The Great Transformation By Karen Armstrong 469 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, $30 (hc).
FOR ANY THINKING STUDENT OF RELIGION, a broad knowledge of religious history can enhance and bolster one's own belief system. For example, at a time when women were denied public education, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer of Christian Science, read widely and familiarized herself with literature about the Bible and religious history. Her knowledge in this area permeates her writing. In Science and Health, for example, she specifically discussed other religious traditions See Science and Health, p. 524. and definitions in the then-recent Smith's Bible Dictionary. See ibid., p. 320.
In this tradition, Christian Scientists may find one of today's bestsellers—Karen Armstrong's latest book, The Great Transformation—a worthwhile read. Armstrong delivers an articulate recounting of major historical religious trends in the Middle East, Greece, India, and China over a 700-year period. Her skillful presentation takes us effortlessly through centuries of little-known history, although the simplicity of her presentation masks the many controversies that beset this history.
The core of the narrative stretches roughly from the ninth century BC, when the writings called the Brahmanas began in India, to the Bhagavad-Gita, sometime before 200 BC. The religious traditions she discusses are Brahman Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, monotheism in Israel, and Greek philosophical rationalism. Armstrong finds that during this period of intense creativity, spiritual and philosophical geniuses in all these traditions pioneered an entirely new kind of human system of rationality, based on a "spirituality of empathy and compassion." To these thinkers, people's behavior mattered more than what they believed. The great thinkers of this period held that nobody should accept religious teaching secondhand either from dogma or a teacher, but rather, one should question everything and test any teaching against personal experience. But Armstrong notes that these sentiments did not last in any of these traditions. Rather, "people [fell] prey to exclusivity, cruelty, superstition, and even atrocity."
Armstrong offers two suggestions for those today who would combat what she calls militant piety. First, people need to examine their own behavior and not simply lambaste the "other side." Secondly, she counsels "practical, effective action" in confronting aggression by rewriting and reorganizing rituals and scriptures to eliminate the violence that accumulates over years.
Karen Armstrong has written a number of notable and influential books on Buddha, Islam, Christian fundamentalism, and other religious subjects. Following seven years as a Catholic nun in the 1960s (as recounted in her autobiographical work, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness), she has become a renowned religious scholar and writes prolifically about the commonalities among religious traditions and in particular about the political and social fallout of religious extremism.
Armstrong's motivation for writing this book appears to lie in the deep spiritual crisis she sees the world struggling with today, a time "when the sense of the sacred inviolability of every single human being has been lost." She notes in her introduction that an increasing number of people find traditional religious doctines and practices irrelevant and incredible, and instead turn to art, music, literature, dance, sport, or drugs to give them a transcendent experience.
The central structure of her book rests on successive descriptions of century-long developments in four major geographical areas, as parts of a single "Axial Age." For her sources, she relies on ancient classics and archaeological finds. However, she admits to uncertainty about how historically accurate they are. Working through written sources as she does, she appears to limit the dawn of full-blown spiritual insight and compassion to the beginnings of written literature.
The Great Transformation does not present religious myths as historical fact. However, Armstrong does treat many events thought of as historical as myths, such as the Exodus, the Ten Commandments, and Joshua's conquest of the Promised Land. She also tends to highlight the positive side of non-Christian religions, while omitting positive aspects of post-Pauline Christianity.
Overall, given the scant ancient documentation available to scholars, The Great Transformation is necessarily more a scholarly defense of Karen Armstrong's personal views than an objective overview of historical facts. However, given those limitations, this book offers an entertaining and accessible review of religious history in the ancient world.
