Lecture 6 16 Sept.

, 2019

Video
● Exploring Arabia pre-Islam
○ All of the major world religions were already established when Islam arose
○ Christiniaty is interesting to understand the backdrop of Islam
● The Quran gives a very broad outlook
○ Pluralistic outlook ⇒ i.e. those who are in the graces of God will be rewarded, but is
not limited to Islam
■ Generally speaking about whoever does good
■ Quran is embracing of all people and respects the faith of others
○ However, says that people need to rally behind the new message of the Quran
● What is axial about the way the rise and character of Islam is described?
○ The accommodation of pluralism on the one hand (of religions before it), but
also the need to rally people behind a notion a radical transcended delivered by
the latest messenger, Mohammed
■ Radically transcendental orientation of Islamic movement
○ What events speak to this? Why do people go to Mecca?
■ To pay tribute to the Prophet who went from Mecca to Medina;
commemoration of an important journey he took
○ Why do people walk around the Kaaba stone?
■ A kind of an iconically axial moment
● Similar to Protestant reformation
■ Prophet is appalled by the idolatry in Mecca, and clears the place of
them except for the stone
■ The stone is shapeless ⇒ nothing figurative about it
■ It represents that there is no God except for God
● If there’s going to be a material representation of something
divinely important, it’s non-figurative and amorphous: just looks
like a rock
● “Axial age” - Karl Jaspers
○ All the people who explored this have been preoccupied by a moment in history
in geographically disparate places
○ All seem to share a family resemblance even though the contexts are very different ⇒
they all differ from archaic religions

Axial qualities
1. Transcendence vs. immanence
○ Durkheim religion, like totemism, is materially oriented ⇒ used to compel people of a
feeling of the sacred
■ Symbolism is ritually activated to reference the existence of the small
community itself
■ About the community there, about sacred places and times that have a
relative meaning to the community
 ○ Axial religion is the opposite of embedded religion; it is disembedded religion
■ In contrast to the imminent (meaning things around us) Durkheimian
religion, there is a radically transcended religion
● Things of spiritual value are no longer attached to objects and
specific people
● A kind of denunciation of idolatry
■ Not apprehendable by our senses (in rituals or sacred objects)
2. Iconoclasm
○ Refers to radical protestants in the reformation era who would burn images and
alters to express a commitment to a “pure” Christiniaty
○ Not about representation or rituals, but about radically transcending God
3. Moralization of divinity (devaluation of humanity)
○ Associated not just to the big world religions, but also to the Greco-Roman
religion
○ This kind of expectation that God or the Gods are morally perfect in a way that
you don’t see in pre-axial religions
■ For instance, Greek/Roman gods behave badly all the time; are not held
as a moral example
■ Human beings are not called on to act like gods because gods act kind
of badly
○ Instead, beginning with ancient Judaism, there’s a notion that God is radically
out there (inaccessible, cannot be depicted), all-powerful, and perfect
■ Draws attention to the imperfections of the day-to-day mundane world
■ A way of separating human beings from what’s spiritually
transcendentally important
○ On the other hand, Durkheim says religion reproduces society, from generation
to generation
■ Religion kind of legitimacy or aids in the reproduction of how society is
conducted: who gets to do what and what society means
4. Prophetic denunciation of the world
○ Prophetic dimension: Mohammad comes to Mecca with his followers having
received a mandate to spread the truth
5. Ascetic withdrawal
○ Asceticism in the Protestant ethic context
○ Value attached to removing yourself from everyday society
■ Closing yourself in a mestary, going on a pilgrimage
■ All activities that take people out of everyday life, but also things that not
everyone could do b/c otherwise who continues society?
○ Embodiment of something not ordinary ⇒ tension b/w spiritual transcendental truth and
everyday life that results in ascetics leaving to find the truth or prophets arrival to
reveal the truth

Axial moments
● Judaism: Abraham bringing the truth from the mountain
 ● Zoroastrianism

History
● Why would this similar form of religion emerge in roughly the same time across these
different parts of the world?
○ From Babiloia, to Greece, to East Asia, etc
○ Thinking is that it had something to do with the emergence of cities for the first
time in places like Mesopotamia and China
● Importance of emergence of city
○ Unlike subsistence human survival that occurred for the majority of history,
surplus means that people have more time on their hands
■ People can feed themselves more
■ Can trade surplus
○ Society gets a little more complex with free time
■ Leaders, urban centers around market places, the rudiments of
disembedded economies and cities
● What about this transformation encourages a change in world view?
○ Encourages a world view of the transcendental, beyond the material
○ A lot of different people coming from different places with different deities
■ The co-presence of them all in a place like a city suggests a relativism
■ Should people be looking beyond the differences? Does anything
transcend the particularity of these groups such that they can work and
live together?
○ A shift away from the imminent upwards
■ Maybe what is spiritually valuable is further out there
● Axial revolution is not seen only in religion ⇒ movement in Greek though in time of Plato and
Aristotle
○ The Republic, Plato: the parable of the cave
■ People are scared but they see shadows of real things made by fire
■ No objects we engage in the world is a perfect approximation of its
philosophical form; all imperfect types of real entities we don’t see for
themselves
● We mistake the shadows for the real things
○ Apprehension of truth involves some kind of effort (through faculty of reason maybe)
⇒ things are not as they seem and transcendental truth is behind what we
see
■ This suggests a path towards what is tracendal
■ Reality is elusive, there’s some path of englightent, development or
education required of people to actually understand truth
● How is the nature of religion changing with the rising of priesthood?
○ Religion is no longer personal, but there is a written down tradition
■ A text that people can refer to; something which was not necessary in
totemic times
 ○ Priests were professionals who could interpret these texts and could tell people
what they were or weren’t doing right
■ This changes the relationship of religion to the rest of the social land
● Priests, prophets, kings
○ Priests are the religious experts who you go to advice
■ Enforce what is right according to the scriptures
○ Prophets are different
■ When prophets have influence, they can change the status quo
■ He or she is not afraid to speak truth to power and say society has gone
astray, maybe even at the hands of the ruling elite
● Can denounce the priesthood as lazy or power hungry, not
serving religious truths adequately
○ Kings

Contemporary examples
● Do we live with the prophetic today?
○ A lot of prophetic figures today, yes ⇒ especially in public life
○ i.e. Martin Luther King’s last speech: “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”
■ Allusions to religion, ie “we will get to the promised land”
■ He’s foreshadowing his own demise
○ How else is this directly axial?
■ A notion of sacrifice, and later going to a better place
■ The language invoked
● old testament motif
■ The ascetic withdrawal of “i’ve been to the mountaintop”
● The mountaintop is an allusion to Moses receiving the law
directly from God
● After Moses receives the law and returns to the community,
where all hell broke loose, revealing the truth
■ Invoking notions of sacrifice
● Saying that the way things currently are going are not ok, and
that we have to be willing to put ourselves on the line
■ The journey we are going through, and how we have to get to the
“promised land”
● Suggests a historical end that escapes us now
● Suggests the arrival at some spiritual reconciliation
○ “Were imperfect now, we’re not there yet”
● Notion that history has an end that has to unfold and we are
agents of bringing what’s spiritually transcendally valuable
● Current discourse on environmental angst is kind of axial, religion ways of talking
about
○ Notion of apocalyptic future
○ Having to right our ways to avoid future doom
Key points on axial religions
● Emergence of great tension b/w the world as it is and the transcendent
○ Human civilization and human beings don’t match or live up to what is
spiritually and morally divinely good
○ Suggests a different kind of religious experience from Durkheim religion which
is about passing down customs within a community
● Suggests that religion is in sacred texts guarded by authorities and can critique
everyday life
● Religion having to bridge between this tension

Lecture 7 18 Sept., 2019

Crusoe 2
Recap
● Fifteen years later, Crusoe is doing alright
○ Made some mistakes, but is doing ok; learned what to do to survive
○ A monarch of all he surveys
■ Talks about his manor house
■ He talks about his plantations
■ Has animals and is growing grapes
● He sees footprints on the beach, and all his confidence vanishes
○ We see this over and over: must think of the book as a Puritan spiritual
autobiography
■ More than a metaphor about the journey of the inner state
■ Survival story and of spiritual development
○ A little bit later, he sees evidence that he’s not alone and has not been alone
this whole time
■ Sees the pile of bones
○ Built up this confidence, but when he realizes he’s not alone, he’s completely
undone (spiritually and otherwise)
■ Shuts himself in his house for a while
○ He’s been building the notion that though he doesn’t understand God fully, God
has been delivering help all along
■ When he sees the footprints, he believes God helped him because the
footprints where on the other side of the islands (until he sees them
closer to him)
○ Once he realizes he’s not alone, he fortifies his house
● Important elements of first encounter of realizing he’s not alone
○ Uncertain and second guessing
■ Scared of the unknown
 ■ Goes back and forth on whether footprints are providential signs;
presence of the devil
○ Has debate on how to deal with the others (should he attack them?)
■ Wonders whether it’s morally right to attack them if they never hurt him
● “When do you justly kill another person or go to war?”
■ Long meditation about what he’s supposed to do
● He’s got guns and is ready to fight ⇒ pre-emptive strike
● Has evidence of what humans do; dread about cannibals and
being a captive on savages
○ Cannibalism as the antithesis of what it means to be a
moral Christian
■ Decides he won’t do anything until they show aggression
● Frees Friday from the cannibals and becomes his slave
○ Once Friday learns a bit of English, Crusoe asks about the other natives on the
island and asking about the nations, religion, etc
○ Crusoe judges Friday for believing the wrong thing ⇒ tries to convert him
○ Tries to “civilize” him by making him eat meat with salt instead of human meat
○ Gives him a tent within the fortification but not in the manor house
○ Not trusted to be around guns ⇒ finds him a nice guy but still suspicious of him
○ Teaches Friday to clothe himself (important to Crusoe)
● Fires guns and says it was the first time on the island
○ Seems to kind of worship the guns
○ Crusoe wouldn’t be so strong and have survived so long w/o guns
● Crusoe persuading Friday of the truth of Christianity
○ Gives him grapes and dried cracker ⇒ alludes to communion service of wine and bread

Historical background
● Crusoe as more Franklin than Baxter
○ Homo-economic with material prosperity, but engages in some missionary work
on the side
○ A lot of scholars want to bring to the foreground the religious narrative
● In 1719, when Dufoe published the story, the Protestant world (unlike Roman Catholic
rivals) had few examples of sustained and successful missionary work outside of
Europe
○ No converts outside of Europe seen as proof of falseness of Protestantism
● Crusoe figure of English imperialism
○ Doesn’t want to conquer anybody, just industries about taming the land around
him and make a little bit of civilization
● John Elliot, figure in the middle 17th century
○ Spearheaded the first sustained missionary enterprise in the new world, in New
England Massachusetts
○ Published literature in relation to his mission called John Eliot’s Missionary
Indian Dialogues
■ Was published and distributed widely in Puritan circles
 ■ Written recordings of his engagements with Native Americans
○ Elliot’s work showed how missionary work was carried out
■ Was not violent or forceful, wanted to expose Native Americans to the word of
God and convert them by how powerful seeing the word of God is ⇒ should
see the truth in the message
● Cultural training for receptivity
■ In addition, Elliot and his tenants would organize the Indians/Native
Americans who were receptive to Christianity into wholly different
settlements called praying towns
● Were modelled on colonial towns of New England
■ Making Native Americans in English-men
● In order to wean them off the evils that get in the way of
receiving Christina truths, they had to shed their cultural, habits,
modes of dress, and patterns of moving around for hunting and
agriculture
● Settle them in little towns
○ This influenced the way Dufeo wrote about Crusoe’s encounter with Friday
● Friday asks Crusoe: if God is so powerful, then why doesn’t he defeat the Devil?
○ This seems to catch Crusoe off-guard
■ Friday is more or less on board with a notion of an all-powerful God,
seems rational except for this question
○ If the evil entity has liberty in the world, doesn’t that undermine the good work
of God?
■ This seems to undermine Crusoe’s point of an all-powerful God
■ Crusoe answers that he never thought about questions like this
○ In this missionary dialogue, Crusoe is for the first time being challenged about
the tenets of Christiniaty in a way that he had not previously had to deal with
■ Has to persuade somebody who has no familiarity with where he’s at
■ An important way in which Crusoe has to rediscover the truth of
Christianity himself, way away from England
● Crusoe sees Friday’s acumen of receiving the truths of Christianity as a kind of
philosophical/anthropological statement on whether to convert others or not
(something Europeans cared a lot about back then)
○ Europeans would ask themselves “are Native Americans human beings or are
they animals?” “Do they belong to the same species?” If they do, they must be
creatures of God and have to have some spark of what theologians at the time
call “natural religion”
■ Regardless of what they were born into, there is some baseline of what
was called “natural religion” at the time
■ By virtue of their God-endowed reason, they are naturally receptive to
the truth of Chrinistay
● “If you are human beings like us, you will understand this truth”
● This was true up until a certain point ⇒ the Bible is the revealed word of God
 ○ Crusoe agrees that Friday’s question is reasonable and doesn’t know the
answer
■ Admits that stuff about the devil, God undermining his own sovereignty
by letting evil in the world makes no sense
○ Limits of natural reason and natural religions capacity end here
○ We can only get to the next step (saving grace) through the revealed word of
God, we accept it as truth b/c the Bible is the real word of god
■ This is different than what we can receive by virtue of natural religion
● Crusoe is wondering about the luck that he had been born into a Christian nation
○ Why does Friday seem to have all the attributes of the natural being, but why
wasn’t he was born into a Christian nation? Something unjust with Providence
exposing some but not others
● A lot of speculation, Robinson Crusoe is not just an adventure storey
○ Dufoe was very philosophically informed and involved in the debates at the
time
○ Some kind of story set in a place that doesn’t exist ⇒ utopia
■ “No place”, illustrates something essential
■ Thought-provoking
■ Creating a fictional rival world that is not like our own
○ This is what seems to be happening in the story
■ How much can we read between the lines of the scenes that suggest
Dufeo beliefs about how political societies and religion should be
configured should be organized?
● What is religion in this time of the novel?
○ There is no church in the sense of an institution
○ Crusoe denigrates the cannibal religion
○ We see in little sacramental moments (grapes and biscuits) ⇒ most sacrosent moments
of communal life in Christian towns was the wine and flesh ceremony
■ This same thing is occurring far away from civilization, and Crusoe is
doing it on his own
○ Relates to Protestant Ethic, what religion truly is
■ No need for church or clergy, can be individually spiritual
● Utopian allegorical device of setting the story in an unknown setting
○ What is the point of putting the character in an unfamiliar setting?
■ Cast away on a lone island who doesn’t see another soul for 15 years
seems to make some progress in his spiritual journey (despite
setbacks) and has a semi-sacramental moment by himself
○ Important take-away: suggests something of possibility or superior
authenticity of the kind of religion that is inside
■ Can be as or more effective when far from home, far from Europe, far
from England as when you are home
■ Not only the possibility of this, but also the superiority of religion that is
stripped of its cultural, civilizational, and institutional elements
● Involves just the sinner and his God
● Another important intellectual context at the time
○ Important ideas of the time ⇒ what is the proper form of organization of political life
and to what end?
■ Locke - reason teaches humans to be good
● Wants less govt control over people
● Wrote Treatise of Government ⇒ govt can’t be justified through the
divine
■ Hobbes - people in their state of nature are bad
● Needs a monarch to rule over people
○ In that emerging philosophy of politics and sovereignty, there is a lot of
speculation about the state of nature
■ Locke versus Hobbes → how to organize society in a peaceful way grounded
on basis what we are when we come out of the womb before interacting with
civilization
○ One way to think about what Crusoe is up to with respect to religion is trying to
evoke the state of nature
■ Adventure story set as far from civilization as possible
■ The way he describes Friday and his acceptance of Christiniaty ⇒ demonstrates
something of the possibility of anyone coming to Christian truth, even the most
savage of people who have a taste for human flesh
■ Says something about how has the capacity to become a Christian
● A relatively progressive spiritual journey despite having no access to the church as an
institution and sacraments and so forth
○ Conversion of Friday ⇒ a lot of fellow Protestants would have said that Native
Americans were not convertible; insurmountable task of making Indians into
Englishmen in the model of Elliot
■ Settling them in towns, bringing them civilization and so forth
■ The relative ease with which Friday comes to receive Christanity +
becomes an authentic Christain speaks to a new way of thinking
○ England had just finished a series of internal battles advocating different forms of
church organization → people trying to kill each other and control politics
■ Dufoe thought this was a weird archaic dispute that divided people from
each other
○ The fact that Dufoe illustrates a fully thriving Christian experience suggests a
possibility that all these problems in England can be stripped away
■ Shows that we don’t need the clergy, that Crusoe was as an effective
missionary as any licensed clergy-person
○ Take-away: a sense of pure Christanity in a state of nature
■ REMEMBER: this assumes a lot of background knowledge we briefly went
over in class
● Next class, we’ll look at early missionary history ⇒ historical struggle in mission field
○ We’ll explore the historical contexts in which questions like whether non-
Europeans had the stuff internal to them to become Christinas
 ○ If so, where did early Christian missionaries see the evidence of true
Christinaty taking place?
■ Did natives have to undergo a civilizing mission? Did they have to
become Englishmen too?
■ Or, do natives have the same foundation to become Christians?

Lecture 8 20 Sept., 2019

NO CLASS ⇒ prof has conference