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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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