Sages of the world, unite!

Karen Armstrong likes to take on large subjects, and they don’t come much larger than this. Her latest book is nothing less than an attempt to describe the historical origins of all the great world religions. The nearest analogy is The Key to All Mythologies, the grandiloquently named tome which George Eliot’s Mr Casaubon never got round to finishing. But it would be unkind to press the analogy too far. Armstrong is not a pedant, and whatever else may be said about this book she has certainly finished it.

Its focus is what she calls the ‘Axial Age’. The phrase was coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers to describe the sixth century BC, the period in which he wrongly believed that Buddha, Lao-tzu, Confucius and Zoroaster had lived. Unfortunately, accurate chronology is particularly difficult in this period, and modern scholarship later reassigned these sages to various periods from the 13th century BC to the third. This rather undermined Jaspers’ theory that there was a critical (‘axial’) moment when human sentiment took on new and abiding forms in different regions of the inhabited world.

Armstrong knows this and can see the difficulty. But it does not stop her running with the theory. The idea, in summary, is that at a certain stage of humanity’s intellectual development a few great teachers at different times and places hit upon the notion that instead of ritualised violence, compassion might be the basis of religious experience. Kindness, tolerance, mutual respect among neighbours and rivals, understanding other systems of belief, became part of the practice of religions which were in other ways as different as Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoro- astrianism and Judaism. The author contrasts this approach with the dogmatic rationalism which she perceives in Greek political thought from Plato onwards, and which she regards as fundamentally intolerant.