We do not even know what they called themselves. Certainly, they did not call themselves Anasazi. That is a name that the Athabaskan-speaking Navajo, who moved into their homeland and saw the monumental ruins of their settlements, gave to them. It is a term tinged with more than a hint of hostility. It is often translated “ancient strangers,” but it is more precisely rendered “ancient enemies” or “enemy ancestors” (annasázi, from anna' = enemy/stranger, and bizází = ancient/ancestor). They were the ancestors of the modern-day Pueblos. Their descendants most often call them simply “the ancient ones.” The Hopi, one of the tribal nations descended from them, term them hisatinom, “the ones who came before.” Understandably, given the etymology of the term “Anasazi,” contemporary Pueblos consider the term offensive. Today it is considered more precise and correct to refer to them as “Ancestral Puebloans” or “Ancient Puebloans.”

Despite the pejorative connotations of their most familiar appellation, no indigenous people in the Americas has been more romanticized than the “Anasazi.” Given this and the fact that they disappeared before the coming of Europeans to North America, is it possible to say anything about their religious beliefs and practices? The answer is a definite (but cautious) “Yes.”

There are thousands of years of Native American habitation in the Americas prior to European contact that can only be known in two ways: archaeology and oral tradition. For groups like the Ancestral Puebloans, there is only archaeology and the oral tradition of others. Archaeology is excellent at helping us discover the material world. It can tell us what a given people’s houses were like, what they ate, their level of health, and many other tangible things.

The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy was planned to provide a comprehensive overview of European philosophy in the seventeenth century in a series of contributions, each written by an appropriate specialist or group of specialists. As in the immediately previous volumes in the series, and in deliberate contrast to most histories of philosophy, the subject is treated by topic or theme, rather than chronologically or by individual. Since history does not come in neat bundles, our response to the boundary problems engendered by such a project has been deliberately flexible. First, we have allowed our subject-matter to overflow, with the oeuvres of individuals and with particular debates, into the adjacent scenturies. Contributors have also been encouraged to explicate the meaning and wider significance of seventeenth-century argument by reference to antecedent or, if it seemed appropriate, consequent theory. The former has often meant reference both to mediaeval and Renaissance ideas and to the antiquity directly studied and avidly plundered even by some of the reputedly most ‘modern’ philosophers. The geographical scope of the volume is admittedly more restricted, although we are pleased to be able to include one chapter on the intense interest of some European philosophers in Chinese culture and thought.

Second, we have allowed some compromise between what the term ‘philosophy’ meant then and what it means now. In the seventeenth century it was unremarkable if the same 'philosophers' who wrote on metaphysics, logic, ethics, and political theory, on the existence of God, or on the varieties of human knowledge and belief also made contributions to mathematics, offered an account of the laws of motion, peered through microscopes or telescopes, recorded the weather, conducted chemical experiments, practised medicine, invented machines, debated the nature of madness, or argued about church government, religious toleration, and the identity and interpretation of divine revelation.

Religion played only a supporting role in the American Revolution. As the new republic's founding documents attest, secular matters were paramount. The Declaration of Independence sets forth a rationale for revolution that closely follows John Locke's liberal conception of the relationship between the governed and the government, and it includes a long list of grievances against George III for his alleged violation of the colonists' constitutional rights. The offenses listed relate to such issues as taxation, representation, standing armies, and markets; they do not include religious issues.

Similarly, the U.S. Constitution is a secular document with scant mention of religion. Records of the Federal Convention that deliberated in Philadelphia for four months in 1787 include only a smattering of religious language. The name of Jesus or Christ does not appear at all, and the framers invoked the name of God just twelve times. Even then several of the phrases were such popular expressions as “Good God, Sir …” and “God knows how many more …” rather than reverent invocations of the deity's name. The Constitution itself contains only one reference to religion and that a negative one: “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” The Constitution granted no power whatever to Congress pertaining to religion. Although applied only to the federal government, the removal of religion from government jurisdiction soon led the states to adopt similar measures.

Natural or rational theology, as opposed to revealed theology, is concerned with the knowledge of God which can be attained by human reason without the help of revelation. Traditionally, a central part of natural theology is devoted to the arguments for the existence of God, that is, to rational demonstration of the existence of God through the light of unaided natural reason. Not surprisingly, therefore, philosophical arguments for the existence of God (intended as first cause or first principle) pre-date Christianity. Yet they became an integral part of traditional Christian theology from the patristic period onward as preamble to the specifically Christian revelation by providing arguments which are valid for every human being on purely rational grounds. To be sure, different thinkers held different and often opposite views regarding the way in which human reason can lead to God – notably whether human reason can prove the existence of God a priori (that is to say, according to scholastic terminology, from the cause to the effect or, according to modern terminology, independently of experience) or a posteriori (from the effect to the cause, or, in the modern sense, starting from experience). But despite these important differences, both camps agreed that unaided human reason could prove God’s existence. The outbreak of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century undermined this Christian consensus by raising a question preliminary to that of whether the way of human reason to God is a priori or a posteriori. Following in the footsteps of Martin Luther and Jean Calvin, Protestant theologians asked: is natural theology even possible? In other words, is a true knowledge of God available to human reason after the Fall and before revelation? More specifically, is it at all possible for unaided natural reason to prove the existence of God? This general question of principle gained new prominence and had to be addressed before entering the discussion of specific proofs of His existence.

In 1600 the population of Western Europe (that is, Europe West of the Elbe) was about 60 million; by 1750 it had become somewhat more than 75 million. So the continent which the philosophers of the seventeenth century inhabited had a population approximately the same as that of the islands of Britain and Ireland today; England, to pursue this parallel, had a population the same as that of the modern Republic of Ireland, about 4 million. The most populous country was France, with about 19 million inhabitants, though the states of Italy contained between them scarcely fewer people. The states of Germany held about 12 million; Spain, about 7 million; and the Netherlands (modern Holland and Belgium), about 3 million. The densest population was in the two great urbanised areas at each side of the continent, Italy and the Netherlands. They were also still the economic centres of Europe, though by the end of the century the growth of extra-European commerce had tilted the balance more towards the Atlantic and left Italy relatively worse off. The wealth of these two areas was matched by their cultural predominance: the history of the fine arts in early modern Europe could be told almost entirely in terms of the artists who worked in Italy and the Netherlands. This is less true of philosophy, but one is constantly made aware of the extent to which philosophers working outside these historic centres of European culture (other than in Paris) thought of themselves as somewhat provincial.

In Book IV of The Social Contract (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed a “civil religion” which, like the ancient pagan religions, would deepen and intensify republican patriotism, but without their superstitious adherence to polytheistic gods. Its dogmas would be few: “the existence of a mighty, intelligent, and beneficent Divinity”; an afterlife where the just would be rewarded and the wicked punished; and the sanctity of the constitution and laws of the republic.

America has had from its outset a civil religion of its own, but one far different from Rousseau's utilitarian concoction. America's God is not a distant “Divinity,” but a living God deeply involved in the story of a particular people. Even Thomas Jefferson, often called a deist, invoked this God in his second inaugural address in 1809. “I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life.”

Jefferson was working out of a narrative that originated more than a century and a half earlier in Puritan New England. The American colonies' main tradition in the eighteenth century was the covenantal Calvinism of the seventeenth. As historian Mark A. Noll writes, “Puritanism is the only colonial religious system that modern historians take seriously as a major religious influence on the Revolution.”

The work of Maximus the Confessor (580–662) presents the philosophical world view of the Greek-speaking Christian tradition in its most fully developed form. It is comprehensive both in the extent to which it draws upon earlier authors – including Clement of Alexandria, Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers, Nemesius of Emesa, Evagrius of Pontus, Cyril of Alexandria, and Pseudo-Dionysius, among others – and in its far-ranging scope. Pride of place among the influences on Maximus must undoubtedly go to Pseudo-Dionysius. Like the Areopagite, Maximus regards ‘good’ as the pre-eminent divine name, and he welcomes the Platonic description of the Good as ‘beyond being’ as appropriate to the Christian God. He is also like Pseudo-Dionysius in his vision of the cosmos as fundamentally theophanic, a manifestation of intelligible or spiritual reality in sensible form. However, Maximus is more explicit than Pseudo-Dionysius about the role of the divine will in creation, and he gives a more prominent role to the Incarnation as the central act by which the divine is made manifest. Accordingly, whereas Pseudo-Dionysius can be (and often has been) read as implicitly denying that God is a personal being, for Maximus the personal character of God is never in question.

Any attempt to situate Maximus within the history of philosophy must begin with some disclaimers. Maximus writes as a theologian rather than a philosopher, and many of his most interesting ideas are presented through elaborate allegorical interpretations of Scripture. To winnow out the philosophical elements, as we shall do here, can inevitably present only a partial picture of his thought.

The eighteenth century in British America witnessed the flowering of an evangelical movement, especially within, but not entirely limited to, the Protestant churches. The spiritual phenomenon flourished during the first half of the century in many parts of the eastern colonies in what has often been called the Great Awakening. Many people of the time were certainly aware of a more widespread quickening of the Spirit in the ministries of the churches along the Atlantic seaboard, but the term has become a moniker by which historians now treat the American developments as part of a broader transatlantic spiritual awakening during that period.

Historians have debated such epoch-naming as though such questioning itself was part of their vocation. Is “medieval” an appropriate denominator for a period, seen as a “middle age” between the grandeur of the Greco-Roman world and its renaissance centuries later? Is “renaissance” a fitting term for a multifaceted movement that is difficult to define and date? Is “reformation” a singular term that fits a series of movements with different goals in different places at different times? Is “enlightenment” a useful designation for a movement that manifests itself in so many ways? The didactic usefulness of such terminology provides constant grist for the careful historian's mill, and the debates over such terminology will be endless. So it is also with the topic of this essay, the so-called evangelical awakenings, especially in their American manifestation.

Can we know whether or not there is a material world? Before Descartes, this question was rarely asked. A few thinkers in antiquity were reported to have expressed sweeping doubts about the existence of things. For instance, Sextus Empiricus tells us that Gorgias of Leontini defended the threefold claim that nothing exists; that even if something existed, we could not understand it; and that even if we could understand it, we could not communicate that understanding to anyone else. Zeno of Elea is alleged, by Seneca, to have asserted that nothing exists. And Metrodorus of Chios, according to Cicero, thought we cannot know whether anything exists. But expressions of such world-annihilating doubt were rare, their interpretation is debatable, and they provoked no sustained debate about whether we can know that bodies exist. It was far more common for the ancient sceptics to argue that we cannot get beyond the appearances of bodies, to discover their true nature, than to raise doubts about their existence. Thus Sextus, in a well-known passage, said we must grant that honey appears sweet to us, but we cannot determine whether honey in itself is sweet; but Sextus did not suggest that, apart from the appearance, there may be no honey at all.

A few mediaeval thinkers do seem to have voiced doubts about the existence of the bodies our senses perceive. al-Ghazali, for example, held that we cannot be certain that, at death, we will not find this life to have been a dream and the things we seem to have perceived in it but ‘empty imaginings’. And Nicolaus of Autrecourt said that if it is granted that God can cause our sense perceptions, then we cannot be sure that bodies exist, for we cannot be sure that God Himself is not causing our perceptions.

The study of the African epic was born in denial. In the third volume (1940) of their classic Growth of Literature, H. Munro and N. Kershaw Chadwick, discussing the “distribution of literary types” across the world, conclude there is no “narrative poetry … at all in Biblical Hebrew or anywhere in Africa.” Assuming a difference between such poetry and “saga,” by which they mean a narrative form with an admixture of prose and verse, they conclude the latter is found in “several African languages” (1940: 706).

In his equally epochal book, Heroic Poetry (1952), C. M. Bowra also has difficulty in recognizing the existence of epic or “heroic” poetry in Africa. Adopting an evolutionist approach in his discussion of “the development of primitive narrative poetry” across nations, he concludes, on the one hand, that, in cultures like Africa, heroic poetry had not quite graduated from a tradition of predominantly panegyric forms to one of sustained heroic narratives, and, on the other, that such narratives of heroic pretensions as might be found on the continent were centered around figures who achieved their feats more by magic than by force of sheer physical might. Bowra’s language is particularly alarming: in discussing pieces of historical panegyric and lament songs from Uganda and “Abyssinia,” he observes that in spirit they are “close … to a heroic outlook” but that “the intellectual effort required” to advance such texts to the level of heroic poetry “seems to have been beyond their powers” (1952: 10–11)!

The folktale is the most important strand within the prose narrative complex in Africa. It is also the most widely studied. The distinctiveness of the folktale as a genre, however, is questionable due to its close textual affinities with other expressive genres such as myth, epic, dilemma tale, legend and proverb.

Even though local terminology often provides the best basis for resolving ambiguities in genre taxonomies (see Herskovits and Herskovits 1958), the folktale has sometimes posed a problem in Africa. In certain cultures, such as the Limba of Sierra Leone, the folktale and proverb do not have separate labels (Finnegan 1967: 28). Besides this, whenever the folktale has been cited in ongoing discourse for the purposes of persuasion, it has attracted the label “proverb” in certain cultures (see Yankah 1995: 88–93). The overlap between the proverb and tale should not be surprising, since they both convey moral lessons, and are mutually interactive in performance situations. Tales based on proverbs abound in Africa, and so do proverbs based on folktales. No doubt scholars who have compiled proverbs in Africa have often shown interest in the folktale (see Rattray 1916 and 1930; Dugaste 1975).

The question of the existence of God is central for the seventeenth century at a time when atheism is no longer just an individual standpoint but a philosophical school and a genuine system of thought. Standing behind the new atheism of the seventeenth century was a new approach to the question of the nature of God. The scholastics of earlier years had first asked an sit Deus, whether God exists, and then discussed at length His nature: quid sit. But in the seventeenth century, the traditional order was reversed, as Descartes explicitly declared: since one cannot seek to establish the existence of that which one does not know, before knowing whether God exists, it is necessary to define His identity. This change in perspective allowed the question of the existence of God to become a legitimate topic of atheist critiques concerning God's function in the new mathematical and mechanical universe of seventeenth-century philosophy. At this point, atheism ceased to be the easily dismissed rantings of the fool and became a real epistemological possibility. This break was crucial for metaphysics, and it is in this context that we must understand Descartes's preoccupation with proofs of the existence of God. The Cartesian discourse constituted a necessary reference for all later systematic examinations of the question, whether they were positively inspired by Descartes (Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibniz) or explicitly opposed him (Gassendi, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley).

THE CONDITIONS OF ATHEISM

How did scholars come to speak of ‘proofs’ of the existence of God outside the classical problematic concerning God? In 1581, in the treatise De la vérité de la religion chrétienne, the Protestant Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, a great apologist of Christianity, wonders whether proofs of God are really necessary. But in the end he reconciles himself to the task: 'Let us nonetheless dedicate this chapter, with the permission of all charitable men, to the wickedness of our century.'

CATEGORICAL PROPOSITIONS

Seventeenth-century logicians commonly adhered to the usual distinction between two operations of the mind: on the one hand, simple conceptions, through which things are apprehended that, as categorematic terms, are capable of becoming the subject and the predicate of a categorical proposition; on the other, acts of predication, by which the contents of simple apprehensions are combined into a propositional complex that is a suitable potential object of assent or dissent. Although at the propositional level acts of predication and judgement will often coincide, authors were aware that there are good reasons to distinguish merely apprehensive propositions from judicative propositions. The former are states of affairs that are presented to the mind without any commitment to truth or falsity, whereas the latter actually have judicative or assertive force. Notwithstanding the predominant tendency to stick to the traditional division into incomplex concepts and propositional complexes, there were also factors at work which made for blurring of that fundamental distinction. One of them was Descartes's use of the word idea for both the categorematic elements of a proposition and the proposition itself, as the object of judgement. Spinoza went even farther by explicitly declaring that at bottom a particular idea and a particular act of affirming or denying are one and the same thing. When, for example, the mind affirms that the sum of the three angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles, that affirmation cannot exist or be thought without the idea of a triangle.

LIFE AND WRITINGS OF DAMASCIUS (AROUND 462 – AFTER 538)

Biographical data

The chronology of the Platonic Academy in later ancient times is relatively well known, owing to the description Damascius furnishes in his Vita Isidori (a biography of Damascius’ beloved teacher, who was probably also one of his predecessors as the head of the Academy). Concerning Damascius’ own life, however, we do not have very detailed knowledge. One of the few facts that are known with certainty is that he originated from Damascus (as we know from Simplicius, In Phys. 624.38 Diels, and from Damascius’ own Vita Isidori 200 Photius). The only dates that are certain are circumstantial to Damascius’ life: the closing down of the pagan schools by the Emperor Justinian in 529, which led to Damascius’ exile; and the date of a stele, found in Homs (Emesa, Syria) in 1925 and dated 538 ce. It bears an epitaph that was known from another literary tradition (the Anthologia Palatina), to be attributed to Damascius:

Zosime, who has been a slave only in body, has now found freedom even from her body.

(Anthologia Palatina VII, 553)

The stele quotes the verse in the first person (‘I, Zosime …’), which suggests that this is the original version of the text, written for this occasion. If that is true, then it is more than probable that Damascius was living in Syria around 538 ce.

According to his own Vita Isidori, Damascius had been in Athens already before 485, when Proclus died. He had been studying rhetoric in Alexandria, and then came to Athens as a teacher of rhetoric.