Now that we have a good handle on the 1st Axial Age, we should explore what Karen Armstrong has put forward in her theory of the 2nd Axial Age, which would be occurring now. The religions born out of the 1st Axial age did not remain static and esoteric, as the primordial religions had done before them. Instead, the impact of axial religions on man and culture has expanded through further contemplation over the transcendent mysteries of the universe. Over the centuries, around these first drives toward an individual’s direct participation in transcendent virtuous life, religions have developed doctrines, dogmas, and moral laws around which societies came to be largely governed.
In this dogmatic state, Armstrong suggests that religion has overstepped its usefulness to man and is bound to be changed. It is fair to say historically, the expansion of Axial age religions remained unchecked until Western civilization entered the Enlightenment in the late 1600s, positing the idea that science and reason alone could explain the universe. This creates two important shifts away from thinking in the 1st Axial Age. First, man’s focus is shifted away from what is externally true to focusing on what we can be certain, first introduced by Decarte in the 1640’s in his Meditations of First Philosophy. By focusing on certainty, man is now the arbiter of truth and is left to explore what is directly accessible to him. This brings us to the second major shift humanity’s acceptance of materialism, that our physical being or matter is primary and all of our thoughts, drives , even our transcendental natures are secondary to our physical building block, as evidenced by the materialistic definition of the human soul in 1748 by the French doctor and philosopher La in L'Homme Machine.
Man as machine leads directly to disenchantment with the monotheistic creation mythologies and the embracement of evolution’s natural selection as the creation myth of man. Thus man reverts back to an animal whose biological drives and instincts are now the primary moral order, leaving the aesthetic virtuous life to seem outdated or as Armstrong describes it the The Great Transformation coercive and more likely to drive people out than keep people in.
Thus the explosion of scientific discovery and technological advancement that comes with the Enlightenment when coupled with our philosophical focus on the primarily material drives of man heralds in the 2nd Axial Age as Nietzche declares in the late 1800’s: ““God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. ”[1] Armstrong posits that a 2nd Axial Age is necessary as we cannot remain “imprisoned in the past.” Modern society has institutionalized change to the point where it is fair to say that the primary myth that drives humanity now is the “Myth of Progress”. We humans, through technology, can raise every human’s station to a life of contentment and physical comfort. What a brave new world that is. With the expectancy of change being the norm, Armstrong posits that the 2nd Axial Age is bring about a singular global experience of meaning, without the need for restrictive liturgical practice where everyone is the individual arbiter of faith, morality, and purpose from within themselves. The question that remains though whether this axial shift towards extreme individualism is actually evolutionarily sustainable or whether it may indeed herald the Abolition of Man, as C.S. Lewis once speculated.
Thus we should move our discussion over to the impact of transcendence on the evolution of man and its health as a species.
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.