The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions by Karen Armstrong

The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions Reviews

• 
  فؤاد

  کارن آرمسترانگ، ایدۀ اصلی کتاب رو از کارل یاسپرس گرفته که در
  آغاز و انجام تاریخ، گفته در حوالی قرن پنجم قبل از میلاد، در فاصلۀ بین از بین رفتن یک نظم قدیمی و پدید اومدن یک نظم جدید، یک آشوب عمومی در جهان پدید اومد. این آشوب باعث تشویش و اضطراب مردم شد، اما در عین حال آزادی لازم رو در اختیار متفکرها قرار داد تا در سنت ها و باورهای عمومی تجدید نظر کنن و نوعی معنویت جدید ایجاد کنن که مشخصه هاش در هر سرزمین متفاوت بود، اما اساسش، افزایش خودآگاهی و درون نگری، پذیرش سرشت دردناک زندگی، گذشتن از خود و همدردی با دیگران، و سلوک شخصی به سمت حقیقتی برین و غیر قابل بیان بود. آرمان‌هایی که به باور کارن آرمسترانگ جهان امروز ما همچنان بهشون نیاز داره.
  
  آرمسترانگ توی این کتاب سترگ، تاریخ این سرزمین ها (چین، هند، اسرائیل، یونان) رو بر اساس این نظریۀ کارل یاسپرس روایت می کنه. تاریخ یک هزاره رو نقل می کنه (از ۸۰۰ قبل از میلاد تا ۲۰۰ قبل از میلاد)، هر قرن رو در یک فصل جداگانه، و این معنویت، ریشه هاش، و نتایجش رو شرح میده. حتی اگر این نظریۀ یاسپرس رو قبول نداشته باشید یا براتون اهمیت نداشته باشه، کتاب به قدری سرشار از اطلاعاته که خوندنش همچنان آموزنده و لذتبخشه. ترجمه هم برازندۀ چنین اثر بزرگیه.
  
  فقط یک نکته: کارن آرمسترانگ تاریخ چهار کشور محوری رو همزمان نقل می کنه، یعنی کمی از تاریخ چین می گه، بعد میره سراغ هند، بعد اسرائیل، بعد یونان، دوباره بر می گرده سراغ چین، بعد کمی هند، و به همین ترتیب...
  این شیوه شاید از بعضی جهات خوب باشه، اما چون کتاب طولانیه، قطعاً دنبال کردن تاریخ هزار سالۀ چهار کشور به صورت همزمان، باعث میشه آدم گیج بشه و سیر تاریخ هر کشور رو فراموش کنه، اتفاقی که در خوانش اول برای من افتاد. در نتیجه، دوباره برگشتم از اول و این بار تاریخ هند رو به طور کامل خوندم و تموم کردم، بعد برگشتم از اول و تاریخ چین رو شروع کردم و تا آخر خوندم، باز برگشتم از اول و تاریخ اسرائیل رو شروع کردم و همین طور... که در عمل روش خیلی مفیدی بود.
• 
  William2

  Karen Armstrong takes great mountains, virtual Everests, of wretched scholarly prose and turns them into something highly readable. She is a first-rate disseminator and popularizer of the history of religion. The Great Transformation reviews the history of what Karl Jaspers famously termed the "Axial Age." During this period, roughly 900-200 B.C.E., the foundations for all of our present religious traditions were laid down: Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Jainism, Judaism, the other monotheisms, etc. For example, she follows the Aryans from the Caucasus onto the Gangetic Plain and unfolds the story of proto-Hindu culture there. Similarly, she writes of the pre-Biblical development of what would become Judaism, and so on for all the relevant faiths. These are stories I have never come across elsewhere. Leave it to Armstrong to see this gap in common knowledge of religious history and seek to fill it. What she has undertaken here is of enormous scope. To write the proto-history and then the history of all the Axial faiths is not just ambitious, it is an effort that astonishes the reader as he watches it unfold. I recommend all Armstrong's books but especially
  The Case for God (also reviewed here) and
  A History of God. What marks her prose is tremendous empathy. Her portraits of the various Axial Age peoples are stunning in their range and complexity. It is a very dense book, but loaded with fascinating information for the patient reader. Armstrong believes that there is much to be learned from our religious history. Properly understood it is both a cautionary tale and an indication of how very much we need spirituality in our lives. To paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre, without it we are left with a great "God-shaped hole" in our lives. Christopher Hitchens (R.I.P.) and Richard Dawkins think we can discard it. I disagree. This is an integral part of our evolution as a species and we have much to learn from it. (Note: The other writer of excellence in this field I'm familiar with is Elaine Pagels. She, too, has a number of wonderful books but it is her
  The Gnostic Gospels (also reviewed here) that is her summa.) Highly recommended!
• 
  P.J. Wetzel

  I came to be aware of this book through my research for my distant future fantasy/sci-fi novel series 'Eden's Womb'. I wanted to understand the origin and evolution of mankind's religious journey in order to project a plausible future. That's a tall order, of course, but for me the study was a fascinating journey. I started by reading Huston Smith's iconic 'The World's Religions' and then began to delve deeper.
  
  Along the way I had a little epiphany: It seemed that many major faith traditions/institutions were founded about the same time (800 to 200 BCE). I pursued this idea, wondering if the nascent trade routes that would become the Silk Road had begun a cultural exchange that early in human history.
  
  Well, as I dug into it, I found out that my idea was far from original (few ever are). Karl Jaspers had the idea, and published it in `The Origin and the Goal of History' in 1953. Karen Armstrong seems to have latched onto Jaspers' grand theories as a way of hooking the reader (selling more books). But it remains unclear whether she actually believes them. Nowhere did she overtly refute Jasper's theories, but in the meat of the text she seems uninterested in reinforcing them. Sometimes it seems as if she finds his themes unsupportable but doesn't want to make an issue of it. That's not the kind of incisive scholarly analysis I would hope for from a book with such a grand title published by an expert. It's clear she's more interested in the detail. She shies away from big-picture analysis. Result: the title begins to come across as disingenuous--false advertising. And I begin to feel cheated.
  
  From my point of view I wanted insight into the maturing of the human psyche, its causes and implications. Were there unifying factors that led to this period of unprecedented global advancement in and formalization of human thought?
  
  Through my own independent research I found that this revolution or maturing of human consciousness seemed to be entirely global. Jaspers and Armstrong focus only on four major hubs of emergent civilization (Greece, Judea, India and China). What I found was that there were many more examples of emerging faith traditions and landmark human advancement that flowered during this period. Shinto religion began during this time frame as did the Norse theology--Odin first appears during this time. The first major cities of the Maya civilization arose during this period. The Polynesians were at the height of their seagoing prowess as they migrated across the south Pacific, and humans arrived in Madagascar for the first time. Clearly any unifying mechanism went far beyond cultural stimulation via the Silk Road trade routes.
  
  To my disappointment Armstrong mentions none of these other cultures, and does not seem to be interested in the physical/environmental/external underpinnings of why this revolution happened. Rather she focuses on something she seems to implicitly assume is a 'universal' underpinning of human morality.
  
  Fine. She's on a different wavelength. By now this has become abundantly clear. Okay, I'll sit back and let her elaborate before I pass judgment.
  
  So now she proffers her primary theme: it's all about the `Golden Rule' -- "Do unto others as you (in your '*infinite wisdom and universal understanding*') would desire that others would do unto you."
  
  For the obvious reasons (highlighted in the sarcastic parenthetical expression) this ancient and revered ethical directive is becoming one of the old canards that can no longer be supported. It translates into: 'ignore cultural diversity, reject the opportunity to expand your personal horizons through deep listening and understanding of your neighbor's point-of-view, and just blindly assume that everyone wants to be treated the way you want to be treated'.
  
  Surely (Armstrong implicitly assumes) the 'Golden Rule' is a universal sign of humanity's newly emerging (shallowly defined) 'compassion' to which all these nascent religious movements must have aspired, and thus to which they all gravitated.
  
  To me this is not a satisfying explanation. I see no universality. I'll offer one benign example: In China you must burp to express your satisfaction for a meal. In western Europe the burp is a sign that you're uncultured. Okay, here are a few more examples:
  http://mrfarshtey.net/WorldCultures/2...
  
  The closest Armstrong comes to addressing my 'big-picture' question is by regurgitating Jaspers' thesis that the Great Transformation was a result of an interregnum between eras of war and destruction and suppression of original thought by great empires. This seems insufficient, and again this is not my original thought--it is shared by other critics.
  
  Having posited her theme for the 'Axial Age' (as Jaspers called it), Armstrong proceeds to delve into an historical survey, in chronological blocks, of the secular and spiritual events in the four cultures. It turns out that the Axial thinkers (by her definition) arose sporadically, not simultaneously in most cases. In fact she concludes that Axial thinking never really took hold in Greece as it spawned the Western philosophies.
  
  No unifying motivation? Why publish it under such a lofty title: "The Great Transformation"? Why parrot Jaspers' themes if you don't even support them?
  
  Here's why: your publisher wants to sell books.
  
  Armstrong is a 'can't see the forest for the trees' thinker. Her book reads like a series of book reports (here is what I read and here's what I got out of it). Too often her work becomes a tedious recitation of factual historical events and summations of ancient writings without any raison d'être. Rather, it seems, she has an obsession for completeness (demonstrated in other works of hers such as `A History of God'.) Finally, a pet peeve: Armstrong has the annoying habit of using `chic' words drawn from the subject culture, such as nibbana (nirvana), ahimsa (harmlessness) and li (tradition). There are many of these. She defines them once and then expects the reader to remember them all.
  
  As a research earth scientist I find myself wondering if human interactions with the changing global climate of the time may have contributed to this great global revolution. Psychologists may wonder if this was a result of the natural evolution of human self-awareness as we came to recognize our mind as a useful tool. Armstrong peripherally mentions (in barely a few lines) such revolutions as the smelting of iron and the domestication of the horse as contributing factors to destabilization during these times. She was silent on my Silk Road thesis and the others. In the end, this book was not what I was hoping for.
• 
  John

  The Great Transformation argues that the core religious/philosophical traditions of several major civilizations -- China, India, Greece, and Israel -- emerged at about the same time, for the same reasons, and were preoccupied with the same ideas. The time is what philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, the period from approximately 700-200 B.C. when these civilizations all developed philosophical or religious tenets that emphasized what we might now call inner spiritual development rather than abasement before omnipotent deities. The reason, Armstrong suggests, is that each of these societies was seeking a way beyond the incessent violence that marked their existence. As for the ideas, they have become cliches but are no less powerful for that: first, do unto others as you would have them do unto you; and second, be the change you wish to see in the world. Armstrong concludes that from these concepts, explored in different places and for somewhat different reasons, emerged Confusianism, Buddhism, classical Greek philosophy, and rabbinical Judaism (she considers the core precepts of both Christianity and Islam to be mere latter-day variations on rabbinical Jewish thought, with few innovations to contribute to that philosophical tradition).
  
  Much as I enjoy reading early religious history, I'll confess that I don't have the background to evaluate Armstrong's argument on its merits. It's certainly compelling -- and given my own leanings (which are pretty vague, but could be said to be triagulated by agnosticism, unitarianism, and secular humanism), the argument that religion is at its best when it emphasizes personal growth rather than proper worship of the correct Sky God is one I'm inclined to favor. I did find myself wondering whether Armstrong was overstating the extent to which these complex philosophies had an impact on their own societies, as well as the extent to which they displaced, even temporarily, traditional religious emphasis on pleasing and/or appeasing an external deity. In addition, her final chapter -- aimed at today's fundamentalists of all faiths -- spends more time celebrating Christianity's and Islam's connections to Axial Age tradition than exploring why those connections seem, more and more, a minor part of both faiths (at least as professed by their loudest adherents).
  
  Still, this was a thought-provoking read and, while slow going at times, one I found rewarding. A final word of praise: the book contains many useful maps and an excellent glossary, both of which are essential to a work like this but, I find, are too rarely included. Bravo to Armstrong and her publisher for providing them; they really help.
• 
  Nicholas Whyte

  
  http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1541807.html
  
  This is a rather brave attempt to wring significance out of the fact that Confucius, the Buddha, Socrates and Jeremiah all lived at about the same time, between them causing a revolution in the way in which humans relate to the universe in philosophy and religion. It did not completely work for me. I found Armstrong's account of the evolution of the Old Testament as a product of the Jews' exile in Babylon pretty compelling, and we have a couple more of her books on the shelves which I am looking forward to reading now. Her description of ancient Greek thought, which I gave tutorials on many years ago, seemed decent enough and made a very interesting claim about the importance of Sophocles in particular and Greek theatre in general as giving people a new way to talk about and think about the world. But her Indian sections were rather dull, and her Chinese sections very dull indeed, coming alive respectively only with the appearance of the main characters, the Buddha and Confucius. It is my fault more than hers, but I felt completely adrift in Chinese geography; various kingdoms with unfamiliar and confusingly similar names, and no obvious relationship to the present day geography which I know a little better.
  
  And I was not convinced by the book's overall thesis, which seems to be that the near-coincidence of lifespan of the four main characters is a particularly interesting fact. It is true, but rather dull, to note, for instance, that James Marsters and Sophie Aldred were born on the same day. I think it is a little more interesting that Alexander Hamilton and the Duchess of Devonshire were born and died within two years of each other, because both were engaged in politics, and particularly in relations between England and America, at the same time. But Armstrong doesn't seriously argue that there was any influence, or even much in the way of common roots, between her four main characters, so we get four completely different stories (only two of which are interesting) chopped across each other with various totally disparate incidents lumped together purely because they happened at roughly the same time. It did not really work for me.
• 
  Jason

  Karen Armstrong looks beyond doctrine to find a common core in the religious and philosophical traditions that emerged during the years 900 to 200 BCE - an era the German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age. All around the world at the time, people were trying to address the question of violence and endless war.
  
  What she found in the writings of the great thinkers and sages of Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Judaism and the precursors of Christianity in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece is this: what a person believes is not what brings an end to suffering. Suffering only ends when we let go of selfishness and learn compassion for others. Or, as Rabbi Hillel summarized it: "What is hateful to yourself, do not to others. That is the whole of The Torah. The rest is commentary."
  
  From this perspective, arguing over whose views on God are "correct" is not just pointless but actually harmful to ourselves and to others. This concurs with what the Buddha said to many a disciple. The remedy to conflict is not to find the flaws in our enemy, but to look inside ourselves for our own flaws.
  
  Even for those not interested in saving the world or finding peace within themselves, this book should still prove an enjoyable reading experience. It is a thoroughly researched, well-written romp through a very interesting time in history, over a wide range of peoples and cultures. Armstrong's writing is always clean and lively, never stuffy or morbidly academic.
  
  This is a book well-suited for our troubled times.
• 
  Megan Kiekel Anderson

  This textbook covers the beginnings and transformation of the major world religions through the Axel Age, from 1600 BCE to 220 BCE, plus an epilogue that brings the history into the current time.
  
  I borrowed this from our friend Steve last fall, and I haven’t had enough brain cells to absorb this much information until now. This was the textbook from one of his religion classes in undergrad (he’s a genius grad school engineer now), and he passed it on to me because he knew I’d love it. I have to give this copy back to Steve, but I’m totally buying it for reference. (For the record- I did not read an entire textbook in a month. I was reading this well into October as well).
  
  I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I needed a clear head to read it; it’s a lot of information to take in. But it is amazing to trace the changes in philosophies and religious practices over time with the changes in human development. Each chapter is broken into four parts: one focusing on each of the major Axel Age peoples in China, Greece, India, and Jerusalem.
  
  This was an introduction to this information for me, so I’m not really able to fully criticize the biases or limitations of this text. Armstrong did seem to have a strong detachment from the information, except when she was drawing her main points in the introduction and final chapter. All history texts, of course, are an argument: the author chooses which information to include and which to leave behind in order to strengthen their points and persuade the reader to their way of thinking. It is impossible to be objective when writing about history because of the vast amount of information out there. Armstrong obviously focused on what tied the major world religions together and made connections between their individual developments over the age. A book could probably just as easily be written on the differences of these religions.
  
  I’d love to come back to this after I know more.
  
  P.S. If you dislike religious history that is not written from a theological standpoint, then you may find this work offensive.
• 
  Tim Pendry

  
  The core of this book is a solid account of the 'spiritual' traditions of four great civilisations (the Hellenistic-Pagan; the Judaean; the South Asian; and the Chinese) during the thousand or so years before the end of the third century BC. As far as it goes, it is an excellent and coherent narrative.
  
  But I have my doubts. The story sometimes seems shoe-horned not only into the contention that all four cultures saw a first axial age that defined Old World culture until a second 'axial age' in the early modern era but it seems to be designed to be a rather passive-aggressive polemic for religion.
  
  Although the range of reading is extensive, the transmission of specialist research impressive and the insights to be had considerable (until the very last chapters when Armstrong sometimes just tells a story most educated people already know), some claims for the early period seem excessive.
  
  There are occasions when she appears to lack imagination about the claims of her sources. Is it really so that the very ancient Chinese conducted war in such stately fashion? Perhaps but perhaps the story is derived from later literary tropes. She takes texts on trust sometimes.
  
  But the book disappoints because one soon becomes suspicious of her ideological motivation. The first and last chapter spin a yarn about religiosity that I found irritating and even misleading insofar as an empathic sentimentality was linked without warrant to her academic findings.
  
  I found this shoe-horning of history into a 'sell' for religion in an age of violence (the book was written five years after 9/11) on the edge of objectionable as if somehow the essentialism of religion was not in itself part of the problem of all times. Complexity went out the window.
  
  Still, if you can get her spirituality 'sell' (what the hell is this thing called 'spirituality' when it is not ideology or sentiment?) out of the way, her narrative flows, she is readable and one gets a sense of how one idea builds on its predecessors and why some particular ideas take root.
  
  As history it is mostly very worthwhile but as proselytising for empathy and idealistic sentiment, it is in cloud-cuckoo land. There is some very good analysis of the social and political conditions in which ideas take root but very little critique of the nexus between material reality and 'religion'.
  
  This intellectual weakness frustrates when the book is taken as a whole. It stays in the library as a ready reference on some key ideas and thinkers, with some sound general history thrown in, but it cannot be regarded as a first class text because its final analysis is overwhelmed with apologia.
  
  The fashion for 'spirituality' is one of the problematics of current Western culture. The main theme of the sentimentalists is that if only we would listen to the great teachers and become empaths or submit to something outside ourselves, the violence would cease. Well, perhaps!
  
  In fact, the violence and terror won't cease because universal empathy is a human impossibility. We are who we are, complex creatures. If someone has an idea you can be sure that the idea will be used as a tool or a weapon to gain advantage. Yes, this is what we are.
  
  Her book-ending chapters presents a world of shoulds and oughts that defies reality and creates a vision that is always going to be more fiction than fact. Exhortation may influence some people to be better persons but as many or more will and must ignore the message.
  
  If anything an excess of empathy, when faced by the standard alleged sociopathy of social systems, simply neuters the 'good' and sends them into defensive postures, private life, clerisy or the monastery, leaving everyone else as prey while the faithful protect themselves with 'sacred space'.
  
  If humanity is to be liberated in terms of both private freedoms and the avoidance of oppressive harms, it is a moot point whether a passive intellectual and 'spiritual' approach will offer anything more than this defensive protection for the few (often at the expense of the many).
  
  I have no problem with people believing in nonsense or even coming together consensually in societies that believe in nonsense but the idea that 'spirituality' will do anything other than abandon the mass of the people to the wolves is increasingly absurd.
  
  'Spirituality' (I am still waiting for a non-nonsensical definition beyond mere sentiment) may be regarded as any belief system that eases the suffering and neuroses of life. There is nothing wrong with that - unless we think it reflects anything other than magical thinking.
  
  Out of spirituality comes religion which is little more than the imposition of social order on the crooked timber of humanity, a process of containing and corralling the human 'spirit' (actually the human being) in despair at any other form of social organisation possibly 'being good'.
  
  This book, for all its descriptive and narrative value, thus becomes a false friend to a species that needs to stop evading and avoiding material reality and the actual structures of power, stop trying to find bolt holes for itself and start creating practical approaches to solving problems.
  
  In essence, there are only two problems here ... how to ensure human autonomy within an otherwise functional social system and how to ensure that one person does not do harm to another person. The great faiths partially solve the second but usually at the expense of the first.
  
  They are only a partial solution because religious and 'spiritual' tendencies to treat personal liberation as liberation from the world will often result in the accidental de-humanisation of humanity, running away from materiality by (for example) 'abandoning the ego'.
  
  The religious obsession with abandoning the ego is cowardice. The real task is to embrace the ego and put it to work as a lifetime project of self improvement and the social project of equalising the value of all egos viz. a society where you can 'do what thou wilt an harm no-one'.
  
  There are arguments, of course, for mystery and ritual - like the Greek tragedies or Chinese li - as undogmatic artistic and magical endeavours that are not trying to make too many claims.
  
  The poetry, drama, art, ritual and magic in the performance art that is 'religion' is not a bad thing but it is only valuable when it allows persons to appreciate the liminalities and absences in the world. Subsequently building a system out of such things destroys that very purpose.
  
  One final world of praise for the book, however. It is very well served with maps, charts and plans - 25 in all. These are invaluable in comprehending the narrative. Despite the irritations, the book still remains recommended for anyone wanting a basic overview of ancient intellectual culture.
  
  
• 
  Sarahj33

  So I bought this book about three years ago at a street festival in Michigan when I was on a big non-fiction kick. I never got past the first couple of chapters because the writing felt pretty dense and seemed to assume that I had a background knowledge of things like the Assyrian Empire and the Book of Deuteronomy. I still don't know anything about those things, but I decided to give the book another go as part of my quest to actually read all the books that are languishing on my shelves before buying any new ones.
  
  And somehow, this book was exactly the book I needed to be reading right now. If you've been keeping up with the news lately, it can feel like a lot of things are going wrong in the world, and organized religions in some form are implicated in a lot of the world's problems. So to open a book and read about lots of very smart people from 500 BCE seeing the same problems and actually coming up with solutions is very comforting. Obviously the solutions didn't last forever, but I've come away from this book convinced that we can learn a lot from the sages of the Axial Age.
  
  The basic idea of The Axial Age is that around the same time, many of the world's religions took profound leaps forward in terms of incorporating ethical systems into their traditions - new ethical systems that were based on the Golden Rule, non-violence, and the suppression of ego. These systems also took the fascinating position that, although they never denied the existence of a god, they thought it was counter productive to try to define "God" when God is by nature undefinable. It would be much more appropriate to spend your energy leading a good life than worrying about whether Yahweh was more powerful than Baal. Armstrong writes clearly and concisely, weaving together different stories in a well organized but intricate web. I ended up changing my mind about the writing being too dense and requiring too much outside knowledge - it is easy to follow her arguments and conclusions even if you don't know anything about Vedic texts or the Chinese classics.
  
  This book doesn't claim to be a panacea for all the world's problems, but to me it felt like it could be. Armstrong doesn't deny the various problems of the Axial traditions - the Greek Axial Age never really coalesced, the Chinese tradition split into several splinter groups, basically all the Axial sages completely ignored women, etc. And, of course, none of them could really make it last for more than a few hundred years. But overall the message of the book is hopeful. These guys were on to something, and it shows that even if religion is part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution.
• 
  Lucy Johnston

  I don't know much about Indian or Chinese religious history, so those sections were difficult for me. Even though her writing is accessible, I had trouble keeping track of the big picture. At least I'm closer to understanding that history than before 🤷
  
  I only know Jewish history through Sunday School, so reading any more academic take on how the doctrine changed over time completely blew my mind.
  
  The Greek pieces didn't blow my mind, but I do feel like I have a better grasp of that history now. Like I wouldn't be able to articulate the differences between Socrates and Plato on my own, but maybe I could at least recognize them now.
  
  Her thesis that all these religions are related didn't really come together for me, but the history is cool!
• 
  Corina Anghel

  I started reading this book on Easter, because although I am not religious, I wanted to celebrate the spirituality of the Holiday. It was absolutely fascinating to read the history of the four most popular religions of the world and it was so interesting to discover that:
  - the Christian God's (and Islams's Allah's) story dates long back, evolving from the story of Yahweh, a warrior god who later on "started" to also support people with their crops and "became" omniscient and omnipresent when the Jews were exiled to Babylon and had to leave their physical temple;
  - the Greeks didn't receive too much support and guidance from their Gods who seemed to mirror the same challenges they were going through so instead they focused on asking questions, analyzing and on dialogue which soon enough resulted in the invention of democracy, philosophy and scientific interest;
  - the Hindus started focusing on themselves and invented meditation and the Buddhist practices when some wise scholars changed the sacrificial rituals, replacing the violence in them with an inward focus. Instead of sacrificing an animal they would pretend to sacrifice themselves and that, in exchange would make them feel they are one with the Gods. Soon, they realized they can achieve Nirvana by themselves and a lot of them renounced the normal life to go on quests of finding their true selves (sure, that is not within reach to everybody so the majority of the population still had a strong connection to the old Gods, or just practiced yoga and various forms of more simple meditation);
  - the Chinese people, with a strong cult of the ancestors, were much more pragmatic and focused more on the present life than on the past or future, their rituals explained up to the utmost details were means to show how one should live the best of life. I like how they believed that spirituality and "heaven" is something that you can bring on Earth rather then something you need to reach for.
  
  My summary is, of course, over-simplified. What is interesting is to see how these religious and spiritual practices evolved depending on the period, on what happen in people's lives and what were their needs in certain times. In our contemporary, highly scientific, world, when people focus on their own individuality, it is no wonder that so many people from western countries are now drawn to the spiritual practices of the yogis rather than the religious christian rituals and the figure of an almighty God.
  
  What all the sages from the Axial Age* had in common and what Karen Armstrong tried to show is that they all "put the abandonment of selfishness and the spirituality of compassion at the top of their agenda". No matter if their beliefs were secular or religious as long as they made people act compassionately and to "honor the stranger" they were "skillful".
  
  The book is sometimes a challenge to follow as there are so many concepts and historical figures mentioned and you really want to remember all (I took a lot of notes). I admire the author so much for having the skill and knowledge to put everything together so comprehensively and, on top of that, because in 2009 she created a Charter for Compassion, an umbrella for people to engage in collaborative partnerships worldwide to do good.
  
  
  * Axial Age = is a term coined by German philosopher Karl Jaspers in the sense of a "pivotal age", characterizing the period of ancient history from about the 8th to the 3rd century BCE, the time in which all foundations that underlie current civilization came into being.
• 
  عمر الحمادي

  
  
  كتاب رائع يلخص في صفحات عديدة تتابع ظهور الأديان الرئيسية اليوم وكيف أن حكماءها قد تقاطعت أفكارهم تقاطعاً عظيماً... أنصح المتشددين بقاراءته لعل الكتاب يساعدهم على هجر النظرة الضيقة التمكن من رؤية الأديان بنظرة أكثر شمولية وأوسع أفقاً.
  
  العصر المحوري -بحسب كارل غاسبار- هو ذلك العصر الممتد بين ٩٠٠ إلى ٢٠٠ ق.م وفي أربع مناطق مميزة ظهرت الحركات الدينية الكبرى في تاريخ الإنسانية: الكونفشيوسية والداوية في الصين، الهندوسية والبوذية في الهند، الوحدانية الإبراهيمية في الشرق الأوسط، والعقلانية الفلسفية في اليونان، أنبياء ومتصوفو وفلاسفة وشعراء العصر المحوري كانوا متطورين جداً وغير مغالين كما هم تلاميذهم، وإجماع عصر المحور هو شهادة بليغة على السعي الروحي نحو الرحمة والمحبة والتسامح، بل قد تجد إيمانك متوافق مع إيمان الآخرين دون أن تغادر تراثك الخاص، ما يميز تراث العصر المحوري في كل المناطق الأربعة هو تجذر الخوف والألم في هذا التراث، والمطالبة بالإقرار بهذه الآلام كمقدمة من أجل التنوير.
  
  اكتشف علماء الآثار أن معظم السكان في مناطق اليهود عبدوا بعل إلى جانب يهوه -إله الحرب- حتى القرن السادس ثم بدأوا بتقليل عدد الآلهة التي عبدوها وتجاهل عبادة الآلهة الأخرى، أما البراهمة في الهند فقد اتجهوا إلى تحرير أنفسهم من الشعائر الخارجية والآلهة وركزوا على النفس الخالدة واكتشاف عالمها المستقل.
  
  تعلم الإسرائيليون التعالي على مصالحهم الذاتية وأن يحكموا بالعدل والمساواة، وكان النبي فيهم مثالاً حياً على إفراغ النفس من الأنانية.
  
  أصيب أفلاطون بالرعب من مقتل معلمه سقراط بدعوى تعليمه أفكار دينية زائفة للشباب، إلا أنه في نهاية حياته دافع عن إيقاع عقوبة الموت على من لم يشاركوه آراءه، سعى أفلاطون إلى فرض الفضيلة من الخارج ولم يكن يثق بدافع الرحمة، وجعل دينه الفلسفي فكرياً بالكامل، ومع التقدم الهائل في العلوم والطب والرياضيات، حصل بعد عن الروحانية، رغم إن أفلاطون دافع عن عبادة الأولمب لأنها مهمة وأساسية للمدينة رغم كونها أقل درجة من الفلسفة عنده
• 
  Charles Matthews

  We can be almost certain that somewhere, at this very moment, someone is committing an act of violence in the name of God. That troubling realization underlies this book, an attempt to reach back 2,500 years and more, to survey our earliest attempts to establish systems of belief that promise a release from human strife.
  
  Karen Armstrong's "great transformation" took place in what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called "the Axial Age" – roughly seven centuries, starting around 900 B.C., in which the foundations were laid for Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as for such later faiths as Christianity and Islam and for secular inquiries into the nature of being and the good life. In discrete corners of the world -- places we now know as Greece, Israel, India and China – thinkers developed new concepts of human beings' relationship to God and to one another.
  
  This was the age of great texts: the Hebrew scriptures; the Upanishads, Bhagavad-Gita and Mahabharata; the Analects of Confucius; the dialogues of Plato. All of them stressed the primacy of doing good. As Armstrong sums it up, "First you must commit yourself to the ethical life; then disciplined and habitual benevolence, not metaphysical conviction, would give you intimations of the transcendence you sought."
  
  The Golden Rule -- do unto others as you would have them do unto you -- recurs through all four of the traditions Armstrong surveys. "The Axial sages put the abandonment of selfishness and the spirituality of compassion at the top of their agenda," she writes. "For them religion was the Golden Rule. They concentrated on what people were supposed to transcend from – their greed, egotism, hatred, and violence."
  
  What makes the emergence of this "spirituality of empathy and compassion" more striking, and earns it the designation of "great transformation," is that in all four regions, Armstrong observes, it was "rooted in fear and pain." Brutal tribal warfare was the rule at the opening of the Axial Age, and religion was very much a matter of trying to make sure – through ritual and sacrifice and other means of subjugation to a mysterious higher power -- that you had a god on your side who was stronger than the other guy's god. Armstrong's often fascinating intellectual history shows how a new attitude toward God and humanity emerged from these bellicose origins, a belief that "Heaven was not simply influenced by the slaughter of pigs and oxen, but by compassion and justice."
  
  The transformation was brought about by a variety of thinkers whose ideas Armstrong presents with a welcome lucidity. There is, for example, the biblical author or editor – "or, more probably, a school of priestly writers and editors," Armstrong notes – whom scholars identify as "P." Armstrong shows how, in the opening chapter of Genesis, P transformed the creation myth, which in most traditions was presented as a titanic struggle, into a story of calm mastery: "There was no fighting or killing. God simply spoke a word of command: 'Let there be light!' … P methodically extracted aggression from the traditional cosmogony."
  
  Other sages recognized that religious dogma was itself a cause of strife. Confucius "discouraged theological chatter," Armstrong tells us. "Instead of wasting time on pointless theological speculation, people should imitate the reticence of Heaven and keep a reverent silence. … The ultimate concern was not Heaven but the Way." The Buddha, Armstrong says, even went so far as to deny the existence of "an authoritative, overseeing deity," because it "could become another prop or fetter that would impede enlightenment. … But his rejection of God or gods was calm and measured. He simply put them peacefully out of his mind."
  
  "The Great Transformation" is likely to irk scholars and specialists who object to an amateur, a former nun with degrees in English literature, venturing onto their turf. The book does seem over-ambitious in its attempt to survey four distinct cultures over a span of seven centuries about which reliable documentation is scant and what little is known has been overlaid with interpretation and speculation. Armstrong often glosses over the economic, social and political forces that underlie the transformation. She's much more focused on what was thought than on why it was thought. And there are good reasons to object to her overuse of phrases like "a time of transition." We're always in some kind of transition, after all – history is not a row of little fixed and stable boxes between which human beings scurry, doffing old ideas and putting on new.
  
  But above all else, this is a book that aims to still the noise of our own troubled time. Since Sept. 11, 2001, Armstrong has been a frequent commentator in the media on matters of belief, particularly on the emergence of militant fundamentalism. Her book is a defense of the healing power of religion in an age when many have concluded, as she puts it, "that religion itself is inescapably violent or that violence and intolerance are endemic to a particular tradition." She reminds us that the Axial sages lived "in violent societies like our own. What they created was a spiritual technology that utilized natural human energies to counter this aggression." Armstrong's conviction, passion and intelligence radiate throughout the book, making us feel the urgency of the ideas it seeks to convey.
  
  
• 
  Nathan

  Beginning with an exploration of Asian religious tradition, Karen Armstrong gradually moves to a general, and rather generic, call for religious tolerance. She focuses exclusively on the religious traditions of the Asian continent, notably Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism, and while she does a cracking good job of it (her explication of Buddhist belief was the clearest I've ever read), she does so to the neglect of the contributions of the West to religious thought, notably Catholicism and post-Reformation Christianity. If these are too modern for her selected timeframe, she ought to have presented Judaism as more separate from Christianity; as it is, the omission feels like a job half-done.
  
  She also doesn't do so well when highlighting the distinctives of each particular faith, combining them into a single nebulous philosophy more akin to modern New Age thought, rather than presenting each as an independent system. I think part of the problem was ambition: she can't possibly present a nuanced and exact portrait of each faith in the amount of detail she needs to. This sort of syncretism, while it may help the cause of religious tolerance in general, does nothing to further the ostensible goal of such a study: substantive dialogue on religious issues that doesn't degenerate into violence.
  This book had potential, and realizes some of it. But it leaves much to be desired, foremost a fulfillment of its own solution: genuine discussion between different faiths that isn't afraid to acknowledge differences.
• 
  Dawn

  Much as I’d like to just leave my review to one word, fascinating, I don’t think that would be sufficient.
  So, this book left me feeling just a bit uneducated as I know practically nothing about all but one of the religions discussed but I did find it curious, as obviously the author has, that all three would have such similar ideas at approximately the same time. The progression of each religion based on their geographical area and societal influences as well as their ultimate conclusions, which while laudable don’t seem to have been followed very well through the centuries, made for some thought provoking reading.
  While the conclusions of the book came across to me as simplistic to the point of being boiled down to ‘be nice’, the lead up to that and all the historical elements were very well presented.
  
• 
  Cliff

  A bit dry but very well researched.
• 
  Becca

  Armstrong is quickly becoming one of my favorite religious thinkers. Here, she gives a history of the evolution of religious concepts from ancient times through the Axial Age when the ideals governing the world's societies were developed, taking us into the development of religion and philosophy in Asia, Eurasia, India, and the Middle East. I've been waiting to read a book like this practically my whole life, and while I certainly learned plenty, I now have even more questions: What about the ancient religions in the Americas? They followed many of the same evolutionary paths that the Eastern-based religions did, but Armstrong said nothing about the Western ancients. I understand this is meant to be a book about the thoughts that are still prevalent today on a global scale, so those religions may be outside the scope of this work, but I certainly hope she writes about them someday and how they fit into the timeline she's developed here.
  
  She frequently uses the term "technology" in this book to describe the mental/doctrinal inventions developed over different regions to address life's common questions and challenges. It's such a wonderful way to think about religious thought.
  
  Some things to know if you are considering reading this:
  *Armstrong is a former Catholic nun who is a leading scholar in the field of world religion and religious history.
  
  *While she continues to believe in Christian principles, her books are wonderfully neutral. You'd never guess she adheres to any specific viewpoint because she is unfailingly fair and respectful of each viewpoint she's talking about.
  
  *If you're looking for scholarly "proof" of the supremacy of Christianity, you won't find it here. But I guarantee you'll see the faith (and all the others) with a much deeper appreciation than you did before.
• 
  Jill Hudson

  I was surprised by the many gushing reviews this book has received. Yes, it is a useful survey of the emergence and development of several world religions, and a very readable introduction to their characteristics. It also makes a strong case for mutual understanding and tolerance. But for me it just doesn't do 'what it says on the tin'. It offers no real explanation of why so many similar ideas emerged in different cultures at a similar time, though on the cover it says it is going to. Why were so many of Plato's ideas so reminiscent of Hinduism? What were the links between the two? We never find out; and what is more, the similarities between the various religions and philosophies are stressed rather too simplistically at the expense of the differences. Armstrong implies that metaphysical beliefs simply weren't important to the 'Axial sages', whose insights she boils down to not much more than 'The Golden Rule' which she says has never been improved upon. In fact Jesus' statement of this 'rule' goes way beyond most of its previous formulations, in that most other sages stated it in its 'negative' form ('Don't do to others what you wouldn't want them to do to you') whereas Jesus', positive, version is much, much more challenging ('Do to others what you would have them do for you'). She claims that 'loving your neighbour' is pretty much all that true religion entails, forgetting that loving God is seen as equally important, not only by Jesus but by the Jewish 'Shema' and by the champions of many other faiths as well. Belief in God is not an optional extra; genuine compassion and transformation are only attainable when God's grace indwells us, not as a result of 'discipline'. Furthermore neither Christianity, rabbinic Judaism nor Islam emerged in Armstrong's 'Axial Age' (900-200BCE) at all, so she has to perform some dodgy sleight of hand to force them to fit into her framework. She is also guilty of some vague, generalised statements unbacked up by evidence and almost worthy of Philomena Cunk (e.g. 'In the ancient world it was generally permissable to eat only meat that had been sacrificed ceremonially in a sacred area'(!) - p161). I think I would have enjoyed this book more if its blurb hadn't made all sorts of extravagant claims which the content doesn't live up to.
• 
  Miroku Nemeth

  I have mixed feelings about this book. It's a perspective on history that is interesting in many ways, but very misleading in others. The attribution of nonviolence to peoples who were violent is really quite inexplicable if it was actually a historical analysis of the theoretical "axis age" (that this is a problematic construction is actually borne out by the tortured argument structure of the book), but it is a recurrent theme she uses to support her thesis throughout the 500 and some odd pages of this text. She insists on finding ahimsa where there is no ahimsa, making maddening logical leaps when doing so.
  
  It's sad because I do believe in the idea that her construction of the core of the beliefs of the axial age puts forth is actually one worth supporting. I believe that the values of compassion, spirituality, and a universal application of the "Golden Rule" found throughout the cultures surveyed in this book are what all human beings, religious or non-religious, need to live by, and I support any who wish to foster these things among humanity. It is an essential aspect of my work as a teacher to try and bring awareness of these values across the "walls" where "good fences" do not "make good neighbors". Worth a read on many levels, and of much redeeming value, but a very agenda-driven (even if a positive and beautiful agenda) narrative that is not necessarily very historical. Perhaps if I hadn't been reading so much of the history of violence and warfare recently, including Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined", this wouldn't have bothered me so much, but these readings only brought what I had long known to the forefront of my mind and thus clashed with her reshapings of history.
  
  
• 
  Edwin Setiadi

  The birth and evolution of religion
  
  Karen Armstrong refer to it as the Axial Age. It was a period of time between 900 to 200 BC where in 4 distinct regions the great world traditions came into being: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and mythology and philosophical rationalism in Greece.
  
  These traditions bring us the likes of Socrates, Plato, Buddha, Confucius, Jeremiah, Euprides, Mencius, and the mystics of Upanishads. Even today, in times of spiritual and social crisis we constantly referred back to this period of time for guidance, as Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were all latter-day flowering of the original Axial Age.
  
  So what prompted these 4 regions to develop a similar philosophy?
  
  This book is about the history of that period of time. It is about the people and the conflicts, the drama, and the reconciliations.  About how spiritual and religious lives evolved, with all the stories exquisitely told in impressive detail and reads like 4 different epic colossal movies. It is quite literally 4 big historical accounts combined into one dense narrative.
  
  Now, due to its incredible wealth of knowledge this book is not only heavy to read, but also challenging to summarize. But here are the 5 main points that I learned from the book:
  
  Firstly, the 4 Axial Age traditions were born out of a reaction of their respective circumstance of the time. Confucius was born in the middle of lawless, battle-torn, region. The birth of the dark Greek mythology stems from a period of 400 years of darkness in that region due to war and hardship. The Axial Age in India began when the ritual reformers began to extract the conflict and agression from the sacrificial contest. While Israel started their Axial Age after the destruction of Jerusalem and the enforced deportation of the exiles to Babylonia, which then the priestly writers began to create a philosophy of reconciliation and non-violence.
  
  Even in what Armstrong refer as “the final flowering of the Axial Age”, the prophet Muhammad (PBUH) lived in a violent society when old values were breaking down, before Islam arrises. Indeed, as Armstrong remarks, “[t]he religious traditions created during the Axial Age in all four regions were rooted in fear and pain.”
  
  The second point of the book is, when the environment changes the religion changes along with it. One of the most common occurances of change is political move, which can sometimes include or emit a deity from a culture. For example, when King Solomon made diplomatic marriages with foreign princesses, the marriages include the merging of the gods in the royal cult, where they built temples for them in the hills outside Jerusalem.
  
  Another example of the politics of gods is the story of Elijah. In the old Middle Eastern theology, El had appointed a deity to each of the nations: Yahweh was the god of Israel, Chemish the holy one of Moab, while Milkom was the god of Ammon. But some Israelites prophets felt that their god Yahweh would be undermined in the region if a king imported a foreign deity into the royal cult. Hence, during his time, Elijah tried to keep the god of Baal in Phonecia so that Yahweh would remain thriving as the local god, where the brutal story on how exactly he did it was told grippingly in the book.
  
  Meanwhile, Yahweh Himself was originally one god among many others (He was a god of war), but later in the 6th century BC as the circumstances changed He too evolved to become the only God in the eyes of the worshipers, which in turn evolved to eventually become the sole God that we familiar with today.
  
  Thirdly, when the religion gets too brutal or corrupted there will be a breakaway sect, such as Christianity from Judaism, Protestants from Catholic, and the many religion out of Hinduism like Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, while Islam fixed the problems of old Pagan faith that was no longer working in Arabian society.
  
  Fourthly, all of the Axial Age changes had often occurred between two imperial-style ventures. The Indian Axial Age occurred after the demise of the Harappan Civilization and ended with the rise of the Mauryan empire. The Greek Axial Age transformation occurred between the Mycenaean kingdom and the Macedonian empire. The Chinese Axial Age got under way after the collapse of the Zhou dynasty and ended when Qin unified the warring states. And the Jews, who had suffered horribly from the imperial adventures in the region, had been propelled into their Axial Age after the destruction of their homeland and the trauma of deportation that severed their link with their past and thus forced them to start again.
  
  And lastly, most of the Axial Age sages did not leave a book. Instead, their teachings were passed on orally, which was the custom back then. And their wisdom were eventually written down as a holy text long after they’re gone, which as you can imagine could be exposed to the many risks of human errors or misquotations or hidden agenda of the writers.
  
  Hence, everything that have been written down ever since, everything that we now know in the modern society, are the product of many environmental changes, compromises, evolution, revolution, mergers and acquisitions, or even anihilation of deities and cults over a long and turmulous period of time.
  
  So, in short: 1. The Axial Age were born as a response of a violent era 2. When the environment changes the religion changes with it 3. When the religion gets too brutal or corrupted there will be a breakaway sect 4. The Axial Age occurred between two imperial-style ventures 5. Most of the Axial Age sages did not leave a book, and their written wisdom could be exposed to the many “agency problems.”
  
  Seeing this summary might prompt us to ask the next question: will this pattern repeat itself? Karen Armstrong remarks that reformation should be happening all the time, that religion cannot stand still. Because if they cannot adapt they will become obsolete and fade away, just like the many religious cults mentioned in the book that did not survive the Axial Age. And yes, according to Armstrong, we are now in the midst of a Second Axial Age.
• 
  جاسم كلمد

  تصفحتُ الكتاب بالبداية فقط لأعرف عما يدور وعما يتحدث، ثم وجدتني أمضي فصلاً بعد الآخر بثبات.. اللاعنف.. الحب.. التسامح.. الرحمة.. كتاب كبير، يأخذك عبر التاريخ متتبّعًا تطور عدة أديان، منها أديان وضعية، وسماوية.. فقط لتخبرنا الكاتبة بكل حب بأننا يجب أن نتعلم تلك المبادئ التي أرساها الحكماء الأولين، والأنبياء الأولين، لنبذ العنف ونشر الحب والتسامح.. معلومات كثيرة يمتلئ بها الكتاب حول طوائف دينية مختلفة، كلها يُفضي للذي بعده.. وكأنما هو تطور للفكر البشري الديني.. إنه ليس بكتاب ممتع لمن لا يهتم بتفاصيل كتلك، لكنني بعدما أغلقت الكتاب، وجدتني أتذكر كتابًا للدلاي لاما.. ربما وصاياه أكثر وضوحًا وبالإمكان استيعابها بل وتطبيقها
  أن ننبذ الأنانية، ونحب الآخر.. شيء ليس بهذه السهولة... لكنه ممكن جدًا.. وعلى حد قول الكاتبة بهذا الكتاب هو شيء نحتاج إليه بشدة في عالمنا المتفجر بالعنف
  
  
• 
  AC Fick

  Armstrong is informed and informative without ever being didactic or preachy. This book, given the vast scope of its subject matter -- across time and space -- is infinitely readable, while always being detailed, specific, and accurate.
  
  If you're intrigued by or interested in the history of the major religious and faith-based traditions in the world, this book is rewarding reading.
  
  In fact, this ought to be required reading for all students of humanity; everyone, every last one of us, ought to read this book.
• 
  Lori

  I have read this two times and now am having it read to me in bed by my husband, a release for gut centered pacifists pained by all these wars.
  
• 
  Tom

  It took a long time to finish this book, but it is worth the effort. In its scope and importance, it reminds me of Ideas: from Fire to Freud, another very worthwhile book. However, this one is more focused and, in some ways, more original.
  
  Armstrong deals with what the historian Karl Jaspers calls the Axial Age (that period between 900 and 200 BC) during which the major philosophical and religious traditions that exist today, began. She follows developments in this regard in 4 distinct regions and traditions: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece. “The Axial Age was one of the most seminal periods of intellectual, psychological, philosophical and religious change in recorded history; there would be nothing comparable until the Great Western Transformation, which created our won scientific and technological modernity.”
  
  A recurring point made by Armstrong, is that, in each of these examples, advances in understanding occurred in the midst of periods of violence and turmoil. Perhaps such social, and spiritual stresses are necessary pre-conditions for such change.
  
  “The prophets, mystics, philosophers, and poets of the Axial Age were so advanced and their vision was so radical that later generations tended to dilute it. In the process, they often produced exactly the kind of religiosity that the Axial reformers wanted to get rid of. That, I believe, is what has happened in the modern world.”
  
  “In Middle Eastern treaties, to 'love' meant to be helpful,loyal, and to give practical support. The commandment to love was not excessively utopian, therefore, but was within everybody's grasp.”
  
  In speaking about the importance of theater in Greek culture: “The playwrights often chose subjects that reflected recent events, but usually presented them in a mythical setting that distanced them from the contemporary scene and enabled the audience to analyze and reflect upon the issues. The festival was a communal meditation, during which the audience worked through their problems and predicament. All male citizens were obliged to attend; even prisoners were released for the duration of the festival.”
  
  In fifth century BC China a school of philosophy founded by Mozi, “...used the imagery of the working man, comparing Heaven's organization of the world to the compasses and L-square of the wheelwright and the carpenter, who employed these instruments 'to measure the round and the square throughout the world.;”
  
  Mencius (371-288 BC) was a devout Confucian. He taught that it was natural for people to feel compassion toward those who suffer. [This is supported as well by newer findings in human behavior and neuroscience] “Every single person had four fundamental 'impulses' (tuan) that, if properly cultivated, would grow into the four cardinal virtues: benevolence, justice, courtesy, and the wisdom to distinguish right from wrong. They were like the first shoots that would one day grow into a plant...You could stamp on these 'shoots'-just as you could cripple or deform yourself-but if they were cultivated properly, they acquired a vibrant, dynamic power of their own. Once they were active, they would transform not only the person who practiced them, but everyone with whom he came into contact.”
  
  “The Greek word idea did not mean 'idea' in the modern English sense..[it] was not a private, subjective mental construct, but a 'form' pattern' or essence'. A form of ideas was an archetype, the original pattern that gave each particular entity its distinctive shape and condition. Plato's philosophical notion can be seen as a rationalized and internalized expression of the ancient perennial philosophy in which every earthly object or experience has its counterpart in the divine sphere.”
  
  “We moderns experience thinking as something that we do. But Plato envisaged it as something that happened to the mind: the objects of though were living realities in the psyche of the person who learned to see them. This vision of beauty was not merely an aesthetic experience. Once people had experienced it, they found that they had undergone a profound moral change and could no longer live in a shabby, unethical way. A person who had achieved this knowledge could 'bring forth not merer reflected images of goodness, but true goodness, because he will be in contact not with a reflection but the truth...Plato's description of beauty was clearly similar to what others called God or the Way” In Plato's world: “..the nous of each human being was divine; each had a daimon, a divine spark, within him or herself, whose purpose was to 'raise us up away from the earth and toward what is akin to us in heaven.' Human beings therefore lived in a perfectly rational world, the exploration of which was both a scientific and a spiritual enterprise.”
  
  “The Hellenistic philosophers may not have been as revolutionary as their predecessors, but hey had lasting influence, and in many ways they epitomized the emerging Western spirit. In the West, people gravitated toward science and logos, and were less spiritually ambitio9us than the sages of India and “China. Instead of making the heroic effort ot discover a realm of transcendent peace within, the Hellenistic philosophers were prepared to settle for a quiet life. Instead of training the intuitive powers of the mind, they turned to scientific logos. Instead of achieving mystical enlightenment, the West was excited by a more mundane illumination. The Western genius for science eventually transformed the wolrld, and in the sixteenth century its scientific revolution introduced a new Axial Age. The would greatly benefit humanity, but it was inspired by a different species of genius. Instead of the Buddha, Socrates, and Confucius, the heroes of he second Axial Age would be Newton, Freud, and Einstein.”
  
  Re: the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) credited to Laozi: “While other creatures kept to the Way designed for the, humans had separated themselves from thier dao by constant, busy yu wei relfection: they made distinctions that did not exist, and formulated solemn principles of action that were simply egotistical projections.”
  
  Re: Jewish theology: “ The rabbis fully accepted the Axial principle that the ultimate reality was transcendent and ineffable. Nobody could have the last word on the subject of God. Jews were forbidden to pronounce God's name, as a powerful reminder that any attempt to express the divine was so inadequate that it was potentially blasphemous...What we call 'God' was not the same for everybody. Each of the prophets had experienced a different 'God', because his personality had influenced his conception of the divine.”
  
  Re: Muslim theology: “the Quran did not claim to be a new revelation, but simply to resate the message that had been given to Adam, the father of humanity, who was also the first prophet. It insisted that Muhammad had not come to replace the prophets of the past but to return to he primordial faith of Abraham, who lived before the Torah and the gospel-before, that is, the religions of God had split into warring sects.”
  
  “When warfare and terror are rife in a society, this affects everything that people do. The hatred and horror infiltrate their dreams, relationships, desires, and ambitions. The Axial sages saw this happening to their own contemporaries and devised an education rooted in the deeper, less conscious levels of the self to help them overcome this. The fat that they all came up with such profoundly similar solutions by so many different routes suggest that they had indeed discovered something important about the way human beings worked. Regardless of the theological 'beliefs'-which, as we have seen,did not much concern the sages-they all concluded that if people made a disciplined effort to reeducate themselves, they would experience and enhancement of their humanity, in one way or another, their programs were designed to eradicate the egotisms that are largely responsible for our violence and promoted the empathic spirituality of the Golden Rule....The practice of disciplined sympathy would itself yield intimations of transcendence.”
  
  “This is not to say that all theology should be scrapped or hat the conventional beliefs about God or the ultimate are 'wrong'. But-quite simply- they cannot express the entire truth. ...Christianity... has set great store by doctrinal orthodoxy, and many Christians could not imagine religion without their conventional beliefs. This is absolutely fine, because these dogmas often express a profound spiritual truth. The test is simple: if people's beliefs-secular or religious- make them belligerent, intolerant and unkind about other people's faith, they are not 'skillful'. If, however, their convictions impel them to act compassionately and to honor the stranger, then they are good, helpful and sound. This is the test of true religiosity in every single one of the major traditions.”
  
  What I found most original about this book is the idea that over centuries, humans, at least some of us, have been engaged in a gradual advance in our spiritual nature and that, across time and distance, different cultures and traditions have converged in very similar ways. The general road map that Armstrong describes runs through ritual, kenosis (emptying...of one's ego and material attachments), knowledge, suffering, empathy, concern for everybody and all is one. She argues that the Axial sages brought forth new formulations during times of violence and social upheaval. Given recent history, are we in a period when there will be further advances in human spiritual development?
  
  
• 
  Dan

  Why should we look to Confucius or the Buddha for help? Surely a study of this distant period can only be an exercise in spiritual archaeology, when what we need is to create a more innovative faith that reflects the realities of our own world. Yet, in fact, we have never surpassed the insights of the Axial Age. In times of spiritual and social crisis, men and women have constantly turned back to this period for guidance. They may have interpreted the Axial discoveries differently, but they have never succeeded in going beyond them. Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for example, were all latter-day flowerings of the original Axial Age.
  
  Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions is an exhaustive review of how the religious spirituality reflected in the Axial Age (as defined by Karl Jaspers, which extended from about 900 to 200 BCE) developed “spiritual technology” for humanity to cope with existence, conflict, civilization, and death. She focuses on the evolving philosophies underpinning the religious practice of four main civilizations burgeoning during these centuries: China, Greece, India, and Judea. The research is thorough, but her prose is academic and dry. This is a difficult, lengthy book to complete which rewards the labor.
  
  I found her examination of ancient Jewish and Greek life rich, detailed, and fascinating because I am familiar with the main players and history of the period: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Homer, Socrates, Aeschylus, and Plato. By the same token, the sections on Chinese were dull and plodding because, honestly, a majority of my understanding of Chinese history is through repeated viewings of Mulan. I can’t fault Armstrong for pressing on regardless; she should not dumb her material down because western civilization education—specifically, American education--ignores Asian history. The complicated evolution of the Hindu faith is excellently presented, though the names and philosophical terms were largely indecipherable. Armstrong conscientiously includes original language in her text—she waters nothing down. It makes for difficult reading, but the main thrust of her arguments and her confident narrative voice carried me through.
  
  We should all read an objective book on religion like this one. We can cherry-pick denominations and sects, but we should have a good perspective on how major religions intersect as well as diverge. Armstrong makes a strong case that spirituality has many underlying, universal currents which, in the end, provide humanity with a means to navigate life.
  
  The test is simple: if people’s beliefs—secular or religious—make them belligerent, intolerant, and unkind about other people’s faith, they are not “skillful.” If, however, their convictions impel them to act compassionately and to honor the stranger, then they are good, helpful, and sound. This is the test of true religiosity in every single one of the major traditions.
  Instead of jettisoning religious doctrines, we should look for their spiritual kernel. A religious teaching is never simply a statement of objective fact: it is a program for action.
  
• 
  Thomas

  While it is very easy here to lose the forest for the trees, The Great Transformation is a fine popular account of comparative religion. What drives the book is the idea that there was an Axial Age that spanned several cultures which could have had little to no contact with each other, and that this age was marked by peace-seeking and empathy after millenia of tribal warfare. This is vastly oversimplying the notion first put forth by Karl Jaspers, which Armstrong uses as a frame without really attempting to prove. She presents the historical details of the world's major religions (and Greek philosophy) in a vivid and absorbing manner, suggesting the proof without actually proving what is most likely unprovable anyway. What she ends up with is something better than a dry theoretical argument: she tells the stories, and the stories survive for reasons that are evident beyond proof.
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  Sean

  "The Great Transformation: The Beginnings of Religious Traditions" is the sort of scholarship you can come to expect from Karen Armstrong, an independent scholar from Britain who writes extensively on religious topics. She is able to take quite complicated issues and ideas and his able to make them accessible to a wider audience. This really is the biggest job of a scholar, whether independent or attached to a university- to be able to communicate your thoughts and ideas in a coherent way. If you can do this to a massive audience of non-academics, all the better. In this regard, Karen Armstrong is in many ways second-to-none.
  
  "The Great Transformation" describes a theoretical period in history known as the "Axial Age," which according to her estimations ran from about 900 BCE to 200 BCE (with extensions into the Common Era). During this time period of immense change and characterized by violence and trauma, nearly all of the worlds major religious or philosophical traditions got their starts, from Israelite Monotheism to Vedic Religions to Chinese Religions to Greek Philosophy. Its a very broad theory they implies that humanity as a whole had reached a certain point by this time period to need a new form of religiosity and spirituality and therefore, this transition happened in a number of places simultaneously. For Armstrong, the transition to Axial Age religions involved an evolving sense of self and an acute awareness of suffering and pain. These religions gave their followers the tools to live in chaotic times and make sense of the rapid changes surrounding them. There is also the sense that the religious journey is one that forced the follower to acknowledge the impermanence of things and the difficulty of knowing the divine. What these faiths did was to encourage their followers towards a certain "knosis" of the divine, or to a sense of truths and ideas which are not able to be articulated. This is the sort of knowledge that cannot be taught but knowledge acquired through living and practice.
  
  The book has some amazing ideas and deserves a high rating for the audacity to try to synthesize almost 1,000 years of complex history and philosophy from four different areas. The information is fascinating and clearly aimed for a modern audience- whom she tries to encourage at the end to take the lessons from these thinkers and apply them to the modern world. However, I cannot rate this higher for a number of reasons. First is that while the information is extremely useful and interesting, it suffers from a real lack of organization. The book is arranged chronologically and thematically but within chapters, there is really jumping between the four regions. I do not think that she chose the order of the content randomly but her chain of logic is hard to discern. I also think that by trying to connect these movements so closely, she risks making them seem like they were in extremely close contact and that their developments were in one logical stream. It is a very tricky line to balance and I feel at times, she gets trapped in the idea of the Axial Age. What I may consider doing in the future is reading all of the material for one area at once to be able to connect the sections across chapters. Second is that I am not sure how much I buy into the Axial Age theory. The evidence is compelling but I am wary of "all-encompassing" theories of religion. We must be careful not to allow the theory to overtake what I would call the organic nature of religion.
  
  As a new scholar of religion myself, I can agree with this theory on a basic level. I think that this new conception of humanity was a logical development of religion and shows one way that humans can react to profound change. An axial mindset would be useful in the modern world and I think this book goes a long way to remind us of these essential truths founded by these seekers so many years ago.
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  Mary Ellen

  Karen Armstrong's scholarly exploration of the Axial Age was esoteric at times, and I found her discussion of Christianity to be surprisingly lacking, but ultimately I loved how she rounded it all out with a discussion of how compassion and the Golden Rule is the heart of all the world's religious traditions. Very inspiring.