Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  One way of thinking about Aristotle is to say he was a post-axial thinker. Plato had gone through the great struggle to break with what he had inherited from the past in the light of Socrates’s search for wisdom. He used every resource that a great mind and a great artist could muster to open up the possibility of a new kind of person and a new kind of society, not only a new kind of thought. And he did so with a brilliance that must still have been vivid in Aristotle’s day. But what Plato did, Aristotle did not have to do.208 Most remarkably, instead of being overwhelmed by his predecessor, as most gifted persons would have been, Aristotle was able calmly to look around the new world that Plato had opened up and explore its many possibilities, without rancor, though certainly not evading a good argument when he needed one. There was very little he did not see. Though less “religiously musical” than Plato, as Max Weber would have put it, we must not think of Aristotle as secular. He had a theology as well as a logic and a metaphysics, a variation on the idea of a Cosmic God as first dimly discerned by Anaximander, and developed richly in Plato’s late dialogues, a theology that would be very influential in later times. And certainly, like Plato, he thought of philosophy as a way of life.209

  The philosophic schools were indeed the organizational form for the education of the Hellenistic and Roman elites. None of the schools ever became orthodox even to the extent that Confucianism did in China, and they always had to compete with poetry and rhetoric for the allegiance of members of the elite. The extent to which philosophy as a way of life penetrated nonelite strata is an open question. There the old Olympian myth and ritual pattern never entirely lost its hold, even though increasingly interpreted allegorically.210 But that classical culture after Plato and Aristotle was axial seems beyond dispute.

  “Doomed to Extinction”

  We saw earlier Eric Voegelin viewing the trial of Socrates as the death sentence not only of Socrates by the city, but of the city by the gods. Obviously Athens did not collapse in 399 BCE, though the final conquest by Macedonia in 322 did end its independence, and Paul Veyne has argued that even earlier than that the Athenian democracy was turning into the rule of the notables that would characterize most Greek cities in the Hellenistic age, even if their outer forms, as Athens’s did, remained The “spirit” of the golden age, however, did not disappear, it simply moved out of the polis as such. If the order of the polis was transferred to the soul of Socrates and then to that of Plato, we can see that happening sociologically in the emergence of the Platonic Academy, to be followed by other philosophical schools later in the fourth century, notably Aristotle’s Lyceum, but also Stoics, Epicureans, and others in time.

  W. G. Runciman helps us understand what happened to the Greek polis in the fourth century, and it had to do with the end of an extraordinary geopolitical anomaly rather than the death of Socrates, with which it correlates only “in spirit.” Runciman’s basic point is that the Greek polis was “an evolutionary dead-end,” able to survive as long as it did only because of its special geopolitical situation-close enough to learn from neighboring civilizations, but too remote to be conquered by them: witness the basically logistic failure of the Persians, which we can recognize without minimizing Greek heroism. The dead end of the polis was the very fact that made it so culturally creative: it never became a state, and for sure, it never became a state of states. This citizen state, which was its citizens, wasn’t even a citystate. For all Plato’s attacks on Athenian democracy (we should remember that Plato also bitterly attacks oligarchy, the only realistic alternative to democracy other than tyranny in the Greek polis), he affirms in the Republic that other than in the good city, philosophy could arise only in a democracy; and for all his sympathy for Sparta, when he tries to found the second-best city in the Laws, the primary speaker is not a Spartan stranger, but an Athenian one. One could not imagine a Spartan speaking so long. It is the very uniqueness of the Greek sociopolitical form, particularly its democracy, that made it the germ of so much that we still value culturally, its combination of the very primitive and the ultrasophisticated, unique in world history, but this was also its fatal weakness when finally faced with the much more resilient form of a large scale monarchy, this time, much closer than Persia, namely Macedonia. Runciman argues that only a monarchy, or a very strong oligarchy such as Rome or Venice, of the kind the Greeks never had, could mobilize the power to compete effectively in the political world of antiquity. The Greek poleis were just too small and too divided to withstand a major challenge. If there is a Greek miracle, it is its geographical situation that allowed the Greeks for almost five centuries, from the eighth through most of the fourth, the freedom to carry out their extraordinary experiment without having to pay the price for their political/military vulnerability2‘2 For that we can only say, Halleluiah!

  Runciman has pointed out that evolution occurs at more than one level. Biological, social, and cultural evolution are interdependent, even interpenetrative, processes, but are not identical.213 The failure of the polis as a social experiment did not mean the failure of Greek culture. And, of course, culture never survives without some kind of social carriers. We have already indicated the social vehicle for the survival of Greek culture: the schools, in the first place the gymnasia, in the second the various schools of philosophy, but also of medicine and other arts. Long after Athens lost its political independence, it remained a center of culture, of the schools to which Greeks and later Romans from all over came to study. Of course, another factor of critical importance was that both the Macedonians and the Romans deeply admired Greek culture, imitating it rather than attempting to destroy it. And it was also the good fortune for the survival of the tradition that Christianity, not inherently friendly to the Greek ethos or to philosophy in particular, was, even in the letters of Paul if not earlier, gradually Hellenized, so that much of Greek culture and Greek thought survived inside the church, even though the intolerant church once in power closed not only the temples but the philosophical schools as well.

  What survived would be reborn again and again. And what survived depended very much on organization. Chance, to be sure, played a part, but it can hardly be entirely by accident that Plato and Aristotle survive almost entire, but of Heraclitus’s little book, so small, but so precious, we have perhaps less than half, not to mention the great majority of Greek tragedies that are lost. But enough, surely enough, of what was created, especially in those first decades after Socrates, survived to make the world forever a different place. And when the traditions of axial Israel came together in a strange lovehate relation with the traditions of axial Greece, the result was, to more than a small degree, and for evil as well as good, the world we have.

  One of the more remarkable things about classical Greece is that it seemed to go from a tribal society (actually a retribalized society) to something on the verge of modernity within a matter of generations. The sheer rapidity of the change has been seen as having something to do with the vigor of the ultimate flowering. There had, of course, been a Bronze Age palace society, the Mycenaean, in second-millennium BCE Greece, with powerful rulers, monumental buildings, and a written script. All that had been largely forgotten during the Greek Dark Age from roughly 1200 to 800 BCE, with only the foggiest memories surviving, and, significantly, the complete loss of writing. The monuments of that earlier culture were strange outcrops on the landscape, in need of invented legends to make sense of them.

  Ancient China could hardly have been more different. In Chapter 5 we considered pre-axial China-the Shang dynasty in the late second millennium BCE and the Western Zhou in the early first millennium BCE.’ We noted that the continuity between pre-axial and axial culture in China was without parallel in Greece or Israel (we will consider the question of such continuity in India below). This continuity is signaled by the continuity of the writing system-the graphs that we have from the Shang dynasty are recognizably ancestral to all subsequent Chinese writing. Confucius is said to have taught his students selections from
what we know as the Documents and the Odes, which in their present form were edited long after Confucius’s death, but parts of which probably date to the early Zhou, and were in existence in the lifetime of Confucius.’ The continuity in writing signals an even more significant continuity in cultural content. We have a much clearer understanding of Shang and Western Zhou society than we have of Mycenaean and Dark Age Greece, because we have not only rich archaeological material but significant textual continuities.

  And yet, China from the time of Confucius (conventional dating, 551479 BCE) to the Qin unification (221 BCE) was as stunningly innovative as was ancient Greece. It was the time of the flowering of the “hundred schools,” in their variety as well as in their content presaging modernity, differently but to the same degree as the classical Greeks. The Confucian Analects, and those who subsequently venerated Confucius as their teacher, idealized the culture of early Zhou and made it a standard to which later China should return, but in the guise of returning to the old they opened up remarkably new possibilities. China in the late first millennium was undergoing a dramatic transition from the “feudal” (in the sense described in Chapter 5) regime of the Zhou to the centralized bureaucratic regime of the Chinese Empire. Because the society that the Confucians idealized differed significantly from the society we take for granted as Chinese, we must first try to understand what it was like, returning briefly to some of the themes of Chapter 5. China’s axial transition occurred when a society ruled by warriors was being transformed into a society ruled by imperial bureaucrats. What was that society ruled by warriors like?

  Before Confucius

  As we noted in Chapter 5, Western Zhou (1045-771 BCE) society, though in its decentralization similar to what we think of as feudal, was actually a lineage society in that “fiefs” were not based on a contractual relation between lord and vassal, but were “gifts” from the king, usually to kinsmen, sometimes to other loyal vassals, that were in principle conditional, such that they could be revoked at any time.’ In Weberian terms it was a decentralized patrimonial society, and using the term “feudal” points only to its decentralization. We must remember that early first millennium BCE China was more thinly populated, and less economically developed and urbanized, than would be the case by the end of the millennium. Non-Chinese “tribes” were interspersed with Huaxia (Chinese) peoples, and much of the land had yet to be cultivated.

  Under these circumstances the early Zhou monarchy probably maintained a degree of centralized control only for a century or two. Centralized rule would, with the passage of time and the increasing distance of lineal ties, gradually disintegrate. The decline of central authority was signaled by, though in fact it had almost surely preceded, the fall of the Western Zhou capital in 771 BCE and the move of the capital from the Wei River valley in western China, which had long been the home of the Zhou people, to Louyang in the east, where the power of the Zhou became largely ceremonial and depended on the goodwill of the more powerful, now in fact independent, eastern states.

  The ensuing Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn) period, named after a chronicle that spans the years 722 to 481 BCE, saw a gradual descent into incessant warfare, leading into the Warring States period (450-221 BCE) when a series of new developments changed the nature of Chinese culture and society and led to the elimination of the warrior aristocracy that still dominated in the Spring and Autumn period.

  Confucius himself lived at the end of the Spring and Autumn period and viewed the society in which he lived with critical apprehension. He idealized the early Zhou, and he was the first to “use the old to criticize the present,” a practice that never ceased among his followers and that many rulers, including the first Qin emperor, strongly condemned. By looking more closely at the reality of Spring and Autumn society, we can see what tied Confucius to it and what he condemned in it.

  Mark Edward Lewis describes the “great services” that were the primary concern of the Spring and Autumn aristocracy: sacrifice, war, and These three services were heavily ritualized and interrelated; ceremonial was at the heart of this, as of many other aristocratic societies. Though li, ritual, would come to have very different meanings in later Confucianism, it was, in the form of the “great services,” at the very heart of the early Zhou culture that Confucius claimed to venerate. The central service, of which war and hunting were extensions, was sacrifice itself. The great sacrifices to the spirits and the ancestors were the forms in which Zhou society enacted itself to itself. Because our Western view of China is so much influenced by the central figure of the civilian scholar-bureaucrat in imperial China, it is important to recognize that in Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn China we are dealing with a warrior society, one different from, but perhaps of the same genus as, premonarchical Israel (think Samson and the David of the David and Goliath story), Homeric Greece, and the India of the Mahabharata. It was the warrior who carried out the sacrifices so central to the society’s selfunderstanding, in this respect similar to early Greece, but not to early Israel or India, where the priestly class carried out the sacrifices. As Lewis puts it:

  In the Spring and Autumn period political authority was derived from the worship of potent ancestral sprits and the gods of locality through regular offering made at the altars of the ancestral temple and the state. The actions that set the rulers apart from the masses were the “great services” of those altars, and these services were ritually directed violence in the form of sacrifices, warfare, and hunting. These activities, symbolically linked through the ceremonial exchange and consumption of meat, reached their common culmination in the offering up of living beings at the altars. Thus the noble was above all a warrior and sacrificer, a man who took life in order to feed the spirits who gave him power.5

  Lewis then quotes from the Zuo zhuan, a text probably assembled in the fourth century BCE but drawing on older materials and still our best source for the Spring and Autumn period:

  The great services of the state are sacrifice and warfare. In the sacrifices one takes the meat from the sacrifices in the ancestral temple, and in warfare [before setting out on a campaign] one receives the meat from the sacrifices at the she altar. These are the great ceremonies of the spirits. 6

  Sacrifice and warfare (hunting was ancillary to both, providing some of the meat for the sacrifice and training for warfare) defined the warriors against the common people, who participated in neither. Further, sacrifice reflected the organization of the warrior class, divided into lineages as it was, and organized hierarchically in lineage terms.

  In this patrilineal society, primogeniture was a significant factor: the eldest son succeeded, in principle though often not in fact, to his father’s position, but younger brothers would be granted domains of their own. In the domains of younger brothers, their younger sons would receive still smaller domains. A formal system of ranks, depending on where one stood in the lineage system, was expressed ritually by rules governing the kind and number of ritual implements appropriate for each level of the hierarchy and the degree of elaboration of the ceremonies.

  Archaeology has discovered that the so-called Zhou ritual system, the one that Confucius idealized, probably was not established at the founding of the dynasty but was the result of a major ritual reform dating to around 850 BCE, which standardized the form of ritual implements and the number of them appropriate for each rank, a reform that very rapidly established itself all across the Chinese cultural world, but that is not described in any text. Lothar von Falkenhausen, in his important synthesis of decades of archaeological discovery, has argued that what he calls the Late Western Zhou Ritual Reform was probably an effort to restore coherence to a system of lineage relationships that had become confused after 200 years of Zhou rule, in that the demographic increase in aristocratic lineages created a situation that was hard to represent ritually. The Reform drastically restricted the number of lines of descent that carried significant status, reducing many nobles to a kind of low-level elite status represented by the ter
m shi, often translated as “knight,” to which Confucius may have belonged. Falkenhausen further speculates that this drastic Reform was justified on archaistic grounds as going back to the founding period of the Zhou, and that it was only during that Reform that Kings Wen and Wu and the Duke of Zhou took on their archetypal significance, and even that the earliest parts of the Shangshu (Documents) and the Shi (Odes) were initially codified only in this Reform

  Whatever the actual date of the Zhou ritual system that Confucius saw himself as renewing, what is significant is the extreme importance of ritual from the earliest historical times, that is, in the Shang dynasty as well as in Western Zhou. Because ritual (li) is at the center of the thought of Confucius and the Confucian tradition, this should not be a surprise, yet it is important to realize that Ii in the Western Zhou did not mean exactly what it would later mean to the Confucians. Falkenhausen helps us understand this early importance of ritual: