Appeal in the Axial Age

APPEAL IN THE AXIAL AGE
Adapted from Chapter Two of Appeal and Attitude by Steven G. Smith
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005)

Steven G. Smith's Home Page

When we feel it necessary to try to establish our fundamental orientation, we appeal to great appeals like God, reality, humanity, the Earth, reason, love, and hope. This appealing action of ours has of course been shaped and to some extent aimed by a history. (Notice that I construe what we have been doing and are doing as an action rather than as, say, activity; I mean to speak purposefully and directively, though without trying to insist on a perfected mastery of our action or a perfected interpretation of it.) If we are to have the greatest possible lucidity in this supposed action of ours, we need an assessment of representative formulations of appeals, appeal situations, and appeal power that have been made in our history, particularly those that have had "classic" force. In an accompanying interpretation of classic attitude conceptions of the Axial Age (Chapter 6 of Appeal and Attitude), I show more fully how the appeal ideal involves issues of response that must be interpreted in the category of attitude--concerning, for example, the inner determination of subjectivity that enables a Yahwist to face up to the lord of the universe and a Daoist master to be oriented to none of the "ten thousand things" but rather to "the boundless." [3] But many important considerations can be uncovered by tunneling from the appeal side, as it were, asking about models of appealing and inherent problems in appealing.

I will concentrate here on one part of the history of appeal thinking. My main premise is that we inherit from Axial Age thinkers and texts an understanding of the possibilities of appeal that gears our directive thinking--our "normative" thinking, when in legislative mode--toward a supreme appeal. Although the whole range of relevant data far exceeds the scope of this or any single study, as what is in question is nothing less than the structure of the appearing of meaningfulness, nevertheless certain points can be made strategically to frame larger issues pertaining to the ideal of supreme appeal. It will be useful for many humanistic purposes to acquire a structured, debatable overview of the cross-cultural intellectual and spiritual matrix in which classic philosophical and religious claims are made about the conditions of supreme meaningfulness.

The term "Axial Age" was proposed by Karl Jaspers to draw attention to the synchronous appearance in the mid-first millennium BCE of most of the foundational intellectual and spiritual teachers of the Old World civilizations--including Zarathushtra, the Hebrew writing prophets, the Greek philosophers, the Upanishadic sages, the Buddha, Mahavira, and the first great writers of Confucianism and Daoism. [4] What parallel social developments in the Old World civilizations enabled these religious and philosophical fruits to ripen together? [5] The rise of the new thinking probably depended on a combination of prosperity and disunity in the affected societies: at a time of serious threats to social order there existed a class of people able to devote themselves to an ideal reformulation of good order. Subsequently the new thinking could not have endured had there not been a complementary relationship between its conceptions of accessible ultimate reality and individual responsibility, on the one hand, and the governing strategies of the societies that officially adopted them, on the other.

Be all that as it may, a practical factor that was clearly of enormous importance in the formation of Axial Age appeals and attitudes was a new development of literacy. Overflowing from the authoritarian channels of state and religious business, often promoted by trade, literacy created a revolutionary communicative situation in which messages of "wisdom" or "truth" could travel freely and compete with each other for attention. [6] Relatively independent patrons could ask purveyors of wisdom for increasingly refined articulations of the conditions of worthy individual existence, even theories of one strategic adjustment of life that would solve all problems forever; meanwhile, any free individual could influence the thinking of a public by publishing teachings, and any individual hearer could browse anonymously and latch onto ideas in an ideological marketplace--which gave a newly powerful sense to "freedom" and "individuality." [7] Our generally credible "philosophies" and "religions" (that is, "world religions") are born in this marketplace, and the reasons and revelations they offer still presuppose it.

Jaspers was interested above all in the relationship of the Axial Age to our contemporary existence. Why should the teachings of that time remain the axial "classics" around which our reflection continues to revolve? What is the significance of the fact that such teachings were generated in all the literate civilizations? Borrowing the premise of a centerpoint of human history from the Christian "B.C."/"A.D" scheme, Jaspers claimed that the ideas and methods of the mid-first millennium BCE should be acknowledged as central and decisive for the kind of life that is most deserving of any human being's consideration and therefore as constituting the axis of a common world history (in a way that Europe's "modernity" does not). [8] For the radical questioning of the Axial Age breaks through the limits of custom and myth to bring about a direct confrontation between thinking individuals and Being as a whole. These thinking individuals--as modeled and challenged by the classic sages, philosophers, and prophets--experience a terrifying insecurity in the face of boundless possibilities from which they are no longer sheltered, but also a new power and self-confidence in their thinking. [9] What would be the impact of such a development on the understanding of appeal? Or how might a new conception of appeal be instrumental to that development?

The dynamics of appeal seems to have been a prominent theme of communication fully as long as there has been thematic communication. Our oldest surviving stories make much of the presentations, rivalries, and consequences of appeals. The Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, originating in the early third millennium BCE, dwells on the attention-worthiness of its hero ("Gilgamesh the tall, magnificent and terrible . . .his beauty was consummate") and his works ("He built the rampart of Uruk . . . See its wall like a strand of wool, view its parapet that none could copy!"), includes the gods' hearkening to human cries, pits female sex appeal and the charms of the city ("Every day [in Uruk] there is a festival . . . and there are harlots, most comely of figure, graced with charm and full of delights") against the appeal of the wild life in Enkidu's seduction, motivates the adventures of Gilgamesh and Enkidu by their attraction for each other, and so on through the bitter lesson of the impermanence of all goods that strikes Gilgamesh when Ishtar, angry at him for spurning her, causes Enkidu's death--a lesson that is finally confirmed in the theft of his remedy, the plant of immortality, by a serpent drawn by its scent. [10] Words like "sublime" or "imperative" or "poignant" will not be found in the epic, but it does not lack an appeal vocabulary: it speaks of beauty, shining, fragrance, and greatness. In its later part it makes Gilgamesh move the hearts of those he meets with his "hollow cheeks." [11] Vision is an important modality of appeal, but the story is interested also in hearkening, smelling, and pondering. The ideal of justice is implied by an indictment of Gilgamesh for abusing his royal power in Uruk. [12]

We see the same limitation in the surviving Bronze Age literature of India. The vocabulary of appeal qualities is remarkably smaller than ours even though much attention is paid to the seeing and hearing of what is impressive. Rig Veda hymns evince much interest in the stirring of the appellate heart, especially in hymns to the intoxicating soma: "Where there are joys and pleasures, gladness and delight, where the desires of desire are fulfilled . . . there make me immortal." [13] There is no absolutely privileged mode of appeal--the "Aryans" or "shining ones" are second to none in their appreciation of what shines, and the Rig Veda writers are known as "seers," but at the same time it is possible to construct a theology of sacred voice and sound from certain passages--nor is there any one wholly dominant appeal. [14] A hymn may greatly magnify a god, particularly Indra, but the relevance of the god's impressive qualities is always limited in being tied to specific actions and events in the god's legend and usually to specific practical contexts in the life of worshipers.

The Gilgamesh narrative does coordinate an array of powerful appeals--that of charismatic characters like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, of sex, of urban civilization, of gods and goddesses, of adventure, of immortality--so that they make coherent sense together and even imply a major theme: life is best lived zestfully with friends but in any case must be lived subject to mortality and the assessments of justice. Thanks to this unity Gilgamesh is an impressive story. But the story's unity is not achieved by affirming a single dominant appeal. It entertains the possibility that endless life could hold such appeal, but this possibility is ultimately dismissed; what is affirmed is that we have to find our way amidst diversely potent appeals. As rival appeals vie for attention, so also appellate subjectivity is conceived as a manifold of engaged responsiveness: it would strike a jarringly modern note to be told something like "Enkidu found Gilgamesh appealing," implying that Enkidu weighs appeals in an inner center.

The Logos (as controller of Heraclitus' "one"), the Way, Yahweh, and Brahman are inescapably compelling once one understands--now there must be a dominant intellectual modality of appeal, so that the appellate subject is free from the contingency and diversity of sense experience. In the Bhagavad-Gita, an Axial Age addition to India's Mahabharata epic, the hero Arjuna is made to see a blazing image of the uniquely full reality of divinity and to tremble before it, but the scene is intended as a metaphor for a profound access of understanding; bodily sense alone could never establish that uniqueness and depth. [20]

What could have led in a specifically appellative way to this great simplification of positing a supreme and comprehensive appeal, which goes so much against the grain of pluralistic appeal experience? Two noteworthy trends are visible in ancient literature. They are important for our purposes to pick out and compare because they have deeply conflicting implications for the meaning of a supreme appeal and yet their conflict is often disguised, if not actually mediated, by their intertwining.

1. One trend is clearly intellectual: the ancient sages participate in a competitive refinement of reflection and explanation that leads to the discovery of positions of ever greater intellectual leverage with ever more powerful principles. In appreciating this evolution we should not dwell so much on the technical advantages of rationalization that we overlook the sheer impressiveness of the intellectual discoveries. The leverage is exerted upon, not merely by, the sages. Heraclitus submits to the Logos.

What the sages submit to transcends the world. Thus response to a supreme appeal is an adventure of leaving the world. Gilgamesh arguably had some implicit idea of attempting this adventure, only to be turned back by the disappointingly ordinary gatekeeper, Utnapishtim; Bronze Age Egyptians already looked ahead to an encounter and reconciliation with a world-ordering principle of truth and justice, maat, upon their death. [21] One may wish to interpret the realizing of maat, the Logos, the Way, Brahman, or the lordship of Yahweh purely as an event in the inwardness of the appellate mind, but however the locus of transcendence is understood, a crucial consequence for the appellate subject is liberation from worldliness. (Indeed the question must arise whether the main point of submitting to a supposed supreme appeal is nihilistic--whether that intellectual affirmation expresses a resentful negation of the pulls of actual appeals.) The supreme principle will be tested in worldly experience, which it must successfully interpret, but its appeal power is heightened extraordinarily by its independence and better-than-worldly simplicity.

The intellectual evolution of a transcendent supreme appeal can be traced in all the civilized literatures: in the Vedas, where early recognition of cosmic order (rita) and speculation on the seemingly unknowable origin of all things ripen into the Upanishadic affirmation of the essential Self; [22] in the Greek world, where Hesiod's systematic organization of older creation motifs in the Theogony is succeeded by the centralizing Ionian physics, starting with Thales' derivation of all things from water, and the imperatively unifying concepts of justice (dike) and destiny (moira) are taken up in the speculation of Anaximander and in the reflective tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; [23] in classical Chinese writings, where Heaven as a universal structure of events displaces a high god; [24] and in the Hebrew Bible, where the Israelite god for whom earlier prophets speak is conceived in and after the Exile, as by Second Isaiah, as sole master of the universe. The purely intellectual motivation of these developments is not hard to recognize since the Axial Age proposals cater directly to our reflective curiosity.

2. The other great trend of appeal consolidation in the ancient world is practical and primarily political. As governments attempt to control larger areas, binding culturally diverse and even inimical populations together, neither custom nor the forceful personality of a leader is sufficient to maintain good order. It is necessary to have rationalized law, to expand the charisma of an individual monarch into the institutionalized glory of a regime, and to anchor government in a view of reality that is correspondingly centralized.

The unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in the third millennium BCE, for example, was supported by a remarkable theological declaration that all Egyptian gods are derived from Ptah, a god associated with the new capital of Memphis. This proposal accommodates the divine rulerships of Horus and Seth and the contributions of Atum, Thoth, and Osiris within Ptah's work as a primal thinker and speaker of all things. To exercise this hegemony over the sprawling array of Egyptian religious appeals, including world-creator claims for Atum, Ptah must be positioned in an abstract, philosophically interesting space, virtually equated with "heart" and "tongue" as general principles: "So were all the gods born . . . for it is through what the heart plans and the tongue commands that every divine speech has evolved." [25] In the Vedic literature of India we can see how priests' appreciation of what they themselves do led similarly to an absolutizing of the appeal of "what the heart thinks and the tongue commands," "brahman" as word of power or prayer coming to be identified with Brahman as ultimate reality. [26] But this parallel idea was not so directly coupled with the fortunes of monarchy, though it undoubtedly helped to maintain the social privileges of the north Indian priestly class. In the culture of dynastic Egypt, as generally in the ancient Near Eastern states, the politics of monarchy was more dominant.

Another Egyptian text famous for its philosophical and religious interest, Akhenaten's proto-monotheist hymn to the solar divinity Aton, was composed to strengthen royal authority against the priests of Amun and other cults during the 14th century BCE. In the hymn, Akhenaten's enthusiasm in beholding a universal principle of beneficent power is inseparable from his self-presentation as preeminent among humans:

As the unique "son of God," Akhenaten's entitlement to political deference is refracted through and amplified by the glory of a paramount divinity. The political point of the hymn requires that its appeal content be predominantly worldly; it dwells on human experience of the day-night cycle, animals and plants, procreation, farming, and geography. When it approaches a transworldly plateau of insight into the essence of life, the that-by-which-life-is-possible--"You yourself are lifetime, one lives by you"--it does not press further toward transcendental logic in the manner of Heraclitus or toward metaphysical substance in the manner of the Chandogya Upanishad; instead it veers immediately back to the world to confirm and expand on its political relevance.

As the sun shines on all Pharaoh's subjects, so the same sky or "Heaven" embraces and stipulatively unifies all subjects of the ancient Chinese government according to a theory offered by the Zhou rulers to justify their displacement of the Yin (Shang). A Zhou ode to the legendary sage-king Wen shows the same mixture of philosophical and political advantage, for a predominantly political purpose, in the use of sky appeal:

The "Mandate of Heaven" that confers legitimacy on every Chinese imperial government has the interesting property that it lacks tangibility (sound or smell)--it is abstract so that it can stand above claimants to cultural and political authority in the right way, warranting some against others, impossible to challenge in turn.

Somewhat different political factors push the Israelite figure of Yahweh toward a comparable abstract comprehensiveness. First there is the heritage of wandering; Yahweh makes surprising appearances to the patriarchs as the same god who is remembered to have appeared under different circumstances: "I am Yahweh, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac," he informs Jacob in a dream. [29] Next there is the problem of Israelite weakness in relation to neighboring peoples; a god more concretely correlated with Israel could not be expected to overcome the might of Egypt, for example, so that it is crucially reassuring when Moses' appellant defines himself enigmatically as "I am who I am." [30] Finally there is the federalism of the Israelite tribes assumed in the old covenant formula, "Hear, O Israel, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh alone." Yahweh overarches tribal differences without cancelling them. [31]

In spite of their abstractness, the discourses of Heaven and Yahweh focus relentlessly on the worldly actions that must be performed--acts of filial and civic piety, of honest work, of traditional sacrifice--if good order is to be sustained. Thus they revolve around the worldly administration. The appeal of the divinity is yoked to the idealized splendor of the king, this approach intended not of course as an idolatrous reduction of divinity but for the sake of practicality and responsibility: only as subject to the commands of a prime agency are humans drawn fully into the work of the best world-making; only as subject to the judgments of a prime court are all humans fully accountable for their actions. For purposes of devotion, the divinity itself is addressed as the ultimate and most real ruler, either through the instrumentality of the human king or independently. The worldly axis of collective life, in any case, is the government. The exigencies of government fund the general understanding of the divinity's activity; the divinity may be identified as a supreme appellant of the kind that a king is, personally commanding and calling to account. The appeal is powered by the perception of the reins of the whole campaign of life being gathered into the hands of one agency.

With this sort of supreme appellant one keeps faith. This sort of supreme appellant is trusted for one's salvation. This sort of appellant prevails over others by imposing the conditions of the appellate subject's partnership with it on that subject's dealings with any other being. "He who has put himself in the wrong with Heaven has no means of expiation left" (Kongzi). [33] The partnership is understood on the model of the strongest possible family tie, the parent-child or marriage relation: "I fell in love with Israel when he was still a child; and I have called [him] my son ever since Egypt," professes Yahweh. [34]

It is quite otherwise with the supreme appeal that is formulated through an intellectual evolution. This appeal maintains its supreme position by explaining; it alters the meaning of any rival appeal so as to bring it under its own principle. It can have massive worldly implications--as the great simplifications of the Ionian physicists were pregnant with natural science, for example--but it is not intrinsically practical in the way that the politically formulated supreme appeal is. It is activated primarily in reflection and in reflective communication, both of which depend on relative immunity from worldly concerns. As it is not directly practical, neither is it directly personal: the exposure of the appellate subject to the appellant being involves neither loyalty nor hope but only access to the rewards of clear and consistent perception.

One can imagine stark conflict between these two types of supreme appeal, as perhaps in a fanatical Yahwist barking at a reclusive Vedantist to pitch in with the Mosaic social project (buoyed by hope for final salvation in the day of a Davidic messiah) while the Vedantist calmly unravels each of the Yahwist's claims as a species of world-illusion. Conflicts like this do actually occur, in various guises. But combinations of the appeal forms are common as well. Loyalty to Yahweh is bolstered by ontological, cosmological, and axiological reflection; clear perception of Brahman is guarded by loyalty to a historical and functional community.

A notably smooth blend of supreme appeal motivations underlies the Chinese Axial Age philosophies of Confucianism and especially Daoism. These schools of thought took over the political concept of the mandate of heaven but modulated the discourse on legitimate kingship to a discourse on righteous and enlightened life as accessible to any thinking individual. The king's task of managing worldly affairs remains a featured topic, but with the complete generalization of the practical point of application it becomes possible for a reader of the Daodejing to become wholly absorbed in the deep interpretation of reality. "Dao never does, yet through it all things are done. If the barons and kings would but possess themselves of it, the ten thousand creatures would at once be transformed" [35]--in such a formulation it is hard to determine whether one or the other of the two major types of supreme appeal is dominant. It sounds both philosophical and political. Is it equally impressive philosophically and politically? Could it be?

This irreducible divergence of supreme appeal rationales introduces the broader topic of the potentially very serious difficulties that supreme appeal thinking makes for itself.

Supreme appeals will inevitably be formulated in an open marketplace of communicative appealing, but maintaining a supreme appeal is not easy. It will be useful for future reference to survey the more important problems inherent in that premise that the classic supreme appeal proponents are obliged to wrestle with.

1. The problem of adequate representation of the appellant by the appeal. A major Bronze Age appellant was typically understood as a deity; a deity was represented as an extraordinarily powerful agent in narratives and a noteworthy physical presence in pictures. For example, Egyptian maat was portrayed as a queen wearing a special ostrich feather that she used to weigh the hearts of the dead in a scale of righteousness. Such imagery was always palpably suitable, for the particular thrust of the representation could be seen as corresponding to the thrust of the principle or power represented--as in this case the feminine majesty of Ma'at brings home to her viewer the integrity of truth. Obviously there were discussions among patrons, priests, and artists about better and worse ways to portray gods, but it would be foolish to denounce a given story or picture as inadequate when virtually any representation (if not perversely designed) gives its audience a fair chance to attend to the appellant it represents.

The question of adequacy cannot be handled so easily with a purportedly supreme appeal. Compared with the gods of polytheism, the supreme appellant is more remote from worldly qualities, more ethereal in presentation, necessarily the object of a more abstractive work of understanding. Every finite being fails to tally with it in a most important way. Without the checks and balances of polytheism, a mistake about such an appellant can have more serious consequences. We can be hurt more by our intellectual and communicative limitations in this situation. To attain what seems like a necessary minimum of concreteness in our supreme reference point, we might lapse into a totalizing kind of idolatry much more dangerous than idolatry can ever be on the premise of competing great appeals.

Axial Age teachers acknowledge these problems with a new rhetoric of circumspection. "The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way," cautions Laozi. [36] "Of the Logos which is as I describe it men always prove to be uncomprehending," says Heraclitus. [37] In Second Isaiah, Yahweh removes himself from our grasp: "To whom can you compare me or declare me similar? . . . As the heavens are high above the earth, so are my ways high above your ways." [38] The Upanishadic insight is said to be beyond the ken of the learned class. [39]

The claim of the supreme appellant cannot be straightforwardly and completely apprehended; naive trust in any concrete token of the supreme appeal is a pitfall that must be avoided. Moreover, the apparent good promised by the appeal can go sour: the ancients came to realize that the astrological interpretation of heaven's appeal spawns an oppressive fatalism, for example, and moderns have come to realize that the monarchist interpretation of the practical appeal of unified government is closely allied with sexism. [40] (The intellectual appeal of the autonomous individual subject may have a sexist affinity as well, though this is more controversial.) [41] We are best advised, therefore, to understand our relationship with the supreme appeal as a journey on a way to a conclusion that cannot yet be completely specified. In a simile used by the Chandogya Upanishad, the reception of the supreme teaching is like having bandages removed from one's eyes after being led away from Gandhara; at that point one does not yet see Gandhara, but one is able to ask one's way there. [42] "Phusis [reality] is accustomed to hide itself," says Heraclitus, implying that the Logos-oriented philosopher is in the hunt for truth rather than in possession of it. [43] What could be seen as a discrediting unreliability in supreme appeal is made a dynamic and authenticating principle within it.

2. The problem of adequate response by the appellate subject. How can an appellate subject be authentically captured by a transcendent appellant? How can the right journey into mystery be discriminated from wrong ones? Appellate subjects can be sure they are on the right journey if they apply the right algorithm of interpretation to their experiences. "Asking one's way to Gandhara" might involve the cultivation of extraordinary states of consciousness as in Indian disciplines, rational or empirical inquiry as in Greek philosophy or Daoism, classical scholarship in the Confucian sense, or prophetic attention to a covenant with the lord of the universe in the Israelite manner. Each of these very different modes of intellectual discipline attests the comprehensiveness of a supreme appeal by applying itself to experience unlimitedly and rewardingly. Commitment to the supreme appellant becomes inseparable from commitment to the discipline; the ideal of the discipline can be the supreme vehicle of the supreme appeal. The most successful discipline will enact and prove the superiority of that appeal in every situation by trumping finite appeals and exposing defects in rival claimants to appeal supremacy.

Axial Age texts offer models of authentic appellatehood also in the dimension of style: on the surface, the riddling wit of the Daoist sage, the Confucian's enthusiasm for learning, the intellectual luxuriance of the Upanishadic writer, the dialectical tenacity of the Greek philosopher, the mordant misanthropy of the Hebrew prophet whom Israel continually disappoints; at a deeper level, the fundamental attitudes achieved and prescribed by the model appellate subjects. A strong style is requisite because of the exceptional demand and vulnerability a supreme appeal imposes on a subject. Style enables the teachers to uphold their own appellate position and then mediates that advantage to their audience. If the prescribed style resonates with impressive individual style, we see that individual freedom and distinctiveness need not be annihilated by subjection to such an overwhelmingly imposing appellant.

An algorithm and style that are understood as universally sustainable, "objectively valid" in a stronger sense than was earlier available, can sponsor high-handed and brutal treatment of those who disagree. Avoiding this pitfall requires clarity about the relation of appellate subjects to real good and the real inclusiveness of the appellate community.

3. The problem of the appellate subject's relation to the promised good. The gap between an appeal token or moment of appeal and the shared flourishing that the appeal promises is extremely large when the appellant is transcendent. This problem is partly solved in the projection of a strong subjective style by the teacher in the role of model appellate subject. Being like Kongzi, for example, seems a good life. But the Analects themselves acknowledge that Confucian life, even though it is confidently geared toward the greatest general flourishing, does not necessarily produce all the flourishing one might wish for in a particular situation. "Wealth and rank are what every man desires; but if they can be obtained to the detriment of the Way he professes, he must relinquish them. Poverty and obscurity are what every man detests; but if they can only be avoided to the detriment of the Way he professes, he must accept them." [44] In fact, Axial Age teachers are often represented as persecuted, which has the double rhetorical advantage of proving the toughness of their way of being and of dramatizing the disparity between the supreme appellant and the ordinary world. Appreciating the supreme appellant requires that one reckon goodness more deeply (in heart and mind) and more extensively (in the cosmos and in history) than human subjects ordinarily do.

The most persecuted of all Axial Age teachers as a class seem to be the writing Hebrew prophets, for theirs is the most vividly, turbulently political version of supreme appeal. They are in constant jeopardy in relation to their fellow citizens, their rulers, rival prophets, and events generally because the algorithm of their appellate journey involves enforcing norms of righteousness, love, and covenant history upon actual decisions that their contemporaries are making or trying to make. The world's uncooperativeness forces great inconveniences and indignities on prophets--the exile of Elijah, Hosea's marriage to a harlot, Jeremiah's yoke-bearing, Ezekiel's 390-day prostration, and the affliction of Second Isaiah's "suffering servant" representing the historic affliction of the whole people of Israel as the servant of Yahweh. [45] The crucifixion of the Christian savior seems to risk greatly this reverse-credibility of supreme appeal by pushing it to an extreme, yet the flourishing of Christianity (with its cult of martyrs also) proves there can be great power in contrasting actual evil with postulated good.

4. The problem of the appellant's ontological location. The supreme appeal's promised good cannot be fully meaningful to me if I cannot understand how in principle an appellate subject comes into real relation with the supreme appellant. Even if we all agree that the supreme appellant belongs on an ontologically extraordinary "level"--say, as Creator rather than one of the creatures, or as Being rather than one of the beings, or as Emptiness rather than any sort of fulfillment--we will still have important uncertainties about how to find it and respond to it, attenuating its appeal, if we do not make a determination of where, in some deeper-than-spatial sense, it is. Are we always already in relation with it? Is it most properly the real correlate of an intensive experience, like a brilliantly composed picture, as a contemplative would suggest--a present possibility? Or is it most properly the real correlate of an extensive experience, like a vast piece of music, as a historically minded prophet would suggest--a goal to work toward, hope for, continuing an action already underway? If it calls from the past, does it call from a stabilized past or a restless, haunting past? If it calls from the future, does it call from an excitingly open future or a prefigured future?

The primary rubrics for the appellant give important but sometimes misleading clues in this regard. "Creator," for example, seems to locate the Abrahamic God in the ontological background as a first cause of all that we experience and value. [46] The central positive response to such a god would be gratitude and a practical concern for continuity. And ancient Israelite theology does run in this channel in repeating its assertion that Yahweh created the nation of Israel by leading them out of Egypt and giving them their laws. "I [Yahweh] am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage: You shall have no other gods beside Me," begin the Ten Commandments. [47] But the classic Hebrew prophets cite this creation as an auxiliary consideration for their more urgent appeals relating to ethical and political possibilities of the moment and sometimes also to messianic hopes for the future. Second Isaiah, for one, recalls the storied power of Yahweh over the waters of the Red Sea primarily to lend force to his optimism about an imminent restoration of Israel:

The apocalyptic strain in later Hebrew prophecy moves the apparent site of divine power farther off into the unknown future, the openness of which is all-the-more-impressively determined by detailed imagery, as in Ezekiel's description of a last battle against evil in the oracle of Gog and Magog. [49] But this is not the only biblical trend: the ripe reflection of the book of Job most crucially locates God in the past, for the weightiest part of the answer Job receives lies in God's rhetorical question, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?" [50]

An analogous uncertainty helped to motivate classic Chinese debates on the Way of Heaven. Does right response to Heaven consist primarily of acknowledging and respecting a continuity with the past of the ancestors (as a traditionalist appeal to the "rites" implies), or of actualizing the moral possibilities of human nature in the present (as Kongzi and Mengzi argued), or of building an ideal society (as the Legalists thought)? [51] Since it is proverbial that Chinese Heaven "does not speak" to us directly, we are thrown on our own resources in determining how to comport ourselves under Heaven's appeal. [52]

It is easy to say formally that an ultimate appellant must saturate all meaningful ontological locations. But the supreme appeal may not actually be able to register so fully--as, for example, with the end of accepted prophecy in the late biblical period, Yahweh disappeared from the arena of live present encounter in one important way. Even apart from limitations of this sort, it is unclear how human appellate subjects could act coherently on so broad an understanding, and it remains debatable whether one such location ought to dominate or even preclude the others.

5. The problem of the inclusiveness of the appellate community. The supreme appeal ought to be everyone's supreme appeal. To some extent this issue is addressed by the transcendent perfection in the conception of the appellant; if Yahweh, for example, is understood to be ruler of the entire universe, then necessarily Yahweh is the rightful lord of every possible appellate subject. Or if Heaven is the way all things spontaneously go, then no one could be exempt from its pattern. There is a vital communicative concern, however, that everyone understand and respond rightly to this one appellant--supposing a spiritual linkage between the teacher and all fellow subjects, or even a merely social linkage--without a guarantee that everyone will be capable of apprehending the appeal. [53] On the contrary, the very notion of a certain mandatory discipline seems to guarantee that supreme appeal insiders will be divided from outsiders, even within a single culture that notionally pledges itself as a unit to right piety or right reason. [54]

Heraclitus can be taken as proposing that "the one" is inherently what people can understand in common; the quest for consensual objectivity and the journey to the supreme appellant are identical. This is a great procedural strength of "logic" as Logos-appeal. But the use of logic does not actually produce an impressive consensus on important matters. The history of philosophy makes logic look more like a framework for chronic disagreement than a royal road to agreement.

The Confucian and Israelite programs reach for the appropriate ideological inclusiveness by making a point of conserving traditions. Kongzi references the ancient "rites" and the sage-kings of yore, Yao, Shun, and Yu; a "covenant theology" that forms the ideological backbone of Israelite prophecy is woven of reminders of divine appeals made in connection with Noah (the covenant of the rainbow with all humanity), Abraham (the covenant to sustain the people of Israel), Moses (the covenant of laws), and David (the covenant to sustain the kingdom). [55] Analogous to the Israelite four-covenant scheme is the four-yoga scheme of Hinduism as classically discussed in the Bhagavad-Gita, where a certain preeminence is accorded to the way of devotion (bhakti yoga) but valid places are granted also to the ways of intensive self-control (raja yoga), philosophy (jnana yoga), and the fulfillment of worldly duties (karma yoga). [56]

What about social inclusiveness? The classic teachings of supreme appeal all have the revolutionary feature that they can be read as available and applicable to any human being in principle--and so they are commonly read today--but were they actually aimed at all human beings? In the Axial Age civilizations, awareness of the supreme appeal became part of the social standard of an educated person; but that standard was inseparable from restrictions of literacy and leisure, firstly in the specialized activity of the Axial Age teachers and their followers and secondly as those teachings were taken up by a ruling elite. The earliest Axial Age thinkers formed small counter-cultural groups within or at the margins of their societies. There is evidence of participation by women, especially in Greek and Indian philosophy, but not of a sincere or effective program to overcome sexual inequality. [57] The Hebrew writing prophets give the impression that the whole people of Israel is continually confronted with Yahweh's self-revelation, but even though prophets did preach publicly it seems most likely that serious monotheist theology was reserved to the same small circles that transmitted the prophetic texts, analogous to the early cells of philosophers and seekers in China, India, and Greece. The transcendent supreme appellants recognized by these small communities were conceived in such a way as to sustain the communities against the mainstream in their incongruousness--to sustain them, in effect, outside the world, which made them quietist as well as radical, esoteric as well as universalist. The key appellate subjects in their own estimation were the ones who had taken up relation with the extraordinary appeal, namely, themselves. The transpersonal understanding of goodness they reached remained in their custody. Not until the mass movements of proselytizing Judaism succeeded by Christianity, bhakti Hinduism, Mahayana Buddhism, and Islam did a presumption for unfettered sharing of supreme appeal begin to be effective. But the ideally catholic communities created by these movements have not been able to escape the insider/outsider division created by the exigencies of discipline on the one side and unreduced social inequalities on the other. They have had to concede the imperfect inclusiveness of the appellate community and rationalize it by a theory of multiple truth--asserting, for example, that divinity must be understood differently by the educated, using reason, than by the uneducated, relying on imagination--or by a law of karma that balances opportunities for enlightenment across a succession of lifetimes. [58]

6. The problem of the inclusiveness of the appeal. A supposed supreme appeal that simply eclipsed the appeals of worldly beings or required total insensitivity to other appeals would produce objections: how could this appellant be attractive and promise good in a way that has nothing to do with how other beings are attractive and promise good? Or how could the attraction and goodness promised by this appellant really be greater than the whole sum of attraction and goodness promised by all other appellants or the largest compossible set of such appellants? Some otherworldly ideologies, including early Christianity and Buddhism, are able to draw paradoxical strength from their categorical rejection of worldly appeals. (Accordingly they are denounced by some observers as world-hating.) [59] But most of the durable candidates for supreme appeal meet these objections by including the appeals of finite things within the infinite appeal--by discovering the divine harmony of Beauty in all things insofar as they are beautiful, as in Platonism, or the grace of a Heavenly Way or a creator God in all worldly beings.

The imperative of inclusion suggests an agenda for systematic cosmology in Axial Age traditions. But the imposition of the formula of inclusion on the subordinate appeals tends to homogenize them and mask the actual appellants. For us there is historical charm in reading a medieval breviary account of how various species of animals exemplify God's wisdom and love, for instance, yet modern naturalist work on animals opens up to much wider, more interesting horizons. Ironically, a community of supreme appeal becomes dangerous precisely in the apparent success it has in giving substance to its assumption of inclusiveness. The world it sees is the whole real world; the history it is able to tell is the whole of meaningful history; the membership it can imagine exhausts eligibility. The humility enjoined by the Axial Age sages is always liable to be overbalanced by the urgent-seeming work of filling in an appearance of all-inclusiveness.

Another problematic side of the inclusiveness of a supreme appeal is that it necessarily includes too much reality, evil as well as good; an appeal of this form should perhaps be seen as a sinister seduction rather than a gateway to true flourishing. According to a latter-day polytheist, "Our attitude toward the First Cause need not be religious. It ought not to be so, unless we are consciously forgetting the evil side of this Ultimate Being and thinking only of its good side. It is best to worship the 'little gods' and defy the First Cause. Thus, what we should really aim at is to become idolaters" (John Cowper Powys). [61] In spite of much mythological and theological attention paid to the problem of evil in Zoroastrian and Abrahamic monotheism, the implied acceptance of evil remains an important limitation of God's appeal.

7. The problem of abstractness dissolving appeal. A striking feature of Akhenaten's new monotheist iconography is the privileged position it grants the king himself, as though the real upshot of the clearing out of lesser appeals on behalf of a highly abstracted supreme appeal might be the destruction of external appeal altogether. An Egyptologist observes of a typical image in the Akhenaten style:

There is a similar implication, though at a higher level of abstraction, in the Qur'an's story of the birth of monotheism: Abraham sees the beautiful stars set, then the more beautiful moon, then the most splendid of all heavenly bodies, the sun, and concludes that no visible thing can be worthy of worship, only Him who created everything. [63] What holds center stage in the end is Abraham's own judgment apart from any being actually appealing to him.

The problem of abstractness might be seen as an alternate aspect of the previously discussed problem of adequately representing a supreme appeal. To distrust any concrete token of the supreme appellant is to be driven back to the power of our understanding as a check on perceptual or imaginative credulity. But it is also to be driven back to our own understanding as the one occupant of supreme appeal space that cannot be dislodged--in other words, to be driven into our own embrace, dissolving the difference between appellate and appellant. Without a difference between appellate subject and appellant being, without a promised good greater than the good otherwise accessible to the appellate subject, the point of appeal vanishes and with it the fundamental principle of meaningful experience. Thus it seems, as Feuerbach would argue later, that "the consciousness which the understanding has of its own perfection" is inevitably our god, but it must be disguised somehow as an Other to sustain its appeal to us. [64] Axial Age transcendentalism bares its humanism in the prayer Euripides gives Hecuba: "You that support the earth and have your seat upon it, whoever you may be, so hard for human conjecture to find out, Zeus, whether you are the necessity of nature or the mind of mortal men, I address you in prayer! For proceeding on a silent path you direct all mortal affairs toward justice!" [65]

The Upanishads grasp this nettle directly by asserting that salvation just is the knowledge of salvation; the distance between appellant and appellate subject is cancelled. "Knowledge is the eye of the world, and knowledge, the foundation. Brahman is knowing. It is with this self consisting of knowledge that [the seer Vamadeva] went up from this world and . . . became immortal." [66] So long as the inquiring self is still on its way to becoming this nondual "self consisting of knowledge," however, philosophical and religious appeal persist as a function of an apparent dualism.

The image of one who does have full knowledge of Brahman can be supremely appealing to us in our goal-directed orientation: "Be a man who [sees that Person], who knows this . . . a man who dallies with the self, who finds pleasure in the self, and thus an active man. He is brahman! and of those who know brahman, he is the best!" [68]

A theistic counter-current to nondualism, signs of which appear in the Shvetashvatara Upanishad and the Bhagavad-Gita, contends that the supreme discipline is devotion rather than knowledge (or intensive self-control or socially dutiful works) precisely because a Beloved has the superior power of appeal to call the subject toward and into itself. "Not through sacred lore, [austerities, almsgiving,] or sacrificial rites can I be seen in the form that you saw me," says Krishna after the great theophany of the Gita; "by devotion alone can I, as I really am, be known and seen and entered into, Arjuna." [69] This approach is dedicated to preserving and exploiting the appeal structure of meaningful experience. It seems however that appeals to the gracious Lord, whether on a path of bhakti or of Abrahamic monotheism, are liable to be completely dominated by exigencies of human desire and judgment--in practice, dominated by the desires and judgments of particular religious leaders. When the appeal is so abstract, what can push back against an appellate subject's willful shaping of it?

That the Logos, the Way of Heaven, Brahman, Yahweh, and other Axial Age supreme appeals differ importantly from each other sets up the problem of conflicting ultimate truth-claims in an inclusive culture. We have seen that within this well-known problem and within each appellate community and stated appeal there lurks a variance between theoretical and practical interpretations of supreme appeal, and that a number of other possibly ineliminable problems in appeal-appellate relations are associated with the presumption of supreme appeal.

Appealing is itself in an important sense the main point of the classic religious and philosophical initiatives of the Axial Age. Perennial issues of order and power are now framed, animated, and ruled by consciously recognized appeals. Ultimates of order and power for which names previously existed--destiny, Heaven, El the high god--become fully activated for appellate subjects, commanding their lives, saturating their horizons of meaningfulness; the empowerment of human beings as "rational" or "spiritual" is thought to be achieved in this centered, deepened, broadened subjection to appeal, a newly lucid commitment that is not to be identified simply with ordinary confidence in the accuracy of beliefs, the efficacy of practices, or the consistency of order.

It is commonly said, with good reason, that Axial Age ideologies are concerned with "salvation," yet it is a mistake to construe the appeals we have been discussing, even the political ones, as too closely bound to any individual's worldly interest. The Axial Age type of salvation is far different from bodily healing or victory in battle, though it may encompass such goods. The supreme appellant is lifted clear of the appealing of its devotees; it does have power and confer benefits, but its supreme intrinsic greatness sustains any subject's attention unconditionally and so conquers any suspicion that the represented appeal of the Logos, the Way, Brahman, or Yahweh reflects only the incontinent flattery of anxious, greedy human appellants.

It is characteristic of Axial Age traditions to distinguish between true philosophy and religion within the circle of supreme appeal and manipulative "magic" and "superstition" outside it. Although we have found reason to characterize the relationship with a supreme appeal as a journey, nevertheless, in comparison with the worldly instrumentalism and mythological supernaturalism that dominate earlier thinking, the Axial Age appeals announce an arrival: the supreme appellant has been seen only in a mirror, dimly, to use a Christian writer's expression, but still appellate subjects are sure that what they see dimly has uniquely and sufficiently great meaningfulness. [71]

A false arrival? Life in this world does go on, its prospects of good ever-changing, ever-diverging. Supreme appeal claims could deceive us profoundly about our situation. There now seems little room to doubt that historically such claims have promoted a kind of reasoning that is insensitive to the intrinsic meaningfulness of actually existing beings and so have produced, in Weber's expression, a general disenchantment of the world. [72] A strange consequence of this disenchantment is that the category of appeal has become marginalized in the rational interpretation of meaningfulness, which now most often refers not to appellatecy but to quasi-physical vectors of desire and need or purely functional exigencies; religions and philosophies are evaluated primarily as explanations of experience; appeal experience as such is left over as an "affective" surplus. [73] Still, insofar as we continue to reach for a true, fully justified understanding of our situation--insofar as our communication is oriented to perfecting a communion of responsible beings--the premise of supreme appeal continues to structure even our criticisms of the supreme appeal premise.

As heirs of the Axial Age, we live in a regime of supreme appeal. This assertion indicates something important about the meaning of our "classics" and thus of a large phase of cultural history we live in. However, the specific currents and edges of our most acute directive thinking today reflect a modern phase within that larger phase. To understand the state of appeal issues today, it is necessary to understand the structure of a modern discussion in philosophy and theology that flows largely from a bold reformulation by Immanuel Kant, at the height of the European Enlightenment, of the supreme appeal premise. [Chapters 3 and 4 of Appeal and Attitude take stock of philosophical and theological developments of the Kantian initiative.]

1. Psalms 139.7-8 (all Hebrew Bible quotations are NJPS).
2. The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu [Zhuangzi], trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), Chapter 33, p. 373.
3. "Leap into the boundless and make it your home!"--Zhuangzi, Chapter 2, p. 49.
4. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, trans. Michael Bullock (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953).
5. See "Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspectives on the First Millennium BCE," Daedalus, 104 (Spring 1975) [the whole issue]; S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of the Axial Age (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986); and J. P. Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt, and B. Wittrock, eds., Axial Civilizations and World History (Leiden: Brill, 2005).
6. For an overview of changes in social organization promoted by the use of writing, see Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Goody emphasizes the change in the communicative situation caused by the relative independence of written language from particular interactive contexts.
7. John B. Cobb, Jr. makes the point that individuality and freedom in their preeminently meaningful senses come with the shift of the human "seat of existence" to rational, reflective consciousness--"Axial Existence," chap. 5 in The Structure of Christian Existence (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967), pp. 52-59.
8. Jaspers, p. 76.
9. Jaspers, pp. 2-4.
10. The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Andrew George (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 1-4, 7-9, 15-62, 98-99.
11. Hollow cheeks, Gilgamesh, pp. 77, 80, 83-84.
12. "His companions are kept on their feet by his contests, [the young men of Uruk] he harries without warrant. Gilgamesh lets no son go free to his father, by day and by [night his tyranny grows] harsher . . . Though he is their shepherd . . . Gilgamesh lets no girl go free to her bride[groom]"--Gilgamesh, p. 4.
13. Rig Veda 9.113, trans. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, in The Rig Veda. An Anthology (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 134.
14. On the theology of sacred voice and sound see Guy L. Beck, Sonic Theology. Hinduism and Sacred Sound (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993).
15. For the concept of "momentary deities," extraordinarily impressive occurrences that have only a minimal categorical identification (like "daimon" in Greek), see Hermann Usener, Götternamen. Versuch einer Lehre von der religiösen Begriffsbildung (Bonn: F. Cohen, 1896), reviewed by Ernst Cassirer in Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946), pp. 15-22.
16. Heraclitus, fragment 196, in The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd ed., ed. G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 187.
17. Daodejing 16, trans. Arthur Waley, in The Way and Its Power (New York: Grove, 1958), p. 162.
18. Isaiah 43.10-11, adapted from the NJPS trans.
19. Chandogya Upanishad 6, trans. Patrick Olivelle, in Upanishads (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 152-156 (repeated passim).
20. Bhagavad-Gita 11. My dating of the Gita to the late Axial Age (on the basis of its attitude vocabulary) is on the early end of the current range of estimates, which go as late as the 2nd century CE.
21. E. A. Wallis Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead (New York: Dover, 1967), p. cxix.
22. Early speculation, Rig Veda 10.129, p. 25: "There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where? . . ." On the "search for ultimate objectivity" in the earliest Indian philosophers and the shift from rita to atman as central explanatory principle see David Kalupahana, A History of Buddhist Philosophy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992), Chapter 1.
23. Thales, fragment 85, and Anaximander, fragment 110, in The Presocratic Philosophers, pp. 88-95 and 117-121 respectively.
24. On the early Chinese divinity Di or Shangdi (Lord-on-high), see W. T. de Bary et al., eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 10-13, 22-23, 27; on Heaven as a fundamental structure, a concept that becomes a commonplace by the 3rd century BCE, see already Daodejing 73 and Analects 8.19 and 17.19 (but cf. 5.12).
25. The "Memphite Theology," trans. James B. Allen, in William W. Hallo, ed., The Context of Scripture, Vol. 1: Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World (Leiden: Brill, 1997), p. 22.
26. On brahman concepts see Sources of Indian Tradition, 2nd ed., Vol. 1, ed. Ainslie T. Embree (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 6, and Olivelle, p. lvi.
27. "The Great Hymn to the Aten," trans. Miriam Lichtheim, in Hallo, p. 46.
28. "King Wen," in the Classic of Odes, trans. Burton Watson, in Sources of Chinese Tradition, p. 38.
29. Genesis 28.13.
30. Exodus 3.14.
31. Deuteronomy 6.4.
32. Dong Zhongshu, "Luxuriant Gems of the Spring and Autumn Annals," trans. Sarah Queen, in Sources of Chinese Tradition, pp. 300-301.
33. Analects 3.13, trans. Arthur Waley, in The Analects of Confucius (New York: Vintage, 1938), p. 97.
34. Hosea 11.1.
35. Daodejing 37, p. 188.
36. Daodejing 1, p. 141. This line is often read as separating anything we can grasp from a presumed transcendent. But Bo Mou argues on grammatical and transcendental grounds that the line allows a positive relation between any helpful, albeit finite, reaching toward the way and the inexhaustible Way--"Ultimate Concern and Language Engagement: A Reexamination of the Opening Message of the Dao-De-Jing," Journal of Chinese Philosophy 27 (December 2000), pp. 429-439.
37. Heraclitus, fragment 194, in The Presocratic Philosophers, p. 187.
38. Isaiah 46.5, 55.9.
39. E.g. Chandogya Upanishad 5.3.7, p. 140; see Olivelle's discussion of the significance of these stories of Kshatriyas rather than Brahmans possessing the highest wisdom, pp. xxxiv-xxxvi.
40. On the rise and effect of astrology see Gerardus van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, trans. J. E. Turner (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1967), pp. 71-73.
41. A good feminist discussion of this issue will be found in Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
42. Chandogya Upanishad 6.14, p. 155.
43. Heraclitus, fragment 196, in The Presocratic Philosophers, p. 187. The conception of "philosophy" as a longing, non-possessing love of the Good was influentially promoted by Plato in Symposium 205-212.
44. Analects 4.5, pp. 102-103.
45. I Kings 17-19 (Elijah); Hosea 1-2; Jeremiah 27-28; Ezekiel 4; Isaiah 53 (the Suffering Servant).
46. Van der Leeuw discusses Preuss and Söderblom's concept of the "originator" type of deity in his section on divinity perceived as a "background" power and will--pp. 164-168.
47. Exodus 20.2-3, Deuteronomy 5.6-7.
48. Isaiah 43.26-19.
49. Ezekiel 38-39.
50. Job 38.4.
51. Samples of these views are conveniently found in Sources of Chinese Tradition, pp. 44-63 (index p. 44), 174-177 (Kongzi and Xunzi rationalizing the "rites"), 129 (Mengzi on cultivation of the spontaneous human tendency to do good), 205 (Han Feizi on a new formation of the subjects of the state).
52. Analects 17.19, Mengzi 5.A.5 (Sources of Chinese Tradition, pp. 62, 143-144).
53. S. C. Humphreys points out that there is a problem in making the necessary terms of a purportedly universal appeal sufficiently explicit and not too much restricted by the appeal-maker's distinctive social position--"'Transcendence' and Intellectual Roles: The Ancient Greek Case," in Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspectives on the First Millennium BCE, Daedalus 104, 2 (Spring 1975), pp. 112-113.
54. The division created in this way will not necessarily coincide with naturally occurring differences of religious temperament or capacity (noted as an "empirical fact" standing "at the beginning of the history of religion" by Max Weber--"The Social Psychology of Religion," in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Wax Weber: Essays in Sociology [New York: Oxford University Press, 1946], p. 287). It might highlight such differences but it might also cover them over with its own normative scheme.
55. On Yao, Shun, and Yu in the Analects, see e.g. 8.18-21; on the rites, 3 passim and Sima Qian's "Life of Confucius" in The Wisdom of Confucius, trans. Lin Yutang (New York: Random House, 1938), esp. p. 60. For the Noachide covenant see Genesis 6-9; the Abrahamic, Genesis 11.26-22.19; the Mosaic, Exodus 20-24, 32; the Davidic, I Samuel 16.1-14, II Samuel 7, I Kings 2.1-4, 9.1-9.
56. On the preeminence of devotion, see 11.54; on the other three yogas, teachings 3-6.
57. The Pythagoreans come closest; Iamblichus gives the names of seventeen "illustrious Pythagorean women"--"The Life of Pythagoras," in The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library, ed. Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie (Grand Rapids: Phanes, 1987), p. 122. On women in the Upanishads, see Olivelle, p. xxxvi.
58. Ibn Rushd (Averroes) argued that what constitutes true belief for a philosopher can be heresy for a non-philosopher and vice versa in The Decisive Treatise, Determining the Nature of the Connection between Religion and Philosophy, trans. George F. Hourani (London: Gibb Memorial Trust, 1967), Chapter 3, pp. 63-71--note the parable of the skillful doctor on p. 67. A locus classicus in Buddhism for the subjective relativity of religious perspectives is the parable of skillful instructions given by a father to his endangered children in a burning house in the Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma (the Lotus Sutra), trans. Leon Hurvitz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), Chapter 3, pp. 57-64. The notion that souls are reborn into better lives as a consequence of good actions and worse as a consequence of worse appears in the Upanishads--see Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.4.5 and Chandogya Upanishad 5.10.
59. Tacitus complains of Christians' "hatred of the entire human race"--The Annals of Tacitus, trans. Donald R. Dudley (New York: New American Library, 1966), p. 354. Han Yu warns that "the Buddhist doctrine maintains that one must reject the relationship between ruler and minister, do away with father and son and forbid the Way that enables us to live and to grow together--all this in order to seek what they call purity and nirvana"--"Essentials of the Moral Way," trans. Charles Hartman, in Sources of Chinese Tradition, p. 571.
60. The Wisdom of Solomon 13.2-5 [NRSV], probably written in the late 1st century BCE or early 1st century CE by a Hellenistic Jew of Alexandria.
61. John Cowper Powys, In Defense of Sensuality (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1930), p. 95, quoted by Catherine Madsen in "Revelations of Chaos," Cross Currents 41 (Winter 1991/92), p. 493. In his Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1934), Powys significantly appeals to the Axial Age ideal of coping with life from inner resources--"we have the power of re-creating the universe from the depths of ourselves . . . we share the creative force that started the whole process"--but a key exercise of this inner discretion for him is forgetting the bad parts of the whole (pp. 331, 343).
62. Donald Redford, Akhenaten, the Heretic King (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 174.
63. Qur'an 6.74-79.
64. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), Chapter 2, p. 34.
65. Euripides, Trojan Women, trans. David Kovacs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 101, ll. 884-888.
66. Aitareya Upanishad 3.3-4, trans. Olivelle, in Upanishads, p. 199.
67. Katha Upanishad 3.10-11, in ibid., p. 239.
68. Mundaka Upanishad 3.1.3-4, in ibid., p. 274.
69. Bhagavad-Gita 11.53-54.
70. Iamblichus, "The Life of Pythagoras," p. 70.
71. "In a mirror, dimly," Paul, I Corinthians 13.12 (NRSV).
72. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," in Gerth and Mills, p. 155.
73. An articulate and not insensitive specimen of this style of thinking about religious meaning is Melford Spiro's "Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation," in Michael Banton, ed., Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (New York: Praeger, 1966), pp. 98-122.