452 a note on the three orientationsprocedures, on the value accorded to the agency of the individual, and
on the conviction that our most important endeavors have a history,
succeeding or failing in historical time. It is an image, avant la lettre, of
post- Enlightenment modernity, looking for its ancient roots even in the
troubled wilds of the religious consciousness. Th e second theme repre-
sents, in this construction, an indispensable bridge between the fi rst and
the third. Th e fourth theme spells out the po liti cal implications of the
other three: the dialectic between worldly and priestly or philosophical
authority in the contest to infl uence the direction of society.
Th e application of this scheme to the orientations that I have called
the overcoming of the world and the humanizing of the world can be
achieved only through a forceful stretch. Th e core intended instances of
the Axial Age scheme are the religion of the ancient Jews, purged of its
sacrifi cial- cultic parts; the philosophical and scientifi c speculations of
the ancient Greeks; and the tendencies in ancient Indian and Chinese
philosophy off ering the most plausible counterparts to these present-
able ancestors of the Eu ro pe an Enlightenment. Th e varieties of Christi-
anity relatively less off ensive to reason could then fi gure among the
worthy heirs of the Axial Age.
If this approach were to be accepted as a guide to the understanding
and criticism of the history of Christianity, the nominalist or dualist
theology of the fourteenth and fi ft eenth centuries, with its fateful dis-
junction between the realms of grace and of nature, would amount to a
consummation of Christian insight. It was in fact the beginning of
some of the tendencies that culminated in the secularizing naturalism
of the early modern period in Eu rope.
Th e view of the common ground of the three orientations in this
book has a diff erent focus. Th e contrast with the Axial Age conception is
complicated because in my account the protagonists and historical peri-
ods also diff er from those that mark the thesis of the Axial Age. Ancient
Greek philosophy appears only through its contribution to the over-
coming of the world (in Plato, the Stoics, and Plotinus). Confucianism
represents the most important instance of the humanizing of the world,
aided in the per for mance of this role by its relentlessly anti- metaphysical
metaphysics, in contrast to many of the other schools of speculative phi-
losophy that fl ourished during and aft er the Warring States period in
proto- imperial China. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam matter most, as