On the eve of the American Revolution, Mary Cooper was a fifty-four-year-old farm woman living in Oyster Bay, Long Island, in the colony of New York. Her life, as revealed in staccato entries in her diary, was hard. She constantly struggled to manage the demands of farm and domestic life and hopelessly watched as her daughter's marriage disintegrated. Winter was, of course, the hardest season on Long Island. Typical was an entry from March 1769. “Extreeme high wind. Cold. Freeses all day long. O, I am tired almost to death, dirty and distressed.” In her dark moments, Cooper found comfort – fleeting though it might have been – in her faith, and in a new congregation of saints she had recently discovered and joined. Although Cooper came from a traditional Anglican background, this church was like none she had ever seen before. African Americans, Native Americans, and women all not only participated actively in her New Light meeting, but often exhorted and preached sermons. Almost the only joy in her diary was associated with the new, exciting church. She often commented that the redeemed, motley community had a “happy meeten.” Occasionally in those meetings she even experienced “heavenly tranceports” of spiritual ecstasy herself.

A history of American Indian religions in America must first acknowledge that Indian religious experience is different from the practices of the organized religions that are generally studied in American history. Indian religions are place based, drawing spiritual power from specific aspects of the landscape. Their senses of spirituality come from an intimate relationship between humans and forces in the environment – winds, storms, the movements of animals, the flow of rivers, and significant rock formations in the landscape, because rocks may represent events that occurred in the formation of their worlds. In this sense religion is a part of life, and environment is the source of spirituality.

Given the widely varying environments in which Indians lived throughout North America in 1790, however, ideas about spirituality took greatly varying forms. Among the hunting people of the Great Plains, men established their individual identities by seeking visions in isolated places and demonstrated their powers in warfare and hunting. Pueblo peoples in their agriculturally based societies believed that humans have a causal role in maintaining the world. Their ceremonial cycles promoted human fertility and growth of crops.

This sense of human agency, the ability of human beings to influence the forces of the natural world, is a defining characteristic of native religions and one of the causes of conflict in the encounters of Christian missionaries with native people in the new American nation. One manifestation of individual power that affects other humans is the practice of witchcraft.

In this section, we begin the treatment of Jewish and Christian thinkers who were among the first to encounter ancient Greek philosophy in a systematic way. The relationship between Judaism and Christianity (and later, Islam) as religions, on the one hand, and their theological formulations, on the other, is an ongoing theme through this book. The Hellenized Jew Philo of Alexandria is perhaps the first to see in Greek philosophy the vocabulary and the conceptual framework for articulating Biblical revelation. The principal challenge Philo faced was how to express in the language of Greek philosophy the personal nature of the first principle of all and the relation that existed between that principle and the Jewish people. The history of ancient Greek philosophy is often characterized as having separated itself from the personalized Homeric gods in favour of more rational and so more impersonal causes. But it was not so much the personal as it was the non-rational aspects of the personal that Greek philosophical theology wished to abandon. Philo’s efforts to provide a systematic allegorizing of Scripture was to be enormously influential in both Jewish and Christian attempts to commensurate the philosophical and the theological.

In Justin, Clement and Origen we have three of the earliest major thinkers to argue that Christianity was a philosophy, indeed, that it was the culmination of Greek philosophical thinking. It is already evident from the Pauline Epistles that Christianity and Greek philosophy were apt either for conflict or harmonization. This option for the latter will be reprised and also repeatedly rejected up through the Reformation and beyond. Tertullian’s (c. 160–c. 220) famous query, ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem or the Academy with the Church?’ is an emblematic reaction to the more eirenic or perhaps strategic efforts of the above three. It was their approach, however, that mainly prevailed. In them, we see much of the common currency of Greek philosophical language employed in a way intended to preserve the distinctiveness of the Christian message.

If for the period extending from the end of the nineteenth century to the present, Africa’s contribution to art, ideas, and especially world literature has been duly recognized, its contribution has yet to be acknowledged for preceding centuries, and in particular for the period from the decline of the Roman Empire up until the first European explorations along the continent’s great river highways.

It has not gone unnoticed that in effect this category of African literature was “invented” in circumstances that make it more accessible to Europe, since its written beginnings are substantially in European languages and it takes over from, and sometimes counterbalances, ethnographic studies. Just as African art was “discovered” at the turn of the twentieth century and studied for the answers it might bring to the questions of form posed by Cubism, so African literature – that which emerged at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries – seems to raise questions that concern Europe itself, which was engaged forcefully and improvisationally in the process of colonization that inevitably radically modified the relationships of colonizers as well as colonized to history, language, and identity.

Moral philosophers, theologians, scholars of religion, and historians until recently have traced the trajectory of modern urban religious history as a tragic story of decline and loss. To cite a prominent and influential example of this way of thinking, conservative Christian moralist Alasdair MacIntyre writes,

Viewed from the perspective of antiurban moralists, modern cities are great engines of secularization. They give us urban religious history as sacred noir, with God's body outlined in yellow police chalk on a city sidewalk.

The great historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, likewise thought that all that remained of humankind's great religious traditions in modern cities were degraded and decadent survivals. Life in the city is about speed, efficiency, function, and novelty, Eliade and others following his lead believed; caught up in this frenzy of over-stimulation, city people are disconnected from the ontological grounds of human experience, alienated from being itself, as being is revealed in nature, in the rhythms of the moon, the cycles of the seasons, and the pulse of the oceans.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the United States underwent profound and at times traumatic social change occasioned by the processes of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. The United States was transformed from a rural, agricultural nation into an urban, industrial nation. In 1899, industrial exports surpassed agricultural exports for the first time, and by 1920, more Americans lived in urban settings than in rural. Fueling this transformation were the millions of immigrants who arrived to become the raw materials for this expansion. The massive influx of immigrants presented the churches in the United States with enormous pastoral, physical, and human challenges, and the churches responded in a variety of ways.

Immigration, which had slowed during the first several years of the Civil War, picked up again in 1864 and exploded by the end of the nineteenth century. The immigration immediately following the war was similar to prewar immigration with the largest groups still coming from Germany, Ireland, and Great Britain. By 1910 the face of immigration had dramatically changed. Immigrants now poured in from Italy, Russia, and Austro-Hungary, which included Austrians, Hungarians, Galician Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Rusins, Ukrainians, Slovenes, Croatians, and Serbians. Significant numbers also came from the Scandinavian countries: Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. The unsettled and changing economic conditions in Eastern, Southern, and Central Europe led to a new immigration. The disastrous Kulturkampf in German-controlled lands and the brutal pogroms directed against Russian Jews sent many more.

In New France, the European community consisted of a single body of lay Catholic men and women who were held together, under God's guidance, by the sacraments administered by the clergy. The latter comprised a number of secular priests and the male and female members of the regular orders. The male members of the regular orders were ordained priests who had also pledged themselves to some special vows. In principle, the same description applied in France. The relationship between Church and crown, the role of the Church within the crown, and the crown's obligations toward its Catholic population were the same on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

In the early days of French expansion (1608–59), there had been two major differences between France and New France. The most significant one was that the small Catholic community of New France lived side by side with the Indian nations. Although the Indians vastly outnumbered the French, it was then believed that the Indians could become part of the overall Catholic community by way of religious conversion.

Until 1659, the second major difference was the absence of a bishop, that is, a member of the clergy who was not only in a hierarchical superior position, but who also possessed some spiritual faculties that allowed him to administer certain sacraments that simple priests – secular or regular – could not administer, such as the power to ordain new priests or to confirm lay members of the community.

SYRIANUS’ LIFE AND WORKS

Information about the life of Syrianus, son of Philoxenus, is scarce, and is limited to what can be deduced from what we know about the life of Proclus, Syrianus’ disciple, who became much more famous than his master. Nevertheless, one date is certain: Syrianus became head of the Platonic school at Athens in 432 ce, after the death of his master, Plutarch. As to Syrianus’ own death, the date which is often given, of 437 ce, is only conjectural, if probable, but it is certain that he died before 439 ce, when Proclus wrote his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus; the past tense verbs in this text indicate that Proclus’ master had already passed away.

Among Syrianus’ numerous works, only his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics has survived, and that in an incomplete form comprising only books 3, 4, 13 and 14. A commentary on two treatises by Hermogenes of Tarsus, an orator of the second to third century ce, On Types of Style and On Argumentative Stances, has also been transmitted under Syrianus’ name. However the most recent editor of these commentaries, H. Rabe, has expressed doubts concerning their authenticity.

But we know that Syrianus gave lectures, not only on works by Aristotle other than the Metaphysics, but also on Platonic dialogues. As regards the latter, we have a commentary on Plato’s Phaedrus, written by Syrianus’ disciple Hermias: he wrote this commentary on the basis of notes taken during his master’s lectures.

MATHEMATICS, MECHANICS, AND METAPHYSICS

At the beginning of what we now call the scientific revolution, Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) displayed on the title page of De revolutionibus (1543) Plato's ban against the mathematically incompetent: ‘Let no one enter who is ignorant of geometry’. He repeated the notice in the preface, cautioning that ‘mathematics is written for mathematicians’. Although Isaac Newton posted no such warning at the front of the Principia a century and a half later, he did insist repeatedly that the first two books of the work treated motion in purely mathematical terms, without physical, metaphysical, or ontological commitment. Only in the third book did he expressly draw the links between the mathematical and physical realms. There he posited a universal force of gravity for which he could offer no physical explanation but which, as a mathematical construct, was the linchpin of his system of the world. ‘It is enough’, he insisted in the General Scholium added in 1710, ‘that [gravity] in fact exists.’ No less than the De revolutionibus, the Principia was written by a mathematician for mathematicians.

Behind that common feature of the two works lies perhaps the foremost change wrought on natural philosophy by the scientific revolution. For although astronomy had always been deemed a mathematical science, few in the early sixteenth century would have envisioned a reduction of physics – that is, of nature as motion and change – to mathematics. Fewer still would have imagined the analysis of machines as the medium of reduction, and perhaps none would have accorded ontological force to mathematical structure.

In 1899, Father Ignacio García, a country priest ministering in Atlacomulco, published an epistolary account of popular religious mores titled El catolicismo expirante. This now forgotten tract was so damningly picturesque that it is worth citing at length by way of introduction. “I hold as absurd and ridiculous,” García fulminated in one of eight “humble treatises” to the archbishop of Mexico, Próspero María Alarcón y Sánchez,

The peoples whom European explorers, conquerors, and colonists found in North America were as diverse as the newcomers would eventually become, and their built environment, including their sacred structures, was equally diverse. One of the determining factors was their natural environment and the lifestyle it dictated. Northern peoples, who depended on hunting for much of their sustenance, followed a semi-nomadic course, and the buildings they constructed were often impermanent. Those further south, where the land conduced to agriculture, were able to erect more elaborate and permanent structures, such as the sun temple in the “grand village” of the mound-building Natchez near today's Mississippi city of that name. Still further south, in what is now Mexico, imperial powers such as the Aztecs arose, which were able to command the resources to build vast temple complexes such as that at Tenochtitlán near present-day Mexico City.

For most of the aboriginal peoples of present-day Canada and the United States, sacrality was not confined to buildings set apart for ritual use, although the latter certainly existed. The lines that separate public and private as well as sacred and secular were blurry or absent among native peoples. The longhouse of the Iroquois in upstate New York, for example, served as a general center both for family residence and for communal activity, whether in the form of ritual or public discussions. Like many native structures, it was modeled on a legendary prototype.

The founders of New England's Congregationalism in the 1630s had an ambitious agenda. Their churches would be islands of sectarian purity, each one covenanted with God and restricted in adult membership to people testifying to conversion. Power in each church would be shared between ministers and laity; each church would police its members with strict communal discipline, and the churches would be united voluntarily, not coercively. The churches would work closely with the secular authorities, all church members, who would protect the churches' religious monopoly, morally supervise the general population through strict laws, and see that the region's youth were indoctrinated. Success in this hegemonic project would bring God's blessings on New England; failure would bring his wrath.

By the start of the 1680s, signs of God's wrath were mounting: crop failure, a devastating Indian war, the irrepressibility of Baptists and Quakers, and in 1684 the most severe punishment of all. Massachusetts' charter, which for half a century had allowed the heartland of Congregationalism to act virtually independently of the English government, was vacated in an English court. There was no barrier between Massachusetts and King Charles II, increasingly authoritarian and increasingly hostile to the Nonconformist heirs of the Puritans. The situation ominously resembled the one that had driven the Puritans to New England initially, and it grew even worse when James II, an open Catholic with an even more expansive understanding of the monarchy's powers, assumed the throne in 1685.

About fifteen years after embarking in April 1759 on a one-and-a-half-year tour of North America's “middle settlements,” the Anglican minister Andrew Burnaby published an account of his travels. By 1775, political unrest in North America had led the English to wonder if their North American colonies would claim independence, and Burnaby's book attempted to ease anxieties. In his account, Burnaby insisted that his time spent traveling between Virginia and New Hampshire had shown him that England's colonies could not cohere independently of Britain. They simply were too diverse. Noting that the colonies “are composed of people of different nations, different manners, different religions, and different languages,” Burnaby pointed out that “religious zeal too, like a smothered fire, is secretly burning in the hearts of the different sectaries that inhabit them.”

Burnaby was largely right. The peoples of British North America were diverse, and religious differences provided flash points of discord. Immigration to England's colonies had exploded in the decades preceding Burnaby's visit, with large waves of immigrants coming from Scotland, Ireland, and Germany. As Burnaby indicated, “different nations” and “different manners” brought with them “different religions,” which almost invariably were strains of Protestantism. With different Protestant loyalties serving as ciphers for other forms of difference, Protestant identities were more distinct and more discordant in eighteenth-century North America than at any time before or after.

When the final draft of the British North America Act was being completed at the London conference in December 1866, one of the thorniest problems facing the delegates was a name for the new nation. While reading the Bible, as was his custom every evening, Samuel Tilley of New Brunswick stumbled upon a phrase from Psalm 72, “His Dominion shall also be from sea to sea.” The suggestion of “the Dominion of Canada” was seized upon by the Fathers of Confederation as an appropriate choice. Although the churches in Canada did not play a significant role in confederation, this phrase inspired a sense of mission to build a Christian nation from sea to sea. The biblical reference also resonated with the overwhelmingly Christian character of the new country. Over 98 percent of the people indicated to Canada's first census takers in 1871 that they were Christian. Of the population, 43 percent was Roman Catholic, while another 52 percent was from one of four mainstream denominations – Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Baptist. Most of the remaining population was either Lutheran or members of a pacifist group, such as Quakers or Mennonites. The non-Christian population was very small, with only eleven hundred Jews, and most of them concentrated in the city of Montreal.