In a period as actually or potentially unstable as the post-Reformation era, it would probably be a serious (albeit common enough) mistake to speak of religious traditions as though they were stable and unproblematic features of the religious, cultural, and political scene. Rather we should think of the period as one in which various traditions were under construction and reconstruction, as a number of different groups and factions sought both to accommodate themselves to and to shape the course of events. On both sides of what by the latter part of the sixteenth century had become the confessional divide between Catholics and Protestants, the issue was how to explain the past and exploit the present. The resulting processes of tradition building were dialogic and even dialectical in nature, as each group and subgroup reacted to and played off the claims and counterclaims of others. The result was a complex series of dialogues and exchanges not only between Protestants and Catholics, but also between various subgroups or factions located within the two great confessional coalitions or syntheses. It is a situation that positively demands a chronologically organized, diachronic recounting, as well as a rather more static, synchronic, and analytic approach.

Let us start with the group whose relationship to tradition ought to have been the least problematic – the Catholics. Theirs, after all, was the “old religion,” and yet there has long been a debate among historians of English Catholicism about the extent to which the English Catholic community that emerged over the course of Queen Elizabeth’s reign represented continuity or change.

Plotinus is generally acknowledged to be, after Plato and Aristotle, the dominant figure in the entire history of ancient Greek philosophy. Beginning in the eighteenth century, German historians of philosophy gave Plotinus and his successors the pejorative label ‘Neoplatonists’. With this label ‘Neo’ they explicitly intended to indicate a decline in the rational purity of Platonic thought. Plotinus, however, in no way regarded himself as an innovator. He consistently maintained that he was explicating and defending the philosophical view that we know as ‘Platonism’ and that he believed was found primarily, though not exclusively, in the dialogues of Plato. Typical of all Plato’s disciples, Plotinus welcomed insight into the nature of Platonism from the testimony of Plato’s immediate disciples – especially Aristotle – and from what we can only suppose was the continuous oral tradition beginning within the Old Academy and leading up to Plotinus himself. At least part of the appearance of innovation arises from Plotinus identifying as authentically part of Platonism what he took to be necessary implications of claims made explicitly in the dialogues. In addition, Plotinus as well as his successors, taking Aristotle to be an Academic – albeit at times a dissident one – were content to articulate Platonic claims in Aristotelian language. We shall find throughout this book that Aristotelian terminology and arguments are regularly used by self-declared disciples of Plato to express the Platonic world view.

This chapter will not be strictly chronological and teleological. It is not an attempt to begin at a “beginning” and indicate a “development” to an ever-shifting present. It utilizes the concept of the “discursive formation,” where these formations were created within the political, social, and material conditions in South Africa. These broadly historical formations, identified by the distribution of “statements” within discourses, from approximately the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, can be identified as follows: Europe meets Africa; the indigenization of language; colonization; literature as discourse; the phenomenon of a “minor literature”; modernism and postmodernism.

Europe meets Africa

The creation of a written literature in South Africa – literature as a nineteenth-century European construct – does not begin with the canonical “literary” text. It will take its representations from the navigation texts and travel journals of those who documented the first meetings and confrontations in the contact zone between the indigene, the Portuguese and Dutch seamen and explorers. The travel discourses of the first Portuguese and Dutch navigators who sailed around the southernmost point of Africa, Bartolomeu Dias (1487–88), Vasco da Gama (1497–99), and Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1579–92) (see Axelson 1988: 1–8; Itinerario Voyage 1934), which record what seems to be the first significant impressions of the people and landscape of southern Africa, have to be read not only for their content as texts describing what they saw and experienced. They are also representations in language, limited as instruments of representation; but also powerful as textual creations constructing images of the other people as wild, barbaric, dirty, stupid, and untrustworthy.

Pleading the demands of “urgent war work,” the U.S. Bureau of the Census waited until 1919 to publish its two-volume compendium of data collected during the war from 202 religious denominations, over 150,000 ministers, 227,487 individual congregations, and just fewer than 42 million members. The report aspired to provide a useful snapshot of the nation's religious institutions as of 1916. The bureau boasted a 97 percent response rate while admitting it had been constrained by an incomplete list of churches. Limiting its survey to “organizations for religious worship,” the bureau ignored such bodies as the YMCA, the American Bible Society, and even the Jehovah's Witnesses, whose followers shunned the institutional church. It also had to contend with “a considerable number of churches [that] protested against the inquiries, claiming that the United States government had no constitutional authority to make any investigation in regard to religious matters, and one denomination [that] refused to furnish any figures, whatever” – bold acts of defiance in a mass democracy mobilized for total warfare and demanding an unprecedented degree of national unity.

Even a cursory glance at this incomplete profile of America's religious bodies suggests some of the challenges facing historians grappling with the scope, magnitude, and complexity of the religious experience in the United States during the Great War of 1914 to 1918. Expand that task to include North America as a whole, and discerning patterns and offering generalizations seems impossible.

The present work is a successor to The Cambridge History of Late Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (CHLGEMP) which appeared in 1967 under the editorship of A. H. Armstrong. Since the publication of that work, an enormous amount of fundamental philological and historical scholarship pertaining to the philosophical works of late antiquity has appeared. New critical editions, commentaries and translations of important philosophical texts have made this vast complex of material more accessible to historians, who in turn have made considerable advances in the understanding of the last phase of ancient philosophy. Although this more than forty years of labour seems justification enough for a new survey of the period, it should not be supposed that all or even most of the assessments made in the earlier work have been summarily invalidated. Hence, the sense in which the present work is a ‘successor’ to the earlier work does not indicate that it is a replacement. Students of this period will no doubt continue to profit from consulting the earlier work, which deserves to be recognized as groundbreaking.

It will be useful to point out how The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity (CHPLA) differs in some obvious ways from its worthy predecessor. First, the reader will notice that the subtle change in title presumes that much of what was once labelled – no doubt with a certain amount of diffidence – ‘early medieval’ is now more properly brought within the ambit of ancient philosophy. The reasons for this will be discussed below in this introduction and in various places throughout the volume. Here, it may simply be noted that the new title indicates a vigorous recognition of the extension of the canon of ancient philosophy far beyond the all-too-narrow confines of the fourth century bce.

The beginnings of written literatures among the indigenous peoples of southern Africa are rooted in the nineteenth century, a period of intensive and extensive missionary activity in that region. As the word made visible, writing was ushered in by translations of Bible tracts, followed at a slower but steady pace, by the Bible and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The writer most likely to be published was one who advocated the abandonment of indigenous customs and cultures and the acceptance of their rivals from the west. A typical and much quoted example is that of Thomas Mofolo’s Moeti oa Bochabela (Sesotho, 1907) (Traveller of the East), which described the premissionary Lesotho as a place steeped in darkness in which “people ate each other like the animals of the veld,” and was accepted with great enthusiasm by the Paris Evangelical Mission Society, while Chaka (Sesotho, 1925), a much superior work artistically, was kept from publication for a long time by the same missionary group because they did not like its message. Typically, in Moeti oa Bochabela, Mofolo created a protagonist, Fekisi, who rejects his people and their customs, and undertakes a journey similar to that of Christian in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Fekisi’s “escape” from his culture is replayed over and over as African-language writers simulate Bunyan’s hero, especially in the early missionary period.

With the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492 in his quest for the Indies and the subsequent extermination of the native population of this region, the definition of the region’s identity became an acute and abiding issue. The question of definition became further aggravated by the peculiar nature of the settlement of the Caribbean. Because of the need for repopulation of the islands of the Caribbean archipelago, plantation slavery and later schemes of indentureship left in their wake diverse groups of people who were cut off from their communities of origin. Out of the need for cheap labor to work the plantations, new and undefined cultural and social entities were produced. This phenomenon of ethnic and cultural heterogeneity was further intensified by prolonged periods of colonization. Caribbean societies are some of the oldest colonies in the west and cannot be accounted for without reference to the powerful shaping forces of colonialism. Nevertheless, because of their unusual hybrid genesis, they could neither be seen as “western” or an extension of Europe nor could they be considered “native,” that is distinctly “other.”

These new social and ethnic realities remained an oddity in western scholarship or simply emerged in terms of images of savage otherness: problematic, impure, and unpredictable creations of the ongoing process of historical change and world trade. They were initially relegated by early commentators to a kind of prehistoric timelessness that may have received its most notorious manifestation in the racial theorizing of Gobineau between 1835 and 1853.

In the Epistle to the Colossians, 2.8, Saint Paul warns the faithful against those who would seek to corrupt them through ‘philosophy and vain deceit’. Almost all seventeenth-century philosophers accepted Paul's words as authoritative, but there was little agreement about how they should be understood. Indeed, the history of the relation between philosophy and theology in the period might be written in terms of contrasting responses to this one text. For many thinkers, the message was clear: Paul wished to warn Christians against Aristotle and his legacy, but he did not mean to impose a total ban on the use of philosophical arguments. On the contrary, when purged of scholasticism, philosophy had a major role to play in the service of Christian theology. Other thinkers drew a more radical moral from the same passage in favour of ‘revealed’ as opposed to ‘natural’ theology. They saw Paul's words as an indication that Christian theology must be purged of the whole taint of Greek influences; indeed, the Pauline text became a rallying-point for those who were hostile to the very pursuit of natural theology, the appeal to natural reason in support of theological conclusions. Yet, at a deeper level, conservatives and radicals were often engaged in a common enterprise; they both sought to find a way in which theology and the ‘New Philosophy’ could co-exist.

If the overthrow of scholasticism made the project of reconciling philosophy and theology a major concern for most thinkers in the period, it is tempting to suppose that theology acted simply as a dead-weight, hampering the free development of philosophical thought. Yet that would be a mistake. It has been argued with respect to an earlier age that the Judeo-Christian tradition helped to fertilise philosophy by suggesting new problems and points of view.

“Popular” is one of the most elusive concepts to define within the context of African studies. An attempt to understand this aspect of African culture should begin with a simple but generally over looked premise: that “popular” is a fugitive concept, because theoretically oriented critics have tended to use the term to designate whatever each one of them has wanted it to mean at a particular place or context, and time. Having to depend – far more than any other expression in the scholarly discourse in the field – on the caprices, the whims, convenience, and moods of its users for its continuing circulation, the very malleability of the word has not only allowed “popular” to serve a variety of purposes but it has made it to be a phrase without a clear meaning.

The consequences of scholars’ inability to settle for any fixed definitions of “popular” are real, although continually disregarded. Not being able to delimit the contours of the popular may have provided unlimited room for those attempting to write theoretical essays about the field, but it has also led to methodological uncertainty and instability as well as ideological confusion. There has been a tendency for each aspiring theorist, viewing an aspect of this heterogeneous body of material from his or her own limited standpoint, to believe and to argue strongly that the part seen, the element encountered and seized upon by the individual scholar, is all there is to see. And so, as each scholar has been mistaking a part for the whole, what we have come face to face with in studies of the popular cultural expression in Africa is a situation that calls attention to itself as a crisis in the modes of investigation.

In the absence of significant archival materials, it is difficult to reconstruct the exact nature of precolonial sub-Saharan African religions. Current understandings about early African religious practices are based on accounts written by missionaries during the colonial period and date primarily from the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, ethnographic research can help contemporary scholars envision the religious traditions that existed prior to European contact. Indeed, the cosmogonic structures and general praxis found in the colonial and postcolonial eras emerge from a preexisting polytheistic worldview that had been heavily influenced by newer monotheistic traditions. This essay seeks to outline the nature and structures common to many African belief systems prior to 1800. Surprisingly, long before the transatlantic slave trade, these belief systems contained elements not only of traditional African religions, but of Islam and Christianity as well.

An inquiry into African religions requires an understanding of the African contexts in which these religions developed. Human species have walked the continent for at least two million years. Archeological finds since the early twentieth century verify the existence of hominids in Africa during this period. Thus Africa, we understand, was the human beings' initial home. As Homo sapiens migrated, new ethnic groups and cultures emerged. The San and Khoi Khoi, among the earliest groups, inhabited the Kalahari Desert, a thirstland stretching across Namibia and Botswana that sustains water-retaining vegetation such as the tsamma melon and the gemsbok cucumber.

THE HEIRS OF THEODOSIUS I: CONSTANTINOPLE VERSUS RAVENNA

In the fall of 394, as his entourage – victorious after fighting along Istria’s Frigidus River – moved steadily toward Milan, the southwestern imperial capital, Theodosius I (378–95) could have been excused for thinking that heaven had amply rewarded his piety. His sons had outlived the heirs of Valentinian I (364–75), so his family alone held claim to the throne. He had successfully put down not one but two usurpers, Magnus Maximus in the 380s and most recently Eugenius at the Frigidus River. And the emperor’s recent edicts nourishing the now officially orthodox Nicene form of Christianity aimed to stifle, if not extinguish, all other forms of religious expression save Judaism, which was still tolerated, despite events in Callinicum (CTh. 16.1.2; 16.10.10–12). Certainly, Augustine saw the entire history of the Christian message as culminating triumphantly in this period (Comm. in Psal. 6.10–12). Nevertheless, in the time he took to travel between the battleground and the capital city, Theodosius, now in his late forties, became gravely ill. He sent for his son Honorius, residing in Constantinople with his older brother, Arcadius, ruling as eastern Augustus in his late teens under the watchful eye of his praetorian prefect. The nine-year-old arrived, and Theodosius appointed as his guardian Stilicho, his magister utriusque militiae (Zos. 4.59). By 17 January 395 the emperor was dead.

The fundamental methodological controversy of the eighteenth century also affected the philosophical treatment of political problems, and two major currents, one rationalist and one empiricist, may be distinguished in the many-sided political philosophy of the period. Each of these traditions is of course considerably heterogeneous in itself and includes quite different thinkers who are, however, connected by characteristic family resemblances so that it is permissible to assign them to a single theoretical conception. Rationalist political philosophy is based either on a sort of natural law theory or on a conception of human rights and organises its justificatory arguments within the conceptual framework of contractarianism. Rousseau and Kant are the great protagonists of eighteenth-century contractual political philosophy, but it also includes the political philosophy of early and late German natural law theory, which has to be taken into account as an exceedingly interesting variant of modern contractarianism. Empiricist political philosophy, on the other hand, rejects both the justificatory constructs of the natural state and the normative presuppositions of natural law and human rights theories. Its basic arguments are founded on human interests and needs, on history, on prudence, and on the most profitable development of society. Elements of an empiricist political philosophy may be found in Montesquieu, the father of the modern theory of the separation of powers. The centre of empiricist political philosophy, however, is in Britain; its first great representative was Bernard Mandeville but Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, the inventor of the utilitarian formula of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, also belong to this tradition.

During the seventeenth century the major cognitive faculties - sense, imagination, memory, and understanding (or intellect) - became the focus of argument in metaphysics and epistemology to an extent not seen before. The theory of the intellect, long an important auxiliary to metaphysics, moved to the centre of metaphysical dispute, especially concerning the scope and powers of the intellect and the existence of a ‘pure’ intellect. Rationalist metaphysicians such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Malebranche claimed that intellectual knowledge, gained independently of the senses, provides the framework for constructing a new theory of nature. Other writers, including Hobbes and Gassendi, denied the existence of a distinct intellectual faculty, and so challenged the metaphysicians’ abilities to perceive the essences of substances directly. The theory of the senses, which had long been a part of philosophical discussion, took on a new urgency, for adherents of the new corpuscularian philosophy needed to replace the dominant Aristotelian theory of real sensory qualities and sensible species. The revival of scepticism and a renewed interest in method also brought the faculties into prominence, for sceptical challenges typically were directed towards the faculties of sense and understanding, and the theory of method was conceived as providing instructions for the proper use of one’s cognitive equipment.