Nominal Christians think of the life of Jesus as being paradoxical.
According to the myths which are typically misread as historical narratives,
Jesus was miraculously born to a virgin and when he came of age, the Holy
Spirit descended on him in the form of a dove and he heard the voice of God
bless him. Jesus grew up and taught a radical message of peace, performed
numerous miracles, started a church that flourishes to this day, and was
resurrected after his physical death. His life is supposed to represent a
pivotal intersection between the supernatural heavens (which we know of now merely
as places in outer space) and the fallen world of Earth. Christianity thus
follows the patterns of deification and mythologization that are familiar not
just to all historians, but to anyone who’s coped with the loss of a loved one
by confabulating and concluding that the dearly departed was the greatest
father, mother, husband or wife for whom anyone could have asked. When dealing
with a horrific experience, we often enter tunnel vision; far from soberly
accepting the statistical fact that none of us has everlasting significance, we
glorify those in whom we’ve been emotionally invested, to avoid the awkwardness
of having wasted our feelings on something so transient and ultimately
inconsequential as another human life.
The Axial Age
Much of the historical context of Christianity was
deliberately destroyed by the established churches. Those who rejected the
party-line myths or whose deviant form of worship pointed to a larger earthly
milieu were demonized and persecuted, their texts burned and their movements
wiped out. Then the Church lost its autocratic power as a result of the Age of
Reason which began with the Renaissance. And now we’re poised to see, indeed,
that the contemporary enlightenment in Europe from the 14th to the
17th centuries CE wasn’t the first of its kind. It was indeed a re-birth, as indicated by the word “Renaissance,”
which means Revival. The most illuminating part of the historical context of
Christianity is what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Period. As
he writes in The Origin and Goal of
History, that was the uncanny “period around 500 B.C., in the spiritual
process that occurred between 800 and 200 B.C. It is there that we meet with
the most deepcut dividing line in history. Man, as we know him today, came into
being.”
More specifically,
The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this period. Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Lieh-tsu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to skepticism, to materialism, sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers—Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato—of the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West, without any one of these regions knowing of the others.
Jaspers describes what is new about this age in existential
terms: “man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and of his
limitations. He experiences the terror of the world and his own powerlessness.
He asks radical questions. Face to face with the void he strives for liberation
and redemption. By consciously recognizing his limits he sets himself the
highest goals. He experiences absoluteness in the depths of selfhood and in the
lucidity of transcendence.” The cause of these revolutions, says Jaspers, was
“reflection. Consciousness became once more conscious of itself, thinking
became its own object.”
So this ancient period of enlightenment was both spiritual
and philosophical, and a word that encompasses both aspects is “existential.” We
might compare, then, the two historical awakenings, the ancient Axial Age and
the modern one, by noting that the latter leaves less room for spiritual,
psychological or social growth, because its catalysts were advances mainly in technoscience,
in an instrumental affair that only presupposes rather than justifies certain
ideals. After the medieval Dark Age, reason was wedded not to the
self-awareness of Byronic loners but to industrialists. (Romanticism was a movement
of counter-Enlightenment in the early 1800s.) Instead of a mass flowering of
spiritual insight, Europe and the Americas devised new forms of population
control that were made possible by developments in economics and public
relations. Instead of efficacious modern religions we had “ideologies” such as
the Nazi or Communist utopias and the American Dream of Liberty.
That, though, makes for a larger point of similarity between
the two periods of existential enlightenment. As Jaspers wrote,
The age that saw all these developments, which spanned several centuries, cannot be regarded as a simple upward movement. It was an age of simultaneous destruction and creation. No final consummation was attained. The highest potentialities of thought and practical expression realized in individuals did not become common property, because the majority of men were unable to follow in their footsteps. What began as freedom of motion finally became anarchy. When the age lost its creativeness, a process of dogmatic fixation and leveling-down took place in all three cultural realms. Out of a disorder that was growing intolerable arose a striving after new ties, through the re-establishment of enduring conditions.
Thus arose empires of conquest in China (Tsin Shu hwang-ti),
India (Maurya dynasty), and the West (Hellenistic and Roman empires).
“Everywhere the first outcome of the collapse was an order of technological and
organizational planning.”
That which had collapsed as a result of rational
enlightenment was the “Mythical Age, with its tranquility and self-evidence.” What
the Frankforts call the mythopoeic naiveté of childhood innocence was
suspended by the Axial Age of Doubt. Those prehistoric, that is, prehumanistic
and regressive myths had codified prejudices and superstitions that had held
together tribes and kingdoms since the end of the Paleolithic Era. Once the
conventions were questioned, because of the dawning of hyperconsciousness, the multitudes
could no longer take their existentially inauthentic modes of life for granted.
At least, they had to defer to the newfangled spiritual and philosophical elites
whose knowledge and experience were subversive and might have led to mass panic
if the majority had had firsthand access to them. The Axial Age liberation was thus
relatively short-lived, but there was a long-delayed aftershock after the Dark
Age: the Rebirth of Reason, beginning in the 14th C. And arguably,
the creative spirit of that latter age has likewise left us in the last century,
and we “postmodern” or “post-postmodern” relativists and cynics now absurdly
wait for Godot, knowing that no mythical narrative can sooth us.
