The Great Transformation: The World in the Time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah [Paperback]

The range of Karen Armstrong's work on the history of religion is becoming ever more ambitious. To her previous works on Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam she has added in this book sections on Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism and Greek thought. She examines how thought in China, India, Ancient Greece and the Biblical Middle East became transformed during the Axial Age (the phrase was coined by Karl Jaspers)- the seven hundred years between about 900 BC and 200 BC - from primitive beliefs and practices into the more sophisticated religious and philosophical teachings which laid the intellectual foundations of the following centuries. All this in 400 pages, so it is sometimes a bit of a gallop, especially in the first two chapters (about a fifth of the book) which describe the 800 or so years before the Axial Age begins. After that, when the transformation really gets going, Armstrong allows herself much more space to expound the teachings of the great axial thinkers.

She argues that axial insights were often the result of suffering and that the search for them was born out the experience of the local region being convulsed in unsettling change, in chaos and in violence, the political and economic background of which she provides in rather more detail than I think is really necessary.

The 700 years described as the Axial Period are quite long and have been stretched to this length in order to accommodate processes that happened in different phases and at different speeds within it. Indian thought, for instance, was already becoming quite sophisticated at the beginning of that period, whereas Greek thought matured much later. Armstrong considers `the first phase of the Axial Age of Israel' to have ended with Ezra in the 5th century BC, but to have had a second flowering four hundred years later, outside the limits of the so-called Axial Period, under the rabbinical sages in the first century BC, and then through the teachings of Jesus and of Paul. Even further beyond these chronolgical limits, she sees in Muhammad's message of peace and tolerance (she does not mention his other side) the teachings of the Axial Age being again renewed.

What is interesting is that the insights of the Axial Period emerged from societies that were after all very different from each other. I was struck at least as much by the differences that emerge from her account between the attitudes of the various civilizations as I was by their similarities. For example the fascinating sections on China (fascinating because the material is probably the least familiar to most of the readers of this book) show an approach there which I think is in many ways quite unlike that found in India, Greece or the Middle East, even if at the end some similar insights are reached. Karen Armstrong herself from time to time contrasts, en passant, the views of the axial sages from different civilizations, just as she points up similarities, sometimes ingeniously and illuminatingly so.

The first stage of the transformation was the time when, in the various civilizations, the purpose of rituals changed from doing something for the gods to doing something also for (not necessarily in that order) the community and for the individual who was partaking in the ritual. This involved the new notion that the individual had an inner self that could be transformed. That would lead to a call for introspection and self-knowledge. That in turn created two tasks which are at the heart of the Great Transformation. The first was to set goals for this inner self, some of which were ethical: the elimination of egoism, the Golden Rule that you should not do to others what you would not have done to you, and therefore the cultivation of non-violence, love and compassion. The second task was to devise the means of reaching these goals - in other words the development of spiritual training. All this is superbly, nobly and topically summed up in the last ten pages of the book.

It is this process which Karen Armstrong considers the essence of the Axial Age. 'In Greece' she writes, 'despite some notable contributions to the Axial ideal - especially in the realm of tragedy - there was ultimately no religious transformation'. When Plato and Aristotle deserted the spiritual quest and turned their attention to cultivate pure reason, she recognizes of course that in point of chronology they belong to the Axial Age; but she intimates that, however transformative in their different ways Plato and Aristotle were (as, in a lesser way, were Epicureans, Stoics and Sceptics), they departed from what made the Axial Age so valuable to her.

This is not always an easy book to read. Parts of it are wonderfully lucid and carry you along; others are quite heavy going. But hers is a demanding subject, and one must stand in awe of the range of her knowledge and her skill in interpreting her material.

In the Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong traces the origins and development of spiritual thought during the Axial Age. The Axial Age was a period between approximately 900 - 200 BC, in which new philosophical and religious concepts emerged in four disparate regions - namely China, India, Israel and Greece - and which still have a lasting impact on our world today.

Armstrong does an admirable job of expounding the political and social situations of the period, and how they eventually developed into the new schools of thought. Although the situations in the four regions are highly different, they share some striking similarities as well. The Axial Age was a very violent and unstable period, and the new schools of thought are all arisen from the same basic need for a better life, in which compassion, understanding and tolerance all play an important role.

Through all this, Armstrong attempts to impart a valuable lesson which we would do well to heed in our time and age. Instead of focusing on the differences between the different religions, we would do well to remember that these differences evolved out of the very particular needs and situations of the people of that time, but that they ultimately all share the common ideals of compassion, understanding and tolerance. Religious thought should not be dogmatic, but should rather be a guide towards achieving those ideals.

Or to use one of Buddha's metaphors in the book: "In just the same way my teachings are like a raft, to be used to cross the river and not to be held on to."

This is an entertaining book, but it doesn't deserve all that much praise, I'm afraid. First, Armstrong neglects the most important thinkers of the period between 900-200 BCE. By far the most important thinkers are the Greek pre-socratics (Thales, Anaximenes, Zeno, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Diogenes, etc), Plato, Aristotle, and the Chinese Warring States era philosophers, like Xunzi, Zhuangzi, and the logicians. These people created our world, from the origins of science to the idea of atomism to the entire realm of secular moral philosophy on which our legal, philosophical, academic, and governmental organisations depend. From them we get the world's first true philosophy - questing, thoughtful, synthetic, and imaginatively unconstrained by tradition.

Armstrong is utterly uninterested in this real intellectual revolution, and instead chooses to focus on the revolution that apparently occurred in religious thinking in the same period. This is spurious in itself; the central thesis of the book is that religion became more humanistic and, well, New Age-y, in this period, instead of consisting entirely of abstract ritual designed solely for the gods. This is bizarre. For a start, no one can truly say what religion looked like before this period. In India, there was no (decipherable) writing before Alexander's invasion in the fourth century BCE, and the vedas, transmitted orally, show a fair amount of humanism as it is. In Babylon and the middle east, the various tales of Gilgamesh (or Bilgames) show a consistent pro-humanity bent against the avaricious, squabbling gods. And in China, the only records we have to go on are the Books of Documents, Songs, Changes, etc, and the Shang oracle bones, none of which show some anti-human inclination. In Egypt, too, stories from as early as 1900 BCE, like the Tale of Sinuhe, show an obvious humanism. There doesn't appear to be anything that required transformation prior to the "Axial Age", and the evidence of a transformation in that supposed age is somewhat spare.

Furthermore, a quick scan of the ethnographic record shows that societies do not progress in some unilineal evolution, and humanistic elements may be found almost anywhere. There is no need for an "Axial Age" to transform religions from being placatory to being humanistic, and no need to go looking in the (sparse and here poorly analysed) data for axial thinkers who just changed everything.

Oh, and the current consensus is that there was no such person as "Lao Tzu". Laozi, the name ascribed to the author of a book named the Daodejing, was almost certainly a composite figure, and the treatise appears to have had several authors, and not just one.

In summary, the reason that an "Axial Age" appears to come about between 900 and 200 BCE is probably due to the proliferation of writing worldwide and the increasing priority and superordinacy of writing over oral transmission in the period. As different views found their ways across the continent (especially with the Alexandrian age), and different positions found themselves in conflict, intellectual problems were created and resolved in new and imaginative ways. This didn't lead only to religious change, but to the development of mathematics, which relied on notation; logic, which relied on complex chains of argument that could not be sustained without writing; and from there, highly developed philosophical positions, drawing on a fertile field of pre-existing writing. That ideas developed in this period is unsurprising, but what is surprising is Armstrong's focus on the silliest and most conservative ideas of the age.

The central position taken by the book is therefore somewhat ridiculous, and this is compounded by the neglect and even disdain shown for the real thinkers of the first millennium BCE: the Greek pre-socratics and their intellectual offspring; the Chinese logicians (like Gongsun Long) and political thinkers (like Han Feizi); and the Indian grammarians (like Panini). Simply put, this is an entertaining book that focuses on some largely non-existent intellectual developments across an arbitrary span of time that happens to coincide with the spread of writing throughout Afro-Eurasia. Writing enabled ideas to spread, and that allowed different viewpoints to clash. While this resulted in many of the most interesting scientific, political, and metaphysical ideas of our species (atomism, recursive grammar, the Hobbesian state, democracy, infinity), Armstrong chooses to ignore these genuinely good ideas in favour of intellectual backwaters.

I have no doubt that it will appeal to people who consider themselves 'spiritual' despite these clear problems.