Confucius solved the problem by replacing the program of unconscious tradition that prevailed in tribal society with a program of conscious tradition.  His formula was expressed in the Five Constant Relationships that prescribed his ideal of conscious tradition.  It constrained the military egoist who demanded to know only “what’s in it for me” with the demand that he integrate his competitive ego with the cooperative and self-conscious tradition of the Confucian relationships.  It was a formula that served the Chinese people down to the irruption of the West in the nineteenth century.

As Confucius had solved the problem for East Asia, the Buddha solved it for South Asia, and Zoroaster solved it for West Asia, and the Hebrew prophets solved it for the Jews.  The followers of Jesus Christ solved the problem for the Roman Empire; the bishops of the Catholic Church solved it for the warring kings, the Franks and Anglo Saxons of Northern Europe in the seventh century; and in the middle of the last millennium the prophets of Protestantism solved it for the emerging bourgeoisie.  In place of the pure power relations that had obtained before—subordination, kin, force, feud, dependency, and clientage—these prophets and seers developed the idea of conscious tradition, reason and rules, good and evil, as a basis for human society.  Nor was it found sufficient to stop at Five Constant Relationships, The Eightfold Way, The Ten Commandments, or The Five Pillars of Islam.  The rulemaking expanded into codes and commentaries.  In Exodus, for example, the chapter following the Ten Commandments is filled with mind-numbing rules about indentured servants, penalties for sheep-stealing, and compensation for damage caused by livestock.

In The Ever-present Origin, Jean Gebser gives this cultural strain a curious name.  The world of reason and rule, the world of the rational observer, he calls the “perspectival” world that finally triumphed in 1500 with the successful realization of perspective in art.  By perspective, he means the world-view that issues from the idea of a separate Ego, indeed the whole idea of a “world-view” itself: that a person can conceive of themselves as a separate “I,” and gaze upon the world, rather than be an organic part of the world, and to believe that life has direction, and purpose, and a single Truth, that a man can have a direct relationship with God, unmediated by priestly vicar or Son of Heaven.  And that he can reason.  For Gebser, the period from 500 BCE to 1500 CE is the period in which this mental structure of reality was developed and stabilized.  With Parmenides, the radical idea that “thinking and being is one and the same” is first proposed.  By the time of Descartes, this has become “I think, therefore I am.”  For Gebser, the appearance of such figures as Zoroaster, Confucius, Chuang-tsu, Lao-tsu, Buddha, Socrates, Plato, and Jesus Christ was not fortuitous.  It marked the crisis of the beginning of the rational, the mental age, and the beginning of the end of the mythical age.

Gebser asserts that by 1500 the rational worldview had been completely worked out.  This does not mean, however, that all humankind had now been enrolled into the mental universe from the traditional, mythical world of unreflective tradition.  It only means that the most advanced thinkers had encountered the problems of the rational ego and had formulated a response.  While advanced thinkers and city dwellers had penetrated to this universe in the vibrant cities of the Renaissance, ninety percent of humans remained peasants toiling in the cyclical world of agriculture.  In Europe, they were Christians because their masters were Christian, and the heavy mythologizing practiced by the Catholic Church witnessed to the need to dumb down Christianity for its pre-rational flock.  Even then, the peasants usually practiced on the side a myth religion more appropriate to their agricultural culture.  But a tiny minority of advanced minds had worked out a rational world, the first world-view in which man could experience himself having an ego and a place in the world, a place that was symbolized by his mastery of perspective, a technique that relates everything in a two dimensional artwork to the viewer, places it in relation to him.  The stage was set for this spark to travel throughout society like a flame front wherever the right fuel was available.

Once the rational universe had been realized in Europe, the stage was set for the first great outburst of Protestantism, in the movements created by Martin Luther of Wittenberg and John Calvin of Geneva.  As we have seen, the movements were identifiably urban.  They appealed and spoke to the literate burghers of European towns who avidly snatched up the printed tracts that had started to circulate, bought the bestsellers of Erasmus, and studied their family Bibles.

Back in the Axial Age, when the idea of reason and rules was first developed, it solved the great problem of its time: how might the roving egos of the Warring States period be restrained from destroying society?  A thousand years later as the Catholic Church propagated Christianity among the kings and warrior aristocracies of Northern Europe, it solved the problem of predatory kings preying on their neighbors in endless wars of plunder and helped extend the zone of peace beyond the boundaries of clan and kin to the artificial kinship of the nation. Two thousand years later, in the Protestant Reformation, the rising bourgeoisie created a movement to assist their progress in the burgeoning cities of Germany and Holland.  In the seventeenth century, the Puritan movement in England helped the rising middle class negotiate power with the political class and formalize the new relationship in a contract between the rulers and the governed.  In the eighteenth century, in colonial America, the Great Awakening helped the colonists manage their rebellion against the fathers, and set up their own contract of governance.  In England, it helped mechanics on the road to the middle class.

In the nineteenth century this movement continued as strong as ever, renewed by a Second Great Awakening in the United States but uncelebrated, out of sight of the public press and the public history. For the writing and the chattering classes, the nineteenth century was not a century of lawful advance and slow development in the burgeoning cities by mechanics and transplanted peasants inspired by the love of God and the saving grace of Jesus Christ. They experienced instead a different awakening, one that inspired them to a century of revolution and required them to seize the reins of power from the stolid hands of the bourgeoisie and rule in their place.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill