Music offers an often-neglected lens on the beliefs and practices of American religion. The popular religious music of a majority of Americans for most of American history was Christian hymns. They are the most widely shared ritual texts, and their lyrics express formal and popular theology more effectively than any other body of literature. Rich in all biblical metaphors, Protestant hymns popularized the phraseology of the Authorized (King James) Version. They have influenced both the texts and musical style of American secular music, and some (like “Amazing Grace”) have found a place in popular culture. Hymn singing helps immigrants preserve identity, but also eases adaptation to new surroundings. The slave experience gave a particular character to African American religious music. Participants in homegrown American religions like Shakers, Latter-day Saints, or Christian Scientists, meanwhile, produced hymnals that set their own convictions and aspirations to music that mirrored the style of established Christian hymnody. Catholics brought vernacular hymns and the rich musical content associated with the Latin Mass. Jews carried along their own accumulated musical traditions to the United States. American-lived religion features religious music, and disagreements about what to sing and how to sing it have historically provoked some of religious communities' most bitter controversies.

Caribbean literature in French is the symbolic, imaginative expression of the peoples of the French-speaking regions of the Caribbean, including Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guyana, and their dependencies. Each of these areas has in common the legacy of French colonialism. However, differences of history and geography have meant that though fundamental commonalities inform literary production across this linguistic and geographic zone, marked divergences are to be noted in the relative development and importance of various literary styles and themes. The challenge, then, in presenting a brief survey of this literature, is to respect its diversity (of genres, styles, themes, and regional concerns) while offering the reader the means to conceive of this field of writing as a whole. Briefly put, do these texts have anything in common besides the contingency of their common recourse to the French language?

Any attempt to encompass francophone Caribbean literature in this fashion within the boundaries of a conceptual, explanatory apparatus is at once an imperative of critical thought and the staging of an impossible task. Not only is it inevitable that certain texts will remain excluded, others misrepresented. That a world will never fit within the limits of its symbolic representation, that any analysis, no matter how detailed and thorough, will always leave out a stubborn empirical remainder is not simply a vexing logical truism. It also has the advantage, in the context of francophone Caribbean literature, of presenting as a methodological dilemma a more general existential and epistemological impasse whose reappearances and transformations can be traced throughout Antillean history. This chapter will invite the reader to consider francophone Caribbean literature in light of the divisions and alienations characteristic of francophone Antillean experience, as well as their possible transformations and resolutions.

Modern African literature was produced in the crucible of colonialism. What this means, among other things, is that the men and women who founded the tradition of what we now call modern African writing, both in European and indigenous languages, were, without exception, products of the institutions that colonialism had introduced and developed in the continent, especially in the period beginning with the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and decolonization in the late 1950s and early 1960s. African literature had, of course, been produced outside the institutions of colonialism: the existence of oral literature in all African languages and precolonial writing in Arabic, Amharic, Swahili, and other African languages is ample evidence of a thriving literary tradition in precolonial Africa. But what is now considered to be the heart of literary scholarship on the continent could not have acquired its current identity or function if the traumatic encounter between Africa and Europe had not taken place. Not only were the founders of modern African literature colonial subjects, but colonialism was also to be the most important and enduring theme in their works. From the eighteenth century onwards, the colonial situation shaped what it meant to be an African writer, shaped the language of African writing, and overdetermined the culture of letters in Africa.

The roots of English-language literature in West Africa may be traced to the formation of various cultures in reaction to external contacts during successive overlapping historical periods. The literary traditions of the region have been shaped by these interlocking cultural histories, just as the cultural identities of the region are products of its many-layered history. These cultural strata have had such a strong influence, and writers borrow so freely across cultures that it is not always possible to determine the essential African element from the invasive or the syncretic product. Each of the major literatures is the product, not of any one tradition – not even of one as dominant as English colonial culture – but of live traditions that are always available to creative writers even when they are inactive: as Wole Soyinka puts it, “the past exists now” (1988: 19).

The dominance of English as a linguistic medium has tended to obscure this fact. Only the colonial connections of the culture are implied in categories like “Common wealth literature” – where the literature is seen as an extension of the English tradition, or “postcolonial literature” as a product of European cultural imperialism to which it is a counter discourse. Femi Osofisan sees in the latter category a revival of the “grand myth of [precolonial African] Absence” (1991: 1). The exclusion of indigenous traditions is inherent in such language-based classifications of Europhone African literatures. The continuing influence of the different traditions is an essential part of the literary history.

From the second half of the fourth century ce until the death of Augustine in 430 Christian theology fully matured. The fact that Marius Victorinus and Augustine wrote in Latin hardly suffices to justify our setting them outside of the dialogue of Christians and pagans within the ancient Greek philosophical world. Even when Latin speakers learned their philosophy from the books of Latin authors like Cicero, what they learned was ancient Greek philosophy. The refined vocabulary of ancient Greek philosophy was the starting point for the expression of theological doctrine. The well-known example of the controversy over how to express the relation between the persons of the Trinity turns upon the understanding of one of the central terms of Greek philosophy – ousia. As theologically motivated students of philosophy learned almost immediately, the Greek philosophers differed in their understanding of ousia. Plato in his Republic has Socrates state that the Good is ‘above’ ousia, primarily owing to the absolute simplicity of the first principle of all. Aristotle in his Metaphysics states that the question ‘what is being?’ is just the question ‘what is ousia?’ He goes on to argue that the primary referent of ousia is the thinking of a divine mind ‘beyond’ which there is nothing. This fundamental disagreement is reflected in the philosophical schools throughout period. So, the question of whether the first person of the Trinity was in any way ‘beyond’ the second and the third is inseparable from the question of whether the first principle must be absolutely simple.

Seventeenth-century philosophers discussed several related questions under the heading ‘individuation’, although they did not always distinguish clearly between them. Four of these questions in particular will be considered in this chapter. First, there is the metaphysical question about what it is that makes an individual the individual it is and distinguishes it from all other individuals of the same kind; this is the question of a ‘principle of individuation’, of an intrinsic cause of individuality in the things themselves. Second, there is the epistemological question of how we know individuals and their distinctness from one another; this question concerns the basis on which we pick out individuals and distinguish between them. The third question concerns identity through time, the conditions of an individual's remaining the same over time even though that individual may have undergone some change. The fourth question arises from the distinction between the metaphysical problem of what constitutes the identity of a being and the epistemological problem concerning our criteria for making a judgement about a being's identity at different points in time. The question of individuation (what brings about individuality at any one time) and the question of identity (what constitutes sameness at different points in time) were often discussed in connexion with each other; sometimes the emphasis was on individuation, and at other times it was on identity through time and partial change.

Problems of individuation and identity had been discussed extensively long before the seventeenth century. Hence, the search for a principle of individuation was a standard topic in mediaeval philosophy. And the mediaeval disputes about the principle of individuation formed a large part of the background to seventeenth-century discussions of the issue.

Riding together along the road between Philadelphia and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1760, two men – one a Euro-American Quaker and the other a Munsee Indian – had an opportunity to discuss religion, a topic of great interest to both individuals. The Quaker thought he could use the occasion “to say something” to the other man “about our Savior's words and good examples, when on earth.” The Munsee Indian, named Papoonahoal, listened as the Quaker, through an interpreter, inquired whether Papoonahoal “was disposed to hear such things.” Papoonahoal seemed interested in Quakerism; however, now was not the time for such talk. Papoonahoal's response indicates how Native Americans valued ceremony and honored the power of words. Rituals of preparation, he implied, were needed before broaching sacred matters. “Such words are very good,” Papoonahoal said,

The era from the 1730s to the 1790s was one of religious ferment within areas that were, or had been, part of the British North American colonies. The exchange on the Philadelphia road was just one of a multitude of encounters in an increasingly diverse world in which religion was often part of a “trade in culture.”

When several girls and young women living in Salem Village, Massachusetts, began to have strange fits in January 1692, their worried families and neighbors wanted to know what was causing the afflictions and how to end them. Two of the girls lived in the household of Samuel Parris, the minister in Salem Village: his daughter, Elizabeth Parris, and his niece, Abigail Williams. Parris responded to the situation by calling in the local physician, William Griggs, so as to establish whether the afflictions had a “natural” cause. But the doctor told Parris that he could do nothing for them: they were, he declared, “under an evil hand.” Parris then consulted with fellow ministers from neighboring communities, who agreed with Griggs that the fits were “preternatural.” They advised Parris to “sit still and wait upon the Providence of God to see what time might discover; and to be much in prayer for the discovery of what was yet secret.”

Yet not all villagers were willing to wait on “the Providence of God” to reveal the cause of the fits. Mary Sibley, a member of the local church and the aunt of another afflicted girl, Mary Walcott, suspected that her niece was bewitched and turned to countermagic in an attempt to cure her. Sibley asked two Indian slaves who lived and worked in the minister's home, Tituba and John, to bake a cake consisting of meal and the afflicted girl's urine, which they then fed to a dog.

The story of Spanish Catholicism in the Caribbean and New Spain from the 1680s to the end of the colonial period falls easily into two clearly distinguishable parts. The first runs to 1713 and is characterized by the perfection and consolidation of the Habsburg system of church-state relations. The second begins with a change of dynasty, the Bourbons replacing the Habsburgs, and the introduction of a far different form of government. Strongly influenced by the ideals of the Enlightenment, the new rulers completed the state's domination of the Church and centralized their rule as a form of “Enlightened Despotism.”

The Catholicism in the Spanish Caribbean in the latter half of the colonial period has not been intensively studied. It thus becomes difficult to describe it in the various islands that made up Spanish possessions in that area. The disasters of the early period of discovery and colonization, especially European diseases and exploitation, had left the Caribbean area all but depopulated of native races. As time went on, they were replaced by African slaves who were imported to work on the sugar plantations. These Africans tended to retain many of their ancestral religious beliefs and practices. Because the islands were main ports of entry and exit for Spanish treasure fleets, they became the objects of attacks by pirates.

In general the area was characterized by great poverty, small populations, and lack of good priests. The latter had little incentive to migrate to the islands, where opportunities for advancement were few.

INTRODUCTION

As noted in Chapter 15, Aristotle and the Peripatetics held that local motion is primary with respect to all other kinds of motion or change. Proponents of the new natural philosophies of the seventeenth century, including neo-atomists and those of Stoic inspiration, would have accepted this view and, indeed, would not have spurned the way it was presented by some of the later Peripatetics. They would not have been out of sympathy with the Aristotelian Keckermann, whose teaching on this issue in the Danzig Gymnasium in 1607 was not far removed from the new understanding of the rôle of local motion: ‘According to the order of nature, local motion is the first among motions, partly because it is common to the totality of all natural bodies, partly also because the other motions arise from it as from a cause [tanquam à causa]’. Nor would they have been seriously at odds with Chasteigner de la Rochepozay: ‘All other motions are included in local motion as in a cause [ut in causa], on account of [its being] the primary motion, because it is the cause of every corporeal motion, and without it there cannot be any other motion’. Yet it is not clear whether the causality in these texts is real or analogical or, if real (assuming it to be efficient), whether proximate, partial, or productive efficient causality is intended. The causal rôle reserved for local motion by some early seventeenth-century scholastics is still not the special rôle reserved for it by the proponents of the mechanical philosophy.

Any attempt to describe and understand the transition between ancient and medieval philosophy is immediately confronted by the enormous quantity of writings to be evaluated and by the complexity of their interrelations. In the face of such a challenge, certain methodological premisses guiding the selection of authors, texts and themes must be established, even if that selection can only be fully justified at the conclusion of the project. The analysis to be undertaken here will employ the following explicit criteria.

First, the authors of the texts transmitted and their privileged themes will be used as the basis for investigating the readers of the transmitted texts and their privileged themes rather than the reverse. To provide some concrete examples, we will employ the ancient writer Calcidius’ presentation of the three principles of Platonism as a starting-point for the discussion of Hugh of St Victor’s medieval treatment of the same topic, or the ancient writer Boethius’ definitions of nature as a starting-point for Iohannes Scottus Eriugena’s treatment of the same issue during the ninth century, or again the ancient writer Proclus’ placing of the One beyond Being as a starting-point for Berthold of Moosburg’s medieval treatment of the same question. Discussion of the actual medieval context of such philosophical questions in a systematic or chronological manner will not be our primary concern.

Little is known of the life of Priscian of Lydia (born late fifth century ce), who is not to be confused with his older namesake Priscian of Caesarea (fl. c. 500 ce), the famous Latin grammarian. Priscian of Lydia is one of the six philosophers listed by Agathias Histories 2.30–1 to have accompanied Damascius on his journey to the Sassanian king Chosroes I (reign 531–79 ce). Agathias suggests they came of their own accord guided by the false impression that Chosroes’ reign resembled a Platonic state; he does not connect their journey to the famous closure of the Athenian school in 529. The philosophers soon discovered that Chosroes was far from the ideal king and resolved to leave quickly. Because Chosroes was well disposed towards them Priscian and the others were able to leave Chosroes under the safeguard of a treaty the Persian king concluded with Rome in 532, which comprised a clause that ‘these men should be allowed to return to their own country and live there henceforth in safety, without being forced to adopt opinions which they did not hold, or to change their own faith’. Whether they settled in Athens, or perhaps in Carrhae (Harran), where over a century later a centre of Platonic philosophy was flourishing, is still a matter of controversy.

SOLUTIONES AD CHOSROEM

Priscian is credited with a work apparently written for King Chosroes, and known to us in Latin translation3 under the title Solutiones eorum de quibus dubitavit Chosroes Persarum rex. The text does not give us any indication about the circumstances in which it originated.

INTRODUCTION

It has often been taught, and may in dark corners still be taught, that in the seventeenth century epistemology was transformed by a new notion of ‘ideas’ as the immediate objects of perception and thought. Henceforward, it was said, philosophy was saddled with ‘representative’ theories of perception and knowledge that gave rise first to the metaphysical isolation of the mind and then to the thoroughgoing idealism of the following century. In the eighteenth century itself, the realist Thomas Reid saw the Cartesian theory of ideas as the error which, by insinuating a veil or tertium quid between the mind and reality, set philosophy on a course leading logically to the scepticism of Hume. Proponents of such an account in the recent past, however, have been less likely to be realists than conceptualists eager to announce that traditional epistemology, in turn, has made way, or ought to make way, for something else, whether for the philosophy of language, for ‘naturalism’, or for some more refined and elusive form of ‘edifying discourse’.

Recent (and some less recent) work on theories of ideas has undermined this influential story. The epistemological debates of the seventeenth century no doubt supplied the seed-bed of later idealism, but there was no sudden, radical departure, least of all by Descartes, from traditional frameworks for dealing with the relation between thought and its objects. As his own explanations emphasise, Descartes’s use of the old term ‘idea’ was only mildly innovative.