Stephen Geller puts another dimension of particularity in context by reminding us that the “Arnoldian distinction between Hellenism and Hebraism as polar opposites” is far from the whole truth:
Both world views share an exclusive claim to validity, the chief outward expression of the tremendous energy released by the new insights. Both developed a new view of community, a new ethic of education and new institutions to support it. Gymnasium and synagogue are both unprecedented forms of communal organization. To be sure, an immense gap separates biblical faith from Greek logos, the kind of tension-filled dialectic we have studied from the calm assertions of absolute, eternal verity that philosophy and science came to postulate.127
But, just as we have seen several far from easily reconcilable strands of Israelite religion contributing to its dynamism, the very gap to which Geller points, the gap that would make the Western tradition forever at least dual, would prove enormously fruitful for the many generations that sought to cross it.
Before concluding, let us sum up what we have found about the ways in which an axial breakthrough occurred in ancient Israel. To the extent that we have made theory, second-order thinking, the criterion of axiality, Israel remains a problematic case. But the Hebrew scriptures have marshaled a number of resources to do something quite similar to the achievements of the other axial cases, most notably Greece. Rhetoric, which, for all its tension with philosophy was part of the axial transition in Greece, was highly developed in Israel, notably in Deuteronomy. Further, Israelite rhetoric was developed in a forensic context. Walter Brueggemann has organized his magisterial Theology of the Old Testament along the lines of testimony, countertestimony and cross examination.128 If the ancient Israelites finally made the case for Yahweh as the only God there is, they did so argumentatively. They were not even averse to arguing with God himself The clearest example of argument is the book of job, essentially a complex dialogue, involving, finally, the voice of God himself Out of all this argument and counterargument emerged an idea of God unique in the world and with enormous historical implications. An utterly transcendent God, of whom there is to be no image, is both loving and righteous and demands love and righteousness from his people, and, insofar as his people is to be a light to the nations, from all the world as well. The powerful beings of tribal peoples and the gods of archaic civilizations were all in critical respects embedded in the social world in which they existed. In archaic societies the critical embeddedness was the relation, approaching identification, of god and king. In the early monarchy the relation of god and king was more than a little analogous to that relation in the great Near Eastern archaic civilizations. In the end, however, the children of Israel did not need “kings of flesh and blood” as the rabbis called them, to relate them to God who is the only real king. A God who is finally outside society and the world provides the point of reference from which all existing presuppositions can be questioned, a basic criterion for the axial transition. It is as if Israel took the most fundamental symbolism of the great archaic civilizations-God, king and people-and pushed it to the breaking point where something dramatically new came into the world.
Yet this profound historical shift, this gift of ethical freedom to a people who could see that God’s justice is itself the highest expression of ethical freedom‘121 was attained through a cultural medium that never gave up narrative as the fundamental framework for cultural understanding. This leads us to ask if the ancient Israelites were not using narrative in a new way, to do what would today be called “narrative theology,” that was effectively a functional equivalent for theory-not, to be sure for the analysis of nature, but for the understanding of human existence. Much in the Hebrew Bible is similar to, sometimes identical with, the myths, legends, folktales, sayings and poetry of other Near Eastern peoples. Yet the great enveloping narrative moves from the Creation to the Babylonian captivity, and, with the apocalyptic passages in the late prophets, projects into the future when on “that day” the Lord will set all things right. With its reiterative theme of promise, unfaithfulness, punishment, and redemption, this great narrative was something new: a way of placing believers in relation to a story that gave them meaning and hope. The very opening of the first book of Moses, Genesis 12:4a, even if it was the late product of the priestly school and even if it did not contain the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, is a powerful and austere account of creation, unique in ancient Near Eastern creation stories.130 Indeed, the whole book of Genesis is a narrative masterpiece, incorporating old fragments but making them into a prologue for everything that will follow-as is sometimes said, it is the Old Testament of the Old Testament.
Taken as a whole, the historical framework of the Hebrew Bible is metanarrative big time, to be sure, but a metanarrative that no culture that has received it has ever been able to escape. And a metanarrative powerful and flexible enough so that movements and countermovements, establishments and heresies, could all turn to it to justify ethical/social/political programs, programs that would contribute, not always to the good, to all subsequent historical dynamics. Here, too, we find a new cultural form so powerful in its consequences that we must understand it as part of the axial transformation.
Finally, as a result of both the rhetorical and narrative innovations accomplished by ancient Israel, we must understand the social achievement of peoplehood without monarchy, of a people ruled by divine law, not the arbitrary rule of the state, and of a people composed of responsible individuals. Here, as Geller noted, the postexilic emergence of the synagogue was crucial: a religious community that could come into being wherever a quorum of Jews was gathered, a community that would be subordinate in outer things to whatever state was in power, but which provided an alternative rule of life to the believers. This was the chrysalis of both the Christian Church and the Islamic Umma. It was not “the differentiation of church and state,” but it was the entering wedge that would make that idea thinkable.
What this summary suggests is that in our quest to understand what makes the axial age axial, we will need to look, surely, at the emergence of theory wherever it arises, but we must also look at the possible transformation of older cultural forms into new configurations, and at the social consequences of such transformations.
In this chapter I have tried to understand the religion of ancient Israel as an axial breakthrough. It may be worth closing this section with what amounts to a confession of faith by a contemporary Jew, Jon Levenson, that contains even today all the dynamic terms of God, king, and people that we have seen as decisive from the beginning:
There is, therefore, no voice more central to Judaism than the voice heard on Mount Sinai. Sinai confronts anyone who would live as a Jew with an awesome choice, which, once encountered cannot be evadedthe choice of whether to obey God or to stray from him, of whether to observe the commandments or to let them lapse. Ultimately, the issue is whether God is or is not king, for there is no king without subjects, no suzerain without vassals. In short, Sinai demands that the Torah be taken with radical seriousness. But alongside the burden of choice lies a balm that sooths the pain of decision. The balm is the history of redemption, which grounds the commandments and insures that this would-be king is a gracious and loving lord and that to choose to obey him is not a leap into the absurd.131
Ancient Greece would seem to be the easy case when it comes to the axial age. Greece gave rise to a form of democracy based on decisions made after rational argument in the assembly; to philosophy, including formal logic (secondorder reasoning); to at least the beginnings of science based on evidence and argument; not to mention that it also gave rise to extraordinary artistic and literary achievements. Some have been so overwhelmed by the culture of ancient Greece as to imagine a “Greek miracle” emerging, without forerunners or rivals, full-blown from the head of Zeus so to speak. The Greeks were just inherently “rational.”
In recent years such extreme enthusiasm has been countered with vigorous debunking, the enthusiasts charged w
ith being Eurocentric or Westerncentric, with failing to recognize how much the Greeks got from Asia or Africa (mathematics, astronomy, and so on). And the critics insist that Greek “democracy” wasn’t very democratic after all-it applied only to the minority of the population who were citizens and excluded women, slaves, and resident aliens. Greek philosophy, they say, led to the blind alley of “metaphysics” that kept philosophers for centuries preoccupied with wholly illusory issues. And Greek science, by rejecting experiment, never amounted to much. I heard Carl Sagan in one of his television broadcasts on the history of science declare that “Plato set back European science by 1500 years.” Quite a trick, but by far not the only baneful influence that has been attributed to Plato.
So where are we? I think it best to treat ancient Greece as just one of our four axial cases, try to understand how it developed, how it was similar to and different from the other cases, and end with a brief reference to what it contributed to the future. It might be well to begin with a paragraph from Louis Gernet,i student of Durkheim, friend of Mauss, and teacher of Jean-Pierre Vernant, around whom in recent years, a remarkably creative group of French classicists has formed:
Is this not the secret of Greece: that it allowed the least number of its legacies to die, and fused the largest numbers of its ancient values? In any case, one of its most authentic successes was to conceive as one an ideal of heroism and an ideal of wisdom. The two easily cohere in figures in whom a benevolent and organizing activity dominates, or in those vaguer ghosts of the founders of the sanctuaries and cities who were the welcoming hosts of men and gods. In the obscure regions where ideals are fashioned, the experiences of a thousand years count for something. A vivid feeling flourishing in the past, a sense of joyous participation in a commerce with humanity and nature according to accepted rhythms of life. In contrast to the brutalities of daily life, the myth of the Hyperboreans [a people in the far north still living in conditions of the Golden Age] could, at a very early date, evoke from the distant past the image of a tranquil, just people engaged in the delightful hospitality of the agapai.2
The point here is that the continuities in Greece from pre-state to, in the Greek case, quasi-state conditions, although evident in all the axial cases, are particularly easy to recognize in the survival of pre-state institutions and beliefs.
In particular the myths, many of which are similar to the ancient Near Eastern myths that also underlie the Hebrew scriptures, but are visible only in fragments there, have been preserved in great detail. Although they contain occasional references to an early period when gods and men participated in the same feasts, an idea that Gernet believed was still being lived out in rural festivals, the primary picture of the divine-human relation as depicted in Homer and other early texts is quite different, and startlingly different from the relation between Yahweh and the children of Israel that we saw in Chapter 6. According to Hugh Lloyd-Jones:
In the Iliad, as in all early Greek poetry, the gods look on men with disdain mingled with slight pity. “I should not be sensible,” says Apollo to Poseidon when he meets him in the battle of the gods, “if I fought with you on account of wretched mortals, who like leaves now flourish, as they eat the fruit of the field, and now fade away lifeless.” Nothing says Zeus himself, “is more wretched than a man, of all things that breathe and move upon the earth.“3
Lloyd-Jones goes on to say that the gods “treat men as the nobles of an early stage of a rural society treat the peasants.“4 In the heroic age and later, there is no indication that the gods, though they have their favorites, to be sure, “love” human beings in general or any particular group of them. The Greeks as a whole are not “chosen,” though, again, particular individuals may be, and the Greeks are not shown as better than their enemies.’ On the contrary, Troy is treated with more sympathy than the Greeks in the Iliad; certainly Hector is shown as more admirable than Achilles or Agamemnon.6 So the most fundamental feature of the divine-human relation in Israel-God’s love for Israel and the obligation to return that love, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy completely missing in Greece. Aristotle said: “For it would be strange for one to say that he loved Zeus,” and held that philia (love, friendship) was impossible between man and God.7 Justice is another matter. The gods in general and Zeus in particular are indeed concerned with justice, something we will have to consider at length below.
Although there were many tensions evident within the Hebrew scriptures, and sharp differences developed over the centuries in their interpretation, the Torah achieved a normative authority that had no equal in ancient Greece. Homer and Hesiod were central texts in Greek education throughout antiquity, but they never had the authority of the Hebrew scriptures. Old myths were reformulated by poets and tragic dramatists; criticized and reformed by philosophers; and new myths, gods, and goddesses from a variety of sources were introduced from time to time without causing undue disturbance. Ancient Greek religion was in every sense more fluid than that of ancient Israel, and we will have to consider the social causes and consequences of such fluidity.
Early Greek Society
We have noted the central significance of the god-king-people complex in all the archaic societies and the fact that each axial case had to come to terms with this complex, so it is significant that ancient Greece in the period of the axial transition was the only case where actual kings were absent, though not absent in the cultural imagination. In short, the polis, problematically translated as “city-state,” the dominant institution in the period from the eighth to the fourth centuries BCE that saw the flourishing of ancient Greek culture and the axial transition, was not ruled by kings. Tyrants there occasionally were, but as we will see, they were quite specifically not kings. It is not as though the idea of kingship was lacking. Even though, by the eighth century, the Greeks no longer had a very clear idea of the Mycenaean civilization that had preceded them in the second millennium BCE, they did know the Mycenaeans were ruled by kings. On the basis of our modern archaeological knowledge of that Mycenaean civilization, we know that those kings were divine, semidivine, or priestly on the model of archaic Near Eastern culture, of which Mycenaean civilization was only a western extension. Not only did the polis-dwelling Greeks know that there had been kings in their past, but they were aware that there were kings in Scythia in the north, in Assyria and Persia in the east, and in Egypt to the south. But their ideas of kingship were formed not only by external models but by central figures in their own myths and legends: the Iliad is a story of a Greek army under the ostensible rule of a king, namely Agamemnon, referred to on occasion by the word anax, which is descended from the Mycenaean word for king, wanax.s The later Greek word for king, basileus, is used loosely in Homer for king, noble, or, simply leader.9 Agamemnon does not seem to be much of a king-half the time he looks more like a paramount chief. Zeus is also referred to as anax, though in the Iliad not as basileus, and he is a king, though a bit like Agamemnon, not one who can ignore the feelings of his divine subjects. Interestingly enough, Zeus is referred to in Homer more often as pater, father, than as king.10 After Homer the powers attributed to Zeus grew even stronger, so that we are confronted with a situation where a king of the gods is not mirrored by a human king, a situation unique to the Greeks.”
But if the Greeks were not organized in kingdoms, what kind of society did they have? The earliest Greek society is, if anything, even more obscure than that of the Israelites. Somewhere around 1200 BCE the Mycenaean cities were either overrun or abandoned, due to internal collapse, climate change, or external conquest. If the last, it was not by “the Greeks,” as the Mycenaeans, as we know from the Linear B syllabic script, had been Greek speakers for some centuries. Greek speakers of the Dorian dialect, and thus called “the Dorians,” have sometimes been blamed for the fall of Mycenaean civilization, but there is not enough evidence to make that more than speculation.12 In any case, Linear B and the other achievements of Mycenaean civilization disappeared after 1200, and the next 400 ye
ars are generally referred to as the Dark Age. It is at least dark to us, as archaeology has yielded only sparse findings in this period and evidence of a considerable decline in population. There are hints in some places that trade with the Near East had not ceased altogether. The Athenians maintained a tradition that their city, not an especially eminent one, alone among the Mycenaean cities escaped conquest, and they also believed that it was from Athens that a considerable number of refugees, perhaps around 1000 BCE, emigrated to the Anatolian coast, where they established towns that would be significant centers of the reemerging Greek culture in the eighth century. But if Athens was never destroyed, still it shrank to a very small town in the centuries after 1200.
The low point of the post-Mycenaean period seems to be 1100. Ian Morris tells us that after 1100:
Much of the countryside was probably abandoned, or left very thinly settled. Most people lived in small hamlets, occupied for anything from 50 to 300 years … [T]he disasters around 1100 may have impoverished central Greece, with what little wealth was left falling into the hands of village headmen, the heirs of the last Mycenaean local officials … Central Greece had become something of a ghost world. Practically every hilltop and harbor had had earlier occupants, and by 1050 the landscape was dotted with the ruins of a more glorious age. Just listing examples cannot evoke the atmosphere of those days … If any part of the Iron Age deserves to be called a Dark Age, then this is it. From some perspectives, such as that of the lower classes who built the Mycenaean palaces and labored to meet their quotas, or that of the local aristocrats held in check by the wanakes [plural of wanax] and their officers, the destruction around 1200 may have been a blessing. But by 1050 the costs of change-not just the loss of high civilization, but also disruption and massive mortality-outweighed the benefits to any group. Egyptian documents record crop failures at just this time.‘3
Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age Page 45