September 21 is the annual United Nations Day of Peace. In observance and ahead of time, I give for reflection some highlights of Karen Armstrong's book, The great Transformation: The Beginning of our Religious Traditions (New York: Anchor Books, c2006). I recently completed reading the book and it does have some lessons for us regarding the cause of peace.
Armstrong wrote in her introduction to The Great Transformation:
In our current predicament, I believe we can find inspiration in the period the German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age because it was pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity. From about 900 to 200 BCE, in four distinct regions, the great world traditions that have continued to nourish humanity came into being: Confucianism and Daoism in China; Hinduism and Buddhism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece. (p.xvi)
She wrote in the book about The Persians, a play by the Greek Aeschylus that was presented in 472 BCE. This play she said provided the Athenians with some sympathy for those who had destroyed their city a few years earlier.
She also wrote about The Persians:
The play reflected on the lessons of the war. Xerxes had been guilty of hubris; he had overstepped the mark and refused to accept the divinely appointed boundaries of his empire.
She then gave a warning from the ghost of Darius:
... Let no man,
Scorning the fortune that he has, in greed for more
Pour out his wealth in utter waste. Zeus throned on high
Sternly chastises arrogant, boastful men. p.270)
I was interested to learn of a Chinese sage called Mozi, "Master Mo" (c.480 -390 BCE), who lived in the period called the Warring States. Mozi wrote, "Regard another state as your own, another's family as you regard your own, and another's person as you regard your own." (p.322)
Armstrong wrote of him:
During the Warring States period, Mozi was more widely revered than Confucius, because he spoke directly to the terror and violence of his time. As he watched the whole of China mobilizing for war, it seemed that human beings were about to erase themselves from the face of the earth. If they could not curb their selfishness and greed, they could destroy one another. The only way they could survive was by cultivating a boundless sympathy that did not depend upon emotional identification but on the reasoned, practical understanding that even their enemies had the same needs, desires, and fears as themselves. (p.326)
In her section on the Buddha, Armstrong included an early Buddhist poem:
Let all beings be happy! Weak or strong, of high, middle or low estate,
Small or great, visible or invisible, near or far away,
Alive or still to be born--may they all be perfectly happy!
Let nobody lie to anybody or despise any single being anywhere.
May nobody wish harm to any single creature, out of anger or hatred!
Let us cherish all creatures, as a mother her only child!
May our loving thoughts fill the whole world above, below, across,--
Without limit; a boundless goodwill toward the whole world,
Unrestricted, free of hatred and enmity! (pp.340, 341)
Armstrong's final chapter called, "The Way Forward," updates Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism. She wrote there of Rabbi Akibba, killed by the Romans in 132 CE, who taught:
"Religion was inseparable from the practice of habitual respect to all other human beings. You could not worship God unless you practiced the Golden Rule and honored your fellow human beings whoever they were." (p.454)
In her concluding section, Armstrong wrote:
We are living in a period of great fear and pain. The Axial Age taught us to face up to the suffering that is an inescapable fact of human life. Only by admitting our own pain can we learn to empathize with others. Today we are deluged with more images of suffering than any previous generation: war, natural disasters, famine, poverty, and disease are beamed nightly into our living rooms. Life is indeed dukkha [suffering, out of kilter]. It is tempting to retreat from this ubiquitous horror, to deny that it has anything to do with us, and to cultivate a deliberately "positive" attitude that excluded anybody's pain but our own. But the Axial sages insisted that this was not an option. People who deny the suffering of life and stick their heads in the sand are "false prophets." Unless we allow the sorrow that presses in on all sides to invade our consciousness, we cannot begin our spiritual quest. In our era of international terrorism, it is hard for any of us to imagine that we can live in the Buddha's pleasure park. Suffering will sooner or later impinge upon all our lives, even in the protected societies of the first world. Instead of resenting this, the Axial sages would tell us; we should treat it as a religious opportunity. (p.473)
We must continually remind ourselves that the Axial sages developed their compassionate ethic in horrible and terrifying circumstances. They were not meditating in ivory towers but were living in frightening war-torn societies, where the old values were disappearing. Like us, they were conscious of the void and the abyss. The sages were not utopian dreamers but practical men; many were preoccupied with politics and government. They were convinced that empathy did not just sound edifying, but actually worked. Compassion and concern for everybody was the best policy. We should take their insights seriously, because they were the experts. They devoted a great deal of time and energy to thinking about the nature of goodness. They spent as much creative energy seeking a cure for the spiritual malaise of humanity as scientists today spend trying to find a cure for cancer. We have different preoccupations. 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. (p.474)
... We now have to develop a global consciousness, because,whether we like it or not, we live in one world. Even though our problem is different from that of the Axial sages, they can still help us. They did not jettison the insight of the old religion, but deepened and extended them. In the same way, we should develop the insights of the Axial Age. (p.475)
I note that almost in echo of Armstrong's book, John Nichols published an
article commemorating the beginning of the Second World War that reflected on and included W.H. Auden's poem, "September 1, 1939," in which Auden wrote of "imperialism's face" and "international wrong" and said, "We must love one another or die."
I note also that the annual International Day of Peace falls shortly after September 11 or 9-11 and I do find the close proximity of these dates fortuitous.
