Fundamental Questions 1
The Axial Age Debate as Religious Discourse
HANS JOAS
It is an undisputed fact that Karl Jaspers invented the term âAxial Ageâ in his 1949 book Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, but it is also uncontested 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 following, I will offer some material that could help to clarify these three matters, 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 discourseâa series of highly complex attempts of intellectuals to position themselves with regard to the problem of âtranscendence,â its role in history, and viable forms of its articulation in the present.
But let me first briefly return to the question of the origin of Jaspersâ idea and concept. For all readers familiar with Georg Simmelâs last book Lebensanschauung, the term âaxisâ would seem to have been inspired by him, because in Simmel we find the idea of an âaxial rotationâ 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 âaxial rotationâ is the genesis of autonomous 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 Simmelâs idea is the origin of Jaspersâ expression.2 But this seems to me to be not really plausible since Jaspers does not have the autonomy of cultural products in mind when he speaks of an axial turn, but the âaxisâ of world historyâthe 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 passage, 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 decisive 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 universally acceptable alternative. The problem with his reference to Hegel is, however, that no such passage has so far been detected in Hegelâs 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 principleââthe axis on which the History of the World turns. This is the goal and starting point of History.â4 While these sentences may sound like the source of Jaspersâ book title, the problem with the whole quotation is that Hegel in the German original does not use the word âaxis,â but âAngelââa word that is normally translated as âhingeâ or âpivot.â Could it be that Jaspersâ confusion of âAchseâ and âAngelâ 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 indubitably influenced by the writings of Max Weber, his brother Alfred Weber, and through them by Weberâs close colleague and longtime friend Ernst Troeltsch and Troeltschâs friend Wilhelm Bousset. They all wrote about similarities between the ancient Hebrew prophets and comparable phenomena in other civilizations and used terms like âprophetic ageâ or âsynchronistic ageâ to designate these similarities as the common features of a specific phase in world history. They were in turn influenced by important scholars from the field of religious studies (Hermann Siebeck) and Indology (Rhys Davids) so that one could already speak of an âAxial Age debateâ 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 classicist 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 developed at length the idea taken up by Jaspers in a remarkable and almost completely forgotten book of 1856, Neuer Versuch einer alten, auf die Wahrheit der Tatsachen gegrĂŒndeten 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 (1731â1805). He was a deeply Catholic and royalist French scholar who spent almost six years in India, wrote an empirically founded work on âorientalâ forms of political rule, criticizing Montesquieuâs distorted ideas about oriental despotism, and studied the ancient Iranian religious traditions. He has long been considered one of the founders of Iranian studies. In the year 1771 he claimed that the ideas articulated by Zoroaster probably in the sixth century BCE were part of a more general ârevolutionâ in different 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 toâbeyond an observation of a certain parallelism in the cultural transformation of four or five major civilizations between 800 and 200 BCE? The best shorthand characterization is from the American Sinologist Benjamin Schwartz, who called the Axial Age âthe age of transcendenceâ;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 transcendental sphere and a mundane one is then seen as the defining characteristic of axiality. Others, for example Arnaldo Momigliano, speak of an âage of criticismâ11 and emphasize the relativization of all mundane realities as the crucial feature of the ageâan aspect that also plays the greatest role in Shmuel Eisenstadtâs sociological elaboration of the Axial Age thesis. The main emphasis in Eisenstadtâs 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 meaning of divine commandments, a growing separation between ethnic and religious 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 transformation of religious presuppositions or on the social and political consequences of this religious transformation. But this image changes when the focus on âtranscendenceâ 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 âan increasing reflexivity of human beings and their ability to overcome the bounds of a perceived inevitability of given conditions in temporal and social orderingsâ as its defining characteristic instead.12 For him it is a matter of context and contingency whether this transformation leads to a cosmology in terms of transcendence or immanence. Empirically, the most contentious case in this connection is ancient 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 âepoch-making innovation that gave rise to enduring civilizational identities as well as to religious visions of universal communityâ 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 revelation 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 language 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 âemergenceâ of the idea of transcendence, I chose this expression in order to avoid speaking either of its âdiscoveryâ or its âinventionââbecause âdiscoveryâ refers to an understanding of religious evolution that considers the Axial breakthrough as progress, whereas âinventionâ is a term that can only be plausible from a secularist perspective for the creative achievements of mankind in that period. Furthermore, if âtranscendenceâ is not the defining 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 prophetic plea for a forceful liberation from later attenuated versions of the fundamental impulses of post-Axial religion and of philosophyâor as a dangerous regression to obsolete fanaticisms. Not only can the different versions of the Axial Age be played out against one another: Athens or Jerusalem?âthere can also be a nostalgia for pre-Axial myths and cosmologies or a radical modernism that sees the heritage of the Axial Age as a mere preparation for a modernity that is in its core independent from it. This affects the implicit views on our relationship to the Axial turnâwhether we think of it in terms of replacement 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) assumptions 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. Lasaulxâs Organicist Defense of Revelation
Lasaulxâs 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 origin, 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 Ottoman Empire in 1832. This brought him to Greece, and from there he traveled through the Middle East, returning with the deep conviction that Christianity 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 loverâthe dancer Lola Montezâwith 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 nationalization of historiography. Until the seventeenth century such a Christian perspective had dominated historiography in Europe, but since then it had gradually lost out to a strict separation of empirically grounded historiography and a theological discourse about the history of salvation. Lasaulx and other romantic thinkers assumed that a new âorganicistâ understanding of history would enable them to revitalize the older unity of theology and historiographyânot 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 âA new attempt at an old philosophy of history, based on the truth of facts.â I interpret this title as...