In the fourth century ce we can begin to see the tide shifting in favour of Christianity over paganism. The murder of Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon of Alexandria, in 415, is emblematic of the ominous turn from mere intellectual controversy to political power struggles begun a century earlier. Prior to the tipping point that was Constantine’s conversion around 312, Alexandria flourished as a polyglot and multicultural intellectual centre of the Mediterranean world. We have considerable evidence of Christians and non-Christians studying together under some of the famous philosophers of the time. Probably in early Alexandria even more than in Rome, there were genuine encounters of philosophy and religion. The writings of Philo and Clement are only two early examples of these. Lamentably, there is a dearth of extant philosophical material from Alexandria in our period, though we have accounts of an extremely active academic community. With regard to the natural and mathematical sciences, however, there is a substantial amount of material, focused principally on development of the scientific heritage of Ptolemy. Here we see, for example, in the practice of astrology a focal point for the confluence of philosophy, religion and science. The enduring theme of providence and fate, too, will be a battleground for opposing world views. It is natural to see in the Christian responses to the Hellenic views on these matters the lineaments of Biblical theology.

The attempt to understand morality in the legalistic terms of a natural law is ancient but is now mostly associated with the formulation given it by Thomas Aquinas in the late thirteenth century. Earlier natural law is commonly seen as leading up to Aquinas’s paradigmatic version, whereas later natural law is understood as deriving from it. This approach has resulted in long-standing disputes about the status of Protestant natural law vis-à-vis Thomism, disputes generally centring on the question of the originality of Hugo Grotius, commonly considered ‘the father of modern natural law’. It is easy to understand why there should be such disagreements. The sources reveal an extraordinary degree of continuity between scholastic – and not only Thomistic – natural law and the natural law doctrines which dominated Protestant Europe during the seventeenth century and much of the eighteenth. Yet it seemed to moral philosophers of these centuries, and especially to the modern natural lawyers themselves, that something decisively new happened with Grotius. Protestant natural law was seen as a distinct school of moral philosophy until the history of philosophy was redrawn by Kant and by others working in the light of his philosophy.

The resolution of these disputes has in some measure been frustrated by the predominant concentration on the rôle of Grotius. While conveying to Protestant Europe large parts of the natural law material used by the great scholastic thinkers, especially those of sixteenth-century Spain, Grotius’s underlying theory contained elements which his successors considered dangerous. In their commentaries on Grotius’s text and histories of their discipline, later natural lawyers glossed over or repudiated these elements and ascribed Grotius’s novelty to ideas which were in fact not at all new to him but which were important to them.

LIFE

Ammonius the son of Hermeias (c. 435/45–517/26) was the most important – at times, perhaps, the only important – pagan teacher of pagan philosophy in Alexandria from the late fifth into the early sixth century. He numbered among his students Asclepius of Tralles, John Philoponus, Simplicius and probably Olympiodorus, all known at least in part for their commentaries on Aristotle, and the first two of whom published commentaries said to be ‘from the voice’ or ‘from the lectures’ of Ammonius, while Olympiodorus considered himself, and perhaps was also officially, Ammonius’ successor in the Alexandrian chair of philosophy. In the concrete, personal sense, at least, Ammonius was the founder of an ‘Alexandrian’ school of Aristotelian interpretation.

Whether and in what sense Ammonius also made significant alterations in the philosophical system he inherited from his own teacher Proclus in Athens, and thereby originated an Alexandrian variant of late Platonism, has been widely debated. This question, forcefully raised by K. Praechter in 1910, hangs closely together with the conditions of Ammonius’ life and teaching in Alexandria.

After the murder of Hypatia by a mob of Alexandrian Christians in 415, the most authoritative professor of philosophy in Alexandria was Hierocles. But Athens’ older philosophical school headed by Hierocles’ teacher Plutarch and Plutarch’s young Alexandrian pupil Syrianus was apparently more attractive for ambitious Alexandrians. Accordingly, Hermeias, among others, left his native Alexandria for Athens to study with Syrianus, who was head of the school there from 429 until 436.

In the academic study of religion, “new religious movements” has a specialized but not entirely specific meaning. Rather than encompassing all new religious entities, the term typically targets an assortment of groups that used to be labeled “sects,” or more disparagingly “cults.” Less pejorative terms have also been employed: “alternative” or “nonconventional” religions. If there is no universally agreed-upon nomenclature, the taxonomy of characteristics that constitutes the category has been even more diverse. Powerful leaders and uncritical followers, exclusivism and secrecy, extrabiblical revelation, and un-Christian or unconventionally Christian beliefs and practices are just a few of the criteria that sometimes appear as classificatory keys. Such taxonomies, of course, are highly subjective and based on assumptions about religion and the study of religion that are far from universally embraced. What most categorizations share, however, is an interest in cultural difference and a focus on the more “exotic” manifestations of religious innovation. Thus groups classified as “new religious movements” are not just new, but are religions whose belief systems and behaviors are interpreted as exhibiting considerable divergence from the “mainstream.” Even narrowing in this manner the groups to be included leaves a cluster too large to be considered in a brief study, despite the fact that some, such as Christian Science, that arguably fit the focus are treated elsewhere in this volume. This essay examines the Shakers, Unitarians, Mormons, Millerites, Seventh-day Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses, important and representative new religious movements that prospered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The religious landscape of the 1790s was widely diverse. Religious groups fleeing persecution in Europe, African traditions that had survived the Middle Passage, a variety of Native American religious forms, religion brought to North American shores by persons seeking commercial success or otherwise aspiring to social and political achievement, and a rising tide of Enlightenment-derived criticism of religion made the 1790s a decade of contrasting religious styles, contested spaces, and sharply framed arguments. In the new nation, under the banner of religious freedom and separation of church and state, religion flourished in a multitude of cultural settings and in an abundance of practices, some formal, others informal. Debates about religious ideas were common, and experimentation with practices was in evidence everywhere. There sometimes was friction between religious groups. There also was a determination to overcome differences in making an American polis. Most importantly, religion in the United States at the end of the eighteenth century was complex and fluid, sometimes defined within traditional institutional structures and sometimes represented by detailed networks of occult religious ideas, arcane practices, magic, folk wisdom, and supernatural lore that was passed on from generation to generation outside the channels of ecclesiastical communications.

The religious lives of many Native Americans were in flux in 1790. The massive depopulation of indigenous peoples from disease and the practical consequences of the relentless expansion of Euro-American cultures into tribal territories diminished the capability of Native Americans to resist adaptation.

From the founding of the first diocese in the United States in Baltimore in 1789 with only a few thousand Catholics, the population of Catholics grew rapidly until in 1850 Catholics made up the largest denomination in the United States. By 1962, Americans had elected a Catholic, John F. Kennedy, president of the United States. The nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century proved to be a time of growth yet marginalization for American Catholics. Catholics came to the United States from Europe in large numbers, creating immigrant ethnic church communities all over the country. There were Irish, Italian, and French Catholics in the Northeast, German and Polish Catholics in the Midwest, and Mexican and Latin American Catholics in the Southeast, Southwest, and West. They had all come as immigrants, putting them on the bottom economic and social rung of society. Being Catholic made them double outsiders in a society dominated by Protestants who had founded the country.

On 6 November 1789, Pope Pius VI appointed John Carroll the first bishop in the United States and established the Diocese of Baltimore, Maryland. When Carroll took office, only one church served the entire region. According to reports sent to Rome in 1780, Maryland was home to sixteen thousand Catholics served by only nineteen priests. By 1790 the entire United States counted only forty thousand Catholics among its citizens, fewer than 1 percent of the population.

Off the southeast coast of the African continent and beneath the Equator lie a rather large number of islands that comprise the Comoros, Madagascar, the Mascarenes (Mauritius, Réunion, and Rodrigues), and the Seychelles. The Indian Ocean was created when the original continent of Gondwana split apart, giving birth to Africa, India, Australia, and Antarctica, around 140 million years ago. Geologically, these islands differ greatly. Whereas most of them are vestiges of the driftage from that original continent, others like Réunion and the Comoros are, on the other hand, the result of more recent volcanic eruptions. Their origins explain why these islands, which are relatively close to one another, reveal such great natural diversity, from the “Great Island” of Madagascar which is almost a continent itself (measuring 1,580 km from north to south and only 580 km at its greatest width for an area of 587,041 km2), to the numerous small coral islands of the Seychelles, to Mauritius with its flattened plains (2,100 km2), Réunion (2,512 km2) with the spectacular contours of its volcano and mountains, and Rodrigues (110 km2) which is but a mass of lava. There is nevertheless a similar tropical-variety “island climate” that along with the monsoon has historically allowed for movement between the islands.

LIFE AND WORK

Not much is known about Olympiodorus’ life apart from what we can derive from the surviving works. A student of Ammonius the son of Hermias, but probably not his direct successor, he was active in Alexandria in the sixth century. If Olympiodorus heard Ammonius lecture his year of birth can hardly have been later than 505. He was still lecturing in March/April 565, the date of the passing of a comet mentioned in the Commentary on the Meteorologica (52.31).

The commentators David and Elias are held to be the pupils of Olympiodorus, because their works display the formal peculiarities of Olympiodorus’ commentaries; in addition their texts reproduce entire passages from Olympiodorus; David occasionally mentions him by name. The names David and Elias suggest a Christian background. This would make Olympiodorus the last representative of the non-Christian Platonic tradition. It is, however, not so clear whether David and Elias were really Christians: their works do not betray a commitment to specifically Christian doctrines, even where one would have expected this, and their names could also be mere parts of a disguise that allowed them to continue practising philosophy in an intellectual environment that was no longer hospitable towards non-Christians.

EXTANT WORKS

Olympiodorus’ surviving commentaries are all apo phōnēs, i.e., lecture notes by students. We have commentaries on two works of Aristotle and three Platonic dialogues (the latter are all transmitted through Marcianus gr. 196), more precisely commentaries on: Categories, Meteorologica, Alcibiades I (henceforth Alcibiades, considered genuine by the later Platonists), Gorgias, Phaedo (incomplete, the extant lectures are on Phaed. 61c–79e).

African performance traditions entered the orbit of European discourse – which, by virtue of language, supplies the operative terms “festival,” “ritual,” and “drama” – primarily as negative examples. As a result, the origins of that entrance were marked in the main by condemnation, inferiorization, and general disregard. It was asserted or implied that blacks either had no traditions of drama indigenous to them, or had traditions that, in comparison with Europe and Asia, were merely “proto-dramatic” or “quasi-dramatic,” cretinous forms in a state of developmental arrest in terms of style, esthetic canons, formalization of technique, and mode of historical transmission. Wherever “properly dramatic” traditions were found, they were marked off as but products of the African encounter with Europe – a way of claiming that the “properly dramatic” traditions are nothing less than derivatives of western forms and traditions (Jeyifo 1990: 242–43). There is a larger context, of course, to these deeply ethnocentric claims. They were part and parcel of the implacable inferiorization of African corporeality and cultural forms that matured in Europe in the eighteenth century and remains a major constituent of Eurocentrism. In the operations of the discourse, the inferiorization of a cultural practice becomes a shorthand to the inferiorization of the bearers of that culture and practice.

In the early 1960s a young man from a self-described “Yiddishist-left-wing” Canadian family arrived in the United States to begin doctoral studies in literature at the Claremont Graduate School. Named in honor of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Massachusetts anarchists whose execution had caused an international uproar in 1927, that student, Sacvan Bercovitch, would go on to become a distinguished scholar of American literature and religion.

What astonished this young Canadian when he landed in the United States was the degree to which late-twentieth-century American culture kept casting its experience in a seventeenth-century framework. A debate “full of rage and faith” was going on about the nation's destiny, Bercovitch recalls, with conservatives busy ferreting out un-American attitudes and radicals righteously recalling a wayward nation “to its sacred mission.” In that era of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, the plea of the ancient Psalmist met the promise of the New World: “When is our errand to be fulfilled? How long, O Lord, how long?” The Christian cries coming from all sides of the political debate made Bercovitch feel like he was “Sancho Panza in a land of Don Quixotes.” The American dream was a “patent fiction,” but nevertheless it involved “an entire hermeneutic system.” Unlike any other modern nation, “America was a venture in exegesis. You were supposed to discover it as a believer unveils scripture.”

In the late fifth or early sixth century, a Christian writer, most likely a monk, probably from the Syrian region of the eastern Roman Empire, composed a body of works in which the philosophy of Plotinus, Proclus and other thinkers in the Platonic tradition is united with Christian belief. The works appeared under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, and in them the author apparently identifies himself as this first-century figure, who is named in the Acts of the Apostles as an Athenian converted to Christianity after hearing St Paul’s sermon on ‘the unknown God’ (Acts 17.34) and who is said to have become the first bishop of Athens. The author is now generally referred to as ‘Pseudo-Dionysius’, or, in order to avoid the pejorative connotations of the prefix ‘pseudo-’, simply as ‘Dionysius’ or ‘Denys’. Attempts have been made to discover his true identity, but none has received general acceptance, and in the absence of any solid evidence such efforts necessarily remain merely speculative and inconclusive. What seems clear, however, is that the author’s concealment of his own name is related to the philosophical content of his works. Like the God of whom he writes, the author remains nameless, inaccessible, hidden behind his works and knowable only as he is manifest in them. His choice of pseudonym, moreover, links him both with the idea of ‘the unknown God’ and with the integration between Greek philosophy and Christianity which is at play in Paul’s sermon.

During the eight decades spanning the end of the U.S. Civil War and the conclusion of World War II, the United States underwent a profound transformation. The nation, broken in 1865, emerged in 1945 as the most powerful country in the world. One of the driving forces of change was industrial development, which began in earnest in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Capital investments in new technologies and expanding national and international markets throughout the century enabled the processing of agricultural commodities and mineral resources as well as the manufacturing of consumer goods. From a land dominated by rural and small-town life, the United States became an urban and industrial giant by the first decades of the twentieth century.

The radical shifts that occurred in these eight decades took a heavy toll on social relations, cultural values, and Americans' everyday lives. The nature and condition of labor required in an industrial capitalist economy differed significantly from that of the artisanal shop, agricultural work, and small-scale factories that defined antebellum America. Individual craftsmanship and artisanal skills gradually gave ground to machine production and assembly lines. Labor in an industrial economy became a cost of production that employers and investors wanted to keep as low as possible. Workers' strikes against their employers in the 1870s and 1880s typically revolved around the sudden reduction of wages or changes in the condition of work.

Most seventeenth-century thinkers regarded mind and body as distinct entities, though a few philosophers, such as Hobbes, did embrace versions of radical materialism. But dualism, as this chapter shows, inherently presents certain fundamental problems. We shall first discuss two distinct but closely related issues: (1) the nature of the ‘union’ between mind and body in a given human individual and (2) the question of whether mind and body can and do interact causally – and, if not, what may truly be said about the relation between a given state of mind (such as a pain or an intention) and a state of body (such as a pinprick or arm movement) normally taken to be its cause or effect. Descartes's position on these two problems is of particular interest in that he established the framework of argument – for both followers and opponents – throughout the seventeenth century. Then in Section II we shall turn to later dualists' responses. Finally, in Section III we shall address important questions for dualism connected with the new mechanist world-view. The most crucial from this perspective is perhaps the following: What is the relation between human volitions, conceived as irreducibly non-physical states, and the universal laws of motion which lie at the heart of the new science? If volitions are genuinely effective, must they result in unacceptable disruption of the uniform working of such laws?

Questions of boundary-definition and entitlement to the term “African” have been a feature of literary scholarship and the criticism it has produced on the continent since at least the 1960s. Those questions have not been superseded, as is evident from the continued currency in certain quarters of the term “Europhone” to identify imaginative literature by Africans in English, French, or Portuguese. But if such questions are characteristic of the field of African literary scholarship as a whole, they acquire a different kind of complexity in the South African context, with its peculiar history of far-reaching colonial settlement, industrialization, and cross cultural encounter. Part of that complexity can be discerned in the emergence of strains of African nationalism that have developed out of the repudiation of the prescriptive forms of ethnic identity inscribed in apartheid, prompting many writers of African origin to turn to English as the language most appropriate to their context and aspirations. To speak of African writing in English in South Africa, therefore, is to confront a situation for which prior debates in literary historiography on the continent provide little by way of an appropriate framework within which to begin distinguishing the various lines of development.

There is also the unsurprising fact that in South Africa itself there has been a lively debate over the literary historiography of the region, a debate conducted with only passing reference to the question of the place of South or southern African literature within the context of the literary production of the continent as a whole. The main question in contention is the desirability or otherwise of an integrated, indeed properly national literary history, in which the histories not only of black and white writing in the colonial or colonial-derived languages (English and Afrikaans), but also of writing in the indigenous languages – nine of which are now enshrined in the postapartheid constitution as official languages – might achieve collective recognition.

In 1682, seventy-five years after its first permanent settlement was planted at Jamestown, England's empire on the North American mainland consisted of thirteen colonies with some 160,000 inhabitants. The vast majority of that population lived in New England and the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland. Carolina was barely ten years old, the territory of New Jersey was being split by its investors into two parts, and William Penn was newly arrived to found Philadelphia. Great changes in rule and demography were in the offing, but at the moment the colonies were more English and less entrammeled by English rule than they would ever be again. The slave-labor system and the African American population were just beginning their course of rapid growth. Gender ratios in the Chesapeake were only then coming into close enough balance to make the majority of the white population there native-born for the first time, opening the prospect of sustained institutional development. Only in New England were institutions old enough to be threatened – in some people's perception – with the prospect of atrophy. All this is to say that the study of religion in the English colonies over the first eighty years of the seventeenth century is in most instances a study in small numbers, embattled beginnings, and fitful development – but also in bold experimentation and what proved to be some definitive shaping of the future.

Africa is everywhere inscribed. From rocks to masks, sculptures, pyramids, and manuscripts one needs but a stubborn and narrow-minded commitment to alphabetic writing to deny that the continent has left graphic marks of its history everywhere. Graphic representation is indeed present, but is it writing? One of the best books on the topic, written from an Asian angle, Visible Speech, subtitled “The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems,” by John De Francis, will be my guide on what can be called the “African chapter in the history of writing” (see Figure 9.1). Speech communities always generate material means to keep and retrieve information – this is not always writing. I will then reflect on graphic representation of sounds and the competition generated between several systems of graphic representation, before considering the contribution of a new kind of artist, the alphabet inventor, who belongs to the history of art, and not to the history of literature.

De Francis makes two useful distinctions that have a practical bearing on the analysis of writing in Africa. He divides students of graphic systems into two camps, the inclusivists and exclusivists, using as a discriminating criterion their definition of writing:

INTRODUCTION TO PART I

In this section, we aim to provide a survey of philosophy as it was generally understood and practised around 200 ce. One may imagine the array of material confronting an advanced student of philosophy in, say, Rome or Alexandria at this time. We assume that the student would already be acquainted with what were then thought to be the major works of the founders of the great philosophical schools of antiquity – Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus and Zeno. In any case, he or she would have available various doxographical accounts of the ancient practitioners of philosophy. With this acquaintance must have come a considerable degree of perplexity, not the least owing to the apparent conflicts among the conclusions of these giants and the obscurity of many of their writings. Our student, however, would soon discover that these conflicts and obscurities had in fact been the subject of intense philosophical reflection and commentary for the intervening 500 years since the early days of the philosophical schools. Depending on the master whom the student chose to follow, he or she would encounter a complex tradition of defensive explication of one school’s positions against those of opponents. The student would also encounter various philosophical strategies employed to demonstrate that philosophical positions that seemed to be at odds were in fact in harmony. This approach, which certainly antedates our starting point by at least 300 years, will eventually take on an increasing urgency in the minds of Greek philosophers when faced with the growing dominance of Christianity.