BRITAIN

Introduction

In the seventh and final part of his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith reviews ‘the most celebrated and remarkable of the different theories which have been given concerning the nature and origin of our moral sentiments’. Nearly all earlier theories agree, he suggests, in one important respect: ‘they are all of them … founded upon natural principles’. He then adds that, in analysing moral theories, we should consider their answers to two questions: (1) ‘wherein does virtue consist?’ and (2) ‘by what power or faculty of mind is it that virtue is recommended to us?’ In the course of his review of answers to the first of these questions, Smith discusses four different theories: the theory that traces morality to propriety; that which traces it to prudence; and that which traces it to benevolence. He then compares these three theories with a fourth, or what he calls the ‘licentious system’. He describes this fourth system as a theory that has its ‘real foundation’ in a misguided understanding of popular asceticism. The proponents of this system, he says, attempted ‘to prove that there was no real virtue’ and that ‘what pretended to be [virtue], was a mere cheat and imposition upon mankind’. But however ‘groundless’ this licentious theory really is, Smith argues, it ‘must have had some foundation’, even a ‘foundation in nature’; otherwise its fraudulent character would immediately have been perceived by everyone (VII.ii.4.12 and 14).

THE TRANSMISSION OF THE GREEK LEGACY TO THE ARAB WORLD: AN OUTLINE

It is widely acknowledged that the origins of Arabic-Islamic philosophy are to be found in the transmission of a great amount of texts both from classical Greece – some Plato and virtually the whole of the Aristotelian corpus – and post-classical Greek thought, from Hellenism to late antiquity. In this chapter, we shall see that post-classical thought has been of momentous importance in the Arab interpretation of Plato’s and Aristotle’s doctrines. Predictably, the transmission of their works was made possible through the spread of classical Greek philosophy in the Mediterranean area during the Hellenistic and imperial ages, and then again through the scholastic tradition of late antiquity. However, post-classical thought was decisive for the rise of Islamic philosophy even from a more substantial point of view: the main problems dealt with by Muslim philosophers can be understood only against the background of the rethinking of Plato and Aristotle which took place in the imperial age, chiefly thanks to Alexander of Aphrodisias and Plotinus. Furthermore, the systematic structure into which Aristotle’s doctrines were moulded in the curricular teaching in the schools of late antiquity paved the way for their transmission to Latin and Arabic thought.

During the years of anticolonial struggle Africa’s nationalist leaders had a better idea of what they were fighting against than of what they wanted to replace it with. Beneath the heady euphoria of independence, there were few framing political principles or social visions with which to navigate the difficult years of nation building that lay ahead. Instead of specific restructuring programs there were only vague gestures towards economic self-reliance, democratic modernization, and detribalization. In the place of a constructive political ideology and training in multiparty parliamentary practices, Africans were given high-sounding rhetoric, personality cults that urged them to identify their charismatic leaders’ personal fortunes with their own, and nostalgic communalist myths that, under the guise of socialism, would shortly be used to entrench totalitarian political systems. Thus it was not surprising that by the end of the 1960s most of the make shift national democracies with which the departing imperial powers had hurriedly patched over the continent’s social and ethnic fissures a decade earlier had given way to one-party states or dictatorships. In Nigeria intractable tribal rivalries plunged the fragile nation into genocide and civil war while neighboring Ghana floundered into a morass of institutionalized corruption and political repression. For the majority of Africans independence did not bring unity, social justice, peace, or prosperity, but division, inequality, political violence, and economic stagnation.

At the end of the independence decade it was clear to African writers and intellectuals that national liberation had been a selective affair, mainly consolidating the power of indigenous professional elites with whom the colonial regimes, in former administrative colonies like those of British and French West Africa, had maintained a long-established political dialogue.

Claims concerning the foundations of knowledge and the nature of reality have played a central role in American religious discourse. For that reason many participants in that discourse have engaged in a lively, often spirited interaction with philosophical thought. This was especially the case in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when profound changes in American cultural and intellectual life resulted in challenges to prevailing doctrines and traditional sources of religious authority. In responding to those changes, many theologians, clergy, and learned laypeople found themselves drawing on the resources of philosophy in formulating and defending their worldviews.

For much of the period between 1865 and 1945 the engagement of American religious thinkers with philosophical reflection and analysis was motivated primarily by a desire to come to grips with the implications of modern science. By the second half of the nineteenth century scientists had become quite successful in describing phenomena in terms of intelligible natural laws, and many enthusiastic supporters of their efforts saw no reason to doubt that the reign of order pervaded the entire universe. Just as importantly, even pious members of the scientific community were coming to believe that “it is the aim of science to narrow the domain of the supernatural, by bringing all phenomena within the scope of natural laws and secondary causes.”

If Tahiti suggested to theorists comfortably at home in Europe thoughts of noble savages without clothes, those who paid for and went on voyages there were in pursuit of a quite opposite human ideal. Cook’s voyage to observe the transit of Venus in 1769 symbolises the eighteenth century’s commitment to numbers and accuracy, and its willingness to spend a lot of public money on acquiring them. The state supported the organisation of quantitative researches, employing surveyors and collecting statistics to compute its power. People volunteered to become more numerate; even those who did not had the numerical rationality of the metric system imposed on them. There was an increase of two orders of magnitude or so in the accuracy of measuring instruments and the known values of physical constants. The graphical display of quantitative information made it more readily available and comprehensible. On the research front, mathematics continued its advance, even if with notably less speed than in the two adjoining centuries. The methods of the calculus proved successful in more and more problems in mechanics, both celestial and terrestrial. Elasticity and fluid dynamics became mathematically tractable for the first time. The central limit theorem brought many chance phenomena within the purview of reason. These successes proved of interest for ‘low philosophy’, or philosophy-as-propaganda, as practised by the natural theologians and the Encyclopedistes. Both had their uses for scientific breakthroughs, though sometimes not much interest in the details. For ‘high philosophy’, as constituted by the great names, mathematics and science had a different importance.

On the map of knowledge which the eighteenth century inherited from long centuries of scholastic instruction and debate, natural philosophy or ‘physics’ occupied a large and prominent place. The university culture of the High Middle Ages had absorbed much of the Aristotelian canon into four main compartments: metaphysics – the study of being as such; ‘physics’ – the study of being as qualified; logic; and ethics. Thus a form of education was created whose imprint was still evident at the beginning of the eighteenth century despite the great intellectual upheavals of the seventeenth century. At most universities the arts students (including those who subsequently undertook postgraduate education in medicine, law, or theology) were exposed to a curriculum which – despite some modifications prompted by Renaissance humanism – was still very largely dominated by such philosophical canons. Moreover, as confidence waned in the possibility of the unaided human intellect to arrive at worthwhile conclusions in the fields of ethics or metaphysics – particularly in Protestant cultures with their emphasis on the fallibility of the human mind – the study of natural philosophy waxed in importance.

The weight of tradition, then, accorded natural philosophy an important place in the mental furniture of the elite, and the domain accorded to it was extremely broad. Natural philosophy in the scholastic tradition embraced the study of all natural things both organic and inorganic. Aristotle and his innumerable scholastic commentators and disputants had sought to provide a priori, qualitative explanations about such fundamental concepts as form, matter, cause, and motion which could be used to explain all natural phenomena.

Sacred music played a complex and crucial role in the development of colonial American religious cultures from the earliest encounters of Europeans and indigenous peoples to the Revolution of 1776. The ritual singing of sacred texts is a constituent part of most religious cultures, and colonial religions produced a rich diversity of such sacred music. This multiplicity, however, developed within the broader context of colonialism that imposed processes of transmission, assimilation, and hybridization on every religious community in the New World. Understanding sacred music in colonial America therefore demands attention both to its variety and to the common cultural processes that shaped it.

MUSIC AND MISSIONS

The original sacred music of North America was that of indigenous peoples. Hundreds of First Nations occupied the continent at the time of European encounter. Their cultures were grounded in traditional religious worldviews whose principal means of expression were singing and dancing. From shamanistic healing chants to calendric festival dances, the religions of Native Americans were filled with musical vocalization, typically accompanied by rhythm instruments like drums and rattles.

Indigenous religions understood humans to live in a sacred cosmos in which all natural forces and things were personified in spirit beings. The religious task of humans was to live in balance with these beings by honoring them in celebrative or sacrificial rituals and invoking them for aid in times of famine or disease.

The distinction that is now drawn between natural and revealed theology evolved gradually. In its eighteenth-century form it is traceable to a debate that started with the Reformation but took a recognizably modern shape only in the seventeenth century. That reason and experience offer a route to some degree of religious belief or knowledge has been a common assumption for as long as philosophy has served the interests of the Church, the Synagogue, or the Mosque; but historically it was a route that was not sharply differentiated from revelation. The evidence of the world was one kind of revelation and that of conscience another. Verbal revelation as a third kind has always had an important role in institutional religion. Different modes of revelation suited the knowledge and mental capacities of different believers and were considered compatible.

In the eyes of the Reformers, however, the institutions of religion had become corrupted over the centuries and had corrupted in turn both the spirit and the letter of the message they purported to preserve. The Catholic Church took refuge in the longevity and solidity of its tradition, including a continuity of biblical and doctrinal interpretation and of what were taken to be miraculous occurrences that identified it uniquely with the original Church from the days of the Apostles. Protestants sought to discredit Catholic miracles while safeguarding those of the Bible and to portray themselves as the rediscoverers and true heirs of the first Church. In this contest, the nature and basis of institutional authority and historical evidence, and the role of reason in general and individual reason in particular, were all up for review.

Long before the American Revolution, Muslims were a vital presence in the thirteen colonies and throughout the Americas. Though Muslim explorers from North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula may have been among the first Mediterranean peoples to arrive in the Americas, it was slaves from sub-Saharan Africa who composed the first significant population of Muslim Americans. No sidebar to United States history, Muslims at home and abroad became a vital symbolic force in national debates over slavery, the defining of American political identity, the shaping of evangelical Christianity, and the emergence of American consumer culture. As a religious and for the most part racial minority, Muslim Americans in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history helped to define the center of cultural and political power in the United States.

The history of Muslim Americans also illuminates the simultaneous local, national, and global nature of American religious history from the colonial age to the early twentieth century. Shaped by voluntary and coerced travel and resettlement, most Muslims lived both as Americans and as persons whose identities crossed national and regional boundaries. In addition to Muslim slaves from Africa, Muslim practitioners in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included immigrants who came largely from the Balkans and the Middle East, but also from Eastern Europe and South Asia. These were the first Muslims to establish mutual aid societies and other formal Muslim American associations.

The new nation would not feature one legally established religion. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution settled that. Neither the Congregational legal establishments in New England, nor the Anglican ones in New York and in the South would be extended nationally. However, as the Constitution could not anticipate the evolution of a robust, ever more populist democracy, institutionalized by two-party politics and governance, neither could Constitution drafters or the new nation's religious leadership foresee that religious freedom would foster

• the emergence and evolution of multiple national, purposive, entrepreneurial, missionary denominations;

• competing for adherents across the expanding U.S. landscape and to some extent across racial, language, and ethnic lines;

• generating single-purpose voluntary societies to underwrite infrastructural and socially transformative measures;

• constituting collectively in this denominational order, a religious counterpart to party government and with a similar pattern of major and minor (or marginal) parties;

• providing through membership, methodology, and message an American religious citizenship in a commonwealth defined with evocative Protestant images, myths, and concepts (for instance, new Israel, election, covenant, providence, millennium);

• tending thereby to tie religious purpose to America as land, nation, society, and people;

• and creating as agenda and aspiration an informal Christian establishment with its own political-religious convictions about insiders and outsiders, its expectations for and from elected officials, and its evolving ways of participating in the political process.

The rise of Protestant Fundamentalism, a movement that began in the post–Civil War decades and reached the peak of its influence in the mid-twentieth century, is a frequently misunderstood but important episode in American religious history. At first glance, Fundamentalism's combative and angular style – it has often been defined as “militant antimodernism” – seems out of place within the general narrative of American Protestantism that has emphasized the spread of pluralism and tolerance. Not surprisingly, the historians and social theorists who began to write about Fundamentalism in the 1930s and 1940s interpreted it as a temporary aberration, at best a curious cultural cul-de-sac proving the general rule of declining religious polarization in the face of rising secularism.

Events of the late twentieth century forever changed that perception. The growing political power of the religious Right in the United States, the rise of militant Islam, and the explosion of Pentecostal sects around the world forced scholars to abandon the very notion of religious decline and, to a degree, the narrative of tolerance. After the 1980s, the new agenda was to explain the durability of traditional religion in the modern world and to explain the success of antimodern faith in a presumably secular age. Many observers began to include American Protestant Fundamentalism within this larger social reality, as one of many reactionary religious movements standing in opposition to the social and political encroachments of modernity.