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  4.2 Protestantism: An Eonic Effect  

Last modified 05/26/2008

 Full understanding of the eonic effect, and the Axial Age, requires seeing how the eonic sequence follows a strange property: its frontier effect. Each stage of the sequence seems to jump to a new region of realization. The Greeks and the Israelites were relative outsiders to the previous cycle of civilizations. The rise of the modern is another such jump. Our subject is really Eurasian, thence world, civilization, and yet the modern transition misleadingly seems to be a European phenomenon. 

Not for long! We will soon have little reason to worry about this factor in the explosive globalization of modernity. But one of the problems with the eonic sequence lies in the way its 'restarting' in a new area can sometimes seem to leave behind the advances achieved in prior stages of the sequence. This factor impinges on the issue of religion and secularism, and especially the Indic transition, in all its complexity, witness the Buddhist revolution. 

And yet modernity seems to simply abandon this tradition and move in a new direction. In fact we have seen that the great flood of New Age movements already moves to compensate for this. 

Whatever the case the modern transition is misleadingly pegged as showing a Protest Reformation in a continuance of Christianity, but none of the other religions either of global or of Axial antiquity. This non-problem will swiftly move to solve itself, and we can with bias look at the unique character of the Protestant Reformation. Despite its Christian signature, this reformation is really the first of the modern revolutions, and swiftly moves to transcend itself in the Enlightenment. A close look shows that what is really at work is a broader creation of a new kind of religious institution in a secular framework, along with the equally significant action of Biblical Criticism and archaeology. Thus the Reformation foretells the passage to a new formulation of religious association in the context of civil society, a piece of real estate and a dwelling therein for religious activities taken in any way: the rubric of secular religion, and the model for all subsequent religious associations, including the frequently rowdy attempts of the various gurus to declare their ashrams as beyond the civil sphere, etc..

The point for us is that the mighty Protestant Reformation surpasses itself in its own action, and it is ironic once again that, in the words of the philosopher Hegel, German classical philosophy is the completion of the Reformation. Be this as it may, the fact is that the early stage of Protestantism, seemingly frozen at the moment of its creation, has already spawned the seeds of it successor. 

 

 

  

 


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