a note on the three orientations 449side the chronological and analytic scope of the Axial Age category,
because they arose later. Everything in these world- shaping religions
that was recalcitrant to the supposed alliance between refl exive reason
and religious vision could be easily disregarded.
Th ere were two central pieces in the idea of the Axial upheaval. Th e
fi rst was the break with cosmotheism: the identifi cation of the divine
with the world. Th e second was the development of the use of human
reason to form a general account of the world and of society and to
criticize established regimes of thought and of society in the name of
such an account. Th e central claim in the idea of the Axial period was,
and ever since has been, that there is an affi nity between these two
parts of the idea.
Th e chief good to be defended was not the disruptive vision of the
troublesome found ers of the world religions. It was the legacy of the
Eu ro pe an Enlightenment, seen through the eyes of its belated, self-
appointed defenders in the immediate aft ermath of the calamities of
twentieth- century Eu ro pe an and particularly German history. On this
basis, philosophy held out its hand to religion, but only to the parts of
religion that could plausibly be represented as friendly to the party of
Enlightenment. No wonder the putative nascent intelligentsias of the
Axial Age, not isolated claimants to divinity or divine inspiration, were
given the starring role.
Th is intellectual move had pre ce dents in the period before the Sec-
ond World War. For example, the decisive conceit in Max Weber’s es-
says on the comparative- historical sociology of religion (published in
1921– 1922) was the notion of an affi nity between prophetic Judaism and
the array of ideological and institutional tendencies that Weber brought
under the heading “rationalization.” A similar connection between
transcendence and reason was established by Simmel in his analysis of
the idea of transcendence and of its meaning in history (Lebensan-
schauung, 1918).
Th e same emphasis on the link between the turn to transcendence in
the history of religion and the commitment to systematic and critical
thought, exemplifi ed by the work of an in de pen dent intelligentsia, has
ever since marked writings about the idea of the Axial Age. Some of its
contemporary exponents have drawn the natural conclusion, insisting
that refl exive thought, individual agency, and historical consciousness,