ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly sketches the worldviews and approaches to understanding human suffering in early religion and the Axial Age (about 800–200 BCE), which radically transformed our outlook on life and approach to suffering, significant strands of which persist into the present day. This review raises the question, as Robert Bellah puts it, whether the Axial Age heritage is a “resource” or a “burden” in facing the challenges of today’s post-traditional world and suggests that the revised religious outlook of the Axial Age has to be taken seriously, neither flippantly dismissed nor wrapped in dogmatic certainty, in considering the meaning of human suffering.
