The Axial Age,Axiality,and the Missionary Enterprise

This article reviews recent literature on the Axial Age as a phase of world history and seeks to illuminate the role of Christian missionaries as part of this broad perspective. Introduced by Karl Jaspers in 1949, the concept has attracted attention from scholars interested in human development. The cognitive psychologist Merlin Donald views it as the third stage of “brain-culture co-evolution,” which draws on the external memory storage that literacy provides. I argue that missionaries have been central agents in conveying such stored knowledge to non-axial cultures.