The New York Times, TUESDAY, APRIL 25, 2006

By Karen Armstrong

469 pages. $30. Alfred A. Knopf.

Reviewed by William Grimes

For most of recorded history, human beings have been embroiled in violent conflict, either as victims or aggressors. Life, filled with pain and suffering, has been shaped by unpredictable forces beyond mortal ken. In “The Great Transformation,” Karen Armstrong, the historian of religion, offers a sweeping account of the centuries-long struggle by spiritual seekers to address these problems and transcend them in China, India, Israel and Greece.

“The Great Transformation” looks far into the past. It begins with the first stirrings of religious consciousness, about 3,500 years ago among the Aryans of the southern Russian steppes, that would eventually lead humanity from nature worship and sacrifice to an inward-looking, self-critical and compassionate approach to life.

This transformation occurred independently in four different regions during the Axial Age, a pivotal period lasting from 900 B.C. to 200 B.C., producing Taoism and Confucianism in China, Buddhism and Hinduism in India, Judaism in the Middle East and philosophic rationalism in Greece.

Moving back and forth from one culture to another, Armstrong, the author of “A History of God” and histories of Buddhism and Islam, provides a lucid, highly readable account of complex developments occurring over many centuries. For the general reader “The Great Transformation” is an ideal starting point for understanding how the crowded heaven of warring gods, worshiped in violent rites, lost its grip on the human imagination, which increasingly looked inward rather than upward for enlightenment and transcendence.

In historical time the great transformation is remote. But Armstrong argues passionately for its relevance to a world still embroiled in military conflict and sectarian hatreds. This is the powerful undertow to her book.

Armstrong argues that the radicalism of the great Axial thinkers has yet to be understood. Their notion of the religious life was concerned less with belief systems than with self-transformation. Most were uninterested in questions of theology. “Their objective was to create an entirely different kind of human being,” she writes.

Spiritual change took place in specific historical, social and economic contexts, which Armstrong sketches out as she moves her narrative along. Centuries fly by, often in a blur, and the need to press ahead can lead to extreme foreshortening. In a discussion of karma, the author uncorks a doozy: “As this new concept took hold, the mood of India changed and many became depressed.”

With only a few slips, however, Armstrong keeps her four plates spinning at top speed, moving easily from one to another. She is particularly nimble in working her way through the Bible, tying each book to the historical circumstances of its composition and the preoccupations of its many editors.

Armstrong tells a hopeful story. The Axial sages move humankind from a religious worldview mired in tribal loyalty and self-interest to an expansive spirituality that takes account of others. Greece is the great exception. At a time when the Hebrew prophets were preaching monotheism, Greece opted for polytheism. Their achievements lay in the fields of philosophy, ethics and science, and it was they who would lay the groundwork for what Armstrong calls the second great transformation, the scientific revolution of the 16th century that created the industrial world but that represents “a more mundane illumination.” Armstrong gives them, and the West, a somewhat grudging two cheers.

“The Axial Age was a time of spiritual genius; we live in an age of scientific and technological genius, and our spiritual education is often undeveloped,” she writes.

Armstrong makes a plea for the warriors and aggressors of the world to heed the teachings of the Axial Age. It is time, she argues, for the modern world to adopt the Axial ideals of “sympathy, respect and universal concern.”

Well, all right, fine. But these sentiments, however lofty, seem squishy. The conclusion does a disservice to a splendid book. After an inspirational journey through more than two millennia of profound thought, the reader gets a fortune cookie at the end.

Fromm http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/24/features/booktue.php