Customer Reviews

The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions

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Karen Armstrong spent seven years as a nun, has written 16 previous books about religious matters, and is a prominent commentator on religious affairs in Britain. Her views have changed considerably since her earlier days in the convent, but she maintains tremendous respect for the world's great religions. She is a self-proclaimed "monotheist," but her writings seem to merely support and encourage a spiritual approach toward life - rather than a belief in any deity..."Human beings are spiritual animals...homo sapiens is also homo religiosus."

Armstrong's topic in this book is the Axial Age - those seven centuries from 900BCE to 200BCE that were marked by violence and warfare. In four different regions of the world, four great theologies (or ideologies) arose specifically to oppose these violent trends:

China - Daoism and Confucianism
India - Hinduism and Buddhism
Palestine - Judaism, which led to Christianity and Islam
Greece - philosophical rationalism

In all four geographical regions, the initial teaching was of tolerance, love, and humane treatment of others - despite the tendency for some of these to evolve into something else. Each tradition formulated its own version of the Golden Rule because what mattered was how one acts - putting ethical behavior at the heart of the spiritual life. The original prophets never relied on dogma - their emphasis was consistently on compassion. "The consensus of these four areas is an eloquent testimony to the unanimity of the spiritual quest of the human race. The Axial peoples all found that the compassionate ethic worked."

When secondary prophets or philosophers did start to insist on obligatory doctrines, it was usually a sign that the movement was losing its momentum. In our religious institutions and their dogmas, we are at times creating the exact type of religiosity that the prophets from the Axial Age were trying to get rid of.

Armstrong follows the progress of the religious development of the four Axial peoples side by side, charting their progress, sometimes in fits and starts. According to the author, we have never surpassed the insights of the Axial Age. Each generation since has tried to adapt the original insights to their particular situation and that is our task today.

The following themes are apparent throughout:

1. God is made in man's image rather than the other way around. He is a projection of man's cultural needs, changing as culture evolves, and as new charismatic leaders present themselves.

2. Each tradition wrestled with Mythos versus Logos - the more mystical, spiritual, and tolerant approach versus the one more analytical and theological. An emphasis shift from a mystical, unknowable God to a more personal God has its advantages, but tends to allow intolerance and fundamentalism.

3. When concentrating on the similarities as to how humanity has always searched for God, they are more obvious than the differences.

Armstrong started life with a conservative faith which has changed over the years to a more liberal and mystical one in her quest for God, sans dogma. Many Christians have lived a similar scenario, yet maintained their original beliefs. This book is not a polemic, and I think most people of any faith would not be offended by her approach. In "The Great Transformation," Armstrong is her usual scholarly and convincing self, with insightful comments on every page that would be hard to find elsewhere. "Religion is like a raft," she has said, explaining the Buddhist view of it. "Once you get across the river, moor the raft and go on. Don't lug it with you if you don't need it any more."

The Great Transformation is a history of the Axial Age, the period in the approximate first millenium B.C.E. when nearly all of our present day religions and philosophies were born. The Axial Age was a time when religion and philosophy evolved from the mere worship of something out of fear it could hurt you to a true ethical, compassionate belief. Karen Armstrong is a brilliant writer and thinker, and this is her finest work.

In a series of well organized and clearly developed chapters Armstrong traces the development of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Greek philosophy, Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Armstrong provides context for the developments of these thought systems by succinctly describing the troubles of the time: invasions, epidemics, and the ebb and flow of cultural diffusion and change. She then relates these problems to the developing thought systems and shows how their influence penetrated the minds of the seers, prophets, and philosophers who were at work throughout the turmoil. Most interestingly, she interconnects the ideas with each other, showing how similar circumstances and contacts created philosophies and religions which shared the same concerns and often advocated many of the same solutions.

The Great Transformation should be on the shelves of all who seek to better understand the origins of so much of our human cultural heritage.

Karen Armstrong has written many shorter books dealing with the history of specific religious traditions, and has earned wide respect for her learning and insights. In "The Great Transformation" she attempts a grand synthesis of many of these traditions.

She gives us richly detailed accounts of the flow of religious thought within four cultural geographies over a vast period of time, but centering on what is labeled the "Axial Age": from around the 10th century BCE to approximately 200 BCE. China, India, Greece, and Israel are the geographical loci of her account. She interweaves these accounts in chronological fashion, seldom drawing explicit parallels until she reaches her concluding chapter.

In her introduction however, Armstrong makes clear her intent and her thesis. She says that "we have never surpassed the insights of the Axial Age" and that "[t]he Axial sages have an important message for our time." A reader will naturally go forward wondering if she will succeed in convincing us of that age's cohesion and its relevance to our own.

The amount of information in this book of almost 500 pages is undeniably impressive. It is organized effectively and embeds over 25 maps and other clarifying tables. The Bibliography is excellent.

When describing one of the phases of religious thinking that rolled across the Indian subcontinent, Ms. Armstrong writes "To an outsider, this sounds frankly incredible - a series of abstract statements that are impossible to verify. ... The sages did not give us rational demonstrations of their ideas." This fairly describes most of what she presents. Although this kind of editorial comment is rare in the main text, that text makes clear that "rational demonstrations" are seldom what religious teaching is about. One notable omission in the book is any substantive reference to the cognitive processes that might have underlain the developments that she describes. Any book that purports to treat the early history of religious thought (she actually begins in the 17th century BCE), should at least touch on current research into the evolutionary and cognitive basis of such thought. This could have added significant clarity to the work.

In describing what Armstrong takes to be the deliberate lack of certainty in Socrates' teachings, she writes that "at this time of anxiety and war, people did not want to be confused ... They wanted certainty." Since the author's thesis is that the great spiritual advances she surveys were made at exactly those kinds of violent, high-stress times, a reader may begin to wonder how influential any of these movements were among the majority of the populace.

And this very suspicion undermines the synthesis that Armstrong is clearly trying to forge. In her reading of these widely dispersed movements, the common elements turn out to be these: "the abandonment of selfishness and the spirituality of compassion." She writes, "For them (the Axial sages), religion was the Golden Rule." This may not be banal, but it borders on the simplistic. It seems as if, faced with the complexity of each of the Axial traditions, she has had, in the end, to bleed out that complexity and reduce their insights to one which is notoriously easy to state (and apparently impossible for cultures as a whole to follow).

Near the end of her recounting of the Chinese Axial Age, she writes of the unease spawned by the great variety of spiritual movements that had developed. She writes that "many people felt confused and found it hard to choose between the different schools." A reader of "The Great Transformation" may wind up with similar feelings: the promised synthesis is not convincing and the great accumulation of detailed material is otherwise hard to digest. I will rely on the book's encyclopedic nature for future reference, but feel that the author allowed her hopes for cultural salvation to outpace what the narrative could support.

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.

Karen Armstrong is a prolific author who has gone far beyond the faith that was taught to her as an aspiring nun in the early 1960s. I've enjoyed a few of her earlier works (Through the Narrow Gate and A History of God) and I picked this up with great anticipation. I was intrigued by her assertion that a short span of history (800-200 BCE) marked a dramatic leap in the beliefs of several religions throughout the world at a time when they had limited or no contact with each other. Her writing is both gripping and persuasive and I was very impressed with the book.

That said, there are groups of people who will not like this book and would be best served by not reading it. If you are a fundamentalist Christian or Jew, buy another book and leave this on the shelf. We who are not fundamentalists are familiar with the understanding that the first 5 books of Scripture are a compliation of several documents and were not written by Moses. The Great Transformation assumes the compilation. Also, she states on page 39 (hardbook edition) that "[t]he general scholarly consensus is that the story of the exodus from Egypt is not historical." If you are comfortable with that assertion I think you will enjoy the book.

If you are looking for something that may challange your beliefs and open you to new ways of thinking, you will find it here. It did this for me.

The range of Karen Armstrong's work on the history of religion is becoming ever more ambitious. To her previous works on Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam she has added in this book sections on Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism and Greek thought. She examines how thought in China, India, Ancient Greece and the Biblical Middle East became transformed during the Axial Age (the phrase was coined by Karl Jaspers)- the seven hundred years between about 900 BC and 200 BC - from primitive beliefs and practices into the more sophisticated religious and philosophical teachings which laid the intellectual foundations of the following centuries. All this in 400 pages, so it is sometimes a bit of a gallop, especially in the first two chapters (about a fifth of the book) which describe the 800 or so years before the Axial Age begins. After that, when the transformation really gets going, Armstrong allows herself much more space to expound the teachings of the great axial thinkers.

She argues that axial insights were often the result of suffering and that the search for them was born out the experience of the local region being convulsed in unsettling change, in chaos and in violence, the political and economic background of which she provides in rather more detail than I think is really necessary.

The 700 years described as the Axial Period are quite long and have been stretched to this length in order to accommodate processes that happened in different phases and at different speeds within it. Indian thought, for instance, was already becoming quite sophisticated at the beginning of that period, whereas Greek thought matured much later. Armstrong considers `the first phase of the Axial Age of Israel' to have ended with Ezra in the 5th century BC, but to have had a second flowering four hundred years later, outside the limits of the so-called Axial Period, under the rabbinical sages in the first century BC, and then through the teachings of Jesus and of Paul. Even further beyond these chronolgical limits, she sees in Muhammad's message of peace and tolerance (she does not mention his other side) the teachings of the Axial Age being again renewed.

What is interesting is that the insights of the Axial Period emerged from societies that were after all very different from each other. I was struck at least as much by the differences that emerge from her account between the attitudes of the various civilizations as I was by their similarities. For example the fascinating sections on China (fascinating because the material is probably the least familiar to most of the readers of this book) show an approach there which I think is in many ways quite unlike that found in India, Greece or the Middle East, even if at the end some similar insights are reached. Karen Armstrong herself from time to time contrasts, en passant, the views of the axial sages from different civilizations, just as she points up similarities, sometimes ingeniously and illuminatingly so.

The first stage of the transformation was the time when, in the various civilizations, the purpose of rituals changed from doing something for the gods to doing something also for (not necessarily in that order) the community and for the individual who was partaking in the ritual. This involved the new notion that the individual had an inner self that could be transformed. That would lead to a call for introspection and self-knowledge. That in turn created two tasks which are at the heart of the Great Transformation. The first was to set goals for this inner self, some of which were ethical: the elimination of egoism, the Golden Rule that you should not do to others what you would not have done to you, and therefore the cultivation of non-violence, love and compassion. The second task was to devise the means of reaching these goals - in other words the development of spiritual training. All this is superbly, nobly and topically summed up in the last ten pages of the book.

It is this process which Karen Armstrong considers the essence of the Axial Age. 'In Greece', she writes, `despite some notable contributions to the Axial ideal - especially in the realm of tragedy - there was ultimately no religious transformation'. When Plato and Aristotle deserted the spiritual quest and turned their attention to cultivate pure reason, she recognizes of course that in point of chronology they belong to the Axial Age; but she intimates that, however transformative in their different ways Plato and Aristotle were (as, in a lesser way, were Epicureans, Stoics and Sceptics), they departed from what made the Axial Age so valuable to her.

This is not always an easy book to read. Parts of it are wonderfully lucid and carry you along; others are quite heavy going. But hers is a demanding subject, and one must stand in awe of the range of her knowledge and her skill in interpreting her material.

Very well-written, and it flows past as you read it very nicely. The four stars come mainly from that, and from the courage even to tackle so vast a subject. However its interest comes more from seeing what Karen Armstrong's view is, rather than on the content of what she says as such. She covers a vast range of material and history, but regarding the areas about which I know a little, her views are often highly idiosyncratic.

For example, she spends a long time discussing Sparta as a model of Greek cities, whereas Sparta was almost as exceptional in Greece as it was of any other society past or present. Her idea that justice became completely arbitrary under Athenian democracy is also an extremely exceptional view. She emphasises the role of slavery in Greece, without mentioning that Persia, India and China, with which she is making a comparison, had much greater slavery and less freedom.

Similarly, stating as a fact that Laozi wanted to use contradictions as a way of inducing people use mystical insight rather than rational logic, is also another oddity. There are many more conventional ways of taking Laozi and it would have been better if she at least mentioned other approaches.

Most illuminating of all is her view that Mohammad was the "last flowering of the Axial age". It is hard to say, given that she has already extended the era 800 years, why she doesn't continue with subsequent thinkers in the tradition, such as al-Hakim or the Sikh gurus or even Bahaiullah or Hazrat Inayat Khan. What is interesting here is the limit she puts on her ecumenicalism. The Axial age sages are recognised by most Muslims as earlier prophets. However, normally, only an orthodox Muslim would consider Mohammad to be the "last".

I really loved this book, and it is a must in any serious library.

This is a book to read and reread several times in order to really understand the roots of the religions of the world. Why did prophets come to our aid? Who are prophets in the first place? Are philosophers like Plato and Aristotle prophets? What about Confucius and the Buddha, are they prophets? Who determines who is a prophet and who is not? And when it comes to prophets, who is right and who is wrong?

Not all prophets preached the same message, and not all teachings spanned the test of time. Buddha, for example, did not believe in a monotheistic God. The Greeks believed in many gods. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, on the other hand, believe in one God, though they call Him by different names. The earliest Greek religions rewarded warriors for indiscriminate conquests, while latter religions like Christianity and Islam forbade unprovoked wars and conquests. Some prophets, like Jesus for example, preached to leave all worldly possessions and ambitions behind and follow him to the way of God. Buddha too left his newlywed bride and his newly born child to search for enlightenment, and together with his followers begged for food and lived almost naked during their entire spiritual journey. Islam and Judaism, on the other hand, place great importance on family life and one's role in society. Abandoning one's family is condoned in both Judaism and Islam.

Is there such a thing as a right and a wrong religion? And which religion should one follow? Should one choose his religion or is religion chosen for a person at birth?

This is a really fascinating book that will leave you bombarded with many questions. Karen Armstrong shows how all religions differ in their roots and motivation, yet in a subtle way are very similar. You will learn of many early religions such as Zoroastrianism.

Zoroastrianism is the religion and philosophy based on the teachings ascribed to the prophet Zoroaster (also known as Zarathustra or Zartosht). I mentioned here because some scholars have suggested that Zoroastrianism was where the first prophet of a monotheistic faith arose. It is probably the oldest of the revealed creedal religions. Scholars believe that Zoroastrianism had more influence on mankind both directly and indirectly than any other faith. It was once the dominant religion of much of Iran. As of 2007 the faith has dwindled to small numbers; some sources suggest that it is practiced by fewer than 200,000 worldwide, with its largest centers in India and Iran.

One thing is common to all religions and spiritual movements: they all sprang from social unrest and injustice during a period known as the axial age. In case you are wondering what the "axial age" is, the philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) first originated the term in his book entitled The Origin and Goal of History (published in 1949): " ... In the years centering around 500 B.C. -- from 800 to 200 -- the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently in China, India, Persia, Palestine and Greece. And these are the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today."

This book is easy to read and a pleasure to devour. I highly recommend it! But be forewarned: you will never look at your religion the same way again!

Karen Armstrong's previous books have been scholarly and comprehensive, and her latest work is equal to her past works in scholarship and even greater in scope. She undertakes to describe the origins of our major religious over a period of nearly 4000 years, starting with a group of Aryans from the Steppes whom she refers to as the "Axial peoples", and tracing them down to the emergence of Islam.

I had two problems with this book. The first is that Armstrong's writing style is not the easiest to navigate, and the enormity of her task compounds this failing. Of course, given the value in the book, the relatively difficulty can be forgiven.

My second issue with the bok is Armstrong's assertion, very early on, that the warrior path gave birth to the religion of the Axial peoples. I'm not convinced. There is almost no discussion of the role of agriculture, whose seasonal variations and ties to astronomy surely deserve more than the very limited space she gives them.

Other than these two issues, the book is flawless.

Bottom line - this is an excellent book and any scholar interested in religion will profit from wading through it. I don't think it's suitable for beginners.

PS - Amazon uses 5 stars. On a 10 point scale I would give it 9.

Karen Armstrong is the best when speaking about religion and/or the history of religion. The material covers a great deal of time and a great deal of geography and requires an effort to follow such an in depth analysis.
Well worth the effort. Leaves one with desire to return to the era when charity and concern for "the other" was the guiding principle of thoughtful men and women. I believe Armstrong quotes Hillel who said: "Do not do unto others as you would not have them do to you." All the rest (Old Testament) is comentary. It could be said of all the holy scriptures of all the faiths. A lot of commentary for such a simple yet crucial idea.