To be cast away, forsaken, very far away from the very civilization: that is what happened to poor Robinson Crusoe. Time passes by and the wretched things seem to be really evident to him while the good ones are just obligatory needs. When one reads Defoe's tale of double moral and religious repentance, destiny itself is put into question: whether our lives are just the lesser intricacies of an allmighty God or the result of unexpected causality is something far beyond the capabilities of Crusoe:
Thus my fear banished all my religious hope; all that former confidence in God, which was founded upon such wonderful as I had had of His goodness, now vanished; as if he that had fed me by a miracle hitherto, could not preserve by his power the provision which he had made for me by His goodness.
His confidence in divine protection is wiped away and now his seeing a group of merciless cannibals is the same as waking up from a never ending dream. Once his fear overcomes his faith, reality shows its innermost fangs. Cannibals will discover him and devour him, feasting with the flesh of a Christian, being this one of the most horrid experiences Crusoe has ever imagined. Now he is the God, now he will kill them in the name of God, which should remind us of the Crusaders who relied on faith to label their slaughter as righteous. Remorse invades Crusoe's mind when he is devising his plan to kill the cannibals:
[...] what authority or call I had to pretend to be judge and executioner upon these men as criminals, whom Heaven had thought fit for so many ages to suffer unpunished to go on, and to be, the executioners of His judgements upon one another; also, how far these people were offenders against me, and what right I had to engage in the quarrel of that blood which they shed promiscously one upon another. I debated this very often with myself thus; -How do I know what God Himself judges in this particular case? It is certain these people do not commit this as a crime, it is not against their own consciences reproving, or their light reaproching them. They do not know it to be an offence, and then commit it in defiance of divine justice, as we do in almost all the sins we commit. They think it no more a Crime to kill a Captive taken in War, than we do to kill an Ox; nor to eat human Flesh, than we do to eat Mutton.
It is therefore by his own musing that Crusoe, the righteous Christian under God's blessing, reaches a conclusion far beyond Christian justice: that Cannibals are not sinners at all, that the one who kills today cannot blame the other who kills tomorrow. Is there sin, God's surveillance, anything related to repentance? No, only nature's atavistic drive... To survive.
Quotes taken from Collins Classics 2010 edition, pages 133 and 146.
Quotes taken from Collins Classics 2010 edition, pages 133 and 146.
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