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

by Robert N. Bellah

  We saw, however, even in an early state like Hawaii, the emergence of what can be called moral upstarts-prophet-like figures who, at great peril to themselves, held the existing power structures to a moral standard that they clearly did not meet. The axial age-the middle of the first millennium BCE-was the time when such challenges to the dominant cultural order become widely apparent. It is part of the definition of the axial age that it was then that a universally egalitarian ethic first appeared. How can we think about that momentous time today?

  Here I would turn to Jurgen Habermas’s essay “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism” as a point of departure. In speaking of the transition from tribal societies organized by kinship to the emergence of the early state, he writes:

  Social integration accomplished via kinship relations … belongs, from a developmental-logical point of view, to a lower stage than social integration accomplished via relations of domination … Despite this progress, the exploitation and oppression necessarily practiced in political class societies has to be considered retrogressive in comparison with the less significant social inequalities permitted by the kinship system. Because of this, class societies are structurally unable to satisfy the need for legitimation that they themselves generate.17

  It is true that the early state and its accompanying class system emerged in what I have called archaic societies well before the axial age and generated a degree of popular unhappiness that can be discerned in the texts we have from such societies, but the legitimation crisis of which Habermas speaks arises with particular acuteness in the axial age, when mechanisms of social domination increased significantly relative to archaic societies and when coherent protest for the first time became possible. It would surely be far too simple to interpret the axial transitions as forms of class struggle, but it cannot be denied that they all involved social criticism and harsh judgments on existing social and political conditions.

  In answer to the question of where this criticism was coming from, there has been a tendency to speak of “intellectuals,” though what that term means in reference to the first millennium BCE is not obvious. Scribal and priestly classes come to mind, but we can assume that most of them were too tied in to the existing power systems to be very critical. Even though the kind of state that existed then tried to override, and in some important ways succeeded in overriding, kinship relations, various kinds of particularistic and ascriptive associations were widespread. It is not easy to imagine the social space for criticism in such societies. It is in this context that we have to consider the role of the “renouncer,” to take a term most often used for ancient India.

  There were renouncers already in late Vedic India; perhaps the first of whom we have an account is Yajnyavalkya, who appears in the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad. What the renouncer renounces is the role of the householder and all of the social and political entanglements that go with it. Buddhism provided a radical form of the renouncer, whose initial act is to “leave home” and who thereafter remains permanently homeless. If the renouncer is “no where,” then he, and sometimes she, can look at established society from the outside, so to speak. It is not hard to see the Hebrew prophets as, in a sense, renouncers, though I have also called them denouncers. They too stood outside the centers of power, attempting to follow the commandments of God, whatever the consequences. Even in opposition, they were more oriented to power than were Buddhist monastics, to be sure, but, as we will see, the Buddhist monks also had a radical critique of worldly power. It is easy to see the Daoists who appear in Warring States China as renouncers, and they too have a critique of power, though perhaps more satirical than ethical. But there is a sense in which the Confucians, especially the greatest ones, who never held office or held only lowly ones briefly and were in principle opposed to serving an unethical lord, were renouncers, criticizing power from the outside. And finally I will argue that Socrates and Plato were, in different ways, also renouncers, who were in but not of the city and also criticized it from the outside.”

  For all the differences in what can in most cases only loosely be called renouncers in the several axial cultures, the one thing such renouncers shared was that they were teachers, and founders of schools or orders, thus more or less, and often less, securely institutionalizing a tradition of criticism. Ultimately their power was exercised through the extent to which they influenced or even controlled elite education, as, to some degree paradoxically, many of them ultimately did.i9 And inevitably their survival depended on what they charged for their services or were freely given.

  By pointing out the significance of renouncers, we in a sense return to our original question. How did renouncers garner the support that allowed them to survive in their outsider position? It seems apparent that some degree of unease about the state of the world must have been relatively widespread, even among the elite, to provide the support without which renouncers would simply have faded away into the wilderness. But the sociological basis for the culture of renunciation was the establishment of some kind of relaxed field within which the followers of the new spiritual virtuosi, as Weber called them, formed groups for religious practice. In one sense what the renouncers renounced was “work,” and what they pursued instead was “play,” often a very serious kind of play but having its joyous moments. Shared ritual was almost everywhere central to their practice, but almost all of them also took responsibility for the education of outside sympathizers. Traditions survived and were elaborated only when they gained the toleration, even the respect, though sometimes the hostility, of elite political groups. Much of the history of such groups arising in the axial age has to do with their complex and ambivalent relation to political power.

  If Habermas is right about the legitimation crisis of the axial-age state, brought on by the dissonance between the developmental-logical advance and the moral-practical regression, as I think he is, I would like to illustrate the response to this legitimation crisis by referring to the utopian projections of a good society that the various kinds of renouncers offered in criticism of the existing order. These utopian projections took quite different forms in the four cases, but each one of them was harshly critical of existing socialpolitical conditions. One thing being criticized was the harsh conditions of work, and almost all axial-age utopias had a large element of play.

  Axial-Age Utopias

  In ancient Israel the prophets sharply criticized the behavior of foreign states, but also conditions within the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. According to Amos, the rich and the rulers “trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and turn aside the way of the afflicted” (Amos 2:6-7). In contrast the prophets look forward to the Day of the Lord when judgment will come to the earth and justice will “roll down like the waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). The prophets admonish rulers and people alike to change their ways, but look forward to a divine intervention that will finally put things right.

  In ancient China, Mencius, for example, but many Confucians before and after him, bemoaned the sad state of society, the corruption of the rulers, and the oppression of the peasantry, and offered an alternative form of government: rule by moral example, by conformity with the li, the normative order, and not by punishment. The Confucian hope for an ethical ruler who would follow Confucian injunctions did not involve any idea of divine intervention, except a vague notion that Heaven would eventually punish behavior that was too outrageous, but it was in its own way as utopian as the prophetic hope of ancient Israel.

  Plato, in the Gorgias and in the first book of the Republic, is a critic of a politics where the strong could inflict harm on the weak with impunity: for him despotism was always the worst form of government. In the Republic he depicted a good society in contrast to the one he criticized, but which he knew was a “city in words,” or a “city in heaven,” and not likely to be realized on this earth.

  The Hindu epic, the Ramayana, can be seen as a critique of existing society, offer
ing a different ideal of kingship. The early Buddhist canon describes an ideal society so different from existing reality as to be perhaps the most radical utopia of all, the most drastic criticism of society as it is.

  In each axial case, what I am calling social criticism is combined with religious criticism, and the form and content of the axial symbolization take shape in the process of criticism. I will take the Greek case as exemplary because their term “theoria” was the source of our term “theory,” which I, following Merlin Donald, take as diagnostic of the axial transition, there. I argued in Chapter 7 that Plato completed the axial transition: it is therefore not surprising that it was Plato who transmuted the traditional term for ritual theoria into philosophical theoria, which, as I will attempt to show, is not the same as what we mean by theory, but is its lineal predecessor, and we can also see the beginning of the transition to what we mean by the term in Aristotle, Plato’s pupil.

  My discussion of theory in Plato would not be possible except for the remarkable book by Andrea Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context, from which I will draw extensively. Nightingale describes theoria before Plato as “a venerable cultural practice characterized by a journey abroad for the sake of witnessing an event or spectacle.” It took several forms, but the one that Plato took as the analogy for philosophical theoria, most extensively in the Parable of the Cave in books 5-7 of the Republic, was the civic form where the theoros (viewer, spectator) was sent as an official representative of his city to view a religious festival in another city and then return to give a full report to his fellow citizens. Nightingale notes that by its very nature theoria in this sense was “international,” Panhellenic, and that Athens itself attracted many theoroi from other cities to view its great festivals, the Panathenaia and the city Dionysia.20 She notes that Plato himself begins and ends the Republic with examples of traditional theoria. The dialogue begins with Socrates going to the Piraeus, the port of Athens, to attend the festival of the Thracian goddess, Bendis, suggesting that the festival was more “international” than the short distance to the Piraeus might indicate, especially in view of Socrates’s remark that the Thracian procession was as fine as the Athenian one, expressing a Panhellenic viewpoint. And the Republic ends with the Myth of Er, which turns out to be a most remarkable theoria, because Er, who had been killed in battle and was about to be cremated, awoke and told his fellow countrymen about a journey he had made to the land of the dead and the festival he had attended there.21

  Nightingale notes that in the Republic, Plato for the first time has Socrates give an account of what he meant by “philosophy,” a term that confused his interlocutors, who knew it only in its previous sense of broad intellectual cultivation, but which is now to be understood in the context of a new meaning of “`theoria’ as the quintessential activity of the true philosopher.“22 The traditional theoros was a lover of spectacles, particularly of religious rituals and festivals, whereas the philosophical theoros “loves the spectacle of truth.“23 Plato puts great emphasis on vision, on seeing the truth more than hearing it; it is also a special kind of seeing, seeing with “the eye of the soul.” This kind of seeing is possible only after a protracted philosophical education that prepares one for it, but it ends with the “theoria [the “seeing”] of all time and being” (Republic 486d).

  Thinking of this kind of vision from an Indian or Chinese perspective, one might imagine that the way to attain it would be through some form of meditation, probably involving breath control. Although Socrates is portrayed twice in the Symposium as being in some kind of trance, it is not meditation that Plato finds to be the way to philosophical vision. The education that ends with “seeing reality,” or “seeing Being,” begins with number and calculation, which “enables the mind to `view’ the great and the small in themselves, abstracted from their concrete manifestations.“24 Geometry and astronomy follow, each of which involves “seeing” higher truths. What Plato meant by astronomy is not so much stargazing as “the mathematical principles that govern the motions of the heavenly bodies,” which one “sees” when “gazing with the mind and not the eyes.” Finally comes “dialectic,” which Socrates never plainly defines but uses metaphors to describe, speaking of the “journey of dialectic” toward the contemplation of “true being.“25 What is involved is not “implanting vision in the soul,” but turning the vision in a new direction, “away from the world of becoming and toward true being”26 (Republic 521d).

  At the critical moment, then, Plato turns to narrative, what Nightingale calls the Analogy of the Cave-which is not simply an allegory that can be translated into propositional language, but a kind of myth that reveals truth on its own terms, and that I would rather call the Parable of the Cave. The Buddha too uses stories, often referred to as “similes” in the secondary literature, to make a point, as in the famous Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant. It seems that at the very point when thought was emerging from myth to theory, narrative still had to function as the midwife.

  I cannot here give an account of the beauty and complexity of the Parable of the Cave, but only allude to those aspects of it that relate to my argument. The Parable begins with a person who is “at home,” though home in the Republic is more apt to be the polis, the city, than the oikos, the household. Home, however, turns out to be a dark cave that is in fact a prison where one is in bonds, so that one is forced to look at shadows on the wall cast by people (ideologists?) behind one’s back projecting images by holding various objects in front of fires. Still, those shadowy images are what one is used to, so that in a situation where one is freed from one’s bonds and, in Plato’s words, “compelled to suddenly stand up and to turn [one’s] head and to walk and turn upward toward the light” (515c), one will be confused, in a state of aporia, profound uncertainty, the opposite of poria, certainty. One will have entered, in Nightingale’s words, “a sort of existential and epistemic noman’s-land,” being no longer able to recognize the old familiar shadows nor yet to see anything in the blinding light above, so that one would be tempted to flee from the whole journey and return to the old familiar prison.27

  Yet the would-be philosopher does not flee back, even becomes accustomed in some degree to the condition of uncertainty, aporia, which Nightingale describes as “(among other things) a state of homelessness.” She goes on to describe the new condition as basically similar to the renouncer position in other cultures:

  In addition to the state of aporia, the philosopher’s departure from home leads to a permanent state of atopia [no place, nowhere]. For the person who has detached himself from society and gone on the journey of philosophic theoria, will never be fully “at home” in the world. Theoria uproots the soul, sending it to a metaphysical region where it can never truly dwell and from which it will inevitably have to return. As a theoros, the Platonic philosopher must journey to “see” truth (in various degrees of fullness) and bring his vision back to the human world.28

  In a good city he will be given civic office and expected to serve, even though he would rather spend his time in contemplation, yet even in office he is still a kind of foreigner in his own city. But if he returns to a bad city, his report of what he has seen will be mocked as foolish and nonsensical: he will be abused, he may even be killed. Nightingale sums up: “When he returns to the human world, then, he is atopos, not fully at home: he has become a stranger to his own kind.“29

  We still need to understand, as best we can, what philosophical theoria itself is; the ritual theoros sees the festival; what does the philosophic theoros see? Here we need to discount the caricature of classical theory, which assumes that the philosopher is a disengaged spectator, viewing at a distance what is an object different from himself as a subject, a kind of premature Descartes. Plato does not help us understand what the philosopher seesthat is, the “forms,” eide, and in particular the “form of the good,” agathon, which seems to be truth and reality itself-because he stays
in the myth to talk about them. In the myth Plato compares the form of the good to the source of all light, something like the sun to the eye of the soul. But if we gazed at the sun very long with our physical eye, we would go blind, whereas the soul who gazes at the form of the good sees all things as they really are.

  Nightingale shows us that the forms are not abstractions, but are, to the eye of the soul, ontological presences, “beings” or “substances.” Further, the vision of the forms is not disengaged, but involves participation, for part of ourselves, our nous, inadequately translated as “rational soul,” is akin to the forms. The vision is genuinely interactive: as Nightingale puts it, the vision is “granted to us as a gift.“30 Furthermore, it is anything but cool and detached: it is affective and emotional, it brings intense pleasure and happiness, it is erotic, even sexual. The soul, says Plato, “draws near to and has intercourse with (makes love to) reality” (490b) Furthermore, the experience of the vision is utterly transformative; one becomes a different person as a result.3’ One could speak of the soul as “enlightened,” but if, as in translating nirvana or moksha, one wanted to avoid eighteenth-century terminology, one could speak of the soul as “awakened,” or even “released,” for hasn’t the transformed soul been released from the prison of the cave in order to participate in the really real?

  Plato then goes on to describe the good city to which the fortunate philosophic theoros returns. To discuss that in detail would take us too far afield, but I want to allude to a couple of aspects of the good city. The good city, as we noted, is ruled by the philosophically liberated, even though they would rather be doing something else. Why then do they take on political responsibility? Nightingale provides an interesting discussion of this issue: