8/11/2019 Art. the Diabolical Disruption of Order in Robinson Crusoe
1/9
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'Why God no Kill the Devil?' The Diabolical Disruption of Order in Robinson Crusoe
Author(s): Nicholas HudsonSource: The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 39, No. 156 (Nov., 1988), pp. 494-501Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/516220Accessed: 05-08-2014 14:23 UTC
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2/9
WHY GOD
NO KILL
THE
DEVIL?
THE DIABOLICAL DISRUPTION OF ORDER
IN ROBINSON CRUSOE
By
NICHOLAS HUDSON
ALTHOUGH
Crusoe
experiences
little
difficulty
in
persuading Friday
to
adopt
correct
notions on
most
points
of
Christian
doctrine,
he
finds his pupil strangely unreceptive to his scriptural account of the
devil.
If
God
much
strong,
much
might
as
Devil,
Friday
asks,
why
God no
kill
the
Devil,
so make no more do wicked?
(p. 218).1
Crusoe
can offer
no
answer to
this
problem
and
eventually
retires to
pray
for
inspiration,
leaving
Defoe s
commentators
with
their
own
problem
of
how to
interpret
his
confusion. Solutions to the
problem
have
varied,
but most have had
in
common the
assumption
that Robinson
Crusoe is
a
deeply
orthodox,
unambiguous,
even
allegorical
account
of
the
hero s
spiritual
journey
towards faith
and trust
in
God.
There must be
an appropriatelypious reason for Crusoe s hesitation.2
A broader
consideration of Defoe s
writings
suggests,
on
the
other
hand,
that he was
genuinely
baffled
by
the
kind
of
problems
raised
by
Friday.
As revealed
by
Defoe s
subsequent
discussions of the devil in
Serious
Reflections during
the
Life
and
Surprising
Adventures
of
Robinson Crusoe
(1719)
and,
most
notably,
The
Political
History
of
the
Devil
(1726),
the devil
presented perhaps
the
central
challenge
to
Defoe s
continuing
effort
to
justify
and honour the
Wisdom of
Providence
(p. 1). Throughout
his
writings
he
deliberates
on
the
heterodox possibility that God has given the devil an unjust range of
liberties or
that,
indeed,
the
devil
is
as
strong
as God. This
essay
will
examine
the
nature
and sources of these doubts.
1
All
references
in the text are
to
The
Life
and
Surprising
Adventures
of
Robinson
Crusoe,
ed.
J.
Donald
Crowley (London, 1972).
2
George
A.
Starr,
for
example,
has
interpreted
Crusoe s
difficulty
as
simply part
of
the
traditional
conception
of
the
fledgling
spiritual
guide
(Defoe
and
Spiritual
Autobiography
(Princeton, 1965), 90).
J.
Paul
Hunter
has
pointed
out
that,
according
to
17th-cent.
accounts
of
missionaries,
Indian converts
frequently questioned
the Christian
teachings
on
the
devil: Defoe
is
being historically
accurate
( Friday
as a
Convert: Defoe and
the
Accounts of Indian
Missionaries ,
RES NS 14
(1963),
243-8).
Most
recently, Timothy
C. Blackburn
interpreted
the
episode
as
a
dramatization
of
the failure
of
reason,
as
championed by contemporary
deists,
to
discover
the
mysteries
of
the
revelation
( Friday s
Religion:
Its
Nature and
Importance
in
Robinson
Crusoe ,
Eighteenth-Century
Studies,
18
(1985), 360-82).
Oxford University
Press 1988
ES New
Series,
Vol.
XXXIX,
No. 156
(1988)
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3/9
WHY
GOD NO
KILL THE DEVIL?
In
The
History of
the
Devil
Defoe broaches
the
questions
which,
once
solved,
might
remove all doubts
concerning
the
devil s
role in
providence: Who is he? What is his original? Whence came he? And
what
is his
present
state
and condition? 3 These are
virtually
the same
issues which Crusoe
attempts
to
elucidate when
Friday
reveals
he has
no Notion of an evil
Spirit;
of
his
Original,
his
Being,
his
Nature,
and
above all of
his
Inclination to do Evil
(p.
217).
And
just
as
Friday
responds
to Crusoe s account of the
devil
with
embarrassing
ques-
tions,
Defoe admits
in
The
History
of
the Devil that the
Bible
has
left
sceptics wondering
why
God has not
killed or
at
least
kept
the devil
imprisoned:
I
know
it has been
questioned
by
some,
with
more
face than
fear,
how
it
consists
with a
complete victory
of
the
Devil,
which
they say
was at
first
obtained
by
the
heavenly
powers
over
Satan,
and his
apostate army
in
heaven,
that when he
was
cast out of
his
holy
place,
and
dashed into
a
place
of
punishment,
a condemned
hold,
or
place
of
confinement,
to be
reserved there
to the
judgment
of
the
great day:
I
say,
how
it consists with that
entire
victory,
to let
him
loose
again
and
give
him
liberty,
like
a
thief
that has
broken
prison
to
range
about God s
creation,
and there to
continue his
rebellion,
commit
new
ravages
and acts
of
hostility against
God,
make new
efforts at dethroning the almighty Creator; and in particularto fall upon the
weakness of his
creatures,
man?4
Defoe
promises
that he
will
give good
answer to these
questions .
In
fact,
he never mentions the
questions
again.
He does affirm
later that
the earth
is
the Lord s and the
kingdoms
thereof ,s
but he
makes little
effort to reconcile this
conventional tenet of
orthodoxy
with his
chronicle
of
all
the
times-ranging
from Noah s
flood to the
corrup-
tion of the
Popes-when
the devil was
truly
and
literally
the
universal
monarch, nay
the
god
of the
world .6
The
History of
the
Devil
covers
four millenniums of
struggle
between God and
Satan for
empire
over
mankind.
More often than
not,
Satan s
designs
have
succeeded,
forcing,
as it
were,
his maker in a new
kind
of
creation,
the
old one
proving
ineffectual .7 The verb to
force ,
which is
used more than
once
in
Defoe s account
of
the devil s
triumphs,
seems
remarkable,
for
it
elicits the heterodox
impression
that
God
has not
been in full
control of the devil s activities.
History
has
apparently
been
dominated
by
a Manichean
struggle
between
good
and
evil
in which
the
forces
of evil have
often been able to thwart the
designs
of
good.
3
Satan s
Devices;
or,
the Political
History of
the
Devil
(London,
1819;
repr.
Wakefield,
Yorks.,
1972),
I,
ii.
242.
4
Ibid. 39-40.
5
Ibid.
II,
viii.
341.
6
Ibid.
I,
ix. 144.
7
Ibid. x. 175.
495
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4/9
Thus,
seven
years
after Robinson
Crusoe,
Defoe was still
allowing
sceptical
questions
about the devil
to
be
expressed
in his
writings,
but
was still unable to mount a convincing or entirely orthodox case to
answer those
questions.
A
major
instance of
the
troubles he
encoun-
ters
in The
History of
the
Devil
is his
treatment of the devil s activities
in
the New
World,
an issue of obvious relevance
to
Crusoe s
religious
instruction of
Friday.
Defoe entertained an unusual
theory
on the
barbarity
of
primitive
people
which
we
should
first
explain
before
showing
how
it
undermined
his efforts
to
justify
providence
in
both
The
History
of
the
Devil
and
Robinson Crusoe.
In The
History
of
the
Devil Defoe
argued
that Satan was
in
full
and
quiet possession of all the native peoples of America, such as Friday
and
his nation.8
There was
nothing
unusual about
this
opinion,
but
whereas Richard
Baxter and
other writers on the
devil had
suggested
that the
Indians
consciously practised
Satanism,9
Defoe
maintained
that the Indians
were not aware that their
society
harboured an
evil
being. According
to
Defoe,
the devil would not have achieved such
success
if
he were
readily
recognized
as the devil.
Thus,
primitive
people
all
practised
devil-worship-but
with the
full
conviction
that
they
were
worshipping
the
true God.
Defoe
was convinced
that
belief
in a benevolent Deity was so natural to men that it could never be
erased. The devil s
only
recourse
throughout history
had been to set
up wrong
notions of
worship,
and
bring [men]
to a false
worship
instead
of a
true,
supposing
the
object
worshipped
to
be
still
the
same .10
That the natives
were
worshipping
the devil could be
determined
by
their use of
bloody
sacrifices ,
a
practice
which fulfilled
the
devil s
objective
of
not
only
corrupting
men s
souls but also
destroying
their
bodies.
Defoe did not
directly
refer to
cannibalism
among
the
natives,
but cannibalism served as his
metaphor
for the
devil s promotion of bloodshed throughout the world: mankind,
worse than
the
ravenous
brutes,
preys
on his own
kind,
and
devours
them
.
. .
by
all the
ways
of
fraud and allurement that hell can
invent. 11
The
implication
of Defoe s
argument
was
that the
devil
rather than
innate wickedness was the
major
instigator
of
bloodshed
among
primitive people
and indeed mankind
in
general.
This
thesis
may
help
to
explain why Friday
and
his nation seem to be neither noble
savages
8
See Satan s Devices, viii. 123.
9
See Richard
Baxter,
The
Saints
Everlasting
Rest,
9th
edn.
(London,
1662),
256.
Baxter,
one of
Defoe s
favourite
divines,
upheld
belief
in various
diabolical
phenomena
such
as
witch-
craft and
possession
in
The
Certainty of
a
World
of Spirits
(1691),
a work which
was later blamed
for
helping
to
legitimize
the
Salem
witch trials
of 1692.
10
History, I,
x. 174. See
also
I,
ii.
33.
l
Ibid.
II,
iv. 296.
496
HUDSON
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5/9
WHY GOD NO KILL THE DEVIL?
nor
without
strong
traces
of mankind s
original
innocence and
good-
ness.
In
recent
years,
critics
have
generally agreed
that
Defoe
absolutely rejects the idea of the noble savage, and gives an essentially
Hobbesian or
Calvinist
account of man
in
his
natural
state;
in
the
words
of
J.
Paul
Hunter,
Defoe s
depiction
of
cannibalism
vividly
dramatizes
the
horrors of natural
depravity .12
While
this
interpret-
ation is consistent with
Crusoe s reaction
to
the cannibals
when he first
sees
them,
it does not
explain
why
he finds
little
evidence
of
depravity
when he
finally
meets a cannibal. In
fact,
just
the
opposite
is true.
Friday
is like a child
(p.
209)-grateful,
honest,
happy,
affectionate.
This
seeming paradox-that
an
otherwise innocent
and benevolent
people could be reduced to acts of cannibalism-is partly explained
when
Crusoe
questions
Friday
about his
religious
beliefs.
Friday
tells
Crusoe
of
his
god,
a benevolent
deity
named
Benamuckee
( much
good )
who
lives on
top
of
a mountain.
Crusoe
finally
tells
Friday
that Benamuckee is a
Cheat and
that
if
his
priests
talked to
anyone
on
top
of the
mountain,
it
must be with
an evil
Spirit (p.
217).
It is then
that he instructs
Friday
on
the
devil.
It
would
seem,
therefore,
that Benamuckee
demonstrates how
the devil
has
achieved
power
over
primitive
nations
by
setting
himself
up
as
God, taking advantageof mankind s naturaldesire to worship a deity.
Like
mankind before the
fall,
Friday
has no
understanding
of
evil;
he
worshipped
Benamuckee
with no
inkling
that this
might
be the
devil.
And
although
Friday s
people
are
guilty
of
cannibalism,
Crusoe
indicates
in
A
Vision
of
the
Angelic
World
(1720)
that
these abomin-
ations
had been incited
largely
by
the devil
rather than
by original
sin
or an
inherent
propensity
to
evil:
if
the Devil had not
been
in
them,
they
would
hardly
have
come
straggling
over
the Sea
so
far,
to
devour
one another. 13
By indicating that cannibalism-perhaps along with a great deal of
human evil-results
largely
from the
instigation
of
Satan rather than
12
J.
Paul
Hunter,
The
Reluctant
Pilgrim
(Baltimore,
1966),
130-1. See also
Blackburn,
pp.
364-5;
Virginia
Ogden
Birdsall,
Defoe s Perpetual
Seekers
(Lewisburg,
1985),
24-49.
13
A
Vision
of
the
Angelic
World,
appended
to
Serious
Reflections
during
the
Life
and
Surprising
Adventures
of
Robinson Crusoe
(London,
1720),
35. This
treatment of evil
among
primitive people
does
not
necessarily
contradict Defoe s
opinions
on
original
sin ,
which
in
fact
were not
perfectly
in
line with
the traditional
theology
of
Puritanism. In
The
Family
Instructor,
11th edn.
(London,
1734),
Defoe described
original
sin
not
as
the
inherent
or
necessary
evil
attributed to
mankind
by
strict
Calvinism,
but
as
a natural
Propensity
in us
to do
Evil
(p. 21).He
generally
assumed
that this
propensity
could be
controlled
through
education and
discipline.
The mind
of a
child,
he
argued,
is
malleable
and
ready
to be
molded
into
any
Form
by
wicked
or virtuous
influences
(pp.
64-6).
Consistent
with
this
doctrine,
Crusoe s
education
of
Friday
is
remarkably
quick
and
easy, suggesting
that
Friday- a
child -is
capable
of
being
turned
towards evil or
goodness according
to the
predominant
influence at
any
time. For
a
contempor-
ary explanation
of how this
understanding
of
human nature differs from
the Calvinist
view,
see
497
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6/9
original
sin,
Defoe
raises
a
number of
serious doubts
concerning
the
justice
of
providence.
First,
why
would
a
just
God abandon a
whole
nation to the wiles of an evil being whom they could not recognize and
therefore
could
not
avoid? Prominent
scholars
of
diabolical
phenomena,
such
as
Joseph
Glanvill,
acknowledged
the
seriousness
of
this
problem:
unless
all men had the
ability
to
distinguish
between
the
deceptions
of the devil and the
ways
of
God,
it
was
impossible
to
argue
that a
just
and
caring providence
ruled
over the
world.
As Glanvill
wrote
in
his textbook
on
witchcraft
and the
devil,
Sadducismus
Triumphatus
(1688-9),
..
if
there
be a
Providence
that
superviseth
us,
(as
nothing
is
more
certain)
doubtless
it
will
never
suffer
poor
helpless
Creatures to be
inevitably
deceived
by
the
craft
and
subtlety
of their
mischievous
Enemy,
to their
undoing;
but
will without
question
take such
care,
that
the works
wrought by
Divine Power
for the Confirmation
of
Divine
Truth,
shall have such
visible
Marks and
Signatures
... as
shall discover
whence
they
are,
and
sufficiently
distinguish
them
from all
Impostures
and
Delusions.14
In
order
to
prove
that
Friday s
people
should have
recognized
the
wickedness of their
customs,
Crusoe must
postulate
the existence of
visible
marks and
signatures
which
distinguish goodness
from
evil.
But even when Crusoe first
sights
the
natives,
he assumes that
they
had no
inkling
of the wickedness
of
cannibalism:
it is not
against
their
Consciences
reproving,
or
their
Light reproaching
them
(p. 171).
Long
before
his
religious
discussions with
Friday,
this
opinion
leads
to doubts
concerning
the
justice
of
God,
for
why
would the wise
Governor
of all
Things give up
any
of
his
Creatures,
to such
Inhumanity; nay,
to
something
so
much
below,
even
Brutality
it
self,
as
to
devour
its own kind?
(p. 197).
Crusoe s ruminations on
this
topic
are
at first
fruitless ,
but
having
observed
Friday s
evident
potential
for
goodness
and
piety,
he
eventually
decides
that the
natives
do
possess
a
natural
Light
to
distinguish
right
from
wrong. They,
not
God,
are
responsible
for
their
falling
into the
paths
of
evil:
... I sometimes
was
led
too far to invade the
Soveraignty
of
Providence,
as
it
were
to
arraign
the
Justice
of so
arbitrary
a
Disposition
of
Things,
that
should hide that
Light
from
some,
and reveal it to
others,
and
yet expect
a
like
Duty
from both: But
I
shut
it
up,
and check d
my Thoughts
with this
Conclusion .
. . as God was
necessarily,
and
by
the Nature of his
Being,
infinitely Holy
and
Just,
so it could not
be,
but that if these creatures were all
Richard Fiddes s admired textbook of
Christian
thought,
The
Body of
Divinity (Dublin,
1718),
i. 152-228.
14
Joseph
Glanvill,
Sadducismus
Triumphatus:
or.
Full and Plain Evidence
concerning
Witches and
Apparitions,
ed.
Henry
More
(London, 1688-9),
ii.
103.
498
HUDSON
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7/9
WHY GOD NO
KILL THE DEVIL?
sentenc d to Absence from
himself,
it
was on account
of
sinning against
that
Light
which,
as
the
Scripture
says,
was
a
Law to
themselves,
and
by
such
Rules as their Consciences would acknowledge to be just, tho the Foun-
dation was not discover d to
us.
(p. 210)
Significantly,
Crusoe
has at this
point adopted
a
position very
like that
of
contemporary
deists,
who were
arguing
convincingly
that
orthodox
writers must either
acknowledge
the
capacity
of
non-Christians
to
distinguish
between
good
and
evil or
else
give
up
belief
in
the
justice
of
God.15
Crusoe,
we
might
say,
is
caught
in a
trap
between
Manicheanism on one hand and deism
on the other. None
the
less,
the
above statement
represents
a
position
which Crusoe is able to
hold
only briefly before the culminating religious discussion with Friday.
This discussion throws the whole issue of
divine
justice
back into
question by
revealing
that
Friday
has been the victim of
diabolical
influences which he did not
suspect,
and does not
understand even
when
Crusoe
explains
them.
Timothy
C.
Blackburn
may
be
right
to
suggest
that
Friday s ignorance
on this and other
religious
questions
dramatizes Defoe s scorn
for
the
deists.16 It
should
be
kept
in
mind,
however,
that
this denial of mankind s natural
understanding
of evil
jeopardizes
Crusoe s
faith in a
just
providence.
As
Crusoe had
himself
admitted, such a providence would have given the natives the means,
either
naturally
or
through
revelation,
to
recognize
the wickedness of
Satan s directions.
Thus,
Friday s
question Why
God
no
kill
the Devil? is the climax
of
a
continuing struggle
with the
theological
issues raised
by
the
barbarity
of
the
natives,
a
struggle
which
would
continue
with
similar
irresolution and
contradiction
in
The
History
of
the Devil.
There
is,
moreover,
a
further
question
which
Defoe and
Crusoe
try
to answer.
What should
Christians
do
about cannibals? Could the
cannibals be
justly punished
or
persecuted
for sins
they
were deluded into commit-
ting
by
the devil?
This
problem
is raised
by history,
for
the New
World
savages
did
suffer enormous
cruelty
and
persecution
when
they
were
conquered
by
the
Spaniards.
This
persecution
would
suggest
either
that
providence
has
unjustly permitted helpless people
to
suffer
for
no
good
reason
or,
alternatively,
that God
sometimes
judges
the
world
according
to
a
standard
of
moral truth
incomprehensible
to
mortals.
In
Serious
Reflections
during
the
Life
and
Surprising
Adven-
tures
of
Robinson
Crusoe,
Crusoe
indicates
that
the
persecution
of
the
Indians was authorized
by
divine justice. The
Spaniards
were the
Instruments of divine
providence
to
destroy
those
Peoples,
who
15
See
e.g.
Charles
Blount,
The Oracles
of
Reason
(London,
1693),
196.
16
See
Blackburn,
pp.
369-74.
499
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8/9
were
come
up (by
the Influence of the
Devil,
no
Doubt)
to such
a
dreadful
height,
in that abhorr d Custom of human
Sacrifices,
that the
innocent Blood cried for it .17 Given the devil s own taste for
bloodshed,
however,
it
does
not
seem reasonable
to
make
providence
the
destroyer
of
those
unwittingly
under
his influence. Later
in
Serious
Reflections,
Crusoe comes close to
contradicting
his
justifi-
cation
of
providence:
since
pagans
such
as the Indians had no
knowledge
that their actions were
wrong,
how
can
we,
upon any
Christian
Foundation,
punish
or
persecute
the
Man for
not
exercising
that which
God
had not
given
him? 18 In
The
History
of
the
Devil,
Defoe takes the
further
step
that
places
the
Spaniards
on
the
side
of
the devil rather than providence. The slaughtering of the natives, he
argues,
was
as
pleasing
to Satan as the
murderous rituals
of
the natives
themselves.
The
Spaniards
planted religion
in
those countries
in
a
glorious
and
triumphant
manner,
upon
the
destruction
of an
infinite
number
of
innocent
people,
whose blood has fattened
the soil for the
Catholic
faith,
and to Satan s full satisfaction .19
Defoe s
confusion
on this
problem
is
shared
by
Crusoe,
whose
final
years
on the island
seem
preoccupied
with
the
question
of what to do
about
the
cannibals.
When
Crusoe
first
witnesses the cannibalism of
the natives who come on shore, his anger fills him with murderous
designs.
These
designs
are
abandoned when
Crusoe concludes
that
cannibalism is not much worse
than
the atrocities
perpetrated by
Christian nations at war.
In
particular,
he remembers that
the
slaughter
of the Indians
by
the
Spaniards
was mere
Butchery,
a
bloody
and unnatural Piece of
Cruelty,
unjustifiable
either to God or
Man
(p. 172).
According
to
The
History
of
the
Devil,
this
brutality
had
greatly pleased
the
devil,
so
Crusoe
may
have
good
reason to
give
most humble Thanks
on
my
Knees to God for
saving
him
from
the
temptation to Blood-Guiltiness (p. 173). On the other hand, he later
decides
that
Providence
does wish
him
to attack the
natives when
they
come on to the island
with
white
prisoners.
He
now
apparently
feels
that the
time
has come
to be the destructive instrument of
providence,
a role he
initially
bestows
on the
Spanish
conquistadores
in
Serious
Reflections.
Significantly,
the
attack
on
the
savages
is
prompted by
a
sudden
impulse-mere
instinct rather
than
any
reasoned
speculations
on
the
will of
God.
Crusoe
increasingly
finds that his
attempts
to reason
through problems lead to doubt and indecision rather than action,
17
Serious
Reflections
during
the
Life
and
Surprising
Adventures
of
Robinson
Crusoe,
247-8.
Serious
Reflections
is in the same volume as
A
Vision
of
the
Angelic
Wborld,
ut the two works
are
separately
paginated.
18
Serious
Reflections,
256.
19
History,
I,
i. 14.
500
HUDSON
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9/9
WHY GOD NO
KILL
THE DEVIL?
indecision
which
eventually
forces
him
to seek divine
inspiration
to
answer the
doubts raised
by Friday.
Similarly,
in
The
History
of
the
Devil Defoe periodically turns to the argument that the wisdom of
providence-the
wisdom which he
himself has elsewhere
attempted
to
delineate-is
beyond
the humble
capacities
of
human reason.
As he
comments
on how the first seeds
of evil
could have been
planted
in
the
angelic
nature
of
Lucifer,
I
acknowledge
I
do not
see
through
[this
difficulty];
neither do
I
think
that the
great
Milton,
after all
his fine
images
and
lofty
excursions
on
this
subject,
has left it one
jot
clearer
than
he found
it. 20
Defoe
frequently
criticizes
Milton,
his most
famous
predecessor
as the devil s
historian,
for
pretending
to
know
facts regarding Satan s nature and origin which the revelation left
concealed.
In view of
this
criticism,
it is
curious
how
closely
Defoe
echoes
Milton
in
the
preface
to
Robinson
Crusoe,
where
he
promises
to
justify
and honour the Wisdom of
Providence
(p.
1).
Whatever
objections
Defoe
later
expressed against
the
possibility
of
entirely
justifying
the
ways
of
God
to
man,
Crusoe
attempts
to answer
the
serious difficulties
raised
by,
in
particular,
his
observations on
the
wickedness
of the natives. His
resort
to
various irrational
alternatives
to a reasoned trust
in
God-sudden
impulses,
divine
inspiration-run
counter to the desire for certainty, the stolid empiricism, and the
hostility
to
superstition
which often
informs
Defoe s
theology
and is
the foundation
of
his
technique
as
a
realistic novelist.
What our consideration of
the devil
finally
reveals is
that
Robinson
Crusoe is not
a
confident
and
systematic
account
of
a
man s
journey
from error to
truth,
irreligion
to
piety, perplexity
to a firm
reliance on
the wisdom
of
providence.
Crusoe s hesitant
shifting
between
reason
and
impulse,
between
a
desire
to
reduce the
universe
to
some
logical
order and the
grudging acceptance
of a
universe
beyond
comprehen-
sion, reflects dilemmas that persist throughout Defoe s later writings
on
religion.
What
is
remarkable
is that
Defoe dramatizes his
per-
plexities
so
ingenuously,
and
allows
himself
to
journey
hopefully
down various
theological paths
without
knowing
whether his final
destination
will
be orthodox or
consistent
with
his
positions
elsewhere.
Historically,
Defoe s
discussions
of
the
devil
and
provi-
dence illustrate the
conflicts
and
perplexities
which
accumulated when
English
Protestants
began
to insist
on
a
theology
that
seemed
accept-
able
to reason
and common
sense,
a demand
inseparable
from
the rise
of empiricism and the increased liberty to question established
doctrines
which followed
the
political
events
of
1688
and
1714.
From
the
doubts
of
Crusoe,
we
might
say, grew
the
scepticism
of
Hume and
the need for new
ways
to
defend the wisdom of God.
20
Ibid.
v. 77.
501
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