450 a note on the three orientationsrather than any change in the content of religious beliefs, were the deci-
sive attributes of the Axial innovations.*
Th e Axial Age thesis has thus been in part inspired by the desire of
the self- professed party of Enlightenment in the North Atlantic world,
from the Second World War to today, always ready to see itself as the
beleaguered friends of reason, to invent a genealogy for itself. A major
fe at u re of t h i s end e avor h a s b e en to fi nd a modus vivendi with religion—
religion insofar as it can be understood, or made to remain, “within the
bounds of pure reason” and brought into league with secular human-
ists and critical thinkers. One might be forgiven for recalling White-
head’s defi nition of a Unitarian as a man who believes that there is no
more than one God and for suspecting that in the eyes of the propo-
nents of the Axial Age thesis the heroes of the story have always been
people such as themselves.
Like Jaspers, I have philosophical and practical aims in my discussion
of major orientations to existence. Th ese goals diff er in spirit from those
that have driven the campaign for the Axial Age idea. I have refused to
view religion, in the inclusive sense in which I have defi ned it, as the hazy
penumbra and occasional ally of philosophy. A vital part of the world
religions is the contention over the nature, or the inscrutable character, of
ultimate reality as the setting in which we defi ne an approach to life and
to society. We must choose without ever having adequate grounds for
choice. In a sense, the task of religion begins where the instruments of
the party of Enlightenment lose their effi cacy. To think otherwise is to
assign the criticism and revision of religion to those whom Max Weber
(writing about himself) described as “religiously unmusical.”
When Hegel speaks of the doctrine of the Trinity as the hinge on
which world history turns, he has in mind a sectarian understanding of
a view that can be stated much more broadly. Th e dialectic between
* See, for example, Bjorn Wittrock, “Th e Axial Age in Global History: Cultural Crys-
tallizations and Societal Transformations,” in Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas, eds.,
Th e Axial Age and Its Consequences, 2012. In the same volume, refl ecting on the con-
tributions of his colleagues, Bellah concludes that the production of theory, as both
utopian vision and disinterested inquiry, was the chief achievement of the Axial pe-
riod. Along similar lines, see Arnaldo Momigliano, “Th e Fault of the Greeks” in Es-
says in Ancient and Modern Historiography, 1947, pp. 1–23.