In the Western World the philosophy of history was founded in the Christian faith. In a grandiose sequence of works ranging from St. Augustine to Hegel this faith visualised the movement of God through history. God's acts of revelation represent the decisive dividing lines. Thus Hegel could still say: All history goes toward and comes from Christ. The appearance of the Son of God is the axis of world history. Our chronology bears daily witness to this Christian structure of history.

But the Christian faith is only one faith, not the faith of mankind. This view of universal history therefore suffers from the defect that it can only be valid for believing Christians. But even in the West, Christians have not tied their empirical conceptions of history to their faith. An article of faith is not an article of empirical insight into the real course of history. For Christians sacred history was separated from profane history, as being different in its meaning. Even the believing Christian was able to examine the Christian tradition itself in the same way as other empirical objects of research.

An axis of world history, if such a thing exists, would have to be discovered empirically, as a fact capable of being accepted as such by all men, Christians included. This axis would be situated at the point in history which gave birth to everything which, since then, man has been able to be, the point most overwhelmingly fruitful in fashioning humanity; its character would have to be, if not empirically cogent and evident, yet so convincing to empirical insight as to give rise to a common frame of historical self-comprehension for all peoples–for the West, for Asia, and for all men on earth, without regard to particular articles of faith. It would've seem that this axis of history is to be found in the period around 500 B.C., in the spiritual process that occurred between 800 and 200 B.C. It is there that we meet with the most deep cut dividing line in history. Man, as we know him today, came into being. For short we may style this the "Axial Period".

The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this period. Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Lieh-tsu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to scepticism, to materialism, sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers–Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato–of the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West, without any one of these regions knowing of the others.

What is new about this age, in all three areas of the world, is that man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations. He experiences the terror of the world and his own powerlessness. He asks radical questions. Face to face with the void he strives for liberation and redemption. By consciously recognising his limits he sets himself the highest goals. He experiences absoluteness in the depths of selfhood and in the lucidity of transcendence.

All this took place in reflection. Consciousness became once more conscious of itself, thinking became its own object. Spiritual conflicts arose, accompanied by attempts to convince others through the communication of thoughts, reasons and experiences. The most contradictory possibilities were essayed. Discussion, the formation of parties and the division of the spiritual realm into opposites which nonetheless remained related to one another, created unrest and movement to the very brink of spiritual chaos.

In this age were born the fundamental categories within which we still think today, and the beginnings of the world religions, by which human beings still live, were created. The step into universality was taken in every sense.

As a result of this process, hitherto unconsciously accepted ideas; customs and conditions were subjected to examination, questioned and liquidated. Everything was swept into the vortex. In so far as the traditional substance still possessed vitality and reality, its manifestations were clarified and thereby transmuted.

The Mythical Age, with its tranquillity and self-evidence, was at an end. The Greek, Indian and Chinese philosophers were unmythical in their decisive insights, as were the prophets in their ideas of God. Rationality and rationally clarified experience launched a struggle against the myth (logos against mythos); a further struggle developed for the transcendence of the One God against non-existent demons, and finally an ethical rebellion took place against the unreal figures of the gods. Religion was rendered ethical, and the majesty of the deity thereby increased. The myth, on the other hand, became the material of a language which expressed by it something very different from what it had originally signified: it was turned into parable. Myths were remoulded, were understood at a new depth during this transition, which was myth-creating after a new fashion, at the very moment when the myth as a whole was destroyed. The old mythical world slowly sank into oblivion, but remained as a background to the whole through the continued belief of the mass of the people (and was subsequently able to gain the upper hand over wide areas).

This overall modification of humanity may be termed spiritualisation. The unquestioned grasp on life is loosened, the calm of polarities becomes the disquiet of opposites and antinomies. Man s no longer enclosed within himself. He becomes uncertain of himself and thereby open to new and boundless possibilities. He can hear and understand what no one had hitherto asked or proclaimed. The unheard-of becomes manifest. Together with his world and his own self, Being becomes sensible to man, but not with finality: the question remains.

For the first time philosophers appeared. Human beings dared to rely on themselves as individuals. Hermits and wandering thinkers in China, ascetics in India, philosophers in Greece and prophets in Israel all belong together, however much they may differ from each other in their beliefs, the contents of their thought and their inner dispositions. Man proved capable of contrasting himself inwardly with the entire universe. He discovered within himself the origin from which to raise himself above his own self and the world.

In speculative thought he lifts himself up towards Being itelf, which is apprehended without duality in the disappearance of subject, and object, in the coincidence of opposites. That which is experienced in the loftiest flights of the spirit as a coming-to-oneself within Being, or as unio mystica, as becoming one with the Godhead, or as becoming a tool for the will of God is expressed in an ambiguous and easily misunderstood form in objectifying speculative thought.

It is the specifically human in man which, bound to and concealed within the body, fettered by instincts and only dimly aware of him self, longs for liberation and redemption find is able to attain to then already in this world–in soaring toward the idea, in the resignation of ataraxia, in the absorption of meditation, in the knowledge of his self and the world as atman, in the experience of nirvana, in concord with the tao, or in surrender to the will of God. These paths are widely divergent in their conviction and dogma, but common to al of them is man's reaching out beyond himself by growing aware o himself within the whole of Being and the fact that he can tree them only as an individual on his own. He may renounce al worldly goods, may withdraw into the desert, into the forest o the mountains, may discover as a hermit the creative power of solitude, and may then return into the world as the possessor of knowledge, as a sage or as a prophet. What was later called reason and personality was revealed for the first time during the Axial Period.

What the individual achieves is by no means passed on to all. The gap between the peaks of human potentiality and the crow became exceptionally great at that time. Nonetheless, what the individual becomes indirectly changes all. The whole of humanity took a forward leap.

Corresponding to this new spiritual world, we find a sociological situation showing analogies in all three regions. There were a multitude of small States and cities, a struggle of all against all which to begin with nevertheless permitted an astonishing prosperity, an unfolding of vigour and wealth. In China the small States and cities had achieved sovereign life under the powerless imperial rulers of the Chou dynasty; the political process consisted of the enlargement of small units through the subjection of other small units. In Hellas and the Near East small territorial units–even, to some extent, those subjected by Persia–enjoyed an independent existence. In India there were many States and free cities.

Reciprocal intercourse set a spiritual movement circulating within each of these three regions. The Chinese philosophers–Confucius, Mo-ti and others–wandered about the country and met in place of renown favourable to the spiritual life, founding schools which are termed academies by sinologists: the sophists and philosophers of Hellas travelled about in similar fashion and Buddha passed his entire life in wandering from place to place.

In the past, spiritual conditions had been comparatively enduring; despite catastrophes everything had repeated itself, confined within the horizons of a still, very flaw spiritual movement that did not enter consciousness and was therefore not apprehended. Now, on the contrary, tension increases and causes a movement of torrential swiftness.

This movement reaches consciousness. Human existence becomes the object of meditation, as history. Men feel and known that something extraordinary is beginning in their own present. But this very realisation also makes men aware of the fact that this present was preceded by an infinite past. At the very commencement of this awakening of the specifically human spirit, man is sustained by memory and is conscious of belonging to a late or even a decadent age.

Men see themselves faced by catastrophe and feel the desire to help through insight, education and reform. The endeavour is made to dominate the course of events by planning, right conditions are to be re-established or brought about for the first time. History as a whole is seen as a sequence of shapes assumed by the world, either as a process of continual decline, or as a circular motion, or as an ascent. Thought is devoted to the manner in which human beings may best live together, may best be governed and administered. Practical activity is dominated by ideas of reform. Philosophers travel from State to State, become advisers and teachers, are scorned or sought after, enter into discussions and compete with one another. A sociological parallel can be drawn between Confucius' failure at the court of Wei and Plato's failure at Syracuse, between the school of Confucius, which trained future statesmen, and the academy of Plato, which served the same purpose.

The age that saw all these developments, which spanned several centuries, cannot be regarded as a simple upward movement. It was an age of simultaneous destruction and creation. No final consummation was attained. The highest potentialities of thought and practical expression realised in individuals did not become common property, because the majority of men were unable to follow in their footsteps. What began as freedom of motion finally became anarchy. When the age lost its creativeness, a process of dogmatic fixation and levelling-down took place in all three cultural realms. Out of a disorder that was growing intolerable arose a striving after new ties, through the re-establishment of enduring conditions.

The conclusion is at first of a political character. Mighty empires, made great by conquest, arose almost simultaneously in China (Tsin Shi hwang-ti), in India (Maurya dynasty) and in the West (the Hellenistic empires and the Imperium Romanum). Everywhere the first outcome of the collapse was an order of technological and organizational planning.

But the relation to the spirit of what had gone before remained everywhere. It became a model and an object of veneration. Its achievements and great personalities stood clearly in view and provided the content of schooling and education (Confucianism was evolved under the Han dynasty, Buddhism by Asoka, and the age of Augustus consciously established Graeco-Roman cultural education).

The universal empires which came into being at the end of the Axial Period considered themselves founded for eternity. But their stability was only apparent. Even though these empires lasted for a long time by comparison with the State-formations of the Axis Period, in the end they all decayed and fell to pieces. Subsequent millennia produced an extraordinary amount of change. From one point of view the disintegration and re-establishment of area empires has constituted history ever since the end of the Axis Period, as it had constituted it through the millennia during which the ancient civilizations were flourishing. During these millennia however, it had possessed a different significance: it had lacked that spiritual tension which was first felt during the Axial Period and has been at work ever since, questioning all human activity and conferring upon it a new meaning.

Reference to a few facts, such as I have made, does not suffice in itself to bring about complete conviction as to the truth of particular view of history. Portrayal of the full wealth of historic material can alone cause the thesis either to appear in ever greater clarity or to be rejected. Such a portrayal is beyond the scope of short book. The facts to which I have referred should be looked upon as a question and a challenge to put the thesis to the test.

Assuming this view of the Axial Period to be correct, it would seem to throw a light upon the entire history of the world, in such a way as to reveal something like a structure of world history. Let me endeavour to adumbrate this structure:

(I) The thousands of years old ancient civilizations are everywhere brought to an end by the Axial Period, which melts them down assimilates them or causes them to sink from view, irrespective whether it was the same peoples or others that became the bearer of the new cultural forms. Pre-Axial cultures, like those of Babylon, Egypt, the Indus valley and the aboriginal culture of China may have been magnificent in their own way, but they appear in some manner unawakened. The ancient cultures only persist in those elements which enter into the Axial Period and become part of the new beginning. Measured against the lucid humanity of the Axial Period, a strange veil seems to lie over the most ancient cultures preceding it, as though man had not yet really come to himself. This fact is not obscured by isolated beginnings, moving in themselves, but without effect on the whole or on what followed (such as the Egyptian discourse of a man tired of life with his soul, the Babylonian psalms of repentance and the Gilgamesh). The monumental element in religion and religious art, and the extensive State-formations and juridical creations corresponding to it, are objects of awe and admiration to the consciousness of the Axial Period; they are even taken as models (by Confucius and Plato, for instance), but they are seen in a new light that transmutes their meaning.

Thus the imperial idea, which gains new force toward the end of the Axial Period and terminates this era in the political domain, was a heritage from the ancient civilizations. But whereas it originally constituted a culture-creating principle, it now becomes the means by which a declining culture is stabilised by being laid in its coffin. It is as though the principle that once bore mankind upward, despite its factually despotic nature, had broken through afresh in the form of conscious despotism, but this time merely to preserve a culture in icy rigidity.

(2) Until today mankind has lived by what happened during the Axial Period, by what was thought and created during that period. In each new upward flight it returns in recollection to this period and is fired anew by it. Ever since then it has been the case that recollections and reawakenings of the potentialities of the Axial Period–renaissances–afford a spiritual.

(3) The Axial Period commenced within spatial limitations, but it became historically all embracing. Any people that attained no part in the Axial Period remained "primitive" continued to live that unhistorical life which had been going on for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. Men living outside the three regions of the Axial Period either remained apart or came into contact with one of these three centres of spiritual radiation. In the latter event they were drawn into history. In the West this happened, for example, to the Germanic and Slav peoples, in the East to the Japanese, Malays and Siamese. For many primitive peoples this contact resulted in their extinction. All human beings living after the Axial Period either remained in a primitive state or took part in the new course of events, now the only one of fundamental significance. Once history had come into being, the primitive peoples represented the residue of prehistory, which occupied a continually shrinking space and has only now reached its final end.

(4) Between these three realms a profound mutual comprehension was possible from the moment they met. At the first encounter they recognised that they were concerned with the same problems. Despite the distance that separated them they at once became involved in one another. To be sure, they were not bound by the common possession of a single, objective truth (such a truth is only to be found in science which, methodologically conscious and compelling general assent to its propositions, is capable of spreading over the entire globe without undergoing any metamorphosis as a result and has a claim on the collaboration of all); but the authentically and absolutely true, which is lived by mankind historically from diverse origins, was seen and heard reciprocally in this encounter.

To sum up: The conception of the Axial Period furnishes the questions and standards with which to approach all preceding and subsequent developments. The outlines of the preceding civilisations dissolve. The peoples that bore them vanish from sight as they join in the movement of the Axial Period. The prehistoric peoples remain prehistoric until they merge into the historical movement that proceeds from the Axial Period, or die out. The Axial Period assimilates everything that remains. From it world history receives the only structure and unity that has endured– at least until our own time.

The earliest discussion of the facts of the Axial Period known to me is to be found in the works of Lasaulx and Viktor von Strauss.

Lasaulx (Neuer Versuch einer Philosophie der Geschichte, Munich, 1856, p. II5) writes: "It cannot possibly be an accident that, six hundred years before Christ, Zarathustra in Persia, Gautama Buddha in India, Confucius in China, the prophets in Israel, King Numa in Rome and the first philosophers–Ionians, Dorians and Eleatics–in Hellas, all made their appearance pretty well simultaneously as reformers of the national religion."

Viktor von Strauss, in his wonderful Lao-tse commentary, p. lxiv (I870), says: "During the centuries when Lao-tse and Confucius were living in China, a strange movement of the spirit passed through all civilised peoples. In Israel Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Daniel and Ezekiel were prophesying and in a renewed generation (521-516) the second temple was erected in Jerusalem. Among the Greeks Thales was still living, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and Xenophanes appeared and Parmenides was born. In Persia an important reformation of Zarathustra's ancient teaching seems to have been carried through, and India produced Sakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism."

Since then these facts have now and then been noted, but only marginally. As far as I am aware, they have never been grasped as a whole, with the aim of demonstrating the universal parallels obtaining for the entire spiritual being of the humanity of that time. Let us consider possible objections to this view.

(1.) One objection might be that the common element is only apparent. The differences–differences of language and race, differences as to the types of empire and in the mode of historical recollection–are so great that, by comparison, the common element strikes us as no more than a series of coincidences. Every clear-cut formulation of the common element as a whole is refuted by the facts. Or, it is argued, it amounts to no more than the trivial maxim that fundamentally everything can be found everywhere amongst men, either as a beginning or as a potentiality. In the realisation of common human possibilities it is the differences which are essential distinctive and historical; the whole can never be apprehended as a unity, except in the unhistorical, universal characteristics of human existence.

The answer to this is: What is involved in the Axial Period is precisely the common element in an overall historical picture, the break-through to the principles which, right up to our own time, have been operative for humanity in borderline situations. The essential thing here is this common element, which does not stem from all over the earth, wherever man as such exists, but historically speaking solely from these three origins and the narrow area they occupy. The question is whether increasing knowledge will prove this common element to go even deeper than appeared at first, despite the differences that still remain. In that event, the temporal coincidence would become a fact, all the more astonishing the more clearly it is visualised. To demonstrate it thus convincingly would, however, demand a broader canvas.

(2.) A further possible objection would be: The Axial Period is not a fact at all, but the product of a judgement of value. It is on the basic of a preconceived opinion that the achievements of this period are appraised so inordinately highly.

The answer to this is: In matters of the spirit, a fact can only be apprehended through the understanding of meaning. Understanding, however, is by its nature valuation. Though it rests empirically upon an accumulation of separate data, an historical construction never comes into being through these alone. Only through understanding do we arrive at our view of the Axial Period, as of the spirit of any historical period. And this view involves understanding and valuation at the same time; it includes the fact that we are emotionally moved, because we feel ourselves touched by it, because it concerns us as our own history and not merely as a past of which we can trace the effects, but a the past whose wider, more original effect, which is continual! beginning afresh, is incalculable.

For this reason the whole man is the organon of historical research. "Every man sees that which he hears within his own heart". The source of understanding is our own present, the here and now, our sole reality. Thus the higher we ourselves ascend the more clearly do we see the Axial Period.

If the hierarchy of the contents of history can only be grasped in the subjectivity of human existence, this subjectivity is no extinguished in the objectivity of something purely factual, but in the objectivity of communal perception–perception on the part of a community which man seeks after if he does not find himself already within it; for truth is that which links us to on another.

It is my thesis that in common understanding, which is inseparably bound up with valuation, we shall realise the significance of the Axial Period. This thesis is not, by the nature of the matter, susceptible of final proof; it can, however, be substantiated through a widening and deepening of the conception.

(3) A further objection may be: This parallel is not historical in character. For that which has no contact in spiritual intercourse does not share a common history.

This objection was already put forward against Hegel, who brought together China, India and the West as stages in the dialectical sequence of the development of the spirit. It was argued that here no real contact led from one stage to the next, as it did between the various stages in the development of the history of the West.

Our thesis, however, involves something altogether different. It is precisely this series of stages from China to Greece whose reality we deny; there is no such series, either in time or in meaning. The true situation was rather one of contemporaneous, side by side existence without contact. To begin with, several roads seem to lead from disparate origins toward the same goal. There is a multiplicity of the same in three shapes. There are three independent roots of one history, which later–after isolated and interrupted contacts, finally only a few centuries ago and properly speaking not until our own day–become a single unity.

The question at issue is, therefore, the nature of the parallelism involved.

2. What is the nature of the parallelism asserted?

The facts of the Axial Period might represent nothing more than a number of synchronistic curiosities devoid of historical significance. Numerous strange synchronism can be pointed to in world history. For example:

In the sixteenth century the Jesuits discovered in Japan a Buddhist sect which had flourished there since the thirteenth century. It seemed to bear (and actually did bear) an astonishing resemblance to Protestantism. According to the description given by the Japanologist Florenz (in the textbook by Chantepie de la Saussaye) their teaching was somewhat as follows: Man's own efforts contribute nothing toward his salvation. Everything depends upon faith, faith in Amida's loving kindness and aid.' There are no meritorious good works. Prayer is not an achievement, but only an expression of gratitude for the redemption granted by Amida. "If even the good shall enter into eternal life, how much more so shall sinners", said Shinran, the founder of the sect. As against traditional Buddhism it demanded: no works, no magical formulae or conjurations, no amulets, pilgrimages, atonements, fasts or other forms of asceticism. The layman has the same prospects of salvation as the priest and the monk. The priests are only a body of teachers to the laity. There is no more need for them to differ from the laity in their way of life and they wear the same clothes. Celibacy is abolished. The family is regarded as the best sphere of action for the religious life. Members of the sect are counselled to "preserve order, obey the laws of the State and, as good citizens, to care for the wellbeing of their country".

This example of synchronicity, which extends to identity with the basic doctrines of Lutheranism, is astonishing. Numerous other parallels occur throughout the centuries, from China to Europe. They have been tabulated on synchronistic charts.

The answer to thus is:

Firstly: It can be said of many parallels in history, whether they are synchronistic or not, that they manifest a rule which holds good for single phenomena. Only in the Axial Period do we encounter a parallelism that follows no general law, but constitutes rather a specifically historical, unique fact of an all-embracing character which includes within itself all spiritual phenomena. The Axial Period is the only one that represents a total universal parallelism on the plane of world history, and not merely the chance concurrence of particular phenomena. Single phenomena or series of phenomena do not suffice to establish the kind of parallelism with which we are dealing in the Axial Periods.

Secondly, the three parallel movements are close to each other only during those centuries. The attempt to prolong the parallel beyond the Axial Period–in synchronistic tables spanning millennia–becomes increasingly artificial. The lines of subsequent development do not run parallel, but rather diverge. Though originally they appeared like three roads directed toward the same goal, they finally became deeply estranged from one another. But the farther back we go toward the Axial Period, the closer our relationship becomes, the closer we feel to one another.

It seems to me continually more unlikely that this overall aspect of the Axial Period should be no more than an illusion created by historical coincidence. It seems rather to be the manifestation of some profound common element, the one primal source of humanity. What followed later in the course of increasing divergence produces occasional analogies, marks of a common origin, but never again in toto that real, original community a meaning.

The only comparable world historical parallelism occurs at the commencement of the ancient civilisations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus valley and China.

Within this temporal coincidence, however, there are differences of millennia. The beginnings stretch from 5000 to 3000 B.C. (Mesopotamia and Egypt; the earliest discoveries on Crete and a Troy date from the same period). The beginnings of the Chinese and Indus civilisations fall within the third millennium B.C.

Comparable to these ancient civilisations are those of Mexico and Peru, which are conjectured to have arisen during the first millennium A.D.

Their common properties are highly developed organisation and a high level of technical achievement. In Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus valley and in China along the banks of the Hwang-ho, analogous civilisations sprung up in the river valley characterized by the central administration of a highly evolved mechanism for satisfying the needs of the community.

They also have in common a magical religion destitute of philosophical enlightenment, devoid of any quest for salvation and lacking any break-through into liberty in the face of extreme situations, as well as a singular apathy accompanying extraordinary stylistic achievements in art; especially, in the case some of these civilizations, in architecture and sculpture.

However, this parallelism does not exhibit the same synchronism as does that of the Axial Period. Moreover it consists only of the similarity of an established type, not of a spiritual movement. It involves strangely stable conditions which, after destructive catastrophe, tend to reconstitute themselves in their old form. It is a world between prehistory, which is almost a closed book to us, and history proper which no longer permits things to remain constant in the realm of the spirit. It is a world which furnished the basis for the Axial Period, but was submerged in and by the latter.

If the facts of the Axial Period are beyond dispute, we must now ask ourselves what caused them. Why did the same thing happen at three mutually independent points? The fact that these three regions were originally unknown to each other seems, at first, to be entirely extraneous–but it is an historical mystery which progressive research into the facts of the situation renders increasingly great. The Axial Period, with its overwhelming plenitude of spiritual creations, which has determined all human history down to the present day, is accompanied by the enigma of the occurrence, in these three mutually independent regions, of an analogous and inseparably connected process.

Apart from the Axial Period, the mystery of simultaneity applies, as we have shown, to perhaps only one other situation in the whole of world history: the genesis of the ancient civilizations. The question is, why did the development from the general condition of prehistoric peoples to the ancient civilisations take place more or less simultaneously–despite intervals of up to two millennia–in the river valleys of the Nile, of Mesopotamia, the Indus, and the Hwang-ho?

The usual answer is that analogous tasks (provision of irrigation and the fight against floods) had similar consequences. But in that case, why simultaneously? Why only in respect of these particular rivers? Why much later and under different conditions in America?

Commercial and cultural exchanges might have had a releasing effect. At all times civilising achievements of a craft character have slowly made their way across the earth, or at least the entire Eurasian continent. The invention of writing may possibly have taken place at a single spot and spread from there; without it the tasks of administration, and especially of river-control, would have been insuperable. But these are only possibilities. Such exchanges can be proved to have occurred in the third millennium between the Sumerian culture of Mesopotamia and the culture of the Indusvalley; they existed between Egypt and Babylonia i early times, being very active during the second millennium.

But the multiple developments leading up to the ancient civilisations of the early millennia cannot be explained in terms diffusion from a single source. E. Meyer (Gcschichte des Altertums, I, 2 p. 935) therefore remarks: "We must assume that around 5000 B.C. the genus homo had reached a stage in his evolution that opened up to all human groups or peoples, whose inherent aptitudes (i.e. the spiritual forces latent with them) rendered them capable of rising above this level at all, the way toward the genesis of a culture which would thereafter continue to advance." The parallel phenomena would, in that event, have to be regarded as simultaneous developments in the biological evolution of human beings who are members of a similarly endowed humanity. That which, by virtue of a common origin, is dormant in all of them, manifests itself simultaneously and independently–as happens during the life-span of identical twins who have been separate from one another.

But this idea is a mere figure of speech which explains nothing. It is empty because it provides no basis for further research. The "evolution of the genus homo" is not a reality that can be apprehended as such or serve as an explanation of anything. And, above all, this "biological evolution" would only have been accomplished by a small, scattered section of mankind, not mankind as a whole. The mystery of the simultaneous inception of the Axial Period appears to me to be situated at a much deeper level than the problem of the birth of the ancient civilizations. In the first place the simultaneity is much more exact and, in the second, it relates to spiritual-historical developments in the whole conscious, thinking aspect of humanity. The three regions which, from the beginnings of the ancient civilizations onward, were possessed of unique character, brought forth creations during the millennia before Christ upon which the entire history of the human spirit has rested ever since.

These developments were originally independent of one another. Real communications and stimuli must be ruled out. Only after the penetration of Buddhism into China, which took place at the end of the Axial Period, did a profound spiritual communication between India and China come into being. Though there had always been relations between India and the Alest, these only became extensive during Roman times, vis Alexandria. But the origin of these developments is not affected at all by the relations between India and the West, their further course not visibly so.

Let us see how this mystery has been explained:

Lasaulx writes: "This strange concurrence can only be founded on the inner unity of substance in the life of mankind and the life of peoples, on a vibration of the total life of humanity which passed through all peoples, and not on the particular efflorescence of the spirit of any one people." But that is not an explanation, it is merely a paraphrase of the mystery.

V. von Strauss talks of a hidden law: "This phenomenon, for which there is no lack of parallels in history, and from which very mysterious laws may be inferred, probably has its roots, on the one hand, in the total organism of mankind, by virtue of its homogeneous origin, while on the other it presupposes the influence of a higher spiritual power, in the same way that the urge to florescence in nature only arrives at the unfolding of its magnificence through the vivifying rays of the returning sun." But, as with Lasaulx, such figures of speech only paraphrase the mystery. In addition they make the mistake of levelling down the uniqueness of the historical fact of the parallels of the Axial Period in the name of supposedly similar instances of shared development throughout history.

Keyserling says (Bach vom Ursprurg, p. 151): "From generation to generation men seem to change in the same fashion and in the same direction, and at turning-points of history a similar change embraces enormous areas and peoples who are complete strangers to one another." But this again is simply a paraphrase of the mystery, and a bad one at that, because it sinks down completely into the realm of biology without there being the slightest basis for approaching the problem from a biological standpoint.

All these explanations overlook the clear fact that it was not mankind, not all men, who by that time had occupied the entire planet, but only a few, relatively very few, who took this step forward at three points. As in the case of the ancient civilisations not mankind as such, but only a small section was involved.

Instead, therefore, of taking as a basis a biology of mankind, something falsely supposed to be held in common and valid for the whole of humanity, the attempt has been made to trace back the few peoples amongst whom this revolution occurred to a common historical origin within mankind. This origin is admittedly unknown to us. It would have to be assumed to lie In prehistoric Central Asia. With their source in such a common origin the parallel developments could perhaps be considered related. But this hypothesis has so far eluded all possibility of verification. It is improbable because it would have to prove a common origin for such disparate racial groups as the Chinese, the Indo-Europeans and the Semites; furthermore, this common origin would have to be taken as only a few millennia prior to the period at which the inception of these peoples' history becomes visible to us–biologically speaking a very short space of time and hardly sufficient to allow profound racial differentiations to take place.

In response to the question, why this simultaneity? only one methodologically arguable hypothesis has so far been advance that put forward by Alfred Weber. The penetration of the nations of charioteers and horsemen from Central Asia–which did, in fact, reach China, India and the West and introduced the horse to the ancient civilisations–had, so he argues, analogous consequences in all three regions. The men of these equestrian people came to experience, thanks to the horse, the limitless vastness of the world. They took over the ancient civilizations by conquest. In hazards and disasters they experienced the problematic character of existence, as master-peoples they developed an heroico-tragic consciousness that found expression in the epic.

This turning-point of history was brought about by the Indo-European nations of horsemen. By the end of the third millenium they had reached Europe and the Mediterranean. A great new thrust carried them as far as Iran and India round about 1200. In the same way, other nations of horsemen reached China by the end of the second millennium.

Before, from Europe to China, there had been the ancient civilizations reaching back into the depths of the past and characterised variously as matriarchal, as civilizations of settled cattle breeders, or simply as the population masses flourishing in close self-sufficiency in the fertile regions of the belt of civilisation extending from China to Europe.

History became a conflict between these two forces: the old, stable, unawakened matriarchal powers against the new, mobile liberating tendencies of the equestrian peoples which were rising into consciousness.

Alfred Weber's thesis demonstrates the existence of a real uniformity within the Eurasian bloc; how far the appearance of the equestrian peoples was decisive is difficult to determine, however. Geographical situations and historical constellations may have given rise to the preconditions; but what set the work of creation in motion remains the great enigma.

Weber's thesis possesses a singular power of illumination arising out of its simple, causal explanation based on the human character of the life of the horseman. But it still applies at most to a precondition. The contents of the Axial Period are so remarkable and all-embracing that one hesitates to derive them from such a cause, even if it be regarded as only a necessary precondition. Counter-evidence is afforded, for example, by China, which produced the rich contents of the Axial Period, but neither the tragic consciousness nor the epic (in China nothing comparable to the epic appears until the centuries after Christ, during the period of long-drawn-out struggles against new peoples, corresponding to our migration of the peoples). A further contradictory instance is Palestine, whose population experienced no mingling with equestrian peoples and yet, through the prophets, produced an essential factor in the spiritual creation of the Axial Period.

The credibility of the hypothesis is further impaired by the fact that movements, migrations and conquests had been precipitating themselves upon the ancient civilisations for millennia; to this is added the further fact that the period of incubation between the Indo-European invasions–themselves distributed over a period of more than a thousand years–and the inception of the spiritual development of the Axial Period was very long, while this inception, when it took place, did so with such astonishingly exact simultaneity.

That it is necessary to enquire after the historical reason for the events of the Axial Period is due to the fact that it is a question of a new departure within mankind–involving small areas only–and not of a development shared by the whole of humanity. The Axial Period does not represent a universal stage in human evolution, but a singular ramified historical process.

Whereas Alfred Weber has given an ingenious and clearcut reply to this question, that can be put to the test and rendered fruitful by further discussion, the mystery of the lack of contact between the three independent origins has usually been veiled by the vague assertion of a general Eurasian interrelationship. Perhaps, so it is meaninglessly said, influences no longer apparent to us were at work. The unity of the history of the whole Eurasian bloc, determined by constantly renewed advances, migrations and conquests from Central Asia, is pointed to, as well as the demonstrable parallels that can be observed in archaeological finds of a technological and ornamental character. These finds go back to early prehistory and permit a perpetual cultural exchange over the entire major continent to be inferred. Against this, however, it must be said that the spiritual movement of the Axial Period, in its simultaneity and the sublimity of its content, cannot be accounted for in terms of such migrations and exchanges.

In the end, the simplest explanation of the phenomena of the Axial Period seems to lie in common sociological preconditions favourable to spiritual creativeness: many small States and small towns: a politically divided age engaged in incessant conflicts; the misery caused by wars and revolutions accompanied by simultaneous prosperity elsewhere, since destruction was neither universal nor radical; questioning of previously existing conditions. These are sociological considerations which are meaningful and lead to methodical investigation, but ultimately they merely illuminate the facts and do not provide a causal explanation of them. For these conditions form part of the total spirit phenomenon of the Axial Period. They are preconditions of which the creative result is not a necessary sequel; as part of the overall pattern their own origin remains in question.

No one can adequately comprehend what occurred here became the axis of world history! The facts of this break-through must be seen from all sides, their many aspects must be fixed the mind and their meaning interpreted, in order to gain a provisional conception of the Axial Period, which grows more mysterious the more closely we examine it.

It might seem as though I were out to prove direct intervention on the part of the deity, without saying so openly. By no means. For that would not only be a salto mortale of cognition into pseudo-knowledge, but also an importunity against the deity. I want rather to prevent the comfortable and empty conception history as a comprehensible and necessary movement of humanity; I should like to maintain awareness of the dependence of our cognition upon current standpoints, methods and facts and. thereby, of the particularity of all cognition; I should like to hold the question open and leave room for possible new starting-points in the search for knowledge, which we cannot imagine in advance at all.

Wonder at the mystery is itself a fruitful act of understanding in that it affords a point of departure for further research. It may even be the very goal of all understanding, since it means penetrating through the greatest possible amount of knowledge authentic nescience, instead of allowing Being to disappear by absolutising it away into a self-enclosed object of cognition.

4. The meaning of the Axial Period

The problem of the meaning of the Axial Period is something quite different from that of its cause.

The fact of the threefold manifestation of the Axial Period is in the nature of a miracle, in so far as no really adequate explanation is possible within the limits of our present knowledge. The hidden meaning of this fact, however, cannot be Discovered empirically at all, as a meaning somewhere intended by someone. In enquiring after it we are really only putting our own interpretation on the facts and causing something to grow out of them for us. If, in the process, we make use of terms which seem to indicate that we have in mind some plan of providence, these are only metaphors.

Really to visualise the facts of the Axial Period and to maker them the basis of our universal conception of history is to gain) possession of something common to all mankind, beyond all differences of creed. It is one thing to see the unity of history from one's own ground and in the light of one's own faith, another to think of it in communication with every other human ground, linking one’s own consciousness the alien consciousness. In this sense, it can be said of the centuries between 800 and 200 B.C. that they are the empirically evident axis of world history for all men.

The transcendental history of the revealed Christian faith is made up out of the creation, the fall, stages of revelation, prophecies, the appearance of the Son of God, redemption and the last Judgement. As the contents of the faith of an historical human group it remains untouched. That which binds all men together, however, cannot be revelation but must beexperience. Reveltion is the form taken by particular historical creeds, experience is accessible to man as man. We–all men–can share the knowledge of the reality of this universal transformation of mankind during the Axial Period. Although confined to China, India and the West, and though there was to begin with no contact between these three worlds, the Axial Period nonetheless founding universal history and, spiritually, drew all men into itself.

The fact of the threefold historical modification effected by the step we call the Axial Period acts as a challenge to boundless communication. To see and understand others helps in the achievement of clarity about oneself, in overcoming the potential narrowness of all self-enclosed historicity, and in taking the leap into expanding reality. This venture into boundless communication is once again the secret of becoming-human, not as it occurred in the inaccessible prehistoric past, but as it takes place within ourselves.

This demand communication–made by the historical fact of the threefold–is the best remedy against the erroneous claim to exclusive possession of truth by any one creed. For a creed can only be absolute in its historical existence, not universally valid for all in its predications, like scientific truth. The claim to exclusive possession of truth, that tool of fanaticism, of human arrogance and self-deception through the will to power, that disaster for the West–most intensely so in its secularised forms, such as the dogmatic philosophies and the so-called scientific ideologies–can be vanquished by the very fact that God has manifested himself historically in several fashions and has opened up many ways toward Himself. It is as though the deity were issuing a warning, through the language of universal history, against the claim to exclusiveness in the possession of truth.

If the Axial Period gains in importance with the degree to which we immerse ourselves in it, the question arises: Is this period, are its creations, the yardstick for all that follows? If we do not consider the quantitative aspect of its effect, nor the extent of the areas involved in its political processes, nor the pre-eminence accorded to spiritual phenomena throughout the centuries, is it still true that the austere grandeur, the creative lucidity, the dept of meaning and the extent of the leap toward new spiritual world contained in the phenomena of the Axial Period are to be regarded as the spiritual peak of all history up to the present? Do late manifestations, in spite of the heights to which they attained and in spite of having become irreplaceable in their turn, pale before the earlier–Virgil before Homer, Augustus before Solon, Jesus before Jeremiah?

It would certainly be wrong to answer this question with a mechanical affirmative. The later manifestation invariably possesses a value of its own, which was not present in the earlier one: a maturity of its own, a sublime costliness, a depth of soul, especially in the case of the "exception". It is quite impossible to arrange history in a hierarchy of values following automatically from one universally applicable conception. But the manner in which this question is formulated–and also, perhaps, a prejudice against the later–does result from an understanding of the Axial Period. This in turn illumines what is specifically new and great after a different fashion and does not belong to the Axial Period. For example: Anyone studying philosophy is likely to find that after months with the Greek philosophers, St. Augustine affects him like a liberation from coldness and impersonality into questions of conscience, which have remained with us ever since the time of St. Augustine but were alien to the Greeks. Conversely, however, after spending some time on St. Augustine, he will experience an increasing desire to return to the Greeks and clean himself of the feeling of impurity that seems to grow with the pursuit of this type of thinking, to regain his health by immersion in the pellucid waters of Greek thought. Nowhere on earth can we find final truth, authentic salvation.

The Axial Period too ended in failure. History went on.

Only this much seems certain to me: Our present-day historical consciousness, as well as our consciousness of our present situation, is determined, down to consequences I have only been able to hint at, by the conception of the Axial Period, irrespective of whether this thesis is accepted or rejected. It is a question of the manner in which the unity of mankind becomes a concrete reality for us.

If we are concerned with the history of philosophy, the Axial Period affords the most rewarding field of study and the one most fruitful in respect of our own thought.

It may be called an interregnum between two ages of great empires, a pause for liberty, a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness.

The Axial Period becomes a ferment that draws humanity into the single context of world history. It becomes. for us' a yardstick with whose aid we measure the historical significance of the various peoples to mankind as a whole.

A deep division falls between the peoples according to the manner in which they react to the break-through. We can distinguish:

(1) The Axial peoples.–These are the peoples which accomplished the leap as a direct continuation of their own pasts. To them it was a second birth, so to speak, and through it they laid the foundations of man's spiritual being and his history properly so called. The axial peoples are the Chinese, Indians, Iranians, Jews and Greeks.

(2) Peoples without the break-through.–Although the break-through was decisive for universal history, it was not a universal occurrence. There were the great peoples of the ancient civilisations, who lived before and even concurrently with the break-through, but had no part in it and, despite their temporal concurrence, remained inwardly unaffected by it.

During the Axial Period the Egyptian and Babylonian cultures were still flourishing, although in a palpably later shape. Both of them were destitute of that quality of reflection which transformed mankind; they underwent no metamorphoses under the influence of the axial peoples; they no longer reacted to the break-through that had taken place outside their orbit. To begin with they remained what they had been earlier, as the predecessors of the Axial Period: magnificent in the organization of public and social life, in architecture, in sculpture and painting, in the fashioning of their magical religion. But now they came slowly to an end. Outwardly subjected by the new powers, they also lost inwardly their old culture, which flowed out into Persian, afterwards Sasanian culture and Islam (in Mesopotamia) or into the Roman world and Christendom (which in Egypt subsequently became part of Islam).

Both of them are of significance to universal history, because the Jews and Greeks, who created the basis of the Western World, grew up in sight of them, learning from them, drawing away from them and striving to outdo them. Then these ancient cultures were almost forgotten, until they were rediscovered in our own time.

We are gripped by their magnificence but feel somehow remote from them, in consequence of the gulf created by their lack of everything that went with the break-through. We are infinitely closer to the Chinese and the Indians than to the Egyptians and the Babylonians. The grandeur of the Egyptian and Babylonian world is unique. But that which is familiar to us only starts with the new age of the break-through. In evanescent beginnings we see an anticipation of what comes later that excites our wonder; it is as though the break-through were about to commence End then came to nothing, particularly in Egypt.

There is one fundamental question that is crucial for our conception of human history: Are China and India to be set alongside Egypt and Babylonia and really only distinguished from them by /the fact that they have survived until today–or did India and China, through their share in the creation of the Axial Period itself, take that great step which carries them right past those ancient civilisations? I will repeat what I have already said: Egypt and Babylonia may be set alongside early China and alongside the Indus Culture of the third millennium, but not alongside China and India in their entirety. China and India occupy a position beside the West, not only because they lived on, but also because they accomplished the break-through. We will look briefly at the pros and cons of this view:

It is an old thesis that, compared with the West, China and India had no proper history. For history implies movement, changers of inner nature, new beginnings. In the West there are a succession of totally diverse cultures; first the ancient culture of Hither Asia, then the Graeco-Roman, then the Teuto-Romance. There is a constant change of geographical centres, areas and peoples. In Asia, on the other hand, a constant situation persists; it modifies its manifestations, it founders in catastrophes and reestablishes itself on the one and only basis as that which is constantly the same. This view gives rise to a conception that pictures unhistorical stability east of the Indus and the Hindu-Kush, to the west of them historical movement. Accordingly the deepest division between the great provinces of culture lies between Persia and India. The European might believe himself still in Europe till he reaches the Indus, said Lord Elphinstone (who is quoted by Hegel).

This view seems to me to have its origins in the historical situation of China and India in the eighteenth century. Lord Elphinstone saw the circumstances of his own time and failed altogether to discern China and India in their overall import. At that time they had both reached an advanced stage in their downward path.

Is not the recession that has taken place in India and China since the seventeenth century like a great symbol of what may happen to the whole of mankind? Is not the problem of our destiny to avoid sinking back into the Asiatic matrix from which China and India had also raised themselves up?

(3) The peoples that came after.–All the peoples were divided into those which had their foundations in the world of the break-through and those which remained apart. The former were the historical peoples, the latter the primitives.

The peoples responsible for the political construction of the new great empires were the Macedonians and the Romans. Their spiritual poverty consisted in the fact that the experiences of the break-through failed to touch the inner core of their souls. For this reason they were able, in the historical world, to conquer, to govern, to organise, to acquire and preserve the forms of civilisation, to safeguard the continuity of the cultural heritage, but not to carry forward or deepen experience.

It was different with the Nordics. To be sure, the great spiritual revolution no more took place in the North than it did in Babylonia or Egypt. The Nordic peoples lay in the slumber of primitivity, but when the Axial Period reached them they had attained, with the essence of their psychic attitude which it is so difficult for us to apprehend objectively (Hegel calls it the Northern soul), to an autonomous substance.

Two thousand years have passed since the Axial Period. The consolidation in world-empires was not definitive. The empires collapsed; in all three regions there was a succession of ages of warfare between States, ages of confusion, of the migration of peoples, of ephemeral conquests and fresh moments of the highest cultural productiveness which rapidly vanished in their turn. New peoples entered the three great spheres of culture, in the West the Teutons and Slave, in Eastern Asia theJapanese, Malays and Siamese; all of them for their part brought forth new cultural configurations.. But they did so in a process of coming to terms with the civilisation transmitted to them, by appropriating and refashioning it.

The Teutons only began their spiritual world-mission at the moment when they achieved a share in that revolution of humanity which had started a thousand years earlier. The instant they related themselves to this world, they began a new movement in the midst of which, as the Teuto-Romance world of Europe, they still stand today. One more historically unique phenomenon commenced. That which Antiquity had no longer been capable of achieving now took place. The most extreme tensions of humanity, the luminosity of extreme situations, everything which had begun In the period of the break-through, but had almost foundered in late Antiquity, was accomplished afresh at the same depth and in perhaps greater extension; on this occasion it was not accomplished for the first time and not by the Nordic peoples out of their own resources, but originally as a result of the meeting with an alien tradition which they now felt to be their own. A fresh trial was begun of what is possible to man.

In comparison with China and India, there seem to be far more dramatic fresh starts in the West. Side by side with a spiritual continuity, which became very attentuated at times, there appeared a series of totally dissimilar spiritual worlds. The pyramids, the Parthenon, Gothic cathedrals–China and India can show no such diverse phenomena as these appearing in historical succession.

Yet there can be no question of stability in Asia. In China and India there were silent centuries, like our period of the migration of the peoples, during which everything seems to disappear in chaos, only to reappear and give birth to a new culture. In Asia, too in India and China–there were shifts in the geographical position of cultural pinnacles and political centres; the peoples bearing the movement of history alternate. The dissimilarity to Europe is not a radical one. The great analogy remains: the creative epoch of the Axial Period followed by revolutions and renaissances; until A.D. 1500, when Europe takes its unprecedented step, whereas China and India, at precisely the same moment, enter into cultural decline.

Once the break-through of the Axial Period had taken place, once the spirit that grew up in it had been communicated, through ideas, works and constructs, to all who were capable of hearing and understanding, once its infinite possibilities had become perceptible, all the peoples that come after were historical by virtue of the intensity with which they laid hold of that break-through and the depth at which they felt themselves spoken to by it.

The great break-through was like an initiation of humanity. Every later contact with it is like a fresh initiation. Subsequent to it, only initiated individuals and peoples are within the course of history proper. But this initiation is no hidden, anxiously guarded arcanum. Rather has it stepped out into the brightness of day, filled with a boundless desire for communication, laying itself open to every test and verification, showing itself to all, and yet an "open secret" in so far as he alone can discern it who is ready for it, he who, transformed by it, comes to himself.

The fresh mutation takes place in interpretation and assimilation. Conscious transmission, authoritative writings and study become an indispensable element of life.

From time immemorial peoples have streamed out of Asia toward the south. The Sumerians themselves came from the north From about coo B.C. peoples with Indo-Germanic languages moved into India and Iran and then into Greece and Italy; the Celts and Teutons who, during the last millennium B.C., again disturbed the cultural worlds of the south and were for a time held at bay by the Roman Empire–as the nomadic Mongols were for a time by China–were also Indo-Germanic peoples. After that it was the Teutonic and Slavonic peoples of the period of the migration of the peoples, then the Turkish peoples, then the Mongols. This incessant movement of wandering peoples toward the regions of culture only came to a stop a few centuries ago. Its final conclusion was the cessation of the nomadic way of life. From the eighteenth century until today Chinese peasants from the south have peacefully settled Mongolia. From the north the last of the nomads were compelled to settle by the Soviets.

Amongst these wandering peoples who, throughout the millennia, have determined the course of events, we are wont to give historical precedence to the bearers of the Indo-Germanic languages–with justice, but with limited justice.

At no point were the ancient civilisations Indo-Germanic. The linguistic type of the Hittites, which shows clear Indo-Germanic influence, was not accompanied by any tangible spiritual distinctiveness.

It is true that the past of the Indo-Europeans, contemporary with the ancient civilizations, exhibits no organised world comparable to the latter, with writing, State power and cultural tradition. But there must have been a world of more than simply linguistic community. Profound spiritual contents may be inferred–such, for example, as the idea of a Father-God and the peculiar closeness to nature.

There runs through history a periodicity of times in which the past is neglected, forgotten and allowed to sink out of sight, alternating with times in which it is recognised afresh, recalled to mind, re-established and repeated. Ever since then renaissances have run through history at all points (the Augustan age, the Carolingian, the Ottonian renaissance, the Renaissance so called in a narrower sense, the German humanist movement from 1770 to 1830, the Sanskrit renaissance in the twelfth century–the Confucianism of the Han period, the neo-Confucianism of the Sung period).

For the Axial Period and for the ensuing millennia of the West, however, the cultures founded by the Indo-Germanic peoples were of paramount importance. These peoples–Indians, Greeks, Teutons, as well as Celts, Slavs and the later Persians–have ones thing in common: They gave birth to the heroic saga and the epic, they discovered, shaped and evolved the tragic spirit. Comparable creations on the part of other peoples–the Babylonians' Gilgamesh, the account of the battle of Kadesh written by the Egyptians, the Chinese San-kwo tshi–are quite different in feeling. The Indo-Germanic peoples played a part in determining the mode of the Axial Period in India, Persia and Greece. But peoples such as the Jews and Chinese, who were so essential to the Axial Period, are not Indo-Germanic at all. Moreover, everything founded by the Indo-Germanic peoples was based on the higher cultures that preceded them and developed through mixture with the previous population and assimilation of the alien heritage.

In Europe there awoke out of the Nordic peoples, after they had come into contact with the Axial Period in the first millennium A.D., a hitherto unreflected substance, which–vague as such notions are bound to be–is akin to the forces partially manifested in the Axial Period itself. It needed this much later contact to enable the content of impulses, which were perhaps uncomprehended by themselves, to attain sublimation in the Nordic peoples. In new creations of the spirit there developed qualities that progressed from intractable obstinacy to a movement of spiritual rebellion and then of questioning and seeking, or from the unshakable ego to the free personality founded on existence as an autonomous individual. With resolution every tension is pushed to the extreme and in tension itself Northern man learns the significance of mankind, of life on earth, of Being itself; in tension he becomes cognizant of transcendence.

(1) Overall aspect.–The history of China and India does not fall into such clear-cut divisions as that of the West, it does not contain the same clarity of opposites, nor the lucidity of spiritual conflict in which the various inner forces and religious trends displace one another. The West possesses the polarity of Orient and Occident not only in the distinction between itself and the other world outside it, but also as a polarity within itself.

The history of the West may be divided into epochs as follows:

Three thousand years of Babylonia and Egypt up to about the middle of the last millennium B.C.

One thousand years, based on the break-through of the Axis, of the history of the Jews, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, in the course of which the West was consciously constituted; this lasted from the middle of the last millennium B.C. to the middle of the first millennium A.D.

Following the division into East and West round about the middle of the first century A.D., there grew up in the West, after an interval of some five hundred years, the new history of the Western world of the Romance-Teutonic peoples; this began in about the tenth century A.D. and has now lasted approximately one thousand years. In the East the empire and culture of Constantinople persisted in unbroken continuity into the fifteenth century. There the present-day Orient of Hither Asia was formed by Islam, in constant touch with both Europe and India.

In this passage through the millennia the Western World made its way with decisive steps, not shrinking from sharp breaks and sudden bounds and introducing radicality into the world, in a measure unknown to China or India. The differentiation into a multiplicity of languages and peoples is perhaps no less in India and China. But there this differentiation does not become, in the course of struggle, the foundation for a three-dimensional contrast between the various forms taken by social and cultural reality, it does not become the historical structure of a world in which the particular configurations develop an energy and consistency that threaten to burst asunder the whole mass.

(2) The significance of the Christian axis.–For the consciousness of the West, Christ is the axis of history. Christianity, in the shape of the Christian Church, is perhaps the greatest and highest organisational form yet evolved by the human spirit. Its religious impulses and premises stem from the Jews (from an historical viewpoint Jesus was the last in the series of Jewish prophets and stood m conscious continuity to them); its philosophic breadth and the illuminative power of its ideas stem from the Greeks, its organizational energy and its wisdom in the mastery of reality from the Romans. These elements combine to make a whole which no one planned as such and which, on the one hand, is a remarkably complex end-product in the syncretistic world of the Roman Empire, while on the other, it is set in motion by new religious and philosophic conceptions (the most important representative of which is St. Augustine). This Church proved capable of compelling contradictory elements into union, of absorbing the highest ideals formulated up to that time and of protecting its acquisitions in a dependable tradition.

Historically, however, Christianity, in respect of its contents and in its reality, is a late product. The fact that this was taken as the matrix and origin of the time to come led to a shift in the perspective of the Western view of history in favour of a late-Antique phenomenon–analogous shifts took place in India and China. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages Caesar and Augustus were esteemed more highly than Solon and Pericles, Virgil than Homer, Dionysius the Areopagite and St. Augustine than Herachtus and Plato. The later return to the real and original axis never took place as a whole, but only fragmentarily in various re-discoveries, such as the appraisal of Aristotle and Plato already during the Middle Ages, the renewal of the profundity of the prophetic religion by Protestant movements and the re-experiencing of the Greek spirit by German Humanism at the end of the eighteenth century.

The ways of Western Christianity became decisive for Europe not only spiritually, but also politically. This is disclosed by a comparative view. The great dogmatic religions, after the third century A.D., became factors of political unity. The Iranian religion became the bearer of the Sasanian Empire from 224 onward, the Christian religion the bearer of the Roman Empire from the time of Constantine, Islam the bearer of the Arab Empire from the seventh century. In contrast to the world of relatively free cultural exchanges in Antiquity, that world of humanity, the chasm now yawned. Wars became religious wars at the same time–between Byzantium and the Sasanids, between Byzantium and the Arabs, later on the wars of the Western States with the Arabs and after that the wars of the Crusades. In this world, transformed Christianity in Byzantium was not very different from all the other dogmatic religions. It was a more or less theocratic State. Things were different in the West. Here the demands of the Church were just the same. But because they were not fulfilled the Church fought; here it not only unfolded the spiritual life, but became a factor of liberty against worldly power. Here Christianity fostered liberty even in the very foes of the Church. The great statesmen were pious. The force of their wills not only to the accomplishment of the passing designs of power politics, but also as they operated to fill the forms of life and of the State with ethos and with religion, was one of the major wellsprings of Western liberty after the Middle Ages.

(3) The cultural continuity of the West.–The cultural continuity of the West was never lost, notwithstanding extraordinary ruptures, destructions and apparently total decay. There are at least certain conceptional forms and schemata, words and formulae which have persisted through millennia. And where conscious references to the past ceased, some degree of factual continuity remained and was consciously linked up with past tradition again later.

China and India always lived in continuity with their own pasts; Greece, on the other hand, lived beyond its own past in continuity with an alien, Oriental past; the Nordic peoples lived in continuity with the culture of the Mediterranean world which, to begin with, was foreign to them. The West is characterised by the manner in which, at a given moment, it introduced its own originality into a continuity taken over from a foreign source, which it appropriated, worked over and transmuted.

The West founded itself on Christianity and Antiquity, both of them to begin with in the form in which late-Antiquity transmitted them to the Germanic peoples; it then thrust back step by step into the origins both of the Biblical religion and of the essential spirit of Greece.

Since the times of the Scipios, Humanism has been a form of the cultural consciousness which, in varying inflections, has run through Western history right up to the present.

The West created for itself the universal crystallisations from which the continuity of culture drew its life: the Imperium Romanum and the Catholic Church. Both of them went to make up the basis of the European consciousness which, though it is continually threatening to disintegrate, has always been constituted afresh–though not reliably–in the great undertakings against the menacing stranger (as at the time of the Crusades, and of the Mongol and the Turkish threats).

The tendency to unitary forms of culture did not, however, lead to static mummification of the spiritual life, as very largely took place in the Confucianism of China. There were continual break-throughs, in which the various European peoples in turn had their' creative epochs, from which the whole of Europe then drew its life.

The period following the Italian Renaissance conceived of itself as a renewal of Antiquity, that following the German Reformation as the re-establishment of Christianity. In the sequel both of them, in fact, became the most penetrating recognition of the axis of world history. Both of them, however, were also and above all original creations of the new Western World, which had already set in with growing vigour before that recognition. The period of world history from 1500 to 1830, which in the West is distinguished by its wealth of exceptional personalities, by its imperishable works of poetry and art, by the most profound impulses of religion and finally by its creations in the fields of science and technology, is the immediate presupposition of our own spiritual life.