The three arabophone and francophone nations of North Africa – Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia – came under French colonial rule in the nineteenth century. Along with military, political, and economic domination, the French instituted a cultural and linguistic supremacy whose effects are still felt in the region today, even after forty years of independence. These three countries of North Africa are also collectively called the Maghreb (meaning “The west” in Arabic). Whereas Morocco and Tunisia had the administrative status of protectorates, Algeria was a colony. Before the end of the nineteenth century, Algeria was divided into three départements and declared an extension of French continental territory. Invaded by the French in 1830, Algerian independence was granted only at the conclusion of a violent conflict (1954–62), referred to as “the Algerian Revolution” by Algerians. Morocco and Tunisia received their independence from France in 1956, after several years of conflict that was often violent, but did not reach the same level of warfare as the Algerian Revolution.

The three countries of the Maghreb are distinct in terms of their political and cultural history, yet the shared experience of French colonization makes it possible to discuss them together, particularly concerning the development of French-language literature in the region. When the French conquered North Africa, they found a well-established Arabic literary tradition that had existed since the time of the Arab expansion into North Africa during the seventh century. But the French colonial endeavor depended upon a bureaucracy and an administrative mission in which French was the dominant means of communication.

In this section, we turn to the last phase of pagan ancient philosophy. The date 529 ce when the Emperor Justinian officially closed the Academy in Athens is conventionally taken to be the terminus of non-Christian philosophy. Of course, this is something of an overstatement. The philosophers Olympiodorus, Damascius and Simplicius all lived up to a generation beyond this date. They were apparently, however, not allowed to teach in public. We have no record of any openly non-Christian philosopher in the ancient world after the last quarter of the sixth century ce. Nevertheless, ancient Greek philosophy itself did live on within the Church and in the seventh century, within the early schools of Islamic philosophy. The history of ancient philosophy as intellectual infrastructure for religion as opposed to autonomous enterprise will be canvassed in the last two sections.

Here we are concerned with those philosophers, mainly in Athens and Alexandria, who sought to articulate and defend the Platonic inheritance. Scholars in the early part of the twentieth century sometimes maintained that the Alexandrian and Athenian ‘branches’ of Platonism differed in their focus on either religion or metaphysics. This view is generally regarded today as mistaken or greatly oversimplified. Modern research has led to the view that the interchanges between Athens and Alexandria were frequent and fruitful during this period. The supposed emphasis on religion among the Alexandrian Platonists is probably to be accounted for by the strong Christian political domination.

Jonathan Edwards' Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737), a report of religious activities during the preliminary stages of the New England revival known as the Great Awakening, introduces several aspects of sectarianism, or “the appearance of indigenous new religious cultures” that permeated the British colonies between 1730 and 1790. Written to dispel rumors of heresy and to convince Puritan Congregationalist leaders in Boston of the validity of spiritual fervor within his community, Edwards' report explains, “There has been much talk in many parts of the country, as though the people have symbolized with the Quakers, and the Quakers themselves have been moved with such reports; and came here, once and again, hoping to find good waters to fish in; but without the least success, and seemed to be discouraged and have left off coming.” Employing a derisive name to label another religious group, namely, the “Quakers”; discussing popular accusations of religious affiliation afloat at the time; and describing itinerant practices of attempted conversion, Edwards' comments present some patterns that recurred throughout the colonies with regard to these numerous “new religious cultures.” Not only were many individuals seeking religious and spiritual fulfillment in groups they believed the “true church,” but also religious leaders were working diligently to build and sustain such faith communities through their public messages. The pulpit and the press provided popular venues for leaders to defend their distinct doctrines and practices as well as to convert additional followers.

It is not difficult to agree with the scholars who maintain that the eighteenth century saw the end of philosophical theodicy, or at least of an important chapter in its history. The decisive attack on rational theodicy (and theology) was by Pierre Bayle at the end of the seventeenth century. Much of his work is intended to illustrate the impossibility of a rational, hence philosophical, solution to the question of evil in the world. The Christian conscience, on his view, has to choose between reason (that is, scepticism and ultimately atheism) and fideist religion.

The most important response to Bayle is Leibniz’s Théodicée, which is, on the one hand, an attempt to revive old categories already destroyed by Bayle and, on the other, an original metaphysical construction, which yet does not fulfil its aim of justifying evil. Leibniz’s philosophy, still rooted in the metaphysical framework of the seventeenth century, was one of the main topics of European philosophical discussion in the first half of the eighteenth century. With regard to the question of evil, the so-called optimism of the German philosopher was discussed, defended or condemned, sometimes trivialised and equated with the naive optimism of Alexander Pope.

The question of the human condition and its capabilities became central in mid-century when the crisis in the great metaphysical systems of the past became clear. Worries and doubts that might undermine an optimistic view of the universe and human existence are highlighted in the writings of Samuel Johnson and particularly in Voltaire’s literary and philosophical works.

LIFE AND WORKS

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was descended from an established Roman elite. His date of birth is unknown but must have been c. 480, perhaps as early as 475. His father, (? Narius) Manlius Boethius (cos. 487), came from a line that may have had its origins in the East, while his maternal lineage too went back to the Gens Anicia, which had converted to Christianity in the fourth century. Boethius himself was named Consul in 510, the Consulship being one of only two securely datable facts concerning his public life. He evidently lost his parents, or his father, when still young and was adopted by Q. Aurelius Memmius Symmachus (cos. 485), a descendant of Q. Aurelius Symmachus (cos. 391). Although the details of Boethius’ education remain obscure, we may be certain that Symmachus had a controlling hand in shaping it. At Variae 1.45.3 Cassiodorus mentions Boethius’ having ‘entered far away the school of the Athenians’ (Atheniensium scholas longe positus introisti), which, as Courcelle observed, probably indicates only that Boethius intellectually ‘enrolled’ in the school despite the distance from Athens. Courcelle alternatively proposed that Boethius studied under Ammonius in Alexandria, but his thesis is seriously undermined by the texts he adduced in support of it. Boethius’ commentaries are not mere copies of Ammonius’, and even if they were, to demonstrate that Boethius actually studied in Alexandria would be an entirely different matter.

THE SOURCES AND STATUS OF THE OCCULT PHILOSOPHY IN THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

One of the first members of Rome's Accademia dei Lincei, established in 1603 to advance the understanding of natural philosophy, was Giambattista Della Porta, Galileo's colleague in the renowned Roman society and his rival in the development of the telescope. Four decades before, Della Porta had founded his own Accademia dei Secreti della Natura, only to see it fail when the Inquisition called him up on charges of sorcery. He died in 1615, 1ong after publishing his Magia naturalis libri IV in Naples in 1558; a much enlarged edition followed in 1589, commanding enough interest through the seventeenth century to support many Latin and vernacular printings. Readers of the English version (London, 1658) learned in the first chapter that ‘Magick is taken amongst all men for Wisdom, and the perfect knowledge of natural things: and those are called Magicians, whom… the Greeks call Philosophers’. This overture to a treatise on magic was commonplace in its own time and had been familiar since antiquity, but when Della Porta called magicians philosophers, he struck a note that jars modern ears.

‘There are two sorts of Magick’, he explained; ‘the one is infamous… because it hath to do with soul spirits and… Inchantments… and this is called Sorcery…. The other Magick is natural…. The most noble Philosophers… call this knowledge the very… perfection of natural Sciences’. In other words, the good natural magic that Della Porta traced to Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, andother philosophical worthies was not the evil demonic magic that ‘all learned and good men detest’.

Eighteenth-century natural history comprised a complex body of investigations that included local studies of botany and zoology, collection of natural artifacts, geographical and meteorological descriptions, geological study, landscape and gardening design, and other forms of inquiry conducted by an international group of practitioners. Deriving inspiration from the researches and speculations of Aristotle, Dioscorides, Theophrastus, Pliny, and Vergil in Antiquity, natural historians of the period could also draw upon important Renaissance transformations of the field inspired by such naturalists and herbalists as Otto Brunfels (1488–1534), Conrad Gesner (1516–65), Guillaume Rondelet (1507–66), Andrea Cesalpino (1519–1603), and Ulysses Aldrovandi (1522–1605) who created the tradition of ‘emblematic’ natural history. Institutionally, natural history developed in the seventeenth century in different forms of association with medical schools, in courts of the nobility, and in association with the new scientific academies inspired by the societies of London and Paris. Less elite forms of natural history were practiced by pharmacists, farmers, country clergy, and ‘local’ naturalists who created in the early modern period, particularly in the British Isles, the tradition of ‘chorographic’ natural history. This had originated in the works of William Lambarde and William Camden in the Elizabethan period and was developed by Gerard Boate and Joshua Childrey in the middle seventeenth century. It was exemplified for the early Enlightenment by Robert Plot’s The Natural History of Oxfordshire of 1677 (Oxford).

Each of these complex strands of development has a separable historical analysis and each feeds into the formation of eighteenth-century natural history. For the purposes of this chapter and this volume, the primary focus will be upon a select set of cognitive questions and will concentrate on an elite tradition of European naturalists, recognizing that a full understanding of the topic in this period requires analysis on several levels.

The seventeenth century saw the emergence of the corpuscularian, or ‘mechanical’, philosophy, which succeeded far beyond any previous science or philosophy in explaining particular phenomena of nature, and which, as a general framework for thought about the physical world, has continued to guide philosophical and scientific investigation down to the present day. Modern scholars have often sought to understand the emergence of this new philosophy by placing it within the context of some previous tradition of thought. In the words of J. H. Randall:

Two generations later, there is still no agreement. In what follows I will not attempt to assess the relative importance of the different intellectual traditions leading up to the seventeenth century (in any case, the relative importance of these different traditions as background will vary widely, depending on which seventeenth-century figure we wish to study), but I will try to indicate the broad range of intellectual traditions in terms of which the various seventeenth-century figures defined their attempts to establish a new philosophy.

Eriugena, master of the liberal arts, translator, philologue, poet, philosopher and theologian, developed the most systematic and radical form of Platonism in the Latin West until Maître Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa – both, directly or indirectly, under his influence. His accomplishment is the more remarkable because made almost entirely without access to non-Christian authors, by drawing out philosophy largely from theological writings – into which genres his own works also almost entirely fall. After Boethius, he was the first to draw together the Greek and Latin Platonisms and the resulting system enabled his reconciliation of Latin and Greek Christian theology. For him the Latin Fathers were foundational – pre-eminently Augustine, importantly crucially Boethius, and also Ambrose. They are contained within a single logical structure with the Greek Fathers, whose writings are known to him and influential even before he made his famous translations. Eriugena’s reconciliation was accomplished by extending the primarily Plotinian and Porphyrian Platonism of the Latins in the direction of crucial notions from Iamblichus, Proclus and Damascius transmitted by the Greeks. The conclusion of Hellenic philosophy John encounters indirectly by way of Boethius, the Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor – to name the most influential sources. In general, in the Latin Middle Ages, when the earlier Platonism of Augustine met the later, most authoritatively through the Pseudo-Dionysius, ‘this highest theologian’ (Expos. 4.189), the latter established the encompassing logic. Eriugena established the norm.

LIFE

Plutarch of Athens (d. 432 ce), son of Nestorius, was the philosophy teacher of Hierocles of Alexandria, Syrianus and the young Proclus. The story of the meeting between Plutarch, now advanced in years, and Proclus, who had not yet reached his twenties, is touching. It was Syrianus who introduced the young man to Plutarch, who immediately had such a favourable impression of him that he wanted, without delay and despite his advanced age, to give the new disciple some lessons in philosophy.

Plutarch made Proclus read Aristotle’s De anima and Plato’s Phaedo, and talked to him about these works. He encouraged the young student to take notes, in order to produce a commentary on the Phaedo. This fact, transmitted to us from Marinus (who in turn was Proclus’ pupil and biographer, cf. Proclus 12 pp. 14, 1–15, Saffrey and Segonds = Fonte 2 Taormina), might imply that Plutarch had already composed his own written commentary on the De anima (which, as we shall see, is confirmed by several sources), but this was not the case for the Phaedo, for which Plutarch wanted a new commentary to be composed by his ambitious disciple.

In any case, this information confirms Plutarch’s interest in the study of the soul, that is, in Platonic and Aristotelian psychology. The evidence which we have about his position with respect to two passages in the Phaedo (Plato, Phd. 66b2 and 108c6) confirms his exegetical activity on this text, but it does not explicitly refer to a written commentary (Damascius, in Phaedonem §100, p. 67 and §503, p. 255 Westerink = Fonti 59–60 Taormina).

In the seventeenth century more than in many other periods of philosophy, scepticism was a fundamentally important philosophical phenomenon. Charron, Pascal, and Bayle are among the greatest sceptical thinkers. And Montaigne as well belongs to this period, for although he died eight years before the century began, he was the central figure in its debate about scepticism. These philosophers argued persistently and imaginatively against the possibility of knowledge in natural science, ethics, and theology, and they developed novel and powerful views of how the sceptical outlook is to be understood. Scepticism was also important because almost every major philosopher who was not a sceptic believed that a decisive feature of his own position was how it differed from scepticism. Some of these philosophers (the ‘mitigated sceptics’ such as Mersenne and Gassendi) tried to show that a great deal of scepticism could be accepted without abandoning all possibility of knowledge or without leaving reason idle even where knowledge was not possible. Others (such as Bacon and Descartes) tried to work out a new conception of the sources of knowledge which would prove immune to doubt. In general, the issue of scepticism was one around which many of the most important developments in seventeenth-century philosophy crystallised.

It is impossible to examine the place of conflict involving religion in America without first knowing how Americans perceive the role of conflict in their society. In fact, until recently most views of American history selectively read conflict out of the national story, with one signal exception. That exception was, of course, race, whose salience was such that it could hardly be ignored. From slavery to the Civil War, from Reconstruction through segregation and lynchings, from Brown v. Board of Education to the civil rights movement, conflicts about race cast a shadow over both the American past and the American present. All other forms of conflict, however, tended to be ignored or forgotten, made the domains of specialists or of the interest groups they affected, as if a kind of collective amnesia had settled over the subject. This was true of labor strife and ethnic conflict, and it was also true of religious conflict. The overriding desire was for a picture of the American past that emphasized harmony rather than division.

At no time was this stronger than in the 1950s, the years of the Eisenhower presidency. Religion was said to be good in itself. The president himself was believed to have said, “I don't care what religion you are, as long as you believe in something,” although subsequent attempts to source the quotation have been unavailing.

INTRODUCTION

That the passions are both wayward and destructive is one of the commonplaces of seventeenth-century thought. Plays, religious tracts, meditational manuals, educational handbooks, maxims, and philosophical treatises all emphasise this conviction, remorselessly probing the hazards posed by our emotions and desires. To be passionate is to be blinkered and impressionable, vulnerable and a threat to others. At the same time, it is part of our natural condition, an endowment with which we are born and which we rarely escape.

This fundamental fact about human nature is held to be compatible with a vast diversity of temperaments. Among the many factors that may have a hand in shaping our individual emotional dispositions are the circumstances of a child’s conception, the social position of its family, its experiences in the womb, the climate in which it grows up, its education, the chance associations and repetitions of events it encounters, and the presence or absence of divine grace. But the processes by which our passions are channelled or modified do not usually create well-rounded and balanced personalities. On the contrary, adults are often left with powerful contradictory affections and thus remain vulnerable to destructive conflicts of emotion. Sometimes, as seventeenth-century drama vividly reminds us, this flaw in human nature can be the cause of tragedy; and at a less apocalyptic level its effect is to make people inconstant and restless, driven from one emotion to the next as waves on the sea are driven by the wind.

PROGRAMS IN SEARCH OF A SCIENCE

The briefest useful summary of some of the chief topics of eighteenth-century thought concerning the social, or moral, sciences was written by the nineteenth-century entrepreneur of social reform, Robert Owen. The summary forms the long title of one of the many editions of his program for a ‘new moral world’: ‘An Outline of the Rational System of Society, founded on demonstrable Facts developing the Constitution and Laws of Human Nature being the only effective Remedy for the Evils experienced by the Population of the World: the immediate Adoption of which would tranquilize the present agitated State of Society’ (1830). The search for demonstrable facts, and for the true character and laws of human nature, in the interests of immediate social therapy was a characteristic feature of eighteenth-century thought in Europe. It was characteristic because the success of Newtonian physics at the end of the seventeenth century powerfully stimulated interest, early in the eighteenth century, in the development of an analogous science of social topics. Advocacy of the application of the new ‘experimental philosophy’ of such natural scientists as Hooke, Boyle, and Newton to the problems of society was difficult to resist. Not only were the problems urgent and general, but the benefits might be great. Investigators had only to proceed on the assumption, as Hume later put it in the Treatise (1739–40), that there is a close similarity between the uniformity of nature and the ‘uniformity of human actions’. For if that is true, then it follows that ‘in judging of the actions of men we must proceed upon the same maxims, as when we reason concerning external objects’.

African literature in Spanish is a cultural project that has received very little critical and theoretical attention, compared to francophone, anglophone, or lusophone African literature. Beyond certain limited circles in Madrid and Euskadi (Basque territory) in Spain, African literature in Spanish may be considered the most conspicuous absentee in the literary debate on Hispanic and/or African literatures. On that basis, Guinean poet Ciriaco Bokesa Napo observed:

This chapter proposes to explore the circumstances of the gestation, birth, and development of African literature written in Spanish between 1947 and the 1990s. It will examine the sociohistorical trajectory and the diverse forms of literary expression specifically in the cultural project of Equatorial Guinea. The former “Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea,” which subsequently became “Spanish Guinea,” were a Spanish possession for almost two centuries. The sole Spanish colony in sub-Saharan Africa, Equatorial Guinea is thus the only African country south of the Sahara whose official language is Spanish and therefore producing a literature written in the language of Cervantes. As a production at the junction of two different literary experiences – the first, Bantu and black African, marked by the stamp of orality with its pragmatic and supple rules, and the other, European, characterized by the more rigid rules of writing – the writing of Equatorial Guinea, like most texts of African literature written in foreign, European tongues, inherited this double cultural tradition that endows it with a very specific character.

America's religious history rests on an unsettling pattern of contradiction. While the United States has served as a refuge for generations of newcomers fleeing religious persecution abroad, the nation has simultaneously been the site of intense interreligious conflict and persecution. This essay sketches an outline of America's religiously inspired prejudice from the late eighteenth century through 1945, arguing that such intolerance informed a broad range of American cultural biases. In popular literature, social movements, legal decisions, and military or political campaigns, America's aspiration to serve as the world's religious safe haven clashed uncomfortably with the harsh reality of domestic turmoil.

Ironies abound in the study of America's religiously inspired xenophobia. The task of identifying examples of religious persecution can be problematic, since victims can also be perpetrators. For instance, while Catholics endured generations of discrimination on the grounds of their alleged “foreign” demeanor, they also lashed out at “heathen” Asian immigrants on the West Coast, and the outspoken Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin broadcast vehemently anti-Semitic messages to millions of radio listeners in the 1930s. More often, however, religious conflict signaled an attempt to define the United States in largely or exclusively Protestant terms and to rally the nation against a perceived enemy lurking within American borders.

DEFINING NATIVISM

In a famous letter addressed to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, George Washington proclaimed that the new American republic “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

As a European historian has observed, historians “have a soft spot for conquest,” which provides a neat, defined chronology in which to fit an intractable past. That is particularly true in the Americas, where the conquest of the native states has been generally accepted as marking the beginning of modern history. But conquests can provide only a chronology for the winners, for like many defining “events,” they become clear only with the passage of time, and only as long as they are seen from a single perspective. The Spaniards who moved into the Andes in 1531 regarded themselves as conquerors, and their own versions of what happened in the region between that date and the 1560s remains unchallenged. After all, after 1532, it became impossible to deal with the region without taking into account the European presence. The Andes became part of an expanding Europe, and more specifically, of the Spanish empire, the most powerful European political structure of the sixteenth century (Map 12.1). But it would be very poor history to view the events of the sixteenth century through the focus of the twentieth, and to assume the absolute victory of Spaniards over Andeans simply because, centuries later, the relationship between people who defined themselves as European and people who were defined (and often defined themselves as well) as Andean was one of almost total domination of the latter by the former.

The pages that follow attempt to examine the period from 1500 to 1580 – the period usually classified as the Spanish conquest – from a somewhat different perspective. The task is not easy because the appearance of the Spaniards in the Andes also means that the sources for the study of the region change massively. Before 1531, the only direct records available to a student of Andean history are those read by archaeologists; the Europeans who came to the Andes after 1532 generated the kind of record used by scholars who traditionally depend upon written materials. That change is both useful and misleading, because the standard bias of the written word, which is a bias toward the view of an élite, is multiplied by the fact that all our data about Andean people undergoes a process of translation and interpretation through a different culture. Even sources generated by Andeans are constrained by the differences between oral and written traditions.