Ilia delivered the Axial Age lecture this past week from her temporary post in Germany, and the questions came in fast enough that we ended up touching the third rail of the whole class — the rise of monotheism. Yes, there was a time when God was not. Yes, there was a time when God was gods. Yes, Psalm 82 is in your Bible, and yes, Yahweh shows up at the divine council to judge the other deities. If that sounds sacrilegious, you might be exactly the right person to take this class. The Axial Age is when the I gets invented, the score gets written, the disengaged knowing that becomes science comes online, and 60,000 denominations begin arguing over whose copy of the score is correct. We are still inside its inertia. We are also — Ilia argues, and I think she is right — already past its hinge.

Highlights from the conversation

Pre-axial identity was a strand of wheat in a field of wheat. Ilia’s image for the kind of personhood we cannot easily imagine — where the self did not exist apart from the group, where “who am I” would not have parsed as a question, and where the question of interiority does not yet arise. The Axial Age is where the I gets born, and with it, almost everything we now take for granted as religious.
Psalm 82 and the divine council. Read the actual psalm: Yahweh shows up where all the local tribal deities are gathered, indicts them for letting injustice run their territories, finds them guilty, and claims the throne as the God of all the nations. The Hebrew Bible itself contains the receipts on the move from henotheism to monotheism. “There was a time when God was not. There was a time when God was gods.” Ilia, on the third rail.
How forests think. Tripp on Eduardo Kohn and the ontological turn — how literacy hijacked parts of our brain that other humans used to read a forest, and why most humans who ever lived were not literate. What our consciousness is for depends on what we have been trained to attend to. The Native American hearing birds while the American hears coins jingling in his pocket is not a metaphor. It is what cognitive evolution actually looks like.
Consciousness lag dressed up as holy war. Hannah’s question and the answer that ties this Q&A back to the last one. We are trying to hold what cannot be held. Most of our religious conflict is the lag of an Axial consciousness fighting to remain normative inside a world that has already moved. The 60,000 denominations are the score wars. The future is not a better score. It is remembering what music sounded like before there was a score.
Incarnation is a cosmic event, not an exception. Nancy’s question, and Teilhard’s both/and: the moment the incarnation is no longer the great exception breaking into the natural world from outside, the incarnation has to be an expression of what the cosmos is already doing. From the leap of the quark, Teilhard insists, everything is incarnation. There is no such thing as stuff.
“We are not religious. We are becoming religious.” Ilia’s closing reframe. Religion in the making. The wheel hit a pothole at the Axial Age and we got stuck inside it for two thousand years. There are no signs that say you are entering the second Axial Age. The class is, in part, practice in reading the unsigned shift.

The Future of Religion is a six-session class Ilia and I are teaching together this summer — Tripp on religion before belief and the train wreck of the present, Ilia on the Axial Age and what comes next. It is donation-based, including zero (we accept anything up to one million dollars per registration — we have standards). Register at www.thefutureofreligion.com and respond to the class emails with your questions for the next Q&A, after Ilia’s Axial Age lecture next week.

Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, and American theologian specializing in science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology.

Previous Episodes with Ilia Delio