The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions Paperback – April 10, 2007

My first comment is that the Amazon post from Publishers Weekly (pasted here) needs an editor..Karl Jung is not the one who coined the term Axial Age. It was Karl Jaspers.Furthermore, the review is sensationalistic and misses the key points of Armstrong's work."It's not what one may expect from a book about the development of the world's religions: 'Crouched in his mother's womb, he lay in wait for his father, armed with a sickle, and the next time Uranus penetrated Gaia, he cut off his genitals and threw them to the earth.' However, the Greek myth of Cronus clearly illustrates Armstrong's main thesis, that the 'simultaneous' development of the world's religions during what Karl Jung called the axial age, is a direct result of the violence and chaos, both physical and spiritual, of past civilizations. Armstrong, a former nun turned self-described 'freelance monotheist,' has enough background and personal investment in the material to make it come alive. Her delivery is crystal clear, informative and, though somewhat academic, easy for the layman to understand. Her voice is straightforward yet wrought with palpable concern. This reinforces the book's goals of creating a clear understanding of where religious developments have come from and explaining how today's 'violence of an unprecedented scale' parallels the activities that created the 'axial age' in the first place."In The Great Transformation (TGT) Armstrong meticulously, but without losing energy, explores the emergence of the pivotal religions of the world that emerged from c. 900 to c. 200 BCE. Her treatment is, first of all, historical and cultural, with emphases upon India (Hinduism and Buddhism), China (Taoism and Confucianism), the Middle East (Judaism), and ancient Greece.Although Armstrong often is tagged as a comparative religion scholar/writer, she is less interested in comparing religions (comparisons almost always devolve into value assessments that fuel competitive approaches to religion) than she is showing how diverse histories and cultures leave us with deep resonances of religious and spiritual awareness.Those resonances--including ritual, kenosis (emptying), knowledge, suffering, empathy, and concern for everybody--provide the clues to a careful reader to help understand how regional/cultural/historical expressions of religion finally transcended those beginnings and became viable across cultures and eras in history.The transformation suggested in the book's title is kaleidoscopic. From time to time and from place to place the resonances emerge from particular circumstances and move toward universally recognized traits of authentic, transformative religions.A delight found in each chapter is Armstrong's judicious use of primary sacred texts--yes, including Homer's epics and the Greek dramatists broad ouvre--that contextualize the values of religion without attempting to put all religions in one proverbial pot.Finally, TGT begins with reflections upon recent history (e.g., the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001) and the rise of the perceived certainties of science and technology that have had the effect of muting the myths and mysteries found in the history of religions. Armstrong's closing parenthesis, "The Way Forward," holds out the hope those seeking to survive the twenty-first century might find, again, the values of myth and mysteries from ancient and contemporary flowerings of Axial Religion.

This is an outstandingly interesting book, even if you do not agree with every one of Karen Armstrong's conclusions.The great German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers first proposed the idea of an "Axial period" that ran from approximately 800 to 200 BCE. During this time all the fundamental creations that underlie our current civilization came into being. It was also during this time that four of the world's great religions and philosophical traditions emerged: Hinduism and Buddhism in India; Confucianism and Taoism in China; Monotheism in Israel, that eventually gave expression to Judaism, Christianity and Islam; and rationalism in Greece. Some experts - including Jaspers - included a fifth: Zoroastrianism in Persia. Most scholars now consider that Zoroastrianism emerged before the Axial period, so it is discussed in this book, but is not one of the four great strands.Following Jaspers' lead, Karen Armstrong credits this six to seven hundred year period as the turning point in the development of human spiritual consciousness. She describes these developments as a reaction to political disintegration and religious intolerance that lead large numbers of people to turn away from their customary systems of ritual and worship, and instead to search for and to create new systems based on justice, compassion and love. This search provided the catalyst for major transformations in religious culture.Though she is a scholar, Karen writes a clear and easily digestible account about the spiritual heart of each of these religious doctrines, and shows that they all have some things in common: primarily the need for compassion and love in overcoming violence, hatred and selfishness. All the great sages of the time from Socrates to some of the Old Testament prophets, the mystics of the Upanishads and the Buddha taught the central importance of personal responsibility and self-criticism, which had to be followed by practical. effective action.Although a great step forward, the emergence of the ethics and religions of the Axial period was far from perfect. As the most glaring example, women were largely excluded from a significant place in most of these systems.Karen's approach also begs another question: did religions emerge as a reaction to the times or had some people reached a point in their development where they were able to receive Divine guidance?It is easy to see many of the parallels between the Axial period and the turmoil of today. Perhaps a return to the ethos of the time, in an evermore interconnected world, armed now with the cognitive and emotional insights of the last two thousand years, might help provide the guidelines for another great step forward along the spiritual path. And a way of dealing with some of the problems that threaten to engulf us.As Karen Armstrong say, "In the last resort, "love" and "concern" will benefit everybody more than self-interested or shortsighted policies."This book makes for absorbing and inspirational reading, and shows the importance of returning to the roots of our different faiths.Highly recommended.