order of nature), and politike (the con-
ventional nomoi of the democratic polis) entails certainly a radical desacral-
ization, but its dynamic is not necessarily a “religious” one, and its crystal-
lization is hardly one of a single ontological dualism between “transcendent”
kosmos and devalued “mundane” reality.52 Moreover, this desacralization
does not lead to “religious” rationalization per se or to any form of resacral-
ization. Indeed, the Greek archaic public religio-political cultic system of
worship and sacrifice is somewhat transformed but not radically altered,
despite the radical Axial theoretic breakthroughs in other spheres. Only
with Plato does one find the combination of radical theoretic deconstruc-
tion of mythic culture and the conscious attempt to construct a new myth of
radical ontological dualism. But this model of Axial Platonic theoria, which
occupies such a central role in Bellah’s analysis, only emerges after the crisis
of Athenian democracy when theoretic breakthroughs of second-order
thinking in cosmological, physical, logical, mathematical, ethical, and po-
litical ideas had already been accomplished.
One observes therefore two radically different Axial breakthroughs. Both
entail processes of desacralization that undermine the archaic monist sacred-
profane order. But the dynamics are very different. The Israeli dynamic is
“religious” through and through in that, by means of the Mosaic distinc-
tion, it invents a new Axial type of “religion.” But in fact this new Axial form
of “religion” will only find full crystallization in late antiquity with the trans-
formation of Second Temple Judaism into Talmudic Judaism after the de-
struction of the temple and the end of sacrifice, and the emergence of the two
“daughter religions,” Christianity and Islam. By contrast, the Greek process
of desacralization can hardly be depicted as a process of religious rational-
ization. Of course, Greek philosophia had strong “religious” elements of theo-
retic divination that entailed the search of spiritual paths of self-realization,
at times approximating transcendent “religious” paths “beyond human
flourishing.”53 In this respect, it would also be anachronistic to speak of the
Greek Axial path as being more “secular,” a modern category that has its
origins in a radically different Christian theological system than the Greek
one. Some of these philosophic paths, Platonic and Stoic, will clearly merge
with and enrich more characteristically “religious” Christian paths of other-

worldly salvation. But this will happen much later beyond the Axial Age
proper.
One could draw similar contrasts between the two radically different Asian
Axial paths, the Indic and the Sinic. Buddhism represents a more clearly Axial
dynamic of “religious semantic” relocation of the sacred through a radical
transvaluation of the Vedic sacro-cosmic-sacrificial ritual order, which much
later, beyond the Axial Age proper, was eventually transformed into a differ-
ent type of Axial “religion” with the institutionalization of Mahayana Bud-
dhism. The various competing Sinic paths of desacralization are less clearly
“religious,” both in their dynamics and in their outcomes.
Bellah’s reliance on Donald’s conceptual formulation of “theoretic cul-
ture” allows him to reformulate his theory of axiality in such a broad and
general way that the central argument is “that the axial breakthrough was
essentially the breakthrough of theoretic culture in dialogue with mythic
culture as a means for the ‘comprehensive modeling of the entire human
universe.’ ”54 But unless one assumes that every “comprehensive modeling
of the entire human universe” is per se “religious,” then one should be able
to differentiate between those comprehensive worldviews that should be
properly called “religious,” those that appear to be more humanist ethico-
philosophical without apparent reliance on some form of “supraempirical
transcendence,” and those that appear to be more “protoscientific,” thus
anticipating modern scientific theoretic culture. In this respect, the relation
between these diverse Axial theoretic breakthroughs and later “religious”
historical developments, particularly the emergence of the historic “world
religions,” still remains unclear.
Bellah conjoins Arnaldo Momigliano’s notion of “an age of criticism,”
Elkana’s “second-order thinking,” Eisenstadt’s idea of “transcendence,” and
Eric Voegelin’s concept of “mythospeculation” in an attempt to offer a more
precise formulation of the kind of comprehensive modeling he views as
characteristically “Axial.” What all Axial breakthroughs have in common,
according to Bellah, is some kind of “second-order thinking about cosmol-
ogy, which for societies just emerging from the archaic age meant thinking
about the religio-political premises of society itself. It is second-order think-
ing in this central area of culture, previously fi lled by myth, that gave rise to
the idea of transcendence, so often associated with the axial age.”55
But Bellah qualifies Elkana’s conception of “scientific theorizing” and ar-

gues that “because transcendental realms are not subject to disproof the way
scientific theories are, they require a new form of narrative, that is, a new
form of myth,” which, following Voegelin, he calls “mythospeculation.” “The
transcendental breakthrough,” Bellah concludes, “involved a radicalization
of mythospeculation, but not an abandonment of it.”56 One needs to ask,
however, whether all Axial mythospeculations, in all four Axial cases, ought
to be characterized as “religious.” One could argue that the most “theoretic”
Axial mythospeculations appear to be the least “religious,” while the most
religious ones appear to be the least “theoretic.”57 Again and again one faces
the same terminological difficulty, the moment one tries to use the category
of “religion,” anachronistically as it were, in order to analyze and compare
the diverse Axial cultural transformations. Such a difficulty is inherent in
the fact that the very category of “religion” itself emerged out of one of the
par ticu lar Axial transformations, though eventually it crystallized into the
modern Western “religious-secular” system of classification, which has now
become globalized.
One can postulate that the Axial breakthroughs certainly prepared the
ground and the conditions for the later institutionalization of the “historic”
world religions. But that which, following Weber, could be called the dy-
namics of “religious” rationalization proper were carried by radically new
types of distinct religious communities, which offered some form of salva-
tion to the individual qua individual and were in this respect radically dif-
ferent from the “community cults,” which had been characteristic of the
religio-political archaic order.58 In fact, as Bellah himself acknowledges, the
so-called world religions are “successor faiths” which only emerge after
the Axial Age, after all the competing Axial ontological visions failed to es-
tablish any long-term institutionalization. Even Talmudic synagogue rab-
binic Judaism was a new form of religious community radically different
from the religio-political community cult of ancient Israel addressed by the
biblical prophets. Under Hellenism, Greek culture underwent a process of
archaic resacralization. Confucius was equally unsuccessful in establishing
his ethical humanist vision. Confucianism only became established as an
official state orthodoxy now linked with the sacro-magical religio-political
imperial cult under the Han dynasty.59 But as Bellah emphasizes, following
Donald, it is precisely the evolutionary cognitive advantage of theoretic
breakthroughs that they become a form of external memory, which can be

reappropriated again and again, as happened repeatedly to all Axial theo-
retic breakthroughs. In fact, Bellah would argue, they are precisely Axial
insofar as they constitute a cultural memory that is still alive today and is
the patrimony of all of humanity.
But, as Stroumsa has shown so convincingly, in terms of the dynamics of
“religious development” in the strict sense of the term and in terms of world-
historical relevance, the truly religious “Axial” transformations happened in
late antiquity from the second century ce, with the interlinked coemergence
of Talmudic Judaism, Christianity, and Manicheism, to the seventh century,
with the later explosive eruption of Islam.60 This era, Stroumsa asserts, “also
has a claim to this title of ‘axial age,’ an epoch in which the very frameworks
of a civilization are transformed in a radical way . . . one may follow from
Jesus to Muhammad, the transformation of the very concept of religion. . . .
the Christianization of the empire permitted the establishment of a new sort
of religion that was unknown in the ancient world.”61
The new type of religion was based on five interrelated transformations,
which were shared by Judaism, Christianity, Manicheism, and many other
religious movements of the late Roman Empire, although after the Constan-
tinian establishment of Christian hegemony, those characteristics would
appear as paradigmatically “Christian.” Stroumsa depicts those five trans-
formations as (a) “a new care of the self,” (b) “the rise of the religions of the
book,” facilitated by the media revolution in the transmission of cultural
memory effected by the invention of the codex, (c) “the end of sacrifice” and
the radical transformations of mimetic ritual culture associated with such a
development, (d) the passage “from civic religion to community religion”
with the equally radical cultic transformation from the public open religio-
political ceremonies of the outdoor temple to the private closed congrega-
tional indoor gathering of the religious community, and (e) the transforma-
tion in the model of paideia “from wisdom teacher to spiritual master.”62
But strictly speaking, those were particular historical religious develop-
ments that it would not be appropriate to conceptualize in human evolu-
tionary terms. With the institutionalization of Buddhism, another different
type of “Axial” religion became institutionalized across Asia, introducing
new religious dynamics everywhere, including in China, where it entered a
creative interactive relation with Confucianism and Taoism. Eventually this
interactive dynamic crystallized in the syncretistic Chinese religious system

of “the three teachings” (sanjiao).
Following Stroumsa, one could perhaps attribute “Axial” relevance to the
historical religious transformations of late antiquity only in the sense that
they formed the basis for the European religious system of medieval Chris-
tendom, out of which emerged the modern process of secularization, which
in turn culminated in our global secular age. But this is a particular histori-
cal development with world-historical consequences, not a universal or evo-
lutionary process of human development.
The Modern “Secular-Religious” System of Classification
The modern “secular-religious” system of classification, which emerged out

of the transformation of Western Christianity, has now become globalized,
entering in dynamic transformative interaction with all non-Western sys-
tems of classification, pre-Axial as well as Axial. All the religio-cultural
systems, Christian and non-Christian, Western and non-Western, have been
transformed through these global interactive dynamics. As I have stressed
throughout my work, one can trace the modern process of secularization,
or the crystallization of the modern secular age, by following the semantic
transformations in the Latin word saeculum.63
Originally, the term saeculum, as in per saecula saeculorum, only meant
an indefinite period of time, with a connotation similar to the Greek term
aeon. But Augustine turned it into a Christian theological category when he
used the term to refer to a temporal space between the present and the es-
chatological parousia, the Second Coming of Christ, in which both Chris-
tians and pagans could come together to pursue their common interests as a
civil community.64 In this sense, the Augustinian use of “secular” is very
similar to the modern meaning of a secular political sphere, that of the con-
stitutional democratic state and of a democratic public sphere, which is sup-
posedly “neutral” with respect to all worldviews, religious as well as nonre-
ligious. Such a theological conception of the secular does not equate it with
the “profane,” as the other of the “sacred,” nor is the secular the other of the
“religious.” It is precisely a neutral intermediate space, between Christian
“sacred” and pagan “profane,” which can be shared by all who live in a not
religiously homogeneous or in a multicultural society, which by definition
will have different and most likely competing conceptions of what is “sa-
cred” and what is “profane.”65
Eventually, however, with the consolidation of Western medieval Chris-
tendom and the hegemonic triumph of the Christian church, the secular
became one of the terms of a dyad, religious/secular, which served to struc-
ture the entire spatial and temporal reality of medieval Christendom into a
binary system of classification separating two worlds, the religious-spiritual-
sacred world of salvation and the secular-temporal-profane world. It is from
this new theological perspective of medieval Christendom that the modern
meaning of “secularization” emerges. This historical process can best be
understood as an attempt to bridge, eliminate, or transcend the dualism
between the religious and the secular world.
Even in the West, however, this process of secularization follows two dif-
ferent dynamics. One is the dynamic of internal Christian secularization,
which aims to spiritualize the temporal and to bring the religious life of per-
fection out of the monasteries into the secular world. It tends to transcend
the dualism by blurring the boundaries between the religious and the secular,
by making the religious secular and the secular religious through mutual
reciprocal infusion.
The other, almost opposite dynamic of secularization takes the form of
laicization. It aims to emancipate all secular spheres from clerical-ecclesiastical
control, and in this respect it is marked by a laic-clerical antagonism. Here
the boundaries between the religious and the secular are rigidly maintained,
but those boundaries are pushed into the margins, aiming to contain, priva-
tize, and marginalize everything religious, while excluding religion from
any visible presence in the secular public sphere, now defined as the realm of
laïcité, freed from religion.
With many variations these are the two main dynamics of secularization
which culminate in our secular age. In different ways both paths lead to an
overcoming of the medieval Christian dualism through a positive affirma-
tion and revaluation of the saeculum, that is, of the secular age and the secu-
lar world, imbuing the immanent secular world with a quasi-transcendent
meaning as the place for human flourishing.
The function of secularism as a philosophy of history, and thus as ideol-
ogy, is to turn the particular Western Christian historical process of secu-
larization into a universal teleological process of human development from
belief to unbelief, from primitive irrational or metaphysical religion to mod-

ern rational postmetaphysical secular consciousness. Even when the particu-
lar role of internal Christian developments in the general process of secular-
ization is acknowledged, it is not in order to stress the particular contingent
nature of the process, but rather to stress the universal significance of the
uniqueness of Christianity as, in Marcel Gauchet’s expressive formulation,
“the religion to exit from religion.”66
I would like to propose that this secularist stadial consciousness is a cru-
cial factor in the widespread secularization that has accompanied the mod-
ernization of Western European societies. It is, in my view, the presence or
absence of this secularist historical stadial consciousness that explains when
and where processes of modernization are accompanied by radical secular-
ization. In places where such secularist historical stadial consciousness
is absent or less dominant, as in the United States or in most non-Western
postcolonial societies, processes of modernization are unlikely to be accom-
panied by processes of religious decline. On the contrary, they may be ac-
companied by processes of religious revival.
In fact, the particular Western Christian dynamic of secularization be-
came globalized through the process of Western colonial expansion, enter-
ing, however, into dynamic tension with the many different ways in which
other civilizations had drawn boundaries between “sacred” and “profane,”
“transcendent” and “immanent,” “religious” and “secular.” I would like to
reiterate that we should not think of these dyadic pairs of terms as being
synonymous. The sacred tends to be immanent in pre-Axial cultures. The
transcendent is not necessarily “religious” in some Axial civilizations. The
secular is by no means profane in our secular age.
In a certain sense, not only the so-called secular societies of the West
but the entire globe is becoming increasingly more secular and “disen-
chanted” in the sense that the cosmic order is increasingly defined by mod-
ern science and technology; the social order is increasingly defined by the
interlocking of “democratic” states, market economies, and mediatic public
spheres; and the moral order is increasingly defined by the calculations of
rights-bearing individual agents, claiming human dignity, liberty, equality,
and the pursuit of happiness. Yet comparisons of secular Europe and reli-
gious America and the evidence of religious revivals around the world make
clear that within the same secular immanent frame one can encounter very
diverse religious dynamics. In this respect, the disenchantment of the world
does not necessarily entail the disenchantment of consciousness, the decline
of religion, or the end of magic. On the contrary, it is compatible with all
forms of reenchantment. What characterizes the contemporary global mo-
ment is precisely the fact that all forms of human religion, past and present,
from the most “primitive” to the most “modern,” are available for individual
and collective appropriation and tend to coexist increasingly side by side in
today’s global cities.
We now find ourselves within a global secular/religious system of classifi-
cation in which the category of religion has to do extra work and serve to
articulate and encompass all kinds of different “religious” experiences, indi-
vidual and collective; all kinds of magical, ritual, and sacramental practices;
all kinds of communal, ecclesiastical, and institutional arrangements; and all
kinds of processes of sacralization of the social, be it in the form of religious
nationalism, secular civil religions, or the global sacralization of human
rights. We, as well as Bellah, tend to use the same qualifier, “religious,” to
characterize all these diverse phenomena in a way that can only be mind-
boggling for a “secular” as well as for a “religious” mind-set. Yet despite the
futile calls by so many scholars of “religion” to drop the concept altogether
because it has become meaningless, there is no point in bemoaning this fact,
since the global secular-religious system of classification of reality is here to
stay. It has now been adopted by basically every state in the world system.
Simultaneously, drawing the proper boundaries between “the religious” and
“the secular” has become a source of contestation in every society in the
world.67
In his most recent work, Bellah has revised his older evolutionary narra-
tive according to which a historic or Axial stage of religious evolution was
followed by an early modern and a modern stage. As he acknowledges:
In my original essay on religious evolution, I made the point that the

“stages” were not discrete, that nothing is ever lost. I argued that even
aspects of tribal and archaic religion survive among us. What I did
not recognize clearly enough is that the axial age remains as determi-
native for us as ever, that we have not left it behind, that what I called
the early modern and modern were only phases of working out its
implications. . . .
Neither the Enlightenment nor any of the great ideological move-
ments of the twentieth century have supplanted the axial heritage; of-
ten they have acted it out in parody even as they imagined themselves
rejecting it.68
In response to Habermas’s project of the “linguistification of the sacred,”

Bellah now writes: “If I am right that not only religious but also ethical and
political thought can never be simply theoretic but are always also indelibly
mythic and mimetic, then it is not only ‘opaque features’ and ‘bizarre ex-
pressions of alien cultures’ that we need to understand, but our own modern,
partially disguised, mythic and mimetic practice.”69 As to his older rather
sanguine analysis of American “civil religion” as the immanent institution-
alization of transcendent values, Bellah has also become a “prophetic” harsh
“denouncer” of America’s delusive self-conception of “immaculate excep-
tionalism,” of being “A City upon a Hill” and the realization of the Kingdom
of God on earth. With resigned irony he concludes, “perhaps we are just one
more tired example of Augustine’s city of man.”70
Notes
1. In this essay I only want to interrogate some problems in Bellah’s usage of

the category of religion. I cannot offer here a more systematic analysis of Robert
N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).
2. Robert N. Bellah, “What Is Axial about the Axial Age?,” European Journal of
Sociology 46 (2005): 69–89.
3. Robert N. Bellah, “Religious Evolution,” American Sociological Review 29
(1964): 358–374; and “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96 (1967), no. 1, 1–21.
Both essays were reprinted in Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Reli-
gion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 20–50 and
168–189.
4. Robert N. Bellah, “Introduction,” in Robert N. Bellah and Steven M. Tipton,
eds., The Robert Bellah Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 6; see also
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Macmillan,
1963).
5. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Mark C. Taylor, ed.,

Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998),
269–284.
6. Guy G. Stroumsa, “Cultural Memory in Early Christianity: Clement of Al-
exandria and the History of Religions,” in Johann P. Arnason, Shmuel N. Eisen-
stadt, and Björn Wittrock, eds., Axial Civilizations and World History (Leiden:
Brill, 2005), 314–315.
7. Bellah, Beyond Belief, 21.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 22.
11. Ibid., 22–23.
12. Ibid., 24.
13. Ibid., 22.
14. Ibid., 21.
15. Ibid., 21–22.
16. Ibid., 43– 44.
17. Bellah will later adopt the less pejorative term “tribal religion.”
18. Bellah, Beyond Belief, 23 and 29.
19. Ibid., 29 and 31.
20. Ibid., 32–36.
21. Ibid., 36–39.
22. Ibid, 42.
23. See Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolu-
tion of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991);
A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York: Norton,
2001); and “An Evolutionary Approach to Culture: Implications for the Study of
the Axial Age,” in this volume.
24. Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, 115.
25. Bellah, The Bellah Reader, 11.
26. Ibid., 17.
27. Ibid., 11.
28. Bellah’s “pervasive” conception of religion is illustrated in his depiction of
the folk religion of southern Italian peasants, the official Roman Catholicism,
Croce’s liberalism, Gramsci’s socialism, and Mussolini’s fascism as “the five reli-
gions of modern Italy.” These only enumerate five collective social forms. If one
was to add the private individual forms, from the idiosyncratic “cosmos” of Men-
occhio, the sixteenth-century heretic miller made famous by Carlo Ginzburg, to
the many contemporary Italian forms of “Sheilaism,” as Bellah and his collabora-
tors depicted the “private faith” of Sheila Larson in Habits of the Heart, the num-
ber of religions in Italy or in any other society become myriad. See Robert N.
Bellah, “The Five Religions of Modern Italy,” in The Bellah Reader, 51–80; Robert
N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven
M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985),
221 and 235; and Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a
Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
29. One can find such terse formulations, which reflect Bellah’s central Durk-
heimian premises, in “Rethinking Secularism and Religion in the Global Age,” a
conversation between Mark Juergensmeier and Bellah at the University of Cali-
fornia at Berkeley, September 11, 2008, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/wp-content/uploads
/2009/09/Bellah-Juergensmeyer.pdf.
30. See Robert N. Bellah, “The Ritual Roots of Society and Culture,” in Mi-
chelle Dillon, ed., Handbook of the Sociology of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 31– 44; “Durkheim and Ritual,” in The Bellah Reader,
150–180; Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2004); and Erving Goff man, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-
Face Behavior (Chicago: Aldine, 1967).
31. Weber’s theories of rationalization and differentiation appear throughout
his work, in his Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion as well as in Economy
and Society. The most succinct statement of his theory of differentiation appears
in the Zwischenbetrachtung, translated as “Religious Rejections of the World and
Their Directions,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber:
Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 323–359. Haber-
mas’s most systematic formulation of his theory of “linguistification of the sa-
cred” appears in Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2:
Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston: Beacon Press,
1987), chap. 5, 1–111.
32. Bellah’s critical reviews of both theories appear in “Stories as Arrows: The
Religious Response to Modernity,” and “Max Weber and World-Denying Love: A
Look at the Historical Sociology of Religion,” in The Bellah Reader, 107–122 and
123–149 respectively.
33. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution.
34. Bellah thus meets Arnason’s critical demand to rehistoricize the Axial Age.
See Johann P. Arnason, “Rehistoricizing the Axial Age,” in this volume.
35. Bellah, “What Is Axial,” 77.
36. Ibid., 88.
37. See Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civi-
lizations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986); and Arnason, Eisen-
stadt, and Wittrock, eds., Axial Civilizations.
38. See Arnason’s chapter in this volume, p. 337; see also Arnason, “The Axial
Age and Its Interpreters: Reopening a Debate,” in Arnason, Eisenstadt, and Witt-
rock, eds., Axial Civilizations, 19– 49.
39. See Johann P. Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and

Theoretical Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2003); and “Rehistoricizing the Axial Age.”
See also Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Axial Civilizations and the Axial Age Reconsid-
ered,” in Arnason, Eisenstadt, and Wittrock, eds., Axial Civilizations, 531–564.
40. On this issue, see Björn Wittrock, “The Meaning of the Axial Age,” and
Peter Wagner, “Palomar’s Questions: The Axial Age Hypothesis, European Mo-
dernity and Historical Contingency,” in Arnason, Eisenstadt, and Wittrock, eds.,
Axial Civilizations, 51–85 and 87–106 respectively; see also Hans Joas, “The Axial
Age as Religious Discourse,” in this volume.
41. See Yehuda Elkana, “The Emergence of Second-order Th inking in Classical
Greece,” in Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity, 40– 64; Bellah, “What Is
Axial”; and Wittrock, “The Meaning of the Axial Age.”
42. Jan Assmann, Ma’at. Gerechtigkeit und Unsterblichkeit im alten Ägypten
(Munich: Beck, 1990); Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (Munich: Beck, 1992); Moses the
Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1997); Herrschaft und Heil: Politische Theologie in Altägyp-
ten, Israel und Europa (Munich: Hanser, 2000); and “Axial ‘Breakthroughs’ and
Semantic ‘Relocations’ in Ancient Egypt and Israel,” in Arnason, Eisenstadt, and
Wittrock, eds., Axial Civilizations, 133–156.
43. Donald, “An Evolutionary Approach.”
44. Bellah, “Introduction,” in The Bellah Reader, 11.
45. Donald, “An Evolutionary Approach.”
46. See Mark Elvin, “Was There a Transcendental Breakthrough in China?,” in
Eisenstadt, ed., Axial Age Civilizations, 325–359; and Kurt A. Raaf laub, “Polis, ‘the
Political,’ and Political Thought: New Departures in Ancient Greece, c. 800–500
BCE,” in Arnason, Eisenstadt, and Wittrock, eds., Axial Civilizations, 253–283.
47. Wittrock, “The Meaning of the Axial Age.”
48. Jan Assmann, “Cultural Memory and the Myth of the Axial Age,” in this
volume.
50. I am using here the typology developed by Wittrock in “The Meaning of
the Axial Age,” 73–76.
51. Rémi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Uni-
verse in Western Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
52. Brague’s insightful comparative analysis of Greek, Jewish, Christian, and
Muslim conceptions of the kosmos and “world,” physis and creation, divine law
(nomos) and the law of God, and so on offers a fruitful model of how to unpack the
overly compact and undifferentiated categories of Axial “cosmological transcen-
dent visions” and “mundane reality” in par ticu lar civilizational contexts. See
Rémi Brague, The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Wisdom of the World.
53. Charles Taylor, “What Was the Axial Revolution?,” in this volume.
55. Ibid., 81.
56. Ibid.
57. Bellah himself points to this difficulty when he writes: “Formal theoretic
developments seem virtually absent in ancient Israel. Compared to the other
three cases, Israel approaches theoretic culture only asymptotically, yet it was
there, perhaps, that the revolution in mythospeculation was most profound.”
“What Is Axial,” 89.
58. For a critical analysis of this crucial Weberian distinction between undif-
ferentiated “community cult” (Gemeinschaftskult) and differentiated “religious
community” (religiöse Gemeinschaft), see José Casanova, “Welche Religion
braucht der Mensch? Theorien religiösen Wandels im globalen Zeitalter der
Kontingenz,” in Bettina Hollstein, Matthias Jung, and Wolfgang Knöbl, eds.,
Handlung und Erfahrung: Das Erbe von Historismus und Pragmatismus und die
Zukunft der Sozialtheorie (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2011), 169–189.
59. Tu Wei-ming, “The Structure and Function of the Confucian Intellectual in
Ancient China,” in Arnason, Eisenstadt, and Wittrock, ed., Axial Civilizations,
360–373. Unique about the Chinese case, in comparison to the other Axial Age
cases, is the historical continuity between ancient and modern China, notwith-
standing the radical modern break that accompanied the abolition of the imperial
cult and the disestablishment of Confucianism as state orthodoxy.
60. Guy G. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late
Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
61. Ibid., 6.
62. Ibid.
63. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2008). See also José Casanova, Public Religion in the Modern World (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); “A Secular Age: Dawn or Twilight?,” in
Michael Warner, Craig Calhoun, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds., Varieties of
Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010),
265–281; “The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms,” in Craig Calhoun, Mark
Juergensmeier, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds., Rethinking Secularism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 54–74.
64. Robert A. Markus, Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2006).
65. José Casanova, “Exploring the Postsecular: Three Meanings of ‘the Secular’
and Their Possible Transcendence,” in Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and
Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds., Habermas and Religion (Cambridge: Polity Press,
forthcoming).
66. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of
Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
67. José Casanova, “Westliche christliche Säkularisierung und Globalisierung,”

in José Casanova, Europas Angst vor der Religion (Berlin: Berlin University Press,
2009), 83–119.
68. Robert N. Bellah, “Epilogue. Meaning and Modernity: America and the
World,” in Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M.
Tipton, eds., Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity and Self (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2002), 273.
69. Bellah, “Introduction,” in The Bellah Reader, 13.
70. Bellah, “Epilogue,” 273.
9
Where Do Axial Commitments Reside?
Problems in Thinking about the African Case
ann swidler
I am interested in a relatively simple question: Where are Axial commit-

ments located socially, or to put it another way, what does it mean to say that
something is an “Axial civilization,” especially for latecomers to global mo-
dernity in places like Africa, who sometimes receive pieces of the Axial in
disconnected chunks? I have been fascinated by Shmuel Eisenstadt’s argu-
ment in Japanese Civilization (1996) that Japan could embrace Axial ele-
ments while keeping an archaic core. Despite absorbing many aspects of two
great Axial traditions—Buddhist philosophical sophistication and Confu-
cian techniques of governance—Japan remained fundamentally pre-Axial.
Japan retained central archaic commitments—the divinity of its imperial
system and the unique, particularistic value of “Japaneseness” (nihonjin)—
despite having assimilated Axial insights into what was understood as fun-
damentally Japanese. It “contained” Axial cultural elements structurally,
incorporating them within robust pre-Axial social forms. For example, ac-
cording to Eisenstadt, Japanese Buddhist communities, despite their uni-
versalistic philosophical orientations, became organized as contained, hier-
archical communities, focused on the personal relationship between teacher
and disciple, on the model of the Japanese ie, or household. So in this case, a
“civilization” could remain fundamentally archaic, incorporating many Axial
elements while limiting their implications. Conversely (I take this argument
from one of Robert Bellah’s lectures), when the Hawaiian king Kame-
hameha III, a descendent of the gods (see Bellah 2011, 197–209), converted to
Christianity, Hawaii’s archaic religious system collapsed—so one dramatic
event at the “center” of an archaic system could transform a civilization.
What, then, does it mean to say that a “civilization” is Axial or pre-Axial?
Perhaps with our own commitments to the importance of the political sphere
Where Do Axial Commitments Reside? 223
and our belief that public officials should be held to transcendent ethical
norms, we define the essence of the “Axial” as the creation (by a core reli-
gious community) of a transcendent realm in terms of which “the ruler” can
be judged. But is this really the best or only way to think about where Axial
understandings reside?
Ambiguities of the African Case
I first want to describe the wide varieties of ways in which Africans and Afri-
can societies are integrated with—or have integrated into themselves—
central elements of the great Axial traditions available in the world today.
Here I include not only religious traditions but also other elements of “world
society” (Frank and Meyer 2007). Indeed, it would be fair to say that on many
fronts Africans have embraced modernity with unparalleled enthusiasm.
Axial Religious Participation
If what it means to be an Axial civilization is that most individuals and com-

munities in Africa have embraced one of the Axial religions, there is no ques-
tion that Africans have joined the Axial Age. While there is enormous varia-
tion in religious belief and practice, Islam and Christianity have attracted
large and ever growing numbers of adherents (B. Meyer 2004). In Malawi,
where I have worked over the last several years, it is almost unheard of not to
be a member of a church or mosque, and many of those we meet are passion-
ately committed to their churches, participating in emotionally vivid, musi-
cally intense worship. Especially in the Evangelical and Pentecostal churches,
one sees a level of religiosity—a fusion of individual hope and striving, at-
tempts to root out threatening demons and cleanse the community and the
self, and a determination that faith and discipline will triumph over
obstacles—that makes clear that adherence is genuinely integrated into per-
sonal and communal life (B. Meyer 1999, 2004; Marshall 2009; Manglos
2010). Indeed, perhaps the most important and to some degree least explored
aspects of African Christianity (Islam may operate somewhat differently in
this respect) is that, as it did in the Protestant West, it has introduced the
model of a fully voluntarist community, chosen by its members, supported
by their contributions, and largely independent of clan or village ties.1
World Culture
African communities are also in ever-widening contact with global realities.

Examining the response to AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, one is made viv-
idly aware how broadly universalizing claims about such matters as “human
rights,” “gender equality,” or the right to education (Frye 2012) have become
disseminated in Africa.
First, internationally sponsored NGO (nongovernmental organization)
and international organizational activity has an enormous presence (Wat-
kins et al. 2012). In Malawi, for example, for most of 2008 and into 2009
UNICEF ran an eye-catching daily banner on the front page of the major
newspaper, The Nation, proclaiming the right of every child to health and
education, and warning against violence against children, sexual abuse, and
other ills (“STOP Child Trafficking” with the tagline, “every child has a right
to their childhood”; “STOP Sexual Abuse” with “every child has a right to be
free from abuse and violence”; “STOP Harmful Cultural Practices” with “ev-
ery child has a right to good health”; “STOP Early Marriages” with “every girl
has a right to complete her education”; “STOP Child Labour” with “every
child has a right to go to school”; “STOP Sexual Exploitation” with “every child
has the right to be free from sexual exploitation”; “STOP Property Grabbing”
with “every orphan has a right to inherit their parents’ property”). The same
slogans appeared on vivid, cherry-red banners and bumper stickers around
the country, strung above town halls, decorating police checkpoints, and on
the bumpers of the ubiquitous mini-buses.
At least since the coming of attempts to fight the AIDS epidemic through
local community mobilization, and indeed in prior community mobiliza-
tion for family planning programs, even remote villages often have an en-
trepreneurial group of young people—perhaps those with Form 4 diplomas
(high-school graduates in Malawi’s British-style educational system)—who
have established a “CBO” (community-based organization). Using globally
sanctioned language, they will have written proposals for “training” (which
might include “gender sensitization,” as well as education in the mysteries of
the male and female reproductive tracts, the distinction between HIV and
AIDS, and “decision making”) and created committees to support those liv-
ing with AIDS as well as the ever-present (at least in the proposals) “OVCs”
(orphans and vulnerable children) and the HBC (home-based care) activi-
ties of the group’s volunteer members (Swidler and Watkins 2009). The acro-
nyms here (all of which are widely understood by villagers) suggest the facil-
ity with which Malawian villagers have appropriated the necessary arcana
of globalized social technologies (see Nguyen 2005b, 2010).
Second, as elsewhere in Africa, Malawians also take seriously the univer-
salizing claims of modern science and medicine. As Émile Durkheim noted
in the closing pages of Elementary Forms, only participation in something
like a universal society can ground confidence in the existence of imper-
sonal scientific laws that are somehow “the same” across time and space.
While most Malawians still consult traditional healers, and even the edu-
cated accept the ever-present danger of witchcraft, they also have a very
straightforward confidence in science and modern medical technology. In-
deed, one of the difficulties for Malawians in the early days of the AIDS epi-
demic was accepting that there could be a disease that was, so to speak, a
Western-style affliction but that modern medicine could not cure. Medical
anthropologists have studied extensively how Africans distinguish the ail-
ments that Western medicine can cure from those that require traditional
healing. Some may go to traditional healers (who are less expensive and usu-
ally closer by than the local clinic or hospital) and seek regular medical
treatment only if traditional remedies fail. In general, however, they treat
most illnesses in straightforward scientific materialist ways, seeking an herbal
remedy from a healer or an injection or “tablets” from a clinic with the same
pragmatic spirit.
Most Africans we have met also show great interest in the scientific or
“materialist” explanations of HIV and AIDS. So, for example, if we mention
the recent research showing that male circumcision is strongly protective
against HIV transmission, the Form 4 graduates who work with us will say,
“Yes, I have been very curious. Why is that? What does circumcision do?”
These are exactly the questions public health researchers (and our own stu-
dents in the United States) ask, and the answer that satisfies them—about
the vulnerability of the mucosal underside of the foreskin and its rich supply
of the very white cells HIV infects—satisfies the Malawians as well. But even
uneducated villagers, whose conversations the Malawi Research Group proj-
ect has captured in a remarkable set of journals recorded by local diarists,2
often seek quite straightforward, material explanations of biological phe-
nomena. In a journal from 2003, the journalist overhears a bar girl debating
with three men whether one is more likely to get AIDS from a circumcised
or an uncircumcised man: each uses different empirical evidence. The bar
girl says to a client:
“If you want to have sex with me I have to know first whether you are
circumcised or not because I don’t use condoms, in so doing, I do go
only with those who are circumcised because they don’t have AIDS and
those who are not circumcised have got AIDS.” Manuel’s friend got
puzzled with that point and he wanted to learn about what she meant
with that point. He said to her, “Why do you think so?” She responded,
“It is easier for the uncircumcised men to get AIDS because their fore-
skins wrap the fluids after sexual intercourse and this makes them
highly risky of catching AIDS, while the circumcised men don’t have
the foreskins and in so doing, they remain dry at the tips of the genital
organs after sexual contact, thus making them not catch AIDS.”
Manuel agreed with the bargirl’s point, but Malova disagreed with
her and he told her that the circumcised ones are the ones who can eas-
ily catch AIDS because their genital tips are always displayed, thus giv-
ing them a high chance of catching AIDS, while the uncircumcised do
sometimes have sexual contact with their foreskins covering the tip of
the genital organ that acts as a barrier to permit the infection to enter
into their bodies and that makes it less easy for them to get infected
with AIDS.
In another diary, men are discussing the many disadvantages of condoms,

and a young man offers a quasi-experimental observation:
One boy said that he slept with a woman whom people were saying that
she had gonorrhoea, but since he had sex with her, he has no sign of gon-
orrhoea meaning that the condom he used at that time protected him.
And he also said that his friend Faston Ngalande slept with the very same
woman a week after him and after four (4) days, Faston also had gonor-
rhoea that is when he started trusting a condom.
Thus empiricism and faith in the universalized discourses of modern medi-

cine and science are joined, even if the details remain open to debate.
Third, Malawians, like others across Africa and in poor countries around
the globe, participate in world culture through their passionate faith in edu-
cation. David Frank and John Meyer (2007) have recently made an extraordi-
narily interesting argument about what we might think of as the “Axial” im-
plications of the expansion of universities around the world: “The university
expands over recent centuries because—as it has from its religious origins—
it casts cultural and human materials in universalistic terms” (287).
In parts of Africa I have visited, there is a painful, poignant, almost over-
whelmingly powerful thirst for globally legitimated knowledge. This takes
the form partly of an obsession with credentials and diplomas. Everyone we
meet is longing to better him or herself by completing a two-year degree in
accounting, taking a course of study to become a Rural Community Devel-
opment Officer, or taking a six-week course to become a VCT (Voluntary
Counseling and Testing) counselor. But this longing for official knowledge
goes far beyond hopes for material betterment. As one of our Malawian in-
terviewers said, when her husband’s death ended her hopes of further school-
ing, “I was going to be something!” Even those who are not trying for more
schooling plead with us for books to make their AIDS knowledge official,
and others—like the young woman who comes by foot and mini-bus each
time she hears we are nearby—simply want the loan of novels or history
books to feed their curiosity. It is not just knowledge, but “official knowl-
edge.” As Frank and Meyer (2007) note, “the university is positioned to
teach both students and society at large the meta-principle that all sorts of
particulars can and/or could be understood, and should be understood, as
instances of general abstractions” (294). Frank and Meyer further note that
the prestige and influence of this officially sanctioned knowledge is directly
connected to its claims to transcendent, universalized truth: “The Modern
globalized knowledge system increasingly extends into the furthest reaches
of daily life, spreading universalized understandings of all aspects of nature
and every social institution worldwide” (289).
Social Organization as Personal Dependence
Despite the enormous appeal of universalized understandings and the

powerful appeal of connections to that luminous—if distant—sphere of global
society, for most Africans, even those in the modern, cosmopolitan sector,
life is experienced as dependence on personal relationships (Chabal and

Daloz 1999; Swidler and Watkins 2007; Chabal 2009).
Chiefs and Public Goods
As many others have noted, in contexts from the personal to the political,
across Africa (and much of the rest of the world; see, e.g., Eisenstadt and
Roniger 1984) most social relationships are organized through personal de-
pendence or patron-client ties (Chabal and Daloz 1999). From pervasive
corruption in Nigeria (Smith 2006), to political-party affi liations that turn
out to be code words for patronage along lines of kinship, clan, and ethnic
group (Weinreb 2001; Chabal 2009), across Africa what might seem like as-
pects of modern economic and political life are often organized structurally
through lineage and kinship. What is more, in societies where personhood
is defined in large part through the obligations one performs for superiors
and the “redistribution” of wealth one performs for inferiors (Collier 2004),
even those without pressing kin obligations constitute their personhood
relationally by creating ties of unequal interdependence (Swidler and Wat-
kins 2007).
In interviews with those working in AIDS projects around Africa, I have
become convinced that chiefship (or in other places the remnants of preco-
lonial and colonial structures like age sets) remains essential to the organi-
zation of public, indeed civic, life (see Swidler 2010).3 Mahmood Mamdani
(1996) is certainly right that colonial authorities perverted the fundamental
structure of chiefship. The colonial powers both altered and in some re-
spects reinforced (some might say “invented”) the powers of chiefs. The
ability of people to abandon a bad chief, and the corresponding expectation
that chiefs would “consult” with elders and headmen on important deci-
sions, was weakened as colonial authorities made chiefs into tax collectors
and legal authorities, backed by force, with power over “customary land”
and “native law.” Nonetheless, all over Africa, however often people are dis-
appointed by chiefs who take resources and fail to redistribute them, it is
through chiefs and similar authorities that collective life can actually be or-
ganized.4 The resilience of African chiefship (Oomen 2005) is evident in a
recent Afrobarometer report from nineteen sub-Saharan African countries:
Logan (2011, 1) found “startling . . . intensity” of support for traditional au-
thority, with “large majorities believing that the institution should still play
a significant role in local governance.” African publics value “the role tradi-
tional authorities continue to play in managing and resolving conflict . . .
their leadership qualities and their accessibility to ordinary people,” as well
as their “essential symbolic role as representatives of community identity,
unity, continuity and stability.” Indeed, I would hazard that where chiefship
has been fatally undermined, as in parts of South Africa, collective capaci-
ties for communal action have been undermined as well.
Let me offer a few examples as evidence of how chiefs provide the mecha-
nism for creating public goods.5 The first, most obvious, point is that in vil-
lages various public works are organized by chiefs. If the village paths need to
be repaired, the village borehole maintained, or a school building constructed,
the chief calls a village meeting and asks the villagers to do the work. Thus
cooperation is stimulated by and channeled through chiefs. But the chiefs’
role is both more important and more varied than that. It is not just that chiefs
organize certain cooperative activities. Even more, the vaunted “generalized
reciprocity” of African societies is often organized through them.
I interviewed a young woman who ran an AIDS hospice, attached to a
Catholic church, outside Lusaka, Zambia. Among other activities, the hos-
pice provided midday meals and eventually schooling for orphans whose
parents had died. The hospice director explained that while the hospice ar-
ranged for orphaned children to live with relatives in the ten villages and
compounds that constituted their catchment area, relatives were willing to
take children in only if the chief told them to. Indeed, she explained, they
had to involve the chiefs in everything they did, inviting them to be first to
join an AIDS committee or to receive “training” in health practices, or the
activity would fail.
Another, very different example comes from a funeral I attended in Bo-
tswana in 2003. African funerals are large, expensive, and very important
events (see Durham and Klaits 2002; Smith 2004).6 This funeral, far out in
the dry, barren Botswana countryside, drew about 200 mourners for a young
man in his forties (a schoolmate of my Motswana friend’s fiancé), the un-
married son of a single mother. As the mourners stood in the dusty ceme-
tery singing hymns, and three somewhat bedraggled, dusty pastors from
different denominations spoke at the graveside, a small, beat-up white van,
off to one side, started up and loudspeakers on its roof suddenly came to life,
interrupting the pastors in mid-sentence. My friend whispered that the

chief’s headman was saying that people were not pressing closely enough
around the grave, not providing sufficient comfort to the grieving mother.
The ceremony was unceremoniously interrupted twice more when the chief’s
headman conveyed the chief’s wish that people sing the hymns with greater
energy and again when he demanded that people stop gossiping and pay full
attention to the funeral. Thus it was the chief’s responsibility to remind people
of their communal obligations and to police, or enforce, those obligations.
In Malawi, the hold of even “bad” chiefs over their people is directly con-
nected to chiefs’ authority over funerals (and thus to the all-important rela-
tionship to ancestors). When one Malawian acquaintance complained that
his chief was corrupt and not respected, we asked why people still were loath
to disobey him. Our friend replied, haltingly, as if too appalled to complete
the thought, “What if someone in your family died? Or you died . . .” And
then he simply trailed off. It was evident that the chief’s cooperation—his
presence (or that of one of his counselors), his willingness to give a funeral
oration, and more important, his permission to bury a family member in
the ancestral burial ground, which the chief controls—was essential. Of-
fending the chief, so that one couldn’t have a funeral for one’s dead, was
unthinkable, and essentially unspeakable.7
Chiefs make possible the provision of public goods of all sorts. One vil-
lage woman, a subsistence farmer like her neighbors, but more fortunate
since she had occasional work with our project, was asked by her chief to
create a youth group in her village, for which she provided weekly refresh-
ments along with advice about AIDS prevention. Thus it was the chief who
made sure she redistributed some of her good fortune. The expectation, in-
deed, is that the chief will be “self-sacrificing.” It is he (or occasionally she)
who encourages his village to seek out donor-sponsored funding for a CBO,
since these have become a major source of cash infusions for villages largely
deprived of access to the cash economy. The chief typically asks a public-
spirited villager, somewhat better educated than the rest, to prepare a pro-
posal and organize a group of village volunteers. We learned that a chief will
also reward those who have shown selfless devotion to collective life: several
of our village informants agreed that the chief might come in person, rather
than sending one of his counselors, to give a funeral speech for a “worthy”
villager—not a wealthy villager, but one who had worked for the welfare of
the whole community. Thus the chief in essence keeps the accounts that re-
ward generalized reciprocity. Another of the village-based interviewers who
worked for our project told us proudly how he had helped his village get
several grants (from World Vision and other donors) for community bene-
fits ranging from blankets for orphans and those living with AIDS, to cloth
sufficient for 200 children to have school uniforms, to plastic water jugs for
those living with AIDS to fetch water. He insisted that he and the small
number of other volunteers who visit the sick and see to their needs, and in
his case coordinate the work of the seven CBOs he has helped to found, re-
ceive no benefits from all those donor funds, except the occasional per diem
when they go for “training.” But he also told us that when his mother died,
he went to his uncle, the chief of a nearby village, to ask him for some land.
His uncle gave him five hectares—a very large “garden” by Malawi standards—
and his own T/A (the Traditional Authority, the top of the chiefly hierarchy in
Malawi’s “traditional” administrative structure) told the uncle that he was
very pleased, since the young man had been such a worthy member of his
community. So “what goes around comes around” largely via the chiefs.
In the occasional story in which a chief is run out of his village—in the
most recent story we heard, the women (in a matrilineal region) gathered
around the chief’s hut and shouted humiliating insults until he had to leave—
his key failing was that he had behaved selfishly, doing things only when
they benefited him, and not when they benefited the village as a whole.
Those who recounted the scandal said that if the villagers came to this chief
because their paths were overgrown and needed clearing, he might “not
show up”; he would say the paths were okay. But if he were invited for train-
ing at the District Assembly, for which a per diem and travel allowance
would be available, he would be “very punctual.” This failure of either the
capacity or willingness to be public-regarding, and to produce the public
goods on which villagers depend, is the essential failing that could mean
disrespect for a chief and ultimately lead to his being deposed.
Finally, the chief’s spiritual strength is essential to the health of his com-
munity. A chief needs to be “confident,” and this confidence makes his vil-
lage strong enough to resist encroachment by other villages on their lands.
He also requires spiritual strength to resist witchcraft and the threat it poses
to those under his care. In a fundamental way, villagers are dependent on
the cooperation and help of those around them, and this cooperation is tied
directly to a person—the person of their chief—in whom spiritual power

and personal power are combined.
Personal Dependence and the Danger of Witchcraft
Although witchcraft has been declared illegal throughout most of Africa (in
Malawi, officially witchcraft does not exist and witchcraft accusations are a
crime), it is a pervasive fact of contemporary life.8 The belief in witchcraft—
at all levels of society—is linked in turn to Africans’ direct dependence on
personal relationships. One way to think about this is simply to say that in a
world in which everything depends on obligations to and from others, but
where those obligations have only spiritual and informal, rather than en-
forceable, legal sanction, it is no wonder that any misfortune must be seen as
due to someone’s malevolence, even if that other remains hidden. At the
same time, fear of witchcraft is also the sanction on those who have re-
sources but fail to redistribute them. As Mark Auslander (1993) notes for
Ngoni communities in Zambia, “reciprocity builds up social relationships
and ultimately enables social reproduction, as in bridewealth transactions.
By contrast, the witch—as the ‘excluded other’—who has been denied gifts,
commodities or assistance—is held to reciprocate subversively, by endan-
gering the community . . . he or she may be represented as a marginal being
excluded from redistributive networks or as an avaricious, secretly wealthy
hoarder”(178).
The role of witchcraft beliefs (and actual witchcraft accusations—a terri-
ble danger9) is not confined to isolated villagers. Indeed, the continuing role
of witchcraft (its “modernity” in Peter Geschiere’s [1997] term)—and the
continuing social primacy of ties of personal dependence—can be seen in
the ways witchcraft accusations follow acts of political betrayal among top
African leaders. When Malawi’s recently deceased president, Bingu wa Mu-
tharika, was first elected in 2004, he almost immediately declared his inde-
pendence from the former president, Bakili Muluzi, founding his own break-
away political party. Mutharika (usually called simply “Bingu”) faced a
scandal in the newspapers because he refused to move into the presidential
mansion. The newspapers claimed that he feared the house had been be-
witched; Bingu vigorously denied the accusations, while offering a variety of
other reasons for refusing to move into the house. The subtext to the scan-
dal, however, was that the former president’s people had suggested that
Bingu lacked the spiritual strength—as a traitor to his former patron, spiri-
tually in the wrong—to ward off the threat of witchcraft from Muluzi. Bin-
gu’s furious denials were not so much denials of backward superstitions and
assertions of his modernity or rationality, as declarations that he was more
than fortified against any magic Muluzi could muster. In Nigeria (Smith
2006), a similar witchcraft-laden battle erupted when another political leader
betrayed his former patron—with open letters published between the two,
accusing each other not of corruption, but the former patron accusing the
former client of refusing to use government resources to repay the patron
who had placed him in power. Witchcraft accusations and terrible panics
about children stolen and murdered for witches’ rites also erupt where glar-
ing inequalities between rich and poor demand redress (see Smith 2006).
How else could the grotesquely wealthy acquire their wealth than by se-
cretly stealing the blood of other people’s children? Hence witchcraft accu-
sation can provide a form of political critique, and witchcraft itself can be a
sanction against misuse of resources.
Axial Religion and the Social Location of Dependence
Robin Horton, in his classic essay “African Conversion” (1971), developed a

brilliant argument to account for the appeal of Axial religions in Africa.
Horton argued that both conversion to the world religions, Christianity or
Islam, and “internal conversion,” in which indigenous African religious
systems evolved to emphasize the centrality of a “supreme being,” reflected
the same social transformation. Africans reworked their faith as they in-
creasingly came into contact with powerful, cosmopolitan forces, so that
their fates were determined by forces beyond the local, interpersonal world
of the village. As Horton and J. D. Y. Peel (1976) describe it, “economic and
political changes . . . weakened the boundaries which had previously kept
the local community more or less insulated from the wider world. They were
therefore just the sort of changes which . . . result in a high level of Christian
affi liation” (492). The appeal of the Axial religions is that they offer powerful
rituals for gaining access to the forces that now control life: “a person who
has found himself thrown into the wider world beyond the bounds of his
local community, and who has therefore sought to come to terms directly
with the forces underpinning this wider world,” engages in a “quest for a
more elaborate concept and cult of the Supreme Being” (496).
Horton is certainly right about the individuating and universalizing ele-
ments of contemporary African experience that make Axial religions intel-
lectually plausible and experientially resonant. Indeed, he provides a per-
suasive interpretation of another aspect of African religion—and African
attitudes more generally—when he argues that churches like the Aladura
churches Peel studied in Nigeria also offer direct linkages to the wider
world. As he and Peel (1976) observe:
whatever the local peculiarities of their origins, [these congregations] are

always anxious to see themselves, not as closed, self-contained commu-
nities, but as local cells of large, even world-wide organizations, as small
parts of the immense body of world Christendom. This is something
very obvious to the visiting historian or anthropologist. When he attends
a sacrifice to the ancestors in, say, an Ibo village, he is very much aware of
being there as an outsider, for they are not his ancestors. When, however,
he visits an Aladura congregation, he is invited to participate in its reli-
gious life as a brother Christian. In this capacity, moreover, he is quite
likely to be asked for advice, particularly on the matter of contact with
other Christian groups in the world outside. (496, italics in the original)
This is true of African churches I have visited, but also more generally of the
Africans who are eager for a business card, for an address, or even a post-
card that conveys some image of the wider world the visitor represents.
Horton and Peel (1976) have thoroughly refuted the charge of “intellectu-
alism” leveled at their interpretation of African conversion.10 Nonetheless, I
think there is a fundamental weakness in their model, and thus in the basic
interpretation of Africans’ embrace of Axial religions as creating an Axial
civilization. In a passage I agree with profoundly they say, “Our position is
that cosmology, and its related cultic practice, arises as a response to experi-
ence. We do maintain that religions must be regarded first and foremost as
systems of thought; but experience, not thought, is the object of thought and
hence of religion. And as sociologists we are concerned with thought as a
response to social experience” (485). But what they miss, at least to some
degree, is the “social” in the constitution of social experience.
In Bellah’s (1964) original model of religious evolution, the intellectual or

cosmological breakthroughs of the historic (Axial) religions were accompa-
nied by profound changes in social and religious organization: toward at
least partially autonomous religious organizations, toward a differentiation
of worldly and religious authority, and toward new modes of integration of
individual personhood (and thus of personal moralities) into collective life.
Horton and Peel’s model, while it is not “intellectualist,” is still at some fun-
damental level individualist. It focuses on how changes in social and eco-
nomic organization—in the “scale” of the factors that impinge on people’s
lives—affect individual experience. What is left out of this way of formulat-
ing the issue is the question of how religious ideas and experiences contrib-
ute to relocating the sacred, and thus to reformulating the fundamental so-
cial codes that constitute collective entities. It is at this level, I would argue,
that the African case raises fundamental questions about where Axial com-
mitments reside.
Axial Experience without Axial Civilization
In a way that resembles Eisenstadt’s (1996) analysis of Japanese civilization,

I argue that much of Africans’ access to the universalizing elements of
global discourses has been incorporated without fundamentally changing
their patterns of collective life. Like the Japanese, African social patterns
and the cultural codes that govern them have proved extraordinarily resil-
ient. Patrick Chabal (2009), the great authority on Africa, describes the pat-
tern this way:
One is a person, one belongs, one is part of a community, in so far as one

is integrated in a complex system of authority, deference and participa-
tion, which forms the backbone of the intersecting spheres of identity
that matter for life in that given society. The idea that an individual
could live utterly detached from any community is not one that finds
favour, or is even meaningful in Africa—as is made clear by the pejora-
tive reputation such individuals inevitably acquire. Therefore, the ques-
tion is not whether to be party to a system of obligations or not but how
to manage one’s place within such a system. To have no obligations is
not to belong; it is not to be fully and socially human. Obligations,
therefore, are not seen—as the Western concept seems to imply—as

impositions, claims on one’s otherwise better used time and energy,
but as a means of sustaining one’s place in a network of belonging:
that most vital attribute of humanity, sociability and, ultimately,
being-in-the-world. (48, italics in the original)
Thus the universalizing elements of NGO discourses are appropriated within

an understanding that converts them, both organizationally and cogni-
tively, into ingredients for the formation of patron-client ties. Daniel Jordan
Smith (2003), an anthropologist who studies Nigeria, has a wonderful anal-
ysis of the “workshop mentality” in family planning programs. Family plan-
ning workshops advocate lowered fertility and thus a decreased reliance on
accumulating “wealth in people.” In practice, however, the workshops allow
Nigerians to accumulate precisely the wealth in people that is understood to
constitute both personhood and sociality. Those who organize a workshop
distribute patronage and accumulate “wealth in people” by choosing who
will participate and thus gain access to valuable per diems and travel allow-
ances; participants can use the workshop to reward their own patrons by
inviting them as trainers or honored guests.
In an analogous way, as Harri Englund (2003) has argued, Malawian Pen-
tecostal churches frequently split over the distribution of “goods,” both spir-
itual and material, to which their pastors have access by virtue of their con-
nection to foreign church sponsorship, and by virtue of their access to
transcendent spiritual powers. Like chiefs, pastors are expected to redistrib-
ute spiritual powers and material goods; accusations that a pastor has mo-
nopolized those goods can precipitate a church schism. Much as the Japa-
nese assimilated Axial civilizational elements to the cultural framework of
the household, many Africans assimilate elements of “universalistic” global
modernity within the flexible and robust cultural structure of lineage and
chieftaincy, with its hierarchy of sacredness, ties of personal dependence,
and redistributive obligations of superiors. Thus the elements of universal-
izing modernity, such as the discourse of “empowerment” or human rights,
are appropriated through and reworked to produce patron-client ties, in
which spiritual power and the responsibility for reproducing collective life
flow upward in a lineage-like hierarchy (even if such a hierarchy is rein-
vented by urbanites seeking to define themselves as a community and a po-
litical constituency [see Barnes 1986]). This is not simply a matter of politi-
cal patronage and the persistent routing of political benefits through ethnic
loyalties. It goes deeper, to the basic codes through which people can consti-
tute and reconstitute social relationships.
Africans do manifest one fundamental element of the Axial—an enor-
mous longing, a reaching out to grasp “the universal,” the global symbols of
a higher, transcendent reality (a longing that would be quite unfamiliar, I
think, to the Japanese). This “transcendent” reality’s presence also, however,
suggests the fundamental problem about conceptualizing the social “loca-
tion” of axialness.
In contrast to Horton’s perspective, in my view the worship of a “tran-
scendent being,” or in Bellah’s (1964) terms a “dualistic” cosmology, is not
just a way of mediating individuals’ understanding of the world and their
need for access to the forces that control it. The creation of Axial civiliza-
tions also involved fundamental reorganization of the sacred—in Clifford
Geertz’s (1968) terms, a new understanding of “the mode in which the di-
vine reaches into the world” (44). Understandings of the sacred are not pri-
marily “about” individual experience, even individual experience of social
relationships. Rather, the sacred, as Bellah (1973) suggests in his classic essay
on Durkheim’s Elementary Forms, constitutes and makes accessible (if only
as an ineffable possibility) the fundamental organization of collective life.
And thus Axial cultural elements acquire their meaning in part from the
collective capacities they make possible.11
Religious or other ultimate meanings, while they may provide answers to
fundamental questions about causality and may promise individuals the
possibility of influencing the important powers that impinge on their lives,
more importantly provide the basic codes, and encode basic reservoirs of
sacredness, that allow the constitution and reconstitution of patterns of col-
lective life. These are the codes through which human communities create,
interpret, and regulate authority, preeminence (status), cooperation, and
reciprocity—the fundamental processes of social life. Such codes—basic con-
ceptions of obligation or morality but also the imagined shape of the institu-
tional arrangements that create capacities to act as a group—are normally
transposed from one familiar realm to another, as when political authority
is understood on the model of the relationship between parent and child, or
when the relationship between lord and serf provides the template for the
practices through which factory labor is organized (Biernacki 1995). Axial

elements at the level of individual experience can thus be incorporated within
fundamentally pre-Axial forms of social organization.
Africa and Africans have been eager recipients of the increasingly univer-
salized ideologies and forms of social organization being imported wholesale
into contemporary societies that are too poor or too unsure of themselves to
resist “missionary” intrusions. It is less clear whether, at least in most parts
of Africa, there have been new constitutive moments, dramatic collective
“events” in William Sewell’s (1996) sense, that have been able to reconstitute
forms of collective life to match the Axial aspirations of Africa’s increasingly
universalized global citizens. Indeed, in many ways it is as if Africans were
being assimilated directly, at least in their imaginations, into the global in-
stitutions of the international community, its international NGOs, churches,
courts, and transnational advocacy organizations, bypassing the Axial re-
construction of national or society-wide institutions.12
In trying to determine where the Axial is located, I am arguing, we need
to look not only at the great traditions that shape individual aspirations and
experience, but also at the fundamental “constitutive rules” that define the
social location of the sacred power of collective life. Thus we should look not
only for the penetration and resonance of Axial traditions but for changes in
the rules that constitute forms of individual personhood and collective life.
Here the churches, especially the Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, have
supported both new forms of community and newly individualized forms
of self-discipline, aspiration, and striving. The churches have introduced
new, voluntarist forms of group cohesion and obligation at the level of the
congregation. But in the wider society, and to some degree penetrating reli-
gious congregations as well, the effective forms of obligation and the sym-
bolic resources that underlie them are still modeled on the hierarchical,
personalistic ties of lineage, clan, and chieftaincy. Most importantly, capaci-
ties for collective action have not really been reconstructed at the societal
level. Rulers are not directly held accountable to universalized, transcendent
moralities, and capacities for collective action are still very much dependent
on the powers of chiefs and other traditional figures to anchor the public-
regarding morality that creates collective goods. Whether the attempts of
transnational bodies, like the International Criminal Court in the Hague,
or the broader attempts to bring war criminals and others to justice under
the banner of human rights (Sikkink 2009) can constitute a meaningful

form of Axial transcendence for a new global society remains to be seen.
Locating the Axial, finally, raises the question of where authoritative no-
tions of reality are anchored. This question is unresolved in the United States
and the rest of the so-called Modern West, as illustrated by the debates be-
tween fundamentalists insistent on asserting the literal, scientific reality of
biblical truths, and by the many who remain skeptical of the authority of
modern science (Whitehead 1974). In contemporary African societies one
sees a genuine syncretism with respect to the sources of authoritative under-
standings of reality, if we mean by this that multiple notions of what is really
real can coexist: the one God who created the world, controls its processes,
and redeems his children; the universalistic rights of all human beings, an-
chored in the global claims of World Culture and in the specific slogans and
practices of NGOs and other emissaries of the global; and witchcraft and the
sacred powers of chiefs and others who anchor the ties of personal depen-
dence on which personhood and collective possibility depend.
In Africa, people increasingly have access to the global, the universalized,
the cosmopolitan (blue jeans and the iPod) in just the ways Horton has ar-
gued. But there has not been a reconstitution of “society.” Rather, there are
patches of the Axial in societies where the sacred is fundamentally consti-
tuted in archaic ways, even if that archaic pattern can absorb the new pa-
trons who come from abroad, suggesting new projects, altering individuals’
fates, requiring propitiation, but without connection to a fundamental so-
cial ethics or a realistically accessible set of institutional possibilities.
My final point applies not only to Africa but to societies around the globe.
If the social-structural bases of modernity take root—a labor market that
grounds the experiential understanding that one is dependent primarily on
one’s own abilities and efforts rather than on others, and a modern state that
anchors and enforces universalized claims to citizenship and individual
rights (Soysal 1994; Collier 1997)—we will certainly have a globalized Axial
ideology of individual experience, reinforcing and justifying the lived real-
ity of individuals around the world. But without transformation of the basic
meanings that govern collective action, and without either the transforma-
tion or re-creation of the deepest layers of sacred symbols that constitute
new collective capacities, I cannot see how we can have a globalized Axial
civilization.
To constitute a globalized Axial civilization, such a culture would have to

create symbolic leverage for judging the morality of human conduct and
holding rulers accountable; define a transcendent sphere of potential libera-
tion or salvation toward which individuals and communities could strive;
construct a narrative of the “radical evil” from which human beings seek to
be redeemed; and create the moral basis for a wider community, increasing
the capacity of human beings to organize and act in an increasingly interde-
pendent world.
Notes
I am indebted to many people who have helped me think through the issues raised in this es-
say: Bob Bellah, Dick Madsen, Bill Sullivan, Steve Tipton, Jane Collier, Claude Fischer, Susan
Watkins, Arlie Hochschild, Cihan Tugal, Kim Dionne, Adam Ashforth, Tom Hannan, Mi-
chelle Poulin, and the many Malawian collaborators and friends who shared their knowledge
and experience. Support from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research is gratefully
acknowledged.
1. The creation of a fully voluntarist model of community was, of course, a

relatively late development within Protestantism, most fully realized in the Anglo-
American tradition where multiple sects competed in the absence of, or in oppo-
sition to, a state church. It is perhaps this voluntarist model of how communities
can be formed and re-formed that is one of Protestantism’s most significant cul-
tural and structural legacies (E. P. Thompson 1963; Walzer 1978; Bellah et al.
1985; Gorski 2005; Fischer 2010; Jepperson and Meyer 2011).
2. A fuller description of the journals can be found in Watkins and Swidler
(2009). Papers using material from these diaries suggest their remarkable richness
(see, e.g., Kaler 2003, 2004; Swidler and Watkins 2007; Tavory and Swidler 2009).
A sampling of the anonymized journals is available at: www.malawi.pop.upenn
.edu/Level%203/Malawi/level3_malawi _qualjournals.htm.
3. See Karlström (1996, 1999) and Schaffer (1998) on the fusion of clan and
chiefdom with concepts of democracy and civility in Buganda and Senegal, re-
spectively. Both authors report, for example, that civic equality is understood as
equal or fair treatment from a superior or chief, who listens to everyone fairly.
Karlström (1996, 489) writes: “The concepts of justice (obwenkanya) and impar-
tiality (obutasosola) were used by infor mants in explaining both the importance
of free speech and their sense of justice. Obwenkanya is an abstract noun de-
rived from the verb kwenkana, ‘to be equal/similar,’ and can be loosely trans-
lated as ‘fairness’ or ‘equality.’ The equation of democracy with obwenkanya
may seem to indicate something akin to Western egalitarianism. What is im-
plied here, however, is narrower: a situational equality of subjects before a power-

holder and decision-maker rather than an ontological equality of persons.
Hence the centrality of the implied audience of decision-makers in statements
like the following: ‘I understand “democracy” to mean obwenkanya, like when
you give an opinion and it is not ignored but is also considered and a decision is
made taking it into account (cited by Tidemand, 1995: 127; emphasis added).’ ”
4. A remarkable work of social history, Landeg White’s Magomero (1987), shows
that Africans were in no way bound by unchanging tradition. Rather, they re-
sponded actively and inventively to both threats and opportunities, migrating to
new lands, reinventing their genealogies, and sometimes reinventing their family
structures and tribal identities as necessity or opportunity dictated. Even in peri-
ods of massive disruption, however, chiefdom provided a flexible schema through
which people could reestablish community, make claims on others, and recreate
capacities for collective action.
5. This line of argument draws on recent work focusing on governance as a
crucial aspect of development in poor communities. The study of governance is
being embraced by economists, who still think in terms of “transparency” and
how to create conditions that maximize things like the flow of information so that
well-informed constituents can use their votes effectively. The interesting results,
however, are those like Cornell and Kalt’s (2000) work on “cultural match” as a
predictor of good governance in American Indian tribes and Lily Tsai’s (2007)
remarkable work on how in contemporary China “accountability” and the provi-
sion of local public goods depend on local government officials’ participation in
traditional cultural groups, such as those that maintain ancestors’ graves or per-
form traditional Chinese dance.
6. The Daily Times (Friday, June 27, 2008, p. 1) reported a Malawi government
study which found that Malawians spend between 200,000 and 3 million Malawi
Kwacha on a funeral—a “fortune” equivalent to $1,400 to $20,000 in a country
with GDP per capita of about $300 per year.
7. We have been told that in rare cases failing to “respect” the chief can lead to
being “chased” from the village, losing one’s land as well as one’s community.
Denying someone the right to bury a family member would be one form of “chas-
ing” the person away. On the other hand, in addition to reports of chiefs being
deposed, in the diaries there is a case of a chief asking people in his village to re-
pair a village road, and the villagers answering that the chief should tell his rela-
tives to repair the road, since they are the only ones who benefit when the chief
has something to distribute. Several people also told us that when there is a dis-
pute in a village, or when the person who inherits the chief’s position is incompe-
tent or “dull,” a section of the village can move a short distance away, retaining
their lands but constituting themselves as a new village with a new headman.
Such splits are the major way new villages form, either when there is dissatisfaction
or when villages get too large—or, as we learned recently, when new government
salaries for chiefs make the multiplication of chiefs (and thus villages) attractive.
8. See Smith (2006) on witchcraft accusations in contemporary Nigeria, Ash-
forth (1998, 2000, 2005) on South Africa, Abrahams (1994) on contemporary
Tanzania, and Englund (1996) on Malawi.
9. See Miguel (2005) on witch killings in contemporary Tanzania.
10. Horton and Peel note that “Horton’s approach to religious change in Africa
is founded on two premises. First, that where people confront new and puzzling
situations, they tend to adapt to them as far as possible in terms of their existing
ideas and attitudes, even though they may have to stretch and develop them con-
siderably in the process. Second, that where people assimilate new ideas, they do
so because these ideas make sense to them in terms of the notions they already
hold” (1976, 482).
11. Bellah (1970) has made the point that sacred symbols make such collective
capacities graspable by connecting unconscious emotional energies to collectively
accessible symbols.
12. The literature on global and transnational institutions is now vast, but
there is little analysis of where their fundamental cultural claims could be worked
out institutionally. Vinh-Kim Nguyen (2005a) has articulated the notion of “ther-
apeutic citizenship,” in which Africans living with AIDS become direct clients of
transnational organizations, and perhaps “citizens” of some global community.
John Meyer and his collaborators (J. Meyer et al. 1997; Boli and Thomas 1997)
have the boldest description of the creation of a “world polity,” but they dismiss
the question of the gap between the cultural imaginary that system creates and its
institutional embodiments with the simple notion of “decoupling.” Many others
have written of the varied aspects of an emergent, actual, or failed project of
global governance (see, e.g., Keck and Sikkink 1998; Callaghy et al. 2001; Slaugh-
ter 2004), but with few exceptions they deal only obliquely with the gaps between
the cultural and institutional aspects of a putative “global society” (though see
Heydemann and Hammack 2009; Swidler and Watkins 2009; and the quite varied
work of critical anthropologists of development, e.g., Mosse and Lewis 2005;
Adams and Pigg 2005; Ong and Collier 2005; Ferguson 2006).
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10
The Axial Age Theory
A Challenge to Historism or an Explanatory
Device of Civilization Analysis? With a Look at the
Normative Discourse in Axial Age China
heiner roetz
After the end of the cosmopolitism of the Enlightenment, Occidental unique-

ness and superiority have become firm features of the Western self-
understanding. Hegel’s statement that “the Oriental has to be excluded from
the history of philosophy” (1940, 152) and Leopold Ranke’s echo that for
understanding world history “one cannot start from the peoples of eternal
standstill” (1888, viii) are two prominent examples for a conviction that be-
came dominant in the historical disciplines. World philosophy and world
history have been Occidental.
There were few serious attempts to overcome this mind-set. One is Karl
Jaspers’ theory of the “Axial Age,” published in 1949 in Vom Ursprung und
Ziel der Geschichte, which is explicitly directed against Hegel’s and Ranke’s
view of the “Orient.” It claims to break through the “self-evident equation of
a closed circle of Western culture with world history as such” (Jaspers 1953,
69) and denies the ascendancy of the “Weltgeist” from backward China to
enlightened Greece. In its stead, Jaspers proposes the idea of a truly univer-
sal world history constituting a “single unity” from different “independent
roots.”
Jaspers’ theory has its antecedents, above all the Enlightenment and its
Stoic conviction of a time and space transcending “consensus gentium,”
which inspired Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron to formulate an
early version of the Axial Age idea (Metzler 1991), or Max Scheler’s call for a
The Axial Age Theory 249
“cosmopolitan world philosophy” after the experiences of World War I

(1954, 106). As far as the empirical aspect is concerned, Alfred Weber’s no-
tion of a “synchronistic world epoch” has to be mentioned (Weber 1935, 7).1
However, what makes Jaspers’ Axial Age theorem stand out in comparison
to forerunners is the systematic importance that he attributes to it for re-
orientating Western scholarship and, above all, its strong normative claim
under the impression of the German crimes of World War II. Jaspers, unlike
most of the scholars who have adopted his theory, does not merely want to
explain developments. He wants to draw lessons from the past, and he is
convinced that a new approach to history is one of these. There is the “disas-
ter for the West,” namely, the “claim to exclusiveness,” which has to be
warded off by the “language of universal history” (Jaspers 1953, 20).
The possibility of such a language results from what Jaspers regards to be
a historical fact: the existence of at least three great and influential “centres
of spiritual radiation”—the “Near East” and Greece, China, and India—
where around the middle of the last millennium bce, and from the far
perspective of the twentieth century nearly simultaneously, the “step into
universality” (1953, 2) was made independently. This step constitutes a fun-
damental turning point, the “deepcut dividing line in history” (1), by leav-
ing behind hitherto valid orientations and giving birth to “the fundamen-
tal categories within which we still think today” (2). “The whole of humanity
took a forward leap” (4).
The step in question has a number of facets outlined quite impressionisti-
cally rather than with systematic precision in Jaspers’ presentation of the
epoch in question, which he calls the “Axial Age.” He admits that his “the-
sis” is in need not only of further corroboration but also of “ever greater
clarity” (Jaspers 1953, 6). Still, one can roughly distinguish the following
main features of the “Axial Age”:
Sociologically, the background of all Axial Age developments is a poly-
centrism of cities and small states, mobility within and between the cen-
ters, increasing tension (Jaspers 1953, 5) and “struggle of all against all”
(4). For the fi rst time in history, the individual, be it as prophet, hermit,
ascetic, or wandering phi losopher, becomes an independent social unit;
“human beings dared to rely on themselves as individuals” (3) and con-
front the majority. Correspondingly, the end of the Axial Age is brought
about by large empires with their “order of technological and organisational
planning” (5) and the fi nal prevalence of the “continued belief of the mass
of the people” (3).
On the level of thought, “hitherto unconsciously accepted ideas, customs
and conditions were subjected to examination, questioned and liquidated”
(Jaspers 1953, 2); the Axial Age is thus characterized by “reflection” rather
than “unquestioned grasp of life,” “open[ness] to new and boundless possi-
bilities” rather than closedness of mind, man “rais[ing] himself above his
own self” (16), “transcendence,” the ethicization of religion, the struggle of
“logos against mythos,” a new self-understanding of the human being vis-à-
vis the world, and the discovery of history (3). In later systematizations,
“reflexivity, historicality and agentiality” have been rightly singled out as
the most fundamental characteristics of “Axial” consciousness (Wittrock
2005, 67). From a semiotic perspective, they represent the self-reflection of
“symbolic culture” made possible by the mastery of writing in a relatively
broad intellectual stratum of society.2
The “historical fact” (Jaspers 1953, 15) that these developments were not
merely local events but happened autochthonously at (at least) three different
places in the ancient world reveals exemplarily the basic unity of mankind—
there are different modifications of one and the same step. For Jaspers, this is
a strong argument against the “claim to exclusive possession of truth” (19)
that has in particular marked Western history. The Axial Age works as a
bridge to recognize oneself in the other (“daß es sich beim andern auch um
das eigene handelt” [Jaspers 1949, 27]), to realize that “profound mutual
comprehension” is possible (8). Different cultures become “involved in one
another” (8) and are faced with the “challenge to boundless communication”
(19). Though not historically universal, it is decisive for universal history in
terms of a common future marked by human solidarity. This is the ethical
nucleus of Jaspers’ theory. It has consistently been underexposed in most of
its later adaptations.
Jaspers borrows the metaphor of the “axis” from Hegel, who has called
the appearance of Jesus the “angle around which world history is turning”
(Hegel 1939, 408). Hegel understands this crucial historical moment in terms
of the self-elevation of “self-consciousness” to “spirit,” a step in the “Phä-
nomenologie des Geistes.” Jaspers disbelieves that such a turning point can
be located in “particular articles of faith,” which cannot count as a “com-
mon frame of historical self-comprehension for all peoples” (1953, 1). Such a
framework must be established on a much broader basis. When Jaspers
dates the Axial Age between 800 and 200 bce, in particular highlighting the
time “around 500 b.c.” (ibid.), he consciously avoids laying the main accent
on Christianity and draws the attention to the founding phase of the classi-
cal philosophies. Obviously, he is convinced that in the final analysis an
“Axial” function cannot be fulfilled by dogmatic belief systems, but only by
the undogmatic “belief of philosophy.”
The primarily philosophical rather than religious focus can also make
clear the double dimension of the “axis”: it is a turning point of history and
at the same time a connecting link between all cultures. This function is
rooted above all in the formal achievements of the Axial Age on the level of
thought rather than in specific contents: in systematic reflection, radical
questioning, and “transcendence”—the latter understood not primarily in
religious terms but in the more general sense of detachment and going be-
yond existing limits, of “standing back and looking beyond” or recognizing
that “another world is possible,” as Benjamin Schwartz and Peter Wagner
have aptly put it in their reading of the Axial Age theory (Schwartz 1975, 3;
Wagner 2005, 97). It is the problematizing, the transcending of one’s own
reality, that opens the possibility for fully recognizing the other. Even if this
potential was not exhausted in the Axial Age itself, turning the eyes back to
it will open a future perspective on a common “goal of history.” Thus to do
research on the basis and in the spirit of Jaspers’ approach—and he invites
this research not only in order to corroborate his thesis, but also to contrib-
ute to a normative reorientation of the respective disciplines—would mean
developing a specific awareness for formal shifts, for modes of arguments,
criteria of justification, detached and second-order reasoning,3 and relating
these to a universal ethical concern. “Empirical facts,” Jaspers says, are exam-
ined “in order to see to what extent they are in accordance with such an idea
of unity, or how far they absolutely contradict it” (1953, xv).
Jaspers’ theory of the Axial Age thus combines an empirical hypothesis
with a two-level normative program: it comprises the rejection of cultural
exceptionalism and the promotion of a common future, the “unity of man-
kind.” This has offered a new field for comparative research and has at the
same time been a challenge to comparativism, as well as to all historical
disciplines and cultural sciences. As Rudolf Schottländer, a Jewish philoso-
pher and classicist who survived the Holocaust hiding in Berlin put it in the
first review of Jaspers’ book entitled “Die Überwindung des Historismus”
(“The overcoming of historism”), “there is a calling for historical reflection
in Jaspers’ work that couldn’t be more urgent. He who after this book buries
himself in history is beyond help” (Schottländer 1949, 98). The Axial Age
theory, then, demands not only treating non-Western philosophical tradi-
tions on eye level, but also seeing the foreign world as a part of one’s own
world and one’s own history as part of the foreign. It demands a hermeneu-
tics based on a dialogical subject-cosubject relationship rather than only on
the explanatory subject-object perspective (Apel 1994; Roetz 2009b).
However, contrary to Schottländer’s expectation, Jaspers’ theory has cer-
tainly not led to the “overcoming of historism.” It has inspired historical re-
search, but it has not shaken the historistic self-understanding of the corre-
sponding disciplines. They have rather singled out the empirical part of the
Axial Age idea and neglected or rejected the normative framework that
gives meaning to it in the first place. This leads to the curious situation that
if one wants to defend Jaspers’ theory one has to confront not only its critics
but also many of its adherents.
Both critics and adherents are above all to be found in the social sciences.
Jaspers’ theory had no comparable echo in philosophy, and it didn’t have
much appeal to the historical disciplines where it has “nearly fallen into
oblivion” (Scheit 2000, 49). The foremost scholar who has helped to keep the
Axial Age discourse alive is surely Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (ed. 1987, 1992).
Nevertheless, the ser vice that the social sciences have done to the Axial Age
theory is a mixed blessing.
This might be due to the “typical” sociological view of that which prevails
and, above all, materializes in institutions. But this is not Jaspers’ outlook.
From the beginning, it is his assumption that the Axial Age “ended in fail-
ure” (Jaspers 1953, 20). To him, the world-historical meaning of the Axial
Age is not dependent on the factual realization of Axial Age ideas. It is
grounded in the evidence that human beings independently of each other
are able to mentally transcend themselves and their culture under similar
circumstances. This is in turn the basis for entering into communication
with others. The Axial Age is important as a “symbol” for the possibility of
“boundless understanding” (xv). Kant would have called this a prognostikon
or “sign of history” (1983, A:141–142). For Jaspers, rather than sociologically
describable facts, the Axial Age constitutes a “single realm of everlasting
spirits” (1953, xv), whereby he calls to mind the old humanist idea of a limit-
less “colloquium” of the “high minds” of all ages (Brogsitter 1958). “Axial”
ideas remain important as a textually fi xed repository of “transcending”

thinking, even if their effective history has up to now come to nothing.
In the hands of the social sciences, by contrast, Jaspers’ normative per-
spective has by and large been replaced by an explanatory and descriptive
one, the perspective on mankind has been replaced by the perspective on a
plurality of great “civilizations,” and the future perspective has been re-
placed by a retrospective into the formation of longue durée civilizational
patterns. This has made the “Axial” approach a variant of comparative civi-
lizational analysis, also in the cultural disciplines. This owes more to Max
Weber or the Weber brothers than it owes to Jaspers. It comes as no surprise
that Max Weber often has been identified as the true progenitor of the Axial
Age theory (e.g., Arnason 2005; Thomassen 2010), although he explicitly
formulates a contrastive “idealtypical” rather than an accommodating com-
parison (Weber 1991, 19). In fact, what Weber offers is a sociologically en-
riched reformulation of the same Hegelian view of non-Occidental cultures
that Jaspers attacks.
The point of my argument is not to question the fruitfulness of a sociolog-
ical approach to the Axial Age hypothesis, but to recall the normative es-
sence of Jaspers’ idea. Still, Jaspers, in his “historical Platonism” (Habermas
1981, 92), links his normative program to an empirical hypothesis and an-
chors the future goal of history in a historical “origin.” His theory, therefore,
has to withstand some sort of historical and philological test. And it has
been a matter of debate whether it is able to do so.
As to the critique of the Axial Age theory, is has taken two main direc-
tions: on the one hand, despite Jaspers’ claim to overcome exclusivism, he
has been reproached for promoting a new exclusivism himself, namely of
Axial against non-Axial cultures; on the other hand, he has been criticized
exactly in the name of exclusivism, that is, a reestablished Greek and Judeo-
Christian uniqueness.
The first kind of criticism has, for example, been uttered by Aleida Ass-
mann, to the effect that Jaspers’ theory is hegemonic, trying to “realize unity
at the expense of diversity” (1992, 330–331). Jan Assmann reproaches Jas-
pers for his “far reaching ignorance of the pre-axial-age world,” in particu-
lar of Egypt, and his “oversimplified black and white thinking” (1990, 12
and 27). A place has been claimed within an “Axial” theory also for Islam
(Arnason et al. 2007, introduction). Critics of “evolutionism” have rejected
the whole idea of an epoch threshold in terms of a “breakthrough” as misjudg-

ing the efficiency and accomplishments of conventional morality (Rappe
2003).
The exclusion argument is invited by Jaspers’ talk of the “three realms”
(1953, 8). However, his point is not that only three cultures took part in the
Axial Age, but, conversely, that is was not only the Occident. Occidental
antiquity is not the sole witness to the possibility of self-transcendence as a
precondition for all-encompassing communication. It would not affect the
theory if other “realms” misjudged by Jaspers had to be included in the
“Axial Age.” It is not of first-rank importance when and where Axial develop-
ments in terms of “transcendence” (one could as well speak of the step toward
postconventional, detached, decentered, or consciously symbolic thinking)
took place, but that they took place to a considerable extent.
Still, Jaspers might have chosen an exclusivist indication for “Axial” de-
velopments. According to Aleida Assmann, this is the case with the crite-
rion of “reflexivity,” which springs from the very “European arrogance” that
Jaspers opposes. Her alternative is “historicization and contextualization”—
the “same historicization and contextualization that Jaspers was so eager to
avoid” (A. Assmann 1992, 38). However, the argument of “historicization
and contextualization” itself belongs to the culture of “reflexivity.” It is al-
ready employed by Axial Age thinkers in order to refute the authority of
tradition. In fact, the critique of the criteriology of the Axial Age theory
would have to be directed against Axial Age thought itself, because it is here
where this criteriology is put into effect for the first time—which in turn has
motivated the Axial Age theory. The same applies to the critique of “post-
conventionalism” in the name of pre-Axial conventional morality. None of
these arguments escapes “Axial” reasoning.
As to Islam, to narrow the Axial Age down to a few centuries in the mid-
dle of the last millennium bce seems to be important for Jaspers for two
reasons. Firstly, he identifies an early epoch in which a diff usion of ideas
between the great civilizational centers is still unlikely, so that one can ex-
pect mutually independent developments as an indication of the inner unity
of humanity. Secondly, Jaspers dates the Axial Age in a way that it does not
comprise the founding phase of Christianity, because he is skeptical about
the universalizability of religious contents. The inclusion of Islam in the
later Axial Age discourse shows the extent to which the content of the origi-
nal theory has been lost in its reduction to an explanatory device in

historico-sociological functionalism: “axis” is no longer the world historic
moment when the unity of mankind becomes imaginable in an exemplary
(rather than exclusive) manner, but the historic moment of the formation of
different cultural programs that form basic patterns of long-term develop-
ments, the multiplicity of which finally produces culturally distinct “multi-
ple” modernities (Eisenstadt 2001, 332). It is certainly possible to use the
concept of “axis”—or, in this case, of a plurality of axes—for the founding
phases of the “great traditions,” and Jaspers himself calls Christ “the axis of
history” for the “consciousness of the West” (1953, 58). But this “Christian
axis” is not the axis that constitutes universal history as a “single overall pro-
cess” and the “continuity of humanity” (xvi). Jaspers acknowledges that
“man’s historicity” is always “multiple historicity,” but there is no doubt that
the “multiple is subject to the imperative of the One” (247). He is not looking
for a pseudo-universalism that consists in the generalization of the beliefs of
specific systems of self-assertion, but for a true universalism that overcomes
the logic of self-assertion itself.
As far as the second kind of criticism, the criticism in the name of exclu-
sivism, is concerned, this was brought forward by Schottländer, who claims,
not very consistently with his praise for Jaspers mentioned above, that some-
thing happened in Greece “essentially not comparable with seemingly simi-
lar steps in China and India, but infinitely superior to them.” There are
“much deeper” differences, Schottländer stresses, “in the relationship of
Greek and Oriental nature” than Jaspers would admit (1949, 97).
In subsequent discussion of the Axial Age theorem, China in particular
has become a crucial case to test the empirical soundness of the Axial Age
theory. The superiority of Greek thought has above all been defended in re-
lation to the nature of the “breakthrough” from mythos to logos that accord-
ing to Jaspers is an essential feature of the epoch as a whole. The Voegelin
school has claimed that there was only an “incomplete” breakthrough in
China, since, contrary to Greece, it has remained a “cosmological civiliza-
tion” where the cornerstones of mythical thinking, the “consubstantiality”
and “conduration” of the political and cosmological order, have not been
consistently called into question (Voegelin 1956, 35 and 39; Weber-Schäfer
1968, 22).4 Stefan Breuer has given a similar assessment: China has over-
come “homology,” that is, the assumption of a world of gods conceived in
analogy to the human world, and replaced the former by depersonalized

concepts like dao (Breuer 1994; 1998, 101). But China, according to Breuer,
has not broken the “ontological continuum” that fuses everything into a
single all-encompassing totality. If there have been deviations from this pat-
tern, they “did not become culturally determinant” (Breuer 1998, 101). The
only cultures where both homology and the cosmological continuum were
abolished were the ancient Jewish and Greek cultures. For this and other
reasons, Breuer suggests dropping the concept of the Axial Age as a tempo-
rally fi xed epochal threshold brought about by “transcendental [sic] break-
throughs” and rather speaking of “cultural transformations in different di-
rections” (1998, 105). Thus whether “Axial Age” is a meaningful idea in the
first place would, among other things, hinge on what is actually offered by
the Chinese sources.
With regard to Breuer’s critique, Jaspers’ hypothesis in fact does not imply
that “Axial” developments became “culturally determinant”—this is again
rather the standard perspective of the social scientist. It is only from this
perspective that one may disregard the disruptions in the “ontological con-
tinuum,” for example in Xunzi’s (c. 310–c. 230 bce) “separation of the realms
of heaven and man” (Xunzi 17; Roetz 1984, §21), because they are later over-
laid by holistic cosmologies. A major challenge to be dealt with is Breuer’s
claim that to conceptualize the Axial breakthroughs on the basis of Law-
rence Kohlberg’s “cognitive developmental theory,” as I have done in my
own reconstruction of classical Chinese ethics (Roetz 1993a), is misleading,
since it encourages one to overlook the fundamental differences between the
Chinese and the Western developments. In an elaboration of Jean Piaget’s
genetic epistemology, Kohlberg has proposed a three-level and six-stage
model of the development of moral reasoning in ontogenesis.5 Mutatis mu-
tandis applied to sociogenesis, this model makes visible the genetic struc-
ture of moral evolution as based on the growth of human learning as a pro-
ductive response to challenges. It describes the stages of possible progress,
without assuming a strict necessity for it to happen as in nineteenth-
century evolutionism.6 What makes this theory especially promising for
reconceptualizing the Axial Age is that Kohlberg shares with Jaspers the
universalistic outlook on human culture and likewise works with a stark,
empirically testable, and at times normatively laden hypothesis. It is tempt-
ing, therefore, to examine the Axial Age phenomenon in the light of devel-
opmental psychology, the potential of which for comparative studies is far

from exhausted.
In the light of Kohlberg’s theory, the entrance into the “Axial Age” would
mean the transcending of the “conventional” level of “ethical life” (Hegel’s
“substantielle Sittlichkeit”) in an adolescent crisis of society, and the break-
through toward a “postconventional” perspective from where the “conven-
tional” morality is either rejected or transformed and reestablished on a new
level and with new restraints. In the Chinese case, the historical background
is the breakdown of the old order in a deep crisis of the ancient society in the
middle of the last millennium bce. It shook the traditional worldview based
on the religion of “Heaven” (tian) and the code of propriety (li) of the Zhou
people. There is a very clear notion in Zhou texts that something unprece-
dented has commenced. They speak of a “chaotic” and “drowning” world
that has lost its foundations and is falling apart. The original “undivided-
ness” has been “cut into pieces” (Laozi 28), “the great primordial virtue is no
longer one” (Zhuangzi 11). The main directions of classical Chinese thought
are answers to this crisis.
These “Axial” developments and their prehistory can be brought into a
Kohlbergian system. A key indication of the transcendence of Kohlberg’s
“conventional” level of family and state morality can be found in the numer-
ous attacks on culture and custom among the Daoists (similar to Greek
Sophism). They are exemplary representations of Kohlberg’s Stage 41⁄2 , the
phase of youthful protest, when conventional mores are typically exposed as
artificial. Nature, life, and individual happiness are played off against the
despotism of custom by an appeal to the naive rationality of the preconven-
tional stages. The Daoists and their predecessors coin classical topoi for the
recourse to preconventional freedom: the unaffected child not yet corrupted
by education, the hedonist giving free vent to his inclinations, and the rob-
ber (Roetz 1993a, 248–249 and 256–257). The Confucians as well as the
Mohists have surpassed this stage in the direction of a quasi-contractual
utilitarian Stage 5 and a principled Stage 6 orientation, the latter comprising
a nonegoistic fundamental norm, a universality claim, and a principle of
autonomy. This is again similar to Greek developments, for example in Pro-
tagoras, the Anonymus Iamblichi, Socrates, and the Stoics.7 In China, among
the key elements of these endeavors we find abstract notions of reciprocity
(as in Confucius’ Golden Rule) and justice (as in the maxim from Xunzi 29,
“Follow the Dao and not the ruler, follow justice and not the father”), as well
as a notion of the human heart (xin) as a sovereign organ of decision.8
Such a perspective on Axial Age normative reasoning, of which I can only
give a very sketchy impression here, as well as the theoretical model on
which it is based, is not without problems. The emphasis of cognitive devel-
opmental theory on a principled ethics seems to contradict what has been
frequently described as the context sensitivity of Confucian ethics. How-
ever, principles and context sensitivity are not necessarily mutually exclu-
sive (Roetz 1996, 351–357), and this wrong alternative is not supported by
the late formulations of Kohlberg’s theory. Here the highest stage is con-
ceived as a coordination of justice and beneficence, incorporating a concern
for interpersonal relations and the well-being of concrete individuals in
concrete circumstances, thus transcending the solitariness of the Stage 6 ac-
tor in favor of a Stage 7 communicative ethics of responsibility (Habermas
1976, 83–88; Apel 1988, 306–369; Kohlberg 1990). This would also do justice
to the fact that Chinese Axial Age thinkers, above all the Confucians, do not
necessarily employ “postconventional” thinking in order to dismiss “con-
ventional” duties but in order to reformulate and qualify them.
A methodic problem of the analysis is the loose relationship between
chronological and developmentological aspects. For philological reasons it
is only partly possible to write a reliable history of ideas of Axial Age China.
My reconstruction rather assumes the simultaneous presence of a spectrum
of positions within an overall discourse in a relatively broad period of time,
in “one arena of intellectual articulation” (Hsu 2005, 459). It shows struc-
tural and logical relations that cannot always be proven as exactly congru-
ent with historical successions. It has to be admitted, furthermore, that the
“reconstructive” method itself (Habermas 1976, 9) is already indebted to the
specific perspective on history that is part and parcel of the Axial Age hy-
pothesis. However, it does not necessarily lead to committing intentional
fallacies and reading something into the texts—reconstruction is not con-
struction at will. It aims at an equilibrium of philological solidity and nor-
mative concern.9
A main objection to a Kohlbergian reconstruction of Axial Age thought
is that it invites an overinterpretation of the sources. This is the aforemen-
tioned objection of Breuer. Without in principle rejecting the application of
ontogenetic models to sociogenesis, Breuer argues that, if one follows Kohl-

berg, one will “read any hints to moral autonomy, mutual respect and reci-
procity as indications of postconventional consciousness” and thus of the
highest level of moral reasoning, while Piaget has shown them to be possible
already on the medium level of “concrete-operational” (logical operations
in concrete contexts) rather than “formal-operational” (reflexive, hypothet-
ical, experimental, “second-order”) thought (Breuer 1994, 5).10 This would
again open the gap between China and Greece and, according to Breuer,
render the Axial Age hypothesis meaningless. His objection is crucial, since
what Jaspers calls “transcendence” is marked by structural features and not
only by specific contents.
However, the contradiction between a Piagetian and a Kohlbergian out-
look on China is relieved when it comes to an analysis of the formal archi-
tecture of Chinese normative reasoning. In general, recourse to formal-
operational thought is taken for granted only for Greek philosophy (referring
to notions like episteme, techne, organon, logike) but not for China. This is
because of an alleged preference for practical rather than theoretical matters
on the Chinese side. But one can admit the primarily practical concern of
the Chinese thinkers—as a matter of fact, as Pierre Hadot (1995) has shown,
Greek philosophy, too, is not a purely theoretical undertaking—and still
recognize the abstract theoretical layer of their thought. This is because in
the convulsions of Zhou society, from which Chinese philosophy as a phe-
nomenon of crisis emerges, there were no longer simple and direct answers
to practical questions of right and wrong. This is how a contemporary source
describes the chaotic situation:
Numerous are those in the world who explore methods and arts, and
all of them think they have something to which nothing can be added. . . .
The Dao and the primordial virtue are no longer one, and the world
often grasps just one aspect, and is self-complacent upon examining
it. . . . Every single man in the world does just what he prefers and
thinks of himself as the model11 [compare the Greek notion of auto-
nomia]. Alas! The hundred schools proceed and do not return, and will
never be reunited. . . . The art of the Dao will be split by the world.
(Zhuangzi 33, 463–464; my italics)
At a time when “private scholars discuss hither and thither” (Mengzi 3b9)
and when there is “no longer any measure for right and wrong, and proper
and improper change every day,”12 normative thinking has to be elevated to
a new level in order to regain firm ground. This is the background of formal
shifts typical of Axial Age reasoning. I will now turn to these formal shifts in
order to supplement the content analysis given in earlier writings by a dis-
cussion of structural features of Zhou philosophy.13
In the crisis of Zhou society, above all in its late phase of the “warring
states” (fift h to third century bce), it is no longer possible to talk about mor-
als in a simple intentio recta, let alone exclusively performative attitude. In
China, like in Greece, ethics as a reflection of morals comes into existence
and is embedded in still more complex considerations. Xunzi’s work, to-
gether with the Mohist writings, is the best example. Similar to most other
thinkers of his time, Xunzi’s interest is a practical one: to bring the chaotic
world to peace again. But in the debate about normative orientations that
actually constitutes the Axial Age, the competing programs have to be justi-
fied, defended, and argued for, and there is hardly any writer who has done
this in a more systematic manner than Xunzi. For him, at a time when “cha-
otic rulers of doomed states let themselves bewilder by shamans and priest
and believe in oracles” (Shiji 74, 2348), any solution for the age presupposes
a rational view of nature, and therefore he composes his treatise “On Heaven”
(Tian lun). Moreover, a realistic assessment of the human being is necessary.
Xunzi deals with this in his anthropological chapter “Human nature is bad”
(Xing e). Both texts break the “ontological continuum” and expound the
necessity of human artifice (wei) as a cultural achievement neither predis-
posed in the cosmos nor in the spontaneous natural inclinations (xing) of
man (Roetz 1984, §21). To appropriate the dao, the “right way,” is a matter of
correct cognition, and this prompts Xunzi’s epistemological essay “Dissolv-
ing obscurations” (Jie bi). Furthermore, since the political and social crisis is
reflected in a crisis of language, Xunzi writes his “On the correct use of
words” (Zheng ming).
The thematic treatise, the appearance of which reflects how much the
time is in need of argumentation, is a typical layer of the architecture of the
Zhou discourse. It was probably invented by Mo Di (fi ft h century bce), and
in the Mohist texts we find the most distinct occupation with a new field of
formal reasoning: criteriology. Mozi 4 states the necessity of having “norms
and standards” (fa yi), and at the same time denies that the conventional
authorities—parents, teachers, and rulers—could serve as such standards,
since “only few of them are humane.” This throws a light on the connection
between content and form of ethical reasoning. Mo Di also explicitly denies
that “habits” (xi) and “customs” (su) can deliver as acceptable norms, be-
cause this would logically imply endorsing “inhuman” and “unjust” prac-
tices like cannibalism, infanticide, and geronticide, which are established
practices in some cultures.14 The Mozi, moreover, sets up criteria (biao, fa) to
be fulfilled by any “words” (yan, compare the Greek logos) that deserve con-
sent: they should have a “foundation” (ben) in the works of the sage kings,
they should have a “source” (yuan) in the sensual perceptions of the major-
ity, and they should be “applicable” (yong).15 The past—in the form of the
sage kings—is only one criterion here and has to make room for other crite-
ria located in the present. Among the latter criteria we also find consistency
(bu bei) used in transcendental arguments in the Mohist canon.16
Correspondingly, the Mohist canon distinguishes several ways of achiev-
ing knowledge: transmission (chuan) is supplemented by personal observa-
tion (shen guan) and explanation (shuo) independent of one’s position in
time or space, “without the location acting as a barrier” (Mozi 42, 211).
Xunzi, although in many respects a traditionalist, says, “A person who is
good in talking about antiquity must have a tally ( jie) from the present”
(Xunzi 23, 293). Antiquity is not directly accessible to our knowledge; “it is
only by the near that one knows the distant” (Xunzi 5, 50–51). The epistemo-
logical priority of the “near” over the “distant” corresponds to the priority
of “seeing” over “hearing.”17 Han Fei (c. 280–233 bce), again, stresses that no
knowledge based on evidence is possible about the idealized past, adding,
“To take something as a given without any proof by examination is stupid,
but to base arguments on something that one is unable to confirm is to
swindle” (Hanfeizi 50, 351). Wang Chong (27–91 ce), a post-Axial Age thinker
who continues this line of reasoning, has compared traditionalists to “post-
men delivering letters” (Lunheng 80, 266).
There is a conspicuous epistemological shift from secondhand knowl-
edge to personal experience, from the “remote” to the “present” and “near,”
from the indirectly to the directly accessible in Chinese Axial Age texts. It is
accompanied by a systematic spectrum of doubt and critique of endorsing
the past. We can distinguish at least the following types of arguments: the
logical argument refers to the paradox that traditionalism appeals to values

that originally were not traditional but newly created, as in the statement
“What one follows must have been invented by someone,” brought forward
in the Mozi (39, 181; and 46, 262–263) against the maxim “to transmit and
not to innovate.”18 This means the logical priority of creativity over preser-
vation. The historical argument refers to the futility of tradition in view of
the changes of the times, as in the statement from the Zhuangzi (14, 227),
“Morals and regulations change according to the times. . . . The old is as dif-
ferent from the new as a monkey is different from the Duke of Zhou.”19 The
empirical argument refers to the heterogeneity, complexity, and even contra-
dictory nature of tradition, as in the rhetorical question from the Shangjun-
shu (1, 2), “The former generations did not follow the same doctrines, so
which version of antiquity should we emulate?” The epistemological argu-
ment refers to the increasing vagueness of transmitted knowledge the far-
ther we go back into the past. Han Fei notes that within a short period of
time the Confucians and the Mohists have split into eight and three factions
respectively that dispute the original teaching of their founders. How much
more futile would it be to achieve accurate knowledge about the remote
times of the idealized predynastic rulers, to which both schools refer (Han-
feizu 50, 351)? The ontological argument refers to the impossibility of trans-
mitting the true, as in the introductory statement of the received Laozi, “The
Dao that can be spoken about is not the constant Dao” (Laozi 1). The ethical
argument refers to the possible moral questionability of tradition, as in Mo
Di’s remark mentioned above that he who wants to follow established cus-
toms must be ready to practice infanticide and cannibalism, since these are
established practices in some cultures. The invention argument, added later
by Wang Chong, points out the possibility of deliberate manipulation and
faking of records from the past, because the “vulgar world esteems the an-
cient and disparages the present” (Lunheng 25, 76; 84, 286).
Normativity comes into tension with history. This shift can even be de-
tected in the still widespread affirmative references to the early “sages” (sheng-
ren) and kings in late Zhou, above all Confucian, texts. The shengren prove
to be ideal representations of values that they teach but that genetically do
not depend on them and do not presuppose a historical rooting in the first
place. They are exemplary embodiments of one and the same human nature
inherent in all human beings (Mengzi 6a7, 2a2). In the Xunzi, the shengren
of antiquity generate norms, but they are merely particular expressions of

human reason, endeavor, and effort within the reach of even the ordinary
“man in the street” of today (Xunzi 23, 296). Nearly all of the central orien-
tation marks of the different Zhou “schools” no longer share the time para-
digm of traditionalistic thinking. In the Mozi, we find the abstract criterion
of the “good” (shan), understood in terms of “utility,” regardless of whether
old or new.20 The same applies to the Legalist criterion of practicability
(ke).21 The Daoist dao is grasped in immediate mystical immersion and ex-
plicitly not by transmission. Detachment from the past even holds true for
the Confucian school, which upholds the closest ties with tradition. One of
the most interesting cases is the Golden Rule, formulated in Confucius’
Analects (Lunyu 15.24) as a general maxim that “consists of one word and
can therefore be practiced for all of one’s life.” The Golden Rule does not
draw on a setting of traditional values, virtues, or patterns, but only presup-
poses the implicit or explicit assumptions of generalizable, and in that sense
timeless, basic human needs and aspirations, in the form of the self’s trans-
fer of its own wishes to the other and taking the other’s role. The “transcend-
ing” implications of this pattern of thought can be seen from the fact that it
also appears in a passage from the “Watch the present” (Cha jin) chapter of
the Lüshi chunqiu (238 bce), where “knowing others by examining oneself”
provides an orientation declaredly set against the unqualified endorsement
of past models:
Why should the ruler not take the standards of the early kings as a
model? It is not that the former kings were not wise. It is because they
cannot be taken as a model. The standards of the former kings have come
upon us by passing through the remote ages. Some men have added to
them, and some have omitted parts from them. How then could they be
taken as a model? But even if nobody would have added or omitted
something, they could still not be taken as a model. . . .
The standards of antiquity and of today are different in their lan-
guage and their statutes. The words of antiquity, therefore, often do not
correspond with the expressions of today, and the standards of today
often do not accord with the standards of antiquity. . . .
How could the standards of the early kings be taken as a model
then? Even if this were possible, it would still not be proper. The stan-
dards of the former kings were somehow required by the times. But
the times have not come down to us together with the standards.
Thus, even if the standards should have come down to the present, it
would still not be proper to take them as a model.
Therefore, we should abandon the fixed standards of the early kings
and take as a model how they set up their standards. But how did the
early kings make their standards? That by which they made their stan-
dards was the human being (ren). But we ourselves are human beings,
too. Therefore, by examining oneself one can know others. By examin-
ing the present one can know the past. The past and the present are one,
and the others and I are the same. A scholar who is in possession of the
dao appreciates knowing the distant by the near, knowing the past by
the present, knowing what he has not seen by what he has seen. There-
fore, look at the shadow below the hall, and you know the course of
sun and moon and the change of yin and yang. Look at the ice in a
vase, and you know that it is cold under heaven and fish and turtles
will hide. Taste one mouthful of meat, and you know the flavor of the
whole cauldron and the seasoning of the whole vessel. (Lüshi chunqiu
15.8: 176–177; my italics)
In this passage, which is a theoretical culmination point of classical Chinese

critique of tradition, the Lüshi chunqiu recommends a shift in category: one
should “abandon the fixed standards of the early kings and take as a model
how they set up their standards.” In place of the old models, a new standard
is established, which is located in the here and now: the self as a generalized
human being. The way to set up standards is nothing but self-observation
and subsequent generalization—the very way which Confucius calls “the
method of humaneness”: neng jin qu pi (“to be able to take what is near as
analogy” [Lunyu 6.30]).
The Golden Rule paves the way for the new and likewise nontraditional
paradigm that Mengzi, in reply to Daoist naturalism, introduces into Con-
fucian philosophy: the paradigm of innate spontaneity, the immediate stim-
ulation of a moral impulse located in the natural disposition (xing) of the
human being “prior to any learning” (Mengzi 7a15), that is, socialization
and education. It is later reproached for undermining not only tradition but
also political rule (Roetz 1993a, 221–222).
The Chinese Axial Age search for standards no longer rooted in the past
but in the present reaches its formal climax in the following passage from the
Mozi, which is itself the most “formal” Zhou text. It contains a formulation
of the primacy of the better argument that we cannot surpass even today:
Humane persons inform each other of the reasons (li) why they choose
or reject something or why they find something right or wrong. He who
cannot bring forward reasons (gu) follows the one who brings forward
reasons. He who has no knowledge follows the one who has knowledge.
He who has no arguments (ci) submits to the other, and when he sees
something good, he will change his position accordingly. Why then
should they [quarrel]? (Mozi 39, 182)
I take these arguments together with the underlying and partly explicit
structures of Zhou normative reasoning as indications that, even without
referring to the “logical” chapters of the Mozi, a reading of classical Chinese
philosophical texts in terms of concrete-operational (as suggested by Breuer),
let alone preoperational thinking, is not plausible. This does not imply that
the whole body of texts is on a formal-operational level, but that at least the
basics of formal-operational thought must be taken into consideration in or-
der to understand the main positions of the Chinese “Axial Age” discourse.
At the same time, one can admit that neither in content nor in structure
was the Axial Age “breakthrough” “complete” in a strict sense. This not
only allows us to understand the possibility of regressions behind the stan-
dard of developed Axial Age thought in post-Axial times, when the innova-
tory potential of this thinking was absorbed and monopolized by the novel
authoritarian centralistic state. It also allows us to understand the many dis-
crepancies between formal-operational and still-existing concrete-operational
and preoperational elements in Axial Age thought itself, which even the
Mozi, the most “argumentative” Zhou text, is not free of. Mo Di believes, for
example, that according to the “source” standard (yuan) that he has set up
for valid speech, the existence of ghosts and the nonexistence of fate can be
proven—ghosts have been sensually perceived by the majority, but fate has
not (Mozi 31 and 36). Mo Di, furthermore, formulates the principle of the
better argument in his polemics against the Confucians. It does not enter his
mind that he himself should be bound by this principle when he formulates
his own vision of a functioning society as a vertical system of obedience

(Mozi 11–13). It appears to be a general feature of the Axial Age that the
morals proposed for the polity do not necessarily reflect the same level as
the elitist thinkers’ own consciousness and reasoning standards.
Such reservations do not merely apply to China—in the case of Greece,
too, it is not self-evident that we can speak of a “complete breakthrough” in
the light of either a Kohlbergian or a Piagetian conceptualization of the
Axial Age. It is far from evident that Greek ethicists reached Kohlberg’s
highest stage.22 An interesting case is the natural philosophy of Aristotle,
which dominated Europe till Kepler and Galileo, and which Piaget has de-
scribed, in the formulation of Oesterdiekhoff, “as partly right down to the
details structurally identical with the third stadium of animistic thinking of
ten-year-old children” (Oesterdiekhoff 1997, 83; Piaget 1978; Fetz 1982). To
put it another way: Axial Age thinking is not wholly identical with modern
thinking. Nevertheless, it contains anticipations of modern thought, in the
sense that Hegel saw the Greek Sophist movement as an early representation
of what he calls the “principle of the modern world”—the “principle of free
subjectivity” (Hegel 1938, §§124, 273; 1940, 153). This means that in the final
analysis only modernity in terms of this principle, or its “neoclassic” refor-
mulation in terms of intersubjectivity (Habermas 1992, 125 and 156), is the
true and full realization of the Axial Age “breakthroughs.” The theory of the
Axial Age has to be transferred (“aufgehoben”) into a theory of modernity.
If this is true, it would have a bearing on the theory of “multiple moderni-
ties,” currently the most influential elaboration of Jaspers’ Axial Age hy-
pothesis. If the Axial Age breakthroughs, as I have tried to show by the
Chinese example, essentially comprise a novel time paradigm23 of thought
that implicitly or explicitly puts the present, the here and now—the moral
impulse, the thought experiment of role taking, self-reflection, the reasoned
scrutiny of arguments—in the place of the past as a formal feature of de-
tached thinking, then it would amount to a category mistake to see “Axial”
developments primarily as founding phases of a multiplicity of great cul-
tural traditions. It comes as no surprise that in Chinese adaptations of the
“multiple modernities” theory all of the constituents of first-order thinking
that were transcended in Axial Age philosophy—thinking in terms of “cul-
tural genes” (Hsu 2005, 451), of rootedness, embeddedness, primordiality,
or ethnicity (Tu 1998, 2000), of looking back to one’s “heritage” rather than
looking beyond—are reenthroned, accompanied by contextualistic, role-

moral, ritualistic, aestheticizing, and spiritual readings of Confucianism, in
order to bypass the principle of subjectivity of “Western” modernism (see
Roetz 2008). If the legacy of the Axial Age lies in the development of “post-
conventional,” “detached,” or “second-order” forms of reasoning as an antici-
pation of modernity (granted that this anticipation is incomplete), being
an “Axial Age” culture would first of all be a particular provocation to any
kind of cultural self-affirmation. One cannot invoke the Axial Age without
living up to its standards, that is, without transcending one’s own historical
and cultural framework in the direction of a “modern,” all-encompassing
communicative orientation. The theory of “multiple modernities,” which
links modernity intrinsically to different cultural programs “rooted” in dif-
ferent “axes,” tends to circumvent the main challenge of the Axial Age: that
any drawing on the past, on traditions, on “roots” and “origins” is in need of
justification by generalizable criteria. If this challenge is accepted, Jaspers’
disputed theory of the “age of transcendence” may even itself be “tran-
scended.” For Jaspers himself adheres to an ideology of “origin” that is not
consistent with Axial Age consciousness. It is only against the Axial Age
that one can think with it. The “axis” is wherever there is enlightened thought.
Notes
1. Jaspers also mentions Ernst von Lasaulx and Victor von Strauß among his
forerunners.
2. See the contributions of Merlin Donald and Matthias Jung in this volume.
For the importance of writing, see also Jan Assmann’s article in this volume and
Dürnberger 2005 (based on Vilém Flusser’s “communicology”).
3. The importance of second-order thinking is frequently stressed in the litera-
ture on the Axial Age; see for example Bellah 2005, 80.
4. For a critique of this much too undifferentiated assumption with regard to
Egypt, see Assmann 1990, passim.
5. Kohlberg’s preconventional Level I comprises the stages of punishment and
obedience orientation (Stage 1) and of instrumental exchange (Stage 2). The con-
ventional Level II comprises the stages of interpersonal concordance and expecta-
tions, above all within the family (Stage 3) and of law and order (Stage 4). The
postconventional Level III comprises the stages of utilitarian, relativistic social
contract orientation (Stage 5) and of universal ethical principle orientation (Stage
6). See for example Kohlberg 1981, 409– 412.
6. In a critique of my approach, Zhang Hao (2000, 4) writes that the applica-

tion of Kohlberg’s theory would make the Axial Age a “natural result” of history.
This is a misunderstanding. If one does not want to mystify the emergence of the
Axial Age, it can only be the result of an evolution of moral learning. But there is
a growing probability rather than necessity that this evolution takes place.
7. For a more detailed Kohlbergian description of the Chinese and Greek de-
velopments, see Roetz 1993a, 265–272; and 2000. For Greek postconventional
thinking, see Apel 1980. For contractualism in early Chinese thought, above all in
the Xunzi, see Roetz 2009c.
8. See for these points Roetz 1993a, 119–146, 64– 65, and 159–160.
9. See Peter Wagner’s felicitous remark on the “double requirement” of Axial
Age investigations: “They have to be sustainable in the light of the best available
historical evidence, and they have to give answers to the questions we pose to the
past from the point of view of the present” (Wagner 2005, 93).
10. Breuer 1994, 5. For the ontogenetic approach to sociogenesis and its prob-
lems, see Apel 1980. See also Dux 2000 and Oesterdiekhoff 1992 and 1997.
11. For fang in the meaning of “model” or “measure,” see Shijing 241.6.
12. Lüshi chunqiu 18.4, 225 on the situation in the state of Zheng in the sixth
century bce.
13. See for the following Roetz 2005a,b.
14. Mozi 25, 115–116: “In ancient times, there was a land named Kaishu east of
Yue. Right after birth, the people dismembered the firstborn child and ate it, say-
ing that this was propitious for the younger brothers. When the grandfather died,
they loaded the grandmother on their back and abandoned her, saying that they
could not live together with the wife of a ghost. The superiors regarded this as the
correct order, and the people saw it as a custom. Thus they carried on practicing
these things. But how could this, in fact, be the way of humaneness and justice?
This means to consider a habit as convenient, and to regard custom as a norm for
what is just.”
15. Mozi 35, 164: “Speech (yan) must [comply with] three standards. . . . There
must be something in what it is founded (ben), something which can serve as its
source (yuan), and something for which it is applicable (yong). In what should it be
founded? It should be founded above in the works of the sage kings of antiquity.
What should serve as its source? We should below take as a source and examine
what is real (shi) in the ears and eyes of the people. For what should it be applica-
ble? When put into practice for administration, one should examine whether it
meets the benefit of states and clans, citizens, nobility, and common people. This
is meant by the three standards of speech.”
16. For example, “To take all statements as contradictory is contradictory. The
explanation lies in that statement” (Mozi 41, 201, B71); “To refute refutation is con-
tradictory. The explanation lies in not refuting [that one refutes refutation]” (Mozi
42, 202, B79); “That learning is useful is explained by those who reject this” (Mozi
41, 201–202, B77); “If you think someone does not know that learning is of no use
and therefore inform him [of this], this means to let him know that learning is use-
less. But this is teaching. To think that learning is useless and to teach [this] is con-
tradictory” (Mozi 43: 233–234, B77). For this and related topics see Roetz 1993b.
17. “Not to hear something is not as good as hearing it. To hear something is
not as good as seeing it. To see something is not as good as knowing it. And to
know something is not as good as doing it” (Xunzi 8, 90; my italics).
18. The phrase is from Lunyu 7.1. It was later understood as a traditionalistic
maxim.
19. The Duke of Zhou is one of the founders of the Zhou dynasty.
20. Mozi 46, 262–263: “Gongmengzi said, ‘The gentleman does not innovate,
but merely transmits.’ Mozi said, ‘Not at all. Those who are the most unlike a gen-
tleman neither transmit the good of antiquity nor initiate the good of the present.
The next group of people unlike gentlemen [likewise] does not follow the good of
antiquity, but if they have something good themselves, they will put it into practice
because they want it to emerge from themselves. Now, to transmit but not to in-
novate is not different from innovating without loving to follow [= without trans-
mitting]. I think that one should transmit the good of antiquity and create the
good of today, in order to increase the good all the more.’ ” It is an interesting par-
allel that Confucius, too, refers to the “good” (shan) as the ultimate value when he
rejects the idea of simply taking the opinion of one’s fellow citizens as a measure
for right conduct: “Zigong asked, ‘If everybody in the neighborhood likes a person,
how would that be?’ The Master said, ‘That is not enough.’—‘And if everybody in
the neighborhood dislikes a person?’—‘That is not enough either. It is better if the
good in the neighborhood like and the bad dislike that person’ ” (Lunyu 13.24).
21. “Those who do not understand politics insist that one must not change old
ways and alter long-established regulations. But to change or not to change is
something the sage does not listen to. He simply rectifies the government. Whether
old ways should not be changed and long-established regulations should not be
altered, then, depends on their being practicable [for today] or not” (Hanfeizi 18,
87; my italics).
22. Socrates (frequently discussed in Kohlberg 1981) would be a candidate, but
since he expresses sympathy for the antidemocratic constitution of Sparta (Plato,
Crito 52e), a stronghold of slavery, his universalism is doubtful.
23. See Roetz 2009a.
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Destructive Possibilities?
11
The Axial Conundrum between
Transcendental Visions and Vicissitudes
of Their Institutionalizations
Constructive and Destructive Possibilities
shmuel n. eisenstadt
In this essay I shall examine the tensions and contradictions attendant on

the institutionalization of Axial visions. These tensions are, first, the result
of problems inherent in the institutionalization of Axial visions—for exam-
ple, the implementation of economic and power structures. Second, these
tensions are rooted in the internal structure of Axial visions—most notably
in the tension between their inclusivist universalist claims and their exclu-
sivist tendency, rendering their institutionalization potentially destructive.
These problems point to the continual tension between constructive and
destructive elements of social and cultural expansion and evolution.
The crystallization of Axial civilizations constitutes one of the most fasci-
nating developments in the history of mankind, a revolutionary process that
has shaped the course of history dramatically. It is not surprising that it
constitutes a great challenge to sociological theory as well.
Robert Bellah, in his article “What Is Axial about the Axial Age?,” has
presented a succinct analysis of the cultural specificity of the Axial break-
through.1 The core of this breakthrough, so he argues, has been a change or
transformation of basic cultural conceptions—a breakthrough to what he
calls the theoretical stage of human thinking, or reflexivity. The distinctive-
ness of this breakthrough and its impact on world history, however, does
not lie solely in the emergence of such conceptions but in the fact that they
278 D e s t ru c t i v e P o s s i b i l i t i e s ?
became the basic, predominant, and indeed hegemonic premises of the cul-
tural programs and institutional formations within a society or civilization.
Not all places that witnessed the emergence of such conceptions saw also
their transformation into hegemonic cultural premises; even in places where
such a transformation took place, it was usually very slow and intermittent—
Islam being the only (partial) exception in this regard. It is therefore only
when both processes come together that we can speak of an Axial civilization.
This Axial breakthrough occurred in many parts of the world: in ancient
Israel, later in Second Commonwealth Judaism and in Christianity, in an-
cient Greece, (partially) in Zoroastrian Iran, in early imperial China, in
Hinduism and Buddhism, and later in Islam. With the exception of Islam,
these civilizations crystallized in the first millennium bce and the first cen-
turies of the Common Era. It was this relative synchronicity that gave rise to
the concept of an “Axial Age”—first formulated by Karl Jaspers and imbued
with strong, if only implicit, evolutionary notions.2 Jaspers saw the Axial Age
as a distinct, basically universal and irreversible step in the development—
or evolution—of human history. However, while the emergence and insti-
tutionalization of Axial civilizations heralded revolutionary breakthroughs
that developed in parallel or in similar directions in different societies, the
concrete constellations within these civilizations differed greatly.
The distinctive characteristics of each Axial civilization lie in the devel-
opment of a specific combination of cultural orientations and institutional
formations that triggered a specific societal dynamic.3 The core of the Axial
“syndrome,” to paraphrase Johann Arnason, lies in the combination of two
tendencies. The first tendency was the radical distinction between ultimate
and derivative reality (or between transcendental and mundane dimen-
sions, to use a more controversial formulation), connected with an increas-
ing orientation toward a reality beyond the given one, with new temporal
and spatial conceptions, with a radical problematization of the conceptions
and premises of cosmological and social orders, and with growing reflexiv-
ity and second-order thinking, with the resultant models of order generat-
ing new problems (the task of bridging the gap between the postulated levels
of reality is one example).4 The second tendency was the disembedment of
social activities and organizations from relatively closed ascriptive, above all
kinship or territorial, units or frameworks; the concomitant development of
“free” resources that could be organized or mobilized in different directions
The Axial Conundrum 279
gave rise to more complex social systems, creating potential challenges to

the hitherto institutional formations.5 These two tendencies led to the devel-
opment of specific patterns of social organization and cultural orientation,
and ultimately to the crystallization of Axial civilizations. Until the emer-
gence of modernity, they represent probably the most radical pattern of de-
coupling of various structural and cosmological dimensions of social order.
What was revolutionary about these developments was the fact that the
civilizations in question experienced a comprehensive rupture and prob-
lematization of order. They responded to this challenge by elaborating new
models of order, based on the contrast and the connection between tran-
scendental foundations and mundane life-worlds. The common constitutive
features of Axial Age worldviews might be summed up in the following terms:
they include a broadening of horizons, or an opening up of potentially uni-
versal perspectives, in contrast to the particularism of more archaic modes of
thought; an ontological distinction between higher and lower levels of reality;
and a normative subordination of the lower level to the higher, with more or
less overtly stated implications for human efforts to translate guiding prin-
ciples into ongoing practices. In other words, the developing Axial visions
entailed the concept of a world beyond the immediate boundaries of their
respective settings—potentially leading to the constitution of broader insti-
tutional frameworks, opening up a range of possible institutional forma-
tions, while at the same time making these formations the object of critical
reflection and contestation. The common denominator of these formations
was their transformation into relatively autonomous spheres of society, regu-
lated according to autonomous criteria.
Part of this process was the attempt to reconstruct the mundane-world
human personality and the sociopolitical and economic orders according to
the appropriate transcendental vision, to the principles of a higher ontologi-
cal order formulated in religious, metaphysical, and/or ethical terms—or,
in other words, the attempt to implement some aspect of a par ticu lar vision
in the mundane world. This new attitude toward the development of the
mundane world was closely related to concepts of a world beyond the im-
mediate boundaries of a par ticu lar society—a world open, as it were, to
reconstruction.
An important institutional formation that developed within all Axial
civilizations was a new type of societal center or centers constituted as the
major embodiment of the transcendental vision of ultimate reality or as the

major locus of the charismatic dimension of human existence. In contrast to
their non- or pre-Axial counterparts, these new centers attempted to perme-
ate the periphery and restructure it according to the prevailing Axial vision.
Axial civilizations also developed a strong tendency to constitute distinct
collectivities and institutional arenas as the most appropriate carriers of a
particular Axial vision—creating new “civilizational” collectivities, which
were often—though not always (as in the case of China)—religious in nature,
but in any case distinct from existing “primordial,” “ethnic,” local, political,
or religious collectivities. It is one of the most important features of these
broader civilizational frameworks that they were not tied to one political or
ethnic collectivity. They could encompass many different collectivities,
could impinge on existing political, territorial, or kinship collectivities and
institutions—challenging them or causing contestations among them over
the “cultural” or “ideological” primacy within the broader civilizational
framework. Ultimately, this led to continual reconstruction and transforma-
tion of the premises and contours of the different collectivities involved.
Such transformations were perhaps most clearly visible in the political
realm.6 The king-god, the embodiment of the cosmic and earthly order, dis-
appeared, and the model of secular ruler appeared, who could still embody
sacral attributes, but who was in principle accountable to a higher order or
authority, to God and divine law. In other words, there emerged the possi-
bility of calling a ruler to judgment. A dramatic example is the priestly and
prophetic pronouncements of ancient Israel, which were transmitted to all
monotheistic civilizations. Similar concepts emerged in ancient Greece, in
India, and in China—most clearly manifested in the concept of the Mandate
of Heaven.
A parallel development was the transformation of family and kinship re-
lations, to some extent also of economic relations. They often emerged as
distinct autonomous symbolic and institutional arenas, disembedded from
broader ascriptive formations and the criteria and modes of justification
governing them.
Another development was the emergence of a new type of reflexivity
rooted in “theory,” and of new criteria of justification and legitimation of
the social and the political order. That entailed the possibility of principled
critical examination of these orders and their premises, the awareness that
alternative institutional arrangements were possible and could challenge

existing institutions—including the possibility of a revolutionary transfor-
mation of these institutions.7
These new patterns of reflexivity were closely connected with the develop-
ment of new forms of cultural creativity. On the “intellectual” level, elaborate
and highly formalized theological and philosophical discourses flourished,
organized in different worlds of knowledge and in manifold disciplines.
Within these discourses, the tension between new cultural concepts and the
mundane reality was played out—for example between cosmic time and the
mundane political realm, between different concepts of historia sacra in rela-
tion to the flow of mundane time, between sacred and mundane space. New
types of collective memory and corresponding narratives developed.8
The specific kind of reflexivity, especially second-order thinking, charac-
teristic of Axial visions or programs, produced a number of internal antino-
mies or tensions. The most important of these tensions concerned, first, the
great range of possible transcendental visions and the ways of their imple-
mentation; second, the distinction between reason and revelation or faith
(or their equivalents in nonmonotheistic Axial civilizations); and third, the
problematique of whether the full institutionalization of these visions in
pristine form is desirable.
One outcome of these modes of reflexivity was the fact that the new soci-
etal centers, institutional frameworks, and distinct “civilizational” collectivi-
ties were no longer taken for granted; they were no longer perceived as “natu-
rally” given, either by divine prescription or by the power of custom. They
could become the object of contestation between different elites and groups.
That such relatively autonomous elites and groups existed was itself a dis-
tinctive characteristic of Axial civilizations. They were responsible for the
unique dynamics of these civilizations—namely, the possibility of princi-
pled, ideological confrontation between hegemonic and challenging groups
and elites, of the continual confrontation between orthodoxy and hetero-
doxy (or sectarian activities), and the potential combination of such con-
frontations with political struggles over power, with movements of protest,
with economic and class conflicts—all of them creating challenges to the
existing regimes and their legitimation.
The confrontation between heterodoxy and orthodoxy was by no means
limited to matters of ritual, religious observance, or patterns of worship.
What the various “orthodox” and most of the “heterodox” conceptions had
in common was the will to reconstruct the mundane world according to
their respective Axial visions. They were bound together in their struggle—a
struggle through which most elites were transformed, to follow Max Weber’s
designation of the ancient Israelite prophets, into potential “political dema-
gogues” who often attempted to mobilize wider popu lar support for the
visions they promulgated.
The continual confrontation between hegemonic and secondary elites
and between orthodoxy and heterodoxy has been of crucial importance in
shaping the concrete institutional formations and dynamics of the various
Axial civilizations. It generated the possibility of development within these
civilizations, even of revolutionary changes and transformations. It is of
special importance in this regard that is was sectarian activities that were
among the most important carriers of the broader, often universalistic ori-
entations inherent in Axial cosmological visions. The implications of these
developments were summarized by Arnason as follows:
The cultural mutations of the Axial Age generated a surplus of mean-

ing, open to conflicting interpretations and capable of creative adapta-
tion to new situations. But the long-term consequences can only be
understood in light of the interaction between cultural orientations
and the dynamics of social power. The new horizons of meaning could
serve to justify or transfigure, but also to question and contest existing
institutions. They were, in other words, invoked to articulate legiti-
macy as well as protest. More specific versions of both of these alterna-
tives emerged in conjunction with the social distribution, accumula-
tion and regulation of power. The dynamic of ideological formations
led to the crystallization of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, more pro-
nounced and polarizing in some traditions than others. In that sense,
the history of ideological politics can be traced back to the Axial Age.
But the development of new cultural orientations should not be seen
as evidence of a thoroughgoing cultural determinism; rather, it entails
the complex interplay of patterns and processes and is conducive to
more autonomous action by a broader spectrum of social actors and
forces.9
With respect to the constitution of different patterns of collective identity,

the very distinction between different collectivities generated the possibility
that primordial, civil, and sacred themes could be recombined on the local,
regional, and central level in ever new ways, and be reconstructed in relation
to sacral civilizational themes—including the possibility of continual con-
frontation between them. No single locus, not even the centers of the most
centralized European empires, could effectively monopolize all these themes.
Rather, they were represented on different levels of social organization by
different collectivities—“ethnic,” political, civic, and religious—each with
relatively high levels of self-consciousness and different conceptions of time
and space.
The tendency within Axial civilizations to constantly reconstitute institu-
tional formations was reinforced by the fact that a new type of intersocietal
and intercivilizational world history emerged. All Axial civilizations devel-
oped a certain propensity to expansion and combined ideological and reli-
gious with political and, to some extent, economic impulses. To be sure,
political, cultural, and economic interrelations between different societies—
including the development of types of international or “world” systems—
existed throughout human history.10 Concepts of a universal or world king-
dom had emerged in many pre-Axial civilizations, for example in the Mongol
Empire of Genghis Khan and his descendants.11 However, it was only with
the crystallization of Axial civilizations that a more distinctive ideological
mode of expansion developed in which considerations of power and eco-
nomic interest became closely related to ideological premises and indeed
imbued by them.
The zeal for reorganization and transformation of social formations ac-
cording to particular transcendental visions made the “whole world” at least
potentially subject to cultural-political reconstruction. Although often radi-
cally divergent in terms of their concrete institutionalization, the political
formations within Axial civilizations comprised representations and ideol-
ogies of a quasi-global empire. Some civilizations, at specific moments in
their history, even managed to build such an empire. This mode of expan-
sion also gave rise to attempts at creating “world histories” encompassing
different societies. However, there never existed one homogeneous world
history, nor were different types of civilizations similar or convergent in this
respect. Rather, a multiplicity of different and mutually impinging world

civilizations developed, each attempting to reconstruct the world according
to its basic premises either to absorb other civilizations or to consciously
segregate itself from them. In any case, the interrelations, contacts, and con-
frontations between different Axial and between Axial and non-Axial civi-
lizations constituted a fundamental aspect of their dynamics. Such contacts
were not only important transmitters of different cultural themes, thus giv-
ing rise to different patterns of syncretization of cultural and religious tropes;
they could also promote the crystallization of new—both pre-Axial and
Axial—civilizations, as was the case with the Ahmenid and Hellenistic em-
pires, with several southeast and east Asian civilizations, and of course with
Islam.12
It was the potential for change, the attempt, undertaken by different co-
alitions of elites, political activists, and other social actors, at reconstructing
the internal and transsocietal institutional formations, and the close linkage
with economic and class confl icts that constitute the core of the revolu-
tionary transformations within Axial civilizations. “Ethnic” group, political,
economic, and class conflicts became transformed into ideological ones;
conflicts between tribes, political regimes, could become missionary crusades
for the transformation of civilizations. All of this generated the possibility
of change far beyond existing formations.
Axial Visions and the Crystallization of Institutional Formations
The starting point of an analysis of the institutionalization of Axial visions

is naturally the emergence of these visions, the characteristics of their car-
riers, and the nature of the processes through which these visions were
institutionalized.
The most important characteristic of the carriers of Axial visions was their
relatively autonomous status as Kulturträger—for example the ancient Israel-
ite prophets and priests and later on the Jewish sages, the Greek philosophers
and sophists, the various precursors of the Chinese literati, the Hindu Brah-
mins, the Buddhist “monks” that later became the different Sanghas, and the
nuclei of the Ulema among the Islamic tribes and societies.
Such groups developed in all Axial civilizations; they constituted a new
social element, a distinct sociocultural mutation, a new type of religious or
cultural activist that differed greatly from the ritual, magical, or sacral spe-
cialist in pre-Axial civilizations. However, the conditions under which such
groups could arise have not yet been adequately addressed or systematically
analyzed in the social sciences. There are only indications to be found in the
literature—for example the observation, put forward by Bellah, that Axial
visionaries tend to emerge especially in secondary centers in relatively vol-
atile international settings, or the more general observation that charis-
matic tendencies are more likely to arise in periods of social turmoil and
disintegration.13
Only some of the carriers of Axial visions were successful in the sense
that their visions were institutionalized and became influential or even he-
gemonic in a respective society. In many cases, for example in some Greek
city-states, appropriate resources or organizational frameworks for their
implementation were not available or could not be mobilized.14 Even where
such visions were implemented, the resulting institutions differed consider-
ably, not only between different Axial civilizations, but also within the frame-
work of the same civilization—be it Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, or
Christian. The variety is clearly visible in different institutional choices
prevalent in different civilizations: full-fledged empires (such as the Chi-
nese, Byzantine, or Ottoman empires), rather fragile kingdoms or tribal
federations (e.g., ancient Israel), combinations of tribal federations and city-
states (e.g., ancient Greece), the complex decentralized pattern of the Hindu
civilization, or the imperial-feudal configurations of Europe. Moreover, all
these institutional formations developed their own distinctive dynamics
and were continuously changing, albeit in a different tempo and direction.
The general tendency in which new types of institutional formations de-
veloped was prescribed by the particular Axial vision. But this was only a
potentiality; the actualization and the nature of the exact modes of institu-
tionalization depended on specific conditions that were not given with the
Axial vision itself. In other words, the concretization of these potentialities,
the crystallization of new Axial institutional formations, was not given with
the mere development of an Axial vision. This helps to explain the great va-
riety of typically Axial institutions. And it suggests that in order to under-
stand the formation and dynamics of Axial civilizations and the nature of
their revolutionary impact on world history, we have to focus on the analysis
of the processes of their crystallization.
The institutionalization of Axial visions was contingent, first, on the de-

velopment and mobilization of the necessary resources for their implemen-
tation; second, on the availability of organizational frameworks which could
facilitate such mobilization; third, on the formation of a coalition between
the original carrier of a particular Axial vision and other actors—especially
political, economic, and communal activists, potential elites within a given
society.
As part of the process of institutionalization, new political, economic,
and communal elites emerged. They tended to become disembedded from
the major ascriptive frameworks; at the same time, they claimed autono-
mous access to the new order promulgated by an Axial vision, which resulted
in continual contestation about their status in relation to the new order.
These elites were usually recruited and legitimized according to distinct
autonomous criteria, promulgated by the elites themselves. They did not think
of themselves as only performing specific technical or functional activities—
for example as scribes—but indeed as carrying a distinct cultural and social
order manifest in the prevailing transcendental vision of this society. They
often acquired a countrywide status and claimed an autonomous place within
the institutional formations.
But with the successful institutionalization of a particular Axial vision,
the carriers of that vision became part of the ruling coalitions, participating
in the activities and mechanisms of control and in the regulation of power.
Thus the institutionalization of Axial visions often entailed far-reaching
transformations of the major social and political elites; they all tended to
become more autonomous, claiming a place in the promulgation of the Ax-
ial vision, while at the same time challenging the monopoly of the carriers
of these visions in the process of their institutionalization. Meanwhile, the
growing—if, by comparison with modern societies, still rather limited—
autonomy of the major institutional formations led to the parallel develop-
ment of relatively autonomous media of exchange—power, money, influ-
ence, and solidarity—especially as they became attributed to particular
societal sectors—which, in turn, exacerbated the problems of regulation and
coordination within these societies.15 With respect to both the extent of au-
tonomy of different elites and the new institutional formations and media of
exchange, Axial civilizations could differ markedly.
In India, for example, a very high degree of autonomy among religious elites
stands in contrast to a lower degree among political elites. While there was a
relatively small degree of differentiation of political roles among the broader
strata, European societies developed a much greater degree of autonomy and
differentiation among all elites. Similarly, far-reaching differences existed be-
tween the different imperial agrarian regimes, as the comparison between the
Byzantine and Chinese empires clearly indicates, in the structure of their elites,
centers, and their developmental dynamics, despite the fact that they shared
rather similar degrees (and relatively high ones for historical societies) of struc-
tural and organizational differentiation in the economic and social arenas.
In many Axial societies, the different institutional frameworks—political,
economic, cultural, and religious—also acquired a certain degree of auton-
omy. This is most apparent in the case of empires, but it is also visible in
other political formations (for example in patrimonial formations) when
compared with non-Axial civilizations. Although, in their basic structural
characteristics, many Axial formations are seemingly similar to their coun-
terparts in pre-Axial or non-Axial civilizations, for example the patrimo-
nial societies in southeast Asia, they developed distinct characteristics that
set them apart from pre- or non-Axial societies.
The Distinctive Dynamics of Axial Institutional Formations
The variety of institutional patterns and their potential to change was sig-
nificantly greater in Axial civilizations. Both variety and changeability were
the result of multiple factors: a multiplicity of cultural orientations; different
ecological and social settings; their volatility; the continuous encounter and
contestation between different social, economic, religious, and cultural ac-
tors and elites within these settings.
As in other historical cases, any such institutional formation is character-
ized by different relations between social structure and cosmological vision,
manifest in the constitution of institutional boundaries and in different
affinities between symbolic orientations and geopolitical conditions and struc-
tural formations.
The openness of the relation between “cosmological” visions, ecological
settings, and institutional formations is of special importance in the case of
what Talcott Parsons called “seedbed societies”—early ancient Greece and

ancient Israel being prime illustrations.16 The characteristic feature of these
societies has been a discrepancy between the potential institutional range of
their basic visions and the concrete possibilities of their institutionalization—
resulting in the fact that many of the institutional potentialities of their
visions were in a sense “stored,” to be transmitted as components of institu-
tional settings and dynamics of other civilizations.
Each institutional formation is also characterized by different ways of in-
corporating non- or pre-Axial symbolic and institutional components. Even
in new Axial settings, such non-Axial orientations and their carriers still
played an important part in the cultural and institutional dynamics of these
societies. They created autonomous spaces, which could remain very influ-
ential within the new Axial civilization, often persisting (as in the case of
Egypt) over a long period of time. They could also (as in the case of Japan)
create their own very important niches in an international framework dom-
inated by Axial civilizations.17
The distinctive dynamics of each institutional formation were generated by
the internal tensions and contradictions that developed in the course of the
institutionalization of Axial frameworks, by the tensions and contradictions
between these processes and the basic Axial premises of each civilization, and
by the ways in which these societies were incorporated into the international
framework that was the result of the expansion of particular civilizations.
These dynamics intensified the consciousness of the tensions, antinomies, and
contradictions inherent in the Axial cultural programs and their institution-
alization, which in turn gave rise to the continual reinterpretation of the
premises of each Axial civilization. The distinct relations between orthodoxy
and heterodoxy and their combination with power structures and economic
interests could create—or block—new developmental possibilities, different
potentially evolutionary paths. One such development—that of “Western”
Christianity—gave rise to the postrevolutionary transformation of the first
modernity, which then expanded throughout the world, encountering other
Axial civilizations in their respective historical institutional and symbolic set-
tings. These encounters eventually gave rise to multiple modernities.
The fact that the potentialities of the crystallization of Axial symbolic and
institutional formations were dependent on broader evolutionary factors at-
tests to the fact that the tendency toward continuous expansion of the range
of human activities, the tendency toward a growing complexity of social

structures, to the “rationalization” and problematization of symbolic realms18
and of criteria for the justification of human activities and of social order is,
at least potentially, inherent in all human societies. However, historical evi-
dence suggests that such potentialities were not realized in all societies that
had seemingly reached the “necessary” evolutionary stage, that the crystal-
lization of concrete institutional patterns is, therefore, not assured or shaped
by the mere development or emergence of appropriate symbolic and struc-
tural evolutionary tendencies. In other words, the different institutional
patterns that crystallized in the Axial civilizations did not develop, as it
were, naturally or automatically as manifestations of a distinct stage of evo-
lutionary history. Nor was this process always peaceful. On the contrary, it
was usually connected with continual struggles between activists and groups
and their respective visions and adaptive strategies. Such contestations con-
stitute an important feature of all Axial civilizations.
Theoretical Implications: Evolutionary Tendencies,

Institutional Formations, Agency, and Control
The analysis of the processes of institutionalization within different Axial

civilizations has implications for sociological theory and the analysis of
world history.
The analysis indicates, first, that the crystallization of any institutional
pattern is dependent on social interaction. Second, that it is dependent on
mechanisms of control and regulation between major social actors, above
all between future elites. Third, the crystallization of institutional and sym-
bolic formations is effected by distinct types of actors, the emergence of
which constitutes itself a sociocultural mutation that is not predetermined
by broad evolutionary tendencies, even if such tendencies provide the basic
framework for such crystallizations. Fourth, historical contingencies play
an important role in the process of such crystallization.
The core of the crystallization of any concrete institutional formation is the
specification of distinctive boundaries of social interactions. Since the human
biological program is, to use Ernst Mayr’s expression, an “open program,”19
such boundaries are not predetermined genetically, but have to be constituted
through social interaction. Given this openness and the indeterminacy of the
relation between actors’ goals and the general conditions of their actions, the
crystallization of any concrete pattern of social interaction generates major
problems. The most important of these problems were already identified by
the founding fathers of sociology: the constitution of trust, regulation of
power, and provision of meaning and legitimation of social activities and
frameworks.20 In order to cope with these problems, distinct patterns of inter-
action between institutional formations—political, economic, or cultural—
and between collectivities develop, all of which tend to pursue systemic
tendencies of their own. The degree of their autonomy or predominance varies
in different societies, depending on the degree of embedment in broader
frameworks.
The inherent fragility of the constitution and reproduction of boundaries
demands the creation of mechanisms of social integration, regulation, and
control. Such regulation is effected by the activities of social actors; the most
important actors in this regard are those who structure the division of labor in
a society, those who articulate collective political goals, those who specify the
borders of different ascriptive social collectivities, and those who articulate
the basic cultural visions and models predominant in a particular society.
Such processes of control and regulation entail the transformation of ba-
sic symbolic orientations—cosmological visions—into “codes” or schemata.
Such codes are akin to what Weber called Wirtschaftsethik. This term does
not connote specific religious injunctions about the proper behavior in any
given sphere, nor is it merely a logical deduction from theological or philo-
sophical principles predominant in a given religion. Rather, it denotes a
general mode of “religious” or “ethical” orientation that shapes the major
criteria of evaluation and justification of human activities and institutional
formations—criteria which then serve as starting points in the regulation of
the flow and distribution of resources and media of exchange in a society.
Such regulation is supported by organizational means, especially by incen-
tives and sanctions, and exercised in public and semipublic rituals.
The mechanisms and processes of control within a society are hierarchi-
cally composed of many intermediate units that are strongly interconnected
horizontally, but less strongly vertically. Furthermore, the strength of verti-
cal linkages differs according to their position within the hierarchical order.
Lower-level controls manage short-term and local affairs, while higher-level
controls provide system-wide decision-making capabilities.21
Such mechanisms develop in all societies, but they differ with respect to
the degree of complexity: the more complex social and political systems and
civilizational frameworks become, the more autonomous and potentially
more fragile they tend to be. Axial civilizations provide an excellent illustra-
tion of the problems concerning the emergence of complex social systems
rooted in evolutionary tendencies. Following the analysis of Herbert Simon,
one could say that the modes of institutional formation within Axial civili-
zations gave rise to potentially fragile modes of control, thus enhancing the
possibility of challenge and transformation, which in turn led to multiple
new and ever-changing institutional formations.
The preceding analysis indicates that institutional formations, though
rooted in evolutionary tendencies and potentialities, cannot be designated
as natural manifestations of particular stages in the process of social evolu-
tion. Rather, they must be seen as a contingent outcome of a particular his-
torical constellation that allowed for a multitude of possible ways of devel-
opment. The major dimensions of the social and cultural order within Axial
civilizations developed, at least to some extent, independently of one an-
other and often in opposite directions, each pushed, as it were, by its own
momentum. Second, this development is exacerbated by the fact that the
crystallization of specific patterns of the social always takes place under
contingent historical and geopolitical conditions. Third, and most impor-
tantly, any such crystallization is effected by distinct types of agency, by
entrepreneurial activities that mobilize available resources and develop
appropriate patterns of regulation for the flow of these resources.
The emergence of new institutional entrepreneurs and their visions con-
stitutes a distinct mutation which developed in different historical situa-
tions and in different parts of the world in seemingly unpredictable ways,
producing very different orientations and worldviews (for example, this-
worldly and other-worldly orientations) with different institutional implica-
tions. The principled openness of any historical situation and of any evolu-
tionary stage of development means that attempts to implement a particular
institutional pattern can become subject to continual contestation.
The tendency of human activities to continuously expand their sphere of
influence potentially undermines whatever temporary equilibrium may have
been attained in any institutional formation with regard to the building of
trust, regulation of power, and legitimation of social order. It heightens the
awareness that any social order is arbitrary. The history of Axial civiliza-
tions and particularly that of modernity (with its Axial roots) attest to the
fact that any such extension entails both constructive and destructive
potentialities—a fact that has not been given full attention in sociological
analyses.22
Notes
1. Robert N. Bellah, “What Is Axial about the Axial Age?,” European Journal of
Sociology 46 (2005): 69–89.
2. On the concept of the Axial Age, see Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of
History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul / New Haven: Yale University Press,
1953 [1949]); Eric Voegelin, Order and History, 5 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1986–1987); Benjamin I. Schwartz, “The Age of Transcen-
dence,” Daedalus 104, no. 2 (1975): 1–7; Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “The Axial Age:
The Emergence of Transcendental Visions and the Rise of Clerics,” European
Journal of Sociology 23 (1982): 294–314; see also nn. 3 and 4 below.
3. This analysis is based on Eisenstadt, “The Axial Age”; Eisenstadt, ed., The
Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1986); Eisenstadt, ed., Kulturen der Achsenzeit I: Ihre Ursprünge und
ihre Vielfalt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987); Eisenstadt, ed., Kulturen der
Achsenzeit II: Ihre institutionelle und kulturelle Dynamik (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1992); Johann P. Arnason et al., eds., Axial Civilizations and World
History (Leiden: Brill, 2005).
4. See Eisenstadt, “Axial Civilizations and the Axial Age Reconsidered,” in Ar-
nason et al., eds., Axial Civilizations, 531–564, esp. 537–538; Johann P. Arnason,
“The Axial Age and Its Interpreters: Reopening a Debate,” in Arnason et al., eds.,
Axial Civilizations, 19–49; Eisenstadt, “The Civilizational Dimension in Sociolog-
ical Analysis,” Thesis Eleven 62 (2000): 1–21.
5. On the concept of free resources, see Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Em-
pires (New York: Free Press, 1963).
6. Eisenstadt, “Cultural Traditions and Political Dynamics: The Origins and
Modes of Ideological Politics,” British Journal of Sociology 32 (1981): 155–181.
7. See Bellah, “What Is Axial”; Yehuda Elkana, “The Emergence of Second-
Order Thinking in Classical Greece,” in Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity,
40– 64.
8. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Ilana Friedrich Silber, eds., Cultural Traditions
and Worlds of Knowledge: Explorations in the Sociology of Knowledge (Greenwich:
JAI Press, 1988).
9. Arnason, “The Axial Age and Its Interpreters,” 2–3.
10. On world systems, see for example André G. Frank and Barry K. Gills, The
World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? (London: Routledge, 1993);
J. Friedman and Michael J. Rowlands, “Notes towards an Epigenetic Model of the
Evolution of Civilizations,” in Friedman and Rowlands, eds., The Evolution of So-
cial Systems (London: Duckworth, 1977); Immanuel M. Wallerstein, World-
Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
11. Michal Biran, “The Mongol Transformation: From the Steppe to Eurasian
Empire,” in Johann P. Arnason and Björn Wittrock, eds., Eurasian Transforma-
tions, Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries: Crystallizations, Divergences, Renaissances
(Leiden: Brill, 2004), 339–363; Biran, Chinggis Khan (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007).
12. See the respective chapters in Arnason et al., Axial Civilizations.
13. Bellah, “What Is Axial”; see also n. 14 below.
14. Kurt A. Raaf laub, “Polis, ‘The Political,’ and Political Thought: New Depar-
tures in Ancient Greece, c. 800–500 BCE,” in Arnason et al., eds., Axial Civiliza-
tions, 253–283; Eisenstadt, The Political Systems.
15. Talcott Parsons, American Society: A Theory of the Societal Community
(Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2007).
16. Talcott Parsons, The Evolution of Societies (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall,
1977), 13; see also pp. 99–114 on the “Cultural Legacies for Later Societies: The
Hebrew and Greek Concepts of a Moral Order.”
17. Eisenstadt, Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1996).
18. Eisenstadt, The Great Revolutions and the Civilizations of Modernity
(Leiden: Brill, 2006).
19. Ernst Mayr, Evolution and the Diversity of Life: Selected Essays (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press, 1976).
20. For details, see Eisenstadt, “Action, Resources, Structure, and Meaning,” in
Eisenstadt, Power, Trust, and Meaning: Essays in Sociological Theory and Analysis
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 328–389.
21. Herbert A. Simon, “The Architecture of Complexity,” Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society 106, no. 6 (1962): 467– 482; Simon, Models of Dis-
covery: And Other Topics in the Methods of Science (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977), esp.
chap. 4 on “Complexity.”
22. For attempts in this direction, see for example Edward A. Tiryakian, “War:
The Covered Side of Modernity,” International Sociology 14 (1999): 473– 489; Hans
Joas, War and Modernity (Oxford: Polity Press, 2003); Eisenstadt, “Barbarism and
Modernity: The Destructive Components of Modernity,” in Eisenstadt, Compara-
tive Civilizations and Multiple Modernities II (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 561–571; Eisen-
stadt, ed., Max Weber on Charisma and Institution Building: Selected Papers (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
12
Axial Religions and the
Problem of Violence
david martin
Pre-Axial religion in archaic societies was replete with sex and violence. Ide-
ally, sex and violence should be treated together, because both are associated
with tribal survival as well as with forms of antisocial ecstasy and excess.
However, my concern here is solely with violence, because it poses the most
acute problems for Axial religion and is a key element in the crucial differ-
ence between Us and Them.
Axial religion has many different characteristics. Whereas pre-Axial reli-
gion is often bound in with the powers of Nature, its temporal rhythms and
cycles, Axial religion either abandons such cycles for timelessness or creates
a forward-looking narrative whereby salvation comes in history. Whereas
pre-Axial religion accords reverence to inanimate objects as though they
were active agents representing “the powers,” Axial religion dismisses such
reverence as idolatry. Whereas pre-Axial religion is tribal, Axial religion is
universalistic. These wide-ranging differences are worked out in a number
of ways and in different sectors of human activity, for example the dynamics
of power and wealth. These ways are analyzed by Max Weber in two famous
essays, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Direction,” and “The
Social Psychology of the World Religions,” and in what follows I implicitly
combine Weber’s analysis with Karl Jaspers’ understanding of the Axial Age
as presented by Robert Bellah.1 My focus is on that kind of ambivalent rejec-
tion of the world represented by Christianity. Christianity accepts the Cre-
ation and the social order as in principle good but fallen and in need of re-
demption. That redemption crucially entails the establishment of a universal
reign of peace and the rejection of violence. My argument focuses on the
Axial Religions and the Problem of Violence 295
clash between the social logic of human solidarity, which exhibits the mu-
tual entanglement of peace and war, and Christianity’s revolutionary at-
tempt to disentangle them. I assume that such disentanglement will only be
partially successful, and that Christianity itself will be partially pulled back
into the regimen of violence.
Biogenetic versus Cultural Understandings
My approach is rooted in the cultural sciences. Nevertheless, I approach the

problem sideways, beginning with the salience of the theme of violence and
religion today, because in the popular media, and biogenetic incursions into
the media, social-scientific approaches are ignored. Instead we have people
who should know better pointing accusingly, and in a simplistic manner, at
this or that outcrop of religious violence from the Crusades to September 11,
2001 (and the reaction of George W. Bush), and at the same time offering
generalized biogenetic explanations. So I need first to address approaches of
this kind before turning directly to the problem of religion and violence in
the context of the cultural sciences.
I begin with an obvious philosophical point. If religion and/or violence
are indeed part of our genetic program in the form, say, of “memes,” apart
from a few brave and intellectually superior persons who have the wit to
swat a meme before it bites, then moral accusation is beside the point. One
might as well complain to the winds and waves about tsunamis.
But that is incidental. There are also important historical and cultural
observations to be made. One major version of the biogenetic approach
“blames” religion for being an “unconscious” tendency to treat the inani-
mate as animate, built in to the psychic basement. This is an old theory in
modern guise, just as “memes” look like a revised version of William Mc-
Dougall’s psychology of instincts. However, the universal religion of the
Axial Age is defined, notwithstanding the richness of imagery in Catholi-
cism and Orthodoxy, by an adamant rejection of the confusion between
animate and inanimate as idolatrous. Biogeneticists characteristically talk
about “explaining” religion, as though the concept of religion were all of a
piece and not an essentially contested category.
Then there is, of course, an enormous variety of evidence illustrating the
sheer range of “religious” manifestations. If the biogenetic approach somehow
manages to circumvent this, as Pascal Boyer claims, it is still difficult to see

how the cultural variations in secularity and secularization can be explained
by a biological constant.2 Whereas Darwin thought that the universality of
the idea of God counted in its favor, the cultural variation in the incidence of
secularization counts against a universal biogenetic explanation of religion.
The Czech Republic, the former German Democratic Republic, and Estonia
exhibit the lowest indices of nominal adherence and active religious involve-
ment in Europe, but these indices have nothing to do with a sudden atrophy of
the “meme” for religion, or of the tendency to detect agency where there is
none, or an inexplicable eradication of the religious virus.
Of course, if you resort to the tactic of labeling all fanaticism as an in-
stance of religion, irrespective of whether it propagates or suppresses what is
normally understood by religion, then one could argue that the religious
meme of Communism simply replaced that of Christianity. To do that, how-
ever, is culpably to ignore the obvious cultural and historical explanation. In
the Czech case, to take just one example, that explanation is rooted in the
specific history of Czech Lands, and, incidentally, one not applicable to Slo-
vakia, which has a far more positive historical relation to Catholicism, more
like that of the Poles than of the Czechs. The myth of Czech nationalism is
rooted in the proto-Protestant and incipiently radical Hussite movement of
the fifteenth century and not in Counter-Reformation Catholicism, which
replaced and literally displaced it after the Czechs were defeated at the Battle
of the White Mountain in 1625. Czech liberalism looked back to the Hussites
for inspiration, and, given the failure of the Western liberal democracies to
succor the Czechs in their hour of need in 1938, there was a considerable
volume of support for the Communist takeover a decade later. Catholicism
was on the wrong foot, therefore, when it came to defending itself against
Communist indoctrination, and extensive secularization was the result. The
contrast with Poland has its historical roots in the positive relation of Polish
nationalism to Catholicism, not in the reinforced virulence of the religious
“meme” east of the Elbe and north of the Tatra Mountains.
The Dubious Light of the French Enlightenment
A historical explanation is also available to help us appreciate the difference

between the French Enlightenment and the American one when it comes to
understanding the social role of religion. The secularization associated with
the French Enlightenment is a specific historical construct occurring in

given conditions and it combines a rationalist theory of secularization with
a historical proposal for its implementation. It describes and prescribes, as
well as elevating itself as the normative Enlightenment above all others. By
contrast, the American Enlightenment is a construct that arose in very dif-
ferent sociohistorical conditions, and it treats religion as a source of cohe-
sion, peace, and political liberty.
The essential point here is the historically and socially located character
of our theories of religion, and it trails an obvious corollary: we should be
very cautious when generalizing about the social role of religion treated as a
generic category. It should not be necessary to stress this obvious maxim
since it is taken for granted in the social-scientific community. Yet it is nec-
essary here because those promoting biogenetic approaches seem to have
thrown scientific caution to the winds. What now follows depends on con-
tinuing to observe that scientific caution. That means keeping an open mind
about any biogenetic contribution, say, to all the phenomena of social soli-
darity and conflict, while seeing how much is more plausibly understood in
sociohistorical terms. It is, I imagine, on the cards that what makes good
sociological sense in terms of solidarity, and its corollary, conflict, has also
been selected for in the course of evolution.
Interestingly enough, the contemporary critique of religion attributing to
it, and also blaming it for, a supposed peculiar association with violence and
oppression, revives the old moral and rationalist position transferred to a
biogenetic framework. That comes out in the tendency to treat religious af-
firmations as positive empirical and logical assertions, and therefore part of
the vast corpus of failed science. There seems to be little sense of the nature
of religious language as debated philosophically and analyzed in the sci-
ences of religion and in anthropology and sociology.
Moreover, the hostile and rationalist tradition deriving from the French
Enlightenment has itself been a major source of violence, arguably far more
so than the “religious” (Christian and Deist) tradition of the American En-
lightenment. Notoriously the Jacobin variant of the French Revolution is
one of the many dramatic and instructive instances of secular ideology re-
producing precisely the violence and oppression it identifies as specially as-
sociated with religion, and therefore destined to disappear once religion has
been adequately suppressed, if necessary with violence. Once again one has
to apologize for referring to the history of Marxism in Soviet Russia, Maoist
China, North Korea, Cambodia, and Ethiopia in order to suggest that there
may be something more endemic about violence than would be the case if it
could be in large measure suppressed simply by repressing religion. Would
it were so easy, and would that secularist ideologies were not so fatally prone
to think that one great orgy of suppression and violent eradication with re-
spect to one particular type of human institution could at a stroke take us
from darkness to light. It is more plausible to suppose that violence has an
endemic character, rooted in human association as such, and it is that en-
demic character the present argument aims to bring out.
Here I refer to the work of S. N. Eisenstadt where he suggests that the Ja-
cobin version of the Enlightenment can be seen as a secular mutation of the
sectarian and millenarian strand within Christianity.3 This suggestion is
not to be seen as yet another deployment of the rhetorical tactic which shifts
the boundary of what is to count as religion by treating all forms of fanati-
cism as religious. Rather it shows what is likely to occur when the eschato-
logical judgment of God at the End of History is enacted here and now on
earth. During the long centuries of established Christendom, the millenar-
ian and sectarian witness exhibited a dual nature: pacifist and potentially
violent, anarchic and totalitarian, immanent and transcendent, all in differ-
ent combinations. Thus the anarchistic elements that emerged in the Hus-
site and Puritan revolutions could envisage human beings as immanent
gods, and therefore able to renew the earth and human society. At the same
time, these have been shadowed, or preceded and succeeded by, pacifist and
quietist movements of withdrawal, such as the Mennonites and the Quak-
ers. These wait in patience for the renewal wrought by a transcendent God.
He alone is able to bring the earth and everything within it to a primal and/
or final perfection. For the most part the sectarian and millenarian strand
in Christianity awaited a renewal of the earth to be wrought by the action of
God. The Kingdom would come when least expected, like a thief in the night.
However, once the sectarian tradition mutated and took on immanent
and secular form, the restraints exercised by the transcendence of God were
removed and the violent potential could, under favorable conditions, be re-
leased. In Marxism and in anarchism alike, violence could be legitimated
and justified precisely because it brought in the kingdom of freedom. You
cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs. Thus secular ideology shares
with the sectarian strand of Christianity a dual potential, for pacifism and
for violence, except that the violent potential is enhanced in the secular
variant. By a further paradox, the pacifist revolution, locked in sectarian
capsules like the Quakers, slowly seeps out into the social mainstream in
any number of reforms, including liberal educational and peace movements.
The year 1816 saw the origins of modern peace movements, and can be seen
as a benchmark for a partial transition from sectarian pacifism to liberal
pacificism and internationalism.
The Entanglement of Violent and Pacific
The dual potential, pacific and violent, found in both religious and secular
visions of a better world to come illustrates a fundamental characteristic of
human association to be canvassed below, for which one might borrow the
natural-scientific term “entanglement.” However, it is all too easy for West-
ern liberals to suppose that liberalism is the great exception. Christianity in
mainstream and sectarian forms may have a dual nature by reason of en-
tanglement, and anarchism likewise, but liberalism is by definition only
benign. Of course, if true liberalism is by definition solely benign the same
applies to true Christianity, true anarchism, and true Marxism. But we are
dealing with really existing liberalism, and its failure to perform according
to its own self-image stems from the dual nature written into the fundamen-
tal logic of liberalism. This then is the point at which to illustrate this dual
nature before indicating how it inheres in human solidarity as such.
It has always been part of the Marxist critique of liberalism that the pa-
cific and internationalist potential liberals attributed to free trade was in
practice only another version of the beneficent invisible hand hiding the
aggressive capitalist pursuit of markets. That at least was the argument of
the theory of imperialism put forward by J. A. Hobson and by V. I. Lenin.4
The argument is not without force, in particular in the contemporary world
when it comes to the politics of oil and other scarce raw materials. But ag-
gression and violence is also built into the logic of liberalism in a way
brought out in a recent book by the philosopher John Gray.5 It seems that
Gray holds two incompatible positions, which are reconcilable if you draw
the boundary separating the religious from the secular in a different place.
On the one hand, he holds that the Enlightenment itself simply translates
the eschatological and deluded historical telos of Christianity, so that the
horrors of the twentieth century are merely the latest chapters in the history
of religion. At the same time, by shifting the boundary of what is to count as
religion, he argues that the ideological sources of what is widely seen as reli-
giously inspired violence are not only European but starkly secular, for ex-
ample the violent anarchist teachings in the Bakuninite tradition that in-
spired the Baader-Meinhof gang, as well as the technique of suicide bombing
invented by the Marxist-inspired Tamil Tigers. What matters most in the
context of this discussion, however, is that he includes liberal and enlight-
ened hopes of installing liberal democracy, if necessary by violence, under
the head of unreal and deluded hopes.
One such hope is represented by Francis Fukuyama’s idea of an end to
history once liberal democracy is installed everywhere as in some way the
natural destiny of humankind.6 Under all the apparent variations of a pro-
tean and often oppressive human species-being lurks a lovely liberal just
waiting for the touch of historical opportunity, if necessary made available
by appropriate violence, to emerge into the light. Liberal imperialism has a
long history, and it was the two most advanced liberal democracies, France
and Britain, who were its most successful practitioners. Notoriously they
retained most of the liberal sweetness and light for their own consumption,
just as they retained other products of imperialism for their own consump-
tion, but the logic of liberal imperialism is clear enough in its own right. For
liberal imperialists, the hand of history may need a violent nudge from time
to time to achieve the liberal consummation, nor are there lacking instances
where such a position has something to be said for it. Not all violent inter-
ventions are unjustified, even though they are usually powered by obvious
material interests.
Violence, Nationalism, and Ethnic Cleansing
If our concern is with really existing liberalism rather than the usual self-
congratulatory checklist of all the liberal virtues unattended by any correla-
tive costs, then we need also to consider the violence that logically inheres in
the ideology of liberal nationalism, and in the right of every ethnic group to
self-governance. This is especially revealing because it exposes the potential
violence inherent in all forms of human solidarity, not merely the solidarity
conferred by religion. The origins of nationalism are much disputed be-
tween those who regard it as a product of early modernity and those who
trace a consciousness of tribal kind much further back, including an early
template provided by the elect status claimed for the Jews in the Hebrew
Scriptures. That early template also exhibited a Janus-face, because an initial
liberation was followed by the ethnic cleansing of the “people of the land.”
In the early modern period, the glory of the nation was focused in the mon-
arch, and the initial expulsions of minorities, in Spain and France for exam-
ple, were of a religious character. However, the logic of national homogeneity
and of the need to secure the dominance of the ethnically central or core
group replicated itself in all subsequent forms of nationalism. The same logic
applied, whether the nationalism was religious or secular, liberal or otherwise.
Whereas in the multiethnic Ottoman and Habsburg empires a Muslim or
Catholic core culture was compatible with the continued coexistence of many
different groups and ethnicities, once nationalism and ethnic self-governance
were conceded, ethnic or ethnoreligious expulsions followed.7
America and France are usually regarded as examples of civic rather than
ethnic nationalism, but they exemplify the same logic of nationalism. France
has a liberal polity, but it released the Jews from the ghetto only on condi-
tion that they conceded the supremacy of a French identity over their com-
munal religious identity. In the United States, all identities, whether reli-
gious or ethnic, were required to concede supremacy to an American identity,
starting with the “native Americans.” In the same way, contemporary mul-
ticulturalism is everywhere no more than the acceptance of different sub-
identities within the overall framework of a majority and dominant identity,
British, Dutch, or whatever. Liberal democracy demands no less. Instances
of ethnic cleansing initiated by secular regimes are provided by Turkey in
1922 and by the Communist government in Bulgaria. Russian nationalism
at the present time is directed against numerous minorities of all kinds. The
early stages of liberal nationalism in Britain were marked by stern measures
against minority nationalities. The pressure toward uniformity around a
core identity, even where that is broadly defined, is based on a logic of attack
as the best form of defense, and on some kind of limit to the range of accept-
able difference. In World War II, the Japanese minority in the American
West was badly treated even though evidence of treasonable activity was
minimal. After 1945, vast numbers of Germans were expelled from coun-
tries where they had been domiciled for centuries, to create homogeneous
national entities. Nations based on a core ethnic identity construct a myth

of their historical role, as victim, or bearer of civilization, or whatever. Can-
ada is perhaps the obvious case of a multiethnic national identity, but only at
the expense of a mixture of territorial segregation and the fragmentation
represented by federalism and local autonomy.
Axial Revolution and Counterrevolution
It does not matter whether we are talking about ideological or political soli-
darity, or national or religious solidarity, the establishment of a sentiment of
unity is achieved at the expense of a potentially divisive relationship with
the Other. When the Axial religions attempt to create a sense of the unity of
humanity as made in the image of God, they find themselves potentially at
war with rival expressions of that unity, or with persistent particularities, as
well with the centripetal pull of particular imperial identities priding them-
selves on being coextensive with civilization, as in China or Rome. In sum-
mary, universalism does not do away with boundaries. Rather, the bound-
ary originally marking off the natural group is transferred elsewhere, for
example, between rival universalisms. Universalism actually conflicts with
the fragmentation represented by contiguous particularisms, and that con-
flict usually becomes realized because a universalism is normally carried by
the interests of an expansive imperial center.
What, then, of the attempt on the part of the universal or quasi-universal
Axial religions to overcome the potential of local solidarities for violence
against the Other by condemning in its core scriptures the inbuilt aggres-
sive tendency of all forms of human solidarity? For present purposes it is not
crucial whether or not these tendencies are fueled to some extent by biologi-
cal programs rooted in the requirements of survival, notably among males.
Axial faith requires a radical devaluation of the logic of defense through
preemptive attack, and of the potential for endless and murderous feuding
that goes with it. This is where violence is linked to sexuality, since the dy-
namic of group survival is supported by the biological imperative to create a
tribe as numerous as the sands of the seashore. I deliberately use this figure
from the Hebrew Scriptures because the announcement of a humanity uni-
versally bearing the image of God in the book of Genesis is still attended by
a pre-Axial pressure to reproduce. In the same way, the tendency of Axial

religion to lay stress on the inward appropriation of the moral law is still at-
tended by the demand for “outward” and automatic ritual performance.
The most dramatic expressions of Axial religion are found in monastic
brotherhoods renouncing the imperatives of sex and violence, and the
appearance of such brotherhoods can be treated as an index of the radical
embrace of Axial principles. A monastic brotherhood stands over against
the blood brotherhood of imputed consanguinity and of arms. A monk di-
vorces himself from the “natural” demands of the territorial group and sets
up a protected community of peaceful and celibate men in the wilderness
and the solitary place. There is perhaps a difference here between the two
most obvious instances of the monastic principle in Buddhism and Christi-
anity. Insofar as classical Buddhism lacks a teaching concerning a good
Creator responsible for what is in principle a good creation, it initiates a
permanent pacific withdrawal without at the same time attempting to real-
ize a good creation here on earth. The same may be true of the kind of radi-
cal dualism found in Catharist heresy, where the aim of the last sacrament is
not to sanctify this material world but to depart from it into the world of
light. In that case, the dual nature of eschatological anticipation, pacific and
violent, disappears.
The Revision of Sacrifice
Pre-Axial religion, as Bellah and Charles Taylor point out, often involves
violent sacrifice in order to maintain the survival of the group and the fruit-
fulness of nature.8 That violent impulse needs to be redirected in a manner
compatible with Axial religion. Here we enter the profound mysteries of teach-
ings about salvation through the oblation of the self in a manner absolutely
contrary to the imperatives either of blood brotherhoods of arms or of codes
of honor. It is in the ethical revision of the practice of sacrifice that the Axial
revolution is most evidently realized, since it includes the possibility of a new
understanding based on a free-will offering or thanksgiving. In its developed
Christian form the gift is fused with a simultaneous self-offering of man to
God and God to man in the person of the God-man, Jesus Christ, thereby
ushering in the interim consummation of history indicated by the last words
from the cross, “It is finished.” It is an interim consummation because the End
only comes with the arrival of the Kingdom of God beyond history. If this
deployment of theological code language seems surprising in a sociological
discussion, that is because I do not believe there is a metalanguage into
which theology may be translated without a loss of essential character.
One way to approach the revision of the practice of sacrifice can be found
in the Christian typological account of Abraham’s divinely aborted sacrifice
of Isaac. God’s intervention deflects the knife onto the scapegoat, seen as a
substitute sacrifice, which is in turn deflected onto God in Christ. Christ ac-
cepts the burden of sin and carries it away, supremely so when he transcends
all the negative reciprocities of violence with unrequited forgiveness. In the
language of the New Testament, Christ takes into himself the murderous
fracture in human relations represented by Cain, absorbing the wound and
the demand of the law that justice be satisfied into his own broken body.
Once God in love has taken the brokenness of humanity on himself, hu-
manity is once more made whole: the Father receives the Prodigal and puts
on him the robe of grace.
No doubt one can regard the language just used as a theological summary
of a narrative myth, but the radical revision of earlier ideas about the hero
who physically defends his honor in mortal combat is clear. What was previ-
ously putting one’s body on the line in obedience to a code of honor has been
converted into honoring the law by losing one’s life for others and thereby
finding it. The religious insight about the efficacy of losing oneself to find
oneself is dramatized in the narrative of the Passion and the Resurrection.
The procession to the cross enacts self-offering in vulnerability and weakness
to the pent-up violence written in human relations, healing the wound by
receiving the wound. This is repeated in the pattern of the creed because in
Christ the divine descends into the contingency of human existence and
frustration that humanity may rise again in him, and with him ascend into
an unbroken communion. The interweaving and cross-referencing of motifs
to be found in the narrative, and in reflection on the narrative, is astonish-
ingly dense, but the social consequence is quite simple. Particular human
blood-brotherhoods united in the guilt of shedding blood (as the conspirators
who murdered Caesar were united in dipping their weapons in his blood),
give place to a universal brotherhood constituted by the blood donation of-
fered in love, and absorbed into the body as a medicine of immortality.
Once again I turn to Christian typology. The Christian typological revi-

sion achieved by superimposing the Passion and Resurrection onto the story
of Israel’s liberation from oppression through an exodus across the Red Sea
to liberty, measures the distance traveled in the moral judgment of violence,
and the imperatives of tribalism. As told in the Old Testament, the original
story exalts the Lord as a man of war, and as such he periodically licenses his
people to ethnically cleanse the “people of the land.” But that is not all.
Though the Christian understanding stands in opposition to the implica-
tions of the Exodus story, it stands in apposition to the eschatological vision
of universal peace centered on Jerusalem in Micah and Isaiah, except that
the place of the physical Jerusalem is taken by the spiritual “Jerusalem
above, the mother of us all.” In the same way, the place of the physical tem-
ple is taken by the spiritual body of Christ, broken outside Jerusalem but
resurrected and present wherever his friends come together.
Military Imagery Taken Over and Reasserted
This account of the Axial transition in Christianity represents the Christian

self-understanding as coded in the New Testament, but, of course, things in
history turned out rather differently, for reasons to be indicated below. Our
object here is to examine the social limits inhibiting the Axial revolution,
and even reversing it. Territoriality, the tribe, the biological family, and war-
fare are not so easily abolished. But as encoded in the New Testament, we
have the plenary presence of Axial characteristics, which, however much
reversed, are of world historical importance. We have the universality of
Genesis united with the prophetic hope of peace and a consummation of the
divine purposes, a transvaluation of violence, power, honor, and wealth, and
an inward appropriation of the spirit of the law, united with a trustful faith
whereby one is accounted righteous by grace in order better to fulfill the
works of the law. The metaphors of warfare, honor, and satisfaction are com-
mandeered in the ser vice of the nonviolent “warfare of the cross”; the Son of
Man is crowned with glory and honor on account of his humble obedience
“even unto death”; and those who are “in him” are armed with “the sword of
the spirit” and “the helmet of salvation.” Even the metaphors of manly
achievement in athletics are taken over and applied to those who run the
straight race for the laurel and for the crown of spiritual glory.
That, then, is the coding, and it represents an appropriation of the pano-

ply of warfare and manly heroism so radical that it will be countered by the
realities of social life. These will partly reverse the coding, pushing it below
the surface in underground and sectarian forms. The injunction to “call no
man father” and the claim that we are “all kings and priests,” for example,
taken together, are so far-reaching in their egalitarian implications that they
run counter to the social prerequisites of authority and functional special-
ization. The “natural” pressure of worldly power and wealth, and indeed
everything indicated by the Christian category of “the world,” will reappro-
priate the spiritualized imagery of warfare and status, creating a continuous
tension within Christian iconography, evident, for example, in the ideas of
the “parfit gentil knight” and the gentleman. A gentleman represents simul-
taneously a status and a moral disposition.
Creative Tension, Persistent Dichotomies
The Axial revolution in its Christian and indeed its Buddhist forms exter-
nalizes the inner tension working away within iconography through mo-
nasticism as well as through radical underground movements like the Poor
Men of Lyons. There are on the one hand the attainments of the average
sensual man or woman, and there are on the other hand the high prizes set
before the “athletes of God,” and this dichotomy is recognized in the dis-
tinction between the City of Man and the peaceable City of God. Earthly
temples return in the form of richly appointed basilicas, and sacred territo-
ries reappear with holy cities at their center, for example Rome, Santiago,
Cologne, and the holy sites of Ethiopia, the Isle of the City in Paris and in
Salisbury.9 In the early Byzantine Empire, the cathedral or principal church
replaced the forum and the agora, and the landed elites in conjunction with
the bishop replaced the curiales of the Roman Empire. It is instructive that
when pious ecclesiastics, like St. Theodore of Sykeon, sought to divert re-
sources to the poor in obedience to the Gospel, they found themselves op-
posed and in danger of being deposed. Once again the power and glory of
the city reasserted itself as Christianity became the property of propertied
elites. The saeculum was, literally, back in force. The pagans in the Byzantine
Empire, who continued to make sacrifices, did so in part to make appropri-
ate obeisance to the gods of the city, whereas Christians aspired to be citi-
zens of another city whose builder and maker is God, but they were pulled
nevertheless into the aura of the social sacred as the Christian emperor ac-
quired an exalted status as defender and enforcer of their faith.10
The Forward Thrust Bent Back

Another manifestation of the return of the irrepressible was bound to occur
in the sphere of ritual, where the forward pressure of eschatological hope
was bent back into the annual liturgical cycle. These were reconstituted in
the mold set by the Easter ceremonies in Jerusalem, no longer mournful and
deserted but once again regarded as a holy city. Not only was the saeculum
back but the social sacred as well, so that the inwardness of faith and trust
partly reverted to outward ceremony of the kind that took place in the the-
aters of the ancient city, for example the tumultuous rites of Diana of the
Ephesians. The inner purification and perfecting of the will can only go so
far before there is resort once more to materializations and to the tangible
signs or icons that the prophetic impulse condemns as idolatry. There are
inherent limits, and beyond a certain point purification turns self-destructive
in its attempt to escape the material.
That is another way of indicating that Émile Durkheim, in his analysis of
the power of the social sacred, and of ritual in sustaining it, was both pro-
foundly right and essentially wrong. There is perpetual recourse to a gener-
alized social sacred, celebrating an idealized vision of the group and uniting
the living with the ancestors. But in Christianity, as one of the most radical
expressions of the Axial Age, the communion of the Church has to be dis-
tinguished from the natural community, its rites of passage from the natu-
ral progressions of the life cycle, and its appeal to the foundation in Jesus
Christ (and in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) from any generalized invocation
of the ancestors.
These distinctions become attenuated as the centripetal power of the so-
cial sacred and its attendant rituals blunt the countercultural thrust of Chris-
tian radicalism. The Christian God is not, any more than the God of the
Hebrew Scriptures, a celestial reinforcement and projection of the sacred
ruler. Indeed, the reverence due to the Sacred Head of the King of spiritual
glory directly contradicted the reverence demanded by the Roman head of
state, in an oath known as the sacramentum. Nevertheless, the models
provided by the Davidic and Solomonic monarchies are always available for
redeployment by the monarchs of Christendom. King Edward the Sixth of
England even saw himself as another King Josiah in his rediscovery of “the
law.”11 Once Christianity becomes established, the Solomonic concept of
Wisdom sharply reduces the tensions of eschatological hope in favor of a
more quotidian commonsense. Though God and Caesar are assigned differ-
ent spheres in the Gospels, and the disciples are enjoined not to seek after
status in the manner of the gentiles, the day is bound to come when the
palace of the Byzantine emperor is part of an architectural complex that in-
cludes the Church of the Divine Wisdom. As ever, the spatial proximity of
the architecture confirms the symphonia of church and state. To take yet
another example, in the settled territories of Christendom the sacrament of
baptism, originally signifying the transition from death to life, becomes a
rite of automatic entry into the tribe. In its social function baptism approxi-
mates circumcision. Primitive Christianity experienced major conflict in
order to break loose from circumcision and thereby bring in the gentiles as
promised in the Magnificat and the last sentences of St. Matthew’s Gospel.
Yet it returned in another form as infant baptism, and was not seriously
challenged until the Radical Reformation restored the voluntary principle of
belonging.
Partial Reversions to Tribalism
Nationalism in its contemporary form is a relatively recent development,

but insofar as it carries forward the tribal principle and a sense of ethnic
belonging, it has deeper and longer historical roots. Sometime between the
fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, established Christianity began to mutate
into national forms, with all that implied for its relation to power in the state
and realpolitik in international relations. In the feudal period, the monastic
order of Cluny evolved into a hugely wealthy corporation spread across
much of Western Europe, and largely responsible for financing the recon-
quest of Spain from the Moors. In the post-Reformation period of national
states, Protestant and Catholic Christianity alike served to legitimate na-
tional monarchies and then popular nationalism. From 1789 on, local cir-
cumstances determined whether an elite or a popular nationalism opposed
or allied itself to Christianity. In France and Italy, nationalism and the
Church were at odds. All the same one can see in the Italian rallying cry of
Risorgimento a national translation of the Christian idea of Resurrection.
In Poland and in Serbia, nationalism clothed itself in the idea of messianic
people-hood and embraced the concept of a suffering victim. Protestant na-
tions, like the United States and Britain (in particular Ulster), were more
likely to think of themselves in Old Testament terms as a New Israel. Their
expansion and their survival consequently became sacred causes, so that
President McKinley could promote the war with Spain, especially the occu-
pation of the Philippines, as an opportunity for American power to spread
the Gospel. In the world wars of the twentieth century the suffering was so
great that it translated the death of millions of combatants into the imagery
of the saving death of Christ: “Greater love hath no man than this; that he
lay down his life for his friends.” Once Christianity is nationalized, redemp-
tion and sacrifice become collectivized in a manner that echoes the concept
of redemption in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Christianity Infiltrating and Infiltrated
All the examples just given serve to show how the inherent constitution of
society works against the adoption of the radical revolution represented by
Christianity considered as a version of Axial religion. The tension between
the Christian revolution and the social sacred might be expressed in terms
of a reversion to classical ideas of honor, as in the Renaissance, or in terms of
a reversion to the warrior ethos of the peoples of Northern Europe, as in the
later stages of German nationalism. The central point is as easily grasped as
it is easily ignored: the repertoire of the Christian revolution infiltrates, and
is infi ltrated by, the characteristics of the kinds of society in which it is in-
carnated. In feudal society, the warrior ethos is inflected by the ideal of
Christian chivalry, and in commercial Amsterdam the embarrassment of
riches is inflected by a sense of moral obligation. Most recently, in a mature
capitalist society the good news is spun to include health and prosperity,
and finds ample justification for that by reverting to a major strand in the
teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Once again Bellah is shown to be right in his contention that nothing is
finally lost.12 Almost anything can be recycled as circumstances require, or,
as Taylor puts it, can be reconstituted in endlessly variable packages.13 One
might add that the Old Testament provides a major legitimation for the re-
cuperations found throughout Christian history, to be deployed along-
side reversions to the classical world and pre-Christian paganism. The Axial
revolution is under constant challenge from the past as well as from social
realities. Indeed, they reinforce each other, so that some Christian societies
strongly resemble Judaic or classical societies. An ancient Roman would not
have found Washington in the early years of the American republic unfa-
miliar. Not for the first time, a republic composed of Christians fused the
Virgilian hope of a novus ordo seclorum with the Exodus and the Eschaton.
From Outer to Inner
In this recital of recoils from the Axial revolution considered as a revolution

too far, I have not followed through one central theme in the Christian rep-
ertoire. That is the move from exteriority to inwardness as previewed in the
Hebrew Scriptures, deepened by Jesus and St. Paul, revived in medieval de-
votion (for example, Anselm), and dramatized for the whole of modernity
by Luther. The reason for avoiding an extended treatment of this theme,
otherwise understood as a move toward private subjectivity, or in Taylor’s
formulation as the turn to the self, is strategic.14 One such strategic reason
relates to modern concepts of what Taylor has called “human flourishing,”
because the turn to the self is not only a feature of the Axial revolution,
where it remains under some kind of communal restraint, but can be viewed
in its extreme manifestations as a feature of a post-Axial world.15 This turn
is not the Catholic recognition of the limits set on heroic virtue by everyday
human nature, but humanism as a distinct human ideal.
Humanism etc.
Humanism is one version of this crucial shift to subjectivity, whether ex-

pressed in Christian terms or not. Christian love can be expressed as a de-
cent concern for one’s neighbor and the proper disciplines of friendship;
ascetic rigor can be translated as self-control; holy poverty as being content
with a reasonable standard of living; and holiness as personal integrity. As
inflected by Christianity, this ideal of human (or humanistic) flourishing
will embody the Axial and Christian insight that whosoever seeks his life
will lose it and whosoever loses his life will find it. Whether in eighteenth-
century Christian Rome or in Boston at the same period, this kind of ideal
in Christian dress was an accepted norm. It emerges quite clearly in the
moral worlds promoted in the kinds of theater associated with the oratory,
and in Baroque oratorio. Indeed, in oratorio the Old Testament is reclothed
in humanistic classical dress. It is precisely at this time that the idea of
canon as applied to sacred Scripture is extended to include the exalted gene-
alogy of great works of art, so that these are eventually accorded something
of the reverence once reserved for sacred Scripture. Moreover, in the Ro-
mantic period emerging at the close of the eighteenth century, some of the
metaphors and images of the transcendent realm in the church are reused
to express a more generic human experience, referred to by Taylor as
“transcendence-in-immanence.”16 Examples are to be found in Wordsworth,
Novalis, and Friedrich, and in such creative geniuses the Christian reference
is retained. In later versions the Christian reference may be discarded with
contempt, for example in Swinburne and Nietzsche. Sometimes the boundary
becomes blurred, perhaps on account of an oscillation between the religion of
art and Catholicism, as in the cases of Wilde and Huysmans, or because the
meaning of resurrection and the Holy Spirit acquires a more generic refer-
ence, as in Mahler. There is a constant movement back and forth between a
Christian reference, often marked by conversions to Catholicism, and the
kind of generic and primeval sacred evoked by Wagner, where a pre-Axial fu-
sion of sexual love and death anticipates a possible post-Axial condition.
A rather different marker is provided by the changes in the approach to
education associated with Dewey. The objective disciplines embodied in the
absorption of the humanistic classics are subverted in favor of whatever
serves to locate the authentic self. Thus one has an initial progression from
holiness to integrity, which then moves on once more from integrity to
something potentially very different: self-realization and authentic being.
The Trail of Popular Protestantism
There is a paradox here worth exploiting, and it is this. The changes just re-
viewed occurred in the culture of elites, though they moved progressively
down the social hierarchy in a sequence from the 1890s to the 1930s and
eventually to the 1960s. However, the transition of greater importance for
culture in the broader anthropological sense is to be traced in the shift inau-

gurated by the Reformation away from the tangible, material, and external
rituals and icons of devotion to an inward appropriation of trusting faith. In
this shift, the reference back to the Old Testament was firmly in line with the
Axial revolution because it denied independent reality to idols. Thus refer-
ences back to the Hebrew Scriptures can be deployed both to mitigate the
Axial revolution in order to embrace prosperity, and to reinforce it through
the prohibition of idolatry.
The celebration of the created order in the Enlightenment, including a
Christian Enlightenment, and the mystical celebration of Nature found in
Romanticism, including a Christian Romanticism, mutates under the pres-
sure of a radical turn to the self into environmentalism and into forms of
sexuality conceived, not just as forms of natural expression but as a self-
expression to be realized “on demand.” This is Freud rendered optimistic by
being tailored for American consumption: civilization shorn of its repres-
sions and devoid of its discontents. Whereas in Christianity forgiveness
coexists with judgment, it now mutates into an indiscriminate compassion
that diminishes responsibility and devalues striving. Christianity itself is
reformulated in sentimental mode, so that the idea of cost, including the
cost of redemption on account of the exactions of sin and evil-doing, ceases
to make sense. Once the idea of cost, of limits, of social disciplines, and of
the need for striving in order to achieve anything, ceases to make sense, the
quotidian frustrations of life come to be experienced as a deprivation of hu-
man rights. The figure of the Victim, which in Christianity codes the cost of
evil, is now generalized into inevitable grievance against the world. We are
all of us victims, but nobody is to blame except an external and inherently
oppressive entity called Society.
What has happened can best be focused by the issue of authority, because
authority is one of those prerequisites of society that cannot be circum-
vented, however much it is complained about and rhetorically identified
with authoritarianism. Sentimentalized translations of Christianity and of
humanism simply cannot cope with the reality principle of politics, which
depends on order, discipline, and coordination through structures of au-
thority, and so far as relations between states are concerned, on power and
at least the threat of force. Not only are order, discipline, and authority writ-
ten in to political activity, but they are also necessary for human flourishing,
with the result that government lurches between humanistic principles and
the demands of popular sentimentality, especially in the spheres of penol-
ogy, welfare, and education, until reality imposes an inevitable if unac-
knowledged correction. It is simply not the case that all desirable principles
are reconcilable, or that any given principle can be pursued without correla-
tive cost. A costless world is envisaged, and one entirely compatible with a
private spirituality. The Pentecostalism now burgeoning throughout the de-
veloping world also lacks the sense of cost as that is coded in the narrative of
the Passion, but otherwise it knows very well that all gains are costly. In
particular, Pentecostalism cannot afford to devalue striving and discipline.
Pentecostalism is a kind of Axial religion in its sexual restraint, in its com-
bination of the pacific ideal with eschatological hope, and in its reservations
about political power, though these vary with time and place.
Is the Axial Revolution Still Active?
The question now to be asked concerns the extreme extension of the turn to
the self inaugurated by the Reformation and the associated potential for an
antinomian dismissal of the law. What does a “me” religion mean for Axial
religion as represented by Christianity? It means that what was once a cre-
ative tension between a hope of a universal brotherhood in pursuit of peace,
and the realities of violence, power, wealth, tribe, and family, has now be-
come a blindness induced by sentimentality about the self, to the disciplines
of communal living, or the costs necessarily exacted by the exigencies of
political action. Such costs have to be presented as “hard choices” to elector-
ates bound to complain whichever choice is made. There is no such thing as
a foreign policy without casualties, pursued on a straightforward ethical
basis without inconsistency or switching one’s allies over time as national
interest requires. One cannot simultaneously try to create an educated elite
capable of competing internationally and ensure that all shall win and all
shall have prizes, or seek a strong and overarching identity while pursuing
multiculturalism without limit.
Liberalism demands that religion acts as one of a number of pressure
groups translating its viewpoint into the liberal lingua franca. Where
more than that is conceded, it is not because a religious viewpoint is ac-
corded independent standing, but because some element in the ideals of
the Axial revolution coincides with and overlaps liberal pacificism or con-
cepts of human dignity. The implications of the Catholic tradition of natu-
ral law remain problematic in certain areas, for example in gender rela-
tions and regarding contraception and abortion, but they can usually be
modified to conform to the required liberal consensus. If judgment is a
Christian category in a state of mutual interdependence with forgiveness,
then there are equivalents to be found in humanistic discourse. In the
same way, there are humanistic equivalents of the Christian concept of
universal brotherhood.
At one level, religion has a right to be heard in the public forum alongside
other views, possibly because it can claim to be a mode of rationality, but
more plausibly because it constitutes a body of opinion with interests and
values to promote. That at least would be taken for granted in the United
States, whatever may be the case in societies influenced by the laïque tradi-
tions of France. At another level, the insights of Axial religion lie beyond the
political realm. For example, the voluntary embrace of celibacy has no sa-
lience outside the community of believers. Similarly, the embrace of holy
poverty or charity is not a political cause, anymore than nonviolence in all
circumstances can be a matter of public policy. The furthest the most faith-
ful of politicians would or could go in implementing the ethic of the Sermon
on the Mount is the invocation of the principle of going the extra mile, and
for the most part Christian politicians are content to promote charity to-
ward one’s neighbor and communal responsibility, and to argue for com-
passion rather than the war of all against all. Moral stances of this kind are
hardly exclusive to Christianity, although some of their authority may his-
torically rest on it.
At the heart of Christianity as an expression, the Axial revolution is the
enactment of mutual self-giving between the faithful and God, and shared
participation in saving grace and the divine presence. This is eschatological,
since this participation anticipates the peace and fullness of joy at the heav-
enly banquet. The political realm may from time to time claim a false tran-
scendence on its own account, and in its deep structure of hopes and fears it
actually carries forward eschatological anticipations, but it is inherently in-
capable of hosting that banquet. There is, therefore, a boundary between
Christianity and politics. The processional banners of Christianity occa-
sionally cross over it to enter the public forum, as they did briefly in 1989,
but they can only act as pointers to a different order, and as protests against
what are, from an Axial viewpoint, claims to a false transcendence, not as
concrete policies. Once they act to promote something else, say the role of
the Church as carrier of the national myth, as recently in Greece, they be-
come themselves forms of false transcendence. They represent the Durk-
heimian social sacred, not the Axial revolution. The Axial revolution may
well be a permanent revolution, but the forces of counterrevolution are very
resilient, for reasons this essay has attempted to set out.17
Notes
1. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber (London: Routledge,
1957), 323–359; Robert Bellah, “What Is Axial about the Axial Age?,” Archives
Européennes de Sociologie 46, no. 1 (2005): 69–87.
2. Pascal Boyer, Explaining Religion: The Human Instincts that Fashion Gods,
Spirits and Ancestors (London: Heinemann, 2001).
3. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Fundamentalism, Sectarianism and Revolution
4. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1902).
5. John Gray, Black Mass (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007).
6. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The
Free Press, 1992).
7. Tony Judt discusses how a process of nationalistic ethnic cleansing, begun
in the dissolution of multiethnic empires, was resumed when the fall of Commu-
nism in 1989–1990 released Eastern European and some Asiatic nationalisms
from Soviet control: the ending of vertical oppression released horizontal antago-
nisms that Communism had sometimes repressed but often manipulated. Tony
Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005).
8. Bellah, “What Is Axial”; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).
9. Martin D. Stringer, A Sociological History of Christian Worship (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
10. Mark Whitton, “Ruling the Late Roman and Early Byzantine City,” Past
and Present 129 (November 1990): 3–29; K. W. Hart, “Sacrifice and Pagan Belief
in Byzantium,” Past and Present 128 (August 1990): 7–27.
11. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant (London: Allen Lane, 1999).
12. Bellah, “What Is Axial.”
13. Taylor, A Secular Age.
14. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
15. Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission En-
counter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Adam Seligman, Robert
Weller, Michael Puett, and Bennett Simon, Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay
on the Limits of Sincerity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
16. Taylor, A Secular Age.
17. In the course of this argument I have drawn on several of my own books, in
par ticu lar: Pacifism: An Historical and Sociological Study (London: Routledge,
1965); The Breaking of the Image (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980); Does Christianity
Cause War? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
13
Righteous Rebels
When, Where, and Why?
w. g. runciman
Whatever disagreements there may be among historians about the prove-

nance, nature, and scope of the intellectual innovations originating in Is-
rael, Greece, Iran, China, and India during Karl Jaspers’ “Axial Age,” the
emergence of critical reflection on the source and use of political power by
reference to some transcendental ethical standard marks a major transition
in human cultural evolution. How does it come about where and when it
does? And what accounts for the different forms that it takes?
The search for an answer to these questions leads far back in the history of
the human species. Recent research in paleoanthropology, cognitive archae-
ology, evolutionary and developmental psychology, and brain science gives
strong reason to conclude that long before the advent of written records,
human beings were talking to each other in a world of myth, ritual, art,
technology, and emotionally charged interpersonal relationships in which
past encounters were recalled and discussed and patterns of part-cooperative,
part-antagonistic behavior toward others established and sustained. Our
human ancestors had inherited from their primate forbears, and shared
with their primate cousins, innate mental capacities for beliefs about the
workings of the world on the one hand and attitudes toward the things and
people in it on the other. But, as Darwin himself had always recognized, for
all the similarities between humans and other primates in quarreling, col-
laborating, befriending, deceiving, imitating, learning from, and showing
off to one another, only human beings have the capacity to reflect, as Dar-
win put it, on whence we come and whither we go, on what is life and death,
“and so forth.”1 Thus there are numerous rebellious chimpanzees seeking to
reverse the existing rank-order in the troops to which they belong. But no
primatologist claims that they share the ideals set out in the United Nations
Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Although field research
and laboratory experiments have combined to demonstrate that chimpan-
zees have mental capacities and cultural traditions of a kind that Darwin’s
successors were for a long time unwilling to credit them with, critical reflec-
tion and moral argument are unique to us, with our larger neocortices and
modified vocal tracts and the linguistic skills made possible by them.
We do not know when our distant ancestors first started to hold conversa-
tions with one another or what they may have been saying in them during
the many tens of millennia before the first epigraphic or literary evidence.
But we do know that they began to ask questions about the non- or quasi- or
suprahuman agencies acting on the world in which they found themselves.
Much information that presupposes a consistent relationship between causes
and effects and thereby dictates the performance of everyday behavioral rou-
tines can be transmitted from mind to mind without language. But when
it comes to exchanging opinions about the weather, the movements of the
heavenly bodies, the generation and decay of plants and trees, the habits of
birds and beasts, accidents, sickness, and the inescapability of death, lan-
guage not only makes it possible but steadily expands both its frequency and
its coverage. There emerges among other things Geisterglaube—the belief
that natural objects, animals, and artifacts, as well as persons, are endowed
with some form of volition2 and that, as Marcus Aurelius was to put it, we
cannot but believe in the existence of suprahuman agents for the simple rea-
son that we experience their power. By the time that the archaeological re-
cord contains the material remains of shrines, altars, idols, talismans, fig-
urines, grave goods, votive offerings, and visual depictions of gods and
goddesses, human beings are talking to each other not only about how to in-
terpret the seemingly purposeful actions of beings directly observable in the
world but about how the invisible suprahuman agencies seemingly acting on
the world might be entreated, propitiated, or manipulated. Is there some way
in which their favor can be solicited and their anger appeased? Is there some
way of finding out how, given the presumption of their existence, human be-
ings should behave toward them? And with these come the questions of cos-
mogony and the afterlife. Who or what brought the world into being at all?
And is there the possibility of survival or resurrection after death?
Righteous Rebels 319
Second, we know that our ancestors began to exchange information—

gossip, if you prefer—about each other’s behavior in ongoing relationships of
collaboration and exchange. Who can be trusted, and who can’t? Who can be
relied on to return a favor—particularly if not someone whose probability of
reciprocation will be a function of what “we” now know as Hamilton’s Rule?
Evidence from cross-cultural ethnography, experimental psychology, and
evolutionary game theory all supports the conclusion that behavior per-
ceived as violating an implicit social contract or norm of fairness evokes in
all human beings feelings not merely of resentment but of justified resent-
ment. It is true that indignation at misbehavior is equally to be seen among
chimpanzees. When Frans de Waal at the Arnhem Zoo observes the punish-
ment meted out to two unruly teenagers who have delayed the group’s eve-
ning meal, it looks plausible to attribute to the punishers something approxi-
mating to “Serve ’em right!” There is also some experimental evidence that
primates perceive and resent unequal distribution of food. But it is a big step
from there to self-conscious passing of judgment on the offending behavior
according to an explicit moral standard. We shall never know who was the
first person to express one, or how long ago it was that they did. But at some
point, whatever the culturally variable codes of conduct whose violations
give rise to accusations of immoral behavior, such accusations begin to be
uttered, debated, and on occasion acted on, within human groups.
Third, our ancestors began to exchange information about the traits and
behavior of the members of the out-groups with whom they interacted,
whether in collaboration or conflict, in the demarcation of territorial bound-
aries, the exchange of material goods or nubile women, or periodic cultic or
ritual observances. As they spread out into increasingly unfamiliar environ-
ments, the stereotyping of strangers was an adaptive response to the diffi-
culty of choosing the strategy to follow in relations with persons about whom
little was initially known. Mutual differentiation was symbolized by a prolif-
erating range of cultural markers in bodily decoration, clothes, hairstyles,
diet, idioms, totems, and taboos that could be interpreted as signals indica-
tive of the behavior to be expected and the likelihood that mutually benefi-
cial relationships could be sustained without excessive risk of treachery and
deceit. And with that came discussion of the ways in which their own group’s
way of life was more deserving of admiration than that of those whom they
defined as “other” and stigmatized accordingly.
From then on, all human populations were potential carriers of coher-
ently articulated beliefs and attitudes censorious of the behavior not only of
noncooperators and nonconformists but of seekers of power over others. It
is notoriously hazardous to read back from the lifestyles of twentieth-
century hunter-gatherers to those who lived 100,000 or more years before
the present. But the ethnographic evidence for vigilant monitoring of the
distribution of food, ridicule or ostracism of would-be self-aggrandizers,
punishment of violators of group norms, and formation of coalitions to re-
strain bullies and braggarts is so extensive and so consistent that the burden
of the argument falls on anyone reluctant to agree that the behavior of our
remote ancestors is likely to have been similar in these respects. However far
short it fell of the formulation of a set of coherent ethical principles, it surely
extended to exchanges in which one person conveyed to another not just
“Don’t go there!” or “Try eating some of this!” or “Look out—the animal is
coming this way!” but “That is not the right way to behave around here—okay?”
By this time, whenever it was, human sociology was, so to speak, no lon-
ger primate sociology. (I bypass the intriguing but controversial topic of the
intellectual and perhaps linguistic capacity of the Neanderthals.) But there
was still a long way to go from articulate willingness or refusal to acknowl-
edge a leader whose claim to influence rests on personal attributes (which
might include an acknowledged shamanistic or mantic ability to interpret
the volitions of suprahuman agents as well as courage in battle, or oratorical
skill, or the ability to organize collective activities or tasks) and articulate
willingness or refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of institutions that give
rulers power over their subjects underwritten by formal sanctions. Only
after the evolution of “society” out of “culture”3 could self-aggrandizers move
into, rather than create, positions of institutional power, whether economic,
ideological, or political, and their roles be designated by appropriate words
in the vernacular language. It is true that any band of hunters and foragers,
or aggregation of members in a voluntary association, or ad hoc group held
together by some common purpose can be said to constitute a “society,” just
as any performance of a ritual or participation in a game can be said to in-
volve playing a “role.” But the critical difference is between a world of inter-
personal relationships, informal conventions, and habitual behavior patterns,
and a world of established institutional modes of production, persuasion, and
coercion—of landlords and tenants, priests and parishioners, masters and
slaves, and the rest. Only then can the resentment of the more powerful by
the less take the form of challenging the system that empowers the incum-
bents of the superordinate roles to behave as they do. Speculation about su-
prahuman agencies, denunciation of bad behavior by fellow members of an
established community, and stigmatization of persons or groups defined as
“other” can now generate explicit repudiation of rulers’ claimed entitlement
to rule.
Resistance to rulers perceived as misusing their power does not need to be

inspired by a vision of an alternative social order. It can be motivated simply
by a perceived need for defense, and if possible retaliation, against ill-treatment
or a desire for a share in the power which the rulers hold. The secessions of the
Roman plebs in 494 and 449 bce were successful attempts to extort conces-
sions from the dominant patricians, not to replace the existing constitution of
the Roman state in the name of some higher good. Rulers who are denounced
as having forfeited by their impiety the favor of the gods on whom victory and
prosperity depend, or deemed to have betrayed an implicit contract with the
ruled, or resented as alien intruders can provoke disobedience (or—if the op-
portunity presents itself—desertion) without any of the ruled being carriers
of, in Arnaldo Momigliano’s characterization of the Axial Age, “new models
of reality, either mystically or prophetically or rationally apprehended,” which
“are propounded as a criticism of, and alternative to, the prevailing models.”4
In due course, the combination of active opposition to existing rulers with the
conviction that a morally superior social order can thereby be brought into
being generates the kind of authentically righteous rebellions exemplified by
the Jewish uprisings against Rome, the Yellow Turbans in China, the Qarma-
tians in Iraq, the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, Müntzer and the Anabap-
tists, the Scottish Covenanters, Robespierre and the Jacobins, the Taiping,
Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the Andalusian anarchists, and Al-Qaeda. But nei-
ther a “social bandit”5 on the one hand nor a preacher in the wilderness
prophesying the downfall of the oppressors on the other are at the same time
both rebellious and righteous enough to qualify. For that, either the bandit
must come to be inspired by the preacher’s transcendental moral vision or the
preacher must come to be the leader of an organized movement that confronts
the rulers and their agents directly.
It seems to be agreed among the authorities on Pharaonic Egypt and the
monarchies of Sumerian and Akkadian Mesopotamia that in neither of
these were any of the domestic uprisings or foreign invasions by which rul-
ers were periodically faced motivated by a vision of an alternative and mor-
ally superior social order. It is not that concepts of both justice and benevo-
lence were not there to be drawn on in the vernacular terminology. The
Egyptian ma’at, “a term whose meaning goes far beyond legal fairness or
factual accuracy” to the point of denoting an all-embracing principle of or-
der governing both the physical universe and human society,6 imposed on
successive kings an obligation to act not only protectively but solicitously
toward their subjects. But ma’at did not legitimate rebellion against a king
who failed to practice it. On the contrary, rebels were “not simply transgres-
sors against ma’at; they were accomplices and instruments of superhuman
powers of chaos.”7 In Mesopotamia likewise, it is incumbent on the kings to
rule justly and benevolently: Hammurabi in his law-code takes explicit pride
in doing so. But where they fail to protect and care for their subjects as they
should, it is for the gods, not the subjects, to withdraw their support and
decree a transfer of power from one to another. Nor, in either case, were the
temple priests ever carriers of a rival ethical doctrine and associated politi-
cal program. The one radical innovation was that of Akhenaten. But his
identification of himself with the one true god had nothing to do with a
reformation of Egyptian society for the benefit of the ruled, and was in any
case immediately reversed by his successor.
Where, as in Egypt and Mesopotamia, rulers are believed either to par-
take in divinity or to be divinely appointed, the concomitant assumption is
that they are the defenders of themselves and their subjects against both
their human and their suprahuman enemies. But it can also happen that the
forces of evil are seen to be stronger than the forces of good, the enemy tri-
umphant, and the rulers wicked. The idea that the world is a battleground in
which beneficent and maleficent quasi-personal suprahuman agencies are
engaged in perpetual combat is familiar from many times and places in the
historical and ethnographic record. By contrast with the manifestly implau-
sible idea that the world is the creation of a single omnipotent being who is
not only wise but good, dualism or polytheism in their various forms are
much more obviously consistent with universal human experience. There
then arises the question: What is the outcome of the battle between good
and evil going to be? It is his answer to it which makes Zoroaster, so far as is
known, the first of the many optimistic eschatologists in human history. If
Zoroaster was indeed the first prophetic exponent of a transcendental moral

standard which enjoined the members of all classes and categories of men
and women to help bring about an impending redemptive transformation of
the existing social order, he is the prototype of the whole long tradition of
righteous rebellion against rulers perceived as either tacit or open accom-
plices of the forces of evil which, for the time being, prevail.
The new order that righteous rebels are pledged to bring into being does
not necessarily involve the creation of a utopian future. It may equally in-
volve a re-creation of a golden age located somewhere in the past. Or the two
can be fused, as when the French revolutionaries harked back to Roman re-
publican virtues and rituals, or the Yellow Turbans harked back to the ad-
ministrative tradition and system of land distribution of the T’ang. But
righteous rebels aim not merely to punish rulers for their misdeeds. Their
aspiration is to demolish the institutional structures from which the rulers
have derived their power. It may then happen that they have no sooner suc-
ceeded than they provoke a new generation of righteous rebels to rise up
against them in their turn. But the moral vision by appeal to which authen-
tically righteous rebellion is initially inspired is not merely of the overthrow
of a maleficent king but of abolition of the evil institution of kingship; not
merely of the defrocking of venal priests but abolition of the corrupt institu-
tion of priesthood; not merely of the expropriation of exploitative capitalists
but of abolition of the inherently exploitative institution of private property;
and so on. Active resistance to the oppressors is legitimated not merely by
the oppressiveness of their individual actions, or failures to act, but by the
prospect of creating an alternative social order in which such actions, or
failures to act, will no longer be possible. The appeal to a transcendental
ethic may be bound up with a variety of answers to the question of the ori-
gin of evil as such: the Zoroastrian conception of Ahura Mazda as the be-
neficent creator confronted by Angra Mainyu as the personification of evil
is only one among others. But once rulers are seen not merely as impious, or
untrustworthy, or alien, but as allies or servants of evil against good, then
whatever the explanation given of the existence of evil in the world, the
allies or servants of the good are morally in the right if they rise up against
them.
Yet that is not by any means what always happens. A comparative sociolo-
gist looking across the range of “Axial” societies is likely to be struck more
by the differences than by the resemblances between them in this respect.

Common to them all is the emergence of critical reflection on the state of
not only the natural but the political world. But the advocacy of righteous
rebellion, familiar though it becomes in the subsequent course of human
history, is only one of several possible inferences to which it may lead. As
always in comparative sociology, it is as problematic to explain what doesn’t
happen as what does. Even if there can be traced a line of intellectual de-
scent from Zoroaster to the Hebrew prophets to the millenarian Christians
to Robespierre to Marx and Engels, there are responses other than righteous
rebellion open to those who see the all too flagrantly unrighteous all too
firmly in possession of worldly power.
One such alternative response is withdrawal from the world altogether. But
the hermit living alone on roots and berries and wild honey is a rarity at any
place and time. The righteous renouncer is more likely to be either a holy
man who, as Louis Dumont puts it in the Indian case, “leaves his social role
in order to adopt a role that is both universal and personal” in which he is
sustained by alms,8 or a member of a sectarian or monastic community in
which the righteous support themselves in self-quarantined isolation from
worldly corruption. Nothing prevents either monks or holy men from inter-
vening on occasion in the affairs of the world, whether cudgel-wielding Cir-
cumcellions descending from the deserts of Roman Egypt to attack pagan
temples or Buddhist monks actively resisting Chinese Communist rule in
Tibet. But that is not the same as casting down the wicked rulers from their
seats and replacing them with a new regime staffed by the pure in heart. Re-
nouncers may on occasion inspire, encourage, or assist righteous rebels, but
they do so from positions both culturally and socially apart from them.
There is also the middle way between renunciation and rebellion. How-
ever much controversy there continues to be among specialists about the
reconstruction and interpretation of the teachings of Confucius, there ap-
pears to be no disagreement about their distinctiveness, their influence, and
their general import. In relation to worldly power, and the failure of its hold-
ers to live up to the moral standards to which Confucius held that they
ought to subscribe, he preached neither rebellion nor renunciation but
reform—that is, the duty of the righteous not merely to expound by precept
but to demonstrate by example the right way for both rulers and their sub-
jects to behave. This explicitly involved “reanimation” (in Arthur Waley’s
translation of Analects II.11) of a past in which there had been good kings
who behaved as they should and adhered to the traditional rituals by which
respect for other persons is both regulated and defined. But it at the same
time involved an unambiguous repudiation of the prevailing warrior ethic
and associated rituals of hereditary aristocratic elites. For Confucius, righ-
teousness and the conduct in which it finds expression is attainable by any-
one who is willing to learn. It follows that the good society will be one whose
rulers have absorbed this lesson and surrounded themselves with officials
and counselors who have done likewise. But the Confucian ethic disavows
rebellion at the same time that it eschews total withdrawal from the world.
In Book VIII of the Analects, the Master acknowledges that any but the
“truly Good” will, if their sufferings are “very great,” be likely to rebel. But
his disciples are then enjoined neither to enter a state “that pursues danger-
ous courses” nor to “stay in one where the people have rebelled” (VIII.10
and 13, again following Waley’s translation). This is not merely prudential
advice. Even though there is no appeal to a suprahuman deity as the source
of the transcendental moral standard which the Master is preaching, no
reader can doubt that it is indeed a moral standard and one that implies the
possibility of an alternative social order. But the truly righteous man will
not himself be a rebel, however understandable it may be that an ill-treated
subject of a wicked ruler should become one.
Rebellion, renunciation, and reform are not mutually exclusive. Nor need
the righteous be precluded by their disapprobation of their rulers from ex-
ploring possibilities for negotiation or compromise. Where, in particular,
secession is a continuing option, as it is among nomadic pastoralists or in
underpopulated regions where cultivable land is readily available elsewhere,
the righteous can threaten simply to move out of reach. Many secessions
have been no more inspired by a moral vision of an alternative social order
than were those of the Roman plebs, just as many colonies have been founded
not as refuges from evil oppressors but in quest of independent opportuni-
ties for exploitation and plunder. But the Pilgrim Fathers who set sail for
Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620 were “self-conscious separatists who made
no bones about their wish to separate completely from corrupt English reli-
gion” and set up a self-governing “city upon a hill” by whose example the
righteous elsewhere might be inspired.9 The subsequent fate of the settle-

ment may not have been what the founders had envisaged and worked for.
But the self-consciously righteous who despair of reforming their rulers and
lack the means to rebel against them are sometimes able to translate their
theoretical condemnation of the existing order into action by taking them-
selves to another place where the righteous, and only the righteous, will
hold power.
There still remains, however, the problem posed by those societies where
the conditions for the “emergence, conceptualization, and institutionaliza-
tion of a basic tension between the transcendental and mundane orders,” as
Shmuel N. Eisenstadt has put it,10 are present, but these things nonetheless
fail to occur. Momigliano remarks of “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” that
they all “display literacy, a complex political organization combining cen-
tral government and local authorities, elaborate town-planning, advanced
metal technology and the practice of international diplomacy.”11 But what is
to be said about Japan, which Eisenstadt calls “the only non-Axial civiliza-
tion to have had a continuous, autonomous—and very turbulent—history
up to and including modern times”?12 Or about Rome, which I have cited
elsewhere as an exception that proves (or does it?) the rule.13 No conception
of an alternative and morally superior social order ever emerged within Ro-
man culture. The gods were assumed to be supportive of Rome and the ex-
pansion of its power provided that they were appropriately honored and
propitiated; the conventional code of conduct presupposed the wisdom of
ancestral tradition and the need to preserve the virtues of courage, loyalty,
and self-discipline; and alien cults and creeds outside the official religion
were swift ly and brutally suppressed if they were thought to pose a threat to
the Roman state. Misconduct by individual rulers and their agents might
be denounced—there can, for example, be no mistaking the authenticity of
Cicero’s disapproval of a provincial governor who behaved like Verres—but
it is symptomatic of the Roman attitude that when, during the period of his
retirement from politics, Cicero set himself to write in imitation of Plato’s
Republic and Laws, his ideal state turns out to be the Roman state and his
ideal laws the laws of Rome. Roman priests were functionaries of the Roman
state, not “clerics” in Eisenstadt’s sense. For all the lip-service paid to the
traditional republican virtues, no contender for power ever did so in the

name of constructing, or reconstructing, a world purged of wickedness and
injustice. Nor, as pointed out by Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price,
did any Roman ever claim a religious identity separate from identity as a
member of a Roman family and a citizen of the Roman state.14
But it is Greece that, in the context of the present discussion, is more puz-
zling still. Its philosophers, tragedians, and historians were all aware of the
diversity of forms of government in the world around them and voiced opin-
ions about their respective merits. If, moreover, an Axial breakthrough in-
volves not only theoretical but metatheoretical speculation (“thought about
thought”), there can be no doubt whatever that the Greeks achieved one. But
it is as true of the Greek poleis as it is of Rome that despite frequent usurpa-
tions, or attempted usurpations, of power by violence, the rebels weren’t righ-
teous and the righteous weren’t rebels—Socrates, among the righteous, least
of all. There were lawgivers like Solon or Philolaus of Corinth, but they
weren’t moral reformers: their objective, and that of those who enlisted their
ser vices, was the design of constitutional arrangements that would moderate
internal strife (stasis). There were scoffers and skeptics, including the original
“Cynics,” but no renouncers like the Hindu or Christian holy men. The
“seers” (manteis), like Teiresias, might warn rulers like Creon of the nemesis
awaiting them for their hubris, but Teiresias can no more be equated with
Zoroaster or the Hebrew prophets than Antigone, in her defiance of Creon’s
command, with Rosa Luxemburg. There were no religious wars, no millenar-
ian uprisings, no anarchists, no pacifists, and no armies fighting in the name
of good against evil. Why not?
One possible response is to say that the intellectuals whose writings exem-
plify the breakthrough to critical reflection and theoretical speculation never
envisaged the creation of an alternative social order purged of wickedness
and injustice as a practical objective. Plato, at the end of Book 9 of Republic,
has Socrates say that his ideal society exists only “in heaven.” Aristotle, in
his Politics, is concerned above all with the kind of constitution that will have
the best prospect of minimizing internal conflict within the polis. The “Athe-
nian Stranger” in Plato’s Laws says that peace is merely a state of undeclared
war between rival poleis, and Aristotle takes what he calls “neighbortown”
(astygeitones) wars as to be expected as a matter of course. Neither had ethical

qualms about slavery beyond deploring the enslavement of Greeks by other
Greeks as opposed to non-Hellenic “barbarians.” But these shared assump-
tions, realistic as no doubt they were, could still have been more actively
challenged. Greek religious beliefs offered ample scope for the idea that re-
gimes whose rulers’ conduct is offensive to the gods should be replaced by
more virtuous ones; Greek moral concepts offered ample scope for the for-
mulation of a political program aimed at realizing a transcendental notion of
the good; Greek discussions of the workings of societies other than their own
offered ample scope for comparison by reference to a universal criterion of
political legitimacy. But there never emerged the righteous rebels (let alone
righteous renouncers or righteous reformers) of the kind that public debate
about these issues might have been expected to inspire.
Despite the persistent minority of scoffers and skeptics, the capacity of
quasi-personal suprahuman agents to intervene in human affairs was taken
seriously at all social levels. The manteis, as opposed to the hieropoioi charged
with ensuring that sacrifices were properly conducted, were often castigated
by disappointed clients as charlatans, as after the failure of the Athenian
invasion of Sicily. But divination and oneiromancy were taken for granted
as part of everyday life. There were strict procedural rules governing com-
munication with the gods and the actions to be taken by, or against, anyone
guilty of behavior held to be sacrilegious or polluting. A hard-headed pro-
fessional soldier like Xenophon regularly sought guidance from on high
through the performance of animal sacrifices. What is missing is the idea of
a god who has laid down the binding moral standard by which the conduct
of rulers toward their subjects is to be judged and the regime condemned if
it fails to meet it. The “justice of Zeus” had nothing to do with what would
much later be called “social justice.” Zeus is the punisher (kolastēs) of the
presumptuous (tōn agan hyperphronōn), but not the protector of the humble
and weak. The “just deserts” of either an individual or a community are the
nemesis following from hubris which has provoked divine jealousy (phtho-
nos). Although there were mystery cults offering personal initiation and
purification, there was no Weberian “salvation ethic” by which there might
have been inspired a social movement whose organizing principle was the
mobilization of the righteous against the forces of evil. Tyranny was often
hated by its subjects as well as disapproved of by philosophers: Sara Fors-
dyke has recently drawn attention to the razing to the ground of tyrants’
houses and tombs in Corinth after the killing of Cypselus, and in Syracuse
after the overthrow of Dionysius II.15 But their motivation was not that of
the English regicides who condemned Charles I to death in 1649 any more
than it was that of the religiously inspired assassins, or would-be assassins,
of monarchs such as Henri IV of France or Elizabeth of England. The idea of
acting as desired, or required, or even compelled against the person’s will,
by one or another suprahuman agency is thoroughly familiar in Greek cul-
ture. But the gods’ own motivations are taken to be self-interested in much
the same way as those of the mortals in whose lives they intervene. They re-
ward and punish; they take sides; they exact obedience; they on occasion
pardon transgressions. But they do not instruct their devotees in the making
of a world of peace and goodwill cleansed of evil and relieved of suffering.
The lack of an accepted set of divinely revealed commandments did not
in any way inhibit the Greeks from passing judgments on each other’s con-
duct couched in a rich and explicit moral vocabulary. But their conception
of good government had to do with maintenance of order, conformity to
custom, and enforcement of appropriate penalties, not redress for the hum-
ble and powerless who are being denied equality of opportunity as well as
condition. Beggars, strangers, and supplicants might receive hospitality from
a motive of personal piety, but they were never seen as a public responsibil-
ity. For the philosophers, tragedians, and historians alike, the just (dikaios)
man is the man who pays his debts, keeps his promises, honors the gods,
refuses bribes, performs his civic duties, serves in the army when sum-
moned, stands firm in battle, and goes to the help of friends and allies when
called on. He is a reciprocal, not an unconditional, altruist. Conversely, the
unjust (adikos) man is above all pleonektēs—he is guilty of wanting more
than he should. Aristotle explicitly defines adikein as the doing of harm to
someone contrary to nomos, and nomos is much nearer to “good custom”
than to a Kantian moral law. The Athenian orators use every rhetorical trick
at their command to put their opponents in the wrong and to rouse the in-
dignation of the jurors (andres dikastoi) against them. But the wrongdoing
is conduct alleged to be unpatriotic, or impious, or overweening, or a breach
of an undertaking given, or a refusal to meet a recognized obligation. The
offences for which holders of public office were systematically held to account
were misuse of funds under their control or collusion with a foreign enemy.
The notion of legal equality among citizens (isonomia) had nothing to do

with universal human rights. In interstate relations, it is symptomatic that
when the Spartans momentarily felt, as reported by Thucydides, that they
deserved the humiliation they suffered at the hands of the Athenians at Py-
los, it was because they had broken the treaty under which they should have
agreed to go to arbitration (es dikas), with the consequence that the bad be-
havior (paranomēma) was theirs. Rebels against their rulers are righteous
rebels only to the extent that they see themselves as having been treated para
nomon. As Moses Finley pointed out in discussing the ancient historians’
treatment of stasis, “throughout these accounts legitimacy was never chal-
lenged or proclaimed by the rebels, nor was a right of rebellion or even civil
disobedience formulated in general terms.”16
In their attitudes to societies other than their own, the Greeks were as
free with explicitly moral judgments as they were in their internal quarrels
within their separate poleis (or tribal ethnē). But recourse to arms, whether
against fellow Hellenes or Persia or Macedon (which was both geographi-
cally and culturally the borderline case), was dictated by a perceived oppor-
tunity or need to gain prestige, or secure independence, or exact revenge, or
support an ally, or protect friends and kin, or acquire material resources—as
is spelt out in almost exactly these terms by Anaximenes of Lampsacus in
his Rhetoric to Alexander. When Isocrates argued for a pan-Hellenic cam-
paign against Persia, it was not in order to overthrow an evil regime but to
divert the Greeks from fighting one another. For all the eloquence with
which Pericles is reported by Thucydides as extolling the virtues of Athens
in his Funeral Oration, neither he nor anyone else saw the Peloponnesian
War as other than an undisguised struggle for power, whatever differences
of view there might be about who was to blame for the rivalry between Ath-
ens and Sparta having escalated to the point that it did.
The puzzle accordingly remains. But perhaps the answer is that it is not a
puzzle at all. Why should it be assumed that critical reflection and theoreti-
cal speculation should lead to the formulation of a transcendental moral
standard by which the mighty will be judged and the institutions empower-
ing them found wanting? Why should advances in mathematics and logic
on the one hand, and empirical study of the natural and the social worlds on
the other, lead to the conclusion that it is the duty of subjects to overturn
unrighteous regimes? The political environment in which the Greek philos-
ophers, tragedians, and historians wrote was one in which might was all too
visibly right. To recognize this as a matter of observable fact did not imply
acceptance of the extreme amoralist position that Plato puts into the mouth
of the rhetorician Thrasymachus in Republic. There are good reasons why
the members of any society should keep promises, return favors, help their
friends, and restrain themselves from totally uninhibited exploitation of op-
portunities for self-aggrandizement, and the Greeks were well aware of them.
But in a world of scarce resources, endemic rivalry for prestige, and frequent
recourse to violence, the rational strategy is to play to win. This may not be
so if there is a life after death: in Republic, “Socrates” veers uneasily between
claiming that the just who suffer from injustice at the hands of others are
rewarded in this life at the end of the day and falling back on the prospect of
recompense in the world to come, and Pythagoras and his disciples appear to
have believed that the righteous will be reincarnated at a higher level and the
unrighteous at a lower one. But to Aristophanes in The Clouds, as later to
the satirist Lucian in The Double Indictment, Socrates was a figure of fun.
The role models of the persistent ly disputatious and (in Jacob Burckhardt’s
word) “agonistic” citizens of the poleis weren’t Socrates or Pythagoras but
wily Odysseus and man-slaying Achilles. Plato didn’t live to witness the ca-
reer of Alexander of Macedon, but it triumphantly vindicated the observa-
tion that he had put into the mouth of Thrasymachus to the effect that suc-
cessful conquerors are the people who are most admired of all. Nobody
suggested that Alexander’s motive was to impose a reign of virtue on what
came to be called the “Hellenistic” world.
It has long been recognized, as Robert Bellah has pointed out, that “the cultural
transformations” of the societies which between them define Jaspers’ Axial
Age “are by no means uniform.”17 But the culture in which there emerged a
tradition of righteous rebellion in its most enduring and persuasive form
falls outside Jaspers’ period altogether: Islam. Unlike Zoroaster or Confu-
cius or Socrates or Buddha or the Hebrew prophets, the Arabian merchant’s
son to whom it was revealed early in the sixth century of the Christian era
that there is but one true God of whom he is the chosen prophet converted a
following which not only challenged by force the power-holders who op-
posed him but successfully imposed across an increasingly large geographical
area the rule of the righteous as defined by adherence to principles laid

down by him in the Quran and his posthumously attributed sayings. The
consequence was that after his death any Islamic ruler deemed wanting in
righteousness was liable to be challenged by rebels seeking to institute gov-
ernment by and for the community of the faithful in accordance with his
commands. During the centuries after the proclamation of his message,
righteous rebellions against Islamic rulers took many different forms, and
the rulers responded in many different ways. Nor did the ulemate—the schol-
ars and jurists charged with the interpretation and exposition of the Law—
agree with one another on how to reconcile the ideal of rule by a rightly
guided spiritual leader with the manifest failings of corrupt and oppressive
rulers sustained in power not by their piety but by their control of the means
of coercion. Some Islamic intellectuals, including al-Ghazālī, were reform-
ers who, like Confucius, advocated persuasion by precept and example but
refused to condone rebellion. Others, like the Sufi masters and their disci-
ples, more nearly resembled some of the monastic and mystical renouncers
of Christianity. But the Islamic tradition is unique in the inherent dilemma
that it faces about the source and use of power, which derives from the cir-
cumstances of its origin. Just as the millenarian tradition gives rise to the
idea of permanent revolution as the only means to prevent the initially un-
corrupted revolutionaries from abusing their power, so does the Islamic
tradition give rise to the idea of a necessary cycle of rebellion and decadence
as the only means to prevent the initially uncorrupted rebels from betraying
their sacred duty to deploy their power in subservience to a creed that per-
mits no distinction between church and state.
There are, accordingly, more different answers to the questions asked in
the opening paragraph of this essay than can be accommodated within a
cross-cultural and transsocietal generalization whose applicability through-
out the range of cases will not turn out to be an inverse function of its ex-
planatory potential. Jaspers’ conception of an Axial Age has a demonstrable
rationale in the contrast between societies where a monarch who embodies
divine authority holds a monopoly on the means of persuasion as well as
coercion, and societies where carriers of alternative visions of a morally su-
perior social order call rulers’ legitimacy into question. But the story that he
tells in its terms derives from a Hegelian philosophical anthropology rather
than from a Weberian comparative sociology within which rebels, renounc-
ers, and reformers are located along a path-dependent sequence of local

causal interactions between metaphysical and ethical ideas on the one
hand and material and political interests on the other. The two are not mu-
tually exclusive. There is a story to be told in which Zoroaster, Socrates,
Confucius, Buddha, and the Hebrew prophets are all protagonists in the
long struggle for reflective human self-awareness and the emancipation of
critical reason from unexamined traditional attitudes and beliefs. But to ac-
cord “Axial” status to those societies where the transition has been achieved
leaves it still to be explained whether the achievement is due to homologous
cultural descent or convergent cultural evolution, and if the latter, whether
there were specific environmental conditions which made it more likely
when, or if, there would appear one or more innovative thinkers able to ar-
ticulate it. It is, to quote Momigliano yet again, remarkable how clearly the
personalities of Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, the Hebrew prophets, and
the Greek philosophers have come down to us: “they are the masters whose
thoughts still count today and whose names we remember.”18 But how far
may this be due to chance? Once past the initial transition that created the
possibility of discussion among the ruled about the prospect of a social or-
der other than the one that has placed their existing rulers in power over
them, how can we be sure that there were not other righteous rebels (or re-
nouncers, or reformers) of whom we know nothing because neither the ini-
tial carriers of the novel ideas nor their descendants or disciples ever set
their ideas down in writing? We must make the most that we can of the
sources that we have for the lives and teachings of a set of exceptional indi-
viduals who, however much or little influence they had in their lifetimes,
have become part of our enduring intellectual legacy. But we must beware of
fitting them into a master teleological narrative composed from what is it-
self a parochial and selective point of view.
Notes
1. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd
ed. (London, 1882), 83.
2. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 4th ed. (Tübingen, 1956), vol. 1, 246.
3. W. G. Runciman, “From Nature to Culture, from Culture to Society,” Pro-
ceedings of the British Academy 110 (2001): 235–254.

bridge, 1975), 9.
5. E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (Manchester, 1959), chap. 2.
6. Barry J. Kemp in B. G. Trigger, B. J. Kemp, D. O’Connor, and A. B. Lloyd,
Ancient Egypt: A Social History (Cambridge, 1983), 74.
7. Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots
of Apocalyptic Faith (New Haven, 1993), 20.
8. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications
(London, 1970), 185.
9. Diarmid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700
(London, 2003), 185.
10. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “The Axial Age: The Emergence of Transcendental
Visions and the Rise of Clerics,” Archives Européennes de Sociologie 23 (1982): 294.
11. Momigliano, Alien Wisdom, 8–9.
12. Eisenstadt, Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View (Chicago, 1996), 3.
13. W. G. Runciman, “The Exception That Proves the Rule? Rome in the Axial
Age,” in Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg, eds., Comparing Modernities:
Pluralism versus Homogenity; Essays in Homage to Schmuel N. Eisenstadt (Leiden,
2005), 125–140.
14. Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, Religions of Rome (Cambridge,
1998), vol. 1, 43.
15. Sara Forsdyke, “Street Theatre and Popu lar Justice in Ancient Greece:
Shaming, Stoning, and Starving of Offenders Inside and Outside the Courts,”
Past and Present 201 (2008): 32.
16. M. I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 1983), 131.
17. Robert N. Bellah, “What Is Axial about the Axial Age?,” Archives Europé-
ennes de Sociologie 46 (2005): 88.
18. Momigliano, Alien Wisdom, 9.
Reevaluations
14
Rehistoricizing the Axial Age
johann p. arnason
Since the historicizing argument to be developed below runs counter to

stronger trends and more widely shared approaches in the present discus-
sion, it may be useful to begin with a brief indication of the main points at
issue. To rehistoricize, or bring history back in, is—most obviously—to make
a case for reemphasizing the Axial Age as a historical epoch, with at least
approximately definable boundaries, rather than transfiguring its innova-
tions and achievements into an ideal type of “axiality.” But it also means to
pay more attention to the internal historicity of the epoch: changing con-
stellations as well as diverse lines of development will have to be given their
due. A further corollary is that a nuanced historical account of both connec-
tions to earlier periods and the transformations that set the Axial Age apart
from them is needed. There is no denying that interpreters of the Axial
Age—and a fortiori those who preferred to shift the focus toward more ab-
stract categories—have tended to overdraw contrasts with a pre-Axial world.
On the other hand, the highly diversified Wirkungsgeschichte of traditions
taking off from the Axial Age has to be taken into account; the meaning of
the sources must be deciphered in light of the whole spectrum of later rami-
fications. Finally, the proposed historicizing turn would be incomplete with-
out reflection on the premises and problems of historical interpretation as
they appear in reconstructions of the Axial Age. All these questions will be
touched upon, but no balanced coverage can be attempted within the limits
of this essay. The aim is, for the time being, to present a preliminary survey of
a problematic that has been unduly simplified by overtheorized accounts
of the Axial Age.
338 Re e va luat i o n s
Demarcating an Epoch
If we consider the unfolding debate on the Axial Age, there is no reason to
disagree with Jan Assmann’s suggestion (in this volume) that the interest
now seems to focus more on the phenomena themselves than on their
chronological location. The question is how far this shift can go. Are the
“phenomena themselves” fully separable from the context of a historical
epoch? If we subsume the Axial phenomena under general categories, thus
converting the phenomenological approach into a typological one, the cat-
egories in question—reducible, in one way or another, to heightened levels
of reflexivity and agency—can be understood either as recurrent patterns or
as cumulative trends. In the former case, we are dealing with a uniform
logic that repeats itself at successive moments; the originality of the Axial
Age disappears, and with it the points of orientation for comparison with
other major cases of sociocultural transformation. We would then need to
invent new concepts to recapture the lost ground. In the second case, the
Axial Age disappears into an evolutionary vision of history. Here I agree
with the point made in Shmuel Eisenstadt’s contribution to this volume (al-
though, as will be seen, my reflections on the Axial Age diverge from his
argument in fundamental ways): there are evolutionary trends in history,
and there is no doubt that some such trends were significantly and conspic-
uously accelerated during the Axial Age, but above and beyond that, there
are the contingent and creative—and therefore divergent—elaborations of
possibilities linked to the evolutionary trends. The flowering of such elabo-
rations is what is most noteworthy about the Axial Age. An interpretation
that singles out its evolutionary aspects will certainly tell us something, but
it will screen out an all-important part of the picture. In both cases, then,
the typological perspectives result in one-sided accounts without any clear
indication of alternative ways to tackle the neglected themes. If we reverse
this trend and set out to rehistoricize the whole problematic, it will no lon-
ger be obvious that we need the general category of axiality. The emergence
of rational argument, universalistic ethics, theoretical discourse or “second-
order thinking” (thinking about thinking) can be described in their own
respective terms, without subsuming them under a more abstract structural
principle. As for “Axial civilizations,” the term can be used to refer to civili-
zational complexes whose histories can be traced back to comparable ori-
Rehistoricizing the Axial Age 339
gins, but I do not think that it can denote a durable common denominator
of civilizational patterns.
The case for rehistoricizing should begin with a reminder of our incom-
plete knowledge and changing images of the Axial Age. The idea—or, to use
a more appropriate German term: the Denkfigur—of the Axial Age goes
back to eighteenth-century origins, and it resurfaced in various contexts; a
comprehensive history of its appearances and reappearances has yet to be
written, but it seems clear that it did not develop into a research program
until very recently (Karl Jaspers’ invitation to grasp the Axial Age as a grow-
ing mystery [“als wachsendes Geheimnis vor Augen zu gewinnen”—Jaspers
1949, 39] hardly deserves that label). It was only with Eisenstadt’s reformula-
tions in the 1970s and 1980s that systematic inquiry into the comparative
history of the Axial Age became possible; the first installment was the one-
volume collection published in English in 1986 and the five German vol-
umes published around the same time. This research is still in progress, and
in view of that, the typological turn seems decidedly premature, even if we
set aside the other arguments against it. Recent scholarship has advanced
our understanding of each key case as well as of contrasts and parallels be-
tween them. But it has done so in different and uneven ways, and at the
same time it has shown how much more work there is to do. During the last
twenty or thirty years, our knowledge of archaic and Axial China has made
very significant progress due to new evidence as well as new approaches; in
the Greek case, these two factors have combined in a different way, but also
with noteworthy results. As for other Axial centers, the state of the art is
perhaps more controversial, but in general terms, it seems obvious that the
research program is still in a phase of growth and ongoing reorientation.
We can discuss the relationship between culturally unique, specifically
Axial and universal or evolutionary aspects of the transformations in ques-
tion; but attempts to construct a comprehensive model of “axiality” seem
premature.
On these grounds (and for other reasons to be explained later), it seems
appropriate to retain the term “Axial Age” as a provisional demarcating la-
bel for a historical epoch. It is easily imaginable that historical scholarship
might in the end move beyond this terminology. For the time being, how-
ever, it remains useful. A historical period cannot be defined without some
kind of chronological anchorage. In this case, a long and loosely defined
chronology seems preferable; we should, in other words, talk about a long

Axial Age, extending roughly from the eighth to the fourth or third century
bce, rather than a short one around 500 bce. Both alternatives are indicated
in Jaspers’ Origin and Goal of History, but the long chronology is more ex-
plicitly proposed at the beginning of the book. The most obvious and ele-
mentary feature of the period is a rare flowering of sociocultural creativity.
It is one of the basic facts of history that such phases—some longer and
some more conspicuous than others—stand out in contrast to less creative
ones. In the case of the Axial Age, we can spell out some more specific con-
notations that will facilitate comparison with other periods. It is not only
characterized by an uncommon clustering of cultural innovations, but also
by a more sustained activation of innovative capacities; if there is some
truth in Arnold Toynbee’s conception of “creative minorities” as the repre-
sentative and pioneering elites of whole civilizations, this would seem to be
one of the corroborating cases (the coalitions of these minorities and power
elites more directly involved in state- and empire-building seem to be a
more variable factor than Eisenstadt’s formulations on this subject would
suggest). As for the long-term results, the creations of the Axial Age became
defining cores of durable and formative traditions, which in turn (although
to a varying degree) proved capable of further foundational developments
(it seems best to avoid explicit reference to civilizations when defining the
Axial Age, but I would of course argue that a civilizational perspective is—
ultimately—the best way to make sense of the broader problematic involved
in discussions about this period). Moreover, the founding ideas and inter-
pretations of the Axial Age have—also to a varying degree—been recurrent
foci of reinterpretations within the framework of the respective traditions;
returns to the sources have thus helped to challenge dominant currents and
established orthodoxies.
Axiality before and after the Axial Age?
Arguments in favor of the typological turn have often stressed a few salient
examples that seem to settle all doubts about Axial turns occurring outside
any particular epochal framework. It seems best to quote Assmann’s com-
ments on this point (1997, 290–292); he admits “a certain concentration” of
the phenomena in question during the period singled out by Jaspers and
others, but notes cases of transformations that followed fundamentally sim-

ilar lines in other chronological settings, and argues that, in the last in-
stance, we are not dealing with a distinctive historical epoch but with a
cultural transformation that could occur at different points in time. The
main point is the “transition from ritual to textual coherence” (ibid., 291),
and neither the use of writing nor the creation of representative texts is a
sufficient condition for this. The decisive factor is a culture of interpretation
that makes the texts central to cultural memory, and which in turn presup-
poses supporting institutions and elites. Three breakthroughs before and
after the conventionally defined Axial Age stand out: the religious innova-
tion attempted by an Egyptian Pharaoh in the fourteenth century bce, the
emergence of Zoroastrianism in ancient Iran, and the formation of two
monotheistic world religions—Christianity and Islam—in and beyond the
eastern Roman world during the early centuries of our era. But as I will ar-
gue, these examples can be accounted for in a way that does not undermine
the rehistoricizing approach.
Ikhnaton’s vision of one god was, according to Assmann, “surely the most
radical of all monotheistic revolutions” (1997, 291), and the texts that reflect
it could have become foundational for a new religious culture; but there was
no reinforcing culture of interpretation. Detailed analyses in Assmann’s
other writings suggest a more nuanced picture. The radicalism of this reli-
gious revolution seems to have been of a very specific kind, grounded in a
historical context very different from that of the Axial Age. Assmann distin-
guishes Ikhnaton’s revolutionary monotheism from the evolutionary vari-
ety that subsequently gained ground within Egyptian religion; the latter
grew out of polytheism and avoided a radical break with it (Assmann 1993,
45). But if the revolutionary thrust invites comparison with the later rupture
brought about by Jewish monotheism, another feature sets Ikhnaton’s mono-
theism apart from that incomparably more momentous turn: his monothe-
ism is cosmological rather than political, it takes the cosmotheistic aspect of
Egyptian religion to extreme lengths at the expense of the polytheistic one,
and has no implications of the kind associated with the idea of shifting sov-
ereignty from a sacral ruler to a divine legislator. If there is a revealed side to
this monotheism, it is only the “negative revelation” inherent in the “insight
that God is only light and time” (1993, 33). As Assmann sees it, the emphasis
on the visible world and human belonging to it is more reminiscent of the
Ionian philosophers than of Jewish monotheism, and suggests an even more

far-reaching parallel with the French revolutionaries, who tried to engineer
enlightenment through the foundation of a new religion. But if such retro-
spective affinities seem plausible, a closer look at the historical context will
highlight their limits. Ikhnaton’s monotheistic revolution did not question
the institution of sacral kingship. On the contrary: the exclusive position
of the ruler seems to have been enhanced by making him the only instance
through which “the divine could be addressed as a person” (Assmann 1996,
247). All things considered, then, this episode illustrates the possibilities of
religious innovation—and, sit venia verbo, enlightenment—within a cul-
tural universe dominated by cosmotheism and an uncontested sacral power
center. The Axial Age was to problematize these presuppositions in more
fundamental ways.
The problem of Zoroastrianism calls for more detailed comments. In his
discussion of the Axial Age, Robert Bellah reviews the question of a Persian
contribution and concludes that we have to recognize a significant Persian
impact on three of the well-documented cases (Greece, Palestine, and In-
dia), while Persia itself remains largely a historical cipher (Bellah 2005). This
situation is all the more uncomfortable because of the role played by the
Persian connection in earlier interpretations of the Axial Age. As has now
been shown, the oldest documented vision of the Axial Age goes back to the
eighteenth century: it grew out of Anquetil-Duperron’s pioneering work on
Zoroastrianism and its surviving heirs (it may be noted that Anquetil-
Duperron seems to have built on this basis the most uninhibitedly meta-
physical version of axiality ever proposed: “Il se fit alors dans la nature une
espèce de révolution qui produisit dans plusieurs parties de la terre des Gé-
nies qui devoient donner le ton à l’univers” (quoted by Metzler 1991, 125).
For Jaspers, Persia had become much less important, but it was more than a
cipher. His references to Zoroastrian dualism do not amount to more than
nominal inclusion among Axial breakthroughs, but when he distinguishes
three worlds of the Axial Age—the Occident, India, and China—the demar-
cation of the first one seems to presuppose the Persian Empire. Jaspers uses
Max Weber’s broad concept of the Occident, without grounding it (as Weber
did) in geographical or geo-economic considerations, and decisive encoun-
ters with the Persian Empire were—as he notes—the most significant thing
that the Greek and the Jewish experience had in common. Apart from that,
it is clear that Achaemenid expansion initiated a new phase in relations be-

tween the Near East and India, however difficult it may be to illustrate this
in detail.
The issue is important enough to merit some further discussion. It boils
down to two main points: the dating of Zoroaster’s reform and the relation-
ship between Zoroastrianism and the Achaemenid dynasty. On the former
point, there is—notoriously—no consensus among scholars in the field. The
view that Zoroaster can be dated to the second millennium bce, perhaps
even to the middle of that period, was forcefully defended by Mary Boyce,
but it was always contested, and more recently, there has been a pronounced
reaction against it—the results were becoming thoroughly implausible. Two
of the most eminent authorities, Gherardo Gnoli and Shaul Shaked, have
argued for the tenth or the ninth century bce, which would put Zoroaster a
good deal closer to the Axial Age. Shaked defends this view in his contribu-
tion to the Florence symposium on Axial civilizations (Shaked 2005); Gnoli
linked it to a detailed analysis of the evidence for Zoroaster’s homeland. He
rejected the idea of Central Asian or Transoxanian origins and located Zo-
roaster in eastern or southeastern Iran, that is, a region that had gone through
a particularly unsettling history. A precocious urbanizing process had been
followed by regression and a partial reversion to pastoralism. This kind of
background to Zoroaster’s reform makes more sense than the picture of a
pre-urban environment. But on top of this, there seems to have been a re-
cent shift back to the traditional date (late seventh to sixth century bce). The
case for it was restated by Ilya Gershevitch in the mid-1990s and Gnoli has
now come around to it (Gershevitch 1995; Gnoli 2000). In fact, Gnoli speaks
explicitly about “restoring him [Zoroaster] to the axial age” (Gnoli 2000, 4)
and proposes very precise dates: 618–541 bce (for an unrepentant statement
of the traditionalist view by somebody who never wavered, see Metzler 1991).
The vast difference between the world of the Achaemenids and the world of
the Gathas remains uncontested, but the question that has at least been re-
opened is: Exactly what combination of time and space would explain it?
That brings us back to the Achaemenid dynasty and its model of kingship.
In my opinion, Gnoli, Shaked, and others have—notwithstanding the very
scanty evidence—made a plausible case for the Achaemenids having been
some kind of Zoroastrians, although not in a very orthodox or exclusive,
and certainly not in a missionary, sense. The author of the most exhaustive
account of the Achaemenid Empire seems to be leaning in the same direc-

tion when he stresses the special relationship between Ahura Mazda and the
Great King, although he cautiously notes that “all these interpretations seem
to be built on sand” (Briant 2002, 94). But the Achaemenid model of king-
ship is a more complex phenomenon: as Gnoli (1983, 62) puts it, it is “a meet-
ing point of many conceptions and cultures.” It took shape in the course of
the astonishingly rapid rise of the Persian Empire. This was an unprece-
dented historical achievement, nothing less than a takeover of the whole
ecumenic zone of the ancient Near East, not to be equaled until the eruption
of Islam more than a millennium later. It is tempting to suggest that this
could be the key to Persia’s position in the Axial Age: a religious reform that
had begun some time before the Achaemenids was partly instrumentalized
and partly overshadowed by a multicivilizational version of sacral kingship.
And Dieter Metzler’s (1977) admittedly speculative conjectures about Zoro-
astrian involvement in the late sixth-century dynastic crisis do not seem
far-fetched: the resistance to a kingship that was drawing closer to ancient
Near Eastern patterns may well have sought a stronger Zoroastrian connec-
tion than the victorious monarch and his successors were to do.
Finally, a brief comment on Christianity and Islam is in order. The notion
of a secondary breakthrough, tentatively used by Eisenstadt in earlier writ-
ings, has been abandoned: it cannot do justice to religious transformations
that involved much more than reelaborations of Axial visions. From the re-
historicizing viewpoint defended here, it seems appropriate to situate the
two monotheistic world religions within a new historical period, posterior
to the Axial Age. As already noted by Jaspers, the ascendancy of empires
was, for the most part, a post-Axial phenomenon (the Persian Empire ap-
pears as a precursor, with an unclear and probably ambiguous relationship
to Axial religiosity). It is surely one of the most striking contingent parallels
in world history that both the Roman and the Chinese empires took shape
as such toward the end of the third century bce. In both cases, but in very
divergent ways, the consolidation of imperial power was accompanied by
adaptive uses of Axial legacies. Different constellations emerged in the geo-
political and geocultural space between the eastern- and westernmost Eur-
asian zones. The Mauryan Empire in India was short-lived, fragmentation
followed soon after the fifth-century culmination under Ashoka, and no
later attempt resulted in a durable indigenous tradition of imperial rule. In
the Near East, the Macedonian takeover of the Persian Empire proved un-
sustainable, but the outcome was a stalemate: neither the Hellenistic king-
doms nor the half-restored Iranian realm under the Parthians could aspire
to imperial power on the Achaemenid scale. The Sasanian state that replaced
the Parthians in the third century bce was a stronger contender, but could
not prevail against the expanded Mediterranean empire of the Romans. It
was in this new historical environment that the world religions took shape,
and their new universalism—more emphatic than Axial precedents—was
related to imperial visions, though not always in the same way. It can be
argued that Buddhism is more directly linked to Axial beginnings than
Christianity or Islam, but the definitive transformation of Buddhism into a
missionary world religion seems to have coincided with Ashoka’s imperial
zenith; the religious innovation survived the political one, and Buddhism
(further transformed by the ascendancy of the Mahayana branch) went on
to profit from both the crisis and the reconsolidation of the Chinese Empire,
as well as from the restructuring of emerging East Asian states along the
lines of the Chinese model. By contrast, the imperial vacuum in the Near
East was finally overcome by a new religion that became a direct carrier of
an imperial vision. It is a measure of the limited impact of the Sasanians
that they had neither taken their reactivation of the link to Zoroastrianism
to the level of a full-fledged imperial religion, nor continued the brief third-
century rapprochement with an aspiring world religion that was to gain
adherents in both the East and West but failed to establish itself on an en-
during basis. As the outstanding case of an ambitious but ultimately un-
successful world religion, Manichaeism deserves a more prominent place in
comparative studies than it has hitherto been granted.
Parallels and Divergences
All attempts to go beyond this very general characterization of the Axial

Age have focused on a configuration of parallels and contrasts. Some con-
sideration has always been given to the contrasts: no account of the Axial
Age could ignore the antagonism between Athens and Jerusalem, nor was it
ever possible to understand Confucius and Buddha as pursuing the same
goals. But there has, from Jaspers to current debates, been a certain shift of
emphasis from the parallels to the contrasts and divergences. Notwithstanding
Eisenstadt’s focus on “transcendental visions” as the prime defining feature

of Axial civilizations, his analyses allow for more pluralism than Jaspers’
model of the Axial awakening could do. Constructive critics of Eisen-
stadt’s interpretation have moved further in that direction. And if we think
of the Axial problematic as an unfolding research program, it seems best to
treat this aspect as an open question: more work on comparative history is
needed before we can attempt a more balanced assessment of unity and di-
versity in the Axial Age. Another open question relates to the parallels as
such, and to the underlying unity that has been inferred from them. It is still
a matter of debate whether—or more precisely: to what extent—these paral-
lels are contingent or due to identifiable historical connections. At this stage,
it seems clear that the most visible connection between Axial centers is an
indirect one. The rise and expansion of the Persian Empire decisively af-
fected both Greek and Jewish history, albeit in very different ways; Persian
presence in and influence on India clearly marked a new round of interre-
gional contacts, but details are very hard to document. Persian rule in the
Near East was the culminating phase of a process that began when eighth-
century Assyria embarked on an unprecedented project of world empire;
this was the starting-point for the Near Eastern sequence (both real and
imaginary) of world empires, and more peripheral parts of the region, in-
cluding the exceptionally creative “seedbed societies” (Talcott Parsons) of
ancient Greece and ancient Israel, were drawn into the process (in earlier
discussions, it was occasionally suggested that the Assyrians were on the
verge of an “Axial breakthrough,” but the evidence does not seem convinc-
ing). At the other end of the spectrum, the question of early contacts be-
tween India and China is now more vigorously debated than before. Some
speculations seem excessive (e.g., claims about Buddhist influence on Daoist
thought), but it is probably best to see this controversy as a revision in prog-
ress; there was more interaction across the Eurasian macroregion, before
and during the Axial Age, than earlier historians tended to think.
To rehistoricize the Axial Age, that is, to bring historiographical and so-
ciological constructs closer to historical experience, is—as the above consid-
erations suggest—to bring more diversity into the evolving accounts of the
period. This has so far mainly been done in terms of different paths taken by
different civilizations during their Axial phase. But here I will focus on the
institutional and interpretive pluralism that may be seen as a precondition
for historical differentiation. The divergent paths of traditions or civiliza-

tions result from combinations of developments in these different fields. The
dominant tendency among interpreters of the Axial Age has been to empha-
size the role of explicit cultural (i.e., primarily religious and/or philosophi-
cal) elaborations. A more pluralistic view would take into account the im-
manent logic and ongoing self-reflection of other spheres. Developments in
the economic sphere have, on the whole, not figured prominently in the de-
bate. But one somewhat puzzling case should be noted in passing: the ques-
tion of “money and the early Greek mind”—to quote the title of a recent
book (Seaford 2004)—seems to have survived the Marxist answers that for a
while gave it a bad name. It can be argued that a monetizing process, much
more rapid and pervasive than anything seen in the ancient Near East, was
an integral part of the new form of life commonly identified with the polis;
more controversially, Richard Seaford (2004, 315) maintains that this pro-
cess “was an important factor in the genesis and form of the first ‘philoso-
phy’ and of tragedy.” This view, not to be confused with the economic reduc-
tionism of some earlier accounts, merits a discussion that has hardly begun.
More has been said—and more remains to be said—on political transforma-
tions. An interpretation of ancient Greek history, developed most eloquently
by Christian Meier and Kurt Raaf laub, puts politics (in Meier’s terms: “the
emergence of the political”) at the center of the Axial turn in Greece. Both
Meier and Raaf laub have a rather ambivalent attitude toward Axial theoriz-
ing, but their arguments are highly relevant to the issue to be discussed here.
The primacy of the political manifests itself on several levels. The polis rep-
resents a new form of political life, more precisely a fundamentally anti-
monarchic one, with direct and indirect implications affecting the whole so-
cial world; it is from the outset conducive to political reflection of a new kind,
not to be confused with the more detached political theory that emerges from
later crises (Raaf laub has made this distinction very clear); the polis also fa-
vored the development of philosophical reflection open to broader horizons
and engaged in a complex dialogue with other cultural domains. This thesis
(one is tempted to call it a model of political axiality) is, especially in Meier’s
work, linked to a strong defense of Greek uniqueness. There is something to
be said for that view (Meier’s description of ancient Greece as “das Nadelöhr
der Weltgeschichte” does not seem inappropriate), but it has to be handled
with care, and when it is linked to the claim that the Greeks—alone among
the civilizations of the Axial Age—invented or discovered “das Politische,”

it oversteps the mark. It would seem more fruitful to use the Greek encoun-
ter with the political as a starting point for comparison with other centers of
the Axial Age. The most striking example of similarly momentous changes
with very different long-term consequences is China during the “Spring and
Autumn” and “Warring States” periods. Several trends unfolding from the
eighth century bce onward problematized the political sphere and provoked
reflection on its fundamentals as well as strategies for overcoming its crises.
The Chinese experienced the multicentrality of the political field through
interstate competition on a more massive scale than anywhere else at the
time, and through a generalized disruption of hierarchy that brought new
contenders for power into the field. Both these processes undermined the
previously very close connection between the political and the sacral sphere.
On the intellectual level, they led to a systematic elaboration of state-
centered rationality, most frequently identified with the current known as
Legalism, but to some extent observable in other contexts. But the critical
responses were more characteristic of the Chinese Axial Age and more im-
portant for the profile of Chinese civilization. A traditionalist but at the same
time humanizing countercurrent aimed at a reintegration of the political
sphere through a mixture of ritual, cultivation, morality, and wisdom (ex-
actly how these components fitted together in the original Confucian mes-
sage, and how their interrelations were modified in later Confucian thought,
is less relevant to our present concerns). But a shared notion of cosmic order
could also be turned into an imaginary space for detachment and liberation
from the constraints and dangers of the political domain.
There is thus a prominent political side to the Chinese Axial Age, even if
there is no Chinese parallel to the Greek rejection of monarchy. Can we
speak of political elements or implications in the other cases? If we follow
Assmann’s interpretation of ancient Israel (as the present writer is inclined
to do), the idea of the divine legislator—the most decisive aspect of the
monotheistic turn—represents a very radical devaluation of the political
sphere. It emerged in the then most global political context, that is, interim-
perial competition in the Near East, but it grew into a critique of the domes-
tic monarchic tradition, whose mythologized origins were used to delegiti-
mize a more problematic present. As for India, Louis Dumont and J. C.
Heesterman have insisted on the close but nevertheless competitive rela-

tionship between brahmins and kshatriyas; however difficult it may be to
reconstruct its early stages and transformations, it seems clear that the out-
come was a very distinctive distribution of power and authority, leaving
kingship in a particularly exposed position (according to Heesterman [1985,
108], “nowhere is the problematic character of kingship clearer than in the
Indian case”; that is another way of saying that the political sphere was
problematized, but neither in the Greek nor in the Chinese way).
Excursus I: Schwartz on the Chinese Axial Age
As we have seen, closer examination of the Chinese case suggests ways of

thinking about more general issues. A detour through an original and care-
fully argued but not widely discussed interpretation of the Axial Age may help
to take this perspective further. Benjamin Schwartz’s work, beginning with
his contribution to the 1975 Daedalus workshop (to which he seems to have
given a more clearly defined direction than any of the other participants), and
continuing on a much more massive scale in his history of ancient Chi-
nese thought (Schwartz 1985), represents—so far—the most articulate China-
centered perspective on the epoch in question; as such, it becomes especially
interesting when set alongside the dominant accounts that have tended to
privilege the Greek and Jewish patterns of cultural change (that applies,
though not in the same way, to Jaspers and Eisenstadt; it might even be argued
that later developments, more precisely the typological turn, shift the Greco-
Judaic focus toward a more restrictive Platonic Christian one). Schwartz’s
Chinese corrective begins with a minimalist description of the Axial opening
to transcendence. It is, as he argues, best understood in a broadly existential
rather than a definite contextual sense: as a way of “standing back and looking
beyond.” It would, I think, be more than a play on words to suggest that the
Chinese case, with which Schwartz is mainly concerned, can also be under-
stood in inverse order: “standing beyond and looking back.” As Schwartz sees
it, the most novel aspect of the Confucian turn—the overture to the Chinese
age of transcendence—was the emergence of the autonomous thinker, step-
ping beyond the established social division of labor and thus gaining a
vantage point for a new kind of retrospective insight into a whole tradition.
Schwartz’s “standing back and looking beyond” acquires a more concrete

meaning in the context of his reconstruction of the Chinese “world of
thought.” Although the work is first and foremost a history of classical Chi-
nese philosophy, it contains comparative reflections that add up to a distinc-
tive vision of the Axial Age, and the most interesting points are made in
connection with the Confucian beginnings of classical thought. Schwartz
links the attitudes sometimes seen as characteristically Confucian to a gen-
eral reappraisal of the Axial turn. The starting point is the widely shared
view that a this-worldly stance sets Confucius apart from other key figures
of the Axial Age; Schwartz objects: “The God of the Bible is transcendental,
but what he reveals to Moses is a decidedly this-worldly law; Plato’s philoso-
phy may have other-worldly possibilities, but he himself remains devoted in
varying degree to his this-worldly mission. Even in India, the Brahmanism
of the Upanishads is still deeply committed to the worldly duties of the
householder, despite the proliferation of individual ascetics. Only primitive
Buddhism seems to call for radical renunciation, for those prepared for the
monk’s vocation” (Schwartz 1985, 118). Even the Buddhist exception can, on
closer examination, be reduced to less radical dimensions. Schwartz refers
to the more specific portrayal of Confucius as not just a this-worldly thinker,
but a humanistic and pragmatic one, and goes on to argue:
Again, this pragmatism does not differentiate him notably from great
religious figures and wise men of the other contemporary civilizations.
While Moses and the prophets may be “god-centered,” they are not
theologians, and the diverse revelations which they receive all direct
their attention back to the concern with the salvation of man. The his-
toric Buddha himself, we are often told in the literature, was a “human-
istic” pragmatist whose main and overwhelming concern was with
saving humans from the sea of suffering. His “eight-fold path” cer-
tainly dwelt above all on the human ethical-spiritual prerequisites for
achieving this goal. In one sutra, he is made to dwell at length on a
whole series of speculative metaphysical problems which do not “tend
to edification” and should be avoided. In the case of Socrates we find, of
course, a constant discussion of his “humanistic revolt” against the
whole tradition of pre-Socratic natural philosophy and his turn to hu-
man concerns—a revolt which he shared with the “Sophists.” . . .
If all these figures are, in a sense, pragmatists bent on achieving hu-

man ends, it would appear that there really is no such thing as “hu-
manistic pragmatism” in a vacuum and that all pragmatisms tacitly
presuppose certain images of the larger frame of things in terms of
which pragmatic goals are set and pursued.” (118–119)
These encompassing images may be treated as domains of tacit knowledge,

but that does not make them less essential to the explicit levels of discourse:
“The assertion that Confucius did not discuss the ‘tao of Heaven’ does not
mean that he had no beliefs about the tao” (ibid., 119). Finally, this survey of
parallels and affinities leads to a general conclusion: “In all these civiliza-
tions the axial age is in fact marked by a kind of transcendental ethical reac-
tion against the total world involvement of the religion of previous centu-
ries, but in most cases this reaction does not necessarily assume an extreme
other-worldly form” (ibid., 118).
Schwartz’s reflections call for further comments, with particular reference
to the assumptions and questions implicit in his statements. The first point to
note is that the “total world involvement” mentioned in the last quotation is
not an archaic legacy of prehistorical cultures. As Schwartz makes clear
elsewhere in the book, he is primarily referring to the dynamics and results
of early civilizing processes, and more specifically to the competitive—often
mutually destructive—accumulation of wealth and power, as well as to the
luxurious lifestyles based on both these kinds of resources. The Axial turns
are responses to cultural trends and behavioral patterns seen as endanger-
ing or degrading the civilizations within which both kinds of developments—
the excesses and the protest—take place; no interpreter of the Axial Age has
stressed this connection as strongly as Schwartz did (the focus on China
seems to have made it particularly visible, because of the intensive forms of
accumulation that emerged in the “Warring States”). Given the close links
between religion and social power, the Axial protest had to target inade-
quate and perverted forms of religious life. And if the response can be de-
scribed as an “ethical reaction,” this term should not be taken to suggest a
one-sided emphasis on moral principles or doctrines. The Axial visions are
more comprehensive: they have to do with new ways of being in the world.
For analysts arguing in light of later differentiations, it is tempting to distin-
guish between moral, cognitive, and aesthetic aspects. But when it comes
to comparing civilizations of the Axial Age, it is more rewarding to focus on

the different overall patterns that combine the three dimensions. Although
there has never been any doubt about the very prominent place of morality
in Confucian teachings, the relative weight of cognitive, moral, and aesthetic
moments in the original Confucian vision is uncertain enough to have
sparked an unending controversy. At this point, we cannot enter into de-
tailed discussion of the whole Axial spectrum, but let us note in passing that
even if Schwartz seems to accept a rather traditional view of Socrates’ dis-
sent from the Pre-Socratics, more recent scholarship has moved our under-
standing of early Greek philosophy closer to the Axial paradigm as summed
up in the above quotation: the line of interpretation pioneered by Pierre Hadot
has drawn attention to the search for a way of life inherent in philosophical
reflection from the beginning.
The rejection of humanly impoverishing or ethically inferior attitudes and
relations to the world goes hand in hand with the elaboration of alternative
models (the latter may, with varying degrees of justification, be presented as
revivals of older traditions). The more radical versions of this reorientation
open up “other-worldly possibilities,” as Schwartz puts it. His formulations
suggest a point that merits further development and discussion: it may not be
easy to draw a line between this-worldly and other-worldly trends in Axial
thought. The attempt to “look beyond” the boundaries of a given world is
fundamental, but whether it results in a clear vision of another world alto-
gether may be a matter of debate for contemporary participants as well as
later interpreters. In any case, we should distinguish between Axial begin-
nings and post-Axial articulations of other-worldliness. The reminder that the
prophets were not theologians should be seen in this context. Theology in the
strict sense is the joint offspring of metaphysics and monotheism, and thus a
combined product of two different traditions that emerged during the Axial
Age. In more general terms, the hypothesis implicit in Schwartz’s reflections
may be summed up as follows: instead of drawing a sharp distinction be-
tween this-worldly and other-worldly directions of the Axial turn, we should
allow for some initial indeterminacy in this regard, and for the possibility
that some civilizations might be more durably attuned to this condition than
others; the most emphatic expressions of other-worldly attitudes grew out of
developments posterior to the Axial Age, and at least in some prominent
cases, they drew on multitraditional sources.
The uncertain range of “other-worldly possibilities” is not unrelated to

another point mentioned in the above quotation. The tacitly presupposed
“images of the larger frame of things” may be a more significant aspect of
the Axial constellations than the most influential accounts have wanted to
admit. The problematic of these implicit visions becomes, as Schwartz notes,
particularly significant when they serve to back up—broadly speaking—
pragmatic projects with a narrower focus. The “assertion” about Confucius,
quoted by Schwartz, can in fact be read as more than that. When a disciple
says, “The Master’s cultural accomplishments—we get to hear them, but the
Master’s ideas on human nature and the Way of Heaven—we hardly get to
hear them” (Analects 5.13, trans. Huang 1997), the most plausible interpre-
tation is that more could be done to spell out the tacit knowledge behind an
explicit message; later protagonists of Confucian thought did just that, but
in ways that brought unsettled questions out into the open and gave rise to
alternatives within the tradition. The assumption of a tacit—not ipso facto
unimportant or unproblematic—conception of Heaven and its Way runs
counter to the idea of an unequivocally “secular” turn, often attributed to
Confucius, and it seems even less compatible with the radical indifferentism
posited by A. C. Graham (“it is not so much that he [Confucius] is a sceptic
as that he does not care whether you are a sceptic or not” [Graham 1989, 15];
but how is this claim to be reconciled with statements to the effect that
“Confucius may be seen to fluctuate between a faith that Heaven will protect
his mission and despair that Heaven has abandoned him,” and that he “strug-
gles to understand ‘destiny’ [ming, literally ‘decree’ what Heaven has de-
creed]?” [ibid., 17]) Apart from textual indications, a more general consider-
ation may be adduced. It seems more than unlikely that Confucius’ emphatic
commitment to the legacy of the Zhou dynasty could have been accompa-
nied by a wholesale devaluation of the relationship to Heaven that was
known—or assumed—to have been central to the self-understanding of the
Zhou tradition.
To sum up, the Confucian case exemplifies the general question of under-
lying frameworks that remain implicit in crucial expressions of the Axial
turn, and then become focal themes for conflicting interpretations during
later phases. The relationship between implicit and explicit visions can
vary from one civilizational context to another, and more comparative
study of that topic would be instructive. The cases in point include borderline
developments, such as Plato’s unwritten doctrine. Broad agreement has now

been reached on a few basic points (see especially Reale 1997). The unwrit-
ten teachings were not of the kind later known as esoteric; they were spelt
out for a limited audience under restrictive circumstances; they did not
represent a break with the problematic of Plato’s dialogues but rather a con-
tinuation of the same project in different terms. All this makes them a dis-
tinctive and significant offshoot of the Greek Axial Age, and a rewarding
topic for the comparative history of philosophy.
Toward a Pluralistic Model
It remains to consider more closely the case for pluralism within the domain
of the cultural elaborations mentioned above. It has proved difficult to sub-
sume the whole spectrum of the Axial Age under an idea of transcendence
à la Jaspers; critics have also noted problems with Eisenstadt’s broader con-
ception of “transcendental visions,” as well as with the strict dichotomy of
this- and other-worldly versions of them. The phenomenological idea of
world articulation and its cultural variations may help to construct a less
prejudiced frame of reference. To retain a link to the earlier discussion, the
concept of “transcensus” (as distinct from both transcendence and transcen-
dentality) occasionally used by Jan Patočka, may be useful. What Patočka
had in mind was the human relationship to the world, and more precisely
the mixture of involvement and freedom that characterizes all human cul-
tures, even if the different aspects do not always intertwine in the same way.
From this point of view, the historical conceptions and figures of transcen-
dence can be deciphered as interpretive projections of the existential tran-
scensus. One implication to be noted is that there can be no condition of
untroubled and quasi-natural absorption in the world: constructions of on-
tological continuity are always superimposed on underlying tensions be-
tween life-world contexts and transcending human capacities. Even when
this basic point is accepted (as it is in Eisenstadt’s general social theory), it is
not clear that the consequences have been given their due, especially not in
relation to the contrast between Axial and pre-Axial cultures. Jaspers’ no-
tion of “unawakened cultures” is no longer explicitly defended by anybody,
but descriptions of a pre-Axial continuity between nature, society, and cul-
ture sometimes come uncomfortably close to it. Following Lévi-Strauss and
later discussions inspired by his work, even the thought of pre-state and
preliterate societies can now be understood as a sustained effort to neutral-
ize basic differences, rather than as marked by a simple inability to grasp
them, and constructs of undifferentiated modes of thought are a fortiori
implausible when it comes to archaic civilizations. On the other hand, new
constructions of ontological continuity, striving to minimize the impact of
ruptures and tensions discovered during a phase of intensified reflexivity,
can appear in the aftermath of Axial transformations. If we want to distin-
guish the Axial Age from earlier historical epochs, that cannot be done on
the basis of a simple contrast between the presence and absence of differen-
tiation; the question must be posed in terms of changing modes of interplay
between differentiating and unifying trends. This phenomenological con-
nection is proposed here as a tentative hypothesis, and the first steps will be
enough to show that we will not get much further without closer coopera-
tion of comparative historians and area specialists. To avoid misunderstand-
ings, it should be noted that I am not equating specific attitudes to the world
with particular cultural formations. The categories suggested below recur in
different contexts; they enter into varying combinations, and the compari-
son of different Axial patterns can only be developed in terms of such
combinations—even if specific orientations are more highly developed in
some cases than others. That said, I would—as a first step—propose to dis-
tinguish five ways of relating to the world, or directions of world articula-
tion, that are especially important to cultural developments during the Ax-
ial Age. This does not necessarily imply that all of them are equally new
when compared to trends in archaic civilizations (especially Egypt and
Mesopotamia); there is room for variation in that respect, and also in the
overall relationship of cultures of the Axial Age to their archaic precursors.
Aspects and Directions of World Articulation
(a) The first aspect to note is explicit world articulation as such, the begin-
ning of a “sagesse du monde” (Rémi Brague brought this theme into debates
on the Axial Age, but his analysis has not been as widely discussed as it de-
serves). This explicit conception of the world seems to be the most funda-
mental Greek achievement (more fundamental than the idea of exclusive
theoretical truth), without parallel in the cultures of the ancient Near East.
Several phases may be distinguished. Philosophical reflection begins with

the explication of an underlying Vorverständnis of the world; it goes on to
develop more structured and reasoned models of cosmic order; finally, the
notion of cosmic order takes a turn that brings it closer to the vision of an-
other world (how close is still being debated). This is the Platonic moment,
but it is neither unequivocal nor irreversible. The ambiguity underlined in
Schwartz’s comments on Plato, quoted above, also applies to the translation
of the doctrine of ideas into positive cosmology: the status and significance
of Plato’s ventures into this field is as disputed as the meaning of his political
projects. And as Brague’s (1999, 41–86) discussion stresses, other modes of
interpretation—including, in particular, the atomistic school—endured and
gave rise to new variants. This point can probably be taken further. It seems
likely that the originality of Stoic cosmological conceptions would be more
easily acknowledged if the sources had survived in more adequate shape.
But in regard to the Greek trajectory as a whole, a further aspect should be
underlined. The shift toward explicit world articulation is at the same time a
change in conceptions of the divine and the beginning of a dialogue be-
tween philosophy and religion that has been noted (see especially Hum-
phreys 2004) but not sufficiently recognized as characteristic of the Greek
Axial Age. If rational theology, in a broad sense, is a Greek invention and a
prominent thematic focus of Greek thought, this should be a starting point
for comparative perspectives. To mention only one case, it can hardly be
claimed that rational theology ranks among the inventions of the Chinese
Axial Age, but it may be possible to identify another path that bears at least
some resemblance to the Greek one. The notion of dao, generally seen as the
most central but also one of the most elastic ideas of the Chinese tradition,
and particularly central to the intellectual movements of the Axial Age,
seems to have connected efforts to depersonalize the notion of divinity to
evolving conceptions of a cosmic order. Despite growing interest in com-
paring ancient Greece and ancient China, there has been—to the best of
my knowledge—no extensive discussion of these affinities.
(b) Another major shift is perhaps best described as a recentering of the
world. The logic of recentering is most evident when grasped in opposition
to the archaic center par excellence: the institution of sacred kingship, and
the most emphatic recentering is the Jewish invention of monotheism. In
other cases, recentering can take more pluralistic and/or impersonal forms.
To clarify the differences as well as affinities between different Axial paths,

we should distinguish between cosmic and human centers. The institution-
alized notion of sacred kingship (or, in broader and less specifically archaic
terms, sacral rulership) links these two levels, and when its foundations are
problematized, new perspectives emerge on both sides. As otherwise differ-
ent interpreters of the Greek polis—from Jean-Pierre Vernant to Meier—
have stressed, the crisis of sovereignty and the new vision of power as situ-
ated in the midst of a multipolar political field changed the very idea of
center. The polis religion that was an integral part of the new form of social
life was the outcome of a restructuring process (some historians have specu-
lated about a religious revolution), too elusive for any specific conjectures,
but in any case less radical than the political transformation in that it left
more space for a supreme and central authority. The personalized idea of
divinity was transformed in a more radical way by philosophical reflection,
but this did not have an impact comparable to the unfolding political dy-
namic. Alongside these developments, the imaginary signification of king-
ship survived in less institutionalized forms, and together with other fac-
tors, this created preconditions for the reemergence of sacral rulership in a
new context.
A different but comparably complex constellation developed in China dur-
ing the Axial Age. A particularly intensive phase of state formation unsettled
the traditional bonds between rulership and the sacral order (although the
ritual frameworks of statehood remained strong). A central current of Chi-
nese thought during this period strove to reestablish the connection between
political authority and an inherited vision of order, temporarily disturbed and
therefore in need of reflection and instruction. At the same time, alternative
notions of order pursued decentering in a way much less amenable to ideo-
logical uses by rulers (that is at least a possible interpretation of some “ways of
Taoism,” to use Schwartz’s formulation). In the end, however, an elaborately
reconstructed and exceptionally durable version of sacral rulership prevailed
and presided over a selective canonization of Axial ideas.
The resurgences of sacral rulership, along different lines in the East and
West, are easier to understand if we accept that even its archaic form was
never an invariant and unproblematic anchor of order. Recent scholarship
on archaic civilizations, especially those of the Near East, has highlighted
changes to the conception of kingship over a long period and redefi ned
differences between traditions—for example, those of Egypt and Mesopota-

mia—in more nuanced terms than before. Moreover, the question of sacred
kingship can be linked to the problematic of human being-in-the-world.
The sacred (in extreme cases divine, but never wholly and solely) ruler ex-
emplifies the summit but also the limits of human perfection; his status is
defined within a broader framework of assumptions about the constraints,
possibilities, and orientations inherent in human relations to the world; his
authority is embedded in more complex structures of hierarchy. But reflec-
tions on sacred kingship and the human condition are also bound to remind
us of pre-Axial sources: the epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest recorded elabora-
tion of these themes.
(c) It seems justified to speak of world negation as a specific mode. This is
the most distinctively Indian contribution to Axial traditions, and an over-
all interpretation that takes it as a starting point will be discussed in the
excursus below. But a few general remarks are in order. “World negation” is,
in the given context, a more adequate term than the Weberian “world rejec-
tion.” The world is envisioned as a place to escape from, rather than a defec-
tive order to be reformed or subdued, and there is no reason to regard this
attitude as a first step toward the more activist stance that Weber ascribed to
the Occidental versions of world rejection. In the Axial Age, a reformist
ethos—the aspiration to build, in some sense, a better order—was associ-
ated with religious and intellectual orientations of the kind that Weber
called world-accepting (that applies to Greek and Chinese visions of a better
order, as well as—in a very different way—to the prophetic current in an-
cient Judaism), rather than with world-negating radicalism. If the latter is
preeminently characteristic of the Indian Axial Age, it must be added that
its more specific meanings are still very much a matter of debate. The chro-
nological as well as the substantive relationship between Buddhist and proto-
Hindu versions of world negation is controversial; the historical relationship
between these divergent currents and the rivalry of priests and warriors is
not easy to decipher; and some interpretations of early Buddhism suggest
that its world-negating ethos was associated with a more inner-worldly ethic
adapted to the stronger kingdoms emerging at the time.
(d) There is also, in varying degree across the spectrum of Axial cultures,
a shift toward world extension (the German term Welterweiterung may be
suggested in passing). There are two sides to this, a spatial and a temporal
one: the discovery and/or imagination of other human forms of life else-
where, and a growing grasp of “the past as another country”—in other
words: some kind of deepening of the “cultural split between antiquity and
modernity,” to quote Assmann’s formulation. Here we have the earliest
beginnings of comparative cultural reflection as well as of historiography
(Herodotus has come to be regarded as a founding father of the second, but
his work is in fact even more relevant to the first). The temporal side raises
the question of what Aleida and Jan Assmann call cultural memory. From a
phenomenological-hermeneutical point of view, cultural memory appears
as one of the world-articulating capacities or dispositions of human socie-
ties, and it intertwines with other such capacities in varying ways. Its trans-
formations and potentialities depend on writing as a cultural medium, but
when Assmann stresses the distinction between writing systems and writ-
ing cultures, and argues against the simplistic “media determinism” de-
fended by some earlier writers on this subject, the other side of that is that a
writing culture is always embedded in and codetermined by a broader cul-
tural constellation, and what is being suggested here is that these broader
contexts can be deciphered as complexes of relationships to the world.
(e) Finally, it can be argued that the Axial Age saw a shift toward human-
ization, in the sense of a new and enhanced kind of human participation in
ordering the world. But care must be taken to avoid absolutizing and over-
generalizing descriptions of this turn. Humanization does not mean the
same thing—nor does it lead to the same kind of distinction between a human
and a nonhuman world—in Greece and China, the two places where such
trends became most significant. The other two key cases seem more ambig-
uous. There is a humanizing side to the idea of the covenant, but the idea of
the divine legislator has the potential for a very radical negation of human
autonomy. As for India: can we—as some interpreters have suggested—
understand early Buddhism as a humanizing twist to the idea of renounce-
ment? Here I can only signal issues to be explored, and it seems fitting to
end on that note. The above suggestions on the phenomenology of world
articulation are meant to open up ways of reorienting the debate on the
Axial Age, rather than to outline a self-contained model.
Excursus II: Dumont on the Indian Axial Age
As far as I can judge, there has been no India-based approach to the Axial
Age that could be compared to Schwartz’s work on China (and it is proba-
bly true that analysts working with Western models—in the sense of We-
ber’s European-cum–Near Eastern Occident—have, because of the suppos-
edly common focus on transcendence, found it easier to assimilate the
Indian experience than the Chinese one). But if we look for adumbrations
of a view from India, one obvious choice is Dumont’s contribution to the
1975 Daedalus discussion. It seems to have gone largely unnoticed by later
scholarship, but as I will try to show, it poses problems that will have to be
confronted by any interpretation aspiring to comprehensive coverage of
Axial transformations.
Before he was drawn into the debate on the Axial Age, Dumont had al-
ready developed a comprehensive framework that placed a uniquely strong
emphasis on India as the traditional society par excellence, to be contrasted
with the very different model of social order that emerged in the modern
West. From his point of view, the idea of a broader historical category, en-
compassing major traditional civilizations and drawing them closer to mo-
dernity, was therefore a challenge to basic assumptions. Dumont was quick
to dismiss strong claims about parallel developments: “they recede or disin-
tegrate when one tries to grasp them more precisely” (1975, 153). For our
purposes it is more important that he went on to sketch an alternative model
of contrasts that presupposed a common ground; the Axial Age thus re-
turned as a topic for comparative analysis, but in a shape very different from
the mainstream images. For Dumont, the starting point had to be India,
and given his Durkheimian presuppositions, it was natural to stress institu-
tional developments and innovations. However, his version of the institu-
tionalist approach did not differ from the otherwise current emphasis on
ideas in Axial theorizing, as first impressions might suggest. The institutions
in which Dumont was interested—especially the institution of kingship—
had a particularly strong interpretive content. They were “meta-institutions,”
in the sense often used with reference to Émile Durkheim’s work, that is,
frameworks lending meaning and direction to the formation of more cir-
cumscribed institutions. In the case of kingship, and more particularly sa-
cred kingship, the inbuilt idea is a notion (in Cornelius Castoriadis’s terms:
an imaginary signification) of sovereignty, which on the one hand lends it-

self to extension into more or less elaborate patterns of socio-cosmic order,
and can on the other hand become a regulating principle for the distribu-
tion of social power. In the Indian case, the institution of kingship under-
went a particularly momentous process of differentiation. The story begins,
as Dumont sees it, with the Indo-Aryan invasion or immigration, and its
first formative phase ends with a “proto-Hindu agricultural society with its
center in the middle-Ganges region and a distinct polity which is on the
verge of developing into a large empire” (1975, 162). With regard to the
starting point, Dumont accepts Georges Dumézil’s account of an original
Indo-European conception of sovereignty, characterized by a strong magico-
religious component. The Vedas already reflect an unusually extreme devel-
opment of this aspect; the historical outcome is a bifurcation of sovereignty,
elevating priestly authority above its political counterpart and redefining
kingship as “secularized while subordinated” (ibid., 162). The caste order
crystallized around this asymmetrically split center. As Dumont’s critics
have argued, the relationship between kings and priests was more contested,
and attempts to readjust the balance in favor of kings more significant than
he thought. But here it seems more relevant to note some additional features
of his model. The primary distinction between priests and kings (or, in a
broader sociological sense, between priests and warriors) is accompanied by
the formation of a “peculiar social role outside society proper: the renouncer”
(ibid., 163). Although Dumont’s genealogy of the renouncer is not always
clearly formulated, this is a key aspect of his argument, and some implica-
tions should be underlined.
Dumont’s image of the renouncer presupposes a specific interpretation of
the Indian Axial Age: the decisive change takes place between the Vedas
and the Upanishads, and Buddhism appears as nothing more than a varia-
tion on proto-Hindu themes, developed by a later generation of renouncers.
Other analysts of Axial India have stressed the originality of Buddhism and
portrayed it as the most representative product of the epoch; this debate re-
flects divergent assumptions and is not likely to be settled soon. For Du-
mont, the figure of the renouncer was invented in the course of the very
process that established priesthood as the suprapolitical level of authority.
The logic of his argument seems to be that the Brahmin bid for primacy
triggered a reflective and imaginative effort transcending the original goal
and culminating in a new type of authority that entered into a paradoxical

relationship with the priestly one. The renouncer internalized and transfig-
ured sacrifice into ascetic exercises; he could thus be seen as the perfect
embodiment of aspirations inherent in the priestly model, but also as the
higher instance questioning “priestly representations” (Dumont 1975, 163).
What he stood for was “not a revolutionary or reforming, but a relativizing
attitude” (ibid.). It is important to note that Dumont describes the existen-
tial orientation of the renouncer as “outworldly,” rather than other-worldly:
the common denominator is an effort to maximize distance from the world,
and the other-worldly dimensions thus opened up can be defined in differ-
ent ways. The emphasis on the “outworldly” stance thus helps to minimize
the differences between Hinduism and Buddhism. It is also a key to the dy-
namics of Indian cultural history. Distance translates into innovative ca-
pacities: for Dumont, “the inventions of the renouncers and their sects and
the interaction between them and the religion of the man-in-the-world are
the vital factors of Indian history, something like the basic ‘principle of be-
coming’ of Indian civilization” (ibid., 167).
The Indian Axial Age, as analyzed by Dumont, is characterized by a dif-
ferentiation between religion and politics. But some qualifications must be
added to this description. Dumont uses the concept of differentiation in an
emphatically nonevolutionistic sense. It can, in his view, only refer to con-
crete historical processes, each of which generates its own patterns. In the
case at hand we are not dealing with a progressive separation of general
principles following their immanent logic; rather, the story begins with the
primary institution of kingship, and the changes that it undergoes in a con-
crete historical setting result in the constitution of separate but intercon-
nected forms of religious and political life. A further crucially important
aspect of Dumont’s model is the role of the renouncer. On the social level,
the separation of priesthood and kingship appears as the most massive and
at the same time most meaning-laden expression of a process that draws
new boundaries between religious and military elites. But when the cultural
context is taken into account, it becomes clear that the binary division is ac-
companied and modified by a third line of differentiation: the emerging re-
ligious culture of renouncement.
With these points in mind we can return to Dumont’s India-centered
survey of the Axial Age. He first distinguishes a strong and a weak hypoth-
esis. The strong one would claim that the flowering of intellectual life during
the Axial Age—a salient and indubitable fact—presupposes a differentiation

between religion and politics. According to Dumont, the Chinese experience
refutes this thesis: the intellectual achievements of the Chinese Axial Age
are beyond doubt, but the unity of religion and politics remained a defining
feature of the Chinese imperial order. He then goes on:
If its case proves intractable, that is, if some unsuspected equivalent to

the differentiation cannot be discovered there, then the weaker thesis
could be proposed that the previous evolution of kingship—i.e., what
happened to the basileus in Greece, the relationship between kings and
prophets in Israel, the secularization of kingship in India, the perma-
nence of the archetype in China—should have important concomitants
regarding the orientation or “dimension” of the intellectual develop-
ments in each case. This time, the case of China seems to admit and
confirm the thesis by its wholesale and relative “this-worldly” orienta-
tion. (Dumont 1975, 166)
We can disregard the speculation about an “equivalent to the differentiation”

and adjust the statement about a “previous evolution of kingship”—as even a
quick look at Dumont’s own reflections on India will show, he is in fact dis-
cussing interconnected processes, rather than successive stages. That said,
Dumont’s overview of the Axial cases is still worth closer examination. It is
inadequate, but its very shortcomings are instructive. The “weak thesis” is
never formulated in a way that would do justice to available knowledge about
the Axial Age. In the first place, it is—as has been seen—more than a little
misleading to talk about a Chinese “permanence of the archetype.” Sacral
rulership was reconstructed after a very eventful phase of several centuries.
“[W]hat happened to the basileus” is a very cautious reference to radical
changes that must be analyzed in more complex terms. In regard to ancient
Israel, the most obvious problem with Dumont’s description is that the priests
are missing. The triangle of kings, priests, and prophets would invite compari-
son with its Indian counterpart—kings, priests, and renouncers—and closer
examination of contrasts and parallels between different roads beyond sa-
cred kingship.
In short, it is not at all clear what the weaker thesis would maintain and
how it could be tested. What remains is a useful suggestion: that the debate
on the Axial Age would benefit from closer analysis of the diverse and
changing relations between religion and politics. Despite a lingering ten-

dency to overemphasize “secularizing” trends in Greece and China during
the Axial Age, the religious factors involved in these two very different pat-
terns of political change are now being studied more attentively; Assmann’s
interpretation of ancient Israel in the context of its Near Eastern environ-
ment has thrown new light on the political implications of one of the two
most radical religious transformations of the period. The other one is the
emergence of Buddhism, and even if doubts can be cast on the details of
Dumont’s account, his questions seem worth pursuing.
References
Assmann, Jan. 1993. Monotheismus und Kosmotheismus. Heidelberg: Winter.
———. 1996. Ägypten—Eine Sinngeschichte. Munich: Beck.
———. 1997. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Iden-
tität in frühen Hochkulturen. Munich: Beck.
Bellah, Robert. 2005. “What Is Axial about the Axial Age?” European Journal of
Sociology 46: 69–89.
Brague, Rémi. 1999. La sagesse du monde. Histoire de l’expérience humaine de
l’univers. Paris: Fayard.
Briant, Pierre. 2002. From Cyrus to Alexander—A History of the Persian Empire.
Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns.
Dumont, Louis. 1975. “On the Comparative Understanding of Non-modern Civi-
lizations.” Daedalus 104, no. 2: 153–172.
Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., ed. 1986. The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civiliza-
tions. Albany: State University of New York Press.
———, ed. 1987. Kulturen der Achsenzeit I: Ihre Ursprünge und ihre Vielfalt. Part
1: Griechenland, Israel, Mesopotamien. Part 2: Spätantike, Indien, China,
Islam. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
namik. Part 1: China, Japan. Part 2: Indien. Part 3: Buddhismus, Islam, Altä-
gypten, westliche Kultur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Gershevitch, Ilya. 1995. “Approaches to Zoroaster’s Gathas.” Iran 33: 1–29.
Gnoli, Gherardo. 1983. De Zoroastre à Mani. Paris: Collège de France.
———. 2000. Zoroaster in History. New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press.
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Kingship and Society. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
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51–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Kippenberg, 279–312. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
———. 1991. “A. H. Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805) und das Konzept der Achsen-
zeit.” In Achaemenid History: Through Travellers’ Eyes, ed. Helen Sancisi-
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Catholic University of America Press.
Schwartz, Benjamin. 1985. The World of Thought in Ancient China. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Seaford, Richard. 2004. Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy,
Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock, 183–200, Leiden: Brill.
15
Cultural Memory and the
Myth of the Axial Age
jan assmann
The theory of the Axial Age is the creation of philosophers and sociologists,
not of historians and philologists on whose research the theory is based. It is
the answer to the question for the roots of modernity. When and where did
the modern world begin as we know and inhabit it? The historian investi-
gates the past for the sake of the past. The quest for the roots of modernity,
however, is not interested in the past as such but only as the beginning of
something held to be characteristic of the present. These are two categori-
cally different approaches that must be carefully kept apart, which does not
mean, however, that there could and should not be interaction and coopera-
tion between historians and theorists or, to give the distinction a different
turn, between specialists and generalists. On the contrary, I think this inter-
action indispensable if the theory of the Axial Age should be any more than
just a scientific myth.
It is the quest for beginnings that gives the Axial theory or narrative a cer-
tain mythical quality; myths tend to construct beginnings, which the histo-
rian then feels summoned to deconstruct. In the Vorspiel to his Joseph novels,
Thomas Mann deals with exactly this tension between the mythical and the
historical approach to the past. In the perspective of the historian, the mythi-
cal beginnings tend to dissolve and to give way to ever earlier beginnings, and
the depth of the “well of the past” proves to be unfathomable. “Tief ist der
Brunnen der Vergangenheit. Sollten wir ihn nicht unergründlich nennen?”1
This opening sentence describes with inimitable precision the misgivings that
historians, especially those who, like myself, specialize in “pre-Axial” civiliza-
tions, feel with regard to Karl Jaspers’ theory of the Axial Age. To them, Jaspers
Cultural Memory and the Myth of the Axial Age 367
appears as a teller of myths, narrating about beginnings where they see slow
developments, continuities, discontinuities, revisions, and recourses.
The myth (and to a large degree also the theory) of the Axial Age is centered
on the following principal assumption: there is but One Truth and One Man-
kind.2 At a given point in its moral, spiritual, and intellectual evolution,
mankind “broke through” to a much clearer apprehension of this Truth. This
happened independently at several places at approximately the same time
around 500 bce. In Jaspers’ rather tragic view of universal history, these Axial
breakthroughs did not really survive their later institutionalizations—at
least not undistortedly—when the formative phase of competing small states
was followed by the rise of large empires; they remain a goal to be achieved,
which gives universal history its normative perspective. If these Axial break-
throughs constitute the roots of modernity, modernity appears as an still
unfulfilled project. Mann, in his own ways, adhered to a similar conception.
Opposing Oswald Spengler and his theory of eight mutually nontransparent
and untranslatable cultural spheres, he propagated the unity of the human
spirit (“Die Einheit des Menschengeistes”)3 across cultural boundaries. In
his Joseph novels, he not only showed how such a synthesizing view of dif-
ferent cultural traditions could work with regard to ancient Mesopotamia,
Egypt, Israel, Greece, Christianity, but devised also a similar normative
concept of modernity as a goal still to be achieved.4 As far as the assumption
of the unity of humanity is concerned, Mann agreed with the Axial myth,
but—as mentioned above—he would never have subscribed to the idea that
all this began only in the first millennium bce. It is important to recognize
the political and ideological context of both Mann’s and Jaspers’ concept
of the unity of the human spirit. In the heydays of nationalism, racism, and
other theories of human “pseudo-speciation” (E. H. Erikson)5 it was neces-
sary to formulate concepts of human intellectual unity and universal Truth—
as it is necessary now to remember and to elaborate these concepts in order
to overcome the “clash of civilizations” that is now being prophesied by neo-
Spenglerian theories. In a normative perspective, the myth of the Axial Age
has a clear function of orientation. As a reconstruction of the intellectual and
social history of the first millennium bce, however, it is highly problematic.
In a different way, similar misgivings apply to theories of cultural evolu-
tion. Theories of evolution reconstruct history in terms of nature, as a largely
unconscious, uncontrolled, and in this respect “blind” accumulative progress.
As far as the history of culture is concerned, however, we are dealing also

with processes that involve consciousness, observation, governance, control,
reflection, choice, decision, and intervention of various kinds and to various
degrees that do not necessarily follow any evolutionary, that is, intrinsic and
in this respect “blind” logic. We have to account for losses, intentional breaks,
reversions and recourses, rediscoveries, reconstructions. Nobody will deny
that there is evolution even in culture. Evolution applies to those areas of
culture that lie beyond conscious observation and control, especially pro-
cesses that run unnoticed and unremembered over a long stretch of time,
such as linguistic change or innovations that become an unreflected part
of the world in which we are living and that sink below the level of public
awareness and discourse to the cultural unconscious. The world we are living
in is to a large degree the result of unconscious accumulation. The innova-
tions of former times become the unquestioned and unreflected foundations
and presuppositions of later times on which to build in order to find new so-
lutions for new problems. This process, which Pierre Bourdieu called habit-
ualization, may well be described as cultural evolution. It concerns the dark
side of collective memory, which lies outside the realm of conscious reflec-
tion and communication and which corresponds in many respects to Mi-
chel Polanyi’s “tacit dimension.”6 However, the paradigm of evolution loses
in applicability if the horizon of unconscious accumulation is transcended
and we enter the realm of conscious reflection, debate, and decision, the realm
where the “Axial” moves take place. Evolution theory works so well with
nature because nature knows of no conscious relationship to the past. Nature
neither remembers nor forgets its past. Human beings, however, dispose of a
form of memory that allows them to orient themselves in time, in memory
back to several millennia and in expectation forward to temporal horizons of
varying extension. This human capacity of temporal orientation invests the
sheer historical process with meaning in various forms and steers it in various
directions. For this reason, evolution theory, if applied to the human world,
has to be supplemented by a specifically cultural theory that accounts for the
dynamics of the bright, the conscious side of cultural memory.
The Axial Age is unanimously hailed as an evolutionary achievement, a
step forward, a “breakthrough” toward the future, toward modernity. It is
certainly not a coincidence that its first discovery happened at that other
evolutionary moment in the intellectual history of the West that Reinhart
Koselleck dubbed Sattelzeit (literally “saddle time”), the period between

1750 and 1850 when the idea of “progress” began to move to the center of
a new paradigm of historical consciousness. The Iranologist Abraham-
Hyacinth Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805) observed as early as 1771 the syn-
chronism between Zoroaster, Confucius, Laotse, Buddha, the prophets in
Israel, and the Greek philosophers and spoke of “a great revolution of the
human species.”7 For Koselleck, the Sattelzeit around 1800 marks the begin-
ning of modernity in much the same way as the Axial Age for Jaspers: the
boundary between strangeness and familiarity. Both Jaspers’ Axial Age and
Koselleck’s Sattelzeit meant a fundamental restructuring of our orientation
in time and our relation to past and future. The paradigm of progress was
linked to historicism as a new attitude toward the past, which became im-
portant in all its aspects for its own sake, and the Axial “breakthrough” was
linked to new forms of relating to the past, of looking backward and cleav-
ing to sanctified, age-old cultural articulations. If it is a breakthrough, this
goes in the direction of looking back, of memory, of cultural consciousness
and discursive reflection.8 In a recent paper, Aleida Assmann criticizes what
she calls “modernization theory” for its future-orientedness and its all too
exclusive concentration on innovations, changes, beginnings, which neces-
sarily leads to a complete blindness as to the cultural achievements of stabi-
lization and of establishing long-term continuity and diachronic identity. In
the framework of modernization theory (to which the theory of the Axial
Age obviously belongs), tradition and cultural memory appear as factors of
mere retardation, regression, and stagnation.9 In the framework of a theory
of cultural memory, the Axial Age complex appears in a different light: as a
phenomenon of tradition as much as of innovation. Within this method-
ological framework, the decisive question is not so much what happened in
the Axial Age but how have these events been remembered, represented,
and reconstructed in cultural traditions.
As far as the breakthrough to monotheism is concerned, this quintessen-
tial Axial event is represented in cultural memory as well as in the Axial Age
narrative in terms of revolution rather than evolution. Revolution and evo-
lution are in many respects opposites. It is certainly true that revolutions do
not occur without preparatory stages, developments, and movements lead-
ing in the direction of what is then achieved by a revolutionary transforma-
tion or “breakthrough.” Nevertheless, the process leading from state A to
state B via a revolutionary intervention could never be adequately described

solely in terms of evolution. As stated above, evolution is “blind,” whereas
revolution implies observation and decision. An evolutionary process fol-
lows exclusively intrinsic vectors without exterior intervention and without
decision between opposite options. The best example is perhaps the transi-
tion from “primary” to “secondary religions” or “polytheism” to “monothe-
ism.”10 Unless we create a specifically cultural (as opposed to biological)
meaning of “evolution” that allows for revolution as a means of evolution,
this change may never be described in terms of evolution alone. Monothe-
ism is not a more developed state of polytheism. Polytheism does not “lead”
to monotheism as its ultimate state of maturity; at most, it leads to a form of
inclusive monotheism that views the gods as immanent manifestations of
one transcendent supreme deity. Exclusive monotheism, which does not
recognize any gods except one, is never the outcome of evolution (as a form
of development) but only of revolution (as a form of rejection).11
Distance, Disembedment, and Universalism: Features of Axiality
How could such an interaction between theorists and specialists be real-

ized? First of all, it would be important to come to an agreement concerning
the characteristic traits or distinctive features of modernity, whose origins
we are looking for in the remote past. What were the decisive innovations
that brought about the world which we still inhabit? The first candidate, put
forward by Jaspers, is something like general consciousness. In the Axial Age
and in the three spheres of China, India, and the West, Jaspers claims, “man
becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations.”12
This kind of “general consciousness” is the hallmark of philosophy, under-
stood as the art of seeing the world and human existence from a distance, a
technique of cognitive disembedding from the symbiotic embeddedness
of early man in the cycles of nature, political institutions, and social
constellations.
The next two features are cognate to this one and hardly separable from
it. The first is reflexivity, which Jaspers defines as second-order thinking,
thinking about thinking. “Consciousness became once more conscious of
itself, thinking became its own object” (“Das Bewußtsein machte noch ein-
mal das Bewußtsein bewußt, das Denken richtete sich auf das Denken”).13
The second is what Shmuel Eisenstadt calls transcendental visions. Tran-

scendental visions concern concepts with a claim to absolute, unconditioned
Truth, with a capital “T.” These visions or conceptualizations presuppose
new techniques of “standing back and looking beyond” (Benjamin Schwartz),
of self-distanciation from the various conditions under which the traditional
truths were believed and transmitted, a distance that could be achieved only
by very few and only in the first millennium bce, which the Sinologist Ben-
jamin Schwartz, for this reason, called “the Age of Transcendence.”14 This is
a very convincing characteristic of the intellectual transformations occur-
ring in the first millennium bce in the East and West, but is it also charac-
teristic of modernity? Are we still living in an “age of transcendence,” and if
so, in what sense? In another context, modernity is defined by the loss of
transcendence in the course of the nineteenth century.15 More important,
however, is the question whether, and in what sense, we can deny the pre-
Axial world any notions of transcendence or “transcendental visions.” Ob-
viously, only transcendence in the very strong and emphatic sense of “a
cosmological chasm between a transcendental and a mundane sphere”
(Hans Joas) can qualify as an exclusively “Axial” concept of transcendence.
It is precisely this form of “two worlds theory” that is denied, for example,
by Nietzsche’s concept of modernity. On the other hand, it applies perfectly
well to the pre-Axial world. Even the gods of the polytheistic world are
“transcendent” in the sense that they belong to “another” world. Transcen-
dence in the sense of other-worldliness is common to all forms of religion
and concepts of the sacred. These gods and spirits are, however, not “extra-
mundane.” Their “other-worldliness” does not prevent them from being
immanent in nature. For this reason, Eric Voegelin, Talcott Parsons, Robert
Bellah, and others have spoken of “cosmological societies” with regard to
pre-Axial civilizations, and I try to capture this concept of cosmic imma-
nence of the divine by preferring the term “cosmotheism” to “polytheism.”16
Voegelin’s main criterion for distinguishing between pre-Axial and Axial
civilizations (not his terminology) deserves a discussion in this context. It is
differentiation, or, in an evolutionary perspective, the transition or turn
from “compactness” to “differentiatedness.”17 Axiality, in this perspective,
consists primarily in the introduction of new distinctions. My own concept
of the “Mosaic distinction” between true and false within the realm of reli-
gion and, more generally, between god and world, is in this respect indebted
to Voegelin’s approach. Conceptual “compactness” goes together with ana-

logical thinking. The human world is symbolically articulated on the model
of the cosmos, and vice versa (in Voegelin’s terms: “microcosmos” and
“macranthropos”), a style of thought that I would call “mutual modeling” and
which obviously comes very close to Merlin Donald’s concept of “mythic
culture.” Mutual modeling and the ensuing conceptual compactness are
based on the “integration of society in nature” (a concept that Voegelin bor-
rows from the Egyptologist Henri Frankfort). Conceptual compactness re-
sults not so much from an inability to differentiate, a mere absence of later
achievements, but from a will to connect and to integrate, to establish alli-
ances, equations, and identities. Also in this perspective, the Axial turn ap-
pears as a process of distanciation and disembedding, leading to or ex-
pressed in conceptual differentiation.
Distanciation or disembedding is also a quintessential trait of another
feature, which Jaspers calls critique and which may be defined as a new
power of negation. “Hitherto unconsciously accepted ideas, customs and
conditions,” Jaspers writes, “were subjected to examination, questioned and
liquidated.”18 This radical questioning of tradition led, according to Jaspers,
to monotheism in the eastern, and to the birth of philosophy in the western
part of the Eastern Mediterranean. Arnaldo Momigliano put this feature
first and spoke with regard to the Axial Age of the “age of criticism.”19
It is this power of negation that turns transition into rejection (and evolu-
tion into revolution). Unlike Donald and Bellah, who conceive of the vari-
ous stages of cultural evolution in terms of addition and integration instead
of replacement and supersession,20 Jaspers constructs the transition from A
to B in terms of A contra B. The success of logos meant the end of mythos,
the success of monotheism the end of polytheism (or paganism or “cos-
motheism”). The critical, antagonistic, or iconoclastic element in monothe-
ism is unmistakable. Both philosophy (since Parmenides and Plato) and re-
ligion (since Moses or what this name stands for) imply a strong concept of
absolute Truth, which is in fact a great innovation. This new concept of
Truth constitutes the borderline separating what Claude Lévi-Strauss called
“la pensée sauvage” from logical and scientific thinking, and “primary,”
culture-specific religions from “secondary” or world religions. I would in
fact subscribe to this theory. The appearance of a new concept of absolute
and exclusive truth in the Eastern Mediterranean world is a decisive innova-
tion. In the paradigm of cultural memory, however, the former stages are
neither only “integrated” in the sense of Donald’s and Bellah’s evolutionary
theory, nor are they totally discarded and overcome in the sense of Jaspers’
model of intellectual progress. They are excluded, in Aleida Assmann’s ter-
minology, from the “canon” and relegated to the “archive” of cultural mem-
ory,21 from where they might be later recovered, and this rediscovery may
then lead to another intellectual revolution such as the Renaissance with its
flourishing of cosmotheism, magic, divination, astrology, and other seem-
ingly “pre-Axial” features.
Jaspers describes the direction of this primal turn from mythos to logos
and polytheism to monotheism as Vergeistigung (spiritualization), which
may be retained as a further feature of axiality. The term comes close to Max
Weber’s concept of rationalization and disenchantment, and to Sigmund
Freud’s concept of a progress in Geistigkeit (spirituality or intellectuality).
The German word Geist is a notoriously difficult and untranslatable term. It
is best understood in the sense of the Greek logos, meaning word, discourse,
and reason. Geist has an intimate relationship to language. Vergeistigung
means, therefore, something like Versprachlichung, transforming the world
into discourse. It is exactly in this sense that Freud interpreted the prohibi-
tion of images as a “progress in Geistigkeit.”22 The concept of Geistigkeit,
which was so important for Freud and Jaspers, gains in significance if seen
in the context of the assaults on Geist committed by Nazi Germany. Jaspers’
theory of the Axial Age with its characteristic traits of “modernity” is not
only a self-portrait or a cultural autobiography but also a normative mirror,
confronting modern man with an image of how he should be. As far as the
Western part of the Axial hemisphere is concerned, the concept of Geist
(ruach, neshamah, pneuma, logos, nous, psyche, animus, spiritus) plays in
fact an enormous and ever-increasing role in the cultural texts of the an-
cient, especially (neo-)Platonic, Jewish, Christian, and, above all, Gnostic
worlds.
Another Axial feature, besides general consciousness, second-order think-
ing, and critique in the name of a new concept of Truth, is the rise of great
individuals and the discovery of individuality. The appearance of the “great
individuals” such as, from East to West, Confucius, Lao-tse, Meng-tse, Bud-
dha, Zoroaster, the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers, tragedi-
ans, and poets is in fact the most striking Axial phenomenon. This is the
very core of the Axial myth as it was first designed by Anquetil-Duperron

and then taken up and elaborated by Jean Pierre Abel-Rémusat, Ernst von
Lasaulx, Victor von Strauss, and many others. The great individuals are the
few who effectuated the step back and the look beyond, this great achieve-
ment of social and ideological disembedding, this display of negational power
and radical questioning. Inseparably linked to the discovery of individual-
ity is the stress on interiority, the rise of inner man, homo interior (Augus-
tine), ho endos anthropos (Paul), a kind of inner transcendence—the turn, in
David Riesman’s terms, from tradition- to inner-directedness.23 This turn
may also be interpreted as a move of disembedding and distanciation, which
appears to be something like a common denominator of all the Axial fea-
tures enumerated so far.
The most radical form of both social disembedding and interiorization is
what Karen Armstrong in her book The Great Transformation (which has
been published in German under the title Die Achsenzeit)24 calls kenosis, a
form of radical renunciation, of disembedding oneself from all social and
other “worldly” bonds in the search for the absolute.25 I do not think, how-
ever, that we should include kenosis within the Axial features. In its radical
form, it seems specific to Indian asceticism, lacking the universality charac-
teristic of typical Axial phenomena. In its more general sense of mere altru-
ism, which Armstrong also includes in her notion of kenosis, it is, on the
contrary, far too unspecific and applies also to non-Axial cultures.26 This
form of renunciation is only a more efficient way of self-embedding into so-
cial or communal constellations, not a form of radical disembedding. Dis-
embedding, however, deserves to be retained as a decisive and defining fac-
tor of axiality. “The surprising feature of the axial religions,” writes Charles
Taylor, “is that they initiate a break in all three dimensions of embedded-
ness: social order, cosmos, human good.”27
A last feature of axiality has such an importance for Jaspers that he puts it
in the very title of his book: history. History, according to him, is the quint-
essential feature of axiality. History begins with the Axial Age in its three
centers—China, India, Israel/Greece—and everything unrelated to one of
these centers stays outside history, as a Naturvolk without history. History
or historical consciousness functions in Jaspers’ theory as a leitfossil of axi-
ality. Since the Axial narrative or theory is in itself a prominent manifesta-
tion of historical consciousness in the sense of becoming aware and render-

ing an account of one’s own past and origin, it becomes again clear in what
sense the Axial narrative is a self-portrait and a cultural autobiography.
Historical consciousness, however, is one of the fields where there is most
diversity and least convergence among the “Axial” civilizations.28
This brief survey has shown that the Axial features have two common
denominators. One is a move of distanciation or disembedding, the other
the claim for universal validity. To these two general categories, distancia-
tion and universality, has to be added a third one, which, in the context of
the Axial narrative, is the most decisive and in my eyes the most problem-
atic one: synchronicity. My impression is that time matters too much in the
theoretical debates on the Axial Age. There is the danger of being caught in
a vicious circle by including time among the features or conditions of axial-
ity. A phenomenon qualifies as “Axial” if it occurred around 500 bce. It is
the temporal argument that gives the Axial process the enigmatic character
of an event, a turn, or even a mutation.
Mutation is in fact the way in which Jaspers interpreted the Axial trans-
formation. In the centuries around 500 bce, “man, as we know him today,
came into being,” Homo sapiens axialis, so to speak. “The whole of humanity
took a forward leap.”29 Voegelin will later speak of a “leap in being” with
regard to the Axial event.30 The term “axis” refers to a point—the “Axial mo-
ment” as Bellah calls it—that divides the stream of time into “before” and
“after” in the manner of the birth of Christ. Jaspers’ opposition between the
Axial and the pre-Axial worlds appears to me in many respects as a secular-
ized version of the Christian opposition of true religion and paganism or
historia sacra and historia profana. The biblical (both Jewish and Christian)
concept of history implies radical changes, sharp discontinuities, a spiritual
“mutation,” the emergence of a new man. The Axial Age narrative has the
structure of such a mnemohistorical construction that dramatizes a ten-
dency, a development, a process of emergence in form of a revolutionary
break, and it personifies it in the figure of a great individual.
The most problematic aspect of such a dramatization of change is the
alienation or “estrangement” of the past.31 In the same way as Christian (and,
for that matter, also Jewish and Islamic) orthodoxy blinded itself for the
truths that may be contained in other religions by constructing and rejecting
them as paganism, idolatry, or “ignorance” ( jahiliya, the Muslim concept of

paganism), Jaspers seems to be blind to truly Axial motifs in pre-Axial
civilizations.
Little consensus has been achieved as to the agents of change. What could
possibly bring about such a general transformation or fuel a process of
longue durée? Jaspers subscribed to Alfred Weber’s theory about the Reiter-
völker, equestrian tribes or peoples, who by means of their new technology
of horse-riding and chariot-driving were able to overrun the ancient world.32
Such migrations, invasions, and conquests did in fact happen, but not in the
Axial Age. The most decisive wave occurred in the first half of the second
millennium bce, with a second wave around 1200–1100 bce. The first gave
rise to the Hittite Empire, while the second destroyed it, and it also put an
end to the Bronze Age in general. It is, however, more than unclear how these
events could be related to intellectual and spiritual breakthroughs of the
kind Alfred Weber and Jaspers are reclaiming for the Axial Age. If we look
for something similar on the political plane taking place around 500 bce,
we find the establishment of the Persian Empire in the West, the Maurya
kingdoms in India, and the period of the warring kingdoms in China.
The interesting fact about the Persian Empire is that it constituted at its
time the most extensive move of globalization in human history. This may
have promoted the emergence of universalist ideas. By globalization I under-
stand a process of coalescence of various previously isolated zones into one
system of interconnections and interdependencies, where everything, that
is, all nations, empires, tribes, and states cohere in some way or other by
political, economic, or cultural relations. Universalism, on the other hand,
refers to the rise of theories, ideas, or beliefs with a claim to universal valid-
ity. By universalism, therefore, I understand an intellectual and spiritual
phenomenon; by globalism, a political, economic, and civilizational process
(implying material rather than spiritual culture).33 The two typical univer-
salisms of Western antiquity are monotheism, both in its inclusive (“all gods
are One”) and exclusive, biblical form (“no other gods!”) on the one hand,
and Greek science and philosophy on the other. Since globalization is a cen-
tral aspect of modernity, we are in fact dealing here with one of its roots.
Imperialism, however, is not the only form of political globalization. In
the ancient world, globalization started much earlier, with the emergence of
and the contact between the superpowers of the Late Bronze Age in the sec-
ond half of the second millennium bce.34 The transition in cultural and po-
litical outlook, orientation, or mentality to this new stage of incipient glo-
balization may most clearly be observed with respect to ancient Egypt.
During the Old and Middle Kingdoms, that is, from 3000 until 1500 bce,
the Egyptians quite simply identified their world with the world in general.
Egypt is seen as a cosmos, a sphere of order, surrounded by a zone of chaos,
inhabited by nomadic tribes whom it is important to ward off but not to
conquer and integrate. The symbolic expression of this attitude is the same
as in classical China, a great wall “built to fence off the nomads” (Sinuhe,
B17).35 Only with the beginning of the New Kingdom around 1500 bce does
the extra-Egyptian world appear as part of God’s creation. By then, the
Egyptians have learned the lesson that their environment is not only formed
by nomadic tribes but by empires much like their own: the Hittite Empire,
the empire of Mitanni, the Babylonian and later also the Assyrian empires,
the city states of Syria-Palestine, the Minoan and Mycenean states and colo-
nies, and the Nubian state of Kerma that had emerged south of Egypt. Deal-
ing with these states and empires was no longer a matter of exclusion and
negation, but of warfare and diplomacy. Egypt had entered the “age of inter-
nationalism,” a political network that was coextensive with the world as it
was known to and conceived of by its members. The change of political and
mental orientation was accompanied by a rise of first universalist concepts,
above all the idea of a creator who created the whole world in its differenti-
ated variety—including the multiplicity of languages and skin colors—whom
the Egyptians identified with the sun. This development culminated in the
middle of the thirteenth century bce, in a veritable religious revolution, the
instauration of a purely and exclusively monotheistic religion by King
Akhenaten that lasted, however, for only twenty years at most. This Egyptian
example provides a paradigm for the connection between globalization and
universalism, as well as for the connections between politics and, at least po-
tentially, Axial breakthroughs. We may call this form of globalization “in-
ternationalism,” which appears as the hallmark of the Late Bronze Age
(1500–1100 bce).
In the form of imperialism, however, globalization seems to be the hall-
mark of the first millennium bce. The Assyrians started this politics of
unification with the conquests of Tiglat-Pileser III (745–727 bce), the founder
of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, whose successors extended its frontiers as far
as Egypt. Forming an alliance with the Medes, the Babylonians under Na-
bopolassar defeated the Assyrians and founded the Neo-Babylonian Em-
pire, which only ninety years later fell victim to the Persian expansion. The
Persian Empire lasted about 300 years, until it was conquered by Alexander
the Great. The biblical book of Daniel, composed in the year 165 bce, gives
an account and an interpretation of this sequence of empires in the two vi-
sions recorded in chapters 2 and 7. Daniel is an apocalypsis prophesying the
end of history and the advent of the Kingdom of God after the fall of the
fourth empire. In its Christian reception, the fourth empire, which origi-
nally referred to Alexander’s empire (split up under his successors, the Dia-
dochi), was identified with Rome, and because the end of history was not
deemed really desirable, the end of Rome was deferred as far as possible in
the form of the “Holy Roman Empire.”36 In this respect, Daniel opens a his-
torical perspective that connects the first millennium bce with Napoleon,
who finally put an end to this construction and aspired to continue this
tradition of imperialist globalization by building an ever greater empire.
Daniel provided the universalist vision to the globalist project of Hellenistic
imperialism. A similar project may have inspired Jaspers after the break-
down of Hitler’s global imperialism. It is obvious that the idea of imperialis-
tic globalization emerged in the first millennium bce and remained a major
factor in political thought until modernity. In this respect, we may indeed
speak of an “Axial Age.” But this is not what Jaspers had in mind, and “glo-
balization” is not his theme.
Literacy as an Agent of Change
As far as the agents of change are concerned, there might indeed exist a re-
lationship between technological and intellectual innovations on the one
hand, and political breakdowns and intellectual breakthroughs on the other.37
In my contribution to the volume Axial Civilizations and World History, I
tried to shed light on the second aspect with regard to Egypt and Israel.38
In this contribution, I want to focus on technological and intellectual inno-
vations, dealing, however, not with engineerial technologies of warfare and
transportation but with writing as “a technology that restructures thought.”39
I am, therefore, arguing in the field of a semiotics and pragmatics of sym-
bolic forms, which is also treated in the more theoretic contributions to this
volume by Merlin Donald and Matthias Jung. As early as 1783, the Jewish
philosopher Moses Mendelssohn stated that “the grammatological transfor-
mations which occurred in different periods of cultural development had an
important impact on the revolutions of human cognition in general and
changes in religious concepts in particular.”40 Homo axialis is the man, the
symbol-user, who by “mutually reinforcing feedback loops between levels of
consciousness and different modes of sign-usage” (Matthias Jung) has been
formed by the very tools he invented.
Writing as a cultural technique may be looked at under two different as-
pects: as a technology of creation and a technology of preservation. Nobody
will doubt that, without writing, none of the great texts that we are still
reading today could have been preserved in such a manner that they could
still exert their normative and formative impact, and that writing, therefore,
has to be recognized as a necessary condition of axiality. Few, however, would
subscribe to the idea that writing constitutes also a sufficient condition,
which would mean that axiality is a causal consequence of writing. I myself
would never go so far. There is, however, a third way of conceptualizing the
relation between writing and axiality, taking axiality to be not a consequence
but an implication of writing, an option opened up by literacy of a certain
quality, whose acceptance, exploration, and elaboration, however, depends
on historical and cultural circumstances. Until very recently, the invention
or reception of writing and the development of literacy have mostly been
studied as factors of cultural evolution. In the famous studies of Walter
Ong, Jack Goody, Eric Havelock, and others, this has led to a kind of media-
determinism, taking for inevitable consequences what at best are potentiali-
ties, propensities, and implications that may become real only in interaction
with contingent political, social, and cultural factors.41
Writing is not the same in every context. We have to distinguish between
systems and cultures of writing (this distinction will be explained later), and
within cultures of writing between several stages of literacy. First of all,
however, we have to consider writing as a medium not only of communica-
tion but also of memory. Under certain conditions, writing restructures
thought not only in the direction of invention but also of retention and may
eventually lead to a complete restructuring of what we call “cultural mem-
ory.” Only writing creates the tension between “canon” and “archive” (Aleida
Assmann) that accounts for a cultural dynamism typical of “Axial” cultures.42
Writing is a technology that makes cultural creations possible that would

otherwise never exist, and that preserves cultural creations in memory,
making accessible to later recourse what would otherwise be forgotten and
have vanished. Writing, in short, is a factor of cultural creativity and cul-
tural memory.
In order to clarify these points, I would like to start with some very gen-
eral remarks. As human beings we live in a world of symbolic articulation
that we ourselves have created. Our world is created through communica-
tion. Aristotle’s two definitions of man, as zoon logon echon, the animal that
has language and reason, and as zoon politikon, the animal that lives in
communities, go together: we possess language as a function of our depen-
dency on, and capacity for, bonding, and we use language and other means
of symbolic articulation in order to form social bonds and inhabit the world
that we create. This space or world of symbolic articulation borders on the
inarticulate that we bear in us as the unconscious and that surrounds our
world from without.
It is in this space of symbolic articulation and communication that, 5,000–
6,000 years ago, the space of writing emerged at various places on earth, in
very different forms and on different scales, and also with different cultural
and social consequences. By writing I understand a special kind of symbols
that bestow visibility to the invisible, stability to the volatile, and wide dis-
semination to the locally confined. Language uses sound-symbols that are
invisible, volatile, and locally restricted. Therefore, language is the classical
case for the application of writing. In everyday language, by writing we un-
derstand language made visible. For other domains of the use of symbols for
visibilization, fi xation, and dissemination such as music and mathematics,
we speak of notation and not of writing. At best, musical notation, at least in
German, is often called writing. Notenschrift is a common term in German.
The human space of symbolic articulation and communication was with-
out doubt always occupied not only by acoustic but also by visible symbols.
In this sense, humanity has always used writing alongside language. I am
thinking of petroglyphs, cave paintings, pottery marks, knotted cords, and
other markers in the space of visual communication and of cultural mem-
ory, which Donald calls “exograms.”43 There are various means to visibilize
the invisible, stabilize the transient, and disseminate the local. It is, however,
obvious that by writing or by the various forms of writing that developed at
various places over 5,000 years ago we understand something different,

something that must have changed the space of symbolical articulation
more or less radically in proportion to its functions and range. Before going
into details here and in order to gain a general idea of this connection be-
tween writing and change, I refer to the example of musical notation. There
are still many traditions of music that are untouched by musical notation
and that correspond to what in the domain of language is called orality.
They differ mainly in two points from literate musical traditions: in stan-
dardization and evolution or innovation. “Oral” musical traditions tend to
be less standardized and less innovative. They are more complex in their use
of features that cannot be rendered in musical notation and in spontaneous
improvisation, and they are less complex and innovative in the lack of po-
lyphony and in a certain formulaic repetitiveness that is characteristic also
of “oral literature.” The kind of music, however, that develops in the space of
writing shows a breathtaking speed and range of evolution. Eighty years lie
between Monteverdi’s Poppea and Handel’s Alcina, sixty between Alcina and
Mozart’s Figaro, and another eighty between Così fan tutte and Wagner’s
Walküre. This evolution is a matter both of creativity and of memory. Musi-
cal notation enables the composer to create music of unknown complexity
and it establishes a memory that excludes unconscious repetition and deter-
mines the directions of development by intertextual competition. The West-
ern history of music would not have been possible without the invention of
musical notation. This invention brought about a truly Axial turn in that it
triggered an evolution of global significance, putting every form of music
untouched by it in the position of “folk” or “ethnic” music comparable to
the position of oral societies beyond the realm of “history” in Jaspers’ sense.
What we may learn from this example of the space of writing is that here
a pressure on innovation is prevailing that is alien to the space of orality.
There is no more eloquent testimony for this pressure than the Complaints
of Khakheperreseneb, an ancient Egyptian author writing in the beginning
of the second millennium bce:
Had I but unknown phrases, strange expressions,

new speech that has not yet occurred, free of repetition,
No transmitted proverbs used by the ancestors!
I quench my body of all it contains
and relieve it from all my words.

For what has been said, is repetition
and nothing is said that has not been said.
One cannot boast with the utterances of the ancestors
for posterity will find out.
O that I knew what others ignore
and what is not repetition!44
This poignant complaint refers to a problem that only the author has. The
public expects from the bard the familiar, but from the author something
new. The author has to position himself in a space of intertextual competi-
tion. It is through this constant pressure that the space of writing is working
on the space of symbolic articulation, modifying but, above all, expanding
it. Writing, far from just stabilizing the volatile and visibilizing the invisible,
discloses entirely new areas of the inarticulate. Khakheperreseneb’s com-
plaint contains many typical Axial motifs such as reflexivity, interiority, in-
dividuality: “I quench my body.” Tradition made visible through the use of
writing assumes an emulatory character. One even thinks of sensing an ele-
ment of “anxiety of influence” (Harold Bloom) in Khakheperreseneb’s com-
plaint. It is, therefore, not enough to state that without writing the great
texts would never have been preserved for posterity. Without writing, they
would never have been created, because the necessity would not have been
felt to go beyond everything already existing in a written tradition. The bard
embodies and performs a tradition, an author changes it by adding to it.
This is what the Latin word auctor (from augere, to increase, grow, multiply)
means.
These effects, however, did not immediately occur with the invention of
writing, nor must we think of these changes in terms of evolution, that is,
logical consequence and strict determinism. First of all, we have to distin-
guish, as has already been suggested, between systems and cultures of writ-
ing. Writing systems concern differences such as ideographic, logographic,
syllabic, alphabetic scripts, and so on; writing cultures concern functions of
writing and forms of its social embedding. All the major scripts that are cur-
rently in use stem from two sources: the Chinese script and the scripts of the
ancient Near East, that is, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform.
Already this fact gives us an idea of the interconnectedness of cultural phe-
nomena. India is a latecomer in this context. Its script (Devanagari) is prob-

ably a derivative of the Near Eastern alphabets. The invention of writing is
indeed an event of Axial range, dividing the world into literate and oral so-
cieties. But it was not the invention as such that led to Axial transforma-
tions. This was the first step, and I will try to show that it was only the sec-
ond and above all the third step in the process of literacy that changed the
world.
The first step, the invention of writing, led to what I propose to call “secto-
rial literacy.”45 In this stage, writing is used exclusively in those sectors of
cultural activity for whose needs it had been invented. In the case of Meso-
potamia, this is economy and administration. In Egypt, too, economy or
bookkeeping is the central function besides which, however, writing is also
used for political representation, funerary monuments, and cultic recita-
tion. In China, writing seems to have originated in the context of divina-
tion. In Minoan and Mycenean Greece, writing (Linear A and B) never
transcended the realm of economy (bookkeeping) and vanished with the
end of the economic system (the palace-culture) that needed it. In Egypt,
Mesopotamia, and China, however, the space of writing soon expanded into
other fields of cultural practice.
The turn from “sectorial” to “cultural” literacy occurs when writing pen-
etrates into the central core of culture that we (Aleida Assmann and myself)
call “cultural memory.” This is a question not of a system but of a culture of
writing. What matters here is not whether we are dealing with an alphabetic
(consonantic or vocalized) alphabet or with a syllabic, logographic, or ideo-
graphic script, and the theories especially of the Toronto School (Harold
Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, and recently Friedrich Kittler),
which put too much stress on the Greek invention of the vocalized alphabet,
are in my opinion mistaken on this point. What matters is whether or not
writing is used for the composition, transmission, and circulation of “cul-
tural texts.” This is the second step toward axiality. It occurred in Mesopo-
tamia toward the end of the third millennium bce, when the sagas of the
Gilgamesh cycle were first collected into a continuous epic, and in Egypt at
the beginning of the second millennium bce, where the first truly literary
texts were composed.
“Cultural memory” is that form of collective memory that enables a soci-
ety to transmit its central patterns of orientation in time, space, and divine
and human worlds to future generations and by doing so to continue its

identity over the sequence of generations.46 Cultural memory provides a kind
of connective structure in both the social and temporal dimensions. It pro-
vides that kind of knowledge that enables an individual to belong, and since
human beings need to belong, they serve their drive to belong by acquiring
the relevant knowledge, which in German is called Bildung, in Greek pai-
deia, in Hebrew musar, and in Egyptian sebayt. We associate with these con-
cepts institutions of reading and writing, bookcases, libraries, schools, uni-
versities, and we find it hard to imagine a kind of cultural memory that is
not based on writing and literacy.
The contrary, however, is the case. Orality and ritual are the natural me-
dia of cultural memory, frequently accompanied with basic methods of no-
tation or prewriting such as the Australian tchurungas, the knotted cords
(quipus) of the Incas, and similar mnemonic devices. For most of the time,
these oral mnemotechniques were considered much more efficient than the
early forms of writing. This is for many reasons. First, the contents of the cul-
tural memory such as the great myths about the origin of the world, the
tribe and its central institutions, the moral norms, and similar cultural texts
are, so to speak, “mnemophilic”; they stick in the memory because of their
poetic form and substantial relevance. We must not forget that writing was
invented to record the non-mnemophilic, the contingent data in economy
and administration, which no human memory can keep for a long period of
time. Secondly, the various cultural texts (I am using this term like Clifford
Geertz, who described the Balinese cockfight as a cultural text) tend to be
multimedia productions, involving (besides language) pantomime, music,
dance, ritual and may not easily be reduced to that one stratum of symbolic
articulation that lends itself to transcription into writing. For this reason, it
took the Mesopotamians and Egyptians more than a millennium to take
this step. When writing is introduced into this domain, however, there is a
high degree of probability that it will lead to drastic transformations.
When writing enters the realm of cultural memory, there seem to be
three options: either to transcribe the oral texts and transform them into
literature, or to compose entirely new texts whose complexity already re-
quires writing for conceptualization and composition, or, finally, a combi-
nation of both. Mesopotamia and Israel seem to belong to the third category,
Greece to the first, and Egypt to the second. The Homeric epics present
themselves as transcripts of an oral performance, they exhibit their oral

character. The same holds for Greek lyrical poetry, drama, and even the Pla-
tonic dialogues. This is not to exclude the possibility that Homer used writ-
ing for the composition of his epics. I am only stressing the fact that they
imitate the form of oral composition and presentation. In Egypt, the situa-
tion is different. The earliest literary texts such as the “instructions” of Ptah-
hotep, Amenemhet I, and (for) Merikare, the complaints of Ipuwer and
Khakheperreseneb, the prophecies of Neferti, the tales of the Shipwrecked
Sailor, Sinuhe, and the Eloquent Peasant exhibit their genuinely literary
character in the richness of vocabulary and grammar and their structural
complexity. In Egypt, the use of writing for the work on cultural memory
does not lead to the transcription or textualization of oral texts but to the
composition of new genuinely written texts, in much the same way as in
Western music culture, where the introduction of writing led to the compo-
sition of a new kind of music, polyphony. It was only 500 years later, with
the New Kingdom and especially in the Ramesside age (1300–1100 bce),
that the use of writing extended to typically oral genres such as folk tales,
love songs, harpers’ songs, and so on that, however, disappeared again from
the space of writing after 1100 bce.
With the literarization of significant parts of cultural memory and the
production of cultural texts that are conceptually literate (requiring writing
already for composition and addressing a reader), a writing culture changes
from sectorial to cultural literacy. Only at this point the techniques of writ-
ing and reading affect the connective structure of a society. One of the typi-
cal effects of this transformation is the construction of a glorious, heroic, or
classical past or “antiquity.” The cultural memory becomes two-storied, di-
vided into the new and the old, modernity and antiquity. An important fac-
tor in this development is linguistic change. The older texts within the liter-
ary tradition, which now become validated as “classics,” preserve a linguistic
stage that no longer corresponds to the spoken language of the present. At a
certain time, this distance between the “classical” and the vernacular idiom
grows so wide that the classical language has to be learned specifically; we
are dealing with cultural diglossia. This situation is typical of Mesopotamia
as early as the third millennium, where Sumerians and Akkadians lived to-
gether speaking two completely different languages, and where Sumerian
stayed in use for liturgic purposes until the age of Hellenism. With respect
to the restricted use of Sumerian in this culture, we may speak of sectorial

diglossia, which is a very widespread phenomenon. Cultural diglossia, on the
other hand, is reached where and when the other language characterizes the
cultural texts, those texts that carry the normative and formative knowledge,
which constitutes and transmits a cultural identity across the sequence of
generations and forms the diachronic backbone or connective structure of a
society. This stage of cultural evolution characterizes the Cassite age in Meso-
potamia (1550–1150 bce) and the Ramesside age in Egypt (1300–1100 bce).
The construction of a classical, heroic, or “golden” age, an “antiquity” as a
past to look back at for models of behavior and literary production, means a
first step in the direction of canonization. This cultural split into antiquity
and modernity seems to me one of the characteristic prerequisites if not ele-
ments of axiality. It introduces into a given culture an element of critical
distance and reflexivity. Canonization, at this first stage, means the collec-
tion of cultural texts of the past to form an obligatory syllabus of cultural
knowledge, to be learned by heart and to be referred to as authoritative in
critical discussions and situations. An Egyptian wisdom text of the thir-
teenth century bce gives a list of eight “classics” of the past, whose models
the pupil should follow in his strive for immortality. These authors achieved
immortality, not by building pyramids but by writing books that are still
read, learned, and quoted because of their ever valid truth and authority:
Is there anyone among us like Hordjedef?

Or someone like Imhotep?
Among our contemporaries, there is none like Neferti
or Kheti, the greatest of them all.
I mention to you only the names of Ptahemdjehuti and
Khakheperreseneb.
Is there another Ptahhotep
or somebody like Kairsu? 47
A German-Egyptian team discovered some years ago a tomb chapel in As-

siut in the northern part of Upper Egypt that was reused during the New
Kingdom for what seems to be a chapel of cultural memory. Some learned
scribes had covered free spaces on the walls with large sections from classi-
cal texts of the Egyptian literary tradition containing two versions of the
instruction of King Amenemhet I, the Instruction of Dua-Kheti, and the

Hymn to the Nile, all three believed to be works of Kheti, “the greatest of
them all,” as well as two versions of the Loyalist Instruction by Kairsu, the
Teaching of a Man for his Son, and the Prophecies of Neferti,48 thus six works
of the classical tradition whose superior rank and high esteem as cultural
texts is also documented by dozens or even hundreds of ostraca, limestone
flakes that were used in school. The Egyptian scribe learned the craft by
learning by heart the classical texts and by writing them down in appropri-
ate portions using potsherds and limestone flakes as material. Another col-
lection of Egyptian classics of the past can be found on a wall in a tomb at
Saqqara dating from the thirteenth century bce.49 The two lower registers,
the only ones to have survived, list thirteen names apiece, the upper con-
taining names of viziers and high priests of Ptah, the lower those of priests
of slightly inferior rank, while the two sections are divided by a horizontal
line that contains other names. Of these, four names reappear from the Pa-
pyrus Chester Beatty: Kairsu, Imhotep, Khakheperreseneb, and Kheti. The
fift h is Ipuwer, the “author” of the Admonitions of Ipuwer, whose appearance
confirms that lamentations and chaos descriptions (the genre to which be-
long also the works by Neferti and Khakheperreseneb) were also considered
cultural texts of highest rank. Apart from these “authors,” the list spans
notables from the Old to the New Kingdom. The only name among these
classics that is still unknown to us is Ptahemdjehuti. Hordjedef, Neferti,
Kheti, Khakheperreseneb, Ptahhotep, Kairsu, and Ipuwer are known by
their texts; Imhotep is known by a wealth of data, and his lost instruction is
often referred to.
I think that the Egyptian case may be generalized. At a certain stage, ev-
ery literate culture enters the stage of a split culture, divided into the old and
the new, and it is writing in the form of cultural literacy that brings this split
about. Since this split is dependent on linguistic change and finds its typical
expression in the distinction between classical and vernacular language,
and since linguistic change is a largely unconscious and uncontrolled pro-
cess, we may even speak of evolution. The cultural and social consequences
of this split, however, depend on cultural decisions and institutions.
Even the typically Egyptian association of this split with the idea of im-
mortality may, at least to a certain degree, be generalized. In its literate,
written form, cultural memory appears as a timeless or at least imperishable
space of immortality, which one may enter by creating a book or work of art
of everlasting beauty, truth, or significance. This idea of literary or artistic
immortality may be considered as a first step in the direction of transcen-
dence or transcendental visions (Eisenstadt). The use of writing for the ful-
fi llment of the desire to transcend one’s life span and to live on in the mem-
ory of posterity dates back, in Egypt, to the very beginnings of literate
culture, but I would classify this use of writing for tomb inscriptions as
sectorial literacy. The step toward cultural literacy is achieved when the
tomb monument is topped by the literary work, for example in the words of
Horace, who said with regard to his book of odes: “exegi monumentum aere
perennius / regalique situ pyramidum altius.” This motif appears already in
the same Egyptian text that contains the canon of classical authors:
They [the sages of the past] have not created for themselves
pyramids of ore
nor stelae of iron;
they have not contrived to leave heirs in the form of children,
to keep their names alive.
But they created themselves books as heirs
and teachings that they have written.
They employed the scroll as lector priest
and the slate as “loving son.”
Teachings are their pyramids,
the reed their son,
the polished stone surface their wife.
Their tomb chapels are forgotten,
but their names are recalled on their writings, that they have
created,
as they endure by virtue of their perfection.
Their creators are remembered in eternity.50
We are not yet dealing here with “real” axiality, because this step of canon-
ization is still culture-specific and lacks the global claims typical of Axial
movements. But it is a step in the direction of axiality, and it is a step within
the space of writing.
Another sphere of cultural memory that is strongly affected by the use of

writing is history. The existence of written sources about the past makes it
possible to draw the distinction not only between the old and the new, but
also between myth and history. The use of written records creates history in
the sense of a critical discourse, separating mythical tales about the past
from reasoned accounts of documented history. This step seems to be a
Greek achievement, but the Greeks themselves attributed it to the Egyp-
tians, opposing their own mythical form of historical consciousness to Egyp-
tian history, which is based on written records. Typical examples of this in-
tercultural comparison are Herodotus’ account of the visit of Hecataeus of
Miletus with the priests of Amun at Thebes51 and Plato’s account of Solon’s
visit with the priests at Sais.52 Both Hecataeus and Solon confront the Egyp-
tian priests with Greek traditions about the past. Hecataeus recites his own
genealogy, which leads after fifteen generations to a god as the ancestor of
the family, and Solon tells the Greek version of the story of the flood, the
myth about Deukalion and Pyrrha. Both are then confronted by the Egyp-
tians with their records. Hecataeus is led into the temple where he is shown
341 statues of high priests, one the son of the other and no god interfering,
documenting 11,340 years of purely human history. Solon is shown the
Egyptian annals stretching back over more than 9,000 years, where the
memory of Athens’ glorious past is preserved, for example their victory over
Atlantis, which in Greece itself is destroyed and forgotten. All this is, of
course, pure fabulation, but it illustrates the principle of critical history with
its distinction between myth and history, brought about by the use of writ-
ing for chronological bookkeeping, which, in the form of annals and king-
lists, belonged to the first and most important applications of writing in
Egypt and Mesopotamia. In this sense of documented past and critical veri-
fiability, it is writing that produced history and dispelled mythology. Writ-
ing caused history to be where myth was, because it documented conditions
in which not gods but human kings reigned and in which humans were re-
sponsible for their actions. Writing bestows to historical memory the qual-
ity of verifiability and adds a truth value to its accounts about the past that
myth, in spite of its truth claims, is lacking.
A third domain of cultural memory where the use of writing leads to dra-
matic changes is religion. It is here that the second and decisive step toward
canonization is achieved, a step of truly global significance, which in my

opinion forms the very center of Jaspers’ concept of the Axial Age. In the
realm of religion, writing appears with the same critical pathos as in the
sphere of history, opposing its superior truth to the invalidated truth claims
of myth. Here, its claims to superior truth are based on revelation, which it
codifies. All world religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Jain-
ism, the religion of the Sikh, Confucianism, Daoism—are founded on a
canon of sacred scripture that codifies the will of their founder and the su-
perior truth of his revelation. This step of canonization was invented only
twice in the world: with the Hebrew canon and the Buddhist canon. All later
canons followed these examples. This second step of canonization changed
the world in a truly “Axial” way.
The first step of canonization, which we encountered in Egypt and Meso-
potamia, was connected with a cultural split into antiquity and modernity,
drawing a distinction within the culture. Canonization here means the se-
lection of the timelessly authoritative and exemplary texts from the plethora
of written literature. The second canonization applies a different criterion:
the criterion of absolute and universal truth, drawing a distinction that sets
one’s own culture or religion off against all other religions (including one’s
own past), which become now excluded as paganism, idolatry, heresy, and
error. Some of this pathos of distinction and exclusion seems to me still
present in Jaspers’ concept of the Axial Age, which in this respect appears as
a secularized version of the religious distinction between paganism and true
religion. His idea of Axial civilizations puts the pre- and extra-Axial world
in a position similar to the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic construction of
paganism. This aspect becomes even stronger with Schwartz’s definition
of the Axial Age as the “age of transcendence” and Eisenstadt’s concept of
“transcendental visions” as the hallmark of axiality. All this is to a large de-
gree a feat of cultural memory and an effect of writing and canonization.
We don’t know anything about the transcendental visions of shamans, kings,
priests, and seers unless they become not only written down but, above all,
are received into a canon of sacred scripture. It is only then that they be-
come part of cultural memory and religious identity.
If primary canonization may be partly explained in terms of evolution
dependent, as we have seen, on the truly evolutionary process of linguistic
change, secondary canonization is by no means an evolutionary achieve-
ment but a matter of conscious revolution, which in individual life could be

compared to a conversion. The distinction between evolutionary processes
and other forms of change implying conscious interventions and decisions
between alternative options seems to me highly important in the study of
the Axial Age.
In the West, the Hebrew canon of sacred scripture is complemented by a
Greek and Latin canon of classical literature. The cultural memory of the
West rests on these two projects of canonization, which were conducted
roughly simultaneously—and probably not independently—by specialists
in Palestine and Alexandria. The distinctive hallmark of what I call second-
ary canonization is the rise of exegesis. In the stage of primary canoniza-
tion, the texts selected as classics exist in a form that the medievalist Paul
Zumthor called mouvance.53 The texts were constantly reformulated, ampli-
fied, or substituted by other texts in order to accommodate them to the
changing conditions of understanding. Their “surface structure” was sacri-
ficed in order to save at least part of their meaning. This is why even written
texts tend to exist over a longer stretch of time in many different versions.
The continuous growth of the book of Isaiah, first into Deutero- then into
Trito-Isaiah, is a typical case of how a cultural text is changing in what the
Assyriologist Leo Oppenheim called “the stream of tradition.”54 The Epic of
Gilgamesh developed in the course of its transmission and redaction from a
cycle of sagas into the “twelve-tablets-composition” in which it appears in
the Neo-Assyrian library of Assurbanipal at Niniveh. In a similar way, the
Egyptian Book of the Dead developed from a pool of unconnected spells out
of which every individual funerary papyrus picked its own specific selection
into a real book with a fi xed selection of 167 spells in a fi xed order. Written
texts, in this “stream of tradition,” share to a certain degree the sort of oral
texts that are not fi xed but subject to much variation over the course of time.
This flexibility or mouvance is categorically stopped and excluded by
the process of secondary canonization.55 Secondary canonization means the
combination of a sacralization of surface structure typical of sacred texts
like hymns, incantations, and ritual spells on the one hand, and the preser-
vation of meaning typical of cultural texts in the state of mouvance as the
constant adaptation of the text to changing conditions of understanding on
the other. Sacred texts are not necessarily cultural texts, since they may be
known only to specialists and withheld from public circulation. Sacred texts
are verbal enshrinements of the holy. In sacred texts, not a syllable must be
changed in order to ensure the “magical” power of the words to “presentify”
the divine. In this context, not “understanding” matters but correctness of
pronunciation, ritual purity of the speaker, and other requirements con-
cerning proper circumstances of performance. As the case of the Rgveda
shows, this principle of non-mouvance and verbatim fi xation applies to sa-
cred texts independently of their oral or literate form of transmission.56 Sa-
cred texts, therefore, are exempt from the pressure to adapt to the herme-
neutical conditions of a changing world.
In the process of secondary canonization, the principle of sacred fi xation
is applied to cultural texts. On the one hand, they are treated like verbal
temples enshrining divine presence, but on the other they require under-
standing and application in order to exert their formative and normative
impulses and demands. The solution to this problem is exegesis. Exegesis or
hermeneutics is the successor of mouvance. In the mouvance stage of literate
transmission, the commentary is being worked into the fabric of the text.
This method has been shown by Michael Fishbane to be typical of the bibli-
cal texts in their formative phase.57 They are full of glosses, pieces of com-
mentary that later redactors have added to the received text. Only with the
closure of the canon is this process stopped, and exegesis has now to take the
form of a commentary that stays outside the text itself.58
This distinction between text and commentary typical of secondary can-
onization applies not only to the sacred but also to the classical canon. In
this respect, the Alexandrinian philologoi seem to have led the way. They
introduced into their collection of ancient writings the distinction between
hoi prattómenoi (literally “those to be treated”, that is, the classical texts
worthy of exegetical treatment, of a commentary) and the rest.59 The Latin
author Aulus Gellius compared this textual elite to the highest class of Ro-
man taxpayers called “classici.” In the Jewish tradition, this split into and
relationship between text and commentary typical of secondary canoniza-
tion finds its earliest expression in the concept of written and oral Torah
(torah she be’al khitav and torah she be’al pe). Here, commentary has to be
oral in order not to violate the space of writing, which is exclusively reserved
for and occupied by sacred scripture. The oral Torah is a collection of oral
debates and commentaries on the written Torah that became itself codified
in the Talmudic and Midrashic traditions. It is believed to go back via an

unbroken chain of reception (shalshelet ha-qabbalah) to Moses himself.
The oral exegesis of a sacred text accompanying its public recitation seems
indeed to correspond to Jewish custom dating back to the beginnings of
canonization. The book of Nehemiah reports a public reading of the Torah,
where Ezra read the text and several of the Levites gave a commentary:
And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was
above all the people, and as he opened it all the people stood. And Ezra
blessed the LORD, the great God, and all the people answered, “Amen,
Amen,” lifting up their hands. And they bowed their heads and wor-
shiped the LORD with their faces to the ground.
Also Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah,
Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, the Levites, helped
the people to understand the Law, while the people remained in their
places. They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they
gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading. (Neh. 8:5–8)
Some centuries later, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus testifies to the
same custom, where he confronts Jewish and Greek religion:
Can any government be more holy than this? or any Religion better
adapted to the nature of the Deity? Where, in any place but in this, are
the whole People, by the special diligence of the Priests, to whom the
care of public instruction is committed, accurately taught the princi-
ples of true piety? So that the body-politic seems, as it were, one great
Assembly, constantly kept together, for the celebration of some sacred
Mysteries. For those things which the Gentiles keep up for a few days
only, that is, during those solemnities they call Mysteries and Initia-
tions, we, with vast delight, and a plenitude of knowledge, which ad-
mits of no error, fully enjoy, and perpetually contemplate through the
whole course of our lives.60
It is obvious that Josephus, in this polemical passage, does not do full justice
to the Greek organization of cultural memory. He ignores the classical
canon, the traditions of scientific discourse, and the various forms of exege-
sis practiced in the schools of philosophy, medicine, and other branches of
knowledge. He focuses only on religion and confronts the Jewish institu-
tions of religious instruction and the Greek mystery cults. Arbitrary and
highly selective as this comparison may be, it illustrates a very important
distinction: the distinction between ritual and textual continuity.61
In spite of their extensive use of writing, Egyptian and other “pagan” reli-
gions were still relying on ritual continuity. In the world of ritual continuity,
the public has indeed to wait for the next performance in order to get access
to the sacred texts of cultural memory. Textual continuity is only achieved
when institutions of learning and exegesis are established that keep the an-
cient texts constantly present and semantically transparent. The transition
from ritual to textual continuity means a complete reorganization of cultural
memory in the same way that the transition from the ethnically and cultur-
ally determined religions of the ancient world to the new type of transcul-
tural and transnational world religions meant a totally new construction of
identity. The canon, in a way, functioned as a new transethnical homeland
and as a new transcultural instrument of formation and education.
There seems to exist a strong alliance among revelation, transcendence,
and secondary canonization. The codification of revelation leads to a expa-
triation of the holy from the worldly immanence into transcendence and
into scripture. The pagan or pre-Axial cult religions presuppose the imma-
nence of the holy in images, trees, mountains, springs, rivers, heavenly bod-
ies, animals, human beings, and stones. All this is denounced as idolatry
by the new scripture-based world religions. Scripture requires a total re-
orientation of religious attention that was formerly directed toward the
forms of divine immanence and is now directed toward scripture and its
exegesis. Secondary canonization means an exodus both of the holy and of
religious attention from the cosmos into scripture. To the extramundane
nature of God corresponds the textual character of his revelation. To be
sure, these remarks concern only the sacred canon such as the Tanakh, the
Christian Bible, and the Qur’an, and not the canon of Greek and Latin clas-
sics. The structure of the classical canon is different in that it is open and
allows for constant modifications around an unquestionable core, whereas
the sacred canon is closed. This distinction between closed and open canons
applies, however, only to the West. Eastern, especially Buddhist, canons
have a different, less strict structure. Common to all corpora of secondary

canonization is the existence of a full-fledged culture of exegesis and the
strict distinction between text and commentary.
Seen as an agent of change, we may ask to which aspect of axiality literacy
at the stage of secondary canonization makes the most decisive contribu-
tion. In my opinion, this is precisely the aspect of axiality that has been
shown to function as a common denominator of most of the Axial features
discussed above: distanciation and disembedding. Writing is a technology
that restructures not only thought but also, under certain cultural circum-
stances, the whole network of relations between human beings, man and
society, man and cosmos, man and god, and god and cosmos. The meaning
of distanciation and disembedment as “Axial” moves, however, can only be
properly understood if we get a better understanding of what embedment
and integration mean.
In the evolutionary framework of the Axial narrative, embeddedness ap-
pears as the “not-yet” of the Axial achievement of distanciation and disem-
bedding. What disappears in this perspective is the positive aspect of embed-
ding. Embedding man in a social, political, and conceptual or ideological
network of meaning and coherence and embedding the divine in a cosmic
network whose meaning and coherence is modeled on the same basic ideas of
order, truth, and harmony, should be recognized in its own right as a major
civilizational achievement. There is perhaps no society on earth that went so
far as the ancient Egyptians in articulating, elaborating, and also institution-
alizing their vision of sociocosmic coherence, which they called Ma’at. There
is no reason not to call this conceptualization a “transcendental vision.” We
cannot point to a “great individual” to have first formulated it, since no insti-
tutionalization of this first “vision” has been preserved, but the Egyptians
themselves would have pointed to Imhotep, the first of their celebrated sages,
who worked as a vizier under King Djoser (2750 bce) and was divinized for
his great invention, the art of building in stone, and the erection of the first
pyramid, the step pyramid at Saqqara. His often-mentioned “instruction” is
lost to us, but the transcendental character of the idea of Ma’at is obvious.
Ma’at is what Kant would have called a “regulative idea.”
Ma’at, however, works in the opposite direction of distanciation and dis-
embedment. It is the very principle of embedment, of creating connectivity
in the social, temporal, and cosmic dimensions, establishing social bonds
between humans and temporal connections between yesterday, today, and

tomorrow ensuring memory, success, stability, and even immortality. Who
lives in and by Ma’at, this is the great Egyptian promise, will not perish but
pass through the test of the judgment after death to eternal life in the Ely-
sian fields.62 However, even this concept implies an element of distanciation,
which is self-distanciation, renunciation from an immediate fulfillment of
one’s drives and impulses. The ideals of self-control, discretion, modesty,
altruism, beneficence, openness to the needs of others, pity, compassion,
empathy are at the core of the Egyptian concept of virtue. Knowing how to
listen well is deemed more important than knowing how to speak well. This
form of self-distanciation is the prerequisite for self-integration. It may also
be described as a way of standing back and looking beyond: standing back
from one’s own narrow sphere of interests and looking beyond at the whole
or at least a larger horizon of community. It is certainly not a mere coinci-
dence that the hero of Egyptian wisdom was both a vizier and an architect.
Knowing how to build a pyramid and knowing how to build a state and a
society require comparable qualities. Certainly, this is not the kind of state
and society we would very probably like to live in, and “Egyptian man,” able
to perfectly integrate him/herself into this pyramidal sociopolitical edifice is
not man as we know or want him today, at least after the breakdown of the
socialist totalitarianism, but even this construction of reality was illumined
by transcendental visions, otherwise it would not have persisted for three
millennia and more. It was certainly not the “house of slavery” as it is de-
bunked in the Bible.63 What the Egyptian example may teach us is that even
the pre-Axial world is the result of positive achievements and that the Axial
breakthrough is not just the result of discoveries of what was unknown be-
fore, but also the result of conscious acts of rejection, abolition, rebellion
that cannot be accounted for in an evolutionary perspective.
By adopting Christianity, the Egyptians themselves were able to perform
a change in the most radical way. From champions of integration they
turned into champions of isolation. To the ancient Egyptian mind, nothing
could perhaps appear more absurd than total self-disembedding, since so-
cial embeddedness was identified with life, virtue, and morality. Seth, the
god of evil and brutal violence, is the typical solitary one, and everyone flee-
ing from social life would be associated with Seth and considered as evil.64
After converting to Christianity, however, the Egyptians became virtuosos
of solitude and went to unprecedented extremes in their search for isolation

and renunciation. The Egyptian saint Anthony became the patron of Chris-
tian hermits, the Egyptian monasteries with their rules as codified by Pa-
chom and Schenute became the models for Christian monasticism. The
Egyptians adopted the Christian idea of the Kingdom of God as a goal of
integration and reembedment with the same passion and perfection as pre-
viously the kingdom of Pharaoh, who was believed to be a god on earth and
the son of the highest god.
To the disembedding of man from society and the world corresponds the
disembedding of God from cosmic immanence and a pantheon of co-deities.
These two movements of disembedding, that is, monotheism and the birth of
individualism, have always been seen in strong connection. The connection
becomes only the more obvious if one realizes that it is toward God that the
hermit and toward man that God turns. The hermit abandons human society
in order to draw nearer to God, and God, one could say, renounces divine
companionship in favor of the “covenant” he establishes with his chosen
people. In the early stages of biblical monotheism, the texts lay great stress
on God’s “jealousy” and compare the covenant between God and his people,
God and man, to the erotic, sexual, and matrimonial bonds between man
(God) and wife or bride (Israel). God can by no means be alone; what he ab-
hors most and what puts him into fits of fury and jealousy is to be abandoned
by his people. Man, in turn, leaves society not out of misanthropy but for the
love of God. Both forms of solitariness, God’s and man’s, are not absolute but
rest on a new form of partnership. In the frame of this partnership, man
grows individualistic and God grows monotheistic.
It is fascinating to see how important a role writing, literacy, and scrip-
ture play even in this connection. With monotheism, the case is obvious. No
monotheistic religion, in fact no “secondary” (i.e., founded) religion can do
without a canon of sacred scripture. The solitude of God is, one could say,
scripture-based. Similar statements apply to the solitude of man. Generally
speaking, there can be a solitary reader but no solitary listener. Writing and
reading create the possibility of communication without interaction. To
scripture, however, this concept of interaction-free communication applies
in a much more poignant sense. Studying the Torah and learning it by heart
is the first and foremost requirement of man in the frame of monotheistic
religion. Scripture, that is, the Torah, is the only mediator between the two
solitary partners, God and man. Ger anokhi ba-’aretz (“I am a stranger
on earth”) the psalmist says in Psalm 119:19, adding: al-taster mimméni
mitswoteýkha (“do not conceal thy commandments from me”). We see that
also man’s solitude, his alienation on earth, is scripture-based. God’s com-
mandments, which are codified in the Torah, offer him a home that he is
missing “on earth.” This home is what Heine called “ein portatives Vater-
land” and what Bellah calls “a portable religion.”
Conclusion
As a result of these considerations concerning literacy as an agent of change

in the structure and organization of cultural memory, I have to confess that
I cannot bring myself to really believe in the “Axial Age” as a global turn in
universal history occurring grosso modo in the middle of the first millen-
nium bce. On the other hand, I find the concept of axiality (with pre- and
post-axiality) a valuable and even indispensable analytic tool in the com-
parative study of cultures. In my view, the stress on the alleged and in sev-
eral cases undeniable synchronicity of Axial moves has led to an unneces-
sary mystification of the historical evidence.65 These “breakthroughs”
occurred in different civilizations at different times and to different degrees
under different conditions and with different consequences. The undue fas-
cination with time and simultaneity is the congenital defect of the Axial Age
theory, lending it the character of a myth rather than a theory. We should
give up the idea of synchronicity and, along with it, the tendency to describe
the transition from pre-Axial to Axial to post-Axial stages exclusively in
terms of evolution. There is, in my view, no evolutionary logic that leads
from pre-Axial to Axial societies. Axiality implies always a revolutionary
break, a “vertical” intervention of the spirit into the “horizontal” line of
natural and cultural evolution.
As far as the “great individuals” are concerned, their appearance in re-
corded history stretches over several millennia. Akhenaten, who has every
right to be included in this number, lived as early as the fourteenth century
bce, Moses, if he ever lived, must equally belong to the second millennium
bce, to which also Zoroaster is now dated by most scholars, whereas there is
no reason why Jesus and Mohammad, who came much later, should be ex-
cluded. Had his writings been preserved or his visions been institutionalized,
we should even include Imhotep, who lived in the twenty-eighth century
bce. The decisive event is not the terrestrial existence of the great individu-
als but the canonization of their writings. The real “Axial Age” is not the age
of the great individuals such as Akhenaten, Zoroaster, Moses, Homer, Isa-
iah, Plato, Confucius, Buddha, and so on, who did not wait until 800 bce to
appear and who did not disappear by 200 bce, but the age of secondary
canonization. Canonization, as we have seen, is not an individual but a so-
cial and collective process. Canonization is the achievement of a society that
decides to invest these texts with the highest values, to hold them in the
greatest authority, to make them the basis of its life, or to follow their model
in artistic creation. There were presumably always great individuals with
“transcendental visions.” Decisive is the step to turn these visions into “cul-
tural texts,” to select these texts into a canon and to frame the transmission
of this canon by institutions of exegesis ensuring its availability, readability,
and authority over 3,000 years.
If we insist on a first period of axialization, we could point to the years
about 200 bce to 200 ce when the great canons were established: the Confu-
cian, the Daoist, and the Buddhist canons in the East, and the Avesta, the
Hebrew Bible and the canon of Greek “classics” in the West. This is not the
time when Homo sapiens axialis, “the human being with whom we are still
living,” came into being, but when the texts were canonized that we are still
reading. The Axial Age is nothing else but the formative phase of the textual
continuity that is still prevailing in our Western and Eastern civilizations.
If we have to give up the concept of an Axial “age” in the sense of a con-
crete time period in universal history, this does not mean that we have to give
up the adjective “Axial” as well. “Axial,” it is true, has strong temporal con-
notations. The axis around which history is believed to revolve, dividing this
history into before and after, is a point or period in time. What we have to
give up is the universality of this axis and this history. Different civilizations
have different turning points in their history. That these turning points coin-
cide temporally may be due to contact or to structural analogies. By no means,
however, should this coincidence be promoted to a major factor in the inter-
pretation of the turning point in question. Having occurred around 500 bce
is not per se a feature of axiality. Neither have we to look for the roots of
modernity exclusively in this period. It is our cultural memory that reaches

back to Homer and Isaiah, but not the emergence of our modern world.
With regard to the ancient world, we are dealing neither with a mutation
nor with a “blind” evolution, but with cultural processes stretching over
several millennia, implying various historical factors and agents, and im-
plying even reversibility, backward movements of “de-axialization,” as has
been rightly stressed by Eisenstadt on various occasions. Instead of an Axial
“age,” we should speak of axiality and axialization in the sense we speak
of globalism and globalization, as a tendency that appears under different
conditions in different “ages” of human history. Civilizations with a title to
qualify as “Axial” should show significant forms of emancipation from tra-
dition and primary world-embeddedness, and a pronounced tendency to
formulate ideas or norms with a claim to universal validity. They should be
able to produce a canon of texts enshrining these ideas and norms as well as
institutions of learning and exegesis that keep their normative and forma-
tive impact alive until today. A given civilization arrives at the stage of axi-
ality if these conditions are fulfilled.
It would be highly desirable to distinguish, within or below the two gen-
eral categories of distanciation and universality, a certain number of “Axial
features” such as reflexivity, individuality, interiority (“inner man”), progress
in abstraction and intellectuality, theory, critique of tradition, differentia-
tion, transcendental concepts or visions, and so on, and to arrive at a consen-
sus concerning their definition. It is not necessary that all of them be present
in a given civilization at a given epoch. Axiality, in my view, should not be
conceived of as a Platonic idea66 that finds its expression in more or less per-
fection in the course of history, but rather in terms of “family resemblance”
in the sense of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Family resemblance connects a set of
items and a set of properties in the way that all items share some properties
with some (not all) other items. Time (occurrence around 500 bce ± 300) has
to be ruled out as a significant property. Literacy in the form of cultural, not
sectorial, literacy and perhaps even secondary canonization, together with a
culture of exegesis as its necessary complement, are probably to be recog-
nized as indispensable prerequisites for most of the “Axial features.”
Another question is how to deal with precursors such as ancient Egypt
and ancient Mesopotamia. Generalizing from ancient Egypt, my impression
is that we should allow for proto-axiality in the sense of intermediate stages

between non-axiality and full axiality in the same way as we distinguish
prewriting from both pure orality and literacy proper. Among the proto-
Axial features in ancient Egypt, I would include the idea of an individual
judgment after death with its concepts of individuality and moral responsi-
bility, a rather strong concept of “inner man” in connection both with the
judgment of the dead and the rise of “personal piety,” a radical rejection of
tradition in the context of King Akhenaten and his religious revolution,
and, in the aftermath of this revolution, the development of strong concepts
of divine transcendence. With regard to Mesopotamia, we may point to
considerable steps toward canonization and a rich tradition of commentar-
ies, to the level of theorizing in the fields of astronomy and mathematics, the
astounding depth of certain literary texts (especially the Epic of Gilgamesh)
and the beginnings of historiography. It should also be possible to discern
specific “Axial moments” within the history of these and other civilizations
that were obviously not numerous or strong enough to bring about the fa-
mous “breakthrough” into something that lasts until this day and has there-
fore a title to count as a root of modernity. It would also be important to
account for this failure. Were there no “transcendental visions” in Mesopo-
tamia and Egypt or were there no means of institutionalizing them?
As historians, we have to be careful not to characterize a civilization ex-
clusively by the absence of features that we classify as “Axial” because they
belong to our understanding of modernity, and to reconstruct the way that
led from past to present civilizations exclusively in terms of evolution.
Antiquity is much more than the mere “not yet” of modernity. Much has
doubtlessly been lost along this way and much has been rediscovered that
in reemerging from oblivion changed our world no less than real inven-
tions and innovations. This is, however, only the historian’s point of view,
which is by no means the only one possible with regard to the past. It is
equally important to look at the past not only for its own sake but also for
the sake of the present and the future in order to get a clearer idea of where
we come from and “whither we are tending.” The idea of the Axial Age is
not so much about “man as we know him” and his/her first appearance in
time, but about “man as we want him” and the utopian goal of a universal
civilized community.
Notes
1. For this interpretation, see my book Thomas Mann und Ägypten: Mythos
und Monotheismus in den Josephsromanen (Munich, 2006), 15–36.
2. Aleida Assmann calls this “Zentralperspektive in der Geschichte”; see her
“Jaspers’ Achsenzeit, oder: Schwierigkeiten mit der Zentralperspektive in der Ge-
schichte,” in Dietrich Harth, ed., Karl Jaspers—Denken zwischen Wissenschaft,
Politik und Philosophie (Stuttgart, 1988), 187–205.
3. Thomas Mann, “Die Einheit des Menschengeistes” [1932], in Gesammelte
Werke (Frankfurt am Main, 1975), vol. 10, 751–755.
4. For details, see my book Thomas Mann und Ägypten.
5. Erik H. Erikson, “The Ontogeny of Ritualization in Man,” Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society 251 B (1966): 337–349.
6. See Aleida Assmann, “Zeichen—Sprache—Erinnerung: Voraussetzungen
und Strategien kultureller Evolution,” in Heinrich Schmidinger and Clemens Sed-
mak, eds., Der Mensch—ein animal symbolicum? Sprache—Dialog—Ritual (Darm-
stadt, 2007), 27–40, esp. 38–40.
7. Dieter Metzler, Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte und Religion des Altertums
und deren Nachleben (Münster, 2004), 565ff. and 577ff.
8. See Johann Arnason’s inversion of Benjamin Schwartz’s characterization of
the Axial Age (“standing back and locking beyond”) as a way of “standing beyond
and looking back” in this volume, p. 349.
9. Aleida Assmann, “The Religious Roots of Cultural Memory,” Norsk Teolo-
gisk Tidsskrift 4 (2008): 270–292. She uses the term in a more general sense than it
is used in sociological discourse.
10. The distinction between “primary” and “secondary” religion goes back to
Theo Sundermeier, “Religion, Religionen,” in K. Müller and Th. Sundermeier, eds.,
Lexikon missionstheologischer Grundbegriffe (Berlin, 1987), 411–423, and Was ist
Religion? Religionswissenschaft im theologischen Kontext (Gütersloh, 1999). See also
Andreas Wagner, ed., Primäre und sekundäre Religion als Kategorie der Religionsge-
schichte des Alten Testaments (Berlin and New York, 2006). My concept of “primary
religion” corresponds to Charles Taylor’s concept of “early religion,” encompassing
Bellah’s “primitive” and “archaic” religion, although I agree with Bellah that the
distinction between these two forms of religion is important. However, since there
is an unbroken continuity between “primitive” or tribal and “archaic” religion (re-
lated to states and institutions of priesthood), whereas there is always a revolution-
ary break between these two and “Axial” or “secondary” religions, the first two
types of religion may be taken together. I disagree, however, with Bellah in the as-
sumption that the transition from “archaic” to “Axial” religion might be described
in the same terms of evolution as the transition from “primitive” to “archaic.”
11. For these questions, see my book Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel and the
Rise of Monotheism (Madison, 2008).
12. Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven, 1953), 2. See also
Johann Arnason, “The Axial Age and Its Interpreters: Reopening a Debate,” in
Johann Arnason, Shmuel Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock, eds., Axial Civilizations
and World History (Leiden, 2005), 31–32.
13. Jaspers, Origin, 2. Yehuda Elkana elaborated on the notion of second-order
thinking in his contribution “The Emergence of Second-Order Thinking in Clas-
sical Greece” in Shmuel Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age
Civilizations (Albany, 1986), 40– 64.
14. Benjamin I. Schwartz, “The Age of Transcendence,” Daedalus 104, no. 2
(1975): 1–7, here 3. On the concepts of “transcendence” and “transcendental” and
Schwartz’s contribution, see esp. Johann Arnason’s chapter in this volume.
15. See, for example, Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, 2007). See
also Karl Heinz Bohrer, Der Abschied: Theorie der Trauer; Baudelaire, Goethe,
Nietzsche, Benjamin (Frankfurt am Main, 1997). Bellah, in his 1964 essay on “Re-
ligious Evolution,” takes into account this change between the “Axial” form of
religion and modernity in distinguishing, after “primitive,” “archaic,” and “his-
toric religions” (i.e., Axial religions), two more recent steps: “early modern reli-
gions” and “modern religion.” See “Religious Evolution,” American Sociological
Review 29 (1964): 358–374.
16. Obviously, we have to distinguish between the “other-worldly” and the
“extra-mundane.” Other-worldliness allows for degrees, extramundaneity has to
be defined as a categorical chasm without any intermediate stages.
17. See my introduction to the German translation of Eric Voegelin, Ordnung
und Geschichte, vol 1: Die kosmologischen Reiche des Alten Orients—Mesopotamien
und Ägypten (Munich, 2002), 17–23.
18. See Jaspers, Origin, 2.
bridge, 1975), 8. See Robert Bellah, “What Is Axial about the Axial Age?,” Euro-
pean Journal of Sociology 46 (2005): 69–89, here 72–73, and Hans Joas’s contribu-
tion in this volume.
20. See Joas’s chapter in this volume, n. 14.
21. Aleida Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning,
eds., Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook
(Berlin and New York, 2008), 97–107.
22. See Peter Schäfer, Der Triumph der reinen Geistigkeit: Sigmund Freuds “Der
Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion” (Berlin, 2002), and my article “Der
Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit. Freuds Konstruktion des Judentums,” PSYCHE:
Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und ihre Anwendungen 56 (2002): 154–171.
23. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American
Character (New Haven, 1950). Riesman describes the emergence of (American)
modernity as the transition from inner- to other-directedness, with reference, of
course, not to the Axial Age but to the Industrial Revolution.
24. The Great Transformation—the Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (New

York, 2006); German translation: Die Achsenzeit: Vom Ursprung der Weltreli-
gionen (Berlin, 2006).
25. She takes the term from Philippians 2:7: “he emptied himself taking the
form of a bond-servant” (ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν μορφὴν δούλου λαβών).
26. For the ancient Egyptian ethics of altruism as self-distanciation, see my
book Ma’at: Gerechtigkeit und Unterblichkeit im Alten Ägypten (Munich, 1990).
27. Charles Taylor, “The Future of the Religious Past,” in Hent de Vries, ed.,
Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York, 2008), 178–244, here 185–186.
28. See, for example, Jörn Rüsen, ed., Westliches Geschichtsdenken (Göttingen,
1999).
29. Jaspers, Origin, 1 and 4 respectively.
30. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 1: Israel and Revelation (Baton
Rouge, 1956), passim.
31. Anthony Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past: A Study in the Origins of
Modern Historical Consciousness (New York and Oxford, 1991).
32. Jaspers, Origin, 16–17. Jaspers’ indebtedness to Alfred Weber’s Kulturge-
schichte als Kultursoziologie (Leiden, 1935) goes in fact much beyond what he
himself acknowledges.
33. This distinction between globalism and universalism corresponds grosso
modo to Garth Fowden’s distinction between “political universalism, which is
shorthand for ‘political, military, and economic universalism’ and cultural uni-
versalism, which stands for ‘cultural and especially religious universalism,’ reli-
gions being understood to be a constituent part of the wider concept of culture.”
See G. Fowden, Empire and Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late
Antiquity (Princeton, 1993), 6–7.
34. Peter Artzi, “Ideas and Practices of International Co-existence in the 3rd
mill. BCE,” Bar Ilan Studies in History 2 (1984): 25–39; Artzi, “The Birth of the
Middle East,” in Proceedings of the 5th World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusa-
lem, 1969), 120–124.
35. Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 1: The Old and Middle
Kingdoms (Berkeley, 1973), 224.
36. See Aleida Assmann, Zeit und Tradition: Kulturelle Strategien der Dauer
(Cologne and Vienna, 1999); Klaus Koch, Europa, Rom und der Kaiser vor dem
Hintergrund von zwei Jahrtausenden Rezeption des Buches Daniel (Hamburg, 1997);
Mariano Delgado, Klaus Koch, and Edgar Marsch, eds., Europa, Tausendjähriges
Reich und Neue Welt: Zwei Jahrtausende Geschichte und Utopie in der Rezeption
des Danielbuches (Fribourg and Stuttgart, 2003).
37. The relationship between historical breakdown and spiritual breakthrough
has already been proposed by Eric Weil in his contribution to the 1975 Daedalus
volume: “What Is a Breakthrough in History?,” 21–36.
38. “Axial ‘Breakthroughs’ and Semantic ‘Relocations’ in Ancient Egypt and

Israel,” in Johann Arnason et al., Axial Civilizations, 133–156.
39. Walter J. Ong, “Writing Is a Technology That Restructures Thought,” in Gerd
Baumann, ed., The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (Oxford, 1986), 23–50.
40. “Mich dünkt, die Veränderung, die in den verschiedenen Zeiten der Kultur
mit den Schriftzeichen vorgegangen, habe von jeher an den Revolutionen der men-
schlichen Erkenntnis überhaupt und insbesondere an den mannigfachen Abände-
rungen ihrer Meinungen und Begriffe in Religionssachen sehr wichtigen Anteil.”—
Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem oder Über religiöse Macht und Judentum, in
Schriften über Religion und Aufklärung, ed. Martina Thom (Berlin, 1989), 422–423.
41. See Aleida and Jan Assmann, “Einleitung: Schrift—Kognition—Evolution.
Eric A. Havelock und die Technologie kultureller Kommunikation,” in Eric A.
Havelock, Die Schriftrevolution im antiken Griechenland (Weinheim, 1990), 1–36.
On pp. 27–28 we give a bibliography of the works published by Ong, Goody, and
Havelock until 1990.
42. On the distinction between “canon” and “archive,” see Aleida Assmann,
“Memory, Individual and Collective,” in Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, eds.,
The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (Oxford, 2006), 210–224.
43. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution
of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, 1991), 308–315.
44. Schreibtafel BM 5645 rto. 2–7, ed. A. H. Gardiner, The Admonitions of an
Egyptian Sage (Leipzig, 1909), 97–101; M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature
I (Berkeley, 1973), 146–147; B. G. Ockinga, “The Burden of Khackheperrecsonbu,”
JEA 69 (1983): 88–95.
45. The term corresponds more or less to what Eric Havelock in his A Preface
to Plato (Cambridge, 1963) calls “craft literacy.”
46. See my book Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remem-
brance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge, 2012); see also Aleida Assmann,
Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cam-
bridge, 2011).
47. Pap. Chester Beatty IV rto. 2.5–3.11; M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Lit-
erature, vol. 2: The New Kingdom (Berkeley, 1976), 177.
48. Ursula Verhoeven, “Literarische Graffiti in Grab N13.1 in Assiut/Mittel-
ägypten,” in P. Kousoulis, ed., Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists: Ab-
stract of Papers (Rhodes, 2008), 262.
49. D. Wildung, Imhotep und Amenhotep: Gottwerdung im alten Ägypten (Mu-
nich, 1977), 28–29.
50. Pap. Chester Beatty IV rto. 2.5–3.11; D. Wildung, Imhotep und Amenhotep,
25–27.
51. Herodotus, Historiae II, chap. 143.
52. Plato, Timaios, 22b.
53. P. Zumthor, Introduction à la poesie orale (Paris, 1983), 245–261; see also
Aleida Assmann, “Schrift liche Folklore: Zur Entstehung und Funktion eines
Überlieferungstyps,” in Aleida and Jan Assmann, C. Hardmeier, eds., Schrift und
Gedächtnis: Beiträge zur Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation (Munich,
1983), 175–193.
54. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization
(Chicago, 1968), 13.
55. See Aleida and Jan Assmann, eds., Kanon und Zensur (Munich, 1987).
56. The case of India, where the sacred texts were not written down but memo-
rized by specialists, the Brahmin, seems to contradict this reconstruction, be-
cause here, in the context of oral tradition, we also meet with secondary canon-
ization and traditions of exegesis. Here, however, the techniques of memorization
have been brought to a degree of perfection that human memory could very well
fulfi ll one of the main functions of writing, which is stabilizing the text. The deci-
sion to withhold the sacred texts from writing seems to have been common to
several Indo-European religions such as Zoroastrianism and the Celtic Druidism.
It is usually explained as an attempt to avoid the mistakes of copyists, but the
main motive seems to have been the fear of unwanted dissemination, which is
also one of Plato’s arguments against writing. Stabilizing the text can be achieved
either by writing or by an elaborate mnemotechnique. The latter requires usually
a very strict poetic formalization of the text.
57. Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford, 1986).
58. See Jan Assmann and Burghard Gladigow, eds., Text und Kommentar (Mu-
nich, 1995).
59. See Ernst A. Schmidt, “Historische Typologie der Orientierungsfunktionen
von Kanon in der griechischen und römischen Literatur,” in Aleida and Jan Ass-
mann, eds., Kanon und Zensur, 246–258.
60. Flavius Josephus, Contra Apionem, cap. 22, in W. Warburton, The Divine
Legation of Moses (London, 1738–1741), vol. 1, 192–193.
61. For this distinction, see my book Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 87–103.
62. For these beliefs, see my book Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt (Ithaca,
2005).
63. It is also very important not to mistake the “connectivism” of Ma’at for the
collectivism of certain modern ideologies. Collectivism presupposes the exis-
tence of ideas of communities such as tribe, people, nation, state, and so on that
claim predominance over the individual member. None of these ideas exist in the
ancient Egyptian lexicon, unlike, for example, the Hebrew Bible with its emphasis
on concepts of community, especially the idea of a “holy people” (goj qadosh,
Exod. 19:6).
64. See my article “Literatur und Einsamkeit im alten Ägypten,” in Aleida and
Jan Assmann, eds., Einsamkeit (Munich, 2000), 97–112.
65. See also Stefan Breuer, Der Staat. Entstehung, Typen, Organisationsstadien
(Reinbek, 1998), 101, and “Kulturen der Achsenzeit. Leistungen und Grenzen
eines geschichtsphilosophischen Konzepts,” Saeculum 45, no. 1 (1994): 1–33.
66. Jaspers’ “Platonism” has been criticized also by Jürgen Habermas,
Philosophisch-politische Profile, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), 92.
Perspectives on the Future
16
The Axial Invention of Education and
Today’s Global Knowledge Culture
william m. sullivan
Education in its most basic sense is coeval with humanity. In historical socie-
ties, as the author of a distinguished study of education in Western antiquity
has noted, education can be seen as transmitting “the concentrated epitome of
a culture and as such it is inseparable from the form of that culture and per-
ishes with it.”1 In another sense, however, as the conscious effort to form—and
reform—human individuals and society to correspond to ideals of imagined
but unrealized possibilities, education is one of the great legacies of the Axial
turn. The new human possibilities envisioned by the great Axial figures gave
rise to formative practices that outlasted the societies in which they first ap-
peared. Moreover, the educational aims and institutions that emerged from
Axial movements have in several instances gone on to profoundly shape sub-
sequent human societies, not least our contemporary global era.
In what follows I want to confront one such Axial legacy, Plato’s advocacy
of a philosophical education to transform individual perspective, with the
unintended consequences of one of the most remarkable developments of
the past half century, the dramatic worldwide expansion of university edu-
cation. This educational diff usion represents the propagation of an institu-
tional model derived from European and American developments that can
claim an intellectual heritage reaching back to Plato and classical Greece
through Latin Christendom. As analyzed by John Meyer and others, the
contemporary model of the university can be understood as a great culture-
forming agency of modernity, a “secular canopy, drawing cultural matters,
people, and nature under a universalized umbrella, and providing religious-
like cultural unity.”2
412 Pe r s pe c t i v e s o n t h e F u t u re
Today’s global knowledge culture centered on the university disseminates

cultural norms that everywhere celebrate ideals of individual agency rooted
in capacities for grasping experience through abstract, universal concepts.
This culture of knowledge understands everyone as potentially rights-
bearing individuals capable of entering into political relations and market
transactions for mutual benefit. It therefore propagates central features of
modernity across older civilizational boundaries. In that sense it carries on
the Axial project of universalization.
At the same time, it is both intolerant of nontheoretic forms of knowledge
and militant in its advocacy of a strong version of individual agency. This
culture trusts wholly in the theoretic in Merlin Donald’s and Robert Bel-
lah’s sense, while it typically ignores or directly challenges tradition-based
understandings of identity and selfhood. In these ways it seems to echo Ax-
ial themes associated with the Platonic heritage. However, at the same time
its dominant form inculcates as its way of understanding reality a “closed
immanent frame,” in Charles Taylor’s phrase, thereby occluding as a source
of meaning the awesome transcendent of the Platonic tradition.
The knowledge culture fostered by the contemporary university is a major
feature of the world society prone to what Jürgen Habermas has memorably
called crises of legitimation.3 In the eyes of many, especially outside Europe,
Japan, and North America, the workings of the economic and political insti-
tutions of today’s global society threaten to frustrate and undercut the ethi-
cal norms of equality and universality that legitimate this order. Beyond
that, the university seems unable to avoid communicating to many a weak-
ening of meaning and sense of alienation even as it expands scientific knowl-
edge and technological capacities. The question I want to address is whether
a better understanding of the Axial era and its tensions, such as that pro-
posed by Bellah in his work on religious evolution, could help reshape global
educational culture to realign theoretic reason with moral-practical sources
of understanding? 4 How might such a reconfigured educational culture sus-
tain the “Axial tension,” in S. N. Eisenstadt’s phrase, as a creative source for
a richer, more ecumenical global culture?
Plato’s Complex Legacy: Paideia as Logos and Mythos
Platonic philosophy emerged in Athens of the fourth century bce as one of

several responses to what Bellah calls the perceived “breakdown” of that
Education and Today’s Global Knowledge Culture 413
society’s inherited moral order. By emphasizing this cultural breakdown in

the face of rapid political expansion, prolonged warfare, and unexpected
defeat, Bellah locates the Axial “breakthrough” of Socratic-Platonic philos-
ophy in a situation analogous to the civilizational crises that Karl Jaspers
described in his pioneering exposition of the emergence of the Axial fig-
ures.5 Bellah also follows Werner Jaeger in presenting Plato, and his mentor
Socrates, as linked to the new cultural movement led by the Sophists. This
pioneering cultural movement appeared in response to these tensions, be-
coming an integral feature of the Hellenic “enlightenment” that would later
be so important as a model in the early phases of Western modernity.6
The Sophists were itinerant intellectuals who gained livelihood and influ-
ence by providing a new kind of training for elite young Greeks, one based
not on traditional poetic sources but on a logical analysis of arts of speech
and persuasion, the skills of ruling in the contentious Greek cities. Jaeger
emphasized that these Sophists were the first to develop a self-conscious art
of pedagogy, coining the term paideia, or “culture.” They embodied this in-
sight in an explicit educational program, the “trivium” familiar to the Euro-
pean Middle Ages: the study of grammar, logic or “dialectic,” and rhetoric.
Donald has noted that the Sophists’ invention of rhetoric was a self-reflective
turn within a culture already characterized by argumentative discourse in
many areas. For Donald, rhetoric represents the first attempt to separate the
forms of the “metalinguistic skills” essential in a mostly oral culture from
their traditional content, making possible both a systematic analysis of ar-
gumentative discourse and a “systematic curriculum for the training of
thought skills and habits.”7
The invention of rhetoric, at once scientific and pedagogical, was both the
product and the basis for the Sophists’ remarkable cultural creativity. In ef-
fect, they developed a protosocial scientific approach to culture and religion,
analyzing traditional practices and beliefs in a consciously critical and re-
ductionistic way. As Plato saw it, the educational and, more broadly, cul-
tural implications of this development were manifest: the subversion of all
moral norms through the instrumentalizing of speech in the ser vice of indi-
vidual advantage. The social consequences seemed equally manifest in the
general moral breakdown, and threats of tyranny, endemic in late fift h-
century Athenian democracy.
As Bellah presents the situation, Plato saw Socrates as an alternative to
such cultural implosion, a figure at once self-consciously critical of aspects
of the received culture and yet not nihilistic, committed in both word and
deed to a loyalty to norms beyond the purely instrumental and self-regarding.
Plato’s philosophical writings would become efforts to understand the mean-
ing of Socrates’ life and death and, increasingly, essays toward institutional-
izing a Socratic perspective as an alternative basis for Greek culture itself.
In Plato’s hands, this project came to mean a full-scale paideia that could
compete not only with the traditional mythos or narrative imagination of the
poets but with the instrumental rationalism of the Sophists as well. That
drove Plato to search for ways to find in logos an evaluative dimension, to
ground the “training of thought skills and habits” within a new sense of the
transcendence and objectivity of moral order.
The result, as tentatively articulated and revised in a series of “dialogues,”
Bellah calls Plato’s new “hybrid system.” He means a culture that sought
guidance in the newly developed capacities of theoretic reason but that was
nonetheless deploying all three of Donald’s levels of consciousness: mythic
and mimetic as well as the theoretic.8 The dialogues themselves, especially
the so-called Middle Dialogues such as the Republic (often in antiquity
called On Education), present the new Platonic arguments within a narra-
tive, indeed dramatic framework, making their interpretation notoriously
complex and open-ended. However, it is in these Middle Dialogues that
Plato provides the fullest, indeed perhaps the paradigmatic articulation of
the Axial movement in Greece. Particularly in the Republic’s central meta-
phors or parables, as Bellah calls them, we can see a clear articulation of
Taylor’s notion of the Axial as “disembedding.”9
The famous Parable of the Cave seems to set out clearly all three dimen-
sions of Axial disembedding. The “lover of wisdom” who is able to “turn
around” and is drawn upward out of the cave in search of the light of reality
breaks with the existing social order, now denigrated as a dark place of
bondage, with the traditional understanding of the world, suddenly revealed
as a realm of shadowy illusion, and even with conventional goals of living,
now shown up as guided by no more than futile guesses about the human
good. At the climax of the journey, the philosopher experiences a transfor-
mative vision of the form of the Good. This encounter with the transcendent
source of reality changes the philosopher, who becomes able to imagine a
very different kind of self capable of living and shaping another sort of soci-
ety in accord with transcendent norms of truth and goodness.
Philosophy emerges in the Parable of the Cave as an educational process

of expanding the horizon of understanding and aligning oneself with this
wider view of the whole of reality instead of the narrow and confused aims
of life in the cave. However, the narrative of disembedding is concluded by a
reverse journey, a kind of reembedding: the return of the transformed phi-
losopher to the cave for the sake of those still enchained by illusion. So the
Axial movement of disembedding is closely followed by a parallel but op-
posite action by the philosopher, who strives to realign soul and society with
this new understanding of reality.
This picture is further developed in the story that in Book VII follows im-
mediately on the Parable of the Cave. Here Plato presents the reader with
another kind of narrative: a model curriculum, a developmental paideia for
shaping the soul of the philosophers who are to rule Socrates’ imagined
good city. In this narrative, development begins in Donald’s mimetic, with
dance and sports shaping body and sensibilities. To this is added the mythic
learning of poetry, building on the rhythms established through embodied
experience within the linguistic and symbolic realm. Finally, and crucially,
the content of these preparatory studies is articulated in theoretic form,
brought to explicit and critical awareness through a reflective thought pro-
cess modeled on Greek mathematics and astronomy (Rep. 553a–540a).
Plato here provides the historically earliest sketch of the notion that
“higher education” should be heavily “theoretic” in nature, focused on de-
veloping formal-operational thinking. This higher phase, however, would
draw upon but also criticize the concrete-operational thought fostered in
the students’ earlier induction into literature and culture, the abstract and
general building upon and acting back upon the more concrete and particu-
lar. So, in Plato’s developmental story, philosophy would use mathematics,
logic, and rhetorical theory to organize, criticize, and rearticulate literature
and the arts. Plato would thereby take up the critical discourse of the Soph-
ists, but in a Socratic moral project. The aim of his educational program
would be to instill a reflective reverence and to shape a thoughtful response
to the philosopher’s encounter with the goodness at the core of reality. As we
will see, this is a program strikingly parallel in structure yet different in aim
from the modern culture of the university.
In Socrates’ telling, after this long and arduous education, the future rul-
ers are then to spend years as apprentices in ruling the good city, learning
how in practice to bring unchanging Goodness into the realm of confusion

and change. This phase represents what we might call a higher mimesis, the
conscious modeling of self and activity on the wider reality disclosed by
philosophical study. Finally—and the order is different from that in the Par-
able of the Cave—the development of the philosophers remains incomplete,
perhaps not fully authentic, without the experience of encounter with the
Good itself, the principle that transcends form yet provides the ground of all
structure and the source of all value. Whether Plato considered this critical
transformative vision a kind of theoretic reflection or something closer to
embodied experience is ambiguous. Famously, in his Seventh Letter, Plato
denied that true philosophy can be taught by written concepts, requiring
rather that a “spark of understanding and intelligence flashes out and illu-
minates the subject at issue.”10
These two central educational narratives from the Republic introduce a
strong note of “Axial tension” between the conditions of existing life and
claims of transcendent reality. The connection between the two movements—
the arduous disembedding and the equally demanding efforts to realign
oneself with the expanded horizon of reality—is a transformation of under-
standing that Plato describes in largely mythic terms: enlightenment, see-
ing, lifting up one’s soul, and so forth. This sharpening of insight, however,
is followed by the practice of “imitating” what is “seen.” The object of such
encounters is never described directly. It is said to lie beyond all words and
forms. Yet Plato also describes it as the source and ground of being, like the
sun in the visible world.
Hans-Georg Gadamer has made the important observation that the phil-
osophical aim at knowing, which starts off the process of seeking reality,
necessarily grows out of prior, prereflective involvement in and with the
world. Like the “radiance” of a work of art, experiences of truth and good-
ness can “happen” to us, drawing us into a relationship with a reality that
suddenly illuminates but also surpasses us, making demands to which we
must respond.11 Yet finally, the experience calls out for a response: like Pla-
to’s philosopher, each person must consciously aim to make an adequate
response to Goodness as encountered. Or as Plato describes the psychic dy-
namic at work throughout the educational narratives of the Republic: “Or do
you think it possible not to imitate the things to which anyone attaches
himself with admiration?” (Rep. 500c, Loeb trans.) A return to mimesis at a

higher level indeed.
Plato’s pioneering explorations of these issues bequeathed to posterity a
number of ambiguities and unresolved tensions. The whole educational
scheme was grounded in a problematic sense of a cosmos in which the tran-
scendent was somehow immanent but never fully embodied. This problem
ensured that something of Plato’s own Axial tension continued to haunt
philosophical education. Even within the Platonic tradition itself, a long ar-
gument developed. There were those Platonists who saw the object of the
philosophic quest as “flight” from the distorted world of experience to tran-
scendent unity. Others argued that the point was to become “at home”
within the wider and deeper context disclosed by appearance of transcen-
dence within the multiplicity.
It was never clear, however, whether Plato’s apparent aim to supplant the
traditional forms of everyday life with philosophically prescribed mores, as
depicted in The Laws for example, was a practical aim. Furthermore, the is-
sue of how to reshape customs, the proper mix of what Plato had called
“persuasion” and “necessity” or coercion remained unresolved as well. It is
worth noting, however, that in antiquity the practice of philosophy was al-
ways considered a “way of life” that involved practices of self-formation
aligned with the metaphysical articulation of a particular philosophical ap-
proach. The mythic and mimetic forms of consciousness, therefore, contin-
ued to have their place.12
When Christianity developed its deep but uneasy symbiosis with Greek
philosophy, particularly Platonism, these tensions continued. In the centu-
ries of post-Axial “compromise” in Latin Christendom, as Taylor describes
it, intellectual elites tended to adopt a stance of compromise or accommoda-
tion with traditional forms of embodiment. This meant that the educational
ideals proposed by the Axial movements functioned in rough symbiosis
with more particularistic, mythical images and models of human identity
and solidarity. The custody of these hybrid cultures was largely the charge of
intellectual, usually religious elites who, for both good and ill, became ex-
perts in the maintenance, and occasional reworking, of common rituals,
myths, and symbols upon which Christendom, like the other post-Axial
civilizations, depended.
The slow but decisive disruption of this “compromise” that Taylor calls
“Reform” has left in its widening wake the remarkable and historically unpre-
cedented cultural situation we call modernity. By taking an activist stance
toward everyday life, the reformers of Latin Christendom set in motion ef-
forts to realize the Axial critique of traditional, or in Bellah’s terms, archaic
forms of life. One of the most startling results of these efforts has been the
diff usion of modern education as an institution for the compulsory recul-
turation of everyone.
The University as Modern Architectonic Cultural Institution
The kinds of knowledge produced by the university and the personnel it

certifies have become central to nearly all aspects of what we understand as
progress in the social, economic, and political domains. Indeed, in selecting
personnel for occupational roles, educational certification has become vir-
tually the only legitimate form of discrimination. It is as though the utopian
proposal of Plato’s Republic that the rulers of the just city should be chosen
on the basis of intellectual and moral merit had been realized—at least as
regards the intellectual merit—on a universal scale. (In imperial China,
something approaching this idea was institutionalized in the examination
system based upon the Confucian classics.) However, the critical certifying
role of the university today has not arisen because universities can be shown
to do a particularly good job of preparing people for the actual business of
carry ing on functions in the occupational order, nor because they have nec-
essarily the most egalitarian of selective processes. On the contrary, as Da-
vid Frank and Meyer argue, there is much evidence that “the university
certifies individuals . . . without actually preparing them to meet occupa-
tional role demands.”13 On a macrolevel across societies, the worldwide ex-
pansion of universities since World War II also correlates only weakly with
measures of national growth in functional effectiveness in economic, mili-
tary, or political spheres.14
Instead of searching for elusive, and he believes, illusory functional ex-
planations for this expansion, Meyer counters the usual functionalist sociol-
ogy of education with the argument that the evidence supports a very differ-
ent hypothesis. “The university,” he argues, “is less about training people for
jobs in the complex society, and more about establishing the ground rules
for this society—the doctrines that local realities and actions can and should
be seen in terms of universal principles.”15 The university, in this view, is an
institution of culture-formation more than it is a motor of social, economic,
or even technological development. Its main function is to induct young
people into the use of what Richard Madsen in his contribution to this vol-
ume, following Mary Douglas and Basil Bernstein, calls “elaborated speech
codes.” The “functionality” of the university is in this sense cultural rather
than technical.
Meyer characterizes his view as sociological institutionalism. As a theory,
it is antireductionistic, postulating institutions as holistic symbolic forms,
cultural models made up of constitutive rules that societies use to establish
and enforce a particular conception of reality and moral order. That is, insti-
tutions both establish what is taken as “real” and also provide individuals
and collectivities with legitimation for aspirations and actions in accord
with their rule-like norms. The amazing fact about the university-based
culture of knowledge, Meyer argues, is that over the past half century it has
been able to make its definitions of reality and legitimate purposes prevail
against a large variety of more local traditions. In today’s world, any state
seeking to be seen as modern hastens to establish a university on the cosmo-
politan model of the “advanced countries,” while it selects its personnel
from among those certified by either its own or similar foreign universities.
Similarly, for individuals anywhere, university education has become ever
more important as the singular route to full participation within the global
economic and political order.
It is an important feature of our world that both proponents and critics of
today’s “globalizing” institutions share this culture in common. Its core is
what Meyer and associates call “analytical reason.” For members of this cul-
ture, knowledge—and therefore reality—share common abstract and univer-
sal features. As universities have spread and grown more central to the insti-
tutional order everywhere, analytical reason has become established as the
only legitimate source and guarantee of knowledge, at least for elites in-
volved in constructing global institutions and relationships. As Meyer puts
it: “Universities recast concrete, local, and particular understandings into
abstract, global, and universal knowledge.”16 As particular matters are cate-
gorized in general terms, what is real is understood as a law-like order of ab-
stract and causal relationships. The model for this is, of course, the natural
sciences. However, in an empirical study of university curricula and orga-

nizational change around the world over the past century, Frank and Jay
Gabler have shown how homogeneous the expansion of such thinking has
been as evidenced in changes within university curricula and faculties. They
note in particular the growth of the analytical social sciences and the con-
comitant decline in the traditional humanities disciplines with their con-
cerns for inherited national and religious cultures.17
As individuals shaped by the global knowledge culture come to under-
stand it, the world, both natural and social, makes sense as the resultant ef-
fects of abstract and universal processes. At the same time, the physical, so-
cial, and indeed psychological worlds appear more and more available for
use and manipulation. Indeed, the center of the global knowledge culture is
occupied by a conception of the individual as actor in a very strong sense. In
effect, the global culture of knowledge propagated by the university as an
institution “anchors” its claims in “individualized persons” who now claim
“sovereignty” over all sorts of realms once controlled by extrahuman forces,
increasingly even “over matters of life and death.” The basic notion is that
self-conscious human initiative can grasp the world and intervene in it for
human improvement. This is the context, Meyer asserts, in which notions of
promoting human rights and global environmentalism take form.
The premises of the university’s sweeping reformation of global culture,
however, are rarely fully transparent, even to its most ardent advocates. This
is because they are rooted in a kind of mythic structure that sees “progress
and justice” as the “natural” goals of human societies. Meyer claims that
this “rational myth” is in fact the descendent of medieval Christendom, but
in a highly secularized, this-worldly form. Since World War II, American
hegemony has facilitated the spread of a highly individualistic, as opposed
to more nationalist or corporatist, version of these premises. The result is an
emerging world society “founded upon the ultimate rights of human indi-
viduals, bound together by common humanity and embedded in a scien-
tized nature and rationalized society.”18 The culture of the university, as
Meyer sums it up, is crucial to this myth of “progress and justice.” The uni-
versity “tames and ‘scientizes’ and universalizes nature; it rationalizes mod-
els of society; and it celebrates the extraordinary capabilities for agentic
action of the supreme modern individual.” This institutionalizing of the
culture of analytical reason thereby “creates the cultural conditions en-

abling the contemporary society.”19
Meyer places his theory of educational institutions within a narrative of
modernity that parallels the accounts of the Axial transformation and its
consequences developed by Bellah and Taylor, Eisenstadt and Habermas,
among others. Meyer also emphasizes, however, the historically extraordi-
nary optimism embodied in the premises of this culture. It presupposes that
both individuals and societies can be “improved” cognitively, technologi-
cally, and morally by conscious effort: the primacy of education in modern
societies is precisely the embodiment of this optimism about consciously
undertaken collective self-improvement.20 At the same time, Meyer points
out, this global educational culture imagines this process as lifting individ-
uals out of less rational, more local and particular understandings of them-
selves and the world into this modern realm defined by analytical reason-
ing, universal concepts, and autonomous agency.
Other commentators have noted that the university in its earlier phases
was able to rely upon an explicit philosophical Idealism to reveal the idea of a
substantive culture immanent in the many forms of analytical thought. Now,
whatever cohesion there is can be provided only by common procedures for
testing and communicating analytical investigation.21 It is perhaps an indi-
rect confirmation of Meyer’s claim for the mythic status of the underlying
dynamic that confidence remains high in the face of institutional impera-
tives that often seem guided by little substantive purpose or meaning.
Sophism Redivivus? The University and the

“Dark Side” of Cosmopolitanism
There is no lack of a literature criticizing these premises. However, it is

worth noting the range and persistence of some of these criticisms. For ex-
ample, in The Revolt of the Elites (1995), Christopher Lasch raised concerns
about the effects of higher education. He depicts a culture of knowledge that
is more Sophistic than Platonic. Higher education’s great function is to initi-
ate students into a distinctive “culture of critical discourse” that resembles
Meyer’s analytical mind and the “elaborated speech codes” of Douglas. Th is
culture values innovation over continuity, flexibility and variety over loyalty,
technical intelligence and instrumental finesse over character and moral

cultivation, and iconoclasm over reverence. Since this culture is the key to
elevation into superior status, possession of the credentials of critical dis-
course leads those who master it to see themselves as meritorious, problem-
solving experts. Lasch points out that such experts tend to see themselves
and their lives in strategic terms, often consumed by maneuvering for the
better deal in the status competition internal to professional occupations.
When embraced naively, Lasch concludes, this apparently sophisticated
consciousness becomes the growing soil of nihilism.22
Some of the more influential analyses of the “information economy” have
raised similar issues. In a succession of studies of the new workforce staffing
the advanced sectors of the global economy, former U.S. secretary of labor
Robert Reich has called attention to the pivotal position of university-educated
workers he calls “symbolic analysts.” This is a broad category, as much cul-
tural as economic, that includes researchers, engineers, lawyers, and jour-
nalists. Their common identifying feature is that they live by “identifying
and solving problems,” “doing conceptual puzzles,” and playing the role of
strategic brokers among various groups and organizations. “The symbolic-
analytic mind,” Reich summarizes, “is trained to be skeptical, curious, and
creative.”23 Their structural position as staff for increasingly global firms
and organizations tilts symbolic analysts toward a strategic and instrumen-
tal cast of mind.
Reich descries the appearance among the ascendant symbolic analysts of
“the darker side of cosmopolitanism.” He writes: “Without strong attach-
ments and loyalties extending beyond family and friends, symbolic analysts
may never develop the habits and attitudes of social responsibility. They will
be world citizens, but without accepting or even acknowledging any of the
obligations that citizenship in a polity normally implies.”24 Reich fears that
such people will resist any calls for common sacrifice and commitment based
on justice and fairness, ideals they may find to be “meaningless abstractions.”
There are clear echoes of Reich’s analysis in the otherwise more enthusiastic
portrayals of today’s symbolic analysts in David Brook’s “bourgeois-
bohemian” high achievers and Richard Florida’s “creative class.”25
There may be yet another, paradoxical, problem attendant upon the suc-
cessful diff usion of the university’s culture of analytical reasoning as the
lingua franca of our global elites. As we have seen, today’s political left and
right, both proponents of Neoliberalism and opponents of the World Trade

Organization, share a many common assumptions as a result of their school-
ing. This can and surely does promote global integration, as in the rapid
growth in nongovernmental organizations and transnational associations
and social movements. Yet Meyer points out that the spread of the culture of
analytical discourse can also “serve as a mechanism for greatly enhanced
social conflict in a world with so much actual inequality and diversity.”
Once they come to be seen “in the light of a common universalistic culture and
schooled stratification system,” inequalities are “increasingly difficult to legiti-
mate,” and as Meyer notes, this can make once incidental cultural differences
sources of major conflicts over access to and control of societal resources.26
The “theoretic” as Bellah and Donald describe it is the horizon of our age.
Yet the criticisms just surveyed suggest that the abstract and universalistic
features of the current global culture, despite the optimism of their advo-
cates, create problems of legitimacy as they come closer to apparent triumph.
Perhaps the ideals of our global culture require a prior, tacit integration into
the underlying “rational myth” of “progress and justice” with its attendant
attitudes toward change and possibility in order to avoid the alienating con-
sequences that seem all too evident in many parts of the world. Certainly, in
a world economy characterized by ever more rapid forms of what Joseph
Schumpeter called capitalism’s “creative destruction,” something like Haber-
mas’s colonization of the cultural “life-world” by the “systems” of strategic
action seems likely to be an endemic feature of our era.27
The final question I want to consider is how to do justice to the claims of
modern subjectivity and creativity, themselves legacies of the Axial Age, by
developing a culture that can reembed the theoretic within care for the
world without losing openness to the transcendent. The culture of the theo-
retic seems inherently dependent for stability upon its rootedness in narra-
tive and mimetic modes of engaging the world and constituting human
selves through social relationships. If this is so, we also need a richer, more
comprehensive vision of education for an ecumenical global world. Such a
vision of paideia for our times has to find ways to integrate rather than sup-
press both the theoretic and the moral-practical dimensions of conscious-
ness and culture. In what follows I want to suggest such an educational
project by building upon the cultural vision of the classic American prag-
matist philosophers, especially George Herbert Mead and John Dewey.
Resources for the Renewal of Paideia as an Educational Agenda
One of the peculiarities of the global theoretic culture is its belief in its own
self-sufficiency as well as the legitimacy of its standing in judgment of vari-
ous forms of embedded and embodied consciousness. These ideas have long
been supported by Enlightenment philosophical epistemology and some
versions of moral philosophy. However, if Bellah and Donald are correct,
this self-sufficiency is an illusion, and indeed not simply an innocent one.
While the theoretic is the most universal and self-aware representational
mode available to us as modern humans, in an epigenetic sense it is clear
that the development of theoretic consciousness, like learning elaborated
speech codes, grows out of and depends upon prior competence in the nar-
rative and mimetic modes. A large body of research in both psychology and
sociology supports this conclusion.
Philosophically, the epistemology upon which the self-sufficiency of the
theoretic has stood has been challenged by phenomenological thinkers, cri-
tiques stemming from the work of the late Wittgenstein, and the American
pragmatic tradition. These philosophical currents converge on the notion
that explicit, articulate understanding necessarily grows out of and depends
upon a prior and more encompassing prereflective sense of things. This
“background” or tacit sense of participation within a whole is presupposed
by conscious articulation but cannot be encompassed by it without remain-
der. Human cognition is grounded in social practices, as Taylor emphasizes
in his contribution to this volume.
This prereflective grounding of the theoretic in practical engagement pro-
vides the inescapable source of linguistic and conceptual meaning. More-
over, since this engagement is unavoidably social, all forms of knowledge,
including the theoretic, necessarily presuppose forms of community activ-
ity for their functioning and sense. There is no use of the theoretic, even
epistemology, that does not tacitly presuppose its own embedding in some
linguistic medium and mimetic practices. This philosophical critique has
returned engagement with the world to its place as a constitutive feature of
all human consciousness. Such a reconnection also opens again the possi-
bility of encounter with transcendence and the question of response to the
transcendent that was, as we have seen in the case of Plato, a determining
factor in the genesis of Axial movements toward formative education.
Dewey’s philosophy provides an instructive example of a systematic work-

ing out of the implication of these insights. Dewey’s theory of inquiry placed
the detached, analytical stance of scientific investigation as a “moment”
within the larger process of human experience. Dewey noted how modern
natural science has enabled our species to better understand the workings of
nature, and in certain areas to control nature in support of human pur-
poses.28 However, the reason for undertaking the investigation in the first
place, as well as its potential meaning, come only from those shared, histori-
cally rooted cultural meanings that Dewey sometimes called “experience.”
Dewey argued that it was a shared “experience,” or cultural ethos, that
enables a group of interacting investigators to perceive a situation as “prob-
lematic” in the first place, and therefore a stimulus to inquiry. Purposeful
human activity, or praxis in the Greek sense, is thus the ground and also the
goal of analytic thinking. For Dewey, the point of inquiry is to restore, or
reconstitute, the flow of meaningful activity in social life. Analytic thinking
is successful when it contributes to a fuller, more adequate understanding of
the salience of events in light of some aim or purpose. The construction of
such aims and purposes is largely the work of narrative and reflection of col-
lective experience rather than a deduction from analytical principles. Hu-
man rationality in its full sense is ultimately practical—and therefore social,
historical, and narrative—by nature.29
With the emergence of theoretic forms of thinking, the analytical phase
of inquiry has gradually become codified and institutionalized. However,
fi xating on the analytical phase of inquiry threatens to short-circuit the cru-
cial relationship between interaction and reflection that Dewey believed
constitutes social learning. Dewey’s theory of inquiry was his attempt to
provide a release from this fi xation on analysis at the expense of other di-
mensions of experience. His theory of inquiry restates and generalizes the
central insights of Aristotle’s notion of practical reasoning, in effect making
theory a special case of practical insight.30 Dewey set out to map this wider
terrain of human rationality in order to circumvent the theoretic trap. What
needs more emphasis today than in Dewey’s time is the vital necessity of
regrounding the university’s legitimate concern to foster analytical think-
ing upon the meaningfulness of lived experience itself. More than ever, to-
day’s higher education needs Dewey’s insight that intellectual reflection—
the transmuting of meaningful experience into general concepts—is not an
end in itself, but a potentially helpful guide for engaging more richly and
responsibly the terrain of experience.
Dewey also sought to move beyond critique toward the practical reshap-
ing of modern education. Writing in the early twentieth century, his efforts
were focused on pre-university schooling, but his approach has two valuable
lessons for the global university culture of our time. First, Dewey sought to
place education within an explicitly historical, and therefore narrative, con-
text. Second, Dewey sought to make education a conscious form of the kind
of normative social experience he called “democracy.”
Famously, Dewey thought that learning should be carried out through ex-
perience of basic “occupations,” in order to locate school learning within what
today would be called the “authentic performance” of key social practices. But
these occupations were not “jobs” so much as what Dewey termed “points of
departure.” Deweyan schooling was to be careful induction into the larger
narrative of human evolution in which, by taking up an “occupation” in both
its concreteness and its imaginative location in this history, all learning could
be situated in “the central dramas of humanity, our effort . . . to build civiliza-
tion in the mutual transformations of earth and humankind.”31 The method
of thinking implicit throughout was “inquiry,” the movement from “problem-
atic situation” through reflective problem-solving or analysis, to “reconstruc-
tion of experience” through redesigned technique or social practice. But this
process of remaking and in a sense reenacting human historical development
was to be, at the same time, an education for and through democracy. Dewey,
like Mead, understood democracy in a wide sense as the goal and means of
consciously constructed “conjoint activity.”32 This normative aim, too, was
implicit in the method of inquiry used throughout.
Dewey’s was perhaps a Romantic and optimistically American vision of
education. In that distinctive idiom, however, his program consciously rec-
ognized and tried to reconstruct for pedagogical purposes the tension be-
tween the theoretic and the narrative and mimetic dimensions of human
experience. And it presented these within a “grand narrative” of historical
emergence. Dewey was proposing an educational form of “mythistory,” to
use William McNeill’s term, the effort to use critical, analytical insight in
the ser vice of the larger goal of providing an account of human affairs that
“fits experience better,” yet is neither narrowly ethnocentric nor too de-
tached to provide the basis for “coherent public action” within a cosmopoli-
tan world. Discussing the difficult relationship between the critical and the
guiding aims of the historians’ enterprise, McNeill argues the primacy of
aiming at a wide perspective in which “the things that unite human beings
would come to the fore . . . a matrix for mutual understanding and more ef-
fective public action . . . avoiding the mistaken notion that generalization
[in itself] involves error.”33
The mythistory underlying Dewey’s educational program is for many
reasons no longer adequate. Yet it clearly was able to play one of the roles of
that McNeill singles out for serious, constructive historical narrative: ex-
panding the sympathies of the groups being addressed while yet balancing
“ecumenical and parochial” points of view so as to make significant partici-
pation in the concerns of human society.34 But is meaningful education pos-
sible without some functional equivalent? Is the “pedagogy” of the world
market, including the world labor market, a sufficient basis for the continu-
ing development of the theoretic, analytical culture of knowledge? If not,
then we may find earlier orienting models of paideia a necessary if not suf-
ficient guide for redeeming the ambiguous promise of global modernity. We
will have reason to hope for the truth of Bellah’s adage that in human evolu-
tion “nothing is ever lost.”
Notes
1. Henri Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity (New York: Sheed and

Ward, 1956), xviii.
2. David John Frank and John W. Meyer, “Worldwide Expansion and Change
in the University,” unpublished paper, Stanford University, January 5, 2006, 13.
See also Evan Schofer and John W. Meyer, “The Worldwide Expansion of Higher
Education in the Twentieth Century,” American Sociological Review 70 (Decem-
ber 2005): 898–920.
3. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975).
4. Quotations and references will henceforth be to Robert Bellah, Religion in
Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).
5. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1953).
6. Bellah, Religious Evolution, chap. 6, 94ff.
7. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of
Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 346.
8. Bellah, Religious Evolution, chap. 6, 115.

9. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2007), 146–158.
10. Plato, Seventh Letter (344b) in Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, trans.
Walter Hamilton (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 140.
11. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies
on Plato (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 88–91. See also
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum Press, 1993), 106–169.
12. See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwell Publish-
ers, 1995), esp. 81–125.
13. Frank and Meyer, “Worldwide Expansion,” 10.
14. John W. Meyer, Richard Rubinson, Francisco O. Ramirez, and John Boli-
Bennett, “The World Educational Revolution, 1950–1970,” Sociology of Education
50 (October 1977): 242–258.
16. Ibid., 12.
17. David John Frank and Jay Gabler, Reconstructing the University: Worldwide
Shifts in Academia in the 20th Century (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,
2006).
19. Meyer, “Foreword,” in Frank and Gabler, Reconstructing the University, x.
20. Meyer et al., “The World Educational Revolution,” 255. See also David K.
Cohen, “Professions of Human Improvement: Predicaments of Teaching,” in
Mordechai Nisan and Otto Schremer, eds., Educational Deliberations (Jerusalem:
Keter Publishers, 2005), 278–294.
21. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1996), 83.
22. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites (New York: W. W. Norton,
1995), 34.
23. Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century
Capitalism (New York: Alfred Knopf Publishers, 1991), 230.
24. Ibid., 309.
25. See David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They
Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), and Richard Florida, The Rise of
the Creative Class (New York: Viking Publishers, 2000).
26. Schofer and Meyer, “Worldwide Expansion,” 917.
27. See the discussion in Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol.
2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston: Beacon Press,
1987 [1981]).
28. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, in Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–1953,
ed. J. A. Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), vol. 4.
29. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in The Later Works, vol. 12, 192.
30. I have tried to develop some of the implications of this idea in A New
Agenda for Higher Education: Shaping a Life of the Mind for Practice (San Fran-
cisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2008; with Matthew S. Rosin).
31. David K. Cohen, “Dewey’s Problem,” The Elementary School Journal (John
Dewey: The Chicago Years): 98, no. 5 (1998): 427– 446, here 433.
32. The importance of the idea of democracy in this wide, Deweyan sense in
providing a thematic continuity in Mead’s work is developed by Hans Joas in
G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought (Boston: MIT Press,
1985).
33. William H. McNeill, Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986), 20–21 and 23.
34. Ibid., 18.
17
The Future of Transcendence
A Sociological Agenda
richard madsen
“A total metamorphosis of history has taken place,” wrote Karl Jaspers sixty
years ago in the immediate aftermath of World War II. “The essential fact is:
There is no longer anything outside. The world is closed. The unity of the
earth has arrived. New perils and new opportunities are revealed. All the
crucial problems have become world problems, the situation a situation of
mankind.”1 But it was a spiritually empty unity. There was a universal eco-
nomic and political interdependence, based on the universal permeation of
technologies of dominance, but it did not rest on any common ethical foun-
dation. “[S]omething manifestly quite different from the Axial period is in-
volved. Then the plentitude, now the emptiness.”2
In the past sixty years, there has been an enormous amount of writing
about the unity of the earth—indeed in the past two decades, such discus-
sions, under the rubric of “globalization” have become ubiquitous. But there
has been proportionally little systematic reflection on the possible spiritual
foundations for global interdependencies of wealth and power. One reason
may be that it is so difficult to imagine how this may be done. In this essay I
will suggest an agenda for such exploration—or at least review pieces of
such an agenda suggested by the writings of Jaspers, Robert Bellah, and
Charles Taylor.
Jaspers suggested that a beginning would be to “look back toward our ori-
gin. The deep matrix from which we sprang . . . is to become articulate once
more. In this process of self-understanding through the knowledge of
whence we come the mirror of the great Axial Period of humanity will per-
haps, once more, prove one of the essential assurances.”3 But this requires a
The Future of Transcendence 431
theoretical depth and historical erudition possessed by few scholars. One of

these, however, is Bellah, whose book on religious evolution does indeed
undertake to provide a comprehensive self-understanding of our common
spiritual situation through the mirror of the Axial period of humanity. Be-
sides demanding theoretical depth and historical erudition, such an effort
requires the willingness to undertake great intellectual risks to extract grand
unifying visions from the obscurity of history. Having now enjoyed the fruits
of Bellah’s ordeal, we might now consider an even more perilous undertaking:
a prognosis of the future in the light of the past.
The Future in the Mirror of the Past
Jaspers follows his call to deepen our understanding of our present situation
through knowledge of our Axial roots with an essay on “The Future”—a call
to “look at the present from the viewpoint of the future as well as that of the
past. The ideas we have of the future guide the manner in which we look into
the past and the present.”4 Prognosis of the future is not only risky because
it may be wrong, but because it may be self-fulfilling in harmful ways that
preclude more beneficial possibilities. However, in any case, says Jaspers, it
cannot be avoided. “All our activity depends upon what we expect from the
future, upon the picture we form of chances and certainties. The goals of our
activity are set within the area of that which we deem possible.”5
From his vantage point in 1949, Jaspers described three tendencies in the
world, “socialism, world order, and faith.”6 By socialism he meant “the uni-
versal tendency of contemporary mankind toward an organization of labor
and of participation in the products of labor that will make it possible for all
men to be free. To this extent almost everyone is a socialist today.”7 He saw
this tendency heading toward two possible outcomes, either a kind of social
democracy or the total planning of communism. He saw world unity as pos-
sibly taking two forms, “world empire” or “world order.” World empire would
be based on the coercion of a single great power maintaining itself through
the use of force combined with propaganda. World order would achieve
unity “without unifying force other than that afforded by common decision
in negotiation.”8 By faith, he meant not dogma but “the fulfilling and moving
element in the depths of man, in which man is linked, above and beyond
himself, with the origin of his being.”9 The alternative to faith was nihilism.
What has been the fate of Jaspers’ prognoses? There was indeed a great
struggle between communist state socialism and social democracy (practiced
even in the United States under the name of the “welfare state”), which ended
with the collapse of both communism and social democracy (in the United
States at least, where the welfare state has been largely dismantled in the
name of a neoliberal free-market fundamentalism). There were attempts to
develop a world order through the UN and a declaration of universal hu-
man rights, but this was overshadowed through rivalries between the two
great superpowers and their client states. After the end of the cold war, the
United States has tried to assert itself as the unchallenged hegemonic center
of a new world empire, but it now seems to lack sufficient military power to
effect this. Moreover, there are no effective international institutions to en-
force respect for universal human rights. Finally, although there were im-
pressive movements toward renewal and modernization of Axial faiths—for
example in the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council—these efforts
were not sustained. The major current alternative forms for the expression
of faith seem to be an archaic “paleo-Durkheimian” submersion of the self
into politically organized communities or a “post-Durkheimian” exaltation
of the self in an expressive spirituality.10
We seem now to be in a liminal period, where the incipient tendencies
that Jaspers discerned have now played themselves out, and we are pre-
sented with a new phase in history, with a new manifold of possibilities. In
the light of a renewed understanding of the Axial Age, what new prognoses
might we make for our future?
One difference between our current situation and that faced by Jaspers in
1949 is that the situation at the time of his writing was like a pre- or post-
Axial Age, but our situation today is structurally more similar to that of the
Axial period. As Jaspers wrote, “the present age is one of real technological
and spiritual remolding, not yet of eternal spiritual creations. We may more
readily liken ourselves, with our grandiose scientific discoveries and tech-
nological inventions, to the epoch of the invention of tools and weapons, of
the first use of domestic animals and horses, than with the age of Confucius,
Buddha, and Socrates.”11 Elsewhere, Jaspers compares the post–World War II
hardening of organizational systems and the consolidations of world empires
to the period after the Axial Age, when there were founded the Qin dynasty
in China, the Maurya Empire in India, and the Roman Empire.12 In con-
trast, our present period is more akin to times like the Warring States in
China, when a heretofore stable political and economic order was collapsing
and the threat of anarchy impelled a search for new unifying spiritual visions.
Under such circumstances, the future of faith, the third of Jaspers’ three di-
mensions of tendencies toward the future, becomes all the more urgently
relevant. But it is developments along this line that seem the most confusing
and most ambiguous.
Conditions of Axial Creativity
On the one hand, the conditions seem to be ripe for an explosion of spiritual
creativity. There is a loosening of older affi liations and anxiety about the
meaning of life in a world rife with profoundly destabilizing conflicts. More-
over, new means of communication facilitate the emergence of itinerant in-
tellectuals, like those whose ideas engendered the innovations of the first
Axial Age. Finally, modern psychology, philosophy, and cultural studies of-
fer us a more multilayered understanding of human rationality—an under-
standing more open to possibilities of spiritual innovation than that which
has prevailed in post-Enlightenment discourse.
Yet the present global situation seems like that in the early Roman Empire:
The world was levelled off spiritually into two languages (Greek and
Latin), into a shallow ethical system which, because it was without ef-
fect on the masses, made room for enjoyment for its own sake and for
the desperate sufferings of slaves, of the poor, and of the vanquished. . . .
Where nothing is really believed any more, the most absurd beliefs
gain the upper hand. Superstition in manifold guises, doctrines of sal-
vation of the most extraordinary kinds, circles gathered round peripa-
tetic preachers, therapists, poets and prophets, in an endless confusion
of vogue, success and oblivion, present a garish picture of narrow
fanaticisms, wild adorations, enthusiastic devotion, and also of oppor-
tunism, imposture and knavery.13
Jaspers says that Christianity brought order to this chaos. Although there is
much in our age that is analogous to this period in ancient Rome, however,
there is today “nothing corresponding to the Christianity which, at that time,
was new and world-transforming.”14 What passes for Christianity today is

mostly too trapped in dogmas and creeds to contribute to a new universal
world order. Nonetheless, the fundamental insights of Christianity, together
with the fundamental insights of the great Axial religious traditions, could
provide spiritual resources for a spiritual vision adequate to the challenges of
the future.
Although we seem to be living under structural conditions similar to the
matrix of creativity found in the Axial Age, and although we are faced with
challenges that might only be resolved by a leap to transcendence—by a new
Axial Age—it is hard to discern the beginnings of such a leap. Where would
we look? What would we look for? How would we recognize the seeds of an
emergent world faith even if we saw them? In the remainder of this essay, I
suggest a sociological agenda for seeking, recognizing, and guessing the di-
rection of the spiritual movements that could coalesce into a new Axial Age.
I would suggest that we begin the search in contexts where political and
social orders have partially but not fully collapsed—where creative energies
are freed from previous integuments but where there remain sufficient cul-
tural resources to nourish systematic thinking and teaching. The initial
Axial breakthroughs took place on the margins of powerful empires, in
small states that had experienced some prosperity but were locked in inces-
sant competition with other states and were insecure and vulnerable.
The work of Bellah goes beyond Jaspers (and Jaspers’ mentor Max Weber)
by arguing for the complex interplay between the theoretic, critical rational-
ity that we associate with Axial breakthroughs, and the dense, multivocal
symbolisms of the mythic and mimetic cultures associated with archaic and
primitive religious consciousness. We can (as Bellah indeed has done in
some of his previous writings) analyze this interplay in terms of the “grid”
and “group” framework developed by another great Durkheimian social
scientist, Mary Douglas.
For Douglas, the structure of a society’s moral order, the forms of its cos-
mologies, and the meaningfulness of its rituals all depend on the tightness
of its group ties (which, in her shorthand jargon, she calls “group”) and the
clarity and specificity of its moral norms (which she calls “grid”).15 Societies
strong in group are structured into closed corporate groups which are diffi-
cult to exit and can put high levels of social pressure on their members. So-
cieties weak in group are assemblages of mobile individuals who can volun-
tarily choose their associates. Societies strong in grid have clear, coherent,
and well-institutionalized systems for classifying roles and statuses, rights and
responsibilities. Societies weak in grid are anomic—their institutions are
weak and moral standards indistinct.
Societies with different combinations of strong and weak group and grid
give rise to different kinds of symbol systems. People socialized under con-
ditions of strong grid and strong group employ a “restricted” symbolic lan-
guage. We might speculate that conditions of maximally strong grid and
group are exclusively associated with the ritual processes of the mimetic
consciousness; and that conditions of medium strong grid and group help
produce the sacred stories of the mythic consciousness (without giving up
on rituals—for as Bellah emphasizes, “nothing is ever lost”).
In a context of weak grid and weak group, people use “elaborated” speech
codes. These are based on symbols with specific, clearly defined meanings,
which each individual can use to communicate his or her unique interests
and feelings in the hope of reaching agreement with someone with comple-
mentary interests and feelings. It leads to a religion of inner experience rather
than external form and to a critical consciousness that frees individuals
from authority, even as it allows them to calculate strategically in a com-
plexly organized world. The consequences of extremely weak grid and group
would be a Hobbesian world, an anarchic struggle of all against all. A strong
grid and weak group might produce a rationalized, bureaucratically struc-
tured world, where self-consciously independent individuals seek to express
their unique selves and advance their strategic interests through a rigidly
fi xed, taken-for-granted framework of procedures.16
The United States today is a society with a rather weak group life, but it is
nonetheless rationalized through strongly enforced, bureaucratically insti-
tutionalized “rules of the game.” Thus the strong individualism of America,
based upon what many Americans would see as their critical-rational, theo-
retic consciousness, is held in check by a powerful framework of rules and
procedures. One sees this in the modern American research university,
where the flood of specialized publications is channeled according to strong
canons of scientific procedure, and true breakthroughs that would integrate
different levels of knowledge are hard to come by.
Closed societies with strong group and grid would not be likely to pro-
duce breakthroughs to transcendence. If threatened from outside by an
encroaching global system, such societies might produce a rigidly intran-

sigent “fundamentalist” spirituality. But neither would breakthroughs to
transcendence come in a society like the United States, for all its wealth
and power. America’s combination of strong grid and weak group may
produce a spiritual life more like the Roman Empire, “circles gathered
round peripatetic preachers, therapists, poets and prophets, in an endless
confusion of vogue, success and oblivion.” Breakthroughs to transcen-
dence might more likely arise in contexts where relatively strong corpo-
rate groups were beginning to break down, but still retained much of their
coherence; and a grid of moral rules was being called into question, but
still provided a foundation on which to build new moral frameworks. It is
such a context that might provide a generative dialectic between restricted
and elaborated symbol systems, a fruitful interplay between interpene-
trating mimetic, mythic, and theoretic consciousness.
Thus a search for tendencies that might lead to new Axial breakthroughs
today might best begin at the interstices of the great economic political pow-
ers, in societies challenged by neoliberal globalization and made vulnerable
by great power rivalries—but which are for now still holding their own in
the midst of these challenges.
Examples from Asia
In a recent book, I have described the emergence of new “socially engaged”

Buddhist groups in Taiwan, an island that has experienced impressive
growth and political development in the past generation, but is extremely
vulnerable to military threat from the People’s Republic of China, faces
intense economic competition from other newly industrializing countries,
and is situated at a confluence of Asian and Western popu lar cultures me-
diated through new information technologies.17 In the past generation,
roughly coincident with its transition to democracy, it has given rise to
Buddhist movements that draw upon core Buddhist understandings about
compassion to adapt both Buddhist practices and Confucian ethics to a
globalized world.
Let me provide some brief examples of such creativity from my book.
Despite their great differences, Taiwanese organizations such as the Bud-
dhist Compassion Relief Society (Ciji gongde hui; hereafter referred to as
“Ciji”), Buddha’s Light Mountain, and Dharma Drum Mountain follow a

broadly similar pattern of creative cultural development.
First of all, they partially demythologize traditional beliefs. That is, in-
stead of taking Buddhist symbols as solid, literal representations of a world
beyond the one of ordinary experience, they see the symbols as expressions
of a common human life. Some of the members of these Taiwanese organi-
zations describe their beliefs as symbols of traditional moral principles from
within their culture.18 When they say things like this, however, they are not
advocating an uncritical acceptance of their inherited culture. As Xingyun,
the founder of Buddha’s Light Mountain writes:
Professor John Dewey, the American philosopher, educator, and teacher

of Dr. Hu Shih [Hu Shi], once said, “We must reappraise the meaning of
value.” His remark has had a tremendous impact on my thinking and
my method of reappraisal and reorientation when dealing with issues of
Buddhism, life, and society . . . I do not unconditionally follow tradi-
tion. I do not toy with the idea of emptiness and talk in vain about ab-
struse things. I do not consciously accept the opinion of the majority.
Instead, I constantly review our tradition, observe, and think about the
future of Buddhism. I keep on reappraising values as I grow.19
Members of Ciji sometimes refer to this process as “adaptation to life” (sheng-

huohua), adapting the best of their cultural values to the changing condi-
tions of life in modern Taiwan.
In these groups, there is indeed much talk about “cultivating practice”
(xiuxing), a term well known from books on Confucian philosophy. The
term refers to the process of spiritual development that enables one to under-
stand how to apply basic moral principles in the broadest possible contexts.
But this development now is not to be confined to an elite of “great men.”
With the aid of modern communications and with a democratic spirit that
stresses the inherent equality and dignity of all persons, anybody can ex-
pand his or her heart. The many multimedia publications of all of the groups
aim to facilitate this understanding.
The norms of fi lial piety, for instance, have to be adapted to a world of
high-tech occupations in which, to be successful, children have to learn to
think critically for themselves, and may eventually have to move far away
from their parents. The religious groups that I have studied all say that one
should still hold on to the principle of filial piety under these circumstances,
but that one must understand it in a deeper way and exercise it through new
methods. To be truly filial, one must not blindly obey one’s parents but
thoughtfully assimilate the lessons they have taught and carry on their leg-
acy in a cosmopolitan world that they may not be able to comprehend. The
collective work of these Buddhist groups is an example of how to do this.
They devote themselves to reworking the lessons that Chinese parents typi-
cally impart to their children. They encourage followers to help strangers in
need as if they were one’s own parents. If one is living far away from home,
then one can help one’s parents by generously caring for someone else’s
parents—and in the process one can gain confidence that other members of
one’s religious community will be on hand to take good care of one’s own
parents. Self-cultivation, then, is not just improvement of one’s individual
self (using neo-Confucian language, publications of these groups refer to a
“small self”—xiao wo), but a broadening of vision that generates affi liations
to a wider community (a “big self”—da wo). Other characteristics are a sim-
plification of ritual and dilution of hierarchy, which gives increasing amounts
of initiative to lay devotees.20
Sometimes fundamental moral precepts are diluted so as to adapt to the
demands of a scientific modernity. But this is done to better enable con-
structive efforts to transform modernity itself in accord with the moral as-
pirations of human beings.
Consider, for example, the way Ciji operates its innovative hospitals and
medical school. It has adopted a mission to provide the most modern forms
of Western medicine, but to carry out this mission it is willing to compro-
mise the basic Buddhist precept forbidding killing of any sentient beings. At
the small monastery that is the headquarters of Ciji, both nuns and lay visi-
tors make assiduous efforts not to kill even mosquitoes or ants. But the Ciji
hospital and medical schools conduct scientific research that involves kill-
ing animals—and Ciji’s foundress, Master Zhengyan, permits this if it is
“done for a good purpose and if the animals are not made to suffer unneces-
sarily.” At the same time, Ciji seeks creative ways to inject Buddhist values
into modern medical practice, to maintain the benefits of scientific medi-
cine while redeeming the practice of healing from its objectifying and alien-
ating tendencies. For example, the Ciji medical school has a distinctive way
of conducting its anatomy class. Before students dissect the human cadavers
used in the class, they pray for the souls of the deceased. On the walls of the
classroom, they post biographies of the cadavers they are working on, and
students write essays expressing their gratitude toward the person who do-
nated his or her body. When the bodies are cremated at the conclusion of the
class, half the ashes are returned to the deceased’s family, and the other half
kept in an urn in a chapel next to the anatomy classroom, where students
can meditate and give gratitude for the lives of the people who have helped
them in their education. The aim is to instill in young doctors a respect for
the human persons who will be their patients, and to imbue within them the
Ciji commitment to “compassionate care.”21
Such creative cultural innovation makes various combinations of Bud-
dhism and Confucianism come alive for members of the modern mobile
middle classes—white-collar workers, entrepreneurs, professionals who are
thoroughly committed to modern scientific worldviews and to work in mod-
ern organizations, but who nonetheless feel a need for moral guidance and
more comprehensive meanings to put such work into perspective and to help
them set life priorities.
One finds analogous innovations in other pressured but still open and co-
herent societies within Asia. The Dalai Lama has formulated Tibetan Bud-
dhism in such a way as to push it beyond the boundaries of an isolated Hima-
layan society and, without denying its function as an expression of a particular
ethnic identity, he has turned it into a vision of a “middle way” toward uni-
versal peace, a vision that (like the Christian variant of prophetic Judaism)
might survive the destruction of its territorial temples and national commu-
nity and, through culturally adaptive diaspora, become a global faith.
Out of the Christian tradition, South Korea meanwhile has produced im-
portant innovations with relevance to the whole globe: a vigorous minjung
(people’s) Christian theology, which mixes some of the expansionist passion
of evangelical Christianity with the concern for social justice of ecumenical
Christianity. Members of such a faith have taken the lead in movements to
gain respect and dignity for migrant workers in that relatively closed society.
And in Indonesia, there is the Dian Interfidei organization, founded by
the late Dr. Sumartana and based in Yogyakarta. Dian Interfidei has built
networks of Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Confucians. It
holds seminars and workshops that introduce participants to the history,
theology, and ethics of the various traditions. Each participant is led to em-
phasize the centrality of their respective faith traditions in building bridges
across the bias and distrust that all too often eventuate in violence in Indo-
nesia. All of the organization’s programs are aimed at helping participants
to listen, to step back and accept difference without any investment in shap-
ing such difference into sameness. Prayer and worship is part of all Interfi-
dei gatherings and always involves multifaith expressions of reverence, in-
cluding music, prayer, and ritual reflecting several of the religious traditions
that constitute Indonesian religious culture. The goal of all this is to create a
new kind of religious person, a person Sumartana called a “cross-religious
person.” Such a religiously endowed person does not abandon one faith tra-
dition for another but becomes an intentional religious citizen of the world.22
All such movements arguably take place in contexts of moderately strong
grid and group which have been undergoing dynamic change in response to
outside political pressure and economic globalization. They share some com-
mon characteristics.
First, there is a reinterpretation of tradition. This is not a slavish, “funda-
mentalist” clinging to a frozen, stereotyped tradition, but an active, creative
engagement with tradition from within the wider horizons that the global
communications of modernity give us. This involves a struggle to be faithful
to the deepest principles of the tradition—in Taiwan, for example, with the
principles of fi lial piety—while shedding parts of that tradition that are no
longer compatible with the demands for individual autonomy, personal re-
sponsibility, and self-expression that life in dynamic urban societies places
upon us.
Second, there is an attempt to communicate this vision through words,
images, music, and dance—and practical philanthropic gestures—that link
the creative imaginations of cultural entrepreneurs with the expectations of
ordinary people embedded in their local cultural communities.
Third, there is active, critical dialogue with other culture creators, even
those outside of one’s own tradition—Buddhists with Christians, Christians
with Muslims, and so forth. Such dialogue best takes place in apolitical ven-
ues, so that arguments are won and lost as far as possible on the basis of
whose ideas are most convincing, not on who has the most political power.
Identifying Seeds of Transcendence
The examples described above are at least superficially suggestive of pre-

liminary movements to transcendent religious and moral visions. They sug-
gest that we might be looking in the right places. But how could we tell if we
were actually observing seeds of transcendence? For initial guidance, we
might return to Jaspers.
First of all, he argues, authentic new movements toward transcendence
would not take the form of new revelations. “In the lucidity of our world, a
prophecy that made its appearance with the claim to a fresh divine revelation
would perhaps always give the impression of madness or false prophecy, of
superstition, that collapses before the one great, true prophecy which oc-
curred thousands of years ago.”23 Movements toward transcendence would
take the form of recovery and readaptation of the roots of the great Axial
traditions. But these traditions could not be appropriated as exclusive truths.
For that the truth of faith lies in the multiplicity of its historical mani-
festations, in the self-encountering of this multiplicity through ever
deeper communication, is an insight and experience of latter centuries
which cannot be reversed. This experience cannot be fallacious in its
origin. . . .
If it be deemed improbable that a world order will develop without
unity of faith, I venture to assert the reverse. The universality of a world
order obligatory to all (in contrast to a world empire) is possible only
when the multiple contents of faith remain free in their historical com-
munication, without the unity of an objective, universally valid doctri-
nal content. The common element of all faith in relation to world order
can only be that everyone desires the ordering of the foundations of
existence, in a world community in which he has room to evolve with
the peaceful means of the spirit.24
At their origins, the great Axial traditions were open-ended. They proclaimed
that there was a great universal fountain of Truth that existed beyond all of
the particular alliances of this world. The search for this Truth and obedience
to its demands was the lever for criticism of exclusive myths and particular
communities. But the prophets who initiated the Axial traditions were all, in
their own ways, against idolatry—the notion that the ultimate Truth could be
definitively captured by symbols or institutions constructed by humans. So
the Axial insight impels us to a constant critical search that pushes beyond the
symbols that provisionally form the vehicles of its expression. Each of the
Axial traditions quickly became mummified. A new Axial Age would break
through the mummifications and take up the critical task of seeking a spiri-
tual unity where they left off.
One expression of this is in the writings of Sheng Yen, the Zen master
who was the founder of the Dharma Drum Mountain Buddhist organiza-
tion in Taiwan: “Once on an airplane, I was sitting next to a Christian mis-
sionary who was piously reading the Bible and praying. Seeing that I had
nothing to do, he gave me a Bible and showed me how to read it. I praised his
good intentions and enthusiasm, and agreed with his statement that Chris-
tianity is the only religion through which one can attain salvation. He im-
mediately asked me, ‘If this is the case, why are you a Buddhist monk? Isn’t
that a pity?’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, but for me, Buddhism is most suitable. So I
would say that Buddhism is the best religion.’ ”25
Sheng Yen explains this paradoxical position in terms of classical Zen.
“Transcending your thoughts . . . is a method that consists of maintaining
the attitude of non-involvement with yourself or others. The goal of this
method is roughly described as a phrase that translates as, ‘Be separate, or
free, from the mind, from thoughts, and from consciousness.’ To be free
from all this is to be in a state of enlightenment. In such freedom of mind it
might be said that we see the world.”26
He supplements this classical Zen analysis, however, with a touch of Durk-
heim. He distinguishes between a culturally relative “sacred” and the ulti-
mate truth.
The definition of the “sacred” varies according to time, place, and indi-
vidual. This is something we must be aware of in a modern, pluralistic,
and globalized society. . . . The supreme truth revered by every religion
should be absolute and flawless. It is definitely sacred. But once secular
elements and outside agendas are incorporated into the interpretation,
it becomes a subjective notion and thus generates diversity. For exam-
ple, the theory of causes and conditions is the utmost sacred in Bud-
dhism. But we do not deny the value of monotheism. While we neither
identify with nor accept monotheism, we can understand and respect

it. We acknowledge that all virtuous religions have room for continu-
ous development and also have the right to proclaim themselves the
world’s best religion. Likewise, I myself would say that Buddhism is the
best religion. . . .
The days of monocultural societies are long gone and will not return
again; and fortunately so, otherwise the destiny of humanity would be
a very tragic one! Therefore, I would like to make this appeal here for
all humanity: humankind must understand that the notion of the sa-
cred is interpreted differently in a multicultural pluralistic world, and
that we should strive to seek for harmony. Such harmony is not to be
found in dogmatic homogenization or elimination of difference. It can
only come through a grassroots discovery of commonality within dif-
ference, and difference within commonality.27
In the Zen Buddhist view, the discovery of commonality within difference

comes not from philosophic manipulation of categories but from leaps of
consciousness, a passage through the “gateless gate” in which attachment to
the self is lost and one faces circumstances and deals with people in clear
immediacy. Some such leap of consciousness seems indeed to be the driver
of all leaps to transcendence, even though such leaps are inevitably followed
by mummification in institutions.
Invoking Ivan Illich’s Corruption of Christianity, Taylor offers a provoca-
tive interpretation of the original Christian insight that, surprisingly, has
much in common with the perspective of the Buddhists cited above: the in-
carnation of God in Jesus pushes us outward, beyond the boundaries of all
tribes and nations, beyond all civilizational rules, into direct encounters
with other persons based on the unconditional love which God has for us.
The enfleshment of God extends outward, through such new links as

the Samaritan makes with the Jew, into a network, which we call the
Church. But this is a network, not a categorical grouping; that is, it is a
skein of relations which link particular, unique, enfleshed people to
each other, rather than a grouping of people together on the grounds of
their sharing some important property (as in modern nations, we are
all Canadians, Americans, French people; or universally, we are all
rights-bearers, etc.). It resembles earlier kin networks in this regard. . . .

But it is unlike tribal kinship groups in that it is not confined to the
established “we,” that it creates links across boundaries, on the basis of
a mutual fittingness which is not based on kinship but on the kind of
love which God has for us, which is called agape.28
This is the kind of Christianity that Jaspers seems to have had in mind when
he referred to the new and world-transforming movements that brought
order to the spiritual chaos of the Roman Empire.
Inevitably, however, this movement of the Christian spirit ends in the
corruption of Christendom, the idolatry of fi xed systems of rules and cate-
gories, dehumanization and alienation, and violence by Us against Them.
But once kindled, the spark of transcendence is never fully lost. It remains
buried within the tradition as a heritage of hope.
Authentic movements toward transcendence would then be character-
ized by new movements within the great Axial traditions toward ecumeni-
cal openness. This would be arrived at not through some superficial syncre-
tism but through an intellectual and moral commitment to the deepest
roots of a tradition. But how would one distinguish a reactionary, parochial
clinging to tradition from a progressive, transcendent springing out of tra-
dition? The only way would be through the fruits of the enterprise.
I have suggested that one might discern the beginnings of such move-
ments within renovations of Buddhist and Confucian traditions within
parts of Asia. Within Christian traditions in the West, one might also find
such sparks of (all-too-fragile and easily corruptible) movements of tran-
scendence around the world. Examples would perhaps be the Taizé commu-
nity in France or the Sant’Egidio community in Rome. In the United States
in the first half of the twentieth century, the Catholic Worker Movement
was inspired by a similar spirit, and out of the evangelical part of the Protes-
tant tradition, the Sojourners seem to be following a similar spiritual path.
Other examples might be found in movements like those for “transitional
justice,” to bring about reconciliation in the wake of conflicts, beginning in
South Africa and initially inspired by creative appropriation of Christian
traditions, but now being applied in Eastern Europe and Latin America.29
Such movements usually occur at the margins of their respective institu-
tionalized religious traditions. They reach across doctrinal religious bound-
aries to create networks of concern, cross-national and cross-class affi lia-

tions of unlikely bedfellows. It is such movements that Jaspers seemed
to think were the potential fabric of authentic world community: “He who
would like to live in the unclosed and unorganised and unorganisable com-
munity of authentic human beings—in what used to be called the invisible
Church—does in fact live today as an individual in alliance with individuals
scattered over the face of the earth, an alliance that survives every disaster, a
dependability that is not fi xed by any path or any specific imperative.”30
Although such movements may contain at least some seeds of a new Axial
transcendence, they are not a good object for standard sociological study.
They cannot easily be categorized, pinned into a theoretical framework.
Sociology is more at home with studying the corruption of the spirit than its
emergence. So perhaps we cannot “operationalize” the seeds of global tran-
scendence; sociology in itself cannot tell us when we have encountered them.
But by amply theorizing and documenting the boundary development, the
alienation and dehumanization that call out for transcendence, and by start-
ing us on a global, comparative search for the contexts in which transcen-
dence might happen, sociology might lead us up to the point where we
might actually witness it. Sociology can play the role of “philosophy” in
Jaspers’ essay on “The Future”: “Philosophy leads us along the road to the
point at which love acquires its depth in real communication. Then in this
love, through the success of communication, the truth that links us together
will be disclosed to those who are most remote in the diversity of their his-
torical origin.”31
Notes
1. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1953), 127.
2. Ibid., 140.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 141.
5. Ibid., 152.
6. Ibid., 172.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 196.
9. Ibid., 215.
10. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2007), 455ff and 487ff
11. Jaspers, Origin, 140.
12. Ibid., 194.
13. Ibid., 216.
14. Ibid.
15. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York:
Vintage, 1973), 77–92.
16. Ibid., 19–58.
17. Richard Madsen, Democracy’s Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political
Development in Taiwan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
18. Ibid., 5– 6.
19. Venerable Master Hsing Yun, The Philosophy of Being Second (Hacienda
Heights, CA: Hsi Lai University Press, 2000), 76.
20. Madsen, Democracy’s Dharma, 5– 6.
21. Ibid., 40– 41.
22. Clare B. Fischer, “Democratic Civility: Interfidei and the Work of Social
Harmony in Indonesia,” unpublished paper.
24. Ibid., 226–227.
25. Sheng Yen, “Inter-religious Understanding and Cooperation” (concluding
address, International Conference on Religious Cooperation, September 20,
2001); see www.chan1.org.
26. Sheng Yen, “Human Consciousness in the Chan Perspective,” Chan News
Letter 84 (March 1991).
27. Sheng Yen, “The Sacred in a Pluralistic World: Seeking Common Ground
while Preserving Differences” (speech, World Economic Forum, New York, Feb-
ruary 1, 2002); see www.chan1.org. Quotes from Sheng Yen are included in Mad-
sen, Democracy’s Dharma, 96–98.
28. Taylor, Secular Age, 739.
29. See Daniel Philpott, ed., The Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation,
and the Dilemmas of Transitional Justice (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2006).
31. Ibid.
18
The Heritage of the Axial Age
Resource or Burden?
robert n. bellah
In this volume the contributors are focusing on the Axial Age and my chap-
ter will do likewise. However, my work on the Axial Age comes out of a
larger project concerning religion in human evolution from the Paleolithic
to the Axial Age.1 I will therefore begin with a word about evolution itself as
a concept. I assume that none of the contributors to this volume has a prob-
lem with the theory of biological evolution, even though we may have some
different ways of interpreting it. Problems arise when we speak of social and
cultural evolution: Is that even a valid idea and, if we think it is, what do we
mean by it? Here I will briefly state my position insofar as it is fundamental
to my whole project, before turning to a consideration of the Axial Age and
its consequences.
Although I will want to qualify it, my conception of social and cultural
evolution is basically neo-Darwinian, with variation and selection operat-
ing not with genes but with cultural traits and institutional structures. For
example, no tribal society, and so no tribal religion, anywhere in the world
today can survive without some kind of state protection. That says nothing
about the value of tribal societies or their religions, only that they cannot
compete against state societies and today must be protected by them. This
does not at all mean that state societies are better than tribal societies. Left
alone, tribal societies might have survived for millions of years, whereas
state societies seem to have a strong tendency toward mutual extinction. I
believe that progress, even ethical progress, is an important issue. However,
an evolutionary increase in complexity, and, in the short term, viability, tells
us nothing about the ethical quality of the apparently more viable society, or
about its long-term fate. There have been and surely will be again cases in
which increased complexity and apparent viability turn out to be an evolu-
tionary dead end, leading to extinction.
I can certainly understand the anxiety that speaking of social evolution
would reduce culture and society to biology, an anxiety not unwarranted in
a world where sociobiology and the selfish gene have become popular ideas.
As a defense against that kind of reductionism, there has been an effort to
distinguish evolution and history: evolution occurs in nature, history oc-
curs in culture. This distinction is, I think, a somewhat modified version of
the old distinction between Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft.
And, as in this older distinction, there is the sense that evolution involves
determinism, whereas history involves freedom, or at least a degree of con-
tingency that is incompatible with deterministic natural science.
I believe this whole distinction is misplaced: evolution is historical; history
is evolutionary. Evolutionary biologists have come to recognize that they often
deal with contingent events—global warming or cooling, for example—that
have major consequences for the survival or extinction of species. They also
realize that species play an active part in their own future, having an impact
on their own environment. Both biologists and historical sociologists recog-
nize path dependence. Species and societies are enormously flexible, but once
they go down a certain path, some alternatives become difficult or impossi-
ble. This can be seen as a historical fact with evolutionary consequences. We
do not have to choose: evolution and history are two mutually compatible
ways of looking at long-term development in nature and in culture.
The most complete discussion of the several ways of thinking about social
evolution that I know of is an early essay of Jürgen Habermas, “Toward a
Reconstruction of Historical Materialism.” Habermas, while accepting the
validity of neoevolutionist approaches in their own terms, still finds them in
need of supplementation. He believes, if I understand him rightly, that we
human beings are involved in our own evolution and cannot escape making
judgments that are evaluative as well as cognitive. The evolution of complex-
ity is one standard of evolutionary development, but, Habermas writes,
“Social scientific neoevolutionism is usually satisfied with the directional
criterion of increasing steering (or adaptive) capacity. . . . [However] even in
natural evolution the degree of complexity is not a sufficient condition for
placing a species in the evolutionary rank order; for increasing complexity
The Heritage of the Axial Age 449
in physical organization or mode of life often proves to be an evolutionary

dead end.”2 Habermas argues that in the very use of linguistic communica-
tion we have built-in standards that are not only cognitive but normative,
and that lead us to view human evolution not only in scientific but in moral-
practical terms, that is, in terms of increasing capacities for social learning.
He concludes his essay by saying, “The development of productive forces, in
conjunction with the maturity of the forms of social integration, means
progress of learning ability in both dimensions: progress in objectivating
knowledge and in moral-practical insight.”3
Habermas argues that in studying social evolution we will inevitably be
governed not only by cognitive standards but by normative ones, though I
am sure he would not want to confound the two levels. Even if we can speak
of normatively lower and higher levels of social learning capacity, we can
never assume that there is anything inevitable about attaining the higher
levels. If we are going to talk about levels at all, as I am prepared to do, we
must expect to find regress as well as progress and face the possibility that
the human project may end in complete failure.4
This brief discussion of the idea of social evolution provides a prelude to
my real subject: whether the heritage of the Axial Age is a resource or a bur-
den in our current human crisis. I remember that Louis Dumont long ago
pointed out that intellectuals specialize in crises and can always find one to
talk about. True though that may be, I have lived long enough to experience
a sea change with respect to popular sentiments about the human future.
William Sullivan, in our collective book The Good Society, wrote about the
1939 New York World’s Fair and about the General Motors exhibition, “Fu-
turama,” that had over five million visitors and set the tone for the Fair. Fu-
turama was a celebration of the technological advance, material abundance,
and rewarding leisure that the future was assumed to hold, if not for the
world, at least for the United States. It was about fleshing out the progress that
most Americans took for granted and making it come alive. I was twelve years
old in 1939 and visited the San Francisco World’s Fair, which rivaled New
York’s in celebrating the brave new world that was expected. That 1939 was on
the verge of World War II, which saw the worst horrors in human history up
to that time, was an irony lost on the millions of visitors to these two fairs.
Yet in the immediate years after the war, when I was an undergraduate and
then a graduate student in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, I
experienced an extraordinary euphoria about how good things were going to

be. We had fought the good war. Though the Cold War was already under-
way, we assumed that “modernization” was the wave of the future, that what
was then called “the developing world” would soon become more or less the
same as “the advanced world,” and that convergent development would even
gradually minimize the differences between the Soviet Union and the West.
It took the sixties to puncture that dream and, one might say, it has been
all downhill ever since. Cultural pessimism (Kulturpessimismus) goes back
a long way—Max Weber was not immune to it—but until relatively recently
it remained a property of one section of the intellectual elite. What has be-
come ever clearer to me in recent years is that the old dream of progress in
popular culture is being replaced by visions of disaster, ecological catastro-
phe in particular. If, as I believe, we human beings are at least to some extent
in charge of our own evolution, we are in a situation of high demand. The
social learning capacity that might enable us to deal with our current chal-
lenges does not seem very adequate at the moment.5
If I am right, there is today a feeling of crisis that is first of all ecological, but
also social and cultural, having to do with global inequality and instability
that is deeper and more widespread than has been the case for a long time.
It is in this context, then, that I want to inquire whether the Axial heritage
can help us or hinder us in our current crisis. Here I would like to return to
Habermas’s previously cited essay, “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical
Materialism,” as a point of departure. In speaking of the transition from tribal
societies organized by kinship to the emergence of the early state, he writes:
Social integration accomplished via kinship relations . . . belongs, from

a developmental-logical point of view, to a lower stage than social inte-
gration accomplished via relations of domination. . . . Despite this
progress, the exploitation and oppression necessarily practiced in po-
litical class societies has to be considered retrogressive in comparison
with the less significant social inequalities permitted by the kinship
system. Because of this, class societies are structurally unable to satisfy
the need for legitimation that they themselves generate.6
It is true that the early state and its accompanying class system emerge in
what I have called archaic societies well before the Axial Age and generate a
degree of popular unhappiness that can be discerned in the texts we have

from such societies, but the legitimation crisis of which Habermas speaks
arises with particular acuteness in the Axial Age, when mechanisms of so-
cial domination increase significantly relative to archaic societies and when
coherent protest for the first time becomes possible. It would surely be far
too simple to interpret the Axial transitions as forms of class struggle, but
that they all involved social criticism and harsh judgments on existing so-
cial and political conditions cannot be denied.
In answer to the question of where this criticism was coming from there
has been a tendency to speak of intellectuals, though what that term means
in the first millennium bce is not obvious. Scribal and priestly classes come
to mind, but we can assume that most of them were too tied in to the exist-
ing power systems to be very critical. Even though the kind of state that ex-
isted then tried and in some important ways succeeded in overriding kin-
ship relations, various kinds of particularistic and ascriptive associations
were widespread. It is not easy to imagine the social space for criticism in
such societies. It is in this context that we have to consider the role of the
renouncer, to take a term most often used for ancient India.
There are renouncers already in late Vedic India; perhaps the first of whom
we have an account is Yajnyavalkya, who appears in the Brhadaranyaka
Upanishad. What the renouncer renounces is the role of the householder
and all of the social and political entanglements that go with it. Buddhism
provides a radical form of the renouncer, whose initial act is to “leave home,”
and to be permanently homeless. If the renouncer is “nowhere,” he, and
sometimes she, can look at established society from the outside, so to speak.
It is not hard to see the Hebrew prophets as, in a sense, renouncers, though I
have also called them denouncers. They too stood outside the centers of
power, attempting to follow the commandments of God, whatever the con-
sequences. Even in opposition, they were more oriented to power than were
Buddhist monastics, to be sure, but, as we will see, the Buddhist monks also
had a radical critique of worldly power. It is easy to see the Daoists who ap-
pear in Warring States China as renouncers, and they too have a critique of
power, though perhaps more satirical than ethical. But there is a sense in
which the Confucians, especially the greatest ones who never held office or
held only lowly ones briefly, and were in principle opposed to serving an un-
ethical lord, were renouncers, criticizing power from the outside. And finally
I will argue that Socrates and Plato were, in different ways, also renouncers,
who were in but not of the city and also criticized it from the outside, so to
speak.7
For all the differences in what can in most cases only loosely be called
renouncers in the several Axial cultures, the one thing they shared was that
they were teachers, and founders of schools or orders, thus more or less, and
often less, securely institutionalizing a tradition of criticism. Ultimately
their power was exercised through the extent to which they influenced or
even controlled elite education, as, to some degree paradoxically, many of
them ultimately did.8 And inevitably their survival depended on what they
charged for their ser vices or what they were freely given. By pointing out the
significance of renouncers we in a sense return to our original question.
How did renouncers garner the support that allowed them to survive in
their outsider position? It seems apparent that some degree of unease about
the state of the world must have been relatively widespread, even among the
elite, to provide the support without which renouncers would simply have
faded away into the wilderness.
If Habermas is right about the legitimation crisis of the Axial Age state
brought on by the dissonance between the developmental-logical advance
and the moral-practical regression, as I think he is, I would like to illustrate
the response to this legitimation crisis by referring to the utopian projec-
tions of a good society that the various kinds of renouncers offered in criti-
cism of the existing order. These utopian projections took quite different
forms in the four cases, but each one of them was harshly critical of existing
social-political conditions.
In ancient Israel the prophets sharply criticized the behavior of foreign
states, but also conditions within the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Accord-
ing to Amos, the rich and the rulers “trample the head of the poor into the
dust of the earth, and turn aside the way of the afflicted” (Amos 2:6–7). In
contrast, the prophets look forward to the Day of the Lord when judgment
will come to the earth and justice will “roll down like the waters, and righ-
teousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). The prophets admonish
rulers and people alike to change their ways, but look forward to a divine
intervention that will finally put things right.
In ancient China Mencius, for example, but many Confucians before and
after him, bemoaned the sad state of society, the corruption of the rulers and
the oppression of the peasantry, and offered an alternative form of govern-

ment: rule by moral example, by conformity with the li, the normative or-
der, and not by punishment. The Confucian hope for an ethical ruler who
would follow Confucian injunctions did not involve any idea of divine in-
tervention, except a vague notion that Heaven would eventually punish be-
havior that was too outrageous, but it was in its own way as utopian as was
the prophetic hope of ancient Israel.
Plato, in the Gorgias and in the first book of the Republic, is a critic of a
politics in which the strong could inflict harm on the weak with impunity:
for him, despotism was always the worst form of government. In the Repub-
lic and the Laws he depicted a good society in contrast to the one he criti-
cized, but which he knew was a “city in words,” or a “city in heaven,” and not
one likely to be realized on this earth.
The Hindu epic, the Ramayana, can be seen as a critique of existing soci-
ety, offering a different ideal of kingship. The early Buddhist canon de-
scribes an ideal society so different from existing reality as to be perhaps the
most radical utopia of all, the most drastic criticism of society as it is.
In each Axial case, what I am calling social criticism is combined with
religious criticism and the form and content of the Axial symbolization take
shape in the process of criticism. I will take the Greek case as exemplary
because our term “theory,” which I, following Merlin Donald, take as diag-
nostic of the Axial transition, first appeared there. I argued in my chapter on
ancient Greece that it was Plato who completed the Axial transition: it is
therefore not surprising that it was Plato who took the traditional term for
ritual theoria and transmuted it into philosophical theoria, which, as I will
attempt to show, is not the same as what we mean by theory, but is its lineal
predecessor, and we can also see the beginning of the transition to what we
mean by the term in Aristotle, Plato’s pupil.
My discussion of theory in Plato would not be possible except for the re-
markable book by Andrea Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek
Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context, from which I will draw exten-
sively. Nightingale describes theoria before Plato as “a venerable cultural
practice characterized by a journey abroad for the sake of witnessing an
event or spectacle.” It took several forms, but the one which Plato took as the
analogy for philosophical theoria, most extensively in the Parable of the
Cave in Books V–VII of the Republic, was the civic form where the theoros
(viewer, spectator) was sent as an official representative of his city to view a

religious festival in another city and then return to give a full report to his
fellow citizens. Nightingale notes that by its very nature theoria in this sense
was “international,” Panhellenic, and that Athens itself attracted many theo-
roi from other cities to view its great festivals, the Panathenaia and the City
Dionysia.9 She notes that Plato himself begins and ends the Republic with
examples of traditional theoria. The dialogue begins with Socrates going to
the Piraeus, the port of Athens, to attend the festival of the Thracian god-
dess, Bendis, suggesting that the festival was more “international” than the
short distance to the Piraeus might indicate, especially in view of Socrates’
remark that the Thracian procession was as fine as the Athenian one, ex-
pressing a Panhellenic viewpoint. And the Republic ends with the Myth of
Er, which turns out to be a most remarkable theoria, since Er, who had been
killed in battle and was about to be cremated, awoke and told his fellow
countrymen about a journey he had made to the land of the dead and the
festival he had attended there.10
Nightingale notes that in Republic Books V–VII Plato for the first time
has Socrates give an account of what he meant by “philosophy,” a term
which confused his interlocutors, who only knew it in its previous sense of
broad intellectual cultivation, but which is now to be understood in the con-
text of a new meaning of theoria as the “quintessential activity of the true
philosopher.”11 The traditional theoros was a lover of spectacles, particularly
of religious rituals and festivals, while the philosophical theoros “loves the
spectacle of truth.”12 Plato puts great emphasis on vision, on seeing the truth
more than hearing it; it is also a special kind of seeing, seeing with “the eye
of the soul.” It is this kind of seeing that requires a protracted philosophical
education to prepare for, but it ends with the “theoria [the “seeing”] of all
time and being” (Rep. 486d).
Thinking of this kind of vision from an Indian or Chinese perspective,
one might imagine that the way to attain it would be through some form of
meditation, probably involving breath control. Although Socrates is por-
trayed twice in the Symposium as in some kind of trance, it is not meditation
that Plato finds to be the way to philosophical vision. The education that
ends with “seeing reality,” or “seeing Being,” begins with number and calcu-
lation, which “enables the mind to ‘view’ the great and the small in them-
selves, abstracted from their concrete manifestations.”13 Geometry and as-
tronomy follow, each of which involves “seeing” higher truths. What Plato
meant by astronomy is not so much stargazing as “the mathematical prin-
ciples that govern the motions of the heavenly bodies,” which one “sees”
when “gazing with the mind and not the eyes.” Finally comes “dialectic,”
which Socrates never plainly defines but uses metaphors to describe, speak-
ing of the “journey of dialectic” toward the contemplation of “true being.”14
What is involved is not “implanting vision in the soul,” but turning the vi-
sion in a new direction, “away from the world of becoming and toward true
being” (521d).15
At the critical moment, then, Plato turns to narrative, what Nightingale
calls the Analogy of the Cave, but which is not simply an allegory that can
be translated into propositional language, but a kind of myth that reveals
truth on its own terms, and that I would rather call the Parable of the Cave.
The Buddha too uses stories, often referred to as “similes” in the secondary
literature, to make a point, as in the famous Parable of the Blind Men and
the Elephant. It seems that at the very point when thought was moving from
myth to theory, narrative still had to function as the midwife.
I cannot here give an account of the beauty and complexity of the Parable
of the Cave, but only allude to those aspects of it that relate to my argument.
It begins with a person who is “at home,” though home in the Republic is
more apt to be the polis, the city, than the oikos, the household. Home, how-
ever, turns out to be a dark cave that is in fact a prison where one is in bonds
so that one is forced to look at shadows on the wall cast by people (ideolo-
gists?) behind one’s back projecting images by holding various objects in
front of fires. Still, those shadowy images are what one is used to, so that in
a situation where one is freed from one’s bonds and, in Plato’s words, “com-
pelled to suddenly stand up and to turn [one’s] head and to walk and turn
upward toward the light” (515c), one will be confused, in a state of aporia,
that is, profound uncertainty, the opposite of poria, certainty. One will have
entered, in Nightingale’s words, “a sort of existential and epistemic no-
man’s-land,” being able no longer to recognize the old familiar shadows nor
yet to see anything in the blinding light above, so that one would be tempted
to flee from the whole journey and return to the old familiar prison.16
Yet the would-be philosopher does not flee back, and even gets used in
some degree to the condition of uncertainty, aporia, which Nightingale
describes as “(among other things) a state of homelessness.” She goes on to
describe the new state as basically similar to the renouncer position in other
cultures:
In addition to the state of aporia, the philosopher’s departure from

home leads to a permanent state of atopia [no place, nowhere]. For the
person who has detached himself from society and gone on the journey
of philosophic theoria will never be fully “at home” in the world. Theo-
ria uproots the soul, sending it to a metaphysical region where it can
never truly dwell and from which it will inevitably have to return. As a
theoros, the Platonic philosopher must journey to “see” truth (in vari-
ous degrees of fullness) and bring his vision back to the human world.17
In a good city he will be given civic office and expected to serve, even
though he would rather spend his time in contemplation, yet even in office
he is still a kind of foreigner in his own city. But if he returns to a bad city,
his report of what he has seen will be mocked as foolish and nonsensical:
he will be abused, he may even be killed. Nightingale sums up: “When he
returns to the human world, then, he is atopos, not fully at home: he has
become a stranger to his own kind.”18
We still need to understand what philosophical theoria itself is; the ritual
theoros sees the festival; what does the philosophic theoros see? Here we
need to discount the caricature of classical theory, which assumes that the
philosopher is a disengaged spectator, viewing at a distance what is an object
different from himself as a subject, a kind of premature Descartes. Plato
does not help us understand what the philosopher sees, that is, the “forms,”
eide, and in particular the “form of the good,” agathon, which seems to be
truth and reality itself, because he stays in the myth to talk about them. In
the myth, Plato compares the form of the good to the source of all light,
something like the sun to the eye of the soul. But if we gazed at the sun very
long with our physical eye, we would go blind, whereas the soul who gazes at
the form of the good sees all things as they really are.
Nightingale shows us that the forms are not abstractions, but are, to the
eye of the soul, ontological presences, “beings” or “substances.” Further, the
vision of the forms is not disengaged, but involves participation, for part of
ourselves, our nous, inadequately translated as “rational soul,” is akin to the
forms. The vision is genuinely interactive: as Nightingale puts it, the vision
is “granted to us as a gift.”19 Furthermore, it is anything but cool and de-

tached: it is affective and emotional, it brings intense pleasure and happi-
ness, it is erotic, even sexual. The soul, says Plato, “draws near to and has
intercourse with (makes love to) reality.” (490b) Furthermore, the experi-
ence of the vision is utterly transformative; one becomes a different person
as a result.20 One could speak of the soul as “enlightened,” but if, as in trans-
lating nirvana or moksha, one wanted to avoid eighteenth-century termi-
nology, one could speak of the soul as “awakened,” or even “released,” for
has the transformed soul not been released from the prison of the cave in
order to participate in the really real?
Plato then goes on to describe the good city to which the fortunate philo-
sophic theoros returns. To discuss that in detail would take us too far afield,
but I want to allude to a couple of aspects of the good city. The good city, as
we noted, is ruled by the philosophically liberated, even though they would
rather be doing something else. Why then do they take on political respon-
sibility? Nightingale interestingly discusses this issue:
If there is an ideal city—and it is by no means clear that Plato believed

in its possibility—then it can and must be ruled by philosophers. In this
case alone, the philosopher must live a double life (as it were): he will
practice philosophy and serve as a ruler. To qualify for this position, an
individual must possess theoretical wisdom and practical virtue; in ad-
dition, he or she must not want to rule or lead a political life (347c–d,
521a–b, 540b). A person who does want to rule is, by definition, not a
true philosopher and thus disqualified from ruling. The philosopher in
the ideal city, however, will agree to rule, in spite of his disinclination to
do so. Since he is a “just” person responding to a “just command,” the
philosopher is “willing” to return and rule the city (520d–e).21
This is all the more odd since, as Nightingale notes, the philosopher remains
a foreigner in his own city, a “non-mercenary mercenary” who is supported
but not paid, can own nothing, and can never touch gold or silver. Many
scholars have been puzzled by this situation, but Nightingale, drawing on
the work of Christopher Gill, points out that because they are “ ‘just men
obeying just commands,’ they are eager to pay back their city for the educa-
tion and rearing that has been granted them.”22 And remember that it had
been the obligation of the ritual theoros to return and give an account of
what he had seen to his fellow citizens.
The rulers, or as they are often called, the “guardians,” are an ascetic lot,
and have been compared to a monastic order. Not only are they committed
to a life of poverty (they live on what the city gives them, not on anything of
their own, and can be considered in a way to be beggars), but their sexual
life is so regulated that, though they have children, they have no family life,
no personal household: the children are raised in common. They embody
the virtue of wisdom, but they preside over a city that is characterized by the
virtues of justice and moderation, and, not insignificantly, where there are
no slaves. A democracy the ideal city is not, and I’m sure we wouldn’t want
to live in it, and perhaps even Plato would have had his doubts.
In Books VIII and IX of the Republic Plato describes a steady decline
from a mythical first regime that is a version of his ideal city, a decline that
begins because some of the guardians go astray, desiring personal enrich-
ment, even though that involves, for the first time, the enslavement of fellow
citizens. This produces timocracy, the rule of honor, with Sparta as an actual
example. But unchecked desires lead to a further downward spiral, first to
oligarchy and then democracy. While Plato’s argument compels him to say
that democracy is the worst regime short of tyranny, he also says it is the
freest of regimes, and the freedom of democracy is what makes it the only
regime where philosophy is possible. Within the multicolored variety of
democratic ways of life, the philosophical life can be pursued, at least until
the democratic lack of self-control leads to tyranny, the worst of all possible
regimes. Outside the rigid logic of decline, it would seem that Plato has
more sympathy with democracy than he admits. In any case, in the only
great dialogue in which someone else takes the part of Socrates, the Laws,
the central character is an Athenian philosopher, not a Spartan, that is,
someone from what in the scheme of decline should have been a better city
than Athens. But then, there were no philosophers in Sparta, and besides,
no Spartan could ever have talked as much as the Athenian in the Laws.
Compared to the cities of his day, Plato was holding up an ideal. It has
often been called an aristocratic ideal, but aristocrats on the whole favored
oligarchy, which Plato despised, and Nightingale argues that Plato used aris-
tocratic ideals against the aristocrats, who were not “real” aristocrats in his
eyes, just as the Buddha criticized the Brahmins for not being “real”
Brahmins.
Which takes us to the Buddhist case, where religious reform and political
criticism also went hand in hand. I have been presenting a more Buddhist
Plato than usual before turning to the Buddha himself. There are some in-
teresting parallels between them: recent revisions of the dates of the Buddha
bring him into the fourth century bce, and make them possible contempo-
raries. One striking parallel is the degree to which each one threw out his
respective inherited tradition and attempted to replace it with an entirely
new one. Plato composed a huge corpus intended to replace the entire po-
etic, dramatic, and wisdom traditions that preceded him. Fortunately, he
did not succeed in eliminating his forbears, but start a new tradition he did,
as the famous quip of Alfred North Whitehead that all of Western philoso-
phy is nothing but footnotes to Plato indicates. The Buddha similarly threw
out the entire Vedic tradition, from the Rig Veda to the Upanishads, and in
its place left us with a collection of sermons and dialogues, the Buddhist
canon, that is several times bigger than Plato’s complete works. We can be
relatively sure that all that is attributed to the Buddha is not his, that succes-
sive generations added to the tradition in his name. It is not improbable that
the Platonic corpus is similarly layered. But here we are interested in the
degree to which both men succeeded in starting something quite new.
Of course, the Buddha, like Plato, owed a great deal to his predecessors, is
inconceivable without them. But, as Richard Gombrich has pointed out,
those who see Buddhism simply as a later school of Brahmanism and those
who see it as a totally new conception are equally mistaken: Buddhism is
a reformulation of Brahmanism so radical that it began a new and enor-
mously influential tradition, even though it did not survive in India. Both
men could be seen as in some ways visionaries; both also as great rational-
ists, adept in argument, superb in dialogue; and both were before all else
teachers and, though we often fail to see this side of Plato because of the
quite artificial distinction we make between philosophy and religion, or that
we project back into premodern times, both were teachers of salvation.
The Buddhist version of the Parable of the Cave is in an important sense
the whole elaborate story of the Buddha’s life as the tradition handed it down.
Just as the philosopher had to leave his oikos and his polis, so the Buddha had
to leave his oikos and his polis, or rather his kingdom, the rule of which
should have come to him. But, seeing sickness, old age, and death, the Bud-
dha wanted to leave that cave and spent years of suffering and deprivation
trying to do so. In the end, however, he found a middle way between the
sensual indulgence of the world and the harsh austerities of the renouncers
who preceded him, a way in which serene meditation could lead him to the
truth and the release which he sought.
It was during his meditation under the Bodhi tree that he famously at-
tained his vision of the truth and his release from this world of samsara.
Sometime later when he was considering what to do next he almost con-
cluded that there was no use in trying to teach what he had learned to a
world filled with lust and hate. But just then he was approached by a Brah-
man, not the Upanishadic absolute, but one of the many high gods whose
ultimacy but not whose existence Buddhism always doubted, who implored
him to return to the world after all:
Let the Sorrowless One survey this human breed,

Engulfed in sorrow, overcome by birth and old age.
Arise, victorious hero, caravan leader,
Debtless one, and wander in the world.
Let the blessed One teach the Dhamma,
There will be those who will understand.
And so the Buddha undertook, out of compassion for all sentient beings,
forty-five years of itinerant preaching to make sure that the truth he had
seen would not be lost to the world.23
That followers of the Buddha, like those of Plato, knew a lot about the le-
gitimation crisis of Axial Age society is evident in many texts, but we can,
following Steven Collins, take a particularly vivid example from one of the
Jataka stories (stories of the Buddha’s previous lives, among the most widely
known genres of the Buddhist canon), long and fascinating, that I will all
too briefly summarize.24 “Once upon a time there was a king of Benares who
ruled justly (dhammena). He had sixteen thousand women, but did not ob-
tain a son or daughter from any of them.”25 Indra, the king of the gods, took
pity on him and sent the future Buddha to be born as a son to his chief
queen. The child was named Temiya, and his father was delighted with him.
When he was a month old, he was dressed up and brought to his father, who
was so pleased with him that he held him in his lap as he held court. Just
then four criminals were brought in and the king sentenced one of them to
be imprisoned, two to be lashed or struck with swords, and one to be im-
paled on a stake. Temiya was extremely upset and worried that his father
would go to hell for his terrible deeds. The next day Temiya remembered his
previous births, including that in the past he had been king of this very city
and that, as a result of his actions, he subsequently spent eighty thousand
years in an especially terrible hell, where he had been cooked on hot metal
in excruciating pain the whole time. He determined that this would not
happen again, so he pretended to be lame, deaf, and dumb so that he could
not succeed to the kingship.
Since he was beautiful and had a perfectly formed body, people found it
hard to believe in his defects, but because he was a future Buddha, he was
able to resist all temptations to give himself away, whether with loud noises,
terrifying snakes, or beautiful girls. When he was sixteen, the soothsayers
told the king that he would bring bad luck to the royal house and should be
killed. His mother begged him to save himself by showing that he was with-
out defect but, knowing his fate if he succeeded to the kingship, he refused.
Temiya was sent in his chariot to the charnel-ground where he was to be
killed, but the gods saw to it that the charioteer took him to the forest in-
stead. At that point Temiya revealed his true self, showing himself strong
and fit. His charioteer offered to take him back to the city so he could claim
his succession to the throne, but Temiya explained to him the dreadful fate
in hell that awaited him if he did so and declared his intention to become an
ascetic instead. At that point, “the chariot-driver, seeing that Temiya had
cast kingship aside ‘as if it were a dead body,’ wanted to become an ascetic
also.”26 Temiya ordered him instead to return to the city and tell his parents
what had happened.
When Temiya’s parents received the news, they rushed to the forest where
he was, and overwhelmed with his new self, proceeded to renounce the world
themselves. Soon the whole city had come out to the forest and everyone be-
came a renouncer. They left gold and jewels in the streets of the city as of no
more use. Soon a neighboring king, hearing what had happened, decided to
annex Benares and scoop up the gold and jewels, but once in the city, he felt
an overwhelming impulse to find the ascetic prince and his parents. Upon
finding them, he, too, and his subjects following him, became renouncers.
Another king followed his example. Soon it was clear that Temiya was, after
all, a cakravartin, a universal ruler, though his rule was renunciation.
Collins sums up by saying, “It is difficult to imagine a more explicit con-
demnation of kingship: despite the narrative voice’s assertion in the first
sentence that Temiya’s father ruled justly, or ‘in accordance with what is
right’ (dhammena).”27 Collins points out that dhamma is used in two senses,
worldly dhamma and buddhadhamma, and that it is the former that the
kingdom embodied and the latter that it drastically violated. Temiya’s fa-
ther’s kingdom represented what Peter Brown, the great historian of late
classical antiquity, described as “the more predictable, but no less overbear-
ing ‘gentle violence’ of a stable social order.”28 In a class society, even if those
who serve and are never served are not beaten or hungry, as in fact they of-
ten are, they are always at the whim of those they serve; they have no control
over their own lives. If it is unlikely that Plato ever imagined that his ideal
city could be realized, it is very clear that in this Buddhist story Temiya’s
universal empire of renunciation could never be realized on this earth: it
would involve not only the absence of violence; it would involve the absence
of sex. Nonetheless, as with all the great Axial utopias, it stands as a measure
of just how short life in this world falls compared to what it ought to be.
The great utopias served for the renouncers as stark contrasts to the ac-
tual world and their vision of that other world could be called “theory” in
Plato’s sense. But the very distance they felt from the world to which they
returned made possible another kind of “theory,” another kind of seeing,
that is, a distant, critical view of the actual world in which they lived. The
renouncer sees the world with new eyes: as Plato says of the ones who have
returned to the cave, they see the shadows for what they are, not naively as
do those who have never left. One could say that the ideological illusion is
gone. One gazes at a distance, objectively, so to speak.
Once disengaged vision becomes possible, then theory can take another
turn: it can abandon any moral stance at all and look simply at what will be
useful, what can make the powerful and exploitative even more so. One
thinks of the Legalists in China and of Kautilya’s Arthashastra in India. Al-
though the Hebrew prophets saw and condemned the self-serving manipu-
lations of the rich and powerful, we can find in the Bible no example of
someone arguing for such behavior in principle. Except possibly for some of
the Sophists, whose surviving writings are fragmentary, we have nothing
quite like Han Fei or Kautilya in Greece. Or do we?
Aristotle was not an amoralist; he was one of the greatest moral theorists
who ever lived. Yet in Aristotle we can see the possibility of a split between
knowledge and ethics that will, when it is fully recognized, have enormous
consequences in later history. Pierre Hadot argues that Plato’s school, for all
its concern for mathematics and dialectic, had an essentially political aim:
philosophers in principle should be rulers. Aristotle’s school, however, is
specifically for philosophers, those who do not participate actively in the life
of the city, in a way a school for renouncers.29 But in distinguishing the phil-
osophical life from the political life so clearly, Aristotle threatens the link
between wisdom (sophia) and moral judgment (phronesis), in which he still
clearly believed. Most of his surviving texts were notes for lectures within
the school and express aspects of the philosophical life, though the Ethics
and the Politics were intended for a larger audience of active citizens. The
link between the two realms is not direct but appears in the fact that both
are oriented to good forms of life, one toward knowledge for its own sake,
the other for the creation of a good city.
Although the highest form of theoria is contemplation of the divine and
through it the philosopher, however briefly and partially, actually partici-
pates in the divine, theoria includes the search for knowledge of all things,
including the transient ones. Hadot, however, argues that Aristotle’s mas-
sive research project is not quite what it seems to modern minds:
It is thus indisputable that for Aristotle the life of the mind consists, to
a large degree, in observing, doing research, and reflecting on one’s
observations. Yet this activity is carried out in a certain spirit, which
we might go so far as to describe as an almost religious passion for real-
ity in all its aspects, be they humble or sublime, for we find traces of the
divine in all things.30
He goes on to quote a passage in which Aristotle says, “In all natural things
there is something wonderful.”31 It is as though theoria in its highest form is
close to what the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik calls “lantern
consciousness,” the apprehension of reality as a whole, but in its lesser forms

it becomes various kinds of “spotlight consciousness,” focusing on each aspect
of reality, however humble, in an effort to understand it and what causes it.32
So one possible split apparent in Aristotle is that between his metaphys-
ics, where he describes the ultimate source of all knowledge, and the many
particular fields of inquiry that he had so much to do with founding. But the
second possible split is between theoria, contemplation, in all its various
levels, as the best life for human beings, and the life of the city, of politics
and ethics. Theoria, in his words, is useless. It is a good internal to itself, but
it has no consequences for the world.
But perhaps we miss Aristotle’s point if we ask what the theoretical life is
good for. Being the best kind of life, and good in itself, then the question is
what kind of person and what kind of society could make this life possible.
The Ethics and Politics, then, describe the conditions under which the theo-
retical life could be pursued. But unlike Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics is
no utopia but an empirical and analytical description of actual Greek society,
containing ethical judgments between better and worse, but objective, dis-
tant, as an analysis of the second best kind of life, one that has its final value
in making possible the first kind of life. Aristotle was the founder of sociol-
ogy, which Émile Durkheim recognized when he assigned the Politics as the
basic textbook for his students when he first began to teach at the University
of Bordeaux. What I am suggesting is that the distinctions between two
kinds of theoria, pure contemplation and various fields of inquiry, and two
kinds of ethical life, the intellectual and the practical, made possible, once
the unity of Aristotle’s thought was broken, separate developments that could
lead to autonomous sciences and utilitarian ethics in the long run.
Aristotle was really a stranger in his own city, if Athens was his own city:
he was not a citizen. He had to set up his school, the Lyceum, in a public
building because, as an alien, he could not own land in Athens and so could
not buy land for his school. And when things turned grim, he, unlike Socrates,
had no compunction about getting out in time. He was a teacher, one of the
greatest who ever lived, but one of his (not very apt) pupils was Alexander,
the greatest conqueror of the ancient world. Aristotle on the whole used the
word theoria in Plato’s sense, but he also used it from time to time for “in-
vestigation,” or “inquiry,” that is, for the study of all things in the world,
natural and cultural, to see how they worked and what they are for.
My point is that the Axial Age gave us “theory” in two senses, and neither
of them has been unproblematic ever since. The great utopian visions have
motivated some of the noblest achievements of mankind; they have also
motivated some of the worst actions of human beings. Theory in the sense of
disengaged knowing, inquiry for the sake of understanding, with or without
moral evaluation, has brought its own kind of astounding achievements but
it has also given humans the power to destroy their environment and them-
selves. Both kinds of theoria have criticized but also justified the class soci-
ety that first came into conscious view in the Axial Age. They have provided
the intellectual tools for efforts to reform and efforts to repress. It is a great
heritage. I doubt that any of us would rather live in a tribal society than in
one whose beginnings lie in the Axial Age; I know I would not. Yet it is a
heritage of explosive potentialities for good and for evil. It has given us the
great tool of criticism. How will we use it?
Notes
Portions of this chapter first appeared as the concluding chapter to my Religion in Human Evo-
lution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2011).
1. See Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the
Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).
2. Jürgen Habermas, “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism,” in
Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon, 1979 [1976]), 130–
177, here 174.
3. Ibid., 177.
4. Eli Sagan believes there is an inherent drive toward higher levels of morality,
though such a drive may suffer blockage and regression. In chapter 4 of my book
on the evolution of religion I speak of a biological drive toward domination on the
one hand and toward nurturance on the other. Human culture has greatly elabo-
rated these drives but has not eliminated them. We must face the reality that these
remain two of our deepest motives. For Sagan’s views see his Freud, Women, and
Morality (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 222ff.
5. For a penetrating analysis of just where many of our problems lie in this re-
spect see Jürgen Habermas, “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of
Democracy,” in The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2002 [1998]), 58–112.
6. Habermas, “Toward a Reconstruction,” 163 (emphasis in original).
7. Perhaps it would be best to call only Plato a renouncer. Andrea Nightingale

argues with Simon Goldhill, who called Socrates a “performer in exile” because
he did not display his wisdom in the assembly or other political gatherings (except
on one important occasion). She holds that in his exchanges with his fellow citi-
zens he remained intimately tied to the city. See Andrea Nightingale, Spectacles of
Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 73, n. 2. Can we call Socrates a “dissident,”
who, like Václav Havel, criticized his city but refused to leave it at whatever cost?
Fortunately for Havel, he only had to serve four years in prison.
8. Of course, as in many legitimation struggles, what began as a tradition of
criticism could become a tradition of legitimation.
9. Nightingale, Spectacles, 40– 41.
10. Ibid., 74–77.
11. Ibid., 78.
12. Ibid., 98.
13. Ibid., 80.
14. Ibid., 81.
15. Ibid., 80.
16. Ibid., 105–106.
17. Ibid., 106.
18. Ibid., 106–107.
19. Ibid., 111.
20. Ibid., 110–116.
21. Ibid., 134 (emphasis in original).
22. Ibid., 135.
23. On the Buddha’s visions in his “meditative trance” on the night of his
“Awakening,” see Gananath Obeyesekere, Imagining Karma: Ethical Transforma-
tion in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 2002), 158. For the words of the Brahman see Ariyapariyesana Sutta
19–21, in Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A
Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya (Boston: Wisdom, 1995), 261.
24. This is the well-known “Birth Story of the Dumb Cripple” (Mugapakkha
Jataka, Ja 6.1ff., 158) as recounted and partly translated in Steven Collins, Nir-
vana and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 425– 433. For a complete translation see “The
Story of Temiya, the Dumb Cripple,” in The Jatakas: Birth Stories of the Bo-
dhisatta, trans. Sarah Shaw (New Delhi: Penguin, 2006), 179–221.
25. Collins, Nirvana, 426.
26. Ibid., 430.
27. Ibid., 233–234.
28. Ibid., 417. The quote is from Peter Brown, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects
of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 53. It is worth noting that the “gentle violence” of which Brown
speaks was inflicted by an empire that had become “Christian,” just as “Buddhist”
empires would do the same.
29. Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2002 [1995]), 78. My discussion of Aristotle draws heavily from
Hadot’s chapter on Aristotle in this book, pp. 77–90.
30. Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 82.
31. Aristotle, De partibus animalium I and De generatione animalium I, trans.
David M. Balme (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 18, 645a.
32. Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us
about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2009), 129.
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Notes
1. “Anything like complete proof of a Revolution of such a mental character as

we should deduce from our Ultimate Law, having actually occurred in the Sixth
Century b.c. cannot of course here be given. For our main purpose here is but to
state some of the larger deductions from this Law, and we can refer, in but the
most summary manner, to the facts by which we believe that these deductions
will be found verified. This being understood, I would now proceed summarily to
state . . . some of those more important synchronous events of the Sixth Century
b.c., which appear to me to imply a new mental development, constituting, in fact,
such a Revolution, as we have above deduced from our Ultimate Law. . . . Note,
then, first, as illustrative of the Intellectual Revolution of this Century, three great
general facts. Throughout the civilised world, in Japan, China, India, Persia, Ju-
daea, Greece, and Egypt, we find a new intellectual activity in collecting, editing,
and for the first time writing down in alphabetic characters the Literature of the
preceding centuries. It is only in this century that a Profane, as distinguished
from a Sacred Literature arises; only from this time forth that, speaking generally,
we have independent and nameable individual authors; and only now that, in the
speculations of Thales, philosophical, as distinguished from religious Specula-
tion, begins. . . . But far more extraordinary still will this Century be found as an
Era of Religious Revolution. Independent investigators of the history of Japan, of
China, of India, of Persia, of Assyria, of Judaea, of Greece, and of Egypt have
found that the Religion of each of them underwent a great moral change or trans-
formation in the same Sixth Century b.c. In Japan, there then arose the religion of
Sinto; in China, that of Confucius; in India, that of Buddha. If the Polytheisms of
Assyria, of Greece, and of Egypt did not, like that of India, give birth in this cen-
tury to a distinctly new religion, to this century we trace a profound disorganisa-
tion of them, and change in their spirit. And the Aryan and Semitic Monotheisms
of Persia and of Judaea . . . came now, at Babylon, into contact, and, in the new
enthusiasm of the Messiahism of the one, and the World-conquest of the other,
Bibliography 537
exercised the most profoundly revolutionary effects on the creeds and institutions
of Mankind. . . .”
2. “Then suddenly, and almost simultaneously, and almost certainly indepen-
dently, there is evidence, about the sixth century b.c. in each of these widely sepa-
rated centres of civilisation, of a leap forward in speculative thought, of an new
birth in ethics, of a religion of conscience threatening to take the place of the old
religion of custom and magic.”
3. “The age of the exile and the reconstruction of Israel was one of unrest; there
was a widespread religious awakening. To China with Lao-tse and Confucius, to
India with the Buddha, Gautama, and with Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, to
Persia with Zoroaster (probably), and to the Greek world with its mystic cults, we
must add the movement lying behind Isaiah xl–lv” (p. 489, 3rd reprint 1954).
4. [As part of the “Chronological Summary”] “c. 581 Age of Jeremiah, Eze-
kiel . . . and later, the age of the Deutero-Isaiah. . . . Note the dates—Zoroaster, c.
600 . . . ; Confucius, 551– 478, and his older contemporary Laò-tse; Buddha,
c. 560– 480, and his older contemporary Mahavira, the founder of Jainism. Solon
(c. 638–538). The Ionian school of philosophers, followed by the Italian school
(Pythagoras)” (p. 230).
5. “It may possibly be thought at this point that the study of history cannot well
be organized with reference solely to the incidence of barbarian attacks on a van-
ished empire. . . . It must be stated, therefore, that classes of events are in number
practically unlimited, and are by no means restricted to the outbreak of wars.
“As an example of a wholly different type, I may point to the great religious
movements associated with the names of Zoroaster in Persia, Lao-tzu” and Confu-
cius in China, Mahavira (founder of Jainism) and Gautama Buddha in India, the
prophets Ezekiel and Second Isaiah, Thales in Ionia, and Pythagoras in southern
Italy. All these great personages belong to the sixth century b.c., and their appear-
ance certainly constitutes a class of events. Yet, though the correspondence of
these events has frequently been observed, no serious effort has ever been made,
so far as I have been able to discover, to treat the appearance of these great
teachers—within a brief compass of time—as a problem which called for system-
atic investigation” (p. xi).
6. “The close coincidence in date between the appearance of many of the great
ethical and religious leaders has often been remarked upon: Confucius, c.—550;
Gautama (Buddhism), c.—560; Zoroaster (if a historical personage), c.— 600;
Mahāvīra (Jainism), c.—560, and so on” (vol. 1, p. 99).
7. References (page numbers refer to Collected Works of Voegelin): no direct
references in vol. 1 (indirect reference on p. 44, according to other sources also the
chapter on The Prophets, pp. 481ff.); vol. 2: 86–87, 90; vol. 4: 47–51, 276, 380–385.
Contributors
johann p. arnason is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at La Trobe

University, Melbourne, and Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Human Studies,
Charles University, Prague. He has published Civilizations in Dispute (Brill,
2003) and Axial Civilizations and World History (edited, with Shmuel N.
Eisenstadt and Björn Wittrock; Brill, 2005). His main research interests are in
historical sociology, with par ticu lar emphasis on the comparative analysis of
civilizations.
jan assmann is Professor Emeritus of Egyptology at Heidelberg University

and Honorary Professor of Cultural and Religious Studies at the University of
Constance. He has published on ancient Egyptian religion, literature, and
history, the afterlife of Egypt in Western thought (Moses the Egyptian: Harvard
University Press, 1997), and the origins of monotheism (Of God and Gods:
Madison University Press, 2008).
robert n. bellah is Elliot Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of

California, Berkeley. He is the author of Religion in Human Evolution (The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), coauthor of Habits of the Heart (Univer-
sity of California Press, 1985), and a winner of the National Humanities Medal.
josé casanova is Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University and

heads the Berkley Center’s Program on Globalization, Religions and the Secular.
He is the author of Public Religions in the Modern World (University of Chicago
Press, 1994).
ingolf u. dalferth is Danforth Professor of Philosophy of Religion at

Claremont Graduate University, California, and also Director of the Institute of
Hermeneutics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Zurich, Switzer-
land. He is the author of, among other works, Umsonst: Eine Erinnerung an die
540 Contributors
kreative Passivität des Menschen (Mohr Siebeck, 2011), Radikale Theologie (EVA
Leipzig, 2010), Malum: Theologische Hermeneutik des Bösen (Mohr Siebeck,
2008), Becoming Present: An Inquiry into the Christian Sense of the Presence of
God (Leuven, 2006), and Die Wirklichkeit des Möglichen: Hermeneutische
Religionsphilosophie (Mohr Siebeck, 2003).
merlin donald is Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Education at

Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada, and Honorary Professor at Aarhus Univer-
sity, Denmark. He is the author of Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the
Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Harvard University Press, 1991) and A Mind
So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (W. W. Norton, 2001).
shmuel n. eisenstadt (1923–2010) was born in Warsaw and received his

Ph.D. in Jerusalem in 1947. He was Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem and Senior Research Fellow at the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute. He
was a member of many academies and recipient of several honorary doctoral
degrees. His main publications include The Political Systems of Empires (1963),
The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (edited, 1986), Axial Civiliza-
tions and World History (edited, with Johann Arnason and Björn Wittrock, 2005),
and Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities (2 vols. of collected
essays, 2003).
hans joas is Professor of Sociology and Social Thought at the University of

Chicago. He is also Permanent Fellow of the School of History at the Freiburg
Institute for Advanced Studies based at the Albert Ludwig University of
Freiburg, Germany. Among his book publications in English are The Creativity
of Action (University of Chicago Press, 1996), The Genesis of Values (University
of Chicago Press, 2000), War and Modernity (Polity Press, 2003), Do We Need
Religion? (Paradigm Publishers, 2008), Social Theory (Cambridge University
Press, 2009; with Wolfgang KnÖbl), and War in Social Thought (Princeton
University Press, 2012; with Wolfgang KnÖbl).
matthias jung is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Koblenz,

Germany. He is the author of Der bewusste Ausdruck (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009),
Erfahrung und Religion (Freiburg: Alber, 1999), and other books. His main
interests are moral philosophy, philosophy of religion, and philosophical
anthropology.
richard madsen is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University

of California, San Diego. He is a coauthor with Robert Bellah, Steven Tipton, Ann
Swidler, and William Sullivan of Habits of the Heart and The Good Society. He has
also authored or coauthored five books on Chinese societies, the latest of which is
Democracy’s Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan.
Contributors 541
david martin is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of

Economics. His main interests are in global Pentecostalism, religion and
secularization, religion and violence, theology and sociology, and religion and
music, especially the Baroque.
gananath obeyesekere is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at

Princeton University. He has published several books on religion, psychoanalysis
and anthropology, voyages of discovery, and the ethnography of Sri Lanka.
heiner roetz is Professor of Chinese Philosophy and History at Ruhr

University, Bochum. His main interests are classical Chinese philosophy and its
relation to modernity. He is the author of Mensch und Natur im alten China
(Frankfurt am Main, 1984), Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age (Albany, 1993), and
Confucius (Munich, 2006).
W. G. RUNCIMAN is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge University. He is

the author of A Treatise on Social Theory (Vol. 1, 1983; Vol. 2, 1989, Vol. 3, 1997)
and The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection (2009).
william m. sullivan is a senior scholar at the Center of Inquiry in the

Liberal Arts at Wabash College. Formerly senior scholar at the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, he is the author of Work and
Integrity: The Crisis and Promise of Professionalism (2005) and coauthor of
Habits of the Heart (1985).
ann swidler is Professor of Sociology at the University of California,

Berkeley. She is the author of Talk of Love (University of Chicago Press, 2001) and
coauthor of Habits of the Heart (University of California Press, 1985) and Inequal-
ity by Design (Princeton University Press, 1996). Her current research is on
cultural and institutional responses to the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa.
charles taylor is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at McGill University.

He is the author of A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007) and other
books.
björn wittrock is University Professor at Uppsala University and

Principal of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala. He is the
editor of Frontiers of Sociology (2009, with Peter Hedström), Axial Civilizations
and World History (2004, with Johann Arnason and Shmuel N. Eisenstadt), and
The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity: Conceptual
Change in Context, 1750–1850 (1998, with Johan Heilbron and Lars Magnusson).
Index
Abel-Rémusat, Jean Pierre, 374 Beard, Mary, 327

Acton, John Emmerich Dalberg, Lord, Bellah, Robert N., 2–3, 6, 24, 26nn13,15, 31,
13–14 44, 45n8, 48, 68, 70, 73, 79, 80–83, 85–87,
Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV), 322, 341–342, 89, 91, 93, 96, 107–108, 110, 124nn11,14,
377, 398–399, 401 139, 141, 191–206, 208–211, 215–216,
Alexander of Macedon, 331, 378, 464 217nn17,28, 218nn29,32,34, 220n57, 222,
Amenemhet I, 385, 387 235, 237, 242n11, 277, 285, 294, 303, 309,
Amos, 1, 452 331, 342, 371–373, 375, 398, 402n10,
Anaximenes of Lampsacus, 330 403n15, 412– 414, 418, 421, 423– 424, 427,
Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham-Hyacinthe, 430– 431, 434– 435
11, 25nn8,9, 248, 342, 369, 374 Berlin, Isaiah, 39
Anselm of Canterbury, 310 Bernstein, Basil, 419
Anthony the Great, 397 Blake, William, 135–136, 138
Apelles of Kos, 165 Blavatsky, Helena, 135, 138
Aristophanes, 331 Bloom, Harold, 382
Aristotle, 1, 106, 149, 266, 327, 329, 380, 425, Bonjour, Casimir, 130
453, 463– 464, 467n29 Bourdieu, Pierre, 368
Armstrong, Karen, 374 Bousset, Wilhelm, 10, 17, 27n23
Arnason, Johann, 4, 12, 26n14, 202, 218n34, Boyce, Mary, 343
278, 282, 402n8 Boyer, Pascal, 296
Arndt, Johann, 99 Brague, Rémi, 207, 219n52, 355–356
Ashoka, 116, 344–345 Brandom, Robert, 81–82, 84, 86, 88, 96
Assmann, Aleida, 253–254, 359, 369, 373, Breuer, Stefan, 255–256, 258–259, 265
379, 383, 402n2 Brook, David, 422
Assmann, Jan, 4, 30, 93, 114, 124n12, Brown, Peter, 107, 462, 466n28
192, 203, 206, 253, 338, 340–342, 348, Brown, Spencer, 154
359, 364 Buddha. See Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha
Assurbanipal, 391 Burckhardt, Jacob, 13, 331
Augustine, 10, 27n29, 162, 183n15, 187n77, Bush, George W., 295
192, 212, 216, 374
Aulus Gellius, 392 Caesar, Gaius Julius, 304
Auslander, Mark, 232 Casanova, José, 5, 107
Cassirer, Ernst, 4, 81, 83
Baader, Franz von, 13 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 360–361
Barth, Karl, 166, 173, 175, 183n15, Catherine of Siena, 138
188n89 Chabal, Patrick, 235
544 Index
Charles I of England, 329 Eliade, Mircea, 195

Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 326 Eliot, T. S., 143
Collingwood, Robin G., 156 Elizabeth I of England, 329
Collins, Randall, 200 Elkana, Yehuda, 106, 203, 209–210,
Collins, Steven, 460, 462 403n13
Confucius, 1, 15, 34–35, 108, 115, 210, 257, Engels, Friedrich, 324
263–264, 269n20, 324–326, 331–333, Englund, Harri, 236
345, 348–353, 369, 373, 399, 432, 536n1, Ezekiel, 537nn4,5
537nn3,4,5,7
Cornell, Stephen, 241n5 Finley, Moses, 330
Croce, Benedetto, 217n28 Fishbane, Michael, 392
Cypselus, 329 Florida, Richard, 422
Forsdyke, Sara, 328–329
Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso), 439 Forst, Rainer, 94–95
Dalferth, Ingolf, 5 Fowden, Garth, 404n33
Darnton, Robert, 107 Frank, David J., 227, 418, 420
Darwin, Charles, 67, 296, 317–318 Frankfort, Henri, 372
Davids, Thomas W. Rhys, 11 Frege, Gottlob, 138
De Nys, Martin J., 175 Freud, Sigmund, 130, 312, 373
De Waal, Frans, 319 Friedrich, Caspar David, 311
Deacon, Terrence W., 57, 81–83, 87, 90, Frye, Northrop, 47
97–98 Fukuyama, Francis, 300
Dennett, Daniel, 80–81
Derrida, Jacques, 166–167, 186n61 Gabler, Jay, 420
Descartes, René, 144n12, 150–151, 162, Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 416
187n77, 456 Galileo Galilei, 266
Dewey, John, 83, 311, 423, 425– 427, 429n32, Gallagher, Shaun, 82, 91
437 Gauchet, Marcel, 214
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 90 Gaultier, Jules de, 151
Dionysius II of Syracuse, 329 Geertz, Clifford, 237, 384
Djoser, 395 Genghis Khan, 283
Döllinger, Ignaz von, 16 Gershevitch, Ilya, 343
Donald, Merlin, 3– 4, 78, 80–86, 89–90, 97, Geschiere, Peter, 232
110, 198–199, 204, 209–210, 372–373, Gfrörer, August Friedrich, 25n8
379–380, 412– 415, 423– 424, 453 Ghazālī, al, 332
Douglas, Mary, 419, 421, 434 Gill, Christopher, 457
Dumézil, Georges, 361 Ginzburg, Carlo, 217n28
Dumont, Louis, 38, 41, 46n16, 107, 324, 348, Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 16
360–364, 449 Gnoli, Gherardo, 343–344
Durkheim, Émile, 140, 195, 200, 207, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 16
218n29, 225, 237, 307, 315, 360, 442, Goff man, Erving, 200
464 Goldhill, Simon, 466n7
Gombrich, Richard, 459
Eckhart, Meister, 132, 143, 147 Goody, Jack, 379
Edward VI of England, 308 Gopnik, Alison, 463– 464
Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., 5, 11–12, 24, 45n10, Görres, Joseph, 13, 16, 26n16
46n12, 107–108, 112, 120–121, 139, 202, Graham, Angus C., 353
205, 209, 222, 228, 235, 252, 255, 298, 326, Gramsci, Antonio, 217n28
338–340, 344, 346, 349, 354, 371, 388, 390, Gray, John, 299
400, 412, 421 Grotius, Hugo, 43
Index 545
Habermas, Jürgen, 23, 26n15, 88, 107, 120, 342, 344–346, 349, 354, 366–367, 369–370,
201, 216, 218n31, 407n66, 412, 421, 423, 372–376, 378, 381, 390, 404n32, 407n66,
448– 452 413, 430– 434, 441, 444– 445
Hadot, Pierre, 259, 352, 463 Jellinek, Georg, 24
Hamann, Johann Georg, 16 Jeremiah, 1, 537n4
Hamilton, William D., 319 Jesus of Nazareth, 10, 16, 102, 172, 211, 250,
Hammurabi, 322 303, 307, 310, 375, 398, 443
Han Fei, 261–262, 463 Joas, Hans, 1, 6, 93, 107, 125n23, 371,
Handel, George Frideric, 381 429n32
Hausmann, Sebastian, 135 John of the Cross, 132
Havel, Vaclav, 466n7 Josephus, Flavius, 393–394
Havelock, Eric, 379, 383, 405n45 Judt, Tony, 315n7
Hebb, Donald O., 47 Julian of Norwich, 131
Hecataeus of Miletus, 389 Jung, Matthias, 4, 379
Heesterman, Jan C., 348–349
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 10, Kairsu, 386–387
102–103, 120, 124n11, 248, 250, 253, Kalt, Joseph P., 241n5
257, 266, 332 Kamehameha III of Hawaii, 222
Heidegger, Martin, 24n1, 167 Kant, Immanuel, 16, 144n12, 151, 158–159,
Helling, Victor, 135 162, 197, 252, 329, 395
Henri IV of France, 329 Kapferer, Bruce, 40
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 90 Karlström, Mikael, 240n3
Herodotus, 359, 389 Kautilya (Chanakya), 462– 463
Hildebrand of Fossombrone, 41 Kepler, Johannes, 266
Hitler, Adolf, 378 Khakheperreseneb, 381–382, 385–387
Hobbes, Thomas, 435 Kheti, 386–387
Hobson, John A., 299 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 187n89
Homer, 384–385, 399– 400 Kittler, Friedrich, 383
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Kohlberg, Lawrence, 256–259, 266, 267n5,
388 268n6
Hordjedef, 386–387 Kosambi, Dharmananda D., 139–140
Horton, Robin, 233–235, 237, 239, 242n10 Koselleck, Reinhart, 368–369
Hu Shih, 437
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 81, 90 Lanzky, Paul, 135
Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 311 Lao Tse, 11, 25n6, 326, 369, 373, 537nn3,4,5
Larson, Sheila, 217n28
Iamblichus, 257 Lasaulx, Catherine von, 26n16
Ikhnaton. See Akhenaten Lasaulx, Ernst von, 11, 13–17, 23, 25n8, 26n16,
Imhotep, 386–387, 395, 399 267n1, 374
Innis, Harold, 383 Lasch, Christopher, 421– 422
Ipuwer, 385, 387 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 299, 321
Isaiah, 1, 305, 391, 399– 400, 537nn3,4,5 Levinas, Emmanuel, 152–153, 162, 167
Isocrates, 330 Levine, Donald N., 10
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 83, 354–355, 372
Jaeger, Werner, 413 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 195
Jaspers, Karl, 1, 5– 6, 9–11, 13, 16–17, 21–24, Lipsius, Justus, 43
26n15, 34, 45n10, 77, 79, 102–108, 110, 113, Lowe, Walter, 187n77
120–121, 124n11, 139, 146–147, 153, 158, Lucian of Samosata, 331
168, 180–181, 182n3, 203, 248–256, 259, Luckmann, Thomas, 161
266–267, 278, 294, 317, 331–332, 339–340, Luhmann, Niklas, 153, 157
546 Index
Luther, Martin, 99, 157, 184n46, 310 Napoleon Bonaparte, 378

Luxemburg, Rosa, 327 Neferti, 385–387
Nelson, Katherine, 62– 63
Madsen, Richard, 6, 419 Nguyen, Vinh-Kim, 242n12
Mahavira, 139, 537nn3,4,5,7 Nicholas of Cusa, 147
Mahler, Gustav, 311 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 132, 135–138,
Mamdani, Mahmood, 228 144n12, 147–148, 154, 157, 181, 184n46,
Mann, Thomas, 366–367 311, 371
Marcus Aurelius, 318 Nightingale, Andrea, 453– 458, 466n7
Martin, David, 5 North, John, 327
Marvell, Andrew, 137 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 311
Marx, Karl, 324 Numa Pompilius, 15
Mayr, Ernst, 289
McDougall, William, 295 Oakley, Francis, 34
McKinley, William, 309 Obeyesekere, Gananath, 4–5
McLuhan, Marshall, 383 Oesterdiekhoff, Georg W., 266
McNeill, William, 426– 427 Olcott, Henry Steele, 132
Mead, George Herbert, 423, 426, 429n32 Ong, Walter, 379
Meier, Christian, 347, 357 Oppenheim, Leo, 391
Meinecke, Friedrich, 102 Otto, Eckart, 21
Mencius (Meng Tzu), 108, 115, 264, 269n20, Otto of Greece, 13
373, 452
Mendelssohn, Moses, 379, 405n40 Pachom, 397
Menocchio (Domenico Scandella), 217n28 Parmenides, 143, 372
Merikare, 385 Parsons, Talcott, 196–197, 288, 346, 371
Metzler, Dieter, 344 Patočka, Jan, 354
Meyer, Eduard, 17 Paul of Tarsus, 310, 374
Meyer, John W., 227, 242n12, 411, 418– 421, Peel, J. D. Y., 233–235, 242n10
423 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 57, 83, 90
Micah, 305 Pemalingpa, 131
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Pericles, 330
Simoni, 25n2 Philolaus of Corinth, 327
Mill, John Stuart, 34 Piaget, Jean, 256, 259, 266
Momigliano, Arnaldo, 11, 209, 321, 326, 333, Plato, 1, 35, 37, 39, 132, 143, 147–148, 187n77,
372 194, 208, 326–327, 331, 350, 354, 356, 372,
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, 11 385, 389, 399, 406n56, 411– 418, 424,
Monteverdi, Claudio, 381 452– 460, 462– 464, 466n7
Montez, Lola (Elizabeth Rosanna Gilbert), 14 Plessner, Helmuth, 81
Moses, 16, 91, 92–93, 96, 350, 372, 393, Polanyi, Michel, 368
398–399 Pollock, Sheldon, 117
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 16, 381 Price, Simon, 327
Mozi, 115, 260–262, 265, 269n20 Protagoras, 257
Muhammad, 211, 331–332, 398 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite,
Muluzi, Bakili, 232–233 183n15
Müntzer, Thomas, 321 Ptahemdjehuti, 386–387
Mussolini, Benito, 217n28 Ptahhotep, 385–387
Mutharika, Bingu wa, 232–233 Pythagoras, 331, 537nn4,5
Nabopolassar, 378 Raaf laub, Kurt, 347

Nagarjuna, 135 Rahner, Karl, 166
Index 547
Ranke, Leopold von, 248 Strauss, Victor von, 11, 25n6, 267n1, 374
Reich, Robert, 422 Stroumsa, Guy, 193, 211–212
Ricoeur, Paul, 79 Sullivan, William, 5, 449
Riesman, David, 374, 403n23 Sumartana, Thomas, 439– 440
Robespierre, Maximilien de, 321, 324 Sundermeier, Theo, 402n10
Roetz, Heiner, 4–5 Swidler, Ann, 5
Röth, Eduard, 25n8 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 311
Runciman, W. G., 5
Russell, Bertrand, 138 Tambiah, Stanley J., 46n16
Taylor, Charles, 4, 28, 41, 61, 97–99, 107,
Sagan, Eli, 465n4 156–157, 303, 309–311, 374, 402n10, 412,
Sakuludayin, 134 414, 417– 418, 421, 424, 430, 443
Savage-Rumbaugh, Emily Sue, 56 Teresa of Avila, 138
Schaller, Susan, 63 Thales of Miletus, 536n1, 537n5
Scheler, Max, 248–249 Theodore of Sykeon, 306
Schenute, 397 Thomas Aquinas, 183n15
Schirnhofer, Resa von, 136 Th rasymachus, 331
Schlette, Magnus, 101n37 Thucydides, 330
Schluchter, Wolfgang, 107 Tiglat-Pileser III, 377
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 144n12 Tillich, Paul, 173, 175
Schottländer, Rudolf, 251–252, 255 Tomasello, Michael, 62
Schumpeter, Joseph, 423 Toynbee, Arnold, 340
Schütz, Alfred, 161 Trevarthen, Colwyn, 62
Schwartz, Benjamin, 11, 26n13, 107, Troeltsch, Ernst, 10, 16, 21, 23–24, 28n34
251, 349–353, 356–357, 360, 371, 390, Tsai, Lily, 241n5
402n8 Turner, Victor, 41
Seaford, Richard, 347
Sellars, Wilfrid, 81 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 192
Sewell, William, 238 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 357
Seydlitz, Reinhardt von, 136 Verres, Gaius, 326
Shaked, Shaul, 343 Vico, Giovanni Battista, 150
Sheng Yen, 442 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 310
Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha, 1, 15–16, Voegelin, Eric, 13, 107, 209–210, 255,
30–31, 34, 41, 108, 126–137, 139–140, 371–372, 375
142–143, 194, 326, 331, 333, 345, 350, 369,
373, 399, 432, 437, 455, 459– 461, 536n1, Wagner, Peter, 251, 268n9
537nn3,4,5,7 Wagner, Richard, 311, 381
Siebeck, Hermann, 11 Waley, Arthur, 325
Simmel, Georg, 9–10, 24n1, 25n2 Walzer, Michael, 93
Simon, Herbert A., 291 Wang Chong, 261–262
Smith, Daniel Jordan, 236 Weber, Alfred, 10, 13, 102–103, 107, 249,
Smith, Joseph, 135 253, 376, 404n32
Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 192 Weber, Max, 10, 13, 17–21, 23, 27n34,
Socrates, 16, 30, 34, 132, 257, 269n22, 327, 28n41, 29n47, 37–38, 103, 107, 124n11,
331, 333, 350, 352, 413– 415, 432, 452, 141, 194–195, 197–199, 201, 210, 218n31,
454– 455, 458, 464, 466n7 220n58, 253, 282, 290, 294, 328, 332, 342,
Solon, 327, 389, 537n4 358, 360, 373, 434, 450
Spener, Philipp Jakob, 100 Weil, Eric, 107, 404n37
Spengler, Oswald, 15, 367 Westphal, Merold, 183n15
Stanner, W. E. H., 36, 196 White, Landeg, 241n4
548 Index
Whitehead, Alfred North, 459 Xingyun (Hsing Yun), 437

Wilde, Oscar, 311 Xunzi (Hsün Tzu), 256, 260–261
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 87, 135–138, 400,
424 Zhang Hao, 268n6
Wittrock, Björn, 4, 12, 46n10, 203, 205–206, Zhengyan (Cheng Yen), 438
219n50 Zigong, 269n20
Wordsworth, William, 311 Zoroaster, 11, 15–16, 25n9, 322–324, 326–327,
331, 333, 342–343, 369, 373, 398–399,
Xenophanes, 78 537nn3,4,5,7
Xenophon, 328 Zumthor, Paul, 391

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The Axial Age

Robert N. Bellah and

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

2. What Was the Axial Revolution? 30

3. An Evolutionary Approach to Culture:

4. Embodiment, Transcendence, and Contingency:

5. The Axial Age in Global History:

6. The Buddha’s Meditative Trance:

7. The Idea of Transcendence 146

9. Where Do Axial Commitments Reside?

10. The Axial Age Theory: A Challenge to Historism or

12. Axial Religions and the Problem of Violence 294

13. Righteous Rebels: When, Where, and Why? 317

Perspectives on the Future

17. The Future of Transcendence: A Sociological Agenda 430

18. The Heritage of the Axial Age: Resource or Burden? 447

Bibliography: Works on the Axial Age 469

of earlier attempts to understand the contemporaneous emergence of these

The evolutionary psychologist Merlin Donald has profoundly influenced

In close relationship to Donald’s work, the German philosopher Matthias

forms of culture that, although being a product of life-processes, now have a

I. Lasaulx’s Organicist Defense of Revelation

to be as relevant for peoples as it is for individuals. This is also the reason

the first philosophers . . . as reformers of popular religion; this remarkable

II. Max Weber’s Reductionist View of Sacramental Experience

to a pre-Axial culture as, for example, in the Christianization of Europe. But

only gradually emerged in his thinking as a conceptual roof under which he

theranism and Calvinism with regard to their political implications is a re-

III. Karl Jaspers: Communication about Transcendence

mental values and our experiences of transcendence. Such a communica-

1. Georg Simmel, Lebensanschauung (Munich and Leipzig, 1918). An English

12. Björn Wittrock, “Cultural Crystallization and Civilization Change: Axial-

see Daniel Silver, “Religion without Instrumentalization,” Archives Européennes

It is a remarkable fact that Ernst Troeltsch, the Lutheran theologian, explicitly

Any view about the long-term history of religion turns on an interpretation

The full scale of this far-reaching change becomes clearer if we focus on

unconditional benevolence of God toward humans; there is none of the

Kingship . . . emerged from an “archaic” mentality that appears to have

the order of things, to be accepted as such. Something has to be done about

In Latin Christendom, we get an upsetting of this shaky equilibrium, in the

among important elites of a buffered identity, impervious to the enchanted

intrinsically concerned with disembedding. This is clear with the drive to

Basic Principles Underlying the Cognitive Classification

mental work that characterizes symbol-using cultures. The collective knowl-

guage, because the retrievability of morphemes (a skill) is a logical precon-

Establishing a Rough Chronology of

Episodic Primate Complex episodic Improved self-awareness Episodic and reactive;

and chimpanzees, and drawing out common cognitive traits. Following

their ability to coordinate their hunting behavior (suggesting at least some

One corollary of this development was increased variability in the mor-

make up the culture. Although such networks may exist in rudimentary

storytelling, which can convey huge amounts of knowledge at speeds that

is effectively an increasingly abstract and powerful hierarchy of event-

part, a result of enculturation. This is due to the extreme plasticity inherent in

is the key factor. Moreover, an understanding of reciprocal attention and an

The Third Transition: The Rise of Theoretic Culture

Table 3.2. Comparison of the properties of internal and external memory