The Forgotten Earth: World Religions and Worldlessness in the Legacy of the Axial Age/Moral Revolution

The rise and legacy of world religions out of what John Stuart-Glennie termed the moral revolution, and Karl Jaspers later called the axial age, has been marked by heightened ideas of transcendence. Yet ironically the world itself, in the literal sense of the actual earth, took on a diminished role as a central element of religious sensibility in the world religions, particularly in the Abrahamic religions. Given the issue today of ecological unsustainability, including massive die-offs of wildlife and ever-increasing global human population and consumption, the legacy of those world religions face the question I consider here: Can religion transcend the earth in the long run?

For aboriginal hunter-gatherer peoples of the past as well as today, as evident in ethnographic and archaeological records, the wild habitat is a common focus of reverential as well as practical attunement, a great teacher and source of wisdom, and central to religious life. With agriculture and civilization, the wild habitat begins to recede from a central place in religious belief, even as the domesticated environment and human interests become pronounced in state religions. In the place of the wild earth sacred history comes to the fore, signaling locations of human activity deemed sacred or significant, often centered in cities and humans.

With the Axial Age/Moral Revolution, comes the possibility of transcendence of the world per se. The axial ideal of transcendence connects to a larger ideal, manifest not only in the legacies of the world religions but in contemporary science and technology, of a philosophy of escape from the earth. I will show how ideas of axial transcendence, celebrated by scholars such as Jaspers and Bellah, nevertheless involve an unacknowledged tragic cost, the forgetting of the earth and its lessons and limits as central to what I have termed elsewhere, “sustainable wisdom.”