Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 104

GRIPLA104
and man. the emergence of a competing, transcendent order opens the
way for revolutions, radical discoveries, new social institutions, but also
constant strife. When the distance between dichotomous realms reaches
into infinity, the most stringent battles are waged by the supreme authority
assigned to that transcendent realm, as it casts perpetual suspicion on the
mundane features of the temporal realm.
In summarizing eisenstadt’s general model, jóhann emphasizes the
connections between cognitive transcendence and the dynamics of political
development:
The axial visions give rise to more ambitious and elaborate ways of
legitimating more complex and expansive power structures...; the
axial transformation broadens the cognitive horizon and therefore
the strategic scope of power centres and elites, but the growing
quantity and diversity of cognitive resources is at the same time an
obstacle to the monopolization of power... (Jóhann Páll Árnason
2003, 47).
Questions about authority and legitimacy thus shift from the strategic
realm of mundane competition and acquire a new horizon and potentially
a new conceptual vocabulary, importing values from a newly accessible
normative realm.
In applying this model to early Iceland, jóhann seems to identify that
new realm as already belonging to transcendent religion. For him, the turn­
ing point is the emergence of sacred kingship, often a pivotal transition for
the civilizations of the axial age (2003, 42). And surely this emphasis on
the sacred deserves to be developed further. But there is another possibility,
if one regards this transitional period in Iceland from the vantage point of
its own past, and especially from the perspective of “the only European
people who remember their beginnings” (Sigurður Nordal 1942, 1). Saga
writing presents us with a muted or inchoate form of transcendence – one
that retains a distinctly human or pragmatic dimension, where the distance
between realms falls short of the infinite distance found in Plato, St.
Augustine, and other visionaries of the axial age. Elsewhere I have sug­
gested that a work like Heimskringla offers a fundamentally secular vision
of concepts that later periods would eventually label “legitimacy” and
“authority,” a vision that holds great interest for us because of its pre­con­