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I have been waiting for Karen Armstrong's new book <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375413170/103-9318616-0772603?v=glance&n=283155">The
Great Transformation</a> on the Axial Age. Based on her previous remarks in
earlier books, with a short version in <em>The History of Myth</em>, the
result is going to make a complete mess of the material on the Axial Age.
Since she has a ready public eager to lap up her brand this is going to make
life difficult for anyone who tries to deal with the Axial Age phenomenon.
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Fortunately I have already beaten her to it, and anyone who reads <em>World
History and The Eonic Effect </em>will be able to extricate themselves from
the confusion she creates/will create. I will, of course, keep an open mind,
but in fact the short take in The <em>History of Myth </em>gives a fairly
good summary of her new thesis.
I find it hard to believe she is not aware of my material on the subject,
and I have all along been suspicious of the switch in here thinking. The
rise of the modern, she seems to have suddenly realized was her 'second
Axial Age', which is inconvenient, since the strategy is a second postmodern
Axial Age, complete with religious revival, gurus, and the propaganda for
New Age religiosity.
I have made mincemeat of all of that, but without enough market share, and
the total incomprehension of the current sci community, Armstrong will get
the legitimation to a lot of people for the destruction of secular modernity
in the name of a second Axial Age.
She should be ashamed of these tactics, but apparently can't grasp the
basics of her thesis on the Axial Age.
<blockquote>From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Having already recounted "a history of God," the redoubtable
Armstrong here narrates the evolution of the religious traditions of the
world from their births to their maturity. In her typical magisterial
fashion, she chronicles these tales in dazzling prose with remarkable depth
and judicious breadth. Taking the Axial Age, which spans roughly 900 B.C.E.
to 200 B.C.E., as her focal point, Armstrong examines the ways that specific
religious traditions from Buddhism and Confucianism to Taoism and Judaism
responded to the various cultural forces they faced during this period.
Overall, Armstrong observes, violence, political disruption and religious
intolerance dominated Axial Age societies, so Axial religions responded by
exalting compassion, love and justice over selfishness and hatred. Thus, the
central Buddhist and Jain practice of ahimsa, doing no harm, developed in
India in reaction to the self-centeredness of Hindu ritual, and Hebrew
prophets such as Amos proclaimed that justice and mercy toward neighbors
offered the only correct way of walking with God. Accounts of the world's
religions often present them as discrete entities developing apart from each
other in a vacuum. Armstrong's magnificent accomplishment offers us an
account of a violent time much like ours, when religious impulses in various
locations developed practices of justice and love. (Apr. 3)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All
rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* The foremost English-language historian of religion today,
whose A History of God (1993) has become the standard popular work on the
great monotheisms, expands upon German philosopher Karl Jaspers'
characterization of the long period preceding the rise of Rome--900 to 200
B.C.E.--as the Axial Age. That at first puzzling geometric metaphor
crystallizes Jaspers' sense, which Armstrong clearly shares, of that immense
era as pivotal in human consciousness. During it the major religious
traditions began and refined the moral attitudes they manifest to this day.
Commencing as tribal and aristocratic, the pre-Christian religions became
personal and democratic as the realm of divinity came to be perceived as
transcendent. Most important was the development of nonviolence as a holy
ideal, not least because the early religions initially employed violence in
their rituals and justified violence by their adherents. The Aryans of
northern India and the Chinese, both initially violent, attempted to
constrain belligerence and avert chaos by fashioning what became Hinduism
and Buddhism, and Confucianism and Taoism, respectively. Meanwhile, the
smaller civilizational formations of the Jews and the Greeks responded to
experiences of, respectively, periodic near-obliteration and social collapse
with monotheism and philosophical rationalism, respectively. Armstrong tells
this huge story in 10 chapters that each relate historically parallel
developments among the Indians, Chinese, Greeks, and Jews. Magisterially but
companionably, she unfolds the successive movements that molded religious
consciousness in each nation, explaining them with such clarity that this
book ranks with A History of God as one of her finest achievements and an
utterly enthralling reading experience. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved </blockquote>
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