I Cogitate

By JOHN BLAKE
Cox News Service
April 29, 2006

ATLANTA -- After writing about history’s greatest spiritual leaders for the past 20 years, Karen Armstrong experienced a revelation that would shock many religious people.

Few of the “founders” of the world’s great religions were interested in creating new religions. Not Muhammad, not Jesus, not Buddha - not even some of Judaism’s greatest leaders, she says. Each taught that practicing compassion was supreme. Believing in certain doctrines was ultimately unimportant.

“What mattered was not what you believed, but how you behaved,” Armstrong says. “Religion was about doing things that changed you at a profound level.”

That simple message was so radical that later generations diluted it, but the popular British author is trying to revive it in her latest book, The Great Transformation (Knopf, $30). The book’s title is her description of a spiritual renaissance that took place from 900 to 200 B.C. during what she calls the Axial Age.

Armstrong says some of humanity’s most transcendent spiritual figures - Buddha, Confucius and the Hebrew prophets - suddenly sprouted across the globe during that time. They all preached a similar message. Forget about trying to find God through rituals and doctrine. Turn inward and practice compassion instead. Their message subsequently shaped figures such as Jesus and Muhammad.

Armstrong argues that people must absorb the lessons of the Axial Age or humanity won’t survive. Some of those lessons are personal to her. An ex-nun who lives in London, she left the Catholic convent she entered as a teenager after seven years and took on an academic career that included having her dissertation rejected and being fired as a teacher.

Today her best-selling books have been translated into 40 languages, and Armstrong is considered by many to be the world’s premier writer about religion. Armstrong talked by phone from New York during her current book tour.

Q: What’s so fascinating about the Axial Age?

A: We got the idea these days that to be religious, you have to hang onto tradition. The Axial Age was a time of great innovation. It was a complete revolution in thinking that proved to be the axis of the spiritual history of humanity, the hub of the wheel, the pivot upon which everything has since continued. The people such as the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, all inherited very ancient religious traditions and they all in their different ways turned them around so that religion was about being creative, not conservative.

What about the importance of holding onto religious tradition and orthodoxy?

The Axial Age sages were not interested in orthodoxy. Orthodoxy means correct teaching. They weren’t interested in theology much at all. For them, religion was not about belief or holding onto correct beliefs but about behaving in a way that changed you at a profound level.

How does one behave in such a way?

The essence of Axial Age religion is the disciplined practice of compassion. Compassion could not be confined to your own particular group. It had to be what one of the Chinese sages called “concern for everybody.” That meant that you just couldn’t love people in your own group or your own church. You had to extend your compassion to every creature.

You also say in your book that Jesus didn’t teach doctrine. Explain that, please.

Does he mention the Trinity, the Incarnation or original sin? What you see Jesus doing is going around being good, asking questions. They’ll ask him what is the greatest commandment and he says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart.” But he’s not telling them what the Lord your God is, whether he is the Trinity or not. There’s very little of that. 

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