The Great Transformation

"The Great Transformation: The Beginnings of Religious Traditions" is the sort of scholarship you can come to expect from Karen Armstrong, an independent scholar from Britain who writes extensively on religious topics. She is able to take quite complicated issues and ideas and his able to make them accessible to a wider audience. This really is the biggest job of a scholar, whether independent or attached to a university- to be able to communicate your thoughts and ideas in a coherent way. If you can do this to a massive audience of non-academics, all the better. In this regard, Karen Armstrong is in many ways second-to-none.

"The Great Transformation" describes a theoretical period in history known as the "Axial Age," which according to her estimations ran from about 900 BCE to 200 BCE (with extensions into the Common Era). During this time period of immense change and characterized by violence and trauma, nearly all of the worlds major religious or philosophical traditions got their starts, from Israelite Monotheism to Vedic Religions to Chinese Religions to Greek Philosophy. Its a very broad theory they implies that humanity as a whole had reached a certain point by this time period to need a new form of religiosity and spirituality and therefore, this transition happened in a number of places simultaneously. For Armstrong, the transition to Axial Age religions involved an evolving sense of self and an acute awareness of suffering and pain. These religions gave their followers the tools to live in chaotic times and make sense of the rapid changes surrounding them. There is also the sense that the religious journey is one that forced the follower to acknowledge the impermanence of things and the difficulty of knowing the divine. What these faiths did was to encourage their followers towards a certain "knosis" of the divine, or to a sense of truths and ideas which are not able to be articulated. This is the sort of knowledge that cannot be taught but knowledge acquired through living and practice.

The book has some amazing ideas and deserves a high rating for the audacity to try to synthesize almost 1,000 years of complex history and philosophy from four different areas. The information is fascinating and clearly aimed for a modern audience- whom she tries to encourage at the end to take the lessons from these thinkers and apply them to the modern world. However, I cannot rate this higher for a number of reasons. First is that while the information is extremely useful and interesting, it suffers from a real lack of organization. The book is arranged chronologically and thematically but within chapters, there is really jumping between the four regions. I do not think that she chose the order of the content randomly but her chain of logic is hard to discern. I also think that by trying to connect these movements so closely, she risks making them seem like they were in extremely close contact and that their developments were in one logical stream. It is a very tricky line to balance and I feel at times, she gets trapped in the idea of the Axial Age. What I may consider doing in the future is reading all of the material for one area at once to be able to connect the sections across chapters. Second is that I am not sure how much I buy into the Axial Age theory. The evidence is compelling but I am wary of "all-encompassing" theories of religion. We must be careful not to allow the theory to overtake what I would call the organic nature of religion.

As a new scholar of religion myself, I can agree with this theory on a basic level. I think that this new conception of humanity was a logical development of religion and shows one way that humans can react to profound change. An axial mindset would be useful in the modern world and I think this book goes a long way to remind us of these essential truths founded by these seekers so many years ago.