02.16.08
Armstrong echoes
Chasing Axial Age confusions, via links…
Spirituality that determined history’s course
Armstrong on the Axial Age is the subject of extensive commentary on this blog, and one should be wary of her highly flawed analysis.
In this very lucid narrative, Karen Armstrong, by now an accomplished writer on comparative religion with such works as A History of God, Islam: A Short History, The Bible, and important biographies of Muhammad and Buddha behind her, explains how and why people of varied environment and cultures took to developing the fundamental spirituality that shapes the world even today. They did it without even knowing each other, their actions were based on very different realities, but there is a surprising coherence in the core message they left for us. Armstrong writes in a chronological story-telling fashion how people from different regions went about developing the core spirituality defining the Axial Age. In the very first chapter (The Axial Peoples: 1600 to 900 BC), she tells the story of the journey of Aryans from the south Russian steppes into Northern India, how the terrain and the social realities gave rise to the Vedic sages’ spirituality which would ultimately lead to the later very mature Upanishadic spirituality.