Axial Age

The Axial Age was a significant moment in the development of ancient religious cultures. In 1949, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) suggested the term Axial Age, or Axial Turn, for the period around the fifth century BCE, a time when, throughout much of the world, a new kind of thinking gained force. It questioned wisdom based on tribe, tradition, or shamanic mysticism, offering instead new answers, grounded at least in part in intellectual analysis, concerning the gods, the nature of the universe, and the meaning of human life, and emphasizing individual freedom and moral responsibility. Jaspers also stressed that while in pre-Axial societies the spiritual world tended to be close to earth and a model of the earthly world, now the divine was far more transcendent, and salvation was a matter of individually bridging that divide.

These were the years of Confucius and Lao Ze in China, the Buddha and the Upanishads in India, perhaps Zarathustra in Persia, the earliest Greek philosophers, and the greatest Hebrew prophets. Some religious studies scholars have expanded the Axial Age to include the emergence of the major global religions, including Christianity and Islam, or at least have recognized the significance of the Axial Age in their prehistorical development. The later evolution of Judaism and the spread of Hellenism in the wake of Alexander the Great, with their subsequent immense influence on religion and culture, are no less products of the Axial Age.

The Axial Age, and the appearance of individual religious prophets and founders, was undoubtedly a result of the earlier invention of writing, which led to recorded awareness of history and individual experience and made scriptures possible. After the fifth century BCE, the major literate religions can be viewed in terms of three principles that, while they certainly had earlier antecedents, were especially well honed by the Axial Age kind of consciousness. These principles are as follows: (1) an awareness that human life is lived in the context of historical time, within which new revelations can be received or teachings uttered and which itself can have spiritual meaning as the arena of spiritual warfare and (even if ultimately cyclical) is bounded by creation and consummation; (2) the realization that individual humans can be the agents of these revelations and can achieve spiritual eminence in historical time, as did Confucius, the Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad; and (3) recognition to a radical degree that the spiritual destiny of the individual is based on his or her own choices, whether expressed in the language of karma and reincarnation or of sin, faith, and forgiveness.

The Axial Age wrought a vast and potentially global change in human consciousness, though of course it took many centuries for its impact to permeate the globe.